shadzar wrote:isnt that what "Take 10" is from 3rd and such, in that you stop playing the game and play the numbers instead by playing the law of averages? you just decide that you have a good enough chance for X to happen so it happens, just forget the dice and such....
That is only for skills, and only in situations you are not threatened (ie not in combat).
Yeah my biggest beef with 4e was that after a turn or two in a encounter you can see who will win. And that is mostly due to the fact that you as a PC don't know what the monsters can do. If you had the numbers beforehand you could probably judge the way encounters will go.
Ghremdal wrote:
Yeah my biggest beef with 4e was that after a turn or two in a encounter you can see who will win. And that is mostly due to the fact that you as a PC don't know what the monsters can do. If you had the numbers beforehand you could probably judge the way encounters will go.
In later revisions, that gets extended to more like five or six rounds, because you have to find out what the monsters do when they get bloodied and a bunch of random crap happens. Honestly, while that preserves a bit of tension, it's even more insulting.
shadzar wrote:isnt that what "Take 10" is from 3rd and such, in that you stop playing the game and play the numbers instead by playing the law of averages? you just decide that you have a good enough chance for X to happen so it happens, just forget the dice and such....
Yes. But it is the difference between 'successfully drive through town to get groceries' or 'successfully control a Formula 1 car at top speed on the freeway.' People get tetchy if you a) make them waste time on the trivial shit, b) realize they're going to fail roughly every 20 times at perfectly mundane and routine stuff.
In other words, it is really stupid to expect to have a car accident every 2 weeks (assuming you drive to work both ways, 5 days a week). Or in D&D terms, in the course of 3 weeks of normal travel, you're going to randomly fall off your horse at least once.
On the other hand, trying to jimmy a door open while an orc is trying to split your skull open, yeah. Making a test actually matters.
hogarth wrote:
The problem with Darths & Droids is that it's a pretty crappy simulation of what it's like to play a tabletop RPG: they only stick to the idea that they're playing a game about half the time and the rest of the time they're just goofing on Star Wars.
It's definitely no DM of the Rings.
I think they do a fair job at it. My groups, I think, are closer to Darths and Droids than it is to DM of the Rings. Certainly I've never been in a group remotely as dysfunctional of DMotR.
I eventually figured out what bothers me about Darths & Droids:
(1) There's way too little interaction between the GM and the players compared to one of my real life games.
(2) The ratio of in-character to out-of-character comments is way off.
The basic flow of a tabletop RPG is that the players describe what they want to do and the GM describes the results. But that describes a small minority of Darths & Droids comics, which are more about the players and the GM talking in character, or more often than not, the players talk to each other in character and the GM talks to himself in character.
