Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Andor" data-source="post: 4156239" data-attributes="member: 1879">But it's not a faulty expectation. One of the things I find delightful about RPGs from a DM or Worldesign standpoint is either taking the games starting assumptions and figuring out how things might progess from there, or by taking the rules and making a world that would result from those rules. *Having the standards and expectations I do do not prevent me from enjoying RPGs, they are one of my most loved hobbies, it simply means I may prefer to play a different set of them than you do. *You are kind of correct here. It is pretty much true that D&D game worlds never make sense in the context of the rules for D&D. Eberron perhaps comes closest. But so what? No one holds a gun to my head and forces me to play in those worlds. I am free to take those rules and create a world that looks however I want, and that makes sense to me in the context of those rules. If I choose not to do so, and play in someone elses game while they use a more mainline D&D world I'm obviously giving up the right to bitch about their world as that would be plain bad manners. The first thing I ask when playing in someone elses game is "How can I make a character to fit into your world, and is there any way I can construct my character that will help you with your plot?" Mind you I rarely get an answer that's not "Whatever you want man."  :\ Why do I think the rules are intended to portray a world? I'm not sure I understand what other role the rules could possibly have, to be honest. The rules exist to tell me how my character can interact with the world and other characters, and include a conflict resolution method designed to prevent the "No you didn't! Yes I did." arguments observable on any playground where kids point imaginary guns at each other. If I have a climb skill of 10 and a typical DC for climbing a tree is 15, then I can reasonably expect that my character can climb most trees. If we remove me from the equation and pretend that my character is an actual being in an actual world, then he too will be able to anticipate climbing most any tree as he is a skilled and experienced climber. If I am playing in a Supers game and my character has superman like toughness then I can reasonably expect him to ignore small arms fire. If bullets suddenly start hurting my character he would have every reason to think something unusual was happening. If a mage wakes up in the dark, casts a light spell and still can't see, something is wrong. He could be in a magical darkness more powerful than his light spell. He could be in an anti-magic zone. He could have gone blind. But it is reasonable for him to immedately assume some other problem exists other than he is simply in a dark room. If I am playing a D&D mage, and my character wakes up in a dark room, casts a light spell, and still can't see. The GM should not be surprised if I look for another explanation for my blindness. The rules of the game portray a world where light spells do not simply fail. If the GM has decided to change those rules because he wants a world where magic sometimes just fails, he has to tell me that, because otherwise I will be playing a mage who after years of studying magic has somehow never learnt that spells sometimes just fail. Spell failure is an observable phenomena inside the game world, and it is rediculous to think that a Mage might some how not know about it. The rules effect how character interact with their world, and to pretend that they don't have some level of understanding of how those rules work is to make a disconnect that seems to completely preclude any immersion in the characters. If the rules weren't intended to portray a world, then why do we use different rule sets for different worlds? Why does Oriental adventures offer rules for Honor instead of alingment? Why is a Wu-jen given a different spell list than a wizard? Why does a planescape character have the ability to sense portals while a spelljammer character does not? Why does mainstream D&D include clerics while Darksun and Midnight do not?Role playing to me means that to some extent I am assuming the role of my character. If I cannot understand how my character views his world, then how can I possibly assume that role?</blockquote>

Verification