Search results

Save or Die needs to be directly tied with quick and rapid character generation. The amount of work that goes into a 3.x or 4E character makes save or die a pretty horrible prospect. It's a lot of work flushed down the toilet. Now with some older versions of the game (and some slimmed down...

I don't believe the fire elemental in the Monster Vault has any resistance at all.

Cool. I get exactly what you're saying. I'm more of a fan of being able to describe my character in 3rd person. Mostly because I find that when I play a heavily 1st person game, I can really find the experience too intense. My natural instincts when it comes to play acting is to fall into a...

No, it's definitely been the contention of people in this thread that the desire for verisimilitude is nonsense and should be abandoned wholesale. And that if rules present people with moments that break their immersion, the problem is with the people and not rules. Sylrae, I'd give you XP...

Right. And that's why I'm talking about how the narrative calls up the resolution mechanic and it gets used. It's not all process. It's a process to set up a point where the result is unknown/contested and then the system resolves it. The payoff of resolution is part of the enjoyment. It's...

That's a very, very different thing that the claim that the whole concept is a crock and that if someone finds the rules hamper immersion for them than it must be the person with the problem and never the rules. I don't think the core experiences of playing D&D are all that disparate. I...

Core: No skills, you just make ability checks. Option 1: A few "skills" that when you do an ability check for them, you get a bonus. A character would have four or five of these at most. Option 2: A 4E style skill list with bonus points each level Option 3: 3.x skill system

I quite agree. In fact, I think I disagree very, very little with what you wrote. The type of play I'm describing is what people on story-games might call "trad" (short for traditional). It's a description of how the majority of RPGs have functioned during the majority of years RPGs have been...

I'm against Raise Dead as being part of the default as well. Unsurprisingly, my biggest issue with it is that it doesn't really line up with anything in the genre. I don't ever recall seeing any fantasy fiction where the characters can just come back from the dead if someone buys it for them...

I think the sentence "Do you know what killed the immersion for me?" is the key here. There are things that make people unable to suspend their disbelief any longer. An enemy can just side step the warrior and walk over the person he was protecting and eat them? A barbarian has certain...

Sim guys are often also playability guys. I've played and ran a game that broke things down into .6 second phases. That's not going to happen again. People do what at least a reasonable amount of verisimilitude. And pretty much every RPG. 4E has it. It produces play in keeping with heroic...

So what? Just because me and the OP might have different ideas about what things should be represented to get the verisimilitude we want, that means that neither of us want something legitimate and verisimilitude is a crock that should be tossed out? You pick an element and you design a game...

It certainly broadens the appeal of the game from just those who like game play to those who like to think in dramatic or story terms to think about scenes and scene framing and whatnot. I don't think that solves it though, for people who are into the trad continuous narrative verisimilitude...

I actually think it's one of the worst things about 4E. It creates all sorts of refresh and reward cycle problems and accentuates the jarring nature of game mode changes from non combat to combat. I feel that it takes the game in a completely different direction than I want. I'd much rather...

Only if you think verisimilitude can only mean the exact simulation of reality and forget that you could also be simulating the genre, colour, theme and flavour of a type of fiction. So if D&D next comes out and they include a rule that whenever steel touches water, there is an explosion and...

This is a pretty classic "verisimilitude vs game" discussion that has been at the core of people's dislike of 4E since its launch. Lots of people react negatively to the "it doesn't make sense" moments they get from rules. The rules are designed with a goal that prioritize "making sense." So...

If it's anything other than a clear opt-in, then they won't repair the rift with alienated players. If the default is 4E, and then you opt out of stuff to make it into a different play experience, then they probably won't attract many more players than 4E already does.

Here is a role-less monster reference sheet for people to customize: http://slyflourish.com/master_dm_sheet.pdf

Great question. I want a combat system that I can use when someone at the table describes one character attacking another (with character here including monsters and animals). I want it to resolve the described actions. I don't want a change in game mode. I don't want to leave the...

For a while I was running 4E as pretty much explicitly story after (we would literally pause during the session and sum things up, interpreting them into a story structure after they happened). We were primarily interested in "getting it right" with the "it" being heroic fantasy-- so right to...