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Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 745579" data-attributes="member: 812">Celtavian, I think you're missing the point.I'm not hearing JD say (forgive me for jumping in here but it's lunch hour and I have time) that D&D is a bad system. It sounds like you two are saying the same thing, really, which is that one has to tweak and alter the system in order to get it to replicate what one sees in various fantasy novels. I know that Joshua's come up with a variety of alternate magic systems (as have I) for his campaigns.What I see as the real issue here is the notion that what works (storywise) in a novel is not what works (storywise) in an RPG.For example, you say you create a Tolkeinesque feel in your campaigns. And perhaps you do (but with clerics? How does that work?) But that's not the point. What JD is saying is that you can't reproduce a story like LotR in a game. Because who's going to want to play Frodo, and be good at nothing, never win any fights, never get any stronger or braver or smarter or more powerful, just suffer endlessly and get forgotten by everyone except a few elves living far away?Who's going to want to play Boromir, and what do you do with them after the party has killed them or kicked them out?Who wouldn't want to play Gandalf or Aragorn and get to have all the fun, be the decisive force in any conflict, be the heroic leader and so on?Frodo and Sam do basically nothing but walk for the last two-thirds of the story. Who wants to play those characters and how do you run sessions where half your party spends six months walking uneventfully across Middle-Earth while the other half fights endless battles, performs daring rescues and wins the love of ladies and stout-hearted warriors all around?RPG structure and novel structure are necessarily different. They have to be, because a good game has to be fun for everybody. A good novel doesn't have to be fun for ANYONE. I refer you to the novels of Steven Erikson.This leaves out such notions as game balance, which can be very important in a game but has nothing to do with a novel, and systematic consistency, which again a novelist doesn't have to worry about (Conan's just defeated three hundred swordsmen with his bare hands but when the bad guy's lieutenant points his sword at the hero's throat, Conan surrenders. NEVER HAPPEN in an RPG). Nobody's writing an RPG session. Nobody can decide what this episode is going to show, or what the themes of this campaign will be.Blah blah blah.I'm eating lunch, and you want coherence? Dream on.</blockquote>

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