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: 5874750" data-attributes="member: 58197">And you think of that as encouraging creativity?! Well... if it works for you, more power to ya. But that sounds to me like jumping through a whole lot of silly hoops, not to mention buying a ton of splatbooks, to wangle permission from the rules to make the character you wanted to make in the first place.I don't think any edition of D&D has encouraged creativity in character generation--except, as I said, the build-optimization angle, which many people quite legitimately enjoy. Some editions have done a better job getting out of the way than others. I'd say BD&D is best at that because it doesn't pretend to have rules for everything. If you want to make a half-demon cleric of Pelor who burns in her own god's sunlight, there's no expectation the rules will tell you how to do that. You work something out with the DM.If you tried to do that in 3E, you would find that the half-fiend template has an "always evil" alignment, which means you can't be a cleric of a good deity, and it has a +4 level adjustment so you couldn't play the character until 5th level, and there are no rules anywhere for non-undead that burn in daylight, and its special abilities may or may not look anything like what you had in mind for your half-demon. So you go to the DM and ask how to work this out, and the DM says, "Well, half-fiend probably isn't going to work, but you could play a tiefling, and I guess we can house-rule in the burning in sunlight thing."So you end up with a cleric who has a couple of resistances and can cast darkness once a day, while being a level behind everyone else and having a Charisma penalty. Whatever you envisioned your half-demon being like, this probably wasn't it.This is not encouraging creativity. It's punishing it. A good DM can certainly make this character fun and exciting to play, but that's the DM encouraging creativity, not the rules! For more on this, please refer to "Oberoni fallacy." BD&D does no more than 3E to encourage creativity, but it does do a better job of getting out of the way of the players and DM--it makes no pretense of having rules for stuff like this.The best thing D&DN could do to encourage creativity in chargen is to give the DM some general guidelines (not hard-and-fast rules!) and examples for how to create unusual and interesting characters, and exhort both DMs and players to push the boundaries. Then provide a dead-simple core game and let DMs and players figure out the rest.</blockquote>

Verification