*[caveat] (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Monday, May 21, 2018, 11:23 (2177 days ago) @ Cody Miller

I have two main D&D type games going on right now. One is Pathfinder, which is very crunchy and numbery. The other is based on GURPS, and the way we are playing it barely has any rules at all. And know which one I prefer? The Pathfinder one. By far. Because of “the most boring parts.”

The rules and far more tightly regulated combat and leveling up greatly enhances things for me. I look forward to combat far more because I have a character I’ve been building for years to enhance and compliment the strengths and weaknesses of the group. I have spells I’ve selected for the particular in game day. I have different weapons that works differently depending on what I’m fighting. I have used my different skills to save myself and my party in various times of crisis that I most certainly remember. And all of this is not to say we don’t have any story. We have loads and loads and loads of story and chanaracter development and inter party conflict and diplomacy with friends and foes alike. But for me, the best of the best moments have been when the story and the number-y rules have worked together to generate instances of awesome. For instance:

- The time where our Barbarian dove into a river where he should have drowned but rolled well so he didn’t. He waded out surprising the surrounding towns people both because he was naked and because he had retrieved the lost silver club that he then preceded to use to finish off the werewolf who had been dogging our party for the past two days. My character helped, because I was the only other one who could damage the werewolf thanks to its thick, damage resisting to hide.

- Or the time that my character, a heavy armor sword and shield Paladin went off on his own and got surrounded by Kobolds. Instead of fighting through the group one by one, I relied on my superior armor to wade forward while deflecting 4+ attacks of opportunity per round until I gloriously and heroically reached the Kobold leader and killed him with one swipe of my sword. The others panicked and were soon cut down or ran away. I loved that scene because I used my character’s armor, and quick healing and ability to choose a target to do extra damage and take less damage from.

My GURPS game, by contrast, is very free form. Our story is pretty good, but mechanically speaking, I find it very lacking. We don’t use distance really at all so anyone can attack from anywhere. Most of our players attack no matter the combat situation because there are basically no rules so we basically cannot lose. There are no skills or feats or really much distinction between even our fighter and our doctor in terms of combat. Without “the boring parts” we barely have gameplay and we might as well just declare that we win whenever there is combat.

I think there are certainly cases where going strictly by the rules isn’t a good thing. Leveling up where it makes sense seems far better to me than counting XP, especially in games where the entire story and world are made up by us instead of being pre-made and pre-playtested. But yeah... what you find boring isn’t what I find boring. And I’d go as far as saying I would not like to play in your D&D group because of the way your players seems to treat the rules and mechanical bits.

It’s not that D&D group is wrong. But, there’s more than one way to play that people enjoy... And, that, of course, applies to Destiny as well.