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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Varianor Abroad" data-source="post: 2343689" data-attributes="member: 12425">Where I think AE has its best appeal is to the already experienced gamer. The first time player is going to be comfortable in D&D with well-known fantasy tropes, but not always ready to take on a more detailed set of rules. The AE setting is less high-magic than Forgotten Realms, in my opinion. As already noted however, the classes get more built-in powers and cool ways to shine. Which I think is a really, really good thing. I ran a game for two years. Two of my players moved. Now I'm working on a new one. AE is the same as all other RPG games. The first couple sessions are getting used to the character, the abilities and the group. It's once you get past that that the roleplaying sets in. There's nothing inhibiting about AE. If anything, the players I've seen at cons and gamedays who try it out are generally better roleplayers than the ones I see when I DM a vanilla D&D game. My own players were really fun roleplayers and we had a blast with our sessions.I think a really key point often overlooked is that while AE is an alternate player's handbook that can be used to run a complete, self-contained game with a different default setting than D&D, it's own creator uses it as a supplement for a D&D game. Monte's games include AE PCs and D&D 3.5 PCs. Many of the "silent majority" of gamers I've found (anecdotally at least) use it that way also. It's pretty rare to see it exclusively in use, and generally it's for gaming groups that have been around for 10-20 years and want something cool and different. My next f2f game is going to pull from both 3.5 and AE and my own warped imagination.So I'd suggest trying to use it as an add-on if you can't get a group to adopt it wholesale. There are classes that exemplify archetypes that players have wanted to try for years. The mageblade. The unfettered. The witch. The Champion. These are all easily imported. Many of these are also relatively easy to learn. Glassjaw's point about getting used to the options is well put, but that applies more to magisters, runethanes and akashics, classes that have unusual options. Heh. I'll say it again. If anyone ever wants me to DM AE for them, I will. If it's out of state and not in easy 2-3 hour driving range, pay my plane fare and get me a place to stay. I'll come. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

Verification