VƎX Werewolf

Training my hound so it can imitate having life in its eyes for when non-kinky company is over

Woman transformed into a gem dragon. She's standing naked, grinning and looking down to the viewer.

My contribution to @monstrifex.bsky.social's new solo book FANGED GRINS! the book is amazing and you should def go check it out ;)

A bichrome Blender 4.1 render of an anthropomorphic shark leaning slightly from the cockpit of her mech, with a feral expression on her face. She is wearing a pilot's mask incorporated into a cage muzzle.

A quick render I did up because our hound headmate, Ferra (pictured) wanted a render that was more #WARHOUND -y

very flawed and quickly done, but i just wanted to make something, not make it perfect!

By the way, yes, I am aware that I excluded parts of the 4E and 5E statblocks for brevity, and this makes the Pathfinder statblock look much bigger and more complicated by comparison.

IT IS, UNRELATEDLY, STILL MUCH BIGGER AND MORE COMPLICATED

This is the Balor statblock from Pathfinder

I have put the second picture there for no particular reason

Well, I make a point in the thread of drawing a line between "complex" and "complicated"

Even when it makes active Perception checks, its bonus is only +9 - +3 from its Wisdom and +6 from its 19 Challenge Rating. This will probably catch most characters who aren't skilled in Stealth, but a level 1 Rogue with high Dexterity won't sweat it too much, especially if they have Expertise.

Meanwhile, the 5E Balor has Passive Perception 13 (another great feature 5E introduced!), meaning you can probably hide from it as a starting character who doesn't even have proficiency in Stealth, which adds more texture to interactions with it - it's big and scary but not especially observant.

The 4E Balor has Perception +23. That reliably hits at least 34 on 50% of rolls. A character needs at least a matching +23 in Stealth to have a 50/50 chance of hiding from it, which means trained Stealth (+5), DEX at least 18 (+4) and level 28 (+14). This is, frankly, an unreasonable expectation.

Fire immunity vs fire resist 40 is way better - "oh, you can still attack this with fire, it's just your attacks will do 40 less damage" is a blatant trap. My low-level fire attacks won't do shit, so let me waste my valuable high-level spell slots on a fire spell that... does dogshit damage?

Compare and contrast the statblocks for an iconic high level enemy, the Balor, 4E on the left, 5E on the right.

Notice how the 4E Balor has a ridiculous 42 AC and utterly deranged save bonuses, while the 5E Balor is still stacked but can be hit about 10% of the time even by a level 1 PC?

It's not COMPLEX - it's COMPLICATED. I'm having to work out what bonuses and maluses apply in any given situation. These numbers don't add much texture or nuance to the game, they just create busywork. They increase mental overhead.

Even D&D 4E didn't actually fix this; 5E did.

But in D&D-style d20 systems, the target of the roll is static, and the outcome is binary! Your number is either big enough and the roll succeeds, or too small and it fails!

This isn't COMPLEX! There are only two outcomes! This is basically the most mechanically simple determination you can have!

Add on the 3.5E/Pathfinder tendency for class abilities, feats, species traits, magic items etc. to give you +1 or +2 bonuses while environmental effects and enemy abilities imposed -1 or -2 maluses, and it rapidly turns into every roll requiring an accountancy diploma

Rolling 1d20+27 gives you a possible range of 28-47. Against AC 38, you have a 50% chance to hit.

This is statistically identical to rolling an unmodified 1d20 against AC 11 - you have a 50% chance to hit.

The only thing that changes here is you have to do more math with bigger numbers.

Anyway, Pathfinder 1E looked at the absurd number inflation of D&D 3.5E and said "what if we not only didn't fix that, what if we added EVEN MORE numbers to keep track of"

This, believe it or not, isn't mechanical complexity. It's mechanical complication, which is subtly different.

And yes I did just boot up a 20-year-old game to check that I was right about this. Argali's Arms sells +3 weapons for 2-3k gold.

Even in D&D 3.5E, where magic items are way more prevalent and commonplace, +3 weapons and armor are meant to be absurdly expensive, powerful and rare, and yet you could just walk into Argali's Arms and buy a +3 longsword for just over 2000 gold because you needed it to be able to hit consistently.

When numbers increase without a tangible improvement to your character's performance, it makes advancement feel meaningless and gameplay frustrating. It led to something utterly absurd in Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark, which starts at level 15: the starting vendors sell +3 gear.

To save you from like 500 pages of rant, my succinct answer would be "yes but nowhere near enough, and it adds exciting new problems."

There's a similar issue I have with Borderlands 2, wherein guns would do absurd damage numbers - stuff like 250K per shot at max level - but even the scrub-tier enemies had several million HP, so enemies took the same number of shots to kill that they did 50 levels ago.

The biggest problem I had with 3.5E was number inflation. At high level, your attack bonus could be something like +20 but comparable level enemies had ACs around 35-40 so your to-hit chance was not meaningfully different to a level 1 guy with a +1 attack bonus fighting a dude with AC 15.

My EXTREMELY controversial hot take is that Pathfinder 1E, a system born out of frustration with D&D 4E's mechanical changes - a frustration that, in hindsight, nearly everyone (including Paizo) seems to agree was overblown and misplaced - essentially just managed to create a worse version of 3.5E.

Consider my favourite system:

Lancer's in-mech gameplay is extremely crunchy and is widely considered to be some of the best in class.

Lancer's out-of-mech roleplay is extremely sparse and must be carried almost entirely by the GM and the players, something that's regularly criticised.

I think the entire premise of "hahaha McDonalds CEO ate burger bad, I will prove my relatability by eating burger good" is terminally marketer-brained.

Yes, I agree. There are certainly BETTER systems one could start out with, but I don't think that, all things considered, D&D 5E was that bad.

My EXTREMELY hot take is that Pathfinder 1E did nothing better than D&D and arguably did almost everything worse, and 2E did not fix nearly enough

I actually think it's good when a new player is confronted with an absurdly complex system for doing something seemingly simple and asks "WHY IS IT LIKE THIS?!"

This is actually a good instinct to cultivate, because it also cultivates an appetite for other systems which don't do it like that.

You absolutely should not limit yourself to D&D! You must break out of the Tolkien Mind Prison! You need to try other systems!

But actually, if those advisories are followed, D&D 5E does a surprisingly good job preparing players for how fundamentally weird and idiosyncratic TTRPGs are.

Mechanical complexity is a tool to be wielded responsibly, not a hazard to be avoided. TTRPGs with very freeform, sparse rulesets are not good teaching tools for players new to the medium. Mechanical idiosyncrasy is not the work of Satan.

And D&D 5E is not the WORST system to start out with.