Subj : RE: City] To : All From : yl112@cornell.edu Date : Sat Jul 15 2000 01:43 am From: yl112@cornell.edu Subject: RE: City] On 14 Jul 2000, HAROLD GROOT wrote: > I just checked my own characters. Pulling out 20 at random, there > wasn't a single character that exceeded your guidelines for the amount > of magic that they should have. So if you expect "normal" characters to > need to be "toned down" to meet those guidelines, you have again been > playing in universes with different expectations than those I play in. In all the live campaigns I've played in, I have *never* gained level (AD&D) or rank (Legend of the Five Rings). And you know what? Nobody really cares. The level tells us what our characters are roughly capable of, and we wing it from there. > And these characters of mine only have the items that the DMs have > chosen to make available through hard work. One of my characters has a > "magic grey skipping rock" as part of his total. This is hardly In the one campaign where the GM allowed us magic items, I vetoed the plus-whatever sword and asked for (and got) a rock that could change into a bird (roc? but it was pretty small, say large crow-size) and maybe run an errand once per week. It was more interesting, and it never actually got our tail out of any hotspots. If given an option, I will always take the less-powerful "flavorful" magic item over the power gamer item. That's a personal quirk, though. I feel a go set that will "autoplay" against you is much more fun than whatever weapon nemuranai (L5R-speak for "magical"). > force, only to find it was essentially useless. It whiles away time > about as well as a yo-yo because it comes back to him when he throws it > with intent to skip (i.e. not thrown as a weapon). It makes a good > conversation piece. He's won a few small bets and so on. But if my That's a *great* item! I'd've killed for that one, just because of the fun value. Especially if I were playing a bard/minstrel/poet type character (which I've always wanted to do, but haven't had the opportunity for). > -> I can also be fairly sure that the players will take more note of the > -> surroundings I place them in. Basically, it makes me feel better because I > know > -> I'm not putting a lot of work into something for nothing. > > Well, yes and no to this. Yes, a person has plenty of time to think > about the situation. If they missed something they can go back and > reread things. It tends to do away with "you never said that" - "yes I > did" that can happen over the table. The witty rejoinder that you only > think of 10 minutes after the insult - you have plenty of time to think > of it before you write. There are advantages to PBEM, no doubt. > > But no, the amount of character development is not greater in PBEM games > in my experience. That's because of the limitations of typing. Compare > the number of lines players are willing to type during a move compared > to the number of lines they are going speak in an over-the-table game. > They might possibly develop a single encounter/concept further in PBEM > if it struck their fancy - but in OTT games there will be a LOT more > encounters, problems, ideas and so on. Yes, they have to fit it in to > the time constraints of the OTT game - but there will be so many more of > them that the overall character development will definitely NOT lag > behind the PBEM game. > > All IMHO, of course. YMMV. Very true--because in my experience there's a lot more character development in a PbEM. We're probably working from vastly different samples (as a college student, I game with other college students--or a grad student or two, as the case may be). I don't know if you ever glanced over the Black Wall, which I quit, but there was more character development for *some* of those characters than any of the tabletop campaigns I've been in. Tabletop play around here, OTOH, tends to be on the good-humored side, and has this frustrating tendency to degenerate into battle after battle. (Which is why I haven't yet gotten to play that bard.) Maybe it's because all the rest of the gamers (except me and another) are college guys. :-/ I *do* like battles where there's strategic planning involved; I had great fun with the one time our group was trying desperately to improve a city's defenses against a group of--orcs? something like that, but organized rather like the Romans, and with better tech than we had (e.g. trebuchet). But sitting around and rolling dice and saying "I hit, I missed"--blah. Battles are only fun if there's roleplaying in them, too. The point of this digression being: indeed, YMMV. One of the reasons I've had more fun with most PbEM's I've tried, as opposed to the tabletop campaigns (which were still fun, just not as fun), is the opportunity for character development. As long as moves come out something like once a month up to once a week, and things happen, I'm happy. YHL -- |Fidonet: yl112@cornell.edu |Internet: scott@conchbbs.com | | Standard disclaimer: The views of this user are strictly his own. --- # Origin: (1:106/357.99) * Origin: ConchGate (1:106/357.0) .