Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ariosto" data-source="post: 5027511" data-attributes="member: 80487">I agree with this: That makes me wonder about this: That looks like a contradiction, and in fact what I find in old D&D is the free potential for unlimited types of characters that Sadrik's earlier statements seem to predict one ought to find. It is really quite beyond me where he finds any "restrictions" laid down. All I can figure is that he chose to impose them on himself, arbitrarily waiting for the explicit, minute point-by-point permissions of 3e.Well, what follows? Just what he seemed -- again -- to predict above: the flip side of "needing" and getting permission for A is not being permitted B or C. Thus, one chooses to get stuck with "a very limited group of character possibilities" (expanding bit by bit with the purchase of expansion sets at $35, or whatever, each).Adequate examples suffice for the old-style gamer, who does not expect everything to be as limited as in a computer program. Got a rule for bows? Cool -- that's the essence needed for anything further along that line, from an arquebus to a laser gun. The original Marvel Super Heroes set does not need to give specifics for a long list of super powers, only to demonstrate how to use the game-mechanical tools to represent whatever one wants.Nor does it need a rigorous system of points values or anything like that, because it is not a set of rules for wargame tournaments. Artificial "army lists" are of limited interest for historical campaigns, which are naturally more concerned with actual orders of battle. The RPG started out more like that, and some D&Ders still lean more toward playing characters on adventures in worlds than toward mustering forces for tournament-style play.That rules-bound, "by the books" style can only ever encompass a subset of the possibilities. For that reason, I favor making its apparatus a supplement to the fundamental necessities -- not making it the ubiquitous foundation that is constantly demanding attention, as WotC has done.I expect this may be not just unpalatable but simply hard to grasp for the hardcore "gamers" steeped in the abstract-reductionist mode of thinking about the game. It would hardly be worth the trouble of addressing if a very simplistic approach were likely to satisfy enough of us. The problem is that D&D has an inherent non-quantified, situational complexity that appeals to many people -- and from which mechanical complexity can be a bothersome distraction; to which it can, indeed (as in the combat sub-game's bloating in 3e and 4e, and skill-denying "skill challenges"), be a tiresome, time-consuming barrier hard to hurdle.</blockquote>

Verification