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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 7679410" data-attributes="member: 2067">"Incredibly Judgmental" of hypothetical individuals? Don't you imagine that's....at least a little hyperbolic? More prosaically, it was meant to indicate a difference of play agenda. "Easy" fun vs. "Hard" fun (like overcoming a "a climatic encounter full of action, suspense, and danger"), and "Social" fun vs. "Sharing" fun (like a player who "is impatiently waiting for actual play to resume so his character can act out his story of vengeance" might want). D&D has left the days of hard fun (like killer dungeons) mostly in the past, and has never been a great venue for pure sharing fun (see, for instance, the archetypal railroad DM who has a story you're going along with like it or not), so it's not exactly controversial to state that D&D might not be the best venue for those seeking those experiences. Someone seeking the most challenging fun they can get out of D&D would absolutely love going head-to-head with a monster in a featureless room, simply ability vs. ability, skill vs. skill, monster vs. PC in a knock-down drag-out assault. That would show skill and mastery and intelligence. There's nothing puerile or boring about that, but D&D might not be the best place to do that in. A DM in such a mode would totally have a problem with the joking - they just out-of-the-boxed this whole challenge! That's not the test of skill, it's just circumventing it! But D&D in general has no problem with clever players circumventing challenges - it's not a game of skill mastery, it's a game of role-playing, of inhabiting a character's mindset and doing what they would do. That aspect makes it a bad fit in general for people who want to optimize this kind of fun in D&D. Someone seeking the most creative fun they can get out of D&D would be delighted if everyone got on board with his personal character's mission and referenced elements of his character's history and actions to this point and felt the same sense of worry and urgency that his character was feeling at that time. That's compelling, there's nothing purile or boring about that either! And a player in such a mode would absolutely tone-police a funny incident like a plumetting golem as "not what the scene is really about." But D&D in general has no problem with breaking character and laughing at a joke outside the context of the game world. It's a social game where friends come together to enjoy each other's company in the moment. That aspect makes it a bad fit in general for achieving a consistent and sustained and meaningful emotional resonance with the plight of the fictional characters at all times. It's why horror (and humor) games struggle. That aspect also makes it a bad fit in general for people who want to optimize this kind of fun in D&D.D&D's also flexible, so you could probably make it more challenge-based or more sharing-based, and it's not like those elements don't crop up, but in a fundamental sense, it's not a game about either of those things. Lean too hard into those elements and you'll find some of the game assumptions breaking down. But the emotional goals served by D&D are, IMXP, better suited to a social delight rather than to challenge or personal creativity. It's why tables have discussions about how PC death will be handled and why a character that hurts the social dynamic (such as by stealing from other PCs) is toxic, no matter how well-justified and resonant their motivation for that action is.</blockquote>

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