NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7034930" data-attributes="member: 996">That's called 'sandboxing.'  The other tables are full.QUOTE=cavalier973;7034681]I consider the Four Defenses (instead of Saving Throws) to be elegant.</blockquote>I can accept that - I was thinking more of character options. Not elegance.  Also what you're alluding to is transcending the system, rather than a quality of the sysyem. The ugliness is that common sense is rarely held in common. A decision based on an uniformed, unguarded, uncritical, opinion or snap judgement?  A hypothesis formed within the confines of a putative lowest-common denominator of knowledge and experience?Anti-intellectualism?Not that common.  The DM's.  Which common sense the DM may not commonly have in common with the common run of players.  Thus disagreements and arguments are not uncommon in such games.   Cool, almost like a 4e meet-cute. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />The Feb after 4e hit the shelves, I still hadn't run it yet, and my group hadn't played yet - having finished out two 3.x campaigns in the meantime.  I submitted a 4-hr 4-player 4e intro game to my local convention, and it was rejected as too short (ironically, they now have scads of 4-hr D&D slots).  I'd created the 4th level pre-gens (Fourtinbrass, Fourtunata, Rochefour, and Foursaken), but not the 4-encounter dungeon I had in mind.  So, I'm sitting in open gaming and a few acquaintences sit down and I tell them about it.  They want to play.  I have the pregens.  I pull out my MM, and find there are no 4th-level-ish Elementals.  Flipping through, in a matter of minutes, I re-skin Firebats, a Galeb Dur, a Black Dragon, and some spectres, as fire, earth, water and air elementals respectively.  Just like that I have a game.  (BTW, Feb after 5e hit the shelves, I ran several short intro games, with pregens:  Penthia, Quintus Maximus, Quintus Minimus, Sinko Bandydoe, and Fivie.  Shame?  No, none that I'm aware of.)That would be the correct tense.    Are you sure you've played 3.x?  .. Oh, OK, maybe you have. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> When I ran In Search of the Unknown on a Monday morning at the above convention, converting it to 5e on the fly, I read the bit about opening the uniformly-stuck doors in the heavily-worked 'caverns' of unpronounceable, and decided.  OK, STR 14+ you open them, otherwise roll.  Was I crazy?(Well, obviously to be running that thing at 8 am, but I mean that specific ruling.) I can't say that's the first time I've heard "punting on the first down" in that context.   They let you work.  With tools.  Kinda like vocational school. A better evolution than more skills might have been to go with the stat from column A/skill from column B (or attribute + ability, for the obvious reference) take that the playtest used for maybe 1 packet towards the end - but fewer skills.   3e & 4e were very player-option rich, yes. It's true that being good at exploration doesn't excuse being bad at combat:  what if the game is all combat & interaction, no exploration?  But that's not a problem with the concept of pillars, just with trying to balance across all of them, rather than within each. And, in all fairness, they didn't. That's a broad definition of 'encounters' if you're including traps and skill challenges and the like.  And, to be fair, it's a definition that goes back to 3e, IIRC.[/QUOTE]

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