[Ari Marmell's blog] To House Rule or Not to House Rule

[Henry]

Knowledge of a media may prevent you from enjoying the lowest common denominator of that media, but what it grants you is the ability to appreciate things which are better.

True, but by the same token it almost emotes pity from me when I see a doctor who can't enjoy House, MD or E.R., or a Nascar Driver who can't enjoy a Speed Racer cartoon without critiquing them.

 

[Rechan]

True, but by the same token it almost emotes pity from me when I see a doctor who can't enjoy House, MD or E.R., or a Nascar Driver who can't enjoy a Speed Racer cartoon without critiquing them.

IME, usually it's the professional who just doesn't want to pursue fiction relating to their field. I know an ME who just doesn't enjoy forensic fiction because it feels too much like work.

 

[Doug McCrae]

But you are missing the point. Whether you want to call the mechanics "magical" or not 4E is still a type of supernatural superhero world, a very very specific artificial genre which doesn't really relate to anything outside of the RPG / MMORPG / comic book subculture. Battleminds and Runepriests and paragon class powers don't show up in History, mythology, literature or cinema that I'm aware of. I don't see any Teiflings in Kirosawa Samurai flicks or in the Arabian knights or Robert E Howard or Jack Vance or the Icelandic Sagas or the Ring of the Nibelungenleid.

I don't see any deadly Jello cubes, beholders or rust monsters in Kurosawa, to be fair.

Which parts of 4e are from comic books? Note that the shambling mound and the soulknife, both pre-4e, are from Marvel comics. A very small portion of 4e is mmorpg inspired - role names, disenchantable magic items, phased monster fights, possibly the stickier tanks. In some very important respects - no need for a dedicated healer, less Xmas tree - 4e is the least mmorpg-y version of D&D. Tieflings are in Conan though they aren't called that. A battlemind is just a guy with both psionic and physical abilities, and those have been in D&D since forever. The runepriest has a somewhat Norse flavour.

D&D has always been its own genre. The magic system is useless if you want the magic of Elric or Earthsea or that of any mythology. If you want non-Vancian, then you have to do it yourself. Nothing in literature or myth resembles the classic D&D mega-dungeon. No stories have the sheer quantity and variety of monsters, weirdness and magic that the typical D&D adventure possesses. D&D is the game where a pre-Roman Celtic druid, a paladin of Charlemagne, Cugel the Clever and Caine from Kung Fu team up to fight Man-Thing from Marvel comics, Harryhausen skeletons, Tolkien's orcs and something from an episode of Space:1999. Most fiction has a single protagonist, often with one or more sidekicks, not the D&D party of half-a-dozen or so roughly equal protagonists. Gray Mouser and Fafrhd, the Argonauts and the Fellowship of the Ring are rare exceptions. Because of the risk of PC death by RAW, D&D isn't very good at simulating the epic quest style of fiction. It's more suited to short sword & sorcery type stuff. Gold for xp in 1e is tied to the representation of Conan and Cugel, not LotR or Elric.

Possibly the weirdest thing about D&D is the level track. At low levels, PCs die very easily, in fact far more frequently than any fictional protagonist. At high levels, D&D is a crazy monster-beset magic carpet ride of resurrection and teleportation. Both extremes are very rare in fiction and folklore. The progression itself is unique, as far as I am aware.

 

[BryonD]

Honestly, I believe a DM should be doing that because that's what the player wants to play. It doesn't matter if it comes from a core or non core or whatever - if the DM's campaign is so inflexible that he won't make room for what a player wants, then I'd have to make a value judgment about that DM. It's the players' campaign too.

If the DM sucks, then allowing or disallowing stuff makes no difference.
If the DM rocks and the player just can't think of anything that actually fits within the framework of the campaign, then I'd have to make a value judgment about that player.

If this is an impasse then the player and DM should not be in the same group.

Personally, I have no interest whatsoever in playing in an anything goes campaign. A one shot, sure. But I want some suggestion of a cohesive story and setting. Not everyone plays that way. Cool. But suggesting that wanting to play that way is a sign of inflexibility is pretty absurd.

No. Wolverine is not allowed in my Game of Thrones campaign. Nor is your Frost Giant Warlock.

 

[Steel_Wind]

Honestly, I believe a DM should be doing that because that's what the player wants to play. It doesn't matter if it comes from a core or non core or whatever - if the DM's campaign is so inflexible that he won't make room for what a player wants, then I'd have to make a value judgment about that DM. It's the players' campaign too.

Perhaps. And if the campaign was just running a bunch of home-brewed series of adventures, I would agree with you.

But does your answer change if the GM wants to drop $250 bucks on Rise of the Runelords, with all its associated bells and whistles? And you, as a player, propose to use Book of Nine Swords, Tome of Magic, Spell Compendium and the Magic Item Compendium, while some other players then ask to play classes and races out of all of the Complete and Races of Series?

Because I assure you, in those circumstances, what you propose to do will break the published adventures into a million pieces. Your uber-powered characters will blow through the Rise of the Runelords, as written. The published Adventure Path just breaks under the power creep.

The only way that doesn't happen is if the GM wants to then put a lot of work into beefing up and redesigning the set-piece encounters across all six volumes of RotRL. (And then ncompensate for addtional XP earned in beefed up encounters, and so on and so forth, with a chain reaction of consequences across six volumes of adventures...)

As it stands, there is already a LOT of work involved in running and creating other bridge and side material for use during the play of an Adventure Path. Your proposal as a player greatly adds to the GM's burden of running that AP. So much so that I, as a GM, would just outright veto it.

So the "my game too" argument, while true, doesn't really capture the practical problems that such desires really cause. It's not just a matter of "taste, touch and feel".

It's not just a matter of fluff; it's stone cold crunch we're talking about here.

You can't hand wave this stuff away; it matters.

 

[BryonD]

True, but by the same token it almost emotes pity from me when I see a doctor who can't enjoy House, MD or E.R., or a Nascar Driver who can't enjoy a Speed Racer cartoon without critiquing them.

Have either of these ever actually happened to you?

I have a degree in Chemical Engineering and a background that includes analytical lab work. My wife has a great deal of lab experience ranging from analyst to manager.

We both really enjoy NCIS and think Abby is a great character. In reality it would take teams of people days or even weeks to do things she does simultaneously in hours or less. Its absurd. It is also great fun.

But if anything remotely close to that happened in a gritty supposedly realistic crime movie were to occur, it would probably detract from my enjoyment. The context is very important.

Extrapolating to experiences I don't actually have, I'd think that a skilled doctor may find some degree of issue with ER, but only to a small extent. House, on the other hand, uses a lot of medical facade, but in the end is a fictional super sleuth (Sherlock Holmes) in a hospital. I'd bet the ability to completely ignore the hand waving is just as easy for the doctor watching House as me watching NCIS. Same for a skilled driver watching Speed Racer.

Context is everything.

 

[Steel_Wind]

Have either of these ever actually happened to you?

Yes, actually. As a lawyer, I can't stand most legal dramas on TV as a consequence. Some of them are ok. Glenn Close's Damages, for example, comes to mind as one of the best ( but then it reminds me of why I got out of practice in a big firm in the first place .)

But in the main, they drive me nuts. It's distracting and I have difficulty swallowing the premise, when the premise makes little sense. My wife feels the same way about medical dramas -- for the same reason.

A few years back when I was hip deep on the technical side of making computing games, I was driven to distraction while trying to play them. The game is trying to do something dramatic and immersive, and I'm distracted by their polycounts, lighting engine effects and wanting to pause the game to look at their textures.

It's just the way it is.

If you listened to Ronald D. Moore's podcasts concerning Battlestar Galactica, he made it very clear that his technical knowledge and involvement in the business of "one hour drama" gets in the way of his enjoyment of TV. A thorough knowledge of sets, budgets and what the constraints of the budget and production flow place upon a one hour drama script drives knowledgeable people to distraction too. They usually know what's going to happen next -- because they know what a show can and can't afford to do.

As a rule, when it comes to enjoying packaged entertainment, ignorance is bliss.

 

[xechnao]

A discussion of this blog post goes on on therpgsite. I posted there, I copy-paste here -please pardon the fact but it saves up time.

"
The "problem" ["problem" here is intended as the game's challenge(s) -while clear in context of the original thread I cant copy paste the whole original discussion over here] can be anything of interest. It does not have to be an encounter. But it should exist and it should be interesting. This means that players should have the possibility of a number of distinctly different but desirable game outcomes -which will be based on their individual choices and thus "personalized".
So, what I am saying is that the game's design goal should be about guiding GMs to be creating interesting problems. This can happen by design by creating clear limits and rewards to player characters for the GM to handle. Why for the GM? Simply because players are not meant to handle their own limits or rewards while both limits and rewards have to work in tandem with each other if they are to work at all for the game to take place.

This on contrast to Wotc which seems to think that it is not about GMs but about players. It tries to offer the "problem" directly to players by focusing its design goals on player character building. Why? IMO because this way it is easier to commercially succeed towards selling product as a tabletop rpg. So after a certain point 3.x's design came at odds with extensive GMing in a smooth way. In 4e they created a game where they simplified the scope of the game to a board tactical game so that the GM does only have to play out the strictly similar encounter monster pawns and free-form what happens in between. They sort of made a game that does neither help nor creates difficulties for a GM due to the game's own design. While it wants to sell to roleplayers, I am not sure 4e, at its design level, wants to be a roleplaying game. It just wants to be an "encounter" game and offer inspiring fluff for GMs to want to GMer by their freeform capabilities.
"

 

[Rechan]

It's not just a matter of fluff; it's stone cold crunch we're talking about here.

You can't hand wave this stuff away; it matters.

You are talking about crunch, maybe. But that is not what I am talking about, and crunch is unrelated to what I was responding to. In fact, I said this in the paragraph right after the one you quoted:

The caveat here... Or if he thinks it's broken or will disrupt his game, by all means.

Edit: Adjusted to be less... emphatic.

As a side note, I think that the ToM classes are mechanically weak compared to other classes. If later books had power creep, then the power tide receded and left barren sand in ToM's case. Which is a shame, because I wanted to marry the Binder and have its children. The same with the Archivist.

 

[Mouseferatu]

Deleted.