Reynard
aka Ian Eller
It occurs to me that while I never specified the age group of the hypothetical new DM, a lot of folks in this thread are assuming an adult. I wonder why that is.
D&D General A Rant: DMing is not hard.
- Thread starter Reynard
- Start date
I thought I had. And just read it and your response again. It may well be I am misinterpreting somewhere or reading things in to replies.
I certainly have more patience for youngsters who are trying out things!
Reynard
aka Ian Eller
I was not making any arguments about when a new GM should try a long form campaign. I was responding to.the poster that suggested they wouldn't even give the new GM a chance because as a player they were looking for a long term campaign (although a year hardly seems to.qualify).
Again: the rant was against grifters. But as the thread goes on, I find myself more and more opposed to the apparent multitudes of gatekeepers we have around here.
HomegrownHydra
Adventurer
Because your justification for your rant was products being marketed to DM's and such products are most likely purchased by adults.
They had written: "This doesn't mean groups can't have fun with an ok or sub-par DM. They can. But, if as a player, you are expecting great thing for your year-long campaign,"
The first sentence and the "if" didn't lead me to thinking "they wouldn't even give the new GM a chance" at all.
Knowing that's how you read it certainly changes how I read your response! Thank you for the explanation.
Reynard
aka Ian Eller
I don't see the difference in my further explanation, but that's likely a me problem.
EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
Does it?
Because that exact thing is the problem. You've locked monsters into being one, and only one, kind of progression. But the purpose monsters fulfill within the abstraction that is the game doesn't progress that way. I agree that having numbers has its uses, but those uses are vastly outweighed by how much they hem you in as almost all of your GMing hats: the rules-adjudicator, the world-drafter, and the (I know you're going to hate this one) storyteller. When creatures work by precisely the same rules as characters, you as rules-adjudicator cannot ensure that (as I mention below) the specific, intended experience that characters really do survive/escape most combats, while monsters almost never do (with "capture" counted among "not surviving/not escaping").
Unfortunately, that's where you--and most fans of this approach--are wrong.I should note that IMO bonuses and penalties from high or low stats should apply equally to monsters as to characters (both PC and NPC). One of 1e's biggest errors was to not give monsters their bonuses for high Strength and-or Con, making them far easier to defeat than they really should have been. 3e fixed this...but of course went overboard with it.
The "fix" IS the "overboard". There is no separation between the two. Doing to D&D the thing you call a "fix" will always produce that, unless you build the entire system, top to bottom, to be what is needed. And that's...
...where point-buy enters. A truly point-buy game from the ground up, one where actually every character is assembled from disparate pieces, actually does put all entities on the same footing. It abandons some of the premises that went into D&D's design which separate the role of monsters from the role of characters. Unless and until you abandon those premises, you can't get a game that puts things on the same footing. Characters have genuine classes, have full articulation of a bunch of built-in stuff. Monsters/opponents don't. Characters are meant to survive through an indefinite number of encounters. Monsters/opponents aren't. Characters frequently carry significant spent-across-the-day resources. Monsters/opponents can't--because they're going to blow their whole load all at once, massively exceeding the design limits.
When you move to true, pure point-buy, all of the above is taken care of in looking at the budget for each creature, since you're, y'know, building them yourself, piece by piece, and you can directly tabulate precisely what each monster is. You know, down to a very fine grain, what each monster is--so you know precisely how much you're challenging the players. That's not possible in a class-based, asymmetrically-balanced, "daily"-resources (or other long-period resources) design paradigm. By moving to pure point-buy, where even having a single "daily" resource is something you had to buy, you break that connection.
D&D monster design doesn't work that way. It's all hunches and hard-coding. The latter is what traps you into the progression, the former makes it so putting a threat outside of a narrow set of contexts breaks that progression. The in-built design assumptions do you in.
And those hard numbers being identical to player numbers is what causes the "overboard".
Having numbers is fine! But making it so those numbers have to be locked into one, and only one, progression--numbers that must always work precisely the same as the players' progression--is what causes the "overboard" you lament. It can't be separated...unless, as noted, you go to true, fundamental point-buy. Do that--abandon the class-based, asymmetrically-balanced, variable-resource-schedule structure--and you can perfectly achieve the goal you've set out for.
The game just won't look very much like D&D anymore.
SableWyvern
Cruel Despot
I had no local gaming store. I assumed there were ones in Melbourne, a four hour drive away, but I didn't really know anything about them and never visited them. That didn't stop us keeping abreast of what was out there. We just had to wait three months between updates for the quarterly mail order catalogue to be released.
Obviously, plenty of people had different experiences but, from what I've been able to gather, my experience was pretty standard in Australia and lots of different games were being played by the mid- to late-80s (I have no idea what it was like before that).
Iry
Legend
They seem to be true, subject to individual variance.
