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I found something in a campaign blog that I read that I thought bore mention.  Let met state in no uncertain terms I am not condemning the idea, the poster or the philosphy.  I try to do the golden rule, “You play your way, I’ll play mine and you’re welcome to join me if you can at least temporarily play mine.” in terms of ideas. So with that said this is simply my response, not a debate or a discussion really, just my kneejerk response.

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Here’s  the quote:

Now I’m sure someone is saying “What if I want to take a less effective power in favor of more flair or role-playing reasons?”

My response is – it depends on your campaign, but for me role-playing is usually not done during a combat on a level where powers are used.

A less nice way to say it is “You are stealing the XP your teammates earned because you wanted to try something ‘cool’”.

The emphasis is mine. This to me helps reinforce my personal belief that MMOG’s have definitely interacted with all facets of gamers.  It seems that the almighty Treadmill ideal is now insidiously embedded across genres.  It’s no longer the journey, it’s been ingrained in many (most?) players that it’s the destination.  Gotta get that XP as quickly as possible and get to the end game.

And that I feel is where players can be potentially missing out.  It’s not the destination, its the journey on the way.  Does anyone remember the fight where everyone just did their attacks one after another?  Or do they remember the fight where “someone tried something cool” and it failed or not.

Anyway I just wanted to comment on the post.

2 Responses to “Something to consider”

1. Anonymous Says:
   June 14th, 2009 at 8:55 am

   Since I wrote that quote, I will explain the reasoning behind it.
   And I can guarantee you that it has nothing to do with getting to the “end game” of the D&D.

   I do not like 4E combat as it takes way too long, sometimes longer than 3E. We have one player in particular who loves to take overly-complicated powers that are more time consuming but equally or less effective than other powers.

   This was my way of saying “stop it” to that one player without coming out and saying it.

2. Dennis Says:
   June 14th, 2009 at 10:23 am

   And is a valid issue and certainly a way to deal with it. In part that’s why I didn’t link the quote, I didn’t want to give ammunition to the ‘offender’ if it was something like that. Certainly I’ve had to deal with player issues of all kinds, from basic and blatant cheating to players if you accidentally bypassed their turn in initiative order because they never ever spoke up or seemed to ‘be there’ were all, “no no I missed my turn, that’s okay, I’ll get it next time” because they wanted to be martyrs at least in their own mind to players who would pass notes “I’m going to steal Bob’s sword when he’s sleeping the next time we’re in a big town and sell it.” because they were ‘roleplaying’ a thief.

   The quoted part struck a chord with me though as I heard that conversation over teamspeak or read it in guild forums in a MMOG venue where some people would get mad at other people because they didn’t have their characters maximized for the utmost in efficiency. “But I like this hat, I think it makes me unique.” – “Yes but the stats don’t do anything for you, at level XX you should have #001_uberclasshat”. And that kind of thinking isn’t something that goes hand in hand with with a PnP game.

   But with that said, if a player is intentionally taking powers that contribute to the duration of combat because of the mechanics involved in processing his turn are a burden to the others then certainly it should be dealt with in a viable fashion.

   If the length of combats are an issue there are ways to deal with it or at least alleviate it.

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