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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6067138" data-attributes="member: 2067">In my mind, a solid modular game will be what your table likes, whatever your table likes. That's one of the big strengths of modularity: the game isn't ONE thing, it's many different things, to many different tables. I think that a modular game that encourages some easy modification is really no different than what every DM already does for their own home games. Do you identify player types a la Robin Laws/4eDMG2? Do you build encounters? Do you pay attention to what your players like and what they don't? Do you create NPC's? Do you decide what options are available? Do you invent stories and create world elements? Then you're already putting forth some minimum of effort. Modularity doesn't need to be any more complex than the work the DM already does in setting up a campaign.That's part of why I'd present a modular system with a simple "newbie-version" of the game up front. It gives you a very basic skeleton that can be run straight out of the box. It doesn't have a whole lot of options, but it's easy to add and subtract and modify. A comparison with LEGOs seems salient: you buy a basic set that lets you build a castle according to the instructions, and then you buy another castle set and build a bigger castle of your own design, and then you buy the Batman set and suddenly you have a medieval Gotham City and then you buy the Star Wars set and now you have Batman and Yoda and some medieval knight sipping tea in the Mos Eisley Cantina while the Joker, Darth Vader, and a dragon burninate the peasants. That basic set isn't going to exactly enable you to do everything right out of the box -- it's pretty simple. But it works, and delivers a basic LEGO experience. So what's that look like in play? What's an example of that working in 4e that couldn't work in any other edition for one reason or another?Yeah, that's the original LEGO castle: the instructions are clear and it comes with everything you need. And if what you want is clarity and ease of use, you can buy as many castle sets or as many sets from the Medeival World collection you want and make a whole medieval village look exactly like that one on the box. Easy peasy. In D&D, this might look like a "basic dungeon-crawl" kind of a game. Gives you the basic elements of a D&D game (fighters, wizards, clerics, a dungeon, a dragon, some goblins, orcs, and kobolds, some treasure) and you don't even need to think about them. And then as the game goes on, you can add more dungeons, or different monsters, or new classes like Thief and Paladin, and different kinds of dragons, and you don't need to think about them. Of course, the blocks are built with modularity in mind, so that kid with Batman and Yoda and Medieval Knight Guy (or, in this analogy, the guy with his Space Opera Cthuluesque Psionics Game) is also enabled to go wild. So, that's how I DM every edition except 4e. In 3e, or 2e, I don't feel like I need to account for corner cases or odd rules. I feel like I can plunk down some obstacle, and the party will figure out what to do with it, and I don't need to figure that out. In 4e, I feel like I need to spell out what my players' party needs to do to overcome the challenge quite explicitly. I can't just say "goblins live here," I feel like I have to say, "the party has X encounters with Y goblins and spend Z% of their resources and then they can rest because otherwise it's not fair."But this is really just illustrating that when the game is going well, it seems that we're running it the same way, and we'd claim it had the same qualities. There's something about the rules of 4e that make this easier for you and harder for me, and there's something about the rules of the other e's that make it harder for you and easier for me, and I'd love to figure out what that is and why the approach is different. I can certainly elaborate on my reasons, but I feel like I might need to couch them in all sorts of caveats so that people don't come along, read my post, and then try to "correct" me. I feel like if I try to describe the elements of 4e that work against achieving this for me, people are more apt to tell me that I'm doing it wrong than they are to try and help me understand why it doesn't work for me, and why it does work for them.</blockquote>

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