Smoot:
Just curious what people think, now that WM style games have been in style for a few months.
I like a lot of what I'm (just now) reading about it.
Only use RAW, for instance. I don't see another way to play, frankly. It's noteworthy that Ben's game started in the 3.0 era and that he observes that players of that and later editions probably won't find that approach strange. It reminds me how ad hoc a lot of earlier editions were.
Of course, the rules don't cover everything and it sounds like rulings are still called for in his games. In my experience, even when there are very clear rules and a very clear map to answer a lot of questions, the time saved just gets filled back up with other questions. The only way I've found to get around this is to just let the players decide things and roll with it.
I like the focus on adventuring and avoiding "town intrigue." I'm one who thinks there's more to "roleplaying" than just talking, so I think such a game would still have plenty of roleplaying. I can see how certain skills would see a lot less use - Streetwise for instance - but I think there'd still be room for Diplomacy, Bluff and the like. The world is dangerous, but not everyone the PCs encounter will need to be killed in order to deal with them.
4th Edition D&D, whether it took from this concept directly or not, seems to establish a similar kind of baseline setting: the world is dangerous and only the scattered "points of light" of civilization are even reasonably safe.
4th Edition also tends to push in the direction of the PCs being adventurers, trained to deal with dangers, not rat-catchers or blacksmiths who are in over their heads from the get-go. So, insofar as this approach advocates that, I like it.
I don't need it for the "huge player pool" aspect. I'm pretty much done playing face-to-face games, specifically
because I'm a busy adult wanting to play with other busy adults (and also because there probably aren't 10 people within 100 miles of me who would want to play 4th Edition). PBF games are already "catch as catch can" in terms of participation.
I'm so tired of the glorification of "ooh, it's an open world, so the players could get in over their heads and get wiped out, ooooh." I don't need a game like that, I don't want a game like that. If my players specifically
want to confront something really tough, I'll happily serve that up, but I'm not interested in trying to signal to them that something is too tough for them and that they shouldn't fight it, and I don't want to either fudge dice or deal with a wholesale replacement of characters.
That has a lot to do with the prep this approach seems to require, which is the biggest turn off for me. Ben likes layered, logical history, and a detailed map peppered with interesting (and logical!) things. I don't. I like an unknown and unknowable history that lets me put in things that are awesome and fun and I like to focus my effort on creating things I
know will get used, because they're just about to, rather than on things that might never get used, or only get used when the players are hugely powerful and can just squash them.
I also like creating things with my players, so if they want to collaborate with me on a detailed history, I'm all for it. That way, even if it never comes up in game, at least we all know the details and can enjoy those, and even sprinkle references to them in games for our characters to blithely ignore.
That said, I am envious of the exploration approach that some DMs can implement. Back before I gave up and when to improv and collaboration based games, I tried it but could never pull it off. Now I'm edging back in that direction, but since I'm never going to premake a lot of stuff, I'll probably never really get it to work.
I'd play in this style of game, if it was with a system or edition I didn't find atrocious. But I probably wouldn't run one quite like it.
Edit: Another aspect of the game I think would grate on me is the apparent emphasis on death being the only way (or at least the primary way) to fail. One nice thing about set missions and plots is that the players can fail without even a scratch, and can win even if they're killed to the last person.
Edit: One downside with the "PHB only" approach is that this would seem to block the possibility of the DM say, offering a skill challenge instead of a gout of flame when the players "foolishly" stumble into the lair of a dragon who is too much for them. Skill challenges tend to step outside of how skills "typically" work and so might tend to veer away from the "players decide what is possible" approach. But it doesn't have to veer all that much, and this is already not the only thing a DM would have to make a ruling on.
This message was last edited by the user at 15:58, Tue 09 Oct 2018.