And yet a lot of thought went into it, and explanation provided, in the 1E PHB and DMG.
Flavour First vs Game First - a comparison
- Thread starter Hussar
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And yet a lot of thought went into it, and explanation provided, in the 1E PHB and DMG.
And yet there was 30 years of people realizing that the mechanic made no sense within the reality of the game world, which led to a lot of tinkering with alernate wound systems and a lot of variations of "don't think about it."
The Little Raven
First Post
Which is probably why Gygax wrote that essay in the 1e DMG about how D&D isn't intended to represent the "reality of the game world."
But the perspective of the OP seems to me to be entirely based on the "anti-1E" (or whatever you want to call it) side of the edition war. If you say something is a bad game element, and then base that opinion on what the prevailing design philosophy is for the current edition, then I think this is, necessarily, going to be about edition.
For example - the design philosophy of 1E says it's ok that specialist characters (like a giant-slaying ranger) to sometimes not be very effective (like when facing all non-giants or whatever). The idea that the player is somehow "owed" his character always being effective seems IME to belong to later editions, especially 4th. 1E was fine with characters being sub-optimal. If you've used up your spells, or the party is fighting something you're weak against, then hide in the back and wait for the next battle.
Look - it's not like it's that much fun to play Monopoly for 3 hours and wind up losing. But the philosophy that most people seem to operate under is that the existence of adversity makes the good things more enjoyable. The alternative, which is true of a lot of DnD games, is that you "just barely" kill everything that you fight, time after time - after a while people are going to catch on, and the illusion of risk that your character was taking (perhaps an artifact of people's memories of previous editions) will fade.
It would be like comparing soccer to horseshoes. 4E players would probably complain that soccer isn't fun because no one wants to do that much running. Similarly, 4E players probably don't enjoy mapping dungeons in detail, catching diseases, getting lost, dealing with paladin vs. assassin party problems, running away from monsters, losing levels for kissing a demon, having their equipment turn to rust, and dying from a system shock roll. Because those things aren't fun to you doesn't mean that they were designed from a "flavor first" perspective.
The "flavor first" train of thought is not about what you think is fun/not-fun. It's logically about what the motivations/priorities of the designers were, and so IMO it helps to recognize that they probably thought a lot of things were mechanically fun/interesting that many of the current generation of gamers don't.
Here's the problem: you can do that in 3rd ed. Heck, when they release the druid class you can do it in 4th ed. Why the hell not. You have players who are okay with it, fine, go nuts.
But let's assume you had some players who weren't okay with the idea of, say, driving two hours for the once-every-two-weeks game and spending the whole time being a spectator to somebody else's awesome thing. In 3rd ed and 4th ed it's just Mr. Awesome arguing with the Unwilling Cheerleaders. But before then the Unwilling Cheerleaders go up against Mr. Awesome and THE RULES, which is a much bigger psychological block. And even if the Unwilling Cheerleaders win that fight, you've acknowledged that THE RULES, which started out as being accepted in common, are now mutable if enough players make enough noise.
Now in principle this isn't a bad thing. Democracy, right? But even if you make some new rules, piecemeal, that you all agree on, they're just temporary practical patches, and they may not work - or worse, they may undermine the entire rest of the original rules. So you make new patches as you go, and maybe your whole adventure collapses in on itself in a wonderfully perverse way, and you're left with either an unworkable system or you change your mind and then become in the players' eyes Sir Arbitrary the Unreliable.
Somewhere in there I drove past something that looked kinda like a point, so here it is: THE RULES are the basis for the social contract among your gaming group. Fluff can't support something like that, no matter how much shellac you dip it in.
Exactly. Don't think about it; it's just a game construct, move on and have fun.
Scribble
First Post
You're categorizing.
This poweris X type of power therefore it will always have M, L, and P qualities.
Or the reverse: This power has M, L, and P qualities, therefore it is X type or power.
This is the same as trying to categorize things into genres. This film has M, L , and P qualities therefore it's X genre.
Call it in world logic if you want, but it amounts to categorizing elements of the game.
I agree with you to a certain extent. Mainly on the rules side, but yeah there does need to be a certain amount of underlying assumptions, but they should not be strict guidelines, otherwise you run into stagnation. The guidelines need to be flexible, and basically just an overal idea.
In the case of Martial Powers:
These are powers some have that allow them to perform feats and tricks others cannot. The source of said powers is different from what is considered "magic."
So what?
Was there a big PC movement to have people with a low Midichlorian count equal status within the Jedi Order that I missed?
I have to ask at what point is the issue finalized? There can always be a question asked about a subject. Will it never be "complete" in that case?
Eegads!
I'd say what prevented Godzilla from showing up has nothing to do with any kind of in world categorization, but instead because the story didn't call for Godzilla to show up. Had the story called for Godzilla, he would have been there.
And Deckard actually did perform some particularily inhuman stunts. Just about all action heroes do.
Or that you've been asking the question too much and trying to get WAY too much into the details because you don't like the answer, or want to try to prove some sort of point.
Saying stop thinking so much seems to be a responce to an endless stream of "but why?"
You can always ask "but why." Eventually you have to just stop- otherwise you end up constantly asking "but why." Usefull in fields like science or research... But in a game... Kind of gets in the way of actually playing.
You wanna talk about sports? Okay. Let's talk about sports. Let's talk about basketball.
Did you know basketball didn't originally have a shot clock? It's true. The team that was ahead would often just hold onto the ball forever, and the team that was behind would deliberately foul their opposition for a chance at getting the ball back after the free throw. Games ended with scores as low as 19-18 at times, in one memorable case rolling over to QUINTUPLE OVERTIME with the first four of them SCORELESS. Then came the shot clock. Suddenly games were faster-paced and more fun for both players and audiences, and basketball's popularity took off like a rocket!
Were there people who would have preferred the old low-scoring high-fouling ultra-conservative shot-clock-less basketball? Sure there were! Some of 'em even wrote letters to the editor deriding the new innovation. Some people also think the earth is flat, or that the sun revolves around it. The point of this all is: some people are very wrong.
There is already a time when you are in a combat but cannot do anything to affect it. That time is called "everyone else's turn". Already you are only one person out of five or six who can affect how a combat plays out - why make your part even smaller?
Do I have to post a Youtube video with me asking "but why" and rolling a d20 simultaneously? It's not like I'm talented enough to join the circus or anything - I just don't think that asking "why" is a barrier to playing the game.
I personally think that most of the "don't think about it" responses are just a variation of "don't criticize our game system". Asking a question doesn't have to lead to more question asking until your head explodes. Being defensive about the question, and feeling a sense of insecurity is probably a more powerful motivation for putting the breaks on the question asking. When the Wizard of Oz was encouraging the adventuring party to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, he wasn't worried about their heads exploding. He was worried about himself.
Some people think the earth is flat, and some people conflate their opinions with facts. There's no objective basis for discussing whether or not a shot clock is "right" or "wrong" completely absent of context (which is appears is the case here).
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