Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Libramarian" data-source="post: 5853036" data-attributes="member: 6688858">I feel like there is something missing from Consume, Engage, Cherish.Umm.The reason I don't want a D&D book that looks like a textbook, is not I can't go 5 minutes without the soothing caress of faux-parchment and florid prose.It's because textbooks are designed to do a thing: hook the absolutely necessary information into your brain as you skim it the night before the test. But D&D is not a test. It's a creative and social activity. Which means that just the crunch is not enough. You need "fluff" that provides a narrative or image that channels and undergirds this creativity. The rules will never be so tightly designed that creativity and improvisation and interpretation are obsolete, and this is not an ideal to strive for in any case.The 1e DMG, for all of its faults in haphazard organization and rules design, gives me an image of the Gygaxian Dungeon Master personality. You're not bound to the letter of the rules because the spirit of the rules is palpable. I'm not going to say it's a great work of literature because it is not. But you can feel the "psychic warmth" of literature in places, when you can tell that EGG is speaking directly from extensive live DMing experience. This is useful to me. I don't think it's just fluff.Pre and post-chapter bullet-point summaries don't have this voice. I don't like D&D books that give you any sort of impression that it's sufficient to just skim the essay portions and get to the crunch.It's not that I hate the textbook look in itself. It's that I feel it doesn't fit with the kind of thing D&D is.You might say that you already know how to play D&D and just want some new rules to do the sort of thing you usually do with. But newbies need the whole package. And some of us who already know how to play still like to read the "personality" of a new edition.tl;dr:I want to consume, but some of the stuff I want to consume is best expressed in the form that I think you would consider engage. I would disagree that consume is all about practicality and engage is all about entertainment.What turns me off about the "textbook look" is not so much it in itself, but what I see it as telling me what the game is like--a test. The only "feel" that's important is the confidence of knowing what rules to turn on where. That's not enough. I need an image/narrative thread to follow.</blockquote>

Verification