Lancelot
Adventurer
hong said:
Hyuk huk. Nice. Forgot all about that one...
Well, that settles it for me. If 4e doesn't bring back the flumph, it's dead to me. DEAD, I say!!!

hong said:
That's not the point. If it doesn't make sense to new players, it needs to be justified somehow or junked. (IMO, and apparently the O of the 4E design team.)JoelF said:a) since when does logic have anything to do with demons (in their historic and current incarnation at least) which are embodiments of chaotic evil - they don't HAVE to make sense, sicne chaos allows all sorts of forms, even hot human looking women demons. *
As someone who's brought in a half-dozen players in the last two years, I will state with absolute conviction that a large number of D&Disms that many veteran players don't even notice cause new players to say "whaaaa?" When bringing folks into my Midwood campaign, it was the D&Disms, not the setting-specific stuff, that regularly stopped the game for a round of "whaaaaa?"b) has anyone actually heard a potential new player say "this D&D game is just too complicated, I can't tell demons apart from devils, and espeically those women ones - they're just the same, so how can some be demons and some be devils"? Personally, I think clearing up tough rules and makeing the game more faster are ways to get new players into the game easier, but this change is not going to impact new players in any way.
Make them emaciated pale humans with tiny horns and a barbed tail with a scorpion tail tip, perhaps?Voadam said:Making devils human but diabolic looking is a good way to do things, but description wise I think that makes them mostly succubi and arch devils and not a lot of anything they were before. I really don't see bone devils fitting in for example.
The D&D universe (and multiverse) is a beautiful synthesis of many different sources that makes something unique. Rather than alienate, newcomers to the game with some familiarity with some of those sources have an instant starting reference point for the "flavor" of the game.Terraism said:I honestly don't think that D&D's legacy of lore and cut-and-paste, wedge-the-square-peg-into-the-round-hole mythos actually does do the game any favours. In fact, I think it's quite the opposite - that it alienates, or at least confuses, newcomers. So, for my part, yes. Throw the 30 years of flavour out the window - those of us who want it can put it back in, and it makes the game more accessible.
And now this god is imprisoned in an icy lake at the bottom of Hell, with his three-faceted head chewing in each mouth the greatest traitors of all time . . .Brian Gibbons said:I will be interested to see the details of this backstory.
Personally, were I to use this in a campaign, the god would have been an extremely LG deity who snapped and began killing other deities (primarily neutral and other good deities) that did not measure up to his high standards. His angelic servants, horrified at his actions, realized eventually that they were the only ones who could stand up against this perversion of justice and finally mustered up the courage and power to move against him, though not before he had slain eight other deities and absorbed their realms into his own.
Quite right! Plots are common property. Shakespeare's "Comedy of Errors" is a take on Plautus's (a poet of the New Greek Comedy genre) "The Brothers Menaechmus," for instance.Oldtimer said:Bah! A good skald always takes what is familiar and builds his story from that. It's not like they are going to copy text verbatim out of any religious texts. It's still a new story, but built on a somewhat familiar foundation.
Shakespeare was copying old stories for most of his work. Do you consider him lazy as well?![]()
Whizbang Dustyboots said:That's not the point. If it doesn't make sense to new players, it needs to be justified somehow or junked. (IMO, and apparently the O of the 4E design team.)
A previous Design & Development article mentioned WotC watching newbies play with just the books from behind a one-way mirror. While they had fun, they got a lot of it backwards and they had a whole lot of "whaaaa?" moments.
QUOTE]
Ah, ah, now that's interesting !
I have not seen the article, but getting things wrong in the start and learning your error later, can actually be quite fun.
When I started playing 1e, we made lots of horrific mistakes, which we corrected next session after a little rules talk.
We keep hearing how 4.X will be more "newbie-friendly". Laughable.
Let's be honest for two seconds : DOES ANYBODY THINK THAT EVEN WITH A "BETTER" 4.X or 5.X or Y.X EDTIION ANY NEW PLAYER CAN LEARN A THREE HUGE (200+) BOOK SYSTEM WITHOUT ERROR ?????
In any events, it is bad to let newbies on any RPG game without some outside help.
So this argument makes no sense at all to me.
Just because some error is inevitable, why is it a bad idea to minimize the errors?Stereofm said:Let's be honest for two seconds : DOES ANYBODY THINK THAT EVEN WITH A "BETTER" 4.X or 5.X or Y.X EDTIION ANY NEW PLAYER CAN LEARN A THREE HUGE (200+) BOOK SYSTEM WITHOUT ERROR ?????
In any events, it is bad to let newbies on any RPG game without some outside help.
So this argument makes no sense at all to me.