Search results

I would say also the huge variability between different game groups in houserules and ways of doing things IMO becomes increasingly visible at higher levels, and it becomes increasingly difficult to produce adventure content that's actually useful to a significant section of the small target...

It's also highly variable from group to group depending on the rule elements they like to use and what level they started the game at, as a lot of groups started at 3rd level or higher. Some spells and abilities can take lots of time to resolve by the book. Summoned monsters, companions...

I would suggest using some other term than "tediousness" as the sort of bean counting play this refers to is for a small minority actually fun and not tedious in their eyes. Tedium is a negative term, but what people find tedious is very subjective. (withdrawn: "Accounting" may be a more...

I disagree with you on a number of counts. Runequest combat is dangerous from it's swinginess,hit locations nasty criticals and tends to push players into going for ambushes, superior numbers and dirty tricks and avoiding a fair fight at all costs, if they want their PCs to survive. Which...

D&D means different things to different people. I never played in a "gp=xp" game and as the gamers here in Ireland learned RPGs from books rather than from existing players, a separate culture evolved to the original. As I learned it, the exploring and money grubbing was primarily a low level...

I find the unspoken compromises in a particular group become more visible when there's a new player with different expectations to provide a contrast to the evolved culture of the existing group. It can be surprising how many unspoken, unwritten compromises evolve over time in a long standing...

People play RPGs for a variety of different reasons, and care about each reason in varying proportions. Players may not even be aware of their own tastes, as it takes time and honest introspection to analyse such things. DMing needs to be its own reward as it does involve more work than the...

At an abstract level, it is true that lessening the constraints on a problem expands it's decision space and multiplies the available options. If all or most decisions lead to success, we probably have a trivial problem with an obvious solution. As you narrow the number of success paths, the...

I know for a fact that this isn't true for me, which means it isn't a universal truth at all. The more valid options I have the harder I find it to make a decision, I get overwhelmed and have difficulty seeing the big picture. I prefer having a smaller filtered down set of options I can make an...

4e is the major victim and casualty of the edition wars. 4e players have their share of the battle fatigue fallout of the wars, and I suspect a good fraction of them see the futility of them. Your theory should be modified so as not to conveniently ignore those who won't convert. There are...

This seems to ignore those who embraced 4e and it's aspirations to varying extends as "their D&D" and see 5e as nostalgic backsliding. I'm probably in a minority as I like to play and DM for long-running campaigns with low casualty rates that are intended to reach and stay at high levels for a...

I disagree re the tactical depth in 4e, as it makes individual encounters interesting even without the constant fear of sudden death. Players generally find entertaining ways to mix and match their power use. Super high death rate D&D isn't common nowadays AFAIK. I do like forced movement...

I find the all-striker party tends to fail if ambushed properly, against minion hordes or in long adventures where their lack of healing surges bites them. Their lack of resilience, control, marking and healing dictates an all-or-nothing strategy where they must quickly win every fight, as they...

I'm still running my 4e campaign at weekends. I have few houserules, the main one being long rests may not be available every day.

Logistical D&D is an old tradition and a perfectly valid playing style, but I think one that primarily interests a subset of detail-oriented people, and bores rather more. I've seen horrible unfun issues arise in this playing style so I no longer find it attractive as a constant pursuit. Forcing...

There's more than one sort of transparency. Giving lots of step-by step instructions is one sort of transparency, but that's not the sort of transparency 4e uses outside of combat. The primary transparency in 4e is powers working as listed with very little qualification or special cases. The...

I think a lot depends on how much one cares about successfully accomplishing tasks in the game versus the procedure of how one achieves success. Myself, I'm invested in the former, not the latter. In most editions of D&D there isn't much in the way of system for larger macro tasks, the systems...

I think there's the issue that standards for plot and presentation for adventures has gone up over the years, not uniformly but there is a trend. A lot of early D&D modules were quite primitive and/or random in content and presentation. Modules for other popular games e.g. Call of Cthulhu...

This is my interpretation, obviously. My mistake in my previous post was not initially specifying "high damage ranged attack" as a striker-siloed ability category in 4e. AFAIK the preponderance of high damage ranged attacks have been assigned to strikers. Strikers often have a bonus damage...

Yes, but IMO restrictions are one of the main features of class-based systems. Classes consist of features and restrictions e.g. some classes can cast spells, some can't. Some classes can be good archers, some can't. And then there are the classes who could invest some options in spellcasting or...