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How much should 5e aim at balance?
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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5985075" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>I agree with you that the adventure design advice in the 4e DMG is worthless. I don't think it's radically different from that in 3E, which also seems to support a very high degree of adventure path play (especially looking at Paizo's business model). The last really good scenario design advice I can think of from a D&D book is in Moldvay Basic.</p><p></p><p>But I don't think the adventure design advice exhausts the 4e DMG. And the whole thing is not entirely coherent. Other parts of the game - eg player designed quests, and the commentary on story elements in Worlds & Monsters - point in a different direction.</p><p></p><p>And as far as I can tell, there are other posters on this board who have stumbled, independently of me (and vice versa, with one exception) on more-or-less the same way of running 4e: [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION], [MENTION=25643]ca[/MENTION]pmbell, [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION], [MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION], and (before he drifted 4e into his current hack) [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION] (who is the exception noted above - my approach to 4e was heavily influenced by his actual play posts from back in the early months of 4e).</p><p></p><p>It's hard to tell exactly what Chris Perkins does in his games, given that his play reports are written up and edited for publication on a commercial website, but he also seems to be running something more than a bloodless adventure path.</p><p></p><p>I guess what I'm saying is that I don't think I'm as deviant as you think.</p><p></p><p>Thanks. That's kind of you to say so.</p><p></p><p>That hasn't been my experience. 4e, in keeping with D&D tradition, has lots of lists - of monsters, maps, skill challenge ideas etc - that can be run without prep. (I run monsters from books without prep all the time.) And the cosmology is there in the books (a lot of it in just the PHB and DMG). Apart from that I just use the standard techniques for encounter-driven narrativist play. (Very thematically light - or, if you prefer, hackneyed - narrativist play in my own case.)</p><p></p><p>My own campaign notes, after (I would guess) 70-odd sessions, are 4 A4 pages of background, about the same length of "campaign diary", plus probably a few dozen pages of printed out monster stats, plus the typical scratch sheets, battlemaps etc produced in the course of actual play. Not all that onerous.</p><p></p><p>Now you're just making me blush. And what you say is pretty unfair to Piratecat, I think. I don't do very good NPC voices, or very vibrant descriptions. And with me and three other dads in our Sunday afternoon games, our sessions double as "D&D creche"! (Another bit of 4e DMG advice that we ignore.)</p><p></p><p>Anyway, for what it's worth, I admire you as one of the few consistent posters advocating for classic D&D play: multiple parties in the same world; stables of PCs; intraparty contracts for the division of loot; and the like. I tried to GM in that Gygaxian style when I was first starting out, but sucked at it. My main influence as a GM is Chris Claremont's X-Men (both the good and the bad - just as Claremont's X-Men collapsed under the weight of its own plotsand background in the early 90s, my first uni campaign ended up suffering the same fate a few years later). And my other main technique - that I learned, somehow, GMing Oriental Adventures (AD&D version) is to trust my players. Follow their leads, frame scenes in response, and see what happens. If nothing else, this is a cure for the bloodless adventure path play that Libramarian rightly criticises.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 5985075, member: 42582"] I agree with you that the adventure design advice in the 4e DMG is worthless. I don't think it's radically different from that in 3E, which also seems to support a very high degree of adventure path play (especially looking at Paizo's business model). The last really good scenario design advice I can think of from a D&D book is in Moldvay Basic. But I don't think the adventure design advice exhausts the 4e DMG. And the whole thing is not entirely coherent. Other parts of the game - eg player designed quests, and the commentary on story elements in Worlds & Monsters - point in a different direction. And as far as I can tell, there are other posters on this board who have stumbled, independently of me (and vice versa, with one exception) on more-or-less the same way of running 4e: [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION], [MENTION=25643]ca[/MENTION]pmbell, [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION], [MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION], and (before he drifted 4e into his current hack) [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION] (who is the exception noted above - my approach to 4e was heavily influenced by his actual play posts from back in the early months of 4e). It's hard to tell exactly what Chris Perkins does in his games, given that his play reports are written up and edited for publication on a commercial website, but he also seems to be running something more than a bloodless adventure path. I guess what I'm saying is that I don't think I'm as deviant as you think. Thanks. That's kind of you to say so. That hasn't been my experience. 4e, in keeping with D&D tradition, has lots of lists - of monsters, maps, skill challenge ideas etc - that can be run without prep. (I run monsters from books without prep all the time.) And the cosmology is there in the books (a lot of it in just the PHB and DMG). Apart from that I just use the standard techniques for encounter-driven narrativist play. (Very thematically light - or, if you prefer, hackneyed - narrativist play in my own case.) My own campaign notes, after (I would guess) 70-odd sessions, are 4 A4 pages of background, about the same length of "campaign diary", plus probably a few dozen pages of printed out monster stats, plus the typical scratch sheets, battlemaps etc produced in the course of actual play. Not all that onerous. Now you're just making me blush. And what you say is pretty unfair to Piratecat, I think. I don't do very good NPC voices, or very vibrant descriptions. And with me and three other dads in our Sunday afternoon games, our sessions double as "D&D creche"! (Another bit of 4e DMG advice that we ignore.) Anyway, for what it's worth, I admire you as one of the few consistent posters advocating for classic D&D play: multiple parties in the same world; stables of PCs; intraparty contracts for the division of loot; and the like. I tried to GM in that Gygaxian style when I was first starting out, but sucked at it. My main influence as a GM is Chris Claremont's X-Men (both the good and the bad - just as Claremont's X-Men collapsed under the weight of its own plotsand background in the early 90s, my first uni campaign ended up suffering the same fate a few years later). And my other main technique - that I learned, somehow, GMing Oriental Adventures (AD&D version) is to trust my players. Follow their leads, frame scenes in response, and see what happens. If nothing else, this is a cure for the bloodless adventure path play that Libramarian rightly criticises. [/QUOTE]
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