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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5361322" data-attributes="member: 82106">Eh, well, if people interpret it a certain way then maybe I haven't said it as well as I can. I don't hate Essentials at all. I think the effort going into it might not end up accomplishing what was intended is all. Basically if you take any rules system and make some different variation of it then that variation is going to appeal somewhat to different people than the original. So Essentials will grab some people that 4e hasn't already. The question is does it really accomplish making a game that more people play? It doesn't matter much as long as all the different flavors of the game continue to exist. It does matter though in the sense that there is an opportunity cost. What ELSE could have been added to the game instead? Nobody will ever know the answer to that really, but we might at least see how it changes the popularity of the game. All I'm saying is that the powers which are out there are a good guideline to what improvisation can reasonably do in different situations and at different levels. Guesstimation IS one of the primary arts of DMing. You NEVER know what the results of putting the party in any given sort of encounter is going to be. Really though, improv isn't rocket science. My players do it a lot. I have a bunch of example DCs and standard damage expressions that make a good solid starting point. One of the best practices I know of (and something that none of the books really comes out and says) is that a stunt can work like a power, but it should basically require hitting a DC first, so if you have Tide of Iron you can shove people around just by hitting them. If you don't, well, you can still do basically the same thing, but you'll have to pass a check to try it, and then STILL have to hit. It is less reliable, but the player can do it. You'll find they will generally take the power if they do it very often. If they just do it once in a great while then they probably won't. I'm not being condescending. I think most of the built-in rules that say 1e, 2e, and 3.x had for doing things like tripping, unarmed combat, etc really didn't work well at all. I don't really think I understand what exactly it is that you DO want. Maybe there is some middle ground that works for everyone. I don't want exhaustive rules for every situation, you don't want just a single very simple improv rule and nothing more. I figure there's a level of rules support that might work for both of us. Well, I disagree that the mechanics of the rules in the DMG and the SC stuff was 'crap'. I think it had its flaws, but the concept is pretty solid. It can be hard to master SCs. I don't think there is any amount of guidance for that which would be too much. The real question is only how much can they afford to put in a book and is it the best it can be? The DMG1 missed on that in some ways. There is still a lot of good advice and general stuff there. The RC talks somewhat more about improvising than the PHB did, yes. That's good. I'm all for it. I did think that some of the material in the RC was a bit off though. DCs that scale to PC level are a bad concept for instance. They either feel extremely artificial and/or they actually punish you for being higher level. As it stands right now a LOWER level Wizard for instance can more easily detect the same magic than a higher level one can if you go exactly by the RC. I'm good with improvements in presentation and mechanics. Essentials has some. I just didn't see it as being uniformly better. It is actually pretty hard for us who have the baggage of the existing 4e rules in our heads to tell how it will look to someone just coming to the game. Maybe it is better, maybe not. The fact that all the errata are worked in is a big plus at least.  I think I've articulated some pretty detailed ideas about it actually. Maybe it isn't coming across very well. Nobody is 100% objective either, and I'm not even going to pretend I am, but I figure that is true of everyone else too and I look at what gets posted in that light. In the final analysis does it really matter what I think? Seems to me all we can really accomplish in a forum is trade ideas about how to play the game better. Maybe at most some WotC dev will read some post someone makes and take that idea into account. Essentials is what it is, we're not going to change that now.</blockquote>

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