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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5878624" data-attributes="member: 42582">Again, thinking just about the published Moldvay Basic rules, there is nothing on diseases, nor on curses (I don't think Moldvay Basic even has cursed items, does it?).The general assumption is that when the heroes leave the adventure site they return to some nebulously defined town in which they can rest and recover without too much trouble.The examples of play don't show anything like this happening. They do show more interesting stuff being done with the reaction rolls than the rules themselves might suggest (eg a bonus for a peaceful greeting, and a reroll to work out the response to an offer).Again, to try and be clear: this isn't to try and refute you. It's to try and show how the game presents to a reader/new player based on reading the rules text.But the Basic rules don't even flag buying goats.And nothing suggests that using livestock as targets (something that figure in none of the genre fiction that I'm familiar with) is an important part of the game.The foreward (by Moldvay himself?) is presumably meant to give some indication of the game's style/genre. It doesn't suggest anything OS-ish. It involves a heroic warrior being given a magic sword by a wise cleric, rescuing a princess from the dragon, then slaying the dragon with a single blow with the sword, that hews through the dragon's neck. Thus liberating the people from the dragon tyrant.All good high fantasy stuff, but (i) tricky to replicate with the actual game as published (max damage in basic is 10 (2h sword) +2 (best sword bonus) +3 (best STR bonus) = 15, not generally enough to kill any uninjured dragon), and (ii) not having much in common with OS play as I understand it - it certainly involves tackling the threat head-on. It is redolent of Beowulf or Arthur, for example. Or even Conan, who has a tendency to tackle threats head-on. (It is the NPC, for example, in Tower of the Elephant who uses trickery vs the guards. Conan just fights them!)I'll grant this, but then it makes me think that combat stats, and the variability of these based on die rolls (for attributes, for hp, etc) does affect the balance, at least to some extent.Again, this isn't meant to be a Basic-bash. It's a nice game. But I think there are some issues of disjunction between the game as presented, and the game as actually played OS-style. And the more the game is played as presented (eg tackiling things head-on, to use VB's phrase) the more some of the issues with the numbers crop up.Plus there is the issue of thief skills (a personal bugbear of mine, as back when I used to GM classic D&D I had players who loved to play thieves). You said you house rule to add DEX bonus. If I was playing Basic (ie level 1-3) I might be inclined to add the full DEX score, to try and lift these into a more playable range.This particular style of play is one I'm not that interested in - but I've got nothing aginst it for others who like it!Biology/ecology is just about my weakest area of personal knowledge, and I don't enjoy incorporating it into the game beyond the level of background setting (Tolkien or Earthsea are about the right amount for my tastes). Conversely, history, myth and law are among my strong areas of personal knowledge, and I do incorporate these into my game and expect the players to draw on them to build up their understanding of the fictional situation. At the moment, for example, they are in an old minotaur temple to Torog, located in a hidden valley that the both the dragonborn and Nerath empires had used as a last redoubt, but currently occupied by human and hobgoblin cultists of Bane.This is the sort of setting stuff that I base my game around, and I think 4e is one of the better versions of D&D for working with it, because it builds a lot of history and cosmology into many of the PC options, the monster descriptions, etc.I think this is a bit unfair on 4e (I can't comment on 3E, not having played very much of it). Or, at least, it doesn't reflect the play of the game at my table.It's true that PC build is a huge part of 4e in a way that it is not part of classic D&D at all.But when actually playing the game, my players imagine what's around them and use that to inform their decisions. Fictional positioning matters.I like your phrase "description of my next move", because I think it picks up on something pretty central. It's true that 4e powers establish moves - not unlike at least some classic D&D spells. But do they etablish "my next move"? Not in my experience. To set up my next move requires engaging the fiction, not unlike Silverleaf setting up his(?) sleep spell in the sample of play in the Moldvay book.Of course I don't want to say the two games are the same. In 4e, for example, fighting down a slope is more likely to add to an existing forced movement effect, then to create a context for doing something outside the formal action resolution rules. (In published 4e materials, some of the best examples of this sort of stuff I've seen are in module E1.)But I think the alleged fictional sterility of 4e (and the related allegation of mechanical homogeneity) is grossly, grossly overstated - at least as it plays at my table.4e can contain a fair bit. Which is not to say that one mightn't reasonably want more. But I remember running a pretty near-thing stirge encounter at level 10 in 4e: two PCs went to explore the top of a ruined temple, go attacked by the stirges that flew out of the hole in the roof (I can't remember the exact stats, but probably a swarm, a couple of real creatures and a handful of minions). They were only saved by the wizard using his Arcane Gate to let the other PCs get up on the roof in one turn and stage a rescue.Not the same sort of gameplay as herding in goats, I'll concede.</blockquote>

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