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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7335951" data-attributes="member: 82106">There are two parts to this. The 'gap between commoner and level 1' part is really a little hard to judge. There is literally no standard in 4e of what a 'commoner' is, because 4e doesn't posit that statistics are the world. There is a bigger gap between the weakest possible generally usable stat block in 4e and a level 1 PC than in say 1e (where the weakest PC and a Kobold and a notional '0 level human' are all pretty close, with the PC having some special class abilities and maybe equipment, but not a lot else). In 4e a level 1 minion is a LOT weaker than a level 1 PC. I think its fair to say we can imagine commoners occupying some range in there, but some of them COULD be about on a par with PCs (certainly there are examples of 'townspeople' in Fallcrest, the only really developed 'normal' town in 4e material) who are on a par with PCs, so its a hard call actually. Some may be a lot weaker.The second part, about 'riskiness', I dismiss out of hand. Risk doesn't exist in D&D. You play a character, the GM determines what dangers exist. He can threaten, and indeed carry through on, killing any PC regardless of statistics, and he can do it without using any fiat simply by what he places in the challenges that the character faces. Risk is thus an illusion, or at least it is simply an agreement between the GM and the player as to what sort of game is being played at the table. Thus it is entirely orthogonal to what rules set is being used. If risk of character death (wagered on player skill and luck with the dice in most games) is an element of a particular scenario, then so it is. Even then DMs have traditionally (even 4e has Rule 0) absolute fiat power that ultimately decides life and death.Eh, I can see an argument from the standpoint of trying to move players out of their comfort zone and get them to play something new. The original point, to make the choice of which type of 'pawn' the player had to attempt to solve the dungeon with a matter of both chance and skill in deciding if it was better to be a suboptimal wizard or an optimal fighter, doesn't matter in anything but Gygaxian play however. The philosophical notion that there is a 'luck of the draw' in what attributes we are born with is so dubious to begin with that to attach any 'realism' constraint to it is practically meaningless IMHO. Again, I think its valid to want to both express the full range of possible characters and push players into new experiences, though it obviously has to mesh with what the PLAYERS want. I actually don't have an issue with random 3d6 in order character creation. I personally find it entertaining. Maybe some time I will run a game like that and see who is interested. I'm OK with point buy though for a lot of games. I actually thought the Traveller process, where the player makes some choices and rolls some dice, was pretty interesting.Yes, but such 'spherical cow' type evaluations are meaningless. You won't ever even see Questioner of All Things coming, nor ever get surprise on him. Even if you did, he long ago took specific magical precautions against that sort of thing. You might cause him a significant inconvenience, at best, if you were to catch him at unawares going about his presumed daily routine life or something like that. GMs of course rarely stoop to that kind of thing, though in a certain type of game I don't think its unfair. As I say, Q has countermeasures. DMs are of course equipped with infinite resources, so you can't say I'm proof against any possible plot, but it would require a level of resources, preparations and knowledge that a GM would be hard pressed to justify NPCs having in order to succeed. In any case, just because your fighter could gank my wizard from a standing start at a range of 5 feet with a 50/50 toss of the initiative die doesn't make him my equal in an adventure. Even zero-to-hero doesn't necessarily need to have this gritty kind of logistics sub-game. DW for instance has a pretty abstract concept of character resources. They exist, and you can track them to whatever detail you want, but they aren't generally central to play of the game. In fact they're more a sort of 'plot hook' (so for instance the GM in that game might reveal an unpleasant truth, your last torch is guttering down and the exit is nowhere in sight, a 'soft' move, but yet kind of nasty depending on the mix of PCs in the party). I think in terms of (a) they took the mass of disfunctional 2e kits and supplements and rationalized it into a set of workable character options, which was good to some degree. On (b) I think there was a huge pent-up demand for a new set of core books, since 2e was over 10 years old at that point. 3e was thus a pretty good bet, they could have sold almost anything to people that hadn't had a new product in 5 years aside from a few things left over from TSR's pipeline. I'd note that, while 3e was pretty popular it doesn't seem to have ever reached the levels of 1e (nothing since has) and it quickly faded, so quickly that 4 years later they had to roll out 3.5e to keep selling books. I think 3e has its good points in a sense, but I'm not real convinced it was all that incredible a product. There are certainly plenty of grounds upon which to criticize the particular design choices it made. I'd also say that 'back to the dungeon' is no more than a slogan, the rules don't support it at all.Yeah, that's a possibility. You could work out some sort of milder form of 'Birthright' kind of game as well, or various things. Battlesystem was, I think, one of several attempts to revitalize that aspect of the game that ultimately failed. Court intrigue is fun, but D&D doesn't really support it well. You need rules that outline how to progress through stories and really do a better job of defining character's capabilities. OA does it better than any other part of 1e. 3e can do it fairly well, which is maybe its strongest suite really.This might all be true if you assume that antagonism must involve different game participants taking each side. However, because the antagonism is at the CHARACTER level, the participants are free to make decisions about any or all sides in the conflict, THEY aren't on any side, inherently, because they aren't part of the narrative. It would be perfectly feasible for a player in a game to say something like "Wait, when the guy in the helmet raises his visor, its General Zongo, my family's nemesis! I channel all my anger into one mighty surprise attack against him!" Obviously there may be game mechanics that govern the details of what the player can establish, when, how often, to what degree, who else needs to concur, etc. The conflict between the PC and General Zongo is no less a conflict simply because it was arranged by the same game participant who decides what the PC does about it.I would say that one considers one's knowledge of a particular person, and generally only a fairly significant understanding of that person leads to good presents. It isn't exactly controversial to ask people what they want. Anyway, the analogy shouldn't be stretched too far. You wouldn't consider it an appropriate present for me to buy you a coupon to have your old sick cat euthenized. I think maybe I'd ask before I introduced a plot element that totally re-arranged the basis of your character's history or something too.I think this is a perfectly OK way to play, but the way you state it is as if it is THE way it HAS to be, not just one of many options. Now, I don't think you and I are anywhere near disagreeing that we both play an RPG, or think the other guy's playing style is somehow badwrongfun or anything like that. HOWEVER, I've heard much more militant versions of what you stated here that basically do amount to that, many times! There are people that have posted a bit here even that have pretty much told me that what I do isn't RPing, isn't a game, etc. You may hear [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] that way at times, but I think, at worst, he's just got strong preferences of his own. You could probably go through his activity over the last year and find a LOT of times he's been told he's off the reservation and not even playing an RPG. Its a bit like the old Edition Wars where certain things just got to be silly.Anyway, not that we're fighting, this is a fun conversation, and I don't even totally disagree with you, there's a very strong tradition of D&D where what you're saying is how its played. I even like a lot of those games, in moderation. Yeah, I meant 'grown up like weeds' more than 'as in more mature' in some fashion. I think we can safely say that playing ANY kind of RPG is often seen by the world as childish, lol. I actually think Gygaxian D&D is a very clever and surprisingly 'mature' game in terms of the evolution of its forms. Its restricted enough that it got there in a relatively short period of 5-6 years, but Gary himself was quite good at welding together game elements to do what he wanted. OD&D is messy, but once you mix in Greyhawk it is a pretty tight dungeon crawl game. The higher level/other elements are a bit 'out there', but it does dungeons really well. Heck, Mentzer is really just a distillation of that one part of OD&D.Well... I think as long as each player is associated with a character, and that there are genuine mechanical constraints on the player's game activities, they're pretty much playing an RPG. Its a different kind of game than classic D&D maybe, but there's still a lot of 'game' in it.Again though, I think this concern is only cogent in terms of a sort of Gygaxian-like type of game where treasure and advancement is the main goal and the GM's main function is to act as the opposition standing in the way of that goal. Once that paradigm is discarded, then the concern is no longer present. There may of course be OTHER concerns which are equally significant in say [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]'s game, which he's got to address in whatever ways you address those.Yeah, if you play to find loot and beat the GM's traps and monsters and such to get it, then the non-existence of such traps and monsters, or your ability to edit them away, would be problematic. I could see a game however where the players had the ability to set the level and nature of the opposition, and then lets say that the referee set the corresponding reward (or some sort of game mechanic did so). That could work as a system with both challenge (IE you can lose) and a feasible reward mechanism. I actually haven't seen a game like that in action, though the idea seems obvious enough that SOMEONE must have experimented with it by now!</blockquote>

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