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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6097467" data-attributes="member: 82106">Sure, OTOH what is "mundane"? It feels to me like this concept gets wielded like a hatchet to chop away at anything that isn't someone's favorite edition's way of doing things. I don't at all (seriously) mean to be critical. I consider your way of playing as valid as any, and I'd probably have fun playing with you (I'm really pretty adaptable that way, the point is to have fun, not worry about the details, friends, table, dice, etc). OTOH it is like there is a whole subset of people that seem to almost define their tastes and opinions by what is opposite to 4e's conventions and assumptions. I guess for every opinion/preference there will be someone on the opposite side of it, and someone on the opposite side of them ALL (I think we do agree about a few things). IMHO nothing about anything in D&D has EVER been mundane. Maybe a level 1-3 fighter in pre-3e editions was (depending on race and such) more-or-less roughly similar to a real guy, but not THAT much. Even in OD&D 4th level sure broke that wall, when you could just start walking away from arrows through the gut and 20' falls onto hard stone and things. So, sure, gravity works, basic physics works, mostly if you explain something that isn't overtly magical you can kind of explain it roughly in real-world terms, but I am not sure I understand how that doesn't apply to 4e as well as 1e. OK, I can only use my Brute Strike power once a day, but its a plot coupon. My character CAN AND WILL hit things really hard with his sword many times in a day. He can even try to pull off something like Brute Strike any old time with a page 42 stunt. I think, again, there are perfectly valid differences in taste here, you don't like plot coupons, but I don't think plot coupons have to violate causality or stop the game from following 'mundane' genre conventions (whatever those are in D&D). So I guess I am a bit puzzled as to why the discussion devolved down to being about fantasy realism. IMHO this is a pretty easy dial to tweak, one of the easiest. The DM vs player narrative control agenda differences are larger, and that's in my mind where we can't easily meet on a game design. I think it would be POSSIBLE to share some degree of game mechanics between our styles of play, but I probably want to play a whole different style of adventure, in a different type of setting, etc. It seems like the overlap is small enough that maybe it really just isn't worth the pain and agony to try to say "we're playing the same game", when in fact in any realistic sense we won't be, even if we share a very few basic rules.IMHO WotC would be better off making a game focused on something like your agenda, calling it something evocative of that, and simply providing support for 4e and/or some sort of 4.5 update for the rest of us. The people in the middle ground will gravitate to whichever system is convenient or closer to what they want and each one can have some options to allow it to cover more ground. There can still be a nugget of commonality between the two, and you could probably port/share some sorts of rules (something like domain management is pretty abstract, or mass combat). You wouldn't have to even pretend though that items, spells, feats, etc were cross-compatible.</blockquote>

Verification