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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ratskinner" data-source="post: 7070615" data-attributes="member: 6688937">Sure, but plenty of old-timers see "true D&D" as nothing but that. I mean, that's the whole murder-hobo thing, isn't it? "Why do we kill these monsters? To get treasure and XP. Why to we want treasure and XP? To level up so we can kill bigger monsters better."Absolutely. I'd add that I think that the "treadmill" of (especially classic) D&D plays directly against the idea of compelling story in a couple of ways: (a) virtually no mechanical support or detail regarding OOC "story" elements (especially lack of substantive reward mechanisms), (b) romanticization of the Awesome-campaign-that-took-30-levels (Good stories require tension and resolution.) (c) no real mechanical reflection of basic story structure(s) (b) may take on other forms as well, like pride in how long a player sticks with a certain character. There's nothing wrong with that, but the stories that result are more like accidental war stories or sitcoms, not strong fiction. For that matter, almost every table I've played OSR games at penalizes your XP earnings and progress, should you have the audacity to acquire allies. I generally don't disagree much. Although I think classic D&D is such a hodge-podge of mechanics and systems that discerning a motivation or design goal is a tenuous affair. Not to mention that some of the mechanics are...*ahem* less successful than others... at achieving what their apparent goal is. (IMO, anyway.) As far as players go: IME, lacking mechanics to encourage or enforce motivations, all you can do is throw down the gauntlet and hope they pick it up. I suppose the juvenile nature of TTRPGers would depend on one's opinion of sitting around a table pretending to be elves. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> I would also note that Merry and Pippin are characters also from the mind of JRR Tolkien, and that RPGers tend to revere many other properties as well including The Princess Bride and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. No doubt. However, once the characters are solidly powerful in a personal capacity, it only takes one dissenting Dwarf Fighter or Human Barbarian to derail such progress and get back to the business of proving that the numbers on your sheet are bigger than the numbers on mine. In a recent AD&D campaign,  I had a (half?-)elf wizard/cleric. A wish had granted him the ability to continue leveling in wizard, but he was doomed by the goofy rules to remain badly behind the rest of the party. Once he had access to reliable invisibility and flight...well, many fights went start to finish without much, if any, input from that PC. That's not the only character I've seen who ends up in that position, rogues can be the same way with an invisibility ring. "See, if I actually attack the Ettin busily clubbing you to death, then I become visible. Best of luck, though! I have every confidence in your ability to fight him off." From my perspective, my character's interests in survival had been removed from most fights. He was perfectly capable of watching them from a safe, invisible, height or corner of the room. For him/me, a combat encounter could usually be viewed in the much the same way that the fighter (in our examples above) viewed a social encounter. "I can safely ignore the details of this as being irrelevant or tangential-at-best to actual progress in the game." I think this was exacerbated by the fact that most of the "heavies in the party were rather....unconcerned by the mysteries we were trying to solve. That left all the "understanding" and "figuring out" to the two or three of the PCs who would.</blockquote>

Verification