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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5619392" data-attributes="member: 54877">This is where you hit up against the multiple reasons why Dailies are in the game, and thus to answer that, you have to consider all of those reasons. (I might miss some.) Pemerton already aluded several times to narrative pacing.  Flatly, the whole question of people being comfortable with the relation between the mechanic and the in-game reality is ignored here, with the goal of giving the player a way to impose drama at times of his or her choosing.  So there is a sense in which--even if you can stay in actor stance and rationalize a given power--you aren't using them to their full potential unless you deliberately go into author or director stance.   But it doesn't stop there.  From a simple handling time perspective, Dailies also serve the purpose of very clearly and sharply handing out this narrative (and gamist) power, in a simple package.  This is, in fact, exactly a big reason that Vancian magic was adopted in the first place, per earlier quote by Gygax.   Then there is the balance and aesthetic issue (it is both) of giving martial characters something impressive to do at high levels.  Dailies are a way that this can be done. It it true that from any single perspective, a game could produce simulate the things done by fighter dailies using some other mechanics.  Many games have.  But when you look at it from a wider perspective, not so much.  Name me the options for so simulating, while allowing or even pushing the fighter's player to take temporarily control of the narrative and exert resources to win an encounter, with simple handling time for the player, and giving the fighter the opportunity to exert some of the aesthetic choices from famous fighter characters in fantasy, while neither subordinating the fighter to other characters or overwhelming them either.  And feel free to include other parts of "Dailies" that I have probably overlooked.  Oh, and whatever you list, it has to work for a version of D&D. That's a tall order.  It is such a tall order, that some people might feel that 4E was an ambitious failure, in that it got a little too far from "a version of D&D," and there wasn't a way to meet all that.  However, that is a separate criticism, and really ought to be made upfront, if that is the tack someone wants to take.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

Verification