The double standard for magical and mundane abilities

[Minigiant]

No, the problem is that magic always just works, while mundane skills have a tendency to be nerfed beyond the written rules by "believability" concerns, making them weaker than they already are.

The problem is not that magic always works.

It is that we don't know when it doesn't work because we dnt know how it works.

We can see the mundane in our world for reference. We have none for magic in D&D.
D&D magic has no explanation.

So a DM would be challenges if they say:

1. Your magic does work because you broke taboo.
2. your magic does not work because you are a fey and I'm wearing cold iron
3. your necromany fail because he is standing on holy ground
4. the orc holds his breath and the cold matrix of your ice spell recalls a zero and fails to affect him.

Etc

 

[The Crimson Binome]

This isn't true for OD&D: monsters can open doors without a STR check, and doors stay open for them; whereas for PCs a STR check is needed, and doors swing shut unless iron spikes are used.

This is also true in 1st ed AD&D, and from memory in Moldvay Basic as well.

In 1st ed AD&D, half-orc NPCs attack on the monster table appropriate to their HD; they don't use the class tables, even if they have levels in a class.

That's very interesting! I hadn't really heard this before, so this is pretty new information to me. As I mentioned, I first got started with AD&D 2E, where I'm pretty sure that this was no longer the case.

It's entirely possible that OD&D started as an incredibly gamist system, without even a semblance of universal rules, and then started shedding that in favor of rules-as-physics for the period where I was observing it. If you neglect 4E as an outlier, then that only really leaves three data points (2E, 3.0, 3.5), so it's not entirely unexpected for them to indicate a trend.

 

[Tony Vargas]

So magic can do magic things and non-magic cannot and that is a problem? Scratches head.

Put that way, yeah, mabye. If it's magic can do anything and non-magic can't do anything at all, that'd certainly be a problem. What I think you mean though, is that magic can do things a wider and more wonderous range of ways than non-magic can. A band of soldiers can burn down a village by riding through it, throwing torches, and cutting down any villagers that try to quench the blaze. A wizard or dragon can also burn down the same village, just in a different way.

The double-standard goes a lot further than that. It has magic doing things that, even in genre, it generally can't, and has non-magic unable to do thing that not only in genre, but even, demonstrably, in reality, it can.

For instance, if you're in a medieval battle, you could very easily loose a limb. You could catch an arrow in the eye and be instantly killed. In both cases, no matter how skilled and experienced a soldier you might be.

Those things can't happen in D&D - they can be arbitrarily narrated for 1d6 hp NPCs killed by an arrow or axe or whatever, but they can't happen to anyone with a stack of hps. There have been critical hit variants that let that kind of thing happen, but never an official part of the game. No, in D&D, you'd need a magical Sword of Sharpness or Arrow of Slaying to accomplish them.

Conversely, magic-users in legend and literature can do some remarkable things. Circe could polymorph men into animals. Gandalf could conjure light or fire. Merlin could foretell the future. Maleficent could put a helpless baby in a coma with a 16-year delay. But, they couldn't all do all of those things and more. D&D magic-users of high enough level could.


I guess one way of putting it is that if any wizard (or sorcerer, or god) ever did anything magical in any story from anywhere/when, any D&D (and every) wizard with a high enough level spell slot can probably do it. But, if a fighter is to do something in D&D, it had better be something that absolutely anyone could do, on demand, at any time.

Even with your pejorative way of viewing it Tony, you are right. I don't want a game that is "fixed" in the way you want it fixed. For me that would be a broken game. Which is why we view 4e differently. You think it fixed things and I think it broke them.

We are speaking of two very different things here, so we can't even say that we're at odds, really (except in what we focus on as important). I'm talking about the qualities that make a good game in a technical sense (measurable, things like clarity, consistency, and balance - things that don't make a game fun, by themselves, but the absence of which can make it unplayable). You're talking about the subjective criteria that you demand in a game (verisimilitude, immersion, feel - things that are critical to a an individual gaming experience, and may be quite different for each individual).

That 4e happens to be a good game in that technical sense, but not one that you care for, personally, is, to make some polite assumptions, little more than a coincidence. The difference in opinion is what we care about enough to debate on the internet. I care enough about the quality of the actual content of the game to debate the finer points of it, I don't care enough about a specific style of play to advocate for it above all others. That makes me a detail-oriented and obsessive hobbyist, which is not exactly something to be proud of, even in geek culture, but I'll own up it.

I do doubt there is any real solution where we all play the exact same game.

All, maybe not. You and I? I could envision such a game. It probably wouldn't be a fantasy-genre game (because of the very topic of this thread), but I suspect there could be a game that was decent enough from me to enjoy playing, and that didn't push any of your hot-buttons. Also, I'm sure we could sit down and play 1e AD&D together, we'd just get different things out of it - for me it'd be mostly nostalgia, which isn't enough to keep me playing for /long/, but it's not impossible.

Rules flexibility and modularity would be the only possibility for us to use the same rules book. We still wouldn't be playing the same game. I'd be playing D&D modded one way and others would be playing D&D modded another. The bitter battles that rage which neither side is going to give an inch on ultimately get us nowhere.

Nod. The 'kit to make your own game' game is something I, personally, like (it's kinda how a lot of us Hero fans used to view that system), but it's not for everyone. It requires work, up-front, to make the game your own - game-design work for the DM, and negotiation/consensus among the players & DM to make sure everyone's good with the design goals the DM is shooting for.

If I had to play a game you liked Tony, I'd just quit gaming altogether.

You've never had to, and, with the d20 OGL and SRD, out there, it's prettymuch inconceivable that you ever would be. Which does make one wonder about this ceaseless crusade against games you'd never be forced to play.

I believe ideally the solution would be two versions of D&D supported side by side.

Well, we had that - 4e and Pathfinder were both supported for a little while there - but, it didn't stop the edition war from raging against 4e the whole time.

But right now we are going for the flexibility and modularity edition. I feel like the wizard in many ways has been hammered and many of you are spouting off that it's still dominating the fighter.

Really, it seems more like 5e is seeking to balance the wizard and fighter by harkening back to the two editions where each was at it's most broken. The wizard harkens back to 3e, with high save DCs that can hammer the target's worst save (for all spells, not just his highest level ones), tremendous flexibility (both tactical and strategic, as opposed to mainly strategic in 3e), and virtually no meaningful restrictions on casting. The fighter harkens back to the 2e cuisinart-of-doom, with a hail of multiple attacks leveraging even small static bonuses into monster-mincing DPR.

Thing is, the double standard still applies: While the fighter delivers high DPR, there isn't really a huge gulf between it and the Evoker wizard. OTOH, the gulf in flexibility between the two is immeasurable. The Evoker can wake up one morning and decide to prep a slate of utility and control spells and completely change his contribution to the party, tailoring it to the expected challenges of the day - while, at the same time, keeping a couple of scalable evocations in his back pocket in case he needs to bust out just a bit less DPR than he can when he's loaded for bear.

So I throw up my hands.

Sorry if that sounds rantish. I'm just tired of this fight. I wish there was a happy solution for us all.

You've been saying that for years.

The happy solution would have been for people to live and let live, and never started the edition war. I'd be happily playing well-supported 4e (and looking forward to a 5e in a another 3 or 4 years), you'd be happily playing 3.5, grognards would happily be playing well-supported retro-clones.

A happy solution to the double-standard would be for those harboring that prejudice to leave it at their tables, and not try to browbeat WotC into making the game force it on everyone else. It's not like you couldn't still apply the double-standard in an otherwise balanced game, you'd just make casters higher-level or ban non-caster abilities until they were suitably pathetic.

 

[ThirdWizard]

It remains to be seen, but is irrelevant to this case, since it doesn't reference class features. Regardless of how it solves the issue of NPC classes, the whole system of skills and ability checks must remain universal.

Man, some incredibly awesome RPG systems don't even have rules at all for resolving actions that the PCs aren't involved in!

 

[ExploderWizard]

Maleficent could put a helpless baby in a comma with a 16-year delay.

We shall have to add Mistress of fiendish punctuation to her list of accolades.

 

[Tony Vargas]

We shall have to add Mistress of fiendish punctuation to her list of accolades.

They keep spells in books for a reason, I suppose.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Man, some incredibly awesome RPG systems don't even have rules at all for resolving actions that the PCs aren't involved in!

YMMV. Those same games would be unplayable to me.

 

[Ranes]

This is something that's been bothering me in the discussion about the halfling sniper, and I think it deserves its own discussion.

I personally feel like the rules for hiding in 5th edition are fairly clear; if the enemy can't see you, you can use the Hide action. Some special abilities, like the halfling's Naturally Stealthy, allow for exceptions to this general rule. So far, so clear, right?

However, because Hide is not a supernatural ability, it becomes subject to the dreaded unwritten verisimilitude rules. Rules which seem clear per the RAW are now subject to whatever the group decides is believable for heroic characters in a world full of dragons and wizards to accomplish.

Certainly, it's an understandable tendency. However, it often has the unintentional side effect of neutering martial characters in comparison to spellcasters. No one ever forces the wizard to come up with a new situation where he's allowed to cast his Magic Missile spell he has prepared. No one ever forces the cleric to come up with a believable explanation for why he can cast cure wounds a second time during an encounter.

What can be done to counter the tendency for mundane skills to be overshadowed by always-works magic? Is the only solution to say "all skills are magical so characters trained in them can do them whenever the skill says they can"?

First of all, I have to repeat my usual disclaimer. The acronym 'RAW' is intellectually bankrupt, although I am sympathetic to posts that use it (including yours). The reason why it's bankrupt is because implicit in it is the idea that the rules as written are somehow divorced from the rules as interpreted. This is simply never, ever the case. It's glib, a conceit that puts an enormous strain on any subsequent discussion of a rule. All this is simply to say that any reading of a rule (as written, obviously) requires interpretation of intent.

With that out of the way, here's some sympathy for the concern you express. It is easy for players - new to fantasy games or otherwise - to say, "Yes, I see that this is meant to relate to the real world I recognise, whereas this thing over here is fantastical, so I can excuse the fact that it doesn't relate, but this thing over here isn't explicitly quantified as being something magical and yet it sounds fantastical and therefore I have a problem with it from the point of view of - take a deep breath - verisimilitude."

In fact, the specific example you refer to, that being the halfling sniper discussion, caused me just that discomfiture in the thread to which you refer. And another poster took the trouble to make the point to me that it's one of those things that sounds mundane that really isn't. I'm still not overly happy with the rule in question but I got his point and I get yours.

I don't want to see characters whose skills and talents aren't clearly based on one side of the 'this is magical' line to be neutered or diminished, at the expense of others. But the tendency is, as you say, understandable. I think third edition came close to addressing it with definitions like spell-like and supernatural abilities but fifth has missed out on an opportunity to give these particular phenomena that you're talking about the permission to occupy the space they do. They could have easily been given the label 'fantastical' in the sense of being that class of ideas that sounds larger than life without being attributable to one of the other definitions.

In the meantime, if you find yourself debating the verisimilitudinalization (sorry, couldn't resist) of such phenomena with your players, perhaps such a proposal can help you frame your justification.

The corollary to this, however, is that many players take issue with this or that aspect of the game's assumptions about magic and the supernatural. These things often give rise to complaints about believability (hurrah for synonyms); it's not just the otherwise fantastical that people have issues with. And that's for good reason. Some of the ideas employed in D&D, not to mention other fantasy games, are inevitably at odds with what some players will consider too far-fetched to accommodate. I can only suggest that you appeal to such players to consider that, in such games, what the rules call 'magic' is one thing but that the entire game is based upon the fantastic.

Where any set of rules lets itself down is where it excuses or gives the fantastical this permission in this context but arbitrarily denies it the same in some other marginally different context, without providing an internally consistent rationale. When you find a system doing that, I can't help you and nor can anyone else.

 

[Emerikol]

You've been saying that for years.

The happy solution would have been for people to live and let live, and never started the edition war. I'd be happily playing well-supported 4e (and looking forward to a 5e in a another 3 or 4 years), you'd be happily playing 3.5, grognards would happily be playing well-supported retro-clones.

A happy solution to the double-standard would be for those harboring that prejudice to leave it at their tables, and not try to browbeat WotC into making the game force it on everyone else. It's not like you couldn't still apply the double-standard in an otherwise balanced game, you'd just make casters higher-level or ban non-caster abilities until they were suitably pathetic.

4e arrived before Pathfinder and created a lot of animus. You have to realize that there are people of my preferences who have been playing D&D since the OD&D days. So they have an emotional attachment. They don't like the idea of some upstarts coming in and totally changing the game and abandoning everything D&D stood for prior.

It's like there were two favorite restaurants in town. Both were nice. One though has gone to ruin and it's the one where you proposed to your wife twenty years ago. If you just want to eat sure you can go to the other restaurant. But there is an emotional and nostalgic attachment to D&D for many people.

And all of the LFQW stuff has been in more editions than not even by your own admissions. I consider it balderdash so it's just a code word for whatever you think about gaming to me.

 

[pemerton]

It is because D&D magic is not explained nor has a frame of reference to base limitations on.

The point [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] is making is that many parts of D&D magic are explained. For instance, the wizard has to copy spell formulae into his/her spellbook. And then has to read those formulae. And then, at least in AD&D (I'm not as sure about 5e) has to impress the mystic formulae upon his/her mind. Then, when casting, s/he has to speak certain words perfectly, and wiggle his/her fingers in just the right way, and pull the right material component out of his/her pouch at the right time.

If a player wants his/her bard to sing a song perfectly, a Perform check must be made. Why does the player of a wizard character not have to make a Perform check to recite the words of the spell properly?

If a player wants his/her thief to do a card trick without fumbling, a Sleight of Hand check mut be made. Why does the player of a wizard not have to make some sort of DEX check to wiggle his/her fingers properly, or to pull the right component out of the spell component pouch?

To remember facts requires an INT check. So why does forcing a spell formula into the brain of the caster not require an INT check also? Why does transcribing a spell into a spell book not require an INT check to avoid confusion/mistranslation (as a real-life teacher of complicated material, I can say that transcription by students is far from infallible), or a DEX check to get the copying right (I know more than one person who can't read his/her own handwriting)?

And flipping this around: if we are happy with a mechanical system that ignores the chances of a wizard mucking these things up, and that allows auto-success whenever the player makes the action declaration "I'm transcribing a spell", "I'm memorising a spell", "I'm casting a spell", then what is wrong with a system that similarly ignores the chance of a fighter or rogue mucking things up when the player declares "I'm cutting down that goblin" or "I'm hiding behind that tree/ogre/person." (DoaM would be an example of such a system. Some of the 4e powers for rogues that let the turn invisible etc are similar such examples. Others could probably be invented without much trouble.)

Memorization and casting is supposed to be difficult. So difficult that you require extensive training to do it. But, once you've had that training, you absolutely cannot ever fail to succeed in doing it (unless something outside prevents you) every time you try. But a rogue trying to hide, despite his extensive training in it, fails fairly often.

It is a good point. Why is "extensive training" acceptable in one case for automatic success, but not in others?

This is why I like Rolemaster (which puts the magic-user on the same mchanical footing as the rogue/fighter, needing to roll to cast), and 4e (which puts the rogue/fighter on the same mechanical footing as the magic-user, having a range of auto-success abilities). And why I find 3E not very appealing, because of all the versions of D&D I think it has one of the starkest disparities across the two categories of character.

If physics don't generally work in your game world like they do on Earth, then this needs to be communicated and explained so the modified meaning of mundane can be understood.

My own view is that "physics" is not all the helpful as a pathway into the issue. I prefer genre.

When I think of REH's Conan, for example,I don't think of a world governed by different physical laws: REH's Hyobrea is our own Earth. Likewise for Marvel Comics's Punisher: the Marvel Universe is our own world, and so The Punisher is not governed by physical laws any different from ours.

Rather, Conan and The Punisher have capabilities that are to be understood within the context of the pulp/super-hero genre. Part of this is that events which would be near-miraculous or wildly coincidental in the real world - eg falling three stories and walking away, or not being defeated in a solo fight against a dozen enemies - are recurrent events for these genre heroes. If we want the game to model that, we don't need to change the physics; we need to change the odds. That is, PC heroes aren't held to the odds that govern the ordinary processes of the gameworld. They are reliably lucky. This is what a power system (4e) or a Fate Point system (Conan d20, HARP, Burning Wheel, and many other systems) is meant to ensure.