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PhoneLobster
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Post by PhoneLobster »

Schleiermacher wrote:Look, PL, game balance is important but in the end, if your character doesn't have any in-fiction goals (that, being fictional, are objectively speaking entirely meaningless to pursue) you're just playing Progress Quest.
You are trying to represent this as a grand quest?

Putting in a concubine harem in your home palace? THAT is a grand an lofty "in fiction goal"?

What about all the other luxuries? Is the private heated bathroom an "in fiction goal"?

Is a nice ornamental garden courtyard an "ultimate quest of deep personal significance"?

Is a system of ventilation ducts for some luxurious castle ventilation "the point at which Gragnar the Barbarian knows his life's quest is complete"?

Aside from that being a fucking stupid idea even if we pretended it is acceptable it doesn't make it acceptable for those things to be pointless trap option money sinks. If your ultimate personal goal is a harem of 1000 concubines that DO NOTHING OF VALUE in the game then the CORRECT thing to do is be a worthless murder hobbo until your savings are large enough to do that IN ONE FUCKING GO... at which point you presumably have just ended the fucking game. And if you HAVEN'T ended the fucking game your stupid "in fiction goal" has just made you WILDLY weaker than the guy who's stupid "in fiction goal" just totally coincidentally was "MOAR PYLONS FOR MORE PEASANT SPEARMEN".

If investing in 100, then 300, then 500 of those concubines did SOMETHING, hell almost ANYTHING of reasonable value then fine, it can be an in fiction goal or whatever and everyone is happy. But if incremental investments in ever growing ornamental gardens or whatever DO NOTHING then they become objectively inferior trap options compared to the "in fiction goal" of "MOAR PYLONS!".

When you make cool luxuries into worthless trap options it isn't supporting cool luxury in fiction goals it is DOING THE OPPOSITE and eventually ALL the players will wise up and EVERYONE'S "in fiction goals" will be "MOAR FUCKING ADDITIONAL PYLONS".
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Post by hyzmarca »

PhoneLobster wrote: If your rule set has NO fucking answer to "Wait, why did the demon king sink all that money into demon concubine harems? if he had sunk it into MOAR PYLONS for his peasant spearmen like my hobbo barbarian did then he would have had moar abstracted war powa!?" then your game has fucking failed as a fantasy RPG.
I'm pretty sure "because he likes to fuck" is a legitimate answer to why anyone sinks money into a harem of concubines.

I mean, we can get down to some serious psychoanalysis to figure out why the demon king likes to have sex with hundreds of nubile young women, if it's a power thing or a prestige thing or if he's just a sex addict. But at the end of the day, he likes to fuck is probably the best answer."

Though, you could also say that he's like Immorten Joe and is more concered with his legacy, and wants to produce viable offspring to succeed him.

Or you can make him like the emperor of China, where cultural requirements demand that he have a hundreds of wives, and he pays a person just to manage his sex schedule, which he considers to be an annoying chore.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

hyzmarca wrote:I'm pretty sure "because he likes to fuck" is a legitimate answer to why anyone sinks money into a harem of concubines.

When has that EVER been considered a legitmate answer for sacrificing real character power in an RPG?

If you gave a group of players the choice between all of them getting to pick a prince/princess to have sex with OR a cool functional magic item of their choice as a reward IS "I like to fuck!" actually a legitimate answer?

OR is it an objective trap option that the majority of gamers will NOT take and will make the minority of gamers that DO pick it into an objective burden for the rest of the party?

Since when the fuck is that a good thing?
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Post by Schleiermacher »

When you make cool luxuries into worthless trap options it isn't supporting cool luxury in fiction goals it is DOING THE OPPOSITE and eventually ALL the players will wise up and EVERYONE'S "in fiction goals" will be "MOAR FUCKING ADDITIONAL PYLONS".
I see where you're coming from, but it's a deeply strange place.

This ultimately comes down to the point that in a roleplaying game, playing the role you want should never force you to have a character that's worse than the other PCs for no good reason. Which I think everyone here at the Den agrees with.

But having a powerful character is in and of itself meaningless. This isn't an arcade game where completing the quest the fastest will get you a spot on the leaderboard, and it's not a competitive game like Magic where you have to play whichever archetype is best if you want to do well.

Having a powerful character is only important inasmuch as it enables you, the player, to do cool stuff in that character's idiom when playing him, accomplish his goals in the fiction and not get killed or otherwise permanently defeated such that you have to make a new character. And those things are only relevant insofar as the game experience generated by playing that character is fun.

So when you start to let your choice of role be dictated entirely by what will give you the most powerful character, you have defeated the point of playing the game in the first place.

Note, I said "entirely" - like most people here I usually play casters and rarely play fighters, because I find playing an overly weak or limited character to be no fun. But if I were to never ever play anything but obsessively magic-hoarding ascetic murder-hobo grey elf Conjurers because that is the most powerful character option, regardless of whether I actually enjoyed that... well. What would be the point?

If I want to play Ragnar the Landscaping Barbarian, who spends his money on ornamental gardens and ventilation ducts for his ancestral castle... well, Ragnar will be less powerful than if he hoarded all his money to buy ever-sharper magical axes. Which is entirely fine because that is exactly what you'd expect. If having ventilation ducts in his castle or an ever-bigger ornamental garden somehow makes Ragnar the Barbarian better at barbarian-ing then you have lost me because that makes no sense on any level.

In the real world, people install ornamental gardens and air conditioning in their homes instead of ever more awesome security systems because we have a lot of priorities that no RPG will ever have the granularity to adress game mechanically - there are no rules for how shitty it is to live in an improperly ventilated dungeon, eat nothing but troll jerky and be alert for danger 24/7, nor is it easy to see how there could be without the game becoming an unplayable morass of minutiae. But people who make a point of playing as if nothing that exists below the granularity of the system is of concern at all just make the game worse for everyone, and I don't want to play with them.
Last edited by Schleiermacher on Sun Jun 12, 2016 10:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by hyzmarca »

PhoneLobster wrote:
hyzmarca wrote:I'm pretty sure "because he likes to fuck" is a legitimate answer to why anyone sinks money into a harem of concubines.

When has that EVER been considered a legitmate answer for sacrificing real character power in an RPG?

If you gave a group of players the choice between all of them getting to pick a prince/princess to have sex with OR a cool functional magic item of their choice as a reward IS "I like to fuck!" actually a legitimate answer?

OR is it an objective trap option that the majority of gamers will NOT take and will make the minority of gamers that DO pick it into an objective burden for the rest of the party?

Since when the fuck is that a good thing?

That really depends on who you're playing with.

Like, if you're doing a 1 on 1 RP with your significant other. Or perhaps something with your neighborhood swinging group, then it most certainly is a viable choice.

And having played in the former situation before, I can say with certainty that it is a much better choice than a +1 sword.

The point of playing a game is to have fun, after all.

But, every time I've done actual kingdom management roleplay with actual people the focus has always bee on citizen welfare first, with military might coming in second. Because the sort of people who want to build kingdoms are generally the sort of people who want to build kingdoms that are nice to live in, rather than blighted totalitarian conquest machines.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

So then the hyzmarca/schlemeiemarcher or "Marcha" consensus is that player characters should totally invest character building in basket weaving skills instead of spells and combat bonuses "JUST FUCKING BECAUSE THEY WILL WANT TO FOR NO REASONS OK!".

You guys realize you are repeating pretty much verbatim like EVERY tired old failed basket weaver excuse right?

You know all the ones about how awesome it is to deliberately choose inferior trap options. Those excuses.
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Post by Schleiermacher »

Deliberately choosing suboptimal (i.e less than literally optimal) options has never been a problem, as long as you are still playing a character who can hold their own in an SGT when all is said and done.

Accidentally choosing trap options, or having no good options to pick for a given archetype, or being able to set so much character power on fire that you cease to be level-appropriate at all -those are the problems.
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Post by Mechalich »

hyzmarca wrote:
Schleiermacher wrote:What sort of Gelugons are you talking about here, Hyzmarca? Because in 3E, Gelugons have DR 10/good, AC 32 and fire immunity, meaning that this mass of level 1 archers has to be very large indeed and setting them on fire is just going to make them feel at home.
Well yes, I said 12,000 men. It's a very big mass of archers. But it's still possible for enough tiny men to accomplish this.

I forgot about the fire immunity. And they have acid resistance, so that's a no-go. Substitute, Holy Water instead. That still works to full effect.
Gelugons have fly at will. They also have ice storm at will as a 13th level caster, meaning it has 1000 ft. range. A summoned Gelugon hovers at 1000 ft. up and rains 5d6 damage in a 20 ft. radius (meaning it kills ~40 men if they're packed in formation) every single round and is completely unable to be attacked by anything on the ground with a caster level below its own (barring some method to dramatically expand missile range).

Really, the precise example doesn't matter (Greater Planar Binding can summon Pit Fiends and make it really stupid too). The thing is, not only is summoning outsiders potentially far more effective than building an army or a castle, it's also cheaper. Armies require equipment, they require food, they need supply lines and maintenance, and when victorious they require plunder/rewards. War is expensive, its the number one cause for economic collapse in history.

The ability to replace armies with individuals means that armies become obsolete pretty much instantly if there's an infinite supply of those individuals. At some point of accumulation - which I would peg at mid-range superheroes and certainly within the range most D&D hits - individual power renders armies obsolete. Heck, we've all played BGII - remember that part in Throne of Bhaal where you fight through a huge chunk of the Tethyrian army? The game up-leveled those guys to insane capability so that your party is effectively taking on 100 10-12th level fighters at once. And you slaughter them utterly. A full party of 15th level characters is a whirling dervish of destruction that can obliterate a nearly infinite number of enemies below some threshold, it's just a matter of how long it takes.

So you can certainly incorporate mass combat and kingdom-building into a fantasy game, its just at a certain point the power level overwhelms the contributions of the masses or, even if it doesn't entirely do that, it produces weird optimization choices that create weird distortions. In D&D as currently construed would create a huge incentives to have your kingdom mass train wizards and mass produce magic items like wands (a problem that they recognized way back in 2e when the DMG explicitly told GMs to prevent their players from doing this, even though there was nothing in the rules to stop it), which means everyone is doing this, which means the world stops functioning.

In order to have kingdom management your simulated world requires a certain level of robustness. D&D at levels ~12+ simply is not, and has never been, sufficiently robust to do this. Not for nothing did Planescape basically reject all concepts of territorial control and shift the paradigm to 'everything's about ideas.'
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Post by Foxwarrior »

As a DM, I find it amusing to let the player's actions have consequences on the scale of sparking revolutions and collapsing kingdoms, and I can definitely see how giving that more mechanical weight could be an improvement. In that situation, affecting nations is the goal, rather than the means, so it's fine for kingdom management mechanics to mostly affect kingdoms rather than personal-scale hero battles. Then, having the class feature "owns a kingdom" is more or less the same sort of thing as "having a god who gives you holy quests".

However, as a beneficial class feature for fighters, I'd have to side with PhoneLobster here. While getting a fear aura for owning a fancy throne or a bonus to hit for having concubines are not particularly cool or appropriate rewards, they do at least keep the Fighter from becoming a Shadowrun Hacker by another name. Unless all the other players have also switched to kingdom management at the same time of course, at which point you should be straight up making a kingdom management game, and the mechanics for playing characters who don't run or significantly influence kingdoms are just dead weight.
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Post by deaddmwalking »

Hell, the Frank & K wish economy already dealt with this. Ornamental gardens are a good way to show you are wealthy enough that you have transcended the gold economy.

It is also objectively true that modern nations could spend the money on 'public art' on other things that are more obviously helpful (like road construction). It is equally obvious that they still spend money in those ways. Clarifying what objective they think they're accomplishing could be worthwhile, but it clearly is not to have more military power. I don't know that the 'system' needs to include a benefit of an ornamental garden if most of the players have the expectation that 'public art' is an expectation of being a powerful ruler. It becomes a self-enforcing norm if it is ubiquitous enough.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

deaddmwalking wrote:Hell, the Frank & K wish economy already dealt with this.
No... wealth tiers don't solve the problem. They just mean you only get luxuries that do nothing when they become free... by being a tier behind your actual current game play state. So your awesome wizard who has hit a tier where he is all about summoning elemental and demon warriors has peasant blackjack and peasant hookers for his luxuries, and only gets elemental blackjack and demon hookers when he is summoning the gods themselves as warriors. That's a... poor... "solution".

Then the rest of your argument is a poor understanding of realizmz and declaring the apparently unrelenting hypnotic appeal of basketweaving.
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Post by hyzmarca »

PhoneLobster wrote:So then the hyzmarca/schlemeiemarcher or "Marcha" consensus is that player characters should totally invest character building in basket weaving skills instead of spells and combat bonuses "JUST FUCKING BECAUSE THEY WILL WANT TO FOR NO REASONS OK!".

You guys realize you are repeating pretty much verbatim like EVERY tired old failed basket weaver excuse right?

You know all the ones about how awesome it is to deliberately choose inferior trap options. Those excuses.
If you have a strong kingdom building mini-game, then building a nice kingdom is a win condition in and of itself.

Likewise, if you have a strong basket weaving mini-game, then there are very good reasons to invest character resources into basket-weaving skills. In a Baskets and Baguettes game, a character who doesn't have either basketweaving or baking is completely useless.

The fact of the matter is that changing the win condition does dramatically change what is optimal.

Like, if I'm playing Guns and Guerillas and my goal is to protect the South Vietnamese from Communist aggression, indiscriminately dropping napalm on villages suspected of harboring VC might be a military effective strategy, but it's sub-optimal when it comes to the goal of actually protecting the people who live in those villages.


If the actual goal of your game is to build a wealthy and prosperous kingdom, then investing in your kingdom is a good idea.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

hyzmarca wrote:If you have a strong kingdom building mini-game, then building a nice kingdom is a win condition in and of itself.
You don't understand what a minigame is do you. Hint. Mini.
hyzmarca wrote:Likewise, if you have a strong basket weaving mini-game, then there are very good reasons to invest character resources into basket-weaving skills.
Grind to a fucking halt right fucking there because YOU are the one defending having a WEAK basket weaving game. You have flat out been claiming that people will invest in basket weaving "just because" even if it provides NO MECHANICAL REWARDS and NOTHING BUT MECHANICAL COSTS AND PUNISHMENT. You don't get to pull "well since I'm providing a strong rich basket weaving focused minigame...". Your whole argument is "you don't need a rich and rewarding basket weaving mechanics... because people will just do basketweaving regardless!".

You do NOT get to change your argument to "Basket weaving needs no mechanical rewards because people will basket weave because of the mechanical rewards!". What the hell is wrong with you making an argument like that?

But again, maybe it's just because you seem to not understand what a minigame is. Hint. Game.
If the actual goal of your game is to build a wealthy and prosperous kingdom, then investing in your kingdom is a good idea.
No... it doesn't work like that. If the goal of your game is counter to mechanical advancement incentives then it ISN'T actually a good idea to invest in said goal, possibly EVER, and definitely not before you can complete it in one go.

You are proposing a game where the goal or victory condition is a bottomless pit of waste and worthlessness. Players that willingly sacrifice their resources to that pit are falling into a definitive and obvious trap option, and your game mechanics have failed because you are actively motivating AGAINST your stated primary goal.
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Post by maglag »

PhoneLobster wrote:
deaddmwalking wrote:Hell, the Frank & K wish economy already dealt with this.
No... wealth tiers don't solve the problem. They just mean you only get luxuries that do nothing when they become free... by being a tier behind your actual current game play state. So your awesome wizard who has hit a tier where he is all about summoning elemental and demon warriors has peasant blackjack and peasant hookers for his luxuries, and only gets elemental blackjack and demon hookers when he is summoning the gods themselves as warriors. That's a... poor... "solution".
Yeah. Getting a palace of gold is exactly as good as having a palace of poop when gold is worth as much as poop for the other beings you're currently dealing with.

It's as anti-fantasy as it gets. "As your reward, you get something that's actually completely worthless! A winner is you!"
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Post by hyzmarca »

PhoneLobster wrote: Grind to a fucking halt right fucking there because YOU are the one defending having a WEAK basket weaving game. You have flat out been claiming that people will invest in basket weaving "just because" even if it provides NO MECHANICAL REWARDS and NOTHING BUT MECHANICAL COSTS AND PUNISHMENT. You don't get to pull "well since I'm providing a strong rich basket weaving focused minigame...". Your whole argument is "you don't need a rich and rewarding basket weaving mechanics... because people will just do basketweaving regardless!".
I never said that. I said that weaving a +20 basket of demon slaying is stupid. Well, more accurately, I said that sheathing your dick in a +20 Vagina of Demon Slaying is stupid. While there are actual justifications for getting combat bonuses from a witch's vagina, and there is precedent for it in the source material for magic vaginas that grant magic powers, it's not something that you should get from every vagina.

Furthermore, I said that if the players want to play a game in which they run a basket shop, the fact that basket weaving does not directly interact with the combat minigame does not matter, because the players probably aren't going to be doing combat. If you're playing Logistics and Dragons, it's not because you personally want to kill orcs with your teeth.

Because people will play the game that they want to play. And they won't play the game that they don't want to play. That's pretty much a tautology.

And I also said that are concerns other than the ability to kill things. Because there are concerns other than the ability to kill things. I dare say that there are things that are more important than the ability to kill things. That ultimately if you're playing a Kingdom Management minigame then there are things like citizen morale, loyalty, and average quality of life - and that watching those numbers go up in a totally masturbatory manner can be just as satisfying as watching your combat numbers go up in a completely masturbatory manner. Because a player whose character concept is Wise Philosopher King is going to masturbate to different things to one whose character concept is Psychopathic Mass Murderer.


I also never said that people should spend combat-minigame resources on the kingdom-management minigame. Actually, I think that wealth by level is incredibly stupid and should fuck itself up the ass with a baseball bat turned sideways and people playing kingdom-scale games should get kingdom-scale funds as a matter of course.
maglag wrote:
PhoneLobster wrote:
deaddmwalking wrote:Hell, the Frank & K wish economy already dealt with this.
No... wealth tiers don't solve the problem. They just mean you only get luxuries that do nothing when they become free... by being a tier behind your actual current game play state. So your awesome wizard who has hit a tier where he is all about summoning elemental and demon warriors has peasant blackjack and peasant hookers for his luxuries, and only gets elemental blackjack and demon hookers when he is summoning the gods themselves as warriors. That's a... poor... "solution".
Yeah. Getting a palace of gold is exactly as good as having a palace of poop when gold is worth as much as poop for the other beings you're currently dealing with.

It's as anti-fantasy as it gets. "As your reward, you get something that's actually completely worthless! A winner is you!"
I have to disagree. A palace made out of poop is much more impressive than one made out of gold. Stinkier, but more impressive. One is an ostentatious display of wealth. The other is a miraculous engineering feat.
Last edited by hyzmarca on Mon Jun 13, 2016 5:30 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by rasmuswagner »

So, in our hypothetic perfect D&D that's still actually playable past level 9 with only a moderate amount of Gentleman's Agreement; that is, not 3.X or Tome D&D; there are two important design goals as i see them:

1: The basic currency is armies. Not gold or turnips, but armies. Kingdoms that output another +1 on your Cloak of Protection are super lame.


2: Players want to break the rules. If you poll people on the times they've had fun playing Dragons & Logistics, i promise you that 99% of the time it's when they magiced up their castle, lit the entire nation by negotiating with a few lantern archons, or redirected an elemental portal for logistic purposes., and the GM made up some rules for that.
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Post by erik »

hyzmarca wrote: I have to disagree. A palace made out of poop is much more impressive than one made out of gold. Stinkier, but more impressive. One is an ostentatious display of wealth. The other is a miraculous engineering feat.
Nah, you just don't know shit.
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Post by FatR »

rasmuswagner wrote:So, in our hypothetic perfect D&D that's still actually playable past level 9 with only a moderate amount of Gentleman's Agreement; that is, not 3.X or Tome D&D; there are two important design goals as i see them:

1: The basic currency is armies. Not gold or turnips, but armies.
Yes, pretty much. Gold can be a currency at low level, when PCs are squires and poor knights, and getting a warhorse and a full set of armor can be matters of a whole quest, once PC become barons and lords the only thing that matters for 99% of fantasy stories, besides their important named allies, is the number and quality of armed men they can raise.
rasmuswagner wrote:Kingdoms that output another +1 on your Cloak of Protection are super lame.
Anything that outputs another +1 on your Cloak of Protection is super lame, and items that just give you plusses are lame too. That said, there is nothing particularly wrong with providing you with a meaningful magic item or two being one of a kingdom's functions. Crown relics with actual power happen all the time in fantasy.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

hyzmarca wrote:I also never said that people should spend combat-minigame resources on the kingdom-management minigame.
Why do I somehow think this is a goal post shift right there... hm...

So let's forget for now you are directly arguing against the position that things you spend character resources on you know should contribute to your character power. Lets pretend you are in your own little world arguing with yourself...
hyzmarca wrote: I'm pretty sure "because he likes to fuck" is a legitimate answer to why anyone sinks money into a harem of concubines.
Hm. "Likes to fuck" so combat resource down the drain.
hyzmarca wrote:[re: sex vs magic item of your choice] I can say with certainty that it is a much better choice than a +1 sword.
Not only are you directly refusing a combat option to get in character sex instead... the magic item of your choice is apparently a +1 sword...

hyzmarca wrote:every time I've done actual kingdom management roleplay with actual people the focus has always bee on citizen welfare first, with military might coming in second. Because the sort of people who want to build kingdoms are generally the sort of people who want to build kingdoms that are nice to live in, rather than blighted totalitarian conquest machines.
Well, that's pretty fucking damning right there. Players will invest in citizen welfare, explicitly at the cost of combat effectiveness, not because it provides any meaningful mechanical benefit EVEN in the poorly affixed strategy layer, but because they are just a nice sort of person. That seems pretty fucking damning for your "I never said that!" claim.

Hey. I wonder if you said something directly in the same post as your denial that you are arguing directly and explicitly in favor of throwing generic character resources right down the toilet in return for literally nothing with luxury facilities...
Because a player whose character concept is Wise Philosopher King is going to masturbate to different things to one whose character concept is Psychopathic Mass Murderer.
Hm. You know that your biggest single character resource is? YOUR VERY CHARACTER CONCEPT ITSELF. And YOU explicitly state it as a choice between Psychotic Mass Murderer and Wise Philosopher king, NOT an option of both at once with alternative king variants and alternative murderer variants. YOU just conceptualize it as one OR the other and by extension one IN EXCHANGE for the other.

But hey can we get something a bit more direct back in the older posts?
Likewise, if you have a strong basket weaving mini-game, then there are very good reasons to invest character resources into basket-weaving skills
Oh hey LOOK generic character resources thrown the fuck away into basket weaving. The ONLY given reason "because it was there!".

You want to fucking pretend "oh no wait I was talking about special segregated basket weaving resources only ALL ALONG (but never mentioned that)", and you know we could start trying to explain to you in slow large words why a completely segregated basket weaving minigame STILL needs to feed back to the main game in some way or else it is shit even if it has segregated basket weaving only character resources.

But no, with goal post shifting like that what is the fucking point of even talking to you? You want to shift the goal post you can fucking correct yourself and admit you were wrong first, because you aren't worth talking to otherwise.

Mind you... since in your LAST post during your eagerness to strawman the very concept of any and all mechanically rewarding luxury facilities in player owned castles as +20 vaginas of junk... YOU COULDN'T EVEN HOLD A CONSISTENT POSITION ON WHETHER YOU LIKED THE IDEA OF YOUR OWN +20 STRAWMAN VAGINA OR NOT FOR A SINGLE FUCKING OPENING PARAGRAPH.

So hell, before you even stop shifting goal posts and denying your own prior position. FIRST, get your fucking head in order. Develop a single opinion on this topic you can express for more than three sentences without either changing your mind or shifting your goal posts. THEN maybe we can fucking talk, right now I might as well be interacting with a fucking gibberish generator.
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Post by Username17 »

FatR wrote:Anything that outputs another +1 on your Cloak of Protection is super lame, and items that just give you plusses are lame too. That said, there is nothing particularly wrong with providing you with a meaningful magic item or two being one of a kingdom's functions. Crown relics with actual power happen all the time in fantasy.
Sure. But more fundamentally what you want to do is to make sure that you get progress towards whatever minigame you do next by completing the minigame you're doing now. Because different players will have different interest levels in different parts of the story and the game, and "progress quest" elements alleviate that tension. If one player is interested in fighting dragons, and another player is interested in conquering kingdoms, then fighting dragons shouldn't be a complete waste of time for the guy who wants to conquer kingdoms and conquering a kingdom shouldn't be a complete waste of time for the guy who wants to slay dragons.

But I don't know why that would be a thing worth shouting about. That was a solved problem in the 1970s. XP and tiered treasure piles present fungible character growth from adventures of any type. You slay a dragon and you gain XP and get a shiny magic sword that makes it easier to slay the next dragon, but you also get XP and a big pile of electrum pieces that make you better able to expand your barony.

Owning a domain can have gold taxes that you can flush back into the domain running minigame, and it can have magic items fall out of it from time to time from craftsmen and merchants and shit. And solving domain level challenges gives you XP. The Dragon Slaying player advances towards better Dragon Slaying when the Domain Lord player gets everyone at the table to do some Domain stuff. This just isn't even difficult. D&D had this problem licked before I was born.

3rd Edition broke the paradigm by drastically reducing the amount of gold people got and then tying mid and high level equipment directly to total gold owned. That meant that players no longer gained Domain Benefits from dragon treasure, and no longer gained dragon slaying equipment from hiring soldiers. Thus there was no easy way to do domain management and dragon slaying with the same characters . But that was a bad idea, and that part of the game worked much better in AD&D, 2nd Edition AD&D, OD&D, and whatever you want to call Greyhawk and shit. It simply isn't difficult to get both parts of the game feeding and advancing each other. D&D is already built to do that at its most basic levels.

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Post by deaddmwalking »

Frank,

Do you think XP especially in the form of older editions where it was a fixed value per monster are good or something to avoid?
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Post by Username17 »

deaddmwalking wrote:Frank,

Do you think XP especially in the form of older editions where it was a fixed value per monster are good or something to avoid?
Fixed XP for monsters is something to avoid. Indeed, XP per monster is something to avoid. It encourages mass murder expeditions to kill large numbers of monsters that pose little or no threat in order to get aggregate XP awards.

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1000 ants at 1 XP per ant...

More generally, "kill completionism" and its cousin "XP dancing in the woods" are not fun, heroic, or interesting from a storytelling standpoint. They are empty die rolling exercises that you do because you are near an arbitrary breakpoint on the level treadmill. In short, they are exactly the same problem as being asked to pay too much attention to spreadsheets in domain management minigames. However, while the answer to how you get the minutiae levels right in domain management is hard, the answer of how you stop players from feeling compelled to continue rolling for stabbing webbed Goblins long after the battle is functionally over is easy. You just stop handing out XP on a per-monster basis and move the fuck on with your life.

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Post by deaddmwalking »

That's what I thought. In your prior post you mentioned killing the dragon and getting XP. Are you in favor of XP at all? For example, for quest completion? Or is a system where level-up happens for 'story reasons' better. Or is XP a useful fiction where the GM should award it for quest completion and the amount is essentially arbitrary so it works out to 'you level up now'?
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