D&D thread
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in D&D thread:
Uh, I'm not sure I've said anything that would warrant a crass "you don't like, you don't buy" reply.
Sorry that wasn't the intended message, I actually meant that quite literally: as I see it, everything in a role-playing campaign is customizable as long as you can get the buy-in of the group (and of course most importantly the GM as they'll have the final say on the matter), and I'd encourage everyone to use this freedom to the fullest in order to make the game as enjoyable as possible to everyone involved. That said, world consistency is IMHO important for a good experience and when doing such customizations you'll have to be mindful of this.
Same goes for the "there's too much dice rolling / random chance" argument btw. Messing with the basic mechanics is somewhat more sketchy than adapting the setting, as you risk unbalancing the game; but in the end it's always the GM's call to decide if a roll is warranted in a particular situation and how to interpret the result. Combat does tend to be mechanics-heavy, but there's always the option of having a combat-light, roleplay-heavy storyline.
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@ixvedeusi Alright. I got too angsty myself. I'll try and excuse myself that it's Friday and I just want it to end.
Anyway, apparently WotC has attempted to address that now by officially letting people pick what they like and add bonuses to any two a la Variant Human. It just took goddamn 40 years to wise up to that. It still screws CHA-casters, because CHA-casters other than bards don't make sense to me. It seems I'm not going to be
paladin, but I guess that can't be helped.
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
Also, if you as a player know you’re good with people, and want to play your character that way … why take low Charisma?
Because that shitshow of a stystem that WOTC is pleased to still call D&D forces me to sacrifice something in order to be able to do something else, and if I want (or have) to play a specific role in non-talking encounters, I must put the ability points elsewhere.
You could just as easily ask why don't we bar players that aren't good with people nor show inclination to take initiative in this aspect of play from having high Charisma characters.
Or we could simply use the "mental" abilities of Int, Wis, and Cha as "crutches" for those players who aren't equally blessed, whilst at the same time not penalising those players who are capable of figuring things out on their own, etc., etc. - which is how we used to do it before we decided we absolutely need to roll the dice for everything.
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@remi said in D&D thread:
@PotatoEngineer said in D&D thread:
I haven't played Amber, but I have listened to a podcast review of it. And the rulebook itself apparently thinks of it as a "con game," not a long-term game.
TBH, I don't remember having had this impression while reading it. But this was a very long time ago and also I had the French version, which maybe pitched it a bit differently.
It is distinctly possible that the podcast I listened to was reviewing the first edition, and that later editions got rid of the con-game/GM-vs-players bits. But remembering fiddly little details is somebody else's problem, so I get to keep making unsupported pronouncements.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in D&D thread:
It should be that CHA bonus/penalty depends on the interlocutors.
Whenever someone creates rules for sex in D&D (officially supported or not), they usually end up with some kind of "roll to seduce." And since CHA is objective and universal in D&D, it means that trolls should have died out thousands of years ago from failure to get any other trolls to have sex with them.
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@PotatoEngineer said in D&D thread:
@Applied-Mediocrity said in D&D thread:
It should be that CHA bonus/penalty depends on the interlocutors.
Whenever someone creates rules for sex in D&D (officially supported or not), they usually end up with some kind of "roll to seduce." And since CHA is objective and universal in D&D, it means that trolls should have died out thousands of years ago from failure to get any other trolls to have sex with them.
Trolls just have a -10 bonus to their seduction save
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@GOG said in D&D thread:
Because that shitshow of a stystem that WOTC is pleased to still call D&D forces me to sacrifice something in order to be able to do something else, and if I want (or have) to play a specific role in non-talking encounters, I must put the ability points elsewhere.
Maybe it’s that I’ve never played any recent versions of D&D,¹ but I don’t really see a problem here. Sure, to have high Charisma you’ll need to sacrifice some points elsewhere, but in most RPGs I can think of, this would still leave you enough left over to be a reasonable fighter, if that’s what you also want to be capable of, rather than be instantly crap at it.
¹ I saw my very first D&D5 book yesterday, when one of the players brought one to our Shadowrun session because of the D&D group he and our group’s newest player also play in. It didn’t inspire me to want to play that game, though. Hat of Vermin …?!
Or we could simply use the "mental" abilities of Int, Wis, and Cha as "crutches" for those players who aren't equally blessed, whilst at the same time not penalising those players who are capable of figuring things out on their own, etc., etc.
My problem with this is that it doesn’t feel fair to give some players a crutch in their character’s stats, while all but ignoring those same stats for players who don‘t need the crutch. If you’re allowing the first kind of players to use their character’s abilities for things they’re not good at, IMHO the second kind of players should let themselves be limited by their stats at the same time.
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
Maybe it’s that I’ve never played any recent versions of D&D,¹ but I don’t really see a problem here. Sure, to have high Charisma you’ll need to sacrifice some points elsewhere, but in most RPGs I can think of, this would still leave you enough left over to be a reasonable fighter, if that’s what you also want to be capable of, rather than be instantly crap at it.
It's not about being instantly crap at it, but about being worse at what you do than the other members of your party who do specialise.
5e is not as bad here as the previous attempts by WOTC, but that's a low bar.
@Gurth said in D&D thread:
My problem with this is that it doesn’t feel fair to give some players a crutch in their character’s stats, while all but ignoring those same stats for players who don‘t need the crutch. If you’re allowing the first kind of players to use their character’s abilities for things they’re not good at, IMHO the second kind of players should let themselves be limited by their stats at the same time.
My idea is that RPGs are supposed to be fun. I'm not about to say: Bob you're dumb as a sack of bricks so you don't get to play a wizard, or any other character that's got an above-room-temperature IQ (Celsius), because - presumably - I like Bob and I would like him to enjoy playing the game.
What I found in the game I mentioned is that the more it gravitated to roll-playing the less fun I was having, because if the only thing that matters is how well you roll the dice, then I might as well just shut up and roll the dice. So even if I made a high CHA character, there would be exactly zero point to me doing any sort of role-playing other than "I ask him about the McGuffin, here's my Persuasion roll".
Or, I could decide to find something more worthwhile to do with my time - which is what I ended up doing.
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@GOG said in D&D thread:
if the only thing that matters is how well you roll the dice, then I might as well just shut up and roll the dice. So even if I made a high CHA character, there would be exactly zero point to me doing any sort of role-playing other than "I ask him about the McGuffin, here's my Persuasion roll".
This is why I favour rolling the dice and then using that as the basis for the roleplaying. Don’t just roll the dice and proceed directly to the result, roll the dice, interpret the results in the light of what the player is doing, and weave that into the story. So you roll your dice against your crap Charisma stat, but unexpectedly do really well; roleplay out the conversation while keeping the good roll in the back of your head, and arrive at the player’s desired outcome — even if the player isn’t very good at roleplaying this out. Conversely, if you have a high Charisma but roll badly, do the same but direct the roleplaying into the player not getting the desired outcome.
Of course, this requires players who cooperate with that. If you have players who are there mainly to roll dice to see how well they hit with their attacks, this may be a bit difficult.
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@Gurth It's a way to do it, and it might even be fun on occasion. I suspect, however, that playing second fiddle to the randomiser can get old after a while.
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@GOG said in D&D thread:
@Gurth It's a way to do it, and it might even be fun on occasion. I suspect, however, that playing second fiddle to the randomiser can get old after a while.
Probably right about the time the
GMrandomiser mercilessly kills you with a dragon
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@GOG said in D&D thread:
@Gurth It's a way to do it, and it might even be fun on occasion. I suspect, however, that playing second fiddle to the randomiser can get old after a while.
But it doesn’t in combat? Nobody is going to claim that missing with their sword a lot because they don’t have much skill in it while the player is a good fencer, gets old after a while.
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@Gurth Combat is literally "roll to hit; roll for damage" - nobody's even pretending that it involves any sort of role-playing, and it inevitably devolves into fifty shades of cringe if they try.
Which is to say that if your idea for resolving the issue "is NPC convinced" is "roll a die", then why not just do that and stop pretending that it's about anything but the RNG?
If people enjoy roll-playing, that's fine with me. I don't have to play with them.
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@GOG said in D&D thread:
@Gurth Combat is literally "roll to hit; roll for damage" - nobody's even pretending that it involves any sort of role-playing,
Wrong!
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in D&D thread:
@GOG said in D&D thread:
@Gurth Combat is literally "roll to hit; roll for damage" - nobody's even pretending that it involves any sort of role-playing,
Wrong!@GOG said in D&D thread:
it inevitably devolves into fifty shades of cringe
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@GOG said in D&D thread:
@Gurth Combat is literally "roll to hit; roll for damage" - nobody's even pretending that it involves any sort of role-playing
What, not even embellishments like how the attack goes in, that the target tries to dodge but fails and now has a big sword cut on his arm? Attacker rolls the dice, the attack hits; target rolls the dice, the dodge attempt fails; attacker rolls the damage, which is fairly bad but not lethal: GM describes how the attacker swings the sword and inflicts a non-fatal wound that reflects not dodging well enough. This is roleplaying too.
Which is to say that if your idea for resolving the issue "is NPC convinced" is "roll a die", then why not just do that and stop pretending that it's about anything but the RNG?
But the opposite is just as much an argument: if your idea for resolving whether an NPC is convinced, is having to in-character convince the GM, why not drop the pretense that a character’s stats matter?
Most RPGs have a RNG in order to get unpredictability into the resolution system. I don’t see why that should be ditched selectively for certain things players might be good at even if their characters aren’t, but not for others.
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@GOG Well, yes, but I am led to believe that's a natural and unavoidable part of the whole process.
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
What, not even embellishments like how the attack goes in, that the target tries to dodge but fails and now has a big sword cut on his arm? Attacker rolls the dice, the attack hits; target rolls the dice, the dodge attempt fails; attacker rolls the damage, which is fairly bad but not lethal: GM describes a non-fatal wound that reflects not dodging well enough.
@GOG said in D&D thread:
it inevitably devolves into fifty shades of cringe
... which is why everyone quickly stops doing it unless something really extraordinary happens, and even then it's typically played for laughs.
@Gurth said in D&D thread:
But the opposite is just as much an argument: if your idea for resolving whether an NPC is convinced, is having to in-character convince the GM, why not drop the pretense that a character’s stats matter?
Frame challenge: what makes you think the stats matter?
Prior to the WOTC takeover and 3e, ability scores just weren't that important - not even when it came to combat. The purpose of Int, Wis and Cha were respectively: what spells you get as a magic user, what spells you get as a cleric, and how many followers/henchmen you could have.
Here's the thing: when D&D and its imitators came out, wargames were already a thing and had been for a while. If your idea of a game was "move some miniatures around and roll dice", Chainmail already had you covered.
What D&D brought to the table was the idea that rather than pick from a limited set of moves described in the rulebook (and "roll to Persuade" is fundamentally exactly the same as "roll to hit"), you could have a referee and, potenitally, do anything you can think of.
To be fair, TSR always sucked at teaching people how they intended their game to be played, but people tended to figure it out eventually (inevitably, after going through several iterations of ill-conceived house rules for "things missing from the rulebook").
Then, roughly around the turn of the century, the... um... neurodivergents took over and it all went to shit.
Look, you were never supposed to test for everything. Having random results for everything doesn't even make sense on the game level. The moment you touch the dice you've already lost.
Old-school D&D was a meat-grinder chiefly because you weren't supposed to get into fair fights. I will never stop repeating this: the goal of the original game wasn't "kill monsters, get treasure"; it was "get treasure" - it's enough to apply the minimum amount of thought to the XP rules to see this. Killing monsters is what you did if you had no better option, and even then you tried to make sure that you'd roll as few dice as possible (which is why you had Willie the Wizard take sleep as his first choice of spell.)
Most of the random checks that exist in modern (=WOTC) D&D didn't exist, because they are challenged, and always have been. It's okay to have a simple, passive 1d6 check for Elwood the Elf to realise there's a door hidden behind the tapestry, but it's absolutely fucking insane if the player says "I check behind the tapestry" and you tell him to roll a Perception check. Once you think to look behind the tapestry, the door is in plain sight.
Player (as opposed to character) growth in old-school consisted not in figuring out "how can I stack fifty obscure rules to get a +gazillion bonus to my skill check" (in my day, we used to throw rules-lawyers into a sphere of oblivion; seriously), but rather in realising "I've been screwed before by not considering certain possibilities that are pretty obvious, in hindsight, so I'm gonna make damn sure I don't make the same mistake again" - which is why every party in a dungeon carries at least one 10' pole.
Similarly, when it comes to persuading people, having a good argument beats luck every day of the week. What's the NPCs deal? What do they want? What's gonna put them in a good mood? What's likely to piss them off? If I try to bribe them, will they take it, or have me hauled before the beak?
You don't need to be a talented actor, or even much in the way of social skills to do this. Literally all of it can be done in the passive voice. However it requires you to actually think about what you're doing, and make some effort to get information about the game world. Which is a hell of a lot more than you can say for "I rolled 14, is that enough?"
Plus, let's be honest, most things aren't deserving of a test. If it's important for the party to get some information to advance the plot, putting it behind a die-wall is retarded and so is any DM that does that. You can see just how retarded it is by considering the existence of things like taking 20 and 10 which is as obvious a declaration as any that "yeah, having to roll a die for everything is dumb, but we've built our whole game around that, so let's just pretend you rolled it, okay?"
Summing up, D&D came about when people who were into the pure "roll to hit, roll for damage" wargames realised that you can have a lot more fun if you're given free reign with a neutral referee deciding the results - typically without resorting to a randomiser. The second game TSR put out - Boot Hill - had random resolution for everything (mostly, rolling against tables). Does anyone here even know what Boot Hill was?
Mind you, the idea that you should have a rule and a die roll for everything isn't something that originated with WOTC. People were coming up with these sorts of "improvements" to D&D pretty much from day one. We used to make fun of them.
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@GOG said in D&D thread:
it's absolutely fucking insane if the player says "I check behind the tapestry" and you tell him to roll a Perception check. Once you think to look behind the tapestry, the door is in plain sight.
I can see some very limited circumstances under which it's not completely insane. For a particularly clumsy character, there might be a 95% chance of success, but a roll of 1 results in, "You get tangled up in the tapestry and fall flat on your face," without seeing anything behind it. Or perhaps the perception check is not to see the door, but to detect a booby trap before pulling on the tapestry. But yeah, absent something like that, it should simply be visible.
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@GOG said in D&D thread:
"I've been screwed before by not considering certain possibilities that are pretty obvious, in hindsight, so I'm gonna make damn sure I don't make the same mistake again" - which is why every party in a dungeon carries at least one 10' pole.
The end-game of that process produces zero fun, as characters take an hour of table-time to move to the next room, or else they get killed by a green slime again. I have enjoyed those kinds of games, but only as one-shots with two backup characters where we all expected to die and had fun doing it.
It really depends on what you want from a game of D&D, which is why it's so incredibly important to have a session zero and figure out what kind of game of D&D you're going to play. Which is why we have these giant arguments about whether you use the player's CHA or the character's CHA: some people like to role-play out their conversations, and they should all play a great game together, while you play at a completely different table with others who prefer to roll Persuasion.
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@GOG said in D&D thread:
Prior to the WOTC takeover and 3e, ability scores just weren't that important
OK, your wall of text has made me realise an important thing about this discussion: you are talking about D&D specifically while I’m talking about RPGs in general, whereas I at least was assuming you were just giving some D&D examples when you were really also talking about RPGs in general. And it looks to me like you keep replying as if I’m also talking only about D&D.
Old-school D&D was a meat-grinder chiefly because you weren't supposed to get into fair fights. I will never stop repeating this: the goal of the original game wasn't "kill monsters, get treasure"; it was "get treasure" - it's enough to apply the minimum amount of thought to the XP rules to see this.
Assume I haven’t figured that bit out, because every edition of D&D I have played (admittedly, that’s limited to AD&D2 and D&D3), the only realistic way to advance your character was by killing monsters to get XP. Sure, there were other ways to get XP, but the amounts all pale in comparison to what you get from killing monsters — so what, in your opinion, did I miss there?
it's absolutely fucking insane if the player says "I check behind the tapestry" and you tell him to roll a Perception check. Once you think to look behind the tapestry, the door is in plain sight.
This is a good example for the philosophy I’ve been talking about: make the roll, then explain its outcome. Perception check succeeds? “You search the room for hidden doors, and find one when you pull aside a tapestry.” Don’t try to put in a great amount of detail that might affect the roll, do it the other way around.
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
so what, in your opinion, did I miss there?
Do you know how that Monopoly rule how when you land on an unowned property and decline to buy it it immediately gets put up for auction so that anyone can buy it - that everyone always forgets or ignores?
The rule that persisted through all TSR editions of D&D - yes, even 2e, although there it was demoted to Optional, because the employee churn associated with the ownership change meant that the people who knew what's what were mostly gone - was this:
1 gp of treasure found = 1 xp (2xp if you were a Thief in 2e)
Which is how, as a fighter, you can need 2000 xp just to get to level 2, but a 1HD monster only pays out 7 xp - split four ways (or however many people you have in the party). A 1+1 HD monster pays out a cool 15 xp, but prolly has more hit points than you.
That was the entire foundation the game was built on.
@Gurth said in D&D thread:
This is a good example for the philosophy I’ve been talking about: make the roll, then explain its outcome. Perception check succeeds? “You search the room for hidden doors, and find one when you pull aside a tapestry.” Don’t try to put in a great amount of detail that might affect the roll, do it the other way around.
No, that's exactly why your way is - I'm sorry to say - dumb, because what happens in a real game is that the DM describes the room to the players when they enter, there's no check to see the huge-ass tapestry on the wall (because that would really be retarded), asks them what they want to do, and Bob the Fighter says "I check behind the tapestry", because of course you check behind the fucking tapestry. That's, like, Adventuring 101.
So, are you making him roll Perception, or what?
Instead, what you describe is a prime example of what I'm talking about, which is: use rolls when players are unwilling or unable to come up with stuff on their own. So, same thing as before, except rather than specifically stating that they check behind the tapestry, the party says that they search the room. That's when you roll the dice.
People think that because D&D uses Funny Dice, you must always be rolling the Funny Dice or you aren't playing D&D. No, you don't.
@Gurth said in D&D thread:
OK, your wall of text has made me realise an important thing about this discussion: you are talking about D&D specifically while I’m talking about RPGs in general, whereas I at least was assuming you were just giving some D&D examples when you were really also talking about RPGs in general.
Everything I've said applies to pretty much every D&D-like RPG, so like... 90% of all existing RPGs (excluding weird "collaborative storytelling" things).
I'm using D&D fors specific examples because, as I've said, none of this shit is new - this stuff was already talked to death in the 70s. Plus, with D&D - more than anything - we have a very concrete line between the original game and a brand new game under the same name (the split between AD&D 2e/D&D 3e), and finally - more people still play some variant of D&D (Pathfinder, for example, absolutely qualifies, as does anything OGL-based) than anything else.
I'm aware that there are many games - modern D&D included - that, starting with the old D&D as a template, saw it fit to include rules and random checks for all sorts of stuff that old D&D deliberately ignored. The reasons for this were numerous, but mostly bad and it simply showed that the designers had no idea what a Role Playing Game was supposed to be about. The first adventure board games (think Talisman) appeared around the same time D&D did, yo!
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@PotatoEngineer said in D&D thread:
@GOG said in D&D thread:
"I've been screwed before by not considering certain possibilities that are pretty obvious, in hindsight, so I'm gonna make damn sure I don't make the same mistake again" - which is why every party in a dungeon carries at least one 10' pole.
The end-game of that process produces zero fun, as characters take an hour of table-time to move to the next room, or else they get killed by a green slime again. I have enjoyed those kinds of games, but only as one-shots with two backup characters where we all expected to die and had fun doing it.
Anything you can do well, you can also do... not so well. The existence of this site is evidence of this.
It really depends on what you want from a game of D&D, which is why it's so incredibly important to have a session zero and figure out what kind of game of D&D you're going to play. Which is why we have these giant arguments about whether you use the player's CHA or the character's CHA: some people like to role-play out their conversations, and they should all play a great game together, while you play at a completely different table with others who prefer to roll Persuasion.
Here's the thing: it's not about role-playing in the sense of "I pretend to be my character", but about whether the world reacts to you in a way that's predictable and consistent, or one that's random.
Since it started with Charisma, let's have a Charisma example. Let's say Alice is trying to persuade a low-level flunky or guard to do something that's not particularly dangerous, but is also not something that they are just gonna readily agree to.
One way is to have Alice roll a Charisma check.
Another is to have Alice's player put on their best Dale Carnegie impression.
The sensible way is to observe that a low-level (that's social, not game, level) flunky or guard is gonna be earning something like 1 or 2 gp a month. A bribe of just 10 gp (which tends to be peanuts to yer typical adventurer) might well be half-a-year's wages. I think you just might have his attention.
What if he's still not biting, 'coz he's a bit scared. How about a 100 gp bribe? That's close to ten years' wages. The DM needs to have a damn good reason why the guard doesn't take the money, and - if he's worried about being found out - be half-way to the next city by morning.
You need exactly zero interpersonal skills for the above, merely enough of a head on your shoulders to ask the DM how much a flunkey makes (if you don't know already, because you'd been hiring flunkies).
Bribery is the easiest case, but the same applies to everything else: gather some information about the problem you're trying to solve and come up with what appears to be the easiest and least risky solution. You don't need to do any "play" in the theatrical sense, but it does require a wee bit more work than saying "I'm trying to persuade the guard to look the other way".
However, if after I have done the work and come up with a good plan, you tell me to just roll the dice (without considerable bonuses for the prepwork, at the very least), the next time I'm just leading with the die roll.
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@GOG said in D&D thread:
You need exactly zero interpersonal skills for the above
Of several things in your rant this is what you're most wrong about. So hard that I suspect @Gąska has stolen your account. He also could imagine a whole lot of stuff (and state it with zero-tolerance confidence) but for one thing - that others are not like him.
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@GOG said in D&D thread:
However, if after I have done the work and come up with a good plan, you tell me to just roll the dice (without considerable bonuses for the prepwork, at the very least), the next time I'm just leading with the die roll.
If the flunky is lawful stupid, the above will probably earn you a roll penalty.
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@GOG said in D&D thread:
So, are you making him roll Perception, or what?
Yes. Nothing to do with seeing there's a door (if this is indeed obvious once the tapestry is out of the way); but if I don't, the players would conclude that it is indeed a door, and not, say, a mimic or an illusion. Making them roll keeps them on their toes when they try to open it. Having the players roll some dice from time to time can provide for some nice suspense even if the result of the roll is entirely irrelevant.
Rolls are for cases when there's some doubt about an action succeeding or not, or about any potential side effects. If the outcome is obvious, don't roll dice, just continue with that obvious outcome. I'm pretty sure this is explicitly stated that way in the rule book (for D&D5e at least).
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@GOG said in D&D thread:
Do you know how that Monopoly rule
I haven’t played Monopoly literally in decades. But now you mentioned it, yes, I do remember that rule exists.
1 gp of treasure found = 1 xp (2xp if you were a Thief in 2e)
Which is how, as a fighter, you can need 2000 xp just to get to level 2, but a 1HD monster only pays out 7 xp - split four ways (or however many people you have in the party). A 1+1 HD monster pays out a cool 15 xp, but prolly has more hit points than you.
That was the entire foundation the game was built on.
We did play with that rule in most AD&D campaigns I’ve ever run, and the other optional XP rules. I’ve not seen many players make big headway level-wise from just finding treasure, though — because much of the time, in order to get to a big treasure they had to defeat (not necessarily kill, mind) lots of monsters that all had so little treasure that it hardly added up to any XP at all.
But not everyone plays the game the same way, of course. Though you seem to be of the opinion that most people are
because they’re not doing it your way, which, IMHO, is just that.what you describe is a prime example of what I'm talking about, which is: use rolls when players are unwilling or unable to come up with stuff on their own. So, same thing as before, except rather than specifically stating that they check behind the tapestry, the party says that they search the room. That's when you roll the dice.
Ah, OK, I get it now. You’ve read into my posts that I have players roll dice for every small step they take. Want to open a door? Roll Strength to see if you can get it open. Once outside, want to walk across the street? Roll Dexterity to see if you trip on the horseshit. Tripped, fell and took 1D6 damage, now want to remember where the local healer is? Roll Intelligence.
FYI, I don’t play like that, and I didn’t advocate it. Rather, what I said — and maintain — is that IMHO, characters’ stats should matter when they’re applicable. You’re saying that, if a player doesn’t have good people skills, they should be able to use their character’s Charisma or Persuasion or whatever, but if the player and GM roleplay the whole interaction out, the stats don’t matter.
My point is that if you do that for social skills, why not for others as well? Sure, the character has Dex 5 (in D&D) but the player is a trained gymnast, so surely the character can climb into the tree without needing to roll — but the wheelchair-bound player in the group should roll to follow the gymnast into the tree, because that player’s character needs the crutch. Somehow, I doubt a lot of groups would do that for climbing a tree — but they do for fast-talking a city guard, and find it weird when somebody speaks out against it?
@GOG said in D&D thread:
it's not about role-playing in the sense of "I pretend to be my character", but about whether the world reacts to you in a way that's predictable and consistent, or one that's random.
These two are not mutually exclusive. Complete randomness means the world and its reactions aren’t predictable, and so stats wouldn’t matter at all. But random chance based on character stats is predictable to a degree (depending on the exact rules system used, of course), and that means the world will react in a consistent and believable manner. Just one that isn’t always automatically the same, but is on average over a series of rolls, and with a predictability that fits the difference in stat values. A D&D character with Dex 5 is going to fall out when trying to climb a tree roughly three times as often as one with Dex 15, for example.
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@Gurth I mean, we're really just haggling about the price at this point.
There's fundamentally no difference between "I'm not gonna make the player roll Perception because he thought to check in the place where the hidden object is and now it's in plain sight" and "I'm not gonna make the player roll Persuasion, because he came up with a good argument".
So, yes, you do that for all the skills. Hell, do it for combat! If the players spent some time rigging the whole slope to come crashing down on the oncoming goblins, describe the scene, hand out xp and move on.
The whole point is that "this is what the RNG came up, so here's the brilliant plan you came up with" is not nearly as fun as coming up with a clever plan. If the success of the clever plan you came up with then hinges on what comes up on the RNG (not because your plan hinges on luck, but because the DM wants you to roll the Funny Dice), the correct response is to forget about making clever plans and just roll the Funny Dice.
I've mentioned before how Dice-rolls-as-default doesn't even work on a game level, so I probably should give more detail here. If the default assumptions is that outcomes are random, then the probability of the players losing through no fault of their own approaches 1. Sooner or later, they're gonna have an unlucky string of rolls and their characters will die, in a stupid fashion, and ruin the whole game. Same goes for skill checks: sooner or later, the situation will come up where the dice land the wrong way, but this bit was crucial to your adventure and now you have no good options.
Anyone who has a modicum of experience running games will have at least given some consideration to fudging rolls. All rulebooks I've ever read (and - lest you get the wrong impression again - I have played, and run, quite a few different systems) always make a point to underline: don't let the dice dictate your game, or you're gonna have a problem.
The root of the problem is that if die rolls are to mean anything, failure must be an option. Old-school D&D was brutal, when it came to that (cf. saving throw vs. Death), but it could afford to do this, because the assumption was that if the player could come up with some way to avoid rolling a die, they wouldn't roll the die. That was D&D's (and subsequent role-playing games') secret sauce: you weren't stuck with a limited move-set, you could try to do anything, and it was the DM's job to be the judge of the result. The judgement could be "roll a die to see if it works", but didn't have to be.
WOTC tried doing it the other way: 4e. Lasted all of six years, the shortest-lived version of D&D to date. Also the only edition which wasn't the top RPG of its day (being overtaken by Pathfinder.)
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@GOG said in D&D thread:
The root of the problem is that if die rolls are to mean anything, failure must be an option. Old-school D&D was brutal, when it came to that (cf. saving throw vs. Death), but it could afford to do this, because the assumption was that if the player could come up with some way to avoid rolling a die, they wouldn't roll the die. That was D&D's (and subsequent role-playing games') secret sauce: you weren't stuck with a limited move-set, you could try to do anything, and it was the DM's job to be the judge of the result. The judgement could be "roll a die to see if it works", but didn't have to be.
There's a name for that phenomenon: Goblin Dice. In short, you roll a lot of dice during combat, so the high variance of a d20 mostly evens out over time (until you hit that combat on the very far side of the probability curve, which is another problem). Whether a goblin dies this round, or next round (because you missed), doesn't really matter all that much. But social interactions, lockpicking, running away from giant boulders, etc. usually just comes down to one die roll, and as you said, rolling that 1 could turn an entire campaign on its side if it happens at exactly the wrong moment.
On the DMing side, there are two ways to handle the one-roll-to-kill-the-campaign:
- When the players have set up things properly, you're not rolling for success, you're rolling for degree of success. A negotiation to get a king to join a war could get enthusiastic support on a natural 20, or grudging support with a high price on a natural 1.
- Don't hinge everything on one roll; apply initial consequences on a failure, but allow another roll to try to salvage the situation. The king refuses to join the war, but might still be bribed into it, or require the party to do some quest. Of course, this just kicks the can a bit further down the road, and a terrible and continuous run of luck will catch up with you eventually -- but maybe not in this campaign.
There's still something to be said for letting the dice dictate the game in limited ways: we all have stories of that one time when things went gloriously (or very, very weirdly) when the dice dictated something the DM hadn't planned. If the players bypass an entire chapter of content, you can recycle it for the next campaign or even the next chapter.
WOTC tried doing it the other way: 4e. Lasted all of six years, the shortest-lived version of D&D to date. Also the only edition which wasn't the top RPG of its day (being overtaken by Pathfinder.)
4e was WOTC's attempt to make the classes balanced, because players had been whining for decades about class balance. And 4E got balance mostly by a) constraining the available actions pretty heavily (by making your class skills so much better than default actions that there was hardly ever a reason to do anything else), and b) bringing the power levels roughly on par with each other. Most of the players disliked a) to some degree or another, and all of the caster classes hated b) with a passion, because the point of being a wizard/cleric/whatever was to be the most powerful character at the table. (Some of them were brazen enough to say it, others just enjoyed the incredible versatility.)
Also, the non-combat skills got shoved off into a pretty small corner compared to the combat skills, which emphasized combat over role-play even more than, say, the 3E rules did. And the non-combat skills/abilities often lasted for incredibly short durations, which meant that a wizard's or druid's versatility-in-solving-problems went to nearly nil. A town guard and a 20th-level adventurer had nearly the same options when it came to a bridge that was out.
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@PotatoEngineer I'm always slightly puzzled by these lengthy discussions about "how to handle rules that make the game less fun" because they seem to assume a type of player (and GM) that's focused on following the rules to the letter rather than having fun, and then complaining... that they don't have fun.
I get that rules are important as a way to get different people to start playing together (new players, new group, one-shot games in conventions etc.). But it has always seemed obvious to me that an RPG wasn't about winning (there isn't any "victory condition") but having fun (which doesn't rule out opposition between players (including GM), nor cases where one player feels they've won/lost the day). So if everyone around the table agrees that something isn't fun... maybe just stop doing that? Why would you need some rule to tell you that?
This is different from e.g. board games with clear winning conditions (and/or winning players, in non-cooperative games), where tweaking a rule may change the outcome of the game and thus "just not a fun rule" isn't enough to remove it (though there's nothing to say you can't tweak rules if everyone agrees, but it's more complicated than in RPGs). But RPGs are very different from traditional board games, and not just because there isn't really a game board.
So yeah, if you find out you're rolling dice in cases where that breaks the fun... just stop doing it? Conversely, if you're having fun when the whole campaign depends on a single roll... just keep doing it? But in either case, I don't really see the point of a lengthy discussion about whether it is "right" or not to do so.
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@remi said in D&D thread:
a type of player (and GM) that's focused on following the rules to the letter rather than having fun
: Ahem. Have you forgotten where you are?
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@Zerosquare You could also have quoted that part:
I don't really see the point of a lengthy discussion
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@remi They have no point, but we love them anyway.
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"Being an annoying pedant is part of my characters' background. I'm just roleplaying!"
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@Zerosquare said in D&D thread:
"Being an annoying pedant is part of my characters' background. I'm just roleplaying!"
I actually include "makes bad puns" in all my characters (usually as a flaw) because I know that it's going to happen anyway.
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@Benjamin-Hall Puns are bad only when someone else makes them. When I make them, they're hilarious.
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@HardwareGeek said in D&D thread:
Puns are bad only when someone else makes them. When I make them, they're hilarious.
At least you think they're hilarious.
Witzelsucht (German: [ˈvɪtsl̩ˌzʊxt] "joking addiction") is a set of pure and rare neurological symptoms characterized by a tendency to make puns, or tell inappropriate jokes or pointless stories in socially inappropriate situations.
(...)
Patients do not understand that their behavior is abnormal, therefore they are nonresponsive to others' reactions.
(I like that a humor disorder has a German name.
)
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@Zerosquare said in D&D thread:
tendency to make puns, or tell inappropriate jokes or pointless stories in socially inappropriate situations.
I make puns and tell dad jokes mostly around my kids and on TDWTF, so not socially inappropriate.
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@HardwareGeek said in D&D thread:
I make puns and tell dad jokes mostly around my kids and on TDWTF
You must be kidding me
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@izzion said in D&D thread:
@HardwareGeek said in D&D thread:
around ... kids and on TDWTF
But you repeat yourself
But you lot aren't my kids, for which I am very thankful.
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The sword of summoning geese, however, is a cursed item and does it randomly.
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@Benjamin-Hall the sword of summoning geese is also a little rusty, I think.
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It's way worse than that. If you pick it up, it causes all of your other belongings to develop rust as well.
Witzelsucht - Wikipedia
Gritty Cop Show: LibertyCon 35 Charity Game Recap (the statistically impossible edition)