Wire Fu Demonic Magical Superheroes

[Rechan]

"This turn" vs "this combat" is still a resource management question. The only thing that changed in the question was the length of time.

Not to mention that, past the first few levels, Rage was essentially a per-encounter ability anyway.

Aye; I was trying to suggest that resource management will be present. It's just shuffling abilities and deciding "What should I do this round given what I CAN do per encounter?"

 

[mhacdebhandia]

and it is puzzles and tricks and other "player oriented" challenges

I am so glad that you have nothing to do with the design of D&D.

Player-oriented challenges are exactly the sort of thing that should be expunged from the official game, and put back in by "old-school" grognard types if that's what they want to do.

Writing that crap in to earlier editions, leading a generation of gamers to believe (at least for a time, thank the gods) that such verisimilitude-breaking nonsense was essential to the game, was the worst thing Gygax ever did.

 

[howandwhy99]

FYI,
Our OD&D campaign includes PCs 2nd - 5th. About 6 months back 4 (or 5?) PCs traded in portions of their life force (or others' life forces) to an unknown "power hole".

Boy oh boy, did I tell 'em not to do that.

So those 4 (or 5) all gained Demon Powers. Some even Wire-Fu abilities. If you take into account my clerics' OD&D rule Psionic rule abilities (and they are Faarrr Out), we are Superheroes.

So just an FYI,
We are already playing Wire Fu Demonic Magical Superheroes in Diaglo's OD&D game.

 

[Reynard]

So just an FYI,
We are already playing Wire Fu Demonic Magical Superheroes in Diaglo's OD&D game.

Awesome. But do me a favor, kay?

If you ever get hold of the IP and produce an update or new edition, don't make that the default playstyle in the core rulebooks.

Thanks.

 

[howandwhy99]

Awesome. But do me a favor, kay?

If you ever get hold of the IP and produce an update or new edition, don't make that the default playstyle in the core rulebooks.

Thanks.

Unlikely, but rest assured I would not.

Not that everyone will like going back to OD&D rules...

But I wouldn't limit anyone's playstyle.

 

[Malhost Zormaeril]

The "bad" has been a part of the game, defining it even, for 30 years. That has to say something about how "bad" it is. inertia alone isn't that powerful.

Let's not talk about RPGs anymore. Let us talk about computer operating systems. Of the OSs currently in use, there are two important ones: Windows and Unix. Of these, Windows is by far the most used -- something about 80% of all computers running today use some version of Windows -- and Unices (especially Linux and Mac's OSX) have a solid second place. By your reasoning, of course, Windows must be far better than Unix, since some flavours would have supplanted Windows by now if it were really that bad.

Of course, the truth is that Unix itself isn't that good, either. Originally, the hallmarks of Unix were to be "portability" and "everything is a file". That philosophy broke down in the late 70s when parts of the OS which weren't files (sockets) were introduced. Portability followed soon after when the various incompatible corporate flavours of Unix were created (AIX, HP/UX, Xenix, etc.). So perhaps Unix hasn't overtaken Windows because it is just as bad, then...

However, there is an OS out there which is "Unix done right", and it's called "Plan 9 from Bell Labs", created to take the philosophies of Unix to the last consequences. And they succeeded beautifully; the system is small, lean, works across a network transparently, handles concurrency transparently, and is generally all-around better behaved.

So why hasn't this system supplanted Unix? For several reasons, among which the license under which the code was released, but mostly because even though Unix isn't good, it's good enough: People already know it, and they've learned to work with it, and if they have a hard time trying to make it jump through hoops, that's how computers work, there's no way around it... Windows is the same; it's harder to program for by an order of magnitude, but the customer uses it, and everybody knows how to work in it, so that's what people use.

So back to talking about RPGs: Yes, inertia really is that powerful. So much that people played 1st-level mages casting Sleep once in the dungeon and falling back on the sling for the rest of it. It's not actually good game design, but we fool ourselves that it has to be that way, and that's how the hobby works. Humans are a difficult species to work with...