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1 year ago ::
Apr 15, 2012 - 3:05PM
#31
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Date Joined:
May 20, 2011
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Yeah, I get that some people want this kind of play, I just don't get why. Shutting down a chicken uprising, running town hall meetings and training local militia may be the stuff of backstories, but it would bore me to death. I like my fantasy rpg to be fantastic, not like everyday life. You can be a rat catcher in Warhammer RPG if you're looking for that kind of play experience. But, to each their own. Just hope if this concept is included, it is an optional module and not part of the core.
I'm one of the people who don't like the all superhero pg, common weak person npc (this is an hyperbole, don't start yelling against this), and I like it not because I have fun playing a farmer, though playing one for the starting part of a campaing could be fun, I love roleplaying my character's background. I do not want a character to be a commoner, just a common member of his class. A 1st level wizard is an average wizard, all he can have more than another first level npc wizard can be ability scores and, maybe, some background stuff. The part I like then is'nt being average, is emproving from being a common one to be the great, incredible one. I'd find terribly boring being special from the beginning.
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1 year ago ::
Apr 15, 2012 - 11:52PM
#32
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Date Joined:
Sep 26, 2001
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I like the little bit of discussion we've got about what level to start at and playing pig-farmers vs superheroes. It goes straight to the point of the idea: people want different kinds of stories. Some what an heroic story, and that doesn't need to include 10 levels of slowly becoming good enough to attempt somehting heroic. Some want a gritty, believable story, where 'heroism' is there in taking any risk when you have so few hps and such limited abilities. D&D has always catered to those differences with a sliding scale: level. That scale has never been to consistently calibrated. If you want to play 'gritty' you'll have to come up with some 0-level rules, and your characters won't stay too gritty for long. If you want to play 'real heroes,' you'll have to start at 3rd, and, again, not too many level later things that style will also start coming apart at the seams. If 5e were to adopt an approach something like this, the game could be played in very different ways without needing very different rules, and without having to start - unintuitively - at any level other than 1. Taken to the extreme, characters of different Tiers could even be played in the same group. Obviously the higher-tier characters would overshadow the lower, but, being of the same level, the specialities of the lower tier characters, when they came up, would still be meaningful - rather like what I suggested here.
Love 4e? Concerned about its future? Join the Old Guard of 4e"You want The Tooth? You can't handle The Tooth!" - Dahlver-Nar. "If magic is unrestrained in the campaign, D&D quickly degenerates into a weird wizard show where players get bored quickly" - E. Gary Gygax
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1 year ago ::
Apr 16, 2012 - 11:08AM
#33
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Date Joined:
Mar 26, 2007
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Due to the flattening of the scaling/math in 5th Ed, I think this idea could really work (so the high level dextrous duelist vs. The Pig-Bear-Man-Boy-God could be an interesting fight).
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1 year ago ::
Apr 16, 2012 - 11:24AM
#34
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Date Joined:
Jan 15, 2009
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No different than me not finding much fun playing superpowerful heroes of legend. Just opposite sides of the same coin.
My level one pig farmer snaps his fingers and the camp of goblins falls asleep so we cut there throats and set up camp tomorrow my wizard is hit by an arrow and is dying the cleric smiles and brings him back to full capacity.. level 1, AD&D ... shrug.
Them are damn fancy pig farmers.
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1 year ago ::
Apr 17, 2012 - 10:05PM
#35
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Date Joined:
Sep 26, 2001
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Due to the flattening of the scaling/math in 5th Ed, I think this idea could really work (so the high level dextrous duelist vs. The Pig-Bear-Man-Boy-God could be an interesting fight).
The aproach builds in some flattening. Say you had a 4e like scaling, with as much as +1/level to most things. Since it's not 1-40, but 1-10 up to 4 times, it's already 'flattened.' No one's going to have more than a +10 to one things. A character that's traversered the first 3 tiers and started the 4th might be "+10" at the calligraphy he did in Tier 0, the ordinary rapier he used in tier 2, and the Sleep spell he learned in Tier 3, but at his newly-acquired Tier 4 godlike powers he's just a beginner (again).
Love 4e? Concerned about its future? Join the Old Guard of 4e"You want The Tooth? You can't handle The Tooth!" - Dahlver-Nar. "If magic is unrestrained in the campaign, D&D quickly degenerates into a weird wizard show where players get bored quickly" - E. Gary Gygax
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1 year ago ::
Apr 18, 2012 - 5:13AM
#36
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Date Joined:
Sep 25, 2009
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I've never understood why some people want to play peasants and pig farmers. I'd completely skip that tier if it were incorporated into Next.
Some people subscribe to the fact that their character had a life prior to being an adventurer and want to role play the events that led up to the day it begins "for real." Heroes typically don't just wake up one day as heroes. There are trials and tribulations that forged their path; important life-changing decisions that are made along the way. The story of a hero starts long before that character is actually a hero.
This.
Samwise Gamgee was a gardener. Taran was a pig-keeper.
I often like to run campaigns where the heroes start out as common folk who scrape and claw their way out of their dunghill of a village to shape the future of the world.
The story of the son of the head of a knightly order who becomes a knight and eventually heads the same order as his father before him isn't nearly as interesting as the story of a poor stable-boy who avenges the death of his father at the hands of the corrupt head of a knightly order, who becomes a knight against all odds and goes on to head that knightly order and cleanses it of corruption.
Samwise was a gardener, Taran was a pig keeper, but notice where the books start. We don't get chapter after chapter of trimming the verge and cleaning the slop trough, we get tiny bits of exposition and flashback about their lives before they started their heroic journey, plus a tiny piece to set the stage (Bilbo's party, a stern talking to re Taran's incompetence). We get even less about the more traditionally "heroic" heroes like Gimli, Legolas, and I-can't-remember-his-name the heroic mentor figure from Book of Three that leads Taran over the threshold (haven't read it in 15 years).
If you want to run those games, fine, but don't pretend they're necessary to telling the complete story of a hero.
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1 year ago ::
Apr 18, 2012 - 7:06AM
#37
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Not sure if you mean Coll, Dalben or Gwydion but all three of them contributed to Taran's growth (and damn, I wish Coll's story had been written in full because just what we see of him in The High King defines Retired Badass (I wish I could do that link HTML thing).
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1 year ago ::
Apr 18, 2012 - 12:10PM
#38
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Date Joined:
Sep 26, 2001
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While gritty low-power play could be used to 'play through' the backstory of an heroic character, it can also be used to tell stories in their own right. Think about most murder mysteries, for instance. No one in them is particularly badass, the vicitim is often dispatched with a fairly minor 'attack power,' an ashtray to the noggin or a few drops of poison or a letter-opener or what-have-you. But they're interesting stories. Lots of great stories can be told about ordinary people with ordinary abilities, from beginning to end.
Love 4e? Concerned about its future? Join the Old Guard of 4e"You want The Tooth? You can't handle The Tooth!" - Dahlver-Nar. "If magic is unrestrained in the campaign, D&D quickly degenerates into a weird wizard show where players get bored quickly" - E. Gary Gygax
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1 year ago ::
Apr 19, 2012 - 4:38AM
#39
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Date Joined:
Jan 15, 2009
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While gritty low-power play could be used to 'play through' the backstory of an heroic character, it can also be used to tell stories in their own right.
I think gritty is tone, not power... I have a group of characters who are afflicted by a connection to a force we could call the remnants of Io, those who master it are heroic figures who bind themselves to justice like Bahamut and become their nations knights errant and general emergency force, those who do not descend in to a madness their minds decimated by forces they cant control ... they are captured and permanently imprisoned and sometimes killed if that isnt possible. This latter element of the story is ignored in a non-gritty campaign in a grittier campaign the hero considers his job a penance for killing another child in a fit of madness when his link to the force first manifested. In story recurring nightmares plague these characters but in our game for the most part they learn a ritual that duplicates the eladrin trance state and it never really comes up, shrug.
One of these characters could well be very powerful, they could also be just the detective archetype in your murder mystery.
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1 year ago ::
Apr 20, 2012 - 3:06PM
#40
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Date Joined:
Sep 26, 2001
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OK, yeah, you can have high power and gritty, I suppose, though I think it can become forced pretty easily. Y'know the kinda thing where you find yourself wondering why the uberguy doesn't just fix the gritty bits...
Love 4e? Concerned about its future? Join the Old Guard of 4e"You want The Tooth? You can't handle The Tooth!" - Dahlver-Nar. "If magic is unrestrained in the campaign, D&D quickly degenerates into a weird wizard show where players get bored quickly" - E. Gary Gygax
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