Yeah, if only people didn't have to lie about the content of books when the pages were already posted, after attempting to pretend they're correct because they didn't actually read what they were responding to. As if they were too busy wanting to be some old man on the mountain who knows all and can't be wrong.
Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)
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4e got a ton of things right (typesetting, layout, art, concept, module encounter layout) but got a bunch of things wrong (everything is a formula, chapter ordering, different to be different (e.g. barbarians), some bad design goals).
Also now that the line is dead, one of 4e's worst warts is now safely hidden in the sands of time: namely WotC trying to cash-grab the edition by selling "play aids" and hiding the best shit in books. Now that WotC isn't trying to slide their slimy hands into your pants every month,
Open Grave is one of the books I was not able to get my hands on, so I'm a little jelly.
Also for campaign, highly recommend Madness at Gardmore Abbey. Its a really great sandbox with incredible replay value, and brings in The Deck Of Many Things.
(however it also has one of the bigger 4e issues which was want of the designers to open up "legendary" items/artifacts/characters to all level ranges. Which is a noble goal but in implementation was a mess)
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- Joined
- Oct 10, 2014
I'm a pretty big 3.5 apologist but all of my monster lore came from different sources or were pulled directly out of my ass. The books really gave you a very general idea of what something was and called it a day, probably because they had to print a bunch of mechanics and didn't have enough space to write all that much. Honestly I liked a lot of the lore in 5e, it wasn't long but there was some clever stuff they would include, a lot of it was things to give you ideas for adventures. I remember the green hag description being really good.
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- Nov 15, 2021
It's really simple, and it's a question I got tired of asking because the answer is so obvious. "Oh really? So what was your campaign like?" The answer's always the same, "I never ran or played in a campaign."
"2e was great because of the deep, rich Planescape setting. Every edition after was disappointing."
Oh, so tell me about your 1990s Planescape campaign, and how your table reacted to 3rd edition.
"Oh, I didn't play D&D in the 1990s, I was too little, and I never really played a Planescape campaign, but I hope to some day."
"5e is terrible because it has no guidance on how to run a campaign."
Oh, so tell me about your 5e campaign and what struggles you had due to lack of guidance in the DMG.
"Uh, I never ran a 5e campaign and don't even own the DMG."
"5e isn't playable at high levels."
My campaign is at 15th level, still going fine. When did things fall apart for your campaign?
"Oh, I've never played past 6th level."
"You can't roleplay at all in 4e. It's just like playing a video game."
Really? You couldn't provide players any opportunity to roleplay in your 4e game?
"I never played 4e before."
"AD&D is basically unplayable because of all the crazy tables. It's just a mess."
Really? I know a guy who's been running the same campaign since 1980. How long did yours last?
"I was born after 9/11."
In fact, I've noticed the people with the strongest opinions play RPGs the least. I think it's because just about any game that's made it through some playtesting and become a real product with a decent number of fans and regular players is going to be fun enough if the person running it isn't a moron and the table isn't full of cunts, but also, RPGs are complicated that they've always got warts and rough edges.
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- Nov 4, 2017
That is what I noticed about 3.5; now to be fair here, I didn't own a 3.5 PHB for a while and never owned a 3.5 DMG. I played exclusively through d20srd.org resources.
But 3.5 wasn't really about anything other than a very generic setting. All the lore was in setting-specific media (splats, modules, novels if you want to get technical) and they had a ton of overlap with 2e which overlapped with 1e/1eAD&D, so the impression I got was 3.5 was very much Bring Your Own Lore. You either got it from your setting book, or it was what you dreamed up based on fantasy books/media, or what you ported in from your previous campaigns in earlier editions.
So the printed material didn't spend much time detailing what a troll was because you should know that already, you just needed to know how it translated to the game. The Pit fiend gets 2 sentences because they don't want to contradict whatever campaign setting you are running.
this is a sharp constrast with 4e/5e where the default setting is heavily baked in.
4e on my reading with its lore tried to be helpful but hands off; "You can make up your own lore or get it from your setting. If your setting doesn't cover it and you don't want to go off-the-cuff, but here is some decently detailed lore you can use or pick-and-choose parts from, because its got enough detail for hooks but also enough gaps for you put whatever works in your setting/campaign"
5e is much more about "You are either in the Forgotten Realms (or the gay prom coffee shop, which is inside Forgotten Realms) or you are doing it wrong".
Which now that I think about it that lack of guardrails and very basic guidelines is probably why I still have a huge softspot for 3.5 despite its many, many problems.
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- Dec 16, 2019
Dice Scum is looking back at the origins of Warhammer's Chaos with the first book of Realm of Chaos!
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- Sep 3, 2014
Part of it was assuming you wouldn't be a dribbling retard and actually play it smart since it's been decades since those splats work, and the abilities are right fucking there to read, as well as denoting if these entities are intelligent or charismatic or not. The problem is most people refuse to use their brains to do this and choose to be dribbling retards.
It's because Wizards in their desperate attempt to keep Faerun under their rights shifted the setting from Oerth, realized that you can tool kit, fired most of the world building specialists, and then went from there; losing their developmental experience they got from TSR. Made all the worse when they had them get sacrificed to shit out Gammaworld 7e.
They then finished the job when the weak as piss Lights idea 4e had was aborted. That was the last attempt to even try to do a setting they will ever do, and they culled it because it didn't salvage the insane sales they expected.
Hence why they take contractors that shit out lame and gay nothing settings because they don't understand you NEED villains and EVIL to emphasize the good, and conflict drives interest.
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- Joined
- Nov 15, 2021
Sounds like somebody's upset that more women and minorities are playing D&D!
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- Dec 28, 2014
Outside of joke meme games like F.A.T.A.L. or RaHoWa, I've rarely seen a game I would actually describe as unplayable.
Kyria the Great
kiwifarms.net
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- Jun 2, 2017
I might be trying to run a fallout game for a different group that isn't anyone on the farms. I'm wanting to make it Midwest so I'm wanting ideas for factions to throw in there with none of the standard stuff that's been done to death as so far I'm thinking a faction of catholics out of Cincinnati going to have the claims of a pope out of it.
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- Oct 10, 2014
Fallout Tactics takes place in the Midwest. It's also criminally underrated despite doing some weird shit with the lore so it's worth playing through at least once. It's also pretty brutal at some points in the game.
From what I remember there were talking deathclaws, guys obsessed with being cyborgs called reavers, remnants from the masters army and misc raider groups. You eventually get to recruit from all of those as they join the brotherhood of steel.
Kyria the Great
kiwifarms.net
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- Jun 2, 2017
Likely taking some inspiration as it's going to take place more during the events of F1. I was going to incorporate the cyborgs and possibly the deathclaws but I don't want brotherhood of steel or super mutants
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- Nov 15, 2021
- The Skyliners, a faction of religious zealots following a weird post-apocalyptic version of Catholicism who believe immortality will be achieved by communing with Good via a sacred meal. The recipe to this sacred meal requires a long-lost can of chili and some spaghetti, the main quest being to retrieve this can from the hive of mentally retarded, ultra-violent mutants in Bond Hill. Once you find it, the people taste it, realize it's fucking disgusting, and the religion peters out, with only a few adherents trying to keep it alive.
- Upper Peninsula Rangers, a faction of some of the most hardbitten innawoods drunken quasi-loners who have reverted to pre-industrial American life, i.e. trapping, surviving brutal winters, and being borderline insane
- The Five Hundred, a Spartan-like warrior society whose citadel is the repurposed ruins of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway
- Detroit is just a wasteland of feral ghouls
- The central hub of the game is Chicago, which got the fuck nuked out of it, of course. It is now ruled over by a fantastically corrupt, self-serving crime family. Ghouls wander the streets, and the entire South Side is a radiation zone known as Hydeland. Legends say it's, well, a lot better than it used to be, since the city's autocratic family doesn't mind if you shoot the ghouls that wander out of Hydeland.
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- Nov 4, 2017
> Midwest Football obsession + Mayan ball games = Death Sport Football (Maybe the champions get beheaded in glory?)
> Amish; the Cows have two heads now, but nothing else has changed. Play that up; an Amish faction are the gods of the waste land; being stuck in the 1800's puts you leaps and bounds above people thrust back to 1400.
> Speaking of corn, Aspen Superorganism + Corn + FEV + children of the corn = man-eating corn fields. Its seasonal - the corn fields are safe from october until june, but once the ears sprout they crave meat. They can't move from where they're planted, so its completely safe to farm as long as you avoid them. But once you have that true "elephant's eye", childen are too small for the corn to predate and are ignored. So you have your little lamplight in the middle of the cornfield.
> if they get a vehicle, it has to be assaulted by a bunch of fucking deer that damage it nearly beyond repair. This non-negotiable.
> Midwest winter + nuclear winter = FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK its cold
> old busted: Deathclaws. New Hotness: Deathquitos.
> Large mouth bass + angler fish + every girl's dating profile = giant man-eating bass that hunt with lures they toss onto land. And or The Meg, but its a bass.
> Do something with the mothman. Maybe literal mothmen - humanoid man-sized moths that are formed from caterpillars the size of rhinos. And of COURSE they primarily meat.
Maybe the mothmen are intelligent, and their larval forms need to eat brain tissue; or maybe it has to be human brain tissue or the resulting mothmen aren't intelligent. Or maybe no intelligence, the caterpillars just love energy and nutrient dense brains.
You could maybe have a set up with a cult attracting ghouls - let the Mothmen caterpillars eat your brain before slow decay makes you feral, and be reborn as a mothman. (maybe its legit and the mothmen are imprinted with the consciousness of the "donor", maybe its a lie - perpetuated by the mothmen, or maybe by a ghoul-hating human.)
> Ohio/Michigan war goes hot again.
> Rust Belt + Riddle of Steel = Barbarians. Maybe combo that with Deathsport Football. Its not tribes or clans that they are organized into, its Teams.
-- going along with that, maybe go for a "The Noble Savages more enlightened than you, white man" at the start where they talk about how disagreements between the "Teams of the Great Eastern League" are settled not by war but by the Holy Football. Then the players see a 'game' and realize its more bloody than any war with scalping, disembowlments... basically just look up what the Eastern tribes used to do captives.
-- this works even better if you really lean into it. The Amish Empire has teams, the raiders have teams, Brothethood of Steel chapter has a team, etc.
> Appalachian Mountains = inbred cannibal horror. but then make it interesting: They discovered a bunker with advanced weapons and equipment. Its not just inbred cannibals. Its Cloaked inbred cannibals with laser rifles.
> Hyper intelligent giant Copperheads. Imagine the snake from Conan the Barbarian, but IT is thulsa doom. But with no arms, the copperheads are dependent on humans to toil for them. Maybe have the Copperhead Mines be very interested in the Cyborg guys - with cyborg bodies they wouldn't be stuck relying on humans.
But no matter how smart they are, they are copperheads and thus tremendous assholes
> Storm chasers gone Fallout. Maybe they have machines that can manipulate the weather and the storm chasers are fighting an evil megalomaniac who has control of it.
Maybe its on an airship, and the storm chasers are using the tornado data to track it down. Or they just worship tornados. Whatever.
> Dearborn Caliphate.
> Mutant evil canadian geese.
> Lake Effect Yetis. they are ampibious and vanish into the depths of the great lake to hibernate all summer, emerging in the winter to hunt.
> just straight up steal the Railroad cult from Wasteland
> Mutant Great Horned owls
> There are a lot of War of 1812 battlefields and "pioneer" villages. These battle grounds were equipped with Protectrons that would reenact battles, and protectrons that would demonstrate the old pioneer skills. But these protectrons were coded with Asmovian logic. Thus as orphaned children (either send away because of too many mouths to feed or their parents died) wandered in, they were adopted and cared for by the robots who also demonstrated the skills needed to survive and carry on the 1800's way of life (as well as having the Amish nearby). Because its fallout, the children took all the wrong lessons and now reenact the battles with live ammunition as they believe is their religious duty.
>UFOS in Dayton air base.
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- Dec 28, 2014
There are a lot of military bases in relatively rural and remote places with wildlife refuges and the like around them. They'd probably all have been nuked so would make a good location for bizarre wildlife, ghouls, and the like. Possibly there could be semi-intact ones occupied by survivors or groups that are used to living near radiation.
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- Apr 19, 2022
Lol what universe do you live in?
D. Pedro II
kiwifarms.net
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- Apr 2, 2025
agreed. I will also add that I enjoy the keywords for the power system, It's quite helpful when I am designing the encounters sessions on my table.
What do you mean by "play aids"? I am quite curious how WOTC managed to mess up yet again.
Oh I will check that out! I love the concept of card games in RPGs, this is why my favorite class on Fabula Ultima is Ace of Cards. On a side tangent, has any of you guys ever played FU? as long you ignore the creator who's a politically possessed fiend, his game is pretty good.
And yeah, I utilize the 4e database for some of the things I need that I don't have with my books/errata changes, and I noticed some masterwork/legendary/wondrous items that are given at heroic level. I try and pace and avoid giving those powerful rewards to my players aside from some big milestones, otherwise you kind of break the whole formula of the game.
- Joined
- Nov 4, 2017
They don't make 4e content anymore, so yes. WotC is no longer trying to suck out your wallet every month with 4e content. they do it with 5e now.
I have extremely mixed feelings on the keywords.
On one hand, it is extremely useful for figuring out "does this work and does this apply?; you get an AOO if the enemy uses a power with the ranged keyword in a square you threaten. Your feats apply to powers with the Melee keyword. It is a simple, straight forward, extensible system.
On the other hand it is spergy and moderately unsatisfying to play because of how clinical it is.
in a word, cards.
They released packs of power cards for the 4e core classes which were hideously overpriced. There was some other stuff they released too that I don't remember.
You won't play card games, but it uses the Deck as a RNG generator. Events in the Abbey can unfold VASTLY differently. So you draw out the deck, and depending on what cards you draw in what order various events might happen, not happen, or happen in different ways.
So without spoilering too much, in MaGA the cards of the Deck of Many Things were spread out over the abbey. These are acquired by various NPCs and the players will collect them over the course of the adventure. The majority of these cards can be obtained from the NPCs without fighting (or at least not fighting the NPC that possesses them). Which NPCs have which Cards is also determined by the random draw.
In battle, the players can draw from their partial deck and the card will produce an effect on the battlefield. When they start combat with an NPC with a card, the NPC's card (or one if they have multiple) will activate. Basically you can run the module dozens of times and it'll never be the exact same.
Well there is a Heroic version, Paragon Version, and sometimes an Epic version. Some of the items are supposed to level up with the players but often even the max-level version of an item doesn't quite match its description in the lore.
Which again, I get from a game design perspective but it doesn't translate so well to a campaign unless everyone is willing to shut off those parts of their brain.
Same for 4e's economy.
There was a good blog post I read about instead of having the party track gold, to instead issue them "money points" equal in value to a magical item of their level. Consumables cost 1/8th a money point and anything with a value less than a consumable magical item of the party level can be acquired in reasonable quantities "for free".
- Joined
- Nov 15, 2021
The keywords made the 3.5 grogs burn with white-hot rage. Game rules, they argued, aren't supposed to be clear and unambiguous. Not in an RPG. They're supposed to be fun to read first and foremost (most of these people buy RPG books to read them, not play games). Then they got mad that the 5e rules took a more natural language approach (although still used a lot of keywords if you paid attention, up until Jeremy Crawford started being clever-silly about his Sage Advice rulings).
- Joined
- Dec 21, 2020
I never actually put too much thought into that before but i didnt hate 4e
I didn't liked it but it didnt caused the anger and annoyance that 5e cased.
Like 4e tried to do its own thing in a way and i could respect that even if i didnt cared for it.
5e felt like skinwalker of 3.5 that also thinks you are a retard who cant add 4 to a number.
I didn't liked it but it didnt caused the anger and annoyance that 5e cased.
Like 4e tried to do its own thing in a way and i could respect that even if i didnt cared for it.
5e felt like skinwalker of 3.5 that also thinks you are a retard who cant add 4 to a number.