NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9181771" data-attributes="member: 6690965">I don't think that follows. The fighter has an ability, the monster meets the triggering condition. The ability is clearly a trait of the fighter and the mechanic exists to say something about the character. You could take the same group of low HD monsters put them next to a different character, and get a different result. Thus, using the ability satisfies the fantasy, as it differentiates your character from a different character faced with the same situation.I'm not sure how to do this argument, because it just comes down to back and forth assertions that the game's fantasy is predicated on consistent mechanical expressions of objects in the game, or assertions that it doesn't.I can tell you that I'm unhappy with the idea of a tactical puzzle contained to a singular scene; that's a device one might use to structure a series of events, but I expect the gamestate to be sufficiently robust that the rules of engagement might change, but I should still be able to determine the result from the inputs of the players and the established board. But I'm pretty sure that's not even normative to other players who would be unhappy with this model. If the NPC is likely to remain relevant (in the sense of challenge and combat effectiveness) over an 8 level period of growth, I'd have reasonably expected her to also be involved in whatever progression defines the PCs, probably gaining levels herself, but I'd expect that be reflected in mechanically mediated progression that expands from her initial statblock to her final state. Regardless, the NPC's "fictional positioning" isn't determinative of her stats, it should be determined by them. The game is in seeing that result occur.This could as easily read as a play report of a dungeon crawling board game with scenario coded play, something like Descent or Gloomhaven. This feels like you've taken an engine for designing such games and provided the output, introducing a mechanic to achieve a specific setup, creating a board state with reference to these unique mechanics and some universal rules and establishing a win condition to move to the next linked scenario. The whole differentiating point of an RPG (as far as I am concerned) compared to a similar experience is that it strives to provide a consistent board state on which any number of actions can continue to be resolved with dynamic results. Your NPCs and entities don't have fictional purposes that can be resolved so cleanly; they have statistics that provide information to the ongoing state of play, and learning and leveraging that information to achieve the player desired result is the whole point.</blockquote>

Verification