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mlooney

Story Monday, May 25, 2020

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On 6/1/2020 at 5:27 AM, mlooney said:
On 6/1/2020 at 3:26 AM, hkmaly said:

Hmmm ... ok, in that sense yes, although wouldn't those other parts be technically also part of world building?

Well, some writers will tell you that story telling isn't part of world building and that it's the important part of writing fiction.  A RPG designer that has that sort of attitude will tend to write very railroady adventures or rule sets that do not easily support sandbox gaming.  I'm all about sandboxing.  Just as an example, based on my experience, D&D 3.x and Pathfinder support sandboxing fairly well.  D&D 4 really doesn't and D&D 5 supports it quite nicely.   Traveller and it's offspring, of course, truly support sandbox universes.

Oh. Right. If you railroad the story enough you can skip worldbuilding. If you are crappy author at least. I mean, seriously, this kind of stories are usually bad even in book, not speaking about having it as adventure / game / ruleset. (It can work in short story, if it's short enough there really isn't space for anything else. But something bigger, no.)
Out of curiosity, what makes D&D 4 specifically bad for sandboxing in contrast with D&D 3 and 5?

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6 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Out of curiosity, what makes D&D 4 specifically bad for sandboxing in contrast with D&D 3 and 5?

It makes doing "on the fly" encounter design a lot harder than it is in 3.x and 5.  Both 3 and 5 have fairly complex rules for encounter design, but they can be avoided if you are doing a sandbox.  The encounter design system in 4 is much more part of the game system than it is in the others.  Of course the fact that 4 is basically a tactical combat game may have something to do with that.

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52 minutes ago, mlooney said:

It makes doing "on the fly" encounter design a lot harder than it is in 3.x and 5.  Both 3 and 5 have fairly complex rules for encounter design, but they can be avoided if you are doing a sandbox.  The encounter design system in 4 is much more part of the game system than it is in the others.  Of course the fact that 4 is basically a tactical combat game may have something to do with that.

I've never played 4, mostly because I liked 3.5 and had a bad impression of four. You're convincing me that was a wise choice.

It even goes into 'abandoning their base' territory, no? I wonder why? Sell plastic minis? There were pushing that for a while, minis as the product, rather than as an adjunct to the game itself. Whiz Kids envy? If that's true, I'm glad they found their way again.

WoW did something similar, had a huge market share, then started chasing the also rans and lost much of it.

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On 5/31/2020 at 11:27 PM, mlooney said:

Well, some writers will tell you that story telling isn't part of world building and that it's the important part of writing fiction.  A RPG designer that has that sort of attitude will tend to write very railroady adventures or rule sets that do not easily support sandbox gaming.  I'm all about sandboxing.  Just as an example, based on my experience, D&D 3.x and Pathfinder support sandboxing fairly well.  D&D 4 really doesn't and D&D 5 supports it quite nicely.   Traveller and it's offspring, of course, truly support sandbox universes.

It's funny what you say about Traveller, that's what first attracted me, but I've never seen anyone use it that way, they stick to the setting. Granted, that setting is big.

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39 minutes ago, Darth Fluffy said:

It's funny what you say about Traveller, that's what first attracted me, but I've never seen anyone use it that way, they stick to the setting. Granted, that setting is big.

When I GM a game of Traveller set in the OTU, which is rare, I tend to put it in the Foreven sector, which is set aside as the "never used in canon" sector.  It's the sector to the spinward of the Spindward Marches.

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2 hours ago, mlooney said:

It makes doing "on the fly" encounter design a lot harder than it is in 3.x and 5.  Both 3 and 5 have fairly complex rules for encounter design, but they can be avoided if you are doing a sandbox.  The encounter design system in 4 is much more part of the game system than it is in the others.  Of course the fact that 4 is basically a tactical combat game may have something to do with that.

And yet I preferred 4 for providing more flexibility and symmetry. At higher levels you didn't have to carefully rig encounters to make your non-magic-using characters' presence actually meaningful. And "the effect LOOKS LIKE this" wasn't so deeply embedded in the rules, so it was easier to make the effect look different.

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1 hour ago, Don Edwards said:

At higher levels you didn't have to carefully rig encounters to make your non-magic-using characters' presence actually meaningful.

I find that 5th ed fixes that rather well.  I really dislike 4th ed, but I grant it has some good points but in general it's not the game I want to play.

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4 hours ago, Don Edwards said:

At higher levels you didn't have to carefully rig encounters to make your non-magic-using characters' presence actually meaningful.

This was the challenge of making the Elongated Man a vital member of the Justice League for most of the Silver Age

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4 hours ago, mlooney said:
5 hours ago, Don Edwards said:

At higher levels you didn't have to carefully rig encounters to make your non-magic-using characters' presence actually meaningful.

I find that 5th ed fixes that rather well.  I really dislike 4th ed, but I grant it has some good points but in general it's not the game I want to play.

Then they must have reversed course. I was watching the early development of 5E, and it appeared to me that they were carefully studying everything that the 4E fans preferred about that edition and making sure that 5E was WORSE than any previous edition on those points. So I gave up on it.

(But like I said, EARLY development. Plenty of time between when I stopped watching and when it was actually released.)

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14 minutes ago, Don Edwards said:

Then they must have reversed course. I was watching the early development of 5E, and it appeared to me that they were carefully studying everything that the 4E fans preferred about that edition and making sure that 5E was WORSE than any previous edition on those points. So I gave up on it.

Some of the early playtest stuff was strange, I'll give you that.

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