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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3262542" data-attributes="member: 4937">In first edition, major artifacts had the property of not radiating magic unless otherwise specified.  If this has changed, I must have overlooked it.   (Ever heard of the legendary Head of Vecna?  Great story.)  In any event, even if it has changed there is no rule that says a major artifact must radiate magic, since by definition what makes it an artifact is that it breaks the normal expectations of how things work.And what makes you think he was fudging and not 'rewriting' the rules?  Things like the fact that spells worked differently on planes other than the prime, magic items were reduced in 'pluses' when brought to the outer planes, and clerics lost access to high level spells when on an outer plane other than thier dieties home plane became standard parts of D&D lore when Gygax 'revealed' that thats how things worked.What I find most annoying about all this talk of 'DM's cheating' is most of the things you and the others are complaining about aren't DM's breaking rules.  They are DM's doing things that don't match your expectations.  As an example, there is no rule that says an object can't be unbreakable, and there are in fact obvious examples of objects which aren't breakable.  So if a DM wants to have an unbreakable door, he's not 'cheating'.   He might not be a good DM and there might not be a good in game reason for such a door and it might or might not be a better module without an unbreakable door, but he's well within his rights to have one.When you start claiming, "The DM is cheating because he's ruled the door is unbreakable.", what you are really saying - or at least what I as a DM am hearing - is, "My expectation is that doors should be breakable, that's how I always solve the problem of doors I can't open, and if I'm not allowed to solve the problem that way then I'm going to fall back to solving the problem through metagaming like rules lawyering, whining, or acting like an @$$".I wonder how many of you complaining about the DM 'cheating' would be complaining at all if the DM's same fiat ruling benifited the player.  For example, what if the DM informed the player that his new Sword of Nifty Slaugtering was unbreakable and hense immune to sundering and any other form of damage?  Would that also be 'cheating'?  Would that be equally as 'uninteresting' as an unbreakable door?So, the fact that I played 1st edition for 14 years doesn't enter into this equation?  Sheesh.  I'm supposed to balance 14 years of AD&D experience against some guys theoretical calculation of how fast you leveled up based on his work with a sample of 1st edition modules?  Yeah, that's going to convince me.  "Don't believe your own 14 years of personal experience, I read on this thread how if you plug numbers into this formula some guy came up with how your personal experiences are just a myth."</blockquote>

Verification