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Feb 11, 2013 -- 11:41AM, ninjazombie42 wrote:

Feb 11, 2013 -- 11:10AM, DavidArgall wrote:

      But D&D is not a game of creating a character.  That is just a tiny part of the game.  We strive to survive and prosper in the fantasy world.  The world is not our creation.  It is our problem.

Creating a character, developing and roleplaying that character may actually be the absolutely biggest part of the game for me and many gamers I know. And yea, the world IS my creation! Even if a dm use a premade setting, he or she is like a diracter adapting a story based on a book, a comic or history, it will be that dm`s interpretation!
How many versions is there of Batman, for example? Or do you really think 300 happened like that in the real world? No, it`s all interpretations! Interpretations by very creative people who perhaps started out as dnd-gamers themselves.
For me the story and rp will always come first! Being allowed creativity and inspiration to create is one of the many reasons so many people love the game! Dnd has always been a game that goes beyond the rules. To focus to much on the crunch and the rules lessens the experience for many gamers who play dnd, regardless of edition!
I know many feel the same, that the rules are the least important part of the game and that "rules-lawyer" is a bad word:p To me that is what makes tabletop rpg`s uniqe and magic! Something so much more than a videogame or a board-game.
But as I said before, nomatter how you play it, as long as you are having fun, you are doing it right!

I agree. half of the fun is creating a character and a world in which you envision. I know people try to create their own settings. The whole game is about using your imagination and being creative. The mechanics are just there for aid and when they stop aiding then they should be changed if they are impeding fun. 

Feb 9, 2013 -- 11:40PM, DavidArgall wrote:

     How much reskinning do you see in football?, baseball?. track?, chess?, Bridge?, or any other game?  The answer is durn little or none at all.  And when you see some, it is with an acknowledgement that the reskinning is producing an inferior game [which may do for special types of play, but is not the real thing.]
     D&D rules are much the same.  You should not have to reskin, and if you do you are saying the game is junk.  We don't want a game that assumes reskinning. 

I don't see why not. If a mage wants to reskin a Magic Missile to do fire damage instead of force damage, there's nothing saying it cannot be done. If the DM wants to bend the rules so his world can be based on Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom, with lower gravity and air pressure, he should be able to. He'd have to work out the carrying capacity, endurance, and jump distances, but it's quite doable. And it wouldn't produce an inferior game at all, nor would it be saying the game is junk. D&D as written is a starting point, not the be-all-and-end-all of the rules. We all begin with the same starting point, but I daresay my game won't be 100% the same as someone else's. And it still will be D&D.

Feb 9, 2013 -- 2:28PM, ninjazombie42 wrote:

Rules shmules!:p IMO they should only be considered guidelines, an aid in telling the story. If dnd looses track of that and gets too obsessed with balance and crunch, we end up with something that feels more like a videogame or a boared game than a roleplaying game.

I'm paying them for rules, not suggestions. I will not be paying them for terrible rules on the absolutly backwards and incomprehensible myth that "Bad rules make good roleplaying". I can roleplay just as well, if not better, in a system with good rules as one that has terrible rules.
    

Balance shmalance! I think all of us players in the group had different levels when we played ad&d, it was still fun as hell. It felt more real, like a story, not a game, that the characters involved were not equally powerfull.

If your group WANTS characters to be of unequal power, this should be handled by making them different levels, NOT by entire CLASSES being more or less powerful than eachother BY DEFAULT. Level is a mechanic that models how powerful an entity is in the game world. The moment level starts meaning different things to different characters just because one waves a magic stick around and the other swings a sword, you have made it meaningless. Making level actually mean something by making all characters of the same level equal makes the game better for everyone, since people who want characters of equal power aren't screwed over by the devs deciding one character class should be arbitrarily better than others, and those who want their characters to be of unequal power "because it makes it feel more like a story" when half the group is sidekicks can just jack up the powerful characters levels and KNOW that will actually make them more powerful.
 

I want to be able to play an unbalanced game if I want, that allows  characters to be on different levels even, without that crashing too much with how the game plays and the system works. To me it is very important to avoid that my game feels meta!

Almost every day on these forums, I ask why one or more people are even playing a game when they seem to recoil at the very THOUGHT that there are *shudder* rules in it.

PS: Balance doesn't stop you from making characters different levels if you wanted to. A balanced game is balanced by default, but if you don't CARE about balancce, you can change things to your little hearts content until the game is suitably broken for you. Honestly, you'd think from the way the anti-balance brigade talks that 4E was LITERALLY a videogame, because for some reason putting a "4" on the cover suddenly removed their ability to change anything in the system.