Geron Raveneye
Explorer
Remathilis said:
Uhm...not to be snarky or anything...but 4E is all about making people change how they play D&D, and so far nobody chalked that up to a failure if the rule..hard to do since they aren't in print yet.
(Friendly tease 
).The thing is, for some reason the "basic assumption" that was built into pretty much every edition of D&D, namely that of gathering information about the locale you're going to invade along with the basic opposition seems to get lost frequently. Every edition I've played featured stuff like rumor lists (with false and true rumors), opportunities for the players to gather information about some special feature of the adventure or a special monster in the area, and since 3E they often included DCs for Bard's Knowledge about the topic at hand. The challenge might be to intimidate the goblins enough to make them tell the truth, or bribe them enough to make it worth their while (Come on, it's not that hard to promise them 1 gp first, and if they don't talk, offer them 9 silver pieces and argue that it is a lot more
). And no, I won't accept goblin warriors who DON'T know what is guarding their most treasured posessions and demads trubute for it as part of the same tribe. If we're talking the goblin cook here, or the nurse...fine. But not the warriors of the tribe. That sounds too far-fetched to me...or like a DM who WANTS to screw over his group even though they are trying to scope out the opposition."Get information about the adventure" is not a specific answer to a rules-problem with save-or-die effects...it is a general advice given to nearly everybody who plays D&D....equally, every DM who read the advice in the DMG gets told to leave those bits and pieces of information for the adventurers to find, at least when they try to. I'm simply applying this advice equally to save-or-die as to dragons, liches, special items, local nobility and weird events of the past. And there generally are multiple ways for a DM to bring some information into play, from a very passive level to very active information sources that seek out the characters to sell them info.
If some people play D&D as "screw rumors, information and all that talking, lets simply rush into the dungeon blindly and see how far we can kill our way through" (both sides...players AND DMs), that's not a "problem" with the rules, that is a group overemphasizing the "bash the door in" philosophy of D&D in their playstyle. Sure, as long as they have fun, that's great...but if some element of the game constantly stumps them then maybe, just maybe, it's not a problem of the rules but of how they are approached. That can be solved by either adapting the playstyle, or by houseruling out the element that stumps them (in this context here it would mean no save-or-die effects). But at the same time, taking that element out of the whole game for everybody simply takes away one option from those who are not stumped by it and actually can have fun with it.
Disclaimer: Note that I'm not generalizing this kind of playstyle as the one everybody who is against save-or-die effects favours, and neither am I saying that they all have a problem with them because they don't know how to handle them so they don't give them a problem. The above description is a limited example that is meant as a reply to Remathilis' setup only, and not aimed at the general player populace.
