DIE, TWENTY!

[athelind]

It has come to my attention that many D&D players spend a great deal of time, energy and effort complaining about core concepts in the system: Alignment, Class, Level, the Magic System, incompatibility between optional rules sets, and even things that exist at the setting level rather than the mechanical level, such as the perponderance of monsters

Comments

[rikoshi]

No, I think that ol' Athe actually has a pretty good point, here. I think it goes beyond the fact that Ironclaw features squirrels with breasts, too. :)

[bfdragon]

Worst, comment, ever.

[athelind]

I dunno; check out Rooth's, below.

[baiji]

Myself, a play D&D a lot, just because WWTA(old version), IC/JC, World Tree, and Alternity groups tend to be outright rare. I-MOO, I hold that some of trouble comes from overpowering urge to keep things leveled in the d20 system, so a lot of good ideas are tossed away/dimissed without considering the merit in it, or given painfully lacking systems (prestige classes: I wanna be a freaking ape lord now by nabbit.) Blue planet system for say doesn't even to balance, a soldier would outdo a scientist in combat and a orca would bite the same soldier in half in a second. And least not get started on the great whites. Not to say that control is bad, but ignore it a little to streamline a good thing in or to make changes for the better

[athelind]

To quote one of my own Laws of Gaming from 'way back: Game balance is a myth. There is only game bias. If your character rules go to ridiculous lengths to insure that everyone is approximately equal in combat, then that demonstrates that combat is the Most Important Thing In The Game.

The Blue Planet soldier might scrag the scientist without a thought, and the Orca might effortlessly bite the soldier in half in retaliation -- but they're BOTH screwed when it's time to analyze the alien artifact.

One of my favorite things to do as a player is to play a formidable combatant -- say, a fire-breathing dragon -- dropped into circumstances where his physical prowess is of only minor utility -- say, the intrigue of human court politics.

[reveille_d]

I play d20 D&D a lot, and I'm sick of it. I want to play something new, but of the two other games that aren't D20 that I could possibly get in to (or even know about), one is Werewolf/Mage/Etc and already has NINE PEOPLE in it, and the other is Hackmaster, which I despise.

[normanrafferty]

I've seen this with other games, though. Like, say, fans of GURPS who think of everything in GURPS terms. It's not just d20.

[athelind]

Yes, but note: I didn't say "d20 Players", I said D&D players.

There's a difference between saying "I can use this system to adapt this genre or concept" and saying "I can't shoehorn this idea into the highly specific genre conventions of this particular game, therefore I'm just going to shrug it off."

You noted the other night that nothing in fantasy literature much resembles D&D's fire-and-forget "Vancian" magic -- not even Vance's own work, and in many cases, not even novels based on D&D. You ALSO noted that the one thing most of the non-D&D d20 Fantasy settings do is change the magic system.

[rooth]

Folk magic and consecrated ritual tools in magickal practice can work in D&D. Anyone who says otherwise has a limited imagination

[athelind]

Please note, once again, that when I discuss "game design", I don't mean just "designing a campaign for someone else's rules system" -- I mean game DESIGN, making the choices about system as well as setting from ground up.

That's the most consistent entertainment value I've gotten out of this whole silly hobby in the last decade. Somehow, hearing someone say, "What's the point? Everyone's just gonna wind up playing D&D anyway" just doesn't strike me as useful or productive.