Sacrosanct
Legend
He's making assumptions FOR - HIS - GAME. Not yours... HIS. And thus you are in absolutely no position to tell him that what he thinks his players will do WON'T happen. So rather than trying shut down his thread by saying "There's no reason to even talk about this other ideas because they aren't going to happen"... why don't you just walk away and let CapnZapp and anyone else who wishes to participate do so.
Besides which... how do you even know he's going to run sections 1 and 2 at level? Hmm? You don't. Perhaps he's going to start at level 9 like the book says he can. And yes, while the book says doing so will make sections 1 and 2 rather trivial... perhaps he's trying to figure out ways so that IT ISN'T TRIVIAL. Even *if* his party has Create Food and Water and Leomunds Tiny Hut, etc. etc. etc.
But you've got this huge bug up your rear end that make you come running into a completely new thread trying to shut it down just because you don't like how CapnZapp expresses himself. A thread that he purposefully took out of another thread in order to avoid overlapping on that one... and you come chasing after him telling him his thread isn't worth even looking at.
I'd like to think that if he had just put at the top of his first post "Okay, here's a thought experiment I'd like to work out for my personal game I'm going to run... it might not happen but just in case it does..." that you wouldn't spend all your time going through it saying "No! No! False! No!"... but my instincts tell me you'd probably have done that anyway because you just can't help yourself when CapnZapp is involved.
This has nothing to do with how he expresses himself, or his preferred playstyle. Resorting to strawmen is a clear indicator that you really don't, or can't, come up with an argument that actually addresses what I've said. That's pretty telling.
What this has to do with, is him saying all these challenges that would come up are going to just be handwaved away as trivial based on a list of assumptions that are factually incorrect. Many of the solutions (lists of all the spells) he gives aren't even accessible for that phase of the game as designed. That is a factual statement. Nothing to do with opinion, or playstyle, or whatever. He hasn't even seen the book, and tried to tell me I was wrong and that exploration of Chult was tier 2 when it's clearly not. Again, factual inaccuracy that has nothing to do opinion.
He's making several claims that are objectively not true, and here you are making personal attacks on me and my character while making assumptions of your own to defend his arguments (He never mentioned anything about starting at level 9, so how the heck are we supposed to know that, let alone assume it). Literally every other thread in the past 3 years hasn't been presented by him as his own opinion or style. They've been comments like "You can't do that in this game without changing it." (that was just yesterday in fact, and I tagged you on it so you know exactly what I am talking about) or "the game is broken, the designers are lazy/incompetent, and you're all apologists for defending it." The last three YEARS have been like that, over and over. But here you are, saying, "No man, he's just stating his opinion, not trying to act like it's objective." when that flies totally counter to his posting history. If Captzapp doesn't want me (and others who have also chimed in) to come away with the impression that he's saying his way is the one true way, then maybe over the past three years he shouldn't have over and over made claims that his way is the only right away and the game is broken and we're all apologists for bad game design for disagreeing with him, or that we can't play the game as intended without changing it.
You attack me personally by saying I have some sort of agenda of hate against him when the only thing I've ever done is point out how his claims are not actually objectively true, when it's you who seems to completely ignore all the actual evidence and bend over backwards to defend the argument that depends solely on your own assumptions that there isn't any evidence of. "Well, if you assume he changes x, y, and z, and ignores a, b, and c, then I can see where that may be the case, even though he never said he was planning on changing x, y, or z, or ignoring a, b, or c." Unless he specifically states he's starting at a high level, then it's entirely reasonable that people are going to respond with the assumption he's going to be running the adventure as designed, and therefore it's entirely reasonable to point out how some things he's mentioned that would make the situation trivial wouldn't actually apply.
*Edit* And if he is going to start at a higher level, that definitely should have been mentioned, because it changes everything. The adventure is designed to give the feel of the sheer suckiness of the jungle at low levels. By the time you reach tier 2 (Dwellers of the Forbidden City), the adventure is designed assuming the party is going to bypass much of the sucktitude of the jungle (in no small part because the players will by then have access to spells that mitigate it like he says). I.e., it doesn't want players still spending a lot of time dealing with dehydration and exhaustion because it wants the players to focus on the dungeon areas by that point. The game is clearly designed to not have those exhaustion rules and dehydration rules be as big of a factor or impact to PCs once you hit tier 2 level. It's meant to set the stage and the feel of the environment for those first several sessions only. If he's going to start at a higher level and bypass how the game is designed, then that is a pretty darn important thing to mention up front because it changes the entire context of this whole discussion.
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