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="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6044479" data-attributes="member: 2067">Mostly, it's the hooks for hanging specific rules on, and the possibilities that creates.For instance, looking at my original list of rules I'd like to see:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> Starvation and thirst are accounted for by requiring supplies, but at a level that's more manageable than the detailed accounting for individual pounds of food and drink and rope and boots, so at a level more conducive to use in play. This lets us model things like druids finding food and water, and translate that into specific game rules that can be compared to others: druids are 5 less GP each day in the wilderness than other characters. In comparison, maybe a bard can do that in urban environments, and a priest can do that in an area with one of their temples. Maybe the fighter can go for longer without food. A cleric's create food and water then can be compared to what a druid can do. Using the "disease track" as a model for things that persist past an extended rest allows things like CON checks to feature into how your character survives. It's possible to get more variation, uniqueness, and strategy out of it when it's explicitly accounted for. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> Making encumbrance units bigger makes them easier to use (and interfacing with the rules for daily supplies makes encumbrance relevant when stocking up for a long journey) and more subject to variation with other rules, too. For instance, a fighter might be able to carry more, while a horse or a cart might be able to carry even more. This encourages a more detailed account of how the party is distributing its load, without requiring fiddly bits of pound-accounting. In interfacing with rules for food and water, it allows a variation to occur. For instance, the party fighter carrying more of the load and also being more resistant to starvation and thirst means that the party fighter plays a big "support" role in exploration. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> Weather hazards can be modeled by a "random encounter" system which also allows the use of player abilities to neutralize encounters, so that we can directly compare a druid's control weather to the ranger's Wisdom check to build a shelter for the night. Using measurable and manageable units for daily supplies allows us to account for damaging and losing them in more varied ways. Rain can now ruin 1d3 days' worth of supplies without bothering to specify that specific items got ruined or decayed, and in a way that can be codified and controlled. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> Random encounters (and maps and lairs) are a deliberate option that allows the use of unique character abilities in varied ways to negate or lessen. Stealth and Bluff can now be used to avoid random encounters with certain creatures, while Natural Lore can be used to avoid other encounters, and these don't have to be die rolls, they can just be declared effects: DM says "There's bandits ahead," rogue says, "I use Stealth," wizard says "I use Invisibility," and these can be comparable effects without one dominating the other. There is tactical choice: a rogue who can find traps (a subset of random encounters) can be more useful in a trapped tomb, while a ranger who can predict the weather is going to be more useful in the open wilderness. No longer is it simply a DM judgement call, or a prohibited effect, but a direct comparison of abilities used to avoid something that threatens them. It's a defense against the hostile world, rather than a "skip this encounter" button. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> Obstacles become interesting because they do codified things, rather than leaving it up to DM judgement and binary reactions. If you fail a check to cross that bridge, you don't have to die, but you can have some lasting impact. This lets you compare abilities for overcoming obstacles fairly well, weighing the ability to disable traps against the ability to charm monsters against the ability to climb walls, and make a tactical decision about what challenges you're likely to face. Weaving obstacles into the "random encounter" chart helps them actually occur, and using unique character abilities to overcome them helps reinforce the character archetype that you're playing.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> The last two points are kind of sub-points of stuff I talked about above, but briefly, random encounters means that you can avoid combats without ruining a DM's game, and...</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> Obstacles being considered the equal of other encounters means that you can have them be engaging and dangerous and still mandate that everyone have a weight to pull in them. It's not impossible to sit out navigating around that trap, but if you "fail" you also take a lasting penalty that is potentially deadly. </li> </ul>"Druids are friendly with animals and rangers hunt" is, for me, way to abstract, fluffy, and loose. I don't know what that means mechanically, and what it means mechanically is usually "whatever the DM wants it to mean, along with maybe some input from how high you roll on a d20" which is really disempowering for me as a player and really a hassle for me as a DM. It also wangs on my "fence between gameplay and mechanics" chung, because it means I, as a ranger, don't know what I can actually do to functionally hunt at the table, I'm just told in a sort of fluffy, distant way, "Oh, you're a ranger, you hunt. Roll a d20." "Druids have an ability called Animal Empathy that lets them charm an animal and make it friendly toward them, and Rangers have an ability called Wild Game that gives them 1d3 days' supplies in the wild" is more concrete, more grounded in rules (assuming "friendly" and "days' supplies" are codified), and thus more in my hands as a player (and more not my problem as a DM). It reinforces my role-playing because when the party encounters a group of wolves, I can speak up as a druid player and get them to let us pass, and when my party is running out of food in the wilds, I can speak up as a ranger player and supply that. And it's different from a bundled skill challenge because those differences matter in play: the bard can't help out with that group of wolves, no matter how high his Perform skill is, and the cleric can't create enough food & water by herself to supply us with only a few spells per day. Meanwhile, as a cleric, I can maybe do more than HP healing, I can heal broken bones and tend to gangrenous wounds and perhaps offer a prayer to the gods of the rain to save our supplies. It makes those things relevant in the actual gameplay, and gives a lot of possible hooks to hang actual gameplay distinctions on. Good encumbrance rules, good long-term complication rules, good "avoidable encounter" rules...those are all things that DMs can do on the fly, but they're all things I want to be able to use to give my groups the thrill inherent in exploration.</blockquote>

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