Quote:
Originally Posted by sir_pudding
Yes, because arbitrarily changing the setting to match the player characters undermines any sense of verisimilitude or challenge. For me part of the fun of this genre in particular is facing unexpected threats and challenges with insufficient resources. If not having a thief guarantees that you won't face locks or traps, not having a holy warrior means no ghosts or demons with Possession, not having any strong melee fighters means easy fights, and so on then the game just isn't going to be fun for me. The party composition and planning really shouldn't be predictive of the dungeon.
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To a certain extent this is true, and I would certainly not change the setting
after it has already been established merely to make life easy for the players, but, on the other hand, the setting became Dungeon Fantasy rather than a modern office building because the players wanted to play spelunking warriors rather than accountants. If you have indeed already designed a setting where different forms of magic play a role, by all means use it, but also consider that the "default" dungeon fantasy setting makes substantial changes from realism, history, and sanity for the sole purpose of matching what people tend to want to play. Consider easy, reliable, and consequence free healing (whoever you choose to allow to cast it), an economy where assorted dungeon loot never saturates the market, a society that tolerates and even encourages heavily armed men of no clear loyalty, and so forth. All of these setting design choices were made for the sole purpose of making life easy for the players; if you make life easy in one more way, the world will not end.
That said, I in no way claim that a multiple-magic-role system is in any way undesirable, and I agree that hirelings are a useful solution to this and other problems.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Anthony
The standard choices are: - over the top natural healing (D&D 4th/5th, almost all video games)
- trivial item-based heals (D&D 3/3.5, almost all video games)
- henchmen healbots (D&D any edition, lots of video games)
House-ruling the cost of healing potions is probably the easiest option. |
Fair enough. It occurs to me that, in fiction, all of the above are rare, and rapid healing magic is not overly common, but that is presumably because authors can have their characters wounded only when time spent recovering would be dramatically appropriate, and role players have not yet worked out how to manage that.