Narrative Space Options for non-spellcasters

[Manbearcat]

I must admit this applies to me. People say I am a good GM, and I feel my campaign-building skills are also on par. I am also good at improvising and adjusting. But when I try and make adventures from scratch, they tend to be over-complex and byzantine to a degree that makes them less than fun. So I use a lot of canned adventures.

<snip>

(In writing that sentence I found I lacked an English translation of the word "förebygga" - which is Swedish for a proactive prevention of a problem that is as yet only a potentiality, not yet a concrete issue. The lexicon could not help me. I find it worrisome that English does not have a word for this, and perhaps it is a part of the reason Scandinavia is so politically stable - we like to "förebygga" things. Put that way, I think "preventive measures" or even just "measures" could be an ideomatic translation. I rewrote the above sentence that way from an earlier unwieldier form.)

The word you're looking for is indeed preemptive.

And you certainly don't need to apologize. It wasn't a condemnation, merely an observation and a hypothesis.

With respect to using canned content versus improving or writing your own, keeping it simple and self-editing is easily the most difficult part of content creation. I would assume that using canned content aids most people in that endeavor and helps them focus their creative energies (and their players by-proxy) on specific, focused conflict.

Whatever gets the job done!

 

[pemerton]

I also get the impression from my players that those who pick martial classes don't want these kinds of tools. They are satisfied to be reactive rather than proactive.

If you include narrative options and trickery on the non-casters then the sort of people who normally pick casters add them to their mix. if you include casters like the Elementalist Sorceror then the sort of people who normally stick exclusively to fighters add them to their mix.

I think this is an interesting question. Do certain fantasy archetypes have more or less appeal to particular gamer personalities? My gut instinct is to agree with Neonchameleon, but not on the basis of any serious research or evidence!

The teleport spell is the benchmark for high-level magical transportation. If it's used to take the party to far-off places in search of adventure, then back home, there's probably no issue. If the player is trying to use tactically to surprise people in combat, or trying to teleport to secure or secret areas, it can conceivably become a problem.

Going back to and from base via teleport is a big issue in a system where PCs are balanced on a "limited abilities per day" model - because the casters can teleport home and rest when they run out of juice.

When my group used to play Rolemaster we eventually adjusted the balance of martial PCs and casters so that a martial PC in action was about the equivalent of a caster PC going nova. Anything short of this still left too much advantage to the casters, given there ability to control the refresh rate. Teleporting to base only amplifies this effect.

I'm curious and still a little unclear on what exactly falls into the category of "narrative" abilities and what doesn't... Would skills be considered tools to change the narrative?

In my understanding, skills allow a player to participant in the DMs narrative, but not to shape the narrative themselves.

This is a bit of a repost from another thread (on Free Will and Story). It talks about things other than skills, but also a bout skills:

I want to split the notion of narrative into two components: situation; and plot.

Very roughly, by "situation" I mean "the obstacle/challenge/encounter/scene that confronts the PCs"; by "plot" I mean the sequence of events that occurs over the course of play.

Some elements of D&D suggest that the GM has (or should have) strong control over plot - especially a lot of 2nd ed advice and adventures, which encourage the GM to exercise control over "the story" - but others don't (eg there is a fairly strong sandbox tradition in D&D play, and also strong elements of 4e advice that push against GM control of plot). To the extent that players of casters have more authority over plot than (say) those of fighters - for instance, they can more easily bring about results via action resolution (say, save-or-die; or buffing other PCs) - then that just seems like an issue of imablance of effectiveness. Whether this is good or bad depends, I guess, on how important the balance of effectiveness is. 4e, at least as I see it, tries to deal with this by giving players of fighters more meta-abilities (eg enc and daily powers).

With situation, it's a bit different, in so far as different editions take quite different by seemingly deliberate approaches. 4e tends to assume a high degree of GM situational authority - players can write quests, for instance, but it is the GM who gets to frame the obstacles in the way of the PCs. And 4e drops many of the notorious rules elements (eg reliable long-range teleportation) that tend to undermine GM authority over the framing of situations. Whereas Classic D&D, with the dungeon crawl, tends to be built on the assumption that the GM will author "possible" situations, but the players will choose which ones their PCs confront. (Gygax, in the final section of his PHB, recommends the decision about which "situation" to confront - ie scouting out the dungeon to find a suitable target - as a reasonable goal for a session in of itself.)

Casters certainly have better capabilities at exercising situational authority in classic D&D - movement spells, scrying spells (to help inform choices), etc. And this seems to be deliberate. It's not just a balance issue, but seems to be part of what playing a caster gets you that playing a fighter doesn't. Changing the game to make casters more like fighters in this respect (which 4e does) is a fairly big thing. Changing the game to make fighters more like (traditional) casters in this respect would be an even bigger thing, I think.

One of the bigger issues, for me, about 3E-style D&D - which includes skills - is that with many abilities the designers seem to equivocate between action resolution abilities, which give control over plot ("OK, now my guy does this thing, and these consequences for the other pariticpants in the situation ensue."); and scene-framing abilities, which give control over situation ("OK, GM, you've framed us into an illusion-filled room, but not my guy casts True Seeing and you have to reframe us as being in a plainly perceptible room.) Divination spells are particularly obvious instances of this, but so is the Diplomacy skill (reframes from social conflict to NPCs as non-obstacles), the Perception skill (use much like True Seeing above), and other abilities too. Teleport is another instance too - it looks like it could be action resolution (say in a game like MHRP, which permits the challenge to be framed as one involving vast galactic distances) but in D&D, which really has no action resolution mechanics for dealing with conflicts beyond skirmish-level ranges, it defaults to scene-reframing.

It's not necessarily a bad thing to have abilities that straddle action resolution and scene-reframing, but it's seem a mistake to include them just by accident.

And on a lighter note:

IYes, my players are the kind that wouldn't use nature's ally spells until I ruled that the summoned animals were not real, live animals but spirit animals summoned from some otherworldly place, and never hurt at all by being summoned (and killed).

In a RM game that I ran the player of the summoner used to worry that he was summoning (and therefore killing) giant eagles at such a rate that he was the biggest single factor contributing to the extinction of the species!

 

[Starfox]

What other class has the basic flavor of the fighter, but with greater narrative breadth? You've got an argument that the 4th Edition Warlord fits the bill.

I agree with most of your reasoning, but not with that the warlord has much in the way of narrative control - all warlord abilities are combat abilities. Nor would a version of the warlord in any other edition necessarily have more out-of-combat options. Heals, buffs, removing negative effects from allies, tactical positioning and action surges - all say "combat" to me. The warlord's out-of combat options are about as wide as the fighter's, possibly with a little additional skills. I like the warlord, but not because of it's narrative options.

Of course, this only strengthens your original point.

 

[Ahnehnois]

3.x? Scribe Scroll at 1, CWI 3rd, CW 5th? I've never, ever heard of a spell-starved Generalist Wizard in 3.x.

How people handle magic item creation is apparently a big point of difference between groups. I never saw that players were willing to blow feats on item creation (trading out Scribe Scroll is a given), and I find that XP costs (back when I used XP) are anathema to players. This being a game about adventure, PCs also tend not to have a ton of downtime in my games (though there are exceptions). Also, item-based spells are useless if CL or DC matter at all.

But I have heard this narrative of omnivalent item-enabled casters dominating the game, and it does make me wonder what is going on there. Certainly, 3.X's item creation rules need a major overhaul regardless.

I've GMed 6 Wizard players ranging from average system mastery to Magic The Gathering savant level of system mastery. By 5th level, they were spell-factories and dominated all theaters of conflict resolution. Mind you, none of these guys were/are gross, power-gaming jerks (most of them were swell enough folks). They were just playing RaW, core material...not god-awful abominations.

I've DMed...I don't remember how many wizards. Several, but not a ton. They invariably struggle to keep up with other PCs. Playing a wizard is more of a fun experiment than a quest for world domination. I find the same thing with NPC wizards; they tend to be less of a challenge then their level would suggest and running characters with spellbooks and memorized spells sucks. It's very hard to memorize optimal spells, and in 3.5 math, most saving throws are made. The powerful effects are there in the rules, but getting results in-game is pretty hard. Again, for me it's two birds in a bush.

In the same time I GMed a few Clerics, Druids and mundane, martial characters. The 3e Druid player was probably worse.

I've had a ton of druids, because my games tend to be outdoors, perhaps. Useful, but never dominant.

Then again, my most recent experience was having an 11th level NPC druid sneak attack a party of 3 10th level PCs and one fairly weak NPC. Your PCs were a ranger, a monk, and a monstrous character with blink dog abilities and a couple levels of rogue (i.e. no real casters). I definitely optimized that druid and unleashed the rulebook on them, and the PCs totally owned him. None of his offensive spells could pierce their defenses, his animal companion was useless, and his wild shape forms did him no good. I find that happens frequently with casters; tons of options, but most of them don't work, and option paralysis sets in.

However, as I've read aplenty, this all may be because I'm a bad GM and/or my players are (were) entitled.

I'm not going to say that, but I will say that the rules themselves don't dictate those outcomes. There's room for revision in the rules, but I don't think that eliminating the god-wizard or trying to create a god-fighter is needed.

Going back to and from base via teleport is a big issue in a system where PCs are balanced on a "limited abilities per day" model - because the casters can teleport home and rest when they run out of juice.

When my group used to play Rolemaster we eventually adjusted the balance of martial PCs and casters so that a martial PC in action was about the equivalent of a caster PC going nova. Anything short of this still left too much advantage to the casters, given there ability to control the refresh rate. Teleporting to base only amplifies this effect.

I've never believed that limiting abilities "per day" had much of an effect on balance. As Trailblazer states, it's really "per rest". So yes, I generally believe that casters will nova, and need to be balanced based on that expectation in the model we have. Whether you can teleport or not (though moreso with Teleport), players are generally quick to rest.

Difference is, if anything I've modified the rules to encourage that, as spell points and standard spell DCs (i.e. all spells are one DC instead of lower-level spells being garbage) make it easier. I want my casters to A) use their best abilities frequently and have some chance of them working, and B) run out of spells regularly. To me that's the best way to utilize the mechanical assets in the game to create an interesting and dynamic play experience.

In the broader context of my games, starting from RAW and gradually moving to widespread houserules, I've yet to see the casters take over the narrative.

 

[Imaro]

You'd have to hammer it into shape with a modicum of specificity, of course, and take into consideration the various interactions with subsystems and general system assumptions. You'd also have to figure out the how the resources are scheduled/rationed (eg 1/day or what). It was just a quick and dirty example of the general principle.

However, way more powerful than any spell? Ghost Sound? Silent Image? The combo of the the two? Charm Person? Spider Climb? Invisibility? Levitation? Any number of these are extraordinarily functional in Exploration encounters where you need to bypass a manned obstacle without conflict. None of these even touch on the ridiculous potency of Sleep, Glitterdust, Empowered Ray of Enfeeblement, Grease as these are of primary use in combat resolution and all encounter-enders of the SoS variety at low level (which isn't relevant to bypassing obstacles, of course...well its relevant to bypassing sentient obstacles).

My point was that without the checks and balances of a spell such as saving throws, picking against the unknown, etc... yes it is more powerful than even the spells you listed, making an obstacle a "non-obstacle" is very powerful without any type of restrictions.

Magic gives an extraordinary amount of fiat. Allowing players to contrive the narrative around their spell is more on the technique level than the system level. I routinely let my players do it. They have my trust. Just as I have theirs.

It's not just about trust, it's about system too. A fire spell has certain rules that go along with it, as does charm, sleep etc. that all put limitations and specified effects to constrain the narrative. Remove an obstacle is a pretty broad power, couple that with the fact that you can then mutate the fiction in any way you want to account for it... what spell allows such a thing? but you've addressed this up top and my acceptance or non-acceptance of it would depend heavily upon it's implementation.

Sure, not all players have the practice in this so they "can't be trusted" (yet). And some might try to push the game in a direction that requires some reining in or table/GM veto. However, the gate swings both ways here. There are untrustworthy GMs, out of practice (or unpracticed) GMs the same as players. I don't know why we should endorse "rulings not rules" design ethos (that implicitly trust the GM) while forbidding player authorial control options (which implicitly distrusts players) when there are plenty of each group lacking the chops and plenty possessing them. I would likely trust most people on this board with authorial control options.

Well just as a piece of anecdotal data, one of the problems I and the other DM in our group have when giving over this type of authorial control is that the setting can often loose mood, consistency and tone. In fact you really get to see how each individual player is picturing the story, setting, etc in their head... and of course it's only natural that when they have authorial control this creeps into it. If I as DM am running a game and describing it with gritty realistic fluff... but then Bob takes over authorial control, and suddenly we are in a land of giant Buster Swords with a japanimation feel... then John uses his narrative control to impose a fairy-talesque world... well (IMO) the consistency and importance of the fluff looses something. I don't think this is about trust or anything like that since it's perfectly ok for individual players to picture in their head the gameworld as they see it... however I do think there needs to be a baseline commonality and that it should start with the DM since ultimately he is responsible for running the game in the imagined setting.

 

[Doug McCrae]

baseline commonality

This is particularly an issue with D&D, because there isn't any. D&D doesn't have a genre other than 'fantasy', which is extremely broad. I'm currently co-GMing a Star Wars game and it's much easier to establish a baseline from the movies, as everyone has seen them, though it does get a little trickier when you get into the Expanded Universe.

A lot of roleplaying games are based on a tighter genre than D&D is. For example superhero games, Call of Cthulhu, Pendragon, James Bond 007, or Feng Shui.

 

[Manbearcat]

Well just as a piece of anecdotal data, one of the problems I and the other DM in our group have when giving over this type of authorial control is that the setting can often loose mood, consistency and tone. In fact you really get to see how each individual player is picturing the story, setting, etc in their head... and of course it's only natural that when they have authorial control this creeps into it. If I as DM am running a game and describing it with gritty realistic fluff... but then Bob takes over authorial control, and suddenly we are in a land of giant Buster Swords with a japanimation feel... then John uses his narrative control to impose a fairy-talesque world... well (IMO) the consistency and importance of the fluff looses something. I don't think this is about trust or anything like that since it's perfectly ok for individual players to picture in their head the gameworld as they see it... however I do think there needs to be a baseline commonality and that it should start with the DM since ultimately he is responsible for running the game in the imagined setting.

Framed this way (rather than what I thought you had intended with trust), I understood your concerns. Coherency of genre conceits (mood, tone, tech level, etc) is huge to me as well. Much of this just falls into social contract and calibration. If Bob is breaking out the Japanime in a game that is meant to be Spaghetti Western, then I probably didn't brief Bob well enough, he's utterly unaware, or he's being belligerent. I've had all 3 of these scenarios before; its the primary reason why my calibration with my players is extremely thorough and my player-base has contracted to a few great players and a few guest appearances.

 

[Starfox]

The more we talk about this, the more I feel the term "narrative space" is misleading, and the more I lean into the "three pillars" model - Combat, Exploration, Social. What we call narrative abilities are abilities that fall under the last two pillars. The goal seems to be to give all character some level of competence in each pillar, to avoid bored players reading their mail at the table. Of course not everyone need to be as good in each pillar, not should different characters deal with each pillar in the same way - a wizard's exploration is vastly different from a fighter's. By the same token, a front-line fighter a, a buffer, an "autoturret" archer, and a controller mage all contribute to combat, but if in different ways. This is as it should be. But to have a character lack almost all competence in a certain pillar is not good.

About what pillars there should be, I find the above three work for me. Investigation is a mix of exploration (physical examination) and social (witnesses & rumors). Aerial combat is still combat. Travel is a variant of exploration. Castle-building is a part of social. So it is with most adventure activities - they are either a part of one of the pillars, or a mix of them. The three pillars are arbitrarily chosen, but they work for me.

The best scenes are those with a mix of the pillars - someone has to open the secret exit, someone else convince the princess to come with you, while others keep the castle guards at bay (preferably without killing any). That way the scene is sure to engage everyone, but not all scenes can be this complex.

This is what I've gotten out of the discussion here so far (as well as some concrete ideas on social and exploration options).

 

[Alzrius]

What part of "the style matters" didn't get across? What other class has the basic flavor of the fighter, but with greater narrative breadth? You've got an argument that the 4th Edition Warlord fits the bill, but if you don't like 4e for other reasons, you're pretty stuck for options, especially in the core.

First of all, exercise some moderation of your tone, please. Saying "what part of X didn't get across" comes across as a very aggressive response. Don't make me report you.

The problem with this statement is that it moves the goalposts - we're talking about the issue of narrative areas of the game where the fighter has relevant options for directing/affecting the flow of the narrative. The question of the "style" of those options - which seems to be the in-game contextualization of how they're exercising those options (e.g. "it's magic" versus "it's non-magical inspiration," when both have the same game results) - is a separate (though related) consideration.

As such, as [MENTION=2303]Starfox[/MENTION] very cogently pointed out, the issue with "style" is a separate consideration. The warlord has a different style than the fighter, but that doesn't broaden where they have narrative options; they're still all combat all the time. They just have a slightly different set of options for the same narrative.

Basically, you're saying a player needs to choose class based primarily upon narrative breadth, rather than upon flavor or style. I'm suggesting that's pretty much a non-starter as a suggestion.

For the purposes of this thread, I'm saying that if you're unhappy with the narrow breadth of narrative options available to a fighter, then you shouldn't play a fighter. The style of the class is a secondary concern, in this instance - if you really want to be a character that's focused on exploration, then a fighter isn't going to suit that theme very much, even if you don't like that the more-suitable druid class is so heavily slanted towards "priest of nature."

Just to hammer home the point - rangers and bards are, flavor-wise, not much like fighters. No heavy armor for either. Music-magic for one, treehugging for the other. These are not very fighter-like.

That's the point - they're not fighter-like; they have greater breadth of narrative options, at the (ostensible) cost of some combat mastery.

Which is stepping outside the scope of the discussion as set in the OP.

So are questions of style, which is why (as I mentioned above) the OP gently rebuked you for citing the warlord as an example of a solution to this particular issue.

But, I'll say again - while some folks may like that "wake me up when my particular situation comes up" gaming, I've seen far more complaints that folks without narrative breadth are bored, than I've seen complaints that the game doesn't provide them enough time to nap or check their e-mail. Anecdotal, sure, but that's what I have to go with.

You've moved the goalposts back to the original complaint, here. Warlords will be just as bored in that particular regard as fighters, despite their stylistic differences.

 

[N'raac]

Going back to and from base via teleport is a big issue in a system where PCs are balanced on a "limited abilities per day" model - because the casters can teleport home and rest when they run out of juice.

I hear this a lot. It carries a lot of implications that, to me, make it a less than perfect option. First, it assumes there is never any urgency to getting the job done and we can have a single encounter, then teleport home until tomorrow no deadline, no "the hostages die at Noon", no "the stars will be right for the ritual in two days". Second, it assumes that the enemy does nothing during our absence (related a bit to the first, but not deadline-centric). They don't take the hint that someone keeps coming in once a day and bolster their defenses, lay traps, gear up to go nova themselves, etc. Third, this ties up two L5 spell slots (one for there and one for back again), so it's eating up a resource. At L9 a very significant resource, less so by L13 or so.

The spell itself is not unlimited. Within 900+ miles, you should be able to have a location at least "studied carefully", but "very familiar/you feel at home" seems less likely, depending how wide ranging the game. You can "study carefully) your point of return, but that takes an hour of study. So do you stop after going nova to study this place or an hour, or restart out at the beginning so there's a landing point for you to be ambushed at? Teleporting home gives you a 2% chance of missing by 1 to 100% of your distance (perhaps in another danger zone, after you nova'd out all your spells) and a 1% chance at ending up off base, but probably at another Inn so no big deal. Studied carefully gives you a 3% chance of missing, 2% of a similar area (what's similar to that dungeon you were headed back to?) and a 1% mishap possibility with a decent chance of ending up somewhere you didn't want to be as well. Those numbers will come up sooner or later, especially when you Teleport twice a day.

You teleport yourself plus 1 person per 3 levels. That's 4 size M creatures at L9, 5 at L12, 6 at L15. How many in your party? Don't forget the cohorts, animal companions, mounts, familiars, etc. If the adventure includes guiding someone else through, or rescuing prisoners, that changes the dynamics quite a bit. What about a "bring this traitor(s) to me alive to face the King's Justice" mission? Or does the wizard take off without his buddies, so we have some party members stuck here in the danger zone?

Why don't NPC's use similar tactics? Dont they have the same access to divination magic that PC casters use to render investigation irrelevant, the same scrying spells to "study carefully" the location the PC's use as their safe haven and the same teleportation magics to bring in their own ambush team when the PC's are resting? Why don't their enemies use similar tactics to go nova, flee untracably and return at their leisure?

How people handle magic item creation is apparently a big point of difference between groups. I never saw that players were willing to blow feats on item creation (trading out Scribe Scroll is a given), and I find that XP costs (back when I used XP) are anathema to players. This being a game about adventure, PCs also tend not to have a ton of downtime in my games (though there are exceptions). Also, item-based spells are useless if CL or DC matter at all.

The importance of these rules also depends on the availability of puchased magic. Item creation makes it cheaper at the cost of xp and feats, but 3e commoditized magic to a significant degree, so item availability is pretty easy in many games.

I've DMed...I don't remember how many wizards. Several, but not a ton. They invariably struggle to keep up with other PCs. Playing a wizard is more of a fun experiment than a quest for world domination. I find the same thing with NPC wizards; they tend to be less of a challenge then their level would suggest and running characters with spellbooks and memorized spells sucks. It's very hard to memorize optimal spells, and in 3.5 math, most saving throws are made. The powerful effects are there in the rules, but getting results in-game is pretty hard. Again, for me it's two birds in a bush.

I've had a ton of druids, because my games tend to be outdoors, perhaps. Useful, but never dominant.

Then again, my most recent experience was having an 11th level NPC druid sneak attack a party of 3 10th level PCs and one fairly weak NPC. Your PCs were a ranger, a monk, and a monstrous character with blink dog abilities and a couple levels of rogue (i.e. no real casters). I definitely optimized that druid and unleashed the rulebook on them, and the PCs totally owned him. None of his offensive spells could pierce their defenses, his animal companion was useless, and his wild shape forms did him no good. I find that happens frequently with casters; tons of options, but most of them don't work, and option paralysis sets in.

The advantage of teammates is pretty significant. That solo wizard doesn't have a fighter and a rogue running interference for him, so he needs to devote a good portion of spell selection to keeping away from the enemy and allow him to cast his spells. Really, what arcane caster solo needs any 4th level spells other than Dimension Door? Why dont we see a party of four clerics, or four wizards? Because, I suggest, the other classes also bring benefits to the table, and the team.