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!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Oni" data-source="post: 5901212" data-attributes="member: 380">Except who said anything about artificially monitoring and micro-managing the game for spotlight balance.  Player choice and luck of the dice have so much more to do with who gets the spotlight than anything else, but no one ever talks about that.  Those are things that you can't really manage, they're outside of the designers' and DM's control.  If the volume is turned up to 11 all the time for every character in an effort to make sure that everyone is constantly getting spotlight time, it frankly sucks the specialness out of the moment, it just turns into a big mass of frenetic samey-ness. You need lulls and downbeats to provide contrast.  And you're wizard pops into the room and blows it smithereens in one spells example is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about.  He got a moment where he was truly the star of the show, without anyone competing or detracting from that.  And I don't know about anyone else, but a lot of of the fun of RPGs for me isn't just doing awesome stuff, it's getting to see my friends characters also do awesome stuff.  Now if we're not laboring under an intensive encounter centric system this will take only a very little time to resolve and then we're off to the next thing.  A single bombastic beat in a much larger piece.  If you blow through an encounter in one action, no matter how exciting it might have been, its a blip and you don't dwell on it, that's the nature of emergent play.  I want a game that lets the players and chance decide what's important, not DM picking what, a game that surprises the person running it as much as the players.  And a game that focuses on maintaining a certain pitch every, single encounter just isn't going to have that kind of beautiful natural variation, it's too controlled, it can't oscillate wildly all over the place in an organic manner.</blockquote>

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