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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Argyle King" data-source="post: 8273157" data-attributes="member: 58416">I expect that -even in a reality which drastically departs from our own- that the internal consistency of the story itself be mostly solid.For example, I highly enjoy most of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It's a universe in which people are flying, making incredible leaps, and doing all sorts of things which are far beyond what is even remotely possible in the real world; but, at the same time, there generally are some "in-game" (if I can borrow that phrase and apply it to movies) rules which generally remain consistent. When something deviates from that foundation of the rules, the audience tends to notice. When it is done well, there's typically some onscreen explanation of why to ease the audience into it. When it is done poorly, it tends to be jarring for the audience.Obviously, no story (movie, game, or otherwise) is perfect, but that's not necessarily a problem -if the story being told has built up some amount of goodwill with the audience. An audience may easily forgive a handful of drastic departures from the rules of the story if most everything else is done in an acceptable way. If deviations from the established logic of the world are the norm -rather than the exception to the general rules, it becomes (imo) more difficult for an audience to buy in.I may not care about dragons picking pockets, but there were times when comparing -monster math vs game world math- against -PC math versus game world math- produced jarring results, especially in the context of trying to frame a scene and tell a story.Later 4E books started to attempt to fix this; as I alluded to in previous posts, I also started to rework some of how the game functioned on my own. The best 4E campaigns I ran looked quite a bit different from what was advertised in the 4E preview books.To be completely fair, I will say that I found 4E to be overall more consistent than 3E, and that is because of my response a few posts back (in which GURPS was mentioned). At first, I honestly did not notice because I was not very familiar with rpgs when I was playing 3E. I had little idea about how a game should function (or really even that games beyond D&D existed and did things differently). I started to realize that things did not quite make sense when I attempted to make a character who was (what I thought was) a classic fantasy archetype: the armored knight on horseback. The outcome was a miserable failure once I gained a few levels. Likewise, taking the leadership feat and attempting to role-play being a character who was in a leadership role in an organization didn't work very well because no amount of low-level followers could tangibly help against level-appropriate creatures. 3E advertised that such things were viable options for building a character, but -in actual play- they worked very poorly, and I believe that is because 3E was attempting to be two different games at the same time: 1) something resembling an attempt at what GURPS does and 2) a game with a rather steep power curve and linear level advancement in the vein of D&D.Note: None of this is meant to suggest that I did not (or have not) enjoyed D&D throughout the years. Just, as my gaming palate has been exposed to more flavors, I have gained a better idea of what I like, what I don't like, and what I believe things should taste like. In a similar way, I once believed the store down the road from where I grew up made the best pastries, but my opinion changed after I went elsewhere and tried different things. Can I still buy a pastry from there and enjoy it? Sure, but if I want something which pairs better with the coffee I drink or something which I feel is better suited to relaxing and home and reading a book with my cat, I make the trip elsewhere.</blockquote>

Verification