Will the real Mike Mearls please stand up?

[Bedrockgames]

Pffft. It's not like there were games that called a GM a "storyteller" or something stupid like that!

Yeah, that was kind of my point. It was building before vampire came around, but after the success of WoD you saw TSR rushing to catch up (i was really into ravenloft and you could clearly see this escalate as the 90s progressed).

 

[jadrax]

The truly sad thing is this: running those with the railroading stripped out, the adventure became more interesting when players killed the NPCs they weren't supposed to or when they stopped/started events that were on a track. It involved a bit of forethought to run them this way, but they turned out so much better than how they were initially meant to function.

Yes. I don't believe in unkillable NPCs, so if I do run a scenario with one I always let them die (which they tend to, as their only defence is plot invulnerability). Every time this has happened it has been fantastic, it has always really opened the scenario up.

 

[JRRNeiklot]

Heh, we broke one of the Dragonlance modules. There was supposed to be a war in which the town lost. We recruited all the strongest men in town, gathered all the oil from miles around, had them all toss oil with every means at their command. Bsrrels, buckets, flasks, etc. We followed that up with torches, flaming arrows, and a fireball or two. End result, we burned down the docks and a good quarter of the town, but won the war, and thus made the rest of the module not happen.

 

[Balesir]

Pffft. It's not like there were games that called a GM a "storyteller" or something stupid like that!

Yep - some reasonable-ish game systems, and some absolutely amazing setting ideas, but the most egregiously misnamed game series ever! "Storytelling" my rear end...

 

[Balesir]

And I don't think it's going, 5th Ed has a nice BECMI/1st Ed AD&D feel, where no one is looking out for you.

I guess this fits into the "combat as war" idea; I find that it has a flaw as far as "playing D&D" is concerned. Take the B2 "Caves of Chaos" dungeon, for example. Either the DM is looking out for you, or any adventuring group going in there gets wiped. Monster groups that see/hear/sense adventurers going into other groups' areas just wait until they emerge, low on resources and loaded with loot, and jump them. Rinse, repeat as necessary. The logical response is not to go in as "adventurers" - just take an army. The same approach made sense of many of the old scenarios. I remember the Tomb of Horrors being tackled, after the party found the oh-so-hard mithril doors, by parlaying with the dwarf king to let him have the mithril doors (estimated ~1/4 ton of mithril) if he and his people mined out the tomb from the outside in. Screw the traps - just remove the walls.

4e gets around this by structuring itself as a game - that you roleplay characters through. The army won't be able to hit the DCs the adventure needs - so don't bother to bring one. What can achieve the adventure tasks is a party of appropriate level PCs - so that's what you send. It's "fake" and contrived, to be sure - but it's coherent as a setup and it's fun.

I am in no way advocating killer-DMs; but I felt 4th Ed went too child-safety (round edges) route.

If death happens too many times between level 1 and level 30 it just becomes a drag. 4e does what it does exceedingly well; this naturally means that, if you want to do something else you need to use a different system.

 

[Herschel]

http://www.enworld.org/forum/d-d-4th-edition-discussion/290165-mike-mearls-ruined-everything-2.html

The REAL effect of Mike Mearls on our world. Read it, learn it, be afraid, be very, very afraid. Don't blink. Don't even blink.

 

[Nathal]

This is the sort of thing that keeps me coming back to these forums. Sounds like it was a fun game!

I remember the Tomb of Horrors being tackled, after the party found the oh-so-hard mithril doors, by parlaying with the dwarf king to let him have the mithril doors (estimated ~1/4 ton of mithril) if he and his people mined out the tomb from the outside in. Screw the traps - just remove the walls.

 

[F700]

Player entitlement has gone to far when a game designer is expected to justify his decisions like he's an elected official tasked with protecting the public trust.

Mearls is a guy with a job. His personal opinions don't count. The company line counts.

If the company is promoting 4e, he's expected to love 4e. If he's told to down talk 3e, he's expected to trash 3e. If the company decides 5e should be appealing to 3e players, I'd expect him to talk up 3e. And if he winds up working at Paizo in the future, expect him to extoll the virtues of Pathfinder.

Look at it this way: Do you care if the kid making your Big Mac personally prefers Whoppers? As long as he puts the beef on the bun and slathers it in secret sauce what difference does it make?

 

[Lord Mhoram]

I remember the Tomb of Horrors being tackled, after the party found the oh-so-hard mithril doors, by parlaying with the dwarf king to let him have the mithril doors (estimated ~1/4 ton of mithril) if he and his people mined out the tomb from the outside in. Screw the traps - just remove the walls..

Heh, we broke one of the Dragonlance modules. There was supposed to be a war in which the town lost. We recruited all the strongest men in town, gathered all the oil from miles around, had them all toss oil with every means at their command. Bsrrels, buckets, flasks, etc. We followed that up with torches, flaming arrows, and a fireball or two. End result, we burned down the docks and a good quarter of the town, but won the war, and thus made the rest of the module not happen.

These are things I game for.

I did the same thing in a champions game. I suggested a course of action - the GM looked at me in shock, then theatrically buried his face in his hands. It completely sidestepped what he had in mind, but he went with it.

My wife has a great talent for short circuiting adventures like that. She just thinks like that.

 

[Balesir]

This is the sort of thing that keeps me coming back to these forums. Sounds like it was a fun game!

These are things I game for.

Yeah, the problem is that, under the old school assumptions, pretty much all of the adventures are "fixable" using this sort of "engineering solution". It's fun for a while, but sooner or later you realise you aren't playing the game you set out to play, any more. So, in our case, we drifted off to other systems and began to figure out, painfully slowly, what different rules systems could give you and what we liked.

One or two developments have apparently recognised the situation and tried to do something constructive with it. Birthright was a setting that I think at least approached the topic, but mixing adventuring into the pot never seemed to jive quite right with it - pity.

Doing a game right - like 4e did - is difficult; really difficult once you try to stretch out the scope. But I think a 4e stretched to cover interaction and exploration well (i.e. as thoughtfully produced "strategy" systems in their own right) and to add in Birthright-style realm management (as another "strategy" game level) could be absolutely awesome.

D&DNext as it's being done could be a good game, but it's got a long way to go. The "bounded accuracy" will bring back "the solution is an army", making trasure balancing critical (you need rewards that are enough to tempt adventurers but insufficient to pay a regiment) and it will also make adventure rationalisation an issue. The balance of putting focus on the game world when a world that supports the basic D&D tropes is non-sensical by definition will be another challenge. But just because one game uses the D&D tropes well doesn't mean that there isn't another that could do likewise.