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dagonweb wrote:

" Well, there are some people in this world that haven't surrendered their souls to MMORPGs "

*sighs*

What I am advocating is about as different from BOTH tabletop roleplaying AND Wow-style MMORPGs as airplanes are from bikes and boats.

You are a roleplayer. You are supposed to be imaginative. Holy poo, you are acting like the hezbolla as if I come to sell them "girls gone wild" video's.

I will try one more time.

Imagine a small device, about twice as big as a calculator. It is lightweight, it costs less than 100$, it has a large touch screen and it is robust enough to drop and still work. It is about as common as your current phone. It will be quite common in 2012. The (touch-)screen is a high resolution display with more detail than your current monitor. It holds more memory than a room full of your current PC's. Its flash-like memory starts up in 0.3 seconds. You can phone with it, shoot almost limitless highresolution video with it. It talks to you. You can load software in it almost arbitrarily.

Most extreme roleplaying-based application:
You sit in a the roleplay section of your favorite cafe, with some 25 active players scattered about. A quick scan using your handheld tells you 17 of those 25 players are currently playing games you are playing, and 14 are currently with on-line characters in your D&D world who are not in privacy mode.

When you walk up to a preferred player you look at your screen and press a standard query icon on the screen. The screen displays the character in question, and some gossip you heard about the player in question. You query where the character is. The players character is currently in the galleries below the small Arena, negotiating with the ex gladiator now weaponsmith Bakhbar the Gray, argueing over quality longbow arrows. The player in question is a man in his 50s, rather massively built, with a ponytail painted green IRL. His character is a whispy red haired elf with extensive yakuza tattoos and an odd looking psi crystal and a dragonleather eyepatch set with small greenish gems.

You move your character through the busy alleyways surrounding the arena and move towards the character, at the same time ordering an espresso IRL and moving towards the player. Before you move to the player you have your character greet his character. As chance has it you were both part of the same raiding party that battled 3 months ago against VelHruk, a bloated slaad creature that was spreading an infective insanity. You remember that battle well as you had to be resurrected afterwards and you are still paying the local church of Pelor for that little slice of fun.

After your characters have exchanged greeting and a few scans (alignment, detect magic, detect poison, detect curse, possession you know, the standard scans) you IRL sit down, spilling some espresso on your jacket, while your character (a tall pale man in a tattered grey cloak, a web of silver goethic runes slowly ...moving... on the fabric) greets the elf. You then start negotiating. As its a PC your social skills wont have sway over the character, but each time you casually press "diplomacy" (which you have maxed out, plus racial and aptitude bonuses, as well as your psi-based diplomacy bonus) icon on your touch screen, each time your handheld device emits the blue-ray signals to your tablepartner's device and he sees a message scroll by "suggesting" appropriate roleplaying behaviour using subtle icons and phrases.

Then you have an intuition. So you press the icon for your psionics, all your psionic powers scroll down, and you activate one that pierces guises and deceptions. And lo and behold, you see an animation you never seen before, something strange and rather shocking - the redhead elf before you seems to be subject to some kind of strange possession you haven't seen before, one hidden the standard assortment of cursory scans ... apparently the slaad VelHruk still has some minions on this plane, as the emanation was evident. You seemed to have critted your scan!

Instantly you press the icon for the Raghar, your dreaded short scimitar (whose powers you do not yet fully know) and active a series of 4 firm psionic defenses. However your actions are far from subtle. Immediately two players in the cafe look alarmed at their handhelds, and immediately after that their gaze shifts to you two IRL


So *please* get of the paranoid bandwagon of militantly defending tabletop roleplaying. If you want to, nobody is stopping you. But aks yourself, what the heck are you affraid off? Is your identity and sense of selfworth tied up in the ritual act of getting together around that table? Affraid to evolve? Or you want to keep hiding there in that dark little room?

Uhhhhhhhh, Uhhhhhhhhh. Yeaaahhh good luck with that. Someone pass the nachos.

thaX wrote:

I thinks that Psionics should use the Force Powers mechanic.

What the heck is a "Force Powers mechanic"? And how does it make it unique compared to magic?

Otto the Bugbear:

Krys Tamar wrote:

Because it would open up options. Sure, it is an action...but that's one less healing spell in the precious spell slots. .

That would only allow the cleric more spells to cast on himself and such-like, thus increasing the dreaded "CoDZilla" potential.

danielinthewolvesden wrote:

That would only allow the cleric more spells to cast on himself and such-like, thus increasing the dreaded "CoDZilla" potential.

Well, then, I suppose it would have to be met with some other balancing factor...it was just a wish, something I would like to see that "makes sense" to me; I'm leaving it up to others (you maybe?) to figure out what else would need to be done to balance out the cleric.