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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6080501" data-attributes="member: 42582">I really like Moldvay's GM advice, and I'm glad you've called it out. Page-for-page I think it's better than the 4e DMG.What I found, though, was I could never quite seem to get Moldvay's advice to fit his mechanics, precisely because of this:In other words, Moldvay's D&D, and his discussion of scenario design, made me want to run a non-classic-dungeoncrawl game - but it took the original Oriental Adventures to actually give me the material to really do that for the first time.I'm not sure you've really grasped what   [MENTION=205]TwoSix[/MENTION] wants out of RPGs. There was nothing in there about videogames, or that struck me as "videogamey".I mean, looking at the list:Use my powers. Interact with interesting NPCs. Fight, not as a last resort, but because there are bad guys that need whupping, and I'm the biggest ass-whupper around. Avoid caution, because my character can handle almost anything I throw at him short of pure suicide. Travel the planes, not because I got the right spell, but because the party managed to complete the ritual at the altar of the fallen temple that opened a passageway to Hell.Where's the videogame? What I see there first and foremost is immediacy -  in the situation that the GM is describing things are happening to my PC now. There's no time to faff around with encumbrance, or planning spell books - I have to act, and because the NPCs are interesting, and because a passageway to Hell has just opened, and because I'm the biggest ass-whupper around, when I act it will matter. Stuff will happen.At least for me, the emotional experience of playing a spell-stocktake game is something like the emotional experience of doing a crossword, or winning at Connect-4. It's puzzle-solving. I think TwoSix is looking for a more visceral experience, one that is closer, in play, to reading REH's Conan (minus the virulent racism, I guess) or to watching John Boorman's Excalibur. It's about players and GM collaborating to create a drama rather than a spreadsheet.As for death or glory - even in my rather staid academic life I feel I've had moments of glory, though I was never in danger of dying. A game can have high stakes, stupefyingly intense stakes, without having to put the PCs' lives on the line in any mechanical sense.</blockquote>

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