Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9554875" data-attributes="member: 6790260">It's not a matter of unused material. It's a matter of what results are (IMO extremely) likely to pop out by accident when you design without any consideration for what the experience of facing off against something will feel like. A conflict or two where the experience is sacrificed in the name of naturalism is fine. A campaign built out of them is not. I would much, much, much rather have something that specifically sets out to produce a string of "good" (well-crafted) experiences, even if it must make minor (I stress, minor) sacrifices to naturalism in the crafting of those experiences, than something which ensures that every single experience is as maximally natural as possible even if that harms the experiences in the doing.I understand that, for you, naturalism is an extremely high priority in order to have an experience you can "enjoy" (noting that that "enjoyment" can include frustration or grief or whatever other emotions, it doesn't have to be 100% happy happy joy joy all the time). Believe it or not, despite my arguments here and elsewhere, I really do also need a fair amount of naturalism, setting cohesion, and consistent logic in order to enjoy the experiences that make up a game. (That "consistent logic" thing is actually one part of why I am so antagonistic to fudging!) My problem is, and has always been, I have seen what an obsessive dedication to naturalism-above-all does to games, to whole game systems. I have seen how it pretzels the player experience in the process of going where it goes. The experience-of-play becomes mired in constant checking and re-checking of situational modifiers, poring over page after page of complicated simulation-engine details, spending half an hour just determining whether the wording of a particular rules-element actually applies or not, etc.I'm here to play a game. I need that game to actually be fun to play in and of itself. Once I have a game that is fun to play in and of itself, I can then work with and around the rules of that game to craft an exciting, engaging, self-consistent, and yes, naturalistic experience. I find that it is actually quite easy to do this in most cases, and even when it is hard, it is usually only an issue of being overly literal with terms (like "prone", the bugaboo of many an edition-war argument) or demanding that everything be as concrete as possible when abstraction is the much more appropriate approach. I get that this means you and I don't necessarily get the same value out of a given set of rules, but in my experience, having played the games I have and having designed a fair amount of reasonably-good homebrew stuff over the years, I will continue to insist: A game that has been successfully designed to be a great and exciting experience, even if naturalism was not a primary concern during the design, will almost always be superior to a game that made ferdamsher that it was as naturalistic as possible and only then began to concern itself with whether it's actually fun to play it.</blockquote>

Verification