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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="billd91" data-source="post: 6280663" data-attributes="member: 3400">It's not that they're not (or weren't) playing by the rules of D&D. They certainly were - in more of a literal sense than most home games will play because that's the common standard between all tables. The additional rules laid down by Living Greyhawk and other organized play groups are primarily the specific house rules that the average campaign will use writ large and codified so that the campaign standards can be applied at multiple tables by multiple DMs instead of at a single table by a single DM. As far as being representative of what kinds of play occur outside the organized play settings - it is and it isn't. There are plenty of campaigns that, I'm sure, follow similar guidelines of what to ban or restrict. Yet DMs in the organized play system aren't given as much freedom as they have outside the system in order to facilitate a common style of play across numerous scratch-built tables.There were aspects of organized play that can deviate substantially from other home campaigns. The format really pushes certain types of encounters over others. With a 4-5 hour duration, no idea who is going to come to the table, and varying strengths of numerous DMs, the adventures tend toward relatively easy to run, short, and non-complex encounters that need to focus more heavily on rules and set situations than on on-the-fly creativity and improv. And that means... combat encounters rule the roost, as do combat powers and abilities. Combat may take a while, it may even grind if the dice are cold and players indecisive. But rules are relatively clear to adjudicate and everyone can move about and try to do stuff. Role playing the bluff of the derro slaver so he thinks you're a representative of his superiors and he should turn his slaves over to you (so you can rescue them) - that may take time and a clever tongue on the part of the player and DM to keep the encounter from being a pointless die roll. And, let's face it, not every player-DM combo is up to that. So, of course, those encounters are generally fewer and farther between than the encounters where you beat up a monster or two in weird terrain (just to spice things up).To hit on the New Coke analogy in a slightly different way - when the scope of your survey is a taste test, you come up with different conclusions about what is the successful strategy for the future than if you do a more thorough examination of what you've got going for you. Coca Cola's taste tests showed New Coke beating Pepsi... and the previous Coke formula. But that little slice of success ignored how people feel about drinking a whole can rather than a small sip. It ignored other aspects of the Coke brand like Coke being explicitly different from Pepsi, having a long history of being the way it was, and the whole brand identity of its customers. If WotC did, in fact, rely too heavily on RPGA and organized play to inform its strategy for 4e, it falls into a similar trap - focus on a particular style of play built around combat encounters, spicing up combat encounters, balancing PCs for combat encounters, relying on rules for adjudication of events, sweeping away the messy aspects of DMing things that are ambiguous like charms and illusions, and so on.</blockquote>

Verification