Perhaps. Though what you consider "suffering", I consider mild discomfort and sometimes mild amusement over his constant grumbling about people to the point of absurdity. He's told me how if he was in charge, he'd hold a lottery to kill off 80-90% of the population to get rid of the majority of people so he didn't have to worry about being around them all the time.
Then again, his schizophrenia manifests itself as paranoia most of the time. He constantly thinks people are staring at him and out to get him. Or at least he does when he isn't on medication. I suspect, however, that the medication doesn't remove these feelings entirely, just lowers their intensity to the point where he feels that people are out to get him in small ways....like a DM ruling against him in a game.
I've gotten used to listening to his grumbling, laughing at it and moving on.
I well understand your affinity for your friend, your protection of him, and can appreciate your noble loyalty to him; it is a credit to you. I've known and cared for multiple people with mood disorders (some drug-addiction induced) and mental disorders (including schizophrenics) and count many of the known in my intimate inner circle and family. I know better than most what it is like to deal with them daily and have their issues/behaviors/conditions as an albatross around the neck. I wouldn't debate you on the merits or demerits of having this Jim specifically in your life or at your gaming table. You get to figure that out. But generally, "Jims" thrust specific dynamics onto play at the table and as they have been introduced, they are open for discussion.
At the risk of adding to the edition warring, I'd like to say that despite my love of 4e, it does have some issues. Jim isn't the only one with that mindset towards the game.
<snip several examples>
It's been my experience that when rules oriented players get a hold of 4e's rules, they tend to abuse them.
Though, the damage they can wrought in 4e is completely insignificant compared to what those same players did in my 3.5e game.
While I understand your position here, you're talking about something orthogonal to what I was citing; eg the use of someone with willful, belligerently destructive behavior (who self-professes social dysfunction, such as intentional game fun disruption as a goal because they themselves aren't having fun, and wears it as a badge of honor) as Evidence A that a ruleset is causal for a cited, insidious cultural problem.
Looking under the hood of a system with complex PC build rules, it is easy to see that they (any of them) would attract "puzzle-breakers" and "tinkerers/engineers" who like to create power-gaming monstrosities out of the complex synergies of the various (non-discrete) resources to see if they can create something powerful enough to "break the game." That is in
their nature. If you give them a challenge that involves building something or taking something apart and putting it back together (especially if the challenge involves it being better than before), they revel in it. The only way you avoid this is by (A) making all PC build tools extraordinarily limited and/or shallow, (B) making all PC build tools utterly discrete and non-stackable such that the siloing removes all possibility for 2nd and 3rd order synergies, (C) canvassing it clearly that you are playing a socially cooperative game and thematic archetype is paramount (and utterly power-gamed monstrosities, eg movement rate of 200 and a trail of 5 OG fire at your feet, are forbidden). Most people don't want A. 4e does as much of B as possible (non-discrete feats and their interactions are the problem). C is easily enough done with a group of mature people who are actually playing for the sake of the fun of the whole. Again, if you have people at your table who "just want to watch the world burn" or people who just consider the game an opportunity for playing Calvinball or uber narcissists bent on unleashing their social dysfunction in a contained playground (such that it won't spill over into the real world), then you have much bigger problems than any ruleset. You better have an assertive, alpha dog leader who can hem them in, or outright castrate them, or you can forget about a fun, rewarding, cooperative gaming experience.
There is exclusive territory carved out between
enable and
promote. What's more, the fact that it enables while not promoting just clearly puts the ball in our court and expects us to put our big boy pants on. I'm a "buyer beware" guy. If we fail to put our big boy pants on (eg we don't make clear our collective table expectations and then enforce them or excise problem children), then that is on us. 4e makes it extremely difficult to create an unbalanced monstrosity. You don't pick a class that says "wizard" or "druid" on the tin and the game goes wobbly merely be the pressing of that button. You have to work the system, and hard (to create something such as the monstrosities above). Anyone doing so is willfully working against the system to break it and would be willfully working against an explicit, social compact to not do so (which should be implicit...don't willfully work hard to "break stuff" or "don't ruin everyone's fun" is something that should be learned early on or you're going to have some problems normalizing to societal standards). If they grumble and work to sow misery at the table thereafter (because they can't play their willful, destructive Calvinball in a cooperative RPG game), the decision to excise them is one that should not come as a surprise to them.
And we move onto the Encounter building "
guidelines". There is nowhere in any rulebook that says you must adhere to some specific format. There is advice on what perturbing the system may create for pacing and expectant difficulty. That is it.
- DMG1 pages 56-57 talk about Spending your XP Budget and what standard (n-2), easy (n to n+1), hard (n+2 to n+4), and deadly (n+5 and beyond). It goes on to talk about monsters below (PC level) n-4 being too easy while n+7 being too difficult and both being problematic for the basic Attack vs Defense math.
- DMG1 pages 104-105 elaborate on the above but not only don't forbid it, they talk about using deadly encounters (n+5 and beyond) or encounters with monsters of level n+8 and beyond and give explicit advice: "
Use such overpowering encounters with great care. Players should enter the encounter with a clear sense of the danger they're facing, and have at least one good option for escaping with their lives, whether that's headlong flight or clever negotiation." Of note; (A) It doesn't forbid as it explicitly says
use and it wouldn't be providing advice for forbidden techniques and (B) this is sound advice as it makes the math clear and basically warns against the use of the commonly understood cultural idiom of "rocks fail, you die".
- The same pages use the same logic (perturbation of the Attack vs Defense math) to warn against using Soldiers that are higher level than the PCs as it creates the well known "slog" as PCs percentage chance to hit them is very reduced (or extremely, depending on what n + is used) and they don't particularly threaten the PCs as they should only be used as melee controllers to protect more dangerous adversaries.
- And finally DMG2, pages 52-55 talk about Encounter and Attrition; primarily focused on Pacing. It canvasses all of the various models for the adventuring day and then gives guidance on the Prohibition (its own section) of Extended Rests and that this is particularly useful for the invocation of attrition/horror themed gaming (which I have used aplenty). It talks about how to accomplish this via plot device and rules systems; Curses/Disease mechanics and Skill Challenge mechanics.
I don't know where these ideas that 4e advocates bounded, Delve (3 encounters or progressive difficulty only) format play only and forbids all other adventuring day formats and/or the introduction of deadly encounters meant to be dealt with outside of the scope of the combat mechanics...but this garbage needs to die. Its flat out not true and its used only as a weapon in edition warring nonsense. Allowing it to proliferate only serves those edition war ends.
