Am I the only one who doesn't like the arbitrary "boss monster" tag?

[Ahnehnois]

I *hated* the 4E attitude that everyone must be useful in combat. I love playing Call of Cthulhu because there's always room for a professor who can't shoot an elder thing with a shotgun at five yards.

I like CoC for exactly the same reason.
My last PC party was a football player, an air marshall, and a music student.
No reason a D&D party like that wouldn't be great.

I want 5E to follow simulationist principles, but with the flexibility of being a 4E DM - and I believe this is POSSIBLE, especially with flattened math. Whether it happens is another matter.

I think I'm in the same boat here. It's possible, but I haven't seen it yet.

 

[Gryph]

See above, but also consider that both 3E and 4E are flawed in that they don't allow PCs to make up characters that follow some of these archetypes. In 3E this is because you won't be able to do anything useful in combat as an NPC class. In 4E this is because you can only become good at stuff by gaining levels - and in fact levels dominate how good you are at stuff, and how good you are at all stuff all at once. 4E is much worse than 3E in terms of correlating all these features for player classes. 5E has a good chance to avoid it with flat math (but so far hasn't).

If we want to shift the discussion this way then I agree with your point above. 3e and 4e (4e more than 3e) have rules for creating adventurers. They do, in fact, do a pretty poor job of creating a PC who mechanically reflects being an adventurer with great skill in some craft or profession. I think that even the 3e skill rules for such things were somewhat of a sop to what the 3e designers thought was a small share of the player base. The 4e designers clearly thought it was a really small part.

Its an interesting game design problem though. If such skills or abilities use the same character build resources as other parts of the pc build rules, they are almost always going to be suboptimal choices because they are unlikely to effect play that often. Point buy systems like HERO and GURPS have rich systems for creating characters like this and the cost is still swapping adventuring effectiveness for what is often flavor.

On the other hand a lot of folks seem to balk at something that looks handwavy (which I kinda of agree with most days). Like just writing master blacksmith as part of your pc background and then letting the player and dm negotiate what that means mechanically when it comes into play.

Maybe the backgrounds should include something like a pool of player option "everyman" skills (to borrow HERO's term for it) that cost no build resources and give a trained trait but are restricted from the adventurer skill list. To represent expertise maybe they can be stacked.

For example, Bill the fighter grew up on a ranch he has everyman skills in Grooming, Farriering and Cattle Roping. If a situation arises that he needs to infiltrate the kings castle he can attempt to seek employement in the stables and his grooming and farrier skills can add to his diplomacy/disguise roll to convince the steward to hire him.

His brother Bob grew up on the same ranch but he was a rodeo rider so he puts 3 points of everyman skills into cattle roping. If they situation arises where lassoing something is an important part of the plan he will get a very large bonus to the roll.

 

[slobster]

I like CoC for exactly the same reason.
My last PC party was a football player, an air marshall, and a music student.
No reason a D&D party like that wouldn't be great.

It's interesting that the two of you agree on this point. I agree as well, I love games like that. But Call of Cthulu never struck me as very simulationist in its philosophy or rules. At most what it attempts to simulate is the feel and mood of Lovecraft's mythos works, but its rules don't seem very interested in doing world simulations of the sort we've been talking about, like constraints on monsters or NPCs other than what the GM finds appropriate. And that's exactly the amount of simulation that you get from a 4E GM.

If I'm mistaken let me know, I've never GMed CoC and haven't played in ages.

 

[Obryn]

I *hated* the 4E attitude that everyone must be useful in combat. I love playing Call of Cthulhu because there's always room for a professor who can't shoot an elder thing with a shotgun at five yards.

Righto. When I want that experience, though, I am content playing Call of Cthulhu or - for more traditional fantasy - WFRP2e. I have different expectations from D&D.

Whoever brought up the 'make these NPCs' challenge should be shot, because it was ultimately edition warring which has led to me constantly having to defend my simulationism, which everyone here associates with 3E.

I don't see the edition warring here. When you're talking about the various ways in which editions (and games) handle certain situations and edge-cases, that's kind of the essence of productive gaming conversation.

If you don't want be in the position to specifically defend the 3e way of doing things, nobody is asking you to. What's relevant here is a pretty core question though - (1) is the (or a) class/level system necessary or sufficient for every NPC in the world; (2) must NPCs and monsters follow identical rules to PCs; and (3) what are the merits and flaws to each approach?

That seems pretty productive to me, and if we've gotten a bit into the weeds with NPC classes, I'd say it's pretty relevant. After all, Next either will or will not have them, and it's a contended point whether or not they add anything to the game.

-O

 

[GreyICE]

Yeah basically see above, and I thoroughly agree with [MENTION=17106]Ahnehnois[/MENTION] ' point that it's crappy players can't do the same things the DM can do with his NPCs. I *hated* the 4E attitude that everyone must be useful in combat. I love playing Call of Cthulhu because there's always room for a professor who can't shoot an elder thing with a shotgun at five yards.

Whoever brought up the 'make these NPCs' challenge should be shot, because it was ultimately edition warring which has led to me constantly having to defend my simulationism, which everyone here associates with 3E. 3E was flawed, but it doesn't make simulationism inherently wrong. 4E gives you buckets of flexibility in NPC creation but doesn't offer the same courtesy to players. I want 5E to follow simulationist principles, but with the flexibility of being a 4E DM - and I believe this is POSSIBLE, especially with flattened math. Whether it happens is another matter.

I don't see this as an inherently worthwhile goal, to be honest. A non-combat character should be focusing on non-combat issues, and combat is the heart of D&D. A non-combat game of D&D is like a game of Vampire: the Masquerade which doesn't have any vampires in it. A game of Shadowrun where everyone sits around and has a tea party. A game of Paranoia where the Computer suggests a nice, sane, sensible mission, gives the PCs tools to complete the mission that are well documented, and everyone cooperates to accomplish the task.

Your character is not defined by his combat ability in D&D, but the mechanics of the character are driven by the fact that this is a combat-centric game. Take the mechanic of levels. What do levels do? They make sure everyone is on the same "level" for combat encounters. Level-free heavy combat games inevitably run into problems where certain people are Physical Gods while others are cardboard tigers (see: Exalted). Or they just make a high lethality game where death is inevitable and expected and character advancement is minimal.

Also there's the fact that there's two types of simulation! This has not been adequately discussed.

Type 1: Simulationism of rules (aka the top down approach)

The game rules attempt to simulate a reality. Everything is made according to the game rules, top-down. Where the rules conflict with setting structure, rules win. Everything follows the template laid down in the rules, and if the outcome doesn't make sense it is handwaved. Exceptions are rare and apparent.

Type 2: Simulation of outcome (aka the bottom up approach)

The game world is described and created to be consistent. Rules are created to match what characters in the game world are capable of doing. Applying different rules for different situations is fine as long as the rules encapsulate what is occurring and fit the narrative. Where the rules conflict with setting structure, setting wins. Exceptions are commonplace and hard to distinguish from "business as usual."


Simulationist applies solely to people in group 1. Creating a rules structure to define reality.

Group 2? I find that leads to a much more compelling experience, for me personally. I like consistent settings, even if rules are being fudged "behind the scenes."

I hope this adequately explains why so many of us in Group 2 like our approach, and the goals that we are trying to accomplish with our system.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Fair point. I do a bit of this in my own game - at 1st level very many opponents were higher level (for the obvious reason that there is no other way but up!) whereas now, at 17th level, many opponents are 16th or lower.

But I do a lot of minions and swarms also, which in some ways act as a nice halfway between purely fictional advancement and actual mechanical advancement.

I do like shifting monsters along the solo-minion scale to represent PC advancement. An example I used once was orcs. In classic D&D, an orc is prettymuch an orc, except for a few leader types that are a bit tougher. They quickly become a trivial challenge. In 3e, you could fight plain orcs for a while, and keep fighting orcs - the DM just gives them more and more character levels, so, a 18th, you're figting 18th level Clerics of Gruumsh and the like. In 4e, you could also just scale up a monster, from a 1st level or to an nth level orc Elite with a couple of class or class-style powers. But, you could also keep the same orcs, but as the party leveled up, change their stats to reflect the way the challenge they represent changes. At 1st level, a single warrior of a tribe of uruk-hai-like uber-orcs might by a solo challenge for the party, a 'boss' at the end of an adventure where they finally track down the agent provacatuer that's been causing trouble in their corner of the world. Five levels on, the same sort of orc (maybe that first one's twin brother, looking for revenge, maybe the exact same uber-orc if he escaped that boss fight) might be statted out as a same-level elite. Another 4 or 5 levels, and they're 'just' standard monsters. Another 18, and the paragon level PCs are facing hordes of the same sort of orc warriors, but now they're only minions. When those get too easy, the DM can pull them together into even-higher-level mobs. You keep fighting the same sort of monster, in the fiction, the modeling is just changed to fit their changing role in the PCs story.

'Bounded accuracy' tries to give monsters that same sort of longevity without changing their stats. You go from an orc being a modestly tough monster to a minion-equivalent as your minimum damage potential (damage/hps being the primary source of scaling under bounded accuracy) exceeds it's hps, and it's damage potential becomes nearly trivial compared to your hps.

 

[Obryn]

But Call of Cthulu never struck me as very simulationist in its philosophy or rules. At most what it attempts to simulate is the feel and mood of Lovecraft's mythos works, but its rules don't seem very interested in doing world simulations of the sort we've been talking about, like constraints on monsters or NPCs other than what the GM finds appropriate. And that's exactly the amount of simulation that you get from a 4E GM.

That's pretty well right, but it has a few things going for it. Not using a class-based system is up there. So's an extensive skill list. But honestly, BRP was developed well before anyone thought up GNS theory or thought to call a game or playstyle "simulationist." Much like with 1e, the extent to which it's in any camp is largely accidental; the designers just made a game that they thought would be fun and which emulated the genre conventions they were interested in. (And BRP has not changed much in decades.)

I found that CoC d20 worked better for me and my group, overall. It's basically a super-stripped-down 3.0e. I added in VP/WP, and it worked great as a more pulp-ish take on modern Lovecraftian horror.

-O

 

[Ahnehnois]

It's interesting that the two of you agree on this point. I agree as well, I love games like that. But Call of Cthulu never struck me as very simulationist in its philosophy or rules.
...

If I'm mistaken let me know, I've never GMed CoC and haven't played in ages.

My experience is with CoC d20, so I can't speak to the original BRP game (or any of the many CoC-based games out there).

Mechanics are only part of it, but let's take a look. In CoC d20, you still have the basic level advancement architecture (meaning that you get better at attacks, saves, and hp no matter what you do). However, there is no "good" base attack, there is a very low massive damage threshold (10 or 15 I think), and there is the sanity system. Everyone gets 8 + int mod skill points, and the skill list is expanded. There are only two "classes", offense and defense. If you stay in low levels, you are getting a relatively good simulation for a d20 game.

The sanity system does not allow will saves or any d20 rolls to resist it and has nothing to do with your level or your character power (and is a central mechanic, and, IIRC, is ported in from BRP CoC). The effects of insanity are essentially copied from the DSM-IV-TR (i.e. the book psychiatrists use to diagnose disorders and bill insurance). Does it truly model mental health? Of course not; it simplifies complex biological and psychological processes to percentile rolls. But it subverts the scaling of d20 mechanics and offers a lot of verisimilitude.

As to monster design, the monsters are built in 3.0 style, but without much of a sense of balance (despite the token CRs). The DMing section strongly advises that fighting is very different from D&D, and that characters should run when they see a monster, not fight it.

***

At most what it attempts to simulate is the feel and mood of Lovecraft's mythos works

It's also worth noting that despite the fact that he wrote about monsters and magic, Lovecraft himself was very "simulationist", was a huge science nerd and history nerd, and did the best he could to incorporate realistic elements into his stories, despite the existence of unrealistic ones.

***

That being said, d20 mechanics are still not great at simulation. I've used vp/wp for a while used CoC as a test venue for my injury system and grittier d20 combat rules for that reason.

(Seems like I have some things in common with [MENTION=11821]Obryn[/MENTION] with regards to CoC).

 

[Obryn]

I do like shifting monsters along the solo-minion scale to represent PC advancement. (snip)

Ditto. I've just done the same with Gith. Just this past session, in fact.

I think of it in terms of Buffy the Vampire slayer. At the outset, vampires are kinda hard. They're a fight - normal monsters, in other words. Later on in the series, they're clearly "minions." Move to the end, with the "super-vamps"... They start out incredibly challenging, like almost unkillable. But by the end of the series, they too are dropping like flies.

Solo-Elite-Standard-Minion is a good genre convention to me.

-O

 

[nightwyrm]

Not to get into a GNS derail, but how are people defining "simulationism"? It seems some of us are talking pass each other coz we defined terms differently. Simluationism used to mean genre emulation and just the running of an internally consistent world. Some uses it to mean simulating reality. Others use it more in the sense of running a computer simulation where you plug in the rules and data and the production of whatever results (sensible or otherwise) is its own goal.