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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 6099979" data-attributes="member: 6696971">I'm not going to get into semantic games.  When someone uses the term "presuppose" when referring to "orthodoxy" they aren't qualifying anything.  They're merely saying orthodoxy exists and the default assumptions of the ecosystem around it behave in accordance.  As they do.  In any facet of life.  I'm not going to get into some existential debate and deconstruct orthodoxies and try to unpack if there is meaning there or if we're just living in an absurd world of orthodoxy figments.  What has changed is no you are in fact not playing D&D anymore. Its not Badwrongfun.  I'm sure its great.  But the fact remains you are now playing Shopkeepers and Artisans, specifically Celebrim's Shopkeepers and Artisans.  There are no default assumed rules that mechanically incentivize playing Shopkeepers and Artisans.  You can come up DM forced, SWAG <a href="http://www.wizards.com/dnd/DnD_DMG_XPFinal.asp" target="_blank">ad hoc variants</a> in AD&D 2e and 3.x, but that is explicitly Celebrim's house rules and Celebrim's house rules to adjudicate Shopkeepers and Artisans on their track to level 20 where they parlay their efforts toward Merchants and Aristocracy.  Story, Roleplaying and Noncombat encounter awards in AD&D 2e and 3.x are not important enough to have legitimate, designed XP systems and mechanical interfaces to facilitate them.  They are not default.  They are not orthodoxy.  And professions yield no XP either.  They offer that you can make them up and hand wave some truly vapid guidance.  But they're quiet neutral, at best, on those things (lest they would produce systems for them and advocate for those systems).  We've had default XP as treasure accrued, monsters/traps/hazards defeated and 4e has a mechanical system for XP for story awards and non-combat encounters.The codified mechanical resolution systems as the means to deal with challenges and the incentive system to progress reveal the base assumptions of the game; accrue treasure, kill monsters, survive in the most fundamental sense of D&D.  That doesn't mean that as a GM you actively want to kill your players.  And it doesn't mean that you have the authority to work outside of the resolution systems and arbitrarily say "you are dead" (unless you don't want players for very long).  It means "here are the mechanical parts of the game to resolve tasks/conflict...fill in your color as you wish...but these are binding and tell you what the game part of the game is about."  If D&D was meant to be mechanically drifted as Shopkeepers and Artisans (by rule/default assumption...if you want to bend it to your own will...have at it), then there would be legitimate, codified resolution systems for it and accompanying codified XP.I can try to break out a baseball game in my Sunday morning basketball but in no way does the basketball ruleset assist me in that nor is the greater culture unflinching when I attempt to do so.</blockquote>

Verification