Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 6789460" data-attributes="member: 87792">Fair enough - and that's why I expanded the metaphor.A big part of this IMO is that D&D took a massive step back post DL-1 and with 2e. And never really recovered. In oD&D, 1E, and B/X, BECMI, and the RC you have the following goals you need to balance in character.<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Stay Alive, and keep your hit points up.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Get Treasure (1GP = 1XP - and for wizards treasure is the main way of getting new spells)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Move Fast - every ten minutes spent in the dungeon or hour in the wilderness is a wandering monster check. And wandering monsters don't carry treasure. The clock is ticking.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Preserve resources including spells, equipment, and hirelings. You might need them later, and your hirelings might quit on you if you lose too many. And as you won't clean out the dungeon in one go preserving spells means you can go deeper and get more treasure.</li> </ol>That's four distinct goals that are frequently in tension arising just from the rules of the game. And that's before you take characterisation into account.On an adventure path like Dragonlance you lose most of these goals - you seldom have to worry about wandering monster checks, treasure is nowhere near as important, and you don't have hirelings to look after. Meaning that the goals on an adventure path boil down to "Stay Alive" and "Make the check points" - a far less interesting set of choices especially because making check points follows on almost automatically from staying alive. (The Dragonlance Obscure Death Rule takes away even the need to stay alive, but I digress).This means that even the most one dimensional murderhobo in a dungeon crawl under classic rules has more interesting RP choices than any but the most well defined PCs being pitched to directly by a good GM in most modern RPGs. Even just adding very simple pressures or conflicts within motivations adds dimensions to a character.(On a tangent, one of my many problems with 3.X wands of Cure Light Wounds and 4e played without pressuring extended rests is that it turns hit points from a strategic resource where the loss of each hit point is something that might come back to bite you to a tactical resource where only the hit points in the specific fight matter, making that question a lot less pressing for staying alive; being put into a position in 4e when your Invoker is tanking because no one else has healing surges is awesome and doesn't happen enough).Modern and Indy games have tried to add back these goals-beyond-staying-alive and lend them mechanical weight; there's a gaming equivalent to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law" target="_blank">Gresham's Law</a> that says if there's a fun way and a way that wins people will pick the way that wins (I forget who I'm paraphrasing). This means that if the mechanical model of success boils down to "Do you stay alive?" and nothing else gives them extra mechanical effectiveness, that's what people will prioritise. Even nice ones trying to play the game you're offering them - because that's what the game actually is. In order to get most groups to play for other motivations you need to give mechanical weight to them (possibly including the Tenra Bansho Zero reverse-death-spiral where PCs can't be killed unless they've declared they can, but when they declare "This is something I'm willing to die for" they get pretty big bonusses as the music swells).The MSH abstract karma point to spend on things you care about. The Fate freeform aspect to indicate what you care about in the world - and give you a bonus for invoking it and a reason to want it invoked on you (and a lot of variations on this theme from the Cortex+ distinctions onwards). Hard coded morality systems (MSH, WoD) have given way to aspect based ones. Characters starting with a relationship map (Smallville) which has been thinned down to Hx or Bonds so that you actually have defined starting relationships, indicating how you want to treat your fellow PCs. Get that number of motivations up to four and you have a three dimensional character, although a crude one. (Get it up to ten separate aspects and you're left with a mess).</blockquote>

Verification