The Gaming Den

True. His gaming buddies might have found TPKs (or trying to avoid them) fun.

No one I've ever known wanted to play 'Gygax thinks you're a dumbfuck, so you just have to die'.

Voss at [unixtime wrote:1194295680[/unixtime]]No one I've ever known wanted to play 'Gygax thinks you're a dumbfuck, so you just have to die'.

I don't know. Mind you it depends on the "Gygax" in question. I probably would have loved to be in his early games when he was actually in charge of the game.

Then he went through his rejection period when he was thrown out of the playground but they didn't let him have his toys back. Most of the general impression of Gygax really come from this era. I myself remember saying that Gygax was the "Shattner" of D&D because at the time Shattner was cursing all the Trekie fans.

Then there is the bright rebirth period of his dangerous ... er I mean (one lawsuit later no you can't reuse D&D with different words) attempt to make a new gaming system. I would have liked to be in a campaign with him when he was playtesting his new system.

Now he has all the fondness of that old great uncle of yours. He's nice to look at every other year but that's about it.

tzor at [unixtime wrote:1194289188[/unixtime]]

FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1194286324[/unixtime]]Yeah. I'm not even kidding. His advice is seriously to just TPK any party where someone asks to play a hobgoblin or a giant. No rules. No empathy. The entire section is just a rant about how people who want to play non human characters need to have their character sheets ripped up in front of them.

I'm going to disagree. His rant was that people who wanted to play "monster" characters were doing so because they wanted to play something powerful over and above the norm, so the only proper way to combat such power players is to throw power back at them in an even greater manner until they realize that the game is not about power in as much as it is the persuit thereof.

So you do TPKthem until they get the idea?

Wait.. isn;t that what frank said?

cthulhu at [unixtime wrote:1194500992[/unixtime]]
So you do TPKthem until they get the idea?

Wait.. isn;t that what frank said?

First of all I think there is a subtle difference between TPK and what I've basically described as overadjusting. You don't really need to raise the power to go over the top to do a TPK. (All you need is some lucky save or die rolls for that.)

Secondly I don't agree with the idea. Yes I've raised the power when the players raised the power, but never to the point where it became an arms race that I could always rig in my favor.

Well there was that evil monk who tried to become an Ice Devil once ... but that's another story. I gave him the option to change his name, not my fault he chose not to. Also not my fault that he also at the same time managed to piss off the bigest wizard's guild in the land, insisting that the custom warhorses by the rangers should go on "public auction."

And it certnaly wasn't my fault that Mr. Gygax put in some nasty enslavement spells for devils if only you know their ... er ... name? Naturally he showed up for the "auction." Mua ha ha ha ha ha.

Heck, I was more than happy that because an Ice Devil has no teeth, he could no longer use the "teeth of spell storing" he got from some other DM. (We used to allow character crossovers all the time in our group. He also had an M16 of sharpness by the way.)

Gygax doesn't even talk about ramping up the difficulty in that DMG section. He basically just says not to worry about it since the PC who wants to play a monster character is obviously a moron and will kill himself trying to perform simple adventuring tasks.