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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="tomBitonti" data-source="post: 5704549" data-attributes="member: 13107">Well, mid-80's is twenty-five years ago.I could go back to Keep on the Borderlands (which I played) or Chainmail (which I read over).  Or the original Village of Hommlet, which was excellent, or the old tournament modules, such as the Slavers modules (mostly meh, except for the very creative last one).I still think that "grognard" and "plot" (or "story", if you prefer) are independent.  My impression is that the more grognard-y folks prefer better stories, and conversely find the 4E style of dense and unconnected encounters to be a turn-off.But I do think there are object measures to quality: Definitely in terms of the physical artifact (I think we agree on this).  There are a few grey areas: Organization and Writing Quality are important, but factorable in the sense that any product that is largely written need these, independent of the gaming content.There are qualities to Art as well, some of which are taste driven, but some are Objective.  Since the game is about imagination, there has been a wide range of Art Quality which is acceptable, so while this is measurable, it is important only to a limited degree.After all of that, one starts looking at issues of the presence (or lack) of detail, including consistency, and whether the detail illuminates and highlights the game.  Or, whether the game "pulls together" or is a rambling jumble of mostly independent encounters.Then there are issues of mechanical fit, cf: monster hit points and grind; broken math in social encounters; incorrect attack bonus scaling, or: blasphemy DC's, wimpy fighters at high level, strange multi-classing rules in 1E.While such issues are hard to put on a scale, they are still Objective measures.My sense of what is Subjective is more the focus or weight which a particular person places in one or another area.TomB</blockquote>

Verification