Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 6257526" data-attributes="member: 22424">'Fun' is one of those things that is really hard to define but quite easy to identify when I see it. It's also much easier to describe things that aren't fun than things that are.For the most part, the things I find fun in an RPG are the 'soft' things that don't really have anything to do with mechanics at all - the storytelling, the characterisation, the banter around the table, and so on. So, in general, what I want from a game is mechanics that don't get in the way of those aspects, but beyond that it doesn't much matter.But, yes, one of the things that I find is most definitely not fun is where a character proves to be useless, either because the mechanics just don't support the archetype right, because the character is just built badly, because a freak run of luck means that he constantly misses, or simply because some other character/class/build that is present at that table does the same thing better.For example, the most recent time I played 4e I was running a Gladiator in a Dark Sun game. In one of the key encounters I found myself hit by one of my not-infrequent runs of hideous luck, and every single Daily or Encounter power I used resulted in a miss (even if I stacked up mods to hit on a 4). That encounter proved to be a massive exercise in frustration, and most definitely not fun.So I have considerable sympathy for the notion that a character shouldn't just be rendered useless if at all possible.(On the other hand, that encounter was then counter-balanced by the next one, where I hit virtually every time and thus did really well. And, also, I would argue that that risk of a freak set of bad rolls was probably a necessary risk in the game. It's just that, at the time, it really sucked. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> )My gut feeling is that such runs of freak bad luck might be best handled with an escalating bonus that applies to attack rolls and damage (say +2 to each for each 'failed' round). That way, the failures can't go on forever, and when you do hit you hit really hard, which has its own appeal. But that probably wouldn't have worked in that game, what with 4e's Daily/Encounter/At-will paradigm.Another option, and one that the DM of that game has since adopted, is to give each player a handful of reroll tokens each session, which also go a long way towards mitigating the problem - either you accept the lost round (your choice), or you reroll and probably hit (success!), or you reroll and still fail (adding to the bank of hilarious stories of Delericho's bad dice). Which, in any of the three cases, represents a 'good' outcome.</blockquote>

Verification