D&D General I’m Trying to Love D&D Again—and I’ve Got Some Complaints. Young Grognard posting.

soviet said:

Wait what?

4e was very rewarding of skillful play, and punishing of bad play. I would say more so than in 3e (where the mastery was in chargen).

I have never before felt that Gamist thrill of 'each decision matters' so strongly in an RPG. Some of our combats reminded me of tournament Magic: the Gathering.

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they might have been referring more to the skilled play of like, player decisions, tapping the hall with your 10ft pole to detect pit traps and pressure plates? either that or it's referring to the player skill of being able to construct an optimized character?

CreamCloud0 said:

they might have been referring more to the skilled play of like, player decisions, tapping the hall with your 10ft pole to detect pit traps and pressure plates? either that or it's referring to the player skill of being able to construct an optimized character?

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CharOp would make sense. 4E definitely raised the power floor and lowered the power ceiling for characters by quite a bit.

3E vs 4E are both games that included Skill mechanics, though 4E pared them back a good bit and simplified them a ton, so if we're comparing to determine which one lends itself more to narrated play vs using abilities on one's character sheet for out of combat problem resolution, 4E tends to be a bit closer to TSR-era D&D in that sense, I would say.

Mannahnin said:

In Forge speak 4E is often referred to as more unashamedly Gamist in its design. It embraced the G hard. It did aim to reduce the importance and insane variance in power of 3E-era Character Optimization. It did aim to reduce the prevalence of "trap options", though wasn't entirely successful in that.

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For me 4e played like a free-form glorified board game that you could layer RP onto now and then. Not only did combat become basically a group based card game like Frosthaven* but skill challenges also killed most creativity and reason to RP out of combat as well unless you just ignored the design of the game.

*I'm enjoying playing Frosthaven, but it's not what I want out of D&D.

The old E

Dire Bare said:

You're allowed to meet with ENWorlders offline? I didn't know that! Seems dangerous . . .

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The old ENWorld Game days rocked.

Gradine said:

Quick question though... do player characters have pronouns?

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Given 5e explicitly made transgender characters something supported, even favored, by Corellon Larethian (who has appeared in male, female, and/or androgynous aspect at different times), it would seem that yes, characters can have whatever pronouns the player likes.

Which is what it should be. (Note, this is a rant and not at you.) It's so goddamn stupid that something so tiny as "please call me what I prefer to be called, not what you think I should be called based on my appearance" is even the tiniest bit controversial.

I was raised by two people who grew up, mostly, in the South. I was taught that being respectful to others was of paramount importance when talking to them. You call gentlemen "sir" regardless of their age, you call ladies "ma'am" or "miss" depending on context. I have called children "sir" or "ma'am" because I want to show them that I respect them enough to treat them just like I would anyone else, at least in conversation.

It is literally the smallest thing to say "oh you use 'him'? Sure, cool, I can do that, good sir."

It just infuriates me that "respect" is this hollow shell held up by some groups trying to shield themselves from what they see as attacks against them...only to be instantaneously thrown aside the moment someone else wants them to be respectful when it requires even a momentary inconvenience.

If respect matters, use the goddamn pronouns. And if it doesn't matter, then don't come crawling back when people disrespect you. It's that simple, and I'm so, so tired of people making it something more than that.

Lanefan said:

A quick whip-round where players tell the table their character's name, species, and class doesn't (or bloody well shouldn't!) take more than a couple of minutes total; and ideally everyone is taking notes of at least the other character names in the party. We don't need any backstory.

EDIT to add: at a con game, the only real-world name I probably need to know as a player is that of the DM. But even there, if the DM doesn't give a name then simply "DM" will do.

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Would you call this "introducing a character's backstory"? Because that was kind of the operative term. It being the backstory was important.

GrimCo said:

You are right. They are anglophone thing. It's just about how other languages work. In romance and slavic languages, names themselves are gendered nouns, there are very few unisex names, so name dictates pronoun. Gender of the name defines rest of the sentence , if you have male name, grammar requires rest of the sentence to be in masculine form, same for female name making rest of the sentence in feminine form. You can't combine name of one gender with rest of the sentence in other, it's just wrong and sounds wrong. Using neuter form after name is considered both grammatically wrong and offensive since that form is not used for people, same for using neuter pronouns. And then, there are languages which have just one pronoun for all, like turkish or hungarian.

Because of how my language (slavic) is hard coded on morphological and grammatical level with gender, most non binary people i know just use gender of the name they have and trans people use name of their preferred gender.

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But even then it's complicated. (Again, this may be a rant, but not directed at you.) Spanish, for example, is currently (well, some speakers of it are) trying to figure out a way to have not-inherently-gendered terms. Some folks have become uncomfortable with the notion that if you have 999,999 women and one single man involved in an action, the one and only correct term is to refer to them all by male gender. That, I think, most people agree is kinda weird. Why does male gender "predominate"? Gendered nouns is one thing, but having actual human gender work in that way creates cognitive dissonance if you think about it too much.

Gender has never been as simple as folks would like it to be. Sex has never been as simple as people would like it to be. Consider things like 45,X; 47,XXY; 47,XXX; and 47,XYY. These can all result in unusual sexual organ presentation at birth, and in particular Kleinfelter syndrome (47,XXY) and Jacobs syndrome (47,XYY) can both potentially result in intersex birth, where a doctor cannot distinguish what sex the child has. That, alone, is enough to prove that neither biological sex nor gender identity can be a single, simple binary.

Languages are old. Very, very old. Often, the structures we use today developed thousands of years ago, and have been kept around through cultural inertia FAR more than any other reason. It should surprise nobody that languages that grew out of a relatively obscure dialect from the middle of the Italian Peninsula might not accurately reflect modern, rigorous understandings of complicated subjects.

EzekielRaiden said:

Languages are old. Very, very old. Often, the structures we use today developed thousands of years ago, and have been kept around through cultural inertia FAR more than any other reason. It should surprise nobody that languages that grew out of a relatively obscure dialect from the middle of the Italian Peninsula might not accurately reflect modern, rigorous understandings of complicated subjects.

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They are old, but they are living constructs that change over time. It's just that changes happen gradually over long periods of time. For example, i learned Latin and speak Italian. Latin has grammatical cases. Italian doesn't. It took almost 9 centuries of gradual changes to lose them. Reading Meditations by Marcus Aurelius in Latin and then reading Divine Comedy by Dante in original Italian (Florentine to be precise) you see difference and evolution of language. Grammar and morphology of language is part that changes way slower than vocabulary, cause it's core system of a language, it's base structure. Once you learn it, you use it automatically.

I'm sure even most rigid languages will change over time. It will just take lot longer than in more simpler languages like english.

Sometimes language change happens quickly too, it's not something one can predict just because of it having old origins.

Like the previous French colonies have a much more living french language than France does because they don't have an institute trying the preserve "the integrity" of the language, then again so does Iceland but they're good at adding words quickly and have fewer users.

A language that don't change is a dead language.

CreamCloud0 said:

they might have been referring more to the skilled play of like, player decisions, tapping the hall with your 10ft pole to detect pit traps and pressure plates?

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That's player skill.

CreamCloud0 said:

either that or it's referring to the player skill of being able to construct an optimized character?

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That's system mastery.