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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shaman" data-source="post: 2292444" data-attributes="member: 26473">I’d like to start off with a thought:Arguably, a debate is intended to change an opinion, but I think I understand your broader point. IMX discussing ideas and sharing views is a valuable tool for improving as both a GM and a player. It makes me sad when such discussions are dismissed as whining or griping, as I’ve picked up some really helpful advice and insight from threads like this. I’d like to think that we can disagree about specifics in games.With that in mind, this thread touches on a number of things that have been on my mind lately. To begin...I suggested this a few days ago and got jumped on like a trampoline at an 8-year-old’s birthday party, to the point where one poster said...This really sums up for me a number of problems I have with the current iteration of D&D.Back in the day, when a fighter was a fighter was a fighter, we expressed our creativity by more subtle means. We generally started off with some differences, of course: ability scores were rolled rather than generated by point-buy, so a certain amount of variability was built-in. Race selection was an obvious point of difference, and occasionally class and abilities would be put to novel uses (such as a Dex-based fighter who specialized in ranged weapons) but the way in which we really differentiated our characters was through role-play.One group with which I played included two fighters in the party: one character (played by a good friend of mine) was a knight (he would’ve played a paladin but he didn’t have the ability scores for it...1e, when balance was a wink-and-a-nod) and the other (mine) was former gladiator escaped from the slave-pits. As luck would have it, we both concentrated on melee over ranged combat and both characters had 16 Str. However, no one ever had a hard time telling one character from the other: the knight was courtly and chivalrous, preferring single-combat (often calling out the leader of the bad guys) – the gladiator fought using every dirty trick I could think of, from ambush to bull-rush. The knight fought in plate armor and large shield, a sword or a lance in his hands – the gladiator wore studded leather and carried a small shield and short sword, relying on quickness and mobility. The knight would give quarter, did charitable works, was beloved by the NPCs – the gladiator drank and whored himself into the gutter every time we were in town and was usually considered a menace to society.The fact that these characters were nearly identical in terms of mechanics made absolutely no difference in terms of playing the game: they were as distinct and as different as could be in terms of outlook, tactics, and so on, but they rolled to hit on the same chart, had the same hit dice, and the same abilities aside from those which we presumed by roleplay, such as the knight’s extensive knowledge of the nobility and the gladiator’s intimate knowledge of taverns and brothels – we didn’t need ranks in Knowledge (nobility) or Knowledge (streetwise) to make this distinction. It was simply the outcome of our imaginations brought to life in the course of the game, and sadly, my recent experience tells me that this is less common than it once was among D&D players.Before everyone gets riled up, consider that this is simply my personal sample of the gaming community: I’m sure that everyone here at ENWorld can improvise a Shakespearean tragedy or comedy (or both) using nothing more than a blank piece of paper and a coin to flip. However, the last couple of times I’ve played D&D, the experience wasn’t a positive one, and it was brought home to me again the other night when we brought a new player into our Mutants and Masterminds game, a friend of one of the regular players. I spoke with the new guy (hereafter “the FNG”) a few days earlier: yes, he’d played M&M before and could pre-gen a character before Friday, which was great for me as it meant less time sitting around and more time gaming – I painstakingly explained the setting to him, described a couple of the characters’ powers as examples and so forth, and gave him my little spiel about the importance of role-play to our group. The FNG showed up with a standard brick, a character that had no relationship at all to the setting and that specifically ignored my prohibition against Super-Strength. When I explained to him why the character wouldn’t work, he complained that he generated it “by the rules” and that therefore it was “legal” to play. Once again I walked him through the setting while the rest of the players watched a movie on HBO or Starz or something, until after more than an hour of wrangling we managed to come up with a character that was mutually acceptable so that we could finally get the game underway.In talking with the player later that night, after our abbreviated game session broke up for the evening, the FNG spoke about his D&D group, and the characters he likes to build: this base class from this book, that feat chain from that book, those PrCs from those books. I explained that when I ran a 3.0 game, I’d allowed nearly every PrC printed, but that if I ran a 3e game again in the future I would limit the number of PrCs and encourage multi-classing instead. The FNG complained again that that would be too limiting in terms of his character “concepts” – I countered with a class combo that could meet most of the requirements of his concepts, but when I pressed him for details each time he came back to some mechanical ability as key to the “concept” without which the character would be “boring.” After he was gone my sister-in-law, one of my regular players, looked at me and said, “He’s not playing with us anymore, is he?” – the next day the player who invited the FNG called to apologize.I’d love to say that this was a unique occurrence, but it seems that every D&D group I’ve played with since 3e was released has included one or two or even three examples of the FNG’s style of play. None of them have been kids, none of them have been noobs – all of them see the mechanics as dictating the character concept. When I picked up 3.0, I was generally happy with the changes, including the addition of prestige classes – as time has gone on, as splatbooks brimming with “options” appeared, most of which seemed to exist primarily to nerf the restrictions imposed by the previous splatbooks or the core rules (“this ability does not provoke an attack of opportunity”; “this ability is not affected by energy resistance”; et cetera), I’ve seen how for many players have substituted mechanics for imagination.Apparently I’m not the only gamer to notice this phenomenon... There are a couple of interesting suggestions as to why this happens...These ideas fit very closely to my 1e example above: both characters were “fighters” in terms of class mechanics, but that’s where the similarities ended. We didn’t have or need a “knight” or “pit fighter” prestige class for either character: we role-played the differences and while it may seem inconceivable to some players ( <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> ), we had a lot of fun doing it.The FNG and other players with a similar mindset see the mechanics underpinning their concepts as part of their self-expression, and while I may not agree with it, I do understand it: I’m not suggesting in any way that my way is better or their style of gaming is inferior to mine. In fact, there are times when I’ve agreed with them...When I ran a pulp-adventure game a year or two ago, I used Mutants and Masterminds instead of Pulp Heroes, for many of the same reasons I’m using M&M for our current “Darkest Africa” game instead of d20 Modern – while I love d20 Modern like a fat kid loves cake, for these games I didn’t like the constraints of the Vancian magic system or psionics in Modern on the genre. I didn’t want either game to “feel like D&D,” so I chose a system that is more open-ended, more customizable, to step away from those constraints.Back in the day, before PrCs, we customized our D&D characters as well: in the campaign I ran I had a “weapon specialization” house rule long before the original Unearthed Arcana was released, a necromancer could sub certain spells and gain a small bonus while accepting a penalty to casting other kinds of spells, and so on. I allowed the players to personalize their characters in small but interesting ways – the skill and feat system of 3e appealed to me instantly as a result of that experience, as did prestige classes, which is one of the reasons I loaded up on them for my 3.0 campaign-world. However, in actual play with 3e over the years, the problem of mechanics-oriented thinking has crept up and up to the point where it interferes with the fast and heroic style of play that I look for in a fantasy RPG, that which appealed to me most about D&D compared to other systems I’ve player over the years since I first made the transition from wargaming in 1977. IMX too often characters stopped being characters and started being collections of stats – the concept was the mechanics.Again, please let me stress that that’s not a criticism: it is just my personal preference for a game that is less dependent on mechanics like class abilities and one that is more free-flowing, more personal.I’ve also noticed another consequence of PrCs over the years...There is a rigidity in character concepts that depend on mechanics that tends to make players somewhat inflexible over the course of the game, dictated by pre-requisites and feat trees and skill ranks. Instead of being able to evolve based on the events of the game, the character follows a set path without deviation, effectively ignoring the results of a career spent adventuring on the development of the character’s personality, outlook, relationships, and so on.I played a dwarf fighter, my longest-running character, with my high-school gaming group. Following an adventure where we explored a mummy’s pyramid, he gave up his hammer and axe for a scimitar and a wickedly curved dagger, took to wearing a turban and flowing robes over his armor, and even arranged for a custom saddle so that he could ride a camel. This was not something that I’d considered before creating the character: it was the direct result of the adventures in the desert. My gut feeling tells me that a player who is too locked into the mechanics of his character wouldn’t be willing to make that sort of transition: how many 3e players would give up their character’s primary weapon if access to Weapon Focus was at stake? how many 3e player would give up on a prestige class toward which they’d been building over several levels to take a different class because of something that happened during the campaign?For me, prestige classes and the metagame thinking that goes with them take away from the kind of fantasy game I enjoy playing. I don’t think my way is better or worse than anyone else’s: I only know that my madbadfun probably differs from the majority of players out there, and that makes me a little sad (or at times rather frustrated, as with the FNG last Friday night). There are probably players out there that are masters at seamlessly melding roleplaying and mechanics – it’s been my unfortunate experience to meet so few of them.</blockquote>

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