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General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
07/29/2013 - Legends & Lore It’s Mathemagical!
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<blockquote data-quote="Trickster Spirit" data-source="post: 6163752" data-attributes="member: 6701829"><p>You and I are in a similar boat. I currently DM Pathfinder for a group consisting of nothing <em>but </em>casual players - I'm literally the only one at the table who has read any of the books, let alone owns any of them. They're all great roleplayers, reasonably intelligent people who enjoy cutting down goblinoids and coming up with interesting back-stories for their characters. But for all their enthusiasm about finally achieving "ultimate nerd" by finally getting together to play some D&D, character creation was a nightmare and my players <em>still</em> go cross eyed when I ask them about anything on their sheet more complicated than their BAB. </p><p></p><p>Personally, I find myself torn on this issue; I broadly agree with DEFCON 1 here, that D&D has always been a game of number-crunching, and that if you can't find your Spell Level DC on your character sheet, the game might just be too complex for your tastes. But at the same time I've always hated that "Well if your group can't handle a little complexity, go find a game other than D&D to play and quit wasting time complaining to the rest of us who can handle it" attitude, which always reeks of elitism and bad-wrong-fun one-true-way-ism even if that's not the spirit in which the remarks were intended.</p><p></p><p>Ultimately I think the solution is modularity in the form of Basic / Standard / Advanced D&D. Basic should pare things down to a manageable level of complexity for our casual players and then we should be able to cherry pick game mechanics to build something more resembling "classic" D&D but still providing for an easy to run and play experience. No WotC edition of D&D has ever really managed to pull off "D&D as easy or as complex as you want it to be" right, and if they even come close I'm going to love switching my group over to Next.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Trickster Spirit, post: 6163752, member: 6701829"] You and I are in a similar boat. I currently DM Pathfinder for a group consisting of nothing [I]but [/I]casual players - I'm literally the only one at the table who has read any of the books, let alone owns any of them. They're all great roleplayers, reasonably intelligent people who enjoy cutting down goblinoids and coming up with interesting back-stories for their characters. But for all their enthusiasm about finally achieving "ultimate nerd" by finally getting together to play some D&D, character creation was a nightmare and my players [I]still[/I] go cross eyed when I ask them about anything on their sheet more complicated than their BAB. Personally, I find myself torn on this issue; I broadly agree with DEFCON 1 here, that D&D has always been a game of number-crunching, and that if you can't find your Spell Level DC on your character sheet, the game might just be too complex for your tastes. But at the same time I've always hated that "Well if your group can't handle a little complexity, go find a game other than D&D to play and quit wasting time complaining to the rest of us who can handle it" attitude, which always reeks of elitism and bad-wrong-fun one-true-way-ism even if that's not the spirit in which the remarks were intended. Ultimately I think the solution is modularity in the form of Basic / Standard / Advanced D&D. Basic should pare things down to a manageable level of complexity for our casual players and then we should be able to cherry pick game mechanics to build something more resembling "classic" D&D but still providing for an easy to run and play experience. No WotC edition of D&D has ever really managed to pull off "D&D as easy or as complex as you want it to be" right, and if they even come close I'm going to love switching my group over to Next. [/QUOTE]
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