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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5048372" data-attributes="member: 4937">Fail.This has nothing at all to do with game balance.  I don't agree that it is a penalty and that it destroys game balance, but to be perfectly frank, if it did I'd toss out game balance before I'd toss out the sort of versimilitude I'm going for.What if I promised the players at the beginning of the game that they'd never be ambushed by combat in the city for there entire careers.  (I wouldn't promise such a thing because I don't know what is going to happen in the game, but for the sake of argument let's imagine I did because on the whole its not an entirely objectionable promise if I knew the players wouldn't abuse it.)  In that circumstance where the player knew that he'd never be forced into combat in a social situation without time to prepare or 'even the odds', exactly what penalty would I be imposing?  How would balance be effected then?This sort of statement tells me that you play in games that have one mode: combat.  I like combat.   I like dungeon crawling.  If you'd not want to play in any other sort of game, that's fine with me.  However I don't consider your criticism even relevant to how I play my game.There are two ideas that I think we should separate.  One, the wearing of arms and two, being decked out for battle with missile weapons, armor, and a backpack.  The wearing of a sword was indeed a mark of nobility - and in fact swords were often taxed or outright illegal - such that you couldn't own one if you weren't.   I have not quibbled at all with the right of the PC's to bear some sort of personal weapon.  I have quibbled with the idea that they have the right and reasonable expectation to roam around decked out in full adventuring gear everywhere that they go.Why?  I would consider that a very harsh pregame restriction on what sort of character you may create.  Or be accused of being bandits for travelling the King's Highways while bearing arms.  Yes, indeed, there are all sorts of problems involved.  That's why starting the game with a Noble rank is, for my campaign, something I consider to be worth a feat (well, technically, an advantageous trait, but that would get deeper into my house rules that is necessary for this forum).Yes, and dragons don't exist either.  But it is here, and not in the physics of the game, that I think we must appeal to stories.  While the real peasants didn't regularly live adventuring lives, the peasants of their stories - of what we'd call 'faerie tales' - did often live adventurous lives.  And real commoners did rise to quite high ranks from time to time.  Certainly, and I've never denied it.  But you are quite mistaken if you take that to mean that real world knights spent all their lives going around in mail or plate like some John Boorman movie.  Noble rank is something that is utterly divorsed from class in my game world.  There are nations where most of the nobles are rogues.  It's great class for representing scheming, worldly, backstabbers - social or less metaphorically.  It's quite impossible to tell what class a noble might be.  Indeed, while I think 'role' is a concept with in-game reality, I don't personally believe that class is something with in-game reality.  You can't create a spell to 'Detect Fighter' or 'Detect Rogue'.   IMO, class is entirely a convienent metagame construct.  The people of my game world, unlike say that of Order of the Stick, don't really think think of themselves as having classes.   Class is a metagame construct representing a bundle of related skills and abilities that are related to the practice of a profession of some sort and thus are often taught together.  A class is intended to be flexible enough to encompass a very great many roles so there is not an absolute correlation between what someone of a class knows and what is known by someone else of the class.   From the in game perspective, the characters see several distinct roles - archer, bounty hunter, game warden, sergeant, thief, blacksmith, etc.  They don't see 'class'.  Class is an abstraction; a simplification of a the messy reality for the purpose of achieving a certain sort of game play.</blockquote>

Verification