Save or Die: Yea or Nay?

[BryonD]

So I'm not sure what the issue is, then. Since medusas aren't much like Medusa, you're going to have to mod things to get what you want, regardless of the version of D&D you're running.

When did I agree with this? My point is quite the opposite.

And modding a medusa in 4E to a simple save-or-petrified is easy-peasy.

This I agree with, and made this exact point somewhere upthread.

However, as I said

Medusa and SoD in general are simply symptoms of the design approach.

 

[BryonD]

I thought the original point was that SoD and level drain are needed to maintain fear in the players? Fear, not simulation.

Ok, I concede that. I'll defend that the poll is HORRIBLY worded because it specifically asks for a flat up or down on SoD and makes no mention of fear. And we are 8 days out and I don't recall "fear" having been mentioned in a single post.

I am hugely pro-SoD, but if the actual question is : "Do you need SoD for the purpose of fear?", then my answer is:

What a stupid question.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Another strange thing about the medusa of myth is that her petrification power seems to be entirely due to her ugliness. In the universe of the story one gets the impression that any sufficiently ugly being would turn onlookers to stone.

 

[BryonD]

Another strange thing about the medusa of myth is that her petrification power seems to be entirely due to her ugliness. In the universe of the story one gets the impression that any sufficiently ugly being would turn onlookers to stone.

Well, it is divine ugly. I certainly assume that the people hearing the story took for granted that the divine nature was way outside the realm of anything that could occur naturally.

Though it seems reasonable that the gods could go around putting petrifyingly ugly creatures, items, or whatever any place they wanted. It's the Hussarian approach.

Zeus gets mad and makes the moon so ugly it turns viewers to stone.

 

[Fifth Element]

Yes it does. "Simulation" or not has a ton to do with whether or not SoD is fitting. The "Greek Myth" specification is irrelevant beyond simply being an example.

The specification is extremely important, though. "Simulation", by itself, means nothing. You need to define what you're simulating. The mechanics to best simulate Greek myth are different from those that best simulate wuxia.

 

[Fifth Element]

I am hugely pro-SoD, but if the actual question is : "Do you need SoD for the purpose of fear?", then my answer is:

What a stupid question.

Well yes, and I don't think the OP literally meant fear, but rather the idea that unless there are SoD effects the players feel entitled to their characters surviving anything and everything, or some such drivel.

 

[Doug McCrae]

To me, that's good enough to call it T&T -- to just the same degree. So, you can have fun with your T&T, and I'll have fun with my D&D! /joking

Eh, T&T's just Ken St Andre's houserules for D&D. As rpgs go, it's incredibly similar to D&D and I wouldn't fault anyone for calling it D&D.

 

[Ariosto]

Remember not everyone is as interested in doctrinal purity as you are.

Remember, you're not just being insulting when you write that -- you are also being irrelevant. Perhaps you could instead address a subject in which I actually have expressed an interest?

In fact, some people, like me, think D&D is all but defined by a DIY spirit, large-scale tinkering, and kitbashing

So, D&D is ... ?

No, actually, as the term is conventionally (and in keeping with trademark) used.*

If it works for you to go to the FLGS, advertise a "D&D" game on the bulletin board, and then surprise prospective players with a concoction hitherto not known by that name then shine on you crazy diamond. ("Cool GM, but I don't know why he can't just say 'Polaris' or 'Universalis' or 'Mallus' or 'In a Wicked Age' or 'Houses of the Blooded' or whatever.")

Wherever you get the notion that there is some privileged merit in such behavior, the fact remains that it is eccentric and not merely unproductive but counter-productive of all but confusion.

The rest of the world is not engaging in some oppression of your free spirit simply because we are able to refer to books with "Dungeons & Dragons" on the cover, and some indication of "edition", and know quite a bit more than that the game is not "Wiz-War" or "Magic Realm" -- that, indeed, we can know about what it is.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Setting aside, please, the absurd semantic quibbling, the fact is that
(A) There were was something prior to "large scale tinkering" and
(B) There is something different afterward.

It seems to me reasonable that either
(A) You like that so much that you should like it even better with something you find even less satisfactory to start. In that case, you can stop already with the complaining about what you actually enjoy, and move along to that something else even more opposed to your tastes.
or
(B) You actually don't like rebuilding so much as you like having a game that you enjoy playing. In that case, you can stop already complaining about what nobody put a gun to your head and made you play in the first place, and move along to something more aligned with your tastes.

In either case, your not liking the game is a matter of personal preference, not some universal standard by which liking it is wrong. This is the point some people have a problem sorting out.

They mistake their tastes for objective standards, and "D&D" for whatever they have in mind. Thus, their logic leads to the conclusion that anything called "D&D" is an "inferior D&D" to the extent that it is different from that ideal.

It is as if someone who does not like tomatoes were to insist that the best tomato is a potato. What in blazes is the point?!

If you think that the purpose of a monster must be to get into, and lose, a fight with the players' forces, then you are thinking along quite different lines than the old D&D game in a lot of ways. Odds are that you have a list of other objectives likewise at odds with many of the same (and many other) elements of design.

It's the same as if you came to the board game Frag and hated the dice rolls, and the drawing of cards, and the shooting, and the starting over when a piece is killed, and the scoring. That's the game, I am afraid. You can take the map and pawns and make up some other set of objectives and procedures -- but then it really would not be helpful to call it "the same game".

*[In case the picture link gets broken, it's Ed "Big Daddy" Roth's Rat Fink.]

 

[Ariosto]

Eh, T&T's just Ken St Andre's houserules for D&D. As rpgs go, it's incredibly similar to D&D and I wouldn't fault anyone for calling it D&D.

I would say that the ways it is notably similar (and to what) are precisely those that offend the people who will deny up and down that there is any "D&D" in the first place to which anything could be similar -- or, by the same measure, different. I find it incredible that you find anything incredible in the similarities.

The "playing D&D" that is in fact relevant is playing the generic "dungeon game". It is extremely old news that this colloquial usage is a stab in the back to the value of the trademark. Thus, the Phoenix people had to come up with another name when they published their game.

Ken's proposal, IIRC, was something like "Caverns & Catoblepas". (He did better when he came up with "Wasteland" for the superb computer RPG.)

Anyhow, it is the very rejection of the principles of the old "dungeon game" that is significant here.

"Save or die" is certainly in T&T, at any rate, along with heaps more of the alternately wildly random and crushingly deterministic (which gets more chiaroscuro in later editions).

 

[Lanefan]

I thought the original point was that SoD and level drain are needed to maintain fear in the players? Fear, not simulation.

Huh?

If a basilisk has a turn-to-stone gaze in myth, then if the party meets a basilisk in the game any simulation of the myth kinda dictates that said basilisk also have a turn-to-stone gaze effect in the game.

Turn-to-stone effects have, in the game, usually been handled by a SoD mechanic - or SSSoD in 4e - so there's the simulation.

Players don't often want their characters turning to stone. There's the fear.

Lan-"ay, marry, there's the rub"-efan