I love Swordslinger's whiny myopia. 'Oh, it doesn't matter that those things have circulation in the millions, I don't like anime so it doesn't count' and then tops it off with a statement that shows that he didn't even google the series in question. All of those are heroic fantasy series and don't have a single giant robot in it.
What a maroon.
wotmaniac wrote:
But that's not how D&D works (hmm -- I wonder where I've heard that ...). I think that sabs covered this adequately -- let me know if you need to have all the dots connected for you.
I wouldn't be surprised if authors had this opinion because fluff writers tend to be morons, but it really doesn't work like that in the rules. Even in 4E D&D, a game that wanks to Conan-level bullshit, a thousand elite guards fail to be even a minor threat to paragon-level PCs. A battlerager fighter or a battle cleric or whatever will chew through all of them without even meaningfully dipping into their resources. This isn't hyperbole or anything. The STR/WIS cleric just spams Recovery Strike to make up for the few attacks that get through and if he takes down 8 elite soldiers a minute he'll annihilate the army in about 16-17 hours. There are some weird results in it due to how minions work (that favor characters with surgeless healing, damage reduction, and/or temporary hit points) such that the swarm druid is actually the best army killer, but 'army-killer' builds are so persistent at level 16 that it's a safe assumption that 4E actually expects you to be at that power level.
Anyway, the difference between padding and the Law of Conservation of Detail is application. When you meet random Joe Blow guard in the castle, from an in-universe perspective he's not just a bag of hit points and attack. He's a 38-year old guard who hasn't advanced past sergeant because he keeps persistently screwing things up. He often cuts out out guard duty early so he can spend time with his kids; one of whom is a rare genius and is trying to get a scholarship to the Wizard's Guild and the other is a half-orc from a woman he loved. Joe Blow's favorite weapon is a spear, since he used to be an amateur pole-vaulter when he was a teenager. Etc. etc..
The vast majority of players of players won't know this. Probably the DM and the module writers don't even know this. There's really no point to include it in the game, because it's mostly superfluous information. It's barely relevant even if this biography applies to the BBEG and you're trying to determine his identity for a ritual you want to thwart. But if a player for reason actually cares about Faceless Goon #25, if you dig deep enough you'll get a biography like that. It's okay to provide all of the details in that case because someone actually cares about it. But just because most stories actually can't withstand providing that level of detail, it's just assumed that Joe Blow has a life outside of this combat encounter even if no one cares. Joe Blow doesn't cease to exist from an in-universe perspective just because the DM and PC never meets him, but you don't actually have time to talk about him unless for some reason it's important.
PADDING is just the inclusion of material that has no purpose other than to lengthen the adventure. If the DM stopped the adventure to give Joe Blow's biography when no one asked for it that's padding. If the DM has bandits suddenly attack in the middle of the night because he feels that players shouldn't have just 1 encounter in a day (and not for any story reason), that's also padding. Yes, it makes sense from an in-universe perspective to have bandits unconnected with the main arc wandering the forest and deciding to attack, but if you took them out the main story wouldn't have changed much. Putting them in when nobody would've cared about them otherwise is padding. So would having the PCs meet the bandits on the way to the hidden temple. Or having the PCs get ambushed by a bandit group while carrying away their lucre. Etc.
Padding is considered the hallmark of a weak writer, because it shows that rather than trying to create an entertaining story they're just stalling for time to fill some sort of quota. Now while it's possible for padding to be entertaining in of itself (and it also helps to flesh out a world), the fact is that forcing the players to fight random bandits in the forest or faceless goons guarding the throne room because you have some sort of non-story quota to fulfill is boring, overused, and just a way for a hack or overworked DM to look like they're telling a story when they're not.
