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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 9682111" data-attributes="member: 7026594">For me it's another area where I feel like 2E lets down new DMs by not giving clear guidance.  It prioritizes "you can do it however you want" over teaching how to run the game and then offering variations to try once you have the baseline.  Of course, there may have really been no consensus baseline by that point, 15 years after OD&D sprang out of wargaming, and 5 years after Dragonlance established a heroic narrative-focused agenda of play. Having quasi-expendable auxiliary characters to bump up your numbers makes a great deal of sense if you're playing any TSR edition with fewer than 8 PCs.  But running a small squad of secondary characters alongside the PCs doesn't make nearly as much sense if your focus is on an epic story about a few heroic PCs. For the latter mode, doing what the WotC editions do, making the PCs stronger and the death rules more forgiving, is the logical choice.  2E instead defaults to weaker ability score generation and higher lethality death rules than 1E, while reducing the rules support for hiring help and for playing more cautiously and avoiding fights.  Of course in practice nearly everyone house ruled the ability score generation and used the optional death at -10 death's door rule, thus supporting a more heroic tone by taking a step toward what WotC would eventually do, with stronger PCs and more forgiving death rules.</blockquote>

Verification