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Message: <blockquote data-quote="IanArgent" data-source="post: 4244403" data-attributes="member: 21673">OK - I've been exposed to forge terminology through this and a couple of other threads, not through the Forge itself; so I'm not necessarily using the terminology in a technical sense. What I want out of a game (and a game system) is that after the session is over, when the players are BSing over their beer and skittles (10 minutes, 10 days, or 10 years later); they start off their stories with "No s**t, there I was;..."I had a hard as hell time doing this in 3E, to be honest. Prior to that, I had spent most of my time GMing Shadowrun 2 & 3, where I could walk into a session cold, set a mission to my players, and go from there. I had nothing more than a plot hook, a MacGuffin, and anywhere from 2 to 12 players depending on the night. I had NO prep, I didn't need it. I could generate a nearly unlimited amount of content from my own head based on the rules and the fluff, and based on the guidelines and some knowledge of probability. I had a very tight and fine control on the difficulty of each challenge. Shadowrun has NO rules whatsoever for generating NPCs (barring cyberware, but there's really no way for the PCs to tell if you boned the essence rules for an NPC). What it did have was fairly explicit guidelines on what an appropriate level of challenge was. And I knew if I made a mistake, the players had the ability to correct for it via the karma mechanism, while I rebalanced the challenge behind the screen.3E D&D was an entirely different paradigm. So many world assumptions were baked into the rules, and some much of the balancing was implicitly "fudge to fit" without telling you what you were fitting to. I could follow the rules for advancing a monster, and still not be sure at the end whether or not the rules resulted in a valid end product (the monster's actual challenge matching the "expected" CR). Or I could wing it, but with no guidelines on whether my winging it would end up "right" either. 3E was a much more rigid system. In the name of "support" the rule endied up being quite constraining. Monsters were built using the same tools as PCs were built, so that they could conceivably be used as PCs. Except that because monster abilities are not always appropriate as PC powers, the entire reason for using the PC framework for monsters (HD as level, etc) became a cruel joke for most monsters. But without the need to make monsters conform to the PC paradigm for creation and advancement, you are free to break the rules of PCs when designing monsters.Who cares if a monster PC of 15th level in 4E isn't the same as a 15th-level monster NPC of the same race. In cases where the monster's powers were interesting, the vast majority of the time a 15th level monster PC was vastly weaker than a 15 HD example of the same race, because of level adjustment (and to a lesser extent, racial hit dice). PCs and NPCs live by different rules for creation and advancement, because PCs and NPCs fill different roles. Even in 3E, this was the case because of level adjustment.D&D is not intended as a world simulator. the vast majority of people in a world don't live by D&D rules. The rules are for governing the interaction of PCs (who are exceptional, and have been exceptional in every edition of D&D I've been familiar with) with the rest of that world. When PCs interact with the world, the GM and the PCs are attempting to tell a story (IMHO). That all the rules have to support, and that's all they should support, to the extent that the GM needs the rules to do so. The rules shouldn't say how the avaricious vizier overthrows the old king. The GM should take care that that method is at least plausible - if the king dies in a locked room, there should be a method that the PCs can discover that the room wasn't sealed after all. The PCs may not be able to perform the same trick, but it shouldn't be absolutely forbidden by the rules. (This is why SR only has 3 things that magic can't do, as near as I can tell - you can't raise the dead, you can't teleport, and you can't time travel; anything else is at least theoretically possible - and even those rules have exceptions if you look hard enough).</blockquote>

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