Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
My character knows trolls' weakness is fire. His uncle told him. Prove me wrong.
His uncle died 6 years before he was born.
My character knows trolls' weakness is fire. His uncle told him. Prove me wrong.
The idea that having PCs be nobles will break the game in some way, and thus needs super-special GM policing, isn't something that I've seen in my play experience.
I don't care whether you think he's an expert or an amateur. The point is that he shows how a game can proceed with metagaming about "the party", "team cooperation" etc - which helps us identify the presence of such metagaming advice in the RQ rules.Why is Ron Edwards the expert on setting focused games here?
Plenty of obstacles do kill. Pits & chasms are an obvious example. PCs can get themselves
killed trying to leap the chasm, or can try climbing down it - hopefully with rope - or go look for another path. Slow but deadly monsters are very similar in game effect.
I just didn't understand the point you were trying to make. Could you rephrase it?
It strikes me that this entire concept, and all the baggage attendant onto it, which includes a lot of the anti-meta-gaming creed, as well as the whole "you're just a small guy without any special place in the world" is all basically just a shadow of Gygax (or again maybe I should be more fair to call it a shadow of Dave Arneson).
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The irony is that the lesson "never give the players anything for free" was fully absorbed, but the actual context of skilled play dungeoneering was lost! There is no reason, from a standpoint of how a game should or must work for these things to exist anymore, unless you really do play very much like Dave did
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It isn't to put down any style of play, it just REALLY does seem very unexamined, like this is maybe how I would have thought if this was 1974 and D&D was just starting.
These are really strong posts. They capture what I was trying to get at upthread with some remarks about "cargo cult" and similar. That is to say, particular design/play features that can work well as elements in a "skilled play" game simply don't make any sense in other RPGing contexts. Hence treating those particular design/play features as if they're part of what it means to roleplay makes no sense.Again, this is simply a relic. In OD&D, or B/X, you would all start with a toss of 3d6x10 gold pieces and equip yourselves as best you could, then plunge into the dungeon in the hope of gathering loot to spend on more equipment, etc. This was the very ur-game of D&D, the origin and font of all its traditions and concepts. Even magic items and such were originally just sort of lucky finds or rewards for cleverness that let you loot better, or increase survival.
In that paradigm, to admit of a character which has an entourage, or even a suite of armor, is grossly unfair! The game is a contest in which the players compete (even though the PCs cooperate, this is a subtle point). A suite of chain armor was 90gp, a BIG advantage! You don't just give that away, its to be earned.
This is literally the schema which is still being played out in all these protestations of strictures, even though the form of the game is almost utterly different and they make little sense today.
Ok so we have some pretty straightforward bad Npc that threaten lives of innocent Npc: linear railroad with evident psicological use of Force (because children + heroes pc, for Goodness sake).
And the Drama is, what? A metagamey resource management?
Providence knows, and that's virtually everything in Tolkien's world.And yet virtually nobody knows, so his title is empty.pemerton said:Aragorn's status as the rightful king is fundamental to his character from the moment he enters the story.
There's no reason in the fiction why a 20-something year old, inexperienced wizard could not have inherited a fortune of many thousands of gold pieces. But the standard D&D rules for starting money make this impossible, purely for balance reasons.How so?pemerton said:Assuming you use the standard D&D rules for starting money, aren't they exactly an example of this?Maxperson said:I get the balance reasons for the trade-off style of PC building, but it doesn't sit well with me when designers use balance to justify things that don't make sense.
To relate this to [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION]'s posts: a really strong set of assumptions underlies this post. Some of those are sociological/economic: that a noble family has readily available assets that it is able to repurpose at the behest of the character. As a matter of human history this isn't always true; in the context of a fantasy RPG it's even easier not to proceed on the basis of its truth.The reason nobility is different is because of just how powerful it is.
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she was only able to get several thousand gold and one powerful magic item
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If a player wants that kind of power and resources, he's going to have to roll it. I'm not going to allow that to be picked.
The big issue for me, in the setup [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] describes, is how do we know how many children are eaten? In a skill challenge, this can be managed through failures - each failure is more children dead. But in other D&D versions, which have no rule for determining children eaten per orc-time-mile-unit, it becomes GM fiat. So the stakes and the action resolution become somewhat illusory.Eh, it is a perfectly solid 'quest'. This would be a fine and perfectly acceptable 4e kind of scenario, played in the sort of way that we play. I mean, there are stakes, the lives of children, which the players have themselves expressed an interest in. They set out in pursuit. The initial framing, with the orcs taking some children COULD be a consequence of a failed SC, or even just simply the framing of a scene where the players get a choice. Assuming they were already invested in the well-being of this town that option hangs together pretty well too.
Obviously if the players were pretty much railroaded into chasing the orcs, then it would be different, but that doesn't appear to be the case here. Possibly you could feel that the setup with the town is kind of that sort of thing, but I think this stuff is really all in the presentation. Its THEIR TOWN, then orcs raided it is just a fact. This would simply be a 'hard move' in DW for instance.