Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Nightfly" data-source="post: 9611861" data-attributes="member: 89601">Whoa, friend. No need for ruffled feathers. I meant no disrespect or insult. Just my opinion, and heaven knows my opinions are often stupid. I apologize if I expressed myself a little too forcefully.It's like the old The Ship of Theseus question: at what point have you changed a thing to the point that it's no longer that thing anymore? Like, you can make a chocolate cake with 8 eggs, or 2 eggs, or no eggs. You can even make it without flour, since &quot;flourless chocolate cake&quot; is a common dish. But you can't make it without chocolate, right? At a certain point we can say, &quot;That thing you just baked is not a chocolate cake, it's a meatloaf.&quot; And there's nothing wrong with a meatloaf, but it isn't the same thing.Likewise, if we're taking all the randomness out of character generation, I respectfully think we're doing something different. Maybe I'm biased as an old fart who rolled 3d6 in order back in the eighties, but I think that element of the game is foundational. You need cocoa in a chocolate cake, and you need to largely go where the dice lead you in an OSR game, especially during character creation. That's one of the things that makes it an old-school game in the first place -- possibly even the main thing. There's obviously some wiggle room there, since people have been fudging 3d6 rolls since the seventies. But if you dump that entirely, I think you've lost one of the pillars of that style of play and now you're more or less playing modern D&amp;D. Which is fine! I love modern D&amp;D too, and that's mostly what I play. 90% of my D&amp;D characters use pointbuy. But if I did that for a Shadowdark character...well, I truly feel that I wouldn't be playing Shadowdark any more. Being surprised by how your character ends up is one of things that defines that experience for me, and scratches a different itch than 5e's customized, powerful characters do. Both are fun, but not the same. In my humble opinion.No hard feelings, fellow stingbat?</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Nightfly, post: 9611861, member: 89601"] Whoa, friend. No need for ruffled feathers. I meant no disrespect or insult. Just my opinion, and heaven knows my opinions are often stupid. I apologize if I expressed myself a little too forcefully. It's like the old The Ship of Theseus question: at what point have you changed a thing to the point that it's no longer that thing anymore? Like, you can make a chocolate cake with 8 eggs, or 2 eggs, or no eggs. You can even make it without flour, since "flourless chocolate cake" is a common dish. But you can't make it without chocolate, right? At a certain point we can say, "That thing you just baked is not a chocolate cake, it's a meatloaf." And there's nothing wrong with a meatloaf, but it isn't the same thing. Likewise, if we're taking [I]all [/I]the randomness out of character generation, I respectfully think we're doing something different. Maybe I'm biased as an old fart who rolled 3d6 in order back in the eighties, but I think that element of the game is foundational. You need cocoa in a chocolate cake, and you need to largely go where the dice lead you in an OSR game, especially during character creation. That's one of the things that makes it an old-school game in the first place -- possibly even the main thing. There's obviously some wiggle room there, since people have been fudging 3d6 rolls since the seventies. But if you dump that entirely, I think you've lost one of the pillars of that style of play and now you're more or less playing modern D&D. [B]Which is fine![/B] I love modern D&D too, and that's mostly what I play. 90% of my D&D characters use pointbuy. But if I did that for a Shadowdark character...well, I truly feel that I wouldn't be playing Shadowdark any more. Being surprised by how your character ends up is one of things that defines that experience for me, and scratches a different itch than 5e's customized, powerful characters do. Both are fun, but not the same. In my humble opinion. No hard feelings, fellow stingbat? [/QUOTE]

Verification