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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4565419" data-attributes="member: 2067">Well, that's something of a 4e mantra: Miss an opportunity now to "get it right!" later. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />It kind of boils down to D&D and "gothic horror" being very different in terms of what each one teaches. Games teach you things. D&D 4e as it exists now teaches you to crunch numbers to kill things and take their stuff. That's satisfying and fun and can be woven into a fun story, too. "Gothic Horror" isn't about that, though. That's not what you do, in Ravenloft. In Ravenloft, you save innocents. You defend purity. You struggle with inner and outer demons. You see horrible things happen to everyone you love and you soldier on to stop it from happening to others. Heroism is re-defined: you're not slaying monsters, you're overcoming evil. That would be rewarding with different mechanics, different rewards, different heroic archetypes, than D&D is built to contain. That's why a more generic and flexible system (something like d20 Modern or T20) might be better for it: it doesn't have the same expectations that D&D 4e has, so you can put your own expectations into it a little bit easier.D&D (and 4e especially) is about action and motion, power and prestige, luck, progress, and physical rewards.Gothic Horror is more about corruption, innocence, brooding evil, flawed heroes, ideas gone too far, old customs haunting the modern day, moral fortitude, endurance, and deeply personal success (family members, loved ones) at great personal price (...usually the same things). Remember that the protagonists of Gothic Horror are usually villains, and they aren't overcome by courageous heroes as much as they are overcome by their own flaws. Like in any horror movie, there are only two classes of good guys: the lucky and the victims. To do Ravenloft "right," I'd say you'd need to create a game that evokes all of those feelings in the very structure of the mechanics itself. This runs right aground on some of the ideas of D&D, and makes it hard for them to be compatible. You could do Ravenloft and compromise on some of those aspects to make room for D&D, but you run the risk of making a tepid soup that doesn't really do either aspect right except in the hands of a strong DM with a strong sense of purpose and atmosphere. I think 2e RL (and 3e) suffered a bit from this. It was good with a good DM, but without a good DM, a lot of the point of it was lost. Or you could do D&D and just add Barovia in as a "dungeon of the moth" that your group can play through October. Just as characters could probably come from Winterhaven or Freeport or the Free City of Greyhawk, they could come from Barovia, too, but they're going to fit the model of a D&D hero, not a gothic horror hero. I'd rather see the two extremes than see the middle ground, because the middle ground is very shaky, always working at cross-purposes to itself, and results in some heavy dissonance when one person brings in his dragonborn barbarian who worships the god of slaughter and another person brings in her Mina Harker-esque innocent townsgirl who only took levels in "rogue" because she needed some sort of class in order to play in this week's zombie invasion adventure. But, again, this is all theory-level speculation. The Coasties might have a trick or two up their sleeve with this one. I kind of hope they can prove my speculation wrong. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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