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Saving Throws as I understand were added actually a bit later from most of the other rules; originally if the medusa caught your eyes or you got hit with the super poison you just loving died. Likewise you couldn't dodge fireballs or oil grenades or what have you for the above reason of the whole "siege engine" thing. Gygax later went "No wait this is terrible" and added saving throws. They incidentally weren't about you like, dodging the fireball or whatever, it was just fate smiled on you and you survived. You met the medusa's eyes and somehow turned away just in the nick of time, or the fireball managed to scorch just above you by luck, or something like that. If it helps, remember that HP was never intended to be actual physical wounds, and that rules were just sorta created ad-hoc in play because Gygax was playing his dumb elfgame basically every goddamn day and revising stuff on the fly. And that the whole "roleplaying thing" wasn't actually intended.
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Dec 2, 2014 01:57
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Quarex posted:Will it make you feel better or worse to know (if you do not already) that "saving throws" and "armor class" both predate Dungeons & Dragons by decades? If I recall the whole "HP" thing also came from the same naval wargame, which is why combat in D&D - and combat in almost every other ttg since because this hobby is little more then copy the leader followed by TRADITION! - is more or less two sides broadsiding each other and seeing who survives the volley.
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Dec 4, 2014 10:25
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The real trick is to go full escapist fantasy. Stat some cool hero types. At the start of the game, you play yourselves. Then A Thing Happens and you become those cool hero types (while still also being yourselves).
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Dec 7, 2014 22:51
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Galaga Galaxian posted:And then that one annoying kid decides you've all got to go back to your lovely normal lives. Waffleman_ posted:It's escapism! It's not healthy! Ok, back to the wheelchair 
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Dec 7, 2014 23:22
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I feel there's two entirely different discussions here, because when I think of "playing myself" in a game where you become rad superheroes or get teleported into a fantasy land to become an acrobat, I don't think of literally stating out intelligence or whatever, I think of "Ok I have these sweet superpowers or whatever but I still think like me." Like what sort of physical or mental stats I would have never even enters the equation. I'm this superhero who's super strong or super fast, or I'm this cool thief who can steal anything, but with "Cirno" as their personality. That's what I was trying to get out; trying to stat yourself out is a thing I probably a game I wouldn't want to play. But that's not the only way to play yourself. Playing myself as this awesome protagonist who's also still totally me? That's a whole different story.
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Dec 9, 2014 13:47
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I think that's the big disconnect. If I woke up tomorrow with superpowers, I'd still be me. I'd just be a me that can also fly. If I woke up tomorrow and found myself suddenly as an action hero, I'd still be me, just a me that's way better at certain things. When I work out, I don't become another person! The disconnect is the idea that I'd suddenly have this totally different personality. Which is the opposite of what I'm saying! Why on earth would I suddenly have this totally different personality?
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Dec 9, 2014 23:06
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If I woke up with crazy superpowers and found out there were evil secret nazi wizard illuminatis with some plots then maybe I'm unique in my response of TIME TO SUPER-PUNCH SOME NAZIS. If I and some buds were reading a magic book and got teleported to a fantasy world the last thing I'd do is just sit back and do nothing. That's a clear sign that it's time for some adventures.
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Dec 9, 2014 23:51
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AlphaDog posted:Have you read The Magicians? I've not! I read the wiki on it and it sounds depressing. Totally not what would happen, nope. It'd be rad adventures.
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Dec 9, 2014 23:59
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grassy gnoll posted:Everybody always thinks they're gonna be the wizard, but it turns out 99.99% of the denizens of Heartbreakerland are poo poo farmers. Just sayin'. Yeah, but we're talking rather explicitly about a game where it's "wake up and now you're a protagonist." Davin Valkri posted:Let me put it this way. It's no secret--a lot of my characters are prettyboys. I try my best to take them in different directions, but odds are they're at least a little attractive. Everybody makes light of it and I laugh along with it too. No great harm. That'd be a dickhead thing to do! There's no difference between "I turn into this loving rad wizard with fireballs and lightning bolts and a skull because DEATH IS CERTAIN" and "I become this sweet beguiling fey enchanter who bends the wills of my enemies with my near supernatural glamour." If people are ok with the former and not the latter, I pronounce them dickheads.
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Dec 10, 2014 01:23
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Simulationism is a disease.
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Dec 13, 2014 09:23
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Sionak posted:In general, I think genre emulation works best when it's baked into the whole game in a specific way - as in Apocalypse World's language and playbooks. Grafting a sanity mechanic onto D&D for a Ravenloft expansion isn't really going to be sufficient when the rest of the game is about heroic fantasy. Which is why and where so many "simulationist" games completely collapse; they're so busy trying to adhere to a setting in the mechanics (relying on fiction to carry the tone) that they completely ignore that mechanics contribute more to a game's tone then the game's fiction. Sometimes this means directly working AGAINST the tone for the same of making sure your mechanics read really well! To use the aforementioned example, Planescape wanted people to travel across the planes and experience how weird and different they are. So to show this, magic items would get stronger or weaker depending on what plane you were currently at. In reality, this was a pain to deal with, so people either ignored the rule (always the sign of a good rule), or didn't travel the planes and experience how weird and different they were.
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Dec 14, 2014 11:12
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The Plane of Salt could have a lot of fun and cool ideas. Sadly, it didn't. Once again: it is the failure of simulationist design. The idea of using the game to create a setting and nothing else. So you have this Plane of Salt, and then you ask "well what do you DO with it?" and the game designer just calmly points out that hey, it sure does exist, huh? I'm reminded of a guy elsewhere who really hated Eberron because it was too focused on giving him plot hooks. It had too many mysteries! Too many fine details left unsaid! How am I supposed to get into the world as a DM if I don't know what caused the Mourning? How am I supposed to run a game if all I have to give players is adventure?
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Dec 15, 2014 01:15
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AlphaDog posted:I'm not sure why D&D specifically is prone to this kind of thing, but games I run or play in do consistently lean toward silly rather than serious, regardless of the original intent. D&D is and always basically has been a fairly silly game. In the end, it is basically a pulp action game where you mow through enemies while cracking one liners with your friends in order to get a treasure. It's Nathan Drake with swords. And that's ignoring all the intentional silliness built into the game from the start. The vaunted "grim gritty deadliness" that grogs desperately try to staple to D&D frankly only makes it worse, because then you care even less about your chess piece because, it turns out, when death is cheap and easy, so is just remaking your character. Or you reach high enough level that you care even less and just cast a raise dead spell.
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Dec 15, 2014 02:24
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Meanwhile on the note of simulationism, over in the Shadowrun forums, someone is getting sad that their need to make the proper immersive world has excluded PCs existing, and has yet to realize what the actual flaw here is. Simulationism is the idea that the best game is the one you can never play. It is the death of actual gaming.
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Dec 15, 2014 11:06
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AlphaDog posted:Can you post a link? I really want to read this. Done The best part of it is that it all stems from "Hey, this expensive and powerful and useful item that the PCs want - shouldn't it really screw over the PCs without them realizing it?" The bright side is that most of the thread (though depressingly not all) reacts with "why on earth are you screwing over the PCs for no reason?" and when the answer is "verisimiitude!" they respond in turn with "that's dumb."
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Dec 15, 2014 17:54
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Even before the whole GG thing, the Escapist ran ad pieces disguised as interviews and articles , wherein the ACKS creator aimlessly attacks D&D a bunch while plugging his own system, pretending it was all just another news bit. It wasn't morally wrong, but it was disgustingly shameless.
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Dec 16, 2014 22:17
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Reminder that 4e outsold Pathfinder easily for two years, and only started to fall behind after Mearls took over and muddied the waters with Essentials. "4e was the WORST EDITION EVER AND SOLD TERRIBLY" isn't even something Mearls fights against, which isn't surprising given his attitude towards 4e once he took the reins. Go check out the 4e Portable Hole sometime. Then check out the version Mearls made later, which he literally named "True Portable Hole." Dude has never liked 4e. Honestly we've reached a point where 4e needs to have sold poorly (even if it didn't) because the most outspoken consumers of the industry - and it's biggest gatekeeper - have all but staked their lives on it. The actual numbers don't matter. If 4e didn't sell poorly then the market isn't what they want it to be, and they don't know where to go from there.
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Dec 20, 2014 06:27
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D&D suffers heavily - both now and by 4e - by the fact that a) it was no longer the only game in town, and b) video games have increasingly devoured D&D's traditional spaces. There's a reason you saw a sudden growth in the indie scene, and it's because they figured out how to aim for the places other entertainments couldn't hit. D&D meanwhile, in it's big push to NOT BE VIDEOGAMEY in 5e, gives you close to nothing that you can't get from any other game - or, to be blunt, most other cRPGs. It doesn't help that the big industry leaders would rather the hobby burn to the ground (or, more likely, quietly rot away) then allow anything they don't approve of in. Tabletop gaming in general suffers from the fact that most games are made for other ttg veterans and nobody else. Like, remember that loving Dragon Age game that came out that has gently caress all to do with Dragon Age? The one that was painfully obviously a retroclone that someone crowbar'd a bunch of Dragon Age names onto after the fact? The one that has been completely forgotten despite the fact that DA: I is selling gangbusters? None of the big industry leaders are interested in improving the hobby or growing it in any way. They want to make Their Game, drat anyone and anything that could get in the way. WordMercenary posted:I don't think Essentials helped much, kinda a 3.5,style reboot but also kinda not, and one that abandoned several of 4e's design conceits. It just muddied the waters. Essentials lined up perfectly with a huge loss in market share for 4e if you go by those ICVwhatever numbers. Mearls absolutely sunk 4e, and then coincidentally was also the guy in line to be the lead designer for 5e. And wouldn't you know the only other co-lead was Cook, who very explicitly is not listed in the credits.
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Dec 20, 2014 11:21
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neonchameleon posted:"Sudden growth in the indie scene"? The indie scene is tiny. Bully Pulpit have stopped publishing their sales numbers - but it took being featured on Tabletop to push Fiasco past 10,000. Fate Core and Dresden Files are both round the 20,000 mark. Lumpley had sold a grand total of 8000 games by the end of 2012 and a further 2000 in 2013. Yeah, now compare that to the indie scene before.
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Dec 20, 2014 20:39
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4e, it's important to remember, went through an initial "alpha" edition that they eventually scrapped completely. Tome of Battle was sort of a beta for that. Not a lot of that alpha survived to the actual 4e that was printed.
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Dec 21, 2014 10:18
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While there were some good things to come from the OGL, the best of them did so by either skirting the rules as hard as they possible could and divorced themselves from D&D entirely, or came out like 6 years after the fact. The initial point of the OGL was to kill the market by creating a monopoly for d20 products that all lead back to D&D. This was couched in terms of ending the bubble cycle in the hobby. What it did instead was create probably the biggest bubble the hobby's seen - which then popped, and destroyed a lot of the market. So sorta what they wanted to do, but in all the worst ways. There's a reason the Forge talked about the "fantasy heartbreaker" during this time - this was the era of a plethora of products that boiled down to "one good idea, everything else is d20." While 3e reigned supreme, it did so by cannibalizing and hollowing out the rest of the hobby.
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Dec 21, 2014 22:49
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I stand corrected!
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Dec 22, 2014 01:33
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gradenko_2000 posted:I was actually going through the D20 SRD and I found this little thing: Reminder that when 4e was released, the wizard was slightly unfinished because, during development, some people in the dev team kept buffing them to be intentionally more powerful then every other class, so they had to revise the wizard constantly to fight against it.
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Dec 22, 2014 22:52
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Quarex posted:Also for as much as D20 seemed to sink the gaming universe from like 2005-2008, I still wish it were possible to ever live in as exciting a TIME FOR GAMING again as the first few years of D20. It was probably the last time actual newly-released physical books were by and large a better solution to a problem than the Internet! Honestly I get that much more now then I did then, but I was rarely into the third party stuff of 3.x BECAUSE of the glut. I am infinitey more interested in new indie games then I ever was in More D20 Splats. The arrival of completely new and different games and game styles from Japan only makes current times that much better. In the year or two before 4e gaming seemed to be excited over new bonuses and subclasses for a single game. Right now, the excitement is over new ways to game entirely.
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Dec 24, 2014 20:33
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Dec 25, 2014 22:12
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