The most far-reaching bad descisions in RPG design? [Archive] - Page 3

Sith_Happens

2015-02-26, 05:29 PM

I can go hiking in the woods in real life. I can shoot guns in real life. I can fight with a sword in real life. In fact, these three are part of my other hobbies. Why do I want to do that in a game?

Presumably for much the same reasons you want to do them in real life. Tripping on a trash can, on the other hand, is presumably something you want to not do in real life.

As per Gykax, D&D and RPGs are not about realism, but where it improves the game, it's still attempted.

A constant risk of tripping on trash cans does not improve the game.

It's funny that the cure is often the same as the proposed illness. In reality, people rarely fumble in trivial tasks or tasks they are good at. Let's take the example of introducing fumbles to D&D, which would lead to high level characters fumbling more often than low-level ones due to added die rolling. The best argument against it is that it's unrealistic, it breaks the verisimilitude of people who've accustomed to skilled people failing less often and less catastrophically.

When people argue against the realism, they usually focus on stuff that's petty or harmful to their characters to, shall I say, unrealistic degree, completely forgetting that it's also about causality, attention to detail and allowing for broadest possible amount of in-game decisions. Realism may be the double-edged sword that makes your character trip over trash cans, but it's also the tool that tells you can speak with other in-game characters even if the game has no rules for such, the tool which tells NPCs will react and respond even when your characters are off resting and regaining their spells, the tool you and your GM use to breathe life to characters and settings and fill the gaps left by game rules.

If you'll reread my post, my nomination of realism for this thread was based on the nearly-universally faulty way in which people apply it. Or, to put it differently, it is in fact unrealistic for a player character to suddenly end up looking like one of the Three Stooges, but try telling that to a typical game designer or GM. Whenever "realism" as used as the justification for some feature of a game, it's almost always because the game would, on the whole, be better off without that feature (and if not, then why aren't you using the reason why not as your justification instead?). Therefore, its presentation as a legitimate basis on which to design game features is a far-reaching bad decision.

Frozen_Feet

2015-02-26, 05:40 PM

Constant risk of tripping is not realistic. But yes, you're right, something got lost upstream. We're both objecting to faulty use of realism, though approaching from different angles. "We added this really existing thing because we enjoy the situational comedy it creates" is better than "we added this thing because it really exists".

Cazero

2015-02-27, 03:26 AM

Arbane

2015-02-27, 05:21 AM

Fumbles: Because stabbing yourself to death is Fun(tm Dwarf Fortress).

Comet

2015-02-27, 06:11 AM

Talakeal

2015-02-27, 11:51 AM

The secret formula to solve every fumble table problems !
Step one : add a confirmation roll. For example, roll a D100 : 1-20 fumble, 21-100 normal failure.
Step two : tweak your confirmation roll so that character competency is factored in. For example, with the above in D&D, add character level to the roll.
Step three : ???
Step four : profit !!!

This is an obvious first step. I am kind of surprised that every group I join has a "natural 1s fumble rule" but none of them have any sort of confirmation roll.

There was a thread a few months back on the topic of fumbles, and it had a lot of good arguments both for and against. The problem is that if you make fumbles common enough that they actually come up at times when it is important than they show up with alarming frequency when performing mundane tasks or when applied to large enough crowds.

Ceiling_Squid

2015-02-27, 12:05 PM

One character in our game kept missing with his sword in almost every combat, but whenever he fumbled and had to grab an improvised weapon to replace the one he had just lost he would roll nothing but critical hits left and right. So it's not all bad.

This is how the cosmos tells you that you should have been a drunken master instead.

Then again, if the cosmos suggests that you should have been any form of monk, maybe it hates you anyway.

...which reminds me, that's another element of bad design. Trying to shoehorn unarmed or improvised-weapon masters into a game that is not mechanically-suited to reward them. If you want to go with a fantasy-kitchen sink setting that includes martial-artist types, you really ought to have a little parity, mechanically speaking. The amount of investment needed to be only semi-competent with your bare hands or, gods-forbid, an improvised weapon is staggering.

It'd also encourage more badass behavior. There are plenty of non-eastern heroes of legend who fought with their bare hands at times. And what character in a desperate moment won't grab whatever object is near at hand and start swinging, if they lost or broke their weapon? If the fighter is going to declare that he's doing an eye gouge during a brawl, or that he's going to stomp on a fallen enemy or take an opportunistic elbow strike, then, damn it, I'd like that sort of variety to be rewarded without needing to invest three or four feats into it.

It still blows me away a little at just how weak they decided to make it, since 3rd edition HAD monks in the PHB1 from the get-go. Should have been an early priority.

It's a minor gripe, but since then, rare is the game stystem that doesn't think it has to massively penalize unarmed or improvised attacks. Even though no small amount of scuffling can easily occur in a dense melee, and there really is mythological precedent for playing a hero that can still overcome foes when bereft of his steel.

Mr.Moron

2015-02-27, 12:12 PM

Flickerdart

2015-02-27, 12:16 PM

This is an obvious first step. I am kind of surprised that every group I join has a "natural 1s fumble rule" but none of them have any sort of confirmation roll.
How about "dice roll bloat" as a far-reaching bad decision?

You rolled a crit? Roll another die to confirm. You rolled a fumble? Roll another die to confirm. You rolled a roll? Roll another roll to roll your roll.

Any dice roll that has its effects immediately cancelled by the following dice roll is two dice rolls worth of time wasted. The obvious solution is to get rid of fumbles, and get rid of crits so severe that you need to roll twice just to make sure they don't happen too often.

Ceiling_Squid

2015-02-27, 12:27 PM

The tendency towards of lots of dice. All the d6s for d20 damage, the huge combined pools of exploding d10s in those miserable World of Darkness games. Basically if a mechanic requires the rolling of more than a small handful (3-4) dice, I don't like it.

It's literally too many moving parts. It takes time to roll them, it takes time to add them together, they spread out all over the table or fall off it, they get nudged while grouping, the cover character sheets, or bump miniatures (if you're using those), the results aren't cleanly and simultaneously readable to everyone at the table.

Agreed.

The only exception I'll make is for custom dice systems like Fantasy Flight's recent EoTE and WFRPG systems, which are at least visually organized. They tend towards slightly larger pools, but manage to be workable.

And that's only because they use easy-to read symbols and color-coded dice to keep things moving quickly when interpreting results. Each symbol or die color has a clear meaning, so composition of your pool isn't hard to understand at a glance, for everyone at the table.

Combine a large pool of dice with a lot of numbers, though, and it becomes an inconvenience.

Talakeal

2015-02-27, 12:35 PM

How about "dice roll bloat" as a far-reaching bad decision?

You rolled a crit? Roll another die to confirm. You rolled a fumble? Roll another die to confirm. You rolled a roll? Roll another roll to roll your roll.

Any dice roll that has its effects immediately cancelled by the following dice roll is two dice rolls worth of time wasted. The obvious solution is to get rid of fumbles, and get rid of crits so severe that you need to roll twice just to make sure they don't happen too often.

Personally I would just not have critical hits or fumbles in that case. Having the character's skill or the difficulty of the task at hand be completely irrelevant would ruin my experience really fast as it throws BOTH verisimilitude and game balance out the window.

I really don't see rolling on extra dice 10% of the time to be that big of a hassle though and I certainly don't see how it is wasted time. The confirmation dice doesn't invalidate the success or failure of the initial dice, and failure on the confirmation dice is no more wasted time than any other failed dice roll in the game. Now, if you are playing in a "fail forward" or there are no failures only degrees of success system I can see the second roll being wasted, but generally a system like that wouldn't have D&D style crits to begin with.

I do agree with you that roll bloat is a huge problem btw. Iterative attacks and the handfuls of dice you roll for damage when using high level spells and powers drive me nuts, but apparently a lot of people derive a great deal of pleasure from throwing down massive handfuls of dice that crack the table under their weight; the exact same reason a lot of video games use scores in the hundreds of thousands or millions (or in the case of some mobile games billions or trillions), many people get off on big numbers.

Mr.Moron

2015-02-27, 01:00 PM

Agreed.

The only exception I'll make is for custom dice systems like Fantasy Flight's recent EoTE and WFRPG systems, which are at least visually organized. They tend towards slightly larger pools, but manage to be workable.

And that's only because they use easy-to read symbols and color-coded dice to keep things moving quickly when interpreting results. Each symbol or die color has a clear meaning, so composition of your pool isn't hard to understand at a glance, for everyone at the table.

Combine a large pool of dice with a lot of numbers, though, and it becomes an inconvenience.

I could probably be enthusiastic about a system that rolled more dice, if like you said they had very different kinds of results: symbols/colors/numbers/letters/whatever. I guess one big metric for it would be:

Can the hands of a 5'1" woman comfortably shake and roll all the dice at once, without needing small dice (hard to read) or doing one of those terrible "just kind of drop them" throws?

Cazero

2015-02-27, 01:07 PM

Mr.Moron

2015-02-27, 01:23 PM

Alternatively, you can integrate the confirmation roll in the fumble table with a broad range of "no effect" results. One roll saved, yay !
But getting rid of fumbles works too.

You don't even need a table. If you moved away from a single die, to some kind of compound roll you could get all results.

Just to keep things vaguely on the d20-scale you could use the existing "3d6" house rule for putting things on a curve and stipulate that you roll 2 dice with one color, and 1 with another. Or 2 with pips, 1 with numbers.

Anything that singles out the 3rd die as a unique result.

A failure by 5 or more is fumble.
A success by 4 or more is a critical.

The 3rd die pulls double duty, by also indicating severity of Crit/fumble.

1 = Bad Fumble/Minor Crit
2-5 = Somewhere in between.
6 = Minor Fumble/Huge Crit

At this point you don't really need tables, and both the presence and severity of the unusual result is handled in the same roll. You can even tweak the Critical/Fumble thresholds to make them more or less common.

EDIT:
You could also do something like a positive/negative twist system. Where you roll 2d20, with one being the normal die you add your modifier to and the other being if the result has a positive or negative twist. Again specify they be different colors.

Odds = Negative Twist. Evens = Positive Twist. Further from the middle is more severe.

A success plus a "20" is a success and damn how.
A failure plus a "20" is failure, but bungling your way into somehow achieving something else useful.

A success plus a "10 or 12" is just your basic success.
A failure plus a "10 or 12" is just your basic failure.

A success plus a "1" is a success, but with unintended negative consequences.
A failure plus "1" is a royal ****up.

Arbane

2015-02-27, 04:38 PM

You rolled a crit? Roll another die to confirm. You rolled a fumble? Roll another die to confirm. You rolled a roll? Roll another roll to roll your roll.

And then roll on a table to see which table you get to roll your roll on!

Flickerdart

2015-02-27, 05:26 PM

And then roll on a table to see which table you get to roll your roll on!
And then when you roll on the table, your dice roll off the table and under the couch.

Ceiling_Squid

2015-02-27, 05:40 PM

I could probably be enthusiastic about a system that rolled more dice, if like you said they had very different kinds of results: symbols/colors/numbers/letters/whatever. I guess one big metric for it would be:

Can the hands of a 5'1" woman comfortably shake and roll all the dice at once, without needing small dice (hard to read) or doing one of those terrible "just kind of drop them" throws?

Hm. Unfortunately, the entire dice pool might just be large enough to make an "all at once" roll a little unwieldy for someone with small hands.

That said, since the dice are color-coded, it may be reasonable to roll each category of opposed colors individually in quick succession, and then tally everything up.

Effectively, you're looking at system where symbols for failure/success conditions will cancel one another out. In Edge of the Empire (the Star Wars RPG), you roll your character's skill dice (green) VS the difficulty dice assigned to the task (purple). The green dice have beneficial symbols on them, and the purple dice have negative symbols. Failure symbols you roll will cancel out successes, and if net successes are left over, you succeed at the task.

There's a secondary set of dice (gray vs black), which are added to represent situational modifiers. Grays are added to the pool for each positive modifier (ample time, proper tools, etc.) and blacks are added for each negative modifier (poor lighting, nearby distractions, etc.)

So roll your skill/difficulty dice first, then drop in another roll with the positive/negative modifier dice. Then you just start pairing off pass/fail symbols and seeing if you get a net success or failure. Still a pretty quick way to interpret the roll, purely visual matching.

I like the system a lot. There's a secondary set of symbols mixed in with the success/fail marks that are called called advantage/threat...you pair those off as well. So it's possible to get a success but wind up with net threat - effectively having some negative side effect so that success/failure isn't binary.

For example, In A New Hope, Luke and Leia are stuck at a chasm, and they want to delay the pursuing stormtroopers behind them. Luke blasts the control panel, hoping to close the blast door. He gets a net success, but he also has net threat symbols. So the GM says "Alright, the blast door closes shut behind you, buying you time. But moments later, you realize that your hasty decision also fried the bridge controls. You'll have to find another way to cross that chasm."

It's effectively a vehicle for adding complications to a scene.

On the same token, you can fail a check but still wind up with net advantages, which allows you to at least get a positive side effect or make some progress. You could miss hitting an opponent with a blaster shot, for example, but still force him to keep his head down or retreat into cover.

While the GM gets to spend net threat to invoke negative complications, you the player get to spend net advantage to invoke a positive side effect. A sort of back-and-forth situation.

I'm starting to like the idea of abstracted dice. I hope I didn't explain that too confusingly - it's really quite easy once you try it yourself.

Sorry about the very lengthy tangent! I wanted to describe an alternative to a purely-numerical large die pool as an example. It's as much about the ease of reading the die results as it is about the number of dice.

Sith_Happens

2015-02-28, 08:59 AM

This is how the cosmos tells you that you should have been a drunken master instead.

Then again, if the cosmos suggests that you should have been any form of monk, maybe it hates you anyway.

[saved for future sig-extension]

...which reminds me, that's another element of bad design. Trying to shoehorn unarmed or improvised-weapon masters into a game that is not mechanically-suited to reward them.

[Snip]

Ooh, good one.

And then roll on a table to see which table you get to roll your roll on!

Then roll whatever roll the second table tells you to roll!

DigoDragon

2015-02-28, 10:54 AM

This is an obvious first step. I am kind of surprised that every group I join has a "natural 1s fumble rule" but none of them have any sort of confirmation roll.

I personally skip confirmation rolls to keep the combat flowing faster, but to keep it fair I skip the confirmation rolls on critical hits too. So it goes both ways for the players (and since D&D 3.5 can get you larger crit-success ranges than failures it tends to favor the PCs anyway).

Knaight

2015-02-28, 12:27 PM

The tendency towards of lots of dice. All the d6s for d20 damage, the huge combined pools of exploding d10s in those miserable World of Darkness games. Basically if a mechanic requires the rolling of more than a small handful (3-4) dice, I don't like it.

It's literally too many moving parts. It takes time to roll them, it takes time to add them together, they spread out all over the table or fall off it, they get nudged while grouping, the cover character sheets, or bump miniatures (if you're using those), the results aren't cleanly and simultaneously readable to everyone at the table.

Most of the systems that use tons of dice don't involve adding them together, and as such are much more cleanly or simultaneously readable. D&D is the big exception here, where it actually has things like rolling 20d6 and adding them all together for damage - every other game I can think of where you could conceivably roll 20d6 just has you counting how many are above or below a certain number.

Mr.Moron

2015-02-28, 12:47 PM

Most of the systems that use tons of dice don't involve adding them together, and as such are much more cleanly or simultaneously readable. D&D is the big exception here, where it actually has things like rolling 20d6 and adding them all together for damage - every other game I can think of where you could conceivably roll 20d6 just has you counting how many are above or below a certain number.

"Adding them together" didn't just mean "Sum the face values" here, though that's even more egregious problem. I also meant counting how many over a threshold as in "Adding up the total number of 8+s", hence my World of Darkness example. I don't personally find anything where I have to determine the state of more than 5 or so dice to be cleanly readable from across the table.

Sorry if my phrasing was a bit odd there.

Solaris

2015-02-28, 12:52 PM

Mathematically, what's the difference between counting successes on a handful of dice and just rolling a die with a bonus? Rolling a d20 and adding X just seems so much simpler and more elegant than rolling X d10s and figuring out how many of them got above the target number.

Knaight

2015-02-28, 01:00 PM

"Adding them together" didn't just mean "Sum the face values" here, though that's even more egregious problem. I also meant counting how many over a threshold as in "Adding up the total number of 8+s", hence my World of Darkness example. I don't personally find anything where I have to determine the state of more than 5 or so dice to be cleanly readable from across the table.

Sorry if my phrasing was a bit odd there.

I've generally found the WoD method clearly readable (though WoD itself has a separate habit of having four rolls where one will do, so it's still slow as molasses) - though I also don't feel any particular need to actually see what exactly the dice my players are rolling say, as I can generally assume that the players aren't cheating and can do the math involved.

Mathematically, what's the difference between counting successes on a handful of dice and just rolling a die with a bonus? Rolling a d20 and adding X just seems so much simpler and more elegant than rolling X d10s and figuring out how many of them got above the target number.

The probability distributions are different, and in practice if you are rolling a smaller number of dice the latter method is often just as fast. For instance, most of Burning Wheel uses Xd6, check for 4+, you'll have somewhere between 3-6 dice most of the time. This gets you a standard binomial probability distribution, and it also allows for other mechanics to interact with it in ways that are harder to model with roll d20 and add X - for instance, there are meta game resources which let you use exploding dice where you roll another die when you get a 6. It also sets up a fairly elegant method of having degrees of success which diminish significantly.

Then there's something like Shadowrun, which has a surprisingly versatile core mechanic. You roll Xd6 and check for 5+, if you have more than the necessary amount you succeed. You also check for how many 1s you have, if you have more than half your roll in 1 you get a "glitch" (thing that goes wrong in some way). This does some interesting stuff:

You can get a glitch with a failed roll or a succeeded one, creating a wider range of possibilities.
The way the math works, the more dice you are rolling (and thus more skilled the character), the lower the probability of a glitch.

Both systems have their advantages, as do other die systems. I certainly wouldn't call roll and add categorically more elegant.

SpectralDerp

2015-02-28, 01:06 PM

Mathematically, what's the difference between counting successes on a handful of dice and just rolling a die with a bonus?

Binomial distribution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_distribution) vs uniform distribution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_distribution_(discrete)), you can use http://anydice.com/ to figure out probabilities. Counting successes makes it so that doing really really well/badly is far less likely than doing ok-ish. And yes, rolling a d20 makes the math a lot easier.

Amphetryon

2015-02-28, 01:15 PM

Mr.Moron

2015-02-28, 01:32 PM

How is your 'positive/negative twist system' different than an example of this very concern? From here, both read as a number of dice (greater than 5, in all likelihood) that one will need to read and compare from across the table.

Uh? My positive/negative twist system was exactly 2 dice. It's a standard d20, plus another one that serves as the twist factor. Where are you getting over 5 dice out of that? Granted the second die is sort of carrying two pieces of information, but both of those are conveyed pretty apparently by the face number without additional math.

EDIT:
I see where your confusion may have come from. My post had two different systems (that I wasn't suggesting be used in conjunction), where one operates off 3d6 with DC thresholds for critical/fumble. Separately the twist system that doesn't provide criticals/fumbles per se, but outcome modifiers that are effectively critical/fumbles on the extreme ends when paired with a simliar base result.

Solaris

2015-02-28, 06:19 PM

The probability distributions are different, and in practice if you are rolling a smaller number of dice the latter method is often just as fast. For instance, most of Burning Wheel uses Xd6, check for 4+, you'll have somewhere between 3-6 dice most of the time. This gets you a standard binomial probability distribution, and it also allows for other mechanics to interact with it in ways that are harder to model with roll d20 and add X - for instance, there are meta game resources which let you use exploding dice where you roll another die when you get a 6. It also sets up a fairly elegant method of having degrees of success which diminish significantly.

Binomial distribution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_distribution) vs uniform distribution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_distribution_(discrete)), you can use http://anydice.com/ to figure out probabilities. Counting successes makes it so that doing really really well/badly is far less likely than doing ok-ish. And yes, rolling a d20 makes the math a lot easier.

The fact that it wasn't immediately obvious to me that it's binomial distribution vs uniform distribution is probably why I got a B in Algebra.

Knaight

2015-03-01, 01:43 AM

The fact that it wasn't immediately obvious to me that it's binomial distribution vs uniform distribution is probably why I got a B in Algebra.

That's more statistics than algebra, though probability gets wedged in a lot of weird places.

johnbragg

2015-03-01, 08:23 AM

How about Cleric/Priest/Divine gish as a fourth "standard adventurer type"? It's pretty much a D&D innovation--the historic, legendary and literary precursors fit pretty well into either the "spellcaster" category or the "warrior" category, at least in western traditions. You had divine warriors (medieval crusader orders, legendary figures like St George, Old Testament warrior-kings, the romances of the paladins of Charlemagne), you had divine casters (miracle working prophets and saints and such), but until D&D rolls out the Priest or Cleric class which was halfway between Fighter and Magic-User, (Notice that the UA no-frills gish, the Battle Sorcerer, cribs most of its chassis off of the Cleric) you don't have divine warrior-casters whacking people with maces when they're not magically healing people or Turning Undead.

It's not necessarily a bad decision, so it's somewhat OT for the thread, but it's as far-reaching as all get-out.

veti

2015-03-01, 02:46 PM

Flickerdart

2015-03-01, 02:54 PM

I disagree. Particularly in a close fight - there's a real moment of suspense before you roll the second die, as everyone knows it could make or break the combat. If you consider that a waste of time, then you might as well not turn up at all.
Or you can have the first die roll be meaningful and have a moment of suspense whenever that's rolled - which is already true even if you haven't critted, because surprise, you're still doing variable damage, and the damage may or may not be enough to kill the enemy. By your logic, there's no reason to show up at all unless you bring a shipping crate full of dice and throw 50 tiers of confirmation rolls for everything (see, I can do hyperbole too).

Citrakayah

2015-03-03, 02:09 AM

Knaight

2015-03-03, 02:12 AM

goto124

2015-03-03, 03:10 AM

Frozen_Feet

2015-03-03, 05:22 AM

This isn't that far reaching.

Yes it is. Look outside pen & paper for a moment and at computer games. D&D invented hitpoints as we know them, and now they're absolutely everywhere.

Also, said this before, will say it again, it's not actually a bad decision at all. It's, like, the second simplest way of modeling damage. (The simplest being one-hit-kills.) Majority of more complex wound systems build upon it, rather than abandon it.

Grac

2015-03-03, 05:29 AM

People have come up with lots of things that are commonly hated. Vancian casting, classes, xp for killing, and so on.

Mine is a bit different:
Subjective XP rewards.
These breed a playstyle of "play the DM, not the game".

If xp is given at a predictable trickle rate, such as 1 level every 3 sessions, then OK. You level up predictably. If xp is given at a predictable rate for killing things, you know that if you kill a hobgoblin you will be x points closer to the next level. If xp is given for gold, then you know that you need to go grab some treasure.

But if the xp is given for roleplaying, well now you have to convince the DM you deserve to level up. Not the game.

Knaight

2015-03-03, 06:50 AM

Yes it is. Look outside pen & paper for a moment and at computer games. D&D invented hitpoints as we know them, and now they're absolutely everywhere.

Let me correct that then. It's not that far reaching in tabletop RPGs.

goto124

2015-03-03, 07:48 AM

Subjective XP rewards.
These breed a playstyle of "play the DM, not the game".

If xp is given at a predictable trickle rate, such as 1 level every 3 sessions, then OK. You level up predictably. If xp is given at a predictable rate for killing things, you know that if you kill a hobgoblin you will be x points closer to the next level. If xp is given for gold, then you know that you need to go grab some treasure.

But if the xp is given for roleplaying, well now you have to convince the DM you deserve to level up. Not the game.

How does this become a problem in actual gameplay? If the DM doesn't like you, you're screwed anyway.

XP for killing makes it necessary to kill things to level- good for combat-oriented games, not so much if you want your players to do things other than murder.

Not sure about the others.

Frozen_Feet

2015-03-03, 08:45 AM

Let me correct that then. It's not that far reaching in tabletop RPGs.

Debatable. All pen & paper games I own use hitpoints on the side, even if they have other modeling systems as the primary. Considering the sheer amount and popularity of d20 spin-offs and OSR games, all of which use hitpoints...

Morty

2015-03-03, 08:47 AM

"Hit points" is an awfully broad and general concept, though. GURPS or Warhammer games use "hit points", but the way they're depleted and regained, and the effects thereof, are quite different than in D&D.

Segev

2015-03-03, 09:51 AM

1. Hit points. As it stands, a decent martial character in the average Pathfinder campaign can withstand a rocket. To the face. At point blank range. This would be somewhat acceptable if the character was, say, a robot, or a golem, or used magic, or was really big. But a non-augmented, non-magical, normal human, even a really tough one, should not be able to take an explosion to the face.
Isn't there already a argument for why HP works that way in a lot of games, tabletop and computer? Something about keeping things simple, and that making combat harder the more health you lose will make the entire game very punishing on the player?
There's also the notion that "hit points" are not representing "taking it to the face," at least not before that last, all-important final hit point.

Hit points are your ability to turn otherwise-deadly blows into glancing blows. To have your clothes shredded rather than your flesh, to take flesh wounds rather than mortal ones. Even falling great distances and the like, it's a representation not that your bones are that tough, but that you know how to roll with it that much better.

This, admittedly, gets a little silly if you're 100% unable to act to so much as twitch away. This is why many game systems have something like D&D 3e's "coup de grace" rules. They may be imperfect, but they do provide for means to greatly overcome the usual limits on damage. (IIRC, D&D's rule also forces a fort save with a DC equal to the damage dealt by the massively-multiplied coup de grace attack, or you die even if you still have hp. So...yeah.)

2. Making combat the primary focus of D&D. Have you ever seen a character class intended for PCs that didn't have a lot of combat powers? I've seen classes for investigators, and tacticians, but for some reason they are still primarily focused around combat.This is not a "design decision" to exclude RP rules. It's a design artifact from D&D's origins as an evolution of a minis wargame called "chainmail."

In World of Darkness (I keep going back to that because it's the other system I'm most familiar with)... it just kind of seems like there are more options for a noncombat character.WoD, notably, came AFTER D&D, and was developed precisely for the reasons you outline as your reason to prefer it. More power to you; have fun with it. I, too, like White Wolf's (now Onyx Path's) games. But I wouldn't call the combat-focus of D&D a "bad decision" so much as just where it started.

It IS why combat is the most-evolved RPG mechanical technology we have; we've been modeling it the longest.

But if the xp is given for roleplaying, well now you have to convince the DM you deserve to level up. Not the game.

In my experience, "RP XP" are used in one of three ways:

1) They're handed out to anybody who showed up. This is usually related to a desire not to tell anybody that the GM subjectively did not care for their (lack of) role playing.
2) They're given out only to those who really amuse the GM. This is often the least popular method and can be - though isn't always - a warning sign as to the kind of GM you're dealing with.
3) They're handed out to everybody who showed up...but the GM takes special care to call out at least one particular bit of RP that player engaged in to earn them.

I like 3 best, myself, because it avoids hurt feelings as in 1, but it also serves a constructive purpose of both focusing the GM on each player to see what they're contributing to his game (and thus, what he can do to play off of that), AND it gives the player feedback on what the GM is looking for, and often (from other players' suggestions or reactions to the reason for the reward) what he did that made the game more entertaining for the others at the table.

"RP XP" thus become both the standard "you 'always' get this" reward that keeps you advancing, and a great way to highlight cool stuff from the game session that each player did, and a way to promote improved social interaction and cohesion at the gaming table.

Flickerdart

2015-03-03, 10:46 AM

2. Making combat the primary focus of D&D. Have you ever seen a character class intended for PCs that didn't have a lot of combat powers? I've seen classes for investigators, and tacticians, but for some reason they are still primarily focused around combat.
If there are 3 combat guys and 1 non-combat guy, then you get one guy being bored in combat, and three guys being bored out of it. But if you have a guy that's not worthless in and out of combat, then you've got something going.

Broken Twin

2015-03-03, 10:53 AM

In my experience, "RP XP" are used in one of three ways:

Just thought I'd chime in, that you missed my favorite form of "RP XP".

4. Bonus experience awarded via player consensus.

This works better in larger groups (4+ PCs), but the idea is that at the end of each session, each player votes for who they think had the best roleplaying (they can't vote for themselves, obviously). Whoever has the most votes gets a small XP bonus.

Obviously, this method still involves the issue of some players being better than others at roleplaying, but it removes the stigma of GM-favoritism.

Flickerdart

2015-03-03, 11:02 AM

Just thought I'd chime in, that you missed my favorite form of "RP XP".

4. Bonus experience awarded via player consensus.

This works better in larger groups (4+ PCs), but the idea is that at the end of each session, each player votes for who they think had the best roleplaying (they can't vote for themselves, obviously). Whoever has the most votes gets a small XP bonus.

Obviously, this method still involves the issue of some players being better than others at roleplaying, but it removes the stigma of GM-favoritism.
I like to do this with Action Points (for which I have my own rules): At the end of the session, every player and the GM picks a PC that they think is most deserving, and that PC gets an action point. These points can be spent once per round on the following things:

1 action point: Replace the result of a d20 roll you just made with a 10, before you know the result
2 action points: Replace the result of a d20 roll you just made with a 20, before you know the result (this is not a natural 20)
1 action point: Add +1d6 to the result of a d20 roll another character just made, before they know the result
1 action point: Automatically stabilize at -1 HP when reduced to between -1 and -9 HP

Then you get epic situations like the entire party pitching in their +1d6 for a desperate last-ditch effort to pull off something ridiculously awesome, and then everyone feels like they contributed to the one time the barbarian shrugged off Asmodeus's mind control and then bent him into a pretzel.

Segev

2015-03-03, 11:26 AM

Broken Twin

2015-03-03, 11:51 AM

Fair enough. I usually don't see XP-by-vote where only one player can get it, though, because, well, only one player can get it. That tends to require a group of people VERY comfortable with each other. Also, I imagine it leads to, "It's Bob's turn this week. Everybody okay with that?"

True enough. I've been gaming with the group, relatively speaking, for a while now, and we're all quite comfortable with each other. They're also fairly competitive, so it occasionally leads to amusing situations where they're trying to be the most in character.

VincentTakeda

2015-03-03, 12:35 PM

I'm a big proponent of the palladium xp model... Its certainly not an xp for killing model, but I cant really call it an xp for role playing model either.

While it does give some xp for killing things, it also gives xp for saving people, self sacrifice, endangering your life, staying in character when it would have been easier not to, kindness, mercy, self restraint, daring, compassion, clever useful ideas, clever futile ideas, avoiding unneccesary violence, keen observations and skill use.

While some of those things qualify as giving xp for rp, and some of those things qualify for xp for killing things, theres an additional gamut of xp rewards as well. And sure, its been argued that you could 'game the xp system' by just performing a skill over and over and over again, but in order to hit 15th level by skill use alone you'd have to perform a skill roll 220 times per session over the course of 52 weeks in a weekly game session in order to hit 15th level in a year. Thats not an efficient way of doing things... On the other hand if you can pull off saving large groups of people, you'd only have to do that 6 times per weekly session, and thats still quite a lot.

While its objectively true that you could make it to 15th level using nothing but keen observations or clever but futile ideas..., you'd need nearly 6000 of them. You just want to do it with skills. Sure thing. You're only 11500 skill rolls away. Yes. You're actually going to have to make the rolls. Better get to it. That kinda thing is gonna get old even for the most opportunistic players.

Flickerdart

2015-03-03, 12:45 PM

While its objectively true that you could make it to 15th level using nothing but keen observations or clever but futile ideas..., you'd need nearly 6000 of them.
Have you never met an adventuring party? They have 6000 clever but futile ideas every 30 seconds or so.

VincentTakeda

2015-03-03, 12:47 PM

True, but they have to actually tell you those ideas and you have to rule them to be 'clever'
and for it to be 'futile' you have to try it and it has to not work out.
Otherwise its a clever useful idea thats worth twice as much!

The system states it as either 'clever useful' or 'clever futile' as opposed to simply 'clever'
So its not as simple as just saying 'oh I have lots of ideas'...
In order to get xp for the idea you must implement it and if it ends up being useful its worth one thing, and if it doesnt pan out its worth another. If you don't actually try it, its worth nothing.

A good example would be someone who says 'I'm going to chew some bubblegum and stick it to his front porch so when he comes after us he'll get stuck!'... Its probably going to be futile and that futility makes it sound more foolish than clever... so you may give it 50 points for being clever but futile if you feel like it, or zero points because its futility means its not that clever really... But he is going to actually have to get some gum, chew it, and stick it to the guys porch and see how it plays out.

On the other hand if they say 'I'm going to leave a burning bag of dog poo on his porch too keep him from chasing after us because he'll be more interested in putting out a dangerous fire than running us down... it could get 'clever futile' even if he doesnt answer his door. Its a clever idea that might have worked but didnt pan out... or it could work exactly as intended and then you get 'clever useful' instead.

Mr.Moron

2015-03-03, 12:59 PM

I like to do this with Action Points (for which I have my own rules): At the end of the session, every player and the GM picks a PC that they think is most deserving, and that PC gets an action point. These points can be spent once per round on the following things:
..
Then you get epic situations like the entire party pitching in their +1d6 for a desperate last-ditch effort to pull off something ridiculously awesome, and then everyone feels like they contributed to the one time the barbarian shrugged off Asmodeus's mind control and then bent him into a pretzel.

I almost always include some kind of hero points system in my games too. Though I tend make them more baseline than strict RP rewards. I like what you've done with the communal d6 adding, I might have to fold something similar into my system.

Flickerdart

2015-03-03, 03:08 PM

I almost always include some kind of hero points system in my games too. Though I tend make them more baseline than strict RP rewards.
It basically works out that way - the PCs end up sharing the points in such a way that everyone gets one, most of the time, especially since I insist that people can't award points for the same thing (so if the fighter punched out Cthulhu, that's only worth one). Notable exceptions are when someone wasn't there that day, so it's a soft encouragement not to miss sessions rather than a hard "no XP for you" one.

I like what you've done with the communal d6 adding, I might have to fold something similar into my system.
At a convention game I went to once, the DM brought a set of poker chips, which PCs could cash in to either boost an ally, boost themselves, or inconvenience an enemy (depending on the color). He had some system for handing them out but I forget what it was.

Talakeal

2015-03-03, 04:09 PM

Let me correct that then. It's not that far reaching in tabletop RPGs.

That's actually kind of funny. HP are used in virtually all RPG video games, but I can't think of any table top RPGs aside from D&D and its clones that use it.

Mr.Moron

2015-03-03, 04:34 PM

That's actually kind of funny. HP are used in virtually all RPG video games, but I can't think of any table top RPGs aside from D&D and its clones that use it.

Depends on if you need them to consider it a hit point system.

If it's just a pool of points, or a series of check boxes that you lose as you take damage and when they run out bad stuff happens to you, lots of games use it. The pools are usually a fair bit smaller, say under 30 or so at the high end. They usually have a different name like "Wounds" but in the end they're points that get tallied to determine when you start hurting.

If you need something where it's like a big pool of points that treats all sources of damage in a totally generic fashion that's pretty unique to D&D.

Knaight

2015-03-03, 05:50 PM

That's actually kind of funny. HP are used in virtually all RPG video games, but I can't think of any table top RPGs aside from D&D and its clones that use it.

CRPGs often lag behind TRPGs in a lot of ways, and that's before getting into the ways they just can't catch up. Something like Fate's Aspect system would be nearly impossible to do with anything short of an actual AI. Although, on the video game front it's hardly just RPGs which use hit points heavily. Shooters, strategy games, basically anything that has things which get damaged where physics engines aren't what gets used...

neonchameleon

2015-03-03, 10:50 PM

Just thought I'd chime in, that you missed my favorite form of "RP XP".

4. Bonus experience awarded via player consensus.

I'm going to add a fifth.

In Apocalypse World (and Monsterhearts and a few other variants) two stats are marked for each PC at the start of the session. One by the MC (GM) and one by the other players. And you gain an XP whenever you roll a marked stat. So basically you gain XP for focussing on the aspects of the character the GM and the other players pick out at the start of the session. (And there are always consequences for failure, with people normally marking low stats).

2. Making combat the primary focus of D&D. Have you ever seen a character class intended for PCs that didn't have a lot of combat powers? I've seen classes for investigators, and tacticians, but for some reason they are still primarily focused around combat.

In World of Darkness (I keep going back to that because it's the other system I'm most familiar with)... it just kind of seems like there are more options for a noncombat character.

This was not the plan for D&D.

In oD&D (and B/X, BECMI, Rules Cyclopaedia, and 1e) you gained 1XP for every GP you found - which was approximately 80% of the XP you expected to receive. Which meant the smart way for levelling up was to go past the monsters and loot the dungeons while risking your neck as seldom as possible. There was also a barely-combat class. The thief. Who had poor armour proficiencies, poor weapon proficiencies, and precisely one combat ability; backstab. (If anyone is wondering where the 3.0 monk went wrong, the 1e monk is basically a variant 1e thief with the same skills and a worse XP track in exchange for minor abilities, mostly out of combat. The 3.0 monk is close to a straight port of the 1e monk when the thief was massively upgraded by backstab going to sneak attack (even as its skills were nerfed and the monk had its skills nerfed even harder)).

However D&D as planned was a tightly focussed game on dungeon exploration and looting. People found the XP for GP rule unrealistic. And therefore removed it - it didn't fit with Dragonlance and other adventure paths, or high fantasy. 2e relegated XP for GP to an optional rule and 3.0 removed it entirely. Which pushed combat to the primary focus of the game as the default; it was far the biggest source of party XP.

Rhaegar14

2015-03-03, 11:38 PM

Pex

2015-03-04, 12:08 AM

So, I won't lie, I haven't read this entire thread because it's very long, so if I'm about to tread ground that's already covered, I apologize. However, two things come to mind immediately for me (and really, the second is just a sub-point of the first).

Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma as Ability Scores

I get that spellcasters need to scale off Ability Scores in a way similar to martial characters, but couldn't we have made them something more generic like "Magic"? Intelligence and Charisma are almost universally dump stats for Fighters, and as a result, most "faithfully" roleplayed Fighters are idiots with no social skills. Even if you try to buck the trope through roleplaying, you don't have the skill bonuses to back it up; your smart Fighter is still gonna have zero knowledge skills (admittedly, intelligence and knowledge are different things, but the latter helps to sell the former), and your military commander Fighter is going to be the least inspiring leader of men ever as soon as dice come in to the mix. Ability scores based off actual mental/personality traits stifle roleplaying.

Social Skills (Diplomacy, Intimidate, Bluff) as Game Skills

This ties in to the above point. For a rather extreme example, let's use a relatively mid-level 3.5e character. Say you're sixth level, and you have nine ranks in Diplomacy with a +2 Charisma modifier. Now, you are trying to convince a nobleman to help you in your quest. In reality, a good chunk of this would come down to your arguments. With the way I have seen a lot of D&D games DM'd (and according to the guidelines in 3.5's DMG), a well-constructed argument is going to get you a +2 circumstance bonus that looks all but irrelevant next to your +11 Diplomacy modifier. At that point, it's once again killing roleplaying; it's no longer about actually making a good argument, it's about saying enough that the DM asks you to make a Diplomacy check. Plus, characters without mechanically-based social skills (because, for example, they have a low Charisma score and too few skill ranks to invest in social skills) can't hope to sway someone with even the most compellingly roleplayed, laid-out argument. You can't effectively contribute in social encounters, regardless of whether or not that makes sense for your character concept, unless you have the skills to back it up.

I will admit here that Bluff is somewhat less offensive, as you do frequently need a way to tell whether a character believes a lie, but it still contributes to the overall problem.

But then you deny the shy player the ability to play the ladies' man bard, to be stereotypically extreme. Certainly not all gamers are socially awkward, but they do exist. Some people cannot articulate well. To deny social skills is to have only the real life charismatic players be able to do anything because they can convince the DM the sky is green. Other players as a matter of preference just don't want to act out a Broadway play and just say what their character does. It's enough for them to say they try to convince the Duke to send help to the baron and present the Duke with a few orc heads as proof the trouble exists. They don't want to give a rousing speech of earnest plea filled with platitudes. 3E's error was not in having the social skills but the mechanics in using them. Success should have been determined by opposed rolls instead of fixed DCs, though more effort to explain the difference between a successful Diplomacy Check and the spell Dominate Person would have been helpful.

Edit: As for Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma, you're again interpreting dislike for a mechanic as a dislike for existing. Not liking how D&D math portrays smart warriors and charismatic leaders doesn't mean any RPG should not enable such characters. Other game systems do allow for such characters with better math behind it for the game and characters to function.

goto124

2015-03-04, 12:11 AM

No, not that kind of Dominate.

YossarianLives

2015-03-04, 12:43 AM

I don't know, I find the idea of a guy literally being crushed by meteors or hit with a massive fireball completely shrugging it off and continuing to fight absolutely hilarious.

Cazero

2015-03-04, 02:50 AM

But then you deny the shy player the ability to play the ladies' man bard, to be stereotypically extreme. Certainly not all gamers are socially awkward, but they do exist. Some people cannot articulate well. To deny social skills is to have only the real life charismatic players be able to do anything because they can convince the DM the sky is green. Other players as a matter of preference just don't want to act out a Broadway play and just say what their character does. It's enough for them to say they try to convince the Duke to send help to the baron and present the Duke with a few orc heads as proof the trouble exists. They don't want to give a rousing speech of earnest plea filled with platitudes. 3E's error was not in having the social skills but the mechanics in using them. Success should have been determined by opposed rolls instead of fixed DCs, though more effort to explain the difference between a successful Diplomacy Check and the spell Dominate Person would have been helpful.

Wich leads directly into the real problem of D&D 3.5 skill system (and HP, especially in videogames).
Excessive escalation of numbers. Now don't get me wrong : escalation of numbers in itself is a good thing. It creates a sense of progression and accomplishment.
But when it gets excessive, it creates an equally excessive disparity between basic competency for everyday life and high power level for fighting tough monsters, while not actually improving the success rate of the high level character when it matters since his average opposition follows the same excessive scale.
Granted, it's difficult to do with social skills since the mechanics will always contain a level of hand waving. But this (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0767.html) goes too far.

Kami2awa

2015-03-04, 03:05 AM

Isn't there already a argument for why HP works that way in a lot of games, tabletop and computer? Something about keeping things simple, and that making combat harder the more health you lose will make the entire game very punishing on the player?

I agree - death spiral systems (where you get worse the more hits you take, so you take more hits, so you die) are realistic (ish) but not fun. Once you get hit, you cease to be able to contribute to the combat, and then end up sitting around doing very little for ages (or dying).

More realistic injury systems also involve a lot more bookkeeping and that detracts from getting combat moving forward. I'd say slow, turn-based combat is one of the things I find most annoying about some RPGs.

Kami2awa

2015-03-04, 03:20 AM

So, if, say, one of your players is an engineer with historical interest who does their research, they get to advance technology a few centuries on their own?

If they are willing to give up adventuring and spent their whole life experimenting, and have huge resources and an army of workers, and can deal with the ensuing riots when they disrupt the previous way of life, maybe. The cleverest people in the world don't just pull inventions out the air - even if you "know how to build one" you run into enormous problems. "Everyone knows" that a steam engine is just the pressure of expanding steam driving a piston, but it took decades of progress to get a useful one.

Broken Twin

2015-03-04, 09:00 AM

In regards to the six ability scores, I'm fully in support of the idea that Charisma should not have been a primary stat. It should have been a secondary stat, that modified your rolls when needed.

My personal gripe? Single Attribute Dependency. A lot of people praised the various movements to make Multiple Attribute Dependent characters less MAD, but personally, they should have been going in the opposite direction.

Also, number bloat. D&D 3.5 was particularly bad for it. You should never be able to have a permanent bonus large enough that the roll of the dice is functionally irrelevant. +10 skill bonus items? Ridiculous. It makes it so that the only people who can participate in something are the ones that specialized in it, and jack-of-all-trades characters become more and more useless as the game progresses.

Segev

2015-03-04, 09:21 AM

My personal gripe? Single Attribute Dependency. A lot of people praised the various movements to make Multiple Attribute Dependent characters less MAD, but personally, they should have been going in the opposite direction.The real problem is that the MAD classes didn't get adequately rewarded for it. The reason to have MAD is twofold: to make the well-rounded character that is solid at a lot of the basic, underlying rolls (good hp, solid saves, competent to hit and damage, not bad at any particular untrained skills) also get benefit in his class from all of them (thus encouraging him to continue improving evenly); and to mitigate a powerful class's features by spreading out their requirements such that focusing in one reduces the scope of one's other features.

The trouble is that most of the MAD classes actually had subpar features to begin with, and the SAD classes had some of the most powerful and versatile ones in the game (spellcasting on primary casters, I'm looking at you).

Also, number bloat. D&D 3.5 was particularly bad for it. You should never be able to have a permanent bonus large enough that the roll of the dice is functionally irrelevant. +10 skill bonus items? Ridiculous. It makes it so that the only people who can participate in something are the ones that specialized in it, and jack-of-all-trades characters become more and more useless as the game progresses.

This is less a problem of the specific bloat and more a problem of relative differences.

Exalted actually did this pretty well, though I will admit it may have been more happy accident than brilliant design.

Lunars are very multitalented. They can be well-rounded and powerful in all the areas. Solars are extremely potent specialists. A Solar who tries to be a Jack-of-all-trades is not going to fail at it, but most Lunars will be generally better than they are. Lunars ARE capable of specialization, but they will not be as good in their specialties as Solars are in theirs.

So the trick, it seems to me, is to reward "well-rounded" builds, or those with MAD, with easier build-up to about 75% power in multiple areas, while the SAD types find it hard to get to even 50% power if they don't focus, but hit 95-100% power in areas of focus relatively easily. The MAD build that tries to focus, to specialize, by contrast should only be able to push their area of focus to, say, 85%, maybe 90% if they REALLY work it to the point they're actually sacrificing their generic 70-75% competence in "everything."

To the point of the quoted box, massive bonuses aren't a problem as long as they're in the ballpark of all other static numbers, such that the die roll matters. They can be overwhelming against "old" challenges, so now you don't bother rolling to see if Hercules can break out of the wooden stockade. But you do roll if it's an adamantine one (whereas, earlier, you probably wouldn't have because he literally could not have made the DC).

Kurald Galain

2015-03-04, 10:12 AM

Wich leads directly into the real problem of D&D 3.5 skill system (and HP, especially in videogames).
Excessive escalation of numbers. Now don't get me wrong : escalation of numbers in itself is a good thing. It creates a sense of progression and accomplishment.
But when it gets excessive, it creates an equally excessive disparity between basic competency for everyday life and high power level for fighting tough monsters, while not actually improving the success rate of the high level character when it matters since his average opposition follows the same excessive scale.

Right. The bad decision is not so much "numbers go up", but "bonuses that go up at the same rate as target numbers", because that makes the progress meaningless.

Segev

2015-03-04, 10:15 AM

Right. The bad decision is not so much "numbers go up", but "bonuses that go up at the same rate as target numbers", because that makes the progress meaningless.

It's a tricky balance.

Having bonuses scale in line with the target numbers of expected challenges for that level is okay. You can come across challenges that are too tough or trivial, still, and as you level up, you expect more and more things that were once challenges to become trivial.

Having ALL target numbers scale with your bonuses removes the entire point.

Kurald Galain

2015-03-04, 10:26 AM

It's a tricky balance.

Having bonuses scale in line with the target numbers of expected challenges for that level is okay. You can come across challenges that are too tough or trivial, still, and as you level up, you expect more and more things that were once challenges to become trivial.

Having ALL target numbers scale with your bonuses removes the entire point.

It's an interesting far-reaching decision, yes.

3E, skill modifiers go up and target numbers pretty much don't. Result: players complain.
4E, skill modifiers go up and target numbers go up by the same amount. Result: players complain.
5E, skill modifiers don't go up and target numbers don't go up either. Result: players complain.

:smallbiggrin:

Segev

2015-03-04, 10:30 AM

It's an interesting far-reaching decision, yes.

3E, skill modifiers go up and target numbers pretty much don't. Result: players complain.
4E, skill modifiers go up and target numbers go up by the same amount. Result: players complain.
5E, skill modifiers don't go up and target numbers don't go up either. Result: players complain.

:smallbiggrin:

I disagree on 3e; target numbers don't go up...but there remain (or should remain) things to do at every target number scale. So while you now don't have to roll to pick nearly any lock in creation, you might still need to roll to pick that masterwork enchanted lock sealed with Arcane Lock by throwing a dagger underhanded in just the right way to lodge in there and hit the pins perfectly in one round while hanging upside-down from a swinging chandelier thirty feet away in the dark.

Broken Twin

2015-03-04, 10:31 AM

Yeah, it's definitely one of those can't-please-everyone situations. Personally, I like how they did it in 5E. One of the reasons that I was willing to give D&D as a whole another shot, honestly.

Psyren

2015-03-04, 10:35 AM

3E, skill modifiers go up and target numbers pretty much don't. Result: players complain.

The real answer is that some targets shouldn't go up and others should. For instance Sense Motive - a gumshoe rookie detective should spend an entire evening trying to get a hunch (i.e. taking 20), while an experienced sleuth like Sherlock Holmes or the Doctor would be making deductions and logical leaps so fast its like they have permanent Metafaculty up.

Kurald Galain

2015-03-04, 10:39 AM

The real answer is that some targets shouldn't go up and others should. For instance Sense Motive - a gumshoe rookie detective should spend an entire evening trying to get a hunch (i.e. taking 20), while an experienced sleuth like Sherlock Holmes or the Doctor would be making deductions and logical leaps so fast its like they have permanent Metafaculty up.

Yes. The other real answer is that you probably shouldn't base your game design on whatever people on internet forums complain most about. Because those tend to be vocal minorities, not your actual target audience.

Segev

2015-03-04, 10:56 AM

Yes. The other real answer is that you probably shouldn't base your game design on whatever people on internet forums complain most about. Because those tend to be vocal minorities, not your actual target audience.

Indeed. Though that does create opportunities for competitors to cleave off a huge chunk of your former near-monopoly!

Yora

2015-03-09, 11:02 AM

Sith_Happens

2015-03-09, 03:05 PM

Mr.Moron

2015-03-09, 03:20 PM

It's the natural end-point of a game that uses resource management as its primary way to mediate player power. I'm pretty sure it isn't a thing outside of D&D and clones, though.

It can be, I don't think it's an inevitable conclusion.

There is nothing saying that resource management has to be strictly coupled to an in-universe measurable such as "Days". A good example of resources like this that see some play in the D&D-ish space are action points. They let characters do things, sometimes even things they wouldn't be capable of otherwise but they're generally tied meta-events like levels, or sessions. They're not strictly coupled with any particular thing you could observe empirically from within the game universe.

Similarly you could imagine spells, hit points or manuevers being recovered at say the end of Sessions, Chapters, Adventures or any other way you want to frame discrete sets of challenges that might exist outside narrative time.

The conceit in a case like that being the game isn't modelling the world itself but providing abstraction for having a certain style of experience. Whatever the in-universe reason for the events playing out the way are exists, but on a level below the abstraction that doesn't generally demand our attention. Any situational weirdness can have an explanation given at the time or be given a limited exception to the general rules.

Sith_Happens

2015-03-09, 03:27 PM

...In my head I was specifically referring to resource management as a function of in-universe real-time.

NoldorForce

2015-03-09, 05:56 PM

1337 b4k4

2015-03-09, 06:24 PM

It's the natural end-point of a game that uses resource management as its primary way to mediate player power. I'm pretty sure it isn't a thing outside of D&D and clones, though.

See I look at "encounters per day" not as the inevitable endpoint of "resource management as power management" but as the inevitable endpoint of trying to reduce the game to something that can be modeled and statted via spreadsheets. I mean it's built right into the wording by assuming an "encounter" is some quantifiable thing that you can then measure into units per other unit. It's only when you start needing or wanting to do comparisons between classes and between tables that "encounters per day" has any relevance on anything. I mean, in general the concept of "Y amount of resource consumption in the form of Y amount of monsters of Z HD/Level means that throwing more or less than A such sums of monsters at your party and expecting them to be defeated in mortal combat will lower or raise the survival difficulty respectively" is a useful planning tool for a DM, but like most such tools, I think it got used for things it wasn't meant for. I agree however that I rarely encounter the concept outside of D&D.

Segev

2015-03-10, 07:57 AM

I've often wondered how things would look if spellcasters had a much sharper limit on their total spellcasting ability, but more spells in that limit to compensate.

Specifically, calculate how many encounters they are expected to have before getting to the next level. Divide by 4 to determine number of days they should take to get all of those encounters.

They get that number times their spells-per-day. For that level. Period. They don't get more spell slots until next level.

This would make spellcasters have a desperate need to level up.

It would also make them shepherd their spells carefully for when they need them. Some sort of "ritual magic" might be necessary to give them things they can do to live up to their wizardly and clerical reputations during down time.

Milo v3

2015-03-10, 08:15 AM

obryn

2015-03-10, 08:29 AM

That would feel very gamely to me, wouldn't that require character level to be a thing in the setting....
No more than it already does. After all, there's a point where a Cleric suddenly says, "Hey, look, now I have 2nd level spells and all of my other spells work better and can go farther!"

Mr.Moron

2015-03-10, 08:47 AM

That would feel very gamely to me, wouldn't that require character level to be a thing in the setting....

"Gamey" certainly possible, though that's more of a subjective feeling than anything else.

As to what I've put in bold: No. The game is an abstraction layer on top of the "Real" setting and nothing requires the mechanics of the game to be directly coupled with of the mechanics of the setting. Just like in universe being good at something is a matter of practice, natural talent or experience and not "Skill Ranks".

D&D by default doesn't handle simulating how much you learn from doing a task, and how much attention you gave what you learned, or if your mind was kind of wandering because you were thinking about some conversation you had that morning. It doesn't aggregate all the things that really go into learning something over time and instead provides us with an abstraction and a rather loose one at that. The abstraction exists to support a particular kind of experience: A heroic story about people who do stuff, rather than being about properly absorbing lock picking experiences.

Similarly in a system where you can only cast "Fireball"... say every time you defeat 4 Frogs, we're dealing with an abstraction. Just as there are underlying in-universe mechanics that go into learning a skill that the system doesn't bother to deal with, we now have underlying limitations on casting spells we're choosing not to deal with. It might be that casting spells is about having the right pacing, or the right materials or plain luck. However we're agreeing not to track those pacing, materials or luck and instead focusing on having a particular kind of experience: Shooting every 4th frog with fireballs. The abstraction tells us that and we assume the in-universe stuff is happening that way because it's not important to the 4th-frog-frying experience even if it might able to "Really" happen otherwise with less abstracted more granular control.

When you use any abstraction you're making something of a statement "There is a kind of experience we want to have, and we're going to make the assumptions needed to have it". Some of those assumptions may lead to directly coupling with "Real" in-setting mechanics but they don't have to.

goto124

2015-03-10, 09:39 AM

So, who wants roasted frog meat?

neonchameleon

2015-03-10, 10:30 AM

Sorry to beat this horse again. But Encounters per day? Who thought that would be a good idea?! This goes completely against the entire concept of early D&D where the entire point was to think outside the box and do brute frontal assaults against everything.

OK. We're once more in the territory of "D&D is not used for what it was designed for, and this causes problems".

In the beginning was oD&D and it was played in basically two modes. Adventuring and Down Time. When you went adventuring things were simple. You went through the dangerous wilderness, not stopping lest the dangerous monsters catch you. You then made it to the dungeon. And you didn't stop to rest in the dungeon - wandering monster rolls were made every ten minutes. You pressed on or cashed out and took your loot home. Then you spent time living high on the hog before your next delve. For pseudo-realistic reasons, spellcasters recovered all their spells after a night of rest and it took fighters longer to recover hp - but for most practical purposes you were either (a) on an adventure having started on full hp and spells or (b) enjoying your downtime.

Enter the Dragonlance. Or more accurately enter people who didn't want to dungeon crawl. Wandering monsters were kicked to the kerb because they make no sense most of the time, and certainly not outside certain limited environments. You could rest in the wilderness. But spellcasters, which were set up to rest at downtime because there weren't meant to be overnight adventures, could now recover their spells every adventuring day on a multi-day adventure. Which meant that the spellcasters could dump their full load on encounters, making them thoroughly broken.

Rather than realise it was the spellcaster recharge mechanic that was broken the designers decided to keep the spellcaster recovery rules and say "Throw enough fights to exhaust the spellcaster". Because they didn't want to redesign the game, it being supposedly fine as is. The problem therefore must be one for the DM to fix by throwing more encounters per day.

Segev

2015-03-10, 10:37 AM

That is an interesting thesis. Have you a suggested alternate recharge mechanic for spellcasters which might be a solution?

Mr.Moron

2015-03-10, 10:46 AM

That is an interesting thesis. Have you a suggested alternate recharge mechanic for spellcasters which might be a solution?

One immediately apparent approach is tying spells to XP. Since at least by RAW assumption the assumption is XP is generated by encounters, and XP per encounter falls within a specific range you can get roughly an idea of encounters-per-XP.

Assign spell slots an XP value, scaled against spell-level character level to recharge. Each time you gain XP that works towards recharging a spell.

For Example:
Regain a spent spell slot of a given level each time you get (Character Level + Spell Level^2)*[Variable] XP.

The formula would be something that snaps spell-slot recovery across level such that, given expected CR encounters filling our your XP gains you'd have roughly 1/4th your spell supply for each.

This strictly ties spell slots to encounters with the advantage of fluff-ing nicely into the "XP as Spirutal Energy" and/or spell cost that already seems like a thread through the system.

EDIT: This is literally just something I came up with the top of my head as I was writing the post, but It should illustrate the kind of general principles you could follow.

Flickerdart

2015-03-10, 10:48 AM

One immediately apparent approach is tying spells to XP. Since at least by RAW assumption XP is generated by encounters, and XP per encounter falls within a specific range you can get roughly an idea of encounters-per-XP.

Assign spell slots an XP value, scaled against spell-level character level to recharge. Each time you gain XP that works towards recharging a spell.

A spell slot of a given level each time you get (Character Level + Spell Level^2)*[Variable] XP.

The formula would be something that snaps spell-slot recovery across level such that, given expected CR encounters filling our your XP gains you'd have roughly 1/4th your spell supply for each.

This strictly ties spell slots to encounters with the advantage of fluff-ing nicely into the "XP as Spirutal Energy" and/or spell cost that already seems like a thread through the system.

EDIT: This is literally just something I came up with the top of my head as I was writing the post, but It should illustrate the kind of general principles you could follow.
Holy mother of bookkeeping, Batman!

Frozen_Feet

2015-03-10, 10:57 AM

"Encounters per day" is a resource-management guideline that came about in response to the fact that people weren't just doing dungeons anymore. Originally "get through the dungeon in one-shot, or else [whatever]" was the guideline for play, but when people tried to generalize things...

It's not by any means the only possible guideline in such a scenario, but it was at the time a decent attempt to correct an actual problem.

"Encounters per day" exist in dungeon crawl situation just as well, because it's the answer to the question "how many fights can we expect to get away with?" Doing what you safely can and then retreating to rest is, like, Tactics 101. This was known from the start of the game, and wandering monsters and random encounters existed to add an element of surprise so players wouldn't be able to follow an optimal strategy and have perfectly-ordered expedition every single time.

Where things took a left turn was when this ceased to be a possible player strategy and turned into a rule enforced by a GM. Having guidelines for how many encounters you can have and reasonably expect players to survive is all fine and dandy... always having exactly that many encounters is a good way to stiffle player thinking and leads to formulaic gaming.

This is also why I'm ambivalent to afore-mentioned divorce of in-game time from in-game resources. If you dish out character resources "per the scene", to model a certain type of story, it quickly makes a game unable to tell anything but that story. Keeping resources tied with in-game time ideally improves verisimilitude and allows for wider range of possible events, even though it allows for more player exploits.

Lord Torath

2015-03-10, 11:02 AM

That is an interesting thesis. Have you a suggested alternate recharge mechanic for spellcasters which might be a solution?AD&D did. Each spell you wanted to memorize took 15 minutes per spell level after your 8 hours of sleep. So your first level mage could easily recharge every day. But each 2nd-level spell took 30 minutes of memorization, so a 3rd level mage needs 8 hours of sleep and 1 hour of study (2 1st and 1 2nd level spells) to fully recharge. A 5th-level mage needs 45 minutes for his Fireball, an hour for his two 2nd level spells, and an hour for his four 1st level spells - 2hr 45 min. A 10th-level mage (4 4 3 2 2) needs 9 hours and 45 minutes to fully recharge, and that's after an 8-hour rest.

Mr.Moron

2015-03-10, 11:03 AM

Holy mother of bookkeeping, Batman!

Yes it could wind up fairly fiddly. There are a few ways to keep bookkeeping down, an XP "Spell Track" that you populate on level-up. This way you'd really only be doing book keeping once per level. When you get XP you simply look at the track you made earlier to see if you're entitled to any recovery.

You could also just spell slots a kind of XP debt. Cast a level 1 spell, incur 50 points of debt. Cast a level 2 spell 200 points. If your current XP "Debt" is higher than your current XP you can't prepare/cast the spell in question. Since the value of each spell slot is pre-calculated you just have to keep a running total, instead of timing a billion recharges.

Another variation might be that you get a single allotment of spells-per-level, that forms a pool that doesn't refresh until you level. The per day cap remains in place (or even gets lowered) as a sort of nova-limiter but when your spell pool is gone, it's gone. This means you can't just nova every encounter as you just don't have enough spell-slots-per-level to go full out in every encounter, since you're given less than you'd need to do that for the XP needed to jump a given level. Tough this kind of resource management can let you put yourself into a really unfun state.

Again this is all top-of-my-head rambling. I just mean if you're looking for a means to key spells off encounters that already has some "Fluff" inroads, XP is probably one of the better things to use as a framework. It's already closely tied to the encounter concept and already is treated as kind of spell energy.

neonchameleon

2015-03-10, 11:29 AM

That is an interesting thesis. Have you a suggested alternate recharge mechanic for spellcasters which might be a solution?

Yup. "Long lazy weekend somewhere safe." And hit points recover at the same rate is the mechanical part, and then I've wrapped more round it.

To recover hit points a fighter or thief needs to spend a couple of days carousing or being pampered. A cleric needs a full day fasting and meditating or taking part in rites at a holy site (and time both setting that up and recovering) and a wizard needs time in a library or lab (their choice) for spells. It works well - fluffier than the official D&D rules, makes pacing much more intense and casters much less likely to blow spells gratuitously. It also invests them into the community (clerics get seriously pissed off if you desecrate their temples and they know they need them to recover spells, and smart enemies may try and mess with their meditation - also it provides NPCs they know they should care about).

The full detailed rules I've never tested in detail because they only kick in at high level are that you need different levels of holiness/research materials to recover spells depending on the spell level. The minimum you need to recover your spells is below - but this is a bare minimum. The "Recover first level wizard spells by turning the walls of the cell into something out of Good Will Hunting" worked well however. I've not actually squeezed rests hard enough that they haven't been able to recover fifth level spells.

First level spells require a holy symbol blessed by three drops of blood of a divine representative for a cleric/paladin or something to write with and on (prison walls and a colored rock will do) for a wizard.

Second level spells require a minor relic or portable shrine with incense for a cleric or a handful of the equivalent of pop-sci books or effectively free reign over a kitchen for a wizard (and you probably want new pans afterwards). This is the level at which things are portable and if you were going undercover you could still recover second level spells.

Third level spells require a tended shrine for a cleric (no need for it to be tended by someone divinely invested; a household shrine that gets incense lit in it every week will do), and the equivalent of a classroom for a wizard. Most wizards and clerics don't have to work to reach this bar even at first level.

Fourth level spells are the final level you can do it on your own. A shrine regularly tended by a divinely empowered priest is required for a cleric. (That doesn't mean you need a priest in residence, merely that they have regularly visited). A noble dilletante who's paid for a lab or ruined wizards' tower will be enough for a wizard.

Fifth level requires a church with either a priest or a handful of trained acolytes/initiates for a cleric, and a wizard's tower with a handful of apprentices (treated like PhD students) or another wizard to discuss things, check, and bounce ideas off.

For sixth level a cleric requires a full congregation and a handful of acolytes. A wizard requires actual collaborators

Seventh level requires either the high holy site (the equivalent of St. Peter's in Rome) and a full congregation, complete with acolytes and a deacon, while wizards require a conference (when all of them are recharging their spells).

Eighth level spells are very hard to recharge - requiring a High Holy Day or Solstice or Equinox. And a network of churches or a conclave of wizards supporting you.

9th level spells each require their own condition. And generally direct divine approval for clerics.

Flickerdart

2015-03-10, 11:38 AM

This was known from the start of the game, and wandering monsters and random encounters existed to add an element of surprise so players wouldn't be able to follow an optimal strategy and have perfectly-ordered expedition every single time.
Were there literally tables for when random encounters happen, too? Because random encounter tables for every CR take up a good bit of the books.

neonchameleon

2015-03-10, 11:47 AM

Were there literally tables for when random encounters happen, too? Because random encounter tables for every CR take up a good bit of the books.

In the dungeon you rolled once for every ten minutes of (in-character) time and from memory you had a random encounter on the roll of a 1 on a d6. This prevented people going in with the "tap every square with a 10' pole and turtle up" approach. In the wilderness I think it was once/hour, but wilderness encounters were much nastier at low levels.

Frozen_Feet

2015-03-10, 12:04 PM

Were there literally tables for when random encounters happen, too? Because random encounter tables for every CR take up a good bit of the books.

The basic rule was "check encounter once in turn (10 in-game minutes)". I'm not sure, but for wilderness encounters, there might have also been a table telling how often encounters should be checked based on terrain and time of day. A lot of old-school modules, then and now, add or replace these rules with a check more specifically tailored to the adventure. Lamentations of the Flame Princess adventure God that Crawls is perhaps the best modern example.

Note that in addition to dice rolling, both God that Crawls and old D&D offered a harder, purely mechanistic solution: monsters had listed sensory ranges and movement speeds, so if the PCs caused noise (etc.), if a GM knows where the monsters are, he can easily tell how long they will take to arrive at the PCs' location. The random element here is player actions, of course.

Talakeal

2015-03-10, 02:43 PM

That is an interesting thesis. Have you a suggested alternate recharge mechanic for spellcasters which might be a solution?

I have adopted Werewolf: The Apocalypse's system and tied spell casting to the phases of the moon, meaning that casters only get a full recharge once per month (which generally sinks up pretty well to the time between adventures). Of course, you have to give your spell casters significantly more base spell slots for a system like this to work.

Flickerdart

2015-03-10, 03:51 PM

I have adopted Werewolf: The Apocalypse's system and tied spell casting to the phases of the moon, meaning that casters only get a full recharge once per month (which generally sinks up pretty well to the time between adventures). Of course, you have to give your spell casters significantly more base spell slots for a system like this to work.
Doesn't this just further augment casters' already brutal nova capabilities?

veti

2015-03-10, 03:55 PM

The basic rule was "check encounter once in turn (10 in-game minutes)". I'm not sure, but for wilderness encounters, there might have also been a table telling how often encounters should be checked based on terrain and time of day.

I seem to recall, outdoors the check was supposed to be once every 3 hours. Or possibly 6 hours. Still often enough to be a nuisance, certainly.

Worth noting that there was no such concept as "CR" in those days. In a dungeon, the only variable between tables was "which level of the dungeon you're on": first level easy, 10th - not. Outdoors there wasn't even that - it was all down to terrain, and your random encounter might be anything from a brownie, to an entire tribe of gnolls, or a bullette or a sphinx or something else that could basically eat a low-level party whole.

Talakeal

2015-03-10, 04:53 PM

Doesn't this just further augment casters' already brutal nova capabilities?

If they choose to play that way, yes, absolutely. I find it to be a good thing though, as you get more of the mythological wizard who acts subtly and judicially but can go all out when the stuff hits the fan.

johnbragg

2015-03-10, 04:59 PM

I seem to recall, outdoors the check was supposed to be once every 3 hours. Or possibly 6 hours. Still often enough to be a nuisance, certainly.

Worth noting that there was no such concept as "CR" in those days. In a dungeon, the only variable between tables was "which level of the dungeon you're on": first level easy, 10th - not. Outdoors there wasn't even that - it was all down to terrain, and your random encounter might be anything from a brownie, to an entire tribe of gnolls, or a bullette or a sphinx or something else that could basically eat a low-level party whole.

This was softened somewhat, at least in 2E, by the encounter tables working off of a 2d10 roll, with more common encounters taking up the fat part of the bell curve. Of course, I did wipe out a 2nd level party (PC and DMPC) because I thought they had a shot at beating a Hill Giant. :smalleek:

Tvtyrant

2015-03-10, 05:09 PM

How would you homebrew/houserule/change DnD to not use that Race/Level/Class system?

Sorry to be so late to this discussion, but if you look at D20 future you find mutant rules which allow you to make your own race from a pretty massive selection of different attributes. It is at the point where you can't call them races anymore, with each individual being pretty far from each other. Classes could be dealt with the same way, and even levels would just be adding more points (pretty soon it becomes Mutants and Masterminds).

Edit: To the thread in general I add the concept of Experience as a definition of power. The basic assumption that humanoids get better from experience, while many sentient creatures are stronger because of mutations, eugenics or age is weird. It leads to issues like Sorcerers and Psions getting stronger as they age the same way a Wizard does, even though their power is intrinsic and often called out as instinctive. Or Barbarians who are stronger at 90 then they were at 20.

BootStrapTommy

2015-03-10, 05:20 PM

Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma as Ability Scores Intelligence is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing tomatoes don't belong in fruit salads. Charisma is being able to sell tomato based fruit salads by calling them "salsa".

They exist because they are all very conceptionally different.

Social Skills (Diplomacy, Intimidate, Bluff) as Game Skills
One thing I've learned as a GM:
Players will never be smart, nor witty, nor competent. Or at least I get yelled when I assume they are.

Removing mechanics from social interaction sounds like a great way to promote roleplaying. Until you dumb friend wants to roleplay a genius. Or you socially awkward, shy friend wants to roleplay a seductress.

In which case, you just robbed them of their fantasy. Given roleplaying is the exercising fantasy, you've actually done the opposite of what you intended.

Amphetryon

2015-03-10, 05:24 PM

Sorry to be so late to this discussion, but if you look at D20 future you find mutant rules which allow you to make your own race from a pretty massive selection of different attributes. It is at the point where you can't call them races anymore, with each individual being pretty far from each other. Classes could be dealt with the same way, and even levels would just be adding more points (pretty soon it becomes Mutants and Masterminds).

Edit: To the thread in general I add the concept of Experience as a definition of power. The basic assumption that humanoids get better from experience, while many sentient creatures are stronger because of mutations, eugenics or age is weird. It leads to issues like Sorcerers and Psions getting stronger as they age the same way a Wizard does, even though their power is intrinsic and often called out as instinctive. Or Barbarians who are stronger at 90 then they were at 20.

Are you familiar with Terry Pratchett's Silver Horde?

Kurald Galain

2015-03-10, 05:57 PM

Intelligence is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing tomatoes don't belong in fruit salads. Charisma is being able to sell tomato based fruit salads by calling them "salsa".

They exist because they are all very conceptionally different.

No, not really. Particularly with regards to intelligence and wisdom, there are frequent discussions on forums what (if anything) the difference between the two is. So while any individual player may have some kind of distinction in mind, there is really no consensus about what it should be.

It is telling that no RPG anywhere has a wisdom score, except for D&D spinoffs.

Eldan

2015-03-10, 06:19 PM

Intelligence is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing tomatoes don't belong in fruit salads. Charisma is being able to sell tomato based fruit salads by calling them "salsa".

They exist because they are all very conceptionally different.

Actually, intelligence is knowing that there's a botanical and a culinary definition of "fruit" and the two are very different and the contexts in which they matter rarely overlap. :smalltongue:

Frozen_Feet

2015-03-10, 06:35 PM

Differentiating between Intelligence and Wisdom is fairly easy - the former is analytical thinking and general intelligence, while the latter is intuitive thinking and instinct. I analyzed this in a world-building thread once. The problem is that unlike Intelligence, Wisdom does not have singular measures rated on a bell curve that could be used as easy reference frame for what different scores mean. Further complicating things in d20 specifically is that sensory perception is folded into Wisdom, but different senses often don't correlate even with each other, let alone other traits associated with Wisdom.

Tvtyrant

2015-03-10, 06:38 PM

Are you familiar with Terry Pratchett's Silver Horde?

I am. It is a fun parody which implicitly acknowledges the problems with the experience=power interpretation. Clearly they wouldn't win the fights they get into, which is why they are an amusing group. Druss the Legend is a straighter example of how levels work in D&D, but he acknowledges that he is no longer physically stronger than his opponents. An elderly Barbarian in D&D is at least as strong as they started out as, and in most editions far stronger.

Kurald Galain

2015-03-10, 06:45 PM

Differentiating between Intelligence and Wisdom is fairly easy

I'm sure it is, but if you start a thread on it you'll have ten different definitions in an hour.

Of course, the only reason why perception was folded into wisdom (in 3E and up) was because otherwise, wisdom doesn't really do anything for any character that's not a divine caster :smallbiggrin:

NichG

2015-03-10, 06:45 PM

One thing I've learned as a GM:
Players will never be smart, nor witty, nor competent. Or at least I get yelled when I assume they are.

Removing mechanics from social interaction sounds like a great way to promote roleplaying. Until you dumb friend wants to roleplay a genius. Or you socially awkward, shy friend wants to roleplay a seductress.

In which case, you just robbed them of their fantasy. Given roleplaying is the exercising fantasy, you've actually done the opposite of what you intended.

The causal direction is messed up in this. There are always character concepts you can envision, but which are inappropriate to play at a particular game for various reasons. Usually this isn't a problem because its obvious that the character concepts are inappropriate for the game - for instance, you're in the wrong if you just arbitrarily decide something like 'my character concept is an ancient Babylonian deity of vengeance and disease - anyone who tries to harm him gets the plague and dies' in a game about detectives in the 1930s, or Lv3 D&D characters, or whatever. The system and the setting and the genre all inform the players about what would be appropriate. It's just as much of a problem if a player decides 'my character is a banker, and he's going to spend most of his game time doing accounting' in a D&D game, for that matter - it doesn't have to be about the power level. Another example would be, you can't declare that your character is 'a legendary warrior who cannot ever lose a fight' because winning and losing fights is obviously something which the game focuses on as a point of contention.

You have to look at why the player decides with absolute focus that their character must be able to be a genius or a seductress as a starting declaration rather than a consequence of in-game events. This is usually the fault of the system providing false expectations. The problem with things like someone feeling thwarted with respect to something they feel they should be able to play is that the system lies to them about what things mean, and then they incorrectly conclude that there's support for their idea.

So the problem with someone wanting to play a seductress and then feeling like they can't is not solved by the existence of a Charisma stat and social skills, its actually created by them - combined with the fact that those stats and skills don't actually do what they sound like they should.

Flickerdart

2015-03-10, 06:51 PM

for instance, you're in the wrong if you just arbitrarily decide something like 'my character concept is an ancient Babylonian deity of vengeance and disease - anyone who tries to harm him gets the plague and dies' in a game about detectives in the 1930s, or Lv3 D&D characters, or whatever.
Really? A guy who slyly poisons his enemies seems like a very practical and appropriate choice in both cases (though in the latter he'll have to get creative with access to poisons and magical diseases).

Amphetryon

2015-03-10, 06:58 PM

I am. It is a fun parody which implicitly acknowledges the problems with the experience=power interpretation. Clearly they wouldn't win the fights they get into, which is why they are an amusing group. Druss the Legend is a straighter example of how levels work in D&D, but he acknowledges that he is no longer physically stronger than his opponents. An elderly Barbarian in D&D is at least as strong as they started out as, and in most editions far stronger.

Given the inherent penalties to physical stats associated with Venerable (which a 90 year old Human Barbarian would be) in D&D, in conjunction with the rapidity with which a hypothetical 16 year old Human Barbarian could reach the highest pre-epic Levels in a default campaign arc in D&D, I'm going to go ahead and disagree with the highlighted final sentence. The only way he'd be 'far stronger' is if he had access to magic which was inexplicably denied to the younger, equally high-level, Barbarian.

NichG

2015-03-10, 08:33 PM

Really? A guy who slyly poisons his enemies seems like a very practical and appropriate choice in both cases (though in the latter he'll have to get creative with access to poisons and magical diseases).

However, that's still different than being a god. Just like playing someone who has a lot of blackmail material on important people is different than playing someone who uses cold reads and direct seduction to get their way. You can figure out a way to fit elements of that character concept into a system, but its clear that that's what you must do - its not the fault of the film-noir detective game system for not letting you play a god, but rather its your responsibility to try to figure out how to make your character idea fit into the constraints given by that genre, setting, and system.

In a system with an Intelligence score, the system is saying 'since you as the player can control this score, you may choose to play a character who is intrinsically Intelligent' (and then problems happen when that means something different than the player expected, e.g. that they can't just use their Intelligence to solve riddles or something like that). In a system without an Intelligence score you can still play a character who does smart things though - it just isn't something that the system explicitly claims to do anything with. Just as you can play a kind character in a system without alignments or moral statistics; or a French-Chinese woman living in Mexico in a system that doesn't have specific mechanics for nationality, race, and gender.

BootStrapTommy

2015-03-10, 09:00 PM

In a system without an Intelligence score you can still play a character who does smart things though - it just isn't something that the system explicitly claims to do anything with. Just as you can play a kind character in a system without alignments or moral statistics; or a French-Chinese woman living in Mexico in a system that doesn't have specific mechanics for nationality, race, and gender. Unless of course, you happen to be dumb. In which case you as a player would not be able to play a smart character in a game without mechanics for that. Because you are not smart. So how could you roleplay your character as such?

See the issue? I have a buddy who absolutely fried his noggin with controlled substances. But he loves to roleplay. But thinking will never be his strong point. So when he wants to play without mechanics to enforce his character's intellect, his genius character will always an idiot. Because he is.

My bestfriend's girlfriend is a mouse. A charismatic war leader might appeal to her. But charismatic isn't something that she can do. Because she's not.

Your "Egyptian plague god" argument is a reductio ad absurdum. System limits are the nature of the beast. Player limits, however, are destructive to roleplaying, unless every player is a trained actor.

Flickerdart

2015-03-10, 09:05 PM

However, that's still different than being a god.
You can make a character that believes he's a god, just like you're a player who's playing make-believe that you're a god. What's one more level of abstraction?

1337 b4k4

2015-03-10, 09:36 PM

No, not really. Particularly with regards to intelligence and wisdom, there are frequent discussions on forums what (if anything) the difference between the two is. So while any individual player may have some kind of distinction in mind, there is really no consensus about what it should be.

It is telling that no RPG anywhere has a wisdom score, except for D&D spinoffs.

Eh, they may not have "Wisdom" scores per se, but plenty of RPGs have an INT like stat and additional mental stats. For example:

Eclipse Phase gives us COG (problem solving, logic), INT[uition] (gut instinct, physical awareness, cleverness) and WIL (self control).

Call of Cthulhu gives POW (force of will, spirit, mental stability), INT (cunning, leaps of logic) and EDU (book learning, streetwise)

Dragon Age gives Cunning (inteligence and education), Perception (sensory interpretation) and Willpower (mental toughness, discipline)

Traveller gives us INT and EDU

World of Darkeness has Int, Wits and Resolve

So the segmenting of mental capabilities into one or more stats is hardly unique to D&D

NichG

2015-03-11, 02:22 AM

Unless of course, you happen to be dumb. In which case you as a player would not be able to play a smart character in a game without mechanics for that. Because you are not smart. So how could you roleplay your character as such?

See the issue? I have a buddy who absolutely fried his noggin with controlled substances. But he loves to roleplay. But thinking will never be his strong point. So when he wants to play without mechanics to enforce his character's intellect, his genius character will always an idiot. Because he is.

My bestfriend's girlfriend is a mouse. A charismatic war leader might appeal to her. But charismatic isn't something that she can do. Because she's not.

Your "Egyptian plague god" argument is a reductio ad absurdum. System limits are the nature of the beast. Player limits, however, are destructive to roleplaying, unless every player is a trained actor.

If I'm in a mood to play Nergal, I can play Nobilis or Exalted or something along those lines. If I'm in a mood to play Sam Spade, I can play Gumshoe. Gumshoe doesn't have to support me playing Nergal to be a good game, nor does Exalted have to support me playing Sam Spade. Similarly, not all characters that a player might theoretically want to play ever need to be feasible for that player to play in every system ever.

If Exalted says 'yeah, playing a mortal detective amidst a bunch of Solars can totally work out!' and then I find that, no, it doesn't, I'm going to be annoyed. But if Exalted says 'this is a game about god-like ascended individuals who are perfection personified, and who go beat up elder gods and dinosaurs' then thats on me if I decide to bring in Sam Spade. I might want to try to challenge myself and try to make it work with my own abilities, but I'm pushing what the system is intended to do.

There's nothing wrong with systems having boundaries. Its fine to say 'being smart is not a mechanical thing in this game, it has no particular support' just as its fine to say 'being an inventor is not a mechanical thing in this game, it has no particular support'. If I want to hang my character's identity on being particularly smart or on being an inventor, then that's on me in such games. And that's okay because the game never lied to me and say 'heres what you should put points into if you want to be smart'.

Besides, players don't have to be a trained actor to bring different skills and ideas to the table. If all the players are barely-sentient blocks of wood then it isn't going to make for very interesting gaming anyways, but that's a very extreme case. Most players actually do have something to contribute, so long as they don't convince themselves that they shouldn't or don't have to try.

You can make a character that believes he's a god, just like you're a player who's playing make-believe that you're a god. What's one more level of abstraction?

You can make a character that believes he's smart, too.

Kurald Galain

2015-03-11, 02:46 AM

So the segmenting of mental capabilities into one or more stats is hardly unique to D&D

The point is that all those systems you mention have a much clearer distinction between the mental stats than D&D does. Which is why we have semi-frequent disagreements on whether some fictional character is supposed to have high int or high wis (or conversely, low int or low wis).

BootStrapTommy

2015-03-11, 03:19 AM

If I'm in a mood to play Nergal, I can play Nobilis or Exalted or something along those lines. If I'm in a mood to play Sam Spade, I can play Gumshoe. Gumshoe doesn't have to support me playing Nergal to be a good game, nor does Exalted have to support me playing Sam Spade. Similarly, not all characters that a player might theoretically want to play ever need to be feasible for that player to play in every system ever.

Your "Egyptian plague god" argument is a reductio ad absurdum. System limits are the nature of the beast. Player limits, however, are destructive to roleplaying, unless every player is a trained actor.

You seem to be missing a very big point here. There is a huge difference between limiting the power level of a character and limiting a character's personality to that of its player. The first is the nature of a setting. The second is a largely inexcusable limiter on roleplaying.

NichG

2015-03-11, 04:20 AM

You seem to be missing a very big point here. There is a huge difference between limiting the power level of a character and limiting a character's personality to that of its player. The first is the nature of a setting. The second is a largely inexcusable limiter on roleplaying.

No, a character's personality can always be whatever the player wants it to be. But the ability to game-mechanically be persuasive, or 'come up with a good idea', or do other things of that nature isn't just personality, its actually a character power.

Any player can say 'my character is very smart' and can play them in a way that is consistent with what they imagine a smart person would do. But to go beyond that and say 'based on something on my character sheet, my character's smartness has a concrete effect on the world' makes it into a character power, not just an aspect of their personality.

The mistake is to say that everything that one can say about your character must tie in with a specific mechanical effect in order to be meaningful. You can play a character who says the things you think a smart person would say and does the things you think a smart person would do just fine without the game specifically letting you, e.g., use a character power to solve a mystery.

Cazero

2015-03-11, 04:40 AM

But to go beyond that and say 'based on something on my character sheet, my character's smartness has a concrete effect on the world' makes it into a character power, not just an aspect of their personality.

Considering the point of BootStrapTommy is that social skills should be kept in the game, you sort of missed it.
Yes, it is a character power. A power that should not be unattainable for real life lack of wittyness or acting skills. The chosen example are appropriate.

Let's say Joe wants to play a wizard. Since he understands the basic mechanics of the game and doesn't want to be useless, he decides to max his INT score. His wizard quickly becomes a supergenius on par with Sherlock Holmes. But Joe has an average real life intellect and erudition and is unable to play his character properly because D&D does not have mechanics for exceptionnal intellect.

Now, let's say Bob wants to play a seductress sorceress. But in real life, Bob is not really good with social interactions in general and seductive flirt in particular. It can happen regularly in various games, especially since Bob might be as young as 10. It's a good thing it can all be handwaved with a persuasion roll, because roleplaying it would result in systematic failure of something the character should be able to pull off with ease.

Both of these example are on par with the fighter player not needing to be strong enough to break iron bars with his bare hands, or the cleric player not actually needing to have miraculous powers granted by a god. Requiring your players to have that sort of abilities in real life is ridiculous, the same should be true for intellect and sociability.

NichG

2015-03-11, 05:24 AM

Considering the point of BootStrapTommy is that social skills should be kept in the game, you sort of missed it.
Yes, it is a character power. A power that should not be unattainable for real life lack of wittyness or acting skills. The chosen example are appropriate.

Let's say Joe wants to play a wizard. Since he understands the basic mechanics of the game and doesn't want to be useless, he decides to max his INT score. His wizard quickly becomes a supergenius on par with Sherlock Holmes. But Joe has an average real life intellect and erudition and is unable to play his character properly because D&D does not have mechanics for exceptionnal intellect.

Now, let's say Bob wants to play a seductress sorceress. But in real life, Bob is not really good with social interactions in general and seductive flirt in particular. It can happen regularly in various games, especially since Bob might be as young as 10. It's a good thing it can all be handwaved with a persuasion roll, because roleplaying it would result in systematic failure of something the character should be able to pull off with ease.

Both of these example are on par with the fighter player not needing to be strong enough to break iron bars with his bare hands, or the cleric player not actually needing to have miraculous powers granted by a god. Requiring your players to have that sort of abilities in real life is ridiculous, the same should be true for intellect and sociability.

Both examples are in a game which actually has an Intelligence score, but where it doesn't do what 'Intelligence' actually means to most people. That's the problem right there - its the disconnection. The game tells you 'yes, you can play a super-genius, that is a valid character archetype'. Then at the same time it denies you what you need to actually do it. So then you have a disconnect between what you think you're playing and what you're actually playing.

When I play D&D, I don't have the expectation going in that I can play a 'scientist' character and receive mechanical support. I can cobble together something that looks like how I imagine a scientist to be, get as close as I can using the mechanics available to me, etc, but all of that is basically me trying to do something that the system never claimed that it was going to help me do - if I fail, so be it, because its obvious I'm coloring outside of the lines. Not only that, but the type of gameplay involved in most D&D-style campaigns isn't very compatible with the sorts of things that real scientists do. 'Scientist' is just not a standard D&D archetype. That's not saying it can't be done, but if its going to be done it's only going to be through a lot of effort on my part as a player.

Now, lets consider another game, a phantom bizarro-world version of D&D where instead of an Intelligence score, there's a 'Learning' score. Mechanically, it does everything exactly the same as Intelligence does in D&D, but its just called 'Learning' instead of 'Intelligence'. In such a game, there isn't going to be an expectation that 'super-genius' is a supported character archetype. If you play a Wizard, you're probably playing a well-informed character (and that's mechanically supported in the form of Knowledge checks), but the game doesn't try to tell you that your character is also supposed to be a super-genius.

1337 b4k4

2015-03-11, 07:57 AM

The point is that all those systems you mention have a much clearer distinction between the mental stats than D&D does. Which is why we have semi-frequent disagreements on whether some fictional character is supposed to have high int or high wis (or conversely, low int or low wis).

Again, I have to disagree. D&D (at least since 3.x, I don't have my other books in front of me) distinguished between the two just as well as any other system. To quote the SRD:

Intelligence determines how well your character learns and reasons.
Wisdom describes a character’s willpower, common sense, perception, and intuition. While Intelligence represents one’s ability to analyze information, Wisdom represents being in tune with and aware of one’s surroundings.

I really don't see how that's any less clear than any of the above mentioned systems.

Flickerdart

2015-03-11, 09:22 AM

IYou can make a character that believes he's smart, too.
If you don't understand the distinction between character fluff and basic abilities, this is a pointless conversation.

Segev

2015-03-11, 10:30 AM

If a system does not have mechanics to support something, then that system is saying that, for games run in it, it is not expected for that "something" to be important.

If a system lacks, say, social skills/stats and supporting systems and subsystems, then that game is stating that social interaction isn't really expected to be a big part of the game.

The problem and core of most debates like the one I'm seeing in the last page or so usually comes in when somebody says, "In order to emphasize role-playing, I am going to remove/ignore mechanics that would reduce social interaction to dice rolls," or equivalent things.

Social interaction is something we can abstract, to a degree. Just as we do physical prowess. "Throg the Mighty swings his greatsword to cleave the sneaky goblin in twain, having smelled the foul things stench and thus gotten warning of its impending attempt at backstabbing," requires not a lick of physical capability on the player's part when it comes to identifying goblin odor, nor swinging massive bars of sharpened metal in precise arcs that intersect with tiny goblin bodies.

All of that is represented mechanically - Throg succeeded his Perception check and his attack roll, and rolled enough damage to brutally slay the goblin.

Social interaction can be similarly abstracted: "Alphonse elegantly offers the matron a rose and speaks eruditely about the topiaries in her garden, subtly flattering her taste and working the conversation around to matters of privacy offered by the hedge maze," also requires little in the way of the player's own social skill. He need not give the eloquent speech, and even if what he describes to the GM comes off as...tactless...to the GM, if Alphonse's player rolls well enough, the GM can work with it - the matron finds it endearing and takes it in the best possible light, or maybe the GM points out an approach that would work a little better or at least a critical flaw in the presentation that Alphonse's player can retroactively correct.

It gets harder with intellectual matters, but isn't impossible. "Wyleaum the Wizard contemplates the ancient runic texts and attempts to use his years of training in Ancient Menzobaxitan heiroglyphs to help him discern their meaning," only requires an appropriate roll - perhaps Decipher Script, in D&D - to gain a mechanical advantage showcasing his brilliant cryptographic and translation skills.

On the other hand, when the GM actually has a riddle or puzzle... that gets less satisfying to abstract. "Wyleaum makes his Int check and solves the riddle" defeats the purpose of introducing the riddle in the first place. Still, making there be some subsystem to play through that makes it more than a roll - even something as simple as a number of hints with different difficulties of rolls to get them, leading up to "practically gives it away" - can be more satisfying. Meanwhile, if a player just knows the answer, a contested Intelligence roll might allow for checking to see which character actually comes up with it. Sometimes, it's satisfying just knowing that your PC is at least as good as the best player at your table at a given thing.

(Incidentally, that last approach can be a good one when a smart, clever player is playing a dullard and is still the best source, OOC, of clever ideas for the party: have him feed those ideas to the smarter PCs' players OOC, and let those smarter PCs propose them, IC.)

Jay R

2015-03-11, 11:36 AM

Differentiating between Intelligence and Wisdom is fairly easy ...

But all such differentiation is retro-documentation. In the game that introduced them, the full description of their effects, separate from XP bonuses, was this:

Intelligence would also affect referees' decisions as to whether or not certain action would be taken, and it allows additional languages to be spoken

Wisdom rating will act much as does that for Intelligence.

The only actual difference between them when introduced was that high Intelligence gave an XP bonus to Magic-Users, and high Wisdom gave it to Clerics.

I seem to recall, outdoors the check was supposed to be once every 3 hours. Or possibly 6 hours. Still often enough to be a nuisance, certainly.

Worth noting that there was no such concept as "CR" in those days. In a dungeon, the only variable between tables was "which level of the dungeon you're on": first level easy, 10th - not. Outdoors there wasn't even that - it was all down to terrain, and your random encounter might be anything from a brownie, to an entire tribe of gnolls, or a bullette or a sphinx or something else that could basically eat a low-level party whole.

That's not as big a problem as you think, because a large monster, or an entire tribe of gnolls, is heard long before they get there. You just hide until they go by, and listen to see if the gnolls' conversation gives you a hint where the adventure might be found.

Just because it's a random encounter doesn't mean you have to wait there and actually encounter them.

Sith_Happens

2015-03-11, 02:24 PM

Holy mother of bookkeeping, Batman!

I already use Excel for my character sheets, so for me it would just be a few more formulas to write out once ever.:smallcool:

Doesn't this just further augment casters' already brutal nova capabilities?

Yes, but if they do decide to nova the period for which they suffer the aftereffects is far longer. And it's a lot harder to say "let's stop and rest for two weeks" than "let's stop and rest for the night," which means that said period of aftereffects is much more likely to actually be relevant.

If they choose to play that way, hes, absolutely. I find it to be a good thing though, as you get more of the mythological wizard who acts subtly and judicially but can go all out when the stuff hits the fan.

Also this.

(Incidentally, that last approach can be a good one when a smart, clever player is playing a dullard and is still the best source, OOC, of clever ideas for the party: have him feed those ideas to the smarter PCs' players OOC, and let those smarter PCs propose them, IC.)

I've been doing this a lot myself in one of my current campaigns, so I can attest to how well it usually works.

Talakeal

2015-03-11, 03:28 PM

Considering the point of BootStrapTommy is that social skills should be kept in the game, you sort of missed it.
Yes, it is a character power. A power that should not be unattainable for real life lack of wittyness or acting skills. The chosen example are appropriate.

Let's say Joe wants to play a wizard. Since he understands the basic mechanics of the game and doesn't want to be useless, he decides to max his INT score. His wizard quickly becomes a supergenius on par with Sherlock Holmes. But Joe has an average real life intellect and erudition and is unable to play his character properly because D&D does not have mechanics for exceptionnal intellect.

Now, let's say Bob wants to play a seductress sorceress. But in real life, Bob is not really good with social interactions in general and seductive flirt in particular. It can happen regularly in various games, especially since Bob might be as young as 10. It's a good thing it can all be handwaved with a persuasion roll, because roleplaying it would result in systematic failure of something the character should be able to pull off with ease.

Both of these example are on par with the fighter player not needing to be strong enough to break iron bars with his bare hands, or the cleric player not actually needing to have miraculous powers granted by a god. Requiring your players to have that sort of abilities in real life is ridiculous, the same should be true for intellect and sociability.

I agree with everything you said here.

What I do not agree with, however, is how most people take this logic one step further and use it as a justification for why they shouldn't have to try and explain their action. For example, just wanting to "roll diplomacy" instead of actually telling people what you are asking for or how you are saying it, let alone actually talking in character.

Yes, but if they do decide to nova the period for which they suffer the aftereffects is far longer. And it's a lot harder to say "let's stop and rest for two weeks" than "let's stop and rest for the night," which means that said period of aftereffects is much more likely to actually be relevant.

That's the theory. Of course, you also get a lot of players who are either overly cautious and save everything until the last possible moment (or until things go wrong and it is too late to help) or people with poor impulse control who blow their wallet right away. Both of these people then spend the rest of the game complaining that they are bored and "not a wizard, just a smart old guy with a staff" or a "cheerleader".

veti

2015-03-11, 03:55 PM

That's not as big a problem as you think, because a large monster, or an entire tribe of gnolls, is heard long before they get there. You just hide until they go by, and listen to see if the gnolls' conversation gives you a hint where the adventure might be found.

Just because it's a random encounter doesn't mean you have to wait there and actually encounter them.

Ideally, yes.

But there was no guarantee. You could always fluff your initiative/surprise rolls. And the aforementioned tribe of gnolls probably has its own scouts, with decent perception skills, who may well have spotted you long before the main body came anywhere near.

Of course, that still doesn't mean you have to fight them. Negotiation, or just shameless pleading for mercy, are always options. And the monster wouldn't attack the party unless the DM decides it will, which in most cases probably means the DM is being a git.

Sith_Happens

2015-03-11, 04:00 PM

That's the theory. Of course, you also get a lot of players who are either overly cautious and save everything until the last possible moment (or until things go wrong and it is too late to help) or people with poor impulse control who blow their wallet right away. Both of these people then spend the rest of the game complaining that they are bored and "not a wizard, just a smart old guy with a staff" or a "cheerleader".

Yeah, the one obvious downside of spells per month is that it makes it far harder to account for player behavior.

Solaris

2015-03-11, 04:03 PM

That's the theory. Of course, you also get a lot of players who are either overly cautious and save everything until the last possible moment (or until things go wrong and it is too late to help) or people with poor impulse control who blow their wallet right away. Both of these people then spend the rest of the game complaining that they are bored and "not a wizard, just a smart old guy with a staff" or a "cheerleader".

Then they should be playing another class. Just 'cause they can't play something well isn't a reason to mollycoddle them.

VincentTakeda

2015-03-11, 04:21 PM

Hey baby. Would you like to 'tune my mandolin?'

-Flynn the Fine

veti

2015-03-11, 04:31 PM

However, that's still different than being a god.

OK, interesting question: what's the difference between:

a player playing a deluded character who earnestly thinks he's a god, and
a player who thinks her character is a god, and
a player whose character really is a god?

Assume that all three understand that "being a god" doesn't come with any particular in-game perks or powers, you still have to use mechanical effects provided within the game rules to implement your Divine Will.

NichG

2015-03-11, 05:55 PM

If you don't understand the distinction between character fluff and basic abilities, this is a pointless conversation.

I'm not talking about character fluff in either case, I'm talking about things which the player wishes to have directly impact their abilities in the game.

Wishing to gain mechanical advantage for being 'a smart character' and wishing to gain mechanical advantage for being 'a deity' are both examples of wishing to
gain mechanical advantage. If you have a character ability that says 'roll a dice and X happens', that isn't just fluff anymore, even if its tied to fluff.

So if you're fine with your character believing he's a god but not gaining any mechanical powers from it, why are you not fine with your character believing that he's
super-smart but not gaining any mechanical powers from it? What is it that makes you assume that 'super-smart' should always and in every RPG be on the table as
a specific set of character powers, but 'being a god' should not?

OK, interesting question: what's the difference between:

a player playing a deluded character who earnestly thinks he's a god, and
a player who thinks her character is a god, and
a player whose character really is a god?

Assume that all three understand that "being a god" doesn't come with any particular in-game perks or powers, you still have to use mechanical effects provided within the game rules to implement your Divine Will.

I feel that the assumption negates the difference (only if NPCs acting a certain way counts as an in-game perk or power, e.g. having other gods say 'hey All-father, long time no see!' is also a form of perk). There's still some difference between cases 1 and 2, inasmuch as a skilled RPer is likely to treat them differently in their RP. For example, the character in case 1 is more likely to remain oblivious even if their mortality is demonstrated to them directly.

However, if we're talking about whether or not there should be stats for particular things, then the existence of such stats corresponds directly to 'particular in-game perks or powers' which distinguish cases 1 and 2 from 3.

johnbragg

2015-03-11, 06:49 PM

What is it that makes you assume that 'super-smart' should always and in every RPG be on the table as
a specific set of character powers, but 'being a god' should not?

...............................

However, if we're talking about whether or not there should be stats for particular things, then the existence of such stats corresponds directly to 'particular in-game perks or powers' which distinguish cases 1 and 2 from 3.

I think the latter answers the former. If my character sheet says "INT 20", and your character sheet says "STR 20", and your stat gives your character special powers, and my stat does not, then the stats are not equal. Which is especially a problem if the player chose INT 20 over STR 20, and feels more or less ripped off.

BootStrapTommy

2015-03-11, 06:54 PM

goto124

2015-03-11, 07:34 PM

The option to simply 'roll diplomancy' should remain, with any roleplay left to the players and DM.

In combat, it's 'roll for this and that check, with modifiers'. Any fluff such as 'the barbarian raises her club high above the goblin's head, then brings it down in a hefty smash, crushing the green monster's skull' can be described by the people at the table. The fluff isn't directly supported by the mechanics, but it doesn't have to.

Similar things can happen for social encounters.

NichG

2015-03-11, 07:59 PM

I think the latter answers the former. If my character sheet says "INT 20", and your character sheet says "STR 20", and your stat gives your character special powers, and my stat does not, then the stats are not equal. Which is especially a problem if the player chose INT 20 over STR 20, and feels more or less ripped off.

This is basically my point, since the focus of this is about whether having Int stats at all is a good or bad design decision. The issue with the player feeling ripped off is created by the system having an Int stat and then not assigning it abilities appropriate to what it suggests that Int is supposed to represent. If you have a system where there's no Int stat, then the player is never presented the option to choose Int 20 over Str 20. The system doesn't tell them that its a mechanically comparable choice of investment that they could make, and so there's no rip-off.

This. Sometimes Segev makes me feel like an inept wordsmith.

The issue people keep bringing up is that social interaction rolls can be used to mull over social interactions, reducing them to numbers. They purpose that removing the math restores roleplaying.

Aside from Segev's above wisdom, the issue lies in that removing the mechanic removes character personality outside what the player themselves can accomplish. We're not all actors. As a result, it proves more detrimental to the spirit of roleplaying than some folks abusing the mechanics.

From the point of view of Segev's post, what I'm saying is: "Not all games must consider character intelligence/persuasiveness to be core elements of the gameplay." It's not just Intelligence or Charisma; a game of Accountants vs Lawyers shouldn't really have need of a Strength score. If you want your Lawyer to be particularly buff, you can just say so, but it doesn't need to have a mechanical effect. And if it happens that a particular juror is impressed by big muscles, then so be it - you're as likely to find a juror who thinks it makes the lawyer look like a thug, so its just a nuance to deal with.

In any event, I don't need a 'Kindness' mechanic to play a character who I portray as being a kind person. I don't need a 'Rage' mechanic to portray an angry person. And rather than focusing on the 'intelligence' part of it, if I want to play a character who has an 'intelligent personality' I can focus on their thoughtfulness, when they choose to speak and when they choose to remain silent, and their goals and interests as ways to play up them seeming like a smart kind of person. And maybe things happen in game that challenge that depiction, but when things don't have concrete stats then there's a lot of room for interpretation because there isn't some concrete representation you can point to and say 'I should be more X than the other guy'.

So maybe my character won't see through the BBEG's cunning deception, but rather than interpreting that as 'that means my character isn't smart', I can just say 'that means the BBEG is also smart'. If another party member solves a riddle before I figure it out, 'hey, my friends can be pretty smart at times too' - and then I can decide whether the character's ego makes them live in denial of that, or whether to embrace it.

None of this makes me a professional actor, because I don't need to be to do a reasonable job at it for a bunch of friends sitting around and playing a tabletop game. If my supposedly smart guy does something a little dumb, I'll get some ribbing for it but generally people are going to give me a break since we're all friends getting together to play a game rather than consumers of what is presented to be polished, professional media.

But what I do need in order to do a reasonable job at it is to actually approach the situation as if its possible for me to do so. If I decide 'nope, can't do it so I won't try' then I'm going to be a very boring person to play with.

Jay R

2015-03-12, 09:44 AM

If a system does not have mechanics to support something, then that system is saying that, for games run in it, it is not expected for that "something" to be important.

If a system lacks, say, social skills/stats and supporting systems and subsystems, then that game is stating that social interaction isn't really expected to be a big part of the game.

The only problem with this statement is that it purports to be universal, but it isn't.

Yes, this is one way to design games. And it's the most common modern way.

But it isn't the only way games are designed. It just isn't.

The essence of original D&D is that the system will only provide mechanics for the things that cannot be handled without them. Partly that's because the entire ruleset was 28 sheets of 8 1/2 x 11 sheets of paper, folded over, plus covers. But also, the intent was to allow people to invent their own ideas of what to do.

There was no "Search" skill. According to the statement above, that would mean that search wasn't important, or wasn't a big part of the game. But that just isn't true.

We could not say, "I search the room; my roll was 14, plus a Search level of 8 is 22."

Here's the example of searching, from the rules.

CAL: Ok, what's the room look like -- we're examining the walls, ceiling, floor, and contents of the room itself.
REF: (After checking to see if dwarves and/or elves are in the party:) The room is a truncated pyramid. The east wall is the truncated part, directly opposite the door you entered. It is 10' long with another door in it. The walls connecting it to the west wall, the place you entered, are about 35' long. The west wall, where you entered, is 30' long with a door in the middle of the wall. The elf has noted that there seems to be a hollow spot near the east end of the southeast wall. The floor and ceiling seem to have nothing unusual. The room contains the bodies of the gnolls, a pile of refuse in the north corner of the west wall, and two trunks along the wall opposite the one that sounds hollow.
CAL: The elf will check out the hollow sound, one of us will sort through the refuse, each trunk will be opened by one of us, and the remaining two (Naming exactly who this is) will each guard a door, listening to get advance warning if anything approaches.
REF: Another check on the hollow sound reveals a secret door which opens onto a flight of stairs down to the south. The refuse is nothing but sticks, bones, offal and old clothes. One chest is empty, the other has a poison needle on the lock. (Here a check to see if the character opening it makes his saving throw for poison.) The chest with the poison needle is full of copper pieces -- appears to be about 2000 of them.
CAL: Empty out all of the copper pieces and check the trunk for secret drawers or a false bottom, and do the same with the empty one. Also, do there seem to be any old boots or cloaks in the rubbish pile.
REF: (Cursing the thoroughness of the Caller!) The seemingly empty trunk has a false bottom... in it you have found an onyx case with a jeweled necklace therein. The case appears to be worth about 1000, and the necklace 5000 Gold Pieces. Amidst the litter the searcher has located a pair of old boots, but there is nothing like a cloak there.

As you can see, searching mattered, but how well you did it was based on how thorough you were in figuring out what to search, and how. If the caller above hadn't thought to check the bottom of the chest, then it wouldn't have been found. If he hadn't specified what to look for in the pile of old clothes, he wouldn't have found the Elven Boots.

And it should be clear that anybody used to playing like this would feel that simply rolling a Search Check loses a lot of the role-playing of the game.

I used the Search example because it's much clearer. The player doesn't actually search a room, but she must come up with the idea of what to search, and how.

Similarly, social interaction was a major part of the game - particularly since encounters were often far beyond the power of the party to defeat in direct combat. There were no rules for it (or rather, very few). The player had to role-play it. That didn't mean that she had to have a great voice, but it did mean inventing the bluff, or coming up with the terms of the diplomatic offer, etc.

And yes, players who couldn't figure out that the king wanted to hear about the rebellion in the south couldn't convince him very well, just as players who never think to retreat are at a tactical handicap in fighting, and players who didn't explicitly search the bottom of the chest failed to find treasure.

In many games, it is simply not true that the lack of a mechanic for something meant that it wasn't expected to matter. It just isn't. And any argument based on that assumption is logically invalid from the start.

Amphetryon

2015-03-12, 07:56 PM

The only problem with this statement is that it purports to be universal, but it isn't.

Yes, this is one way to design games. And it's the most common modern way.

But it isn't the only way games are designed. It just isn't.

The essence of original D&D is that the system will only provide mechanics for the things that cannot be handled without them. Partly that's because the entire ruleset was 28 sheets of 8 1/2 x 11 sheets of paper, folded over, plus covers. But also, the intent was to allow people to invent their own ideas of what to do.

There was no "Search" skill. According to the statement above, that would mean that search wasn't important, or wasn't a big part of the game. But that just isn't true.

We could not say, "I search the room; my roll was 14, plus a Search level of 8 is 22."

Here's the example of searching, from the rules.

CAL: Ok, what's the room look like -- we're examining the walls, ceiling, floor, and contents of the room itself.
REF: (After checking to see if dwarves and/or elves are in the party:) The room is a truncated pyramid. The east wall is the truncated part, directly opposite the door you entered. It is 10' long with another door in it. The walls connecting it to the west wall, the place you entered, are about 35' long. The west wall, where you entered, is 30' long with a door in the middle of the wall. The elf has noted that there seems to be a hollow spot near the east end of the southeast wall. The floor and ceiling seem to have nothing unusual. The room contains the bodies of the gnolls, a pile of refuse in the north corner of the west wall, and two trunks along the wall opposite the one that sounds hollow.
CAL: The elf will check out the hollow sound, one of us will sort through the refuse, each trunk will be opened by one of us, and the remaining two (Naming exactly who this is) will each guard a door, listening to get advance warning if anything approaches.
REF: Another check on the hollow sound reveals a secret door which opens onto a flight of stairs down to the south. The refuse is nothing but sticks, bones, offal and old clothes. One chest is empty, the other has a poison needle on the lock. (Here a check to see if the character opening it makes his saving throw for poison.) The chest with the poison needle is full of copper pieces -- appears to be about 2000 of them.
CAL: Empty out all of the copper pieces and check the trunk for secret drawers or a false bottom, and do the same with the empty one. Also, do there seem to be any old boots or cloaks in the rubbish pile.
REF: (Cursing the thoroughness of the Caller!) The seemingly empty trunk has a false bottom... in it you have found an onyx case with a jeweled necklace therein. The case appears to be worth about 1000, and the necklace 5000 Gold Pieces. Amidst the litter the searcher has located a pair of old boots, but there is nothing like a cloak there.

As you can see, searching mattered, but how well you did it was based on how thorough you were in figuring out what to search, and how. If the caller above hadn't thought to check the bottom of the chest, then it wouldn't have been found. If he hadn't specified what to look for in the pile of old clothes, he wouldn't have found the Elven Boots.

And it should be clear that anybody used to playing like this would feel that simply rolling a Search Check loses a lot of the role-playing of the game.

I used the Search example because it's much clearer. The player doesn't actually search a room, but she must come up with the idea of what to search, and how.

Similarly, social interaction was a major part of the game - particularly since encounters were often far beyond the power of the party to defeat in direct combat. There were no rules for it (or rather, very few). The player had to role-play it. That didn't mean that she had to have a great voice, but it did mean inventing the bluff, or coming up with the terms of the diplomatic offer, etc.

And yes, players who couldn't figure out that the king wanted to hear about the rebellion in the south couldn't convince him very well, just as players who never think to retreat are at a tactical handicap in fighting, and players who didn't explicitly search the bottom of the chest failed to find treasure.

In many games, it is simply not true that the lack of a mechanic for something meant that it wasn't expected to matter. It just isn't. And any argument based on that assumption is logically invalid from the start.

Yes; 'guess what the GM is thinking' is a long-standing tradition in RPGs. Whether that's an example of a far-reaching bad decision, from a design perspective, is apparently a matter of some disagreement.

goto124

2015-03-12, 08:03 PM

It applies in CRPGs, for sure. Tabletops I don't know.

Arbane

2015-03-13, 02:49 AM

It applies in CRPGs, for sure. Tabletops I don't know.

Adventure and puzzle games, sure, but CRPGs tend to have PC-object interactions standardized enough (and allow saved games) that sheer trial and error can eventually uncover most hidden stuff.

1337 b4k4

2015-03-13, 06:33 AM

Yes; 'guess what the GM is thinking' is a long-standing tradition in RPGs. Whether that's an example of a far-reaching bad decision, from a design perspective, is apparently a matter of some disagreement.

Ultimately, if you're playing a TTRPG you're playing "guess what the GM is thinking" at some level. Whether it's "guess where they hid the treasure" or "guess the right things to say to the king" or "guess which direction this plot hook is pulling you" in the end, the GM has set up some secrets and you need to find them. The alternatives to this is either playing a fancy "choose your own adventure" game where the outcomes are pre-determined based on macro level decisions, or you're playing a game where player agency (and therefore the choices you make) doesn't matter. And frankly speaking as a DM, if you expect me to take the time to come up with a believable world, then I think it's only fair to expect you to interact with that world rather than reducing it to a spreadsheet of random numbers.

Still, I see the reasoning and logic behind the idea that "my character sheet says I'm very X, but in real life I'm not" so this is the compromise I use in my games:

1) If you simply want to "roll to pass", whether it's rolling to search the room for treasure, or rolling to diplomance the king, if you pass you will pass with the absolute minimum necessary. In the case of searching the room, you'll find the treasure, but you'll also be rolling a trigger check for every trap in the room too.

2) If on the other hand, you specify your actions, and tell me where you search and how, you'll only find the treasures you specifically look for, but at the same time, you'll also only trigger any traps in the area's you specifically searched. Likewise, if you simply want to "diplomacy" the king, you will get the barest minimum necessary for you to proceed. For example, the king will give you leave to travel the lands if necessary, but will not be offering you equipment, personelle, or supplies to ease your journey. By comparison, if you specify the sorts of things you say, and the questions you ask, your response from the king will include specifics related to your statements and questions.

3) In the cases where you get specific rather than just rolling, your relevant ability or skill scores will be used to modify things to be more or less in your favor. Good searching skills might reduce the base odds of triggering a trap without noticing it. High WIS and diplomacy skills might turn your "you have a fine looking ass your royalshipfulness" into "Might I say your majesty, that you are looking rather resplendent as always". So you don't have to be good at it in real life you just have to interact and be specific.

Amphetryon

2015-03-13, 08:10 AM

Ultimately, if you're playing a TTRPG you're playing "guess what the GM is thinking" at some level. Whether it's "guess where they hid the treasure" or "guess the right things to say to the king" or "guess which direction this plot hook is pulling you" in the end, the GM has set up some secrets and you need to find them. The alternatives to this is either playing a fancy "choose your own adventure" game where the outcomes are pre-determined based on macro level decisions, or you're playing a game where player agency (and therefore the choices you make) doesn't matter. And frankly speaking as a DM, if you expect me to take the time to come up with a believable world, then I think it's only fair to expect you to interact with that world rather than reducing it to a spreadsheet of random numbers.

Still, I see the reasoning and logic behind the idea that "my character sheet says I'm very X, but in real life I'm not" so this is the compromise I use in my games:

1) If you simply want to "roll to pass", whether it's rolling to search the room for treasure, or rolling to diplomance the king, if you pass you will pass with the absolute minimum necessary. In the case of searching the room, you'll find the treasure, but you'll also be rolling a trigger check for every trap in the room too.

2) If on the other hand, you specify your actions, and tell me where you search and how, you'll only find the treasures you specifically look for, but at the same time, you'll also only trigger any traps in the area's you specifically searched. Likewise, if you simply want to "diplomacy" the king, you will get the barest minimum necessary for you to proceed. For example, the king will give you leave to travel the lands if necessary, but will not be offering you equipment, personelle, or supplies to ease your journey. By comparison, if you specify the sorts of things you say, and the questions you ask, your response from the king will include specifics related to your statements and questions.

3) In the cases where you get specific rather than just rolling, your relevant ability or skill scores will be used to modify things to be more or less in your favor. Good searching skills might reduce the base odds of triggering a trap without noticing it. High WIS and diplomacy skills might turn your "you have a fine looking ass your royalshipfulness" into "Might I say your majesty, that you are looking rather resplendent as always". So you don't have to be good at it in real life you just have to interact and be specific.
Do you give combat bonuses to the Players who demonstrate they know how to handle a sword, or a firearm?

VincentTakeda

2015-03-13, 08:16 AM

you have a fine looking ass your royalshipfulness

Now that's sig worthy.

Knaight

2015-03-13, 08:26 AM

TheCountAlucard

2015-03-13, 09:11 AM

Do you give combat bonuses to the Players who demonstrate they know how to handle a sword, or a firearm?"Stick 'em with the pointy end."

1337 b4k4

2015-03-13, 09:35 AM

Do you give combat bonuses to the Players who demonstrate they know how to handle a sword, or a firearm?

We call them "called shots" at my table but more or less yes. If you come up with specific and creative actions for combat beyond "I swing my sword" then you get specific bonuses or actions related to that. My party of level 1 OD&D players took out the ogre in 2-3 rounds in the Caves of Chaos doing just that. Wizard cast Light on the ogre's eyes, blinding him, and the two fighters got behind him and placed specific shots at the knees / hamstrings dropping the monster to it's knees and making it unable to stand. A blind, crippled ogre is a much easier fight than a healthy sighted one.

Now that's sig worthy.

I live to serve the internet meme machine.

There's a fair amount of "figure out what's going on", and "figure out how to get through this situation" in more traditional RPGs, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you have to guess what the GM is thinking. Just because I present a scenario doesn't mean that I have a pre-made list of solutions for it. I'll generally develop at least a few in my head, but they're by no means a comprehensive list of what works. Heck, GMing is generally more enjoyable when you can't predict what the players are doing and they surprise you a bit.

Absolutely, and nothing in JR's posited scenarios nor mine would exclude that. However, my experience has been that people (and I'm lumping Amphetryon in here although perhaps unfairly) that argue strongly for "dice diplomacy" and (derisively) view JR's scenario as "guess what the DM is thinking", tend to look at leaving the options list open ended as "fast talk the DM into accepting your solution"

Segev

2015-03-13, 10:12 AM

Aside from Segev's above wisdom, the issue lies in that removing the mechanic removes character personality outside what the player themselves can accomplish. We're not all actors. As a result, it proves more detrimental to the spirit of roleplaying than some folks abusing the mechanics.You flatter me, sir. Thank you for your kind words.

This is the essence of my point: if you want to design a game wherein people who are not already gifted in the kind of actions that game-characters are meant to be taking, you need to have mechanics to represent them. If you do not, then you're testing the player's ability to do one of two things:

1) Actually perform the action, himself (most commonly intellectual or social pursuits)

2) Use social interaction, IRL, to persuade the GM that his character's approach should be likely to work.

These are not inherently bad! But it is very important to recognize that this is what you're doing. If the game system has no rules, for example, for making an attack roll (this would be highly unusual), then it becomes the player's job to convince the GM that his character did, in fact, hit with his attack.

The only problem with this statement is that it purports to be universal, but it isn't.

Yes, this is one way to design games. And it's the most common modern way. It's more that it's how games have evolved as people realized the shortcomings of the free-form alternatives.

The essence of original D&D is that the system will only provide mechanics for the things that cannot be handled without them. Partly that's because the entire ruleset was 28 sheets of 8 1/2 x 11 sheets of paper, folded over, plus covers. But also, the intent was to allow people to invent their own ideas of what to do.Actually, it provided rules for a lot of those things. They were blanket, catch-all rules of "tell the DM what you're trying to do and how, and convince him that it should work."

There was no "Search" skill. According to the statement above, that would mean that search wasn't important, or wasn't a big part of the game. But that just isn't true.

We could not say, "I search the room; my roll was 14, plus a Search level of 8 is 22."

(...)

As you can see, searching mattered, but how well you did it was based on how thorough you were in figuring out what to search, and how. If the caller above hadn't thought to check the bottom of the chest, then it wouldn't have been found. If he hadn't specified what to look for in the pile of old clothes, he wouldn't have found the Elven Boots.This actually is little different from, "You see three posts with different sized rings stacked on them. It's clear that the rings cannot support rings bigger than they are. There is a locked door beyond." And then the players have to describe, step-by-step, how they solve the Towers of Hanoi problem.

Again, this is not invalid, but you're no longer testing the characters' ability to perform this check. You're testing the players'.

Additionally, in some cases, it becomes a binary thing: you can automatically succeed at anything you think to try. The elf automatically succeeded at noticing the hollow-sounding section of the wall when it was stated that she started tapping along them. There's no provision made for how cunningly that secret door is hidden vs. how good the elf's hearing really is.

The fact that the game's rules for searching things out were, essentially, "if you think to say you look in the right place, you find the hidden object," makes it a text-based adventure game. It also makes the statement that it is assumed all PCs are exactly as adept at adventuring as their players are at the theory of adventuring. Generally, for even moderatly experienced players, this is going to be a rough but constrained band of skill.

Every player knows to check the walls, chest, etc., and to run through a litany of "we do this, and this, and this..." so the DM can't or won't declare you forgot something and thus leave you stuck without all the possible rewards.

It makes it hard to differentiate between the "experienced treasure-hunting rogue" and the "wet-behind-the-ears city-bred wizard" when it comes to how good they are at those things which have no mechanics.

If that's your design goal, great! But if something is supposed to be integral to the game and NOT something at which all PCs are roughly equally skilled - or, more precisely, at which PCs are exactly as skilled as their players' theoretical understanding and personal smarm can make them - then lacking mechanics is a sign that you forgot something, or that it isn't really that important to the game.

And it should be clear that anybody used to playing like this would feel that simply rolling a Search Check loses a lot of the role-playing of the game.Only if they chose for it to. What it does is constrain their player skill to that of the character. This can be a bonus or a penalty: if the player would not have thought to look somewhere, the high Search roll might compensate.

"I search the floor, the elf searches the wall, and the rogue takes the treasure chest," followed by a roll, can use or add to whatever RP fluff was applied to the effort.

Similarly, social interaction was a major part of the game - particularly since encounters were often far beyond the power of the party to defeat in direct combat. There were no rules for it (or rather, very few). The player had to role-play it. That didn't mean that she had to have a great voice, but it did mean inventing the bluff, or coming up with the terms of the diplomatic offer, etc.No, it really wasn't. And to the extent that it was, playing a diplomatic character made no difference. Charisma was a "dump stat" for a reason: when social interaction came up, it was down to the players' social skills, and those alone.

And yes, players who couldn't figure out that the king wanted to hear about the rebellion in the south couldn't convince him very well, just as players who never think to retreat are at a tactical handicap in fighting, and players who didn't explicitly search the bottom of the chest failed to find treasure.Not quite the same. Players who can't figure out how to give the proper courtly styles and who don't have silver tongues with which to persuade the GM that he should have the King be persuaded are at a disadvantage, unlike those who couldn't so much as lift a shield IRL being quite able to use one to defend themselves in the game's combat system.

If it is meant that social interaction should be a part of the game, mechanics for it should be included.

Of course, the WORST sin I've tended to see is games which have stats for social interaction, but then never use them. These stats become a trap: "I want to play a social manipulator, so I'll raise this Manipulation stat high" is just wasting your building materials if social interaction is mechanic-less.

In many games, it is simply not true that the lack of a mechanic for something meant that it wasn't expected to matter. It just isn't. And any argument based on that assumption is logically invalid from the start.Perhaps, but the deeper premise is that a well-designed game will have mechanics to represent things which are to be important to it. Leaving them out says that these are not important things for your character, at best.

Leaving them out removes the "RP" from the "G." The game mechanic becomes like that in chess, stratego, or a puzzle game: the player's own intellectual or social capability against the GM's (or the module-writer's) ability to write the scenario.

You are no longer playing a role. You, Jay R, are the person solving the problem, not your character. Who will be as good at these tasks as you are.

You can go ahead and argue that you re-introduce the "RP" to the "G" by choosing to play your big dumb fighter as too stupid to solve the obvious logic puzzle you, the player, figured out in a minute. However, if you're not the smartest person in your play group, you can't re-introduce the "RP" by playing the role of somebody smarter than you are. It just isn't an option. You can try to act lik that genius, but you don't have the genius to emulate the actual results.

You're pretending to understand particle physics, but it won't let you actually build or even design or recognize flaws in the design of a supercollider. Whereas that Ph.D. in particle physics playing the Big Dumb Fighter could have his character, in these "I say what he does, and he does it successfully" mechanic-less instances, look it over and describe in detail what is right and wrong with it.

"But that's not RP!" you might say. And you'd be right. But there's no way of knowing if the BDF is able to grasp any particular level of subject. And it's certain your ultra-genius wizard can't grasp subjects which should possibly be easy for him, because YOU cannot.

That is why I say that mechanics enable RP: they let your PC do things you, yourself, cannot. And do so without a binary "GM says it (doesn't) work(s)."

1337 b4k4

2015-03-13, 11:18 AM

Leaving them out removes the "RP" from the "G." The game mechanic becomes like that in chess, stratego, or a puzzle game: the player's own intellectual or social capability against the GM's (or the module-writer's) ability to write the scenario.

You are no longer playing a role. You, Jay R, are the person solving the problem, not your character. Who will be as good at these tasks as you are.

You can go ahead and argue that you re-introduce the "RP" to the "G" by choosing to play your big dumb fighter as too stupid to solve the obvious logic puzzle you, the player, figured out in a minute. However, if you're not the smartest person in your play group, you can't re-introduce the "RP" by playing the role of somebody smarter than you are. It just isn't an option. You can try to act lik that genius, but you don't have the genius to emulate the actual results.

I think there needs to be a balance however, after all this is a game, and not a play, or a live action choose your own adventure. And if there's no balance, the logical end of this line of reasoning leads to the well known scenario so lovingly skewered in The Gamers:

Thief: I walk down the corridor
DM: Save vs fireball
Thief: Did I say I walk down the corridor? I meant I gingerly step down the corridor, looking for tripwires
DM: Save vs fireball
Thief: Did I say step? Of course a thief of my caliber would be crawling down the corridor, probing carefully with a 10' pole
etc

At some point, we have to allow for player skill and player choice to have an impact, or else we're all just acting as the slow computer in an imaginary world simulator just waiting to see how things turn out, rather than actually playing a game.

Segev

2015-03-13, 11:53 AM

Of course. Note how I've never suggested removing the descriptive aspects of what you're doing. And there will always be a measure of "convince the DM to do things your way," if only in trying to sway him that your description permits a kind of roll.

But the point is, having a system does not, in and of itself, obviate role-playing, and in fact enables it for those who are not innately good at the thing the system simulates.

SowZ

2015-03-13, 12:04 PM

That could be a simulationist. His top priority is on the players decisions and actions having an effect desirable to the players themselves. The setting is secondary to player agency. The qualifier is that the players have control over what the changes to the world end up being, or that if the players are not interested in the 'narrative of learning about the world in order to break it'... then the narrative of the campaign can change with the players' motivations. Maybe they dont want to change it. Maybe they just want to run it. Maybe they want to just do something else within the world without changing it...

I'd revert back to calling him a narrativist if the players decided they were not interested in 'learning about his world in order to break it' and they got all bothered by the players not having an interest in following the theme. Then his narrative 'learn about my world and care enough about breaking it to break it' takes precedence over player agency.

I'd also call him a narrativist if there is only one possible outcome for the players changing the world. If the 'change that can happen to the world by the player's actions' is [b]a single outcome that the gm has already planned as part of his narrative[b/], then the players never really had much agency in the first place. They were just along for the ride. Story time on the reading railroad.

The setting is super important to me. I make flowcharts for the populations of different people groups and demographics. If there is a faction that hunts people group X, I have the lethality rate calculated and how many of X people group the average agent of that faction kills per year. I keep track of the finances and popularity and manpower of every faction and military.

I know about significant people in the world and what they are doing while the PCs aren't interacting with them, so the PCs can actually screw up or help their plans without the PCs even knowing.

But I'm all about character. I design plots around characters. I change up things when I talk to players out of game and they give me a good idea. The characters are central to the world. They've done things like get entire nations destroyed, kill the Big Bads and other super significant NPCs prematurely, decimate factions and make new ones. If it is reasonable, and that would be a real consequence of their actions, and it is good for the story? Awesome.

Hell, I'm a screenwriter. Story is what I was trained to do professionally. I'd seem to fit your narrativist thing but I don't think I do.

I'm a big believer in player driven choices and character arcs. I plan things loosely because I love to be surprised and when the story takes a direction completely its own.

That's the problem with the whole GNS philosophy. Good GMs take the best parts of each for their particular group, and the balance will be different for different groups but basically every group will use some of each.

Frozen_Feet

2015-03-13, 12:08 PM

There's a major difference between traditional RPG design and computer RPG design.

Starting with D&D, pen & paper rules were never meant to be exhaustive. The game was intended to simulate a whole setting, so it was understood that any attempt at comprehensive rules listing would fall short. That's one of the major reasons why there's a GM in the first place - to make new rulings to solve situations not detailed in the basic rules. The game was expected to expand beyond its original premises.

This approach works poorly with computers, as they lack imagination. There's nothing in a computer game if the programmer doesn't include it. All rulesets have to be exhaustive as incomplete computer programs simply lead to system halt.

In traditional RPGs, "real world unless stated otherwise" is in effect. Players are expected to have some recourse to real history, science, their personal experience and plain common sense so they can choose to do what their characters would do, even if the rules don't explicitly call it out as a possibility.

In computer games, such recourse to reality is often pointless, as real life is too complex to model properly - so you either have to guess what the programmer put into the game, or accept the game's limitations and internal logic as overriding all of things listed in previous paragraph.

Now, it's not a hard distinction. A lot of computer games try their damnest to approach an open-ended world simulation. A lot of tabletop games assume a programmer-like or author-like perspective and try to tell a linear story. You can see this divide even among just CRPGs. One end of the table, we have stuff like (later) Final Fantasies, which tell prescripted story of premade characters with the actual game parts only influencing how fast the story progresses, and on the other, we have stuff like Dwarf Fortress and Unreal World, which honestly try to simulate an actual world and often lack even any hard-coded victory conditions, relying on the players to come up with their own.

Amphetryon

2015-03-13, 12:34 PM

We call them "called shots" at my table but more or less yes. If you come up with specific and creative actions for combat beyond "I swing my sword" then you get specific bonuses or actions related to that. My party of level 1 OD&D players took out the ogre in 2-3 rounds in the Caves of Chaos doing just that. Wizard cast Light on the ogre's eyes, blinding him, and the two fighters got behind him and placed specific shots at the knees / hamstrings dropping the monster to it's knees and making it unable to stand. A blind, crippled ogre is a much easier fight than a healthy sighted one.

Follow-up: Do you rule that a blow which the dice indicate should have missed (say, by 2) if the defending Player fails to specify how he's using his shield to defend the blow?

Flickerdart

2015-03-13, 01:57 PM

It seems to me that unless the DM is an expert on swordsmanship, he has no place ruling what particular description of a sword blow will get what kind of bonuses.

Frozen_Feet

2015-03-13, 02:09 PM

1337 b4k4

2015-03-13, 02:26 PM

Follow-up: Do you rule that a blow which the dice indicate should have missed (say, by 2) if the defending Player fails to specify how he's using his shield to defend the blow?

I'm not sure I understand the question. Are you asking if I would rule that a roll that should fail by the dice succeeds because the defender did not specify how they're defending? The answer is no, because defending (in D&D, most of the time) isn't an active behavior. However, there are times when the defender specifying individual actions they take might mitigate certain attacker actions. For example, OD&D (or was it AD&D) has a rule that 1 : 6 attacks to a creature not wearing a helmet is a head shot and deals extra damage. Putting a helmet on would mitigate this. I happen to be a big fan of the "Shield Shall Be Splintered" house rule, which allows a defender to sacrifice their shield (or one +1 for magical shields) in exchange for negating damage from a single attack. Of course, this only applies if it's reasonable that the shield could be brought into play.

It seems to me that unless the DM is an expert on swordsmanship, he has no place ruling what particular description of a sword blow will get what kind of bonuses.

The logical extension of this is that unless the DM is an expert on anything, they have no place making a ruling on whether it will or will not have a bonus or penalty. Are you an expert on rock climbing? No, then you can't determine whether or not greasing up my palms and blindfolding myself will make this climbing easier or harder. Are you a medical doctor? No, then you can't say that stabbing my friend with the Sword of Healing (http://www.d20monkey.com/comic/the-sword-of-healing/) doesn't actually heal them. And conversely you can't tell me that using modern medical advances gets me a bonus. Are you an expert in trap finding? No, then you can't determine that using a 10' pole to probe for traps gives a bonus to finding them. Are you an expert in bomb diffusion? No, then you can't determine that a player who declares they carefully study the wires, using their background in electronics gets a bonus that the player who just blindly cuts wires didn't get. Seems kind of ridiculous to me, and also leads to "I hit it with my stick" (or alternatively, "It's [not] in the rules so you can't do it") syndrome rather than fun and engaging battles. We're playing a game. My job as a DM is to create a fantastic world, to put the characters in danger and make their lives exciting and to be fans of the players. Rewarding them for creative behavior that makes some degree of sense is one (very effective) way of accomplishing this. Declaring that "because I'm not an expert in this endeavor which is imperfectly abstracted by the system, we can't deviate from the system" is not.

SowZ

2015-03-13, 03:00 PM

It seems to me that unless the DM is an expert on swordsmanship, he has no place ruling what particular description of a sword blow will get what kind of bonuses.

I'm not a stock car driver, but I give bonus and penalties based on what seems reasonable. It isn't about true realism. It's about verisimilitude. Does it break the suspension of disbelief or not? Alternatively, it may be a game like Exalted where the bonus is based on how awesome the description is to reward creative depictions.

Flickerdart

2015-03-13, 03:43 PM

The alternative is to trust the game author was an expert on swordsmanship. So how lucky are you feeling? Or it could be the case rules for swordsmanship were not included. What, then, is the alternative to the referee deciding the chances and effects of an in-game swordblow?
The author doesn't need to be an expert, because everyone gets the same rules. If it's up to the DM, trying to hamstring the enemy in one campaign leads to victory, and doing the exact same thing in exactly the same situation leads to your immediate demise.

1337 b4k4

2015-03-13, 04:25 PM

The author doesn't need to be an expert, because everyone gets the same rules. If it's up to the DM, trying to hamstring the enemy in one campaign leads to victory, and doing the exact same thing in exactly the same situation leads to your immediate demise.

Which as I've argued many a time before is only a problem if you expect one DM and game to be run exactly the same way as another. Frankly, I expect my games to be different, otherwise, I'd play in one game.

Beta Centauri

2015-03-13, 06:58 PM

Amphetryon

2015-03-13, 09:42 PM

I'm not sure I understand the question. Are you asking if I would rule that a roll that should fail by the dice succeeds because the defender did not specify how they're defending? The answer is no, because defending (in D&D, most of the time) isn't an active behavior. However, there are times when the defender specifying individual actions they take might mitigate certain attacker actions. For example, OD&D (or was it AD&D) has a rule that 1 : 6 attacks to a creature not wearing a helmet is a head shot and deals extra damage. Putting a helmet on would mitigate this. I happen to be a big fan of the "Shield Shall Be Splintered" house rule, which allows a defender to sacrifice their shield (or one +1 for magical shields) in exchange for negating damage from a single attack. Of course, this only applies if it's reasonable that the shield could be brought into play.

Defending, in D&D, is very much an active behavior. If it weren't, it would not alter AC for those prepared for combat versus those unprepared for it (Flat-footed, not to mention non-proficiency penalties to AC, etc.). I'm asking if you'd rule that a person who has an out-of-game understanding of how to effectively use a shield (and armor, come to that) should get a mechanical benefit in-game for that, in the same way that you said you'd give a mechanical benefit in-game to a person who has an out-of-game understanding of how to use a particular weapon. If you do, I'm curious as to how big that benefit is in your games. If you don't, I'm curious as to why you choose to limit benefiting out-of-game knowledge in the way(s) which you do.

SowZ

2015-03-13, 09:51 PM

Flickerdart

2015-03-13, 09:57 PM

In my opinion, you may as well ask a player what their procedure is when repairing a car engine and giving them a penalty if they cannot tell you the right way to do it. Or making a doctor character less effective at performing a surgery because the player knows nothing about medicine. What's the point in character skills at that point?
Didn't you know? Using dice to accomplish things is cheating. Real DMs should replace all dice with Orcus.

1337 b4k4

2015-03-13, 10:17 PM

Defending, in D&D, is very much an active behavior. If it weren't, it would not alter AC for those prepared for combat versus those unprepared for it (Flat-footed, not to mention non-proficiency penalties to AC, etc.). I'm asking if you'd rule that a person who has an out-of-game understanding of how to effectively use a shield (and armor, come to that) should get a mechanical benefit in-game for that, in the same way that you said you'd give a mechanical benefit in-game to a person who has an out-of-game understanding of how to use a particular weapon. If you do, I'm curious as to how big that benefit is in your games. If you don't, I'm curious as to why you choose to limit benefiting out-of-game knowledge in the way(s) which you do.

As I said, most of the time, defending is not an active behavior, and nothing you said contradicts that. Flat footed is a single round condition (vs every other round you'll be fighting) and proficiencies are passive attributes not active roles taken by the player. I also did not say that I'm granting bonuses for out of game understandings of things, I said I grant boons for in game creative or specific applications that go beyond the minimum necessary. There is a difference. If you tell me you swing your sword, then you swing your sword and attacks go as normal. If you tell me you search the room, then you search the room and you get exactly what searching the room would give you. If you tell me you diplomance the king, then you diplomance the king. I don't care that in real life you know that you can wield a sword a certain way to gain better vantage on an armored opponent. I don't care that in real life you are a forensic scientist and I don't care that in real life you couldn't talk your way out of a wet paper bag. I do care what you say your character is doing ... and if you tell me your character is doing the absolute minimum, then that is what your character will do.

As a final note, I limit these benefits only to the degree that they don't make sense within the game world. It's great that OOC you know how to whip up gun powder. You're still not doing it in game unless it makes sense. Likewise, I'm glad OOC you're an accomplished heart surgeon. IC, society hasn't advanced enough for you to be one, and your character would have no clue about it. Beyond that though, I actively encourage my players to try to come up with out of the box solutions to their problems that involve more than just slinging dice and hoping the RNG comes up their way. If I (and my players) wanted to be a lousy computer simulation, we wouldn't be playing the game we are. Why should I have objections to my players actively being creative? Creative solutions are fun, "I hit it with my axe ... again" isn't. Again, my job is to make the characters lives exciting and to be a fan of my players (and my world). Limiting my players and myself to the boring, limited and restrictive set of RNGs and statistics the game designers came up with would be a dereliction of my responsibilities as a DM.

Didn't you know? Using dice to accomplish things is cheating. Real DMs should replace all dice with Orcus.

Careful now, wouldn't want you to burn down anything important while you're torching those straw men. Using dice to accomplish things isn't cheating. Using dice (or stats) to override playing the game is. I don't care how many ranks in healing you have, if you tell me you're shoving the Sword of Healing into your partner, they're dying, and no amount of "Obviously a physician of my caliber would never believe such a trick" will prevent that. Likewise, I don't care how many ranks of diplomacy you have, if you tell me "I opine at length about the sexual practices and history of the King, his parents, his extended family and make allusions to the Family Bush" you're going to insult the king. I refuse to deny player agency simply because the player is unwilling to take advantage of their agency. I'm not asking for an eloquent speech from you, but if you want the king to get friendly and offer material support for your quest, you're going to have to at least make some effort into explaining how you plan on doing that.

SowZ

2015-03-13, 10:21 PM

As I said, most of the time, defending is not an active behavior, and nothing you said contradicts that. Flat footed is a single round condition (vs every other round you'll be fighting) and proficiencies are passive attributes not active roles taken by the player. I also did not say that I'm granting bonuses for out of game understandings of things, I said I grant boons for in game creative or specific applications that go beyond the minimum necessary. There is a difference. If you tell me you swing your sword, then you swing your sword and attacks go as normal. If you tell me you search the room, then you search the room and you get exactly what searching the room would give you. If you tell me you diplomance the king, then you diplomance the king. I don't care that in real life you know that you can wield a sword a certain way to gain better vantage on an armored opponent. I don't care that in real life you are a forensic scientist and I don't care that in real life you couldn't talk your way out of a wet paper bag. I do care what you say your character is doing ... and if you tell me your character is doing the absolute minimum, then that is what your character will do.

As a final note, I limit these benefits only to the degree that they don't make sense within the game world. It's great that OOC you know how to whip up gun powder. You're still not doing it in game unless it makes sense. Likewise, I'm glad OOC you're an accomplished heart surgeon. IC, society hasn't advanced enough for you to be one, and your character would have no clue about it. Beyond that though, I actively encourage my players to try to come up with out of the box solutions to their problems that involve more than just slinging dice and hoping the RNG comes up their way. If I (and my players) wanted to be a lousy computer simulation, we wouldn't be playing the game we are. Why should I have objections to my players actively being creative? Creative solutions are fun, "I hit it with my axe ... again" isn't. Again, my job is to make the characters lives exciting and to be a fan of my players (and my world). Limiting my players and myself to the boring, limited and restrictive set of RNGs and statistics the game designers came up with would be a dereliction of my responsibilities as a DM.

Careful now, wouldn't want you to burn down anything important while you're torching those straw men. Using dice to accomplish things isn't cheating. Using dice (or stats) to override playing the game is. I don't care how many ranks in healing you have, if you tell me you're shoving the Sword of Healing into your partner, they're dying, and no amount of "Obviously a physician of my caliber would never believe such a trick" will prevent that. Likewise, I don't care how many ranks of diplomacy you have, if you tell me "I opine at length about the sexual practices and history of the King, his parents, his extended family and make allusions to the Family Bush" you're going to insult the king. I refuse to deny player agency simply because the player is unwilling to take advantage of their agency. I'm not asking for an eloquent speech from you, but if you want the king to get friendly and offer material support for your quest, you're going to have to at least make some effort into explaining how you plan on doing that.

That's my point about versimilitude. It shouldn't break immersion, that is, it should follow basic common sense. Beyond that, though, it is okay for characters to know things that players do not.

1337 b4k4

2015-03-13, 11:09 PM

Beyond that, though, it is okay for characters to know things that players do not.

Absolutely, that's why I have my compromise. I'm perfectly willing to allow you to delegate the task of searching the room to the "AI" of your character and I am happy to assume that said "AI" is smart enough to know all the usual spots to check. However, I'm not going to assume that your "AI" is clever enough to find every trap perfectly, hence they will roll a trigger check for each trap in the room as well as finding all the treasure. If you want to avoid the traps, you have to take the risk of missing some treasure. It's not fair for you as a player to say "because my stat is X or I rolled a Y, then I find all the treasure everywhere, but oh yeah, I don't trigger any of the traps" any more than it's fair of me to say (and I did this once as a newbie and it was stupid) "When you said you searched the desk, you didn't specify under the drawer so you missed the hidden key but you triggered the trap in the drawer". I'm happy to not "pixel bitch" as long as you're happy to accept that by taking the short cut, you've "clicked every pixel", just without declaring it.

Along a similar line of thought, I tend to avoid knowledge checks for this reason too. If the character is supposed to know something, the player may not know that they're supposed to know it and therefore may not even ask for the knowledge check. Characters should get the knowledge they're supposed to have and all the knowledge the player needs to make an informed decision based on what the character would know. If anything, I like to use knowledge checks as "luck" checks. When the players want to know things, they know what their character would know. Then if they want, they can roll knowledge checks to see if they ever heard anything else. I try to keep success or failure of that check a secret (hidden DC) and players always get some information if they take the roll. Whether (and how much) it's true depends on the roll, but there's always a hook to follow and the players are always informed that unlike what their characters "know" this is what they've "heard" and the information may not be reliable or 100% accurate.

Edit
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Note that I'm not saying the knowledge stats and skills are useless either. It still affects how much information you would have normally and it affects how likely the things you've heard are to be reliable. But in this case, I'm avoiding the scenario where it's perfectly reasonable for the character to know something but since the player doesn't, they couldn't think to exploit that knowledge either.

Pex

2015-03-14, 12:41 AM

Didn't you know? Using dice to accomplish things is cheating. Real DMs should replace all dice with Orcus.

Careful now, wouldn't want you to burn down anything important while you're torching those straw men. Using dice to accomplish things isn't cheating. Using dice (or stats) to override playing the game is. I don't care how many ranks in healing you have, if you tell me you're shoving the Sword of Healing into your partner, they're dying, and no amount of "Obviously a physician of my caliber would never believe such a trick" will prevent that. Likewise, I don't care how many ranks of diplomacy you have, if you tell me "I opine at length about the sexual practices and history of the King, his parents, his extended family and make allusions to the Family Bush" you're going to insult the king. I refuse to deny player agency simply because the player is unwilling to take advantage of their agency. I'm not asking for an eloquent speech from you, but if you want the king to get friendly and offer material support for your quest, you're going to have to at least make some effort into explaining how you plan on doing that.

Aww, you missed the joke. To explain it always ruins it.

Lord Raziere

2015-03-14, 12:58 AM

Didn't you know? Using dice to accomplish things is cheating. Real DMs should replace all dice with Orcus.

Thats not far enough.

They should replace the rulebooks with Orcus. get rid of those rules lawyers while your at it.

Edit: Because as everyone knows the only real way to prevent cheating is to.....basically shut down the PC's from having any agency so that they worship Orcus while exercising their cheese-forging genes.

goto124

2015-03-14, 05:43 AM

1337: So, in your opinion, all Knowledge checks should be passive?

Yora

2015-03-14, 08:15 AM

I would say yes: It's not like you sit down and do some knowledging, it's just a check to see if you have the knowledge or not. A player can remind the GM "I have some ranks in Knowledge (Stuff), does that make a difference what we know about this thing?", but that would be it.

1337 b4k4

2015-03-14, 01:51 PM

1337: So, in your opinion, all Knowledge checks should be passive?

Honestly, for whether you know something or not, yes. Knowledge checks are one of those skill checks that are often used very wrongly and grind the game to a halt. If your players need to know X, then as a DM you should give them the knowledge they need or at the absolute minimum give them the steps and quest necessary to obtain that knowledge. But 90% of the time, failure on a knowledge check doesn't add anything to the game. No one really has fun with the "hah hah, you failed your knowledge check so you don't know that trolls regenerate" type of scenario. In that case, it's basically saying "if you were luckier, you would be smarter". And unlike with the room searching scenario, where the trade off is all the treasure but all the traps vs some of the treasure but better chance for no traps, there's no benefit to your player to making them risk a die roll for knowledge. They don't wager any game state by rolling the dice.

Now there are times that a knowledge check can be used to good effect. In the middle of a pitched battle, can you remember anything from the lore of your people about how to kill the chupacabra? That might be a good time for a check if such knowledge wouldn't be part of the standard lore (OTOH, if the standard lore is stories of vanquishing the chupacabra, then why roll? It would be like making a modern day person with knowledge of vampires roll to see if they remember how to kill one, that sort of knowledge is baked into the common lore at this point).

Alternatively, I've also used knowledge checks in a Dungeon World-esque manner when it's something that maybe there isn't a pre-standing reason for them to know about the specific information they want to know. For example, in one dungeon, my player came across a room with writhing vines snaking across the floor. In this case, I haven't really come up with any lore, the vines are just a monster/obstacle and the players have never encountered such a thing before. The players ask if they know anything about these vines and I tell them they haven't encountered anything like this before in real life or in research. I then tell them if they want they can make a knowledge check in whatever appropriate skill. Success will give them a useful piece of information, failure will give them the same information, but will also reveal bad news for the party as well. In this case, the players are given a choice. They can remain with the status quo and learn by doing or they can wager some of the party's safety against their pre-existing skills to obtain knowledge they don't have and have no real reason to know. In this case the players chose to roll, and failed their knowledge check. This gave them the following result:

"You do recall stories from other children when you were young of vines that were almost alive, that would respond to touch and if a traveller was unwary, would ensnare them and strangle the life out of them. The good news is that according to most of the rumors you remember, the vines only really bothered you if you touched them, and even if "alive" can be dispatched with a well placed sword blow or torch. Other than strangulation though, you don't recall any stories of poisons or toxins."

That was the truthful and useful knowledge they gained success or failure. And this is the "bad news" for the party:

"Unfortunately, like most children's horror stories, the truth is often far worse and as your eyes follow the vines around the room, you see them climb the walls, cover the ceiling and see their writhing tendrils hanging down heading right towards your heads. These are no passive dangers. Roll initiative"

Ultimately, like most things, it's a continuum, but where as I would very rarely allow my players to bypass a combat roll, I will also very rarely ask my players for a knowledge roll. Not because knowledge skills are useless but because every roll of the dice should alter the game state in some meaningful way.

SowZ

2015-03-14, 02:01 PM

Honestly, for whether you know something or not, yes. Knowledge checks are one of those skill checks that are often used very wrongly and grind the game to a halt. If your players need to know X, then as a DM you should give them the knowledge they need or at the absolute minimum give them the steps and quest necessary to obtain that knowledge. But 90% of the time, failure on a knowledge check doesn't add anything to the game. No one really has fun with the "hah hah, you failed your knowledge check so you don't know that trolls regenerate" type of scenario. In that case, it's basically saying "if you were luckier, you would be smarter". And unlike with the room searching scenario, where the trade off is all the treasure but all the traps vs some of the treasure but better chance for no traps, there's no benefit to your player to making them risk a die roll for knowledge. They don't wager any game state by rolling the dice.

Now there are times that a knowledge check can be used to good effect. In the middle of a pitched battle, can you remember anything from the lore of your people about how to kill the chupacabra? That might be a good time for a check if such knowledge wouldn't be part of the standard lore (OTOH, if the standard lore is stories of vanquishing the chupacabra, then why roll? It would be like making a modern day person with knowledge of vampires roll to see if they remember how to kill one, that sort of knowledge is baked into the common lore at this point).

Alternatively, I've also used knowledge checks in a Dungeon World-esque manner when it's something that maybe there isn't a pre-standing reason for them to know about the specific information they want to know. For example, in one dungeon, my player came across a room with writhing vines snaking across the floor. In this case, I haven't really come up with any lore, the vines are just a monster/obstacle and the players have never encountered such a thing before. The players ask if they know anything about these vines and I tell them they haven't encountered anything like this before in real life or in research. I then tell them if they want they can make a knowledge check in whatever appropriate skill. Success will give them a useful piece of information, failure will give them the same information, but will also reveal bad news for the party as well. In this case, the players are given a choice. They can remain with the status quo and learn by doing or they can wager some of the party's safety against their pre-existing skills to obtain knowledge they don't have and have no real reason to know. In this case the players chose to roll, and failed their knowledge check. This gave them the following result:

"You do recall stories from other children when you were young of vines that were almost alive, that would respond to touch and if a traveller was unwary, would ensnare them and strangle the life out of them. The good news is that according to most of the rumors you remember, the vines only really bothered you if you touched them, and even if "alive" can be dispatched with a well placed sword blow or torch. Other than strangulation though, you don't recall any stories of poisons or toxins."

That was the truthful and useful knowledge they gained success or failure. And this is the "bad news" for the party:

"Unfortunately, like most children's horror stories, the truth is often far worse and as your eyes follow the vines around the room, you see them climb the walls, cover the ceiling and see their writhing tendrils hanging down heading right towards your heads. These are no passive dangers. Roll initiative"

Ultimately, like most things, it's a continuum, but where as I would very rarely allow my players to bypass a combat roll, I will also very rarely ask my players for a knowledge roll. Not because knowledge skills are useless but because every roll of the dice should alter the game state in some meaningful way.

Things is, if you don't use knowledge checks with scaling DCs, skill points invested don't matter much. Sure, the DM might give you more info if you have a total of 14 compared to 6, but there is no real difference between 12 and 13. The DM is almost certain to give the exact same info.

I use knowledge checks sparingly. If it is something that is common knowledge, people generally just know it. If it is easy to know for someone with some knowledge on the subject, I'll also just tell them. If it is a more complicated scenario I'll call for a roll. I'll give any information necessary to move the plot forward regardless, assuming it is halfway reasonable. But beyond that I factor in the roll.

That Trolls regenerate I'll give them very easily. With a moderately successful roll I'll even tell them Fire and Acid are their weakness. With a great roll, I'll tell them a little about troll ecology and social structure/hunting habits.

Also, anything a character learned or was told throughout the course of play they know now and do not need to invest points in order to know.

The Random NPC

2015-03-14, 02:13 PM

...
That was the truthful and useful knowledge they gained success or failure. And this is the "bad news" for the party:

"Unfortunately, like most children's horror stories, the truth is often far worse and as your eyes follow the vines around the room, you see them climb the walls, cover the ceiling and see their writhing tendrils hanging down heading right towards your heads. These are no passive dangers. Roll initiative"...

I'm not sure if I'm just missing something, but it sounds like this part here is only told to the players if they fail the knowledge roll. So... do they only see it if they fail? Or does it spontaneously get worse if they fail?

SowZ

2015-03-14, 02:16 PM

I'm not sure if I'm just missing something, but it sounds like this part here is only told to the players if they fail the knowledge roll. So... do they only see it if they fail? Or does it spontaneously get worse if they fail?

It's knowledge, not perception. If they fail the roll, they just aren't told what it is. The amount by which they succeed will likely determine how much of the monsters abilities and strengths are told to the PCs.

Seerow

2015-03-14, 02:57 PM

No one really has fun with the "hah hah, you failed your knowledge check so you don't know that trolls regenerate" type of scenario.

Just as a quick counter-anecdote to this claim: My group a while back ran into some Ettins. We ran across them while there was a silence spell up since we were sneaking around, and the gnome beguiler who sees them starts trying to hand signal to us that there's some giants with two heads. The player is doing the hand signals himself at the table, and none of us quite get it. It looks like he's gesturing to himself, then indicating much bigger.

When we come around the corner, we see the Ettins, and every person in the party fails their knowledge check. Not one of us can even tell that it is called an Ettin, or much of anything else about it. Somehow, after killing these ettins, someone in the party comes to the conclusion that the Gnome was trying to tell us these Ettins were big gnomes, and we all decided that yes, this must be what a gnome grows up into. Gnome decides it's funny so rolls with it, going so far as to say that one of them looks just like his uncle.

Ever since Ettins have been referred to in that campaign as the big gnomes. It's worth a laugh every time. A more memorable and entertaining reaction than if we had just been told automatically "yep they're ettins".

mephnick

2015-03-14, 03:26 PM

I use passive knowledge unless a player specifically asks if he knows more. I only show the relevant player what he knows.

I do enjoy knowledge for monster abilities, as a DM and as a player. The problem is with players who have memorized the bestiary and won't keep their mouths shut.

Even I can't pretend "trolls don't like acid" is entertaining, but that's a pretty low check. It's much more entertaining for the weirder entries in the bestiary. Or variant monsters (which I use frequently).

Arbane

2015-03-14, 04:53 PM

Even I can't pretend "trolls don't like acid" is entertaining, but that's a pretty low check. It's much more entertaining for the weirder entries in the bestiary. Or variant monsters (which I use frequently).

I wouldn't say it's far-reaching, but I think it was a bad decision in 3.0 to make the difficulty of monster-knowledge checks go up for more powerful monsters. "It's Smaug, the terrible dragon who has terrorized our nation for generations untold! He.... um... actually, I have no idea HOW he's been terrorizing us.

One bit of skill-checkery that's a problem in any system with a finite point allocation is thin-slicing skills. Like Craft: Blacksmithing, Craft: Boatmaking, Craft: Cheese.... At the other end D&D's Linguistic skill is a bit whacky. You either cannot comprehend a particular language at all, or you spend 1 skill point and speak it fluently.

SowZ

2015-03-14, 05:30 PM

I wouldn't say it's far-reaching, but I think it was a bad decision in 3.0 to make the difficulty of monster-knowledge checks go up for more powerful monsters. "It's Smaug, the terrible dragon who has terrorized our nation for generations untold! He.... um... actually, I have no idea HOW he's been terrorizing us.

One bit of skill-checkery that's a problem in any system with a finite point allocation is thin-slicing skills. Like Craft: Blacksmithing, Craft: Boatmaking, Craft: Cheese.... At the other end D&D's Linguistic skill is a bit whacky. You either cannot comprehend a particular language at all, or you spend 1 skill point and speak it fluently.

Yeah, it should have been based on rarity. One would think that more people could name an Elephant, who live in your country and you even ate it once when you went to the big city for a festival, would be way more common knowledge than a CR 3, bizarre extra-dimensional creature where even one of its kind has never stepped foot on your whole world much less your country for thousands upon thousands of years would be

Flickerdart

2015-03-14, 05:39 PM

Yeah, it should have been based on rarity.
That's what the "answering questions in your field" DCs are for. Anyone taking 10 on Knowledge: Local will know that a firebreathing dragon is terrorizing the town. The identifying checks will get you abilities and weaknesses that nobody even knows the dragon has, such as the hole in his scales.

Talakeal

2015-03-14, 07:00 PM

Just as a quick counter-anecdote to this claim: My group a while back ran into some Ettins. We ran across them while there was a silence spell up since we were sneaking around, and the gnome beguiler who sees them starts trying to hand signal to us that there's some giants with two heads. The player is doing the hand signals himself at the table, and none of us quite get it. It looks like he's gesturing to himself, then indicating much bigger.

When we come around the corner, we see the Ettins, and every person in the party fails their knowledge check. Not one of us can even tell that it is called an Ettin, or much of anything else about it. Somehow, after killing these ettins, someone in the party comes to the conclusion that the Gnome was trying to tell us these Ettins were big gnomes, and we all decided that yes, this must be what a gnome grows up into. Gnome decides it's funny so rolls with it, going so far as to say that one of them looks just like his uncle.

Ever since Ettins have been referred to in that campaign as the big gnomes. It's worth a laugh every time. A more memorable and entertaining reaction than if we had just been told automatically "yep they're ettins".

A lot of people play this game to look / feel cool. They do not like failure, and they will complain that even a memorable and entertaining failure like the above ruins the mood and is only appropriate in a comedy game.

And honestly, sometimes they are right. Not always, but sometimes. It really depends on judging how the people at the table are feeling at the moment.

SowZ

2015-03-14, 07:23 PM

A lot of people play this game to look / feel cool. They do not like failure, and they will complain that even a memorable and entertaining failure like the above ruins the mood and is only appropriate in a comedy game.

And honestly, sometimes they are right. Not always, but sometimes. It really depends on judging how the people at the table are feeling at the moment.

Making things challenging increases the sense of accomplishment when you succeed, though, so you feel more cool. And unless the challenge is a fake challenge, making things tough means occasionally the heroes aren't going to pull something off the way they wanted to. It keeps the tension there. Now, silly failures like the above don't fit in the tone of every game. But in the vast majority of games, failing occasionally is more than appropriate.

Even James Bond movies have at least two parts in the movie, usually closing in on halfway and about 2/3 the way through, where he abjectly fails at something.

BootStrapTommy

2015-03-14, 07:26 PM

Ever since Ettins have been referred to in that campaign as the big gnomes. It's worth a laugh every time. A more memorable and entertaining reaction than if we had just been told automatically "yep they're ettins". Regenerating Wizbangs. That was the name an insane gnome warlock in a party bestowed on trolls. The rest of the party was eventually given the right name, but throughout the game, the gnome's player wrote and cataloged his absurd names for various monsters. And used them IC for the rest of the campaign.

1337 b4k4

2015-03-14, 09:57 PM

I'm not sure if I'm just missing something, but it sounds like this part here is only told to the players if they fail the knowledge roll. So... do they only see it if they fail? Or does it spontaneously get worse if they fail?

They are. Basically, in these cases, I use knowledge checks as something of a luck roll, rather than straight up "do you or don't you" rolls. Bearing in mind that this works well for my table and is definitely not standard D&D, had the players succeeded in their knowledge check, the vines would have been passive and there would be no need for rolling initiative unless one of the players later touched a vine. The players are always given the knowledge they should have as characters up front. Had a party member had a "Knowledge: Vines" skill or something similar, they would have gotten all the information about these things without needing to roll a check. The check was to see if the players could get information outside of their knowledge base without having to experiment first hand. So I present my players with 3 options:

1) Take the status quo: If you want to know more, you're going to have to experiment or find the knowledge elsewhere.
2) Succeed at a knowledge check: Get additional truthful or useful information
3) Fail at a knowledge check: Get additional truthful or useful information, but something is going to go badly for the party

The players know up front that if they opt for the check, they're risking relative safety for additional knowledge, but it's always with the understanding that the additional knowledge is something they don't and shouldn't know. A way to look at it is that the knowledge check in this case is a ret-con. If it succeeds, the ret-con is all good for the party. If it fails, the ret-con also makes things dangerous for the party. But ultimately what makes this work is I will never ask for a knowledge check for things the party should already know or have a way to know. Knowledge checks are always for bonuses. At my table, you can take the status quo and be comfortable knowing that you always have every thing you're allowed to know. To put it in 3e terms, if you take the status quo at my table, it's as if you took 20 on your knowledge check at any other table. And if I ever deviate from this, the players are informed of that fact before they are given the choice to make the roll.

Just as a quick counter-anecdote to this claim:
...
Ever since Ettins have been referred to in that campaign as the big gnomes. It's worth a laugh every time. A more memorable and entertaining reaction than if we had just been told automatically "yep they're ettins".

Sure, but as Talakeal has pointed out (and IIRC, you pointed out in discussions on 5e's skill system) not every group likes blatantly silly outcomes for things that should have been within the reasonable realm of the characters in the first place. And of course, the same outcome could have been generated passively by your DM saying: "No, you've never seen or heard of such creatures before".

Still, as I said, this is a continuum and there's certainly times when a standard knowledge check can be appropriate or game play inducing. One should never take my proclamations on GMing a game as absolutes. Except that last bit there, that was an absolute. :smallbiggrin:

Seerow

2015-03-14, 10:08 PM

Sure, but as Talakeal has pointed out (and IIRC, you pointed out in discussions on 5e's skill system) not every group likes blatantly silly outcomes for things that should have been within the reasonable realm of the characters in the first place. And of course, the same outcome could have been generated passively by your DM saying: "No, you've never seen or heard of such creatures before".

Still, as I said, this is a continuum and there's certainly times when a standard knowledge check can be appropriate or game play inducing. One should never take my proclamations on GMing a game as absolutes. Except that last bit there, that was an absolute. :smallbiggrin:

My main argument with regards to skill systems is that there should be potential to get significantly better. My preference is for there to be at least 3 distinct sets where you can say "Person A can do task 1 with difficulty, and can't accomplish Task 2. Person B can accomplish Task 1 easily, Task 2 with difficulty, and can't accomplish task 3. Person 3 can accomplish Task 2 easily and Task 3 with difficulty".

Applying that to the knowledge check example, in my party there was one person with any significant ranks in Knowledge Nature, it was a moderate check for him and he failed. The rest of us rolled but had no real chance, and that's okay, because we hadn't invested anything into that. As for blatantly silly outcomes, ones that are a foregone conclusion I don't like, for the same reason I really dislike fumbles. But that particular situation was one entirely player created.

Or going back to the original point of "The DM should hand out the results he deems appropriate rather than letting the players roll", if the DM said "You identify the Ettin as an adult gnome", I would have been annoyed, even offended that the DM would assume the characters are idiots like that, even if the characters didn't have the knowledge to know any better, with no context jumping to that conclusion is absurd and would have made the game worse. Whereas the way it actually played out happened organically, through entirely player interaction, and that turned it into a lasting good memory.

Anyway, my only real point here is that I don't see rolling knowledge checks as a bad game mechanic, and actively prefer doing so over the DM automatically telling players things their characters may or may not have ways of knowing.

Now if we want to talk about DC calibration (seriously I can't identify that the Dragon that is bright red attacking the village is a Red Dragon?! But I can tell you everything you want to know about [insert obscure splatbook 1hd outsider here] in extreme detail), or availability of knowledge skills (3.5 has too many skills and not enough points to go around. That is a problem I have had with the system for a long time)... then yeah I'll agree with those problems and talk about ways around them. But I disagree with the correct solution being "The DM will tell you what you need to know".

1337 b4k4

2015-03-15, 12:15 AM

Or going back to the original point of "The DM should hand out the results he deems appropriate rather than letting the players roll", if the DM said "You identify the Ettin as an adult gnome", I would have been annoyed, even offended that the DM would assume the characters are idiots like that, even if the characters didn't have the knowledge to know any better, with no context jumping to that conclusion is absurd and would have made the game worse. Whereas the way it actually played out happened organically, through entirely player interaction, and that turned it into a lasting good memory.

I believe you may have misinterpreted what I'm saying. The DM should not hand out results deemed appropriate. They should hand out the knowledge the players have, rather than making them roll to see if they're lucky enough to know it today. I would never suggest the DM say "You identify the creature as an adult gnome" because that is not within the purview of the DM to decide. The DM's purview is to provide the players with the information the characters have. Either "You identify it as an Ettin", "You don't know for sure, but you've heard of similar creatures before with X, Y and Z traits" or "You don't know what these things are". Those are the things the characters can know and therefore the only proper things the DM could say. Your organic situation could have come about just as easily with the later statement from the DM. It wasn't the knowledge check that led to the situation, it was the at table miming and the lack of knowledge for the character. All rolling the die did was give a random chance for this not to occur.

But I disagree with the correct solution being "The DM will tell you what you need to know".

But how else can players make informed decisions without knowing what their characters know. To me, filling in the details that characters would know about creatures is the same as filling in details about what's on the ground, what's in the air and what sounds they hear. It's no fun (and frankly bad GMing) neglecting to mention that small rocks and debris falls intermittently from the ceiling and then springing lurkers on my players when they neglect to say "I look up in this room too" when they walk through the door. Why would it be any more fun to hold back information the characters can (and should know) only to reveal it if the players think to ask for it in the first place, and then only if they're lucky enough for the RNG to come up their way. Rolling the die doesn't wager anything in this case, it's simply an artificial barrier to informed decision making for the sake of not having to decide what is or isn't knowledge to the players.

Edit
------

Again please don't take this as an absolute prohibition on random chance knowledge or as me saying I always do this every time without fail (I wish I were a good enough GM to live up to my ideals 100% of the time. But my guiding philosophy is rolling the dice should always generate more fun, and should always alter the game state from before the dice were rolled. If it doesn't fulfill one of those items, it should be used sparingly, and if it fails to fulfill both of those items, it probably shouldn't be rolled at all. 90% of the time, in my experience, knowledge checks fail to fulfill both of those rules and so 90% of the time, they shouldn't be rolled.

The Random NPC

2015-03-15, 02:26 AM

They are. Basically, in these cases, I use knowledge checks as something of a luck roll, rather than straight up "do you or don't you" rolls. Bearing in mind that this works well for my table and is definitely not standard D&D, had the players succeeded in their knowledge check, the vines would have been passive and there would be no need for rolling initiative unless one of the players later touched a vine. The players are always given the knowledge they should have as characters up front. Had a party member had a "Knowledge: Vines" skill or something similar, they would have gotten all the information about these things without needing to roll a check. The check was to see if the players could get information outside of their knowledge base without having to experiment first hand. So I present my players with 3 options:

1) Take the status quo: If you want to know more, you're going to have to experiment or find the knowledge elsewhere.
2) Succeed at a knowledge check: Get additional truthful or useful information
3) Fail at a knowledge check: Get additional truthful or useful information, but something is going to go badly for the party

The players know up front that if they opt for the check, they're risking relative safety for additional knowledge, but it's always with the understanding that the additional knowledge is something they don't and shouldn't know. A way to look at it is that the knowledge check in this case is a ret-con. If it succeeds, the ret-con is all good for the party. If it fails, the ret-con also makes things dangerous for the party. But ultimately what makes this work is I will never ask for a knowledge check for things the party should already know or have a way to know. Knowledge checks are always for bonuses. At my table, you can take the status quo and be comfortable knowing that you always have every thing you're allowed to know. To put it in 3e terms, if you take the status quo at my table, it's as if you took 20 on your knowledge check at any other table. And if I ever deviate from this, the players are informed of that fact before they are given the choice to make the roll.

Sure, but as Talakeal has pointed out (and IIRC, you pointed out in discussions on 5e's skill system) not every group likes blatantly silly outcomes for things that should have been within the reasonable realm of the characters in the first place. And of course, the same outcome could have been generated passively by your DM saying: "No, you've never seen or heard of such creatures before".

Still, as I said, this is a continuum and there's certainly times when a standard knowledge check can be appropriate or game play inducing. One should never take my proclamations on GMing a game as absolutes. Except that last bit there, that was an absolute. :smallbiggrin:

Just so I'm sure I understand, if no knowledge check had been made, the vines would not have been dangling from the ceiling, but if a knowledge check had been made, and failed, they would have? If so, that seems like an interesting method, but I don't think I would enjoy it.

NichG

2015-03-15, 02:57 AM

I've never really been satisfied with any system I've encountered for modelling character knowledge of this sort. I don't like the metagame 'but how could I know to ask to know?' from active rolls, the tendency of passive systems to either require massive info-dumps ('here's everything that rank of Knowledge gets you') that the player will get lost in or the alternative being a sort of inevitable GM hinting by selecting particular moments to reveal information ('so for no apparent reason, a factoid you once heard about Lurkers flashes across your mind...'). I also don't like the 'you must pay X skill points to know what you already know' kind of dynamic you can get in some cases.

So far the best solution I've found is to focus rolls on the application of complex and unspoken domain knowledge. For example, from the last session of my current campaign, a character used extensive knowledge of architecture to analyze a building of an ancient civilization and figure out something about how it was destroyed, what the materials it was made of were like, etc. In character this involved understanding things like the surface fracture patterns of metals versus cements, the behavior of anisotropic materials in response to plastic deformation, etc - basically detailed domain knowledge that goes beyond the usual level of description of the scene.

For simple factoids like 'trolls regenerate' I just provide a setting document containing things that would be considered common knowledge (or common knowledge for adventurers), and from that point on everything the player knows is fair game.

This isn't completely satisfying, but its the best breakdown I've found for my tastes so far.

TarkXT

2015-03-15, 10:33 AM

Existence: RPG's really should never have existed. Bad decision overall as ever since they started we've never heard the end of all the issues.

In any case as a medium that evolves with its audience I can't say there have been issues so far reaching as to merit my disdain. Most of the really nasty decisions I've encountered have been policy issues involving individual companies and creators. Everything else is just game rules, which are easier to deal with than company policies and stupid people.

For example Pathfinder really should have shied away from backwards compatibility to 3.5, but within the context of its release people were clamoring for it awfully hard. Now it seems people are a bit more willing to abandon the old silliness.

There's also Wizards of Hasbro's head scratching decisions during the 4th ed. years. The GSL was an OGL that turned around and bit off your hand. The decision to stop selling PDF's due to piracy is a considerable blunder since that ultimately meant whole swathes of players without access to a brick and mortar store nor the desire to pay for the mark up of a hard copy were cut off.

These decisions in spite of their biggest competitor meeting and then exceeding sales with all crunch being OGL and having a rather large store with pdf's much cheaper than print (and often more desirable for niche products).

I think big companies turning to kickstarter will also turn out to be a big mistake. Little companies use it as a legitmate means to gather funding for a project. Big companies don't need to do this so for them it's just an easy way to get some extra funds and act as a barometer for popularity. The first part is shady and extortionist behavior as you dangle something neat in front of people and say "this cannot exist without your dollar!" and then fail to produce a good product. The second part really limits you as a company in how you find out what's going to be popular. I, for one, don't give anything to kickstarter by simple fact that I simply don't have the money to throw at a project that might be rather than a project that is.

Lord Raziere

2015-03-15, 11:10 AM

Existence: RPG's really should never have existed. Bad decision overall as ever since they started we've never heard the end of all the issues.
*snip*

Whoa. let me stop you right there.

RPG's got 99 problems but their existence ain't one of them. and really, "it was a bad idea because we've never the end of the problems with the thing"? you could argue that for anything ever made, because everything has problems, because the world is imperfect. you just remind of a certain Douglas Adams quote:

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

{scrubbed}

johnbragg

2015-03-15, 01:00 PM

Whoa. let me stop you right there.

RPG's got 99 problems but their existence ain't one of them. and really, "it was a bad idea because we've never the end of the problems with the thing"? you could argue that for anything ever made, because everything has problems, because the world is imperfect. you just remind of a certain Douglas Adams quote:

{scrubbed}

I don't think you read the rest of his post. I'm pretty sure his first line was sarcasm (even if it wasn't in blue text), complaining-about-the-complaining, since he then goes on to argue:

In any case as a medium that evolves with its audience I can't say there have been issues so far reaching as to merit my disdain. Most of the really nasty decisions I've encountered have been policy issues involving individual companies and creators. Everything else is just game rules, which are easier to deal with than company policies and stupid people.

For example...

Pathfinder made too big a fetish of 3.5 compatibility; WOTC's GSL and no-PDFs decisions; big companies using Kickstarter.

I think you're over-reacting, Lord Raziere.

TarkXT

2015-03-15, 04:07 PM

^Got the joke.

Though I'm happy to remind anyone of Douglas Adams.

Segev

2015-03-16, 08:36 AM

I don't care how many ranks in healing you have, if you tell me you're shoving the Sword of Healing into your partner, they're dying, and no amount of "Obviously a physician of my caliber would never believe such a trick" will prevent that. Likewise, I don't care how many ranks of diplomacy you have, if you tell me "I opine at length about the sexual practices and history of the King, his parents, his extended family and make allusions to the Family Bush" you're going to insult the king. I refuse to deny player agency simply because the player is unwilling to take advantage of their agency. I'm not asking for an eloquent speech from you, but if you want the king to get friendly and offer material support for your quest, you're going to have to at least make some effort into explaining how you plan on doing that.

Eh... this is also kind-of straw mannish. "I do this thing that is very clearly not in keeping with what the mechanics I'm invoking cause" is grounds for the DM to say, "What you just described would call for this other set of mechanics, and your character knows it won't have the effect of the mechanics you want to invoke. Would you like to try something else that would have the effect of the mechanics you want to use?"

In less general terms, the healer example would get a response of, "A doctor of your caliber does, indeed, know that this is not a 'sword of healing,' but is in fact just a sword, and that stabbing your patient with it will kill him. You will not get to roll a Healing check if you do that; you will instead roll a coup de grace. Is that what you want?"

The "diplomacy" example would have the DM say, "You know before you even open your mouth that there is no way to phrase that which will not be offensive to the king. Here are some topics and suggestions for approaches which would be more reasonably flattering. If you wish to roll Diplomacy, you'll need to use something which will not offend him."

These are similar to if a player of a Barbarian said, "My character pulls out a set of wicker reeds and begins to weave baskets. He uses his rage and has his battle axe equipped, so I will roll to hit and damage these goblins..."

The DM is completely within his rights to say, "Er, no. You have to swing your axe at the goblins to be able to roll to hit and damage them with it. Weaving baskets is not a viable way to do this, and would take your action up for an extended period of time."

Mechanics do have the ability to specify what you're doing, at least in broad terms. Attacks involve moving weapons in the direction of the targets. Diplomacy involves trying to get on the target's good side. Healing involves actions which plausibly (within the setting) could be reparative.

If you truly don't know what would be reasonable, you can describe it in as vague of terms as needed and let the mechanics handle it. More power to you if you can describe it well. But nobody is arguing that "I describe this activity that is definitely NOT what I am rolling to accomplish" should qualify as a valid way to achieve something. At BEST, if it's a misunderstanding of the tone of the game, the GM should be warning the player that that isn't going to do what he thinks it is, and his character would know that. Then let the player choose something that would do what his character is trying to achieve. If it comes down to, "Well, um, can I just roll?" the answer should be, "Yes."

1337 b4k4

2015-03-16, 12:26 PM

If you truly don't know what would be reasonable, you can describe it in as vague of terms as needed and let the mechanics handle it. More power to you if you can describe it well. But nobody is arguing that "I describe this activity that is definitely NOT what I am rolling to accomplish" should qualify as a valid way to achieve something. At BEST, if it's a misunderstanding of the tone of the game, the GM should be warning the player that that isn't going to do what he thinks it is, and his character would know that. Then let the player choose something that would do what his character is trying to achieve. If it comes down to, "Well, um, can I just roll?" the answer should be, "Yes."

My answer is "yes, but you'll only get the minimum required to advance the game and accomplish your goal on a success". I ask for players to be specific both because I want them to engage with the world, but also because I want them to tell me specifically what they want to accomplish. I want my players to give me the things they want to do because that's the best way for me to get them what they want. If you tell me "I want to diplomance the king" and expect to just roll, then what should I give you? I assume you want to advance the story, so I can give you that, and that's all I'll give you unless you give me more. Do you want supplies? Do you want allies? Do you want to lie? Do you want fame? Do you want money? Do you want to proposition the king for a trist? As a DM, I don't act for your character. I've got too much to do figuring out what everyone else does, and frankly, it takes away your agency for me to tell you that you lied, or that you asked the king for a loan or extra supplies. If you want these other things, or you want something specific that's not covered under the heading of "The absolute minimum possible to meet the definition of this mechanic" then you need to give me something to work on.

Again, I don't need a speech. I don't even need you to tell me in character. I just want you to express your intentions and your goals. I don't allow my players to roll initiative and then sit there and say "I attack a creature". I ask for their movements, their targets, their called shots, their intentions (i.e. I want to push him back). And I don't run their fights for them. They don't tell me "I attack" and then sit back as I determine the target they choose, the movement they take to get there, the power they chose to use, the tactics they engage in etc. All of that is up to them. None of my players are expert swordsmen or fighters and yet they (and thousands and hundreds of other players just like them) manage this all the time. I hardly think it's unfair to ask the same of players trying to use diplomacy or any of the other skills to give me the specifics of what they're doing and trying to accomplish.

Edit
-----------

Just so I'm sure I understand, if no knowledge check had been made, the vines would not have been dangling from the ceiling, but if a knowledge check had been made, and failed, they would have? If so, that seems like an interesting method, but I don't think I would enjoy it.

That's the gist of it, though it doesn't have to be specifically that. Had the knowledge check been done after dispatching the vines, it could be bad news like "the vines begin releasing a cloud of gas as they decay, and you begin to cough. You need to get out of this room quickly and you'll probably need to find another way around if you need to back track" or "These vines are almost never found without being accompanied by giant spiders, and your party elf's keen hearing picks up on some vaguely arachnoid foot steps coming your way, you've attracted someone's attention."

As I said, it's definitely not standard D&D (it's a very Dungeon World esque way of doing it) but I've found it works well, makes knowledge checks interesting and risky and generally adds a bit more spice. I've even asked players to tell me what the bad news is, and they're always worse on themselves than I would be (and they always get a kick out of dropping something on the party). The key I've found is to not make the "bad news" something stupidly unfair. For example, "vines above you, roll initiative" is fair, while "vines above you, everyone takes 3d6 damage and the dwarf is being strangled" is not. Likewise, attracting the attention of the spiders is fair, spider sneak attacks from the ceiling is not. Green gas that they need to escape from and blocks their path in the future is fair, "save vs poison or die" is not.