Post/Author/DateTime	Post
a_psh 03-18-07, 03:53 AM	In another thread (http://boards1.wizards.com/showthread.php?t=810534), Imperator58 said this: I dunno, I just remember in 1977 it was just more fun. There was less dredging through Rules and more inventive playing. It was... purer.It got me thinking a bit. Not really thinking about anything new per se, but expressing some things more clearly than I had before. Here's a little rant to brighten your day. Self-consciously incoherent. I love it when folks appeal to the old-school sense of wonder and anything-can-happen, the kind of magical kick they got from playing their first D&D game barely knowing the rules. (I hate it when folks appeal to old-school bad design as something to be venerated and copied for its own sake, but that's a matter for another time.) 3e is a great refinement of the rules of D&D but loses sight of the way that a lot of people actually played D&D back in the day. Well, the people who liked it and were smitten with it and didn't feel like they outgrew it when they turned 15, at least, because those were often the people who most quickly tapped into the idea of RPG as storytelling rather than RPG as crappy hackfest simulator , some of whom went on to make other games that didn't look like D&D at all on paper but played like the D&D they actually played (and many of whom went on to copy D&D lamely and then magically hope it would turn out like their cool D&D). I'm a relatively young gamer, at least as far as threads that are all about reminiscing about older editions go. Still, I remember AD&D 2nd Edition and the 3e changeover. There was a time when I looked at 3e and was like "Hey! They fixed so much! This is superior in every way!" Now, having played a lot more I see it as an improvement in almost every way, but mostly an altogether irrelevant improvement. The rules are still singularly irrelevant as far as all the juicy bits of D&D go, both then and now. And, y'know what? That sucks. Big time. It's like the books are just missing the point, over and over and over again. When I get more good gaming ideas out of some random guy's blog post than half of the DMG, that's a problem. When the game books actively tell you to do stuff that sucks, that's a big problem. When almost everyone on the game's Internet forums seems to be missing the point most of the time, that's a problem. And it's not that second or first or zero-th or ugly-booklet-that-looks-like-it-came-out-of-a-photocopier editions were better, either. It's that, back then, folks didn't know better. When people recount their glorious D&D adventures from the 1980s, all the best parts seem to come from twisting and mangling and ignoring the rules. This was the frontier. Nowadays, we really should know better. The RPG hobby has had decades to get its act together. D&D has become this elaborate, polished thing. 3e's layout team in particular absolutely rocks. But, fundamentally, the game's still no better for actually doing something cool with it than it was in the days of saving throw tables and racial level restrictions. You're still just narrating action on top of the game mechanics, which are useless more often than they're helpful. Look at combat. Everything is just an "abstraction." Trying to be all explicit about it just gives you farcical, nonsensical BS (take a look at Order of the Stick). And yet we waste all this time on resolving all these little actions that don't help you generate an interesting story at all. Kinda dumb given that all those old-school gamers describe their best moments as instances with a lot of handwaving and "winging it," isn't it? And you know what the most common defense is when someone says "Oh, gee, I'm having trouble with the game mechanics"? "Blah blah need a good GM to make it work." I'm sick to death of hearing this. The example "good GM" is just compensating, compensating, compensating. Heck, in a pathological case, he's doing more work handwaving his way past the system than he is just making stuff up without any system at all. It's just so frustrating to see the most famous pen-and-paper roleplaying game suck]. Especially when you and almost everyone in the hobby started on pen-and-paper RPGs by playing it, when it defines every other game out there, and when most of the gamers you've interacted with persist in clinging to it like a liferaft because it's all they know (and because it was just so damn painful to learn that they wouldn't dream of picking up another RPG). Everywhere I look, the game does jack **** to make the imaginative stories that people gush so much about actually happen. Instead, it just wastes everyone's time with books upon books and rules upon rules, none of which are the right kind of book or the right kind of rule. You can write a D&D that is all about making a great story happen. People have done that with games that just aren't called "D&D." When will D&D -- the game that almost everyone learns and plays by default, the game that so many RPG players cling to as the only game they know, and the game that so many game designers shamelessly copy without even thinking about it -- live up to its own players' hype? When will there be a D&D that actually helps players think about their characters, or helps them frame and narrate interesting scenes, or in any way meaningfully relates hundreds of pages of game mechanics to a good story? That's supposed to be the point here. That's what even the challenge-focused Gygax raves about when he writes about D&D: stories of wonder and imagination. I'm sick of watching everyone constantly wrestle with the system to make all that cool stuff they're really jonesing for actually happen in play. It makes so many games degenerate into boring, monotonous, dysfunctional wastes of time. All because most of the rules have absolutely nothing to do with the flow of the game, the story being told, the relationships between players (yes, I meant specifically players, not PCs), or even anything that's actually happening in the imagined world of the game, and most of that stuff -- the juicy tender meat of play -- is altogether absent from the books or covered in a way that's shallow or downright wrong. Why the hell do we put up with this from our games? Why do we admire and worship something so decisively useless? Why do we rave about awesome, imaginative, fantastical stories and then lock ourselves into this stupid byzantine framework that outright rewards you for doing the monotonous and punishes you for ingenuity? Why do we tolerate a game that is only held together by one guy's fiat? Why do we as a community perpetuate all of this brain damage from generation to generation? Why is it that you've got so many people talking about how their favorite experiences all happened back when they didn't understand the game and just kind of muddled about at random, like actually understanding the game did nothing to improve their fun? * - I say this with 0 animosity towards video games: if you want to play a hackfest that's actually fun, buy a good video game. They're ten times more exciting and a hundred times better designed for this kind of thing. EDITED TO ADD: I made a series of new threads, more specific. Should be clearer and less frustrating. Here you go (http://boards1.wizards.com/showthread.php?t=817745).
Daydreamer 03-18-07, 04:13 AM	unfortunately hindsight isnt 20/20. Nostalgia causes ppl to miss the so called good old days. I remember playing 2nd edition, and for a while it was like this-but the truth is for reasons that had other factors than the purity of the systems. 1. I was younger, i was more nieve, things were simpler in my life period. 2. It was new, it was exciting, i hadnt learnt all the problems, and it was an experience. 3. People tend to remember the fondness of the past. Sometimes when i think of highschool it seems a paradise, but i found myself more satisfied in my life by university in truth.
Singer_of_the_Song 03-18-07, 04:26 AM	/ Golf clap. I like this rant. I like it a lot. It really reminds me of why I toss out "mechanics" left and right.
khyron1144 03-18-07, 04:29 AM	It's a long rant. I skimmed and believe I got the gist of it. Some of your points seem right on to me, some seem completely off. 1) Except in very minimal instances 3.x is not 2e with house rules that people would add anyway. I've heard people say similar things before. a) Most people after seeing a level 1 Wizard with 1 HP do eventually come up with a maximum hit dice at 1st level house rule. Okay, 3e adopted that. b) Nobody in 2e has ever said: The Berserker Kit is cool, I wish I could take that at 5th+ level by selecting my weapon and non-weapon prooficiencies carefully. c) In 2e magic equipment was rare and special if the DM made his own adventures and used the treasure tables honestly. The biggest 2e maxim is there are no magic shops. 2) It's natural that you get more inspiration from something other than the DMG. a) Most of my inspiration comes from the Monstrous Manual. It's not unlikely to be randomly paging through the book and go: There's a good number of cat monsters. A dungeon full of cat monsters might be cool. b) Most adventure inspiration comes a little bit at a time. 3) The rules are less important than anything in an RPG. That's why so much of the 2e PHB and DMG is highlighted in blue and called optional and why rule 0 is made clear and emphasized from the beginning. 4) I like 2e better. That's probably clear to anyone. I can't explain why too exactly. a) A few 3e things feel like concessions to the video game generation (Sorcerers are as close as D&D can or will get to pure magic points casting and there is now definitely such a thing as magic shop). b) Other than maybe two Sage Advice questions, polymorph never caused any real confusion earlier than 3e and most of that was from not reading the spell carefully. Attacking three times a round is a magical ability of a Quickling. Polymorphing doesn't grant magical special attacks. A PC polymorphed into a quickling doesn't get three attacks a round. Now compare that to all the errata and revisions of 3.x Polymorph and Wild Shape. 5) If you like 3.x better cool for you. Different salves for different wounds. Game on.
ORC_Paradox 03-18-07, 04:37 AM	Things are always "better" when they're new to you, and you're young and stupid. Driving a car for the first time- "FREEDOM!!!". Driving a car today: "Argh! I have to get some gas and the price spiked up to record levels AGAIN. And I have to make that insurance payment. And get the car inspected. Oh, and now it's making some noise!" Getting a job for the first time- "Now I can get all the D&D books I want!" A job today- "Ugh... I don't want to go to work today. But I'll have to so I can pay my bills. And maybe I'll have enough to pick up just one D&D book this month." Same goes with D&D.
Singer_of_the_Song 03-18-07, 04:39 AM	I feel, though, that there is a definite problematic trend trying to make D&D all about math. So many new rules, PrCs, base classes, monsters, feats, spells....I mean there's really a veritable mountain of it, and WotC is always adding more. Is it really improving the game, or is it derailing it and bogging it down? I think questions like that honestly require some thought on the part of the design team, and soon.
longlivetheloud 03-18-07, 04:42 AM	I didn't understand most of that. But there are way too many rules now. and that sucks. it's almost unnapealing, how many rules there are nowadays. And the artwork nowadays sucks. the artwork. and the v3.5 just seems like... it limits the worlds you can create. you have to live in their world. Like with religons. The DM should create the religons and there should only be like, an official rule of how religous you are. not that the charecters have to "believe in these gods and these only" (at least I think that is how it works, I don't know.) but let us not complain; at least d&d is still around. That would suck if it wasn't.
longlivetheloud 03-18-07, 04:45 AM	there should be like, a basic version and a advanced version ( i think this already happened) now so that those of us who don't like too many rules can have our simple version. and we can all argue on message boards over which is better. ha ha.
khyron1144 03-18-07, 04:51 AM	Things are always "better" when they're new to you, and you're young and stupid. Driving a car for the first time- "FREEDOM!!!". Driving a car today: "Argh! I have to get some gas and the price spiked up to record levels AGAIN. And I have to make that insurance payment. And get the car inspected. Oh, and now it's making some noise!" Getting a job for the first time- "Now I can get all the D&D books I want!" A job today- "Ugh... I don't want to go to work today. But I'll have to so I can pay my bills. And maybe I'll have enough to pick up just one D&D book this month." Same goes with D&D. Good point, but I don't think it's all rose-colored glasses. I think that I and others who prefer an older version have in some cases taken a look at the various aspects of the game and said: I like edition X. I will play edition Y or Z, if it's the only game in town, but I will make an offer to teach any group that I meet my preferred edition. That's just the way I see it, though.
ORC_Paradox 03-18-07, 04:53 AM	I feel, though, that there is a definite problematic trend trying to make D&D all about math. So many new rules, PrCs, base classes, monsters, feats, spells....I mean there's really a veritable mountain of it, and WotC is always adding more. Is it really improving the game, or is it derailing it and bogging it down? I think questions like that honestly require some thought on the part of the design team, and soon. D&D has ALWAYS been about math. THAC0, for obvious example. And in the 1st edition DMG, there's over a page and a half on discussing dice probablility. Urghgh. If there's pages I'd want to tear out of the book, that would be it. Tables, charts, dice rolls and results. Kits, base classes, sub classes, sub races, encumbance, weapons speed factor, weapon type vs armor type, monsters. Five different saving throws and saving throw priorities. (Is that a save vs wands, spells, or petrification?) Rules didn't mesh from book to book. The mountain has always been there, and will always be there. It is nothing new.
a_psh 03-18-07, 04:53 AM	I skimmed and believe I got the gist of it.With all due respect, nope, sorry. Maybe I'm incoherent, maybe you skimmed too much, maybe our experiences are different. Here are the big ones: 2) It's natural that you get more inspiration from something other than the DMG.Structure, not inspiration. Structure is one of those things that keeps a story from sucking. It's also one of those things that defines what kind of story a story actually is. This is absolutely integral to making the narrative of play work, and it's absent from D&D books. And those are the rules that matter, the ones that actually define and shape play more than anything else. The ones that set up scenes and themes. All you really get from a D&D book of any era is just "the GM gets to narrate." 3) The rules are less important than anything in an RPG. That's why so much of the 2e PHB and DMG is highlighted in blue and called optional and why rule 0 is made clear and emphasized from the beginning.System Does Matter. There's whole essays about this that I, at least, find very persuasive. The belief that system doesn't matter comes from playing too many identical systems, particularly ones that rely on the GM to fix everything and don't actually help create any meaningful structure. This one is about ephemera (just a cute fancy word for stuff that's trivial compared to the fundamental structure of the game), but I want to respond to it, so I'm going to do that real quick. It's small to emphasize that this isn't a big deal as far as this thread is concerned: a) A few 3e things feel like concessions to the video game generation (Sorcerers are as close as D&D can or will get to pure magic points casting and there is now definitely such a thing as magic shop). "Points" make more sense than "slots." They're closer to what everyone who's read any fantasy books other than Dying Earth intuitively assumes about magic and understands. Spell memorization is mostly just a tactical gimmick anyway. The magic shop thing is, sadly, a natural conclusion to jump to when you've designed a game where having or not having an item makes all the difference in a scenario. The worst thing about older editions of D&D especially was that your stuff was hands-down the most prominent form of character customization: two fighters were nearly identical except their gear. The natural result of trying to make more customizable characters is to then let players pick a big part of that swag.
longlivetheloud 03-18-07, 04:54 AM	uhm. i don't get it.(this was in reference to a post 1 million posts ago and I no longer care)
longlivetheloud 03-18-07, 04:55 AM	D&D has always been about math; but now it seems like more than normal.
AffableDoomwalker 03-18-07, 04:55 AM	This rant is made of win and mudkips. Habeeb it. There's nothing better than enjoying a good four-hour STORY, a story you, the player, are a part of. Mechanical plot elements made to move things along and put the treasure in your hands and the XP in your head so you can level up and get more treasure and XP are no fun. No fun at all. I really did enjoy the rant, but it seemed to be pointing at the books [EDIT: or did it? After re-reading, I'm not so sure, seems like you're calling out the players as well] as the primary problem, and that is where I disagree. Its the players, and the DMs who decide to follow the drab, dull, and mechanical - practically every rule/thought/region/skill/class in the core book set is entirely optional if a DM wills it to be - but how many do? Not very many. C'est la vie - there's always the RP aspect.
khyron1144 03-18-07, 04:59 AM	With all due respect, nope, sorry. Maybe I'm incoherent, maybe you skimmed too much, maybe our experiences are different. It's near 5 AM in my time zone. I ought to go to bed. I am probably not thinking straight right now. If I have a better understanding, after sleep and a second viewing, I'll get back to you.
Vaelan 03-18-07, 06:32 AM	Some people seem to have a problem understanding the post, so I'm going to go ahead and quote what I figured to be the main assertion this rant is making. It's like the books are just missing the point, over and over and over again. When I get more good gaming ideas out of some random guy's blog post than half of the DMG, that's a problem. Seeing as how it is the explicitly stated intention of the developers to simply give you rules, not to tell you how to actually play the game, I don't see this kind of a change as likely.
Nidair 03-18-07, 06:33 AM	Maybe you can try Arcana Evolved. At least it throws some of the least contributing elements of D&D out of the window (like, when are save-or-die-spells fun for anyone?). They still have the vancian system though.
longlivetheloud 03-18-07, 08:03 AM	noways man..if it doesn't havr D&D on it...it just sucks... a simpler d&d that works is what is needed.
Seeker95 03-18-07, 08:33 AM	there should be like, a basic version and a advanced version (i think this already happened) nowYour wish has already been granted. There is a Basic Set (old 3e and new 3e), a Players Kit (PHB and starter accessories), a Core Set (only three books, nothing more needed), and Supplements. For the supplements, you can pick and choose as little or as much as you want. Take your pick. As for the DMG teaching you how to roleplay... that is not its purpose, and never has been. The game has always taught you how to game, not how to roleplay. Gaming comes from the rules. Roleplaying comes from within, just as it always has. And always will.
mlasater 03-18-07, 08:41 AM	I am one of those old-school DMs who ran (and occassionally played) 1st & 2nd ed AD&D. We patched & house-ruled that ugly system into a semblance of functionality- every patch added more problems - by the time I gave up, our system only barely resembled the D&D system we started with & it had become way to complex. I came to truly loathe it & quit - I was through with D&D for good. Years & numerous game systems later - I was convinced to play D&D 3. I liked it & am now running D&D again. Upshot, I was there, I remember how bad the old system was. System does matter, get experience with enough really different game systems & you'll understand. A good DM can run a good & enjoyable game no matter how awful the mechanics. Think D&D is too complex - use nothing but the PH & the DMG - simple, straightforward & easy (except the grapple rules :) ) Me, I like the variety, but tastes vary - that is what I like about the system - you can have as much or as little as you like.
longlivetheloud 03-18-07, 08:51 AM	Hmm. I see. Scribe...define "old 3e and new 3e," please. i have a question, being new to this. what is the purpose of having more than one core rulebook?
Zaxon D'Mir 03-18-07, 09:36 AM	3e is a great refinement of the rules of D&D but loses sight of the way that a lot of people actually played D&D back in the day. Yeah, that pretty much sums it up for me.
longlivetheloud 03-18-07, 10:47 AM	uhm, ok. what i meant was if by "3e" he meant 3.0 or 3.5.
aotrscommander 03-18-07, 10:48 AM	I'm afraid I must disagree, a_psh. Perhaps it's because, for me, there was no 'golden age' of D&D (since D&D appeared late in my RPGing history), but I think the game is in better shape than it's ever been. And that means I find it more fun both to play and to run. While I enjoyed playing games using AD&D, mechanically it was less satisfying than Rolemaster, which for years was our system of choice. I found when I actually ran AD&D, I ended up adding dozens of house-rules. So I at, least, have no nostalgia towards earlier editions. Heck I've lost any sense of nostalgia I might have once had for Warhammer (thanks to 3.5), and even Rolemaster and HeroQuest (which were my first two games). I remember the characters from those games, not the way the games played. I have not ever noted that the quality of roleplaying has ever decreased in whatever system has been used, from HeroQuest to Rolemaster, save that we are now more proficient at it after 17 years; though the mechnical aspect certainly fluctuates (on Thursday, I spent about half the evening saying '"No! This isn't D&D, it's Warhammer! The rules don't work like that!!!") (I could, in fact, probably run the same (fantasy) adventure for my players in any of my rulesets without there being a noticeble difference in collective game play save the mechanics!) Indeed, I must say that several of my favourite characters stem from the 3.x era (not all of them though, Rolemaster still holds the top slot there!) I find it always fascinating that people view the old editions with nostalgia. To me, rules are just rules, and better rules = a better game. [Pointlessly mathmatical aside]Since the level of roleplaying is unaffected by the set of rules used, overall quality of my games (as a DM), Q = x+y+z or as a player Q = x+y where: x is the constant Level of Roleplaying y is the variable set by the rules quality where D&D 3.x/Rolemaster > other RPGs > Warhammer1 > no RPGs > Vampire2 z the variable is ease of running where D&D 3.5 > D&D 3.0 > Rolemaster > AD&D/Warhammer/Dungeoneer (etc) > HeroQuest [/Pointlessly mathmatical aside] I sometimes look back fondly at my core Rolemaster books, and remember the times whan I was learning and we only had the basic books. Or even pull out mt AD&D books and skim through them. Would I ever want to go back and play like that again? No. I, at least, would not. 1Warhammer loses point for being very big and not having an index in the main rules (they printed it seperately, for crying out loud!) combined with non-comprehensive contents. Trying to look up rules can be a nightmare. I can find a rule that's located in any of my 17 odd Rolemaster books faster than I can in Warhammer's one! 2Oh, come on, like I could miss that opportunity to get a dig in...
Kursk 03-18-07, 11:03 AM	/ Golf clap. I like this rant. I like it a lot. It really reminds me of why I toss out "mechanics" left and right. Yep, same here & I why I don't slaver at the thought of new splat books coming out.
Scavelock 03-18-07, 11:11 AM	The only thing that bothers me about DnD these days are things like bluff checks out of combat. It seemed that in advanced, the player had more options with how she could play a character out of combat. She didn't necessarily need to roll checks to see if she could intimidate an NPC (although, some people did play this way). In a way, I understand why the system does this, and not every player can act like a thespian, and these players should have the oppurtunity to play the flashy bard or politically minded scoundrel, but on the other hand, it seems as though game has tried to quantify everything. The game is more streamlined, yes, and I do prefer many of the game mechanics in third edition, but it does seem as though more emphasis is placed on the RAW than ever before.
johnkretzer 03-18-07, 11:46 AM	In another thread (http://boards1.wizards.com/showthread.php?t=810534), Imperator58 said this: It got me thinking a bit. Not really thinking about anything new per se, but expressing some things more clearly than I had before. Here's a little rant to brighten your day. Self-consciously incoherent. I love it when folks appeal to the old-school sense of wonder and anything-can-happen, the kind of magical kick they got from playing their first D&D game barely knowing the rules. (I hate it when folks appeal to old-school bad design as something to be venerated and copied for its own sake, but that's a matter for another time.) 3e is a great refinement of the rules of D&D but loses sight of the way that a lot of people actually played D&D back in the day. Well, the people who liked it and were smitten with it and didn't feel like they outgrew it when they turned 15, at least, because those were often the people who most quickly tapped into the idea of RPG as storytelling rather than RPG as crappy hackfest simulator , some of whom went on to make other games that didn't look like D&D at all on paper but played like the D&D they actually played (and many of whom went on to copy D&D lamely and then magically hope it would turn out like their cool D&D). I'm a relatively young gamer, at least as far as threads that are all about reminiscing about older editions go. Still, I remember AD&D 2nd Edition and the 3e changeover. There was a time when I looked at 3e and was like "Hey! They fixed so much! This is superior in every way!" Now, having played a lot more I see it as an improvement in almost every way, but mostly an altogether irrelevant improvement. The rules are still singularly irrelevant as far as all the juicy bits of D&D go, both then and now. And, y'know what? That sucks. Big time. It's like the books are just missing the point, over and over and over again. When I get more good gaming ideas out of some random guy's blog post than half of the DMG, that's a problem. When the game books actively tell you to do stuff that sucks, that's a big problem. When almost everyone on the game's Internet forums seems to be missing the point most of the time, that's a problem. And it's not that second or first or zero-th or ugly-booklet-that-looks-like-it-came-out-of-a-photocopier editions were better, either. It's that, back then, folks didn't know better. When people recount their glorious D&D adventures from the 1980s, all the best parts seem to come from twisting and mangling and ignoring the rules. This was the frontier. Nowadays, we really should know better. The RPG hobby has had decades to get its act together. D&D has become this elaborate, polished thing. 3e's layout team in particular absolutely rocks. But, fundamentally, the game's still no better for actually doing something cool with it than it was in the days of saving throw tables and racial level restrictions. You're still just narrating action on top of the game mechanics, which are useless more often than they're helpful. Look at combat. Everything is just an "abstraction." Trying to be all explicit about it just gives you farcical, nonsensical BS (take a look at Order of the Stick). And yet we waste all this time on resolving all these little actions that don't help you generate an interesting story at all. Kinda dumb given that all those old-school gamers describe their best moments as instances with a lot of handwaving and "winging it," isn't it? And you know what the most common defense is when someone says "Oh, gee, I'm having trouble with the game mechanics"? "Blah blah need a good GM to make it work." I'm sick to death of hearing this. The example "good GM" is just compensating, compensating, compensating. Heck, in a pathological case, he's doing more work handwaving his way past the system than he is just making stuff up without any system at all. It's just so frustrating to see the most famous pen-and-paper roleplaying game suck]. Especially when you and almost everyone in the hobby started on pen-and-paper RPGs by playing it, when it defines every other game out there, and when most of the gamers you've interacted with persist in clinging to it like a liferaft because it's all they know (and because it was just so damn painful to learn that they wouldn't dream of picking up another RPG). Everywhere I look, the game does jack **** to make the imaginative stories that people gush so much about actually happen. Instead, it just wastes everyone's time with books upon books and rules upon rules, none of which are the right kind of book or the right kind of rule. You can write a D&D that is all about making a great story happen. People have done that with games that just aren't called "D&D." When will D&D -- the game that almost everyone learns and plays by default, the game that so many RPG players cling to as the only game they know, and the game that so many game designers shamelessly copy without even thinking about it -- live up to its own players' hype? When will there be a D&D that actually helps players think about their characters, or helps them frame and narrate interesting scenes, or in any way meaningfully relates hundreds of pages of game mechanics to a good story? That's supposed to be the point here. That's what even the challenge-focused Gygax raves about when he writes about D&D: stories of wonder and imagination. I'm sick of watching everyone constantly wrestle with the system to make all that cool stuff they're really jonesing for actually happen in play. It makes so many games degenerate into boring, monotonous, dysfunctional wastes of time. All because most of the rules have absolutely nothing to do with the flow of the game, the story being told, the relationships between players (yes, I meant specifically players, not PCs), or even anything that's actually happening in the imagined world of the game, and most of that stuff -- the juicy tender meat of play -- is altogether absent from the books or covered in a way that's shallow or downright wrong. Why the hell do we put up with this from our games? Why do we admire and worship something so decisively useless? Why do we rave about awesome, imaginative, fantastical stories and then lock ourselves into this stupid byzantine framework that outright rewards you for doing the monotonous and punishes you for ingenuity? Why do we tolerate a game that is only held together by one guy's fiat? Why do we as a community perpetuate all of this brain damage from generation to generation? Why is it that you've got so many people talking about how their favorite experiences all happened back when they didn't understand the game and just kind of muddled about at random, like actually understanding the game did nothing to improve their fun? * - I say this with 0 animosity towards video games: if you want to play a hackfest that's actually fun, buy a good video game. They're ten times more exciting and a hundred times better designed for this kind of thing. I disagree on a couple of points. The largest is that the rules of 3.x are more restrictive. The rules aren't. If you look at the rules there are presented as guidelines for new DMs to make ruling. Look at the version Wish. It can keep this spell from destroying a campiagn by making a wish. This keeps down the number of arguements and allow you to focus on RPing. Second I am really happy that the DMG don't set rules on structure or adventures(it does offer advice though though the DMG2 does it alot more). Because I don't need rule to regulate Role-Playing. Third D&D or any RPG has never been about telling a story like writting a novel it is about taking the role of a character in a different reality....which means just because a action means it will make a 'good story' doesn't mean it can work because at that point you are just reading a novel and not interacting with a different reality. Also just a quick adjustment to people thinking magic item shops have existed in D&D since the beinging. Also 1st and 2nd edition was more equipment base then 3rd in some ways. If you don't have a silver weapon and are fighting a were creature you can still have some effect. In 1st and 2nd you manage as well have been swinging a feather. So in closing while you may veiw D&D is going nowhere because it doesn't drectly caters to what you want from a RPG. I veiw this as the strongest trait of D&D is that it doesn't cater to anyone play style. It doesn't even really suggest which one is right. It allows you to develope your own.
longlivetheloud 03-18-07, 01:15 PM	perhaps you are right.
GoriceXII 03-18-07, 01:28 PM	Actually I do have something good to say about present day D&D: I think that Dungeon magazine is upholding high standards still. I'm a somewhat ecclectic DM and I basically will take on what works for my campaign over what I'm told ought to. The rulebooks--well, I have to be honest and say that I use a bit of 1st ed, 2nd ed, 3rd ed as suits me and my players. Generally the only hard and fast rule is that we have to agree on changes or character based stuff before actual in game application. In a way its like building a model--if you want it to be really good you might prefer some stuff from one kit, other stuff from another, but it's your creation. However the adventure writing seems far better in quality to me. For instance I'm really looking forward to the time when my players will do part of the Isle of Dread series Dungeon magazine is doing. The adventures I have bought are totally awesome and unlike say some of the old Forgotten Realms stuff easy to adapt to my own campaign. The writing is generally better, there is more room for character development and the art in Dungeon especially is cool to look at. I've always liked both main magazines but the new generation seems first rate to me.
Solik 03-18-07, 01:34 PM	Well that was a thoroughly offensive rant to anyone who actually enjoys mechanics. You can't write rule books to cater to people who don't want to use rules, guy. Nobody's forcing you to use any of them.
Seeker95 03-18-07, 01:53 PM	Hmm. I see. Scribe...define "old 3e and new 3e," please.They made a Basic set a few years ago, and now there is a new Basic Set. I think they are both 3.5.i have a question, being new to this. what is the purpose of having more than one core rulebook?The PHB is a core rulebook for everyone. The DMG is the core rulebook for DMs. The Monster Manual is the core rulebook for, well, for DMs, but it contains the monsters.
razorboy 03-18-07, 02:07 PM	A thoroughly enjoyable and good rant. I have one objection however: sometimes more books is better. Not every single kind of book perhaps, but books that save me time as a DM are thoroughly welcome. Among such books are Monster Manuals that save me time by giving me pre-made monsters, adventures and modules that I can run as-is or steal parts from to add to my own game. I completely agree that more rules is not a solution, even skill tricks (to use the most recent example) can be done with a bit of imagination and without resorting to Complete Scoundrel. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the book glut panders more to the players than the DMs, and thus does little to improve the quality of DM-made games.
Red12 03-18-07, 02:13 PM	noways man..if it doesn't havr D&D on it...it just sucks... You sir, have yet to play some absolutely amazing systems that are out there. Anyways. Well thoughtout and said rant. A few minor things I may disagree with, but I believe the sentiment is quite good. A quick question, tho. What would you like to see DONE? Its one thing to complain about what is, its another thing entirely to give a suggestion on how to change it.
bholdr_mage 03-18-07, 02:15 PM	I disagree on a couple of points. The largest is that the rules of 3.x are more restrictive. The rules aren't. If you look at the rules there are presented as guidelines for new DMs to make ruling. Look at the version Wish. It can keep this spell from destroying a campiagn by making a wish. This keeps down the number of arguements and allow you to focus on RPing. Wish never destroyed games. Players do and DMs do. Swords don't slice people, people slice people with swords. The "feel" of the campaign needs to be laid out before the players before the campaign even begins...If a DM has authority fo his game, he can control this issue of being walked on by a particular spell. Does Wish from 2nd edition have it's loopholes? Sure does. And weak DMs let the spell ruin the game. While the 3.x spell is more precise with what you can do with the spell, inevietably it's the player that wants to "win" the game or take control of the game that words the wish, instead of casting said spell to better the game-play for all involved. Second I am really happy that the DMG don't set rules on structure or adventures(it does offer advice though though the DMG2 does it alot more). Because I don't need rule to regulate Role-Playing. Maybe you don't. For one I have played in many games that needed structure. They needed a place to end and begin and they needed the answer to the question: Why does this printed adventure do this a particular way? For most, even college students, don't understand structure in a story; they read the story as just a story without picking the intro, end, plot, antagonists, protagonists and what makes up the skeleton of the proportional tale. Sit in a regular college class and have the professor ask who the antagonist was and many in the class will get it wrong. And that's not just because the people don't know the definition of the word "antagonist," but rather sometimes the "voldermort" or obvious bad guy isn't nearly as noticeable. Most just look for a "meaning" or a point to the story than where the glue is that holds it together. Dungeon's Dungeoncraft is IMHO much better than half of the DMG. Third D&D or any RPG has never been about telling a story like writting a novel it is about taking the role of a character in a different reality....which means just because a action means it will make a 'good story' doesn't mean it can work because at that point you are just reading a novel and not interacting with a different reality. I understand your point and where you are coming from. However some descriptive narratives help our minds picture the scene. It's the level of description that we don't fully agree on (as a whole audience, not just you and I, for I don't know your opinion on this) that is the issue. You're right in that role is very important, but seeing the role and understanding that role as well as enjoying it, makes the story form. That enjoyment factor is necessary and what I believe a_psh is getting at. The story has to develop as well as the player enjoying his pertient role. Also just a quick adjustment to people thinking magic item shops have existed in D&D since the beinging. Also 1st and 2nd edition was more equipment base then 3rd in some ways. If you don't have a silver weapon and are fighting a were creature you can still have some effect. In 1st and 2nd you manage as well have been swinging a feather. Very true. So in closing while you may veiw D&D is going nowhere because it doesn't drectly caters to what you want from a RPG. I veiw this as the strongest trait of D&D is that it doesn't cater to anyone play style. It doesn't even really suggest which one is right. It allows you to develope your own. Yes, you are correct, it IS open-ended. But most don't even come to the point of understanding what style is, and I for one would LOVE to see a book on JUST Dming style. And not just how they DM, but how they think and how they put those adventures together, and how the players interact with the DM. The DMGII labeled players into categories which, is somewhat helpful. But it's missing something that I can't put my finger on. I beleive that it's too open-ended for my tastes, and we may just have to agree to disagree on this issue. WiZo Paradox-While you're correct that new things lose its luster after a time, there are still games I've played recently that were much better than the ones before. And that X-factor is emotion. I believe the emotion is missing from this game. It's all too serious and full of rules without the "light side" of the comics from 2nd edition of those crazy zany adventurers to make you smile when you turn the page. It's almost robotic in the fact that most adventures get too caught up in saving the village from a hoarde of draconic half orcs without another purpose than "this is what's right" and "what gold do we get." a_psh-I completely agree with you. Our game needs direction and purpose; or rather ones that are written rather than assumed. In second edition, there were times when i wouldn't read a book from cover to cover, but now the books seem like a chore to get through. Why? because there isn't any variation. It's either a boring history of some stuff without a purpose, interesting back-story, or a sense of cohesiveness; or it's a bunch of rules. Our game needs enjoyment.
Sarella Starshine 03-18-07, 02:42 PM	I for one absolutely hate it when others try and tell me how to play games (when I don't play D&D I play a lot of MMO's and you will not be surprised how many people think 'their' way is the only way to 'win' the game). Same for role playing. I DON'T want rules for that. I want rules telling me how to resolve combats if they occur. I want rules about character creation (what I can and can't have at any given time of character development). But I want total freedom on how to role play that character, and not be told that I need to have her be played in a certain manner because the rules says I must. I get inspired to try different characters by flipping through books. I WANT to be able to decide HOW my character got the powers (read level and class) that she has, and not be told how SOMEONE else feels MY character should have gotten those powers. As a player, I want my DM to create the world, and then sit back let me explore the world, and depending on who I talk to, or fight with, abdicate fairly what happens (anything from being given a quest (read adventure) to starting a bar fight to getting into mortal combat). As a DM, I want complete and total freedom to use the rules as I see fit to create a world I want, instead of being spoon-fed someone else's idea of what it should be. Like with religons. The DM should create the religions and there should only be like, an official rule of how religious you are. not that the charecters have to "believe in these gods and these only" (at least I think that is how it works, I don't know.) *gasp* Believe it or not you do have the freedom you know to create your own gods and religions in your game. the gods (and goddesses) mentioned are if you want to use the default setting of greyhawk for your world and don't want to create new stuff. The rules for how religious you are very simple too, anyone can follow any god/goddess they want, but they must be certain classes to draw powers/have powers granted to them by these gods/goddesses and those gods/goddesses will only grant powers to those that worship them and follow the ideals of the gods/goddesses.
a_psh 03-18-07, 03:12 PM	Some specific responses: Seeing as how it is the explicitly stated intention of the developers to simply give you rules, not to tell you how to actually play the game, I don't see this kind of a change as likely.The rules of a game themselves provide structure. Heck, play the much-maligned Monopoly the ways it's actually written (which no one ever does) and the game will actually end in less than an hour. I'm afraid I must disagree, a_psh. Perhaps it's because, for me, there was no 'golden age' of D&D (since D&D appeared late in my RPGing history), but I think the game is in better shape than it's ever been. And that means I find it more fun both to play and to run.I'll say it straight-up: old D&D sucked. The good parts of old D&D were all in the player's heads. Stuff they did on top of the system rather than with the system or within it. And that's where we still are now. Hence, "going nowhere." After 30 years, we can do better than this, in my opinion. ... The largest is that the rules of 3.x are more restrictive. The rules aren't.Never said they were. Second I am really happy that the DMG don't set rules on structure or adventures(it does offer advice though though the DMG2 does it alot more). Because I don't need rule to regulate Role-Playing.A single rule that helps everyone at the table meaningfully contribute to the shared imagined content of the game is better than a hundred rules about Third D&D or any RPG has never been about telling a story like writting a novel it is about taking the role of a character in a different reality....which means just because a action means it will make a 'good story' doesn't mean it can work because at that point you are just reading a novel and not interacting with a different reality.See, it doesn't even do that very well. Encumbrance, hit points, skill ranks, &c. don't actually simulate anything effectively. No set of rules that you can write down in an RPG book can do more to simulate reality than the plain old common sense of the players at the table. Trying to spell it all out with situation-specific rules while keeping those rules still playable just leaves you with a cartoon reality that everybody makes fun of mercilessly for how unsatisfying it is. Or, worse yet, they spend a large part of their time ignoring the damn rules to actually make that "reality" work. Here's a good example of a common frustration that D&D players have and it's pretty clear why it happens: because the rules don't actually take into account what the people playing the game are imagining at all. Also 1st and 2nd edition was more equipment base then 3rd in some ways.This is tangential, but I agree. So in closing while you may veiw D&D is going nowhere because it doesn't drectly caters to what you want from a RPG. I veiw this as the strongest trait of D&D is that it doesn't cater to anyone play style. It doesn't even really suggest which one is right. It allows you to develope your own.You can't write 1000 pages of inter-related rules without catering to a specific playstyle. You can't even do that with one page of rules. Leaving it unstated just invites folks who don't play that way to pick up the game and either give up because they hate it or muddle through and play suckily for years and years and years. That first one is a big problem for anyone who ends up not liking D&D's "playstyle," because it means that the introductory RPG for almost everyone who takes up pen-and-paper gaming is sitting there and turning people they might want to play with away from gaming; that second one is a problem because it leads to tons of boring, dysfunctional play, which you hear about practically every day on the forums, &c. (D&D: not really. You can elide anything unrelated to combat, but that's about it.) ... Well that was a thoroughly offensive rant to anyone who actually enjoys mechanics. You can't write rule books to cater to people who don't want to use rules, guy. Nobody's forcing you to use any of them.You'd think that if I hated mechanics I'd just tell everyone to go freeform. Note that I'm not doing that. Probably because I see the value in strong rules driving the game. Which is why there's a whole rant about what the books are missing -- specifically, rules that actually work for the group rather than just getting in the way until you feel like playing a wargame battle again. (I love wargames. But wargames are downright boring as far as the imagined events of play are concerned, and D&D is weak as a wargame anyway.) ... I for one absolutely hate it when others try and tell me how to play games (when I don't play D&D I play a lot of MMO's and you will not be surprised how many people think 'their' way is the only way to 'win' the game). Same for role playing. I DON'T want rules for that. I want rules telling me how to resolve combats if they occur. I want rules about character creation (what I can and can't have at any given time of character development). But I want total freedom on how to role play that character, and not be told that I need to have her be played in a certain manner because the rules says I must.With all due respect, you're not talking about what I'm talking about, and have never seen what I'm talking about. The use of the phrase "rules for roleplaying" is an immediate clue. Rules that effectively help you negotiate about the shared imagined content of the game are not the same as rules that tell you how to method-act. Intelligent, elegant rules that tell you how to resolve conflicts about imagined events if they occur can only improve an RPG. Any RPG. Ditto for rules that allow for flexible scene-framing. As it is right now, D&D just assumes that all of that stuff -- and that's the hard stuff, as evidenced by the fact that any ol' shmoe on the Internet can write a prestige class -- will somehow magically come out of the GM. It's certainly not alone in this, nor the worst offender. But this way of thinking is just plain bad. Heck, right now I might just settle for a reward cycle that looks like it came from somewhere other than a wargame. Those are a dime a dozen these days (unlike 15 years ago). ... ... An overall thing: It's not about math (though math is a game design concern). It's not even about lots of rules vs. few rules, though that's also a game design concern. It's not about "rules for roleplaying." That's a meaningless phrase. It's about... this is hard to express... how much the text of the game actually helps you create the narrative of play. Y'know, that story that everyone gushes about so much. That thing needs like ten different kinds of structure to work right. That structure is what makes a story really *click* in our heads. Pacing, the ordering of scenes, the escalation of a climax, the revelation of theme, character development, all that kind of stuff. That's not really there in the mechanics of the game, and that's a cryin' shame. Or, heck, just a framework for collaboration, for putting your imaginative powers together to make something cool. The only one we've got is the same one countless lesser RPGs have been parroting for thirty years, and it doesn't even work that well. Nor is it spelled out very coherently. Maybe I'd even settle for something that drives the story forward. Not much of that around. Yet another thing to dump into the "leave it to the GM" basket. Some kind of example of what I'm talking about might help. I'm hard-pressed to come up with the ideal one right now, but some mental flailing around will help. So, err, expect one soon.
aotrscommander 03-18-07, 03:55 PM	It's about... this is hard to express... how much the text of the game actually helps you create the narrative of play. Y'know, that story that everyone gushes about so much. That thing needs like ten different kinds of structure to work right. That structure is what makes a story really *click* in our heads. Pacing, the ordering of scenes, the escalation of a climax, the revelation of theme, character development, all that kind of stuff. That's not really there in the mechanics of the game, and that's a cryin' shame. Or, heck, just a framework for collaboration, for putting your imaginative powers together to make something cool. The only one we've got is the same one countless lesser RPGs have been parroting for thirty years, and it doesn't even work that well. Nor is it spelled out very coherently. Maybe I'd even settle for something that drives the story forward. Not much of that around. Yet another thing to dump into the "leave it to the GM" basket. Some kind of example of what I'm talking about might help. I'm hard-pressed to come up with the ideal one right now, but some mental flailing around will help. So, err, expect one soon. Ah, so what you're getting at is not really do with superior rules mechanics etc, but you think there is a lack of innovation in the fundemental structure of RPGs. I think I can sort of see where you're coming from (I have been involved with designing wargames that fundementally altered the way you played.) So, if I am getting you right, you think there should a) be more information/support on how to dungeonmaster/play a more (for want of a better phrase) dramatically paced or cinematic adventure and b) perhaps be some sort of way to improve/innovate the entire fundemental structure of the game (i.e the way in which the DM and players interact). I agree the former would be useful, but I'm not even sure how or where you would start with the latter. Indeed, a successful such attempt might be so far from what we currently associate with an RPG it might arguebly be something different altogether, whatever that might be!
Roxlimn 03-18-07, 04:28 PM	This may just be me, a_psh, but the math and the rules never really daunted me. There's not a lot of rules that I don't know where to find in preparation for a session. When I look at a feat or class, the math is usually so simple that I frequently can estimate its performance right then and there. Of course, nothing can beat actual playtesting, but seriously, it's not calculus or integration. The rules now are better in every way, and that includes making the game a better experience, especially for the newbies. CR systems are useless for those who have experience, since you eyeball everything anyway, and mostly ignore the CR ratings. For the newbie DM, though, they're a very useful yardstick so you don't make as big of a mess as you otherwise would. It's better than HD estimates, at any rate. In the DMG itself, there are numerous tips and tricks for how to make the game a better experience. Stories and plots and cutesie stuff is all well and good, but in reality, I've found that the cheesiest plotline carries over well when you get the important things down pat - and the new DMG helps you to do that where the old ones do not. It tells you that gamers are different and that you should get their measure individually. It tells you that different styles of play are okay. It tells you to keep the ball rolling instead of bogging down the game in rule arguments. It tells you which details to dwell on in-game and which ones to skip. The new DMG II even categorizes players and advises you on how to cater to their fancies. In the related Dragon magazine, there's a very useful article about how to plan your sessions story wise in order to maximize impact in the manner of a movie or TV series. Dungeon mag has Monte Cook's series on DungeonMastering and it contains similar bits of useful advice. All this is very concrete and easily confirmable evidence that your rant is untrue; the new D&D does help you to make a better story - or at least it helps you to tell a crappy one so that your players remember it with a golden glow. It does quite literally help you in exactly the manner you want: Everywhere I look, the game does jack **** to make the imaginative stories that people gush so much about actually happen. The game is chock-full of advice that helps the DM to make it happen. Setting and rules product don't only contain suggestions on how to tell a story better, they're also full of story suggestions you can adopt. Look at the excellent Waterdeep, Sharn, ECS, FRCS, SoS, and SoX products and tell me they doesn't give you ideas.
boozerker 03-18-07, 04:56 PM	Things are always "better" when they're new to you, and you're young and stupid. Driving a car for the first time- "FREEDOM!!!". Driving a car today: "Argh! I have to get some gas and the price spiked up to record levels AGAIN. And I have to make that insurance payment. And get the car inspected. Oh, and now it's making some noise!" Getting a job for the first time- "Now I can get all the D&D books I want!" A job today- "Ugh... I don't want to go to work today. But I'll have to so I can pay my bills. And maybe I'll have enough to pick up just one D&D book this month." Same goes with D&D. Disagreed. I haven't played the first editions, but your examples likely refer to crappy vehicles and crappy jobs. The 68 Mustang GT. Owners back then: "I'll hang on to this!" Non-owners today: "wish I could drive one!" The manufacturer a few years ago: "Let's replicate its spirit with our new line" Jobs where inventiveness is your main duty: "I create new things daily, different projects each month, it's refreshing/challenging" Jobs doing someting you love = a happier worker, likely. But if someone changed it on you (thus bastardizing what you love): :rant: Also, your examples are based on things which change slowly, if at all. Yet D&D's evolution jumps dramatically from one edition to the next. One's ride or job is unlikely to change much except to deteriorate (for a car) and/or become more resented (for a dead-end job). A more appropriate comparison of the older D&D vs. the newer D&D might be the Commodore 64 (officially the most popular computer of all time) and modern computers. If today's computers had kept the charm/allure of the Commodore 64, while integrating the web and updating features, you'd probably see a bunch of happier people sitting at their computers. Its system had been nicely adaptable for people adding their own made-up software, plus easily viewed on TV (no need for a monitor), with a very basic framework for the amazing things it could do. Making changes on that system had been easy, where for today's computers it's difficult and/or messy.... ...but that's the cost (to us) of ultra-protective ownership, which led to the modern arrangement of software in a very complicated manner so few could decifer it, thus computing became a pain for the world. Of course WotC didn't go that route, and so d20 today is basically favorable to change. It's modular (to a point). However, its rules structure has perhaps narrowed down the availability of "let's pretend" elements. I don't believe a group of newbies could just pick the later edition books and make up their own stuff (until they got familiar with the rules), which seemed to be more the case with the original Dungeons & Dragons. :tiphat:
Daydreamer 03-18-07, 05:08 PM	I feel, though, that there is a definite problematic trend trying to make D&D all about math. So many new rules, PrCs, base classes, monsters, feats, spells....I mean there's really a veritable mountain of it, and WotC is always adding more. Is it really improving the game, or is it derailing it and bogging it down? I think questions like that honestly require some thought on the part of the design team, and soon. D&D is a torn community, between the type of geeks who like hardcore sciences and mathimatics. The more traditional geek who think its cool if they find a neat feat combo to do x dmg per round. Whereas on the other side you have the art geeks who view d&d more like mythology and tend towards being less rules oriented and more story oriented. Then you have the half way between ppl, who from my experience, are a minority.
a_psh 03-18-07, 05:10 PM	This may just be me, a_psh, but the math and the rules never really daunted me. There's not a lot of rules that I don't know where to find in preparation for a session.I agree here. Rules are easy. They're just useless, too. And resolution time is still overlong even if you do know the rules. In the DMG itself, there are numerous tips and tricks for how to make the game a better experience. Stories and plots and cutesie stuff is all well and good, but in reality, I've found that the cheesiest plotline carries over well when you get the important things down pat - and the new DMG helps you to do that where the old ones do not. <snip /> It tells you that gamers are different and that you should get their measure individually. It tells you that different styles of play are okay. It tells you to keep the ball rolling instead of bogging down the game in rule arguments. It tells you which details to dwell on in-game and which ones to skip.You mean like page 8 ("Deep-immersion storytelling"), where the game tells you that rules are the enemy of actual roleplaying and then equates "story" with talking to a shopkeeper for an hour? The DMG is definitely better than it was in ages past (where it just told you to go talk to shopkeepers for an hour), but it's still, well... misguided at best. A piece of paper that says "keep things moving" (that's on page 15) is not a system that actually keeps things moving. The new DMG II even categorizes players and advises you on how to cater to their fancies. In the related Dragon magazine, there's a very useful article about how to plan your sessions story wise in order to maximize impact in the manner of a movie or TV series. Dungeon mag has Monte Cook's series on DungeonMastering and it contains similar bits of useful advice. All this is very concrete and easily confirmable evidence that your rant is untrue; the new D&D does help you to make a better story - or at least it helps you to tell a crappy one so that your players remember it with a golden glow. It does quite literally help you in exactly the manner you wantThe manner I want actually involves structure originating from the mechanics of the game (which is the hallmark of any good game design). Everything you're talking about just shows you how useless the game mechanics are, since you can just dump Monte's column into a different magazine and say "Here, here is advice for how to run your game!" Heck, you can harvest some rules from Warhammer, wrap them in the same GMing advice you already see in the DMG, and call it "D&D 4.0" if you wanted to. Because none of the game rules significantly address what matters in an RPG: that big ol' thing you made up. The game is chock-full of advice that helps the DM to make it happen. Setting and rules product don't only contain suggestions on how to tell a story better, they're also full of story suggestions you can adopt. Look at the excellent Waterdeep, Sharn, ECS, FRCS, SoS, and SoX products and tell me they doesn't give you ideas.Those are some of the better books written, but they just lay the groundwork for a setting. They all have very little do to with system. Heck, half the ideas you get from reading Sharn: City of Towers don't actually work well with D&D. And the actual rules you're playing with do nothing to actually help the group come to a unified vision of what they think Sharn is like, either. For a "game of your imagination" (PHB pg. 4), D&D's mechanics sure give you very little to work with.
Daydreamer 03-18-07, 05:12 PM	unfortunately you cant systemitize the intangible role playing and especially storytelling aspects of the game. They are inherently unable to be systamitized. All you can do is give some general pointers about them. If d&d has a skill per se, its this non rules oriented ability to think and make the game flow. To put the flesh over the bones(rules) as it were. This isnt something that they have failed to systemize, it is something that CANT be systemized.
boozerker 03-18-07, 05:16 PM	Third D&D or any RPG has never been about telling a story like writting a novel it is about taking the role of a character in a different reality....which means just because a action means it will make a 'good story' doesn't mean it can work because at that point you are just reading a novel and not interacting with a different reality. Not that I disagree on D&D's purpose with regards to capturing the spirit of a novel, but the Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy had been written in part by how events within a group's D&D campaign turned out. Not sure what percentage of their PCs' actions made it into the books, but still it turned into an awesome trilogy, did it not? So it's not really such an alien idea, and could be the inspiration for certain views in that context -- it might be a novel idea for some players :)
IceFractal 03-18-07, 05:19 PM	A lot of the problems mentioned, however, are only problems if your goal is story. Now stories can be great, and even a wargame can benefit from good narration, but they're not the only factor. The problem I see with quite a few otherwise excellent systems is they're completely relative. That is, everything is up to either the DM or the players. Now admittedly, that's an odd statement - of course everything is up to the DM or players. But let me give an example: A few days ago, I was reading a thread about planetary exploration in D&D. Of course, Teleport can be used to reach planets, but you have to see them first, so basically a spaceship was required. There were several good ideas about how to propel this ship, my favorite of which was a large array of magical traps using Mage Hand in sequence to propel the ship at significant speed. The characters, and the players, discovered how to do something that didn't previously seem available in D&D. And in most of the other RPGs I've played, that discussion would be meaningless because you can either have the FTL spaceship or not - there's no question of discovering how to do it. In Hero, for instance, there's just two questions - is the FTL power available for players in the campaign, and do we have enough points to get a ship with it? In a freeform narrative system, it's even simpler - is having an FTL ship going to be a good part of the story? But only in certain systems, or which D&D is one, can you take existing pieces like Mage Hand and use them to build an FTL ship, and do it "fairly", without the DM just giving it to you. Now of course, the DM can change that - by making it impossible to correctly sequence that many traps, by deciding that space works differently in this setting, or inversely, by just giving you an artifact ship. But the point is that the rules, although they can be ignored, do set a baseline which you can "push back" against, to see what you can do. And the parts of D&D that enable this, are the parts a lot of people hate: 1) Comprehensive and mostly impartial rules. Even though the DM can, of course, change them, they provide the baseline to work from. 2) A large number of somewhat complex rule elements, spells for instance, with more being introduced in each book, such that it's impossible to see all the possible combinations. If everything is immediately apparant, there's nothing to discover. 3) The lack of a universal measuring factor, outside of DM judgement. If there was a general factor like "X points = X effect", then there'd by no point to discovering better ways of doing things - they'd cost the same as the worst ways. So I guess it just goes to show that different people like different elements out of the game. Which means that what would be an improvement to some would be detrimental to others.
a_psh 03-18-07, 05:33 PM	unfortunately you cant systemitize the intangible role playing and especially storytelling aspects of the game. They are inherently unable to be systamitized. All you can do is give some general pointers about them. If d&d has a skill per se, its this non rules oriented ability to think and make the game flow. To put the flesh over the bones(rules) as it were. This isnt something that they have failed to systemize, it is something that CANT be systemized.I call BS. It's something that they didn't try to "systematize," which is, yes, different from failing. But it's not something that you can't "systematize" -- and, if it is, we should all be dropping D&D like a rock and just playing "Let's Pretend" all over again. Heck, D&D gives you certain kinds of structure. It's just a bad one. You can't write an RPG without answering questions like "Who gets to narrate things happening?" and "Who controls what elements of the shared imagined fiction?" Unfortunately, D&D's answer 30 years ago was oftentimes "Yeah, the GM does everything" and every mainstream game out there persists in parroting this because it's all that players and game designers know. (A central GM used intelligently is a powerful and functional thing. A central GM just dumped there makes for a lame-ass game.)
Roxlimn 03-18-07, 05:42 PM	a_psh: I agree here. Rules are easy. They're just useless, too. And resolution time is still overlong even if you do know the rules. If you have problems with resolution time, you're not as well acquainted with rules use as you might think. You mean like page 8 ("Deep-immersion storytelling"), where the game tells you that rules are the enemy of actual roleplaying and then equates "story" with talking to a shopkeeper for an hour? The DMG is definitely better than it was in ages past (where it just told you to go talk to shopkeepers for an hour), but it's still, well... misguided at best. Still means it's going somewhere, no? The manner I want actually involves structure originating from the mechanics of the game (which is the hallmark of any good game design). Everything you're talking about just shows you how useless the game mechanics are, since you can just dump Monte's column into a different magazine and say "Here, here is advice for how to run your game!" Sorry, but this is just you wanting to impose your preferred style of play on everyone else, and I'm GLAD that D&D doesn't do that. Hardcoding story structure into the game precludes us just using it to have a bashfest where we attack everything that moves without any semblance of story or plot. And who are you to tell us that this style of play isn't good, "mature," "advanced," or whatever and that it doesn't deserve advancement in terms of refinement? I've seen Exalted. I've seen Vampire. I would rather not have the core books be like those because, yes, I can easily pick up elements of plot and story from people who actually know what they're talking about. Monte Cook talks the talk because he's integrating the performance art of storytelling (not the art of storywriting) into D&D. And he's good. If I wanted tips on how to make a good story, I'd look up my Creative Writing teacher in the university. Or pick up a good book and dissect it to pieces. That kind of advice is best placed right where it is. I don't need a bunch of game experts telling me things they don't know anything about. I need them to tell me about mechanics and implementation.
KillerGM 03-18-07, 05:48 PM	D&D has ALWAYS been about math. THAC0, for obvious example. And in the 1st edition DMG, there's over a page and a half on discussing dice probablility. Urghgh. If there's pages I'd want to tear out of the book, that would be it. Tables, charts, dice rolls and results. Kits, base classes, sub classes, sub races, encumbance, weapons speed factor, weapon type vs armor type, monsters. Five different saving throws and saving throw priorities. (Is that a save vs wands, spells, or petrification?) Rules didn't mesh from book to book. The mountain has always been there, and will always be there. It is nothing new. I agree completely. I wouldn't have touched AD&D with an eleven-foot pole, because I couldn't stand the system - there were so many mechanics and so much hand-tying for my tastes. I played other RPGs with better systems (for my style) before 3.0. It was actually Star Wars d20 that made me go "Hey, this isn't too bad, maybe I should give D&D 3.0 a try!" Also, most people who discuss how great AD&D was talk about how they manipulated/changed/house-ruled all the rules to just about obvlivion to make it playable. This brings up 2 questions: Why does that make AD&D so great? AND Why can't you just do that with the current system? If that's what you and your players want, then go for it! I told and played in great stories in other systems. WEG Star Wars, World of Darkness (Vampire/Werewolf/Mage/etc), Marvel Super Heroes, others. I have played in and told great stories in d20 systems as well (Star Wars, Farscape, D&D 3.0 & 3.5). All without having to majorly overhaul the rules just to do the cool stuff. It doesn't seem to me that the old ways were great at all. I mean, if your argument is that mechanics are moot in comparing systems, then your argument is moot. The difference between AD&D and D&D *is* the system of rules. There's still plenty of game-inspiring ideas everywhere - plenty of pre-generated settings, plenty of "DM suggestions", plenty of good and bad DMs who are using or not using the resources available. Are the first games you play going to be the best you remember? Probably. There is always a sense of wonder in any new thing. I recall my first D&D character fondly (a Sorcerer), and she was played in 3.0 - and the story was awesome! I remember my first WEG Star Wars character with warm regards, and the same with other "firsts". Part of it may be that you're getting older. :P Older people tend to look at what younger people do and go "WTF?" and vice versa. I'm sure the things you thought were "cool" back in the day would rankle you to no end now - it's just a part of changing as you get older. Lord knows I would not enjoy some of the games I remember fondly now. :D
Roxlimn 03-18-07, 05:49 PM	a_psh: I agree here. Rules are easy. They're just useless, too. And resolution time is still overlong even if you do know the rules. If you have problems with resolution time, you're not as well acquainted with rules use as you might think. You mean like page 8 ("Deep-immersion storytelling"), where the game tells you that rules are the enemy of actual roleplaying and then equates "story" with talking to a shopkeeper for an hour? The DMG is definitely better than it was in ages past (where it just told you to go talk to shopkeepers for an hour), but it's still, well... misguided at best. Still means it's going somewhere, no? The manner I want actually involves structure originating from the mechanics of the game (which is the hallmark of any good game design). Everything you're talking about just shows you how useless the game mechanics are, since you can just dump Monte's column into a different magazine and say "Here, here is advice for how to run your game!" Sorry, but this is just you wanting to impose your preferred style of play on everyone else, and I'm GLAD that D&D doesn't do that. Hardcoding story structure into the game precludes us just using it to have a bashfest where we attack everything that moves without any semblance of story or plot. And who are you to tell us that this style of play isn't good, "mature," "advanced," or whatever and that it doesn't deserve advancement in terms of refinement? I've seen Exalted. I've seen Vampire. I would rather not have the core books be like those because, yes, I can easily pick up elements of plot and story from people who actually know what they're talking about. Monte Cook talks the talk because he's integrating the performance art of storytelling (not the art of storywriting) into D&D. And he's good. If I wanted tips on how to make a good story, I'd look up my Creative Writing teacher in the university. Or pick up a good book and dissect it to pieces. That kind of advice is best placed right where it is. I don't need a bunch of game experts telling me things they don't know anything about. I need them to tell me about mechanics and implementation.
boozerker 03-18-07, 05:58 PM	I disagree that D&D is going nowhere, it might address those issues concerning story and whatever in the next edition, judging from certain areas that designers have been exploring lately. There is lots you can do with D&D, it just takes a lot of digging and putting 2-and-2 together, and thinking outside the box for certain mechanics. At first this is not evident, but the more time spent on these boards, you really see possibilities not considered before. All that needs to be done is to roll all those loose possibilities into a cleaner set of mechanics, and from here that looks feasible. a_psh I agree that roleplaying can be more systemized, and it would be an improvement for the game, but it needs to be done carefully -- where DMs aren't being told how to run their game or what style is better. There are lots of preventable errors usually learned the hard way, that a simple one or two lines in the core books might have fixed.
navar100 03-18-07, 06:03 PM	Things are always "better" when they're new to you, and you're young and stupid. Driving a car for the first time- "FREEDOM!!!". Driving a car today: "Argh! I have to get some gas and the price spiked up to record levels AGAIN. And I have to make that insurance payment. And get the car inspected. Oh, and now it's making some noise!" Getting a job for the first time- "Now I can get all the D&D books I want!" A job today- "Ugh... I don't want to go to work today. But I'll have to so I can pay my bills. And maybe I'll have enough to pick up just one D&D book this month." Same goes with D&D. How true. While I don't know all the rules by heart, I know enough to see the mathematics and game mechanics take place as the game is played. I do take some enjoyment out of that. However, it does take the DM to make the game interesting. When my character matters in the gameworld, I have fun. NPCs need to react to me, both positive and negative, because of things I have done. I don't necessarily eventually have to become the ruler of some realm (though I did last campaign :cool: ), but my character should be deemed a Hero(tm). Still, it does help when the DM uses stuff I don't know. This campaign my DM is using Libris Mortis. I do not have this book. Other than nightsticks, which have been talked to death around here, I have no idea what's in that book. We've fought opponents who utilize that book or at least inspired the DM. Last game sessions we fought some ghouls when destroyed, burst into a 5' radius flame then came back, and we had to fight them again. The whole party went :OMG! . It was fun. We defeated them. I had that sense of joy of fighting a monster I didn't know everything about it. The ghoul with monk levels was a real kicker. As for the rogue in our party, he still has that sense of exhuberance. He plays well, but he only knows the rules as far as his character is concerned. As he gains levels he looks for ways to improve. He multiclassed to ranger this past level gain and will eventually go into a homemade prestige class. He wanted to be able to fight better. He got the Dive for Cover feat, and while it is a good one, he's absolutely thrilled with it. He's excited about having the Dodge feat, which people here tend to pooh-pooh. He is enjoying the game for the sake of the game. It's fun watching him have fun. I never played 1E. I played 2E. I liked the game then. That's all there was, though I dabbled in GURPS :gah: , Rolemaster :yuck: , Fantasy Warhammer :pbbbtt: , and Ars Magica :) . However, there were lots about 2E I didn't like. 3E fixed a lot of what I didn't like it, and anything that remained (spell preparation, elves get "everything") I just lumped and even spell preparation I've acclaimated to. I could never go back to 2E.
Lokiyn 03-18-07, 06:19 PM	Just as a quick little story, In the games i've been in the last few years we stopped about a month ago then looked at our last dozen or so adventures. All of the sudden we realized that our adventures are not near as heroic as we thought. For example. Adventure x consisted of someone finding a book that explained about a magical device in a castle that made making constructs easier, what did we do? Show up, break the door, kill everything, steal the device destroying it in the progress. Most adventures now a days don't seem to be good versus evil any more, its neutral wandering over to a nother neutral party kicking them in the face and taking thier stuff. The rules just don't easily support high epic fantasy as much, mainly because the rules have been set to as neutral as possible in many cases. A big part of the game is that you have an effect on the game world. in many games the things you do have no lasting effects on the world. Or when they do its the unsung hero adventure. None of which has any real point except to say that its real easy to slip into the rules of the game as the flesh rather than the bones of the story. Rules provide the foundation, story provides the muscle to make it move. How often has anyone caught themselves as a dm, simply rolling up an encounter on the tables just because you are supposed to have an encounter? I know i do it, mainly because its easier. Also many players have this sort of kill kill kill mentality. If the event isn't directly related to them or thier backstories, its kill kill kill, otherwise its "let me interact with it" while the others want to kill it.
Daydreamer 03-18-07, 06:31 PM	I call BS. It's something that they didn't try to "systematize," which is, yes, different from failing. But it's not something that you can't "systematize" -- and, if it is, we should all be dropping D&D like a rock and just playing "Let's Pretend" all over again. Heck, D&D gives you certain kinds of structure. It's just a bad one. You can't write an RPG without answering questions like "Who gets to narrate things happening?" and "Who controls what elements of the shared imagined fiction?" Unfortunately, D&D's answer 30 years ago was oftentimes "Yeah, the GM does everything" and every mainstream game out there persists in parroting this because it's all that players and game designers know. (A central GM used intelligently is a powerful and functional thing. A central GM just dumped there makes for a lame-ass game.) Perhaps we are not quite talking about the same thing. I do not see how you can systemize creativity? I am not talking about rules in the sense of combat, or the awarding of xp for even intangibles like role playing. I am talking about the creative aspects of the game. I dont see, or understand how u can systemize creativity. Creativity is like mathimatical ability, some people have it, others do not. the creative part of d&d cant be systemized, some ppl just get it and others dont. This certainly conforms to my xp as a player and dm, and my xp with other players and dms. The rules can always be improved, in the sense of, they can make being creative easier by providing a better basic structure, but they cant stand in for it. Being a good storyteller isnt the sort of thing that has systematic rules. It has guidelines, i agree they can provide those, but not formal rules.
johnkretzer 03-18-07, 06:57 PM	Not that I disagree on D&D's purpose with regards to capturing the spirit of a novel, but the Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy had been written in part by how events within a group's D&D campaign turned out. Not sure what percentage of their PCs' actions made it into the books, but still it turned into an awesome trilogy, did it not? So it's not really such an alien idea, and could be the inspiration for certain views in that context -- it might be a novel idea for some players :) Not disagreeing with you D&D campaign can make a awesome novel, movie, etc. But then again there was major changes to what happened in the campaign vs the novels because a campaign doesn't translate well.
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-18-07, 07:02 PM	I can see what you're saying about too many rules. D&D lost its way the moment it started creating pointless rules for DMs. And I'm not talking about good guideline concepts like the CR system, I'm talking about garbage like monster BaB and saves being derived from creature type and hit dice. Everything else about monster design is arbitrary, why have some contrived meaningless system to determine base saves and BaB? The main failure of 3rd edition isn't so much its math, but rather its creation of so many secondary statistics, For instance, your attack bonus (the meaningful statistic) is derived from BaB and strength modifier. BaB is in turn derived from your hit dice, which are placed in possibly multiple class levels, each with separate progressions. Strength modifier is derived from your strength score and so on. To make matters worse, bonuses add even further levels of separation. we have bonuses which add to strength score, which indirectly add to strength modifier, which indirectly adds to final attack bonus.
johnkretzer 03-18-07, 07:20 PM	See, it doesn't even do that very well. Encumbrance, hit points, skill ranks, &c. don't actually simulate anything effectively. No set of rules that you can write down in an RPG book can do more to simulate reality than the plain old common sense of the players at the table. Trying to spell it all out with situation-specific rules while keeping those rules still playable just leaves you with a cartoon reality that everybody makes fun of mercilessly for how unsatisfying it is. Or, worse yet, they spend a large part of their time ignoring the damn rules to actually make that "reality" work. Here's a good example of a common frustration that D&D players have and it's pretty clear why it happens: because the rules don't actually take into account what the people playing the game are imagining at all. You can't write 1000 pages of inter-related rules without catering to a specific playstyle. You can't even do that with one page of rules. Leaving it unstated just invites folks who don't play that way to pick up the game and either give up because they hate it or muddle through and play suckily for years and years and years. That first one is a big problem for anyone who ends up not liking D&D's "playstyle," because it means that the introductory RPG for almost everyone who takes up pen-and-paper gaming is sitting there and turning people they might want to play with away from gaming; that second one is a problem because it leads to tons of boring, dysfunctional play, which you hear about practically every day on the forums, &c. (D&D: not really. You can elide anything unrelated to combat, but that's about it.) ... You'd think that if I hated mechanics I'd just tell everyone to go freeform. Note that I'm not doing that. Probably because I see the value in strong rules driving the game. Which is why there's a whole rant about what the books are missing -- specifically, rules that actually work for the group rather than just getting in the way until you feel like playing a wargame battle again. (I love wargames. But wargames are downright boring as far as the imagined events of play are concerned, and D&D is weak as a wargame anyway.) ... With all due respect, you're not talking about what I'm talking about, and have never seen what I'm talking about. The use of the phrase "rules for roleplaying" is an immediate clue. Rules that effectively help you negotiate about the shared imagined content of the game are not the same as rules that tell you how to method-act. Intelligent, elegant rules that tell you how to resolve conflicts about imagined events if they occur can only improve an RPG. Any RPG. Ditto for rules that allow for flexible scene-framing. As it is right now, D&D just assumes that all of that stuff -- and that's the hard stuff, as evidenced by the fact that any ol' shmoe on the Internet can write a prestige class -- will somehow magically come out of the GM. It's certainly not alone in this, nor the worst offender. But this way of thinking is just plain bad. Heck, right now I might just settle for a reward cycle that looks like it came from somewhere other than a wargame. Those are a dime a dozen these days (unlike 15 years ago). ... ... An overall thing: It's not about math (though math is a game design concern). It's not even about lots of rules vs. few rules, though that's also a game design concern. It's not about "rules for roleplaying." That's a meaningless phrase. It's about... this is hard to express... how much the text of the game actually helps you create the narrative of play. Y'know, that story that everyone gushes about so much. That thing needs like ten different kinds of structure to work right. That structure is what makes a story really *click* in our heads. Pacing, the ordering of scenes, the escalation of a climax, the revelation of theme, character development, all that kind of stuff. That's not really there in the mechanics of the game, and that's a cryin' shame. Or, heck, just a framework for collaboration, for putting your imaginative powers together to make something cool. The only one we've got is the same one countless lesser RPGs have been parroting for thirty years, and it doesn't even work that well. Nor is it spelled out very coherently. Maybe I'd even settle for something that drives the story forward. Not much of that around. Yet another thing to dump into the "leave it to the GM" basket. Some kind of example of what I'm talking about might help. I'm hard-pressed to come up with the ideal one right now, but some mental flailing around will help. So, err, expect one soon. I would like to point out I really don't want realistic combat in my RPG thank you...why? Because realistic combat is boring and one-sided. It is not fun. So that the rules aren't 'realistc' doesn't bother me. Also if you really look at this stuff most rules are ignored. Really and this is not to be offensive or anything, but I or most people I play never had these problems that you seem to have with D&D. I am not just brainwashed D&D player who doesn't know better. I don't want a game with rules for Pacing, the ordering of scenes, the escalation of a climax, the revelation of theme because they tend to break the 4th wall. Character development happens at the pace of the player who character is being develope. Others shouldn't have a out of character say in this. Sure in game they can effect it but that is what role-playing is all about. In my veiws any RPG is what you make it. It largely depends on who you play with not what you play.
johnkretzer 03-18-07, 07:24 PM	I can see what you're saying about too many rules. D&D lost its way the moment it started creating pointless rules for DMs. And I'm not talking about good guideline concepts like the CR system, I'm talking about garbage like monster BaB and saves being derived from creature type and hit dice. Everything else about monster design is arbitrary, why have some contrived meaningless system to determine base saves and BaB? The main failure of 3rd edition isn't so much its math, but rather its creation of so many secondary statistics, For instance, your attack bonus (the meaningful statistic) is derived from BaB and strength modifier. BaB is in turn derived from your hit dice, which are placed in possibly multiple class levels, each with separate progressions. Strength modifier is derived from your strength score and so on. To make matters worse, bonuses add even further levels of separation. we have bonuses which add to strength score, which indirectly add to strength modifier, which indirectly adds to final attack bonus. Sure a creatures attack matrix and saves where never based on hd. Did you even play 1st or 2nd? Also going from 3 saves to 5 is some how getting multiple secondary statistics? Also what you described has always effected the total to attack numbers.
johnkretzer 03-18-07, 07:31 PM	You mean like page 8 ("Deep-immersion storytelling"), where the game tells you that rules are the enemy of actual roleplaying and then equates "story" with talking to a shopkeeper for an hour? The DMG is definitely better than it was in ages past (where it just told you to go talk to shopkeepers for an hour), but it's still, well... misguided at best. I hate this...who talks to a shopkeeper for an hour? Really I have been a cashier for years and only the really lonely people talked to me for any great length of time( And I usualy broke the conservation off after 15 mins because well I have to work). Again not very reallistic.
Sylvaroth 03-18-07, 07:32 PM	*sigh* :bigeyes: wipes away a happy tear, wallowing a little in nostalgia
johnkretzer 03-18-07, 07:37 PM	I will also say this to me when somebody usualy says I should be able to break x rule because it fits with my concept of the character or it would make for a better story are usualy doing it so their characters can outshine everybody else....which I'll admitt probably doesn't mean everyone who does, but that is a factor in my thinking.
a_psh 03-18-07, 08:15 PM	Ah, so what you're getting at is not really do with superior rules mechanics etc, but you think there is a lack of innovation in the fundemental structure of RPGs.Correct, pretty much. The mechanics seem to fail to actually capture and encourage the part of the game that people most seem to enjoy. And, moreover, the part that's singular to pen-and-paper roleplaying (how good of a wargame D&D can be is kinda irrelevant when you've got, y'know, real wargames around). So, if I am getting you right, you think there should a) be more information/support on how to dungeonmaster/play a more (for want of a better phrase) dramatically paced or cinematic adventure and b) perhaps be some sort of way to improve/innovate the entire fundemental structure of the game (i.e the way in which the DM and players interact)."B" is the important one. "A" is nice, but is something that can stand somewhat independent of system, I think. I agree the former would be useful, but I'm not even sure how or where you would start with the latter.For me, there are two logical starting points: the reward cycle and the resolution system. Resolution's simple enough to address, potentially. Here's one way: "task resolution" needs to die, with "conflict resolution" taking its place. The game would go a long way towards being both more dynamic and more creative if you actually get to set the stakes for your actions. Essentially, "task resolution" is succeed/fail and "conflict resolution" is win/lose. The canonical example is cracking a safe to get some dirt on the bad guy. In task resolution, it's all about whether you open the safe or not: you could open the safe but find nothing there -- the GM has made your success or failure irrelevant to whether you actually get what you want. In conflict resolution, it's all about whether you get what you wanted (what was "at stake") -- if you fail, you might open the safe and find nothing, whereas if you succeed, there's going to be some dirt somewhere (though maybe you can succeed and then narrate failing to open the safe and finding a document in the trashcan). Conflict resolution just plain enhances collaboration and storytelling in a game. It puts your goals front-and-center and significantly expands the range of meaningful actions available to you without necessarily burdening you with tons and tons of rules. ... If you have problems with resolution time, you're not as well acquainted with rules use as you might think.Non-trivial actions in D&D involve quite a lot of dice and modifiers. You can ease this somewhat by precomputing a lot of stuff, but then your prep work escalates. And you've always gotta ad lib something as the GM. Hardcoding story structure into the game precludes us just using it to have a bashfest where we attack everything that moves without any semblance of story or plot. And who are you to tell us that this style of play isn't good, "mature," "advanced," or whatever and that it doesn't deserve advancement in terms of refinement?Like I've said before, video games beat the crap out of D&D for bashfests. There's just absolutely no contest. D&D was a great substitute for a video game hackfest back when video games were primitive. Nowadays video games give you that experience far more quickly and elegantly than D&D can. I've seen Exalted. I've seen Vampire. I would rather not have the core books be like those because, yes, I can easily pick up elements of plot and story from people who actually know what they're talking about. Monte Cook talks the talk because he's integrating the performance art of storytelling (not the art of storywriting) into D&D. And he's good.Vampire is crap because the core book tells you to do a bunch of stuff that the rules don't support. It's talks up a storm about story and personal horror and then just puts you in a stupid D&D clone with gimped mechanics. If I wanted tips on how to make a good story, I'd look up my Creative Writing teacher in the university. Or pick up a good book and dissect it to pieces. That kind of advice is best placed right where it is. I don't need a bunch of game experts telling me things they don't know anything about. I need them to tell me about mechanics and implementation.Ever think that means you've got the wrong people writing your games? Maybe that's why we have more mechanics for simulating how much gear you can carry than for negotiating contributions to the shared fiction of the game? ... Okay, this is totally a tangent, but I like this tangent, so here we go: I would like to point out I really don't want realistic combat in my RPG thank you...why? Because realistic combat is boring and one-sided. It is not fun. So that the rules aren't 'realistc' doesn't bother me. Also if you really look at this stuff most rules are ignored.People defend the game rules by saying you need this stuff to somehow simulate an imaginary reality. I'm only pointing to lack of actual realism in this regard. Enforcing "realism" Rolemaster-style is a terrible idea, but I still think it's important for a game to support "realistic" narration: in other words, if I want to describe something happening in a quasi-realistic way, it really is better for the system to let me do that. D&D's basic resolution mechanics fail here because they chop the action into these discreet cartoony chunks. Sometimes it's like a superhero comic with the characters waling on each other continually for pages on end -- campy and repetitive. The fact is, a better way of negotiating what you think would make sense in this context -- whether it's for the sake or realism or just whatever floats your storytelling boat at the moment -- is more useful for creating shared content that everyone can actually get behind and meaningfully contribute to in play.
ArcTan 03-18-07, 08:37 PM	3) The rules are less important than anything in an RPG. That's why so much of the 2e PHB and DMG is highlighted in blue and called optional and why rule 0 is made clear and emphasized from the beginning. The rules shouldn't be less important than anything in an RPG, is my feeling. If they are, there's a problem with the rules. a) A few 3e things feel like concessions to the video game generation (Sorcerers are as close as D&D can or will get to pure magic points casting and there is now definitely such a thing as magic shop). I'm not going to pick on everything else, but mana points are *not* a "video game generation" thing. And psionics is a part of D&D.
ArcTan 03-18-07, 08:39 PM	I didn't understand most of that. But there are way too many rules now. and that sucks. it's almost unnapealing, how many rules there are nowadays. And the artwork nowadays sucks. the artwork. and the v3.5 just seems like... it limits the worlds you can create. you have to live in their world. Like with religons. The DM should create the religons and there should only be like, an official rule of how religous you are. not that the charecters have to "believe in these gods and these only" (at least I think that is how it works, I don't know.) Of course that's not how it works. Nothing in the PHB or DMG says that the "official" D&D (Greyhawk) deities are the only ones who exist, and no others can exist. They just use those as examples all the time. The idea of having Clerical Domains listed out for you, of the sourcebook Deities & Demigods, and so on were all to make it easier to create your own religions. The PHB even outright states that Clerics don't have to worship any god at all.
ArcTan 03-18-07, 08:42 PM	I really did enjoy the rant, but it seemed to be pointing at the books [EDIT: or did it? After re-reading, I'm not so sure, seems like you're calling out the players as well] as the primary problem, and that is where I disagree. Its the players, and the DMs who decide to follow the drab, dull, and mechanical - practically every rule/thought/region/skill/class in the core book set is entirely optional if a DM wills it to be - but how many do? Not very many. These boards have the Oberoni Fallacy, but there should be something beyond it, something important: Even if the book doesn't *require* you to do something bad or dumb, it's the book's fault if it *pressures* or *advises* you to do something bad or dumb, because the reason people read books is to be told what to do because they don't yet know. Expecting people to buy books and throw out huge sections of them based on their own judgment is unrealistic and doesn't excuse badly written books.
Fencerboy 03-18-07, 08:43 PM	Why the hell do we put up with this from our games? Because we enjoy D&D... My point being: What are you getting at, a_psh? You gave us this long and well written rant on a subject which basically tells the community that you don't want to be here talking abou D&D, that D&D is dumb as is and you would rather free-form roleplay with no rules. That is great, except these forums are for D&D discussion, not the total insulting of D&D and its rules system. I did not read the last 15 or so replies, so I may have missed something, but PLEASE state why you are saying this? You would rather play 2nd edition, without all the fluff and rules? Go ahead!! No one says that is bad, or forbidden. You would rather just free-form RP? Go ahead!! The reason people play D&D is for the enjoyment. I have never talked to anyone who roled their eyes and said "...Well, I Have to go play D&D today. Honestly, my DM is such a loser, its just torture to play and no one should be forced like this..." Its not Algebra (no offnse to mathemititions) or something that someone forces down your throat... It recreation. No matter how you like it. If you want to play with no rules, and call it D&D, fine!!! If you want to spend your time crunching every rule you can, fine!!! But don't post this barely feasible rant in around D&D subjects, please!! Or at least tell the community, or just me why you posted it, and what we should be saying...
ArcTan 03-18-07, 08:44 PM	As for the DMG teaching you how to roleplay... that is not its purpose, and never has been. The game has always taught you how to game, not how to roleplay. Gaming comes from the rules. Roleplaying comes from within, just as it always has. And always will. That sounds pretty, but doesn't mean anything, unless you think that roleplaying is and always will be a sort of organic, spontaneous, unplanned thing that happens by accident while people are playing the game. Which it isn't, and a lot of D&D groups never end up doing it well at all because they don't see that roleplaying is its own thing that, like anything else, is something that you need to learn and that takes practice. (What's the closest thing in another hobby that you can think of to roleplaying? Acting. And yes, even though a lot of acting is natural talent and intuition, a lot of it can be and *needs to be* taught.)
ArcTan 03-18-07, 08:46 PM	Seeing as how it is the explicitly stated intention of the developers to simply give you rules, not to tell you how to actually play the game, I don't see this kind of a change as likely. But this is nonsense. Rules *do* tell you how to play the game. The more rules you give someone for how to do something, the more likely they are to do it. The fewer you give, the less likely they are to remember to do it at all, and if they do do it the harder it'll be. Can anyone really honestly say the fact that D&D has so many rules about combat doesn't contribute at all to making combat important in D&D?
ArcTan 03-18-07, 08:50 PM	Well that was a thoroughly offensive rant to anyone who actually enjoys mechanics. You can't write rule books to cater to people who don't want to use rules, guy. Nobody's forcing you to use any of them. That's not really what he was getting at. He's making the usual Forge rant about how D&D has lots of rules but the rules aren't intentionally focused on shaping the game experience to be fun -- there's just a lot of irrelevant rules that try to simulate things that aren't fun. Freeform isn't the solution, because freeform doesn't have rules and therefore doesn't shape the game. The point is -- or should be -- that D&D could benefit from being rewritten so the rules are designed to explicitly and intentionally encourage a certain kind of storytelling and roleplaying, which right now they aren't.
Fencerboy 03-18-07, 08:50 PM	That sounds pretty, but doesn't mean anything, unless you think that roleplaying is and always will be a sort of organic, spontaneous, unplanned thing that happens by accident while people are playing the game. Which it isn't, and a lot of D&D groups never end up doing it well at all because they don't see that roleplaying is its own thing that, like anything else, is something that you need to learn and that takes practice. (What's the closest thing in another hobby that you can think of to roleplaying? Acting. And yes, even though a lot of acting is natural talent and intuition, a lot of it can be and *needs to be* taught.) Your acting analogy is pretty good, but Seeker has the true statement (imeo). Often times new roleplayers will need "refinement" on their RPing skills, but 99% comes from within, and the persons personality. Every once in a while, you get a complete moron who has a real life charisma of 1, who just doesn't have an imagination or roleplaying ability. So you stated true, but not as true as seeker :P
johnkretzer 03-18-07, 08:52 PM	Okay, this is totally a tangent, but I like this tangent, so here we go: People defend the game rules by saying you need this stuff to somehow simulate an imaginary reality. I'm only pointing to lack of actual realism in this regard. Enforcing "realism" Rolemaster-style is a terrible idea, but I still think it's important for a game to support "realistic" narration: in other words, if I want to describe something happening in a quasi-realistic way, it really is better for the system to let me do that. D&D's basic resolution mechanics fail here because they chop the action into these discreet cartoony chunks. Sometimes it's like a superhero comic with the characters waling on each other continually for pages on end -- campy and repetitive. The fact is, a better way of negotiating what you think would make sense in this context -- whether it's for the sake or realism or just whatever floats your storytelling boat at the moment -- is more useful for creating shared content that everyone can actually get behind and meaningfully contribute to in play. I disagree but then again I can get into elaborate descriptions of the action. Not everyone can but like I said it is never about the system it is about the players. I also don't wait for the DM to do so...here is a funny story of why. In a game I play a duelist type character. There is also a axe weilding barbarian. The DM for the life of him can't describe a fatal wound from a rapier in such a cool way as he can with a axe. I would jokingly complain about it. But then I started to describe it. There is no mechanics on how this must work or etc. So I can describe it anyway I want because mechanicaly the opponent is dead or unconscience. And lastly if your D&D combat breaks down people just hitting each other then you don't use the system to it's fullest.
ArcTan 03-18-07, 08:56 PM	unfortunately you cant systemitize the intangible role playing and especially storytelling aspects of the game. They are inherently unable to be systamitized. All you can do is give some general pointers about them. If d&d has a skill per se, its this non rules oriented ability to think and make the game flow. To put the flesh over the bones(rules) as it were. This isnt something that they have failed to systemize, it is something that CANT be systemized. *shrug* People have tried. I would at least dip your toe into some of the indie RPGs that try before saying that it's inherently impossible.
Arivia 03-18-07, 08:58 PM	Nowadays, we really should know better. The RPG hobby has had decades to get its act together. D&D has become this elaborate, polished thing. 3e's layout team in particular absolutely rocks. But, fundamentally, the game's still no better for actually doing something cool with it than it was in the days of saving throw tables and racial level restrictions. You have a quote from Dogs In The Vineyard in your signature. You know other games can do better. You've probably heard the great things Vampire is doing of late; how much crap Paranoia just cut out of its system. So why not D&D? Because D&D isn't aspiring to anything more. It's all still hack-and-slash, and it's getting left behind. It's the action movie to an actual good story, and it's fine with that - D&D isn't going to change, because it doesn't want to. Unfortunately, it does suck. I'd love for my schedule to be wall-to-wall way better games, but D&D is about the only one I can find players for. This problem has existed since the mid 90s, and except for that mass of Vampire players, it never really changed. Welcome to the sociology of gaming.
Fencerboy 03-18-07, 08:59 PM	That's not really what he was getting at. He's making the usual Forge rant about how D&D has lots of rules but the rules aren't intentionally focused on shaping the game experience to be fun -- there's just a lot of irrelevant rules that try to simulate things that aren't fun. Freeform isn't the solution, because freeform doesn't have rules and therefore doesn't shape the game. The point is -- or should be -- that D&D could benefit from being rewritten so the rules are designed to explicitly and intentionally encourage a certain kind of storytelling and roleplaying, which right now they aren't. How aren't they? To repeat myself from other places, I enjoy my D&D. You should enjoy your D&D. If you don't enjoy your D&D, fix it or shut up. Don't try to tell anyone else that it sucks, becuase thats just being a dog in the manger. Once you fix it, tell us how. If you truly fixed something that was truly wrong, those who thought it was wrong and like your solution will adopt it into their game. Those who didn't think it was broken will ignore it. Problem solved. But don't, I repeat don't tell me that you don't like D&D. Even if you have 9999999 good reasons, I enjoy my D&D. If you don't, and all you are going to do is try to get me to agree, you should not be on these boards. You should be doing something you do enjoy, instead of ruining something for other people who enjoy it because you don't. I've tried things I didn't like before, and so I stopped. Some of my friends enjoyed it, but I didn't try to force down their throats the "fact" that it sucked!! I've tried things I've liked, but that my friends haven't. I'm thankful that they didn't try to force the "fact" down my throat that it "sucked". So don't here. Please.
ArcTan 03-18-07, 08:59 PM	Your acting analogy is pretty good, but Seeker has the true statement (imeo). Often times new roleplayers will need "refinement" on their RPing skills, but 99% comes from within, and the persons personality. Every once in a while, you get a complete moron who has a real life charisma of 1, who just doesn't have an imagination or roleplaying ability. So you stated true, but not as true as seeker :P I don't mean RPing as in being able to speak well, or do a good portrayal of your character, or have soulful eyes and a voice brimming with emotions (i.e. literally the acting part of RPGs, which half the point of RPGs is to allow you to elide because most people aren't actors). Although all that stuff *can* be trained over time, and though you can't teach talent you'd be surprised how much a mediocre actor can improve if he has some idea of what he's doing, and how far someone you think is a "natural" can improve if he starts to really understand how he does what he does by instinct. But the deal isn't how to express the ideas you RP, but what you should RP in the first place. When does a story begin, how does it progress through its middle, where is its natural end? How do you pass along the spotlight from one character to the next? How do you combine different plots into one overarching arc? These are things that can be learned, or at least that you can give good advice about, and D&D pretends it doesn't exist. It acts like the DM can just slap down encounters one after another and a good story will magically appear by alchemy out of the series of wargame challenges. Which doesn't happen, and leads to those long boring "dead" sessions everyone hates because no one knows what to do next.
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-18-07, 09:01 PM	Sure a creatures attack matrix and saves where never based on hd. Did you even play 1st or 2nd? Also going from 3 saves to 5 is some how getting multiple secondary statistics? Also what you described has always effected the total to attack numbers. You're missing what I'm saying. In fact, 2nd edition was easier, because there was one table you looked at and that's it. I mean seriously, you took hit dice, looked up the THACO and that's it. No strength modifiers, no weapon focus, no nothing. Just THACO. done. Same with saves. You say "save versus spell" and you look in that category, and it says 12. Ok you've got the answer. And that works for any monster you may be dealing wtih, from the 10 hit dice custom monster you just wrote up 5 minutes ago to the classic minotaur. 3rd edition calculating a monster's vital statistics is harder. First you need to know its type, then you have to look up what the BaB and save progression is fro saves. Then you've got to calculate its BaB based on hit dice. After you're done there, you've got to look at it's strength and calculate that modifier. And then apply it to the BaB you got. And that's just attack bonus. Each save requires that you reference a separate ability score and base save category. That's a lot of calculations compared to "look at hit dice. look up THACO on DM screen. Done."
Patera_Quetzal 03-18-07, 09:04 PM	It's about... this is hard to express... how much the text of the game actually helps you create the narrative of play. Y'know, that story that everyone gushes about so much. That thing needs like ten different kinds of structure to work right. That structure is what makes a story really *click* in our heads. Pacing, the ordering of scenes, the escalation of a climax, the revelation of theme, character development, all that kind of stuff. That's not really there in the mechanics of the game, and that's a cryin' shame. Or, heck, just a framework for collaboration, for putting your imaginative powers together to make something cool. The only one we've got is the same one countless lesser RPGs have been parroting for thirty years, and it doesn't even work that well. Nor is it spelled out very coherently. Maybe I'd even settle for something that drives the story forward. Not much of that around. Yet another thing to dump into the "leave it to the GM" basket. Some kind of example of what I'm talking about might help. I'm hard-pressed to come up with the ideal one right now, but some mental flailing around will help. So, err, expect one soon.Yes, I think an example might help immensely. I have recently taken up D&D, and I have serious complaints about several things, though I believe certain other things have definitely improved. But generally, I’m extremely sympathetic to your argument. However, in most of my complaints I don’t seem to be on the same page with you, which just means that you can’t please everyone with an RPG or anything else. The first of the above-quoted paragraphs seems to ask for a system that will help you create an interesting narrative, and I honestly think you’re asking for too much there. I believe that such a system would be a thousand pages long and full of caveats, the last of which would be “None of these rules really makes a good story any more likely than a bad one.” If you want a good story, then rule #1 is “beginning, middle, end,” and that’s really about all you can say for certain. Think of a writer you’ve read who had a good sense of structure (Gene Wolfe is the master of this). The simple fact is, that’s really hard to do. It’s maybe the hardest thing, and you sure as hell can’t systematize it. But again, an example might help. What do you think a RPG system can do in this regard? Your second paragraph above: framework for collaboration. This sounds like something more achievable, and indeed it sounds like a description of D&D. What is it that you want in terms of a collaborative framework that D&D doesn’t now provide, other than cooperative players? Third paragraph above: driving the story forward. An example is needed before I can really comment. Later:Here's one way: "task resolution" needs to die, with "conflict resolution" taking its place. The game would go a long way towards being both more dynamic and more creative if you actually get to set the stakes for your actions. Essentially, "task resolution" is succeed/fail and "conflict resolution" is win/lose. The canonical example is cracking a safe to get some dirt on the bad guy. In task resolution, it's all about whether you open the safe or not: you could open the safe but find nothing there -- the GM has made your success or failure irrelevant to whether you actually get what you want. In conflict resolution, it's all about whether you get what you wanted (what was "at stake") -- if you fail, you might open the safe and find nothing, whereas if you succeed, there's going to be some dirt somewhere (though maybe you can succeed and then narrate failing to open the safe and finding a document in the trashcan). Conflict resolution just plain enhances collaboration and storytelling in a game. It puts your goals front-and-center and significantly expands the range of meaningful actions available to you without necessarily burdening you with tons and tons of rules.Well, I think I had the wrong idea about how far you want to take the “collaboration” aspect. I’m not sure I totally follow your example, but from what I can tell, this is not what I want from an RPG. I want a concrete world to interact with. If there is a safe, and there is some dirt on the bad guy, then I want for the dirt to either be in the safe or not. I want the clues to have led me there rightly or wrongly. I want my game reality to be stable (this is one reason for the DM), and my success or failure to depend on my character’s abilities and my own ingenuity. If you don’t use task resolution to determine success/failure at a task, then what determines whether you win/lose in the conflict? Why role play a safecracker if I can just as well find the dirt in the trash? Maybe I’m not understanding your example.
ArcTan 03-18-07, 09:05 PM	es as a dm, simply rolling up an encounter on the tables just because you are supposed to have an encounter? I know i do it, mainly because its easier. Exactly. This gives the lie to the idea that D&D can support "any kind of story" and "doesn't privilege one kind of play over another". D&D still has the core of a wargame deep inside. It's still a game about fighting. It's hard to keep the pace up for even *one session* that doesn't have combat in it, much less base a campaign around a concept that doesn't involve combat. Also many players have this sort of kill kill kill mentality. If the event isn't directly related to them or thier backstories, its kill kill kill, otherwise its "let me interact with it" while the others want to kill it. Yeah, because 99% of everything the rules give their characters power to do is kill things, and the abilities they have that don't kill things are vague and unsatisfying.
Arivia 03-18-07, 09:15 PM	The first of the above-quoted paragraphs seems to ask for a system that will help you create an interesting narrative, and I honestly think you’re asking for too much there. I believe that such a system would be a thousand pages long and full of caveats, the last of which would be “None of these rules really makes a good story any more likely than a bad one.” If you want a good story, then rule #1 is “beginning, middle, end,” and that’s really about all you can say for certain. Think of a writer you’ve read who had a good sense of structure (Gene Wolfe is the master of this). The simple fact is, that’s really hard to do. It’s maybe the hardest thing, and you sure as hell can’t systematize it. But again, an example might help. What do you think a RPG system can do in this regard? The last World of Darkness game, Promethean, includes a set goal, waypoints to get there, and entire systems for how. It provides lots of structure. Your second paragraph above: framework for collaboration. This sounds like something more achievable, and indeed it sounds like a description of D&D. What is it that you want in terms of a collaborative framework that D&D doesn’t now provide, other than cooperative players? R. Sean Borgstrom's Nobilis gives players plenty of control over the game by making them collaboratively create a large portion of the setting and the organization of sorts the players work for.
a_psh 03-18-07, 09:28 PM	Later:Well, I think I had the wrong idea about how far you want to take the “collaboration” aspect. I’m not sure I totally follow your example, but from what I can tell, this is not what I want from an RPG. I want a concrete world to interact with. If there is a safe, and there is some dirt on the bad guy, then I want for the dirt to either be in the safe or not. I want the clues to have led me there rightly or wrongly. I want my game reality to be stable (this is one reason for the DM), and my success or failure to depend on my character’s abilities and my own ingenuity. If you don’t use task resolution to determine success/failure at a task, then what determines whether you win/lose in the conflict? Why role play a safecracker if I can just as well find the dirt in the trash? Maybe I’m not understanding your example.Depending on the GM to judge whether you actually get what you want or not is completely arbitrary. Constructing any kind of story involves arbitrary choices. With any kind of resolution, once a fact is established, it remains a fact (though you can make games that directly subvert this, but it's a different kind of change). Basically, it goes like this: You as the player want something to happen, right? Task resolution says that you tell your GM what you want your character to do but he makes everything up as he goes along. He might then ask you to roll something to see if you succeed or fail at some task. How that task actually relates to your goals is completely out of your hands, though. Maybe there's secret documents in the safe. Maybe there's a bomb wired to go off when you open it. In the second case, you succeed in your task but don't get what you wanted at all. It's all the GM's fiat running everything behind the scenes. You have near-zero authorship as far as the game is concerned. And that means, really, that you're not contributing anything to the shared imagined fiction. You're just sitting there being entertained by the GM, who's calling all the shots, some of them in secret. You rolling a good number on your Safecracking check only means something if the GM decides that success should actually lead to a positive result. He can just as easily shaft you majorly any time you do anything regardless of how it turns out. He's putting on a magic show, using the rules to hide the fact that, really, you as the player can't do anything directly. He might as well just be calling out results at random from behind his little GM screen, given that the game mechanics have almost nothing to do with your character's ultimate destiny.
aotrscommander 03-18-07, 09:29 PM	Correct, pretty much. The mechanics seem to fail to actually capture and encourage the part of the game that people most seem to enjoy. And, moreover, the part that's singular to pen-and-paper roleplaying (how good of a wargame D&D can be is kinda irrelevant when you've got, y'know, real wargames around). "B" is the important one. "A" is nice, but is something that can stand somewhat independent of system, I think. For me, there are two logical starting points: the reward cycle and the resolution system. Resolution's simple enough to address, potentially. Here's one way: "task resolution" needs to die, with "conflict resolution" taking its place. The game would go a long way towards being both more dynamic and more creative if you actually get to set the stakes for your actions. Essentially, "task resolution" is succeed/fail and "conflict resolution" is win/lose. The canonical example is cracking a safe to get some dirt on the bad guy. In task resolution, it's all about whether you open the safe or not: you could open the safe but find nothing there -- the GM has made your success or failure irrelevant to whether you actually get what you want. In conflict resolution, it's all about whether you get what you wanted (what was "at stake") -- if you fail, you might open the safe and find nothing, whereas if you succeed, there's going to be some dirt somewhere (though maybe you can succeed and then narrate failing to open the safe and finding a document in the trashcan). Conflict resolution just plain enhances collaboration and storytelling in a game. It puts your goals front-and-center and significantly expands the range of meaningful actions available to you without necessarily burdening you with tons and tons of rules. I see what you're getting at a_psh. Perhaps if I use the example of our wargames rules, it might help illuminate what your trying to get at for everyone else. How we got where we are was a two-stage process, each of which (like I lik to think of 3.x) was a quantum leap above what had gone before. Some years ago, my Dad started developing fold-flat cardboard terrain via a CAD package for 25mm modern/sci-fi/WW2 (etc) wargames. (We've actually become rather (in)famous for it actually...) Mainly this was for storage reasons but we quickly found that we could buidl enough hills and houses to have a realistic battlefield. Now, most wargamers - especially histroical wargamers - have a tendancyto have a village which consists of about three houses (mainly because they haven't got room or money for anymore). Now, we culd have lots of houses, since they took no storage space (as they floded flat) and we comparitively quick to make (because you just had the assembly time since unlike drawing it out by hand just print out the designs, which are accurate to factions of a mm. (My Dad is quite a senior aerospace engineer.) When you're defending a village with only three or so houses, it's pretty easy to decide where you go - since in all likelihood, you'll have enough squads to put one in every house. However, once you get to a realistic village of thirty houses - and the same number of squads, you have to start thinking about where you put your squads quite hard. It became clear, when Dad got whomped by his oppo (who wasn't famialr with the rules we were using at the time) because the chap was able to use real-world infantry tactics (because we'd got a real-world type map). That was stage one. Stage two came when my Dad and the same chap sat down and decided to write their own set of modern rules. What we'd been using up until then was a set of Sci-fi rules called Stargrunt II, which itself was innovative beyond most other rules; it concentrated less on weapons factors for a start. Unlike most wargams rules writers, where the authors tend to decide how how to adjudicate game functions (i.e. weapon factors, range damage) to make basically a combat system, the pair of them went back to frst priniciples and said "what happens in the real world?" So, from the start, they knew what the answer was before they asked the question (i.e. how do we model this?" Anywy, to make a long story...slightly less long, they did some unsual things like making you actually drive your tanks (i..e you run at a slow or fast speed, and it takes an action to change), turn your turrets (which again takes time) - and the most important change: reduced what the tanks could see. In a wargame like, say Warhammer 40K,your troops can pretty much see everything on the board. In Manouver Group, tanks can only see in a narrow field of vision (and even with the CO with his head out the top, they can't see everything). What this fundementally means is that, combined with realistic terrain, you actually have think about where your turrets are and where you're looking. Because if you look the wrong way and some sneaky bastard with and RPG shoots you in the side, he might well have legged it before you can swing you turret round to look for him. So, organically, you end up doing what they do in the real world; use formations, with the tanks watching each other's sides. The game thus becomes less about what weapon you've got, but about maneouver and where your facing. My own ephinany, and sort of what I'm trying to get at, i that what you end up doing is not, like most wargames, lining up and fighting across the board, perpendicual to the the edges; but instead, you end up fighting more or less diagonally, since you're trying to find the guy's weak spot and get behind him where you can't see him. The way the game plays is totally different. (In fact, we've had people complain it's too hard - not the rules, they're frag-easy, but the level of decision making.) And that's what a_psh is trying to get at. What he's saying is that he thinks the rules should be looking at whether or not the result is achieved, not necessarily how they are achieved; essentially, abstracting any unimportant details (which can them be flavoured back in). At the most extreme, this might be a one-roll resolutuion combat, where you roll to see if you die or the other guy dies (based on your relative likelihood of killing each other), and from that result, you then describe how you killed him, and it doesn't matter if you used your sword, your fist, the guy died of a heart attack or a rock fell on his head. Obviously, you wouldn't want to go that far (I certainly wouldn't!) but the example is illustrative of the concept nontheless. I'm not sure, though, how you would go about modelling that in an actual system. I've seen systems that are very rules-lite and enourage this sort descriptiveness (Morrigan Press' Omni is even D20-based); my opinion was of them was they they were a little too arbitary (in that in was pretty much back to the DM deciding of his own bat what the difficulty of something was). It would take more thought than I've got time to devote to it to be able to come up with an answer. Hopefully I've managed to clarify things (though I suspect I haven't and most of you are even more confused, but I did try!)
a_psh 03-18-07, 09:35 PM	That is great, except these forums are for D&D discussion, not the total insulting of D&D and its rules system.For a long time, D&D was all there was to roleplaying. Every system written in the first 15 years or so of pen-and-paper gaming did a lot to emulate D&D. People gush about all the wonderful experiences they've had muddling through older editions, barely grasping the rules but having so much fun making stuff up. Where's all that going, I ask? Why is it that 99% of mastering mechanics is just improving your ability to play this shoddily-put-together wargame instead of actually improving your ability to make a cool story happen at the table with your friends? You would rather play 2nd edition, without all the fluff and rules? Go ahead!! No one says that is bad, or forbidden.No. 2nd Edition was horribly incoherent. It was my introduction to RPGs, but, at this point, I wouldn't touch that thing with a ten-foot-pole. You would rather just free-form RP? Go ahead!! Err, nope. Freeform lacks structure. One of the dumbest things about D&D is how it basically turns into freeform the moment you step out of combat. But don't post this barely feasible rant in around D&D subjects, please!! Or at least tell the community, or just me why you posted it, and what we should be saying...I'm saying that it's time that the world's most famous RPG actually delivered on all the hype about being a game of imaginative storytelling. I'm saying that D&D should be better than just a bunch of freeform roleplaying with an ugly wargame strapped on. It's the game almost everyone starts with. That makes it the game that, for many people, defines roleplaying. (Especially for all the ones that try it looking for some sweet collaborative action and then leave because they have to master hundreds of pages of wargame rules and their only contributions to the shared imagined content have to go through the GM.) That game absolutely has to not suck. In fact, it should rock as hard as it possibly can. In so far as there is a general community of pen-and-paper RPG players, we need to actually question whether out long-held assumptions, as codified in the D&D rules and the way folks play the game, actually work. A lot of them don't. The alternative is for everyone who gets a whiff of what you can do with a game to slowly leave D&D, leaving it there as this weird kind of carcass thing. And, even then, all the people who leave D&D behind will still be stuck dealing with the problems it causes in the form of potential gamers it turns away or lingering Roleplayer Brain Damage.
Fencerboy 03-18-07, 09:42 PM	Thank you, you answered perfectly. To my understanding of you post, you want D&D to have more of a system for RPing and less for wargaming. I can see your point of view now. You have converted me to your unclear cause! :bow: I think thats what you meant...:thinks:
a_psh 03-18-07, 10:03 PM	Thank you, you answered perfectly. To my understanding of you post, you want D&D to have more of a system for RPing and less for wargaming. I can see your point of view now."Roleplaying" means a lot of different things to a lot of people, unfortunately. But, in the general sense, yes. The thing that makes a pen-and-paper RPG special when you compare it to like every other game out there is that it's all about this stuff that you're imagining together. For example, you can play a game like Warhammer without ever once thinking about the game as anything other than some abstract thing and greatly enjoy it; not so with an RPG . Now, I think most people get this and want this. Whenever we have all these "help me explain D&D to my friends" threads, they responses are all like "D&D is like playing Let's Pretend" or "D&D is about creating cool stories about your character having adventures" or other stuff like that. So, because you're imagining stuff "together," you need some way to agree on what you all should be imagining and how. That's roleplaying's fundamental thing: negotiated imagination. A system really has to address that, in my opinion. Furthermore, a system has to help you make all the stuff you're imagining be awesome. (In particular, imagined events, since there are more of those than imagined people and things and places, and how you deal with imagined events really determines how the game progresses from moment to moment.) That's the whole reason you want a set of rules rather than a freeform game in the first place: you can do some negotiated imagining without rules, but rules can help steer that carefully and help it along, turning what would otherwise be so-so play into good play. * - I will note that a lot of wargames to strive to simulate something or include some kind of imagined component. That element is usually secondary to the idea of the game as an actual game-you-can-win thing, though.
Molitor 03-18-07, 10:10 PM	For the most part i agree with you a_psh. That is why i wish to write this: I was raised on these..... http://home.flash.net/~brenfrow/dd1/dmgr1.htm http://home.flash.net/~brenfrow/dd1/dmgr5.htm http://www.icewebring.com/ICE_Products/RMSS/RMSS_5521_Gamemaster_Law.php These are where a DM really gets good ideas, and learns how to actually DM. if you get the chance to buy these jump at it. They are the best in the RPG field. At least that is my opinion. You of course are welcome to disagree. But the entire game comes down to one thing...and that is 'fun'. If you are having fun then you are doing it right, if not then you are doing it wrong. It is that simple.
Leo 03-18-07, 10:20 PM	Honestly, I think that what makes D&D special over the other games is the versatility it allows. Wanna be a sword wielding warrior? Check Wanna be something big and ugly or something small and cute? Check. Wanna be a giant spell slinging bear? Check. Wanna kill oponents with rubber dukcies while singing the national music? Check. The rules, altought probably not perfect, allow you to convert your ideas into the world and interact with the other players.
Lokiyn 03-18-07, 10:28 PM	Yeah, because 99% of everything the rules give their characters power to do is kill things, and the abilities they have that don't kill things are vague and unsatisfying. My *favorite* Players are the ones who when this situation comes up *talk to high priest for information on quest* immediatly demands we fastforward and get the synopsis so we can get to combat. but when this senario pops up *Npc related to backstory shows up* Demands that everyone stop while they deal with backstory npc completely reversing thier positions. Sad thing? They don't even realize it. It entirely becomes "if it puts me in the spot light i'm for it, if not ignore it" If one of the other players come up with something its either "lets not do it" or "lets rather do it *this* way, which oddly enough puts them in the spotlight, again!" These are usually the same players that will complain about the other players doing something broken or overpowered while simultaneously cradleing thier Jovar blade powerattacking monster. Its not about whether or not the game is unbalanced its that another character might be able to do something better than them! And the game rules activly support this kind of play. What drives me nuts is that i can not for the life of me come up with a good way to assign experience except in the terms of combat. After all, if our bard spends the night on the town and discovers the hidden lair of villan x how do i rate that? no combat or monsters, no conflict, just an application of skill rolls to overcome a challenge. What is the Cr of a hidden base? I tried handing out exp for such things but it wound up being arbitrary with no real rules bouncing high and low. Finally i just gave up the whole exp system entirely and stated that you level when i say you do. That cut down on some of the uneccessary combat when exp was no longer directly linked to killing, a little more tactics started to show up and all in all it it seems to work out a little better this way.
Patera_Quetzal 03-18-07, 10:40 PM	Depending on the GM to judge whether you actually get what you want or not is completely arbitrary. Constructing any kind of story involves arbitrary choices. With any kind of resolution, once a fact is established, it remains a fact (though you can make games that directly subvert this, but it's a different kind of change).The difference is, with task resolution, as we’re calling it, the facts in the world -- the virtual reality -- were established by the GM before the player’s characters came on the scene. You’re suggesting a game where all participants have an equal (?) share in establishing these virtual facts -- not just facts about their character and his/her actions, but facts about the problems s/he is trying to solve. That could be an interesting game, but I’ll need a lot more information on how it would work. But in any case, as I say, I don’t find this to be a central problem with D&D.Basically, it goes like this: You as the player want something to happen, right? Task resolution says that you tell your GM what you want your character to do but he makes everything up as he goes along. He might then ask you to roll something to see if you succeed or fail at some task. How that task actually relates to your goals is completely out of your hands, though. Maybe there's secret documents in the safe. Maybe there's a bomb wired to go off when you open it. In the second case, you succeed in your task but don't get what you wanted at all. It's all the GM's fiat running everything behind the scenes. You have near-zero authorship as far as the game is concerned. And that means, really, that you're not contributing anything to the shared imagined fiction. You're just sitting there being entertained by the GM, who's calling all the shots, some of them in secret. You rolling a good number on your Safecracking check only means something if the GM decides that success should actually lead to a positive result.I think you might be overstating your case here. The GM, one hopes, is not “making everything up as he goes along.” S/he has determined, in our example, what is in the safe, what dangers are present, the difficulty of opening the safe, etc. You, as the player, determine whether your character has a skill set that includes safe cracking, whether you will attempt this safe in spite of possible dangers, how you will protect yourself from these dangers, etc. It’s true that the GM has authored all the problems, and the rules determine the possibilities for solution, but the creativity and ingenuity of the player are not irrelevant. The player's choices matter.[The GM] can just as easily shaft you majorly any time you do anything regardless of how it turns out. He's putting on a magic show, using the rules to hide the fact that, really, you as the player can't do anything directly. He might as well just be calling out results at random from behind his little GM screen, given that the game mechanics have almost nothing to do with your character's ultimate destiny.Well now you’re talking about a bad, and dishonest, GM, which -- though it apparently happens pretty frequently, and I’ll never understand why -- is nevertheless a different issue from the one at hand. But it’s simply not true that the game mechanics have almost nothing to do with your character’s ultimate destiny, unless the GM is dishonest. Anyway, clearly what you want is a different kind of game from D&D -- one with cooperative authorship of a narrative that is determined on the fly. Again, that sounds like it might be cool, and maybe there’s already a game like that, or maybe there’s a niche for such a game.
Vaelan 03-18-07, 11:50 PM	But this is nonsense. As are many other design philosophies espoused by the D&D team. Rules *do* tell you how to play the game. The point is that the designers intentionally tried to limit the degree to which the rules tell you how to play the game. Whether or not this is actually possible isn't relevant to my point, which is that it was a conscious decision and not a mistake.
Arivia 03-19-07, 12:11 AM	Anyway, clearly what you want is a different kind of game from D&D -- one with cooperative authorship of a narrative that is determined on the fly. But that's his point - D&D, and a lot of other roleplaying games sell that, and a lot fail to live up to it, including D&D, the gateway drug.
johnkretzer 03-19-07, 12:15 AM	You have a quote from Dogs In The Vineyard in your signature. You know other games can do better. You've probably heard the great things Vampire is doing of late; how much crap Paranoia just cut out of its system. So why not D&D? Because D&D isn't aspiring to anything more. It's all still hack-and-slash, and it's getting left behind. It's the action movie to an actual good story, and it's fine with that - D&D isn't going to change, because it doesn't want to. Unfortunately, it does suck. I'd love for my schedule to be wall-to-wall way better games, but D&D is about the only one I can find players for. This problem has existed since the mid 90s, and except for that mass of Vampire players, it never really changed. Welcome to the sociology of gaming. I disagree. Atleast in my experience Vampire players are the worst at RPing, Imagination, and storytelling. This system doesn't make you better at these things. As a matter of fact it makes you worse at it. now of course that is my experience with the game. Parnioa??? You actualy have campaigns??? I thought this was something people did for when a real game got canceled. It is like a board game with character sheets.
Arivia 03-19-07, 12:33 AM	I disagree. Atleast in my experience Vampire players are the worst at RPing, Imagination, and storytelling. This system doesn't make you better at these things. As a matter of fact it makes you worse at it. now of course that is my experience with the game. I'll be one of the first to admit that Masquerade had some big system problems and a really bad fanbase sometimes. However, White Wolf did the right thing by hitting the reset button - they not only lost a lot of poor players/fanpeople, they gave the system a great makeover. The system doesn't hinder you: it emphasizes theme and other real narrative concepts, and uses simple rules items and concepts to promote narrative design, not just gaming. A great example of this is the Requiem Chronicler's Guide, which discusses at length what you can do with your games, showing you everything from a melodramatic love story to a procedural to stories dealing with racial issues, and gives you the tools to make those work, in addition to showing you what those frameworks are good for asking questions about. Parnioa??? You actualy have campaigns??? I thought this was something people did for when a real game got canceled. It is like a board game with character sheets. See, this is the thing. The recent version of Paranoia has some alarmingly good design in that it asks you what you want to do with the game, and based upon your answer (the over-the-top Zap!, the classic Classic, and meaningful, actually long-term playable Straight) bends the rest of the system into a game that works for what you want to do with it. It's been carefully designed to expose just the core elements, give you tools to play with those elements, and tells you exactly how to get the type of game you want. That's what makes both recent Vampire and recent Paranoia so good: they show you how to make what you want happen, happen. EDIT: This is in contrast to D&D, which generally throws elements at you without context and hopes you already know the right recipe.
johnkretzer 03-19-07, 12:43 AM	"Roleplaying" means a lot of different things to a lot of people, unfortunately. But, in the general sense, yes. The thing that makes a pen-and-paper RPG special when you compare it to like every other game out there is that it's all about this stuff that you're imagining together. For example, you can play a game like Warhammer without ever once thinking about the game as anything other than some abstract thing and greatly enjoy it; not so with an RPG . Now, I think most people get this and want this. Whenever we have all these "help me explain D&D to my friends" threads, they responses are all like "D&D is like playing Let's Pretend" or "D&D is about creating cool stories about your character having adventures" or other stuff like that. So, because you're imagining stuff "together," you need some way to agree on what you all should be imagining and how. That's roleplaying's fundamental thing: negotiated imagination. A system really has to address that, in my opinion. Furthermore, a system has to help you make all the stuff you're imagining be awesome. (In particular, imagined events, since there are more of those than imagined people and things and places, and how you deal with imagined events really determines how the game progresses from moment to moment.) That's the whole reason you want a set of rules rather than a freeform game in the first place: you can do some negotiated imagining without rules, but rules can help steer that carefully and help it along, turning what would otherwise be so-so play into good play. * - I will note that a lot of wargames to strive to simulate something or include some kind of imagined component. That element is usually secondary to the idea of the game as an actual game-you-can-win thing, though. Personaly I think a RPing game is about the hardest thing to explain to a a non-RPer. And those explanation are the easiest ways though there aren't entirely true. But everyone as a equale way in expressing a vision who decides what the bad guys do? Where is the challenge in outthinking yourself? Your way of RPing get rids of the one important thing about Rping and that is you don't have control over everything. Hence much more like reality. If I as a player has a say over what NPC x or another player will do or as a DM what a player will do that stops being a RPG and becomes a collabative storytelling...and if you are not going to publish it what the point of going it? Now this is just my veiw of it...this what I enjoy. But if you enjoy something else in your RPG find that works for you. That is what I don't think you get about RPGs( or actualy the majority of people on this board) is that a RPG is what you make of it. Now here is a question if you can't get people to share your veiw on how a RPG should work...why do you think you'll get them to agree with on a shared story concept? Where everyone has a equale say? I am not saying it is impossible it just gets to be very problematic as you go over three people even with rules and structure.
ArcTan 03-19-07, 12:49 AM	My *favorite* Players are the ones who when this situation comes up *talk to high priest for information on quest* immediatly demands we fastforward and get the synopsis so we can get to combat. but when this senario pops up *Npc related to backstory shows up* Demands that everyone stop while they deal with backstory npc completely reversing thier positions. Sad thing? They don't even realize it. To be fair, this makes sense. Players want to have fun, first and foremost. There's nothing wrong with that. The most obvious part of D&D that's fun is killing monsters -- the rules describe it, you develop all these abilities around it, it's in a way the simplest side of what's advertised to you as being the cool thing about an RPG, etc. Yes, RPing can also be fun. But you only really have an *idea* of what will be fun to RP because you put it in your backstory and were ready to RP it ahead of time. D&D doesn't give you any guidance out of the box -- and many DMs never develop their own systems for giving you guidance, because D&D's rules don't lend themselves to such things -- for figuring out *new* situations to RP that everyone can participate in that wasn't a backstory hook you made up by yourself for your own character. It could be that talking to the high priest is an opportunity for everyone to pitch in to a conversation, develop their characters, build the story, etc. Any scene can function that way if you do it right. But doing it right is *hard*, and most of the time it just becomes a boring talk-fest -- the PCs stand around going "Gasp!" and "Oh no!" and "We must end this menace!" while the NPC drones on and on about the horrible monsters and in real life the DM is getting hoarse talking and the players are staring out the window or rooting around in the fridge for Mountain Dew. This happens a lot, and players often have no real reason to expect this exposition scene will be very different, and thus are eager to skip it. If it were the case that there were rules that made sure something had to *happen* in a scene that people were in -- rules for making things *happen* that don't have anything to do with defeating equivalent-CR challenges on a tactical grid -- it wouldn't be this way. It entirely becomes "if it puts me in the spot light i'm for it, if not ignore it" And people fight for spotlight because outside of combat -- which isn't balanced very well, but when well-balanced forces every character role in the party to contribute something to the fight -- there aren't any rules for sharing spotlight, and it jumps around more or less randomly unless you try to hog it or unless the DM becomes the Spotlight Nazi and starts arbitrarily pushing people to do stuff in scenes. If one of the other players come up with something its either "lets not do it" or "lets rather do it *this* way, which oddly enough puts them in the spotlight, again!" These are usually the same players that will complain about the other players doing something broken or overpowered while simultaneously cradleing thier Jovar blade powerattacking monster. Its not about whether or not the game is unbalanced its that another character might be able to do something better than them! And the game rules activly support this kind of play. Yeah, but I wouldn't really blame the players. Some players are bad eggs from the beginning, but other players just do it because they've sat through some really boring sessions before and have figured out that unless they fight for spotlight they're not going to get a chance to RP anything they want to RP. Which isn't how it should work. There *should* be some kind of system that makes sure everyone with something to contribute to the story gets a chance to contribute it. I mean, we're playing a game, with rules. *Lots* of rules. People come to the table agreeing to abide by the rules. The rules are supposed to be there so we can have fun. Why can't we have rules that force people to cooperate and share spotlight fairly and work together to make a story, as opposed to rules that basically let non-combat RP be a free-for-all and that makes combat into a "Who's-got-the-better-build?" competition? (To be fair, the latter is much less intentional than the former. I think marketing forces have unconsciously pushed WotC into turning D&D into a competitive build-making contest in some ways, but they clearly weren't planning on this from the outset, and designers like Mike Mearls have actively spoken out about changing it.) What drives me nuts is that i can not for the life of me come up with a good way to assign experience except in the terms of combat. After all, if our bard spends the night on the town and discovers the hidden lair of villan x how do i rate that? no combat or monsters, no conflict, just an application of skill rolls to overcome a challenge. What is the Cr of a hidden base? I tried handing out exp for such things but it wound up being arbitrary with no real rules bouncing high and low. Finally i just gave up the whole exp system entirely and stated that you level when i say you do. That cut down on some of the uneccessary combat when exp was no longer directly linked to killing, a little more tactics started to show up and all in all it it seems to work out a little better this way. Yeah, exactly. The fact that the rules for combat XP are so *clear* while the rules for non-combat or RP XP are so unclear and haphazard are what, more than anything else, tell you what kind of game D&D is. I mean, XP is what holds the whole game together -- the DM's primary means of rewarding players for making the game work -- and the only decent rules for it involve defeating monsters (and, okay, traps).
johnkretzer 03-19-07, 12:53 AM	I'll be one of the first to admit that Masquerade had some big system problems and a really bad fanbase sometimes. However, White Wolf did the right thing by hitting the reset button - they not only lost a lot of poor players/fanpeople, they gave the system a great makeover. The system doesn't hinder you: it emphasizes theme and other real narrative concepts, and uses simple rules items and concepts to promote narrative design, not just gaming. A great example of this is the Requiem Chronicler's Guide, which discusses at length what you can do with your games, showing you everything from a melodramatic love story to a procedural to stories dealing with racial issues, and gives you the tools to make those work, in addition to showing you what those frameworks are good for asking questions about. See, this is the thing. The recent version of Paranoia has some alarmingly good design in that it asks you what you want to do with the game, and based upon your answer (the over-the-top Zap!, the classic Classic, and meaningful, actually long-term playable Straight) bends the rest of the system into a game that works for what you want to do with it. It's been carefully designed to expose just the core elements, give you tools to play with those elements, and tells you exactly how to get the type of game you want. That's what makes both recent Vampire and recent Paranoia so good: they show you how to make what you want happen, happen. EDIT: This is in contrast to D&D, which generally throws elements at you without context and hopes you already know the right recipe. Again my arguement just meant to illustrate that it isn't about the system as much as the people you play with. Trust me if you lived in my area you would despies White Wolf(me I am open minded I just wish the system wasn't so restrictive and also it actualy successfuly combined the different aspects and that it actualy attracted better players in my area).
ArcTan 03-19-07, 12:57 AM	Personaly I think a RPing game is about the hardest thing to explain to a a non-RPer. And those explanation are the easiest ways though there aren't entirely true. But everyone as a equale way in expressing a vision who decides what the bad guys do? Where is the challenge in outthinking yourself? Your way of RPing get rids of the one important thing about Rping and that is you don't have control over everything. Hence much more like reality. If I as a player has a say over what NPC x or another player will do or as a DM what a player will do that stops being a RPG and becomes a collabative storytelling...and if you are not going to publish it what the point of going it? ...Because it's fun? But you're misunderstanding, in some ways. D&D isn't always about "challenge" anyway. I mean, seriously, many players, not unreasonably, get really angry if their characters actually die -- the DM's job is to make sure that the "challenges" are specifically designed to be beatable and survivable. This wasn't always the way it worked, but it sure is the expectation in mainstream D&D now -- because it's more like a story about a challenge than it is a real challenge. And right now the DM *is* supposed to be in communication with the players. A DM who doesn't pay attention to the fact that his party has no divine caster when deciding how long he can keep the party away from healing is a bad DM. A DM who uses powerful traps all the time against a party with no trapfinder or disabler is a bad DM. The DM needs to keep the game playable for his players and fun, and that means communication. This kind of thing can be as basic as saying "I'd really like this campaign to have a lot of undead, because I'm basing my abilities around destroying the undead" or "I'm taking a lot of social skills and abilities and gimping myself for combat, so I really hope this campaign has opportunities to use detective work and negotiation instead of fighting". A good campaign *does have this*. It's just haphazard and unsystematic and a bad DM who wants to screw with people has all the power to flagrantly ignore it, and a lot of players who don't know what they're doing get no guidance on how to bring these things up. It creates problems. Now this is just my veiw of it...this what I enjoy. But if you enjoy something else in your RPG find that works for you. That is what I don't think you get about RPGs( or actualy the majority of people on this board) is that a RPG is what you make of it. It is what you make of it, but it's also what the *designers* make of it, and the point of the "System Matters" stuff is that there's no reason not to ask designers to try to make the kinds of things you want. It's not a fair expectation that if you want a fun time you should get the DM to spend hours and hours reworking an RPG system to give you the kind of fun time you want, rather than just going out and buying a system that does what you want in the first place. The way some people throw out rules, houserule, or ignore rules, they basically *are* playing freeform or playing their own system, which makes you wonder why they paid all the money for D&D books in the first place. Almost as though the name "D&D" was just an excuse for playing an RPG -- and if so, why not spend that money on an RPG system that *helps* you do what you want to do instead of getting in your way? Now here is a question if you can't get people to share your veiw on how a RPG should work...why do you think you'll get them to agree with on a shared story concept? Where everyone has a equale say? I am not saying it is impossible it just gets to be very problematic as you go over three people even with rules and structure. Again, don't say it's impossible if you haven't actually tried it. Improv acting isn't easy, but people do it all the time. Collaborative writing isn't easy, but people do it all the time. Freeform message-board RPGs -- which are like collaborative writing, but explicitly for the benefit of the people participating rather than for publication for a mass audience -- isn't easy, but people do it all the time. (A *lot* of people, many of whom do it badly or selfishly or in a shallow way, but it's still something people get a lot out of.) I wouldn't say this kind of thing is "impossible" to do unless you've really tried it.
Mecha_Pope 03-19-07, 12:59 AM	The point of D&D is not to tell a story, it's to play a story. The point of an rpg is to play the roll, not to tell it. Without the rules, there is no chance of failure and it's just you and some guys sitting around a table and saying, "Well, I do this!" "And I do that!" "You can't do that!" "Can to!". If you want to tell a story, then write a book. If you want to experence a story, with real chances of success and failure, and actual stakes, then play D&D. I don't want WoTC to publish material that helps me tell the story, or develop my charicter, because my group and I do that ourselves, thats part of the fun, us exersising our creativity. The rules are a seperate entity, there to help us experince the story, to make us feel as if we're working twords some goal. It gives us, no matter how illusury, something to accomplish, and something to work against. Some people like a challenge now and again.
ArcTan 03-19-07, 12:59 AM	As are many other design philosophies espoused by the D&D team. The point is that the designers intentionally tried to limit the degree to which the rules tell you how to play the game. Whether or not this is actually possible isn't relevant to my point, which is that it was a conscious decision and not a mistake. Sometimes, honestly, it seems like it's more a marketing soundbite than even a real "philosophy". They still do, after all, treat D&D like a wargame in most important ways, and designers still say that the best way to start a session is with a combat so players don't get bored (sheesh, those "Save My Game" articles).
johnkretzer 03-19-07, 01:01 AM	Yeah, exactly. The fact that the rules for combat XP are so *clear* while the rules for non-combat or RP XP are so unclear and haphazard are what, more than anything else, tell you what kind of game D&D is. I mean, XP is what holds the whole game together -- the DM's primary means of rewarding players for making the game work -- and the only decent rules for it involve defeating monsters (and, okay, traps). Or maybe it doesn't want to hit RPers with the hammer of rules? Or maybe they feel that gamers have a right to decide how they want to play. Also reread the rules again...you get exp. for the encounter not combat. If you RP around the encounter then you get the exp for the encounter. If you DM doesn't do this then he has a problem and not the game. I give my players 2x the exp for getting around the encounter though RPing because it is much harder to do in certain siturations.
Qwicksilver 03-19-07, 01:02 AM	Even if the book doesn't *require* you to do something bad or dumb, it's the book's fault if it *pressures* or *advises* you to do something bad or dumb, because the reason people read books is to be told what to do because they don't yet know. Expecting people to buy books and throw out huge sections of them based on their own judgment is unrealistic and doesn't excuse badly written books. This is one point that I think is pretty sure to say about D&D as it is. In terms of allignment and other roleplaying issues, the D&D books leave this all up to you. The problem comes, as someone else said, when the battle mechanics collide with the roleplaying aspect of D&D. The two aren't separate things, they really shouldn't be, and i often point out that one must roleplay both in and out of combat. I think some people do forget that what you do in battle is informed by who your character is out of battle. The problem is that a system that does end up becoming about math to define what you want to do from what you can do. What people wanted to do can be worlds away from what is available to do. For me, the job of a game mechanic is to assure that whatever someone wants to do, as long as it's effective in the imagination, it is effective on paper, and for the same reasons why. So people talk about how some classes are underpowered or some forms of fighters are weak, etc., I think all the griping is about how people wanted them to be just as effective on paper as it is cool to roleplay. So most of my own ideas kind of actually add to the rules, unfortunately, rather than making them simpler. I tend to focus on "you want to do that? It seems a bit underpowered or less cool in the mechanics, well I'll make something up to fix that." With that said, it'd be nice for me personally to try out one of the more freeform pen and paper rpgs that is out there, with less mechanic etc. I'd like to see if people can pull it off, not having to argue about whether or not you can do X thing legally, if it could really work out. The anarchist in me hopes it could. I completely identify with your "we should have less rules" thing, but I don't know how to pull it off without a lot of anger and yelling and screaming. Gamemechanics do often get in the way of our party and having fun. I get more angry when I feel the sting of being a fighter, or when other people argue the limitations of this feat or that. And it's silly, it really is. The battle stops being a narration and just becomes a series of rolling dice. We started it out with actual narrative descriptions of the action, as any good d&d game should have, but then our DM just got bogged down with having to move the actual rounds along. In some ways I see it as Gamemechanics, but then again it's also about administrating them, and judiciously applying them and making the rules clear where they aren't.
boozerker 03-19-07, 01:10 AM	What drives me nuts is that i can not for the life of me come up with a good way to assign experience except in the terms of combat. After all, if our bard spends the night on the town and discovers the hidden lair of villan x how do i rate that? no combat or monsters, no conflict, just an application of skill rolls to overcome a challenge. What is the Cr of a hidden base? Find the DC of accomplishing whatever (such as Gather Info to find the base). Then do a quick computation. Skill CRs (non-combat): 1. (PC's) level squared x DC 2. Divide that by the amount DC is beat 3. Divide the total by # of party's attempts The final result is the XP each party member receives. (class abilities that require beating a DC also count) Any PC who tries to beat a non-combat DC adds +1 to the party's total attempts. Which "reset" however the DM wishes -- once per scenario, each 1/3 of a day, etc. Drop the system during combat, as those XP calculations assumes skill use as part of monster CRs. Also ignore the system when there is no reasonable penalty for failure. You might find the system works for other non-CR, non-XP aspects of the game as well. :tiphat:
Lokiyn 03-19-07, 01:14 AM	Hmm i supose i did come off as blaming the players, More clearly, it frustrates me that there is not reason for players to care about anything beyond the next random encounter. The game doesn't support interaction beyond swordpoint very well. The player type i ment to get across wasn't the standard "its a long cut scene can we speed it up a little its been 10 min of you talking" the type i'm talking about are the ones who's though process apparently work like this new enviromental feature introduced Apraise Value Can i kill/steal/aquire it? Else Ignore See 1 I'm not necessarily talking about heavy RP, i'm more talking along the lines of no one even pays attention to the npc or other information. Quests devolve from "Slay the Green dragon X, to save wendy the mayors daughter, who is being held in the forest of spiders" to "Uh we were suposed to kill somthing over there did anyone pay attention to where, or how, or what we are doing?" "Dm now that it is directly impacting on use could you please repeat all that stuff you said earlier, but in 5 words or less? or roll up some trolls to fight?" The MMORPG or video game mentality that as long as you kill bad guys everything works out in the end regardless of the details. The problem (for me) is that the dnd ruleset almost activly supports this. For example any one or anything without a name? ignore it. does it have a name? Kill it, or get information from it. I found one of the things that can drive players up the wall is mention an item that has 0 importance. I believe my favorite was the fern episode. "You walk into an empty room there is a fern in the center of the room" "*Gasps* and player frantically trying to remember a fern monster" "2-3 min of player plotting/sneaking" "Massive assault on a fern, since of course none of them remember a fern monster it must be a custom dm creation and thus needing as much power as possible to destroy." "Angry glares as in this case, a potted plant was just a potted plant." Lets see, the player who carried a jar with a wax doll inside for multiple sessions trying to break the curse because obviously no one would just put a figurine in an airtight container. The "treasure map" that turned out to be gardening plans. Its this strange world where anything mentioned by the dm is not only important but must be executed for the general good. Although in the priest example the conversation was "Our local shipping has come under attack with ships dissappearing, can you help?" Followed by the entire party running out the temple to hire a fishing boat, leaving a startled priest behind. No questions, no nothing just poof, off on a quest.
johnkretzer 03-19-07, 01:19 AM	...Because it's fun? But you're misunderstanding, in some ways. D&D isn't always about "challenge" anyway. I mean, seriously, many players, not unreasonably, get really angry if their characters actually die -- the DM's job is to make sure that the "challenges" are specifically designed to be beatable and survivable. This wasn't always the way it worked, but it sure is the expectation in mainstream D&D now -- because it's more like a story about a challenge than it is a real challenge. And right now the DM *is* supposed to be in communication with the players. A DM who doesn't pay attention to the fact that his party has no divine caster when deciding how long he can keep the party away from healing is a bad DM. A DM who uses powerful traps all the time against a party with no trapfinder or disabler is a bad DM. The DM needs to keep the game playable for his players and fun, and that means communication. This kind of thing can be as basic as saying "I'd really like this campaign to have a lot of undead, because I'm basing my abilities around destroying the undead" or "I'm taking a lot of social skills and abilities and gimping myself for combat, so I really hope this campaign has opportunities to use detective work and negotiation instead of fighting". A good campaign *does have this*. It's just haphazard and unsystematic and a bad DM who wants to screw with people has all the power to flagrantly ignore it, and a lot of players who don't know what they're doing get no guidance on how to bring these things up. It creates problems. It is what you make of it, but it's also what the *designers* make of it, and the point of the "System Matters" stuff is that there's no reason not to ask designers to try to make the kinds of things you want. It's not a fair expectation that if you want a fun time you should get the DM to spend hours and hours reworking an RPG system to give you the kind of fun time you want, rather than just going out and buying a system that does what you want in the first place. The way some people throw out rules, houserule, or ignore rules, they basically *are* playing freeform or playing their own system, which makes you wonder why they paid all the money for D&D books in the first place. Almost as though the name "D&D" was just an excuse for playing an RPG -- and if so, why not spend that money on an RPG system that *helps* you do what you want to do instead of getting in your way? Again, don't say it's impossible if you haven't actually tried it. Improv acting isn't easy, but people do it all the time. Collaborative writing isn't easy, but people do it all the time. Freeform message-board RPGs -- which are like collaborative writing, but explicitly for the benefit of the people participating rather than for publication for a mass audience -- isn't easy, but people do it all the time. (A *lot* of people, many of whom do it badly or selfishly or in a shallow way, but it's still something people get a lot out of.) I wouldn't say this kind of thing is "impossible" to do unless you've really tried it. 1: Sure you are right that is a bad DM...but most people will agree that DM who sets it up so the PCs win no matter what happens is also a bad DM. Read some players opinions on when a DM fudges a roll in benefit to the player. Also if a player gets upset that his PCs dies and stay upsets(I can understand it at first) find more mature PCs. 2:Agree that has alway been the case. Comunication has always been key.. What are you getting at? 3: I disagree the undead destroying character should have to face living foes...the social character should have to face combat...the combat character should have to face the social situration. Because if they don't there is no growth. I am not saying all the time but another that they realize that they have to grow into actual full dimensional characters to survive instead of the one-dimensional min/maxers we see. 4:I believes I said it wasn't impossible just problematic. As I said before I have very bad experience with people who say I should ignore x rules because it makes a better story...or you have to x with your character so my character can develope. These people use the 'story' idea to get their vision though and screw everybody else. I am not saying anybody who supports this idea of this but that has been my experience.
Lokiyn 03-19-07, 01:19 AM	Or maybe it doesn't want to hit RPers with the hammer of rules? Or maybe they feel that gamers have a right to decide how they want to play. Also reread the rules again...you get exp. for the encounter not combat. If you RP around the encounter then you get the exp for the encounter. If you DM doesn't do this then he has a problem and not the game. I give my players 2x the exp for getting around the encounter though RPing because it is much harder to do in certain siturations. ah and see thats the problem. in this statment encounter = Combat situation How about "Party bard smooth talks his way into a party" or "Rogue finds the hiding place of the local drug cartel" None of which had anything to do with combat, making it difficult to place exp values on them. Most of the time *no* exp is awarded for this, instead the players must fight or dodge a fight to get exp (notice how combat is always used as a touchstone in the system)
a_psh 03-19-07, 01:31 AM	But everyone as a equale way in expressing a vision who decides what the bad guys do? Where is the challenge in outthinking yourself?Where is the challenge in figuring out the thing the omnipotent GM expected you to do in the first place? If you want to really be challenged, put some limits on what the GM can do. Then have him take the gloves off. Y'know, those gloves he always wears, because he automatically and instantly "wins" any time he wants to. Give a friend a limited range of powers and then let him rip into you for all he's worth. (The Lord of the Rings board game -- the one with the hobbits and all the mini-maps for different areas -- is a pretty good example of this: you can bring in a human being to play Sauron, and he can be as vicious and conniving as he wants without breaking the game, and good solid adversarial play results.) To talk about "challenge" in the face of an all-powerful GM is silly. Your way of RPing get rids of the one important thing about Rping and that is you don't have control over everything.You have to divide everything up between the group somehow. I'm not talking about axing the GM (that's certainly an option, but I don't want to go there right now, except to say that you can easily do it either way). Axing the idea of "GM is God" is absolutely vital, however, since that also gives us "GM is sole author." And then the other players aren't doing anything. Let's face it: either everyone is actually taking part in the imaginative part of the game, or it's not fun for anyone but the GM. All of the players then need to negotiate about what's happening in the fictional world they've created in order to go anywhere. Part of that is to figure out who gets narrational priority over what. But the game is absolutely no fun unless everyone gets some way to pitch an idea. And the whole problem of task resolution is a good example of why D&D makes it look like players have more power than they actually do (which then causes frustration when they figure out otherwise). If I as a player has a say over what NPC x or another player will do or as a DM what a player will do that stops being a RPG and becomes a collabative storytelling...and if you are not going to publish it what the point of going it?The point of any game is to have fun. Since D&D has already been turned into a cooperative thing where the only antagonist absolutely positively has to want the other players to "win" in order for the game to even get off the ground, it's pointless to talk about D&D as written as any kind of challenging activity. That's all fake beyond belief. What's left is, in fact, the meat of any RPG: the social fun of making stuff up together with your friends. This is the thing game designers need to support and enhance. Because, once again, otherwise you're just stuck with freeform + an ugly wargame. That is what I don't think you get about RPGs( or actualy the majority of people on this board) is that a RPG is what you make of it.It's what the designers make out of it, too. Otherwise we'd all just be playing freeform, since it's way cheaper than D&D. Now here is a question if you can't get people to share your veiw on how a RPG should work...why do you think you'll get them to agree with on a shared story concept? Where everyone has a equale say? I am not saying it is impossible it just gets to be very problematic as you go over three people even with rules and structure.Actually, creating consensus is pretty trivial. Freeformers do it all the time. Consensus? Cakewalk. A small group of friends is pretty good about agreeing on things. The real challenge (and, yes, for anyone in the know, I am basically just crappily paraphrasing Vincent Baker here, because he's so right about this that I really see no point not to) is to create good conflict. Conflict is hard because people often tend to hold back or, when they don't hold back, to take it personally. Good rules should help players generate interesting and dynamic conflicts, because those are awesome. That's not the same as "challenge"... though. Conflicts can be challenging, but only in a situation that is actually adversarial rather than fake-adversarial. There is, once again, minimal actual "challenge" in interacting with an all-powerful GM.
ArcTan 03-19-07, 01:47 AM	Or maybe it doesn't want to hit RPers with the hammer of rules? Then why are we hitting combat with the hammer of rules? Or maybe they feel that gamers have a right to decide how they want to play. ...Then they'd give options for gamers who didn't want any combat at all, right? They sort of do, but not really. A D&D game without combat is a D&D game that doesn't use 90% of all the rules that exist, and is resolved mainly by the DM arbitrarily setting DCs for things that are resolved with single die rolls. Also reread the rules again...you get exp. for the encounter not combat. The whole idea of an "encounter" presupposes combat. I know it doesn't have to, technically, but in practice it almost always does -- an "encounter" is a creature or set of creatures you're supposed to beat in combat. Its ECL is, by default, based on CR of individual monsters, which is based on how hard they are to kill. If you RP around the encounter then you get the exp for the encounter. If you DM doesn't do this then he has a problem and not the game. DMs often don't provide ways to RP around encounters because the game provides no clear rules for doing so and it's not easy to decide whether or not some means you've provided for doing so is "fair", which is a problem because the game stresses "balance" as an ideal and tries very hard to balance encounters *as combats* -- and yet provides no real guide for doing this in non-combat situations. (The closest you get are things like setting a DC for a Diplomacy skill check -- and it does a horrible job of that, with flat DCs that are low enough that a mid-level character can be assured of success.) I give my players 2x the exp for getting around the encounter though RPing because it is much harder to do in certain siturations. When you decide how easy or hard these things are, you do a lot of ad hoc-ing. This is what I don't like about it.
ArcTan 03-19-07, 01:53 AM	Find the DC of accomplishing whatever (such as Gather Info to find the base). Then do a quick computation. Skill CRs (non-combat): 1. (PC's) level squared x DC 2. Divide that by the amount DC is beat 3. Divide the total by # of party's attempts The final result is the XP each party member receives. (class abilities that require beating a DC also count) Any PC who tries to beat a non-combat DC adds +1 to the party's total attempts. Which "reset" however the DM wishes -- once per scenario, each 1/3 of a day, etc. Drop the system during combat, as those XP calculations assumes skill use as part of monster CRs. Also ignore the system when there is no reasonable penalty for failure. You might find the system works for other non-CR, non-XP aspects of the game as well. :tiphat: Words cannot express how much I don't like this idea. You're basically encouraging people to go after as high a DC check as they can rather than trying to be clever and find a lower-DC way to do it. (Why look for the stairs when you can try to scale the wall and earn XP?) You're reverting to old-school "Don't negotiate! Kill him for XP!" thinking, only with combat at least something is *happening*, while making a single skill check roll is one of the more boring abstractions in D&D. (If you were actually watching someone do it, watching someone scale a sheer wall could be as interesting as watching someone fence with an orc, but in D&D the former is rolling one die while the other is going back and forth rolling dice.)
longlivetheloud 03-19-07, 01:55 AM	to the guy that answered my "what is the purpose of more than one core rulebook?" post, thanks, but what I meant was that I don't understand the purpose of having a PH I, II, and III...
a_psh 03-19-07, 01:56 AM	I think you might be overstating your case here. The GM, one hopes, is not “making everything up as he goes along.” S/he has determined, in our example, what is in the safe, what dangers are present, the difficulty of opening the safe, etc.Well, either the GM is wasting enormous amounts of time with unnecessary prep, or she's actually winging most things as she goes along. If you want to give the players meaningful choices, you can't avoid either doing one or the other, even when playing straight-up D&D. You, as the player, determine whether your character has a skill set that includes safe cracking, whether you will attempt this safe in spite of possible dangers, how you will protect yourself from these dangers, etc. It’s true that the GM has authored all the problems, and the rules determine the possibilities for solution, but the creativity and ingenuity of the player are not irrelevant. The player's choices matter.The player's choices matter only in so far as the GM pretends that succeeding on a task leads to succeeding in the conflict. If the GM ever breaks the connection between the two, the player's choices are irrelevant. That's why you should just use conflict resolution anyway. Well now you’re talking about a bad, and dishonest, GM, which -- though it apparently happens pretty frequently, and I’ll never understand why -- is nevertheless a different issue from the one at hand. But it’s simply not true that the game mechanics have almost nothing to do with your character’s ultimate destiny, unless the GM is dishonest.Given the way the resolution system works, the GM's narrative power is vastly more important than any specific game mechanic. Without any fudging or rule-bending at all, the simple ability to say "this kind of thing exists here" gives the GM unlimited authority: if she doesn't want you to go south, maybe there's a giant chasm or a flooded river or a horde or orcs or a giant wall of force blocking your way, simple as that. Anyway, clearly what you want is a different kind of game from D&D -- one with cooperative authorship of a narrative that is determined on the fly. Again, that sounds like it might be cool, and maybe there’s already a game like that, or maybe there’s a niche for such a game.There's a phrase that those much-maligned Forge folks call "The Impossible Thing Before Breakfast." It goes something like this: "The GM is the author of the story and the players control the protagonists." It's called that because this is basically how every RPG book from the 80s described a roleplaying game (i.e. everyone pretend it's simple)... and it's completely untenable (i.e. it's actually impossible). If one person is in control of the whole "story," everybody else is just there for the ride. You can't have it any other way. There's no such thing as a controlling a protagonist without being able to write large swathes of the story. What you end up with is either a collaborative structure (nothing about a collaborative structure says everyone has to do the same thing, just that all have some power and are working together) or a dysfunctional game with GM as puppeteer. So many groups drift into GM-as-puppeteer mode that you have books written by well-respected designers telling you all about how to be a good little puppeteer.
khyron1144 03-19-07, 01:57 AM	Honestly, I think that what makes D&D special over the other games is the versatility it allows. Wanna be a sword wielding warrior? Check Wanna be something big and ugly or something small and cute? Check. Wanna be a giant spell slinging bear? Check. Wanna kill oponents with rubber dukcies while singing the national music? Check. The rules, altought probably not perfect, allow you to convert your ideas into the world and interact with the other players. I agree with you totally there. I once said something on these boards to the effect of what is D&D? If you take three people and one DMs a Xanth-like silly campaign where everyone does magic, that's D&D; if the second one runs it tactical with more rules than the average war game, that's D&D; and if the third one enforces a good handful of optional rules for "realism" but not all of them for simplicity's sake, that's D&D.
a_psh 03-19-07, 02:00 AM	to the guy that answered my "what is the purpose of more than one core rulebook?" post, thanks, but what I meant was that I don't understand the purpose of having a PH I, II, and III...PHB II and DMG II aren't core books. They're billed as supplements that extend the core books with additional suggestions, examples, &c. So the PHB II, for example, shows you some variants for the standard classes and talks a bunch about character backgrounds and other kinds of stuff that the designers thought got insufficient attention in the original PHB. (And a big part of it is more-or-less random rules that WotC wanted to publish somewhere and thought might fit okay in a book called "PHB II," which you can't really fault them for.)
ArcTan 03-19-07, 02:03 AM	1: Sure you are right that is a bad DM...but most people will agree that DM who sets it up so the PCs win no matter what happens is also a bad DM. And yet in most games, the PCs win. "The PCs win no matter what" is a little strong, but yes, most "challenges" in D&D are "The PCs win unless they do something very stupid or are very unlucky". Read some players opinions on when a DM fudges a roll in benefit to the player. I have. They vary. There generally *is* an expectation that challenges are beatable, and usually people don't mind fudges if they occur because the DM made a mistake in evaluating the difficulty of an encounter. Fudges tend to arouse ire only when they're so obvious that they destroy the illusion of risk that makes the game fun. But characters who actually say things like "That's not fair, we should've been TPK'd!" are rare. Also if a player gets upset that his PCs dies and stay upsets(I can understand it at first) find more mature PCs. Why? The game is supposed to be fun. Yes, people who want a very shallow kind of fun (where the game contains no real tension and conflict) are immature, but I would argue that so are DMs who get off on arbitrarily raising the "challenge" bar so high that the game becomes a repetitive exercise in dying and trying again. Being upset that the game is too hard is a good reason to be upset, since you are, after all, investing time and often money into playing the game and should be getting fun out of it. 2:Agree that has alway been the case. Comunication has always been key.. What are you getting at? That "communication" is a form of "collaboration". 3: I disagree the undead destroying character should have to face living foes...the social character should have to face combat...the combat character should have to face the social situration. Because if they don't there is no growth. I am not saying all the time but another that they realize that they have to grow into actual full dimensional characters to survive instead of the one-dimensional min/maxers we see. Yes, but this should be at a level the player feels is a reasonable challenge to his character, or else the player will justifiably get upset that the DM is ignoring his ideas. Players should never be in the position of creating a Sacred Purifier and having the DM pointedly avoid ever having undead foes in the game, or playing a Wizard and the DM refusing to give the PCs any downtime to prepare spells. 4:I believes I said it wasn't impossible just problematic. As I said before I have very bad experience with people who say I should ignore x rules because it makes a better story...or you have to x with your character so my character can develope. These people use the 'story' idea to get their vision though and screw everybody else. I am not saying anybody who supports this idea of this but that has been my experience. Yes, but don't you see? That's why we're talking about the *system* changing, not the players. Saying "Just ignore the rules of D&D and work among yourselves to create a story" *is* a problem. It's a huge problem. It's really, really hard to try to do this kind of thing with no guidance, especially when all the rules that do exist are actually kind of trying to prevent you from doing it. Every time you look at the rules they give you more rules for fighting things in encounters that progress along a linear path. Every time a DM gets low on prep time and needs to steal something from a book he'll almost certainly end up railroading the party into a combat encounter rather than making up a critical roleplaying scene. D&D doesn't *give* you the tools to "Ignore X rules because it makes a better story", much less actually having rules *designed to make a better story*. That's why it ends up so screwed up so much of the time if people try to do it. There's no way to make sure that everyone who wants their backstory to have spotlight can; to make sure that everyone who wants to take the lead role in a scene can; to make sure that everyone gets a fair number of chances to introduce ideas that become part of the plot; etc. It just leaves you on your own as far as the story goes -- the rules only kick in and give you a foundation to stand on when you're killing monsters, which is why EVEN DMs WHO DON'T REALLY WANT TO end up filling time with monster fighting -- because suddenly when you're fighting monsters there *is* balance, and a turn order, and a specific role different characters are supposed to fill in order for each character to have a chance to say or do something, etc. Outside of combat things are murky; in combat there are rules and balance. No wonder people keep falling back on combat in D&D, or saying that "catering to RP" will "unbalance" the game. It's not that non-combat concerns of story and spotlight can't be "balanced" inherently -- a ludicrous idea -- but that D&D *has no rules for doing so*.
khyron1144 03-19-07, 02:04 AM	Vampire is crap because the core book tells you to do a bunch of stuff that the rules don't support. It's talks up a storm about story and personal horror and then just puts you in a stupid D&D clone with gimped mechanics. I like Vampire: The Masquerade. It's my second great RPG love after A&D 2nd. The personal horror element is well-integrated into the rules, if the Humanity rules are used as intended, I believe.
a_psh 03-19-07, 02:08 AM	Or maybe it doesn't want to hit RPers with the hammer of rules? Or maybe they feel that gamers have a right to decide how they want to play. Also reread the rules again...you get exp. for the encounter not combat. If you RP around the encounter then you get the exp for the encounter. If you DM doesn't do this then he has a problem and not the game. I give my players 2x the exp for getting around the encounter though RPing because it is much harder to do in certain siturations.D&D's reward cycle is all about combat. The basic means of getting XP and treasure is killing things. Even when you don't kill things, all your XP is good for is boosting your combat prowess. What about skills, you say? Skills unrelated to combat or trapfinding are a joke. Like 90% of your character sheet is useless unless you plan to go killing and looting. That's a pretty clear indication of what you're expected to do. So is the language of "encounters" and "adventures."
ArcTan 03-19-07, 02:11 AM	I agree with you totally there. I once said something on these boards to the effect of what is D&D? If you take three people and one DMs a Xanth-like silly campaign where everyone does magic, that's D&D; if the second one runs it tactical with more rules than the average war game, that's D&D; and if the third one enforces a good handful of optional rules for "realism" but not all of them for simplicity's sake, that's D&D. ...Big whoop. I can play a game where I run around and shoot random passersby with a Super Soaker and call it "chess". And then say that this proves chess is a versatile game. And yet it's not, because it's really just that I made up a game and called it "chess" even though it's not. And this might not matter from some perspectives, but it does matter when you have to pay money for a chess set (or set of D&D books). It does make it dumb to pay a lot of money for a bunch of books and then have to spend a lot *more* time fixing things, changing things, or outright making things up in order to play the game I actually want to play. This isn't even really a specific criticism of D&D, per se, but just the problem with having a monopoly product. There are tons and tons of RPGs out there, and lots of them will be *better* at a specific game concept than D&D. You can play checkers on a chess board with chess pieces, but the extra money you paid for those distracting carved pieces that have no meaning in a checkers game is wasted -- why not just buy a checkers set instead? You can play a game of Monopoly with a chess board, if you do a *lot* of work and write up a bunch of labels to stick to the board and so on... or you can buy a Monopoly set, and even if the game of Monopoly you want to play isn't identical to Parker Brothers Monopoly, this game set will be a lot more like what you want to play and give you a lot more pushes in the right direction. This is the thing -- a lot of people who haven't played other RPGs don't even realize that D&D is NOT THAT VERSATILE. It really isn't. There's a whole lot of stuff it just provides no rules for at all, nor even rules that serve as models for those nonexistent rules that you could use as guidelines to push you in the right direction. If you seriously want to run a campaign that isn't about combat, most of the backbone of the rules -- the task resolution, the structure of the game, etc. -- has to be STUFF YOU MAKE UP. This is a problem. It means a lot of people are playing games that aren't very good, because the important part of the game (which they paid money to get core books to play) hasn't been designed by professional game designers that they paid their money to but by their hard-put-upon buddy who tries to ad hoc rules together in his spare time after work without the benefit of a team, or testing, or much experience. Saying that a game's system doesn't matter if you have a good DM basically translates to "You should be okay with dropping a hundred bucks on game materials from professional designers that don't do what you want them to do, as long as you have an *amateur* designer on hand who will spend a ton of his own blood, sweat and tears undoing what the professional designers made up and trying his best to make up something new in its place". Such "good DMs" are hard to find, and it's not fair to say that if you have an "average DM" (who may, in fact, be very good at the core task of leading and refereeing the group but just doesn't have the *time* to be constantly writing new material) you can't play a good game that does what you want. Even if you have such a "good DM", wouldn't he have more fun and be able to do more for the game if he didn't have to rewrite certain core things from scratch? If I want to play a different board game from chess, shouldn't I be able to buy a differently shaped board rather than endlessly trying to figure out new uses for a chess board? This is the same thing. So many people play "D&D" by default because it's the only RPG they've heard of, and their D&D spins off and mutates and evolves in random ways to try to get it to do something the rules don't do by themselves, and they could save so much time and energy by playing a *different* RPG that actually served their needs.
khyron1144 03-19-07, 02:27 AM	1)...Big whoop. I can play a game where I run around and shoot random passersby with a Super Soaker and call it "chess". And then say that this proves chess is a versatile game. 2) This is a problem. It means a lot of people are playing games that aren't very good, because the important part of the game (which they paid money to get core books to play) hasn't been designed by professional game designers that they paid their money to but by their hard-put-upon buddy who tries to ad hoc rules together in his spare time after work without the benefit of a team, or testing, or much experience. Saying that a game's system doesn't matter if you have a good DM basically translates to "You should be okay with dropping a hundred bucks on game materials from professional designers that don't do what you want them to do, as long as you have an *amateur* designer on hand who will spend a ton of his own blood, sweat and tears undoing what the professional designers made up and trying his best to make up something new in its place". 3) Such "good DMs" are hard to find, and it's not fair to say that if you have an "average DM" (who may, in fact, be very good at the core task of leading and refereeing the group but just doesn't have the *time* to be constantly writing new material) you can't play a good game that does what you want. Even if you have such a "good DM", wouldn't he have more fun and be able to do more for the game if he didn't have to rewrite certain core things from scratch? 1) The person who invented chess is lost to the mists of time more or less. It is a good bet that it was not a company that had "Products of the Imagination" as its official slogan, though. RPGs are meant to have this flexibility, thus the highlighted blue optional sections and emphasis on Rule zero. Chess is not, hence the rules printed on something in the box rarely contain words like optional and discretion. 2) If cost is a major issue, I'll give you my homemade system for free and I would love to hear what you change. 3) Every DM who puts in his years will eventually become one of these good DMs. Every DM will find a bit of official rules that is too clunky that he has the perfect elegant refinement of. Every DM finds a point in the official metaplot that he'll change. It doesn't mean his time reading the rules and official setting material and metaplot were wasted. It doesn't mean that his money spent on rules and setting is wasted. It means that they served as launching pads for his imagination. 1) No. 2nd Edition was horribly incoherent. It was my introduction to RPGs, but, at this point, I wouldn't touch that thing with a ten-foot-pole. 2) I'm saying that it's time that the world's most famous RPG actually delivered on all the hype about being a game of imaginative storytelling. I'm saying that D&D should be better than just a bunch of freeform roleplaying with an ugly wargame strapped on. 3) It's the game almost everyone starts with. 4) That makes it the game that, for many people, defines roleplaying. 5) (Especially for all the ones that try it looking for some sweet collaborative action and then leave because they have to master hundreds of pages of wargame rules and their only contributions to the shared imagined content have to go through the GM.) 6) That game absolutely has to not suck. 7) In fact, it should rock as hard as it possibly can. 1) I disagree with everything you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it. 2) I don't think D&D fails to live up to its promise. I also don't think the wargame is apsect of it is ugly, if you mean too many fiddly bits that don't contribute anything and that slow down play. 3) True. 4) Also True. 5) I suspect this phenomenon is rarer than you believe. 6) Totally right. I'm glad it doesn't. Even 3.x, which I consider to be the game's weakest iteration is pretty nifty. 7) Also totally right. Glad it does. Even 3.x, which I consider to be the game's weakest iteration is pretty nifty.
a_psh 03-19-07, 02:42 AM	1) The person who invented chess is lost to the mists of time more or less. It is a good bet that it was not a company that had "Products of the Imagination" as its official slogan, though. RPGs are meant to have this flexibility, thus the highlighted blue optional sections and emphasis on Rule zero. Chess is not, hence the rules printed on something in the box rarely contain words like optional and discretion.I'm rather behind Ben Lehman's theory (http://benlehman.thesmerf.com/?p=91) here, and his theory is unflattering: RPG players are used to changing rules because their rules suck so much. "Good rules" don't need changing.
Reinforcements 03-19-07, 02:49 AM	I have to say, a_psh, that in regards to your task vs. conflict resolution discussion with the safe-cracking example, I really don't understand it. I can't conceive how the conflict-resolution paradigm would work without becoming so abstract that it lost any sense of verisimilitude. Honestly, the whole shared-narration thing in general - I get your point, I think, but I can't even begin to imagine how such a game would actually work. Also, I disagree with what you said about D&D having no challenge since the DM technically "wants" the players to win. In D&D (and similar RPGs), the GM is separate from the players as the sole arbiter of the rules. In any game that isn't competitive there has to be such an arbiter to set up these kind of beatable challenges. Video games are good examples - the creators of the game made them to be winnable, but that doesn't mean no challenge is involved. Now, video games may have more wiggle room than a game like D&D, but the basic concept is the same.
boozerker 03-19-07, 02:50 AM	Find the DC of accomplishing whatever (such as Gather Info to find the base). Then do a quick computation. Skill CRs (non-combat): 1. (PC's) level squared x DC 2. Divide that by the amount DC is beat 3. Divide the total by # of party's attempts The final result is the XP each party member receives. (class abilities that require beating a DC also count) Any PC who tries to beat a non-combat DC adds +1 to the party's total attempts. Which "reset" however the DM wishes -- once per scenario, each 1/3 of a day, etc. Drop the system during combat, as those XP calculations assumes skill use as part of monster CRs. Also ignore the system when there is no reasonable penalty for failure.You're basically encouraging people to go after as high a DC check as they can rather than trying to be clever and find a lower-DC way to do it. (Why look for the stairs when you can try to scale the wall and earn XP?) Actually, no. It's self-correcting. As players don't know by what method the DM resets the party's number of attempts, a PC could very well end up scaling that wall for no XP. PCs get more XP when they barely just succeed, but practically nothing for a huge success. The higher a number they beat the DC by = drastically fewer XP. Beating the DC by the lowest amount possible gains the most XP, so trying to improve your odds is not practical. And it's risky. Failure = injury/death (climbing high), money loss (crafting), worsened reputation (diplomacy), etc. Secret reset times is key. If players abuse it, the DM might announce that reset times are between a week and a month (secretly choosing which). The XP scales with character level to remain practical even at epic levels.
khyron1144 03-19-07, 02:55 AM	I'm rather behind Ben Lehman's theory (http://benlehman.thesmerf.com/?p=91) here, and his theory is unflattering: RPG players are used to changing rules because their rules suck so much. "Good rules" don't need changing. Interesting article. I agree with the first sentence of the first comment wholeheartedly. The main article, though is another: I disagree with all he said, but I will defend to the death his right to say it.
Patera_Quetzal 03-19-07, 02:57 AM	That's why you should just use conflict resolution anyway.Well, ultimately you're going to need some way to know what the conflict is, and someone to decide how to overcome it, and something that determines whether that solution works. These roles traditionally belong to the GM, the Player, and the Rules, respectively. How do you envision these roles being distributed in your game? Or are there different roles entirely?
Archon of Light 03-19-07, 03:53 AM	Thank you for this topic, a-psh, and everyone involved for this discussion. There is no problem with the game system. There is no problem with the players, or the GMs, or the core rules, or the supplemental rules, or the creative industry behind it. There is no problem with MMORPG players, powergamers, rules lawyers, munchkins, roleplaying purists, hack-n-slashers, Monty Haulers, killer DMs, noobs, nerds, geeks, or leets. There is no problem with this game... ... except for that part, or parts, that does not appeal to the individual who plays it. And that is a very broad and varied range of problems that some may share with others, but not always shared by everyone else. For myself, I concur with a-psh's general sentiment of what grieves him the most; but it's not a problem with the game that he is trying to explain. At it's most fundamentally basic core, the Dungeons and Dragons game (in it's most current incarnation, especially) is a miniature tactical strategy game of COMBAT. The majority of nearly every hard and fast rule, stat, or option involving a dice roll or character customization feature is directly related to COMBAT. And there is nothing wrong with that. Secondarily, the game revolves around the EXPLORATION and ADVENTURE aspect of the game. This is what seperates a series of random skirmishes and tactical battle scenarios from the rest of the miniature wargaming world at large. We do not gather masses of armies just to throw them at each other and see who the better general is. This is much more personalized and rewarding when there is a sense of continuity and wonder about the world we become immersed in as individuals, not regiments of nameless bodies. And there's nothing wrong with that, either. The last part of this game, of course, is the ROLE PLAYING aspect... which, despite it's namesake (as in 'RPG'), is the one that gets the least support from the people who publish the games. It's not a problem inherent in the game itself, mind you, and not the real problem for this rant to take aim at. The complaint comes from the lack of real support and attention from the industry giants themselves who fail to provide real hard and fast rules about ROLE PLAYING. Guess what! There is STILL nothing wrong with that because there are no hard and fast rules to offer about ROLE PLAYING! The game focuses on the combat aspects because that is what it is built upon. You can make all the rules you need and implement all that you want, removing or cutting those that you don't want, and still adjucate your own rules as you see fit for the kind of game you want to play. The rest of the game is adjucated on it's own by the people who really participate and are involved in playing the game the way that they want to play it. How can you possibly get a million people to agree on how a paladin should deal with a thief he just caught stealing? What dice do you roll to make a morality check against temptation? What rule can be written in stone that says a player must not disrupt the fun of the group by revealing his character has turned against them and lead them to an ambush where they are all killed? ROLE PLAYING does not need to be strictured or pigeon-holed for everyone to unanimously consent to. The true source for support and advice comes from the community of gamers around you like this message board, for example. From here we draw our greatest inspiration and ideas from other gamers who are trying to figure out where this game is going, and those who have made it go somewhere for them. For over 20 years, I have struggled with this game that went nowhere for me. I've expected and demanded great things from it, from those I felt were responsible for providing such things for me, and even those who just wanted to play it. In all those years, I can easily count the number of sessions I've actually sat and played in groups with other people. I've sat and poured over many rules and sourcebooks that I've rarely implemented or used. Notebooks and drawings sit discarded on shelves waiting for me to take any slightest inspiration and run with it. It is this topic and this discussion that has finally made me realize that the very things most people take the time to complain or criticize about can be fixed by those same individuals for themselves. I will no longer wait for a company to come out with the rules and ideas that I need to enjoy the game I've been wanting to play for so long. There is no problem with the game; you just have to modify it to your own personal tastes, or find something that better suits them. (And so, this response went in a slightly different direction than I previously intended. Sorry for that. One of the main points I wanted to convey was that the idea of a 'true' roleplaying game that focused more on the ROLE PLAYING aspect would have a lot less rules and stats centered around combat abilities and capability. But the very notion that awarding XP for roleplaying as an incentive is necessary and encouraging is just feeding into the powergaming mindset anyway. XP is a measurable standard that instantly translates into character levels, which defines your character's strength and power in COMBAT. If ANYBODY can figure out how to create a game that can adjucate every roleplaying possibility or instance and provide rules that do not center around the combat encounter AND still make it an enjoyable game that many people will want to partake in, then I believe you will have redefined the very definition of an RPG. And that's almost another tangent or topic right there, so I'll stop while I'm ahead.) :D
a_psh 03-19-07, 04:29 AM	I have to say, a_psh, that in regards to your task vs. conflict resolution discussion with the safe-cracking example, I really don't understand it. I can't conceive how the conflict-resolution paradigm would work without becoming so abstract that it lost any sense of verisimilitude. Honestly, the whole shared-narration thing in general - I get your point, I think, but I can't even begin to imagine how such a game would actually work.The thing with abstraction is a question of scale. Any system is abstract on the large scale (imagine task resolution with a single "Sailing" check to represent a month worth of travel by ship, for example). Conflict resolution focuses on consequences rather than acts. With pretty basic stuff, small-scale conflict resolution looks a bit like task resolution: in essence, when you roll an attack and then some damage dice, the damage gives you the consequences of your attack action, right? I tried to write up an example but it's kinda hard without actually falling back on a system. So, err,here (http://zork.net/~nick/loyhargil/tsoy2/book1--rulebook.html#resolution)'s a better example from a system that thematically resembles D&D (hurray for stuff people post for free on the Internet through Creative Commons!). ... Well, ultimately you're going to need some way to know what the conflict is, and someone to decide how to overcome it, and something that determines whether that solution works.Yup. Here are your roles converted into an order for resolving something, with a slight addendum (1b and 4) 1. What's at stake? 1b. What happens if you win? What happens if you lose? (multiple if there's a three-way tug-of-war over stakes, &c.) 2. What do you do? 3. What actually happened? (i.e. resolution) 4. (What are the consequences?) These roles traditionally belong to the GM, the Player, and the Rules, respectively. How do you envision these roles being distributed in your game? Or are there different roles entirely?The way I see it: 1. What's at stake? -- this is negotiated (usually, actual negotiation is minimal here) 1b. What happens if you win / lose? -- negotiated or GM (either way, declared up front as part of the stakes) 2. What do you do? -- the player 3. What actually happened? -- mechanics (with someone narrating based on the stakes, of course) 4. What are the consequences? -- mostly you just figure this out based on the previous steps, especially 1 These pretty much follow your layout except for the first one. Typically, stakes are negotiated between the whole group (including folks who aren't involved in the conflict sometimes). This page (http://www.lumpley.com/hardcore.html) offers the best synopsis of basic conflict resolution, I think. And some other stuff that's unrelated to that but kinda eye-opening, even if you don't totally agree with it.
Seeker95 03-19-07, 08:22 AM	Because D&D isn't aspiring to anything more. It's all still hack-and-slash,It is not all hack-and-slash, although many players comfortably and enjoyably use it that way.and it's getting left behind.Define "getting left behind". If you mean "highest sales revenues ever" and "still the highest-grossing RPG system in the world" and "still the standard by which niche products measure themselves" then I guess you're right. If you intended "getting left behind" to mean something negative from a business sense, you're not quite accomplishing your objective.It's the action movie to an actual good story, and it's fine with that - D&D isn't going to change, because it doesn't want to.Edit: Because it doesn't have to.I'd love for my schedule to be wall-to-wall way better games, but D&D is about the only one I can find players for.That it is the only game you can find players for is a testament to its continued success -- both in the marketplace and content. Does D&D offer all things to all RPG players? No. But it doesn't have to. D&D meets a critical need for you: D&D is the baseline by which players like you (versatile, experimental, diversified, discerning, and whole bunch of other positive terms) measure the viability of other games. D&D doesn't suck. It does quite well nearly everything it intends to do. And the things it does not try to do give room for smaller, niche games to exist. And the best of them will even thrive.
Roxlimn 03-19-07, 08:45 AM	Quite honestly, "conflict resolution" can stay right where it is: outside of D&D! The only people who think that this kind of crap is "superior" or "an advancement" of D&D is those people who think that D&D should be a collaborative storytelling experience exactly similar to how they've enjoyed it. I've got news for you, people. Not everyone likes that kind of thing. D&D is THE premier roleplaying game because it's nonspecific. It allows you to get your storytelling jollies and also allows people who like bashfests to socialize in the same environment. And that's not the only people it caters to. More than any other system, more than any other mechanic in the game, D&D allows you to make the character you want, moreso now than ever before. The macho guys around here won't like to admit it, but at its heart, D&D is about character creation - the fleshing out of a character concept. It's like Tamagotchi with fantasy characters and paper stats. It's a bit like playing with dolls. There are more rules in the game about making a player character than there are about anything else. In fact, the entire game is arguably about making a character. This is not the same as a storytelling game (and I wouldn't play such a game if I had to pay money to get out of it). D&D can be a storytelling game if you want it to, but IMX, the most successful DMs who have multiple groups who enjoy their DMing adapt the game and their style to whoever is playing it. Do videogames do bashfests better? Says who? Certainly not the people who have a blast optimizing their characters in D&D (and there appear to be an awful lot of those). I used to get a lot of such players myself when I used to DM. The game can be a puzzle-game, a realization game, a riddle-platform, an esacpe from reality, a story game, and it can even be all of these in the same session. I don't want D&D to hardcode the kind of games you can play on it. That would definitely be moving somewhere, but it's not the kind of movement that I see being beneficial to D&D. As I said, if I wanted a collaborative writing experience, I'd go to a writing club in university.
WayneTheGame 03-19-07, 10:29 AM	FWIW on-topic, I've never really had a problem like is being described here.. but then again I've also never sat down and thought of a problem. It does seem to me like the game focuses too much on the emphasis of killing stuff (i.e. combat) but that felt like a natural progression to entice new blood into the game. One thing I don't like, though, is that the DMG basically says not to give out "story awards" like you got in the old days; the ONLY real way to get XP is via combat or using skills (again, mechanics) to overcome things. IIRC it even says so much that if you DO give story awards/roleplaying awards, you shouldn't give XP for combat!
Ezell Pike 03-19-07, 10:40 AM	D&D is the best IMO, but it could be better. Financially it is a success. The problem I have is with the actual mechanics of the game. The average 4-5 round fight at 10th level is a quagmire of one shot rules in the form of spells and feats. So at 10th level those suggested 14 encounters to get to 11th end up taking 10 to 24 hours of game time that represents about 6 minutes. If you take a look at rules that eat up time in 2e and 3e. In 2e it was initiative there were like 4 pages devoted to it in the 2e PHB. In 3e its attacks of opportunity and swift actions, move actions, partial actions, free actions, full round actions, and standard actions. Often more than one of these goes on during a single persons initiative. Rolling initiative every round wth are they trying to do?
Roxlimn 03-19-07, 10:51 AM	It simply means not to double-dip. If you're giving significant XP for story goals, then the entire CR table goes out of whack and there's no way to usefully estimate XP per combat - you might as well just remove that altogether. I don't see anything particularly wrong about that. If you don't give XP for combat, doesn't that significantly de-emphasize its use?
a_psh 03-19-07, 11:03 AM	If you don't give XP for combat, doesn't that significantly de-emphasize its use?Somewhat. A game's reward cycle is about what reward you're getting as well as why you're getting it, though. The reason it's called a "cycle" is that those two should kinda feed each other. If you don't give XP for combat but all the stuff you get from XP is combat-related, XP isn't a very good reward (and there's still the cycle of loot keeping combat going).
Roxlimn 03-19-07, 11:15 AM	That only doesn't make sense because you insist on using a nonapplicable "reward system cycle." For many players, XP is just a convenient excuse to go into combat. They go into combat anyway, whether or not there's XP or treasure to be had. The combat is its own reward. NOT all the stuff you get from XP is combat-related, and depending on which kind of gamer you are, XP bought stuff that appears combat-related may not be combat related anyway. More than a few players I know pick their weapons based on what looks cool rather than on what works for combat. The reward is superficially combat related (they picked up a new weapon) but it's really characterization (they got to develop their character or better realize a latent character concept). I realize that this vague assignment of reward cycling can be a foil to a DM who doesn't know what his players want out of the game, but I don't know that it helps the game to just kill every playstyle but one.
a_psh 03-19-07, 11:24 AM	The only people who think that this kind of crap is "superior" or "an advancement" of D&D is those people who think that D&D should be a collaborative storytelling experience exactly similar to how they've enjoyed it.No, I'll settle for any kind of functional collaborative storytelling experiences. Frankly, any RPG demands collaboration for anything to happen. Otherwise, you don't generate any imagined content at all. D&D is THE premier roleplaying game because it's nonspecific. It allows you to get your storytelling jollies and also allows people who like bashfests to socialize in the same environment. And that's not the only people it caters to.But it doesn't! Unless you think that playing in a group where everyone is bored most of the time is somehow a worthwhile experience. (D&D players accept that all too regularly.) More than any other system, more than any other mechanic in the game, D&D allows you to make the character you want, moreso now than ever before. The macho guys around here won't like to admit it, but at its heart, D&D is about character creation - the fleshing out of a character concept. It's like Tamagotchi with fantasy characters and paper stats. It's a bit like playing with dolls. There are more rules in the game about making a player character than there are about anything else. In fact, the entire game is arguably about making a character.If D&D's all about making a character and then not playing it, then it's time to just rub the word "game" out of the title, since the important part is clearly sitting alone in your room fantasizing about how awesome your barbarian warrior named Big McLargehuge really is. If it's about actually playing that damn character, where's the structure that creates meaningful play? Cuz all I'm seeing is a wargame with some freeform on the side (and a few crappy and lifeless mechanics for everything else, which we call "the skill system").
Roxlimn 03-19-07, 11:39 AM	a_psh: No, I'll settle for any kind of functional collaborative storytelling experiences. Frankly, any RPG demands collaboration for anything to happen. Otherwise, you don't generate any imagined content at all. This phrase is so vague it's hard to tell what you're actually saying. This selfsame sentence could be used to argue FOR D&D as it is, and that it's improved since 1e. But it doesn't! Unless you think that playing in a group where everyone is bored most of the time is somehow a worthwhile experience. (D&D players accept that all too regularly.) Um. I don't play in games that bore me. I think that this just mainly applies to you and like-minded people who prefer stuff like Exalted or whatever. You can still play those games, you know, without turning D&D into them. I'm NOT bored at all when I play D&D. If D&D's all about making a character and then not playing it, then it's time to just rub the word "game" out of the title, since the important part is clearly sitting alone in your room fantasizing about how awesome your barbarian warrior named Big McLargehuge really is. The making of the character and showing him/her to other people - talking about this character and defining him further in made up situations - that's what I'm talking about. It's just as much fun to share the character with others as it is to make him up. Sometimes, sharing a made up character with others is the entire point. Clearly you do not understand that D&D can have this application and that there is a significant demand for this style of play. If this kind of play bores you, please be polite enough not to tell whoever else is playing at your table that they're wrong and that their kind of fun is going nowhere. PLEASE recgonize that your style of D&D play isn't the only one worth covering. You are not superior to others. Your style of play is not more valid than others'. Until you can acknowledge this very simple point, it's pointless for me to go further. You will simply not get what I'm saying. Just because you don't enjoy particular styles of play doesn't mean that players who do so should just go hang, play videogames, aren't really playing, or whatever other insulting phrases you can imagine to denigrate your fellow gamers.
not Yoda 03-19-07, 12:34 PM	I'm with a psh here. The system generally does not support the style of play that old-school players are used to. Character building used to mean developing the character as you played it. (after spending 30 minutes tops filling out a character sheet not a 2-4 hour marathon to construct a monolithic collection of errata.)
IceFractal 03-19-07, 12:34 PM	It's been said that without elements like conflict resolution, the players have no authorship of the game. Which may be true - but who says I want authorship? Actually, in a lot of cases the game would be pointless if I were controlling the reality as a player, because you can't really solve a puzzle you made yourself. And that's one of the main things I like - being challenged and discovering new things as a player, not just as a character. If the character just makes an Intelligence check to solve a puzzle, or the player rolls well and decides that the puzzle was actually a red herring with the key being under the carpet, those are ok, but all the player actually did was roll some dice. I'd prefer to actually try to solve the puzzle, or at least a shortened form of it. Likewise, with discovering new combinations of spells. Of course you can cast Fireball and claim it's a new formula that your Wizard just invented, but that's not the same as actually finding a synergistic combination yourself. Having your character exercise won't make you more fit. To go back to the "safe" example, what I want for the safe is not that the player determines what's in it or the DM just makes it up randomly - the DM should have determined it by the time the players got to the safe, and from then on it should be concrete, whether the player carefully plots out a safecracking plan or just sees the safe and runs over to bash it with an axe. Because without the risk of working pointlessly, you can't have the satisfaction of short circuiting your foes plans, or neatly bypassing the deadly trap.
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-19-07, 01:48 PM	I'm rather behind Ben Lehman's theory (http://benlehman.thesmerf.com/?p=91) here, and his theory is unflattering: RPG players are used to changing rules because their rules suck so much. "Good rules" don't need changing. To a degree this is true. Though keep in mind that RPGs are much more complex than conventional games like chess. In conventional games, we aren't trying to achieve balance, so much as fairness. In chess, we do eventually want a player to win and the game is designed that way. You may start with equal pieces, but skill levels the playing field. In an RPG, the objective isn't to produce a winner, and nor is it necessarily to reward player skill. In chess, your objective is to make the best move to achieve a win. In an RPG, this isn't true. You're supposed to be roleplaying a character, and this can actually lead you to making moves that are suboptimal or even bad. Because of this, it's not enough to simply make a fair game, we also have to create a balanced one. In an RPG, a lot of effort has to be made to protect people from bad choices, because people don't always make choices for reasons of pure effectiveness. It's ok in chess to say, "That move sucks and it'll lose you the game". The existence of bad moves is an accepted part of the game. But in an RPG we don't want to have too many instances where we're saying, "That class sucks, don't choose it, it'll lose you the game." So the design goals are entirely different (and much harder) for RPG design. You can't let the game evolve on its own based on player skill and strategy, because it's not a game of strategy. Now, you can go one of two routes in RPG design. One is the route of absolute simplicity. Use the same mechanics for everything. So you ensure that people tend to be balanced, because there is no difference between using a dagger or using a greatsword, they're all mechanically the same. Of course, this leads to a boring game to some degree because everyone is equal. So D&D tries the alternative, which is to try to create a complex set of rules that allow for different choices, while still keeping things relatively different. That being said, I think D&D has gone in the wrong direction by embracing the idea of rules mastery giving people benefits. There is too much synergy in various D&D abilities and that's the problem. There are certain "pet" styles that the designers totally love, like AoO/reach builds, charge builds or battlefield control spellcasting, that the designers make more powerful than anything else in the game. And that's a big problem.
a_psh 03-19-07, 02:03 PM	This phrase is so vague it's hard to tell what you're actually saying. This selfsame sentence could be used to argue FOR D&D as it is, and that it's improved since 1e.D&D 3e is no worse than 2e, 1e, whatever-e. And, yes, I am being kinda incoherent. Apologies. What I'm saying is this: Everything about old D&D was a kludge. A lot of people's fondest memories of D&D basically arise from this thing that they cobbled together on top of the actual game rules. We've since de-kludged a big part of the wargame-y rules. But D&D's utility as an actual roleplaying game hasn't improved. All the character development, storytelling, &c., &c. is all just freeform-y stuff the players kludge together on top of the wargame-y bits. If D&D is going to be anything other than a moldy old dinosaur left by the wayside or a big drop of poison in the roleplaying well, it's time to de-kludge all the other stuff. Um. I don't play in games that bore me.Then you're not playing with people who have radically different desires from you in the first place. When two people who want ridiculously different things out of something get together, their game sucks. The making of the character and showing him/her to other people - talking about this character and defining him further in made up situations - that's what I'm talking about. It's just as much fun to share the character with others as it is to make him up. Sometimes, sharing a made up character with others is the entire point. Clearly you do not understand that D&D can have this application and that there is a significant demand for this style of play. If this kind of play bores you, please be polite enough not to tell whoever else is playing at your table that they're wrong and that their kind of fun is going nowhere.Are you referring to talking or playing? Because if this is the whole "it's more important to be able to fantasize about an awesome game than actually play it" shtick that people get from flipping through 20 campaign books, then, no, it isn't. If you're talking about experiencing your character in play, why is it that you consider a bunch of combat mechanics and some illusionist freeform to be the right path here? PLEASE recgonize that your style of D&D play isn't the only one worth covering. You are not superior to others. Your style of play is not more valid than others'."Freeform + wargame" is clunky and cumbersome for whatever you might want to do with it. Just because you don't enjoy particular styles of play doesn't mean that players who do so should just go hang, play videogames, aren't really playing, or whatever other insulting phrases you can imagine to denigrate your fellow gamers.Video games and true tabletop wargames create more functional competitive tactical play. They've got a framework that permits unabashed hardcore balls-to-the-wall adversarial play, for starters. Anything that involves not playing the game is not playing. If you're talking about actual play, then ignore that bit.
Lokiyn 03-19-07, 02:13 PM	Lokiyn, I'm sorry but I have to ask: Is your real name Boris Alphonso Felton and are your players named Bob Herzog, Dave Bozwell, Sara Felton (your cousin) and Brian Vanhoose? Your players quite literally sound like the physical representation of Knights of the Dinner Table (Remember the gazebo? Or the magic cow?) the way you described those scenarios. No, but i'm certain the reason we find comics like knights of the dinner table so funny, is because we all have at some point run into players that act exactly like or even worse than the stereotypes portrayed in such comics. In my case i ran into a couple of games where the stereotypes were in party leadership position.
Arivia 03-19-07, 02:23 PM	It is not all hack-and-slash, although many players comfortably and enjoyably use it that way. a_psh has explained at length how the system neither aspires to nor supports more than just combat. The only supplement that has attempted to change that was Power of Faerun, and it's still years behind systems with cleaner, more general resolution systems. Define "getting left behind". Artistically, it's been mostly outdone since...Traveller? It's been definitely outdone since Amber, Ars Magica, and (if you believe Allen Varney) the first edition of Paranoia. It's made tries to get itself back on top (the Forgotten Realms, Planescape), but if VtM didn't firmly put it in the grave, the smaller games of late definitely have. (Compare 3e to the-My Life With Master derived Paranoia XP [EDIT: Especially with regards to Extreme PARANOIA.]) If you mean "highest sales revenues ever" and "still the highest-grossing RPG system in the world" and "still the standard by which niche products measure themselves" then I guess you're right. If you intended "getting left behind" to mean something negative from a business sense, you're not quite accomplishing your objective. The business and artistic/design sides of an RPG are largely separated, and the business part has little to do with this debate. No one disputes that D&D is the market share leader, but it's a design and artistic artifact these days. Edit: Because it doesn't have to.That it is the only game you can find players for is a testament to its continued success -- both in the marketplace and content. *bzzt* Again, D&D is the undisputed business leader, but much of its current presence is either held over from the glory days of the 70s or takes advantage of WotC's subsidiary to Hasbro status. D&D can suck completely, because no one else has the distribution or market penetration that it does. Going down to your next largest competitor (White Wolf), the distribution shrinks considerably, and mainstream attention withers away to near-nothing. To get into the real gems of roleplaying games, you have to enter RPG-specific social circles, where competition actually exists. D&D doesn't suck. It does quite well nearly everything it intends to do. And the things it does not try to do give room for smaller, niche games to exist. And the best of them will even thrive. D&D doesn't suck as a hack and slash action thriller. The problem is that it sells itself as way more and fails to live up, while doing a good job of blocking out those that do live up to what they promise. D&D is about the worst-case-imaginable example/spokesperson for roleplaying games as a whole.
ArcTan 03-19-07, 02:37 PM	1) The person who invented chess is lost to the mists of time more or less. It is a good bet that it was not a company that had "Products of the Imagination" as its official slogan, though. RPGs are meant to have this flexibility, thus the highlighted blue optional sections and emphasis on Rule zero. Chess is not, hence the rules printed on something in the box rarely contain words like optional and discretion. There's a difference between "flexibility" and tossing out half the rules in a game to try to make it do something it wasn't meant to do. I actually disagree that RPGs were "meant to have this flexibility", since D&D actually doesn't. If it did, then it would be just as easy to play D&D as a cerebral thriller as it is to play D&D as a dungeon crawl hackfest. It isn't. It's about a hundred times easier to play D&D as a dungeon crawl hackfest than to do *anything else with it at all*. It's *possible* to do D&D as something else by throwing away lots of rules and making up lots of others, but it's not *easy*, and the rules don't *help* you. The vast majority of Optional Rules and Rule Zero things in official publications are ways to vary the power level and pacing of a dungeon crawl hackfest, not ways to make D&D into a non-dungeon crawl hackfest. I'm not saying there's anything particularly wrong with dungeon crawl hackfests. But it's stupid that people keep pretending that this isn't what D&D is, and that you can do other things with D&D just as easily as you can do dungeon crawl hackfests and so other RPGs are unnecessary. 2) If cost is a major issue, I'll give you my homemade system for free and I would love to hear what you change. At the very least, reading your homemade system and learning it would cost me *time*, which means that if it's not useful to me I shouldn't bother learning it in the first place. Paying for official gamebooks is supposed to give me a higher guarantee of quality and effort than if I download something for free online. It increases the degree to which I should be able to expect large amounts of material that I can actually use. But I should be able to expect that anyway. What I really hate is the people who have a hard time doing what they want with D&D and are repeatedly told they need to "learn to be a better DM" (i.e. make up the system they need on their own and try to find a way to convert it into D&D terms) rather than actually purchasing a different RPG system that would serve them better. 3) Every DM who puts in his years will eventually become one of these good DMs. Every DM will find a bit of official rules that is too clunky that he has the perfect elegant refinement of. Every DM finds a point in the official metaplot that he'll change. Not really. A lot of them get bored with D&D and stop playing altogether. I regard this as a problem. It doesn't mean his time reading the rules and official setting material and metaplot were wasted. It doesn't mean that his money spent on rules and setting is wasted. It means that they served as launching pads for his imagination. There are much better ways to launch someone's imagination than to have them say "Geez, this is stupid. I really wish I could think up something that made more sense than this. Maybe I'll stumble upon it after years of playing games that bog down and aren't fun."
fatal error 03-19-07, 02:38 PM	Everything about old D&D was a kludge. A lot of people's fondest memories of D&D basically arise from this thing that they cobbled together on top of the actual game rules. We've since de-kludged a big part of the wargame-y rules. But D&D's utility as an actual roleplaying game hasn't improved. All the character development, storytelling, &c., &c. is all just freeform-y stuff the players kludge together on top of the wargame-y bits. If D&D is going to be anything other than a moldy old dinosaur left by the wayside or a big drop of poison in the roleplaying well, it's time to de-kludge all the other stuff. So, umm, how would you suggest that you put "actual roleplaying" into the rules of a game? Shouldn't roleplaying, by its very nature, not be limited by a ruleset? If I play the same character concept in D&D, GURPS, and WoD, shouldn't I be able to roleplay them the same? I guess I just don't understand exactly what you want to change. You say "de-kludge all the other stuff." But what is "all the other stuff," precisely?
ArcTan 03-19-07, 02:44 PM	Actually, no. It's self-correcting. As players don't know by what method the DM resets the party's number of attempts, a PC could very well end up scaling that wall for no XP. PCs get more XP when they barely just succeed, but practically nothing for a huge success. The higher a number they beat the DC by = drastically fewer XP. Beating the DC by the lowest amount possible gains the most XP, so trying to improve your odds is not practical. And it's risky. Failure = injury/death (climbing high), money loss (crafting), worsened reputation (diplomacy), etc. Secret reset times is key. If players abuse it, the DM might announce that reset times are between a week and a month (secretly choosing which). The XP scales with character level to remain practical even at epic levels. I still think for this to work, everything interesting a character does would have to be something you could break down into skill checks, which it can't. And you're still vastly privileging trying stuff within the rules rather than finding clever ways around things. ("I make a Search check" becomes better than "Well, let's look behind the painting", because the former is guaranteed to involve the mechanic of rolling for Search.)
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-19-07, 02:57 PM	What I really hate is the people who have a hard time doing what they want with D&D and are repeatedly told they need to "learn to be a better DM" (i.e. make up the system they need on their own and try to find a way to convert it into D&D terms) rather than actually purchasing a different RPG system that would serve them better. While I'm all for pointing out the problems in D&D, I think that finding a different system that's better is much more difficult than you'd think. See D&D is one of the few systems that actually supports large scale character advancement. In vampire, GURPS or ANY other RPG system I've read, characters advance notoriously slowly and the majority of your character is chosen at creation. Along the road of playing the character you may get a few extra skill points or whatever but really your major abilities are set in stone. That's just not so with D&D, because characters are always getting better. Your PC is dramatically different at 10th level than he was at 1st. And that's pretty cool. No other RPG does that even remotely like D&D does. That's why I think D&D is such a popular RPG. It has little do with brand name or market penetration. If you look at every other RPG, it has much slower character advancement.
ArcTan 03-19-07, 02:58 PM	Guess what! There is STILL nothing wrong with that because there are no hard and fast rules to offer about ROLE PLAYING! What do you mean by "hard and fast" rules? All rules, of course, are arbitrary in the end, but that doesn't mean you can't have them. There aren't any "hard and fast" rules about combat, either -- any guidelines about how hit points should work or attacks should work or rounds should work -- until the designers make them up, and we all accept them basically because the game only functions if everyone's on the same page. Why can't the same be true of roleplaying? Yes, it'd mean if the rules didn't offer what you wanted you'd have to houserule (i.e. start to make up your own game) or buy a different game, but that's *already* true. No one says that just because one person thinks VP/WP makes for more cinematic fight scenes than HP, or another person wants opposed rolls for attack and defense rather than static AC, or a third person hates the way AoOs lengthen resolution times and wants to play without a grid, that there shouldn't be any rules for combat at *all* and DMs should ad hoc a combat mechanic on the fly. To the contrary, it's important that we have a standard ruleset so we have common expectations, and then we vary things from there. So why do people keep arguing that it's a good thing that for every possible story situation outside of combat, D&D gives you no rules *at all*, or sometimes no rules beyond rolling a single die against a single DC? (Seriously, reducing the final negotiations with the enemy king about the disposition of the borders to "roll a Diplomacy check" would be like making the final battle against the demon monster a single "roll a Combat check". Saying you can add "flavor" to the Diplomacy check by narrating around it is like saying you can add "flavor" to a single d20 Combat check by describing the long pitched battle in RP.) The game focuses on the combat aspects because that is what it is built upon. You can make all the rules you need and implement all that you want, removing or cutting those that you don't want, and still adjucate your own rules as you see fit for the kind of game you want to play. But if it's not the kind of game that, as you say, the game was built upon, you will run into endless ambiguities, disagreements and problems. The rest of the game is adjucated on it's own by the people who really participate and are involved in playing the game the way that they want to play it. How can you possibly get a million people to agree on how a paladin should deal with a thief he just caught stealing? What dice do you roll to make a morality check against temptation? What rule can be written in stone that says a player must not disrupt the fun of the group by revealing his character has turned against them and lead them to an ambush where they are all killed? You *could* invent all kinds of rules to solve these problems. DMs do invent all kinds of rules. But because these aren't experienced game designers we're talking about, they often invent stupid or bad or inconsistent rules that lead to endless arguments and fights and badness, especially because these rules are supposedly part of the "D&D system", which itself is only primarily concerned with the wargame and when it offers you advice about the rules gives you bad advice based on the wargame. (Handling moral conflicts within the story through D&D's alignment system is a prime example.) You can't get a million people to agree on how to balance spellcasting in combat either. The difference is that D&D at least *tries* to provide a guideline by making a bunch of rules about it. ROLE PLAYING does not need to be strictured or pigeon-holed for everyone to unanimously consent to. But it helps. Look, the reason people like 3e better than 2e is that in 2e the combat mechanics were often so bad that people often had to make up their own rules to make combat doable. Sure, you could still play a game this way. But there was no standardization, no guarantee that what your DM came up with ad hoc fueled by Mountain Dew and pizza would be fair, balanced or a good idea, and no reason to expect you wouldn't have to learn the whole game all over again every time you went to another gaming group. That's *why* we have rules in the first place. Not having rules for writing the story basically means that D&D doesn't care much about writing the story, so that it's natural and to be expected that the story that comes out of D&D will frequently suck. The true source for support and advice comes from the community of gamers around you like this message board, for example. From here we draw our greatest inspiration and ideas from other gamers who are trying to figure out where this game is going, and those who have made it go somewhere for them. In an ad hoc way, littered with flame wars and biases and people who don't know what they're talking about. There's a reason people pay money to WotC for sourcebooks when looking for, say, spells and PrCs, rather than just posting a thread on the boards. For over 20 years, I have struggled with this game that went nowhere for me. I've expected and demanded great things from it, from those I felt were responsible for providing such things for me, and even those who just wanted to play it. In all those years, I can easily count the number of sessions I've actually sat and played in groups with other people. I've sat and poured over many rules and sourcebooks that I've rarely implemented or used. Notebooks and drawings sit discarded on shelves waiting for me to take any slightest inspiration and run with it. And this doesn't strike you as problematic? It is this topic and this discussion that has finally made me realize that the very things most people take the time to complain or criticize about can be fixed by those same individuals for themselves. I will no longer wait for a company to come out with the rules and ideas that I need to enjoy the game I've been wanting to play for so long. There is no problem with the game; you just have to modify it to your own personal tastes, or find something that better suits them. It's the "find something better" that bugs me. D&D could be so much better than it is for the majority of people who flock to this idea of a "roleplaying game", but it's remained stuck for so long in the same old same old -- and there are better RPGs out there that people might like if they tried them, but they can't get any market penetration because of the way the market works. Seriously, what you're saying sounds to me like someone saying "There's nothing wrong with Top 40 pop music; you just have to modify it to your own personal tastes, or find something better that suits you". Which is technically true, but so many people listen to Top 40 crap because they don't even know where to begin looking for more interesting music, much less compose and play their own.
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-19-07, 02:58 PM	So, umm, how would you suggest that you put "actual roleplaying" into the rules of a game? Shouldn't roleplaying, by its very nature, not be limited by a ruleset? If I play the same character concept in D&D, GURPS, and WoD, shouldn't I be able to roleplay them the same? I guess I just don't understand exactly what you want to change. You say "de-kludge all the other stuff." But what is "all the other stuff," precisely? I'm rather curious too. I've always considered the more rules you have for role-playing, the more it gets in the way of actual role-playing. About the only somewhat constructive role-playing rules I can see might be insanity rules in a game like Call of Cthulhu.
ArcTan 03-19-07, 03:05 PM	Define "getting left behind". If you mean "highest sales revenues ever" and "still the highest-grossing RPG system in the world" and "still the standard by which niche products measure themselves" then I guess you're right. If you intended "getting left behind" to mean something negative from a business sense, you're not quite accomplishing your objective. It's this kind of attitude that's the problem. The network externality means that in a relatively small market that does depend a lot on stuff like being able to find players for your game, once you're on top it doesn't take much effort to stay on top. Nonetheless, RPGs in general -- which basically means D&D above all else -- are losing ground to video games and other forms of entertainment, as you can tell by the way the *growth is slowing* and has been slowing since their heyday in the '70s and '80s. (Saying "highest revenue ever" means nothing, thanks to inflation and the market growing generally. It's like saying President Bush is the most beloved president ever because he had the highest absolute number of people vote for him in an election, when all it means is that the USA's population keeps growing and Bush is the most recent president.) Edit: Because it doesn't have to.That it is the only game you can find players for is a testament to its continued success -- both in the marketplace and content. Ah, the same logic that says that Windows is the best operating system in the world, Britney Spears the best female vocalist in the world, Titanic the finest movie in the world... Does D&D offer all things to all RPG players? No. But it doesn't have to. D&D meets a critical need for you: D&D is the baseline by which players like you (versatile, experimental, diversified, discerning, and whole bunch of other positive terms) measure the viability of other games. Not really. Saying "Wow, this RPG makes so much more sense than D&D!" is only because D&D is really popular and I've almost certainly played it if I know anything about RPGs. It doesn't say anything about D&D itself. If by some coincidence GURPS had become the industry leader instead of D&D, then I would just as easily say "Wow, this RPG makes so much more sense than GURPS Fantasy!". It's like saying there's something good or special about the English language because it's the language you always talk about other languages in. Not really. It's just popular. D&D doesn't suck. It does quite well nearly everything it intends to do. It depends what you mean by that. They really do try to sell D&D as the Everything RPG and say that you can make up any story you want and play it in D&D, and you really can't. And a lot of people discover this to their chagrin. And the things it does not try to do give room for smaller, niche games to exist. And the best of them will even thrive. Well, sort of. It gives them room to exist by not doing them, sure, but by *pretending* to do them -- by selling itself as the One True RPG and trying to get everyone to play that way -- it's what's choking their revenue to death and making it nearly impossible to make a living that way. Do you really think indie music "benefits" from Top 40 pop music because Top 40 pop music is so bland and unimaginative it gives indie artists "room to exist" even as it soaks up all the money people spend on music so that indie artists have to take day jobs to make a decent living? And that a lot of people who like indie music wouldn't actually be *pleased* if a lot of indie music wasn't indie anymore because mainstream pop music actually started getting better and more inclusive and such? (Maybe some people who really are elitist snobs would. I wouldn't.)
Arivia 03-19-07, 03:07 PM	While I'm all for pointing out the problems in D&D, I think that finding a different system that's better is much more difficult than you'd think. See D&D is one of the few systems that actually supports large scale character advancement. In vampire, GURPS or ANY other RPG system I've read, characters advance notoriously slowly and the majority of your character is chosen at creation. Along the road of playing the character you may get a few extra skill points or whatever but really your major abilities are set in stone. That's just not so with D&D, because characters are always getting better. Your PC is dramatically different at 10th level than he was at 1st. And that's pretty cool. No other RPG does that even remotely like D&D does. That's why I think D&D is such a popular RPG. It has little do with brand name or market penetration. If you look at every other RPG, it has much slower character advancement. D&D is not the only system to offer character advancement: its advancement is far more rules-based than other systems, however. Take your Vampire example. If my group Status grows from 2 to 5 points, it's a minor rules advancement - but in game, in story, where it really matters, I've leapt up the totem pole from "promising neophyte" to "local ruler/mover and shaker". My character has advanced greatly, but their rules presentation is little different. Not everything is numbers. The bit about your character being set in stone is only true if you want it to be, too. If my character undergoes story that would necessitate such a change, then I can implement it in game, and end up with a great change in rules that exemplifies that movement of allegiance or philosophy. Finally, this geometric growth is only shown in systems with geometric abilities. D&D does offer it, but most of d20 Modern does not. Vampire does not, but Mage's practices give it that growth, too. On the other hand, some systems do offer little in the way of character advancement, like Paranoia and RuneQuest - usually because there's little need for it.
ArcTan 03-19-07, 03:10 PM	While I'm all for pointing out the problems in D&D, I think that finding a different system that's better is much more difficult than you'd think. See D&D is one of the few systems that actually supports large scale character advancement. "Large-scale character advancement" more than anything else is one of the things that greatly constrains the kinds of stories D&D can tell. It means that your player's character *will* eventually become a superhero/action hero/legend whatever, and there's nothing you can do to stop that and still have characters grow and change. In vampire, GURPS or ANY other RPG system I've read, characters advance notoriously slowly and the majority of your character is chosen at creation. Along the road of playing the character you may get a few extra skill points or whatever but really your major abilities are set in stone. Well, you're still talking about traditional commercial RPGs, not the indie RPGs a_psh means (like Dogs in the Vineyard). Even then, I don't consider this a problem -- I think the *only* way to play a game that doesn't look identical to D&D is to at least take out D&D's geometric power curve based on "levelling up", even if it's hard to think of something dynamic to replace it with. That's just not so with D&D, because characters are always getting better. Your PC is dramatically different at 10th level than he was at 1st. And that's pretty cool. No other RPG does that even remotely like D&D does. Because if you do that your games and stories end up looking exactly like D&D, even if they're superficially different. You can only tell stories about superheroes, not even "survival horror" or "noir mystery" or other stories that depend on protagonists being weak and intrinsically limited in ability. This is why d20 Call of Cthulhu was a particularly problematic concept. That's why I think D&D is such a popular RPG. It has little do with brand name or market penetration. If you look at every other RPG, it has much slower character advancement. I doubt it. Yeah, levelling up is a very cheap and simple way to give people a thrill of excitement and addict them to the game's challenge-reward cycle. But it's also a reason a lot of people who dislike the game make fun of it and are deeply skeptical about its ability to tell non-childish stories. All you have to do is hear people mutter snide remarks about a "level 15 baker" or "Epic-level mail carrier" to see why.
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-19-07, 03:12 PM	The bit about your character being set in stone is only true if you want it to be, too. If my character undergoes story that would necessitate such a change, then I can implement it in game, and end up with a great change in rules that exemplifies that movement of allegiance or philosophy. Well gaining status keep in mind is something the DM just hands out, which has little to do with character advancement systems. As far as character advancement systems go, you really can't get that much more powerful in vampire, at least not at the rate you advance in D&D. The raw amount of XP you have to spend on disciplines is huge and it's nothing like the change you experience in D&D where you go from a fragile 1st level character to a 10th level powerhouse capable of taking on 200 orcs solo. I mean keep in mind in D&D you're going from say a +5 attack bonus to three attacks with +25/+20/+15. Don't get me wrong, there is character advancement in vampire, but it's just not anywhere close to the degree of advancement you see in D&D. For the most part, your vampire does not see huge jumps in power and hes pretty much the same character you started with, with only a few minor increases in statistics. Most vampire characters never even transcend the 10 dice cap on rolls.
Arivia 03-19-07, 03:17 PM	I'm rather curious too. I've always considered the more rules you have for role-playing, the more it gets in the way of actual role-playing. About the only somewhat constructive role-playing rules I can see might be insanity rules in a game like Call of Cthulhu. Nobilis, page 77: How to be a Hollyhock God (the game's GM), part 4. It talks about the basic play contract everyone should sign before playing. If you've looked at the BoVD or Heroes of Horror, you'll be familiar with this: it's to make sure everyone is on the same page and that no one will push anyone else's personal boundaries too far. So it goes on about levels of sex, violence...and mind control. "Mind control? Wait, what?" I go back and reread that section. To summarize it, the game does not include any mind control powers, and specifically tells you that a clause in the contract saying that a player has final judgment over their character is a good thing. Why? Two reasons. First off, having a player lose control is the short ticket to frustration and one lost player. The why of that is the second reason: if a player loses control, they lose narrative autonomy - that is, through being controlled, they are not contributing to the game, and that lack of contribution is inimical to the cooperative storytelling good roleplaying games propose. Those are the sorts of good rules - ones that even the field, and better the game for all.
ArcTan 03-19-07, 03:19 PM	To a degree this is true. Though keep in mind that RPGs are much more complex than conventional games like chess. In conventional games, we aren't trying to achieve balance, so much as fairness. In chess, we do eventually want a player to win and the game is designed that way. You may start with equal pieces, but skill levels the playing field. In an RPG, the objective isn't to produce a winner, and nor is it necessarily to reward player skill. In chess, your objective is to make the best move to achieve a win. In an RPG, this isn't true. You're supposed to be roleplaying a character, and this can actually lead you to making moves that are suboptimal or even bad. Because of this, it's not enough to simply make a fair game, we also have to create a balanced one. In an RPG, a lot of effort has to be made to protect people from bad choices, because people don't always make choices for reasons of pure effectiveness. If the real goal of the RPG is to roleplay the character, then "effectiveness" shouldn't come into it. There shouldn't be such a thing as being punished for "bad choices", since your goal is not to "win" anything but to roleplay a character, and the right way to roleplay a loser -- and a realistic character is surely a loser in at least some things -- is to lose. The problem is that D&D schizophrenically switches back and forth between saying you should realistically try to roleplay your character and saying that you're playing a game about making war against monsters and you should try to be as good at that as possible. What this ends up creating is schizophrenic, bitter debates on the boards that lead to things like the Stormwind Fallacy. The only solution is frequently to either roleplay your character as a distorted caricature of a real person who truly doesn't care about anything but slaughtering enemies in the most efficient way possible (the old cliched joke about what a sociopathic monster a "D&D adventurer" would be in real life) or else draw a solid wall between RP and combat, so that you're really playing two games that have nothing to do with each other. (And this is the madness that lies behind the Stormwind Fallacy, that your character sheet can be a mess of arcane symbols that make you a Fighter/Rogue/Bear Warrior/Eldritch Knight/Warmage, but "flavorwise" you're just a really good warrior. Rules and RP live in different worlds and barely touch.) It's ok in chess to say, "That move sucks and it'll lose you the game". The existence of bad moves is an accepted part of the game. But in an RPG we don't want to have too many instances where we're saying, "That class sucks, don't choose it, it'll lose you the game." Yes, and that's the problem, that the game is set up so that there's any incentive to think this way at all. Giving XP for beating encounters, making the default punishment for losing an encounter death (and giving no XP for losing, even losing impressively or gracefully), making 90% of all mechanics have to do with combat -- what do you expect? It's a wargame with a narrative laid loosely over it. So the design goals are entirely different (and much harder) for RPG design. You can't let the game evolve on its own based on player skill and strategy, because it's not a game of strategy. It's only harder because you have schizophrenic goals. If you started out by *dropping* the wargame and saying "This is a game about making up a story and playing a role within it, where there is no winning and losing", the design becomes very easy. Just like it becomes very easy if you *drop* the roleplay and say "We're just going to make a balanced wargame with strict rules, and any roleplaying will be this sort of side thing that gives flavor to the game and nothing else." Now, you can go one of two routes in RPG design. One is the route of absolute simplicity. Use the same mechanics for everything. So you ensure that people tend to be balanced, because there is no difference between using a dagger or using a greatsword, they're all mechanically the same. Of course, this leads to a boring game to some degree because everyone is equal. So D&D tries the alternative, which is to try to create a complex set of rules that allow for different choices, while still keeping things relatively different. These are ways to balance the game side of D&D. They still don't really make sure that the story you make up will be interesting or good or give everyone a fair chance to participate. That being said, I think D&D has gone in the wrong direction by embracing the idea of rules mastery giving people benefits. There is too much synergy in various D&D abilities and that's the problem. There are certain "pet" styles that the designers totally love, like AoO/reach builds, charge builds or battlefield control spellcasting, that the designers make more powerful than anything else in the game. And that's a big problem. The problem is that once you take out mastery of the rules many people become bored, because that really is so much of what the game is. If all choices become equal then the game should be about playing your role -- but the game gives you *no guidance for doing that*, which means that unless you're playing with a bunch of naturals it's likely to be un-fun and frustrating.
Arivia 03-19-07, 03:21 PM	Well gaining status keep in mind is something the DM just hands out, which has little to do with character advancement systems. Maybe you're rusty, but I'll remind you anyway: Status is a Merit, which you buy with XP. Don't get me wrong, there is character advancement in vampire, but it's just not anywhere close to the degree of advancement you see in D&D. For the most part, your vampire does not see huge jumps in power and hes pretty much the same character you started with, with only a few minor increases in statistics. Most vampire characters never even transcend the 10 dice cap on rolls. Please read the latter half of the post you quoted, and I'll again remind you that not everything is numbers, especially in story-and-politics-bound Vampire. (Which of late explicitly glosses over numbers to get at the political goodies: see the Requiem Chronicler's Guide.)
boozerker 03-19-07, 03:31 PM	I still think for this to work, everything interesting a character does would have to be something you could break down into skill checks, which it can't. And you're still vastly privileging trying stuff within the rules rather than finding clever ways around things. ("I make a Search check" becomes better than "Well, let's look behind the painting", because the former is guaranteed to involve the mechanic of rolling for Search.) Good point. Maybe it's best left for social type skills (encouraging roleplaying). The only people who think that this kind of crap is "superior" or "an advancement" of D&D is those people who think that D&D should be a collaborative storytelling experience exactly similar to how they've enjoyed it. I've got news for you, people. Not everyone likes that kind of thing. D&D is THE premier roleplaying game because it's nonspecific. It allows you to get your storytelling jollies and also allows people who like bashfests to socialize in the same environment. And that's not the only people it caters to. More than any other system, more than any other mechanic in the game, D&D allows you to make the character you want, moreso now than ever before. The macho guys around here won't like to admit it, but at its heart, D&D is about character creation - the fleshing out of a character concept. It's like Tamagotchi with fantasy characters and paper stats. It's a bit like playing with dolls. There are more rules in the game about making a player character than there are about anything else. In fact, the entire game is arguably about making a character. . . . . . The game can be a puzzle-game, a realization game, a riddle-platform, an esacpe from reality, a story game, and it can even be all of these in the same session. I agree with everything except the part about it being crap. Like you mentioned, it's whatever style players want to use...even if I wouldn't use it. Anyway, it's evident that character creation is tops on the list as the Character Optimization (http://boards1.wizards.com/forumdisplay.php?f=615) boards have the most posts and threads, with Classes and Prestige Classes (http://boards1.wizards.com/forumdisplay.php?f=15) second in line. Third is the What's a DM to Do? (http://boards1.wizards.com/forumdisplay.php?f=53) boards, so DMing obviously takes up a great interest. Magic is 4th and combat is fifth. Perhaps hack and slash isn't the main interest, if combat is last of those. Interesting..
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-19-07, 03:34 PM	"Large-scale character advancement" more than anything else is one of the things that greatly constrains the kinds of stories D&D can tell. It means that your player's character *will* eventually become a superhero/action hero/legend whatever, and there's nothing you can do to stop that and still have characters grow and change. Well right, and to some degree the rules do define the kind of stories you tell with the system. But my point is that I directly cite this effect as the reason D&D has so much appeal. Because it's one of the few systems to actually have a power curve like that. It's also the most successful system. Even other systems designed to simulate superheroes, like champions, have a slow progression system. Because if you do that your games and stories end up looking exactly like D&D, even if they're superficially different. You can only tell stories about superheroes, not even "survival horror" or "noir mystery" or other stories that depend on protagonists being weak and intrinsically limited in ability. Well of course, if you're looking for weak heroes, then by all means, choose another system. D&D isn't about creating weak PCs. It's about creating heroes like Legolas or King Arthur. Now that doesn't mean that you can't run horror campaigns in D&D, it's just that the horror takes on a more epic scale. Killing horrible monsters isn't really horror in terms of D&D. It's just simply an average days work. So you can't really do a classic zombie tale (at least not as a horror story anyway). Remember, monster slaying is everyday in D&D. And really in most RPGs, just fighting a monster isn't especially horrible. Yeah, it's another beast. We've all fought them before. And anyone who knows the rules of the game simply knows the creature is a straight up rules construct. Regardless of what game you're playing. You can't get the cheap "BOO!" jump-out-of-the-shadows horror style that you can get in a video game or a movie. Also, to a certain extent horror requires bending of the rules. It also requires a rather rigid rules system as well, so that when the rules are bent, the PCs realize it. The PCs have to feel a legitimate doubt and fear of the unknown. Throw in something that they can't fight and then you get some real horror. Horror in D&D isn't Resident Evil, think more in terms of The Ring or Final Destination. When you're fighting an intangible force that's immune to your swords and spells, you'll get scared. I doubt it. Yeah, levelling up is a very cheap and simple way to give people a thrill of excitement and addict them to the game's challenge-reward cycle. But it's also a reason a lot of people who dislike the game make fun of it and are deeply skeptical about its ability to tell non-childish stories. All you have to do is hear people mutter snide remarks about a "level 15 baker" or "Epic-level mail carrier" to see why. True. But a lot of people like it as well. D&D is the only RPG to use a system like this and also the most popular.
Arivia 03-19-07, 03:34 PM	Anyway, it's evident that character creation is tops on the list as the Character Optimization (http://boards1.wizards.com/forumdisplay.php?f=615) boards have the most posts and threads, with Classes and Prestige Classes (http://boards1.wizards.com/forumdisplay.php?f=15) second in line. Third is the What's a DM to Do? (http://boards1.wizards.com/forumdisplay.php?f=53) boards, so DMing obviously takes up a great interest. Magic is 4th and combat is fifth. Perhaps hack and slash isn't the main interest, if combat is last of those. Interesting.. How much of those first four boards are devoted to combat, though? CO is usually about power optimization, and D&D classes are made for combat, while DMs have plenty of combat concerns. Magic is usually combative in D&D.
Arivia 03-19-07, 03:36 PM	True. But a lot of people like it as well. D&D is the only RPG to use a system like this and also the most popular. You make my sides hurt. Level-and-class has been the standard for much of this field's history, and I believe it wasn't until the late 70s that anyone even tried anything else.
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-19-07, 03:38 PM	Maybe you're rusty, but I'll remind you anyway: Status is a Merit, which you buy with XP. Please read the latter half of the post you quoted, and I'll again remind you that not everything is numbers, especially in story-and-politics-bound Vampire. (Which of late explicitly glosses over numbers to get at the political goodies: see the Requiem Chronicler's Guide.) Oh, I've never played Requiem. I've just played Masquerade. So apparently things are slightly different now. I found the new white wolf system so abhorrent I have yet to read it or play it at all.
Seeker95 03-19-07, 03:39 PM	The system generally does not support the style of play that old-school players are used to.I'm about as old school as you get, and I disagree with this statement. The 3e system supports the style of play (more accurately, styles) that old-schoolers are used to. However, it also supports (and admittedly, even fosters) a style of play that seems much more new-school: numeric builds. That does not prevent old-school character development approaches.
Arivia 03-19-07, 03:40 PM	Oh, I've never played Requiem. I've just played Masquerade. So apparently things are slightly different now. I found the new white wolf system so abhorrent I have yet to read it or play it at all. The relevant points are still the same: Status becomes a Background, and Vampire's politics get a bit tainted by a few wars and the rest of the metaplot, but it's still the same. EDIT: There is nothing innately bad about Requiem compared to Masquerade; there is plenty good and better.
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-19-07, 03:46 PM	The problem is that D&D schizophrenically switches back and forth between saying you should realistically try to roleplay your character and saying that you're playing a game about making war against monsters and you should try to be as good at that as possible. What this ends up creating is schizophrenic, bitter debates on the boards that lead to things like the Stormwind Fallacy. I agree. There is definitely a double-think going on in D&D. Yes, and that's the problem, that the game is set up so that there's any incentive to think this way at all. Giving XP for beating encounters, making the default punishment for losing an encounter death (and giving no XP for losing, even losing impressively or gracefully), making 90% of all mechanics have to do with combat -- what do you expect? It's a wargame with a narrative laid loosely over it. Well, the mechanics generally are going to cover combat in a game of heroes, as for the most part, you don't need mechanics to help you roleplay. You do need mechanics to resolve stuff like "I try to bash open the door" and "I slay the dragon". But when you're talking to the king... you can just well... talk to the king. If you started out by *dropping* the wargame and saying "This is a game about making up a story and playing a role within it, where there is no winning and losing", the design becomes very easy. Just like it becomes very easy if you *drop* the roleplay and say "We're just going to make a balanced wargame with strict rules, and any roleplaying will be this sort of side thing that gives flavor to the game and nothing else." I don't think the design does become easy in the first case. Designing RPG rules is hard, because everyone has different stories they'd like to tell. These are ways to balance the game side of D&D. They still don't really make sure that the story you make up will be interesting or good or give everyone a fair chance to participate. Well, yes, stories aren't about rules, they're about people. If the PCs and DM make boring characters and plots, then the stories will suck. The rules are there effectively to make the story seem more alive and less like playing out the DM's novel. The rules do allow the PCs to participate more in the story than they would otherwise, where the DM just declares the result of every action. The problem is that once you take out mastery of the rules many people become bored, because that really is so much of what the game is. If all choices become equal then the game should be about playing your role -- but the game gives you *no guidance for doing that*, which means that unless you're playing with a bunch of naturals it's likely to be un-fun and frustrating. What kind of guidance do you expect as far as roleplaying goes? I mean roleplaying is something we do naturally. Long before we even knew what RPGs were, we were roleplaying. It's just that without rules, we didn't have any coherent game and sooner or later things fell apart into: "BANG YOU'RE DEAD!" "NO I'M NOT!" "ARE TOO!" "AM NOT!" I don't legitimately believe we need any help role-playing. The job of good rules is to take their hands off the role-playing end and merely provide an environment conducive to role-playing. That's it.
ArcTan 03-19-07, 03:46 PM	Well right, and to some degree the rules do define the kind of stories you tell with the system. But my point is that I directly cite this effect as the reason D&D has so much appeal. Because it's one of the few systems to actually have a power curve like that. It's also the most successful system. Do you really think that this is a factor in its success? The fact that the competitors *don't* try to imitate it wholesale should tell you something, shouldn't it? Sure, a lot of people who get used to it find other games "slow" or "boring" afterwards, though generally because they have a shallow view of it. And yet I think there are just as many people who find D&D annoying because of the monomaniacal focus on "levelling up" and the way this distorts the game and the story. I know a lot of the D&D haters I know regard levelling up as one of the things they dislike most, and a lot of games that aren't that different from D&D -- including most of the ones you name -- can pretend to be fundamentally different games that will fix everything wrong with D&D (which they don't) by getting rid of the levelling up system. Well of course, if you're looking for weak heroes, then by all means, choose another system. D&D isn't about creating weak PCs. It's about creating heroes like Legolas or King Arthur. Now that doesn't mean that you can't run horror campaigns in D&D, it's just that the horror takes on a more epic scale. Killing horrible monsters isn't really horror in terms of D&D. It's just simply an average days work. So you can't really do a classic zombie tale (at least not as a horror story anyway). Remember, monster slaying is everyday in D&D. D&D's Heroes of Horror game basically says you have to do a lot of work in the metagame -- in the freeform talking-about-it part that's not really part of the D&D ruleset -- to make a D&D campaign feel "horrific". It's possible. It's possible to do a lot of cool stuff in D&D. But because the rules don't directly fit with it, it's a lot of work. Even the Taint mechanic is limited in how well it can mimic "taintedness" because of its tie to the powering-up, gaining-levels, slaughtering-bad-guy mechanics of D&D. And really in most RPGs, just fighting a monster isn't especially horrible. Yeah, it's another beast. We've all fought them before. And anyone who knows the rules of the game simply knows the creature is a straight up rules construct. Regardless of what game you're playing. You can't get the cheap "BOO!" jump-out-of-the-shadows horror style that you can get in a video game or a movie. It depends on the RPG. The problem is that even the games you're talking about maintain D&D's basic "kill the monster" structure as a way to give the story oomph, even though killing monsters is really a very limited way to tell stories. It's like how the mainstream comic book industry can't seem to get away from the idea of a superhero who fights supervillains as a way to tell stories. Also, to a certain extent horror requires bending of the rules. It also requires a rather rigid rules system as well, so that when the rules are bent, the PCs realize it. The PCs have to feel a legitimate doubt and fear of the unknown. Throw in something that they can't fight and then you get some real horror. Horror in D&D isn't Resident Evil, think more in terms of The Ring or Final Destination. ...Enh. But the game's *structure* demands that things end either with "The PCs fail and are killed" or "The PCs succeed and kill their enemy". More complex things like this frustrate the way character advancement works, the way the combat mechanics work, etc. You can do it. But you're clearly bending the game to do something it wasn't meant to do. As you point out, you're creating *exceptions*, left and right, to the rules, not actually using rules about horror. (And if the rules are meant to do horror then they do horror pretty well.) True. But a lot of people like it as well. D&D is the only RPG to use a system like this and also the most popular. Oh, c'mon. D&D is the most popular RPG, period. Trying to claim that any element of D&D is what makes it the most popular is ignoring the massive effect of being the first RPG and having a powerful marketing engine does. It's like trying to figure out what "secret ingredient" makes Coca-Cola the world's most popular brand of vaguely flavored sugar water.
Lokiyn 03-19-07, 03:51 PM	Just as a side note Did anyone ever see that aberrant subset that broke social interaction down into a combat style setup? An example in dnd would be somthing like Social AC 10+(cha Mod)+(1/5 Sense Motive)+(Reputation Score) Vs Social Attack (1/5 skill)+(reputation score)+(Int or Cha) (thats just a cobbled up example) But the point was that it allowed one to devise a "social CR" for characters and introduce a combat that was more than just "i rolled higher i win" It actually worked (to a limited degree) to allow one to simulate the back and forth of a debate or argument using the existing combat rules. it also worked well in simulating the social star browbeating the guttersnipe into submission (much higher reputation, higher charisma) Besides, our group has come to the conclusion that dnd isn't about producing heros, its about producing monsters wrapped in human skin that pretend to be good. For example Princess locked in tower GoodStorm the tower, slay our foes, rescue the princess, collect the spoils of battle EvilStorm the tower, kill everything, Get the loot, untie the broad there really doesn't seem to be much difference between the two in practice.
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-19-07, 03:53 PM	The relevant points are still the same: Status becomes a Background, and Vampire's politics get a bit tainted by a few wars and the rest of the metaplot, but it's still the same. Well, you couldn't buy backgrounds with XP in masquerade. Backgrounds were just assigned to you after play began as a reward. EDIT: There is nothing innately bad about Requiem compared to Masquerade; there is plenty good and better. It wasn't so much Requiem that I didn't like so much as the new system in the core world of darkness book. Everything in that system just seemed off to me. I didn't like the fixed difficulty numbers or the new combat system, or the vices system or really anything in that book. On a side note, they also totally butchered the storyline to Mage: The Awakening.
ArcTan 03-19-07, 03:53 PM	Well, the mechanics generally are going to cover combat in a game of heroes, as for the most part, you don't need mechanics to help you roleplay. You do need mechanics to resolve stuff like "I try to bash open the door" and "I slay the dragon". But when you're talking to the king... you can just well... talk to the king. You say this, and yet games bog down far more easily and commonly when you try to do the "talk to the king" part than the "slay the dragon" part. Trying to tell a story through imaginary conversations is not easy. It's frequently not fun because people don't know what they're supposed to do when they do it. This is what a_psh was pointing out with the hour-long shopkeeper conversations. Real conversations frequently bog down in trivialities and waste time, even when you *really are* trying to accomplish something in a conversation. Real conversations are frequently boring. In order to have fun and try to accomplish goals in a conversation, you need direction, especially when you're not just conversing naturally but having a made-up conversation as a made-up character about a made-up situation. I don't think the design does become easy in the first case. Designing RPG rules is hard, because everyone has different stories they'd like to tell. "Easy" is, of course, exaggerating the matter. (But then designing a fun pure wargame isn't "easy" either.) However, it's a lot easier, because you've eliminated this schizophrenia, and you know exactly what you're trying to do and where you're going wrong if you fail. D&D's current problem is that tons of people don't realize this schizophrenia exists. They'll talk about the intractable problem of people wanting to play weak characters to get attention without realizing that this is only a problem in a game like D&D. If all we cared about was roleplaying, of *course* everyone would be trying to get attention -- getting attention would be the RP version of "winning" the "game" -- and the rules would provide fair ways for people to dole out attention to each player, and the character's "weakness" or "strength" would be irrelevant as long as the character was interesting. Well, yes, stories aren't about rules, they're about people. If the PCs and DM make boring characters and plots, then the stories will suck. The rules are there effectively to make the story seem more alive and less like playing out the DM's novel. Which they miserably fail to do, especially outside of combat. If it is a game like that, it doesn't become not the DM's novel, it becomes the DM's novel punctuated by an endless series of Spot checks, Search checks, Listen checks, and Diplomacy checks. What kind of guidance do you expect as far as roleplaying goes? I mean roleplaying is something we do naturally. Long before we even knew what RPGs were, we were roleplaying. It's just that without rules, we didn't have any coherent game and sooner or later things fell apart into: "BANG YOU'RE DEAD!" "NO I'M NOT!" "ARE TOO!" "AM NOT!" I don't legitimately believe we need any help role-playing. The job of good rules is to take their hands off the role-playing end and merely provide an environment conducive to role-playing. That's it. Yes and no. D&D, after all, doesn't actually provide much guidance for "BANG YOU'RE DEAD!" situations that don't actually involve banging someone dead. Am I allowed to have a long-lost uncle in this city? Should I be allowed to fall in love with this character and develop a relationship with her? Is this the right time for our character's anger with each other to break out into a fight? In every case, letting one person do this will step on other people's turf and steal game time away. Do we have rules for how to deal with this? Not really. That's the problem.
boozerker 03-19-07, 03:58 PM	Just as a side note Did anyone ever see that aberrant subset that broke social interaction down into a combat style setup? An example in dnd would be somthing like Social AC 10+(cha Mod)+(1/5 Sense Motive)+(Reputation Score) Vs Social Attack (1/5 skill)+(reputation score)+(Int or Cha) (thats just a cobbled up example) But the point was that it allowed one to devise a "social CR" for characters and introduce a combat that was more than just "i rolled higher i win" It actually worked (to a limited degree) to allow one to simulate the back and forth of a debate or argument using the existing combat rules. If it's using combat mechanics, there must have been social HP. Sounds a bit cool though, where's it from?
Dragon Snack 03-19-07, 03:59 PM	My eyes have long since glossed over in reading this thread... I find it funny that D&D is such a "bad" game when my groups have a long trash heap of RPGs that fell far short of D&D (including systems I liked that did not satisfy the rest of the group). Even the other games I currently play in (Savage Worlds and Serenity, in case you feel the need to rip them) fall short of D&D in my mind. I may like them (mainly because they do something different), but I don't see any other system that really compare to D&D. The only other system I've played longer was WEGs SW d6 (Savage Worlds is closing in quickly on that), until they went out of business. Yeah, that's all personal opinion, just like what everybody else is posting when they say D&D is a "poor" system...
Arivia 03-19-07, 04:04 PM	Well, you couldn't buy backgrounds with XP in masquerade. Backgrounds were just assigned to you after play began as a reward. By the time I came in (the last revision, leading up through Demon till the end), that had changed - you could buy Backgrounds. It wasn't so much Requiem that I didn't like so much as the new system in the core world of darkness book. Everything in that system just seemed off to me. I didn't like the fixed difficulty numbers or the new combat system, or the vices system or really anything in that book. I had exactly the same reservations - the thing is, it's way cleaner in actual play. It's like exceptional Strength - how do you deal without it? By realizing that it just bogged things down in the first place. The Virtue/Vice axes are great in that they're a quick key to personality, and there's some wonderful tricks they pull off with them in supplements. On a side note, they also totally butchered the storyline to Mage: The Awakening. Atlantis is a bit hard to swallow, but the overall story makes sense in context of the game's theme; recent supplements have boiled that story down to its absolute basics and reopened the gates to Ascension's panoply of traditions and beliefs again (which was actually born out by the core rulebook, but it's very easy to lose stuff in there).
Lokiyn 03-19-07, 04:09 PM	Hmm it first showed up in Aberrant World Wide Phase 1, and more information was presented in Forceful Personalities. Apparently the simple method is to substitute your physical stats for your corresponding mental stats and "fight" possibly with your diplomacy as your base attack and or your sense motive as your base ac, With your hp being something like wisdom mod * level
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-19-07, 04:09 PM	Do you really think that this is a factor in its success? The fact that the competitors *don't* try to imitate it wholesale should tell you something, shouldn't it? Often times its competitors try to cater to a different subset of gamers. Sure, a lot of people who get used to it find other games "slow" or "boring" afterwards, though generally because they have a shallow view of it. And yet I think there are just as many people who find D&D annoying because of the monomaniacal focus on "levelling up" and the way this distorts the game and the story. Well again, numbers state that more people like D&D than hate it. That's just pure statistics of people who play D&D. If everyone thought it sucked, nobody would want to play it. D&D's Heroes of Horror game basically says you have to do a lot of work in the metagame -- in the freeform talking-about-it part that's not really part of the D&D ruleset -- to make a D&D campaign feel "horrific". It's possible. It's possible to do a lot of cool stuff in D&D. But because the rules don't directly fit with it, it's a lot of work. Well of course, but horror is generally quite a bit of work. It's a difficult feat to scare people playing an imaginary game with imaginary characters. It depends on the RPG. The problem is that even the games you're talking about maintain D&D's basic "kill the monster" structure as a way to give the story oomph, even though killing monsters is really a very limited way to tell stories. Well, a great deal of stories have action sequences. The more important aspect of the story is why are they killing the monster. If it's just a "there's treasure in there, lets take it" story, then it's not going to be very deep. If on the other hand they're hunting a werewolf who happens to be one of the PC's brothers, then things may get a bit more interesting. ...Enh. But the game's *structure* demands that things end either with "The PCs fail and are killed" or "The PCs succeed and kill their enemy". More complex things like this frustrate the way character advancement works, the way the combat mechanics work, etc. Yeah, I agree. D&D definitely makes it way too easy for PCs to die. I'd like some more rules for PCs being left for dead and similar things that continue the story as opposed to bring it to a screeching halt. You can do it. But you're clearly bending the game to do something it wasn't meant to do. As you point out, you're creating *exceptions*, left and right, to the rules, not actually using rules about horror. (And if the rules are meant to do horror then they do horror pretty well.) No, not really. I don't believe rules can ever do horror, unless the rules are hidden from the PCs. Horror is not knowing what's going to happen next. Part of horror is having your expectations of reality twisted (reality in this case is the rules). The dead don't just get up and walk. ghosts can't just materialize out of nowhere. I shot that guy in the head with a shotgun... how is he still alive?! Bending the rules of reality is one of the primary tools of horror. As far as supernatural horror goes anyway. Now note that all those above are things that happen in D&D on a regular basis, so you've got to step it up to the next level and bend not the reality of the world we live in, but the reality of the world the heroes live in. There are other forms of horror, like exploring the depths of the evil of mankind, which you can also do. But in any case, horror exposes you to some revelation that the universe is not exactly as well understood and safe as you thought. Once the PCs know the rules, then the horror is lost, because now it's just another creature that fits within their conception of reality. Oh, c'mon. D&D is the most popular RPG, period. Trying to claim that any element of D&D is what makes it the most popular is ignoring the massive effect of being the first RPG and having a powerful marketing engine does. It's like trying to figure out what "secret ingredient" makes Coca-Cola the world's most popular brand of vaguely flavored sugar water. I disagree, brand name may help to some degree, but remember that it's not like most of the people here haven't tried other RPGs, it's just that other RPGs haven't quite been as good. At least as far as my players are concerned, it's D&D's level advancement that puts it above the rest.
Arivia 03-19-07, 04:12 PM	I disagree, brand name may help to some degree, but remember that it's not like most of the people here haven't tried other RPGs, it's just that other RPGs haven't quite been as good. We've been over this a lot in Future Releases - the online populace is not representative of players as a whole. Market share figures, market penetration figures - all of these indicate that many people see "RPG" and "D&D" as synonymous, that many people do not even know other games exist.
Solik 03-19-07, 04:15 PM	That's not really what he was getting at. He's making the usual Forge rant about how D&D has lots of rules but the rules aren't intentionally focused on shaping the game experience to be fun -- there's just a lot of irrelevant rules that try to simulate things that aren't fun. Freeform isn't the solution, because freeform doesn't have rules and therefore doesn't shape the game. The point is -- or should be -- that D&D could benefit from being rewritten so the rules are designed to explicitly and intentionally encourage a certain kind of storytelling and roleplaying, which right now they aren't. The point is that I don't want them written that way. I disagree in full that D&D would benefit from this; in fact, I'd probably stop playing if this sort of stuff was enforced on me. I'll choose which adventures to run and how to run them, or I'll write my own. The rules can stay the hell out of that, thanks. Exactly. This gives the lie to the idea that D&D can support "any kind of story" and "doesn't privilege one kind of play over another". D&D still has the core of a wargame deep inside. It's still a game about fighting. It's hard to keep the pace up for even *one session* that doesn't have combat in it, much less base a campaign around a concept that doesn't involve combat. Maybe for you. I don't have any problems, and neither do plenty of other people, based on things I've seen and read. Task resolution says that you tell your GM what you want your character to do but he makes everything up as he goes along. He might then ask you to roll something to see if you succeed or fail at some task. How that task actually relates to your goals is completely out of your hands, though. Maybe there's secret documents in the safe. Maybe there's a bomb wired to go off when you open it. In the second case, you succeed in your task but don't get what you wanted at all. It's all the GM's fiat running everything behind the scenes. You have near-zero authorship as far as the game is concerned. And that means, really, that you're not contributing anything to the shared imagined fiction. You're just sitting there being entertained by the GM, who's calling all the shots, some of them in secret. You rolling a good number on your Safecracking check only means something if the GM decides that success should actually lead to a positive result. He can just as easily shaft you majorly any time you do anything regardless of how it turns out. He's putting on a magic show, using the rules to hide the fact that, really, you as the player can't do anything directly. He might as well just be calling out results at random from behind his little GM screen, given that the game mechanics have almost nothing to do with your character's ultimate destiny. This entire block is utterly and completely wrong. I mean, sure, these scenarios are possible -- if you have a jerk for a DM who goes directly against the advice in the books and the precedents in most of the official adventures. Why is it that 99% of mastering mechanics is just improving your ability to play this shoddily-put-together wargame instead of actually improving your ability to make a cool story happen at the table with your friends? Why on earth are you expecting a textbook on storytelling from RPG sourcebooks? There's classes and generic books on that stuff. It's utterly pointless for a game company to replicate that material. One of the dumbest things about D&D is how it basically turns into freeform the moment you step out of combat. Completely false. In fact, the only thing that changes is the mechanic of turns. The thing that makes a pen-and-paper RPG special when you compare it to like every other game out there is that it's all about this stuff that you're imagining together. No... no, it isn't, at all. You can do that with board games, minimalist video games, and freeform. PNP RPGs are special because they have flexible rulesets, allowing players to be creative rather than being so limited by preset parameters common in video games. If it were the case that there were rules that made sure something had to *happen* in a scene that people were in -- rules for making things *happen* that don't have anything to do with defeating equivalent-CR challenges on a tactical grid -- it wouldn't be this way. And codifying that in mathematical or logical rules would be either nonsense, or would take you back to video game levels of restriction (and probably still be nonsense, just a different kind). Instead, this is a rule of thumb that DMs should follow and that the games directly suggest -- involve the players directly in every scene, as they are the stars. And people fight for spotlight because outside of combat -- which isn't balanced very well, but when well-balanced forces every character role in the party to contribute something to the fight -- there aren't any rules for sharing spotlight, and it jumps around more or less randomly unless you try to hog it or unless the DM becomes the Spotlight Nazi and starts arbitrarily pushing people to do stuff in scenes. Plenty of players don't care for spotlight. You're advocating forcing them to take it on through a set of rules that governs who's important when? And for the record, character diversity in parties takes care of spotlight just fine. There's plenty more to D&D than just combat, and that's evident in many of the most important spells and abilities in the game. The fact that the rules for combat XP are so *clear* while the rules for non-combat or RP XP are so unclear and haphazard are what, more than anything else, tell you what kind of game D&D is. I mean, XP is what holds the whole game together -- the DM's primary means of rewarding players for making the game work -- and the only decent rules for it involve defeating monsters (and, okay, traps). And once again, this is to keep D&D flexible. If you start getting specific with XP rewards outside of combat, you'll end up with a game where people feel they can only do X, Y, and Z (or that those are the only things worth doing). With "freeform" DM-based XP handouts, individual groups can determine on their own what actions are important, fun, and worth XP. That is as it should be. I mean, seriously, many players, not unreasonably, get really angry if their characters actually die -- the DM's job is to make sure that the "challenges" are specifically designed to be beatable and survivable. This wasn't always the way it worked, but it sure is the expectation in mainstream D&D now -- because it's more like a story about a challenge than it is a real challenge. Your jump here from "beatable and survivable" to "story about a challenge a real challenge" is perplexing. A challenge that isn't beatable or survivable isn't a challenge; it's a death trap. "Beatable and survivable" imply a valid challenge, not one that you're guaranteed to win. If you want to really be challenged, put some limits on what the GM can do. Then have him take the gloves off. You know, for all your complaining about wargaming, this is, by far, the best advice I've heard thus far for transforming D&D into a real wargame. Which means, of course, that I'll ignore it completely, but whatever. Axing the idea of "GM is God" is absolutely vital, however, since that also gives us "GM is sole author." And then the other players aren't doing anything. I'm starting to think you're playing D&D like most people are playing Monopoly. The rules don't support this at all. Well, either the GM is wasting enormous amounts of time with unnecessary prep, or she's actually winging most things as she goes along. Or she's using the rules. What's the challenge of getting the safe? What's the expected treasure value of such a challenge? Adjust (half, double, etc, as with some monsters) based on safe location and owners. Then roll it up. It goes something like this: "The GM is the author of the story and the players control the protagonists." It's called that because this is basically how every RPG book from the 80s described a roleplaying game (i.e. everyone pretend it's simple)... and it's completely untenable (i.e. it's actually impossible). The problem word there is "author." The entire group are collectively the author; the DM controls everyone that's not the protagonists and, using the rules, makes judgment calls for action resolution. This is exactly as the books present the game. "The PCs win no matter what" is a little strong, but yes, most "challenges" in D&D are "The PCs win unless they do something very stupid or are very unlucky". This keeps the game flowing. If all the challenges were of higher difficulty, you'd have to stop and replace dead people more often. To note, climactic and pivotal challenges are supposed to be of higher difficulty. Players should never be in the position of creating a Sacred Purifier and having the DM pointedly avoid ever having undead foes in the game, or playing a Wizard and the DM refusing to give the PCs any downtime to prepare spells. You can't solve people problems through rules. This DM is a problem, and no matter the ruleset, he'd find a way to be a problem (and if nothing worked -- by whining to play something else incessantly). Saying "Just ignore the rules of D&D and work among yourselves to create a story" *is* a problem. It's a huge problem. It's really, really hard to try to do this kind of thing with no guidance So use a published adventure. That's the "story" part of the books. You may find the [i]quality of those stories lacking -- but that's another discussion altogether. What about skills, you say? Skills unrelated to combat or trapfinding are a joke. This I agree with. D&D would benefit from a revamped skill system that makes areas other than combat more interesting, by incorporating a wealth of options and tactical decisions comparable to combat. I bet you'd then have a whole lot more to complain about with this, since that seems to be exactly the opposite of what you're suggesting. There's still some pretty good ways to do this, though. Try having dangerous rooms with multiple layers of traps that require a bit of puzzle solving and application of several skills used in tandem to complete (with multiple solutions possible to different types of characters). Social situations are much easier, since it's trivial to incorporate diplomacy, bluff, sense motive, and disguise into one big stretch of interaction. James Bond style situations are recommended for this. I'm not saying there's anything particularly wrong with dungeon crawl hackfests. But it's stupid that people keep pretending that this isn't what D&D is, and that you can do other things with D&D just as easily as you can do dungeon crawl hackfests and so other RPGs are unnecessary. Given that I've only played a couple sessions of "dungeon crawl hackfests" in my entire history of D&D, I can only repeat what I've said to you in another thread -- I think you're playing a very different D&D than I am, and I don't think I like yours very much. So why do people keep arguing that it's a good thing that for every possible story situation outside of combat, D&D gives you no rules *at all*, or sometimes no rules beyond rolling a single die against a single DC? (Seriously, reducing the final negotiations with the enemy king about the disposition of the borders to "roll a Diplomacy check" would be like making the final battle against the demon monster a single "roll a Combat check". Saying you can add "flavor" to the Diplomacy check by narrating around it is like saying you can add "flavor" to a single d20 Combat check by describing the long pitched battle in RP.) Yes, that would suck. Good thing the rules don't work that way. Diplomacy is only used to change someone's attitude towards you, which doesn't in any way mean that you succeed in negotiations. It can help, like a buff can help you in combat, but that's about it. But if it's not the kind of game that, as you say, the game was built upon, you will run into endless ambiguities, disagreements and problems. There's no real way to solve this. You could make a set of "generic rules" that apply to any "thing you're trying to do," but now the story becomes superficial -- the game is exactly the same no matter what the circumstance is. In order for a game to allow players to do anything, you just have to provide some general guidelines, cover things you think would be most common and complicated (like fighting), and rely on a human to make rulings. And this is the madness that lies behind the Stormwind Fallacy, that your character sheet can be a mess of arcane symbols that make you a Fighter/Rogue/Bear Warrior/Eldritch Knight/Warmage, but "flavorwise" you're just a really good warrior. Rules and RP live in different worlds and barely touch. No, that's preference. That's people who like abstract ability building systems playing D&D their way. It's only harder because you have schizophrenic goals. And that's been a very interesting aspect of game design for a long time. Game design textbooks frequently discuss the disparity between gameplay and storytelling -- that gameplay specifically requires the lack of a story, that the player is free to perform actions, and those actions themselves generate a story of sorts. Those same books then look at games that attempt to tie the two together, like Final Fantasy, and call them interesting attempts and nothing more. Meanwhile, of course, actual game players eat that stuff up. It's not popular just because of a logo -- it's popular because it's fun. People are sufficiently advanced enough to be able to handle "schizophrenic goals." It really isn't all that hard to switch between things. At any rate, suffice it to say that I am in full disagreement with the OP and everything he's calling for D&D to become.
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-19-07, 04:18 PM	By the time I came in (the last revision, leading up through Demon till the end), that had changed - you could buy Backgrounds. Hmm.. I've got V:tM 3rd edition, and I don't see any spot for buying backgrounds on the XP table, there's no listed cost anyway. I thought 3rd edition was the most recent vampire, prior to Requiem but I could be wrong. I had exactly the same reservations - the thing is, it's way cleaner in actual play. It's like exceptional Strength - how do you deal without it? By realizing that it just bogged things down in the first place. Well it seems cleaner, but also oversimplified. Especially the fact that there is no damage roll really bothered me. Atlantis is a bit hard to swallow, but the overall story makes sense in context of the game's theme; recent supplements have boiled that story down to its absolute basics and reopened the gates to Ascension's panoply of traditions and beliefs again (which was actually born out by the core rulebook, but it's very easy to lose stuff in there). From what I read of the Awakening, it got rid of the whole ascension war theory and now you're just a bunch of guys who can cast spells. There was a special metaplot behind the original mage that made it interesting. You had the technocracy who wanted to control reality, but they wanted to do it for the good of mankind, because convincing mankind that magic didn't exist protected them from a lot of the dangerous stuff that was out there. They weren't exactly evil, but they could be. In the Awakening, they're replaced with a bunch of faceless villains called the exarchs (I think that's their name), who are just your typical vanilla D&D style evil sorcerer who wants to conquer reality for the hell of it. No higher purpose or anything. It's just... I'm evil and I want to have all the power for myself. I just found it incredibly dull, given the rich number of viewpoints in Mage: the Ascension.
Arivia 03-19-07, 04:22 PM	This entire block is utterly and completely wrong. I mean, sure, these scenarios are possible -- if you have a jerk for a DM who goes directly against the advice in the books and the precedents in most of the official adventures. See this (http://boards1.wizards.com/showpost.php?p=11823578&postcount=147). I'll leave the other points to, well, others.
Grand Theft Otto 03-19-07, 04:30 PM	So, because you're imagining stuff "together," you need some way to agree on what you all should be imagining and how. That's roleplaying's fundamental thing: negotiated imagination. A system really has to address that, in my opinion. Furthermore, a system has to help you make all the stuff you're imagining be awesome. (In particular, imagined events, since there are more of those than imagined people and things and places, and how you deal with imagined events really determines how the game progresses from moment to moment.) That's the whole reason you want a set of rules rather than a freeform game in the first place: you can do some negotiated imagining without rules, but rules can help steer that carefully and help it along, turning what would otherwise be so-so play into good play. Essentially everyone's a GM. I dont think that's going to happen, nor do I think its actually a good thing for most groups. You'd be targeting such a small niche of idealistic and utopian gaming circles that I've never encountered in real life. The resulting average play experience would be so horrible I might buy a ticket just to see Optimus Prime slapping someone's character with his robo boner while an old woman screams "Tomatoes! Tomatoes por los muertos!" at the top of her lungs on top a pile of vorpal whips. Before the rocks fall that is. If you're talking something along the lines as "Swashbuckling Cards", where players get dealt a number of cards at the beginning of each session that lets them dictate a few events throughout play (ie, "get a rumor", "find a secret passage", "conveniently placed bucket of soapy water", "guillable guard") that could work. But I think someone's got to grab the bull by the short hairs and be the head cook in the kitchen. Otherwise I'd just play a Betrayal at the House on the Hill all the time.
Arivia 03-19-07, 04:32 PM	Hmm.. I've got V:tM 3rd edition, and I don't see any spot for buying backgrounds on the XP table, there's no listed cost anyway. I thought 3rd edition was the most recent vampire, prior to Requiem but I could be wrong. *shrugs* Well it seems cleaner, but also oversimplified. Especially the fact that there is no damage roll really bothered me. I think it's a good thing: it makes combat slightly deadlier. Also, note that everything plays into your roll that gets converted into damage - you end up with a smaller dice pool than before, and actually get less successes than you would have in your damage pool. I just found it incredibly dull, given the rich number of viewpoints in Mage: the Ascension. First off, the Awakening core rulebook is really dry. So dry, in fact, that there are lots of good details that get lost: did you catch the Silver Ladder wanting to follow in the Exarchs' footsteps? Second: Remember that that explanation of the Technocracy didn't happen until their splatbook, and the Exarchs don't have one yet. However, the people the characters are actually supposed to face - the Seers - do have more detail and much more motivation. (Check them out in the Antagonists chapter.) Third: Mage did the same thing Vampire did, which was fold all of its old splats into one new social splat. Most of Ascension's cool traditions all exist in the Free Council, just like how all the various permutations of the Camarilla exist in Requiem's Invictus. Through this, they open up the moral grey areas and inter-player conflict much much more, as each of the social groups now has a completely different philosophy, not just different thematics.
Arivia 03-19-07, 04:36 PM	Essentially everyone's a GM. I dont think that's going to happen, nor do I think its actually a good thing for most groups. You'd be targeting such a small niche of idealistic and utopian gaming circles that I've never encountered in real life. Either that, or you restrict the GM's power - say, by setting up a pre-designed structure and giving everyone free reign inside that structure. If you boil D&D down to save the something from the someone else in the terrible place, which always occurs in a set order, there's plenty of room for creativity on everyone's part without the GM running roughshod over everyone. Admittedly, these games are more constrained, but there's plenty of possibility in them (Paranoia uses them to have fun with shop clerks; VtR uses it to explore operatic tradition), they're much easier to run, and often do get people more involved.
Solik 03-19-07, 04:46 PM	See this. I'll leave the other points to, well, others. I'm rather confused as to what that had to do with anything being discussed.
Grand Theft Otto 03-19-07, 04:52 PM	Either that, or you restrict the GM's power - say, by setting up a pre-designed structure and giving everyone free reign inside that structure. If you boil D&D down to save the something from the someone else in the terrible place, which always occurs in a set order, there's plenty of room for creativity on everyone's part without the GM running roughshod over everyone. See my above comment on the storytelling miscarriage that would likely follow for your average group. First off, you'd have to distance the players from their characters, as essentially no one has a PC. Otherwise you'd have people constantly manipulating favor towards their characters (and against anyone who they had a rivalry with). Something along the lines of the card/board game "Slasher", where no one really controlled individual characters within the game, and just set about tormenting or helping the expendible meat as they saw fit (everyone filled the director role). That's not the experience I really go to an RPG for, nor do I think its why most people want to play one.
Arivia 03-19-07, 04:57 PM	See my above comment on the storytelling miscarriage that would likely follow for your average group. First off, you'd have to distance the players from their characters, as essentially no one has a PC. Otherwise you'd have people constantly manipulating favor towards their characters (and against anyone who they had a rivalry with). Something along the lines of the card/board game "Slasher", where no one really controlled the characters within the game, and just set about tormenting or helping the expendible meat as they saw fit (everyone filled the director role). That's not the experience I really go to an RPG for, nor do I think its why most people want to play one. No, no. Everyone has a character inside that framework - you're still Bob the fighter, and the GM spends way more time responding to Bob. There is still a set GM, and set PCs - but both exist in the framework of the story, and then it's all improv from then on out. Also, the "killing characters" bit does work as an RPG - Classic/Zap! Paranoia, actually. @Solik: It's the best case I've found for player sovereignty.
boozerker 03-19-07, 05:16 PM	Either that, or you restrict the GM's power - say, by setting up a pre-designed structure and giving everyone free reign inside that structure. If you boil D&D down to save the something from the someone else in the terrible place, which always occurs in a set order, there's plenty of room for creativity on everyone's part without the GM running roughshod over everyone. There's a game, Rune RPG that lets everyone take turns sharing the mantle of DM. Everyone takes a turn running and creating scenarios. Players build scenarios from a checklist, using a set number of points: things that endanger the heroes cost points; elements that might benefit them add points. (So do terrain features, which make the fights more interesting and challenging.) So you pay points for traps and tricky tests of skill, but gain them for including treasures or easy challenges. That excerpt comes from the preview kit here (http://www.atlas-games.com/pdf_storage/RunePrev.pdf). You play as viking PCs. Of course, in that "RPG" people can actually win.
Grand Theft Otto 03-19-07, 05:17 PM	No, no. Everyone has a character inside that framework - you're still Bob the fighter, and the GM spends way more time responding to Bob. There is still a set GM, and set PCs - but both exist in the framework of the story, and then it's all improv from then on out. Someone has to decide where the Duke is, what is in the safe, etc. Multiple players create multiple opportunities for the equivalent of narrative roadblocks. Invite 6 people to sit around and write a story. You'll get a lot of cool ideas tossed around, the problem is narrowing them into a coherent end product. If you think action resolution slows down narrative play, wait til you see the mess that arises when you have 6 different views on what Duke Dunderhead's big secret is (assumign you got the comitte to agree there was one). Again, cooks and kitchens. I dont see this working for anyone, let alone the average group in any way except limited circumstances. And you're still better off just forming a writers group.
Grand Theft Otto 03-19-07, 05:26 PM	There's a game, Rune RPG that lets everyone take turns sharing the mantle of DM. That excerpt comes from the preview kit here (http://www.atlas-games.com/pdf_storage/RunePrev.pdf). You play as viking PCs. Of course, in that "RPG" people can actually win. Except its basically just a point buy battlefield for a limited unit skirmish. A dungeonkeeper sim with the hassle of having to roll the dice yourself. Part of the fun for me as a player is not knowing the answers to all the mysteries. If I create them, that robs me of the joy of the unkown. IMO, this method works a lot better for running fights than social situations and mysteries. I'm all for encouraging interaction between players and GM's. Whenever I start a campaign in any system, I ask the players to give me a list of things they want to see happen, and encourage them to figure out in game goals and go after those. I just think its more satisfying when someone sets up the stage and everyone sees how they play out.
DoveArrow 03-19-07, 05:29 PM	Disclosure: Before I post my comments here, I feel the need to confess something. I've never played 1st or 2nd edition. I have never known the trials or virtues of THAC0, I have no firsthand experience with having to kill other druids in order to advance in the druid class, and I don't know what it's like to play in a game where every class advances in levels at a different pace. What I know of those other editions is based on what I've heard other people talk about, and so I really can't say whether those older systems encouraged or discouraged roleplaying more than the current system. With that said, I have played in games that used the Palladium system and the Hero systems respectively, so I do have some experience outside of d20. I therefore hope you will respect my opinions on this discussion and take them for what they're worth (which is about two cents). :rant: Perhaps it's an absurd opinion, but I don't think the rules of D&D, either current or past, have anything to do with the art of storytelling. I think the rules exist simply to provide a framework for what characters, both player and non-player, are capable of doing in game. I therefore think it's ridiculous to blame the rules for taking the focus away from storytelling, because the rules have nothing to do with storytelling; they exist separately, and should therefore be evaluated separately. In my opinion, the art of storytelling is ultimately the responsibility of the players and the DM. As a player, it is your responsibility to come up with an intriguing, and compelling character whose background and actions fit into the world that your DM has created. As a DM, it is your responsibility to create a world that is rich with history, intriguing plots, fantastic creatures, and memorable NPCs. If the story works, it is because both the players and the DM have lived up to their responsibilities. If the story fails, it's because either the players have failed to live up to their responsibilties, or the DM has. I dunno, I just remember in 1977 it was just more fun. There was less dredging through Rules and more inventive playing. It was... purer. I think this quote, at the beginning of your rant, gets most directly at the problem you have with 3.5. Setting aside the issue of whether or not the game was more 'pure' back in 1977 (because I think that's more of a subjective opinion, than anything), it's certainly true that, under the d20 system, games can grind to a halt whenever a player or a DM decides to argue over how a particular rule should be adjudicated in game. While I haven't played older editions of D&D, I have played in other systems, and I can personally attest to the fact that this issue is not something unique to 3.0 or 3.5. If it's a real problem for you, and one that you feel is detracting from the game, you can try using a system that is less rules intensive, or you can try using a simplified version of the 3.5 rules. You might also try finding ways to make sure that rules questions don't bog down the game. For example, you might try insisting that players have the book open to the appropriate page whenever they cast a spell, perform a skill check, or engage in a special attack action. If they don't, you might say that players lose their action that round, or you might force them to delay until the end of the next player's turn.:rant:
MysticalNyte 03-19-07, 05:54 PM	a_psh is exactly right. That is why I have stopped playing the game and just read FR novels now. Every new expanded rules set that comes in book or magazine that they read and your player just has to have for his uber character is one more thing to memorize. Its all way to much. Even all of the "upgrading the history of Land or city xxx" books is getting way out of hand if you follow novels and incorporate them into your game. And to all of us "old school D&D gamers" out there, if the internet was available for 1st or even 2ed back then, would all of this in depth arguing be going on about "mega rules", "mechanics", " I want everything spoon fed to me by Developer Joe Blow"? etc. be happening?
Grand Theft Otto 03-19-07, 06:47 PM	a_psh is exactly right. That is why I have stopped playing the game and just read FR novels now. Every new expanded rules set that comes in book or magazine that they read and your player just has to have for his uber character is one more thing to memorize. Its all way to much. Even all of the "upgrading the history of Land or city xxx" books is getting way out of hand if you follow novels and incorporate them into your game. Except thats not really what he's saying, if I understand correctly. He wants a more equal footing with players and DM's in terms of who controls the story. Which is pretty much the exact opposite of 1st edition, whose non-combat resolution (and indeed, many in combat resolution) was DM fiat, about as lopsided as you can get. Lets say your players have decided to try and break into some cort of command center somewhere. Part of the plan involves sneaking up and jumping a guard when he goes out for a smoke break and stealing a uniform. But who is to say the uniform fits a member, or if the guard takes a smoke break? In a system that encourages both player and DM input, the players can encourage their course of action (guard smokes, uniform fits, whatever) to be more likely. D&D has added a lot of mechanics, but is lacking some sort of way to players to jury rig the system from time to time. Call of Cthulhu somewhat had it in the form of the Luck stat. To my knowledge, outside of calling on Fate in 2nd edition Al-Quadim, D&D doesnt have anything built in. Yeah, you got action points to increase your hide roll or whatever, but that doesnt really get the guard out smoking in the first place. You rely on the whim of your DM to have him come out. Some DM's will play along, others wont. Unfortunately what should have been a pretty quick process of weeding out the asshats who refuse to ever play ball hasnt panned out that way. In the chest thumping realm of "macho" DMing, its frequently looked at as "coddling" your players to have that sort of thing happen.
Lokiyn 03-19-07, 07:13 PM	Currently the only way to get the game under player control is a severe amount of manipulation from the skill players. For the example above the only option is basically to somehow provide the "smokes" as a player. One thing i know i've done as a player was to fake a caterer rolling by with a cart and having a small basket fall off the cart (which of course was drugged) but that sort of thing is hard if not impossible to set up. Its easier in the dnd rules to simply slaughter the guards kill the ones that respond to the alarm and smash the door, than lure the guard away, pick the lock and steal the document.
Solik 03-19-07, 07:18 PM	What? No it isn't. Ghost Sounds, skill check, done. Compare that to combat.
Altar_Boy 03-19-07, 07:31 PM	If it's using combat mechanics, there must have been social HP. Sounds a bit cool though, where's it from? Dragon #294. BTW, for those of you talking about collaborative DMing, I might suggest you go to Terisia City, a sub-board of the Magic boards. Essentially, everyone is a DM, with no-one receiving greater or lesser privellege to determine outcomes (with some caveats: you can't destroy someone's home/thread, PC, etc.) . With good and fair people, it works well; with the average RPGer, it's a mind-numbing hell. I was fortunate that most are the former.
mysticpot31 03-19-07, 08:33 PM	Yes there are a lot of rules. My gaming group spent a lot of time arguing over this and that and looking up every little thing but that doesnt bother me about 3rd edition problems like that can be solved, what bothers me about 3rd edition is the following. The cost of the books: The rulebooks just cost way too much and there are sooo many that come out that does have something that I am looking for but a lot that I find irrelevant. Even the modules are hidiously expensive compared to what you get this makes pirating downloaded copies more tempting. The creatures of 3rd: I find most of the monster manuals introduce too many new creatures, now I know that its nice to throw baddies that the PCs being veterans have not encountered before but I find a lot of them just ho hum. I also dont like how all the creatures are split in various rulebooks. You have the dracolich in the FR book some demons and devils in the book of vile darkness etc etc. makes getting all the creatures you want a pain the ass. Makes one want to download books illegaly to get them. The new minis: I like the fact they have prepainted minis out and many of them look really good but I am absolutley PEEVED that they are more like a collectible card game than miniatures for a role playing game. I dont give a 9 hells damn that some are rare and powerful and can let you win some stupid minis tournament I want to be able to walk down to my local hobby store and pick up a beholder, not buy boxes and boxes to find one or go to E bay and pay high prices. This increases scalping and there is already enough to pay for this hobby without the prices to get hold of some minis. 3rd edition has just seemd to make DND more of a pain in the ass than fun and the rules are not too blame, its the money grubiness of Wizards. They have turned it into a money making fiasco throwing out book after book just to cash in quick in case some day DnD burns out but i think they are the ones who are burning DND out they are throwing things out at a quicklings pace. It seems more like they are business men who dont have any real love for DnD unlike how it was started, by gamers who decided to turn soemthing they were playing and loved into a worldwide phenomenon. Its not the rules, its the craftmanship, the other editions felt like they were made by people who loved the game and wanted to share their experiences and passion with other people to create a truly unique hobby.
Reinforcements 03-19-07, 08:39 PM	a_psh is exactly right. That is why I have stopped playing the game and just read FR novels now. Every new expanded rules set that comes in book or magazine that they read and your player just has to have for his uber character is one more thing to memorize. Its all way to much. Even all of the "upgrading the history of Land or city xxx" books is getting way out of hand if you follow novels and incorporate them into your game. And to all of us "old school D&D gamers" out there, if the internet was available for 1st or even 2ed back then, would all of this in depth arguing be going on about "mega rules", "mechanics", " I want everything spoon fed to me by Developer Joe Blow"? etc. be happening? Yeah, that isn't even close to what a_psh is saying. His point is that, while the 3rd Edition mechanics ARE significantly superior to all previous additions, they haven't pushed the game toward being a more collaborative storytelling experience. The points of the debate are basically, Does the present system cater too much to one kind of play? and, If so, do we want the game to move in the direction a_psh suggests? Frankly, the idea that older editions somehow catered more to "role-playing", or were "purer" or any other positive superlative is laughable to me. It might (MIGHT) benefit the game to "take it in a bit of a different direction", as it were, but regardless of how much better it COULD be, it's certainly better than it ever has been.
Seeker95 03-19-07, 08:47 PM	if the internet was available for 1st or even 2ed back then, would all of this in depth arguing be going on about "mega rules", "mechanics", " I want everything spoon fed to me by Developer Joe Blow"? etc. be happening?Yes. At least among the crowd using the Internet. I am the only WotC Boards member in my D&D group. The arguments, claims of brokenness, and abuses that happen here on these Boards *never* come up in my games.
ArcTan 03-19-07, 08:55 PM	Often times its competitors try to cater to a different subset of gamers. Yeah, but you can't really say that about commercial games like GURPS or Rolemaster. Well again, numbers state that more people like D&D than hate it. That's just pure statistics of people who play D&D. If everyone thought it sucked, nobody would want to play it. "Hate" is a strong word. There are a lot of people who play D&D largely because other people they know play it, and it's easier for them to go along with it than to try to teach everyone a brand new system. There are also a lot of people who just plain haven't tried any other systems besides D&D, ever, and are only vaguely aware that other systems exist (and assume they must be just like D&D). This is the problem with D&D being the Microsoft of PnP RPGs. Well of course, but horror is generally quite a bit of work. It's a difficult feat to scare people playing an imaginary game with imaginary characters. That's the way with any story. It's difficult to get people excited about saving the world when the world is an imaginary one that you just made up. Well, a great deal of stories have action sequences. The more important aspect of the story is why are they killing the monster. If it's just a "there's treasure in there, lets take it" story, then it's not going to be very deep. Yes, but not all stories are about the *mechanics* of how the monster is killed, with an emphasis on tactics and power. Lots of movies have action sequences, but a lot of those movies aren't action movies, per se. If on the other hand they're hunting a werewolf who happens to be one of the PC's brothers, then things may get a bit more interesting. It might be more interesting if whether or not the werewolf succeeds in killing one of them is determined by something other than attack rolls and AC and HP. Yeah, I agree. D&D definitely makes it way too easy for PCs to die. I'd like some more rules for PCs being left for dead and similar things that continue the story as opposed to bring it to a screeching halt. Mainly that your PC is the one thing you're invested in, in D&D -- the only point of interaction you have with the world -- and it is absurdly easy for the DM to take it away from you, and with it the entire thread of everything you've been doing so far, in a fit of pique or even *by accident* (by underestimating the difficulty of an encounter). No, not really. I don't believe rules can ever do horror, unless the rules are hidden from the PCs. Horror is not knowing what's going to happen next. Part of horror is having your expectations of reality twisted (reality in this case is the rules). The rules of the game don't have to be the rules of the world. The dead don't just get up and walk. ghosts can't just materialize out of nowhere. I shot that guy in the head with a shotgun... how is he still alive?! Bending the rules of reality is one of the primary tools of horror. As far as supernatural horror goes anyway. But not all horror is supernatural horror, and horror can simply come from people acting in a horrific way you don't understand. Now note that all those above are things that happen in D&D on a regular basis, so you've got to step it up to the next level and bend not the reality of the world we live in, but the reality of the world the heroes live in. I agree that a big part of horror is not knowing what happens next, which means not knowing the rules of the world. But that's the point -- the rules of the *game* don't have to be the rules of the world. D&D makes it seem like those are the same thing, but they don't have to be. (And the D&D sourcebook Heroes of Horror has a lot of stuff about how a horror campaign has to have the DM dealing the cards under the table, so to speak.) There are other forms of horror, like exploring the depths of the evil of mankind, which you can also do. But in any case, horror exposes you to some revelation that the universe is not exactly as well understood and safe as you thought. Once the PCs know the rules, then the horror is lost, because now it's just another creature that fits within their conception of reality. Which is why a game that's primarily a tactical simulation, and therefore has to have, somewhere, a stat block that lists a creature's HP, ability scores and special attacks, will have a tough time doing horror. I disagree, brand name may help to some degree, but remember that it's not like most of the people here haven't tried other RPGs, it's just that other RPGs haven't quite been as good. Most people, actually, haven't. And a lot of times when they have, what they've tried have been RPGs that were trying in some way to knock off D&D rather than really do something different. It's like someone saying that the Backstreet Boys are the pinnacle of music because they've listened to bands like 'N Sync, 98 Degrees and New Kids on the Block and they're not as good.
a_psh 03-19-07, 09:00 PM	Yeah, that isn't even close to what a_psh is saying. His point is that, while the 3rd Edition mechanics ARE significantly superior to all previous additions, they haven't pushed the game toward being a more collaborative storytelling experience. The points of the debate are basically, Does the present system cater too much to one kind of play? and, If so, do we want the game to move in the direction a_psh suggests?You nailed it. Frankly, the idea that older editions somehow catered more to "role-playing", or were "purer" or any other positive superlative is laughable to me.Ditto. The point about older editions is that a lot of people had a semi-functional collaborative storytelling experience when they first started the game and were just muddling through, making stuff up as they went and essentially playing a freeform game, and then actually lost that as they got better with the rules. I probably shouldn't have introduced it, since I think too many people are raising the "edition war" banners over it as if that's something to be proud of per se.
Fencerboy 03-19-07, 09:05 PM	First of all, I'm skipping several pages of in-depth discussion, so I may have missed something. However, I go back to my original arguement several pages ago: I enjoy my D&D. You may tell me to get out of this conversation if I don't have "good" input, but D&D IS fun. No arguement. If you don't think so, ignore these boards and play something else. But if all you want to do is sit around and say how much D&D sucks, take it somewhere else. But don't be a dog in the manger. Thats asenine!!
graddlin 03-19-07, 09:09 PM	Indeed, friend. I agree with the imaginative aspects of the game, and truly wish that they would be brought to the forefront instead of the rules being held over the heads of the players. There was indeed a time when the game was a more simple experience. But that experience is not gone, you simply have to put yourself back in that mind frame. Go to a library and do some research on the middle ages or the Roman empire in the peace and quiet, you'll find the flare again. It is all about point of view. We make the rules, the rules do not make us. That aside, I enjoyed reading your entry. Well spoke, friend.
a_psh 03-19-07, 09:23 PM	Here's a long post. Labeled with little titles for your convenience. On "de-kludging": So, umm, how would you suggest that you put "actual roleplaying" into the rules of a game? Shouldn't roleplaying, by its very nature, not be limited by a ruleset? If I play the same character concept in D&D, GURPS, and WoD, shouldn't I be able to roleplay them the same? I guess I just don't understand exactly what you want to change. You say "de-kludge all the other stuff." But what is "all the other stuff," precisely?On one level, there's a strong need to de-kludge every situation other than violent armed conflict. On another level, there's a strong need to de-kludge a bunch of stuff that happens on the metagame level. How we actually go about creating the shared fiction of D&D is downright childish at this point. It's like all the examples of roleplaying: "Let's Pretend" with a few dice rolled to see who actually gets shot. By itself, "Let's Pretend" doesn't make for very compelling or adult stories. ... The mechanics of roleplaying, if you could call them that: I'm rather curious too. I've always considered the more rules you have for role-playing, the more it gets in the way of actual role-playing. About the only somewhat constructive role-playing rules I can see might be insanity rules in a game like Call of Cthulhu.The easiest example is mechanics that actually make your characters' motivations relevant. Here's an excerpt (http://theriddleofsteel.net/whatis/SA.htm) from The Riddle of Steel, a game that's very traditional and rules-focused in most ways, but introduces a little trick: you pick some stuff that's important to what you want your character's story to be about, and you get big mechanical bonuses (and the game's equivalent of XP) for following that. That game's "Spiritual Attributes" are mostly designed for two purposes: flagging (as a way of saying "here, this is the kind of thing I want to explore") and spotlight control (guaranteeing that, in fact, your character is the hero of a plot arc that's all about redeeming his evil brother, but that he can't then turn around and leave his friend with the magical destiny in the dust when the story spotlight moves to focus on that magical destiny). I certainly don't think Riddle is that great all around, but it has a few gems like this within the rules. (In general, Riddle is more interesting for folks who like fancy simulations of swordfights than those who want to see innovative non-combat mechanics, but "Spiritual Attributes" are the big exception here.) My favorite example of a very tight and snappy ruleset that packs a lot of narrative punch in general but still manages to remain newb-friendly is Dogs in the Vineyard. There's not really anything you can do except narrate and roleplay (in the broad sense rather than the one that means "talk"), but the steady and powerful mechanics for escalation make that play really work. I couldn't find a good enough quote of hte actual game text, so here's an RPGNet review (http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/10/10742.phtml) with a decent but very on-the-surface write-up of the game mechanics. ... On horror and structure: And really in most RPGs, just fighting a monster isn't especially horrible. Yeah, it's another beast. We've all fought them before. And anyone who knows the rules of the game simply knows the creature is a straight up rules construct. Regardless of what game you're playing. You can't get the cheap "BOO!" jump-out-of-the-shadows horror style that you can get in a video game or a movie. Also, to a certain extent horror requires bending of the rules. It also requires a rather rigid rules system as well, so that when the rules are bent, the PCs realize it. The PCs have to feel a legitimate doubt and fear of the unknown. Throw in something that they can't fight and then you get some real horror. Horror in D&D isn't Resident Evil, think more in terms of The Ring or Final Destination. Horror and mystery are the two most structure-sensitive genres. That's why attempts to do them with an unstructured RPG totally suck. Especially mysteries. But we're talking about horror for now, so... The best approach to zombie-movie/campfire/Lovecraftian/monster/&c. horror (i.e. the "regular" kind -- Vampire and friends have kinda taken over "horror" to mean personal stuff) I've ever seen is Dead of Night. The mechanics are lightweight, but they definitely set the mood through careful use of resources. And it's got something absolutely vital to any horror plot built in very carefully and customizably -- pacing. This is controlled by a resource that represents how close your character is to the end (being killed, going insane, whatever is appropriate), which you then have to expend in order to try to save your ass... and then converts into a GM resource once you've spent them. The players can even negotiate about the structure of the narrative without spoiling the surprises that await them by defining when and how the GM is supposed to spend his store of points, which is hella cool. Horror's really not my thing, but DoN is great. Find an actual play thread about it somewhere and see how it works! ... On Savage Worlds &c.: Even the other games I currently play in (Savage Worlds and Serenity, in case you feel the need to rip them) fall short of D&D in my mind. I may like them (mainly because they do something different), but I don't see any other system that really compare to D&D. The only other system I've played longer was WEGs SW d6 (Savage Worlds is closing in quickly on that), until they went out of business.Those are all quite similar to D&D, unfortunately. ... Selective reply to Solik: Why on earth are you expecting a textbook on storytelling from RPG sourcebooks? There's classes and generic books on that stuff. It's utterly pointless for a game company to replicate that material.Good mechanics facilitate play. You've never seen good mechanics for the kind of stuff I'm talking about, so you assume that none exist. And codifying that in mathematical or logical rules would be either nonsense, or would take you back to video game levels of restriction (and probably still be nonsense, just a different kind). Instead, this is a rule of thumb that DMs should follow and that the games directly suggest -- involve the players directly in every scene, as they are the stars.That's why you want flexible rules that prioritize coherent and dynamic negotiation rather than a bunch of mathematical statements. You know, for all your complaining about wargaming, this is, by far, the best advice I've heard thus far for transforming D&D into a real wargame.As long as the GM is an all-powerful arbiter wearing kid gloves, there's no real challenge. As long as the GM is an all-powerful sole author, there's no real conflict or collaboration. Either way, whether you're there to experience a story or a tactical battle, YOU LOSE. I'm starting to think you're playing D&D like most people are playing Monopoly. The rules don't support this at all.Illusionism. That's mostly what D&D rules give you. ... On GMless play: There's a game, Rune RPG that lets everyone take turns sharing the mantle of DM.Polaris and Capes are the canonical examples of GM-less play these days. Polaris: Chivalric Tragedy at the Utmost North is a great example of how you can basically start with freeform and add a few rules to make a much more focused and dynamic game; it's also my favorite example of social ritual in RPG play. ... On rules and the "art of storytelling": :rant: Perhaps it's an absurd opinion, but I don't think the rules of D&D, either current or past, have anything to do with the art of storytelling. I think the rules exist simply to provide a framework for what characters, both player and non-player, are capable of doing in game.Except all that does is create consensus about what your character can't do and what he can't. Creating consensus is like step 1 of successful storytelling. You absolutely need everyone to agree to buy into some presuppositions before any meaningful storytelling can really occur. So, I'd say what the D&D rules do provide is not really very impressive. You can do it pretty easily without any rules at all. It's kinda silly to say "Hey, we need all these books and books of rules to fulfill this very basic task, but we're such good storytellers that we don't need any structure for the actual juice bits!" ... On unheroic heroes and humorous D&D-bashing: Besides, our group has come to the conclusion that dnd isn't about producing heros, its about producing monsters wrapped in human skin that pretend to be good.If you're amused by "low humor" and don't mind lots of profanity and violence, read Greg Costikyan's RPG Violence, a parody of D&D. It'll tell you how much treasure a single mother usually has in her lair and other stuff like that. (Free on the web, just google it.)
RedRory 03-19-07, 09:33 PM	As Barbosa in Pirates points out about rules; "They're more like guidelines." Point is the game is little fun if its all about obscure rules or mechanics taking over role-playing. If the player presents a good argument to the King why he should ally with his rival King against the orcs well I'm not going to screw that player over because of a bad Diplomacy check. With a reasonable DM and a group of co-operative players you should be able to use the rules to adjucate the more random elements of the game (do I hit or miss?). A good adventure should have various points where success (or the conditions for success) isn't determined by dice rolling but thinking, role-playing etc. For instance, did the players take the time to stake out the wizard's tower so they know about the group of lions in the garden? Did they make use of the information in the dusty tome that tells of the creature's weakness to fire? The point is I guess not to be behoven to the rules but rather always put the actions of the characters as the first place to take your cues from as a DM and the rules second. As an addendum to that, re other people's thoughts about the piles of rules published in every book by Wotc. Well the three core books is plenty. Everything else you or your group decide to use.
Fencerboy 03-19-07, 10:13 PM	a_psh, I thought I had your problem figured out, but I guess I don't. You are now stating that D&D doesn't need structure, and that one all-powerful GM is "childish". You are contradicting yourself!! It doesn't make sense, and I can't even detect any sort ofargument or sense in your post. I thought I could read that stuff well, having dug through Shakespeare and The Canterbury Tales, but I can't make sense of your argument. Please state in spades your issue and what you think should be done. Please.
Lokiyn 03-19-07, 10:24 PM	On unheroic heroes and humorous D&D-bashing: If you're amused by "low humor" and don't mind lots of profanity and violence, read Greg Costikyan's RPG Violence, a parody of D&D. It'll tell you how much treasure a single mother usually has in her lair and other stuff like that. (Free on the web, just google it.) I think i've seen some of that quoted. I think my main problem with this is that, in dnd, its difficult to find a non resource aquisition method that the party can get behind. (and by resource i mean, money, treasure, exp, etc) Its hard to feel heroic when the party paladin is withholding medicine from the gold dragon because "its a better bargaining position".
Arrowhen 03-19-07, 10:39 PM	Damn it! There oughta be a law against starting interesting threads like this over the weekend, when I don't have time to check the boards because I'm too busy having a life. :P The game would go a long way towards being both more dynamic and more creative if you actually get to set the stakes for your actions. Essentially, "task resolution" is succeed/fail and "conflict resolution" is win/lose. The canonical example is cracking a safe to get some dirt on the bad guy. In task resolution, it's all about whether you open the safe or not: you could open the safe but find nothing there -- the GM has made your success or failure irrelevant to whether you actually get what you want. In conflict resolution, it's all about whether you get what you wanted (what was "at stake") -- if you fail, you might open the safe and find nothing, whereas if you succeed, there's going to be some dirt somewhere (though maybe you can succeed and then narrate failing to open the safe and finding a document in the trashcan). Conflict resolution just plain enhances collaboration and storytelling in a game. It puts your goals front-and-center and significantly expands the range of meaningful actions available to you without necessarily burdening you with tons and tons of rules. I don't see how this style of gaming could be satisfying for me. A huge part of the fun of D&D for me is exploration, facing the unknown, going into that dark, scary dungeon not knowing what fearsome beasts or wondrous treasures lie around the next corner. Quite simply, I don't want that much control over the narrative. What I like about D&D is the way you can be both actor and audience. You can be both the protagonist going down into the basement full of zombies and the viewer/reader/listener/whatever thinking "don't go down there, you idiot, it's full of zombies!" (Incidentally, this is why I like rolling everything in the open. When I know my character's just blown a Spot check and I have him blithely march into danger, it's like the moment in a horror movie when the ominous music starts up and the shaky camera starts following the hero from the monster's POV.) The system you're describing would attempt to make me actor, audience, and author all at once, and I just don't think it's possible to be all three. Now, having said that, I do agree that the game benefits if you actually get to set the stakes for your actions. I just don't want to set the stakes of every action. What would be nice would be the ability to set those stakes on a much larger scale, the scale of the adventure hook. A system where each player had a number of "plot points" to spend could be interesting. For example, I could tell the DM, "I'm spending a plot point to try and dig up some dirt on the bad guy." He'd then tell me, "You spend half the evening buying drinks for various shady characters and eventually find out that the bad guy operates out of an office down by the docks." It would still be up to me to infiltrate the office, discover the aforementioned safe, etc., but there'd be a somewhat formalized mechanic for requesting adventure hooks.* Of course, most DM's I've played with wouldn't wait for me to ask for such an adventure hook. They'd already know I was interested in digging up dirt on the bad guy and provide me with ways of doing so. I've been lucky, though, in that the overwhelming majority of DMs I've played with have been very good ones. D&D's basic resolution mechanics fail here because they chop the action into these discreet cartoony chunks. Sometimes it's like a superhero comic with the characters waling on each other continually for pages on end -- campy and repetitive. Yes, but for many of us it's fun campy and repetitive. ;) I've said it before and I'll say it again: D&D is primarily about killing monsters underground. The farther you get away from killing monsters underground, the less suitable the rules become. I can understand the desire to get more out of the game than just killing monsters underground**, but any changes to the game that make killing monsters underground less fun would be bad for the game, IMHO. You rolling a good number on your Safecracking check only means something if the GM decides that success should actually lead to a positive result. Sure, but a good DM is going to make that decision based to a large degree on how fun a positive or negative result is going to make the game for you. If you're just cracking safes for the hell of it, a negative result could be just as entertaining as a positive one. If you're cracking that safe because you really, really want to dig up some dirt on the bad guy, then a positive result is going to be a lot more fun--unless a negative result coupled with a clue where to look next is going to make eventually digging up that dirt even more satisfying. He can just as easily shaft you majorly any time you do anything regardless of how it turns out. Sure, but if he wants you to keep playing with him, he won't. I understand the desire to have some kind of rule-based protection against lousy DMs, but I just don't know that it's possible. The conflict resolution that you suggest just sounds to me like making players be DMs too, which I just don't think is feasible. Playing and DMing are fun for different reasons; trying to do both at the same time just makes each role less fun. When two people who want ridiculously different things out of something get together, their game sucks. Agreed. But that's true of any activity. You can't fix that with rules; all you can do is look for people who want the same thing out of the game as you do. * Characters in Mutants & Masterminds get hero points (http://www.mutantsandmasterminds.com/super-vision/000196.php) that they can spend to reroll failed checks, shrug off damage, manifest superpowers they don't usually have--essentially "cheat" in genre-appropriate ways. They gain these points in a variety of ways, but the most interesting is through GM fiat. When the GM "cheats" to further the plot, they characters affected by that "cheating" get hero points, which they in turn can use to "cheat" through encounters. I think this is a great way of giving players a limited measure of control over their characters' destinies while still leaving the GM in control of the overall plot. ** Hell, even the addition of something as simple as a decent chase mechanic would make killing monsters above ground more fun.
Arrowhen 03-19-07, 11:10 PM	How we actually go about creating the shared fiction of D&D is downright childish at this point. It's like all the examples of roleplaying: "Let's Pretend" with a few dice rolled to see who actually gets shot. By itself, "Let's Pretend" doesn't make for very compelling or adult stories. Childish can be fun, too, though. I might prefer to read compelling, adult stories, but that doesn't mean I necessarily want to play them. Although I still have high hopes for my role-playing game based on the works of Philip K. Dick (http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=66731520&blogID=147466085).
a_psh 03-19-07, 11:17 PM	a_psh, I thought I had your problem figured out, but I guess I don't. You are now stating that D&D doesn't need structure, and that one all-powerful GM is "childish".No, you had it before. "Let's Pretend" is storytelling done in a childlike way. No structure, no theme, nothing but a list of events, essentially. For an adult who's been fed a steady diet of books and movies, an unnuanced story that doesn't address Western storytelling conventions (either by sticking to them or deliberately breaking them in an outspoken manner) often feels fluffy and unsatisfying. Adding a referee makes it trivially easier to figure out the age-old question of who got shot (which was never that tricky anyway), but counting on one overworked person to put together a grade-A storyline mostly on the fly (a large part of it has got to be on the fly since otherwise the game's not very responsive and play suffers) and essentially in freeform is rather a recipe for disaster.
bholdr_mage 03-19-07, 11:20 PM	a_psh: Check out Dynasties and Demagouges (sp?) from Atlas games. It has some "personality feats" that reward the player action points similar to vices in WoD for willpower. This may assist you in at least some kind of revelation. Rich Burlew has a great suggestion for the "diplomacy" skill, which you can find on his site (sorry, no link). Outside of this, aside from giving xp for role-playing, there really isn't any motivation and I think this is the idea. Several people have discussed that they don't want dnd to tell people how to play...and I couldn't agree more. However, if there was books to give hints on how to connect the combat dots into more of a cohesive story arc without sitting there reading a novel to your players...this would make more campaigns memorable and more games likeable by so much more people.
ArcTan 03-20-07, 12:04 AM	First of all, I'm skipping several pages of in-depth discussion, so I may have missed something. However, I go back to my original arguement several pages ago: I enjoy my D&D. You may tell me to get out of this conversation if I don't have "good" input, but D&D IS fun. No arguement. If you don't think so, ignore these boards and play something else. But if all you want to do is sit around and say how much D&D sucks, take it somewhere else. But don't be a dog in the manger. Thats asenine!! *sigh* And it's this kind of reaction -- "I'm okay with the way things are right now, so don't you dare say anything critical" -- that makes it, in general, impossible to improve anything. So what, Fencerboy? You don't read errata? Or new sourcebooks that change old mechanics, like Spell Compendium, Player's Handbook 2 and Magic Item Compendium? When WotC inevitably comes out with 4e you'll curse it and not buy it? Sheesh. I'm not even saying that you "shouldn't" like D&D the way it is -- I'm saying that you may not even be perceiving the ways D&D is inadequate to what you're doing and you're spending time routing around things you wouldn't need to if the rules actually addressed certain things. (The key thing here is the big problem of DMs being "bad at handling roleplay situations" because they haven't "learned to do it yet", when the reason it takes so much learning is because the game itself doesn't help you at all.)
ArcTan 03-20-07, 12:07 AM	Outside of this, aside from giving xp for role-playing, there really isn't any motivation and I think this is the idea. Several people have discussed that they don't want dnd to tell people how to play...and I couldn't agree more. If you don't want D&D to tell you how to play, then make them change the DMG to say that a DM only gives XP for winning combats if he feels it's appropriate or advances the story. And axe the huge, long sections that are all about "balancing CRs" and "giving appropriate treasure and XP for defeating an encounter". I find it ludicrous that people keep saying D&D makes you "free to play any way you want" by not giving any guidance for RP XP -- and outright *saying* in the DMG that RP XP should never be enough to significantly affect the progression of a character -- while giving extremely detailed, hard-and-fast rules for combat XP. This is *not* any kind of game you want to play. This is a combat wargame that lets you possibly play something else in between the "real" games of tactical monster slaying. If D&D can come right at you with specific rules that are *not* presented as optional for how to deal with combat XP, they *can* do the same for roleplay XP. The fact that they don't is because D&D actively pressures you to have combat, and lots of it.
ArcTan 03-20-07, 12:15 AM	Quite simply, I don't want that much control over the narrative. What I like about D&D is the way you can be both actor and audience. You can be both the protagonist going down into the basement full of zombies and the viewer/reader/listener/whatever thinking "don't go down there, you idiot, it's full of zombies!" (Incidentally, this is why I like rolling everything in the open. When I know my character's just blown a Spot check and I have him blithely march into danger, it's like the moment in a horror movie when the ominous music starts up and the shaky camera starts following the hero from the monster's POV.) One of the things, though -- and I'm going to start lapsing into Forge jargon if I don't catch myself -- is that D&D doesn't really let you be both actor and audience in a balanced kind of way. It really pushes you to be actor first and audience second. That is, you *really* don't actually want to get your character killed -- and the consequence for failure in most stock D&D situations is death. Because killing your character screws up the story. And you *really* do want your character to succeed, because success means XP, and XP means advancement. No XP means no advancement. So you fall back into playing the game like a game, which means inhabiting your character in a way that emphasizes *winning* and *surviving*, and doing so from an external perspective -- you-the-player are constantly calculating the risk of various actions from you-the-player's armchair perspective and trying to figure out what would be the *best* thing to do, tactically, not what your character realistically *would* do or what your character might do that would be interesting to watch. The canonical example of this is the "stupid" Int 6 character who nonetheless takes only sensible and tactically useful actions during combats because doing idiotic things -- even if doing so would be funny, or tragic, or interesting -- would wreck the game. The "cowardly" character who's never *too* cowardly because if you run away from the combat you're basically sidelined from the game and will never gain XP. The "daredevil" character who nonetheless is never *really* more risk-seeking than other characters. There are other systems where you do get tangibly rewarded, not for doing the "best" thing (i.e. making your character more like an optimal-path encounter-beating expert system) but for doing the "right" thing, the thing that your character would do at this point in the story. This adds to the appeal of being the "audience", because you can intentionally play a horribly evil, or craven, or foolhardy, or gullible character, and *intentionally* go back in there as the actor while screaming "Don't go back in there, you idiot!" as the audience. Because, speaking from an actor's perspective, what kind of acting is fun if it never lets you do bad things, or stupid things, or things you'd never actually do?
fatal error 03-20-07, 12:43 AM	Adding a referee makes it trivially easier to figure out the age-old question of who got shot (which was never that tricky anyway), So how do you have any question of who got shot when everyone's in on making the answer? You speak of D&D as playing "pretend" and describe in long specifics how D&D has problems with nearly every aspect of it, yet you don't give examples of what your ideal play would look like. Could you give a complete example of what you want D&D to be like? A complete example of how your ideal game would go? A complete example of how you want something, not how you don't want it? Because quite frankly, I can't quite wrap my head around what you are trying to move towards, on a detailed level. Cooperative storytelling? That sounds like a move toward playing childhood pretend than it does away from it. How are you suggesting making cooperative storytelling more sophisticated, without turning it into "let's make a group novel"? Just the liberty for players to include minor events as they think they should (the guard does indeed go take a smoke so you can jump him away from his post)?
a_psh 03-20-07, 12:51 AM	I don't see how this style of gaming could be satisfying for me. A huge part of the fun of D&D for me is exploration, facing the unknown, going into that dark, scary dungeon not knowing what fearsome beasts or wondrous treasures lie around the next corner. Quite simply, I don't want that much control over the narrative. What I like about D&D is the way you can be both actor and audience. You can be both the protagonist going down into the basement full of zombies and the viewer/reader/listener/whatever thinking "don't go down there, you idiot, it's full of zombies!" (Incidentally, this is why I like rolling everything in the open. When I know my character's just blown a Spot check and I have him blithely march into danger, it's like the moment in a horror movie when the ominous music starts up and the shaky camera starts following the hero from the monster's POV.) The system you're describing would attempt to make me actor, audience, and author all at once, and I just don't think it's possible to be all three.Arrowhen, I wrote up a reply to this, especially the part about suspense and the unknown in story games, and then stopped. What I was writing was getting cluttered and incoherent. Instead, I'll offer you a real game text as an example. Since we're talking about D&D, let's dig up something kinda like it. The Shadow of Yesterday (http://www.crngames.com/the_shadow_of_yesterday/index) is, I think, a great example. It's got a GM. It's fantasy inspired by the likes of Leiber and Howard. It's got things that work like feats and things that work like skills. Pretty D&D-ish there (no classes and the like, though). Most importantly (for our purposes), you can read TSOY without having to pay anything because it's available under a Creative Commons license. Here's a pretty and hyperlinked version of the rules text (http://zork.net/~nick/loyhargil/tsoy2/book1--rulebook.html). (There's also a book.) So, there you go. Of course, that's like 25+ pages worth of stuff. So, err... Take a look at two things, specifically, when you're bored: 1. The resolution mechanics. 2. The reward cycle. The reward cycle is pretty simple and sweet: you choose what matters about your character and that leads to advancement, you choose how to allocate those advances, and there are specific big rewards for change and character development (buying off Keys); finally, all that filters into a larger-scale cycle that enables you to retire a character gracefully and dramatically when you think the moment is right, but throws a bit of chance into the mix. (Also, there's a smaller secondary reward system in the form of the gift dice; its purpose is pretty transparent.) The resolution mechanics are mostly straight-up single checks. Large-scale (well, medium-scale depending on how you look at it) conflict resolution. It's not that different from D&D's skill system in some ways. The basic resolution mechanics certainly don't remove all traces of the unknown or force you to continuously be in author stance throughout the entire game (everyone needs a little bit of author stance now and then, though, as far as I'm concerned, in any game -- fortunately, shifting stance is so easy that people don't even bother talking about it anymore). Ooops, getting off-track... Anyway, TSOY is an example of a very character-focused story game. You don't have broad powers to step outside your character to make something happen as you would in, say, Universalis (where even talking about "your" character is a mistake). What TSOY does give you is the broad ability to say what you want the overall effects of actions your character undertakes to be. I like this. And then, TSOY waits for you to catch your breath and hands you...a can of whup-ass. That's what Bringing Down the Pain really is: concentrated narrative "oomph". You're not just an actor and an audience anymore. You're also the cameraman. When you want something interesting to happen, you take your magic camera and zoom right in. Between Bringing Down the Pain and Keys, it's really the players that are driving the story, controlling its focus and its pace. There's a GM there to help it along, but you're not dependent on her for every little thing. Which actually makes the GM more useful since she's free to focus on stuff like playing the NPCs. TSOY is, frankly, not very innovative. All of the shiniest mechanical bits in it are just refinements of stuff from other games (there's a page listing exactly which ones). But I think it's a good example of how to do something cool with a game that still looks and feels a lot like D&D, which is why it's the specific one I'm bringing out. * - Some of my most frustrating D&D moments have been with players who hatch crazy plans and then try to carry them out all without any explaining anything to the other people at the table. Invariably, those plans fail because the GM (which, in these examples, is usually me) will do something somewhere that causes that plan to fail. Even if the GM wants to help the too-clever player get what he wants, he can't do that unless he actually understands what's going on. Usually he just ends up making some kind of simple ruling that ruins the player's plans completely unintentionally. Even in straight-up D&D, keeping track of intent is pretty important.
a_psh 03-20-07, 01:39 AM	Could you give a complete example of what you want D&D to be like? A complete example of how your ideal game would go? A complete example of how you want something, not how you don't want it?Hmmm... here are some core concepts. These are off the top of my head rather than a full list... 1. You say what your character is all about. "I'm ____" is a very important thing in and of itself. Right now, there's a lot more focus "I'm ____ and this is how I kill things." The game rewards you for playing your character and pushes you to develop that character (TSOY's Keys, above, are a simple example of how one such system could work). 2. Your character is more important as a character than as a pawn. As ArcTan said, the game should give you room to do what you think is interesting rather than just what you think is most effective. 3. More on-the-fly flexibility. It's more important to have a system that makes it easy to make something up on the spot than it is to have a system that covers everything (you can't, anyway). The average player should, after two or three sessions, be informed enough to make up a reasonably functional new spell or feat or et cetera. 4. The GM has limits at least some of the time. Think of it this way: he's got a rules arbiter / game moderator hat and a conflict-master hat. When he's wearing the arbiter/moderator hat, he's being helpful and friendly. When he's wearing the conflict-master hat, his abilities are a lot more restricted, but he's pushing on you with all he's got, escalating with all his might because he knows it's safe to do that and he won't break the game. 5. (This one doesn't necessarily need rules, but it's a core concept.) Narration passes freely around the table. At the level of detail, everyone's got a bit of everything. This is pretty basic. It's just the way you actually share your imagined stuff. Games where all of the narration is done by the GM are kind of a joke (those are out of style nowadays anyway; there's a pretty striking example in one of those D&D documentaries, though). Even the stodgiest most reticent player is going to want to be able to tell you how he imagines something his character does sometime. 6. Reduced prep time. This isn't really related to a change in direction per se, but... slow prep is bad. That's nothing like a complete list. Probably focus on 1-3, as those are the big 'uns. Cooperative storytelling? That sounds like a move toward playing childhood pretend than it does away from it. How are you suggesting making cooperative storytelling more sophisticated, without turning it into "let's make a group novel"? Just the liberty for players to include minor events as they think they should (the guard does indeed go take a smoke so you can jump him away from his post)?If you want to see a full-on cooperative storytelling game, Polaris: Chivalric Tragedy at the Utmost North is a good bet. What's interesting is how much it's basically just freeform with a few very deliberately constructed rules. The story created feels very different from what you can construct with conventional freeform, however, with a lot of cuts, this big legendary feel, and a sense on inexorable, unavoidable corruption dragging everyone down (hence "tragedy"). Even then, though, it's not a group novel for one very simple reason: you're invested in the experience of play itself, not writing a novel or whatever. Sorry, I'm kinda winding down for the day, so this isn't a very good post. I'll see if I can say something less wishy-washy later.
docjack 03-20-07, 01:44 AM	O.k., I'll throw in here but be advised I'm not considered a "real roleplayer".:D I don't play D&D or any roleplaying game with other people...I play alone. Why? There are a few of reasons, but the one I'll address hopefully will be in keeping with this argument. When I started roleplaying again in 2000, I went to the local gamestore to scout the local talent, in hopes of finding a group. I walked around, pretending to look at the books and I just listened to the games being played. I noticed that the people playing fell into two groups: 1. XP Junkies 2. Hurry Up and Get to Me! XP junkies are only concerned with POWER. They want the o.k. from the DM to scribble numbers on their character sheet so they can level up and smash the hell out of the biggest, baddest creature in the monster manual with one blow and collect every Feat in the book. Their true concern for everything they do is XP. Hurry up and Get to Me people are the funniest because they are the "real roleplayers". They want to explore narrative, and NPC interaction and sub-plot...but only for themselves. When Frankie the Fighter wants to follow his story arc of falling in love with the tavern girl, the HU&GTM people are bored and start tapping a finger and sighing. That's not a D&D mechanic problem, that's a player problem. The bored player hasn't quite figured out that he can have just as much fun, IMHO, sitting back and watching the improvisational theater being preformed just for him. Will Frankie be permitted a kiss, or will he be teased and denied yet again? Tune in next week for another exciting episode of "As The Ale Flows". With these two types you can never have a real roleplaying game. Think about it, Eberron has been billed as a setting where one can participate in political intrigues. Having said that, look at the Eberron boards: there is no one posting about how they spent an entire session foiling the plot of a noble who was trying to establish a trade monopoly in a thrilling session of council. Why not? I will sit through two hours of a courtroom drama movie, A Time To Kill is a great movie. Why not sit through a 45 minute debate between two characters in a courtroom where I get to be the jury? Because people will get bored with the game...and that's where the problem is... I believe the problem doesn't come with D&D calling itself an end all be all game of RolePlaying, it gets in trouble by calling itself a "Game". It's not a game. It's improvisational storytelling, with a designated setting and skeletal plot to be fleshed out by the characters with dice simulating the chaos/luck/what have you of life. When one thinks "game", one tends to think of the standards such as Monopoly, where every turn lasts a total of four seconds. Nobody has the time to get bored because just as soon as you roll and move, it's your turn again. It's this mentality that leads some people to just want combat underground with monsters because everybody gets to "play their turn in the game." Billing D&D as a "Game" only gets people jones-ing for their turn. Billing D&D as improvisational storytelling won't solve the problem, but I think it will make one approach D&D differently. Does D&D cater to this mentality? Yes. Although there have been some advances toward more rounded, not so combat/ confrontational oriented, characters. Look at the Flaws in Arcana Unearthed . Great idea, (although I think getting a Feat for a flaw is a bit much...I think a few more skill points would be appropriate) but does anyone ever use them? I have yet to read on this board about anyone talking about the Flaw they took for their character. Why not? Flawed characters make for interesting stories. (That's why I hate Superman. Superman is perfect, he can do anything...boring. Batman? This is a dude with some serious psychological issues...interesting.) People don't take the flaws because they feel, I assume, it is a hinderance to the super-uber monster-stomper they want to create. "But it's not my fault, D&D is designed for the super-uber monster stomper. They want me to play that way or else there would be just as many rules for roleplaying as there are for combat...that's why there are levels!" Poppycock. First off, when did leveling up become a race? Why are people so obsessed with levels? I have a group of characters that I have had since December and they're still 1st level and I'm having just as much fun with them now as I did when I first made them so why..." "I Want My Kewl Powerz! I Need Every Feat In The Book! That's the only way I can have an interesting character!" Poppycock.You have the power to chose what is most crucial to any character in a story: motivation... a psh mentioned motivation and I agree that motivation should be a key part to a character. However, if I read right, he wants for somehow a player to be rewarded for roleplaying that motivation and feels players will play more motivated characters if they get rewarded for it. Why? One doesn't get rewarded for playing within their alignment. Their reward for roleplaying their motivation should be that they do so for the good of the STORY; the good of the whole, not just their little slice of it. When a group plays for the good of the story then Jimmy is just as invested in Brenda's character as I am in Jimmy's. But this doesn't happen and it's not the fault of the rules. It doesn't happen because D&D is a GAME...and I want MY TURN. And that's why I don't play with people. Jack P.S. I was, of course, making generalities. I am sure that there are quite a number of you out there in D&D Land that would be an absolute joy to game with and I wish you much joy in your games. Also, I have nothing against those that want to level up and eventually have it out toe to toe with a Great Wyrm. I myself enjoy a good slugfest from time to time and have a band of adventurers waiting in the wings that I pull out whenever the need arises (which is usually right after Mid-Terms.:D ). To all those who play for the dungeoncrawl bloodfest I say, much love to you and I wish you much joy in your games. Jack
ArcTan 03-20-07, 02:21 AM	Hurry up and Get to Me people are the funniest because they are the "real roleplayers". They want to explore narrative, and NPC interaction and sub-plot...but only for themselves. When Frankie the Fighter wants to follow his story arc of falling in love with the tavern girl, the HU&GTM people are bored and start tapping a finger and sighing. That's not a D&D mechanic problem, that's a player problem. The bored player hasn't quite figured out that he can have just as much fun, IMHO, sitting back and watching the improvisational theater being preformed just for him. Will Frankie be permitted a kiss, or will he be teased and denied yet again? Tune in next week for another exciting episode of "As The Ale Flows". Again, one reason this happens is that D&D doesn't give any guidance on what happens in roleplaying, so people do what comes naturally. What comes naturally tends to be writing out your own story that you act out by yourself and no one else having any input on it. There's no reason for you to be bored because you're a passive audience member for someone else's story. You can and should have input in what happens, both by your own character getting involved and by being able to cast some kind of vote over what ideas are and aren't good for the game as a whole (i.e. be able to veto plot points that *demand* the character get tons of time to himself with no one else being able to intervene). With these two types you can never have a real roleplaying game. Think about it, Eberron has been billed as a setting where one can participate in political intrigues. Having said that, look at the Eberron boards: there is no one posting about how they spent an entire session foiling the plot of a noble who was trying to establish a trade monopoly in a thrilling session of council. Why not? I will sit through two hours of a courtroom drama movie, A Time To Kill is a great movie. Why not sit through a 45 minute debate between two characters in a courtroom where I get to be the jury? Because people will get bored with the game...and that's where the problem is... I would say this is less about the acting ability or writing ability of the players and more about the *editing*, of which there is often none. Even a not-that-great courtroom scene can hold my attention as long as it's cut and spliced in the right places. The problem is that players with no guidance for doing this will try to *literally* "play through" a conversation in its entirety, which can never be anything but boring. I believe the problem doesn't come with D&D calling itself an end all be all game of RolePlaying, it gets in trouble by calling itself a "Game". It's not a game. Well, it started out as one. It still is one, sort of. It's just that the "game" part isn't the part that gets people excited, mostly, and it's the part for which D&D keeps losing its player base to video games and such -- because if all you want is a hackfest, then video games give you a *better* hackfest and one with fairer rules. (Hell, old-school minis wargaming, which D&D grew out of, gives you a better hackfest with fairer rules. D&D exists because of people compromising the fairness and coherence of a wargame for the sake of a story, or at least the semblance of one.) It's improvisational storytelling, with a designated setting and skeletal plot to be fleshed out by the characters with dice simulating the chaos/luck/what have you of life. When one thinks "game", one tends to think of the standards such as Monopoly, where every turn lasts a total of four seconds. Nobody has the time to get bored because just as soon as you roll and move, it's your turn again. It's this mentality that leads some people to just want combat underground with monsters because everybody gets to "play their turn in the game." Billing D&D as a "Game" only gets people jones-ing for their turn. Billing D&D as improvisational storytelling won't solve the problem, but I think it will make one approach D&D differently. Yeah, I agree. Does D&D cater to this mentality? Yes. Although there have been some advances toward more rounded, not so combat/ confrontational oriented, characters. Look at the Flaws in Arcana Unearthed . Great idea, (although I think getting a Feat for a flaw is a bit much...I think a few more skill points would be appropriate) but does anyone ever use them? I have yet to read on this board about anyone talking about the Flaw they took for their character. Why not? Flawed characters make for interesting stories. If people do take Flaws, it's frequently so they can take one they can easily get around -- one that affects them in a minor way -- so they can get an extra feat that they can use in a *major* way. Min/maxing, in other words -- and it's because of the almost irresistible temptation to do this that many DMs refuse to allow Flaws. (That's why I hate Superman. Superman is perfect, he can do anything...boring. Batman? This is a dude with some serious psychological issues...interesting.) It's a tangent, but I'm interested in Superman because I'm convinced he has some fairly serious psychological issues of his own. People don't take the flaws because they feel, I assume, it is a hinderance to the super-uber monster-stomper they want to create. Or, conversely, if they allowed them, it would "unbalance" the game by allowing more monster-stomping flexibility. "But it's not my fault, D&D is designed for the super-uber monster stomper. They want me to play that way or else there would be just as many rules for roleplaying as there are for combat...that's why there are levels!" Poppycock. First off, when did leveling up become a race? Why are people so obsessed with levels? I have a group of characters that I have had since December and they're still 1st level and I'm having just as much fun with them now as I did when I first made them so why..." Well, because anyone's reasonable assumption upon reading the PHB is that you are, in fact, supposed to move up in levels over time, and that XP is your reward for doing the right thing in the game, which is beating encounters. You don't have to play the game this way. Certainly a game doesn't need to *be* this way. But everything you see in the game when you read it pushes you toward this. How many DMs flagrantly violate the rules in the DMG and houserule that you simply don't gain XP or level up at all, and must play the game through with, say, 10th level characters? How many people in your average gaming group would take kindly to such a game and not complain that the "fun" has gone out of the game because they're not getting XP anymore? "I Want My Kewl Powerz! I Need Every Feat In The Book! That's the only way I can have an interesting character!" Poppycock.You have the power to chose what is most crucial to any character in a story: motivation... I don't blame the players, though. They're just following the lead of the rules, which make the motivation of beating encounters to get XP abundantly clear. a psh mentioned motivation and I agree that motivation should be a key part to a character. However, if I read right, he wants for somehow a player to be rewarded for roleplaying that motivation and feels players will play more motivated characters if they get rewarded for it. Why? One doesn't get rewarded for playing within their alignment. Their reward for roleplaying their motivation should be that they do so for the good of the STORY; the good of the whole, not just their little slice of it. When a group plays for the good of the story then Jimmy is just as invested in Brenda's character as I am in Jimmy's. But this doesn't happen and it's not the fault of the rules. Well, it does, because the rules don't give you any tools for doing this, and the rules don't even tell you that you *should*. It doesn't happen because D&D is a GAME...and I want MY TURN. Well, yeah, but it's not just that they call D&D a game, but that the rules treat it as one. You could stealthily change the nature of the game by slowly changing the rules. A lot of so-called "good DMs" get the results they do by doing this under their players' noses over a many-year-long process of trial and error. It's that process I don't think is really necessary.
Archon of Light 03-20-07, 03:26 AM	You know, I had to go back and double-check to see if my post was somehow lost or misplaced since I made it the other day. Turns out it was just completely ignored or overlooked by everyone... which is quite feasible considering the size of these posts... except for ArcTan. My thanks for just taking the time to respond to it, at least. What do you mean by "hard and fast" rules? All rules, of course, are arbitrary in the end, but that doesn't mean you can't have them. There aren't any "hard and fast" rules about combat, either -- any guidelines about how hit points should work or attacks should work or rounds should work -- until the designers make them up, and we all accept them basically because the game only functions if everyone's on the same page. You honestly believe that, or are you trying to grasp at something for the sake of having a counterpoint to argue with someone? Seriously, how do you believe that there are NOT any 'hard and fast' rules about combat? All creatures have hit points. If your attack roll exceeds an opponent's Armor Class, then you hit for damage that is subtracted from their hit point total. If they reach 0, they are unconcious and/or dying. That is a hard and fast rule and the very core of the combat system. Any variant designs or alternate mechanics are derived from this simple concept, but they are variations of the original 'hard and fast' rule that remains accepted as the easiest and most efficient rule around which the entire game engine is designed. Why can't the same be true of roleplaying? Yes, it'd mean if the rules didn't offer what you wanted you'd have to houserule (i.e. start to make up your own game) or buy a different game, but that's *already* true. No one says that just because one person thinks VP/WP makes for more cinematic fight scenes than HP, or another person wants opposed rolls for attack and defense rather than static AC, or a third person hates the way AoOs lengthen resolution times and wants to play without a grid, that there shouldn't be any rules for combat at *all* and DMs should ad hoc a combat mechanic on the fly. The simplest answer is really a question; When you start relying on game mechanics and dice rolls for roleplaying, is it still roleplaying? I prefer to think that it's not. To the contrary, it's important that we have a standard ruleset so we have common expectations, and then we vary things from there. Yes, everyone likes to live inside the box, don't they? But you're suggesting we should have a set of standards and preconcieved outcomes for the sole purpose of knowing where and how to deviate from it. Did I read that correctly?? :confused: So why do people keep arguing that it's a good thing that for every possible story situation outside of combat, D&D gives you no rules *at all*, or sometimes no rules beyond rolling a single die against a single DC? (Seriously, reducing the final negotiations with the enemy king about the disposition of the borders to "roll a Diplomacy check" would be like making the final battle against the demon monster a single "roll a Combat check". Saying you can add "flavor" to the Diplomacy check by narrating around it is like saying you can add "flavor" to a single d20 Combat check by describing the long pitched battle in RP.) So... in other words, you're actually hoping for a more dynamic system, much like combat, but for roleplaying. Your character now has a different set of stats and abilities that you can build and enhance for the 'roleplaying' battles between your group and highly-skilled diplomats. You roll your RP attempt die using various modifiers to match against an opponent's RP resist class until he succumbs to your willful words and rapier wit. That's what you're hoping for? That's *why* we have rules in the first place. Not having rules for writing the story basically means that D&D doesn't care much about writing the story, so that it's natural and to be expected that the story that comes out of D&D will frequently suck. But there ARE rules for writing stories already. Well... they're more like guidelines, really. In fact, there's HUNDREDS of books available to give you all the advice you could ever want on writing stories, plots, developing characters, etc... you just need to look outside the gaming/hobby areas of your bookstore. In an ad hoc way, littered with flame wars and biases and people who don't know what they're talking about. This is true, but you can select who's advice is worthy to you and who can just be ignored, right? Or does someone else need to point them out as well? And this doesn't strike you as problematic? Did my comments not strike you as suggesting I didn't think they were problematic?? The problem was within myself because I have always been too much of a perfectionist. The other part of that is how much I simply loathe other gamers in general for what they are: imperfect like me. Do the math. Seriously, what you're saying sounds to me like someone saying "There's nothing wrong with Top 40 pop music; you just have to modify it to your own personal tastes, or find something better that suits you". Which is technically true, but so many people listen to Top 40 crap because they don't even know where to begin looking for more interesting music, much less compose and play their own. That makes absolutely no sense to me. You cannot change the music that is being played; you can only change what you are listening to. Game rules, on the other hand, can be modified and will affect how you play your game. As much as I appreciate you taking the time to respond and acknowledge what I wrote, I'm afraid you've really offered nothing to this except some flippant and pointless remarks just for the sake of having something more to say to someone who does not agree with your opinion. It's not even an opinion, really... just a cry for what you want and why someone should do it for you. I know that sounds harsh and you won't take kindly to such words, but this is precisely how you present yourself to me. In all honesty, if anyone hopes to see an actual rulebook strictly on ROLEPLAYING... well, it's just not going to happen. Understanding how to roleplay means understanding human nature, which is far too complex to lump into a bunch of stats and alignments to define for every instance and circumstance that could ever possibly be. The trick is just knowing about your own character before you even know what his/her gaming stats are. Think of them as characters you would write about in a book. The most revealing question you could ask is "What motivates him?". Let that be your North Star.
Daydreamer 03-20-07, 04:05 AM	I am vehemently opposed to collaborative dming, and from other gaming systems that somehwhat have this have found it to be terrible. This isnt a system problem, its a dm problem. You need an arbitrator with more authority for situations to get resolutions. Most good dms build in many options for pcs to solve problems.
a_psh 03-20-07, 08:26 AM	So... in other words, you're actually hoping for a more dynamic system, much like combat, but for roleplaying. Your character now has a different set of stats and abilities that you can build and enhance for the 'roleplaying' battles between your group and highly-skilled diplomats. You roll your RP attempt die using various modifiers to match against an opponent's RP resist class until he succumbs to your willful words and rapier wit. That's what you're hoping for?With intelligent mechanics, this works quite well. Look at The Shadow of Yesterday (linked above) or Dogs in the Vineyard and just try and tell me that their all-purpose resolution mechanics somehow make "roleplaying" worse.
Solik 03-20-07, 10:48 AM	As long as the GM is an all-powerful arbiter wearing kid gloves, there's no real challenge. As long as the GM is an all-powerful sole author, there's no real conflict or collaboration. Either way, whether you're there to experience a story or a tactical battle, YOU LOSE. Illusionism. That's mostly what D&D rules give you. Laff. Okay, I can no longer take you seriously. Like, at all. Apparently, I have been doing nothing but losing at illusions for the past few years. Imagine that! All the fun I've been having, not real. Or outside the game. How enlightening. Or crazy. Heh, have fun with this discussion. There's absolutely nothing of value to see here.
Arrowhen 03-20-07, 11:13 AM	Take a look at two things, specifically, when you're bored: 1. The resolution mechanics. 2. The reward cycle. The resolution mechanics are interesting, but I wouldn't want to see D&D go too far in that direction. I know I don't have the real life social skills to play a game like that, unless it was with people I knew very, very well. I certainly can't see your average nerdy 14 year old* enjoying it, and while I don't think D&D should only appeal to nerdy 14 year olds, it shouldn't alienate them, either. Nerdy 14 year olds are vital to the continued success of the hobby, and D&D should be a game that one can start playing as a nerdy 14 year old and continue to play (in an increasingly sophisticated manner, if one wishes) on into adulthood. I do like the reward system a lot, though. I really could have used something like this in the last D&D campaign I ran. That group wasn't happy with the way the XP system worked; they didn't like how sometimes their characters would level up at the successful conclusion of an adventure, while other times they'd level up after some random, inconsequential bandit attack. They felt (as did I) that the former was much more satisfying, that mechanical advancement coinciding with plot advancement just "felt" better. They also thought (as did I) that they were leveling up too fast, gaining new abilities before they'd even had a chance to enjoy their current ones. My suggestion was that we throw out XP altogether and just have characters level up whenever it seemed appropriate. (I believe my exact words were "go up to the next level when you feel like you're done with this one.") But that was too abstract for them, I guess, so we just ended up doing it "you level up when the DM says you do." They were fine with it, but I wasn't. I wanted them to have more control over their characters' development than that. A system where they could set their own parameters for advancement while still operating within a rules framework would have worked really well for them, I think.
Grand Theft Otto 03-20-07, 11:28 AM	a_psh do you currently play D&D? You dont seem to enjoy the game in its current form, so I'm a little confused why you frequently post on a D&D board. I realize this initially sounds confrontational, but its not intended to be. I think our differences in opinions on the state of the game is more of degree, rather than kind, and I find your insights interesting. I'm just genuinely curious.
ArcTan 03-20-07, 01:23 PM	You honestly believe that, or are you trying to grasp at something for the sake of having a counterpoint to argue with someone? Seriously, how do you believe that there are NOT any 'hard and fast' rules about combat? All creatures have hit points. If your attack roll exceeds an opponent's Armor Class, then you hit for damage that is subtracted from their hit point total. If they reach 0, they are unconcious and/or dying. That is a hard and fast rule and the very core of the combat system. Any variant designs or alternate mechanics are derived from this simple concept, but they are variations of the original 'hard and fast' rule that remains accepted as the easiest and most efficient rule around which the entire game engine is designed. I mean that there don't start out being any "hard and fast" rules for combat. D&D just makes one up (hit points! attack bonus! armor class!) and we all take it as hard and fast because it makes life easier, despite the fact that we can change it any time we want, and some people do change it radically. There's no reason why you can't do the same with rules about story or roleplaying. The simplest answer is really a question; When you start relying on game mechanics and dice rolls for roleplaying, is it still roleplaying? I prefer to think that it's not. It doesn't have to be freeform to be roleplaying. Really, by this definition, combat in D&D can *never* be a form of roleplaying. Which is something a lot of people seriously believe and that other old-school D&Ders argue strenuously against -- but I think that roleplaying is anything that gives you a structure for making up a story. D&D just gives you structure to make up stories about brutally efficient combat machines and not much else -- but people find a way to do stuff with it nonetheless. I'd like to see D&D open doors to do more. Yes, everyone likes to live inside the box, don't they? But you're suggesting we should have a set of standards and preconcieved outcomes for the sole purpose of knowing where and how to deviate from it. Did I read that correctly?? :confused: Isn't that exactly what people say when they defend rules like HP or XP or class levels as a "good baseline" for DMs to start out from? So... in other words, you're actually hoping for a more dynamic system, much like combat, but for roleplaying. Your character now has a different set of stats and abilities that you can build and enhance for the 'roleplaying' battles between your group and highly-skilled diplomats. You roll your RP attempt die using various modifiers to match against an opponent's RP resist class until he succumbs to your willful words and rapier wit. That's what you're hoping for? In essence, though the emphasis is more on what happens in the story than winning the game. But there ARE rules for writing stories already. Well... they're more like guidelines, really. In fact, there's HUNDREDS of books available to give you all the advice you could ever want on writing stories, plots, developing characters, etc... you just need to look outside the gaming/hobby areas of your bookstore. Writing a story at home on your computer by yourself is infinitely different from playing an RPG, even an RPG that's all about story. The intention is different (you're hoping for an enjoyable experience on the fly as you tell the story, not to sit through many boring hours at home to create something people will read after the fact), the power dynamics are different (*everyone* is supposed to be making up this story, not just you), the rules are different (you're supposed to be in some way inhabiting just one part of the world, not creating the whole world as an omnipotent author), etc. A book on how to write a novel is going to give you the general shape of ideas for how to make up a story for an RPG, but it's not going to be the guide you want for playing an RPG. All those people who say "Maybe the DM should just write a novel" have a point when they say that, though I vehemently disagree with the usual implication that writing a story in a game is a futile task. This is true, but you can select who's advice is worthy to you and who can just be ignored, right? Or does someone else need to point them out as well? There are always better ways to divvy up time than having an all-powerful director who simply picks. Since we've all had the experience of running into a director/GM who's just *bad* and not really being able to do anything about it because the rules don't give us a leg to stand on if we complain -- the game just tells us to disband the game and find a new GM. There ought to be ways to make these decisions without putting all the pressure on one guy to make the correct one. Did my comments not strike you as suggesting I didn't think they were problematic?? The problem was within myself because I have always been too much of a perfectionist. The other part of that is how much I simply loathe other gamers in general for what they are: imperfect like me. Do the math. And the point of playing a game with rules is to compensate for people's imperfections. In general these imperfections matter most when you give people no direction and no structure and expect them to come up with something good all on their own. That makes absolutely no sense to me. You cannot change the music that is being played; you can only change what you are listening to. Game rules, on the other hand, can be modified and will affect how you play your game. And that's why we have more power than people who listen to music. Although, to be honest, the undercurrent here is that there really *are* games you can just go out and buy that already do this, without having to take D&D and modify it up the wazoo from scratch, and maybe the D&D designers should take a page from what these indie designers have been doing instead of just churning out the same old thing edition after edition. As much as I appreciate you taking the time to respond and acknowledge what I wrote, I'm afraid you've really offered nothing to this except some flippant and pointless remarks just for the sake of having something more to say to someone who does not agree with your opinion. It's not even an opinion, really... just a cry for what you want and why someone should do it for you. I know that sounds harsh and you won't take kindly to such words, but this is precisely how you present yourself to me. Really? My opinion is basically "Maybe WotC should pay more attention to the writers who post on the Forge instead of ignoring them". I think that's a plenty coherent opinion. In all honesty, if anyone hopes to see an actual rulebook strictly on ROLEPLAYING... well, it's just not going to happen. Understanding how to roleplay means understanding human nature, which is far too complex to lump into a bunch of stats and alignments to define for every instance and circumstance that could ever possibly be. But roleplaying doesn't just "happen". It's this idea that it needs to arise spontaneously from people playing a wargame that I don't like. D&D right now is people playing chess with a note saying "And once in a while, one of the knights has a conversation with one of the pawns". Roleplaying, at the very least, can only happen if you create a space for it to happen, which D&D right now does a very poor job of doing. The trick is just knowing about your own character before you even know what his/her gaming stats are. Think of them as characters you would write about in a book. The most revealing question you could ask is "What motivates him?". And D&D doesn't tell you to ask that question, and it gives very weak guidelines about asking that question. (It does the *opposite* of what any beginning actor or writer knows you should do -- rather than giving the character a specific motivation and set of circumstances, you start with a character "archetype" -- stereotype -- and are expected to have motivation and circumstances arise magically and spontaneously from the wargame, which frequently doesn't happen.)
Arrowhen 03-20-07, 01:26 PM	I would say this is less about the acting ability or writing ability of the players and more about the *editing*, of which there is often none. Even a not-that-great courtroom scene can hold my attention as long as it's cut and spliced in the right places. The problem is that players with no guidance for doing this will try to *literally* "play through" a conversation in its entirety, which can never be anything but boring. This kind of thing can happen with combat, too. Currently, the game uses the same exact mechanics for a random barroom brawl as it does for the climactic battle with the BBEG. What I'd like to see is resolution mechanics that scale in complexity in proportion to the importance of their outcome. Something where your average bar fight/bandit attack/wandering low-level monster (the encounters that are there primarily to show what badasses the main characters are, rather than to present any significant challenge) would be resolved very quickly, maybe with a single roll, maybe with just a quick comparison of abilities; where fights with the bad guy's lieutenant/the monster guarding the evil temple/etc. (encounters where failure represents a significant setback and success means the characters are one step closer to achieving their goals) would be dealt with in greater detail--but still quicker than "normal" D&D combat; and where only the encounters that really matter (where failure would lead to death or some other plot-related catastrophe) would be handled on the gritty, tactical, blow-by-blow level. This same scaling of complexity would also apply to non-combat actions (picking a couple random pockets for beer money vs. swiping a palace guard uniform from the royal tailor's shop vs. infiltrating the palace to rifle through the king's personal effects).
ArcTan 03-20-07, 01:30 PM	Laff. Okay, I can no longer take you seriously. Like, at all. Apparently, I have been doing nothing but losing at illusions for the past few years. Imagine that! All the fun I've been having, not real. Or outside the game. How enlightening. Or crazy. Heh, have fun with this discussion. There's absolutely nothing of value to see here. All he means is that a lot of D&D games turn into the DM secretly simply deciding, as the all-powerful director/author/whatever, how the game should turn out, and manipulating events so they turn out that way. The rules and the dice don't make the game turn out that way -- the DM does, and he frequently does it by ignoring the rules and the dice or subtly putting pressure on them by doing things the rules and the dice don't tell him to do. I mean, in one sense this is obvious. All the *important* things that happen in a story, the D&D rules give you not one whit of encouragement to do. The D&D rules tell you flat-out that a dungeon-crawling random-monster-encounter adventure is the baseline assumption of D&D, and anything else -- recurring characters, political intrigue, siding among a group of factions, etc. -- is something you add on, "optionally", with no guidance for when or how to do this, or how to tie this into what the PCs are doing. This goes further, though. What DM who actually puts story above all hasn't ended up fudging because, *dammit*, the BBEG that looked so cool turned out to have an unexpected synergy of abilities that meant this encounter really should turn out as a TPK from a wargaming perspective, but a TPK would absolutely destroy the story from any kind of story perspective? What DM hasn't tried to make sure this character survives or that character dies because the plot is completely messed up if he lets the dice be as random as he wants them to be? *Especially* when he starts rolling on percentile charts, which are the bane of any actual story advancement? (Technically, after all, the DM has already begun to fudge when instead of rolling on environment charts he just *says* "And it's a dark and stormy evening", or instead of rolling on an encounter table he just *says* "It's that same bandit group you encountered before!") The main thing is that when people talk about how D&D is *great* and you can have wonderful stories in D&D if you just have the "right DM", they're not talking about the rules of D&D. The rules of D&D have nothing to do with it. This is why so many people are disappointed when they move from group to group, and then cuss out a DM who, frankly, isn't doing that bad a job following the rules he's been given as an "awful DM" or "stupid DM" or whatever. "Good DMs" tend to be DMs who have come up with a huge, complex, hidden set of rules that they're quietly using behind the scenes all the time to decide how the story should go, to adjudicate player input, to do this and that and the other thing -- and players are encouraged to pretend that all this narrative intensity "grew naturally" from the rules and the dice, that it's a natural result of just sitting around playing D&D, when it's not -- it's one person working his ASS off, and possibly not even aware of how hard he's working because he thinks of this as just "playing D&D" too, and he doesn't realize how many of the things he's "learned" about how D&D works are things he *invented* in order to make his game work the way he wants.
DoveArrow 03-20-07, 02:00 PM	Creating consensus is like step 1 of successful storytelling. You absolutely need everyone to agree to buy into some presuppositions before any meaningful storytelling can really occur. So, I'd say what the D&D rules do provide is not really very impressive. You can do it pretty easily without any rules at all. So to summarize, it sounds like you're saying we need consensus... the D&D rules provide consensus... but we don't really need consensus. :confused: It's kinda silly to say, "Hey, we need all these books and books of rules to fulfill this very basic task..." First of all, I never said we need books and books of rules to fulfill any task. In fact, what I said was that if the rules are getting in the way of your game, you might consider using a simpler system, or a simplified version of the d20 system. In any case, you only really 'need' one book to play D&D. If you're the DM, you need three. Sure, you can buy more books if you want to, but it's not like you have to show up to every game with your entire library in tow. Personally, I have a whole shelf of books at home. When I go to a game, though, I usually show up with only the Player's Handbook, the Dungeon Master's Guide, the Monster Manual, and, if we're playing in a published campaign, the campaign setting book. Sometimes, I'll bring one of the Complete books, or the Spell Compendium, if I'm planning on using something from one of those, but usually I don't. As a DM, I might bring one or two more, depending on my needs, but that's really about all I ever carry. ...but we're such good storytellers that we don't need any structure for the actual juice bits! I think Wizards does a fairly good job of providing fans with storytelling material. They have a fair number of adventure modules published, which are essentially ready made stories. There's also advice on how to run various types of campaigns in the back of each Complete book, there's tons of information about how to roleplay the various races in the Races books, Heroes of Horror goes into great depth about how to run a horror campaign, The Eberron Campaign Setting has a whole chapter devoted to running campaigns in that campaign world, the Dungeon Master's Guide II has ideas for all kinds of different campaigns that you can run, and the list goes on and on. Of course, maybe these books don't inspire you. In that case, do what you're already doing and look elsewhere for inspiration. Personally, I find that many of the suggestions in the books I mentioned above are quite inspiring. I also find that many of them aren't. I have also found that other resources can sometimes be more inspiring than the ones suggested by Wizards. For example, Joseph Campbell's "Heroes with a Thousand Faces" (a book that has nothing to do with gaming, by the way) is a great resource for creating memorable adventures. That doesn't mean I think there's something lacking from the game because Wizards hasn't republished the hero's journey. Inspiration can come from any number of sources, and what works for one person may not work for someone else. But maybe that's not getting at the heart of what you think is wrong with D&D. Maybe when you say 'storytelling components' you mean something else other than the components needed for telling a story. In fact, in a later post, your complaint seems to be more about the fact that players aren't rewarded for roleplaying: 1. You say what your character is all about. "I'm ____" is a very important thing in and of itself. Right now, there's a lot more focus "I'm ____ and this is how I kill things." The game rewards you for playing your character and pushes you to develop that character (TSOY's Keys, above, are a simple example of how one such system could work). I think this is a fine idea. In fact, I could see this being done fairly easily in D&D. For example, you could have the players give the DM folded pieces of paper with numbers on one side and the desire of their character folded up inside. If the player fulfills a character's desire, they ask the DM to open the corresponding piece of paper, and the DM rewards a certain amount of XP based on the nature of the desire. 3. The average player should, after two or three sessions, be informed enough to make up a reasonably functional new spell or feat or et cetera. A-FRIKKIN-MEN! In fact, there's actually a system for creating spells in the Epic Level Handbook that I would love to see adapted for use in the game. In any case, if these are your complaints, it seems to me you've already found solutions, and it makes me wonder, what exactly are you complaining about? You have great ideas, so share them with people. I know personally, I'd much rather see a post that says, "Hey guys, why don't you try using this great idea in your own game!" rather than "Hey guys, D&D sucks, and I wish they'd come up with something better."
Seeker95 03-20-07, 02:01 PM	All he means is that a lot of D&D games turn into the DM secretly simply deciding, as the all-powerful director/author/whatever, how the game should turn out, and manipulating events so they turn out that way.If by "secretly decides" you mean: Selects the adventures s/he has the time and energy to prepare; Selects the world / campaign setting; Selects the overall storyline (if any); Selects the NPCs Then yes, I guess this is secretly decided. But I disagree that the the DM decides outcomes. The DM provides the challenges. The players decide the responses. The rules provide the framework in which challenges and responses are adjudicated. This applies to combat in more detail than to non-combat, but the approach is the same for any encounter / challenge.
elondir 03-20-07, 02:42 PM	Reading that rant made me realize just how few actual rules I actually used. At least until the Core Rules 2.0 Expansion CD-ROM came out. D&D is best when it's fast-and-loose. AD&D was more receptive towards colorful descriptions of combat that 3e would force you to have ranks in tumble or a feat or something. AD&D didn't care about game balance, either. By the way, I don't think the game is stagnating. Yes there are lots of rulebooks with thousands of feats and PrCs, but some great books just came out this month: Secrets of Sarlona and Magic Item Compendium.
Solik 03-20-07, 02:53 PM	All he means is that a lot of D&D games turn into the DM secretly simply deciding, as the all-powerful director/author/whatever, how the game should turn out, and manipulating events so they turn out that way. The rules and the dice don't make the game turn out that way -- the DM does, and he frequently does it by ignoring the rules and the dice or subtly putting pressure on them by doing things the rules and the dice don't tell him to do. That's not the impression I was getting from him. I fully agree that that's a problem, and it sucks when it happens. But he's railing against the rules here (or at least what they're lacking) as being at fault for this. I'll happily join in rants about bad DMing, but this just doesn't feel like one of them to me. Maybe I'm misreading. All the *important* things that happen in a story, the D&D rules give you not one whit of encouragement to do. The D&D rules tell you flat-out that a dungeon-crawling random-monster-encounter adventure is the baseline assumption of D&D, and anything else -- recurring characters, political intrigue, siding among a group of factions, etc. -- is something you add on, "optionally", with no guidance for when or how to do this, or how to tie this into what the PCs are doing. This is not true if you consider published adventures part of the official D&D game (whether you opt to run them or not). They're quite good at this sort of thing. Speaker in Dreams and Expedition to Castle Ravenloft have been quite effective at setting up this stuff, even though the latter has tons of hack-n-slash as well. What DM who actually puts story above all hasn't ended up fudging because, *dammit*, the BBEG that looked so cool turned out to have an unexpected synergy of abilities that meant this encounter really should turn out as a TPK from a wargaming perspective, but a TPK would absolutely destroy the story from any kind of story perspective? These two things shouldn't be so intrinsically linked. The BBEG looks cool because the DM describes him that way. That really doesn't need to have much at all to do with its abilities. Sounds like a DM that's skilled at storytelling and not skilled at the mechanics. The DM position does require both. Perhaps you're arguing that it shouldn't? You can always run (balanced) published adventures in that case. What DM hasn't tried to make sure this character survives or that character dies because the plot is completely messed up if he lets the dice be as random as he wants them to be? Me. I've fudged dice to keep players from dying, but only because either the player was new or I screwed up the encounter. Doing this for plot reasons is a Very Bad Idea (TM) imho. *Especially* when he starts rolling on percentile charts, which are the bane of any actual story advancement? This leads to a very interesting side-discussion that I wouldn't mind running a whole topic about. This goes back to the story and gameplay dichotomy that's a very debated issue in game design. Stories are linear and constrained, but games are open and frequently random(ish). On the other hand, stories can emerge from the gameplay, involving the players, and that makes for truly quality gaming. Are random tables good for this sort of thing? Maybe. Sometimes. It's certainly more of a game element than a story element. But can it lead to emergent story? The main thing is that when people talk about how D&D is *great* and you can have wonderful stories in D&D if you just have the "right DM", they're not talking about the rules of D&D. The rules of D&D have nothing to do with it. This is why so many people are disappointed when they move from group to group, and then cuss out a DM who, frankly, isn't doing that bad a job following the rules he's been given as an "awful DM" or "stupid DM" or whatever. "Good DMs" tend to be DMs who have come up with a huge, complex, hidden set of rules that they're quietly using behind the scenes all the time to decide how the story should go, to adjudicate player input, to do this and that and the other thing -- and players are encouraged to pretend that all this narrative intensity "grew naturally" from the rules and the dice, that it's a natural result of just sitting around playing D&D, when it's not -- it's one person working his ASS off, and possibly not even aware of how hard he's working because he thinks of this as just "playing D&D" too, and he doesn't realize how many of the things he's "learned" about how D&D works are things he *invented* in order to make his game work the way he wants. Sorry, I just don't see this reflected in my games at all. That's not what I mean when I talk about D&D being good, and I have no set of "hidden rules" that I use when running games. I've run quality games straight out of published material or using completely original adventures and worlds, gone straight by the rules, and watched stories emerge. As an example, in an original world, I had a city where some conspirators were planning to overthrow the emperor (who was away on a war campaign). I defined the conspirators, their motivations, some other key NPCs, and the initial hook that would involve the players on all this (along with maps of the city and the like). Some of that used the rules (city size and contents, etc) and some was backstory with no rule constraints (thankfully). Following that initial event, I let the players do what they wanted. They explored, asked questions, strategized, met NPCs, formed alliances / friendships, and slowly figured out what was going on. At the end of each session, I'd ask them what their plans were, and I'd write up encounters, dungeons, whatever I needed in response to what they were going to do (and written through me roleplaying the NPCs and how they'd react, not done by me deciding how to keep the players on the story rails based on what they do). A story emerged from that, driven by the players, with all the gameplay founded in the rules. The rules were quiet where I needed them to be (designing the core plot) and helpful where I needed them to be (resolving actions). It was one of the finest adventures we've run. I see no place for additional rules in structuring story. They'd just get in the way.
ArcTan 03-20-07, 03:14 PM	So to summarize, it sounds like you're saying we need consensus... the D&D rules provide consensus... but we don't really need consensus. :confused: Well, the D&D rules don't. They make it sound and look like two players can come in looking for completely different things and both be satisfied -- it's the marketing department going over the top again, saying that a dungeon crawler who wants lots of tactical grit and a dreamy actor who wants to live through a romance can be satisfied by the same session and the same DM, which is almost never true. The problem is that there's no *method* for achieving consensus given in the game. It often just comes down to the DM saying "Well, this is going to be a campaign about political intrigue in the big city, and that's it, and anyone who doesn't like it can leave", without giving tools for how you can turn one person's idea into everyone's idea by building on each other. The DMG even gives what I consider to be pretty weak advice on how to deal with "problem" players or "oddball" players, pretty much telling you to relegate them to the sidelines, to let them steal spotlight and annoy everyone for a little while and then shut them down by fiat. First of all, I never said we need books and books of rules to fulfill any task. In fact, what I said was that if the rules are getting in the way of your game, you might consider using a simpler system, or a simplified version of the d20 system. A_psh is asking for a rules-based structure for making up stories, which D&D currently has none of, despite the fact that it has tons and tons of rules for simulating combats. That's the contradiction there. I think Wizards does a fairly good job of providing fans with storytelling material. They have a fair number of adventure modules published, which are essentially ready made stories. There's also advice on how to run various types of campaigns in the back of each Complete book, there's tons of information about how to roleplay the various races in the Races books, Heroes of Horror goes into great depth about how to run a horror campaign, The Eberron Campaign Setting has a whole chapter devoted to running campaigns in that campaign world, the Dungeon Master's Guide II has ideas for all kinds of different campaigns that you can run, and the list goes on and on. We're not talking about "inspiration". Not like reading a short story about pirates and saying "I want to run a game about pirates!" We're talking about *rules*, *structures*, *procedures*, some *way* to run a game and make sure it's about pirates, rather than simply saying "This is a pirate-based campaign" and letting everything else emerge from the primordial soup, with the rules only intervening in stuff like combat or skill checks. In any case, if these are your complaints, it seems to me you've already found solutions, and it makes me wonder, what exactly are you complaining about? You have great ideas, so share them with people. I know personally, I'd much rather see a post that says, "Hey guys, why don't you try using this great idea in your own game!" rather than "Hey guys, D&D sucks, and I wish they'd come up with something better." Because the real thrust is that the design philosophy of D&D 3e isn't taking these concerns into consideration at all, and that this is a bad thing for the game, even if you make up your own system (as many people have) to make things better in your games.
ArcTan 03-20-07, 03:24 PM	That's not the impression I was getting from him. I fully agree that that's a problem, and it sucks when it happens. But he's railing against the rules here (or at least what they're lacking) as being at fault for this. I'll happily join in rants about bad DMing, but this just doesn't feel like one of them to me. Maybe I'm misreading. They are at fault for this. Because so many people want a story-based adventure from D&D and the rules don't provide one. This is not true if you consider published adventures part of the official D&D game (whether you opt to run them or not). They're quite good at this sort of thing. Speaker in Dreams and Expedition to Castle Ravenloft have been quite effective at setting up this stuff, even though the latter has tons of hack-n-slash as well. The published adventures don't create *rules* for *developing* a story. They just give you a story in black and white and tell you to run it. All the rules for adjusting or adapting the story basically tell the DM to do it by fiat. It all comes back to the "If it doesn't involve the player actually performing an action in-character that needs to be resolved by die rolls, the DM is the omnipotent god of the game" philosophy. These two things shouldn't be so intrinsically linked. The BBEG looks cool because the DM describes him that way. That really doesn't need to have much at all to do with its abilities. Sounds like a DM that's skilled at storytelling and not skilled at the mechanics. The DM position does require both. Perhaps you're arguing that it shouldn't? You can always run (balanced) published adventures in that case. I'm saying that it shouldn't come down the DM's skill, or to the skill of someone who wrote a pre-published adventure. There should be some structure inside the game by which these stories come out by players working with them. Me. I've fudged dice to keep players from dying, but only because either the player was new or I screwed up the encounter. Doing this for plot reasons is a Very Bad Idea (TM) imho. Depends. This leads to a very interesting side-discussion that I wouldn't mind running a whole topic about. This goes back to the story and gameplay dichotomy that's a very debated issue in game design. Stories are linear and constrained, but games are open and frequently random(ish). On the other hand, stories can emerge from the gameplay, involving the players, and that makes for truly quality gaming. Are random tables good for this sort of thing? Maybe. Sometimes. It's certainly more of a game element than a story element. But can it lead to emergent story? It often doesn't. I'm not a fan of players who want something having to sit around and wait for it to "emerge" from randomness. It's what makes so many D&D games so stultifying to sit through -- because half the time it's *not* emerging from randomness, it's someone quietly forcing things to occur -- the DM causing things to happen "randomly" or "by chance" according to his Master Plan -- and everyone pretending like it was random. This is why players are often so mystified that a game that "comes together" so well when the "right people" play it falls apart when they join a new group, despite the fact that the other players are using the same rules with the same ideas -- sometimes even the same published adventure -- and the DM is *not* stupid but just doing what the rules tell him to do. To blatantly misuse an analogy, I'd rather the story in D&D came as a result of intelligent design than random emergent evolution (which ends up being design, in the long run, anyway -- just *un*intelligent design). Sorry, I just don't see this reflected in my games at all. That's not what I mean when I talk about D&D being good, and I have no set of "hidden rules" that I use when running games. I've run quality games straight out of published material or using completely original adventures and worlds, gone straight by the rules, and watched stories emerge. As an example, in an original world, I had a city where some conspirators were planning to overthrow the emperor (who was away on a war campaign). I defined the conspirators, their motivations, some other key NPCs, and the initial hook that would involve the players on all this (along with maps of the city and the like). Some of that used the rules (city size and contents, etc) and some was backstory with no rule constraints (thankfully). Following that initial event, I let the players do what they wanted. They explored, asked questions, strategized, met NPCs, formed alliances / friendships, and slowly figured out what was going on. At the end of each session, I'd ask them what their plans were, and I'd write up encounters, dungeons, whatever I needed in response to what they were going to do (and written through me roleplaying the NPCs and how they'd react, not done by me deciding how to keep the players on the story rails based on what they do). A story emerged from that, driven by the players, with all the gameplay founded in the rules. The rules were quiet where I needed them to be (designing the core plot) and helpful where I needed them to be (resolving actions). It was one of the finest adventures we've run. I see no place for additional rules in structuring story. They'd just get in the way. Speaking as someone who's been in this kind of situation (and been called a "good DM" of the kind you mean) I would suspect, even though I've never been in any of your games, that you're doing more to keep the story running than you're aware of, and that if we replaced you with a DM who was intimately familiar with the rules but who hadn't had your experience with your particular gaming group the whole thing would fall apart. Which may not be a big deal to you, because of course you aren't going to disappear and be replaced anytime soon. But this is like when people talk about 1e D&D and how much "fun" it was as long as you had "the right DM" to adjudicate combats "fairly" instead of "stupidly" -- it's a game that only works with your particular set of people and after you've had a long time to develop it -- i.e. it's a game that depends on you making it up. I think the whole "It's fun but only if you play with people you've known for years with a DM who's spent years honing his craft" thing I hear so often from people is, yes, a problem with the hobby. It shouldn't be that hard. It shouldn't be so difficult to translate what works well for one group into something that every group could use. It shouldn't be impossible to pick up the game by having someone who's never DMed before coming up with a single-session scenario with a bunch of his friends and *not* needing a published adventure to handhold him through every aspect of it. It's not *impossible* right now with D&D 3e, but it's much more difficult than it could be.
Roxlimn 03-20-07, 03:35 PM	a_psh: Everything about old D&D was a kludge. A lot of people's fondest memories of D&D basically arise from this thing that they cobbled together on top of the actual game rules. We've since de-kludged a big part of the wargame-y rules. But D&D's utility as an actual roleplaying game hasn't improved. All the character development, storytelling, &c., &c. is all just freeform-y stuff the players kludge together on top of the wargame-y bits. If D&D is going to be anything other than a moldy old dinosaur left by the wayside or a big drop of poison in the roleplaying well, it's time to de-kludge all the other stuff. I disagree. Since D&D was invented "RPG" has always meant a little bit of wargaming, and lots of "RPG games" are expected to hold to this standard, so much so that many gamers would be bitterly disappointed if an "RPG" didn't provide at least something of a nod to wargaming. Thus, D&D is an actual roleplaying game, and its improvement as a wargame improves it as a roleplaying game. You could invent your own definition of what a "roleplaying game" ought to be, but you'd be paddling in your own boat there. I'd rather not join you. It also isn't true that the character development parts and the storytelling parts haven't improved. Indeed, much of the DMG II is a big nod towards this part of the game, and much of the fluff about various classes and prestige classes, the "flavor" and "fluff" parts of D&D have increased since the old days. It would, indeed, be a great big nice deal if all those Dungeoncraft and Dragon articles about pacing and storytelling and suspense and excitement were all built into the core books, but that's a lot of ink and paper to be selling there, and you have to prioritize. I like it that they prioritize mechanics because they're the only ones who can do that. My professor can't tell me how D&D builds cities and metropolises. He can tell me the elements of a good story. If I want storytelling technique, I'd learn it from people who know what they're talking about. I'm quite sorry but I have absolutely no respect for people who pretend to know how to make a good story but can't sell a literary piece to a publisher to save their lives. Even those that manage to con a publisher to sell a badly told tale don't have a lot of skill. Much of the fantasy fare that comes out these days is third rate at best, and that adds little to my respect for these hacks. D&D designers stick to what they're good at: designing a mechanical game, and that's why I pay them good money. Then you're not playing with people who have radically different desires from you in the first place. When two people who want ridiculously different things out of something get together, their game sucks. Not really. It's when people who are too selfish to try to enjoy other parts of the game and just have a good time with their friends get together that the game sucks. I don't particularly enjoy the storytelling part, to tell you the truth. I find it ineffably boring and self-aggrandizing. I CAN enjoy it in small doses, and I try to do so for the sake of my friends who do. If two players can't put together their differences and find a compromise in order to spend enjoyable time together, then yes, that game will suck. The social aspect of D&D is important. You really oughtn't play with people you wouldn't otherwise hang out with. True with other games as well, not just RPGs. It's less to do with how similar my preferences are to my friends (because I have very diverse social groups) and more to do with how I enjoy their company. D&D caters to radically different people. That alone makes it a winner. It means that two radically different groups can play it and have fun. They may not have fun playing with each other, but separately, they could. Your proposal to hard-code fringe elements into the game is simply reflective of an intolerant desire to make the game ONLY into what you enjoy. If you're talking about experiencing your character in play, why is it that you consider a bunch of combat mechanics and some illusionist freeform to be the right path here? I don't consider it the holy grail, but it's a whole lot better than anything else I've seen. I get the distinct impression that what you mean by "experiencing your character in play," only means the way you want to play, not the manner of play I'm talking about. "Freeform + wargame" is clunky and cumbersome for whatever you might want to do with it. It's useful for doing more than one kind of game. If I want a wargame, I can do that. If I want a puzzle game, the game also can be tailored to handle that. The game could ALSO stand to benefit from having a bunch of puzzle-making advice loaded onto it but I don't see you proposing that much. Video games and true tabletop wargames create more functional competitive tactical play. They've got a framework that permits unabashed hardcore balls-to-the-wall adversarial play, for starters. But they don't allow people to create the particular character concepts they like. Some people like to play like that, and getting to play like that with people who like to do story brings diverse people together into a common social environment. Anything that involves not playing the game is not playing. If you're talking about actual play, then ignore that bit. What you mean to say is that anything that doesn't conform to your intolerant views of how the game should be played isn't playing the game and ought to be removed or remodeled so as to marginalize these other gamers, who don't deserve to play D&D. Gary Gygax once said something to the same effect. "If you're not playing by my rules, you're not playing D&D." Guess how well he's doing?
Arrowhen 03-20-07, 03:43 PM	These two things shouldn't be so intrinsically linked. The BBEG looks cool because the DM describes him that way. That really doesn't need to have much at all to do with its abilities. Sounds like a DM that's skilled at storytelling and not skilled at the mechanics. Or it could be a sign of an overly complex, obtuse ruleset which makes developing skill at the mechanics more difficult than it needs to be.
Solik 03-20-07, 04:11 PM	They are at fault for this. Because so many people want a story-based adventure from D&D and the rules don't provide one. There is a massive gulf between "story-based adventure" and "game that follows a predetermined story put forth by the DM." I don't think this DM wants what you're describing at all. He wants to tell his story, and he intends to tell it to the players whether they want to hear it or not. The published adventures don't create *rules* for *developing* a story. Give me some example of such rules. Good or bad, I don't care. I need something concrete before I respond so I don't misunderstand what you're talking about. It all comes back to the "If it doesn't involve the player actually performing an action in-character that needs to be resolved by die rolls, the DM is the omnipotent god of the game" philosophy. This isn't worded very fairly. Player actions are a massive part of the game; indeed, they are the focus and the driving components. I'm not a fan of players who want something having to sit around and wait for it to "emerge" from randomness. RPGs aren't about sitting and being spoon-fed a story, either from random tables or DM storytelling. The story comes from what the players do. Random events, DM setup, these things are just the ignition and points of challenge. There is a subgenre of games, of course, that unfortunately have the RPG brand, that are about being spoonfed stories. These are the Final Fantasy style console RPGs. While I enjoy these, I hardly want to play them around a table. I think the whole "It's fun but only if you play with people you've known for years with a DM who's spent years honing his craft" thing I hear so often from people is, yes, a problem with the hobby. It shouldn't be that hard. I don't think it is. I've been DMing on-and-off for only two years. The first games I played had a bad DM and a newbie group and were still fun. It shouldn't be impossible to pick up the game by having someone who's never DMed before coming up with a single-session scenario with a bunch of his friends and *not* needing a published adventure to handhold him through every aspect of it. Why? What's so wrong with published adventures? It's a complicated game, but that's because there's a lot to it, not because it's unnecessarily convoluted (well, mostly). Good. That makes the game rich and enjoyable (for me). I mean, yeah, it takes some amount of talent and skill to make adventures. So what? Most hobbies do. I can't just go out and start flying small planes, or knitting sweaters, or hunting wild turkeys. I'll have to learn how to do it, acquire the associated skills, and I'll probably do so by associating with veterans. Sure, you could simplify the game to the point where it could be picked up and played like a board game, but how satisfying would that be?
DoveArrow 03-20-07, 04:22 PM	We're not talking about "inspiration". Not like reading a short story about pirates and saying "I want to run a game about pirates!" We're talking about *rules*, *structures*, *procedures*, some *way* to run a game and make sure it's about pirates, rather than simply saying "This is a pirate-based campaign" and letting everything else emerge from the primordial soup, with the rules only intervening in stuff like combat or skill checks. If he wants more rules, then why does he say this? When people recount their glorious D&D adventures from the 1980s, all the best parts seem to come from twisting and mangling and ignoring the rules. Or this? And you know what the most common defense is when someone says "Oh, gee, I'm having trouble with the game mechanics"? "Blah blah need a good GM to make it work." I'm sick to death of hearing this. The example "good GM" is just compensating, compensating, compensating. Heck, in a pathological case, he's doing more work handwaving his way past the system than he is just making stuff up without any system at all. Or this? Why is it that you've got so many people talking about how their favorite experiences all happened back when they didn't understand the game and just kind of muddled about at random, like actually understanding the game did nothing to improve their fun? He's not advocating more rules, he's advocating less! Honestly, no wonder nobody can figure out what the heck you guys want out of the game. You don't even know yourself. You're sitting here complaining about how the game should have more rules, but less rules, how it should have more consensus, but no consensus, how it should be more like this system, but not really, and about how it should be more open to the imagination, but more rigid in the kinds of stories you can tell. Good grief! I have no idea what kinds of games you're running, but if they're anywhere near as inconsistent as this hodgepodge of contradictions that you've come up with in this 8 page thread, I'm glad I'm not sitting at your tables.
Reinforcements 03-20-07, 04:33 PM	He's not advocating more rules, he's advocating less! Um, there is another alternative you know - he's advocating DIFFERENT rules, or rules for different things. I don't really agree with a_psh but it doesn't seem that hard to understand his point to me.
a_psh 03-20-07, 04:49 PM	It also isn't true that the character development parts and the storytelling parts haven't improved. Indeed, much of the DMG II is a big nod towards this part of the game, and much of the fluff about various classes and prestige classes, the "flavor" and "fluff" parts of D&D have increased since the old days.That's writing game content, not actual game design. It would, indeed, be a great big nice deal if all those Dungeoncraft and Dragon articles about pacing and storytelling and suspense and excitement were all built into the core books, but that's a lot of ink and paper to be selling there, and you have to prioritize.Play supported by system is better than play unsupported by system, hands-down. That's the whole point of a system. That's why games have rules. This is true for story-generating play as well as more straightforwardly wargame-like play. Guides and articles don't give you a system except when they directly offer you little tidbits of play procedures to incorporate into the game you're playing, and those little tidbits are building blocks at best. As for space? The functional, general-purpose, player-driven reward system from TSOY only takes up a few pages. So does the big XP-to-CR chart and the section about ad hoc XP, how to divide up XP, how to count different monsters for XP vs. how to calculate their EL, et cetera. Hey, a better system in about as many pages. (Or, heck, if you find yourself needing another 50 pages -- I doubt you would, -- throw some filler out of the core books. Start with all the spells and magic items that nobody ever uses because they're widely acknowledged to suck.) **** space! You can write a good system in 30 pages, plus another 30 for context and examples. I like it that they prioritize mechanics because they're the only ones who can do that. My professor can't tell me how D&D builds cities and metropolises. He can tell me the elements of a good story.Can he write you a game that actually helps make kick-ass collaborative storytelling happen at the table? Then stop talking about the damn college professor. It's as silly as "Yeah, if I wanted a wargame, I'd call up a Pentagon general in charge of military simulations and ask him how to put advanced military tactics into my freeform roleplaying." He'll either tell you a bunch of stuff you can't use or, if he does understand what you're talking about, will just stare at you confusedly. No amount of advice you shovel on top of a wargame can make it anything more than a wargame. I'm going to ignore the thing about publishing because: 1. You're equating the ability to negotiate a byzantine social network (which is a freakin' awesome ability, but not writing) with the ability to write something good. 2. You then turned around and said getting published is unrelated to the actual ability to write, given how much schlock gets printed. 3. You're equating off-the-cuff collaborative social storytelling with the laborious production of a polished work that you then try to sell to strangers. D&D designers stick to what they're good at: designing a mechanical game, and that's why I pay them good money.Once again, I am talking about mechanics here. Intelligently-written, general-purpose, story-enabling mechanics. Not a big book of advice on how to be a freeform roleplayer. I don't think that's quite clear yet. D&D caters to radically different people.No, it doesn't. It pretends to cater to everybody. It supports a bastardized flavor of wargaming and only half-heartedly permits everything else. But they don't allow people to create the particular character concepts they like.As opposed to D&D, which gives you a big bag of archetypes and tells you to go mix and match them until you get a character that vaguely resembles what you want, then tweak that until it's actually capable of killing people? Back in the day, some random Ultima Online players created a bunch of characters (you can only be human) with really grey skin, then killed some orcs and took their special orc hats and went around pretending to be orcs. That's about what making a character in D&D is like, too: "Hey, look, everybody, I swear I'm not just a killing machine!". What you mean to say is that anything that doesn't conform to your intolerant views of how the game should be played isn't playing the game and ought to be removed or remodeled so as to marginalize these other gamers, who don't deserve to play D&D.No, I'm specifically talking about stuff that you are not doing at the table with your friends. Like designing an adventure or daydreaming stuff about your character while sitting through work/school or puttering around on the forums joking about magic items. None of that stuff is as important as the social experience of play itself. If it's somehow snobbish to say that what actually happens during a session is more important than how much fun you can have making up classes by yourself, then, yes, call me a snob. But then please explain to me how favoring stuff you do outside of play at the expense of stuff you do when you're actually at the table with your friends makes for a better game. Gary Gygax once said something to the same effect. "If you're not playing by my rules, you're not playing D&D."No, no, much simpler: "If you're not playing D&D at the moment, they you're not actually playing D&D at the moment."
DoveArrow 03-20-07, 05:21 PM	Um, there is another alternative you know - he's advocating DIFFERENT rules, or rules for different things. I don't really agree with a_psh but it doesn't seem that hard to understand his point to me. Well that might be what he's advocating now, but that's not what he was advocating at first. If you read through the three quotes that I posted from his original rant, it's obvious that he was originally advocating a system with less rules, period. Now he's taking a different tack and saying not less rules, but more rules for roleplaying and storytelling. But no wait... he's not saying that either because he says having extra books at the table is a bad thing. :banghead: Honestly, if he was just advocating a way to adjudicate XP better for roleplaying, I'd be cool with that. If he was advocating a way to incorporate storytelling rules into the game, I'd be cool with that too. However, that's not what he's advocating. He wants everything to be simpler and more complex, less rules oriented, but moreso all at the same time, and you can't have it both ways.
Roxlimn 03-20-07, 05:26 PM	a_psh Play supported by system is better than play unsupported by system, hands-down. That's the whole point of a system. That's why games have rules. This is true for story-generating play as well as more straightforwardly wargame-like play. Guides and articles don't give you a system except when they directly offer you little tidbits of play procedures to incorporate into the game you're playing, and those little tidbits are building blocks at best. As for space? The functional, general-purpose, player-driven reward system from TSOY only takes up a few pages. So does the big XP-to-CR chart and the section about ad hoc XP, how to divide up XP, how to count different monsters for XP vs. how to calculate their EL, et cetera. Hey, a better system in about as many pages. Incorporating a player-driven reward system into D&D will conflict with its DM-driven wargame-based prerogative that it also uses to generate "story," such as it is. (Or, heck, if you find yourself needing another 50 pages -- I doubt you would, -- throw some filler out of the core books. Start with all the spells and magic items that nobody ever uses because they're widely acknowledged to suck.) **** space! You can write a good system in 30 pages, plus another 30 for context and examples. 60 pages is a lot of content. Spells and Magic Items that suck are only known to suck because they've already been played and proven to suck. When they were released, this was not known. Heck, we won't know how much your proposed rules will suck until they're printed, either. Speaking plainly, you want the game to include rules you want at the expense of rules that cater to play you don't enjoy. Can he write you a game that actually helps make kick-ass collaborative storytelling happen at the table? Then stop talking about the damn college professor. Yes, actually. Collaborative storytelling isn't new. He can point me to storytelling traditions, for instance, in which the storyteller changes from session to session, building on what has gone before, or similar such games. He's already helped me a lot with designing the story parts of my games, and if I wanted a collaborative storytelling experience, I'm quite sure he can help me with that, too. That's because he knows storytelling, which is why he's a paid expert. Once again, I am talking about mechanics here. Intelligently-written, general-purpose, story-enabling mechanics. Not a big book of advice on how to be a freeform roleplayer. I don't think that's quite clear yet. Nope. It was quite clear. The "game" and "mechanics" and "rules" parts were rather hard to miss. No, it doesn't. It pretends to cater to everybody. It supports a bastardized flavor of wargaming and only half-heartedly permits everything else. It knows what sells and prioritizes that. You're just miffed because you don't happen to enjoy the parts of D&D that are currently emphasized. That doesn't mean that D&D is going nowhere, and it's arrogant for you to insinuate that everyone else's playstyles are inferior to yours. As opposed to D&D, which gives you a big bag of archetypes and tells you to go mix and match them until you get a character that vaguely resembles what you want, then tweak that until it's actually capable of killing people? In all fairness, it's such a big and diverse bag of archetypes that it's probably more than what you can ever need (and it's expanding every day). Characters we envision and create, particularly the heroic ones, are themselves made up of preconceived heroic archetypal characteristics we glean from our idols and aspirations. So D&D's method of presenting you with the very building blocks you normally use to create an imagined ideal isn't all that far from the mark. No, I'm specifically talking about stuff that you are not doing at the table with your friends. Like designing an adventure or daydreaming stuff about your character while sitting through work/school or puttering around on the forums joking about magic items. None of that stuff is as important as the social experience of play itself. Hey, let's insult some more people! What about those darned goblins, eh? They stink, huh? Playing with D&D CAN be the design of adventures, classes and feats, and if someone enjoys himself doing this, what's the point of ruining his fun? Why exactly are we trying to alienate him by saying that his fun isn't as important as our fun? Is it because he's fundamentally inferior as a person? Maybe he just isn't as smart as you, eh? Yes, you are a huge snob. I'm only responding to your request. But then please explain to me how favoring stuff you do outside of play at the expense of stuff you do when you're actually at the table with your friends makes for a better game. It doesn't impact MY play at MY table. I quite enjoy my D&D games just fine. Thanks for asking. This is the entire point. It impacts YOUR play at YOUR table. You believe that your style of play is better (or even the only valid one) so you think that it's better to cater to it rather than to everyone else. You are, in effect, calling everyone else backwards, idiots, bad for the game, and all around parasites. You can imagine that I don't particularly like the insinuated insults.
Always-Late 03-20-07, 05:31 PM	No amount of advice you shovel on top of a wargame can make it anything more than a wargame."No amount of rules you shovel on top of a role-playing game can make it anything more than a role-playing game."
Solik 03-20-07, 05:35 PM	We're talking about *rules*, *structures*, *procedures*, some *way* to run a game and make sure it's about pirates, rather than simply saying "This is a pirate-based campaign" and letting everything else emerge from the primordial soup, with the rules only intervening in stuff like combat or skill checks. Saw this quoted in Dove's excellent post, was confused, and decided to go after more clarification. What in the Nine Hells are you talking about here? Seriously, the way to make the game about pirates is... to put pirates in it. Are you seriously suggesting that the game's mechanics need to change for every possible setting, situation, and flavor? I don't think you're talking about what a_psh is talking about at all. Which is probably a good thing, because he's still not making any lick of sense.
a_psh 03-20-07, 06:03 PM	The resolution mechanics are interesting, but I wouldn't want to see D&D go too far in that direction. I know I don't have the real life social skills to play a game like that, unless it was with people I knew very, very well. I certainly can't see your average nerdy 14 year old* enjoying it, and while I don't think D&D should only appeal to nerdy 14 year olds, it shouldn't alienate them, either. Nerdy 14 year olds are vital to the continued success of the hobby, and D&D should be a game that one can start playing as a nerdy 14 year old and continue to play (in an increasingly sophisticated manner, if one wishes) on into adulthood.This is the tricky thing. Most indie games are written by adults for adults. This is a consequence of the market for this stuff and the whole one-man publishing thing. I can, off the cuff, think of at least one specifically kid-oriented story game, called The Princes' Kingdom, which actually does actually use a set of mechanics that resemble Dogs. I don't know much about the game, unfortunately. It's targeted at children around 8-10 or so, IIRC, but leads to fairly rewarding play for adults as well. Gonna think on this more... I do like the reward system a lot, though.I think that's one of the coolest parts, too. Here (http://files.crngames.com/cc/sweet20/experience.html)'s the same author's aborted attempt to turn TSOY-style Keys into something you can kinda drop into regular D&D, if you're interested (not as clean as the original TSOY implementation, but it beats making stuff up from scratch!).
a_psh 03-20-07, 06:15 PM	60 pages is a lot of content.For an entire game, start to finish? That's because he knows storytelling, which is why he's a paid expert.And a game designer is what? A paid expert. If the current designers aren't up to snuff for designing anything other than mediocre wargames, get some new ones. You'll note that the people who actually designed the core game (Tweet, Cook, &c.) mostly don't work for WotC at this point, anyway. It knows what sells and prioritizes that.What sells to whom? Niche market, dude. If you chase away anyone who picks up D&D, the flagship RPG and a self-proclaimed game of imagination, looking for something other than a wargame, then, yes, only wargamers will be left to buy stuff. *Sigh.* At least they finally figured out how to do a little bit less to alienate women and folks who aren't white. Playing with D&D CAN be the design of adventures, classes and feats, and if someone enjoys himself doing this, what's the point of ruining his fun? Why exactly are we trying to alienate him by saying that his fun isn't as important as our fun? Is it because he's fundamentally inferior as a person? Maybe he just isn't as smart as you, eh?If it's more satisfying to daydream about playing and tinker with rules than it is to actually play the game, that means you've got a poorly-designed game.
Grand Theft Otto 03-20-07, 06:19 PM	No, it doesn't. It pretends to cater to everybody. It supports a bastardized flavor of wargaming and only half-heartedly permits everything else. I honestly dont see much of a difference in playing D&D, Over the Edge, Unknown Armies or any of the other stuff I've been playing recently. Maybe my games are atypical, maybe they arent. Maybe thats badwrongfun, god knows the Forgies love to inform you that you're too ignorant to know you arent having a good time. Unless you just want some kind of point buy plot, where the GM spends X plot allotment points to be able to include opportunity for blackmail, and Z points to have a red light occur at an intersection during a chase, etc, and granting the players Y action dice if there guy they are attempting to coerce has expert legal advice from a talking yak, someone is making some abstract decisions. Unless you're going to have massive specific charts for this sort of thing, theres still going to be a need to eyeball things. You cant create a rule system to eliminate GM error in setting up or telling stories, and if you did I wouldnt be interested in being divested of any real creative input aside from point allocation by comittee.
Always-Late 03-20-07, 06:45 PM	If it's more satisfying to daydream about playing and tinker with rules than it is to actually play the game, that means you've got a poorly-designed game.This means that you could take a well-designed game, add some rules or supplements that make designing adventures and messing with rules a lot of fun, and suddnely the game would become worse.
a_psh 03-20-07, 06:56 PM	Honestly, no wonder nobody can figure out what the heck you guys want out of the game. You don't even know yourself. Here's that clarification you asked for. You're sitting here complaining about how the game should have more rules, but less rules, ...The game should have different rules. Rules that actually impact the shared narrative of play rather than just rules for a mediocre wargame. ... how it should have more consensus, but no consensus, ...This is the really important realization that leads to the awesome thing: Just plain making consensus happen is easy. Making the process of creating that consensus cool and exciting is the tricky bit. Here's the canonical "Let's Pretend" example that everyone uses to explain why you need RPG rules: "BANG! BANG! I shot you!" "No you didn't!" "Yes I did!" "No you didn't!" "You're dead, I said!" "Screw you, I'm not dead!" *argument* Dumb, huh? Here's that same scenario with the players reaching consensus: "BANG! BANG! I shot you!" "Okay. I guess I'm dead now." *crickets chirp* That's dumb, too. I mean, wow, that's as boring as a regular ol' conversation. The traditional solution is "Hey, let's dump a mediocre wargame in there!" Here's what you want in a story: "BANG! BANG! I shot you!" "No you didn't!" "Hell yeah, I did." "Okay, but I get to spray you with my tommygun as I fall over. RAT-TAT-TAT!" "It'd be lame if we both just died, wouldn't it?" "Too true. The hail of bullets miss you but hits your girl a few times. She's dying in your arms." "That's harsh, man." "Harsh, but cool. If I die, I'm taking someone you love with me. Them's the breaks." "Fair enough." What's happening there? Hardcore negotiation. Which means that consensus is reached, but there's argument and disagreement along the way. It's that back-and-forth that makes the story you tell dynamic. It's also that back-and-forth that adds details to your story. There are a variety of different approaches to this. Examples I've previously mentioned: - Dogs in the Vineyard and The Shadow of Yesterday, both very character-focused games, emphasize "giving": as you go through a conflict, fallout from that conflict builds up. You stop when you decide you that the stakes are less important than the collateral damage you're taking trying to accomplish them. - Polaris, being character-focused but very rules-light and GM-less, looks like a slightly more formal version of the example above. You literally just say stuff like "But only if..." or "You ask far too much" to negotiate over what happened, using traits on the character's sheet to add your description. - Universalis and Capes, which are likewise GM-less but generally take a wider view of the story, give you tokens that represent your ability to affect the story. You can then spend those tokens to get things to happen your way in a conflict, and being in a big dynamic conflict gives you more tokens you can use later. All of these flat-out work. They accomplish different things. Some of them don't interest me very much personally. But, as far as making the shared imagined fiction really shine, they work. ... how it should be more like this system, but not really, ...I don't think most D&D players could play, say, Universalis and really get it. Heck, I'm in the same boat, largely, because I like character-focused play. But the general pattern for how to get interesting resolution is pretty clear here. ... and about how it should be more open to the imagination, but more rigid in the kinds of stories you can tell.I wrote a long response to this, but then thought better. Here's the essential thing: The way we're raised as "first-worlders," "Westerners," or whatever you want to call it -- folks who have access to a variety of media and get a lot of traditions from Europe and a lot of modern stuff from America -- means that there are certain things we expect in a story (subtlety, conflict, theme, a climax). Something without that structure isn't really a "story" to us. Or, talking about more concrete structure, you could say that "no coherent genre" is not the same as "any genre." At the moment, you're basically getting the worst of both worlds: a very floppy and unstructured narrative and a very limited range of subjects, since all the elements D&D offers you to put into your story are just bits and pieces of quest fiction, anyway.
a_psh 03-20-07, 07:00 PM	This means that you could take a well-designed game, add some rules or supplements that make designing adventures and messing with rules a lot of fun, and suddnely the game would become worse.Well, adding rules to things willy-nilly does usually make them worse.
Otto the Bugbear 03-20-07, 07:24 PM	I must say that after muddling through this thread over the past 2 days (work, sleep, life, etc.), I'm with DoveArrow and Solik on this topic. This whole idea is more :censored:-up than a football bat.
Always-Late 03-20-07, 07:48 PM	The traditional solution is "Hey, let's dumb a mediocre wargame in there!" Here's what you want in a story: "BANG! BANG! I shot you!" "No you didn't!" "Hell yeah, I did." "Okay, but I get to spray you with my tommygun as I fall over. RAT-TAT-TAT!" "It'd be lame if we both just died, wouldn't it?" "Too true. The hail of bullets miss you but hits your girl a few times. She's dying in your arms." "That's harsh, man." "Harsh, but cool. If I die, I'm taking someone you love with me. Them's the breaks." "Fair enough." What's happening there? Hardcore negotiation. Which means that consensus is reached, but there's argument and disagreement along the way. It's that back-and-forth that makes the story you tell dynamic. It's also that back-and-forth that adds details to your story.What if I don't want to actually be writing a story? In a wargame, you get, "we conquered Lord DarkBadGuy after going through so and so encounters, using so-and-so equipment, we lost persons W and Z, the first through terrible luck and the second through half-assed tactics, and there was a fight at the end and we really didn't know if we were going to make it." Details can be added without tossing on rules. In a storytelling game, you can say the exact same thing, but the way it played out was more like, "Okay, we won, like we usually do, but since it was pretty hard we gave up W and Z along the way, because otherwise the story would really suck." The thing about a wargame, or random determination of results, is that in the end when you look back at a certain encounter, you have a success measure - hit points, tactics, etc. and if you win you've "accomplished" something. The way you're doing it, it feels to me (and correct me if I'm wrong) you're merely announcing victory and asking, "so what was the price?" Finally, there are players out there that don't want character-tailored plot or things that revolve around them. They want to get the (absolute illusion, of course) of exploring a world where their chances are as good as anyone elses, and the expenditure and gain of "fate points" doesn't do that much. Eberron, for example, does give a concession to "better story" with action points, but even those are implemented mechanically, which I find personally more interesting than just getting something to happen because I feel like it.
aotrscommander 03-20-07, 07:48 PM	a_psh, I'm going to horribly destroy your wargames comments by suggesting something that has been used by wargamers to represent I think the kind of thing you getting at. Maybe less rules for roleplaying than making the adjudication slightly less dependant on the DM fiat. (Grand Theft Otto touched on it earlier, actually.) We have occasionally theorised - but never actually practised - about a system to make low-scale skirmish operations more interesting. This being the sort of game where the line between wargames and roleplaying gets really blurred. The situation we discussed was as follows. You have a small band of crack troops, set to inflitrate an enemy base. To make things more interesting we thought about handing out a number of cards to the players, each of which had some sort of event; like say the attacker's might be the sentry goes to the toilet and thus misses the hero (or walks out of the toilet at the wrong moment!) or the hero steps on a twig at the wrong moment (a la Han in Return of the Jedi), or the hero pulls an Indiana Jones and finds he's not got his pistol to shoot the sword-wielding guy; all the typical action-movie cliches. The player would then be able to play those cards at an appropriate juncture. You could have a similar (more flexible) system for an RPG. On other 'system' we use for our Star Trak starship games is the Yes/No/Maybe dice. One of the players found it. It's a large actual D6 with Yes, No and Maybe on it. It's remarkably useful for dealing with odd situations or reactions (like "are my Klingon crew bloodthirsty enough to stay on the ship and fight to the death while I take the important dignitary away in my shuttle?1") Or, and this is probably the best idea for an RPG, the system used by a friend of ours for his colonial games. Basically, every time you wanted to do something out of the ordinary, you had to give three reason why that event would occur. If they were good enough you'd make a roll modified by the quality of the reasons. Now, if there was an umpire, the opposing side got to make three reasons why your event wouldn't happen. And that is probably the best bit for an RPG. You could hand out a certain number of, let's call them Reality Distortion Points for want of a better phrase, like Action Points. (The DM could recieve a certain number too, based on the amount the player had). Then, when you choose to 'spend' one of these reality points on some action, you have to give three reasons (flavour reasons, not mechancial ones!) why this is going to work. The opposing player (if doing something PvP) or maybe the DM can get to make up three reasons why it doesn't work (that ae not directly contradictory to the other reasons) and then the DM (or the general concensus of the group) can decide which wins out (and the DM can then decide any mechanical modifers accordingly if they are needed). An example might be illustrative. Let's take the the sneaking past the guard one, because it's fairly simple. Scooflangle Wibbleflozoer the Rogue wants to sneak past the guard patrolling outside Mad Lord Bowelsplitter's Fortress of Expedient Hurtiness to get inside and steal back his lucky pennywhistle2. He's standing outside in the garden in wet mud at dusk (it's nearly always raining round the fortress, which is always overcast with pointlessly dramatic lightning). Scooflangle: Right, I'm going to find it easy to sneak past the guard because *spending reality distortion point* 1) It's been raining all day and he's wet and miserable and not very alert 2) I'm covered in the mud from walking up here so I'm quite well camoflaged 3) When he looks towards my position, it'll be just after the pointlessly dramatic lightning has flashed and so in that instant his eyes won't have adjusted. The DM might respond with (or not as they case may be!) The guard will notice you as you go past because 1) You're wet through so your boots squeltch 2) The ground is really muddy so you'll leave dirty great muddy footprints 3) He's been on duty all evening and he really needs to loo and he just happens to choose the bush you are hiding behind. Then by general concensus (or whatever) the group settle a reasonable set of modifiers (since this is clearly going to be an opposed roll situation). Okay, so that's a pretty lame example! In actual play, you'd have a much better feel for the environment and characters in question and you ought to be able to come up with something a little more sane. But the theory still stands. The example aside, it needn't apply to situations that require rolls either; it could be something like attempting to pull the bar maid, the guard you're talking to happens to be that lad who left your home town years ago and you recognise each other and so on. Obviously, I'm sort of defining this as I go, but I think the theory is a fairly good one. Llimiting the amount of times you can do it in theory stops players abusing the privilidge, but you might find that unnecessary anyway. Is that of any help? 1They were, actually. 2I'm making this up as I go along. Can't tell at all, can you?!
Arrowhen 03-20-07, 08:03 PM	This is the tricky thing. Most indie games are written by adults for adults. This is a consequence of the market for this stuff and the whole one-man publishing thing. I can, off the cuff, think of at least one specifically kid-oriented story game, called The Princes' Kingdom, which actually does actually use a set of mechanics that resemble Dogs. I don't know much about the game, unfortunately. It's targeted at children around 8-10 or so, IIRC, but leads to fairly rewarding play for adults as well. Gonna think on this more... I kind of wonder if 8-10 year olds would be more suited to that style of play than would, say, adolescents to twentysomethings. After all, at nine years old, you're still at the age where you're encouraged to have an imagination. When you're nine, it's normal to make up stories. When you're 15 or 26, that's weird; you're expected to leave that sort of thing to the professionals.* I think a lot of the appeal of roleplaying for many people is that it give you an "excuse" to be imaginative. After all, you're not really sitting around making up stories with your friends (cause that would be weird), you're just playing a game. It's just a hobby, a pastime, no different from Texas Hold' Em or Frisbee golf or whatever. And if you happen to be making up stories while you're doing it... eh, no big deal, it's just part of the game. It's not like you're a crazy artist or something. I think deep down most of us realize that hearing and creating and telling stories is Important. But we're also brought up to believe that if you're going to do something Important, you had better be good at it. Since most of us aren't good at creating and telling stories**, we tend to stop doing it once we get old enough to realize that we're not very good at it. But then something like roleplaying comes along, where suddenly you're encouraged to tell stories again. But, and here's the great part, since it's "just a game", since it's not something Important, it's OK if those stories aren't any good. You know what it's like? It's like karaoke. Like most people on the planet, I can't sing.*** I know I can't sing, and so, for the most part, I don't. But if you take me to a bar on karaoke night and get a couple beers in me, I'll happily belt out Elton John numbers, crappy 80s rock ballads, and hokey old 70s country tunes all night long. Why? It's not the beer, really (although it certainly doesn't hurt ;)), it's the fact that I'm in a situation where it's expected that I can't sing and accepted that I'm going to go ahead and do it anyway, no matter how disastrous the results. Hmm. Now that I think about it, there's also the fact that it's a communal experience.**** We're all there singing crappily together. I certainly wouldn't buy a karaoke machine and sing karaoke at home by myself. Where's the fun in that? Anyway, I guess where I'm going with this rambling is this: could designing a set of rules that ostensibly supports telling good stories actually turn people away from the hobby? After all, there's a good chance that those stories won't turn out very good. If people are going into the game with the expectation that it's going to make them good storytellers, might they not then assume that they're doing something "wrong" if the game doesn't deliver on its (maybe unrealistic) promise? Maybe a better design standpoint might be: "This game lets you tell stories, if you want. They might be great stories and they might not, but who really cares? No matter how they turn out, we want you to have fun telling them, so we've designed this set of rules that won't get in your way." * Don't get me wrong. I don't think there's anything weird about making up stories, writing silly songs, or painting really awful watercolor seascapes at any age. But we all know that the prevailing attitude these days is "creativity is for children and weirdos, unless you can manage to get paid for it." ** Now is this because storytelling is hard, or because we're afraid to practice it? *** Now is this because singing is hard, or because we're afraid to practice it? ;) **** Like roleplaying, interestingly enough.
Lokiyn 03-20-07, 08:15 PM	It think the main point is that more than a few people would be please if the rule set contained as much detail on the non combat aspects of the game as the combat aspect. One possible way to do this, as mentioned above is the idea of social combat. Take the detailed rules of combat we have, then find a way to convert social attributes into a format that can be used as a combat allowing players to "duel" socially. For example two players working on a victim micght get a social flanking bonus for a good cop bad cop routine effectivly working from two different angles. Another point is that some players want the ability to modify events. as mentioned a simple method would be with a dice. For each event players have the option to roll with certain numbers being favorable events and certain numbers being unfavorable. Say Natural 1 is guards are having poker night and there are more than you thought, while a natural 20 is that the guard is sick and is spending as much time inside by the fire as possible. Basically a sort of luck roll with possible modifiers from feats and other sources.
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-20-07, 08:58 PM	This is the really important realization that leads to the awesome thing: Just plain making consensus happen is easy. Making the process of creating that consensus cool and exciting is the tricky bit. Where's the excitement? It sounds like in your examples, it's just a matter of assured victory. Since the PCs are basically just dictating what happens, there is no real challenges and no chance of unexpected failure. When there's no chance of failure, except when you deem it, you're in perfect control.
Therese404 03-20-07, 09:05 PM	Well I can really get where your coming from, I still play First Edition with DND3.5 Mods. I think 3.5 can be everything you want it to be, you just have to be prepared to work it ove a little. I really think 3.5 is a really good system. Its just very different from the original, in a lot of ways, but good ways. Its just more modular. You can pick & choose what you want, includes rules, supplements & adventures. I think that a really cool thing, because every one is really different, everyone playes differently & wants different things from their game.(like the levels of complexity from their gaming) Not to mention the wide varation of age in groups as a whole. I'm 35, Married & ride a harley, live in Australia, my need & my gaming group needs are very different from say a young 18 year old female uni student in the UK. This is where 3.5 really rocks, it gives you a set of block, & challenges you to get up & create. You can use all this material to do so...
Squirrelloid 03-20-07, 09:09 PM	I for one would like to thank a_psh for the names of a bunch of games, and the Capes Lite "demo game" i found online sounds really cool. Its too bad so few of the other games advertise by giving you a decent glimpse at the rules. (Lets face it, most people get into a game because they've had a demo of some sort - usually played it - and thus demos are essential to selling a game). I also found the Sweetd20 xp system to be very awesome, and much better than kill xp. (I've always been a fan of story xp, but thats just more ignoring the rules on my part as the DM to control leveling dynamics).
a_psh 03-20-07, 10:36 PM	Okay, example time... Eberron, for example, does give a concession to "better story" with action points, but even those are implemented mechanically, which I find personally more interesting than just getting something to happen because I feel like it.That's the idea: that last "Let's Pretend" example seldom happens perfectly in freeform, because people either just nod their heads at everything or get really argumentative and don't stop, right? So, you bring in mechanics to encourage some hardcore negotiation but also make sure that negotiation is resolved. Imagine if the primary resource in a game was action points. That's The Shadow of Yesterday. Alternatively, imagine going into a conflict with finite resources... Dogs is my favorite example of a well-built conflict-driven game. It's pretty accessible and very juicy at the same time. So, the basics: When you get into a conflict, you roll a bunch of dice and put them out in front of you like a hand of cards (well, like a hand of cards except they're not secret). Whoever's your opponent (usually the GM) does the same. Then you take turns saying stuff, which is called making a Raise. Every time you make a Raise, you pick two dice out of your pile and push them forward. That's your Raise. Two dice. The opponent then has to See that Raise. - If he can get the combined value of those dice or higher on two dice, he Blocks your action. - If he needs three or more dice to do so, he'll suffer fallout (think "damage," kinda). - If he can meet the number with just one die, then he can Counter and gets to keep the die he used for his next Raise (this exists to make weak Raises undesirable, since they benefit your opponent more than you). So, for example, I say: "I punch you in the face. 5 + 7 make 12." Then you say: "Nope! I catch your fist. Here's two 6s to See that 12. Then I pull on your arm and put my leg under you, like this, to trip you. Raise you 5 + 4 for 9 in all." And I say: "Crap! I don't have enough dice to see that. I'll Take the Blow with four dice: 4, 3, 2, 1 makes 9." (And my character would suffer fallout for that later. ) So, that's the basic mechanics. Also, you can add more dice. You add more dice by involving a trait or item (e.g. if you have a really big, really awesome gun, you get to roll 2d8+1d4 and add that to your pool if you can bring it into the scene, i.e. whip it out and start shooting). Also, you can escalate the conflict. There's four stats and four types of conflict (talking, physical, fighting, guns), with two stats for each. For example, if you talking (Acuity + Heart) to gunfighting (Acuity + Will), you get to roll your Will stat and add those dice to your pool (Acuity was already rolled before, so you don't get to double up). That means that, when stuff's not going your way, you don't just burn out and die with no recourse. Instead, if you're willing to take a few punches to the face or a few bullets to teh gut, you take the conflict to a higher level. (Higher risk = more painful every time you Take a Blow instead of Blocking or Countering it. You can die from guns even when you're life isn't explicitly at stake in the fight.) And, here's the other important bit: you can Give, as in "give up". It's a lot like folding in poker: the other guy wins the stakes but you don't have to deal with his most recent Raise. This is the single most important thing about Dogs. Wild example... What's at stake is "Do you redeem Sister Althea?" I'm the GM, playing her. She's a sorceress and a blasphemer, and thinks she's already damned. She's got a knife and is trying to kill herself. You're trying to convince her that the King of Life can cleanse any sin. We've been Raising and Seeing back and forth. You're doing a good job but I've got some big dice saved up, and you're running out of juice. When it's my turn, I put my fattest dice into this doozy: "She says 'Oh, yeah? Think I'm still worth saving now?' Then she stabs her baby." You don't have enough dice to See or Counter. You've got more dice than me and I'm almost out of good ones, so you think you can ultimately redeem her if you Take the Blow right now and keep pushing, but that means her latest action comes to pass. Her latest action, of course, was killing her baby. Or you can Give, avoid the events of her last Raise, but lose the stakes. So, which is it: a child's life or a woman's soul? You decide. (I think that's pretty hot.) * -- What about faceless thugs and the like, you ask? Y'know, characters that don't matter after a scene so fallout for them is irrelevant? Instead of giving them fallout, your PC gets a bonus that rolls over into the next conflict.
a_psh 03-20-07, 10:36 PM	Where's the excitement? It sounds like in your examples, it's just a matter of assured victory. Since the PCs are basically just dictating what happens, there is no real challenges and no chance of unexpected failure. When there's no chance of failure, except when you deem it, you're in perfect control.Oh, there most certainly is. You could say that all the players (that includes the GM, if there is one) put together are in perfect control, but no one individually is. Not even the GM. However, at least one person is playing the antagonists (the GM or a specific player who decides to pick up the mantle of antagonist-du-jour in a GM-less game -- e.g. the guy who elects to control the supervillain during a scene in Capes). Failure's quite real. There's less random failure than in a traditional roll-lots-of-dice-for-every-action game, but you're not always going to get what you want. Many games I've mentioned basically let you and your opponent keep piling negative consequences onto each other until one of you either runs out of resources to use in the conflict or gives up. They strongly encourage giving up when you think those negative consequences are worse than failing the thing that's at stake. (This maps fairly well onto real life and is definitely good for roleplaying: in a real duel, for example, combatants will be weighing "how much do I want to win?" vs. "how much do I want to avoid dying?" and likely give up when the chances of victory seem too slim or the price in wounds suffered begins to be too high.) The best thing I can find on the spur of the moment is this example (http://zork.net/~nick/loyhargil/tsoy2/book1--rulebook.html#an-example-of-bringing-down-the-pain-and-harm) from TSOY. That one's a bit weird but it should give you a general idea of how this works. That's a PVP scene, but it can work the same way with a GM involved. See also my Dogs example in the post above this one.
ArcTan 03-20-07, 11:09 PM	Saw this quoted in Dove's excellent post, was confused, and decided to go after more clarification. What in the Nine Hells are you talking about here? Seriously, the way to make the game about pirates is... to put pirates in it. Are you seriously suggesting that the game's mechanics need to change for every possible setting, situation, and flavor? No. Although "a game about pirates" is too vague for what I'm talking about. What happens in a pirate adventure story? Where do we start out? Do we start out with civilian heroes who are in a town being raided by pirates? There needs to be a moment where we make First Contact with the pirate hordes, a moment where the pirates start to change from a faceless threat to characters with their own histories and agendas, and rising tension building to a climax, right? There *are* rules for what makes a good pirate story as opposed to a crappy story that happens to have pirates in it. D&D currently doesn't help you in any way with these rules, and in fact encourages you to make a crappy story about pirates (by making the easiest thing to do to be to fight pirates as simple encounters over and over again, then use a bunch of stupid clunky rules for ship-to-ship combat, then fight some more pirates). There should be rules that clearly define what kind of story you're doing here -- are you really have a dungeon-crawl-style hackfest? If not, are you doing Political Intrigue? Kidnapping and Rescue? Survival in the Wilderness? A Hero Rising to the Challenge of War? These are all different *shapes* of stories that should require different mechanics to bring them to life. D&D tries to shoehorn all of these stories into cutscenes between wargame encounters, like pearls on a string. That doesn't work.
a_psh 03-20-07, 11:12 PM	The situation we discussed was as follows. You have a small band of crack troops, set to inflitrate an enemy base. To make things more interesting we thought about handing out a number of cards to the players, each of which had some sort of event; like say the attacker's might be the sentry goes to the toilet and thus misses the hero (or walks out of the toilet at the wrong moment!) or the hero steps on a twig at the wrong moment (a la Han in Return of the Jedi), or the hero pulls an Indiana Jones and finds he's not got his pistol to shoot the sword-wielding guy; all the typical action-movie cliches. The player would then be able to play those cards at an appropriate juncture.Are you familiar with the Lord of the Rings board game? The one with all the little boards and an expansion pack that makes Sauron an antagonistic player rather than a random event generator? Reminds me of the cards in that, which represent various events and LotR characters getting involved (the protagonists all play hobbits, passing the ring back and forth and moving around a board and having bad stuff happen to them in the process, trying to reach Mt. Doom before they succumb to corruption). Other board games have used similar tricks. I think there's one called, err, Evo (it's about dinosaurs) with event cards you put in your hand. It's cool to see that in a wargame. Also, D&D kinda has this in the form of those RPGA Eberron cards. Though I think their particular execution is a bit slipshod. On other 'system' we use for our Star Trak starship games is the Yes/No/Maybe dice. One of the players found it. It's a large actual D6 with Yes, No and Maybe on it. It's remarkably useful for dealing with odd situations or reactions (like "are my Klingon crew bloodthirsty enough to stay on the ship and fight to the death while I take the important dignitary away in my shuttle?1")Quick aside here: what examples like this show us is that it's really not that big of a deal to have a fine gradation in outcomes. I think some game designers, particularly in the 80s, went really happy with d100s and the like and having giant charts with tons and tons of outcomes even when they weren't necessary at all. (The most hilarious and worst example is FATAL, which uses a d10,000 at some point. Then again, FATAL is the most hilarious and worst example of anything you can think of, as far as RPG rules go.) Or, and this is probably the best idea for an RPG, the system used by a friend of ours for his colonial games. Basically, every time you wanted to do something out of the ordinary, you had to give three reason why that event would occur. If they were good enough you'd make a roll modified by the quality of the reasons. Now, if there was an umpire, the opposing side got to make three reasons why your event wouldn't happen. And that is probably the best bit for an RPG. You could hand out a certain number of, let's call them Reality Distortion Points for want of a better phrase, like Action Points. (The DM could recieve a certain number too, based on the amount the player had). Then, when you choose to 'spend' one of these reality points on some action, you have to give three reasons (flavour reasons, not mechancial ones!) why this is going to work. The opposing player (if doing something PvP) or maybe the DM can get to make up three reasons why it doesn't work (that ae not directly contradictory to the other reasons) and then the DM (or the general concensus of the group) can decide which wins out (and the DM can then decide any mechanical modifers accordingly if they are needed). An example might be illustrative. Let's take the the sneaking past the guard one, because it's fairly simple. Scooflangle Wibbleflozoer the Rogue wants to sneak past the guard patrolling outside Mad Lord Bowelsplitter's Fortress of Expedient Hurtiness to get inside and steal back his lucky pennywhistle2. He's standing outside in the garden in wet mud at dusk (it's nearly always raining round the fortress, which is always overcast with pointlessly dramatic lightning). Scooflangle: Right, I'm going to find it easy to sneak past the guard because *spending reality distortion point* 1) It's been raining all day and he's wet and miserable and not very alert 2) I'm covered in the mud from walking up here so I'm quite well camoflaged 3) When he looks towards my position, it'll be just after the pointlessly dramatic lightning has flashed and so in that instant his eyes won't have adjusted. The DM might respond with (or not as they case may be!) The guard will notice you as you go past because 1) You're wet through so your boots squeltch 2) The ground is really muddy so you'll leave dirty great muddy footprints 3) He's been on duty all evening and he really needs to loo and he just happens to choose the bush you are hiding behind. Then by general concensus (or whatever) the group settle a reasonable set of modifiers (since this is clearly going to be an opposed roll situation). Okay, so that's a pretty lame example! In actual play, you'd have a much better feel for the environment and characters in question and you ought to be able to come up with something a little more sane. But the theory still stands. The example aside, it needn't apply to situations that require rolls either; it could be something like attempting to pull the bar maid, the guard you're talking to happens to be that lad who left your home town years ago and you recognise each other and so on. Obviously, I'm sort of defining this as I go, but I think the theory is a fairly good one. Llimiting the amount of times you can do it in theory stops players abusing the privilidge, but you might find that unnecessary anyway. Is that of any help?It reminds me of various things. Engel Matrix Games are very fringe-y but have been around for a long time. On the order of 20 years. They're very basic in their structure (are they RPGs? are they board games? are they...? enh, I can't really tell). This is, in essence, the resolution mechanic: I pick another player to be my "referee" for this action and then say something that I think should happen next, making a little argument for why it should occur based on the established facts of the game. Then he assigns it a difficulty, which is a number on a single d6 that I have to get over (or under? I don't recall) to succeed. Otherwise, I fail. Universalis defines important characters, places, &c. as game objects and then gives them adjectives and phrases to describe things about them (e.g. for three points, you made up a monster called the lasershark, which is "Silent but deadly," "Can smell prey for miles away," and "Has a laser beam on its forehead"). You then call on those adjectives in a conflict, kinda like how you describe in the example.
a_psh 03-20-07, 11:18 PM	I kind of wonder if 8-10 year olds would be more suited to that style of play than would, say, adolescents to twentysomethings. After all, at nine years old, you're still at the age where you're encouraged to have an imagination. When you're nine, it's normal to make up stories. When you're 15 or 26, that's weird; you're expected to leave that sort of thing to the professionals.* I think a lot of the appeal of roleplaying for many people is that it give you an "excuse" to be imaginative. After all, you're not really sitting around making up stories with your friends (cause that would be weird), you're just playing a game. It's just a hobby, a pastime, no different from Texas Hold' Em or Frisbee golf or whatever. And if you happen to be making up stories while you're doing it... eh, no big deal, it's just part of the game. It's not like you're a crazy artist or something. I think deep down most of us realize that hearing and creating and telling stories is Important. But we're also brought up to believe that if you're going to do something Important, you had better be good at it. Since most of us aren't good at creating and telling stories**, we tend to stop doing it once we get old enough to realize that we're not very good at it. But then something like roleplaying comes along, where suddenly you're encouraged to tell stories again. But, and here's the great part, since it's "just a game", since it's not something Important, it's OK if those stories aren't any good. You know what it's like? It's like karaoke. Like most people on the planet, I can't sing.*** I know I can't sing, and so, for the most part, I don't. But if you take me to a bar on karaoke night and get a couple beers in me, I'll happily belt out Elton John numbers, crappy 80s rock ballads, and hokey old 70s country tunes all night long. Why? It's not the beer, really (although it certainly doesn't hurt ;)), it's the fact that I'm in a situation where it's expected that I can't sing and accepted that I'm going to go ahead and do it anyway, no matter how disastrous the results. Hmm. Now that I think about it, there's also the fact that it's a communal experience.**** We're all there singing crappily together. I certainly wouldn't buy a karaoke machine and sing karaoke at home by myself. Where's the fun in that? Anyway, I guess where I'm going with this rambling is this: could designing a set of rules that ostensibly supports telling good stories actually turn people away from the hobby? After all, there's a good chance that those stories won't turn out very good. If people are going into the game with the expectation that it's going to make them good storytellers, might they not then assume that they're doing something "wrong" if the game doesn't deliver on its (maybe unrealistic) promise? Maybe a better design standpoint might be: "This game lets you tell stories, if you want. They might be great stories and they might not, but who really cares? No matter how they turn out, we want you to have fun telling them, so we've designed this set of rules that won't get in your way." * Don't get me wrong. I don't think there's anything weird about making up stories, writing silly songs, or painting really awful watercolor seascapes at any age. But we all know that the prevailing attitude these days is "creativity is for children and weirdos, unless you can manage to get paid for it." ** Now is this because storytelling is hard, or because we're afraid to practice it? *** Now is this because singing is hard, or because we're afraid to practice it? ;) **** Like roleplaying, interestingly enough.I like this post. You make some interesting observations and ask good questions. For "good stories," I can only say this... Here's why I like Polaris despite the fact that it mostly looks like freeform: pretty much whatever you do, as long as you're doing the basic stuff you need to keep your friends from getting actually angry at you (which you have to do in any RPG) and following the game mechanics as best you can, you'll get a tragic story. Your guy will either die in vain or commit the ultimate act of betrayal. There's a playtest report where they tried to break the thing pretty hard, by throwing in all this stuff that sounds stupid or is outright slapstick, as well as bits of spite here and there. The overall theme and story of the game stood up surprisingly well, despite the bad ideas people were intentionally dumping into the game. Of course, Polaris definitely breaks down when people don't want to contribute altogether, as you'd expect in a game where everyone acts like a bit of a GM.
a_psh 03-20-07, 11:19 PM	These are all different *shapes* of stories that should require different mechanics to bring them to life. D&D tries to shoehorn all of these stories into cutscenes between wargame encounters, like pearls on a string. That doesn't work.Here are the trickiest ones: mystery and horror. Both go absolutely nowhere if you mess up the story structure just a bit.
arjomanes 03-20-07, 11:23 PM	Ok, I didn't read through all the pages here in the thread, but I think I get the gist of what you're talking about. And I think D&D has taken a step in that direction in a way with the PHB2. Read the section on affiliations. Basically, you can set up large overarching goals and simplify combat with a violence check. Maybe this kind of system can be applied to the strong base of D&D to create something different. Here's an example: Your affiliation can declare a crusade. You designate an enemy and attempt a Diplomacy Check (DC 20 + scale of target affiliation). If you succeed, your followers martial their resources and travel any distance to attack the offending blasphemer. If the target is an affiliation, make opposing violence checks. If your affiliation is successful, an opposing affiliation loses 1 capital. If the target is an individual, he must make a Fortitude save (DC equal to your violence check result). If the target fails, he perishes under your righteous onslaught. If you wronged an enemy affiliation by prying out the ruby eyes of its sacred idol, selling the head of its demon guardian at auction, or rescuing a screaming sacrifice from its altar, your rival might retaliate by targeting your character with an unholy crusade. Your DM might set aside the normal Fortitude save and choose to play out an encounter. In that case, you will be set on by creatures appropriate to the rival affiliation, with an EL equal to 10 + your opponent's violence check. Each month that it crusades, an affiliation loses 2 capital due to the cost of the ongoing operations. While first glance will notice the simplified, almost freeform ruleset on affiliations, the most important thing about affiliations is that they are player-driven. You decide to go on a crusade, and the DM reacts to your actions. In most cases in D&D it's players reacting to DM actions. Taking this approach as a very rough base could develop a different kind of system. Maybe one without a DM even? Where the party attempts actions against a grid, with variables tossed in with random dierolls maybe? I'm no game designer or anything so I don't know if such a thing is doable or appealing to anyone. But it would bea deviation from the reactive player system most RPGs are now.
a_psh 03-20-07, 11:29 PM	a_psh do you currently play D&D? You dont seem to enjoy the game in its current form, so I'm a little confused why you frequently post on a D&D board. I realize this initially sounds confrontational, but its not intended to be. I think our differences in opinions on the state of the game is more of degree, rather than kind, and I find your insights interesting. I'm just genuinely curious.Naw, not confrontational at all. No worries. Here's recent gaming history: A few months ago, I played Riddle of Steel for a few sessions. It was alright. Some great meat to the battles but the rest was weak. I felt just like a D&D GM most of the time. Before that, I wanted to run a d20 Iron Heroes game (that's basically D&D with more swords and less magic), but aborted that in favor of Riddle. Before that, I played an i]Eberron[/i] campaign that went for about 30 sessions. It was a big mix of fun, dysfunction, GM burn-out, and lots of player-driven fiddling with the game. It took me about six months (during which time I was playing Riddle, &c.) to sort out what specifically was making a sizable chunk of the game unsatisfying, and to figure out why the players did some of the things they did during the game (and I don't mean "acted like jerks" -- it's hard to explain what I do mean without some long play examples and an uncomfortable amount of personal information about the personalities of some of my friends). (GM in both games above.) Even when I'm not playing anything, my social sphere is constantly playing D&D. My girlfriend played in an Eberron game that stopped recently, which I was around for a fair bit but didn't play in. Some friends of mine did a weekly "casual game" pretty consistently: just three people, a mat, a few books, and some clay they sculpt into silly minis, -- and there are two other groups (Eberron and a many-year-old homegrown setting) playing more mainstream/serious games pretty consistently. Other people in my milieu are constantly trying to start up games of D&D or a few related systems, though few make it off the ground and some are downright terrible.
ArcTan 03-20-07, 11:32 PM	a_psh: I disagree. Since D&D was invented "RPG" has always meant a little bit of wargaming, and lots of "RPG games" are expected to hold to this standard, so much so that many gamers would be bitterly disappointed if an "RPG" didn't provide at least something of a nod to wargaming. It depends. The level of wargaming in D&D is pretty extreme even for a traditional RPG. D&D's closest competitors, like White Wolf and GURPS, gain market traction by claiming to veer away from the "dungeon crawl", regardless of how well they succeed. Thus, D&D is an actual roleplaying game, and its improvement as a wargame improves it as a roleplaying game. I don't think this is necessarily true any more than it has to be the case that a comic book must be a good example of the superhero genre to be a good comic book, or that a science fiction novel has to be a good example of space opera to be a good science fiction novel. The stereotype that currently dominates a genre isn't necessarily what's good for that genre's future growth. In cases of fringe genres that are demonstrably losing ground to other things (like the often-brought-up bleed of players away from D&D to video games and such), the stereotype may be what's slowly killing it -- like how comic books as a medium are being choked by the near-total dominance of people beating each other up in tights. The thing is that the wargame experience is something you get a lot *better* from CRPGs in one direction and MMORPGs in another and actual miniatures wargames in a third. An RPG is not a good wargame, because the RPG part gets in the way. Isn't it better to focus on what the RPG does do that a wargame doesn't? As Scott McCloud pointed out, one of the main reasons comic books are losing readership is because they've been dependent on superheroes for many years, and yet superheroes are *much more fun* as characters in movies and video games than in comic books. Comic books don't actually do splashy, shiny, graphic power-fantasies that well. They're reaching the point where they need to find something else to do to remain relevant. I think PnP RPGs are slouching in that direction. That's why Ron Edwards and the Forge sprang into existence in the first place -- because so many people were playing PnP RPGs and asking "What's the point of this? What am I *really* trying to get out of this that I couldn't get by playing World of Warcraft or Warhammer 40K?" It also isn't true that the character development parts and the storytelling parts haven't improved. Indeed, much of the DMG II is a big nod towards this part of the game, and much of the fluff about various classes and prestige classes, the "flavor" and "fluff" parts of D&D have increased since the old days. Okay, see, pre-written stories aren't storytelling *mechanics* any more than a pre-written description of orcs as "powerful warriors" would qualify as a combat mechanic. This is the problem, that D&Ders have come to equate "crunch" with "combat" and "fluff" with "story" -- that the only way to tell a story in D&D is to be, well, fluffy, to handwave and make things up in a disorganized way. It would, indeed, be a great big nice deal if all those Dungeoncraft and Dragon articles about pacing and storytelling and suspense and excitement were all built into the core books, but that's a lot of ink and paper to be selling there, and you have to prioritize. I'm not talking about vague advice, I'm talking about rules and game structure. I like it that they prioritize mechanics because they're the only ones who can do that. My professor can't tell me how D&D builds cities and metropolises. He can tell me the elements of a good story. Your lit prof probably doesn't have much experience with *collaboratively creating a story in a gamelike environment*, though. If I want storytelling technique, I'd learn it from people who know what they're talking about. I'm quite sorry but I have absolutely no respect for people who pretend to know how to make a good story but can't sell a literary piece to a publisher to save their lives. Again, writing a story by yourself and collaboratively creating one are not the same thing. If talent at writing your own story meant talent at creating a story in game, there wouldn't be so many complaints about "railroading DMs who should just write a novel". The question of how to make up a story and still have players wandering around inside of it making choices and contributing is a big one, and one people who aren't used to doing that probably can't answer very well. (The city and metropolis creation rules are one thing I'm talking about, by the way. Knowing how many people live in a city and how many of them have what character class is absolutely useless when it comes to putting *story elements* in a city.) Even those that manage to con a publisher to sell a badly told tale don't have a lot of skill. Much of the fantasy fare that comes out these days is third rate at best, and that adds little to my respect for these hacks. D&D designers stick to what they're good at: designing a mechanical game, and that's why I pay them good money. *shrug* If in thirty years we can go from knowing very little about how to design and balance wargaming rules to being pretty good at it, can't we make the same kind of process with rules for collaborative storytelling? Not really. It's when people who are too selfish to try to enjoy other parts of the game and just have a good time with their friends get together that the game sucks. I don't particularly enjoy the storytelling part, to tell you the truth. I find it ineffably boring and self-aggrandizing. I CAN enjoy it in small doses, and I try to do so for the sake of my friends who do. Maybe it's not that the people who want to do so are inherently "selfish" (after all, it's *natural* to want attention for your great idea when you have a great idea). Maybe they're just not that good at it and need guidance and structure. If two players can't put together their differences and find a compromise in order to spend enjoyable time together, then yes, that game will suck. The social aspect of D&D is important. You really oughtn't play with people you wouldn't otherwise hang out with. True with other games as well, not just RPGs. Yes, but even perfectly nice people can cause games to bog down because they have a really good idea they think other people might enjoy but there's *no easy way to sink it into the story proper*. Half the time this is the way with "backstory hogs" -- it's not that the backstory is *bad*, but that the way it's being introduced into the game is hackneyed and clumsy, because the game doesn't actually give you any good way to introduce a story element into the game -- the game actually sort of assumes your character is a faceless adventurer whose job it is to kill monsters. (You realize that by default the character creation rules don't even let you say who your parents are or where you went to school, and that it's up to DM fiat if these NPCs are allowed to exist in the game?) D&D caters to radically different people. That alone makes it a winner. It means that two radically different groups can play it and have fun. They may not have fun playing with each other, but separately, they could. But it *doesn't*. It's a combat wargame. It doesn't "cater" to people who don't want to play that -- it just includes vague handwavy advice for how to tack on a freeform storytelling session onto the combat wargame. It doesn't have *rules* for playing that other game. It's very *hard* to play that other game unless you have a DM doing tons of side stuff. Your proposal to hard-code fringe elements into the game is simply reflective of an intolerant desire to make the game ONLY into what you enjoy. It's reflective of a desire that a game that claims to be selling to me -- D&D's marketing calling it a "role-playing game" and a "world where you can step into the story" -- actually allow me to do so. I don't consider it the holy grail, but it's a whole lot better than anything else I've seen. People keep saying things like this. Have you ever tried reading or playing indie RPGs? I really think this is why the conversation is one-sided -- because, as a_psh says, so many people treat "RPG" and "D&D" as synonymous (especially because so many mainstream RPGs try to mimic D&D) that it's hard to even have a conversation about how they could be different. I get the distinct impression that what you mean by "experiencing your character in play," only means the way you want to play, not the manner of play I'm talking about. I don't think that linking my character concept to a stat block and then having that stat block survive a combat encounter is a very deep way of "experiencing" that character. It's useful for doing more than one kind of game. If I want a wargame, I can do that. If I want a puzzle game, the game also can be tailored to handle that. The game could ALSO stand to benefit from having a bunch of puzzle-making advice loaded onto it but I don't see you proposing that much. He's not talking about "advice". If D&D were supposed to be a puzzle game, then yes, there should be a big set of rules about the creation of puzzles, the scaling of puzzles and the way puzzles are solved and players are rewarded for solving puzzles. But the end is that the game is not a game that can handle everything. It's a wargame that you can attach everything to if you handwave the "everything" in between combat sessions. But they don't allow people to create the particular character concepts they like. Some people like to play like that, and getting to play like that with people who like to do story brings diverse people together into a common social environment. Well, video games and wargames do allow quite a bit of "character concept" leeway. It's just that yes, after a while, too much time devoted to "character concept" gets in the way of making actually good, balanced rules. The problem with D&D as a wargame is that there's been so much material published about character concepts that it's been impossible to balance it all, and making a broken PC build is not actually very hard, and has become a popular sport. Which means that a wargame is impossible to play unless you have a DM available to arbitrarily ratchet up difficulty levels when PCs seem to have it too easy, which puts us right back on the path of the "illusion". And I don't like the thing about luring people who like to "do story" into a wargame to make the game more "diverse". A game that makes it so the story people are bored half the time during combats and the combat people are bored half the time during RP isn't, in my eyes, a great game. As you yourself admit, it means people who are playing the game in good faith the way they see it end up boring you and driving you to distraction. What you mean to say is that anything that doesn't conform to your intolerant views of how the game should be played isn't playing the game and ought to be removed or remodeled so as to marginalize these other gamers, who don't deserve to play D&D. Gary Gygax once said something to the same effect. "If you're not playing by my rules, you're not playing D&D." Guess how well he's doing? *shrug* I'm saying that D&D shouldn't be lying and saying it's something it's not, and that it'd be more fun for a lot more people if it tried to do the things it promises you it'll try to do. Yes, there are always people who like things the way they are. One of the big parts of this is the fact that because D&D is so popular, people have tweaked and made compromises and such so much in D&D that they see D&D as their "perfect game" without seeing the ways in which they've had to change D&D to do so, or the ways in which getting what they want might be easier if they had *more than one game system* to do different things in rather than trying to pull and twist different things out of one rickety game system.
Always-Late 03-20-07, 11:33 PM	Here's why I like Polaris despite the fact that it mostly looks like freeform: OOC, which one? Release date/releaser? There's like three.
ArcTan 03-20-07, 11:36 PM	Well that might be what he's advocating now, but that's not what he was advocating at first. If you read through the three quotes that I posted from his original rant, it's obvious that he was originally advocating a system with less rules, period. Now he's taking a different tack and saying not less rules, but more rules for roleplaying and storytelling. But no wait... he's not saying that either because he says having extra books at the table is a bad thing. :banghead: Honestly, if he was just advocating a way to adjudicate XP better for roleplaying, I'd be cool with that. If he was advocating a way to incorporate storytelling rules into the game, I'd be cool with that too. However, that's not what he's advocating. He wants everything to be simpler and more complex, less rules oriented, but moreso all at the same time, and you can't have it both ways. Er, what's so hard to understand about this: Fewer rules about combat, AoOs, PrCs, spells, magic items, monster hit die advancement, immediate vs. swift actions, 30 ft. fly speed with perfect maneuverability, and all that other crap More rules about writing a story See? Fewer rules about X, more rules about Y. I don't see why this generates such mystification, unless it's just that people can't conceive of having rules about story at all.
Always-Late 03-20-07, 11:44 PM	I'll just quickly sum up why I like D&D (not especially, but moreso than the other games, many of them; anyway I need to get some work done so last comment for today (now there's a laugh)): Something succeeding or failing because a player decided that it would succeed or fail is not fun for me, or giving me final decision on whether he wins or loses makes me sad panda. This is one. Second, I think rules that tell my character how he can and cannot act, or other characters how they will or will not act, are also not fun. @ Bringing Down the Pain: Gee, that looks just like a "wargame" with less dice, more skill rolls, and more action points.
arjomanes 03-20-07, 11:46 PM	umm I edited my post and I think it might have gotten lost in the clutter, so if you don't mind I'm going to repost it. ............ Ok, I didn't read through all the pages here in the thread, but I think I get the gist of what you're talking about. And I think D&D has taken a step in that direction in a way with the PHB2. Read the section on affiliations. Basically, you can set up large overarching goals and simplify combat with a violence check. Maybe this kind of system can be applied to the strong base of D&D to create something different. Here's an example: Your affiliation can declare a crusade. You designate an enemy and attempt a Diplomacy Check (DC 20 + scale of target affiliation). If you succeed, your followers martial their resources and travel any distance to attack the offending blasphemer. If the target is an affiliation, make opposing violence checks. If your affiliation is successful, an opposing affiliation loses 1 capital. If the target is an individual, he must make a Fortitude save (DC equal to your violence check result). If the target fails, he perishes under your righteous onslaught. If you wronged an enemy affiliation by prying out the ruby eyes of its sacred idol, selling the head of its demon guardian at auction, or rescuing a screaming sacrifice from its altar, your rival might retaliate by targeting your character with an unholy crusade. Your DM might set aside the normal Fortitude save and choose to play out an encounter. In that case, you will be set on by creatures appropriate to the rival affiliation, with an EL equal to 10 + your opponent's violence check. Each month that it crusades, an affiliation loses 2 capital due to the cost of the ongoing operations. While first glance will notice the simplified, almost freeform ruleset on affiliations, the most important thing about affiliations is that they are player-driven. You decide to go on a crusade, and the DM reacts to your actions. In most cases in D&D it's players reacting to DM actions. Taking this approach as a very rough base could develop a different kind of system. Maybe one without a DM even? Where the party attempts actions against a grid, with variables tossed in with random dierolls maybe? I'm no game designer or anything so I don't know if such a thing is doable or appealing to anyone. But it would bea deviation from the reactive player system most RPGs are now.
Arrowhen 03-20-07, 11:46 PM	Wild example... What's at stake is "Do you redeem Sister Althea?" I'm the GM, playing her. She's a sorceress and a blasphemer, and thinks she's already damned. She's got a knife and is trying to kill herself. You're trying to convince her that the King of Life can cleanse any sin. We've been Raising and Seeing back and forth. You're doing a good job but I've got some big dice saved up, and you're running out of juice. When it's my turn, I put my fattest dice into this doozy: "She says 'Oh, yeah? Think I'm still worth saving now?' Then she stabs her baby." You don't have enough dice to See or Counter. You've got more dice than me and I'm almost out of good ones, so you think you can ultimately redeem her if you Take the Blow right now and keep pushing, but that means her latest action comes to pass. Her latest action, of course, was killing her baby. Or you can Give, avoid the events of her last Raise, but lose the stakes. So, which is it: a child's life or a woman's soul? You decide. (I think that's pretty hot.) OK, here's what I don't get. Say I decide that the child's life is more important and choose to Give. How is that reflected in the game world? What actually happens to the baby? Does she start to stab it, but I manage to stop her? Or was stabbing the baby just a potential event that doesn't come to pass and now something else happens instead?
ArcTan 03-20-07, 11:49 PM	a_psh Incorporating a player-driven reward system into D&D will conflict with its DM-driven wargame-based prerogative that it also uses to generate "story," such as it is. The backhanded "such as it is" is the problem, really. The DM-driven wargame-based mechanic isn't a good way to create story at all. Many times it fails to do so even when the DM is really trying. (It's way too easy to err on the one side of railroady "Why is the DM reading his novel at us?" or the other side of paper-thin nonexistent dungeon-crawl "story".) 60 pages is a lot of content. Spells and Magic Items that suck are only known to suck because they've already been played and proven to suck. When they were released, this was not known. Heck, we won't know how much your proposed rules will suck until they're printed, either. Speaking plainly, you want the game to include rules you want at the expense of rules that cater to play you don't enjoy. Sure. Isn't that what everyone wants, when they want something? I don't think it's unreasonable to ask that the next big load of PrCs be held back in favor of some rethinking about why some people play the game. Yes, actually. Collaborative storytelling isn't new. He can point me to storytelling traditions, for instance, in which the storyteller changes from session to session, building on what has gone before, or similar such games. He's already helped me a lot with designing the story parts of my games, and if I wanted a collaborative storytelling experience, I'm quite sure he can help me with that, too. That's because he knows storytelling, which is why he's a paid expert. If he's actually that good at this and that interested in doing it, he should sell an indie RPG. (Not all gamers are so fortunate as to be on a college campus where they can go take advantage of his office hours.) It knows what sells and prioritizes that. You're just miffed because you don't happen to enjoy the parts of D&D that are currently emphasized. That doesn't mean that D&D is going nowhere, and it's arrogant for you to insinuate that everyone else's playstyles are inferior to yours. I still think it's a pretty logical conclusion that: D&D the wargame is less good as a wargame than video games and real minis wargames. D&D the RPG is hamstrung by having to make concessions to D&D the wargame. D&D should try to be more of D&D the RPG and less of D&D the wargame. Especially since so many people who talk about what's so great about D&D keep talking about ways to circumvent and work around the rules to do other things. In all fairness, it's such a big and diverse bag of archetypes that it's probably more than what you can ever need (and it's expanding every day). What, you mean classes? Sheesh, what a can of worms. D&D the wargame keeps a lot of interesting-sounding PrCs out of play (the CharOp boards scoffs at nothing harder than the concept of taking a weak PrC "for flavor") and pushes other classes into flavor they weren't meant to have all the time. (Look at how Complete Scoundrel insists you don't have to be a Rogue to be a "scoundrel". D&D admitted a long time ago that people who try to win D&D the wargame treat classes as bags of skills and abilities, not as character archetypes.) Characters we envision and create, particularly the heroic ones, are themselves made up of preconceived heroic archetypal characteristics we glean from our idols and aspirations. So D&D's method of presenting you with the very building blocks you normally use to create an imagined ideal isn't all that far from the mark. I really don't think people who want to create a great warrior who suffers from fear at his own propensity for violence are helped that much by being told "Hey, take Barbarian, it has a Rage class feature that gives you lots of bonus HP in a fight". Hey, let's insult some more people! What about those darned goblins, eh? They stink, huh? Playing with D&D CAN be the design of adventures, classes and feats, and if someone enjoys himself doing this, what's the point of ruining his fun? Why exactly are we trying to alienate him by saying that his fun isn't as important as our fun? Is it because he's fundamentally inferior as a person? Maybe he just isn't as smart as you, eh? If he really likes that, more power to him, but I think he's the kind of person who would have just as much fun reading fantasy novels or the appendices from Lord of the Rings or Star Wars technical manuals without those pesky game mechanics in there, and that the game mechanics are kind of a waste of paper for him. And that there *is* a problem with justifying this hobby to yourself by constantly saying you'll be using this in a campaign "someday" and never doing so. Maybe it's like karaoke -- some people just like to have power fantasies by themselves but need the imaginary idea of a "game" to enable them. I would say they'd be better served by having the power fantasies in pure form and not using the fiction of a game to hide it. It doesn't impact MY play at MY table. I quite enjoy my D&D games just fine. Thanks for asking. This is the entire point. It impacts YOUR play at YOUR table. You believe that your style of play is better (or even the only valid one) so you think that it's better to cater to it rather than to everyone else. You are, in effect, calling everyone else backwards, idiots, bad for the game, and all around parasites. Well, you can say you disagree with people and think that they have a poor perception of what's going into their play experience and are irrationally defending aspects of the game that aren't helping them because they have a hard time conceiving of anything different. That's not quite as strong, but if you take it in that harsh a light, well, there you go. I still think this kind of argument is important to have. The D&D designers have to have it among themselves when they decide what kind of game to make next time they write a book. (And this is what's offending me -- that people are acting like the D&D designers have pursued a great Middle Path of catering to every conceivable D&D fan's desires thus far, when this is *impossible* -- you'd have to write five separate games -- and therefore untrue.) You can imagine that I don't particularly like the insinuated insults. It's not that people are criticizing the way you play your game, but they are disagreeing with your self-perception over how well the game does at fulfilling your objectives and how happy you might be at switching. Because, well, in any context, people are resistant to change. I won't just say that because someone thinks everything is just fine with things the way they are, that means they *are* fine. I don't think that's ever how it actually works.
a_psh 03-20-07, 11:51 PM	OOC, which one? Release date/releaser? There's like three.Sorry. Whenever I refer to Polaris, I mean Polaris: Chivalric Tragedy at the Utmost North (hence me talking about the tragedy). Err, Lehman, These Are Our Games ("TAO Games"), 2005, if that helps.
a_psh 03-21-07, 12:05 AM	OK, here's what I don't get. Say I decide that the child's life is more important and choose to Give. How is that reflected in the game world? What actually happens to the baby? Does she start to stab it, but I manage to stop her? Or was stabbing the baby just a potential event that doesn't come to pass and now something else happens instead?Going straight by the book, it's not 100% clear. In general, winning the stakes implies a bit of narration to imply how exactly the stakes come to pass. I would basically treat Giving as a free "Block" in any situation: describe how you avert whatever the last action is without spending dice, then everything's over and the stakes are resolved. (In Polaris, there's a mechanic specifically for "your last statement doesn't count," but there are no "blocks" -- when you say "He shoots you," you mean "He shoots/shot Fomalhaut," not "he tries to shoot Fomalhaut." This makes sense in the larger context of Polaris, which is that it's supposed to come off a bit like a legend. In TSOY, giving happens during the "what are you doing?" stage, so there's no partially-completed action to countermand. DitV has a cousin called Afraid, still in the works, where escalating also lets you ignore the current Raise.) Hmm, sorry for the tangents, everyone.
CraggleRock 03-21-07, 12:07 AM	Well that might be what he's advocating now, but that's not what he was advocating at first. If you read through the three quotes that I posted from his original rant, it's obvious that he was originally advocating a system with less rules, period. Now he's taking a different tack and saying not less rules, but more rules for roleplaying and storytelling. But no wait... he's not saying that either because he says having extra books at the table is a bad thing. :banghead: Honestly, if he was just advocating a way to adjudicate XP better for roleplaying, I'd be cool with that. If he was advocating a way to incorporate storytelling rules into the game, I'd be cool with that too. However, that's not what he's advocating. He wants everything to be simpler and more complex, less rules oriented, but moreso all at the same time, and you can't have it both ways. I think what a_psh and those in support of his argument are suggesting is not to have more rules or to have less rules, but to have fewer rules that are more all encompassing. From what I've seen of the Dogs mechanics, the rules are set out that any conflict between two characters is resolved with a rule structure that gives a back-and-forth mechanic between the player and the DM. This is true whether the characters are brawling, having a shoot out, or arguing who buys the next round of drinks. Compare this to D&D, where the only "back-and-forth" mechanics are in the combat (and in that area, there is plenty of "back-and-forth", and it continually gets added to with almost every new book published). But when it comes to ruling a successful negotiation, it basically comes down to both sides rolling one dice: highest number wins (yes, there's allowances for favourable and unfavourable conditions with modifiers, but in the end it still pretty much comes down to one roll each). Now, what I think the OP is suggesting is that, rather than publish increasingly complex rules and classes and feats with each new publication, concentrate on a central mechanic that can be expanded into whatever particular area your own adventure is going into. At the simplist, this could be compared to fighting with archery compared to swords: in essence, it's the same mechanics, but with different numbers substituted into the equation (DEX vs STR) and those numbers represent your character. Now, how about if the mechanics were adapted in such a way that when negotiating a peace treaty with an enemy, you use the same base mechanics as the combat system, but substitute CHA bonuses in instead of STR, INT in for DEX, and have a "strength of your argument" score instead of HP. Now, you can roll out the back and forth of the argument, simulating the cutting remarks, the counter-arguments, the witty ripostes, just as the combat mechanics simulates the cut, thrust and parry of sword fighting. Now, with a robust enough system, you can expand beyond just combat and negotiations. What if your characters are participating in a chariot race? With such a system, you take the "combat" mechanics once more, this time substituting in different numbers once more, perhaps using DEX and your Ride skill ranks, with "distance" as your HP. Now, you have a way of creating an exciting race scene, without trivialising it down to "Roll your Ride skill once; beat DC10+1d20 and you've won the race". EDIT: Apologies if I'm completely wrong with any of these assumptions by the way, in which case, please continue and pay no attention the newbie DM behind the curtain... ;)
khyron1144 03-21-07, 01:08 AM	When I checked on this thread very briefly yesterday, I felt that it had reached a point where I was going to be consistently disagreeing with certain points made by ArcTan and a_psh and they would consitently disagree with certain points I make and that no is going to end up changing anyone's mind. It's been kind of fun, but I think I must withdraw from this one. I hope this doesn't come across as storming off in a huff like a three year-old and saying I'm taking my toys and going home. I still like the both of my opponents as much as you can like anyone you interact with in an anonymous and faceless medium like this message board. I just don't think I have anything new to say. Thanks for the time and food for thought.
boozerker 03-21-07, 01:55 AM	I had began dismissing most of a_push's overall points of giving mechanics to story elements in the game, but now I'm more intrigued. It's just that it's a foreign concept, and at first your descriptions led to misinterpretation: people either thought you were bashing D&D, or your so-called roleplay mechanics implied that players are forced to act a certain way -- that social interaction and non-combat events would be straight-jacketed or unnatural feeling. That seems the impression of people by their reaction to your suggestions. Perhaps your better off with starting a new thread, because people who skim through are going to miss lots and end up rehashing old points/arguments. The best thing I can find on the spur of the moment is this example (http://zork.net/~nick/loyhargil/tsoy2/book1--rulebook.html#an-example-of-bringing-down-the-pain-and-harm) from TSOY. That one's a bit weird but it should give you a general idea of how this works. That's a PVP scene, but it can work the same way with a GM involved. So pretty much you can rewind the last action taken by any character, if you succeed, using your dice pool (that acts as a shrinking, limited resource) against your opponent's dice pool. This pertains to any conflict, physical, verbal, whatever. Even convincing someone not to do something dangerous or stupid is a conflict. If that's correct, I have a few questions. What about conflicts against non-creatures? If you climb a wall, does the wall get a dice pool to roll against? If so, and you succeed, does that mean bonus dice for the next conflict? Also, in the example at the link you gave, what stops players from taking shortcuts in the progression of events? Let's say instead of Tela sneaking up in many steps (blend into shadows, tossing pebbles to confuse, etc), her player says "Tela puts a knife to Gael's throat and cuts away"? Or what if when Gael starts running, if Tela instead of following in the shadows, says "I trip/stab him as he begins to run" or what if Gael had decided to run the moment Tela even considered following him? Whatever the case, the game sounds decent. I'd give it a whirl.
Vrykolas2k 03-21-07, 01:59 AM	Doesn't matter what edition of what rpg you play, what matters is... are you and the group having fun, and can you afford to buy the books for the game to stay up-to-date? Every group is going to have a certain amount of house-rules to cover the disliked and ambiguous. That doesn't matter so much as whether everyone agrees and enjoys the game.
Azar_of_Faerun 03-21-07, 02:14 AM	Remember kids, if all else fails, there's no better date than a zombie. No matter what you do or look like, they only want you for your brain.
a_psh 03-21-07, 04:26 AM	So pretty much you can rewind the last action taken by any character, if you succeed, using your dice pool (that acts as a shrinking, limited resource) against your opponent's dice pool. This pertains to any conflict, physical, verbal, whatever. Even convincing someone not to do something dangerous or stupid is a conflict.Well, in TSOY, you can use Bring Down the Pain to preempt an action before it becomes fact. Which is a little different from a rewind per se. Basically, instead of a conflict-winner, that roll turns into a conflict-starter. What's okay for a conflict is pretty much up to the group (the game text could be more specific, but remember that these are all taken from one-man hundred-page books at the moment). DitV says this, basically: players might naturally want big conflicts, so the GM should push for smaller conflicts. As a DitV GM you should find the most critical player and follow his lead as to what's just right and what's overreaching as far as stakes are concerned. If that's correct, I have a few questions. What about conflicts against non-creatures? If you climb a wall, does the wall get a dice pool to roll against? If so, and you succeed, does that mean bonus dice for the next conflict?Okay, I think we're mixing up two games a bit. There's The Shadow of Yesterday and Dogs in the Vineyard. Which is natural since I was talking about like six different games at least. TSOY is a lot more like D&D in terms of flavor and overall structure. The basic structure is this: rolling 1 or higher is a success and lets you beat a challenge. You'll have a skill value of 0-3 and you'll get anywhere from +3 to -3 based on the dice, distributed in a bit of a bell curve: having a 0 in a skill means you're going to succeed a bit less than half the time. For something that's not an opposed roll, that 1 success is all you need. But you can impose a 1-die or 2-die penalty for particularly hard tasks (these will skew your die results towards the negative end but keep them between -3 and +3, still -- that's a bit weird, I know). For an opposed roll, you compare your results to see who wins. There's a limited resource attached: three ability pools, called Vigor, Instinct, and Reason. These basically work like action points: spend a point from a pool to get a bonus die. You also spend them to use special abilities. And you can chain abilities to get some bonuses, yes. I'm a bit hazy on that part. Now, here's the big trick: if you don't like how a roll turned out, you can Bring Down the Pain after an opposed check (not a regular check) and go into a zoomed-in turn-by-turn kind of thing. Only non-GM players can do this. Bringing Down the Pain lets you use your resources and cool abilities to really pull off impressive things, but you put yourself in danger of depleting your resources or suffering harm, which manifests as a penalty to your rolls. You can change your intent during Bring Down the Pain if you want, but it requires a round of inaction. While TSOY basically has "wide-angle" and "zoomed-in" mode, DitV instead uses only long-form resolution, somewhat similar to Bringing Down the Pain, for everything. It assumes that you won't need to roll checks for simple things, or that they'll be part of a larger conflict. DitV is the one that has you preroll and ration out your dice during a conflict (though you can add a few more on the fly by escalating, introducing something related to a trait, &c.). When there is a conflict with no clear opposition, the GM can roll a few dice and use those as his pool (I think it's 4d8 + Demonic Influence -- that last bit is basically a representation of how bad things have gotten in this particular scenario). The bonus dice for the next conflict if you just beat an unimportant enemy are particular to DitV, and they only apply for related follow-up conflicts. Imagine beating up some thugs and then going after the guy who sent them: that's worth the bonus dice. Where both of these systems still need work is in large-group conflicts. Dogs is basically designed so that two or three Dogs working together are practically unbeatable. Also, in the example at the link you gave, what stops players from taking shortcuts in the progression of events? Let's say instead of Tela sneaking up in many steps (blend into shadows, tossing pebbles to confuse, etc), her player says "Tela puts a knife to Gael's throat and cuts away"?Without changing intent, she can't. Her stated goal is "Sneak up on Gael," right? Every small action she takes in Bringing Down the Pain has to serve that goal. If she wants to knife him, she has to take a round to change her goal. (So, why not start with the intent of killing him? See below.) Or what if when Gael starts running, if Tela instead of following in the shadows, says "I trip/stab him as he begins to run" ...I think that may also require changing intent. At the point where Gael changes his intent to "run away," Tela should decide what her new goals are and change intent appropriately. ... or what if Gael had decided to run the moment Tela even considered following himAs far as I understand it, when Matt (Gael's player) first declare his intention to notice Tela, he could've just said "run away." Instead, he said that his intention was to notice her (the text says "notice and get away from her," but that's kinda ambiguous and multi-part -- a hedged intention; really the "get away from her" bit isn't doing much, and a clearer way of putting it would be "notice her before she can get in striking distance"). But, whatever intent Gael declares when he Brings Down the Pain, Emily gets to declare her intent after him, allowing her to compensate. Instead of "Emily decides that she will keep her intention of sneaking up on Gael," Emily can throw out a new one there. So, what's up with all that sneaking around, anyway? Why isn't Tela just going for his neck with a knife? I mean, isn't it her desire to make the Ammenite bleed like a stuck pig? Well, initially, it's simple: Gael's got some nice combat abilities, so Emily needs Tela to get some bonus dice from a comboed skill check in order to really off him. So she starts a Sneak + Knife-Fighting combo. And she does well on Sneak, lining herself up for a wicked Knife-Fighting check. That's when Matt thinks "I'm gonna stop her now" and decides to Bring Down the Pain, right? So they go into BDTP mode. Instead of just saying that Tela has snuck up to Gael, we're going to play it out blow-by-blow. So, why not declare "kill Gael" as her intent now? Mostly it's because Gael is pretty dangerous. If the stakes are low, Matt is more likely to give if he gets too beat up. If Gael's life is riding on the conflict, Matt'll stay in til the bitter end and could potentially overpower her. So she starts by lowballing it. And, indeed, when she finally springs the "I'm going to kill him," Matt immediately starts playing very aggressively, doing his best to win the fight regardless of harm suffered. And it's tense, but he does. His real trick for winning the fight is to lowball the stakes: if Emily gives, Tela is going to be captured and humiliated. If he had said "I want to kill her," Emily might stick around and desperately try to spend her last few points to off him before he got her. Luck was a big part of Gael's win, but the fact that Emily didn't give him an out also played a role. Matt might've caved if she gave him something vicious but survivable like "I want to ruin his sword hand" or "I want to stab him in the throat; he'll survive it but be unable to speak" or "I want to put the fear of death into him, so that he'll be too scared to ever strike a Zaru again." Whatever the case, the game sounds decent. I'd give it a whirl.There's a short setting attached, too. I rather like Ammeni, Maldor, and Khale. These two sections are part of one physical book but are weirdly separate in the Creative-Commons-ified version. Here (http://files.crngames.com/cc/tsoy/book2--world_of_near.html)'s the version 1.0 setting (which uses a different basic die roll, like 2d6 instead of Fudge dice).
Roxlimn 03-21-07, 04:50 AM	a_psh: For an entire game, start to finish? If you can put an entire game in 60 pages for storytelling that's essentially independent of everything else in D&D, then you don't need to put it in D&D for it to work. You can publish it as a separate game that you could play alongside D&D if you're so inclined. Hey, don't they do that already? And a game designer is what? A paid expert. If the current designers aren't up to snuff for designing anything other than mediocre wargames, get some new ones. You'll note that the people who actually designed the core game (Tweet, Cook, &c.) mostly don't work for WotC at this point, anyway. Sorry, I still can't appreciate how making up a game for making up a story (almost always a bad one at that) is beneficial for the game as a whole. What sells to whom? Niche market, dude. If you chase away anyone who picks up D&D, the flagship RPG and a self-proclaimed game of imagination, looking for something other than a wargame, then, yes, only wargamers will be left to buy stuff. True, which is why D&D is heading away from wargaming. The skill system, for instance, is a much-needed characterization package that has been clamored for since the early days of 2e and only tangentially ties into combat. Most skill conflicts don't involve combat, even if they are still task resolution mechanics. I agree that D&D should be less of a wargame, but I disagree that we should do this by insulting and alienating everyone who's playing the game and enjoying it currently. If it's more satisfying to daydream about playing and tinker with rules than it is to actually play the game, that means you've got a poorly-designed game. I didn't say that, so I don't know where you get it. Lots of people get their jollies tinkering with things. Gearheads like to tinker with cars. A car that lets them do that more isn't necessarily a failure as a car. The problem here is that you can't understand that the game currently is only what you make of it - and you can make a lot out of it. It's more LEGO than Matchbox. While Matchbox might make for better playcars, guess what? People who play with LEGO don't always want to make LEGO cars and play with them that way. You're saying that since you like playing with playcars, D&D should just abandon everyone else who likes playing with it as is and cater to YOU. Can you imagine why I'm so against your egocentric and arrogant statements? See here: Here's what you want in a story: "BANG! BANG! I shot you!" "No you didn't!" "Hell yeah, I did." "Okay, but I get to spray you with my tommygun as I fall over. RAT-TAT-TAT!" "It'd be lame if we both just died, wouldn't it?" "Too true. The hail of bullets miss you but hits your girl a few times. She's dying in your arms." "That's harsh, man." "Harsh, but cool. If I die, I'm taking someone you love with me. Them's the breaks." "Fair enough." What's happening there? Hardcore negotiation. Which means that consensus is reached, but there's argument and disagreement along the way. It's that back-and-forth that makes the story you tell dynamic. It's also that back-and-forth that adds details to your story. I ABSOLUTELY DO NOT WANT TO PLAY THIS. Seriously. I think it's stupid and boring. I don't want to play a story this way and I don't think I'll EVER want to play a story this way. You can propose crap like this for indie games (and yes, I've tried a few) but at its heart, it's a poker game masquerading as storytelling technique or a storytelling game. The "mechanics" of most of these games could be lifted en bloc from the storytelling aspect of them and they would still be the same. In effect, you're proposing that putting poker, gin rummy, Settlers, or freaking Monopoly mechanics into D&D with a storytelling spin on it would be better for the game. What utter rubbish. If you want to play this kind of game, there are other games out there that you can play that do exactly this. If they're more like what players want, then they should be doing better. Magic The Gathering itself was a fringe game concept with hardly any advertising to start with and operated out of a garage with a handful of employees. It's doing well because players like playing Magic games. The advertising and market domination comes after. Just so you get it, in case you didn't realize what I've been saying, I'll be much more blunt: All of these flat-out work. They accomplish different things. Some of them don't interest me very much personally. But, as far as making the shared imagined fiction really shine, they work. I DON'T LIKE playing this kind of game. So don't suggest that I'm not thinking for myself and don't know what I like. I know what I like, thank you very much. It sounds more than a little pro-establishment, but I like how D&D does the "shared fiction" thing. Indeed, the success of multiple kinds of games on computer and noncomputer platforms, combat and noncombat alike attests to the allure of the RPG as D&D does it. Is D&D's wargame model ultimately mediocre? Yup. Never said otherwise. If I wanted a serious competitive wargame, I'd play a tabletop wargame, Starcraft, WoW, or Warcraft III. And I do. I still play D&D, though. As I said before, D&D is about character creation. It's like playing with dolls. It's creating and roleplaying a character you like in situations made up by a gamesmaster. The difference here is that you equate "roleplaying" with "shared imaginative fiction." Yuck. Sorry, man, but yuck. D&D is "shared imaginative fiction," but not in that ineffably boring and snobby manner you think is right to impose on everyone. Do I REALLY care that I don't control the actions and events of everyone else in the "story?" No. When I play my character, I want to be "in-role." My character doesn't get to undo events and barter about how the story goes, so I don't want to have to do that. What I want is the GM telling me a situation, and I get to decide how to roleplay my character responds to it, pretty much without any sort of rule or game attached to it. It's exactly like a child's game of "Let's Pretend," since I get complete imaginative control over my character's internal conflict and crap like that. I don't WANT a game for that. I like it just as it is. In D&D's imagined fiction, the DM crafts a series of situations, the outcome of which is ideally affected by player action (that's the default D&D recommendation) in a limited manner. The action here is just "yes or no." There's no negotiation ongoing. If the player selects "yes," the GM can't interfere, although he does get to say what happens as a result of "yes" thereafter, which is ideally also apparent from the actions involved. I don't want to have to play gin rummy to say "yes" or "no." Whatever the consequences of the decision is (as determined by the GM), the important part for me is the making of the decision. The wargamey part of resolution is also attractive to me. It lends verisimilitude to a situation, easing suspension of disbelief. If I can negotiate events with cards or dice, or whatever, it seriously compromises my sense of being "in-character." I DON'T LIKE THAT. You could postulate and insinuate all kind of market tricks and cheap monopolistic practices D&D does, but you've got no proof for it and in the end it's just baseless accusation and empty words. Since D&D was not always dominant (and it is, now), I prefer to interpret that to mean that more players prefer to play the way D&D plays rather than the way Exalted plays.
a_psh 03-21-07, 04:55 AM	Incidentally, I'm not trying to hype up DitV and friends. I do think they deserve a lot of hyping, but what I'm most interested in right now is what kinds of examples they can serve as. And, no, I don't think D&D will turn into something as radical as Polaris. But I think there's a fine middle ground between what D&D is now and what games like DitV have created over the past few years that can make for some really, really satisfying play. If you're scratching your head when you read over TSOY or DitV, that's cool. Even if you're going "Why would you ever want to do it that way?" half the time. Look at those things and think "Hmm, what really pops out as interesting here?" Maybe the different reward systems are interesting. Maybe it's the various ways in which you can dictate your own outcomes. I'm sure there's something new and different that will pop out and get you thinking a bit. Mostly, I'm bringing out these examples to show off how story games are very much the opposite of "you have to roleplay a certain way." They may do some tricks with narrative power or scene-framing or characters that you're not comfortable with , but they're not pretentious knock-offs, they're not stupid straight-jackets for roleplaying, they're not just 50 pages of some guy telling you how to play and then doing nothing useful for you, and they're not all about sitting in a big circle singing "Kumbaya." There's a lot of meat in some of these things, and a lot of good ideas. * -- Notice how nothing about a conflict specifically has to happen sequentially? You can just as easily go "Two weeks later, I do this" right in the middle of a conflict. Or something like "Three days ago, this happened," too. That might surprise you a bit... While you're at it, note that this is a totally legit conflict in DitV or TSOY: "Do I make you fall in love with me?" That set offs a little alarm in your head that's going "Wait! That's my character! You can't change his emotions like that," doesn't it?
Roxlimn 03-21-07, 06:10 AM	ArcTan: It depends. The level of wargaming in D&D is pretty extreme even for a traditional RPG. D&D's closest competitors, like White Wolf and GURPS, gain market traction by claiming to veer away from the "dungeon crawl", regardless of how well they succeed. D&D IS THE traditional RPG. It's the benchmark by which all other RPGs are measured. That means that the wargaming in D&D is pretty much normal. In Diablo, for instance, practically the entire game is a wargame. You may balk and whine at how Diablo gets classified as an "RPG," but it is and that's what RPGs are, regardless of what you may personally think of it. I don't think this is necessarily true any more than it has to be the case that a comic book must be a good example of the superhero genre to be a good comic book, or that a science fiction novel has to be a good example of space opera to be a good science fiction novel. The stereotype that currently dominates a genre isn't necessarily what's good for that genre's future growth. In cases of fringe genres that are demonstrably losing ground to other things (like the often-brought-up bleed of players away from D&D to video games and such), the stereotype may be what's slowly killing it -- like how comic books as a medium are being choked by the near-total dominance of people beating each other up in tights. You're completely missing the point. The point is, for good or for ill, RPGs traditionally contain a healthy part of wargaming. 3e D&D improves on what previous editions have, at the very least in the wargaming department. That means that it's a better game than its predecessors and consequently is moving forward. The thing is that the wargame experience is something you get a lot *better* from CRPGs in one direction and MMORPGs in another and actual miniatures wargames in a third. An RPG is not a good wargame, because the RPG part gets in the way. Isn't it better to focus on what the RPG does do that a wargame doesn't? That's very debatable. The level of character customization you can get in CRPGs and MMORPGs is rather limited. It's expanding by the second, of course, but there are still limitations on that kind of thing. Most daming is that MMORPGs are not social events in the manner that a D&D game is. D&D currently focuses on the character building aspect of the game. If you look at the evolution of the game, it's been heading in this trend since the start. It's currently working, but if this approach will work in the future remains to be seen. I CAN'T customize my character in WoW the way I can with D&D because WoW is a prebuilt world with prebuilt character concepts and archetypes. Moreover, I can't kick back in my lawn with a beer in hand and casually roleplay an idyllic encounter in a grove. Okay, see, pre-written stories aren't storytelling *mechanics* any more than a pre-written description of orcs as "powerful warriors" would qualify as a combat mechanic. This is the problem, that D&Ders have come to equate "crunch" with "combat" and "fluff" with "story" -- that the only way to tell a story in D&D is to be, well, fluffy, to handwave and make things up in a disorganized way. Uh, no? You're confusing D&D's wargame aspect with the game itself. D&D comes from a wargame tradition, but it is fundamentally different from a wargame in that it focuses on roleplaying a character. That's why it's not the same as Warhammer 40k. The false dichotomy between "fluff" and "crunch" and probably your bad experience with the game is causing you to make up a bad game where the game isn't telling you so. Dungeon Design is at the heart of D&D storytelling, and it is what differentiates it from a true wargame. Your apparent lack of skill at this vital D&D technique leads you to think that "fluff" is story and "crunch" is combat. Fluff and crunch are two sides of the same coin. They're as different as yin and yang, but like yin and yang, cannot successfully exist alone. Fluff without crunch is just handwaving and crunch without fluff is just pointless number-crunching. A Dungeon isn't a prewritten story. It's a prewritten set of situations that characters tackle at their own pace and preference. The actual story that gets written is an interaction between these two. I'm not talking about vague advice, I'm talking about rules and game structure. So far, I haven't seen any rules and game structure I'd care to be included in D&D. Even the vague stuff you like to go on and on about turns me off. Your lit prof probably doesn't have much experience with *collaboratively creating a story in a gamelike environment*, though. If I wanted to play poker, I'd just play that. Again, writing a story by yourself and collaboratively creating one are not the same thing. If talent at writing your own story meant talent at creating a story in game, there wouldn't be so many complaints about "railroading DMs who should just write a novel". The question of how to make up a story and still have players wandering around inside of it making choices and contributing is a big one, and one people who aren't used to doing that probably can't answer very well. There isn't a single "collaborative story game" I've encountered wherein the game elements are largely separate from the story elements. Claiming that a game is more "story oriented" because you can manipulate story elements more drastically and because DMing is shared is a bit dishonest. In truth, none of the games I've encountered ever incoporate story into game. They give that impression by giving more story authority in the hands of players, but in reality, that's all they do. The game is usually just as independent of story (or arguably moreso) than it is in D&D. Yes, but even perfectly nice people can cause games to bog down because they have a really good idea they think other people might enjoy but there's *no easy way to sink it into the story proper*. Half the time this is the way with "backstory hogs" -- it's not that the backstory is *bad*, but that the way it's being introduced into the game is hackneyed and clumsy, because the game doesn't actually give you any good way to introduce a story element into the game -- the game actually sort of assumes your character is a faceless adventurer whose job it is to kill monsters. (You realize that by default the character creation rules don't even let you say who your parents are or where you went to school, and that it's up to DM fiat if these NPCs are allowed to exist in the game?) That's actually not true. Plenty of game elements pertain to characterization. In fact, D&D is arguably more about characterization than about anything else. The games being thrown around in here appear to incorporate more "fluff" (or story, if you will) because they make that "fluff" the "chips" or "victory points" or "goalposts" around which the game revolves, but the truth is, these things could just as easily be money or chips or almost anything else, and the game elements would largely be unaffected. Flaws, starter feats, flavor feats, class choices, class features and abilities ALL feature ways and means by which you can introduce character features into the game. Are you from Breland? That can be made more apparent by clothing, markers, equipment, class and feat choice. Did your parents die from a fire? Well, how does that affect your character? Does he benefit or suffer from the experience? Feat or Flaw? Higher Wis or Lower Cha? Is your character from the Plains and good at herding dinosaur? That can be accomodated. In fact, more of these characterizaton features can be accomodated than ever before in D&D and D&D does this better than any other game I know of. Indeed, the level of character featuring in the game is so extreme that it's been spoofed in many comics. No one's just a mercenary looking for a job anymore. Every character is so colorful and garish it almost looks like the Superfriends. But it *doesn't*. It's a combat wargame. It doesn't "cater" to people who don't want to play that -- it just includes vague handwavy advice for how to tack on a freeform storytelling session onto the combat wargame. It doesn't have *rules* for playing that other game. It's very *hard* to play that other game unless you have a DM doing tons of side stuff. Dungeon Design isn't a freeform storytelling session. The manner and design of a Dungeon or Adventure is very crunchy but it also fundamentally incorporates elements of plot, story, and pacing. You can't separate one from the other. If you mindlessly design an Adventure without paying attention to the guidelines, you'll have poor pacing, boring plot, and nonexistent story. It's all just a bunch of guidelines, of course, but so's most advice you're ever going to get for writing a story on your own. Storytelling in D&D isn't a game that you play. It's something you experience (or create). I think that this is the core of this particular thread. a_psh and you think that D&D should change into a game that it's not. I disagree. I like D&D just as it is and I would rather not have to wade through some crummy half-assed game just to get on with what I want. Worse still, I don't want D&D to eliminate the parts that I enjoy to incorporate what I think are cheesy games meant to entertain people who would really rather not play D&D. People keep saying things like this. Have you ever tried reading or playing indie RPGs? I really think this is why the conversation is one-sided -- because, as a_psh says, so many people treat "RPG" and "D&D" as synonymous (especially because so many mainstream RPGs try to mimic D&D) that it's hard to even have a conversation about how they could be different. I've tried a couple White Wolf "story-oriented" games. Ick. In fact, I've tried a LOT of games, not just RPG ones. Carcassone is an excellent game. If you want collaboarative storytelling, you could do worse than tacking it onto that game's mechanics. It's wicked fun. But it's not D&D. And when I want to play D&D, I don't want to play Carcassone, or whatever other second rate game you want to replace D&D mechanics. I don't think that linking my character concept to a stat block and then having that stat block survive a combat encounter is a very deep way of "experiencing" that character. Arguably, action films are also very bad films. A stat block containing customized elements that reflect your concept is a very attractive lure. It's a wargame's equivalent of your character's portrait. Is it fun to have a portrait? Yes, it is. The ship designer in GalCiv2's game doesn't, in fact, impact ship combat in the slightest. Despite that, people expend hours of their time in Ship Designer, to design pretty looking ships from their imaginations whose forms will have nothing at all to do with combat. Are they "really" playing the game? Of course they are. If I want to freeform act my character, D&D allows for that. No rules at all, just do your thing. There are minimal guidelines for making it smoother, but nothing obtrusive. The DM can construct classic encounters, combat or otherwise, that incorporates character elements. In fact, the DMG strongly recommends this approach and contains many guidelines on how to successfully engage players using character elements. Having your character simply "survive a combat encounter" isn't much fun, but successful D&D games are less about surviving the encounter and more about doing your schtick within it. If you're a Fire Mage, using fire effects inside and outside of combat is your thing, and D&D provides plenty of well-ruled aspects to allow players to enjoy and live this. If you're a Shaolin Monk, same thing. Arguably, the game doesn't allow you very much leeway in roleplaying a snivelling coward, but it's a Heroic roleplaying game, and it's understandable that it engages people more on the strengths of their Heroes rather than on their weaknesses. Hero faults are still essentially game pieces, though, but Heroes tend to have more strengths than weaknesses. He's not talking about "advice". If D&D were supposed to be a puzzle game, then yes, there should be a big set of rules about the creation of puzzles, the scaling of puzzles and the way puzzles are solved and players are rewarded for solving puzzles. D&D is supposed to incorporate puzzles into it. Most of the best D&D modules and campaigns have puzzles in them - it's an essential part of the genre. So why isn't anyone saying that puzzlemaking rules should be more a part of the game? Are YOU going to start making this suggestion, now? But the end is that the game is not a game that can handle everything. It's a wargame that you can attach everything to if you handwave the "everything" in between combat sessions. To be quite honest, it appears to me that you simply just play your D&D a lot more like a wargame than the rest of us. And I don't like the thing about luring people who like to "do story" into a wargame to make the game more "diverse". A game that makes it so the story people are bored half the time during combats and the combat people are bored half the time during RP isn't, in my eyes, a great game. As you yourself admit, it means people who are playing the game in good faith the way they see it end up boring you and driving you to distraction. You're very much mistaken. I didn't say I get bored when I play D&D. I just said that I accomodate other people's interest and try to have fun anyway (and I do). D&D doesn't lure "story people" to try to play gin rummy or DitV into it. Even the most casual glance at the Player's Handbook should tell you plenty about what the game is about. In fact, D&D advertises itself as a "heroic roleplaying game." When it has more space than a blurb, it quite plainly states that it's a game wherein you take the role of a Hero to bash monsters. What about that is confusing or misleading? Yes, there are always people who like things the way they are. One of the big parts of this is the fact that because D&D is so popular, people have tweaked and made compromises and such so much in D&D that they see D&D as their "perfect game" without seeing the ways in which they've had to change D&D to do so, or the ways in which getting what they want might be easier if they had *more than one game system* to do different things in rather than trying to pull and twist different things out of one rickety game system. Yes. It would be nice. The problem is that people like you and a_psh spend too much time bashing other people and not enough time looking after what you'd rather do. By and large, these other games suffer from identity crisis - they don't really know what they want to do. The only thing they really focus on is "this game is better than D&D." To that end, they usually try to do all kinds of things that demonstrate how "superior" they are to D&D. It's the game market equivalent of "mature" storygamers "demonstrating" how superior they are compared to other kinds of gamers. This thread itself suffers from this bigoted point of view. D&D isn't "moving forward" despite significant improvements to its wargame aspect?!? What the hell kind of crap is that? Wargamers aren't worthy of having D&D cater to them? Hey, let's just chase them off to all other other games that "do what they want better." "D&D is too good a game to waste on these brats." Games like Exalted and Vampire and any game originating from Forge authors are reactionary. They're focusing too much on what they aren't (snot-nosed wargamers) to create a truly good game. This thread is the same. It's all about "story" being "better" than "wargame" and how D&D is going to the dogs because it caters to wargamers.
StormKnight 03-21-07, 10:27 AM	I find the idea that D&D mechanics don't do enough to support storytelling interesting. In my opinion, D&D is not a storytelling game. It never has been, and its not meant to be. Its a roleplaying game. For many people, the whole point is to, suprise, suprise, to play a role. To act in the part of a character, trying to make decisions as that character would and see what happens when you do. To explore the feelings of that character. To simulate the experience of being a different person in a different world. Creating an interesting story is a good side-effect of such a game, but its not the point. It does have a war-gamish combat system, true. Its never really tried to have anything else. While certain people seem to believe that people play it in spite of its combat system, a lot of people actually enjoy the tactical, mechanical system as well. They liking playing out battles, picking which spell to use to defeat their foes, deciding whether or not to risk that AoO to get into a better position. If you want a narrative game without a tactical aspect, D&D is not the game for you. Its not a be-all and end-all system. I don't think any system could be. At its cores, its roleplaying high adventure with characters that grow in power and ability. If that's not what you want to do, its probably not the system for you. But saying "that's not what the game it should me" doesn't make sense. That's what the game it is meant to be. If it becomes something else, its no longer D&D. The rest of what follows are long rants on a variety of topics... I keep seeing people espouse the narrative games. If you like them, great. But trying to say how they are "superior" is ridiculous. They are entirely different kind of game. To my view, they are in as different a category from a roleplaying game as a boardgame is. Just because a person likes roleplaying games doesn't mean she will have any interest in a narrative game. Nor do I see that many of the 'mechanics that encourage' an interesting story really will. The imagination and effort put into a roleplaying or narrative game will determine what kind of result you get, and no system can make it otherwise. A system where you "wager" things your character values? So, the important people and connections in your life are reduced to essentially a HP meter, a resource to be expended? Does this really encourage getting emotionally invested in a character? In the example play from Vineyard Dogs (or whatever its called), the mechanic is essentially "Roll some dice. Compare the dice and determine who wins and who gets penalties. Tell a story to make it interesting". Sure, you might get an interesting story, but you might get: "I uh...convince him of stuff." "He disagrees and says something upsetting." "Darn. Well, I be more convincing." Does this strike anyone as enjoyable sounding? I'm happy for RPGs to leave blank spots. In my opinion, the purpouse of mechanics is to provide uncertainty about character success, to provide a means for your characters to have different abilities, and to let you simulate things that the player's can't do. I and my players are quite capable of talking, or deciding if a character gets angry, or falls in love, or what not. I don't want mechanics for that. Sometimes things in an RPG work out in a dramatic and exciting way. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes what was supposed to be a "minor" encounter winds up being incredibly interesting and memorable, or even leads to fundamental "plot" or character changes. If you play a game where everything is based on driving the story, and everything is "dramatic", is any of it really dramatic? Uncertainty, discovery, the unexpected, and sheer dynamic unpredictability are some of the most enjoyable aspects of an RPG for me. As a GM, I don't enjoy "crafting a story". I enjoy presenting an interesting world filled with characters and seeing how the players react to and explore it. Because the players and NPCs have their own drives and desires, and because they have connections to each other, a story is created. On an entirely different topic...D&D experience is based on challenges. This is hardly suprising; the vast majority of a character's abilities are based on overcoming challenges. If you haven't been overcoming challenges, you haven't gotten a chance to use your abilities. Isn't the entire point of the experience system to advance your abilities and the challenges you face in such a way as to keep the mechanical game elements new and interesting? If you haven't yet gotten to face the challenges and use the abilities appropriate to a given power level, what is the point of skipping that power level and moving on to the next?
a_psh 03-21-07, 10:38 AM	I've tried a couple White Wolf "story-oriented" games. Ick.Yeah, that's not what I'm talking about. This (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storytelling_System) is basically just more everything-happens-by-GM-fiat.
The_Clumsy_Robot 03-21-07, 11:04 AM	a_psh: As someone who has tried to twist the rules to encourage a better roleplaying environment, with some degrees of success and failure, I can understand how you can think D&D hasn't really gone anywhere. Really, the current D&D is a wargame with some muddy vague DM-defined options for roleplaying. But D&D's probably not going to turn back now. Looking at the responses, the only concession you're probably going to get is a supplement or optional book that introduces ("Unearthed Tales" or some type of "Storyteller's Handbook", depending on the authors, I might not mind seeing this). Although there are stubborn old-guards of the current D&D who can't be reasoned with, by looking at the current gaming community in my area, I can confirm that there is a large number of reasonable people who can't accept what you are proposing. I wish WotC whould throw a few more bones to DMs who would like to see different ways to engage constructive roleplaying, but money talks. Loudly. The current system of D&D is good enough. It's too risky to change.
Zersch 03-21-07, 11:27 AM	Although there are stubborn old-guards of the current D&D who can't be reasoned with, by looking at the current gaming community in my area, I can confirm that there is a large number of reasonable people who can't accept what you are proposing. I wouldn't necessarily go right to that statement. I'm part of that old guard and after having played over 40+ different RPG's in my time, I simply made the decision to stick with D&D/d20. I have played DitV, My Life With Master, and games like that. I (and it seems alot of others) have made a clear choice to play this game the way they want to. I personally don't need anyone telling me that I'm not having fun playing the game either a)the way it's written, or b)the way I choose. The OP and others seem to be under the assumption that no one has the skill level or knowledge of RPG's that they do, and that we must be all lead to the light guided by them. I don't buy that and lots of others do not as well. I appreciate that a_psh is talking about these other games that many have not heard of or experienced, but the way they are going about just rubs me the wrong way. Also, after twenty years of roleplaying, I know how to fun with several diffrerent engines, not just d20. I also like 1st and 2nd Edition AD&D, d6 Shadowrun, d10 Star Wars, Stormbringer, Palladium, and White Wolfs various games, etc. Ultimately, what I want is simple, and I suspect alot of other people as well. I want to be able to sit back and tell the story of the time that we foiled whatever plot the BBEG has concocted. I have a METRIC TON of these stories, as does most gamers, and all these stories from many, many different engines and obtained with various methods under those rules.
Grand Theft Otto 03-21-07, 11:34 AM	Where's the excitement? It sounds like in your examples, it's just a matter of assured victory. Since the PCs are basically just dictating what happens, there is no real challenges and no chance of unexpected failure. When there's no chance of failure, except when you deem it, you're in perfect control. More importantly, since you dictate what happens to yourself and others, wheres the surprise? Its as exciting as reading a murder mystery you wrote yourself. Maybe I'm just misunderstanding the entire suggestion. I had a discussion with my 4 players last night. Aside from getting to introduce NPC's they create for the world, picking where they go on adventures, suggesting story arcs, and for one person picking out what the art objects they find look like, they honestly dont want that much control of the world. When they do, they run something. The last "adventure" or arc was basically put forth this way. One character had requested a love interest for his PC, and 2 otbhers wished to do something wilderness oriented (the majority of the game had taken place in Penance, a megacity in the Oathbound setting). Someone else had written they wanted to discover why the Forest of Echoes was a dead place to druids when the campaign started. OK, we can do this. Picking a liosalfar (elf) NPC that they had rescued earlier after she was entombed in a wall for a few days (and left somewhat catatonic), his character began taking more of an interest in her wellbeing. The elves in my game are pretty much your typical mindless fey that forget everything at sunrise, unless they've been blessed by the treant council with a drop of sap on their foreheads that retain memories. After a while, the immobile ancient treants collect the sap back, to experience the outside world, and the liosalfar is sent out to get more memories/knowledge for the council. I decided to have a past memory sap of hers still intact in the forest of echoes, which was calling out, and due to her weakened mental state after being entombed, able to overlap with her current personality - which causes plants to go apeshit in her immediate area. After some research, the group set out to fix this, and maybe cure the forest itself. Pretty much an adventure written to order. However the players themselves dont really want to decide why the forest is cursed, or how her past incarnation played a role in it. Were I a player, I dont think I would either. I'd want to be able to suggest a decent way to fix the problem once discovered, and have that be potentially able to work, but the basic setup for us as players is more entertaining if I dont know that much going in, and for me as a DM if I'm not 100% certain what course of action they will take to resolve it. I've set out a few possibilities, but if they come up with something that makes sense, we'll roll with it. Maybe I'm just misunderstanding when you talk about having rules to set scenarios up, but I dont think the basic story would be enhanced by me having to draw a particular card, roll a set %, or have the players reach a majority vote on what is going on.
Solik 03-21-07, 11:45 AM	I'm in full agreement with Roxlimn's post at the top of this page. Every concrete example provided by those arguing for change has made me ill. In no way do I want to play those games or anything resembling them. I won't say that the ideas are necessarily horrible, but in no way do they appeal to my tastes. I want to build characters. I want to play with numbers and mechanics. I want to wargame. And I want to roleplay. And as long as WotC does too, I'll keep giving them my money. If they move to this other... stuff... I'll stop.
a_psh 03-21-07, 11:49 AM	D&D isn't "moving forward" despite significant improvements to its wargame aspect?!? What the hell kind of crap is that? Wargamers aren't worthy of having D&D cater to them? Hey, let's just chase them off to all other other games that "do what they want better."The heart of the wargame is still mediocre at best. While AoOs and the like are nice, the fundamental structure of the game limits the degree of challenging wargaming that you can actually accomplish. The strategy is mostly in character-building, not the combat scenes themselves: you have a pretty straightforward set of abilities to actually choose from in combat. Since you're not creating a new character every week in the standard "campaign" style of game (which D&D prioritizes over other styles that might allow for more variety), how much you can do with that is limited. Moreover, since the GM is supposed to create encounter after encounter specifically for you to win it, there's really not a lot of honest-to-goodness wargamey tension there (there is, FWIW, narrative tension, which comes in the form of "how much do you lose before you win?"). When I've got my wargamer hat on, this is flat-out annoying. Games like Exalted and Vampire and any game originating from Forge authors are reactionary. They're focusing too much on what they aren't (snot-nosed wargamers) to create a truly good game.DitV is straightforwardly focused on what it is: a mixture of Western and morality play. The mechanics very coherently support this. The poker shtick screams "Western," the mechanics gently drive you to use violence to solve your problems, and the violence you get is fast-paced and only abstractly tactical. The guy who wrote it grew up on, like, Ars Magica and freeform (as well as LDS, which Dogs is transparently and unabashedly about); he's not grinding a big ol' axe against D&D. Look, I know you read Exalted and it ****** you off. I don't give a crap about Exalted. Exalted is jokingly called "D&D from levels 12 to 17 with some cool window-dressing." Some of that window-dressing (e.g. the art) is pretty good, but the Storyteller/Storytelling System is just that: a system with one guy telling the story. This thread is the same. It's all about "story" being "better" than "wargame" and how D&D is going to the dogs because it caters to wargamers.D&D is going to the dogs because it perpetuates a crappy model. The way D&D treats the creation of imagined stuff not only gimps a lot of the stories you could tell with it, but also diminishes the awesomeness of the wargame.
Arrowhen 03-21-07, 12:40 PM	D&D is going to the dogs because it perpetuates a crappy model. The way D&D treats the creation of imagined stuff not only gimps a lot of the stories you could tell with it, but also diminishes the awesomeness of the wargame. So do you think there's anyway that one ruleset could both a) not gimp the stories you might want to tell and b) make the wargame more awesome? Or are the two just too dissimilar for a game to do both?
Grand Theft Otto 03-21-07, 01:26 PM	The heart of the wargame is still mediocre at best. While AoOs and the like are nice, the fundamental structure of the game limits the degree of challenging wargaming that you can actually accomplish. The strategy is mostly in character-building, not the combat scenes themselves: you have a pretty straightforward set of abilities to actually choose from in combat. Since you're not creating a new character every week in the standard "campaign" style of game (which D&D prioritizes over other styles that might allow for more variety), how much you can do with that is limited. Moreover, since the GM is supposed to create encounter after encounter specifically for you to win it, there's really not a lot of honest-to-goodness wargamey tension there (there is, FWIW, narrative tension, which comes in the form of "how much do you lose before you win?"). When I've got my wargamer hat on, this is flat-out annoying. DitV is straightforwardly focused on what it is: a mixture of Western and morality play. The mechanics very coherently support this. The poker shtick screams "Western," the mechanics gently drive you to use violence to solve your problems, and the violence you get is fast-paced and only abstractly tactical. The guy who wrote it grew up on, like, Ars Magica and freeform (as well as LDS, which Dogs is transparently and unabashedly about); he's not grinding a big ol' axe against D&D. Aside from the improved social system (no arguments that D&D could use another boost), I dont see a huge difference. You say that D&D presents challenges that are pointless and geared towards the PC's winning, but unless you just play a bunch of one shots in DitV, it seems that you're going to be having the same thing there as well, or a parade of new characters. In the review I read, it indicates that death is rare. Social fallout is "feeling bad" about something. Maybe you've never played with anyone who actually has a D&D character react or grow in regards to anything but killing monsters and taking loot, but I certainly have. UA has a system to track hardened and failed checks on various meters (isolation, helpessness, violence, unnatural) etc. From what I can gather, it too is a situation of the game going on. Meaning conflicts are just as "pointless" as in D&D. The conflict resolution system sounds interesting, but to imply that you cant tell the same kind of stories with D&D, Unkown Armies, Over ther Edge, Deadlands or whatever the other system you pick just seems to be really fanboy-ish. I've been there myself with the whole "this is the best game of all-time ever!!" Several times heh. After a while it goes back to tomato tomahto. The examples of play I've read seem by and how our games go, just with slightly different mechanics. Last time we played, the group got into a debate with a council of druids who were trying to stop them, and had to appeal their case. A series of player speeches, sense motives and knowledge checks to grant hints as to how best to appeal to their emotions and mindset, and persuade checks made after a number of points, they managed a marginal success and were granted more time to persue their actions (but not free reign). The worse alternative would have been the character they were trying to protect would have been killed and the akashic record of her memories purged, fundamentally erasing her. That really doesnt seem very pointless to me or my players.
a_psh 03-21-07, 02:01 PM	So do you think there's anyway that one ruleset could both a) not gimp the stories you might want to tell and b) make the wargame more awesome? Or are the two just too dissimilar for a game to do both?Well, here's the part of DitV/TSOY/&c. that would really shiny up a wargame, too: the general framework of "Here is my goal, how much damage to I want to sustain before it's not worth it anymore?" When to give up is both a powerful roleplaying choice and a cool strategic question as well. And I think it's something that RPGs can handle well because being invested in the character makes it a more interesting question. This doesn't necessarily require an elaborate conflict-resolution-heavy system. What it does require is more gradation in terms of what kinds of damage you can sustain and a bit more variety in potential goals (which may just be a matter of scenario design). HP are a decent abstraction but the fatalism they create is kinda ugly, since your character is basically either "fine" or "dead." Ideally, an approach like that also be abstracted a bit to cover something other than physical combat, too. The other thing that I really see as benefit both storytelling and wargaming is the general concept of "The GM has very specific limits" (at least, at times). This is what I love about the LotR boardgame (+expansion), for example: the player playing Sauron is supposed to powergame like hell and do his absolute worst to the other four players (who are playing Hobbits). Likewise, a DitV GM can afford to be significantly more vicious than a D&D or Exalted GM (as long as you acknowledge that, in fact, the players are going to win most of the time, so the struggle is really going to be more satisfying for you than the outcome). Dead of Night does something a bit like that with horror, where it's really important not to wuss out and pull your punches. In general, the thing that most bores me about D&D-the-wargame is that you have a wide range of character abilities but, once you pick them, your options in a fight aren't that impressive. And they don't change much from fight to fight. 3e gives you nice options like tripping and bull rushing and all that jazz, but you usually need a specific build to take advantage of those (and, at that point, you're locked into mostly using a few specific techniques again). This is true of how D&D's skills work, too: if you really buff up your Diplomacy check, you'll likely never be trying to use anything but Diplomacy in a social situation, right? This ultimately erodes some of the tactical fun of picking the right option for the right moment. It'd be nicer to have more flexibility and range within a scene rather than during character generation.
Arivia 03-21-07, 02:07 PM	Yeah, that's not what I'm talking about. This (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storytelling_System) is basically just more everything-happens-by-GM-fiat. I've got to jump in and defend that system here. While recent Storytelling System publications don't offer that same give-and-take that say, DotV does, they've definitely done more right than D&D has. In fact, with the huge amount of emphasis on theme as the overruling game element, not plot or character, you could say they're aiming for more, and that more demands that Storyteller. First off, one thing that drives the entire body of rules is that rules are always second to story. Always. A lot of systems try to talk about this, but the Storytelling System is specifically designed to be driven by the story first, only pop up if there's a conflict to be resolved, and then go away again. Everything in the system supports this, from antagonist design through to task/conflict resolution. Now, as I mentioned previously, everything also aims good games towards themes, not just a riveting plot or interesting character. Why? A theme (any theme, from Mage's "power corrupts" to Promethean's "explosions are fun") gives the game direction, something to be about, not just a collection of events with little common element. This ties into the second pillar, which is that the system promotes turning your play into an art form: that there should be valid, well-thought-out viewpoints about your theme, and that you should be commenting on that theme. This is why the system has the Storyteller: a guiding influence to promote that theme. Nowhere is the Storyteller to "challenge" the players. Nowhere are they to provide an entertaining plotline to walk on. The Storyteller is to provide extra conflict if necessary (through antagonists and party-external opposition), inspire (through guidance, imagery, and symbolism), and (this is the controversial one) edit. Yes, the Storyteller has GM fiat through that responsibility. However, as the Storytelling System does not aim for just cooperative storytelling, but also artistic merit, the editor's job is not to cut the story into shape, it is to cut the story into shape as necessary to achieve the common goal. That is the crucial difference there: everyone is secondary to the theme, the ST has limits in that they should serve that theme. Can't players do that on their own, though? No. See, the ST's job in providing antagonism reflects that crucial difference between antagonist and protagonist in narrative, and keeping them separate promotes that for the sake of good storytelling. As the system emphasizes good storytelling above everything else, having no ST is anathema to that purpose.
Solik 03-21-07, 02:10 PM	In general, the thing that most bores me about D&D-the-wargame is that you have a wide range of character abilities but, once you pick them, your options in a fight aren't that impressive. This depends on the character. If you're playing a straightforward charge fighter or archer or skillmonkey or something, yeah, okay, maybe. But a sorcerer? A warblade? A warlock past the first few levels? A druid? A well-prepared wizard? Even a dextrous fighter in complex terrain? Not to mention, the huge variety of creatures and terrains in D&D is plenty sufficient to keep players on their toes.
a_psh 03-21-07, 02:16 PM	More importantly, since you dictate what happens to yourself and others, wheres the surprise? Its as exciting as reading a murder mystery you wrote yourself. Maybe I'm just misunderstanding the entire suggestion.I don't believe most D&D players will enjoy knowing everything in advance. The real point of the conflict resolution examples is to illustrate how mechanics can be generic without being weak, and how a lot of the juicy "story" bits come from a bit of back-and-forth between the players. Note that both DitV and TSOY don't give you a perfect picture of what's happening ahead of time (though they do both advise you to remove perception checks and the like: the DitV GM is advised to lie like a movie character -- i.e. transparently and with a little wink to the camera, -- not lie like an average person). <SNIP />I like the thing with memories. It's super-cool. Maybe I'm just misunderstanding when you talk about having rules to set scenarios up, but I dont think the basic story would be enhanced by me having to draw a particular card, roll a set %, or have the players reach a majority vote on what is going on.None of that. For me, it's really more a question of how scenarios develop. The main role of mechanics in almost any RPG is to provide the "time" component of a scene, so to speak: to help you make things change over time. As far as scenario setup, DitV is very specific because of what it's trying to explore. The game text blurs the line between rules and guidelines quite often, however, so it's not really anything like "roll a die to see what's happening." What the rules do say about town prep is this (remember that this is to represent something a lot like a Mormon town in the Wild West -- a community of people defined by their faith and living in a rather hostile environment): 1. Somebody's Pride creates Injustice. (The community is out of balance somehow.) 2. That Injustice inspires Sin. Sin lets the demons in. The demons want to drive the town to ruin. (Spurred by some Injustice, someone breaks a rule and damages the community in the process. Bad stuff happens.) 3. When people rationalize their Sin, it becomes False Doctrine. (E.g. "It's okay for a woman to have two husbands," "My wealth is a clear sign of God's favor," "God told me to kill him.") 4. False Doctrine adopted by a whole group turns to False Worship. (The community is decaying.) 5. False Worship allows people to work Sorcery. (The community is really decaying.) 6. Sorcery will invariable lead to Hate & Murder. (Killing people is a Sin, too, of course -- you can, in fact, put a Murder in step 2 or even step 1, if you want. Hate & Murder represent the near-total desolution of the community.) When writing the town, you start with 1 and keep going until you want to stop. You basically right down who's doing what and why. Concurrent chains in the same physical town are also possible, of course. That town setup generates the basic story during play, which is that the Dogs find a problem that is eating the town like a cancer and try to resolve it, and their actions have the weight of moral and religious authority behind them regardless of what they decide to do. (Aside: One cute thing here is that none of this need be supernatural unless you want it to be. Metaphorically, Demonic Attacks are negative external forces -- bad luck. A town where someone breaks up the community but nothing bad happens isn't in crisis. A town that suffers bad luck but is strong together isn't in crisis. A town where the social fabric has been damaged and then bad luck hits is in danger.) ... In the review I read, it indicates that death is rare. Social fallout is "feeling bad" about something.The game is mostly designed to make death voluntary, and tries to tie advancement into social fallout. Some of that is clunky, I agree. The Afraid prototype (http://www.lumpley.com/comment.php?entry=201) works better. It clearly separate experience from short-term fallout, and social fallout is transparently negative. The conflict resolution system sounds interesting, but to imply that you cant tell the same kind of stories with D&D, Unkown Armies, Over ther Edge, or whatever the other system you pick just seems to be really fanboy-ish. The examples of play I've read seem by and how our games go, just with slightly different mechanics.You can play out any story in freeform; mechanics just push it in a specific direction. It's always possible to step back from a game and revert to freeform if the game mechanics are pushing you somewhere you don't want to go. So, in that regard, a specific system is unnecessary (of course, freeform has an implied system if you use "system" in the wider sense). All games are pushing you in slightly different directions, but you're totally right about the fact that you can swim in any direction you want, as long as you're stronger than the current. My main reason to like conflict resolution is that it's pretty flexible without the big rulebook. Most traditional games seem to rely on a defined set of things you can do for each ability. "You can use a Knowledge check to..." et cetera. D&D as a whole (i.e. with all the splats) has too many mechanics of the form "You can do this thing, but only if you take this feat."
Grand Theft Otto 03-21-07, 03:01 PM	I don't believe most D&D players will enjoy knowing everything in advance. The real point of the conflict resolution examples is to illustrate how mechanics can be generic without being weak, and how a lot of the juicy "story" bits come from a bit of back-and-forth between the players. Note that both DitV and TSOY don't give you a perfect picture of what's happening ahead of time (though they do both advise you to remove perception checks and the like: the DitV GM is advised to lie like a movie character -- i.e. transparently and with a little wink to the camera, -- not lie like an average person). Like I said, it largely feels like 5 of one, half dozen of another. Not exactly the same, but not a bizarrely different beast. I prefer the sense motive, perception, psychology or what have you rolls myself to automatically tipping off the players when someone is lying. Same goes for when I'm playing. At the same time, I want a chance to discover it. I like the thing with memories. It's super-cool. Thanks. None of that. For me, it's really more a question of how scenarios develop. The main role of mechanics in almost any RPG is to provide the "time" component of a scene, so to speak: to help you make things change over time. As far as scenario setup, DitV is very specific because of what it's trying to explore. The game text blurs the line between rules and guidelines quite often, however, so it's not really anything like "roll a die to see what's happening." What the rules do say about town prep is this (remember that this is to represent something a lot like a Mormon town in the Wild West -- a community of people defined by their faith and living in a rather hostile environment): 1. Somebody's Pride creates Injustice. (The community is out of balance somehow.) 2. That Injustice inspires Sin. Sin lets the demons in. The demons want to drive the town to ruin. (Spurred by some Injustice, someone breaks a rule and damages the community in the process. Bad stuff happens.) 3. When people rationalize their Sin, it becomes False Doctrine. (E.g. "It's okay for a woman to have two husbands," "My wealth is a clear sign of God's favor," "God told me to kill him.") 4. False Doctrine adopted by a whole group turns to False Worship. (The community is decaying.) 5. False Worship allows people to work Sorcery. (The community is really decaying.) 6. Sorcery will invariable lead to Hate & Murder. (Killing people is a Sin, too, of course -- you can, in fact, put a Murder in step 2 or even step 1, if you want. Hate & Murder represent the near-total desolution of the community.) When writing the town, you start with 1 and keep going until you want to stop. You basically right down who's doing what and why. Concurrent chains in the same physical town are also possible, of course. That town setup generates the basic story during play, which is that the Dogs find a problem that is eating the town like a cancer and try to resolve it, and their actions have the weight of moral and religious authority behind them regardless of what they decide to do. (Aside: One cute thing here is that none of this need be supernatural unless you want it to be. Metaphorically, Demonic Attacks are negative external forces -- bad luck. A town where someone breaks up the community but nothing bad happens isn't in crisis. A town that suffers bad luck but is strong together isn't in crisis. A town where the social fabric has been damaged and then bad luck hits is in danger.) It sounds like good advice for scenario building. D&D could certainly use more good advice to running the game, as well as a player base not directly predisposed towards antagonism and more "normal" people playing the game. I think the last thing I saw that I thought was genuinely helpful was an example of how to play along with players who enjoy their characters to fail in the DMG 2. Its not overly different to how I go about setting up potential outcomes to whats going on and pre-player intervention plotlines. You can play out any story in freeform; mechanics just push it in a specific direction. It's always possible to step back from a game and revert to freeform if the game mechanics are pushing you somewhere you don't want to go. So, in that regard, a specific system is unnecessary (of course, freeform has an implied system if you use "system" in the wider sense). All games are pushing you in slightly different directions, but you're totally right about the fact that you can swim in any direction you want, as long as you're stronger than the current. Except its not free-form really. It was done using the rules in place, with some tweaks. Maybe its just because we've played tons of games other than D&D, but it doesnt take a complete system deconstruction to get where we want. My main reason to like conflict resolution is that it's pretty flexible without the big rulebook. Most traditional games seem to rely on a defined set of things you can do for each ability. "You can use a Knowledge check to..." et cetera. D&D as a whole (i.e. with all the splats) has too many mechanics of the form "You can do this thing, but only if you take this feat." That could be fixed with relaxing certain restrictions as well (I'd expect this in 4th edition). Meaning anyone could trade accuracy for power, just power attack lets you do it better. You can already use most skills untrained anyways. We decided to remove AoO's from many maneuvers in order to open up more combat options to people beyond those with the feats. But by and large, theres going to be a few things you cant do unless trained, be it by feat or skill. A normal person cant fly without some other means, and I cant walk into a hospital and perform complex surgery with any degree of success. So I'm comfortable with some things being relageted to "you cant, unless you do X first" and many others being "you can, but if you do Y you'll be better". Just because knowledge checks are currently trained only in core doesnt mean thats the only way to find something out. Easily fixed by making DC's above a certain number trained only (to represent common knowledge). A core way to get extra skills or feats aside from merely leveling up would be nice. I have my own, but that's neither here nor there heh. I could see a 4th edition "class" system where you buy feats, skills and abilities with exp. When you have a certain set of abilities, you can qualify for a level of a class (effectively representing a synergy between the abilities). That would keep the basic concept of a class system, but remove the archtype prison which you had mentioned earlier where it can be difficult to figure out which hole your character peg fits into. I just think the pig needs less lipstick than you I guess. D&D currently fits my "close enough for government work" criteria.
a_psh 03-21-07, 03:10 PM	Except its not free-form really. It was done using the rules in place, with some tweaks. Maybe its just because we've played tons of games other than D&D, but it doesnt take a complete system deconstruction to get where we want.Eeek. What I meant was that if the mechanics pinch, you can always pull back a bit and end up in freeform land. I'm not trying to imply that that's what you do all the time, just that it's a reaction whenever the rules start to mess something up. Although I must say that your group does sound atypical in a lot of (good) ways. I could see a 4th edition "class" system where you buy feats, skills and abilities with exp. When you have a certain set of abilities, you can qualify for a level of a class (effectively representing a synergy between the abilities). That would keep the basic concept of a class system, but remove the archtype prison which you had mentioned earlier where it can be difficult to figure out which hole your character peg fits into.Yup. What annoys me a lot about D&D 3e is that feats and class abilities are basically the same thing but you get them in different ways. It's like I have Feat X that I get by just picking it, but Feat Y requires me to do all this other weird stuff (like cherrypick some class levels). Class abilities are just feats with messy, messy prerequisites.
Roxlimn 03-21-07, 04:39 PM	a_psh: The heart of the wargame is still mediocre at best... Which part of "I agree with you there," wasn't clear? Moreover, since the GM is supposed to create encounter after encounter specifically for you to win it, there's really not a lot of honest-to-goodness wargamey tension there (there is, FWIW, narrative tension, which comes in the form of "how much do you lose before you win?"). When I've got my wargamer hat on, this is flat-out annoying. You're not following guidelines is what you're doing. The DM isn't supposed to create encounter after encounter just for you to steamroll over it. In fact, the best D&D games have events and goals (even in combat) that involve more than just winning combat. This is detailed more in adventure and encounter design (which I hope you're familiar with since you've been bashing D&D). Creating interesting encounters involves more than just putting together a bunch of monsters to beat up on. In some cases, the beating up isn't even a good option. Indeed, some encounters can be designed so as to be intentionally unwinnable in the sense of beating the enemy up. Escape, Ambush, and Protection encounters are typically set up this way. D&D encounters are exactly what you make them out to be, and if you haven't been doing all that much with them, then that's really your failing, not the system's. DitV is straightforwardly focused on what it is: a mixture of Western and morality play. The mechanics very coherently support this. The poker shtick screams "Western," the mechanics gently drive you to use violence to solve your problems, and the violence you get is fast-paced and only abstractly tactical. The guy who wrote it grew up on, like, Ars Magica and freeform (as well as LDS, which Dogs is transparently and unabashedly about); he's not grinding a big ol' axe against D&D. Really? Then what was he getting at with this: If you, the GM, can judge my character's actions, then I won't tell you what I think. I'll play to whatever morality you impose on me via your rulings. Instead of posing your players an interesting ethical question and then hearing their answers, you'd be posing the question and then answering it yourself. How dull would that be. Sounds like a hit on D&D, no? Much of the stuff that comes out is like this - more a reaction and less of action. That's why I think most of them can't rise above a certain level of quality - because they're more about what they AREN'T than about what they are. D&D is going to the dogs because it perpetuates a crappy model. The way D&D treats the creation of imagined stuff not only gimps a lot of the stories you could tell with it, but also diminishes the awesomeness of the wargame. Well, being market leader and stealing market away from M:tG argues strongly for "not going to the dogs." I've also covered stuff about how you really want to play something other than D&D, and not really what D&D offers. I get that you don't appreciate the stuff that D&D does well. That doesn't mean that we don't enjoy it, and we don't like being called idiots for enjoying things you don't happen to. In general, the thing that most bores me about D&D-the-wargame is that you have a wide range of character abilities but, once you pick them, your options in a fight aren't that impressive. And they don't change much from fight to fight. 1. You're just downright wrong there. Options for characters are getting wider and more interesting than ever before. That's one of the main draws of the Tome of Battle, actually. Arguably, the options you can get out of WoW are considerably less when a fight gets underway. And Diablo? How many hotkeys do you use for when your Fire Sorceress gets her thing going? Two? 2. D&D fights arent about having options. They're about doing your thing, being in-character. It would be useful for your Fighter to be able to fly and shoot Fireballs, but it's just such a wide disconnect to the character concept that most Fighter people wouldn't choose to do that kind of thing even if the option presented itself. 3e gives you nice options like tripping and bull rushing and all that jazz, but you usually need a specific build to take advantage of those (and, at that point, you're locked into mostly using a few specific techniques again). At this point, it's obvious that you just don't know what you're talking about. Tactically speaking, these options are always available. It's just a matter of cost and effect. Is a bull-rush (with the associated AoO) worth enough to do? Sometimes it is, even without the feat investment. This is true of how D&D's skills work, too: if you really buff up your Diplomacy check, you'll likely never be trying to use anything but Diplomacy in a social situation, right? This ultimately erodes some of the tactical fun of picking the right option for the right moment. It'd be nicer to have more flexibility and range within a scene rather than during character generation. Options can only go so far. D&D isn't about providing you with options in scenes, although it does so more than you apparently are famliar with. More than that, D&D is about differentiating any one player's options from any other player's options. If you all had the same kind and quality of options at every scene, then characterization suffers. Being bad at Diplomacy is just as important as being good at swinging a sword. If you just stubbornly view D&D as a bad wargame you wouldn't realize this. That's why Flaws were developed. Mechanically speaking, they can be used to facilitate even greater specialization in one field of ability, but they're more important as characterization tools (and they're explicitly outlined as being most useful for that). These character features tell you what your character is BAD at, and for some, that's more important than the feat you get from it. Finally, your notion of skill conflict in D&D is also rather less than impressive. One person can't always represent everyone, and Diplomacy isn't always a skill conflict you can choose. While skill conflict is arguably primitive in D&D, it's also better than it has been before, so it can't be said that D&D has gone nowhere with this. My main reason to like conflict resolution is that it's pretty flexible without the big rulebook. Most traditional games seem to rely on a defined set of things you can do for each ability. "You can use a Knowledge check to..." et cetera. D&D as a whole (i.e. with all the splats) has too many mechanics of the form "You can do this thing, but only if you take this feat." Aside from the fact that this helps characterization, which is what D&D is about, it's also untrue. Splats are just that - splats. How you use the material in them is entirely optional. You can, for example, decide that everyone can Quick Reconnoiter, on the presumption that this is a natual ability that everyone possesses. You can do this with any ability you see in any splat book - even the class features. This is partially why the boards are replete with all kinds of rule questions and suggestions and inquiries. "I think that it's stupid that Hazing Strike needs to be a feat." "If you're the DM, you can decide to give that choice as an option to anyone with SA." "I think it's stupid that people without X can't do Y." "It doesn't have to be that way." It's important to separate D&D's compartmentalized rule snippets from the main structures of the game itself. Feats, class abilities, spells, maneuvers, and skill options are all optional components that you can mix and match however you want. In fact, there's a healthy amount of stuff in D&D books that tell you how to manage this kind of customization. Complaining that these rule snippets can't be changed goes completely against what D&D guidelines imply. If you think this, you can't be enjoying a good D&D game. More correctly, you're probably NOT enjoying a lousy D&D game. There's ample evidence of this as well. For instance, in an Oriental setting, everyone could have Improved Unarmed Strike. Certainly, monks are given various other options like being able to flurry with any weapon, or free multiclassing. Despite this, in Eberron your monk would typically need Monastic Training to multiclass effectively, and this is still different from how FR manages monk multiclassing. All of these are characterization options that characterize the WORLD as well as the characters that move within that world. All of these are D&D.
Dragon Snack 03-21-07, 05:04 PM	On Savage Worlds &c.: Those are all quite similar to D&D, unfortunately. ... As long as the GM is an all-powerful arbiter... I was going to ask you to explain further (especially since we've had all of 2 combats -with 3 whole attacks- in the 4 months I've been playing Serenity, it's certainly not "wargamey"), but if the second part of your quote (even if it was in response to someone else) is your big beef (the DM controls the story?), then I'm afraid I can't agree with your concern. Sure, some DMs are less than stellar, but I can see far more problems arising from not having someone at the helm. It's far easier to find a good DM than to find a group that shares the same 'wants' and can form a cohesive storyline. If you've found one, good for you... Anyway, this thread is growing far too fast (and really, isn't grabbing my attention) to keep up with, so good luck with whatever you want to play - I just don't agree.
Arrowhen 03-21-07, 05:39 PM	Yup. What annoys me a lot about D&D 3e is that feats and class abilities are basically the same thing but you get them in different ways. It's like I have Feat X that I get by just picking it, but Feat Y requires me to do all this other weird stuff (like cherrypick some class levels). Class abilities are just feats with messy, messy prerequisites. Yeah, especially when some of those class features really are just "you get X feat for free." I like the way True20 does it, where all the d20 class abilities are turned into feats. (Of course, I like just about everything about True20, except for the fact that no one plays it.)
a_psh 03-21-07, 05:52 PM	No time, so a selective response for now: Really? Then what was he getting at with this: ...That's D&D, oWoD, and almost every other game out there, including the way many people play freeform. The point is that you can't explore morality, especially the nature of religious morality, if you've got one guy at the table treating God as a NPC. That's why almost any kind of morality meter is an absolute abomination. It's something that explicitly needs to be said and understood for the game to work. Aside from the fact that this helps characterization, which is what D&D is about, it's also untrue. Splats are just that - splats. How you use the material in them is entirely optional. You can, for example, decide that everyone can Quick Reconnoiter, on the presumption that this is a natual ability that everyone possesses.A mediocre core mechanic (skills) + 100 little feats you turned into houserules isn't exactly my idea of a good time. Especially when those 100 little feats are scattered through a bunch of splats that you paid for. At that point you're asking me to write my own system based on the d20 skeleton.
Roxlimn 03-21-07, 06:06 PM	a_psh: A mediocre core mechanic (skills) + 100 little feats you turned into houserules isn't exactly my idea of a good time. Especially when those 100 little feats are scattered through a bunch of splats that you paid for. At that point you're asking me to write my own system based on the d20 skeleton. When you get to the point where you don't like the core mechanics, this is essentially what D&D is - a d20 skeleton that you can customize for your own use. Most of the d20 systems are similar. The 100 feats in the splatbooks are departure points for how to manage situations that could come up in the game, but you don't have to use them if you don't want to. You're insisting on getting hung up on stuff that isn't even required. They're OPTIONAL. Let's say that again. THEY'RE OPTIONAL. I don't know why you miss that since it appears to be quite simple when I read it myself. You can freeform house rule these situations when you prefer to do so, and in fact, the default D&D position in the core books IS for you to do so. That's why there's that little section where they advise you on how to handle stuff that doesn't have anything concrete on it. Supplemental material can give you extra options, but only when you want it, and none of it is hardcoded as to how you use it. Do you want 10 more options? 20? 50? 100? To tell you the truth, few people use more than 10 different options at any one time in any situation, even when they CAN. The human brain can only hold so much data in its short term memory. For the same reason, attention span for all people (even adults) is usually restricted to about 20 minutes. Honestly, at this point you're just ranting at random elements within a system you're proven to hardly even know. You can't do something because a feat somewhere outlines it and you don't have the feat? What the heck kind of nonsense is that?
ArcTan 03-21-07, 11:49 PM	You can't do something because a feat somewhere outlines it and you don't have the feat? What the heck kind of nonsense is that? You're just arguing in bad faith if you think no rules-obsessed DM or player has ever argued this. ("You can't do that -- that's a tactic from this tactical feat and you haven't taken it! It wouldn't be fair!")
navar100 03-22-07, 02:41 AM	You're just arguing in bad faith if you think no rules-obsessed DM or player has ever argued this. ("You can't do that -- that's a tactic from this tactical feat and you haven't taken it! It wouldn't be fair!") Interesting anecdote. My warlock was being attacked by a skeleton. I was trapped against a wall. With a lousy AC and no concentration (It was my tactic at the time. I've learned. :) ), eldritch blast was not a good idea. I just wanted to get out of melee. However, I would still draw an AoO for moving through its threatened area. I asked the DM if I could bluff such that the skeleton would be distractted enough not to take an AoO when I moved. I figured the feint ability of bluff was the closest thing I wanted. Since all I wanted was to move, I accepted it being a standard action to bluff and could then move freely for my move action. The DM said sure. With my lovely Beguiling Influence giving me a very good Bluff score, I easily bluffed the skeleton and moved out of the way without an AoO. Even now I don't even know if this is "book legal". I was just trying to think outside the box, and the DM was ok with it. No big deal. A few months later I buy Complete Scoundrel that has a Skill Trick that does this exact thing ...
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-22-07, 03:14 AM	In general, the thing that most bores me about D&D-the-wargame is that you have a wide range of character abilities but, once you pick them, your options in a fight aren't that impressive. And they don't change much from fight to fight. 3e gives you nice options like tripping and bull rushing and all that jazz, but you usually need a specific build to take advantage of those (and, at that point, you're locked into mostly using a few specific techniques again). This is true of how D&D's skills work, too: if you really buff up your Diplomacy check, you'll likely never be trying to use anything but Diplomacy in a social situation, right? This ultimately erodes some of the tactical fun of picking the right option for the right moment. It'd be nicer to have more flexibility and range within a scene rather than during character generation. This is a major flaw with D&D character design in my opinion. D&D has started to try to get away from it, in creating the Tome of Battle, where it organizes fighter combat manuevers in ways that at least attempt to minimize synergy so warriors don't become one trick ponies. The diplomacy rules on the other hand are just stupid in general. I still wonder why RPGs have rules for roleplaying. It's never made sense to me. We don't need dice to tell you how the king reacts, let the DM decide that. the PCs don't roll dice to see how their characters react, they just roleplay it.
MEAT 03-22-07, 03:18 AM	Nice rant, however I find it ironic that your spiel about how D&D is lacking 'lacks' a conclusion. I believe if this train of thought were further traveled, it would come to the inevitable decision that the pleasures experienced by gamers from all RPG's require an adequate, adaptable GM or DM (your pleasure) to proliferate a "good-time" experience. This person needs to know when to 'throw out' or 'bend' the rules, and when to abide by them. An experienced storyteller need not even have much rules, such as the old Call of Cthulu style play. Really, what this particular argument comes down to is: YOUR GAME IS ONLY AS GOOD AS YOUR GM. This can obviously be argued to the group as a whole in regards to conflicting personalities, youth, and other factors, however none of these factors relate to the first posts rant, hence are a mute point here.
ArcTan 03-22-07, 04:10 AM	Nice rant, however I find it ironic that your spiel about how D&D is lacking 'lacks' a conclusion. I believe if this train of thought were further traveled, it would come to the inevitable decision that the pleasures experienced by gamers from all RPG's require an adequate, adaptable GM or DM (your pleasure) to proliferate a "good-time" experience. This person needs to know when to 'throw out' or 'bend' the rules, and when to abide by them. An experienced storyteller need not even have much rules, such as the old Call of Cthulu style play. Really, what this particular argument comes down to is: YOUR GAME IS ONLY AS GOOD AS YOUR GM. This can obviously be argued to the group as a whole in regards to conflicting personalities, youth, and other factors, however none of these factors relate to the first posts rant, hence are a mute point here. If all this were really true in the ultimate, absolute sense, then spending hundreds of dollars on RPG sourcebooks would be a huge waste of money. The tagline "System Matters" sounds annoyingly trite, but when you really think about what its opposite -- "System Doesn't Matter" -- implies, you realize how silly that is. People are paid tons of money to design rules. Buying rules is a major industry among geeks. We go on these boards all the time and talk about rules, about design, about what WotC is doing and whether the game is going uphill or downhill depending on what they make. Obviously the system *does* matter. A game isn't *just* as good as the GM -- a GM who's working from scratch with nothing at all has a much harder time than a GM who's working with a system he likes that works for what he does. That's why GMs spend money on games.
a_psh 03-22-07, 07:59 AM	Nice rant, however I find it ironic that your spiel about how D&D is lacking 'lacks' a conclusion.Well, that's why I labeled it an incoherent rant. I believe if this train of thought were further traveled, it would come to the inevitable decision that the pleasures experienced by gamers from all RPG's require an adequate, adaptable GM or DM (your pleasure) to proliferate a "good-time" experience. This person needs to know when to 'throw out' or 'bend' the rules, and when to abide by them.What about GM-less games? Or GM-ful indie games that don't involve any rule-bending in play (DitV can be better if you fiddle with the mechanics a bit, i.e. redesign the system, but deciding to selectively ignore them in play really just ruins the game)? People who talk about all the rules ad-libbing that "all RPGs" need, as you see too often on D&D forums, are oblivious to the fact that they're mostly just ad-hoccing situations or tweaking details. The average gamer can't even begin to change any of the central mechanics of the game in a coherent way. An experienced storyteller need not even have much rules, such as the old Call of Cthulu style play. Really, what this particular argument comes down to is: YOUR GAME IS ONLY AS GOOD AS YOUR GM. This can obviously be argued to the group as a whole in regards to conflicting personalities, youth, and other factors, however none of these factors relate to the first posts rant, hence are a mute point here.Okay, first off, I don't believe in worshipping the GM. Your whole group matters. If the GM can make the other players irrelevant to whether you have fun or not, he's doing something bad. A good GM with a good system is better than a good GM with no system, since he's got the system to help the game fly. (If you don't think is true, why are you still using a system?) A good GM with a crappy system might be worse than a good GM with no system, because wrestling with the system takes his attention away from everything else. A bad GM with a good system at least has some framework to help him improve his abilities.
Arrowhen 03-22-07, 08:44 AM	I still wonder why RPGs have rules for roleplaying. So we can play characters who are more charming and convincing than us, just like the combat rules let us play characters who can fight better than us and the magic rules let us play characters who can cast spells better than we can.
Zumarai 03-22-07, 09:13 AM	All I have to say is that I've never had a problem capturing the feel/flavour of any genre/campaign etc with any edition of the D&D rules. If it's not real life, and it's just a game, it will never perfectly capture the "real thing".
a_psh 03-22-07, 11:18 AM	So we can play characters who are more charming and convincing than us, just like the combat rules let us play characters who can fight better than us and the magic rules let us play characters who can cast spells better than we can.Well, that's an issue of acting vs. narration, too. People mix the two into a big goop when they talk about "roleplaying," which creates a lot of confusion. Here's how I look at it: While you can't act more charming than you really are, you can always narrate your character doing that, regardless of whether you've got rules or not, right? (Indeed, the hallmark of a pen-and-paper game is that you're narrating most actions rather than acting them out, anyway.) What are you doing in a D&D combat, as far as imaginary events are concerned? Narrating stuff happening. The rules help make that narration go somewhere. The thing about scenes where you're talking a lot, which is what most people call "roleplaying," is that you're still narrating stuff, too. You add details to the world on the fly, summarize unimportant actions instead of dragging them out forever, and generally frame the "acting" part of roleplaying with all this other stuff, which is narration. Because the acting by itself doesn't take you anywhere. And, just like those combat scenes, good rules can help structure that narration.
Grand Theft Otto 03-22-07, 12:06 PM	You're just arguing in bad faith if you think no rules-obsessed DM or player has ever argued this. ("You can't do that -- that's a tactic from this tactical feat and you haven't taken it! It wouldn't be fair!") Very true. I was initially excited to see skill tricks in Complete Scoundrel, then I realized that many of them were stuff I'd previously allowed with simple skill checks. Probably other DM's too. But now some DM's might take that fun stuff away. Basically its skill bloat, where the number of options to pick from gets larger and more restrictive, while the players resources to divide amongst those options gets smaller. IMO, they had a good thing going in, what was it, song and silence when they added "Same Skill, New Use" sections to expand on what players already had. Its why I'm always veery reluctant to add a new skill in any system, and instead try and figure out how it can be folded into an existing one.
Arrowhen 03-22-07, 12:53 PM	While you can't act more charming than you really are, you can always narrate your character doing that, regardless of whether you've got rules or not, right? Sure, but without rules you end up with... "I talk the orcs out of killing me." "It doesn't work; roll initiative." "But I'm charming!" "Not charming enough." "Says who?" The same "Bang you're dead!", "No, you missed!" arguments that RPGs are supposed to help you avoid in the first place. Because the acting by itself doesn't take you anywhere. And, just like those combat scenes, good rules can help structure that narration. Right, and the thing about combat scenes is not only are they helping you structure the narration, they're also giving you a game to play. A lot of people argue against social rules by saying, "it's a roleplaying game." Which is true, but it's also a roleplaying game. If you're just roleplaying, just having conversations in character without any sort of rules framework, you're not really playing a game anymore. You're just doing improv acting. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but one would assume that you're playing a roleplaying game because you like roleplaying and games. Why should the game go away when the out-of-combat roleplaying starts? One reason this might happen is that your system doesn't have any rules for talking scenes, so it's not possible to "play the game" while you're roleplaying social conflicts. This was the case in previous editions. In 3rd Ed., there are some rules for social conflicts (Diplomacy checks, Bluff, Sense Motive, etc.) but they're not any fun. You can take every last bit of descriptive stuff out of a D&D combat encounter and treat it as nothing more than a complicated dice game and it's still kind of fun. It's not as fun as imagining characters actually involved in combat and not nearly as fun as imagining that your success or failure in that combat will help or hinder your furtherance of a larger goal, but still kinda fun nonetheless. There's room for tactics. You have options to weigh. "Do I use my action this round to replenish my own resources or do I try to drain my opponents resources and hope mine don't run out first?" "Should my team concentrate its efforts on one opponent at a time, or should we each try to neutralize a different one?" But if you take all the descriptive stuff out of social encounters, you just end up with "Let's each roll a die. OK, you rolled higher, you win. Game over." Boring as hell. Even rock, paper, scissors has more strategic depth. As awful and dull as the social game is, it's no wonder that so many people think there shouldn't be a social game at all. After all, given the choice of trying to win a good-natured argument with the DM (which is really all that "just roleplay it" boils down to) or playing the world's most boring dice game, most people are going to pick the argument. Trouble is, arguing isn't really a game. It might be a fun activity, but it's not really a game. I think a lot of people have convinced themselves that it is, because not only does it crop up during gameplay, it's often necessary in order to move on to more gameplay. What they don't seem to realize is that a well-written, fun to play set of social rules would allow for more gameplay during a session. You'd think "gamers" would want that.
Reinforcements 03-22-07, 01:22 PM	Arrowhen, you do know that you're by and large AGREEING with a_psh, right? Anyway, the question I'd like to pose to anyone who cares to answer it is: Do you think D&D could benefit by adding and changing rules to deal with narration and social interaction (i.e., "role-playing") without significantly changing or removing the current rules as they are?* How would we do that? *This is, of course, not to say that the rules as they are (which mostly pertain to combat) are perfect, but the point of the question is whether or not we could add to the game without having to scrap a lot of what we already have.
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-22-07, 01:48 PM	Right, and the thing about combat scenes is not only are they helping you structure the narration, they're also giving you a game to play. A lot of people argue against social rules by saying, "it's a roleplaying game." Which is true, but it's also a roleplaying game. If you're just roleplaying, just having conversations in character without any sort of rules framework, you're not really playing a game anymore. You're just doing improv acting. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but one would assume that you're playing a roleplaying game because you like roleplaying and games. Why should the game go away when the out-of-combat roleplaying starts? Because quite simply, the game is more fun when you don't apply hard and fast rules to role-playing. The essence of a game isn't rolling dice or drawing cards, it's player choice. That's what makes something a game, the choices we make and the impact they have on the game world. By creating hard rules to determine what happens during social interaction, you've gone from a game to a straight narration. That no longer is a game of any kind. In fact you're saying, "Lets skip this part so that we can get back to the real game." Now, this kind of thinking is fine if you just like the wargame aspect of D&D. If you don't want to talk to stuff and would prefer to just get back to the hacking, then having rules to easily resolve and skip by diplomatic actions without any player choice is a reasonable goal. On the other hand if you want role-playing to be part of the game, taking away the impact of player-choice during role-playing sections of the adventure is completely counter to the idea of a game. You see, when entering into a conversation with the king to enlist his aid, I get to choose what angle I'm going to take to try to convince him, I get to choose what sort of things I'm going to say. And well, I could insult him if I say the wrong thing, or I could earn his favor by saying the right thing. I don't want my ability to choose lost in a simple dice roll. Don't forget that dice don't make a game, player choices do. Dice can add randomness to a game, which can sometimes make for a better game and sometimes not, depending on the game in question, but it's all about player choice. If my role-playing is just window dressing and no longer affects the game itself, then we're no longer playing a role-playing game at all.
Archangel_yuki 03-22-07, 02:25 PM	Bravo. If only we had more people that thought like you; more people that would really look at a game and realize that in the pursuit of a perfect game we lost the point of the game itself.This is so going to be saved into a document, and sigged too... You, my dear sir, are my hero. ^_^
Grand Theft Otto 03-22-07, 02:46 PM	By creating hard rules to determine what happens during social interaction, you've gone from a game to a straight narration. That no longer is a game of any kind. In fact you're saying, "Lets skip this part so that we can get back to the real game." Theres plenty of choice in how you interact. By ditching any social rules, you place everything back in the land of DM fiat. Systems emphasize what is important. By removing social rules, the system us basically saying "You dont have control over any of this besides hoping your DM isnt a douche - but dont worry, its not important like combat". After all, why is "talking and hoping the DM likes it" good enough for bluffing or persuasion, but not for describing a hit with a sword? Why do you think so many players in earlier editions resorted to violence as a staple? Because thats the only way they could hope for a fair shake, as there was at least some rules suggestions to indicate the outcome. You STIL get to choose what you say, what angle, etc. The DM assigns some circumstance mods, and you roll to see how well it worked, try and accumulate successes, etc. To me, while not perfect, thats preferrable to talking and then simply hoping the DM is in a good mood. A bad roll doesnt necessarily mean you did poorly, merely that it didnt have the desired results.
High Octane 03-22-07, 03:17 PM	All I have to say is, it's not the system's responsibility to teach you how to make the game fun. A teacher can only teach you correct grammar. If you want to learn how to write, you have to read books.
HawkTheOne-Handed 03-22-07, 03:28 PM	We used to roleplay back then (the groups I was in back then were more interested in acting than actual rolling of dice). Everytime I get into a group outside of the guys I play with these days, if I don't take a combat optimized character, I rarely get healed and am more often than not, the last person to receive aid if the party gets swarmed by multiple enemies. It almost always ends up with people saying stuff like, "You're not pulling your own weight. I refuse to help anyone who doesn't know how to play their character." Never game with those people more than once. If I wanted to be ostracized for not being an exact character build or the right character class, I'd still be suffering through mmorpgs like Everquest or World of Warcraft. It seems like most of the roleplayers head to games like Vampire. I just don't enjoy that genre.
Jack Daniel 03-22-07, 03:35 PM	Well that was a thoroughly offensive rant to anyone who actually enjoys mechanics. You can't write rule books to cater to people who don't want to use rules, guy. Nobody's forcing you to use any of them. I have to thoroughly disagree. The original poster hit the nail on the head, as far as I'm concerned, with the state of things D&D. It's just become so rules-heavy anymore that all the noise drowns out the story. I've been playing in my current campaign for more than a year now, and the player characters -- we're talking a year's worth of gaming, now, with the PCs surviving it all -- have yet to develop anything that I'd call "personality". This has happened every time I've ever run a 3rd edition (.0 or .5, doesn't matter) game. It cannot be that I'm just getting crop after crop of sucky roleplayers. That's impossible, because I remember players actually playing unique and interesting characters when I ran basic D&D or 2nd edition AD&D. The only variable here is the edition of the game. (Now, granted, 1st edition AD&D was also pretty rules-heavy, very close kin to its war-gaming origins, and I never ran a game under those rules, so I can't comment on how it compares.) But the point is, yes, the rules do impact the degree of role-playing. I'll say it again, because it bears saying. THE RULES DO IMPACT THE DEGREE OF ROLE-PLAYING. Even as little as a year ago, I would've been the first to shout this notion down. "Impossible! The two are completely separate! You can't bottle good role-palying and put it in the rule-books! Rules-light or rules-heavy, the story and the role-playing will only be as good as the DM and the players!" But I now consider that position to be naive. I've had too many campaigns since 3e came out that prove to be nothing more than boring, hack and slash, dungeon crawling, power-fests. I blame two things: the whole "get back into the dungeon" philosophy behind 3e, and feats. First off, 2nd edition AD&D was a very different game from its predecessor and its successor. The rules may have been a clunky mess, but it wasn't so bad if you kept to the core rulebooks -- and best of all, 2e was written with the assumption that combat and dungeons were not the point of the game. The rules were quite literally devoted to role-playing and "over-world" adventures. "Go into the dungeon, kill monsters, and take their stuff to get more power" was one part of the game, not the whole game. This mood, this tone, this feel, is the best that D&D has ever been. D&D peaked with 2nd edition (which is said, since so many rules in 2e were nonetheless stupid and arbitrary). Basic D&D was nince because it was so easy to run and play. "Rules light" hasn't come in a better form since the Rules Cyclopedia. Pick your class: fighter, mage, cleric, thief, monk, elf, dwarf, or halfling. And then go kill monsters and take their stuff... until 9th level, when you have to start running your own country, unless you'd rather be a "wandering" high-level PC (it was in the rules). D&D at its purest. The point is, the game itself encourages certain styles of play. 3rd edition encourages increasing your character's power more than any past edition, and the main reason is feats. (No, I'm not even going to blame prestige classes -- they're a natural part of the game, and they have been ever since the 1e bard and thief-acrobat, or even the basic D&D druid.) The fact that you must now have a plug-in game mechanic in order to customize your character is the single worst facet of modern D&D. Each new book is a dozen more of these pointless little space-wasters, and the eerie thing is, for all the customization that feats give you in combat (supposedly with the intent of making Joe Fighter different from Fred Fighter), all the really do is take focus away from your character's personality and place it squarely on how many plusses you have on this or that action. In old D&D and in 1st & 2nd editions of the advanced game, if you wanted your fireball-blasting magic-user to be different from every other fireball-blasting magic-user, you needed to come up with a character to play. Background, personality, these things were downright essential. These days, they're the most optional of all the optional facets to the game. And what's required? What's not optional anymore? Attacks of opportunity, a game mechanic that does nothing but slow down combat and excuse the existence of about 50% of all feats in the PHB. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm one of those mechancis junkies, which is why I take such issue with the post quoted above. I'm not offended at all by the original poster. I'm gratified to find that there are others noticing this problem. I love minitatures. I would never play a D&D battle without a grid on the table, and I always encourage my players to make use of tactical movement, cover, and other such things in combat. But when the players stare at their character sheets more than the tableu of pawns and pieces, and when I have to pause the action for even 30 seconds to look up how grappling works, then that means something about the game mechanics: they suck. They just suck. I love mechanics, but I really only like the good ones, and D&D hasn't had any yet. My ideal version of D&D? Something that keeps the streamlined nicities of 3rd edition (everything is d20 + modifiers vs. a DC, one EXP chart for all classes, multiclassing is an intuitive matter of one class level to one character level) and the emphasis on tactical movement (speed in squares, reach and facing in the monster stat blocks) but does away with all the unneccessary mess (attacks of opportunity, over-complicated combat actions, feats, skill points, 90% of prestige classes, and even a few base classes). It's the way I'm playing it now, and I've never been happier. And now that the party barbarian isn't waiting for the next feat slot, he's actually started to role-play a personality. Imagine that.
ArcTan 03-22-07, 03:51 PM	Because quite simply, the game is more fun when you don't apply hard and fast rules to role-playing. The essence of a game isn't rolling dice or drawing cards, it's player choice. That's what makes something a game, the choices we make and the impact they have on the game world. Does having hard and fast rules for combat take away player choice from combat? By creating hard rules to determine what happens during social interaction, you've gone from a game to a straight narration. Does having hard rules for combat make combat go from a game to a straight narration? That no longer is a game of any kind. In fact you're saying, "Lets skip this part so that we can get back to the real game." Does having hard rules for combat make combat something D&D groups tend to skip so they can get back to the real game? Now, this kind of thinking is fine if you just like the wargame aspect of D&D. If you don't want to talk to stuff and would prefer to just get back to the hacking, then having rules to easily resolve and skip by diplomatic actions without any player choice is a reasonable goal. And yet the wargame itself is almost completely bound by rules, and yet people don't talk about how these rules strip away "player choice". On the other hand if you want role-playing to be part of the game, taking away the impact of player-choice during role-playing sections of the adventure is completely counter to the idea of a game. You see, when entering into a conversation with the king to enlist his aid, I get to choose what angle I'm going to take to try to convince him, I get to choose what sort of things I'm going to say. And well, I could insult him if I say the wrong thing, or I could earn his favor by saying the right thing. I don't want my ability to choose lost in a simple dice roll. What amazes me is people getting so locked into D&D-ish assumptions that they assume the only way to have rules for social interaction is to reduce social interaction to a Diplomacy check. This isn't true, any more than the only way to have combat in a game would be to roll a single Combat check. Don't forget that dice don't make a game, player choices do. Dice can add randomness to a game, which can sometimes make for a better game and sometimes not, depending on the game in question, but it's all about player choice. Sure. And combat includes both dice and choice. Why can't anything else? Hell, WHY are we talking as though "combat" automatically means "not roleplaying" and "roleplaying" automatically means "not combat"? Can't you be playing a role while you're in a dramatic swordfight? If my role-playing is just window dressing and no longer affects the game itself, then we're no longer playing a role-playing game at all. I think what we're asking for is rules that specifically allow roleplaying to affect the game by folding it into the rules.
fjw70 03-22-07, 03:52 PM	I am an old time 1st Edition D&Der. I haven't played since the 80s, but I have started looking at D&D 3.5 because I would like to teach my kids about RPGs when they are older. My perspective is that 3.5 has too many rules. This isn't a case of my nostalgia making think 1.0 was better. I actually like the d20 system and think that it is far superior than the ways we did things in the old days. That being said I don't like all the skills and feats and prestige classes and stuff like that. There is another game out (I won't mention any names since it isn't a WOTC game) that I think perfectly (okay nothings perfect but it's pretty good) balances roll-playing and role-playing. In this game for stuff like interacting with NPCs and knowing if your character has certain knowledge is all done by attribute checks. But for certain attributes (some chosen by class and others by the player) you get a bonus for check of the attribute. I haven't played the games but it looks very elegant in design. It looks to have the simple feel of early D&D with the updated (and superior IMO) d20 system. As far as resolving social interactions with role-playing or dice, I think you need both. The DM should make the players go through the motions of trying to convince an NPC of something and then use a modified skill (or attribute) check (with appropriate modifiers) to see if they succeed. If the players do a particularly good or bad job then the DM can decide to ignore the dice (kind of like a judge overturning a verdict).
Arrowhen 03-22-07, 03:58 PM	Arrowhen, you do know that you're by and large AGREEING with a_psh, right? When did I say I wasn't? Anyway, the question I'd like to pose to anyone who cares to answer it is: Do you think D&D could benefit by adding and changing rules to deal with narration and social interaction (i.e., "role-playing") without significantly changing or removing the current rules as they are?* How would we do that? Well, we already do have rules for social interaction: "Roll a Diplomacy check, if your DM lets you, otherwise hope your real life acting skills are good enough, no matter what your character is capable of." So no, not without removing some current rules as they are.
boozerker 03-22-07, 04:04 PM	...The original poster hit the nail on the head, as far as I'm concerned, with the state of things D&D. It's just become so rules-heavy anymore that all the noise drowns out the story. I've been playing in my current campaign for more than a year now, and the player characters -- we're talking a year's worth of gaming, now, with the PCs surviving it all -- have yet to develop anything that I'd call "personality". This has happened every time I've ever run a 3rd edition (.0 or .5, doesn't matter) game. ....<Snippety> Jack Daniel, I vote for you to begain a new thread with everything you mentioned (minus the quote and references to Solik's post, of course). It'd be interesting to see more people's opinions on that. :tiphat:
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-22-07, 04:21 PM	Theres plenty of choice in how you interact. By ditching any social rules, you place everything back in the land of DM fiat. Systems emphasize what is important. By removing social rules, the system us basically saying "You dont have control over any of this besides hoping your DM isnt a douche - but dont worry, its not important like combat". After all, why is "talking and hoping the DM likes it" good enough for bluffing or persuasion, but not for describing a hit with a sword? Why do you think so many players in earlier editions resorted to violence as a staple? Because thats the only way they could hope for a fair shake, as there was at least some rules suggestions to indicate the outcome. You STIL get to choose what you say, what angle, etc. The DM assigns some circumstance mods, and you roll to see how well it worked, try and accumulate successes, etc. To me, while not perfect, thats preferrable to talking and then simply hoping the DM is in a good mood. A bad roll doesnt necessarily mean you did poorly, merely that it didnt have the desired results. Keep in mind that if the DM can hand out arbtirary modifiers, he has control over the situation, so if he wants to create impossible social scenarios he can, it just involves throwing out -20s and -40s as modifiers. So lets not pretend that the dice system + arbitrary modifier system gives the DM any less control. All it does is add randomness. And while you seem to think of randomness as being more fair, lets analyze that in-depth. I'm looking at a social encounter as a puzzle encounter. But social stuff is complex, so lets look at a simpler puzzle. All the basic rules apply, but it's much easier to understand. Lets use a much simpler puzzle. A riddle. So your characters are walking in a dungeon and they come across a riddle. Now, this riddle has a right answer (possibly more than one) and a bunch of wrong ones. There are four basic styles. A: Narrative, random: What the riddle is, or even its answer, is unimportant, as the riddle is resolved with a check of some kind and a DC. If the check succeeds, then the character solves it, if not, then he fails. Note that here there is no decision to the player at all, and it's not really part of the game. B: Narrative, non-random: Like the first, the riddle is simply an obstacle that needs to be bypassed. Only this time, we don't roll dice, but use some static method for solving it, such as having characters of INT 12 or higher automatically solve it. Alternately, the DM just announces success or failure. As with the prior example, there's no player choice. C: Game style, non-random: In this style, the riddle actually exists and its a puzzle the PCs have to solve. What happens depends on if the PCs get the right answer or the wrong answer. So if they happen to answer the riddle with "water" and that's the correct answer, then the PCs beat that challenge. If they answer with a wrong answer, then they fail that challenge. D: Game style, random: This is effectively role-playing with modifiers, as you suggested. Basically this time, the PCs try to solve the riddle, only they don't automatically win if they solve it correctly. Instead, it merely gives them a bonus to a die roll. If they answer incorrectly, they don't automatically fail either, it's just a dice roll penalty (or possibly no bonus). So you can choose well and fail and choose poorly and succeed. Maybe you even throw in a "riddle" skill which can try to swing that random chance one way or the other. Now, I think because this is an RPG, we're stuck between styles C and D (because they're game styles). Now, the question is which is more fun? So lets take a puzzle game, like Myst. There's some obscure puzzle you've got to solve by pulling levers which ultimately open a door. If we go by C, this is a straight up puzzle like in Myst. Do it right and you move on, fail and you don't. If we go by option D, sometimes you may pull the right levers and fail anyway because you got unlucky. On the same token, you could pull the wrong series of levers and the door opens anyway, just because you happened to luck out. So the question is, does randomness actually make the game better or more fun? In my opinion, it doesn't. It ends up trivializing player choice. It doesn't add any excitement, it just creates frustration, as the player who selected the right choice may get screwed out of his good decision making by bad luck. That's not particularly exciting at all, and if it happened to you while playing Myst, you'd probably feel like the game cheated you. Social situations are much the same way. They're nothing more than more complex puzzles. Instead of trying to solve a riddle, or figure out a sequence of levers, you're trying to figure out what to say to someone to get him to do what you want him to. If you say stuff that the king wants to hear, then you should succeed, if you say stuff the king doesn't want to hear, then you should fail. I see little gained in the way of a better game by arbitrarily deciding that 10% of the time, a PC's well worded argument fails because the dice say so, or arbitrarily deciding that 40% of the time, a PC who makes a terrible argument in fact succeeds. That just doesn't improve the play experience at all. In fact, it detracts from suspension of disbelief quite a bit and trivializes the PCs' choices. Combat is another matter of course, in that case, having dice rolls does make for a more exciting game. I don't think I really need to explain why, because we can all envision how boring combat would be without dice. There are certainly good arguments to be made about why a little randomness makes for a better game in combat. Maybe you can give me a good reason why adding random chance to social encounters improves the game, but I for the life of me, cannot think of one right now.
Arrowhen 03-22-07, 04:42 PM	Because quite simply, the game is more fun when you don't apply hard and fast rules to role-playing. The essence of a game isn't rolling dice or drawing cards, it's player choice. That's what makes something a game, the choices we make and the impact they have on the game world. But players don't have any choice now! The only way we have to make an impact on the game world through social situations is either a) roll Diplomacy or b) try to impress the DM. By creating hard rules to determine what happens during social interaction, you've gone from a game to a straight narration. That no longer is a game of any kind. In fact you're saying, "Lets skip this part so that we can get back to the real game." I don't understand this at all. We have hard rules to determine what happens during combat, and yet that's still a game. That's pretty much the only game we have right now. Sure, rolling a Diplomacy check is still a game, but it's a boring, crappy one, so it's no wonder that lots of groups want to dispense with it. But what's left is "talk in character and if the DM likes what you say, then you win," and that's not a game at all. Now, this kind of thinking is fine if you just like the wargame aspect of D&D. If you don't want to talk to stuff and would prefer to just get back to the hacking, then having rules to easily resolve and skip by diplomatic actions without any player choice is a reasonable goal. We already have those kinds of rules, and they suck. I want to talk to stuff, but I also want to be able to choose to play characters who are better at talking to stuff in real life and have fun-to-play rules that represent that ability. On the other hand if you want role-playing to be part of the game, taking away the impact of player-choice during role-playing sections of the adventure is completely counter to the idea of a game. You see, when entering into a conversation with the king to enlist his aid, I get to choose what angle I'm going to take to try to convince him, I get to choose what sort of things I'm going to say. And well, I could insult him if I say the wrong thing, or I could earn his favor by saying the right thing. Sounds a lot like combat to me. When entering into a fight with a monster, I get to choose what angle I'm going to take to try to kill it, I get to choose my tactics. And well, I could get killed if I choose the wrong tactics or emerge victorious if I identify and exploit its weaknesses. I don't want my ability to choose lost in a simple dice roll. I don't either, which is why I don't want a social system to be just a simple dice roll. Don't forget that dice don't make a game, player choices do. Dice can add randomness to a game, which can sometimes make for a better game and sometimes not, depending on the game in question, but it's all about player choice. No, of course dice by themselves don't make a game. But there's a lot more than dice in the combat system. There's all sorts of player choice involved (though I'd argue that the current overabundance of mechanical options takes too much player choice out of combat and into character creation, but that's a whole other tangent) in combat. A lot more choice than there is in "do I want to Bluff or Intimidate?" and a hell of a lot more choice than there is in "let's stop playing the game for now and have a DM-judged acting contest instead." If my role-playing is just window dressing and no longer affects the game itself, then we're no longer playing a role-playing game at all. And if the game goes away every time we start roleplaying outside of combat, we're also no longer playing a role-playing game. We're playing "impress the DM".
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-22-07, 04:46 PM	I don't either, which is why I don't want a social system to be just a simple dice roll. The question becomes whether randomness aids or detracts from the game experience. Because that's all adding a dice system does. It creates randomness. Read my above post which deals with that topic in more detail.
boozerker 03-22-07, 04:56 PM	a_psh, a while back a D&D fansite had a list of special occurences that you could print on cards and hand them to players, who'd use them during other players' turns to alter circumstances or to introduce conflict. Dunno if they are still around (can't remember the website's name), but I found this when looking: event cards (http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?manufacturers_id=332&products_id=3332&), which aren't nearly the same, because (if memory serves) in the original any player could introduce unexpected circumstanes/conflicts for other players.
ArcTan 03-22-07, 05:04 PM	Keep in mind that if the DM can hand out arbtirary modifiers, he has control over the situation, so if he wants to create impossible social scenarios he can, it just involves throwing out -20s and -40s as modifiers. So lets not pretend that the dice system + arbitrary modifier system gives the DM any less control. All it does is add randomness. It depends on how you do it. Roll dice in the open with a predetermined definition for the situation (i.e. the DM has to *explain* why he's adding +20 to a roll instead of just doing it) and it's a lot less arbitrary. And while you seem to think of randomness as being more fair, lets analyze that in-depth. I'm not talking about "fair". I'm talking about "interesting". "Fair" is, as with everything else, an illusion. The main reason we have dice in combat, as you note, is to make it interesting. I'm looking at a social encounter as a puzzle encounter. But social stuff is complex, so lets look at a simpler puzzle. All the basic rules apply, but it's much easier to understand. It's also different because with a puzzle I can artificially constrain choice in such a way as to frame the puzzle as a puzzle. This is frequently not the case with social situations, or if I do make it the case with social situations it becomes contrived. (The requisite "courtroom scene" in Bioware games where you're a defense lawyer in a courtroom with ridiculous rules for how arguing works.) Lets use a much simpler puzzle. A riddle. So your characters are walking in a dungeon and they come across a riddle. Now, this riddle has a right answer (possibly more than one) and a bunch of wrong ones. There are four basic styles. A: Narrative, random: What the riddle is, or even its answer, is unimportant, as the riddle is resolved with a check of some kind and a DC. If the check succeeds, then the character solves it, if not, then he fails. Note that here there is no decision to the player at all, and it's not really part of the game. B: Narrative, non-random: Like the first, the riddle is simply an obstacle that needs to be bypassed. Only this time, we don't roll dice, but use some static method for solving it, such as having characters of INT 12 or higher automatically solve it. Alternately, the DM just announces success or failure. As with the prior example, there's no player choice. Third option: Players and DM collectively decide whether it'd be a good idea right now for the characters to solve the riddle. This can be in a very handwavy New Age gaming kind of way -- "Who thinks the characters should survive? Let's vote!" -- or a way that's slightly more game-y, like giving players Action Points or Story Tokens that they can play. ("I'm going to spend all my Action Points right now so that my mentally retarded character miraculously solves the riddle.") C: Game style, non-random: In this style, the riddle actually exists and its a puzzle the PCs have to solve. What happens depends on if the PCs get the right answer or the wrong answer. So if they happen to answer the riddle with "water" and that's the correct answer, then the PCs beat that challenge. If they answer with a wrong answer, then they fail that challenge. D: Game style, random: This is effectively role-playing with modifiers, as you suggested. Basically this time, the PCs try to solve the riddle, only they don't automatically win if they solve it correctly. Instead, it merely gives them a bonus to a die roll. If they answer incorrectly, they don't automatically fail either, it's just a dice roll penalty (or possibly no bonus). So you can choose well and fail and choose poorly and succeed. Maybe you even throw in a "riddle" skill which can try to swing that random chance one way or the other. It doesn't have to be so stilted if you want to use Task resolution of this kind to solve the problem. Many Bioware games simply use your Int modifier to give you the player "clues" to solving the riddle -- a ridiculously high-Int character just solves the riddle automatically, middling-Int characters get a clue ("Your character realizes, 'Wait, the colors are following a pattern that repeats in time with the musical tones!'") and low-Int characters get no help at all. This vaguely simulates the idea that even a low-Int character can solve the riddle but finds doing so to be far more difficult. But this wasn't what we were really talking about. Still, going from a traditional, task-resolution, simulationist perspective, this is a way to add granularity and interest to D&D-style "social skills" -- a high modifier doesn't auto-succeed for you, but it means I-the-DM start feeding you more and more "hints" about what to do. ("You notice she seems receptive to your advances." "She seems to like it when you talk about your family." Etc.) Now, I think because this is an RPG, we're stuck between styles C and D (because they're game styles). Well, okay, I disagree. I think these "Narrative styles" can work just fine for something called an RPG. Now, the question is which is more fun? It depends. So lets take a puzzle game, like Myst. There's some obscure puzzle you've got to solve by pulling levers which ultimately open a door. If we go by C, this is a straight up puzzle like in Myst. Do it right and you move on, fail and you don't. If we go by option D, sometimes you may pull the right levers and fail anyway because you got unlucky. On the same token, you could pull the wrong series of levers and the door opens anyway, just because you happened to luck out. A puzzle game like Myst is not an RPG in any traditional sense. As you say, it's a puzzle game. It's sold to you as a string of puzzles that you-the-player have to solve. Many people who play RPGs don't have that same expectation, and really would feel cheated if they, for instance, went to a lot of effort to boost their character's Intelligence to 25 and yet gain no benefit from this when trying to solve a simple puzzle. Many other people don't care that much about the simulation effect of stats, but do like the idea of playing an intrepid adventurer who cleverly bypasses traps and answers riddles despite the fact that they themselves are not very good at it. Which is no different from wanting to play a mightily thewed barbarian despite the fact that you're an 80-pound weakling in real life, or wanting to play a seductive social manipulator despite the fact that in real life you're annoying and unconvincing when you speak. So the question is, does randomness actually make the game better or more fun? In my opinion, it doesn't. It ends up trivializing player choice. Well, for one thing, no randomness doesn't necessarily mean freeform RPing based on real-life acting skills. It doesn't add any excitement, it just creates frustration, as the player who selected the right choice may get screwed out of his good decision making by bad luck. That's not particularly exciting at all, and if it happened to you while playing Myst, you'd probably feel like the game cheated you. But we're playing D&D and not Myst. I mean, seriously, people who play CRPGs often feel "cheated" because the game stats make them "miss" even when they aimed and fired at exactly the right place. Why? Because they're used to playing Quake, and they're used to the game being a test of their *real* hand-eye coordination and timing abilities, not a simulation based on a statistical representation of their character. Again, I don't feel "cheated" if I miss or an attack deals no damage in D&D even though I am, in real life, a pretty strong guy who could probably hold my own in a fight. I *would* feel cheated if the game explicitly gave me an opportunity to take someone down in a fight but I lost the fight for no good reason in the game. This is what you're talking about, right? But that happens a lot more often with freeform than with rules. That's the problem -- that old-school D&D ad hocs so many things that unless the DM sat down ahead of time and created a conversation tree for the orcs, if I say "I negotiate with the orcs" by far the *easiest* thing for the DM to say is "They ignore you and attack!", and the success of the negotiation depends *not* on actually finding any "correct" answer but, well, my DM's mood and how much he likes me (consciously or not). You only feel cheated if the rules create an avenue for something and then cut it off. I don't feel cheated if I say "I leap up over the monster's head, swing on the chandelier, drop down behind him and run him through!" and the DM says "You can't do that; make an attack roll". I really don't see why this is different. Social situations are much the same way. They're nothing more than more complex puzzles. Instead of trying to solve a riddle, or figure out a sequence of levers, you're trying to figure out what to say to someone to get him to do what you want him to. If you say stuff that the king wants to hear, then you should succeed, if you say stuff the king doesn't want to hear, then you should fail. And who gets to decide this? The DM? How does he decide this in a way that's fair and doesn't penalize someone for things they frequently can't help (like the fact that I'm playing a pretty girl but I'm actually an ugly guy and you-the-DM have an immensely difficult time picturing what I'd sound like as a more attractive person)? I see little gained in the way of a better game by arbitrarily deciding that 10% of the time, a PC's well worded argument fails because the dice say so, or arbitrarily deciding that 40% of the time, a PC who makes a terrible argument in fact succeeds. That just doesn't improve the play experience at all. In fact, it detracts from suspension of disbelief quite a bit and trivializes the PCs' choices. Dude, suspension of disbelief? Nothing shatters suspension of disbelief faster than running a conversation between a mighty warrior and an old sage as an actual conversation between a stammering 14-year-old and his sweaty 20-year-old DM. Combat is another matter of course, in that case, having dice rolls does make for a more exciting game. I don't think I really need to explain why, because we can all envision how boring combat would be without dice. There are certainly good arguments to be made about why a little randomness makes for a better game in combat. See, this is idiotic. I'm going to come right out and say it. It's IDIOTIC. People have their heads so far up D&D's ass they'll actually come out and say that it's "obvious" why D&D should be the way it is, that arbitary distinctions D&D makes are "natural", that making something different from D&D simply "would not work". There's no reason combat couldn't be exciting without rolling dice. Guess what -- combat in a first-person shooter video game is completely deterministic and based *entirely* on what you do, with randomness kept to a minimum. If you aim and fire and your aim was good, you hit. No "attack roll". Most people who like FPSes consider this *very* exciting. *Actually* "role-playing" a swordfight by, y'know, picking up fake swords and having a fencing match can also be plenty exciting. If you're good enough at it, you can make a whole sport/game out of just that. Real competition fencers, people who play boffing games at the SCA, whatever. You're telling me that's not fun? And simply telling the story or narrating combat can be just as fun too. Maybe it's not your cup of tea, but I could totally get behind freeforming (which is fun in the right mindset) that's partly freeforming a duel between two people ("Hiram screams in rage and brings his blade down toward Elayne!" "Elayne's rapier moves rapidly, parrying his every attack!" "Hiram growls like a tiger, pacing, searching for an opening, heart pounding...") It's all because you're trying to *get* different things from each experience. But people who are playing a task-resolution-based RPG are not trying to get a realistic simulation of the tasks they're trying to resolve, nor are they trying to have a static outcome based on "What Happens Next" in the story (though that can also happen). They're trying to get a way to simulate, fairly, what might happen in an abstract way if this abstract character they made up faces a challenge. It's that that the dice are for. Maybe you can give me a good reason why adding random chance to social encounters improves the game, but I for the life of me, cannot think of one right now. Well, in real life there *is* random chance in social encounters. I can't predict perfectly whether I'll say the right thing or wrong thing in a conversation. I might think I'm pretty good at holding my own, but there's always the chance I might screw up. So when I put a character on paper, I make him different from me -- unlike the *real* me, his ability to speak is not inherent in my ability to sit at the table and come up with things to say, but in his character sheet, represented as numbers. So the random factor that affects his chances doesn't come out of me and the fact that I'm tired today and can't concentrate and just want to unwind with a game after a hard day of work, but comes out of the dice I roll for his character. I don't see how, in any way, this is conceptually different from rolling dice to see how tough someone is in combat rather than making me beat the DM in a boffing game with foam weapons. You act like it's so obvious that the act of killing someone with a sword is fundamentally different from anything else you do in life, when I think it's pretty obvious that it isn't. (And some kind of simulationistic conversation engine -- some way to represent "rounds", "defenses", and "attacks" in, say, a formal debate or an attempt at seduction -- has a chance to seem really silly but is nonetheless something I'd be interested in.)
ArcTan 03-22-07, 05:07 PM	The question becomes whether randomness aids or detracts from the game experience. Because that's all adding a dice system does. It creates randomness. Read my above post which deals with that topic in more detail. The system doesn't have to use dice to have mechanics. It's just that dice in D&D usually go with mechanics, because D&D uses dice to enforce a degree of fairness. But I wouldn't complain if the mechanics you added were diceless, just so long as they *were* mechanics and not just "freeform with me and impress me". For example, if every NPC had a list of "Priorities and Values" that had to be written down, and there was an in-the-open announcement that "I'm going to try to hit this one of the king's Values with a statement that will perform one of the following actions -- Appeal to Existing Values, Draw Comparison Between Two Values, Attack an Existing Value, Change Priority of an Existing Value" and then there was some agreed-upon mechanic for deciding if I'd succeeded or failed. It wouldn't have to have dice at all. It *would* have to be something that signalled "Okay, we're going to all pay attention now because this is serious and there are rules coming into play", not "Hey, we're on break from killing monsters, let's do this chatting with the king BS".
High Octane 03-22-07, 05:24 PM	You know, everyone seems to think this is a latest edition bashing thread. It isnt. The OP did not intend to say that the game itself is worse from the changes. He is talking about the people not the system. Yes it does concern the printed material, but I think a_psh is saying taht the manuals give rules but dont tell anyone how to have fun. The thing is, you cant publish a book like that. Because its an opinion. D&D is played in many different valid ways. These blogs that give heartfelt inspiration are the opinions of one person. They are philosophical creations. Wizards is a group of game makers, not philosophers. They keep their game style opinions to themselves since its not their place to dictate what is right and wrong for gaming. The last time somebody decided to try to be philosophical about aspects of the game we got two of the most hated books ever published. The Book of Exalted Deeds and The Book of Vile Darkness.
Grand Theft Otto 03-22-07, 05:27 PM	Keep in mind that if the DM can hand out arbtirary modifiers, he has control over the situation, so if he wants to create impossible social scenarios he can, it just involves throwing out -20s and -40s as modifiers. So lets not pretend that the dice system + arbitrary modifier system gives the DM any less control. All it does is add randomness. It does have the benefit of making it more obvious when you have a crap DM though. And a certain amount of obvious accoutnability would do well to reign in some of the egomaniacs I had the misfortune of playing with in the 80's. And again, I've already said the social rules could be greatly improved on. Take Unknown Armies for example. Each character has various stimuli written into their background. Obsession, Fear, Rage, and Nobility. The nobility stimuli brings about the best in the person, so appealing to that would give you a significant bonus (we rule it letting you flip-flop when trying to use a social skill in regards). Similarly, if you threaten a guy with dumping him in a pit of maggots who has a fear stimuli of "squirmy things", youd get a huge bonus as well. Got an epidermancer there to turn his fingers into spider legs? Lets just move straight to the him wetting himself part. I'm looking at a social encounter as a puzzle encounter. But social stuff is complex, so lets look at a simpler puzzle. All the basic rules apply, but it's much easier to understand. Lets use a much simpler puzzle. A riddle. So your characters are walking in a dungeon and they come across a riddle. Now, this riddle has a right answer (possibly more than one) and a bunch of wrong ones. Riddles and puzzles have a right or wrong answer. You either answer correctly, or you dont. No DM fiat needed. There is no right or wrong response when the guard asks you "Did you take this man's wallet" and you try to bluff. Its complicated even more by the fact that the DM himself knows you are lying.
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-22-07, 05:29 PM	Third option: Players and DM collectively decide whether it'd be a good idea right now for the characters to solve the riddle. This would simply be a narrative, non-random method. It just involves the PCs as well as the DM. But this wasn't what we were really talking about. Still, going from a traditional, task-resolution, simulationist perspective, this is a way to add granularity and interest to D&D-style "social skills" -- a high modifier doesn't auto-succeed for you, but it means I-the-DM start feeding you more and more "hints" about what to do. ("You notice she seems receptive to your advances." "She seems to like it when you talk about your family." Etc.) That's certainly fine and a good way to handle things. But note that this still uses the basic puzzle set-up, where RPG elements may give you some benefits. Well, okay, I disagree. I think these "Narrative styles" can work just fine for something called an RPG. Narrative styles are nice if you just want to skip past something that you can't make fun. For instance, there's no real player decision making or role-playing involved in picking a lock so we just narrate it, either randomly or not randomly and get on with it. Social encounters however are the core of role-playing, so we don't want to simply narrate them away. A puzzle game like Myst is not an RPG in any traditional sense. As you say, it's a puzzle game. It's sold to you as a string of puzzles that you-the-player have to solve. Right, there's no real roleplaying in figuring out what lever to pull. Myst is cited entirely focusing on the "game" aspect. But as soon as you integrate conversation (which takes place in character), you've now got a role-playing game. It's a game because it presents the player with a challenge and it obviously involves role-playing. Many people who play RPGs don't have that same expectation, and really would feel cheated if they, for instance, went to a lot of effort to boost their character's Intelligence to 25 and yet gain no benefit from this when trying to solve a simple puzzle. There's no problem with subtle clues, though the "game" aspect is ultimately lost if you have ability scores completely solve problems. Many other people don't care that much about the simulation effect of stats, but do like the idea of playing an intrepid adventurer who cleverly bypasses traps and answers riddles despite the fact that they themselves are not very good at it. Which is no different from wanting to play a mightily thewed barbarian despite the fact that you're an 80-pound weakling in real life, or wanting to play a seductive social manipulator despite the fact that in real life you're annoying and unconvincing when you speak. Well, this is where the problem lies. When we start talking about this kind of thing, we move away from the "game" method and more into the narration method. When you're playing a game, it's going to test you in some way as a player as you play it and you're going to have to make decisions. Those decisions will impact the game's outcome in some way. I *would* feel cheated if the game explicitly gave me an opportunity to take someone down in a fight but I lost the fight for no good reason in the game. This is what you're talking about, right? Well, fights are a separate matter, so I don't really analyze them with the same degree that I would social situations. Adding dice to combat actually makes it more exciting and more fun, in the same way that shuffling your deck in Magic makes it more exciting and interesting a game than just arranging your deck however you wanted. But that happens a lot more often with freeform than with rules. That's the problem -- that old-school D&D ad hocs so many things that unless the DM sat down ahead of time and created a conversation tree for the orcs, if I say "I negotiate with the orcs" by far the *easiest* thing for the DM to say is "They ignore you and attack!", and the success of the negotiation depends *not* on actually finding any "correct" answer but, well, my DM's mood and how much he likes me (consciously or not). If your DM doesn't want to create an immersive world, then yes, your role-playing experience will be terrible. But that's rather self-evident. And who gets to decide this? The DM? How does he decide this in a way that's fair and doesn't penalize someone for things they frequently can't help (like the fact that I'm playing a pretty girl but I'm actually an ugly guy and you-the-DM have an immensely difficult time picturing what I'd sound like as a more attractive person)? Again, adding random dice rolls doesn't improve this. At all. It just makes it more random, not more fair or interesting. Yes, it takes skill on the part of the DM, but this is a role-playing game. If your DM can't get into character, then he needs more practice DMing, not some system that tells him how to play all his NPCs. What next? a System that tells PCs how to play their characters too? Dude, suspension of disbelief? Nothing shatters suspension of disbelief faster than running a conversation between a mighty warrior and an old sage as an actual conversation between a stammering 14-year-old and his sweaty 20-year-old DM. If you have trouble with imagining things, then you probably need to find a new game. *Actually* "role-playing" a swordfight by, y'know, picking up fake swords and having a fencing match can also be plenty exciting. If you're good enough at it, you can make a whole sport/game out of just that. Real competition fencers, people who play boffing games at the SCA, whatever. You're telling me that's not fun? It can be, but we're designing a tabletop RPG, so having physical tests like that isn't exactly in the paradigm of the game. And simply telling the story or narrating combat can be just as fun too. Maybe it's not your cup of tea, but I could totally get behind freeforming (which is fun in the right mindset) that's partly freeforming a duel between two people ("Hiram screams in rage and brings his blade down toward Elayne!" "Elayne's rapier moves rapidly, parrying his every attack!" "Hiram growls like a tiger, pacing, searching for an opening, heart pounding...") Well, possibly, but narration as I said, is no longer a game. It's just collaborative storytelling. Remember, in a game, player actions have to in some way serve to influence the outcome. Well, in real life there *is* random chance in social encounters. I can't predict perfectly whether I'll say the right thing or wrong thing in a conversation. I might think I'm pretty good at holding my own, but there's always the chance I might screw up. Well, right, but remember we're putting that in the hands of the player himself. So, maybe the player does screw up while he's talking to the king. That random chance is already accounted for. It's like having an umpire in a baseball game roll a random variable to see if the batter might swing too early and miss the ball. You've already taken that into account by having a real human do it. I don't see how, in any way, this is conceptually different from rolling dice to see how tough someone is in combat rather than making me beat the DM in a boffing game with foam weapons. You act like it's so obvious that the act of killing someone with a sword is fundamentally different from anything else you do in life, when I think it's pretty obvious that it isn't. It's not. It's a matter of excitement and fun. Randomness adds excitement and fun to combat. Randomness does not do the same to social interaction and other puzzle encounters. This is a game, we play it to have fun.
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-22-07, 05:34 PM	But I wouldn't complain if the mechanics you added were diceless, just so long as they *were* mechanics and not just "freeform with me and impress me". For example, if every NPC had a list of "Priorities and Values" that had to be written down, and there was an in-the-open announcement that "I'm going to try to hit this one of the king's Values with a statement that will perform one of the following actions -- Appeal to Existing Values, Draw Comparison Between Two Values, Attack an Existing Value, Change Priority of an Existing Value" and then there was some agreed-upon mechanic for deciding if I'd succeeded or failed. It wouldn't have to have dice at all. Well, the problem is that social situations are very complex. And it's hard to make a rules set that makes sense to everyone and actually works. It makes a lot more sense to people to just actually freeform it out, since again, this is a role-playing game, and talking to NPCs in character is roleplaying. If you don't want to ever do that and would prefer a system to handle it. You don't want to play an RPG. It *would* have to be something that signalled "Okay, we're going to all pay attention now because this is serious and there are rules coming into play", not "Hey, we're on break from killing monsters, let's do this chatting with the king BS". It doesn't sound like you enjoy role-playing at all from this statement. Guess what? Roleplaying is free form. If you don't like free form play and want a rule for every little thing your character says, then it's no longer an RPG, it's a very rigid simulation, because you never talk in character anymore, you just make decisions cycling through an endless set of rules systems. I personally think that game would totally suck. Not to mention it wouldn't bear the label RPG on it. I mean when I play an RPG, I kind of expect to do some role-playing, not have rules that methodically make sure you never have to role-play ever.
ArcTan 03-22-07, 05:37 PM	You know, everyone seems to think this is a latest edition bashing thread. It isnt. The OP did not intend to say that the game itself is worse from the changes. He is talking about the people not the system. Yes it does concern the printed material, but I think a_psh is saying taht the manuals give rules but dont tell anyone how to have fun. *sigh* He says the manuals give rules for things that a lot of players aren't actually interested in -- i.e. simulating deep details of the game world like environmental effects and so on -- while not giving rules for things that would actually be helpful, like structuring a story or giving players input into things that happen. Yes, rules for the latter would lead to more fun than rules for the former. That doesn't make them "rules to have fun". The thing is, you cant publish a book like that. Because its an opinion. Okay, see, but a book should *have* an opinion about what is fun and tell you how to do that fun thing, so that if you don't think it's fun you can go get a different book. It shouldn't pretend to neutrally portray a world and say that everyone in this world can have fun in their own way, because that doesn't work. D&D is played in many different valid ways. These blogs that give heartfelt inspiration are the opinions of one person. They are philosophical creations. Wizards is a group of game makers, not philosophers. They keep their game style opinions to themselves since its not their place to dictate what is right and wrong for gaming. You can't keep your game style opinion to yourself and still *make a game*, because the game's shape will be dictated by your idea of the game style. I mean, seriously. The reason you make a game one way and not another is because you want to emphasize some things and not others. The fact that D&D has so many rules for combat is because D&D *emphasizes combat*. I can't comprehend how people can look at the D&D rules and think of them as this "neutral baseline", when they so clearly aren't, except for the "head-up-the-ass" factor (which I'll continue to call it, offensive as it may be) -- having played nothing but D&D so long you assume D&D is the baseline for everything. The last time somebody decided to try to be philosophical about aspects of the game we got two of the most hated books ever published. The Book of Exalted Deeds and The Book of Vile Darkness. For cripes' sake. They weren't philosophical about aspects of the game at all. They were philosophical about in-character ideas about how characters should think about morality without *touching* the actual structure of the game. That's one reason they were so stupid. (Basically that to be a Vile or Exalted character you make yourself really bad at winning the game until suddenly you become really good at winning the game, and that's what "moral sacrifice" means. Friggin' A.) Heroes of Horror is a damn good D&D book because it actually dares to mess around with the structure of how D&D works in order to achieve a certain "philosophical" goal, achieving a horror mood and atmosphere. (Openly telling the DM things like "no resurrection", "sudden game-changing events with no mechanical reason", "building up a Taint score orthogonal to XP or alignment", etc. -- all this is the kind of tweaking D&D needs to do something besides "dungeon crawl".)
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-22-07, 05:39 PM	I think its normally expected to be close to the +2/-2 method. Well that's a drop in a bucket then. Basically then all your social encounters become a set of random rolls. Pick the right lever? an extra 10% chance you succeed! Pick the wrong one? an extra 10% chance you fail! Eh... why bother giving people a choice of what to say at all? It's only mildly beneficial and only matters 20% of the time. Riddles and puzzles have a right or wrong answer. You either answer correctly, or you dont. No DM fiat needed. There is no right or wrong response when the guard asks you "Did you take this man's wallet" and you try to bluff. Its complicated even more by the fact that the DM himself knows you are lying. Yes, they're more complex, but not entirely different. You're still trying to create a believable story. There may be multiple right answers, and sometimes you may think of something where the DM says "Yeah, that works." even if he didn't think of it originally. I mean sometimes you've got a riddle where the PCs come up with an alternate answer that fits all the criteria, even though it wasn't the one you came up with first and you still award them with a victory. And yeah DMs have to deal with not using metagame information all the time. It's nothing particularly new. If we can expect DMs not to immediate exploit our PCs weakness to fire in every combat we get into, then we can hope he won't automatically have every guard know you're lying. These are directly related to what was previously said, but here are other ways social systems detract from the game. Exclusivity: Now presumably we're incorporating a system so you can make characters who are better at social stuff than other characters. Of course, this has a big problem. In an RPG, you're probably going to spend a lot of time talking to others. It's something you want every PC to do, not just one. Having some people make "role-playing characters" and others not make such characters is counterproductive, as you're directly excluding PCs who didn't make characters specifically devoted to roleplaying. That is if the rogue has +25 diplomacy and your fighter only has a +2, there's no reason for you to talk, ever. So you've create a system that encourages people not to talk in-character. Bad idea. Fickle NPCs: It's impossible to model the human thought process and mind in a rules sense. So social systems are going to get your NPCs to do really dumb things from time to time, which can range from campaign disasterous, like haggling the price of a staff of power down to 5 gp or just making your NPCs look really silly and stupid. In any case, it's not particularly good for the game. DM role-playing is impacted: When systems dictate what the NPCs do, how much does the DM really role-play. How many true character types does he create. He can't create fearless warriors or gullible children anymore, because the system dictates exactly what his NPCs believe or don't believe. So you've also limited the DM's creativity and ability to portray the world.
Grand Theft Otto 03-22-07, 05:43 PM	Yes, they're more complex, but not entirely different. You're still trying to create a believable story. There may be multiple right answers, and sometimes you may think of something where the DM says "Yeah, that works." even if he didn't think of it originally. I mean sometimes you've got a riddle where the PCs come up with an alternate answer that fits all the criteria, even though it wasn't the one you came up with first and you still award them with a victory. And yeah DMs have to deal with not using metagame information all the time. It's nothing particularly new. If we can expect DMs not to immediate exploit our PCs weakness to fire in every combat we get into, then we can hope he won't automatically have every guard know you're lying. No, its, in fact, entirely different. Again, because there is a RIGHT and a WRONG response. Its perfectly cut and dry. Try your systemless system for combat. You decide how you swing, and the DM decides if it hits based on his whim. You say you roll right when the blast explodes, and the dm decides if thats correct. If its not good enough for fighting, its not good enough for talking IMO.
Ezell Pike 03-22-07, 05:45 PM	It would seem that so many people involved in the development of D&D had pet mechanics that they may have pushed for. If that is not the case playtesters must have ignored a multitude of rules during actual gamplay to facilitate a faster and more rewarding expirience. I for one do not like the social skills in D&D. I cringe whenever a player grabs a die and declares that he/she is going to gather infromation/bluff/use diplomacy/sense motive or so on... What role exactly is someone playing when that occurs? In most cases the players response is predetermined in their own mind and they simply narrow their own options by crapping out on a roll and having to justify metagaming, or actually role playing and playing their character (with newfound info due to the roll) in a way that is not of their own choosing.
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-22-07, 05:59 PM	No, its, in fact, entirely different. Again, because there is a RIGHT and a WRONG response. Its perfectly cut and dry. Try your systemless system for combat. You decide how you swing, and the DM decides if it hits based on his whim. You say you roll right when the blast explodes, and the dm decides if thats correct. If its not good enough for fighting, its not good enough for talking IMO. You're missing my argument. I'm not necessarily saying that you can't do that for combat. Because you can. I'm just saying combat is more interesting and fun with randomness mixed in. The GM could arbitrarily decide that a troll's defenses are vulnerable to a low slash at its legs. So anything directed low works, while high attacks fail. Of course, this game amounts to rock-paper-scissors or battleship. It's boring to play because there's no actual skill to it. You're just taking wild guesses and hoping they work out. We could do that, but it wouldn't be as fun as the current combat system we have. And dice are ultimately there in combat because they add fun. Social situations aren't like that (at least not under a good DM). You can do some research on your NPC's motivations, on what kinds of things he's done in the past. You can use divinations to help guide you and so on. There are things you can do to get an idea of how the NPC thinks and what sort of things may influence him. As far as the DM playing the NPC in character, he does that stuff all the time. You as a player do that stuff all the time. When the DM's seductive female NPC comes up to you, you get to decide if your character goes with her or not. Do you really want your character's reaction to be decided by some system? Do you think that would make for a more fun gaming experience?
ArcTan 03-22-07, 06:03 PM	This would simply be a narrative, non-random method. It just involves the PCs as well as the DM. But the fact that it involves players means that it does, in fact, allow "player choice". That's certainly fine and a good way to handle things. But note that this still uses the basic puzzle set-up, where RPG elements may give you some benefits. Yes, and I would call it a suboptimal solution, because it would likely lead to some quite nonsensical situations if I tried to use it but still insisted on "roleplaying it out". "Ask her about her hair." "Er, why is your hair like that?" "No, no, in a complimentary way!" "Er, why is your hair so good?" "No, no, in a way that implies discerning taste on your part and a desire to know more about her!" "Er, I really think your hair is good. How did you get it so good?" "*sigh* No, I mean ask something like 'Your hairstylist must be excellent. Where did you get it done?'" "Oh, okay. Your hairstylist is excellent. Where did you get it done?" I've had situations exactly like this when trying to do a riddle or trying to do a social situation in D&D, because of characters who supposedly had Int 18 or a base 15 on their Diplomacy modifier but were, in real life, bored, sleep-deprived and very uncharismatic college students. Nothing shatters suspension of disbelief like something like this. Narrative styles are nice if you just want to skip past something that you can't make fun. For instance, there's no real player decision making or role-playing involved in picking a lock so we just narrate it, either randomly or not randomly and get on with it. Well, that's the idea. In general, though, failing at something because you're not good at it in real life isn't fun. That's why there are mechanics -- so you have something that decides whether you succeed or fail for you. Social encounters however are the core of role-playing, so we don't want to simply narrate them away. Are they? Really? I think roleplaying is anything where you feel invested in your character and your character is doing something interesting. Right, there's no real roleplaying in figuring out what lever to pull. Myst is cited entirely focusing on the "game" aspect. But as soon as you integrate conversation (which takes place in character), you've now got a role-playing game. It's a game because it presents the player with a challenge and it obviously involves role-playing. You seem to think "roleplaying game" means "game where you test someone's ability to play a role", while I think it just means "game where you play a role". If social encounters are actually the "heart" of an RPG for you, does that mean that whether a party succeeds in a D&D campaign really does depend on the acting and improvisation skills of the players rather than the stats on their character sheet? If you have players who are good enough actors to do this, then I imagine this could be a lot of fun. With most D&D groups I've been involved with, this would actually mean a lot of dominant play by the most socially dominant person there and a boring time for everyone else. With a lot of D&D groups that played this way, this *is* what it meant. (Everyone reads their sourcebooks or futzes with their character sheet while the one party face "drama queen" blusters to the DM with faux-medieval rhetoric.) There's no problem with subtle clues, though the "game" aspect is ultimately lost. See, "Improvise a conversation completely from scratch and see if it fits my preconceived notion of what an 'appealing' or 'effective' conversational style would be" doesn't sound like a fun game to me. It sounds like a stupid game. It's guaranteed to be unfair. After all, I am not an omniscient judge of how every imaginary person might react in any imaginary situation. Not that many people are. And when you're talking about something as subjective as "Is this conversational approach appealing?", hell yes it's going to be influenced by all kinds of unconscious factors. Well, this is where the problem lies. When we start talking about this kind of thing, we move away from the "game" method and more into the narration method. When you're playing a game, it's going to test you in some way as a player as you play it. 1) I don't think a game has to be something that challenges your own innate abilities. We call things games that are nothing more than tests of random chance (craps, blackjack) and things where there isn't any real winning or losing (Truth or Dare, Pass the Ghost Story, etc.) 2) In any case, though, if D&D is a test of something, I really don't think it should be a test of acting. It's not billed as an acting game. Most people don't play it that way. There's no training given in any of the editions' manuals for how to be a good actor or judge good acting. Seriously, in games that run this way, what the roleplaying seems to be a test of is "Is the DM my friend?" I see people getting "roleplaying bonuses" all the time for diplomatic efforts that would get you laughed at or punched in the face if you acted that way in front of someone you needed something from in real life. Well, fights are a separate matter, so I don't really analyze them with the same degree that I would social situations. Adding dice to combat actually makes it more exciting and more fun, in the same way that shuffling your deck in Magic makes it more exciting and interesting a game than just arranging your deck however you wanted. Yeah. And why *isn't* it fun to have a turn-by-turn, gritty simulation of hardcore negotiation with a roomful of competing factions, or courtroom arguments, or bidding at an auction, or that sort of thing -- all things you won't be able to simulate well with "Just roleplay it to me by talking!"? It's not fun to just have a single die roll. But that's why combat wouldn't be fun if you rolled a single opposed Combat check against the Orcs either. Randomness is fun *when the game is designed to incorporate randomness*. When it's not, and it intrudes where it feels like it doesn't belong, it detracts. But it all depends on *design*, not on the intrinsic nature of the thing you're simulating. If your DM doesn't want to create an immersive world, then yes, your role-playing experience will be terrible. But that's rather self-evident. It's not actually possible to "create an immersive world" in the sense of actually becoming a whole set of imaginary people who will react realistically to the arguments you bring up. The fact that I can't fairly ad hoc a response to a persuasive argument out of nowhere -- that it'll always feel unfair if I do so -- is no different from the fact that I can't fairly ad hoc a resolution to a fight. Sure, if I were actually a supercomputer with a detailed simulation of the world in my head, the player could just say "I duck past the first orc, jump over the other's head, swing from the chandelier in a wide arc and slice my blade through them cleanly, laughing hysterically as I do so!" and I could just *tell* him whether he succeeded or failed. But I can't. If I tried, I wouldn't really be doing so based on realism, but on whether I thought his idea was cool or dumb, and that would be based on how much cool or dumb stuff had already happened today, and what I originally wanted this orc encounter to turn out like, and how much stuff this player has gotten away with so far, and (unconsciously) whether I like this guy or not or whether he's getting on my nerves. In other words, it's putting me as Daddy DM and him as trying to supplicate me and win my favor, and the sense of fairness rapidly slips away. Again, adding random dice rolls doesn't improve this. At all. It just makes it more random, not more fair or interesting. If all you do is slap a dieroll on it, sure. Just like responding to the above example with "Okay, flip a coin to see if it works" would be dumb. The point of mechanics is to provide a stronger *sense* of simulation than that. Yes, it takes skill on the part of the DM, but this is a role-playing game. If your DM can't get into character, then he needs more practice DMing, not some system that tells him how to play all his NPCs. What next? a System that tells PCs how to play their characters too? Sure. I mean, it is, as you say, a roleplaying *game*. We did pay money for all these rules and thing. If we wanted to just sit around a table and tell a story with no rules or guidance at all, we could just do that. Again, we have rules that tell PCs exactly what they can and can't do in combat, and you're not complaining about how this restricts "player choice". If you have trouble with imagining things, then you probably need to find a new game. If the game doesn't actually give me help with imagining things, then I wasted the money I spent on it. I'd actually argue this the other way around -- if you can't develop an imaginary view of what's going on even if what's being described is being described abstractly through numbers, this isn't the hobby for you. If you can imagine combat without actually having people running around beating each other up, you can imagine a conversation fraught with tension and emotion without the people having to actually go back and forth and say it. In fact, it may be *better* to imagine what's being said rather than to actually hear the guy going "Oh... Oh really, forsooth, I shalleth slay thee here for the glory of my homeland sirrah HO!", just as a combat can be more exciting if I'm imagining all of it as opposed to watching overweight people flail around with fake swords. It can be, but we're designing a tabletop RPG, so having physical tests like that isn't exactly in the paradigm of the game. What, just as a practical matter? Well why not settle fights with arm wrestling, then? Or by flicking little paper footballs at a target? Well, possibly, but narration as I said, is no longer a game. It's just collaborative storytelling. Remember, in a game, player actions have to in some way serve to influence the outcome. Okay. What player actions influence the outcome in combat? Given that this is the most gamelike part of D&D that most people spend the most time on? Once you're actually in combat, don't you just have a set number of actions you can choose from? And isn't success or failure determined by dice? I still don't see how, if you don't have a problem with the way combat is done in D&D, you're so opposed to making social situations work the same way. Well, right, but remember we're putting that in the hands of the player himself. So, maybe the player does screw up while he's talking to the king. That random chance is already accounted for. It's like having an umpire in a baseball game roll a random variable to see if the batter might swing too early and miss the ball. You've already taken that into account by having a real human do it. Yeah. And you could integrate random chance into combat by actually having people boff each other with foam weapons. It's not. It's a matter of excitement and fun. Randomness adds excitement and fun to combat. Randomness does not do the same to social interaction and other puzzle encounters. Only because you've already classified them in your head as "puzzle" encounters. This is a game, we play it to have fun. And I'm going to lay it out on the table: Right now social situations in D&D are rarely fun. They are frequently skipped, and when they're not skipped they're frequently stupid and bog the game down and never have a conclusive resolution.
Arrowhen 03-22-07, 06:04 PM	Keep in mind that if the DM can hand out arbtirary modifiers, he has control over the situation, so if he wants to create impossible social scenarios he can, it just involves throwing out -20s and -40s as modifiers. So lets not pretend that the dice system + arbitrary modifier system gives the DM any less control. All it does is add randomness. At least if the DM is tossing in arbitrary -20s you can tell that he's decided to create an impossible social scenario. When you're playing "impress the DM", you never really know if your character failed because he wasn't a good enough actor, you weren't a good enough actor, or the DM just didn't want you to succeed. A: Narrative, random: What the riddle is, or even its answer, is unimportant, as the riddle is resolved with a check of some kind and a DC. If the check succeeds, then the character solves it, if not, then he fails. Note that here there is no decision to the player at all, and it's not really part of the game. Well, the player does have the decision whether or not to try and solve the riddle in the first place. But yeah, other than that choice, just rolling a die to try and solve it is just as lame as when you have an audience with the king and the DM just says "roll Diplomacy." B: Narrative, non-random: Like the first, the riddle is simply an obstacle that needs to be bypassed. Only this time, we don't roll dice, but use some static method for solving it, such as having characters of INT 12 or higher automatically solve it. Alternately, the DM just announces success or failure. As with the prior example, there's no player choice. Oh, you mean like when you try to fast-talk your way past the palace guard and the DM just decides it doesn't work--with no way for you to know whether it's because your character isn't a good enough liar, you're not a good enough actor, or the DM just doesn't want you to get into the palace without a fight? C: Game style, non-random: In this style, the riddle actually exists and its a puzzle the PCs have to solve. What happens depends on if the PCs get the right answer or the wrong answer. So if they happen to answer the riddle with "water" and that's the correct answer, then the PCs beat that challenge. If they answer with a wrong answer, then they fail that challenge. Wait, what? The PCs can't come up with the right answer, because they're imaginary characters who don't really exist! What's really happening here is that the players have to solve the puzzle. That means if I'm only marginally good at solving puzzles but I'm playing a super-genius puzzle expert, my character's chances of solving the puzzle are still exactly the same as my own. Which in turn means the system is preventing me from roleplaying the character I made. D: Game style, random: This is effectively role-playing with modifiers, as you suggested. Basically this time, the PCs try to solve the riddle, only they don't automatically win if they solve it correctly. Instead, it merely gives them a bonus to a die roll. If they answer incorrectly, they don't automatically fail either, it's just a dice roll penalty (or possibly no bonus). So you can choose well and fail and choose poorly and succeed. Maybe you even throw in a "riddle" skill which can try to swing that random chance one way or the other. Well, this would certainly make it easier for a lousy real-life riddle solver to play a riddle-solving genius, now, wouldn't it? Riddles are a lousy example, though, because riddles suck in roleplaying games. They're either reduced to meaningless abstractions or they're completely player- not character-oriented challenges; you just can't satisfyingly roleplay solving a riddle that you can't solve in real life. So lets take a puzzle game, like Myst. No, let's not. Myst isn't a roleplaying game and D&D isn't a puzzle game, so it's pointless to compare the two. People play puzzle games because they want to solve puzzles. They play roleplaying games because they want to pretend they're someone else. So the question is, does randomness actually make the game better or more fun? In my opinion, it doesn't. It ends up trivializing player choice. It doesn't add any excitement, it just creates frustration, as the player who selected the right choice may get screwed out of his good decision making by bad luck. What randomness does is prevent player choices from being entirely strategic. You can estimate your chances of success, but you're not guaranteed a success. It means that, just like in real life and good drama, things don't always go your way. You try something, it doesn't work, so you have to either give up or try again in a different way. Getting screwed out of good decisions by bad luck isn't necessarily a bad thing. Setbacks only make eventual success that much more gratifying. Where bad luck is a problem is when it prevents you from being able to try again. That's the problem with, for example, save-or-die spells. That's why systems that let you spend some kind of resource (i.e., Action Points) to overcome bad luck when it's really important are a good thing. I see little gained in the way of a better game by arbitrarily deciding that 10% of the time, a PC's well worded argument fails because the dice say so, or arbitrarily deciding that 40% of the time, a PC who makes a terrible argument in fact succeeds. That just doesn't improve the play experience at all. In fact, it detracts from suspension of disbelief quite a bit and trivializes the PCs' choices. Again, you're confusing Players and Player Characters. Player Characters can't, by themselves, make well-worded arguments because they're imaginary characters who don't really exist! Players, those real-life, flesh and blood human beings sitting around the gaming table can make well-worded arguments, but their ability to do so shouldn't be the sole factor in deciding whether the imaginary people they're pretending to be can or not. The dice don't say that the PCs well-worded arguments fail 10% of the time, they say that 10% of the time that imaginary character fails to make well-worded arguments. (That's what happens when the DM says "roll Diplomacy", which, again, is a lousy system.) Combat is another matter of course, in that case, having dice rolls does make for a more exciting game. I don't think I really need to explain why, because we can all envision how boring combat would be without dice. There are certainly good arguments to be made about why a little randomness makes for a better game in combat. Maybe you can give me a good reason why adding random chance to social encounters improves the game, but I for the life of me, cannot think of one right now. Because social encounters (and I mean actual D&D style encounters, where there are two or more opponents involved in some kind of conflict) are a lot like combat. I want something from you (I want you to let me into the noble ball without an invitation, for example), you want something from me (you want me to stay out, because I don't have an invitation). We each have "weapons" we can use(my charm, your imposing demeanor), "armor" against each other's weapons (my irrepressible roguish nature, your skepticism) and "hit points" that we need to conserve in order to stay in the fight (my confidence in my ability to con people, your certainty that I don't belong at the ball). Initiative plays a part (if I can start spinning my story before you start demanding to see my invitation, I'm at an advantage), as do the ever-present tactical decision of conserving my resources vs. trying to drain yours (after a particularly strong rebuff, do I de-escalate the conflict and try to gain some confidence back, or do I press the argument now because I think your certainty will crumble before my nerve does?) That's the kind of back-and-forth, player choice driven tactical game that lets us pretend to engage in combat regardless of our real life fighting ability, and that's the kind of system that would let us pretend to engage in social conflict regardless of our real life social skills.
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-22-07, 06:13 PM	That's the kind of back-and-forth, player choice driven tactical game that lets us pretend to engage in combat regardless of our real life fighting ability, and that's the kind of system that would let us pretend to engage in social conflict regardless of our real life social skills. Thing is... we don't pretend to get in social conflicts. This is a role-playing game. We role-play out that stuff. As a game, it tends to challenge the player as well as the character. And that's good, because lets face it, character challenges tend to be boring. Yeah, you've got a 25 intelligence wizard and that's way smarter than you are as a player. So why bother making decisions at all? Just look to your DM and ask him what your character thinks you should do, at every single decision. You could do that, only you're playing a game, ultimately, your decisions as a player are the most important thing. Combat is so complex because we wanted to give the player more options. Social freeform is perhaps the most complex form of player options, as you can literally do or say anything. And yeah you can sit back and start whining about how your character would know better, but if you never ever made decisions for your character, then you're no longer playing a game, you're just watching a simulation. So if you like diplomacy rolls, you don't like role-playing and you don't like playing games. You might as well just read a fantasy novel. Boromir's decisions are totally determined by Boromir's own abilities, and you won't ever have to worry about talking in character as Boromir, as there's no roleplaying required!
ArcTan 03-22-07, 06:14 PM	Well, the problem is that social situations are very complex. Dude, in real life, so is combat. The real-life situation of people in the real, physical world running around trying to kill each other in earnest? There aren't rules. Things don't happen in order. It's chaotic and messy. And it's hard to make a rules set that makes sense to everyone and actually works. Which is just as true for combat. If you *think* the D&D combat system makes sense to everyone and actually works, it's just because you're used to it. In reality, it's a ridiculously abstract system that bears little to no resemblance to how real fights actually work. Anyone who's studied medieval combat knows how dumb the D&D mechanics are. Anyone who really thinks about what it'd be like if real life worked like D&D can talk your ear off about how silly the combat system is. You just have to read Order of the Stick to see how many inconsistencies you can mine from the way combat works. D&D combat isn't realistic at all. It *is* fun, or can be fun if done in the right environment, which is why people tolerate it. It makes a lot more sense to people to just actually freeform it out, since again, this is a role-playing game, and talking to NPCs in character is roleplaying. Look, the definition of playing a role is pretending that you're doing something but *not actually doing it*. D&D is a roleplaying game because I can pretend to be a powerful knight in armor killing people with a sword while I'm just sitting in my chair saying what I would do. It's the same way with social situations. I can *pretend* to be charming, intelligent and witty without actually having to *be* charming, intelligent and witty. If that weren't the case, then it wouldn't be a roleplaying game about playing the role of a charming manipulator -- it'd be a game about charm and manipulation, itself. If you don't want to ever do that and would prefer a system to handle it. You don't want to play an RPG. Nonsense. It's like saying I'm not really "playing the role" of an archer if I'm not actually standing up firing a bow at something. It doesn't sound like you enjoy role-playing at all from this statement. The kind of BS you used to have to go through in 2e AD&D to try to convince a bad DM to let something happen? Yeah, I hate it. Guess what? Roleplaying is free form. Then why am I paying $30 for a book full of rules? If you don't like free form play and want a rule for every little thing your character says, then it's no longer an RPG, it's a very rigid simulation, because you never talk in character anymore, you just make decisions cycling through an endless set of rules systems. Not really. The rules cover some things and leave others open. But there *are* rules. I make a choice and I know the choice has certain consequences. It can be very open or very closed, but there are rules -- if not then I'm not playing an RPG, I'm just freeforming. That's just it -- if I want to freeform, WTF am I doing sitting at a table with all these dice and books and crap? I *can* do that if I want to any time without paying one red cent to WotC or TSR or anyone. If the point of D&D is to sit around making crap up until it's time to fight, and then we fight in this byzantine wargame with really complex rules, and then we put down all the rules and just make crap up, then it's dumb. You shouldn't need to sit around and make crap up to have fun playing a wargame. You shouldn't need to sit through a byzantine wargame to have an excuse to sit around and make crap up. What's beginning to bother me is the degree to which it's becoming clear that people used to pay Gary Gygax money for the excuse to sit around and make things up! In what way does that make sense? Why do you need to pay someone for a rulebook so you can have the privilege of ignoring it? It's like this social pathology where what you really want to do is sit around and tell stories but you need to be able to slap the label "D&D" on it to feel safe doing it. It bothers me. More than anything else, it serves as a free pass for whoever owns the brand name D&D to do anything they want and be forgiven, because people are using their product as a social excuse rather than as a product. I personally think that game would totally suck. Not to mention it wouldn't bear the label RPG on it. Sure it would. There are games that work like that which do. I mean when I play an RPG, I kind of expect to do some role-playing, not have rules that methodically make sure you never have to role-play ever. Roleplaying should be about making meaningful choices. *Meaningful* ones. Choices where you have no sense of whether they're good or bad because the DM is making up the rules entirely from his gut aren't meaningful.
Solik 03-22-07, 06:20 PM	I have to thoroughly disagree. I want to start out by pointing out that nothing in your post, in any way, disagrees with what I wrote. I stated that you cannot write rule books to cater to people who don't want to use rules. That is a given. You can write flavor books to them, or you can write rule books to cater to people like a_psh who does want to use rules (just a different kind). Now that that's out of the way, let's get to the actual ideas you were communicating. The original poster hit the nail on the head, as far as I'm concerned, with the state of things D&D. It's just become so rules-heavy anymore that all the noise drowns out the story. I've been playing in my current campaign for more than a year now, and the player characters -- we're talking a year's worth of gaming, now, with the PCs surviving it all -- have yet to develop anything that I'd call "personality". This has happened every time I've ever run a 3rd edition (.0 or .5, doesn't matter) game. This is not an argument. This is an observation regarding a very small number of players (those whom you directly interact with), then taken to make some broad claims about an entire ruleset. That works okay as a personal opinion specifically geared to the people you know, but nothing more. Trying to do more with it is a logical fallacy. It cannot be that I'm just getting crop after crop of sucky roleplayers. That's impossible, because I remember players actually playing unique and interesting characters when I ran basic D&D or 2nd edition AD&D. The only variable here is the edition of the game. (Now, granted, 1st edition AD&D was also pretty rules-heavy, very close kin to its war-gaming origins, and I never ran a game under those rules, so I can't comment on how it compares.) But the point is, yes, the rules do impact the degree of role-playing. It could also be that these players, for the first time, actually have real options they can play with in character building and game playing. There's a lot more they can do compared to previous editions, so they're spending a lot of their time doing it. After all, they haven't done it before, while they've done that freeform roleplaying thing already. If and when they've had their fill of it, perhaps they'll go back to playing a more mixed style with plenty of roleplay. Or, maybe they've found that they actually like it better this way. You can make all the elitist claims you want about this sort of play "getting in the way" of the "real" game as you consider it, but it's pretty important what they feel about it too, don't you think? Maybe they roleplayed in the past because it's really all they could do, and now that they can do more, they find that they care about it a lot more than the roleplay. You're claiming that it's the game's fault. My stance is that there is no "fault" if these guys are having fun. I'll say it again, because it bears saying. THE RULES DO IMPACT THE DEGREE OF ROLE-PLAYING. Even as little as a year ago, I would've been the first to shout this notion down. "Impossible! The two are completely separate! You can't bottle good role-palying and put it in the rule-books! Rules-light or rules-heavy, the story and the role-playing will only be as good as the DM and the players!" But I now consider that position to be naive. I've had too many campaigns since 3e came out that prove to be nothing more than boring, hack and slash, dungeon crawling, power-fests. And I consider your position naive. Why? Because I have had opposing experiences, which pretty much renders your entire absolutist argument voided. Yes, I've had plenty of hack and slash, plenty of dungeon crawl, and plenty of power seeking. But I've also had plenty of roleplay, much of it actively powered by the mechanics. And when I look at the old editions, old adventures -- it's ALL hack and slash! Well, okay. Not all of them. I'm sure there's some adventures that weren't. I'll learn from your mistakes and not make absolutist statements about things like that. I blame two things: the whole "get back into the dungeon" philosophy behind 3e, and feats. Now that's just downright silly. First off, feats are, in the broad sense of things, minor tweaks to your character that you get to play with once every THREE levelups. For your average game, that's probably around four times per year, excluding those done at character creation. Claiming that this has somehow sent D&D into the gutter is just plain nonsense. Second, in my games, feats have helped inspire very flavorful characters. Third, this "get back into the dungeon" philosophy you're claiming exists has plenty of direct contradictions in the rules themselves. There are entire books dedicated to adventuring in desert terrain, arctic terrain, and aboard ships. There's an entire book dedicated to city adventures. Two of the core adventures contain little in the way of dungeons (Speaker in Dreams and Standing Stone). Entire sections of the PHB and DMG are focused on overland travel and dangers, and their sequels contain tons of rules for things like running shops and organization affiliations. There's an entire book on building strongholds. Power of Faerun details running border kingdoms, churches, spy networks, and more (and without even a large amount of rule crunch going on). If there's a lot of focus on combat going on in your games, that's because it's popular with the players and/or DM. Not because of rules focus. The fact that you must now have a plug-in game mechanic in order to customize your character is the single worst facet of modern D&D. I could not possibly disagree with this more. I consider this the single best facet of modern D&D, or at least the best change from the old systems (yes, even better than cleaning up the messy ruleset). Being able to fine-tune the abilities my invented character has is just as important to me as filling out the details of the character's personality and history. In fact, it's often even more important. Maybe that makes me one of those "sucky roleplayers" as you like to call them (despite the fact that I routinely inject large amounts of personality, backstory, and realistic traits and goals into every last one of my PCs). Whatever, man. for all the customization that feats give you in combat (supposedly with the intent of making Joe Fighter different from Fred Fighter), all the really do is take focus away from your character's personality and place it squarely on how many plusses you have on this or that action. In your limited experience. Mine has been the polar opposite. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm one of those mechancis junkies, which is why I take such issue with the post quoted above. Oh no you're not. You just spent a couple paragraphs on an anti-mechanics diatrabe. Note, I'm talking about the mechanics of building characters. The mechanics of miniatures combat? Yeah, couldn't care much less about that stuff. Just give me something usable and I'm happy. But when the players stare at their character sheets more than the tableu of pawns and pieces, and when I have to pause the action for even 30 seconds to look up how grappling works, then that means something about the game mechanics: they suck. They just suck. Opinion. One I vehemently disagree with. Nothing more really needs to be said about this. My ideal version of D&D? Something that keeps the streamlined nicities of 3rd edition (everything is d20 + modifiers vs. a DC, one EXP chart for all classes, multiclassing is an intuitive matter of one class level to one character level) and the emphasis on tactical movement (speed in squares, reach and facing in the monster stat blocks) but does away with all the unneccessary mess (attacks of opportunity, over-complicated combat actions, feats, skill points, 90% of prestige classes, and even a few base classes). It's the way I'm playing it now, and I've never been happier. I want you to think VERY VERY CAREFULLY about this paragraph. You just acknowledged that you have been able to make the simple change of discarding rules you don't like and are now having a lot of fun. You are also, however, demanding that D&D remove all of this from the game, even though this would directly impact MY fun in a negative way. And I can't just apply a quick tweak to fix that, oh no. I have to write volumes and volumes worth of mechanics on my own to fix it! So how about this. You play D&D your way, and I'll play it my way. We're both made happy by modified versions of the rules as they are (something the designers intended, one of the primary motivators behind the core d20 mechanics). And you stop demanding that I not be allowed to have fun anymore. Good? Good.
Solik 03-22-07, 06:23 PM	As a game, it tends to challenge the player as well as the character. And that's good, because lets face it, character challenges tend to be boring. Yeah, you've got a 25 intelligence wizard and that's way smarter than you are as a player. So why bother making decisions at all? Just look to your DM and ask him what your character thinks you should do, at every single decision. The correct solution here is to balance the roleplay and game aspects, especially if the rules are flexible enough to allow the group to emphasize whichever they're in the mood for. D&D 3.x succeeds at this; you could say "I try to make him like me" and roll a Diplomacy, or you could chat it up for an hour with everyone and let it play out that way. You can also do anything in-between, such as having roleplayed commentary grant circumstance modifiers, or be a prerequisite to making the roll attempt. Play it the way you like it.
ArcTan 03-22-07, 06:26 PM	You're missing my argument. I'm not necessarily saying that you can't do that for combat. Because you can. I'm just saying combat is more interesting and fun with randomness mixed in. The GM could arbitrarily decide that a troll's defenses are vulnerable to a low slash at its legs. So anything directed low works, while high attacks fail. Of course, this game amounts to rock-paper-scissors or battleship. It's boring to play because there's no actual skill to it. You're just taking wild guesses and hoping they work out. WHICH IS THE EXACT SAME WAY FREEFORM RP "CHALLENGES" TURN OUT! I could say something like "I bring up my off-hand dagger to parry, and then lean against it, applying leverage so my rapier arm can slash in under his defenses and find a gap in his ribs." Sounds great. Without rules, the only way the DM can decide whether it works is whether he thinks it sounds great. Ultimately whether I win the combat is a result of whether I impress him or not. If you did an entire game like this, it could be fun. I have done freeform before -- real freeform -- and in many ways combat *is* more fun when it's really part of the story and when what happens is based on what's cool, not what a set of dice say are "realistic". But, y'know, the people doing this have to be a lot more literate -- and a lot more familiar with what a realistic depiction of combat looks like -- than your average D&D crowd to do this well. Do this in an average D&D environment and you'll get a lot of "I throw my sword right through his chest, and it bounces off the wall and comes spinning back to me!" "No, you didn't! That's impossible!" "Yes, I did!" and chaos. We could do that, but it wouldn't be as fun as the current combat system we have. And dice are ultimately there in combat because they add fun. They add *consistency*. It'd be a lot more fun for me to just say "I dive through the Troll's legs, twist my arm around his ankle, trip him and drive my blade into his eyes", but from a D&D gameplaying perspective it's not fair for me to just be able to *say* this without making a Tumble check, a Trip check, and hitting and confirming a crit. It's that perception of fairness that holds D&D sessions together. Social situations aren't like that (at least not under a good DM). You can do some research on your NPC's motivations, on what kinds of things he's done in the past. You can use divinations to help guide you and so on. There are things you can do to get an idea of how the NPC thinks and what sort of things may influence him. Yeah, and I could still let you do research on trolls before you fight a troll and let you freeform it from there. ("He's vulnerable to fire, so I strike a match and set the underbrush on fire!" "Can you do that?" "Yes I can!" "Well...") The sad thing is that if the only mechanics you provide are these kind of "prep" mechanics, they quickly overwhelm everything else and grow enormously in power. In the above example, if I did that, it'd probably turn out as a rock-paper-scissors kind of thing -- if I don't know trolls are vulnerable to fire, I lose, and if I do, I win. There's no mechanics about the *process* that let you change the possibility of winning or losing in a realistic way. This is what leads to the all-too-common scenario of the "secret weakness NPC", the guard who won't let you pass unless you know the password. Insofar as passwords go, that's fine, but it soon becomes silly -- the noble lady who will become your lover as soon as you tell her a sob story about your dead brother because she has a dead brother. The spy who will tell you everything he knows because you know the BBEG killed his father. The maniac who will surrender to the police once you invoke the memory of his dead sister. (Dead relatives are common "passwords" for this kind of thing.) It's *not* realistic, it doesn't *feel* realistic, and it turns people into lock-and-key puzzles. It should at least have another layer of granularity to that so that negotiation feels like *doing* something and not just playing your ace. As far as the DM playing the NPC in character, he does that stuff all the time. You as a player do that stuff all the time. When the DM's seductive female NPC comes up to you, you get to decide if your character goes with her or not. Do you really want your character's reaction to be decided by some system? Do you think that would make for a more fun gaming experience? Er, yes. I don't, as the DM, want to have immense godlike power where I decide, arbitrarily, whether it'd be fun to have the PC succeed or fail. Because that's what it is. Because -- speaking as someone who's done serious acting before -- whether or not I'm a good actor, no, I cannot *become* a seductive female NPC, I cannot internally simulate the frame of mind of a seductive female NPC, and I cannot magically "know" what this imaginary person really "would" or "would not" do based on what the player is saying to me. All I can do is make it up, and without any system to guide me, it's going to be me BSing it.
ArcTan 03-22-07, 06:30 PM	Thing is... we don't pretend to get in social conflicts. This is a role-playing game. We role-play out that stuff. You're still pretending. Unless you really are angry every time your character's angry, and every time you play a seductive female NPC you become seductive. And female. As a game, it tends to challenge the player as well as the character. And that's good, because lets face it, character challenges tend to be boring. Yeah, you've got a 25 intelligence wizard and that's way smarter than you are as a player. So why bother making decisions at all? Just look to your DM and ask him what your character thinks you should do, at every single decision. Again, tell me how this is different from saying that playing a Str 25 Fighter on the battlemat is "cheating" and he should instead be forced to armwrestle you or duel you with foam swords. You could do that, only you're playing a game, ultimately, your decisions as a player are the most important thing. Combat is so complex because we wanted to give the player more options. Social freeform is perhaps the most complex form of player options, as you can literally do or say anything. Then why not give the player more options in combat, too, by making combat freeform? You seem to be saying that the DM can't perfectly simulate combat situations on the fly in his head. Well, guess what -- you can't do that with social situations, either. If I claim to know what the imaginary king really "would" do if you really did say that to him, I'm BSing. My point is and continues to be that a game is more of a game the less it depends on GM BSing and the more it depends on real rules that everyone is aware of.
Arrowhen 03-22-07, 06:43 PM	Thing is... we don't pretend to get in social conflicts. Dude, everything that happens in the game is pretend. When the PCs go before the king and ask him for a favor, it's not like a real king appears out of nowhere and sits down at the gaming table to talk to the players--who have somehow magically turned into elves and wizards and barbarians. The whole damned game is comprised of made up events in the players imaginations. There's absolutely no difference between imaginary, made up combats and imaginary, made up arguments. This is a role-playing game. We role-play out that stuff. What you mean is you act out that stuff. Acting is not roleplaying. Roleplaying is not acting. Roleplaying just means you're pretending (playing) to be someone else (a role). Acting is one way you can do that, but it's not the only way. Don't you role-play out stuff in combat, too? The head-strong, orc-hating barbarian charges into the horde of orcs, while the cautious, opportunistic rogue nimbly circles the fray waiting for his moment to strike an unaware target... those things are roleplaying just as much as anything else. You're pretending to be someone you're not, and having them do things based on who they are, not who you are. (I can guarantee if I ever saw a horde of orcs, I'd run like hell.) As a game, it tends to challenge the player as well as the character. And that's good, because lets face it, character challenges tend to be boring. Yeah, you've got a 25 intelligence wizard and that's way smarter than you are as a player. So why bother making decisions at all? Just look to your DM and ask him what your character thinks you should do, at every single decision. You could do that, only you're playing a game, ultimately, your decisions as a player are the most important thing. Yes, your decisions as a player, not your acting ability. D&D should challenge players, but it should challenge them to make good decisions, not challenge them to impress the DM. If struggling to impress people is your idea of a good game, you should skip D&D and go into politics or dating. Combat is so complex because we wanted to give the player more options. Social freeform is perhaps the most complex form of player options, as you can literally do or say anything. Yes, and none of it matters unless it impresses the DM. What I want is a game where my character can literally do or say anything--even things that I as a player can't. So if you like diplomacy rolls, you don't like role-playing and you don't like playing games. I don't like Diplomacy rolls. In fact, I friggin' hate Diplomacy rolls. They're a lousy, stupid, simplistic, un-fun system that sucks. But they're still better than "impress the DM", because at least with diplomacy I have the same freedom to play a character who can sweet-talk people better than me as I do to play a character who can swing a sword better than me. I don't see why you think that "impress the DM" and "replace all conversation with a single die roll" are the only two options for social encounters.
a_psh 03-22-07, 07:23 PM	All I have to say is, it's not the system's responsibility to teach you how to make the game fun. A teacher can only teach you correct grammar. If you want to learn how to write, you have to read books.And without a codified standard of grammar, it becomes a lot harder for me to write a novel you can actually read. That's what I'm talking about.
High Octane 03-22-07, 10:10 PM	And without a codified standard of grammar, it becomes a lot harder for me to write a novel you can actually read. That's what I'm talking about. What do you want? Im serious. WHAT. DO. YOU. WANT? Be specific.
a_psh 03-23-07, 12:26 AM	What do you want? Im serious. WHAT. DO. YOU. WANT? Be specific.Well, for starters, I want everyone here to see how "It's not the system's responsibility to teach you how to make the game fun" is a terrible cop-out. I want you to see that "Enh, all this stuff? Just freeform it!" is also a terrible cop-out. Most especially for all the people who then turn around and say that those freeform-y scenes are the heart of D&D. Here's the rant I wish I'd written, in many ways: That's just it -- if I want to freeform, WTF am I doing sitting at a table with all these dice and books and crap? I *can* do that if I want to any time without paying one red cent to WotC or TSR or anyone. If the point of D&D is to sit around making crap up until it's time to fight, and then we fight in this byzantine wargame with really complex rules, and then we put down all the rules and just make crap up, then it's dumb. You shouldn't need to sit around and make crap up to have fun playing a wargame. You shouldn't need to sit through a byzantine wargame to have an excuse to sit around and make crap up. What's beginning to bother me is the degree to which it's becoming clear that people used to pay Gary Gygax money for the excuse to sit around and make things up! In what way does that make sense? Why do you need to pay someone for a rulebook so you can have the privilege of ignoring it? It's like this social pathology where what you really want to do is sit around and tell stories but you need to be able to slap the label "D&D" on it to feel safe doing it. It bothers me. More than anything else, it serves as a free pass for whoever owns the brand name D&D to do anything they want and be forgiven, because people are using their product as a social excuse rather than as a product.
a_psh 03-23-07, 12:31 AM	a_psh, a while back a D&D fansite had a list of special occurences that you could print on cards and hand them to players, who'd use them during other players' turns to alter circumstances or to introduce conflict. Dunno if they are still around (can't remember the website's name), but I found this when looking: event cards (http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?manufacturers_id=332&products_id=3332&), which aren't nearly the same, because (if memory serves) in the original any player could introduce unexpected circumstanes/conflicts for other players.Back in the day (late 80s), Lion Rampant (the guys who did Ars Magica, including WoD's Rein-Hangen and 3e's Jonathan Tweet) released a (non-game-specific) set of cards like this that were really popular at the time. I think that's what prompted Tweet to write Everyway later (well, that and the fledgling WotC's obsession with everything card-based back in the 90s).
a_psh 03-23-07, 12:43 AM	The last time somebody decided to try to be philosophical about aspects of the game we got two of the most hated books ever published. The Book of Exalted Deeds and The Book of Vile Darkness.Those aren't philosophical at all, though! They just over-extrapolate some stuff from existing definitions of alignment and then throw a lot of crunch your way. I'll flat-out say that Dogs in the Vineyard is one of the best games out there. It's the product of sincere introspection, both in terms of "What are the things I do every session as a freeformer that make the game more fun, and how do I codify those to make them happen more often?" and "How do I feel about the religion I grew up in?" In terms of the former, the author flat-out tells you what his design philosophy is and how he imagined you'd be playing the game, which does, in fact, help you play the game. Or, if you don't want to play the game, it lets you pick it up, flip through the book, and go "Yeah, this isn't for me." Either way, you're maximizing your fun time by not wasting it on something that isn't designed for what you want out of a game. How is this bad? Is "Yeah, here's what I was thinking when I wrote all these rules, just so you know..." a bad idea? It's not like a designer can sit there and not think, after all. I don't see the need to be subtle about what he's thinking, either.
a_psh 03-23-07, 12:45 AM	So the question is, does randomness actually make the game better or more fun? In my opinion, it doesn't. It ends up trivializing player choice.That's because you're talking about Fortune-at-the-End. I'll be like the first person to tell you "Fortune-at-the-End sucks, throw it out." There's much more choice and fun in a Fortune-in-the-Middle approach. What's that? Declare an action. Roll a die. Then stop and apply resources to modify the final outcome, if you so choose. Imagine action points on serious crack, and built into the game rather than tacked on. That's a lot of player choice, a fun game-like experience, and an interesting roleplaying situation (what are the challenges you decide your character should fail?). If you say stuff that the king wants to hear, then you should succeed, if you say stuff the king doesn't want to hear, then you should fail.If this turns into "read the GM's mind," it gets pretty boring. Especially since there's usually 4 or 5 of you and one of him, and often he'll let you flail around a lot to find the right answer, so you're babbling for half an hour looking for whatever hook he expected you to jump on. Also, the trick with social situations in real life is that they're like icebergs: 90% is hidden below the surface. This is part of why the social processing people do is so different from "reason," and part of why we anthropomorphize things when our information about them is limited: there's just no way for the puzzle-solving part of our brain to even begin to address a situation where the majority of the variables are completely hidden, which is what real-life social scenarios are like. I don't think I really need to explain why, because we can all envision how boring combat would be without dice.But, but... Polaris. One die that you very, very seldom roll (it's basically the "screw negotiation, I'm gonna take a chance!" die). And yet, it can be pretty fun to narrate combat like a legend. Now, you can't turn "And so it was that, in the barren wastes, Suhail first met the Solaris Knight in bloody battle..." into "four encounters per day" (you'd run out of space for named demon-things on your character sheet after the first session), but the battles you do fight are just as good as the talky scenes. ... If your DM doesn't want to create an immersive world, then yes, your role-playing experience will be terrible. But that's rather self-evident.Immersion is about not breaking the players' suspension of disbelief. Methods that allow you to clearly state what it is that you're imagining and make that matter are better than methods that don't. If you imagine there being pine trees in the forest and make an off-hand in-character comment about it, the GM that breaks your immersion the hardest is the one who says "No, there are only oaks and these five other three types here." If you have trouble with imagining things, then you probably need to find a new game.The key to a stable and interesting imaginary world is good narration. It has to be interesting, it has to be evocative, it has to be provocative -- to make you want to step up and narrate something of your own, too. Imagination is more about vague images and emotional reactions to them than detailed clinical descriptions. In the context of a pen-and-paper game, the person who can deliver the emotional content of a rousing speech with two sentences of narration is a better player than the one who needs to lay out every single word of that over the course of 30 minutes. Well, possibly, but narration as I said, is no longer a game. It's just collaborative storytelling. Remember, in a game, player actions have to in some way serve to influence the outcome.If you're talking about anything even vaguely resembling distribution of narrative power, player actions do very much influence the outcome. Tons more than in situations where everything is being ad-libbed by one guy at the table, in fact. I've already covered a variety of ways in which a handful of different games then introduce game-like elements to make this kind of stuff both fair and fun.
Always-Late 03-23-07, 12:51 AM	There's absolutely no difference between imaginary, made up combats and imaginary, made up arguments.<Donut[AFK]> HEY EURAKARTE <Donut[AFK]> INSULT <Eurakarte> RETORT <Donut[AFK]> COUNTER-RETORT <Eurakarte> QUESTIONING OF SEXUAL PREFERENCE <Donut[AFK]> SUGGESTION TO SHUT THE **** UP <Eurakarte> NOTATION THAT YOU CREATE A VACUUM <Donut[AFK]> RIPOSTE <Donut[AFK]> ADDON RIPOSTE <Eurakarte> COUNTER-RIPOSTE <Donut[AFK]> COUNTER-COUNTER RIPOSTE <Eurakarte> NONSENSICAL STATEMENT INVOLVING PLANKTON <Miles_Prower> RESPONSE TO RANDOM STATEMENT AND THREAT TO BAN OPPOSING SIDES <Eurakarte> WORDS OF PRAISE FOR FISHFOOD <Miles_Prower> ACKNOWLEDGEMENT AND ACCEPTENCE OF TERMSYes, yes there is. How many people do you know who went to see any action movie? What if that movie had all the physical action replaced by talking?View Post That's just it -- if I want to freeform, WTF am I doing sitting at a table with all these dice and books and crap? I *can* do that if I want to any time without paying one red cent to WotC or TSR or anyone.Because you like combat resolution that doesn't involve any one person dictating what happens, and you also don't like the other side, which involves rules for "freeforming."
Zersch 03-23-07, 01:44 AM	I'll flat-out say that Dogs in the Vineyard is one of the best games out there. It's the product of sincere introspection, both in terms of "What are the things I do every session as a freeformer that make the game more fun, and how do I codify those to make them happen more often?" and "How do I feel about the religion I grew up in?" In terms of the former, the author flat-out tells you what his design philosophy is and how he imagined you'd be playing the game, which does, in fact, help you play the game. Or, if you don't want to play the game, it lets you pick it up, flip through the book, and go "Yeah, this isn't for me." Either way, you're maximizing your fun time by not wasting it on something that isn't designed for what you want out of a game. Actually, I'd have to disagree. As you say, I wasn't terribly impressed with DitV. Granted, hands above My Life With Master, but, eh, not so much. I get the idea that he wants to accomplish with the conflict resolution stages, but I had some serious issues with it. Also, it seems too...metagame-y for me. I still like my players to have that look of awe and surprise when they achieve resolution of a major plot point.
a_psh 03-23-07, 01:58 AM	Actually, I'd have to disagree. As you say, I wasn't terribly impressed with DitV.Did reading it paint an accurate picture of exactly what he expected you to be doing in the game?
Zersch 03-23-07, 02:13 AM	As I said above. I do like his conflict resolution, but honestly, it seemed a bit too long winded for me. Also, I can't recall a game using that many dice other than Shadowrun and it's overabundance of d6's. The idea, I agree with you. Nothing wrong with an elegant, well-thought series of events, but the poker style antics are just not to my liking as much as the ubiquitous die rolling involved. Also, when Vincent flat out says, "If the payers want to know something, anything, about their surroundings, just tell them. It doesn't even matter that their character's won't know it, tell them anyway. Just say yes." Paraphrased for sure, but that's the gist. I don't have my book handy at the moment. Kinda kills any suspense you have planned for your players, also plants some serious seeds in their heads for metagaming tactics.
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-23-07, 02:35 AM	But the fact that it involves players means that it does, in fact, allow "player choice". Well collaborative creation is a different kind of player choice. It's not player choice on a game level, but player choice on a design level. And that's no longer truly a game situation, but a narrative one. The PCs are no longer inhabitants in a world, they're now playing god. You seem to think "roleplaying game" means "game where you test someone's ability to play a role", while I think it just means "game where you play a role". Well, if you don't talk in character and instead skip everything, you're no longer playing a role. I mean, if you're for social skills basically you're skipping all the dialogue and just playing the combats... so um, at that point, why not play D&D miniatures? If social encounters are actually the "heart" of an RPG for you, does that mean that whether a party succeeds in a D&D campaign really does depend on the acting and improvisation skills of the players rather than the stats on their character sheet? It's a combination of both. A good DM (and good PCs) need to be able to use their imaginations. So if the DM describes an NPC as an attractive woman, the PCs should react to the NPC as though she was an attractive woman, even if the DM happens to be male. If you have players who are good enough actors to do this, then I imagine this could be a lot of fun. With most D&D groups I've been involved with, this would actually mean a lot of dominant play by the most socially dominant person there and a boring time for everyone else. With a lot of D&D groups that played this way, this *is* what it meant. (Everyone reads their sourcebooks or futzes with their character sheet while the one party face "drama queen" blusters to the DM with faux-medieval rhetoric.) Well no, only if the other PCs refuse to speak. Remember, social skills are much more isolating than freeform, because if you didn't create a roleplaying character, you're actually screwing the group by saying anything. The best contribution you can make to your group is to say absolutely nothing in character. Ever. Because your numbers just aren't there and you could anger an NPC if the DM chooses to force you to make a diplomacy roll. See, "Improvise a conversation completely from scratch and see if it fits my preconceived notion of what an 'appealing' or 'effective' conversational style would be" doesn't sound like a fun game to me. It sounds like a stupid game. It's guaranteed to be unfair. After all, I am not an omniscient judge of how every imaginary person might react in any imaginary situation. Not that many people are. And when you're talking about something as subjective as "Is this conversational approach appealing?", hell yes it's going to be influenced by all kinds of unconscious factors. Of course... but the DM has a better idea of how his imaginary character (that he created) is going to act than some rules set that's created to handle every single character in the world. Again, as a PC do you really want your actions dictated by a die roll? 1) I don't think a game has to be something that challenges your own innate abilities. We call things games that are nothing more than tests of random chance (craps, blackjack) and things where there isn't any real winning or losing (Truth or Dare, Pass the Ghost Story, etc.) Well, some games are created purely for excitement factor, and all these games, even ones like craps, offer some degree of player choice, even if it's something as simple as deciding what number to bet on. While your choice isn't especially significant, you still get the feeling you could choose your fate (if only you could predict the future of course) Yeah. And why *isn't* it fun to have a turn-by-turn, gritty simulation of hardcore negotiation with a roomful of competing factions, or courtroom arguments, or bidding at an auction, or that sort of thing -- all things you won't be able to simulate well with "Just roleplay it to me by talking!"? Because rules sets are notoriously poor at simulating social encounters. That's why. Now maybe I'm wrong and some RPG came up with a fun social system, but thus far I have not seen one, nor have I heard a system idea that's any better than just freeforming it. Generally social systems turn into either randomness, or a game of rock-paper-scissors. I mean if you've got a great social system, link me. Otherwise you're just talking about some theoretical thing that doesn't exist. I can say that in all the RPGs I've read social systems all suck and you're better off just freeforming it. Sure. I mean, it is, as you say, a roleplaying *game*. We did pay money for all these rules and thing. If we wanted to just sit around a table and tell a story with no rules or guidance at all, we could just do that. Again, we have rules that tell PCs exactly what they can and can't do in combat, and you're not complaining about how this restricts "player choice". Well, combat isn't exactly a roleplaying situation. It's a purely mechanical one. Creating a complex combat system actually expands player choice, but it's in the combat sub-game. What, just as a practical matter? Well why not settle fights with arm wrestling, then? Or by flicking little paper footballs at a target? Again, because it's a pencil and paper game. It's not supposed to include physical challenges. If we were designing a physical game, like a live action RPG, then yeah we might include some of these. Okay. What player actions influence the outcome in combat? All kinds of ways. What spell do I cast? Do I want to try to move and flank and try to sneak attack? Do I want to fight defensively? How should we position ourselves? I still don't see how, if you don't have a problem with the way combat is done in D&D, you're so opposed to making social situations work the same way. Because social encounters are the role-playing of the game. We don't need dice to tell us how our characters react, we are supposed to determine that ourselves. That's part of what roleplaying is. If players and DMs can no longer choose how their characters react, then you're not really roleplaying, you're just a slave to the mechanics. And I'm going to lay it out on the table: Right now social situations in D&D are rarely fun. They are frequently skipped, and when they're not skipped they're frequently stupid and bog the game down and never have a conclusive resolution. Well if you run the social system D&D has, yeah social encounters suck. If you freeform them, I find them very fun.
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-23-07, 02:50 AM	There's absolutely no difference between imaginary, made up combats and imaginary, made up arguments. Yeah there is. We can't exactly do out every combat blow by blow as players, not without picking up fake swords and actually running the combat. We can do every conversation word for word though. Don't you role-play out stuff in combat, too? To a lesser degree, but combat role-playing tends to be so simplistic. The majority of true role-playing takes place in conversations. Whether they PC to PC conversations or PC and NPCs. Yes, and none of it matters unless it impresses the DM. What I want is a game where my character can literally do or say anything--even things that I as a player can't. Well, I would hope you can say anything as a player. I mean, unless you have trouble pronouncing words or something, you can say whatever you want. What ultimately you're saying is that you want your character to go on autopilot and make decisions for you. You no longer want to be in control of the character but to simply wind him up and let him go do his thing. That's a different desire, and it's a slippery, slippery slope. Because you know, every single action in the game, from determining what spell you learn at the next level, to your feat selections to your choice of combat action or decision to further the plot, can be simplified to winding up your character and letting him do his thing. So where do you draw the line? What things can and can't you autopilot your character with? I don't like Diplomacy rolls. In fact, I friggin' hate Diplomacy rolls. They're a lousy, stupid, simplistic, un-fun system that sucks. But they're still better than "impress the DM", because at least with diplomacy I have the same freedom to play a character who can sweet-talk people better than me as I do to play a character who can swing a sword better than me. Again slippery slope. What about the player who sucks at thinking of combat tactics? Can he autopilot his 7th level fighter (who obviously has TONS of combat experience) and just say he chose the best tactic available? What about the guy playing the 18 INT wizard with max spellcraft who has trouble choosing a new spell, can he just say he picks the optimal spell because his character has 18 int and max spellcraft and is obviously more qualified at spell selection than he is? If you don't draw a line, then pretty much any decision you have to make can be tossed onto the character, and players aren't doing anything anymore. Sooner or later the DM just becomes the arbiter of all PC action. Sorry, you can't convince him, you don't have any ranks in diplomacy. Sorry, you can't choose that spell load out, your character doesn't have enough spellcraft to know any better. Sorry, but your PC has only 6 int, he's not going to take a good feat, he's going to take toughness, cause he doesn't know any better. It's a slippery slope, and ultimately once you start down the "It's no longer a player thing, it's a character thing" you end up sliding right down into the sewer. I personally draw my line at "if you can do it at the table, then do it at the table". Only roll dice when simulating something you can't do at the table.
Arrowhen 03-23-07, 02:58 AM	Well, for starters, I want everyone here to see how "It's not the system's responsibility to teach you how to make the game fun" is a terrible cop-out. I kind of think that while it's not possible for the system to teach you how to make the game fun, it still might be the system's responsibility to try. I've been playing the guitar for almost as long as I've been gaming. I'm just about entirely self-taught; I had two whole guitar lessons as a kid, didn't like it, and decided to pick it up again after a few years. I've read through a lot of really awful books on how to play the guitar. Really, really horrible books, for the most part. Somehow, miraculously, after years of frustrating trial and error, I managed to eventually pick up some semblance of an idea how to play the damned thing. I'm not what you'd call good at playing the guitar, exactly, but I have a lot fun with it. My interest in learning the guitar stemmed from my desire to write songs. I was never really interested in learning how to play stuff that other people had written; I wanted to write my own. Eventually, I got fairly good at doing just that (and I mean "good" purely by my own standards--I like the stuff I come up with, and other people whose musical opinions I respect tend to like them too). Why am I going on about this? Because I see a lot of parallels between music (specifically, learning to play an instrument) and gaming. See, there's lots of books out there that teach you the basics of how to play the guitar; this is how you hold it, this is how you tune, here's where all the notes are, here's some chords and scales for you to memorize. They tell you how to play the instrument, but not really how to make music out of it. You just know a bunch of notes and scales and chords, but when it comes to turning those elements into interesting songs, you're completely on your own. This is what previous editions of D&D were like. They taught you how to play a roleplaying game (roll this die to see if you hit, roll that one to see how much damage you do), but not how to make a fun* story out of it. We all knew you were supposed to be able to make fun stories out of them (either because they came out and said so on the back cover, or because we kept hearing from other people what great stories came out of their games), but when it came down to trying to figure out how to make fun stories out of them, the rules said nothing. Or, at best, they told us we should ignore the rules when they got in the way of the story, without any real guidelines about when or how to do so. Back to the guitar. Once I outgrew the basic books--once I knew what notes were where, knew how to play some scales, and had a bunch of chords memorized--I thought, "OK, now that I've got the basics out of the way, it's time to learn how to make music out of them." So I went looking for intermediate and advanced books about playing the guitar. There's a ton of those, and every single one is about the same thing: how to play faster, more complicated guitar solos. Not better solos. Not more expressive solos. Not more interesting (from anything but a purely technical standpoint) solos. Just faster and more complicated ones. So while if you absorb all the information in those books (which I never really did, because fast and complicated isn't really what I enjoy playing in the first place) you'll have a lot more options for playing fast and complicated, you still haven't learned how to make music of your own. That's 3rd Edition. We have lots and lots of options for making more powerful and more varied characters, but there's still no meaningful advice on what to do with them, on how to take those powerful, varied characters. We're still promised the ability to tell fun stories, but we're still not given any real guidelines for how, except for the same old "ignore the rules if they get in the way." Now, all this time I was learning to play the guitar I was also writing songs. Most of them sucked, but every once in a while I'd come up with something pretty good. I had no idea how I was doing it, but if you fiddle around with an instrument long enough you're going to eventually come up with something that sounds kind of cool. The trouble is, you don't know where to go from there. If you play something that sounds kind of cool, you don't know what to do to it to make it better. If you write a song you like, you know you did something right, but you don't know what you did right or how to do it again. Eventually, by piecing together scraps of information from a dozen or so different books, I finally came to understand music theory. And that's when I started being able to write good songs. See, music theory doesn't tell you how to write music. It's not the rules for music. It's just a way of describing music. It tells you how everything fits together, how the octave is divided into a scale, what the intervals between the different notes in that scale is called, and how you can make chords out of those notes. Once you know that stuff, you can start purposefully exploring music, rather than poking around at random and hoping stuff sounds good. It's still up to you to write the song, but you have a framework of understanding to base that writing upon. You play a chord and then you play another one and then you think "OK, ordinarily a listener would expect those two chords to lead to this one, so I could do that or if I wanted to do something out of the ordinary, this chord would add a nice bit of tension, especially if it finally resolved to that one." And that is what D&D needs: a sort of "story theory". A set of "rules", not for telling stories, but for describing them. A way of understanding how the parts of a story (and not just any story, but specifically a story told through the unique medium of a roleplaying game) fit together. But, getting back to my music analogy, D&D isn't just a book on how to play an instrument, it's also the instrument itself. So while it needs to teach "story theory", it also needs to be a ruleset that facilitates storytelling. The rules need to actively support the story, not just tell you to ignore them when they get in the way of it. How can it do that? Honestly, I don't know. I'm not a game designer. I know one area that could be improved is the pacing of gameplay. Right now, the game operates at two time scales; it's either "exactly six seconds elapse, decide what you're going to do with them" or it's "however much time the DM says passes, passes--and then exactly six seconds elapse, decide what you're going to do with them." What the rules should realize is that in most forms of storytelling, events take as much or as little time to describe as they need to. To give a quick example, a combat sequence in a fantasy novel might include the following (admittedly cheesy--gimme a break, it's 2 am!) passages... Honed steel flashing, eldrich power crackling eerily, Enric and Aliyat fought their way through the throng of orcs to the Blackguard's throne room... The Blackguard's demonic lieutenant fought with inhuman strength and ferocity, its iron talons rending Enric's armor and scoring a deep, nasty gash down his thigh. But Enric's blade and Aliyat's sorcery were stronger still, and the beast fell lifeless to the floor... Enric feinted high and struck low, his holy blade glowing fiercely in the Blackguard's dim inner sanctum. The Blackguard smirked as he parried Enric's blow with contemptuous ease--but the sneer twisted into a grimace of pain and rage as Aliyat's lightning bolt slammed into him... Now, yeah, those were some pretty cheesy lines, but you see how time slowed down and more detail came out the more important the action became to the overall story? In D&D, fighting through the throng of orcs would probably take longer than fighting with the Blackguard--rolling all those attacks, taking all those AoOs, ticking off all those hit points--even though the fight with the Blackguard is the whole point of the scene. The orcs are just there for the heroes to badass their way through on their way to the "good part." What I'd like to see is a system in which each one of those passages represents a single round of combat. Why roll every attack, why count every magic missile when the orcs are just there to die dramatically while the heroes advance toward the real conflict? Why roll every single attack against the demonic lieutenant when it's just there to cost Enric a good chunk of hp in order to make the final battle a little more tense? Playing everything out round-by-round, blow-by-blow is fine in an old-school dungeon crawl (which are damned fun, by the way, don't get me wrong) where every fight is a "loot or death" matter, but sometimes one fight is just more important than another, and there should be a way for the rules to reflect that, to speed through the warm up encounters (without leaving them out altogether) and to slow down, zoom in, and thoroughly explore all the details of the really dramatic ones. * Note that I said "fun", not "good". This is something a_psh and I seem to disagree about; he wants to tell good stories and I just want to have fun telling them, whether they end up being any good or not. But I think that's just a matter of taste (some of my favorite stories really aren't any good, by any reasonable standards; they're just fun), rather than any fundamental disagreement on what the purpose of a set of rules is. I think we both want the ruleset to help us tell stories, not to hinder us or to completely ignore the fact that we want to tell stores in the first place.
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-23-07, 02:58 AM	What's that? Declare an action. Roll a die. Then stop and apply resources to modify the final outcome, if you so choose. Imagine action points on serious crack, and built into the game rather than tacked on. That's a lot of player choice, a fun game-like experience, and an interesting roleplaying situation (what are the challenges you decide your character should fail?). Ok, great, so PCs just walk into the king's chamber and ask him to turn over his kingdom to them, then they blow all their action points so they succeed. Quest ends. That's the crap that happens when you allow PCs to autosucceed on stuff you don't want them to. Also, the trick with social situations in real life is that they're like icebergs: 90% is hidden below the surface. This is part of why the social processing people do is so different from "reason," and part of why we anthropomorphize things when our information about them is limited: there's just no way for the puzzle-solving part of our brain to even begin to address a situation where the majority of the variables are completely hidden, which is what real-life social scenarios are like. Well, there's no saying you can't have character abilities to help you solve social puzzles. Knowledges, Sense motive or divinations could reveal information about the guy your'e talking to, giving you insight into what he wants. A good DM won't keep you completely in the dark. The key to a stable and interesting imaginary world is good narration. Well to a degree, but interesting is also about player choice too, so you don't want the game to turn into narration of dice rolls either. It's no fun when you're not actually taking action but rather just following the script the dice lay out for you. Choice is mandatory. If you're talking about anything even vaguely resembling distribution of narrative power, player actions do very much influence the outcome. Tons more than in situations where everything is being ad-libbed by one guy at the table, in fact. I've already covered a variety of ways in which a handful of different games then introduce game-like elements to make this kind of stuff both fair and fun. Well, while player intervention into the story can be fun, it creates problems as well. You just can't tell a mystery story for instance if you already know who did it. You can't really do suspense or horror or anything that relies on you not knowing something. You can't do any kind of puzzles or intrigue. So you can do your basic action plot fine, in which the Heroes always win and the sky is always blue and bright and everything always works out perfectly. But I get the feeling that will get boring fast. There's a reason polaris or any of the other GM-less systems aren't very popular. I mean that might be fun to some people, but it's just not D&D. D&D is meant as a challenge to the players, where the players play characters, not gods. They make decisions which are character actions and hope to achieve some result through their decisions.
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-23-07, 03:12 AM	WHICH IS THE EXACT SAME WAY FREEFORM RP "CHALLENGES" TURN OUT! But, y'know, the people doing this have to be a lot more literate -- and a lot more familiar with what a realistic depiction of combat looks like -- than your average D&D crowd to do this well. Do this in an average D&D environment and you'll get a lot of "I throw my sword right through his chest, and it bounces off the wall and comes spinning back to me!" "No, you didn't! That's impossible!" "Yes, I did!" and chaos. Which is why in part, that we don't freeform combat. Your character can say anything, but he may not be able to do anything. This is what leads to the all-too-common scenario of the "secret weakness NPC", the guard who won't let you pass unless you know the password. Insofar as passwords go, that's fine, but it soon becomes silly -- the noble lady who will become your lover as soon as you tell her a sob story about your dead brother because she has a dead brother. The spy who will tell you everything he knows because you know the BBEG killed his father. The maniac who will surrender to the police once you invoke the memory of his dead sister. (Dead relatives are common "passwords" for this kind of thing.) It's *not* realistic, it doesn't *feel* realistic, and it turns people into lock-and-key puzzles. It should at least have another layer of granularity to that so that negotiation feels like *doing* something and not just playing your ace. Well right, and it takes good DMing skill to make negotiations feel this way. As a DM, running negotiations correctly and in a fun fashion is certainly challenging, but I think it's rewarding enough that's a worthy skill to improve. Giving life to NPCs is certainly worthwhile if you want a good and memorable story. If you relegate NPC actions to a simple rules system, then your PCs will never develop any attachment to them. They're a list of numbers and nothing more. They're like robots, they just follow simple instructions based on a set of universal procedures that hold true for every character in your whole world. They're boring and faceless. Your trusted companion could turn on you at any time if the dice fall the wrong way, because well, your companion has no personality or free will. Make a few die rolls and he flips from ally status to hostile status. Er, yes. I don't, as the DM, want to have immense godlike power where I decide, arbitrarily, whether it'd be fun to have the PC succeed or fail. So put the power into an arbitrary dice roll? Because that's what it is. Because -- speaking as someone who's done serious acting before -- whether or not I'm a good actor, no, I cannot *become* a seductive female NPC, I cannot internally simulate the frame of mind of a seductive female NPC, and I cannot magically "know" what this imaginary person really "would" or "would not" do based on what the player is saying to me. All I can do is make it up, and without any system to guide me, it's going to be me BSing it. Yup. All you can do is make it up and try to figure it out based on what you know about the character. Welcome to role-playing, that's what it's all about! How does your character react to his companion getting run through by a troll? Does he lash out in anger, yell out in sadness and horror, or does he simply curl into a ball and cry? It's up to you. Who knows better what your character will do than you? He's your character! Nobody can prove you're roleplaying a character wrong when it's your own character. It's part of the fun of roleplaying.
Always-Late 03-23-07, 03:15 AM	So you can do your basic action plot fine, in which the Heroes always win and the sky is always blue and bright and everything always works out perfectly. But I get the feeling that will get boring fast. There's a reason polaris or any of the other GM-less systems aren't very popular. Actually, in Polaris the hero always loses. But you know the outcome.
Arrowhen 03-23-07, 03:44 AM	I personally draw my line at "if you can do it at the table, then do it at the table". Only roll dice when simulating something you can't do at the table. Ok, here's an example of something I can't do at the table: I can't come up with long, well-structured extemporaneous political speeches. I could probably write a decent political speech if you gave me a couple days, but I couldn't just come up with one on the fly. What I could do is decide on the tactics that a character who was much better at public speaking than I am. If my character wanted to, say, incite a crowd to riot against the king I could work it out like this... Me: Ok, first I'm gonna try something attention-grabbing like, "My friends, we've all suffered under the injustices of the king. Today, that injustice ENDS!" (some kind of dice are rolled) DM: Ok, you've got their attention. Now what. Me: Well, I'll start enumerating the various injustices, starting with something safe that everyone agrees with, like high taxes. Then I'll slowly start working in more controversial stuff like the unfair treatment of non-humans. (more dice are rolled) DM: The crowd seems to be reacting favorably, at least at first. There's quite a bit of cheering and shouts of encouragement, but when you start talking about non-humans it sort of dies down and you notice a bit of scowling and muttering going on toward the back. Me: OK, yeah, that's probably still a sore subject after that thing with the elves last year. I'll go back to safer topics, and throw in a bit about the draft. (dice) DM: The mention of the draft goes over really well. Me: OK, I'll really hammer that point then, something like, "How many more of our sons and daughters will we let die to line a tyrant's pockets?" DM: The crowd goes absolutely wild over that. Me: Ok, I don't let up, then. "The king has power. He has soldiers. But are you so afraid of them that you'll just slink home and dig your childrens' graves?" DM: The crowd responds with a resounding "No!" Me: Now I'll ram it home. "Then let us march! Now! This very moment, while our resolve is strong. Let us march to the palace and pull the child-murdering tyrant from his bloody throne!" DM: The crowd roars their approval and starts picking up cobblestones to use as weapons. See, I could play a character like that just fine, even though I couldn't make up a whole speech for him. The game would still be about player choice, and I'd still be challenged to pick the right tactics for the given circumstances. I just wouldn't be making up entire speeches off the top of my head. But at your table, that wouldn't fly, because it's not "true roleplaying" (by which you mean "good acting"). So I'd probably end up playing a boring old taciturn barbarian or something, just to be safe.
Arrowhen 03-23-07, 03:49 AM	Nobody can prove you're roleplaying a character wrong when it's your own character. Well, I'd certainly be roleplaying my silver-tongued demagogue wrong if I was constantly mumbling and stammering my way through stilted, poorly structured speeches because my DM can't tell the difference between roleplaying and acting. It's part of the fun of roleplaying. As long as your DM is impressed by it.
a_psh 03-23-07, 04:26 AM	So put the power into an arbitrary dice roll?It's not arbitrary! That's a big part of the "conflict resolution" approach: you focus your mechanical attention on situations where different people want different things to happen. You don't bother rolling dice for every little thing. Zerch mentioned how this works in DitV: "Say yes or roll the dice."
a_psh 03-23-07, 04:28 AM	* Note that I said "fun", not "good". This is something a_psh and I seem to disagree about; he wants to tell good stories and I just want to have fun telling them, whether they end up being any good or not. But I think that's just a matter of taste (some of my favorite stories really aren't any good, by any reasonable standards; they're just fun), rather than any fundamental disagreement on what the purpose of a set of rules is. I think we both want the ruleset to help us tell stories, not to hinder us or to completely ignore the fact that we want to tell stores in the first place.Since we're talking about storytelling in an informal context, my measure of "good" is at least 75%, if not 100%, about fun. I don't think you can really separate the two, because our ingrained cultural aesthetics about what's "good" also affect what we think is "fun" (and, yes, I realize that few people actually like reading the classics of literature; but, think about movies, for example). Especially when you're talking about backbone-y stuff rather than detail, and not thinking like an art critic when you use the words, "good" and "fun" are pretty close together: a good story has good pacing, a fun story has good pacing; &c.
a_psh 03-23-07, 04:37 AM	Ok, here's an example of something I can't do at the table: I can't come up with long, well-structured extemporaneous political speeches. I could probably write a decent political speech if you gave me a couple days, but I couldn't just come up with one on the fly. Moreover, even if you can pull that off okay, you certainly can't make up the entirety of your character's well-structured, pre-rehearsed, took-a-week-to-write-it speech on the fly. There's another thing there: even if we believe all that stuff about "good roleplayers" being the ones who can act perfectly in any situation, "good roleplayers" still only have like three or four hours a week to do all this stuff in-game. In order for their game not to suck, even the most skillful "good roleplayers" in the world need to narrate through certain things breezily to get to the juicy bits. It's like Law & Order: good cuts make all the different; those stories would be boring as hell if you actually saw Lenny buying coffee and McCoy spending three days reading legal codices and whatnot (or, heck, if you had to listen to more than a snippet of the witness interviews or courtroom drama). L&O is a narrative held together almost entirely by its very tight scene framing. This is something that a lot of RPG gamers seem to have a rather poor grasp of, and that definitely does bog down their games -- they waste too much precious leisure time on unimportant things. Arrowhen, Here's something about your speech example, by the way: notice how you rolled for the bits you elided and not so much for the bits you acted out? Was that deliberate or subconscious?
graddlin 03-23-07, 04:41 AM	Since we're talking about storytelling in an informal context, my measure of "good" is at least 75%, if not 100%, about fun. I don't think you can really separate the two, because our ingrained cultural aesthetics about what's "good" also affect what we think is "fun" (and, yes, I realize that few people actually like reading the classics of literature; but, think about movies, for example). Especially when you're talking about backbone-y stuff rather than detail, and not thinking like an art critic when you use the words, "good" and "fun" are pretty close together: a good story has good pacing, a fun story has good pacing; &c. Indeed, friend. The quality of the play, as opposed to the percieved quality, is paramount. In order to enjoy a game there must be some cooperation betwixt the players and DM. Now, I must say, as a DM, I find the idea of cooperative story telling a little foreign. However, that does not mean that I am opposed to it. Many would do well to listen to you, and heed your words, for you speak a great deal about the way these games should be: FUN. Unfortunately, we sometimes loose sight of the ultimate goal of our games amidst the forest of rules and books. I do agree that it is sad that the game has become a matter of constant referal and arbitration. The DM and players should colaberate to create the story as they play. Once again, I enjoy this topic and believe that it is presented in a most proffesional way. Good work, friend.
a_psh 03-23-07, 04:45 AM	Actually, in Polaris the hero always loses. But you know the outcome.Well, you die or you fall (or the world ends, but that's rarer). Those are kinda different, and it's never really definite until you really go at it. While your character's death is purely in your hands, it's not exactly something you can pre-plan. In DitV, you know your character won't die for no reason, but she can still die from risking her life for something (e.g. staying in a gunfight) or from her life being at stake in a conflict. Those might seem weird, but it's not like character death means dick in D&D, anyway. The likelihood of random, unthematic death is what necessitated all that resurrection magic in the first place. And that resurrection magic in turn changes death into something survivable. The big choice to actually "retire" a character is often still left mostly up to the player that created it.
a_psh 03-23-07, 04:57 AM	Now, I must say, as a DM, I find the idea of cooperative story telling a little foreign.What's surprising is how much of it we do covertly. For example, do players often narrate their own actions in your games? Games where the GM is actually in charge of everything seem pretty rare. There's pretty extensive video of such a game in a D&D documentary somewhere, though. When I watched it, it seemed so alien to me... I mean, the players literally were only doing dialogue, game mechanics, and very vaguely stating intent. But it was always the GM who would be describing like everything they did. I'm quite used to the kind of thing where if you critical-hit an orc it's kinda assumed that you actually get to say something about what that looked like yourself, and most people I've talked to on these forums seem to play that way, too. It's surprising how easily authority is shared on the small scale. Most GMs keep all of the setting authority and a lot of plot authority, but I've seldom seem narrational authority do anything but pass back and forth freely. This is why I think the way games have talked about what the GM does in the past don't quite reflect what's actually happening in play. Power is a lot more fluid than they usually let on.
a_psh 03-23-07, 06:12 AM	Time for another vaguely controversial post... Ok, great, so PCs just walk into the king's chamber and ask him to turn over his kingdom to them, then they blow all their action points so they succeed. Quest ends. That's the crap that happens when you allow PCs to autosucceed on stuff you don't want them to."You allow." "You don't want them to." That just comes off as GM ass-kissing to me. If GMing is all about making players do what I "want them to," then they don't actually get a lot of choices now, do they? The solution to your problem is as simple as "Hey, guys, this is dumb." If you expect everyone at the table except the GM to just be wasting all their time trying to ruin a story and abuse the rules, why even bother GMing for these people? Choice is mandatory.Well, yeah. Any kind of shared authorship is eleventy billion times more choice than "pick a card, any card..." Well, while player intervention into the story can be fun, it creates problems as well. You just can't tell a mystery story for instance if you already know who did it. You can't really do suspense or horror or anything that relies on you not knowing something. You can't do any kind of puzzles or intrigue.Most attempts to do a mystery story in D&D blow chunks. The most important thing about a mystery: if you don't find the clue, you go nowhere. Most GMs create clue-hunting quests that turn into "beat the check DC / figure out this one arbitrary thing or there is no story at all." At which point the game either dies or they delve into heavy illusionist techniques to keep it going (in which case anything you do ends up mysteriously being the right thing, through a lot of handwaving behind the scenes -- most D&D players start to really get angry about "railroading" at this point). Robin Laws is mucking around with a mystery game right now. You can read about it on his blog thing. Interestingly, most of what he's written so far talks about why you need the game system to impose a coherent structure on the mystery plot so it doesn't turn into a load of garbage. The most important trick is that a mystery is only linear in retrospect. So you can do your basic action plot fine, in which the Heroes always win and the sky is always blue and bright and everything always works out perfectly. But I get the feeling that will get boring fast. There's a reason polaris or any of the other GM-less systems aren't very popular.'Cept Polaris is about heroes that falter and die, which is what they do. And it's got a guy there specifically screwing your character over at every turn, harder-core than a GM can because he's not playing all the supporting NPCs and not adjudicating the mechanics and not trying to juggle the plot, but just sitting there representing all the bad stuff in your life. (And then the scene changes and you get to be that guy for his character, which is fun!) As for popularity? Every game I've mentioned was written by one or two people in their spare time and advertised in the back of other indie games, if at all. You've probably never heard of any RPGs from Poland, either, but that doesn't mean they suck. Not to mention the fact that most people have had so much full-on "Roleplayer Brain Damage" from playing years of nothing but D&D or Vampire that they run away screaming the second anyone introduces anything other than "yeah, here's some crappy mechanics and the GM will handle everything, just sit in the corner and make little monologues now and then." I mean that might be fun to some people, but it's just not D&D. D&D is meant as a challenge to the players, where the players play characters, not gods. They make decisions which are character actions and hope to achieve some result through their decisions.Check this out: "my character" is completely arbitrary. Compare D&D to most online freeform play, like you'd get on a MUSH, for example: isn't it funny how someone else can decide to injure or kill "your character" (even arbitrarily if he wants)? That's not how most freeformers do it, certainly. Look at how much "my character" varies from game to game, too. Some groups flat-out assume "my character" includes a supporting cast of NPCs you invented, or maybe even a whole country. I think someone previously mentioned how you can explicitly use character points to buy contacts in WoD somewhere on this thread, too. Let's look at just the word "character," too. A character isn't just a person. It's this thing in a fictional work. Real people don't come with theme and symbolism and all this other baggage. Just as important as the person named Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire is the particular context in which we see him: seeing that person in those specific scenes is what builds up the character. If he was a real person and you just followed him around, you'd see him in a lot of other contexts where he did a lot of things, too. Show him at another point in his life and there might not even be anything interesting about him. It's all about the scenes he's in and the way they expose a particular fragment of his personality. With that in mind, isn't the ability to set that up also potentially part of "my character"?
Roxlimn 03-23-07, 10:33 AM	ArcTan: You're just arguing in bad faith if you think no rules-obsessed DM or player has ever argued this. ("You can't do that -- that's a tactic from this tactical feat and you haven't taken it! It wouldn't be fair!") As far as I can tell, no one has ever questioned any DM's decision to incorporate feat and spell mechanics into native PC abilities on the basis of "it's not fair." Even if such a person were to exist, his stand is fundamentally unsupportable, since D&D quite plainly states that the DM is given free reign on which rules to use for which purposes. It's also different because with a puzzle I can artificially constrain choice in such a way as to frame the puzzle as a puzzle. This is frequently not the case with social situations, or if I do make it the case with social situations it becomes contrived. (The requisite "courtroom scene" in Bioware games where you're a defense lawyer in a courtroom with ridiculous rules for how arguing works.) That's not usually how it works, actually. Real social situations usually are constrained in the kinds of choices you can make and the kinds of words you get to use. If you don't know what to say and how to say it, you're not even in the game. Once you know the base rules and the kinds of options that are open to you, the rest of it is just skill or personal talent, with maybe a little bit of wiggle room. You could say the exact same thing as a high school president, but he gets to be president because he knows the right timing, the right intonation to produce the right innuendo, and the right people to back him up. It's not all about the connections either. If you've met anyone with real Charisma, you'd know the kind of impact presence and personal skill can make. It's very much possible to model it after a puzzle game not unlike a maze or a game of cards. This can be in a very handwavy New Age gaming kind of way -- "Who thinks the characters should survive? Let's vote!" -- or a way that's slightly more game-y, like giving players Action Points or Story Tokens that they can play. ("I'm going to spend all my Action Points right now so that my mentally retarded character miraculously solves the riddle.") Either way, Ick. As in, Ick. 1) I don't think a game has to be something that challenges your own innate abilities. We call things games that are nothing more than tests of random chance (craps, blackjack) and things where there isn't any real winning or losing (Truth or Dare, Pass the Ghost Story, etc.) To be perfectly fair, blackjack isn't just a test of random chance. It's also test of how well you can predict probabilities, consciously and subconsciously. The best Blackjack players can consistently make money playing it because they know the odds (and yes, the odds are stacked in favor of the house). I can play a house myself to a draw, but I'm not good enough to make money off of it consistently. Most players just lose money, period. a_psh: The thing about scenes where you're talking a lot, which is what most people call "roleplaying," is that you're still narrating stuff, too. You add details to the world on the fly, summarize unimportant actions instead of dragging them out forever, and generally frame the "acting" part of roleplaying with all this other stuff, which is narration. Because the acting by itself doesn't take you anywhere. And, just like those combat scenes, good rules can help structure that narration. I'm not against rules that structure narration. In fact, lots of supplemental material in DMG2 and Dungeoncraft do just this, WHICH AGAIN MEANS THAT YOU CAN'T SAY THAT D&D HAS GONE NOWHERE. More structure for narration is a big help for fledging DMs and players who don't know how to narrate or are too shy to improvise. What I am against is your insinuation that we should cater to these players TO THE DETRIMENT OF EVERY OTHER PLAYER and the implied notion that all these other players are idiots, or bad for the game, or should just be left dead in the gutter. I want you to see that "Enh, all this stuff? Just freeform it!" is also a terrible cop-out. Most especially for all the people who then turn around and say that those freeform-y scenes are the heart of D&D. Here's the rant I wish I'd written, in many ways: In all likelihood, a better rant since it doesn't include insulting every other type of gamer who plays the game. Even so, why are you assuming that the way you found D&D fun was the way I found D&D fun? If I just wanted to roleplay freeform, I just did it without playing D&D. Before and after D&D sessions, my friends and I would often just spout out something of freeform sessions about all kind of stuff that didn't involve rules. And we didn't pay anyone to do that. Except maybe the pizza guy and the electric company. The most fun I've had in D&D was when I actually used the rules to roleplay a character I made. D&D has made characterization better than ever before, and you just can't get this kind of crunch support for characterization in almost any other game. Even in your vaunted DitV, all I've seen is just evidence of a game I don't want to play. A D&D character sheet can contain all kinds of characterization from 6 abilities, to saves, to equipment, to skills, to feats to special abilities and spells. Every one of these - every skill, every ability nuance, every feat, every spell - could tell a different story about my character. And I get to use them in-combat and out of it. I haven't seen any game that featured this much character building. Ever. In terms of the former, the author flat-out tells you what his design philosophy is and how he imagined you'd be playing the game, which does, in fact, help you play the game. Or, if you don't want to play the game, it lets you pick it up, flip through the book, and go "Yeah, this isn't for me." When you pick up the PHB and see that Combat is an entire chapter unto itself, isn't that sort of a dead giveaway? Heck, just looking at the character sheet, I can see Weapons and Attack modifiers figuring prominently on the sheet. Was exactly in the PHB character sheet makes anyone think that this game doesn't figure combat prominently? I mean, there's like 5 rows for ATTACK written right in front in big bold letters! HP, AC, Saving Throws, Protective Items... In fact, going only by the character sheet, I'd say that this was purely a wargame. What's that? Declare an action. Roll a die. Then stop and apply resources to modify the final outcome, if you so choose. Imagine action points on serious crack, and built into the game rather than tacked on. That's a lot of player choice, a fun game-like experience, and an interesting roleplaying situation (what are the challenges you decide your character should fail?). It depends. I find it insulting that you presume to know what's fun for me and apparently everyone else on the planet. I can see where more developed FiTM would benefit D&D. Indeed, it's already headed in that direction with Action Points and Fate Points, and spells and Immediate Actions. Having said that, I think that FiTE is more appropriate for tactical combat action because IMO, it more appropriately simulates the fast action of combat, and the immutable nature of its results. I can't see tactical players having fun playing poker in the middle of a Warhammer 40k resolution sequence. Also, the trick with social situations in real life is that they're like icebergs: 90% is hidden below the surface. Not really. For the most clueless people, yes, most of it is absolutely inscrutable. For the socially skilled, reading the mood and leanings of a room and a particular person is doable, even easy. The best social chameleons can blend into any social situation seamlessly. A Leader not only blends in - he reads people and convinces them that they want to side with him! Of course, foreknowledge is always a great advantage, but much of how people feel can be discerned from nonverbal signals, even if you don't know why they feel that way. There is a reason why a "faux pas" is such a disastrous social event. Since we're talking about storytelling in an informal context, my measure of "good" is at least 75%, if not 100%, about fun... I think what is meant is that your idea of "fun" isn't the same as Arrowhen's. My idea of "fun" rather greatly contrasts with yours as well, if you think that DitV is "the best game ever." Those might seem weird, but it's not like character death means dick in D&D, anyway. The likelihood of random, unthematic death is what necessitated all that resurrection magic in the first place. And that resurrection magic in turn changes death into something survivable. The big choice to actually "retire" a character is often still left mostly up to the player that created it. Again, in fairness, D&D has made strides towards making this optional. Actions Points in Eberron stresses the added power to save your character if he needs saving (since most unthematic deaths come about from unlucky rolls) which is coupled with a concomittant decrease in the availability of resurrection magic. The mechanics of this could be made more streamlined, but I don't believe that making it core and unchangeable will win a lot of fans. Some people rather like random PC death. What's surprising is how much of it we do covertly. For example, do players often narrate their own actions in your games? Not so covertly. Quite overtly, in fact. It's a truism in D&D that if the player wants to ham up the actions his character is doing, you should feel free to let him be up until the point that he's becoming an attention hog or he's violating game rules. This is, in fact, exactly the sense in that D&D is cooperative - the DM sets the scene, the players get to act. How the scene ends is subject to player decision, but the range of possibility is often part of the set itself, and under the purview of the DM. Most attempts to do a mystery story in D&D blow chunks... Correction: most attempts you're aware ofto do mystery in D&D sucks. That's not always the case. Mysteries don't always hinge on finding clues. In fact, getting hung up on finding clues is often the part where people can't see the forest for the trees. A found clue is a dramatic event and that is what mysteries are about - events. Whether you find the clue or not, events happen inexorably. Finding clues allows you to turn the sequence of events, but even if you don't find these clues, events should still proceed apace. In fact, some of the best mystery stories involve the hero bumbling about, missing absolutely obvious clue after clue after clue until he sees the one dramatic clue that "solves the case" for him. That's Hitchcock suspense at work, and you can include elements of that in your D&D game. You can make a sequence of clues absolutely fool-proof. The characters WILL solve the case, eventually. Or you can do something else. It's entirely up to you as the DM. Of course, I confess that much of this comes from experience, Dungeoncraft, and reading the entire line of Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle, but as I said earlier, there's only so much you can put inside a rulebook. With that in mind, isn't the ability to set that up also potentially part of "my character"? The ability, no. It depends what you mean by "character" and "roleplay." You see, when I say "roleplay," I'm talking about making a character and then playing him in an immersive experience. Getting to set up scenes that affect my character's development isn't part of my character's innate experience, and giving those kinds of decisions to me as a player ruins my sense of immersion and suspension of disbelief. That's why I don't want to play DitV as you've described it. Arrowhen: I'm all for a better skill game in general. Social skills aren't the only ones that are suffering. The Open Locks, Traps, and other such skill-oriented activities all are in the same boat. It's gotten so that players sometimes find it MORE fun to spring the trap than it is to allow the Rogue to disarm it. When your players are preferring to do stupid things, there's clearly a problem with the system. That's 3rd Edition. We have lots and lots of options for making more powerful and more varied characters, but there's still no meaningful advice on what to do with them, on how to take those powerful, varied characters. We're still promised the ability to tell fun stories, but we're still not given any real guidelines for how, except for the same old "ignore the rules if they get in the way." You must be joking!!! There's TONS of advice on how to make the game more fun. The CR system itself is a very concerte and omnipresent attempt to make the game more fun for the newbie. It may not work perfectly, but it sure works better than the HD crap we had before. They're also way more transparent about the rules, how they work, and what changing them around might do. That allows you to gun for the game you like more easily. There are tips and tricks for the DM to make his game run more smoothly and how to determine what his players like (and give it to them). There are guidelines for how to manage players at the table. I mean, what?!?!? This is more advice on how to have fun with the game than has ever been given in any edition of D&D, and there's books and books of the stuff. I can personally attest that it's improved my DMing style - it's helped me to see that I needed to cater to my players more than I already was. Dungeon Design is itself a way the game handholds you through a type of game that's considered fun by a lot of people. There's stuff on adventure design and campaign design. Playing everything out round-by-round, blow-by-blow is fine in an old-school dungeon crawl (which are damned fun, by the way, don't get me wrong) where every fight is a "loot or death" matter, but sometimes one fight is just more important than another, and there should be a way for the rules to reflect that, to speed through the warm up encounters (without leaving them out altogether) and to slow down, zoom in, and thoroughly explore all the details of the really dramatic ones. There ARE ways to speed up unimportant encounters. Of course, I had already gleaned much of that myself, but this is covered in Dungeoncraft in Dungeon Mag. There IS a way to use the rules to reflect this, but as with everything else (campaign building, for instance), D&D provides you more with a set of Lego bricks than a set of instructions. Of course, there's little point to having instructions if you didn't have the Lego bricks to begin with. Archtyrant Terevoth: By creating hard rules to determine what happens during social interaction, you've gone from a game to a straight narration. That no longer is a game of any kind. In fact you're saying, "Lets skip this part so that we can get back to the real game." That is, in fact, quite wrong. By creating MORE game where social interaction exists, it becomes more of a game, not less. It's less of an unstructured argument game between DM and player, but that kind of game was never in the D&D system to begin with. Arguably, having results predetermined by numerical game elements also makes "roleplaying" more straightforward. After all, when you play Hamlet, you ARE playing a role, and you don't have any more creative control over that than any predetermined outcome. It's often confusing what we mean when we say "roleplaying" and that leads to plenty of these misunderstandings. For instance: On the other hand if you want role-playing to be part of the game, taking away the impact of player-choice during role-playing sections of the adventure is completely counter to the idea of a game. You see, when entering into a conversation with the king to enlist his aid, I get to choose what angle I'm going to take to try to convince him, I get to choose what sort of things I'm going to say. In this case, when you say you want "roleplaying" being "part of the game," the game you're referring to is the out-of-game social game you play with your DM in acting out a role freeform. This is not in the D&D system and is arguably more incoporated in more narrative systems. Moreover, who's to say that none of the factors you said would matter in a "social game?" If the game were more nuanced than two die rolls, all these choices could easily be made to affect the outcome. Take combat, for instance. In 2e D&D, you essentially rolled just one die and subtract from a pool of HP. That was combat. There were some things you could do to affect that, but by and large, these were "freeform" just as all those factors you mentioned now are in the skill game. In 3e, combat is more nuanced and that means that doing things like "moving to his side" or "slipping under his legs" could have solid mechanical representation. At the very least, such a maneuver would gain you +2 or so. Thus, these things NOW matter where they previously did not. In the same way, the choice between an insult and the "right thing said" could be made more mechanically incorporated - more relevant choices could be represented in the skill game. The same charge could be made on the Open Locks check. It doesn't matter if you sing loudly or jump up and down when you're picking a lock. I'm looking at a social encounter as a puzzle encounter. But social stuff is complex, so lets look at a simpler puzzle. All the basic rules apply, but it's much easier to understand. Lets use a much simpler puzzle. A riddle. So your characters are walking in a dungeon and they come across a riddle. Now, this riddle has a right answer (possibly more than one) and a bunch of wrong ones. Arguably, the game would benefit much more from incoporating rules for making puzzle challenges than from incoporating poker, but I've yet to see a_psh or ArcTan agree with me on it, or even push for it themselves. Clearly, they're more interested in marginalizing hated gamers than they are in actually improving the game for everyone. Jack Daniels: My ideal version of D&D? Something that keeps the streamlined nicities of 3rd edition (everything is d20 + modifiers vs. a DC, one EXP chart for all classes, multiclassing is an intuitive matter of one class level to one character level) and the emphasis on tactical movement (speed in squares, reach and facing in the monster stat blocks) but does away with all the unneccessary mess (attacks of opportunity, over-complicated combat actions, feats, skill points, 90% of prestige classes, and even a few base classes). It's the way I'm playing it now, and I've never been happier. The problem has never been with the rules or with the mechanics. You're still using 3e and things have changed. It's always been you. The way you DM'd changed with the new edition, and your players simply took their cues from you. Then you changed back. You took control of the game and played it the way you wanted. That's why it "plays better now." I've never played D&D in the purely mechanical sense. I can see where that might ring other people's bell (and I support continued support for them), but it just doesn't do anything for me. When I ask players for their characters, I ask for concept first, sheets second. I also make it apparent that I WILL accomodate rule changes and mechanical improvisation on my part to make character (but not mechanical) concepts work. That makes a huge difference apparently, since my main problem is people who take entire boatloads of feats, classes and skills they KNOW are weak, just for the sake of concept. Or they might just like making me squirm this way and that to make otherwise mechanically untenable characters work. It's a tossup.
Arrowhen 03-23-07, 10:49 AM	Arrowhen, Here's something about your speech example, by the way: notice how you rolled for the bits you elided and not so much for the bits you acted out? Was that deliberate or subconscious? Oh, yeah, that was totally deliberate. Even though I was writing is as though I was the player, I was really imagining the scene more from a DM standpoint (probably cause 80-90% of the time, I'm the one DMing). If I was running that scene, I figure that between the character's stats, the player's decisions, and the dice, we would have determined about halfway through that the character had succeeded in winning the crowd over. At that point, I could have just said "OK, the crowd's totally willing to storm the palace for you, what are you going to do next?" But it was obvious that the player was still having fun with that scene, so why not let him go on and enjoy his success for a while before moving on to the next one?
Grand Theft Otto 03-23-07, 11:31 AM	You're missing my argument. I'm not necessarily saying that you can't do that for combat. Because you can. I'm just saying combat is more interesting and fun with randomness mixed in. The GM could arbitrarily decide that a troll's defenses are vulnerable to a low slash at its legs. So anything directed low works, while high attacks fail. Of course, this game amounts to rock-paper-scissors or battleship. It's boring to play because there's no actual skill to it. You're just taking wild guesses and hoping they work out. We could do that, but it wouldn't be as fun as the current combat system we have. And dice are ultimately there in combat because they add fun. Social situations aren't like that (at least not under a good DM). You can do some research on your NPC's motivations, on what kinds of things he's done in the past. You can use divinations to help guide you and so on. There are things you can do to get an idea of how the NPC thinks and what sort of things may influence him. Again, its appeal to the petty tyrant. Given the rabid weasel nature of gamers, thats a ****** idea as a base system. I'll get it out of the way now. I think most gamers fall into the sub human category. You need an actual system aside from hoping the guy running the show isnt a total asshat. Sure, the guy can be an asshat anyways, but it gets it out in the open, and hopefully enough normal people will be playing that their type dies out. As far as the DM playing the NPC in character, he does that stuff all the time. You as a player do that stuff all the time. When the DM's seductive female NPC comes up to you, you get to decide if your character goes with her or not. Do you really want your character's reaction to be decided by some system? Do you think that would make for a more fun gaming experience? Honestly, sometimes yes - yes I do. I am not going to be able to actually seduce my brother in law's character, nor do I really want to. I cannot actually describe mind shattering terror as a shoggoth splits open the streets in front of the characters and emerges. My descriptions, no matter how well done, are not going to inflict actual lasting psychological damage on the players. 2nd edition Ravenloft had fear, horro and madness checks, Cthulhu has sanity, Deadlands has Guts, Unknown Armies has obsessions, madness meters, etc. Sometimes a bump from the system makes RP better, particularly for the average gamer who will stand in front of something that should either move them to tears or make them wet their pants and say "Whatever, I kill it and take its stuff". It helps guide players to actually thinkabout how their character would react. Moreover, they can be averted by voluntarily reacting somewhat appropriately.
Rump_Wrangler 03-23-07, 11:43 AM	[QUOTE=Grand Theft Otto;11864442I think most gamers fall into the sub human category.[/QUOTE] Absolutely, and a lot of the people on these boards (with their inferiority complexes that manifest as a revolting superiority complex) really perpetuate the bad gamer rep.
Grand Theft Otto 03-23-07, 11:45 AM	Sorry, you can't convince him, you don't have any ranks in diplomacy. Sorry, you can't choose that spell load out, your character doesn't have enough spellcraft to know any better. Sorry, but your PC has only 6 int, he's not going to take a good feat, he's going to take toughness, cause he doesn't know any better. If you dont see the difference between enabling the option for success because of a difference between player and character capabilities and disabling failure because of the difference between player and character capabilities, I dont see a point in continuing the conversation.
Grand Theft Otto 03-23-07, 11:46 AM	Absolutely, and a lot of the people on these boards (with their inferiority complexes that manifest as a revolting superiority complex) really perpetuate the bad gamer rep. Man, you think thats bad, try working in a gaming store. 3 years in highschool and taking crap to cons left severely jaded. /shudder
Grand Theft Otto 03-23-07, 11:54 AM	The quality of the play, as opposed to the percieved quality, is paramount. Gotta disagree. I'd rather "think" I had a great time, than actually have a great time and not know it. :)
HerbalTea 03-23-07, 11:55 AM	*steps out of the dnd-playing room after a few decades* Theres a new edition after 1st? oh well, I prefer this one. *goes back into the aforementioned hallowed halls of discovery*
Arrowhen 03-23-07, 12:00 PM	More structure for narration is a big help for fledging DMs and players who don't know how to narrate or are too shy to improvise. What I am against is your insinuation that we should cater to these players TO THE DETRIMENT OF EVERY OTHER PLAYER and the implied notion that all these other players are idiots, or bad for the game, or should just be left dead in the gutter. That's no worse than your insinuation that the only people who might want more structure for narration are clueless noobs or social retards. What I don't understand is why you think more structure for narration would be detrimental to anyone. Again, in fairness, D&D has made strides towards making this optional. Actions Points in Eberron stresses the added power to save your character if he needs saving (since most unthematic deaths come about from unlucky rolls) which is coupled with a concomittant decrease in the availability of resurrection magic. The mechanics of this could be made more streamlined, but I don't believe that making it core and unchangeable will win a lot of fans. Some people rather like random PC death. Right, but even if some kind of Action Point mechanic was Core, no player is going to be forced to use them to avoid random PC death. It's not like a DM is going to say "OK, you fall down a pit and die. Ooops! No you don't; I forgot you still had an Action Point left." You can still choose to die randomly, and use Action Points to let your character do all kinds of cool stuff (get an extra attack, emulate a feat you don't have, boost a spell, etc., etc.) How many players are going to be unhappy that their characters can do cool stuff? I'm all for a better skill game in general. Social skills aren't the only ones that are suffering. The Open Locks, Traps, and other such skill-oriented activities all are in the same boat. It's gotten so that players sometimes find it MORE fun to spring the trap than it is to allow the Rogue to disarm it. When your players are preferring to do stupid things, there's clearly a problem with the system. Agreed. You must be joking!!! There's TONS of advice on how to make the game more fun. The CR system itself is a very concerte and omnipresent attempt to make the game more fun for the newbie. It may not work perfectly, but it sure works better than the HD crap we had before. But I wasn't just talking about advice on how to make the game more fun--there is some of that, just like there's been in every edition--I was talking about ways for the system to deliver on its promise of allowing you to tell fun stories. There are tips and tricks for the DM to make his game run more smoothly and how to determine what his players like (and give it to them). There are guidelines for how to manage players at the table. Pretty much the same advice that was in 2nd Ed. (Campaign Sourcebook and Catacomb Guide), only in this edition there's a much stronger undertone of "we make more money off of players than we do off of you, so give them whatever they want." There ARE ways to speed up unimportant encounters. Of course, I had already gleaned much of that myself, but this is covered in Dungeoncraft in Dungeon Mag. I haven't seen the specific articles you're talking about, so I can't comment on them. I will say, however, that pacing and focus are so important to good drama that they need to be an integral part of the core rules. The rules are the game's "camera", and right now that camera is locked into one specific, unchangeable shot*. It's just "what's this character doing for six seconds? OK, now what's this character doing for six seconds?" (And for anything outside of that, it's pretty much the DM turning off the camera and narrating over a blank screen.) What we need is control over the camera. We need rules that let us zoom in for intense, emotional closeups, pull back for wide shots of the whole battlefield, slow down for Matrix-style "bullet time" shots, etc., etc. * Kind of like the art in the 3rd Edition rulebooks, where just about every picture is of a character or monster just standing there.
High Octane 03-23-07, 12:15 PM	Well, for starters, I want everyone here to see how "It's not the system's responsibility to teach you how to make the game fun" is a terrible cop-out. I want you to see that "Enh, all this stuff? Just freeform it!" is also a terrible cop-out. Most especially for all the people who then turn around and say that those freeform-y scenes are the heart of D&D. Here's the rant I wish I'd written, in many ways: So.... Your problem with D&D is its too open ended?
Arrowhen 03-23-07, 12:20 PM	So.... Your problem with D&D is its too open ended? "Missing vital components" is not the same as "open ended".
Rump_Wrangler 03-23-07, 12:25 PM	Man, you think thats bad, try working in a gaming store. 3 years in highschool and taking crap to cons left severely jaded. /shudder Okay, my main question would be; how did you handle the smell?
Solik 03-23-07, 12:28 PM	What I don't understand is why you think more structure for narration would be detrimental to anyone. Are you not reading the posts these guys are writing? They're not just talking about adding some structure options for people who want to use them. They're advocating changing the ruleset entirely. You've got guys that want to scrap 90% of the rules, removing everything related to mechanical character building. You've got guys saying D&D should be like DitV, and if it's not, then it's contributing to brain damage. This isn't an appeal for a Storyscape book. This is an appeal to change the core of the game to something that appeals only to these elitists. Pretty much the same advice that was in 2nd Ed. (Campaign Sourcebook and Catacomb Guide), only in this edition there's a much stronger undertone of "we make more money off of players than we do off of you, so give them whatever they want." This is startlingly cynical, particularly since it follows your discussion of "fun." The rules are the game's "camera", and right now that camera is locked into one specific, unchangeable shot*. It's just "what's this character doing for six seconds? OK, now what's this character doing for six seconds?" Stop pretending that the game is just combat and DM narration (see my response to Jack Daniel for a full refutation of this assertion).
Roxlimn 03-23-07, 12:53 PM	Arrowhen: That's no worse than your insinuation that the only people who might want more structure for narration are clueless noobs or social retards. You must be referring to Archtyrant Terevoth. I don't recall ever saying that more structure for the game was bad in and of itself. And I certainly didn't equate that with social ability or inability of any sort. What I don't understand is why you think more structure for narration would be detrimental to anyone. As Solik mentions, I don't mind adding a sourcebook or two for storytelling technique. In fact, I recommend Dungeoncraft at every opportunity! I even recommended looking up whatever sources you can find to help you. Certainly, more of these geared particularly to D&D can't hurt. However, a_psh is NOT talking about adding rules to a game. He's talking about changing the fundamental nature of the game to something like DitV. That is something I don't agree with. Right, but even if some kind of Action Point mechanic was Core, no player is going to be forced to use them to avoid random PC death. It's not like a DM is going to say "OK, you fall down a pit and die. Ooops! No you don't; I forgot you still had an Action Point left." It isn't just random PC death. If every random mechanic in the game were made FitM with Action Point-like resources, then combat would be fundamentally different. Players can't choose NOT to use Action Points, because that would become the main vehicle by which they won critical battles, and that would simply not do. Having it as an optional addition only for players as a way of ensuring success on the battlefield for added "cool" effect is okay - it's still optional. But once even the NPCs are using it - it becomes more of a necessity than an option. But I wasn't just talking about advice on how to make the game more fun--there is some of that, just like there's been in every edition--I was talking about ways for the system to deliver on its promise of allowing you to tell fun stories. However the game unfolds, coauthorship, or railroaded or whatever, at the end, it's some kind of story. Making the story fun to go through IS delivering on the promise of telling fun stories. Pretty much the same advice that was in 2nd Ed. (Campaign Sourcebook and Catacomb Guide), only in this edition there's a much stronger undertone of "we make more money off of players than we do off of you, so give them whatever they want." Nope. I read both of those books and they were mostly crap. As you say, chords, not music theory. The DMG 3e is just a little more music theory. DMG2 is loads of game advice. Most books now contain something to this effect. I haven't seen the specific articles you're talking about, so I can't comment on them. I will say, however, that pacing and focus are so important to good drama that they need to be an integral part of the core rules. I've had this argument with a_psh. In theory, I agree with you. Various Dragon and Dungeon articles on pacing and focusing are very helpful for DMing purposes. They are extremely helpful for getting a good grip on the game. At the same time, the rule books only contain so many pages and can only contain so much information. You can't use Lego instructions without Lego bricks to build them with. You can obtain tips for pacing and camera and focusing from a lot of other sources, not all of them D&D-specific. The core books need to focus on the basic mechanics of the game because that kind of content can only be gotten from D&D core books. Beyond that, manipulation of the rules, handling social situations that come up often, and all kinds of important game stuff are more important than this pacing thing - and again, only the core books can supply this stuff. What we need is control over the camera. We need rules that let us zoom in for intense, emotional closeups, pull back for wide shots of the whole battlefield, slow down for Matrix-style "bullet time" shots, etc., etc. 1. Action Points? Saving Throws? Multiple Attack Rolls on Full Attack? Complex Spell Effects? Yup. Got them all. Got your Focus covered. 2. Battlefield rules from Heroes of Battle? Tips for speeding up combat in DMG? Averaging dice and not rolling unimportant events? Yup. Got them. Got your Pan Shots covered. 3. Readied Actions, Immediate Actions, Player Description? Time Stop? multi-action Maneuvers? Combat Reflexes? Yup. Got your slow-down, too.
johnkretzer 03-23-07, 02:50 PM	Where is the challenge in figuring out the thing the omnipotent GM expected you to do in the first place? If you want to really be challenged, put some limits on what the GM can do. Then have him take the gloves off. Y'know, those gloves he always wears, because he automatically and instantly "wins" any time he wants to. Give a friend a limited range of powers and then let him rip into you for all he's worth. (The Lord of the Rings board game -- the one with the hobbits and all the mini-maps for different areas -- is a pretty good example of this: you can bring in a human being to play Sauron, and he can be as vicious and conniving as he wants without breaking the game, and good solid adversarial play results.) To talk about "challenge" in the face of an all-powerful GM is silly. You have to divide everything up between the group somehow. I'm not talking about axing the GM (that's certainly an option, but I don't want to go there right now, except to say that you can easily do it either way). Axing the idea of "GM is God" is absolutely vital, however, since that also gives us "GM is sole author." And then the other players aren't doing anything. Let's face it: either everyone is actually taking part in the imaginative part of the game, or it's not fun for anyone but the GM. All of the players then need to negotiate about what's happening in the fictional world they've created in order to go anywhere. Part of that is to figure out who gets narrational priority over what. But the game is absolutely no fun unless everyone gets some way to pitch an idea. And the whole problem of task resolution is a good example of why D&D makes it look like players have more power than they actually do (which then causes frustration when they figure out otherwise). The point of any game is to have fun. Since D&D has already been turned into a cooperative thing where the only antagonist absolutely positively has to want the other players to "win" in order for the game to even get off the ground, it's pointless to talk about D&D as written as any kind of challenging activity. That's all fake beyond belief. What's left is, in fact, the meat of any RPG: the social fun of making stuff up together with your friends. This is the thing game designers need to support and enhance. Because, once again, otherwise you're just stuck with freeform + an ugly wargame. It's what the designers make out of it, too. Otherwise we'd all just be playing freeform, since it's way cheaper than D&D. Actually, creating consensus is pretty trivial. Freeformers do it all the time. Consensus? Cakewalk. A small group of friends is pretty good about agreeing on things. The real challenge (and, yes, for anyone in the know, I am basically just crappily paraphrasing Vincent Baker here, because he's so right about this that I really see no point not to) is to create good conflict. Conflict is hard because people often tend to hold back or, when they don't hold back, to take it personally. Good rules should help players generate interesting and dynamic conflicts, because those are awesome. That's not the same as "challenge"... though. Conflicts can be challenging, but only in a situation that is actually adversarial rather than fake-adversarial. There is, once again, minimal actual "challenge" in interacting with an all-powerful GM. Sorry for the too long of a lag in response time but I have been sick: Your veiw of the DM and how they are suppose to act are completely different from my own. Here a simple example maybe this will illustrate my differences. The party decides to go after a evil temple that has been hanging around in the background causeing trouble(it might be even from a character's background). The DM has serveral ways to set it up. 1) The 'Evil' All Powerful DM way: The temple is filled with with epic level clerics and creatures who end up making the PCs their slaves...This is bad and very wrong in my opinion. 2) The 'Good' All Powerful DM way: The temple is set up to provide a false sense of challenge but the PCs will win out no matter what. This also bad. Now according to you these are the only ways for a DM to do this. As the DM can't somehow hold back his power. 3) My Way: I think about what the PCs can handle in a fight...what is the knowledge of the bad guys have of the PCs(common tactics, or even if the fact if they know their coming), and other factors. Then I set up the temple to kill the PCs while keeping it within the partie's hands to deal with. The DM might be all powerful but NPCs aren't. Also there is usualy multiple ways to handle encounters set up by me even ideas I might not think of. But a DM can't be afraid of character death and players can't be resentful about their character's death. Now I used thinks this was the standard way of DMing, but it seems that people don't do this. Oh well. Anyway what I think you want is not a RPG as much as a very different type of game from what I would call a RPG. So I'll agree to disagree at this point.
High Octane 03-23-07, 02:58 PM	"Missing vital components" is not the same as "open ended". WHAT vital components are missing? I'm asking you!
Augurer 03-23-07, 03:09 PM	As far as I can tell, no one has ever questioned any DM's decision to incorporate feat and spell mechanics into native PC abilities on the basis of "it's not fair." Even if such a person were to exist, his stand is fundamentally unsupportable, since D&D quite plainly states that the DM is given free reign on which rules to use for which purposes. What is the point in having any rules at all if we're all going to agree that the DM can arbitrarily choose to follow certain ones, and not others? A set of rules is supposed to be just that: a set of rules. Certainly the DM can break the rules, but he/she/it should always have good reason in doing so, and it should be done in a "fair" manner. If a DM is allowed to ignore rules carte blanche, they're arbitrarily deciding success or failure, regardless of how well one role-plays or roll-plays. The way D&D is intended to be played, IMO, is for the DM to provide challenges which are conceivably defeatable or avoidable for the players. If the DM is going to create super-powered (essentially Gestalt in the case of adding feats/powers to PCs that normally can't/don't get them) characters and pit them against standard PCs, that's not much fun for the PCs.
High Octane 03-23-07, 03:38 PM	The way D&D is intended to be played, IMO, is for the DM to provide challenges which are conceivably defeatable or avoidable for the players. If the DM is going to create super-powered (essentially Gestalt in the case of adding feats/powers to PCs that normally can't/don't get them) characters and pit them against standard PCs, that's not much fun for the PCs. Well to be fair, whats the difference between players facing a gestalt character of equal level or a regular character who is a few levels higher? Are you saying the second one is unfair? Fact of the matter is, it doesnt matter how it is created or even what is created really, the only thing that matters is that the challenge is FAIR.
Grand Theft Otto 03-23-07, 04:01 PM	Okay, my main question would be; how did you handle the smell? Leaving the door open helped unless you were running larger events. Then the reek of geek was mighty strong. Controlled breathing then. Its crazy how true the "cat **** man" stereotype is. Not everyone who plays is a spazz, but the hardcore in general frighten me.
Roxlimn 03-23-07, 04:04 PM	Augerer: What is the point in having any rules at all if we're all going to agree that the DM can arbitrarily choose to follow certain ones, and not others? A set of rules is supposed to be just that: a set of rules. The point of having a pool of rules to draw upon is so that the DM can choose the right kind of rules to have the right kind of impact in the game. The DM can't break the rules because he's not even bound by them. He's only following guidelines, and very flexible ones at that. A DM can't ignore rules because rules are how he structures his game, his challenge, and his very world. If he ignores his own setup blatantly and randomly, he may as well not have any! For any given situation, and moreso for border situations, you could have a set of mutually contradictory rules in D&D. If you don't know this yet, you don't know the rules set well enough. The DM sets the tone and pace of his game by deciding on which rules he uses for which purposes and why. For instance, if he's figuring the result of a minor skirmish outside the sight or hearing of the PCs, he could just average the die rolls and calculate the results, or simply rule that one side wins depending on his fancy. He is not, in any manner, forced to mechanically run the conflict, even though this is technically "against the rules." Likewise, he can decide for your character to modify his Will save with Cha instead of Wis, or a Climb check with Dex instead of Str, if he feels that the situation warrants it. As long as what he's doing makes the players happy, it's "fair enough."
a_psh 03-23-07, 04:12 PM	3) My Way: I think about what the PCs can handle in a fight...what is the knowledge of the bad guys have of the PCs(common tactics, or even if the fact if they know their coming), and other factors. Then I set up the temple to kill the PCs while keeping it within the partie's hands to deal with. The DM might be all powerful but NPCs aren't. Also there is usualy multiple ways to handle encounters set up by me even ideas I might not think of. But a DM can't be afraid of character death and players can't be resentful about their character's death.No, that is actually pretty close to what I'm talking about. I'm saying you're spending as much time watering down the hard-hitting conflict as you are pumping it up. Which makes it pretty lackluster for "Challenge me! Challenge me!" kind of play.
Reinforcements 03-23-07, 04:36 PM	Since responding to anyone specifically at this point would require a whole lot of digging and quoting and such that I don't want to do, I'm just gonna give my general feelings on the topic so far. I have to say that this thread has really made me think a lot about the game. I like D&D as it is (more or less), so I wouldn't want too much to change and I have no special desire to play a different game. I definitely agree, though, that the game could seriously benefit from some more rules and structure when it comes to story-telling, social interaction, and well, anything that isn't combat. What we have so far - skills like Diplomacy and Bluff - are a step in the right direction, but they don't work very well (especially Diplomacy). I think that there could - and should - be a system that handles things like pacing and framing and plot and negotiation and diplomacy that rivals the current combat system in depth and complexity, and I think those systems could coexist. It would be a very good thing for the game and everyone who plays it if D&D could become more of a cohesive role-playing experience instead of the wargame + story-time it largely is now. On a more specific note, I also agree that a game that purports to be about role-playing ought to provide a lot of structure toward that goal. It seems silly to me that so many people seem to have this idea that role-playing is something you do when your character isn't fighting. You should be role-playing your character ALL the time - and thus there should be sufficient structure all the time. Maybe some people think we already have that, but I don't, and I think we could really use it. I can no more accurately depict the force of personality, speech mannerisms, and emotional reactions of John Swallow, the smooth-talking pirate with a heart of gold than I can his amazing skill with a sabre. That's why the game exists - to let me do that. I wish it would.
Roxlimn 03-23-07, 05:11 PM	a_psh: No, that is actually pretty close to what I'm talking about. I'm saying you're spending as much time watering down the hard-hitting conflict as you are pumping it up. Which makes it pretty lackluster for "Challenge me! Challenge me!" kind of play. Every game is the same on that point, even Magic the Gathering and World of Warcraft. All these games have artificial markers that allow you to estimate how much challenge is offered in order for you to customize how difficult your game is. You can't pit a competition level deck with a casual deck, and you can't just go out unprotected into most MMORPGs. Even in Settlers, you can't pit expert players against rank newbies, and there's arguably even less structure in that game for estimating comparative challenge. So, too with tabletop miniatures. You have player rankings and point allowances in order for you to estimate challenge - a "challenge rating" of sorts. Chess is the same. Starcraft is the same. Heck, pretty much any wargame is the same. Reinforcements: I can no more accurately depict the force of personality, speech mannerisms, and emotional reactions of John Swallow, the smooth-talking pirate with a heart of gold than I can his amazing skill with a sabre. That's why the game exists - to let me do that. I wish it would. IN all fairness, the game DOES currently allow you to do that. Not very well, and there isn't much of a game attached to it, but to some extent it does allow you to do that.
ArcTan 03-23-07, 05:17 PM	So.... Your problem with D&D is its too open ended? Yes. I don't see why this is a contradiction for anyone. If the D&D PHB literally contained 200 blank pages and one page that said "Do anything you want! Your IMAGINATION is the key to the game!", I would feel like I'd just been swindled out of a lot of money. For people who care about the parts of the game that take place outside of the tactical wargame, that's pretty much what D&D is like. (And that's what D&D 1e was even *more* like, which was why it's even more bogus.)
ArcTan 03-23-07, 05:19 PM	a_psh: Every game is the same on that point, even Magic the Gathering and World of Warcraft. All these games have artificial markers that allow you to estimate how much challenge is offered in order for you to customize how difficult your game is. Yes, but you don't spend as much *time* customizing how difficult your game is. You don't have one poor schlub whose job it is to constantly hover over the game and adjust its difficulty level whenever it gets too high, because the difficulty level is so unpredictable -- and dangerous -- otherwise. D&D as a wargame is like if Magic: the Gathering *always* had one dude actually building a deck and one dude who had access to a deck made out of all the cards that had ever been printed, and the dude with all the cards had to make constant decisions about what cards to bring out when in order to create the best possible challenge.
johnkretzer 03-23-07, 05:24 PM	No, that is actually pretty close to what I'm talking about. I'm saying you're spending as much time watering down the hard-hitting conflict as you are pumping it up. Which makes it pretty lackluster for "Challenge me! Challenge me!" kind of play. Really? How is that watering down the 'hard-hitting' conflict? That was a brief example and not what you ascribe the role of the DM to be. Being how I do get TPKs(also people don't come back from the dead at the drop of a hat in my game)... Don't worry about it. Has I said before we have very different concepts of what a DM should do and to the very nature of what a RPG is about. I have read you example of what RPing should be earlier and find it to many thing but Role Playing. As a matter of fact most Role-Players I know would call it metagaming. Which is fun for you obviously but not for me. I am curious as you have stated in other threads and this one D&D is for the immature who don't know what Role-Playing is yet(true you might have said it nicer but it is what you are saying) why these posts? Why is your way the the only correct way? What people do for fun/escapism is their own choice....all of it equaly valid in my opinion. So do you have anything of value to offer besides insults to the topic of D&D? Or are you here to just try to cause a RPG revolution to have D&D become what you want it to be? Or are you the writer of one of those(or all of those) independent games sytem trying to promote a inferior game(which I gotta say there are after reading up on them)? Like I said lets agree to disagree. Our opinion differ to greatly here.
ArcTan 03-23-07, 05:30 PM	You must be referring to Archtyrant Terevoth. I don't recall ever saying that more structure for the game was bad in and of itself. And I certainly didn't equate that with social ability or inability of any sort. But it's unnecessary because it'd displace the oh-so-necessary big thick chapter on grid combat and Attacks of Opportunity we now have in the PHB? And we'd be "marginalizing" gamers by trimming a little bit of that fat and putting in rules about something D&D currently does not address at all? However, a_psh is NOT talking about adding rules to a game. He's talking about changing the fundamental nature of the game to something like DitV. That is something I don't agree with. There is a middle ground. Right now most games of D&D *don't* follow D&D's hackneyed wargame-based rules for progression -- things like environment tables and random encounter tables and a set number of encounters per day. The wargame *does* intersperse with story events, social interactions, characterization, etc. -- it's just that there aren't any rules for this happening, so it only happens by rampant DM fiat, by DMs just saying things happen (which is what he means by "illusionism"). Which makes this part of the game far, far more uneven than the rest of D&D. (For all you say "It all comes down to the DM", in reality people don't say the quality of D&D 3e's combat system depends solely and utterly on the DM who runs it, because the rules hold him within certain constraints and try to keep things fair -- and yet people can't seem to conceive that the rest of the game could benefit from this kind of thing.) It isn't just random PC death. If every random mechanic in the game were made FitM with Action Point-like resources, then combat would be fundamentally different. Players can't choose NOT to use Action Points, because that would become the main vehicle by which they won critical battles, and that would simply not do. Having it as an optional addition only for players as a way of ensuring success on the battlefield for added "cool" effect is okay - it's still optional. But once even the NPCs are using it - it becomes more of a necessity than an option. Right now the idea of Action Points is to be a metagame label that explicitly marks characters as "important" -- you can't randomly kill the major villain of the story halfway through just because you got lucky any more than he can do the same to you. However the game unfolds, coauthorship, or railroaded or whatever, at the end, it's some kind of story. Making the story fun to go through IS delivering on the promise of telling fun stories. But usually it's the DM doing it, not D&D. Nope. I read both of those books and they were mostly crap. As you say, chords, not music theory. The DMG 3e is just a little more music theory. DMG2 is loads of game advice. Most books now contain something to this effect. Okay, see, you keep asking WHAT DO YOU WANT? so I'll say it again -- I want rules that actually *define* the story structure of a game rather than a set of vague advice telling the DM how he can exercise his godlike power to make things magically happen by fiat. In an ideal world, there wouldn't be a DM at all, or his role would be drastically reduced -- he really would just "play the world" or "play the NPCs", not act as the omnipotent Hand of God saying "And now for the sake of PACING and STORY I will FAST FORWARD the game by three weeks until the next SIGNIFICANT ENCOUNTER". Beyond that, manipulation of the rules, handling social situations that come up often, and all kinds of important game stuff are more important than this pacing thing - and again, only the core books can supply this stuff. You need to do all kinds of dirty little tricks to handle social situations because the rules leave this kind of thing completely open-ended. That's the problem. Replacing 100 pages of advice with 60 pages of an actual rule system seems like a net gain to me. 1. Action Points? Saving Throws? Multiple Attack Rolls on Full Attack? Complex Spell Effects? Yup. Got them all. Got your Focus covered. 2. Battlefield rules from Heroes of Battle? Tips for speeding up combat in DMG? Averaging dice and not rolling unimportant events? Yup. Got them. Got your Pan Shots covered. 3. Readied Actions, Immediate Actions, Player Description? Time Stop? multi-action Maneuvers? Combat Reflexes? Yup. Got your slow-down, too. We ask for story-based changes in scope, and instead we get "extra actions" dictated by mechanical capabilities in combat. Typical. There is a difference between a good camera crew and expert film director and, say, the automatic script that makes Soul Calibur 2 slow down when you do a ring-out.
Qwicksilver 03-23-07, 05:52 PM	Holy *&^&, this became some kind of giganto-huge thread since the last time i posted. D&D doesn't need more rules for roleplaying, it needs more meaningful prompts about roleplaying. I hope to god that roleplaying doesn't mean "I get to roll 1d20 + my diplomacy", for some people. Roleplaying isn't just what happens outside of battle, It really isn't. Roleplaying is everything about the game, even the battle mechanics, even the rules. Ideally what the rules and the mechanics are supposed to do is inform you as to what should or could happen. For Example: to me classes in d&d aren't empty receptacles for abilities, it's a roleplaying choice. An ideal class or prestige class is supposed to be a description that fits the flavor of who you want to be in D&D, and will include all the abilities and traits that you want and need to play that character. I spoke before about how it'd be cool if freeform games worked. I've heard of them, but I just don't know what they're about or how resolution of conflicts would work. With that said; I think that D&D is supposed to have mechanics and have descriptions and fluff that inform you about ways to play and about what is a recommended way to resolve battle, or recommended way to construct a dungeon, or construct story lines, character plots, campaigns, campaign settings, etc. The more D&D has hard and fast rules, the more it can become a numbers game. So having more "rules" for roleplaying, i don't think will help it. Taking all that fluff seriously and having players and DMs informed about what is recommended they do to help roleplaying along, is what should happen. Battle mechanics in some ways need to be explicitly stated because one is dealing with the physical reality of the place, but one shouldn't make "realism" the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal for any rule or anything written, for me, is to facilitate a way to get an immersive experience and a good story. About Fluff I completely object to fluff being called fluff. All that stuff that describes a classes tendencies and personalities. The things that describe the intangibles about a setting or a monster, a world, a building, all that. It's just as important as the hard numbers and abilities. That isn't to say it is as unbendable as the hard numbers and abilities. To the contrary: both the hard numbers and the roleplaying element should be firm but not nonnegotiable. Calling fluff "fluff" and calling the rules "rules" is part of what creates this rift between "roleplaying" and "game mechanic". Nothing in D&D should be completely hard and fast, and nothing should be completely disregarded either, without a good substitution or explanation.
ArcTan 03-23-07, 06:02 PM	ArcTan: As far as I can tell, no one has ever questioned any DM's decision to incorporate feat and spell mechanics into native PC abilities on the basis of "it's not fair." Even if such a person were to exist, his stand is fundamentally unsupportable, since D&D quite plainly states that the DM is given free reign on which rules to use for which purposes. Leave the players aside, then. How many DMs will automatically say "Oh, if I want the player to do *that*, I'll let him take this feat" and reach for a sourcebook instead of actually inventing the houserule that lets the PC do it? It seems to be pretty common behavior to me -- this sort of thing is one of the main things that justifies buying new sourcebooks. That's not usually how it works, actually. Real social situations usually are constrained in the kinds of choices you can make and the kinds of words you get to use. If you don't know what to say and how to say it, you're not even in the game. Once you know the base rules and the kinds of options that are open to you, the rest of it is just skill or personal talent, with maybe a little bit of wiggle room. If every real social situation were completely like this, life would feel like an adventure game with conversation trees. Even if it's *like* this, it needs to be more complex than just "Hit the NPC with the password" like in an '80s text adventure -- "Ask Dora about school" gives you instant access to Dora. That'd be just as dumb as running combats by saying "Anyone who knows that trolls are vulnerable to fire wins". You could say the exact same thing as a high school president, but he gets to be president because he knows the right timing, the right intonation to produce the right innuendo, and the right people to back him up. Right, and establishing this in a tense social situation involves a complex back-and-forth, trading power and advantages in various directions. A bit like a combat. Either way, Ick. As in, Ick. Both would work in the kind of game that they were designed for. To be perfectly fair, blackjack isn't just a test of random chance. It's also test of how well you can predict probabilities, consciously and subconsciously. The best Blackjack players can consistently make money playing it because they know the odds (and yes, the odds are stacked in favor of the house). Then they get kicked out for card-counting, because that's not how the casino intends you to play the game. I can play a house myself to a draw, but I'm not good enough to make money off of it consistently. Fine. Roulette, then. You get my point. a_psh: I'm not against rules that structure narration. In fact, lots of supplemental material in DMG2 and Dungeoncraft do just this Not really. I don't read Dungeoncraft, but I don't remember DMG2 having any rules at all, certainly not public ones that were an acknowledged part of the game -- more like advice telling the DM to start edging this one guy out of encounters if he takes too much spotlight, or pay attention to people's backstories and try to find a way to engage them. Illusionism. WHICH AGAIN MEANS THAT YOU CAN'T SAY THAT D&D HAS GONE NOWHERE. More structure for narration is a big help for fledging DMs and players who don't know how to narrate or are too shy to improvise. What I am against is your insinuation that we should cater to these players TO THE DETRIMENT OF EVERY OTHER PLAYER and the implied notion that all these other players are idiots, or bad for the game, or should just be left dead in the gutter. I still don't see where this "detriment" is coming from, and why you act like putting these rules into D&D would kill the game and make it pointless for everyone who, say, likes combat. In all likelihood, a better rant since it doesn't include insulting every other type of gamer who plays the game. Even so, why are you assuming that the way you found D&D fun was the way I found D&D fun? If I just wanted to roleplay freeform, I just did it without playing D&D. Before and after D&D sessions, my friends and I would often just spout out something of freeform sessions about all kind of stuff that didn't involve rules. And we didn't pay anyone to do that. Except maybe the pizza guy and the electric company. The most fun I've had in D&D was when I actually used the rules to roleplay a character I made. What, like rolling skill checks? That's all you really do, aside from fighting things. D&D has made characterization better than ever before, and you just can't get this kind of crunch support for characterization in almost any other game. For cripes' sake, 80-90% of the stuff you're talking about -- feats, PrCs, different races and base classes -- has to do with making people who can fight monsters in different ways. Even in your vaunted DitV, all I've seen is just evidence of a game I don't want to play. A D&D character sheet can contain all kinds of characterization from 6 abilities, to saves, to equipment, to skills, to feats to special abilities and spells. More to the point, it *has to*. If I want to say that my character has a great love of old poetry and the philosophy behind life and death it gives him, there's no place on my character sheet for that. If I don't care how likely it is my character might score a hit on someone else with a dagger, it doesn't matter -- I have to write it down. Every one of these - every skill, every ability nuance, every feat, every spell - could tell a different story about my character. And I get to use them in-combat and out of it. They can, but they're clearly not *designed* to. I mean, *come on*. I haven't seen any game that featured this much character building. Ever. Again, if "character building" means building your character as a combat simulation gamepiece. When you pick up the PHB and see that Combat is an entire chapter unto itself, isn't that sort of a dead giveaway? Heck, just looking at the character sheet, I can see Weapons and Attack modifiers figuring prominently on the sheet. Was exactly in the PHB character sheet makes anyone think that this game doesn't figure combat prominently? I mean, there's like 5 rows for ATTACK written right in front in big bold letters! HP, AC, Saving Throws, Protective Items... In fact, going only by the character sheet, I'd say that this was purely a wargame. The marketing, the stuff on the back cover about a world of mystery and adventure, the advice you name in the DMG2, the people who keep coming here and complaining about groups or DMs or players who "don't understand how to roleplay"... It depends. I find it insulting that you presume to know what's fun for me and apparently everyone else on the planet. Sheesh, every time someone writes a game they're operating based on a philosophy of what would be fun, which is why they make the game work a certain way. I can see where more developed FiTM would benefit D&D. Indeed, it's already headed in that direction with Action Points and Fate Points, and spells and Immediate Actions. Having said that, I think that FiTE is more appropriate for tactical combat action because IMO, it more appropriately simulates the fast action of combat, and the immutable nature of its results. We are talking about D&D, right, the game where unless you actually go to HP -10 and die, wounds in combat *have* no immutable results that won't heal if you rest up long enough? I can't see tactical players having fun playing poker in the middle of a Warhammer 40k resolution sequence. I can't see why such players aren't playing Warhammmer 40k. Not really. For the most clueless people, yes, most of it is absolutely inscrutable. For the socially skilled, reading the mood and leanings of a room and a particular person is doable, even easy. The best social chameleons can blend into any social situation seamlessly. A Leader not only blends in - he reads people and convinces them that they want to side with him! Of course, foreknowledge is always a great advantage, but much of how people feel can be discerned from nonverbal signals, even if you don't know why they feel that way. There is a reason why a "faux pas" is such a disastrous social event. ...So what's the objection to making a mechanical representation of this, anyway? I think what is meant is that your idea of "fun" isn't the same as Arrowhen's. My idea of "fun" rather greatly contrasts with yours as well, if you think that DitV is "the best game ever." Even so, people who like these games like them because they *are* fun, not because they're nobly sacrificing fun to create some great work of literary merit. Again, in fairness, D&D has made strides towards making this optional. Actions Points in Eberron stresses the added power to save your character if he needs saving (since most unthematic deaths come about from unlucky rolls) which is coupled with a concomittant decrease in the availability of resurrection magic. The mechanics of this could be made more streamlined, but I don't believe that making it core and unchangeable will win a lot of fans. Some people rather like random PC death. I doubt they outnumber the people who get really ticked off and upset when a PC dies and interrupts the story. And the people who like random PC death are probably the ones who would be better served by just wargaming. Not so covertly. Quite overtly, in fact. It's a truism in D&D that if the player wants to ham up the actions his character is doing, you should feel free to let him be up until the point that he's becoming an attention hog or he's violating game rules. This is, in fact, exactly the sense in that D&D is cooperative - the DM sets the scene, the players get to act. How the scene ends is subject to player decision, but the range of possibility is often part of the set itself, and under the purview of the DM. It's still true that the PCs, when they're in a combat situation, can't do things that violate the somewhat restrictive rules -- which go so far as to tell you *where you are on a grid* -- without the DM stepping in and saying "No, it didn't happen that way". Correction: most attempts you're aware ofto do mystery in D&D sucks. That's not always the case. Mysteries don't always hinge on finding clues. In fact, getting hung up on finding clues is often the part where people can't see the forest for the trees. A found clue is a dramatic event and that is what mysteries are about - events. Whether you find the clue or not, events happen inexorably. Finding clues allows you to turn the sequence of events, but even if you don't find these clues, events should still proceed apace. Which means that either games go off-the-rails and, if the players screw up, the big hit does go in, the mayor does get shot and oh, doesn't that suck (only it's *suckier* than when an action movie goes south because it looks like a whole lot of nothing happens for a long time and then a tragedy strikes out of nowhere) -- or else you have to do things to push things back on the rails. The problem with the kind of story you describe is that it requires the players to "just happen" to do certain things the way protagonists "just happen" to do things. You can do stories where the hero is driven entirely by chance if you're just writing a story -- this creates problems if you're doing this as some kind of cooperative game. In fact, some of the best mystery stories involve the hero bumbling about, missing absolutely obvious clue after clue after clue until he sees the one dramatic clue that "solves the case" for him. That's Hitchcock suspense at work, and you can include elements of that in your D&D game. To be fair, those are situations when the audience and the protagonist are separate, so that we can enjoy the dramatic irony of the protagonist missing the point until something happens to resolve the irony. When we *are* the protagonist and we *are* the ones missing things, it's less fun. You can make a sequence of clues absolutely fool-proof. The characters WILL solve the case, eventually. Or you can do something else. It's entirely up to you as the DM. Yes. It is not entirely up to you, however, whether your players will feel cheated and angry if the mystery passes them right by. Of course, I confess that much of this comes from experience, Dungeoncraft, and reading the entire line of Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle, but as I said earlier, there's only so much you can put inside a rulebook. Neither Hercule Poirot nor Sherlock Holmes was known for his tendency to bumble through the story until he solved the crime entirely by chance, so I don't quite know why you brought up those particular examples. The ability, no. It depends what you mean by "character" and "roleplay." You see, when I say "roleplay," I'm talking about making a character and then playing him in an immersive experience. Getting to set up scenes that affect my character's development isn't part of my character's innate experience, and giving those kinds of decisions to me as a player ruins my sense of immersion and suspension of disbelief. That's why I don't want to play DitV as you've described it. I'm still skeptical to what degree what the Forge calls Actor Stance is so essential to "immersion" as you describe it. I mean, I'm already not immersed in that way because I know I'm not a lithe, graceful pointy-eared chick with magic powers. I'm especially not immersed because I had to make up this character and every level I have to write down things that, from her point of view, are completely nonexistent, like her XP total, what feats she has, and so on -- I may even have a 20-level build for her in mind, which has nothing to do with her understanding of herself and her future. The wargame side of D&D means that you're intrinsically metagaming every time you glance down at the sheet. I don't see how you can be so In the Zone of pretending to really live and breathe Herotica the Succubus Paladin that saying "Hey, it'd be cool of Herotica got to meet Fellatiabolus again and had a chance to take her revenge" would snap me right out of it. In all seriousness, I've never seen a D&D game where people didn't at least occasionally ask for things in the metagame and talk in the metagame. I don't think I'd want to play in one that strictly enforced not doing so. Arrowhen: I'm all for a better skill game in general. Social skills aren't the only ones that are suffering. The Open Locks, Traps, and other such skill-oriented activities all are in the same boat. It's gotten so that players sometimes find it MORE fun to spring the trap than it is to allow the Rogue to disarm it. When your players are preferring to do stupid things, there's clearly a problem with the system. On the other hand, sometimes the player leaves Actor Stance, enters Author Stance, and says "Hey, you know, Herotica is *so scared* of being covered by molasses and ants that it'd be really fun to see her reaction to that sort of thing -- it'd be great to roleplay that" and therefore intentionally sets off the trap. I think there's nothing unreasonable about this impulse at all. I would rather see the system actually accomodate it, instead of doing what the DMG2 does -- calling such players "oddball" or "problem" players and recommending that you marginalize them as the DM. (Hey, look who's insulting people who want certain things from the game now.) You must be joking!!! There's TONS of advice on how to make the game more fun. The CR system itself is a very concerte and omnipresent attempt to make the game more fun for the newbie. It may not work perfectly, but it sure works better than the HD crap we had before. Er, the CR system isn't anything but an attempt to fudge the HD system to be more fair. It's not a new idea in any way. They're also way more transparent about the rules, how they work, and what changing them around might do. That allows you to gun for the game you like more easily. Well, sure, but the process of "gunning" for that game is still entirely outside the rules. Hell, most games outside the assumption of the rules -- wargame with random crap stringing together the encounters, which are what really matter -- are still entirely outside the rules and therefore hard to gun for. There are tips and tricks for the DM to make his game run more smoothly and how to determine what his players like (and give it to them). There are guidelines for how to manage players at the table. I mean, what?!?!? This is more advice on how to have fun with the game than has ever been given in any edition of D&D, and there's books and books of the stuff. It's advice on how to drift the game back and forth within the somewhat narrow confines on the rules, not rules that actually *change* the game. The closest publication to doing that was Unearthed Arcana, and even then it was just many different flavors of wargame. Heroes of Horror, which made another valiant attempt, came out and said at the beginning that D&D was a terrible system for horror but you could still make it work if you really try and if you do tons of things to undermine the system's assumptions. There ARE ways to speed up unimportant encounters. Of course, I had already gleaned much of that myself, but this is covered in Dungeoncraft in Dungeon Mag. There IS a way to use the rules to reflect this, but as with everything else (campaign building, for instance), D&D provides you more with a set of Lego bricks than a set of instructions. Which is, y'know, a problem. If you give people a bunch of identical red lego bricks they're going to make a bunch of block-shaped red things. You *can* make other shapes, but D&D is, to use your analogy, just publishing articles on how to use a belt sander and acrylic paints to change the shape of your bricks in whatever vague ways you might find fun, rather than actually publishing *differently shaped bricks*. *snip* Arguably, the game would benefit much more from incoporating rules for making puzzle challenges than from incoporating poker, but I've yet to see a_psh or ArcTan agree with me on it, or even push for it themselves. That's because I don't actually like puzzle challenges in D&D, and nor do most players I've played with. Archtyrant Teveroth is *right* when he points out how they undermine the expectations of both the stats-obsessed wargamers and the people who really like stories, and wrong when he claims this is somehow a good thing. (Whatever the reasons I play D&D, I don't play them so that I, the real person, can be made to sit down for an hour and solve a cryptogram.) Clearly, they're more interested in marginalizing hated gamers than they are in actually improving the game for everyone. I'm interested in a coherent game that actually does something I think a lot of D&D players want it to do and that D&D is in a unique place to do well -- which is why I don't think it should be a wargame (because there are plenty of wargames better than D&D) or a puzzle game (because there are plenty of puzzle games better than D&D), and I *especially* don't think it should be a game that tries to be a little bit of everything and ends up being good at nothing. When I ask players for their characters, I ask for concept first, sheets second. I also make it apparent that I WILL accomodate rule changes and mechanical improvisation on my part to make character (but not mechanical) concepts work. That makes a huge difference apparently, since my main problem is people who take entire boatloads of feats, classes and skills they KNOW are weak, just for the sake of concept. Or they might just like making me squirm this way and that to make otherwise mechanically untenable characters work. It's a tossup. As much as I know Forge jargon tends to infuriate people who disagree with the concepts behind them, this is textbook drifting through illusionism. You've replaced D&D's character creation rules with a new set of rules that work okay except that they're not public, consistent rules, they're rules that exist only in your head.
meabolex 03-23-07, 06:23 PM	(Wow, I've been gone from here a while!) Anyway, as someone who has enjoyed arguing about rules on the forums (because it's not nearly as fun to argue about them at the table - when you're actually trying to play), I'll give my two cents. First cent - I believe the desire to make the game more rules-focused was market demand. The majority of people beat the minority. Most people want a game that doesn't cause arguments and doesn't lead to confusion. My understanding of the term "rules-focused" implies that instead of creativity in a questionable situation, a definite or semi-definite rule is used to move the game along. While the game can run quite well in the hands of experience, D&D needed market savvy to keep up with competitors. Frankly, not everyone has access to an experienced DM. As time has progressed, you see more things automated for the purposes of streamlining the game. One of the more recent features is adding knowledge check DCs in books. This is a huge boost to new DMs who don't have the experience to come up with fair knowledge results on the fly. Better gameplay leads to a better game. Second cent - Compare D&D to other forms of entertainment - fantasy movies, for example. It is often expected that there will be eye-popping special effects. These computer-generated elements rarely add anything to the movie. They're simply standard things that most people take for granted. A diehard fantasy fan and the average movie goer are going to disagree about what is more important in the movie. For the ever-present LotR trilogy, Jackson managed to appeal to both audiences with a precarious balancing act. Perhaps that's what D&D should be - a careful balance of creativity and rules. But guess what? That's hard to do. So there you have it. Not trying to flame anyone or argue. Just letting you guys know how I feel about it. Good post btw a_psh.
Solik 03-23-07, 06:25 PM	I don't get how you can make such long-winded arguments declaring something to be true that your opponents are screaming to your face is absolutely false in their own games. It's mind-boggling how far things are going to support an elitist better-gamer-than-you mentality. Look. We want the game rules to handle conflicts that would otherwise lead to arguments, and we want the rules to provide mechanisms for building characters from an abilities standpoint. That's why we play D&D. If we didn't want those things, we would in fact play freeform and be happy with it. Thus, the worth of a ruleset is entirely based on how well it does those things. You want something else? Play another game. This is what modern D&D is about, and that's why we like it. It has moved forward significantly, because older versions didn't give you much in the way of character building mechanisms. One thing I've noticed that everyone does agree on is that we'd like some richer rules to handle stuff that's not combat -- skill challenges, interactions, and the like. But I wonder about that. That would make for either a very complicated game or a very generic one. I wouldn't mind seeing that discussion (the only thing of value in this otherwise worthless thread) taken elsewhere and explored in depth. I'd love to see what people come up with.
a_psh 03-23-07, 08:41 PM	You see, when I say "roleplay," I'm talking about making a character and then playing him in an immersive experience. Getting to set up scenes that affect my character's development isn't part of my character's innate experience, and giving those kinds of decisions to me as a player ruins my sense of immersion and suspension of disbelief.Unfortunately, "immersion" is a terrible term to bring up here. It gets really little analysis from everyone, even hardcore immersionists. Fundamentally, immersion is about experiencing the merging of "self" and "character," right? In a way that moves the self towards the character rather than just turning the character into a pawn that does what you do, of course (but it's not a one-directional thing, either: a big part of immersive RP is that your character does, in fact, reflect deep things about you, too). There's nothing particular special about the traditional D&D structure that makes it singularly good at supporting immersive play. For every immersionist who exalts it as the one true way to do immersion, you're going to get one who complains bitterly about all the clunky mechanics knocking the wind out of his sails. Creating Immersion 101 is basically all about not having rules "get in the way," which means that the rules shouldn't conflict with what you imagine happening (it also means that what another person narrates shouldn't conflict with what you imagine happening). Sticking the player in a framework where he constantly has to ping the GM for validation of his imagined content isn't exactly the perfect solution here.
ArcTan 03-23-07, 08:43 PM	Creating Immersion 101 is basically all about not having rules "get in the way," which means that the rules shouldn't conflict with what you imagine happening (it also means that what another person narrates shouldn't conflict with what you imagine happening). Sticking the player in a framework where he constantly has to ping the GM for validation of his imagined content isn't exactly the perfect solution here. Once again, classic D&D humor points this out for us. "I have silver eyes!" "Wait, I thought you had blue eyes." "Well, I changed it to silver!" "Hang on, lemme see that sheet..." "I cast Mordenkainen's faithful watchdog!" "No you didn't!" "Yes I did!" (etc.)
a_psh 03-23-07, 08:59 PM	...Interestingly enough, the closest thing to we have to "Advanced Immersion" tells us that ritual is a big part of it. That the most immersive experiences in a game seem to happen through the metaphor of entering your own dreams or descending into the underworld or whatever. Implying that some careful work structuring the narrative of play or the social ritual of the game can broaden and strengthen this feeling. Of course, stretching this ugly metaphor further, nobody's even come close to figuring out "The Immersion Senior Seminar" level techniques, much less getting their "Immersion Ph.D."
a_psh 03-23-07, 09:25 PM	D&D doesn't need more rules for roleplaying, it needs more meaningful prompts about roleplaying.More examples of a prompt, please. I spoke before about how it'd be cool if freeform games worked. I've heard of them, but I just don't know what they're about or how resolution of conflicts would work.The basic GM-less freeform paradigm you'll see on a MUSH or whatever is likely a system called "conflict-consent." Which looks like this (to the guy who's been hanging around long enough to get it but not long enough to figure out all the subconscious tweaks some communities apply, at least): I have privileged authorship about my character, you have privileged authorship over your character; when characters interact, we describe actions related to each other in terms of intent and leave it up to the other player to figure out what happens based on fiat, and we're trying to make stuff that we can both agree on happen in the game. The emphasis is most definitely on respecting authorship and comfort zones, which is why it can sometimes fall really flat. In freeforming with a GM, you've got the GM to handle conflicts if needed. The ultimate goal for any rule or anything written, for me, is to facilitate a way to get an immersive experience and a good story.Ditto, though I would add "fun to use" to that, too.
ArcTan 03-23-07, 09:43 PM	Interestingly enough, the closest thing to we have to "Advanced Immersion" tells us that ritual is a big part of it. That the most immersive experiences in a game seem to happen through the metaphor of entering your own dreams or descending into the underworld or whatever. Implying that some careful work structuring the narrative of play or the social ritual of the game can broaden and strengthen this feeling. Sure. This is why telling someone "I'm about to hypnotize you" is the single most important factor in hypnosis.
a_psh 03-23-07, 09:57 PM	I am curious as you have stated in other threads and this one D&D is for the immature who don't know what Role-Playing is yet(true you might have said it nicer but it is what you are saying) why these posts?Enh? You may be reading more into something than I intended (which would still be my fault, not yours). So do you have anything of value to offer besides insults to the topic of D&D? Or are you here to just try to cause a RPG revolution to have D&D become what you want it to be? Or are you the writer of one of those(or all of those) independent games sytem trying to promote a inferior game(which I gotta say there are after reading up on them)?Yes. No. Definitely no. Hmm, from all that it's clear that it's definitely time to restructure this... Give me a few days and you'll have some threads with individually spelled-out ideas. First one's probably gonna be about the two types of Rochambeau and why we need both. By all means, keep talking here if y'all want. I'll still reply. But this is just a warning that I'm about to push the discussion somewhere else.
CraggleRock 03-23-07, 11:07 PM	Hmm, from all that it's clear that it's definitely time to restructure this... Give me a few days and you'll have some threads with individually spelled-out ideas. First one's probably gonna be about the two types of Rochambeau and why we need both. By all means, keep talking here if y'all want. I'll still reply. But this is just a warning that I'm about to push the discussion somewhere else. I, for one, look forward to seeing those other discussions. Although far from new to the -idea- of roleplaying, the actual experience of such current ammount to: two sessions of being a player and three of being a DM in D&D. This thread has provided much for me to think about. Generally, the way I've been running my game has been mostly freeform with rolls at critical moments, with occasional rolls that I require the players make and then inform the players what their character might be thinking or feeling: prime example being having my group stand around outside a house discussing what -might- be waiting inside when I called for INT rolls from all, success meaning that I told them that to find out they could just look through a window (in fairness, this was all of our very first game beyond that provided by the D&D Starter Kit). Even in three sessions, I have found many of the mechanics of Skill checks to be lacking. I do wonder if perhaps what is needed is for the combat system to be expanded to incorporate whatever of the main stats (STR,DEX,INT,CON,WIS,CHA) are most needed for the current conflict--STR and DEX for combat, CON and STR for a drinking contest, DEX and WIS for a chase scene--and then a way to incorporate various "extra" manouvers, such as being able to jog your opponents elbow in a drinking contest, or spill a cart to prevent persuit in the chase scene. Present a *framework* of mechanics for conflict in such a way that when applying a combat "template" to that framework, you get the current combat mechanisms. I do think that it could be done the other way round: it's been said that reducing combat to a simple "roll your combat Skill and beat X to win", but as someone called for file-like editing, maybe that wouldn't always be a bad thing. Sometimes you might just want to know how -long- it took to resolve some simple combats, such as how many hours it takes to clear a cellar of rats, or to fight through the faceless minions of the BBEG. A simple combat Skill check lends itself to that quite well, without having to tedious work through every round. And I think, going that route, there needs to be at least one more level somewhere between those two "extremes", usuable for both combat and other skills: more complex than a single roll, more simple than a full-blown combat mechanic.
johnkretzer 03-24-07, 02:18 AM	Enh? You may be reading more into something than I intended (which would still be my fault, not yours). Ok granted maybe I am reading thing wrong....but when your response to a Thread Titled "Is D&D for kids?"(I think that was the name of the thread) with a(a paraphase) "Yes it is"....and that player who like playing D&D don't know better or claiming games that you like are "made by adults for adults".... which would indicate D&D isn't made for adults as those who play the game are immature. This is why I am agreeing to disagree seeing how (maybe you don't even realize this) that discussing something with a superiority complex is not fruitful.
a_psh 03-24-07, 03:40 AM	Ok granted maybe I am reading thing wrong....but when your response to a Thread Titled "Is D&D for kids?"(I think that was the name of the thread) with a(a paraphase) "Yes it is"Merr? Not me, at least as far as I can recall. When was this? I have a little thing about how peak D&D-playing years usually correlate with limited access to other means of entertainment, but that's a different thing. I'm not sure I've ever posted it here, either. Are you thinking of someone else with the same little avatar pic, perhaps? ....and that player who like playing D&D don't know better or claiming games that you like are "made by adults for adults"That's actually a bad thing about indie games as well as a good thing. I pointed that out here in response to the valid and major criticism that a game like Polaris wouldn't appeal to most 14-year-olds, and not even most D&D-playing 14-year-olds. Few indie designers are making games with anyone under 20 in mind. To be honest, though, if by "know better" you mean "have experienced a variety of different systems and techniques," I think most D&D players don't "know better." This is the fault of all the RPGs that more-or-less ripped off D&D and then hyped themselves up as big, fancy, new things more so than the fault of D&D itself. You saw a lot of those back in the day. One of the reasons I'm thankful for the OGL is that all the people who would write their own crappy second-rate D&D clone and then waste time talking about how revolutionary some pet house rule is now actually go on to make something a bit more useful to the general community (i.e. a crappy second-rate d20 supplement that just features the pet house rule). .... which would indicate D&D isn't made for adults as those who play the game are immature.I don't really give a damn about "maturity" most of the time. I think the question of "Is this game mature?" is pretty damn silly. Under WotC's control, D&D has been making very impressive strides as far as the only kind of "maturity" I really do care about is concerned. Which is social responsibility. I.e. moving D&D away from the misogyny, racism, and other miscellaneous stupidities of a lot of conventional "fantasy" stuff. In fact, I think the company is doing a much better job than the community here. But that's another discussion.
thanatos_lich 03-24-07, 07:56 AM	The point is, the game itself encourages certain styles of play. 3rd edition encourages increasing your character's power more than any past edition, and the main reason is feats. (No, I'm not even going to blame prestige classes -- they're a natural part of the game, and they have been ever since the 1e bard and thief-acrobat, or even the basic D&D druid.) The fact that you must now have a plug-in game mechanic in order to customize your character is the single worst facet of modern D&D. Each new book is a dozen more of these pointless little space-wasters, and the eerie thing is, for all the customization that feats give you in combat (supposedly with the intent of making Joe Fighter different from Fred Fighter), all the really do is take focus away from your character's personality and place it squarely on how many plusses you have on this or that action. So feats are bad becuase they add customisation? Right.
High Octane 03-24-07, 10:17 AM	So what you are essentially asking for is a manual that says something along the lines of "A D&D adventure has several phases, forming, discovery, unfolding, climax, and aftermath, each of these phases...yada yada"? Sort of the style that some textbooks explain story structure when writing books? I could definitely see a book like that, but I think that it would be best released for general P&P gaming since the theories apply anywhere in the genre. However finding people to write this will be hard since you will need people with a good AND varied experience as a GM in many different groups with different needs.
Dexter_Blacktyde 03-24-07, 06:49 PM	a_psh @ ArcTan: As much as I hate guys who barge into a thread and begin their post with, "Okay, I haven't read the thread, but here's my two coppers", but after reading eight pages I got the impression that this monstrous thread (as its name implies) was going nowhere, so I merely glanced over the rest. Assuming you didn't change your position over the last five pages, my posting will hopefully not be considered dated. It's kinda silly to say "Hey, we need all these books and books of rules to fulfill this very basic task, but we're such good storytellers that we don't need any structure for the actual juice bits!" It may be silly if one has your expectations and preferences. More on that later. Generally I'm with you, regarding your rant - I wanted to quote every other posting of yours on the first few pages with a hearty "Preaching to the choir, man!" -, and I agree with many points you and ArcTan have brought up, but you take things a bit too far for my taste. What irks me isn't your verdict about D&D, it's that you generalize by saying, "Aspect X or doing Y is bad, no matter what"; that you seem to oppose the "powerful GM" concept on principle regardless of individual cases, and that you seem to propose a rules-laden system which regularizes every aspect of roleplaying as objectively better for everyone. In short, my impression is that you'd like to see a system that makes for great roleplaying, regardless of the quality of the respective GM - and that's a forlorn hope, I think. Reading between the lines of your (and ArcTan's postings), I arrive at the conclusion that you dislike the very concept of the traditional GM per se, arguing that though there may be good GMs, there are bad GMs also who could theoretically abuse their position and screw the players, and there's nothing they can do about it, and that the mere possibility of this exists is bad and needs to be remedied. To me that's a little like asking for some kind of infallible government machine so that we don't have to put up with presidents, prime ministers et al. because theoretically they can screw us over. I agree wholeheartedly with Arivia who said, "D&D is about the worst-case-imaginable example/spokesperson for roleplaying games as a whole". It trains newbies to focus on combat, combat, combat and gives them the illusion that's all what roleplaying's about, and I can't even begin to express how horrible that is. However, once you've reached a certain point - be it by having tried out various styles of gaming, be it because everyone in your group can complete a sentence you started and you've reached a certain level of trust -, D&D is good enough at doing what I expect it to do: to be a crutch, nothing more. It complements my personal style of gaming quite nicely – give me any other system, no matter how different from D&D, our style of gaming wouldn't change a bit. As you said before, the (mostly combat-focused) mechanics and roleplaying are completely separated, and the rules give you hardly anything to work with outside confrontational situations. But having extensive rules for, say, diplomatic situations wouldn't work at all for me. I read the RGGnet review of Dogs in the Vineyard, and I must say, I wouldn't touch that system with a 10-foot-pole. Now you could say, "You're the all-powerful GM, you can and do decide on the fly if the players are successful or not, and that's bad." But is it? For everyone? Let's take the situation in the example of the RPGnet review. Sorry, feels like diplomatic combat to me. Rules like these work fine within the wargame aspect of D&D, but outside of it a single dice roll works just fine for my group. Often enough we don't even bother to touch the dice at all, keeping the skill ranks in the back of our heads and going from there. I neither need nor want rules for roleplaying - that's completely missing the point, as far as I'm concerned. Why is it that you seem to think that freeform roleplaying on top of the actual rules is objectively worse than having rules for roleplaying and storytelling? This I don't get. Whatever argument gets thrown at you, you and ArcTan reply something along the lines of, "Yes, but I don't get to write that on my character sheet, so actually it doesn't count. I want hard rules for that." Of course you're entitled to feel hard rules suit you better than the (hopefully controlled) "arbitrariness" of playing "under" / "against" a GM; but why do you claim they are better, period? DB
ArcTan 03-24-07, 07:15 PM	Reading between the lines of your (and ArcTan's postings), I arrive at the conclusion that you dislike the very concept of the traditional GM per se, arguing that though there may be good GMs, there are bad GMs also who could theoretically abuse their position and screw the players, and there's nothing they can do about it, and that the mere possibility of this exists is bad and needs to be remedied. To me that's a little like asking for some kind of infallible government machine so that we don't have to put up with presidents, prime ministers et al. because theoretically they can screw us over. Well, no. I am asking that the government not be one where the DM is automatically a supreme dictator with no control on his powers. Right now there are rules, written down and explicit, that say what a president or prime minister may or may not do. Sure, the president or prime minister can still *actually* violate those rules by main force, just as, no matter what game you're playing, some big scary guy can kick over the table and say "I WIN!" But the point of rules is to regulate what can be done and serve as a disincentive for abuse. The president does *not* have a Rule Zero over all the laws of the United States of America (no matter how much some presidents may think they do and try to act like it). The country *does* have rules that the president is expected to follow, and it does have a system through which the president exercises his power -- he can't just say something and have it occur, it has to happen through the legislature, through federal bureaucracy, etc. People vote. There are procedures. If you're unhappy with the president, you can oppose him through less extreme measures than revolution and anarchy (which is Rule Minus One -- "You can always leave and find a new gaming group" -- yeah, sure, if I'm willing to sacrifice absolutely everything I've done so far in this game to the dogs). I want something like a constitution for the game, one that actually works. Not a system where the dictator is explicitly given total dictatorial power, nor a system where the constitution is widely regarded to be pointless and ineffective and is therefore ignored. (Which is how a lot of D&D works right now -- in theory, you can challenge your DM on RAW, but since the RAW, unmodified, would create a shapeless and ridiculous game that would allow things like Pun-Pun, this is impossible.) The problem is that when the good stuff from a game is all coming from just the DM, it makes the game not *portable* -- it means if I want to have this same experience I can't take my books and go to another gaming group. I don't mean having the exact same experience, I mean even a *similar* experience -- going from one group to another often means playing a TOTALLY DIFFERENT GAME, and often one vastly inferior in quality. It means that DMs who want to be good have to put *tons* of effort into trying to be good and having things fall apart quickly if they take their finger off the button for a second. I mean, using this analogy, you can always point to a great king or great emperor and say "See how much he did with his autocratic power? When you have a good king, you don't need checks and balances." The problem is that any dispassionate view of history -- or your local gaming community -- will show you just how widely bad kings outnumber good kings, and how even good kings can lead countries -- or games -- into ruin because they're only human and make mistakes.
Always-Late 03-24-07, 07:24 PM	I mean, using this analogy, you can always point to a great king or great emperor and say "See how much he did with his autocratic power? When you have a good king, you don't need checks and balances." The problem is that any dispassionate view of history -- or your local gaming community -- will show you just how widely bad kings outnumber good kings, and how even good kings can lead countries -- or games -- into ruin because they're only human and make mistakes.This would be a proper analogy if, you know, the people could decide not to listen to bad kings and anything they said whenever they wanted.
ArcTan 03-24-07, 07:35 PM	This would be a proper analogy if, you know, the people could decide not to listen to bad kings and anything they said whenever they wanted. Sure. Except that then you don't have a country anymore. Or, in this case, you don't have a game anymore. You really think "Fine, I'll leave the game, then" is a sufficient response to DMs' capacity to abuse their position? Why do you think D&D has any rules at all, in the first place? If it was trivial to resolve these things without rules, then any RPG could just be a piece of paper saying "DM: Do whatever you think is right. Players: Leave if you don't like it".
a_psh 03-24-07, 07:50 PM	Reading between the lines of your (and ArcTan's postings), I arrive at the conclusion that you dislike the very concept of the traditional GM per se, arguing that though there may be good GMs, there are bad GMs also who could theoretically abuse their position and screw the players, and there's nothing they can do about it, and that the mere possibility of this exists is bad and needs to be remedied.The central GM is good for certain things. There's two big problems, however: 1. The central GM is used ubiquitously in RPG design regardless of whether it would be a good or bad idea to involve him in the game. 2. Games don't give the central GM the tools he needs to be useful. For example, the way D&D treats the GM can create this big bottleneck where he has to do more work than all the other players at the table put together. I neither need nor want rules for roleplaying - that's completely missing the point, as far as I'm concerned.Equating "roleplaying" with in-character conversation is completely missing the point. Making stuff up about your character is roleplaying. Narrating through a scene is roleplaying. As long as you're treating it as anything other than a boardgame, fighting stuff is roleplaying.
Dexter_Blacktyde 03-24-07, 09:05 PM	But the point of rules is to regulate what can be done and serve as a disincentive for abuse. But is that really all-important? Of course a GM can do whatever the heck he pleases, but you're basing your claim on the assumption that a GM will eventually abuse his power. I've met some of those over the past 20 years, but just because you give them a system that doesn't allow them to screw their players I still wouldn't play with them. Regardless, let's say you create a system that makes it impossible for the GM to cheat. Let's say he cheats nonetheless, maybe for the betterment of the game, maybe because he's a jerk, doesn't matter. Let's say the group finds out about it. What happens? Where's the difference between "We know there's Rule Zero, but we don't like you to cheat" and "The rules forbid what you've done, you cheated, period"? Both versions result in the group having to talk about the perceived problems, because there's no roleplaying jail you can get sent to for cheating, with or without a cheat-proof system. The country *does* have rules that the president is expected to follow As does every system - rules the GM is expected to follow (Rule Zero notwithstanding, of course). And with the know-how that comes with the job, he can not only bend the rules, he can just as easily break them as a corrupt head of state can break his (unbeknownst to the populace, that is, until it finds out). and it does have a system through which the president exercises his power -- he can't just say something and have it occur, it has to happen through the legislature, through federal bureaucracy, etc. People vote. There are procedures. If you're unhappy with the president, you can oppose him through less extreme measures than revolution and anarchy (which is Rule Minus One -- "You can always leave and find a new gaming group" -- yeah, sure, if I'm willing to sacrifice absolutely everything I've done so far in this game to the dogs). So you can talk it over or, if that doesn't help, elect a new GM - if you have the majority of the group. If you don't and still can't live with the situation, you have to emigrate ;) I want something like a constitution for the game, one that actually works. I understand, but going over the points you have brought up so far, you're willing to sacrifice... for lack of a better word, I'd like to call it spontaneity, something I consider integral to the hobby. What you're proposing sounds awfully much like a text of law. Not a system where the dictator is explicitly given total dictatorial power, nor a system where the constitution is widely regarded to be pointless and ineffective and is therefore ignored. (Which is how a lot of D&D works right now -- in theory, you can challenge your DM on RAW, but since the RAW, unmodified, would create a shapeless and ridiculous game that would allow things like Pun-Pun, this is impossible.) Certainly, but D&D's numerous shortcomings notwithstanding, this is true of most RPGs. A logical "if-then" order is reliable, but the way I see it, the truly outstanding adventures often arise from a good GM's spark of ingenuity. (Yes, there's the infamous "good GM" again, I know.) The thing is, being a GM is something you have to learn to become good at. I don't see much sense in placing someone without a driving license behind the wheel of a fully automated car on autopilot. If the latter breaks down, the "driver" is as screwed as the passengers. The problem is that when the good stuff from a game is all coming from just the DM, it makes the game not *portable* -- it means if I want to have this same experience I can't take my books and go to another gaming group. That's right, and that's what I love about it. I don't want to be expendable, and I don't want my players to be. This is not a videogame, this is not a movie, this is a highly individual experience that shouldn't be reproducable, because what's reproducable is seldom, if ever, special. We often talk about these things. "Are there any groups out there who play the way we do? And even if there are some, I wouldn't change groups for all the money in the world." That's what I meant by saying the system is a crutch, an interface between you and the game, nothing more. Anyway, let's say you're an avid soccer player. You move to another town, find a new team and can expect them to play roughly the same game of soccer you know and love. The difference is: It doesn't involve your personality, your fantasy, your creativity. Roleplaying is extremely personalized, you can't expect to have a similar experience with another group. You don't get overly creative when playing soccer. But food for the mind and soul - that's what roleplaying is - demands creativity, and with creativity comes individuality. How often do people change rules without saying, "This rule sucks" - just because they feel they don't need it, or because they prefer another rule? It means that DMs who want to be good have to put *tons* of effort into trying to be good and having things fall apart quickly if they take their finger off the button for a second. This sounds like you're assuming that the group inevitably gives its GM a hard time and keeps watch over all his doings like hawks, only waiting for him to visibly screw up. If it's a well-established group, everybody knows what the other side has in mind, and they all act together to reach what the general consensus on fun is. Why do you think D&D has any rules at all, in the first place? If it was trivial to resolve these things without rules, then any RPG could just be a piece of paper saying "DM: Do whatever you think is right. Players: Leave if you don't like it". As far as I'm concerned, the rules are there to portray the corporeal, manifest, non-negotiable aspects of the gaming world. Either I hit my opponent, or I miss. Either I can get a hold of the lowest limb of the tree, or I can't. I'm 1,90m, not 1,89m and not 1,91m. What cannot be regularized are intellectual or spiritual properties. I remember you being on the same page with me when it came to alignment. Apart from alignment, though – which is indeed a terribly dumb concept –, as far as possible the rules leave the not-so-clear aspects alone. In my book that's a good thing. The bad thing is that newbies think that they are not important because they don't get covered at all. As I said, you have some good points, but all in all your propositions seem to take the fun out of the hobby, at least for me. DB
Dexter_Blacktyde 03-24-07, 09:10 PM	2. Games don't give the central GM the tools he needs to be useful. For example, the way D&D treats the GM can create this big bottleneck where he has to do more work than all the other players at the table put together. I really don't see how this can be remedied (barring an online "instant adventure" program ;)). But I think the work you're referring to isn't the work I'm referring to. What you consider work is the actual juice for me. Equating "roleplaying" with in-character conversation is completely missing the point. Making stuff up about your character is roleplaying. Narrating through a scene is roleplaying. As long as you're treating it as anything other than a boardgame, fighting stuff is roleplaying. I was referring to the example in the RPGnet DitV review, you know, the one with the blow-by-blow in-game discussion, executed by rolling your dice for every sentence your character says. Of course I'm just speaking for myself, but if anything reliably destroys the flow and atmosphere and immersion in the game, it's stuff like this. Actually I wouldn't put introducing a mechanic like this past WotC - and that's not a compliment. That's exactly the naive, unimaginative, soulless "if-then" way of thinking I dislike D&D for. DB
Roxlimn 03-25-07, 12:19 AM	ArcTan: But it's unnecessary because it'd displace the oh-so-necessary big thick chapter on grid combat and Attacks of Opportunity we now have in the PHB? And we'd be "marginalizing" gamers by trimming a little bit of that fat and putting in rules about something D&D currently does not address at all? 1. I never said it was unnecessary. In fact, I mention my support for more extra-combat gaming several times. You MUST be talking to someone else with this. 2. Calling parts of the game that many people think is an improvement "fat" only reveals what I've been talking about all along. You want the game to change to accomodate only you and think that anyone who enjoys this "fat" is undeserving of being supported by D&D. Right now most games of D&D *don't* follow D&D's hackneyed wargame-based rules for progression -- things like environment tables and random encounter tables and a set number of encounters per day. Whoa, whoa. Hold on there, cowboy. Environmental tables aren't used much, but they do offer a short and succint list for what creatures might be used that's consistent with a certain environment. The list is useful and IS used, even if the random numbers on the opposite side isn't. Random encounters aren't used as much as they used to, but there's no real content of that sort in the DMG, other than ONE sample table and instructions for how to make one. Speaking for myself, I've used random encounter tables all the time, and everyone I know who's played 3e D&D uses them, too. However, I don't turn around and say that they're indispensable for everyone or that anyone who doesn't use them is stupid, or that most games of D&D MUST use them because I do. YOU are not "most D&D games" and your perception of D&D as a bad game are not supported by its market dominance. The wargame *does* intersperse with story events, social interactions, characterization, etc. -- it's just that there aren't any rules for this happening, so it only happens by rampant DM fiat, by DMs just saying things happen (which is what he means by "illusionism"). Which makes this part of the game far, far more uneven than the rest of D&D. (For all you say "It all comes down to the DM", in reality people don't say the quality of D&D 3e's combat system depends solely and utterly on the DM who runs it, because the rules hold him within certain constraints and try to keep things fair -- and yet people can't seem to conceive that the rest of the game could benefit from this kind of thing.) Now you're just being bizarre. Everything in the game runs by DM fiat. I say that, and I've always said that. The combat system IS solely and utterly dependent on the DM. What you roll against what and how often is dictated by him and ONLY by him, since he can structure combat rules anyway he wants them. If he doesn't want to run grid combat, he's entitled to do so, and there's nothing you can do other than to voice your preference and walk out if you don't like the game. Combat is inherently unfair because the DM can throw a gajillion Dragons against you and there's nothing you can do about it. Talking about a "fair game" and ranting about DM fiat at the same time is fundamentally contradictory, unless you're using them to make the same point. Combat is wholly and completely within DM fiat. So is the DM really just relating a story that doesn't change? He may very well be. Some groups LIKE THAT. They like the "illusionism" or whatever derogatory bigoted term there is for that these days. Why? Who knows? Final Fantasy is almost entirely linear and yet gamers play through the same story over and over and over. Same for Baldur's Gate. Hey, you know what? Story books have only one ending! What could be the point in reading one? Maybe these gamers don't play for the same reason you do and look for something in the game you don't particularly like. Of course, it's not even true that D&D can only be played this way. Story events, social interactions, and particularly characterization, could all be under player choice, if the DM caters to that sort of thing. Are there rules for social interaction? Yes. One die roll. Sucks, but there it is. Not true that there aren't rules for that. Are there rules for story events? Yes. Dungeon Design. Essentially, a fork in the Dungeon is a player choice that's only wholly his own. The DM can relate possible consequences for each choice, and it should really be quite obvious (good game design guidelines) which choice leads to what if it's significant. May not be your cup of tea, but there it is. Not true that there aren't rules for that. Are there rules for characterization? My dear ArcTan! Every part of character building is an exercise in characterization! Right now the idea of Action Points is to be a metagame label that explicitly marks characters as "important" -- you can't randomly kill the major villain of the story halfway through just because you got lucky any more than he can do the same to you. Technically, that's not true. D&D caters to many points of view. Action Points is no more a metagame label than your own character sheet, or that you have powers few others in the game world do. Major villains can and do die "halfway through the story" if the DM caters to that, and all it does is change the story because of player action. Isn't that what we've been wanting, eh? If you make a game wherein the players can't die unless they want to and can't kill the villain in some random event, aren't you "railroading," too? But usually it's the DM doing it, not D&D. Uh, D&D is an amorphous and self-contradictory set of rules. It CAN'T tell a story. Sheesh. What does it matter than the DM is railroading you through a series of events, if that's what floats your boat? You're having fun, right? In fact, DitV does the same thing - you don't roll the dice unless there's a conflict. All that means is that the DM railroads you through everything you care to be railroaded through. If you don't care how one events unfolds, there's no pressing need to detail it. It doesn't matter. I want rules that actually *define* the story structure of a game rather than a set of vague advice telling the DM how he can exercise his godlike power to make things magically happen by fiat. You're obviously not referring to the guidelines for Dungeon Design that tells the DM tips for how to make a good story structure. Can't be that, even though those ARE rules that DO define the story structure of the game. You obviously want something else. In an ideal world, there wouldn't be a DM at all, or his role would be drastically reduced -- he really would just "play the world" or "play the NPCs", not act as the omnipotent Hand of God saying "And now for the sake of PACING and STORY I will FAST FORWARD the game by three weeks until the next SIGNIFICANT ENCOUNTER". To make a small correction, what you're actually saying is: "In MY ideal world..." Many players, particularly newbies, have no initiative for action. In fact, that's one of the main problems DMs usually face: their players are indecisive and impotent. They don't know what they ought to be doing. Personally, I can't imagine a situation where an amorphous set of undirected gamers would be better than a group that has a clear leader who's taking them to where they want to go. You need to do all kinds of dirty little tricks to handle social situations because the rules leave this kind of thing completely open-ended. That's the problem. Replacing 100 pages of advice with 60 pages of an actual rule system seems like a net gain to me. It would, if the game system catered to exactly the game you wanted. Replacing 100 pages of generally applicable advice with 60 pages of highly specialized ruling that cater only to a small segment of the market seems self-defeating to me. Don't forget that this isn't the first time D&D has played with these games. Dragonlance used to have something like this, and it didn't well very well. We ask for story-based changes in scope, and instead we get "extra actions" dictated by mechanical capabilities in combat. Typical. Two of the three things you mentioned you wanted WERE combat, or didn't you notice? In the first case which wasn't combat, Action Points, Saving Throws, and Spell Effects are things which are often used out of combat. In fact, arguably, the most broken spell effects are those that exist out of combat. Leave the players aside, then. How many DMs will automatically say "Oh, if I want the player to do *that*, I'll let him take this feat" and reach for a sourcebook instead of actually inventing the houserule that lets the PC do it? It seems to be pretty common behavior to me -- this sort of thing is one of the main things that justifies buying new sourcebooks. Lots in my experience. In fact, the boards are chockfull of DMs who are ready and able to invent rulings to accomodate player-instigated events which aren't covered by the rules. That's one of the things that a DM does, by the way - rule on stuff that isn't covered by the rules. If the ability is already detailed somewhere else, why bother going through the effort? Just get the mechanics and see if it fits your style. Most of the time it does, with hardly any tweaking necessary. If you don't care for that (and some DMs don't) just make it up. There ARE guidelines for that, TOO. I don't see an inability to come up with houserules. If anything, players on the WAPTD? boards are complaining about TOO MANY houserules. Beyond that, what's wrong with printing rules that cover player situations that seem to come up fairly often? Isn't that a good thing? If every real social situation were completely like this, life would feel like an adventure game with conversation trees. It does feel like that, sometimes. Even if it's *like* this, it needs to be more complex than just "Hit the NPC with the password" like in an '80s text adventure -- "Ask Dora about school" gives you instant access to Dora. That'd be just as dumb as running combats by saying "Anyone who knows that trolls are vulnerable to fire wins". You'd be surprised at how often you can get on someone's good side just by saying the right sentence or word. Really. A whole lot of people have "keywords" that really set them off on one direction or another. Take you, for instance. If I met you on the road, and I said "Hey, you know D&D story structure really needs some work," I could probably draw you into a conversation. If I say the right things in that subsequent conversation the right way, I could probably ask you to dinner. It sounds complicated if you don't know what the heck you're doing, but if you're "playing," it's not all that complicated. Ask the "playas" around your neighborhood. It's all a matter of finding the right word at the right time. Right, and establishing this in a tense social situation involves a complex back-and-forth, trading power and advantages in various directions. A bit like a combat. There aren't all that many social situations that can be described as "tense." At least not by the people who do it. The important thing about influencing other people is that you have to be confident. You can't BE tense or you've lost it. People who have low self-esteem have no game because every time they sense they're getting it on, they get tense and blow it. There are exchanges of power and advantages, but only in a situation that's close - and that means little to no tenseness overtly. Is it like combat? Not on your life. Both would work in the kind of game that they were designed for. Which I wouldn't play. Congratulations, you've marginalized me. Then they get kicked out for card-counting, because that's not how the casino intends you to play the game. You obviously lose a lot on Blackjack. You can't cardcount in a serious casino because they use a continuous set of cards. Even when they don't, they typically discard the deck after a hand is played. Fine. Roulette, then. You get my point. Not really. Sorry. Not really. I don't read Dungeoncraft, but I don't remember DMG2 having any rules at all, certainly not public ones that were an acknowledged part of the game -- more like advice telling the DM to start edging this one guy out of encounters if he takes too much spotlight, or pay attention to people's backstories and try to find a way to engage them. Illusionism. Bigotry. I still don't see where this "detriment" is coming from, and why you act like putting these rules into D&D would kill the game and make it pointless for everyone who, say, likes combat. It's not about adding rules. It's about replacing existing rules with completely different and alien rules. It just won't be the same game anymore. You DO notice, that this is directed to a_psh and not to you? Do you even know what we're talking about at this point? What, like rolling skill checks? That's all you really do, aside from fighting things. Oh, so all those noncombat spells in D&D are, like, not D&D? And all those skill check uses that involve taking 10? Not D&D either, I suppose? And the deciding on which part to take first and how to do things, not D&D either? My mistake. Apparently, I haven't been playing D&D all these years. For cripes' sake, 80-90% of the stuff you're talking about -- feats, PrCs, different races and base classes -- has to do with making people who can fight monsters in different ways. 1. Um, no? I estimate that only about 75% of content relates to combat at all, and of those, more only relate to combat indirectly. 2. Even if they're like that, you DO realize that fighting things differently IS characterization? The only thing that differentiates Jin Kazama from Lei Wu Long is that they fight differently. More to the point, it *has to*. If I want to say that my character has a great love of old poetry and the philosophy behind life and death it gives him, there's no place on my character sheet for that. If I don't care how likely it is my character might score a hit on someone else with a dagger, it doesn't matter -- I have to write it down. 1. There is, actually. Skills have to reflect your knowledge of old poetry. You can't love something you have no knowledge of. Your philosophy about life and death should have actual game implications in D&D, depending on what this "philosophy" is and how it affects how your character behaves. It could very well have an impact on feat selection, class selection, and weapon selection (or lack of it). 2. If you don't carry a dagger, you don't have to write anything down. Works for me. They can, but they're clearly not *designed* to. I mean, *come on*. I can't be faulted for using game mechanics more innovatively than you. If you only wish to use an off-roader on paved highways, you can't then fault it for having poor off-road capability. That's just you. Again, if "character building" means building your character as a combat simulation gamepiece. In whatever manner. The marketing, the stuff on the back cover about a world of mystery and adventure, the advice you name in the DMG2, the people who keep coming here and complaining about groups or DMs or players who "don't understand how to roleplay"... Magic the Gathering also markets itself the same way, but I've never really heard anyone complain that they ONLY get to play a card game where they expected something else. Groups who come here to complain do so for a number of different reasons. It's easy to blame the system, but it's usually an intra-group problem, which D&D also endeavors to simplify, by the way. There are also people who come here to fault the system in a rather transparent lowblow meant to insult every gamer who doesn't play the way they do. Sheesh, every time someone writes a game they're operating based on a philosophy of what would be fun, which is why they make the game work a certain way. True, and like you, TSR previously thought it knew what was fun and just dictated it to everyone. Guess what happened? WotC is taking fan feedback seriously, and the new game designers seriously think about what fans would like to play, not just what THEY would like to play. We are talking about D&D, right, the game where unless you actually go to HP -10 and die, wounds in combat *have* no immutable results that won't heal if you rest up long enough? It's the game where you can't retroactively say that you didn't get hit and that no, you didn't actually fall unconscious and fall into the chasm, even though everyone was just talking about the repercussions of that event. I can't see why such players aren't playing Warhammmer 40k. Yes, that was obvious enough. ...So what's the objection to making a mechanical representation of this, anyway? None whatsoever. You should read what kind of argument line you're replying to. Helps. Even so, people who like these games like them because they *are* fun, not because they're nobly sacrificing fun to create some great work of literary merit. Of course. Never said otherwise. I doubt they outnumber the people who get really ticked off and upset when a PC dies and interrupts the story. And the people who like random PC death are probably the ones who would be better served by just wargaming. Those subhuman wargamers! How dare they play a roleplaying game! It's still true that the PCs, when they're in a combat situation, can't do things that violate the somewhat restrictive rules -- which go so far as to tell you *where you are on a grid* -- without the DM stepping in and saying "No, it didn't happen that way". If you want your character to do something, it's usually best to start on the character sheet, not on the combat grid. If your character's abilities aren't to your liking, then you need to go back over your sheet and think about why that happened. Which means that either games go off-the-rails and, if the players screw up, the big hit does go in, the mayor does get shot and oh, doesn't that suck (only it's *suckier* than when an action movie goes south because it looks like a whole lot of nothing happens for a long time and then a tragedy strikes out of nowhere) -- or else you have to do things to push things back on the rails. Here's the thing: when you play mystery adventures, rails aren't a good thing for when you want unexpected player-controlled things to happen. Duh. If you want a railroaded mystery adventure, you set the rails nice and strong, and you better be sure your players want it just like that. Mysteries are typically played by players who want player choice and player actions that impact events. Thus, if you want that kind of thing, playing with rails is a big no-no. You can't go off-rail if rails don't exist. Not solving the mystery and having the mayor get shot sucks, but it would suck even more if the players knew they failed and then nothing happened anyway (unless they're the type who likes rails, and then the mayor should've never got shot). If the players are so clueless that they don't understand clues being literally shoved into their player faces, then maybe they shouldn't be playing a mystery game. Scratch that. Players who don't see a physical clue being dangled in front of their physical eyes are literally blind or comatose, in which case, playing a game isn't their main concern. They'll need to get their eyesight or brain checked out. Honestly, no one is going to miss a clue you give them saying, "You found a clue and it points to X." The problem with the kind of story you describe is that it requires the players to "just happen" to do certain things the way protagonists "just happen" to do things. You can do stories where the hero is driven entirely by chance if you're just writing a story -- this creates problems if you're doing this as some kind of cooperative game. I think you just need more savvy in terms of Adventure Design. I take it you've never designed a successful event-based D&D adventure? To be fair, those are situations when the audience and the protagonist are separate, so that we can enjoy the dramatic irony of the protagonist missing the point until something happens to resolve the irony. When we *are* the protagonist and we *are* the ones missing things, it's less fun. Depends on what you mean by "fun." For instance, if the players like Hitchcock horror, then they're probably like having a metagame "seat" to the action, even as their PCs bungle clue after clue. It sort of depends on players being able to enjoy both immersion and OOC perspective to enjoy, but some groups like that. D&D can do that. On the other hand, you have players who like "Clue" like action, where they don't know what's happening and only piece together clue after clue until they figure it out, oftentimes long after they should've gotten enough facts to come to a logical conclusion. Yes, that's fun too. Congratulations, you've discovered another kind of gamer you can say you're superior to. Let's marginalize them, too. Obviously, if they like mystery games, they should be playing something other than a "roleplaying game." After all, it's not a "mystery game," is it? Yes. It is not entirely up to you, however, whether your players will feel cheated and angry if the mystery passes them right by. Players feeling cheated and angry when the mystery they spectacularly failed to solve results in a spectacular disaster? Good! They're supposed to feel cheated and angry. They failed, after all. It means that you've acheived immersion. Then the adventure goes on. Hopefully, you'll engineer some small successes to salve their frayed nerves. What's bad is if players feel apathetic when they fail. That's very bad. You feel bad when you lose Monopoly, right? Chess? Starcraft? Yes? If you wanted to play a mystery game and you failed it, you'd feel bad? Yes. If it was a terrible mystery game, you'd probably just say, "huh?" and move on. Neither Hercule Poirot nor Sherlock Holmes was known for his tendency to bumble through the story until he solved the crime entirely by chance, so I don't quite know why you brought up those particular examples. Actually, both these characters are known for berating themselves that they didn't solve the mystery sooner. In at least two instances I can remember, Holmes was totally off the mark, and in at least one instance I can recall, events simply passed beyond his capability to change. They're very capable individuals, to be sure, but these instances prove that it can be fun to lose every now and then. Makes those victories all the sweeter. If you never lose, the game stops being fun. I'm still skeptical to what degree what the Forge calls Actor Stance is so essential to "immersion" as you describe it. I mean, I'm already not immersed in that way because I know I'm not a lithe, graceful pointy-eared chick with magic powers. I'm especially not immersed because I had to make up this character and every level I have to write down things that, from her point of view, are completely nonexistent, like her XP total, what feats she has, and so on -- I may even have a 20-level build for her in mind, which has nothing to do with her understanding of herself and her future. I sure that everyone feels that way. Which is exactly why people get depressed when their character die or fail, or why they get wierded out by cross-gender playing. Oh wait, no, it's the other way around, I'm sorry. The game has enough challenges to suspension of disbelief. We don't need to add more to it. The wargame side of D&D means that you're intrinsically metagaming every time you glance down at the sheet. I don't see how you can be so In the Zone of pretending to really live and breathe Herotica the Succubus Paladin that saying "Hey, it'd be cool of Herotica got to meet Fellatiabolus again and had a chance to take her revenge" would snap me right out of it. If, as a player, I could actually make that happen with resources I could expend that are mine more than they are my character's, yes it would be a major hit. In all seriousness, I've never seen a D&D game where people didn't at least occasionally ask for things in the metagame and talk in the metagame. I don't think I'd want to play in one that strictly enforced not doing so. And of course, being superior to everyone else, what you find fun must the yardstick by which everything is determined. I think there's nothing unreasonable about this impulse at all. I would rather see the system actually accomodate it, instead of doing what the DMG2 does -- calling such players "oddball" or "problem" players and recommending that you marginalize them as the DM. (Hey, look who's insulting people who want certain things from the game now.) Actually, the DMG2 provides suggestions for how to accomodate these players so that they still get what they want without bothering everyone else so much. Not a lot of marginalizing going on there. And you don't know what you're talking about. This reply is for Arrowhen, and you clearly don't understand the context in which it was said. Stop answering nonsense to things you don't understand. Er, the CR system isn't anything but an attempt to fudge the HD system to be more fair. It's not a new idea in any way. I fail to see where I said it was new. Well, sure, but the process of "gunning" for that game is still entirely outside the rules. Hell, most games outside the assumption of the rules -- wargame with random crap stringing together the encounters, which are what really matter -- are still entirely outside the rules and therefore hard to gun for. It's advice on how to drift the game back and forth within the somewhat narrow confines on the rules, not rules that actually *change* the game. The closest publication to doing that was Unearthed Arcana, and even then it was just many different flavors of wargame. Heroes of Horror, which made another valiant attempt, came out and said at the beginning that D&D was a terrible system for horror but you could still make it work if you really try and if you do tons of things to undermine the system's assumptions. There are guidelines for how to use the rules to get the game you want. If you hardcoded your own game into the system, it would cease to support everyone else. If you give people a bunch of identical red lego bricks they're going to make a bunch of block-shaped red things. You *can* make other shapes, but D&D is, to use your analogy, just publishing articles on how to use a belt sander and acrylic paints to change the shape of your bricks in whatever vague ways you might find fun, rather than actually publishing *differently shaped bricks*. What a_psh is proposing isn't bricks, but Matchbox - a fully-detailed game system that almost completely precludes doing anything else with it other than playing the game you and a_psh want. That's because I don't actually like puzzle challenges in D&D, and nor do most players I've played with. Archtyrant Teveroth is *right* when he points out how they undermine the expectations of both the stats-obsessed wargamers and the people who really like stories, and wrong when he claims this is somehow a good thing. (Whatever the reasons I play D&D, I don't play them so that I, the real person, can be made to sit down for an hour and solve a cryptogram.) And again, you ARE the only gamer worth catering to and the rest of us can go shove. I, for one, greatly enjoyed the puzzles in Dungeon's Challenge of Champions, as well as the various puzzles in Deserts of Desolation. The greatest D&D modules all have this component (and ways by which to blur them out if no one in the group likes it). In fact, there are D&D sourcebooks that are NOTHING but puzzles and riddles specific for inclusion in the game (rather than just generic puzzles and riddles). Those subhuman puzzle gamers! How dare they play a "roleplaying game!" Clearly, what they want is a "puzzle game." What idiots! I'm interested in a coherent game that actually does something I think a lot of D&D players want it to do and that D&D is in a unique place to do well -- which is why I don't think it should be a wargame (because there are plenty of wargames better than D&D) or a puzzle game (because there are plenty of puzzle games better than D&D), and I *especially* don't think it should be a game that tries to be a little bit of everything and ends up being good at nothing. Exactly!!! You want to turn D&D into something that's fundamentally OTHER than D&D. Why don't you just make an indie game like everyone else does? That way, you can take your insufferable superiority complex where the rest of us don't have to hear it. As much as I know Forge jargon tends to infuriate people who disagree with the concepts behind them, this is textbook drifting through illusionism. You've replaced D&D's character creation rules with a new set of rules that work okay except that they're not public, consistent rules, they're rules that exist only in your head. Practically every group of gamers I've played D&D with is catered to differently. Heck just the same group minus one is already somewhat different. So we should publish separate fantasy-styled games for each of them? And they'd play together, how?
Roxlimn 03-25-07, 12:27 AM	a_psh: Creating Immersion 101 is basically all about not having rules "get in the way," which means that the rules shouldn't conflict with what you imagine happening (it also means that what another person narrates shouldn't conflict with what you imagine happening). Sticking the player in a framework where he constantly has to ping the GM for validation of his imagined content isn't exactly the perfect solution here. Getting to influence time and space by bartering with godlike beings of like stature as yourself is, if you'll pardon me, even less of a perfect solution. Interestingly enough, the closest thing to we have to "Advanced Immersion" tells us that ritual is a big part of it. That the most immersive experiences in a game seem to happen through the metaphor of entering your own dreams or descending into the underworld or whatever. Implying that some careful work structuring the narrative of play or the social ritual of the game can broaden and strengthen this feeling. Of course, everyone has a different level of immersion that they find "fun." Part of why D&D poses such unrealistic characters is so that immersion can be reined in. I don't expect you to understand this. You've already shown that you're only interested in insulting and marginalizing people who don't agree with what you think is "fun."
a_psh 03-25-07, 01:26 AM	Getting to influence time and space by bartering with godlike beings of like stature as yourself is, if you'll pardon me, even less of a perfect solution.Immersion happens within a scene. Which means, necessarily, that it happens in bursts. The freedom to frame a scene doesn't really affect immersion. As for within a scene? Here's something you don't seem to get about DitV: you state an intention, then there's a response, then that gets turned into narration. "I shoot you" is handy shorthand for "my character is going to shoot you." If you say "I grab your gun as you're about to fire," me shooting you doesn't happen and then not happen -- it just starts to happen and then you stop it. No rewinding and rewriting going on. You can, however, pull all kinds of time tricks very easily, spreading a scene over months or seconds, putting in flashbacks, all kinds of stuff like that. Or, if "immersion" just means "I feel like stuff's happening in real time" to you, then you don't use flashbacks -- easy. Of course, everyone has a different level of immersion that they find "fun." Part of why D&D poses such unrealistic characters is so that immersion can be reined in.Okay, that last bit is ludicrous. You can say "D&D gives us such unrealistic characters because immersion isn't a priority" but... actually "reining in" immersion? C'mon! The system pretty clearly isn't actively setting out to sabotage immersive play for the sake of shielding us from the deep dark secrets hidden in our own subconscious minds or whatever.
Roxlimn 03-25-07, 01:37 AM	a_psh: Okay, that last bit is ludicrous. You can say "D&D gives us such unrealistic characters because immersion isn't a priority" but... actually "reining in" immersion? C'mon! The system pretty clearly isn't actively setting out to sabotage immersive play for the sake of shielding us from the deep dark secrets hidden in our own subconscious minds or whatever. You'd be quite wrong there. D&D very assidiously and very carefully sidesteps every immersion landmine there is in existence. Monotheistic religions aren't a main point of D&D storytelling because it would become a very thorny issue in-game. D&D "solves" that immersion issue by not including it in the game. Same thing for racism and sexism. These issues could very well be represented in the game. Indeed, it's altogether reasonable to give women characters a strength penalty if you're after greater "immersion." Women, are, in general less strong than men (which is why olympic games are divided up the middle as they are). But we don't because it deals with immersion issues people would rather not deal with. D&D very carefully winks at the audience and THEN presents them with a fun environment where they can immerse themselves without having to deal with real-life monsters. Playing an Elf instead of an African American or Japanese is a very careful way the game allows for race variation without actually introducing sensitive issues in-game. You can *have fun* being immersed in the freedom struggle of an in-game elf because he's an elf, and fundamentally unreal. Immersion happens within a scene. Which means, necessarily, that it happens in bursts. The freedom to frame a scene doesn't really affect immersion. Even outside a scene, wielding godlike power ruins immersion for me.
Dexter_Blacktyde 03-25-07, 01:57 AM	Indeed, it's altogether reasonable to give women characters a strength penalty if you're after greater "immersion." What does that have to do with immersion? :confused: D&D very carefully winks at the audience C'mon, D&D is about as subtle as a brick. DB
Jenkins007 03-25-07, 02:34 AM	What you need to do is write your own system. Write a guide on how to roleplay/gm/whatever else better. Why would you ask for more advice on how to do these things and then proceed to write fourteen pages on how to do it? I guess I'm missing the fundamental purpose behind this thread, but it seems to me your time would be better spent fixing what you see as wrong. All throughout almost every page you reference other games. How they coax the players to act more and roll less, how they reward for better actions in-game. This is the third and last time I'll say it, go consolidate what you have done here. Most of the work is done. Steal, borrow, mutilate, do what you have to to make the game yours. That's why people have house rules, to be able to do what they want. You can't act? Then use the skill instead. You don't want the skill, improvise. Sure, there are lots of people that follow RAW, but they aren't the only player's out there. It is quite possible that I have completely missed the point here, and I will be the first to admit that I'm wrong, but I'm just calling it how I see it. On a side note, in the groups that I have been in, social skills are rolled sparingly, only if you aren't so quick of tongue.
ArcTan 03-25-07, 02:59 AM	a_psh: You'd be quite wrong there. D&D very assidiously and very carefully sidesteps every immersion landmine there is in existence. Monotheistic religions aren't a main point of D&D storytelling because it would become a very thorny issue in-game. D&D "solves" that immersion issue by not including it in the game. Same thing for racism and sexism. These issues could very well be represented in the game. Indeed, it's altogether reasonable to give women characters a strength penalty if you're after greater "immersion." Women, are, in general less strong than men (which is why olympic games are divided up the middle as they are). But we don't because it deals with immersion issues people would rather not deal with. D&D very carefully winks at the audience and THEN presents them with a fun environment where they can immerse themselves without having to deal with real-life monsters. Playing an Elf instead of an African American or Japanese is a very careful way the game allows for race variation without actually introducing sensitive issues in-game. You can *have fun* being immersed in the freedom struggle of an in-game elf because he's an elf, and fundamentally unreal. I'm rapidly losing interest in the repeated "You're wrong!" "No, you're wrong!" this thread is becoming, but I have to step in here. Dexter_Blacktyde said it -- this isn't "immersion". This has nothing to do with immersion. Its reductio ad absurdum is the game FATAL, which everyone should look up to know what the reductio ad absurdum is. Immersion is not the same thing as realism. Sometimes it's the opposite. I don't think D&D is a very immersive game, but I think things like the combat system and the XP advancement system have more to do with that than the fact that the game does not take place in a realistic setting or try very hard to accurately mathematically simulate all aspects of reality. Neither of those things would actually help me get immersed in a game. (I could go on a whole theater-major rant here about the fundamental problem with assuming that realism or naturalism is the same thing as mimesis. I'll spare you all.) Even outside a scene, wielding godlike power ruins immersion for me. Why? Do you honestly feel "immersed" in your character -- like you *are* your character -- in between scenes? While your DM is munching snacks and saying "Okay, now we're gonna fast forward a few weeks to the point when your characters have been deployed to the northern front", do you mentally experience a few weeks of sleeping on hard straw pallets in the barracks and then feel like it's "the future" when the game snaps back into focus after the fast-forward? I somehow doubt you could actually achieve this kind of immersion even with some kind of virtual reality headset and total sensory deprivation. I mean, come on. D&D isn't even a particularly immersive game. It forces you into the metagame whenever you're making an important decision. How do I make my character switch to multiclassing in Rogue? My character has no concept of what his "class" is. How do I track my character's hit points? It's not clear that hit points correspond to anything at all in particular in D&D. How do I track my character's feat selection? Feats are a particularly thorny abstraction. How do I track my character's XP -- is my *character* honestly supposed to be feeling the sense of anticipation I get when I'm about to level? Does he feel that same sensation of satisfaction at levelling up? Literally interpreting these things to be true gets you nonsensical, Order-of-the-Stick-like scenarios. Every RPG has elements like this -- total immersion is impossible -- but D&D has them a *lot*. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. Total immersion is not only impossible but not really the optimum goal you want, for anything, really. (Dungeon crawls are generally fun because violence, killing and fear of imminent death are fun only when they're not actually happening to you.)
a_psh 03-25-07, 03:05 AM	D&D very assidiously and very carefully sidesteps every immersion landmine there is in existence.Is that stuff about "immersion," though? Polytheism and fantasy races are social cop-outs or narrative cop-outs or creative cop-outs or designer comfort zone cop-outs. "Immersion" is about empathizing with a character. It's not about avatarism. You're drifting "self" and "character" together rather than just dragging "character" all the way over to "self." A game can totally throw out realism and still accomplish this. Although, yes, the features of the game that you list do, in fact, suck.
Always-Late 03-25-07, 03:25 AM	[[EDITED]] Was in terrible taste.
Roxlimn 03-25-07, 04:39 AM	Dexter Blacktyde: At this point, it seems to me that there's such a basic disconnect that I don't think we understand each other anymore. Regardless of that, I find D&D a remarkably subtle game, or rather a game with subtle mechanical construction underneath the top layer that's supposed to hit you like a brick. ArcTan: To tell you the truth, the stiltingly boring goobledegook you guys insist on talking about, thinking that it makes you superior to every other gamer doesn't interest me in the slightest, but when you come in here and basically insult every gamer and call them stupid for playing D&D, well that gets my dander up and I can't not refute what you're saying. Thank you for sparing us even more goobledegook than you've already used. Literally interpreting these things to be true gets you nonsensical, Order-of-the-Stick-like scenarios. Every RPG has elements like this -- total immersion is impossible -- but D&D has them a *lot*. That's true, but nothing like deciding like what's being proposed. That's just a sledgehammer for me. I can overlook all these other things, but not something like DitV mechanics. a_psh: "Immersion" is about empathizing with a character. It's not about avatarism. You're drifting "self" and "character" together rather than just dragging "character" all the way over to "self." A game can totally throw out realism and still accomplish this. Although, yes, the features of the game that you list do, in fact, suck. The fact that what you think is great, I think sucks; and what I think is great, you think sucks - well, I think that you're really wanting to play DitV, not D&D. If you like that game, why not just play that game? You don't need to butcher D&D into a DitV clone to have fun. Just go butcher DitV.
Reinforcements 03-25-07, 11:42 AM	The fact that what you think is great, I think sucks; and what I think is great, you think sucks - well, I think that you're really wanting to play DitV, not D&D. If you like that game, why not just play that game? You don't need to butcher D&D into a DitV clone to have fun. Just go butcher DitV. I really don't understand what's so difficult about seeing where a_psh is coming from instead of just treating him like the enemy. Couldn't D&D benefit, maybe, from some structure for it's role-playing (outside of combat)? Wouldn't it be nice if the game did have some (good) rules for social interaction? I don't want to play DITV either, and I like D&D, but I think I could like it even more. I don't want to put words into a_psh's mouth or give him to much credit, but I doubt that if you said, "You know, maybe we could stand to change a few of the fundamental rules, but I'd like to keep as much intact as possible," he would reply, "NO! That's not good enough! D&D sucks and we need to change EVERYTHING!"
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-25-07, 01:06 PM	Wow. I've been away a couple days and there are 2-3 new pages of material.. well I'm going to try to respond to at least some of this stuff, but honestly, I don't know if I can keep up with it all. "You allow." "You don't want them to." That just comes off as GM ass-kissing to me. If GMing is all about making players do what I "want them to," then they don't actually get a lot of choices now, do they? The solution to your problem is as simple as "Hey, guys, this is dumb." If you expect everyone at the table except the GM to just be wasting all their time trying to ruin a story and abuse the rules, why even bother GMing for these people? Well, no, I expect people are going to try to use the rules, and as far as "ruining the story" that's not always a true RPG idea. RPGs aren't a novel, there is no definite story, and DMs that try to create a full on plot from the beginning usually just end up railroading their PCs. The idea of rules is to give the PCs options, but not to make those options broken. Yes, sometimes you don't want NPCs to be convinced of certain things and you say, "No, that can't happen." Part of good rules is that they don't allow stupid stuff to happen, and if they can't write diplomacy rules that prevent stupid stuff, then there shouldn't be diplomacy rules at all, and we should freeform it. Most attempts to do a mystery story in D&D blow chunks. A lot of attempts at things blow chunks. But just because your DM couldn't pull it off doesn't mean it's something you can abandon.
a_psh 03-25-07, 01:22 PM	The fact that what you think is great, I think sucks; and what I think is great, you think sucks - well, I think that you're really wanting to play DitV, not D&D. If you like that game, why not just play that game? You don't need to butcher D&D into a DitV clone to have fun. Just go butcher DitV.DitV is a freakin' example of certain design patterns. You don't like certain things about DitV? Fine. Whatever. But it's got good stuff to learn from. The basic concept of escalating conflict is something that "do-or-die" D&D is really missing. That bit, for instance, doesn't require the "godlike power" you worry so much about.
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-25-07, 01:22 PM	That is, in fact, quite wrong. By creating MORE game where social interaction exists, it becomes more of a game, not less. It's less of an unstructured argument game between DM and player, but that kind of game was never in the D&D system to begin with. Arguably, having results predetermined by numerical game elements also makes "roleplaying" more straightforward. After all, when you play Hamlet, you ARE playing a role, and you don't have any more creative control over that than any predetermined outcome. But predetermination kills the "game" aspect. It might be cool for an improv acting session, but most gamers don't like fatalism. They want their choices to make a difference. That includes what they say and do. If a social scene is simply "roll a die and act it out", then it's no longer a role-playing game, because player choice is phased out. In a game, choice must always be paramount. You introduce random chance only when it would improve the game. Here, it doesn't. In the same way, the choice between an insult and the "right thing said" could be made more mechanically incorporated - more relevant choices could be represented in the skill game. Well, you run into a few dangerous situations having a social system at all. First, is the social build character. You really don't want characters who specialize in social ability, otherwise it forces the other PCs to not talk and let the specialist do his thing in every roleplaying encounter they come across. So even if you had this great system, which is probably near to impossible to do in the first place. You're excluding people who choose to play fighters instead of rogues and just telling them to shut up everytime there's any talking. I don't know about you, but when I play a character, I like to talk in character. I don't like rules telling me that I've got to take rogue so I can get a decent enough diplomacy score to not screw my party when I speak. Second, as long as you're speaking in character, it's still arbitrary. The DM takes what you say and assigns something. Instead of outright determining a result, he assigns modifiers. And then... you roll a dice. Again, nobody answered my question as to why having randomness in social encounters helps anything, so I still don't see the point. The same charge could be made on the Open Locks check. It doesn't matter if you sing loudly or jump up and down when you're picking a lock. Like I've said before, open locks is different. It's not something we can act out in a fun way to even care about, so we fast forward it. On the other hand, role-playing shouldn't be something we fast forward, unless it's trivial. I mean sure, you can fast forward bartering for a coil of rope. Nobody cares. But when you're trying to convince the king that the prince is trying to murder him, that's central to the plot. That's a dramatic scene. I don't want to fast forward it and just get on with the next combat. I want to play it out! Arguably, the game would benefit much more from incoporating rules for making puzzle challenges than from incoporating poker, but I've yet to see a_psh or ArcTan agree with me on it, or even push for it themselves. Well I don't know if the game really needs additional rules for puzzle challenges. They're already there. Puzzles can be as simple as figuring out how to cross a ravine or trying to solve a murder mystery. You have all the tools you have at your disposal for everything else, including divinations and skills. A puzzle challenge is just a challenge involves the games physics + thinking outside the box. And you can't write rules for thinking outside the box, because then you'd be thinking inside the box. I'm not sure what kinds of special rules we need, aside from rules to assign XP for puzzles.
Dexter_Blacktyde 03-25-07, 01:50 PM	The basic concept of escalating conflict is something that "do-or-die" D&D is really missing. Again: Why is "do or die" bad? Why is it bad that the single roll of a die maybe just complements the actual roleplaying instead of several dice rolls trying to simulate it? DB
a_psh 03-25-07, 02:04 PM	Again: Why is "do or die" bad? Why is it bad that the single roll of a die maybe just complements the actual roleplaying instead of several dice rolls trying to simulate it?I was talking about combat, actually. D&D lifts wargame combat almost wholesale. But it makes a critical mistake in doing that. See, in a fairly typical wargame, you've got a bunch of guys, right? Each of them takes damage in a pretty abstract way -- usually just with one-hit-kills or maybe hit-points. But, the entity that is your entire army takes damage in a much less abstract way: parts of it die. When you lose a unit, you lose out on its effectiveness, too (in other words, dead soldiers can't fight). So, on the level of the game as a whole, there are consequences for every little bit of damage your army takes. In D&D combat, the only hit point that really matters is your last. Everything else is pretty much a resource you can expend freely and get back later through healing. Now, many wargames still end up being farcical "do or die" affairs because they present you with a microcosm where winning a particular scenario is the only thing that matters. A lot of games designed for "campaign" play, however, end up making you choose between immediate objectives and the long-term stability of your army: sometimes the individual scenario objective just isn't worth losing any more guys over. That's cool. That's dynamic. In an RPG, that kind of choice lets you make a statement. You're all like, "Look, this is how much I care about this thing. This is the kind of sacrifice I'm willing or unwilling to make."
Dexter_Blacktyde 03-25-07, 02:20 PM	I was talking about combat, actually. (...) Okay, sorry for the misunderstanding. But if I'm not mistaken, you're complaining about rolling a single die to resolve a non-combat situation (diplomacy, bluff, etc.) also, aren't you? You're advocating the DitV system (as an example, of course) for these situations after all. You highlighted the differences, and I wouldn't have a problem with that had you just said, "I like it better this way"; what you're saying, though, is that it is better, period. I just don't get why you think so. DB
a_psh 03-25-07, 02:47 PM	Okay, sorry for the misunderstanding. But if I'm not mistaken, you're complaining about rolling a single die to resolve a non-combat situation (diplomacy, bluff, etc.) also, aren't you?Yeah. You're advocating the DitV system (as an example, of course) for these situations after all. You highlighted the differences, and I wouldn't have a problem with that had you just said, "I like it better this way"; what you're saying, though, is that it is better, period. I just don't get why you think so.TSOY is closer to a system I'd like to see implemented in D&D than DitV is. The basic idea there is that you can do high-level single-roll resolution or "zoom in" when you want to. For anything. What I really like here is the ability to say "Okay, this is important" or "Okay, this is not as important" about anything and have the detail scale appropriately, thanks to the mechanics. The nice thing about DitV is that it pushes you to figure out how much you care about something. Any argument or conflict you have in DitV, inherently, carries the threat of violence: push too far and there's gonna be blood. This is very good for a Western. Or a horror game, actually (which is what it's being turned into now, with a big and meaty rules revision). In D&D fantasy, this would look different. It'd be a bit more about sacrifices rather than just pure escalation. Like Polaris but less hardcore, in a way. Rules that make that chain of sacrifices happen are nice because they pick up the slack if you flub something. I have more to say about this, but it's kinda tricky, so I'm writing it out slowly for another thread.
Dexter_Blacktyde 03-25-07, 03:03 PM	That still doesn't answer my question ;) DB
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-25-07, 07:57 PM	Rules that make that chain of sacrifices happen are nice because they pick up the slack if you flub something. Sacrifices aren't a great idea, because you want characters to generally get better, not worse. A spiral of degeneration for your character is fine in Call of Cthulhu, but your D&D hero is supposed to get better over time, not worse. That means that you're supposed to be gaining stuff as you adventure, not giving it up. "I sacrifice my weapon focus feat to live!" Sooner or later, you'll all be left playing commoners.
ArcTan 03-25-07, 08:59 PM	Sacrifices aren't a great idea, because you want characters to generally get better, not worse. A spiral of degeneration for your character is fine in Call of Cthulhu, but your D&D hero is supposed to get better over time, not worse. That means that you're supposed to be gaining stuff as you adventure, not giving it up. "I sacrifice my weapon focus feat to live!" Sooner or later, you'll all be left playing commoners. Well, D&D character advancement is about sacrificing something now to get something better later. It's a gamble, in a broad sense. An appropriately challenging EL is one that makes you expend "resources" -- that means HP, consumable items, spells, etc. After you burn off some of your healing potions and spell scrolls and wand charges and so forth, you get gold and XP to make up for it and push your character incrementally forward.
ArcTan 03-25-07, 09:08 PM	But predetermination kills the "game" aspect. It might be cool for an improv acting session, but most gamers don't like fatalism. They want their choices to make a difference. That includes what they say and do. If a social scene is simply "roll a die and act it out", then it's no longer a role-playing game, because player choice is phased out. In a game, choice must always be paramount. You introduce random chance only when it would improve the game. Here, it doesn't. Again, the issue isn't dice -- the issue is making social situations completely DM-fiat with no guidelines for how they should actually work. Well, you run into a few dangerous situations having a social system at all. First, is the social build character. You really don't want characters who specialize in social ability, otherwise it forces the other PCs to not talk and let the specialist do his thing in every roleplaying encounter they come across. "Well, you run into a few dangerous situations having a combat system at all. First, is the combat build character. You really don't want characters who specialize in combat ability, otherwise it forces the PCs to not fight and let the specialist do his thing in every roleplaying encounter they come across." This is the exact same thing you just said with a few words changed. Any defense you make about the combat system in D&D could also be made for a social system. (And please don't give me that "combat isn't roleplaying and everyone gets a chance to roleplay" stuff. Everything you do in a roleplaying game should be roleplaying.) So even if you had this great system, which is probably near to impossible to do in the first place. You're excluding people who choose to play fighters instead of rogues and just telling them to shut up everytime there's any talking. I don't know about you, but when I play a character, I like to talk in character. I don't like rules telling me that I've got to take rogue so I can get a decent enough diplomacy score to not screw my party when I speak. Would you really feel happy if a DM "realistically" told you the king got impatient with you and left the room if it takes you a few minutes to think of what to say? Do you think it's fun to have NPCs get "realistically" confused when players stutter, or stammer, or get tongue-tied? Do you make your players learn the imaginary language of your fantasy world and speak it (because, realistically, why would they speak English at all when it's not even our world)? You seem to be assuming that it's possible for most people to "just roleplay" social situations in the first place. We're *already* having the DM do the equivalent of mentally adding modifiers for your Diplomacy score every time the dashing adventurer says "Um, okay, ah, yer majesty, please don't kill us, cuz we don't deserve it, I can prove it" and mentally translates that into something actually persuasive. Second, as long as you're speaking in character, it's still arbitrary. The DM takes what you say and assigns something. Instead of outright determining a result, he assigns modifiers. And then... you roll a dice. Again, nobody answered my question as to why having randomness in social encounters helps anything, so I still don't see the point. It doesn't have to be randomness. They could be static numbers. You don't necessarily have to represent them as numbers. But the point is to have something *less* arbitrary than the DM "outright determining a result" -- some kind of *rule* for how a social encounter should go. On the other hand, role-playing shouldn't be something we fast forward, unless it's trivial. I mean sure, you can fast forward bartering for a coil of rope. Nobody cares. But when you're trying to convince the king that the prince is trying to murder him, that's central to the plot. That's a dramatic scene. I don't want to fast forward it and just get on with the next combat. I want to play it out! So do I! Which is why I want a *system* for doing it, instead of having to watch my horrendously unpersonable friends badly pretending to be the dashing adventurers and having the results happen for no reason at all! Just as combat is more exciting because it has *rules* and does not consist of us taking out action figures and whacking them against each other going "Ha! Ha! Hiya!" and the DM picking the side that "fought the best" and saying they win the battle. Well I don't know if the game really needs additional rules for puzzle challenges. They're already there. Puzzles can be as simple as figuring out how to cross a ravine or trying to solve a murder mystery. You have all the tools you have at your disposal for everything else, including divinations and skills. A puzzle challenge is just a challenge involves the games physics + thinking outside the box. And you can't write rules for thinking outside the box, because then you'd be thinking inside the box. I'm not sure what kinds of special rules we need, aside from rules to assign XP for puzzles. Puzzles actually shouldn't encourage "thinking outside the box", because if it's outside the box it's not possible to adjudicate. (How the f*** do *I* know if it's even possible to hotwire a military helicopter, for instance? Is it really fair to just let it go as a gimme because someone said "I hotwire it!", since all they did was get a random idea without any standard for how *good* an idea it was? Does it really make the game more fun to let them do this and quietly bypass the interesting puzzle to find the ignition key that I had set up?) And the game doesn't actually have "physics". That's part of the problem with puzzle challenges -- that the world isn't a real thing you can turn around in and poke at, it's a bunch of arbitrary words the DM is saying that can be interpreted in a lot of ways.
ArcTan 03-25-07, 09:18 PM	ArcTan: To tell you the truth, the stiltingly boring goobledegook you guys insist on talking about, thinking that it makes you superior to every other gamer doesn't interest me in the slightest, but when you come in here and basically insult every gamer and call them stupid for playing D&D, well that gets my dander up and I can't not refute what you're saying. Thank you for sparing us even more goobledegook than you've already used. Sheesh. "Gobbledygook"? The most gobbledygook word I used in my last post was "metagame", which is totally a WotC D&D boards term (actually, I think it came first from the Magic community), not a term I've ever heard in a game design class and not one they use much on the Forge. I don't think I'm superior to all other gamers. I don't think everyone who plays D&D is a moron. I think that I've noticed some things that could improve D&D that people seem slow to pick up on simply because *people are naturally slow to accept change*. Often whether or not someone comes to understand the way something they do could be changed is just a result of chance or inspiration, not some subtle superintelligence. To say that you can't suggest that something someone likes could be changed for the better without "insulting" them or implying that they're "stupid" is to shut down all debate about a topic and to prevent something from ever improving. And it's stupid. (Yeah, lots of people liked and bought CDs by the Backstreet Boys back when they were popular. I don't think all those people were stupid. I also don't think the Backstreet Boys are very good as a musical group. I think that lots of smart people watch TV shows, listen to music, and play games that aren't very good. I think that this is just how markets and media *work*.) FWIW, for all that you're trying to take the high road, you've been nothing but vicious and condescending in your replies, Roxlimn -- assuming that the only reason anyone could have anything to criticize about D&D would be being "arrogant", that the only reason to write indie RPGs is to be a "reactionary", and that the only reason anyone could find an indie RPG fun is because we're snickering to ourselves about how we're not playing D&D. "Gobbledygook" or not, a_psh's and my posts have contained a lot more actual talk about RPG and a lot less talk about the motivations of other posters, while the ratios in yours are basically the reverse, and I find that annoying. By the way, if there was too much "gobbledygook" in my last post for you to understand, I'll make it simple: A game isn't more fun just because it tries harder to simulate the real world. A game isn't more realistic just because it tries harder to simulate the real world. A game isn't more immersive just because it tries harder to simulate the real world. I would have a much *harder* time getting into character in a game with gender-based stat mods than a game without them. There are many game systems that take place in the modern world -- with monotheistic religion, computers, quantum physics and all that -- that aren't immersive at all, and plenty of game systems that take place in totally ridiculous game worlds that I have no trouble getting immersed in. Saying that the unrealistic elements in D&D are intended to avoid "overimmersing" players is dumb. I don't think the reason D&D has swords rather than guns is because guns are too "real", but because swords are more *fun* than guns.
a_psh 03-25-07, 11:35 PM	That still doesn't answer my question ;)My apologies. Here goes... A single roll is just an outcome. In D&D, it's just a straight-up "succeed" or "fail." In most cases, picking an outcome is easy, and it's figuring out how the story gets to that outcome in an interesting way that's hard. Sometimes, when the event is trivial, you're okay just knowing an outcome and going on. But if you want to do something important, having game mechanics that tell you the outcome but not the how or why of it tend to get in the way more than they help. Because now you've got this constraint relating to the ending of the scene or micro-scene, but you're still stuck figuring out how to tell the story, right? This is why, I think, people are pretty happy about the skill system when it's like "Do I open this lock?" or "Do I jump this chasm?" but a lot of them get pretty snippy and unsatisfied when you attempt to use skills for "Do I convince the king to trust me?" -- they feel like having the outcome dictated to them isn't doing anything useful. The thing is, by cutting the action up, you generate more meaningful choice, not less. DitV's approach gives you all these little choices along the way. You feel like your ultimate success or failure is riding on something more concrete and more under your control than just one random roll. The system turns the process by which you get to the outcome into a set of meaningful choices; in the roll-a-single-die approach, that's all just color that you introduce. The complexity adds richness to the fictional situation. Maybe you can fail to win the king's trust but still make him feel guilty about the death of his son along the way -- and in a way that doesn't just turn back to fiat. DitV/TSOY-style step-by-step isn't the only option here, either. There's a very different but also very powerful concept that you can borrow from Otherkind and Bliss Stage: roll several dice and assign them to different categories related to the scene, like "Do I get what I want?" or "How does this affect my future relationships?" -- the details, of course, vary from game to game; Bliss Stage, for example, has a category for "How damaged is my robot?" while Otherkind asks "Do I have to hurt anybody to get what I want?" (Here (http://www.lumpley.com/archive/148.html)'s a very simplified version of the Otherkind implementation -- Otherkind itself is a proof of concept, mind you.) The point is: Outcomes are easy. Convincing and interesting details are hard. In a key scene, details matter; at other times, you can just take an outcome. A system that helps you lay out the interesting details is better than one that just dictates an outcome. (For D&D-esque structure, a system that zooms the metaphorical camera in or out depending on the scene is the best. Some other games just assume unimportant scenes become super-unimportant and just let you narrate through.)
Dexter_Blacktyde 03-25-07, 11:43 PM	Again, the issue isn't dice -- the issue is making social situations completely DM-fiat with no guidelines for how they should actually work. Tell me how a social situation in the real world should work - in, say, 8000 words or less? See, I draw a dagger and try to stab you. There are only two outcomes - either I hit or I miss (there are more like stumbling while attacking, a critical hit, and so on, but you get the idea). It's okay to have mechanics simulate this process, because they only determine one of two outcomes, and you can describe the attack in detail. A social situation is so much more complex that we all have to learn dealing with these for roughly two decades, give or take - and you want detailed rules governing them and considering every possible factor that could influence the outcome? I mean, they should be halfway realistic, shouldn't they? This is just like demanding artificial intelligence so you don't have to put up with games like Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale. It would be nice to have games that can simulate an intelligence which can be perceived as a human-like, but absolutely objective GM pulling the strings. At the gaming table we don't need that - we are humans. The way I see it, this "GM fiat" you're criticizing is actually our strength. Any defense you make about the combat system in D&D could also be made for a social system. (And please don't give me that "combat isn't roleplaying and everyone gets a chance to roleplay" stuff. Everything you do in a roleplaying game should be roleplaying.) You equate the "describe the offensive and defensive maneuvers in an entertaining manner" roleplaying with the "feel and think in character and have a social interaction with someone who feels and thinks in character" roleplaying? That's the same to you? All right, in this case rules simulating social interactions might work for you - but please stop claiming they are objectively better, because some gamers have a definition of roleplaying that differs vastly from yours. In a way I'd consider having those rules as almost as bad as generally neglecting social interactions - as D&D does - for newcomers. With the focus almost exclusively on combat, D&D trains newbies to think roleplaying is just hack'n'slay all the way; D&D having as extensive rules for social interactions as it has for combat might train newbies to think everything has to be simulated, no fantasy, no creativity, no immersion required at all, the whole gaming world works on numbers - plug and play. Would you really feel happy if a DM "realistically" told you the king got impatient with you and left the room if it takes you a few minutes to think of what to say? Where do you draw the line? Has a player the right to complain that the whole king's guard attacks his character because he thought it was funny to feint an attack against the sovereign? If you're saying that the individual gaming world doesn't matter all that much, that it has to be formed by the players, that everything is allowed as long as they have fun, all right, again, an "objective" generic social system might work for you. Again, it will definitely not work for everyone. If the players are so dense that they need several minutes to even say something, there are two possibilities: 1) The GM might want to limit the adventures to dungeon crawls. 2) The GM asks the player what the character will say, adjusts the DC, lets him make a diplomacy check, goes from there and bears in mind that "live" in-character roleplaying is just not his players' cup of tea. A GM should know his players well enough without having to resort to "one size fits all groups" rules. Back to the example: Rules for fighting are fine, rules for any physical activity are fine. But rules and tables don't know the NPC, and they cannot possibly cover everything that makes him tick. They don't know him - the GM does. He can act on something rules will never be able to do: His knowledge and his gut feeling allow him to feel what's the right reaction without having to stop the flow and destroying the "in the moment" feeling and the carefully built atmosphere just to look up a table and make a roll of the dice every two sentences. That can be problematic enough in combat encounters as it is. This isn't a system-inherent problem, it's one of colliding roleplaying philosophies. There are people who think a living, breathing and despite all its fantastic aspects believable world has to be one that keeps on living and breathing when the players have left the table and gone home, not just a place that exists solely to cater to the players' preferences. There are people who think like you. And there are people who occupy the thousands of shades of gray inbetween these two cornerstones. In your example the player screws up; it doesn't matter if he does because he just couldn't think of something to say, because of an abysmal skill check or a combination of both. Doesn't that make for an interesting scene? The crude and coarse adventurer who kicks butt left and right in his natural environment is a fish out of water at the king's court, and he managed to annoy His Majesty. An argument between the party's members might ensue - which can cast an even more damning light on them. The characters and the players have learned that they may be the most important people in their adventures, but not the most important people in the world, and now they have to look for another way to get the king's attention and maybe to correct their blunder. Maybe they get the idea that it would be nice for situations like these to have someone who's up to the social challenge. Maybe next time they hire a drunken bard, wait 'til he's sober and let him present their cause to the king because they have to give him a special information? Maybe, maybe, maybe. If the players just think, 'How was I to know that I was supposed to actually prepare myself for this meeting instead of just stumbling into the throne room and waiting for the GM to make things happen the way I want it?', well... they might be a little spoiled. It doesn't have to be randomness. They could be static numbers. You don't necessarily have to represent them as numbers. But the point is to have something *less* arbitrary than the DM "outright determining a result" -- some kind of *rule* for how a social encounter should go. Static numbers are supposed to emulate the intricate web of thousands of factors that influence social interaction...? Oh, dear. So you're advocating a gaming style that should go for all groups. What if gaming style X would suit a newly formed group just fine, but the rigid - and by its nature unrealistic - system never lets them find out? Unfortunately you didn't reply the last time, but I have to know, so I repeat my question: How can you argue so sensibly and strikingly against the concept of alignment - using many arguments I'm using right now against you - and demand such a system? So do I! Which is why I want a *system* for doing it, instead of having to watch my horrendously unpersonable friends badly pretending to be the dashing adventurers and having the results happen for no reason at all! There is a reason - the result of the skill check compared to a DC right out of the PHB, slightly modified to account for the circumstances. You're not complaining that the GM merely getting to make modifications is the big problem? Because if you did, I'd reply that I really don't see the need for an absolutely idiot-proof system, just because one out of, I don't know, 100 GMs makes up completely unreasonable modifications. (How the f*** do *I* know if it's even possible to hotwire a military helicopter, for instance? Is it really fair to just let it go as a gimme because someone said "I hotwire it!", since all they did was get a random idea without any standard for how *good* an idea it was? Uh... now you've lost me. Didn't you want a system that completely complies with what the players think is fun, regardless of how realistic or unrealistic it is? DB
Dexter_Blacktyde 03-26-07, 12:19 AM	The thing is, by cutting the action up, you generate more meaningful choice, not less. DitV's approach gives you all these little choices along the way. You feel like your ultimate success or failure is riding on something more concrete and more under your control than just one random roll. The system turns the process by which you get to the outcome into a set of meaningful choices; in the roll-a-single-die approach, that's all just color that you introduce. The complexity adds richness to the fictional situation. Maybe you can fail to win the king's trust but still make him feel guilty about the death of his son along the way -- and in a way that doesn't just turn back to fiat. You're killing roleplaying! (Sorry for the drama, I just really felt like saying this ;)) That's exactly what I would tell someone relatively new to the hobby who asks me, "Why the heck should we talk in character? That's what the skills are for, right?" So you're opposed to the GM making decisions that influence the outcome of a situation based on various factors, in this example his roleplaying the NPC, his judgement of the characters' arguments and the situation. So far, so good. But let's turn the tables: Why do the characters get to roleplay? I want them to act on rules, too, not on what they think fits their characters best. No more gut feeling, no more intuition, I want to be able to check all their actions and compare them to the rules, and woe to them if I find a single spark of individuality there! (Again, sorry for the drama ;)) I hope I'm not getting annoying, but I have to repeat my question: Why is a GM who makes decisions that cannot be cross-checked by the DMG objectively bad? DitV/TSOY-style step-by-step isn't the only option here, either. There's a very different but also very powerful concept that you can borrow from Otherkind and Bliss Stage: roll several dice and assign them to different categories related to the scene, like "Do I get what I want?" or "How does this affect my future relationships?" -- the details, of course, vary from game to game; Bliss Stage, for example, has a category for "How damaged is my robot?" while Otherkind asks "Do I have to hurt anybody to get what I want?" ([url=http://www.lumpley.com/archive/148.html]Here[url]'s a very simplified version of the Otherkind implementation.) This sounds awfully much like strong simplification, and I feel D&D is simplified enough. But all right, let's say you assign your dice to different categories. You still have to roll certain numbers, right? How can a list of DCs possibly incorporate all the factors that are incorporated automatically by what you call "GM fiat" and I'd prefer to call "GM assessment"? I say it can't. So we have a world that even expands its black-and-white, clear cut tradition, though it's already as deep and believable as a Saturday morning cartoon as it is (by the book). And what about bluffs? What about make-believe? You want outcomes that are objectively revisable, you want the players to be able to look at the dice and know if they succeeded if I get your meaning. What about "Does she believe my lie?", although your counterpart may be very cautious and not let on if she believes anything at all? What about "Do I get what I want" when she can't or won't let you know that she agrees with you? What about "Did I input the code for disarming the virus right, although I have no way of knowing until the timer reaches zero?" Because if you allow hidden rolls, there's your GM fiat again, because he can fudge all he wants. By the way, I'm not saying anything against the Otherkind system, that's not what I'm talking about. I just get the impression you have a strong dislike for the theoretical power a GM wields. Outcomes are easy. Convincing and interesting details are hard. In a key scene, details matter; at other times, you can just take an outcome. A system that helps you lay out the interesting details is better than one that just dictates an outcome. (For D&D-esque structure, a system that zooms the metaphorical camera in or out depending on the scene is the best. Some other games just assume unimportant scenes become super-unimportant and just let you narrate through.) Well, that's not a question of what's objectively better and worse, but a question of what one likes better. Narrating through unimportant segments (you can give away the importance of something seemingly unimportant away by insisting on rolling the dice) is different from playing everything out. But it's not better. Neither is a car "better" than a motorbike; you can transport more things and passengers, it's more comfortable, especially on long trips - but you won't convince a biker that it's better :cool: DB
Arrowhen 03-26-07, 12:37 AM	Back to the example: Rules for fighting are fine, rules for any physical activity are fine. But rules and tables don't know the NPC, and they cannot possibly cover everything that makes him tick. They don't know him - the GM does. He can act on something rules will never be able to do: His knowledge and his gut feeling allow him to feel what's the right reaction without having to stop the flow and destroying the "in the moment" feeling and the carefully built atmosphere just to look up a table and make a roll of the dice every two sentences. All too often, though, the DMs "gut feeling" is based upon "How well is Bob impressing me with his acting ability?"
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-26-07, 12:49 AM	Again, the issue isn't dice -- the issue is making social situations completely DM-fiat with no guidelines for how they should actually work. Well, social situations are generally so complex as to render most systems hopelessly generic and unsuited to the task of handling things in a sense that creates a good story. "Well, you run into a few dangerous situations having a combat system at all. First, is the combat build character. You really don't want characters who specialize in combat ability, otherwise it forces the PCs to not fight and let the specialist do his thing in every roleplaying encounter they come across." This is the exact same thing you just said with a few words changed. Well, and it's true. But here's the catch: In D&D, every character is a combat specialist. Seriously. That's why we have a class based system, so we ensure everyone can fight. People fight in different ways. Some guys toss fireballs, someone heals, someone wades in with a sword, rogues get sneak attacks and so on. But everyone is effective in combat, everyone contributes. Social encounters aren't the same way. You just can't adequately have separate social talents without alienating people. I mean, you can have the intimidator, or the etiquette guy and so on, but this just means that you have one character doing all the work in any given situation and your game turns into a series of one-man show encounters. It's part of the reason that trap disarming and finding is relatively simple in 3.5, because it's a one-man encounter. Nobody wants to sit around bored to tears for 10 minutes while the rogue does his thing and they're helpless to act. You just can't allow social specialists and involve the whole party in social encounters, because social encounters take a lot of time, and it's not acceptable for one guy to do all the work while the rest of the party sits around bored and unable to say or contribute anything in a meaningful fashion. Would you really feel happy if a DM "realistically" told you the king got impatient with you and left the room if it takes you a few minutes to think of what to say? Do you think it's fun to have NPCs get "realistically" confused when players stutter, or stammer, or get tongue-tied? Do you make your players learn the imaginary language of your fantasy world and speak it (because, realistically, why would they speak English at all when it's not even our world)? No, of course not. But this is an RPG and it's fine to give players time to think, especially if their character has a higher int or charisma than they do. It doesn't have to be randomness. They could be static numbers. You don't necessarily have to represent them as numbers. But the point is to have something *less* arbitrary than the DM "outright determining a result" -- some kind of *rule* for how a social encounter should go. But static numbers don't understand the current situation, that's the thing. If you have numbers that apply to the current situation, then it's going to require DM adjudication, and then you're just indirectly saying "let the DM decide", only you're pretending it makes sense because it's a system. If there is some master table, it's going to end up being crappy and unrealistic, like the current diplomacy system is now (only without the dice). I mean, look at the diplomacy DCs. It's just a fixed DC to get a guy from hostile to indifferent. Doesn't take into account the person's personality, why he's hostile to the PCs or anything. So it could be any of the following: -The NPC is a paladin and thinks the PCs are criminals. He is attacking to try to bring them to justice. -The NPC is an evil high cleric, the PCs have come to thwart his plans. -The NPC is a random warrior who returned home to catch one of the PCs forcibly violating his daughter. And guess what? Turning this guy from hostile to indifferent is THE SAME DC, in all these situations. You just can't have a freaking table big enough to handle every single little situation in every case. So either the DM invents arbitrary modifiers (which is the same as just having him assign a DC) or your social system sucks to the point of making your NPCs act completely unrealistically. Yes, you can potentially write a system for bartering and haggling. That's fine. But for every social situation that could come up? I think not. Puzzles actually shouldn't encourage "thinking outside the box", because if it's outside the box it's not possible to adjudicate. (How the f*** do *I* know if it's even possible to hotwire a military helicopter, for instance? Is it really fair to just let it go as a gimme because someone said "I hotwire it!", since all they did was get a random idea without any standard for how *good* an idea it was? Does it really make the game more fun to let them do this and quietly bypass the interesting puzzle to find the ignition key that I had set up?) Well it should be something intuitive as opposed to something that you're just supposed to randomly come up with. But now we're getting into what makes a good puzzle and what makes a bad one. Yes, puzzles suck if there's no reasonable way to get the answer. But they also suck if the solution is written in the PHB or DMG. As far as game physics, they certainly exist. That simply means you can achieve various ends. For instance if you wanted to create water, you have a spell that does that. If you wanted to levitate something, you also have a spell or effect. If you needed to throw an object, you could do that too. And so on and so on.
Arrowhen 03-26-07, 12:52 AM	That's exactly what I would tell someone relatively new to the hobby who asks me, "Why the heck should we talk in character? That's what the skills are for, right?" I'd tell them, "You talk in character because it's fun. The skills are there to determine whether your character succeeds or not, since his social skills may be better or worse than yours are in real life."
Dexter_Blacktyde 03-26-07, 12:53 AM	All too often, though, the DMs "gut feeling" is based upon "How well is Bob impressing me with his acting ability?" Sure, but what Bob's GM does or doesn't do isn't the system's fault. I've always said that D&D should finally look beyond its own horizon to see how other systems treat the non-mechanical aspects of roleplaying, that it should emphasize what I consider the actual meat of the hobby instead of focusing on its wargame aspect and just paying lip-service to the rest. Maybe Bob's GM doesn't know better because D&D doesn't bother to show him what social interaction in an RPG is about because it would rather that he purchases the Complete Warrior IV, Dungeoncraft III, Races of Combat-Effectiveness and what have you? IMHO introducing even more rules is the wrong way. DB
ArcTan 03-26-07, 12:56 AM	Tell me how a social situation in the real world should work - in, say, 8000 words or less? See, I draw a dagger and try to stab you. There are only two outcomes - either I hit or I miss (there are more like stumbling while attacking, a critical hit, and so on, but you get the idea). It's okay to have mechanics simulate this process, because they only determine one of two outcomes, and you can describe the attack in detail. Except that's not true. There's a million different things that can happen if you try to stab me with a dagger. The fact that you're acting like it's as simple as "hit or miss" is because you're used to seeing it in D&D. Do you penetrate my clothes but get caught in the fabric? Do you succeed in drawing a painful but superficial cut across my arm? Do you miss entirely and embed your dagger in the wall? Do I notice your attempt, grab your wrist and force the dagger into your own thigh? Does the dagger point hit a rib and chip? Do you miraculously plunge the dagger straight through my ribs, mortally wounding me? Do I manage to block the blow with my hand but cut the palm badly in the process? Do you stick the dagger in and then, frightened by the blood, suddenly let go, leaving it in my flesh where I can pull it out and use it against you in a rage? Do you score a minor wound that nonetheless leaves me screaming in pain and shock, incapacitated? All these things could happen in real life. Almost none of them are represented by a standard D&D attack roll. Because D&D is an ABSTRACTION. A social situation is so much more complex that we all have to learn dealing with these for roughly two decades, give or take You know that learning to fight isn't exactly easy, either. I'd say that a lot more people among a normal human population are adept at social situations than at combat. I really want to chip away at this "Combat is simple and easy and intuitive to model" kind of thing. It's *not*, not at all. D&D combat is a horrible oversimplification for very obvious reasons designed to bias combat in very specific ways. Once you've played a game like The Riddle of Steel -- or hell, just talked with someone who knows something about fighting and war about the silly results you get with a D&D combat system -- it's impossible to see D&D any other way. (This is a system where *losing almost all your hit points doesn't affect your ability to fight*.) - and you want detailed rules governing them and considering every possible factor that could influence the outcome? I mean, they should be halfway realistic, shouldn't they? They should be as realistic as they need to be. D&D seems to get along okay right now with combat rules that are a little less than halfway realistic. This is just like demanding artificial intelligence so you don't have to put up with games like Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale. It would be nice to have games that can simulate an intelligence which can be perceived as a human-like, but absolutely objective GM pulling the strings. At the gaming table we don't need that - we are humans. The way I see it, this "GM fiat" you're criticizing is actually our strength. GMs' ability to apply common sense to the ruleset is a strength. Not GMs' ability to pull fiat out of their ass. Right now, as silly a mechanic as the Diplomacy check is, I'd rather have it than not have it, because it means that whether you get a chance to negotiate depends on more than just the GM's whim. (If the GM wants to take *away* your chance to negotiate, he has to think of a reason why. In earlier editions, you could lose your chance to negotiate simply because it failed to cross the GM's mind to provide an opportunity.) You equate the "describe the offensive and defensive maneuvers in an entertaining manner" roleplaying with the "feel and think in character and have a social interaction with someone who feels and thinks in character" roleplaying? That's the same to you? No, but I think they can be. I'd rather the game didn't require you to switch modes so often. I also think that the two things you're describing, while different, aren't so different that you can't slide from one to the other without obvious mode-switching. You should be able to think "in-character" "Crap! We need to hit this guy with everything we've got, or we're dead!" and have the decision to use Power Attack flow naturally from that. Just as you should be able to think "The king grows impatient with my stories. I should change the subject to engage him on his own ground" and do the same there. And yes, Roxlimn will probably accuse me of "insulting and marginalizing" gamers again, but I don't think actually "being in character" is very important. Being immersed in a character doesn't mean you have to actually walk around *as* the character and literally say the words that are coming out of his mouth and imagine being inside his body. Most D&Ders' attempts to do this come out sounding silly -- because it *is* silly to try to inhabit the body of a cartoonish sword-swinging muscleman and imagine "how he would really talk". People's attempts to do so are why D&D campaigns are so frequently inconsistent in tone (this guy over here is doing thee's and thou's, this guy over here is acting like a gangster from the Bronx, this guy over here is just talking in flat affectless language because he wants the conversation to be over with...) All right, in this case rules simulating social interactions might work for you - but please stop claiming they are objectively better, because some gamers have a definition of roleplaying that differs vastly from yours. In a way I'd consider having those rules as almost as bad as generally neglecting social interactions - as D&D does - for newcomers. With the focus almost exclusively on combat, D&D trains newbies to think roleplaying is just hack'n'slay all the way; D&D having as extensive rules for social interactions as it has for combat might train newbies to think everything has to be simulated, no fantasy, no creativity, no immersion required at all, the whole gaming world works on numbers - plug and play. Depends on how you do it. D&D's combat system does have annoying ways of simulating things that don't need to be simulated -- I especially don't like things like encumbrance rules and such, which basically say that filling in holes that seem like things you'd keep track of in real life is more important than making the game fun. I don't think the system has to feel extremely hard-edged and ****-retentive to be a system. The system I'd picture for such a thing would be better than the Diplomacy check just because it was more *interesting*, not because it was more "realistic". (There's nothing particularly "unrealistic" about Diplomacy checks -- in some ways they're more realistic, if you set the DC sensibly, than any more interesting system you could make up.) Where do you draw the line? Has a player the right to complain that the whole king's guard attacks his character because he thought it was funny to feint an attack against the sovereign? If you're saying that the individual gaming world doesn't matter all that much, that it has to be formed by the players, that everything is allowed as long as they have fun, all right, again, an "objective" generic social system might work for you. Again, it will definitely not work for everyone. I guess this doesn't come across very well. I'm specifically poking at the idea -- that I really don't like -- that you *literally* have to be "in character" and that the words you, the player, actually speak at the table are supposed to be the words coming out of the character's mouth, and anything more abstract than that "kills roleplaying". One example of this is having the king shout "Explain your actions, now!", which usually leads the players to huddle and whisper to each other about what they want their characters to say. Use this philosophy, and I'd say "The guards smack you and shout 'Answer the king immediately!'" And if a player stared at me blank-faced munching his bag of potato chips when I challenged him as the king, I'd say that the king imprisoned him for his insolence for eating potato chips in his presence. In other words, this is dumb. We can all see how the reductio ad absurdum is dumb, but it's *still* dumb to make the player's *character* be slow to answer because the *player* is slow to answer, to make the PC be tongue-tied or ineloquent because the player is ineloquent, etc. I mean, sheesh. Take this literally enough and I'd just have my NPCs gawk at the strange syllables coming out of my players' mouths, because they're speaking American English and this game takes place on a faraway world where people speak Fwrghrd. If the players are so dense that they need several minutes to even say something, there are two possibilities: 1) The GM might want to limit the adventures to dungeon crawls. 2) The GM asks the player what the character will say, adjusts the DC, lets him make a diplomacy check, goes from there and bears in mind that "live" in-character roleplaying is just not his players' cup of tea. A GM should know his players well enough without having to resort to "one size fits all groups" rules. Sure, but in a mixed group, I don't want a system that encourages the rattletongues to shove the wallflowers out of the spotlight. Nor do I want a system that, in general, is about impressing me-the-DM in real life with your ability to use flowery language. If I really want to make the roleplaying more "live", sure, I can, but that shouldn't be the primary system, any more than the primary way combat is resolved in D&D should be "liveliest narration wins", or "beat me in a real foam swordfighting contest". Our goal should be to have a coherent base game that anyone can play regardless of special skills, with the cute little embellishments being the optional parts. Back to the example: Rules for fighting are fine, rules for any physical activity are fine. But rules and tables don't know the NPC, and they cannot possibly cover everything that makes him tick. They don't know him - the GM does. Although physical environments may not be as varied as people, they, too, have an infinite number of ways they can vary, and they, too, will present situations the rules don't cover. (What GM hasn't had to intervene because things like the falling rules were stupid and didn't fit the scenario he had in mind?) He can act on something rules will never be able to do: His knowledge and his gut feeling allow him to feel what's the right reaction without having to stop the flow and destroying the "in the moment" feeling and the carefully built atmosphere just to look up a table and make a roll of the dice every two sentences. That can be problematic enough in combat encounters as it is. If you really believe in the Power of the GM Screen, then by nature -- because of the presence of the GM screen -- it operates whether or not there's a mechanical system in place. I just happen to think that the GM shouldn't be falling back on his intuition as the sole means of crafting *the entire game*, which is what does happen in certain D&D games. This is that nasty little jargon word "illusionism" again, but it's appropriate -- because the GM, like a magician doing a stage show, is doing *all the work* despite the fact that the "volunteers from the audience" are supposedly waving their hands and concentrating very hard on making their card rise from the deck. And some people really enjoy doing all the work behind the scenes to make something appear effortless. I don't think it should be the baseline assumption of the game, though. This isn't a system-inherent problem, it's one of colliding roleplaying philosophies. There are people who think a living, breathing and despite all its fantastic aspects believable world has to be one that keeps on living and breathing when the players have left the table and gone home, not just a place that exists solely to cater to the players' preferences. There are people who think like you. And there are people who occupy the thousands of shades of gray inbetween these two cornerstones. Yeah, except the first cornerstone is a lie. There can't ever be a living, breathing world that keeps on living and breathing despite the players' actions. All the computers in the world couldn't simulate such a thing, much less your buddy Dirk with a pad of paper and a pencil. It's an ILLUSION. A fun illusion, perhaps, but one that's only useful and that should only be maintained insofar as it is fun for the players -- and it's really easy to forget that when you buy into the illusion that "the world really exists", and you get, as a result, the creepy stuff I see on these boards about GMs perfectly willing to do things that tick off all the players and mess up the game because it's "realistic" or "what the rules call for". Ultimately, it's a *game*. The so-called "world" is *imaginary* -- the fact that it *is* a game means that any statement that the game is anything but an entertainment created solely for the players' sake is a lie -- useful lies, perhaps, but ones that have to be adjusted all the time for the players' sake. In your example the player screws up; it doesn't matter if he does because he just couldn't think of something to say, an abysmal skill check or a combination of both. Doesn't that make for an interesting scene? The crude and coarse adventurer who kicks butt left and right in his natrual environment is a fish out of water at the king's court, and he managed to annoy His Majesty. Sure. The key thing is whether the player desired it, or desired the possibility of it. D&D lets you at least signal that you wouldn't mind the possibility of sucking in social situations by dumping the Diplomacy skill and the Charisma stat. That, at least, is more fair than creating this situation as a result of the player being born with a socially awkward affect that he can't do anything about. An argument between the party's members might ensue - which can even cast a more damning light on them. The characters and the players have learned that they may be the most important people in their adventures, but not the most important people in the world, and now they have to look for another way to get the king's attention and maybe to correct their blunder. Well, they still are the most important people in the world in that the only reason to have this scene is if the players actually would find it fun and enjoyable. Static numbers are supposed to emulate the intricate web of thousands of factors that influence social interaction...? Oh, dear. So you're advocating a gaming style that should go for all groups. What if gaming style X would suit a newly formed group just fine, but the rigid - and by its nature unrealistic - system never lets them find out? One of the things I'm getting at is the *contradiction* in D&D, though. I mean, fine, freeform is great, freeform is fun, if you find the right group it can be magical, if you find the wrong group it's a lot easier to quit than D&D. I don't mind freeform -- *as freeform*. What I don't get is how people can argue so strongly against the idea of "turning D&D into freeform" by making *combat* a little more freeform and a little less calculator-in-one-hand-other-hand-moving-minis-around-the-grid. And then turn around and say that the freeform nature of social situations in D&D is essential to what D&D is and making it more mechanics-based would destroy it. I really think it is one or the other. I don't buy this stuff about how combat is essentially something you have to represent as a board game with dice and social situations are things you essentially have to do by trying to be social with the DM in real life. Unfortunately you didn't reply the last time, but I have to know, so I repeat my question: How can you argue so sensibly and strikingly against the concept of alignment - using many arguments I'm using right now against you - and demand such a system? Alignment doesn't serve a mechanical purpose in the game as it is. If the game were *about* alignment, I would argue differently. I don't, for instance, argue against Vampire's Humanity score -- or Heroes of Horror's Taint mechanic -- because it justifies the presence of an alignment-like mechanic by making the game *about that* and making it have *consequences* for the game. There is a reason - the result of the skill check compared to a DC right out of the PHB, slightly modified to account for the circumstances. You're not complaining that the GM merely getting to make modifications is the big problem? Because if you did, I'd reply that I really don't see the need for an absolutely idiot-proof system, just because one out of, I don't know, 100 GMs makes up completely unreasonable modifications. I'm saying that the system with just the single die roll means that it's really hard to tweak the system one way or the other in a fair way -- the GM is always muttering to himself "How much do I really want them to succeed?" with all the power in a single point of contact -- that one modifier. Uh... now you've lost me. Didn't you want a system that completely complies with what the players think are fun, regardless of how realistic or unrealistic it is? Sure. But we're talking about a game where the players are solving a puzzle. If you're doing the purely Narrativist thing where the players are just telling a story, there shouldn't be a "puzzle" revolving around starting the helicopter in the first place. Instead, we decide whether it'd be more interesting to fly the helicopter away over the city or to shoot our way out through the building below, and narrate whichever one wins out in whatever way we deem necessary. (If getting the key is interesting, we decide what would be the most interesting way to have to get the key, and make that happen -- say, that one guy has to sneak back into the building and steal it, and in so doing face his greatest fear, etc.) If we're doing the Gamist thing about "Are you guys smart enough to steal this helicopter?", that, too, can be fun, and a kind of fun based on testing how smart you are. "Testing how smart you are" should really be a limited test, though, not a test of "Can you think of something to say that violates the assumptions of the test?"
Arrowhen 03-26-07, 01:00 AM	You just can't allow social specialists and involve the whole party in social encounters, because social encounters take a lot of time, and it's not acceptable for one guy to do all the work while the rest of the party sits around bored and unable to say or contribute anything in a meaningful fashion. Doesn't that happen now, though? How many groups have a high-charisma bard or paladin serving as the "party face"? Even worse, how many groups have the one outgoing, well-spoken player who spends the most time roleplaying with the DM--often regardless of what kind of social skills his character has?
a_psh 03-26-07, 01:05 AM	So you're opposed to the GM making decisions that influence the outcome of a situation based on various factors, in this example his roleplaying the NPC, his judgement of the characters' arguments and the situation.This is where we go back to rules-as-structure. The meaningful decisions in DitV aren't being made by the rules. There's no rule that tells you when to Give, other than that you're toast if all your dice have run out. Rules give the players the structure they need to create and regulate adversity. Here's the key: All the headgames and characterization are still happening in your brain. The rules just force you to accept the associated suffering, just like combat rules force you to accept damage -- they turn adversity into something meaningful that you can't just ignore. Otherwise you're left with the common old-timey freeform paradigm of "yeah, you describe swinging your sword and I describe whether I want you to hit me or not." Which actually spoils both story and immersion by obliterating adversity. Another example, if you care for it: "carry. a game about war" Here, the rules actively constrain your actions, in a Dogs-on-crack kinda way. When you're at the end of your rope, the only way you can respond to pressure from someone else is violence. Even if they're conciliatory or backing out of an argument. Even if what you had wasn't exactly an argument. (I'm much vaguer on the mechanics here, so I won't go into detail. But that's the gist of it.) And that's exactly what you need in a Vietnam roleplaying game. That's what gives you immersion. Because, no, you aren't a guy going crazy from fear and isolation and guilt and hatred in the jungle. If left to your own devices, you won't be that guy. In order to feel that guy, you've gotta lose control -- and that's exactly what the rules of carry force you to do. This sounds awfully much like strong simplification, and I feel D&D is simplified enough. But all right, let's say you assign your dice to different categories. You still have to roll certain numbers, right?Other way around. Roll first then assign. You have a bunch of dice in front of you and then you decide whether your character's safety is more important than the goal, who gets to narrate, &c. In Otherkind, the target numbers are set (you're rolling d6s and there's either a 1-2/3-4/5-6 or 1-3/4-6 range depending on the category). I think only one or two simple values modify how many dice you can roll (err, Iron does, IIRC... I'm having a hard time finding the full ~4-page text right now because the site's being switched around a lot). Well, that's not a question of what's objectively better and worse, but a question of what one likes better. Narrating through unimportant segments (you can give away the importance of something seemingly unimportant away by insisting on rolling the dice) is different from playing everything out. But it's not better. Neither is a car "better" than a motorbike; you can transport more things and passengers, it's more comfortable, especially on long trips - but you won't convince a biker that it's better :cool:'Cept everyone's just glossing over unimportant bits. You just can't play an RPG without breaking it into scenes and transitions between scenes. Quite plainly, no mechanics will be able to help you and you'll never get anywhere. Those transitions are, by definition, covering "unimportant" stuff. Deciding that something I consider unimportant to me is important to you is different from actually playing through "unimportant" bits. I think it is important for me to be able to skip something you want to play through or vice versa. One way to support that is a mostly-generalized system. Part of the appeal of TSOY is that I can decide that anything within a very broad range is important or unimportant -- this fight or that conversation or this lock-picking attempt. And without having to then make every fight or every lock-picking attempt important as a result. (D&D just kinda decides for you that every fight matters and that lock-picking never really matters all that much.) (Sometimes, however, forced scenes that you can't avoid are a good idea. Contenders and Polaris show this very well. But they do it very carefully based on what's demanded by the narrative.)
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-26-07, 01:10 AM	Right now, as silly a mechanic as the Diplomacy check is, I'd rather have it than not have it, because it means that whether you get a chance to negotiate depends on more than just the GM's whim. (If the GM wants to take *away* your chance to negotiate, he has to think of a reason why. In earlier editions, you could lose your chance to negotiate simply because it failed to cross the GM's mind to provide an opportunity.) But here's the thing... the quest is about the opportunity. GM fiat applies to everything. If you go to a dungeon, your DM designed the doors, the corridors, etc. When you go up to the front door to pick the lock, the DM chose (by fiat) what lock protects it. He chooses what DC you have to hit to pick that lock. Is it trapped? The DM chooses what trap it has. Is there a monster inside that room? Also a DM choice. Can I get to the final room from that room? Also a DM choice. There could be a hundred separate corridors, or one short linear path... but yeah, that's more DM fiat. And we live with it every day! This idea that we're suddenly worrying about eliminating DM fiat is insane. If the DM didn't put in any locks, then you have no opportunity to pick a lock. That's fine. That's just how the game works. I have no problem with the DM creating opportunities for social progress and denying opportunities when necessary. Sometimes you don't want it to be possible to make the high cleric of Bane your friend... the guy is the villain of the story after all! Asking to be able to solve every problem diplomatically is like asking to be able to solve every problem with disable device. It's fine if your DM doesn't let you reason with everything. You do need opponents you know.
Arrowhen 03-26-07, 01:11 AM	Sure, but what Bob's GM does or doesn't do isn't the system's fault. It is if the system doesn't provide him with a fair way of adjudicating a character's success in social situations regardless of the player's real-world charisma. If I'm DMing and one of my players is gregarious and outgoing and charming while the other one is shy and hesitant and tends to stumble over words when he speaks, it can be very difficult for me not to give the advantage in social situations to the first, even if the second is playing a character with a higher charisma. I try very hard to be fair to my players, and to separate the player from the character, but it's only natural for people to respond better to charismatic individuals. I'd like to see a system that helps me be fair to all my players, not one that rewards outgoing players and punishes shy ones. There's enough of that crap in real life.
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-26-07, 01:13 AM	Doesn't that happen now, though? How many groups have a high-charisma bard or paladin serving as the "party face"? Yes, that is what happens now and that's why I think that having social skills (and by extension, social systems) is a waste of time. Having a party face might sound cool, until you realize that the existence of a face is telling the other PCs to shut the hell up.
Arrowhen 03-26-07, 01:17 AM	Sometimes you don't want it to be possible to make the high cleric of Bane your friend... the guy is the villain of the story after all! Why can't the villain of the story also be your friend? When your new friend tries to kill you anyway ("Nothing personal, old pal!"), that sense of betrayal will add a bit of bittersweet spice to the moment when you finally kick his sorry ass.
Arrowhen 03-26-07, 01:28 AM	Yes, that is what happens now and that's why I think that having social skills (and by extension, social systems) is a waste of time. No, because at least the social system we have now makes it slightly less of an "impress the DM" match. Even better, though, would be having a social system that doesn't suck.
a_psh 03-26-07, 01:31 AM	Even better, though, would be having a social system that doesn't suck.An observation: Every character in D&D can fight, right? I don't think it would be that weird to expect every character to be able to talk, too.
Arrowhen 03-26-07, 01:37 AM	An observation: Every character in D&D can fight, right? I don't think it would be that weird to expect every character to be able to talk, too. My thoughts exactly. And just like every character has its own combat niche, every character should have it's own social niche, too. That charming, fresh-faced young paladin who's got the whole noble court eating out of the palm of his hand isn't going to be nearly as effective in a scuzzy dockside thieves' den.
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-26-07, 01:38 AM	No, because at least the social system we have now makes it slightly less of an "impress the DM" match. Slight less? No, if you follow the current system by the book, then you don't have to talk in character ever. You just say "I diplomacy the creature." If your score is high enough, then you win D&D. Check the char op boards for the super diplomacy builds. They can basically make anyone into a fanatical follower, thanks to the super awesome static DC system. You just start firing off sending spells at people and you can convert anyone, including gods, overgods, you name it... You can even convert Cthulhu if you want. This is what happens when you create social systems and try to phase out the DM. Nothing short of rampant stupidity. But you know, it's okay when one PC controls every NPC in the world, because you know, he didn't have to impress the DM and that makes it all worth it. I'll gladly take a campaign that totally sucks over one where I have to impress my DM. I'm just like that.
Reinforcements 03-26-07, 01:47 AM	Slight less? No, if you follow the current system by the book, then you don't have to talk in character ever. You just say "I diplomacy the creature." If your score is high enough, then you win D&D. Check the char op boards for the super diplomacy builds. They can basically make anyone into a fanatical follower, thanks to the super awesome static DC system. You just start firing off sending spells at people and you can convert anyone, including gods, overgods, you name it... You can even convert Cthulhu if you want. That's because Diplomacy as it stands is both far to simple to serve as anything but a way to determine success and doesn't help you role-play at all, and it's horribly balanced. The latter issue is actually what causes the "convert Cthulhu" thing and would be really easy to fix without actually changing anything too much. This is what happens when you create social systems and try to phase out the DM. Nothing short of rampant stupidity. No. Just - gah - are you really inferring that, because the Diplomacy skill as written is ill-conceived, all rules for social interaction would be as stupid? That's insane! The idiocy of the Diplomacy skill isn't "what happens when you create social systems", it's what happens when you create an incredibly overly-simplified, unbalanced, and easily-breakable social rule.
Arrowhen 03-26-07, 01:56 AM	Slight less? No, if you follow the current system by the book, then you don't have to talk in character ever. You just say "I diplomacy the creature." If your score is high enough, then you win D&D. Check the char op boards for the super diplomacy builds. They can basically make anyone into a fanatical follower, thanks to the super awesome static DC system. You just start firing off sending spells at people and you can convert anyone, including gods, overgods, you name it... You can even convert Cthulhu if you want. This is what happens when you create social systems and try to phase out the DM. Nothing short of rampant stupidity. But you know, it's okay when one PC controls every NPC in the world, because you know, he didn't have to impress the DM and that makes it all worth it. I'll gladly take a campaign that totally sucks over one where I have to impress my DM. I'm just like that. What you're describing, though, is a situation in which one player is deliberately going out of his way to exploit the rules in order to break the game. That's easily fixed; all you have to do is say "Hey, stop doing that." In an "impress the DM" game, though, it's a lot harder to tell the DM "Hey, stop being impressed by Bob's acting ability."
graddlin 03-26-07, 02:01 AM	What's surprising is how much of it we do covertly. For example, do players often narrate their own actions in your games? Games where the GM is actually in charge of everything seem pretty rare. There's pretty extensive video of such a game in a D&D documentary somewhere, though. When I watched it, it seemed so alien to me... I mean, the players literally were only doing dialogue, game mechanics, and very vaguely stating intent. But it was always the GM who would be describing like everything they did. I'm quite used to the kind of thing where if you critical-hit an orc it's kinda assumed that you actually get to say something about what that looked like yourself, and most people I've talked to on these forums seem to play that way, too. It's surprising how easily authority is shared on the small scale. Most GMs keep all of the setting authority and a lot of plot authority, but I've seldom seem narrational authority do anything but pass back and forth freely. This is why I think the way games have talked about what the GM does in the past don't quite reflect what's actually happening in play. Power is a lot more fluid than they usually let on. Most insightful. You make a fine point here, friend. Indeed, now that you mention the covert sharing of story-telling I have found myself sitting back and thinking "Oh, yeah, that is indeed what happens." Take care, friend, and good luck with your attempt to get people to see a different side to the enjoyment provided by the game.
Arrowhen 03-26-07, 02:06 AM	No. Just - gah - are you really inferring that, because the Diplomacy skill as written is ill-conceived, all rules for social interaction would be as stupid? That's insane! The idiocy of the Diplomacy skill isn't "what happens when you create social systems", it's what happens when you create an incredibly overly-simplified, unbalanced, and easily-breakable social rule. Well, that's just typical D&D rules-worship for you. Since D&D is the absolute pinnacle of game-design, obviously anything it doesn't get right can't possibly be done any better. :rolleyes:
ArcTan 03-26-07, 02:18 AM	Slight less? No, if you follow the current system by the book, then you don't have to talk in character ever. You just say "I diplomacy the creature." I don't actually think you should have to talk in character ever. This is not the same as "never roleplaying". I can write a very moving story from the point of view of a character, for instance, without ever having the character speak in quotation marks. Just like I think it should be *possible* to get through a D&D game without narrating your way through combat, or without narrating your way through the thinigs you don't specifically want to narrate your way through. There are games that wouldn't work this way, where the ability to narrate convincingly is the skill being tested -- Feng Shui is an example -- but, to borrow what other people have been saying, that "wouldn't be D&D". I do *want* D&D to maintain its basic agenda of being a simulation that anyone can plug into without having special skills -- I just want it to be a simulation of an interesting story instead of just a pile of stuff. FWIW, have you seen Rich Burlew's Diplomacy fix? http://www.giantitp.com/articles/jFppYwv7OUkegKhONNF.html It's pretty elegant, and it fits what I've been saying well -- a mechanic that -- though still pretty simplistic for my tastes -- does require you to *do something* in a Diplomacy encounter and has a pretty solid abstraction for the back-and-forth of the simple task of negotiation. Notice that this mechanic would actually prompt people to talk in character more than Diplomacy, because it's openly asking you a question -- "What will you offer me that makes it worth doing X despite Y and Z?" -- that you have to answer. The problem with "just impress me" DMing is that it *doesn't* give this kind of direction to players. It often leads to places where players feel "stuck", like nothing they do matters -- because the DM has his own private idea of what the way that "makes sense" to placate the king would be that doesn't match any of the players' -- or just because the players aren't picking up on what the king wants, or just because the players are really bad at talking. The point of a mechanic is to push you toward what you're supposed to be doing and minimize the frustrating "What now?" moments, which more than any other kind of moment is the moment of maximum un-fun in an RPG.
a_psh 03-26-07, 02:18 AM	My thoughts exactly. And just like every character has its own combat niche, every character should have it's own social niche, too. That charming, fresh-faced young paladin who's got the whole noble court eating out of the palm of his hand isn't going to be nearly as effective in a scuzzy dockside thieves' den.I'd say you want a bit more than this, even. In almost any combat scene, every D&D character is useful. The same can hold true for a lot of non-combat scenes. Not just different people getting the proverbial spotlight on a scene-by-scene basis, but multiple characters being active and out there in various scenes. For example, that paladin's thief buddy probably has some nifty stuff he can do in a royal court scene, too (and the paladin, while certainly less effective in the dockside thieves' den, should be able to play a useful supporting role at least, I think). Also, sometimes, four or more people all working as a unit makes a social situation kinda crowded. That's when you split the party.
ArcTan 03-26-07, 02:36 AM	But here's the thing... the quest is about the opportunity. GM fiat applies to everything. I wish people would stop saying this. For one thing, it's not true. It's certainly not *necessarily* true. Yes, someone has to make decisions about what is done or not done in a game, but that doesn't mean you have to appoint one person the all-powerful arbiter of What We Do. In D&D right now, you more or less have to -- the game doesn't hold together otherwise -- but plenty of games lack this assumption. You can play a pickup game of basketball without designating one person the referee. You can play a game of chess with one other person without having a "rules arbitrator" to remind you what the rules of chess are. You can have a freeform RPG where no one moderates to say what does and doesn't happen -- or where a moderator doesn't do anything but literally moderate (i.e. steps in *only* when two people fight, and doesn't "run the game" otherwise). In games in general, people decide *among themselves* what they're going to do or not do. Now, D&D has a lot of things that make it so you can't decide everything among yourselves. The problem is that all these hats go on the same head, and they're a whole bunch of tasks that don't necessarily go together -- you're supposed to be the system editor who decides what rules we're going to use in general *and* the rules arbiter who decides how the rules apply in certain situations *and* the campaign designer who writes down all the plot and setting details for the game *and* the narrator who actually talks through the game as a whole and decides when scenes happen and when they don't *and* the antagonist who plays and animates the NPC, all of them... It's a lot of hats for one person to wear. Is it any wonder that so many campaigns can stand or fall on the GM having one bad day? And that a player-vs-GM mentality seems built into D&D from day one, and GMs are constantly fighting battles to decide what's fair and what's not in the game? If you go to a dungeon, your DM designed the doors, the corridors, etc. When you go up to the front door to pick the lock, the DM chose (by fiat) what lock protects it. He chooses what DC you have to hit to pick that lock. Is it trapped? The DM chooses what trap it has. Is there a monster inside that room? Also a DM choice. Can I get to the final room from that room? Also a DM choice. There could be a hundred separate corridors, or one short linear path... but yeah, that's more DM fiat. And we live with it every day! I wouldn't be very satisfied with an RPG where this was literally "fiat". We're misusing the word fiat, here. I think my comparison to checks and balances is apt. There's a difference between the king being the highest authority in the land who can, if he chooses, have any law amended or make an exception to any law, and the king being the *only* law in the land and every case of law being a personal decision the king makes right there. D&D does, after all, *have rules*. The DM can *choose* to *change* the rules, but it starts out with a big set of rules. This is because a DM is not a perfect computer who can make fair decisions on the fly. If a DM had to make up the whole game out of his own head, it would likely not be a fair game and not be a very well-put-together one. So there are rules that tell him what to do, that create a basically fair framework for him to start with. Then when he changes a rule he knows -- and we know -- that it's being changed for a *reason* -- that he's really thought about it in the abstract (which you can do, if the rules are written down) and found it unfair, or thought it was counterproductive in this one, particular context, etc. Do you really think the game would be improved if -- for instance -- there was no rule about a dungeon being plotted out in advance, and the DM just *decided* what was behind each door when you opened it? And if there were no rules whatsoever for how lockpicking actually worked, and the DM just *decided* whether or not you picked the lock at a certain point? Or -- and I *am* going to keep harping about this -- if there were no rules for combat, and the DM just decided whether you won or lost? You keep saying it's "obvious" that combat is more fun with dice, which suggests to me that you're not really thinking about it. Think about it -- I *don't* think it's the dice themselves that are fun. What's fun about it is that the process of rolling dice is not DM-controlled, and therefore there's some guarantee that in combat the game is, to some degree, fair. That there's a real *risk* being taken when you fight somebody and that how much you have to sacrifice in HP and in spells and such to win the battle is determined by the initial conditions of the fight followed by the rules, which means your choices in character build and in the combat were real choices, etc. Is this largely an illusion? Sure, and in D&D it has to be -- the DM sets up the combat, the DM can fudge the rolls if he wants, etc. But the fact that combat has *rules* obscures this, it makes the illusion feel more real, because there's a *process* you're going through -- you're not just trying to convince the DM that you should win the fight, you're actually *doing something*. It's this that fuels D&D. This idea that we're suddenly worrying about eliminating DM fiat is insane. If the DM didn't put in any locks, then you have no opportunity to pick a lock. That's fine. That's just how the game works. And if the DM doesn't put in any combat, you don't have the opportunity to fight. That doesn't mean that the way combat should work is "Please pretty please let our characters win". I have no problem with the DM creating opportunities for social progress and denying opportunities when necessary. Sometimes you don't want it to be possible to make the high cleric of Bane your friend... the guy is the villain of the story after all! Asking to be able to solve every problem diplomatically is like asking to be able to solve every problem with disable device. Or like asking to be able to slay every enemy with weapons. Which you can't. Which is good. It's possible for the DM to just fiat that an enemy is a Special Case who simply can never be killed, like a dark god or whatever. Or he can set up an encounter that's purposely stacked to make sure that you can't win -- pitting you against someone whose CR is 6 or more above yours -- but because you're playing it through using the system, it feels *real*, the process of hitting him and failing to penetrate his DR or overcome his SR feels *meaningful*, more meaningful than if he just said "The monster is unkillable, don't bother rolling". Dude, everything you say about social systems, whether you like it or not, *can* and *does* apply to combat. This unconscious expectation of one kind of thing for combat and one kind of thing for everything else is one of the things I especially don't like about D&D's "wargame plus freeform" structure. It's fine if your DM doesn't let you reason with everything. You do need opponents you know. It's fine if your DM doesn't let you *succeed* at reasoning with everything. The fact that Diplomacy is too easy to use right now is because the social system is a tiny afterthought with hardly any effort put into it, not because it's too much of one. Having a system to do something doesn't mean you'll always succeed at it, or that you can't create an impossible situation. Look at combat, again -- one of the things people accuse D&D of doing (with some merit) is creating the idea that every being in the universe can be killed and that killing them is always the best way to get what you want -- but you *can*, nonetheless, set up situations in D&D where combat will simply never work, and they get some oomph by being in that context.
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-26-07, 02:54 AM	Do you really think the game would be improved if -- for instance -- there was no rule about a dungeon being plotted out in advance, and the DM just *decided* what was behind each door when you opened it? And if there were no rules whatsoever for how lockpicking actually worked, and the DM just *decided* whether or not you picked the lock at a certain point? But in a manner of speaking, he does. As far as the PCs know, anything could be beyond the door ahead. Whether the DM plotted it in advance or changed it on the fly is unknown. And it exists in an unknowable state. Similarly, you don't know the DC of the lock you're trying to pick, thus the DM can easily create a lock you can't pick or one you can easily pick. You keep saying it's "obvious" that combat is more fun with dice, which suggests to me that you're not really thinking about it. Think about it -- I *don't* think it's the dice themselves that are fun. What's fun about it is that the process of rolling dice is not DM-controlled, and therefore there's some guarantee that in combat the game is, to some degree, fair. That there's a real *risk* being taken when you fight somebody and that how much you have to sacrifice in HP and in spells and such to win the battle is determined by the initial conditions of the fight followed by the rules, which means your choices in character build and in the combat were real choices, etc. Well yes. There's real risk involved, which makes it more exciting. And if the DM doesn't put in any combat, you don't have the opportunity to fight. That doesn't mean that the way combat should work is "Please pretty please let our characters win". And I wish you'd stop saying that. Freeform social isn't a begging match. I mean, it can be, if your DM has no idea what he's doing, but more or less good DMs are waiting for you to make certain points to "win" the encounter. Dude, everything you say about social systems, whether you like it or not, *can* and *does* apply to combat. This unconscious expectation of one kind of thing for combat and one kind of thing for everything else is one of the things I especially don't like about D&D's "wargame plus freeform" structure. Only here's the thing. Combat systems are fun. Social systems are not. Rolling a die at the end of a long drawn out social encounter and simply declaring "nope you blew it, you lose" sucks. Having a system to do something doesn't mean you'll always succeed at it, or that you can't create an impossible situation. Look at combat, again -- one of the things people accuse D&D of doing (with some merit) is creating the idea that every being in the universe can be killed and that killing them is always the best way to get what you want -- but you *can*, nonetheless, set up situations in D&D where combat will simply never work, and they get some oomph by being in that context. Well combat has some safeguards in place to prevent it. Choose the wrong guy to fight with and you die. So there's no incentive to go trying combats where you've got a 1% chance of winning. Diplomacy on the other hand maybe be worth it. So even if there's only a 1% chance you can haggle down the magic shop owner into selling you that cloak of resistance +5 for 10 gold, you'll try it, because you've really got nothing to lose.
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-26-07, 02:57 AM	have you seen Rich Burlew's Diplomacy fix? Yes and it sucks. You can get a +20 diplomacy item and get a king to hand over his kingdom to you for a piece of string. That's exactly the kind of lame plot-destroying stupidity that I'm talking about when I say social systems don't work.
a_psh 03-26-07, 03:00 AM	Only here's the thing. Combat systems are fun. Social systems are not. Rolling a die at the end of a long drawn out social encounter and simply declaring "nope you blew it, you lose" sucks. That's D&D's social system. D&D's social system blows. I've already covered why a system that just gives you vague outcomes is useless for "drawn out" encounters. Vampire LARP pretty much uses rock-paper-scissors to run combat and other physical tests. Does that mean all combat systems suck, too?
a_psh 03-26-07, 03:01 AM	Well combat has some safeguards in place to prevent it. Choose the wrong guy to fight with and you die. So there's no incentive to go trying combats where you've got a 1% chance of winning. Diplomacy on the other hand maybe be worth it. So even if there's only a 1% chance you can haggle down the magic shop owner into selling you that cloak of resistance +5 for 10 gold, you'll try it, because you've really got nothing to lose.In real life, when you try to talk someone into something ludicrous, you tend to get punched in the face.
Dexter_Blacktyde 03-26-07, 03:07 AM	Except that's not true.(...) That's what I meant by "there are more like stumbling while attacking, a critical hit, and so on, but you get the idea". The rest you get by interactively describing the details. What D&D cares about most is a yes or no outcome (aside from the special cases) because it's a very abstract system. (I won't get into how we modified the system because it's too static, too generic, too, well, abstract.) My point is, this is all physical. You don't need any knowledge about several characters, the history of the place you're in, the political situation, the worries of the people in these parts, recent events, and so on. All these things could happen in real life. Almost none of them are represented by a standard D&D attack roll. Because D&D is an ABSTRACTION. I believe I talked about this with a_psh in another thread - that I consciously separate fighting from all the rest. For my group it's like a mini-game within the game, if you will. It's fun because of it's tactical nature, but it really doesn't lend itself to dramatic and even halfway realistic combat. At all. But that's no big deal for us, because as I said, I can live with abstractions of physical actions, however complex they'd be in real life. I cannot live with technical abstractions of believability, creativity, emotional and intellectual immersion, wit, guts, whatever you want to list here for the sake of simplicity or equality, though. You know that learning to fight isn't exactly easy, either. I'd say that a lot more people among a normal human population are adept at social situations than at combat. And from the moment we were born until... in most cases long after reaching majority we train social interaction. Some train their whole life through and still suck at being diplomatic or empathic. You can write a program that perfectly emulates a karateka. You cannot write a program that casually talks to me about the weather and secretly and subliminally influences me to be mad at the weatherman from channel five because it thinks he comes across as terribly arrogant and tries to make me feel the same way. D&D combat is a horrible oversimplification for very obvious reasons designed to bias combat in very specific ways. Sure, but I just don't care that much about that. The heavy emphasis on D&D's wargame roots is part of the appeal for me when it comes to D&D combat. It doesn't mesh with a believable world, but with some houseruling and sometimes changing the system for dramatic purposes I can easily overlook that. It's at its core very simple, and that suits my group, because we've never focused on combat, it's just the icing on the cake and the combat system a necessity to portray a combat without just stating what happens. As I said, a mini-game, a very, very, very rough representation of what actually happens. We're flexible and forgiving ;) They should be as realistic as they need to be. D&D seems to get along okay right now with combat rules that are a little less than halfway realistic. And that would be okay if applied to things we do in our real lives on a daily basis, too? I'd love to get back to alignment, but I hold my tongue... GMs' ability to apply common sense to the ruleset is a strength. Not GMs' ability to pull fiat out of their ass. You seem to assume that every other GM is a jerk who doesn't care about creating a believable gaming environment that stimulates immersion. There are jerks I'd never have given a driver's license because they recklessly endanger everyone on the road everytime they hop in their car. But I don't assume that everyone is such a jerk and that the car just enables them to be one. I get the feeling you've had your share of horrible GMs, right? I'd rather the game didn't require you to switch modes so often. I also think that the two things you're describing, while different, aren't so different that you can't slide from one to the other without obvious mode-switching. You should be able to think "in-character" "Crap! We need to hit this guy with everything we've got, or we're dead!" and have the decision to use Power Attack flow naturally from that. Exactly! But it's still so much different from portraying a character in a way we can relate to. (Assuming you're not fighting for your life on your day job or something *g*) Being immersed in a character doesn't mean you have to actually walk around *as* the character and literally say the words that are coming out of his mouth and imagine being inside his body. (...) Mh... depends. I'd love to get into that, but that's another topic for another thread. Depends on how you do it. D&D's combat system does have annoying ways of simulating things that don't need to be simulated -- I especially don't like things like encumbrance rules and such, which basically say that filling in holes that seem like things you'd keep track of in real life is more important than making the game fun. We kicked that out of the window on the first day. But I assume every group modifies the rules to better reflect its preferences and gaming style. That's one of the points why I don't consider D&D's combat as a big problem - it's easily remedied by hitting the switch you were talking about. People who feel they need a believable and realistic combat system are left in the rain, though, that's true. (There's nothing particularly "unrealistic" about Diplomacy checks -- in some ways they're more realistic, if you set the DC sensibly, than any more interesting system you could make up.) Oh, by the book it is extremely unrealistic because it makes the same mistake I believe your and a_psh's hypothetical system would make: It doesn't incorporate important factors. Sure, the GM can modify the DC, but the general possibility to talk to any person for a couple of minutes and improve their attitude... *harrumph* This sub-system is as dumbed down as it can possibly get and positively needs to be reworked before you can introduce it into your campaign. I'm specifically poking at the idea -- that I really don't like -- that you *literally* have to be "in character" and that the words you, the player, actually speak at the table are supposed to be the words coming out of the character's mouth, and anything more abstract than that "kills roleplaying". Well, for me that would be true, but I'm aware that it's not objectively true. Roleplaying is what you want it to be, and if it's something along the lines of "my characters says that he really doesn't want to do this', that's fine. But: I don't want newbies - and in America almost every newbie's first system that introduces them to the hobby seems to be D&D - to get the idea that's all. That's the same problem I have with alignment: The whole world is based on this concept, the newbies get trained to think in these few silly terms and never learn the reason why no RPG over the past 30 years has copied it. In other words, this is dumb. We can all see how the reductio ad absurdum is dumb, but it's *still* dumb to make the player's *character* be slow to answer because the *player* is slow to answer, to make the PC be tongue-tied or ineloquent because the player is ineloquent, etc. That's all you were driving at? Of course it's dumb; why would we even have to talk about that? But you have to admit that the players still seem very slow-witted in this example, because by now somebody would have said at least something, beginning with "my character". So they don't want to talk in-character. No problem. But in any case they'd communicate to the GM - by whatever means - what their characters say or do. The lack of willingness to talk in-character doesn't necessitate a new diplomacy system, because their arguments are the same, and they should be perfectly fine with a diplomacy check. Maybe they'd want a more complex system than that, but IMHO that would be an individual case, not a universal question of whether a more complex system is better or not. Sure, but in a mixed group, I don't want a system that encourages the rattletongues to shove the wallflowers out of the spotlight. Nor do I want a system that, in general, is about impressing me-the-DM in real life with your ability to use flowery language. If I really want to make the roleplaying more "live", sure, I can, but that shouldn't be the primary system, any more than the primary way combat is resolved in D&D should be "liveliest narration wins", or "beat me in a real foam swordfighting contest". Our goal should be to have a coherent base game that anyone can play regardless of special skills, with the cute little embellishments being the optional parts. So you've just stated what you want the system to be in a mixed group. You know what one could call that? GM fiat ;) What I'm saying is that maybe the group shares these preferences; maybe it doesn't. And who gets to decide what the system should be like if the players are at odds? What if most of the players want extensive room for in-character roleplaying, but you, the GM, don't? Do you decide against them? In any case, this is about the individual group, not about the system. (As an aside, that's what a GM does: He caters to the different needs of the players and tries to give every single one of them their five minutes in the spotlight. By deciding against "live" roleplaying, you're deciding against those members of your group who want it instead of giving them their share and then see to it that the others get theirs.) Although physical environments may not be as varied as people, they, too, have an infinite number of ways they can vary, and they, too, will present situations the rules don't cover. That's where the GM decides on the fly. That's what he's there for after all. I just happen to think that the GM shouldn't be falling back on his intuition as the sole means of crafting *the entire game*, which is what does happen in certain D&D games. Fair enough, but a new social system wouldn't do much more but introducing the argument "You'ne not allowed to act on your intuition anymore". If the GM is prone to this, he will probably continue to do so, if the rules forbid it or not. (I hope I got your meaning here.) This is that nasty little jargon word "illusionism" again, but it's appropriate -- because the GM, like a magician doing a stage show, is doing *all the work* despite the fact that the "volunteers from the audience" are supposedly waving their hands and concentrating very hard on making their card rise from the deck. Yeah, well, all true, but again, it's an individual problem, and whatever the rules might say, you can't get sent to roleplaying jail for breaking them. We change rules all the time, and if I don't feel comfortable with a rule, I'll change it or leave it out. If a rule told me expressly to use table 221.4 to find out how the conversation I'm engaging in turns out, I'll smile and get on with the job - never bothering to look at table 221.4 again. Yeah, except the first cornerstone is a lie. (...) I just tried to draw the borders, and I'm perfectly happy in my own personal shade of grey inbetween, and I think that both extremes are only hypothetical and not really applicable. Well, they still are the most important people in the world in that the only reason to have this scene is if the players actually would find it fun and enjoyable. Not necessarily. As I said, although what you call illusionism is absolutely necessary (without having a system like the one you advocate) and a GM's job is to create an engaging and interesting adventure, some scenes just develop; and I won't sacrifice... let's call it "imagined believability" at all costs just so the players have the time of their lives - because that would make the whole effort utterly pointless. What I don't get is how people can argue so strongly against the idea of "turning D&D into freeform" by making *combat* a little more freeform and a little less calculator-in-one-hand-other-hand-moving-minis-around-the-grid. And then turn around and say that the freeform nature of social situations in D&D is essential to what D&D is and making it more mechanics-based would destroy it. Not D&D but roleplaying per se, at least IMHO, of course. By the way, I wouldn't oppose changing the combat system. Combat has always been much, much more freeform for us, and the (relatively) new extremely abstract and tactical combat that came with 3E D&D is a nice change of pace. (You don't want to know how we've handled combat in 2E - I'm not even sure if you could call it a "system" ;)) Alignment doesn't serve a mechanical purpose in the game as it is. If the game were *about* alignment, I would argue differently. But in a way, it is. It is the source of many, many inconsistencies and hindrances, a big stumbling block you trip over everytime you leave the hack'n' slay area - and as far as I remember, you were with me on this. - You haven't forgotten me, have you? ;) DB
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-26-07, 03:14 AM	What you're describing, though, is a situation in which one player is deliberately going out of his way to exploit the rules in order to break the game. That's easily fixed; all you have to do is say "Hey, stop doing that." Here's the problem with that. Where do you draw the line? What's an ok amount of plot manipulation for a diplomacy based character? Can he use his skills to get magic items from people for free or real cheap? Is he allowed to diplomacy Elminster and other power people for help? How about converting the evil high cleric? If you consider the master diplomat to be a viable character (and if you have a social system, you do), then how do you find limits to what you want him to do? The thing is that different characters have different limits. It's okay if the guy convinces a group of gnoll mercenaries that they're not being paid enough and decide to leave. But it's not okay if he goes up to the main villain (or the main villain's god) and gets him to convert to the side of good. DM fiat is the only decent way of controlling this sort of thing, because any kind of social system that doesn't rely on DM fiat is going to have ways to do things you don't want, because some guy can keep increasing his social skills to the point where he can do crazy stuff, and then, your game is crazy.
a_psh 03-26-07, 03:14 AM	You haven't forgotten me, have you? ;)I thought this (http://boards1.wizards.com/showpost.php?p=11888829&postcount=446) mostly covered it.
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-26-07, 03:19 AM	That's D&D's social system. D&D's social system blows. I've already covered why a system that just gives you vague outcomes is useless for "drawn out" encounters. I've yet to see a social system that actually works so far.
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-26-07, 03:27 AM	In real life, when you try to talk someone into something ludicrous, you tend to get punched in the face. Maybe, but you won't get killed. I mean so the magic shop owner says, "Get the hell out of my shop, that's ridiculous!" Then you just go to the next magic shop. People don't consider diplomacy to be especially threatening, so while ridiculous offers may waste your time, they're not an offensive act. More than likely you're going to laugh at someone offering you that deal. I mean imagine a guy walks into a car dealership, pulls out a nice shiny nickel and offers it to the guy in exchange for a new Mercedes. The salesman is just going to laugh at him probably. The offer is so ridiculous, it's not even going to be seen as an attempt to swindle the guy. It's just a laughable bargain.
Dexter_Blacktyde 03-26-07, 03:28 AM	I thought this (http://boards1.wizards.com/showpost.php?p=11888829&postcount=446) mostly covered it. I'm terribly sorry - I have no idea how I've managed to overlook your reply. Must be because it's early morning where I live, but any excuse will do :D DB
Dexter_Blacktyde 03-26-07, 04:06 AM	All the headgames and characterization are still happening in your brain. The rules just force you to accept the associated suffering, just like combat rules force you to accept damage -- they turn adversity into something meaningful that you can't just ignore. Put the blame on the time of day or on my stupidity, but I'm not sure I get it - meaning I don't get how that differs from sensible GMing. Here, the rules actively constrain your actions, in a Dogs-on-crack kinda way. When you're at the end of your rope, the only way you can respond to pressure from someone else is violence. Even if they're conciliatory or backing out of an argument. Even if what you had wasn't exactly an argument. (I'm much vaguer on the mechanics here, so I won't go into detail. But that's the gist of it.) And that's exactly what you need in a Vietnam roleplaying game. That's what gives you immersion. Because, no, you aren't a guy going crazy from fear and isolation and guilt and hatred in the jungle. If left to your own devices, you won't be that guy. In order to feel that guy, you've gotta lose control -- and that's exactly what the rules of carry force you to do. You're underestimating some roleplayers here. My own imagination isn't enough to enable me to immerse myself in the setting and the character, but a rule, a technical concept will achieve that easily? I don't think so. I do get your point here, I just think that - and I really don't want to insult anyone - that's a possible means of immersion for people with very little imagination. Other way around. Roll first then assign. You have a bunch of dice in front of you and then you decide whether your character's safety is more important than the goal, who gets to narrate, &c. In Otherkind, the target numbers are set (you're rolling d6s and there's either a 1-2/3-4/5-6 or 1-3/4-6 range depending on the category). I think only one or two simple values modify how many dice you can roll (err, Iron does, IIRC... I'm having a hard time finding the full ~4-page text right now because the site's being switched around a lot). The first part actually sounds pretty interesting (although it's too obvious without the possibility of rolls hidden by the GM, and it doesn't even seem to work with hidden rolls); the second part not so much, which is why my point still stands: It's way too simple to keep up suspension of disbelief. That's the problem with rules governing social interaction: In order to be applicable in the first place, they have to be as generic and simplistic as possible (because rules trying to even get near real social interaction with all its possibilities would require the space of all three core books). They are okay in a CRPG because that's the closest a program is capable of getting to simulating human behavior. One of the reasons I play P&P RPGs is because I don't want to put up with a simulation - I want believable human behavior, and these rules don't give me any. D&D's diplomacy rules suck so hard I get a hickey just from reading them, but at least the Wizards keep them short and don't try to build upon them or emphasize the importance of using them, so you can use them as guidelines, if nothing more. 'Cept everyone's just glossing over unimportant bits. Naturally, but we aren't talking about choosing to not play out an uneventful journey, but about, say, choosing to narrate through a fight instead of playing it by the rules, right? D&D just kinda decides for you that every fight matters and that lock-picking never really matters all that much. True, but I could say that this is where sensible and intelligent GMing is required. But be that as it may, I get the feeling we're getting a little sidetracked here. I'm too tired to make more sense than I do right now, though, so I'll better take a rain check. DB
a_psh 03-26-07, 04:42 AM	Put the blame on the time of day or on my stupidity, but I'm not sure I get it - meaning I don't get how that differs from sensible GMing.In DitV or Afraid or Polaris or especially carry, you can't just say "Yeah, that doesn't affect my character." Every other player has the ability to make your character care about something, when it comes down to it. And you can do the same back to them. You're underestimating some roleplayers here. My own imagination isn't enough to enable me to immerse myself in the setting and the character, but a rule, a technical concept will achieve that easily? I don't think so. I do get your point here, I just think that - and I really don't want to insult anyone - that's a possible means of immersion for people with very little imagination.No, the rule allows your imagination to achieve it more easily. Because it forces you into an experience you probably haven't had. As an extreme example, there's a text adventure about having some kind of emotionally-paralyzing mental disorder. Whatever you try to make the character do, he latches onto some kind of cop-out and does pretty much nothing instead. Despite not being an RPG, this is more immersive than just freeform-roleplaying the damn character, because you really are trapped in your own head. That's the problem with rules governing social interaction: In order to be applicable in the first place, they have to be as generic and simplistic as possible (because rules trying to even get near real social interaction with all its possibilities would require the space of all three core books).That's why the prevailing Forge philosophy is not to simulate anything at all. Instead, you trust on human narration to introduce verisimilitude and use the rules to channel and constrain it. DitV doesn't say "You are impressed by the speech and get +2 to Friendship checks"; it says "Okay, now you're at the point in the conversation where you have to either give up or bring in something new." Naturally, but we aren't talking about choosing to not play out an uneventful journey, but about, say, choosing to narrate through a fight instead of playing it by the rules, right?You mean "narrate" as in ignore the rules? Yeah, that's a sign of bad rules. Modifying rules to suit you is one thing. Having to ignore rules in play is another -- a very bad thing. It means the rules are weak to begin with. A big part of the new RPG movement is to produce tight games that you're not supposed to bend the rules of, at all.
Dexter_Blacktyde 03-26-07, 06:23 AM	I'm tired, yet I'm still here. Something's wrong with me. In DitV or Afraid or Polaris or especially carry, you can't just say "Yeah, that doesn't affect my character." Every other player has the ability to make your character care about something, when it comes down to it. And you can do the same back to them. So basically this is about controlling the character. Firstly this concept implies that the player needs to be controlled because it assumes that he isn't able to portray the character the way he's supposed to, and secondly it assumes that the other players know said character better than its player, and that they get to force character development on him whether the actual player – who should know best – thinks it's reasonable or not. I know of a surefire way to scare away many players. It's a sentence that begins with "Your character thinks that..." or "Your character wants..." ;) No, the rule allows your imagination to achieve it more easily. Because it forces you into an experience you probably haven't had. Undergoing experiences one never had and feeling what they might be like is the whole point of roleplaying. Just having a technical rule that tells me how to play a character isn't an experience. Playing him is. There's always the possibility that the player isn't up to the challenge and portrays the character wrong or just not good enough, but the solution to this problem – if it is perceived as one – IMHO isn't "give him rules which make it impossible to portray the character wrong", but "let him learn from his mistakes and let him grow". Same with the disempowerment of the GM ArcTan wants because hypothetically he could make up an unreasonable DC mod on the fly. The main thing isn't playing the character right at all costs, it's trying to play the character right and getting enjoyment and a sense of achievement out of this when you succeed and the character becomes second nature to you. To achieve this I like to think it's better to assume players and GMs are adults acting in concert to get the most enjoyment out of their hobby than to assume they're idiots and jerks who either don't know what they're doing or love to screw around with their power. In my book a game about fantasy and limitless imagination shouldn't try to prevent everything that could go wrong from going wrong by trying to have rules for every possible situation (much less rules that oversimplify what the players know from their everyday life), because it doesn't trust them to play the game right. As an extreme example, there's a text adventure about having some kind of emotionally-paralyzing mental disorder. Whatever you try to make the character do, he latches onto some kind of cop-out and does pretty much nothing instead. Despite not being an RPG, this is more immersive than just freeform-roleplaying the damn character, because you really are trapped in your own head. And that's why I prefer P&P RPGs over CRPGs. CRPGs force you to do something or give you a very limited multiple choice selection. P&P RPGs give you limitless choices and expect you to do the right thing. What's more fun? Being forced to do something or doing it because you've learned how to think like a completely different person, because it feels right, even if it's disadvantageous? If I played someone with the Tourette syndrome, I might forget from time to time to utter an expletive. If I played someone with a severe mental disorder, every now and then I might catch myself wanting to do something perfectly reasonable. That's human. But I don't see how a simple "You have to act like this" rule is supposed to make me immerse myself in a character more than the actual concept. An example: I find the concept of a paladin very interesting. Of course D&D – being D&D – doesn't even scratch the surface of what's actually fascinating here, it doesn't raise the questions the paladin's code provokes, it doesn't go into the possible reasons for it. (But I must admit, it does a nice job of giving me the impression that there's neither rhyme nor reason beyond "We thought it was cool".) It's not the code that forces me to view the world in a different way from my own – it's the amount of thinking I've done to explore what it must be like to have to live by this code in a realistic environment, and to make sense of this generic class (that's supposed to be the same in all possible fantasy settings) in consideration of the setting (and its peculiarities) I'm playing the class in. You mean "narrate" as in ignore the rules? Yeah, that's a sign of bad rules. I thought it was you who brought up the example with playing out only important fights and letting the players describe the unimportant fights without resorting to dice rolls. Maybe it was ArcTan? Whoever it was, I thought that was what you were talking about, sorry for the misunderstanding. DB
a_psh 03-26-07, 07:20 AM	So basically this is about controlling the character. Firstly this concept implies that the player needs to be controlled because it assumes that he isn't able to portray the character the way he's supposed to, and secondly it assumes that the other players know said character better than its player, and that they get to force character development on him whether the actual player – who should know best – thinks it's reasonable or not. I know of a surefire way to scare away many players. It's a sentence that begins with "Your character thinks that..." or "Your character wants..." ;)"My character" is just an artifice of the system. It can encompass anything or nothing at all. You don't seem to have a problem with me telling you that your character is dead, after all. Because you buy into a system that says I get to roll some dice and stick you with a sword whenever I want. ... But, frankly, yes, me being able to say something about how what I do affects your character is important. It means that we're doing something together rather than just stumbling around in our own little corners. Undergoing experiences one never had and feeling what they might be like is the whole point of roleplaying. Just having a technical rule that tells me how to play a character isn't an experience. Playing him is. There's always the possibility that the player isn't up to the challenge and portrays the character wrong or just not good enough, but the solution to this problem – if it is perceived as one – IMHO isn't "give him rules which make it impossible to portray the character wrong", but "let him learn from his mistakes and let him grow".Rules shape the experience of play (any rule that doesn't is dead weight). The point of a psychological Vietnam story, for example, is that you're going crazy and you can't stop it. Even the best roleplayer in the world can, frankly, do more when he's got this nice little engine that's helping him go crazy than when he's just doing whatever he wants. In carry, when you reach for an action and all you've got left is violence, it's like... "****, what do I do?" That is the emotional hook -- you don't have the luxury of just sitting back and going "Hmm, I'm free to make up anything I want all the time." Sometimes, the game just goes and chops your comfort zone to pieces. Same with the disempowerment of the GM ArcTan wants because hypothetically he could make up an unreasonable DC mod on the fly.In order to substantively empower the other players, you have to partially disempower the GM. I GM most of the time and, frankly, I like this. I don't want to wear every hat at the same time. That's just pointless. And I'd rather not spend a whole session exploring just my own creative contributions. To achieve this I like to think it's better to assume players and GMs are adults acting in concert to get the most enjoyment out of their hobby than to assume they're idiots and jerks who either don't know what they're doing or love to screw around with their power. In my book a game about fantasy and limitless imagination shouldn't try to prevent everything that could go wrong from going wrong by trying to have rules for every possible situation (much less rules that oversimplify what the players know from their everyday life), because it doesn't trust them to play the game right.The examples I've presented don't "try to prevent everything that could go wrong from going wrong": they simply make a few key things go right and count on that to drive the rest. Play Polaris in good faith, following the simple structure of the book, and you will, in fact, get a tragic story. I thought it was you who brought up the example with playing out only important fights and letting the players describe the unimportant fights without resorting to dice rolls.The primary purpose of rules in a typical Forge-style game is to tell you who gets to describe what when and set some limits on what she can say about it. You specifically can't just freeform an important conflict in DitV (the GM catchphrase is "Say yes or roll the dice" -- either something is interesting enough to be settled by a conflict or you should just let it happen automatically, the game tells you). Similarly, no one can kill a protagonist in Polaris until he becomes a veteran (someone broken by the world), and then only his own player can cause it; and, when you max out on Weariness, you can't stop your character from falling, either. A good rule is one that you can trust to be useful every time. One that you never have to break.
Spinal_Tap 03-26-07, 07:32 AM	My problem with Diplomacy is this: PC saunters up to Llolth: "Hey, baby, that spider web would look great rolled up in a ball next to my bed." *rolls insane Diplomacy check* Llolth's response: "I like a man who's direct."
Arrowhen 03-26-07, 09:28 AM	I'd say you want a bit more than this, even. In almost any combat scene, every D&D character is useful. The same can hold true for a lot of non-combat scenes. Not just different people getting the proverbial spotlight on a scene-by-scene basis, but multiple characters being active and out there in various scenes. For example, that paladin's thief buddy probably has some nifty stuff he can do in a royal court scene, too (and the paladin, while certainly less effective in the dockside thieves' den, should be able to play a useful supporting role at least, I think). Also, sometimes, four or more people all working as a unit makes a social situation kinda crowded. That's when you split the party. Yeah, that was a poor example I have, really. What I was getting at is that in current game terms, the paladin and the thief might have exactly the same scores in Charisama, Diplomacy, etc., but they're each going to work more effectively in their own particular social circles. The skills and talents that let you hobhob nob with the rich and famous will still come in handy down at the thieves' den, but they won't get you as far. And more importantly, getting the same results outside your own social circle are going to require more risk. A minor social gaffe might set the courtiers to tittering behind the paladin's back; if the paladin makes an equivalent mistake at the thieves' den, he could end up getting stabbed in the back. And vice versa. The thieves might roll their eyes and mutter at the thief's faux pas, but if the thief made the same mistake at a noble ball, he could find himself tossed out into the street or into the dungeon. A well designed social system would account for areas of influence, reputations, contacts, etc., and would involve elements of risk and sacrifice, i.e., "do I risk my reputation to get what I want?", "will I keep pressing for this one favor even though it might cost me this friendship?"
Arrowhen 03-26-07, 09:46 AM	Only here's the thing. Combat systems are fun. Social systems are not. Rolling a die at the end of a long drawn out social encounter and simply declaring "nope you blew it, you lose" sucks. Of course it does, just like rolling a die and declaring "nope you blew it, you lose" at the end of a long drawn out description of combat would suck.
Toptomcat 03-26-07, 12:32 PM	One of the reasons the books tend to focus on mechanics rather than how to tell a good story is that the latter is much harder to teach. You can't really learn it from a book, no matter how good the book is. To do it, you need experience.
Dexter_Blacktyde 03-26-07, 12:53 PM	You don't seem to have a problem with me telling you that your character is dead, after all. Because you buy into a system that says I get to roll some dice and stick you with a sword whenever I want. You don't get to tell me my character is dead out of the blue, there's a mechanism regulating that – but you get to tell my character how he feels and thinks about things? At the end of the day you're playing parts of everyone but your own character, and as far as he's concerned, you're busy picking up the pieces and trying to make sense of what people who don't know him made him feel, think and do – what even might result in a character who's so far removed from the initial concept that you don't even want to play him anymore. ... But, frankly, yes, me being able to say something about how what I do affects your character is important. It means that we're doing something together rather than just stumbling around in our own little corners. In the real world you can do something because you want to achieve a certain result, but you can't just achieve this result by simply wanting to bring it about. You're not controlling results, only your means to achieve them. Imagine we were two players playing ourselves. You could, for example, insult me all you want, but you have no influence over my reaction. If you said, "Okay, my last insult about your father was too much for you, you hit me", that would be utter nonsense for several reasons. The consequence would be characters that are not played right. What's a character concept good for if all and sundry can decide what he's really like? The point of a psychological Vietnam story, for example, is that you're going crazy and you can't stop it. Even the best roleplayer in the world can, frankly, do more when he's got this nice little engine that's helping him go crazy than when he's just doing whatever he wants. In carry, when you reach for an action and all you've got left is violence, it's like... "****, what do I do?" That is the emotional hook -- you don't have the luxury of just sitting back and going "Hmm, I'm free to make up anything I want all the time." Sometimes, the game just goes and chops your comfort zone to pieces. I see your point, but I still say such a mechanism is completely superfluous for many players and can even be counterproductive for some. In order to substantively empower the other players, you have to partially disempower the GM. I think in order to make the players feel empowered, a good GM doesn't have to give them power over other people in that they can decide how they react. If a GM behaved that way – telling his players all the time what their characters think, want, feel, hate –, that would be perceived as wrong, wouldn't it? But it's okay for players to use their "player fiat" and rule that character X is so desperate he starts having suicidal thoughts, maybe just because they feel like it? The examples I've presented don't "try to prevent everything that could go wrong from going wrong": they simply make a few key things go right and count on that to drive the rest. But what you call right I consider absolutely wrong – I don't even see the sense in that :confused: DB
Tekas_Tinkered_Dragon 03-26-07, 12:57 PM	After reading the first post I've completly ignored the last 16 pages of gibberish as I know most people will ignore my post. However I feel a need to state my opinion, more out of boredom. As a long time player and DM as well as a long time avid fan of text based RPGs (I really dislike putting voices to my videogame books as I have always liked to think of them) I have always found that the battles and mechanics we throw in there are simply just ways of spending time between the stories. A game isn't made great by hacking and slashing everything but what got you there in the first place. Many games are just as good without a single attack roll rolled except maybe against a lock on a strongbox or against a grapling hook. Fighting is fun because it is based on your tactical skills and utilizing your abilities against your monsterous opponents and the boss monsters. You don't care as much about the story when in battle but your always aware of who your fighting and why your fighting him and that makes it more important but what advances the game isn't the battles at all. Any DM that can't put an hour aside for battle and then pull the story right back up and keep it going as interesting (or more) as it was before the battle isn't worth his DM screen.
Reinforcements 03-26-07, 01:08 PM	You don't get to tell me my character is dead out of the blue, there's a mechanism regulating that – but you get to tell my character how he feels and thinks about things? Uh, the whole point of the argument is that there should be a mechanism regulating THAT, too. The DM arbitrarily deciding, "The princess rejects your romantic offers and you're emotionally crushed," would be no more or less stupid than the DM arbitrarily deciding, "Your sword bounces off the orc's armor and he runs his spear through your chest." In the real world you can do something because you want to achieve a certain result, but you can't just achieve this result by simply wanting to bring it about. You're not controlling results, only your means to achieve them. Imagine we were two players playing ourselves. You could, for example, insult me all you want, but you have no influence over my reaction. If you said, "Okay, my last insult about your father was too much for you, you hit me", that would be utter nonsense for several reasons. The consequence would be characters that are not played right. What's a character concept good for if all and sundry can decide what he's really like? Which is exactly why there should be mechanics governing this sort of thing, so we can fairly adjudicate what happens. Mechanics are what PREVENTS it from turning into "I win!" "No you don't!". I think in order to make the players feel empowered, a good GM doesn't have to give them power over other people in that they can decide how they react. If a GM behaved that way – telling his players all the time what their characters think, want, feel, hate –, that would be perceived as wrong, wouldn't it? But it's okay for players to use their "player fiat" and rule that character X is so desperate he starts having suicidal thoughts, maybe just because they feel like it? Again, NO. That's the POINT of having rules and mechanics and structure, so that character actions can have consequences both positive and negative without it turning into a ******* contest or an arbitrary manner of "Who impressed the DM more with their acting?"
Reinforcements 03-26-07, 01:17 PM	Any DM that can't put an hour aside for battle and then pull the story right back up and keep it going as interesting (or more) as it was before the battle isn't worth his DM screen. You know, I think it's exactly this kind of crappy attitude that scares off new people and stagnates the game. This idea that the story and social interaction and everything are this big, important thing - indeed, the MOST important thing - and yet the rules, the things we buy all these books to get, give no almost no help whatsoever in this regard. What a terrible thing to tell a player or GM - "Here's all these rules for a war-game, and by the way, you also have to tell a really good story and play interesting characters or your a bad player/GM. No, the rules aren't going to help you at all."
Dexter_Blacktyde 03-26-07, 01:53 PM	Uh, the whole point of the argument is that there should be a mechanism regulating THAT, too. The DM arbitrarily deciding, "The princess rejects your romantic offers and you're emotionally crushed," (...) That's not what I'm saying. It is not the GM's place to decide how a character feels. Neither is it the place of a fellow player or a table. Which is exactly why there should be mechanics governing this sort of thing, so we can fairly adjudicate what happens. Mechanics are what PREVENTS it from turning into "I win!" "No you don't!". I don't oppose better mechanics than those the DMG offers. (Heck, any mechanic would be better than that nonsense.) I oppose mechanics that turn the play into "See? The table says you're desperate enough to kill the guards to get in. Roll initiative!" and suck the imagination, the creativity and the roleplaying out of the game. We don't even know how emotions really work, for example; how is a system supposed to reflect such a plethora of possibilities? Again, NO. That's the POINT of having rules and mechanics and structure, so that character actions can have consequences both positive and negative without it turning into a ******* contest or an arbitrary manner of "Who impressed the DM more with their acting?" You're assuming this is the normal case, just like a_psh and ArcTan. One might even say you're implying here that roleplaying per se is inherently flawed and players shouldn't be trusted with it. Anyway, a_psh's suggestion doesn't sound like it's able to portray a lifelike gaming environment. "If I do this, I make you feel that" is by its nature idiotic. That's what the official diplomacy rules do, but if I'm not mistaken, few are complaining about its completely unrealistic nature, but mostly about the possibility of the GM making an adjustment that's not covered by the rules. So I consider the rules for things like this, be it diplomacy, bluff or whatever, extremely one-dimensional, fit for a CRPG, but not for an RPG involving actual human thought and behavior. That I hear more complaints that the GM gets to make decisions and doesn't get forced to use the moronic rules (implying that he doesn't know his players, their characters and the gaming environment better than very simplistic rules that are supposed to fit all groups) than about the rules themselves is somehow... I don't know... disturbing? IMHO this is the black and white "if-then" thinking D&D has always promoted. Look, I'd like to see a DMG that treats its readers like grown-ups. That tells them that no ruleset on Earth could ever hope to simulate social interaction. That gives the reader examples of situations in which a die roll and looking up a table just don't do the situation justice in any believable way. That clearly differentiates social interaction from combat by explaining that the former relies on the players' and the GM's knowledge of the players, characters, environment and circumstances, whereas the latter only abstracts physical activity, and that the "if-then" concept only works there. That offers guidelines to help differentiate the abilities of the players from the abilities of their characters and to "translate" the intent of the player and the result of the skill check into something believable, depending on countless factors only a human brain but no rules can keep track of. That highlights that "only you know your group, so don't just slavishly cling to the mechanics, use your own head, trust your judgement of the situation, try to be there, emotionally and intellectually". That doesn't put managing social interaction past the group but encourages it to come up with its own ideas to find its ideal gaming style. DB
Jenkins007 03-26-07, 01:54 PM	You know, I think it's exactly this kind of crappy attitude that scares off new people and stagnates the game. Honestly, I think that it's this kind of attitude that causes people to create more in depth creations, encounters, what-have-you. This idea that the story and social interaction and everything are this big, important thing - indeed, the MOST important thing - and yet the rules, the things we buy all these books to get, give no almost no help whatsoever in this regard. What a terrible thing to tell a player or GM - "Here's all these rules for a war-game, and by the way, you also have to tell a really good story and play interesting characters or your a bad player/GM. No, the rules aren't going to help you at all." I think that it's that kind of attitude that scares away people that are trying to have fun roleplaying. Just one person with that kind of overbearing 'The rules are there for a reason, nothing else matters' attitude can tear a group to shreds. I've seen it happen more than once. The game is about bending it to be what you want it to be. The story need not be the most important thing, nor the battles, not even a perfect blend, but it must be what you want it to be or it will continue to fall beneath your standards. The major problem here is not the rules or lack thereof, it is the people not grasping the fact that these rules were made to be broken.
Arrowhen 03-26-07, 01:59 PM	Yes and it sucks. You can get a +20 diplomacy item and get a king to hand over his kingdom to you for a piece of string. That's exactly the kind of lame plot-destroying stupidity that I'm talking about when I say social systems don't work. That sounds more like a problem with items than a problem with social systems. Seriously, if you could make +20 Diplomacy items, why would anyone ever bother with magic swords and staffs of power and stuff? You seem to assume that every other GM is a jerk who doesn't care about creating a believable gaming environment that stimulates immersion. There are jerks I'd never have given a driver's license because they recklessly endanger everyone on the road everytime they hop in their car. But I don't assume that everyone is such a jerk and that the car just enables them to be one. I get the feeling you've had your share of horrible GMs, right? You don't have to be a horrible jerk of a DM to have a hard time separating players' real-life social skills from those of their characters. You just have to be, you know, human. Say you've had a really bad week, you worked late every day, got yelled at by your boss over something that wasn't even your fault, got in a fight with your girlfriend, and on top of all that, you're coming down with a cold. Game time rolls around and you just want to relax with your friends and bust some orc skulls. You can do that easily, because the way the combat rules work is that if you roll a high enough number your character scores a hit, no matter what kind of mood you're in. But then a social situation comes up, and frankly, you're just not feeling up to it. You've been in social situations all week, and most of them ended badly for you. Unlike combat, you don't have any rules to help you out. It's all down to your own personal ability and the DM's judgement. You stumble through the social encounter as best you can, but your acting abilities just aren't up to their usual standards. Now, all the DM knows is that last time your character was in a similar situation you acted out his part in a witty, articulate manner, but this time you're not. Since your acting ability is the only way he has of determining your character's success, he just figures that your character isn't trying hard enough and rules that it's a failure. Now, instead of just playing a game to relax and take your mind off of your troubles, instead of getting to pretend to be someone else, someone who's better at things that you are, you're faced with the same real-life limitations that have been plaguing you all week. Now, sure, if the DM is really, really perceptive, he might realize that you're having a bad day and make allowances. If you're good friends, you might feel comfortable telling him you're having a bad day and that you're not on top of your game. But D&D shouldn't require everyone in the group to be best friends, not should it require all DMs to be psychologists. We kicked that out of the window on the first day. But I assume every group modifies the rules to better reflect its preferences and gaming style. That's one of the points why I don't consider D&D's combat as a big problem - it's easily remedied by hitting the switch you were talking about. People who feel they need a believable and realistic combat system are left in the rain, though, that's true. But now you're just saying "if we don't like the rules, we toss them out." Couldn't you do the same with a set of social rules? If you're free to toss out any rules that don't help you, why deny those rules to other groups who might in fact be helped by them? Roleplaying is what you want it to be, and if it's something along the lines of "my characters says that he really doesn't want to do this', that's fine. But: I don't want newbies - and in America almost every newbie's first system that introduces them to the hobby seems to be D&D - to get the idea that's all. But there's nothing currently in the rules that indicates that there's anything "more" than that. Heck, the PHB doesn't even have an example of play, and the one in the DMG doesn't make any distinction between IC and OOC speech (in fact, skimming over it just now, I don't think there's a single line that can be clearly determined to be IC speech.) And yet somehow players manage to figure out that it's OK to speak in character. On the other hand, the DMG does have tips on describing combat and magical effects, so there's no reason that couldn't be extended to a social system. The rules for social encounters might include DM advice like: "Some groups like to act out every single line of character dialogue, while others like to handle it in a completely abstract manner. Most, however, will probably fall somewhere in between, acting out the 'good stuff' (the most important or dramatic parts of the encounter) and skimming over or summarizing the parts in between. Try out a variety of approaches to see what works best for your group, but remember, it's the characters whose social skills you're judging, not the players." (As an aside, that's what a GM does: He caters to the different needs of the players and tries to give every single one of them their five minutes in the spotlight. By deciding against "live" roleplaying, you're deciding against those members of your group who want it instead of giving them their share and then see to it that the others get theirs.) A social system wouldn't preclude "live" roleplaying, it would just ensure that a character's success or failure is determined according to its abilities, not according to its player's acting talents. It would just mean that roleplaying would remain what it should be--a fun diversion, not an acting contest. Here's the problem with that. Where do you draw the line? What's an ok amount of plot manipulation for a diplomacy based character? Can he use his skills to get magic items from people for free or real cheap? Is he allowed to diplomacy Elminster and other power people for help? How about converting the evil high cleric? If you consider the master diplomat to be a viable character (and if you have a social system, you do), then how do you find limits to what you want him to do? The same way you find limits for what you want characters to be able to do in combat--with a set of limitations and tradeoffs for determining a character's abilities. The trouble with the crazy min/maxed Diplomacy monster isn't that Diplomacy exists, it's that crazy min/maxed anything monsters are allowed to exist. It's no different from the character with AC 60 at first level, or whatever. Crazy min/maxed Diplomacy monsters are only more of a problem because the current social system is so crude and simplistic that there's no real counter for it. There's no "social true strike" or "social touch attack" or "social area effects", etc. A fully formed social system would be somewhat harder to break. (And, as an aside, the whole ruleset could be made much harder to break with the inclusion of a Mutants & Masterminds-style "level cap" on damage, saves, AC, etc. You'd still have the freedom to decide what your character was good at, but how good it could get at that would be limited by level. This would make balancing encounters a hell of a lot easier, too.) The thing is that different characters have different limits. It's okay if the guy convinces a group of gnoll mercenaries that they're not being paid enough and decide to leave. But it's not okay if he goes up to the main villain (or the main villain's god) and gets him to convert to the side of good. It also wouldn't be OK if one character could single-handedly defeat the main villain in combat, though, right? But what if converting the villain to the side of good was just as difficult as defeating him in combat, requiring the whole party's combined efforts and resolved with rules that were just as fun to play as the combat rules? Then wouldn't converting the main villain to the side of good be just as satisfying as sticking a sword through his head? Maybe, but you won't get killed. I mean so the magic shop owner says, "Get the hell out of my shop, that's ridiculous!" Then you just go to the next magic shop. People don't consider diplomacy to be especially threatening, so while ridiculous offers may waste your time, they're not an offensive act. More than likely you're going to laugh at someone offering you that deal. I mean imagine a guy walks into a car dealership, pulls out a nice shiny nickel and offers it to the guy in exchange for a new Mercedes. The salesman is just going to laugh at him probably. The offer is so ridiculous, it's not even going to be seen as an attempt to swindle the guy. It's just a laughable bargain. Sure, here in the real world. In a world where magic exists and everyone knows it, the salesman might just figure the guy's crazy, but he's probably more likely to think maybe the guy was trying to pull some kind of magically-assisted scam. Maybe that nickel was magic and he, the salesman, just lucked out and resisted its effects. Whatever the case, he's probably going to mention it to his buddies over drinks at the Mercedes-sellers guildhall, so when the guy tries to buy a Mercedes from someone else for a nickel, chances are they've already heard of him and are going to be wary. In fact, he might be trying to legitimately purchase a Mercedes this time, but because he's now got a lowered reputation among the local Mercedes dealers, he's going to have a hard time negotiating a good price.
ArcTan 03-26-07, 02:11 PM	Yes and it sucks. You can get a +20 diplomacy item and get a king to hand over his kingdom to you for a piece of string. It's not a complete fix. One of the problems with D&D's skill system is that the system is too compressed, that different skills that do vastly different things are valued the same way (Use Magic Device ranks are worth the same as Knowledge (geography) or Use Rope ranks? Please) and so on. This is the same complaint people had about the Truenamer class -- Truename Magic is a demonstration of why the existing skills framework of D&D as is isn't very robust for anything other than things intentionally meant to be "side parts" of the game. Not that you can't try to fix it. For instance, you can simply *not have* +20 Diplomacy items. They don't exist in the DMG, and everyone, including WotC now that the Magic Item Compendium has come out, agrees that the "Magic Item Creation Guidelines" in the original DMG are dumb and pretty busted. Would you give a Fighter a continuous +20 attack bonus item? Then you wouldn't give a Diplomacy-using character a +20 to Diplomacy item. That's exactly the kind of lame plot-destroying stupidity that I'm talking about when I say social systems don't work. This is no different from saying that if you give a character a +20 to attack sword and a +50 to AC cloak he can kill the king and the king's entire royal guard with impunity.
ArcTan 03-26-07, 02:12 PM	After reading the first post I've completly ignored the last 16 pages of gibberish as I know most people will ignore my post. However I feel a need to state my opinion, more out of boredom. As a long time player and DM as well as a long time avid fan of text based RPGs (I really dislike putting voices to my videogame books as I have always liked to think of them) I have always found that the battles and mechanics we throw in there are simply just ways of spending time between the stories. A game isn't made great by hacking and slashing everything but what got you there in the first place. Many games are just as good without a single attack roll rolled except maybe against a lock on a strongbox or against a grapling hook. Then all those books about combat are really kind of a waste of time and money, aren't they? I think that *is* a_psh's original point.
a_psh 03-26-07, 02:23 PM	You don't get to tell me my character is dead out of the blue, there's a mechanism regulating that – but you get to tell my character how he feels and thinks about things?As Reinforcements said, there is a mechanism regulating that. I see your point, but I still say such a mechanism is completely superfluous for many players and can even be counterproductive for some.All those Forge folks? Hardcore freeformers, pretty much the lot of them. That's why I actually took notice when they started writing game mechanics: because they started with the premise that most conventional game mechanics are superfluous and then asked "What can rules do that's actually worth doing with them?" The hands-down purest example of how carefully-designed rules improve a story that I can think of is Polaris. Because it basically is freeform with just a few added rules. And those rules give it a ton of steam. They turn what could otherwise just be played out as a fairy-tale into a bit of very strong dark tragedy.
ArcTan 03-26-07, 02:26 PM	That's not what I'm saying. It is not the GM's place to decide how a character feels. Neither is it the place of a fellow player or a table. Whether or not the system decides you the *PC* feels depends on what the system is trying to accomplish. (There are some pretty fun games there that *are* about how your character feels, or at least some crucial element of how your character feels. Many games about "dark magic" that use a Humanity score to represent corruption; Call of Cthulhu's Insanity score; Heroes of Horror games and their Taint score.) But there's no reason this system has to tell you how your character feels after a social encounter any more than it tells you how your character feels after a combat encounter. It can *imply* that based on what *happens* in the social encounter, but it's the same way with combat. D&D currently tells you that after you've just lost 68 HP from a single full attack and barely made your Fort save against massive damage, that you're in terrible pain, terrified of your opponent, and seriously considering running away. It doesn't actually *say* this, but the implications of what's going on when this occurs in combat strongly push this to be what you imagine, and the player uses this as a baseline in deciding how her character actually reacts ("A lesser man might shrink now, but I have no choice but to press on!") On the other side, the GM *is* responsible for deciding the emotional state of NPCs, because, well, right now nobody else is. Saying that the king has become annoyed with you because of your botched attempts to sweet-talk him is no different from saying the orcs have become terrified of you after you brutally murdered their leader. And in both cases the idea that your PCs might feel one way or the other -- frustrated, dejected, triumphant, guilty -- is still a ball in your court that you have to determine when narrating what your PCs do. I don't oppose better mechanics than those the DMG offers. (Heck, any mechanic would be better than that nonsense.) I oppose mechanics that turn the play into "See? The table says you're desperate enough to kill the guards to get in. Roll initiative!" and suck the imagination, the creativity and the roleplaying out of the game. We don't even know how emotions really work, for example; how is a system supposed to reflect such a plethora of possibilities? There's no reason the system would have to work that way. Does the combat system currently work by saying "See? You've lost enough hit points that you're now terrified of your enemy and you drop your weapons and surrender!" No. (Sadly, it *does* do this when it comes to "magical" confusion and fear effects, which have their purpose in a tactical game but which I find kind of intrusive in combat-as-roleplaying.) You're assuming this is the normal case, just like a_psh and ArcTan. One might even say you're implying here that roleplaying per se is inherently flawed and players shouldn't be trusted with it. Anyway, a_psh's suggestion doesn't sound like it's able to portray a lifelike gaming environment. "If I do this, I make you feel that" is by its nature idiotic. That's what the official diplomacy rules do, but if I'm not mistaken, few are complaining about its completely unrealistic nature, but mostly about the possibility of the GM making an adjustment that's not covered by the rules. So I consider the rules for things like this, be it diplomacy, bluff or whatever, extremely one-dimensional, fit for a CRPG, but not for an RPG involving actual human thought and behavior. That I hear more complaints that the GM gets to make decisions and doesn't get forced to use the moronic rules (implying that he doesn't know his players, their characters and the gaming environment better than very simplistic rules that are supposed to fit all groups) than about the rules themselves is somehow... I don't know... disturbing? IMHO this is the black and white "if-then" thinking D&D has always promoted. The GM should have rules to use as a *baseline* and be able to violate them based on a real *decision*. He shouldn't be forced to freeform everything important because rules don't exist. If you're really arguing for this, then why can't combat scenarios also be part of the "living, breathing" campaign world? The number of rules for combat right now and number of different character creation rules for optimizing a combat character are ludicrous. Even just from a sheer pragmatism perspective I can see why they need to be pared down (and most DMs do, by just ignoring wide swathes of what WotC has published) -- but you don't think that D&D's current state of the art is *also* bad for the living, breathing campaign world? As far as "realism" goes, it's a completely false argument. We're playing a game, for our entertainment. Nothing about D&D is very realistic at all, starting from the six ability scores, taking a trip through grid-based combat and ending with the whole idea of XP and level advancement. It's a *game*. It's meant to create scenes that we find *fun* and *interesting*, not scenes that "would really happen in real life" (which is a nonsensical thing to say when your original intention is playing through a power fantasy where thousands of foes fall beneath your blade). A system for social interaction would let players contribute in a *meaningful* way, which would make the game more *fun*. Screw realism. (It's not like the DM trying desperately to improv method-act the king is going to be at all realistic either.) Look, I'd like to see a DMG that treats its readers like grown-ups. That tells them that no ruleset on Earth could ever hope to simulate social interaction. IT CAN'T ACTUALLY SIMULATE WHAT HAPPENS IN A LIFE-OR-DEATH COMBAT EITHER! That gives the reader examples of situations in which a die roll and looking up a table just don't do the situation justice in any believable way. That clearly differentiates social interaction from combat by explaining that the former relies on the players' and the GM's knowledge of the players, characters, environment and circumstances, whereas the latter only abstracts physical activity, and that the "if-then" concept only works there. It doesn't work there either, if you really think it doesn't work for anything involving players, characters, environment and circumstances. In a game about combat, combat *above all* involves players, characters, environment, and circumstances. (Will a courageous character's courage finally break? Will a coward rise to the challenge? Will a good man falter when asked to slay an undead creature in the image of his true love? Can a dashing character pull off an almost impossible-seeming series of moves, furthering his legend? Etc.) That offers guidelines to help differentiate the abilities of the players from the abilities of their characters and to "translate" the intent of the player and the result of the skill check into something believable, depending on countless factors only a human brain but no rules can keep track of. That highlights that "only you know your group, so don't just slavishly cling to the mechanics, use your own head, trust your judgement of the situation, try to be there, emotionally and intellectually". Insofar as that works for you, that's something that should hold for everything the group does. If there's one assumption that I want this thread to kill, it's the idea that "wargame + freeform" is a natural and ordinary way RPGs should work. It isn't. If I want freeform I want the freedom to narrate actions *everywhere*, including -- and *especially* -- when my character is desperately fighting for his life against a madman. If I want mechanics I want fair mechanics that give me a sense of solid footing for resolving conflicts *everywhere*, including -- and *especially* -- when my character is desperately bargaining for his life with a merciless ruler. That doesn't put managing social interaction past the group but encourages it to come up with its own ideas to find its ideal gaming style. The whole problem we've been talking about is that D&D isn't really a complete game, as such, and asks each individual DM to painstakingly create their own internal set of rules for a whole hell of a lot of things that a lot of gaming groups value *more* than the grid-based combat that D&D keeps on selling us rules and rules and yet more rules for. A little rebalancing might be in order -- some set of rules so that you might have a chance at a fair and fun game with decent pacing and a means for handling conflict in social situations *without* a DM who's had ten years to play with your group and "learn the ropes", and some lightening of the emphasis on war so that the game doesn't get eaten up by it to the degree it currently does.
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-26-07, 02:36 PM	A social system wouldn't preclude "live" roleplaying, it would just ensure that a character's success or failure is determined according to its abilities, not according to its player's acting talents. It would just mean that roleplaying would remain what it should be--a fun diversion, not an acting contest. Well I guess I'd like my roleplaying to actually have an impact on the game, as opposed to just being a pointless add-on. Otherwise I mean... why not just play chess and role-play while doing that? If you just want role-playing as a fun diversion that doesn't do anything, then you might as well just add it onto your favorite game. The same way you find limits for what you want characters to be able to do in combat--with a set of limitations and tradeoffs for determining a character's abilities. The trouble with the crazy min/maxed Diplomacy monster isn't that Diplomacy exists, it's that crazy min/maxed anything monsters are allowed to exist. It's no different from the character with AC 60 at first level, or whatever. Well, the difference is that broken things in combat are more easily numerically qualified. We know a 1st level character shouldn't be able to kill a CR 5 creature solo for instance. We have guidelines in place. Social situations have far less guidelines and are entirely relative. It also wouldn't be OK if one character could single-handedly defeat the main villain in combat, though, right? But what if converting the villain to the side of good was just as difficult as defeating him in combat, requiring the whole party's combined efforts and resolved with rules that were just as fun to play as the combat rules? I don't think that's even possible. Social abstraction in general just isn't very fun, because you can't get social interaction simulated on the level of combat and make it fun. I mean, you keep talking about these dream social systems, but I have yet to see one ever created. Sure, here in the real world. In a world where magic exists and everyone knows it, the salesman might just figure the guy's crazy, but he's probably more likely to think maybe the guy was trying to pull some kind of magically-assisted scam. Maybe that nickel was magic and he, the salesman, just lucked out and resisted its effects. Whatever the case, he's probably going to mention it to his buddies over drinks at the Mercedes-sellers guildhall, so when the guy tries to buy a Mercedes from someone else for a nickel, chances are they've already heard of him and are going to be wary. Well remember, diplomacy isn't magic. So it could be used in a world without magic too, like d20 modern. In fact, he might be trying to legitimately purchase a Mercedes this time, but because he's now got a lowered reputation among the local Mercedes dealers, he's going to have a hard time negotiating a good price. Not really, remember he's got a ton of diplomacy. So it doesn't matter. Unless of course, the DM is free to throw on arbitrary modifiers for his past actions, but yeah... then you're basically playing a DM fiat system anyway.
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-26-07, 02:39 PM	Would you give a Fighter a continuous +20 attack bonus item? Then you wouldn't give a Diplomacy-using character a +20 to Diplomacy item. Ok forget the item, just max charisma, get skill focus (diplomacy), a 'friendly' psicrystal, and a bunch of other social feats from various books. The char op boards can get huge diplomacy ratings even if you don't have custom diplomacy items.
Dexter_Blacktyde 03-26-07, 02:49 PM	Honestly, I think that it's this kind of attitude that causes people to create more in depth creations, encounters, what-have-you. (...) That's what I was about to say. In Germany we've been brought up on DSA, a system that strongly emphasizes in-depth roleplaying, interesting characters, a good story, believability and what they call "magical realism". That's why D&D is pretty unsuccessful over here because it's viewed as a mindless hack'n'slay superhero system that doesn't care one bit about the above. So I don't see what you, Reinforcements, are complaining about - D&D is about rules, rules, rules and little else. The only kind of player D&D scares off is the one who wants things to do with it rules cannot cover. You don't have to be a horrible jerk of a DM to have a hard time separating players' real-life social skills from those of their characters. You just have to be, you know, human. I don't want to come across as arrogant or condescending or insulting, I really don't - but I may have had a hard time separating those in my first year, and I don't put being able to separate them past any average gamer, newbies notwithstanding. Say you've had a really bad week, you worked late every day, got yelled at by your boss over something that wasn't even your fault, got in a fight with your girlfriend, and on top of all that, you're coming down with a cold. Game time rolls around and you just want to relax with your friends and bust some orc skulls. You can do that easily, because the way the combat rules work is that if you roll a high enough number your character scores a hit, no matter what kind of mood you're in. I see where you're going. The thing is, when it comes to roleplaying, I have to be in the mood, and if I'm not, I have to make do with what I have. But when I'm craving a mindless action flick, I don't watch the Godfather either. If you want an RPG that's so regularized that it's the same no matter what mood you're in - I think that's what video games are for. That doesn't mean that they can (or should aspire to) replace P&P roleplaying. Now, all the DM knows is that last time your character was in a similar situation you acted out his part in a witty, articulate manner, but this time you're not. Since your acting ability is the only way he has of determining your character's success I'm not advocating purely freeform roleplaying when it comes to social interaction. But the way I see it, the skills we have at our disposal should cover most of the ground, and they work best when they're complementing the actual roleplaying, not when they're trying to replace it because a table says "this is the outcome of the roll, no matter what" regardless of what you say and do. But now you're just saying "if we don't like the rules, we toss them out." Couldn't you do the same with a set of social rules? If you're free to toss out any rules that don't help you, why deny those rules to other groups who might in fact be helped by them? I'm tossing out rules and changing them left and right, sure, but this isn't about me. I covered that before: I'm trying to put myself in a newbie's position, and when I compare people who started roleplaying with D&D and those who started with DSA, the difference is mind-boggling. Of course, over time you might find out that the system that influenced you the most - namely your first and oftentimes only one - doesn't reflect what's actually possible in roleplaying in general. Then again, you might not. As I said, I think D&D trains people to think in a very straightforward "if-then" manner. It spells out everything for you, leaves little to the imagination, doesn't even seem to care all that much about what's gotten us into the hobby in the first place but is more concerned with giving us rules from hacking away at your opponents to urinating in a straight line, implying the rules are the meat of the game, not the imagination. For me this is like saying "I don't care about the story of the movie, the acting, the casting or whatever, the main thing is there are lots of explosions". Those movies have a right to exist, too, but they represent only a fraction of what's possible in the medium. And if you've never watched anything but Bruckheimer flicks, you might never know what you're missing - and that what you're missing might actually be right up your alley. In short, I oppose the heavy emphasis on rules dependancy. I'd like an RPG to spark the reader's imagination, not to show him that there's nothing not regulated by a mechanism. On the other hand, the DMG does have tips on describing combat and magical effects, so there's no reason that couldn't be extended to a social system. Tips are fine! Examples, in-depth explanations of how social interaction can be used within the game, I'd welcome something like that. "Some groups like to act out every single line of character dialogue, while others like to handle it in a completely abstract manner. Most, however, will probably fall somewhere in between, acting out the 'good stuff' (the most important or dramatic parts of the encounter) and skimming over or summarizing the parts in between. Try out a variety of approaches to see what works best for your group, but remember, it's the characters whose social skills you're judging, not the players." As a short excerpt that'd be just fine. And, as an aside, the whole ruleset could be made much harder to break with the inclusion of a Mutants & Masterminds-style "level cap" on damage, saves, AC, etc. You'd still have the freedom to decide what your character was good at, but how good it could get at that would be limited by level. This would make balancing encounters a hell of a lot easier, too. I'd like to see that, too. It also wouldn't be OK if one character could single-handedly defeat the main villain in combat, though, right? But what if converting the villain to the side of good was just as difficult as defeating him in combat, requiring the whole party's combined efforts and resolved with rules that were just as fun to play as the combat rules? Then wouldn't converting the main villain to the side of good be just as satisfying as sticking a sword through his head? Naturally that depends on the characters, the villain and the circumstances, of course - but I have a hard time imagining a roleplaying session in which something like that would make sense. Your example is taken out of context, so I'm not sure what exactly you have in mind here, but if it's something along the lines of entering the villain's hideout, killing his underlings, confronting him and then telling him how wrong his doings are, expecting to have a chance of converting him within a single conversation, I'd consider it plain silly, whether it is attempted by roleplaying or by the use of a detailed set of social rules. DB
Reinforcements 03-26-07, 02:56 PM	Ok forget the item, just max charisma, get skill focus (diplomacy), a 'friendly' psicrystal, and a bunch of other social feats from various books. The char op boards can get huge diplomacy ratings even if you don't have custom diplomacy items. But again, that doesn't mean that there's something inherently flawed in the idea of social mechanics. Heck, it doesn't even mean that there's something inherently flawed in the concept of the Diplomacy skill - just that, as written, it's really easy to break. Keeping players from making the dark god their best buddy with Diplomacy is as easy as changing the way the DCs work - make them scale by HD, or something.
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-26-07, 03:05 PM	Whether or not the system decides you the *PC* feels depends on what the system is trying to accomplish. (There are some pretty fun games there that *are* about how your character feels, or at least some crucial element of how your character feels. Many games about "dark magic" that use a Humanity score to represent corruption; Call of Cthulhu's Insanity score; Heroes of Horror games and their Taint score.) You go in dangerous territory when you start telling people (DM or PC) how their characters feel and react. It's okay sometimes when you can blame it on a temporary magic effect that really does remove free will, but diplomacy does not do this. But there's no reason this system has to tell you how your character feels after a social encounter any more than it tells you how your character feels after a combat encounter. It can *imply* that based on what *happens* in the social encounter, but it's the same way with combat. No, it's not. In combat, you either lose free will by magic effects or you have full control. In social situations, the rules say if you're seduced, swindled or whatever. So if you as a PC feel that the DM's NPC is lying about his magic string and how it's worth all your magic items, you can't do crap if the NPC happens to roll high on his diplomacy check. You have to give him all your magic items, because your PC believes it. You've lost your free will entirely. Now, if you want to talk about getting a PC to dislike his character, just try forcing his character to act dumber than a moronic child with the explanation, "Yeah, well I as DM am not a great actor, but it's not my acting ability, it's the NPC, and he convinced your character that his string was worth all his magic items. So deduct all your items from your character sheet, and write down 'fancy peice of string'. You also believe the string is the ultimate artifact of power in this world and you are unstoppable with it." On the other side, the GM *is* responsible for deciding the emotional state of NPCs, because, well, right now nobody else is. No he doesn't, not with a social system. The system tells you if the NPC is intimidated or charmed or annoyed or whatever. There's no reason the system would have to work that way. Does the combat system currently work by saying "See? You've lost enough hit points that you're now terrified of your enemy and you drop your weapons and surrender!" Uh...yes there is. Keep in mind that's what you're asking for. The purpose of a combat system is to determine who gets hurt and how much. The purpose of a social system is determining (and forcing) certain reactions and beliefs. A bluffing system tells you if you think the other guy is telling the truth. So if you fail against bluff, you *believe* something new. Intimidate determines if you feel afraid. You no longer decide your character's reactions to things, the system does it for you. Now, again, this doesn't necessarily take the role-playing out of it, though it might suck to have to role-play your favorite barbarian character as a sniveling coward after getting intimidated, but it removes the game aspect, as you no longer choose how your character feels or acts, the system decides that. Every social encounter is much like getting dominated or charmed, where the DM simply says, "you lost, and now you've got to do this, whether you like it or not." The GM should have rules to use as a *baseline* and be able to violate them based on a real *decision*. He shouldn't be forced to freeform everything important because rules don't exist. This is an example of terrible DMing practice. A player invests all his points in social skills, since the system says they're godly, and then the DM just arbitrarily ignores the system. You're better off just freeforming and letting people know you're freeforming, that way they're not wasting points buying skills that could get nullified at any time. It's a lot easier to teach DMs to freeform rather than have them play a guessing game as to when to use the rules and when not to. It'd be like writing next to a spell "This spell works when the DM wants it to." If you're really arguing for this, then why can't combat scenarios also be part of the "living, breathing" campaign world? Combat isn't character invasive. It doesn't affect your character's personality or actions. Yes, you might die after getting stabbed, but you can go down fighting as the character you wanted to be. You don't get forced to abandon your god and paladinhood because some succubus rolled high on her diplomacy check. We like risk, so it's okay that your character might die, or get beat down by an ogre. It's not okay if you have rules forcing you to act against your character concept unless they have some kind of flavor excuse that removes free will (like a dominate spell). A system for social interaction would let players contribute in a *meaningful* way, which would make the game more *fun*. Screw realism. (It's not like the DM trying desperately to improv method-act the king is going to be at all realistic either.) No, social systems prevent player contribution. They enforce the idea of character contribution. Your contributions as a player go rapidly down, as you lose the decision-making ability when an NPC hits you with social system manipulation. (Will a courageous character's courage finally break? Will a coward rise to the challenge? Will a good man falter when asked to slay an undead creature in the image of his true love? Etc.) This sort of thing is best left for the PC to decide, not the dice. The PCs have to play these characters and if they plan for their cowardly character to make a turn around in the plot, then he very well should! If there's one assumption that I want this thread to kill, it's the idea that "wargame + freeform" is a natural and ordinary way RPGs should work. It isn't. If I want freeform I want the freedom to narrate actions *everywhere*, including -- and *especially* -- when my character is desperately fighting for his life against a madman. You can have that. But remember that the wargame + freeform model is designed to emphasize character risk and the deadliness of combat. When you can narrate, character risk is out the window. Also the other problem with combat freeform is task resolution. PCs don't want to die. So if they can narrate, they never will. In social encounters, you really can get tricked by an NPC or convinced of something. It's not immediately obvious that you want to raise your defenses against it like you do in combat. If I want mechanics I want fair mechanics that give me a sense of solid footing for resolving conflicts *everywhere*, including -- and *especially* -- when my character is desperately bargaining for his life with a merciless ruler. And what about when the villain is bargaining for his life with your character? Should he be able to arbitrarily resolve the conflict with you in the same fashion?
Solik 03-26-07, 03:25 PM	I'm not sure what's going on in here anymore. The current discussion seems to be about having rules systems for social situations, which isn't in any way related to the original topic, and in which I find myself agreeing with ArcTan and friends (except on the topic of the rules controlling how your character feels, etc). Bring on good, simple rules for such things please.
Dexter_Blacktyde 03-26-07, 03:46 PM	Whether or not the system decides you the *PC* feels depends on what the system is trying to accomplish. (There are some pretty fun games there that *are* about how your character feels, or at least some crucial element of how your character feels. Many games about "dark magic" that use a Humanity score to represent corruption; Call of Cthulhu's Insanity score; Heroes of Horror games and their Taint score.) I don't like those, either. I'd rather they get these points across without rules instead of trying to force the player to play a certain way with mechanisms, but I've covered that before. But there's no reason this system has to tell you how your character feels after a social encounter any more than it tells you how your character feels after a combat encounter. It can *imply* that based on what *happens* in the social encounter, but it's the same way with combat. (...) I see your point, but unlike you I don't equate combat with the rest. To you it's important that everything works under roughly similar rules. To me it's important to have rules to govern combat with so it doesn't become arbitrary because every participant imagines the scene slightly different. Player: *describes attack* GM: No, I really don't see how a slash from that angle could possibly slit Grael's throat. Player: But I circumvented him, and right now I'm attacking from his off-hand side. GM: How did you get there? A moment ago you were still defending the gateway...? And so on. Social interaction I can judge, so I need only a minimum of rules to see how good the character is at what she's doing. D&D currently tells you that after you've just lost 68 HP from a single full attack and barely made your Fort save against massive damage, that you're in terrible pain, terrified of your opponent, and seriously considering running away. It doesn't actually *say* this, but the implications of what's going on when this occurs in combat strongly push this to be what you imagine, and the player uses this as a baseline in deciding how her character actually reacts ("A lesser man might shrink now, but I have no choice but to press on!") That's the way we play, too. But you have the same implications with roleplaying complemented by a minimum of rules. There's no reason the system would have to work that way. Does the combat system currently work by saying "See? You've lost enough hit points that you're now terrified of your enemy and you drop your weapons and surrender!" No. We don't need rules for that, either. We roleplay it. The GM should have rules to use as a *baseline* and be able to violate them based on a real *decision*. He shouldn't be forced to freeform everything important because rules don't exist. Agreed, but please keep in mind that I don't oppose guidelines - that seems to be what you're talking about right now and what seems much less rigid than what you've been talking about before - on general principle, quite the contrary. I just oppose some of your and a_psh's extreme examples. More (and more realistic) guidelines would be fine. If you're really arguing for this, then why can't combat scenarios also be part of the "living, breathing" campaign world? Because combat has to be an abstraction. How realistic this abstraction is - do I want Rolemaster or D&D? - is a matter of personal taste, but it's something we cannot judge easily ourselves. but you don't think that D&D's current state of the art is *also* bad for the living, breathing campaign world? You bet I do. I've repeatedly stated how D&D does its best to discourage you from realism and believability. As far as "realism" goes, it's a completely false argument. We're playing a game, for our entertainment. Nothing about D&D is very realistic at all, starting from the six ability scores, taking a trip through grid-based combat and ending with the whole idea of XP and level advancement. It's a *game*. Therefore realism has objectively no place here? So you wouldn't mind pink cows flying through the air everyday at noon in your world? Maybe it's not realistic, but hey - it's a game! I think you know what I mean by "realism". There's a difference between the Masters of the Universe and the Lord of the Rings, although both are at their core unrealistic because they're fantasy entertainment. If somebody wants to play something along the lines of MotU, no problem - as long as the RPG in question shows him that the LotR is possible, too. (By the way, in the LotR the heroes kill Uruks by the dozen, too - yet it manages to maintain a level of "imagined believability" that sets it apart from less sophisticated fare.) A system for social interaction would let players contribute in a *meaningful* way, which would make the game more *fun*. Screw realism. That's your personal preference which you're entitled to. But not every group shares it. IT CAN'T ACTUALLY SIMULATE WHAT HAPPENS IN A LIFE-OR-DEATH COMBAT EITHER! So what? It doesn't even want to - the combat system is supposed to encourage players to buy the miniatures, because that's where a good deal of the money's at. That doesn't necessarily mean that just because combat is abstract, we have to abstract everything else, even those things we can actually do ourselves. You keep coming back to combat which seems to be immensely important to you - but it's not important to me, and I don't think it's a good combat system for an RPG that's many gamers' first (or for an RPG in general for that matter). So, in short: Because combat sucks, everything else has to suck, too? In a game about combat, combat *above all* involves players, characters, environment, and circumstances. (Will a courageous character's courage finally break? Will a coward rise to the challenge? Will a good man falter when asked to slay an undead creature in the image of his true love? Can a dashing character pull off an almost impossible-seeming series of moves, furthering his legend? Etc.) As I said, I don't need rules for that - that's what roleplaying's for. You know, the thing because of which I play the game. The whole problem we've been talking about is that D&D isn't really a complete game, as such, and asks each individual DM to painstakingly create their own internal set of rules for a whole hell of a lot of things that a lot of gaming groups value *more* than the grid-based combat that D&D keeps on selling us rules and rules and yet more rules for. A little rebalancing might be in order -- some set of rules so that you might have a chance at a fair and fun game with decent pacing and a means for handling conflict in social situations *without* a DM who's had ten years to play with your group and "learn the ropes", and some lightening of the emphasis on war so that the game doesn't get eaten up by it to the degree it currently does. Oh, they won't do that - if anything, they'll emphasize the wargame aspect even more in the next edition. Someone has to buy all those miniatures after all ;) DB
CraggleRock 03-26-07, 04:27 PM	In social situations, the rules say if you're seduced, swindled or whatever. So if you as a PC feel that the DM's NPC is lying about his magic string and how it's worth all your magic items, you can't do crap if the NPC happens to roll high on his diplomacy check. You have to give him all your magic items, because your PC believes it. You've lost your free will entirely. But if your PC has 5 in INT and 6 in WIS, chances are that's exactly what the character might do when faced with an extremely smooth-talking, highly convincing, extremely personable Bard who is exceptionally adept at lying his ass off. It's going to take an extremely hardcore roleplayer who actually willingly gives up all his loot because he's used two "dump stats" to get an astonomical STR score, or just because he went from one extreme to the other with the luck of his character building roles, or because some mind affecting poison has severely impaired his characters judgement. What people arguing against more robust rules for social encounters seem to be saying in this case is "forget roleplaying completely, and lets just use the intelligence of me the player in this case". The purpose of a combat system is to determine who gets hurt and how much. So why can't the purpose of a social system be to determine who gets hurt and how much? The only difference is, in a social system, the pain isn't physical. In the above example, the character is hurt by losing his gear, the extent of that damage is "complete". The problem is, you appear to still think of the combat as "I roll one dice, and if I get 15 to 20, you loose all your loot." What a number are proposing is something where the player can "fight back" using whatever tools are available to their character (in the above case with the low INT and WIS player, it might be too intimidate the smooth talker to such an intent that they run away in fear). Well, the difference is that broken things in combat are more easily numerically qualified. We know a 1st level character shouldn't be able to kill a CR 5 creature solo for instance. We have guidelines in place. Social situations have far less guidelines and are entirely relative. And what's to stop us having rules for social combat that say "a character with all these skills and feats and of this level will be a CR X social encounter challenge, and should not be set against a group of less than level Y"? If we're talking of creating a full "social combat" simulation, what's to stop us using all of the same checks and balances as used by the "physical combat" simulation?
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-26-07, 04:47 PM	What people arguing against more robust rules for social encounters seem to be saying in this case is "forget roleplaying completely, and lets just use the intelligence of me the player in this case". To a degree, but we already do this. RPGs aren't a simulation where you just wind up your character and let him go. They're about player choices, which automatically means it's using the intelligence of the player. The fun is that you do get to make decisions for your character. So why can't the purpose of a social system be to determine who gets hurt and how much? The only difference is, in a social system, the pain isn't physical. In the above example, the character is hurt by losing his gear, the extent of that damage is "complete". The problem is, you appear to still think of the combat as "I roll one dice, and if I get 15 to 20, you loose all your loot." What a number are proposing is something where the player can "fight back" using whatever tools are available to their character (in the above case with the low INT and WIS player, it might be too intimidate the smooth talker to such an intent that they run away in fear). if you had such a system for me to critique I could put holes in it rather easily, but right now you're just talking in abstraction about a perfect system that doesn't exist, so I have no means of adequately arguing against a hypothetical. I can poke holes in Rich Berlew's diplomacy fix or the base core D&D diplomacy skill all day long. Write up the system or link me to it and then we can discuss why you think it's better. And what's to stop us having rules for social combat that say "a character with all these skills and feats and of this level will be a CR X social encounter challenge, and should not be set against a group of less than level Y"? If we're talking of creating a full "social combat" simulation, what's to stop us using all of the same checks and balances as used by the "physical combat" simulation? Again, I'd like to see this actually done. It's easy to talk about what could be or what might be, but at the end of the day, these systems don't exist and are thus useless from a discussion standpoint. All I can say right now is that every non-DM-reliant social system I've seen has sucked. The best social systems are the ones that are hands off free form with minimal actual system. I am still waiting for people to give me examples of a social system that works.
CraggleRock 03-26-07, 05:12 PM	I'm curious how those in the "opposed to conflict rules beyond fights" camp would suggest handling the following situation: - I, as a real world person, have an IQ that's roughly 140. My EQ (Emotional Quotient) is 135, backed up by the fact that friends consider me an exceptionally good listener and have an ability to say just the right thing at the right time to make people feel better. I'm extremely quick witted, ready with a wity retort or a groan-worthy pun, and have a wide ranging vocab and versatile command of the English language. I'm observant and perceptive. Although slightly shy around new people, I do have beyond decent acting skills (to the point that when DMing, I have a tendency to freak my players out with the level of schizophrenia displayed with multiple characters in a single scene ;) ). If you were to adapt my scores as a person into D&D figures, my INT, WIS, and CHA would all be in the range to give me comfortable positive modifiers. However, D&D isn't the real world, so I decide for a few hours escapism playing a thick-as-two-short-planks, ugly as sin, smell, repugnant, Half-Orc mercenary who is insanely good with the sword and the bow. I chose something like the Fighter class and have INT, WIS, and CHA scores each around 6. Now, in the roleplaying scene, before the royal court, I, as a player, make a coherent, witty, logically sound, convincing argument: how should the DM respond? Should the DM allow the argument to go my way because my character made the same argument as I just have? In which case my statistics for my character are completely irrelevant. Should the DM just come out and say "No, your Half-Orc doesn't say that, his INT and CHA aren't high enough for him to do so"? In which case, isn't the DM telling me what my character does, thinks, and feels? (Which many people say, and I agree, is a bad thing) It also means that I, as a player, have to pretty much sit this part of the game out because my character can't contribute to it in any meaningful way. Perhaps you believe that, having chosen this character, I need to roleplay it to the hilt, and make him dumb and offensive every time he speaks? Fair enough, I say, and mostly agree with you, but... Even the most offensive, ignorant, socially inept, repugnant person might, occasionaly, purely through chance, string together a sentance that really hits home with a few members of the court. Perhaps my Half-Orc mutters a few heartfelt words about his old life as a slave that moves the members of the court opposed to the slave-trade. Would it be fair that, despite having chosen my stats as they were, I still end up being the main "face" of the party, just because I can act like a big, dumb, hunk of muscle who "coincidentaly" keeps appealing to peoples better judgement purely by luck? Is it right that I could conceivably keep "winning" these "social encounters" with a character completely opposed to that concept? Shouldn't we have a better system of rules that allows my character the chance to "hit" the audience in it's "weak spots" without making it a given because I can act better than the rest of the group, or ruling it out completely, or putting it purely at the whim of the DM?
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-26-07, 05:22 PM	Perhaps you believe that, having chosen this character, I need to roleplay it to the hilt, and make him dumb and offensive every time he speaks? Fair enough, I say, and mostly agree with you, but... Pretty much, yeah. As far as "Getting lucky", I think part of the added challenge of a character like that is framing the right words and concepts in a manner that is consistent with roleplaying that character. So, you handicap yourself playing a character like that. But if you're good enough, maybe you can put things in terms of what your half-orc can do. As far as dealing with a player who utterly ignores his character and doesn't role-play, the solution tends to involve talking to the player and reminding him of the character he's playing.
Solik 03-26-07, 05:45 PM	I can poke holes in Rich Berlew's diplomacy fix or the base core D&D diplomacy skill all day long. Write up the system or link me to it and then we can discuss why you think it's better. I think the whole point here is that this actually is a hard problem, and it takes a lot of time and hard work to come up with something effective. That's why the beseech for the developers to spend that time coming up with something to put into a book. I would love to see an entire splatbook entirely dedicated to doing a host of generic things outside of dungeons and combat, particularly including better-designed systems for the application of social skills. I'm not going to write up such a book myself, though, because I have other things to do, and I won't get paid for it :p
CraggleRock 03-26-07, 05:48 PM	To a degree, but we already do this. RPGs aren't a simulation where you just wind up your character and let him go. They're about player choices, which automatically means it's using the intelligence of the player. The fun is that you do get to make decisions for your character. But doesn't that pretty much negate the point of even having an INT score for a class such as Fighter or Barbarian, and pretty much Cleric, Ranger, Monk, Paladin... And by the same token, why even have a CHA score for the any class aside from the Bard, Cleric, and possibly the Rogue? If that's what you want to do and that's what you find fun, more power to you: I shalln't argue or tell you that you're wrong. However, to me that doesn't sound much like roleplaying. if you had such a system for me to critique I could put holes in it rather easily, but right now you're just talking in abstraction about a perfect system that doesn't exist, so I have no means of adequately arguing against a hypothetical. I can poke holes in Rich Berlew's diplomacy fix or the base core D&D diplomacy skill all day long. Write up the system or link me to it and then we can discuss why you think it's better. [QUOTE] And we can quite easily poke holes in the D&D combat mechanics, but it doesn't make them intrinsically bad, nor does it prevent it from being fun. [QUOTE=Archtyrant Terevoth;11894507]Again, I'd like to see this actually done. It's easy to talk about what could be or what might be, but at the end of the day, these systems don't exist and are thus useless from a discussion standpoint. All I can say right now is that every non-DM-reliant social system I've seen has sucked. The best social systems are the ones that are hands off free form with minimal actual system. I am still waiting for people to give me examples of a social system that works. As long as you are at least open minded that potentially such a system could exist, despite all those that have gone before. I think the original posts intent was to call for those who get paid the big money to design a role-playing game to attempt to give a framework of rules that are more than 95% combat and 5% everything else seemingly as more-or-less an afterthought. I think a_psh concentrated a lot on Dogs in the Vineyard because it presents a system and then shows how it can be applied to pretty much any conflict resolution in the game. Now, it may not be to your taste, and granted, it doesn't completely fill what I'm looking for as a system either, but the concept of a variable conflict resolution framework--that appeals to me. I like combat in D&D, I like a lot of the mechanics in that aspect. It simulates enough of what I want and abstracts most of what I don't. The problem is, almost every big climatic scene pretty much has to be a fight scene with the BBEG, or it's going to fall flat. What if I want a huge, epic charriot race, ala Ben Hur? Simulate it with a load of modified Ride skill checks? Yuck! Or how about a tense court room scene? I either have to have eloquant players possessing of the same level of knowledge of their law as their characters, and who can act out a courtroom scene, or it's a no-go. Note that I could have some shy, retiring players who don't know anything about the law beyond "stealing and killing is wrong", but who are still interested in hearing and participating in the trial (they may have created a diplomatic characters particularly suited to the task) but basically the extent of their involvement becomes "roll a DC 20 Diplomacy or better, okay, now roll a 25 or better..." Oh, what fun and larks... Dungeon 144 has a rather interesting module called Diplomacy which pits the players against "some of the most powerful, cunning, and ruthless races from across the planes in a battle of wits" that is rather an interesting little affair that mixes roleplaying and the rules. Despite that, it's blatant that it is having to work against the rules rather than with them to create an interesting story, and even then the end game has to be a swords and sorcery battle against the big bad, because otherwise the adventure is incapable of ending with "bang". I'd like WotC to have a go at giving me more "bang" for my bucks, without it being just more ways to bang heads...
CraggleRock 03-26-07, 06:01 PM	As far as "Getting lucky", I think part of the added challenge of a character like that is framing the right words and concepts in a manner that is consistent with roleplaying that character. So, you handicap yourself playing a character like that. But if you're good enough, maybe you can put things in terms of what your half-orc can do. But what if I'm extremely gifted at burying pearls of pure wisdom in appropriately dumbed-down language? How often can my Half-Orc just happen to get lucky without it "breaking" the role? Should the DM just rule that it can only happen once per day, per week, per character level? Yes, the DM can house rule it in some manner, but the problem is, we are adhering pretty much to the RAW in this case, so why should there be a need for house-ruling? The designers have pretty much said, "here's a few starters for social situations in game: if you want more, you're going to have to go and write a load of houserules for it" and (almost) everyone is fine. If they had presented all the character building advice in the books as a starter point with just a vague page about combat rolls and then said "if you want more in depth combat, you'll have to write a load of houserules for it", would D&D be in the position of market leader?
HappyPenguinOnAStick 03-26-07, 07:28 PM	hm, well I can understand what you are saying, but I dont really agree. I cant but it into words very well, since my english is limited by what ive learn through watching The Centurions... But ill give it a go. I think the reason you feel(think?) the way you do is because you got barried in the Math, my current GM has the same problem. He cant design a good story (or so he feels) because he has to worry about "is this within the rules?", tbh I dont really feel (How I hate that word, can anyone teach me a substitute for it?) that way about it cause the system is just something in the bagground... I mean you can pretty much do anything you want with the rules (Pun-Pun) so just write your story and fill it with whatever and then smash the rules over it after (Dunno if thats a proper analog). I mean the rules are just there to... Dunno... Make the players feel safe? And give the GM a paragrim to... Okay im sure thats not the right word, but lets pretend it is... build their world on plus a defence against players who cant blah blah blah im out of words, but im sure you get my point. Sorry if it was already made, I just read your post and you reminded me so much of my current GM that I had to make some point that is of no use what so ever to you or anyone... *erhm* have a nice day?
a_psh 03-26-07, 08:37 PM	Therefore realism has objectively no place here? So you wouldn't mind pink cows flying through the air everyday at noon in your world? Maybe it's not realistic, but hey - it's a game!The realism imposed on the shared imagined content by the players themselves is often more powerful and realistic than the realism imposed by a big chart in Arms Law. That's why I've focused on rules that feature the negotiation of imagined events as a strong component.
a_psh 03-26-07, 10:18 PM	Just to append this: GameCraft does "conflict resolution" (http://gamecraft.7.forumer.com/viewtopic.php?t=258). This clears up a lot. The chart is a must-read. I love intention-relevant resolution that lets you pick either long- or short- form depending on what you want out of the scene. I think this is flat-out good for the game, regardless of what you're trying to get out of play. EDIT: The main clarification to add here is that intent-focused mechanics neither hose your ability to be firmly glued to your character, if that's what floats your boat. It's up to the group to figure out how big the stakes are and the scale of the actions, which is what makes this kind of resolution versatile in the first place GameCraft on stakes (http://gamecraft.7.forumer.com/viewtopic.php?t=265), for those interested in some of this stuff.
a_psh 03-26-07, 10:46 PM	Even the most offensive, ignorant, socially inept, repugnant person might, occasionaly, purely through chance, string together a sentance that really hits home with a few members of the court. Perhaps my Half-Orc mutters a few heartfelt words about his old life as a slave that moves the members of the court opposed to the slave-trade. Would it be fair that, despite having chosen my stats as they were, I still end up being the main "face" of the party, just because I can act like a big, dumb, hunk of muscle who "coincidentaly" keeps appealing to peoples better judgement purely by luck? Is it right that I could conceivably keep "winning" these "social encounters" with a character completely opposed to that concept? Shouldn't we have a better system of rules that allows my character the chance to "hit" the audience in it's "weak spots" without making it a given because I can act better than the rest of the group, or ruling it out completely, or putting it purely at the whim of the DM?Some examples of how I'd run this in different systems... Here's the DitV example:There are four stats, right? Acuity, Heart, Body, Will. Intentionally related to personality tropes rather than to how good you are at specific discrete tasks. Anyway, let's say you're dumb and mean and uninsightful and stubborn. Giving you low Heart and low Acuity. Those two together are the talky stats. They measure how much your character is about conversation rather than how good he is per se -- a rough guide to personality rather than just ability, you could say. Basically, you can talk quite a bit, about anything you want, right? But the rules help you figure out how many of those big, juicy pearls of wisdom you've got to drop: statements that your opponent absolutely can't ignore. Anyway, rolling just your low Acuity + Heart won't get you very far. But, wait... look at the rest of your sheet. You've got traits. If it moves your mean and dumb character to speak out from his heart, that slavery thing must've been a big deal for you (it probably also moves you to kick ass in battle sometimes, too). So, that's on your sheet... "I suffered in slavery +3d8". Suddenly you've got a lot more to work with. (Want even more dice? Take some of your unassigned relationship dice and create a relationship with the character you're trying to sway.) Remember that your opponent has a lot of flexibility in when to give up, too; this is where the roleplaying comes in in spades. Here's the TSOY example:Sounds like Sway or Orate. We'll say Orate because you're delivering something close to a formal speech, okay? And because you said you wanted to affect the whole court rather than just one guy. And because you're being direct about it (Sway is more subtle). Anyway, the only skill that matters is Orate. Unfortunately, your base Orate is 0. This means that, when you roll 3dF, you'll end up with a check anywhere between 3 and -3. Given that you want at least one success (i.e. a value of 1 or higher on the total) and given that an opponent might have a check as high as 1-7, that's not so hot. But you're bound to have at least one point of Reason to spend to buff up your roll a bit. Still, that's weak. Fortunately, you've got several players at the table who, if they think your speech makes for a cool story, can give you bonus dice to skew your results towards the "3" range -- it's like action points on crack here. (If you really want a success, though, TSOY pushes you to do a combo check or get your friends' characters in on it, either of which will push up your rolls. And, if you fail, it's time to Bring Down the Pain and play out your character suffering a bunch of scorn and abuse in order to try to get his point across -- which is exactly how I'd want to play it out anyway. If you have some advances banked, it also makes sense to spend them on Orate.) I think it's pretty clear how this is a lot like D&D with a lot more wiggle room built right into the rules. The use of a simple 0-to-4 scale for skills makes setting target numbers a bit less handwavy, since it's pretty easy to rank an opponent as incompetent, very good, or so-so. What you notice in both of these is that you can make that cool scene where your character does something he really sucks at happen if it's important to you. But you can't easily have him do it all the time. The cool thing with both of these is that you have a resource that says "Okay, I'd like to do something really cool now" and you can focus those resources to do something awesome even when you're not very good at it by default.
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-26-07, 11:48 PM	I think the whole point here is that this actually is a hard problem, and it takes a lot of time and hard work to come up with something effective. That's why the beseech for the developers to spend that time coming up with something to put into a book. Fundamentally I don't believe it's just a hard problem. I believe it to be an ultimately impossible one.
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-27-07, 12:01 AM	But doesn't that pretty much negate the point of even having an INT score for a class such as Fighter or Barbarian, and pretty much Cleric, Ranger, Monk, Paladin... And by the same token, why even have a CHA score for the any class aside from the Bard, Cleric, and possibly the Rogue? Whenever you freeform, you can also try to take those stats into account. I'm not saying you outright ignore them, but they aren't the driving force of the encounter. It isn't a charisma check supported by some roleplaying. It's roleplaying supported by a charisma check. And we can quite easily poke holes in the D&D combat mechanics, but it doesn't make them intrinsically bad, nor does it prevent it from being fun. But the holes aren't nearly as severe and game breaking. Burlew's system allows you to effectively trade a peice of string for a castle on a lucky roll. And that's not like a glitch in his system, that's a direct feature. The problem is, almost every big climatic scene pretty much has to be a fight scene with the BBEG, or it's going to fall flat. What if I want a huge, epic charriot race, ala Ben Hur? Simulate it with a load of modified Ride skill checks? Yuck! I certainly agree. Exciting skill uses certainly could use some better resolution mechanics, and the idea of having ways to simulate cool races and stuff would be pretty awesome. Or how about a tense court room scene? I either have to have eloquant players possessing of the same level of knowledge of their law as their characters, and who can act out a courtroom scene, or it's a no-go. Well, I think a lot is lost in social scenarios when you just reduce it to the characters. The drama of a legal scenario is listening to testimony, cross examination, opening and closing arguments and so on. If the scenario is a bunch of rolls that say "Yeah I really nailed that witness", you lose much of the actual drama by removing the role-playing. It's much more fun for players just to try their best at role-playing it out and provide them with some details based on knowledge skills for objections and such. Note that I could have some shy, retiring players who don't know anything about the law beyond "stealing and killing is wrong", but who are still interested in hearing and participating in the trial (they may have created a diplomatic characters particularly suited to the task) but basically the extent of their involvement becomes "roll a DC 20 Diplomacy or better, okay, now roll a 25 or better..." Oh, what fun and larks... Yeah, that's boring. It's why skill checks don't particularly work well in places of actual role-playing.
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-27-07, 12:07 AM	Some examples of how I'd run this in different systems... Here's the DitV example: Sounds kind of crappy. It's just rolling some dice and doesn't incorporate much player choice that hasn't been made in advance. Also the whole deal about choosing when to give up can be really bad for NPCs, since your typical monster can devote all its resources to trying to kill the PCs. The PCs on the other hand have to ration their action points instead of just going nova in the first encounter they have, like every monster can. It's effectively the psionic power point problem in another form. Here's the TSOY example: Still, that's weak. Fortunately, you've got several players at the table who, if they think your speech makes for a cool story, can give you bonus dice to skew your results towards the "3" range -- it's like action points on crack here. Sounds kinda boring if you ask me... it seems like it does the whole "impress the DM" thing, only instead of the DM, it's "impress the PCs" since they give you bonus points for doing stuff they like. Only problem is that it can easily just turn into a game of player politics, where PCs form alliances against the DM or against other players so their characters get all the bonuses everytime. Alternately you can get people ****** off when another player deems their story contribution unworthy. I mean, you complain that freeform storytelling is bad because it's about impressing the DM, but that's about telling the DM what his NPC wants to hear. This is literally about impressing the PCs. I mean it has nothing to do with anything beyond, "is it cool?" This means that the most popular PCs are succeeding the most, and probably hogging the spotlight all the more, while the shy and less active ones fail to get any of the bonuses.
ArcTan 03-27-07, 12:30 AM	Sounds kind of crappy. It's just rolling some dice and doesn't incorporate much player choice that hasn't been made in advance. Also the whole deal about choosing when to give up can be really bad for NPCs, since your typical monster can devote all its resources to trying to kill the PCs. The PCs on the other hand have to ration their action points instead of just going nova in the first encounter they have, like every monster can. It's effectively the psionic power point problem in another form. Well, except that the system doesn't really have "resources" as such; NPCs in such a game will always by definition have fewer character details that grant them dice than PCs. It's not a resource-based task resolution game like D&D -- each NPC only exists as an obstacle the PC has to deal with, not as a fully realized person with an inventory and a stat block with class levels and whatnot.
ArcTan 03-27-07, 12:34 AM	Fundamentally I don't believe it's just a hard problem. I believe it to be an ultimately impossible one. And it's this kind of attitude that I think this thread is supposed to be about. I have no problem with people actually thinking D&D is better than other games based on actual experience and understanding. What I hate is the assumption that D&D is the be-all and end-all of gaming because, well, it's so *easy* to find books and groups to play D&D, so much so that people learn to play D&D and nothing else and never think of trying anything else (and if they do it's a knockoff of D&D, like a d20 product sold next to the D&D books in a gaming store or that you can click on from an Amazon related link). It really is like being a music lover and watching a bunch of preteen girls screaming at each other about how the Backstreet Boys are the BEST BAND EVER!!!
a_psh 03-27-07, 12:53 AM	Sounds kind of crappy. It's just rolling some dice and doesn't incorporate much player choice that hasn't been made in advance. Also the whole deal about choosing when to give up can be really bad for NPCs, since your typical monster can devote all its resources to trying to kill the PCs. The PCs on the other hand have to ration their action points instead of just going nova in the first encounter they have, like every monster can. It's effectively the psionic power point problem in another form.There's no "action points" -- you roll your dice for a conflict and those are your resources. Then you get more by involving relevant traits. As they begin to run out of resources, both sides have to choose whether to pump up the pressure of back down. You are correct in thinking that playing every NPC like a moronic fatalist is going to make the game weird. That's where the "roleplaying" comes in. Unlike the GM just saying "yeah, this guy cannot be meaningfully influenced in any way," you can still win the conflict by escalating hard (translation: if everyone around you is being outright murderously hostile, you're just going to be stuck doing the realistic thing and gunning them all down). Moreover, if you pull in all your traits and gear and stuff and aren't afraid to draw a gun, you are going to win. That's the point. You're the hand of God coming in to cleanse the town. It's just a question of how much you're willing to put on the line and how you judge people. (Though one can construct grizzly, near-impossible towns through careful layering and a lot of sorcery; town that will kill a Dog, if not all of them, along the way.) Overall, if you're interested in something more D&D-like, Afraid is a better implementation of the engine: even though the GM is playing a horrific monster (think "BBEG"), escalating is very dangerous for her -- it means she'll lose part of her power base or have some kind of important secret revealed if she loses. For a player, getting into a knock-down, drag-out fight with a minion who refuses to give up means you'll be able to get some juicy stuff out of it along the way. Sounds kinda boring if you ask me... it seems like it does the whole "impress the DM" thing, only instead of the DM, it's "impress the PCs" since they give you bonus points for doing stuff they like. Only problem is that it can easily just turn into a game of player politics, where PCs form alliances against the DM or against other players so their characters get all the bonuses everytime. Alternately you can get people ****** off when another player deems their story contribution unworthy.This is less than clear in my description: "gift dice" are a secondary mechanic. The real core is an action-point-like mechanic (Reason, Instinct, and Vigor dice; refreshing on the scale of "adventures," more or less) and the freedom to enter into small-scale intention-focused resolution (Bring Down the Pain) if large-scale intention-focused resolution doesn't go your way. Damage in BDTP retards your ability to win subsequent conflicts by adding penalties to your rolls, meaning that you're trading away the ability to do something later to get something you want now. Still, the stupid and unpersuasive character isn't going to be succeeding at most attempts at persuasion, just like in D&D. I'm mostly illustrating what you do when you really want to do something super-heroic and beyond your abilities. The hardcore thing to do there would be to trade off a Key or two to get a lot of advancement points, then dump those into relevant skill-boosting stuff on the spot. Then you'd no longer be bad at Sway or Orate or whatever skill you wanted to use. Since we're talking about a scene that's all about developing that one character, this really is the most effective way to go about it: develop your character mechanically in order to fuel something you want to do with characterization.) I mean, you complain that freeform storytelling is bad because it's about impressing the DM, but that's about telling the DM what his NPC wants to hear. This is literally about impressing the PCs. I mean it has nothing to do with anything beyond, "is it cool?"In a game written in the 1980s, when something is "cool," people ignore the rules to make it happen. In something like TSOY, the rules account for this. I don't see how designing a system to actually play the way people usually play an RPG anyway is a bad idea. You look at "gift dice" and shout "Divisive!" I look at "gift dice" and think "Team-building!" They're a great way to contribute to a scene even when you're not in it, which is the big idea. This means that the most popular PCs are succeeding the most, and probably hogging the spotlight all the more, while the shy and less active ones fail to get any of the bonuses.Meh. Most of the "spotlight hogging" people complain about is caused by the having too many characters in the same scene. In D&D, a big part of why this happens is that combat scenes take so long to resolve and a party is so weak when fractured that characters pretty much always hang together. The fact that most roleplayers opt for long scenes rather than quick, decisive cuts also intensifies this: watching a 10-minute scene play out without your intervention is no problem, but "let's method-act our characters all the time" play, which is what most people are taught about roleplaying when they start gaming, often drags out dialogue to take up much more time than that.
ArcTan 03-27-07, 01:10 AM	Meh. Most of the "spotlight hogging" people complain about is caused by the having too many characters in the same scene. In D&D, a big part of why this happens is that combat scenes take so long to resolve and a party is so weak when fractured that characters pretty much always hang together. The fact that most roleplayers opt for long scenes rather than quick, decisive cuts also intensifies this: watching a 10-minute scene play out without your intervention is no problem, but "let's method-act our characters all the time" play, which is what most people are taught about roleplaying when they start gaming, often drags out dialogue to take up much more time than that. I can name a lot of times in my D&D experience where the game would've been a lot more pleasant, run a lot more smoothly and *kept me more immersed in the imaginary scenario* if people had been prevented from "talking in-character" or "roleplaying it out". Most people who try to pretend to be the character and say what they would say 1) sound like idiots, and 2) waste a ton of time because they don't actually know what they want to say.
Dexter_Blacktyde 03-27-07, 02:03 AM	I can name a lot of times in my D&D experience where the game would've been a lot more pleasant, run a lot more smoothly and *kept me more immersed in the imaginary scenario* if people had been prevented from "talking in-character" or "roleplaying it out". Most people who try to pretend to be the character and say what they would say 1) sound like idiots, and 2) waste a ton of time because they don't actually know what they want to say. So you think the people you've met are representative of the majority, and you think they sound like idiots. So what? I've met my share of players who come across as bumbling morons who feel they need a rule for everything because they don't have enough imagination to think about the next day. And of course I've had similar experiences with players who start yawning, crackling with bags of chips and going to the bathroom with ostentation everytime someone starts roleplaying and whose rules dependancy renders entertaining play impossible. Every faction has its black sheep *shrug* DB
ArcTan 03-27-07, 02:10 AM	So you think the people you've met are representative of the majority, and you think they sound like idiots. So what? I've met my share of players who come across as bumbling morons who feel they need a rule for everything because they don't have enough imagination to think about the next day. Every faction has its black sheep *shrug* DB I'm not even talking about rules. If people just narrated in a sensible way and only used in-character dialogue when it was significant or important or really necessary -- which it almost never is -- I would be very happy. In-character dialogue almost always takes twice as long and is half as impressive as describing it in the first person, honestly. Even the players I know who are *good* at acting, I like better when they're not talking in character.
Dexter_Blacktyde 03-27-07, 02:34 AM	I'm not even talking about rules. If people just narrated in a sensible way and only used in-character dialogue when it was significant or important or really necessary -- which it almost never is -- I would be very happy. Important or necessary in your opinion. Of course it almost never is since you seem to have a strong dislike for in-character roleplaying. I feel the same when because of a minor occurrence people stop the plot and start rummaging through five books, murmuring "I know obscure rule no. 2152 is in of these books" as if their lives depended on it - Bob forbid that the GM makes one up on the fly. This has nothing to do with "important", "necessary", "better" or "worse", these are just two extremely different ways of dealing with the hobby. In-character dialogue almost always takes twice as long Nonsense. I don't know if you're referring to overly melodramatic Shakespeare-wannabes, but in-character dialogue generally takes less time. "Wait a minute, you really wanna go in there?" - "Ghorghor asks Meliamne to stop before she enters the cave and asks if she's serious." Although I must admit that this could be the start of a conversation - and if a conversation between two characters is already too much roleplaying for your tastes, well... then I'm out of arguments ;) DB
CraggleRock 03-27-07, 07:58 AM	Whenever you freeform, you can also try to take those stats into account. I'm not saying you outright ignore them, but they aren't the driving force of the encounter. It isn't a charisma check supported by some roleplaying. It's roleplaying supported by a charisma check. And when I fudge the dice roll to have the last character get a lucky shot in on the BBEG with their dying breath, I'm not outright ignoring their stats, I'm using them as a driving force for the encounter. Just because the rules could be there doesn't mean that they always need to be applied. I'd rather like to see several "tiered" mechanics based on the system that we have with good advice about when to use each. Even with the chariot race, I wouldn't be opposed to using a few Ride skill checks if it wasn't the critical point of the adventure. Likewise, I don't fancy having to work out every Initiative modifier and blow-by-blow attack roll for the players when the landlord asked them to exterminate the completely mundane rats in his cellar. When do we zoom in on a scene and when to do a "montage"? And how do we handle an event in both cases? It would be nice to have a rule set that advised on these points. But the holes aren't nearly as severe and game breaking. Burlew's system allows you to effectively trade a peice of string for a castle on a lucky roll. And that's not like a glitch in his system, that's a direct feature. Hmm? I'm sorry, I was looking over this build for someone named Pun-Pun and missed what you said there... In seriousness, let's take this player trying to swap his bit of string (presumably that he lost all his loot to aquire? ;) ) for a nice big castle in Burlew's system and calculate the base DC... First, we take 15 as the starting point, add the level of the king we're trying to persuade (let's make him a level 1 aristocrat for now, so that's 16 so far), then add his Wisdom modifier (we'll have the king have straight 10's across the board, so there's no WIS modifier to account for right now). Now, for the ranked modifiers. Let's assume that there is no relationship at all between the player and the king, so there's no midifier there, but the Risk modifier is classed as Horrible, and gives a +10 modifier. So we have a DC of 26 for this roll. A level 1 character can only max their ranks in Diplomacy at 4, which makes that a pretty tough roll. Yes, they might have Skill Focus and so on, but sometimes there is the possibility of taking the king into something completely ridiculous (which I shall call The Emperor's New Clothes Factor). But the above situation is extremely unlikely, because how often do you get a level 1 king? And even if you do, you take the highest character level and Wisdom modifier of the group (a king isn't likely to be holding court without his advisors unless he himself has epic levels and Wisdom). This makes it cosiderably harder. And if the king is the BBEG? Well, that's another +10 on with the Relationship modifier. If the king was a close, personal friend then it becomes easier, true, but if my smooth talking Bard was a close, personal friend with a king, I'd like to think that he might be able to present a situation where the swap is a good idea. But I'm not a stunningly charismatic Bard, my DM isn't a king, and we're not close, personal friends: he's a bloke I meet up with occasionally and play some D&D. I don't have the first idea what would be convincing in this situation, and my DM doesn't necessarily know what would really be convincing to a king from a trusted ally. That doesn't mean my character wouldn't, but completely freeforming it, I don't have any potential to draw upon my characters resources. Is Rich's mechanic perfect? No, I wouldn't say it is, and would probably add some house rules in for situations where you are attempting to convice a large group (a jury or royal court) as extra modifiers. But: I add houserules over the RAW, as do (it would appear from looking at these boards) countless people, and apparently that doesn't mean the RAW are "broken". I certainly agree. Exciting skill uses certainly could use some better resolution mechanics, and the idea of having ways to simulate cool races and stuff would be pretty awesome. Then wouldn't it be an idea for WotC to devote some time to either a) writing some rules to simulate cool races (and I don't mean a new variation of elf :D ) or b) creating a solid frame work that leads you through constructing your own way to simulate races? They do presumably have the resources to do so in terms of time, money, and experience that I don't and that precludes me from writing a houserule ssytem from scratch. The later would be preferable to me, as perhaps I want to create a thrilling chase up a cliff face as my set-piece encounter, or a drinking competition with a group of dwarves as my set-piece, or... Well, I think a lot is lost in social scenarios when you just reduce it to the characters. The drama of a legal scenario is listening to testimony, cross examination, opening and closing arguments and so on. If the scenario is a bunch of rolls that say "Yeah I really nailed that witness", you lose much of the actual drama by removing the role-playing. It's much more fun for players just to try their best at role-playing it out and provide them with some details based on knowledge skills for objections and such. And the drama from combat comes from the cool moves to dodge the arrow, skewer your opponent on your lance, draw blood, and so on. If the scenario is a bunch of rolls that say "Yeah, I really nailed that orc", you lose much of the actual drama by removing the... role... playing... oh, wait, that's not true at all, is it? Just as you use the combat roll and then can narrate over the top (usually as a sort of consensus between me and my players when I DM) over how the Barbarian reduces the orc to a pulp, why can't the use of a social combat roll be used to narrate over the top how the confident and logical Paladin barrates the witness into confessing his false testimony? Yeah, that's boring. It's why skill checks don't particularly work well in places of actual role-playing. As mentioned above, why have skill checks in combat in place of "actual" role-playing?
CraggleRock 03-27-07, 08:54 AM	Oh, and I can't quite remember who said they liked the system with the rolling of dice and then assigning them to the various outcomes and "fallouts", I can't quite remember which system it was (please don't make me go back and re-read pages of this thread ;) ), but I do recall the proposed problem of being unable to create "surprise" for your players in such a system. As a possible solution, I might suggest the following: have the player rate the order of importance of each of the areas to them, but the DM rolls the dice and assigns them according to those priorities.
Solik 03-27-07, 11:29 AM	Fundamentally I don't believe it's just a hard problem. I believe it to be an ultimately impossible one. Have you ever played Romance of the Three Kingdoms X? It's an interesting little strategy/roleplaying game for the PS2 that has, among other things, a Debate system. Debating is a minigame where two characters face off in a battle of wits. Character Intelligence and Charisma define some of the basics of how effective you are, and if you have some of the various Debate-based skills learned, you get additional options to use. Each character is presented with a list of options of how to debate that round. An option has an appeal type (Virtue, Profit, or Logic) and a score (1-9). These represent the argument "ideas" that your character has thought up at that point in time. You play out a series of rounds, with each selection facing off against the other, then placing on a 3x3 board in the corner (which you can use to "make your point" by scoring a row of the same appeal type, or have your argument "fall apart" by making a row of one of each type, or place special stuff like Focus that makes your arguments stronger each round that it's there). The gameplay ends up feeling a bit like a card game crossed with a more interesting variant of tic-tac-toe. The effect is a rather startlingly good abstract simulation of debates. Character abilities play a part, player choice plays a part, and it's actually quite easy to take the whole system and draw from it a roleplayed debate with arguments going back and forth until someone wins. Now, this is a simple little minigame created for a console video game. It's not even created for interactive roleplay. Yet, it provides a sample framework for how you could develop a system for handling one of the premier social situations where the outcome can be argued or random (which is where the rules are supposed to appear) -- arguments. In the video game, this system is used to secure alliances, convince hermit swordsmiths to return to the city to continue their craft, and rally an unclaimed city behind your leadership. Imagine what you could do with a more complex and robust system designed for tabletop play.
Solik 03-27-07, 11:32 AM	I have no problem with people actually thinking D&D is better than other games based on actual experience and understanding. What I hate is the assumption that D&D is the be-all and end-all of gaming because, well, it's so *easy* to find books and groups to play D&D, so much so that people learn to play D&D and nothing else and never think of trying anything else (and if they do it's a knockoff of D&D, like a d20 product sold next to the D&D books in a gaming store or that you can click on from an Amazon related link). It really is like being a music lover and watching a bunch of preteen girls screaming at each other about how the Backstreet Boys are the BEST BAND EVER!!! And this attitude is why discussing this issue with you gives a constant feel of being insulted. This condescending tone is unhelpful and makes it very hard to take you seriously. I mean, come on -- who wants to have a debate with someone who's looking at you through lenses like these? And what's worse, what kind of crazy music-lover goes to a Backstreet Boys forum to convince preteen girls that their music taste is limited? Not only is that a hopeless endeavor, but it's just plain rude.
Zumarai 03-27-07, 11:47 AM	And what's worse, what kind of crazy music-lover goes to a Backstreet Boys forum to convince preteen girls that their music taste is limited? Yeah, I mean Backstreet Boys are only the band Colour Me Badd could have been!
Roxlimn 03-27-07, 12:35 PM	ArcTan: I seem to recall "illusionism" and "avatarism" being thrown around some, though not necessarily by you (though that reply wasn't only directed at you, either). If I sound vicious, then I apologize, but I'm only calling it as I see it. See here: Saying that the unrealistic elements in D&D are intended to avoid "overimmersing" players is dumb. I don't think the reason D&D has swords rather than guns is because guns are too "real", but because swords are more *fun* than guns. See that? You refute the argument by saying that "it's dumb?" The only thing that does is belittle the person making the argument, and it's questionable that it does even that. No point is being made, no argumentation being done. However these statements DO belittle people: I think that I've noticed some things that could improve D&D that people seem slow to pick up on simply because *people are naturally slow to accept change*. This is but one example. You are quite bluntly saying that you ARE better than all these people. They're slow to accept change (imbeciles) and you are a better thinker (superior to them). How is that not insulting? I've received private messages (and I never receive private messages) supporting my stand on this thread because there are lurkers who feel that you're bashing them. I feel like you're bashing me. Are you some chance Spiderman who needs to save our bacons from our weak-ass minds? Are you some game Moses inspired by God out to save us from our gaming sins? Either stand insults our intelligence and our taste. Stop it. STOP IT. I can very well hold a thoughtful conversation about how D&D can be improved, but not when someone else thinks that they know what I like better than I do (and particularly not when they're spectacularly proven wrong). This is not a case of me not wanting change. I'm the first on the battlements on many threads where changed is proposed, and I've fought for and against them. Sometimes both at the same time. This is me trying to hammer into you and a_psh that you're insulting a whole lot of people around here and that you're making a BIG, BIG mistake. You're deciding unilaterally what is fun for everyone. You're deciding for me what's fun for me. That won't work unless you're just incredibly lucky, or incredibly insightful. And in this case, I can already tell that you're neither. See here: To say that you can't suggest that something someone likes could be changed for the better without "insulting" them or implying that they're "stupid" is to shut down all debate about a topic and to prevent something from ever improving. a_psh has, at one time, implied that we should just throw out all those 3e combat rules that all kinds of people have been raving about. When opposed on the grounds that people liked it, he said that those people who liked it didn't know any better (are morons) and should just play Warhammer 40k. What hubris! No matter which way you spin that, it's an insult (and I'm accounted an excellent spin-doctor). Discussion isn't being opposed to. Did I say that D&D was okay just the way it is? Did I say that no discussion is necessary, that D&D is perfect? In fact, it's the other way around. By refusing to listen to what's being said, you and a_psh are essentially just saying "are not!" over and over again and essentially not hearing anything anyone is saying unless you've already agreed with it. Where's the discussion in that? Nothing. Nada. Zip. Bupkiss. "Gobbledygook" or not, a_psh's and my posts have contained a lot more actual talk about RPG and a lot less talk about the motivations of other posters, while the ratios in yours are basically the reverse, and I find that annoying. To the contrary. You and a_psh's posts basically bash every style of play other than your own. There is no discussion in this thread that I haven't heard before and I suspect I will hear again. Your post may contain content about RPGs, but you may as well be reprinting combat tables. There's nothing new here except fresh insults to gamers and gaming styles you don't like. My posts are about what D&D is for me and for others - characters of the game you and a_psh insist on ignoring, belittling, or insulting. Characters of the game that a_psh wants to compromise in order to make his gaming style more central to D&D. You can't talk about D&D properly because you can't appreciate much of what it is. You hardly even recognize that it's more than what you enjoy out of it (and from a_psh's posts, you guys enjoy little enough). The "discussion" you're having isn't about improving D&D, but about telling everyone they're morons and changing the nature of the game in order to marginalize what THEY get out of it. Are swords more "fun" than guns? Says who? Says the regular threads that crop up in here asking for guns in D&D? Says the fan demand that actually got guns in the core DMG? Says the numerous magical gun adaptations in the Eberron forums, and the actual magical guns in Faerun? Says the gamers who actually prefer to play d20 Modern or d20 Anime modifed games because they include guns? Are these people stupid or lacking in taste, too? You can say what you think, but telling everyone else that their opinion, particularly taste-based opinion, is wrong is a deadly insult, and nothing high-horsed you can say about "having a discussion" is going to change that. P.S: And yes, Roxlimn will probably accuse me of "insulting and marginalizing" gamers again, but I don't think actually "being in character" is very important. Being immersed in a character doesn't mean you have to actually walk around *as* the character and literally say the words that are coming out of his mouth and imagine being inside his body. Most D&Ders' attempts to do this come out sounding silly -- because it *is* silly to try to inhabit the body of a cartoonish sword-swinging muscleman and imagine "how he would really talk". You bet your screen I will! Some people actually like to dress up, get props, and even devise accents and mannerisms for their characters for use when they're gaming. It's fun for them. You're saying that they're silly. So chuck 'em out with the wargamers. And you say you're not being condescending? I'm not against more structured games on the skills for D&D, but as you can see, you can proceed along that discussion line without telling everyone that you're God's gift to gaming and that everyone else can go jump in the lake. More of the same!... I especially don't like things like encumbrance rules and such, which basically say that filling in holes that seem like things you'd keep track of in real life is more important than making the game fun. Even though I like encumbrance rules and I enforce them, and my gamers like it that I enforce them (although they'll groan if you ask), I'm not telling you that I have better insght into your fun than you do or that you're silly, or that you're a moron. Hey, have your own fun! For what it's worth, encumbrance is vitally important for when characters fall into water, have to run away from things that'll eat them alive, or simply have to maneuver in combat in order to win. Treasure hauling is a major puzzle-scratcher for many groups and they like the challenge. Not that you like puzzle games, I know. I just happen to think that the GM shouldn't be falling back on his intuition as the sole means of crafting *the entire game*, which is what does happen in certain D&D games... He's falling back on his intuition so that he can alter the game to make it more fun for him and his cohorts. Despite your allegations, D&D is surprisingly flexible. It's certainly not as hard as trying to roleplay under Chainmail rules. D&D does sort of fall back on the wargame as an easy "baseline" from which newbies can start playing, but that's because its rules come from wargames and there are fewer variables there to mess up. Admittedly, one can beef up the rules in order to cater to all kinds of tastes just as adeptly, but your proposal only substitutes one baseline for another - it doesn't actually move the game "forward" as opposed to just moving it over to your side of the fence. The only improvement there is from your point of view - that you get to take your cake from the hack and slashers who currently have it. a_psh: DitV is a freakin' example of certain design patterns. You don't like certain things about DitV? Fine. Whatever. But it's got good stuff to learn from. The basic concept of escalating conflict is something that "do-or-die" D&D is really missing. That bit, for instance, doesn't require the "godlike power" you worry so much about. That's actually another of its game elements that I don't like. There are PLENTY of really neat game ideas that exist in the world. If I wanted to play them, I'd play the game in which they came in. I don't import them into D&D to replace game elements that I actually like. In D&D combat, the only hit point that really matters is your last. Everything else is pretty much a resource you can expend freely and get back later through healing. Incapacitation in D&D isn't measured in hitpoints. It's done through other means. It's a crying shame that the core fighting classes and core melee options do not include an awful lot of ways and means to successively incapacitate your enemy but that's changing. Spellcasters, Martial Adepts, and even Rogues and Rangers have options that allow them to incapacitate their foes before they fall. As an aside, this option is not easily acquired in D&D fighting classes proper because the line of thought is that it exacerbates being on the losing side. In actual fights, he who strikes the first telling blow will usually strike the last - and that is exactly because in real life, an injury reduces your capacity to retaliate. However, in D&D, having everyone BUT the melee classes have this ability pretty much amounts to the same thing, so the end effect is only that the melee classes lack capability where other classes do not. Archtyrant Terevoth: But predetermination kills the "game" aspect. It might be cool for an improv acting session, but most gamers don't like fatalism. They want their choices to make a difference. That includes what they say and do. If a social scene is simply "roll a die and act it out", then it's no longer a role-playing game, because player choice is phased out. Combat doesn't phase out player choice. There is no reason that a skills game can't be likewise. First, is the social build character. You really don't want characters who specialize in social ability, otherwise it forces the other PCs to not talk and let the specialist do his thing in every roleplaying encounter they come across. You're assuming that the social game would be a one-of game like it is in D&D right now. It need not be so. Particularly for social encounters, all PCs could be required to participate, and each one's contribution could be crucial to the success of the endeavor - much like combat is now. Thus, Fighters will need to be rebuilt to have certain basic skill applications, and rogues will necessarily have to be scaled back so as not to dominate every skill encounter. What I'm talking about isn't the D&D skill system being more of the same - it's about the D&D skill system being redone from the ground up. Second, as long as you're speaking in character, it's still arbitrary. The DM takes what you say and assigns something. Instead of outright determining a result, he assigns modifiers. And then... you roll a dice. Again, nobody answered my question as to why having randomness in social encounters helps anything, so I still don't see the point. Same as for combat as saves. It adds suspense and the possibility of failure. In a more defined system, you're given a slew of choices, possibly based on your class and your skill resource allocations on character creation. Based on the choices you make, the DM assigns predetermined adjustments to a series of contests (not just one). Each contest result dynamically changes the next, allowing for an ebb and flow between the participants. The ultimate victor will depend on the system used. Like I've said before, open locks is different. It's not something we can act out in a fun way to even care about, so we fast forward it. I can pick locks. Seriously. I would like to roleplay it a bit, but it can take a while, and meanwhile everyone else is getting bored. The key objection to Open Locks is that it's a solo challenge. It has to be resolved quickly, or else be an extremely exciting minigame for everyone or the game's pace and energy suffers. Puzzles can be as simple as figuring out how to cross a ravine or trying to solve a murder mystery. You have all the tools you have at your disposal for everything else, including divinations and skills. Yes, but the how-to of how to make puzzles that work within the framework of D&D play isn't the same as making puzzles for use in puzzlegames, or for use as standalone games. D&D being big on puzzle minigames needs at least a series of useful advice for how to incorporate puzzles into the game, or at least how to keep incoporated puzzles from bringing your game to a screeching halt. This kind of advice is absolutely essential, and is a major recurring piece in the WADTD boards, as well as a perennial thorn in the side of newbie DMs (and even experienced ones). It needs to be included in the core game tips. And neither a_psh nor ArcTan are suggesting this because it clashes with their gamestyles. Dexter Blacktyde: - and you want detailed rules governing them and considering every possible factor that could influence the outcome? I mean, they should be halfway realistic, shouldn't they? Taking a cue from the rest of D&D, skill encounters shouldn't be realistic but cinematic. A skills game should be less realistic and more game-exciting. How many major factors can you count for when Batman intimidates a crook? Not that many - most of them incumbent on him looking scary and them being on the end of a long lifeline over a high fall. Similarly, how many major factors can you count for why Johnny Blaze is having a hell of a time trying to convince his girlfriend that he's Hell's bounty hunter? Not that many. It's the same for stories. Short stories, in particular have no space for pussyfooting around so they tend to bash these things into the scene with a sledgehammer. Fairy tales and legends are notorious for oversimplification of dramatic events, combat or otherwise. Since D&D takes its cue from these sources, why the need to be realistic for these skill encounters? You can nuance your character's success however you like, just as you can now nuance your combat character's critical hit however you like.
Zumarai 03-27-07, 12:46 PM	ArcTan: I seem to recall "illusionism" and "avatarism" being thrown around some, though not necessarily by you (though that reply wasn't only directed at you, either). If I sound vicious, then I apologize, but I'm only calling it as I see it. See here: See that? You refute the argument by saying that "it's dumb?" The only thing that does is belittle the person making the argument, and it's questionable that it does even that. No point is being made, no argumentation being done. However these statements DO belittle people: This is but one example. You are quite bluntly saying that you ARE better than all these people. They're slow to accept change (imbeciles) and you are a better thinker (superior to them). How is that not insulting? I've received private messages (and I never receive private messages) supporting my stand on this thread because there are lurkers who feel that you're bashing them. I feel like you're bashing me. Are you some chance Spiderman who needs to save our bacons from our weak-ass minds? Are you some game Moses inspired by God out to save us from our gaming sins? Either stand insults our intelligence and our taste. Stop it. STOP IT. I can very well hold a thoughtful conversation about how D&D can be improved, but not when someone else thinks that they know what I like better than I do (and particularly not when they're spectacularly proven wrong). This is not a case of me not wanting change. I'm the first on the battlements on many threads where changed is proposed, and I've fought for and against them. Sometimes both at the same time. This is me trying to hammer into you and a_psh that you're insulting a whole lot of people around here and that you're making a BIG, BIG mistake. You're deciding unilaterally what is fun for everyone. You're deciding for me what's fun for me. That won't work unless you're just incredibly lucky, or incredibly insightful. And in this case, I can already tell that you're neither. See here: a_psh has, at one time, implied that we should just throw out all those 3e combat rules that all kinds of people have been raving about. When opposed on the grounds that people liked it, he said that those people who liked it didn't know any better (are morons) and should just play Warhammer 40k. What hubris! No matter which way you spin that, it's an insult (and I'm accounted an excellent spin-doctor). Discussion isn't being opposed to. Did I say that D&D was okay just the way it is? Did I say that no discussion is necessary, that D&D is perfect? In fact, it's the other way around. By refusing to listen to what's being said, you and a_psh are essentially just saying "are not!" over and over again and essentially not hearing anything anyone is saying unless you've already agreed with it. Where's the discussion in that? Nothing. Nada. Zip. Bupkiss. To the contrary. You and a_psh's posts basically bash every style of play other than your own. There is no discussion in this thread that I haven't heard before and I suspect I will hear again. Your post may contain content about RPGs, but you may as well be reprinting combat tables. There's nothing new here except fresh insults to gamers and gaming styles you don't like. My posts are about what D&D is for me and for others - characters of the game you and a_psh insist on ignoring, belittling, or insulting. Characters of the game that a_psh wants to compromise in order to make his gaming style more central to D&D. You can't talk about D&D properly because you can't appreciate much of what it is. You hardly even recognize that it's more than what you enjoy out of it (and from a_psh's posts, you guys enjoy little enough). The "discussion" you're having isn't about improving D&D, but about telling everyone they're morons and changing the nature of the game in order to marginalize what THEY get out of it. Are swords more "fun" than guns? Says who? Says the regular threads that crop up in here asking for guns in D&D? Says the fan demand that actually got guns in the core DMG? Says the numerous magical gun adaptations in the Eberron forums, and the actual magical guns in Faerun? Says the gamers who actually prefer to play d20 Modern or d20 Anime modifed games because they include guns? Are these people stupid or lacking in taste, too? You can say what you think, but telling everyone else that their opinion, particularly taste-based opinion, is wrong is a deadly insult, and nothing high-horsed you can say about "having a discussion" is going to change that. P.S: You bet your screen I will! Some people actually like to dress up, get props, and even devise accents and mannerisms for their characters for use when they're gaming. It's fun for them. You're saying that they're silly. So chuck 'em out with the wargamers. And you say you're not being condescending? I'm not against more structured games on the skills for D&D, but as you can see, you can proceed along that discussion line without telling everyone that you're God's gift to gaming and that everyone else can go jump in the lake. More of the same!... Even though I like encumbrance rules and I enforce them, and my gamers like it that I enforce them (although they'll groan if you ask), I'm not telling you that I have better insght into your fun than you do or that you're silly, or that you're a moron. Hey, have your own fun! For what it's worth, encumbrance is vitally important for when characters fall into water, have to run away from things that'll eat them alive, or simply have to maneuver in combat in order to win. Treasure hauling is a major puzzle-scratcher for many groups and they like the challenge. Not that you like puzzle games, I know. He's falling back on his intuition so that he can alter the game to make it more fun for him and his cohorts. Despite your allegations, D&D is surprisingly flexible. It's certainly not as hard as trying to roleplay under Chainmail rules. D&D does sort of fall back on the wargame as an easy "baseline" from which newbies can start playing, but that's because its rules come from wargames and there are fewer variables there to mess up. Admittedly, one can beef up the rules in order to cater to all kinds of tastes just as adeptly, but your proposal only substitutes one baseline for another - it doesn't actually move the game "forward" as opposed to just moving it over to your side of the fence. The only improvement there is from your point of view - that you get to take your cake from the hack and slashers who currently have it. a_psh: That's actually another of its game elements that I don't like. There are PLENTY of really neat game ideas that exist in the world. If I wanted to play them, I'd play the game in which they came in. I don't import them into D&D to replace game elements that I actually like. Incapacitation in D&D isn't measured in hitpoints. It's done through other means. It's a crying shame that the core fighting classes and core melee options do not include an awful lot of ways and means to successively incapacitate your enemy but that's changing. Spellcasters, Martial Adepts, and even Rogues and Rangers have options that allow them to incapacitate their foes before they fall. As an aside, this option is not easily acquired in D&D fighting classes proper because the line of thought is that it exacerbates being on the losing side. In actual fights, he who strikes the first telling blow will usually strike the last - and that is exactly because in real life, an injury reduces your capacity to retaliate. However, in D&D, having everyone BUT the melee classes have this ability pretty much amounts to the same thing, so the end effect is only that the melee classes lack capability where other classes do not. Archtyrant Terevoth: Combat doesn't phase out player choice. There is no reason that a skills game can't be likewise. You're assuming that the social game would be a one-of game like it is in D&D right now. It need not be so. Particularly for social encounters, all PCs could be required to participate, and each one's contribution could be crucial to the success of the endeavor - much like combat is now. Thus, Fighters will need to be rebuilt to have certain basic skill applications, and rogues will necessarily have to be scaled back so as not to dominate every skill encounter. What I'm talking about isn't the D&D skill system being more of the same - it's about the D&D skill system being redone from the ground up. Same as for combat as saves. It adds suspense and the possibility of failure. In a more defined system, you're given a slew of choices, possibly based on your class and your skill resource allocations on character creation. Based on the choices you make, the DM assigns predetermined adjustments to a series of contests (not just one). Each contest result dynamically changes the next, allowing for an ebb and flow between the participants. The ultimate victor will depend on the system used. I can pick locks. Seriously. I would like to roleplay it a bit, but it can take a while, and meanwhile everyone else is getting bored. The key objection to Open Locks is that it's a solo challenge. It has to be resolved quickly, or else be an extremely exciting minigame for everyone or the game's pace and energy suffers. Yes, but the how-to of how to make puzzles that work within the framework of D&D play isn't the same as making puzzles for use in puzzlegames, or for use as standalone games. D&D being big on puzzle minigames needs at least a series of useful advice for how to incorporate puzzles into the game, or at least how to keep incoporated puzzles from bringing your game to a screeching halt. This kind of advice is absolutely essential, and is a major recurring piece in the WADTD boards, as well as a perennial thorn in the side of newbie DMs (and even experienced ones). It needs to be included in the core game tips. And neither a_psh nor ArcTan are suggesting this because it clashes with their gamestyles. Dexter Blacktyde: Taking a cue from the rest of D&D, skill encounters shouldn't be realistic but cinematic. A skills game should be less realistic and more game-exciting. How many major factors can you count for when Batman intimidates a crook? Not that many - most of them incumbent on him looking scary and them being on the end of a long lifeline over a high fall. Similarly, how many major factors can you count for why Johnny Blaze is having a hell of a time trying to convince his girlfriend that he's Hell's bounty hunter? Not that many. It's the same for stories. Short stories, in particular have no space for pussyfooting around so they tend to bash these things into the scene with a sledgehammer. Fairy tales and legends are notorious for oversimplification of dramatic events, combat or otherwise. Since D&D takes its cue from these sources, why the need to be realistic for these skill encounters? You can nuance your character's success however you like, just as you can now nuance your combat character's critical hit however you like. What a fantastic post – I'm serious. Kick ass. It's people like you that give me hope in gamers.
Jenkins007 03-27-07, 01:30 PM	While I admit that I have only skimmed the majority of the thread, I must say that this has taken a hard turn for the worst. As Roxlimn has already stated, it has turned into much more of a bash-fest than a discussion. The crucial problem with this thread is the fact that it is all opinion. All about tastes. Now I'm taking an unbiased stance, even though it is impossible for anyone that plays to not have an opinion, because this is what I believe should happen to better the game. Actually saying that the games needs to be bettered is self defeating. The game is what you make of it. We don't need WotC to spoon feed us the things we like. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the old saying about trying to please everyone. You end up pleasing no one. Honestly though, the premise of this thread is something that should be rehashed for every group to fit their individual needs. Trying to get everyone involved in the game to offer their two cents about this is ridiculous. You will get nowhere. As you already have. What has happened is that there are so many people participating in the discussion, and stubborn people at that, that no one gains an advantage, at least not a very good one. It has been said that there are three things that you should not discuss openly, religion, politics, and money. This person obviously never played DnD. Trying to start a taste debate is silly in and of itself because you will get nowhere. As I'm writing this, it has occurred to me that I am arguing about not arguing, or rather the pointlessness of arguing something like this. Which is funny to me. :D I'll step down from being the Devil's advocate for now.
Jenkins007 03-27-07, 01:33 PM	I also think that we should stop and clarify what it is that you are discussing. This might help both sides come to an understanding. If someone one would give a summary of where this thread was headed and where it is now, that would be helpful for everyone involved. I'm not sure if everyone can follow everyone else's logic all the time.
a_psh 03-27-07, 01:39 PM	I also think that we should stop and clarify what it is that you are discussing. This might help both sides come to an understanding. If someone one would give a summary of where this thread was headed and where it is now, that would be helpful for everyone involved. I'm not sure if everyone can follow everyone else's logic all the time.I'm starting a new one... intro posts are annoying to write... gimme a sec.
Roxlimn 03-27-07, 01:39 PM	a_psh: I'd say you want a bit more than this, even. In almost any combat scene, every D&D character is useful. The same can hold true for a lot of non-combat scenes. Not just different people getting the proverbial spotlight on a scene-by-scene basis, but multiple characters being active and out there in various scenes. It may actually be better for the game if everyone weren't quite so adept at combat as they are now. It particularly ruins the image of a gentleman expert-spy that he knows how to hit people in combat with deadly force. Part of his character concept is that he's inept in combat. How does Sneak Attack help? Having dual game-systems operating in the same game gives group pros and cons about specialization - a little bit about how people have to decide between a Cleric and a Mage currently. Cleric's awesome powerful, but even the best built "Arcane" Cleric doesn't have quite as many options as a well built actual Arcane. Thus, a combat-inept character can make up for his necessary presence (and liability) in combat games by being a monster in skill games. Of course, it would lead to combat characters not wanting that character around in the combat game (reduces liabilities) but this shouldn't always be an option. After all, it's not much fun to be a combat-inept character if this flaw never actually ever matters. More normally, you could have a combination of abilities spread between combat and skills games, so that people can have the level of proficiency they want in each - ideally building characters that are nominally proficient in each sphere, but expert in one. As you can see, I can discuss this without referring to Archtyrant Terevoth as a moron and a fanboy. If I can do it, so can you. That's why the prevailing Forge philosophy is not to simulate anything at all. Instead, you trust on human narration to introduce verisimilitude and use the rules to channel and constrain it. DitV doesn't say "You are impressed by the speech and get +2 to Friendship checks"; it says "Okay, now you're at the point in the conversation where you have to either give up or bring in something new." You DO, of course, realize that this essentially means that you make mechanics entirely separate from whatever it is that it's supposed to apply to? It won't feel like heroic fantasy combat, because the game system is so generic you could use it to arbitrate debates between rival squirrel factions! ArcTan: In D&D right now, you more or less have to -- the game doesn't hold together otherwise -- but plenty of games lack this assumption. You can play a pickup game of basketball without designating one person the referee. You can play a game of chess with one other person without having a "rules arbitrator" to remind you what the rules of chess are. You can have a freeform RPG where no one moderates to say what does and doesn't happen -- or where a moderator doesn't do anything but literally moderate (i.e. steps in *only* when two people fight, and doesn't "run the game" otherwise). All of these game examples can only ever be played one way. You think that D&D ought to be played only to the way you prefer, but it's not true that it can only be enjoyed that way. Backstreet Boys may be a pop phenomenon that only is targetted at teenage girls, but most music is like this. Mozart's music, rap, blues, and jazz all are targetted phenomenon to a greater or lesser degree, and pop music is arguably the most arduous of them all. Mozart only had to satisfy a few noble patrons who had a limited repertoire of choices - they're almost literally a "captured audience." Backstreet Boys has to cater to a whole demographic and it includes vocal, instrumental, visual, and post-production values. The entire phenomenon of Backstreet Boys, right down to their tax exemptions, is a carefully choreographed product resulting from the efforts of entire teams of support people. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean that it's inane, and your refusal to tolerate the tastes of other people blinds you to subtleties that you can learn from. I'm quite open to stuff like DitV, but not at the expense of D&D mechanics, and only when I want it. I don't want it stuffed down my throat because someone like you thinks I'm a moron. The whole problem we've been talking about is that D&D isn't really a complete game, as such, and asks each individual DM to painstakingly create their own internal set of rules for a whole hell of a lot of things that a lot of gaming groups value *more* than the grid-based combat that D&D keeps on selling us rules and rules and yet more rules for. Your self-serving slant would have a lot more strength if you can provide authoritative survey data that backs up what you say. As it is, all you have is your own opinion, and that's about as valid as anyone else's. Even if we provide a separate skill game set alongside the combat game set, how much each of those sets sees use will still depend on the individual group, and according to the DM's adjudication. It will still be "incomplete," and it will always be "incomplete," because it's supposed to be that way. The day D&D excludes its varied core fan base from playing it the way they want is the day it dies. Archtyrant Terevoth: In all fairness, the current Diplomacy check tables aren't as "broken" as you seem to think it is. A Helpful Cthulu is only more likely to drive you to madness as he seeks to "enlighten" you to his ways. He may not eat you outright, but you'd be too busy frothing at the mouth to notice. Likewise, a Lich is usually an insane spellcaster who is convinced that being undead is a great thing to be. If you get him Helpful, he may just try to kill you, whereas he may not care enough to do so if he's Indifferent. Every social encounter is much like getting dominated or charmed, where the DM simply says, "you lost, and now you've got to do this, whether you like it or not." In all fairness, that's what the DM says anyway in a freeform scenario, except that you get to think that he's decided based on how well you acted. He may not be. He could be just rolling the dice, too. Dexter Blacktyde: In Germany we've been brought up on DSA, a system that strongly emphasizes in-depth roleplaying, interesting characters, a good story, believability and what they call "magical realism". That's actually pretty interesting. I've played a good chunk of German boardgames, and I've liked each one. Would the system be available in English internationally? In short, I oppose the heavy emphasis on rules dependancy. I'd like an RPG to spark the reader's imagination, not to show him that there's nothing not regulated by a mechanism. In all fairness, I actually started gaming with Monopoly, and no one really played that by the rules, either. I had so little to go on as a child that we invented rules on Monopoly alone and playtested them until we got them right where we wanted. What we ended up with was nothing like Monopoly, but we found it fun nonetheless. I suppose I've carried over the same philosophy ever since. While I don't change the rules for Chess (since I don't think they can easily be changed favorably), I never really saw D&D as anything more than a building set of rules. This is particularly so because I played heavily in 2e D&D, and the rules there were so completely contradictory that you had no choice BUT to choose and collate the set of rules you liked best.
ArcTan 03-27-07, 01:43 PM	I feel the same when because of a minor occurrence people stop the plot and start rummaging through five books, murmuring "I know obscure rule no. 2152 is in of these books" as if their lives depended on it - Bob forbid that the GM makes one up on the fly. This has nothing to do with "important", "necessary", "better" or "worse", these are just two extremely different ways of dealing with the hobby. You're comparing to a strawman. I don't like massive rules glut either. I think anything that slows the game down and saps the energy from it is a bad thing, whether it comes in the form of "Wait, there are rules for this in some obscure sourcebook" or "Wait, we have to actually have this conversation in character". Nonsense. I don't know if you're referring to overly melodramatic Shakespeare-wannabes, but in-character dialogue generally takes less time. "Wait a minute, you really wanna go in there?" - "Ghorghor asks Meliamne to stop before she enters the cave and asks if she's serious." "Wait a minute, you really wanna go in there?" isn't what I mean by in-character dialogue. Just by looking at it you can't tell for sure whether it's in-character. It's not what I mean by in-character dialogue -- if people say things like "Let's kill this guy" or "Whoa, no way am I doing that", that's usually the half-in-character half-out-of-character stuff. (For one thing, you notice that this kind of conversation is usually between players, talking about what the players are going to make the PCs do.) It's a lot less natural for a player to talk to the DM as though the DM really were an NPC, because the NPCs, unlike the PCs, are not extensions of the DM with the DM's own intentions, and the DM can jump back and forth between them. It's in that kind of situation that usually causes problems, when the DM says "No, talk to the king in character". It's not that I want to hardcore ban in-character speech -- I just see this as a turnaround of the groups that hardcore *require* in-character speech -- "You can't talk about 'levels', your character doesn't have levels" -- that I see and hear way too often. I'd honestly rather there were no rules about it at all and people did whatever they felt like -- but the thing is that the "I have to be in character" mode gets to be an unwritten rules way too often and makes people feel like they're doing something wrong if they speak out of character even when that's the better thing to do. ("I interrogate him for useful information" rather than spending an hour and a half thinking of what specific questions you want to ask and in what order.) Although I must admit that this could be the start of a conversation - and if a conversation between two characters is already too much roleplaying for your tastes, well... then I'm out of arguments ;) Being more method-acting with your character doesn't mean "more roleplaying". If they can actually pull it off without being very slow about it or being very stilted, great, but unless you're a veteran improv actor it's usually one or the other. This is the thing -- a blurry line between in- and out-of-character makes no difference when it's things like "All right, you stay behind me and I'll try to block him with a wall of force", but a lot of times in games I see people fumbling around for words -- "My... my sister, I have... long, long sought... thee and thine, er, thy presence here does fill me with..." and I just want to scream "YOU CAN JUST SAY YOUR CHARACTER IS GLAD TO SEE HER!"
Dexter_Blacktyde 03-27-07, 01:55 PM	Although I agree with ArcTan on hardly anything in this thread, I have to say that maybe you're being a little hard on him. It may be obvious that he thinks his way of playing is better than most alternatives, but in the end at least it's honest. (Although I'll admit that his way of giving many of his opinions and suggestions a semblance of objectivity bugs me a little.) Taking a cue from the rest of D&D, skill encounters shouldn't be realistic but cinematic. A skills game should be less realistic and more game-exciting. Says you ;) No, seriously, you do have a point here, but as it is, D&D gives the readers the impression there's only one style of fantasy roleplaying - the style you just mentioned. Then again, the distinction is blurred at best: Where does "realistic" end and "cinematic" begin? I'm the first to admit that I play very cinematically, indeed; but I also put great emphasis on realism or (if you associate realism with extreme realism) credibility. These themes are not mutually exclusive. After all we're talking about improving D&D here, so why shouldn't we talk about the question whether the current tone of D&D is the best (or the only one) it can have? D&D is meant to be a generic system for fantasy settings (predominantly at least). What about core rules that introduce bare-bones mechanics and apply them to several styles of gaming? The PHB (and the DMG in greater detail) could juxtapose a gritty realistic style, a cinematic style, a plot- and character-driven style, a wargame style, and encourage the reader to not only choose the style that fits his group best, but maybe to compile a customized style by assembling parts of the sub-systems? ("Let's see... I want heroic stories, and I don't want to abandon the unrealistic, but highly tactical and entertaining combat, but I want to center my plots on deep and believable characters, too, and I want the stories to take place in a logical environment. All right, how do I juggle these factors, what do I have to do to reconcile them?") It's the same for stories. Short stories, in particular have no space for pussyfooting around so they tend to bash these things into the scene with a sledgehammer. Fairy tales and legends are notorious for oversimplification of dramatic events, combat or otherwise. Because rules don't govern my imagination. My imagination is theoretically limitless - why should I let a set of cold mechanisms dictate my style of play? In my book a good system distinguishes itself by letting me play in the style that suits my needs. A system that shoves a certain kind of style down my throat is not a good system, as far as I'm concerned. For example, establishing a heroic yet still believable style in the Forgotten Realms is a terrible lot of work, partly because of the system, partly because of the setting. The setting is excused because it has to have a tone, a flavor; generic rules that are not specifically created with a certain setting in mind, on the other hand, should be easily applicable to any setting the rules claim to be compatible with (in this case fantasy). DB
ArcTan 03-27-07, 02:21 PM	ArcTan: I seem to recall "illusionism" and "avatarism" being thrown around some, though not necessarily by you (though that reply wasn't only directed at you, either). Both of those terms, you realize, have a specific meaning. You may call them "bigoted" terms, but as far as I can see that's you developing a hyperdefensive reaction that I don't think is warranted. See that? You refute the argument by saying that "it's dumb?" The only thing that does is belittle the person making the argument, and it's questionable that it does even that. No point is being made, no argumentation being done. That was, in fact, not the entirety of my post. It was a pretty harsh statement, which is no different from most of the harsh statements you've used. My argument is and continues to be that there are many examples of movies, books, TV, etc. that take place in totally unrealistic worlds but are "immersive", and that to the contrary some very detailed and realistic demographic data isn't "immersive" at all, and that immersion and realism are two different things. And I do think the idea that D&D has swords in it so that people will feel more distanced from the setting and less immersed is almost self-evidently dumb. I doubt that's what you really intended to say when you said it. This is but one example. You are quite bluntly saying that you ARE better than all these people. They're slow to accept change (imbeciles) and you are a better thinker (superior to them). Okay, see, where I come from "slow to accept change" is not a synonym for "imbecile", and "I think I've noticed some things" is not a synonym for "I am a better thinker than you". If you insist on interpreting it that way, then it really is impossible to talk to you. How is that not insulting? If it's impossible to point out to someone something that you think you've noticed that they haven't without insulting them, then so be it. I've received private messages (and I never receive private messages) supporting my stand on this thread because there are lurkers who feel that you're bashing them. I feel like you're bashing me. Yes, and I've noticed that whenever you talk about anything at all on the Internet it doesn't take long for tempers to rise high. I don't consider myself responsible for that. Are you some chance Spiderman who needs to save our bacons from our weak-ass minds? Are you some game Moses inspired by God out to save us from our gaming sins? No. I'm a guy who's noticed some things -- that other people have also noticed, and written about -- and think that other people haven't noticed. Either stand insults our intelligence and our taste. Stop it. STOP IT. NO ONE has ANYTHING to learn from other people about things they like. NO ONE is capable of noticing things other people don't notice unless they are inherently intellectually superior and everyone else is a moron. Sure. I can very well hold a thoughtful conversation about how D&D can be improved, but not when someone else thinks that they know what I like better than I do (and particularly not when they're spectacularly proven wrong). This is not a case of me not wanting change. I'm the first on the battlements on many threads where changed is proposed, and I've fought for and against them. Sometimes both at the same time. This is me trying to hammer into you and a_psh that you're insulting a whole lot of people around here and that you're making a BIG, BIG mistake. You're deciding unilaterally what is fun for everyone. You're deciding for me what's fun for me. That won't work unless you're just incredibly lucky, or incredibly insightful. And in this case, I can already tell that you're neither. *sigh*... a_psh has, at one time, implied that we should just throw out all those 3e combat rules that all kinds of people have been raving about. When opposed on the grounds that people liked it, he said that those people who liked it didn't know any better (are morons) and should just play Warhammer 40k. What hubris! Liking wargaming doesn't make you a moron. Liking wargaming in a context that doesn't support it too well doesn't make you a moron either. It may just mean that you haven't been exposed to the wargaming community because you got into gaming through RPGs, and the barriers that separate gaming communitie are often pretty high. It's the same battle people fight when trying to sell PnP RPGs to people who grew up on CRPGs, or the idea of gaming in general to people who haven't tried it before. No matter which way you spin that, it's an insult (and I'm accounted an excellent spin-doctor). It's impossible to say "Hey, you might like this thing better than what you're doing now, because you probably haven't heard of it or been exposed to it" without insulting someone? I guess I should never recommend new music or books to my friends, then. Discussion isn't being opposed to. Did I say that D&D was okay just the way it is? Did I say that no discussion is necessary, that D&D is perfect? In fact, it's the other way around. By refusing to listen to what's being said, you and a_psh are essentially just saying "are not!" over and over again and essentially not hearing anything anyone is saying unless you've already agreed with it. The thing is that, like you, I don't think either of us is new to this kind of discussion, and I don't think there's that much that either of us hasn't heard. Where's the discussion in that? Nothing. Nada. Zip. Bupkiss. To the contrary. You and a_psh's posts basically bash every style of play other than your own. There is no discussion in this thread that I haven't heard before and I suspect I will hear again. Your post may contain content about RPGs, but you may as well be reprinting combat tables. There's nothing new here except fresh insults to gamers and gaming styles you don't like. You're saying your opinion over and over again, which hasn't changed and isn't likely to change. We're saying our opinion over and over again, which hasn't changed and isn't likely to change. I don't see either of those as a moral failing. And there are people who do seem to have picked up at least some ideas they wouldn't've considered otherwise from this thread, like Arrowhen, which is why I think it's worthwhile to talk about these things. My posts are about what D&D is for me and for others - characters of the game you and a_psh insist on ignoring, belittling, or insulting. Characters of the game that a_psh wants to compromise in order to make his gaming style more central to D&D. You can't talk about D&D properly because you can't appreciate much of what it is. You hardly even recognize that it's more than what you enjoy out of it (and from a_psh's posts, you guys enjoy little enough). Well, what is it, then? What is it I don't notice? I see how people like to grab onto the wargame side of D&D as a tactical exercise. I see how people like the fact that sitting around a table in an RPG context gives them license to freeform. I see how people like to delve into the sea of dependencies that building a character sheet out of the rules is. I also see how these elements sometimes complement each other and sometimes stand squarely in each other's way. What is it that you claim so many people enjoy that I have no conception of? I *do* get how grid-based combat is fun. I *do* get how freeform storytelling is fun. And I *do* get how pure dice-based simulation of the two is also fun. What I disagree with is the assertion that D&D is a perfect blend of all these factor and that these factors complement and synergize with each other, when more often I see them getting in each other's way. The "discussion" you're having isn't about improving D&D, but about telling everyone they're morons and changing the nature of the game in order to marginalize what THEY get out of it. *sigh* This always happens, though. People who want to limit powergaming builds and reduce D&D's emphasis on multiclassing alienate the CharOp boards that thinks finding new ways to make Pun-Pun is the funnest thing since sliced bread. People who find the Diplomacy check annoying alienate people who really like the way they can reduce big things to single skill checks and "get on with the roleplaying". People who want to fix the problem between melee and magical classes in the game get a flurry of people who, for whatever damn reason, love the PHB Fighter exactly as is slamming them up and down the forums and calling them "ToB fanboys". You *can't*, as you said, please everyone. You can't even acknowledge that everyone is equally deserving of being pleased, because the core rules have to make choices somewhere and have to say one thing and not another. People whose greatest pleasure in life is creating a broken character build and making the DM look like a fool (and they exist) can't be catered to by the same game that wants to cater to DMs who like balanced encounters they can run without a huge amount of effort. That's where tradeoffs come from. Are swords more "fun" than guns? Says who? Says the regular threads that crop up in here asking for guns in D&D? Says the fan demand that actually got guns in the core DMG? Says the numerous magical gun adaptations in the Eberron forums, and the actual magical guns in Faerun? Okay, see, you're taking this way out of context. I'm saying that D&D has swords rather than guns just because that's the milieu D&D wants to look like. It wants to be a sword & sorcery game, because it's fun to pretend to be in a fantasy version of medieval times, and that's all. It has nothing to do with "consciously being less realistic" in order to "limit our immersion". I'm pointing out one place where you were probably deliberately being hyperbolic in order to make the designers of D&D look like they had more intention behind what they were doing than they did. As the fact that so many people *like* playing with guns proves, you can have fun with guns just as much as with swords, and "limiting your immersion" has nothing to do with it. Says the gamers who actually prefer to play d20 Modern or d20 Anime modifed games because they include guns? Are these people stupid or lacking in taste, too? See, now it's reaching the point where if I say anything at all you're actually *trying* to find the most offensive possible way to interpret it so you can be mad at me. You can say what you think, but telling everyone else that their opinion, particularly taste-based opinion, is wrong is a deadly insult, and nothing high-horsed you can say about "having a discussion" is going to change that. "Deadly insult"? For cripes' sake. I have conversations all the time with my friends that go along the lines of: "Hey, what did you think of 300?" "Geez, that was the dumbest movie I've ever seen." "I dunno, I kinda liked it." "Are you kidding me?" etc. I guess in your circles this would lead to a duel of honor and bloodshed, but for me this is how you learn about other people's tastes -- and your own. You bet your screen I will! Some people actually like to dress up, get props, and even devise accents and mannerisms for their characters for use when they're gaming. It's fun for them. You're saying that they're silly. So chuck 'em out with the wargamers. I don't deny that it's fun for them. It's also silly. The problem isn't when people do this who want to do this and set up a whole game whose point is to do this (i.e. LARPing, generally -- and yeah, I've done stuff like that, and it can be fun). The problem is when people act like this is necessary for "immersion". It's fun because it's silly, not because it's a magical key to actually turning D&D into a living, breathing world. And you say you're not being condescending? My reaction to the "You have to method-act your character" thing is precisely because people like Archtyrant Teveroth are presenting it as though it's "real roleplaying" and "immersive", which it isn't. (It can be fun, but no, it's not the magic key to being immersed.) I'm not against more structured games on the skills for D&D, but as you can see, you can proceed along that discussion line without telling everyone that you're God's gift to gaming and that everyone else can go jump in the lake. Did I say that? More of the same!... Even though I like encumbrance rules and I enforce them, and my gamers like it that I enforce them (although they'll groan if you ask), I'm not telling you that I have better insght into your fun than you do or that you're silly, or that you're a moron. Hey, have your own fun! For what it's worth, encumbrance is vitally important for when characters fall into water, have to run away from things that'll eat them alive, or simply have to maneuver in combat in order to win. Treasure hauling is a major puzzle-scratcher for many groups and they like the challenge. Not that you like puzzle games, I know. *shrug* I've seen very little done with encumbrance rules -- with the little weight notation for every item in your pack -- that couldn't be done with common sense. (Is he wearing full plate armor? Does he have a handy haversack?) This is really the question I keep asking -- are the encumbrance rules used in your games because they're the *best* or most *efficient* possible tools for the job, or because they're written in the core rules and it's easier to use them than to not? Do your players groan because, regardless of whether or not the encumbrance rules see use in your games (which they don't in many), they're still a pain in the neck to keep track of? He's falling back on his intuition so that he can alter the game to make it more fun for him and his cohorts. Despite your allegations, D&D is surprisingly flexible. It's certainly not as hard as trying to roleplay under Chainmail rules. If you say so. Mainly the upgrade it provides over chainmail is having persistent character stat blocks that move from one encounter to another. In fact, that's what the original D&D *was* -- Chainmail with persistent characters -- before the idea of "role-playing games" was a twinkle in Gary Gygax's marketing strategy. The main way this facilitates roleplaying is that your character has an identity that persists after each combat. It's no quantum leap toward "not a wargame", though -- certainly OD&D wasn't -- and D&D 3.5 is, at best, a few steps ahead from that. D&D does sort of fall back on the wargame as an easy "baseline" from which newbies can start playing, but that's because its rules come from wargames and there are fewer variables there to mess up. Admittedly, one can beef up the rules in order to cater to all kinds of tastes just as adeptly, but your proposal only substitutes one baseline for another - it doesn't actually move the game "forward" as opposed to just moving it over to your side of the fence. "Forward" is, of course, a relative term, but if the game starts as a wargame and the direction of progress is supposedly in moving away from its roots towards a "role-playing game", however that's defined, then it's not unreasonable to use the term "forward" for that. The only improvement there is from your point of view - that you get to take your cake from the hack and slashers who currently have it. Or that hack and slashers, in fact, have a dizzying array of cakes to choose from -- from Warhammer to World of Warcraft to Nethack -- and I'd like a little cake of my own, preferably cake that I don't have to order as little black-and-white booklets from tiny online indie publishers.
Dexter_Blacktyde 03-27-07, 02:21 PM	In all fairness, the current Diplomacy check tables aren't as "broken" as you seem to think it is. A Helpful Cthulu is only more likely to drive you to madness as he seeks to "enlighten" you to his ways. He may not eat you outright, but you'd be too busy frothing at the mouth to notice. That would be the worst possible example you could have come up with - the mere thought of someone sensibly arguing with a being so alien that the human mind cannot even comprehend its mere looks, let alone its mindset, and of Cthulhu falling for some sweet talk ;) That, of course, is the downside of generic rules - they cannot be applied to every setting. That's why every setting (or in my example: every style sub-section) should come with advanced rules that build upon the ground rules and expand them in accordance to the tone and the peculiarities of the setting. That's actually pretty interesting. I've played a good chunk of German boardgames, and I've liked each one. Would the system be available in English internationally? Well, it became a big success because in 1984 there was very little competition which allowed it to strengthen its position in the market in a comparatively short time. Market-wise it's Germany's D&D and has been for decades. But it's a cultural phenomenon, actually, one that's not easily translated. (I can't explain this without writing an essay.) That didn't prevent Fanpro from trying, but since the Sega Dreamcast there hasn't been a marketing blunder as big as DSA's translation. The English version is called The Dark Eye, but apart from the mechanics little of what makes the RPG stand out has been adapted. The mechanics are too complex for their own good, there are some serious issues. They rules are not terrible, by no means, but they're not the system's strong point; it's strong point is the setting and the emphasis on what I mentioned in the post you quoted, and both go hand in hand. For some reason Fanpro tried to keep the international version as generic as possible - as if there weren't countless generic fantasy RPGs as it is - in order to appeal to a "broader audience" or whatever, and then simply forgot about it, keeping all the announced follow-up products on the back burner and seemingly failing to invest a single cent into advertising. Instead of publishing the rules and the world book simultaneously, they just published the so-so rules, waited some months, published three sub-par generic adventures, waited a year and then finally published the world book (which naturally was only a very broad compilation of the extremely detailed setting, neither fish nor fowl). By then, of course, it was much too late, because the system had never had any chance to catch on, so all in all they've thrown gobs of money out of the window for nothing. It was ridiculous, really. DB
elondir 03-27-07, 02:22 PM	Personally I don't like in-character roleplaying. I don't exactly like pure rollplaying either. There's a happy medium between LARPing and D&D Miniatures. That medium is what I think of when I think of D&D. I'm not into improv acting so I tend to prefer "my character tries a diplomacy check to lower the price of the sword" instead of "Hallo, friend, well met. Chance that I might see thy falchion thou art displaying in that corner?" I just want to get acting part over with so we can hurry up and explore the dungeon, fight the monsters in it, and take their stuff so my character can get a little closer to the next level. I like vast wilderness areas crawling with random encounters and filled with random dungeons filled with random monsters, who have random treasure that I can trade-in at the nearest city or town if I don't like it. I don't like traps, puzzles, or mazes. And I don't like the monsters to be difficult. Three or four rounds is a good length for a combat. Since I don't use minis and only do AoOs when disengaging or closing with an enemy with reach, that can go pretty fast.
Roxlimn 03-27-07, 02:55 PM	Dexter Blacktyde: I don't believe so. If I reported him to the WizOs and asked them to intercede - that would be harsh. I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt. I'm assuming that he doesn't realize that he's alienating a WHOLE LOT of people. I'm informing him that he's insulting people, and I'm telling him exactly how he's doing it. Those insulting statements of his are unimportant to his main points - they can easily be removed by him without loss of content. Re: styles of play While, I'm all for allowing everyone to have their cake and eat it, too, the unfortunate truth is that even as a wargame, there's not a whole lot of leeway D&D can do things without sacrificing flavor - and flavor is what interests people, even if they may not like it a particular flavor all that much. The default flavor is "hyperheroic," of course, to the point that D&D is really about medieval-flavor superheroes. Even so, it's not all that hard to tweak it to be more "gritty" in terms of tone, and the DMG gives you several options for how to to that. More options exist in Unearthed Arcana, and d20 Modern. While I think that D&D is a generic system in terms of style of play, it's a very ungeneric system in terms of flavor of play, and I think that both of those are strengths. You can already trim down D&D easily enough to be as simple as you want. Theoretically, combat can be as simple as an opposed Attack Bonus check, or Character Level check although the rules don't specifically say this. You can extrapolate it easily enough, though, from the pieces of rules that they've outlined, even in just the core rules. I may be extraordinary in having this impression, but 3e D&D to me is so easy to manipulate that it's like having a lump of clay. I can devise the kind of check or series of opposed rolls that I think best "flavors" the situation and it doesn't always have to be specifically mentioned in the rules themselves. A BAB table to me is less like an unchangeable table and more like a piece of lego I can use at my leisure. And I can visualize how it relates to level and saves and spell progression numerically and in graph form. So when I want level-derived variables (for when I think levels help the heroes be better), I can usually just select the one I think makes the scene most interesting. For instance, selecting AB not only gets me a specific numbers set for a particular level, it also rewards Warrior types and gives a sense of the activity being "accuracy" or "combat skill" related. You could say I think of BAB as more like a skill check than anything else (with arcanes getting cross class skill ranks). The core books could be more explicit about these relationships, of course, and the probability curves at each rank and level, but it would probably complicate the cores more than the average guy would understand easily, and it would not better his life in any way. On the other hand, the core books ARE explicit about it in that they did print the numerical progressions and their relationships to each other (and the effects of other mechanics) but it's like being explicit about it in Greek. Us numerically gifted dudes understand it, but not everyone does (and I don't really know how to fix that). Compartmentalized rules would be how I see the system evolving as, and that's why I'm glad that the rules currently are as modular as they are. You can add, expand, or contract the rules as you like, and for most of these modifications, the game plays much the same. It would be nice if we could get labels on the rules depending on which style of play they promote, as well as explicit intructions on how to use them in each style. Because rules don't govern my imagination. My imagination is theoretically limitless - why should I let a set of cold mechanisms dictate my style of play? In my book a good system distinguishes itself by letting me play in the style that suits my needs. A system that shoves a certain kind of style down my throat is not a good system, as far as I'm concerned. A system can only be so generic before it bores the hell out of anyone who reads it. GURPS is an excellent example of this. Moreover, I don't usually let the rules dictate the style of play my groups play. I only select the rules that cater to that group, and I apply them similarly - they're tools, not constraints. That's why I like supplements - they're more bricks in my LEGO box, and I'm under no special constraint to use them like the instruction in their own box says. If I want to use a "car" windshield as a space platform window, I'll do it that way and anyone who objects on the basis of rules "RAW" can go find their own game. Honestly, the DMG explicitly tells you to use the rules in this fashion, so I don't understand why everyone doesn't, or so it seems. The only thing you can say against rules in this sense is that they don't provide you with enough tools to play the way you want. You don't have to use your screwdriver to try to screw in a flathead nail, even if the screwdriver manual tells you to do so. Just use your hammer instead. Having the screwdriver in your box is still useful. What would suck (and kinda does in D&D) is if you don't have a hammer and have to try to hammer in a nail with a screwdriver.
StormKnight 03-27-07, 02:59 PM	Liking wargaming doesn't make you a moron. Liking wargaming in a context that doesn't support it too well doesn't make you a moron either. It may just mean that you haven't been exposed to the wargaming community because you got into gaming through RPGs, and the barriers that separate gaming communitie are often pretty high. Or, possibly your opinion that its "a context that doesn't support it too well" might, in fact, be totally subjective. A lot of what is getting said is something like this: "Baseball is fine, but its really got a lot of silly overhead like having to wait for the pitch and a successful hit and all that. You spend half your time on the bench, or waiting. It really doesn't support getting exercise. Yoga is so much better. You are exercising all the time you are doing it, and you don't need a whole group of people." "But...I don't play baseball to exercise, I play it because its fun." "That's just because you don't understand that the real point of baseball is exercise and how poorly you get it." "But, even for getting exercise, isn't yoga entirely different from baseball? Running builds your body in ways that yoga does not." "But you don't run all the time in baseball. Just running would be better. Just running is more like doing yoga than baseball is, so clearly anyone not doing yoga doesn't know what they are doing."
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-27-07, 03:03 PM	You are correct in thinking that playing every NPC like a moronic fatalist is going to make the game weird. That's where the "roleplaying" comes in. Unlike the GM just saying "yeah, this guy cannot be meaningfully influenced in any way," you can still win the conflict by escalating hard (translation: if everyone around you is being outright murderously hostile, you're just going to be stuck doing the realistic thing and gunning them all down). Translation: The game is driven by DM fiat, not rules. Still, the stupid and unpersuasive character isn't going to be succeeding at most attempts at persuasion, just like in D&D. I'm mostly illustrating what you do when you really want to do something super-heroic and beyond your abilities. Also, I particularly worry about what a character who does specialize in social ability can do if he burns all his dice on social tasks. It seems as though you're just going to run into the uber diplomacy build here too. You look at "gift dice" and shout "Divisive!" I look at "gift dice" and think "Team-building!" They're a great way to contribute to a scene even when you're not in it, which is the big idea. And that's the problem. The PCs aren't impartial, so having them hand out bonus dice probably isn't a good idea. They want their companions to succeed, so it's less about what's "cool" and more about "what's most helpful". It's much harder for PCs to draw an impartial line because they have something to risk (their character), where the DM isn't risking anything. Thus if you want to try to have someone determine what's cool and what isn't, you're better off using the DM.
ArcTan 03-27-07, 03:03 PM	You DO, of course, realize that this essentially means that you make mechanics entirely separate from whatever it is that it's supposed to apply to? It won't feel like heroic fantasy combat, because the game system is so generic you could use it to arbitrate debates between rival squirrel factions! See, I'm not actually down on freeforming. I've had a lot of fun freeforming. In freeform RPGs there are no mechanics at all (except very simple ones, like "signal when it's the end of your turn to talk"), and yet I've had no problems feeling immersed in the romantic tension or bitter political rivalry or, yes, life-and-death combat with magic weapons that freeform tells stories about. Thing is, though, if I wanted to freeform I could just do it without buying a game book. As I've kept saying, if I'm playing an RPG system at all, I want the system to do something. Doing something doesn't necessarily mean providing a meticulously detailed dice-based simulation of the world with all physical factors carefully labelled. ArcTan: All of these game examples can only ever be played one way. You think that D&D ought to be played only to the way you prefer, but it's not true that it can only be enjoyed that way. Hey, you can play Monopoly with things like buying immunity, a Free Parking lottery, and borrowing extra money from the bank, and then it becomes less of a game and more of a way to kill time while chatting with the other 13-year-old girls at your sleepover, all night long, until you all get tired and count up the money for who won. Or you can play it with Charles Darrow's original rules tightly enforced, and then it becomes a scary cutthroat game of chance that ends in an hour with one cutthroat shoving everyone else out of business. The thing is that Monopoly does have a core baseline expectation of what it's supposed to be -- a cutthroat game that simulates the unstable world of real estate speculation -- and drifting it one way or the other by using houserules is something you do as a group. Right now D&D is played a lot of different ways, but I'd hesitantly venture to say, based on my own experience and what people say whenever they come on the forums -- as you point out, I haven't done a scientific survey -- that most D&D games involve this kind of drifting to a very strong extent. A lot of the things that define a good D&D game seem to have required the DM to spend a lot of time experimenting and making things up, which I consider problematic. (It's like if Monopoly were an unplayable game unless you used the Free Parking lottery, which isn't mentioned anywhere in the manual.) Backstreet Boys may be a pop phenomenon that only is targetted at teenage girls, but most music is like this. Mozart's music, rap, blues, and jazz all are targetted phenomenon to a greater or lesser degree, and pop music is arguably the most arduous of them all. Mozart only had to satisfy a few noble patrons who had a limited repertoire of choices - they're almost literally a "captured audience." Backstreet Boys has to cater to a whole demographic and it includes vocal, instrumental, visual, and post-production values. The entire phenomenon of Backstreet Boys, right down to their tax exemptions, is a carefully choreographed product resulting from the efforts of entire teams of support people. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean that it's inane, and your refusal to tolerate the tastes of other people blinds you to subtleties that you can learn from. *sigh* While, in the long run, my awareness of the subjectivity of all human aesthetic judgments may mean that you are *technically* correct, I still can't believe you're seriously telling me that the Backstreet Boys are on the same level as -- or, as you almost seem to be saying, *superior* to -- the works of Mozart, and that I'm a bigot for not thinking so. So you really *do* hold with the "D&D is the best game in the world, for the same reasons that Microsoft Windows is the best operating system in the world, McDonald's is the best food in the world and Mandarin Chinese is the best language in the world" argument? In that case it really is impossible to discuss anything. Especially for WotC, who, since D&D is the market leader, have no one "better" than they are to copy, thus making every alteration they make to the game a terrible risk and encouraging them to never change anything at all. (This is the good ol' fashioned conservative business philosophy that causes former market leaders to die.) There are, in fact, factors like the network externality that explain why things are popular *beyond* "It's popular, so people must like them". McDonald's, for instance, doesn't make its money because most of its patrons actually consider McDonald's to be their favorite food in the world. I'm quite open to stuff like DitV, but not at the expense of D&D mechanics, and only when I want it. I don't want it stuffed down my throat because someone like you thinks I'm a moron. I think there's a serious split here between "D&D is the market leader primarily because of its history and its quasi-monopoly status, which itself is largely due to chance", and "D&D is the market leader because of its very specific and well-thought-out design strategy that it has been very successful at carrying out". If it's the former, then D&D really could only stand to benefit from learning from its smaller competitors, just like Microsoft could only benefit by learning from the Mac OS or Mozilla Firefox. If it's the latter, well... I don't see a whole lot of evidence that it's the latter. (C'mon. The core D&D books are walking this very shaky tightrope between doing things they actually want to do and maintaining a relationship with the D&D 2e and 1e rules. The design philosophy for D&D mutates with every new sourcebook, as you can see from Mike Mearls' super-controversial statements every time he makes another Tome of Battle or Magic Item Compendium. Do you really think that D&D would stop being the market leader even if they published a book saying "WE HATE YOU BECAUSE ALL OUR FANS ARE MORONS" in it?) Even if we provide a separate skill game set alongside the combat game set, how much each of those sets sees use will still depend on the individual group, and according to the DM's adjudication. It will still be "incomplete," and it will always be "incomplete," because it's supposed to be that way. The day D&D excludes its varied core fan base from playing it the way they want is the day it dies. Then the game would have "died" the instant it came out in OD&D, which had no rules at all for non-combat task resolution. Rules, as you say, can't ever prevent you from doing something you want to do. All they can do is give you a coherent idea of what to do. Archtyrant Terevoth: In all fairness, the current Diplomacy check tables aren't as "broken" as you seem to think it is. A Helpful Cthulu is only more likely to drive you to madness as he seeks to "enlighten" you to his ways. He may not eat you outright, but you'd be too busy frothing at the mouth to notice. Likewise, a Lich is usually an insane spellcaster who is convinced that being undead is a great thing to be. If you get him Helpful, he may just try to kill you, whereas he may not care enough to do so if he's Indifferent.[/quote] Well, yes, but to be fair these are both pretty special cases. (Most liches, for one thing, don't actually believe undeath is a great thing to be for *everybody*, just themselves, often because it was the only way to escape a natural death.) If you use Diplomacy cheese against your vanilla person who wants to kill you, it is broken. (Or, at least, your DM has to do some serious stretching of what "Helpful" means.) In all fairness, that's what the DM says anyway in a freeform scenario, except that you get to think that he's decided based on how well you acted. He may not be. He could be just rolling the dice, too. Just have to point out that this is the textbook definition of illusionism, and the primary argument for having a system rather than quietly deciding you'll just pick the actor you like best *or* just roll the dice is what's going on here -- the perception of unfairness. If everyone really does come into the game with the expectation that the game is to be a test of their acting ability and public speaking skills, nothing wrong with that. (Some LARPs or freeform games are explicitly for good actors or good writers only.) I think it sits awkwardly as part of a D&D game, but whatever. If people know that it's going to be based on rolling dice, and know where to do stuff like allocate skill points or take feats or whatever to increase a modifier on the dice, that's also fine. (It might be an abusable system, but in essence it's fine.) If people *think* it's one but it's actually the other, or if people don't know what it is at all and it turns out to be one or the other, that's a lot less fine. It means if the players ever get a peek behind the DM Screen or even guess what's behind the DM Screen, they will tend to get angry and ticked off and disappointed. That's the danger of illusionism -- that you can't always keep up the illusion. (You can keep on making up a dungeon as you go along until the day you get tired and realize you've got no ideas for what's behind the next door. You can keep fudging until the day the players suddenly realize you're fudging and stop really trying in combat as a result. Etc.) To clarify something -- I don't think fudging in D&D is bad, necessarily. I've done it. I think that having a system where you *have* to fudge in order to prevent the game from not being fun anymore for your players is a problem, though. And I think the number of players who really are okay with sudden death in an ordinary encounter thanks to a bad roll are fewer than you might think -- which is a problem with D&D combat rules not really doing what people want them to, not a problem with the DM who's using illusion to pull his way out of them. (People who say "I don't have a problem with lethality in D&D -- I've never had a game go off the rails because I did in a fight" probably had illusionist DMs.) In all fairness, I actually started gaming with Monopoly, and no one really played that by the rules, either. I had so little to go on as a child that we invented rules on Monopoly alone and playtested them until we got them right where we wanted. What we ended up with was nothing like Monopoly, but we found it fun nonetheless. I suppose I've carried over the same philosophy ever since. While I don't change the rules for Chess (since I don't think they can easily be changed favorably), I never really saw D&D as anything more than a building set of rules. This is particularly so because I played heavily in 2e D&D, and the rules there were so completely contradictory that you had no choice BUT to choose and collate the set of rules you liked best. I don't think DIY is bad. I just don't think people should have to DIY if they don't want to, and certainly lots of people who play D&D don't expect to *have* to (and you currently kind of do). I also don't think you need a "building set" if you want to DIY. I really think that a set of rules where you have to change half the rules to do what you want is harming rather than helping you -- you could do what you want more easily by making up your own set of rules. (Which wouldn't be as polished, or as well-tested, or come in a glossy book with pretty pictures -- which is why there's a point in asking people to design and publish.)
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-27-07, 03:12 PM	The gameplay ends up feeling a bit like a card game crossed with a more interesting variant of tic-tac-toe. The effect is a rather startlingly good abstract simulation of debates. Character abilities play a part, player choice plays a part, and it's actually quite easy to take the whole system and draw from it a roleplayed debate with arguments going back and forth until someone wins. Well, to me that doesn't sound great, because it's taking the role-playing out of the equation. For a wargame, fine, you can have rules like that to convince people of certain things, but for an RPG, you generally want to be doing some role-playing in debate scenes, not just arranging tiles on a board. It sounds much like the social mini-game in Oblivion, just more complex. Which, while it does something, it doesn't actually give you the feeling you're talking to anyone because it's so abstract. It's more like you yell out, "I challenge you to a debate!" Then you both whip out chessboards and the winner says, "You are a most skilled player, you have convinced me." All without a single real word being said. Personally in an RPG, I like to know what the arguments and the reasons for why you're doing something. Also, again, factoring in personalities should matter.
Dexter_Blacktyde 03-27-07, 03:15 PM	I think anything that slows the game down and saps the energy from it is a bad thing, whether it comes in the form of "Wait, there are rules for this in some obscure sourcebook" or "Wait, we have to actually have this conversation in character". That's why I said there's no objective "better" and "worse", only subjective "better" and "worse". "Wait a minute, you really wanna go in there?" isn't what I mean by in-character dialogue. Just by looking at it you can't tell for sure whether it's in-character. It's not what I mean by in-character dialogue -- if people say things like "Let's kill this guy" or "Whoa, no way am I doing that", that's usually the half-in-character half-out-of-character stuff. (For one thing, you notice that this kind of conversation is usually between players, talking about what the players are going to make the PCs do.) What does it matter what it looks like when you write it down? :confused: Let's just assume for a second it's clear that it's in-character, okay? I just tried to point out that in-character talk doesn't have to take up more time because you don't have to say "[Name] asks [name]" or "[Name] tells [name]" all the time, that's all. It's a lot less natural for a player to talk to the DM as though the DM really were an NPC, because the NPCs, unlike the PCs, are not extensions of the DM with the DM's own intentions, and the DM can jump back and forth between them. It's in that kind of situation that usually causes problems, when the DM says "No, talk to the king in character". *sigh* I must admit Roxlimn does have a point. "This is a lot less natural for a player, that's the kind of situation that usually causes problems..." Based on my own experiences, I have to disagree, and we can't do much more than compare experiences, can we? but the thing is that the "I have to be in character" mode gets to be an unwritten rules way too often and makes people feel like they're doing something wrong if they speak out of character even when that's the better thing to do. ("I interrogate him for useful information" rather than spending an hour and a half thinking of what specific questions you want to ask and in what order.) When I read all your examples of players and DMs in this thread I get the feeling you're either talking about complete beginners, complete morons, complete jerks or a combination thereof. Sorry, I just needed to say that. At least once. Feel better already ;) Anyway - and I'm basing my reply on your numerous uses of phrasings that indicate an as-is state, not exceptions -, in this example I see a group of not terribly experienced gamers who don't know each other all that well. Maybe there are groups out there that have some years under their belts and still act like a bunch of startled chickens whenever something breaks their routine. I don't know many, but I live on another continent, I have no idea of the circumstances in the US (assuming that's where you live). All I can say is that your examples seem to revolve around not too common or even worst case scenarios which in my experience are the exception. Granted, as a D&D player I might belong to a minority, this I have learned, but still... Being more method-acting with your character doesn't mean "more roleplaying". Maybe not in your book. What you're describing what roleplaying should be I wouldn't even call roleplaying anymore, it's something that rather reminds me of a video game with a gripping story, but no actual roleplaying involved, rather the simulation thereof. To each their own, mind you, but maybe we should clear up the definition of roleplaying. What's yours? DB
ArcTan 03-27-07, 03:19 PM	Or, possibly your opinion that its "a context that doesn't support it too well" might, in fact, be totally subjective. A lot of what is getting said is something like this: "Baseball is fine, but its really got a lot of silly overhead like having to wait for the pitch and a successful hit and all that. You spend half your time on the bench, or waiting. It really doesn't support getting exercise. Yoga is so much better. You are exercising all the time you are doing it, and you don't need a whole group of people." I don't want to draw too close a comparison between D&D and baseball, because they're not that much alike (baseball, like all athletic games, like all wargames, is a competitive game with a single goal, already unlike D&D) but you realize that it *is* possible to criticize a game on this basis, right? I think the fact that baseball has a pretty uneven, slow rhythm is, in fact, why baseball isn't very popular in most countries across the world, compared to football (soccer). It's also why Major League Baseball actually *changed the rules* of baseball in order to make the game go faster, in the 1960s. (If you want to draw a rough analogy here, D&D 3.5 lowered the pitcher's mound and shrunk the strike zone, and soccer is the equivalent of World of Warcraft, Magic: the Gathering, or whatever else is "killing" D&D this week.) Sure, baseball won't ever disappear, and the people who love it passionately will still love it. But this is just because of the simple principle that things that are popular stay popular, regardless of what they're actually like. D&D, which is nowhere near as culturally important as baseball, can actually benefit from changing the way it works internally, to a greater degree than just tweaking the rules to make it just a little bit less boring.
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-27-07, 03:20 PM	In all fairness, the current Diplomacy check tables aren't as "broken" as you seem to think it is. A Helpful Cthulu is only more likely to drive you to madness as he seeks to "enlighten" you to his ways. He may not eat you outright, but you'd be too busy frothing at the mouth to notice. Well, Cthulhu doesn't directly seek to drive people to madness. The madness actually comes from knowing something like him exists. Likewise, a Lich is usually an insane spellcaster who is convinced that being undead is a great thing to be. If you get him Helpful, he may just try to kill you, whereas he may not care enough to do so if he's Indifferent. Um.... what? Helpful doesn't mean, "will attack party". Sure, maybe he offers to turn you into a lich, but he's not going to just kill you, nor is he probably going to do much against your will, because that wouldn't be very helpful of him. And keep in mind that you merely need to shift hostile to indifferent to get away from every single combat you have in the game. So yeah, that is pretty broken. Being able to bypass any combat you want, just with diplomacy. If people *think* it's one but it's actually the other, or if people don't know what it is at all and it turns out to be one or the other, that's a lot less fine. It means if the players ever get a peek behind the DM Screen or even guess what's behind the DM Screen, they will tend to get angry and ticked off and disappointed. That's the danger of illusionism -- that you can't always keep up the illusion. Why does it have to be one or the other? Can't a DM take into account the character's social ability in his freeform decision. I mean, legal rulings in courts by judges are pretty much free-form, but they take into account all kinds of precedents, mitigating circumstances, and god knows what else.
a_psh 03-27-07, 03:27 PM	Translation: The game is driven by DM fiat, not rules.Stories are driven by what the players at the table do, yes. But the end result of playing every NPC in Dogs like a psychopath is that the PCs will gun them all down or die trying (in most cases, the former). Which is kinda like what would happen in real life if we all had guns and none of us were ever willing to back down from an argument. I wouldn't call that "fiat," though: you can't just decree that rocks fall and everyone dies, for example. Also, I particularly worry about what a character who does specialize in social ability can do if he burns all his dice on social tasks. It seems as though you're just going to run into the uber diplomacy build here too. And that's the problem. The PCs aren't impartial, so having them hand out bonus dice probably isn't a good idea. They want their companions to succeed, so it's less about what's "cool" and more about "what's most helpful". It's much harder for PCs to draw an impartial line because they have something to risk (their character), where the DM isn't risking anything. Thus if you want to try to have someone determine what's cool and what isn't, you're better off using the DM.Okay, just to be clear: that's an example of how to suddenly pull a 180 and have your character do something "out of character" for him or her because you think it's really cool. (Stories are all about characters being "out of character." That's how they develop in the first place.) Really, the best way to pull off CraggleRock's plan in TSOY if I desperately want to win that check is to spend advances to boost your Orate skill directly. If I were trying to guarantee a success in that scenario, I'd burn two Keys and take Orate up from 0 to 2 and then add Secret of Enhancement (Orate). Then I would throw my whole Reason score into it and come out with a 5 (on a scale where 1 is the typical target number and 7 is a godlike feat, that's a pretty good success!). Yes, that requires changing my character. That's the point, though: dramatic scenes alter your character
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-27-07, 03:37 PM	Combat doesn't phase out player choice. There is no reason that a skills game can't be likewise. No, it doesn't but this is because combat is easier to picture. We can imagine what a flank looks like, or a disarm or what not. Thus we can effect more chance in combat. Combat is a gradual process where lots of things can happen. One side can die, both sides can die, one side can retreat, there can be a mutual truce, one side can be subdued and so on. In physical skill situations, you can make them more exciting, you just need more rules. People can picture a particularly dangerous climb or a chariot race or what have you, but you need a lot of extra rules to handle that. Every time you start writing more rules, you're writing a new mini-game, like combat. And you're going to end up with a pretty amount of mini-games at the end. In social situations, the actual effect is a bit more vague, because it's not physical. Beyond total victory and standoff, we don't have much of an adequate means to discuss social results without pure DM fiat. You need options like, "Made some good arguments but didn't fully convince the guy". Now, that's not the same as saying "you're 50 feet behind in the chariot race." or "you've climbed 30 feet but then lost your grip and had to hope your rope system stops your fall." We can't adequately picture what a gradual success in social encounters means, because there is nothing to picture. All you know is the end result. To get adequate player choice, PCs need to be able to visualize what's going on, so they can formulate a good choice. I mean, sure you can offer them token choices that amount to rock, paper, scissors, but an ideal player choice system needs to give players meaningful choices. The choice also needs to be beyond "what I'm good at" too, otherwise the system turns into a one trick pony attitude, which also isn't a choice at all, it's just endlessly repeating the obviously superior choice and hoping it works. Keep in mind all the combat mechanics. I'm not talking about just attack rolls and AC. I'm talking about elemental resistances, SR, concealment, incorporeality, flight, etc. To make a social system that offers sufficient choice, you need to incorporate all of those to make things interesting. Otherwise social encoutners are going to look like a bunch of 2nd edition fighters hacking at something where all they do is say "I attack!" every round. I can pick locks. Seriously. I would like to roleplay it a bit, but it can take a while, and meanwhile everyone else is getting bored. The key objection to Open Locks is that it's a solo challenge. It has to be resolved quickly, or else be an extremely exciting minigame for everyone or the game's pace and energy suffers. Also that it's a physical challenge and not one that promotes any reasonable player choices. Yes, but the how-to of how to make puzzles that work within the framework of D&D play isn't the same as making puzzles for use in puzzlegames, or for use as standalone games. They can work the same way, though you should probably think of how the puzzle interacts with D&D physics as well. For instance, your game shouldn't come to a screeching halt when a cleric casts a divination or augury about the puzzle. Also, certain puzzles may be able to be bypassed in ways you hadn't thought of. A chasm with a complex series of levers needed to extend a bridge could just be jumped or flown over, or maybe the PCs decide to extend ropes across it. Now, you can either prevent these sort of tactics somehow, or build that expectation into the puzzle itself.
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-27-07, 03:40 PM	Stories are driven by what the players at the table do, yes. But the end result of playing every NPC in Dogs like a psychopath is that the PCs will gun them all down or die trying (in most cases, the former). Which is kinda like what would happen in real life if we all had guns and none of us were ever willing to back down from an argument. I wouldn't call that "fiat," though: you can't just decree that rocks fall and everyone dies, for example. Well it is fiat. Basically the power level of the NPCs is determined by the DM's choice. So if the DM wants the NPC to resist you in a social contest, then he can, just by allocating all the NPC's points against you. This is effectively the same as just letting the DM decide from the start, only it hides it in a system format and pretends you're not doing that.
Dexter_Blacktyde 03-27-07, 04:01 PM	I'm informing him that he's insulting people, and I'm telling him exactly how he's doing it. I don't feel insulted. This is just a (sometimes heated) discussion like any other, nothing to be taken to heart :) Re: styles of play (...) Of course D&D is a toolbox, and of course I've houseruled the system - most GMs do, I assume. And yes, there are advanced rules like Unearthed Arcana et al, but in order to be willing to purchase them, you have to know that the system doesn't even try to give you what you want; what's more, you have to know that there are more ways of roleplaying than what D&D offers to begin with. How is a newbie supposed to know that? Some kid buys the core rules and thinks, "Huh... so that's what roleplaying's about." I want the kid to know this is not what roleplaying's about, this is just what D&D's about and therefore only a small fraction of the plethora of systems and settings out there. Of course WotC doesn't want the kid to know that. It wants to create the illusion that D&D is a "one size fits all" generic system, see its status as the market leader in the US and the beginner system for American roleplayers, see the Realms and Eberron, the multitude of systems AD&D supported, the OGL that was specifically supposed to encourage 3rd party publishers to create settings compatible with the d20 rules [utopia mode] so that one fine day everyone would play in a setting that requires the core rules and WotC accumulates profits beyond its wildest dreams [/utopia mode]. Regarding generic rules: The problem is that the "basic" D&D core rules are already very specific. You can cherrypick all you like, they will only support a very limited number of styles. Anyway, I'm not talking about using only basic rules and nothing else. In my example the basic rules would be the groundwork which different styles / flavors could build upon. See Eberron: a few setting-specific extra rules gently expand the core rules. See Midnight: numerous setting-specific rules heavily expand and even replace the core rules. Makes sense to me. DB
StormKnight 03-27-07, 04:07 PM	...but you realize that it *is* possible to criticize a game on this basis, right? Obviously its possible. You just did so. In your analogy, you just gave a reason that you didn't like baseball. It has "an uneven, slow, rhythm". Whether its "slow" is completely subjective, as are whether "slow" and "uneven" are bad traits. Whether you think baseball has bad traits or not though, saying "it should be like yoga instead" just isn't going to make points with anyone but yoga enthusiasts. Baseball isn't yoga. They aren't even the same kind of thing. I feel like the argument here is the same way. People are picking a different style of gaming, which doesn't remotely resemble what D&D is about, and saying D&D should be more like it. Further, people keep making assumed statements about elements that are entirely subjective as though they are concrete fact, and supported their own conclusion. For example: ...to a greater degree than just tweaking the rules to make it just a little bit less boring. Well, no one wants a boring game, I'd say that's a given. Is D&D boring? Purely subjective. What would make it "less boring"? Again, purely subjective. Person A might say "a more concrete social system". Person B might say "toss out the skills entirely and just let the players free-form everything outside of combat". I think there are lots of improvements that could be made to D&D. They probably are not remotely the same set of changes that you think would improve the game. And keep in mind that you merely need to shift hostile to indifferent to get away from every single combat you have in the game. So yeah, that is pretty broken. Being able to bypass any combat you want, just with diplomacy. If you had the 10 minutes to spend on a diplomacy check, I'm sure you could have found another way to avoid the combat. (Yes, there is that -10 as a full action bit, but that is a special case for certain actions, not a default modifier). And letting you "bypass" any combat is a very relative term. An enemy soldier on the field of battle is still an enemy soldier. A friendly enemy soldier would probably let you surrender, or maybe let you flee without harm, but that doesn't mean she will defect, or let you saunter past to kill the general. But the end result of playing every NPC in Dogs like a psychopath is that the PCs will gun them all down or die trying. Which is not what the original poster suggested. Just because a character cannot be persuaded does not mean she is a psychopath. Since the GM has decided the NPC WILL NOT go back to town with the PCs to get help for the disease that's killing her ("Won't go back 2D20"), the logical progression is that the PCs kill her?
ArcTan 03-27-07, 04:13 PM	What does it matter what it looks like when you write it down? :confused: Let's just assume for a second it's clear that it's in-character, okay? I just tried to point out that in-character talk doesn't have to take up more time because you don't have to say "[Name] asks [name]" or "[Name] tells [name]" all the time, that's all. In some situations, when what you have to say is simple and direct. "Get out of there!" is shorter than "I tell her to get out of there." On the other hand, "I explain to her everything that's happened since we got separated at the cave entrance" is infinitely shorter than "Well, Sara, the first thing that happened when we got separated by that rockslide was that we were stopped and interrogated by these orcs, you see, and..." *sigh* I must admit Roxlimn does have a point. "This is a lot less natural for a player, that's the kind of situation that usually causes problems..." Based on my own experiences, I have to disagree, and we can't do much more than compare experiences, can we? Okay. Can you give an example of when it's easier to have a conversation with an NPC than with another player? When I read all your examples of players and DMs in this thread I get the feeling you're either talking about complete beginners, complete morons, complete jerks or a combination thereof. Sorry, I just needed to say that. At least once. Feel better already ;) Enh. Maybe I've had bad luck. Maybe I attract bad players. Whatever. They've still been problems for me. (Moreover -- and even though we all know that the Internet selects for complaining over praise -- I hear stories like it all the time from the boards and online discussion communities.) Anyway - and I'm basing my reply on your numerous uses of phrasings that indicate an as-is state, not exceptions -, in this example I see a group of not terribly experienced gamers who don't know each other all that well. Maybe there are groups out there that have some years under their belts and still act like a bunch of startled chickens whenever something breaks their routine. I don't know many, but I live on another continent, I have no idea of the circumstances in the US (assuming that's where you live). All I can say is that your examples seem to revolve around not too common or even worst case scenarios which in my experience are the exception. Granted, as a D&D player I might belong to a minority, this I have learned, but still... It's not the "startled chickens" thing that bothers me. A player might not spend an hour thinking of questions -- he might very enthusiastically jump in with questions. And only later does it transpire that he didn't think of some crucial question that -- had he actually been interrogating the prisoner for an hour as he actually would have if this were actually real -- he'd never have missed. Etc. Trying to pretend the boundary between game world and real world is smooth when it's not. Maybe not in your book. What you're describing what roleplaying should be I wouldn't even call roleplaying anymore, it's something that rather reminds me of a video game with a gripping story, but no actual roleplaying involved, rather the simulation thereof. To each their own, mind you, but maybe we should clear up the definition of roleplaying. What's yours? Imagining a character in a particular situation and making choices to see what that character does. I mean, I think the in-character dialogue is the least of the issues here -- you can roleplay by actually pretending to *be* the character and doing what would be best for her or by using the character as something you control and intentionally getting her in trouble -- but either way, in-character dialogue isn't central to playing the role. Do you really think this: "I recoil, horrified. I plead with him to reconsider his case. I recount to him endless details of people like him who have tried to defy death using dark magic and come to terrible ends. I beg him not to force me to have to kill him, for the good of the world." (hackneyed example, I know) isn't roleplaying because it doesn't involve speaking the character's lines word-for-word? DB[/QUOTE]
ArcTan 03-27-07, 04:14 PM	Well, Cthulhu doesn't directly seek to drive people to madness. The madness actually comes from knowing something like him exists. Um.... what? Helpful doesn't mean, "will attack party". Sure, maybe he offers to turn you into a lich, but he's not going to just kill you, nor is he probably going to do much against your will, because that wouldn't be very helpful of him. And keep in mind that you merely need to shift hostile to indifferent to get away from every single combat you have in the game. So yeah, that is pretty broken. Being able to bypass any combat you want, just with diplomacy. Those first two quotes aren't me, by the way. For what it's worth I completely agree with you, but I think this is much more a problem with D&D's definition of NPC attitude than it is the Diplomacy skill itself (since the problem with "shifting attitudes" recurs again and again, with charm spells, for instance).
a_psh 03-27-07, 04:31 PM	Which is not what the original poster suggested. Just because a character cannot be persuaded does not mean she is a psychopath. Since the GM has decided the NPC WILL NOT go back to town with the PCs to get help for the disease that's killing her ("Won't go back 2D20"), the logical progression is that the PCs kill her?You don't construct NPCs arbitrarily. See, in D&D, that NPC can go "Lalalalala I won't go back to town" all day long. In DitV, both she and the players are running out of steam as they go. Your conflict can't stalemate because it's tied to a finite resource. If the PCs can beat her while talking to her, then she either does what the stakes say or has to switch to something other than talking to prolong the conflict. Like punching one of them in the face. Likewise, if the players lose, they can't cajole her forever: either they let it go or start to use force. If the GM is dead-set on having all of his characters actually give up their lives instead of ever caving on anything, then they are, indeed, psychopaths. But there's somewhere for that conflict to go that isn't just "Nope, can't do that." Hence "Say yes or roll the dice." ... Well it is fiat. Basically the power level of the NPCs is determined by the DM's choice. So if the DM wants the NPC to resist you in a social contest, then he can, just by allocating all the NPC's points against you. This is effectively the same as just letting the DM decide from the start, only it hides it in a system format and pretends you're not doing that.'Cept the GM can't strip you of authorship, either intentionally or accidentally, by reinterpreting your actions. Being able to use his own narrative power to challenge yours is exactly what playing a game is all about. That's why you have rules in the first place. I'm not looking to turn the GM into a table -- quite the opposite, I'm looking to turn him into more of a human, since he totally can focus on making things that he wants to happen without having to worry about walking all over the other players at the same time.
ArcTan 03-27-07, 04:32 PM	Dexter Blacktyde: I don't believe so. If I reported him to the WizOs and asked them to intercede - that would be harsh. I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt. I'm assuming that he doesn't realize that he's alienating a WHOLE LOT of people. Oh, believe me, I was aware of it several pages ago. I'm informing him that he's insulting people, and I'm telling him exactly how he's doing it. You're informing me that you feel insulted and exactly how you feel insulted. That's different. Honestly, if I weren't used to people being terribly offended over me simply pointing out that I think they're wrong about something, I wouldn't be on these forums. Those insulting statements of his are unimportant to his main points - they can easily be removed by him without loss of content. I actually think if all I said was, "Hey, have you all tried these indie RPGs? Try 'em!" they would be pretty clearly off-topic for a D&D message board. The point of bringing them up on a D&D message board is to point out the problems that exist with D&D being the market leader, the non-gamer's mental idea of everything an RPG is, the only game the majority of gamers have even tried, and yet still being the highly limited -- and yes, flawed -- game that it is. If you don't think it's highly limited and flawed, well, we disagree. If you think it's insulting that I continue to insist it *is* highly limited and flawed even though you disagree, well, I have no choice but to insult you. While, I'm all for allowing everyone to have their cake and eat it, too, the unfortunate truth is that even as a wargame, there's not a whole lot of leeway D&D can do things without sacrificing flavor - and flavor is what interests people, even if they may not like it a particular flavor all that much. The default flavor is "hyperheroic," of course, to the point that D&D is really about medieval-flavor superheroes. Even so, it's not all that hard to tweak it to be more "gritty" in terms of tone, and the DMG gives you several options for how to to that. More options exist in Unearthed Arcana, and d20 Modern. While I think that D&D is a generic system in terms of style of play, it's a very ungeneric system in terms of flavor of play, and I think that both of those are strengths. This is why Forge terminology comes in handy, because since it feels to me like you just made those terms up, I have no idea what you mean by that. It's not so hard to change the flavor in the most basic sense, of setting -- of moving us to the modern era with machine guns and aliens rather than greatswords and orcs. It's also not so hard to change the flavor to struggling superheroes who bleed a lot rather than super superheroes who win a lot. But the rhythm of the game, the way the game moves, the things that drive the game forward -- those are things that don't change no matter how much you add machine gun rules for D&D or lower the massive damage threshold or whatever. It still feels like interspersed wargame and freeform. You can already trim down D&D easily enough to be as simple as you want. Theoretically, combat can be as simple as an opposed Attack Bonus check, or Character Level check although the rules don't specifically say this. You can extrapolate it easily enough, though, from the pieces of rules that they've outlined, even in just the core rules. It's not that easy to realize that this is what you need to do in order to make your game run more smoothly, is the thing. Having the big complex knobbly ruleset as core is one of those things that creates inertia in games and makes people reluctant to "cut" things from the "RAW". I may be extraordinary in having this impression, but 3e D&D to me is so easy to manipulate that it's like having a lump of clay. I can devise the kind of check or series of opposed rolls that I think best "flavors" the situation and it doesn't always have to be specifically mentioned in the rules themselves. A BAB table to me is less like an unchangeable table and more like a piece of lego I can use at my leisure. And I can visualize how it relates to level and saves and spell progression numerically and in graph form. Good job. A cursory look at the boards or at my local D&D group would show that you are probably extraordinary in this respect. So when I want level-derived variables (for when I think levels help the heroes be better), I can usually just select the one I think makes the scene most interesting. For instance, selecting AB not only gets me a specific numbers set for a particular level, it also rewards Warrior types and gives a sense of the activity being "accuracy" or "combat skill" related. You could say I think of BAB as more like a skill check than anything else (with arcanes getting cross class skill ranks). Well, yes, it is. If the game system explicitly explained this or even provided a series of variants for how to treat attacking, this might even be a helpful fact. But as long as the majority of D&D players look at you bug-eyed if you talk about the possibility of making "attacking" being a "skill check", this won't help. The core books could be more explicit about these relationships, of course, and the probability curves at each rank and level, but it would probably complicate the cores more than the average guy would understand easily, and it would not better his life in any way. It would if it really were a toolbox where he could add things like BAB progressions if he wanted to. On the other hand, the core books ARE explicit about it in that they did print the numerical progressions and their relationships to each other (and the effects of other mechanics) but it's like being explicit about it in Greek. Us numerically gifted dudes understand it, but not everyone does (and I don't really know how to fix that). Make the core of the game simpler (a streamlined game that runs on its own as much as possible), and present extra wrinkles as options to plug in? I would actually be pretty happy if all they did was use the existing kludges they have in Unearthed Arcana, and printed a book with just the four base classes to start with, or d20 Call of Cthulhu's offensive/defensive hero "classes". True20 is already a good fix if this is as far as you want to go with fixing it, but no one owns it. They *are* doing a lot of True20 type fixes for the new d20 Star Wars, which tells me that people like me's jabbering isn't falling on deaf ears. (No more skill ranks in d20 SW -- you either have it or you don't. Etc.) Compartmentalized rules would be how I see the system evolving as, and that's why I'm glad that the rules currently are as modular as they are. You can add, expand, or contract the rules as you like, and for most of these modifications, the game plays much the same. It would be nice if we could get labels on the rules depending on which style of play they promote, as well as explicit intructions on how to use them in each style. Yeah, along with rules for the things there currently are no printed rules for but that every group evolves rules for. A system can only be so generic before it bores the hell out of anyone who reads it. GURPS is an excellent example of this. GURPS is boring only because its core rules are very generic and yet very long, and specific, and detailed. That's why the Forge has its current "dice don't mean anything in and of themselves" standard. The upshot of this is that GURPS sourcebooks frequently have almost no mechanics at all and are a lot more fun to read for pleasure than d20 sourcebooks. Moreover, I don't usually let the rules dictate the style of play my groups play. I only select the rules that cater to that group, and I apply them similarly - they're tools, not constraints. That's why I like supplements - they're more bricks in my LEGO box, and I'm under no special constraint to use them like the instruction in their own box says. If I want to use a "car" windshield as a space platform window, I'll do it that way and anyone who objects on the basis of rules "RAW" can go find their own game. Honestly, the DMG explicitly tells you to use the rules in this fashion, so I don't understand why everyone doesn't, or so it seems. The D&D designers were surprised when they did polls for Unearthed Arcana and found out how many groups never used houserules at all. Why? Partly because people are timid, partly because people lack free time to think up and test new rules, and partly because people aren't that "creative", so to speak -- not that they're actually uncreative, but that rules *do* exert a powerful pressure on how you think. When you're a newbie who's never played before and you pick up a D&D book, you have no idea what an RPG "should" be, and D&D presents itself as a model of just how things should work. Groups can go years without realizing that one of the problems they've been having is because of a particular rule that they really can just drop. (Look at what a revelation it was when people figured out that the Sorcerer's spontaneous casting does not, in fact, make him a horribly broken impossible to control character, and that Wizards never actually needed prepared spellcasting as a balancing condition.) The only thing you can say against rules in this sense is that they don't provide you with enough tools to play the way you want. You don't have to use your screwdriver to try to screw in a flathead nail, even if the screwdriver manual tells you to do so. Just use your hammer instead. Having the screwdriver in your box is still useful. If I give you a ton of screwdrivers and screws and vaguely tell you that you can "look into other fastening methods if you want", most people will still be there, ten years later, trying to drive screws through everything. What would suck (and kinda does in D&D) is if you don't have a hammer and have to try to hammer in a nail with a screwdriver. And a lot of people will do things like pick up a nail and go "Where are the threads on this? This screw is defective" and toss it out without thinking about it, because years and years of playing just one game locks your thinking into certain patterns. (The Riddle of Steel was a revelation for me when it pointed out that no fantasy archetype of a wizard really is "balanced" against a sword-wielding warrior, and that it *is* fun to have a wizard who's flavored as being several hundred times more powerful than an ordinary person -- you just make it so that he's facing challenges that are *separate* from the challenges faced by the ordinary people travelling with him, rather than having all challenges be challenges for "the party", because "the party" doesn't all need to have the same goal. It's dirt-simple once you think of it, but it never came to me for years because, well, it's impossible to do that in the structure of a game like D&D, and that made me think it was impossible to do that in an RPG, period.)
ArcTan 03-27-07, 04:38 PM	Obviously its possible. You just did so. In your analogy, you just gave a reason that you didn't like baseball. It has "an uneven, slow, rhythm". Whether its "slow" is completely subjective, as are whether "slow" and "uneven" are bad traits. Well, it's not *so* subjective that the slow desertion of baseball en masse by fans wasn't enough to make them force drastic rules changes through to fundamentally change the pace of the game. But yes, this kind of thing is harder to prove in D&D. The numbers are smaller. More variance. Whether you think baseball has bad traits or not though, saying "it should be like yoga instead" just isn't going to make points with anyone but yoga enthusiasts. Baseball isn't yoga. They aren't even the same kind of thing. I feel like the argument here is the same way. People are picking a different style of gaming, which doesn't remotely resemble what D&D is about, and saying D&D should be more like it. ...Enh. I don't think it really *isn't* what D&D is about, though. I feel like the situation really is more like being in a neighborhood where, whenever someone wants to go outside to play, they say "Let's play baseball!" and we all go play baseball, because baseball is all we've ever played. It may be that we really want to play soccer, but we can't because no one knows what soccer is (because, in this imaginary world, the books that teach you to play soccer are obscure and hard to find). The closest we get is playing kickball instead of baseball because everyone in our games does find waiting for the pitch to be boring and wants a chance to run around and use their feet more. This may not actually match the situation in the gaming world at all. I think it does, but hey. I'm not, after all, God's gift to gaming. I do think, though, that there *are* situations -- *plenty* of them -- where a lot of people are stuck doing something that isn't really what they want to do because there's a lack of options. In a situation where one company totally dominates the market share that's usually more often the case than not. (McDonald's fast food. Microsoft Windows OS. Top 40 pop radio through ClearChannel.)
StormKnight 03-27-07, 04:47 PM	Likewise, if the players lose, they can't cajole her forever: either they let it go or start to use force. Um, wait, maybe I'm confused here. I thought the whole point is that you asserted that the DitV system ensured that the GM could not arbitrarily decide the outcome. If the players MUST lose, then the GM has arbitrarily decided the outcome. You've got characters using arbitrarily determined stats competing against NPCs with arbitrarily assigned stats, with outcomes that are defined entirely by the arbitrary descriptive abilities of the players. That's a system that is subject to horrible abuse if misplayed. I don't think that's a problem; any open-ended system is subject to abuse. But the advocates of systems like DitV somehow seem to believe that such a system will prevent such abuse.
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-27-07, 04:54 PM	See, in D&D, that NPC can go "Lalalalala I won't go back to town" all day long. No not really. You can't retry diplomacy rolls. So if the PCs fail, then they fail and can't try to influence the NPC again. In DitV, both she and the players are running out of steam as they go. Your conflict can't stalemate because it's tied to a finite resource. If the PCs can beat her while talking to her, then she either does what the stakes say or has to switch to something other than talking to prolong the conflict. The problem is that it sounds like the game is going to turn into a matter of sheer numbers. So you send in one PC to talk to the NPC. He fails. You send in your next PC, he fails but the NPC continues to get drained. You send in PC #3, eventually sheer numbers cause the NPC to run out of resources and you can achieve virtually any result you want that way. So you chain-haggle the magic shop owner till he runs out of points and has to give you his best magic item for 1 gold, simply because you've depleted him with constant nagging. That said, the D&D base model (but not system) is probably more realistic. Eventually you get to a point where your arguments simply fall on deaf ears, as opposed to being forced to resort to combat as wave after wave of people keep trying to wear down your mental resistance to manipulation. 'Cept the GM can't strip you of authorship, either intentionally or accidentally, by reinterpreting your actions. Being able to use his own narrative power to challenge yours is exactly what playing a game is all about. That's why you have rules in the first place. I'm not looking to turn the GM into a table -- quite the opposite, I'm looking to turn him into more of a human, since he totally can focus on making things that he wants to happen without having to worry about walking all over the other players at the same time. The GM is either omnipotent or he's just another player. Trying to create in between sequences to "protect" the PCs from the DM is crazy. If you're dealing with an omnipotent being, there is no point trying to create rules to restrict him, because he can find ways around the rules if he wants. No rules set is going to make a bad DM into a good DM. You might as well just accept that if your game has a poor DM, it isn't going anywhere.
a_psh 03-27-07, 04:57 PM	Um, wait, maybe I'm confused here. I thought the whole point is that you asserted that the DitV system ensured that the GM could not arbitrarily decide the outcome. If the players MUST lose, then the GM has arbitrarily decided the outcome. You've got characters using arbitrarily determined stats competing against NPCs with arbitrarily assigned stats, with outcomes that are defined entirely by the arbitrary descriptive abilities of the players. That's a system that is subject to horrible abuse if misplayed. I don't think that's a problem; any open-ended system is subject to abuse. But the advocates of systems like DitV somehow seem to believe that such a system will prevent such abuse.DitV in particular is fairly powergame-able (a lot more so than its soon-to-be-successor Afraid; it's still more abusable than TSOY and a lot more abusable than Spirit of the Century). "I steal your ability to contribute to the narrative," however, is very hard to pull off without resorting to behavior that outright disregards the existence of the game's rules.
Roxlimn 03-27-07, 04:58 PM	ArcTan: See StormKnight's post. I know that I'm probably thicker than a brick, and I'm not usually one to be someone to be telling you this. The fact that I've unknowingly offended uncounted posters in the past stands testament to my lack of subtlety, but how StormKnight puts it is truly how you sound. To put it in your words: Friend: I think "300" sucked royally." You: 1. It's silly to think "300" sucked. 2. You just don't know what you're talking about. 3. You need to watch more movies. All of these responses can and have been taken as insults. You don't need to be making these statements. It's not favorable to you. Both of those terms... If you'll go back, you'll note that I said that you and a_psh were engaging in jargon in a public forum without explaining what they meant. That's usually considered rude and counterproductive. It's a little like your doctor telling you you have advanced papillary carcinoma and then leaving without explaining anything more. If you must use jargon, take the time to explain. Best not to use jargon at all. My argument is and continues to be that there are many examples of movies, books, TV, etc. that take place in totally unrealistic worlds but are "immersive", and that to the contrary some very detailed and realistic demographic data isn't "immersive" at all, and that immersion and realism are two different things. And my counter continues to be, "that may very well be true, but it's beside the point." And I do think the idea that D&D has swords in it so that people will feel more distanced from the setting and less immersed is almost self-evidently dumb. I doubt that's what you really intended to say when you said it. It's only self-evidently dumb because you can't explain why. D&D is VERY unrealistic because it's not fun to engage, for one thing, in realistic violence. Few people would care for it, particularly if it's risk-free (because it would then be brutalization and/or murder). I don't think it's self-evidently dumb to say that a violent heroic roleplaying game makes a lot of things unrealistic in order to intentionally gloss over very unfun aspects of those things. Yes, and I've noticed that whenever you talk about anything at all on the Internet it doesn't take long for tempers to rise high. I don't consider myself responsible for that. You're actually wrong there, too. I've engaged in many threads about class, feat, and spell building, as well as some few threads in CharOp, and OA, and Psionics. In quite a few places, my posting has defused rising tones, and in many of those places, nothing very fiery ever happened. I also post answers to question I can answer. No fires there either. Just because you don't notice these activities of mine doesn't mean that they don't exist. To be sure, some of my most infamous appearances have been in very flame-infested threads, but all of us here share that to a greater or lesser extent. Liking wargaming doesn't make you a moron. Liking wargaming in a context that doesn't support it too well doesn't make you a moron either. It may just mean that you haven't been exposed to the wargaming community because you got into gaming through RPGs, and the barriers that separate gaming communitie are often pretty high. Generally speaking, assuming things about people can get you into trouble. In this case, it's even more aggresive than that, I'm afraid. In pursuing a ground-level change of what D&D is, you and a_psh aren't merely suggesting that these people try other games, you're basically telling them that they OF A CERTAINTY haven't tried better games and that you're suborning a game they like in order to exile them to games you know they'll like better. There's nothing soft or nonoffensive or suggestive about that. It's nothing less than a hostile takeover. Basically, you ARE telling them that they're idiots, and that you're banishing them to oblivion. It's impossible to say "Hey, you might like this thing better than what you're doing now, because you probably haven't heard of it or been exposed to it" without insulting someone? I guess I should never recommend new music or books to my friends, then. It's more like, "I'll be taking your favorite book now. I know you'll like something else better than this. Now go look for it." What I disagree with is the assertion that D&D is a perfect blend of all these factor and that these factors complement and synergize with each other, when more often I see them getting in each other's way. I haven't read any post that exalts D&D as the "perfect" game. Long time posters will be aware of Archtyrant Terevoth's problems with it, so he can't be thinking that it's perfect. Who's thinking that it's "perfect?" I LIKE "wargaming" in D&D. I've tried all those other things. In fact, most wargamers who play D&D of my acquaintance usually also do minis and Warhammer and Starcraft: the whole shebang. They still like to play D&D, just like they like to play Warhammer and Starcraft, too. It doesn't have to be perfect to be fun. What you're proposing is that we shouldn't be part of D&D because we enjoy other games. Say what?!?!? The fact that we enjoy other games is a basis to leave us out in the cold? What the heck kind of reasoning is that? You *can't*, as you said, please everyone... To the contrary. ALL of those people are getting their jollies off just fine. It's when they talk with each other and insult each other's opinions that the fur starts flying. Most often, gamers complain that they can't find a group that shares their tastes in D&D. That's common. The gamer community isn't so large that we always have a choice. However, if you fracture the gaming community even further by segregating "story" gamers from "war" gamers, the numbers would be even less, and we'd have less disagreements - because no one's playing anymore! It has nothing to do with "consciously being less realistic" in order to "limit our immersion". I'm pointing out one place where you were probably deliberately being hyperbolic in order to make the designers of D&D look like they had more intention behind what they were doing than they did. As the fact that so many people *like* playing with guns proves, you can have fun with guns just as much as with swords, and "limiting your immersion" has nothing to do with it. Of course it does. You just can't accept it for god knows what reason. D&D is quite studiously unrealistic, and the designers haven't been particularly shy about why that was. See, now it's reaching the point where if I say anything at all you're actually *trying* to find the most offensive possible way to interpret it so you can be mad at me. Not at all. "Swords are more fun than guns," is an inherently loaded statement, and if you posted that in any gun thread, you'd quickly find yourself in the middle of a firestorm. The problem isn't when people do this who want to do this and set up a whole game whose point is to do this (i.e. LARPing, generally -- and yeah, I've done stuff like that, and it can be fun). The problem is when people act like this is necessary for "immersion". It's fun because it's silly, not because it's a magical key to actually turning D&D into a living, breathing world. So those people who don't think it's silly and who think that it helps them enjoy the game by bringing them closer to their character? Those guys are just plain wackos? Or silly? Or crazy? What particular insult would you like to use? This is another case of your dictating to everyone what's "fun." In fact, this is worse. You're dictating to people HOW a fun thing is "fun." It doesn't work that way. "You enjoy chocolate sundaes because of the fudge." "Well, actually I really like the cold, smooth, texture..." "Nonsense! You don't know what you're talking about. You like it because of the fudge." Did I say that? I HAVE INSIGHT THAT YOU OTHER GUYS DON'T HAVE!!!! LISTEN TO MY WORDS!!!! Yeah. This is really the question I keep asking -- are the encumbrance rules used in your games because they're the *best* or most *efficient* possible tools for the job, or because they're written in the core rules and it's easier to use them than to not? Do your players groan because, regardless of whether or not the encumbrance rules see use in your games (which they don't in many), they're still a pain in the neck to keep track of? I keep track of encumbrance for them. It's not a pain at all for me. I can keep track of up to 6 people's encumbrances at a time. They don't need to lift a finger. Some of them used to check me, but they invariably decide that I'm accurate enough not to bother. I use them because they're there and they're useful for my purposes. There are shortcuts, and I use these shortcuts for large masses of NPCs, but in general... The main way this facilitates roleplaying is that your character has an identity that persists after each combat. It's no quantum leap toward "not a wargame", though -- certainly OD&D wasn't -- and D&D 3.5 is, at best, a few steps ahead from that. The characterization also facilitates roleplaying, and yes, that HAS progressed very significantly. It's not exactly "gone nowhere." but if the game starts as a wargame and the direction of progress is supposedly in moving away from its roots towards a "role-playing game", however that's defined, then it's not unreasonable to use the term "forward" for that. "Forward" meaning moving towards a game YOU like, and away from games others like. It's not also unreasonable to use "forward" to mean improvements in a game people already like, and using "forward" in your sense insults the people who already like it because it implies that they like stagnation - even are agents of stagnation. It's like saying "America has gone nowhere since its inception!" If it's not going to a place where, say, Brazilians think it ought to go, then they could very well say that, but you'll notice that it'll incense an awful lot of Americans. Or that hack and slashers, in fact, have a dizzying array of cakes to choose from -- from Warhammer to World of Warcraft to Nethack -- and I'd like a little cake of my own, preferably cake that I don't have to order as little black-and-white booklets from tiny online indie publishers. 1. A repetition, but it bears repeating: so wargamers, already having lots of games to play, don't deserve to enjoy D&D their way? 2. If your game style isn't generating a lot of money, it's probably because you're not shelling out enough, or there isn't enough interest in it to make it big. In which case turning D&D into it only makes D&D into another one of those small indie companies. Or maybe these indie companies are churning out such crappy games that no one wants to play them outside a few rabidly loyal cult followers? As I've kept saying, if I'm playing an RPG system at all, I want the system to do something. Doing something doesn't necessarily mean providing a meticulously detailed dice-based simulation of the world with all physical factors carefully labelled. All physical factors? Meticulously detailed? Are you speaking of D&D here? I don't believe so. In which case, I agree. I was, if you'll notice, referring to games made at Forge. I've been to the Forge. The place was so full of individuals so full of themselves it's a wonder they had any place left over for the posts. And I mean that in the best possible way. These guys are just missing the boat, here. Unilaterally deciding what's fun was the way of TSR in its dying days, and in particular, the lack of respect for much of its fan base. That didn't pan out well then, and I don't expect it to pan out today. The sad thing is, whenever someone brings up normal fan-based requests (not from their own cult following), they appear not to listen much. I suppose you could say it's a niche business, and it appears to be doing well on that basis - but it's never going to be mainstream if it refuses to cater to mainstream demand. And if it's not mainstream - well then it's an indie game with black and white print. Or you can play it with Charles Darrow's original rules tightly enforced, and then it becomes a scary cutthroat game of chance that ends in an hour with one cutthroat shoving everyone else out of business. Actually, it doesn't. That's the problem. We have this really weird guy who just keeps on landing on rails and utilities. It doesn't matter what we do. We even tried rolling for him. He just lands on rails and utilities. Not always, but often enough that he can defeat people who own half the board. After one particularly brutal 4 hour marathon where it was just him and one other player, we decided that it was time to step in. As for Darrow's rules, well, it quickly became quite boring. You usually knew the frontrunners within the first 15 minutes, and the rest of the time, everyone's just waiting to get bankrupted. Not a lot of fun, there. that most D&D games involve this kind of drifting to a very strong extent. A lot of the things that define a good D&D game seem to have required the DM to spend a lot of time experimenting and making things up, which I consider problematic. D&D doesn't really drift so much as it doesn't have much of a baseline to begin with. D&D contains rule gaps the size of the Titanic (even in combat), and what rules are there are frequently contradictory. D&D does require the DM to invest a lot of time effort, and vision, but that's what it's always been, and is arguably a strength rather than a weakness. Your Lego set contains a set of instructions that you can use or ignore at your option. The fact that it isn't pre-built isn't all that much of a problem since you can (and should) just build what you like. That ensures that you always like what you end up with, even if it's a bit inelegant at times. This flexibility allows D&D to be played by many kinds of gamers, but more importantly, it consolidates the community by allowing different gamers to play a game together, even when they are small in number and don't all exactly conform to the same tastes. It's a bit like a set of rules that allow all TCG players to play with each other. It's great because you can play your Magic deck against another guy's Pokemon deck, but you may have disagreements, and it occasionally can be clunky. The TCG community, to be frank, is so mainstream that it doesn't need the help. Even significantly fractured, it can survive. Not so for the RPG people. The fact that you have to buy indie games on black and white paper whereas even the marginal TCG games like LotFR can print its cards in glossy card paper with great art tells you how far the gulf is. There just isn't that much money in it, and there aren't a whole lot of gamers in it. We know for a fact that when TSR fractured the game community, it was a disaster. If D&D fractures that again by catering to only one base to the exclusion of everyone else... It's goners for us. I still can't believe you're seriously telling me that the Backstreet Boys are on the same level as -- or, as you almost seem to be saying, *superior* to -- the works of Mozart, and that I'm a bigot for not thinking so. Believe it. "Little Miss Muppet," the nursery rhyme, as part of a cultural phenomenon that holds Western civilization together, is more significant than Mozart - which, let's all admit, is something of a dusty fringe interest. Everyone knows "Itsy Bitsy Spider," and it's points of commonality such as this that ultimately binds the civilization as an identity. Mozart is really more of a divisive factor, if anything, and back when he was composing, he was no less of a "pop" phenomenon than Backstreet Boys or Micheal Jackson. You could even say that Mozart was the Britney Spears of his day (though he kept his pants on). More fairly, he's probably on a level with Jimi Hendrix in terms of musical impact, but it's just not a directly comparable thing. Saying that Mozart is "better" than any other composer or performer on the basis that he's appreciated only by the "cultured" is snobbery and classist bigotry of the most obvious kind. The only fair thing you COULD say would be that you personally like Mozart better than X, and even then you ought to be careful that it's not taken the wrong way. There are, in fact, factors like the network externality that explain why things are popular *beyond* "It's popular, so people must like them". McDonald's, for instance, doesn't make its money because most of its patrons actually consider McDonald's to be their favorite food in the world. Of course, but with the number of indie games that have come and gone, you'd think that at least ONE of them might be given D&D a run for its money. Magic certainly did, and it's not only a radical way to play RPGs - it's not an RPG at all. Back when D&D was still Spells and Options, there WERE better systems, and players did patronize them. They were similar to D&D, of course, but you can't then say that D&D's dominance of the market is suppressing indie games, since it hadn't always been so overwhelmingly dominant. Do you really think that D&D would stop being the market leader even if they published a book saying "WE HATE YOU BECAUSE ALL OUR FANS ARE MORONS" in it?) Yes. As I recall, Magic became quite popular precisely because something similar to this happened not so long ago. Droves of people left D&D and sought other RPGs. ANY other RPGs. For this reason I tried looking into Gamma World, Top Secret, Top Secret SI, Marvel, Deadlands, even Exalted and Vampire. There was a time that if I saw a new game title, I tried it. Shadowrun was fun for a time, but it's just too many d6's, and it wasn't the same level of characterization. Well, yes, but to be fair these are both pretty special cases. (Most liches, for one thing, don't actually believe undeath is a great thing to be for *everybody*, just themselves, often because it was the only way to escape a natural death.) If you use Diplomacy cheese against your vanilla person who wants to kill you, it is broken. (Or, at least, your DM has to do some serious stretching of what "Helpful" means.) Not really. No more than any helpful stranger (or at best a good acquaintance or friend) would do for you. "Helpful" from Tharizdun is pointless. "Helpful" from a guard is almost equally pointless - he's still honorbound to try to arrest you, even if you're his bosom friend. He might not like it, but he's going to do it all the same. And I think the number of players who really are okay with sudden death in an ordinary encounter thanks to a bad roll are fewer than you might think -- which is a problem with D&D combat rules not really doing what people want them to, not a problem with the DM who's using illusion to pull his way out of them. (People who say "I don't have a problem with lethality in D&D -- I've never had a game go off the rails because I did in a fight" probably had illusionist DMs.) They're more than you might think. They won't tell you they're okay with it, and they hate having their PCs die in the middle, but I HAVE offered alternatives, and I always get the same request - don't fudge the dice. That means that even when offered a "system" that eliminated random PC death - a lot of people still chose random PC death. Surviving a deadly encounter is less fun if you know that it's only "story" deadly, and not "actually" deadly. I also don't think you need a "building set" if you want to DIY. I really think that a set of rules where you have to change half the rules to do what you want is harming rather than helping you. I don't have to change half the rules. Most of the time, I can just use the rules I pick. I do have to pick, but it's there if I need it. YOU have to change half the rules, which makes me think that you're really better off giving your money to your indie games so that they get better and give you the games you want. Dexter Blacktyde: Pity. Ah well...
a_psh 03-27-07, 05:27 PM	No not really. You can't retry diplomacy rolls. So if the PCs fail, then they fail and can't try to influence the NPC again.I'm talking about that as opposed to having the conversation in freeform, where you can go "Lalala" forever. The problem is that it sounds like the game is going to turn into a matter of sheer numbers. So you send in one PC to talk to the NPC. He fails. You send in your next PC, he fails but the NPC continues to get drained. You send in PC #3, eventually sheer numbers cause the NPC to run out of resources and you can achieve virtually any result you want that way.Two clarifications: 1. There are practically no resources that aren't generated on a scene-by-scene basis. You roll all your dice at the beginning of each conflict. Being in a conflict doesn't weaken you unless you suffer bad fallout. 2. Multiple parties can be in the same conflict. So, it doesn't work quite how you're imagining: there's no potential for a "chain" here, really, since your opponent is all fresh when you're done. Note also that stakes in a conflict aren't one-sided: "I fail" doesn't mean "nothing happened." But what you can do in DitV is all gang up on an NPC in one go. At that point, you're supposed to win. You've all decided, together, to make something happen. And you're the Dogs, strong in your judgement when you're together. If you want mechanics that make the PCs less powerful when they group up, you want to do something other than just add them up straight. There's good examples of this. D&D's "aid another" works okay for what it is, but I think it over-trivializes the contributions of most of the characters in a group. So you chain-haggle the magic shop owner till he runs out of points and has to give you his best magic item for 1 gold, simply because you've depleted him with constant nagging.People will tell you that a magic shop is a bad idea even in straight-up D&D. "The PCs will find some way to steal all that crap." Really, in any game where your sword's stats are as important as your character's, you want to stay away from anything resembling a magic shop -- items become just too much of a game resource to give out like that. I'm actually quite impressed with the way itemless or near-itemless games run. But that's something for another time... That said, the D&D base model (but not system) is probably more realistic. Eventually you get to a point where your arguments simply fall on deaf ears, as opposed to being forced to resort to combat as wave after wave of people keep trying to wear down your mental resistance to manipulation.See above re: how you reroll all your dice and reuse them if you start a new conflict. The GM is either omnipotent or he's just another player. Trying to create in between sequences to "protect" the PCs from the DM is crazy. If you're dealing with an omnipotent being, there is no point trying to create rules to restrict him, because he can find ways around the rules if he wants. No rules set is going to make a bad DM into a good DM. You might as well just accept that if your game has a poor DM, it isn't going anywhere.If that's how you want to draw the line, then the GM should just be a player where it counts, which is in overall ability to contribute to the narrative. I believe that you can do a lot of useful stuff with a player who is serving a special purpose (a "GM"). Saying that he's omnipotent ruins that, though, because there's no power left for anyone else to wield.
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-27-07, 05:40 PM	(The Riddle of Steel was a revelation for me when it pointed out that no fantasy archetype of a wizard really is "balanced" against a sword-wielding warrior, and that it *is* fun to have a wizard who's flavored as being several hundred times more powerful than an ordinary person -- you just make it so that he's facing challenges that are *separate* from the challenges faced by the ordinary people travelling with him, rather than having all challenges be challenges for "the party", because "the party" doesn't all need to have the same goal. It's dirt-simple once you think of it, but it never came to me for years because, well, it's impossible to do that in the structure of a game like D&D, and that made me think it was impossible to do that in an RPG, period.) I don't think this is a good model for an RPG at all. What's going to happen is that some PCs are wizards and others are warriors, and the warriors get hosed. It's the same problem that hit d20 star wars, where you were either a jedi or you sucked. And when you're role-playing a heroes, you don't like to suck. Yeah it's totally awesome for the wizard player, being a walking god and traveling with the rest of the lesser warriors, but what if you happen to be a fighter? That's not very fun at all as you're instantly relegated to the role of the petty sidekick. In my opinion, the point of rules is to balance out the PCs and ensure this sort of thing doesn't happen. If your rules deliberately allow for one PC to be stronger than the others, then I wonder why use rules anyway? I can balance things out better just by using complete DM fiat in a storytelling system. I'm using rules so all the PCs feel like they matter, not as a structural tool to assign some PCs the role of sidekick and keep them there.
Dexter_Blacktyde 03-27-07, 05:51 PM	On the other hand, "I explain to her everything that's happened since we got separated at the cave entrance" is infinitely shorter than "Well, Sara, the first thing that happened when we got separated by that rockslide was that we were stopped and interrogated by these orcs, you see, and..." That's a given, but I don't know any group that wouldn't fast forward here. (Unless it would be actually of importance or interest to find out what the player knows and / or to check if he accidentally passes down misinformation.) Okay. Can you give an example of when it's easier to have a conversation with an NPC than with another player? Sorry, you've lost me. I'm sure I just can't see the forest for the trees, but what are you driving at? Enh. Maybe I've had bad luck. Maybe I attract bad players. And that's what you've been saying yourself on the last page (to Roxlimn, I believe) - something about not having been exposed to a certain style of play. What bothers me is that you've never been exposed to this one because I have a feeling that had you ever experienced it done right, it could be right up your alley. (Moreover -- and even though we all know that the Internet selects for complaining over praise -- I hear stories like it all the time from the boards and online discussion communities.) That's the difference between communities having been brought up on very different systems. On DSA boards (and most general RPG boards respectively as DSA is the predominant RPG anyway) you will next to never read questions like "How do you play in-character 'properly'?" / "Is it necessary to do so?" / "How do I balance in-character and out-of-character play?" / "Do I have to be a good actor to try in-character play, and will I annoy the others if I'm not?" Roleplaying in the actual sense of the word is just a matter of course around here. It can't objectively suck so hard if a whole community takes it for granted, that's all I'm saying :P A player might not spend an hour thinking of questions -- he might very enthusiastically jump in with questions. And only later does it transpire that he didn't think of some crucial question that -- had he actually been interrogating the prisoner for an hour as he actually would have if this were actually real -- he'd never have missed. Some like playing something out in ten minutes that takes hours in the gaming world, and when they find they haven't thought of something important they say "Tough luck" and move on because they like the (metagame) challenge of earning an advantage because of their own merit instead of their luck with the dice. Others want to complement such an interrogation with a skill check, just to be on the safe side. Yet others roll the dice and be done with it. It's just a matter of how the group likes to play. But yes, deciding how to handle situations like this can be a tricky question for some groups. Do you really think this (...) isn't roleplaying because it doesn't involve speaking the character's lines word-for-word? I do think it is; I just wanted to make sure we're talking about the same thing. Personally I think there's more storytelling than roleplaying involved; "roleplaying light" if you will (not in a derogatory sense!). Such a speech - never mind the actual content - would make a more memorable impression on me if an effort was made to make me feel like I'm experiencing it. It's like a classic storytelling instrument in theatrical plays: the messenger's report (a literal translation, I don't know the official term). A messenger enters the stage and tells the protagonists that there was a terrible battle. This messenger saves time and keeps the costs low, but regardless of how detailed the report was, the battle itself has little chance of impressing the audience. Of course a whole adventure is one long messenger report, so the whole group has to contribute to the storytelling and fill the information it gets with life. But if you think about it, you, the player, give me the script for your character's speech, but because I only get an abbreviated retelling of the actual mono-/dialogue, I have to envision it, to imagine the actual arguments, the gestures, the tone, the inflection, the emotion the voice is supposed to transport, thereby becoming the player myself. I hope I'm getting my point across. But as I said, I'm strictly talking about my personal preferences. This is all one big aside and has little to do with D&D anyway. And now for something completely different, Roxlimn: Why don't you stop fanning the flames? What good will a continuation of "You have insulted us!" - "No, I haven't!" do? I think what needed to be said has been said, and further thinly veiled "You suck!"s will eventually lead to some sort of ugliness I believe we can do without. Let's play nice :cool: DB
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-27-07, 05:54 PM	I'm talking about that as opposed to having the conversation in freeform, where you can go "Lalala" forever. Well of course. This just means that you've crossed the threshold of where negotiation retries are going to work. You've made your case and now you're just reiterating points. Much like in real life, you're probably not going to win an argument trying to beat a dead horse. But what you can do in DitV is all gang up on an NPC in one go. At that point, you're supposed to win. You've all decided, together, to make something happen. And you're the Dogs, strong in your judgement when you're together. This is a real bad idea. Because it means that you can do potentially anything in the campaign world. People will tell you that a magic shop is a bad idea even in straight-up D&D. "The PCs will find some way to steal all that crap." well, it doesn't have to be a magic shop, it can just as easily be convincing the king to sell his kingdom or convincing the villain to recant his ways for no reason and turn to the side of good. The point is that social skills can easily break and destroy the story. Somewhere, you need rules that say "This can't happen if it's bad for the story." and yes, that happens to be entirely DM fiat. I believe that you can do a lot of useful stuff with a player who is serving a special purpose (a "GM"). Saying that he's omnipotent ruins that, though, because there's no power left for anyone else to wield. But inherently, the base power of creation gives you omnipotence anyway. The rules set just acts as a speed bump, not an actual wall. Once you can create the world, then you're no longer a player, you're a GM, and as such the rules no longer truly hold you back. While you may not be able to take a little hammer and bash your PCs to dust, you can always go back and get a bigger weapon. Eventually, regardless of the rules, your PCs won't be able to compensate and you win. The idea however is not to make the DM think adversarially like a player would. He's not trying to complete the adventure by beating the PCs. Unlike the players, he has no objective at all, aside from simulating the world. This is the tool used to ensure fairness, not an arbitrary rules system. Rules exist for the following purposes: -To add fun to the game. (some people play D&D as a straight wargame, like D&D miniatures) -To balance out individual PC abilities among each other. So you don't have the uber wizard dominating the non-caster PCs. -To try to reduce suspension of disbelief by instilling a degree of consistency in the game world. And that's basically it. There is no provision about limiting a DM's power, because that would be rather pointless. If the DM wants you dead, accept it, you're screwed. We don't create guidelines as to what levels of creatures a DM can include in his adventures. We tell him the impact that those creatures may have, but we don't say, "you can't throw a 1st level party against a 20th level necromancer." All we say is, "It'd probably be a bad idea."
Always-Late 03-27-07, 05:58 PM	Friend: I think "Dungeons and Dragons: the Movie" was fantastic! You: 1. It's silly to think "DnDtM" was fantastic. 2. You just don't know what you're talking about. 3. You need to watch more movies.Fixed. (Just commenting out on how your initial example might have been slightly biased in favor of one side.)
Dexter_Blacktyde 03-27-07, 06:07 PM	Fixed. And all of a sudden we all can empathize just a little bit better :D DB
Roxlimn 03-27-07, 07:03 PM	Not too much, actually. I know someone who likes the D&D movies. I didn't tell him it was silly to think so. And I didn't think my taste was any better than his.
Arrowhen 03-27-07, 07:41 PM	I'm starting a new one... intro posts are annoying to write... gimme a sec. Hurry up, damn it. ;)
a_psh 03-27-07, 07:54 PM	well, it doesn't have to be a magic shop, it can just as easily be convincing the king to sell his kingdom or convincing the villain to recant his ways for no reason and turn to the side of good. The point is that social skills can easily break and destroy the story. Somewhere, you need rules that say "This can't happen if it's bad for the story." and yes, that happens to be entirely DM fiat.Here's where we get into the differences between "my story" and "our story." But inherently, the base power of creation gives you omnipotence anyway.That's why you share that. "I think this should be here" and whatnot. D&D players already do it a lot more than they're willing to admit, sometimes. Rules exist for the following purposes: -To add fun to the game. (some people play D&D as a straight wargame, like D&D miniatures) -To balance out individual PC abilities among each other. So you don't have the uber wizard dominating the non-caster PCs. -To try to reduce suspension of disbelief by instilling a degree of consistency in the game world.Your #2 is just a minor corollary of #1. I used to think of #3 as something crucial in its own right, but now I mostly see it as a prominent subset of the larger goal of "aid imaginative negotiation between the players" -- giving people preset content is just another way to get everyone playing on the same page, which is the overall purpose.
StormKnight 03-27-07, 08:10 PM	Well, it's not *so* subjective that the slow desertion of baseball en masse by fans wasn't enough to make them force drastic rules changes through to fundamentally change the pace of the game.... Which only says that it wasn't popular, which is purely subjective. By this same logic, since D&D is more successful than its ever been before, it must be moving in a good direction. Enh. I don't think it really *isn't* what D&D is about, though. I'll keep picking on DitV, since it seems to be the main offered comparison. The original premise was stated that DitV is a game that is designed to be about telling a story. D&D is a game about: 1) Using interesting abilities to kill monsters. 2) Gaining new interesting abilities and items. 3) Playing the role of a character in a fantasy world and interacting with and exploring that world. Sure, what you do might resemble a story, but that's not what its about. At all. One can either look at the total lack of mechanics that facilitate telling a story and say "Hey, this game hasn't gotten any better, since it still doesn't support telling a story!" or say "Hey, this game isn't about telling stories." You'll notice, however, that as versions have advanced: 1) There are more interesting abilities for characters to choose from. 2) Combat with monsters has greater detail. 3) There are more precise guidelines for governing the acquisitions of items and power. 4) There are more skills to describe how you interact with the world. To switch to a different analogy, the complaint does not seem to be "the meal is undercooked". It seems to be "this vegetarian dish doesn't have enough meat in it." Of course it doesn't! Its the vegetarian dish! If you want meat, don't order it! On a totally side topic, I don't see any evidence from what has been said so far that indicates that DitV has anything to do with telling a story either. As described, its a system that determines the success or failure of actions. That's not a story. I haven't seen anything about it manages plot twists, or helps ensure that the most interesting result (out of success/fail) gets picked, or how it provides an interesting story narrative when the imaginations of the players are running a little short at the moment.
Arrowhen 03-27-07, 11:26 PM	Sure, what you do might resemble a story, but that's not what its about. At all. One can either look at the total lack of mechanics that facilitate telling a story and say "Hey, this game hasn't gotten any better, since it still doesn't support telling a story!" or say "Hey, this game isn't about telling stories." Ahem... "Your character is an adventurer, a hero who sets out on epic quests for fortune and glory. Other characters join your adventuring party to explore dungeons and battle monsters such as the terrible dragon or the carnivorous troll. These quests unfold as stories created by the actions your characters perform and the situations your DM presents." --PHB, p. 4 How silly of us to read the Player's Handbook and expect the game to deliver what it advertises. ;)
ArcTan 03-28-07, 01:35 AM	ArcTan: See StormKnight's post. I know that I'm probably thicker than a brick, and I'm not usually one to be someone to be telling you this. The fact that I've unknowingly offended uncounted posters in the past stands testament to my lack of subtlety, but how StormKnight puts it is truly how you sound. To put it in your words: Friend: I think "300" sucked royally." You: 1. It's silly to think "300" sucked. 2. You just don't know what you're talking about. 3. You need to watch more movies. All of these responses can and have been taken as insults. You don't need to be making these statements. It's not favorable to you. That's funny. I say these things to my friends all the time, and they say them to me. Maybe I'm a just a pretentious nerd, but I think there *is* accounting for tastes and we all owe it to ourselves to try to educate ourselves about other people's opinions about things, whether or not we agree with them -- and we also, therefore, have some responsibility to educate other people when we think they're going wrong. It's always up to you whether to accept or reject someone else's standards, but to accuse someone of "insulting" you every time they do confront you with their own set of standards -- even if they do so very harshly -- just means you won't learn anything. Yes, I have had people come up to me and tell me my favorite band was trash and I needed to learn a thing or two about music before I opened my mouth about it again. Given that, at the time, I was fourteen years old and my favorite band was Rage Against the Machine and I genuinely thought rap metal was a musical genre with artistic value, I only have gratitude for such people. I also only have gratitude for people who smacked me on the head and pushed me to investigate RPGs beyond D&D, science fiction (and literature in general) beyond crappy Star Wars tie-ins, and films beyond Dude, Where's My Car? If you'll go back, you'll note that I said that you and a_psh were engaging in jargon in a public forum without explaining what they meant. That's usually considered rude and counterproductive. I tried to avoid most of it. There are some points where I think it isn't too hard to see what a term means from context, where I'm using the term more to show that the vague thing I'm describing is an identified concept that people talk about than to add meaning using the term. It's a little like your doctor telling you you have advanced papillary carcinoma and then leaving without explaining anything more. If you must use jargon, take the time to explain. Best not to use jargon at all. "Illusionism" means what D&Ders generally call "fudging", though it's a little more general than that. (Not just fudging die rolls, but anything where you're doing things behind the players' backs to make the game work but pretending that the game is just going on as usual. The more you have to kind-of sort-of lie to the players about the amount of control you have over what happens, the more it's "illusionism". How many DMs will quietly change an encounter without announcing "By the way, I'm reducing the number of guys in the encounter because your party doesn't seem too effective at combat", or will actively say "Hey, we're going to skip the next several rooms in the dungeon because this session is dragging"?) "Avatarism" means when you really start to think of the character as "you" and therefore mix up your priorities. (Avatarism is why people don't see why it's bad for the game for their character to never be threatened at all in combat and think it'd be fun to be Pun-Pun and have infinite power.) And my counter continues to be, "that may very well be true, but it's beside the point." I'll clarify -- I don't think any of the things you mentioned (lack of human ethnicities, lack of monotheistic religion, lack of firearms) has anything to do with "immersion". It's only self-evidently dumb because you can't explain why. ...Because D&D doesn't actually think immersion is a bad thing, the game materials don't explicitly tell DMs to try to keep players distanced from the story, and many things about the game are only really fun if you can take your mind off the fact that you're a human playing the game? Because the idea of playing a fantasy game is not that you want the world to be fantastic and unrealistic so that you'll feel more detached from it, but that, contrariwise, it's fun to actually feel like you are in a fantastic and unrealistic world? (I don't deny that there *are* people who won't play games with guns because it feels "too real", but that's far from the only reason.) D&D is VERY unrealistic because it's not fun to engage, for one thing, in realistic violence. Few people would care for it, particularly if it's risk-free (because it would then be brutalization and/or murder). Realism is not the same thing as immersion. As much as you're characterizing me as someone who just plain hates D&D, I have had a lot of fun in games where I did succeed, thanks to many factors, in losing myself in the game and briefly forgetting to consciously think about the fact that I was a person playing a game. The world I was living in was an unrealistic one, of course -- one where violence and killing could be done with impunity and ease -- but that didn't stop me from getting immersed in it. People play violent video games all the time and get that "glazed over" look at the screen, losing track of time. Same with violent films, or books with disturbing themes. I don't think it's self-evidently dumb to say that a violent heroic roleplaying game makes a lot of things unrealistic in order to intentionally gloss over very unfun aspects of those things. But that has nothing to do with immersion. You're actually wrong there, too. I've engaged in many threads about class, feat, and spell building, as well as some few threads in CharOp, and OA, and Psionics. In quite a few places, my posting has defused rising tones, and in many of those places, nothing very fiery ever happened. I also post answers to question I can answer. No fires there either. Just because you don't notice these activities of mine doesn't mean that they don't exist. To be sure, some of my most infamous appearances have been in very flame-infested threads, but all of us here share that to a greater or lesser extent. You misinterpreted me. I meant the generic "you". I mean that people, in general, can't talk about things like this without attracting flames. I don't think it'd be possible to have any thread discussing where D&D is going as a game without flames coming up, much less one that does take the position that there's a lot of things wrong with where D&D is now. Generally speaking, assuming things about people can get you into trouble. In this case, it's even more aggresive than that, I'm afraid. In pursuing a ground-level change of what D&D is, you and a_psh aren't merely suggesting that these people try other games, you're basically telling them that they OF A CERTAINTY haven't tried better games and that you're suborning a game they like in order to exile them to games you know they'll like better. I'm not certain of such things. I have, in general, found it to be true. I am interested in hearing from people for whom it isn't true. But look, anything that exists on the scale that D&D does now can't accept the argument "If people like it, don't change it" because then it will never change, because there's so *much* of it flooding the market that of *course* there will always be people who like it. There's nothing soft or nonoffensive or suggestive about that. It's nothing less than a hostile takeover. You notice that I don't actually have a buyout contract in hand and millions of dollars with which to purchase the D&D license. I'm a gamer making a suggestion, like any other. If I'm actually wrong, then WotC has no reason to take my advice. I thought part of the point of having public discussion forums was to hash these things out. Basically, you ARE telling them that they're idiots, and that you're banishing them to oblivion. "Banishing them to oblivion"? Come on. Even if WotC went completely out of business tomorrow and *none* of us had any d20 products to purchase again, ever, that wouldn't stop anyone from having D&D games. It's more like, "I'll be taking your favorite book now. I know you'll like something else better than this. Now go look for it." I'm not actually *taking* anything away from anyone. I am suggesting people try to broaden their horizons a bit, including the people who are writing more books in the *series* of books you're reading (because, of course, your copy of the 3.5 PHB will always be there no matter what happens). The sense of manning the barricades is a little disturbing here -- as though criticizing D&D is the only thing that needs to happen for WotC to fall under our evil hypnotic spell and destroy D&D forever. I haven't read any post that exalts D&D as the "perfect" game. Long time posters will be aware of Archtyrant Terevoth's problems with it, so he can't be thinking that it's perfect. Who's thinking that it's "perfect?" I LIKE "wargaming" in D&D. I've tried all those other things. In fact, most wargamers who play D&D of my acquaintance usually also do minis and Warhammer and Starcraft: the whole shebang. They still like to play D&D, just like they like to play Warhammer and Starcraft, too. It doesn't have to be perfect to be fun. What you're proposing is that we shouldn't be part of D&D because we enjoy other games. Say what?!?!? ...I'm proposing that D&D have a clear vision for doing something instead of being a weird hybrid of other things. "D&D" is not a special club that you've been "banished into darkness" from if you don't like it anymore. It's just a gaming product. It's one that could be improved. But any change in the game will mean some people don't like it anymore, and that's, well, sad but inevitable. WotC should be thinking about how much they stand to *gain* from changing their focus (or rather, *having* a focus) and defining what they mean by an RPG as well as what they have to lose. If the gain/loss ratio is unfavorable, by all means, play it safe. But I don't think it actually is -- I think there are a lot of people who play D&D now who are interested in it because of the non-wargame possibilities of RPGs and a lot of people who don't play D&D who might if those possibilities were realized more, and right now there *aren't* any mainstream RPGs for those people, while there are *tons* of games for wargamers. I'm not talking about who "deserves" to "have D&D" as though being able to play a game called D&D is some kind of sacred honor. I'm saying that WotC has a lot to gain financially and in terms of the game gaining cultural acceptance if they look at how they can break out of the wargame mold. D&D got people to play it in the first place because it was a thing that promised play outside the wargame mold, because it was a wargame that broke some fundamental rules of wargames for the "story's sake". It didn't get far from there, sadly, because of slack market pressure -- when your market is a concentrated market of geeks it's easy to get a place as market leader and stay there. The fact that we enjoy other games is a basis to leave us out in the cold? What the heck kind of reasoning is that? Outside the D&D brandname is "out in the cold", now? Hell, WotC left people who steadfastly only enjoy 2e "out in the cold" when they changed the game. Are you faulting them for that? To the contrary. ALL of those people are getting their jollies off just fine. It's when they talk with each other and insult each other's opinions that the fur starts flying. Most often, gamers complain that they can't find a group that shares their tastes in D&D. That's common. The gamer community isn't so large that we always have a choice. However, if you fracture the gaming community even further by segregating "story" gamers from "war" gamers, the numbers would be even less, and we'd have less disagreements - because no one's playing anymore! I don't think things are so dire that people who want completely different things from a game should have to label themselves by the arbitrary name "gamers" and spend time in sessions where each of them gets 25% of the time to do the part of the game they actually enjoy. I think if you split things up, you wouldn't just have fewer arguments, you'd have more people who *become* "gamers" of one kind or another because right now they don't want to be a part of one kind of the "gamer" community even though there's another kind that they'd really love. I don't understand why more theater geeks don't play LARPs and RPGs, except that there's a strong stereotype that such things are for people who like making a character build for dragonslaying. Of course it does. You just can't accept it for god knows what reason. D&D is quite studiously unrealistic, and the designers haven't been particularly shy about why that was. Yes, but it's unrealistic because unrealism is fun, not because unrealism automatically leads to a lack of immersion and a lack of immersion is fun. We're still crossing wires here. "Realism" and "immersion" are *not* the same thing. A very realistic story about a brutal murder will often leave me quite detached because I don't *want* to be immersed in it. And I can easily get immersed in something like a cartoon because it's fun and enjoyable and I'd like to imagine being in that world, precisely because it isn't realistic. Not at all. "Swords are more fun than guns," is an inherently loaded statement, and if you posted that in any gun thread, you'd quickly find yourself in the middle of a firestorm. ...Which is why I didn't post it in a gun thread. If I made my point badly, fine. It still wasn't my point. My point is that fantasy tropes aren't there to limit "immersion", so things that don't do anything *but* limit immersion are a bad idea. (I'm forgetting what the original reference was, but saying that the lack of immersion that results from, say, clunky mechanics is good because an unrealistic setting is good is missing the point wildly. Unrealistic settings *help* you get immersed by removing obstacles to immersion like real-life hangups; clunky mechanics do no such thing.) So those people who don't think it's silly and who think that it helps them enjoy the game by bringing them closer to their character? Those guys are just plain wackos? Or silly? Or crazy? What particular insult would you like to use? This is another case of your dictating to everyone what's "fun." In fact, this is worse. You're dictating to people HOW a fun thing is "fun." *sigh* Yeah, sure. The fact that I have opinions about these things makes me a huge bigot. Oh, look at me. I hate your fun. It doesn't work that way. "You enjoy chocolate sundaes because of the fudge." "Well, actually I really like the cold, smooth, texture..." "Nonsense! You don't know what you're talking about. You like it because of the fudge." I HAVE INSIGHT THAT YOU OTHER GUYS DON'T HAVE!!!! LISTEN TO MY WORDS!!!! Yeah. So, what I'm getting from you is that for you the whole field of literary and film criticism and, y'know, trying to systematically talk about aesthetics in any way whatsoever is just a gigantic waste of time -- and cultural tyranny, to boot. Good to know. I keep track of encumbrance for them. It's not a pain at all for me. I can keep track of up to 6 people's encumbrances at a time. They don't need to lift a finger. Some of them used to check me, but they invariably decide that I'm accurate enough not to bother. I use them because they're there and they're useful for my purposes. There are shortcuts, and I use these shortcuts for large masses of NPCs, but in general... If you really do enjoy that much bookkeeping, more power to you. The characterization also facilitates roleplaying, and yes, that HAS progressed very significantly. It's not exactly "gone nowhere." What D&D 3.5 mechanic, exactly, facilitates roleplaying? Feats, skills, multiclassing, prestige classes -- it's still all stuff that lives in the wargame. "Forward" meaning moving towards a game YOU like, and away from games others like. It's not also unreasonable to use "forward" to mean improvements in a game people already like, and using "forward" in your sense insults the people who already like it because it implies that they like stagnation - even are agents of stagnation. It's like saying "America has gone nowhere since its inception!" If it's not going to a place where, say, Brazilians think it ought to go, then they could very well say that, but you'll notice that it'll incense an awful lot of Americans. And yet sometimes it needs to be said, and even if I disagree with someone who says it, I'm not going to say that they have to shut up because what they're saying is "insulting". They may, in fact, be right. America's values *may* be horrible values that should never have been proposed. It may, in fact, be time to tear down this farce of a country and pave the way for a socialist revolution. As much as I may disagree with those sentiments, it *is* the duty of every person who really claims to want the best for his countrymen to at least entertain the possibility that this might be true -- to *examine* his moral and cultural values instead of just saying that he's going to keep on defending them because they're his. And while this is a ludicrous comparison to be making, between liking a game and being a patriotic citizen of your country, I'm still making it because I think there's a deeper disagreement here -- you think it's fundamentally offensive to criticize the way someone else thinks, to criticize other people's values, to criticize other people's deeply held opinions. I don't. I think it's an important thing to do, no matter what it is you're talking about. 1. A repetition, but it bears repeating: so wargamers, already having lots of games to play, don't deserve to enjoy D&D their way? It means WotC has less to gain -- and the world in general has less to gain -- from catering to them. 2. If your game style isn't generating a lot of money, it's probably because you're not shelling out enough, or there isn't enough interest in it to make it big. In which case turning D&D into it only makes D&D into another one of those small indie companies. And here we go again -- indie RPGs are indie because of their content, because the big popular companies make stuff people objectively like better. It's ironic how this kind of argument presents itself as a populist defense of the common man when really it's just a defense of the near-autocratic power big companies wield over our culture. ("King Louis XIV has absolute power in France because people love him! Otherwise surely the people, who are so numerous and on whom the economy of the country rests, could rise up en masse and depose him!") Or maybe these indie companies are churning out such crappy games that no one wants to play them outside a few rabidly loyal cult followers? Yeah, and McDonald's, God bless them, has figured out the scientific formula that generate the best food in the world. I'm shocked that chefs would spend so much time and energy making their food that only appeals to a small audience when McDonald's is there for the buying. All physical factors? Meticulously detailed? Are you speaking of D&D here? I don't believe so. In which case, I agree. D&D is over-detailed, really. It's *hard* to convert D&D to a setting beyond the standard D&D fantasy setting -- even though the mechanics would work for a lot of other settings -- because of how much stuff is hard-coded in. It's not as crazy as Rolemaster or similar games, but the Forge's idea that mechanics don't have to be hard-coded representation of a particular thing -- that, from the dice's point of view, one conflict to be resolved is much like another -- is, I think, a step forward. (Hell, D&D 3.5 has already embraced it to a degree beyond previous editions, replacing the big huge tables of results with the single d20 roll representing everything from "Does my arrow hit the orc?" to "Did I tie the rope tightly enough?" to "Was my speech convincing?".) I was, if you'll notice, referring to games made at Forge. I've been to the Forge. The place was so full of individuals so full of themselves it's a wonder they had any place left over for the posts. Yep. We're just so damn arrogant we never have any fun at all. Who the hell tries to think about things in the abstract to figure out how they work, and come up with specialized language to talk about it? Lord knows that's never led to any kind of human progress in any field. And I mean that in the best possible way. These guys are just missing the boat, here. Unilaterally deciding what's fun was the way of TSR in its dying days, and in particular, the lack of respect for much of its fan base. That didn't pan out well then, and I don't expect it to pan out today. I fail to see how it's a bad thing to have a very clear idea of what's "fun" when you design a game. If *you* don't think the game is the most fun thing since stuffing monkeys into a barrel, how do you expect your customers to? (Answer: A powerful marketing and advertising department. But not everyone has access to that.) I think having a clear vision of what "fun" meant was the *last* of TSR's problems, honestly. The sad thing is, whenever someone brings up normal fan-based requests (not from their own cult following), they appear not to listen much. Examples? I mean, yes, their games tend to do very specific things that it's hard to adapt to something else -- that's what tends to happen when you're doing things with not many resources as a labor of love. But I don't remember anything specific that matches what you describe. (I mean, okay, if it's something like a newbie who doesn't understand the differences between the games coming on and asking for, say, a spell list from "Sorcerer" or stats for new weapons from "Dogs in the Vineyard", no, they won't get what they want, but that's like asking for a three-button combo to do a fatality in D&D.) I suppose you could say it's a niche business, and it appears to be doing well on that basis - but it's never going to be mainstream if it refuses to cater to mainstream demand. And if it's not mainstream - well then it's an indie game with black and white print. There are more complex factors in what makes something mainstream or not than content alone. There used to be a lot of arguments about why Linux would never be anything more than a tiny niche OS for geeks. Those arguments had a lot of weight. For the near future, Microsoft Windows will still be the OS everyone uses. That doesn't mean Microsoft can't learn from the ways Windows sucks and the ways Linux is, from every *technical* perspective, superior. Which they did, which is why you're seeing changes (slow, halting ones, but changes) in Windows Vista. Actually, it doesn't. That's the problem. We have this really weird guy who just keeps on landing on rails and utilities. It doesn't matter what we do. We even tried rolling for him. He just lands on rails and utilities. Not always, but often enough that he can defeat people who own half the board. After one particularly brutal 4 hour marathon where it was just him and one other player, we decided that it was time to step in. As for Darrow's rules, well, it quickly became quite boring. You usually knew the frontrunners within the first 15 minutes, and the rest of the time, everyone's just waiting to get bankrupted. Not a lot of fun, there. Well, yeah. Monopoly's not a great game, but you can see what kind of game it's supposed to be from the outset and decide what you want to change about it -- if you want to change something about it -- from the beginning. It's a game of chance -- it originally started as an object lesson about the problem with economic rent, and monopolies. Which is instructive, in fact. The phenomenon in Monopoly where even optimal play won't prevent you from being quickly bankrupted in the endgame because someone got a streak of lucky rolls on their first two circuits of the board captures the way real-life markets work pretty well. Whether or not TSR used it effectively, the D&D "color group" -- the brand name and the space it takes up in people's brains -- is very powerful. Own it and you can screw up a lot and still take the board. D&D doesn't really drift so much as it doesn't have much of a baseline to begin with. D&D contains rule gaps the size of the Titanic (even in combat), and what rules are there are frequently contradictory. D&D does require the DM to invest a lot of time effort, and vision, but that's what it's always been, and is arguably a strength rather than a weakness. Your Lego set contains a set of instructions that you can use or ignore at your option. The fact that it isn't pre-built isn't all that much of a problem since you can (and should) just build what you like. That ensures that you always like what you end up with, even if it's a bit inelegant at times. Well, no, you might not like blocky brightly colored structures made out of rectangles. Then you're kind of screwed. This flexibility allows D&D to be played by many kinds of gamers, but more importantly, it consolidates the community by allowing different gamers to play a game together, even when they are small in number and don't all exactly conform to the same tastes. See, I *don't* like it when a game session is everyone waiting for their ten minutes of fame and patiently tolerating all the crap everyone else has to do. I think we must be able to do better than that. It's a bit like a set of rules that allow all TCG players to play with each other. It's great because you can play your Magic deck against another guy's Pokemon deck, but you may have disagreements, and it occasionally can be clunky. ...We don't have such a system precisely because it would tick everyone off. The TCG community, to be frank, is so mainstream that it doesn't need the help. Even significantly fractured, it can survive. TCGs are also a little more fundamentally dependent on a constant purchasing cycle to stay "alive" than other games are (a frequent complaint about Magic's drain on the pocketbook). I don't actually see the problem with the D&D community "fracturing", if it means the new communities that come out of it are more cohesive and purposeful. I mean, was it really a bad thing when WotC made D&D 3e, and pushed a lot of grognards into huffily playing D&D 1e and 2e by themselves? I don't think so. They may have smaller groups to play with now, but now at least they know everyone in their group chooses to be there because they like the edition they're playing, not because they have no choice. Not so for the RPG people. The fact that you have to buy indie games on black and white paper whereas even the marginal TCG games like LotFR can print its cards in glossy card paper with great art tells you how far the gulf is. There just isn't that much money in it, and there aren't a whole lot of gamers in it. I also think, though, that there's some truth to the idea that D&D is pushing a slightly unhealthy TCG model of sourcebook acquisition on people. With all the people talking about how happy they are with the core rules and the core rules only, would it be a huge disaster if the community "fractured" such that each RPG line really was just two or three core books, with maybe a couple expansions -- only printed on glossy stock and in color? Plenty of board games survive on the basis of printing individual board games, not one core board game and endless heaps of expansions/sourcebooks/splats. And the hardcore board gaming I'm talking about is at least as niche as RPGs. Keep in mind that the indie RPGs I'm talking about are *really* indie, often one or two guys with an online press. In the wider world of commercial RPGs, even hangers-on like the BESM Tri-Stat system were able to print real books on real paper. Yes, the courage to deviate from traditionally structured games is pretty weak in the RPG community, but I don't think this is a result of bitter experience (*what* bitter experience? Who really has tried meaningfully different things in commercial RPGs in recent times?) but just fear of being the first mover. We know for a fact that when TSR fractured the game community, it was a disaster. If D&D fractures that again by catering to only one base to the exclusion of everyone else... I've never heard this particular version of the TSR story. My own impression of TSR's crash is that it was a combination of internal mismanagement and waste, and just printing too *many* products (*not* too few) too fast, burning their capital too quickly to make it back. Believe it. "Little Miss Muppet," the nursery rhyme, as part of a cultural phenomenon that holds Western civilization together, is more significant than Mozart - which, let's all admit, is something of a dusty fringe interest. You know, there is some normative value to looking at what kind of people like what kind of thing. You may not think the kind of person who likes Mozart is a "better" person, but they are a kind of person who has more education, more economic influence in society, and more control over policies and decisionmaking. As far as "significance" goes, this is the problem with using popularity as a benchmark. Sure, most adult Americans have heard of nursery rhymes. Most won't say they hate Little Miss Muffet. How many of them *love* it, though? How many of them make an effort to listen to it? How many of them consider the fact that they like Little Miss Muffet a defining part of their lives? Call Mozart "fringe" if you want, but Mozart is far more important to the people who like it than Little Miss Muffet is. And, even if you want to avoid saying they're better people, the people who like Mozart are a more powerful and important group than the people who don't. (Yes, social class still means something in our world, even if you don't think it does or it should.) Everyone knows "Itsy Bitsy Spider," and it's points of commonality such as this that ultimately binds the civilization as an identity. Mozart is really more of a divisive factor, if anything, and back when he was composing, he was no less of a "pop" phenomenon than Backstreet Boys or Micheal Jackson. Being a divisive factor doesn't make you unimportant. Everyone's heard of him, and people who don't like him *know* why they don't like him just as much as people who do like him do (because they're not "that kind of guy", they're not "educated" or "pretentious" or whatever). That is influence. And drawing a comparison between Mozart and the Backstreet Boys is pretty false. Mozart was highbrow even in his day. There are a bunch of popular folk songs from his time period you were much more likely to hear hummed on the street or sung among the common folk. And they were just as forgettable -- and just as *forgotten*, ten or twenty years later -- as the Backstreet Boys and even Michael Jackson will be when our grandchildren are listening to music. If nothing else, the fact that some things survive to become classical is a reason to call them classics. You could even say that Mozart was the Britney Spears of his day (though he kept his pants on). More fairly, he's probably on a level with Jimi Hendrix in terms of musical impact, but it's just not a directly comparable thing. No, it's not, and I wish people would stop trying to compare them. Saying that Mozart is "better" than any other composer or performer on the basis that he's appreciated only by the "cultured" is snobbery and classist bigotry of the most obvious kind. I don't consider him better just because high-born people like him. I do think upper-class people tend to get better education that gives them more complex, refined, and *interesting* musical tastes (even if you won't call it "better" to be more complex and refined), but anyone can achieve such an education, regardless of their upbringing, and some people whose upbringing pushes them to achieve such an education never do. Look, someone who likes McDonald's hamburgers because they fill his stomach, taste like fat and salt, and are cheap isn't "wrong", per se. But I do think that the fact that his tastes are uninteresting, simple, and easy to predict means that they're less interesting and less worthy of analysis than someone else's. The difference between a restaurant critic and a guy who scarfs down McDonald's hamburgers without thinking there might be something better is that the former person *thinks about what he likes and why he likes it*. And yes, thinking about what you like and why you like it will almost always lead to you not being as easily satisfied with the lowest common denominator as someone else. Those marketers and producers you talk about *do* have a formula, and it involves getting maximum bang for your buck -- using the simplest, cheapest ways to get people to buy tickets to a concert *now*, taking into account that most people *don't think very much* about what they like -- which is why they have no problem with the fact that manufactured groups like 'N Sync and the Backstreet Boys had a horribly short half-life and would need to be replaced very quickly because no one likes them for very long. (You can say all you want about how great a marketing success the Backstreet Boys were and therefore what a great artistic success they were -- but try and count how many of the people who used to generate those monster profits for their shows aren't embarrassed about it now.) The only fair thing you COULD say would be that you personally like Mozart better than X, and even then you ought to be careful that it's not taken the wrong way. Screw that. I've thought long and hard enough about why I like the music I like that I think my thoughts about music *are* worth something, and that if someone disagrees with me about them I damn well have the right to confront them and ask why, and that whatever I get out of that -- whether I agree with them at any point or not -- helps me become a more refined, discerning consumer of music. Call me a bigot or a snob if you like. I used to have no taste when it came to things. Everyone starts out having no taste when it comes to things they like. It's something you *learn*. And I learned it by being upbraided and criticized and argued with, and I'm a *better person for it now*, because at the very least I *think* more about the things I like and don't like and I do more with the brain God gave me instead of just passively accepting things. If that's being a bigot and a snob, I wholeheartedly embrace the label. Of course, but with the number of indie games that have come and gone, you'd think that at least ONE of them might be given D&D a run for its money. Magic certainly did, and it's not only a radical way to play RPGs - it's not an RPG at all. Well, Magic not being an RPG was what helped it. It meant that the audience it captured was new and fresh, without prejudices. I'm not actually at all surprised at how hard it is to give D&D a run for its money. It's hard to give Microsoft Windows a run for its money, too. Linux only managed to do it by not charging any money at all. Back when D&D was still Spells and Options, there WERE better systems, and players did patronize them. They were similar to D&D, of course, but you can't then say that D&D's dominance of the market is suppressing indie games, since it hadn't always been so overwhelmingly dominant. It was still the market leader in a big way, and everyone was taking their cues from them. The one company that really shook D&D's foundations was White Wolf (which, nonetheless, never really cut into their profits very much), and you'll notice they sold themselves as being very "anti-"D&D with the whole Storyteller mystique; the thing being, of course, they weren't *actually* that different from D&D when you peeled off the mask. Whether that helped them or harmed them is up to you to decide, though my own very strong impression is the latter. (White Wolf gameplay reports have an even stronger flavor of "It was so much fun once we started ignoring the rules!" than D&D.) Yes. As I recall, Magic became quite popular precisely because something similar to this happened not so long ago. Droves of people left D&D and sought other RPGs. ANY other RPGs. For this reason I tried looking into Gamma World, Top Secret, Top Secret SI, Marvel, Deadlands, even Exalted and Vampire. Are you talking about the infamous interview quote? Yeah, that couldn't help but lead to bad press, but as I recall D&D's brand name was still the 500-pound gorilla of the scene. It was certainly important enough for WotC, who clearly didn't need the help, to find it worth buying and pouring huge amounts of money into. There was a time that if I saw a new game title, I tried it. Shadowrun was fun for a time, but it's just too many d6's, and it wasn't the same level of characterization. Not really. No more than any helpful stranger (or at best a good acquaintance or friend) would do for you. "Helpful" from Tharizdun is pointless. "Helpful" from a guard is almost equally pointless - he's still honorbound to try to arrest you, even if you're his bosom friend. He might not like it, but he's going to do it all the same. Well, that's one way to rule it. It's a way that, however, swings you to the pendulum of Diplomacy checks being almost useless. ("Yes, you have made a very great impression on me, but since orcs are the sworn enemy of the human race, we still have to kill you.") They're more than you might think. They won't tell you they're okay with it, and they hate having their PCs die in the middle, but I HAVE offered alternatives, and I always get the same request - don't fudge the dice. Which, of course, is what leads to the illusionism -- the knowledge that the player will feel unhappy if he knows you fudged the dice and that he'll feel unhappy if he dies, so the best of both worlds is fudging the dice and not telling him and letting him think he had a wonderful lucky break. Not everyone does it, but it's a hard thing not to do. Especially when you know that dealing with PC death will mean extra work for you *and* for the players. That means that even when offered a "system" that eliminated random PC death - a lot of people still chose random PC death. Surviving a deadly encounter is less fun if you know that it's only "story" deadly, and not "actually" deadly. Sure, but that's where the temptation to use the illusion of deadliness without the reality comes from. The problem with the all-powerful DM and the DM screen is that it gives license for DMs to lie to players, which is all the word "illusionism" means -- and a lot of the textbook "good D&D groups" are based on this kind of lying. And if they're having fun, well, great, but it doesn't take a lot of imagination to see how this can lead to really, really big problems if something goes wrong. I don't have to change half the rules. Most of the time, I can just use the rules I pick. I do have to pick, but it's there if I need it. YOU have to change half the rules, which makes me think that you're really better off giving your money to your indie games so that they get better and give you the games you want. *shrug* There's a part of me that says "Screw it, I'll just use Linux" and part of me that says "Dammit, everyone uses Windows, it wouldn't be hard to fix these problems with Windows, why don't they just do it?"
ArcTan 03-28-07, 01:36 AM	Not too much, actually. I know someone who likes the D&D movies. I didn't tell him it was silly to think so. And I didn't think my taste was any better than his. ...And I don't think you're any better a person for being that way. If anything, it must make you a fantastically uninteresting person to talk about movies with, if your idea of being a polite person means being totally barred from mentioning that sucky movies suck, even when they're as sucky as the D&D movies.
Jenkins007 03-28-07, 01:53 AM	...And I don't think you're any better a person for being that way. If anything, it must make you a fantastically uninteresting person to talk about movies with, if your idea of being a polite person means being totally barred from mentioning that sucky movies suck, even when they're as sucky as the D&D movies. Now that was harsh. He didn't say that he didn't think that the D&D movies were good, so technically he could be agreeing with you. He was, however, being considerate to his friends feelings by accepting what he thinks as good. He didn't say that they didn't discuss the quality of the movie, just that he didn't belittle his friend. You are way too into bashing him to logically see what he is trying to say.
a_psh 03-28-07, 02:13 AM	Hurry up, damn it. ;)I did it. Here we go (http://boards1.wizards.com/showthread.php?t=817745). Hope you think the initial topic isn't too boring. I want to move onto reward systems or "my character" (something I'm calling "scope" in my head) after that, both of which I think are pretty juicy discussions. New thread for you all (http://boards1.wizards.com/showthread.php?t=817745). Clear your minds and dive right in!
a_psh 03-28-07, 02:21 AM	There used to be a lot of arguments about why Linux would never be anything more than a tiny niche OS for geeks. Those arguments had a lot of weight. For the near future, Microsoft Windows will still be the OS everyone uses. That doesn't mean Microsoft can't learn from the ways Windows sucks and the ways Linux is, from every *technical* perspective, superior. Which they did, which is why you're seeing changes (slow, halting ones, but changes) in Windows Vista.I'm totally with you unless you count X as part of "Linux". ;)
ArcTan 03-28-07, 02:30 AM	Now that was harsh. He didn't say that he didn't think that the D&D movies were good, so technically he could be agreeing with you. He did bring up a lot of the art-populist crap I see way too often on the Internet that says value is meaningless, all aesthetics are utterly subjective, the only measure of quality is financial success, and therefore I'm not missing out on anything if the only movies I ever watch are schlocky science fiction and people like my English teacher who try to tell me there's something worthwhile about Dostoevsky are snobs who should shut up and leave me alone. Apparently the D&D movies *didn't* suck -- in fact, *nothing* actually sucks, Little Miss Moffet is better music than Mozart on the grounds of the only thing which matters, and the only thing I'm allowed to say about relative quality is whether I, personally, enjoyed something or not. Again, if thinking all this is BS and a destructive form of excuse-making for cultural illiteracy and lack of standards or taste makes me a snob, I wholeheartedly embrace the title. He was, however, being considerate to his friends feelings by accepting what he thinks as good. He didn't say that they didn't discuss the quality of the movie, just that he didn't belittle his friend. You are way too into bashing him to logically see what he is trying to say. I wouldn't *actually* call my friend a worthless person, or an imbecile, or any of the ugly words Roxlimn was trying to put into my mouth. I would, however, say a lot of the things Roxlimn said was logically equivalent to that, like telling my friend he was being silly, that his opinion was uninformed and that he could benefit from watching more movies.
Arrowhen 03-28-07, 09:33 AM	He did bring up a lot of the art-populist crap I see way too often on the Internet that says value is meaningless, all aesthetics are utterly subjective, the only measure of quality is financial success, and therefore I'm not missing out on anything if the only movies I ever watch are schlocky science fiction and people like my English teacher who try to tell me there's something worthwhile about Dostoevsky are snobs who should shut up and leave me alone. Apparently the D&D movies *didn't* suck -- in fact, *nothing* actually sucks, Little Miss Moffet is better music than Mozart on the grounds of the only thing which matters, and the only thing I'm allowed to say about relative quality is whether I, personally, enjoyed something or not. Again, if thinking all this is BS and a destructive form of excuse-making for cultural illiteracy and lack of standards or taste makes me a snob, I wholeheartedly embrace the title. You know, I've got pretty good taste in movies. Probably a good 70-80% of the movies I watch in a given year are foreign or independent films (although the line between "independent" and "mainstream" has blurred a lot in recent years--which is a good thing, in my opinion) with the remainder being classics and the occasional popular film that catches my interest. And yet, Dungeons & Dragons is one of my all-time favorite movies. Is it a good movie? Hell, no! It's some of the most horrible, horrible crap ever committed to celluloid, but it's fun crap. For a kid who grew up on Krull and Beastmaster and The Sword and the Sorcerer, it was a satisfying continuation of the tradition of sublimely bad fantasy movies. Plus, it's got Jeremy Irons not just chewing the scenery but ripping out huge chunks of it with his bare hands and swallowing them whole. Snobbishness cuts both ways. If all you read is schlocky science fiction, you're gonna miss out on Dostoevsky, but at the same time, if you refuse to read schlocky science fiction (or worse, assume that all science fiction is schlocky) just because it's not Dostoevsky, you're going to miss out on some of the absolute gems buried within the genre.
ArcTan 03-28-07, 10:54 AM	Is it a good movie? Hell, no! It's some of the most horrible, horrible crap ever committed to celluloid, but it's fun crap. For a kid who grew up on Krull and Beastmaster and The Sword and the Sorcerer, it was a satisfying continuation of the tradition of sublimely bad fantasy movies. Plus, it's got Jeremy Irons not just chewing the scenery but ripping out huge chunks of it with his bare hands and swallowing them whole. Sure. I like plenty of movies that suck. Hell, I remember laughing my guts out when Encino Man came on on cable just because I have so many fond memories of the rampant stupidity of that movie. I know enough to know the difference between liking something that sucks because it sucks and liking something that's good because it's good, though. Snobbishness cuts both ways. If all you read is schlocky science fiction, you're gonna miss out on Dostoevsky, but at the same time, if you refuse to read schlocky science fiction (or worse, assume that all science fiction is schlocky) just because it's not Dostoevsky, you're going to miss out on some of the absolute gems buried within the genre. Sure. In the end my concern isn't with what people read but how much thought and effort they seem to have put into deciding what to read. Someone who casually dismisses all SF as schlocky because they don't care is just as bad as someone who casually dismisses all literary fiction as "pretentious" because they don't care.
StormKnight 03-28-07, 10:59 AM	Ahem... "Your character is an adventurer, a hero who sets out on epic quests for fortune and glory. Other characters join your adventuring party to explore dungeons and battle monsters such as the terrible dragon or the carnivorous troll. These quests unfold as stories created by the actions your characters perform and the situations your DM presents." --PHB, p. 4 How silly of us to read the Player's Handbook and expect the game to deliver what it advertises. ;) Well, then you should expect to have a character who sets off on epic quests, explore dungeons, and battle monsters. This WILL "unfold as a story". But there's nothing in there about "you will tell a story". The story is created as a by-product, not as the goal of the game. I recall the first edition of Vampire billed itself as "a storytelling game". In my opinion, it wasn't any more than D&D was. It was an RPG, and criticizing that it wasn't a storytelling game would be valid. However, the logical fix to me is "stop billing it as a storytelling game, which it clearly isn't", not "lets change everything so it IS a storytelling game." Just because a person enjoys one does not enjoy another. I know many people who really like getting into a character and playing a role, but who do NOT enjoy telling a story. At all. Stray comment on the whole Mozart/Backstreet Boys thing: I don't think its an issue whether or not the Backstreet Boys are objectively good or not. The OP, in making the Backstreet Boys comparison, assumes that the subject being compared to is lousy. Because lets face it, we are not in an audience group that will generally think much of the Backstreet Boys. The OP could have just as easily said "Its like someone saying Mozart made the best music in the world, when all they have listed to is Mozart, Beethoven and Chopin". Same meaning, but its doesn't carry the same "that's garbage" implication.
ArcTan 03-28-07, 11:14 AM	Well, then you should expect to have a character who sets off on epic quests, explore dungeons, and battle monsters. This WILL "unfold as a story". But there's nothing in there about "you will tell a story". The story is created as a by-product, not as the goal of the game. I recall the first edition of Vampire billed itself as "a storytelling game". In my opinion, it wasn't any more than D&D was. It was an RPG, and criticizing that it wasn't a storytelling game would be valid. However, the logical fix to me is "stop billing it as a storytelling game, which it clearly isn't", not "lets change everything so it IS a storytelling game." Well, if people bought it because they thought it would be a storytelling game and were disappointed, then that means that there is a market for a storytelling game out there. Probably it'd be very difficult to write such a game by trying to modify the Storyteller system, but that doesn't mean we should just give up on the project and assume *all* RPGs will and should be just like D&D. Just because a person enjoys one does not enjoy another. I know many people who really like getting into a character and playing a role, but who do NOT enjoy telling a story. At all. "Getting into character" and "playing a role" doesn't have to mean writing a story as the omniscient narrator, but it can be something more than getting into the character of a guy with a giant magic sword whose role is someone who kills things and takes their treasure. Stray comment on the whole Mozart/Backstreet Boys thing: I don't think its an issue whether or not the Backstreet Boys are objectively good or not. The OP, in making the Backstreet Boys comparison, assumes that the subject being compared to is lousy. I'm not the OP, for clarification. But yes, this is the kind of assumption I'm making. For all D&D's virtues, its popularity is a curse for it. It means there's no pressure to get better, because it can coast on the fact that people buy it because of the brand name. The comparison between Top 40 music and indie music is, in my mind, very valid. There are tons of very talented people who get into the pop music industry and find their creativity shut down because, frankly, when there's that much money invested in you you don't want to take risks, and when you can *use* that much money in marketing, advertising and promotion to make yourself successful regardless of the content of your music you don't *need* to take risks. Because lets face it, we are not in an audience group that will generally think much of the Backstreet Boys. Yeah. I might've said Limp Bizkit or Papa Roach or something like that, but I was afraid of drawing the attention of actual Limp Bizkit fanboys. The OP could have just as easily said "Its like someone saying Mozart made the best music in the world, when all they have listed to is Mozart, Beethoven and Chopin". Same meaning, but its doesn't carry the same "that's garbage" implication. Well, except that I *did* want to have the "That's garbage" implication. "Garbage" might be too strong a word, but Mozart, for example, is not something you just can't avoid hearing because Mozart's record company has paid all the radio stations to play him all the damn time, Mozart was not carefully packaged by a marketing and advertising campaign to match short-lived demographic trends, and Mozart isn't something people generally like because they thoughtlessly like whatever it is everyone else in their high school clique likes. (And I'm still kind of shocked and horrified that Roxlimn uses the fact that the Backstreet Boys are a carefully engineered product designed to do nothing but extract maximum profit in minimum time from a particular demographic as proof of their *quality* or *worth*.) Is D&D completely like this? No. I don't even think the Backstreet Boys were completely like that -- the guys were musicians and singers, after all, who simply chose to buy into a particular money-making scheme, and I can't really fault people for compromising their talent when a record producer waves billions of dollars under their nose. The record company may have very carefully made sure the songs were as formulaic and uncreative as possible, but they were and are good singers, and D&D, for all its formulaic uncreativeness, contains a lot of interesting ideas that give people an excuse to imagine. But D&D does share a lot of the qualities that, in the end, made the Backstreet Boys phenomenon bad music. D&D is *not* like the one favorite composer of a classical music snob who's spent his life studying music. D&D is Top 40. D&D is something tons of people play just because their friends play it and they haven't heard of anything else, because it's everywhere. D&D exists as a *default*, and if something is something you do by default, then it *will* start to suck, over time, for the simple reason that no pressure is being put on you to improve. No matter what Microsoft does, the Windows OS will never be particularly good, because it doesn't need to be.
ArcTan 03-28-07, 11:17 AM	I'll also add that I agree that I don't expect D&D's market dominance to last forever, and that WotC knows full well that their player base is vulnerable to incursions from things like Magic (hell, they're in a unique position to know exactly *how much* of an incursion D&D is getting from Magic) and from video games. Which is why they are trying to change the game, and you can see the evolution of 4th Edition happening before your eyes. The problem is that they don't have many good examples to follow, because when you're a big company you don't want to take risks that don't make money, and everyone who isn't mimicking D&D has been pushed so far into a niche market that it's very hard to tell what makes money and what doesn't. D&D is like being Michael Jackson and trying to figure out where you want to go next with your music when everyone else is imitating you.
Arrowhen 03-28-07, 11:42 AM	Sure. In the end my concern isn't with what people read but how much thought and effort they seem to have put into deciding what to read. Someone who casually dismisses all SF as schlocky because they don't care is just as bad as someone who casually dismisses all literary fiction as "pretentious" because they don't care. Exactly.
Roxlimn 03-28-07, 11:52 AM	Dexter Blacktyde: My apologies. I genuinely think that I'm making progress with ArcTan and that this kind of discussion is central to the offensive nature of the OP's initial post. ArcTan: There are several things you're misunderstanding. I'm NOT saying that art-populist crap. That's the problem, you see. I notice that people around here are so busy stereotyping that they can't be bothered to read what it is that I'm actually saying. I'm neither Democrat nor Republican, neither art-populist or classist snob. You're reading meanings into what I'm saying that's entirely contradictory to what I post, simply because I LOOK like one of the constructs in your native society. This has occured very often (so you're not exactly unique there). Just because I say that Paladins shouldn't go out looking to kill people doesn't imply that I'm one of those feel-good smushy smarmy pacifistic vegetarians that appear to be ubiquitous in American society. Just because I don't assign value to works of music based on classist valuation of who appreciates them doesn't mean that I ALSO subscribe to all those art-populist crap you seem so hell bent on opposing. Quit stereoptying me and read what I'm actually saying. I'm not a politician. I'm don't have party platforms. I'm NOT advocating popular stereotypes and views. I'm NOT about political correctness, no matter how much it sounds like I am. I'm NOT endorsing a social agenda that's not my own. Just because I don't think insulting people is a good way to start a discussion doesn't mean that I'm an uninteresting yes-man. I won't tell him that it's silly for him to like the D&D movie, but at the same time, I won't say that I like it, either, because I don't. We can discuss about our differences in opinion without insulting each other. Apparently the D&D movies *didn't* suck -- in fact, *nothing* actually sucks, Little Miss Moffet is better music than Mozart on the grounds of the only thing which matters, and the only thing I'm allowed to say about relative quality is whether I, personally, enjoyed something or not. See, that's the thing. You're all about the absolute. If Mozart isn't better than Little Miss Muffet, then I MUST be saying that Little Miss Muffet is better than Mozart. I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying that it's pointless to even compare them directly, just as it's pointless to compare Mozart to Backstreet Boys. The only thing you'd be doing there is belittling other people - calling them initiated unsophisticated boors, or low class morons. "Standards" in culture and "cultural illiteracy" is just a fancy word to describe abusing other people. Again, that isn't to say that you shouldn't listen to other people telling you that there's better stuff out there, but that's a long way from justifying social snobbery and bigotry on the basis of "cultural superiority." Your English teacher asking you try Dostoyevsky is simply asking you to try something he or she has found enjoyable. There's no harm in that. However, if he or she starts calling you an unsophisticated boob just because you didn't fancy Dostoyevsky when you tried it (and quite a lot of people don't), and moreover, tried to transform the literature you liked INTO something like Dostoyevsky on the basis that "it'll make your literature form better," then that's socio-cultural tyranny of the worst kind. That's the kind of thinking that leads to the Maoist Cultural Revolution. I would, however, say a lot of the things Roxlimn said was logically equivalent to that, like telling my friend he was being silly, that his opinion was uninformed and that he could benefit from watching more movies. That's what I'm saying. You've been saying that people who like D&D as it is now are being silly, that they're uninformed, or that they should try more RPGs. You ARE insulting people, and you seem singularly unconcerned that you do. In fact, that seems to be your very purpose in making these insults - just to be insulting. I've given you the benefit of the doubt, and you seem to know that you are purposefully insulting and abusing certain kinds of people. This is as far as this goes. You can't say that I haven't been nice. Maybe I'm a just a pretentious nerd, but I think there *is* accounting for tastes and we all owe it to ourselves to try to educate ourselves about other people's opinions about things, whether or not we agree with them -- and we also, therefore, have some responsibility to educate other people when we think they're going wrong. Actually, saying that some tastes are better than others, and that we're all honorbound to try to change others' environments to suit our tastes "for their own betterment" sounds like nothing so much as cultural warfare and extermination. I tried to avoid most of it. There are some points where I think it isn't too hard to see what a term means from context, where I'm using the term more to show that the vague thing I'm describing is an identified concept that people talk about than to add meaning using the term. "Showing people that I know more than they do" is a pointless self-aggrandizing and egocentric excercise. As a doctor, I know that I know more than my patients do, and they know it, too. I don't have any interest in showing them up, because it's a given and it never comes up. Since I have no vested interest in belittling them, I use layman-friendly language as much as I can and I explain whatever jargon I have to use. There is no need whatsoever to "teach" them that such terms exist. I'm not trying to send them through medical school. "Showing" people that you know made-up terms they don't, and THEN subsequently failing to explain it is just more of this arrogant supercilious behavior. If you're using a technical term, context is insufficent for explanation because you're referring to a very specific meaning that can never be gotten just from context. I would imagine that that would be self-evident. I'll clarify -- I don't think any of the things you mentioned (lack of human ethnicities, lack of monotheistic religion, lack of firearms) has anything to do with "immersion". It really seems to me that you're using unexplained jargon yet again. The world I was living in was an unrealistic one, of course -- one where violence and killing could be done with impunity and ease -- but that didn't stop me from getting immersed in it. People play violent video games all the time and get that "glazed over" look at the screen, losing track of time. Same with violent films, or books with disturbing themes. Again, more jargon. Speaking casually, D&D articles and text occasionally uses "immersion" to also include spectrums of player engagement up to and exceeding "avatarism," as you've defined it. It also is used to refer to a phenomenon where you get so engaged in the game that glosses nothing over that it affects you detrimentally. That's what I mean. D&D purposefully includes unrealistic elements in order to limit your sense of engagement only to the extent that it remains fun. You misinterpreted me. I meant the generic "you". I mean that people, in general, can't talk about things like this without attracting flames. I don't think it'd be possible to have any thread discussing where D&D is going as a game without flames coming up, much less one that does take the position that there's a lot of things wrong with where D&D is now. As far as I can tell, the only flames here are the incidents where you call anyone who disagrees with you an informed lout, and worse. There are many threads on topics similar to this that do not involve flames, particularly when it involves DMs thoughtfully considering solutions to problems that they've encountered when gaming. People CAN talk about the shortcomings of D&D in their games without insulting every other style gamer on the planet. You can, too, if you just remove the parts of your posts which insult other people - parts which, I repeat, are wholly and completely superfluous to the topic of D&D mechanics. But look, anything that exists on the scale that D&D does now can't accept the argument "If people like it, don't change it" because then it will never change, because there's so *much* of it flooding the market that of *course* there will always be people who like it. It's not so much the changing as much as the suggestion of the wholesale removal of these items that bug people so much. People like these aspects of D&D. There can be no denying that. Changing these items into better version of what they already to is not at all an objection. In fact, if you solicit advice, there are literally boards full of fan advice on how to "make D&D better." The objection comes from: "These items need to go, regardless of how many people like them." "If they like these items, they should just go find them somewhere else - D&D should not cater to them." As you can imagine, that gets a lot of people's teeth on edge. AND it's bad business strategy. AND it's bigoted and abusive. I'm a gamer making a suggestion, like any other. If I'm actually wrong, then WotC has no reason to take my advice. I thought part of the point of having public discussion forums was to hash these things out. Telling people that they're idiots and that they deserve to be booted from the game, even if phrased only as a suggestion, is inflammatory and nonconducive to discussion. It's less of an invitation to discussion with differently minded-people and more of a call to like minded people to start bashing "them" together with you. It's a "game" where the ulterior motive is the satisfaction of looking down at "these inferior people." Similar "games" are bashing the government, bashing Faerun, or bashing young folk, or the "noise" that's considered music these days. No discussion is being sought here. Only consensus. I'm not actually *taking* anything away from anyone. I am suggesting people try to broaden their horizons a bit, including the people who are writing more books in the *series* of books you're reading (because, of course, your copy of the 3.5 PHB will always be there no matter what happens). The sense of manning the barricades is a little disturbing here -- as though criticizing D&D is the only thing that needs to happen for WotC to fall under our evil hypnotic spell and destroy D&D forever. It's more along the sense of you're not so much discussing something as insulting people. As you can tell, NO ONE, not even the people who are opposing you on this thread, think that D&D is perfect, nor that more rules in some aspects of the game would be extremely useful and desireable. Hey, I'm all for more tools! Even if I don't personally care for them, they could make the game better for some people out there, and that's a good thing. a_psh, however, is not of that mind. He specifically is suggesting that D&D ought to throw away all those "pesky wargamey rules," and transform into something more like DitV, or Polaris or whatever. If he wants to make those games into a fantasy game, he's more than welcome to. Suggesting that eradicating support for products that a whole lot of people like, on the basis of "introducing them to something better..." Well, that's like outlawing Backstreet Boys so that people would be forced to listen to Mozart. "D&D" is not a special club that you've been "banished into darkness" from if you don't like it anymore... And again, I think you're dead wrong. D&D has a clear vision of what it's doing. 3e moreso than any previous edition of it. What it's doing is enabling people to play different kinds of games with it. The range is necessarily limited, of course, but it's easier to modify it to play to a wide range of people than it is to try playing a wargame with DitV, for instance. You're right in thinking that a lot of people focus on the noncombat aspects of the game, which is probably why they've received increasing amounts of material and focus through the years. It used to be just the Wilderness and Survival Guide, and then Nonweapon Proficiencies, and then Skills in S&P, but now it's an integrated Skills minigame part. With Skill Tricks seeing great play and rave reviews from the fans, it seems certain that attention to nonwargame aspects will only increase as the years go by. Furthermore, there is also more attention being placed on the "story" aspect of D&D, although it's more along the lines of traditional "pick your own adventure" type of development rather than anything more flexible. Dungeon, a sister publication of D&D, hosts Dungeoncraft, which places emphasis on creating pacing, story elements, and so on. There's even a very nice article about Events and making Event-based adventures. And yes, you CAN make a very nice mystery game with D&D that doesn't feel like a card game of some sort. More attention and material on Adventure Design is available now than there ever has been before - so yes, WotC IS looking into expanding D&D beyond the wargame roots, without losing those wargame roots that so many fans love and enjoy. Like it or not, fans DO play D&D to play individual style wargame play, and that kind of play can't be found in Warhammer, or Warcraft, or anything other than D&D or a D&D clone. About the closest analogue I can find is in MMORPGs, but even there the interpretation is quite limited, the gameplay different. I think if you split things up, you wouldn't just have fewer arguments, you'd have more people who *become* "gamers" of one kind or another because right now they don't want to be a part of one kind of the "gamer" community even though there's another kind that they'd really love. That impression is unsupported by WotC's market surveys, my own experience, and even the experience of the people on these boards. It's VERY hard nowadays to look for RPG gamers of any sort, especially since videogames have siphoned off a significant part of those people who would otherwise play RPGs. Fracturing the market further would make it prohibitively difficult to look for other people to game with, except for those lucky few who already game with people of very similar interests. Furthermore, D&D gamers usually enjoy more than one aspect of the game. Most "powergamers" aren't just "powergamers" of the wargame persuasion who only enjoy that part of the game. They also enjoy story points and roleplay opportunities. Your experience is unusual in that you seem to only see gamers who only want one thing from the RPG experience and get bored whenever someone else gets their thing going on. It is also likely exacerbated by poor DMing organization - forcing people to play aspects of D&D they don't like, or forcing them to watch while other people play aspects of D&D they find boring. You don't HAVE to force everyone to solve a puzzle, and you also don't HAVE to force everyone to wait while the puzzle solver does his thing. That's exactly why I think this kind of advice is essential. Too many DMs make the mistake of putting unsolvable puzzles that kill the game, or puzzles at crucial breakpoints that force everyone to either join the puzzle game, or else look around dazedly while the puzzle guy does his thing. Likewise, you don't have to bore the wargamer with roleplay time if he doesn't care for it. It's quite easy to give him something interesting to do. D&D's strength is its ability to engage all these people at the same time on their own terms, and too many DMs don't know how to do it. The problem you see is less a problem of D&D not being focused enough and more a problem of there not being enough advice in the DMG on how to coordinate playtime within the group. *sigh* Yeah, sure. The fact that I have opinions about these things makes me a huge bigot. Oh, look at me. I hate your fun. Having an opinion about D&D isn't bad. Telling people that their opinions are crap because you're superior is. So, what I'm getting from you is that for you the whole field of literary and film criticism and, y'know, trying to systematically talk about aesthetics in any way whatsoever is just a gigantic waste of time -- and cultural tyranny, to boot. There's criticism, and then there's constructive criticism. For the most part, I think that critics are just people who don't know enough to make their own films and literary pieces, but have the gall to say that other people's works are crap. There are good critics, however, and they tend to focus on why they didn't like a particular film, and they ALSO have suggestions on where you might like a film, even when they don't. These guys perform a useful service and they're usually less about how much a film sucks and more about where and why it's good. Good critics never discount ways in which a film might satisfy an audience, even when that audience is a very small part of the general populace. What D&D 3.5 mechanic, exactly, facilitates roleplaying? Feats, skills, multiclassing, prestige classes -- it's still all stuff that lives in the wargame. Are you suggesting that you can't roleplay a combat scene? you think it's fundamentally offensive to criticize the way someone else thinks, to criticize other people's values, to criticize other people's deeply held opinions. I don't. I think it's an important thing to do, no matter what it is you're talking about. However that might be true, it's also against the COC, just in case you didn't know. If you want to criticize people's values and opinions, you'll need to do it somewhere else. Personally, I think that criticizing other people's values is only an activity you participate in if you have no confidence in your own beliefs. If your beliefs are so self-evidently better than another person's then showing them your side should be sufficient to convince them to side with you, and I've found this to be the case nearly anywhere. It means WotC has less to gain -- and the world in general has less to gain -- from catering to them. I disagree. WotC isn't market leader despite catering to a small segment of gamer wants and demands. That would be White Wolf. And here we go again -- indie RPGs are indie because of their content, because the big popular companies make stuff people objectively like better. It's ironic how this kind of argument presents itself as a populist defense of the common man when really it's just a defense of the near-autocratic power big companies wield over our culture. Sorry. My culture is not yours and big companies hold power here quite transparently. If big companies produce things that people want, it stands to reason that ceasing to make those things will result in a decrease in market influence. Despite what you suggest, people have risen up and NOT played D&D when it got horrible. The trouble is, no gaming company got up and gave them what they wanted, so the players went and did other things instead. Yeah, and McDonald's, God bless them, has figured out the scientific formula that generate the best food in the world. I'm shocked that chefs would spend so much time and energy making their food that only appeals to a small audience when McDonald's is there for the buying. Actually, McDonald's actually does give you the best-tasting bang for buck you can get if you're of the American burger-eating persuasion. It's widely successful because it caters to a very common eating menu for a whole lot of people. Of course, McDonald's isn't particularly successful anywhere else, and here in the Philippines, several local food chains easily surpass it in terms of patronage. This despite the fact that McDonald's around here has actually taken the trouble to serve fried chicken, pasta, and rice meals. In terms of world penetration, I think that Chinese restos are much more pervasive, and I also think that this kind of success hinges on the fact that Chinese cuisine is very broad and can be tailored to cater to a wide range of tastes. D&D is over-detailed, really. It's *hard* to convert D&D to a setting beyond the standard D&D fantasy setting -- even though the mechanics would work for a lot of other settings -- because of how much stuff is hard-coded in. It's not as crazy as Rolemaster or similar games, but the Forge's idea that mechanics don't have to be hard-coded representation of a particular thing -- that, from the dice's point of view, one conflict to be resolved is much like another -- is, I think, a step forward. You see, YOU think it's a step forward, whereas I think that it's horrible and misses the point. Mechanics don't have to be hard-coded. Any schmuck who tries to make any kind of game necessarily comes to this obvious conclusion. D&D's level of adjustable detail is what attracts many people to it. It's not just the combat - which can be quite opaque, and it's certainly not the story aspect. D&D purposefully creates detail in order to increase the sense of characterization people can imbue into their characters. 3e D&D recognizes only that some detail is good, and that some detail is bad. By all accounts, the level of characterization and detail in 3e is more than has ever been in the game. It recognizes that the kind of dice you roll does little to add characterization, but it also added individualized features like feats and Skills. If the level of detail 3e involves is not your cup of tea, then D&D is probably not for you to begin with. D&D and AD&D's main draws over wargaming is this level of individualized detail. Beyond this character detailing, the rest of D&D is pretty much mediocre. It's ALWAYS been pretty mediocre. Slamming "300" and "Mission Impossible" because it involved violence you think is entirely superfluous is beside the point. You may think that "300" should be more about general talking about strategy and hardly any action scenes, but if you don't like action sequences, why in the blue blazes are you watching an action movie? Yep. We're just so damn arrogant we never have any fun at all. Who the hell tries to think about things in the abstract to figure out how they work, and come up with specialized language to talk about it? Lord knows that's never led to any kind of human progress in any field. And yet they've hardly ever been cited for general game excellence in any mainstream gaming publication, and their games never sell better than niche games. Trying to think about games in the abstract the way Forge does it is essentially like trying to cook food without tasting it, or studying for a test about some random topic. Regardless of what kind of theories you come up with (and WotC game designers ALSO think about the exact same things, mind you), if you don't put gamer fun and feedback as priorities, you'll never develop a game that's fun for gamers except purely by chance. Always start with the end in mind. That's how you acheive success, in whatever endeavor. You can't make a car that sells - whatever its specs are - if you insist on telling consumers what they want. I fail to see how it's a bad thing to have a very clear idea of what's "fun" when you design a game. If *you* don't think the game is the most fun thing since stuffing monkeys into a barrel, how do you expect your customers to? (Answer: A powerful marketing and advertising department. But not everyone has access to that.) Magic didn't have such a powerful tool at its disposal when it started out. For that matter, neither did D&D. It's not bad to have a clear idea of what you're setting out to do, but I've never said that it was a bad thing. I said that Forge authors insist on saying that their fun is the only fun to be had. The way to make a fun game that everyone will like is to pay attention to what everyone likes and work off of that. If you just pay attention to what you like, you'll only make fun games for people who think like you. That doesn't mean Microsoft can't learn from the ways Windows sucks and the ways Linux is, from every *technical* perspective, superior. Which they did, which is why you're seeing changes (slow, halting ones, but changes) in Windows Vista. Linux actually is a platform that is a reactive solution to a lot of clamor from PC users. It wasn't built from abstract principles. It wasn't built only to cater to things its creator wanted. It is everything that Forge is not. Windows is actually closer to what the Forge is doing, and yes, market dominance can make what is universally viewed as a crappy OS still a mainstream product. Well, no, you might not like blocky brightly colored structures made out of rectangles. Then you're kind of screwed. If you don't like blocky brightly colored structures, why are you playing with LEGO? Why are you asking LEGO to make Matchboxes instead? Just play with the Matchboxes. I mean, was it really a bad thing when WotC made D&D 3e, and pushed a lot of grognards into huffily playing D&D 1e and 2e by themselves? I don't think so. They may have smaller groups to play with now, but now at least they know everyone in their group chooses to be there because they like the edition they're playing, not because they have no choice. Actually not the same thing. Grognards already play with other grognards. Changing D&D doesn't break their group in any material fashion. Furthermore, 3e D&D has drawn more grognards back into the game than it has pushed out, AND WotC has made a lot of old product freebies. With all the people talking about how happy they are with the core rules and the core rules only, would it be a huge disaster if the community "fractured" such that each RPG line really was just two or three core books, with maybe a couple expansions -- only printed on glossy stock and in color? Yes. People who previously played together would no longer be able to do so. Furthermore, with each game so specialized, not only will people have to work more to accomodate other game styles into a specialized game, it would also necessaily entail MORE "boring time" for everyone involved - precisely because people will just cobble together stuff that is designed not to be. I've never heard this particular version of the TSR story. My own impression of TSR's crash is that it was a combination of internal mismanagement and waste, and just printing too *many* products (*not* too few) too fast, burning their capital too quickly to make it back. Each successive game world they printed fractured their market. Dark Sun people won't buy Faerun product who won't buy Planscape product. Instead of a mass market, they ended up with a lot of small markets, each of which became more difficult to predict because they became smaller. Call Mozart "fringe" if you want, but Mozart is far more important to the people who like it than Little Miss Muffet is. And, even if you want to avoid saying they're better people, the people who like Mozart are a more powerful and important group than the people who don't. (Yes, social class still means something in our world, even if you don't think it does or it should.) Very few people actually even appreciate Mozart, even when they say they like it. Lots of such people go to music events and say they like Mozart more for the social benefits. You could say that they're pretentious. People who actually prefer to listen to Mozart even when it's unpopular and downright discriminated against are quite rare, and few of them hold significant power. Jazz, country music, and pop by virtue of their mass appeal actually have much more influential demographics. This explains why people who want to make political music don't make it in classical. If nothing else, the fact that some things survive to become classical is a reason to call them classics. True. Micheal Jackson, Jimi Hendrix, and Aretha Franklin are already considered classics. It's doubtful that they will ever be forgotten because they made such profound influences on music before and after their time. The same could be said of Elvis Presley. Even so, calling Mozart "superior" or "better" on the basis that more influential people hear it is classist and bigoted. By the same token, everything such people say is better and should be imposed and acted upon. Looking down on Backstreet Boys just because you don't like it blinds you to the kind of phenomenon they were and what it took for them to do what they did. They're not the Beatles, but much of what made the Beatles successful were also employed to make Backstreet Boys successful - the kind of extra-product support and manipulation that you say D&D uses to maintain its market dominance. The music of Backstreet Boys itself is a very careful tuned product, which is more than what I can say for Mozart, who really only usually made what he fancied. I do think upper-class people tend to get better education that gives them more complex, refined, and *interesting* musical tastes (even if you won't call it "better" to be more complex and refined), but anyone can achieve such an education, regardless of their upbringing, and some people whose upbringing pushes them to achieve such an education never do. Even today, few "upper class" people honestly enjoy Mozart. I certainly don't see a lot of demand from extremely expensive home entertainment systems to properly capture classical music. Too, complex and refined people can like Backstreet Boys, if the demographic they're in is right. The genius of their music is that they appeal not to musical persuasion, but to romantic persuasion and common teenage fantasy - much of what makes Backstreet Boys music so desireable to their audience is actually separate from the rhythm, melody, and harmony. "Complexity" and "Refinement" are only self-satisfied smug terms snobs use to tell themselves they're better than their peers. This only demonstrates that trying to say that your taste is better than someone else's taste is an exercise in futility, or at worst, an hateful attempt at egocentric cultural domination. And yes, thinking about what you like and why you like it will almost always lead to you not being as easily satisfied with the lowest common denominator as someone else. I disagree. The fact that companies cater to a "common denominator" means that thinking about why you like what you like will often only lead you to pick the same thing anyway. That's why it's called a "common denominator," people will tend to like it even when they think about it. If it's not something that naturally appeals to a lot of people, then it's NOT a "common denominator," and your company is only creating a false market through unfair competition. McDonald's hamburgers appeal to many people because it tastes great. Yes, it DOES taste great. You heard me. Studies show that McDonald's food is engineered to flood your brain with endorphins so that you become euphoric after you eat it. The effect is more promounced the more you eat McDonald's. The taste itself may not be all that subtle or varied, or whatever, but it does appeal broadly to many people, even when they think it over. Screw that. I've thought long and hard enough about why I like the music I like that I think my thoughts about music *are* worth something, and that if someone disagrees with me about them I damn well have the right to confront them and ask why, and that whatever I get out of that -- whether I agree with them at any point or not -- helps me become a more refined, discerning consumer of music. In other words, you're better than a whole lot of people "out there." Screw us, you're better. Got it. Call me a bigot or a snob if you like. I used to have no taste when it came to things. Everyone starts out having no taste when it comes to things they like. It's something you *learn*. And I learned it by being upbraided and criticized and argued with, and I'm a *better person for it now*, because at the very least I *think* more about the things I like and don't like and I do more with the brain God gave me instead of just passively accepting things. If that's being a bigot and a snob, I wholeheartedly embrace the label. Not everyone is like you. Not everyone is an idiot. I happen not to like a whole lot of things. I always think about what I like and why I liked it. I've always thought about what I liked about the things I liked. Even when I was a small kid. Yes, I remember things vividly that far back. When I liked Transformers, I knew that I liked it, and why. In fact, if you ask a lot of children, they will probably tell you exactly why they like ice cream, or McDonald's, or whatever it is that they like. Same with adults. Most of the time, adults like McDonald's for two things: it's fast/convenient, it's cheap. The fact that it's halfway edible is really just a bonus. And these people KNOW that they like McDonald's for just these reasons. Please don't assume that people are idiots just because you "used to be one." From my personal experience, people tend to be very discerning about what they like and what they don't like. Thinking that people are undiscerning fools is one of reasons why TSR went under, possibly why Forge isn't enjoying more success. Well, that's one way to rule it. It's a way that, however, swings you to the pendulum of Diplomacy checks being almost useless. ("Yes, you have made a very great impression on me, but since orcs are the sworn enemy of the human race, we still have to kill you.") It'll be mostly useless as a combat tactic, yes. I seem to have a hard time recalling momentous battles that turned because some fool started shouting at the top of his lungs and made every enemy his friend. Which, of course, is what leads to the illusionism -- the knowledge that the player will feel unhappy if he knows you fudged the dice and that he'll feel unhappy if he dies, so the best of both worlds is fudging the dice and not telling him and letting him think he had a wonderful lucky break. What's wrong with that, exactly? Some misguided notion that "truth" must be the "ultimate guide for games?" What you scorn as "illusionism" is only bad if the player ever finds out, and if he does, then you've failed - just as much as if you threw the entire dungeon design out the window. It's easy to criticize the bad parts of anything. There's a part of me that says "Screw it, I'll just use Linux" and part of me that says "Dammit, everyone uses Windows, it wouldn't be hard to fix these problems with Windows, why don't they just do it?" That would only be a correct analogy if what you've been implying is true - that everyone in the world who matters has the same taste in D&D as you. Of course, it's not.
Dexter_Blacktyde 03-28-07, 01:13 PM	My apologies. I genuinely think that I'm making progress with ArcTan and that this kind of discussion is central to the offensive nature of the OP's initial post. With all due respect, Roxlimn, but I think you're doing more harm than good. ArcTan expressed his opinion in a sometimes rather absolute way. You felt insulted. ArcTan explained that it was not his intention to insult you and that he only tried to get his point of view across, all political correctness aside. Up to that point I was able to relate to both of you. But you just keep going on and on and on about it whereas ArcTan seems to do his best to make clear what he thinks (IMHO that's where he failed before). He's talking about his personal point of view, about how he sees things - and that is by its very nature not insulting unless you want it to be. And I don't even agree with him on... let's see... anything? ;) ArcTan thinks something sucks. You like what he thinks sucks. I like what he thinks sucks. But he's only very honest about it, isn't he? I think rap sucks, big time, and I positively hate that this mass-produced assembly line crap that gets churned out by the dozen sells so incredibly well, although real musicians who are able to actually sing, can play actual instruments and write more than a tiny melody that gets repeated over and over and makes up a whole song aren't successful because the industry doesn't care to advertise them - and the majority seems to like what gets heavy rotation, no matter if it's actually good or not. Same goes for kiddie bands which consist solely of good-looking young people who can dance - if they are actual musicians doesn't matter. If this was a music forum and a good friend of mine told me that she thinks it'd be a great idea to have P. Diddy reissue the albums of the Doors or Queen with distorted samples of the original vocals, but typical rap instrumentation and rap vocals, I'd bite her head off. That doesn't mean I don't respect her anymore, it just means I think her taste in music sucks. If this point of view makes me an a$$hole, so be it. At least I'm honest about it and don't bother stealing her time by beating around the bush and mincing words. The doctor example, by the way, isn't applicable here because no patient thinks they know more than the expert. Here we're all "experts" with differing views. And what about ArcTan's unexplained jargon? I understand what he says, and I'm not even a native English speaker. I really think you've zeroed in on him and will feel insulted no matter what he says. Give him a break, please. If this is going on much longer, the thread will get locked eventually. DB
Cornell_Magunatis 03-28-07, 01:21 PM	That was the greatest rant I have ever heard, kudos. I will be adding a link to my signiture, if you do not want me to put it on there then tell. Until then it will be on my signiture. GREAT JOB!!!!!!
a_psh 03-28-07, 01:39 PM	I will be adding a link to my signiture, if you do not want me to put it on there then tell.If it's all the same to you, I'd rather you not. I don't think it's a particularly constructive bit of ranting. I'm hoping the thread series this has spawned will be more useful. But I basically post on a forum with the assumption that I'm giving stuff away, so I don't mind if you do.
Roxlimn 03-28-07, 01:53 PM	Dexter Blacktyde: I think you're mistaken. I have absolutely no problem that he thinks D&D sucks. That was never in question. What we've been talking about is that ArcTan thinks that people who like D&D suck (or are silly, or should play something else, etc.). That's a problem, not just for me, but for this thread. He thinks that he's better than you, than me. He SAYS that he's better than you. He says that people who like Mozart are better than people who like pop culture pehnomena like Backstreet Boys. These are not expressions of like or dislike about the game. These are abusive expressions bordering on hate speech.
Arrowhen 03-28-07, 02:38 PM	Dexter Blacktyde: I think you're mistaken. I have absolutely no problem that he thinks D&D sucks. That was never in question. What we've been talking about is that ArcTan thinks that people who like D&D suck (or are silly, or should play something else, etc.). That's a problem, not just for me, but for this thread. He thinks that he's better than you, than me. He SAYS that he's better than you. He says that people who like Mozart are better than people who like pop culture pehnomena like Backstreet Boys. These are not expressions of like or dislike about the game. These are abusive expressions bordering on hate speech. Oh, for crying out loud, "hate speech?" Is your life really so dull that you can't find anything better than someone disagreeing with you on a D&D message board to get all offended about? Seriously, if you really, really need to get offended, try reading a newspaper or something. At any given time, anywhere in the world, there's got to be something going on that's more offensive that some random internet stranger not liking the same RPG/musician/whatever as you. Furthermore even if he is saying he's better than you (which he's not) or that Mozart fans are better than Backstreet Boys fans (which he's not), who bloody well cares? Lots of people think they're better than others; that doesn't mean they're right. Why should you even care what some random internet stranger thinks of you? How does it affect your life in any meaningful way? Hell, at this point I think I'm better than you, because I don't let disagreements of taste with random internet strangers bother me.
ArcTan 03-28-07, 02:56 PM	ArcTan: There are several things you're misunderstanding. I'm NOT saying that art-populist crap. That's the problem, you see. I notice that people around here are so busy stereotyping that they can't be bothered to read what it is that I'm actually saying. I'm neither Democrat nor Republican, neither art-populist or classist snob. You're reading meanings into what I'm saying that's entirely contradictory to what I post, simply because I LOOK like one of the constructs in your native society. This has occured very often (so you're not exactly unique there). Just because I say that Paladins shouldn't go out looking to kill people doesn't imply that I'm one of those feel-good smushy smarmy pacifistic vegetarians that appear to be ubiquitous in American society. Just because I don't assign value to works of music based on classist valuation of who appreciates them doesn't mean that I ALSO subscribe to all those art-populist crap you seem so hell bent on opposing. Quit stereoptying me and read what I'm actually saying. I'm not a politician. I'm don't have party platforms. In what way am I stereotyping you? You're coming right out and saying that there's nothing at all better about one kind of art than another, and that the only measure of an artistic work is its popularity, to the point of saying a nursery rhyme is more "important" than a classical symphony because more people know it. I'm NOT advocating popular stereotypes and views. I'm NOT about political correctness, no matter how much it sounds like I am. I'm NOT endorsing a social agenda that's not my own. I'm not saying you're a member of the "art populist" political party, of which there isn't one. I'm using "art populist" as a label for what you've actually said, which I violently disagree with. Just because I don't think insulting people is a good way to start a discussion doesn't mean that I'm an uninteresting yes-man. I won't tell him that it's silly for him to like the D&D movie, but at the same time, I won't say that I like it, either, because I don't. We can discuss about our differences in opinion without insulting each other. We can also discuss our differences in opinion without pretending that these differences in opinion are absolutely value-neutral. Call me crazy, but I think the takeover of televison by reality shows, for example, is not just unfortunate for me because I happen to dislike reality shows, but actually *bad*. See, that's the thing. You're all about the absolute. If Mozart isn't better than Little Miss Muffet, then I MUST be saying that Little Miss Muffet is better than Mozart. I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying that it's pointless to even compare them directly, just as it's pointless to compare Mozart to Backstreet Boys. The only thing you'd be doing there is belittling other people - calling them initiated unsophisticated boors, or low class morons. Mozart and the Backstreet Boys are both music. In what way is it wrong to compare them directly? Especially in a world of limited resources, where the money and time spent on pop phenomena *does* actively cut in to the money and time there is for other things? "Standards" in culture and "cultural illiteracy" is just a fancy word to describe abusing other people. If thinking other people's standards are flawed and criticizing them is "abusing" them, then screw it. I like abusing people. There, I said it. Okay? And apparently the entire concept of cultural education and forcing kids to read Shakespeare in school is also a form of ritual abuse, as is the entire industry of film, music and art criticism. (Ebert and Roeper gave this movie two thumbs down! Roeper told people not to see it! What an abusive maniac!) Again, that isn't to say that you shouldn't listen to other people telling you that there's better stuff out there, but that's a long way from justifying social snobbery and bigotry on the basis of "cultural superiority." Er, if I tell someone there's better stuff out there, I'm saying that the stuff he likes is, in fact, not very good comparatively, and thereby -- according to you -- stomping on the shreds of his poor destroyed soul. Your English teacher asking you try Dostoyevsky is simply asking you to try something he or she has found enjoyable. There's no harm in that. It depends on the English teacher. If I were an English teacher, I would not phrase my attempts to educate my students in the form of "Hey, check out this book I really liked, you might enjoy it." There *is* an urgency to not letting people with great intellectual potential turn into cultural illiterates that goes beyond simply sharing things you like. [qote]However, if he or she starts calling you an unsophisticated boob just because you didn't fancy Dostoyevsky when you tried it (and quite a lot of people don't), and moreover, tried to transform the literature you liked INTO something like Dostoyevsky on the basis that "it'll make your literature form better," then that's socio-cultural tyranny of the worst kind.[/quote] What do you mean by "try to transform"? Am I storming the Virgin Records Megastore with AK-47s and killing all the people who buy crappy pop records? If by making public *criticism* you mean "trying to transform" the culture, that's both my right and my responsibility. Telling people what they should be making, for the good of our society, is part of the democratic process -- it's part of the conversation we need to be having as a culture. There *are* modes of analysis of importance and quality beyond simply "Will it sell?", and the question "Will it sell?" is so powerful otherwise that any foothold other arguments beyond that can get is vital. That's the kind of thinking that leads to the Maoist Cultural Revolution. There needs to be a Godwin's Law analogy for this. That's what I'm saying. You've been saying that people who like D&D as it is now are being silly, that they're uninformed, or that they should try more RPGs. You ARE insulting people, and you seem singularly unconcerned that you do. In fact, that seems to be your very purpose in making these insults - just to be insulting. I've given you the benefit of the doubt, and you seem to know that you are purposefully insulting and abusing certain kinds of people. This is as far as this goes. You can't say that I haven't been nice. "Insulting" and "abusing", bla bla bla. I'm saying that yes, I don't think this is value neutral, that yes, I think people should -- SHOULD, not just "might like it better" -- be more curious and more educated than they are. The world of gaming is a terribly tiny microscopic part of this, but yes, I am continually frustrated by how small and simplistic the cultural worlds of people are. I don't consider it an attack on a person's personality or soul to tell them that they should be more educated than they are. Actually, saying that some tastes are better than others, and that we're all honorbound to try to change others' environments to suit our tastes "for their own betterment" sounds like nothing so much as cultural warfare and extermination. Yeah, yeah, more hyperbole. Kill the English teachers! Destroy the Western canon! These so-called "classics" are merely the tyranny of the upper classes! Resist and fight! You know if anyone's rhetoric at this point sounds like a Maoist Red Guard's, it's *yours*, right? "Showing people that I know more than they do" is a pointless self-aggrandizing and egocentric excercise. As a doctor, I know that I know more than my patients do, and they know it, too. I don't have any interest in showing them up, because it's a given and it never comes up. Since I have no vested interest in belittling them, I use layman-friendly language as much as I can and I explain whatever jargon I have to use. There is no need whatsoever to "teach" them that such terms exist. I'm not trying to send them through medical school. But you aren't here -- no one is here -- to "prescribe treatment" to the rest of the people on the boards passively. Trying to explain the language that's useful for discussing things is a necessary step for having a continuing discussion with them. If you weren't just trying to tell your patient a diagnosis but were, in fact, trying to engage them in a discussion -- casual or not -- about medicine, then yes, introducing certain elements of jargon might be helpful. (And what would qualify as "jargon" is highly dependent on the situation. To me the meaning of "illusionism" is pretty intuitive, even if I'd never seen the word in that particular context before.) "Showing" people that you know made-up terms they don't, and THEN subsequently failing to explain it is just more of this arrogant supercilious behavior. If you're using a technical term, context is insufficent for explanation because you're referring to a very specific meaning that can never be gotten just from context. I would imagine that that would be self-evident. It really seems to me that you're using unexplained jargon yet again. Again, more jargon. Speaking casually, D&D articles and text occasionally uses "immersion" to also include spectrums of player engagement up to and exceeding "avatarism," as you've defined it. "Immersion" isn't really Forge jargon. Speaking casually, I can talk about being "immersed" in any number of things. ("Look at how immersed Joe is in that game of Minesweeper he's playing.") Using "immersion" to mean "realism" doesn't seem intuitive to me at all, as difficult as "immersion" might be to define. It also is used to refer to a phenomenon where you get so engaged in the game that glosses nothing over that it affects you detrimentally. That's what I mean. D&D purposefully includes unrealistic elements in order to limit your sense of engagement only to the extent that it remains fun. As far as I can tell, the only flames here are the incidents where you call anyone who disagrees with you an informed lout, and worse. Where have I said "uninformed lout"? There are many threads on topics similar to this that do not involve flames, particularly when it involves DMs thoughtfully considering solutions to problems that they've encountered when gaming. People CAN talk about the shortcomings of D&D in their games without insulting every other style gamer on the planet. The only difference on this thread is that I've said "You know, D&D itself, in its published materials, could really benefit from a change as opposed to people houseruling things in all the time", people saying "No, D&D is just fine as it is!" and me telling them that I don't think it is. Apparently, saying "This is just fine, because I like it!" and responding with "No it's not" constitutes a "deadly insult" in your eyes. You can, too, if you just remove the parts of your posts which insult other people - parts which, I repeat, are wholly and completely superfluous to the topic of D&D mechanics. It's not so much the changing as much as the suggestion of the wholesale removal of these items that bug people so much. See, when have I actually said "Y'all are uninformed louts and I'm better than you"? You're reading that into "You know, I don't think this aspect of the game is good for the game" and people saying "But I *like* that aspect of the game!" and me not taking that as a good argument. (People like all kinds of things. Try to fix the balance problems in D&D and you'll get protests from people who *like* balance problems and *like* disrupting games with power builds.) People like these aspects of D&D. There can be no denying that. Changing these items into better version of what they already to is not at all an objection. In fact, if you solicit advice, there are literally boards full of fan advice on how to "make D&D better." Okay, but I don't, in fact, agree with these people, and I do, in fact, think D&D *should* become a different game from what it currently is, for the good of the company and the good of the industry and the good of people who are generally interested in RPGs, regardless of whether it offends people who are attached to the game the way it is. It's the same old argument as when D&D 3e came out, which of necessity alienated and marginalized all the grognards who hang out on ENWorld and Dragonfoot.org and talk about how 1e or 2e or the Red Box were the only "real" D&D. The objection comes from: "These items need to go, regardless of how many people like them." "If they like these items, they should just go find them somewhere else - D&D should not cater to them." As you can imagine, that gets a lot of people's teeth on edge. AND it's bad business strategy. AND it's bigoted and abusive. I think it makes sense, honestly. A marketer has to think this way. Phrase it another way: "Right now D&D is competing hard with wargames and the market is diffuse between different wargames, MMOs, and D&D. If we abandon a lot of that base and start picking up a base from people who are interested in storytelling-type RPGs and have no products widely available on the commerical market for them, we stand to increase our market position very strongly". Cold-blooded? Maybe. But that kind of thing is *exactly* the kind of decision companies make when it comes to profit -- and, in the long run, this is also the sort of thing that maximizes utility for the market as a whole -- that makes the most people happy. If I own one country music station out of several, there may be some devoted fans who like my country music channel better than all the rest, but it remains true that -- all else being equal -- I would benefit from changing my radio station to play Latin music, if there's a huge contingent of Latin music lovers in the city who currently have no radio station. *Especially* if I'm already playing a mix of Latin music on certain timeslots on my channel and I have some DJs who are Latin music fans. This is really the same thing. Saying that yes, a lot of fans of D&D right now are *less important to D&D* because what they like is *not unique to D&D* is not "rude" or "abusive" -- it's simple business sense and design sense. Telling people that they're idiots and that they deserve to be booted from the game, even if phrased only as a suggestion, is inflammatory and nonconducive to discussion. "The game would benefit if future products catered less to this market" is not the same as "booting people from the game". Again, you treat D&D as though it's some kind of resort spa we're physically kicking people out of, instead of a *product* that people *buy*. It's less of an invitation to discussion with differently minded-people and more of a call to like minded people to start bashing "them" together with you. It's a "game" where the ulterior motive is the satisfaction of looking down at "these inferior people." Similar "games" are bashing the government, bashing Faerun, or bashing young folk, or the "noise" that's considered music these days. Yeah, whatever. If you really think criticism, even hardcore criticism, is nothing but an exercise in self-congratulation, I have very little to discuss with you. No discussion is being sought here. Only consensus. I'm seeking discussion in that I want to air my views and I have no objection to other people airing their disagreement with my views. If you mean that I'm pretty sure my mind won't be *changed* by things people say, then sure. I could say the same about you. It's more along the sense of you're not so much discussing something as insulting people. As you can tell, NO ONE, not even the people who are opposing you on this thread, think that D&D is perfect, nor that more rules in some aspects of the game would be extremely useful and desireable. Hey, I'm all for more tools! Even if I don't personally care for them, they could make the game better for some people out there, and that's a good thing. a_psh, however, is not of that mind. He specifically is suggesting that D&D ought to throw away all those "pesky wargamey rules," and transform into something more like DitV, or Polaris or whatever. If he wants to make those games into a fantasy game, he's more than welcome to. Suggesting that eradicating support for products that a whole lot of people like, on the basis of "introducing them to something better..." Well, that's like outlawing Backstreet Boys so that people would be forced to listen to Mozart. No, it's like telling a record company "Hey, maybe if you stopped churning out these cookie-cutter boy band albums you could produce something that actually sticks in the public consciousness and reaches out to all these markets you've never reached before". It's not like I have the power to *force* them to do anything. And it's not like you have the right to *demand* anything from them -- they, as always, make what they think will make them money and be good for the game. It's the conflation of "Change what you publish in the future" with "outlawing" what is published now that bothers me. This sense of *desperation* coming from you, as if your whole gaming experience will be destroyed forever and unrecoverable if WotC changes its strategy. It happens a lot with D&D, and it, too, bothers me, and is a nasty artifact of D&D's market-leader position -- that people think of what is "official" D&D as very, very important and go into paroxysms if "official" D&D no longer includes them. And again, I think you're dead wrong. D&D has a clear vision of what it's doing. 3e moreso than any previous edition of it. What it's doing is enabling people to play different kinds of games with it. The range is necessarily limited, of course, but it's easier to modify it to play to a wide range of people than it is to try playing a wargame with DitV, for instance. You're right in thinking that a lot of people focus on the noncombat aspects of the game, which is probably why they've received increasing amounts of material and focus through the years. It used to be just the Wilderness and Survival Guide, and then Nonweapon Proficiencies, and then Skills in S&P, but now it's an integrated Skills minigame part. With Skill Tricks seeing great play and rave reviews from the fans, it seems certain that attention to nonwargame aspects will only increase as the years go by. In order to go much further than skill tricks, which are already problematic, you do have to start redesigning the system, you realize. Furthermore, there is also more attention being placed on the "story" aspect of D&D, although it's more along the lines of traditional "pick your own adventure" type of development rather than anything more flexible. Dungeon, a sister publication of D&D, hosts Dungeoncraft, which places emphasis on creating pacing, story elements, and so on. There's even a very nice article about Events and making Event-based adventures. And yes, you CAN make a very nice mystery game with D&D that doesn't feel like a card game of some sort. More attention and material on Adventure Design is available now than there ever has been before - so yes, WotC IS looking into expanding D&D beyond the wargame roots, without losing those wargame roots that so many fans love and enjoy. We've been over this ground before, and I don't think we're going to gain anything by going over it again. Layering advice on top of a static ruleset does not constitute making rules flexible. Having a very detailed ruleset does *not* constitute an invitation to houserule your own system into it or make doing so automatic or easy -- for many groups it's a very hard process that never quite works out. Like it or not, fans DO play D&D to play individual style wargame play, and that kind of play can't be found in Warhammer, or Warcraft, or anything other than D&D or a D&D clone. About the closest analogue I can find is in MMORPGs, but even there the interpretation is quite limited, the gameplay different. That impression is unsupported by WotC's market surveys, my own experience, and even the experience of the people on these boards. It's VERY hard nowadays to look for RPG gamers of any sort, especially since videogames have siphoned off a significant part of those people who would otherwise play RPGs. And you don't see a reason for this? You don't think that this signals there's something wrong with what D&D is doing, if video games can so easily tap into D&D's core market and suck it away? Fracturing the market further would make it prohibitively difficult to look for other people to game with, except for those lucky few who already game with people of very similar interests. Only if you see it as cutting the existing market into pieces, instead of *expanding* the market to huge demographics of people who have no interest in video games but are very interested in what RPGs could do if they were less video-game-like. Furthermore, D&D gamers usually enjoy more than one aspect of the game. Most "powergamers" aren't just "powergamers" of the wargame persuasion who only enjoy that part of the game. They also enjoy story points and roleplay opportunities. Your experience is unusual in that you seem to only see gamers who only want one thing from the RPG experience and get bored whenever someone else gets their thing going on. It's not absolute, but it exists. It is also likely exacerbated by poor DMing organization - forcing people to play aspects of D&D they don't like, or forcing them to watch while other people play aspects of D&D they find boring. You don't HAVE to force everyone to solve a puzzle, and you also don't HAVE to force everyone to wait while the puzzle solver does his thing. That's exactly why I think this kind of advice is essential. Too many DMs make the mistake of putting unsolvable puzzles that kill the game, or puzzles at crucial breakpoints that force everyone to either join the puzzle game, or else look around dazedly while the puzzle guy does his thing. Likewise, you don't have to bore the wargamer with roleplay time if he doesn't care for it. It's quite easy to give him something interesting to do. It still requires you to cut up the game into little bits that don't quite fit together, though. Look, I know what you're talking about, and I still consider it a problem. It makes a game where the seams are obvious. D&D's strength is its ability to engage all these people at the same time on their own terms, and too many DMs don't know how to do it. The problem you see is less a problem of D&D not being focused enough and more a problem of there not being enough advice in the DMG on how to coordinate playtime within the group. The problem is a DM having to do a very difficult and specific task -- juggle several games at once and pretend they're one game -- which he *shouldn't have to do in the first place*. Having an opinion about D&D isn't bad. Telling people that their opinions are crap because you're superior is. Why? That is part of having an opinion -- believing your opinion is right and other opinions are wrong. Sometimes you feel strongly enough about an opinion that you think there are stakes attached to it and that it's really important that people know your opinion isn't just a matter of preference but something you really strongly think about what's good and what's bad. There's criticism, and then there's constructive criticism. For the most part, I think that critics are just people who don't know enough to make their own films and literary pieces, but have the gall to say that other people's works are crap. There you go. FWIW, most people who *do* create their own films and literary pieces also have strong opinions about others'; some express them publicly, some don't, but it's hard not to have those opinions. There are good critics, however, and they tend to focus on why they didn't like a particular film, and they ALSO have suggestions on where you might like a film, even when they don't. These guys perform a useful service and they're usually less about how much a film sucks and more about where and why it's good. You still have to make a value judgment, though. "This film had slow, muddy pacing and gratuitous violence" doesn't need a "But hey, some people LIKE slow, muddy pacing and gratuitous violence!" qualifier attached to it. I'm also talking about the higher criticism that's about the ideas and trends in film mainly discussed among people who studied it, not just Mr. Moviefone-style "See this if you like pirates!" popular reviews. Good critics never discount ways in which a film might satisfy an audience, even when that audience is a very small part of the general populace. Sure, but they might have an opinion about what kind of person a film would satisfy and whether they *should* be satisfied. I don't like the people who would like the film Birth of a Nation based on its political content; in fact, I go so far as to wish they didn't exist, and try to participate in efforts to educate people out of those beliefs. However that might be true, it's also against the COC, just in case you didn't know. How so? Unless you *do* think criticizing values and opinions is the same thing as attacking a person himself -- an opinion you hold, but I don't -- I don't see how it's the same at all. If you want to criticize people's values and opinions, you'll need to do it somewhere else. Personally, I think that criticizing other people's values is only an activity you participate in if you have no confidence in your own beliefs. If your beliefs are so self-evidently better than another person's then showing them your side should be sufficient to convince them to side with you, and I've found this to be the case nearly anywhere. Yep. Racists, for instance, convert to democratic liberalism in droves whenever I tell them they're wrong.
Roxlimn 03-28-07, 03:10 PM	If it really, really bothered me, do you think I would even have bothered to post? I would've fired off an email to a WizO straightaway. It's an interesting thread, and if you'll notice, I do carry on with a discussion about Skills. I notice that you're choosing to comment on my little tiff with ArcTan, but not about that. Why should it bother YOU that we're having a little disagreement on this matter, in a thread which is specifically about this disagreement? Don't YOU have something better to be concerned about, hmm?
Roxlimn 03-28-07, 03:22 PM	ArcTan: Are you really interested in discussing this further?
Solik 03-28-07, 03:25 PM	Roxlimn is my new hero. He's called out absolutely everything that needed to be called out, expressing exactly what I was thinking using more words than I really had time to write out. And in the process, taught me some things that I'll try to be careful of when I'm engaging in discussions myself. And ArcTan's responses -- that he doesn't care that he's insulting people and he refuses to take responsibility for it -- have been absolutely telling. At this point I'm not even reading his posts anymore. If I want abuse, I'll at least get it from a comic who's entertaining me in the process. Archtyrant Terevoth-- I would have loved to continue the discussion we started, but there's too much noise in here for it to have much value. Perhaps another time, in a thread dedicated to social rules. Suffice it to say that you countered my quality example (RotTKX) with a really bad example (Oblivion). Not that you made a bad choice, but just that Oblivion did it all wrong (Oblivion's can't be roleplayed, can't be made sense of, and isn't really a good abstraction at all... it's actually a rushed feature that appeared very late in development).
Reinforcements 03-28-07, 05:04 PM	Roxlimn is my new hero. He's called out absolutely everything that needed to be called out, expressing exactly what I was thinking using more words than I really had time to write out. And in the process, taught me some things that I'll try to be careful of when I'm engaging in discussions myself. And ArcTan's responses -- that he doesn't care that he's insulting people and he refuses to take responsibility for it -- have been absolutely telling. At this point I'm not even reading his posts anymore. If I want abuse, I'll at least get it from a comic who's entertaining me in the process. Huh. Interestingly (or maybe tediously at this point) I feel the exact opposite way. I absolutely hate the idea that everyone needs to tiptoe through their conversations and post-script every statement with, "By the way, this is just my opinion!" to avoid the merest possibility that they might offend anyone. Sure, sometimes it's in everyone's best interests to be as diplomatic as possible - a word out of place for, say, an international ambassador could have severe consequences (although even then it's less "being super-diplomatic makes you a better person" and more "accept that some people can be easily offended" to my mind). It seems self-evident to me that if my opinion is contrary to yours then I think you're wrong, and it's limiting to discussion and a waste of everyone's time to tip-toe around it. I mean, come on, this is the INTERNET! We don't even know who each other are! How can you ever have a reasonable discussion if you're determined to be offended by "I think you're wrong - here's why"? I'll say it, too. If the Backstreet Boys were your favorite band, I would suggest you expose yourself to more music. I think that their popularity (however brief) over better bands is a bad thing, and that our culture would be improved (however slightly) if fewer people liked the Backstreet Boys and more liked, say, They Might Be Giants (because I like them). And yes, if you think that D&D is fine just the way it is and is the best game available by virtue of being the most popular, I think you're mistaken. Of course, I could be totally wrong. It's just my opinion, after all.
ArcTan 03-28-07, 05:15 PM	And ArcTan's responses -- that he doesn't care that he's insulting people and he refuses to take responsibility for it -- have been absolutely telling. For the record, I would care if I actually thought I had been insulting people and unaware of it. However, if people take my criticism of their point of view or their opinion as an insult, and they take my criticism of a game they enjoy playing as some kind of threat to forcibly rip it out of their hands (or something), I honestly don't see why I should give a crap. Roxlimn has *actually* been insulting me (calling me a bigot and so forth) and I don't actually care because, as Reinforcements says, this is the Internet.
ArcTan 03-28-07, 05:17 PM	Dexter Blacktyde: I think you're mistaken. I have absolutely no problem that he thinks D&D sucks. That was never in question. What we've been talking about is that ArcTan thinks that people who like D&D suck (or are silly, or should play something else, etc.). "Are silly" is not the same thing as "sucks", and "should play somethin else" isn't the same as "are silly", and both are pretty bad misinterpretations of what I was saying. That's a problem, not just for me, but for this thread. He thinks that he's better than you, than me. He SAYS that he's better than you. He says that people who like Mozart are better than people who like pop culture pehnomena like Backstreet Boys. Not really. I just think I have better taste than you. I don't think upper-class people are *better* than people of other classes. To the contrary -- I think the privilege upper-class people have to expose themselves to better literature and music is one of the unfair advantages upper-class people have. I also think upper-class people live in better and more comfortable houses than poor people, as a rule. Does that make me classist against poor people too? These are not expressions of like or dislike about the game. These are abusive expressions bordering on hate speech. Having opinions about taste that go beyond personal preference is not "hate speech". If this is the case, then my friends and I engage in hate speech on each other on a daily basis, and apparently we're too stupid to care. (Oh, hey, you just called me a stupid moron! Hate speech!)
Roxlimn 03-28-07, 05:34 PM	ArcTan: Since you keep posting and responding even to replies that aren't directed to you, I suppose you still want to hash this out? For the record, I wasn't saying that you're a bigot. I said that what you're saying is representative of bigotry. Not the same thing.
Solik 03-28-07, 05:35 PM	None of your comments, or the way you were phrasing them, Reinforcements, were insulting, nor would they have been taken that way. That's not the case with ArcTan's posts, where he's claiming that everyone who disagrees with him is ignorant and at one point compared them to squealing preteen girls.
Cornell_Magunatis 03-28-07, 05:38 PM	first you say you would rather not, then you say you don't mind. May I keep the link on my signiture, I feel asking you is right.
Jenkins007 03-28-07, 11:49 PM	This thread has quickly turned into a massive criticism-fest. Everyone is trying to one up each other, in ArcTan's case, or else justify themselves or clarify and redirect the assault on their person. Hurray dissension!
a_psh 03-28-07, 11:54 PM	Cornell_Magunatis, Go ahead! It's not a problem with me.
Singer_of_the_Song 03-29-07, 01:28 AM	Don't get the thread locked. This is a good discussion (or was).
Andorxor 03-29-07, 01:34 AM	I think they could get it locked,if they want.It has grown to big for meaningfulll discussion.
a_psh 03-29-07, 01:36 AM	Remember, I did make a new one (http://boards1.wizards.com/showthread.php?t=817745). ;) I've got a few more interesting ones in mind, but I don't want to dilute the conversation by having too many going at once.
Archtyrant Terevoth 03-29-07, 05:10 PM	Archtyrant Terevoth-- I would have loved to continue the discussion we started, but there's too much noise in here for it to have much value. Perhaps another time, in a thread dedicated to social rules. Suffice it to say that you countered my quality example (RotTKX) with a really bad example (Oblivion). Not that you made a bad choice, but just that Oblivion did it all wrong (Oblivion's can't be roleplayed, can't be made sense of, and isn't really a good abstraction at all... it's actually a rushed feature that appeared very late in development). I created a new thread. http://boards1.wizards.com/showthread.php?t=818716 With the sole purpose of discussing workable social systems.
ArcTan 03-30-07, 03:46 AM	ArcTan: Are you really interested in discussing this further? To be honest, an argument about the Meaning of Objective Value in Art has the potential for indefinite expansion that makes me queasy about embarking on it. But I will point out that saying "I didn't call you a bigot, I just said you were engaging in bigotry" is rich, given that your whole position is "Saying that one of my opinions is dumb automatically implies that *I* am dumb and a worthless person", or "Saying that I shouldn't like something I like means you have absolutely no respect for me whatsoever", or "Saying that I should go out and read more books than I have is akin to calling me an ignorant member of the lower classes". If you can claim that relatively neutral things like "You should try some of these things before you say they're a bad model for what D&D should be, because most people haven't" really is the same as being a member of the Maoist Cultural Revolution, then I can claim that you saying my opinions are "representative of bigotry" entails calling me a bigot. Really, I think I have the stronger case here.
ArcTan 03-30-07, 03:51 AM	None of your comments, or the way you were phrasing them, Reinforcements, were insulting, nor would they have been taken that way. "If the Backstreet Boys were your favorite band, I would suggest you expose yourself to more music." "And yes, if you think that D&D is fine just the way it is and is the best game available by virtue of being the most popular, I think you're mistaken." None of these is particularly less harsh than anything I said. Okay, "mistaken" is different from "ignorant", but I actually think it's kinder to accuse someone of being wrong because they simply haven't had the opportunity, by chance or circumstance, to expose themselves to the evidence (it's not like playing indie RPGs is a mark of class status in our society) than to say they're just plain wrong because they're wrong. That's not the case with ArcTan's posts, where he's claiming that everyone who disagrees with him is ignorant and at one point compared them to squealing preteen girls. Hey, I thought all taste was relative, nothing was better than anyone else, and the Backstreet Boys are worthy only of our admiration because they represent such a triumph of marketing ingenuity and profit generation. Apparently there *is* something shameful about liking the Backstreet Boys if being compared to a Backstreet Boys fan is something you take as such an automatic insult. Which was my entire *point*. Not that D&D fans are actually like Backstreet Boys fans in every respect, but that if you happen to think that the Backstreet Boys, despite their massive profits, were not actually that good, then you should know why you can't just make the "D&D is the most popular RPG, which means it's perfect" argument. Or *even* the "D&D is the most popular RPG, which means it has no major, glaring, critical design flaws" argument, unless you think that the Backstreet Boys, despite being imperfect, were nonetheless decent music, like any other music, that no one need be ashamed of liking.
Roxlimn 03-30-07, 10:52 AM	ArcTan: But I will point out that saying "I didn't call you a bigot, I just said you were engaging in bigotry" is rich, given that your whole position is "Saying that one of my opinions is dumb automatically implies that *I* am dumb and a worthless person", or "Saying that I shouldn't like something I like means you have absolutely no respect for me whatsoever", or "Saying that I should go out and read more books than I have is akin to calling me an ignorant member of the lower classes". If you can claim that relatively neutral things like "You should try some of these things before you say they're a bad model for what D&D should be, because most people haven't" really is the same as being a member of the Maoist Cultural Revolution, then I can claim that you saying my opinions are "representative of bigotry" entails calling me a bigot. Really, I think I have the stronger case here. Undoubtedly, you do. But I just can't see it.
Zinegata 03-30-07, 11:20 PM	*sigh* And I thought the thread I participated in with ArcTan was huge... First of all, let me remind everyone one important thing about any form of subjective entertainment - be it movies, games, or music. There is no "better", there is only different. People will love some elements about a game, others will loathe it for the exact same reasons. And frankly, most rants are useless because they are written from the perspective of only the writer. Only the writer's own needs and wants are being taken into account. It doesn't care about the needs and wants of others, even if they're the majority. Just see how many, many critics panned the movie 300, yet it's been one of the most-watched films ever. Personally, I loved it too. D&D is little different. There will always be critics panning it even if many others love it. And frankly, I'd suggest to those critics that if they think the game is so flawed,, they should simply play some other game. Unity is overrated. There is no need for there to be One System to rule them all. If you don't like D&D, play something different.
Vrykolakas 04-11-07, 09:07 PM	3) The rules are less important than anything in an RPG. That's why so much of the 2e PHB and DMG is highlighted in blue and called optional and why rule 0 is made clear and emphasized from the beginning. 4) I like 2e better. That's probably clear to anyone. I can't explain why too exactly. a) A few 3e things feel like concessions to the video game generation (Sorcerers are as close as D&D can or will get to pure magic points casting and there is now definitely such a thing as magic shop). b) Other than maybe two Sage Advice questions, polymorph never caused any real confusion earlier than 3e and most of that was from not reading the spell carefully. Attacking three times a round is a magical ability of a Quickling. Polymorphing doesn't grant magical special attacks. A PC polymorphed into a quickling doesn't get three attacks a round. Now compare that to all the errata and revisions of 3.x Polymorph and Wild Shape. 5) If you like 3.x better cool for you. Different salves for different wounds. Game on.I agree with you. 2E said: “A round is one minute. In the course of one minute, you move, faint, dodge, and, maybe, hit.” Abstraction. A 3E round is 6 seconds. We now have stupid things like a fighter attacking once a second; introducing the machine-gun fighter. Go to your nearest armory and try to wield a sword (a real one, not some rattan stuff). “What is a Viking anyway? A Fighter with a special background” (DMG). Granted, they later introduced Kits. Several people mentionned how Hit Points are a mesure of the capacity of staying alive, not some titanium-coated skin. I encourage you to read these posts (post 1 (http://boards1.wizards.com/showpost.php?p=11641333&postcount=63), post 2 (http://boards1.wizards.com/showpost.php?p=11660195&postcount=93)) It is ludicrous to think that those 32 arrow hits are going to be 32 arrows sticking out of him. And, yes, “concessions to the video game generation”. Definitely. PnP is about role. For play, grab a videogame, there is no chance a PnP RPG can fight against it. I think in the long run, frag-a-ton PnP RPG will lose and only atmosphere PnP RPG stand a chance. Meanwhile, money is coming in, so… Thank you Khyron for your post. I could continue and speak about the stupid truckload of new monsters, feats, races, templates, spells and magic-items clearly targetting the kind of people equalling importance with weight--“3 kilos of spells and half-a-kilo of monsters. Yes, the green one please”. I could talk of some other RPG which decided that well-thought advantages are better in the long-run than 25 hastily-made feats a month. But I won't and will just remember the good things about AD&D2—that is, importance of abstraction, playing for the fun of it and not to get yet-another-feat-that kicks asses (I recognize I did not buy much books). Oh, yes, there is some good things in 3.5. Artworks for first. They pretty always look the same, not much imagination there (not even hoping something different than the half-naked woman, sharp-teeth humanoid monster or any other nonsense, in-your-face graphics…) but at least, they really improved over the previous one. There is also an embryo of “hey, look what others are doing” (I'm talking of the advantages things but everyone and his dog is doing it for a long time, D&D is just trying to go on par with the rest and catch up: GURPS, Shadowrun, WOD, <insert your RPG here>… This reminds me of a compagny that embraces and extend (in a clumsy way, see these tons of new rules that have only one reason to be: to be sold, no matter how crappy, redundant or unelegant it is). One thing is 3.0-only. I like incitative title instead of indicative one. I much prefer Song and Silence than Complete Arcane. Oh! And there is the OGL thing. Great idea, also it should be update with new stuff. As time passes, it lloks more and more like free publicity (embrace and extend) than anything else. Take a look at d20srd.org or dandwiki.com and it is ieasy to see how motivated people can make great thing with this. From time to time, someone suggest a two-years old book should be OGL’ed. That would be nice, really. I even think it could still be possible to make money with it--after all mp3 piracy did not hinder much the music market, despite all what the majors are saying--nothing beats a beautifu l CD casing with lyrics and jacket and the same goes for a shiny and convenient hardcover. Yes, I think I know what I am looking for: Elegance. Coding elegance, if you know what I mean (and whence I come). Mandatory “die, vancian system, die!” one-liner