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Message: <blockquote data-quote="molonel" data-source="post: 3504645" data-attributes="member: 10412">Are you aware of how ironic it is when you accuse me of insecurity when your style of gaming cannot even withstand the rather tame, mild humor of a d20 Invalid campaign? I've been in this game a long, long time, and I've also seen fashions and gamers come and go. But one thing has remained constant: at it's red beating heart, D&D is a power fantasy. It's where people go to swing big swords and cast big spells. Sure, there have always been DMs willing to run a Crawl through the Lovely Filth campaign (tm) where characters are afraid of dying from tetanus from a raw splinter. Or they spend the entire campaign screaming "Run away! Run away!" with echoes of Monty Python. But those games have always been in the minority.Why? Because most people do not play RPGs in order to suck. I think most of us have more than ample experience playing Joe Average in our daily lives. We generally go to D&D, or White Wolf, or whatever in order to be something else.If you and your players are happy with your games, then good on you. Enjoy.They are plenty of non-level based game systems. GURPS and any of White Wolf's games come to mind, and there are plenty of others.Of course I've played Call of Cthulhu. I'm using material from the d20 version of CoC in my two d20 Modern games right now, and I several of the old Chaosium books on my shelf as reference and background, as well as links to several Delta Green sites that I use regularly to get the juices flowing. It's a good game.But characters in CoC are as disposable as toilet paper. They WILL go mad, or die. It's a nice break, sometimes, but it can very quickly grow just as disatisfying when your interesting story arc ends with your character scratching out his eyeballs for opening the wrong book. Again. There is an upside and a downside to every playing style. All of the games I'm running right now are low-magic, and I just had a thread not too long ago about incorporating the old MERP/Rolemaster crit charts into a d20 Modern game precisely because I'm running grittier games. You seem to assume that since I can make fun of low magic, gritty games that I must therefore lack experience with them. I don't. But having played in them, and run them, I know that they ALSO have downsides, pitfalls and problems. That's why I can say with confidence that they are often romanticized, and usually by the DM/GMs who run them, rather than their players. I'm not dismissing your gaming style out of hand. In fact, I'm probably at least as familiar with it as you are. And being intimiately familiar with it, I also know how to make fun of it. Because sometimes it takes itself a little too seriously.</blockquote>

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