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<blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 6503280" data-attributes="member: 87792"><p>Except "Occupation" is a term of art. So is "Role". They only have meaning with respect to Dungeons and Dragons. The actual job of adventurers, how they make their money, is adventuring. Occupation and role both specify what they bring to the job of adventuring.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Except you simply haven't understood the point.</p><p></p><p>Looking at it another way, Occupation is what is on your job description on your contract of employment. Role is what you are doing as a part of the team you work with within the team you are currently working with. They both describe what you do as a part of your team.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>And they would be playing on entirely different teams in entirely different parties in entirely different games. Which is why treating them all as football players makes sense in a way your analogy simply doesn't. Football players in different positions work together. Football players and basketball players don't as a rule. So anything saying "There would be football players and basketball players" also says "These people do not work together and are playing completely different games."</p><p></p><p>Now it's possible to argue that a high level 3.X fighter is playing a completely different game to a high level 3.X wizard. But that's a flaw in the game.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>And the point I'm making is that this is irrelevant. <em>Everyone is playing on the same team in a D&D party.</em> For your </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Indeed. When you think that a good analogy for D&D involves a team in which basketball players play alongside footballers, cricketers, and baseball players I'm not surprised you are confused.</p><p></p><p>3.0 was <em>massively</em> divergent from D&D. It attempted to impose "realism" on D&D (and Gygax was very outspoken about that). It turned the game from a genuinely class based game to a game using point buy. It destroyed the balance that Gygax had worked incredibly hard to put into the game. In short it was D&D redesigned by people who did not understand the strong design decisions made in D&D and threw almost all of them out of the window. It kept the look of the chassis. But quite deliberately turned the whole thing from a tightly focussed challenge centered game to an intentionally generic world-simulationist game. All wrapped up in layers of tradition when in many cases the very reasons for those traditions being useful had been removed from the game. Vancian casting was part of a larger system involving wandering monster rolls every ten minutes so recovering your spells while you were adventuring was ... implausible. 3.0 kept the Vancian Casting because it looked like the past while throwing out the intricate system of checks and balances.</p><p></p><p>4e on the other hand looked hard at D&D and realised there were two modes of play. "Dungeons" and "Dragons". Dungeons is what D&D was written to be about. A team of low life adventurers working together to explore challenging and lethal environments and working tightly with logistics. But certainly since 1985 DL1 "Dragons" (i.e. epic quests where fighting fire breathing dragons was awesome rather than dragons being something you tried to kill in their sleep) was the most common mode of play. Pathfinder adventure paths are almost pure Dragons play. And the reason 3.0 could get away with being a generic game was this mismatch. 4e was written from the ground up for Dragons play using a lot of the default gamist assumptions of Gygax - that hit points are as much an abstract pacing mechanism as anything, that classes are meaningful and pointbuy is a bad thing, that the game changes nature at level 10, that classes should all be balanced, and that overcoming challenges is a core part of the experience. Vancian Magic was chosen as a pacing mechanism and because D&D had its roots as a hacked tabletop wargame. Nothing more. 4e, as it normally did, had a purpose to the decision of its magic and pacing mechanism.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Neonchameleon, post: 6503280, member: 87792"] Except "Occupation" is a term of art. So is "Role". They only have meaning with respect to Dungeons and Dragons. The actual job of adventurers, how they make their money, is adventuring. Occupation and role both specify what they bring to the job of adventuring. Except you simply haven't understood the point. Looking at it another way, Occupation is what is on your job description on your contract of employment. Role is what you are doing as a part of the team you work with within the team you are currently working with. They both describe what you do as a part of your team. And they would be playing on entirely different teams in entirely different parties in entirely different games. Which is why treating them all as football players makes sense in a way your analogy simply doesn't. Football players in different positions work together. Football players and basketball players don't as a rule. So anything saying "There would be football players and basketball players" also says "These people do not work together and are playing completely different games." Now it's possible to argue that a high level 3.X fighter is playing a completely different game to a high level 3.X wizard. But that's a flaw in the game. And the point I'm making is that this is irrelevant. [I]Everyone is playing on the same team in a D&D party.[/I] For your Indeed. When you think that a good analogy for D&D involves a team in which basketball players play alongside footballers, cricketers, and baseball players I'm not surprised you are confused. 3.0 was [I]massively[/I] divergent from D&D. It attempted to impose "realism" on D&D (and Gygax was very outspoken about that). It turned the game from a genuinely class based game to a game using point buy. It destroyed the balance that Gygax had worked incredibly hard to put into the game. In short it was D&D redesigned by people who did not understand the strong design decisions made in D&D and threw almost all of them out of the window. It kept the look of the chassis. But quite deliberately turned the whole thing from a tightly focussed challenge centered game to an intentionally generic world-simulationist game. All wrapped up in layers of tradition when in many cases the very reasons for those traditions being useful had been removed from the game. Vancian casting was part of a larger system involving wandering monster rolls every ten minutes so recovering your spells while you were adventuring was ... implausible. 3.0 kept the Vancian Casting because it looked like the past while throwing out the intricate system of checks and balances. 4e on the other hand looked hard at D&D and realised there were two modes of play. "Dungeons" and "Dragons". Dungeons is what D&D was written to be about. A team of low life adventurers working together to explore challenging and lethal environments and working tightly with logistics. But certainly since 1985 DL1 "Dragons" (i.e. epic quests where fighting fire breathing dragons was awesome rather than dragons being something you tried to kill in their sleep) was the most common mode of play. Pathfinder adventure paths are almost pure Dragons play. And the reason 3.0 could get away with being a generic game was this mismatch. 4e was written from the ground up for Dragons play using a lot of the default gamist assumptions of Gygax - that hit points are as much an abstract pacing mechanism as anything, that classes are meaningful and pointbuy is a bad thing, that the game changes nature at level 10, that classes should all be balanced, and that overcoming challenges is a core part of the experience. Vancian Magic was chosen as a pacing mechanism and because D&D had its roots as a hacked tabletop wargame. Nothing more. 4e, as it normally did, had a purpose to the decision of its magic and pacing mechanism. [/QUOTE]
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