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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 5160581" data-attributes="member: 58197">A few months ago, I started playing Diablo II again after a long hiatus - started building up an account's worth of characters from scratch. I'm finding that I play a character for exactly as long as there are new and interesting challenges. My pattern has been to take a character of each class through Hell difficulty, beat Baal on Hell, and then never play that character again. Every so often I find a different type of challenge (trading for runes on the Realms, magic finding) and do that for a bit; but once I feel I've mastered whatever it is, I get bored with it. Sometime in the not too distant future, I'm going to give away all my high-powered gear, delete all my characters, and quit the game for another few years, until enough time and patches have passed to make things seem new again*.I think this is instructive for PnP, because it illustrates one of the places where tabletop gaming can really shine. A tabletop game offers the potential for near-infinite variation, endless new challenges, because it's got a human DM and human players testing one another's skills. The question is, how can D&D (or any tabletop game) best nurture that potential?4E has made great strides in this area in some regards. The clarity of the underlying math, and access to tools such as the Monster Builder, are a godsend for the homebrewing DM.At the same time, I think the drive to "standardize" mechanical systems - especially combat mechanics - is a dangerous road to go down. There has been a steady push across the editions toward putting everything into the basic encounter/hit point model, where all combats boil down to a single challenge: Grind away all of the enemy's hit points before the enemy can grind away all of yours. Challenges that don't fit into that model, from long-duration status effects to monsters that don't care if you hit them with a sword, are minimized or eliminated.I've recently come to believe that, while this is perfectly workable as a "standard model," trying to shoehorn every combat into that model is a Bad, Bad Thing. I'm doing a lot of thinking now about alternative challenges... swarms modeled as terrain hazards, golems with resist all 50 (effectively immune to attack damage) that must be lured into deadfalls or pushed off cliffs, incorporeal undead that vanish when you hit them but reappear a couple rounds later unless you destroy the object to which they are bound.I would like to see some stuff like this in WotC published materials. More than that, however, I would like to see tools and guidelines for building this sort of thing, to help me create new and exciting content for my group**. D&D's greatest strength has always been the creativity of DMs and players. The game should strive to build up that strength.And of course that's just the combat side. There are still immense opportunities for growth on the exploration and social-encounter fronts. 4E took a few tentative steps in this direction with skill challenges, but the mechanic as written takes a lot of hand-tuning to make it work in play.[SIZE=-2]*Or, more likely, till Diablo 3 comes out.**Please note: I am NOT claiming that I am not perfectly capable of doing this stuff on my own. But WotC has a whole staff of professional designers; I would like the benefit of their professional expertise while I'm homebrewing.[/SIZE]</blockquote>

Verification