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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Petrosian" data-source="post: 664521" data-attributes="member: 1149">Re: Getting Tired[/B]</blockquote>it is one realtively minor game element.i never said this. You just invented it wholecloth. this seems to be a habit of the "pro-designer-dr" crowd.Actually i said it ENCOURAGES it, not forces it, iirc.Yup.i played an elven child of an exiled elven fighter who was raised by humans and who, when it came time to sign up with a troupe of all elves jumped at the chance. While he did plan ahead, his decisions were often severely colored by his desire to discover the elven heritage he had lost.in the same game i played an elven sorcerer fascinated by music who maxed his perform skill and fancied himself quite the bard. he was relatively foppish and chose spells sometimes for their convenience... like MOUNT so that he didn't have to keep up and maintain a smelly horse and to allow him the freedom to 'take off" whenever he wished.those are all well and good examples of a player deciding to play a character as opposed to playing a DND character. those characters are much more like the fantasy characters outside of DND who typically carry one weapon or one special family weapons and so on.Unfortunately, these types of characters are the ones affected by the new designer-dr thingy. They are the ones who have their effectiveness to the party reduced by the new designer-DR.The 'DND-based character" who knows a Haversack is cheap and readily available and who buys the golf-bag is the one rewarded.get it! i said this several pages ago. i spelled it out. I dont like the new rule because it hits thw wrong players characters. i much prefer to have the guy who decides his dwarf uses axes because dwarves use axes be rewarded for limiting his character than punishing him for it.The new rule discourages this.and those people will be adversely affected by the rule while those who do plan out will be rewarded. For those who feel golf-bags = munchkin, then this new rule rewards the mucnhkin and adversely affects the roleplayer.this is a good thing? i think not.Why does planning for a deficit or trying to not be adversely affected by it somehow equate to thinking in terms of useless or not. Its nit binary.BTW... have you seen me say "useless" in regards to the effect designer DR has? Nope.In my game it was a black pretending to be a red. My players thought it  clever.Amazinglym i did it by the simple current rules with no need for designer dr to make it an interesting challenge.I think designer DR is vulgar in specific when its arranged by the GM to be of a sort not countered by the players. See above the discussion of not allowing the PCs to have the counter weaponry.its vulgar as in anything thats as simple as engineered to say "you cannot successfully choose this option...bam..i say so" in order to force the PCs to explore other options.If you want subtle, allow them the first option, their normal response works just fine, but also give them a BETTER out-of-the-box option and see if they can pry themselves away from the norm.its vulgar to take away the box when you want them out of the box. its subtle to leave them in their box but leave something a little sweeter just outside for them to try and figure how to get to.Thats the whole point of tough choices.Giving a fighter a -10 damage due to designer-dr in a scenario where he might be able to bull rush the monster into a tarpit is like hitting him over the head with a anvil with "dont try just beatim him down" scrawled on it.instead, give the monster no designer DR and see if the player figures out that rushing him off the cliff is stilla quicker solution. Its superceeded by a magic sword and that makes a magic weapon VERY SPECIAL. It means the character is much more likely, perhaps even encouraged, to wield the one magic weapon and not carry around the golf bag. the roleplayer who only wants elven longsword and longbow is not reduced in impact as compared to the golf-bag guy.i personally see both the golf-bag guy (DND -style-character)and the family weapon guy (if you will... role player) as equally valid and i dont see the need to add a rule that hits one. if i had to hit one, it would be the golf baggie, but i dont feel i need to.The hero that carries one special weapon is the very guy this designer-dr works against.i prefer the former. The former establishs this creature is beyond you current capabilities due to his magic. The threat is not one handleable by force and must be sought as a puzzle. you must find a more powerful sword to beat this beastie yourself. of course, in a team game, you might be able to distract it while more magically endowed guys do the actual killing.Another reason i am much more fond of having "magicalness" trump "materialness" is thats how it works elsewhere.The werewolf with his 5/silver designer DR will give, under the new rules, +1 or even ++2 weapons a definite spot of trouble... but a cantrip like ray of frost is wholly unaffected. A magic missile is wholly unaffected. MAGIC bypasses DR all the time. Magic trumps DR all the time. this will continue to be the case once designer dr comes the norm.If every spell ever built to affect the beastie can counter the DR, then i dont see it as a strech that enchanted weapons can too.matter of fact, it seems rather silly that a mage could cast a spell to hammer the beats but not cast a spell to make an existing weapon do it.So the proper solution in 2 is to just swing and hope you get lucky? pray for crits does not seem heroic or fantastic to me. If the gm has set as his goal to make sure a character is hit by designer dr, its every bit as vulgar as saying 'your stuff dont work tonight, even if only in part. i just didn't dress it up all pretty.uhh... no. lycanthropes are NPCS. They dont get shafted.or.. is that what this new designer dr is for? people are hoping PCs get to be lycanthropes and so then mosnters cannot get arounf their fave PCs silver DR?If an iron golem is too powerful i would look first to its massive spell immunities which have a whole lot more impact than their Dr does.but again, since iron golems are not players... its not an issue. As GM i dont get upset when my monsters dont win.Actually it seemed a very elegant rewrite of the old "so many HD meakes you +1 claws and then +2 and..." so on. it defined in a sense DR as also being a meter for the 'magical" level of a beastie.i am not sure why you feel this is somehow wrong.do you feel that, for instance, werewolves should not be able to kill each other since they both have silvered designer dr and no silver claws or teeth? the SRD werewolf does 1d6+1 bite. if he has to go thru 5 DR, then thats gonna be a long fight.I haven't seen a problem with it. The times my players met a beastie with more DR than they had weapons for, it was a really tough fight. Then again, they have had a lot of really tough fights where DR wasn't an issue. its just one tool of many. I dont need vulgar designer dr to gimmick in "creature you cannot touch of the weeks".designer dr is a gimmick. dr is a moderately weak tool.So if i dont believe designer dr is a good idea you somehow divine that this means i never fought things i didn't have the plusses to hit? your crystal ball needs cleaning.your rune stones need polishing.your ability to read minds and clairvoy others histories from afar seem lacking.At least, psychic awareness is about the only thing that makes your conclusion seem plausible.Actually, the first sure striking weapon appeared in my games just a few weeks ago. A thief got his hands on a sure striking sword of subtlety. he is quite happy with it. unfortunately, during the subsequent encounter where he and the gang ran into a nightwalker AFTER their GMWs were mostly down... he forgot the darned thing.go figure.Did you even read my example above.OK, lets try this again.modules could be written that way before.really they could.heck, it might seem silly but even whole campaigns could be based on that very concept.All this without designer dr.if you say so.Somehow, i seem to see more options in my fantasy world.thats rich, considered how many times i have had to point out that the points being argued against me are not the ones i made.if the gm feels its unreasonable to seek out ahead of time special weapons in case, that that level of preparation is somehow paranoid, then i have to wonder how far this goes. like i said, i routinely see people seeking scrolls of cure blindness and cure disease and the like just becasue they dont normally have the means to handle those threats easily.When the sorcerer used his potion of cure blindness after failing his save vs the lich's spell, it surprised many of us and we thought it was a smart idea.When the fighter pulled out his hammer instead of his axe against the skeletal figure, we thought it a smart idea.We didn;t think it was something that should be pooh poohed or worked against by the GM any more than a fighter going out in armor was.uhh... i ake rules decisions for my games all the time. just because a rule is NEWEST doesn;t mean a thing about its quality.Matter of fact, i have to say, in my experience the NEWEST rules are frequently the worst. most NEW rules get amended by not too long after their release to mass market because the mass audience is a bigger playtest pool than the in house.The best rules, from my experience, are more often the ones which have been out a while and used and had their kinks and crannies explored and reamed thoroughly. The notion of allowing a rule that looks bad, that promotes several thing quite obviously that you find unpleasent, just because ITS NEWER seems very silly to me.I mean really, at work, i would not suddenly spring from my cvhair everytime a NEW VERSION1.0 product came out and say "Ok lets integrate this into our existing software right now." That would be reckless and stupid. instead, i would ask to be shown the benefits, i would suggest we analyze it, and then see if it makes its case. i would also typically insist on letting it run thru a period of evaluation where we waited and saw what other customers reactions were and analyzed its success stories anf failures.i care as much about my game. Why would i do less?and yet another point towards the why are you bothering notion.so once again i ask the unanswered question... why does "the books are already written" impact only the contrary side of the discussion and not the positive side?Why doesn't "the books are already written" mean you should be a little more openminded?Huh?[/QUOTE]

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