I’d begun to notice a distinct lack of D&D posts here lately, which was partially orchestrated and partially just because a lot of other news and thoughts came up here, so last week I ventured to ask who would win in a super big monster brawl. It looks like we have a tie!!! The one and possibly only Tarrasque tied for first place winning the fight with a Gargantuan Gelatinous Cube, with the joke entry of a totally badass Nunchuking Bear coming in second place. I’m very glad I included him, because of how precisely badass he is (even without chainsaw-chuks….which is a ridiculous concept). Third place went to Orcus, demon lord of the undead, but honestly he really has little over the Nunchuking Bear.
I’m posting this week for Dave, who asked me to take care of it but was so very kind enough to provide me with a topic for the inquisition itself. He really just does all the work around here, so why break the mold? What we’d like to know this week is how many of you really enjoy dungeon crawls, or how much combat you like per game session.
[poll id=”89″]
I like a 60/40 combat to conversation ratio, but the games I typically play in usually end up becoming genocide contests…I suspect this may be because of the nature of our characters, or simply our DM virtually running out of ideas for a plot…but ah, well…
I’ve tried to remedy the status quo by taking that mess and attempting to rule it…I was pretty thrilled when I managed to create a 10-minute discussion between the players on whether or not to kill a goblin they captured…they did, of course, but I was proud of the hesitation…
I have to say, I run some pretty combat-heavy games, but never anything I’d call “genocide contests” 🙂
Genocide contest? Its that kind of game where players talk more than a regular hack-n-slash, but when they do they do it in order to make others kill each other?
I’m not sure percentages really apply for me, but I think think that combat and roleplaying have to meet in such a way where the roleplaying and plot elements keep the combat meaningful and where the combat has actual consequences for future roleplaying, plot elements, etc. If one component is lacking than so will the other. Overall, I wouldn’t be so concerned with averages so much as quality to each dimension of the game.
We’ve definitely had contests…both in volume of things killed and a handful of PvP combats…at one time, we were all given a fairly low budget to create lv. 55 characters from scratch, at which point we would have them fight each other…
After a handful of one on ones, there was a rather delightful team match (everyone against me) in which my beloved Dredo Deathkill came out on top…
About a year later, one of the guys created a monk under the same requisites that annihilated Dredo, but even so…