Fighters vs. Spellcasters (a case for fighters.)

[Wicht]

No doubt. It's hard to say telling something to do an action that will cost them nothing is unreasonable when the alternative is one (and potentially many more) days stuck in a trap. Well you can say it, but it's likely not the offer being unreasonable at that point. The problem is the value to party A is at odds to the cost required of party B. Is it reasonable to expect a payment equal to the value one party sees or is it reasonable to cover the cost the other party pays?

It's an area I think would be better served with a skill-challenge-y mechanic -- make an offer, check situation, receive counter-offer, then rinse and repeat until a resolution occurs.

If the creature in the trap is immortal, then some time trapped is probably a small price to pay to avoid being reduced to a mere slave... I would have any immortal creature want a price paid for any real service, especially if the caster is low-level...

As for the offer, counter offer, nothing in the rules really says you can't do it that way. Though, like I suggested, just consider the possibility of a negative modifier (small alteration to the rules as written) and then go from there.

 

[Wicht]

Last time I checked, actors also play roles, and have access to a ton of knowledge that's off-limits to the character, like the entire plot. There's nothing inherent in the words "play" or "role" or "roleplaying" that means "must fully immerse in the character with no access to metagame knowledge".

All your squares are quadrilaterals, but not all quadrilaterals are squares.

But you are missing that actual point it seems to me.

Sure actors have "meta" knowledge but they can't use that knowledge while in character and, in point of fact, often have to act as if they were competely unaware of the knowledge they have. Full immersing themselves in the role very much means separating themselves from that knowledge they actually possess. And there are cases, in fact, where certain parts of a script are withheld from actors by directors because they don't want the potential of the knowledge corrupting the acting.

I believe its possible to have metagame knowledge and play in such a way as to pretend the character does not know what you know and ideally, this is the goal. But most roleplayers are not professional actors and it does help in the role part if there is some limit on metagame knowledge. This is the reason, incidentally, to bring up an old tangent, Gygax did not want players reading the Dungeon Master's Guide.

However, nothing you said actually refutes the definition of roleplaying being "playing a role." That is the sum total of what it means to roleplay. The rules are just there as facilitators of mutual roleplaying to avoid clashes of fictional realities (ie. Bang, I shot you. No you didn't you missed. Did too. Did not... etc.) The DM is there to provide a framework of mutually shared fictional realities. But in the end its all just "lets play pretend" at a table.

 

[TwoSix]

However, nothing you said actually refutes the definition of roleplaying being "playing a role." That is the sum total of what it means to roleplay. The rules are just there as facilitators of mutual roleplaying to avoid clashes of fictional realities (ie. Bang, I shot you. No you didn't you missed. Did too. Did not... etc.) The DM is there to provide a framework of mutually shared fictional realities. But in the end its all just "lets play pretend" at a table.

I'm not trying to refute your definition. I just said it's too narrow.

 

[Wicht]

I'm not trying to refute your definition. I just said it's too narrow.

I don't get that. How can "playing a role" be too narrow? What does it exclude from the broad gamut of the activity that is role-playing?

 

[TwoSix]

I don't get that. How can "playing a role" be too narrow? What does it exclude from the broad gamut of the activity that is role-playing?

Does playing a PC using metagame considerations without any "immersion" constitute roleplaying in your definiton?

 

[Wicht]

Does playing a PC using metagame considerations without any "immersion" constitute roleplaying in your definiton?

Only in the loosest sense of the word. It would have to be true only in the same sense as with which a person might say they are roleplaying while playing chess. That is, strictly speaking, the chessmaster is playing the role of a military leader when they may only be an english professor.

However, most people, I would have thought, would say that there had to be some level of immersion or empathy with a character in order for there to be a level of true roleplaying going on as regards a game. The amount of immersion I do think is subject to a great deal of subjectivity so that one person might enjoy the voices, whereas another, more introverted sort, might do most of the immersing or empathizing entirely intellectually. I would never say that one persons level of immersion makes them a truer roleplayer than another persons level of immersion, though it is my experience that the greater the empathy between the player and the character, the greater the enjoyment of the role aspect of the play. To this extent, metagaming can be counterproductive to immersion and thus to the greatest enjoyment, by de-emphasizing the role aspect of roleplaying and focusing more on the play aspect.

I do think it impossible to have roleplaying if there is no role to play. If there is no role then ultimately it is just playing.

 

[Manbearcat]

No doubt. It's hard to say telling something to do an action that will cost them nothing is unreasonable when the alternative is one (and potentially many more) days stuck in a trap. Well you can say it, but it's likely not the offer being unreasonable at that point. The problem is the value to party A is at odds to the cost required of party B. Is it reasonable to expect a payment equal to the value one party sees or is it reasonable to cover the cost the other party pays?

It's an area I think would be better served with a skill-challenge-y mechanic -- make an offer, check situation, receive counter-offer, then rinse and repeat until a resolution occurs.

The 4e Ritual analogues (Loremaster's Bargain, Adjure, Summon Demon) are all handled in the way you note here; via Skill Challenge. I have experience with player deployment of all 3 of these rituals and resolution via Skill Challenge works swimmingly.

 

[Manbearcat]

@N'raac I'll post a reply to your post in the coming days. I'm very short on time as of now, I just wanted to acknowledge it. I still want to do a 3.x DMG post as well.

Suffice to say, that I'm in agreement with @TwoSix and @sheadunne posts immediately upthread (I'm glad you had a takeaway that may provide some functional worth for your home game sheadunne). There is plenty of rising action there to find, there is plenty of engagement of the players on their own thematic grounds, forcing them into the aggressor role via specific adversity/pressure related to the stakes at hand. Further, all of those (internal inconsistency) questions you asked (as TwoSix notes in hs post), those are all questions that we can address during play and have more fun for it!

I'll address your concerns and thoughts in the coming days in the greater post regarding table/creative agendas and how this situation may be addressed/resolved as it dovetails with the process simulation/causal logic/internal consistency primacy interest inherent to serial, open world exploration/world-building/sand-boxing/deep immersion in actor stance. That is your creative agenda and accompanying principles. Naturally the conflict above is going to bear out a lot of discord with you given that agenda and those principles. The principles and agenda (and mechanics) that guide play for the conflict resolution of the chamberlain scene above are very much at tension (not quite working in opposite direction, but primacy and subordinate interests are deeply in flux).

I think an extremely abridged way to look at outcome-based (rather than process-based), "Big Damn Hero, "Indie play" of 4e is the same way that you look at Die Hard, Indiana Jones, James Bond, and the Avengers. HISHE and Honest Trailers does a pisstake of the movies, waxing on about the internal inconsistency of the movies when viewing their genre conceits of "Big Damn Heroes" through the prism of tight coupling of cause and effect and granular accounting for "how in the world could this possibly happen" or "why wouldn't they just do this". But the answer is always "Uh, who gives a crap! Big Damn Heroes and these movies are awesome!"

However, as can easily enough be seen with movie expectations, if you go into "Die Hard" looking for Cormac McCarthy and the Cohen Brother's perfect marriage of "No Country For Old Men"...you're going to be disappointed. I'm an enormous fan of both, but I expect those genre conceits to be estranged from one another and hold neither to the others when watching the films.

And finally, the primary reason that you are seeing such a "beatdown" of this Skill Challenge is because you have a Chaladin (primary Cha Paladin), and Bilbo-like Rogue, both armed to the teeth with social skill resolution capabilities. The Ranger, not so much, but he filled his role thematically and coherently.

If you subbed that Chaladin and Rogue for a poorly social-skilled Warden and Monk...you're probably looking at a lot of untrained skills being leveraged with a lot of non-primary stats bulwarking those untrained skills (somewhere around + 9 - 10 in bonus on average and maybe even creeping down to 8ish). Different classes, and different builds in those classes, have different conflicts that they can bring their "big guns" to. They can all contribute (a Warden with Intimidate can contribute and pass a check somewhere between 55 - 65 % of the time) in their own thematic way, and maybe the fiction will unfold that they can leverage some of their "off-strengths". But don't expect the Warden to dominate a social skill challenge like a Chaladin who can channel the very voice of his god for giant bonuses (that buff his already considerable numbers) and sprout wings and all sorts of other stuff.

 

[pemerton]

In my view, not so much. I'm defining "roleplaying" in a way that includes the player adopting the "role" of his character and acting from that character's perspective.

<snip>

I find it hard to imagine that you've never met anyone in the roleplaying game hobby who has any interest in adopting the perspective of their character

Of course I have. But adopting the perspective of the character is not the same thing as making decisions solely on the basis of what the character is experiencing within the fiction of the gameworld. Furthermore, it does not exclude other considerations.

Two examples. Adopting the perspective of my character, I might think it would be desirable to engage a group of enemies in combat. Therefore, I use Come and Get It and pull those enemies in around my character. On most interpretations of the power, Come and Get It has some metagame dimensions. But it doesn't require thinking outside the perspective of my character.

Or: adopting perspective of my character, I realise that two alternatives - A and B - are open to me. A seems like it will clearly be more fun, so my character chooses A. That is metagaming, but it hasn't required abandoing the perspective of my character, though I've supplemented that with a desire for fun at the table.

One of the most basic examples of metagaming in a D&D context is the player being able to determine the DC of a check they're trying to make repeatedly. Happens with AC all the time; the players see that an attack roll of 29 missed and 30 hit, so they know the AC is 30. Then, being able to compare their statistics to the enemy's that start making tactical decisions (who attacks who, how much power attack to use, what extra boosts to use, etc.) based on their calculated odds of success. It's almost difficult not to think this way as a player.

I expect my players to take account of the maths of the game - how else are they meant to make meaningful decisions about expending resources?

And how else are they meant to emulate their PCs' understanding of the ingame situation - working with the maths of the game is the analogue, for the players, of their PCs receiving and acting upon sensory experience.

To my mind, there are two main ways of dealing with these kinds of issues. One is to accept them and let them go. The other is to manipulate or deceive the players in some way so that it isn't so easy to discern things that they shouldn't know.

<snip>

That's what DMing and roleplaying are about.

I would not play in a game in which the GM did this. It's a very narrow conception of roleplaying - "illusionism", the GM's deliberate creation of an illusion of meaningful choice on the part of the players, when in fact s/he is manipulating the fiction via secret backstory to generate whatever outcomes s/he thinks desirable.

It's not a style that has any appeal to me.

 

[pemerton]

Ah, but once your players catch on that nothing you run is ever filler you'll never be able to have a supposedly-nothing encounter become relevant a long time later due to something overlooked (or thought of as irrelevant filler) at the time, because they'll know everything is important.

I realised that I didn't reply to this.

In "indie" style, foreshadowing and anticipation are achieved retrospectively - as in, later on you can decide to highlight or riff off something that happened in an earlier encounter that, at the time, no one much thought mattered.

I have already done that a bit with the beholders, and may be doing a bit more if the PCs ever head closer to the Soul Abattior.