Fighters vs. Spellcasters (a case for fighters.)

[Hussar]

/snip

Similar variables apply to any number of other choices. The charop guides are interesting to read and can be useful, but they won't actually lead to creating the most effective character in most games.

Yup, the Charop boards presume you are playing the game as it's presented, using the baselines offered in the DMG. If you've gone that far off the reservation, well, your advice is no help to me because our games in no way have anything in common. I tend to play D&D pretty straight up, out of the box without deviating too far from the baseline presumptions.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Yup, the Charop boards presume you are playing the game as it's presented, using the baselines offered in the DMG. If you've gone that far off the reservation, well, your advice is no help to me because our games in no way have anything in common. I tend to play D&D pretty straight up, out of the box without deviating too far from the baseline presumptions.

Yes, but those baselines are not rules. Running encounters on the CR system or creating standard array characters is analagous to driving your car exactly at the speed limit on an open road. How well the car works is hardly determined by how it works in those ideal conditions. The car can do other things.

Also, if you do that, you're likely to have people tailgating you and honking and probably worse, at least where I live. Much like if you tell a player they have to make a character by the book and use a standard ability generation method, they might not take it well.

And then there's this:

Well, fair enough. Having suffered from way too many DM's who took this sort of advice to ridiculous levels, I have no problem saying that I would not enjoy anyone's game who took that particular piece of advice to heart.

You're admitting that you're rather far off the reservation with regards to how you interpret the role of DM. Me wanting to run a high-powered game and you wanting the players to self-DM are both rather large deviations from what the books say. I've only read about DMs who play D&D "straight up" as you describe it, and I wouldn't enjoy that either.

 

[Wicht]

Well, fair enough. Having suffered from way too many DM's who took this sort of advice to ridiculous levels, I have no problem saying that I would not enjoy anyone's game who took that particular piece of advice to heart. Again, no thanks to Calvinball or Mother-May-I gaming.

Look, I understand 100% that you prefer a much higher degree of DM force. More power to you. That's great. Why is it so hard to understand that I do not enjoy this? That I feel that RPG's are cooperative games where the DM/GM is not really in a privileged position in no way should reflect on your game. It simply means we prefer different things in the game.

That's fine. Enjoy your game. I have nothing against you enjoying your game, have at it.

I was just pointing out that your assertion that the rules don't give DMs that authority is factually wrong and you should stop making the assertion. They have had that authority explicitly spelled out in the rules in every version of the game I can remember reading.

Not to rehash old ground here, but if you would rather have a player centric game, that's fine. You, as the DM have the right to ignore any rule you want, including the rules stating that you can ignore the rules (though thats a bit circular in the end). But when you ignore any of the rules (even that rule) you run the risk of fundamentally changing the game. One of the balances on magic is that Players are not expected to have the authority to tell the DM what works and what does not work. When the game dynamic shifts to where the DM becomes something less than an arbiter, and more akin to a vote counter, then the nature of the game has changed in a rather meaningful way.

And all of that is fine. If thats the game you want to play.

What is incorrect, however, is in claiming that the rules, as written, do not give the DM the power to arbitrate the game and control events within the game, and/or claiming that the rules as written create an imbalance of powers, when it is not the rules as written, but the ignoring of a fundamental rule which is apparently creating the situation. You can call DM authority whatever you want, but regardless of the title given it, it is the way the game was designed. The claim you are making is akin to someone saying that the umpire rulings in baseball's opinion should be modified by the opinion of the pitcher and the catcher, and then once this change is underway, wonder why the pitchers seem to be outperforming the batters, complaining that the game mechanics are flawed, and arguing that your style of play is irrelevant to the issue of why there might be a problem with a certain element of the game.

 

[Cadence]

The notion of "GM force" was introduced into this discussion by me, @Manbearcat , @TwoSix and @Campbell . By "GM force" we mean what @Manbearcat has described about half-a-dozen posts upthread, namely, the imposition of the GM's will onto the fiction in disregard of the outcome of the action resolution mechanics.

(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.
<snip>
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.

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.

Part of this reminds me of discussing whether or not exam grades should ever be rescaled or curved.

A: "I would never scale or curve an exam. They get what they earned."

B: "What happens if you find out some of the problems were much harder than you thought they would be? Do you just let a huge chunk of the class fail because the question was too hard?"

A: "I never have questions that are that badly written."

B: "But even professional test makers at places like ETS and CITO have bad questions slip by once in a while. What would happen if you did have one that missed the target slip by? Don't you at least have the right to lower the grade thresholds if that happens?"

Is A backed into the corner of choosing one of: (i) it is inconceivable they would ever write a bad question, (ii) if they do write a bad question then the students will all get bad grades, or (iii) they do have the right to adjust for that on the fly but haven't had the need to yet?

So, (i) is it inconceivable that you would ever write a bad combat encounter, or (ii) would you let half the party die, or (iii) do you reserve the right to alter your pre-written encounter but have never needed to?

[There could be a tangent here about what ways of altering a pre-written encounter count as forcing vs. non-forcing -- playing the opponents sub-optimally for the remainder of the combat, deus ex machina, reducing the hitpoints and BAB of the attackers in mid-stream but still having them be tactically on, ignoring critical rolls or adjusting down the larger damage rolls, or deciding the enemy was actually out to just capture them instead of killing them -- but I'm passing on that for now, so, if you grant me that pass...]

Assuming you don't pick (i) or (ii), isn't the next question is how much DM force is ok?

Look, I understand 100% that you prefer a much higher degree of DM force. More power to you. That's great. Why is it so hard to understand that I do not enjoy this? That I feel that RPG's are cooperative games where the DM/GM is not really in a privileged position in no way should reflect on your game. It simply means we prefer different things in the game.

I think a lot of us who seem on the "pro-forcing" side would agree that taking it to "much higher levels" isn't good. One problem I think the "pro-forcing" side is having here is that it sounds like a lot of the anti-folks are choosing (i) or (ii) above... Your quote here on the other hand is talking about "degree of DM force". In the 1e DMG Gygax comes out as a (iii) but seems to definitely want it to not happen too much. I completely get that.

 

[Wicht]

Evocation does do other things, most notably (don't laugh) Magic Missile. There are very few things in this game that just work. The ability to deal damage without rolling anything can be very useful when you're fighting enemies who are immune to your attacks, or whose saves/AC you can't beat.

The last evoker player I had, the primary venue for his effectiveness was simply chipping away at opponents with force damage while other PCs distracted them. Even up to level 8, I think MM was his most-cast spell.

Again, reliability.

Yup. And that is partially too why my daughters favorite creature to summon is the lantern archon. The attack is small, but it almost always hits and it ignores Damage Reduction of all types. Its reliable.

 

[Ahnehnois]

I think a lot of us who seem on the "pro-forcing" side would agree that taking it to "much higher levels" isn't good.

It's not hard to see that there are improper exercises of power. I could simply tell the PCs "you die", pat myself on the back for having "won D&D", and go home. That's totally legitimate, but not much fun. It's always the DM's call, but discretion and deferment are often advisable.

With great power comes great responsibility, as they say.

 

[N'raac]

Well, actually, he can. The rules specifically allow you to perform diplomacy without any input from the DM. "I try to convince the chamberlain to let me see the king" is straight from the text of the PHB (3.5 ed). That certainly doesn't sound like I have to ask the DM if I can use diplomacy on the chamberlain.

Granted, the DM can certainly have input too. But, as I read the rules, the input is more reactionary than anything else. If the DM feels that more time is warranted, he can add in time. But, the baseline is that diplomacy takes 1 minute. There's nothing there that says that the DM can flat out rule that you cannot use diplomacy on something.

And when the GM responds that the Chamberlain waves dismissively and states "This audience is over" as you begin to speak, then summons the guards to eject you should you keep speaking, pointing to the time required, did you get to use your diplomacy? What if the DM tells you "The Chamberlain sticks his fingers in his ears and loudly chants "LALALALALALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU GO AWAY"?

When I sit down to play D&D I want to play a game, as in Role-playing Game, not "Mother May I" with the DM.

So does that mean the DM has no right to:

- limit the sources of character build options?
- customize, alter or remove racial or class options?
- ask you to wait your turn, as it is another player's (or the NPC's) action now?

I don't believe any player can just do whatever they want.

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.

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".

[Much more apt, as the Queen is not even the notional head of the US Government. The US is not a Commonwealth nation.] I concur with Ahnehnois that the question is not what power the GM has, but how he chooses to exercise it (often limited by the informal social contract of the group in question). Players have a lot more options to emigrate than Russians under Stalin, which forces a more reasonable balance.

That's a bit of a misinterpretation.
*******************
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.

Semantics aside, yes they are. Not infrequently to fairly extreme "munchkin" levels back in the day, though most of those guys are gone now. Certainly whenever I played, I was very interested in system mastery.

DINGDING - "Systems Mastery", to me, is not "using the system to make munchkin characters". It is using the system to achieve a great game with interesting characters matching the player's vision. Breaking the game accidentally is not Systems Mastery. Breaking it intentionally is a simple violation of Wheaton's Law. Making a character with the sole goal of as much power as possible is, to me and the players I game with, not the goal, and often not really all that fun at all.

D&D and Hero are the systems I have the most experience with, and that may colour my judgement (or typecast my group), in that Hero is easily broken if one wishes to do so, making games where this is the goal unfun and quickly over.

Yup, the Charop boards presume you are playing the game as it's presented, using the baselines offered in the DMG. If you've gone that far off the reservation, well, your advice is no help to me because our games in no way have anything in common. I tend to play D&D pretty straight up, out of the box without deviating too far from the baseline presumptions.

I challenge whether one of those baseline presumptions is "PC's should be designed to be as powerful as possible". Please cite rules text that indicates the primary goal of the players should be to break the game with overpowered PC's.

Unrelated to the quotes above, I'm presently looking at Mutants and Masterminds, which has the very interesting rule that the GM may fiat ANYTHING, but in doing so grants the disadvantaged character a Hero Point. This is how I think many GM's informally use their fiat power - it should move the game forward, and be balanced in advantages and drawbacks to the players.

 

[Cadence]

(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.

<snip>

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.

I'm trying to parse this through and keep getting side-tracked by your posts in other threads on the merits of 4e (which you are quite convincing at).

I don't think I'd say it's GM forcing for me that makes it immersive, but rather metagame mechanics that make it anti-immersive.

Are there any happy gaming tables that don't have at least an implicit social contract around genre? What is an overt one?

--

I'm having trouble with "mere colour". On the surface that's how I'd describe a lot of 4e (we have a bunch of mechanical and meta-game things we can do that all have the same in game effect, but we're going to reskin them so it seems like you're doing something different). Or is it that when it's well done the 4e player should put in the descriptives of what they're doing and not just the non-colour part of what they're doing?

Is the GM describing what you see based on the roll and what you tried to do an "other non-mechanical technique"? I'm trying to picture the way a fireball spell in pre-4's resolution would be described relative to a similar fire power in 4e and I'm failing to see it.

--

Does scene framing mean the GM doesn't roleplay the NPCs? In a recent game I played in, the party came across a girl tied to a stake as a sacrifice to a local witch. We untied her and left a brief sincere note (that we actually wrote down sitting at the table) saying the girl seemed really uncomfortable, we hoped it was all a misunderstanding, and we'd like to come by and chat about it after we brought her home. The GM clearly wasn't expecting us to write a note. If the GM has a clearly set picture in their mind of how an NPC thinks, should they roll to see how she reacts to the note (1e-ish) or just have her react in the logical way for that character (2e-ish). Is the later GM-forcing? Would an ad-hoc "group note writing to a witch" difficulty assignment also have been based on the GM's mental picture of the NPC? Is the only effective difference between the just-deciding and the die-rolling resolutions in this case that a bit of randomness was added?

 

[LostSoul]

So, (i) is it inconceivable that you would ever write a bad combat encounter, or (ii) would you let half the party die, or (iii) do you reserve the right to alter your pre-written encounter but have never needed to?

That's interesting.

I always pick (ii), because I let the players choose the combat encounters, which is nice because I don't have this massive responsibility to make sure everything runs smoothly. What I can screw up is the amount of information the players have - either through poor setting design on my part (whoops, that dragon should have left some signs of its presence/I forgot to mention the acid-melted trees & ogre bones) or miscommunication. I guess what I'd do (or do, when I screw up) is to info-dump on the players if I think they're being misled somehow. I am not sure if that would count as force - maybe, maybe not.

edit: Random wilderness encounters might be different, since the players usually can't choose those. A good reason for having robust evasion & pursuit and reaction rules.

 

[Cadence]

What I can screw up is the amount of information the players have - either through poor setting design on my part (whoops, that dragon should have left some signs of its presence/I forgot to mention the acid-melted trees & ogre bones) or miscommunication. I guess what I'd do (or do, when I screw up) is to info-dump on the players if I think they're being misled somehow. I am not sure if that would count as force - maybe, maybe not.

I'm trying to picture the info dump that would save them from the dragon they just accidentally walked in on.