"......this sounds so crazy that you probably won't believe it right now—we're designing the game so that not every player has to choose from the same set of options. Again, imagine a game where one player has a simple character sheet that has just a few things noted on it, and the player next to him has all sorts of skills, feats, and special abilities. And yet they can still play the game together and everything remains relatively balanced. Your 1E-loving friend can play in your 3E-style game and not have to deal with all the options he or she doesn't want or need. Or vice versa. It's all up to you to decide."
"...this isn't another salvo in the so-called edition wars. This isn't an attempt to get you to play Dungeons & Dragons in a new way. This is the game you've already been playing, no matter what edition or version you prefer. The goal here is to embrace all forms of the D&D experience and to not exclude anyone. Imagine a game where the core essence of D&D has been distilled down to a very simple but entirely playable-in-its-right game. Now imagine that the game offered you modular, optional add-ons that allow you to create the character you want to play while letting the Dungeon Master create the game he or she wants to run. Like simple rules for your story-driven game? You're good to go. Like tactical combats and complex encounters? You can have that too. Like ultra-customized character creation? It's all there."
Quite obviously, they
do mean it literally. If people want to continue to speculate otherwise, this thread is not for you.
This thread is about speculating
how they might be able to accomplish what Monte is talking about here.
Let's say we have 2 friends playing a fighter. Fred is playing BECMI level simple, and the Bob is using 3.5-esque feats and skills with 4.0-esque powers.
Here is what I'm afraid of:
Fred: I attack the skeleton.
DM: Roll to hit and damage.
Fred: Okay I hit AC 17 and do (rolls 1d8+3) 7 damge.
DM: Okay Bob, you're up.
Bob: I use "Come and Get it" to force all the skeletons in the room to move adjacent to me and attack them all as my Standard Action. I hit AC 17 and did 14 damage to all of them. Since I have Two-Weapon fighting feat, I will make another attack on any that remain standing. I then use my Move Action to recover some hit points with "Catch a Breather". As a Minor Action, I take a 5' step, and use my "Spot" skill to see if there are any more skeletons coming down the hall.
Fred: *grumbles something incoherent*
This is what I'm getting at. There must be some sort of balancing mechanism to fix this.
In BASH! UE, I used "Hero Points" to solve a somewhat similar problem of power disparity between supers. Kid Side-Kick (22 point character) and Super Paragon (50 point character) can still have fun on the same team in the same adventure because I give Kid Side-Kick more Hero Points to balance it. I'm wondering if they did the same thing here.
Maybe Bob used up all of his "Fate Points/Bennies/Etc" at character creation, while Fred has X amount he can use per game to perform some stunts, get re-rolls, etc.
Maybe Fred's character takes less XP to level up than Bob's, or he gets more XP per session. Or maybe Fred gets better starting attributes.
But what I'm REALLY afraid of is the answer is: "Well Fred could have taken all those abilities *if he wanted them* but he didn't.
However, I'm pretty confident they do have something pretty great figured out if they're going to be making these promises so early in the game. I imagine they probably can back it up. So I'm wondering "how".
