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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lord Shark" data-source="post: 8247774" data-attributes="member: 6689169">These days, I find it less interesting to play a character who's a platform for magic items. Yeah, it's cool to have a magic sword that can strike someone's head off ... but only if you get very lucky with the dice, and anyone with even a single level of fighter can pick up the same sword and do the same thing.  (Also, my preference is for fewer magic items anyway -- it's purely an aesthetic preference, but I find games where the fighter is walking around in magic armor with a magic shield, a magic sword, a magic helmet, a magic cloak, magic boots, etc., to feel kind of silly.) I'd rather play the swordsman who can do amazing things no one else can do, even if he's only using a rusty old blade he picked off the blacksmith's trash pile. And for me, the benefit of codified abilities are that they let players do cool stuff without having to guess at their odds of success, or jump through hoops set by the DM. Too many DMs, and I include myself in this, respond to players trying to do unusual actions by piling on penalties, extra rolls, and negative consequences because it feels more "balanced" that way. ("You want to spin around and hit everyone surrounding you? Uh, okay, -4 to hit on all attacks and if you miss any of them, you trip over your own feet and fall down.") This quickly gets to the point where the player realizes that the most sensible option is to say "I swing at him" every turn. In 4E, I had a polearm-wielding monk who could  jump in the middle of a crowd of enemies and knock them all flying with a single mighty swing, using just one power. That's something that's never going to happen in an old school game, unless I were to somehow get my hands on a polearm of knocking enemies flying with a single mighty swing +2. (And just to be on topic: not all old players are grognards! I've been playing since 1979 and I quite prefer newer games, thanks.)</blockquote>

Verification