Jeremy Mac Donald's page

Congrats on finishing up a campaign with a beginning, middle and end. That is always tough and its awesome when one manages to pull it off.

The Rule: When stating up monsters the monster's best non AC defense is given an extra +2 while its worst defense is given made even worse with another -2.

My Reasoning: Here I'm looking to get more extreme differentiation between monsters defenses. I'm particularly after an effect where the monster has a real weakness and a real strength. I hope this creates more exciting combats by allowing players to make the discovery both of what the monsters strength is and what its weakness is. I'm essentially looking for more table talk about 'not hitting its reflex' or 'go for its fortitude'. We already see this some of the time with some monsters and I've noticed that when it does come up it tends to add to the excitement at the table - here I'm just pushing that more to the extreme and making it even more prevalent.

...I'd love to return to a city AP in the future ( which isn't the Council of Thieves ).

I don't think its necessarily that easy. In a lot of ways Council of Thieves is a better city adventure campaign then Curse of the Crimson Throne. What makes Curse of the Crimson Throne generally considered the better AP is the really strong and often inspired adventures in it as well as a pretty strong cast of NPCs.

I don't think the designers can just sit down and 'do it right', in fact I think that is exactly what the weak point of Council of Thieves was - Council of Thieves was a city adventure 'done right' but without the awesome ideas that underlay Curse of the Crimson Throne. That is not to say that Council of Thieves was completely without merit part 2 of that AP is brilliant - maybe the single best volume put out in any AP and part 6 does not exactly work but the idea is there and with a good DM who is willing to put in some sweat and is good at improvising it has some exceptional potential - with the right DM it could be an awe inspiring climax to a campaign since it goes so much further then the usual 'and now you fight the BBEG in his throne room' which is the standard (and rather cliche) ending for most APs.

In the end I hope the staff lets good ideas for a city campaign percolate for a while so that, when its done, its as awesome and inspired as CotCT.

No, but I don't think playing Hitman makes you an assassin or playing a racing game teaches you how to drive...and I sometimes feel lonely holding to that opinion.

Anyway, as far as I remember, the idea was to use "plus size" models to show "real women" instead of too thin models, aside from very special fashion shows I haven't heard of any "obese" models", but perhaps tha line of thought mirrors these thoughts.

A billion dollar advertizing industry argues against the idea as well. None of this is to say that everyone who plays Hitman suddenly becomes an assassin or anything like that but the very fact that there are national cultures and that populations of nations and regions have likes and dislikes, beliefs and values that differ would seem to indicate that we are picking this stuff up from somewhere.

Jeremy Mac Donald wrote:

Again one of the strong points about the modrn version of the game is focus - while combat takes forever it is at least much more likely to be against a unique and interesting threat that is a reasonably important part of the story.

Again...

If I may quote the late Mr Gygax.

"The mechanics of combat are not the key to heroic fantasy and adventure games."

Long combats equal rolling many dice over numerous hours with people shouted (lately) damage numbers in there 100's - you seen the 'one-shot' a Balor thread?! The thing has 1000's of hp!!! Not overly sure how that constitutes a "reasonably important part of the story". Hp's have become the Italian lira of the D&D World. Bring in the hp Euro and stop the hp inflation madness!!!!

Creatures can be cool an unique (e.g. 1e Strahd and Ravenloft - sure it was the first D&D soap opera, but the castle was cool) without requiring 100's of hp's and combat rules the size of Gone with the Wind.

Jeremy more times than not I agree with you, but this time I'm firmly on Gary's side.

S.

Mr. Gygax may well have said that and he may even have believed it but it really does not play out in the actual adventures he was writing or that TSR in general was putting out. Tomb of Horrors excepted most of them where jam packed with monsters, and if that was not enough there was the random monster tables included in most of them that did not usually actually effect the population of the the denizens whose lairs the heros where usually invading.

Ravenloft was an exception and it in fact changes course for D&D from that point on (the Dragonlance modules are also heavy on story for example and many of them are really excellent in part because of this) but by this point Mr. Gygax's relationship with TSR is coming to an end.

Hence its possible to claim that combat is not what D&D is about but the material in 1st edition, and especially the emphasis on ever larger dungeons by and large belies this. Most of the adventures really are just chalk full of combat encounters.

It was made that way to rhyme with the original song, "Like a G6."

Ahh...I strongly suspected it was a parody but could not figure out what it was a parody of...now thanks to Google and the term G6 I know. Got to say I think Like a D6 is better.

Curse of the Crimson Throne - a Phenomenal city adventure with great NPCs and an excellent series of plots in the city. The ideas on display for most of these adventures where really inspiring.

Honorable mention for Age of Worms - Probably the most epic series of adventures since the Dragonlance series (and this one is actually playable), again the adventures are pehnominal with a chance to be a gladiator, an adventrue with a great battle between giants and dragons in the background and it all kicks off with one of the best adventures ever written The Whispering Cairn.

Man, I need to work on my reading, I thought a thread had gotten unlocked... :)

That was my first thought too.

For anyone who has not seen this, check it out.

Roll a D6

Loved the video and, on a good night, this is what its all about - the DM and the players buying into the game and having a good time.

From a comment made on a recently locked thread.

Probably the least favorite thing about the system to me is skill challenges, which feel poorly structured and ill-explained; the scenarios skill challenges describe are, to me, the most fun sequences to role play, and telling players, "You can use these skills X times, and you need Y successes before Z failures" makes a story element far more mechanical than it should be. (Of course, I'm new to running this system, so maybe I'm just Doing It Wrong.)

Two quick tips that will help significantly here.

Don't tell the players that they are now in a Skill Challenge and don't get to bent out of shape trying to get everyone involved by asking them what they are doing or telling them which skills to use. Just tell them the situation they are in and let them tell you what they are going to do...then ask for rolls. The best skill challenges don't involve the DM leading the action, let the players lead the action.

There is a lot more after this, and even here there are exceptions where going against my advice is actually a better plan, but start here and you should see a significant improvement right from the get go.

Jeremy Mac Donald wrote:

On the surface the 1E example looks a lot more appealing and in some ways it really is...but how many hours do you have for your sessions? Most of us our in our middle years, deep in our careers and maybe with a couple of kids. Do you really have time in your, once per week 4 hour session, to spend 45 minutes opening a chest that was never trapped or even locked and happens to contains the evil priests mundane gear?

Certainly there are weak elements to 'just tell me all the relevant details' but there are some significant strengths to such a system as well.

I agree about the time and my ahem, age. But we have both 3e & 4e D&D (with equal guilt) RPG's that devote an incredible amount of game time to the "tactic combat". In high school, many moon ago, we played AD&D at lunch time, we had 45-50 mins. In that time we progressed adventures and had multiple combats, under the d20 generation of D&D 45-50 mins in some cases wouldn't cover a single combat. A DM can hurry the trap finding in 1st ed. without too much stress, but in d20 D&D if a DM short-cutted the combat system there would be cries of bad, bad DM etc.

I like the d20 systems (3e/4e) but it seems a slippery slope of "add more detail to combat" that bloats combat encounters to time frame that no longer suit my aging body or my reduced free time. My 2 cents on why this has happened - three words "Hit Point Bloat". The caps of yesteryear (i.e. 9th or 10th level) for actually rolling HP's should never have been removed.

If I may quote the late Mr Gygax.

"The mechanics of combat are not the key to heroic fantasy and adventure games. It is the character, how he or she becomes involved in the combat, how he or she somehow escapes - or fails to escape - the mortal threat which is important to the enjoyment and longevity of the game"...

Certianly 1st and 2nd editions combats where faster but there were more of them as well...a lot more. I mean it used to be common to read an adventure where you'd have something like (all rooms marked 12 have 7 Orcs in them). We certianly did more combats in my youth for the same amount of gaming but I don't think we actually spent less time on combat itself.

Again one of the strong points about the modrn version of the game is focus - while combat takes forever it is at least much more likely to be against a unique and interesting threat that is a reasonably important part of the story. The fact that the modern version of the game presumes that there are between 3-5 encounters also encourages the adventure to move the plot forward. I doubt we were actually getting more story development done back then then we are know.

That said one could mix a system with faster combats in with more focused stories currently if one wanted. That would work I just suspect that its not actually what most players are are after (DMs are often a different story - all this combat just gets in the way of their precious story that the annoying players never take seriously enough).

Nonetheless my original point stands...if your looking for a system that gets through combat more quickly then it only makes since to also use a system that keeps the game focused on the details in the story that are actually relevant. Combat gets something of a pass because most players are actually looking for some cool plot to go with their combats...its the heart of the game which is why some much attention is focused on it. Groups vary up and down on how much of it they want to do but for most groups its at least 50% of the activity of the table and it was that even back in the day (just with more combats each of which was less meaningful to the plot).

3rd came out of TSR going bankrupt.

WotC actually continued on with 2nd edition for some time. The Excellent A Paladin in Hell came out for 2nd edition while it was under WotC control and WotC did another print run of the core 2nd edition books with new covers after they acquired the IP.

Quote Mike M

"With hit points a precious resource, save-or-die traps and monsters lurking throughout the game, and player description of actions serving in place of a skill system, play skill focused on your ability to avoid danger and stack the odds in your favor. A 10-foot pole revealed a pit trap, not a Perception check. When searching a room, you told the DM how you wanted to tear apart a desk to find the gem hidden inside. You couldn’t rely on a Wisdom check or a skill. With few hit points at their disposal, players had to carefully shepherd their spells and use strategy to set up tactically advantageous situations against monsters. Charging ahead, kicking in doors, and pressing on without thought was a good way to die."

AND

"In this situation, play skill focused more on your ability to come up with a good plan or figure out the clues that pointed to a hidden trap or treasure. Character power was at the whim of the dice, making the concept of building your character largely irrelevant. Aside from choosing class and race, you had few decisions to make. How you played your character, rather than how you built it, determined your chances of success."

This is what attracted me to D&D way back when, is Mike saying now that D&D is for people who can't come up with a good plan or figure out clues?

He really makes 1st edition AD&D seem like the best version of the game if you have any interest in an intellectual experience that doesn't end with the "optimization" of the character at creation.

He makes it seem like;

1st ed. AD&D:
Player "What's in the room?"
DM <room discription>
Player "I check the chest while standing behind it. Can I see the hinges..." etc

3.x/PF/4e D&D:
Player "Look I've got +34 to search, just tell me everything and be quick about!"

Hmmmm, what game would I want to play in...

Observations,
S.

On the surface the 1E example looks a lot more appealing and in some ways it really is...but how many hours do you have for your sessions? Most of us our in our middle years, deep in our careers and maybe with a couple of kids. Do you really have time in your, once per week 4 hour session, to spend 45 minutes opening a chest that was never trapped or even locked and happens to contains the evil priests mundane gear?

Certainly there are weak elements to 'just tell me all the relevant details' but there are some significant strengths to such a system as well.

I'd let them know out of game that you expect them to treat your NPCs with the same respect they'd show in the real world. Give them a heads up that they are free to pursue their petty revenge, but that they shouldn't be expecting you to just roll over for them.

After that, if they aren't mature enough to take their medicine like adults, kill them.

This...but give them cookies sometimes. Let them get a chance to lord it over the odd NPC on occasion and provide some of the NPCs just for laughs etc.

Its easier to take ones medicine if sometimes its loaded with sugar.

With the hazard in particular I would have liked to have been able to read an introduction consisting of a few lines or a paragraph on what this is and what it does. If I'm searching for am interesting Hazard for my next encounter and have not read this Conan story I have no idea whether this Hazard might fit the bill until I've gone over the whole thing. I suppose that is true of monsters as well but I might not notice as much because I've been trained by D&D to read a monster statblock quickly and efficiently. That is not the case with Hazards.

Jeremy Mac Donald wrote:

While I'm no Conservative fan this is not why the Conservatives have full war chests and the other parties do not. Individuals are capped at $5000 max donation and businesses are capped at a measly $1000. The Conservatives have full war chests because they have been better at getting to their grass root supporters and getting those grass roots to donate. The Conservatives are masters of getting their supporters to all chip in $20 or $50 bucks and doing that on a large enough scale to make it matter - this is a legacy of the Reform party which was nearly completely funded in this manner.

Yes, but I also think that more of the people who can afford to throw in that max $5000 are likely to be voting Conservative.

Possibly but the average Conservative contribution is around $100, its the fact that they can get 10,000s of these $100 dollar contributions that is the real strength of their parties funding machine. Its this area that the other parties need to improve on.

It will be interesting to see how the next election goes down given the reforms Harper will likely be able to institute around election funding. Currently, there are government subsidies for election campaigns. Harper plans to do away with those, meaning that parties will need to rely on private donations to fund their campaigns. This will work well for the conservatives since they tend to pander to big business...

While I'm no Conservative fan this is not why the Conservatives have full war chests and the other parties do not. Individuals are capped at $5000 max donation and businesses are capped at a measly $1000. The Conservatives have full war chests because they have been better at getting to their grass root supporters and getting those grass roots to donate. The Conservatives are masters of getting their supporters to all chip in $20 or $50 bucks and doing that on a large enough scale to make it matter - this is a legacy of the Reform party which was nearly completely funded in this manner.

Liberal positioning is not surprising considering the scandals and controversies that shadowed Campbell.

That might explain BC but these scandals did not make the radar in Ontario and the Liberals where destroyed in Fortress Toronto. There has to be another (or, more likely many other) explanation for the Liberal collapse.

Jeremy Mac Donald wrote:

Yeah but it got clobbered the second time with only 38% supporting the idea, meanwhile a similar proposal failed in Ontario and that was before we had years of minority governments that seemed to frustrate the voters.

Can anyone explain that to me? I mean, why does a minority government frustrate voters? I see it as the best possible outcome of any election. It means that no one party can run roughshod over what we have, and requires some measure of compromise with parties of other ideologies in order to get soemthing done. Yeah, we have to vote every 2-3 years, big deal. Its only a month long. It's not like the Americans who start 2 years before the actual election date.

I think its the perception that not only are we voting every two or three years but also that parliament itself is 'dysfunctional' in the sense that not much gets done because all the parties are perpetually in campaign mode.

Honestly I think this majority was really, really, bad if one wants to see governments that eventually work out how to run a country in a minority situation. If we had seen yet another minority I think we would have really been well on our way to all the political parties deciding that this was just the way it was going to be from now on...but we didn't and anything that was learned in terms of 'how to make minority governments function' will just be tossed. We'll be right back to square one if next election is a minority government and we'll have to endure multiple elections and multiple minorities for their to be a chance of the political parties resigning themselves to this reality.

Furthermore our first past the post system just does not really do very well in terms of creating minority parties - in the end if you want to rule you need to stake out part of the political spectrum or a particular geographic region and be the big party in that part or the vote splitting means your political opponents will tend to win the seats.

It does dawn on me that Bob Rae won his seat and stands a good chance of taking over the Liberal Party...that might make the chances for a merger between the Liberals and the NDP into a centre-left party slightly more probable...still be hard though - Liberal and NDP candidates are practically knives out in BC and none to friendly with each other anywhere in the west.

I've heard Bob's name bantered about as an interim leader until they can have a full-on convention, which probably shouldn't be for 2 years or more. The next election is going to be no earlier than Oct 2015, so there's no reason to put in a leader too soon. And if Rae is an interim leader, he probably won't do anything too severe. No mandate from the party.

Greg

Your probably right. There is no real reason for the defeated parties to make radical decisions at this moment with another election 4 years off. Better to wait a few years and have some time to reflect on the new political reality...including if there really is a new political reality or if this was a flash in the pan.

Aberzombie wrote:

Leafar the Lost wrote:

"King Ralph" was not a s%$& movie.

Never heard of it.

For your education and edification... King Ralph .

Now I wish I had not looked...definitely a case of ignorance is bliss.

The first prop rep vote in BC actually got 57.7% but required 60% to pass. 57.7% is a pretty good turn out.

The provinces will have some sort of say on any proposed federal electoral reform. It will require a constitutional amendment, which triggers fun unwritten constitutional conventions.

Yeah but it got clobbered the second time with only 38% supporting the idea, meanwhile a similar proposal failed in Ontario and that was before we had years of minority governments that seemed to frustrate the voters. I just don't see the idea flying at the present time.

It does dawn on me that Bob Rae won his seat and stands a good chance of taking over the Liberal Party...that might make the chances for a merger between the Liberals and the NDP into a centre-left party slightly more probable...still be hard though - Liberal and NDP candidates are practically knives out in BC and none to friendly with each other anywhere in the west.

As to the Referendum involving the provinces. I suppose they would, technically, get a say but I really don't think any of them would actually care enough to oppose such a referendum.

BTW, since you think a referendum is de facto necessary for a change to proportional representation, do you also think the same for the Con`s intent to remove public funding from political parties? I`d think by the vote count (and those who such a measure would impact) that such a change could definitely not possibly pass a popular referendum... But perhaps via enough Provincial Parliaments???

No I think the public funding can be cut more or less at will by the party in power. In fact it will almost certianly be by the Conservatives. That public funding element is really very recent. When Chretien made his legacy law that saw caps on how much money corporations and trade unions where allowed to give parties in funding this public funding of the parties based on vote was added as well. Now I suppose other parties could have fought him in court over the donations issue but this was one of the liberals 'legacy' initiatives and the reality was that all the parties where on side with maybe the Liberal Party itself most unhappy. The Conservatives of the time where especially close to their grass roots and where very good at raising funds from them (they still are really), the NDP voter base particularly fears the idea that big corporations might 'buy' elections so capping how much they could donate to some diddly amount resonated with them, hence no one was about to make a court challenge to stop Chretien from implementing this.

Thing is this public funding element only came into existence in 2003...it has no history as some kind of inalienable right for political parties while changing how we do our democracy does and trying to change that because one happens to currently have a majority in power would almost certianly lead to a court challenge...unless there was a referendum - since the referendum itself would give the action legitimacy.

Do you mean party lists?

I agree, those are dumb, much much better are approaches like no-party-list MMP used in Baden-Wurttemberg (Germany) which directly emphasize that candidates with the most voters (constituency) end up in parliament.

Interesting but I still don't really think it'd fly with the Canadian voters, your still talking about a candidate that does not really have a constituency - they where given their seat by voters but once that took place they don't actually owe those voters anything - they don't have long term constituents in other words. Ultimately we distrust our politicians and anything that makes them less accessible to us we tend to vote against. This is why the referendums on proportional representation in Ontario and B.C. lost despite no one really liking first past the the post.

The only question for me is whether to retain the separate vote for party proportional share (which needs a scam-proof, but ideally simple, mechanism to avoid parties creating separate parties just to gain maximal proportional share, as Berlusconi`s party did in Italy), or just ditch that aspect completely and say party share is determined solely by the amalgam of votes for local party-affiliated candidates. (ignoring the side-benefit of being to vote for a different party as a whole vs. the local candidate, i.e. the case where you really hate the local candidate of a party which you otherwise support... the current system of course does nothing to help that scenario)

I hate it when that happens - In one case I actually voted for a different party simply because I could not stand the local MP.

If there`s problems with getting enough provinces to support an amendment,

Its not - I don't think the provinces get a say in this at all. The problem is that they had referendums in Ontario and then later in B.C. on whether the province in question should have proportional representation. Both times the motion was soundly defeated. It seems very likely that there would be a referendum on proportional representation before it could ever be implemented and if there was such a referendum its appears very probable that Canadians will reject proportional representation, two of the larger provinces already have in the recent past after all.

As to the tactical voting. I don't think the Liberal's and the NDP are on that good speaking terms currently. This sort of thing would only be on the table if they loose another couple of elections and if that happens the situation might be significantly different...I actually think organizing a merger might be easier then trying to form some kind of ad hoc tactical voting block every election and then trying to deliver some kind of reasonably coherent message.

Thinking about it some more I thought of another reason why the Liberals might die out as a major party on top of the ones I listed above.

I think the Liberals face one huge disadvantage in trying to survive...the Conservatives. My bet is we will all be standing around scratching our heads as the down and practically out Liberals remain firmly in the Conservatives gunsights while, inexplicably, the NDP are practically let off with little more then the odd barb. In essence I expect the Conservatives to spend millions of dollars launching the most vicious attack ads etc. against whoever takes over the Liberal party leadership while Jack Layton (and whoever comes after him) simply don't receive anything like that kind of treatment.

Basically the Conservatives are playing for the long game, and in the long game there is some reason to believe (and they certianly do) that if every election came down to a straight right/left fight the Conservatives would become the natural ruling party. They'd win more often then they lost and by a reasonably significant amount. Hence the Conservatives will use all the weapons in their considerable arsenal to see the Liberal Party dead and if doing that means actually making the NDP stronger, well that's not such a bad thing in their way of thinking. In effect no one loves the rise of Jack Layton's NDP more then Stephen Harper's Conservatives.

Jeremy Mac Donald wrote:

I don't think this is really a coalition issue, to stop the vote splitting their needs to be a merger.

Maybe I`ll re-phrase to be clearer:

Libs / NDP / Greens make a one-off deal to run a unified ticket.
This means deciding the proportional split ahead of time,
and alotting the coalition a single candidate in each riding.
The exact proportion for each party doesn`t really matter all that much,
as long as the coalition doesn`t have a majority minus one of the parties.
Agenda item number 1 for such a party is getting proportional representation going,
so that arranging such matters ahead of time and in such an inflexible way is un-necessary.
If that happened, I would expect the Conservative party to subsequently split up again, looking for a moderate coalition.
(which would require Liberals to rise again)

I`m still interested if anybody knows of analysis showing which ridings were won with <50% vote.

I'd be very surprised to have us go to proportional representation (or any other form of democracy) without a referendum and proportional representation invariably seems to fail where it does go to a referendum (e.g. Ontario, B.C.). The reality would seem to be that we don't, as a rule, trust our politicians, and the idea that we are now going to have politicians that have no constituency but instead owe everything not to people who voted for them but instead to their political party generally means the referendums fail.

So... a 39% Conservative majority.

Do any of you have links to analyses showing the seat count if Lib/NDP/BQ/Green had ran a single coalition ticket, i.e. winning all the seats where vote splits led to a Conservative win, i.e. seats won with <50%?

I don`t even think including the Blo/Quebec as whole would be necessary for such a project, since the coalition only needs apply to provinces where it would be relevant in comparison to Conservative vote. Who thinks the latest results are enough to convince Liberals to accept a coalition mind-set? Would NDP still insist on enacting proportinal represenation, ala MMP, as a coalition demand, given they are now the number 2 party?

I don't think this is really a coalition issue, to stop the vote splitting their needs to be a merger**. I think we are at least one more and maybe several more elections away from that being taken as a serious proposition. It took fifteen years of being in the political wilderness before the Reform and Progressive Conservatives managed to merge and Reform was new and increasingly willing to consider some way forward that would actually lead to a chance of victory while the Progressive Conservatives where just decimated election after election and had no hope of ever turning things around.

The only way I can see this scenario really being viable is if the Liberals fail to recover in the next few elections. Then they may just fade away. The NDP probably never really agrees to a merger because they can always fall back to their leftist base. Their party just never really dies in this scenario - it just gets smaller.

**Personally the fact that you have to have a merger in Canadian Politics strikes me as a real weak point of our democracy. I'd much prefer run off voting. Basically you number your ballot 1 through 5. Once the votes are counted the candidate with the fewest votes gets knocked off and all the people that made him their #1 pick have their votes transferred to their #2 pick, this process continues until some one has 50% +1 of the vote in a riding then that person gets to be the riding's MP.

This would only be really viable if we did this with computers - i.e. our votes and their orders where scanned by a computer when we submitted them (or we actually did our vote on a computer) and the computer dealt with the tally.

No doubt. And I think they will get that chance in 4+ years. However, if the Liberals rebound with some fresh faces and some new ideas, then this may be their one and only moment in the Sun.

The fact is, the NDP prides itself on being a socialistic democratic party. That can't fly too far country-wide without being moderated somewhat. And if they moderate too much, they'll just end up looking like Orange Libs. I don't know what they should do, quite frankly. If they stick to their guns, they'll only last as long as Grits are down. If they moderate, then they'll be indistinguishable from the Liberal. And then it will come down to who's got the most historical baggage - the sponsorship-scandal Liberals, or the socialist NDPers?

I certianly agree that the Liberals may not really be down and out for the count. They could easily return to the stage after 4 years of rebuilding...on the other hand they may not manage to recover and the politics could shift to a left-right split with both sides trying to grab enough of the centre to win.

Hence I don't think that the NDP would become Orange Liberals exactly. The strength of the Liberals has always been that they actually sit on the centre and they tack right or left depending on the mood of the country as a whole. When they tack to the right they tend to force the conservatives into two bad choices. Either the Conservatives basically run the same campaign as the Liberals or the Conservatives tack even more to the right and get left with just the extreme fringes. Same deal more or less if the liberals tack to the left. Chretien's Liberals where a great example of this - despite most of them coming up the ranks during the heyday of Trudeau's left leaning Liberals they deliberately tacked toward the right to exacerbate the weakness of the Conservatives during Chretien era.

Thing is this election seems to indicate that its a double edged sword. Now the right and the left parties have both moved in toward the centre and gobbled up very significant amounts of the Liberal's base. Harper's Conservatives have been so effective at this on the right that there really is no viable possibility that the Liberal's can rebuild their brand using the centre-right elements of the electorate unless the Conservatives really screw up and alienate the moderate centre-right voters (any of messing with the abortion laws, reopening the gay marriage debate or messing with healthcare might be enough to drive moderate centre-right voters into the arms of the Liberals). Hence the Liberals currently seem to have to try and rebuild on the centre-left. That's their best bet but if the NDP manages to remain strong on the left and keep hold of much of the centre-left vote (while maintaining their traditional control of the leftist vote) then the Liberals will end up with no where to position their party. They don't have all that long to pull this off either, probably just the next election, maybe the one after that as well. After that their funding will be so decimated that the task of rebuilding will probably be impossible. They face a disadvantage here as well because, increasingly, their potential centre left supporters are looking for some way to unseat the Conservatives and that just can't be done if the left of centre vote keeps being split. Thus there is a very real danger that the Centre left simply abandons them while searching for a party that might unseat the Conservatives. This is the great weakness of the Liberals to go along with their strength - they don't actually have a natural support base the way a true right or left leaning party does (where the true right wing or left wing voters will tend to stick with the party through thick and thin unless a more hard core right or left wing party comes into existence - as was the case when the Reform Party decimated the ranks of the, already on the ropes, Progressive Conservatives).

The surprise is that it's so blue in the GTO. That's what gave them the majority. One of the commentators on CBC suggested that Blue Grits were afraid of an NDP led coalition so they bolted to the Tories at the last minute. Sounds plausible.

Greg

I think this idea has a lot of merit and its partly the NDPs fault. They pretty much went into the election promising the moon, which seemed like a good idea at the time, after all they would not win so they'd never have to deliver...and then they suddenly started to surge...really surge, and that put things like their platform under scrutiny in a way that it might not have gotten otherwise. The result was a lot of centrists, the kind of voter that might vote for a centre left party or a centre right one may have gotten cold feat. Better the devil you know whose promises at least sound realistic then the devil you don't know whose promises don't necessarily pass the smell test.

Things like MPs that appear to be woefully unqualified and are not even really campaigning add to that image.

My feeling is the NDP may have actually had a chance to pick up even more seats, especially in Ontario and especially in the GTO if they had actually tacked a little more to the right and had policies that sounded more plausible. For example they made big promises that where to be funded by a cap and trade system but the whole thing seemed unrealistic at least in the short order. They should have skipped the big promise at the end of the rainbow and made a point that they would set up a cap & trade system and maybe eventually that would lead to the government profits from this being used for social programs. That is an argument that fiscally conscious middle class voters can buy into - it seems reasonably realistic in a way that magic money appearing practically overnight does not.

I think to ever win the NDP needs to take a page from the conservatives handbook and do a bit of a better job of tacking their party to position itself more or less right on top of the centre-left part of the Liberal party in the same way as the Conservatives have more or less managed to sit on top of the centre-right part of the Liberal party. The danger (for both the NDP and Conservatives) is that this tends to alienate many of their most fervent supporters who are searching for change that is more significant then what the centre is comfortable with.

That is not to say that the NDP completely dropped the ball or anything - their results speak for themselves and the party has already made great strides in repositioning itself and veering away from policies rooted in ideology that are simply to detrimental to its chances actually winning an election.

In any case it was definitely an interesting election.

I suspect that dead is better then alive. Alive he would have a chance to craft his own martyrdom since there would be millions of camera's pointed at him whenever he got the chance to speak in such a trial. I doubt he'd even attempt to actually win such a trial and instead would focus on the opportunity to craft the message he wanted disseminated. Dead he's just a symbol that is now gone instead of a living example whose ideals some feel should be striven for.

Bury him with no fan fare in some secret location and that's that IMO.

There is some serious legislation that prevents the monarchy from doing anything the Bill of Rights and the Act of Settlement being significant.

I am not familiar with Canadian constitutional law, I assume that Canada has something similar to the Australia Act. The Australia Act effectively terminated the ability of the British Parliament or Government to make laws for Australia or its States, even at their request; and provided that any law which was previously required to be passed by the British Parliament on behalf of Australia could now be passed by Australia and its States by themselves.

Canada does have a similar law. Interestingly enough while the Monarchy in the U.K. has no actual power in Canada the Queens representative in Canada, The Governor-General, has absolute power as her representative. There are, technically speaking, no limits, checks or balances on the Governor-Generals power in Canadian law. Technically speaking the Governor-General of Canada has powers that far outstrip the Queens powers in the U.K. since the Queen is limited by the Magna Carta and other similar laws that came into existence mainly to protect the nobility.

Oddly enough absolute power actually seems to paralyze the Governor-Generals of Canada. The recent ones have been so terrified of causing a constitutional crisis that they have completely avoided using their reserve powers even when it would be clearly reasonable. For example imposing some kind of a time limit (maybe 21 days) to how long the PM could shut parliament down for.

The birth of arguably the most important scientist to ever live, or the naming of our languages greatest writer being less worthy of a national knees up than the marriage of a single couple of no meaningful import is a sad enditment of our country.

The majority of the population would fall asleep when contemplating the celebration of Darwin or Shakespeare. In teh end you will have 'royalty' maybe not of blue bloods but if not them then others will acquire the 'crown' and the public will go mad watching and commenting on their antics. Having people whose job is to be 'professional' royalty means you don't have to put up with quite as many amateurs many of whom will go out of their way to push political agenda's one way or another. At least the current royalty knows to keep its mouth shut (mostly) about politics.

There are other benefits to having a ceremonial figure head. The Commonwealth nations can be quite pragmatic about their laws for example because their meaning is always considered temporary. Our American cousins, on the other hand, spend a great deal of time and energy arguing about their Constitution, trying to decide what it means or once meant and whether or not what it once meant is of greater or lesser importance to the current situation.

Expanding on this cohesive nation states must have mythologies that underpin their national identity and ceremonial figure heads fill that role rather admirably while tending not to get in the way of the nations actual business.

The monarchy is bread and circuses but its not really all that problematic an example of bread and circuses and one way or another we will have bread and circuses...the population demands it.

Jeremy Mac Donald wrote:

I read a piece on this and purportedly the royal family is actually a fairly lucrative asset for Britain basically due to the amount of tourist dollars that it brings in.

People come to see the Castles and Palaces..they would still be there if the Mountbatten-Windsors were thrown out off them.As for the Pagentry it could easily be shifted to an elected head of State.

I'm not so sure. In Europe you can't really go five feet without tripping over a castle. Something about 'living' royalty makes a lot of people very excited when many of the same people would consider a seeing similar architecture that was just about a king/queen that died hundreds of years ago unbelievably boring and certainly not comparable to going to a place that is hot and has a nice beach or is famous for its food.

Do you have strong feelings about it? I find it irritating. In these financially difficult times, it seems to me, an uncouth American, that the monarchy is a parasite on the people of Britain.

I read a piece on this and purportedly the royal family is actually a fairly lucrative asset for Britain basically due to the amount of tourist dollars that it brings in.

Now admittedly not everyone gets an equal cut, currently there are a lot of happy restaurant, pub, and hotel owners in the London area that are having a really good week but the tax payers in Belfast benefit a whole heck of a lot less.

Hmm...I'd generally lean slightly away from Kingmaker and toward LoF with such a large group. The more players there are in a group the longer each player has to wait in order to get some one on one time with the DM. KM is about the NPCs and the players interactions with the NPCs while LoF is about the PC group and how it plans to survive usually in a hostile environment and often cut off from easy access to civilization.

In KM the players will, usually, be directing their attention and their scheming toward the DMs chair as the DM takes on the role of a specific NPC with whom the player is interacting in order to gather information or enact some agenda while in LoF the players will tend to be directing their attention toward each other as they debate how to handle the current problems the group is facing and devise a plan to handle the medium term future considering the current conditions they are in.

Hence KM rewards smaller groups more then larger ones while LoF does the opposite all else being roughly equal.

CourtFool wrote:

Five myths about church and state in America

Washington Post just so you know the bias before going in.

He fails to discuss the various reasons why church membership was low in the 1770s. His assumption seems to be that low offical membership must have meant a general lack of religious faith. He doesn't deal with other factors, such as shortages of trained ministers in certain denominations. To be 'unchurched' did not necessarily mean that one was an atheist, deist, or agnostic.

Still his main point here seems to have merit. If early Americans generally still had faith (and I'm sure almost all of them did - even today the number of actual Atheists in the US is vanishingly small) they did not demand that of their neighbors or their elected officials. The electorate could never pin George Washington down on his religious beliefs because he refused to divulge them. This was not a major block to his political career nor would it be to his contemporaries. President Lincoln was very good at quoting the Bible but its fairly doubtful that he was Christian in the way that it is commonly understood (he appears to not believe in heaven if what we can glean from his personal letters etc. is accurate) and he was never really forced by the electorate to prove his religious faith to be a contender in any election he participated in.

Just so I understand you correctly, the character that you are comparing to your friend's rogue is a cleric? That has been somewhat normal in my groups for the couple of years. Controllers, leaders, and defenders all doing low damage along with the other effects their classes/roles grant and the damage optimized striker just dealing more damage than the rest of the party combined.

That is a big part of my problem, yes, and its the 'more damage then the rest of the party combined (actually we don't have it quite that bad) element that is really at the core here, we expect strikers to do more damage...just not this much more damage.

I mean, what bonus does the Thief get to hit compared to a regular rogue? +1 to hit via charging? Backstab gives +3, but is limited use... and doesn't compare to missing out on multiple attacks or inflicting conditions.

My point isn't to say that you need to be optimized to keep up with the Thief, though. My point is that optimization existed well before the Thief came along.

What is the Essentials character doing at level 12 that gets them +8 to hit ahead of your character? And is it really tied to being Essentials, or is it something a similar optimized non-Essentials character could do as well?

You make a compelling argument and I'm reasonably convinced of your contention. Still it seems to me that pre-Essentials lining up the necessary powers, feats, etc. to make this good was, if not impossible, much more difficult - and hence more common. If I want to make a charging rogue, for example, then I need to find a bunch of powers that work well with charges and then I have to figure out how I'm going to break contact and charge again next round while still insuring that I have CA. Its the reliability of the Essentials builds that makes them so powerful. I suspect that its this reliability that makes various kinds of pre-Essentials Paladins extremely popular as well, that marking mechanic can be depended on to work except in extremes and so its a reasonable way to just pile on the riders and modifiers. In essence something that already seemed to be developing into a problem in the case of the Paladin was then ported to a bunch of classes in Essentials...should not have happened - especially with the classes and roles that got this element.

But lack of conditions, multi-attacks, areas, buffs, debuffs, etc... these are a pretty big deal.

I agree that they can be powerful - some very powerful. However they are also a lot easier to deal with, nixing power X at your table is usually an easy fix while changing how the Essentials builds work is not.

Furthermore as potent as these buffs/debuffs etc. are there is a lot of room here for the DM to get creative in dealing with the issue. Raw damage output is in many ways the worst offender for the DM because there is little that really counters it (except lots of minions) - in the end the baddies die when their hps run out and if a player relies just on high accuracy and putting out shocking amounts of damage there is little maneuver room for the DM.

This is especially concerning with strikers. The overpowered Paladin (and I mean within reason - I don't mean some really insane cheese here) is less of a problem at the table then the overpowered striker because, to do his thing he still has to race around trying to tie up baddies. The DM can introduce lots of good excitement just by varying the location of the threats enough that the group is freaking out trying to figure out how to get the tank between them and the threats. In essence CODzilla may have been broken in 3.5 but it was one of the less problematic elements simply because, when push came to shove, it was still the player that drew the short straw that had to play the cleric.

I agree with the philosophy you want - the ability to have the average character and the optimized character still in the same field, and both able to contribute meaningfully to a combat even if one was more effective than the other. I agree that was a good approach for 4E, and one that is has fallen away from somewhat. But I don't think Essentials has anything to do with it.

You may be right to some significant degree that what I see as an Essentials problem was, in fact, something that was already a problem and its more a case that I am just noticing it now. But even if it is true that the problem existed pre-Essentials my complaint does not completely go away. If nothing else we have a case here of elements of class design that are already proving problematic becoming part of newer classes.

I mean I sure don't know what your team mate is doing with the Battle mind and I agree that what your describing is the worst of all possible worlds. At least with the Battlemind though there is some hope that they will fix the problem. I don't see how that is even possible with the Slayer and Thief. Beyond that we can always hope that whatever it is that they did wrong with the Battlemind is not touted as the next great thing in whatever PHB4 looks like.

What exactly are the issues you think need to be fixed with Essentials? The ability to focus on a single stat is completely not a problem, not in any build. The benefits for basic attacks, mentioned above, bear looking at, but are hardly omnipresent. And tricked out charging builds have been around for quite a while anyway.

The consistency is generally the problem. Its a problem exacerbated by the fact that the problematic feature is something as atomic to the game as raw hp damage (because there is little the DM can do to mitigate its downside at his table) and that its coming from the strikers (If the mage is too powerful the rest of the players in the group still have a job...defend the mage!).

All that said at least half of my unhappiness stems from the fact that Essentials itself appears to be built in a manner that makes fixing the problems really difficult compared to fixing almost any other class. It also seems straight out short sighted to create such classes without seeming to realize the problem at their core, finally its the scaling back on two elements of 4E that I felt were exceptionally worthwhile - the attention paid to play balance and errata and the idea that a none combat build can play in the same party as a combat build.

CourtFool wrote:

Chinese authorities block Easter service in Beijing

That sucks.

I don't know anything about this particular congregation and its history, but if it wasn't a breeding ground for anti-government activity before the state is sure working to turn it into one.

The Chinese government, for mainly historical reasons, spends an inordinate amount of time trying to stamp out anything that that they perceive could ever potentially become an anti-government secret society.

Maybe you can send a letter to her family?

I don't think this is a good idea. There is really no way to know how they are copping with this and it may just open very deep and very painful wounds. While it also could make them smile and be a good thing there is just no way to know one way or another.

However, in this case, the downside seems to be potentially much worse then the upside. The upside is a sad parent smiles fondly that some one remembers their daughter positively...the down side is a mother who has been in hard core grief counciling for years has a relapse because of the letter and slides right back down that bottomless pit of despair.

It might do a little good but it could do a whole lot of harm and your basically flipping a coin to see which outcome you get.

But claiming that Essentials is broken? That anything about it is inherently more powerful than what came before?

It just isn't true.

Essentials builds tend to be easier to create, yes, and more inherently optimized. This mainly means they are more effective at the first few levels. They actually tend to fall behind beyond that point, since their options grow fewer in the form of encounter powers.

I don't really see how this is possible. The whole method of optimizing them seems to be about stacking ever more benefits onto your basic attack. At 1st level there are few places to get those benefits from. You need resources in terms of magic items/feats/prestige class abilities in order to just keep stacking up the points, especially if we are going to be getting to some place that could reasonably be called game breakingly optimized. If, out the gate, your character has +3 better chance to hit then mine and does an extra 6 points of damage on average that is pretty good but probably not really that noticeable - we can certianly play together anyway. Where its really noticeable is when your build is 'realized' at 12th and you have been able to extend that difference to Something really big like an extra +8 to hit compared to my attack rolls and 2.5 times the damage.

But even there... I think it may be more perception than actual fact. I mean, go ahead, build your tricked out Knight... and I'm confident if I toss together a casual Fighter diplomat, the differences in combat effectiveness will be fewer than you think.

I'm increasingly skeptical of this. I mean you could probably build a kind of optimized Fighter that also has a good diplomacy but that seems to miss what I'm saying and, I feel, it misses what I thought Design and Development was going for with the original philosophy - which was I could do my own thing and my buddy could chase combat modifiers and we'd both have a good time, he'd be better then me at combat but it'd be reasonably close.

As it stands I have a cleric with a back up 'plan' of acting as a pinch hitter for the group when necessary. The problem has become that I have, what I think is a moderately reasonable (if not really great) +13 to hit at this point while my charging rogue friend gets a whopping +23 to hit. Worse yet if I do land something with an encounter power I'm doing 2d10+7ish for an average of 18 points of damage and my friends damage ratio runs about 65 for the first hit, 55 for the second and 45 for all hits after that.

Its one thing for player A to not be quite as good as player B in combat - we new that from the get go but to pull this off the range of each players bonus to attack needs to be kept within some reasonable range, probably within about +5 really and damage for the better combatant should be maybe 50% again is good or we could stretch this to around double the other guys damage. As it stands I don't even know why I bother to roll, If I need a natural 20 to hit he makes a hit on an 11 or up, damage output is 2.5 times mine even when we are comparing some of my better attacks to his worst. Seems to me we are straight back at the point where if I'm being challenged my friend is falling asleep from boredom while if he is being challenged I'm cowering and hoping they don't notice me, I'll never hit them and even if I did they'd not really notice.

I'm a bit skeptical about this just being because Essentials is new. Now its possible I just missed out on all the ways it was possible to optimize the older classes, but I really got the impression that, while this sort of optimization existed pre-essentials it was mainly the domain of what amounted to exploits. Also I distinctly remember a period when my friend had to get the DM to allow him to rebuild practically every month because his new build based on everything that was broken in Martial Handbook or whatever the new supplement was had now been nerfed back to some rational place. In other words there where at least some broken combo's in most of the new books...but WotC made a point of fixing them, or so it seemed to me. Here it seems to me that we have had Essentials for some significant time and there is no real sign that there is any plan to fix the issues...worse yet it actually looks like its both not really possible to fix the problem (without going against everything that Essentials was supposed to achieve with these simple builds) and also that the importance of play balance is being scaled back in terms of 4E philosophy.

My group all like the offline character builder, so we're pre-essentials completely. Consequently this 'solution' may not work as I imagine it, but it seems to me the problem is likely to arise from essentials characters using the various boosts to at-will/basic attacks which were not that great pre-essentials.

Is it possible (and reasonable) to insist that players choose one path or the other? If you play an essentials character you can't use the pre-essentials feats/options and vice versa.

Works fine for pre-essentials characters I suspect but the feats etc. are often reprinted in the actual Essentials books so this would not solve the play balance issue in Essentials itself. In fact I don't think anything really solves the problem in Essentials. At its most basic level the whole thing rests on pumping everything into your one attack and I can't easily see how that's reasonably controlled.

I'm sure if you play some more you'll find some people using charging Thief cheese but it works the same way as the slayer more or less. Charge, Charge and charge some more then stack everything into those charges.

The blow out in play balance basically forces everyone into optimization. The very idea that we could make 'diplomacy' fighters that where still worthwhile in combat gets left behind (and that was one of the best ideas they came up with in 4E IMO). Its existence also significantly damages the utility of the VTT itself because it starts to get difficult to design adventures for people on the other side of the world if you don't know whether a few, some or almost all the players will be using cheese. Worst yet any newbie who wanders in is about to get a pretty rude shock when it turns out that they made a character without reading the entire 40 page Clerics Handbook thread on the optimization section and then built their cleric to specs.

Meanwhile, on a personal level, my group just fractured into the acrimonious factions over who is 'ruining' the game because the optimizers in the party have finally found their panacea in the Essentials builds. Now either the DM has to step in and make (highly disputed) ruling that some players are engaged in bad wrong fun or tell other players that their weak ass builds just won't cut it any more and they need to understand that D&D is all about combat and picking nothing but powerful combat classes/feats/powers is the only way we can survive in a game whose lethality needs to be jacked up like mad just to slow the players down - or, alternitivly the DM can just leave things the way they are and follow the DMGs guidlines and and have it so the players whipe the floor in every encounter (Unlikely - all the players will be complaining to the DM if that happens).

We have pretty much returned to everything that was wrong with 3.5 in terms the problems of optimization at this point with no possible way out of the mess that I can see.

The problem isn't really with Essentials, but rather with some existing options beforehand which gave significant benefits to basic attacks since they were rarely the core of a character.

WotC has already addressed several of the worst offenders, and the others only really crop up at paragon or epic levels. And, even then, are no worse than many other builds.

As it is, Essentials builds aren't any more unbalanced than anything else out there. Can you optimize them? Sure. On the other hand, doing so is a bit less of a burden on you, and I find that they are generically strong enough out of the gate that it is much easier to focus on options that suit your concept without feeling like you are passing up other necessary choices.

Essentials did boost the power level of feats, as a whole, which I'm not a fan of. That, I think, is the worst offense. But the builds themselves? I don't think they cause any problems along these lines.

My issue in this regards stems mainly from my feeling that the overpowered build is also a very basic build. If some one has come up with an exploit that involves a two forced teleports that bounces a bad guy back and forth for infinite damage the fix is simple. Disallow one of the powers and the exploit vanishes and the character doing it returns back to the power level it had prior to the introduction of the exploit.

With the Essentials characters there is no real way to easily control for their power - its not usually an exploit but instead simply piling mechanical benefits onto one consistent attack until its overpowered. There is no obvious fix I can see to resolve this either. With most issues its possible to just change how good one or a few powers are and the gimmick that is being used that is overpowered comes back into control (whether WotC will do this or not is another matter - but at least they could) while its not really possible to do this with the Essentials Martial classes. Scaling back their basic at wills gimps the characters out of the gate meaning that they are now only playable by those that know how to optimize them back up to snuff (the opposite of what WotC wants with such simple classes), their benefits come from the liberal application of more mundane feats and magic items and every class is effected is such feats or magical items are, across the board, reduced in power.

With most of the other examples of play balance problems one could always hope that WotC would get around to fixing it and, at least as often as not, they did. Here I don't see how the problem can ever be fixed. The solution that fixes these characters works at cross purposes with the basic intent of the characters themselves or requires that the entire game be rebalanced. Maybe my larger concern is that we also begin to see WotC VIPs like Mike Mearls (in one of the :egend Lore articles) making arguments along the lines that the DM is really the only person who can effectively adjudicate play balance which makes me worry that WotC has, to some degree, abandoned the concept of play balance and returned to the bad old days of 3.5 where they pumped out infinite options and just let the players try and sort out what to do with all the play balance issues that constantly cropped up. This frustrates me because I felt that 4Es emphasis on play balance was really one of its best features and, lately, that seems to have broken down or at least become much less of a priority.

Jeremy Mac Donald wrote:

In the end these two elements seem to exist on a continuum with a game with high levels of player improvisation at one end and one in which the rules are clear, consistent and well understood at the other. I'm skeptical that you can have it both ways.

Not necessarily. One could allow improvisation for new situations that arise (such as an archer who suddenly has a chance for an AoO) and these could develop into consistent rules. Nothing in the rules say that situation is not allowed. Arrows can be used as improvised melee weapons, arrows are also ammunition so there is no action to draw them, thus a rule such as this would be consistent with the current rules and become an established rule for the future.

"Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems."
Rene Descartes, French mathematician & philosopher (1596 - 1650)

However if things keep popping up mid session that are then turned into house rules I don't see how that is not essentially a style where players expectations are not constantly being thrown off.

I included house rules in my response and understand that if the group as a whole implements them consistently then they become part of the rules. In fact I'd argue that if one wants to have a consistent game in this regards but also wants to include house rules the best way forward is probably - X is not in the rules - therefore you cannot do X, but we'll discuss by email over the next week and if we agree then X will become part of the rules from next weeks session on, some one will write it up and put it into our groups official house rules handbook.

This is a very rules consistent method of play with the rules covering everything and the group as a whole making decisions on whether or not to include something - if it is included its done through the implementation of a new rule. One can compare and contrast that with narrative systems such as Storyteller and, to some extent 4E with the broad use of 'Page 42', where the rules systems themselves actually institutionalize spur of the moment innovative play.

Interesting essay and a worthwhile read. That said I note that you spend some significant time discussing how important it is to maintain consistency so that the players know what can be expected and what they can and cannot do however, later in your essay, you then extol the virtues of allowing players to improvise. This strikes me as a contradiction. If the rules (even if they happen to be house rules) are to be applied consistently so that everyone knows what the deal is this not at odds with the idea that a player might use their arrow to stab some one as an attack of opportunity?

In the end these two elements seem to exist on a continuum with a game with high levels of player improvisation at one end and one in which the rules are clear, consistent and well understood at the other. I'm skeptical that you can have it both ways.

It is most certainly easier to setup, but actually running it is going to be harder than a 3.5 game if you encourage the players to be fully creative, requiring a lot more on the fly adjustments since you took less time in the preparation stages. In the end, it takes no more or no less effort once all the factors are added together. You still have to come up with everything the players interact with; whether it is done in game or before the game doesn't make a difference in the end, nor does referring to prewritten down rules or making them up as you go along. Either way, DMing is a lot of work to do well, the system ultimately only matters when individual capabilities, interests, and time limits are factored in. I personally would never want to run 4E because I much prefer to think things out ahead of time, so that I can understand the full ramifications of my plans instead of trying to piece something that is both coherent and complete on the fly.

OK I think I see what your saying.

Now in many cases 3.5 and 4E are pretty much the same while 1E is significantly different. For example if the path forward is blocked by a cliff then 3.5 and 4E deal with that pretty much the same way by resorting to skills and the skills are fairly straight forward and in the rules. In 1E the thief can climb the cliff but no one else can and if the rest of the party must get forward then the players must devise a way to get everyone up the cliff - this will involve a complex series of ropes and pulleys and will be explained through the use of complex diagrams scribbled out on a piece of graph paper - all this despite the fact that no one in the party appears to have any nails, hammers, saws or lumber as part of the equipment they are carrying.

If the players search a room 3.5 and 4E look more or less identical while 1E involves in depth description of all actions being preformed by who and when.

If I'm understanding you correctly your actually thinking of two specific elements of 4E, complex encounter design and Skill Challenges and here the use of skills does get more complex then maybe is common with 3.5

Due to the prevalence of pushes, pulls and slides and the lack of iterative attacks there is a tendency to take on a philosophy of 'if your going to have these highly mobile encounters then there should be stuff in the environment to interact with'. In this case I'd agree that such encounters do take more time and/or skill to develop and in fact come with a learning element where chances are DMs are going to make mistakes - mistakes that turn out to have made an encounter not run as well as planned.

All that said this element of encounter design is very dependent on DM style. Its possible to never have dynamic encounters - all of them are essentially 3 trolls in a room and the rooms only interesting feature are something like an unusual fresco that won't be investigated until after the the trolls are dead. Alternatively every single encounter might be loaded to the gills with dynamic features like draw bridges over acidic rivers and automated repeating crossbow turrets placed high on pillars (so that they are hard to get at and disarm by rogues).

All of that said my experience with this is that its, by mid levels, still faster to prep 4E most of the time. I figure on average your really complex room is not really any longer to deal with then the really complex leveled bad guys one often found in 3.5 and even in 4E the 'average' is likely 1/3 of the rooms are 3 trolls in a room with an interesting fresco, 1/3 are a room with 1 element that exist to complicate combat and its only the last 1/3 are 'pull out all the stops' type encounters. My experience has been the DM saves some prep time on the easier rooms though the adventures 1-3 complex skill challenges eat up some of that savings.

The other element is adjudicating on the fly. Now I'm very much of the opinion that this should not be coming up all over the place. The players are reacting to something the DM has stuck in the environment and the DM should have foreseen most of the possibilities before hand. In the end if its an absolutely blank room with 3 trolls the players won't likely be doing anything funny. When the players are getting creative they are doing it because the DM has done something with the monster or environment that has them interacting with it - and what the DM has done generally has to be quite significant or the players really will default to their powers. In essence the DM has forced the issue generally by being somewhat extreme and once the DM is forcing the issue its reasonable for him to have covered most of the bases in terms of what the players might do during the prep stage.

If the room is full of ledges and such but is going to fill with water during the fight the DM had best have reviewed the rules for swimming, climbing and jumping. If its got all these vines hanging from the ceiling then the DM should probably have thought about what might happen if the players want to swing from ledge to ledge on them. Sure there is some 'page 42' work if they start using them as lasso's but in general being prepped ahead of time is a good idea if the DM wants complex encounters.

All that said even if the players do start making lasso's page 42 is really supposed to make such choices as straight forward as possible...sure you can do that, it'll cost an [X] action and be [Hard DC for parties level] and the result will be [Something in line with damage by level on page 42 or a condition]. At its most complex this element is similar to 1E but at least there are guidelines.

ProfessorCirno wrote:

The problem with the 1e playstyle is how easily it can turn into Mother May I. Didn't check the third cobblestone on the right which if you had just asked you'd notice is more scuffed then the other scuffed cobblestones? Trap unleashes death gas everyone dies. Didn't know to twice the left horn of the rightmost minotaur head decoration on the bench? No secret entrance for you!

This is the biggest problem I ran into with 4E as well. The players were expected to be creative and imaginative, but the DMs, as this was LFR, didn't always give enough information for the players to work with. It is not a bad system, but the DM really has to be very good with their descriptions for the players to have enough material to work with.

I don't understand how the skill system is particularly different in this aspect then 3.5? I mean I understand that the list has been cut down a bit but presuming its not a cut down list issue the system seems practically identical in player usage to 3.5. How the DM sets the DCs has changed but not how the players use skills.

In this aspect 4E and 3.5 are essentially the same, especially if one puts 1E on the table and its serving as the contrast.

So this weeks Legend Lore article was interesting but what I felt was, by far, the most interesting part was a link to something that, on the face of it, was not about D&D at all. The TED Presentation on Spaghetti Sauce.

The key point for me came right at the end when Malcolm Gladwell makes a point that if he took the entire audience and compromised to give them the best coffee that they could come up with what would actually happen is that the audience would rate that coffee at 60 (on a scale between 1 and 100) while if he broke the audience down into three our four groups and then made the best possible coffee for each of those individual groups each group would rate their coffee as 75-78. The subjective difference between the two ratings was quite high - we would consider our 60 rated coffee to be basically 'meh' while the coffee we we rated as between 75-78 we would consider just fantastic and can we please have some more.

In many ways it comes down to a different strokes for different folks argument. In D&D terms there are elements that a lot of us like but, in general, we are best served by a handful of different styles of D&D that are likely to hit on our preferences as opposed to one true style meant to uniformly make us all happy. Interestingly this view can be used in a couple of ways. In one case its easy to see how PF can make some people happy while 4E pleases others. On a deeper note it also speaks to an idea that really to be the best brands they can be both 4E and PF actually have to be capable of giving the player base a number of different alternatives in how they approach the game so that different groups of 4E or PF players can take their favorite game and tune it to play in their favorite style.

Here is the link to Mr. Mearls article The Evolution of D&D.

I guess I should clarify this a bit. Keep in mind that all of this is strictly personal preference.

I absolutely love rolling new characters, and I think everybody does. The problem for me is that when you introduce a huge number of options, as is the case in 3E and to a somewhat lesser extent in 4E, rolling a character becomes a game in and of itself.

I am not disciplined enough to not min-max; therefore I prefer fewer character options, so I'm not tempted to min-max and I'm more likely to focus on role-playing.

I recently flipped through Mouseguard, and I really liked a few of the ideas therein. Of relevance here is that the character blocks were very small, less than half of the block (half a dozen items) was mathematical statistics, and the bulk of it was characterization (character mannerisms, goals, social circle and background, etc.)

I haven't had a chance to flip through the essentials books yet, but they sound like a step in the right direction for me.

The problem, and I keep gripping about it, is that if your prone to min maxing its the fewer more reliable powers in Essentials that are really the way to go (for those classes that have a few reliable powers). Its hard to min-max characters made out of encounter and daily powers because each power is use only once. Even if you aimed to do big things on a charge sometimes taking the charging power would mean being forced to take one of the weaker options available for that level. On the other hand in Essentials your basic attack is a pretty good at will - it can be relied on never to change so its easy to just load every feat, magic item, utility power. etc. into doing that one thing but having it do obscene things when it happens...which should be every single round because the power is an at-will.

In other words in Essentials its easy to make a character that says 'When I charge' I get this bonus and that bonus and another bonus from over here and then use abilities that let you shift 3 or more every round so that you can always charge every turn. With the older format it was harder to find powers that where both good and let you charge and nearly impossible to find an ability that would let you shift 3+ every single round - a few times sure but not perpetually.

Personally I'm pretty happy to see this even though I've not delved into the details. I was becoming pretty unhappy that there never seemed to be any more 'errata' on the classes to help improve them. It was starting to feel a little like 3.5 where WotC put something out but never looked at it again to account for the fact that the game itself was evolving. Ultimately what I want is a game where all the options are kept, so far as is possible, up to date and current. New is interesting and I understand that new is critical in selling books but, especially for subscribers, the real goal, IMO, is to keep the game as a whole running smoothly. Here they are doing that and this pleases me even when I don't necessarily agree with every individual choice of theirs.