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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7335300" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, OTOH the whole rest of the structure of D&D works AGAINST it. You don't get to choose what sort of a character to play, some dice are rolled and you get what you get, at least to some extent. Its likely that Jim will roll and 8 STR and a 13 INT, so he'll end up being a wizard, and Mary will get stuck playing a cleric.Then of course, even if you get exactly what you want, Falstaff is pretty likely to be ganked by the first batch of 4 goblins you run across. Maybe after that Jim decides to call his next character 'Falstaff Jr', and so on. Furthermore the game definitely mires you in a lot of details and trivia that revolve around sub-games, the 'getting your numbers up by acquiring magic stuff' subgame, the equipment and supplies subgame (do we still have some more oil flasks?). There's also the whole issue of some types of characters simply being only marginally useful in play, particularly if you manage to survive and get to higher levels. Falstaff is cool and all, and has a castle, but he is hardly even a vital part of a party anymore when Filmar and her ilk can hire some lower level guys to hold the front line and blast the bad guys with powerful spells.I'm not denigrating 1e, but it really doesn't live up to that blurb. Its a different kind of a game, still fundamentally a Gygaxian dungeon crawl in mechanical and play-structural terms. I guess what I'm saying is, there's not really much incentive to heavily identify with the character you prefer to play and spend a lot of your time in 1st person play. TBH I have only really ever seen fairly sporadic 1st person in D&D, and I've played a LOT of D&D...Only if the focus and structure of play are basically Gygaxian in nature. If the expectations are different then it makes perfectly good sense to have a game which is 100% transparent (I've done this numerous times). It can work in a lot of different ways. Nor are 'dangerous and unpleasant situations' removed from consideration. They just aren't situations where PLAYER SKILL is the determinant. They might be, for example, situations where the player's aesthetic and dramatic sensibilities are fulfilled by a certain PC falling to his death, or something.Heh, I played in a campaign for YEARS with a GM of extremely great energy, creativity, and story-telling power. However that game was EXACTLY described by "players can't affect the gamestate through the actions of their PCs." Truthfully you could TAKE many actions in that game. They would generally have some localized and modest effect, though often not what you were interested in or wanted. In any greater sense, the story was writ, and you were there to experience it. No choice you would make was going to deflect that greater story even one iota. If an NPC was to play a certain role in the meta-plot, then that WAS going to happen. No amount of killin' 'em dead was going to stop it. At most some other NPC would just pop up to take on the same role, or there would be a time warp, or almost whatever it took, but the show was going to go on! I cannot claim this wasn't a highly fun campaign, it was, but you had to be willing to just come to an understanding that you were pretty much watching the show and contributing color. Now, this guy and I were best friends and we talked through a lot of stuff outside of play and came up with ideas, etc. Sometimes things came out the way I thought they should/might/could. It was just, once his mind was made up it was going in a certain way, there wasn't much that was going to change it.I'm sure he's still GMing although we haven't had a chance to play together in quite a few years.</blockquote>

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