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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 6198659" data-attributes="member: 17106">If you want to say that it's deferred to the non-core books to sell more books, that's fine. But there are several sources that extensively and specifically address this topic. Refer to the Complete Arcane section on "problem spells", for example.Which they shouldn't. They're just rules.The rules of chess don't tell you whether it's a good idea to move a pawn or a knight first. You have to figure that out. The rules of football don't tell you whether it's a good idea to run a dive play every time or call a flea flicker. Each team develops a philosophy of how to use the rules. The rules of D&D don't tell you which character you should target in a fight or how to go about it. Again, figuring that out is part of playing the game, and there will be some individual variability in answers.That seems oddly pejorative. I'd say they do obviously want to sell books, but have every interest in satisfying as many people as possible to do so. Thus, they created a game with certain default style assumptions (that matched 2e in most cases), but was more generic and open-ended, and could more easily be hacked to do other things. To anyone who's played prior versions of D&D, it's clear how to play and how to DM. To any new person, it's easy to make up a style as you go, which may or may not be in concordance with the default expectations.That way, pretty much everybody who's not already deeply invested into a strongly different type of game has an in.Well, it did try to be clear about them, but it also changed them, and is less generic and less open to other styles. Meaning that one has to get on board with these changes, or not. Whereas a 2e-3e player can just do a straight conversion of his character, and his DM can learn some new terminology, and they can keep right on playing the same campaign.And if your take on it is right, 4e basically tells anyone who is DMing another version as intended that they're doing it wrong and they need to shut up and let the players dictate them certain parts of the game that were never previously in question. So yes, as a DM I see that as being pretty narrow, and pretty unwelcome.I don't know where that came from. The Schroedinger's NPC idea comes from the uncertainty of who is responsible for determining characteristics of the NPC; e.g. if the player declares that an NPC exists or has certain characteristics and it is not clear whether he or the DM determines these things.If it's clearly the DM's responsibility, his personal uncertainty is irrelevant and is not what is being described by that term. Practically speaking, the players don't necessarily know how or why their action did or did not work on a metagame level, and that's fine.The point is that any statement the DM makes or one that a player makes and he endorses are facts within the game world, and anything that he does not explicitly approve is not. There is no ambiguity there.In other words, instead of having a discussion with the player about metagame considerations his character has no comprehension of, and which do not bear any direct influence on the resolution, the DM simply adjudicates the literal and nonliteral consequences of the rules. In other words, he does exactly what he is supposed to do.Yep, the difference between DMing and whatever role your "indie" philosophy posits is pretty large.</blockquote>

Verification