Disagree: only one needs to be valuable. It's only when both have no value that the usefulness disappears.
Again, completely disagree. Rolls to
simply maintain the status quo or lose it are bad--and are, I'd argue, a leading
cause of the "excessive stealth" problem, because
that's what that is, forcing someone to maintain a status quo over and over again until it fails. The only area I
might budge on is "success means change, failure means status quo," because implicitly on an adventure, the status quo is not good, and thus maintaining the status quo is actually a bad thing (e.g. when you roll to hit and miss, it's not just that the combat doesn't end, it's that the enemy gets another chance to take YOU down, etc.) But even there, I'd argue it should be avoided as much as humanly possible, and I learned that from Dungeon World. Both failure
and success should ideally change the state of play; failing that, success should always change it.
In fact, I would call this a general...guideline, since you seem to have some bugaboos about "rules," of game design. First, don't use mechanics that don't actually matter, which I figure is relatively uncontroversial. Second, mechanics where the state of play doesn't change should generally be avoided. It doesn't have to be a HUGE change, but it should change.
Also, FrozenNorth's got a good point. This does seem to put you in a pickle WRT the Rogue's contributions vs the Fighter's contributions. The Fighter is
guaranteed that either success matters or failure matters (or both), while the Rogue is not guaranteed that either success OR failure matters--there is at least a
chance that NEITHER failure nor success matters, at which point even you would agree that what the Rogue is "contributing" isn't worth doing.
That chance--the chance that you do a thing and it simply doesn't matter, neither by success nor failure--is a serious part of why I don't accept such actions as "contributing" the way the Fighter in your example is "contributing."
Best example I can give here is new RPG players. Brand new players often come up with the best and most creative ideas during play. Why? Because they haven't yet become hidebound by the rules - they just imagine the situation as described, think of something they can do and then try to do it.
My experience reflects that of the others who have replied. New players tend to be very cautious, because they don't want to play "wrong." I have a player who has been very slow to come out of his shell on things. Our last session was one of the first times he really
actively sought out an opportunity to roleplay and it was really cool to see, but it really only happened because I was a little pushy with a prompt in the previous session. Boldness, I find, is not so much a function of "knowing the rules" as it is of underlying player personality. Some players are instigators. Some are...the opposite of that, like my current players.
Depends who's defining what 'better' work is, doesn't it.
Sure does. But,
as a general thing, sentences which follow the rules of English grammar make for better literature than sentences which don't, right? There will always be exceptions. (Some would argue the second sentence of this paragraph violates a rule of English grammar: it begins with a conjunction.) Overall though, we don't expect a nineteen-year-old to write Tolkienesque prose (I respect Mr. Paolini's efforts, but they aren't up to Tolkien's level) for exactly the reason that Tolkien has more experience and training and
understanding of the rules of writing, both how to obey them and when to break them. Other arts, in general, work similarly. Breaking key or time signatures is a general rules no-no for composition, but it is done quite often
when doing so makes better music, because again, that is what all rules for creative works are about: they ALL contain the clause that you SHOULD break them, IF breaking them makes better work.
For almost anything creative that doesn't involve a safety hazard, rules are never necessary. Guidelines might be; and can be useful, as long as they're acknowledged as being no more than that.
And if
necessity were my point, this would be SUPER relevant. But
necessity was literally never my point.
Utility was. Rules are
useful for producing better work. Also: What is the difference between a "rule" you are
supposed to break when you see that doing so produces better work, and a "guideline"? I think you're getting hung up on what "rule" means to you rather than the way I've been using the word.
I'll not dispute any of this; all of it happens far too often. I'll counter with all the bands who, for lack of a better term, "sell out" after their original music leads to some initial success and start following either corporate rules and-or making their subsequent music to fit a formula so it'll sell.
Okay? You seem to be granting me my point, which is that the rules
are useful. Necessity was never my point.
And then the question becomes one of determining who 'the majority' really is; as often a few louder voices saying one thing can drown out a big number of silent ones who think differently.
Certainly. Which is why the statement you made--"some people CAN have fun while doing X"--is so useless. A mechanic which has
no potential for fun is an absolute no-sell for 100% of game systems. Being able to say "some people CAN have fun while doing X" is
the bare minimum qualification to be included at all. It is like saying that in order to be human a creature must have DNA. Well, I mean, yes, that is properly true at this time, but "having DNA" is a really useless
criterion for whether a being is human or not, even though it technically IS a necessary condition, because there are SO MANY things that also have DNA but
aren't human. By exactly the same logic, "some people CAN have fun while doing X" applies to essentially every game mechanic ever designed, including things like loot boxes, 52 pickup, and pay-to-win gaming. "Some people CAN have fun while doing X" is only useful for filtering out absolutely unacceptable mechanics--not for demonstrating that a particular mechanic is a good idea given a type of game you're going for.
I think you might at this point be mixing up
@MoonSong 's posts with mine. I have no issue with characters having high stats, in part because my own observations tell me stats don't make a huge difference in the long run. What I do have issue with is the expectation that they must all have the same stats, rather than random.
Perhaps I am. Not really sure why you'd say the "must all have the same stats" thing--I don't actually think that. I actually quite like the ability to choose, more or less, between three or four different loose categories of stats via point buy: the generalist (most stats are close to the arithmetic mean), the specialist (most stats are far from the arithmetic mean), the focused (two good stats, mostly average stats), and the selective (good at a particular set of things and not good at most others). As an example, I prefer to play Paladins in 4e, and when I do, I prefer to go for 16 Str, 16 Cha as my highest stats (counting racial bonuses!) at first level. I do this because I like having higher secondary scores, because I want to be both Strong and Charismatic narratively, and because I am comfortable enough with the rules that I know the consequences of choosing to play such characters. It is not merely "playable," but entirely possible to have the intended hit probabilities even with such stats. You may consider such stats unusually high, and in a game with 3d6 rolled stats perhaps they would be, but 4e is designed with them in mind.
Again, you're misremembering who said what. In my eyes 'born lucky' doesn't matter. Char-gen luck does not lead to luck during play. They're different and IME almost completely disconneted things.
Fair enough. If the luck doesn't really matter to you, I'll drop the point. Frankly, I'm also dropping the numbers about your own game, because I don't see that conversation going anywhere.
We have different standards of "long". To me, two-and-a-half years is just nicely getting started. When it hits ten years, let me know.
Uhh...yeah. I'd say you have a
highly divergent idea of what a "long-running" game looks like. Very, very, very few people get to that point. Even getting to two years is surprising to most people.
I'm the other way around: if they're not perfect I'll make them perfect* - or at least get them closer than they were. The game I run uses a rules system that started with 1e and has had 40+ years of modifications laid on to it; and it's still getting tweaked.
Obviously, you do you. But imagine, if you will, a game that needed only the lightest touch of house rules--places where you added something cool or the like. That's what 4e was meant to be. Something that literally doesn't NEED house-rules, but which totally still CAN be house-ruled when doing so enhances your experience. (Another oft-stated but entirely false criticism of 4e is that you can't house-rule it or it will break. This is not true. Several DMs have used house-rules in 4e games I've played. They all worked beautifully, and tended to be small adjustments or fun additions, like "leftover forced movement when a target is pushed against a wall or similar causes 1d6 damage per square of leftover." That's a great one for control-focused characters like Wizards, Bards, and even certain Avengers and Fighters.)
This is exactly the trial-and-error bit I mean. Yes, not every fix is going to work, but that doesn't mean one shouldn't try.
Again, you're not getting my point. You keep assuming that (a) the person can SEE that there is a problem to fix, (b) understand WHAT the problem actually is, and (c) can FIND a solution that fixes it even if they do actually see the problem.
Assumptions (a) and (b) are not nearly as common as you think, and while assumption (c) often does happen
given you assume (a) and (b), it's not at all guaranteed. Trial and error depends mightily on
realizing both that there IS an error, and actually discerning what the error is. A lot of problems IRL happen because people DON'T realize there's an error, or do know
something is wrong but can't identify what.
Those hard-mode features should be opt-out rather than opt-in, as it's always easier to remove barriers and restrictions than to implement them.
Uhh...no. No they are not. There is a reason THAC0 doesn't exist anymore. It is NOT axiomatically easier to remove barriers than to place them. I would in fact say it is almost always easier to ADD barriers than to remove them, at least in the D&D design context. You keep making these bald assertions like this without any actual argument for them. I'd really prefer that you actually defend them rather than just stating them as though they are self-evident truths. Because I promise you they aren't.
I wonder if there's a difference in how we (as in all of us, not just you and I) present our games to new players, and whether that makes a difference to how those players start out.
My most skittish player is the one who's never played TTRPGs before. We play Dungeon World and I have repeatedly emphasized to him that he can describe whatever he wants to do, and I'll either agree, negotiate, or roll the dice. We are a
little more rules-forward than DW usually expects, but I try to keep things fiction-focused as much as possible. The player is still very cautious about engaging in any situation (safe or not, combat or not, etc.) It honestly has nothing to do with his experience.
Or, if you prefer: inexperience isn't necessary for boldness. Beyond that, though, it's not even a particularly good
indicator of boldness, as others have argued.
I think there are also DMs that are loathe to let characters die. Once a vet figures this out, they are much more likely to swing from the rigging with knives in their teeth and torches in their toes.
Ironically, my players
know I am loathe to let them die, and they're STILL terribly, terribly cautious almost always. It literally took me raising my voice (something I regret, but which I have been sufficiently forgiven for that it is now a funny story the player tells to others) to get one of them to actually face a threat I had built up and had actively prepared the party to face. By the time they actually DID face it, they trounced it with flying colors and it felt good for the whole party.
