NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 6580655" data-attributes="member: 6696971">I don't either.  I recall what captured my imagination back in 1984.  It wasn't reading the books.  I knew nothing about it before I witnessed it.  I knew about The Hobbit and LotR and I loved that source material.  But D&D?  No clue.  I was a 7 year old.  I liked dinosaurs, Indiana Jones, Star Wars, cool/fast cars, the A-Team, The Dukes of Hazard, He-Man/Transformers/GiJoe, playing make-believe adventure/war, reading books/comics, drawing, and watching/playing sports.  That seems pretty joe-average.One day I found myself at my older cousins.  He was playing D&D with some other kids his age (around 12 or so) and a few adults.  I was mystified.  They scaled a supposedly unclimbable cliff to retrieve a silver dragon's eggs.  The cloud giants had kicked her out of her home, stolen her eggs, and broken her wings so she couldn't fly anymore.  Bastards.  The characters climbed those cliffs.  They heroically beat down those cloud giants and gained magical treasure in the process.  They rescued the dragon's eggs and brought them back to her.  She rewarded them with gratitude and the few baubles she had left.I was mystified.  I was hooked.  All. In.  Any game system that can produce that play experience has a chance to thrive for jenamored by make-believe and tales of heroic daring-do, joe-average kid, I'd think.They could have served as deterrent.  Like you, I don't know.  It is a tough hypothetical.But I think there is just as much of a chance (if not more) that, back in the day, people played fighters because they like the archetype versus the class mechanics or the play procedures involved in action resolution.  That was my experience with the players who picked Fighter or Thief in the games I GMed.  They wanted to be Legolas or He-Man or Optimus Prime or Face or Sherlock Holmes or Han Solo or Indiana Jones or a ninja-ey guy.  And they wanted that to come out through play.  Advanced class/action resolution mechanics may have not been a deterrent in that case.  They may have been welcome.  We'll never know but it is an interesting thought experiment.This is a good point.  Dungeon World is definitely a hybrid outgrowth of 4e coupled with the PBtA engine.  It plays just like it reads and it does it without fail.  And it reads as a rules lite, Story Now (!) rpg with PCs as hearty protagonists, high action-adventure tropes, points of light genre, with robust resolution mechanics, GMing advice, and transparent/coherent play procedures.  And it still has dynamic, exciting, tactical combat (just different than 4e).  That might have been the evolution of 4e back in the day.  If it would have been, who knows where we would be now?  Maybe fractured perhaps but perhaps with a healthy, bustling, competitive marketplace informed by the acknowledged understanding that focusing intently on achieving our varying sought ends (and excluding those anathema to it) at the design phase will create tighter, better games (that consistently produce the play experience we're looking for rather than fighting against us)!  I do not consider the late 80s to mid 90s the high point of RPG design!</blockquote>

Verification