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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6147357" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm sure this is true. I think, given this, that the question is whether we want all concepts to be equally viable from the gameplay point of view?For instance, if players choose mostly on concept, but the game breaks down without a certain mechanical factor being present (in D&D this is generally expressed as needing a healer, and/or a caster of some sort), then the game will break down if no player is attracted to the concept in question.Also, if player choose mostly on concept, but some concepts don't work out that way at the table - for instance, suppose it turns out that a flying invisible wizard really is a mecahnically better stealth option than a thief or ninja - then some players are going to have a compromised play experience simply in virtue of the concept they preferred.I would definitely count this as an instance of "compromised play experience".I think it also relates to my first point - for instance, if D&D (at least by default) assumes that the players will exercise narrative control to succeed at challenges, but confines that to certain concepts only, then the game will break down if (eg) the players want to play an all-fighter or all-ranger party. Even though this does not seem out-of-line for the genre (eg Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas chasing down the hobbits through the fields of Rohan).I think it matters hugely. Playing an RPG, for those I play with at least, isn't just about the party achieving its goals. It's about engaging and shaping the fiction via your PC. If someone else is always doing that, it doesn't matter that, in the fiction, your PC is getting what s/he wants. At the table you're not getting to play the game.This is precisely a point of narrative control issues, I think. Burning Wheel tackles this with its Circles rules, which put control over this sort of stuff back into the hands of the players. But BW is not a class-based system; in a D&D adaptation of its Circles idea it would be a class ability for rogues.The difficulty is that many prospective players would probably reject it because it is clearly a metagame mechanic. Yet I don't know of a game that maintains magic/martial balance without giving the players of martial PCs additional metagame resources to deploy.Why do 4e-style metagame mechanics defeat the point? They give players of martial PCs additional metagame resources to balance their lack of in-fiction magical resources.</blockquote>

Verification