MerricB said:
For many groups, it never was. You could say, "There are curtains and a chandelier", but the PCs wouldn't take advantage of them. Or perhaps they would, but there wasn't any pressing reason for them to do it apart from "it sounding cool."
Ah, the "But you couldn't do all teh cool stuff in 1e since there were no mechanics for it!" party line! And who better to deliver it!
Newsflash: Characters (and monsters) swung from curtains and chandeliers long before someone create the Swing skill and the Improved Swing feat.
But I think that misses (or sidesteps) the point,
MerricB.
MerricB said:
Was Gary Gygax wasting his time when he included illustrations in Tome of Horrors?
This will probably sound heretical coming from a grumpy grognard such as myself, but I've never so much as looked inside
Tomb of Horrors, so I have no data on which to frame a reply to this.
Instead, I'll try this: Some modules include illustrations of traps and puzzles to make sure the players understand exactly what it is they're facing - when players have to make potentially life-or-death decisions on behalf of their characters, this certainly makes sense.
A few years ago I picked up a couple of 3.0
D&D adventures that included illustrations of various scenes and personages - for example, the adventurers encounter a group of travelling gypsies (or the equivalent in that setting) with their wooden wagon, and included a picture of the wagon to show the players. The appearence of the wagon had no particular bearing on the encounter - it was merely a scene-setter specific to that adventure. This comes closer to my original point - what's wrong with the GM simply describing the wagon?
But I think that misses (or sidesteps) at least part of the point as well,
MerricB.
I see two issues with what
Khuxan proposes. First, it leads to the homogenization of settings. Look at my example of the dungeon tiles again,
MerricB - if everyone is sipping from the same finite pool of visual resources, then the well gets drawn down pretty quickly.
What what about published adventures, you may ask? I think the same problem exists here as well, which is one reason that I don't use them, but a GM can tweak the adventure (or fold, spindle, and mutilate it, for that matter) and make it something different, but an illustration is an illustration is an illustration, which leads to another issue...
Second, the presumed benefit of dungeon tiles, those 3D wall pieces, or CAD illos is diminished as soon as the GM decides to add something else instead. I've run into this with CC2Pro already, and I demurred on Dundjinni for the same reason - I quickly bump up against the limits of the data set.
I could use those 3D cave walls for example, but where is the cavern piece that is filled with tree roots from ceiling to floor? It doesn't exist? Well, now the players have to go back to using their imaginations again...
...or at least I hope they do. My concern is that GMs will be less likely to come up with their own descriptions and instead rely solely on those limited data sets.
For me, RPGs are best experienced in the space between the ears. I don't care if my players see the same wildflowers in that meadow as I do, as long as they picture a meadow with splashes of color. My goal as a GM is to stimulate that imagination, not substitute someone else's idea of what my game-world looks like (or worse, confine my game-world only to that someone else's vision of an imaginary world).
