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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9549843" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Then I think there should be useful, productive, well-made, completely opt-in rules to support their preference.Just as things that I prefer--such as having actual mechanics for non-combat content, or protection against R/P/I deaths, or characters being able to craft their own preferred equipment--should have useful, productive, well-made, completely opt-in rules.In the cases where a default really does have to be set, one useful (but not totally universal) rule of thumb is to look for one-way transitions, and set the default on the side that is easy to move away from, but hard to move toward. Well-constructed nontrivial asymmetric balance, for example, is a very difficult thing to generate in general, but extremely easy to deviate away from.Conversely, I'm sure there are some areas where things I would prefer should not be the default. I'm a bit sleep-deprived so no real zingers are coming to mind, but for some less-dramatic ones, "quest" rules for helping players set worthwhile and achievable goals and then earn XP for completing them, "reskinning++" rules that provide a reliable structure for (just as an example) how to make minor but meaningful gameplay changes (such as swapping elements on spells or features so that a "cryomancer" character is reasonable without being abusive), would make sense as being inherently opt-in, rather than an opt-out baseline. Likewise, given the difficulty of creating a reasonably-comprehensive baseline of DCs that aren't just blanket fixed values, even though such an "encyclopedic" approach (as I term it) is...very much not to my taste, that should probably be a default starting point, with both highly-simplified (for "OSR" type gamers) and improvisation-focused (for folks like me) alternatives as opt-in mechanics layered on top or taking the place of those rules.No single universal pattern or rubric can exist for saying what things definitely should be a shared default and what things should be opt-in alternatives, but I've never seen a single shred of evidence that we couldn't do much, much, much better than 5e has with integrating diverse perspectives.Do you think I have a choice in the matter? You might as well tell me not to feel humble feelings when I see a sublime waterfall (happened earlier this week) or righteous indignation when I hear about an acquaintance being mocked and belittled by a friend for being transgender (happened a few hours ago, someone I know on NationStates recently came out as trans to their friends, and one of them--a gay man to boot!--openly denied that transgender identity even exists.)</blockquote>

Verification