Our "magical tea-party" is regulated by us all being adults and having some basic common sense.
Ha! I was thinking the exact same thing when I registered a domain for my gaming stuff: GrownUpGameTable.com The tag line is going to be "Welcome to the tea party."
To me, D&D of any variety has always been on the "Bible Study" end of the scale, because, well, what on earth are all those pages and pages of detail FOR if not for bible study?
Yeah, the people who are actually proponents of it call it "dumpster diving"... going through twenty different books to find the exact optimal combination of stuff that they're convinced will make them invincible/break the game.
And in 3rd Edition D&D, if you were playing it as written, DMs had to do the same thing as players because monsters had the same stat/skill/feat/spell/class/level systems as PCs.
I'll admit that 4E doesn't look much different, especially since its marketing model is built on increasing the number of options.
I like it because it combines "Bible Study" for the combat mechanics with "Magical Tea Party" for everything else... where pretendy fun time games are most likely to break down is when one person says they hit the other, so they have the most rules for that... and in my opinion, they manage to make combats interesting by allowing them to unfold like a story instead of "I hit. I miss. I hit. I hit."
And by putting it all online and giving a point-and-click menu for making characters from it all they make it possible for a casual gamer to see all the choices without "dumpster diving".
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ninetydegrees
no subject
on 2009-07-22 04:49 pm (UTC)Ha! I was thinking the exact same thing when I registered a domain for my gaming stuff: GrownUpGameTable.com The tag line is going to be "Welcome to the tea party."
To me, D&D of any variety has always been on the "Bible Study" end of the scale, because, well, what on earth are all those pages and pages of detail FOR if not for bible study?
Yeah, the people who are actually proponents of it call it "dumpster diving"... going through twenty different books to find the exact optimal combination of stuff that they're convinced will make them invincible/break the game.
And in 3rd Edition D&D, if you were playing it as written, DMs had to do the same thing as players because monsters had the same stat/skill/feat/spell/class/level systems as PCs.
I'll admit that 4E doesn't look much different, especially since its marketing model is built on increasing the number of options.
I like it because it combines "Bible Study" for the combat mechanics with "Magical Tea Party" for everything else... where pretendy fun time games are most likely to break down is when one person says they hit the other, so they have the most rules for that... and in my opinion, they manage to make combats interesting by allowing them to unfold like a story instead of "I hit. I miss. I hit. I hit."
And by putting it all online and giving a point-and-click menu for making characters from it all they make it possible for a casual gamer to see all the choices without "dumpster diving".