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: 8118416" data-attributes="member: 42582">The nit I am going to pick is slightly tangential to your point, but not to my participation in this thread: this claim is true only if the range of events and actions over which choices extends is rather narrowly constrained.For instance, in "classic"/traditional approaches to D&D: a player's choice of his/her PC's attire (other than armour) is not supposed to matter. Nor choice of romantic interest. Choice of religious affiliation is meant to matter in something like, in the real world, choice of trade union membership matters; but it is not supposed to matter in the way which, in the real world, private/inner religious conviction matters.The choices that are canonically supposed to matter are choices that pertain to travel, architecture, and certain sorts of resource expenditure. But as this thread has brought out, the parameters within which these choices matter can be surprisingly narrow: eg while choice of (say) class or skill, and choice of which PC ability to bring to bear, is generally supposed to matter, does it always? Eg does it matter if a PC engages a NPC leading with CHA (Persuasion) rather than CHA (Intimidation)? Sometimes it does, but I think that sometimes it doesn't.I think this is a fairly accurate account of the imperatives of "classic" D&D play, but I think it also reinforces the point I made earlier in this post, about the relatively narrow range of choices that are supposed to matter. The idea of "fixed" setting elements that a player can learn about and make reasonable causal extrapolations in respect of works well for: treasure maps, architecture, certain very simple (simplistic?) social structures (just to give some examples). It works poorly for: dynamic social situations, alliances and betrayals, complex human geography, truly magical places (just to give some different examples). It can even work poorly for contests between reasonably evenly matched opponents - eg races, chess games, etc.To link this to [USER=16586]@Campbell[/USER]'s excellent post not far upthread: many designers (of D&D, and of games that derive their basic infrastructure from D&D) seem to proceed in ignorance of the point made in the preceding paragraph.</blockquote>

Verification