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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4035093" data-attributes="member: 2067">The point of working on a car isn't to drive it, though. It's to work on it.The point of playing D&D isn't to tell a story, for me. It's to play D&D. All of those rules suspensions in the pursuit of a good story ruin, for me, the experience of playing the D&D game, because it is, essentially, cheating. And I'm not looking for a good story out of D&D. D&D is, actually, pretty fundamentally unable to deliver to me a story even half as good as anything written by Shakespeare or Cormac McCarthy or Borges or Bukowski. If I wanted a good story, I'd read a book. Now, D&D can deliver to me an entertaining story derived from the game, but I'm not going to shackle the game to some creative chains it was never really intended to obey just to get a good story out of it. Sometimes the fun comes from the game, not the plot. For me, more fun comes from the game (the excitement of rolling dice and of having my make-believe persona manipulate the world for her advantage) than from the story (which is often poorly concieved, filled with stereotypes, unable to maintain a mood, and takes too long to tell, besides). It's more fun to play a game in which I, as a player, can use the rules to affect the world than one in which you, as a DM, just tell me what I am capable of. It's also more fun to play a game where I use the rules to affect the world than to play one in which I just declare how I affect hte world. I do feel impotent if I don't get to affect the world through the rules. If those rules allow me to play through a combat like that faster, or to avoid it entirely (and they very nearly do), I'll gladly embrace them. If they don't, i'm going to have a lot of fun splattering these goblins on the wall. The game is the thing, after all.Actually, this is slightly disengenuous. If you want a high-level NPC to be able to die from falling off a horse, you, as a DM, need to justify that. There are pretty much unlimited justifications for it, including making a rule, but also including making them suffer a warlock's curse or have them fall off a horse, and then off a cliff, or just making them a 1st level Aristocrat since they don't really need to be a high-level fighter anyway, or having them die by being pulled off their horse on a hunting expedition by the terrasque, or just by having them disappear mysteriously into the forest for unknown reasons. In other words, you have to figure out exactly what you want to accomplish, and use the quickest, easiest path to get there, and not be too married to your idea of falling off a horse and dying.Or, if you want horses to be threatening, make rules for that.But don't tell me that my character can stand tall against a dragon's most powerful flame, but dies the moment it's convenient and he's not exciting anymore. That blows my believability away.</blockquote>

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