What's a Good Gamist Game?
Callan S.:
To get deeper into what you're looking for...
Quote
Not perfectly--but as near as can be. That said, when there need to be tendencies, they need to be set in the PCs' favor so that they don't have a good chance of dying every fight.
Why? Why can't it be set against the PC's (the players) favour, because they will use a number of tactics to grant mechanical bonuses that when added on, that slants the thing towards them winning? Which would also ensure that they don't have a good chance of dying every fight.
Do the other players in your group use tactics much?
Do you want it that you don't have to use tactics, you just can, if you wish, to maybe 'win more', so to speak?
Miihkali:
Ghostwheel,
you might like Iron Heroes by Mike Mearls. It's a variant of 3rd edition D&D with a focus on making tactical, non-magical combat more interesting. All classes but one are different kinds of fighters, and the game is playable without any kind of magic, including magic items.
The quality of Iron Heroes is probably one of the reasons why Mearls got to be the lead developer of 4th edition D&D.
Do your adventures have time limits? Seems to me that gamist play with D&D does not function very well without strict, story-specific time limits. The resource management aspect suffers if you can just sleep after every battle. It's more fun if there are other ways to lose besides getting killed. (For example, your relatives keep dying of necro-plague because you couldn't find the cure in time.)
Mikko Lehtinen
(I'm not actually new here. It's just a long time since I last posted. I'd forgotten my password and my old email wasn't active anymore, so I had to create a new user.)
The_Mormegil:
Something I was thinking about, regarding this issue, is that the duration of conditions could be expanded in a much more tactical sense. What if instead of a fixed duration (one round per level, until the end of the round, until the end of the encounter) or a randomized duration (save ends) the default duration of a condition was "until termination", meaning roughly "until it makes sense for the condition to stop", or more operatively "until you do something to end it". This would be on the player side of things, of course. Player abilities would have fixed or random duration because the DM is a cheating bastard is not a perfectly impartial judge of events in all situations, and deciding whether or not monsters find a way to terminate their condition could lead to problems (or not, of course).
Tactics are all about choices, and this paradigm augments the meaning and impact of choices by forcing you to decide when to attempt to stop a condition and when to let it be. Also, it rewards intelligent and creative gameplay because terminating a condition in creative ways could cost less or have a greater chance of success. It is a bit DM-reliant, because it's very open-ended, but with good guidelines on what should constitute a termination attempt and how effective termination attempts should be, it would probably be ok for most groups. What do you think about it?
(also hello everyone ;) )
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