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="pemerton" data-source="post: 6240823" data-attributes="member: 42582">This is a very particular, personal view of what RPGing is about. It is not an accurate description of the hobby per se (for instance, it has no bearing on what Gygax and Arneson were aiming for, and they played a key role in inventing the hobby).Nor do I think there is any text in any 3E rulebook describing the goal of 3E D&D play in such terms.You don't get to define the scope of RPGing by stipulation. Burning Wheel, HeroWars/Quest, Over the Edge - just to name a few examples - all are roleplaying games, even though they are not designed to satisfy your particular preferences. They are designed by roleplaying designers (Jonathan Tweet, Robin Laws, Luke Crane) and are labelled, sold and described by their purchasers and players as RPGs.Furthermore, by your definition the game that Gygax and Arneson played - and the game for which modules like Tomb of Horrors, White Plume Mountain and Temple of Elemental Evil were desgined - was not a RPG. That consequence of your definition in my view makes it self-defeating. (Who would even imagine that the point of playing Tomb of Horrors is for the players to have some or other subjective experience, as if it were a gathering of the Bloomsbury group! The point of Tomb of Horrors is for the players to beat the dungeon. If it weren't obvious by impication - and it is - Gygax tells us so in his introduction.)Ahnehnois, what you say here - as a rebuttal of Bluenose's point - only makes sense if character level is an ingame phenomenon. I don't think most people play the game that way - they take for granted that level is a metagame device for tracking certain mechanical aspects of a PC's development and power.Hence a Nth level cleric and Nth level fighter should have comparable mechanical capabilities. This says nothing about, in the fiction, how easy or hard it was for one or the other to achieve that degree of capability.</blockquote>

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