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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FireLance" data-source="post: 5046511" data-attributes="member: 3424">A can of worms. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Now that I've got the obligatory joke out of the way... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />I would say that the key idea behind "the Good of the Game" is D&D's survival as a hobby, and central to that is getting the right mix of challenge and reward, simplicity and complexity, familiarity and mystery. To elaborate:Challenge: If the game is not challenging enough, and it soon becomes trivial and the players get bored. Too challenging, and the game becomes frustrating and the players stop playing. This is a simple fact of human nature.Reward: This ties in closely to how challenging the game is because too much reward (especially in terms of XP and magic items) can cause the game to become not challenging enough, and too little can cause the game to become too challenging. Beyond this, rewards help keep the players engaged in the game because they have something to look forward to, but even in this, a balance needs to be struck. If rewards are too frequent, they lose their value, and if rewards are too rare, players will not find it worth their time to wait.Simplicity and Complexity: Ideally, the game should be simple to learn, in order to make it easy for new players to get into the game. However, it should also contain enough complexity to keep players in the game and prevent them from getting bored before too long. Simplicity and complexity are not necessarily polar opposites. Chess has often been cited as a game which is both simple and complex. The basic moves of each piece are simple, but getting your pieces to work well together is highly complex.Familiarity and Mystery: In a way, these two are related to the earlier concepts. Familiarity ties in to simplicity, but from the flavor angle rather than the rules angle. The closer the elements in a setting tie in to what the players expect, the easier it is for them to imagine themselves in that setting. In my view, this is the best argument for "simulationism" (or what passes for it in a fantasy setting). However, mystery (or unfamiliar elements in a setting) helps keep the game fresh for players and shake them out of their complacency that they understand how the world works (unchecked, this may lead to boredom). Mystery also ties in to challenge. The less the players know, the greater the apparent level of challenge. In my view, most of the arguments arise because there is no one true way to balance all of the above elements. Some players like a game with higher levels of challenge and lower levels of reward, while others like just the opposite. And of course, both sides are convinced that the other is going to destroy the game as they know it. <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/nervous.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":heh:" title="Nervous Laugh    :heh:" data-shortname=":heh:" /></blockquote>

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