What Hill Will You Die On?

[Gradine]

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim is really the best video game story ever told and would be infinitely more palatable if it wasn't full of incredibly unnecessary anime fanservice nonsense

 

[Reynard]

Mine is: Having a hill that you would die on with respect to a type of game is very, very silly. That should be reserved for things that really matter in the real world, which would probably be considered politics here so I won't provide any examples.

Thanks for your input.

 

[Thomas Shey]

There aren't any I can really think of outside of personal gaming things (on a personal level, the "RP" and the "G" are equally important and people who want to tell me they aren't can go away). There are ones I think are pretty strongly likely, but none I'm so certain of that I'd die on a hill about them.

 

[Jd Smith1]

My table provides the greatest gaming experience known to Mankind.

 

[loverdrive]

Metagaming isn't a bad thing.

I would go a step further and say that a heavy dose of metagaming is required for a decent game.

 

[DammitVictor]

To bring it back to D&D...

Remove damage cantrips! Make wizards throw darts again!

Bring back 4E style rituals. Adding time and gold costs to powerful spells is balance the way Gygax intended!

I actually agree with these two, if you replace "darts" with "hands". But I don't necessarily think Wizards should be unable to to throw more-or-less unlimited balls of fire out of their hands. I just think Fighters should be better at it.

And 4e rituals were vastly better than 5e rituals for representing spells where the E and D resource economies and the action economy don't really apply.

 

[Andvari]

I think this comes down to the relative illogic of "missing" anyway. With ranged attacks, missing makes general sense.

But melee ranged attacks? Nope. Swinging a sword and completely whiffing it can be fun for the laugh, but if thats to happen during serious combat, it needs to be because something their target did actively resulted in it.

I suspect you could just call attacks as "succeeding" or "failing" instead.

 

[Lanefan]

Hills I'll defend to the death (as opposed to those I'll merely defend to the serious injury ):

--- The concept of ranged healing simply should [edit] not [/edit] exist unless it's being done by a deity.
--- Fail means fail. Not succeed with a cost, not fail but move forward, nor anything else other than you simply flat-out fail, or worse. To succeed with a cost you first have to succeed, rather than fail.
--- "Nothing happens" is a perfectly viable result for those great many action declarations where something might have happened, but didn't.
--- In the interests of balance, pretty much every benefit should and must come with some sort of corresponding penalty somewhere else.
--- Corollary to the last: there is nothing wrong with penalties be they minuses to hit, species-based stat penalties, or whatever.
--- PCs are first and foremost inhabitants of their setting and should - and must - reflect that, in that PCs and NPCs are at their root the same things.
--- A creature's stats define the creature and stay constant regardless of its surroundings or who-what it is encountering at the time. No minions.
--- Common sense and believability win out over nonsensical rules every time. No, you can't trip a snake or a gelatinous cube. Fireballs are round, not pixellated. Nothing ever has to snap to the grid. Etc.
--- Rushing the game's pacing produces a poorer experience. It's not a movie with a limited run-time, nor does it have any requirement for always-on action; it's an open-ended pastime where there's always next session in which to do whatever didn't get done this session.

 

[jdrakeh]

The concept of "balance" - mechanical or narrative - is really overrated. I didn't really see discussion of this until c. 2000 and, prior to that, it was an afterthought in most game groups that I played with. The DM/GM usually just set up encounters that made sense for a given environment or narrative set piece. This meant that sometimes (often) the PCs had to retreat and come up with a better plan or simply return when we were more powerful and better suited to deal with a given threat.

 

[CreamCloud0]

--- The concept of ranged healing simply should exist unless it's being done by a deity.

Is this meant to be shouldn’t? The sentence reads weird otherwise.