Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6299244" data-attributes="member: 42582">Even then you'll still need contrivances, I think, to get dramatically satisfying play. The PCs get dragged into inordinately many Byazantine plots, inherit more than the usual fair share of haunted houses from mysterious uncles, seem to know (or at least be in a position to get to know) all the interesting people, etc.I'm having trouble following this.If the PCs typically win, because they rarely meet NPCs or monsters as "objectively" tough as them, how is this less contrived than a 4e frost giant minion? You've just shifted the location of the contrivance, from character build rules to encounter design rules.(And that's not even addressing the issue of dramatic pacing - I have never found classic D&D attrition-style combat satisfying. For me, a major technical achievement of 4e is showing how you can keep hit point loss at the core of combat resolution while creating dramatically satisfying play.)OK, so you seem to agree with me. Now if what a group wants out of play is anything like an action adventure experience, you are going to need such guidelines, aren't you? Otherwise you'll get a classic D&D PC-mortuary experience instead, I think.AD&D had one of the biggest contrivances of all - the dungeon, layered in a "choose your own level of challenge" smorgasbord. But it did assume that the players, not the GM's, would be deciding how difficult encounters were and hence how much risk there was. But AD&D, at least as presented by Gygax, wasn't at all about achieving a dramatically pleasing play experience. Tomb of Horrors, for instance, can be an intricate intellectual experience, but the only emotion likely to be experienced is frustration. (Of non-RPG activities, the one it has the closest resemblance to that I can think of is a crossword.)Who writes the tables, though? Have a look at the volumes of loot generated by the classic D&D treasure tables and tell me how they're not contrived!And you haven't addressed the Raise Dead point. This is an obvious contrivance, which is not made less so by locating it within an imagined gameworld in which mid-to-high level clerics routinely have this capability.And yet Conan does. And so do the protagonists in LotR. That is the whole point of literary or dramatic contrivances.But in my Spider Man collection, at least, he mostly spends his time fighting super-villains, with the "random goon" episodes being essentially down-time, where the real focus is on character development/backstory progression.Some of this may also depend on how frequently a group plays sessions. My group plays every 2 to 3 weeks for around 4 hours per session. I have no real interest in spending that time dealing with random goons. If we were going to a movie instead, we would expect it to provide real drama. An RPGing session should have something at least comparable to offer, in my view.</blockquote>

Verification