"Oh, that's cool!"

[SangoProduction]

In a recent game of mine, one of the party members got essentially pinned by a vampire, and narrowly avoided getting bit. Everyone's pounding on the vampire to try and... well, kill it mostly, but also get it off of him.

Then the mage pulls out a glue spell, and says he runs up to the vampire, and casts his glue spell (whatever it's called) into the vampire's face to glue its mouth shut.

As you can imagine, that's not how the spell works. It's just entanglement. But that's a neat way of using the spell, and it was allowed.


How often do you guys ( / have DMs that) allow things like this to happen? And if at all, then what's the most notable moment when that happened for you?

[Mordante]

I play a Catfolk Bard.

A while back I sneaked up on a wizard but didn't want to kill/attack him. Just stop him from casting spells. So I jumped on him and tried to pin him down of sorts. one of the party members jokingly said. Is the wizard allergic to cats? The DM made a roll. In advance stating that a roll of 95 or higher would mean the wizard is allergic to cat(folk). So lo and behold he rolled a 96.

The wizard spent the next couple of rounds sneezing and unable to do much else. We then tied him up.

[Malphegor]

it happens. I know one group I’ve played with let Grease be flammable given that there’s another higher level spell that is just Grease but on fire, so it seemed fun to have a lower level ‘you can do the same thing here as it makes sense it just takes a bit more effort’.

[noob]

it happens. I know one group I’ve played with let Grease be flammable given that there’s another higher level spell that is just Grease but on fire, so it seemed fun to have a lower level ‘you can do the same thing here as it makes sense it just takes a bit more effort’.

In dnd 3.5 there is also a "grease spell that is not on fire but that can ignite".
There is so many variants of each spell.

[daremetoidareyo]

I think this stuff is what spellcraft skill is for

[RexDart]

In dnd 3.5 there is also a "grease spell that is not on fire but that can ignite".
There is so many variants of each spell.

What spell is that?

My DM also allows standard Grease to be set on fire, though the damage caused isn't enormous - like 1d6 or 1d8 fire.

I like the idea of tying stuff like the clever application of Glue to Spellcraft.

[Wintermoot]

In a recent game of mine, one of the party members got essentially pinned by a vampire, and narrowly avoided getting bit. Everyone's pounding on the vampire to try and... well, kill it mostly, but also get it off of him.

Then the mage pulls out a glue spell, and says he runs up to the vampire, and casts his glue spell (whatever it's called) into the vampire's face to glue its mouth shut.

As you can imagine, that's not how the spell works. It's just entanglement. But that's a neat way of using the spell, and it was allowed.


How often do you guys ( / have DMs that) allow things like this to happen? And if at all, then what's the most notable moment when that happened for you?

In my experience, this was the norm in D&D prior to 3rd edition. This is exactly how we played basic, 1e and 2e.

Something about the codification of skills, the creation of feats for doing any non-normal behavior and creation of the social skill minigame in 3rd edition somehow changed the default behavior of playing the game. Really tamped down on creative thinking in the moment IMO.

[StSword]

That's an intrinsic part of how stuff works in the FATE/OSR hybrid Monsters and Magic rpg.

It uses the dnd framework- classes, hit points, levels, loot, etc, but uses a dice resolution system where characters can trade out damage or whatever for effects like FATE tilts.

So a wizard might blind someone with a fire spell, or make the floor slippery with an ice spell, or a Monk could punch a wizard in the throat to silence them, a Barbarian might damage someone's sword hand so their swordsmanship suffers, etc, etc.

I like it quite a bit, actually.

I've never ported that over into a 3xp game, but it's something I'd like to try.

[Seward]

This sort of thing is what separates tabletop RPG from CRPG or MMORPG. The GM can decide to let the rule of cool take over, although in D&D there is usually also a need to make some kind of unlikely die roll for drama to win over RAW.

In more story-oriented systems like Fate, you usually burn a resource to get the effect you want instead of using RNG, although as the prior poster noted, hybrid games exist that do both.



How often do you guys ( / have DMs that) allow things like this to happen? And if at all, then what's the most notable moment when that happened for you?

Oddly enough, my story also involves a vampire, encountered about EL4.

Our party rogue had been scamming the locals with garlic and holy symbol "protections" against a fake vampire threat that turned out to be really what was actually going on, which got the vampire more involved in the adventure than was normally the case at that level 4. The GM kept an admirably straight face as we dug ourselves in deeper before the reveal. We were reduced to breaking into a silver shop and stealing some silver dinner knives, to get a sense of how poorly we were prepared for this kind of situation.

In the battle there were a lot of shenanigans, including my wife's barbarian dwarf trying to use her heavily armored dwarf brother (my character) as a weapon, because my backpack was stuffed with flaming oil flasks and the vampire was on fire at that moment. Finally though, the vampire got around to trying to dominate said barbarian, who he'd mistaken for a cleric (as she was the only one in the party with a visible holy symbol) and dominated her.

"I'll Kill ya first because you're my brother" she said as she chased after him, who had immediately fled when he saw her actually focus on him (she's usually kinda spaced out and ditzy - focus = rage).

With the two of them gone, most of the party's combat power went with it. The vampire was surprisingly beat-up - we cast magic weapon on the dinner knives and got a couple hits, plus all that flaming oil, but it was regenerating through the damage. That party rogue who got us into all this decided to block the door, letting the other party members escape, drew his bow and said "If I roll double 20s, could it be that the arrow "staked" him?". The GM, feeling charitable as that rogue was 100% dead if it didn't work (one level drain punch from that vampire would kill him and turn him....) and respecting that he'd sacrificed himself to let his party members escape, let him roll it.

He rolled a 20, then another 20 (this was an online game with a 3rd party die-roller. It was fate).

Well, with the vamp paralyzed by staking the major problem was then to subdue the party barbarian, who by herself was a match for the rest of us. Dominate lasts a really long time, she had to be chained down for a week or so....

That was a table where everybody had fun. The Rogue's player said he would have been pretty ok with his character retired as a vampire spawn, given how everything went, but was happy he got the literal 1% chance to turn it around.

[King of Nowhere]

I take the chance to combine a contribution with a question: my party wants to use create water against fire elementals. Looks a legitimate use of the spell, but what kind of damage would be appropriate? 5d6, for a 0th level spell? more? less?

[Seward]

I take the chance to combine a contribution with a question: my party wants to use create water against fire elementals. Looks a legitimate use of the spell, but what kind of damage would be appropriate? 5d6, for a 0th level spell? more? less?

The best use of create water vs water fire elementals is to put out all the damn fires they start (on environment or teammates. No RAW ambiguity on that front (summoned water elementals are helpful for that task too).

I think if you targeted it on a fire elemental I'd dampen its "burn" power for a round, rather than doing damage. Unless you can somehow use create water to actually immerse it (in pathfinder, this is possible with infinite cantrips and maybe a running battle where you trick it into a confined space). Immersion flat kills a fire elemental but good luck managing that on anything larger than a small one (which you can also just smash with a mace a couple times, or once if you have a strength mod)


http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?531744-The-gallery-of-ridiculous-monsters


On a related note to your sig, we were attacked once on a river by awakened octopi with barbarian levels, greataxes in their tentacles and who had drunk a bunch of potions to fly, air breathe, etc on our boat. While we nearly TPK'd from laughing so hard at the silliness of it all (the GM even said "I'm sorry about this one" before starting the encounter) - they were actually quite dangerous, my wife, upon hearing that story said "Wait, an Octopus in FRESH WATER!?@?"

Like that was the part of the story that was out of line. We'd been pretty inured to strange things after years of playing 3.x

[bekeleven]

I take the chance to combine a contribution with a question: my party wants to use create water against fire elementals. Looks a legitimate use of the spell, but what kind of damage would be appropriate? 5d6, for a 0th level spell? more? less?So long as we're leaving the realm of RAW (you can't conjure matter except onto a surface "capable of supporting it"), I'd say it causes a steam explosion, damaging the elemental and anybody adjacent for 1D8 or 2D6 or so.

[Venger]

What spell is that?

My DM also allows standard Grease to be set on fire, though the damage caused isn't enormous - like 1d6 or 1d8 fire.

I like the idea of tying stuff like the clever application of Glue to Spellcraft.

Incendiary slime.

[icefractal]

In my experience, this was the norm in D&D prior to 3rd edition. This is exactly how we played basic, 1e and 2e.

Something about the codification of skills, the creation of feats for doing any non-normal behavior and creation of the social skill minigame in 3rd edition somehow changed the default behavior of playing the game. Really tamped down on creative thinking in the moment IMO.IME, varies highly depending on the GM.

Some GMs have a "rule of cool" / "yes, and" approach, so going outside the box works great.
Others have more of a "no, because" approach where adjudicating an action outside the rules means they'll consider every way it could go wrong and make you roll for each of them (or just auto-fail because you forgot a step they consider vital).
And of course many are somewhere between those.

Sometimes codified rules get in the way, but other times being able to say "I do this" instead of "may I do this?" is what makes a cool plan possible.

[Athan Artilliam]

I take the chance to combine a contribution with a question: my party wants to use create water against fire elementals. Looks a legitimate use of the spell, but what kind of damage would be appropriate? 5d6, for a 0th level spell? more? less?

The same as Holy water on evil. Or a flask of acid on people. Just size it up if needed.

[mabriss lethe]

Depending on my table and the game system in question, when I GM, I frequently add an extra ability score: BS. I just don't tell the players. If a character wants to do something more than a little creative with a spell or ability, I assign it a DC and roll their BS to see if it will work.

I also use a variant of this rule for players that constantly ask if they can collect/harvest some random bit of adventuring detritus and then later try to use it to gain an advantage in an encounter. Instead of bogging down the game, they just tell me they're trying to pocket something and mark it on their sheet. In this case it takes the form of a BS tool kit. Each random bit of garbage they obsessively pick up is a "charge" for the kit. They use up something every time somwthing they try would call for a BS roll.

[Kurald Galain]

I also use a variant of this rule for players that constantly ask if they can collect/harvest some random bit of adventuring detritus and then later try to use it to gain an advantage in an encounter. Instead of bogging down the game, they just tell me they're trying to pocket something and mark it on their sheet. In this case it takes the form of a BS tool kit. Each random bit of garbage they obsessively pick up is a "charge" for the kit. They use up something every time somwthing they try would call for a BS roll.
I'm not sure if I'm following properly. If players play the murderhobo and loot everything, then they get more BS points and they can use those to break the rules at random moments? I'm not sure that's what you meant but that's what I'm getting here.

[mabriss lethe]

I didn't explain it well. More that, I've got players in certain gaming circles that are constantly asking "can my character take this (random piece of junk that has nothing to do with anything)" as well as "I want to (do something completely outside the rulesthat would require DM fiat/rule of cool)" they also tend to be the players that get really heavy into the RP side of things.

These are often the more laid back game groups who don't care too much about specific mechanica and just want to have a good time.

So I decided to deal with both issues by combining them and hashing out a set of supplimentary rules to act as a guideline for the stuff they want to do. Instead of bogging down play by wanting to know every little piece of junk they can carry away, i just let them scavenge whatever they want as lomg as they write it down. Then, when they want to pull some McGyver bs with a bit of fence post, some twine, and the amputated stinger of a giant scorpion. I let them.

I roll BS against a DC based on how "plausible" I gauge the idea to be and they mark off the junk from their sheet. If they pass the BS check, then it works (usually with some sort of complication they weren't expecting). If it fails, they waste their turn (also, sometimes with complications) The main caveat is that if the player doesn't have the BS idea worked out before their turn, then they can't do it, keeping the game moving.

By anticipating and incorporating player behavior that they will never change into the game, it allows the players to feel more immersed in the world, gives me a number of dynamic hooks to alter encounters, and keeps the game moving.

The specifics of the rules that I use to govern the BS mechanics obviously change from system to system.

[Telonius]

Is there something about Vampires that makes them particularly susceptible to this sort of thing? We had an instance of somebody casting Glitterdust on one. Very much anti-Twilight in our group; the DM allowed it to do an extra debuff. (I think it was an additional penalty to attack).

[RexDart]

Is there something about Vampires that makes them particularly susceptible to this sort of thing? We had an instance of somebody casting Glitterdust on one. Very much anti-Twilight in our group; the DM allowed it to do an extra debuff. (I think it was an additional penalty to attack).

Vampires have so much well-known lore around them (which may or may not be relevant per the game rules) that it's unavoidable. I sort of did something like this myself. We had all managed to stumble into a magical trap that ended up with us naked, without any clothing or equipment - including the Material spell components nobody had given much thought to. Most of my character's spells were looking unusable, but she figured out that she could cast Sound Burst if she busted a wooden chair and used two chair legs as drumsticks to satisfy "Arcane Focus: A musical instrument."

Later on (never did have to cast Sound Burst), we fought a vampire, and I sharpened and used one of the chair legs that I still had in my inventory to destroy it. (Note that the DM wasn't being a hardass or anything, and there were probably several stake-equivalents to be found without great difficulty, but it was nice to just have the thing ready by divine providence.)

[Seward]

There is also the fact that vampires in pretty much any edition of D&D are dangerous at a level well beyond "it punches really hard". Fights with them tend to be "Swingy" because of level drain, dominate etc, plus the combo of being hard to hurt and some kind of regeneration mechanic that can be seen to be outhealing damage. but it's a slow kind of swingy. So you can see the TPK coming after some bad luck, and start casting around for some way to pull your bacon out of the fire.

In organized play (Living Greyhawk, Pathfinder Society) characters accumulate a lot of 1-time boons that can translate into a big dramatic save if you stack them up or you encounter the edge condition they were intended for. When a TPK is coming, people would start paging through their adventure sheets looking for boons (the more organized would keep a list of them for easy reference). Of course level 4 characters don't have a lot of those, and we'd exhausted any we had by the time our barbarian got dominated.

Lacking such a way to find a quick power-up to turn things around, normal parties tend to move into story mode, using the gaps in the game system to find something dramatic, entertaining (even if it fails - entertaining the table and GM is never a bad move and can make for a good death story if nothing else) and in the case of D&D, usually something mechanically difficult needing unusually good luck to pull off, or sometimes a coordinated effort. (that glue spell in the first post didn't suffer some kind of AOO because the vampire was in a grapple, for example. Or the thing where somebody set the vampire on fire and my wife's barbarian attempted to smash me, with backpack full of oil between me and the vampire (I had something like 15 flasks of oil and a few alchemist fire and acid flasks in there..we hate trolls...the attempt destroyed the backpack and all contents, plus I had to use my next action to get it off and smash a winecask over myself to put out my own fire...). We did it because neither of us had any dex, and hitting vampire touch ac with splash weapons wasn't happening for us. The GM, after we made attack rolls had it do decent damage but more importantly bought the party 2 rounds while the vampire spent actions going gaseous and becoming solid to get rid of the fire, which also made him more vulnerable for a round and got our only magic-weapon-spell-silver-dinner-knife hits that happened in the entire fight)

When a death or worse tpk happens because you blew initiative and lost rocket tag before you could act, well, there is less room for shenanigans of this sort. So you tend to see less of it vs, say, a bunch of lance-charging knights or demons who got the party into a blasphemy-lock. Instead you tend to see parties try to negotiate surrender/slavery/something other than just death, if any are able to communicate.

[Asmotherion]

All the time. I love allowing creative uses of spells.

[False God]

Typically allowed, provided whatever they're doing is reasonable. I mostly run off the called shot rules. Smaller targets, more complex maneuvers either gives you penalties to hit or them bonuses to evade. Sometimes a check is required if its very complicated and further outside the spell or ability's normal functioning.

[Seward]

Some easy guidelines if you need numbers for D&D 3.x

Martial stunts
-4 for improvised weapon, damage based on improvised weapon, any damage can smash vials etc.
size penalty (or bonus) for targets, note an unattended object is dex0, so +5 to hit based on size
pay a move action to set up a special attack, possibly with jump, tumble, balance, climb or similar
ignore hardness if the have the perfect tool for the job (pick vs stone, saw vs wood etc)

Eg, Ember is fighting an invisible mage who cast a spell and 5' stepped after. Ember knows the square he cast the spell in, but failed perception to nail down which adjacent square the mage is now in. The mage is under a chandelier, and Ember has an adamantine Kama. Ember wants to get up and drop the chandelier on the mage's stupid head. (depending on terrain, probably an accelerated climb check, a jump check, an attack roll and must do enough damage to break the chain supporting it. If that isn't possible, tossing the Kama as an improvised weapon might also get it done. Kn Arch/Eng or an appropriate crafting skill might reduce damage needed to make it fall) Damage based on weight and falling distance, mage gets a reflex save for half perhaps, if the object isn't so huge that avoiding the damage is implausible.

Turning spell flavor into crunch
spellcraft is the go-to skill (use fireball underwater mechanics for a RAW example of this)
If especially elaborate, a move action and related KN skill to set it up might be appropriate

Eg, Mialee casts fireball hoping to damage the wood supports and cause a cave-in. To get more than the expected result, she needs a move action with a Kn Architecture and Engineering check to figure out what is most vulnerable, and a spellcraft check to target the fireball precisely enough to center on the weakest spot. The fireball ignores hardness on the wood for the purposes of this attack, but anybody in the blast radius gets regular cover bonus to reflex save. If the GM judges enough hp damage to the beams to ruin their ability to support the load, use cave-in rules.

Using Craft and Profession skills creatively

Craft really should do appraisal or serve for other skills (often architecture/engineering, or a weaponsmith might know some common targets for cold iron, adamantine and silver weapons) and should also serve as Kn Local for knowing stuff like - other famous crafters of your type or famous historical crafters or professionals who supply or use your stuff (eg, a weaponsmith might know all the local metal suppliers and the kind of nobility, mercenaries, guards etc who buy his stuff, although in latter case he might know more about the city official in charge of the armory than individual guards).

Profession should include all KN skills they should know (eg, 1 rank of profession farmer means you know all local domesticated animals used on a farm, all local predators or things that devour crops, how to craft things like fences, repair farming tools, handle animal for said domestic animals, who he can sell surplus crops to locally, recognize his lord or at least local officials and armed men owing fealty to his lord, and who he can buy supplies from, weather effects on crops/animals etc). More obscure stuff (how others farm, famous historical farmers, more distant markets, unusual weather, unusual predators, how his lord stacks up against other lords as a boss, etc) requires rolling dice, but you can beat the dc10 common knowledge in his field.

Craft and profession could then sub for kn skills in above examples (if Ember had Craft Weaponsmith at a high level, she might sub it for Arch/Engineering as a spiked chain is pretty similar to the chain holding up the chandelier, or if Mialee had 5 ranks of Profession Miner it might sub for or give a +2 to her architecture Engineering check etc)

Kn skills are polyglot skills. If you have them you can recognize a predator from another plane, not just a wolf of the local sort. You have a chance to know about royalty and heraldry in an overseas empire, not just your local lord, etc.

[digiman619]

..."If I roll double 20s, could it be that the arrow "staked" him?". The GM, feeling charitable as that rogue was 100% dead if it didn't work (one level drain punch from that vampire would kill him and turn him....) and respecting that he'd sacrificed himself to let his party members escape, let him roll it.

He rolled a 20, then another 20 (this was an online game with a 3rd party die-roller. It was fate).

The Rogue's player said he would have been pretty ok with his character retired as a vampire spawn, given how everything went, but was happy he got the literal 1% chance to turn it around.
Forgive my nitpickery, but that's a 0.25% chance.

[Seward]

Forgive my nitpickery, but that's a 0.25% chance.

You are correct. Especially bad bobble as I did statistics as part of my job for 30 years.

[Peelee]

Even though I've told it a few times on here, I will never miss a chance to break out the Tale of Air Bear.

Long story short (and good story told poorly), I was running a Sorc, and the party came across a group of Dire Bears. I go up to mine, successfully grapple it, and teleport us both one mile straight up. I then climb around onto the dire bear's back, grab a tuft of fur with one hand, "stand up" on its back, and start wailing on it with my whip, effectively surfing the bear down. The party finishes up their bears soon enough and are trying to find out where I went. Well, one of them spots us high up but rapidly getting closer, at which time I make a realization, and Message one of them: "So, uh, I never actually learned Feather Fall." At the last second, due to the rest of the party not being able to help (due to no fault of their own, and after great hilarity in their attempts to fix it), DM decided that teleporting conserved momentum, so I teleported myself five feet away and upside down just before hitting the ground (successful Concentration check). The bear splatters against the ground in an unsettling explosion, splattering everyone else in blood and guts, while I rotate myself midair to land mostly on my feet, stumbling on landing (missed the Tumble check by 1). So, finally, I did the only thing I could do - looked straight at the rest of the party, put one hand up and the other out, and said in the shakiest voice I could manage, ".......tadaaaa."

Took several minutes for the laughter to finally die down, and the legend of Air Bear was born. Legends say a good DM will to this day have a night watch see a bear falling out of the sky off in the distance every other campaign or so.

[Kurald Galain]

DM decided that teleporting conserved momentum, so I teleported myself five feet away and upside down just before hitting the ground (successful Concentration check).
Wouldn't that launch you back to the height you started at? If you fell from one mile, then flipped over, your momentum should be enough to get you a mile high again. Even if you subtract friction, that should still be enough to splatter you like it splattered that bear.

[Peelee]

Wouldn't that launch you back to the height you started at? If you fell from one mile, then flipped over, your momentum should be enough to get you a mile high again.

Would it? Quick and dirty calculations for real-world give me a little over 500 feet maximum height from a terminal velocity of 55 m/s, about a tenth of a mile. RAW is you fall 150 feet in the first round, 300 in all following rounds, from what I can tell, so at worst it'd be a 3 round fall once I hit the apex. Still max falling damage.

All of which is more thought than any of us put into it at the time, though. Or any time until now. More was fudged than we realized, but allowing movement speed to remain consistent through a teleport was what I was aiming for in this thread.

[Seward]

Terminal velocity means you'd go up a bit, then come back down. And a sorcerer could just cast it a 3rd time when his velocity hit zero.

Now if the sorc is out of L5+ spell slots, he's still in trouble. My guess is though with that ruling you could have salvaged the situation without going splat. If you couldn't cast teleport a 3rd time your party had 6 rounds to come up with something, and so does the sorcerer if he's got potions or scrolls or another spell known (a summon perhaps?) that could help out.

[Rynjin]

I take the chance to combine a contribution with a question: my party wants to use create water against fire elementals. Looks a legitimate use of the spell, but what kind of damage would be appropriate? 5d6, for a 0th level spell? more? less?

Should be within the realm of all other cantrips, so like Disrupt Undead since it only works on a single creature type: a flat d6.

[Balthanon]

I can recall this happening quite a bit in a generic sense in the first campaign I ever played in, though only a few stand out and some of them weren't really so much "can I do this even though it's not quite the rules" so much as "oh, I forgot I could do that because it's never come up in the campaign". For the most part, that transferred to myself and other players who took up the DM mantle later too because we had gotten used to it.

One that stands out to me was where the DM had apparently decided to kill off or kidnap my character and got me to agree to a solo expedition into a trial to pick up an artifact of my goddess (Sune). He basically had me strip naked for this trial and I had already actually lost my spellcasting due to something earlier in the campaign (this was in part to restore it), so I walked into the final chamber after getting through the trials and he walked out an NPC that he had apparently created based on my backstory-- a half-fiend drow that was well beyond my rather meager abilities with no magic items or spellcasting.

He had it monologue for awhile while I scoured my character sheet and tried to think of some way out of this and I asked him if I could still use spell-like abilities, even if I couldn't cast spells. He thought about it for a bit then agreed, saying I was close enough to the artifact that it was possible. So I basically pulled out a 1/day dispel evil, made a successful touch attack and banished my "brother" back to the Demonweb Pits-- because both he and I had essentially forgotten that my character actually started as a Sacred Exorcist. :)

I didn't find out until years later, but he apparently ranted about that the entire trip home because he had no idea I could do that and it cut short the entire encounter. :P (Though given how beat up I was and my lack of any means of damaging him, I'm not sure what else he expected me to try.) That happened a couple times in the campaign actually, though on one of the last he was kind of asking for it when he had the same half-fiend brother possess a high cleric of Sune later in the campaign and then actually try and bargain with me to release her, apparently not thinking about the fact that I could, you know, exorcise the possessing spirit instead. :)

He probably could have ruled in some of those cases that the abilities didn't quite work like that (the half-fiend wasn't a spirit technically and was probably native to the Material Plane as well), but it made sense, so he went with it. I also actually pulled the "I summon a whale" in front of the gates of Waterdeep when it was being attacked by a black dragon well above our pay grade too; that one was actually what lost me my spellcasting the first time. Not because I summoned a helpless animal as high in the air as I could to squash a dragon, but because I didn't realize the guy standing next to me was the high cleric of Bane and he used the moment of fame to revitalize the religion and get his full powers back. :P

We also at one point created an impromptu "endless rations" by using curative abilities on a donkey we owned when we were starving to death in another game.