Why are we okay with violence in RPGs?

5ekyu · Jun 18, 2019

hawkeyefan said:
Sure, it's discussed as a possibility. But it's pretty vague is what I'm saying. One of the things I like about 5E is that they seem to have left it very malleable so that different groups can use it for different styles of play, and could tweak it as needed. The DMG is largely a list of suggestions on how to do so.

And that's great. I don't know if I'd hold it in the same category as a game that includes partial success in a more definitive way. As we've seen in some discussions on the boards, the very idea isn't always easily understood, so without actual rules, it's harder to grasp. For those familiar with the concept, or who take the mention in the PHB and DMG and run with it, yes, you can establish a pretty different system. But I don't know if many people would do so.

Well, to me, its as vague as succeed and fail are - they get about the same.

I mean, if i am climbing a treacherous hillside do i fall on a fail or just get bo ehere? If i succeed is ot one check for the whole climb or one per my half speed climb segment?

Basically, i do not see the progress with setback as any less detailed than the other two options - each is left to the gm to define based on circumstance in the PHB ability score.

Bedrockgames · Jun 18, 2019

Flexor the Mighty! said:
Is tokeplay how they do it in Mass since its been legalized?

Typo. Just fixed it

hawkeyefan · Jun 18, 2019

Celebrim said:
More to the point, they tend to be less engaging than the social interaction that they are simulating.

By the argument that I outlined above, the more detailed the social interaction rules, the less engaging that they will tend to be because the less they will resemble the thing that they are a model for.

I can foresee this becoming Celebrim's Third Law of RPGs at some point, I just haven't figured out how to phrase it. But I have a strong suspicion that one of the reasons that the systems that try to cover everything using the same mechanical resolution system never seem to catch on is that fundamentally the things that they are trying to model are more different than they are similar. You can hammer every square peg through the round hole in order to get some sort of 'pass/fail' answer, but you can only do so at the cost of increasing abstraction and with that an intuitive and cinematic transcript of play.

"Cinematic" word I realize has been defined in several ways by tRPG writers, but as I use it I mean a process of resolution that tends to increase the ability of all participants to imagine what is transpiring in the scene in the same concrete way. That is to say, it has mechanics which tend to be self reifying. For example, if your process of resolution of a social encounter primarily depends on holding some sort of conversation, then everyone at the table can easily imagine what is transpiring in the scene in the same concrete way, because the transcript of the conversation (or at least something quite similar to it) is right there for everyone to experience. Thus, holding a conversation is cinematic in a way that, "I try to intimidate the guard.", or "I try to persuade the Baron to lend some of his household troops to assault the lizardfolk", or "I use a conversational feint.", etc. etc. just isn't.

I don't know if I agree with this. I mean, I get your point about how a conversation between players is similar to a conversation between characters. But the entire game is a conversation. I don't think the presence of social mechanics means that actual roleplaying will be replaced by dice rolls. Certainly your examples of "I try to intimidate the guard" and "I try to persuade the Baron" can both be used in a game that has no social mechanics just as easily as one that has them. I think that's more a question of how a player approaches the game; some will jump right into character and speak as if they are the character, others will speak as the player summarizing what the character is trying to do. Neither is right or wrong, but also neither is dependent on the presence of social rules.

In my experience, such mechanics actively promote focusing on the social aspect more, which winds up enhancing those scenes. People are more willing to get involved when there are engaging mechanics involved. I mean in meaningful interactions that will have an impact on the fiction....convincing the Baron to lend troops, to use your example. Let's say a game has some kind of meaningful mechanics to support an attempt to convince a NPC to do something, and that it can involve more than one roll and one character....it's not just "have the bard try and convince him to help" but instead it's having the party convince him in a number of ways. Hopefully, this would make the attempt to convince the Baron a more involved encounter rather than simply boiling it down to rolls.

I mean, most people wouldn't say that about combat....."ah it can all be boiled down to some dice rolls", but it's very true.

Bedrockgames · Jun 18, 2019

Umbran said:
I am suggesting, as someone said upthread, that the GM has several functions, only one of which is adjudicating. When the GM is just deciding a result, for their own reasons unrelated to the rules of the game - that's not adjudicating.
.

We just see things differently then. The GM deciding what happens when the players do something in the world, I file that under adjudication. I think we just have fundamentally different ways of thinking about play Umbran.

Flexor the Mighty! · Jun 18, 2019

Celebrim said:
Your example assumes that the players know OOG that rot grubs exist and have some idea what to do about them because they've read the entry, and that the party is of sufficient level that some solution is available and non-lethal. In too many cases, they are just whoops, "Die. No save.", and in the rest of the cases they get rather old fast. At least they usually have a period of time where the party can respond to them before they become lethal. Things like the Bodak, which are randomly lethal and a pushover if they aren't, aren't ever fun.

I tend to get really annoyed by monsters that just come down to, "Do you roll well?" This can include in 1e things like the Death Knight, where if you win initiative as a party it will probably not survive the round, but if it goes first then Power Word: Kill or 20HD Fireball, and someone in the party is probably dying (without a save, or even if they save), turning the initiative into a save or die roll.

Say what you will about the danger of 1e AD&D, I have had far more glorious combats using 3e D&D than I ever had in 1e AD&D, which for all the fun we were having on the whole tended toward the grindy, the random, or the anticlimactic. Possibly things would have been better with more OD&D power level of PCs, but at the time I lacked the knowledge to adjust things.

Of course I assume the players are going to use some of their own experience when they are playing this game. I don't expect them to do stuff they know is wrong and die. And no Rot grubs are not a staple in games like stirges, dire striges, undead dire stirges, the stirge king, and giant dire epic stirges. But they have led to some fun moments and I like to throw them in now and then.

I had some good fights running 3e but mostly it made me stop running D&D until I got the group to switch to a different edition.

Bedrockgames · Jun 18, 2019

Flexor the Mighty! said:
Is tokeplay how they do it in Mass since its been legalized?

And I do know people who play that way. But I don’t smoke or drink

hawkeyefan · Jun 18, 2019

5ekyu said:
Well, to me, its as vague as succeed and fail are - they get about the same.

I mean, if i am climbing a treacherous hillside do i fall on a fail or just get bo ehere? If i succeed is ot one check for the whole climb or one per my half speed climb segment?

Basically, i do not see the progress with setback as any less detailed than the other two options - each is left to the gm to define based on circumstance in the PHB ability score.

There's always some level of judgment needed, yes, I agree. But I think that "success" and "fail" are inherently a bit more clearly understood than "partial success" or "success with a complication". I think that no matter what, you will have things playing out differently from table to table, but I think a lot more so with the partial success.

So if the rules had gone into more detail about what a partial success could be, if they had a more structured system in place that allowed for partial success, and offered examples of what it could mean in different cases, then I think the system expands the potential outcomes more clearly, and the GM has more to lean on to determine what a partial success may be.

I think that you can achieve this with a rules system like 5E....as I said, in my game we've adopted these kinds of elements. But I think a game that's designed with this mode in mind is more likely to do the job cleanly.

GrahamWills · Jun 18, 2019

Hussar said:
I would LOVE to see these mythical AD&D tables where even 40% of encounters were not resolved by combat.

I ran an AD&D campaign recently, using a modern dungeon, and although I had to terminate it early, my players consistently avoided combat. Some of the combats they were clearly outgunned, but even when they were not, they much preferred to talk, find out information and trade, if possible. Looking back, I think the design of the adventure facilitated this, specifically:

Encounters are not guaranteed to be "level-appropriate". If you know you always can fight, then quite often you do. If you know that sometimes the enemy will insta-squish you, you tend to hide and observe at the very least before attacking
Denizens have agendas and needs. If players are used to finding possible people/monsters that want things, then they start thinking "maybe I can make more profit fulfilling their wants than by killing them". This also means they do not auto-kill things they can, because maybe that goblin knows where the lich is hiding that ruby the dragon wanted.
Encounters are entertaining. If you have a room full of orcs that have no personality, then the fun you can have is pretty limited. You see them, they do nothing interesting. You kill them. Instead, if you find them arguing about which orc is the most handsome, maybe you decide to offer to be a judge, and soon you are not killing them, but accepting bribes in a beauty contest ...

When you write encounters, don't start with stats and combat info. Start thinking "what will make this worth interacting with -- what will be fun, what opportunities for profit, what information can be learned". If you as a GM start with the assumption that combat isn't the default option, it'll work its way into your players

5ekyu · Jun 18, 2019

hawkeyefan said:
There's always some level of judgment needed, yes, I agree. But I think that "success" and "fail" are inherently a bit more clearly understood than "partial success" or "success with a complication". I think that no matter what, you will have things playing out differently from table to table, but I think a lot more so with the partial success.

So if the rules had gone into more detail about what a partial success could be, if they had a more structured system in place that allowed for partial success, and offered examples of what it could mean in different cases, then I think the system expands the potential outcomes more clearly, and the GM has more to lean on to determine what a partial success may be.

I think that you can achieve this with a rules system like 5E....as I said, in my game we've adopted these kinds of elements. But I think a game that's designed with this mode in mind is more likely to do the job cleanly.

"But I think a game that's designed with this mode in mind is more likely to do the job cleanly."

See, this is where we just have to disagree... It seem to me that 5e was built with all three modes in mind. Could they give more pre-defined use-cases for each - sure - but they went with a less rigid more "ruling" based push for all of them.

It was built from ground up with ability checks particularly being much more gm situational resolutions with non-binary outcomes. Ruling over rigid.

hawkeyefan · Jun 18, 2019

5ekyu said:
"But I think a game that's designed with this mode in mind is more likely to do the job cleanly."

See, this is where we just have to disagree... It seem to me that 5e was built with all three modes in mind. Could they give more pre-defined use-cases for each - sure - but they went with a less rigid more "ruling" based push for all of them.

It was built from ground up with ability checks particularly being much more gm situational resolutions with non-binary outcomes. Ruling over rigid.

That's fair. And I don't mean to seem like I'm disagreeing with you. But I'd be surprised if most tables don't just rely on succeed/fail without giving consideration to partial success.