Sometimes you read things that you agree with so completely you feel as if somebody has peeked inside your own mind and just written it down - and yet they've managed to say it much more eloquently than you ever could. That's what I felt reading this old post.
If the 5th edition designers take anything on board from anywhere on the internet, I hope it's this.
I can't imagine spending so much time on Character Optimization forums that you begin to follow their arguments.
ReplyDeleteIF I TRY TO BREAK THE GAME IT BREAKS!!!
Whose fault is that, buddy?
It's a really weird mentality. The blog post I linked to just hits the nail on the head: those people don't actually play games - it's almost as if the mechanics are the only thing that's interesting for them. It's a mild manifestation of autism, perhaps.
ReplyDeleteIF I TRY TO BREAK THE GAME IT BREAKS!!!
ReplyDeleteWhose fault is that, buddy?
It makes me think of the episode of Adventure Time where the one goblin is quaking in terror, and says something like "Without a king to tell me not to start a riot...I might start a riot!"
The idea that people who do CharOp don't play isn't really true. People tend to ignore that the really ridiculous builds are there to demonstrate how subsystems interact and synergise.
ReplyDeleteHow that comes back into the game is that when you're creating a 3.x character, you can look at those builds, and the principles that led to them, and extract subsets of the overall structure for your own use.
Far more influential than builds like "Pun Pun" or the "Diplomancer" are the handbooks the WotC CharOp forums put together that analyse each class and species. Those are focused on actual play, and they are extremely useful for boosting character power levels in 3.x without doing anything so crazy that a DM will recognise it as obviously problematic (and indeed, most of them aren't necessarily, except in contrast to crappy builds or when used in games where people don't know the rules very well and can't accommodate them).
Before I read that article (and the others it links to) I lived in benighted ignorance.
ReplyDeleteI think the reason wandering monsters have been removed is because combat is too long in 3e and 4e. As combat has become more involved, the desire to do wandering monsters has gone down. Until combat is shortened, players and dms will avoid wandering monsters because they take up too much of the time they have to game and they want to continue on with the story/adventure.
ReplyDeleteIt's kind of strange, really. I am neither the most experienced nor most outstanding of GMs, though I have played for a startlingly long time with a wide variety of players, and am usually the preferred choice to run the game. However, I have rarely seen any of the bizarre problems that supposedly infest AD&D (versions 1 through 3.5, FWIW), and most of the endlessly debated issues I have never seen. Combat length? Not a problem. Min-maxing? Oddly doesn't come up. Class balance/uselessness? Nothing that can't be handled by any DM capable of hosting a birthday party.
ReplyDeletePerhaps that's why D&D4e never appealed to me: It's a miniatures game with roleplaying bolted on, rather than an RPG that provides for using miniatures to move things along better. The whole idea of live, interactive, improvisational (as in, acting) RPGs is to be unbound by what constrains card and computer games. I like hex-map wargames and all, and love it when their rules are precisely laid out; I just don't confuse that sort of thing with the fantasy storytelling - with rules to keep things even and smooth-flowing - that is D&D.