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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6281779" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'm 40 so I sympathize, and no there is nothing wrong with wanting your gratification "right now".  It's just that I think that leveling in a PnP game is not the way to be doing it.  Leveling up in a PnP game carries a cost with it, and the cost IMO often offsets the gains.  Besides, if leveling up is what the game is going to be about, then there is no way its ever going to be as gratifying as a cRPG which can deliver that experience without cost and with a lot more excitement.   PnPs have to play to their strengths; they can't be just inferior, slower, clunkier cRPGs.My advice to anyone who no longer felt like a 'young'un' and was getting to be a grognard and grumbling about lack of time to play and feeling like you never get anywhere is to give up on the adventure path concept.  Adventure Paths are hugely about delayed gratification.  You don't need big world spanning metaplots to play an enjoyable fantasy RPG.  A full adventure of some scale with a tightly constructed dungeon (or even two or three) can be played out in 6-16 hours.  Instead of measuring your game by the number of levels you pass, measure it by the number of adventures you've had.  Supposing you only meet 40 times in a year before the group falls apart, you still might be able to get in 6-8 adventures.  They don't have to be all connected to some big save the world plot.  It can be enough to be big heroes in 6-8 villages.  What's important isn't the levels you have, but the stories you have to tell.  You can level up 10 or 12 times, but if you never had any sense of completion, so what?   Conversely, you can level up 4-5 times, but if you've got stories to remember and retell no one is going to freaking care what level anyone was at the time.   All those numbers on the character sheet aren't going to have any meaning after the group stops playing, but the stories of those times together will.Yes, but PnP will never beat cRPGs on their own ground.  You won't out Diablo Diablo or its clones.   But PnP can produce experiences video games can't even come close to.  Having a GM that can invent and respond intelligently changes things a lot.  It's that experience that is core to what makes a PnP game fun.  Ironically, PnP designs have increasingly been trying to depricate GMs, focus on tactical positions, characters powers, and so forth.  It's never going to work, because as you note, videogames are already pretty good at giving that experience and are a lot easier to play.Those of us advocating 'old school', whatever game we have in mind when we use that term, are advocating it precisely because modern games seem to be trying to compete with League of Legends strength for strength - trying to match League of Legends accessible tactical depth, its huge array of options, and its quick play.   I see modern games trying to be something equivalent to getting in multiple 30-40 minute tactical skirmish games in an evening, as if that's ever really going to draw in players from League of Legends, World of Tanks, World of Warcraft, Diablo X, or any of the other myriad options for getting your viceral fighting kicks.  It's not going to work.You are right.  It hasn't.  If anything, it's got worse.  Tracy Hickman represents pretty much the high point in adventure design, and no one has looked at what something like Dragon Lance did right and did wrong and managed to fully better that.  Instead 2e (and White Wolf) took what Dragon Lance did wrong and ran with it in to a morass of lazy bad adventure design.  A lot of the rest refuse to trust GMs and spend more and more time trying to communicate exactly what they want the GM to do with every situation in finer and finer details, resulting in less and less actual content.   The Indy games have some good ideas, but the sort of people who write Indy games seem to be angsty and angry and it comes out in their designs in ways that don't help their games.   I'm sure there are some gems out there, but they aren't getting more consistant, but rather harder and harder to find.</blockquote>

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