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View Full Version : Player Help How to get into exploiting open-ended abilities and options?



Coidzor
2016-05-09, 02:48 AM
One thing I commonly find is that while I love the possibilities offered by something like illusions where you can control what is seen by creatures or having a character who is a proficient chemist, I often have a lot of trouble really getting into and fully exploring the possibilities raised by such abilities.

I've picked up a few things just reading around and seeing how other people do it, but the I still find myself blown away by many of the more ingenious things that I wouldn't have occurred to me to consider to be things that players could interact with instead of have to work around.

This has lead me to wonder if any of you have found that learning or studying something has helped with this sort of thing(like, say, maybe actually formally studying Logic itself) or if you found yourself getting more comfortable with such things as anything beyond a function of practice and group brainstorming.

I'm especially interested in any experiences you've had or witnessed where someone went from struggling to go beyond the straightforward applications of something and into the realm of deviousness and maybe even cunning.

Madbox
2016-05-09, 06:35 AM
Something that helps is if you stop thinking in game terms when you face a problem, and think of your abilities in a more vague way. Thinking about the mechanics of your abilities tends to restrict your thoughts to what is explicitly allowed, and not what is implicitly allowed.

For example, take Firebolt in 5e D&D. If you think "Cantrip that takes 1 action, make ranged spell attack, on hit do 1d10 fire damage," you'll only ever think of it as a weapon. Try thinking of it as "Magic I could use all day without trouble, takes a few seconds to cast, needs to be aimed, shoots out an insanely hot ember." Now that we aren't thinking game mechanics, more uses come to mind. Light a campfire! Boil a small pot of water instantly, or a large tub within a minute! Shoot into the air as a signal flare! Power a hot air balloon! You wanna tell me a flame that could kill an average man more reliably than a shortsword isn't hot enough for that?

Also, practice makes perfect. Don't get discouraged if your ideas don't pan out. For every story of a group killing a cave full of monsters by lighting a bonfire at the entrance and using it to draw out all the air, there's a hundred times those same people had an idea that failed. You just don't hear about boring failures.

hymer
2016-05-09, 08:35 AM
I usually find that it's easier when your objective is more concrete. It's harder to 'Think of something creative to do with my illusion spell and a bunch of orcs' than to 'Think of a way to cause at least half the orcs to get very confused'. State an objective to yourself, then see if you can come up with something.
It oftens helps to sound others out and get their reactions or ideas. So if it's possible, bring the other players in. They may have ineteresting abilities of their own, that synergize well with what you're about to do.

ExLibrisMortis
2016-05-09, 11:28 AM
I just wanted to respond to this:

(like, say, maybe actually formally studying Logic itself)
While it's flattering that you would think logic could help here, it's not what you're looking for. In my experience, studying logic prepares you for understanding logic, and not much else (which is exactly how I like it, thank you).

What you're looking for is creativity, and there I agree with Madbox, that most of the creative uses of powers comes from the fluff side, more than the crunch. For example: time stop doesn't, fluff-wise, stop time, it just speeds you up tremendously. Naturally, that means time stop can be used in an ultracentrifuge uranium enrichment plant, which is all about tremendous speed. You cast time stop on yourself and the centrifuge, and then hand-crank it. Since the uraniumhexafluoride is not (in possession of) a creature, you can affect it just fine from within a time stop.

Aron Times
2016-05-09, 12:57 PM
Try experimenting in-character. If you're a wizard or a mage-type, you would be expected to do this in most fantasy settings. Even if you aren't, lots of people discover cool new ways to use the tools at their disposal through experimentation. Tell your DM/ST/GM what your character plans on doing, and what your character expects will happen. He/she will tell you what actually happens, and you can use that to figure out how your character can your his/her abilities in nonstandard ways.

In the last book of the Wheel of Time, one of the characters does an emergency teleport to escape. She created the Traveling portal beneath the group, but she ends up sending the group high above the air. Thinking quickly, she forms a cushion of Air to soften their landing so they didn't all splatter onto the ground.

Also, in the same book, channelers (spellcasters) on the good guys' side discovered that they could use horizontal portals that opened high in the sky to spy on enemy movement. Previously, they only opened vertical portals that they immediately stepped through. They could just stay on their side and observe troop movements. This was the equivalent of our real-life spy satellites, and it gave the Light side a huge advantage against the Shadow side, who didn't even think of using portals this way, or any other creative portal usage because Shadowspawn (basically the cannon fodder monsters of the Shadow) instantly died upon passing through a portal. They could even open the portals above their own armies and drop messages from those portals and onto the ground. A runner would pick up the message and bring them to the generals. Basically, the Light side invented spy satellites and instant communications in the Wheel of Time.

Heck, even this portal communications system was used by several Light-aligned factions to communicate with each other. The Aes Sedai and the Seanchan are, to put it mildly, not on good terms with each other (they're both kill-on-sight to each other), but are both firmly on the side of the Light. Traveling portals allowed them to communicate with each other without having to be in each other's presence. Without this nonstandard use of Traveling, an Aes Sedai-controlled army that ran into the Seanchan army would result in tremendous losses on the Light side for no gain. With it, the Amyrlin Seat (leader of the Aes Sedai) and the Seanchan Empress (leader of the Seanchan) managed to talk face to face with each other with little fear of the massive slaughter that would ensue should they actually meet each other for real.

In another part of the last book, one of the Asha'man opened a Traveling portal directly inside a volcano, with the other side facing the enemy army. It wiped out a huge chunk of the Trolloc army (Trollocs are basically the equivalent of orcs in the Wheel of Time). Demandred, one of the Forsaken/Chosen (leaders of the Shadow side) was genuinely impressed by the unusual use of portals.

And finally, thousands of years before the present, the Light side discovered that Shadowspawn instantly died when passing through a portal (see above). They invented the Deathgate weave, which is basically a moving portal that passed through the Shadowspawn ranks. The mere act of crossing a portal instantly killed Shadowspawn, and the Light side used this weave like a vacuum cleaner against Trolloc hordes and other types of Shadowspawn, forcibly teleporting them somewhere, anywhere. Shadowspawn corpses would appear randomly in different parts of the world, killed instantly through the process of falling into the Deathgate.

Connington
2016-05-09, 01:42 PM
I don't have anything useful to add on the subject of creativity at the moment, but I can comment on taking your crazy plans and making them work. A large part of that is really understanding your GM and the social contract of the table. When you're brainstorming, it's helpful to think of the problem as your character would. Before you put ideas into practice, it's helpful to think of the situation as your GM is going to. Ultimately, you're not controlling the actions of a person in a simulated world, you're a junior partner in telling a collaborative story.

What works in the game world is going to depend on the kind of game you're playing and the kind of GM you have. Some are enamored by social engineering and trickery, some like it when you play games with physics, some will let the rogue sneak past anything, some always give their baddies a motive and have them be open to negotiation, some will let mages or technological gadgeteers get away with anything, some will allow you to get an advantage but won't let you bypass an encounter, some will follow RAW to the letter, some will allow anything that follows the Rule of Cool or the Rule of Funny. Conversely, they may find any of the above to be a cheap trick and disallow or make something ineffective because it triggers a pet peeve. And genre matters. In a semi-comedic beer and pretzels game, anything that relies on a careful reading of game economics might get boos, while a cheap gag based on "trolls are SO stupid that..." may win an encounter.

Basically, the more you know your GM and how they're going to react to your plans, the better.

nedz
2016-05-09, 07:29 PM
I don't think you can teach creativity, or at least I have no idea about how you might go about doing that.

With Illusions: the trick is to think like a con artist. BSFs and Grunts are the best targets because they will believe anything - if role-played properly. The best illusions are those where the mark wants to believe something, or has no interest in investigating further.

Illusions are very DM dependant since they rely on the Mark being role-played rather than the DM applying their own personal reasoning. You have to sell the idea that your trick will work to the DM basically.

Winter_Wolf
2016-05-10, 01:06 AM
The most broken thing I ever saw was the "dynamic sorcery" option in BESM revised 2nd ed. Lets you do literally anything you can imagine with the very vaguest of ideas regarding relative power levels. I bring it up because it is so open that as long as you could spin the details to the GM, you could try even the most outlandish things. Basically taking that philosophy and applying it to anything you could create even a tenuous connection with.

I had a history professor who would often ask, "what's that got to do with the price of tea in China?" And I tell you what, even clumsy and convoluted rationale got her attention and critique. One time I took her literally and somehow connected that to some political event in Japan. I'm kind of fuzzy on it, but I recall vague amusement and approval for my efforts.

What I'm trying to get at is just decide on something you want to happen, and then spin a tale how some ability you have could possibly in a million years effect that goal. Your goal is say robbing a store. Your inventory consists of a cheap green plastic water pistol, some duct tape, and heavy zip ties. Obvious: try to stick up the place and hope you can bluff the cashier with a cheap water pistol; good luck with that! Devious: wait until the place is closed. Use the water to short out electronics (surveillance, alarm); duct tape over glass and smash a hole in the window; zip ties I got nothin' but it's an hour past my bedtime and I think for a two minute plan it's okay. Is it flawed? Of course. But I haven't tried to rob a store before, either.