archangel

I don't know if anyone here is a big fan of the Flash, but the Flash has been my favorite super hero in DC forever, starting with the immortal Jay Garrick and going all the way through Bart Allen.

After the last Crisis, Barry Allen returns from the Speed Force and is trying to cope with his sudden resurrection. There's a new threat to the speedster family, though, and they're all united against they're most dangerous enemy.

So far it's been a really good series, as good as 'The Return of Barry Allen' from the mid '80's that was fucking fantastic.

We're at issue 4/6 so far and I really recommend it.

written by Geoff Johns and illustrated by Ethan Van Sciver.

Also Bahamut and Tiamat in core DnD? Guh, gives me bad memories of Dragonlance.

you will speak no ill of Dragonlance!

I know one complaint about 4th ed was that while characters feel powerful at lower levels, you don't get much more powerful at higher levels, and can never really do all that much damage to creatures and the like even at lvl 30. I know this gets rid of the 1 hit kill problems that can happen in 3 and 3.5, but for those who have done 4e, what is your response?

that's nonsense. While you grow, you only feel more and more powerful, and the damage gets higher, too.

the problem is, if you don't understand the mechanics entirely, at first glance it appears you're not doing that much damage. But that is absolutely false.

District 9?!

last time he was on, he mentioned busting his ass at work and it keeping him offline most times lately.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

silly Nick; Irish don't 'work' lol

:waits for fallout:

The fact is, if you lock it down so much that someone cannot possibly cheese-monkey it, there is no wiggle room to be creative. I, as a DM, don't want to do that to my players. If they min-max, so be it, the world gets tougher and smarter to compensate, but at least they are having fun!

min-maxing is still possilbe, but min-maxing does not equal 'broken'. if things are non-exploitable, that doesn't mean you cannot min max: you can. It just means you can't take advantage of loopholes to use things as they weren't meant to be used.

And because of that it is limited to simplistic, basic, non-exploitable, little-creativity actions.

 

If you could "cheese moneky" 2nd ed effects, its because you CARED about the game, and got CREATIVE.

 

In 4th there is no advantage to giving more of a shit over just showing up and declaring basic actions. You don't need to care. The system lends itself to this, which leads to boring games and bored players.

it always gets back to that.

if it's 'non-exploitable' it stops being 'fun' to many people.

abilities are written out and you can just cut them out. You no longer need a lawyer's mind to read those damned spells, and adjudication is simple and fair.

Honestly I have found that if you have players who respond that way, you have issues that go beyond system. I am all for a balanced, well tested, creative, interesting game system. None of the editions of DnD so far have won out on all fronts. Older was more imaginative and engaging, but less balanced. Newer is more balanced, but more watered down. Granted, a lot of this is from my own impressions, and I am not saying someone can't pick up the 4th ed PHB and think it's the most engaging thing ever written, but it's just not doing it for me.

I think the best function of all is character creation.

3rd ed. character creation took days, sometimes weeks to plan your character out fully and know exactly where you want to take him. Classes and abilities where so complex that tweaking took a very long time.

Character creation in 4th ed takes 15 minutes. You're ready to play in 20.

Dear everyone who complained about the lack of squid in the Watchmen movie, this is for you:

Sorry man, but the only thing I saw while watching that was '90 Gigs of Porn'.

ASC ruined it for everyone.

speaking of....where's ASC?

chaotic neutral = psychotic stupid.

You'll be sad to know that you're playing 3rd ed shit and that crap doesn't exist in 4th Ed anymore. lol

And no, the SuperHero Mutants and Masterminds is a very similar system but a different game entirely. You make superheroes and fight villains. I have a story in the works I'd like to throw at ya'll, and I know the system pretty well so I'd like to test it out on yous guys.

I've actually been tossing together an idea for a superhero mutants and masterminds game, but I gotta talk to george and angel first.

Did this cause players being viciously creative to unbalance things? Maybe. But it rewarded play that was creative and fun for the group.

Not 'maybe': Definitively. An overly creative mind can take that same spell and break the hell out of it, and you and I both know it. Then the DM is caught in a situation where he can't possibly allow that to happen, only to have an indignant player point angrily at the book saying 'but it says I can say it right there.'

When things become unbalanced or broken they become problematic to the game. The new spells are designed for balanced, leaving the imagination squarely on the shoulders of the players. If they cannot imagine it, then they're either lazy or simply unimaginative.

yes

O.M.G This is EPIC

Items are drastically different. If you took one character from 2nd, and transfered it to 3rd or 3.5 his equipment either does not exist, may have a close equivalent, or the item with the same name does something drastically different.

because they didn't want magic items to a. be a crutch and b. define the character.

One of the things I hated about DnD were the cookie cutter items. Every mage had a circlet of Intellect +4. Every rogue had gloves of Dex. Every adventurer had his Heward's Hefty Haversack. There were so many cooker cutter items that characters came to rely on, they became dull.

In fact, the running gag was that somewhere in Faerun there was a factory of magic users who do nothing but spend all day making these ridiculous items and selling them to lazy adventurers.

What's worse, you take a level 14 character and strip them of they're magic items and they're next to useless. That was a big, big problem.

Magic Items are supposed to be extras, but not Character Defining. A warrior is a warrior with any sword, though he may have an affection to a certain relic. But for that warrior to be rendered useless if he looses his +5 Mighty Cleaving Vorpal Great-Axe, then there's a serious problem.

Your character is not the sum of his magic items.

Old spells and class abilities, etc in 2nd gave the idea behind things, and left it to interpretation.

and became either useless at higher levels or ridiculously broken.

4th tells you exactly what one single thing that power or item does, limited to exactness. None of these things can't be worked around, and any good DM/GM should work around them, but why choose a system that is watered down?The only reason I can think of is a GM who has no control of their own game, and/or no sense of game ballance.

flavor text is just that: flavor text. Mechanics is what's important. You can rename and reflavor every single one of your abilities to make them appear however you want, and I've got to tell you: the differences in utility between third and and fourth only means players stop being fucking lazy and start thinking how to solve problems. ya know: roleplay?

Also, I love THAC0. It is exactly the same as the attack rolls in 3rd, but it's expressed backwards and retarded.

you, sir, are a lost cause.

How do you figure? They're not changing creatures, they're only changing mechanics. The same things existed in 2nd ed that exist now in terms of equipment, feel and style. The ONLY difference is the combat algorithm.

DnD is a combat game; primarily a dungeon crawl with monsters thrown at you. That's how the system is designed.

and while THACO was a pain in the ass, I still maintain 3.5 is far, far more complicated than 2.0, and both were more complicated than they had any right to be.

Contrary to DnD, WoD is primarily a role playing game...except 3.0 put more emphasis on combat and made made things more complicated.

Content remains the same, the only thing added was balance. Gone are the days of the bullshit level 20 mages and their invincibility or the elder Tremere's godlike stature because of bullshit Thaumaturge.

All the classes are now useful, they all have tons of flavor, there's tons of content, and everything is balanced.

I started with DnD 3rd Ed, moved to 3.5 (played in all different settings) and 4th Ed. I've played Vampire, Werewolf, Mage (3rd Ed) and 4th ed WoD only, I've played Shadowrun and I've played Mutants and Masterminds ( a VERY fun game but I broke it in 15 minutes and made an Iron Man character that was unkillable and could kill anyone).

See i have to disagree about both versions of DnD and WoD.

DnD needed to do four things: Get rid of/fix useless classes (I'm looking at you specifically Bard/Ranger); Fix overpowered classes (Wizards/Sorcerors) and the huge divide between melee and spellcasters; make playing low level characters feel as cool as playing 10th level 3.5 characters; make the classes more inter-dependent, specifically to encourage more teamwork. It succeeded on all ends.

With WoD, the Changes were a bit more specific: there were too many vampire clans with too many stupidly broken abilities (Chimestry, Viscicitude, and Obtenabration come to mind. and if anyone ever played Transylvania by Night and saw what Tzimisce Koldunic Sorcery or Mortis could do, you've never seen what 'broken' really is). There were also USELESS fucking disciplines. NWoD shrank it down, got to the basics and reworked the system to make it more streamlined, more dangerous to the players, while not compromising the power of a Vampire.

The new systems kept the good and threw out the broken...the problem is, power gamers as a whole flock to 'the broken' and clutch to it like lice to white trash, and bitch and complain when you 'fix' it. We see it in WoW and we see it in DnD, too.

Shadowrun is a different game entirely, far more difficult than it had any right being but very rewarding: so long as you had a very imaginative DM who loved to fuck you while having a team of people actually willing to work together to fuck the DM. I never saw 4th ed, but it supposedly fixed and streamlined alot of the decker/magic issues and made everything function on the same premise instead of having a different system for each class.

why the fuck is there all that text blocking me from seeing what Newt posted?!

Piss off!

Stuff that makes MH go 'EEEEEEEE!"

from ASM 600:

awesome