This is an official rant thread. If you are not ranting, then please don't respond. Also, I am not posting this because I am upset about anything, I am posting this because I have been quietly brainstorming for about a week now, and it's starting to rain. My purpose is not to make people feel defensive, it is to encourage character development onto a new level of RP.
First of all, I would like to thank Gary Gygax for making D&D in the first place. Second of all I would like to quote my sister Tai, "An entire generation of roll players has suffered because roll playing was conceived by war gamers and not by cultural anthropologists." You might be asking yourself what this means. It means that the system we use to govern our characters personalities is a stupid and archaic system that was made up by a war gamer. I swear, the only reason Wizards did not make a better alignment system for D&D 3.0 is "If it aint broke, don't fix it." It's not a bad system for beginners but it has way way too many limitations. Good characters should have the flexibility to do things, on occasion, that are malicious, vengeful, greedy, and vindictive. Evil characters should have certain weaknesses where they behave in a generous manner. A good example of this is when Raistlin Majere demonstrated love and compassion to a gully dwarf. All you RP elitists talk about something not being realistic to a character's alignment, and you miss the point that alignments are incredibly unrealistic. No one, and mean no one fits into any one alignment perfectly at all times. In real life, we call actions and comments that are out side of our normal personalities, "mistakes" or "moment of weakness" or "I was drunk" or "Christmas spirit"
When I make up a character, I do not chose an alignment and then make up an appropriate personality. I make up a persona and then pick an alignment that best fits that persona. When I RP my characters, I never think about alignment. I always think of my characters personality. I don't think, what would I do, I think what would my character do. Some times it comes down to my characters experiances when deciding what they say, and how they would react. Never once though, since high school, has anyone accused me of not playing my alignment. Now is it that I don't care about alignment, and I never think about alignment, but my characters RP fits with in his alignment? Answer, I made the personality first and chose the alignment that fits that personality, and I do stay true to that my character's personality. Hmph, we should just throw that old arcait alignment system out the window, and evolve to better roll playing.
My next rant, is Power gaming. You know, it took me a long time to figure out why power gaming is a bad thing. It is pretty ¤¤¤¤ natural for us to want to be the best at things. We want the strongest, fastest, smartest, wisest what ever character in the world. The hardest to kill, and deals a punch that legendary. There is a problem with the power build. It is called game balance. The more uber your character, the harder it is for a DM to create encounters that are challenging. Encounters that are too easy are boring, and encounters that are too hard are frustrating. When all the stats significant to your class are maximized, every feat works perfectly to maximizing damage dealt and minimizing damage received, then you have just set yourself up for a bad time. Either you are bored, or you are dead. Never did you stop and think about what is most fun. You ever notice that most encounters just seem to get harder. I blame power gamers. We have players soloing the rift, and what happens, the rift gets made so difficult, only power gamers have business being there. In the time I have been playing here, I have seen this as a continuous trend.
The more players power game, the harder the DMs make the encounters, the more players feel like they have to power game in order to not get DTs. The answer to this, is to take feats that do not work best for your character, but take some good RP feats. Do not get the very best equipment you can possibly have, but allow your character to have some weakness. Weaknesses and disadvantages generate good RP, and allow DMs to create fun and interesting encounters that challenge parties. My gut feeling here is that if we the players make conscious efforts to not power game, then the DMs will balance our game world accordingly.
Where power gaming is most painful, is how it effects new players. In the Amber roll playing game, Erick Wugic writes, "If I put a 200 point character in the hands of a novice player, and a 100 point character in the hands of an expert player, the 100 point character will kill the 200 point character every time." Notice that if you power build build your character, you are relying less on your own skill as a player, and more on the brute strength of your character. By this you not only handicap your skill progression as a player, you handicap your personal enjoyment that you get from playing.
Now, what happens on Layo is that new players start playing. They do not have enough playing experience to create a power build, and they lack technical skill. They enter into a game world that is balanced for highly skilled players with well built characters. Bad time. We as players need to turn this around. We need to be patient. Not rush to get as many kills as possible. We need to embrace new players, and coach good RP and technical skills. We need to build characters that are well balanced, and then avoid areas that are too dangerous for a non power built character. Only then will our changes be recognized and certain areas re balanced to be more fun for everyone.
AeonBlues
The following users thanked this post: ycleption
Forums
Show Posts