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MonkeySage
2015-11-03, 08:46 AM
One of the tons of reasons that I've stayed with 3.X for so long is that potential to take an ordinary Commoner all the way to the level of gods. For me, a limit is like a record; it's made to be broken, and if you can break it through hard work, that is intensely satisfying. There is something tremendously satisfying about getting a mage to do fireworks at level 1, and nukes at level 15.

goto124
2015-11-03, 09:54 AM
I was about to talk about the Law/Chaos axis, when I realised this was about mechanical limits.

As with a lot of things in tabletop gaming, the answer is 'depends on the group'. Oftentimes, limits are there so that there won't be one overpowered PC (whose player is typically called a munchkin) steamrolling everything while the rest of the party is bored and frustrated because there's nothing for them to do.

MrConsideration
2015-11-03, 01:18 PM
I find the meticulous loop-hole based power game cheese isn't really conducive to telling a heroic story and tends to shatter immersion.

"Then Lo! The mighty Wizard did use Ice Assassin to..."

themaque
2015-11-03, 01:28 PM
IT depends on how it is given to me.

If I'm asked to keep the power level and cheese down because they want a RP game than I'm all for it. I'll make something that means something to me personally and be non-optimized at best or more likely pretty lame mechanically but cool for the character.

If I'm told there is no possible way I could EVER do "X" and any attempt will be viciously slapped down. Then they just threw down the gauntlet, Game on.

BWR
2015-11-03, 01:34 PM
OP, are you actually talking about limits? Because you seem to be talking about what is allowed by mechanics and setting without reference to any limits in the system or setting.

As for what you actually asked, as a rule, limits are to be abided by.
I may disagree with certain restrictions and alter them as a GM or ask a GM to alter them but in general I do not feel that a limit is meant to be broken. Limits may very from system to system and setting to setting and what may be a beyond the limit in one may be 'unlikely' or 'everyday' in another.
For instance, Ars Magica or L5R have pretty strict limits on what you can do and play and stricter limits on what is commonly done and played. RIFTS is pretty open to almost anything and likely has rules for it somewhere, for one big glorious mess of a setting. In CoC becoming a god is to put it mildly unlikely while in BECMI you have rules for attaining godhood (really cool rules). I abide by those limits as a GM and expect them to be, mostly, heeded by GMs I play under. Limits are part of a setting and going beyond that generally weakens the flavor of the setting. Using mechnical loopholes to get around implicit or explicit mechanical limits is something I do not accept as a GM and disapprove of as a player, especially since that often clashes with setting flavor.

MonkeySage
2015-11-03, 01:44 PM
Well, here I'm not so much talking about optimization or anything like that. When I say "break limits" here, I'm saying that a commoner, through luck and hard work, can achieve the powers of a god. And there are games that in some sense cater to this idea(for example, 3.X). The commoner has broken a limit far exceeding a normal person, and this is reflected in their mechanical stats.

I suppose there are two kinds of limitations here: Restrictive limitations are built into the rules, or into the campaign itself. These cannot be broken without breaking the rules.

The limitations that I really enjoy breaking are those that are difficult to break, but not impossible; for instance, the division between a normal character and an epic character.

3.X is pretty loose about limiting what characters can achieve, and this is part of what I love about it. A character will never not have something to strive for.

In 5e, mean while, there are hard limits which were never meant to be broken. As I understand, once you reach level 20, once you've maxed out your most important ability score(the idea of maxing out an ability score is foreign to me), what more is there to shoot for? Unless your class specifically enables breaking those built in ability score caps, you'll never manage it.

I'm not a fan of restrictive limitations; in my campaigns, a character can in theory do nearly anything if they work towards it. Roleplay here is still very important. I'm not gonna let a player become a lich just because, but if they roleplay, it I'll allow it.



(Forgive me, I'm pretty awful at explaining stuff. Good thing I don't plan to be a teacher, lol.)

BWR
2015-11-03, 02:12 PM
So basically you are talking about things that are hard to achieve, not actual limits.

MonkeySage
2015-11-03, 02:22 PM
Yes and no.

Like I said, I'm really sucky at saying what is on my mind.

3.X sets soft limits on what a character can achieve, 5e sets hard, restrictive limits.

The former kind can be broken, so I suppose they aren't actual limits, but in a way they sort of are.

The latter cannot be broken without breaking the rules.

Keltest
2015-11-03, 03:03 PM
A limit that is not abided by isn't really a limit at all, IMO. There are occasionally times where following the rules or dice rolls or whatever is detrimental to the fun factor, but more often than not letting things play out and seeing what happens is the right course of action.

veti
2015-11-03, 03:39 PM
I find the meticulous loop-hole based power game cheese isn't really conducive to telling a heroic story and tends to shatter immersion.

"Then Lo! The mighty Wizard did use Ice Assassin to..."

This, exactly. In my opinion, the only way to make D&D actually fun to play is to house-rule it so heavily that it's barely recognisable as the base game. And 3.x, far more than AD&D, actively discourages that.


Well, here I'm not so much talking about optimization or anything like that. When I say "break limits" here, I'm saying that a commoner, through luck and hard work, can achieve the powers of a god. And there are games that in some sense cater to this idea(for example, 3.X). The commoner has broken a limit far exceeding a normal person, and this is reflected in their mechanical stats.

It seems to me that's pretty much the opposite of "a limit". What you're saying is that anyone, within the ruleset, can achieve just about anything - given enough luck and resources. Which is true, but it kind of implies that the only "limit" is the individual's own luck and resources - which is something that limits everyone everywhere. We only have so much wealth, so much time, so many friends and family, opportunities and commitments - it's those, and not anything about "the rules", that restrict all of us, and they're also what limit your D&D commoner.

As to the level cap in 5e: didn't 3e also have the same cap when it was first published? That kind of "limit" is just an opportunity for WOTC to milk more money out of its customers by publishing a supplement later, specifically to abolish it.

KillianHawkeye
2015-11-04, 03:07 AM
As to the level cap in 5e: didn't 3e also have the same cap when it was first published? That kind of "limit" is just an opportunity for WOTC to milk more money out of its customers by publishing a supplement later, specifically to abolish it.

Yes, but 3E and 3.5 did it so poorly that 4E never even attempted it and it's unlikely that 5E will either.

Epic levels without any end point is the kind of thing that seems like a cool idea on paper, but in reality it just becomes a nightmare of unbalanced game play. As in, it literally becomes impossible to maintain game balance when all limitations on PC power are removed. It would honestly be a huge surprise to me if "you can gain levels forever" was ever reintroduced into a D&D ruleset.

Sredni Vashtar
2015-11-04, 09:38 AM
Personally, I never liked how 3rd edition just threw open all the doors. Yeah, there were limits in AD&D that made little sense, like racial level limits or class restrictions (though dwarven wizards still feel wrong). From what I've seen and experienced, it shifted the balance of the game towards the players over the DM (instead of 50/50), and in some circles it sounded like the DM was an annoying necessity to have a D&D game (which made the prospect of running the game oh so appealing). I know that in practice, it probably wasn't like that for most groups, and frankly, it wasn't for mine (aside from one player buying up a ton of splatbooks at a point where we were still just getting into the basics). However, I appreciate 5th edition for trying to put the genie back into the bottle.

Mr.Moron
2015-11-04, 09:56 AM
I prefer a more narrowly-bounded scope to a game. I don't really like going through genre changes or order of magnitude increases in power. Ideally capability ceilings move just a little or not at all over the lifespan of a game, the floor a touch more but the average a fair bit. Which isn't to say I only play games like that (I am posting in a primarily D&D-focused forum after all), just that forced to choose one way that's what I'd choose.

TheEmerged
2015-11-04, 01:50 PM
It also depends somewhat on the genre. I would argue, for example, that the superheroic genre is *about* breaking limits (but that's possibly a thread-breaking tangent).

Some players and GM's are going to view it differently as well. There's another thread on one of these boards where a GM told the players they couldn't create supernatural characters. If I said that to my gaming group, they'd *immediately* start looking under every nook and cranny for elements of supernatural - it would be a huge distraction, even if I'm trying to run a murder mystery. I know someone who tried to run a campaign where only women could have superpowers, and the players *immediately* assumed a major plot point in the campaign would be the first male to get them.

Now, I've run enough superheroic/supernatural campaigns that I've established some ground rules for getting the "feel" I want. For example, I have a generic boilerplate about "powers with too much potential to ruin a mystery" - I all but disallow them. But I explain why to the players, and I feel that part in parcel with this is that the NPC's generally face the same restrictions - and any exceptions are going to be a big deal and/or heavily limited. In our last such campaign (a high school \ junior college for a 3rd generation of superheroes), for example, I went ahead and allowed a PC to have "X-Ray Vision" but with the understanding that blocking it was much easier than just lead covering (force fields blocked it too, for example) and that this was something he needed to keep as secret as feasible from most of the character's classmates.

Raimun
2015-11-04, 08:27 PM
You should never break the limits. Of course, it all depends on how you define limits.

If it's about abusing loopholes in a way that's highly questionable and up to the debate by anyone who actually knows the rules? There's a limit, right there. Don't go there.

But combining different rules of the game to create something others might have not seen in advance and there's no question about how all of this works because the rules are clear on this? As far as I'm concerned, there were never limits to be broken.

goto124
2015-11-04, 08:41 PM
OOC limits are part of a gentlemen's* agreement among the GM and the players, to ensure enjoyment of the game by all parties. The GM describes the style of the game, and the players abide by it so that no one breaks out of whatever the game is supposed to be. In return, the GM doesn't go outside the genre that was described.


Hi. Just letting you know, I'm in the game the OP is running; I was at the start, and I still am. Everybody still is, although we've come close to some real issues because of this, but it's been put behind us at this point and we've moved on. In regards to what you've said above, here's what it boils down to for me:

1) The part I've underlined has been so indicated to point out that people go to those kinds of entertainment because they want to be tricked, and being tricked is necessary to the entertainment. Twists and turns in a story have their place, but they have to operate hand in hand with the audience's suspension of disbelief...and that's part of the problem. In a tabletop RPG, the players are not the audience at a play/movie/magic show, they're the performers. If a magician was going to saw me in half, I'd want to know about it before hand so I could take part in fooling the "audience" appropriately. The DM makes up the main story, but he's not the only storyteller: the players (through their characters) influence the story, and if we're not prepared for the twists and turns as players, we might stumble over them, or miss a cue, or react badly IC because it was a bad surprise OOC. Some surprises are necessary in stories because the players are part-audience as well as part-actors, but leaving them completely out of the loop is just as unenjoyable for them as if you spoiled all the surprises. There needs to be a balance, or things can go badly.

2) Lying about an in-game thing is an issue, but lying about the basic premise of the game is a whole different story, especially in pbp where people spend days (or even weeks) putting together characters that fit well with both the world and the other party members. If we were playing 3.5, and magic options were forbidden, and it was otherwise presented as a standard D&D world (like LotR or something), I would assume that it was a no- or low-magic world; if we arrived, and (halfway through the first session) found that it was a high-magic world and we're part of a slave caste in that world, that's a very different game than what was necessarily presented to us. That can be a problem if we've built characters for a very different world, because suddenly that LG Monk stops looking so cool, or that LN ranger is almost as bad as the enemy.

As an example, one of the characters in this game is very much the jealous type, but not romantically: anybody being capable of something that she can never be good at is somebody she can never get along with while staying in-character...and halfway through the first session, the protagonist (and I'll remind you that the goal in this game is to get the protagonist to fall in love with you) is capable of magic, and magic isn't something you can learn; you've either got it, or you don't.

3) Beyond building characters that don't fit the game we're playing because they were built for the game we were told we'd get, there's the issue of players being interested in the game only because we were given the impression that it was (or was not) a particular kind of game. If, in example with mages and the slave caste, I only joined the game because I hated high-op 3.5 stuff and wanted to have fun playing a competent non-caster, why should I stay in a game where casters rule the world? That is exactly the kind of game I was avoiding, and this game being presented as anti-magic was the only reason I joine, so why should I stay?

And as of yet, Senpai's magic hasn't really come up beyond a "oh BTW she's magic"...but that's mostly because it was a bomb dropped at the end of the episode, and we just started the second one. She's a "Magical Girl" (if you're not overly familiar with the genre, think "Sailor Moon").

Part of the problem is that we signed up for a "college students romancing the transfer student" to "that same thing plus an unspecified amount of magical intrigue": the only reason we found out near the end of episode one is because our school bus got knocked off a bridge, and we all ended up in a hospital...where a maybe-magical hitman attempted to kidnap/steal from the Magical Girl DMPC the game is focused around. It's obvious that the magic stuff going on with her isn't supposed to be a huge secret for the characters, since they found out so soon, but if we were going to find out in episode one anyway, why not tell the players? We've got characters that were built for college-level student politics and dealing with school bullies, not fighting the forces of evil. Both in the mechanical and literary sense, we could've been better equipped for this kind of game if we'd known it was coming.

Another art of the problem is that we still don't really know what kind of game we're in; is this just like "Power Rangers/Sailor Moon After Hours", where we focus mostly on the school stuff, and deal with the magic as an afterthought, or is this going to shift to focus mostly on the magic side of things? We still don't know. About the only thing we might be able to depend on is the scale of the issues: our collective Senpai (who we must pursue romantically as the goal of the system we're playing in) is Nanoha from some anime; she and her friend Fate are apparently two of the Earth's most powerful combat mages...and they're approaching low DBZ levels of power, if they're not there already. And the rest of us, who have to get that powerhouse to fall in love with us? Yeah, we're college kids. That's more than a bit of a problem if it's not handled properly. Thankfully, Fate won't be showing up all the time, since she's both the canon relationship and the Childhood Friend, but there's still issues that could come up.

Final part of the problem: two of the players have played together in the past, and seem to have very different play-styles as well as strong meta-ideas on how the game should be played. Both of them had reasons for wanting to keep the game non-magical; one was the jealous example given in my previous post, and the other would've been fine with playing a magic character (or non-magic in a magic game) if they'd been told up-front about it, but they weren't.

We've been allowed to respec our characters, both because of the dropped bomb of "magic is real" as well (we're allowed to take an extra archetype and extra advantages, and can select a homebrew "Magical Girl" archetype that I made, which is partially based on the one Lentrax made), and part because some players were really new to the game and were disenchanted with the choices they made for story because they suck mechanically. Hopefully, things will run smoother from here on out, but things could get kinda weird down the road.


So, yes, that sort of limit is to be abided by, otherwise the game will get unfun for the other people playing with you. Rules-lawyering counts as breaking the limits.

If you want to 'break limits', you should discuss them with the other players and GM first ("Hey guys I've got a cool idea, just wanna make sure you're all chill with it..."). Two posts up, TheEmerged had arranged to allow a PC to have X-ray vision, with enough limits on that power itself to ensure the game isn't broken. Communciation is important.


If it's about abusing loopholes in a way that's highly questionable and up to the debate by anyone who actually knows the rules? There's a limit, right there. Don't go there.

But combining different rules of the game to create something others might have not seen in advance and there's no question about how all of this works because the rules are clear on this? As far as I'm concerned, there were never limits to be broken.

Erm... I'm not sure how the second paragraph is different from the former. Rules As Written (RAW) can be rather different from Rules As Intended (RAI). When a creative use of RAW leads to unforseen consequences that may or may not be RAI (how would you know?), there'd better be a group discussion on whether said creative use can be allowed without making the game unfun. The group can decide "RAW doesn't follow RAI, let's follow RAI", or even "RAW follows RAI, but RAI makes the game less fun for everyone so let's ignore it".

* No offense to non-males, including but not limited to females and those not part of the gender binary.

Knaight
2015-11-05, 03:59 PM
I'm pretty sure that in this case it's less a matter of limits per se, and more a matter of there being broad differentiated classes, and walls between them that may or may not be permeable*. In one game, you might have normal people who are separated from those born to be heroic, and it's only the people in the second group that are the most exceptional. The mightiest mage is probably descended from an ancient bloodline of powerful mages, born under a particular star, or otherwise positioned (if not outright fated) to become the mightiest. In another, you'll still have those walls - the scion of a house of mages with access to the best magical training is basically guaranteed to end up a capable mage, a commoner is going to have some serious trouble getting anywhere - but there's a permeability to it, where there's at least some possibility that the mightiest mage was a commoner who pulled themselves up into it. This might be a setting thing, and this might be a mechanics thing, with D&D 3.x being a classic example where the mechanics are pretty much built for zero to hero play.

This isn't just a style difference in fantasy either, it's pretty widespread. In a superhero game, is there room for a normal person to become a superhero by training, or is it inevitably out of the persons control? In a science fiction game, is the social mobility enough for someone from a poor background to become planetary governor or fleet admiral or some such, or is there a more hierarchical and aristocratic feel? In a romance, is there room for a character who goes out of their way to make themselves appealing and lovable and thus find success, or is passionate love the domain of those born with the genetics to be smoking hot? Admittedly, that last one is a bit of a stretch, particularly in the context of an RPG, but the point is that there's a distinct style.

Personally, I tend to favor settings where the power level is fairly low, and there are real limits to what one can do as a human (or whatever the collection of PC species is, in games that use other ones). The most brilliant people still do what they do because of societal backing, the best warriors are still threatened by groups that aren't hyper competent, being an ace pilot isn't enough of an advantage when your dinky star fighter is up against a dread naught, etc. With that said, I also tend to favor settings where the walls are permeable. There might be a class of people with some big advantages that tend to be better at something, but there's also room for people not from that class to be just as good. To use a chivalric romance example, even if the power level is kept low and a ten on one is basically going to end poorly for everyone, there's still the possibility that just about every warrior worth noting is a knight. Alternately, there's a real possibility that there's a peasant outlaw or veteran foot soldier or similar among the best. I usually favor option two.

*Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, MonkeySage.

Raimun
2015-11-05, 05:12 PM
Erm... I'm not sure how the second paragraph is different from the former. Rules As Written (RAW) can be rather different from Rules As Intended (RAI). When a creative use of RAW leads to unforseen consequences that may or may not be RAI (how would you know?), there'd better be a group discussion on whether said creative use can be allowed without making the game unfun. The group can decide "RAW doesn't follow RAI, let's follow RAI", or even "RAW follows RAI, but RAI makes the game less fun for everyone so let's ignore it".


There is a difference. The former is wrong, the latter is right.

Of course, it is possible that things get un-fun (that's totally a word) even in the latter case. The point I'm making is, it is possible to make new limits. Then, if you stay withing those limits, you are not breaking any limits.

At least my reading talents are limited to books and similar devices. Minds and future are way above my limits.

bulbaquil
2015-11-05, 06:07 PM
Limits, including implied limits, are to be abided by. That's why they're there. If there wasn't a reason for the limit to exist, the limit wouldn't.