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L&L: Putting the Vance in Vancian
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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5838928" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>I agree with this, in the sense that I can cheerfully play an unsupported game. I've done that with Rolemaster in the past. And WotC don't owe me anything - if they want to stop publishing the game I enjoy, and start publishing a different one that they believe will be commercially more viable, that's their prerogative as a commercial publishing house.</p><p></p><p>My irritation is with the implication from some posters that, because I play and enjoy 4e, I'm not a legitimate member of the D&D community (whatever exactly that is).</p><p></p><p></p><p>I agree with the second sentence. But I'm not sure about the first. Obviously D&D covers a range of tropes, and I'm not sure which ones you have in mind. But the tropes I think of when I think D&D (and gonzo fantasy more broadly) are many and wacky monsters (ranging from multiple forms of humanoid through giants and witches and werewolves to dragons and griffons and rocs to mind flayers and aboleths and, heaven help us, beholders), other planes that are sources of foes and places of adventures, demons and devils trying to subvert and destroy the world (including Demorgogon, Orcus, Juiblex and Slaad Lords), PC heroes who are richly and thematically defined personae, who fight and survive implausibly many battles, and gradually but steadily rise from relative insignificance to world-shaking prominence.</p><p></p><p>These are the tropes that I first began to encounter in Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks, and then discovered in B/X D&D. Rolemaster also offers them (whereas Runequest doesn't - part of the reason why I gravitated from D&D to RM rather than to RQ). And so does 4e.</p><p></p><p>I'm not a big fan of 2nd ed AD&D. I think it's GMing advice is poor and many of the modules railroads. I can see the links you are drawing between OA and 2nd ed, but OA does not have the same GMing advice and does not need to be run as a railroad, and does not particularly encourage it.</p><p></p><p>All that said, I think it one thing to say "I don't care for 2nd ed AD&D", but another thing to say that it is not D&D. It was the published game for 10 years, after all.</p><p></p><p>This strikes me as needlessly insulting. Instead of asserting, with no evidence, that my game is full of nonsensical things that leave any semblance of realism behind, you could always have asked how I (or other 4e GMs) handle metagame mechanics like hp, Inspiring Word, etc.</p><p></p><p>Completely agreed.</p><p></p><p>The scene I tend to think of, as an example of someone's love for a friend ally reviving him/her from unconcsciousness, is the Aragorn dream sequences in the Two Towers. The only way to duplicate that in an RPG, as far as I am aware, is via a metagame mechanic of some form or other - by definition, the PC cannot act within the fiction, being unconscious. Inspiring Word is one such mechanic. (And it can also work in the way you describe - the unconscious PC hears the cry of his/her friend and ally over the pounding of the blood in his/her head, and returns to the fray.)</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 5838928, member: 42582"] I agree with this, in the sense that I can cheerfully play an unsupported game. I've done that with Rolemaster in the past. And WotC don't owe me anything - if they want to stop publishing the game I enjoy, and start publishing a different one that they believe will be commercially more viable, that's their prerogative as a commercial publishing house. My irritation is with the implication from some posters that, because I play and enjoy 4e, I'm not a legitimate member of the D&D community (whatever exactly that is). I agree with the second sentence. But I'm not sure about the first. Obviously D&D covers a range of tropes, and I'm not sure which ones you have in mind. But the tropes I think of when I think D&D (and gonzo fantasy more broadly) are many and wacky monsters (ranging from multiple forms of humanoid through giants and witches and werewolves to dragons and griffons and rocs to mind flayers and aboleths and, heaven help us, beholders), other planes that are sources of foes and places of adventures, demons and devils trying to subvert and destroy the world (including Demorgogon, Orcus, Juiblex and Slaad Lords), PC heroes who are richly and thematically defined personae, who fight and survive implausibly many battles, and gradually but steadily rise from relative insignificance to world-shaking prominence. These are the tropes that I first began to encounter in Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks, and then discovered in B/X D&D. Rolemaster also offers them (whereas Runequest doesn't - part of the reason why I gravitated from D&D to RM rather than to RQ). And so does 4e. I'm not a big fan of 2nd ed AD&D. I think it's GMing advice is poor and many of the modules railroads. I can see the links you are drawing between OA and 2nd ed, but OA does not have the same GMing advice and does not need to be run as a railroad, and does not particularly encourage it. All that said, I think it one thing to say "I don't care for 2nd ed AD&D", but another thing to say that it is not D&D. It was the published game for 10 years, after all. This strikes me as needlessly insulting. Instead of asserting, with no evidence, that my game is full of nonsensical things that leave any semblance of realism behind, you could always have asked how I (or other 4e GMs) handle metagame mechanics like hp, Inspiring Word, etc. Completely agreed. The scene I tend to think of, as an example of someone's love for a friend ally reviving him/her from unconcsciousness, is the Aragorn dream sequences in the Two Towers. The only way to duplicate that in an RPG, as far as I am aware, is via a metagame mechanic of some form or other - by definition, the PC cannot act within the fiction, being unconscious. Inspiring Word is one such mechanic. (And it can also work in the way you describe - the unconscious PC hears the cry of his/her friend and ally over the pounding of the blood in his/her head, and returns to the fray.) [/QUOTE]
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