I'm far from a kriegsspiel expert - but my feeling in the D&D context is that knowability is important, so that the player can demonstrate his/her skill. In the context of the frost giant, this is why I have mentioned a few times now that I think it matters how that table handles alignment, and whether the GM's decision was informed by the CE alignment of the giant. Making sensible calls about how alilgnment will affect NPC behaviour is undoubtedly an important skill in kriegsspiel-style D&D.
Introducing Complications Without Forcing Players to Play the "Mother May I?" Game
Yes, there needs to be a high level of consistency and predictability. And the GM/referee needs to make clear the probabilities and be willing and able to explain their rulings. Free Kriegsspiel is basically nothing other than that - one time I saw some senior British army officers play the Battle of Waterloo on TV using Free Kriegsspiel, and it was fantastic. 'Napoleon' used Grant/Zhukov hammer-blow tactics on 'Wellington'. The last line of the show was:
"Well, it's up to Blucher now..."
Sadras
Legend
I haven't yet read any previous posts, but I thought to quickly reply to this, although I do believe I provided upthread my reasoning on the FG motivations for not returning the shard and not being swayed by the soft attempt made by the PC.
In general alignment ofcourse can/will motivate NPC behaviour, but that was not the motivation I gave, as I feel alignment alone may be too shallow to justify certain courses of action.
As a DM I have built up some backstory for the shard (as has the player) and so I would of course like that to come to the fore during roleplay. He was actually tracking the 2nd piece when he came upon the F/Giants. The FG not handing back the shard, affects the time and effort the player and myself have put in with regards to the shard. So the adjudication that was made, was not something light or flippant. It had to do with the integrity of our setting.
By describing the roleplaying style as MMI, you immediately discount all the above and cast the game in a negative light with the pejorative. My limited understanding of MMI, usually involves a DM who may use MMI to run a linear or very railroad-y game, not the type of large open sandbox that we try to run. I'm not at all saying MMI cannot be run in sandbox, it just makes less sense, when you have DM open to the many avenues created by players. EDIT: Especially when those avenues may eliminate entire AP's. How can that possibly be MMI?
As for how our table handles alignment, rather loosely, except maybe when it isn't. For instance the Rod of Seven Parts historically, is meant to sway the user's alignment, if I recall correctly. All I have mentioned to the player, is that the character has noticed a change within himself, a tendency to be a little more rigid morally and ethically and the like in his thinking and acting, a strong lawful feeling if you will.
I noticed that the player out of his own modified his character sheet on Obsidian Portal, reflecting this change in his alignment descriptor.
So no hard or fast mechanics, each situation is dealt with separately, we roleplay it and negotiate/converse at the table. 99% of the time it is a descriptor. I imagine if the setting were Planescape or the 9 Hells it would come up more. Right now we are more concerned with Dragons and Giants, so it is very much in the background.
Last edited:
Sadras
Legend
This is a good response. You acknowledge GM judgment but prefer that the GM defer to the mechanics of the game Easy, Moderate Hard thereby narrowing that personal bias through the mechanics, thus limiting it.
My answer to that is Saying Yes does not defer to the mechanics of the game why does that get a free pass?
Last edited:
Ovinomancer
No flips for you!
This runs into a problem quickly.
Bill: "My character walks across the room to talk to the Baron."
DM; "Okay, well, there's no saying 'yes' in this edition's mechanics, so make your 'walking' check, your 'looking' check, your 'visual recognition' check, your 'talking' check, and, as always, your 'breathing' and 'beat heart' checks. Now, we'll need a 'social' check to say "hello" after which we'll need to check the other words you want to say without offending everyone. And, temember to continue making those 'breathing' checks or you have yo start the asphyxiation rules."
Bob: "Um, I've forgotten yo make a few 'beat heart' checks."
DM: "Ouch, Bob's chatacter falls to the ground clutching his chest. Everyone make 'recognize medical emergency' checks."
Sadras
Legend
Although those are all technically action declarations they are not generally the type of action declarations that require DM adjudication.
"Say 'yes' or roll the dice" is generally associated with systems that use scene-framing techniques to drive the action. In those systems, "saying 'yes'" is a device for allowing a player's response to a GM's framing to go through uncontested. If there's no disagreement or differences of opinion on how the fiction should unfold, then there is no need for mechanics to mediate it, as there is nothing to mediate.
darkbard
Legend
Anything I would add would be redundant to what Ovi and pemerton have stated already. (And probably without the keen humor of the former's post....
)
Ovinomancer
No flips for you!
The point is that "say yes" is a fundamental of all styles. Questioning it is silly. What you seem to want to ask is "why is 'no' not also valid?" That's an interesting discussion that this thread has been avoiding.
I think that you have to accept that the GM being able to unilaterally say "no" based on their interpretation of the fictional position is MMI-alike. So long as the GM retains said authority to negate, all actions are subject to this and therefor can only occur with permission, explicit or implied. But, this doesn't mean play cannot be prinipled or hella fun. A GM in this concept can apply strict principles in play and communicate them to players in a way that they can understand the avaiable play space and enjoy play well. This takes a huge amount of work, though, and the GM must shoulder a massive workload to make it happen. Not to mention the need for good social skills and the effort to maintain trust. I think that most posters here have only played this kind of game and so are somewhat blind to the level of effort this kind of play demands from GMs.
It's actually much easier to run games that don't allow the GM unilateral negatipn authority. This isn't because it takes less work or is strictly better, but because that overhead is shared out among all players. I've seen a number of posts that are focusing only on GM power and responsibility that don't grok this difference. In "trad" play, the GM has the overhead burden to create and model the world fairly, while the players have little burden to do so, as they are exploring the GM's world. This requires the GM to be able to negate action declarations that violate the fiction, which may often be not fully known to players, but also that the fiction be well established in the GM's understanding so that a consistent world is presented. The player's only duty is to poke and prod the world, and they expect to be negated from time to time.
Non-trad play, though, puts much more of the burden on the players to engage and create a world. It does this by framing, mostly. Negation is removed from the GM's toolbox but replaced by a duty to frame players into danger at all times. This means that, yes, players can declare whatever they want as actions (within the limits of the fiction and theme, again assuming principled play as baseline) but if they don't engage the danger, the GM can pay it off, meaning players are strongly incentivized to engage the danger in a scene and use their tools and effort to do so. This reduces the GM overhead because they're now only responsible for the initial scene framing and then adjudicating outcomes. They don't have to plan or hold the world in their head to develop believable and consistant outcomes; they only need to frame danger and then pay it off if not resolved while adding more dangers on failed checks. Sonce the GM is now following the development of play that the players now have the duty to bring, GM workload is much decreased.
These styles create very different play at the table. The non-trad games accept a looseness of world and a frenetic pace of play which isn't to everyone's taste. Trad games accept GM fiat, but can also provide a feeling of depth to story that non-trad games can lack*. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your playstyles will help you to become better GMs, on either side, because you'll know where the potholes are and can better steer around them.
*I know [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] often puts his play up as rich and detailed as a counter to this point, but that ignores that he has a lot of experience steering around the potholes. There seems to be a lot of players out there that have bounced off of non-trad games because they failed to get the narrative depth they find in trad games. Those play examples shouldn't be ignored. If bad play examples are going to be referenced for trad games, we should also look at where non-trad games fail as well, not just where they succeed. It takes a whole table to carry a mon-trad game (or most of one), but a trad game can be carried by a good GM.
innerdude
Legend
Sorry, it's taken me a while to jump back in to this thread. Lots of tangents and interesting responses.
I'll try to answer this as succinctly as possible. Don't want to derail the other trains of thought on the thread, but thought I'd take a minute to try and respond.
Savage Worlds' tactical combat components play out similarly in some respects to D&D 3.x/Pathfinder.
Minis and grids are the assumed defaults (though we've had some tremendously fun combats without them). Positioning matters. Flanking and "gang up" coordination matters. Because of the way wounds/damage modeling are handled, ranged combat can be deadly, and ranged combat tactics really MATTER (range, getting under cover). Engaging/disengaging from melee has consequences.
Many of what would be seen as "fighter only" feats in D&D are baked into the system as general combat options.
In general, if you're a fan of the kinds of combats that D&D 3 and Pathfinder produce, you'll like Savage Worlds' tactical combat.
The most *controversial thing about Savage Worlds is by far its wound/damage rules, which does play into your other question about "whiff factor."
(*in the sense that opponents of the system are very vocal about it)
In D&D, you get used to the idea that every hit does something. Even if it's just 1 lowly hit point subtracted from a foe, it's still something.
Savage Worlds is not like this. In order to meaningfully damage a foe, you have to do enough damage to exceed their base toughness plus any armor reduction.
So, for example, if a foe's damage threshold is 8 total (6 base toughness + 2 armor reduction), any damage rolls of seven or less simply have no effect. Damage rolls from 8-11 would cause a Shaken condition, Damage rolls 12+ would cause one or more wounds.
On some very rare occasions, I have seen this become a source of frustration, and it's happened to me on both sides as a GM and player. Every once in while --- maybe 1 combat in 25 --- the dice just aren't playing nice with the players, and the combat feels like things get mired in a slog. Usually this is a case where players are rolling well enough to hit an enemy but never doing enough damage to exceed the foe's wound threshold.
(The other criticism often leveled at Savage Worlds is that players get stuck in a Shaken "stun lock" loop where they keep losing their actions across multiple turns. This has largely been eliminated with rules changes.)
Now about "bennies" --- the easiest way to think about them is to just call them "hero points" instead, because they serve to allow characters to re-roll actions they've attempted previously, as well as to "soak" a damage roll that would normally cause wounds, but if successfully "soaked", it's as if the wound had never happened.
In D&D terms, you can think of a hero point "soak" check to be the equivalent of a fighter immediately regaining hitpoints in the middle of a fight, or if you're okay with a more "narrative" concept, it's as if the hero did something dramatic at the very last second to "turn away" the attack so it didn't cause a wound in the first place, or caused a less severe wound than it might have otherwise. It's very much a "Saving Throw Against Damage" kind of a check.
It's basically the reverse of the D&D 4/D&D 5 "short rest" healing rules, where instead of saying, "Well, after a short rest, you spend X hit dice to regain Y hit points," you're basically saying, "In that extreme moment of combat, your heroism and luck allowed you to avoid the damage that you'd later have to heal."
If you can think of "bennies" in this light --- as hero points that function as an amalgamation of of D&D 5 hit dice, "short rest healing in reverse," combat-narrative-insta-retcon-to-avoid-damage PLUS the ability to re-roll critical skill checks and damage rolls, then Savage Worlds will immediately feel completely natural and remarkably fun.
All that said, there are a lot of D&D players that just seem to really struggle with accepting these general conceits when they're used to the standard hit point / healing / rest model.
For me, it wasn't even a hurdle at all. In essence, I was trading away the inconsistencies of the hit point model for something different and ultimately better.
For example, in the hit point model, you have to ask questions like, why is cure light wounds massively more effective on a level 1 character than a level 9 character? Why can a character take a "short rest" for 15-30 minutes and suddenly regain a bulk of hit points? Weren't those hit points modeling actual physical injury? And if they weren't modeling actual physical injury, how do I represent what's happening in the fiction? Why can a level 9 fighter jump off a 100-foot cliff and, by rules-as-written, survive the fall in better shape than when (s)he fought a wyvern the day before?
The thing about "hero points"/"bennies" being used as soak/damage ablation, is that it does take a minute to sort of figure out in the fiction what happened when the character avoided that massive damage attack. But the cool thing is, once you cross that hurdle, the actual wound/damage/fatigue model produces much more generally plausible results. When an actual wound takes place, there's absolutely zero question of what it's modeling within the game fiction---your character is hurt, it's making them less effective within the fiction, and if it's serious enough, short-term healing attempts are of limited effect. The "hero point"/damage ablation model removes the mental gymnastics of having to figure out just what those 97 hit points actually mean, how hit point healing works, etc.
For me, despite the fact that "hero points + soak rolls" does have a meta-game component to it, the end result of Savage Worlds' wound and fatigue tracks make it more realistic in the end.
It's definitely a trade-off, in a sense, to shift paradigms from hit points/healing to "hero point"/damage soak, and there is the rare "whiff" factor combat to contend with. But overall I VASTLY prefer the Savage Worlds paradigm for a host of reasons.
Having played Savage Worlds for seven or eight years now, the very thought of reverting to a d20 system of any kind makes me cringe on the inside. To me, going back to d20 after Savage Worlds feels like going backward three or four steps in overall game design functionality, elegance, and playability.
That said, there are some things that D&D can do better. Savage Worlds is utterly fantastic when combats are modeled around generally human-scale participants. It's a little less good at modeling human-versus-gigantic-monstrous-foe combats. So if your bread-and-butter combats are the "The party versus a single, large CR foe," then D&D 5 might be slightly more effective. But if your combats are more along the lines of, "The party faces off against 6 goblins, 2 goblin wolfriders, a cave troll and an orc chieftain," and you want that combat to be fun, dynamic, and tactical, then Savage Worlds is awesome.
Similar Threads
