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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Irda Ranger" data-source="post: 3923178" data-attributes="member: 1003">Thinking about this for a few minutes helps me realize why some aspects of 4E design bother me.When K. Robert Gutschera "does his thing" he has to limit the space in which he is operating.  Studying Chess is easy because when you get to the edge of the board, you stop.  Tabletop RPG's don't work like that.  There is no edge of the map.  There is an infinite "game space" and an infinite number of possible actors acting within that space (all of the NPC's - individuals, organizations, gods, etc.).Also, the game never really ends. You could play a character for as long as you live, if you wanted to and the DM was willing.For all these reasons, Tabletop RPG's are the games most similar to "real life."  We get in arguments about "gamism" vs. "realism", but if you look at all possible games you could be playing (checkers, Wii baseball, WoW, etc.) how many of them have rules for falling damage, drowning, bluffing at cards, encountering monsters, weather generation, gods, demons, alternate planes of exists, etc. etc.Tabletop RPG's are the closest game to "real simulation" yet invented, with the sole possible exception of "massive electronic RPG's" (like Oblivion) that are just trying to recreate the tabletop RPG in a new medium.What I'm getting at is that for a corporate culture that grows up around the idea of balancing a game within a confined space, many of those mental tools and rules of thumb they've established for themselves will not apply well to a game existing within an infinite time and space.  I see that it's a problem in their thinking about Encounters.  Does everyone remember that article where WotC claims to have "discovered" that encounters don't always happen in one room, but an encompass several rooms, as monsters react to sounds and sights they can perceive?  Did anyone else read that and go "Huh? We've been doing that since the 70's; where have you been?"  Their thinking has expanded a bit now (yay! progress!), but they're still thinking too small.  Like drunks looking under the lamplight, they can't model an infinite game space, so they don't bother looking for ways to design a game that works well in one.I trust that someone at WotC is aware of this though, and caries around a little card to remind himself that D&D is not like the other games they design for.  Hopefully this will help them realize which game elements can be mathed and modelled, and which ones should be more "emulationist."  This will create a game that can scale from small-party dungeon clearing to world-shaking events (as any campaign claiming to be "Epic" should).</blockquote>

Verification