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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ariosto" data-source="post: 4847472" data-attributes="member: 80487">Yes, Doug, that is the dichotomy: whichever one is fun, the other is somewhat likely to be tedious!It doesn't thrill me to read 90 pages or so and then spend half an hour trying to build "character" out of Attack X vs Y, +1, shift one square, etc., ... only to spend most of the next six hours waiting for my turn to engage in repetition of such trivia and roll some dice. But that's what rocks some people's boats. Roll scores for six abilities, pick a race and class, roll hit points and gold, and go? What are they supposed to come up with, personality traits or something?!It wasn't "boring" to me to say, "As I go, I'm prodding the floor ahead with the butt of my spear." It's a thing we used to call role-playing. What would be boring to me would be having to stop in each square and say, "I'm rolling a perception check."As boring would be having to look in the rulebook to find out in the first place what the game-mechanical abstraction was (maybe wasting time reading the "dungeoneering" entry first). If there even was such a thing, it used to be the DM's concern. (There's a shift in 2E: making the PHB the big book of rules!) But, again, some people thrive on looking up rules and rolling dice and doing arithmetic for every darned thing.Anyhow, it worked. I found the pit trap and leaped across. It would have been really "boring" if I had had a chance to make fast the line that would let others cross safely ... before a less agile fool ended up in the pit. Instead, we got the "excitement" of wasting time fighting a swarm of stupid bugs I would simply have incinerated if not for my comrade being stuck among them.I would have preferred to get on to the actually decisive fight with the villain, without weakening our party beforehand -- and maybe finish sometime before midnight in real time.Yeah, taking 30 minutes of real time to resolve a fight that supposedly takes 30 seconds of game time is another "love it or hate it" thing. Ten minutes for a fight scene, maybe 15, I can handle; after that, I want to get on with the "story" -- even if what's next is another (but dramatically different) fight. It's about moving from one significant decision point to another, and just finding out how many dice rolls it takes to kill some bugs is not that.Playing WotC-D&D keeps turning into something I can't wait to escape. I've seen people attain that release by falling asleep while waiting for their turns. By contrast, when we play old D&D (such as 2E the other night), the hours fly. I leave feeling not enervated but refreshed. No doubt some people have the opposite set of responses.</blockquote>

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