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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Remathilis" data-source="post: 6299005" data-attributes="member: 7635">Once upon a time, There was this little setting called Ravenloft that tried to mix gothic horror and fantasy. To do so, it had to alter the core rules slightly to make certain thing unpredictable. Divinations were faulty, if not useless. Summoning was a dangerous gambit. Powers that fought undead (like turning) was weakened, while undead gain lots of strengths previously unknown. If you took a group of characters and transported them to Ravenloft (a thing many DMs did) those characters often started playing different immediately, and that was BEFORE fear/horror and powers checks! The Ravenloft rule then, could be described Thusly: "To keep the tension and mystery of Ravenloft, a player character must know he CANNOT rely on his character's abilities to save him." In other words, lots of automatic "I win" buttons prevalent in AD&D got hosed and HARD, so PCs had to do more than think which spell of such will give them success. They PCs were constantly behind the 8-ball. When 3e came out, the Arhaus Ravenloft never captured that same feel (despite trying, and in some points overtrying). 3e was inherently PC oriented, and the rise of feats, prestige classes, and wealth-per-level meant that a lot of Ravenloft's shackle's were thrown off. A paladin could live without his detect evil in 2e and still an effective PC, but in 3e he had too many automatically reliable features (smite, immunity to fear) that needed crippling to keep the sense of terror that the class was basically worthless. To keep it viable, you had to start breaking the Ravenloft Rule and thus defeat the point. Things got even worse when you started adding any sort of optional material: It was far too easy to build PCs geared at fighting the supernatural via feats, magic items, and PrCs, to the point to even try to maintain the Ravenloft Rule you had to ban whole swaths of rules, even whole books. And that's even when they tried: The 2e version of Masque of the Red Death CRIPPLED spellcasting to keep the flavor of 1890's earth feasible. They changed spell parameters, removed spells, and then applied the Ravenloft changes on top. The 3e update? Spellcraft checks to cast and that's it. Of course, 4e, added nothing to the conversation: no official Ravenloft material existed except for a few 4e domains and stats for Strahd. I'm sure if the fabled Ravenloft game had come out, it'd have continued the 4e notion of "never gimp the PCs" and allowed priests to wave their holy symbols over hordes of undead and blast them with divine light, just as the core rules did. So we now come to next. It promises to be closer to AD&D in terms of play, but how about power? Will it allow the Ravenloft Rule to work with only minor changes, or will it require massive banning and re-writes to work as 3e did? Will controlling PC "I wins" be done on the micro-or-macro-level? I'm hopeful that the simpler rules, the optional magical items, and the tweaks-and-dials method of the game will allow a more faithful Ravenloft experience than 3e did.</blockquote>

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