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Mearls On D&D's Design Premises/Goals
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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7759114" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>What techniques has a champion fighter mastered? Where does the narrative of the class tell me that? I think you're just reading it straight of the class-build rules.</p><p></p><p>I'm not sure how that contradicts what I'm saying (or either of the things I said).</p><p></p><p>For a class system to work, the archetypes really need to be pretty strongly drawn. AD&D mostly does this, though thief and assassin and MU and illusionist are counterexamples. But the former are differentiated mostly by their numbers; and the latter mostly by their spell lists, which are somewhat arbitrary in any event. But mechanical variations that fill the same archetypal space (like champion and battlemaster) prompt the question, why can one do it but the other not?</p><p></p><p>As to "doing anything you want to", I think that's one of the least helpful things that people can say in trying to explain what RPGs are - apart from anything else, as you point out, it's obviously not true of the best-known and most widely played RPG. Yet it's a frequently-repeated mantra.</p><p></p><p>The only way we know that that is a "complex action" is because of the mechanics. Strictly from a fiction point of view, there's nothing especially complex about knocking someone prone and hurting them in the process. It seems like something that eg a mace might be pretty handy for, or maybe - with a different fighting style - a quarterstaff. The "complexity" comes from the fact that D&D treats status infliction and hit point attrition as distinct mechanical processes.</p><p></p><p>I'm not complaining. I'm observing. This feature of a system pretty strongly contradicts the idea that it is "naturalistic" or "free flowing" or not mechanically complex. You can't really know what your PC can or can't do until you know the full spectrum of class features.</p><p></p><p>Which in D&D includes spells: for instance, we can't know how to adjudicate an attempt by a tough fighter to scare an opponent witless without thinking about how it balances with the limited-resource Cause Fear spell.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 7759114, member: 42582"] What techniques has a champion fighter mastered? Where does the narrative of the class tell me that? I think you're just reading it straight of the class-build rules. I'm not sure how that contradicts what I'm saying (or either of the things I said). For a class system to work, the archetypes really need to be pretty strongly drawn. AD&D mostly does this, though thief and assassin and MU and illusionist are counterexamples. But the former are differentiated mostly by their numbers; and the latter mostly by their spell lists, which are somewhat arbitrary in any event. But mechanical variations that fill the same archetypal space (like champion and battlemaster) prompt the question, why can one do it but the other not? As to "doing anything you want to", I think that's one of the least helpful things that people can say in trying to explain what RPGs are - apart from anything else, as you point out, it's obviously not true of the best-known and most widely played RPG. Yet it's a frequently-repeated mantra. The only way we know that that is a "complex action" is because of the mechanics. Strictly from a fiction point of view, there's nothing especially complex about knocking someone prone and hurting them in the process. It seems like something that eg a mace might be pretty handy for, or maybe - with a different fighting style - a quarterstaff. The "complexity" comes from the fact that D&D treats status infliction and hit point attrition as distinct mechanical processes. I'm not complaining. I'm observing. This feature of a system pretty strongly contradicts the idea that it is "naturalistic" or "free flowing" or not mechanically complex. You can't really know what your PC can or can't do until you know the full spectrum of class features. Which in D&D includes spells: for instance, we can't know how to adjudicate an attempt by a tough fighter to scare an opponent witless without thinking about how it balances with the limited-resource Cause Fear spell. [/QUOTE]
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