"Simplify, simplify."
-Thoreau
And now, friends, it is time to not only revitalize our once-grand realm, but also incorporate new visions and functional direction. What this means is that, for now, we do not have to port everything from the old COCO, for not only do we lack the population needed to necessitate some of those functions, but we also have a chance to change or edit some things for sake of simplicity.
For now, this is pretty much like an un-official Council with two major differences, the head leads being those volunteered to participate [Huan, guaaN, Yitzi, Zillah, and TelinArtho] and the starting font color is Sienna :p. But, of course, anyone and everyone is encouraged to voice their thoughts. After all, this is for the benefit and fun for everyone.
How will this progress? We will take this one step at a time, covering one aspect or topic at a time, and moving along. A vote amongst the community once debate has settled down (or has gone on for more than a week) will decide matters. By the time we are done, all the work will essentially be done.
-Definition of Core
-Living Gladius
-Leveling
-Races and Classes
-Skills and Feats
-Coliseum Rules [1/3rd rule, Fight Types, Expendables, Environment, Other Rules]
-Quests and Campaigns
-Elections for positions
Topics concluded:
It is my opinion that, for now, we truly stay Core and suspend any technically non-Core-but-still-in-the-SRD material. Namely, Psionics, Unearthed Arcana, and Dieties and Demigods divine material.
My rationale for this being in the interests of re-introducing newer players to the coliseum with an honest face of being core. In addition, less cross-mixing of material will result in less topics for transparency and rules arguing. I do not believe this is a supression of any creativity, or unbalancing of power between mechanics.
So, I motion that, until further expansion, we limit COCO to just material to be found in the PHB, MM, and DMG.
Thoughts?
Some old players have XPH and Unearthed Arcana materials in their characters and they won't be able to play them until the expansion.
On the upside, I also dont think that it helps that much. First we surely wont have any completely new D&D players here. Everyone who learns D&D now will learn 4E. Continuing this 3.5 arena will target those players that already know 3.5 very well, so learning a few extra rules is not that big of a deal.
A compromise would be to allow Core + Psionics and suspend everything else. That will allow most of the old characters to be still valid and gives many more options for the creation of new characters. The other options(Divine, Unearthed Arcana) are still rarely used and have caused confusion in the past. Scrapping them for now is probably a smart idea.
(btw: Im willing to contribute in discussions but wont be able to take on any regular responsibilities.)
That said - I think the available rules we had outside of the UA stuff should definitely still be here. One of the items we will need to work towards is bringing back the people who were here before. If we offer them everything they had before - they have a better chance of coming back to a new environment where they have significantly less than before. So - while I personally hate psionics - I think they will be important to restore the community.
The UA stuff is debateable - I find I enjoy it more than any harm it causes - and I haven't seen anything come out of it that was outwardly broken. I would be okay with removing it with the intention to bring it back soon; I would be less okay with removing it entirely with no intent on bringing it back.
When to use your action point, where to shift, slide, push your enemy, when to use your second wind, etc. are all so many important small decisions that have to be done right at that moment.
IMHO 4E CoCo can work very well if we shift our focus almost exclusively to seperate thread fights. The current pitlord system is just not able to handle the details that make 4E so interesting.
The problem with 4E isn't so much that there is no min-max potential or that 1vs1 doesn't work that well(we can change to team fights there), but the real problem is that pre-written tactics don't work anymore.
When to use your action point, where to shift, slide, push your enemy, when to use your second wind, etc. are all so many important small decisions that have to be done right at that moment.
To be fair, there are similar decisions to be made in 3.5 (when and where to withdraw, when and where to use maneuvers like grapple/disarm/bullrush, when to use a wand of CLW). But I gather that 4E emphasizes those bits to a greater extent by including things like "moves target 1 square" in many of the powers.
I don't know much about 4E, though, so maybe it really is coimpletely different. But to say that tactics in 3.5 are easier....well, they're as easy as you want them to be.
1. i would only return to play verren (psionics) to see him becoming the Cerebremancer he was always meant to be. maybe play a bit with lelenia, but i deem it highly unlikely she's going to hold her GR. ;)
I don't know much about 4E, though, so maybe it really is coimpletely different. But to say that tactics in 3.5 are easier....well, they're as easy as you want them to be.
where both cat and you are wrong, is in the perception that you can make play-by-tactics work as well, which was for me the great driving point of participating in coco for so long. For someone not playing 4th, this may seem like the same trivial or non trivial decisions. in fact, however, 4th has many more rounds of combat, thus making the predictability of a fight closer to 0.
i hold no real love for play-by-post fights, since they actually take lots of activity. i want to be able to play in a week WITHOUT checking on the boards every other hour.
so, my opinion:
-4e coco can work with pbp, but it will attract other people than me.
-3e coco will work for some more time if it is pretty much unchanged from the ruleset, with maybe additional maps or different leveling/gp system. if you start from scratch, you'll lose out on oldtimers. the rules could use simplification, but if you start on them now, well, GL starting coco repro in 2010.
three parallel leagues will kill everything.
Now i do have a Suggestion... to take baby steps into 4th.. Keep the 3.5 arena open.. for levels 3-8..
Have a new 4th Arena open for levels 1-5.. All Quests and Campaigns should be 4th (as 4th is made for team work)..
the new Arena could have it's own tavern and Council So it can develop it's own house rules as it goes..
Sorry folks but writing Tactics will be harder for 4th.. but guess what.. Life isn't easy..
where both cat and you are wrong, is in the perception that you can make play-by-tactics work as well, which was for me the great driving point of participating in coco for so long. For someone not playing 4th, this may seem like the same trivial or non trivial decisions. in fact, however, 4th has many more rounds of combat, thus making the predictability of a fight closer to 0.
Wait a minute...I never claimed that 4E CoCo would work well using play-by-tactics. I'm just saying that using play-by-tactics sometimes worked poorly in 3.5 CoCo as well. The more options that are available to your character, the worse play-by-tactics will work.
As far as 4E having many more rounds of combat...I can recall a few fights that went 200+ rounds. If you're saying those fights would take more than twice as long in 4E, I'll eat my hat.
I think that the only way we'll get CoCo back on its feet by drawing on old CoCo people is to change nothing, or at most simplify XP/GP rules. I'm sure everyone has ideas on how the CoCo could be substantially changed (I do)...but if we do that in 3.5, we're essentially starting a new game with a system that is no longer the latest version. And the issues with doing it in 4e have already been raised (remember, we had a 4e CoCo for the past few months, and see how that turned out). Once we have a good base, we can create a second league with different rules.
A lot of it depends what you see the purpose of the CoCo as:
-If it's to try out min/maxed builds against each other with fast progression (my opinion), play-by-tactics is pretty much the only way to do it, and that's hard in 4e.
-If it's to create a world people can affect, guilds and campaigns are essential; I see this as something we can (but should, as it will be an attraction factor) put up once we've got the arena working.
Also, I would not be surprised if 3.5 is still pretty popular, especially among the min/maxer population (which is largely what we're aiming for). From the last month of the Real Adventures Setup Zone, there are 4 3.5 pregame threads, 2 3.5 midgame threads, 1 3e pregame thread, and 2 4e pregame threads. So I'd say it's somewhat early to say 3.5 is dead.
Yes, 3.5 is not dead, but 4e needs some support and I do not believe it is dead either. Yes, we had a bad start here, but that was likely do to lack of support and action taken with it. (I tried to get some support and buy some time with the Minutemen, but who can say how sucessful that was)
If we try to have both 4 and 3.5, will the increased attraction factor outweigh the competition for players?
The 3.X CoCo started off as a way to test optimizations by having characters fight one another. The process was kludgy and evolved over time to only loosely resemble its original intent. The addition of quests and the rest of Living Gladius dissolved that even further.
So I'm wondering if an option might be to get CoCo back to its roots. PvP was never a great test of optimization because PCs never fought each other in TT games. Since players and monsters (and especially NPCs) used the same rules, it wasn't horrible, but as an optimization test arena it was mediocre.
In 4e, it's even worse. PCs never fight anything at all like other PCs. They fight monsters. So perhaps that might be a better optimization test: pit teams of PCs against various encounters and score them somehow. That would provide an arena for optimization comparison while still maintaining a competitive experience. Plus, characters could level up and such as normal.
Anyway, it's just a thought, but it might be a way to get 4e going.
As such, I think we should just get back into the swing of things - leave 3.5 as it is and just run the fights. While doing that - work hard to get 4e working. Although I'm not as impressed with 4e as I was hoping to be, I have yet to have much chance to play it - both because I am the DM of my group and the group I was in with another DM - he's decided he's not going to 4e (not that he's run a 3e game in a while either...).
Getting things back to "normal" is an essential first step - going through a bunch of efforts to redefine the existing system seems wasted if we're unsure of how many new faces are even going to see it. With 4e as the goal - we at least know that new players should be filtering in now and again.
Herioc, Paragon, and Epic builds. I believe it would add more variety to the mix of 4.0 CoCo
Regarding the Core issue? I think its really important to point out that using only the coreist of core rules is something that brought people to the CoCo once upon a time. Why?1 Because there is nothing else like CoCo. It certainly seemed like the decline came along with the opening to "core+." Perhaps there were other things involved2, but having that SRD-only core CoCo is something that I think should exist.
That said ... you are already creating 2 worlds. 3E and 4E. Why not go with a Core, Core+, and 4E arena?3
The reason to go only core is that allot of core+ material is ... really "six stars" quality. Whereas the reason to go core+ is that some of it is really well written and works in well.
I say go back to Core (and Psionics - basically SRD). And then also have a "Core+ Project" that is all about weeding out the Legendary feats and Improved unarmed defense feats from the Tactical Feats and the Incarna. 4
A subnote/point of interest. We5 can put any rules we want into CoCo. Game rules cannot be copyrighted, and furthermore all derivatives of the d20 architecture are expressly open content. Never forget "Mage's Mnemonic Enhancer" Rary rolled in his grave, but its that simple to turn PI into OC. Furthermore beyond that! With 4E and the fact that 3E stuff is going out of print - having a wizards supported repository of all the 3E stuff that actually works ...
Who better than we to tell the rest which rules to use?
Footnote
1 because everyone was pun punning
2 like 4E, gleemax, gm drama
3 I suggested a 2E arena once actually ...
4 no hurry now.
5 "the lurker says we" - lurker might not be accurate, occasioner? I do advertise ... speaking of which ... I'm gonna go make a random post in the general forum.
1 because everyone was pun punning
2 like 4E, gleemax, gm drama
3 I suggested a 2E arena once actually ...
4 no hurry now.
5 "the lurker says we" - lurker might not be accurate, occasioner? I do advertise ... speaking of which ... I'm gonna go make a random post in the general forum.
The basic audience of the CoCo is going to be dwindling. By separating it into two subsets, it will make each population smaller. Right now, we've got 5-10 fights per week.
That said - I am going to disagree with the "decline" of the CoCo to be attributed with the addition of psionics or any of the non-core stuff. When I joined, in 2005, psionics were already very present and we had 50+ fights/week. The decline was a large number of factors - and only the combination of them brought about the reduced population we see here today.