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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 4178515" data-attributes="member: 5948">Because it shoves the game towards a single style of play.  The walk-up-to-monster-and-beat-on-monster style.  Not that beating on monsters is a bad thing, but I'm worried that other styles my be difficult or impossible to play under the new ruleset.World-builders (of which I count myself one, unashamedly) want setting stuff to make sense because it's good for the game.  It gives a (largely) known set of baseline rules to work with, so that if that PC wizard with a zillion ranks in Bluff and Knowledge(planes) or equivalent wants to, for example, take down Demogorgon by turning his balor minions against him through cunning strategy and subtle magical control rather that by simply walking up to ol' two-heads and throwing lightning at him, the world is built robustly enough for that to be possible (extremely difficult certainly, but possible!).  And further, a smart player will be able to learn enough of the rules of the setting (through Knowledge skills etc) to see the fault lines and come up with this sort of plan him/herself.  Complex and/or sneaky plans are difficult to come up with unless the mechanism/politics of the setting is known in sufficient detail.  WotC doesn't, from what we've seen so far, seem to think that sneakiness (beyond Stealth rolls) and lateral strategic thinking is fun, and seems to be orienting the game much more towards combat.  Tactical flexibility 4e seems to have in spades - strategic flexibility I'm not so sure about.WotC is not barring the possibility of course, but they're avoiding the issue by putting the responsibility for making it work squarely on the shoulders of the GM, and I'm uneasy about that.  They've basically said "here it is, it works, trust us" and wandered whistling off before anyone can ask "Why/what/how?"  From what incomplete preview material we've seen so far, I'm worried that WotC only bothered to build enough of the world to beat up, but not enough to manipulate.Basically if the player wants to implement a complex plan of that type, the GM is going to have to make up all these rituals and templates you refer to on the fly, and run the real risk (since GMs are not all game designers, regardless of our pretensions! <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=";)" /> ) of introducing something very broken into the system.  A ritual is a ritual after all, and if the PCs get the bright idea of breaking into Demogorgon's tower and copying The Rite Of Improvised GM Handwavingness To Enforce Balor Loyalty down, then the campaign (and universe) is in trouble.  Sure you can say "sorry, this ritual can only be performed by a 2-headed evil outsider whose name starts with D", but that's a pretty nasty railroad...</blockquote>

Verification