Zaq
2016-02-02, 04:24 PM
There's been endless discussion on how to tweak Vow of Poverty to make it not horribly suck, but today I'd like to talk about the other VoP: Vow of Peace. (When I refer to VoP in here, I'm referring to Peace, not Poverty.)
I recently did a pacifist run through Undertale (though let's not discuss Undertale specifically here; I don't want any risk of spoilers for me or for anyone who happens to read this), which got me thinking about playing other games in a less-violent or non-violent manner. I feel like the 3.5 system is big enough to handle the concept of a character who doesn't want to kill things the way most adventurers do, but the as-written Vow of Peace feat itself does a very poor job of enabling that kind of character. (Sure, you don't need a feat to simply choose to play a nonviolent character, but I feel like there is value in providing an optional mechanical framework to support characters who choose to go down this path.)
Of course, on a surface level, the fact that it requires two annoying prereq feats makes it hard to fit into a normal build that isn't also being hampered by Vow of Poverty, and the draconian "ONE FALSE STEP EVER = NO MORE FEAT" mindset inherent to all the Vows is incredibly restrictive, so those are things that would have to be changed if we want to make it less annoying to use. But really, we all know that those aren't the primary reasons why VoP is hard to use.
Vow of Peace (and its prereq/cousin Vow of Nonviolence, hereafter VoNV) is really tricky because it forces the rest of the party to fundamentally alter their baseline assumptions about the game. It's a damn near universal baseline assumption that adventurers are going to be killing things (and usually taking their stuff, but that's another matter). Combat is a massive, massive part of the game, for better or for worse. A VoP character suddenly places restrictions on the other party members (generally not a good thing), so if the rest of the party isn't prepared for and actively accepting of a VoP character, you're looking at party friction at best and ruinous disharmony at worst. So any attempt to make VoP more usable is going to have to address that. At a bare minimum, we need to get rid of the clause in VoNV that mechanically penalizes your allies for killing things you have subdued; a VoP character should probably want to discourage their allies from being murderhoboes, but a mechanical "DO AS I SAY OR YOU WILL SUFFER" effect is not something that should be placed on your allies (especially without their consent, but it's bad either way).
In addition to the whole "you have to stop your party members from acting like adventurers" thing, there's the fact that VoP means that, well, you can't fight things normally. This isn't entirely a bad thing—the whole point of playing a VoP character is to explore a character who doesn't think of violence as a first resort and who doesn't want to just wantonly murder things, so to get rid of this restriction entirely is to completely ignore the point of VoP, which isn't what I'm aiming to do. What we need to do is look at where we're putting the emphasis: "can't fight things normally" instead of "can't fight things normally." Unless you're specifically aiming for a zero-combat game (which, again, requires the cooperation of the entire party, so we really don't want that to be the baseline we're starting from), D&D is going to involve fighting things one way or another, so a revised VoP should facilitate new ways for you to participate in combat without necessarily murdering everything. (The existing benefits of the feat are a start, but they're really not a finish, and we'll talk about that in a bit.)
Let's start with nonlethal damage. VoP/VoNV allow nonlethal damage, but they don't allow any new ways of actually doing that nonlethal damage, so unless you've already got access to a nonlethal weapon (typically not the case), you're looking at more feats (like Subduing Strike and/or Nonlethal Substitution) if you want to start "nonviolently" hitting things. Our revised VoP should allow you to do nonlethal damage without investing additional feats; anything less is basically an "unfunded mandate," which isn't good design. Now, being completely honest here, a VoP character who acts just like a non-VoP character but who simply swaps out normal damage for nonlethal damage is almost cheating. That said, I think it's important to have this option for two reasons. First, part of what makes RAW VoP so bloody hard to use is that it is very narrow-minded in exactly what kind of play style it does and does not support, and I don't want to end up with a similar situation. Second, nonlethal damage makes a great fallback or last resort option for a VoP character. Ideally, this type of character isn't going to want to attack things at all (lethally or nonlethally), but honestly, that's sometimes going to be unavoidable without completely overhauling the system (which, again, we don't want to do; we want our new VoP to be as party-friendly as possible, so we don't just want to invalidate the combat portions of our friends' builds), so it's good for a VoP character to have a way to contribute to combat in a semi-normal manner if all else fails. (They still have to take them prisoner and/or try to reform them after KOing them, but they can contribute to adding some kind of HP damage to the field until combat ends.) So, at a minimum, new VoP needs to basically include Subduing Strike and Nonlethal Substitution (or some other manner of converting lethal damage to nonlethal damage without additional investment).
But, like I said, nonlethal damage shouldn't be the primary goal of most VoP characters. (Again, I don't want to disallow the concept of someone who fights like a normal character but who always tries to KO people and take them alive, even if that's not the primary goal of VoP.) A VoP character should seek to end fights in ways that don't just involve comparing damage totals to HP totals. And while a feat cannot be expected to provide every method a character may have of contributing to combat, VoP should offer as many tools as possible to let you convince things to stop fighting you. The as-written VoP feat does provide exactly one tool for this issue, namely a constant aura of Calm Emotions. This is suboptimal for two reasons. First, it affects your allies and your enemies alike; not only does this unacceptably limit your companions' actions (seriously, how much fun is it to be told "make a Will save or you're mechanically not allowed to fight" in literally every single combat, with this situation arising solely from the actions of another player?), but it has a chance of actually doing more harm than good (in the case that the enemies save and your allies don't), which doesn't seem like a good idea. Second, straight up mind-controlling enemies into "save or stop fighting" really shouldn't be your primary method of resolving conflicts. I'm not saying that a VoP character should never be able to force a "save or stop fighting" effect, but just having a constant AoE of it that you can't even turn off just turns every possible conflict into an immediate save-or-lose situation. (It also makes things awkward when you walk away and therefore remove enemies from the Calm Emotions aura. Not an impossible situation to resolve, since ideally you should have used Diplomacy or something else to talk to them once they've been Calmed, but still definitely awkward.)
That said, the Calm Emotions aura is (very broadly) the kind of thing I want to see VoP give you, but I don't like the actual implementation of it. But VoP should give you tools for influencing combats in nontraditional ways. Now, I don't have a specific list of things I want VoP to offer you, and I'm more than happy to hear your input on that. I also open the floor to discuss how these tools should be doled out (whether they should be given all at once, unlocked at preselected levels, or chosen by the player at certain levels, and how often they should be usable, though I highly favor at-will or per-encounter abilities over X/day abilities, especially for something so critical to the character concept). But let's brainstorm the kinds of things that a VoP character should be able to do to influence combat once it starts. Just a few brainstorms:
The ability to magically calm an enemy and make them more receptive to talking isn't actually an inappropriate thing to have; it's really the fact that the RAW VoP gives an always-on AoE effect of it that makes it problematic. Perhaps something similar to the Pacifying Touch of the Apostle of Peace would make more sense.
I feel like it's thematically appropriate to give VoP characters the ability to mechanically discourage enemies from taking violent actions. Perhaps some manner of debuff that becomes worse if the target damages someone, or that lasts until they don't damage anyone for one round?
I'm not sure how to balance it, but it might make sense to force an enemy to take (nonlethal) damage when they themselves deal damage (similar to Forced Share Pain, perhaps).
The holy grail would be abilities that make enemies more willing to consider ways to end combat beyond "one side beats the other into submission." The tricky part would be writing these abilities in ways that are broadly applicable (let's not aim for universally applicable, since that's just going to cause problems) without making them completely OP. In an ideal situation, I'd like to format them in a manner other than simply "save or lose." Diplomacy is a start, but part of the problem is that the as-written Diplomacy skill is kind of bonkers OP if you abuse it; I doubt we can come up with a universally applicable fix for Diplomacy here, but perhaps we can assume that a careful GM will make Diplomacy more nuanced than just "you get a 50, so I'm going to stop fighting you and become your BFF now."
The as-written VoP makes you a less interesting target in that it gives you a weird set of bonuses to AC, and it also gives you a chance to just shatter weapons that attack you (destroying the weapon and negating the damage it would have dealt you). As written, I think this is both too strong and too weak; I don't like it the way it's presented here, but I do think it's valuable for the feat to include an effect or set of effects that discourages enemies from attacking you.
As you can see, I don't have a great set of ideas here. But I do think that VoP should give you ways to influence combat without necessarily influencing HP totals (lethally or nonlethally), and I'd like to see your thoughts on ways we can implement that. Ideally, a VoP character would be looking for ways to stop the combat rather than end the combat (in other words, trying to convince enemies to stop fighting before getting KOed instead of just trying to hasten them getting KOed), but there's a limit to how much of that we can mechanically encourage.
Let's talk a little bit more about how VoP/VoNV should and should not affect your allies. I do feel like it's inappropriate for a VoP character to simply knock out or incapacitate foes and then not think twice about letting their allies kill those foes. (There's a feat/build in 4e called Pacifist Healer that basically illustrates this. Clerics who take that feat get huge bonuses to healing, but bad things happen to them if they directly deal damage to enemies below 50% HP. I always felt like it was really weird to roleplay someone who wouldn't directly deal damage but who would gladly enable their friends to slaughter things; that's not a pacifist so much as someone who just leaves the dirty work to someone else.) That said, I also feel like it's inappropriate for your feat choices to impose penalties on your allies (as the RAW VoNV does), and I feel like it's inappropriate for a different character's actions (killing someone) to cause YOU to lose your feat. As I said above, I think it's a given that we'd need to relax the super-unyielding "any breach of the vow is permanent and irrevocable" nature of the vow, but that's the least part of it.
In terms of how to improve things, though? First off, I feel like carrots are more effective than sticks; I think that if VoP has to affect your allies at all, it should reward them for sparing the lives of enemies instead of punishing them for killing enemies. (Naturally, you'd need a GM to prevent bag-of-rats style abuse, but any reasonable attempt at a VoP character is going to require an involved GM.) What form or forms should this system of rewards take? I don't have a concrete answer. A moderate amount of free healing is an obvious cookie to hand out after a battle. Also, if an enemy who promises to surrender or to not interfere breaks their word and needs to be fought again, your allies should definitely get really big bonuses to fight that enemy the second time around. (This kind of takes the edge off of accusations of "YOU'RE the one who said we should leave them alive, so it's YOUR fault we had to fight them twice," though the fact that it ONLY comes up if the enemy proves dishonorable means that it shouldn't be the only carrot we're using.) It'd be dangerous to do too much hard-coding of this, but we might even provide a bonus to XP (for all involved party members) for encounters resolved nonviolently.
We could conceivably even let party members choose how much to "buy in" to the VoP. A party member who sincerely and willingly vows to approach problems nonviolently could get bigger carrots than a party member who chooses to approach things pretty much the same way they always have. Ideally, I'd like to see it set up such that a party member who doesn't want to buy in to the VoP person's mindset shouldn't have to, and their character would end up functioning exactly the way they expected them to before someone else announced their intention to take VoP. I'd even be willing to say that the VoP character shouldn't be penalized for the unwillingness of their friends to share in their vows (yes, I know this kind of contradicts what I was saying earlier about Pacifist Healer). There should be an understanding that a VoP character should make a sincere effort to convince their friends not to kill people (and the VoP character shouldn't just take VoP to make them better able to disable enemies and let them be killed; like I said, I'm assuming that there's at least a moderately involved GM here), but if their friends choose not to follow the path of peace, that shouldn't penalize the VoP character. The friends who choose violence should stop getting the carrots offered by VoP until they start solving problems nonviolently again, but I wouldn't make a VoP character "fall" because of the actions of their friends. (Again, the expectation should be that the character actually does want peaceful resolutions and shouldn't be planning on just letting their friends do the dirty work, but I don't think we make the game better by trying to mechanically force a very narrow mindset on the VoP character or on their allies.)
I've said an awful lot of words here, so I'll back off for a bit and open up the floor. What should our revised VoP look like? We want to remove some of the obnoxious bits (prereqs and draconian fall-clauses), we want to open up options for influencing combats in nontraditional ways (easy access to nonlethal damage as a last resort, and access to other methods of influencing combat without doing HP damage), and we want to have a positive effect on our allies instead of a negative effect. Fundamentally, we want to allow the VoP character to have new tools to solve problems nonviolently and give them the freedom to challenge some assumptions about the system, but we don't want to force the VoP's character's allies to have to change their tactics and their assumptions unless they freely choose to do so. Let's get started. What improvements can we make?
I recently did a pacifist run through Undertale (though let's not discuss Undertale specifically here; I don't want any risk of spoilers for me or for anyone who happens to read this), which got me thinking about playing other games in a less-violent or non-violent manner. I feel like the 3.5 system is big enough to handle the concept of a character who doesn't want to kill things the way most adventurers do, but the as-written Vow of Peace feat itself does a very poor job of enabling that kind of character. (Sure, you don't need a feat to simply choose to play a nonviolent character, but I feel like there is value in providing an optional mechanical framework to support characters who choose to go down this path.)
Of course, on a surface level, the fact that it requires two annoying prereq feats makes it hard to fit into a normal build that isn't also being hampered by Vow of Poverty, and the draconian "ONE FALSE STEP EVER = NO MORE FEAT" mindset inherent to all the Vows is incredibly restrictive, so those are things that would have to be changed if we want to make it less annoying to use. But really, we all know that those aren't the primary reasons why VoP is hard to use.
Vow of Peace (and its prereq/cousin Vow of Nonviolence, hereafter VoNV) is really tricky because it forces the rest of the party to fundamentally alter their baseline assumptions about the game. It's a damn near universal baseline assumption that adventurers are going to be killing things (and usually taking their stuff, but that's another matter). Combat is a massive, massive part of the game, for better or for worse. A VoP character suddenly places restrictions on the other party members (generally not a good thing), so if the rest of the party isn't prepared for and actively accepting of a VoP character, you're looking at party friction at best and ruinous disharmony at worst. So any attempt to make VoP more usable is going to have to address that. At a bare minimum, we need to get rid of the clause in VoNV that mechanically penalizes your allies for killing things you have subdued; a VoP character should probably want to discourage their allies from being murderhoboes, but a mechanical "DO AS I SAY OR YOU WILL SUFFER" effect is not something that should be placed on your allies (especially without their consent, but it's bad either way).
In addition to the whole "you have to stop your party members from acting like adventurers" thing, there's the fact that VoP means that, well, you can't fight things normally. This isn't entirely a bad thing—the whole point of playing a VoP character is to explore a character who doesn't think of violence as a first resort and who doesn't want to just wantonly murder things, so to get rid of this restriction entirely is to completely ignore the point of VoP, which isn't what I'm aiming to do. What we need to do is look at where we're putting the emphasis: "can't fight things normally" instead of "can't fight things normally." Unless you're specifically aiming for a zero-combat game (which, again, requires the cooperation of the entire party, so we really don't want that to be the baseline we're starting from), D&D is going to involve fighting things one way or another, so a revised VoP should facilitate new ways for you to participate in combat without necessarily murdering everything. (The existing benefits of the feat are a start, but they're really not a finish, and we'll talk about that in a bit.)
Let's start with nonlethal damage. VoP/VoNV allow nonlethal damage, but they don't allow any new ways of actually doing that nonlethal damage, so unless you've already got access to a nonlethal weapon (typically not the case), you're looking at more feats (like Subduing Strike and/or Nonlethal Substitution) if you want to start "nonviolently" hitting things. Our revised VoP should allow you to do nonlethal damage without investing additional feats; anything less is basically an "unfunded mandate," which isn't good design. Now, being completely honest here, a VoP character who acts just like a non-VoP character but who simply swaps out normal damage for nonlethal damage is almost cheating. That said, I think it's important to have this option for two reasons. First, part of what makes RAW VoP so bloody hard to use is that it is very narrow-minded in exactly what kind of play style it does and does not support, and I don't want to end up with a similar situation. Second, nonlethal damage makes a great fallback or last resort option for a VoP character. Ideally, this type of character isn't going to want to attack things at all (lethally or nonlethally), but honestly, that's sometimes going to be unavoidable without completely overhauling the system (which, again, we don't want to do; we want our new VoP to be as party-friendly as possible, so we don't just want to invalidate the combat portions of our friends' builds), so it's good for a VoP character to have a way to contribute to combat in a semi-normal manner if all else fails. (They still have to take them prisoner and/or try to reform them after KOing them, but they can contribute to adding some kind of HP damage to the field until combat ends.) So, at a minimum, new VoP needs to basically include Subduing Strike and Nonlethal Substitution (or some other manner of converting lethal damage to nonlethal damage without additional investment).
But, like I said, nonlethal damage shouldn't be the primary goal of most VoP characters. (Again, I don't want to disallow the concept of someone who fights like a normal character but who always tries to KO people and take them alive, even if that's not the primary goal of VoP.) A VoP character should seek to end fights in ways that don't just involve comparing damage totals to HP totals. And while a feat cannot be expected to provide every method a character may have of contributing to combat, VoP should offer as many tools as possible to let you convince things to stop fighting you. The as-written VoP feat does provide exactly one tool for this issue, namely a constant aura of Calm Emotions. This is suboptimal for two reasons. First, it affects your allies and your enemies alike; not only does this unacceptably limit your companions' actions (seriously, how much fun is it to be told "make a Will save or you're mechanically not allowed to fight" in literally every single combat, with this situation arising solely from the actions of another player?), but it has a chance of actually doing more harm than good (in the case that the enemies save and your allies don't), which doesn't seem like a good idea. Second, straight up mind-controlling enemies into "save or stop fighting" really shouldn't be your primary method of resolving conflicts. I'm not saying that a VoP character should never be able to force a "save or stop fighting" effect, but just having a constant AoE of it that you can't even turn off just turns every possible conflict into an immediate save-or-lose situation. (It also makes things awkward when you walk away and therefore remove enemies from the Calm Emotions aura. Not an impossible situation to resolve, since ideally you should have used Diplomacy or something else to talk to them once they've been Calmed, but still definitely awkward.)
That said, the Calm Emotions aura is (very broadly) the kind of thing I want to see VoP give you, but I don't like the actual implementation of it. But VoP should give you tools for influencing combats in nontraditional ways. Now, I don't have a specific list of things I want VoP to offer you, and I'm more than happy to hear your input on that. I also open the floor to discuss how these tools should be doled out (whether they should be given all at once, unlocked at preselected levels, or chosen by the player at certain levels, and how often they should be usable, though I highly favor at-will or per-encounter abilities over X/day abilities, especially for something so critical to the character concept). But let's brainstorm the kinds of things that a VoP character should be able to do to influence combat once it starts. Just a few brainstorms:
The ability to magically calm an enemy and make them more receptive to talking isn't actually an inappropriate thing to have; it's really the fact that the RAW VoP gives an always-on AoE effect of it that makes it problematic. Perhaps something similar to the Pacifying Touch of the Apostle of Peace would make more sense.
I feel like it's thematically appropriate to give VoP characters the ability to mechanically discourage enemies from taking violent actions. Perhaps some manner of debuff that becomes worse if the target damages someone, or that lasts until they don't damage anyone for one round?
I'm not sure how to balance it, but it might make sense to force an enemy to take (nonlethal) damage when they themselves deal damage (similar to Forced Share Pain, perhaps).
The holy grail would be abilities that make enemies more willing to consider ways to end combat beyond "one side beats the other into submission." The tricky part would be writing these abilities in ways that are broadly applicable (let's not aim for universally applicable, since that's just going to cause problems) without making them completely OP. In an ideal situation, I'd like to format them in a manner other than simply "save or lose." Diplomacy is a start, but part of the problem is that the as-written Diplomacy skill is kind of bonkers OP if you abuse it; I doubt we can come up with a universally applicable fix for Diplomacy here, but perhaps we can assume that a careful GM will make Diplomacy more nuanced than just "you get a 50, so I'm going to stop fighting you and become your BFF now."
The as-written VoP makes you a less interesting target in that it gives you a weird set of bonuses to AC, and it also gives you a chance to just shatter weapons that attack you (destroying the weapon and negating the damage it would have dealt you). As written, I think this is both too strong and too weak; I don't like it the way it's presented here, but I do think it's valuable for the feat to include an effect or set of effects that discourages enemies from attacking you.
As you can see, I don't have a great set of ideas here. But I do think that VoP should give you ways to influence combat without necessarily influencing HP totals (lethally or nonlethally), and I'd like to see your thoughts on ways we can implement that. Ideally, a VoP character would be looking for ways to stop the combat rather than end the combat (in other words, trying to convince enemies to stop fighting before getting KOed instead of just trying to hasten them getting KOed), but there's a limit to how much of that we can mechanically encourage.
Let's talk a little bit more about how VoP/VoNV should and should not affect your allies. I do feel like it's inappropriate for a VoP character to simply knock out or incapacitate foes and then not think twice about letting their allies kill those foes. (There's a feat/build in 4e called Pacifist Healer that basically illustrates this. Clerics who take that feat get huge bonuses to healing, but bad things happen to them if they directly deal damage to enemies below 50% HP. I always felt like it was really weird to roleplay someone who wouldn't directly deal damage but who would gladly enable their friends to slaughter things; that's not a pacifist so much as someone who just leaves the dirty work to someone else.) That said, I also feel like it's inappropriate for your feat choices to impose penalties on your allies (as the RAW VoNV does), and I feel like it's inappropriate for a different character's actions (killing someone) to cause YOU to lose your feat. As I said above, I think it's a given that we'd need to relax the super-unyielding "any breach of the vow is permanent and irrevocable" nature of the vow, but that's the least part of it.
In terms of how to improve things, though? First off, I feel like carrots are more effective than sticks; I think that if VoP has to affect your allies at all, it should reward them for sparing the lives of enemies instead of punishing them for killing enemies. (Naturally, you'd need a GM to prevent bag-of-rats style abuse, but any reasonable attempt at a VoP character is going to require an involved GM.) What form or forms should this system of rewards take? I don't have a concrete answer. A moderate amount of free healing is an obvious cookie to hand out after a battle. Also, if an enemy who promises to surrender or to not interfere breaks their word and needs to be fought again, your allies should definitely get really big bonuses to fight that enemy the second time around. (This kind of takes the edge off of accusations of "YOU'RE the one who said we should leave them alive, so it's YOUR fault we had to fight them twice," though the fact that it ONLY comes up if the enemy proves dishonorable means that it shouldn't be the only carrot we're using.) It'd be dangerous to do too much hard-coding of this, but we might even provide a bonus to XP (for all involved party members) for encounters resolved nonviolently.
We could conceivably even let party members choose how much to "buy in" to the VoP. A party member who sincerely and willingly vows to approach problems nonviolently could get bigger carrots than a party member who chooses to approach things pretty much the same way they always have. Ideally, I'd like to see it set up such that a party member who doesn't want to buy in to the VoP person's mindset shouldn't have to, and their character would end up functioning exactly the way they expected them to before someone else announced their intention to take VoP. I'd even be willing to say that the VoP character shouldn't be penalized for the unwillingness of their friends to share in their vows (yes, I know this kind of contradicts what I was saying earlier about Pacifist Healer). There should be an understanding that a VoP character should make a sincere effort to convince their friends not to kill people (and the VoP character shouldn't just take VoP to make them better able to disable enemies and let them be killed; like I said, I'm assuming that there's at least a moderately involved GM here), but if their friends choose not to follow the path of peace, that shouldn't penalize the VoP character. The friends who choose violence should stop getting the carrots offered by VoP until they start solving problems nonviolently again, but I wouldn't make a VoP character "fall" because of the actions of their friends. (Again, the expectation should be that the character actually does want peaceful resolutions and shouldn't be planning on just letting their friends do the dirty work, but I don't think we make the game better by trying to mechanically force a very narrow mindset on the VoP character or on their allies.)
I've said an awful lot of words here, so I'll back off for a bit and open up the floor. What should our revised VoP look like? We want to remove some of the obnoxious bits (prereqs and draconian fall-clauses), we want to open up options for influencing combats in nontraditional ways (easy access to nonlethal damage as a last resort, and access to other methods of influencing combat without doing HP damage), and we want to have a positive effect on our allies instead of a negative effect. Fundamentally, we want to allow the VoP character to have new tools to solve problems nonviolently and give them the freedom to challenge some assumptions about the system, but we don't want to force the VoP's character's allies to have to change their tactics and their assumptions unless they freely choose to do so. Let's get started. What improvements can we make?