iserith
Magic Wordsmith
It would be a silly view to say you're playing the game wrong, which is why I don't say that.
If an NPC is telling the truth, what's the Insight DC to know they're telling the truth?
It would be a silly view to say you're playing the game wrong, which is why I don't say that.
Tony Vargas
Legend
Don't worry about "gaming the DM accusations."
It is always possible - DMs are human, afterall. The potential opportunities & rewards may be greater the more the system loads the DM, but the potential is always there in any system with anything like a DM role.
There's not even anything wrong with it, necessarily, just as there's nothing innately wrong with system mastery or fudging or illusionism - It's what you do with them that might be judged good or bad.
It is always possible - DMs are human, afterall. The potential opportunities & rewards may be greater the more the system loads the DM, but the potential is always there in any system with anything like a DM role.
There's not even anything wrong with it, necessarily, just as there's nothing innately wrong with system mastery or fudging or illusionism - It's what you do with them that might be judged good or bad.
iserith
Magic Wordsmith
I've been waiting for you to bring this up since your very first post in the thread. Luckily, I already addressed this upthread with Chaosmancer.
Being that "gaming" someone is by definition an unscrupulous, manipulative act, I don't agree that it's okay. I don't think the rules contemplate playing with people who would do this, nor is it advisable to play with such people in my view. The rules describe the people around the table as "friends." Friends don't do that in my book.
Plus, if you're the sort of DM who is getting gamed, then you're not living up to the standards set forth by the DMG for the DM: an impartial yet involved participant who acts as a referee that mediates between the rules and the players, one who sets limits, and who - by following the "middle path" - encourages the players to strike a balance between relying on their bonuses and abilities and paying attention to the game and immersing themselves in its world.
I used to make a "gaming the DM" argument during the playtest because I wanted D&D 5e (or D&D Next, as it was called) to be more like D&D 4e where the DM outsourced more judgment as to the efficacy of the players' ideas to the system and dice. I lost that argument and I'm glad I did because I learned that I was wrong. My hope is that others see that someday too.
Tony Vargas
Legend
I wouldn't want to dissapoint.
A lot of things can be done in the context of a game that would be pretty reprehensible in other contexts.
Friends don't punch eachother, but in a boxing ring, it's OK.
In RPGs, D&D in particular, you don't just imagine a PC in your control doing things that'd be unacceptable in polite society, you willingly enter into an unequal power dynamic of a degree that'd give Christian Grey pause (Did I get that right? Not a fan).
And, at the same time, the stakes are essentially non-existent (imaginary).
When a grifter manipulates you out of $10k, that's a crime, when you manipulate your DM to get your PC 10kgps, not s'much.
That's a legit argument - if you want to avoid gaming the DM, enter into a more balanced imaginary power sharing arrangement that incentivises it less - if that's what you want.
But its not "really D&D," the dynamics of such a game are completely different, and as the edition war illustrated, unacceptable to too much of the fan base to be tenable.
Same with being down on system mastery - you can choose a system that offers fewer rewards for it - if that's your priority.
But I'm less sympathetic to choosing a game that rewards system mastery lavishly, and decrying power gaming as innately wrong, or choosing a DM centric-game and being down on illusionism or gaming the DM.
The idea of carrot & stick isn't to punish going for the carrot.
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Charlaquin
Goblin Queen (She/Her/Hers)
Right, which is why I say a check isn't the worst possible outcome of an action. Technically a check isn't even an outcome of an action, it's the way we determine an outcome. But generally success without a check is preferable to having to make a check, because a check has a possibility of failure and a consequence for failure.
I can see why that would make checks a desirable thing in your game, if not only do they not always have consequences for failure, but they have a possibility of better outcomes than automatic success. This is not how I run the game, however.
Sure there is. The action. The player says what they want to do and how their character tries to do it. The DM uses their brain to try to predict the most likely outcome, and if they cannot do so with certainty, they call for a roll. This process is called resolving, or sometimes adjudicating, the action. So, I guess it would be more accurate to say that dice rolls are a part of the primary resolution mechanic, which is evaluating the goal and approach, relying on a weighted random number generator, in the form of a d20 roll with modifiers based on character statistics, to resolve any uncertainty that arises, and narrating the result based on this evaluation.
I am not assuming you haven't tried telling your players the consequences. I asked specifically to avoid falling into that assumption. The things I say would probably not give off the wrong impression so much if you stopped assuming I'm arguing in bad faith.
"Beter and more dramatic roleplaying" was pemerton's standard, not mine, which you disagreed would result from the method pemerton described. My question was if you have tried the method pemerton described and found that it did not lead to the result they said it would (specifically, better and more dramatic roleplaying), or have you found your own method to result in roleplaying that is dramatic enough and of sufficient quality that you don't believe it would be improved by the method pemerton described?
I'm not going to pretend I don't think the way I do it is better. But I do acknowledge that different people have different tastes and different experiences. Rather than assume you must not have tried my way if you don't think it's better, I thought it would be more courteous to ask if you have tried it and found it lacking, or if you simply aren't interested in trying it because you are already perfectly happy with your own method.
Note that, even if the answer is the latter, I don't believe that you would necessarily find my method preferable to your own if you just tried it. I do think you would find that it works better than you seem to think it would, but I expect you would probably still prefer your way, and indeed, think it is better.
Addressing your point was never the intent of my inquiry. I just wanted to know if your disagreement was based on experience with the method in question or on theory.
Again, I disagree that not knowing the potential consequences of a failed skill check is necessarily more dramatic or interesting. On the contrary, I think it is less dramatic and interesting because it hides what's at stake. I've referenced this before in this thread, I don't remember if it was with you, but I think Alfred Hitchcock's essay on why information is essential for creating suspense is equally applicable to roleplaying games as it is to filmmaking. I think a lot of DMs just get too caught up in worrying about keeping information the characters "couldn't know" out of the players hands and end up convincing themselves that they are making the game more dramatic by keeping information from the players instead of less.
I agree, the player should realize those things. That's kind of my point. There is every possibility that the player doesn't realize those things, in which case you do them a disservice by not making sure they know it. On the other hand, if they do know, you don't do them any disservice by reiterating it. Same concept as a life preserve, better to be given a reminder of the consequences and not need it than need a reminder and not get one.
Sure, but what harm is done by telling the player the chandelier will fall if they fail? Don't tell them, you risk a scenario where the player, who had been expecting the chandelier to remain up if he fell so his other party members could still try to use it to escape, protests "I wouldn't have jumped if I'd known it might have broken!" Tell them, and... What? You ruin the surprise when it falls? I think you might be overestimating the drama added by not telling the players things, and underestimating the drama added by telling them.
Ehh, I'm not really interested in arguing about what is or isn't a "gotcha." My point is "there's no way the character could know that!" is a poor reason not to tell the player something when it is well within your power as DM to set up the scenario in such a way that the character could know it. If you object to me using the term "gotcha" for that, fine, I won't use that term for it.
iserith
Magic Wordsmith
It's a weak argument based on imagining the worst in people and on being too agreeable to act as a judge of the ideas of others. I'm ashamed I made it when I did. What a waste of my time. (Unlike this whole thread which, as anyone can see, has totally been worth it. Yep. Totally. Worth. It.)
I also choose not to see the creation and reception of D&D 5e as a rejection of D&D 4e, as if "I" lost and "they" won. I still have my books. They still work. I don't play it as much as I'd like, but I can when I want to.
Tony Vargas
Legend
I've come to it late.
That's a positive attitude, one that was in short supply when 4e was the current ed.
My feeling is that they're just different games, with different strategies. They give you different tools as player or DM, its all in what you do with them.
My players know that I'm relatively sentimental, and also that I use a high proportion of undead/demon-type opponents compared to human opponents.
They act on this information in PC build (eg building PCs who will be effective against supernatural threats) and sometimes in resolution (eg they know that I'm unlikely to have NPCs who foreswear violence etc to turn on the PCs and break their oaths).
I don't regard this as any sort of improper "gaming" of the GM. It's just the emergence of a group synergy/preference!
Seeing as my standard has been referred to, I thought I would say something more about it. I don't know that the following remarks are apropos of anything in particular, but this thread is well past 1000 posts so I don't think I'm obliged to stay strictly on-topic.
One thing is this: another current thread has given me the impression that some people don't want more dramatic roleplaying. They prefer (what they describe as) more "realistic"/"immersive" roleplaying, which (I would say) involves less drama and more haggling over the price of goods, describing how camps are pitched and dismantled, establishing precise details as to the presence and character of architectural features, etc.
A second thing is that some RPGers seem to envisage the "story" or the "plot" as something to be presented by the GM to the players - so that the drama is provided by that (often pre-established) story/plot. [MENTION=6801228]Chaosmancer[/MENTION]'s idea of the players not knowing what happens next also seems to be an example of something like this - it is the GM who decides what happens next, and for the players the drama consists in that revelation. That sort of approach isn't necessarily going to want a method of the sort I personally like - you can often see this thought reflected in comments like "It's bad adventure design to allow the <whatever> to be gated behind a die roll". That way of thinking about scenario design and adjudication is pretty much the antithesis of what I advocated as a means to achieve "better and more dramatic roleplaying".
A third thing is something that I think of in terms of rationalism vs existentialism (others may not use these particular categories!). The rationalist sees a choice situation as a situation of calculation or optimisation - what ought I to do here to maximise my expected return? Whereas the existentialist sees a choice situation as an imposition of the will upon the world - to paraphrase/butcher Merleau-Ponty (because I can't remember the quote properly), the choice answers a call from a future that the choosing person helps to create through his/her choice. I tend to prefer RPGs that favour, or at least support, an existentialist rather than rationalist approach by the player - this can be a function of resolution mechanics but also of non-mechanical adjudication techniques (such as "fail forward", or permitting success on a check to significantly change the shared fiction which, following Luke Crane in Burning Wheel, I tend to call "intent and task"). Conversely, classic "skilled play" and also many of the presentations in this thread of "goal and approach" are in what I've called the rationalist camp. For those who incline that way, the particular approach to resolution that I advocate is probably less appealing than it is to me.
Oofta
Legend
I would just say that for the whole "know what happens next" vs "not knowing" ... huh? I've never had a DM tell me exactly what was going to happen on every single failure. I mean sometimes it's obvious, if you fail your dexterity check to walk the tightrope you fall. But other times? Is my PC a psychic fortune teller?
In other words, I don't see how it plays in to the immersion and loose simulation of the games I play. I give my players the information I think their PCs would have, nothing more, nothing less. It may be obvious (or detectable) that the chandelier may not support your weight* or it may just look like your standard, ordinary chandelier. If it's not reasonable for the PC to know that the lighting fixture isn't able to support their weight, I'm not going to tell them.
*How does failed check affect the structural integrity of a chandelier?
I know it's just an example, but if my PC swings from it, I don't see how gracefully I swing from it affects anything. Anyway, minor point on an example.
In other words, I don't see how it plays in to the immersion and loose simulation of the games I play. I give my players the information I think their PCs would have, nothing more, nothing less. It may be obvious (or detectable) that the chandelier may not support your weight* or it may just look like your standard, ordinary chandelier. If it's not reasonable for the PC to know that the lighting fixture isn't able to support their weight, I'm not going to tell them.
*How does failed check affect the structural integrity of a chandelier?
I know it's just an example, but if my PC swings from it, I don't see how gracefully I swing from it affects anything. Anyway, minor point on an example.Similar Threads
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