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Kai Tave posted:Yeah, I don't think language barriers should never come up but there ought to be a reason behind it rather than throwing it in there just because. Especially baffling to me are games where player-characters might come from different geographical regions, none of which share a language, and ostensibly characters are required to either buy each others' language to communicate or constantly be rolling dice to understand what the other person is saying. While I can imagine games where interparty language barriers could be entertaining I utterly fail to see how that sort of thing would be anything other than quickly insufferable in your typical fantasy RPG where that was rigorously enforced. I've been trying to find a way to make languages interesting, and I can't really do it (outside of maybe very specific encounters, but that's more of a session design thing than a system design one). You really need to justify every bit of complexity you put in your system, and languages have a hard time being anything but an extra piece of complexity that primarily works to prevent interesting social interactions from happening.
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Oct 1, 2014 07:28
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Yeah, I don't think the randomness is a problem--it's way more of a 'turn off your brain and do poo poo with friends' game than anything competitive. I still hate playing for the reasons people here are citing, though--it takes way too long and the end-game is just incredibly frustrating.
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Oct 2, 2014 17:44
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Sorry to pop into this as it's dying down, but there are some concepts people aren't really bringing up that I figure are useful additions to the conversation.Ratoslov posted:Hell, why shouldn't it be modeled as a bonus? It's a cool scene idea, and you should get some bennies for trying to do something cool. You could just kill the mooks workmanlike, but no, you decided to do it in a neat way, and that deserves applause. Wasn't the whole point of the scene that Riddick took a penalty to gain a bonus? The whole point of the teacup thing was to completely break the morale of the group he was fighting against. Like, there are two ways to look at the scene--as a player controlling Riddick or as the audience watching him. One of the really cool things about RPGs is that both sides are always there--half the fun of the game is switching between the two modes fluidly throughout play. Playing Riddick and watching Riddick in a movie have some things in common, but they have a loooooot different, too. It's satisfying laying down over the top descriptions to the things I'm doing in a RPG, but if that description stays purely in the narrative description and stays removed from the mechanics it starts to feel kind of hollow and reflexive after a while--it divorces player choice from player narration too much. It becomes too much about being the audience and not enough about being Riddick. The thing is, both taking a penalty for no reason and always being at max murder dudes are boring, choice-wise. Bad choices and superficial choices are both essentially no choices. What you want is trade-offs. As I said, though, the scene already has a trade-off baked into it--Riddick took a penalty to combat to gain a bonus to intimidation. RPGs shouldn't just be modeling the physics of fighting with a tea cup, they should ideally be modeling the line of reasoning (inside the character's head, even more so than inside the director's) that led to tea cup fighting in the first place.
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Oct 5, 2014 18:35
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ProfessorCirno posted:This is the thing D&D has warped - the idea that the fighter is a magical item receptacle. And that's what the argument is against - that the fighter is always at GO TIME, and all the magic weapon - or bigger machine gun, or fancier battle axe - does, is put them at GO TIME +. Is that really not the case in D&D, though? I feel like D&D is actually pretty good at balancing a character's mix of inherent bonuses (from ability scores, feats, levels, etc) and equipment-based bonuses. Between two characters who are otherwise identical, it'll be the one with the better gear who has an advantage, but I don't feel like the difference is too huge otherwise. It's probably a bit more pronounced in editions with quickly ascending ACs, but in general I'm not sure that the difference between a +1 sword and a mundane one is worth even as much as a level. Unless you're talking about a guy kitted out in gear versus someone naked, in which case things get a bit more pronounced. Even a level 5 or so fighter shouldn't have any problem taking on some low-level mooks bare-handed, though, thanks to strength bonuses and high hit-points. I feel like I'm maybe still missing something about your perspective, though. To try to use a concrete example, how many levels higher do you think a mundanely equipped fighter in D&D should have to be to take on someone fully kitted out in level-appropriate magic gear? How about a naked fighter versus someone kitted out level-appropriately? Are you saying that the differences should be less than a level, or that they should just be smaller than they are right now? I should probably note that I'm intentionally avoiding utility abilities for now. That's a good discussion, but it's also a huge and messy one.
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Oct 5, 2014 21:07
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