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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6291821" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think if you read play reports from late-70s tournaments like the G-series or ToH, you'll see that people are mostly playing in what is sometimes called "pawn" stance.That's not to say that they're just boardgaming - the shared fiction matters to resolution (eg you can set fire to things because they're described, in the fiction, as being made of wood). But there is no "inhabitation" of the PC. The PC is pretty obviously a playing piece.There seem to me to be two strands in these passages, which correspond (more-or-less) to what seem to me to be two strands of thinking about items as rewards.One strand takes the approach that the function of the reward is to improve the PC's fictional situation from the PC's point of view, and the player then enjoys that because the player is emotionally invested in the PC's fictional situation. From this point of view, magic items are no more special than compliments from the king, the awarding of land and titles, the winning of an NPC's hand in marriage, etc.But the other strand, which in my view at least is the more dominant strand in D&D history, focuses on the mechanical significance of the magic item - unlike the compliment or the wedding, which at least as typically adjudicated do not matter much to D&D action resolution, the magic items changes the scope of action resolution for the PC.As I indicated upthread, in post 73, this sort of mechanical reward for the player may have worked one way in classic Gygaxian play, but probably is less relevant for many mainstream adventure path styles. For instance, what difference would it make to an adventure path which has (say) gargoyles in the 5th level segment of the AP, to drop the AC of the gargoyles and all future monsters by 1, and to make magic items able to his gargoyles +1 to damage only (for their magically sharp edges) but grant no bonus to hit?Or to slightly drop the hit points of all those monsters too, and make the magic items simply capable of striking gargoyles but otherwise mechanically neutral?Making the PCs' numbers bigger, in circumstances where the GM and not the players is deciding what the numbers are on the monsters and NPCs, seems like a potentially illusory reward (which I think was part of  [MENTION=27160]Balesir[/MENTION]'s point in post 85).Your (a) through (c) have implications:(a) without the reward, the game won't get better (so we are prepared to play a game not as good as one we can conceive of, if the players don't somehow earn the rewards for their PCs);(b) without the reward, the game will involve frustrating slogs (ditto the above brackets);(c) the reward is a purely "story" reward like a compliment from the king, which I think is not the general trajectory of D&D history.Gygaxian play is prepared to embrace the implications of (a) and (c): the game is competitive, and for some players the experience will be more sloggy and not as good as we can conceive of, compared to other players. In that respect playing D&D is no different from any other sort of competitive game.But how many contemporary D&D tables play in that sort of style, embracing all the features of play group (large and mutable), GM work (designing and running a mega-dungeon), PC immersion (potentially quite low as turnover is quite high), story (perhaps none of any consequence - ToH is much closer to a crossword puzzle than a novel in its literary merits), etc that are required to make it work?I don't think the answer is "none", but nor do I think the answer is "most" or even probably "lots".Without wanting to be disrespectful, I think that this comment slightly misses the point. Games can be better or worse designed for certain purposes. Good game designers should think about those things - you can see, in 4e for instance, the attempt of good designers to maintain classic D&D tropes (like magic items as rewards for players) while accommodating them to changes in playstyle that mean their Gygaxian function is no longer relevant. (They also tried to avoid adventure path style too - wishlists are part of that, for instance, putting the choice back into the players' hands but at the metagame level rather than via Gygaxian mega-dungeon sandboxing.)And even Gygax saw some of these issues in his gaming - part of the reason a Monty Haul game is a "crashing bore" is because the apparent rewards aren't really rewards for the players, because they undermine the playability of the game. He didn't think it made a difference that the character/I] really would enjoy being the most powerful being in the universe.</blockquote>

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