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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6079076" data-attributes="member: 82106">Actually IMHO the greater argument here WRT 4e is that OD&D and its direct spawn largely reference a world that, while clearly unrealistic in all the ways that you mention, still has a basis in some sort of assumption of PC mundanity. In OD&D your character is very definitely just some ordinary human (albeit a relatively tough and hardened customer). The primary mode of play in early D&D was Gygaxian dungeon exploration. The PCs try to survive and acquire treasure in a hostile underground environment which is designed to challenge them. The less explicitly fantastical the PCs are the more easily they can be challenged and the less arbitrary ways they have to circumvent things. Spells, items, etc can be given away by the system as desired to relax the constraints on the PCs but the gist of play continues to always be fragile limited characters being challenged by the environment. This is neither highly simulationist, nor does plot/narrative play a particularly strong role. It would be possible to play this game with some sort of plot coupons, but they would simply be another resource like hit points and rather out of place WRT the goals of the game. Now, obviously D&D expanded in some sense far beyond that original dungeon crawling sort of model, but in a larger sense it has been stuck there the whole time. Most people play through modules, which are essentially dungeons, without much larger scale plot or campaign arc. Even when there is some of that it isn't overly developed. Something like the Paladin's alignment thing existed within this. The idea of "just RPing a good character" assumes that there's some sort of significant long-term trajectory to the game in which the character's overall personality matters. The D&D paladin's mechanical alignment fit that paradigm well, in each largely disconnected scene of the game the character might have a 'good' or an 'evil' choice. You could largely ignore the wider implications of your paladin being a member of a gang of "murder hobos" or if it was good or bad to murder 'orc babies'. Those things could come up, but you could exactly just hand-wave them. They didn't impact the game balance or goals of dungeon crawl. Clearly 4e in particular has given short shrift to purely episodic dungeon crawl type play, though 3.x also undermined it to a smaller extent and certainly catered heavily to other things (so did 2e, though by keeping the core rules intact it could go either way trivially). That's what the problem is that people like Bedrockgames seem to have is coming from. YOU are playing a game that involves characterization, heavy plot involvement of the world in the form of story arcs, lots of interaction between the characters at the world at multiple levels, and long term goal-oriented play with, certainly in 4e, the ultimate goal being the evolution and eventually apotheosis of the PCs. The characters are inherently fantastic heroes from the start. The idea isn't so much to challenge them with a hostile environment as it is to play out their journey through the environment and how that journey leads to that apotheosis. Plot coupons and heavily RPed alignment with the players and DM free to work out the consequences of something like 'orc babies' without heavy-handed alignment penalty rules are all clearly good things. You can go on and introduce BW-like rules for goals, scene framing, etc if you want. 4e still straddles the fence some in that respect, and seems to want to exist in a sort of halfway point where you can still run a dungeon crawly episodic game or you can play out something closer to an epic soap opera. Nobody can win a debate between you. Bedrockgames keeps insisting on his version of D&D that supports his sort of play. He's going to want hard-coded alignment rules and such because very simply alignment and good and evil etc are just more parts of the environmental puzzle to deal with, and PC characterization is simply scene-based, there's not some elaborate personal narrative around the character. If such a narrative evolves it is purely composed of individual incidents and maybe what areas of the sandbox the player decides to have that character dig in. Alignment and code of honor etc are simply rules that create certain challenges and their point is only to make the character behave in a certain way in each scene. Meanwhile you are injecting larger scale story arc based considerations. Your paladin requires rules that let him evolve a moral stance and follow a personal story arc that is under yours and the DM's control. While you will solve puzzles and whatnot through the lens of your character's alignment you want choices, not challenge mechanics. This is ultimately why things like this thread and the whole giant edition war exist. There are simply fundamentally incompatible visions of what the game is all about.</blockquote>

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