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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="mearls" data-source="post: 3171760" data-attributes="member: 697">First off, the ideas on my LJ have nothing to do with how we develop D&D. This was purely something I thought of while cleaning my apartment on Sunday afternoon while listening to the Seahawks game.The primary thrust of the idea is the idea that, by adding more flexibility to the system, you might encourage people to become more creative in play. Skills are by no means gone. Instead, you'd only have skills that require training.Expressing mastery of something that is currently a skill, like Climb or Jump, would fall to other parts of the system. You might have feats and rules like this:Jumping: Characters can make standing jumps with a distance equal to 1/4 their speed, and running jumps with a distance equal to half their speed.Jump Feat: You jump twice as far as normal.There's an interesting side effect of the skill rules for any game. A character who is good at the skill can use it and gain its benefits. On the opposite end of things, a character who is *bad* at the skill can't use it or doesn't see it as a viable option.The final paragraph in that post is the most important section. Obviously, these rules wouldn't work for a convention game, but they can work fine (and perhaps better than any rigidly defined system) for a group that gets along well.It's funny that a few people commented on IH. Iron Heroes was an important design for me. There's a famous quote that I'm about to mangle, but it goes something like, "Every artist needs someone in position to hit him over the head when he's done with his work, to prevent him from screwing it up."There are some things that you simply cannot define with rules, and I think the creative input that players and DMs can have on a game fall into that category. You can build a framework through which people express their creativity, but that framework cannot define their creativity.</blockquote>

Verification