Invited to a campaign

>What's supposed to be so terrible about D&D 3.5 anyway?

Rules oversights, funky mechanical interactions that weren't really accounted for, stat bloat on monsters, trap options, and general imbalance issues.

4e combat is actually pretty good

Behold, a troll. Make a note of his attempt.

...What?

Here's the basic ultimatum for everyone to see.

If you see someone bump this thread, recognize them for just being a troll. Regardless of whether they're supporting one side or the other, whether they're pointing out how shitty these threads are or calling out trolls, if you see this thread rise up in the bump order, it's guaranteed to have been bumped by a troll.

These trolls have been doing this for the past week and still think that they can "play the game" on Veeky Forums, that there's enough doubt for them to hide behind being anonymous to troll like they do forever.

Easiest way to figure out if a person is a troll? If they're bumping a troll thread. Ignore everything else, because that's enough evidence to dismiss all doubts.

To the people who honestly want to discuss these games, go to another thread. There will only be trolls here.

>I don't have any kind of a rebuttal to my favorite system being torn down!
>I know - I'll just accuse him of trolling!

And that was how it all began

Wasn't trolling. Just trying to honestly answer the question in a clear, concise manner.

Not really. You bumped the thread with your second post. Quit trying to be clever.

>Easiest way to figure out if a person is a troll? If they're bumping a troll thread. Ignore everything else, because that's enough evidence to dismiss all doubts.

Your actions are far, far louder than your words, troll.

So what is it that you're doing?

If they -are- a troll, what good is you calling them out going to do to anyone? Do you think you're telling them something they haven't heard before? Do you think you're convincing them they can stop now because they've been called out?

No. Responding to this thread, calling them out, saying anything at all - even with a sage - is giving them exactly what they want. Stop doing it. Hide the thread and go outside, it's a nice day.

Not only can you not prove if any particular post is bumping a thread, you can't prove that you're saging either. Your "ultimatum" is stupid and pointless.

I'm sorry to have to put you trolls on the ropes like this, but even you trying to defend the idea of these threads is enough to reveal you for what you are.

Games over. How do you expect to lie to people like this and for them to not catch on? Remember that "reasonable doubt" doesn't mean "any and all doubt", and you trying to figure a way to weasel out around the simple truth is enough to thrice damn you.

You know you can just not click on threads you don't like and you can scroll past posts that you think are trolling?

This is on page 1 again, I am disappointed, report and hide, sage if you have to post

You're the only troll in this scenario.

You call everyone a troll like some kind of a shrieking paranoid gun nut, spurred into incoherent rage by the many anti-D&D troll threads, but all you manage to do is to keep the thread alive: you give us, the "trolls", something to respond to. The only winning move is to hide the thread and go away, but the same autism that keeps you playing D&D and ignoring its faults, also keeps you in these threads to constantly and consistently snatch the bait, hook line and sinker.

You are a sad little creature, trying to blame others for your own faults. You'll want to step away from the computer and do some introspection.

Fun fact. The Monk doesn't actually get proficiency with his unarmed attacks by RAW in 3.5.

You bumped the thread troll, so your damage control sort of falls flat.

Really, why even try at this point? You overplayed your hand and revealed your cards by making too many of these threads. Trying to tell people not to call you out is really not helping your cause, because at this point there's really nothing that can.

Thanks for feeding him (you)s

Well combat in D&D is pretty boring until you get to the 3rd to 5th level range.

And are a caster. Don't forget that part.

>why even try at this point?
Because you still keep biting?

Your damage control won't work here, troll.

I know you want to try and play the "He's paranoid, we're not trolls! There's no way to prove we're trolls!"

But there is. You've spammed too many of these threads. You're antics and tactics are plain for anyone to see, and nothing you can say will disguise that, especially when you continue to bump these threads.

>He keeps taking the bait.

Fuck man, even if we are trolls you're making this way too goddamn easy.

No, seriously - you know trolls only crave for those (you)s, right? Why do you keep giving it to them? Why do you keep on keeping the thread alive?

What possible reason do you have to try and moralize us, besides your mantraic "your damage control won't work, troll!" or "muh sage"?

Dungeons and Dragons is the oldest tabletop rpg with the largest player base. It's sort of adorable that you think you need to white knight for it.

If this thread gets over 100 posts, I will be very disappointed

Maybe he's like Barneyfag and he starts these threads himself?

I mean it's pretty obvious it's the same guy, isn't it?

You think we can get him in here and really make this party crazy?

There's been enough of these threads to show that even if people choose to ignore them, you will keep making them and bumping them. If anything, adding posts will just help it reach bump limit sooner.

We're very, very far from the point where you can try to argue the point of "if you ignore the trolls, they'll stop!" The best move now, now that these guys have shown that nothing else will make them stop, is to simply out them and to explain that they're really not as clever or well-disguised as they hope they are.

Or, I should say, you are. Really. You're defending troll threads and hoping to pretend you're anything but a troll yourself.

>Play Stars without Number
>every combat encounter is quick or deadly but also fun in both cases

thats a good combat system, everyone is really killable and the magic system doesn't allow for huge healing like d&d.

Any other science fiction games with fun combat?

>look at me try to start a discussion in a troll thread just to get more bumps!

C'mon now.

I mean you could just hide the thread and pretend it doesn't exist... but then, I suppose if you were capable of such stellar intellect, you wouldn't be playing D&D.

Well, it depends what you think of as fun combat. There's a lot of different ways to do combat 'right'.

Do you really think any troll on the internet is going to care that you, some anonymous chucklefuck nobody, have "outed" them? Do you think anybody else is going to care about you shrieking about threads you don't like? Face it buddy, you can't do shit.

I'm pretty sure by this point he's actually the same 'troll' making the threads.

He's definitely the only thing keeping them up at this point...

As long as no one goes into these threads mistaking them for anything other than the efforts of a few trolls, you're going to have to be content with spending all your time arguing about how you're not a troll, since any other discussion will dry up.

Thankfully, we have the archive and a bank of these threads to help convince anyone with even a slight doubt that you are anything but really bad trolls, so I guess you're just going to see how long you can enjoy playing this game of "Even though I'm bumping a troll thread, that doesn't make me a troll, I swear it! PLEASE BELIEVE ME. PLEASE BELIEVE ME!"

Frankly, you already sound like you're not enjoying this at all, considering how desperate you are to perform damage control right now.

How long have you been on Veeky Forums? Serious question.

Because this board has always had a pretty strong tradition of ignoring the intentions of the OP if we can get a good discussion going. I've seen some of the best, most insightful and interesting conversations on this board crop up from a 'troll' premise being derailed into actual discussion by the anons replying to it.

It certainly seems a lot more productive than your hysterical wailing.

>"Even though I'm constantly responding to anons that I myself claim to be trolls, that doesn't mean I'm taking the bait, I swear it! PLEASE BELIEVE ME. PLEASE BELIEVE ME!"
>"Even though I can't prove it, I'm totally saging the thread that I totally didn't post myself! PLEASE BELIEVE ME. PLEASE BELIEVE ME!"

This is what you sound like.

Wow, you trolls are desperate.

Projecting.

>desperation

You still haven't told me why you don't just hide the thread.

As long as no one goes into these threads mistaking them for anything other than the efforts of a few trolls, you're going to have to be content with spending all your time arguing about how you're not a troll, since any other discussion will dry up.

Thankfully, we have the archive and a bank of these threads to help convince anyone with even a slight doubt that you are anything but really bad trolls, so I guess you're just going to see how long you can enjoy playing this game of "Even though I'm bumping a troll thread, that doesn't make me a troll, I swear it! PLEASE BELIEVE ME. PLEASE BELIEVE ME!"

Frankly, you already sound like you're not enjoying this at all, considering how desperate you are to perform damage control right now.

>play fighter
>try to do something other than standing still and full attacking
>get a million penalties unless I spend every feat I have on every niche thing I might find useful in battle
>stand still and full attack instead

>the troll keeps trying

Ignore the troll hysteria user. If they aren't actually a troll, then they're doing the job of one incredibly well.

Let's actually focus on the topic of D&D combat instead.

I think it's worth mentioning that D&D combat can be good in every edition, it just takes more work than others and depends on what you want from it.

3.PF combat with limited casters and Tome of Battle/Path of War martials, basically tier 3/4 games, can actually be really enjoyable to play combat wise. It takes extra work from the GM to ensure proper content restrictions and internal balance, along with basically reworking encounter design entirely on their own due to how bad the CR system is, but for a veteran GM that's well within their reach, and it can be an incredibly engaging and enjoyable combat system to participate in at that point, with every character having an interesting array of options for how they approach combat.

>user cries trolling at everything
>user gives replies to everyone who posts here.
>user redditspaces.
Not sure if he's shitposting as well or just genuinely autistic.
A true mystery for the ages

Not an argument.

Your desperation really doesn't disguise you for what you are. It's actually kind of funny watching what you try to do to dismiss the accusations, when all the evidence still points to you just being really, really terrible trolls.

Why would he hide his own thread?

That doesn't answer my question at all.

You are legitimately the only reason I am still in this thread. You not hiding it and not ignoring it really does make an impact in keeping it alive. If you did that, then it could well just die. If it doesn't, at least you won't see it and can just continue your day.

But that'd be actually a smart thing to do, now would it?

So retarded then. Got it.

>being really, really terrible trolls
There is only one thing that a troll wants, and the lack of only one thing that makes them terrible: replies. If a troll gets replies, then they are successful.

You shrieking your false-flagging bullshit at every single post they make is in fact proving that they're actually really, really good trolls.

>cleric makes danger dissapear
>not the wizard

...

Clerics are actually more powerful. There's a reason CoDzilla is a meme.

Both are powerful, but in different ways.

In low optimisation practical terms, Clerics and Druids are what break the system balance, each being able to do the job of other classes better while still having amazing magic.

Wizards are still better than most non-casters, but it's in higher level and higher optimisation play where that really shines. Clerics and Druids interact with the games systems around the intentional level, just in ways far beyond what was expected. Wizards can completely ignore the intended combat balance of the system, making the whole notion of HP damage irrelevant.

Start dumping lewds, mods obviously aren't looking

>If I break site rules like a massive faggot, I can try to shut down threads I don't like.

>There is only one thing that a troll wants,

Not these trolls. The "D&D is Garbage" trolls have a deliberate agenda. The problem is that they are too passionate about how much they hate D&D, and literally can't stop trolling, even when people are explaining to them that their trolling is working against them.

And, a good troll knows how to not be obvious. That's what makes these trolls particularly terrible, especially when we already have a troll decoder set up in this thread, and they're still hoping to disguise themselves and pretend to want to have a discussion for any purpose other than bumping this specific troll thread.

It's a troll thread. If you're in here, you're a troll.

This. To make a horrible analogy, wizards are MOBA control/debuff supports whose values are gamebreaking. They stun you for a half an hour and their curse makes you loose 99% of your max hp.
Clerics are just faggots who hulk out and two hit you while lifestealing 200% of their damage.

It's a time honored tradition for people incapable of scrolling past things they don't like.

Spamming is agaisnt the rules too.

So no spamming lewds then? Darn.

Although it is worth noting that 5e, while closing the power gap significantly, doesn't deal with some other issues of the disparity.

The skill gap is the obvious one, but the choice gap mentioned in is relevant too

It's a shame, because they almost fixed it in the playtests, but D&D (outside of 4e) does have an unfortunate tendency to make martial characters boring to play in combat, often justified that they should be 'simple' to play.

It does kinda frustrate me, especially when they've shown they know how to do it better, but then they keep returning to the same models and argue for things like improvisation to close the gap, when spellcasters are better equipped for that than martials are.

I can kinda see how that applied in earlier editions. 2e and before lacked the depth of rules post 3.x D&D had, so there was an implicit assumption that you needed to improvise and make things up during fights.

In 3.x though, they made the core combat options dull and not worth using, and the things which made it a lot more fun (even if they didn't close the power gap with fullcasters) like the Tome of Battle/Path of War got a lot of negative feedback.

I'd still love to see a Tome of Battle/Path of War equivalent for 5e though, or even just a return of the awesome playtest fighter rather than the shitty Battlemaster.

This is a particularly painful example of a try-hard troll hoping to disguise himself while still hoping to bump up his troll thread with empty discussion between himself and his fellow trolls.

>5e Tome of Battle.

Fuck yes. Hell, I'd love to see any sort of class support at this point. They're really dragging their feet when it comes to supplements.

Where can I get the playtest fighter write-up?

Also, it's a long-established tradition of the majority of D&D fans to shit on fighters while doing their best to ignore the minority who advocates for fighters (martials = fighters for the sake of arguement).

>I just want to hear, in coherent and well structured arguments, about the flaws of Dungeons & Dragons that I've had much fun in for so many years.

The thing is, if you are having fun with it, and the system's flaws aren't tripping you up every time you play, then you are playing DnD the right way - you're having fun with the system, and aren't running into problems.

That said, if anyone in your group ever wanted to play a truenamer, or the magic users started going off on their own after seeing what they CAN do versus what the martial characters are allowed to do, or you ever had a druid who took Natural Spell above level 7, then you'll notice a few weird inconsistencies.

For instance, consider the following feats, ostensibly of the same impact on a character: Toughness, Dodge, Power Attack, Improved Initiative. Would you consider them interchangeable?

I wanted to prize out all the trap options from the game, but 5th edition actually removes most of them, so why should I bother working on a broken husk? The only virtues I find in 3.5 is the universality of its mechanics - you have stats for almost everything. It's really helpful if you are trying to see what the economic basis or value of a society should be - for instance, how many farmers are there, what are reasonable taxation values, how many people should there be to raise an army of 10,000 men, whatnot.

I've always felt that the best bits of Veeky Forums come from serious responses to troll threads.

That's because it's a super low budget affair.

The tl;dr is that Hasbro had completely unrealistic sales expectations for 4e, so they threw a lot of money at it, which is why it was such a large range pushed so fast along with things like the online component.

Unfortunately, this fell through in a lot of ways unrelated to the fanbase reaction. The murder suicide crippled the online component, and releasing too many splats too fast cannibalised their own customer base.

4e still made money, but even if things had gone entirely perfectly, it would have still been a failure to Hasbro, as they were expecting D&D to become a big, MtG tier earner.

After it failed, they've thrown a small token budget at it to occupy the license. The profit the actual game makes is so small as to not even be noticeable to them, but they can farm the licenses out for movies and videogames, so occupying the license is still useful.

It's part of the reality that tabletop RPGs are a very small, niche market. To business types, the only real value to be found in our hobby is farming the IPs for more mainstream and large scale profit sources. I think we'll see 5e being a very long, slow edition, with that minimum budget commitment to let them keep the brand occupied and thus avoid losing copyright.

Sadly I don't think we're gonna get anything aside from UA for that kind of stuff. Tome of Battle pissed alot of people off too so WoTC might be leery of trying that again.

>join a Pathfinder game
>write up a character with a background, personality quirks, ideals, and goals
>everyone else is playing Build I Found On An Optimization Forum #283 to #286, a mishmash of random races, templates, classes, prestige classes, and feats that make absolutely no sense for a single character to have
>in-character dialogue is at a bare minimum
>everyone just wants to gain levels to finally "complete" their stupid fucking "build"
>nobody can even remember what the overarching plot is, the GM just leads everyone around from fight to fight

Aren't there video games out there to scratch this itch? Why do these faggots have to shit up my favourite hobby?

Feats broke 5ed again, arguably. It seems that PAM + GWM fighter was never accounted for, and they covered up against any critisism by making feats optional while emphasising "stunts".

They were in your hobby already, user. People have always played D&D that way.

Melf, of Melfs Acid Arrow? Comes from a PC from the early days of the system. The source of the name? 'Male Elf'.

And then you had the whole 'monty haul' phenomenon, which makes no sense in a modern context but was this huge thing back in the day.

>I've always felt that the best bits of Veeky Forums come from serious responses to troll threads.

That's just what trolls say to convince people to get them to bump their troll threads. It's unsound, especially in the era of the catalog. You're much better off bumping an actually good thread if you want actual good discussion, and not the hollow prattle occurring in this thread.

If you weren't a terrible troll yourself and spent all your time trolling, you might realize just how awful and mindless these were written by people squeezing everything out of their skulls and not even getting enough juice to turn the engine.

I feel like you've touched on the truth of the point a lot of people miss through exaggeration.

The issues with 3.x aren't the huge, exaggerated examples that only work in a specific context, it's simple things like your examples. Things an ordinary group could blunder into without malice or ill intent but can still cause the mechanics to twist wildly out of shape with a potentially harmful impact on the experience of the game.

The GM can deal with such things, sure, but it's distractions from being able to focus on running a fun game, and if a system is hurting the experience rather than helping it then that's a legitimate criticism of the system.

You can't bump your own thread.

I was kind of irked after I read Alexandrian's Thracian Caves playthrough. It was tabletop multiplayer rogue-like.

Yeah, you're right. I just see people like that so seldom that it's always a shock when I do find a game with even one of them.

We're replying because it triggers you, user.

Eh, I don't think you can really condemn people for having different playstyles, that strays too far into 'badwrongfun' territory. It's just a matter of being aware that they exist and knowing what playstyles systems focus on and support. D&D can be played as a normal RPG, but for that more mechanically focused mode it also works well.

Ignore the troll, user, or even better report him for spamming. Just replying to him give him what he wants, attention.

You're a cheeky troll yourself. It's funny because you somehow think anyone is falling for your efforts.

The poster count having not changed in the last fifty posts kind of reveals you guys to just be sort of stewing among yourselves, like fat people crammed into a jacuzzi. It's kind of gross, to be honest.

Well, it was his experiment to play a 2ed megadungeon as close to RAW as possible. I was shocked by what those rules shaped up to be in actual play, because grogs fucking love to shit on vidya while playing, essentially, vidya.

Ugh, playing builds you found online is the worst

If you can't optimize without someone online telling you precisely how to build your character, you're shit at optimizing

It does kinda make sense. The early and incredibly influential CRPGs and even earlier MUD's were inspired by that kind of thing, after all.

I sometimes use guides I find online, but rather than following them I use them to understand the class I'm playing, it's strengths and weaknesses and which options are worth using. If something is pure garbage I'll avoid it, but if it's otherwise fluffy and cool I'll take it even if it's considered mediocre. It helps to have a frame of reference for character choices, and it also lets me avoid accidentally taking super OP stuff if they'd be otherwise outside the scope of the game.