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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6250133" data-attributes="member: 42582">I agree with this. Until I read the post I am quoting just below this sentence, I didn't even know what "the players serving the rules" was meant to mean!I can't really comment on 3E as I didn't play enough of it. I think AD&D makes a lot of assumptions too, though. I tried to GM in accordance with them, and found (i) that I wasn't very good at it, and (ii) that my players didn't really seem interested in the resulting game. So I changed my GMing and changed the rules to help with that (eg I dropped mechanical alignment, which is a fairly big part of AD&D as written; and I abandoned all the advice about building dungeons, framing scenes and adjudicating action resolution so as to reward "skilled play").But I don't really find it helpful to say that "using the rules and not enjoying the experience" is "serving the rules". I wasn't serving Gygax's rules. I was just discovering that I didn't like the game they led to, and so I took what I wanted from his rulebooks, plus from various magazine articles, and ran a game that I did enjoy.I read the Mearls column before reading any of the posts on the thread other than the OP. And I had the same response to that sentence as Sage Genesis - it struck me as buying into a widely-known line of criticism of 4e, namely, that it subordinates the fiction to the rules. Rightly or wrongly, I didn't feel embraced. If Mearls had just said "D&D works best when the action flows and the rules serve the gaming group" then I do not think I would have had the same reaction: for that is obviously true, and I guess important for a commercial publisher to keep in mind (ie design what your likely market wants to buy) even if tending somewhat towards the banal.I listened to it too (from around 29 minutes to 32 minutes) and agree with you. (And with Sage Genesis, as far as interpreting what they are talking about is concerned.)The discussion of William Wallace is not about the movie Braveheart - except for their reference to mooning the English and the "cut" scene, which are jocular asides. Whoever is speaking (I don't know the voices) is making the point that a warlord, even if s/he inspires a soldier to fight on, doesn't heal because the hand doesn't grow back or get re-attached. And the discussion of healing leading up to the Braveheart example characterises warlord healing in terms of being a field medic.In other words, they seem to be completely discounting non-magical inspirational healing.I also think that Sage Genesis is correct to note that sleeping doesn't make hands grow back or re-attach either, and hence that - if the hit point/healing model were to be consistent - the limits on inspiration healing should be set by reference to what sleep can achieve rather than by reference to what surgery and miracles can achieve. I am not really expecting D&Dnext to have a consistent hit point/healing model, however. It seems to be closer to pre-4e in both its "natural" healing and magical healing mechanics.</blockquote>

Verification