Fighters vs. Spellcasters (a case for fighters.)

[pemerton]

You inevitably don't think "system matters" so much if your answer to most issues is "GM hammers/forces game/story into shape"

The continuing strong market preference for 3E/PF shows us something important, I think, about general tastes in the current RPing market:

(1) stat + skill as the essence of PC build retains a high degree of popularity, it seems at least in part because of its apparent mapping to both the nature and the nurture aspects of a given character's genesis;

(2) "customisation" of characters is as important as an element of colour as it is in relation to action resolution; perhaps even moreso;

(3) hit point combat resolution retains a high degree of popularity over death spiral combat, but with rocket tag magic seen as a type of permissible override provided its on some sort of leash;

(4) GM force retains a high degree of popularity over metagame mechanics and overt social contract around genre, scene-framing etc, as a way of making the game hum along.​

(1) and (2) also seem connected to "immersion" as a goal of play, which retains importance. (4) also seems related to this, and among other things also seems to act as a brake on the potentially anti-immersive consequences of (3).

At least, that's my take. The Forge idea, that we could make (4) redundant by inventing new systems that would hum along on their own if only everyone did what the system asked them to do, seems to have failed.

 

[Manbearcat]

At least, that's my take. The Forge idea, that we could make (4) redundant by inventing new systems that would hum along on their own if only everyone did what the system asked them to do, seems to have failed.

Excellent, cogent, and very relevant post that I cannot xp. Agree completely. I would be very interested in seeing the various parties in the thread comment on it as its extremely accessible (due to its brevity and clarity). I think those thoughts would be revealing as there isn't much to confuse here.

I'm assuming when you say "seems to have failed", you're referring to "failed at" appealing to something intrinsic to the majority RPG culture, thus capturing little more than a minority market share.

 

[TwoSix]

I'm assuming when you say "seems to have failed", you're referring to "failed at" appealing to something intrinsic to the majority RPG culture, thus capturing little more than a minority market share.

Certainly the strongly worded, visceral reactions by several of the posters on this very thread point towards the strong attachment many players have to the DM-force model, to the point where they can't imagine a style of play that would constitute "role-playing" where DM-force was not being used.

I think the fairly casual nature of most of the D&D fanbase also plays a role. Among the 10 players that constitute my two play groups, only 2 have any exposure to RPGs outside of D&D and retroclones thereof. Additionally, I would say at least 5 of my players are there primarily for social reasons, and not so much for love of the game. I would say the single most important component for a successful player-empowered game is "invested players." When the bulk of the group is invested in the game, the narrative, and their characters, that's when you get the necessary alchemy to make a narrative focused game really sing. With players who along for the ride, hooking them in with mechanical minutiae and a good amount of DM-force as lubricant is often necessary to keep the game going at all.

 

[pemerton]

I'm assuming when you say "seems to have failed", you're referring to "failed at" appealing to something intrinsic to the majority RPG culture, thus capturing little more than a minority market share.

Yes. [MENTION=6688937]Ratskinner[/MENTION] has commented on this too.

 

[pemerton]

I would say the single most important component for a successful player-empowered game is "invested players." When the bulk of the group is invested in the game, the narrative, and their characters, that's when you get the necessary alchemy to make a narrative focused game really sing. With players who along for the ride, hooking them in with mechanical minutiae and a good amount of DM-force as lubricant is often necessary to keep the game going at all.

I wonder if [MENTION=20323]Quickleaf[/MENTION] will comment on this - given the recent thread on trying to make players more proactive in play?

I think The Forge assumed that a lot of player hesitance about doing this sort of thing was due to having had it beaten out of them by Storyteller System and 2nd ed AD&D GMs. But I doubt that that's true.

The casual player thing may be part of it - I don't play with "casual" players these days, in the sense that the newest player in my group was introduced by me to RPGs 15 years ago, and so I'm not in a good position to judge. From the start this player took it for granted that the players will play a key role in driving the action and building the fiction. But also what I think is distinctive about my group, compared to "casual" players I used to play with back in the mid-90s, is a strong sense of connection between the mechanics in play and the colour and "vibe" of the resulting fiction.

Some of that feel you get by doing - and half my D&D group came out of my earlier Rolemaster group, and RM (despite all its flaws) is a good system for establishing that mechanics/colour connection. And I think The Forge may have felt that this would be the "cure" for "casual" play - once people played systems where the mechanics in play generated colour in a visceral way, they would be hooked on that way of RPing.

But I'm now thinking that that tendency to link mechanics-in-play with colour is a minority thing, and that I'm quite fortunate to have found a group of like-minded players. I think a lot of players prefer what I would tend to think of as "mere colour" - eg nice flavour text in a spell or class feature description - because they then rely on GM force and other non-mechanical techniques to bring that colour to life in play, and that is actually more visceral (or, at least, more immersive) for them then seeing it play out through the roll of a die or the declaration of some sort of change of mechanical state in the course of combat resolution.

This may not just be about "casual" vs "invested" players, but also basic differences in aesthetic sensibility.

 

[Manbearcat]

Certainly the strongly worded, visceral reactions by several of the posters on this very thread point towards the strong attachment many players have to the DM-force model, to the point where they can't imagine a style of play that would constitute "role-playing" where DM-force was not being used.

Yup.

When the bulk of the group is invested in the game, the narrative, and their characters, that's when you get the necessary alchemy to make a narrative focused game really sing. With players who along for the ride, hooking them in with mechanical minutiae and a good amount of DM-force as lubricant is often necessary to keep the game going at all.

Yup. That rings true. I would add that there seems to be some "re-eductation", or training, required when the totality of your gaming experience has been premised upon this model. I think the "jarring" response when exposed to (new) metagame mechanics leveraged in conflict resolution in the stead of outcomes derived by strictly causal-logic-driven GM-force is related. They are different models entirely so your brain has to "re-map" to some degree.

Yes. @Ratskinner has commented on this too.

Yup. I've seen his posts on this. They're good and I agree with them.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Yes they would. They could point to the action resolution rules as stated in the rulebook, or to the record of their resources found on their PC sheet, or to past table practice as relevant to one or the other of these matters.

And you could simply invoke Rule 0 or any number of other related explicit text throughout the DMG and proceed with your ruling.

This is true in the same fashion in which it's true that the Queen of England still rules the US, but has simply given blanket approval to the federal and state authorities to do as they please - which is to say, is not true at all.

A more apt analogy would be to say that it's true that the President of the United States is the supreme commander of our military. Does he make every command decision? No. And even the high level decisions, he tends to hear proposals from advisers. But the power is his even if he delegates it.

Outcomes are determined via the action resolution rules. Some of them call for adjudication by me along the line of the Supreme Court analogy. Some of them call for adjudication by me along the lines of the Stalin analogy - for instance, if the PCs perform Object Reading on an artefact which has, up to now, not had any history revealed in play, then I have authority to make up whatever backstory I like. Some of them call for adjudication only in the electoral official sense, as with my example of Miska being blasted set out above.

Even in your own example, it's abundantly clear that you decide what level of "force" to exercise. It sounds to me like even in your own relatively laissez faire approach, you look at yourself as judge, jury, and executioner, but you tend to delegate a lot. I don't see any evidence that the rules or the players decide when it is or is not "Stalin time".

 

[Ahnehnois]

Certainly the strongly worded, visceral reactions by several of the posters on this very thread point towards the strong attachment many players have to the DM-force model, to the point where they can't imagine a style of play that would constitute "role-playing" where DM-force was not being used.

I think it's more that some people simply see the DMing they do as so natural that they don't see the force in it, but they have no trouble finding anyone else's DMing to be "forceful".

I know that my players explicitly want to be given a variety of parameters and have a lot of the game dictated to them so they can just play. But I also know that if any of these other DMs came in and ran a session for them, they would consider the new style very "forceful", as they did when we used different DMs.

For example, if they came to me with some custom class and I told them no, they had to use something within the books (let alone the "core only" philosophy that some DMs use), that would be a rather extreme exertion of force. If I forced them to tell me when they wanted to make a Diplomacy check (rather than simply asking for the roll when appropriate), they wouldn't appreciate that too much, either.

Yup. That rings true. I would add that there seems to be some "re-eductation", or training, required when the totality of your gaming experience has been premised upon this model. I think the "jarring" response when exposed to (new) metagame mechanics leveraged in conflict resolution in the stead of outcomes derived by strictly causal-logic-driven GM-force is related. They are different models entirely so your brain has to "re-map" to some degree.

And that's kind of my point. Both approaches are equally "forceful", but different. You wouldn't need the reeducation if they weren't.

 

[Ahnehnois]

The stumbling block, for me, in this thread, is the insistence that I'm somehow incompetent simply because I have this problem. That if I was just a more "ept" DM, this problem would go away. It's not about my personal eptitude. For me, it is a systemic problem. And, if I excise the problematic systems, then most of hte problems go away.

Well, the reverse is equally true. You have (not here, but elsewhere) criticized my players (and implicitly others, I would hope) for being inept for not breaking the game in the way you describe. For example, for playing an evoker, which apparently is a bad choice for some reason. And yet, I've had some that tried very hard to accomplish the scenario you're describing, and failed, without much "force" at all from me, before the days of rewritten classes and house rules.

 

[Hussar]

Well, the reverse is equally true. You have (not here, but elsewhere) criticized my players (and implicitly others, I would hope) for being inept for not breaking the game in the way you describe. For example, for playing an evoker, which apparently is a bad choice for some reason. And yet, I've had some that tried very hard to accomplish the scenario you're describing, and failed, without much "force" at all from me, before the days of rewritten classes and house rules.

That's a bit of a misinterpretation.

There's nothing wrong with playing an evoker. However, an evoker is not going to break your game because, of the caster classes, an evoker is likely the weakest choice. Particularly depending on what the evoker chooses as his barred schools. IIRC, you mentioned that divination was the most common barred school you saw.

That right there tells me that your players are not terribly interested in the more powerful end of the spectrum, as many of the game breaking spells are in the divination school.

I never said your players are inept. I said that your players are not interested in system mastery. There's nothing wrong with that. But, because the players aren't really interested in system mastery, you obviously aren't going to see the problems in your game that others see. Add to that a large number of custom systems, house rules and a very strong handed DMing style, which, as you say, your players prefer, and, sure, many of the issues aren't going to crop up.

But, that doesn't mean the issue isn't there. There issue isn't there, for you, because of your playstyle. But, again, in a game where the DM is far less heavy handed, sticks far closer to written rules, and features players who are heavily invested in system mastery, you have a recipe for a HUGE disparity between casters and non-casters.