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New Legends & Lore: Player vs. Character
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<blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 5669711" data-attributes="member: 7006"><p>I suspect part of the reason to move towards Skills in 3E in the first place was because player action had evolved to the point where "good playing" had turned into long, drawn-out, and monotonous checklists of actions that every character had to do with every step forward in a dungeon.</p><p></p><p>When the game was still new back in the 70s... having trapdoors open up underneath the PCs feet, or hearing monsters on the other side of a closed door were all novelties. They were unexpected and exciting. Over the years though, as those tropes became more well-known and players started taking actions to eliminate those threats as a matter of course... DMs started inventing even more obscure methods to try and surprise PCs, even if they resulted in many times illogical locations for traps and whatnot.</p><p></p><p>And then as PCs evolved again to begin suspecting even those things... we reached a point upon the approach to 3E where every single character carried 10' poles to tap every single square in every single room, every object or furniture piece was checked for traps and secret compartments, every door was first checked for traps, then listened at for sound, then the lock was picked etc. etc. etc. The PCs became so used to trying to second-guess every surprise a DM threw at them, that every single room became a two hour ordeal just to make sure the DM wasn't hiding something to screw with them. The meta-game of D&D overtook the game.</p><p></p><p>That all got changed with 3E when they instituted Skills... so that now the players could just walk into a room, make a Search check, and be DONE with it. It saved lots and lots of time, and for the most part removed the meta-game from the equation. It was a giant leap forward in speeding up 'dungeon delving'. But as Mearls comments... the only downside is that we'd lost a little bit of that "explain what you're doing" aspect of the game as part of <em>the actual rules</em>.</p><p></p><p>Of course... many of us DMs still make our players do this kind of thing occasionally <em>anyway</em> (Perception check rules be damned) because its an easy and quite often fun house-ruled variant to keep our players guessing... but with so many players getting so hung up on Ruled As Written, you really technically "can't" do it. As a result... Mearls is probably thinking about ways to have the rules eventually allow us to do both so to give options to both types of player.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="DEFCON 1, post: 5669711, member: 7006"] I suspect part of the reason to move towards Skills in 3E in the first place was because player action had evolved to the point where "good playing" had turned into long, drawn-out, and monotonous checklists of actions that every character had to do with every step forward in a dungeon. When the game was still new back in the 70s... having trapdoors open up underneath the PCs feet, or hearing monsters on the other side of a closed door were all novelties. They were unexpected and exciting. Over the years though, as those tropes became more well-known and players started taking actions to eliminate those threats as a matter of course... DMs started inventing even more obscure methods to try and surprise PCs, even if they resulted in many times illogical locations for traps and whatnot. And then as PCs evolved again to begin suspecting even those things... we reached a point upon the approach to 3E where every single character carried 10' poles to tap every single square in every single room, every object or furniture piece was checked for traps and secret compartments, every door was first checked for traps, then listened at for sound, then the lock was picked etc. etc. etc. The PCs became so used to trying to second-guess every surprise a DM threw at them, that every single room became a two hour ordeal just to make sure the DM wasn't hiding something to screw with them. The meta-game of D&D overtook the game. That all got changed with 3E when they instituted Skills... so that now the players could just walk into a room, make a Search check, and be DONE with it. It saved lots and lots of time, and for the most part removed the meta-game from the equation. It was a giant leap forward in speeding up 'dungeon delving'. But as Mearls comments... the only downside is that we'd lost a little bit of that "explain what you're doing" aspect of the game as part of [I]the actual rules[/I]. Of course... many of us DMs still make our players do this kind of thing occasionally [I]anyway[/I] (Perception check rules be damned) because its an easy and quite often fun house-ruled variant to keep our players guessing... but with so many players getting so hung up on Ruled As Written, you really technically "can't" do it. As a result... Mearls is probably thinking about ways to have the rules eventually allow us to do both so to give options to both types of player. [/QUOTE]
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