The Gaming Den

infected slut princess wrote:Say there is a character named Johnny and he likes fighting with a spear. It seems reasonable for the DM to put a few cool magic spears in future adventures. It's a common weapon.

But say there is another character named Burger. He fights with a gyrspike, a weird and obscure weapon that probably doesn't even work.



It seems lame for the DM to put a few cool magic gyrspikes in future adventures.

Whaddya gonna do?

Burger hits himself in the head with that thing the instant he tries to hit anyone with it causing massive trauma to his brain. Upon recovering he is miraculously cured of whatever affliction convinced him that using that thing was a good idea.

Alternatively introduce a gyrspike prestige class with a feature "enchant your gyrspike".

Drolyt wrote:I'm not really familiar with Shadowrun, but Champions' item system is just paying for items with character points just like everything else and getting a discount because it could in theory be taken away. It works very well for four-color supers and reasonably well for a variety of other settings you might want to use HERO with but is not really comparable to D&D. As for AD&D, I suppose I'll defer to you on that one because of your greater experience with the system, but I'm not really seeing how it was any better than 3e, except perhaps that items didn't provide quite as many piddly bonuses.

Champions items are indeed simply an extension of your character. You pay points and get whatever the fuck you want. Or you spend the same points to be the baddest man alive and you don't get any items. Whatever. There's no looting at all, you have whatever specific items you feel like (and can afford out of your character points), and the world moves on. This system works and people actually play with it.

Shadowrun is a full cash system. You get paid in "money" and then you use social skills to track down rare items that you can exchange money for. If you have enough money and roll well on your social skills, you can get whatever you want. This system works and people actually play with it.

AD&D has essentially no crafting, no item markets, and no wishlists. Items are placed items and random drops, final destination. Sometimes players get shafted somewhat, sometimes players get awesome stuff at low levels, but on the balance enough magic items are handed out that players are able to keep up with the opposition at all levels. This system also works, and people actually play(ed) with it.

3rd edition has an item market and crafting and found items all together. And while in abstract you could make something like that work, 3e's system doesn't actually work. It fails in several ways. The first is that crafting generally manifests as the crafting character (who is generally a magic user) having more gold worth of equipment than non-crafting characters. But the casters are the gear independent classes and the non-casters are... not. So that just exacerbates the "Fighters can't have nice things" problem the game already has. Secondly, the actual Wealth By Level guidelines are badly broken and do not scale nearly fast enough in levels 4-10, which is really bad because that's otherwise the "sweet spot" where the rest of the game works best and gets the most play. So no one really uses the 3e item rules, because they are terrible. Not structurally, just the actual numeric inputs used are awful.

Note, I'm really not saying that 3e's item system is structurally unsalvageable. Fuck, K and I put a lot of work into tweaking 3e item rules for the better, and I think we did a pretty OK job (although we never did get a working system for wands, because that turns out to be really hard if people put effort into abusing them). But 3e's item system as released didn't give out enough cash to let a 9th level Fighter have a +3 Sword, a +3 Shield, and a +3 Armor, let alone a backup weapon or secondary doohickies, even though the game math said he should have all that. This means that yes, the fact that Pathfinder straight up gives out more treasure is an overall improvement (though of course it doesn't go far enough). And of course, you can't just fix 3e's item system by handing out bigger piles of gold, because it also has the problem that the quadratic cost advancement is actually totally fucked at the low end and the high end - it takes four times the gold to go from +1 to +2 but only 56% more gold to go from +4 to +5 - which encourages the proliferation of bullshit +1 items to hang on your Christmas tree and also makes trading in everything to get singular unbalancing items that are beyond your level too attractive. So it's not just the wealth system that's fucked, the costs are also fucked.

AD&D didn't have those problems. It had the "problem" where you ended up with a shit tonne of +1 swords that you had very little to do with other than maybe arm your henchmen or hang on your wall - but considering that that actually made your occasional frost brand or doom glaive feel really special, I'm not even sure that counts as a problem. And of course it did have the problem where with poor luck you could end up without a magic sword at all at the point where enemies immune to mundane weaponry started showing up - but the game encouraged running from combat and had short character generation times, so even that was and is considered acceptable.

Note also that literally everything Phone Lobster says is wrong. When I'm talking about AD&D treasure, I'm literally talking about AD&D. 2nd edition did a lot of experimentation with "making treasure rare", which combined with lottery items meant that you basically didn't get the stuff you needed at the level you needed it, and it was in the same shit boat as 3rd edition for high level play. The usual solution was just to hand out more treasure like it was a 1st edition game, and that worked OK. Though of course now we're no longer talking about using the item allocation system out of the box.

-Username17

Drolyt wrote:Since I'm only minimally familiar with AD&D would you mind doing some sort of compare and contrast with 3e? From where I'm standing it looks like it is just 3e without any guidelines like WBL, which would seem to agree with what you are saying but I'd like to hear from someone who knows more about it than me.

It's been way too long for me to give accurate details. But the main differences between 2nd and 3rd...

2nd Edition loot drop mechanics and tables were rather arcane and what loot dropped from what level of enemy was just a touch more swingy.

The mechanic for making your own magic items was "fuck you AHAHAHAHAHAHA".

Cursed items were a much bigger deal since their mechanics were basically "fuck you AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA".

The general assumption for trading and purchasing magic items was "fuck you AHAHAHAHAHAHA".

While there was no open admission of WBL it was still a sort of necessity, only there was no mechanic or guideline like WBL to tell you what you might need in even the vaguest terms, meanwhile parties without the right weapons to overcome monster damage immunites were more screwed than they ever were in 3rd.

Since the mechanics for both reliably GETTING at least a +1 Dagger and just how bad you could be punished for not having at least a +1 Dagger were both, again, "fuck you AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!".

Essentially the general direction Frank and Lago want loot mechanics to go in does in fact appear to be "fuck you AHAHAHAHAHA" because in "fuck you AHAHAHAHAHA" land a +1 Dagger was indeed special. Because "fuck you AHAHAHAHAHA" land was a place for special people. Like the ones who chose to stay there when the improved less fuck you options of 3rd edition opened up. You know. Like Shadzar.

It's kind of beautiful that Phone Lobster's characterization of my views and my statement of my views got posted almost simultaneously. At the very least it demonstrates that my characterization of PhoneLobster as a straw manning lunatic is scrupulously fair.

-Username17

It feels like PL's been on a crusade ever since that centaur business, which he is still butt-hurt about from FIVE YEARS AGO.

virgil wrote:It feels like PL's been on a crusade ever since that centaur business, which he is still butt-hurt about from FIVE YEARS AGO.

That was the one where PL pointed out that horses can bend sideways so far that they can kiss their own ass, right?

Weren't characters in AD+D significantly less item dependent as well? Pretty much the only reasons I've heard you need items in that game is -> You're a Fighter and even then they were just there to give the fighter the ability to fight at all, buff defenses or heal. At least that's what I've heard.

No MGuy.
There were creatures that required magic to hurt. You either needed magic weapons, or you needed magic spells. Also, you needed magic armor to stay competitive.

Vorpal Blades, Holy Avengers, Magical Full Plate +5.. these were things you coveted because they made you effective, and able to survive against the high end monsters.

sabs wrote:No MGuy.
There were creatures that required magic to hurt. You either needed magic weapons, or you needed magic spells. Also, you needed magic armor to stay competitive.

Vorpal Blades, Holy Avengers, Magical Full Plate +5.. these were things you coveted because they made you effective, and able to survive against the high end monsters.

sabs. I'm almost sure that no was meant to deny my theory but all you did was confirm it.

pretty much you only needed magic items if you were going up against the things that required magic items to hit, which means scouring the MM to find the most obscure monsters created for D&D to fight, or dragons. but you don't fight dragons every fight.

many a game has been played with land wars against orcs and stuff without having to dip into the werewolves and vampires.

it really only needs what you make it need. high fantasy high magic fighting "epic" monsters all the time then you need some kind of magic item. again as said, you can make your own potions, armor and weapons. Quaal's Feather Token, quiver of Elhonna, bags of holding.. these are treasure cause you don't normally make them.

3rd made those magic items required cause it made MANY more monster required magic items to hit and defend with because it changed their stats when it aligned XP levels, and then matched monsters to levels with CR and then WBL. WBL of course just another term for "bonus per level" after it already gives you stat bonuses at certain levels anyway.

if you are giving the stat bonuses, you shouldn't need required magic items on top of that or you fucked up monster design.

3rd just changed to say that a fighter would be cool looking to be running around with Ioun stones floating around his head just for the bonuses they give. also the ascending AC means that there isnt a finite range of ACs, so you had to keep adding power to keep up.

Shadzar wrote:pretty much you only needed magic items if you were going up against the things that required magic items to hit, which means scouring the MM to find the most obscure monsters created for D&D to fight, or dragons.

You mean like Elementals, Outsiders, Gargoyles, Golems, and Incorporeal Undead? Basically everything that isn't Orc, Gnoll, Ogre, Troll?

3rd made those magic items required cause it made MANY more monster required magic items to hit

HAHAHAHAH!!! 3E pretty much maintained the ratio, but added the DR mechanic to make it possible for "+1 or better" monsters to be hurt by non-magical means.

FrankTrollman wrote:Honest question: is your experience mostly constituted of 3rd and 4th edition D&D? Because those games had frankly extremely terrible item allocation systems. On the flip side, Champions, Shadowrun, and even AD&D all had item allocation systems that worked reasonably well - and those games usually had people playing by the given rules in my experience.

Essentially you're making an Oberoni fallacy argument by the back door. You're saying that the rules for this subsystem don't matter because people are going to change them. But have you considered the possibility that people are changing them because it does matter and the rules in the systems you are most familiar with happen to be fucking terrible?

-Username17

I have played a fair bit of both Shadowrun and AD&D. My experience was that referees for both games seeded the loot piles with whatever they considered important, and that any other random stuff we could find was nice, but overshadowed by the referee's ad-hoc handouts.

I have played games which had a similar point-system to Champions, but not HERO itself. Those are essentially the provenance of the "almost always" for people always cared more about the item rules there, but even in those games I have found 0-point items being handed out and traded around here and there. Though usually they were not a permanent fixture on anyone's character sheets, but they could exist a while.

These events are in fact why I tend to view loot-distribution systems as heavily houseruled. Because even in the Shadowrun case, the piles of money were very randomly determined by referee whimsy and we could wind up with random-ass items the person running the game wanted us to find (or didn't intend for us to loot but had placed in the scene anyways), like vials of superpoison.

To my disappointment though it's been a while since I've been in any of those games. My last Shadowrun campaign crashed after like four sessions! Sigh.

Items, like monsters, are in my observation, most likely to be placed or created in response to the plot's demands, which suggests that item drop tables are the most superfluous aspect of the game. While I concede the use of item drop tables or crafting systems or the like, hell I've been working (slowly) on the latter, they still seem like a far less important element of play in most systems, compared to item properties themselves. The conversation thus strikes me as equivalent to a verbal rendition of pixel-bitching in adventure games.

And I would view the press to convince people to use the AD&D, SR, and HERO systems of item distributions more favorably, honestly, if it weren't for the fact that someone gave meth to shadzar and he's been posting even more strenuously and histrionically as a result. Or maybe it's cocaine.

EDIT: I suppose, though, upon rereading my complaint, that it is rather silly of me to get frustrated at this thread containing a high amount of incoherent babbling for the same reason it is silly of me to get irked that it is a particularly rainy day in Seattle. But for the same reason as that, I need more coffee.

Almaz wrote:Items, like monsters, are in my observation, most likely to be placed or created in response to the plot's demands,

this is how it should be given enough time, but....

which suggests that item drop tables are the most superfluous aspect of the game. While I concede the use of item drop tables or crafting systems or the like, hell I've been working (slowly) on the latter, they still seem like a far less important element of play in most systems, compared to item properties themselves. The conversation thus strikes me as equivalent to a verbal rendition of pixel-bitching in adventure games.

in the event you haven't fully got AREA 51 detailed or full of monsters and the players wish to travel to AREA 51, or maybe you even left AREA 51 open for transients to inhabit to give your player a place to take a break from major quests; then the random drop tables let you play on the fly and wing it so AREA 51 is a dungeon. it MIGHT have that new shiny X you wanted, or it might just be piles or coins or bones when all the fighting is over.

this is the VERY reason AD&D had such as the terrain and whatnot to tell what monsters could be present in the 2~20 ENCOUNTER TABLES, and offers treasure tables for quick generation of treasure for those monsters. roll a d8+d12 and see what monster is there, see how many in the monster stats or just assign X of them and grab their normal gear and run as if they are a bandit group, then grab some treasure off the tables provided as random drops when the fighting is over.

much like random dungeon creation of 1E it wasnt the way you HAVE to play the game, ALL the random tables exist for you to be able to play WITHOUT having spent 20 hours detailing everything.

the random tables of all sorts are a method to get into play quickly without having to wait for the DM to come up with something, not the standard by which to play the game. many don't understand this (including Gary and he wrote the damn things then ignored his own advice about BARRACKS ROOM LAWYERS).

IF everyone and his brother is playing solely with random item drops, then maybe they should have taken some time when not playing to make something up ahead of time, or wait to play until the did have something made. then less bitching about EVERYONE using ONLY random drops would have occurred?

can't wait until tussock returns to do the treasure write-ups and review for both AD&D versions to see how he parsed the text n the matter of treasure, cause Level By Wealth system of 1e is pretty damn hilarious!

FrankTrollman wrote:It's kind of beautiful that Phone Lobster's characterization of my views and my statement of my views got posted

What? You think that switching out with "Oh no I wasn't referring to the most recent arcane mess of Gygaxian failed rules called AD&D everyone sane rightly abandoned like rats from a sinking ship the moment something better came along!"... "I'm instead referring to the PREVIOUS arcane mess of Gygaxian failed rules called AD&D that essentially did basically everything the same in regards to loot and items which everyone abandoned like rats from a sinking ship the moment something only very slightly better came along!" is an improvement.

Doubling down on the Grognarding and grognarding harder does not make the failed loot systems of the past palatable to modern audiences of players and GMs. No one wants that fossilized shit.

So PL, what the fuck does the gygaxian failure of a ruleset with shitty saves mechanic and shitty THAC0 and shitty player killing have to do with items?

FrankTrollman wrote:AD&D didn't have those problems. It had the "problem" where you ended up with a shit tonne of +1 swords that you had very little to do with other than maybe arm your henchmen or hang on your wall - but considering that that actually made your occasional frost brand or doom glaive feel really special, I'm not even sure that counts as a problem. And of course it did have the problem where with poor luck you could end up without a magic sword at all at the point where enemies immune to mundane weaponry started showing up - but the game encouraged running from combat and had short character generation times, so even that was and is considered acceptable.

The second one is the actual problem there, because the one time you get "fuck" and "all" subtracts more fun than the one time you get the Doom Sabre at level 1. The idea of "The game is more fun for you if there is the very real risk that sometimes there's a shittastic experience" is one of Lago's favourite ones, and he doesn't just sniff petrol, he injects the fucking stuff. I'd amend that to "as long as that risk never actually occurs" - it's great when someone else has a tale of how bad things were.

The bit about "character creation is easy, life is cheap" belongs firmly in the 1980s, or preferably the 1300s, and I'm glad we've moved on from there.

I don't like the 4E wishlist thing. But I do like the idea that player characters can decide what they want and then go about getting it in some way, whether by questing for it (if you don't mind putting the breaks on the campaign to go do powerup missions), going shopping in a planar metropolis or whatever. Sure, it's no 3.Tome method, and if they wanted Wishlists, they should have done the Exalted thing where you literally spend points on having your gear and then you don't have those points to spend on having a pegasus mount.

But it's better than AD&D. And as long as the arguments ever involve "actually, let's just go back to the way AD&D handled it", I will pick whatever alternative is being offered, whether that be cake or death.

Actually, one of the things I really liked in Exalted 1E was that the custom artifact creation rules had (vague) guidelines for how many dots an artifact was, which explicitly and specifically included both "Game Impact" (how much extra work was it going to be for the MC) and "Script Immunity" (ranging from 'Rust Monsters every Tuesday' through 'will not be destroyed while the character lives' and up to 'major setting element'). That's more than a little metagamey, but so is item creation generally, and at least this way you set expectations up front.

The reason you've never heard of this and other actually interesting Exalted subsystems is because they all appeared in this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Savant-Sorcerer-R ... 1588466752

2E, of course, fucked that right up and simplified to "there are several ways to handle artifacts. [description ends]"

Koumei wrote: The idea of "The game is more fun for you if there is the very real risk that sometimes there's a shittastic experience" is one of Lago's favourite ones, and he doesn't just sniff petrol, he injects the fucking stuff.

Shittastic experience is such a huge equivocation, Koumei, that I'm surprised that you'd misrepresent my position like that.

I mean, shittastic experience in a game could mean any of the following:

• My Scooby Doo tactical genius plan that I spent a bunch of time on fell flat on its face.
• I blew a huge saving throw or attack roll at the climax of the campaign.
• The party was completely unable to get organized and even do the most basic of thing because no one knew how the game worked.
• What was expected to be a fun and exciting module turned out to be poorly written and overly easy and everyone was pissed that they wasted two weekends and 20 dollars of the tabletop slush fund on it.
• The encounter had extremely favorable treasure rolls yet everyone else got something awesome while I got something lame.

Etc. etc.

So rather than letting you continue to equivocate a position for me, why don't I just spell out some game paradigms that I think make a game fun beyond the universal glittering generalities of 'crisp, well-written rules' and 'lots of meaningful choices:'

• Regret. Too much regret is discouraging, but a little regret is a huge hook. Regret is why people drop much more money on slots or CCG packs than they expected.
• Surprise. Telling people stuff that they don't know is almost always more interesting than telling them things that they expect. And in a TTRPG, this also applies to the other people at the table. Dave might be so addicted to playing fighters with Hackmasters +12 that he can't enjoy anything else, but that bores the other people who are with him. The more people know how your character is supposed to progress and turn out, the more you bore them.
• Conservation of Detail. The fact remains that there is only a limited amount of cognition anyone can devote to what they're doing. When you spend an hour in-game discussing your character's family and lineage, that's an hour that you can't spend -- or at least have to dilute -- talking about your character's fighting style or political viewpoints. So you'd better be using the time in your game wisely and the game and group better be crystal clear about what's important and what's not.
• Participation. This one should be obvious, but while there's a maximum to how much you can participate (see Conservation of Detail) going below the minimum creates detachment. Picking a character or army or whatever and adding your personally chosen details creates more involvement and attachment than just planning a character someone else wrote.
• Immersion. This one is obvious, not going to talk about it.

The amount of weighing each person does to each 'these make a game more fun' element is subjective, of course. And I don't like wishlists for D&D because they only service the fourth caveat while clashing with the other ones. I like randomized magical items like in 1E and 2E D&D because they service the first three and I also think that players can still get sufficient participation through other game elements (like their class, feats, etc.).

Lago, Koumei doesn't actually play D&D. She plays sexy storytime with character generation rules.

If Koumei doesn't automatically win every single fight immediately, without rolling, and without having to think about her characters actions, she doesn't like it.

She sometimes frankly admits this, hence why I know it is true, and sometimes gets mad when people point it out. But that is how she rolls, so the fact that she thinks not having the exact items is shit shouldn't be surprising, because she thinks failing a save ever, or having to cast two whole spells because the first one didn't win the entire counter by itself is shit.

Lago PARANOIA wrote: Shittastic experience is such a huge equivocation, Koumei, that I'm surprised that you'd misrepresent my position like that.

Misrepresent? You're the one who said:
A. It's important to sometimes have a TPK, thus ending the story and ending the campaign on a sour note, leaving everyone unhappy.
and B. It's important that sometimes you get absolute shit in a game where you need certain stuff, and then you just say "okay my character stays home for this mission" and go play Smash Brothers, or you join in, do nothing and maybe die.

That's what you want in a game. I feel that, in the name of giving everyone what they desire here, you can have both of those things. As in, you get to be the designated person who gets no good items and ends up in a TPK. So that the rest of us can have enjoyable games.

Regret. Too much regret is discouraging, but a little regret is a huge hook. Regret is why people drop much more money on slots or CCG packs than they expected.

Go play a CCG, a slot machine or a Facebook game. The Regret theory isn't one of rewarding people for playing, it's of withholding enjoyment and some degree of punishing them for not playing longer, as a way of milking payments out of people. It's just exploiting a typical psychological weakness for money, and doesn't belong in roleplaying games.

Surprise. Telling people stuff that they don't know is almost always more interesting than telling them things that they expect. And in a TTRPG, this also applies to the other people at the table. Dave might be so addicted to playing fighters with Hackmasters +12 that he can't enjoy anything else, but that bores the other people who are with him. The more people know how your character is supposed to progress and turn out, the more you bore them.

To be honest, I'm not interested in your character, no matter how much or little I know about them. Surprise has nothing to do with that, I just don't give a shit about your character, as we're not in the same game. In a game, the amount I care about other people's characters depends exactly on how much I interact with them in-game (which in turn depends on the attitudes of their character, whether they're engaged in the game, whether they've taken the effort of having nice character art, their proficiency with English and so on). If they play the same character every time, it makes it easier for me to make a snap judgement and decide how much I care, but that's all.

More importantly is that people like surprises that relate to them. But only if they're good surprises. Everyone likes a surprise Birthday party, or being told they won a million dollars. Everyone hates a surprise blanket party, or being told they won HIV.

Conservation of Detail. The fact remains that there is only a limited amount of cognition anyone can devote to what they're doing. When you spend an hour in-game discussing your character's family and lineage, that's an hour that you can't spend -- or at least have to dilute -- talking about your character's fighting style or political viewpoints. So you'd better be using the time in your game wisely and the game and group better be crystal clear about what's important and what's not.

Okay, sure. Less of an issue in play by post, where the majority of my gaming occurs, but that one is reasonable. So why again do you want random factors people have to make an effort to think about, rather than stuff people have pre-chosen that they already know? Why do you want the constant fear of death to be the thing they're busy thinking about rather than being interesting?

Participation. This one should be obvious, but while there's a maximum to how much you can participate (see Conservation of Detail) going below the minimum creates detachment. Picking a character or army or whatever and adding your personally chosen details creates more involvement and attachment than just planning a character someone else wrote.

Yes, and protip: with your hardon for TPKs, the most participation you could expect from me is to ask someone else to make a good build so I don't even have to look at your ruleset, grab a picture off the Internet to slap onto the sheet, scan it so I can just print it out again and again without so much as changing the name, then occasionally declare what I'm doing and tell you to roll for it while I play on my Android, having more fun than you could provide. The positions you advocate suck fun out of the game and result in as little participation and investment as possible, which is why I think you really should go play with shadzar, you'll have a great time in having a terrible time together.

Kaelik wrote:Lago, Koumei doesn't actually play D&D. She plays sexy storytime with character generation rules.

I play both of the above. Often both at once, though sometimes it's only one, and sometimes it's only the other.

If Koumei doesn't automatically win every single fight immediately, without rolling, and without having to think about her characters actions, she doesn't like it.

That's not actually my position. I just think fighting is, always has been, and always will be, boring and not interesting. We discussed that in the anime thing, and you didn't offer up any fighting anime that are actually interesting. Because it's a part of the game that isn't interesting to me, I want to get it over with as quickly as possible, much as I'm sure you want to get "opening that door there" over without taking fifteen minutes of table time.

There are three ways for that fight to end quickly:
1. The players win in the first round and call it a day.
2. The monster instantly wipes everyone out.
3. The groups both decide that it'd be better to not bother fighting at all, and then do something else.

Two thirds of these allow the game to continue. I'm happy for either of those to occur, and if it's option 1, I don't care who is doing the game-winning there, but I'll make a competent characters so that I don't let the team down.

because she thinks failing a save ever, or having to cast two whole spells because the first one didn't win the entire counter by itself is shit.

I don't care which player or combination of players wins the encounter, or even if there is some compromise where both sides realise the fighting is unhealthy and start backing off and try talking. It does not have to be me winning, as long as we can quickly get back to doing something more interesting. As for failing a save ever, when failing that save is "you do not get to participate for the rest of the session" then yes, that is indeed shit.

My position is close to what you state it is, close enough that you feel happy to state it the way you do. But you are being a [EDITED], which is no real surprise, and being intellectually bankrupt, which is only a little bit of a surprise.

To be clear, are we making a distinction between on the one hand giving players exactly the items they want and on the other simply ensuring that players have the ability, possibly through the expenditure of character resources, to get items that they want? Because my argument was always for the latter. I also think this is somewhat separate from ensuring that players have items appropriate for the challenges they face, which doesn't really require player involvement, just write the treasure rules in such a way that the characters are always minimally functional. Of course when you write your actual item system you find that how you solve one problem can have effects or other problems, but at least in the abstract they are separate issues.

Koumei wrote:That's not actually my position. I just think fighting is, always has been, and always will be, boring and not interesting.

I'm not sure D&D is the best game for you. It may be the game that best fits your needs of those that actually exist, but at least in theory there should be game that fits your needs far better.

Koumei wrote:That's not actually my position. I just think fighting is, always has been, and always will be, boring and not interesting.

Why you do not find any part of the combat or resource management parts of the game interesting does not change the fact that you do not want to participate in them. Therefore, everything I said is still true.

Koumei wrote:We discussed that in the anime thing, and you didn't offer up any fighting anime that are actually interesting.

You are living in an alternate reality. Even if we did have a conversation about interesting fighting anime, which I do not fucking remember having with you, that is completely irrelevant to playing D&D. I cannot think of a single interesting chess anime, but playing chess is still fun. I do not dispute that you gain absolutely no enjoyment from the tactical combat minigame which makes up a large part of D&D, in fact, I explicitly stated that. It does not suddenly make my statement that you do want to engage in the tactical combat minigame false. It is literally agreeing with me for you to assert that.

Koumei wrote:Because it's a part of the game that isn't interesting to me, I want to get it over with as quickly as possible

Yes. Which is what I said. So why are you throwing a temper tantrum about how mean I am for saying that you don't play that part of the game, when you are right now admitting that you don't play that part of the game?

Koumei wrote:I don't care which player or combination of players wins the encounter . . . It does not have to be me winning, as long as we can quickly get back to doing something more interesting. As for failing a save ever, when failing that save is "you do not get to participate for the rest of the session" then yes, that is indeed shit.

I never said you were a bad selfish person who meanly won't let anyone else contribute in combat. I said you want to resolve combat instantly without thinking about it. Which is true, and you just said it was true. So again, why are you telling us all this completely useless extraneous information as if it in any way contradicted the things I just said, when in fact you are explicitly stating the exact things I just said all over again?

Koumei wrote:My position is close to what you state it is, close enough that you feel happy to state it the way you do. But you are being a [EDITED], which is no real surprise, and being intellectually bankrupt, which is only a little bit of a surprise.

Your position is exactly what I have stated, as you confirmed again in this post. Great, you have further preferences and motivations behind all the 100% true things I said. So what? That is always true. It is also true that Lago wants people to get random items. The fact that he has reasons doesn't make the first sentence false.

If you want to call me a big meany head for accurately stating your position that you don't want to engage in the combat minigame, go ahead, I don't care. But it isn't intellectually bankrupt to accurately state your position.

Kaelik wrote:chess anime

Code Geass.

@Koumei: What is with [EDITED]? Was that an actual edit, or is that shorthand for "what I think of you is so horrific I can't even say it on the Internet" or something? It's weird, because the only insults I could actually see upsetting anyone on this forum are ethnic slurs and the like.

Drolyt wrote:

Kaelik wrote:chess anime

Code Geass.

@Koumei: What is with [EDITED]? Was that an actual edit, or is that shorthand for "what I think of you is so horrific I can't even say it on the Internet" or something? It's weird, because the only insults I could actually see upsetting anyone on this forum are ethnic slurs and the like.

I think it is the word for a women parts that is totally okay in the UK, and probably Australia, but is considered super bad in the US for no apparent reason. My understanding is that is banned.