Do people really enjoy close battles?

[BRC]

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]

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]

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...

Yeah, I think I could enjoy something like that. But no time for such things now.

[icefractal]

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]

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.

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

@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.

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]

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.

[Imbalance]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

Button vs win button

If 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]

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]

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]

[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 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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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).