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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="LurkAway" data-source="post: 5735111" data-attributes="member: 6685059">Pre-4E, if the curse rule did exist for whatever reason, it might be  stated something like 'when [some condition], the afflicted PC attacks  anyone in sight' and it would then be up to the player to roleplay that directive, along with the pros and cons of the obvious  conflict of interest (a good reason for the rule to introduced with  caution).Pre-4E, I'd guess that curse rule would not have existed in the 1st place. What is the justification for its existence, other than to add a new  tactical element to combat, which didn't have the same emphasis before 4E. Assuming that a lot of (but not all) of pre-4E game design was fiction-first, I'm not aware of any werewolf sources that have werewolves in  human form lashing out in berserk mode against everyone. If anything, the very essence of the werewolf story was the wolf that hides in sheep's clothing until the fur hits the fan on the full moon.(I only bring this up for comparison purposes, to show what I think are different perspectives on adapting fiction to RPG and that the 4E way is I think the more metagame-y way which can make fictional positioning more difficult).The 4E solution is to codify 'attack anyone in sight' with a single simple rule. But since you've eliminated the nuance and complexity and context of a more freeform roleplaying solution, I think it treats the PC like a videogame character. It devolves into a farce if/when the players treat the 'abstraction' as an absolute automaton behavior that can be observed and predicted, diminishing the full spectrum of supposed berserkness into a manageable robotic quirk.Yes, it is an optional rule. But it bothers me as heck that it was included at all, even as an optional rule, because I feel like roleplaying 'out of bounds' in 4E with such rules is to be always be 'fighting' the system, trying to bend it into something it's not, tweaking and ignoring and compensating for rules that were never intended to be designed in the first place for sandbox=style 'out of bounds' roleplaying.Monte's article may not appeal to you because you enjoy the fictional space created within the structure of the current rules. But that's not what his article is about, and although the werewolf curse may be somewhat tangential, the design conventions behind it illustrates for me why some 4E rules make it such an exertion to get "out of bounds".I don't think that Monte was criticizing 4E exclusively by any means, but I don't think that 4E escapes his criticism either using only page 42.</blockquote>

Verification