times they are a changen....
- Thread starter jgbrowning
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rounser said:
Nothing "sagely" about it. It's a copout.
The correct response to "I want to run a whodunnit in 3E, but there are all of these divination spells that make it impossible" shouldn't be
"You don't really want to run a whodunnit! Don't change the rules, change the problem the PCs face . . ."
but
"Whodunnits are cool. Here is how you might change the divination spells in your campaign to allow for more mystery . . . "
Ditto with scrying. Sticking to core rules, I cannot run a campaign in which the enemies of the PCs can just scry them any time they want, and then teleport a party in to kill them. The enemies of the PCs are very, very powerful, and I WANT TO KEEP IT THAT WAY.
So I had a choice. I could change scrying (specifically, making it so that one cannot simply teleport to a scryed location), or I could change what I wanted to do in some fakey way. I could make it so that the enemies of the party didn't REALLY want to kill them, or give the party some cheaty artifact or magic item that made scrying them impossible. Dumb, and dumber. Why not just change the rules?
Why should there be this onus, this stigma, re just changing what a few spells do, to allow me to run a different type of game? I honestly don't get it.
jollyninja
First Post
i tried to post 3 times, each more elloquently put then the last but it keeps telling me that i'm not signed in or that no thread is specified. please do not take this as a flame. perhaps tomorrow if this thread is still going i will have the energy for a fourth attempt. this is the gist of my post. read my sig for my opinion, i've played all 3 editions. have a nice day.
Joshua Dyal said:
The above is absolute truth.
Okay, I'll admit, I'm a min/maxer ... I love balancing and rebalancing the numbers, to see what can or can't be done, to make the at-firs-tblush ineffective, become effective.
I like to wrap my hands around a system and wring the absolute maximum advantage possible out of it (I can get a Fighter-10/Duellist-10 (Sword and Fist PrC) to armor-class 80+ ... both base AND touch).
In a game, I love to find (or make) a situationinwhich to make USE of the character I have carefully crafted, honed, tweaked, and refined.
Does that mean I'm not also a Role Player? Nope. Once I've got the mechanics down, I like to put EQUAL effort into crafting, honing, tweaking, and refining a character,a persona, identity, and so on. I then wrap this "skin" around the numbers -- sometimes taking a hammer to the numbers, to dent-in unseemly projections which clash with the "skin" -- and THEN, I have a character I want to play.
I can enjoy weeks of pure social engagement, without a whiff of ocmbat. Okay, eventually I'll get "the itch" ... but if I wanted pure social interaction for my character, I wouldn't be playing a game dealing with traipsing about after dragons, demons, the undead, and what have you.
I like to know that, within my chosen theme / "schtick", my character is the best I can make him or her. To that end, I gleefully min/max (normally I call it being a "point monkey" -- analogous to being a "grease monkey"). Other than that ... hell, man, I'm here to have fun, period.
Does my being a min/maxer, even occasional pwoergamer mean I'm not a team player? Hell no; LN is my usual alignment, actually. And I'll gleefully help others point-monkey their characters to greater efficiency, without shifting their persona, theme, atmosphere, and so on. I actually enjoy that, as a challenge.
However, I like to plan out the entire 20-level (with ELH, lord, I dunno what I'll do, hehehe) feat and attribute-ad progression for any character I make. My default, when making a "this might be fun", is to plan feat choices out to 10th level. For sorcerors, I plan the feats out to 20th level, along with every spell the character will ever know.
I just don't see that th two must, innately or inherently, be at odds with each other.
And for the record -- I am not a product of CCGs, CRPGs, an the like. I found EQ to be boring in the extreme; plenty of point-monkeying, plenty of hack-and-slash combat ... no RP to speak of, that I could find at least. nor am I young, nor an inexperienced RPG gamer.
I am thirty-one years of age, and have been playing various pen-and-paper RPG's for, um ... 22 to 24 years, now (I started playing "somewhere" between ages 7 and 9). I was introduced to RPGs with 1E and Basic D&D (mostly 1E); I remember getting the old '83 WOG boxed set for my 12th birthday (and lord I wish I had taken better care of it, lol). I also avidly play several CRPG's (the Fallout series on PC is my favorite).
I still have my first-printing '89 AD&D 2d Edition PHB, and MOST of the class books and race books ever printed ( I missed some of the later ones, as I wasn't actively DMing and only buy supplements for what I'm actually playing).
I played for a while in a 3E campaign, going from 1st level Sorceror, through a couple character deaths and replacements, to a Necromancer(7)/Loremaster(7), before leaving the gropup last December.
Did I min/max? Hell, yeah. Did I let that interfere with Role playing, eithe rby others or by myself? Hell no. Is my tendency to min/max based on having played various CCGs or CRPGs?
Nope.
Not in the slightest.
Well, indeed you can. I just suggested that if you do do so, it's best done at the start of the campaign....or, failing that, with everyone's agreement mid-campaign. The stigma is against heavy handed kneejerkery from DMs who suddenly discover that they don't like what their players can do, and nerf their abilities out of hand and unexpectedly....
rounser said:
Yes, lord, I HATE that. Especially sicne (perhaps I'm a rarity in this), if the GM asks me, I'll actually tell him (her?
) how to counter anythign the GM finds especially irksome -- well, untila nd unless the GM displays a tendency to abuse that counter, i.e. every kobold suddenly knows exactly what to do, and when, if I cast X or Y spell, and so on.Example, the GM (in 3E) became nearly livid when the party started benefitting from my wizard's Leomund's Secure Shelter spell, but he was smart, he realised it was STRONG, but not impregnable; we coudl always rely on strong walls and a locked door, was all.
However, when I later chose (to counter the burrowing enemies we suddenly faced several times) the Mordenkainens Magnificent Mansion spell, and he realised there was precious little he could do to get in wihtout a party member's cooperation -- ne NEARLY banned the spell, yet wanted to disallow me to change the choice of spell learned for the level advancement!!!. In other words, "you picked it, it's yours" ... yet he didn't want to let me cast it. Mutterings by the DM about somethign being unfair, etc, etc. Eventually, thank all that is holy, he relented (and if he'd only asked, I'd've told him all it took was a batering ram and a glitterdust spell -- the spell to SEE the door, the ram to force it open; still just a locked door and secure walls, but I had more control over the terrain, and entry points, should we be attacked while encamped).
But in general I despise Rule 0 abuse. That rule should be used sparingly, as a last resort.
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LokiDR said:
It is to laugh.
http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/vehicles/
And the vehicle of the week archive:
http://www.geocities.com/mandjthew/marks_eye/votw/
Forrester said:
And you can do this. The D&D rules span the gamut from gritty and realistic, all the way to four-colour quasi-supers. There's nothing that says you _have_ to go all the way, and in fact, some adventure types work much better with gritty and realistic, rather than four-colour. If you want to run whodunnits, the easiest way to do it is to limit your characters to no more than 4th-5th level. Voila, no more scrying and teleporting.
Because whodunnits don't figure into D&D's core mission of going into dungeons, killing the monsters and taking their treasure.
Sure there has always been powergaming and role-playing. Some like to power up some don't. But I agree that how longer you play the game, the bigger the chance you'll come to like role-playing. Once you've played all the races and classes etc. and you boosted your fighter for 54th time to be the biggest ass fighter of the group, there often comes a time you go and look your fun in other, often role-playing, games
Grz Ash
Grz Ash
Pax said:
There's a difference between Rule 0 use and Rule 0 abuse. I agree that GMs should resist using Rule 0 mid-campaign on the spur of the moment, and that if they do, they should allow the characters to pick another spell, another feat, or whatever. I don't think that if they do, players should act like it's the end of the world --
"Oh my god, Commune doesn't work like I thought it would?! I NEVER would have become a cleric!"
"Oh my god, you've decided to make Haste a 4th level spell! Why didn't you tell me this before I created my character?! I NEVER would have become a wizard!"
. . . and other such nonsense.
But I understand where you're coming from. Remember that it's tough on DMs when their players are smarter and/or know the rules better than they do. Luckily, I don't have this problem, and never will
, but it happens. But I'd hate to take away from those other DMs with less foresight, all control of their campaign just because it takes them a little too long to realize that a combo or spell is broken or leads to effects that screw up his story. If the DM takes away Whirlwind/Cleave in the middle of the campaign, your life will not end. Ditto Magnificent Mansion. I promise.
-----
This is a different issue than the one I was ranting about, though, which concerns Rule 0's pre-campaign. I know, hong, that D&D is supposed to be all about killing things and taking their treasure. But some DMs want to have little side-quests in between all the killin'
. And it's painfully dumb (as I'm sure you realize) to insist that the DM keep the characters at 4th and 5th level if he wants to run a whodunnit.Similar Threads
