NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 6011713" data-attributes="member: 17106">Because there are people at the table. If you throw a bunch of people together, it's natural for them to work as a team. If one character is more powerful than another, the player of the first character will help out the second. If one character is dominating all the scenes, the DM will distract him with something or pull something out of the PCs' backgrounds to shift the spotlight. Bottom line, whatever course of behavior aggregates to producing the best experience for everyone is where the people at the table will gravitate, if they communicate well and set that as the goal.I would not expect a beginner to create an adventure. I don't know that I've "created an adventure" in over a decade of DMing. I would expect a beginner to be able to run a game at the table. The first step to DMing is learning how to react to players and create story elements improvisationally. Any other structure imposed on that is optional, and makes things more complicated.  An interesting example, but D&D isn't as technical as music (I say this as someone who knows both pretty well). Virtually anyone could simply get together in a group and do some freeform interactive storytelling (whereas anyone could not necessarily produce decent music). D&D is simply imposing a set of game rules on storytime around the campfire; learning D&D is learning how to blend those rules with something you already know how to do (tell a story). Not everyone is equal as a storyteller, but in my experience, even people who are lacking in creativity, intelligence, or confidence can still produce relatively high-quality narratives with no training or experience at all.Better? In the eyes of the mass market perhaps. But I don't think that any game designer is likely to understand my style or my players. If I didn't have any prep done (and I usually only do a page or two of stat blocks per session and nothing else) I'd just improvise and make stuff up off the top of my head. My process hasn't changed at all since I was a young teenager picking up the game either; the results have simply gotten better. I'm very critical of my first campaign, but having had experience with (well-regarded) published adventure products, I'd take the stuff I made up as a beginner (or any of the campaigns other people in my group have run, largely as beginners and largely as teenagers) over Eric Mona or James Jacobs' best effort any day. The experience of running my own game and the product that came out, whatever their flaws, were still much, much more personal and much better.Some (not all) of those things I cite as deficiencies are problems with 3e as well; I'm not defending it as a perfect system. However, 3e has a much broader variety of mechanics, and many variants out there that allow you to create the experience I want. If core 4e is 0% of what I want, core 3e may be only 30% or somesuch, but it's still much closer and much more amenable to being customized (as 5e supposedly will be).</blockquote>

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