Of all the complaints about 3.x systems... do you people actually allow this stuff ?

[Lwaxy]

The big one is the what... 20 minute adventure day ? Rules as written yes, this "theoretically" could be a problem. The thing is , I have been running campaigns for about 15 years now and I can honestly say I have never had this problem. This brings me to my question, does this ACTUALLY happen in your games? If so, why do you allow it?

The other thing is the so called "Caster / Melee" rift. Where wizards and other casters are basically much better than every one else. Has anyone ever actually encountered this in their games? I personally haven't, perhaps it's because my group isn't into min maxing or something. People who play fighters or monks or whatever, they have a fantastic time. They kill enemies just as much as any other character, and I personally have just never seen all of these horrible terrible game breaking elements that seem to be so rampant.

Nah, we usually have some sort of time constraints not allowing for cutting days short. Generally, spells are only used as a last resort, anyway.

We also always have strong fighter types - usually multiclassing or paladins though, so they had some magic. There are always ways to boost them, even if it occasionally means to go a bit outside the rules and allow for an extra feat or two.

 

[Lwaxy]

Part of what makes that so funny is that clearly even in the DM's head the party has control of their own destiny right up to the second they do something that the DM decides isn't optimal. But clearly the DM was even fooling himself from the beginning. Given the players the illusion of control so long as they do what is wanted is not at all the same thing as giving them the control. And that applies even if the players happen to do the right thing.

Does anyone really do that unless something is crucial to the story? I mean, I did that once when my only "bridge troll" in the story didn't deter them, switching left with right so that they would still meet the sage ) and felt good because they managed to get there despite the attempts to stop them, in their eyes).

But generally, I would devalue our world if it would not matter where the PCs go. Sure, I lose as many good scenes and opportunities as any other GM. I want to be surprised by the players, even in bought adventures, because otherwise I might as well read a book instead of GMing.

 

[xigbar]

I'm not going to sift through all these posts, but I just want to say, most of the problems people have with this stuff are from DMs who don't have a firm enough grasp of the mechanics. All DMs and players should be made aware of optimization, whether or not they choose to use it. That way, both sides are prepared, in case someone does something game breaking, either intentionally or by accident. Sadly, many people will fall back on dismissing any character with a fraction of mechanical competency as "just one of those 'roll'players."

 

[BryonD]

Does anyone really do that unless something is crucial to the story? I mean, I did that once when my only "bridge troll" in the story didn't deter them, switching left with right so that they would still meet the sage ) and felt good because they managed to get there despite the attempts to stop them, in their eyes).

I would certainly hope not.

I'll never say never.... but I'd probably have let them miss the sage

But once someone says that you should ignore the simulation elements of whether a character could "get there in time" based on where their prior actions put them and instead just say they should get there on time anyway, then IMO, it is essentially the same as moving the trap.

 

[Lwaxy]

But once someone says that you should ignore the simulation elements of whether a character could "get there in time" based on where their prior actions put them and instead just say they should get there on time anyway, then IMO, it is essentially the same as moving the trap.

Yeah, I agree. We had a few "dead princesses" over the years hehe.

 

[pemerton]

But once someone says that you should ignore the simulation elements of whether a character could "get there in time" based on where their prior actions put them and instead just say they should get there on time anyway, then IMO, it is essentially the same as moving the trap.

And as I already said, whether or not it matters to move the trap depends a lot on what has gone before. If the PCs are choosing by rolling a die, then what is at stake in moving the trap?

In a Pulsipherian game, this is what at stake: the PCs could have used an augury spell, but didn't, and if you move the trap you remove the incentive for them to be better operational players.

But in a non-Pulsipherian game, no one may care about these sorts of stakes. And to reinforce that lack of caring, the augury spells might be stripped out of the game. What might the players of a non-Pulsipherian game care about? Perhaps how the PCs perform against the trap. Perhaps whether or not they're prepared to read the scroll that was given to them by a suspicious imp in order to escape from the trap. Etc.

If prior actions establish that the hero can't get there on time, then the hero can't get there on time.

What is at stake here is the verb "establish". In a non-simulatoinist game, the "establishing" isn't settled by the action resolution mechanics. It is settled by whatever the metagame constraints are on framing new scenes in response to previous scenes.

But, that's only true if the time limit has also been established as well. Otherwise, the bomb goes off when I, the DM, decide that it does.

Exactly.

The initial comments were critical of simulation and the idea of looking at a character's speed to see if he could get there in time. So for this debate a known deadline is a given.

First, there was no criticism - either by me or Ron Edwards. There was a contrast drawn between playstyles.

Second, the comment was about scene transition/extrapolation. And I subsequently posted a quote from Paul Czege to elaborate the point.

Even if, in the fiction, a deadline is given, the deadline only constrains things if action is resolved in a certain matter. (I'm putting to one side cases in which the PCs are on the Prime Material plane, the prisoner in Tarterus, and the PCs lack planar travel magic. In that sort of scenario, it's already given that the prisoner is going to die off-screen, and so it's already given that there will be no climax of the PCs rescuing the prisoner. The original example had a superspeedster in the same city as the bomb, which is quite disanalagous to the Tarterus case - or a case in which Sherlock Holmes is in London and the prisoner on a Pacific island with no telegraph station.)

There are a range of possible action resolution systems in an RPG, and a range of possible scene extrapolation/transition approaches, and one in which you would work out whether a PC can get from the end of scene A to the start of scene B by plotting speed against a map is only one of them.

Here is a pasage from Maelstrom Storytelling (p 116) that reinforces this contrast between action resolution techniques:

A good way to run the Hubris Engine is to use "scene ideas" to convey the scene, instead of literalisms. . . focus on the intent behind the scene and not on how big or how far things might be. If the difficulty of the task at hand (such as jumping across a chasm in a cave) is explained in terms of difficulty, it doesn't matter how far across the actual chasm spans. In a movie, for instance, the camera zooms or pans to emphasize the danger or emotional reaction to the scene, and in so doing it manipulates the real distance of a chasm to suit the mood or "feel" of the moment. It is then no longer about how far across the character has to jump, but how hard the feat is for the character. .In this way, the presentation of each element of the scene focuses on the difficulty of the obstacle, not the law of physics. . . If the players enjoy the challenge of figuring out how high and far someone can jump, they should be allowed the pleasure of doing so - as long as it doesn't interfere with the narrative flow and enjoyment of the game. . . Players who want to climb onto your coffee table and jump across your living room to prove that their character could jump over the chasm have probably missed the whole point . . .​

HeroQuest (and to a lesser extent, its predecessor HeroWars) uses a similar approach to action resolution. 4e skill challenges, if they are to be used as anything other than complex skill checks, in my view have to be resolved in the same sort of way.

And once you are using these sorts of action resolution techniques, the character of scene extrapolation/transition can change very significantly.

 

[BryonD]

First, there was no criticism - either by me or Ron Edwards. There was a contrast drawn between playstyles.

That is a pretty severe parsing of words.

You presented not getting there on time as a problem caused by simulation. The lack of the actual word "criticism" does nothing to change that.

And you continue to change the terms of the conversation. Your initial point that got my attention was about calculating how far a character could travel and determining whether or not the character could get there in time. Obviously for that analysis to exist there must be a known distance and time already established. So creating new situations in which the issue simply does not apply does nothing to challenge my point, it just changes the subject.

I'll simply restate my point. If a character needs to get from A to B in X time and those elements are known and it also turns out that the character can not travel that far in X time, then broadly speaking the DM has two options.

He can work with the way simulation would have it and the character does not arrive on time.

Or he can reject simulation and declare that the character will get there on time anyway.

If the DM chooses the later then every choice the player made which caused them to be at A is meaningless to the question because they are still getting there on time. And thus any other player who made decisions which did permit their character to get there on time have likewise had their choices rendered meaningless because they would have gotten their on time even had they not made those choices.

And once the DM opens the box of replacing the consequences of good and bad choices for one part of the game, it is down to DM whim on every other choice along the way.

It is fine to call that latter option more fun. But whether you consider it an overwhelmingly superior choice or not is not relevant to the simple logical result that the latter option moves cause and effect from being a consistent value to being a case by case matter.

 

[Hussar]

If the DM chooses the later then every choice the player made which caused them to be at A is meaningless to the question because they are still getting there on time. And thus any other player who made decisions which did permit their character to get there on time have likewise had their choices rendered meaningless because they would have gotten their on time even had they not made those choices.

Well, it's only meaningless if you prefer a specific style of game. If the game is based on process based simulation, then, great, it's going to be a major issue. OTOH, if the game isn't about process based simulation, but based on other criteria, then choosing the latter is not only a valid choice, it becomes the de facto choice because choosing process based simulation would result in poor play.

IOW, this only becomes a problem when you play with a granularity of simulation fine enough that such determinations are possible. If, OTOH, your simulation is not that fine grained, then there is enough flex in the resolution system to allow you to always arrive on time.

 

[pemerton]

That is a pretty severe parsing of words.

You presented not getting there on time as a problem caused by simulation. The lack of the actual word "criticism" does nothing to change that.

Here are the passages in my first two passages on this issue in this thread:

As I mentioned earlier, this seems to be somewhat scenario-specific. In particular, it seems to posit the PCs tackling an active opposition, rather than something more passive. It also seems to require a willingness to have the PCs fail off-stage.

For those who (i) want the passive "opponent" option (eg ruins exploration), and/or (ii) want the "failures only happen onstage" option, then the 15-minute day is a rules problem, given that - with changes to the rules - those sorts of scenarios and approaches can be made eminently playable.

I'm happy for time to be a factor in the fiction ("If we don't rescue the prisoners in time, they'll all be sacrificed!"). But if it's going to be a factor in resolution, I want that to play out onstage ("Oh know - the gnoll demon priest is about to sacrifice those prisoners, and there's a demon and an ogre in the way - do you think you can get through there to rescue them?" - as it happens, the players in my game adopted defensive tactics at the start of the encounter and lost one of the prisoners).

This passage has influenced quite a bit how I think about and adjudicate ingame time (and some other things as well - the bolding is mine):

<snip Edwards' example of Simulationism over-riding Narrativism</snip>

Conversely, when framing narratively intense scenes is allowed to override simulationist concerns, the hero will arrive "just in time" to try and stop the villain detonating the bomb (or sacrificing the prisoners, or . . .).

A related comment - when Gygax says in the DMG that there can be no meaningful campaign without properly tracking time and treating it as a player resource, he is wrong. For some sorts of play - especially operational gamist play - what he says is true. But there are other ways to play the game.

There is no criticism here. There is an example of the contrast between simulationist and narrativist priorities, and a contrast of playstyles for which "timeline pressure" may or may not work as a solution to the 15 minute adventuring day.

As I said in the first of these two posts, for those who (i) want the passive "opponent" option (eg ruins exploration), and/or (ii) want the "failures only happen onstage" option, then the 15-minute day is a rules problem - not a problem of scenario design. To fix it, you need to change the rules. In Rolemaster, I've adopted various rules changes over the years - one was to have everyone play spellcasters (a de facto PC build rules changes), another was to ensure that fighters play as strongly as nova-ing spellcasters. 4e adopts a different rules change, namely, reducing in various ways the availability and the effectiveness of nova-ing.

The second post talks explicitly about what I want out of a game, and says in a playstyle according to which framing narratively intense scenes is allowed to override simulationist concerns, the hero will arrive "just in time". Obviously that is not a universal playstyle. But it is one for which the timeline "fix" to the 15 minute day won't work. Luckily, a range of other fixes - I myself have used 3 over the years, and I'm sure they are not the only ones possible - can be usd.

You then started posting, telling me that my approach makes long term consequences impossible. Which, for the various reasons I have given, is not true - unless by long term consequences you mean strategic/opeational consequences - but the sort of playstyle I am talking about obviously does not prioritise those sorts of consequences.

And you continue to change the terms of the conversation. Your initial point that got my attention was about calculating how far a character could travel and determining whether or not the character could get there in time. Obviously for that analysis to exist there must be a known distance and time already established.

My example was to contrast playstyles. I even linked to the Edwards essay that I quoted, which makes it clear - if the heading that I quoted didn't make it clear, although I personally think it is pretty unambiguous - that he is contrasting playstyles (or, as he calls them, "player priorities"). He is contrasting how a simulationist and a narrativist playstyle would resolve the "getting there on time" issue. A simulationist would care about distance and time - the ingame causal constraints. A narrativist approach is more likely to focus on the metagame ("here comes the climax!"). Keeping track of time and distance is bound up in those two approaches. The simulationist is likely to keep track of them - in the sort of way that Gygax talks about in his DMG - precisely because the simulationinst wants those considerations to settle the matter. The narativist is likely to track those sorts of things far more loosely - along the lines of the Maelstrom Storytelling quote that I posted upthread - precisely because the narrativist doesn't care about them as much, and is not relying upon them to constrain scene extrapolation/transition.

So the comparison in playstyles in fact does not presuppose that the time and distance are known. Part of the comparison is whether or not the players of the game care about knowing them.

So creating new situations in which the issue simply does not apply does nothing to challenge my point, it just changes the subject.

I don't really know what your point is. And I'm not changing my subject. My subject continues to be what I have consistently posted upthread - that the timeline "fix" for the 15 minute day isn't a fix for those who (i) want passive scenarios, and/or (ii) don't want failure to occur offscreen. Or, to put generalise, it is a fix for some playstyles (which are probably also playstyles for which Gygax's timekeeping advice is relevant) but not others.

If a character needs to get from A to B in X time and those elements are known and it also turns out that the character can not travel that far in X time, then broadly speaking the DM has two options.

He can work with the way simulation would have it and the character does not arrive on time.

Or he can reject simulation and declare that the character will get there on time anyway.

OK. But now who do you think runs games this way? I took it to be obvious that in a "no failure on stage" game, at least one of the following is kept flexible/underdetermined - the time, or the distance. Keeping the time flexibile can be done as [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] suggested above, and as was implicit in my quote above from Paul Czege - namely, leaving the NPCs' plans loose in your mind, to enable them to be retrofitted to the desired framings and conflicts. It can also be done by keeping the narration of the PCs' activities flexible - "You hurry across town, making terrific time" - is that 10 minutes or 15 minutes? We don't need to know, provided that action resolution mechanics aren't involved - this is why spell durations in pre-4e D&D, Rolemaster and other fantasy games aren't so good for this sort of playstyle, because they can require keeping track of durations down to the last few minutes.

Alternatively, you can keep the distance flexible - which was part of the point of the quote from Maelstrom Storytelling above.

Of course, if you use simulationist techniques in your game - of tracking time and distance in a way that sets pre-determined limits on who can be where when - then you will have to determine who gets where in accordane with those limits set by those techniques! My point was that, for those running a game using other techniques, of the sort I've been talking about, "fixes" for the 15 minute day that rely upon the simulationist techniques - like timelines - won't work.

If the DM chooses the later then every choice the player made which caused them to be at A is meaningless to the question because they are still getting there on time.

<snip>

It is fine to call that latter option more fun.

Well, I would call it cheating, but I have very strong views about the GM not suspending the action resolution mechanics.

But I have to say - if you think that in talking about narrativist rather than simulationist techniques, you think I am talking about measuring all the times and distances precisely and then ignoring them, then I get the impression that you don't really have a great familiarity with how non-simulationinst techniques work.

On the other hand, I now have a better idea of why you think my game must be crap - because you're envisaging a game which is just like yours, except from time to time we cheat and rewrite things to get the desired narrative outcome! And yes, that would be a crappy game. The whole point of the "Forge revolution" in mechanics has been to design games which use different techniques for scene framing and action resolution, so that narrativist concerns can trump simulationist ones without having to cheat and rewrite in the way that you seem to be envisaging.

To allude back to the Maelstrom Storytelling quote - if, in playing the game, you have to know how wide the cavern is, or how strong the wind is that the GM is narrating as making the jump a difficult one, or whether it did take 10 or 15 minutes to get across the city, then the sort of techniques I'm describing in this and my earlier posts won't be for you. Which is fine. Like I said at the start, I'm not criticising anyone. I'm talking about what sorts of "fixes" will work for what sorts of playstyles.

 

[BryonD]

Well, I would call it cheating, but I have very strong views about the GM not suspending the action resolution mechanics.

I don't see the quote I originally responded to in your post here.

But, that said, if you are going to call that example "cheating" then we have found agreement.