Do people really enjoy close battles? [Archive] - Giant in the Playground Forums

Talakeal

2021-07-13, 09:07 PM

KorvinStarmast

2021-07-13, 09:24 PM

TLDR: In your experience, do players actually prefer tough battles were they struggle to pull through in the end, or do they prefer easy victories where they clearly outclass their opposition? yes to both. Sometimes, they want to ROFLstomp the foe, and sometime when they barely make it out of the encounter by the skin of their teeth they rejoice.

Your attempt at a false dichotomy is not well done. It's not an either/or deal.

Talakeal

2021-07-13, 09:45 PM

Your attempt at a false dichotomy is not well done. It's not an either/or deal.

That's because it isn't a false dichotomy. It is asking for a preference between two poles.

"What is your favorite ice-cream, chocolate or vanilla," is a false dichotomy as it precludes all the other flavors, asking "Which ice-cream do you prefer, chocolate or vanilla?" is not, it is merely asking which amongst the two people prefer; and as this is a forum people are free (and encouraged) to give in depth answers if a simply one or the other doesn't suffice.

Imbalance

2021-07-13, 09:52 PM

My players always freak out in a close encounter, and usually just get angry and start acting out OOC, or get depressed and give up. After winning, they always bitch about how it was too hard, too stressful, too close, to costly, and dwelling on how badly it could have gone. Even years later, rather than telling stories about how they overcame impossible odds due to how awesome they are, they instead tell stories about how horribly they were screwed over and put into unfair situations.

No offense to your friends, but I don't think I could run games for people who are that neurotic. I also agree with Korvin, both as a player and DM - bring on the easy challenges as well as the heart-thumpers, but a difficult encounter always makes the victory sweeter.

JNAProductions

2021-07-13, 09:53 PM

That's because it isn't a false dichotomy. It is asking for a preference between two poles.

"What is your favorite ice-cream, chocolate or vanilla," is a false dichotomy as it precludes all the other flavors, asking "Which ice-cream do you prefer, chocolate or vanilla?" is not, it is merely asking which amongst the two people prefer; and as this is a forum people are free (and encouraged) to give in depth answers if a simply one or the other doesn't suffice.

Except what you want can vary, especially in a matter like this. It's not like "I prefer chocolate over vanilla," which will usually always lead to you picking chocolate over vanilla if given the choice.

It's more like asking "Would you rather watch an amazing action movie or listen to an awesome song?" Sometimes, you'll want the movie. Other times the song. Likewise, sometimes you've had a long day, you want some minimal-investment make-believe murder, and so you'd rather crush the foe effortlessly. Other times, you're fresh on your feet, and you're ready to really get into the nitty-gritty, using every ability at your disposal for a hard-fought victory. Still other times, you'll have another situation entirely.

GentlemanVoodoo

2021-07-13, 10:17 PM

No offense to your friends, but I don't think I could run games for people who are that neurotic.

+1 to this.

As to your question OP, the answer is going to be yes to both. Like the players you describe they are the type that want to clearly outclass the opposition for an easy victory and more so expect each battle to be as such. Then there are the players that know tough battles are going to happen. Typically it is at the point of facing off against the final villain but there are the instances of randomness occurring in combat.

People have their reasons for wanting each but personally I find such individuals like those you describe reason enough to leave the table. It is a game after all and if you lose or have a TPK, oh well life goes on. The thing a player should have in mind is did they enjoy spending time with others of the group, have fun, and enjoy contributing to a story weaved by the group.

False God

2021-07-13, 10:54 PM

I think the "magic number" of danger in a fight varies from table to table, and fight to fight.

And I think my players enjoy a mix of fights, some tough, especially when they're tough because the enemy is strong, smart, and resourceful,. But also some easy ones, where they can demonstrate their cool UNLIMITED POWER they've worked so hard to earn.

I've got cool stories about times when I barely beat the boss, and I've got stories about times when I turned whole armies to dust in the blink of an eye, and I've even got cool stories where I lost. I enjoy the variety, provided that variety stems from something other than RNG.

I honestly can't figure your players.

Kyovastra

2021-07-13, 11:01 PM

Like a lot of other gaming preferences, this is best thought of as a personality thing more than anything else. Some people enjoy being challenged and struggling, some people find that stressful and don't get that at all, and others are somewhere in-between - for example, they might enjoy being challenged and struggling, but only if they feel like it's "fair" from their perspective and a result of their choices; they'll be stressed out if you just spring a tough encounter on them they couldn't have prepared for, rather than either never enjoy that in the first place or still take it as a fun challenge of their abilities like some may. It's kind of two opposite ends that exist on a spectrum, from what I can tell. Your players sound like they're more on one end than the other, but then you're hearing advice from people on the opposite end.

I think popular RPG design has moved away from the challenge-and-struggle side of things over time, even though there's still a lot of people who find that fun, which has also made a lot of people less exposed to struggle, failure, and so on in RPGs, and of course a lack of exposure to those outcomes will make them seem worse and more stressful than they otherwise would be to a lot of people (whether or not they're on the end of the spectrum that prefers that kind of playstyle in the first place). I think this leads to some of the "neuroticism" in some players as others here called it. Whether or not you enjoy deadliness or having your characters die, it's gonna seem a lot worse if it's never happened and is discouraged by design, for example.

Pex

2021-07-13, 11:13 PM

Ionathus

2021-07-13, 11:20 PM

My players enjoy both, and they've intentionally asked me to run both. I went through a phase where I worried if I didn't truly challenge them every time, I was failing as a DM. But they were clear in their feedback: nail-biters are fun, but they can be overwhelming without quicker, easier fights that let the players feel competent. If your players favor those easier fights, you can always include more of them in an adventuring day, to tax their resources a bit without breaking out the big guns.

If you're looking for ways to change up the fights and keep them interesting/tense without making them obsess about TPKs, try varying the objectives. Maybe they need to keep enemies from escaping, or protect hostages, or subdue the foes in a short time limit! Adding a secondary condition like this can make an otherwise-easy fight with a bunch of goblins into a fight that's interesting, even if it's not frightening.

yes to both. Sometimes, they want to ROFLstomp the foe, and sometime when they barely make it out of the encounter by the skin of their teeth they rejoice.

Your attempt at a false dichotomy is not well done. It's not an either/or deal.

OP's friend group is clearly a different dynamic than yours, but that's no reason to dismiss their question or accuse them of setting up fallacies. The question seemed like it was asked in earnest.

PhoenixPhyre

2021-07-13, 11:21 PM

Somewhat tangentially, but perception matters. And I've found that what seems like a cakewalk to the DM often doesn't seem that way to the players, because they couldn't see all the pieces. So what seems like a close fight to the DM was probably way over the line for most folks.

Personally, I don't get anything from close battles. Challenge is not one of the things I care about. And I've seen where really close battles weren't a matter of skill at all--it was pure luck with the dice. One bad roll on our part or one good roll on their part and we'd have been dead without any hope. And that's not very fun, at least for me. I want to win because I did well, not because the dice said the enemies can't roll above a 5 on their saves. I want to lose because we did poorly, not because the dice said that we kept whiffing and they couldn't not crit. Etc.

Saintheart

2021-07-13, 11:32 PM

Lots of the gaming advice books, blogs, podcasts, and videos take it for granted that PCs love winning a close fight. Heck, most people also follow that same logic for narratives or for sports, that a close match-up is always more interesting.

Bad analogies in that second sentence. By definition, if you are reading a narrative or watching a sport, you are a spectator. You can afford to have the luxury of being bored if the result is 200-0 in your team's favour. Or being bored if the protagonist is a Gary Stu/Mary Sue who cruises through every challenge thrown at him.

Being a player on that sporting field is something else entirely. Absent you being either the best or top 10 player of sportsball in the world, no player on a sports field wants to win by a tiny margin just for the sake of being "challenged". When you're a sports player, you want to win. Higher score means more probability of a win and less probability of a loss. The sports analogy also doesn't hold because it's harder to be overtly slamdunked by the outcome of a single dice roll in a sportsfield situation - team sports, and even individual sports, hide the randomness of their outcomes behind considerable opacity, i.e. the illusion is that skill matters a lot more than it does in playing a game controlled by random dice rolled in the open where it literally doesn't matter how high your attack bonus is, 5% of your swings will always be misses.

Gaming advice books/blogs/podcasts/videos take it for granted that PCs love winning a close fight. What said b/b/p/vs don't tell you, and what they really should before offering up fortune cookies like that, is that people's wants and preferences can and do change, particularly with hindsight. I've been in RPGs as a player where the result went down to the wire. Hated it at the time. Stressful. Hated the natural 1s as they cropped up again and again. Hated watching the hitpoint counters drop to single digits. But a few months later, realised that it was actually fun. And that, I think, was because I'd transitioned from being a player in the game to a spectator of the event in my memory. Or maybe I'd had some sort of catharsis or whatever.

Which is to say: nobody knows much of anything about what players, i.e. people, enjoy, and that's why everyone says "It depends on the player". And that's fine. Psychology (whether evolutionary or otherwise) only gets you so far, and real world causes are a lot more opaque than they seem.

Lacco

2021-07-14, 01:13 AM

I think Jay R summed it up pretty well:

3. What the players want today is a quick, easy victory. But what they will want tomorrow is to have brilliantly and valiantly turned the tables to barely survive a deadly encounter where it looked like they were all about to die.

While there are exceptions - notably people who like the adrenaline of a close combat, 'combat masochists' or personalities that like high stakes - I would say most of the players enjoy close battle as any other battle (except the obvious paper tiger roflstomp). That said, it's a matter of perspective: some players care about their character to the extreme and views their HP as "meat" (meaning: loss of 1 HP out of 10 HP is a wound, not just loss of 10% of their capability). The perception can be also shifted due to previous combats, having some knowledge about what is coming, or generally knowing the world/system (example: loss of 6 HP is a big deal for a level 1 character; now imagine that a first attack in a combat hits the level 15 tank in DnD 3+ and drops him).

Close combat may be thrilling, but as someone else stated, long time ago, if all you get are close combats, the novelty slowly drains off and you get tired of being on your toes. You need a change of pace - it's the same as if you always ate vanilla ice cream as a snack - and nothing else. After some time, you would get tired of it.

Overall, we can say mainly that players enjoy victories and may come to enjoy defeats they turn to a victory later. Close combats are enjoyable when you can tell the story, but when all you get are close combats - or most of the time - it can get pretty tiring fast.

Satinavian

2021-07-14, 01:13 AM

TLDR: In your experience, do players actually prefer tough battles were they struggle to pull through in the end, or do they prefer easy victories where they clearly outclass their opposition?
I don't like it and i know many other players who don't like it but i know at least one player who reallly does like it and some who are indifferent.

So yes, it depends on the player.

My players always freak out in a close encounter, and usually just get angry and start acting out OOC, or get depressed and give up. After winning, they always bitch about how it was too hard, too stressful, too close, to costly, and dwelling on how badly it could have gone. Even years later, rather than telling stories about how they overcame impossible odds due to how awesome they are, they instead tell stories about how horribly they were screwed over and put into unfair situations.Seems like your players don't like it. Which is consistent to what else you told us about them and as per above far from rare/strange in my experience.

Likewise, I have heard quotes like "Players want to be like John Mclaine, they want to be the hero in the end, but they want to be struggle for it and be beat to hell in the process," or "Players want an easy victory in the moment, but when looking back on it want to to have been the toughest thing ever."And just to make sure, don't mix up "wanting a close fight" with "wanting to earn their victories and struggling along". I personally like an easy win that has been easy through perfect preparaction and a good plan, bonus points if backup-utilities/abilities prepared log times ago just in case could be employed successfully. But that is just me. You will find on this board certain very vocal players hating on Shadowrun with its long preparation, legwork and playnning and the resulting smooth execution it often produces.

Onos

2021-07-14, 01:16 AM

Every player - and therefore table - is different. In particular, your usual bunch of players seem to be way outside the curve for what they enjoy.

To go down a video game example, some folks like Dark Souls and want to pound their heads through a brick wall (bonus points for a limited rez mechanic and a death spiral). Some prefer Torment, where the combat is pretty much completely extraneous and it's all about skills and dialogue. Heck, some prefer the Sims and just want to dress characters up and wander around the world with no stakes.

Some people want genuinely difficult fights with strategic depth and don't mind losing/dying. Some want the illusion of challenge but to unfailingly beat every encounter. Some just want to outright steamroll anything that gets in their way and a few things that don't.

It's a bit like pretty much any form of media - there's plenty out there that explores themes and characters effectively, and plenty full of shallow, one-dimensional Mary Sue's. Sometimes the Mary Sue's are on purpose, like the Expendables!

My point is, you're probably not going to get an answer suitable for your table without speaking to your table about this.

Lacco

2021-07-14, 01:18 AM

Personally, I don't get anything from close battles. Challenge is not one of the things I care about. And I've seen where really close battles weren't a matter of skill at all--it was pure luck with the dice. One bad roll on our part or one good roll on their part and we'd have been dead without any hope. And that's not very fun, at least for me. I want to win because I did well, not because the dice said the enemies can't roll above a 5 on their saves. I want to lose because we did poorly, not because the dice said that we kept whiffing and they couldn't not crit. Etc.

A "gambler's high" of rolling several crits in a row and finishing the enemy one turn before TPK can be rather pleasant feeling... but yeah. I'd also prefer my skill to overcome dice before dice winning a fight for me.

So, additional variable: player preference of skill vs. luck.

Batcathat

2021-07-14, 01:24 AM

It's personally subjective, but it depends if I think the DM provided a fair fight. If I get the impression the DM stacked the deck in the bad guy's favor I'm not having fun. We still win, but I don't enjoy the victory because I was miserable playing it. This doesn't mean I think the DM was being a tyrannical killer DM, but he overdid it trying to make a tough challenge. When the bad guys are just tough monsters and/or the battlefield is unusual it can be a real blast. It's difficult to explain how a combat is stacked against us. It is subjective, and I can admit sometimes maybe I'm being the donkey about it because the other players are having fun and I'm already trusting the DM I just think he erred.

Very much agree with this. I can probably get about as upset at the GM fudging things in my favour as in the enemy's. Whether as a player or GM, I expect the GM to set the scene and then let the dice fall where they may – no deus ex machinas to help either side, thank you. (I'm not saying Pex necessarily agrees with all of this, it is indeed quite subjective).

As for the general question: yes, I very much enjoy a close battle. Curb stomping the enemies can be fun too, even if it tends to get old fast. Even getting brutally beaten can be fun, as long as we manage some cool looking escape.

As seems to usually be the case, I don't think your players are very representative, Talakeal.

Personally, I don't get anything from close battles. Challenge is not one of the things I care about. And I've seen where really close battles weren't a matter of skill at all--it was pure luck with the dice. One bad roll on our part or one good roll on their part and we'd have been dead without any hope. And that's not very fun, at least for me. I want to win because I did well, not because the dice said the enemies can't roll above a 5 on their saves. I want to lose because we did poorly, not because the dice said that we kept whiffing and they couldn't not crit. Etc.

I agree with the conclusion (about winning because of my skill rather than the opponent's bad luck) but I don't see how that's opposed to a battle being close.

Mastikator

2021-07-14, 01:41 AM

I think if every encounter feels close then the campaign will feel like a meat grinder. Sometimes you want to outclass the opponents and feel powerful, in D&D and other power fantasies all the more so.

As for players who whine and complain, that has nothing to do with the game and everything to do with the player. On the other hand I don't know where y'all are finding these perfect players who don't have any obvious flaws, I wish I could meet them and play with them. I've never met a person I could say didn't have an outstanding flaw (lack of empathy, or introspection, or foresight, or enjoys being annoying, or whines constantly, or cheats, or rule's lawyers, etc).

Batcathat

2021-07-14, 01:47 AM

Vahnavoi

2021-07-14, 02:13 AM

Firstly: Talakeal, don't try to generalize how your players operate. Understand what makes them special instead. They are a special people, with special sort of metagame. (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?633972-Negativity-bias-trauma-based-game-design-and-learned-helplessness-in-metagames&p=25122137#post25122137)

As for the title question, I feel like whipping out this type of diagram (https://images.app.goo.gl/V45f8CTGJKcmNAuu6) once again. A "close battle" typically exist near the intersection of game difficulty and player skill. The enjoyable feeling tends to be one of arousal, control or flow, as a player figures something out (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insight) and a previously unmanageable problem becomes manageable. If that "aha!" moment causes the difficulty to plummet dramatically, there can also be catharsis (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharsis) as previous anxiety or worry is traded for relaxation.

It should be obvious, then, that for any given "close battle" to fit these criteria, the players need to be up to the task. As PhoenixPhyre's opinion, above, attests, merely surviving due to a random roll has nothing to do with it. (Except in the case when players don't understand randomness and attribute random good results to their own skill, which admittedly happens.) The exercise has to happen in a context where it is the skill and internal motivation of the players causing a change in the game.

On the flipside, a battle doesn't have to be particularly close to create a positive feeling. It only has to have a particular relation to a player's skill. This is what NichG recent thread about challenge and resistance is largely about: creating a game where you don't really have an explicit fail condition but still feel like you're pushing against something.

Recherché

2021-07-14, 03:39 AM

Personally I don't enjoy constant close battles. If it happens occasionally that's cool, but as an all the time thing, it gets stressful.

Easier fights actually give me more space to role play. They let me make mistakes in character without worrying about needing to take actions against a character's personality in order to survive. That doesn't mean I want only easy fights but having a breather occasionally lets me relax tactically and get into role playing my character.

I do often like overcoming impressive odds and pulling off upsets, but that's different from a very close battle. A lot of the time I'll try to arrange the odds to be heavily stacked in my favor before the party even rolls for initiative. I find a certain satisfaction in being able to strategize myself into a great position and utterly destroying enemies via tactics. There's a reason why one of my favorite characters is a cleric with a bunch of divination spells and a tendency to ask her god for exactly the right spells to turn encounters into a cakewalk. The joy isn't from the nail biter of a fight, it's from outthinking the GM several moves ahead so that they're beaten before the conflict begins.

It should be noted that this style of long term chess works best with a GM and player that communicate well and signal their intentions well beforehand. I will let my GM know about any crazy plans and loophole abuse I intend long before I actually put it into play. I don't spring big surprises on my GM if I can help it. This requires trusting my GM to not use this info to be an ass about it, but just to use it to know what's going to happen before I start blowing up their world building. In return I ask that my GM give me plenty of information about the setting, enemies and how abilities interact so that I can make clever plans. I'm not asking to know more than what my character would know, but I figure a smart character will know a lot about how their world works.

For an example of how this works, in a recent game there was a bad guy who was very highly placed in the city government and was considerably more powerful than our party. Via mind reading one of his minions, we knew about multiple heinous crimes he had committed but that evidence could not be entered in court. The party came up with a plan on how to magically transform our rogue to look like the bad guy and then have him publicly confess to the crimes we knew the bad guy had committed. We also came up with a bunch of plans on how to forge false evidence of the his crimes and frame him for things he had actually done. My group talked through all our plans on Discord with our GM able to read everything. We trusted our GM to not use the info we were giving against us, but to take our plans into account when he was prepping the next session. Our GM actually pointed out a few weak spots in the plans where we had misread the rules and suggested ways that we could tweak things to work better with the rule system. When the time came, there weren't any barriers to our plans working. Our GM hadn't changed the world to account for our scheming at all. However he was absolutely prepped for telling the story of the political fallout from our actions. We did actually end up getting our bad guy taken out by the city guards and arrested without us ever fighting him directly. We won and in a very satisfying way. It wasn't a pitched battle by the skin of our teeth though. It was via trickery and lateral thinking.

Sometimes the most satisfying victory isn't the hardest won but the smartest won. Sometimes the best victory is a satisfying story even if it's not even technically a victory. A dramatic and entertaining defeat can be an amazing story if it's role played right.

MoiMagnus

2021-07-14, 04:17 AM

TLDR: In your experience, do players actually prefer tough battles were they struggle to pull through in the end, or do they prefer easy victories where they clearly outclass their opposition?

You're missing the second axis: how much effort they have to put to win, how focussed they need to be, etc.

In my experience, groups of PCs tend to have two different power level. The one more "casual", where they play with their intuition, with little coordination other than what feels right RP-wise, and the one when they are in "serious mode", where they are scrapping for every little bonus, every possible clever use of the environment, and giving advice to each other ("don't you have a spell that can do X?" or "I think you forgot this class feature of yours").
[If you're playing on a grid, "serious mode" is the moment where the players start to actually look at the exact distance between the enemies to see which enemy would be able to reach them depending on where they end their movement]

If you calibrate an encounter to be a close combat for their "serious level", very few will actually enjoy such level of difficulty. On the other hand, if you calibrate an encounter to be a walk in the park for their "casual level", for most intent and purpose, this is not actually a combat encounter, this is just a playground where they will get bored if it lasts for too long.

In my experience, most fight should be in the in-between, where it is a struggle to win in "casual" mode, and easy to win in "serious" mode.

icefractal

2021-07-14, 04:20 AM

IME, not that often. Sometimes, yes. The majority of battles? No. Even 50% of battles? No. It's an ingredient, but it doesn't need to be the bulk of things and (again IME), most players don't want it to be the bulk of things.

I enjoy the tough battles when it's a war of attrition. The tension builds. It's round 6, and the fight is still going. I don't enjoy the battles when retreat looks like a good option, and Round 1 is not even half-way done.Hadn't thought about it this way, but I think I agree. Which means the enjoyably-tough battles are going to be the long ones - another reason you don't necessarily want them in the majority.

Easier fights actually give me more space to role play. They let me make mistakes in character without worrying about needing to take actions against a character's personality in order to survive. That doesn't mean I want only easy fights but having a breather occasionally lets me relax tactically and get into role playing my character.

I do often like overcoming impressive odds and pulling off upsets, but that's different from a very close battle. A lot of the time I'll try to arrange the odds to be heavily stacked in my favor before the party even rolls for initiative.

...

Sometimes the most satisfying victory isn't the hardest won but the smartest won. Sometimes the best victory is a satisfying story even if it's not even technically a victory. A dramatic and entertaining defeat can be an amazing story if it's role played right.Also, this. Managing to do something beyond what you expected, that's satisfying. Having a close or even overwhelming fight and winning it is one way that can happen, but not the only way and not always the best way. Similarly, close fights can be memorable, but so can a lot of other things.

Quertus

2021-07-14, 06:11 AM

"which do you prefer, steak or pizza?" This is very much an, "either, depending on their mood", and an "eating nothing but either would be unhealthy" situation.

IME, both Challenge and ease are required for a health RPG diet.

IME, which the players are in the mood for - or in the mood for more of, or how much of each they're in the mood for - will vary. Some of that variance is on them ("what they've eaten today"), and some of it is on the GM ("how they've fixed the food", "how they've set the atmosphere", "what appetizers they've given").

And, personally (and this is where the metaphor gets a little rough), I don't want the GM *forcing* them to be either. I don't want, "this creature is supposed to be tough" to prevent us from SoD killing it before it gets to go, or "these mooks are supposed to be easy" to prevent us from struggling (often done with a handwave, "after you defeat the orcs" or even a "tell me how you defeated the orcs").

So, what I want is my BDH party, who slays the ancient Dragon (and 95+% of all other foes) before they get to go, but struggles to convince the townsfolk that we're here to help. I want Quertus, my signature academia mage for whom this account is named, whose net contribution to combat for ~10 levels could have accomplished with a bag of flour, but whose allies, fame, research, book publishing, custom spells, and all but unparalleled mastery of space and time (and most anything else magical - especially information-gathering) let him trivialize certain other challenges.

Personally, I want… versimilitude, I suppose. I want to come by my wins and losses, my challenges and cake walks, honest.

And, personally, I want Agency. Of the Combat as War variety. I want my actions to be able to affect the Challenge of the encounter - trivializing or even making it impossible (been there, done that, locked away or handed the BBEG the McGuffin of "only thing that can defeat them"), as versimilitude demands.

But, most importantly, with your players' constant complaints of things being too hard, I suspect that they don't appreciate how much steak you've been serving.

Also,

Somewhat tangentially, but perception matters. And I've found that what seems like a cakewalk to the DM often doesn't seem that way to the players, because they couldn't see all the pieces. this reminds me, have you given any more thought to the 5-point plan, of providing maximum transparency (among other things)?

DigoDragon

2021-07-14, 06:38 AM

My experience as a GM says that the context of what the players are facing in a close battle is important. Random encounters in the middle of the night while camping generally do not sit well, but that BBEG fight at the end of the adventure arc? For sure. They're invested in taking the boss dude down, and (hopefully) you telegraphed that the boss will be a difficult fight needing prep.

I try to reserve the close battles for what really is important to the players' goals. As stated earlier, too many can turn off some players.

NichG

2021-07-14, 07:02 AM

For me, I don't generally want really close battles for their own sake, but I'll accept a really close battle as a price to be paid in exchange for being over-ambitious or gaining access to something I shouldn't be able to, intentionally trying something that I know will be risky, or in some but not all cases as the cost for making a significant mistake (the 'some but all cases' has a lot of nuance as to whether I could personally have prevented it versus if its a mistake the party made).

So a close battle that I'm forced through as part of the campaign will not at all appeal to me. A mysterious glowing orb with the writing 'shatter me to challenge fate and ascend to godhood' that we could just leave in a dusty bin somewhere, but which spawns a solo fight at CR+5 and gives you divine rank 0 if you win I can accept. It's not that I want to struggle against the solo fight at CR+5, but that in that context I can accept that that's a path that is open to me and it can make it worthwhile to try to figure out how I might overcome it. Or if I'm not in the mood for it, I won't shatter the orb. I've been in campaigns with optional downtime 'arena battles' and the like, with things significantly harder than you'd expect to face as part of the actual campaign activities, and as gamey as that is, I've found that it worked for me pretty well and I enjoyed it.

For that kind of thing I also strongly prefer fights that might be close but become easy when you figure out the right way to approach them versus fights which are close regardless of what you do. I'd be fine with having unavoidable 'close if brute force' fights on the main line of a campaign (that is, fights which would be close if you just landed on the field and did your standard operating procedure), as long as there were ways to make them easy and the difficulty of different approaches is well-telegraphed before the fight starts.

I'm not a fan of things where you have no choice but to go and see if you're going to win or lose. If it looks like there's something like that on the horizon - a coin flip that you can't tell or modify the odds, and which seems to have more than a ~10% chance of losing - I'll basically always try to look for third paths that avoid the fight entirely or start to build plans which will work starting from the assumption that we will lose.

Edit: Also, I suspect I might appreciate scary fights more than close fights, though again if they're unavoidable that becomes much less true. Fighting something I know I can beat but which deals 1 permanent point of reduction to my max HP is different than fighting something I feel like I can't beat.

I would also expect most players to potentially have completely different tastes from me on these matters. Nothing I've said here is universal.

Spriteless

2021-07-14, 07:18 AM

I mean, does it feel cheap or earned? If the players are paranoid and prepare for every situation, then there had better be a story explanation for why something is bypassing their plans. Maybe that explanation is the PCs bit off more than they can chew, maybe it's someone more paranoid is watching them, as well. But, it should be someone the PCs know of.

But really, it depends on the players. If they are kicking in the door, then let the scales call for a retreat half the time. If they want an easy win, empower them to find it themselves. And if they complain out of character, let them know the mistakes they made out of character. Also let them know the price of failure is... whatever logically happens if they run away. Put solutions to their problems in their mind, and they will feel more empowered and be less prone to whinging.

I myself prefer close battles, because I have a chip on my shoulder and if you're going easy on me I feel condescended to. I came here to shank bad guys not be insulted by these minions!

So the answer is, PCs don't like to feel helpless and out of control.

Corsair14

2021-07-14, 07:25 AM

Never had an issue with one of my games. My players know if it is a meaningful fight and not just some minor random encounter that they need to be on their toes. I reward smart tactics and play style and I use my mobs and NPCs tactically and at a level with their intelligence. The kobolds are not just going to have a stand up fight, they are going to hit you in ambush with ranged poison weapons from defendable locations, and they will fall back and regroup to fight later if something happens. If at least one character isn't lying on the ground at some point in the fight, the fight wasn't hard enough.

Alcore

2021-07-14, 08:02 AM

I do not enjoy the battles that are close; they are often high stress affairs i try to avoid.

That said if i win i can look back positively on it. They are also the most well remembered. If i had to choose i would prefer easy encounters but then i also like Harvest Moon; i could spend a few hours watching him fish and call it good gaming...

Try talking to your (future?) players. We will give as many answers as there are bodies.

KorvinStarmast

2021-07-14, 08:52 AM

Firstly: Talakeal, don't try to generalize how your players operate. Understand what makes them special instead. They are a special people, with special sort of metagame. (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?633972-Negativity-bias-trauma-based-game-design-and-learned-helplessness-in-metagames&p=25122137#post25122137)
We only hear one side of the story. :smallwink:

I think if every encounter feels close then the campaign will feel like a meat grinder. Sometimes you want to outclass the opponents and feel powerful, in D&D and other power fantasies all the more so.

As for players who whine and complain, that has nothing to do with the game and everything to do with the player. We appear to have a GM who complains about his players as the OP. It's a two way street, I think.

A "gambler's high" of rolling several crits in a row and finishing the enemy one turn before TPK can be rather pleasant feeling... but yeah. I'd also prefer my skill to overcome dice before dice winning a fight for me.

So, additional variable: player preference of skill vs. luck. Nice point that I wish I'd have included in my answer.
I want to win because I did well, not because the dice said the enemies can't roll above a 5 on their saves. I want to lose because we did poorly, not because the dice said that we kept whiffing and they couldn't not crit. Etc. I usually feel that way, but I've noticed that plenty of players don't fit my own approach.

OP's friend group is clearly a different dynamic than yours, but that's no reason to dismiss their question or accuse them of setting up fallacies. The question seemed like it was asked in earnest.
I answered the question as asked, to whit:

TLDR: In your experience, do players actually prefer tough battles were they struggle to pull through in the end, or do they prefer easy victories where they clearly outclass their opposition? That question is set up as a false dichotomy.

As to his players, the OP has a track record of complaining about his PCs on this forum.
At length.
{Scrubbed}

@DigoDragon:
My experience seems to fit closely to yours.

Jophiel

2021-07-14, 08:57 AM

I enjoy a close battle. Not every battle, of course, but I usually play a support role and like sometimes being able to bust out those "Uh oh" skills/spells/tricks to turn things around or give a last chance. I like feeling like we won a fight due to our coordination and skill rather than just the raw superiority of our stats. This also assumes a tactically interesting fight and not ten rounds of chunking away at some hit point bag armed with a club.

Timing is everything. Too many close fights gets exhausting and leaves you unable to get into another fight without resting or burning resources. Plus it stops being interesting if that's every fight. But for the climatic fights and boss battles and chapter closers? Bring it on. Heck, I'll even take a defeat assuming we have a chance to make it out alive. A favorite story involves us getting our butts kicked by a wizard and the half-orc using his Relentless Endurance to eat a jump out the window while I rolled an unconscious ally over a railing and slapped a "Healing Word, good luck!" on them as they went before jumping myself. Don't really tell stories about the time we got attacked by five wererats and, three rounds later, there were five dead wererats as we casually brushed some dust off our armor.

GravityEmblem

2021-07-14, 09:10 AM

I find my players, who are largely unoptimized, tend to complain about mechanically difficult battles, though not quite as bad as the OP described theirs. I actually had a whole thread asking if an encounter I ran was too hard, because I couldn't tell if I made it unfair, or if the party was doing things wrong and complaining about it. I came to the conclusion that it was poorly designed, but their strategies of fighting opponents 400 feet in the air with axe-juggling and trying to find a "bendable tree" to turn into a catapult didn't help. So, between that, and a big fight against a Necromancer Revenant, I've tried to stray away from tough battles. Of course, even the two battles which were tough from a CR perspective (boss battles against a Purple Worm, an Adult Blue Dragon, and a Lich and a bunch of powerful Demons) were won pretty handily. Largely thanks to the OP magic items I gave them, haha.

Since then, I've tried to focus more on the atmosphere of the fights than the actual mechanics. There was a huge battle late in the game, and it was 90% description, and only about 10% dice rolling.

Catullus64

2021-07-14, 09:29 AM

Well there's close battles and then there's close battles, aren't there? All the stuff people are saying about different groups and different circumstances is certainly true, but I think the biggest factor is the kind of difficulty and the pacing of the fight.

The difficult fights that I enjoy are difficult not because of the toughness of the enemies, but because the fight keeps changing. New enemies come in from a different direction, new environmental hazards crop up, the enemies change up their tactics, the PCs have to fight through a series of environments rather than staying in one, or the enemies are just an obstacle to a non-combat puzzle that you have to solve mid-fight. These fights feel difficult because you have to adapt, and you feel like lots of things can happen. When you win, it's often because you figured out some trick, or risked some crazy stunt, so you feel awesome for getting through it.

By contrast, a lot of tough fights can feel like affairs of procedure. It's pretty much determined at the outset which side is going to win, and it's just a matter of slogging through a big pile of attack rolls and hit points to find out which one; a protracted and agonizing suspense. Whatever the result, it doesn't feel like victory or defeat resulted from your actions so much as it resulted from statistics.

kyoryu

2021-07-14, 10:16 AM

Many people do enjoy close battles.

What they usually don't enjoy at all are battles where they feel like they're going to lose for reasons out of their control. Even if they ultimately win.

RandomPeasant

2021-07-14, 11:05 AM

People enjoy the feeling of close-ness, among other things. They're less happy about the prospect of losing, especially since that typically means pretty dramatic consequences. The art of designing encounters in TTRPGs is making the difference between the perceived difficulty and the actual difficulty as large as possible.

Tvtyrant

2021-07-14, 11:07 AM

KillianHawkeye

2021-07-14, 02:03 PM

denthor

2021-07-14, 02:26 PM

Theoboldi

2021-07-14, 03:53 PM

I do always feel a bit weird reading these threads, as I personally could not tell you a single thing about any of the tough encounters my parties have had over the years.

By which I mean I vaguely recall some of them happening, but I would not be able to give you any details on what actually went down in them.

The fights (and other action scenes) I do remember are the ones where the PCs ended up getting creative. Like when they used a ceiling hook and a rope to choke out a giant, or when I distracted a powerful angel with a thrown dagger before plunging down a crevasse to escape him.

I also remember the times players got creative to avoid battles. Like when someone used their knowledge of the campaign world and their enemy's plans to talk an ancient evil into surrendering, despite it being personally more powerful than them at the time.

Those kinds of things stayed in my head. And while sometimes the peril of the situation encouraged these solutions, it didn't always. For me, while some level of danger and stakes are necessary to make a game interesting, they by themselves cannot produce the actual memorable parts. Those being the actions that the characters take to confront the situations in front of them. The worst that can happen for me is that a player is discouraged from taking an interesting action because the scenario is so dangerous that they must play it safe at all times.

I'll admit I am slightly more likely to remember a tough battle than a cakewalk one, but that is not by itself a positive thing. The toughest encounters I recall where nothing of interest happened are ones I connect with frustration and a lack of moment to moment choice. Comparatively, an absolute cakewalk may not be very memorable, but at least it can also be fun in the moment as I just go to town rolling lots of damage and describing how I cut down ranks of goblins.

RandomPeasant

2021-07-14, 03:56 PM

I haven't read the whole thread. I just wanted to say that for me, it needs to feel possible to lose or else the victories seem hollow and I get bored of the game. If the outcome is a forgone conclusion, then just narrate it; why bother rolling dice at all?

Journey matters. If a fight isn't completely trivial, it can still be tactically interesting even if you're not pushed to the edge of defeat. People also like to cut lose with their abilities and feel powerful. Doing that all the time starts to feel boring, but having a fight that emphasizes how strong your character is can definitely be something people enjoy.

Pex

2021-07-14, 04:19 PM

Many people do enjoy close battles.

What they usually don't enjoy at all are battles where they feel like they're going to lose for reasons out of their control. Even if they ultimately win.

That fits me.

Easy e

2021-07-14, 04:35 PM

I do not recall the difficulty of the battle, I recall the "flair" of the battle.

For example,
- I recall a fight where a character did a stiletto leap off the top of a building and into a ganger
- I recall a different battle where one of the PCs out fast-drew (?) a character they had lost to several times before.
- I recall a battle where we pulled a animated rug off a guy that sent the other character spinning like a top away
- I recall a PC sliding down a rope from a tower into a nearby suburb as a Dragon chased behind snapping at their heels
- I recall a foe being decapitated while the PC said, "There can be only one"
- I recall PCs fighting a guy where they could not beat his armor, so they lit his helmet on fire. When he took it off to see what he was doing, they all attacked his head!

That is what I recall. I do not recall if they were tough fights or easy fights, but those moments still stick out in my mind over 20+ years of RPing.

Quertus

2021-07-14, 07:18 PM

What do I / my players think of close battles? What do I / my players remember and talk about?

Off hand? The only "close" battle(s) / campaign(s) I can remember were from the fudge GM who, halfway through the first session of a campaign, I could accurately predict how many and which PCs would still be conscious at the end of the "climactic" final fight with the BBEG, because that's what they'd think world make the best story.

So, not a fan.

The RPG fights I remember fondly and talk about is everything that the BDH party, who wades through most opposition like it was human, did. The running battle where my Sentient Potted Plant remembered where we parked. The Monk goddess who solo'd a Balor, and solo'd several "TPK" encounters, and later killed so many Balor that the ensuing explosions took out all their kin, nearly killing the whole party (Quertus survived inside a continent bubble), while she emerged unscathed. The monster that just listened while the party made their plans. That time my character (the party's primary DPS) unexpectedly fled (and the rest of the party didn't), making an encounter much harder than the GM had expected it would be (the group talks about that one a lot). The purple worm who died to psionics stunning it for 3d4 rounds + ride by attack, spirited charge, and a lance. The fight where the PC got melted. Armus moving to protect someone with better defenses than himself (and numerous other Armus clever tactics scenes). When the Corp shocked everyone (including the GM) with just how *legal* his grenade launcher was. When the shirtless pirate Fighter with Great Cleave declared that his favored enemy was "anything you can fit more than one of in a 5' square". The fight where the "town hero" (PC) fumbled a weapon every round, pulling out a new weapon each round, until they were down from "long sword and short sword" to fighting with "pointy stick" and "big rock". That time the archer 1-shot the Dragon. That time the archer dealt with the invisible foe. When the Cleric got hit by so many cumulative "forget the past day" effects that he no longer remembered the party. And *lots* of things that weren't fights.

My players… talk about encounters where they used Diplomacy instead of fighting, or defeated the fight at the strategic layer. Where they stole mechs or other tech (usually from their enemies, but occasionally from their allies or from neutral 3rd parties). Where the NPC(s) were obnoxious - especially if the PCs gave them their comeuppance. Where the scene was memorable, like an army of robots climbing fences, or a skeletal dinosaur using Swallow Whole and then instantly "pooping" them back out. Where they planned and were in control of (or greatly impacted) how the fight actually played out. Puzzle monsters. Whenever they felt like they "got away with something".

That's what *my* players talk about years later.

Not really much correlation with "challenge" in either list, afaict.

Telok

2021-07-14, 08:47 PM

What I recall tends to be the encounters that suddenly swung from easy to hard, or hard to easy.

The two round set-up that let me declare a nat-20, no-miss, no-sr, -5 save, disentigrate on the enemy mage while the air elemental twirled all the mooks off a cliff. Grease & snatch on the one-really-big-giant's weapon, making it a pushover. The "your jump check is what? you do what with the fire staff? that put your ac at what?" that fragged half an army and put the warrior in the middle of the enemy commanders on round two. The demon dragon that accidentally paralyzed the whole party for minutes except the mage's new golem. The "level appropriate" scry-&-die on the party that TPKed us because the one character with anti-scry & no-surprise was out shopping and everyone rolled abysimal initatives. The simple kneecapping run that resulted in a couple police helicopters machine-gunning down the runner team in downtown Seattle. The "oh a demon-lord. maybe towing an unshielded ship through the warp wasn't as good of an idea as we thought" encounter.

Those are the ones we keep talking about.

Talakeal

2021-07-14, 09:28 PM

It's personally subjective, but it depends if I think the DM provided a fair fight. If I get the impression the DM stacked the deck in the bad guy's favor I'm not having fun. We still win, but I don't enjoy the victory because I was miserable playing it. This doesn't mean I think the DM was being a tyrannical killer DM, but he overdid it trying to make a tough challenge. When the bad guys are just tough monsters and/or the battlefield is unusual it can be a real blast. It's difficult to explain how a combat is stacked against us. It is subjective, and I can admit sometimes maybe I'm being the donkey about it because the other players are having fun and I'm already trusting the DM I just think he erred.

I suppose a defining trait I can name where I think the deck was stacked is when a surprise round or round 1 is an almost TPK. Not necessarily anyone even dropped, but when even the warriors want to cry Medic! it leaves a sour taste. If it's not damage it's a Save or Suck effect where you lose the first two rounds of play doing nothing or you suffer a debilitating effect for the entire combat. I know this can sound petty and immature, but the context matters. I'm ok with the party getting hit by a mind flayer's Psionic Blast when we know we will be facing mind flayers, but when all we're doing is walking in a cavern not knowing there will be mind flayers and suddenly four appear and blast the party then we get attacked by umberhulks, I want the combat over with already.

I have confidence the DM is not trying to kill the party on purpose. If I thought he would do that I wouldn't be playing. I enjoy the tough battles when it's a war of attrition. The tension builds. It's round 6, and the fight is still going. I don't enjoy the battles when retreat looks like a good option, and Round 1 is not even half-way done.

I agree with you in principle, although I am not sure about the specifics.

Fudging dice or monster stats, metagaming, pulling monsters out of nowhere, tailoring enemies to the party, etc. all rub me the wrong way regardless of whether they are in my favor or against me; but I don't think I would qualify an ambush as anything more than realistic tactics unless it was done in a really cheap way out of game.

Also,
this reminds me, have you given any more thought to the 5-point plan, of providing maximum transparency (among other things)?

Yes.

I will definitely be doing stat cards, although I am not sure when exactly I will hand them out.

The black box text is a lot harder for me to figure out how to do.

Speaking of which, are you planning on replying to my questions about treasure and motivation in the other thread?

Because I really do think that, ironically, me being overly generous has inadvertently created a sense of obligation and bitterness which was the opposite of my intent, but this isn't really the best place to talk about that.

Time Troll

2021-07-14, 10:20 PM

Yes, people love close battles. In just about any game "close" is much more interesting and exciting. Everyone tunes in to watch that game that is tied 12 to 12, but no one watches that 36 to zero game.

I have found a LOT of players really do just want an easy game. Show up, don't think much and just "win". Though plenty of GMs want this too.

I'm not one of them. I feel the whole game should be edge of your seat excitement. All battles should be close. Not so much on dice rolls, but more on actions. My game has very few easy, one sided battles. They simply never happen as I see them as pointless. I'm not going to run a combat where some 10th level players kill a group of 1st level kobolds. When such an event happens, I'll do it off game: "you kill all the kobolds".

My default encounter is hard for many players, and often very hard or even impossible. I use tricks, traps, tactics, common sense and surprise in every encounter. A lot of players are not ready for it. A lot of players have only played in much less intense games. They are use to fights just being where the PC target the foes for a couple rounds and win the fight. When even something as simple as a goblin using a ranged disarm to knock their PCs weapon out of their hand will have them react with confusion. When the evil fire mage first has some fire snakes grapple the PCs then he blasts them with fire spells from far away, they react with horror.

Some can't handle that type of game, and many just don't want too. But there are enough that do. And they are the players I look for. Quite often a new player might loose and have dozens of characters die over a couple weeks. And sometimes, things will just 'click' for the player: they will suddenly "get it". They will start using ricks, traps, tactics, common sense and surprise in every encounter.

And, for me, this is the perfect encounter: two sides fully immersed and engaged and doing everything they can to succeed for their side.

Once the players develop this real life gaming skill, they might even be able to have easy not even close encounters. But they will have earned it, and they will know the encounter was only easy as they worked to make it happen that way.

KineticDiplomat

2021-07-14, 10:55 PM

Let’s start with: Talakeal’s surreal table of circular hatred likes nothing but imposing misery on each other, so there is no circumstantially accurate answer to the deep question here.

However, if we take the question at face value, how much people like close battles is some combination of several factors (beyond the people).

1. How exciting is combat? If you’re in D&D or some other combat system that is just a very long winded way to do resource analysis over time with the option for gotcha-Magic-puzzle, largely dictated by decisions in build and class made several sessions (aka a real world month) then the actual execution of the battle isn’t fun, or particularly reflective of player actions “in the heat of it”. And if it’s not fun and reflective of your actions, then there is not a whole lot of value to be gained in a “close” battle. After all, the player had very little to do with it in the immediate and visceral sense. In better combat systems, it goes up…

2. How much risk is there? Zero to Hero games, like D&D, require you to have invested a great deal of time before a “close fight” means more than a good or bad roll. It’s 14x sessions to lvl 5, and if you played that at 3x/mo, that means basically the length of an academic semester. Which means you can lose all of that in a close battle, and can only have a close battle after you’ve got a lot to lose. Many other games both allow you to be powerful enough to be tactically interesting in little (or no) time invested, so you can get close battles early and with plenty of risk to the character but very little to the player.

3. What are the game expectations? If it’s the type of game where character death is expected, overcoming setbacks is part of gameplay, and failure is a routine event then players are mentally prepped to take on odds they might not win. If the basic premise of the game is that competent play should ROFLSTOMP all but the baddest bosses, then frequent close battles - or even a handful of 50/50s, since those odds at up - are going to feel like the GM trying to screw you over.

4. How much player agency is there in making it close? A riff on 1 here - if the battle is mostly determined by the GM selection just such a pool of HP and spells/abilities/etc - then there’s not any feeling that the players triumphed. Just that they were at the mercy or non-mercy of the GMs scenario design skills. And if that GM had a situation he just had to have, maybe his rail road skills too. If the players really feel like zigging left instead of right as an active decision made the difference, far more psychic reward for figuring out how to win when it was close than if it’s all just flavor for the pre-arranged equations running with a dice provided Rand() function.

Calthropstu

2021-07-14, 10:57 PM

When I ran jade regent, the most memorable battles were the following:

White dragon
Raven
A pair of dragon turtles
The woman in control of the weather tower
A arachnae with class levels accompanied with 4 shadow dancers..
The boss of book 4.

The dragon turtles flat out killed a pc and, when it became clear they would lose, fled underwater. They hunted down their lair after resurrecting the dead pc and resting. The turtles were still licking their wounds and had less than half health.

The dragon should have been a tough fight, but got its ass kicked to a pair of crits.

The raven escaped. And set a trap.
And escaped and set a trap.
And escaped and set a trap.
By the time they caught that raven, they were ready to roast it alive.

The boss of book 4 was hilarious. The party was running around with an artifact weapon. A monk successfully disarmed and stole it, getting away and presented the weapon to the boss. The boss promptly lost the ensuing ego battle, got taken over by the sword who promptly killed all his remaining underlings.

The Arachnae was supposed to go insane and attack the party, but I rewrote him to trail the party and harass them. Since they were shapeshifters, they kept approaching the party to try and get nonexistant items from them. I just kept writing new schemes. Of course, it was always a guy and 4 women so it was always easy to tell. Became a running gag.

The cleric in charge of the weather tower was one of the longest fights I've ever run. Everyone involved exhuasted every ability they had. No one could reach her. It took nearly 40 rounds. She was ultimately defeated by wand of magic missle and guy with sword finally catching up to her with air walk. Buffs wore off, By the end, we just wanted it to be OVER.

Anyways, the point I am making is the reasons fights get remembered is because of a myriad of things. I have watched players remember battles where their dice rolled low so many times. Sometimes it's because something funny happens. Sometimes it's because the bastard got away.

Yes, sometimes it's because it came down to the wire. You pulled the fight out of your ass in an all out attempt and triumphed with the skin of your teeth. But just as often it's the opposite.

kyoryu

2021-07-15, 12:19 AM

That fits me.

"I'm going to lose and there's nothing I can do" is rarely a good thing, even if you end up not losing.

Mordante

2021-07-15, 02:13 AM

Onos

2021-07-15, 02:14 AM

...Because I really do think that, ironically, me being overly generous has inadvertently created a sense of obligation and bitterness which was the opposite of my intent...

The ironic thing is that you think you've been generous with your players. Based entirely on what I've seen you post, "overly generous" is possibly the last way I'd describe your GMing style or your communication with your players.

Talakeal

2021-07-15, 02:30 AM

The ironic thing is that you think you've been generous with your players. Based entirely on what I've seen you post, "overly generous" is possibly the last way I'd describe your GMing style or your communication with your players.

Do note, I am specifically talking about how much treasure I give out, not some broader picture of my game as a whole.

And yeah, this is the lovely thing about forums, you get crap for no matter what you do; I remember one poster telling me that I was being extremely generous by not throwing out my player 20 years ago when he carved up my mom's table with his pocket knife to "punish me for running a boring game".

Batcathat

2021-07-15, 02:48 AM

And yeah, this is the lovely thing about forums, you get crap for no matter what you do; I remember one poster telling me that I was being extremely generous by not throwing out my player 20 years ago when he carved up my mom's table with his pocket knife to "punish me for running a boring game".

Yes, that's how most large groups of people work, they have different opinions. So on one hand, you might get crap for whatever you do, but you also might get people supporting whatever you do.

Personally, I think that if your description of your players is in any way accurate, the fact that you keep playing with them at all might have crossed the line between generous and masochistic.

Democratus

2021-07-15, 07:44 AM

I not only enjoy battles that are close where we barely pull out a victory.

I also enjoy the battles that we lose.

Sometimes a TPK, running away, or a whole party capture makes for a great story. And the main reason we play D&D is to have fun stories.

YMMV

farothel

2021-07-15, 07:56 AM

I think it also matters what system you're playing, or even how the rest of your day/week went. If I had a really stressful week at work, I just want to chop things to pieces quickly, sort of letting off steam without really hurting people. But when it's been a nice week, I do enjoy close fights where you really have to think your way through. Those things also play a major role in how combats are perceived.
And the system also matters. For instance in L5R, dying to protect the empire is something every character (not player, character) should be willing to do. In those cases, losing a character doesn't bother me, as it's build into the system. But also in other systems, if for instance you fight to protect your loved ones is different than just a bunch of unknown people.

And the GM can think a combat will be difficult and the players walk over it, while another fight perceived by the GM as easy almost ends up a TPK due to bad (or good) luck with the dice (it has happened to me more than once in my roleplaying 'career', as player and GM).

KorvinStarmast

2021-07-15, 08:22 AM

One of the problems with a difficult combat is

1) they take too long
2) little roleplaying in combat, just dice rolling
3) Often only a few people in the party are useful
4) not only the combat takes a long time, the preparations can take forever as well. Not sure why you assert point 2.
I've seen a number of hard combats where it was the tactical choices and positioning, or use of terrain, that made a big difference. Once last year: shoving a hill giant giant and a few ogres off of a cliff/mountainside to get through a mountain pass: the encounter was right at "Deadly" and was resolved in two turns (shove/help as well as an enlarge spell being cast). In that case, among others, less dice rolling thanks to smart players. It didn't kill the giant, and only killed one ogre (the fall) but it cleared the pass (they were in a bit of a ticking clock situation).
Long combats? Yes, more dice get rolled since more rounds and turns happen. But a good DM with a group of attentive, engaged players can keep the pace of combat going.
(And sadly, it can also take all night to do it, seen that too).

If you go to the the 'thread of awesome' I shared a "we were fleeing for our lives" session from an RPG called Space Quest. It was one of those cases where the danger increased as the session went on based on our decisions as players: the consequences ended up being "get out of this city/starport by any means available or be shot on sight/captured" when it started out as an innocuous "meet in a bar and try to get a mission to make dough" ...

gijoemike

2021-07-15, 09:36 AM

I think the statement that is most telling is that years later they still talk about that one scrape.

Do they say yeah we were 9th level and found 4 goblin scouts we wiped them out in 1 round. Never drank a potion and our wizard did not cast fireball good day all around. In fact the goblins blows were useless against our armor.

We remember that battle from 20 years ago?!

This is what my groups believe. Not just difficulty but the flair of how it gets pulled off.

I remember a fight where the cleric was killed, my fighter was hit with a maximized touch of idiocy and was at 4 int (I was an combat expertise fighter and had a spare int item on). I was at 1/2 health when I killed he last enemy and wandered around the city hugging the bloody corpse of my friend grunting for help.

I was a Halfling sword sage that was killed in the 3rd round of the campaign ending fight with a big archmage. Fight lasted 14 rounds or something insane. Lots of dispels, battlefield control, and summons. My pc was the only death. T'was glorious.

Fight was a green dragon in its own lair. The GM let us fudge a rule to use wall of force over a huge spiked pit that lead into the main lair in a horizontal manner so we could charge across. It was for the cinematic At the time on of the pcs had a purple dragon knights commander's ring. That fight SUCKED. Our DM was an expert in running dragons and properly using their magical abilities and spells to handle buffs, battlefield control, and deception. No one died in that fight but the wizard and cleric were mostly tapped by the end and everyone was at 1/3 hp.

Death isn't what makes the challenge. Die rolls and luck shouldn't be a major factor. The drain on resources to win is what makes the challenge. In most cases above the PC were a clear win and safe bet but had to fight and crawl to get there.

Quertus

2021-07-15, 11:04 AM

Yes.

Cool.

I will definitely be doing stat cards, although I am not sure when exactly I will hand them out.

"The moment they learn of the existence of the creature" seems a good answer.

The black box text is a lot harder for me to figure out how to do.

Definitely workshop it with us! I'm sure lots of Playgrounders would be glad to give their 2¢.

Actually, workshopping it with us before giving it to your players was part of the point.

Speaking of which, are you planning on replying to my questions about treasure and motivation in the other thread?

Because I really do think that, ironically, me being overly generous has inadvertently created a sense of obligation and bitterness which was the opposite of my intent, but this isn't really the best place to talk about that.

Planning to, yes. I've thrown away several responses that felt… wrong. Like I was missing the forest for the trees maybe.

Senility willing, I'll try again… or give up, and post something terse, that probably only covers a small part of what I want to say.

BRC

2021-07-15, 11:53 AM

In the last episode of Fear the Boot, several of the hosts were talking about how nothing feels better than when you have what looks to be an unwinnable situation or a TPK in progress, but you manage to buckle down, pull through, and just barely scrape by.

Lots of the gaming advice books, blogs, podcasts, and videos take it for granted that PCs love winning a close fight. Heck, most people also follow that same logic for narratives or for sports, that a close match-up is always more interesting.

Likewise, I have heard quotes like "Players want to be like John Mclaine, they want to be the hero in the end, but they want to be struggle for it and be beat to hell in the process," or "Players want an easy victory in the moment, but when looking back on it want to to have been the toughest thing ever."

But, is this actually true?

My players always freak out in a close encounter, and usually just get angry and start acting out OOC, or get depressed and give up. After winning, they always bitch about how it was too hard, too stressful, too close, to costly, and dwelling on how badly it could have gone. Even years later, rather than telling stories about how they overcame impossible odds due to how awesome they are, they instead tell stories about how horribly they were screwed over and put into unfair situations.

And, further, when I ask for advice on the forums, it seems that most people agree with them.

For the record, I don't run an old school meat-grinder or anything of the sort. I pretty much stick to the encounter guidelines in modern DMGs (i.e. averaging four equal CR encounters each adventuring day each using up ~20% of the party's resources); we tend to have one "nail-biter" that could go either way every ~20 combats, and only about 1:10 of those actually results in the party's defeat or a PC death. Actual TPKs are all but unheard of and usually the result of something really weird going on.

TLDR: In your experience, do players actually prefer tough battles were they struggle to pull through in the end, or do they prefer easy victories where they clearly outclass their opposition?
The thread has gone on a while but I'm going to respond to the OP.

I find players enjoy "Close" Battles based on how they end, which means it's a difficult thing to shoot for.

A "Close" Battle random encounter against some bandits or the ogres guarding the door isn't fun. It's stressful and exhausting and at the end of it you feel like all you've done is Survive, and if you expect ANOTHER pile of fights of similar difficulty, it can feel hopeless.

Meanwhile, a "Close" battle against the Dark Sorcerer and his Dread Knights that ends with the PC's going back to town to spend their loot and rest is going to feel really good. It's going to feel like triumphing over great odds, because at the end of the fight, the stress has a cathartic release and the PC's Don't Have To Worry Anymore.

A Close battle is a memorable one that feels like a Triumph to win, but only if it's an actual, significant Victory, after which point the resources you expended winning it become less relevant because you can rest up and restock. "Whew, we barely won that by spending everything we had!" vs "Oh no! We spent everything we had and now we Still Have more!". One feels exhilerating, one feels exhausting.

You run 4 equal-CR encounters each day. Lets say there's a 10% chance of any of those going bad due to RNG or players not picking up on something or you miscalculating the difficulty due to other factors or what have you, turning a Reliable Win into a Close Fight. If the Fight is presented as no more significant or memorable than any of the fights they've been reliably winning, it can produce feelings of helplessness and frustration and unfairness.

Another thing to note is that you seem pretty methodical in your encounter preparation. Percieved difficulty can be very different from ACTUAL difficulty.

I frequently see my players being like "Wow that was tough" in a fight where one of them got low, one of them got bloodied, and two were practically untouched, because the collective party goal was "Don't let anybody go down", and they got close to failing that, and because from the other side of the screen, not knowing how hard the enemies hit or how much health they have left, only seeing your mere 50 HP instead of the 200 HP spread across a party of 4, things can feel fraught and far more dangerous than they actually are. This isn't DMing slight-of-hand, it's just the nature of the experience.

Similarly, you the DM know what's coming up. If they expend valuable resources against the first fight, that feels Bad, since they don't know what they'll need later, and will assume the answer is "Everything".

KorvinStarmast

2021-07-15, 12:09 PM

BRC

2021-07-15, 12:21 PM

Last night was a case in point. (D&D 5e).

Very hard fight, very close to losing a PC to PC death (he was at two failed death saves, 1 success, when someone got a healing word to him). Lots of conditions imposed on players, opposing casters casting spells like fireball, darkness, hold person ...

Some key tactical decisions made by the players made a substantial difference in the outcome.
Dice weren't particularly cruel to either side, a few crits here and there, nothing out of the ordinary.

As they explored after the big fight another pocket of enemies cropped up when they went down stairs - near the session's end - three of the party had single digit HP before they left the temple behind them, on fire from the fires they'd set before they headed back to town.

To a man, the players were exultant and gave me the old "great session!" feedback.

Do we have one of these in every session?
No.
And most notably, at the end of the session, the PC's went home.

Which means they recovered the resources (Health ect) that they spent.

Which means that being forced to SPEND those resources becomes a sign of how much they Triumphed Over Great Odds, rather than a Cost They Were Forced To Pay.

Because if you're going to full heal anyway, having taken damage doesn't feel bad.

Spending spell slots doesn't feel bad if you are just going to get them back.

If you follow the pattern of a few "Resource Drain" encounters (PC victory is basically guaranteed, the question is what it will COST the PC's to win), followed by the Big Fight, then the big fight makes the resource drainers feel better.

IF you end the Big Fight having spent every spell slot you had, it meant you needed them, which means you made good decisions in the Resource Drainer fights earlier (since you clearly emerged from those with enough resources to Win The Big Fight).

When people say they want "Close Fights" what they mean is "I want to feel like I, the Player, can take credit for the victory, rather than just winning by virtue of having good enough stats". A Close Fight Demonstrates that something the Player did was integral to the victory. That is the feeling of Triumph that doesn't come from a cakewalk fight.

But players are paranoid, which means that feeling of Triumph can only come if the Victory was complete. If you know you have more fights ahead of you, then a fight in which you expended ANY resources is not a complete victory, since you might have won that fight at the cost of losing one down the line.

KorvinStarmast

2021-07-15, 03:10 PM

I am a little unsure what to make of your post, BRC.

Spending spell slots doesn't feel bad if you are just going to get them back. Did you miss the part where after the big fight they ended up with another fight (no rest) and that three PCs into single digit HP? (The dwarf had 1 HP, the elf 8, the paladin 7. Char level 6).

When people say they want "Close Fights" what they mean is "I want to feel like I, the Player, can take credit for the victory, rather than just winning by virtue of having good enough stats". A Close Fight Demonstrates that something the Player did was integral to the victory. That is the feeling of Triumph that doesn't come from a cakewalk fight. As I noted, they made at least three key tactical choices that prevented the Big Fight from turning out badly.

This was a potential party-wipe encounter if their tactics had not been applied to take a measure of control over the battlefield.

BRC

2021-07-15, 03:21 PM

I am a little unsure what to make of your post, BRC.
Did you miss the part where after the big fight they ended up with another fight (no rest) and that three PCs into single digit HP? (The dwarf had 1 HP, the elf 8, the paladin 7. Char level 6).

And after they got away, at the end of the session, they were talking about how great it was.
In that case, I'd say the whole session was the "Close Fight" that they enjoyed, including the surprise follow-up encounter, but it sounds like the Big Fight was appropriately Climactic.

As I noted, they made at least three key tactical choices that prevented the Big Fight from turning out badly.

This was a potential party-wipe encounter if their tactics had not been applied to take a measure of control over the battlefield.
And the players had a great time. It's a perfect demonstration of what I'm talking about

So long as there was room for SOME level of Tactics, a close battle usually communicates "You won because of something you, the players, did well, not just because you had good stats".

In a cakewalk fight, tactics might mean you win with less expenditure of resources, but that's not quite the same.

The Players knew that, without their tactical choices, they would have TPK'd. They knew that even WITH their smart tactical choices it was difficult fight.
And they won anyway.

That's the sensation of Triumph that players enjoy. Knowing that something THEY did, not just the stats on their sheet, or the luck of the dice, made the victory possible.

Edit: If it wasn't clear, I was using your example as evidence in favor of my point about what players like about "Close Fights", and the circumstances under which that enjoyment is possible.

Players like a "Close Fight" because it's evidence that they made smart tactical choices, and the enjoyment of a close fight comes AFTER total victory has been achieved.

So if you run a Close Fight and look at your players, they're not going to be loving it in the moment, because it's a stressful situation (Well some players thrive in those situations, but). They're going to be loving it after the fact, once they know that Victory has been achieved.

And what they specifically are going to love is the validation that the victory was made possible by their smart decisions.

Edit II

Breaking down my key components

1) A "Close Battle" Should be narratively relevant and climactic. From the sounds of things, your "Tough fight" session was storming some sort of temple, so the extra narrative weight was present.

2) Players like a Close Battle because it demonstrates that they (The Players) triumphed. In your example, there were several major tactical choices that they made which prevented the TPK and contributed to victory.
The closeness of the battle (One PC almost dying) helps heighten the Triumph, driving home how bad things COULD have been had they NOT made those tactical decisions, so the victory can firmly be attributed to the Players.

3) The joy from a Close Battle comes once the players know that their victory is complete, At the end of the adventure. Because until that point, they don't know if they've won by the skin of their teeth, or if they're just woefully unprepared for whatever comes next.
Your Players had their big climactic fight, and then another follow-up fight which ended with the party almost wiped out, and yet, in the end, they had a great time, because the closeness of the victory made the Triumph that much sweeter.

KorvinStarmast

2021-07-15, 03:57 PM

And after they got away, at the end of the session, they were talking about how great it was. In that case, I'd say the whole session was the "Close Fight" that they enjoyed, including the surprise follow-up encounter, but it sounds like the Big Fight was appropriately Climactic.

And the players had a great time. It's a perfect demonstration of what I'm talking about

So long as there was room for SOME level of Tactics, a close battle usually communicates "You won because of something you, the players, did well, not just because you had good stats".

In a cakewalk fight, tactics might mean you win with less expenditure of resources, but that's not quite the same. OK, I was not grokking your post very well, thank you for clearing that up. Sorry, low caffeine is the current excuse. :smallsmile:

And don't get me wrong, some nights with this group a ROFLstomp ends up happening - that has its attractions as well. (And as someone noticed upthread, some of the fine smart aleck ad libs and quips and oddball crazy RP come out of a ROFLstop session)

Edit II

Breaking down my key components

1) A "Close Battle" Should be narratively relevant and climactic. From the sounds of things, your "Tough fight" session was storming some sort of temple, so the extra narrative weight was present.

2) Players like a Close Battle because it demonstrates that they (The Players) triumphed. In your example, there were several major tactical choices that they made which prevented the TPK and contributed to victory.
The closeness of the battle (One PC almost dying) helps heighten the Triumph, driving home how bad things COULD have been had they NOT made those tactical decisions, so the victory can firmly be attributed to the Players.

3) The joy from a Close Battle comes once the players know that their victory is complete, At the end of the adventure. Because until that point, they don't know if they've won by the skin of their teeth, or if they're just woefully unprepared for whatever comes next.
Your Players had their big climactic fight, and then another follow-up fight which ended with the party almost wiped out, and yet, in the end, they had a great time, because the closeness of the victory made the Triumph that much sweeter. Yes to all of that.

BRC

2021-07-15, 04:16 PM

OK, I was not grokking your post very well, thank you for clearing that up. Sorry, low caffeine is the current excuse. :smallsmile:

And don't get me wrong, some nights with this group a ROFLstomp ends up happening - that has its attractions as well. (And as someone noticed upthread, some of the fine smart aleck ad libs and quips and oddball crazy RP come out of a ROFLstop session)
Yes to all of that.

I was thinking about why Talakeal's Players might be complaining,

Either because he's found a group of players that just want to walk into a room, step on a rat, and get paid 500,0000 GP for the trouble, or because he's missing some part of the formula.

For example, if his "Close Battles" occur early in places without appropriate narrative weight, it just feels like he's running a Very Hard Campaign where the PC's need to scrape and struggle to fight off every random bandit ambush.

If his "Close Battles" don't involve the players demonstrating some degree of tactical skill, then it's just Extra Stress on them, rather than a Triumph that they can point to.

If his Close Battles don't have the Players getting to replenish their resources (Achieving a Final Victory) by the end of the session, then they don't know that they actually Won. Instead they might just have spent resources they will need later.

And, if his stories about his players starting to complain and disconnecting from the game the moment things get tough are true, then his sample of "Do my players enjoy this" is going to come from DURING the fight (High-stress) rather than AFTER the fight (victory is complete, looking back on the triumph). It's also possible that his players throw enough of a fit mid-fight that they've already set their opinions by the time they've won.

Zuras

2021-07-15, 05:57 PM

It’s obviously a continuum. Every player wants their choices to matter—a boss fight that’s an easy victory better be because they planned and prepared beforehand.

Most highly tactical players I have DMed for don’t like every fight to be tough, but they love the idea that it *could* be tough if they don’t use good tactics, and still tell stories about the one time in five the ambush didn’t work and they had to fight the entire enemy fortress at once.

Talakeal

2021-07-15, 07:14 PM

Cluedrew

2021-07-15, 08:19 PM

No. Not that there haven't been close battles I have enjoyed but the fact that they were close isn't really the thing that made them enjoyable. No what made them cool is to know that me or my character (this is a case where the two begin to blur together) made a difference. My favourite combat of all time was four (~) rounds long, only one PC participated in it and they did almost exactly the same thing each round. What made it great is that every one of the very diverse PCs came together around that combat in a way that each of them got use their unique abilities and each of them made a critical difference. Other similar incidents also just changed things from win-to-win or loss-to-loss, but how became something unique to that character and that made it interesting.

That being said. I'm a very character/narrative focused player but that is how it seems through my lens.

Jay R

2021-07-15, 10:45 PM

We’re human. We are complex, with both virtues and vices, positive emotions and negative ones, worthy impulses and unworthy ones.

When I fence, I have lots more fun defeating somebody on my level than I do defeating a new, mostly untrained fencer. It’s hard to remember that sometimes when I’m losing, facing somebody with more skill than I have.

I get more satisfaction out of finishing a 30-miles bike ride with aching legs than a five-mile ride. But 25 miles in, with aching legs and too much sun, I’m probably not enjoying it at my cheerful best.

I enjoy a complex game of chess far more than beating a poor player quickly – but I may get frustrated when I lose my queen.

*IF* the players are people who love a challenge, and
*IF* the game is interesting, and
*IF* the players are people who work well together as teammates rather than rivals, and
*IF* they trust the DM, ...

... then yes, in my experience, such players will prefer a hard challenge. But even then, they often lose sight of that during the tough encounter.

My list of Rules for DMs includes the following:

What the players want today is a quick, easy victory. But what they will want tomorrow is to have brilliantly and valiantly turned the tables to barely survive a deadly encounter where it looked like they were all about to die.

But don’t forget that first sentence. Nobody projects their best emotions (or their worst ones) all the time.

Talakeal

2021-07-16, 09:22 AM

What the players want today is a quick, easy victory. But what they will want tomorrow is to have brilliantly and valiantly turned the tables to barely survive a deadly encounter where it looked like they were all about to die.

Thanks, I was looking for that quote!

But yeah, that doesn't actually seem to be the case at my table; all past victories become miserable screw-jobs, the magnitude of which grows with each telling!

LibraryOgre

2021-07-16, 09:58 AM

TLDR: In your experience, do players actually prefer tough battles were they struggle to pull through in the end, or do they prefer easy victories where they clearly outclass their opposition?

It's a balance. The easy fights are great... they show your power. Throwing a previously difficult monster at a group who can now wipe the floor with them shows their advancement in a visceral way.

However, all the stories you see aren't "We wiped the floor with 10 goblins", they're "And we had 10 HP left between 6 characters, but we survived!" The first isn't heroic. The second is either "Goddamn, we could not roll over a 3" or "We conquered amazing odds and it felt so good."

Jakinbandw

2021-07-16, 11:09 AM

I personally hate close battles. It feels like a failure state to me even on a win and I'll dwell on it for a long time to come.

The reason why is probability. If a fight comes down to making a single 50% roll, or there will be a TPK, That means that we will likely tpk within the next 3 encounters of similar difficulty.

If we have a 95% chance to win a battle, but we need to win 10 of them, then our chance of success becomes roughly a coin flip.

More than that however, winning because I got lucky just doesn't feel good to me. I didn't win because I was smart, or clever, or planned well. I won in spite of being too foolish to truly come up with a proper way to win.

Note that I am fine with running from fights. It means that we had a properly planned contingency for the situation (you can't escape in most systems otherwise) and we weren't risking a tpk. It's tpks that I don't enjoy.

KorvinStarmast

2021-07-16, 11:18 AM

Note that I am fine with running from fights. It means that we had a properly planned contingency for the situation (you can't escape in most systems otherwise) and we weren't risking a tpk. It's tpks that I don't enjoy. I love your first sentence there. I too am fine with 'live to fight another day' and that's why I almost always have Fog Cloud as a selected spell.
Drop the cloud and GTFO saved us twice in ToA.

But I think that the general willingness to withdraw is why one of the players dropped out of the campaign. (Though scheduling problems were likely a factor as well)

Man_Over_Game

2021-07-16, 11:33 AM

A lot is going to depend on the culture of the table.

Some players are fine with dying for the drama and the experience, others see their characters as a huge investment and don't want to risk that.

Some players like a challenge, others like to play for the story.

Nobody is wrong, which means there's no wrong solution that includes your party's wishes.

kyoryu

2021-07-16, 11:59 AM

The reason why is probability. If a fight comes down to making a single 50% roll, or there will be a TPK, That means that we will likely tpk within the next 3 encounters of similar difficulty.

If we have a 95% chance to win a battle, but we need to win 10 of them, then our chance of success becomes roughly a coin flip.

Have other results of failure besides "TPK". It opens up a lot of potential.

More than that however, winning because I got lucky just doesn't feel good to me. I didn't win because I was smart, or clever, or planned well. I won in spite of being too foolish to truly come up with a proper way to win.

To me a close fight shouldn't be defined by probabilities, but by tactics. Hoping you get lucky and needing to be good are two different things. The latter is fun. The former is basically helplessness.

Note that I am fine with running from fights. It means that we had a properly planned contingency for the situation (you can't escape in most systems otherwise) and we weren't risking a tpk. It's tpks that I don't enjoy.

Few people do enjoy TPKs.

Calthropstu

2021-07-16, 12:32 PM

Have other results of failure besides "TPK". It opens up a lot of potential.

To me a close fight shouldn't be defined by probabilities, but by tactics. Hoping you get lucky and needing to be good are two different things. The latter is fun. The former is basically helplessness.

Few people do enjoy TPKs.

I thought everyone loved books that end with "and everybody dies. The end."

Zuras

2021-07-16, 12:34 PM

It's a balance. The easy fights are great... they show your power. Throwing a previously difficult monster at a group who can now wipe the floor with them shows their advancement in a visceral way.

However, all the stories you see aren't "We wiped the floor with 10 goblins", they're "And we had 10 HP left between 6 characters, but we survived!" The first isn't heroic. The second is either "Goddamn, we could not roll over a 3" or "We conquered amazing odds and it felt so good."

Don’t forget the stories about when they were facing a tough fight but remembered some obscure ability or rules knowledge that turned a tough fight into a cakewalk. My players still talk about the time half the party couldn’t melee the Big Bad through its anti-life shell and the Battlemaster used his Pushing Attack with a thrown dagger to shove it next to someone and break the spell.

A satisfying major fight, at the end, doesn’t need to be close, but the players do need a moment in the fight where they think “man, how are we going to get out of this one?”

That moment can even be before the fight. I remember several curb stomp ambushes fondly where we were utterly terrified of a spellcasting enemy and carefully planned when and where to take them out to avoid getting Meteor Swarmed.

meandean

2021-07-16, 02:19 PM

A satisfying major fight, at the end, doesn’t need to be close, but the players do need a moment in the fight where they think “man, how are we going to get out of this one?”Sure. You know with far more certainty than you ever could in any game involving randomness -- I mean, literal 100% certainty -- that James Bond isn't going to die in the next James Bond movie. But, if the fights are cool, you'll enjoy it anyway. It's not a prerequisite.

kyoryu

2021-07-16, 02:45 PM

Sure. You know with far more certainty than you ever could in any game involving randomness -- I mean, literal 100% certainty -- that James Bond isn't going to die in the next James Bond movie. But, if the fights are cool, you'll enjoy it anyway. It's not a prerequisite.

How the stakes of the fight are set up matters, too. If you know the hero isn't going to die, you can put something else up at risk that can believably be lost.

https://gizmodo.com/why-you-should-never-write-action-scenes-into-your-tent-511712234

icefractal

2021-07-16, 03:33 PM

*IF* the players are people who love a challenge, and
*IF* the game is interesting, and
*IF* the players are people who work well together as teammates rather than rivals, and
*IF* they trust the DM, ...

... then yes, in my experience, such players will prefer a hard challenge. But even then, they often lose sight of that during the tough encounter.

My list of Rules for DMs includes the following:

What the players want today is a quick, easy victory. But what they will want tomorrow is to have brilliantly and valiantly turned the tables to barely survive a deadly encounter where it looked like they were all about to die.While pithy, I disagree with this as a general rule. You yourself lay out a set of pre-conditions for when players would enjoy it, but then the rule states it as something true for most/all players with no caveats - which it isn't, IME.

But yeah, that doesn't actually seem to be the case at my table; all past victories become miserable screw-jobs, the magnitude of which grows with each telling!Part of this might be from two things:

First, if you get frustrated enough during the encounter, that frustration will be the most memorable thing about it, regardless of if it turned out well in the end. I remember one time when I had a string of bad luck, got pissed off, and visibly sulked about it. And that's just embarrassing. I could make excuses like I was underslept, and I didn't throw anything or yell at anyone, but at the end of the day I acted like an immature idiot, and that is what I remember about the fight (although it was a close fight that we ultimately won). It's not a good gaming memory, it's a lousy one.

Secondly, people will often apply a lot of cognitive bias to preserve their self-image. If someone did get to the stage of yelling at people over their own failure, they have two choices:
A) Accept that they acted badly and should be ashamed of themselves.
B) Double down on the belief that things were rigged against them and their anger was therefore appropriate.

And the more often this get brought up, and the more often they take that "double down" choice, the higher the stakes get. Now for them to admit they were wrong, they'd have to admit they're someone who holds a years-long grudge over their own mistake. Not likely. Hence the "more bitter over time".

How the stakes of the fight are set up matters, too. If you know the hero isn't going to die, you can put something else up at risk that can believably be lost.Non-death stakes are fine, but they don't really take any sting out of defeat. Depending, they might make it worse, especially if the blame falls at all on the PCs' mistakes.

"You screwed up and died." Ok, bummer. Guess that's it for the character ... unless there's a way for them to get resurrected, because I'd be happy to keep playing them in that case.

"You screwed up and got the city destroyed." Immediate retirement time, I don't want to play that character any more, at all.

Mastikator

2021-07-16, 06:49 PM

Typically close battles are always the climax of the night, both because I like to have the "boss battle" be slightly tougher and because the PCs are already worn down from easier fights and obstacles when they get in.

They always replenish their resources at the end of the session barring some weird irl emergency disrupting the game mid dungeon.

Tactics are a double edged sword. As someone said above, you can't balance for player tactics, and so if the players are using good tactics it is unlikely to be a challenging encounter to begin with.

Only about 1 in 20 fights is actually close.

I get bitching in the moment, but it seems like players actually get more bitter as time goes on rather than less; when they tell stories it is always about how I was "always screwing them over" rather than about the glorious victories that ended 99.5% of these "screw-jobs".

I'd say you shouldn't balance for tactics, even if you could. Using tactics is a good thing, a sign of team work and understanding the game. The correct reward for that is that they have an easier time with encounters and expend fewer resources.

Calthropstu

2021-07-16, 08:53 PM

I'd say you shouldn't balance for tactics, even if you could. Using tactics is a good thing, a sign of team work and understanding the game. The correct reward for that is that they have an easier time with encounters and expend fewer resources.

Conversely, a strong, intelligent enemy would be able to adapt to those tactics. They should ABSOLUTELY begin making moves to counter things the party is using. Did they kill your pet dragon with a beefed up maximized empowered disintigrate? Contingency to reflect that back to the caster would be prudent. The party has a pyromancer who sometimes switches to acid? Protect against both.

A big bad who doesn't adapt to enemy strategies is no big bad at all.

Mastikator

2021-07-16, 09:28 PM

Conversely, a strong, intelligent enemy would be able to adapt to those tactics. They should ABSOLUTELY begin making moves to counter things the party is using. Did they kill your pet dragon with a beefed up maximized empowered disintigrate? Contingency to reflect that back to the caster would be prudent. The party has a pyromancer who sometimes switches to acid? Protect against both.

A big bad who doesn't adapt to enemy strategies is no big bad at all.

+1

Actually if the players use the same tactic very often and the enemy has scouts or post-battle reports from on-lookers or just anyway of knowing what the tactic is, they should device a counter to it. That's literally what the players would (and should) do if they knew that the bad guys used a tactic! But ONLY for tactically inclined enemies. Like humans, or hobgoblins. If they're facing orcs the orcs just charge in like idiots.

Calthropstu

2021-07-16, 09:49 PM

+1

Actually if the players use the same tactic very often and the enemy has scouts or post-battle reports from on-lookers or just anyway of knowing what the tactic is, they should device a counter to it. That's literally what the players would (and should) do if they knew that the bad guys used a tactic! But ONLY for tactically inclined enemies. Like humans, or hobgoblins. If they're facing orcs the orcs just charge in like idiots.

Obould would like a word with you...

Quertus

2021-07-17, 04:16 PM

I was thinking about why Talakeal's Players might be complaining,

Either because he's found a group of players that just want to walk into a room, step on a rat, and get paid 500,0000 GP for the trouble, or because he's missing some part of the formula.

For example, if his "Close Battles" occur early in places without appropriate narrative weight, it just feels like he's running a Very Hard Campaign where the PC's need to scrape and struggle to fight off every random bandit ambush.

If his "Close Battles" don't involve the players demonstrating some degree of tactical skill, then it's just Extra Stress on them, rather than a Triumph that they can point to.

If his Close Battles don't have the Players getting to replenish their resources (Achieving a Final Victory) by the end of the session, then they don't know that they actually Won. Instead they might just have spent resources they will need later.

And, if his stories about his players starting to complain and disconnecting from the game the moment things get tough are true, then his sample of "Do my players enjoy this" is going to come from DURING the fight (High-stress) rather than AFTER the fight (victory is complete, looking back on the triumph). It's also possible that his players throw enough of a fit mid-fight that they've already set their opinions by the time they've won.

Obviously, there's some of all of the above - just like in any game.

Talakeal's players obviously have difficulty demonstrating tactical skill. Other than my 5-point plan, how would one go about addressing that?

Every player wants their choices to matter—a boss fight that’s an easy victory better be because they planned and prepared beforehand.

Definitely on "choices matter".

I had a GM who was a "master" of "unintended consequences", who never let actions have their *intended* consequences. It wasn't, "yes, but…" - it was "no, and also…".

I think… that it depends on my character, but… I like to hear a lot of "yes", and to be surprised more often by "yes, and also" than by "yes, but" or "no".

So, when the BDH party fails to convince the villagers that we're the good guys? Not surprising. Appropriate to their stats and theme. When Armus slowly loses a grapple with a Drow warrior? Not surprising.

I get bitching in the moment, but it seems like players actually get more bitter as time goes on rather than less; when they tell stories it is always about how I was "always screwing them over" rather than about the glorious victories that ended 99.5% of these "screw-jobs".

My hope is, using my 5-point plan, going full module mode with them, you'll be able to show your players the module you wrote, and ask them, "so, how would *you* have written this encounter so as not to…", and get actionable feedback. (Or get them to learn not to "double down" by giving them an out. Or, from your feedback, we'll realize that they are truly, unsalvageably insane. Or some other productive outcome.)

But yeah, that doesn't actually seem to be the case at my table; all past victories become miserable screw-jobs, the magnitude of which grows with each telling!

And is that just your players of your games, or stories of other GMs, or even your retellings as well?

*IF* the players are people who love a challenge, and
*IF* the game is interesting, and
*IF* the players are people who work well together as teammates rather than rivals, and
*IF* they trust the DM, ...

... then yes, in my experience, such players will prefer a hard challenge. But even then, they often lose sight of that during the tough encounter.

My list of Rules for DMs includes the following:

What the players want today is a quick, easy victory. But what they will want tomorrow is to have brilliantly and valiantly turned the tables to barely survive a deadly encounter where it looked like they were all about to die.

Yeah, all those qualifiers certainly help me see why your rule felt… incomplete.

More to the point, different people enjoy different types of struggles. Some people won't enjoy the struggle at all.

I enjoy struggling with an impartial system, not with a "mother may i". For example, as a rule, I like utilizing an obscure rule that will let me tickle someone to make them stop holding their breath to winning by rule 0 Fiat.

Or to win by pulling out that wand we got 20 sessions ago, and hitting the "spam" button.

Or to win in clever ways that nobody understands, like Armus moving to protect someone with better defenses, or the Paladin walking up next to my character after he cast Protection from Evil (*I* missed that one at the time, making it one of my favorites).

But evenly-matched sides, where only clever tactics and the whims of Arangee make the difference between victory and defeat? I prefer that in my war games, not my RPGs.

I personally hate close battles. It feels like a failure state to me even on a win and I'll dwell on it for a long time to come.

The reason why is probability. If a fight comes down to making a single 50% roll, or there will be a TPK, That means that we will likely tpk within the next 3 encounters of similar difficulty.

If we have a 95% chance to win a battle, but we need to win 10 of them, then our chance of success becomes roughly a coin flip.

More than that however, winning because I got lucky just doesn't feel good to me. I didn't win because I was smart, or clever, or planned well. I won in spite of being too foolish to truly come up with a proper way to win.

Note that I am fine with running from fights. It means that we had a properly planned contingency for the situation (you can't escape in most systems otherwise) and we weren't risking a tpk. It's tpks that I don't enjoy.

Have other results of failure besides "TPK". It opens up a lot of potential.

To me a close fight shouldn't be defined by probabilities, but by tactics. Hoping you get lucky and needing to be good are two different things. The latter is fun. The former is basically helplessness.

Few people do enjoy TPKs.

I enjoy a well-deserved loss, even if it's a TPK.

I definitely want strategy and tactics to be far more effective than dice at determining the outcome. See also my love of "win buttons". See also the grognard motto of "if the dice come out, you've failed".

While pithy, I disagree with this as a general rule. You yourself lay out a set of pre-conditions for when players would enjoy it, but then the rule states it as something true for most/all players with no caveats - which it isn't, IME.

Part of this might be from two things:

First, if you get frustrated enough during the encounter, that frustration will be the most memorable thing about it, regardless of if it turned out well in the end. I remember one time when I had a string of bad luck, got pissed off, and visibly sulked about it. And that's just embarrassing. I could make excuses like I was underslept, and I didn't throw anything or yell at anyone, but at the end of the day I acted like an immature idiot, and that is what I remember about the fight (although it was a close fight that we ultimately won). It's not a good gaming memory, it's a lousy one.

Secondly, people will often apply a lot of cognitive bias to preserve their self-image. If someone did get to the stage of yelling at people over their own failure, they have two choices:
A) Accept that they acted badly and should be ashamed of themselves.
B) Double down on the belief that things were rigged against them and their anger was therefore appropriate.

And the more often this get brought up, and the more often they take that "double down" choice, the higher the stakes get. Now for them to admit they were wrong, they'd have to admit they're someone who holds a years-long grudge over their own mistake. Not likely. Hence the "more bitter over time".

Non-death stakes are fine, but they don't really take any sting out of defeat. Depending, they might make it worse, especially if the blame falls at all on the PCs' mistakes.

"You screwed up and died." Ok, bummer. Guess that's it for the character ... unless there's a way for them to get resurrected, because I'd be happy to keep playing them in that case.

"You screwed up and got the city destroyed." Immediate retirement time, I don't want to play that character any more, at all.

Interesting. Reminds me of a KotDT comic where someone stopped playing their favorite character.

Other than boot camp - tearing these players down until there's nothing left, them helping them rebuild better - is there any hope if Talakeal is in the situation of the "trained double-down"?

Talakeal

2021-07-17, 09:42 PM

And is that just your players of your games, or stories of other GMs, or even your retellings as well?

They definitely do it with other GMs, probably significantly more so, at least when I am in the room.

I am sure I do it to some extent, but I am a lot more likely to beat myself up over past failures.

For example, the big final battle in my first long term campaign, which happened 25 years ago now, was against the hobgoblin king and his elite retinue. He and his advisors (who all had class levels) slept in an invisibility circle, and when we ambushed them in the night we were totally bushwhacked by this. The thing is, we shouldn't have been, as our rogue had a gem of true seeing, we just forgot to use it, and turned what could have been an easy win into a bitter defeat. Now, the DM also made a ruling that screwed me over in that fight (I cast sticks to snakes before the battle, but he ruled that snakes couldn't run and therefore would be unable to keep up with us and get to the ambush spot on time); which, while realistic, really did hurt us. But that's not what I blame for the loss, and to this day I think back about how I was fundamentally playing a druid wrong, and how much more useful I could have been if I had given my magic items to the fighter (something a young gamer would never even consider!) and then stayed back providing support / summoning / and battlefield control rather than wading into melee in tiger form.

I enjoy struggling with an impartial system, not with a "mother may i". For example, as a rule, I like utilizing an obscure rule that will let me tickle someone to make them stop holding their breath to winning by rule 0 Fiat.

That would be nice, but RPG books can't possibly cover every single situation. That is kind of the advantage of having a human GM though; that tickling idea is an example of a brilliant plan that would probably work at most tables with a reasonable GM, but I can't think of any RPG that actually has tickling rules in the book.

I definitely want strategy and tactics to be far more effective than dice at determining the outcome. See also my love of "win buttons". See also the grognard motto of "if the dice come out, you've failed".

Or to win in clever ways that nobody understands, like Armus moving to protect someone with better defenses, or the Paladin walking up next to my character after he cast Protection from Evil (*I* missed that one at the time, making it one of my favorites).

But evenly-matched sides, where only clever tactics and the whims of Arangee make the difference between victory and defeat? I prefer that in my war games, not my RPGs.

Out of curiosity; what all do you consider tactics here? And what part specifically are you objecting to; the evenly matched, the tactics, the RNG, or all of them at once?

First, if you get frustrated enough during the encounter, that frustration will be the most memorable thing about it, regardless of if it turned out well in the end. I remember one time when I had a string of bad luck, got pissed off, and visibly sulked about it. And that's just embarrassing. I could make excuses like I was underslept, and I didn't throw anything or yell at anyone, but at the end of the day I acted like an immature idiot, and that is what I remember about the fight (although it was a close fight that we ultimately won). It's not a good gaming memory, it's a lousy one.

Secondly, people will often apply a lot of cognitive bias to preserve their self-image. If someone did get to the stage of yelling at people over their own failure, they have two choices:
A) Accept that they acted badly and should be ashamed of themselves.
B) Double down on the belief that things were rigged against them and their anger was therefore appropriate.

That's incredibly insightful, and honestly explains not only a lot of my player's behavior, but also a lot of conflicts I have had with friends and family away from the gaming table.

KorvinStarmast

2021-07-19, 10:12 AM

I thought everyone loved books that end with "and everybody dies. The end." Those of us raised on classical music know that in any opera by Wagner, if there is anyone left alive at the end it was a comedy. :smallbiggrin:

How the stakes of the fight are set up matters, too. If you know the hero isn't going to die, you can put something else up at risk that can believably be lost. Lost MacGuffins can also have ripple effects.

I can't think of any RPG that actually has tickling rules in the book. I'll wager two centavos that the D&D 3.x Book of Erotic Fantasy has tickling rules, but as I have not read it cover to cover I can't say for sure.

Out of curiosity; what all do you consider tactics here? You've been playing D&D for a long time. What do you mean when you say tactics? I have difficulty seeing a lack of clarity regarding the term, but I have been surprised before.

That's incredibly insightful, and honestly explains not only a lot of my player's behavior, but also a lot of conflicts I have had with friends and family away from the gaming table. Yep, it's one of those people things. :smallcool:

kyoryu

2021-07-19, 10:34 AM

Lost MacGuffins can also have ripple effects.

Well, sure. And someone else pointed out massive non-death results. Those can be a thing as well.

I mean, that's the thing with non-death stakes - you can go as severe or as mild as you want, based on what is appropriate for the game and the situation at hand and what makes the most sense.

Dooming the entire world to ruin because of a lost encounter early on is probably a bad call most of the time.

As far as ripple effects, a lot of that also depends on how you view the game/story/etc. If you've got a planned out story, then yeah, that can be hard. But if you don't, then in a lot of ways the ripples are the story. Cause and effect bouncing off of each other.

Quertus

2021-07-19, 11:44 AM

(something a young gamer would never even consider!)

My player could be accused of not knowing how to roleplay children, then :smallamused:

That would be nice, but RPG books can't possibly cover every single situation. That is kind of the advantage of having a human GM though; that tickling idea is an example of a brilliant plan that would probably work at most tables with a reasonable GM, but I can't think of any RPG that actually has tickling rules in the book.

Having rules for every situation would be nice, but that misses the point.

Having a human GM to adjudicate edge cases is also nice, but also misses the point.

Having a human GM to adjudicate edge cases, while nice, is explicitly *not* how I want to win a close fight.

Having rules for every possible edge case may be impossible, but having *enough* rules for edge cases that I can pull out an obscure rule for tickling causing the target to lose the "holding their breath" state (or any other instance of remembering an obscure rule that is applicable to the current situation) is how I like to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

Out of curiosity; what all do you consider tactics here? And what part specifically are you objecting to; the evenly matched, the tactics, the RNG, or all of them at once?

To be fair, I'm thinking in terms of CaW vs CaS here. I'm guessing (darn senility) that I was saying something about wanting the players to have the agency to set the difficulty of the encounter… by charging in blind, or scouting, or sending Gandalf off to the library, or whatever… and not receiving negative feedback for doing so beyond that provided by the physics engine.

As to my objections…

If I'm playing a war game, then the fight being evenly matched, and the outcome coming down to tactics chosen in the moment and the whims of Arangee is fine.

If I'm playing an RPG, that says nothing about the character (aside, perhaps, from them being an idiot). But if I'm invested in the character, then I want more control over the outcome than, "maybe I'll roll well" or "maybe I'll guess right".

Every potion I hoard is a chance it may be applicable, and I may be able to spend it to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Every obscure rule I learn is a chance that it may be applicable, and I may be able to use it to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

But, much like the grognard mantra of, "if the dice come out, you've failed", if the solution to a challenging fight is "mother, may I", that's a fail state - that's "does the GM want us to lose", not a victory worth anything.

That's incredibly insightful, and honestly explains not only a lot of my player's behavior, but also a lot of conflicts I have had with friends and family away from the gaming table.

Yep, it's one of those people things. :smallcool:

All my decades of trying to understand the aliens that surround me, and I don't get it. Anyone care to elaborate?

MrStabby

2021-07-19, 12:34 PM

For me a good fight is one in which I meaningfully contribute.

In an easy fight, whether or not I sit it out doesn't make a big difference. In a really tough fight my presence and actions can make the difference between TPK and survival. But toughness isn't enough.

If a fight is tough because I am playing a caster against magic resistant creatures then I still have no impact. If it is tough because I am playing a melee fighter and all enemies are flying, then the same.

But on the other hand it is about making a difference, not just survival. If I put enemies to sleep and capture them rather than kill them then the outcome is different (I.e. having prisoners) even if the party was never so much at risk.

KorvinStarmast

2021-07-19, 03:58 PM

But on the other hand it is about making a difference, not just survival. If I put enemies to sleep and capture them rather than kill them then the outcome is different (I.e. having prisoners) even if the party was never so much at risk. We had this happen Saturday. Very tough fight, my bard was mostly casting control spells, and it gave the damage dealers the chance to kill or capture the young dragon (one of five enemies). What I did enabled their choice, and I of course went along with "capture! The way my bard approached this was: "How often to you get to talk to a real live {evil} dragon and maybe work a deal of some kind?" It was added, bonus fun after a difficult combat.

PhoenixPhyre

2021-07-19, 04:54 PM

We had this happen Saturday. Very tough fight, my bard was mostly casting control spells, and it gave the damage dealers the chance to kill or capture the young dragon (one of five enemies). What I did enabled their choice, and I of course went along with "capture! The way my bard approached this was: "How often to you get to talk to a real live {evil} dragon and maybe work a deal of some kind?" It was added, bonus fun after a difficult combat.

One note--he was an adult, not a young.

And from my side of the table (as the DM), that wasn't a difficult fight at all. By the numbers? Sure (76,200 adjusted XP vs a daily budget of 54,000 XP, so something like 3.5xDeadly). As usual, the dice had...a strong sense of dramatic appropriateness[1]. I couldn't roll saving throws worth crap, and the party's dice were really hot.

Perception on the different sides of the table is certainly different, that's for sure.

[1] I've found that the dice frequently know who, narratively, should win the fight and go with that. Seriously, this was one of the party member's "backstory" fights, against his ex-wife[2] and (evil) twin brother. I believe he rolled 8 or so natural 20s, including a pair at advantage (both dice natural 20), letting him smite the living daylights out of the enemies. And his griffon was pretty darn strong as well.
[2] a total <bad word> who, in his backstory, had been super abusive and, as it turned out, had been cheating on him with his twin brother. And who, along with said brother, was working for the BBEG.

Talakeal

2021-07-19, 10:40 PM

You've been playing D&D for a long time. What do you mean when you say tactics? I have difficulty seeing a lack of clarity regarding the term, but I have been surprised before.

I just wanted to clarify where tactics stopped.

I am wondering if Quertus counts planning, information gathering, strategic resource allocation, picking the right time and place, setting up traps or magical contingencies, bringing allies, and carefully choosing who to engage, and other preparations which occur "off the battlemat" to fall under tactics as well, because if not I am not sure what all is left that he would like to decide the fate of the battle.

I assume from this context he only means his round to round decisions on the battlefield when he says tactics, but this could also be read in such a (imo far more problematic) way that he doesn't want tactics to matter at all, he simply wants to be so OP that he is guaranteed a win no matter how little thought he puts in (which, on my less charitable days, if often how I feel some of my players want it to be).

Jakinbandw

2021-07-20, 09:23 AM

I enjoy a well-deserved loss, even if it's a TPK.

I definitely want strategy and tactics to be far more effective than dice at determining the outcome. See also my love of "win buttons". See also the grognard motto of "if the dice come out, you've failed".

What do you do after you've had a tpk?

Also, win buttons. As a player I like them, but as a gm I see them as a failure. If there are win buttons then the only reason the pcs live is through NPC incompetence which isn't the type of game I want to make.

As for the game I'm working on, a tpk, if it happens, has the PCs self revive in a few months. This leaves the faction they run without effective leadership and give opposing nations time to build up and invade while the pcs are out of the picture. The world move on its apocalyptic trajectory with noone to stop it for a bit and things get worse.

The players can only truly die if their faction is entirely wiped out first.

Skrum

2021-07-20, 10:41 AM

MrStabby

2021-07-20, 10:56 AM

I hadn't really considered this one or the other until recently, but the group I'm with now it's made me think about it quite a bit. No offense to the OP's group, but the group I'm with is nowhere near as "bad" as that - hard encounters seem to be well-received. The part that's overcooking my grits a bit is character death. It's pretty obvious to me that no one wants their character to die (i.e., character death would not be fun and would be a strict reduction in their enjoyment of the game). This is entirely foreign to me, and somehow especially shocking 'cause we're all in our 20's and 30's and getting *that* attached to the character seems juvenile.

Some have said they don't mind if their character dies as long as it's a great storytelling moment, like against the BBEG. But that to me is barely any better, as it implies that the characters should have plot armor unless they're facing an Story Arc Boss. I don't care for this at all, especially considering the setting is, nominally, supposed to be a gritty, wild-west type of place.

Hmm. For me a good death doesn't need to be epic enemy, but it should reflect the character's story.

As a cleric devoted to healing, dying on a side quest to deliver healing is OK. I died in a way that reflects my character. If the same character dies on another PC's sidequest doing something that does not reflect their values then it sucks a bit more. The source of death might be dragons or goblins in either case but the focus is as much on why as on how.

KorvinStarmast

2021-07-20, 11:26 AM

One note--he was an adult, not a young.
Ooh, I guess I got lucky on that slow spell, legendary save not triggered? Man, I just recalibrated my idea of how lucky we were! :smalleek: (Hmm, I wonder if they had used a legendary save versus that first fireball from the sorc, I need to check up on adult black dragons now ... EDIT: Hilarious, I thought my 26 stealth roll would let me hide from that black dragon. Perception +11...blindsight 60 ft...passive Perception 21 He saw me the whole time! What's that character flaw of mine: "My pride will be my down fall!" yep, so proud of that stealth roll ... oopsie!)
Yeah, the paladin had a serious case of hot dice. and I was hot when I needed to be: those two counterspell rolls. Missing the save on the breath was, uh, me not being hot. :smalleek: Ouch, the acid, It burns, Precious! :smalleek:

@Talakeal:

I am wondering if Quertus counts planning, information gathering, strategic resource allocation, picking the right time and place, setting up traps or magical contingencies, bringing allies, and carefully choosing who to engage, and other preparations which occur "off the battlemat" to fall under tactics as well, because if not I am not sure what all is left that he would like to decide the fate of the battle. I include choosing where (terrain) to engage and having a rough plan, and rough back up plan, as included in party tactics. So too are deliberate attempts to shape the fight (control spells) and to synergize between various PC abilities. Round to round choices are also tactical in nature. (Whom to choose as allies, to me, seems to stray into strategy, but that's a soft boundary).
You and I seem to view tactics similarly enough, thanks for explaining.

PhoenixPhyre

2021-07-20, 11:52 AM

Ooh, I guess I got lucky on that slow spell, legendary save not triggered? Man, I just recalibrated my idea of how lucky we were! :smalleek: (Hmm, I wonder if they had used a legendary save versus that first fireball from the sorc, I need to check up on adult black dragons now ... EDIT: Hilarious, I thought my 26 stealth roll would let me hide from that black dragon. Perception +11...blindsight 60 ft...passive Perception 21 He saw me the whole time! What's that character flaw of mine: "My pride will be my down fall!" yep, so proud of that stealth roll ... oopsie!)
Yeah, the paladin had a serious case of hot dice. and I was hot when I needed to be: those two counterspell rolls. Missing the save on the breath was, uh, me not being hot. :smalleek: Ouch, the acid, It burns, Precious! :smalleek:

Due to the presence of other creatures in the fight (and my own forgetfulness), I wasn't actually using the Legendary actions/saves at all. Could have, which would have Nyx'ed[1] the slow.

[1] For those following along at home, that's a pun based on the paladin's ex-wife's name. Who died...messily. Including her dead body falling 120' to go splat.

KorvinStarmast

2021-07-20, 12:06 PM

Due to the presence of other creatures in the fight (and my own forgetfulness), I wasn't actually using the Legendary actions/saves at all. Could have, which would have Nyx'ed[1] the slow. And it saved the next round anyway, IIRC. A few of the others did not.

Including her dead body falling 120' to go splat. OK, now I have to do a song based on the REM song "Feeling Gravity's Pull" ... a bard's work never ends.

Mr Beer

2021-07-20, 07:21 PM

As a player and as a GM, I like close fights, occasionally, if it feels meaningful.

I absolutely detest 50/50 battles on a regular basis because

- Characters dying all the time is not fun for players.
- I generally prefer games where the characters are heroes not mooks, which doesn't work if everyone they meet is a match for them.
- There are no emotional stakes when the party gets into a lethal fight with some random encounter. It's not heroic or meaningful for Bilbo and the dwarves to get eaten by a bunch of trolls before they even get near Smaug.

You can see from the above if you enjoy Paranoia or some grimdank setting, then YMMV.

KorvinStarmast

2021-07-20, 11:11 PM

As a player and as a GM
Just a quick note: Paranoia isn't played as a campaign. :smallbiggrin:

Quertus

2021-07-21, 12:10 AM

I just wanted to clarify where tactics stopped.

I am wondering if Quertus counts planning, information gathering, strategic resource allocation, picking the right time and place, setting up traps or magical contingencies, bringing allies, and carefully choosing who to engage, and other preparations which occur "off the battlemat" to fall under tactics as well, because if not I am not sure what all is left that he would like to decide the fate of the battle.

I assume from this context he only means his round to round decisions on the battlefield when he says tactics, but this could also be read in such a (imo far more problematic) way that he doesn't want tactics to matter at all, he simply wants to be so OP that he is guaranteed a win no matter how little thought he puts in (which, on my less charitable days, if often how I feel some of my players want it to be).

Being so OP that I win no matter how little thought I put into it? No, that's backwards - I want to put so much thought into it, we win no matter how UP we are.

I want the things we do before the fight to obviate the need to even have the fight. (See also your "totally not like the Goonies" campaign)

Or, more to the point, I want the players to have the Agency to set the difficulty of the fight anywhere from "well beyond impossible" to "well beyond cakewalk" based on their actions before the fight. And replace the word "fight" with "challenge".

So, to answer your first question: I often use the words almost interchangeably, but here I mean "strategy" to mean the actions taken before the challenge that may turn it into a cut-scene victory (or cut-scene loss), or otherwise affect the difficulty, CaW style, in ways that CaS would deem "cheating", whereas I mean "tactics" to be in-the-moment actions of the ilk CaS would be fine with, and that war games are made of.

So, if I'm playing… Let's Make a Deal, and I put a tracking device on the grand prize before the show? That's strategy. If I know how math works? That's tactics.

So, yes, all the things you listed - planning, information gathering, strategic resource allocation, picking the right time and place, setting up traps or magical contingencies, bringing allies, and carefully choosing who to engage, and other preparations which occur "off the battlemat" - fall under strategy. Whereas the choice to Rapid Shot Full Attack and drop prone, vs Full Attack and free action drop bow and Quickdraw a spiked chain, vs Greater Manyshot and move to cover? That's tactics.

Both can have a large impact.

What do you do after you've had a tpk?

Plan the next adventure? See if there's anything for the players to learn?

Also, win buttons. As a player I like them, but as a gm I see them as a failure. If there are win buttons then the only reason the pcs live is through NPC incompetence which isn't the type of game I want to make.

… what?

I like Invisibility that has rules "you cannot be seen", not "+5 bonus stealth".

So that, if you're fighting Medusa, you turn her invisible, and you just pressed a win button of "Medusa *cannot* turn you to stone".

This has nothing to do with Medusa being incompetent. In fact, of she's competent and is using spiked pits or similar, it has a lot to do with reacting to her being competent, and not wanting to use blindfolds or other such that put the party at too great a disadvantage in handling her competent use of terrain.

Talakeal

2021-07-21, 01:31 AM

Being so OP that I win no matter how little thought I put into it? No, that's backwards - I want to put so much thought into it, we win no matter how UP we are.

I want the things we do before the fight to obviate the need to even have the fight.

I got that from your last response, I was just explaining my position to Korvin.

(See also your "totally not like the Goonies" campaign)

I actually am not quite sure if I understand how the analogy fits, but geeze, bringing up an off hand comparison I made what... seven years ago, now? You sound like one of my players.

So much for you supposed senility :)

Telok

2021-07-21, 10:54 AM

Just a quick note: Paranoia isn't played as a campaign. :smallbiggrin:

There's the option and support for it. I had two players keep bringing back Paranoia characters for more missions, and what's a campaign but a series of missions? Sort of like Pendragon isn't played as one-shots, but nothing is stopping you and it works fine.

MoiMagnus

2021-07-21, 12:35 PM

There's the option and support for it. I had two players keep bringing back Paranoia characters for more missions, and what's a campaign but a series of missions? Sort of like Pendragon isn't played as one-shots, but nothing is stopping you and it works fine.

I'd say there is a big difference in expectations.

I'd be ok to change of character at every single session of a series of missions (because each time, my character died, became a traitor that joined some of the faction, or was promoted to a position that make him inadequate for the following mission). I'd be quite pissed if the same was to happen during a campaign.

Similarly, in a campaign, I'd expect some value for the whole which is not simply the sum of its fragments. Like some feeling of progression. In a sequence of missions, if we obliterate the whole planet by mistake and that the GM just decided to ignore the previous mission (and have the planet still exist and everyone still alive), I might joke about it but I would not really care about this lack of continuity: "consequences" are problems to ignore later.

KorvinStarmast

2021-07-21, 12:40 PM

Telok

2021-07-21, 01:24 PM

I'd say there is a big difference in expectations.

I'd be ok to change of character at every single session of a series of missions (because each time, my character died, became a traitor that joined some of the faction, or was promoted to a position that make him inadequate for the following mission). I'd be quite pissed if the same was to happen during a campaign.

Please recall that a Paranoia character starts with six (may vary +/-1 or 2 by edition) clones and can buy or be rewarded with more. Every character starts in an illegal faction. And promotion in no way requires a change of duties (the Computer is insane, that helps with assignments). Treason also generally doesn't follow from one clone to the next, new clones are presumed innocent until accused and treason is not always punished by death.

There really is nothing stopping you from playing the same character ithrough a Paranoia campaign. Remember, the game is a dark comedy with mad science. You get mechanically rewarded for having fun and making people laugh. If it's funny then there's nothing stopping a character being uploaded in to a robot body, going all Frankenstein monster, bribing their way into using some else's clones, or stealing a malfunctioning cloning tank.

KorvinStarmast

2021-07-21, 03:19 PM

or stealing a malfunctioning cloning tank. I know a sorcerer who desperately wants one of these. :smallsmile: He's bugging me to figure out a way to learn the Clone spell (I am a lore bard, I think I need to wait for the Wish spell to do that, magical secrets) so that his play to overthrow a kingdom has a back up plan ...

Calthropstu

2021-07-21, 05:12 PM

I know a sorcerer who desperately wants one of these. :smallsmile: He's bugging me to figure out a way to learn the Clone spell (I am a lore bard, I think I need to wait for the Wish spell to do that, magical secrets) so that his play to overthrow a kingdom has a back up plan ...

A cloning tank? I wonder how you would drive one of those... I feel the motions would be repetitive.

LudicSavant

2021-07-22, 12:35 AM

Jakinbandw

2021-07-22, 08:37 AM

Plan the next adventure? See if there's anything for the players to learn?

… what?

I like Invisibility that has rules "you cannot be seen", not "+5 bonus stealth".

So that, if you're fighting Medusa, you turn her invisible, and you just pressed a win button of "Medusa *cannot* turn you to stone".

This has nothing to do with Medusa being incompetent. In fact, of she's competent and is using spiked pits or similar, it has a lot to do with reacting to her being competent, and not wanting to use blindfolds or other such that put the party at too great a disadvantage in handling her competent use of terrain.

When you say win buttons I think of things like forcecage +cloud kill. Sleep at first level. Things that other npcs could have access to that if npcs used them in a surprisw round (or got lucky with Initiative) would cause the pcs to just loose.

Invisibility on a Medusa isnt an I Win button anyway, because you have to still fight her, and she can target the mage. It nullifies one power of hers, but it doesn't instantly end the fight without issue.

(I'm assuming you you mean improved Invisibility, as to end normal Invisibility, all the Medusa would need to do is make a single attack.)

As for just moving on to the next adventure, do you remember characters that died? Like if I ran for you, and killed your character Quertus in a fair fight (against a party of 4 npc casters of equal level) would you want to bring him back for the next adventure, or would you be fine with him forever being dead?

KorvinStarmast

2021-07-22, 10:24 AM

A cloning tank? I wonder how you would drive one of those... It's remotely piloted, so you use a cellular device :smallbiggrin:

Quertus

2021-07-22, 04:33 PM

When you say win buttons I think of things like forcecage +cloud kill. Sleep at first level. Things that other npcs could have access to that if npcs used them in a surprisw round (or got lucky with Initiative) would cause the pcs to just loose.

Invisibility on a Medusa isnt an I Win button anyway, because you have to still fight her, and she can target the mage. It nullifies one power of hers, but it doesn't instantly end the fight without issue.

(I'm assuming you you mean improved Invisibility, as to end normal Invisibility, all the Medusa would need to do is make a single attack.)

By Playground convention, (D&D) Knock and Invisibility are "win buttons", because they "just work", as opposed to being represented by bonuses to rolls.

Also, I was speaking of Medusa and Invisibility generally, not in a D&D-specific context. D&D has a strange, downgraded form of invisibility that it pawns off as "Invisibility", then gives you the real stuff as "Improved Invisibility". (Except even that's a farce…).

If Dr. Strange used "win button hate" invisibility, whose only mechanic was, "grants a +5 bonus to stealth checks" on Medusa, he / his party would be turned to stone despite Medusa being invisible. But "win button", "real" Invisibility would, well, be a win button vs that power.

As for just moving on to the next adventure, do you remember characters that died?

Senility willing, yes.

Like if I ran for you, and killed your character Quertus in a fair fight (against a party of 4 npc casters of equal level) would you want to bring him back for the next adventure, or would you be fine with him forever being dead?

Honestly? In a fair fight, if they were all roleplayed correctly in accordance with their canonical representation, I think that the whole of the published non-deific NPC Wizards (with the exception of Elminster, who has too much deific mojo backing his capabilities) would lose to Quertus. As I suspect they would to most any high-OP epic Playground Wizards. Because, correct me if I'm wrong, but those NPCs don't have a forum hive mind worth of ideas, and, as a Determinator would say, they really don't have a clue how to play the game.

But, yes, many of my characters have died. None have been Resurrected. One came back as a ghost, one was Kenny, the rest have stayed dead. (Well, the rest that died fair and square. Some GMs make incompetent mistakes and retcon; others don't even do that.)

It's why I don't have many good, heroic characters any more - my cowardly and/or self-serving characters are (unsurprisingly) much more likely to live. (EDIT: and you can call it "survivor bias", that I tend to tell stories about the characters who lived. Or you can just note that I tend to play the character through more sessions if they survive.)

But, to answer the question more in the direction I think you intended… dangerous things are dangerous. I'm baffled by those who don't / can't comprehend that. Characters die. I'll get upset about *how* they died ("what do you mean, he had to die 'for the plot'?!"), not about the death itself.

Character death is… a pain to certain storylines, and (often) a pain to roleplay (both the ignorance of the new guy, and others' tendencies to forget that the same player sitting there now represents a whole new, different individual), so it's suboptimal, and to be avoided if possible. And it certainly curtails my exploration of whatever facet of humanity I was exploring via that character. But it's not the end of the world - well, not *this* world, at any rate! (Yes, I had a character die who had world-ending-plot information, that nobody knew was important until after he died. That *was* kinda the end of the world. Oops.)

Cluedrew

2021-07-22, 07:45 PM

By Playground convention, (D&D) Knock and Invisibility are "win buttons", because they "just work", as opposed to being represented by bonuses to rolls.I believe a "win button" is any option that, once chosen, cause you to win without any uncertainty. Note they can be situational (knock doesn't help you cross a large gap), have limited use or causes that keep you from choosing them all the time. All that really matters is that it removes all uncertainty.

Also theoretically and stat bonus that means the outcome of a check becomes certain could count but usually they are not because... that doesn't happen very often.

Quertus

2021-07-23, 11:43 AM

I believe a "win button" is any option that, once chosen, cause you to win without any uncertainty. Note they can be situational (knock doesn't help you cross a large gap), have limited use or causes that keep you from choosing them all the time. All that really matters is that it removes all uncertainty.

Also theoretically and stat bonus that means the outcome of a check becomes certain could count but usually they are not because... that doesn't happen very often.

On the one hand, it seems similar enough that I could respond, "that's what I said".

On the other hand, that makes it sound like a "framing" issue: if the challenge is, "unlock the door", Knock is a win button; OTOH, if the challenge is "sneak *silently* through the locked door", Knock is a fail, while (taking 20 on) Open Locks is a win button.

kyoryu

2021-07-23, 11:55 AM

On the one hand, it seems similar enough that I could respond, "that's what I said".

On the other hand, that makes it sound like a "framing" issue: if the challenge is, "unlock the door", Knock is a win button; OTOH, if the challenge is "sneak *silently* through the locked door", Knock is a fail, while (taking 20 on) Open Locks is a win button.

And really I like looking slightly bigger in terms of scope. The challenge isn't "unlock the door". It's "get the magic vase from the vault". Now Knock isn't a win button - it's the consumption of a (theoretically) limited resource so it can't be used later. Take 20 (Open Locks) isn't a win button either, because it takes time. Bypassing the door in another way may not be a win button because it might involve combat or other risks.

To me, that's a well-designed scenario. There's multiple approaches, all with their pros and cons, and a good amount of the gameplay is going to be figuring out which costs you can deal with.

Calthropstu

2021-07-23, 12:43 PM

PhoenixPhyre

2021-07-23, 01:22 PM

And really I like looking slightly bigger in terms of scope. The challenge isn't "unlock the door". It's "get the magic vase from the vault". Now Knock isn't a win button - it's the consumption of a (theoretically) limited resource so it can't be used later. Take 20 (Open Locks) isn't a win button either, because it takes time. Bypassing the door in another way may not be a win button because it might involve combat or other risks.

To me, that's a well-designed scenario. There's multiple approaches, all with their pros and cons, and a good amount of the gameplay is going to be figuring out which costs you can deal with.

Exactly. Reframing the challenges above the "single action" level helps a lot. Much more scope for agency and more opportunities to have granular results--"yes, you got the vase, but now everyone knows who did it." Or "you got the vase and framed someone else for doing it". It gives you the benefits of a more granular action-resolution system as well as other useful (to me) goodies while giving more chances for multiple people to get involved as well as reducing the number of win buttons possible.

I'll take option z. Nuke the entire dungeon from orbit, grab the broken vase and use "make whole."

And now the international ecological police are after you for flagrant environmental damage.

KorvinStarmast

2021-07-23, 02:37 PM

@PhoenixPhyre - in D&D terms, that's a whole lot of ticked off druids. :smallbiggrin:

PhoenixPhyre

2021-07-23, 02:53 PM

@PhoenixPhyre - in D&D terms, that's a whole lot of ticked off druids. :smallbiggrin:

Yup. And everyone else around.

RandomPeasant

2021-07-23, 03:06 PM

To me, that's a well-designed scenario. There's multiple approaches, all with their pros and cons, and a good amount of the gameplay is going to be figuring out which costs you can deal with.

Strongly agreed. Mostly what people mean when they say "win button" or "game breaker" is "thing I didn't think of" or even "thing that isn't what I thought of". If your challenge is solved by bypassing a single obstacle, it was probably never a terribly interesting challenge, even if none of your players happened to have an ability that was super-effective against that obstacle.

Quertus

2021-07-24, 12:03 PM

Strongly agreed. Mostly what people mean when they say "win button" or "game breaker" is "thing I didn't think of" or even "thing that isn't what I thought of". If your challenge is solved by bypassing a single obstacle, it was probably never a terribly interesting challenge, even if none of your players happened to have an ability that was super-effective against that obstacle.

This is an interesting take. Perhaps my love of win buttons stems from wanting to skip past these not terribly interesting bits quickly, to get to the good stuff?

And, perhaps, part of why I appreciate an easy win (or loss) over a close fight. Well, that, and they help to characterize the character: this is trivial for Sherlock Holmes / Batman / Hercules / Quertus.

Regardless, Knock and Invisibility are the classic Playground "win buttons", the tools that "win button hater" Playgrounders (ie, that subset of Playgrounders) traditionally direct their ire towards.

I want the things we do before the fight to obviate the need to even have the fight. (See also your "totally not like the Goonies" campaign).

I actually am not quite sure if I understand how the analogy fits, but geeze, bringing up an off hand comparison I made what... seven years ago, now? You sound like one of my players.

So much for you supposed senility :)

I remember "long ago" better than "yesterday".

As to how it fits… in your "(not like the) Goonies" campaign, the only valid solution was to obviate the fight, "Aragorn brings the dead" style.

A cloning tank? I wonder how you would drive one of those... I feel the motions would be repetitive.

In the Eye of Chaos, cloning tank drives you!

Cluedrew

2021-07-24, 12:18 PM

This is an interesting take. Perhaps my love of win buttons stems from wanting to skip past these not terribly interesting bits quickly, to get to the good stuff? [...] Regardless, Knock and Invisibility are the classic Playground "win buttons", the tools that "win button hater" Playgrounders (ie, that subset of Playgrounders) traditionally direct their ire towards.Going into detail would be its own thread, but I think a large part of the hate for win buttons actually comes from their role in caster/martial disparity in D&D. The problem with knock is not really that it is a win button, but it is a win button in a very specialized area that isn't the area of specialty for the character who possesses it. In fact it works in the area of specialty to another character (to my knowledge) has nothing comparable or superior to it in terms of ability to just force a door open.

PhoenixPhyre

2021-07-24, 12:36 PM

False God

2021-07-24, 01:43 PM

This is an interesting take. Perhaps my love of win buttons stems from wanting to skip past these not terribly interesting bits quickly, to get to the good stuff?

To contrast Cluedrew, my hate of "I win!" buttons comes from the DM side. I don't care if people skip the random encounters, the small fights, the locked doors. I do care when people skip the "important stuff" because they had an "I win!" button. In part because yes, I put a lot of work into that and it's annoying, but also in part because expedience often causes players to overlook things. "We skipped this big battle with one spell, therefore it wasn't actually important and nothing around here is important."

When players have to actually engage in the content, they become more involved with everything around it IMO.

When they don't, their eyes just glaze over and they say "Well what's next?"

This sentiment comes up when I'm a player too, but at least at that point I have the ability to interact with my surroundings, even while everyone else walks off.

RandomPeasant

2021-07-24, 07:26 PM

Calthropstu

2021-07-24, 08:43 PM

I just don't agree with that assessment of knock. Casting knock comes at a dramatic cost and doesn't do very much. You give up somewhere between a half and a quarter of your offensive firepower for the day (and you do it before you even know if you'll want to), and you open one door. How many secure areas can you think of that have only one locked door between them and the outside world? My bathroom has better security than that, and the only thing it's protecting is my dignity. knock isn't allowing one player to horn in on another player's specialty, it's providing multiple approaches to a problem that give different players opportunities to shine. Now, I think that you can make an argument that spellcasters have access to too many abilities like that, at least relative to mundanes, but singling out specific abilities as problematic generally misses the point (especially since everything after 3.5 has gone ahead and nerfed knock anyway).

People like having abilities. Having abilities is meaningful because it lets you do things that not having those abilities doesn't. There's certainly value in supporting outside-the-box thinking or nonstandard approaches, but there's also value in getting to say "because I have X, I can do Y".

It's going to sound somewhat rude, but it seems like you're focusing on the wrong things. Creating a big set-piece battle doesn't make it interesting or important. The battle needs to be something the players care about as a step towards achieving their goals. Maybe it secures a location or resource they need. Maybe the villain they hate is there. But if you just slap down a battle, especially one that can just be skipped, that isn't really all that interesting.

Close battles aren't as fun as when the mid-boss gets away, promising to get the pcs and their little dog too. Bonus props if they actually kill the dog.

There's something oddly satisfying to a gm when the creature they spent so much time making ends up wrecking the pc's **** then escaping with their loot.

DwarfFighter

2021-07-25, 06:18 AM

TLDR: In your experience, do players actually prefer tough battles were they struggle to pull through in the end, or do they prefer easy victories where they clearly outclass their opposition?

Necessity is the mother of invention, and I find it gratifying to turn a bad situation with an inspired play. I personally like that to play out during the fight, i.e. reacting to the circumstances, but I guess some players find enjoyment in experiencing that in the planning phase instead. I like for the fight to let the players exercise the abilities of their character, and that usually takes a few rounds.

That being said, the least enjoyable battle I took part in as a player was when one player one-shot the campaign bad guy on the first turn. I think it is telling that the rest of us were simply disappointed while he seemed really surprised that we didn't celebrate his achievement!

I guess my point here is that *winning* is secondary to *playing the game*.

-DF

NorthernPhoenix

2021-07-25, 08:01 AM

"Do people really enjoy close battles?" Well, it's all about context (that applies to everyone), but to me personally, it's all about genre emulation. Both on the player and DM ends of the spectrum. When i'm playing, i like to absolutely dunk on a random group of orcs, and when I'm DMing, i don't particularly mind if "my" group of orcs get utterly dunked on. But in an encounter or battle that narratively seems like it should be tough given the nature of the genre we're playing in (typically high fantasy or soft sci-fi, in my case), then that fight should be tough (or "close") and I'd be disappointed as either player or DM if it somehow turned out to not be that way.

Quertus

2021-07-25, 08:41 AM

Going into detail would be its own thread, but I think a large part of the hate for win buttons actually comes from their role in caster/martial disparity in D&D.

I'll believe that. I feel like, in my "why the hate for win buttons" thread, I identified that as one of several wrong-thinking reasons people who claim to hate win buttons have actually misidentified their issue, and misdirected their hatred.

That said, there were numerous *other* reasons - both valid and not - that people gave. And that's only counting the ones I *understood*. Not everyone has your patience and ability to do a deep dive, to really get to the heart of the issue. Or to explain things when I'm being dense :smallredface:

The problem with knock is not really that it is a win button, but it is a win button in a very specialized area that isn't the area of specialty for the character who possesses it. In fact it works in the area of specialty to another character (to my knowledge) has nothing comparable or superior to it in terms of ability to just force a door open.

The illusion of role protection is an issue - people don't respond well when their illusions are shattered.

NB: I've never seen someone actually cast knock at a 5e table.

However, the idea of "I can do your specialty better than you can, plus any number of other things better than specialists in those areas, plus a bunch of things only I can do" is...sub-optimal. It's why I strongly believe that "spell list is my only class feature" (ie wizards in 3e and 5e) is the worst design pattern for a class, hands down. And it feeds into the mentality that you need win buttons. Or buttons in general. That you need specific abilities to contribute to solving problems, instead of thinking of characters. And that's a mentality I strongly dislike.

Curiously, this wasn't an issue in oldschool grognard days. Yet "Wizard" (whatever name it carried through editions) was pretty much just "cast spells" for class features even then.

So *something else* must have changed. *Something else* must be responsible for this disturbing trend.

If only I had a button I could push to know the answer to the question "why?". :smallamused:

Talakeal

2021-07-25, 07:35 PM

Cluedrew

2021-07-25, 08:43 PM

To Quertus: For some reason I didn't feel like pulling out the quotes:
Win button hate: I'm not a fan of win buttons (see Talakeal's post for an example) but the fact they are tangled up in a bunch of (other?) issues certainly isn't helping their image.
Role-Protection: I think it is the asymmetry of the situation. The wizard can do a lot more to get in on the fighter's turf than the other way around.
Something Changed: Yeah, the number and verity of spells grew and the basic system had a lot of its limitations removed. Or so I have heard I wasn't there.

RandomPeasant

2021-07-25, 09:58 PM

I'll believe that. I feel like, in my "why the hate for win buttons" thread, I identified that as one of several wrong-thinking reasons people who claim to hate win buttons have actually misidentified their issue, and misdirected their hatred.

People are, generally, really good at identifying when there's a problem, pretty bad at identifying what the problem is, and absolutely awful at identifying how to fix the problem. Of course, it's easy to use that truth to overreact and reject any criticism of stuff you like as people misunderstanding the problem, but there are some absolutely wild takes out there about how "win buttons" or "Vancian Spellcasting" or whatever people's preferred bugaboo is ruins everything that don't reflect anything close to what the thing they're taking aim at actually is.

So *something else* must have changed. *Something else* must be responsible for this disturbing trend.

As with most of people's affection for AD&D, I think it's largely a matter of rose-tinted glasses, and the ruleset not getting the full force of the internet pointed at it. Most of the mechanical differences between AD&D and 3e are just things that are clunkier. If AD&D was the game you played with your buddies when you were first starting out, you're going to have fond memories of it. Those memories don't mean it was objectively higher quality any more than any of your other childhood memories represent things that were really objectively better than what you have access to today.

All of these are kind of silly and confusing, and would work much more smoothly if they were just large numerical bonuses. It also avoids the narrative disconnect of some ludicrous situations that absolute abilities might cause.

That only applies to a (fairly small) portion of win buttons. People describe teleport or speak with dead as "win buttons", and those aren't things that can coherently be turned into big bonuses (at least, not without radically changing the level and kind of abstraction the system uses). And even the "win buttons" that could be turned into big numeric bonuses lose something by doing that. The game is less interesting if knock is simply a big bonus to Open Lock and charm person a big bonus to Diplomacy. There's value to approaches that are genuinely different, even if existing implementations are flawed.

Many D&D modules have doors that are immune to knock.

First: not all versions of that are bad things. knock explicitly has things it doesn't do. It doesn't open gates. It doesn't open stuff that's tied shut by rope. Having defenses that reflect the limitations of offensive magic is good, and adds depth to the world.

That said, I do agree that "locking spell that beats knock" and "unlocking spell that beats locking spells that beat knock" and so on are kind of dumb. But I don't think the solution is to remove unlocking spells, or alter how they work. It seems better to do something like kick the dispute up to caster level. If you're an archmage, your arcane lock can stop an apprentice's knock, but another archmage could get through it (or maybe not, if you have some kind of specialty in security magic that makes your arcane lock harder to beat).

kyoryu

2021-07-25, 10:55 PM

kyoryu

2021-07-25, 11:27 PM

Going into detail would be its own thread, but I think a large part of the hate for win buttons actually comes from their role in caster/martial disparity in D&D. The problem with knock is not really that it is a win button, but it is a win button in a very specialized area that isn't the area of specialty for the character who possesses it. In fact it works in the area of specialty to another character (to my knowledge) has nothing comparable or superior to it in terms of ability to just force a door open.

Well what they other characters have is the ability to do it over and over again with no opportunity cost.

The issue becomes when your game is structured such that you're only going into a fairly small number of encounters per day, and so that opportunity cost is little, or when items that do it are trivially available.

NB: I've never seen someone actually cast knock at a 5e table.

However, the idea of "I can do your specialty better than you can, plus any number of other things better than specialists in those areas, plus a bunch of things only I can do" is...sub-optimal. It's why I strongly believe that "spell list is my only class feature" (ie wizards in 3e and 5e) is the worst design pattern for a class, hands down. And it feeds into the mentality that you need win buttons. Or buttons in general. That you need specific abilities to contribute to solving problems, instead of thinking of characters. And that's a mentality I strongly dislike.

Could not agree more on the "buttons" issue.

Curiously, this wasn't an issue in oldschool grognard days. Yet "Wizard" (whatever name it carried through editions) was pretty much just "cast spells" for class features even then.

So *something else* must have changed. *Something else* must be responsible for this disturbing trend.

If only I had a button I could push to know the answer to the question "why?". :smallamused:

One point of reference is that old school D&D (by the book, at least) did not have the presumption that you should be able to get any spell/item you want. Heck, there was a good chance you could not learn a given spell, and in fact never be able to learn it, even if you found a book or scroll to learn it from.

Such win buttons are worse when every caster can grab them at will.

Also, the megadungeon structure of play kind of pushed towards more encounters, rather than having a few set pieces. So resource management was a bigger issue, along with lots of other things. D&D has the baggage of having a ton of rules that were developed for a play structure that really isn't used much any more. And so a lot of balance of certain spells is designed around those uses, along with counter-balancing things.

People are, generally, really good at identifying when there's a problem, pretty bad at identifying what the problem is, and absolutely awful at identifying how to fix the problem.

100%.

As with most of people's affection for AD&D, I think it's largely a matter of rose-tinted glasses, and the ruleset not getting the full force of the internet pointed at it. Most of the mechanical differences between AD&D and 3e are just things that are clunkier. If AD&D was the game you played with your buddies when you were first starting out, you're going to have fond memories of it. Those memories don't mean it was objectively higher quality any more than any of your other childhood memories represent things that were really objectively better than what you have access to today.

Agreed. I also tend to think as said before that AD&D still works really well - but frankly not for what a lot of people use it for. It's a pretty great dungeon exploration game.

That only applies to a (fairly small) portion of win buttons. People describe teleport or speak with dead as "win buttons", and those aren't things that can coherently be turned into big bonuses (at least, not without radically changing the level and kind of abstraction the system uses). And even the "win buttons" that could be turned into big numeric bonuses lose something by doing that. The game is less interesting if knock is simply a big bonus to Open Lock and charm person a big bonus to Diplomacy. There's value to approaches that are genuinely different, even if existing implementations are flawed.

Teleport is actually a great example of what I'm talking about. In the megadungeon game it's a shortcut - a way to bypass a section of the dungeon, or to return back, at some cost in resources and some risk. The "teleport into stone" stuff works because it prevents it from being a get out of jail free card. It's a great example of a spell that works perfectly in the context for which it was originally designed, and starts to be at least semi game breaking outside of it.

BRC

2021-07-26, 10:34 AM

I'd say something like "Teleport" is a different issue than "Knock"

Knock is a "Win Button", especially before 5e, where investing in a given skill was a much bigger deal. You would spend points every level to be the best Lock Opener you could be, but you'll never be better than somebody with the Knock spell. Yes, it was better to have the Rogue do it than use the spell slot (Especially under prepared spellcasting, where casting Knock meant deciding earlier that day to prepare Knock rather than some other spell, so the cost of preparing Knock 2-3 times was actually quite high, and in a Megadungeon environment, cracking open 3 locks a day would be a slow day).

But from the Rogue's perspective it was "One of my specializations, the thing I have invested a decent portion of my character into doing, serves the purpose of saving some of the Wizard's resources to do other stuff".

Like "If I wanted to Open Doors, I could have played a second wizard, and just been the one to prepare Knock".

Teleport has no skill-check equivalent, but it leans into a different problem, which is Impact. The Wizard gets to throw the party across the world, saving weeks of in-game travel.
This isn't as much of a problem IMO, but it does send the message that some classes (Spellcasters) are allowed to be much higher-impact than others, especially as far as Utility is concerned.
Once you get to high levels, campaigns fall into two categories "Has a Wizard" and "Doesn't have a Wizard", and the two are pretty dramatically different.
The issue, and once again this wouldn't have been as much of an issue in a dungeon-crawl centric playstyle, is that a 5th level fighter and a 15th level Fighter have fairly similar options available to them to advance the party's goals when not "Adventuring". A 15th level wizard on the other hand, is a force of nature out of the dungeon as well as in, they can teleport the party, they can Fabricate weapons for the war against the Dark Lord, they can Scry to get information, Send messages to allies, and more.
A campaign can start to circle around the Wizard's spell list.

RandomPeasant

2021-07-26, 12:24 PM

The issue becomes when your game is structured such that you're only going into a fairly small number of encounters per day, and so that opportunity cost is little, or when items that do it are trivially available.

That's true, but I don't think that's really a good approach to game balance. Setting up the expectation that at-will classes will be balanced with daily classes because you have exactly four encounters per day (or two encounters per short rest, or whatever specific numbers) puts the game balance on unnecessarily fragile ground. Every adventure has to come with some kind of timer, or the optimal strategy becomes to rest after every encounter. That's a big design constraint, and it's one that's completely unnecessary if you just move away from the idea that some characters face attrition while others (largely) don't.

It's a great example of a spell that works perfectly in the context for which it was originally designed, and starts to be at least semi game breaking outside of it.

teleport isn't really game-breaking, at least in the abstract (3e teleport does have some issues, but they're tied up in complicated problems with the rest of the system). It's game-changing, but that's a different thing. teleport "breaks" the adventure "get to the other side of the Haunted Woods", but "being able to beat up an army of orcs single-handedly" does the same thing to the adventure "an army of orcs is invading". But those aren't the only adventures you can have. It's easy to design an adventure, even a dungeon crawl, that doesn't break in the face of teleport. You just have to think about teleport when you write the adventure. And I'm not terribly sympathetic to a position I see as boiling down to "I don't want to have to think about what PCs can do when I design adventures".

But from the Rogue's perspective it was "One of my specializations, the thing I have invested a decent portion of my character into doing, serves the purpose of saving some of the Wizard's resources to do other stuff".

I don't think that's a problem with knock. Consider the other side of things, for a Sorcerer or a Wizard who isn't going all out and putting every spell in the game in their spellbook. They spent resources to learn a spell, spent resources to cast that spell, and the effect was marginally better than an ability the Rogue's had since 1st level. The basic trade off of "this ability is at-will but less reliable" and "this ability is more reliable but has limited uses" is 100% fine. The issue is an attitudinal one where DMs tended not to create situations where Open Lock could shine, and non-casters didn't get new abilities at mid or high levels that made up for their 1st level abilities becoming obsolete.

A campaign can start to circle around the Wizard's spell list.

But that raises a question: should we solve that problem by changing the Wizard to have less impact, or changing other classes to have more?

BRC

2021-07-26, 12:33 PM

I don't think that's a problem with knock. Consider the other side of things, for a Sorcerer or a Wizard who isn't going all out and putting every spell in the game in their spellbook. They spent resources to learn a spell, spent resources to cast that spell, and the effect was marginally better than an ability the Rogue's had since 1st level. The basic trade off of "this ability is at-will but less reliable" and "this ability is more reliable but has limited uses" is 100% fine. The issue is an attitudinal one where DMs tended not to create situations where Open Lock could shine, and non-casters didn't get new abilities at mid or high levels that made up for their 1st level abilities becoming obsolete.

So here's a thing about Knock, and the reason I have a more visceral reaction to it than perhaps it deserves.

In 3.5 there was a class called the Beguiler, an illusion and enchantment focused spellcaster that broke all the rules. They had a far more limited spell list than wizards or sorcerers, but they cast like sorcerers, with their entire spell list Known.
On the beguiler spell list, was "Knock".
I GM'd for a few groups with Beguilers.

That seems like a pretty fixable problem, Don't make classes like Beguilers that break the rules/keep Knock of such spell lists (Beguilers had access to Open Lock anyway), but it drives the psychological effect home pretty well.

RandomPeasant

2021-07-26, 01:51 PM

So here's a thing about Knock, and the reason I have a more visceral reaction to it than perhaps it deserves.

In 3.5 there was a class called the Beguiler, an illusion and enchantment focused spellcaster that broke all the rules. They had a far more limited spell list than wizards or sorcerers, but they cast like sorcerers, with their entire spell list Known.
On the beguiler spell list, was "Knock".
I GM'd for a few groups with Beguilers.

That seems like a pretty fixable problem, Don't make classes like Beguilers that break the rules/keep Knock of such spell lists (Beguilers had access to Open Lock anyway), but it drives the psychological effect home pretty well.

I'm afraid I don't understand your point. Yes, the Beguiler steps on the Rogue's toes a bit. But that's because the Beguiler fills the same niche as a Rogue. It's true that a Beguiler probably makes a Rogue feel pretty redundant, but so does a second Rogue. If knock is a Win Button we should be restricting to protect the value of Open Lock, the Beguiler is exactly the class that should be getting it.

I also really don't understand why you say the Beguiler "breaks all the rules". It's just a Sorcerer that trades having a themed list for having more spells known, something I have never before seen anyone complain about and often seen declared a superior alternative to conventional spellcasters (I agree, though usually not for the same reasons as the people making the claim).

Batcathat

2021-07-26, 02:02 PM

I don't think that's a problem with knock. Consider the other side of things, for a Sorcerer or a Wizard who isn't going all out and putting every spell in the game in their spellbook. They spent resources to learn a spell, spent resources to cast that spell, and the effect was marginally better than an ability the Rogue's had since 1st level. The basic trade off of "this ability is at-will but less reliable" and "this ability is more reliable but has limited uses" is 100% fine. The issue is an attitudinal one where DMs tended not to create situations where Open Lock could shine, and non-casters didn't get new abilities at mid or high levels that made up for their 1st level abilities becoming obsolete.

I agree that the problem probably isn't with Knock (or any other individual spell). Rather, the problem is that the wizard has a few spells that can outshine the rogue, a few spells that can outshine the fighter and so on and so forth (not to mention quite a few spells far superior to anything any of them can do).

BRC

2021-07-26, 02:05 PM

I'm afraid I don't understand your point. Yes, the Beguiler steps on the Rogue's toes a bit. But that's because the Beguiler fills the same niche as a Rogue. It's true that a Beguiler probably makes a Rogue feel pretty redundant, but so does a second Rogue. If knock is a Win Button we should be restricting to protect the value of Open Lock, the Beguiler is exactly the class that should be getting it.

I also really don't understand why you say the Beguiler "breaks all the rules". It's just a Sorcerer that trades having a themed list for having more spells known, something I have never before seen anyone complain about and often seen declared a superior alternative to conventional spellcasters (I agree, though usually not for the same reasons as the people making the claim).

While Knock is bad in a vacuum (as an I-Win button) it's usually not THAT bad in the context of 3.5 vancian casting because the cost of preparing and casting Knock is so high. It's a situational spell, and so preparing or knowing it (as a sorcerer) is a pretty high cost.
It still doesn't feel good to know that, as a rogue, one of your primary class features is just saving the Wizard resources, but in practice you don't see Wizards sprinting around Knocking open every door before the Rogue can get their lockpicks out. This is because few wizards are going to bother prepping Knock when they have a rogue in the party. Lockpicks take a bit longer but keep working, a Wizard would need to know how many locked doors they'll need to open in a day.

The Beguiler breaks all the rules in that they have neither a Wizard's requirement for preparation, nor a Sorceror's limited spell list. While their spell list is more limited than "Every spell a Sorcerer could know", a given Beguiler is going to know far more spells than a Sorcerer, with a lot of them being exactly the sort of situational utility spells that Sorcerers usually don't spend a spell known slot on.
(for the record, a 20th level sorcerer knows 5 2nd level spells. A Beguiler knows 19 second level spells).

In the Beguiler's hands, Knock turns from a skill test and potentially interesting strategic exercise (it takes a while to open a locked door), into a pure test of "Do you want to spend the resource to make this problem go away". The purest form of an I-Win button. Having run a few campaign with Beguilers, locked doors become a trivial obstacle, because it's not even so interesting as a skill test to pick one.

I agree that the problem probably isn't with Knock (or any other individual spell). Rather, the problem is that the wizard has a few spells that can outshine the rogue, a few spells that can outshine the fighter and so on and so forth (not to mention quite a few spells far superior to anything any of them can do).

Precisely, the Wizard can choose to outperform any of the other classes if they so choose. The only reason they don't is that they've got better, wizard-only things to do.

For me, it's a question of "how should PC's be solving problems". Spells like Knock indicate that one of the acceptable answers is "Spend a spell slot to make the problem go away" with no further mechanics, which is something I dislike on principle, even if it's usually not that bad in practice, it puts any other method of solving the problem against "Spend a Spell Slot" as a solution, with the only downside being that you can't spend that spell slot on something else.

farothel

2021-07-26, 02:25 PM

Strongly agreed. Mostly what people mean when they say "win button" or "game breaker" is "thing I didn't think of" or even "thing that isn't what I thought of". If your challenge is solved by bypassing a single obstacle, it was probably never a terribly interesting challenge, even if none of your players happened to have an ability that was super-effective against that obstacle.

In our group we really enjoy (both as player and as GM) a well thought out way to get through an obstacle, even (actually especially) if the GM didn't think of it.

Precisely, the Wizard can choose to outperform any of the other classes if they so choose. The only reason they don't is that they've got better, wizard-only things to do.

Totally agree. I've played quite a few casters in the past 20+ years of roleplay, and I don't think I've ever even considered the Knock spell. Why would you spend your precious few spell slots on something one of your party members does at will. It might take a bit longer, but even then. And should the rogue fail in opening a door, there's still the fighter (or barbarian) with the battle-axe to have a go. In our group they have between them so far managed to open all doors I know of and the caster is free to do other stuff.

We also have this unwritten rule that whatever shenanigans the players think of, the NPCs can eventually do as well. If you want to make a character that has these 'save or die' spells, expect to come up at some point against an enemy who does the same to you. Especially at higher levels, you will have a reputation which your enemies can know about and prepare against (not every time of course, but from time to time).

kyoryu

2021-07-26, 03:03 PM

icefractal

2021-07-26, 03:56 PM

For me, it's a question of "how should PC's be solving problems". Spells like Knock indicate that one of the acceptable answers is "Spend a spell slot to make the problem go away" with no further mechanics, which is something I dislike on principle, even if it's usually not that bad in practice, it puts any other method of solving the problem against "Spend a Spell Slot" as a solution, with the only downside being that you can't spend that spell slot on something else.I've seen this perspective before, and I'm curious of the reason. If it was "cast Knock vs some kind of interactive puzzle" then sure, but it's generally "mark off a spell vs roll a d20 (or not, if your skill is high enough) vs say that you're bashing the door down" - none of those are particularly exciting.

There is the problem of overshadowing, but IME, if there's someone who already has the skill, people don't tend to cast Knock - because why pay resources and chant audibly to do something that could be done quieter and for free? And if the locks are generally too high DC to pick ... then it would suck to focus on that skill regardless of whether Knock existed.

I do think that "opens locks and disarms traps" is way too narrow a focus for a class, when other options are things like "be a champion of Good" or "be the master of nature" or "do illusions and other trickery". Luckily the Rogue isn't limited to just that in most editions, but that does seem to be the memetic view of them. On a micro-level, I like that Pathfinder merges Open Lock into Disable Device, a much broader skill with more types of utility.

Quertus

2021-07-26, 05:04 PM

IMO the problem with win buttons is escalation.

For example, in 3.5 there was a feat that let your fire spells ignore immunity to fire.

Warhammer and Magic both have “always strike first” abilities, but also abilities that strike before always strikes first.

Many D&D modules have doors that are immune to knock.

All of these are kind of silly and confusing, and would work much more smoothly if they were just large numerical bonuses. It also avoids the narrative disconnect of some ludicrous situations that absolute abilities might cause.

What really large numeric bonus works better than "ignore immunity to fire"?

Not that I'm sure "I can burn Demons / Fire Elementals" is a concept that should exist, mind you, but, if it should, what big numbers are better than that simple statement?

Let's say we go the "big numbers" route. So now The Seer" needs big numbers to view distant places. And we need to figure out just *how* big, creating penalties for seeing through stone and lead, let alone resolving issues of being able to see the sun.

And if we do this, his ability is no different than what Sherlock Holmes has to spot clues. So The Seer can spot clues, and Holmes can see through walls.

And both of them can probably beat the stealth bonus from Invisibility, so they both turn to stone from an invisible Medusa.

Is that really what you want?

I prefer win buttons, and logical interactions of meta-tags.

Something Changed: Yeah, the number and verity of spells grew and the basic system had a lot of its limitations removed. Or so I have heard I wasn't there.

The 1st level Wizard went from 1 spell to around 5. The adventuring day went from 20-50 encounters to around 4. Casters went from losing their spells if hit automatically, and until the next round, to only maybe losing their spells, and only if they are hit exactly when casting them. (EDIT: the Wizard went from generally random spell access from scrolls found as random loot drops to getting to pick free spells on level-up)

Sure.

But why would that make the Fighter say, "I don't have 'tickle' or 'tell joke' as a button to push on my character sheet, so there's no way I could possibly make anyone laugh. Unlike the Wizard, who gets Tasha's Hideous Uncontrollable Laughter."?

I'm not following the logical progression here.

People are, generally, really good at identifying when there's a problem, pretty bad at identifying what the problem is, and absolutely awful at identifying how to fix the problem. Of course, it's easy to use that truth to overreact and reject any criticism of stuff you like as people misunderstanding the problem, but there are some absolutely wild takes out there about how "win buttons" or "Vancian Spellcasting" or whatever people's preferred bugaboo is ruins everything that don't reflect anything close to what the thing they're taking aim at actually is.

Agreed. This is why, in ages past, I created my "why the hate for win buttons?" thread, to try to understand people's reasoning.

Some of it was (often legitimate) dislike of caster/martial disparity, simply being mislabeled / misidentified as hatred for win buttons. But most of it wasn't.

As with most of people's affection for AD&D, I think it's largely a matter of rose-tinted glasses, and the ruleset not getting the full force of the internet pointed at it. Most of the mechanical differences between AD&D and 3e are just things that are clunkier. If AD&D was the game you played with your buddies when you were first starting out, you're going to have fond memories of it. Those memories don't mean it was objectively higher quality any more than any of your other childhood memories represent things that were really objectively better than what you have access to today.

This assumes incorrectly that 2e wasn't played yesterday. Some of the things I enjoyed (although I can't remember any off the top of my head, so let's pretend… pacman and licorice were among them) I have to ask myself what the draw was, but 2e? No, it is still my favorite system.

No, it's not higher quality. Yes, it could afford to be cleaned up a little (without substantively changing anything). But it put fun first.

That only applies to a (fairly small) portion of win buttons. People describe teleport or speak with dead as "win buttons", and those aren't things that can coherently be turned into big bonuses (at least, not without radically changing the level and kind of abstraction the system uses). And even the "win buttons" that could be turned into big numeric bonuses lose something by doing that. The game is less interesting if knock is simply a big bonus to Open Lock and charm person a big bonus to Diplomacy. There's value to approaches that are genuinely different, even if existing implementations are flawed.

That said, I do agree that "locking spell that beats knock" and "unlocking spell that beats locking spells that beat knock" and so on are kind of dumb. But I don't think the solution is to remove unlocking spells, or alter how they work.

It seems better to do something like kick the dispute up to caster level. If you're an archmage, your arcane lock can stop an apprentice's knock, but another archmage could get through it (or maybe not, if you have some kind of specialty in security magic that makes your arcane lock harder to beat).

OK, so, I agree with those first two parts: I think that the game is better with win buttons as their own thing, rather than lumped in as bonuses to other things. I think that the game benefits from being multidimensional.

I similarly agree that escalating wars of "my infinity is bigger than your infinity" are generally dumb. Although I have played and will play such games - it's why Quertus, my signature academia mage for whom this account is named, knows (and knows counters for (and counters for the counters for (and… (no, he never had the *need* to play the game at the level he does - he just got bored one day, and was looking for something to do, and decided to play the game of "inventing counters" with himself)))) at least a half a dozen different ways to conceal magic.

But I don't think that reducing the game to a flat, "check power" is the right answer, either. I think that Invisibility should always win, no matter how powerful the caster trying to Look, unless their Look spell explicitly interacts with Invisibility's tags.

So a Power Level 100 Wizard casting their Uber Clairvoyance spell? It *still* won't see through the most trivial Invisibility, because it's not designed to See The Unseen, it's designed to See Other Places. And their Invisibility spell? It'll be pierced by a novice's See The Unseen (or defeated by a muggle with wits and a bag of flour).

Actually, I prefer explicit permissions/denials to just doing things with increasing/decreasing bonuses. To each their own.

One point of reference is that old school D&D (by the book, at least) did not have the presumption that you should be able to get any spell/item you want. Heck, there was a good chance you could not learn a given spell, and in fact never be able to learn it, even if you found a book or scroll to learn it from.

Such win buttons are worse when every caster can grab them at will.

Hmmm…

So, I'm a big fan of the random access of bygone days. Two different casters were different, dagnabbit!

On the other hand, having some choice is nice as a "win button" for my "favorite" minigame of, "how do we make *this* group of characters work?".

OK, I love that minigame, and choice obviates the need for something that I look forward to. That's another reason that came up in my "why the hate for win buttons" thread.

So people who like the idea of casters getting to choose their spells (or characters choose their gear)? They love win buttons, whether they realize it or not. :smallbiggrin:

But I can see why people would look at it as an "advantage" of newer editions of D&D, that characters get to choose their spells and gear, rather than being in part defined by them.

icefractal

2021-07-26, 05:35 PM

The adventuring day went from 20-50 encounters to around 4.
...
the Wizard went from generally random spell access from scrolls found as random loot drops to getting to pick free spells on level-upI think one thing driving both of these is having less free time to game leading to less tolerance for things that eat up a lot of time.
Like - I don't have time to go through 20 random characters before I get one that works, just let me play that from the start. I don't have time to play through dozens of ablative fights to maintain the right balance, just make it work correctly with fewer.

Although that is admittedly a balancing act - I do think the pacing and "feel" suffers when you cut out everything except the closest, most dramatic fights. But 20-50 encounters with maybe half of them being fights still sounds like an excessive amount.

But why would that make the Fighter say, "I don't have 'tickle' or 'tell joke' as a button to push on my character sheet, so there's no way I could possibly make anyone laugh. Unlike the Wizard, who gets Tasha's Hideous Uncontrollable Laughter."?Because those sound not at all plausible unless you're playing a Toon-style game? I'm not one for demanding gritty realism, but telling someone a joke, even a very fun one, isn't likely to produce much laughter if it happens mid-fight, and overwhelming laughter that prevents doing anything else even less so. The spell is basically dosing them with magic laughing gas / Joker venom, it's not just throwing a small pie. :smalltongue:

And conversely, casting THL at someone would generally be considered hostile - it's not a good way to make friends, whereas an actual joke might be.

RandomPeasant

2021-07-26, 06:44 PM

I agree that the problem probably isn't with Knock (or any other individual spell). Rather, the problem is that the wizard has a few spells that can outshine the rogue, a few spells that can outshine the fighter and so on and so forth (not to mention quite a few spells far superior to anything any of them can do).

I disagree with that framing of the problem, because it implies that the issue is the existence of abilities that allow players to directly do things rather than the existence of classes that don't have those abilities. That's the path to 4e, and that's not a place I have any interest in going again.

It still doesn't feel good to know that, as a rogue, one of your primary class features is just saving the Wizard resources

But that's not a remotely accurate assessment of the situation. Open Lock isn't "one of your primary class features", it's an ability you get at 1st level instead of "pick pockets" or "have connections in the local underworld" or "know how much gems are worth". It's not even the only ability you get like that, as the Rogue gets 8 base skill points and many will have at least a modest INT score. If your perspective on that is "my primary class feature is saving the Wizard resources" and not "one tenth of my character's backstory is as good as a combat-winning spell", I think that's a problem with your perspective.

While their spell list is more limited than "Every spell a Sorcerer could know", a given Beguiler is going to know far more spells than a Sorcerer, with a lot of them being exactly the sort of situational utility spells that Sorcerers usually don't spend a spell known slot on.

Sure. But at the same time, the Sorcerer has access to a lot of powerful spells the Beguiler doesn't whether that's BFC (black tentacles, web, acid fog), utility (teleport, scrying, contact other plane), blasting (fireball, cone of cold, meteor swarm), or game breaking nonsense (planar binding, polymorph, wish). I certainly disagree with the assessment some people have that says the Beguiler is markedly less powerful than the Sorcerer, but it doesn't really "break the rules" so much as "play by a different set of rules", in the same way that a Binder and a Warblade do different things without either being problematic.

In the Beguiler's hands, Knock turns from a skill test and potentially interesting strategic exercise (it takes a while to open a locked door), into a pure test of "Do you want to spend the resource to make this problem go away".

But if you don't have another option, how is the strategic exercise interesting? "Do I spend the resource to go faster here but not have a resource later" is an interesting question. "I open the lock by using Open Lock, because we need to get through the door and that's the only ability we have that gets us through the door" is not.

I don't have time to go through 20 random characters before I get one that works, just let me play that from the start.

High attrition gameplay is also incompatible with in-depth character building. I think there's validity to "churn through characters until you get one that sticks" as a gameplay paradigm, but it requires that character generation be incredibly simple. Simple to the point where you aren't even picking things like "skills" or "backgrounds" or "specific abilities" at first level. And a lot of people would like characters that are more complicated than that, even setting the time constraints aside.

Cluedrew

2021-07-26, 06:54 PM

Well what they other characters have is the ability to do it over and over again with no opportunity cost.I know, in fact I think I might know just about every common point in caster/martial disparity at this point. I really sunk my teeth into it, started several (long) threads, but eventually hit the point that I stopped seeing new points.

"]I prefer win buttons, and logical interactions of meta-tags.
[...]
The 1st level Wizard went from 1 spell to around 5. The adventuring day went from 20-50 encounters to around 4. Casters went from losing their spells if hit automatically, and until the next round, to only maybe losing their spells, and only if they are hit exactly when casting them. (EDIT: the Wizard went from generally random spell access from scrolls found as random loot drops to getting to pick free spells on level-up)

Sure.

But why would that make the Fighter say, "I don't have 'tickle' or 'tell joke' as a button to push on my character sheet, so there's no way I could possibly make anyone laugh. Unlike the Wizard, who gets Tasha's Hideous Uncontrollable Laughter."?I'm not following the logical progression here.What logical progression do you think I'm saying there is? You just commented that it felt like something else must have changed between editions of D&D, I pointed out that something did any you agreed. I'm not saying the changes were the logical progression of the system or anything.

Also: You are arguing for win buttons but also being real hard on players who want a fighter to have more well defined, win button-like, abilities. If it works for a wizard why not a fighter? Should we start another caster/martial disparity thread?

PhoenixPhyre

2021-07-26, 10:59 PM

If it works for a wizard why not a fighter?

Personally, I'm in the camp (probably composed of me, myself, and I) that says it doesn't work for the wizard. That the wizard is the worst designed class in either 5e or 3e. In large part because they have this opportunity-cost (almost) free "I do everything" by pushing a button. Spell slot, win game (hyperbole alert).

But I'll step off that soapbox.

Batcathat

2021-07-27, 12:51 AM

I disagree with that framing of the problem, because it implies that the issue is the existence of abilities that allow players to directly do things rather than the existence of classes that don't have those abilities. That's the path to 4e, and that's not a place I have any interest in going again.

Abilities that do things are great. Abilities to do all the things are boring and impossible to balance (well, I suppose we could create a system where all the classes can do all the things but personally I would find that very boring and bland).

Talakeal

2021-07-27, 05:22 AM

What really large numeric bonus works better than "ignore immunity to fire"?

Not that I'm sure "I can burn Demons / Fire Elementals" is a concept that should exist, mind you, but, if it should, what big numbers are better than that simple statement?

Let's say we go the "big numbers" route. So now The Seer" needs big numbers to view distant places. And we need to figure out just *how* big, creating penalties for seeing through stone and lead, let alone resolving issues of being able to see the sun.

And if we do this, his ability is no different than what Sherlock Holmes has to spot clues. So The Seer can spot clues, and Holmes can see through walls.

And both of them can probably beat the stealth bonus from Invisibility, so they both turn to stone from an invisible Medusa.

Is that really what you want?

I prefer win buttons, and logical interactions of meta-tags.

Ok, let's use Warhammer as an example.

In that game, whoever has the higher Initiative score strikes first. Simple.

But then, whoever charges goes first regardless of initiative. Unless they are charging into cover, in which case they go last regardless of initiative. Or their opponent's have pikes, which allow you to go first when charged. Warhammer 40,000 also have grenades which negate both charging and cover.

Then great weapons make you always strike last regardless of initiative.

Then elves have a racial rule that allows them to always strike first. Some magic items grant their bearer a similar ability.

Likewise, some races always strike last, and some magical curses cause you to always strike last.

So, now, we have three problems:

You need to create a priority system if both sides have abilities that make them strike first / last, or if they have both rules, which gets more complex and harder to remember as long as the game goes on.

Second, Initiative itself is worthless as you rarely get into situations where it matters, to the point where in eighth edition initiative let you reroll attacks if you would strike first anyway.

Third, as power creep came along, you got rules trying to top other rules; so you would get items that made you "Gain always strike first and lost always strike last. And your opponent gains always strikes last and loses always strikes first." or "You always strike first regardless of any other factors." And of course, who knows what happens when these rules meet one another?

You also get the same weirdness you get in 5E D&D with advantage and disadvantage not stacking, but that is a whole other jar of birds.

IMO it would have been much more elegant and easier for everyone involved to just have all of those things work as modifiers to the initiative score.

But, again, we might just be using "win button" differently as it has very little bearing on your examples of scrying detectives or invisible medusa.

Quertus

2021-07-27, 11:39 AM

I do think the pacing and "feel" suffers when you cut out everything except the closest, most dramatic fights.

Seems very relevant to this thread.

And I agree.

Because those sound not at all plausible unless you're playing a Toon-style game? I'm not one for demanding gritty realism, but telling someone a joke, even a very fun one, isn't likely to produce much laughter if it happens mid-fight, and overwhelming laughter that prevents doing anything else even less so. The spell is basically dosing them with magic laughing gas / Joker venom, it's not just throwing a small pie. :smalltongue:

And conversely, casting THL at someone would generally be considered hostile - it's not a good way to make friends, whereas an actual joke might be.

What logical progression do you think I'm saying there is? You just commented that it felt like something else must have changed between editions of D&D, I pointed out that something did any you agreed. I'm not saying the changes were the logical progression of the system or anything.

Wow, have I ever thoroughly failed at communication with both of you. Let me try again.

@icefractal, what you're saying has nothing to do with my post - literally, as it has to do with the topic of conversation, not my comments on it.

So, the topic of conversation is players who cannot think beyond the buttons on their character sheets. My "Fighter who cannot figure out any way to make someone laugh, because he has no 'make people laugh' buttons to push" is simply an example of the topic of conversation.

And more specifically, the conversation is about a claim regarding the *cause* of this phenomenon.

@Cluedrew, the "logical progression" I am looking for had nothing to do with different editions, it's simple logic, like "the house is on fire, therefore we are getting burned" or "4e was terrible, therefore Wizards lost a lot of its players to Pathfinder". You can follow the logic from one sentence to the next. (Yes, even if they aren't separate sentences. But you can still follow what I'm saying, right?)

But "things changed in 3e, therefore players now only look for buttons to push"? I can't follow that, and I can't ask future game designers to learn valuable lessons from that.

Yes, 3e casters have numerous advantages over 2e casters, and I attempted to enumerate detail uh, "briefly mention" the ones my senile mind could remember.

But I cannot draw the line from any of them to "and therefore people no longer try to tell jokes to make people laugh, or otherwise interact with the fiction outside explicit buttons on the character sheet".

I mean, if you can be like, "Quertus, duh, it's obviously that, in any game where Wizards don't instantly lose their ability to cast spells when hit, nobody will ever attempt to do anything that isn't a button ever again in that system", by all means, point out what I've missed.

But I do not see the logical connection, the logical progression of thought that produces "the changes between 2e Wizards and 3e Wizards caused the modern trend of players who only interact with the game through explicit buttons listed on their character sheets".

Also: You are arguing for win buttons but also being real hard on players who want a fighter to have more well defined, win button-like, abilities. If it works for a wizard why not a fighter? Should we start another caster/martial disparity thread?

Pardon my senility, but I do not remember taking this stance. Care to quote / explain what you're interpreting this way?

Ok, let's use Warhammer as an example.

In that game, whoever has the higher Initiative score strikes first. Simple.

But then, whoever charges goes first regardless of initiative. Unless they are charging into cover, in which case they go last regardless of initiative. Or their opponent's have pikes, which allow you to go first when charged. Warhammer 40,000 also have grenades which negate both charging and cover.

Then great weapons make you always strike last regardless of initiative.

Then elves have a racial rule that allows them to always strike first. Some magic items grant their bearer a similar ability.

Likewise, some races always strike last, and some magical curses cause you to always strike last.

So, now, we have three problems:

You need to create a priority system if both sides have abilities that make them strike first / last, or if they have both rules, which gets more complex and harder to remember as long as the game goes on.

Second, Initiative itself is worthless as you rarely get into situations where it matters, to the point where in eighth edition initiative let you reroll attacks if you would strike first anyway.

Third, as power creep came along, you got rules trying to top other rules; so you would get items that made you "Gain always strike first and lost always strike last. And your opponent gains always strikes last and loses always strikes first." or "You always strike first regardless of any other factors." And of course, who knows what happens when these rules meet one another?

You also get the same weirdness you get in 5E D&D with advantage and disadvantage not stacking, but that is a whole other jar of birds.

IMO it would have been much more elegant and easier for everyone involved to just have all of those things work as modifiers to the initiative score.

But, again, we might just be using "win button" differently as it has very little bearing on your examples of scrying detectives or invisible medusa.

Is it wrong that the Warhammer you described sounded brilliant? :smallamused:

No, seriously.

So, let's ignore the "Gain always strike first and lost always strike last. And your opponent gains always strikes last and loses always strikes first." Because I suspect that that's the answer to my question of, "… where do we see this in MtG?".

So, you've got a bunch of creatures fighting each other. And the question you want to answer is, "in what order is damage assigned?".

Fair question.

And one answer is, "it's assigned all at once, order doesn't matter". This is how most MtG combat is resolved, as well as how Battletech and Chaos Overlords work.

And that's a perfectly valid answer. But let's say that we're not satisfied with that for our system, that we want "who goes first" to be an interesting minigame.

2e D&D balanced ("balanced") smaller weapons strike faster, but for less damage.

And that's… fine.

But let's say that we realize that the purpose of polearms was to strike first (especially against a charge? Or just period?), and we want our system to faithfully emulate that.

In fact, that's our driving goal: that our system faithfully emulates - or, at least, "really feels like" - the idea in our heads.

So, if we decide that charging characters should strike first, except against polearms? We could say that, or we could give Charging charterers +X initiative, and polearms +2X initiative. For simplicity, let's say X=10 is sufficient to guarantee the results we want.

Both sound almost equal easy so far, right?

But then we decide that "cover" should affect initiative, because charging at a group that has cover seems dumb - at least as dumb as charging polearms. So, on the one hand, we could say, "charging cover makes you go last"; on the other hand / in the other system, we would say, "charging cover gives you -20 initiative (on top of the +10 for charging)". Or we could change charging to say, "grants +10 initiative, unless charging into cover, which grants -10 initiative".

But what if the people charging are wielding polearms? They'll win initiative over defenders with polearms, and follow the "normal" initiative rules (whatever those are) when charging into cover. Is this the results we want? Is this how we picture fights working?

Maybe yes, maybe no. If it's not, we probably need to revise the initiative system when the book with "cover" comes out.

Let's say we like polearms charging polearms winning, but want polearms charging cover to lose. Well, when "cover" comes out, we just give "charging into cover" a -20 penalty (that *replaces* the normal cover bonus), and bang, our system works just like we envision it.

Then our next book comes out with grenades. We know that we want grenades to, well, to negate cover (because throwing grenades into cover, we can hit you before we enter your defensive position? Really, I thought that the proper response to grenades was to take cover… shows what I know), but we can't just *say* that, because we're dedicated to encoding math.

So, we modify the initiative rules to say that charging grants +10 initiative, unless charging into cover without grenades, at which point you take a -20. Or we encode grenades as granting +30 initiative, usable only when charging into cover.

Is this really any better than making the decision tree that says…

Win initiative if charging (unless against polearms without polearms) (or into cover without grenades)

Else

Lose initiative if charging into polearms and/or into cover

Else

Follow the "normal" initiative rules (whatever those are)

I'm not seeing the numbers method as advantageous over the flowchart method. You have to encapsulate the same data either way - and numbers are much more prone to the unexpected interactions of polearms charging polearms, or Sherlock seeing through walls.

(EDIT: and, IMO, "grenades grant +30 initiative" just isn't as obviously connected to their function as, "ignores the cover bonus"; that is, I find your words much more evocative than my numbers.)

kyoryu

2021-07-27, 11:46 AM

I'm not seeing the numbers method as advantageous over the flowchart method. You have to encapsulate the same data either way - and numbers are much more prone to the unexpected interactions of polearms charging polearms, or Sherlock seeing through walls.

The numbers method feels more universal/systemized, which has an appeal to some folks.

I suspect both methods have edge cases where they produce weird results. Though, in my experience the numbers-based ones tend to get weirder faster.

Calthropstu

2021-07-27, 11:55 AM

Seems very relevant to this thread.

And I agree.

Wow, have I ever thoroughly failed at communication with both of you. Let me try again.

@icefractal, what you're saying has nothing to do with my post - literally, as it has to do with the topic of conversation, not my comments on it.

So, the topic of conversation is players who cannot think beyond the buttons on their character sheets. My "Fighter who cannot figure out any way to make someone laugh, because he has no 'make people laugh' buttons to push" is simply an example of the topic of conversation.

And more specifically, the conversation is about a claim regarding the *cause* of this phenomenon.

@Cluedrew, the "logical progression" I am looking for had nothing to do with different editions, it's simple logic, like "the house is on fire, therefore we are getting burned" or "4e was terrible, therefore Wizards lost a lot of its players to Pathfinder". You can follow the logic from one sentence to the next. (Yes, even if they aren't separate sentences. But you can still follow what I'm saying, right?)

But "things changed in 3e, therefore players now only look for buttons to push"? I can't follow that, and I can't ask future game designers to learn valuable lessons from that.

Yes, 3e casters have numerous advantages over 2e casters, and I attempted to enumerate detail uh, "briefly mention" the ones my senile mind could remember.

But I cannot draw the line from any of them to "and therefore people no longer try to tell jokes to make people laugh, or otherwise interact with the fiction outside explicit buttons on the character sheet".

I mean, if you can be like, "Quertus, duh, it's obviously that, in any game where Wizards don't instantly lose their ability to cast spells when hit, nobody will ever attempt to do anything that isn't a button ever again in that system", by all means, point out what I've missed.

But I do not see the logical connection, the logical progression of thought that produces "the changes between 2e Wizards and 3e Wizards caused the modern trend of players who only interact with the game through explicit buttons listed on their character sheets".

Pardon my senility, but I do not remember taking this stance. Care to quote / explain what you're interpreting this way?

Is it wrong that the Warhammer you described sounded brilliant? :smallamused:

No, seriously.

So, let's ignore the "Gain always strike first and lost always strike last. And your opponent gains always strikes last and loses always strikes first." Because I suspect that that's the answer to my question of, "… where do we see this in MtG?".

So, you've got a bunch of creatures fighting each other. And the question you want to answer is, "in what order is damage assigned?".

Fair question.

And one answer is, "it's assigned all at once, order doesn't matter". This is how most MtG combat is resolved, as well as how Battletech and Chaos Overlords work.

And that's a perfectly valid answer. But let's say that we're not satisfied with that for our system, that we want "who goes first" to be an interesting minigame.

2e D&D balanced ("balanced") smaller weapons strike faster, but for less damage.

And that's… fine.

But let's say that we realize that the purpose of polearms was to strike first (especially against a charge? Or just period?), and we want our system to faithfully emulate that.

In fact, that's our driving goal: that our system faithfully emulates - or, at least, "really feels like" - the idea in our heads.

So, if we decide that charging characters should strike first, except against polearms? We could say that, or we could give Charging charterers +X initiative, and polearms +2X initiative. For simplicity, let's say X=10 is sufficient to guarantee the results we want.

Both sound almost equal easy so far, right?

But then we decide that "cover" should affect initiative, because charging at a group that has cover seems dumb - at least as dumb as charging polearms. So, on the one hand, we could say, "charging cover makes you go last"; on the other hand / in the other system, we would say, "charging cover gives you -20 initiative (on top of the +10 for charging)". Or we could change charging to say, "grants +10 initiative, unless charging into cover, which grants -10 initiative".

But what if the people charging are wielding polearms? They'll win initiative over defenders with polearms, and follow the "normal" initiative rules (whatever those are) when charging into cover. Is this the results we want? Is this how we picture fights working?

Maybe yes, maybe no. If it's not, we probably need to revise the initiative system when the book with "cover" comes out.

Let's say we like polearms charging polearms winning, but want polearms charging cover to lose. Well, when "cover" comes out, we just give "charging into cover" a -20 penalty (that *replaces* the normal cover bonus), and bang, our system works just like we envision it.

Then our next book comes out with grenades. We know that we want grenades to, well, to negate cover (because throwing grenades into cover, we can hit you before we enter your defensive position? Really, I thought that the proper response to grenades was to take cover… shows what I know), but we can't just *say* that, because we're dedicated to encoding math.

So, we modify the initiative rules to say that charging grants +10 initiative, unless charging into cover without grenades, at which point you take a -20. Or we encode grenades as granting +30 initiative, usable only when charging into cover.

Is this really any better than making the decision tree that says…

Win initiative if charging (unless against polearms without polearms) (or into cover without grenades)

Else

Lose initiative if charging into polearms and/or into cover

Else

Follow the "normal" initiative rules (whatever those are)

I'm not seeing the numbers method as advantageous over the flowchart method. You have to encapsulate the same data either way - and numbers are much more prone to the unexpected interactions of polearms charging polearms, or Sherlock seeing through walls.

(EDIT: and, IMO, "grenades grant +30 initiative" just isn't as obviously connected to their function as, "ignores the cover bonus"; that is, I find your words much more evocative than my numbers.)

Why do I feel I just read a programming language tutorial?

BRC

2021-07-27, 11:58 AM

I think it comes down to, let's call it "Rules Complexity" vs "Execution Complexity"
Goal: Charges go first, except against Polearms or people in cover, unless the person charging has a grenade or other cover-ignoring weapon.

Under the Flowchart system you say

"Attacks resolve in initiative order. Chargers resolve first, unless the target of the charge has a polearm or is in cover, in which case the defender goes first, unless the attacker has a grenade.

Under the "Number" system you say: "Attacks resolve in initiative order, highest to lowest"
and in the Charging rules you say: "Charging gives +20 initiative against Exposed (not in cover) enemies"

And then in the Polearm rules you say "+40 initiative when defending against a charge"

And in the Grenade rules you say "The target of this attack is considered Exposed"

And so resolving charging with a grenade against a bunch of pikemen in cover requires consulting 4 different rules before learning that the Pikemen go first, but it keeps the core "initiative" rules simple and easy to process for when you're just having your Axemen (initative 3) fight Swordsmen (initiative 5).

Which one to use depends on how many edge cases need to be accounted for with which frequency.
If 90% of your attacks are fairly straightforward, but there are some weird edge cases, you want to use Numbers.

If a decent portion of your attacks involve some special priority rule, you want to use flowchart.

Magic is a good example of a Flowchart game: Damage resolves simultaneously, Unless one side has first strike.
And then "This card has super mega first strike" is a special rule on the card itself, rather than built into the core game.

Why do I feel I just read a programming language tutorial?
Because you basically did. Programming and game design have a lot in common.

RandomPeasant

2021-07-27, 12:25 PM

Honestly, the Warhammer thing sounds less like "rules that function by absolute allowances/disallowances are bad" and more like "rules that aren't thought out in advance and try to layer new conditions into a system that wasn't designed to be extensible are bad". Grenades, for example, really should not need special interactions with charging. The polearm charges thing seems like an awkward attempt to handle attacks of opportunity. Overall, my instinct looking at the rules as described is not to say "this just needs to be normalized into numbers" but "this needs to be burned down and replaced by something that was planned out in advance for the cases I want it to cover".

In large part because they have this opportunity-cost (almost) free "I do everything" by pushing a button. Spell slot, win game (hyperbole alert).

How is that not an opportunity cost? I can understand the position that simply going "expend resource, solve problem" is boring (though I think you take it farther than justifiable), but saying that it's anything close to "opportunity-cost free" seems to be in complete defiance of the facts.

Abilities that do things are great. Abilities to do all the things are boring and impossible to balance (well, I suppose we could create a system where all the classes can do all the things but personally I would find that very boring and bland).

Well, spells aren't really "abilities that do all the things". (Almost) every spell has some relatively limited functionality that does a specific thing. knock unlocks a door. charm person makes someone your friend. plane shift takes you to another world. teleport takes you a long distance in this world. But knock doesn't do anything in a social encounter, and teleport is useless if your destination is on the Elemental Plane of Fire. Maybe having all those abilities at once is a problem, but it's really hard for me to see how it's a bigger problem than having none of them. Even if the Wizard has a wider range of potential options than the Rogue or the Fighter, comparative advantages can easily keep them in the game as long as they have some options (and those options aren't simply worse than the Wizard's).

Batcathat

2021-07-27, 12:33 PM

Maybe having all those abilities at once is a problem, but it's really hard for me to see how it's a bigger problem than having none of them. Even if the Wizard has a wider range of potential options than the Rogue or the Fighter, comparative advantages can easily keep them in the game as long as they have some options (and those options aren't simply worse than the Wizard's).

Yeah, maybe it's an issue when some classes can do almost anything and outperform other classes even in their supposed specialties. And who ever said that the alternative was having no abilities? I absolutely think that a hypothetical balanced system should lift up some classes in addition to pushing down others.

And as I alluded to earlier, it's not just about balance. A wizard with spells that can do anything is rather flavorless from a mechanical perspective. Forcing them to specialize would make them more balanced and more interesting (That's obviously very subjective, but so's pretty much anything in this discussion).

RandomPeasant

2021-07-27, 01:01 PM

Yeah, maybe it's an issue when some classes can do almost anything and outperform other classes even in their supposed specialties. And who ever said that the alternative was having no abilities? I absolutely think that a hypothetical balanced system should lift up some classes in addition to pushing down others.

How you frame the argument influences the solutions you'll come to. If you focus the conversation on "the Wizard is too good", that pushes the conversation towards nerfing the Wizard. If you focus the conversation on "the Fighter is not good enough", that pushes the conversation towards buffing the Fighter. And I think to a large degree, the latter is a more productive tack.

I also think the framing of the "can do almost anything and outperform other classes even in their supposed specialties" catastrophizes the problem to a degree that's unhelpful. It's true that the Wizard can out-fight a Fighter, but that has less to do with the fact that the Wizard's combat self-buffs are too good and more to do with the fact that the gap between those classes is really, really big. At a given level of optimization, a Gish Wizard is going to be less effective than a dedicated caster Wizard. Now, I'll acknowledge that's not terribly comforting for the Fighter, as he's outclassed either way, but I do think it's important to understanding and solving the problem (for example, I think not understanding the differences in power between various approaches to Wizard-ing are why many suggestions for blanket nerfs to the Wizard end up incentivizing broken strategies).

(Also: the focus on "the Wizard can do anything" bothers me, because the Wizard really can't. In the overwhelming majority of campaigns, the cost of scribing things into your spellbook is a real constraint for Wizards, and mean that they merely do a sufficiently broad range of things to be effective in most circumstances. It's the Druid and the Cleric who really cause problems here, because they actually can wake up tomorrow and prepare exactly the spell that solves exactly this adventure with zero warning or opportunity for even a stringent DM to veto. But I think on some level these conversations are more about clusters of classes than specifically the Wizard and the Fighter, so it's not a terribly important point.)

But as far as things go, comparative advantage is a real thing, and it means that you genuinely don't need everyone to have explicitly-protected niches for characters not to step on each-other's toes. Consider a party with a Cleric, a Wizard, a Dread Necromancer, and a Beguiler. It's true that the Wizard and the Cleric can both do necromancy. It's true that the Wizard has access to (almost) all the spells on the Beguiler's list. It's even true that the Wizard can pull out some healing, through things like planar binding and that the Cleric could use anyspell to provide arcane utility. Yet for the most part, they aren't going to do that. Because the Dread Necromancer is better at Necromancy than the other characters. And the Cleric is better at healing. And the Beguiler is better at navigating social situations. Roles are implicitly protected, because that's the optimal way to use resources.

Now, that's not perfect, and it relies in part on fuzzy social things that you can't entirely guarantee. But personally, I think that party works better and is more interesting than one that's balanced around classes like the Fighter and the Rogue (or even the Warblade), so I think that paradigm is a better place to start than the low end is.

And as I alluded to earlier, it's not just about balance. A wizard with spells that can do anything is rather flavorless from a mechanical perspective. Forcing them to specialize would make them more balanced and more interesting (That's obviously very subjective, but so's pretty much anything in this discussion).

I think that's absolutely a fair argument. I think that the Dread Necromancer is a better class than the Wizard even completely outside of any balance concerns. But I think that argument is almost never the one that people who talk about the Wizard being broken put forward, and while I'm sympathetic to it, I'm still skeptical that the overall effect of moving based on those people's complaints will be positive.

BRC

2021-07-27, 01:40 PM

I think a lot of the reason this is a perennial discussion is the nature of the Wizard in a Vacuum.

The Theoretical Wizard is a class that can do anything, better than classes that can do, like, three things. If you pick a given simple problem in D&D (With some exceptions), there's usually an answer for how a Wizard would be the best person to deal with it, due to their expansive spell list.
Pick a lock? Wizards have Knock. Deal Damage? Wizards can bypass damage altogether with Save-or-Lose spells, and if that fails, Fireball, Disentegrate, ect.
Get into secure places? Invisibility, spider climb, fly, dimensional door, all that and more!

Now, at the table, any given wizard is going to be constrained by a thousand factors, but it's hard to construct such situations in the hypothetical.

The Fighter can always deal damage, the Rogue can always pick a lock. The Wizard may be able to do either of those things depending on how recently they had a good lie-down, what they thought they had to do today, and what they think they're going to need to do before their next naptime.

But the question is "Who solves this problem better, a Fighter, or a Wizard" not "A fighter, or a wizard who has gone through 2 moderate encounters, is holding a bunch of spell slots for an expected escape-under-fire before the next long rest, and habitually makes sure they always have Mage Armor, Feather Fall, and Invisibility prepared even if they don't have specific plans to use them that day."

There's also the difference of the DM perspective vs the Player perspective.

From a DM perspective trying to design obstacles, a lot of it comes down to "What is going to be trivialized by the Wizard bringing the right spells", while from a Player perspective, it's rarely an issue when the Wizard spends a spell slot to overcome something. It's not interesting, but you rarely mind.

Batcathat

2021-07-27, 02:10 PM

How you frame the argument influences the solutions you'll come to. If you focus the conversation on "the Wizard is too good", that pushes the conversation towards nerfing the Wizard. If you focus the conversation on "the Fighter is not good enough", that pushes the conversation towards buffing the Fighter. And I think to a large degree, the latter is a more productive tack.

It's true that framing the argument is important but I would personally have it both ways in this case. I don't want the wizard nerfed to the fighter's level but nor do I want the fighter buffed to the wizard's.

(Also: the focus on "the Wizard can do anything" bothers me, because the Wizard really can't. In the overwhelming majority of campaigns, the cost of scribing things into your spellbook is a real constraint for Wizards, and mean that they merely do a sufficiently broad range of things to be effective in most circumstances. It's the Druid and the Cleric who really cause problems here, because they actually can wake up tomorrow and prepare exactly the spell that solves exactly this adventure with zero warning or opportunity for even a stringent DM to veto. But I think on some level these conversations are more about clusters of classes than specifically the Wizard and the Fighter, so it's not a terribly important point.)

Indeed. We could probably replace "wizard" with "druid" and "fighter" with "rogue" in most of these arguments without changing much.

But as far as things go, comparative advantage is a real thing, and it means that you genuinely don't need everyone to have explicitly-protected niches for characters not to step on each-other's toes. Consider a party with a Cleric, a Wizard, a Dread Necromancer, and a Beguiler. It's true that the Wizard and the Cleric can both do necromancy. It's true that the Wizard has access to (almost) all the spells on the Beguiler's list. It's even true that the Wizard can pull out some healing, through things like planar binding and that the Cleric could use anyspell to provide arcane utility. Yet for the most part, they aren't going to do that. Because the Dread Necromancer is better at Necromancy than the other characters. And the Cleric is better at healing. And the Beguiler is better at navigating social situations. Roles are implicitly protected, because that's the optimal way to use resources.

Sure, I agree that a class based system should have both specialists and jack-of-all-trades type classes. I do think wizards are generally too powerful to fill that role though. If we base the power curve on them being decent but not great in all areas, the actual specialists have to be quite ridiculously good.

Telok

2021-07-27, 03:43 PM

The Fighter can always deal damage, the Rogue can always pick a lock.

Unfortunately not true in all systems and/or at all times.

A weaponless D&D fighter in, say 5e, is "damage" equal to an unarmed high strength wizard without spells, and the rogue can't do anything to a lock without a specific set of tools. D&D these days being heavily a "is there a rule explicitly allowing me to..." system.

NorthernPhoenix

2021-07-27, 05:24 PM

quinron

2021-07-27, 06:03 PM

My problem with "i win buttons" in DnD from the Dm side is that they function (or are expected to function by at least a significant minority of the community, even today) in situations where they narratively shouldn't. There's nothing wrong with magic spells (or other powers) being "i win" buttons against small town prison doors or orc bandits, this provides needed moments of catharsis and/or heroism, but the games very often have these spells be just as powerful or close too against "The Vault of Kings" or "The Dragon Lord". Now, you can change this when you DM, but i think the rules should do more to bake this expectation into the core game.

It was mentioned that having nothing but close battles is frustrating, and I'd agree, but i don't think most DnD (or similar) games do enough to provide clear mechanical delineation for hard and easy "moments" as we can reference from narrative. Too often, i find the games set up the rules so that either everything can be made easy, or everything will be hard.

The alternative being that, for example, every single high-value vault has a permanent anti-magic zone around it to avoid being automatically opened by a single knock spell. Which quickly ends up spiraling into the kind of "powerful magic is ubiquitous" fare that many people seem to love in settings like FR but which I find incredibly uninteresting. I'd much rather just have knock spells only work on locks with a DC up to a certain level; that seems like a simple, elegant solution.

RandomPeasant

2021-07-27, 06:53 PM

From a DM perspective trying to design obstacles, a lot of it comes down to "What is going to be trivialized by the Wizard bringing the right spells", while from a Player perspective, it's rarely an issue when the Wizard spends a spell slot to overcome something. It's not interesting, but you rarely mind.

I think both of these perspectives stem to a large degree from the fact that other classes don't have these capabilities.

On the DM side of things, the fact that it's just the Wizard (or spellcasters in general) with these types of capabilities makes it easy to look at things in terms of "how do I stop people from blowing up my plot" instead of the (in my view) more productive view of "how do I write adventures that are appropriate for the capabilities of the party". Because most classes don't have anything like teleport, it's easy to look at the Wizard as an outlier and say "teleport breaks the game", when I think the more accurate view is to accept that "travel a long distance" is simply not a good challenge for a party of 9th level characters.

For the players, the Wizard solving a problem feels boring because (in a lot of cases) the only tool the party has for that problem is to point the Wizard at it. teleport is a powerful strategic movement ability, but it's not the optimal solution for every single travel-related problem (though it is at least arguably good enough early enough that it crowds out interesting trade-offs). However, the Rogues and Fighters of the world don't bring anything to the table for a challenge like that, meaning the party defaults to using the Wizard's teleport. That makes what could be an interesting decision with meaningful choices into "push button, solve problem", and feeds into the DM side of the problem by making these challenges seem uninteresting.

Sure, I agree that a class based system should have both specialists and jack-of-all-trades type classes. I do think wizards are generally too powerful to fill that role though. If we base the power curve on them being decent but not great in all areas, the actual specialists have to be quite ridiculously good.

I think there are a few things you should consider on that front.

First, I just don't think it's accurate that specialists need to be "quite ridiculously good" to keep up with the Wizard. The gap between the Wizard and the lesser full casters is really not all that big. The Spirit Shaman and the Sorcerer are worse than the Wizard and the Druid, but not to such a degree that those classes can't keep up or even sometimes be MVP in a party of Wizard-tier classes. And some of those classes are specialists. The Dread Necromancer is genuinely better at commanding a big horde of zombies than a Wizard or Cleric is. If that's what you want to do, you should play a Dread Necromancer. The issue is more that 3e spreads over a big power band, so there are relatively few classes that compete appropriately with any given class.

Second, I think to some degree talking about "power level" is kind of pointless. Power is inherently contextual. The Wizard isn't "powerful" in some objective sense, it's powerful relative to the expected opposition. And one of the nice things about 3e D&D is that challenges have numbers attached to them, so if you tune the power up you can just move the numbers around. The important thing isn't really the power level per se, but play patterns. So you don't want to ask "do you want the power level of characters to be more like the Wizard or the Fighter". You want to ask "do you want characters to play more like the Wizard or the Fighter". Because the power level you want is always going to be "whatever the power target is", so the fact that any given class is above or below that in some other context shouldn't really be relevant.

Third, I think you overrate the degree to which the Wizard is inherently a jack-of-all-trades. The Wizard (and here I mean the Wizard specifically) is customizable. It's true that you can pick up every single spell and scribe them all into your spellbook. But that really isn't as practical as people think, and in practice the Wizard's spell list ends up matching the needs of the party. And you need to think carefully before eliminating that, because if you don't have some character who can adaptively fill out their ability suite from a very wide range, you need every character to have access to a much wider range of problem-solving tools than they do currently. Otherwise, you'll inevitably end up with parties where characters don't have the abilities they need to solve the problems they face.

My problem with "i win buttons" in DnD from the Dm side is that they function (or are expected to function by at least a significant minority of the community, even today) in situations where they narratively shouldn't.

I disagree with that. Setting aside the perils of applying narrative reasoning to TTRPGs (in short: not everyone has the same view of the narrative as you), I think that you're missing what the existence of those abilities communicates. It's not that knock "applies when it narratively shouldn't", it's that certain narratives aren't appropriate for a character with knock. And that's okay. Different people like different things, and different character belong in different contexts. The stories you can tell about Indiana Jones aren't the stories you can tell about Superman, in either direction. That doesn't make Indiana a bad character, and it doesn't make Superman a bad character. It makes them different characters. And that's a good thing, because you can tell more stories that way.

Squire Doodad

2021-07-27, 08:19 PM

I think both of these perspectives stem to a large degree from the fact that other classes don't have these capabilities.

On the DM side of things, the fact that it's just the Wizard (or spellcasters in general) with these types of capabilities makes it easy to look at things in terms of "how do I stop people from blowing up my plot" instead of the (in my view) more productive view of "how do I write adventures that are appropriate for the capabilities of the party". Because most classes don't have anything like teleport, it's easy to look at the Wizard as an outlier and say "teleport breaks the game", when I think the more accurate view is to accept that "travel a long distance" is simply not a good challenge for a party of 9th level characters.

For the players, the Wizard solving a problem feels boring because (in a lot of cases) the only tool the party has for that problem is to point the Wizard at it. teleport is a powerful strategic movement ability, but it's not the optimal solution for every single travel-related problem (though it is at least arguably good enough early enough that it crowds out interesting trade-offs). However, the Rogues and Fighters of the world don't bring anything to the table for a challenge like that, meaning the party defaults to using the Wizard's teleport. That makes what could be an interesting decision with meaningful choices into "push button, solve problem", and feeds into the DM side of the problem by making these challenges seem uninteresting.

Hmm, do you have any ideas on how to make Fighters and the like have more things to bring to the table?
For transporation, you could probably build a set of synergy relating to riding. Say, when in a village or larger settlement, Rogues can always take an hour and "find" a single horsecart of normal size and storage capacity that the party can then buy for a nominal cost/steal without anyone noticing (depending on whether it's a Good or Evil party member). Meanwhile, when Fighters are driving a horse cart, they give an extra 1 mph per level on a horse and make it able to run for 1 extra hour without rest for the first level and every three levels thereafter; this has no negative consequences on the horses, though it cannot take effect during a horserace. So Rogues can consistently find a means of transportation, and Fighters can make the transportation more efficient.
Similar effects can be devised for other methods of transport (Rangers instinctively known how to read star maps and winds, letting them roll a D10 to take 2% to 20% of the time off of the sailing trip; Artificers can improve mechanical vehicles in-transit, bracing it against ambushes and actually netting the party some cash, and so on).

The issue here though is that while some players may make use of this, especially in a low-magic setting, Teleport is just to the point and very effective. Instead of "we can use the Rogue and Fighter to find a cart and rush us to Landonsburg by tomorrow evening instead of next week and save the Baron from being executed!" you get "we can use the Wizard to teleport directly to Landonsburg by lunchtime today!".

Quertus

2021-07-27, 08:48 PM

Why do I feel I just read a programming language tutorial?

Because you basically did. Programming and game design have a lot in common.

Lol. I use my words oddly at times, but that bit is what I tend to refer to as "thinking" - something very few people (programmers or otherwise) seem capable of doing. When I grumble at work that people can't think, I'm (usually) complaining that no one is able to actually, systematically break a problem down into anything reasonable and remotely resembling what they are actually trying to solve.

Curiously, I was actually more than anything trying to *fail* at thinking - or, rather, I was trying very hard not to think very hard about the problem. Because I *wanted* the unplanned, ill-conceived, likely-to-have-errors feel. My hope in doing so was that it would encourage people to think (normal usage) about how both systems might fail, and what fixing them might look like.

Of interest to me is the fact that I tend to view rules through the lens of, "if I wrote these rules as code, and gave them this input, what result would I get?".

BRC

2021-07-27, 08:49 PM

I think both of these perspectives stem to a large degree from the fact that other classes don't have these capabilities.

On the DM side of things, the fact that it's just the Wizard (or spellcasters in general) with these types of capabilities makes it easy to look at things in terms of "how do I stop people from blowing up my plot" instead of the (in my view) more productive view of "how do I write adventures that are appropriate for the capabilities of the party". Because most classes don't have anything like teleport, it's easy to look at the Wizard as an outlier and say "teleport breaks the game", when I think the more accurate view is to accept that "travel a long distance" is simply not a good challenge for a party of 9th level characters.

For the players, the Wizard solving a problem feels boring because (in a lot of cases) the only tool the party has for that problem is to point the Wizard at it. teleport is a powerful strategic movement ability, but it's not the optimal solution for every single travel-related problem (though it is at least arguably good enough early enough that it crowds out interesting trade-offs). However, the Rogues and Fighters of the world don't bring anything to the table for a challenge like that, meaning the party defaults to using the Wizard's teleport. That makes what could be an interesting decision with meaningful choices into "push button, solve problem", and feeds into the DM side of the problem by making these challenges seem uninteresting.

Part of the issue is that it's impossible to predict what things are going to "Not be a challenge" for the wizard.

Let's use Knock as an example. The DM is designing an adventure for a party without a rogue, or other designated lockpicker.

At some point, the party will encounter a locked door.

now, the GM doesn't know if the Wizard is going to prepare Knock or not (They certainly might). If they havn't, then they could try to break this door down, or seek out the Guard with the key and get it from them, or find another way around.

If the wizard DID prepare Knock, then the challenge is trivialized.

And the GM might not know which is the case until after the start of session, because the session has to be build with every potential spell list the wizard could have in mind.

Talakeal

2021-07-27, 08:56 PM

snip about Warhammer

It may seem logical to you, but its pretty convoluted in actual play, and your examples leaves out the fact that the majority of ASF / ASL abilities are just one of special rules of a character, race, or item. It also creates weird narrative disconnect where the initiative stat is more or less meaningless, and weird cases were an elf (Initiative 5 but always strikes first) is sometimes faster than a vampire lord (initiative 8 but no always strikes first) and sometimes slower depending on what the enemy is armed with.

I personally feel it would be much simpler to just have an "initiative modifiers" chart somewhere in the book with one unified mechanic (much like they do for determining who won a round of combat) rather than having to look up and remember half a dozen different rules from all over the book(s).

As for the grenades thing, yeah it feels pretty unintuitive, but its something that will make sense if you play a realistic modern shooter video game; grenades are indirect fire weapons with a delay, and the best use for them is to flush people out of cover; for example if someone is in a building covering all of the entrances and you try to walk in you will get shot to pieces, so instead you lob a grenade into the building and then shoot anyone who runs out, effectively reversing the situation.

GloatingSwine

2021-07-28, 05:26 AM

Is it wrong that the Warhammer you described sounded brilliant? :smallamused:

I mean it's something of a mess of versions of the tabletop wargame rules...

In 8th Edition:

Normal initiative order was just "resolve attacks in order of highest to lowest initiative*". If models on different sides have the same initiative resolve them simultaneously. Initiative was a scale from 1-10. Almost all stats capped at 10.

If a model has Always Strikes First/Last they Always Strike First/Last, and if they have Always Strikes First and higher inititative they reroll misses.

If models on both sides have Always Strikes First/Last then they fight simultaneously and do not reroll misses.

If a model for some reason gains Always Strikes First and Always Strikes Last at the same time they cancel out and the model attacks on its normal initiative.

In 8th Charge did not modify initiative order. It granted +1 to combat resolution** and some models had a special rule called Impact Hits which applied a certain number of hits on the turn it charged before all combat, including before challenges***.

(There were no current units that used Pikes, so there were no up to date rules for them)

* Models on the same side could have different initiatives, eg. a Knight and his horse, or a special character in a regiment.

** Remembering that this is a game of formed regimental combat, combat resolution was basically "who won this round and was it winning enough to make the enemy break and rout".

*** Special characters in a regiment could issue a challenge to a one on one duel if there was a special character in the other regiment. That means they fight only each other. If the challenge is refused then the special character in the challenged regiment moves to the back rank and cannot take part in the combat. (Some characters had to issue and accept challenges if they were in a position to do so, one even issued a challenge you weren't allowed to refuse)

It may seem logical to you, but its pretty convoluted in actual play, and your examples leaves out the fact that the majority of ASF / ASL abilities are just one of special rules of a character, race, or item. It also creates weird narrative disconnect where the initiative stat is more or less meaningless, and weird cases were an elf (Initiative 5 but always strikes first) is sometimes faster than a vampire lord (initiative 8 but no always strikes first) and sometimes slower depending on what the enemy is armed with.

On the other hand, the Initiative 5 basic Elf probably isn't doing much to the (not even special character) Vampire Lord because he needs a 4+ to hit (WS4 vs WS7), then a 6 to wound (S3 vs T5), and then the Vampire Lord would almost certainly have at least heavy armour and shield, even if neither were magical, so that's a 4+ save.

So the Elf only has a 4% chance to wound the Vampire Lord, and then gets demolished in response, and so do the two guys standing next to him, because the Vampire Lord hits on 3, wounds on 2, and at strength 5 hits hard enough to deny the Elf a save.

If you want a narrative explanation for that it's the one where the faster combatant dances through a hail of blows with contemptuous ease and slaughters the mooks opposing them.

Cluedrew

2021-07-28, 07:58 AM

@Cluedrew, the "logical progression" I am looking for had nothing to do with different editions,Reading back I now I understand why you thought I was answering a larger question, but I'm trying really hard to not turn this into a caster/martial disparity thread so I actually stopped after that. If you are still curious we can move this to a caster/martial disparity thread.

Pardon my senility, but I do not remember taking this stance. Care to quote / explain what you're interpreting this way?It isn't actually a stance you formally stated. Its more... I bias I want you to examine? A corner case I would like you to elaborate on? I'm actually not exactly sure because there were two statements (which I have requoted for convince) are not actually contradictions but they do point in very different directions.

I prefer win buttons, and logical interactions of meta-tags.
[...]
But why would that make the Fighter say, "I don't have 'tickle' or 'tell joke' as a button to push on my character sheet, so there's no way I could possibly make anyone laugh. Unlike the Wizard, who gets Tasha's Hideous Uncontrollable Laughter."?

Xervous

2021-07-28, 08:16 AM

Hmm, do you have any ideas on how to make Fighters and the like have more things to bring to the table?

Rather than try penciling in features on the narrow design scope of fighter there needs to be a change to the definition of fighter and co.

The wizard, the cleric, the paladin, the sorcerer, the totemist, the binder... these classes are all defined in terms of their power source. From that we derive a variety of level appropriate things each of them can do.

Fighter, rogue and company are cast in specific terms of what they do. The fighter assumes “use pointy stick” will always be relevant and comes with no unique support for anything beyond that. Rogue’s scope is a bit broader but it never really evolves beyond its starting point.

Conceptually something like the monk is a good idea, gaining new powers that redefine its capabilities and opportunities for interacting with the world as it grows in levels. We’ve just seen terrible implementation of monks in most cases.

Figure out a concept for the fighter that can grow to have relevance alongside the water running, super jumping, X-ray vision, lie detecting when in physical contact monk; the healing, curing, buffing, flying mount summoning paladin; the warlock who can jump from shadow to shadow, change the party’s appearance with illusions, and ask objects about their previous owner.

If the extent of a fighter’s impact can be trivially approximated by N castings of summon beatstick V he’s a pile of numbers, not a class.

NorthernPhoenix

2021-07-28, 09:18 AM

The alternative being that, for example, every single high-value vault has a permanent anti-magic zone around it to avoid being automatically opened by a single knock spell. Which quickly ends up spiraling into the kind of "powerful magic is ubiquitous" fare that many people seem to love in settings like FR but which I find incredibly uninteresting. I'd much rather just have knock spells only work on locks with a DC up to a certain level; that seems like a simple, elegant solution.

That's certainly an elegant solution to the door example in particular. I think these games would benefit greatly from expanding such an example to all forms of "i win button". This would allow for more clear delineation and ease of preparation for "hard" (or "close") and "easy" (there for cartharsis) battles, encounters, and scenes.

Telok

2021-07-28, 10:17 AM

If the extent of a fighter’s impact can be trivially approximated by N castings of summon beatstick V he’s a pile of numbers, not a class.

Truth. As an interesting comparison I recall that AD&D had some monsters with traits like "immune to non-silver attacks" or "immune to all non-blunt damage", along with the famous "immune to weapons of less than +X" and a (short) chart of how many hit dice a monster had to have to count as a +X with its natural attacks. People these days deride the golf-bag of weapons approach, but the fighter classes were seriously the best at using them by quite a wide margin due to some real niche protection. The monster summons of those days couldn't compare to an actual fighter. Add in the fighters having the best AC and the monster trait "immune to magic" being actual real immunity instead of faking a better save or being a 3/fight metagame hack, and people liked playing fighters.

Satinavian

2021-07-28, 10:44 AM

The alternative being that, for example, every single high-value vault has a permanent anti-magic zone around it to avoid being automatically opened by a single knock spell. Which quickly ends up spiraling into the kind of "powerful magic is ubiquitous" fare that many people seem to love in settings like FR but which I find incredibly uninteresting. I'd much rather just have knock spells only work on locks with a DC up to a certain level; that seems like a simple, elegant solution.
Didn't knock have the problem that it didn't work on portcullis and similar things ? So it is trivially easy to build mundane vaults that are immune to knock. And that is how a normal vault in D&D land should work. Too much hassle for regular doors or chests, so knock still retains its use.

Often there is no need for permanent anti-magic as long as you just keep potential magical abilities of your opponents in mind.

BRC

2021-07-28, 10:57 AM

I mean, the easier answer to Knock is that "Secure vaults have multiple Locks", potentially multiple locks that all use the same key (So you only need to keep track of one key), but you put 10 locks on the vault, so a wizard who wants to Knock the thing open requires 10 spell slots.

As a tangent on magical security, I have, in my settings a pretty ubiquitous low-power magic device in the form of a wax seal keyed to a Detect Magic spell that breaks if a spell 1st level or above is either cast or targeted within, say, 20 feet of it (It doesn't give you any indications WHAT spell, just that something WAS cast), which can be rigged to ring a bell or other basic alarm.

It doesn't pick up active magic (So you could cast Invisibility and slip through), but it will detect, say, somebody casting Dimensional Door, or walking up and using Charm Person on the guards.

Xervous

2021-07-28, 11:38 AM

Truth. As an interesting comparison I recall that AD&D had some monsters with traits like "immune to non-silver attacks" or "immune to all non-blunt damage", along with the famous "immune to weapons of less than +X" and a (short) chart of how many hit dice a monster had to have to count as a +X with its natural attacks. People these days deride the golf-bag of weapons approach, but the fighter classes were seriously the best at using them by quite a wide margin due to some real niche protection. The monster summons of those days couldn't compare to an actual fighter. Add in the fighters having the best AC and the monster trait "immune to magic" being actual real immunity instead of faking a better save or being a 3/fight metagame hack, and people liked playing fighters.

I was going to include “or N hirelings”, because it’s mostly the golf bag that’s doing the work, the fighter just happens to be the one holding it. Sure you might need more golf bags to get to a comparable output of one fighter, but you still are able to equate the fighter’s contribution to a multiple of some basic numeric element. The higher level fighter just equates to a larger number of hirelings but never achieves things of note that can’t be solved by throwing multitudes of npcs at.

Calthropstu

2021-07-28, 12:27 PM

Most people do not like close battles. In fact, for most people, they prefer battles to take place far far away from them.

Vahnavoi

2021-07-28, 01:11 PM

Xervous: you're forgetting two things. One, high level fighters were the best at throwing hirelings at things, they got the largest amount of actual loyal followers. Two, a high-level fighter could make Character Level attacks per turn against 0th level hirelings, so if the enemy had a fighter, there go your caddies...

Oh, there was also a third thing. Fighters had naturally highest potential for strength and were capable of using strength increasing items to a higher degree than other classes. (There was a fair number of other magical items too that only benefited fighters or benefited them more than other classes.) So a high-level fighter was better at utilizing the golfbag approach as a single entity than others.

Put together, replacing a high level fighter with hirelings was theoretical more than practical. More often than not, the one utilizing those hirelings was the fighter. :smallamused:

icefractal

2021-07-28, 01:23 PM

the GM doesn't know if the Wizard is going to prepare Knock or not (They certainly might). If they havn't, then they could try to break this door down, or seek out the Guard with the key and get it from them, or find another way around.

If the wizard DID prepare Knock, then the challenge is trivialized.I realize that Knock is just an example, but since it's practically the poster example when this comes up, I'm going to address it directly -

What challenge? You list "break this door down" as an option, and that's something you can do without even rolling. As it should be for most doors; doors being indestructible plot walls is usually a video-gamey thing that TTRPGs don't benefit from, IMO.

Constraints like being subtle can rule out that solution, but they can also rule out Knock - more easily than they can rule out lockpicking in fact, since Knock just opens things indiscriminately, making it hard to avoid triggering a mechanical or magic alarm. Or just have someone stand guard and observe whether people use the proper key or not.

And overall, people put too much emphasis on doors, IMO. They're just inanimate objects, it would be rather insulting if they could stymie so-called adventurers forever.

Secondly, and this is more of an IMO, but if the adventure design/planning requires knowing the party's exact capabilities, it's too tight / challenge-focused for my preference. I don't want an obstacle course precisely tailored to my skills, I want an obstacle that makes sense in the context of the game world and what we're doing.

Jakinbandw

2021-07-28, 01:24 PM

Of interest to me is the fact that I tend to view rules through the lens of, "if I wrote these rules as code, and gave them this input, what result would I get?".

As guy designing a system I think a big thing your missing is that people have limited RAM and a slow CPU clock speed. You're notnpeogramming for windows, or even DOS, you're programming on an old TI calculator.

Thus the more elegant the solution the better it is. I have written mechanics that if followed would be great, but they are forgotten about by my test groups (sometimes by me as the gm!). This means using tricks such as a UI that reminds players of the rules, or having differant modes of play so players can focus on only needing to remember small sections of the rules at a time.

Your example above would be fine if that was all the game was, but it's not. It's a small part of a larger mess. 40k can sort of get away with this using well laid out rulebook and giving lots of time to resolve a single battle. It also doesn't have any larger mode of play to keep track of (you dont need to worry if fighting this battle will make the god Emperor mad at you).

BRC

2021-07-28, 02:21 PM

I realize that Knock is just an example, but since it's practically the poster example when this comes up, I'm going to address it directly -

What challenge? You list "break this door down" as an option, and that's something you can do without even rolling. As it should be for most doors; doors being indestructible plot walls is usually a video-gamey thing that TTRPGs don't benefit from, IMO.

Constraints like being subtle can rule out that solution, but they can also rule out Knock - more easily than they can rule out lockpicking in fact, since Knock just opens things indiscriminately, making it hard to avoid triggering a mechanical or magic alarm. Or just have someone stand guard and observe whether people use the proper key or not.

And overall, people put too much emphasis on doors, IMO. They're just inanimate objects, it would be rather insulting if they could stymie so-called adventurers forever.

Secondly, and this is more of an IMO, but if the adventure design/planning requires knowing the party's exact capabilities, it's too tight / challenge-focused for my preference. I don't want an obstacle course precisely tailored to my skills, I want an obstacle that makes sense in the context of the game world and what we're doing.

Break down the door is a solution with easily understandable trade-offs, it's loud (like, "Hear you from rooms away" loud) and obvious to any patrolling guards. Depending on what the door is made of, it might take quite some time to force it open, even if you're hacking away at it with a greataxe.

Casting "Knock" also has trade-offs, but the opportunity cost trade-off of casting a spell slot is more abstract.

The issue here is from the Perspective of the DM building the adventure. You are creating a scenario, and trying to make sure the party can achieve their goals, but that doing so will be challenging and interesting.

This means that anything the party CAN'T deal with effectively blocks their route completely, and anything they can deal with casually with negligible risk/cost is not an issue at all.

I know most Rogues have their Lockpicking boosted to oblivion, but for the purposes of this (And how the game treats it) "Make a skill test" is considered a fun and interesting way to approach a problem. That said, if you DO have a rogue who can pick any lock they might reasonably encounter (Not that rare in D&D), then you simply don't consider "The door is locked" on your list of challenges unless your narrative can justify it being a super mega lock that is risky to try to crack. The door might be locked for flavor reasons (It wouldn't make sense for the door to be unlocked), but it's not one of the Obstacles that the party is expected to overcome, it's not there to make the scenario interesting.

Breaking down the Door is loud and may take a while, it's a solution, but an imperfect one. In this case the interesting part is not the execution, but the strategic question of "Is it worth it to just break this door down instead of seeking other options", and the consequences that come with doing so.

"Knock" is a problem area because it flips the switch between "Impassable/Very difficult to pass" and "Trivial to pass" depending on what the players decide to do/if they want to expend the resource. It's easy to say 'Okay, if they break down this door, then X might happen, and that will cause problems later", vs "If they Knock, then they'll have one less 2nd level spell slot later on", which is mostly only a real cost if you decide to lean heavily into the Logistics Puzzle Dungeon Crawl style of gameplay (AKA the thing Vancian Casting was built to interlock with).

(I think Knock in particular comes up a lot, not just because it replaces a whole skill, but because it's available at fairly low levels, before Rogues can be assumed to crack any lock they look at, and when something like a Sturdy Locked Door is actually an obstacle).

But your right, doors get talked about too much. Let's talk about a bigger example: Passwall.

I am designing a dungeon. The Party wizard has access to the spell Passwall, but may not prepare it, since it's a high-level spell-slot.

if The DON'T prepare/cast Passwall, they'll need to navigate through the dungeon, overcoming traps and obstacles galore.
If they DO prepare/cast Passwall, they can bypass a decent chunk of the dungeon. Depending on which of the less-than-20ft walls they decide to tunnel through, any number of things could happen.

As the GM, I'm trying to provide a full session's worth of entertainment for a bunch of cunning players. Designing adventures takes energy and time, but depending on "Did the Wizard decide to bring this specific spell", they might be going through two rooms of this dungeon or six.

I can design the dungeon to negate Passwall, or make sure there's no particular wall they could Pass through that skips the bulk of it, but see above, energy and time. The existence of the spell is going to warp how I build the dungeon, even if the PC's never actually cast it. It hangs over my map like the the sword of Damocles, demanding that I specifically counter it if I don't want to see my hard work completely negated.

Plus, if the Wizard has invested one of their few high-level spells into learning Passwall, it feels bad to say "Okay, from now on all dungeon walls are 30ft thick". Just like, if the PC's all buy rings of fire immunity, then it feels like I'm mocking them to just use no fire damage for the rest of the campaign. On the other hand if I DO use fire damage, it's not actually an interesting challenge.

Calthropstu

2021-07-28, 02:27 PM

As guy designing a system I think a big thing your missing is that people have limited RAM and a slow CPU clock speed. You're notnpeogramming for windows, or even DOS, you're programming on an old TI calculator.

Thus the more elegant the solution the better it is. I have written mechanics that if followed would be great, but they are forgotten about by my test groups (sometimes by me as the gm!). This means using tricks such as a UI that reminds players of the rules, or having differant modes of play so players can focus on only needing to remember small sections of the rules at a time.

Your example above would be fine if that was all the game was, but it's not. It's a small part of a larger mess. 40k can sort of get away with this using well laid out rulebook and giving lots of time to resolve a single battle. It also doesn't have any larger mode of play to keep track of (you dont need to worry if fighting this battle will make the god Emperor mad at you).

I once wanted to make a 40k battle campaign. The premise: massive chaos horde incoming. I started writing it up. The end was going to be a massive 50k point battle with the caveat being wins losses and casualties in the campaign battles adding to or subtracting from the final battle.

The verdict? No one got on board because it was too convoluted and the final battle would have taken several days.

Lacco

2021-07-28, 03:07 PM

I once wanted to make a 40k battle campaign. The premise: massive chaos horde incoming. I started writing it up. The end was going to be a massive 50k point battle with the caveat being wins losses and casualties in the campaign battles adding to or subtracting from the final battle.

The verdict? No one got on board because it was too convoluted and the final battle would have taken several days.

I foresee in my relatively distant future... a retirement home. Two or three tables pushed together. Less then two full sets of teeth in the whole room. A massive army of orcs... :smallbiggrin:

Yeah, I think I could enjoy something like that. But no time for such things now.

icefractal

2021-07-28, 03:29 PM

But your right, doors get talked about too much. Let's talk about a bigger example: Passwall.

I am designing a dungeon. The Party wizard has access to the spell Passwall, but may not prepare it, since it's a high-level spell-slot.

if The DON'T prepare/cast Passwall, they'll need to navigate through the dungeon, overcoming traps and obstacles galore.
If they DO prepare/cast Passwall, they can bypass a decent chunk of the dungeon. Depending on which of the less-than-20ft walls they decide to tunnel through, any number of things could happen.

As the GM, I'm trying to provide a full session's worth of entertainment for a bunch of cunning players. Designing adventures takes energy and time, but depending on "Did the Wizard decide to bring this specific spell", they might be going through two rooms of this dungeon or six.This is another case where I'd question whether not having Passwall actually solves anything.

What's the dungeon topology like in this example? Is it interconnected, meaning the PCs can take different paths through it? Then they can already visit a varying number of rooms depending on their route. Is it effectively linear - they need to go through every room? Then make it literally linear - sort of a guarded tunnel. That makes as much sense as a typical dungeon layout in most cases, and Passwall doesn't bypass much.

Plus, if the Wizard has invested one of their few high-level spells into learning Passwall, it feels bad to say "Okay, from now on all dungeon walls are 30ft thick". Just like, if the PC's all buy rings of fire immunity, then it feels like I'm mocking them to just use no fire damage for the rest of the campaign. On the other hand if I DO use fire damage, it's not actually an interesting challenge.I guess this depends how important challenge is to you. Personally I'd just keep using the same foes as if they didn't have the rings, meaning that sometimes a fight is easier and occasionally it's trivial. If as a result the PCs are really steamrolling things, then it sounds like they're ready to take on tougher problems and make tougher enemies. This does mean that a session might go by without much challenge, but I don't consider that a big problem. And if they choose to stay big fish in a small pond, a lack of challenge is clearly what they want.

Vahnavoi

2021-07-28, 03:35 PM

The challenge for using limited-use obstacle bypasses is not bypassing those obstacles, it's pathfinding: figuring out the best path to your goal with least use of resources. Depending on how devious scenario designer your GM is, the challenge can be made very great indeed. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem)

It's worth noting the same applies to lockpicking in majority of games. There is no challenge to the actual event of picking a lock - no fun minigame, no physical effort requiring skill, no puzzle to solve - it's just a die roll you either win or lose. Just, instead of being guaranteed to pass some doors, you now have a chance to go through most (or all) doors and the resource you're trying to conserve is time instead of spell slots.

The reason why limited-use obstacle bypasses end up trivializing scenarios is because GMs sleep on scenario design. There isn't a large or unknown number of doors forcing you to pick and choose where to go, there is just one or other token amount of doors because tradition dictates there ought to be locked door. Passwall isn't accounted for at all, or if it is, it's just stealth-banned by being made useless, instead of there being a large or unknown number of walls between you and the target forcing you to pick and choose where to go. So on and so forth.

Breaking a wall down, in comparison, might actually be a challenge. There might be all kinds of elements you need to figure out (such as what the door is made of and how to minimize noise) turning the action itself into a puzzle. But if not, it's just another obstacle bypass, just with a different cost yet again.

RandomPeasant

2021-07-28, 05:10 PM

Hmm, do you have any ideas on how to make Fighters and the like have more things to bring to the table?

In the specific, I wouldn't. "Fighter" is not a concept that scales to high levels, and by and large the people who like the Fighter don't want it to. So you implement something like 4e's notion of Tiers and when the time comes that the party is expected to have tools like teleport or raise dead the Fighter gets a Paragon Path (or Prestige Class, or whatever you call it) like Blizzard Warrior or Hell Knight that can supply those tools.

But the more general question is worth discussing. Because while the Fighter can't scale up as far as he needs to, there are classes that could but don't. Like the Totemist. So how do you ensure those classes provide people with the tools they need? I think the first thing you need to do is define, in a general way, what sort of capabilities people need (or are expected) to have at what points. For combat, this is well-defined by the Monster Manual. Monsters have CRs that indicate the level at which players are expected to be able to deal with them, and from that you can see the space of abilities that are necessary or unnecessary, appropriate or inappropriate. An Ogre is CR 3, so 3rd level characters need to have something useful to do in a fight with an Ogre. Different classes can (and should) do different things, and can (and should) be more or less effective against specific opponents. But CR gives you reasonable benchmarks for what characters ought to be like (in terms of combat capabilities) at each level.

So what you need to do is generalize that. Now, you don't need a full MM's worth of non-combat challenges and adventuring locales and adventure concepts. But you should give some thought to when you expect people to deal with challenges (and with what degree of difficulty). At what point is it appropriate for a trek across a vast desert to be a full adventure? A single encounter? A trivial challenge? When should players be able to adventure on a cloud island? In the Elemental Plane of Fire? In an acid swamp? How much time and effort should various types of encounters take? How should the spotlight be shared? When you have some notion of your answers to those questions, you can construct a set of benchmarks. And from there, it's just a matter of iteratively tuning characters until they're hitting the benchmark with abilities that fit within their idiom.

The issue here though is that while some players may make use of this, especially in a low-magic setting, Teleport is just to the point and very effective.

I think there is a very good argument to be made that teleport is too low-level for what it does. I don't think it's categorically broken in PC hands, and it's not strictly the best transportation magic, but it's very good in a way that crowds out interesting trade offs. Consider something like shadow walk. That's a cool travel power. You could see how that might have interesting tradeoffs compare to other travel powers, particularly with some tweaking. But for some reason, it's higher level than teleport, making it almost pointless.

I personally feel it would be much simpler to just have an "initiative modifiers" chart somewhere in the book with one unified mechanic (much like they do for determining who won a round of combat) rather than having to look up and remember half a dozen different rules from all over the book(s).

But is that the alternative in practice? Certainly you could write a cleaner system with just numbers. But you could write a cleaner version of the absolute declarations as well, and they didn't do that. I would be wary of looking at messy rules and assuming they're messy because of some specific thing you don't like. Generally, rules are messy because no one put in the effort to write clean rules.

Didn't knock have the problem that it didn't work on portcullis and similar things ? So it is trivially easy to build mundane vaults that are immune to knock. And that is how a normal vault in D&D land should work. Too much hassle for regular doors or chests, so knock still retains its use.

knock also doesn't help you with guards, or warding, or exotic door-equivalents like "a portal that responds to a command word" or "a wall of solid rock an Earth Magus must part for entry". There are plenty of ways of making a vault that doesn't fold to knock without simply saying "knock doesn't work", and I'm not really sympathetic to a DM who wants to withhold knock from people for "narrative impact", rather than earning that impact by creating a challenge that reflects the abilities the party has. Also, I'd echo the sentiment of others that "a locked door" never really has that much narrative impact to begin with. Like, how many fantasy stories can you think of where the climax was "and then there was a door, but the protagonist didn't have a key"?

I know most Rogues have their Lockpicking boosted to oblivion, but for the purposes of this (And how the game treats it) "Make a skill test" is considered a fun and interesting way to approach a problem.

I guess I would question the notion that the game treats "make a skill check" but not "spend a spell slot" as an interesting challenge.

I can design the dungeon to negate Passwall, or make sure there's no particular wall they could Pass through that skips the bulk of it, but see above, energy and time. The existence of the spell is going to warp how I build the dungeon, even if the PC's never actually cast it. It hangs over my map like the the sword of Damocles, demanding that I specifically counter it if I don't want to see my hard work completely negated.

I think this reflects the wrong attitude to dealing with PC abilities. You don't want to design a dungeon that's vulnerable to passwall and passwall-proof it. You want to design a dungeon in a way that passwall can't break it, or better yet so that passwall is a piece of the puzzle of how the party solves the dungeon. So you don't have a bunch of rooms the PCs are supposed to do in a scripted or mostly-scripted order, you have something nonlinear where the goal is to clear out the dungeon or to find some unknown item or location within it. So "the goblin king's court sits within a maze of twisting warrens, reach the center and assassinate him" is a bad adventure for a party with passwall, but "Genericia wants to exploit the forested foothills of the northern mountains, but constant basilisk attacks are hampering their efforts, clear out the basilisk warrens" or "somewhere within the Vault of the Star-Emperor is his fabled Spear, which will give you the legitimacy to reunite his shattered empire, retrieve it" are good adventures for such a party.

In general, as the players get access to more tools, adventure design should shift away from "you want to get from A to B, there are these obstacles between them" and towards "you want to achieve B, here's the lay of the land, figure something out". IMO, those adventures are better in general, but that's a subjective debate.

BRC

2021-07-28, 05:52 PM

I think this reflects the wrong attitude to dealing with PC abilities. You don't want to design a dungeon that's vulnerable to passwall and passwall-proof it. You want to design a dungeon in a way that passwall can't break it, or better yet so that passwall is a piece of the puzzle of how the party solves the dungeon. So you don't have a bunch of rooms the PCs are supposed to do in a scripted or mostly-scripted order, you have something nonlinear where the goal is to clear out the dungeon or to find some unknown item or location within it. So "the goblin king's court sits within a maze of twisting warrens, reach the center and assassinate him" is a bad adventure for a party with passwall, but "Genericia wants to exploit the forested foothills of the northern mountains, but constant basilisk attacks are hampering their efforts, clear out the basilisk warrens" or "somewhere within the Vault of the Star-Emperor is his fabled Spear, which will give you the legitimacy to reunite his shattered empire, retrieve it" are good adventures for such a party.

In general, as the players get access to more tools, adventure design should shift away from "you want to get from A to B, there are these obstacles between them" and towards "you want to achieve B, here's the lay of the land, figure something out". IMO, those adventures are better in general, but that's a subjective debate.

Gonna pull out a couple points

"the goblin king's court sits within a maze of twisting warrens, reach the center and assassinate him" is a bad adventure for a party with passwall
This is true, which means that Passwall is a limitation placed on the type of adventures and scenarios the GM can prepare.

Once Passwall enters the picture "Get into this place protected by physical barriers" ceases to be a valid adventure format. Yes, you can work around it, but you NEED to work around it.

In general, as the players get access to more tools, adventure design should shift away from "you want to get from A to B, there are these obstacles between them" and towards "you want to achieve B, here's the lay of the land, figure something out". IMO, those adventures are better in general, but that's a subjective debate.

I agree that the best adventure design is a scenario-based approach rather than a strict Obstacle Course, "Here is your goal, here is the lay of the land", but as a GM I still want to get a good adventure out of it, which means designing it such that there is no Obviously Best solution, something negated by a single spell-slot.

And this is where Vancian Casting kind of runs up against the problem. Vancian Casting, and spell-slot design in general, turns spells like Knock and Passwall into a Logistical Puzzle. You can guarantee bypassing the obstacle, but at the expense of a valuable resource. The interesting part of the spell is trading off the opportunity cost of preparing and casting that spell with anything else you could be doing.

Wide-ranging Scenario-based adventures tend to be harder to put a hard time limit or pressure on, so it's harder to add that interesting opportunity cost to spells like Passwall. Sure it's doable, but, just like the 30ft thick walls, it's something else you need to consider. "How do I make casting Passwall actually cost something, since they can't just casually long rest".

What's more, I'd argue that Scenario-based adventure design is more vulnerable to being bypassed by "Win Button" spells like Passwall. Win Buttons are good at getting past A Single Obstacle. Obstacle-course design is usually less vulnerable to it, because, yes, you just bypassed one obstacle, but not the whole adventure. It's easy to make it so you can't bypass an entire dungeon by skipping a single wall.

In scenario-based adventure design, you need to be on the lookout for a Trivial Solution that involves Passwall, which could come from any direction.

"Your goal is B, here is the lay of the land", better make sure that the Lay of the Land does not include any points where all the stands between the PC's and B is a physical barrier less than 20 feet thick.

Here's the thing. D&D includes Lots of other, similar Win buttons that I don't mind. Usually in the form of boosted skills. A Rogue that can pick any lock, or a Bard that can charm anyone are pretty common tricks, and so it's pretty easy to remember and incorporate such things.

"The Bard has expertise in Diplomacy, so I design the adventure assuming that any given NPC can probably be talked around into being useful. I'll populate the adventure with NPCs which can provide assistance, but none of whom have the ability to Solve The Problem for the PCs".
"I'll populate the scenario with Locks that can be picked, which will contain useful things, but you can't achieve the goal through lockpicking alone".
If a PC can do a Cool Thing very well, you build your scenarios with an eye towards that Cool Thing being HELPFUL, but not solving the problem.

You can do something similar with Passwall, but Passwall isn't the only such spell a Wizard has, especially as you reach higher levels. Wizards are the Toolbox Caster, which means accounting for every tool in their box, which can turn scenario design into a tangle as you dodge around the Wizard's spell list.

kyoryu

2021-07-28, 08:26 PM

I'd like to point out again, that Passwall is something that was utterly NOT a problem in a megadungeon-style game.

There's a big dungeon - you bypass part of it? Good for you, now you're somewhere deeper and you get a chance at better treasures. You can decide whether it's a good use of resources or not. In that scenario, Passwall breaks nothing and creates interesting decisions.

In a linear dungeon where you're trying to get your N well-placed, crafted encounters in? It's a bigger issue.

Many of the "problems" with D&D are a result of the evolution of typical play style over time - many of the problematic things worked just fine in their original context.

Talakeal

2021-07-28, 09:04 PM

I mean it's something of a mess of versions of the tabletop wargame rules...

I wasn't really describing any particular edition, but I think everything I described (except for the 40k grenade / cover and the mentioning of letting high initiative ASF reroll hits) is from the seventh edition of the game, which is the one I played most.

Quertus

2021-07-29, 11:27 AM

@Cluedrew,

Can't QUOTE right now (don't ask). But "buttons" and "win buttons" are actually completely unrelated.

I (don't dislike and probably generally) like win buttons - things that just work.

Some people rely on buttons - things that are printed on the character sheet.

There seems to be a growing trend to rely on buttons.

The wizard might look at their spells, and be sad that they do not see any buttons that interact with Invisibility. But that doesn't stop the Fighter from grabbing a bag of flour and using it as a win button - one that automatically defeats invisibility without needing to know the effective caster level of flour for it to make an opposed caster level check against the invisibility.

So, afaict (and, by all means, correct me if I am wrong), it is the case that a) buttons and win buttons are distinctly different, unrelated concepts; b) the growing inability of gamers to conceptualize interaction with the fiction in way beyond pressing buttons is not fundamentally related to, and can exist independent from, caster/martial disparity; C) if anything, it could be tied into "player skills vs character skills".

-----

And, to directly address your concern…

Hmmm…

I'm not biased against Fighters *in play*, but I am biased against *me playing Fighters*.

I've long said "I play Wizards". So this is nothing new.

What is new is the fact that, thanks to you, I have evaluated *why* that is, and I have a new answer to cover part of "why". So, thank you. :smallcool:

I like win buttons. And I prefer "rules" over "mother may I". Playing a Fighter, trying to tell a joke to make someone laugh? That's in "mother may I" territory.

As a GM, I'll generally try and "rule 0" something in such a scenario. And often, when players talk about games later (whether I was player or GM), it's those creative rule 0 moments that often are finally remembered as cool moments.

But, personally? I feel no… word… "victory?"… no sense of *accomplishment* in winning through "mother may I". I prefer it for… "unimportant" thing only, as far as my character is concerned.

So, it is possible that one of the reasons I like playing Wizards is that they have spells - explicit pools of buttons to push, that interact with the rules in (generally) defined ways.

I have no problem with the Fighter's bag of flour being a win button to invisibility, or to his axe being a win button to a door.

Nor do I have a problem playing a Wizard whose spells *conceptually* aren't win buttons: "camouflage" and "ram" rather than "invisibility" and "knock".

What I have a problem with is dissonance between the fiction and the rules. Invisibility doesn't grant a +5 bonus to stealth checks, *it makes you invisible*. Flour just defeats invisibility (for purposes of martial targeting) (for D&D invisibility or similar). Flight doesn't provide a +1 "maneuverability" bonus to travel checks, *it lets you fly*.

So the invisible pixie Rogue can absolutely just fly over the moat to scout out the Duke's keep, and won't have her face on a wanted poster the next morning just because the guards' perception beat her "stealth + invisibility bonus".

If the rules say otherwise, *the rules are wrong*.

kyoryu

2021-07-29, 11:38 AM

Imbalance

2021-07-30, 07:31 AM

I think "win button" is being used in a few different ways here.

At one level, it's something that trivializes content.

At another, it's something that gives what we in the Fate world call "narrative permissions" or "narrative denials". IOW, it makes things possible or impossible. If you're invisible, you can't be seen. If you have a fly spell, you can fly. This stands in contrast to "provides a bonus".

These permissions can be "win buttons", but they aren't necessarily.

Thank you. That phrase started getting tossed around, and I wasn't sure what people were talking about, but then it became clear that folks using it may not be sure what they're talking about. That seems to happen frequently around here.

kyoryu

2021-07-30, 09:45 AM

Thank you. That phrase started getting tossed around, and I wasn't sure what people were talking about, but then it became clear that folks using it may not be sure what they're talking about. That seems to happen frequently around here.

Quertus is mostly talking about "permissions and denials". And I agree with him :)

icefractal

2021-07-30, 02:53 PM

b) the growing inability of gamers to conceptualize interaction with the fiction in way beyond pressing buttons is not fundamentally related to, and can exist independent from, caster/martial disparity
This is where I'd disagree - I don't see a "growing inability" to think outside the box. Actually I'd say I see more wacky plans coming out of my current group now than I did when I started playing.

I would say that combat is a fairly unfriendly place to experiment - it's usually high-stakes and you don't get that many chances to act, so using even one turn on a plan which accomplishes nothing is a pretty big loss.

Would making combat much lengthier, like 10+ rounds for a not-difficult fight, make it more friendly to experimentation? Probably, but at the cost of making it much duller the majority of the time - not a trade I'm willing to make.

In other areas which are less deadly and less action-economy bound, like trying to sway the opinion of a town, I do see players trying plenty of outside the box plans, not limited to their class features.

That said, you can think outside the box and have concrete abilities backing you up. The image often presented is rules-usage vs creative thinking, but those are two orthogonal factors. It's just as likely that the player with the cool ideas is also the one who mechanically has a strong toolbox.

False God

2021-07-30, 05:17 PM

This is where I'd disagree - I don't see a "growing inability" to think outside the box. Actually I'd say I see more wacky plans coming out of my current group now than I did when I started playing.

I would say that combat is a fairly unfriendly place to experiment - it's usually high-stakes and you don't get that many chances to act, so using even one turn on a plan which accomplishes nothing is a pretty big loss.

Would making combat much lengthier, like 10+ rounds for a not-difficult fight, make it more friendly to experimentation? Probably, but at the cost of making it much duller the majority of the time - not a trade I'm willing to make.
Personally, and this is just one reason I remain such a big 4E fan, was at-will riders. You could push, trip, pull, etc... without any serious investment in feats (such as all the proficiencies required to wield a spiked chain) and it wasn't trying to figure out if the DM thought your "special maneuver" had a really high DC or was super easy for Joe over there but not for you for *reasons*. It just existed as part and parcel of your fighting ability.

And in longer fights such that 4E had, it really made a difference, at least IMO, that every time you made an attack it wasn't just "I hit it with my stick." It was "I hit it with my stick and cool stuff happens!"

Yes, 5E continued this sort of, but the resource-management angle of the Battlemaster very much inclines a player to be conservative with their "I hit it with a stick and cool stuff happens!" rather than encouraging them to do it all the time. Which, IMO, the game should always lean more towards "You get to do cool stuff when you want to." Than "Sorry, your coolness is limited to 1 or 2 rounds a day."

Because then, as you say, if you choose not to do something cool in order to conserve resources, and then the fight ends, now you don't get to do cool stuff at all.

Cluedrew

2021-07-30, 05:26 PM

But "buttons" and "win buttons" are actually completely unrelated.They are related but as kyoryu mentioned there are some less related ideas buried in there. In fact I can think of at least 3 (more) ideas in there. First there is how powerful an ability is which is a combination of how often it works* and how much effect it gets once it works. We can also consider how flexible an ability is, the different ways in which it can be applied. Picking locks is great example for abilities that are not very flexible, you just sort of select which lock and that's it. On the other hand your character speaking is a very flexible ability as you can say just about anything. The last one is how concrete an ability is, which also means how is it encoded in the rules. Something never mentioned anywhere but possible for a character by extrapolation is not at all concrete, things entirely defined are the most concrete rules and in the middle you have things that are defined but with room for interpretation.

I have no particular point other than to break down win buttons as abilities or other options that are very powerful (by definition) and the tend towards being very concrete but (despite their name using the word button) can be almost anywhere on the flexibility scale.

Playing a Fighter, trying to tell a joke to make someone laugh? That's in "mother may I" territory.And yet you made a comment that suggests you think the people who play fighters are wrong for wanting more concrete (encoded in rules, as stated above) ways to make someone laugh. "But why would that make the Fighter say, "I don't have 'tickle' or 'tell joke' as a button to push on my character sheet, so there's no way I could possibly make anyone laugh. Unlike the Wizard, who gets Tasha's Hideous Uncontrollable Laughter."?" (Yes they (actually you) didn't call out that they have no rules supported way to make someone laugh verses something like a spell, but they did contrast it with a spell so it seems to be implied.) That dichotomy is what I want you to comment on. Including if that is what you were trying to say.

* Once selected in a case that is reasonable to do so. For power/balance descriptions usually include how often it reasonable to select this option. While important in general I don't think it is here.

Telok

2021-07-31, 12:07 AM

First there is how powerful an ability is which is a combination of how often it works* and how much effect it gets once it works. We can also consider how flexible an ability is,

There's another factor: the cost to aquire the ability. That can be an opportunity cost, the things you have to give up or drawbacks you have to accept, or a timesink cost.

[Over-generalization]D&D 3.x had an opportunity cost for melee measured in feats, like 4 or 5 for whirlwind attack. But for the problematic casters it was "I'll have it memorised tomorrow" and/or a minor gold expenditure. 4e put it in your class, the heavy niche protection of the roles was the primary limit on what you could be relevant at. Your wizard was given a controller role, so you couldn't do enough damage for it to matter on non-mooks and you couldn't directly protect or buff your allies.[/over-generalization]

It's one thing that's nice about "build your own" setups, be they point buy or 'choose an extra thingy each level' or whatever. They often (outside D&D, in my experience, ymmv, batteries not included) tend to get a bit more play testing and thought applied to them. Notable is that D&D caster spell lists are usually some form of "build your own" not because you can choose individual spells, but because you can easily combo spells (or class features) for an improved or different effect.

The timesink cost applies to players. Most D&D campaigns run in the 1-10 or less level range, few if any people could claim to have spent more time playing 15+ than the lower levels. Play through 13 levels to find that your next 5 levels in the class just sum up to +1 hit and damage each level (in a D&D-like, so already talking about 4d6+30 dmg vs 200+ hp gaining those +1s), and compare it to the character that gets to clone themselves, fly for hours, teleport across the world, and blow up a city block. Comparatively the player getting a few +1 paid the same timesink cost as the player who gets to define how the party plays the game.

Talakeal

2021-07-31, 07:58 AM

Quertus is mostly talking about "permissions and denials". And I agree with him :)

Out of curiosity, what about things like the uber-charger?

A 3.5 build that could one shot any enemy that it could get off a charge and damage with a melee attack, but was relatively useless in any situation where it couldn't.

IMO that is a classic example of a win button, and more or less always ensures that at least one player feels left out of any given combat and one side always feels the fight was unfair.

Cluedrew

2021-07-31, 08:37 AM

To Telok: That is true and is definitely an issue in the caster/martial disparity discussion. But right now I'm actually just trying to pin down win buttons, guess I should be a bit more direct about that. So how powerful the ability is is the most important this (otherwise you don't have a lot of win) and they don't have to be completely concrete but they do have to be near the top of the scale. Can't exactly pin down why but all the made up interactions, even if they should always work, never get counted. Maybe its because people can just come down and say they don't work if they get out of hand. Flexibility tends to be low in a lot of the examples used but I don't think that actually matters, I just called it out because the word button suggests a lack of flexibility to me.

Similarly, while opportunity cost, applicability (how often you can apply it) and whether its a new permission or an upgrade are important in general, I don't think any of them effect whether or not something is a win button. So (To Talakeal) an uber-charge is generally agreed on to be a win button.

Quertus

2021-07-31, 09:41 AM

Button vs win button

Button and win button: Invisibility.

Button but not win button: opposed grapple check

Not button, but win button: bag of flour

Neither button nor win button: telling a joke.

They are related but as kyoryu mentioned there are some less related ideas buried in there. In fact I can think of at least 3 (more) ideas in there. First there is how powerful an ability is which is a combination of how often it works* and how much effect it gets once it works. We can also consider how flexible an ability is, the different ways in which it can be applied. Picking locks is great example for abilities that are not very flexible, you just sort of select which lock and that's it. On the other hand your character speaking is a very flexible ability as you can say just about anything. The last one is how concrete an ability is, which also means how is it encoded in the rules. Something never mentioned anywhere but possible for a character by extrapolation is not at all concrete, things entirely defined are the most concrete rules and in the middle you have things that are defined but with room for interpretation.

I have no particular point other than to break down win buttons as abilities or other options that are very powerful (by definition) and the tend towards being very concrete but (despite their name using the word button) can be almost anywhere on the flexibility scale.

And yet you made a comment that suggests you think the people who play fighters are wrong for wanting more concrete (encoded in rules, as stated above) ways to make someone laugh. "But why would that make the Fighter say, "I don't have 'tickle' or 'tell joke' as a button to push on my character sheet, so there's no way I could possibly make anyone laugh. Unlike the Wizard, who gets Tasha's Hideous Uncontrollable Laughter."?" (Yes they (actually you) didn't call out that they have no rules supported way to make someone laugh verses something like a spell, but they did contrast it with a spell so it seems to be implied.) That dichotomy is what I want you to comment on. Including if that is what you were trying to say.

* Once selected in a case that is reasonable to do so. For power/balance descriptions usually include how often it reasonable to select this option. While important in general I don't think it is here.

Let's look at flour.

Against D&D style invisibility, flour just works. But I wouldn't call flour "powerful".

It can also be used for detecting breezes, to see if anyone comes a certain way, can be used for numerous crafts, and has some properties related to fire and explosions (and for baking, I suppose), so flour is "flexible" (I had to go back and replace my word "versatile").

None of these uses are *directly* encoded in the rules for flour in any system I know, so it is not "concrete".

"And yet you made a comment that suggests you think the people who play fighters are wrong for wanting more concrete (encoded in rules, as stated above) ways to make someone laugh."

Um… no.

I think that the Fighter player is "wrong" (more… unskilled? Uncreative?) for not being able to look beyond what is printed on their character sheet.

So, my senile mind doesn't remember all the details, but I *think* that this retelling is as close to a true story as I can manage:
Once upon a time, the party Fighter was fighting an invisible assassin in a tavern. They moved the fight into the kitchen, grabbed a bag of flour, and made the Assassin targetable to their "put the pointy end in the other man" button. The Assassin fled.

If the Fighter wants more buttons, they are welcome to pick up the bag of flour and carry it with them. I not only have nothing against such, I a) welcome such behavior and b) expect such behavior from a skilled Fighter, and C) am all about systems printing as many obscure rules as possible, to minimize the need for rule 0 ("The 'Manipulate Other' special action has many additional users beyond those printed in the core rules. For example, suppose you are fighting underwater, and want to try to tickle your opponent. To do so, make…").

So, no, I think I'm pretty on-record as being pro-button, and liking systems that give you lots of buttons.

What I don't like is feeling limited to *just* those buttons.

So, for instance, when my character is being chased by an organized squad of orc troops, and topples a bunch of oil drums in their general direction? I don't want to be limited to, "are you trying to push the 'kill the orcs' button? The 'create distraction and break LoS to gain advantage on losing them' button? The 'remove the *organized squad* status that is giving them bonuses by making them break formation' button? Or the 'add *covered in oil* status' button?"

No, I want that action to have the logical consequences that it would have - some chance of *all* of those, plus the "learn about the orcs" button (do they favor "break formation" or "take damage"?), the "make noise" button (which might attract attention from the party (help), the authorities (help/hurt), random locals (call authorities / easier to hide in mob / potential hostages / additional casualties), or even more orcs (hurt (but give Intel that there *are* more orcs))), the "make it public" button (harder to cover up that nothing happened here), etc.

So, again, I don't begrudge the Fighter for *wanting* buttons. I just feel it is a suboptimal use of the medium when a player (or the GM!) is incapable of interacting with the fiction outside the use of buttons.

Cluedrew

2021-07-31, 12:01 PM

Button vs win buttonIf a win button is not a type of button then we should change one of the names. These confusing names happen sometimes but we shouldn't encourage it. Also I'm still not entirely sure what buttons refer to. I thought it was fire and forget/single application abilities (simple as a button) but not I don't think that is it. Is it concrete abilities? Permissions? Is improving a stat a button?

Against D&D style invisibility, flour just works. But I wouldn't call flour "powerful".Does it though? I mean I have seen flour, it doesn't immediately fall to the ground and you might be able to see some movement if people walked over it. But that's still a step or two down from "might as well not be invisible".

So, no, I think I'm pretty on-record as being pro-button, and liking systems that give you lots of buttons.

What I don't like is feeling limited to *just* those buttons.There we go, that's the comment I was looking for. Although if you want a prime example of someone overly reliant on buttons I would not use someone who has almost none. I'm still not entirely sure what a button is but I'm pretty sure spells are buttons so...

You know what I wonder if there is some echo of the air-breathing mermaid problem here. In that the extreme amount of buttons in some areas make it feel more constricting in others where they aren't. Plus its just a matter of power creep. Dropping the term "buttons" now; concrete abilities don't only accomplish things in their own right but are tools to get other things done. Although abilities aren't equal in terms of the how they can be creatively applied (I think speech is actually the top here) assuming it evens out over all the character with more concrete abilities will not only be stronger on paper but can increase that gap in practice.

PhoenixPhyre

2021-07-31, 12:41 PM

You know what I wonder if there is some echo of the air-breathing mermaid problem here. In that the extreme amount of buttons in some areas make it feel more constricting in others where they aren't. Plus its just a matter of power creep. Dropping the term "buttons" now; concrete abilities don't only accomplish things in their own right but are tools to get other things done. Although abilities aren't equal in terms of the how they can be creatively applied (I think speech is actually the top here) assuming it evens out over all the character with more concrete abilities will not only be stronger on paper but can increase that gap in practice.

The other thing that concrete abilities do, especially embedded in a system that demands permissions and has "technical" language (or a culture of interpreting things technically), is produce loopholes. Since you have a bunch of concrete permissions, the chances of them interacting in unexpected (to their creators) ways increases faster than linearly. And when people think in terms of "RAW-think" (parsing rules quasi-legalistically[1], removing as much of the human from the equation as possible, etc), that leaves gaps. And the more concrete abilities a character has (in general terms), the bigger chances of managing to break out of the framework of the rules and end up somewhere else entirely (in rules space). And then you end up playing the rules, not experiencing the narrative. You end up with things that make no narrative sense, but are "legal".

Is that a pro or a con? For me, it's a con. I prefer thinking of those abilities as narrative suggestions, subject to the constraints of the established narrative, the world, and the desires of the players (including the DM). Not hard "you can do this, everything else be hanged" promises. On the flip side, I'm also comfortable giving affordances well outside the concrete abilities, based on what the narrative suggests should be the case.

[1] I say quasi here, because the kind of argumentation about RAW that exists on these forums (and elsewhere) would get you basically instantly censured in court, with a show-cause order for making frivolous arguments. Context-free meaning is not a thing; legal readings have rules about how the rules are read (canons of construction). Online "RAW" argumentation only has "slice and dice the text to prove that you can do what you wanted to do all along". It's proof-texting at its worst. But that's a separate rant.

Talakeal

2021-07-31, 01:26 PM

Does it though? I mean I have seen flour, it doesn't immediately fall to the ground and you might be able to see some movement if people walked over it. But that's still a step or two down from "might as well not be invisible".

I think the idea is the flour in the air coats the person.

I still think this is a poor idea for a binary ability; an invisible person is not impossible to detect, merely difficult, and an invisible person coated in flower is still much harder to make out than one who is fully visible.

KorvinStarmast

2021-07-31, 01:52 PM

[1] I say quasi here, because the kind of argumentation about RAW that exists on these forums (and elsewhere) would get you basically instantly censured in court, with a show-cause order for making frivolous arguments. Context-free meaning is not a thing; legal readings have rules about how the rules are read (canons of construction). Online "RAW" argumentation only has "slice and dice the text to prove that you can do what you wanted to do all along". It's proof-texting at its worst. But that's a separate rant. yeah, rules-lawyer pays far too high of a compliment to the rules-lawyer.

May I ask the principles in this side bar to please start a new thread about win buttons and buttons. As its own topic, I think it has some rich possibilities. As a digression on the OPs question, it (in my view) adds noise over signal in this poster's opinion.
As to the OP:

I think the idea is the flour in the air coats the person. Yes, it reveals the 3D shape sufficiently to (a) know where it is and (b) given point (a), makes attacking or targeting that shape trivially easier than trying to find or hear or smell the invisible target before attacking.

I still think this is a poor idea for a binary ability You are, IMO, approaching the game as though the rules are computer code.
The use of a bag of flour is a very old solution to the "where is it?" problem in the game, represents some Player Skill that you seem to be deprived of on a regular basis, but it is also constrained by the chance to throw the bag and miss thereby wasting a turn/round/action and being none the wiser once the flour cloud settles.

See also the bane of every invisible character ever: the closed/locked door (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0656.html) in a room where people are looking for the inviso character who is trying to get away.

A certain amount of verisimilitude is healthy for any table's game. Just how much or how little is another dialable feature of this game form (IIRC, you are running a variation on D&D 3.5e).

Vahnavoi

2021-07-31, 02:15 PM

Regarding flour and invisibility: there are many ways it could work, but the actual effect I would base a tactic on is that an invisible person still occupies physical space so in a cloud of powder they would show as a bubble. A similar effect might be achievable by submerging an invisible person in water, given air and water have different refractive indexes. Similar explanation would explain why Invisibility doesn't prevent you from being heard, detected by sonar or tremorsense, etc.

Similarly, splashing someone invisible with paint or throwing a sheet over them isn't useful just because a cover of paint or the sheet might be visible over them - the invisibility spell might turn the coating invisible, but then you'll be able to notice where it is turning invisible. It will be highly conspicuous if splashed paint leaves a person-shaped empty silhouette...

Telok

2021-07-31, 04:20 PM

Similarly, splashing someone invisible with paint or throwing a sheet over them isn't useful just because a cover of paint or the sheet might be visible over them - the invisibility spell might turn the coating invisible, but then you'll be able to notice where it is turning invisible. It will be highly conspicuous if splashed paint leaves a person-shaped empty silhouette...

This is where the problem of "how does the spell work" comes in. It's an issue with explicit buttons that arises when you want both narrative and hard rules based options in a single game. People expect or want a narrative effect of an option, but strict readings of the rules sat it doesn't do that (or worse doesn't really say how it works because the writers use unwritten assumptions).

Illusion spells often have this issue. They'll say "make an illusion of a person", but they also don't say many things. Then you get the narrative push towards an illusion of a person that can deceive or confuse people, but the rules (implicitly or explicitly) don't allow for movement, shadows, reflections, sound, etc, etc. Then we get endless debates about what the ability actually does.

Its not just spells that have the problem, but its where the issue arises most often. I think its also closely associated with the "air breathing mermaid" issue that plagues many systems. If there's a button for something then its implied that nobody can do that thing without the button. I've met this D&D 4e & 5e with the explicit hide action and 'hidden' condition, where DMs read that these things exist and therefore if a character hasn't taken the hide action then they aren't hidden, then everyone knows where they are. The existence of a "hide button" implicitly tells people that the button is the only way to "be hidden".

RandomPeasant

2021-07-31, 05:21 PM

This is true, which means that Passwall is a limitation placed on the type of adventures and scenarios the GM can prepare.

Sure. But passwall also allows new types of adventures, like "the vault is protected by 20ft of solid rock on all sides". And, yes, that's a bit contrived, but frankly so are the sorts of dungeons passwall negates. Mostly it's just another measure of non-linearity in something that is already not completely linear. Beyond that, this is true of every ability. If someone gets bigger numbers in combat (something no one would call a "Win Button" in any system), some enemies that were previously meaningful encounters no longer are.

You can do something similar with Passwall, but Passwall isn't the only such spell a Wizard has, especially as you reach higher levels. Wizards are the Toolbox Caster, which means accounting for every tool in their box, which can turn scenario design into a tangle as you dodge around the Wizard's spell list.

I would argue that's a result of other characters not having similar tools. If teleport is the only fast-travel tool available to players, it's easy to look at that as "Wizards are breaking my travel adventures". If every (or just many) characters got different fast-travel tools, scenario design would have to start from a place that acknowledges that you can't just put a desert between where the players are and where they need to be, then call that an adventure.

This is where I'd disagree - I don't see a "growing inability" to think outside the box. Actually I'd say I see more wacky plans coming out of my current group now than I did when I started playing.

I would also point out that just because you're using pre-defined abilities doesn't mean you're not "thinking outside the box". As they say, restrictions breed creativity, and in some ways figuring out how to get the game to do what you want can be more difficult than simply presenting a plan that convinces the DM to let you do what you want. In fact, I would say that's what combat has (typically) been about in D&D. You're not trying to figure out some totally out-of-left-field solution, you're combining the abilities you have to solve the problem in front of you.

The other thing that concrete abilities do, especially embedded in a system that demands permissions and has "technical" language (or a culture of interpreting things technically), is produce loopholes.

People expect or want a narrative effect of an option, but strict readings of the rules sat it doesn't do that (or worse doesn't really say how it works because the writers use unwritten assumptions).

I think you both are attributing something to "technical rules" that is, in fact, a fundamental problem in cooperative storytelling. It's not the fact that spells and abilities have explicit, spelled-out effects that lead to conflicts with narrative, it's the reality that people have different assumptions about what that narrative should be. Abandoning rules doesn't fix your problem, it just changes it.

Consider invisibility. The party is fighting an invisible enemy, and one of them gets the idea to start throwing handfuls of dirt around, so that the dirt will land on the enemy and make it clear where they are. It's a clever solution to the problem, and you'd like to let him do it. But another player says that she doesn't think this should work. The invisibility is clearly effecting their enemy's gear, so it seems like it would effect the dirt as well. So what happens when the dirt gets thrown?

That's a narrative conflict. But you'll note that I haven't mentioned any rules. I haven't even specified a system. "Loopholes" aren't a result of mechanics colliding with narrative, they're a result of different views of the narrative colliding. It's true that strict rules can make this worse, but that's because you're introducing an additional view of the narrative (the designers), not because you're doing something inherently different from focusing on the narrative. And while the rules can cause conflict, they also save you a tremendous amount of time by resolving conflicts in advance.

Cluedrew

2021-07-31, 06:58 PM

Some really good stuff these last few posts. I really like PhoenixPhyre's comments about rules breaking out of the narrative and much of the follow-up.

Sure. But passwall also allows new types of adventures,Point of note: that is irrelevant if it is not the type of adventure people want to run. Now in the particular case of D&D too many people go to it for too many different things and that's its own problem. But still if you are in it for more gritty survival based adventures unlocking teleport cuts off a lot more interesting adventures than it enables. So its only a neutral thing until you get people involved. I'm not going to argue one type of adventure is better or worse either, but individual people have their preferences.

On the other hand I really like your comment about how you can frame teleport/fast-travel. I don't remember seeing that one before and I think I like it. Also the fact that the fact a lot of these abilities that cut off certain types of adventures don't belong to the characters who are strongest at those adventures probably doesn't help. I actually haven't checked. Does the thief/rogue get passwall or the ranger teleport?

I think you both are attributing something to "technical rules" that is, in fact, a fundamental problem in cooperative storytelling. [...] Abandoning rules doesn't fix your problem, it just changes it.I think there are two sub-cases here. The first... just reread your post it does a pretty good job. The second is the rules-lawyer problem, which can happen accidentally too. And I was going to try and describe it but I don't think I have a better description other than pointing out "What you say is true but I think they are talking about something else." and then suggesting you give their posts another read with that in mind.

I did a lot of pointing back at other people's work here.

icefractal

2021-08-01, 01:10 AM

Let's look at flour.

Against D&D style invisibility, flour just works. But I wouldn't call flour "powerful".
That's sort of a memetic thing though. As in, many D&D players have heard anecdotes about flour beating invisibility and so would expect it work. And/or they think it should work because that's better from a gamist and spotlight balance perspective.

But if you said, "In this fantasy setting that you don't know much about, does flour stick to invisible creatures and negate their invisibility?" I would have no idea, because I can see arguments for it working either way.

Reasoning that it wouldn't, since the reasoning that it would is well known:
* Invisibility turns your clothes invisible too, even if those clothes are dusty.
* Ok, but it could be locked in at casting time. However, in that case, wouldn't having walked along a dusty road while invisible ruin your invisibility (even after leaving that road), from the visible dust sticking to your invisible boots and legs? And yet I've never seen that claim made.
* Even outside of a specifically dusty environment, there are lots of dust particles in the air. Should invisibility decay over time as more of them accumulate on the invisible creature? Again, not something I've seen even mentioned.

Now to be clear, the bag of flour would still reveal the presence of an invisible creature (if you got the right area) by the hollow left in the cloud. But whether they'd be at all visible after they left the cloud, that's up for debate.

Now if I was running a game, and someone did use the "bag of flour" strategy, would I have it work? Yes. But not because I believed it was the only logical way for it work, or even necessarily the most valid. Rather because a player has spent their action on something that they reasonably believe should work, and I can either negate that (possibly causing them to feel overruled by fiat, and likely discouraging anyone else from going outside the mechanics), or I can roll with it, and I choose the latter.

kyoryu

2021-08-01, 10:14 AM

Now if I was running a game, and someone did use the "bag of flour" strategy, would I have it work? Yes. But not because I believed it was the only logical way for it work, or even necessarily the most valid. Rather because a player has spent their action on something that they reasonably believe should work, and I can either negate that (possibly causing them to feel overruled by fiat, and likely discouraging anyone else from going outside the mechanics), or I can roll with it, and I choose the latter.

When I talk about "presume good faith", this is the kind of thing I'm talking about. If the player thinks it should work, and is doing it in good faith, and it's not UNreasonable? Roll with it.

If you're going to shoot that down, frankly I'd tell them up-front, if there's any way to justify it (and frankly maybe even if there's not).

NorthernPhoenix

2021-08-01, 10:24 AM

When I talk about "presume good faith", this is the kind of thing I'm talking about. If the player thinks it should work, and is doing it in good faith, and it's not UNreasonable? Roll with it.

If you're going to shoot that down, frankly I'd tell them up-front, if there's any way to justify it (and frankly maybe even if there's not).

I think this is generally good advice for any time you want to say "no". There are many cases when i want my main villain to be immune to some sort of control effect, and rather than spring this on my players like it makes me very clever, i prefer to say something like "as a powerful wizard, you can sense that spell wouldn't work" and let them do something else with their turn.

DigoDragon

2021-08-01, 02:00 PM

Yesterday's session with my local group revealed that my GM doesn't like close battles either. His 9th level druid NPC (D&D 3.5) almost lost a fight to two boars (a CR3 encounter). Our 1st-level party pretty much lost this fight with half of us down and the other half up in trees to avoid getting attacked. While I appreciate that the GM now understands that we don't like close battles with random encounters, it's also hilarious that he had so little control over his own fight and didn't think to fudge die rolls. He's a veteran GM too, so this wasn't the norm. We all have our off days, but wow... rolled an RL 1 on his GMing check that night.

In a completely different adventure and with a different GM, we were trying to play the first chapter of War of the Dragon Queen (D&D 5e) and every fight was nearly the last one that ended us. We the players were frustrated that the enemies were rolling so well and dropping half the party each battle; they always outnumbered us. And again, the GM too was frustrated with these fights. Though this one didn't have skin in the fights with an NPC, he was frustrated that he didn't want a TPK to end the session, yet again, he didn't want to fudge rolls or maybe even just reduce the enemies so we stood better odds of victory.

So that's two recent stories to share about frustrated groups at close battles, with both players and GMs disliking the fights. I laugh looking back at these experiences, because the commonality in both these cases is the the GMs did not want to fudge dice rolls or the encounter setups. Yet, that is within the GM's power to do so and when they have hidden die rolls it's not like many players would notice a little bump up/down in the rolls to balance out the encounters better. :smalltongue:

Quertus

2021-08-01, 06:48 PM

A "win button" is something that just works - Invisibility on Medusa to keep her from turning you to stone, the Knock spell on the epic challenge of a locked door, etc.

A "button" is a discrete entity on your character sheet (technically regardless of whether or not it has concrete rules).

D&D Invisibility is six kinds of weird. Anything added later - yes, including dust (or a coating of flour) - is not invisible. If you haven't seen it come up before, you probably haven't played with me or read my stories.

Many other kinds of invisibility would not interact similarly with flour. Although most kinds would have issues with "smoky" or aquatic environments.

I guess I can see, "you got to push a button… when do *I* get to push a button" logic limiting people from thinking in terms of non-buttons? Or… Hmmm… someone else pushing a button may make the other players, absent any other information, just assume that this is a button game. Like a boardgame.

If anyone sees a button, and thinks it is the only way to accomplish something (say, "invisibility" and "not be seen")? There's probably some complicated name for that cognitive failure. And whoever invented the catchy phrase, "there's more than one way to skin a cat" was likely very familiar with the failure.

Vahnavoi

2021-08-02, 04:50 AM

Fixating on one aspect at expense of others is colloquially called "tunnel vision", after the optic phenomenom where focusing on one thing limits your peripheral vision.

In tabletop game, it's usually more exact to call it failure of imagination, because that is literally what's happening: a person has to imagine the game situation in their head and is not doing so in sufficient detail for their imagined situation to suggest the alternate solutions.

There's a link between this topic and the three basic forms of problem solving, trial-and-error versus insight versus theory. Trial-and-error often fails to solve insight puzzles, or takes very long time to do so - why? Because the insight puzzle requires realizing that some apparent constraints on the puzzle are not binding - so called "out-of-the-box" thinking. The Nine Dot Problem is a classic example.

Of course, theory can interfere too - in this case, the theory of "exception proves the rule". So if an exception, such as a spell or feat, grants you an ability, it follows people not subject to that exception do not have that ability. This can cross over to learned helplessness, where players just stop trying things lacking explicit permission, because their experience is that nothing without explicit permission is allowed to fly.

...

I guess the point of this post is to showcase there's existent terminology to talk about these issues and you don't need idiosyncratic terms like "button" or "mermaid problem" to talk about them. :smalltongue: :smallwink:

Cluedrew

2021-08-02, 09:34 AM

Quertus

2021-08-02, 08:23 PM

If I may summarise one of the more common schools of thought I've seen in this thread that a close battle is not actually what people want at all. Instead people want to effect the outcome of the battle. Close battles can help with this because it means smaller contributions are more likely to have made a difference. Except for the people who want the end result to be something else (like an overwhelming victory) for other reasons. And there are other variations too, like if people want the difference to be before the battle, during the battle or either. And there are plenty of variations on the main idea.

For instance, I want that contribution to be inline with my character. A purely (but not partially) player skill based contribution is not really getting into the whole role-playing game aspect. So if it is just a clever trick or bold move that turned the tide I would very much like it to feel like a part of the character and not just be my tactically optimal decision.

To Quertus: Yeah I'll try to summarise why explicate/concrete abilities or buttons can reduce other ways of interacting at the game.
First is it sets expectation, this is the one you are talking about and it might be called tunnel vision (credit to Vahnavoi). And it is entirely a mental framework issue that you can break out of but then there are another few issues.
Second, implicit abilities not written on any character sheet are usually available to every character. So not only does the wizard have invisibility, all their spells that explicitly counter invisibility but they also have all* the implicit tools a fighter does to counter invisibility. Here gap between those who have buttons and those who don't is... well it can shrink a bit but unless the implicit abilities are always better and the characters are functionally identical it isn't going to go away. And then there is the next bit.
Third, implicit abilities that are available only to some characters are usually available to the characters with more explicit abilities. So if the wizard has a spell that does not explicitly counter invisibility but does produce mist (we can see the hole), covers the ground in something, produces a constant stream of water or just has an area-of-effect that is safe to fire off into the area the invisible person is roughly in then they have even more tools to deal with invisibility.

(*) Well most of, but honestly none of counters to invisibility given so far depend on having an ability a fighter (in terms of the archetype) has and a wizard (same) does not. Unless you need to tear open that bag of flower with your bare hands first.

On Invisibility: This entire time I have been assuming the flour disappears when it touches the invisible person because the invisibility is like a magic field that wraps the person. Flour was a good counter because unlike mud it stays in the air for a while. Where did this come from? Is there some line about D&D invisibility effecting the target and their possessions at time of casting or something?

I was going to reply to this but then I realised that is a different thread. I'll just drop "there are plenty of good reasons to avoid those" and if we want to get into what they are and if they were/could have been worth it we can go to another thread.

Yes, in at least some editions, D&D invisibility has words which state that it affects you, and your possessions at time of casting, but not things you pick up later. Thus, flour. (And, yes, by hanging in the air, it works great - if in a more limited capacity - for many other forms of invisibility, too.)

Also, invisibility only affects items - not other living beings. So it's a great way to test for morbidity, as well as for lice / parasites / pregnancy.

Your second point is… misleading, IMO. Case in point: as a Sentient Potted Plant, with *absolutely no buttons whatsoever* to push, because my focus was *not* on pushing buttons (or, really, taking actions at all), I was the one who had the focus to spare, and remembered where we parked.

So, IMO, the player whose sheet is free of relevant buttons should have an advantage in terms of looking for non-button solutions.

To say that again, if I were trying to design a character optimized to look outside the box, I would minimize their button space.

Hmmm… "thinking outside the box" could be taken several ways here, I think. In one form, a Fire Mage burning up the oxygen around a target to selectively suffocate them, or "inflaming passions" is considered "outside the box" thinking. In a second, combining "create plant material" and "create water" to create oobleck, or using invisibility to detect pregnancy, is considered "outside the box" thinking. In a third, realizing that effects oppose one another by caster level, and that flour defeated invisibility, therefore flour has a caster level, therefore its creator is a caster is considered "outside the box" thinking. But I feel that those are all distinct from "we're fighting in a tavern" "taverns have kitchens" "kitchens have flour" "this bag of flour can counter invisibility despite not being a button on my character sheet" is a type of "outside the box" thinking distinct from those other 3.

Anyway… I *think* (darn senility) that the points I was trying to make were… that I want intelligent action - whether "outside the box" or "choosing the right button to press / tool to use" - to be able to drastically change the outcome of a conflict far, *far* more than I want a conflict to feel tense/close, and that, despite all the conversations and clarifications, I *still* cannot correlate the *changes* between 2e and 3e casting with the growing trend of being unable to look outside the character sheet / the growing "button-dependent" culture. (Or, in newfangled "old" words, that might mean the same thing, I don't see the connection that would cause 3e to produce increasing tunnel vision or learned helplessness over 2e.)

Satinavian

2021-08-03, 01:43 AM

Anyway… I *think* (darn senility) that the points I was trying to make were… that I want intelligent action - whether "outside the box" or "choosing the right button to press / tool to use" - to be able to drastically change the outcome of a conflict far, *far* more than I want a conflict to feel tense/close, and that, despite all the conversations and clarifications, I *still* cannot correlate the *changes* between 2e and 3e casting with the growing trend of being unable to look outside the character sheet / the growing "button-dependent" culture. (Or, in newfangled "old" words, that might mean the same thing, I don't see the connection that would cause 3e to produce increasing tunnel vision or learned helplessness over 2e.)

If that is your point, it is probably better to forget all those sidetracks about flour and caster levels and stuff.

As for the culture, well, most of your "outside the box" ideas basically resolve via DM fiat. Relying on them makes the game feel like "mother-may-I". Even with a sack of flour against an invisible target, you might well be required to drop everything else in your hands, use one or more actions to ready the flour, then accurately guess, where the invisible enemy is, then hit the invisible enemy with the flour, using a thrown weapon attack with penalties for not being proficient with it and it being an improvised weapen. All the while having the chance that the enemy just retreats out of the poor reach of throwing your flow when you ready it. And that is not even going into whether the flour covering an invisible vanishes or not.

Of course players vastly prefer reliable abilities that work like buttons.

I will also readily admit that i as GM wouldn't have allowed even half the stuff that happens in many of those stories about "out-of-the-box-solution". I think the old culture you miss so much also had some assumptions about rewarding unconventional or surprising solutions or just have them happen when they look cool. Instead of judging them fairly and requiring appropriate skills and tools.

Talakeal

2021-08-03, 08:51 AM

Also, invisibility only affects items - not other living beings. So it's a great way to test for morbidity, as well as for lice / parasites / pregnancy.

Are you joking or do you actually play it that way?

Because if so, you don't need flour to see invisible people, the human shaped cloud of microbes should be more than enough.

Quertus

2021-08-03, 11:25 AM

Are you joking or do you actually play it that way?

Because if so, you don't need flour to see invisible people, the human shaped cloud of microbes should be more than enough.

D&D land is… weird. So, either, just like plants don't count as living beings in some editions, microbes don't either (otherwise, "first living being struck" spells wouldn't make it very far), or they simply don't exist.

So, it depends on the world in question as to which valid implementation they have chosen.

If that is your point, it is probably better to forget all those sidetracks about flour and caster levels and stuff.

Perhaps. But, if I'm explaining a bush, ignoring all the leaves and roots, and just focusing on the genetic markers that make something a bush? I feel it kinda loses something.

As for the culture, well, most of your "outside the box" ideas basically resolve via DM fiat. Relying on them makes the game feel like "mother-may-I".

Indeed, many (but not all) of them do. Which is why I rarely want to form my "critical memories" around such nebulous outcomes, let alone rely on them.

Even with a sack of flour against an invisible target, you might well be required to drop everything else in your hands, use one or more actions to ready the flour, then accurately guess, where the invisible enemy is, then hit the invisible enemy with the flour, using a thrown weapon attack with penalties for not being proficient with it and it being an improvised weapen. All the while having the chance that the enemy just retreats out of the poor reach of throwing your flow when you ready it. .

I will not admit to how many times I have demonstrated to a GM just how much area of their house i could cover just how quickly in flour. :smallamused:

And that is not even going into whether the flour covering an invisible vanishes or not..

Depends on the system.

Of course players vastly prefer reliable abilities that work like buttons.

I *think* you're conflating "buttons" and "win buttons".

I will also readily admit that i as GM wouldn't have allowed even half the stuff that happens in many of those stories about "out-of-the-box-solution".

I think the old culture you miss so much also had some assumptions about rewarding unconventional or surprising solutions or just have them happen when they look cool. Instead of judging them fairly and requiring appropriate skills and tools.

I mean, I've corrected people's mistakes regarding *in-box* solutions, and created experiments (including ones that didn't involve flour) to empirically test the viability of creative solutions. I don't run on "rule of cool"

But, if you want a demonstration for how appropriate the tool is, I'll bring a bag of flour. :smalltongue:

(And I'm pretty sure I've got all those penalties you listed, plus the "I'm not an adventurer, I just play one in an RPG" penalty.)

Telok

2021-08-03, 11:56 AM

I will also readily admit that i as GM wouldn't have allowed even half the stuff that happens in many of those stories about "out-of-the-box-solution". I think the old culture you miss so much also had some assumptions about rewarding unconventional or surprising solutions or just have them happen when they look cool. Instead of judging them fairly and requiring appropriate skills and tools.

There's also the AD&D 1e fighter class. Before followers and without using several optional rules it has no "buttons", no 'appropriate skills', and was perfectly functional and popular. The class held its place by being truely better in combat than the other classes and that was all it had, on paper. But the play style (which I think 5e tries to half emulate and completely fails) didn't rely on character sheet "buttons"...

Realization: All computer games, due to the limited nature of programming, are "button" games. You can't set a tripwire in a dungeon and lure skeletons across it unless its a perbuilt button. Anyone in the hobby with any modern computer game experience is probably subtly predisposed to button thinking. I think we need to recognize that most of us have a bias towards buttons.

Thinking back over the last three years where I haven't been able to play computer games, my style of playing & DMing has been changing back towards that pre-1990s mode where "buttons" were less of a thing. Thus, if the writers of systems, or different writers of a system are not aware of and explicitly communicating their biases & assumptions to the players & DMs using the books then you'll see more of the tunnel vision towards the written rules and explicit character sheet abilities. That will create more tension, drama, and failed games if all the players & the DM aren't aligned with the system's unwritten assumptions.

I think that may explain the repeated failures of new DMs I've seen last decade. No DM who came into the hobby mainly through "button" games and media has been able to successfully deal with repeated non-button based play, and the different D&D DMGs haven't seemed to have any effect on that. If the writers of the classes & combat are primed for buttons, the DMG writers are not writing for buttons, and the difference isn't clearly communicated, then you have the system (sometimes different parts of the system) and users working at cross purposes to create a potential fail state for the game.

Great. Now I know that I and the readers have a potential bias that may not match, and I have to add some more really super-explicit advice to the DtD40k7e appendices.

kyoryu

2021-08-03, 11:57 AM

I really hate the term "Mother May I". It's unnecessarily disparaging towards a game style that works for many many people.

NorthernPhoenix

2021-08-03, 12:02 PM

I really hate the term "Mother May I". It's unnecessarily disparaging towards a game style that works for many many people.

I agree, to me it reads as an expression of rage at not being fully in control of all aspects of a situation. To me, the point of these games is collaborative play, interacting socially with your fellow players (the DM is a "player" in this context) is a healthy part of the game.

PhoenixPhyre

2021-08-03, 12:09 PM

There's also the AD&D 1e fighter class. Before followers and without using several optional rules it has no "buttons", no 'appropriate skills', and was perfectly functional and popular. The class held its place by being truely better in combat than the other classes and that was all it had, on paper. But the play style (which I think 5e tries to half emulate and completely fails) didn't rely on character sheet "buttons"...

Realization: All computer games, due to the limited nature of programming, are "button" games. You can't set a tripwire in a dungeon and lure skeletons across it unless its a perbuilt button. Anyone in the hobby with any modern computer game experience is probably subtly predisposed to button thinking. I think we need to recognize that most of us have a bias towards buttons.

Thinking back over the last three years where I haven't been able to play computer games, my style of playing & DMing has been changing back towards that pre-1990s mode where "buttons" were less of a thing. Thus, if the writers of systems, or different writers of a system are not aware of and explicitly communicating their biases & assumptions to the players & DMs using the books then you'll see more of the tunnel vision towards the written rules and explicit character sheet abilities. That will create more tension, drama, and failed games if all the players & the DM aren't aligned with the system's unwritten assumptions.

I think that may explain the repeated failures of new DMs I've seen last decade. No DM who came into the hobby mainly through "button" games and media has been able to successfully deal with repeated non-button based play, and the different D&D DMGs haven't seemed to have any effect on that. If the writers of the classes & combat are primed for buttons, the DMG writers are not writing for buttons, and the difference isn't clearly communicated, then you have the system (sometimes different parts of the system) and users working at cross purposes to create a potential fail state for the game.

Great. Now I know that I and the readers have a potential bias that may not match, and I have to add some more really super-explicit advice to the DtD40k7e appendices.

I think I agree. And it's something I've seen. But not just video game-induced bias--I've seen it with people who were really strong into ttrpgs that leaned much more to the "button" mentality (4e D&D especially, but 3.5e D&D to a lesser extent). They tend to think (both as DMs and players) as "you need a specific key item/skill/spell/"button" to do X, otherwise deny".

I really hate the term "Mother May I". It's unnecessarily disparaging towards a game style that works for many many people.

Agreed. It's weaponized discourse that assumes the conclusion (that DM discretion in things is something to be avoided).

oxybe

2021-08-03, 12:20 PM

I really hate the term "Mother May I". It's unnecessarily disparaging towards a game style that works for many many people.

the cynic in me welcomes you to how 4e D&D lovers feel when someone throws the word "videogamey" or "mmo" for a game style that works for them (myself included).

in a less snarky tone however "mother may i" does describe how it feels when a GM is overly restrictive in what they allow players to do outside the explicit rules of the game. You've been creatively browbeaten and hobbled by a GM that isn't, as NorthernPhoenix puts it, interested in collaborative play. Thus anything that isn't expressly written in the rulebook (or how they want/expect a scene to play out) turns into a game of... Mother May I.

It's not disparaging the game itself, but rather a symptom of a bad GM or negative interpretation of that game.

PhoenixPhyre

2021-08-03, 12:25 PM

the cynic in me welcomes you to how 4e D&D lovers feel when someone throws the word "videogamey" or "mmo" for a game style that works for them (myself included).

in a less snarky tone however "mother may i" does describe how it feels when a GM is overly restrictive in what they allow players to do outside the explicit rules of the game. You've been creatively browbeaten and hobbled by a GM that isn't, as NorthernPhoenix puts it, interested in collaborative play. Thus anything that isn't expressly written in the rulebook (or how they want/expect a scene to play out) turns into a game of... Mother May I.

It's not disparaging the game itself, but rather a symptom of a bad GM or negative interpretation of that game.

But it's absolutely used (possibly by other people) about game system design writ large. Any form of "well, that's up to the DM" or other explicit room for DM discretion is derided as "Mother May I" (which by assertion is awful and sufficient reason to reject the implementation proposal out of hand). I don't think I've really seen it used when talking about GM behavior.

Xervous

2021-08-03, 12:31 PM

Generally whenever I’ve seen MMI mentioned it’s with respect to GMs that have not or will not work to establish a shared understanding of the game expectations. It’s in this state that players query possible, even plausible actions without much certainty that they’ll get the green light. This is rarely a fault of the system, more a matter of good gaming practices and communication.

But when a system provides arbitrary character features, tells the GM to make stuff up for details that interact with those features, and doesn’t include anything in the way of a suggestion that the GM inform the players on the nature of their personal spin... Hello, are we playing the same game? Again, mostly a matter of bad GMs, but certain systems do set traps for the inexperienced and unwary.

icefractal

2021-08-03, 01:50 PM

the cynic in me welcomes you to how 4e D&D lovers feel when someone throws the word "videogamey" or "mmo" for a game style that works for them (myself included).This. Is "Mother May I" a negative way to put it? Yes. Is a preference for mechanics discussed as a negative thing (sometimes even "video game induced brain damage") extremely often? Also yes. Stones, glass houses, etc.

So personally, I consider the ability to go beyond the rules very important, but if I'm doing so it should be for something the rules can't practically cover. Rigging up some special-purpose device? Ok, sure, let's negotiate. Jumping over a pit? There can and should just be concrete rules for that.

And something that may draw people to concrete abilities - being in control of your own parameters is more relaxing. For example, I can walk or take the bus to get downtown. Walking takes roughly 40 minutes, the bus takes on average 15 (for combined wait time and travel time). So the bus is better, right? Well, if I walk, I know I'll be there in 40 minutes. If I take the bus, I will probably be there in 15. Unless a bus breaks down. And the next one is slow because of picking up more people. And there's more traffic than typical. And so it's possible that I'll end up taking more than 40 minutes, plus I won't know that fact until it's too late to walk instead. For that reason (and that I like walking), I generally walk unless it's raining or I'm in a hurry and willing to take a gamble.

In the same way, "now I'll do this thing that I know will work" is more relaxing than "I can try to do this thing, and it will probably work how I think, but maybe not, so I should have a contingency plan ..."

I would say, if you want to encourage players to go outside the rules more, particularly in high-stakes areas like combat, don't be ****ing cagey about how it will work. If they propose something, tell them how you're going to resolve it. Let them change their action after hearing that, if they want to. "Find out by doing" is one of those things that sounds better than it works in practice. And in many cases, the character would have logically found out by trying it already if it's an area they have experience in, it just occurred offscreen.

PhoenixPhyre

2021-08-03, 02:04 PM

I would say, if you want to encourage players to go outside the rules more, particularly in high-stakes areas like combat, don't be ****ing cagey about how it will work. If they propose something, tell them how you're going to resolve it. Let them change their action after hearing that, if they want to. "Find out by doing" is one of those things that sounds better than it works in practice. And in many cases, the character would have logically found out by trying it already if it's an area they have experience in, it just occurred offscreen.

I totally agree with this part.

As for the other part, there are lots of things where the DM has information that the characters can't have. And things that are context sensitive enough that you can't encode them in the rules without massive bloat (or forcing every game into a single mold). DMs need discretion. Discretion is inevitable. Accepting that fact and being honest about it are key to actually having a system that works well.

kyoryu

2021-08-03, 02:18 PM

the cynic in me welcomes you to how 4e D&D lovers feel when someone throws the word "videogamey" or "mmo" for a game style that works for them (myself included).

in a less snarky tone however "mother may i" does describe how it feels when a GM is overly restrictive in what they allow players to do outside the explicit rules of the game. You've been creatively browbeaten and hobbled by a GM that isn't, as NorthernPhoenix puts it, interested in collaborative play. Thus anything that isn't expressly written in the rulebook (or how they want/expect a scene to play out) turns into a game of... Mother May I.

It's not disparaging the game itself, but rather a symptom of a bad GM or negative interpretation of that game.

As someone that liked 4e, I hated "videogamey" or "mmo" as a descriptor.

Not least because that's been the majority of my career, and 4e would be a terrible MMO/videogame.

But no, I don't see any reason we need to be as pejorative towards game styles that just aren't our preferences, regardless of what that style is.

kyoryu

2021-08-03, 02:26 PM

T
I would say, if you want to encourage players to go outside the rules more, particularly in high-stakes areas like combat, don't be ****ing cagey about how it will work. If they propose something, tell them how you're going to resolve it. Let them change their action after hearing that, if they want to. "Find out by doing" is one of those things that sounds better than it works in practice. And in many cases, the character would have logically found out by trying it already if it's an area they have experience in, it just occurred offscreen.

100% on this, btw. Be clear about how you're going to adjudicate a thing, and then let the player change their mind.

Mostly because the player has an incomplete and non-authoritative view of the world. Since the GM knows everything, and their opinions are authoritative, they need that benefit. Most people can roughly gauge how difficult something is before they start, unless it's due to hidden information. So find a way to give as much info as possible.

BRC

2021-08-03, 02:48 PM

100% on this, btw. Be clear about how you're going to adjudicate a thing, and then let the player change their mind.

Mostly because the player has an incomplete and non-authoritative view of the world. Since the GM knows everything, and their opinions are authoritative, they need that benefit. Most people can roughly gauge how difficult something is before they start, unless it's due to hidden information. So find a way to give as much info as possible.

"Let the player change their mind" is key here, because if asking is a commitment, players are not going to ask.

If a Wizard says "I want to use Magic Missile to cut the Archer's bowstrings", then you reply "Okay, you do and it doesn't work" or "You try, make a DC 30 Arcana check to guide the missiles with that much accuracy", then you've just punished the player for thinking creatively.

In all likelyhood, the Wizard PC knows better than their player how accurate and precise a Magic Missile can be. They would know if targeting bowstrings is doable, or is very very difficult. They would know if this is a terrible idea.

RandomPeasant

2021-08-03, 02:55 PM

Point of note: that is irrelevant if it is not the type of adventure people want to run.

Certainly. But that, I would say, is what the level system is for. The reason levels exist is to divide the playspace into parts, so that you can exclude things that don't fit with your vision of the game. It's not perfect, because it's entirely possible to want to fight 6th level monsters with 14th level utility or whatever, but it's much better than categorically excluding things that create play experiences you don't like.

I actually haven't checked. Does the thief/rogue get passwall or the ranger teleport?

Of course not. Those aren't casters, why would you think they would get nice things?

Realization: All computer games, due to the limited nature of programming, are "button" games. You can't set a tripwire in a dungeon and lure skeletons across it unless its a perbuilt button.

It's a spectrum, not a binary. Computer games aren't all buttons and no creativity any more than TTRPGs were pure creativity in the Good Old Days. Consider a RTS game like Starcraft or Age of Empires. On the one hand, it's true that you can't decide to make a new Zerg creature that's like a Zergling but with acid spit, or take a war elephant and put a bombard cannon on it to make a new siege unit. But on the other hand, the strategy in those games, even in campaigns is not a simple matter of "find appropriate button and apply to problem". There are lots of different ways you can approach a goal in a RTS, and while all of them arise from the defined interactions of the defined elements the developers of those games have created, very often the specifics will be entirely unlike what was expected.

I really hate the term "Mother May I". It's unnecessarily disparaging towards a game style that works for many many people.

I mean, so is the whole "those abilities are just pushing buttons" thing. Basically no one is fully respectful towards things they don't like.

BRC

2021-08-03, 03:48 PM

It's a spectrum, not a binary. Computer games aren't all buttons and no creativity any more than TTRPGs were pure creativity in the Good Old Days. Consider a RTS game like Starcraft or Age of Empires. On the one hand, it's true that you can't decide to make a new Zerg creature that's like a Zergling but with acid spit, or take a war elephant and put a bombard cannon on it to make a new siege unit. But on the other hand, the strategy in those games, even in campaigns is not a simple matter of "find appropriate button and apply to problem". There are lots of different ways you can approach a goal in a RTS, and while all of them arise from the defined interactions of the defined elements the developers of those games have created, very often the specifics will be entirely unlike what was expected.

I feel like you're misinterpreting the term "Button" here.

A "button" is a defined, discreet way of interacting with the game, it doesn't refer to what actions one can take within the game.

In an RTS like starcraft, all methods of interacting with the game are pre-determined. What you DO with those buttons is a whole different matter.

You don't play starcraft by hitting a single button labeled "Build lots of zerglings and swarm the enemy", but anything you do is going to be some combination of building units and then giving them orders, because that's how you the game is played.
It's hitting buttons, but it's not JUST hitting buttons.

Consider Painting. To Paint, you start with a canvas, and you put paint on it. Your buttons are a palette of Paints and a set of brushes. But I don't think anybody would call the act of painting "Just Putting Paint on a Canvas".

it's not about creativity, it's about "What are the ways the player can interact with the game".
For example, a longsword is a weapon that deals 1d8+str damage on a hit. It, along with the Attack action, is a button you can press to reduce an enemy's hit points.

But it's ALSO a piece of sharp metal, about 2-3 feet long with a blunt hilt.

You could use a Sword to cut a rope on a ropebridge, thus destroying it.

In a pure "Button" game, that only works if the game recognizes the ropebridge as destructible, and if it recognizes a sword as a valid tool for destroying it.

In a TTRPG, a sword is a valid tool for cutting a rope the moment the words "Sword' and "Rope" enter the picture, even if "cutting ropes" is not a method of interaction the player was explicitly given.

It's not that Non-Button games offer greater opportunity for creativity, it's that they can be approached from an entirely different perspective. If you design a TTRPG adventure with the perspective that a PC is simply a set of discrete abilities, and not a fictional person living in a fictional world, then you can get blindsided.

Saying something like "I Cut the rope with my sword" isn't a more creative strategy than, I dunno, Tower-Rushing in an RTS. I'd actually say it's far more obvious a solution, but it's a solution that comes from viewing the game from a different perspective, a perspective only possible in a tabletop game, where methods of interaction are not all pre-defined.

KorvinStarmast

2021-08-03, 04:21 PM

I really hate the term "Mother May I". It's unnecessarily disparaging towards a game style that works for many many people. indeed.

"Let the player change their mind" is key here, because if asking is a commitment, players are not going to ask.
Are you sure? can also be used here.

RandomPeasant

2021-08-03, 04:32 PM

In a pure "Button" game, that only works if the game recognizes the ropebridge as destructible, and if it recognizes a sword as a valid tool for destroying it.

In a TTRPG, a sword is a valid tool for cutting a rope the moment the words "Sword' and "Rope" enter the picture, even if "cutting ropes" is not a method of interaction the player was explicitly given.

That's a distinction without a difference. You can rush in a RTS scenario without some explicitly enabled "rushable" tag. There's no categorical distinction between the emergent tactics that arise in sufficiently complex rules systems and the kind of "non-button mindset" that's being argued for.

BRC

2021-08-03, 05:43 PM

Are you sure? can also be used here.

"Are you sure" has it's place, but not here.

"I throw a fireball at the Red Dragon" is a good place for "Are you sure", Are You Sure is a way for the GM to communicate "This is a bad/questionable/risky idea and your character would know better".

That's different than a player going outside the established rules and the GM telling them If the thing they're trying to do is even possible/ how the GM would adjucate such an action, and giving them a chance to retract their action if what the GM proposes is too mechanically risky/low impact for the cost.

This would be more like 'I use Shatter on the cave ceiling so the stalactites fall and land on the Dragon", only to be told that, yeah, that might work, but it's just going to turn into a dex save for moderate damage from some falling rocks.

That's a distinction without a difference. You can rush in a RTS scenario without some explicitly enabled "rushable" tag. There's no categorical distinction between the emergent tactics that arise in sufficiently complex rules systems and the kind of "non-button mindset" that's being argued for.

Emergent tactics are applications of tools that the player has been explicitly given.

You don't need a "Rushable" tag because "Rushing" is not a method of interacting with the game, it's a strategy one implements using the tools you have been given.

You don't tell the game to Rush, you tell the game to do a thousand small actions which, when taken collectively, turn into the strategy known as Rushing. But executing that strategy is a process made up of thousands of discrete inputs, each of which is an explicit tool that the player has been given.

Think about a fighting game like street fighter. When I say "Button", I'm not talking about something like Zoning (Using ranged attacks to keep the enemy at a certain distance) or using change-up combos that are difficult to block.

I'm talking about actual buttons on the controller, individual inputs that translate into discrete actions on the screen. I hit the attack button, and my character throws a punch. I hit down and attack, and my character does a low kick. Those are two of the many Buttons that I have. I don't get to push a button to make Ryu ask Ken if they want to go bowling instead unless that's one of the buttons I've been given. No combination of the buttons I DO have will ever turn into Ryu saying "Hey Ken, what if we just went Bowling?".

Which is completely irrelevant when it comes to the question of what depth of strategy and creativity can be applied to the game, but IS a relevant distinction when it comes to thinking about how the player interacts with the game, especially since it defines what a "Creative Solution" looks like.

Consider, a fighting game like Street Fighter vs something like D&D. A player has a goal: Make it more likely for my attack to connect and not be blocked.

In Street Fighter, a creative solution to that is to work out a combination of moves that is unpredictable and difficult for the opponent to block.

In D&D, you can be as creative as you want describing how your character alternates attacks from different angles to overwhelm the enemy's defenses, but that simply isn't a lever you can pull to achieve your goal. Instead, a creative solution might be something like dousing the only light source in the room, so that you (Who has darkvision) can see, but your opponent (Who doesn't) cannot.

This is relevant because you can get serious problems when the player's perspective doesn't match up with the Games/GM's. Imagine a Starcraft player trying to figure out what buttons to press to load a dropship full of nukes so they can have it crash into the middle of the enemy base.

A GM who views things from a button perspective can get flabbergasted as soon as a player does something that isn't explicitly listed as an option on their character sheet, and either shut it down, or just say "Well that solves the problem I guess?" (Even if it shouldn't have, or should have at least taken a skill check) simply because it didn't occur to them that players could interact with the world in that way.

Often far worse is the opposite, where the GM comes from a firmly Non-Button mindset, but the Players are viewing the world through a lens of Buttons. The GM describes a wide, fast-moving river, and the Players start scanning their character sheet for something that translates to "Cross a long distance without touching the ground", instead of, say, following the river to look for a bridge.

Satinavian

2021-08-04, 01:01 AM

I really hate the term "Mother May I". It's unnecessarily disparaging towards a game style that works for many many people.
Why is referrencing to a somewhat popular children's game a bad thing? The original also does work as well for many people. Children wouldn't play it if they didn't have fun.

I like this referrence because it easily encapsules both benefits (ease of use, adaptibility) and potential weaknesses (biases, mismatching expectations, power dynamics, consistancy ) of extensive GM adjucation.

I will not admit to how many times I have demonstrated to a GM just how much area of their house i could cover just how quickly in flour. :smallamused:Are you saying that you already had problems at real tables to let a GM allow you the flour solution ? Well, that seems like a point against flour as win-button, doesn't it ?

But, if you want a demonstration for how appropriate the tool is, I'll bring a bag of flour. :smalltongue:

(And I'm pretty sure I've got all those penalties you listed, plus the "I'm not an adventurer, I just play one in an RPG" penalty.)Sure. You get a sack of flour, a blindfold to simulate the invisibility, we do it out in the open to have an easier time cleaning and give you an easier time moving with blindfold amd I get to bring some Larp sword. If I hit you three times before you get me covered in flour, the flour solution is considered impractical even against a melee enemy let alone a ranged one. Sounds about right ?

I would say, if you want to encourage players to go outside the rules more, particularly in high-stakes areas like combat, don't be ****ing cagey about how it will work.
But I don't want to encourage players to go outside the rules. I want versimilitude and will always judge (outside of rule) situations as fairly and seemingly realistically as i can. Also combat using weapons specifically made to harm enemies to the best the technology allows used by people trained in using them is really hard to beat with improvised alternatives. If it wasn't, armies would have switched to the alternatives long ago. Established procedured/tactics are established for a reason. That doesn't mean outside the box will never work. But it will never work just because the players brought it up or just because ofdramatic reasons or for some strange always-say-yes mindset.

If they propose something, tell them how you're going to resolve it. Let them change their action after hearing that, if they want to. "Find out by doing" is one of those things that sounds better than it works in practice. And in many cases, the character would have logically found out by trying it already if it's an area they have experience in, it just occurred offscreen.That however is something i would completely agree to.

Glorthindel

2021-08-04, 03:57 AM

the cynic in me welcomes you to how 4e D&D lovers feel when someone throws the word "videogamey" or "mmo" for a game style that works for them (myself included).

If a game didn't want that label, it probably shouldn't have listed Magic Rings as going "in a hand slot". Fingers - rings go on fingers, not in "hand slots" :smallfurious:

(I am only half joking - I don't truly believe 4th ed was 'videogamey', but they didn't help themselves on that front with some of the **** they did)

Pex

2021-08-04, 04:53 AM

Cynical thinking alert.

It is not always/only the player who suffers from tunnel vision. There are DMs who insist on only allowing button solutions. If they don't outright deny the out of the box thinking attempt, they apply penalties to the roll and/or set the target number so high the player is discouraged from trying and doesn't bother. If he does bother he's lucky if a Natural 18 is enough to succeed. Play with enough of such DMs or long enough with one, the player is conditioned to think only of using a button.

The most likely reason the DM behaves this way is because he's afraid by not using a button the player is trying to get away with something. The DM has to make something up the rules don't explicitly cover. He does not want to set precedent where now players will always try the Out Of The Box Thing as a new button they created. He's afraid the players will become too powerful and make the game an unplayable mess. It's not play tested! The rules don't say it's ok, so it must be game breaking!

The catch is that the out of the box thing the player wants to do is possible to be Honest True ridiculous/too powerful/game breaking. A DM has to learn the difference. He won't learn if he denies everything or passive aggressively deny by permitting but making it almost impossible to do. He can still deny what is objectively obvious to be ridiculous, but he needs to permit more with reasonable success chances. When something is proven to be too powerful that's when denial for future games is earned. When players are allowed to think outside the box they will do so.

Edit: You may hate the term, but "Mother May I" is accurate to describe a game where the player has no idea what his character can do unless the DM says he can. It is the DM's job to adjudicate situations and "make things up" when the rules don't explicitly cover them. The problem is where the line should be drawn between where the rules explicitly cover the situation and the DM takes it from there. It is the game designers' job to make those rules so the DM doesn't have to. That's why the game was bought.