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If you've ever left D&D, what made you come back?
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7012564" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>I left D&D once for 5 or 6 years. Mostly because I was frustrated with what I felt was the 'unrealities' of the system - the usual complaints, hit points, clsses, Vancian spellcasting, and every other rock that fantasy heartbreakers dash themselves upon.</p><p></p><p>And I came back through a combination of two things.</p><p></p><p>First, I figured out that when you drop hit points, classes, Vancian spellcasting, and various things of that sort, it's not pure win. You gain some things but you lose some things as well. And the things you lose were more important to me as a DM than the things that are gained.</p><p></p><p>a) Vancian Spellcasting: First of all, I've always had a strong tight in world explanation for how Vancian spellcasting worked that made sense to me. So the problem was less that I couldn't associate the mechanic with the setting in a potent manner, than I thought that Vancian had poor verisimilitude to magic as it appeared in typical fantasy narratives. What I discovered was that spell point systems had even less verisimilitude to magic as it appears in typical fantasy narratives. Besides compartmentalizing magic, Vancian does something very powerful - it explains why the character just doesn't do the same thing over and over again. </p><p></p><p>b) Classes: I've played and admire a great many point buy systems. But point buy systems typically depend on poor system mastery and are broken by high system mastery. It just ends up turning out that some set of builds are more interesting than other ones. Point buy systems are never well balanced because they are impossible to play test. There is almost no good way to measure character ability based on points alone. They are also almost impossible to work with was a DM, because chargen is so much more complex and short hand is so much more difficult. I'm used to doing everything from scratch. Try running a fantasy homebrew from scratch in a highly granular point by system. Moreover, as with Vancian spellcasting, classes do something really interesting - they force players to be both broad and narrow. Typically if you build a class based character, it's both almost impossible to avoid the core focus of the game (say combat) but at the same time almost impossible put all your resources into that narrow focus. By contrast, if you are the GM in a point buy based system, you have no idea what the player's are going to show up with. You could end up with players that are avoiding the core focus of the intended game, or you could end up with Johnny One Tricks that put all of their points into a hammer that they intend to bash every single problem regardless of what it looks like with.</p><p></p><p>c) Hit points: For a mechanic that receives so much hate, I find it interesting virtually no video game has ever dispensed with them. Dwarf Fortress is one of the few I can think of, and would be a case in point for why game designers usually don't. The great thing about hit points is it makes encounter design so much easier. It's pretty easy to work out the math of 'party can probably do about this much damage per round, killing the X in about this many rounds, and receiving about this much damage. Is that a fair fight? Is that going to be interesting?' Without hit points, it's just a really a crap shoot what will happen, and really the luck starts vastly exceeding any other component of the system. It's frustrating as a GM to design for that.</p><p></p><p> Secondly, I came back because 3e D&D looked a lot like a cleaner version of the house rules I was trying to write for 1e AD&D when I gave it up as a bad cause. It was like someone custom designed a platform just for me that was very close to my needs. I understood what the designer's were thinking, because they were addressing problems that had actually come up in my play rather than theoretical problems I didn't have.</p><p></p><p>I can't help but notice you wrote from a player's perspective, and I wrote from a GM's perspective.</p><p></p><p>As a player, I don't really care what rules we use. As a GM, I do.</p><p></p><p>UPDATE: I'll add a third take on this. As a GM, there are a lot of systems I admire. I'm not hidebound to a particular system. I've homebrewed my own for particular purposes and it looks NOTHING like D&D and NOTHING like a fantasy heartbreaker either. But I would assess that for most of those systems it takes a pretty particular group of players to make it work as a game. Many of those systems implicitly depend on player attitudes or player skills that aren't particularly common even in RPing groups. By contrast, I think I could make D&D work for just about anyone that wanted to RP, just by twisting a few dials. There aren't a lot of games like that, and those that exist (WEG Star Wars, for one) I don't have as much experience with so its a lot harder for me to wing it.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7012564, member: 4937"] I left D&D once for 5 or 6 years. Mostly because I was frustrated with what I felt was the 'unrealities' of the system - the usual complaints, hit points, clsses, Vancian spellcasting, and every other rock that fantasy heartbreakers dash themselves upon. And I came back through a combination of two things. First, I figured out that when you drop hit points, classes, Vancian spellcasting, and various things of that sort, it's not pure win. You gain some things but you lose some things as well. And the things you lose were more important to me as a DM than the things that are gained. a) Vancian Spellcasting: First of all, I've always had a strong tight in world explanation for how Vancian spellcasting worked that made sense to me. So the problem was less that I couldn't associate the mechanic with the setting in a potent manner, than I thought that Vancian had poor verisimilitude to magic as it appeared in typical fantasy narratives. What I discovered was that spell point systems had even less verisimilitude to magic as it appears in typical fantasy narratives. Besides compartmentalizing magic, Vancian does something very powerful - it explains why the character just doesn't do the same thing over and over again. b) Classes: I've played and admire a great many point buy systems. But point buy systems typically depend on poor system mastery and are broken by high system mastery. It just ends up turning out that some set of builds are more interesting than other ones. Point buy systems are never well balanced because they are impossible to play test. There is almost no good way to measure character ability based on points alone. They are also almost impossible to work with was a DM, because chargen is so much more complex and short hand is so much more difficult. I'm used to doing everything from scratch. Try running a fantasy homebrew from scratch in a highly granular point by system. Moreover, as with Vancian spellcasting, classes do something really interesting - they force players to be both broad and narrow. Typically if you build a class based character, it's both almost impossible to avoid the core focus of the game (say combat) but at the same time almost impossible put all your resources into that narrow focus. By contrast, if you are the GM in a point buy based system, you have no idea what the player's are going to show up with. You could end up with players that are avoiding the core focus of the intended game, or you could end up with Johnny One Tricks that put all of their points into a hammer that they intend to bash every single problem regardless of what it looks like with. c) Hit points: For a mechanic that receives so much hate, I find it interesting virtually no video game has ever dispensed with them. Dwarf Fortress is one of the few I can think of, and would be a case in point for why game designers usually don't. The great thing about hit points is it makes encounter design so much easier. It's pretty easy to work out the math of 'party can probably do about this much damage per round, killing the X in about this many rounds, and receiving about this much damage. Is that a fair fight? Is that going to be interesting?' Without hit points, it's just a really a crap shoot what will happen, and really the luck starts vastly exceeding any other component of the system. It's frustrating as a GM to design for that. Secondly, I came back because 3e D&D looked a lot like a cleaner version of the house rules I was trying to write for 1e AD&D when I gave it up as a bad cause. It was like someone custom designed a platform just for me that was very close to my needs. I understood what the designer's were thinking, because they were addressing problems that had actually come up in my play rather than theoretical problems I didn't have. I can't help but notice you wrote from a player's perspective, and I wrote from a GM's perspective. As a player, I don't really care what rules we use. As a GM, I do. UPDATE: I'll add a third take on this. As a GM, there are a lot of systems I admire. I'm not hidebound to a particular system. I've homebrewed my own for particular purposes and it looks NOTHING like D&D and NOTHING like a fantasy heartbreaker either. But I would assess that for most of those systems it takes a pretty particular group of players to make it work as a game. Many of those systems implicitly depend on player attitudes or player skills that aren't particularly common even in RPing groups. By contrast, I think I could make D&D work for just about anyone that wanted to RP, just by twisting a few dials. There aren't a lot of games like that, and those that exist (WEG Star Wars, for one) I don't have as much experience with so its a lot harder for me to wing it. [/QUOTE]
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