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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4407800" data-attributes="member: 42582">Forked from: <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showpost.php?postid=4407157" target="_blank"> Necromancer Games NOT going with current GSL. </a>This claim has been made before, but it continues to baffle me.I'm not 100% sure what a "casual gamer" is, but I'm pretty sure that I'm not one. I've played RPGs regularly for all but 2 of the past 26 years. I have over 1000 posts on ENworld and also post from time to time on the ICE and WoTC boards. And 4e is the first version of D&D since 1st ed AD&D that I can imagine playing or GMing in any serious fashion.I don't see it as suffering from too few options to play seriously - it has more options than pre-UA 1st ed AD&D, for example, and that game could certainly be played seriously - and in any event options aren't the be-all and end-all of RPGing.Undoubtedly 4e is a very contemporary RPG - its rules (despite various hiccups like Stealth and Skill Challenges) are carefully designed to support a particular sort of play experience, and (as its designers have indicated with their references to MMOs, indie RPGs and German board games) it draws on a sound understanding of what is cutting edge in game design.But unless one thinks that contemporary game = casual game, I don't see where the idea of "casualness" comes from. There is nothing "casual" about carefully calibrated reward mechanics, or encounter design guidelines, or serious skill challenge mechanics designed to support conflict resolution skill use. Getting these things right is arguably the holy grail of the mechanical aspect of RPG design - how much more serious do you want a game to be! I don't fully understand how different games can be led as evidence of the richness of 3.5. That's like saying that HARP (which resembles RM at least as closely as Iron Heroes does 3.5) is evidence of the richness of Rolemaster, or Call of Cthulhu evidence of the richness of Runequest.Furthermore, and just to pick on one of your examples, OGL Conan has a feature that many detractors of 4e decry, namely, that PCs can't die (because of the Fate Point rules) unless a player self-consciously chooses to run that risk (by spending all his/her Fate Points for other purposes). To the extent that OGL Conan, in featuring that rule, has drawn on a general change in the zeitgeist towards metagame mechanics, 4e already incorporates such innovation into its own design. To the extent that such an innovation makes a game "casual" (because only the non-casual can tolerate the sitting out that comes with PC death) then OGL Conan is as casual as 4e.There's little doubt that 3E and 4e support different approaches to play. But I think it's an error to label one of them as "casual" play. It would be biased to describe it as contemporary play. That's why I (unlike some others) prefer the Forgist language, and describe it as supportive of both gamist and (fairly vanilla) narrativist play.</blockquote>

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