Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jfdlsjfd" data-source="post: 8389324" data-attributes="member: 42856">Really excellent post. I doubt I'll be able to add much to it.Just going by a "genre" like high fantasy or grutty realism isn't clear enough because those broad labels cover a wide range of situation. I want martials to be as heroic as caster and jumping from the flying castle and toughing it is something a high level barbarian would do. Let yhe puny wizard cast feather fall, Thog jumps.It's not because Thog is a moron, it's because he knows that falling doesn't kill, only hurts. In your vision of heroic fantasy, and obviously Lyxen's, falling kills. That's perfectly cromulent because of how you envision fantasy. In mine, the tyrannosaurus-wrestling barbarian will emerge from the rubles of his heroic landing. And he will inflict falling damage on the building. (happened in a campaign I was playing in).If one doesn't tell the players the world physics beforehand, at best they will suffer from Mother may I? (since they will absolutely want to make sure that they are one the same page as the GM to start their decision making) and at worst they will... self-censor(?) and not explore the whole range of possibilities of actions for their characters, assuming it's not possible (possibly after being burnt once or twice).In my world, Thog sees jumping as a valid solution, but the player has no way of telling, especially if he thinks that he will be penalized for the metagaming of looking at his hp vs length of fall. In universe Thog knows that it hurts but is survivable, much as we know that jumping from a small wall has very low risk (but you could always sprain an ankle) while 3rd floor is out of the question. If in a CoC game Thog wouldn't jump... but in heroic fantasy? That's debatable and the onus is on the GM to properly convey the imagery of the game world, because the player isn't in his head.Another design space where it matter is with skills. I don't like long lists of situatuonal modifiers and tasks. But the current approach doesn't help the player to discern what to do reasonably with his skills. I prefer to give openly the range of DC fo, for example, knowing things about monsters beforehand rather than let a player fancy playing a monster hunter and discover his choices in Nature and Survival don't make him as knowledgeable as he envisioned because all monsters are never-seen-before? It's not about powergaming but making a whole character concept lame.Will the concept work in a campaign where the tame is Exploring the wilderness of Xen'drick? Of course. Will it work when the theme is Attack of the Eldritch horrors for Xoriat? Maybe less so. How can the player know? Having some reference about the world and the cahracter abilities will help set the tones and inspire "working" character concepts from scratch.</blockquote>

Verification