Fighters vs. Spellcasters (a case for fighters.)

[Hussar]

N'raac, your constant revision of what's actually being said is not helping the conversation. You're the only one claiming that it was "trivially easy" to summon the Glabrezu. In fact, you're the only one claiming that it's easy to use Astral Projection either. No one said it was "trivial" just that it was plausibly possible.

Like I said, I presumed that the PC would be evil if he's summoning demons to get wishes. An assumption on my part, I admit, but, I don't think it's a terribly far fetched one. So, again presuming a bit here, the wishes aren't likely going to be for fluffy kittens.

But, then again, you're defending the DM in my example here. Which basically hits it right home. Here's a DM who watched, for sessions, as the players planned and worked on a goal, and then, just as they were about to do it, pulled the rug out and expected things to just be fine and dandy.

Like I said, I can't believe people play with DM's like this. But, then again, I guess it takes all kinds. For me, a DM who is that oblivious to the players wishes, who honestly believes that completely wasting everyone's time for hours on end, is a DM I have no interest in playing with. Sorry, if you want to tell me a story, go right ahead, tell me a story. You want to have that much control over the game, rolling up the plot wagon to dole out information when it suits you? Fine and dandy.

But don't waste my time. If the players succeed, they succeed. If you didn't want them to succeed, you should never have allowed them to try in the first place.

 

[Ahnehnois]

But don't waste my time. If the players succeed, they succeed. If you didn't want them to succeed, you should never have allowed them to try in the first place.

Apparently, failure is simply not part of the equation?

 

[SkidAce]

Hussar did say "if they succeed" implying the players could fail.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Hussar did say "if they succeed" implying the players could fail.

True, but I think it's very telling that he left that unsaid.

Who says the DM can't let the players pursue a course of action and then later render it untenable? I'm imagining the Fellowship scaling Caradhras, getting trapped in snow, and some player stopping the game and complaining to the DM about how he misled them by letting them try to scale the mountain. Stuff happens.

His position seems to be that the players can fail by their own bad decisions or bad dice rolls, but that the DM cannot allow them to fail otherwise. Which doesn't sound that bad until you start considering the implications.

 

[Manbearcat]

What type of universal mechanic can replace both the knowledge of location and mis-chance of teleport and the negotiation and cha-check of planar binding?

Dungeon World's universal resolution mechanic works great for what you describe here. You may want to check it out. Its a fantastic game, requires little mental overhead and probably does a lot of the things you seek (by the reading of your posts). It doesn't have all of the (borderline over the top) crunch of D&D but it does have some and you have suave Rogues, canny Fighters, and charming Enchanters working off the same resolution scheme. A Rogue's "Connections" works the same as a Wizards "Contact Other Plane" from a resolution standpoint (with minor codification subtleties). However, the fictional positioning of both represents each archetype as you would expect.

 

[Manbearcat]

I am waiting for @Manbearcat 's close read of the 3.5 DMG. I posted some responses to passages that you posted from the book upthread, calling out the bits that I thought were about authority over fictional positioning, and the bits that seemed to be about authority over outcomes.

I'll post this tomorrow. I should have time then to organize my thoughts and my notes legibly and with brevity.

 

[N'raac]

N'raac, your constant revision of what's actually being said is not helping the conversation. You're the only one claiming that it was "trivially easy" to summon the Glabrezu. In fact, you're the only one claiming that it's easy to use Astral Projection either. No one said it was "trivial" just that it was plausibly possible.

It has been presented as a trivially simple matter in asserting the power discrepancy between warriors and wizards. Why, it should be willing to do virtually ANYTHING just to not have to sit in that magic circle for a few more days. It is now presented as a difficult task requiring extensive preparation, with a significant risk of failure at an extreme cost, when we discuss how unfair it is that the GM might apply the rules in a manner that results in the attempt being unsuccessful. Those difficulties and costs are not, of course, spelled out or quantified. With that in mind, if I am "revising what's actually being said", I think I have plenty of company.

I would see the player having much more grounds for complaint if they have put several game sessions of effort into setting the perfect summoning trap, and the ideal bargaining chips, to obtain that one singular Wish than I would when the player chirps out "I prepare my spells, spend the morning Taking 20 for the perfect diagram, cast my Dimensional Anchor, Magic Circle and Planar Binding, Summon a Glabrezu and tell him either I get my wish or he sits there - how can he possibly refuse? By the way, I'll be doing this every morning until something else comes up."

Like I said, I presumed that the PC would be evil if he's summoning demons to get wishes. An assumption on my part, I admit, but, I don't think it's a terribly far fetched one. So, again presuming a bit here, the wishes aren't likely going to be for fluffy kittens.

I can very easily see wishes an evil PC would make which would not meet the criteria of

used to create pain and suffering in the world

. A wish directed at the wizard's personal power, for example, would not "create pain and suffering in the world", though it may make life more difficult for the PC's rivals. A wish to deal with one or more rivals also seems quite plausible - and those rivals may well be just as evil as the wizard in question.

the glabrezu demands either terrible evil acts or great sacrifice as compensation

, which seems to indicate that a relatively mild evil action is not sufficient to satisfy him of the merits of granting the wish.

You also have not responded to the concern that, if this is a very "game time" consuming endeavour, we are ignoring all of the other PC's while the wizard plays his demon summoning solo quest. It was a GM crime of epic proportions when the rogue could participate, but his sneak attack wasn't useful. Why is it OK to play out several hours of wizardly preparations that the rest of the party isn't involved with at all so your Evil Wizard can cast a summoning spell?

But, then again, you're defending the DM in my example here. Which basically hits it right home. Here's a DM who watched, for sessions, as the players planned and worked on a goal, and then, just as they were about to do it, pulled the rug out and expected things to just be fine and dandy.

So what did the DM do while you spent session after session planning the perfect crime? Just sit there and say nothing? If so, I concur he was doing a poor job as a GM. If he has a concern with the direction the game is taking (and if, as you say, this planning went on for multiple game sessions, he should be able to see where the wind is blowing), then it should be raised and discussed. That does not mean he has to move his game to "cat burglar exploits", but he should be up front that this is not the game he wanted to run. I find it tough to envision the GM who sits quietly through several sessions of such planning, doing nothing and saying nothing, just to pull the rug out at the last minute. I could see a GM becoming more and more frustrated at the players' obvious disinterest in the game he thought he had volunteered to run finally saying "screw it - the jeweler packs up and leaves town - can we get back to the game now?", but dragging it out for several sessions of planning seems ridiculous to me.

Apparently, failure is simply not part of the equation?

Hussar did say "if they succeed" implying the players could fail.

There seems to be an explicit recognition of "failure as a possibility" when explicitly asked, but whatever the reason, any failure always seems to be a GM unfairly overriding the careful plans of the PC's, which otherwise would guarantee success. After all, they planned the heist long and hard, so it should succeed. And they planned the demon summoning with great care and effort, so they should get their wish. That the GM should raise a possibility of failure just because of the rules is completely unreasonable.

I can only see what is posted, so I'm somewhat confused regarding Hussar's real reaction to failure in game. Every time I have seen him post an experience where he did not get what he wanted, it seems to end with him denigrating the GM and either walking out or wishing he had, but he does seem prone to hyperbole, and the nature of the discussion is such that he's logically going to post very negative experiences, so the extent to which it is reasonable to extrapolate these anecdotes to his routine gaming experiences and behaviour is less than clear.

True, but I think it's very telling that he left that unsaid.

Who says the DM can't let the players pursue a course of action and then later render it untenable? I'm imagining the Fellowship scaling Caradhras, getting trapped in snow, and some player stopping the game and complaining to the DM about how he misled them by letting them try to scale the mountain. Stuff happens.

His position seems to be that the players can fail by their own bad decisions or bad dice rolls, but that the DM cannot allow them to fail otherwise. Which doesn't sound that bad until you start considering the implications.

I will admit to some curiosity as to his reaction if they had gotten half way through their heist to discover that there were magical protections they had been unaware of which now frustrated their plans. Of course, I can't tell whether they should have been aware of these from their weeks of preparation, or whether they would eventually come to a point in the plan where it was simply not possible for them to have perfect information.

 

[Manbearcat]

There seems to be an explicit recognition of "failure as a possibility" when explicitly asked, but whatever the reason, any failure always seems to be a GM unfairly overriding the careful plans of the PC's, which otherwise would guarantee success. After all, they planned the heist long and hard, so it should succeed. And they planned the demon summoning with great care and effort, so they should get their wish. That the GM should raise a possibility of failure just because of the rules is completely unreasonable.

I think you would get a lot less pushback if the term "rules" wasn't used interchangeably with "fair-use, GM-extrapolation from setting and/or context."

I think much of the barriers/disconnect in this thread is the conflation of those two terms. The two are not synonymous but it seems as if they're being treated as such. Rules are codified things that provide explicit restraint and/or insurance of action occurring or not occurring. They are meant to be objective things. The latter carries multiple vectors of subjectivity:

"Fair-use" - GM-determined

"GM-extrapolation" - GM-devised

"Setting" - GM constructed of which (in a particular playstyle) GM has utter authority over overt or covert setting backstory and is exclusively privy to the covert portion (thus can leverage it, at-will, with no justification nor quality control required)

"Context" - Only here is the player involved in the variable of the equation. Their strategic use of resources and actions undertaken are an input to the context.


I'll go much deeper into this in my post tomorrow on 3.x GMing ethos/guidance.

 

[N'raac]

I think you would get a lot less pushback if the term "rules" wasn't used interchangeably with "fair-use, GM-extrapolation from setting and/or context."

I think what a "rule" is remains inconsistently defined. "I want the GM to use the rules" is a common statement on this thread when diplomacy is referenced. However, the rules say some tasks take a longer time. I want to summon up a Glabrezu and get a wish - is the description of when a Glabrezu grants a wish part of the rules? What about the bargaining aspect of planar binding, including the outright refusal of unreasonable tasks, or the determination of what tasks are restricted to 1 day/level? I think these can be seen as "rules", but can also fall into any of the four categories you set out.

 

[Jackinthegreen]

There seems to be an explicit recognition of "failure as a possibility" when explicitly asked, but whatever the reason, any failure always seems to be a GM unfairly overriding the careful plans of the PC's, which otherwise would guarantee success. After all, they planned the heist long and hard, so it should succeed. And they planned the demon summoning with great care and effort, so they should get their wish. That the GM should raise a possibility of failure just because of the rules is completely unreasonable.

I can only see what is posted, so I'm somewhat confused regarding Hussar's real reaction to failure in game. Every time I have seen him post an experience where he did not get what he wanted, it seems to end with him denigrating the GM and either walking out or wishing he had, but he does seem prone to hyperbole, and the nature of the discussion is such that he's logically going to post very negative experiences, so the extent to which it is reasonable to extrapolate these anecdotes to his routine gaming experiences and behaviour is less than clear.

I will admit to some curiosity as to his reaction if they had gotten half way through their heist to discover that there were magical protections they had been unaware of which now frustrated their plans. Of course, I can't tell whether they should have been aware of these from their weeks of preparation, or whether they would eventually come to a point in the plan where it was simply not possible for them to have perfect information.

I perceive "ability to fail" as "the dice tell me I fail" usually. That's something somewhat out of the DM's control. The social contract is usually that the DM won't do the numbers such that rolling a 20 would still result in failure. The players must always either have the opportunity to roll or the opportunity to find out, in reasonable time and through reasonable means, why something is going on that they can't impact at the moment. What "reasonable time and through reasonable means" is will depend a bit on the players and what has already happened in the game.

However, there is player investment to consider. At some tables the fact that a player has put a lot of time and effort into something should very clearly send the message that that's what they want to engage with. It is the social contract, again at some tables, that the player not get snubbed beyond what the dice themselves say. The pertinent info to massive potential failures is given out early enough that the players can avoid them or at least not suffer huge setbacks. Going back to the example of the jeweler moving shop: In the kind of play @Hussar seems to like the knowledge that the jeweler could move must be given beforehand so the players can take that into account. And even then, if the guy has moved then there will be clues as to where he goes (that might be subject to die rolls) because the social contract requires and demands that the DM give the players something to work with along the lines of what they've been preparing for.

I dearly hope we don't get hyperbole when it comes to possible examples of this. It's looking like hyperbole won't really work here because that kind of tactic requires people be more on the fence about stuff than they actually are here.

An example that might work with regards to finding out there are more magical protections they thought would be there might have to do with a previous skill check or encounter to gather information. The rogue (or whatever class or character has the skills to handle this) might have indeed tried to Gather Information and succeeded on getting that information, but not succeeded on staying low and not drawing attention to himself. How the DM frames that could have a range of possibilities, but in this style of play the main thing he needs to show if he expects the players to accept the extra magical protection is that someone overheard or perhaps that the person the rogue was gathering info from was a bit suspicious and raised an eyebrow or looked off to someone. In that case calling for a Sense Motive (or Insight I think in other editions) might be one of the appropriate things. The players get to know they might have failed at something and thus the scene is at least partially set up for later depending on the rolls.

The nested checks and rolls don't go on forever of course since there does have to be an end. Where that end is though might depend on the rolls themselves, and of course the style of play. If it's a Skill Challenge with a set number of rolls then of course there are a set number. If, however, it's more of a freeform encounter then making a few rolls might happen. Starting at the top could be the Gather Information check to get info, which could outright fail, could "fail forward" in the sense of getting the info but drawing attention to oneself, or just outright succeed. I imagine another option or two might be in there, but I think we all get the idea. If it's the fail forward outcome then there's likely the Sense Motive roll next, and depending on that roll a Knowledge: Local check might be warranted to know who it was that was glanced to or even to realize more stuff about the person being talked to thanks to new circumstances and information.