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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Goumindong" data-source="post: 4385275" data-attributes="member: 70874">1. I was not aware that house cats were burning walls of fire and ice and pure necrotic energy conjured from the very depths of hell and heights of heaven and the deep inner reserve of personal arcane energy by heroes on a quest to save the world. And/or Lava/pits/etc that would kill them anyway. My bad.  2. No you cannot. See the rules are a method of conflict resolution between the players and the DM. The players naturally want their attacks to hit and the DM usually wants them to miss. So instead of everyone leaving the table in a hissy fit because nothing gets resolved, you roll dice to see what is resolved. This mechanic is the core mechanic of all role playing games. You are playing a role and that role has limitations. In order to determine where those are and whether or not you suceed in your actions a random number generator is compared with bonuses against a target number. DM's do not have arguments with themselves. Anything that is not in conflict with the PC's is there at the behest of the DM to do the DM's bidding so that the players can better roleplay. Its not a simulationist system, its never been a simulationist system, it will never be a simulationist system. Its a system that governs player/DM interaction not a system that covers DM/DM interaction.    There is a level of fudge in all systems. The very low level NPCs that a player had were more or less useless. The level -3 wizard they had tagging along was more or less really awesome.    A torchbearer isn't a companion. He is played by the DM, he dies when the DM says he dies, he is an entity in the game world for you to interact with. He is not a pet, companion, or cohort. He is exactly as strong and useful as is thematically apropriate for the DM because he is an NPC. 1. Its not marketing, its an understanding haven been gleaned from studying games about what happens when there are wide divergences in the amount of actions players take. E.G. Take every turn based AP based game ever(Arcanum, SPECIAL, etc etc). Unless there are very very very tight controls on how many APs characters get then the single best attribute in any game was the attribute that increased the number of AP you had to go around. Ditto exception based design, except that instead of worrying about balance its worrying about people understanding it. If the game is nothing but exceptions with no core rule then no one will understand what is going on. No one will be able to make rational decisions about play, meta play will be more or less impossible. Now you aren't playing a game anymore(which is defined by those choices), you're guessing a game. There is a reason that nearly every game pays close attention to exceptions and economy of actions. Its because its good game design. Pets/Cohorts/Companions are broken if they are not implemented as powers and require action on the part of the player to use each round. This is why nearly all the current summoning powers require sustaining, anything that makes more attacks requires another standard action, anything that moves requires a move action. Its just that simple, you do not break the economy of actions and get away with it. Yes it is. The companion would have to be as valuable as any other class ability, power, or feat. Which is to say not very useful at all. Most games balance companions laughibly. 3.5 is the perfect example. An companion at the begining of the game was terribly strong. An animal companion at the end of the game was more or less useless(iirc). A familiar was a liability nearly the entire game. A cohort was completely and utterly broken. There was no reasonable middle ground and there really never is in a multi-player game. I suppose the one exception to that would be Diablo II and other action RPGs. But they play significantly differently are balanced as powers and their other powers are severely scaled back. There is no way to do something like that in a turn based game, especially one like DnD.</blockquote>

Verification