Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4113857" data-attributes="member: 2067">Thyrwyn, I think that's a pretty good summation, very similar to what I was saying about the character-story continuum. I don't see them as adamant camps, since both are really required to have an enjoyable game, but I do see them as different focuses. Well, sometimes a character can't effectively contribute to a given task. That's entirely consistent and it does add depth to a character. If your reason for never taking ranks in Climb is because you think your character is afraid of heights, then they should be ineffective when the party is climbing the mountain peak. That's not really accidental suck, though, that's more Intentional Suck: It's kind of fun for you to suck at something if you made a concious descision to suck at it. Where it becomes accidental is if, unbeknownst to you, the campaign is all about climbing various mountains and trees, and your height-paranoid character is suddenly incompatible with most of the adventures and just becomes a drain on the party. It's realistic and it's in-character, but it's really annoying.You've gone from Fun and Interesting Challenge to Accidental Suck in a hurry in that case.4e seems to want to solve the problem of Accidental Suck by making sure that everyone has basic competency in anything everyone is expected to do. 4e doesn't really care if your character is afraid of heights -- he's going to be able to climb a mountain pretty freakin' well, regardless. 4e doesn't say "you can't play a character who is afraid of heights." It wouldn't. That'd be silly. Instead, it says "Even if your character is afraid of heights, he can still climb the mountain well. It's up to you to figure out why this happens in-character. In the metagame, this happens because no one wants to haul your 300 lb fighter in full plate around on a chain harnass for half the campaign, and you don't really want to be that burden, either."3e was blissfully unaware of the problem of Accidental Suck, and used the ol' "Make Stuff Up" rule when it became aware of it. "Well, if your party has an agoraphobe, you probably don't want to send them into the mountains more than once or twice, because it wouldn't be fun." The player's choice became the DM's limitation, not the player's. Which isn't really fair to the DMs, either (though I kind of loved these limits, because I improv a lot, limits like that are useful for me). And, it needs to be repeated, I'm a BIG FAN of the new skills system. I think the idea of automatically increasing skills fits the genre, is as buyable as automatically increasing HP and attack bonuses, and that heroes with a fear of heights are enough of a special case that I don't mind house ruling around it, if necessary. I do think that we are giving up increased in-character selection for increased metagame ease, though, and I'm not sure I'm as happy with that in every case as I am with the skills.</blockquote>

Verification