Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 5984999" data-attributes="member: 87792">See, here's the problem. D&D started out life and until 4e remained a hacked tabletop wargame. (4e is closer to a hacked tabletop boardgame). And a big part of many wargames, especially fantasy wargames is selection of your starting forces. Which means that a big part of game design is making sure there aren't exploits in the design process, and things with the same supposed points cost are about the same value. And where is the line between abuse and balance? You speak as if it is obvious. Whereas I look at the 3.5 SRD and compare the Druid to the Monk. Playing a druid straight out of the PHB and just picking Natural Spell, a good animal companion, a few good spells, and Wild Shape is going to beat the tar out of even the most abusive monks going.   Likewise. On a tangent that's one of my biggest disappointments with 3.X, and one of the things I like 4e the most for. 3.X is hard to learn, fairly easy to master. Whereas the more I look at 4e the more I find.  And listening to Old Geezer on RPG.net, it was even more gamist in play than it was presented in the books.  All I can say here is that I learned most of my DMing skills from 4e - and the way I DM looks IMO very like the way pmerton does (I'd never claim to be as good a DM as pmerton, but believe the approach to be fairly simmilar). I have theoretical knowledge from other sources, but had very little practical experience of DMing other systems until I'd been DMing 4e mor than a year.  The only games where you can have two characters that are exactly equal in power are either character-sheet less (e.g. Fiasco, Dread) or where you have identical character sheets (most likely in games like 3:16)  Except those encouraging and enabling it. And where does the abusive line start and end? A 3.5 PHB only Druid or Wizard using abilities all in relatively obvious ways could be seen as abusive and was certainly broken.  Spotlight time brought by the class abilities.  "in combat damage output". Um... I don't know which 4e you've been looking at - but not the one with strikers, leaders, controllers, and defenders. Strikers do the highest damage output - it's what they are about. (Unless controllers are spreading the damage to everyone).  Yes. All of the above. Plus the players who aren't min-maxing because they are not playing an unashamedly gamist game as a gamist game - that is in the way it was intended to be played. You speak of a Social Contract as if it was formed out of whole-cloth and packaged in the box containing the game. This simply isn't the case. Which means that the social contract that you talk about as being normal is strictly contrary to the social contract that happened at E. Gary Gygax's table and that a lot of old school play runs on. There, picking the best spells you can get your hands on and using them as effectively as possible is simply part of smart play - and this is all you need to do to break a 3.0, 3.5, or PF wizard. So if you want your game to come with this it needs to be written down and included as a part of the rules.  And if you listen to really old school players (Mornard, Zak S, and others), they talk about "Player Skill" as something that is important and to be praised.   The question is not whether but by how much.  Nice! But replace the average fifteen year old with an average fifteen year old gamer please.  (Would XP if I could).  The weird thing here is that pmerton's descriptions of his 4e campaign are almost entirely in line with my play experiences and the way I DM. And I more or less learned to DM with 4e.</blockquote>

Verification