Elephant in the room: rogue and fighter dailies.

[LostSoul]

Hmm, okay.

I disagree, though. I'm claiming that if the character can't distinguish the difference in how the player's decision was made, then the rules leading to that decision didn't negatively impact the cinematic story told by the game.

And if the story isn't damaged, should the different rules be a cause of irritation to the players?

I don't know about should. Some players want to make choices as though they were their characters - that is, the player's choices are same as the character's choices.

Player: I want to kill this guy! I will trip him and stab him in the face!
Character: I want to kill this guy! I will trip him and stab him in the face!
vs.
Player: I want to kill this guy! I will use a meta-game resource!
Character: I want to kill this guy! I will trip him and stab him in the face!

That said, I'm not sure if "stab him in the face" is a valid choice for a player in D&D...

Player: I want to kill this guy! I will make a "to-hit" roll, using my sword!
Character: I want to kill this guy! ...

Maybe the character's choice is filled in after the to-hit and damage roll? Maybe not? I'm not sure where the line between abstract and dissociated lies.

The player knows that the rules were different... but if the result for the character could have been achieved by either set of rules, those differences aren't catastrophic.

I think it's more about the process than the outcome.

 

[Hypersmurf]

Player: I want to kill this guy! I will make a "to-hit" roll, using my sword!

"Damn it, Ted! For the last time, you make the to-hit roll using your d20!"

Maybe the character's choice is filled in after the to-hit and damage roll? Maybe not? I'm not sure where the line between abstract and dissociated lies.

The character's intent is presumably determined before the roll, in all versions of D&D. The roll indicates whether his intentions are realised.

I think it's more about the process than the outcome.

I don't think that's universally true. One of the complaints seems to be "He can only Trip one guy!" - an outcome complaint rather than a process complaint - despite the fact that an at-will system for Tripping could also result in only one guy being Tripped.

-Hyp.

 

[pemerton]

[MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION], good examples!

Other games might have sections in their combat rules like 1. Disarm, or 2. Knock back, or 3. Trip. You can choose to do any maneuver you can describe and then the rules are referenced for how to resolve the issue, including perhaps modifiers for the factors of the situation.

You understand the contrast?

Sure, but I'm not sure where that gets us.

In some RPG melee combat systems, I can walk up to a demon and try to stab it in the heart with some mechanical chance of success determined by comparing my attack skill to its dodge skill to my weapond damage to its amour and toughness etc.

But in D&D, in the first round of combat there is no chance for (let's say) a mid-level warrior to one-shot a Vrock. In AD&D, it's close to mechanically impossible for a character of ordinary strength, armed with a dagger, to one-shot a mercenary (daggers to 1d4 hp, mercenaries have 1d4+3 hp - so 3 in 4 mercanaries are mechanically immune to being one-shotted by daggers).

This mechanical impossibility is a consequence of D&D's hit point mechanics - often described as "plot armour" for PCs, and presumably a type of pacing mechanic for NPCs and monsters. (Ie their whole rationale is to prevent one-shotting.)

Is a mechanic like hit points, which makes one-shotting enemies mechanically impossible, fundamentally different from a mechanic like martial encounter and daily powers, which make it mechancilly impossible to replicate certain combat moves? Not in my view. They are all metagame techniques to regulate pacing, provide a certain sort of plot authority, etc.

 

[nnms]

Since the decision you're making has absolutely nothing to do with playing a role, I'm afraid you're running up against the definitions of the English language here.

If you want to try to define "roleplaying" to mean something other than "playing a role", be my guest. But I'm probably not going to be convinced.

I think you've convinced me to a degree. I like using the term RPG as board to the point of useless purely to be polite and to not get people to think I'm trying to say that they're somehow doing it wrong or not part of the hobby. When it comes down to it though, we really can talk about moments when we are actively playing a role and moments when we are taking on a different role, like a narrator or tactical game player.

But there is also clearly a very large body of people who play roleplaying games in order to play their role: To make decisions as if they were their character. The proof of that is that these threads and these arguments aren't going away.

Good point.

Take a second and really think about that. Why are you getting offended? You clearly enjoy making decisions that your character isn't making. Why do you feel some sort of guilt or shame over that?

You should own it and embrace it and figure out how to make those decisions better and more interesting. Is it that you like having input on the world? Input on the pace of the story? An ability to rewrite the game world to favor your avatar?

And I also want some games to give me that experience and other types of games to give me an experience focused more on playing a specific character role.

Of course. I'm not arguing for or against narrative-influence, meta-resource mechanics. I'm arguing that in a game where those mechanics exist, it doesn't have to result in a nonsensical scenario of a character temporarily forgetting a learned skill.

It just suspends narration until after the fact. Or retcons it. Like when you have a warlord around in 4E. You better not narrate a successful hit against a character as a serious wound, because if it gets better because a warlord yells at you, it probably wasn't a serious wound. You need to suspend narration until after the encounter.

This also plays into 4E slowing down if you try to tie every action into the fiction. At first it seems colourful and interesting to describe every power every time you use it, but in the end, it doesn't actually impact anything and just slows down the game. So it's probably best to not make any story descriptions whatsoever and just play out the tactical miniatures combat. It'll go faster, still be enjoyable as a tactical exercise and you won't have to retcon anything. Then just some up in story terms after the whole encounter is over.

The fact that you think the mechanics exist in a completely separate box that doesn't interact with the game world in any way suggests that you are so firmly in love with dissociated mechanics that you are literally incapable of understanding any other mechanical paradigm.

I wouldn't go so far as to claim they're not capable of understanding, perhaps just not willing? Hopefully this will help:

I think the oft repeated "What is an RPG?" type text that is in the front of so many games is a good starting point. They almost always describe some sort of fictional play and then talk about why rules are good. Like the whole "cops & robbers" example where you have rules to solve the "I shot you" "No you didn't" problem.

So someone describes something, someone else describes something and you go on doing that until something someone describes mandates that the resolution mechanics be consulted to determine the results. Then you continue the circuit of description.

However, in the case of some games, the use of resolution mechanics will result in another decision being based off the previous mechanic-based decision, which then calls for another resolution system usage and you end up with situations of compound layers of decision making that is disconnected from the fiction.

Then when the whole thing is resolved, you sort of have to find a way to shoe-horn the fiction around the final results.

It's very jarring if the general approach is to describe what you do and then consult the rules to resolve that, rather than actively choosing to use a rules element and then use other rules elements that trigger off of that (even as part of a larger game mode procedure like combat) and then after it's all done, go back and describe everything, retconing as you need to in order for it to make sense.

Focusing on outcome is a red herring. Dissociated mechanics can be most easily distinguished by the decision-making process: Is the mechanical decision made by the player directly associated with the decision made by the character?

In playing a lot of Basic D&D lately, I'm inclined to agree. I don't recall too many instances of decision making where the process was not directly associated with the decision a given character might make. When I play and run 4E, I find myself surrounded by decision making based off of results of previous system calls rather than descriptions of the in game fiction.

And if the story isn't damaged, should the different rules be a cause of irritation to the players?

The problem is that the story can indeed be damaged. I'm prevented from narrating a sword strike that drops a character to the game state of dying in 4E because a warlord might shout at them and prove my description of the sword stroke being a real injury to be a lie.

Or it might make a sorcerer who is feeble in melee suddenly rush up to a fighter because the fighter's player pushed the "come and get it" button.

Or it might make a player wonder why they can't do something more than once in a five minute period when they've just demonstrated that their character can do it.

In Game C, the Fighter Trips one goblin with his Daily, and then fails to Trip any other goblins (because he's already used the power).

In Game A, the Fighter Trips one goblin, and then fails to Trip any other goblins (through a series of lousy die rolls).

Both systems resulted in only one goblin being Tripped... so the result "Only one goblin was Tripped" isn't something abhorrent about system C which system A renders impossible.

I don't think it's just focused on the final results. The whole point is that if you concentrate on final results, you've already left a circuit of description approach, waited for the final compound mechanics to resolve and then forced the fiction to fit after the fact.

 

[OneRedRook]

If the same story can result regardless of system and regardless of the meta-mechanics leading to those stories... and if the character is unaware of the meta-differences in the three systems... hmm. I guess I'm not understanding why system C should cause irritation.

... despite granting that people have a right to their preferences

-Hyp.

So, the thing that irks me isn't at that point - by the time the action has resolved, I've accepted the narrative and moved on. The problem is when I'm making the decision of what my character does, because there's nothing in the fiction currently that suggests it can't work. Not to get too hooked into the example, but the point of it is to illustrate a set-up where a martial daily (trip, in this case) would be advantageous. Dude might have scissors for legs and be carrying a sack of cats, but I still need to rationalise it away solely because I used my "trip" power recently.

My preference as a player is for mechanics which support in-game character decisions which allow me to stay in the fiction. And I find the use of combat maneuvers as martial dailies breaks me out of that pretty easily.

Hroc, who also suggests people stay the hell away from St. Ives.

 

[pemerton]

you are opening up the field of the discussion of a broader spectrum of game mechanics despite my repeatedly limiting the discussion to actions like "tripping" as being unsatisfactory when expressed as a daily effect.

<snip>

my discussion and disagreement with the mechanics of daily effects finds that in situations like with tripping the mechanic is simply not to my tastes for the reasons I have previously stated above.

In the case of tripping, you seem to wish to adjust the expectations of the player based on a mechanic rather than have the mechanics help adjudicate the natural expectations of the player, that one should be able to attempt to trip someone any number of times a day and that the circumstances influence the result rather than the mechanics restricting the potential circumstances leading to a foregone conclusion.

there's a sort of dissonance between my idea of my character's decision-making process or mental narrative, and my understanding of how this will actually play out in the game. It's not that the character might try, even though there's no chance it will work - that sort of thing is fine. It's that even though the character might want to try, I know it can't work because I've already used that "trip" resource today, and I don't have a map in the character's internal state for that.

I don't see the difference between tripping and decapitation.

In D&D (especially pre-3E D&D) my PC it is mechanically impossible for the typical fighter to decapitate the typical gnoll, bugbear or officer of the guard with the first swing of combat. Compared to the damage dealt, a multiple-HD opponent just has too many hp to wade through.

Regulating tripping via metagame mechanics seems to me no different from regulating decapitation via metagame mechanics. And, conversely, if you're happy that no decapitation occurs until 0 hp are reached, then hadnle tripping this way: when the foe reaches 0 hp, you tripped him/her! (And then stabbed the foe through the heart, or not, depending on whether you want a dead enemy or a merely incapacitated one.)

And decapitation is not just a hypothetical case:

I was busy rescuing the captured maiden when the dragon showed up. Fifty feet of scaled terror glared down at us with smoldering red eyes. Tendrils of smoke drifted out from between fangs larger than daggers. The dragon blocked the only exit from the cave. . .

I unwrapped the sword which the mysterious cleric had given me. The sword was golden-tinted steel. Its hilt was set with a rainbow collection of precious gems. I shoulted my battle cry and charged.

My charge caught the dragon by surprise. Its titanic jaws snapped shut just inches from my face. I swung the golden sword with both arms. The swordblade bit into the dragon's neck and continued through to the other side. With an earth-shaking crash, the dragon dropped dead at my feet. The magic sword had saved my life and ended the reign of the dragon-tyrant. The countryside was freed and I could return as a hero.
​

This narrative from the Foreword to Moldvay Basic is mechanically almost impossible to reproduce in that game, because fighter damage against a dragon is capped at 1d10+6 (two-handed sword, +3 for STR, +3 weapon vs dragons), and only weak or injured dragons will have 16 or fewer hp.

 

[Mark CMG]

I don't see the difference between tripping and decapitation.

One is lower, more likely, and easier on the opponent's necktie collection.

 

[pemerton]

This also plays into 4E slowing down if you try to tie every action into the fiction. At first it seems colourful and interesting to describe every power every time you use it, but in the end, it doesn't actually impact anything and just slows down the game. So it's probably best to not make any story descriptions whatsoever and just play out the tactical miniatures combat. It'll go faster, still be enjoyable as a tactical exercise and you won't have to retcon anything. Then just some up in story terms after the whole encounter is over.

One take away from this is that, whatever sort of fiction 4e is concerned with, it's not fiction about the minutiae of combat positioning and combat manoeuvres. The fiction that does emerge moment-by-moment from 4e play, and that feeds back into 4e action resolution, is who is in whose face, who is helping whom, etc. It's a fiction about conflicts and loyalties.

in the case of some games, the use of resolution mechanics will result in another decision being based off the previous mechanic-based decision, which then calls for another resolution system usage and you end up with situations of compound layers of decision making that is disconnected from the fiction.

This seems to be an issue mostly about search-and-handling time. From my memories of running classic D&D, this can come up in the consultation of encounter tables, as one table sends you to a different subtable sends you to a spell list or magic item table etc.

It seems orthogonal, though, to the issue of fictional positioning and simulation. But I may have missed something.

In playing a lot of Basic D&D lately, I'm inclined to agree. I don't recall too many instances of decision making where the process was not directly associated with the decision a given character might make.

<snip>

the story can indeed be damaged. I'm prevented from narrating a sword strike that drops a character to the game state of dying in 4E because a warlord might shout at them and prove my description of the sword stroke being a real injury to be a lie.

I don't want to harp too much, but in playing B/X, don't your players have regard to their hit point totals? What does that correlate to in the gameworld. Are the PCs wondering how lucky they are?

And do they ever wonder how come no bugbear has ever been decapitated by the first sword blow?

I've got nothing against hit points as a mechanic - I currently GM a game (4e) that uses them! But I don't see that they're entitled to a free pass from the theorists of dissociation and the critics of metagame mechanics.

And there is also the role of XP, as someong ([MENTION=11821]Obryn[/MENTION], I think) noted upthread. When your B/X players think about doing something to earn XP, what does that correlate to in the minds of their PCs?

The problem is when I'm making the decision of what my character does, because there's nothing in the fiction currently that suggests it can't work.

And there's nothing in the fiction that suggests I can't decpaitate that bugbear, or that captain of the guard. But in fact I can't until I chew through their hit points first.

 

[Hypersmurf]

The problem is that the story can indeed be damaged. I'm prevented from narrating a sword strike that drops a character to the game state of dying in 4E because a warlord might shout at them and prove my description of the sword stroke being a real injury to be a lie.

I don't agree that you're prevented.

Given the assumption that hit points represent a combination of factors, only one of which is physical health, there's no reason that someone can't lose hit points (narrated as a deterioration of physical health - wounds, injuries, etc), and subsequently regain hit points (narrated as a resurgence of willpower and determination).

If I narrate a nasty stab in the leg when I'm Bloodied, then just because I return to full hit points during our Extended Rest, that doesn't mandate that the wound in my leg is gone. I'm at full hit points; I also have a wound in my leg which will gradually go away over time. The wound was generated by the hit point mechanic, but it is not inextricably linked to the particular 15 hit points I lost at the time it was incurred.

Similarly, you might have a half-orc archer shoot several large arrows into the PC Fighter. On the one that drops him to Dying, you narrate one of the arrows sinking into his stomach. But he nevertheless triggers a power as a Reaction, which allows him to use his last Healing Surge and kill a few more orc minions. Did the Healing Surge render the shot to the gut narratively incorrect? Not at all. He still had the wound; the hit points his Healing Surge restored represented one of the other facets of the hit point pool.

Or it might make a sorcerer who is feeble in melee suddenly rush up to a fighter because the fighter's player pushed the "come and get it" button.

I see that as a blinkered view of the possibilities. Did the sorcerer decided to run up to the fighter to whack him with his stick? That seems implausible.

What if we narrate that the fighter cuts the rope holding the chandelier aloft? The sorcerer glances up to see it plummeting towards him, and with scant inches to spare, dives clear as the chandelier crashes to the ground. The sorcerer rolls back to his knees... and realises, as the pommel of the fighter's sword smashes into his teeth, that diving towards the fighter might have been a hasty decision he'll come to regret...

What if we narrate that the fighter reaches down and yanks on the rug? The sorcerer, off-balance, stumbles forward to be clotheslined by the fighter's armoured forearm...

What if we narrate that the fighter rolls forward through the barrage of magic missiles, snatches the sorcerer by his lapels, and hurls him ten feet to crash to the floor... before striding back over and stabbing him as he struggles back to his feet?

Any of those could result in the tactical scenario that Come And Get It declares must exist by the end of the power's resolution, and none of them need the feeble sorcerer to decide he's Tenser for no reason.

Or it might make a player wonder why they can't do something more than once in a five minute period when they've just demonstrated that their character can do it.

They demonstrated he could do it, given the combination of circumstances which existed in the cinematic depiction of the combat at that time, and which might not occur again for the rest of the encounter.

There's a shot in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, where two men on horseback charge Robin. He pulls out two arrows, rips the fletching on one with his teeth, and shoots; the damaged arrow veers off-course, and one arrow hits each opponent.

Essentially the Split The Tree power.

What if one guy was two feet left, and the other guy was two feet right? On the battlemat, they occupy the same five-foot squares... but in the cinematic portrayal of the scene, if the first arrow is on-target, the second arrow now misses by four feet!

So when Robin is attacked by two guys, Costner has a choice to make. If he expends his Split The Tree power, they're in position for the ripped-arrow trick to be viable. If he doesn't, then they're out of position by a few feet - not enough to change the location of the minis on the battlemat, but enough that cinematically, he can only reliably aim at one of them.

Kevin Costner has narrative control via the use of the Power; Robin Hood, on the other hand, evaluates the position of the men and decides whether it's worth shooting two arrows. He doesn't know that they'll only line up nicely when Costner decides that they do, but when it happens, he recognises the opportunity to pull off the stunt.

-Hyp.

 

[nnms]

But in D&D, in the first round of combat there is no chance for (let's say) a mid-level warrior to one-shot a Vrock. In AD&D, it's close to mechanically impossible for a character of ordinary strength, armed with a dagger, to one-shot a mercenary (daggers to 1d4 hp, mercenaries have 1d4+3 hp - so 3 in 4 mercanaries are mechanically immune to being one-shotted by daggers).

This was actually an example I used back in 2003 when explaining why I was taking a break from D&D and going to more gritty systems. What's the worst injury you can do with a dagger to a person? Blade in the brain? Heart? Severed spinal column at the base of the skull? Take your pick, but the answer is that you kill them.

In most versions of D&D this was impossible. It's not universally impossible in OD&D where weapons all do the same damage and HP were all a lot lower for everything, but when they made AD&D to undo the preponderance of house rules and to unify the player base into a single way of playing (sound familiar?) things changed (as well as if you get more HP).

It's also important to note that the Runequest system started as Steve Perrin's house rules on 1974 OD&D. From the very beginning there have been D&D players that have seen these issues as being problematic. By the time 1978 rolled around Runequest had grown into a separate game completely and the approach of Steve Perrin in his original house rules was pushed out during the anti-house rule stance Gygax took as part of his attempt to standardize the industry with AD&D.

The approach found in games like Runequest has been there since the earliest days of the hobby. David Wesely (the guy who ran Braunstein for Arneson and others), for example, credits Modern Warfare in Miniature as being the first published RPG in 1968. It is very, very concerned with player decisions being made with the information available to its characters. Even to the point that the resolution system is largely hidden from the players entirely.

In the Theory From the Closet interview with Wesely, he describes Braunstein as having more in kin with LARPing than with many sit down RPGs. It was all about the dialogue and description and shared fiction with the guy running it only getting involved to settle disputes or to resolve things via a system obfuscated from the players.

This mechanical impossibility is a consequence of D&D's hit point mechanics - often described as "plot armour" for PCs, and presumably a type of pacing mechanic for NPCs and monsters. (Ie their whole rationale is to prevent one-shotting.)

Is a mechanic like hit points, which makes one-shotting enemies mechanically impossible, fundamentally different from a mechanic like martial encounter and daily powers, which make it mechancilly impossible to replicate certain combat moves? Not in my view. They are all metagame techniques to regulate pacing, provide a certain sort of plot authority, etc.

The only difference would be when you either describe something and have it retconned or when you are prohibited from describing something until a large compound layered resolution exercise is complete.

For HP, the narration of a given strike is only delayed until the attack roll is rolled and the damage is rolled. Then you can evaluate the relative damage vs the target's HP and make a sensible narration.

The further the distance from the initial expression of desire to when the result is finally concretely discribed and added into the shared story, more it is problematic to those wanting a type of play that goes back to the Braunstein game in 1967 and which Gary Gygax largely abandoned in AD&D.