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General Tabletop Discussion
D&D Older Editions
Core 4E vs. Essentials
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<blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 7174649" data-attributes="member: 6775031"><p>I think that I don't understand enough about your system to make a coherent argument. I'm getting flashbacks to when I read FATE, and that's not fair to you.</p><p></p><p>It's not <em>just</em> numbers going up. It's also the underlying reality which those numbers represent. The character doesn't <em>just</em> have +5 to Arcana checks. The character is <em>also</em> an expert at identifying arcane runes, and everything else that falls under the skill. It gives you the opportunity to play a character who is exceptionally good at one type of thing. It might not mean much from a mechanical standpoint, but giving anyone a specialty can work as a character hook. Even the old Ghostbusters game from West End had that going for it.</p><p>And that's why the better sorts of point-buy games don't ask you to choose between the two. When the designers of early Shadowrun noticed that players were only taking combat and magic skills at the expense of anything flavorful or circumstantial, they added in an entirely new category of skill to cover obscure knowledge and hobbies, so you don't lose your combat edge by also knowing about elven wines.</p><p></p><p>The game at hand could also have gone the same route. They could have left all of the combat stuff within the classes, and left feats to cover the flavorful or circumstantial stuff. The problem is that a lot of feats made you better at fighting, so you needed to take those if you were going to survive long enough to worry about the non-combat stuff.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="The Crimson Binome, post: 7174649, member: 6775031"] I think that I don't understand enough about your system to make a coherent argument. I'm getting flashbacks to when I read FATE, and that's not fair to you. It's not [I]just[/I] numbers going up. It's also the underlying reality which those numbers represent. The character doesn't [I]just[/I] have +5 to Arcana checks. The character is [I]also[/I] an expert at identifying arcane runes, and everything else that falls under the skill. It gives you the opportunity to play a character who is exceptionally good at one type of thing. It might not mean much from a mechanical standpoint, but giving anyone a specialty can work as a character hook. Even the old Ghostbusters game from West End had that going for it. And that's why the better sorts of point-buy games don't ask you to choose between the two. When the designers of early Shadowrun noticed that players were only taking combat and magic skills at the expense of anything flavorful or circumstantial, they added in an entirely new category of skill to cover obscure knowledge and hobbies, so you don't lose your combat edge by also knowing about elven wines. The game at hand could also have gone the same route. They could have left all of the combat stuff within the classes, and left feats to cover the flavorful or circumstantial stuff. The problem is that a lot of feats made you better at fighting, so you needed to take those if you were going to survive long enough to worry about the non-combat stuff. [/QUOTE]
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