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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mallus" data-source="post: 5571147" data-attributes="member: 3887">Big multi-quote post go!I had the same initial reaction to 4e's introduction of wound-inducing witticisms. Then I decided killing with a song or jape, while somewhat out of place in more contemporary commercial fantasy fiction, was entirely appropriate in real mythology and folklore, which wasn't written for or by people with engineering degrees, and thus tended towards towards the more fanciful (and less systems-oriented). So in a way, deadly mockery is more realistic, in that it resembles the stuff for real legend and folklore. It's certainly closer than Vancian magic, which resembles only, in a kinda-sorta way, the magic system in the Dying Earth stories. My group reskinned 3e mechanics all the time, because, while the rules were often sound, the attendant fiction didn't jive with the admittedly idiosyncratic fiction of our setting. So I'm really not seeing the necessary connection/reinforcement between mechanics and fiction in 3e you're talking about. I completely agree with the description of role-playing in the first part of the sentence, but I'm not sure about the caveat. What does "identifying with the fiction" mean? When a character of mine spits out a pithy one-liner, I sure feel like I'm identifying with that fictional character. I'm writing him or her, performing him or her, and sometime feeling as if I am him or her, roughly all at the same time. Ditto when I colorfully describe a non-speech action, or their mode of dress, or anything else that falls into the category: characterization.4e abandoned any pretenses of physics-engine style simulation via the rules (and no version of D&D had a credible "physics engine"). It left the more informal simulation of a fictional setting untouched. My group prefers the latter to the former, so we experienced no loss of simulation/undue cognitive dissonance. However, most of us got a little fed up with the combat maths and the spread of overly-conditional powers. D&D is a game where men, dwarves, and elves can team up to fight Jello. Or tentacle-faced brain eaters from space. Or vaguely dog-like things with a beef against ferrous metals. Or floating eyeball-puns who shoot laser beams...You were saying something about farce? The farce has always been with us D&D players. Unless you scrub most of the Gygax & Arneson out of the game...</blockquote>

Verification