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Feb 5, 2010 -- 6:46AM, smerwin29 wrote:

Spoiler: Show

Thank you, my friend, for having the empathy to understand this and the willingness to mention it.

Everything that really needs to be said was already said by Sean Molley earlier in the thread.  I do feel it important to clear up a couple things.  I was in charge of creating the MYRE adventures, and I also wrote the Ecology of the Rust Monster article for Dragon.  I was acutely aware of the existence of rust monsters, and I was aware of how they could be used by the type of people who give gamers a bad name and make life difficult for others.  Both in the Ecology article and in the MYRE text, I had added text on how LFR should deal with rust monsters (and with the questionable types who feel the need to break the pretty obvious spirit of the rules in regards to them).  All such text never made it into the final versions.

The common assumption was simple: the LFR rules already handle this.  There is already a cap on how much treasure you can take out of an adventure.  You walk in with wealth equal to x gold pieces.  You leave the adventure with x + y gold pieces, where y equals no more than the maximum gold plus a bundle wealth. 

The other rule was "Don't be an idiot."  I would say that a surprisingly vast majority of the players have no trouble following this rule.  They understand that this is a game, and that the admins really bust their humps trying to provide content for the players and DMs to use to make this one big, homogenous campaign.  It's one thing to need to know how certain core rules work.  It's another entirely to go out of your way to be "that guy" and exploit every corner case, and fly in the face of common sense, and do things that are obviously not intended by the rules.

"But you can just add a paragraph here or there," says people, "and then it will be so clear."  Maybe.  But just adding one more paragraph here or there quickly turns into a page, and then 10 pages, and then 100 pages.  I've seen it happen.  And now this game that we are trying to grow and nurture becomes something new players actively avoid because not only do you have to learn the D&D rules, but they have to read that 100-page document covering all of the corner cases.  So the know-it-all, rules-lawyer types get what they want (the campaign staff wastes hours and days dealing with the problem and the know-it-alls can feel superior) at the expense of hundreds or thousands of potential players.

As others have said, this isn't really about the problematic nature of rust monsters.  There is an endless amount of hinky cheating that can be done.  This is about a tiny subset of players who embody some of the negative stereotypes of gamers: socially inept, thinking only of themselves within a context of a narrow set of rules, unable or unwilling to conceptualize the effect of their actions on others and on the campaign as a whole.  It is really just like the gamer hygiene problem, except for the fact that is a lack of intellectual and social hygiene rather than physical.  But it doesn't lessen the stench.

I don't know why you guys just don't add this to the CCG:

"While adventuring in this Living Campaign, on the chance that an item that you have found from a parcel bundle is lost, stolen or destroyed by some means throughout the course of the adventure it is returned in its entirety at the conclusion of the adventure. i.e - Your +4 Harsh Song Blade is eaten by a Rust Monster and becomes an equal amount of residium. Enchant Magic Item can restore it to any enchantment you wish for the remainder of the adventure, but at the conclusion it is restored to its original form."


And on a side note for Shawn: Show

Feb 5, 2010 -- 4:31AM, Thanlis wrote:

Feb 4, 2010 -- 11:10PM, Mirtek wrote:

Feb 4, 2010 -- 9:57AM, soccerref73 wrote:

But if you drastically reduce the XP award to a token amount and don't reduce the gold award,

Why not just make the intended XP/gold ration of LFR a hard rule for Myrealms?

Doesn't help. "Oh, look, it's another 3x3 room full of minion brutes." 

Well, if you're going to worry about easy encounters, that horse left the barn a long time ago. There are enough official easy LFR adventures that you could easily level up a fair ways playing only the easy adventures. I'm not knocking those adventures--some of the easier ones such as Corm 1-1 are actually among the better LFR adventures--but if you are worried that players will level up to X/Y/Z point without facing "sufficient" risks, players and DMs who want to do that can do so even without MYRE adventures.

If the xp/gold ratio were a hard rule for MYRE adventures and rust monster exploits were eliminated, it would at least get rid of the primary means to use MYRE to generate characters with excessive wealth for their level. And that is what is potentially a problem. If Joe Schmoe turns up at a game day with a character who played to level 8 without facing any really challenging encounters, whether he did that in MYRE or standard adventures, he's still got a level 8 character which should be in the same ballpark as all the other level 8 characters at the table. He may get himself or his party killed because he doesn't know how to play the character when his decisions actually matter, but that's a separate problem.