|
bewilderment posted:Same issue either way, a lot of Lancer abilities (e.g. ones that push and pull) let you activate them automatically on allies but require a roll on enemies. If you can treat your enemy as your temporarily ally you'd get to bypass the roll. So to prevent shenanigans like that, it's about how they feel about you. What I mean is, other creatures choose if they're willing to be your allie (and it only works if you agree with their assessment), but YOU and you alone choose if you're willing to designate another creature your enemy. An enemy by default might hypothetically consent to one of your heals or repositions if you're in some kind of three-way war or if they know something you don't (yeah, pull me allll the way adjacent to yourself, buddy, heh heh) but no amount of positive thinking on your part will suffice. This means that: A) a monster can't decide it's your ally when you unleash an "all allies in the radius" healing grenade, and B) a monster can't decide it's not your enemy when you unleash an "all enemies" computer-guided flechette launcher C) a monster can't decide it IS your enemy if you want to exclude them from the flechette barrage ahead of time because you know they can reflect it at you or use the minimal damage dealt to activate berserk mode before you're ready to deal with it or something
|
#
?
Jan 24, 2024 23:15
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 3, 2024 07:44 |
|
|
The best practical answer I've heard is that "ally" vs. "enemy" should mean what you'd think they should mean, and if you have any clever ideas about lawyering definitions, don't. Stop. Cut that out, and shame on you The less glib answer is, I guess, that you and your allies should all be able to agree that you're all allies, but mostly the intended spirit of the rule should be "don't try to do anything funny."
|
|
#
?
Jan 24, 2024 23:26
|
|
|
If we're having a scrap in the bar with the local family of jackasses and the vampires bust in and start killing everyone alive, my pals and I and the Bugnut Brothers might form a temporary alliance in the name of survival, and yes that means Brother Bugnut can now heal me using holy magic. But just because Dingus Bugnut was the moron who invited the vampires in doesn't mean they don't get hit by my "only affects enemies" Holy Fist of Exploding Vengeance spell, that particular vampiric trope isn't a get out of holy fire free card. After we finish turning vampires into dust, it remains to be seen whether our new mutual experience creates a condition of truce between us and the Bugnuts, or not, and the utility of Brother Bugnut's holy magic should not really be a point of argument at the table. If Brother Bugnut intends to heal us up as a gesture of goodwill that's fine and should work, and if he intends to only heal up his family members and definitely not his family's rivals that seems like it obviously should work like that too. Right? The GM can adjudicate if there's some point where the healing stops working if that makes sense for the story, rules be damned, because it's obvious that the rules were just intended to distinguish between abilities that you don't have to worry about using around enemies, abilities you don't have to worry about using around your pals, and abilities that you do actually need to be cautious with or you're gonna accidentally roast your pals or benefit your enemies. Rules lawyering this stuff on forums is mostly about "what if" theorycrafting and not serious, I bet it doesn't actually come up in real games all that often, and when it does, it's just not that challenging of an issue for a game referee to figure out. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 23:39 on Jan 24, 2024 |
|
#
?
Jan 24, 2024 23:37
|
|
|
The quieter partner to the Rule Of Cool is the Rule Of Dumb. If the rules prevent something sensible from happening for a dumb reason, ignore the rule in favour of what works, as long as you understand why the rule is in place.
|
|
#
?
Jan 24, 2024 23:54
|
|
|
Treating "ally" and "enemy" as hidden metaphysical traits that can be empirically detected through the correct combination of keyworded actions BUT which will resist these efforts out of GM spite is a dumb road to go down and serves to make an RPG feel more gamey and less believable no matter how furiously you wave your hands or pressure your players not to ever think about it. The way to make it work sensibly and in a way that doesn't break immersion is to take them as shorthands for how certain abilities look and feel, in character, to deploy. The reason that an AoE sword slash only hits "enemies" is that the sword is in your hand and you can choose who to swing it at. The reason that an AoE flame strike only hits enemies is that it's a miraculous power you can exclude those you wish to spare from. And so on.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2024 00:00
|
|
|
This discussion is helpful for my current work on Strike 2e which will include more AoEs. There are basically 3 categories, right? Everyone (4e says "all creatures") User's choice (4e says "enemies") 2-party consent (4e says "allies") I can imagine a 4th category that is target's choice only, but I don't think it's very useful. Does this exist in 4e? I am thinking I may just abbreviate these as All, Any, and Opt (as in opt in or opt out). You can then modify these with tags: Any Undead All Summoned Opt Bloodied
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2024 00:05
|
|
|
Lamuella posted:The quieter partner to the Rule Of Cool is the Rule Of Dumb. If the rules prevent something sensible from happening for a dumb reason, ignore the rule in favour of what works, as long as you understand why the rule is in place. Isn't that just 5e ruling?
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2024 00:38
|
|
|
in games where tactical combat is an abstraction that you retroactively interpret back into narrative after reaching a win condition, being "gamey" is a good thing. which is to say, the best interpretation of enemy/ally is, in fact, precisely like imagining there were little red and green circles under their feet it's not diegetic commentary on the game world any more than, say, the odds of success always resolving into increments of 5% are e: or to approach it the other way around: if you're modeling a narrative/diegetic scenario where overtly game-like mechanics would spoil the mood or lose something in translation, you shouldn't use the tactical combat subsystem to resolve that in the first place Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 00:58 on Jan 25, 2024 |
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2024 00:53
|
|
|
Really the issue tracks back to players trying to will themselves to believe the creature that was trying to kill them last game round is their friend, for some sort of edge case benefit. Freely switching your enemies/allies shouldn't be a thing in a narrative or tactical system, because then those terms no longer have any meaning. Just tell the players "No, I don't believe you." Or hold them to it, and don't allow them to attack their new allies again .
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2024 01:40
|
|
|
Jimbozig posted:This discussion is helpful for my current work on Strike 2e which will include more AoEs. There are basically 3 categories, right? My take on this is pretty close to Tuxedo Catfish's comment: people intuitively understand what "enemy" and "ally" means in practice. They couldn't explain the logic behind what is and isn't an ally, but they get that their party members are allies and the people they're fighting are enemies and the imperial grunts that are fighting both sides might count as allies on the cleric's turn and enemies on the wizard's turn depending on the specific circumstances. All and Any make sense in the same way, but Opt only makes sense as a term if you have this entire conversation. The point is, we're talking about making RPGs and not logic puzzles. Having a truly watertight definition of enemy and ally is neat, but one of the strengths of the medium is that even in an extremely crunchy tactical system you can go "you can figure out how to take it from here" for weird corner cases in the fiction and it will be mostly fine.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2024 01:46
|
|
|
Jimbozig posted:This discussion is helpful for my current work on Strike 2e which will include more AoEs. There are basically 3 categories, right? The only things I can think of that the 4th category would make sense on is either flavor-based (magical song that only benefits people who choose to listen, song player can’t purposely exclude people) or like a static environmental effect (caster casts a teleportation circle then leaves, anyone who comes across can use it). Neither case really seems necessary to codify.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2024 01:59
|
|
|
So it's not gamey to switch whether or not your party members count as allies at free action speed so that you can activate their triggered abilities. But it is gamey to not do that.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2024 01:59
|
|
|
Jimbozig posted:This discussion is helpful for my current work on Strike 2e which will include more AoEs. There are basically 3 categories, right? Target's choice would work for things that create devil's bargains or commons to get tragically depleted, like a tree whose healing fruits people can snag or a devil that'll give anyone a damage bonus if they accept a DoT at the same time. Those are rare enough so as to probably not need a vocab word, though. Tuxedo Catfish posted:in games where tactical combat is an abstraction that you retroactively interpret back into narrative after reaching a win condition, being "gamey" is a good thing. which is to say, the best interpretation of enemy/ally is, in fact, precisely like imagining there were little red and green circles under their feet Well, first off, in many games tactical combat isn't an abstraction that gets backported, or if it is one it's in a fuzzy and partial way that genuinely tries to represent true things about your character inside its own resolution mechanisms. Like, you could play D&D but break out a chess set every time combat starts, but most people would find that less satisfying than a game that portrays a fighter as a tanky front-line guy and an archer as a fragile ranged attacker, etc. The more that the game abstractions in that subsystem cause weird things to happen or forbid intuitive things from happening, the worse that subsystem becomes, and while that worsening might be counterbalanced by the game-as-game becoming more fun, it very easily might not. As well, it might screw up the non-combat parts of the game as players suddenly and jarringly find that stuff their character does every day suddenly doesn't work on a rope suspending a puzzle element or a window pane or whatever. So if you're just moving colored polygons around a grid, maybe the green attack can never damage a green target, and therefore a status effect that disables a green target until it takes damage is strong. On the other hand, if I can rapidly and precisely throw hails of knives, and you're magically put to sleep, then I really should be able to aim one of those knives at your foot as well as at the goblins surrounding you, even though that makes the sleep spell the goblin shaman cast comparatively weaker than the spheres-and-cubes version described in the first sentence of this paragraph. And if I do have an area attack that not only usually doesn't hit my allies but fundamentally can't hit my allies even if that'd be really useful, it'd actually take a fair amount of background writing to make it make sense, like it's an eldritch power established through some kind of party-wide pact that I couldn't turn on my fellow diabolists even if I wanted to. PharmerBoy posted:Really the issue tracks back to players trying to will themselves to believe the creature that was trying to kill them last game round is their friend, for some sort of edge case benefit. Freely switching your enemies/allies shouldn't be a thing in a narrative or tactical system, because then those terms no longer have any meaning. Lurks With Wolves posted:My take on this is pretty close to Tuxedo Catfish's comment: people intuitively understand what "enemy" and "ally" means in practice. They couldn't explain the logic behind what is and isn't an ally, but they get that their party members are allies and the people they're fighting are enemies and the imperial grunts that are fighting both sides might count as allies on the cleric's turn and enemies on the wizard's turn depending on the specific circumstances. All and Any make sense in the same way, but Opt only makes sense as a term if you have this entire conversation. What if someone switches side mid-battle, because they've just discovered a past betrayal or something? This actually works just fine in most combat systems, including those for D&D, because "enemy" and "ally" are largely not technical terms (except that "ally" can't include you yourself, in most iterations that use the language) but common-sense shorthands describing how spells, items, or special attacks look and feel to use. But the second you're like, no, your character can't change how they feel unless they run it by me first, you get into much weirder and thornier territory that ironically requires way more formal rules as well as delineating of weird edge cases or on-the-fly mother-may-I adjudication. theironjef posted:So it's not gamey to switch whether or not your party members count as allies at free action speed so that you can activate their triggered abilities. But it is gamey to not do that. There's no actual switching who "counts as" what here because "ally" and "enemy" aren't metaphysical categories that need to be cleared with the GM. A white bishop can't take a white pawn, but Thor might well realize that it's a good idea not to prevent all the lightning he's throwing around from arcing into Iron Man if he's previously noticed that it supercharges Iron Man's suit by doing so (that the Avengers movie set this up without ever paying it off stands as one of its many flaws). Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 02:07 on Jan 25, 2024 |
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2024 02:03
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:Like, you could play D&D but break out a chess set every time combat starts, but most people would find that less satisfying than a game that portrays a fighter as a tanky front-line guy and an archer as a fragile ranged attacker, etc. If you're doing game design for "most people" you've already lost my interest.  Less flippantly, some kind and degree of resonance between mechanics and diegesis is valuable, yes; it acts as a mnemonic device, makes interpreting the results back into narrative easier, evokes certain emotional responses, etc. But that resonance is just a means, not an end. The relationship between the modes only needs to be close enough to feel engaging or to get some point across. Chess might be perfectly suitable for a game with only two players and a medieval siege warfare theme, for example. Or perhaps more pertinently, something like Jenga is perfectly suited to a horror game about looming Dread and inevitable doom. e: The relationship between the subsystem and the overall themes of the game is frequently better if it doesn't model minutia like the sleep spell vs. precision knife-throwing example; the more you get wrapped up in that, the more the game becomes about your ability to come up with silly exceptions to the rules, which doesn't reinforce, but rather undermines the pleasing symmetry between the player's skill at the wargame and the character's martial heroism. e2: Kind of like how it might initially seem appealing to model every jewel, gold piece, and precious art object the players loot -- treasure is thematically important, right? -- but in practice making the players feel like accountants is detrimental to all but a few very specific fantasy narratives. Detail should be reserved for things that matter, and the measure of a great game is its ability to establish compelling and obvious parallels with less effort or literal similarity. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 02:52 on Jan 25, 2024 |
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2024 02:25
|
|
|
I don't think "if I can exclude Bob from my AoE why can't I exclude Evil Bob?" is a silly exception or minutia. I think it's an obvious question, with an obvious answer: "of course you can." But that's why I think the categories I laid out make sense. They are simple, and they give the right answers to obvious questions. "Any" will usually mean you exclude your allies and attack your enemies, but for those rare times when you want to also exclude Evil Bob, you can do that too. By getting the obvious stuff right, it makes it easier to have a "no exceptions, no weaseling: play it as written" policy if that's what you want to do. Having rules that are perceived as confusing or leading to nonsense lowers player trust in the rules and increases the pressure for the GM to "fix" it. If you want to design a power that can't exclude people, there's a keyword right there for that: "all." I don't really think that having a power that must target all enemies and only enemies is going to be that tactically distinct from an "Any" power. They will be identical 95% of the time.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2024 04:38
|
|
|
And the short version is that it's the kind of argument that literally only ever comes up when people are grasping at semantic straws trying to pull gotchas and can be safely discarded. If there are legitimate edge cases in RP they can be handled case by case, because the rules are otherwise simple and clear.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2024 04:55
|
|
|
Tuxedo Catfish posted:If you're doing game design for "most people" you've already lost my interest. Well, I've got two broadly-related thoughts here. Firstly, there's obviously levels of abstraction from which there are no, and there should be no, escape. At some point when you explain what you're doing you just have to roll the die and the die tells you what happens, and so if, instead, when you do something and you play an entire game of Stratego and the game of Stratego tells you what happens, that's it, there's no negotiation. You can't be like, well, if I do something clever, can I break the rules of Stratego? Or rather, if you can, that's already factored in, so if I'm doing something that requires a d20 roll with advantage, I can't then get double-advantage by trying to optimize within the "game" of rolling a die on the table. But! The point of a roleplaying game at which the actual roleplaying stops and the pure abstraction begins is important to place deliberately and there are real disadvantages to placing it too "high", if you will. Like, imagine we're playing Call of Cthulhu using its normal rules, but, the moment that an investigation reaches a particular dramatic juncture, we break open and play through an entire session of Arkham Horror instead. Then, based on whether we won or lost Arkham Horror, we go back to our CoC rules and proceed to roleplay out our miraculous victory or crushing defeat, decide which NPCs we're going to tell about it, etc. This works, sure, but it also evacuates us from our characters pretty dramatically and for a pretty extended period of time, not even because our only concern is now beating the board game (in a "real" CoC game, our only concern would also be not getting killed by shoggoths or whatever, and we could rightly get mad in-character at a PC who fails to make the appropriate effort to this extent) but because we've had to sacrifice a lot of the basic conceits of a roleplaying game and the freedom that implies to produce a separate, related experience that basically amounts to rolling a die with extra steps. Let me pull in another post here: Ghost Leviathan posted:And the short version is that it's the kind of argument that literally only ever comes up when people are grasping at semantic straws trying to pull gotchas and can be safely discarded. If there are legitimate edge cases in RP they can be handled case by case, because the rules are otherwise simple and clear. A lot of people's instinctive reaction to the idea that you, on spec, might decide who counts as your "enemy" at a given moment to be cheating, such that in fact you should never be allowed to exclude monsters or include players in your AoEs (among other things). But it's actually pretty weird to take this kind of strategy as a "gotcha" as opposed to organic, emergent strategy. Including your ally in an AoE to wake them up from a sleep-type debuff, for instance, or to trigger some on-damage advantage that outweighs the damage dealt, is a clever thing to do. But the PC who gets a bonus whenever they're damaged might, in another fight, elect to voluntarily move through a damaging zone that an enemy created, or fight in the front lines of combat rather than staying back and shooting. A PC who knows a particular monster gets more dangerous when damaged might opt not to attack it until later in the fight. Hell, PCs might set up traps before a fight starts or make sure to attack the enemy from the high ground or do any number of things that translate to a game-mechanical advantage but aren't strict manifestations of left-clicking on a green unit and then right-clicking on a red unit. Now, there's a lot of dumb special pleading I have no patience for when it comes to roleplaying games. If someone's rolling a d20 to have their rogue swing at the enemy, and then say "uhhh I'm aiming for his head can that let me do more damage?" I will either gently or cruelly, depending on how many times they've tried this already, explain that whether you hit them in the head will be decided by the dice roll rather than by your aspirations. But I think you cause way, way more logistical and narrative problems than you solve by being like, oh, you want to attack someone I didn't expect you to want to attack? Let's see three pages of backstory first, pal, single-spaced.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2024 06:31
|
|
|
This seems like a lot of words to talk about you being mad about rpgs with an explicitly siloed tactical combat component tbh
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2024 10:31
|
|
|
All RPGs are games. It is not possible for one to be 'more gamey' than another. That's like saying a book can be 'more booky' than another book by some metric. I suppose it could be a larger book, or a book with more pages, or with a higher wordcount, but its book status is mostly binary.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2024 10:56
|
|
|
bewilderment posted:All RPGs are games. It is not possible for one to be 'more gamey' than another. That's like saying a book can be 'more booky' than another book by some metric. I suppose it could be a larger book, or a book with more pages, or with a higher wordcount, but its book status is mostly binary. You know, if you assume that a word means something, and that definition when applied means everyone else using the word is talking nonsense, the sensible conclusion to come to is that the word probably doesn't mean that.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2024 11:27
|
|
|
Reveilled posted:You know, if you assume that a word means something, and that definition when applied means everyone else using the word is talking nonsense, the sensible conclusion to come to is that the word probably doesn't mean that. Yeah, the idea that a term has some subjectivity means you should just push it into meaningless is a massive discussion-ending cliche. Gamey is subjective, but it isn't just "this is a game", it's more referring to a feeling about some mechanics versus others. For example, in say, something like Empire of the Sun, a game about the Pacific War, the weather is handled by the Japanese deck containing some cards that can be played as responses to cancel Allied operations. Other games have the weather either be randomized by dice, or fixed based on the historical weather for an area and time. The former is often talked about as more 'gamey', than the others, for a variety of reasons, but the biggest one is probably that neither the real IJA or IJN had weather control devices, so a player being able to pull that on someone feels artificial, very much the game imposing on the fictive reality. It does improve the game in terms of interactivity between the players, but I don't think it's unreasonable to have a preference one way or the other. It's not really that different in the TTRPG space. People are going to have preferences for the levels and kinds of abstractions they prefer in games.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2024 11:49
|
|
|
Gamism, Narrativism and Simulation is a recognised theory in RPG design, using the word as described upthread is valid.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2024 12:24
|
|
|
And so, we are suddenly back in 1997
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2024 12:46
|
|
|
YggdrasilTM posted:And so, we are suddenly back in 1997 Did they actually talk about the industry in spaces dedicated to doing so in 1997 instead of rehashing the same non-industry-related edition war arguments for the thousandth time? I wasn't into RPGs at the time so I wouldn't know, but this is a hell of a long derail. Again. Over the same topic it always is.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2024 14:54
|
|
|
SkyeAuroline posted:Did they actually talk about the industry in spaces dedicated to doing so in 1997 instead of rehashing the same non-industry-related edition war arguments for the thousandth time? I wasn't into RPGs at the time so I wouldn't know, but this is a hell of a long derail. Again. Over the same topic it always is. don't worry, RPG players were already spending all their free time making GBS threads on D&D in the usenet era. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. YggdrasilTM fucked around with this message at 15:02 on Jan 25, 2024 |
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2024 14:59
|
|
|
YggdrasilTM posted:don't worry, RPG players were already spending all their free time making GBS threads on D&D in the usenet era. Let's be fair, sometimes they were making GBS threads on WoD instead. (Actually, making GBS threads on WoD was the original purpose of GNS theory.)
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2024 15:21
|
|
|
YggdrasilTM posted:don't worry, RPG players were already spending all their free time making GBS threads on D&D in the usenet era. They've been doing it since the very beginning. The day Gygax crossed out a word in his first draft of Chainmail someone probably wrote a nasty letter about it.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2024 16:12
|
|
|
Silver2195 posted:Let's be fair, sometimes they were making GBS threads on WoD instead. (Actually, making GBS threads on WoD was the original purpose of GNS theory.) It's a bit quaint, in retrospect, to consider how the new waves of players entering TTRPG spaces because of Vampire: The Masquerade (and sometimes other WoD books) were the CritRole fans of their time.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2024 16:17
|
|
|
Gravitas Shortfall posted:Gamism, Narrativism and Simulation is a recognised theory in RPG design, using the word as described upthread is valid. Kinda funny given the theory as said is completely backwards; it's valid and useful to approach them as things a game needs all three of to be coherent, and to understand how much in one direction it's going. The people who put the theory forward have it all completely, uselessly backwards.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2024 16:28
|
|
|
YggdrasilTM posted:don't worry, RPG players were already spending all their free time making GBS threads on D&D in the usenet era. There’s a rich treasure trove of people making GBS threads on 3e for being a video game if you look around a bit.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2024 16:58
|
|
|
Thanlis posted:There’s a rich treasure trove of people making GBS threads on 3e for being a video game if you look around a bit.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2024 17:11
|
|
|
God, now I'm having flashbacks to the year 2000. Monk/Sorcerer multiclass characters are obviously overpowered and will turn the game into Dragonball Z, with character flying, blasting, and punching being the most supreme tactic. Having Con bonuses for all classes and starting at scores of 12 already (instead of 15, as God commanded it) means that 3e characters are immortal. It's impossible to die in D&D anymore. Oh and dwarves can become wizards now? Despite their obvious anti-magical nature? loving preposterous! (I am not even remotely making any of these up.)
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2024 17:35
|
|
|
Gravitas Shortfall posted:Gamism, Narrativism and Simulation is a recognised theory in RPG design
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2024 17:38
|
|
|
Tbf making GBS threads on 3e for any reason is justified in my book, that game being used as the baseline for various videogames and thus forcing me personally to interact with the worst character progression system ever devised is a crime against god and man
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2024 17:42
|
|
|
To be fair, HP inflation in 3e was a specific bad thing that did happen. Because it also applied to monsters and thereby nerfed fighters while giving more incentives to rely on save-or-lose spells.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2024 18:15
|
|
|
I remember specifically someone made a point of calling 3e “the miniatures wargame of dungeonpunk superheroes.” Even had it as their sig in whatever forum or newsgroup it was.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2024 18:17
|
|
|
Please someone find John Wick's 3E rant. Black and white art!
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2024 18:18
|
|
|
Hi guys. Been a while, eh? Yeah. I know. Trust me, I know. I hear a few of you have been wondering where I've been? You see the scars on my face? Smell the dust in my beard? See the ragged horse I rode in on? I've been away, friends. Far, far away, on a magic journey that led me from the bleak, cold desert to a place where they serve nothing but milk and honey, breakfast, lunch and dinner. I've tasted a moment of paradise, just enough to give me the strength to return here, and share with you the its sublime beauty. I'm not sure if I have the skill to convey it all to you, but I'll try. I'll try. If you've been following this column for even a short while, you know that I love stories. You know the people who love animals more than they love people? Well, that's stories and me. Some of my best friends are stories. More often than not, I've trusted stories more than I've trusted people. And, one of these days, I'll have to take up Mona Hall on her offer, and write down the story she gave me, of a long forgotten fairytale who gets approached by The Mouse. "I can make them remember you again," The Mouse tells the long forgotten fairytale. "Just sign right here on the dotted line, and they'll never forget you again." I owe her for that one. Maybe one day, I'll find the words to tell it. Another of my favorite stories is Percival, the tale of a simpleton who becomes a knight, who loses his innocence, then by finding it again, heals a wounded king. Those of you who have seen Terry Gilliam's The Fisher King (starring Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges) know the story. It's a great story, one that continually finds its way back into my life, no matter how much I try to forget it. And it always amazes me how I don't recognize Percival, even when he walks right up to my face and shakes my hand. He's never upset that I don't recognize him. In fact, it's happened so many times, he's come to expect it. (I'm terrible at names and faces, by the way. If I don't recognize you, please don't take it personally. I do my best, really I do.) So, yes, I've been gone for months. Not a peep. Where have I been? My friends, I've been lost in the Wastelands. And their acrid, dusty air made the sweet nectar of the Grail that much sweeter. * * * One of those stories that's been with me so long, I don't even remember where we met, is a little tale told to me by Stan Lee. Yes, you know it well. He's a friendly chap. A friendly neighborhood chap. Goes by the name of Spider-Man. A wonderful lesson comes out of that story. Not a new lesson, but then again, there are few lessons in this world that don't have long, gray beards. It's that "Great power, great responsibility" lesson we keep hearing about - the lesson we keep hearing about, and keep ignoring. Why do I say that? Have you taken a look around lately? Specifically, at the internet. Just before I got lost (one of the key steps in the wrong direction), I lost my temper at somebody who decided to write a review of ORKWORLD. Instead of being a responsible adult, instead of pointing him toward the incredible review written in PYRAMID, I told the shmuck to blow himself. Not that he didn't deserve it, the whole thing was flame bait to begin with. (Any review of any game that includes the sentence, "The rules are broken. I didn't actually play the game, but I skimmed through the rules, and I can tell" is flame bait. But, hey, if you disagree with me, that's fine. Just go check out the review in PYRAMID. It's just, fair, and well written. Three qualities that the review at rpg.net doesn't have.) But, frankly, I should have known better. But the whole thing was just another straw on that poor camel's back. (Just how many straws does he have on his back these days?) It didn't help that I made such a stink in this very column about Ken Hite getting the only review copy at Gen-Con, that I plugged his column, said a bunch of very nice things about him both here and at Gen-Con. . and then found the review of my game ran almost exactly two paragraphs. Three whole columns devoted to that D&D 3E game, and my book gets two whole paragraphs. Of course, the review follows Gareth Skarka's Underworld paragraphs, and begins with the phrase "If you liked Underworld, you'll like Orkworld!" In other words, Ken, my game and Gareth's game are pretty much the same thing. Oboy. (And all of you who think I only bag on people who say negative things about my games, pay close attention here.) Ken's review was almost entirely complimentary. Unfortunately, it fails as a review. It tells you next to nothing about the game - other than the fact that if you like Underworld, you'll like Orkworld. Not that the two games have next to nothing in common. Not that the people who didn't like Underworld will now pass on Orkworld. Not that people who did like Underworld will buy Orkworld and get pissed off because it isn't like Underworld. Not that people who liked Orkworld will now go and try Underworld and get pissed that they aren't the same game. Not that Ken Hite, the one and only person in the whole world who got a review copy wrote exactly less than one hundred and fifty words about my game and three whole columns about that poorly laid out, poorly illustrated, poorly designed, two-hundred and eighty page RULEBOOK they called DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS THIRD EDITION. Let me tell you something about that book, all right? When's the last time you bought an RPG that was nothing but two hundred and eighty pages of RULES? You know when? Nineteen eighty-five. That's when. Because that's the last time an RPG could get away with being two hundred and eighty pages of rules. IF D&D3E ANY OTHER NAME ON IT AT ALL IT WOULD HAVE BEEN THE JOKE OF GEN-CON. IT'S A TWO HUNDRED AND EIGHTY PAGE RULEBOOK!!! No, check that. I'm entirely wrong. I'm ranting so hard about this that I completely forgot something. It's not just a two hundred and eighty page book of rules. BECAUSE THE STUPID THING COMES IN THREE VOLUMES!!! THAT MAKES IT AN EIGHT HUNDRED PAGE RULE BOOK!!! ALL YOU SUCKERS WHO BOUGHT ALL THREE BOOKS PAID FOR EIGHT HUNDRED PAGES OF RULES!!! Did you even look at the thing? I mean, the PLAYER'S HANDBOOK has black and white art in it. With all the art resources Wizards has, they can't afford to fill that book with FULL COLVER ART??? Wizards has dozens of artists on staff, ready and willing to paint full-color pictures for D&D 3E, and instead, the art director has them drawing black and white pictures for a book that's FULL COLOR. And the quality of art. I mean, the fellow who did all that painting is very nice, but he ain't no Terese Neilson. He ain't no Rebecca Guay. He ain't no Bill O'Connor. He ain't no Drew Str. Drew Str. oh hell, the guy who did the cover of the Star Wars RPG. Yeah, that guy. And, ladies and gentlemen, he is a far way away from being Tom Denmark. This is WotC's premier product. There is no excuse not to have the best drat artists you have painting this book. Instead, they settled for someone who is simply above standard. Very, very good artist. A talented fellow who has a very lucrative career ahead of him. All my best to him and I hope he finds all the best success in the world. But, he's still no Micheal Whalen. Or Brom. Or the guys they have over at LucasArts doing concept sketches for Episode II. Some of the best artists in the world are doing concept sketches for Hollywood. Why not hire them? You're gonna sell 350,000 copies of this book, why not spend a little extra money to make it LOOK NICE??? And then there was the layout. Who the hell did they hire to do the layout on that book? It looks like they scanned a piece of loose-leaf notebook paper, dyed the lines in Photoshop and dropped it in the background. It's like they said, "Hey! I've got an idea! The typeface is already crunched and difficult to read, why not drop in a bunch of lines that are the same color as the type and make it MORE DIFFICULT TO READ! How's that sound?" Idiots. Ryan Dancey fooled you all. Every single last one of you. You all sucked on the big tap of Fool-Me-Three-Times and Ryan Dancey danced all the way to the bank. And what do you have? You have three two hundred and eighty page rulebooks. Eight hundred pages of rules. Congratulations. And all I hear about on the internet is how innovative that game is. You know, I can't tell you how innovative that game is BECAUSE I CAN'T READ IT! MY EYES START BLEEDING ON PAGE FOUR!!! But the whole internet is singing the praises of this game. Ken Hite is doing it - even though the book Tom and I put together gets about a hundred and fifty words - rpg.net is doing it, the whole stinkin' world is doing it. And you know what that says to me? It says, "Screw you, John Wick. Screw you and your screwed up notions of what gamers want. Yeah, you wrote the L5R RPG and won every single industry award for it and made it one of the best-selling RPGs of all time. Yeah, you wrote the storyline for L5R, and all those kids who carry banners on their back during Gen-Con, all those kids who make the L5R tournament LARGER THAN THE MAGIC TOURNAMENT AND THE POKEMON TOURNAMENT COMBINED, who make Ryan Dancey a whole @!#$-load of money, who - I'm getting ahead of myself. I'm tipping my hand. I'll have to slow down here for a moment. Let the rant run out. Get back in control of myself. There we go. . count to ten. . stop and take a breath. . there we go. Wanna know where I've been for the last two weeks? That's where I've been. The Wasteland. Just try writing anything with that going through your head. Go on. I dare you. I know what you're thinking. Sour grapes? Heh. You don't know the half of it. You are absolutely right. I'll admit it right up front. Absolutely truthful. Ain't no way to get around it. But that's what's in my head. I'll be honest about it. I'll tell you the whole, ugly, naked truth: I HATE D&D Third Edition. Why? The same reason I hate STAR TREK: Because the best-selling RPG on the market isn't the best RPG on the market. It's just the one with the best name recognition. However, let's get something else out in the open: D&D3 is a good game. I'll say it again: D&D3 is a good game. And three times, just to make sure. D&D3 is a GOOD GAME Is it the best game? No. It isn't. I don't think anyone will dispute that. The layout makes the book difficult to read. I understand there was a lot of information to cram into two hundred and eighty pages, but they could have chosen a friendlier font and they could have chosen not to put lines between the lines to make the job of reading it even harder. It already has 50 pages of errata. It doesn't have THE BEST artists in our industry between those covers. The art is wonderful, but it isn't THE BEST. And when you have the budget, you go for nothing but THE BEST. The logo is indistinct and difficult to read. The cover has rhinestones pasted onto it. It's difficult to read. It isn't organized very well. It's difficult to read. (Tell me something, would you? What alignment is Darth Vader? Chaotic Evil, you say? Well, that makes sense. He is evil; he kills people. But is he Chaotic? He wants to bring order to the galaxy. He loves his son. Shows signs of regret bringing him before his Emperor. Maybe he's Neutral Evil, then. Right? Hm. Or maybe - just maybe - he's Lawful Good. Don't believe me? Check it out. Vader's actions are all but selfless. He's serving the needs of the Empire. He is unconcerned with personal power or gain. He follows a strict code [I don't think anyone can argue the Dark Side of the Force isn't strict on its followers] and [once again] wants to bring order to the galaxy. That sounds like Lawful Good to me. Sure, he has to kill a few people to maintain that order, but when's the last time a Paladin got chastised for killing a few orks, eh? And those rebel scum. Trying to topple the status quo. That sounds a bit chaotic to me. And do you think they evacuated the Death Star just moments before Luke blew it to pieces? How many people did Luke Skywalker murder when he blew the first Death Star up? And, as Kevin Smith reminds us, the second Death Star wasn't quite complete just yet. That means there were people working away on it when Biggs and Lando blew it to pieces. Innoncent bystanders. All dead. Lawful Good rebels fighting for freedom, right? Wrong. Fighting to restore power to the aristocracy. Or, am I mistaken when I remember that both heroines bore some royalty in their nomenclature? The Rebel Alliance, fighting for truth, justice and restoring a couple of pretty princesses back to power. Yeah. That's what Lawful Good is all about. And don't forget to kill some orks on your way out. They're worth 50 XPs a piece.) It still has Character Classes. (Let me ask you a question. In my years of professional service to the human race, I spent three years as a camp counselor for pre-teens with emotional and family problems, two years as a pin jockey in a bowling alley, another three years as a camp counselor, a few weeks as a singing waiter, a few years as a professional storyteller and singer in a sea shanty group, taught storytelling for three years, two years as assistant manager at Wal-Mart, delivered pizzas, was in a punk band, a blues band and a rock 'n' roll band, worked late night grocery and maintenance and produce at Cub Foods in my home state of Minnesota, worked a year on the Union Pacific Railroad as a switchman and breakman, worked security, served as an office assistant for a foster family agency, looked after developmentally disabled adults, worked as a janitor, tried my hand as staff writer and [part-time] assistant editor at a games magazine, wrote over 1,000,000 words of game fiction, source material and rules and even worked sixteen hours at McDonalds. What character class do I fit into? (What's that? Three dimensional characters with backgrounds and past careers and such don't fit into character classes? Well, what kind of characters fit into character classes? Be careful with your answer; you may not like it.) (And for those of you who think you're clever by calling me a "bard," please don't. There are real people walking around with that honor. They go to a school in Wales - St. David's, I think its called - and they memorize long passages of stories and family histories to earn that title. I have not. (Here. Three quick examples. A couple of friends asked me if I wanted to play in a D&D game. I said, "Sure. Why not. Let's see how it plays." So, here are the two characters I wanted to make. (First, I wanted a young noble who, at the age of ten, found he had sorcerous abilities. This, of course, meant he was a sorcerer. His father, the king, was elated, but his wise men notified him there was only one way his son could be a sorcerer: if his mother slept with a dragon. That meant my character was a bastard, cast out and ostrasiced by his family and friends. He still has his sorcery, and he's looking for his true father. And when he's strong enough, he's gonna come home and he's gonna free his mother [locked up in the tower], and defeat his tyrant father. Sound like a fun character to play? Well, you can't. There are no rules for royal characters. I wanted contacts and money and other noble stuff. I can employ in any other rpg on the market but neither the PH or the DMG have rules for playing noble characters. I have to play something else. (So, I decided to play a bard. A young man who goes to bard school, but his heart is more in wooing women than learning old songs that nobody sings anymore. "Where's the charm person spell?" he asks. They ignore him and teach him a seventeen hour story about people nobody's ever heard of. He steals a couple of songbooks, runs away from the school and becomes a rogue. Well, guess what? I can't play that character, either. Spuh. That was it. If I can't even make the character I want to play, two characters that are entirely legitimate and within the boundries of standard generic fantasy, then I just won't play. I mean, I can make those characters in GURPS, why can't I make them in D&D? (Why? I'll tell you why with one word: character classes. Stupid, idiotic, restrictive for the purpose of being restrictive character classes.) The fact of the matter is, that game has sold enormously well. Has it deserved its sales? That's not for me to say. However, and this is important here, pay close attention: I DO THINK THAT ANY GAME THAT BEGINS WITH THE SENTENCE, "WELCOME TO THE GAME THAT HAS DEFINED THE FANTASTIC IMAGINATION FOR TWENTY-FIVE YEARS" DESERVES NOTHING LESS THAN A .357 HOLLOW-TIP BULLET STRAIGHT THROUGH THE SPINE. As if no other game in twenty-five years has contributed anything to the industry. Every innovation that's in those books, and The Wick means EVERY INNOVATION is from another game. There is nothing new in the PG. Absolutely nothing. You can go through, point-by-point, and find every "new rule" in another game. Not bad for a game that has "defined the creative imagination" for the last 25 years. It's a presumptuous statement that goes right up there on the top of my list, right next to Sen-Zar's "We had to make this game." We've mocked the guys who wrote Sen-Zar. Mercilessly. But then, when D&D pulls the same @!#$, we ignore it, and sing its praises high unto the rafters, agreeing like the mindless, slack-jawed pod-people we are. Well, not me. I calls 'em as I sees 'em. D&D3 is not the holy grail. It is not manna from heaven. It is not the perfect, end all be all game. It is just as wacky and flawed and screwy as it's always been, and always will be. And, frankly, its still about as much fun. No question about it: D&D is a helluva lot of fun. But it isn't brilliant game design. It's still the same game it was when it was the butt of every gamer cliché we know. It's still the clunky, old-school, simple-minded, hack 'n' slash game it's always been. Just like when the Academy Awards brought out Jane Fonda, welcoming her back to the fold after her two-decade long lunacy period of being married to that strange fellow who owns Atlanta, expecting all of us to be fooled. Well, I wasn't fooled. Not by Jane (she'll always be Barbarella to me) and not by D&D (she'll always be Barbarella to me, too.) It's still D&D, folks. The game you were mocking two years ago. The game you complained about two years ago. The game you fought over two years ago. The game you refused to play ever again two years ago. It's still D&D. It's okay to like it. It's even okay to love it. I'm not about pissing in people's punch. But I am about calling a spade a spade, and that game is the damned Ace. Hell, it's the whole damned Royal Flush of Spades. Don't call it anything other than what it is. It's Dee and Effin' Dee. It don't matter how many numbers they put behind it. It will always have those stupid alignments that never made sense, it will always have character classes that keep you from making the character you really want to make, it will always reward murder and genocide with profit and power (XPs), and it will always be clunky, awkward and unbalanced. (Not that I have any interest in "balanced" games but there are folks out there who complain that games I design aren't "balanced" but go on to sing the praises of D&D3. Listen here, buddy. Tell me about it the next time I see your fighter and he's using a longsword instead of a rapier. Wanna know why? Because a longsword does a d8 worth of damage and the rapier only does a d6. "Aha!" you say. "But the rapier does more damage on a critical hit!" To which, I answer: "So what? Your rapier does a crit on an 18 - 20 and my longsword does a crit on 19 or 20. That means you crit 15% of the time. I crit 10% of the time. And, in the meantime, 100% of the time, I've got a better chance of doing more damage while having an only 5% less chance of getting a crit. Nice game balance there. And don't ever ask me to handle a light axe. D4 that crits 5% of the time. Why in the world would I ever waste my time with a light axe??? (But I digress.) Yes, this has been my Wasteland. Watching the internet sing the praises of D&D3, claiming it the savior-messiah of gaming. Folks, it wasn't all that good. It wasn't bad. But, it just wasn't all that good, either. At least, not from my point of view. And it's funny. I was at the Berkeley show a few weeks ago, listening to everyone talk about it. The Hero guys told me, "Yeah. It's dressed up Hero." I heard the Chaosium guys say, "Yeah. It's just dressed up BRPS." I even heard someone say, "They just stole a bunch of ideas from Rolemaster." Funny. No one said they stole anything from L5R or 7th Sea. (Maybe that's because there's nothing worth stealing from them? One never can tell.) Its kinda like when every racial group in the world claimed the trade federation aliens in Episode One sounded like them. I heard Native Americans say it, I heard Chinese say it, I heard Japanese say it. Funny. No one said they sounded Irish. (Maybe that's because nobody wants to sound Irish? One never can tell.) The fact of the matter is, D&D3 looks like a lot of different RPGs. There's just nothing new or innovative about it. I mean, think about the games that have come out lately. Think about the way Unknown Armies handles magic (pornomancy all the way, baby!), the way Feng Shui handles combat (I have to admit, brutes - I mean, mooks are a wonderful idea) the way Hero Wars handles myth (do I have to say anything here?), the way Orkworld handles hunting - . sorry . - and the way Conspiracy X handles psychic powers (and if you haven't seen this one, you are missing something). And think of some older games, and the innovations they made. Cthulhu. Chill. Traveller. Over the Edge. The World of Darkness. GURPS. Hero. Rolemaster. All of these games provided essential building blocks the designers up at WotC used to create the new D&D. And, let's face it, there is nothing new in those books. Nothing. The Saving Throw system (your traits give you bonuses) comes right out of Runequest. Skills are not a new thing. Not even the way they handled skills (making each one a separate ability) is a new thing. I mean, come on. It wasn't even new when 7th Sea did it. Go check out TMNT (and other Palladium books) to see what I mean. The magic system is still the same old clunky, non-linear, non-sensical magic system. Although, I have to admit, this is one place I felt the game really fell flat. I mean, I miss all those funky names for the spells. Now they read like chemical formulae. The bonuses thing is cute, but again, nothing new. It's straight out of Pendragon. Identical in nearly every way. Nothing new. And did I mention they didn't do anything about alignment. Orks - sorry - "orcs" are still chaotic evil. Chaotic evil and tribal. I'd like to see how that works. A culture of sociopaths sounds a bit oxymoronic to me. And did I mention half the art is black and white? In a color book, half the art is black and white. In case you missed that, let me say it again. IN A FULL COLOR BOOK, NEARLY HALF THE ART IS BLACK AND WHITE. That's not just bad art direction. That's a waste of money. So, to recap: 1. D&D3 is a hardbound, full-color book with at least half of its full color pages covered with black and white illustrations. 2. It's mechanics, while improving previous editions, are not innovative, fresh or new; simply patchworks from previous innovations. 3. It is poorly laid out and requires a total of 3 books (a total purchase of sixty dollars) to play. 4. It is a rulebook comprised completely of rules. Something unseen in this industry for nearly a decade. My conclusion? If D&D3 is a rules set for generic fantasy roleplaying. And, like every other generic fantasy game that has released in the last ten years, it should financially fail. However, this is not any other generic fantasy game. This is Dungeons and Dragons. And because of that, it will succeed. Despite the fact it is nothing more than eight hundred pages of rules and not a single paragraph of world. Despite the fact the rules are not well organized or explained. Despite the fact the combat rules require the use of miniatures. Despite the fact gamers have been complaining about this kind of book for the last ten years. Despite this fact, because it was Dungeons and Dragons, this game will sell almost 350,000 copies by the end of the year while Orkworld will probably sell about 3,000. Sour grapes? You bet your sweet dowmga. * * * I promised you we'd get out of the Wastelands. But before we did, I wanted you to get a look at where my mind's been the last two weeks. And, to be honest, there's one more step into the Wastelands before we can take our first step out. Just one more. I promise. I need to tell you one small fact about Ryan Dancey. See, I know Ryan. And Ryan knows me. It ain't no secret we haven't always seen eye to eye. I won't get into that here. That's private stuff between me and Ryan. But, I will tell you a quick story about me and Tom Denmark that involves Ryan in a weird kind of way. It goes something like this. Me and Tom and Morgan Gray (more on him later) are sitting outside a coffee shop. I'm eating a turkey sandwich with cranberry sauce. Never had it before, it's pretty neat. They're smoking. Had that before, it ain't neat. (Something The Wife said to me just the other day. "If I was married to a smoker," she says, "I'd pour a capful of Drano into my food. Just a cap a day. And I'd eat it right in front of my smoking husband. He'd say, "What the hell are you doing?" and I'd say, "I'm killing myself. Very slowly. And you're gonna watch." She's just amazing. Okay. Back to the story.) "We should do it," Tom says. "We should do it," Morgan says. "You two are crazy," John says. They're trying to convince me to do something I promised myself - and others - I would not do. And that, my friends, is write an adventure using the d20 System. "It's like when CCGs first took off," Tom says. And he's right. "We've got to get on there quick, before we're just another adventure," Morgan says. And he's right. "I can't," I say. And I'm right. See, I know Ryan. Worked with him for five years. And there's a proud little part of me that doesn't buy into all this d20 hype. I won't. It's a fad. Besides, I won't write something for d20, even if it is for a quick buck, because that'll prove that Ryan was right. I'll be just like everyone else jumping on the bandwagon. Everyone else so eager to prove that Ryan Dancey was right about the game industry: sooner or later, everything will be d20 whether game designers like it or not. The fans will demand it. Game companies have to either make d20 products or go out of business. The more d20 products there are out there, the harder it will be for anything else to make a mark in the market. And, if I jump on the bandwagon, Wick Fanboys (hi guys!) will shout "Sell Out!" and throw eggs at my house. Besides. I already made Ryan Dancey plenty of money. When they sold Five Rings Publishing to Wizards of the Coast, there were a bunch of people who saw a whole lot of money. No-one on the design team was on that list of people. Not me, not Dave Williams, not D.J. Trindle, not Rob Vaux, not Matt Wilson, not Matt Staroscik. Not one of us. Not one red cent. "I've already made Ryan Dancey a lot of money," I tell them. "I'm not interested in making him more." That's when Tom Denmark looks me in the eye with a smile on his face and he tells me: "Then it's time you let Ryan Dancey make you a lot of money." And, my friends, that was only the second time in recorded history John Wick couldn't think of anything to say. To top it off, Morgan says this: "Besides, the book we'll do will kick the @!#$ out of anything they're gonna do." Then, he goes on to tell me that Ryan said D&D fans will hold the Player's Handbook up to the rest of the industry and say, "The bar just got raised." He smiles. "Let's do a book the D&D players hold up to Ryan and say 'The bar just got raised.'" I won't count that as the third time. It was just an amendment on the second time. So, there I am. Sitting there. Thunderstruck. Dumbfounded. Flabbergasted. Discombobulated. . So, what do I say? "All right," I say. "Let's steal Ryan's customers." Ryan once said that he intended to use the PLAYER'S HANDBOOK as a weapon against the rest of the industry. He said he'd print a full-color, hardbound two-hundred plus page book for only twenty bucks, and the fans would hold that book up to the rest of the industry and say, "Why can't you make something this good?" Well, friends and neighbors, I have seen D&D3, and I can tell you this: I'm doing a d20 Adventure. I've seen the best WotC can do. It was s***. I'm gonna blow their socks off. And they'll hold that book up at the steps of Wizards Central and shout at the top of their lungs: "Why can't you make something this good?" I've taken my first step out of the Wasteland. Thanks to a guy named Percival, hiding in the skins and clothes of Tom Denmark and Morgan Gray. They showed me something I'd forgotten: Gaming is about fun. Providing a tool for others to have fun. I'm back. Back in the saddle, ready to finish what I started Namely, ready to finish Warhamster for John Kovalic, ready to finish The Book of Villains for Green Knight, and ready to finish The Flux for myself. And a few other things as well. More on them later. Take good care of yourselves. Don't get lost in that Wasteland. It's a nasty place. And the only guy who knows how to get out is a funny lookin' pair of fellas living in the Bay Area. And I owe them much. (PS: I will update Orkworld.com this week with a few goodies. And, next week, I'll show you what's up with Warhamster. Boy. It's been a long road. See you on the other side.)
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2024 18:27
|
|
|
Maxwell Lord posted:I remember specifically someone made a point of calling 3e “the miniatures wargame of dungeonpunk superheroes.” Even had it as their sig in whatever forum or newsgroup it was. Which itself feels like kind of an outgrowth of the pushback that seemed to be happening throughout the 90s against content that made D&D characters too "overpowered" and into "superheroes". It really does feel like D&D has long had a problem where different factions of the playerbase want the game's narrative power curve to support a particular type of play - Either playing as mythic heroes fighting dragons and gods or small-time, roguish bums fighting bandits and goblin clans. That D&D ostensibly tries to present itself as being all thigns to all people just ends up setting itself up for failure.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2024 18:29
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 3, 2024 07:44 |
|
|
Yeah, why wasn't 3e full of FULL COLVER ART anyway?
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2024 18:33
|
|