NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9717196" data-attributes="member: 4937">Yep.  I hear you.  I have seen this sort of thing before too.  "Stealth": An entire party casts invisibility on everyone and then claims it can move in perfect silence for hours with drawn bladed weapons while maintaining perfect distance and no hilarity ensuing.  "Negotiation": "I roll to seduce the dragon"  The thing is, I do understand that in 1e AD&D the initiative roll is the later stage of combat, but that's an example of why 1e AD&D is unhealthy, not an example of why it is healthy.  When you understand that the dungeon in Glacier Rift of the Ice Giant Jarl is designed to nerf the giants to give the PCs a chance, then we can talk about stealth and negotiation profitably.My college group came in 2nd out of several score participating groups in a DragonCon tournament scenario.  My current group is a bunch of wargamers.  But whatever, clearly they are tactically inept.Let me be specific then.  It is a strawman to suggest that if you have metacurrencies you can't lose.  All metacurrencies tend to be both ablative and limited, in that they can be eroded and there is a certain level of randomness that produces a result higher than they can mitigate against.  Hit points are very much a case in point.  They do reduce lethal blows to mere scratches in the narrative, but they can be expended quickly by reckless play or else absolutely overwhelmed by certain heavy blows.  Metacurrencies that protect against attacks that bypass hit points are really no different, in that if you expend your currency too fast you'll be unsafe when you really need it, and even with them you can still roll "two ones in a row" or some other low roll.  Indeed, "two fives or less in a row" is a really common situation that should be occurring all the time.Not sure how this is a rebuttal.So this one is particularly interesting because it says a lot about human narrative.  Real stories are retroactively created.  We have survivors bias.  We tend to pick the stories to tell that are interesting.  Reality winnows down who the story is about and then as historians we retroactively pick the ones out of the thousands or millions that were interesting either as "comedy" (in the literal since of happy ending) or "tragedy".  We avoid telling the stories of the meaningless deaths or the ones that lacked struggle.  Often we massage those "real stories" to fit our preferred dramatic tropes, so that close inspection of the real events finds nothing like the story we heard.Roleplaying and combat are radically different things.  Even after 15 years playing together, they are pretty terrible at roleplaying but they are pretty amazing at combat.  And I haven't never died in a con game, was a finalist in online Bloodbowl tournaments back in the day, and generally am used to winning any game I play more than my share. You wouldn't survive my games.  I can just tell already. Give everyone 4 hit points and then come back and tell me about this again.  There is nothing organic and natural about hit points or any other RPG mechanic.</blockquote>

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