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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeff Wilder" data-source="post: 4105366" data-attributes="member: 5122">I haven't read the Pathfinder or GameMastery adventures yet, but the Dungeon adventure paths were written and structured to allow for weeks of downtime occasionally, yeah.  They also had sidebars with things like, "What to do if the PCs get their asses kicked ... "This is a tangent to the thread, so I'll forgo arguing it, and just put it out there.  If anybody really wants to discuss it with me, start a new thread and I might do so.  (I also might not, and please don't hold that against me.  A couple of days ago when I was in a very satisfying but very heavy discussion here, I "lost" about 12 hours over two days.  I'm just not gonna do that again.)One of problems I have with "no injury but death" is that it only grants the players two possibilities for their characters: they can be perfectly fine, or they can be dead.  This is a bizarre sort of script immunity, if you see what I mean.  The story can only go to those two places.  The characters can't fail, except by dying.  (That's a simplification, but not much of one.  Folks keep talking about how "it's no fun waiting for an injury to heal while the BBEG carries out his plans," after all.)Granted, in 3.5 the issue doesn't arise very often -- due to the prevalence of magical healing -- but sometimes the story -- in accordance with the rules --  takes the PCs in a third direction ... seriously hurting, and needing to find something to do other than slug it out with the bad guys, until they're back on their feet.(To forestall those people who claim this doesn't happen in 3.5, you're wrong.  It happens sometimes in my game, and, more importantly, I have the options of setting things up so that it's a real possibility.  As I said, not often.  But sometimes.)Can a DM running 4E just decide his PCs are injured and need rest, to prod them into doing something besides seeking more enemies to kill?  Sure.  The DM can also decide by fiat that one of the PCs has chronic diarrhea.  If the average player is anything like my players -- and after all these years of gaming, I do think my players are pretty typical, if not more laid-back and dude-abiding -- they're willing to accept something that happens in the story that's supported by the rules, but out-and-out DM fiat annoys them.  (At best.)  This is especially true when DM fiat makes their character "less badass" and "less hypercompetent" than the rules allow them to be.1E through 3.5 rules allowed the possibility of injury-without-death.  Because it is in the rules, logical or not, players accept that it happens to their characters.  And injury allows more stories to happen within the framework of the rules.  It allows failure, without requiring the failure to be due to death.  To me, that's a big plus ... so the absence of it is, obviously, a big minus.</blockquote>

Verification