I'm curious as to how the other PCs even knew that you could harness the energy of a dead dragon into enchanting an item. Or how the sorcerer knew that it could gather the dragon's energy for himself. Or, specifically, that he'd need to cast Cyclonic Vortex in order to do so.
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Was it something that the players just made up
Yes.
because they thought it would be cool if they could do it - and you agreed, because you're following the "yes, and..." school of thought?
Sort of.
I was following "say yes to player suggestions" principles, but I think to say the player "thought it would be cool" is to under-describe the play dynamic. The player's idea doesn't come from nowhere - this is happening about 14 levels and 3 years of play in, so both the way the mechanics work
and the shared fiction are pretty well established by this point.
As to why Cyclonic Vortex - how else would you gather all the power into a swirling mass of chaos and then suck it into yourself?!
Upthread I said that, in 2nd ed AD&D, I think it is pretty hard to get things moving without the GM having an overwhelming influence. This snippet of play might give you a better idea of what I see as possible alternatives. In AD&D, there is no mechanic, nor any hint of a gameplay process, that lets a player initiate this sort of action. It would all have to be driven in the sort of fashion you describe: "they'd heard stories of a hero who slays an ancient dragon and uses its spirit to power a sword?"
And if you wanted to run 2nd ed AD&D in a different style, where would you start? For instance, what is the relevant ability? (Presumably the Enchant an Item spell, which requires a 12 level wizard who's memorised it - there goes the spontaneity of player-driven play.) What are the rules governing the introduction of new magic items onto the PC equipment lists? (There aren't any - the game has no balance mechanism for player-created items, as comes through in the discussions in the Book of Artefacts and the High Level Campaign book.)
Hence the importance of mechanics here: 4e gives you a relevant skill (Arcana); a relevant DC (from the DC-by-level chart), hence a check - and so the possibility of failure, which makes it an episode of gameplay rather than book-keeping; and a treasure-parcel system that tells you how the creation of the item by the PC fits into the overall framework of mechanical character progression.
Now, spontaneously creating items from chaotic forces gathered from dead firedrakes is not the be-all-and-end-all of player empowerment. (This episode couldn't happen in Burning Wheel by the books, for instance, which takes a more scholars-in-laboratories approach to sorcery and alchemy.) Not every game has to straddle every fantasy genre possibility.
But in AD&D 2nd ed there are almost no points at which the players can inject their own agenda
unless they invoke the combat rules. I personally think this is why you get so many stories of D&D playes "wrecking" campaigns by just attacking all the NPCs. Because their was no other mechanical avenue for them to exercise power over the shared fiction.
because the thing you are describing is definitely meta-gaming in my book. Even if you later came up with a justification for why it was okay for this thing to happen, the real reason why it happened was because you wanted to create an interesting situation for your players.
See, this I don't really get.
First, the ingame reason for the appearance of the mooncalves is that they feel the call of the chaos energy, and this reason isn't made up later - it is present in, inherent in, the decision to have them turn up at all. There is no separating "desire to create an interesting situation" and "knowing that the chaos called the mooncalves", because the two are part-and-parcel of the same GMing moment.
Second, the only reason there is a gameworld
at all is because the GM wanted to create something interesting for his/her players.
I guess the difference all comes down to timing. Making stuff up ahead of time, because you think it will make for an interesting story later, is fine; changing anything in-the-moment, because you think up something better later on, is less cool.
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As a scientist, I just can't live in a world that shapes itself around what I do or do not want it to be.
The gameworld was authored. It was
already shaped around what someone wanted or didn't want it to be.
That's not to say that questions of timing are of no relevance to RPGing - more on that below - but the reason can't be to do with "made up" vs "real", because the gameworld
is not real. Someone made it up because they thought it would be worth playing a game in.
It would have been ideal (in my perspective) if you'd written down ahead of time that the sorcerer can gain this benefit from jumping onto the dragon and casting this spell.
There are even games that codify this. They'll say that the GM should write everything down ahead of time, and you're not supposed to change anything later on. I seem to recall that the players can even earn XP (or some other benefit) if they successfully call out the GM for cheating in this manner!
And I think that goes back to fairness, for me. It's not "fair" if my character gains a super cool magic power because the DM is changing the world around me such that the thing I want to happen will be the thing that actually happens.
There are a few things here.
First, if nothing ever happens, or can be done, that wasn't written down in advance, you get the Spartan world that I described above. Gygaxian play expressly embraces that Spartan world (the dungeon is an
incredibly artifical and narrowly-defined environment), although even Gygax recognised that the GM might have to make stuff up from time-to-time and provided tables for answering questions like "What colour is the roof" or "What is in the 3rd beaker along on the alchemist's shelf", which the GM couldn't always be expected to have worked out in advance.
Second, if the limits of possibility are what the
GM has written down in advance, you get the situation I've described above where the GM drives everything.
Third, "fairness' makes sense in some contexts but not others. If the game is a competition to find loot from monsters, then being able to create your own is not fair. (Monopoly doesn't allow players to just mint their own bank notes!) But consider an AD&D game in which the player of a wizard gets to choose two new spells upon levelling: if, instead of choosing a spell from a rulebook, the player writes his/her own spell (and the GM agrees that it is reasonable and balanced), is it unfair for the PC to get that spell as one of his/her two? I don't think so - s/he has not got any benefit different from what the rules provide for. In 4e, acquiring magic items is on a model closer to that of spell-acquisition-by-levelling rather than treasure-gain-by-looting.
Fairness about other game elements is relative to play techniques and expectations also. If the players are expected to win the game by clever working out the GM's secrets, then it is obviously unfair for the GM to change those secrets during the course of play. This is very important in Gygaxian play: hence Detect Magic spells, Wands of Meta and Mineral Detection, Potions of Treasure Finding, etc - these are all tools for uncovering the GM's secrets as to the location of loot.
But the Gygaxian secret-keeping game once again depends incredibly heavily upon the artificial dungeon environment. No GM can write up a town of 100s of inhabitants and record all the caches of money hidden in old teapots, under floorboads, in chests buried under earthen floors, etc. Nor all the petty magic items people might wear or carry. Nor all the secret desires that might be uncovered by an ESP spell.
Inevitably, things are going to have to be made up on the fly. At which point the issue is not primarily one of fairness, but rather identifying principles to govern the introduction of new content. Illusionism is one set of such principles, developed primarily in the context of using Gygaxian mechanics to deal with non-Gygaxian play environments and play priorities.
4e encourages a different sort of approach.
There's no reason why the DM needs to be covert about this. If my character was in jail, and the other PCs weren't conspiring to get me out, then there's nothing wrong with the DM explaining to the players about how these decisions are being made. Because the players are expected to maintain a strict wall between player knowledge and character knowledge, the DM is free to mention any factors that the characters don't know - things like the reputation of the imprisoned characters, who knows or doesn't know about it, who might be in a position to do something about it, etc.
The GM can explain it, sure. But that just demonstrates that what is determining the course of events is GM power - the GM's judgment as to what is likely, what is obvious, what is impossible, etc.
And for things where the DM can't help but be biased, where choosing either way would seem inappropriate, there are always the dice. I was once trapped at the bottom of a pit, and the DM rolled random percentage chance for someone to find me. He listed the base chance from the local encounter rate
And once again, this will work for certain very constrained situations, in which encounter tables have been written up and the relevant NPC profile is known in advance.
But if your player is in the stocks, or hanging on a crucifix, what is the likelihood that some NPC notices you before you die (or get pummelled by grapefruit, or whatever)? Practically 100% - these are public forms of humiliation/execution. But what is the likelihood that a person will try and rescue you? To say that this can be extrapolated with even moderate precision from the few known details of the PC's life as roleplayed out at the table is, in my view, utterly implausible.
Of course, I can also imagine being a player, and not knowing whether I was supposed to keep trying to find my own way out, or whether the DM was planning to have a specific NPC rescue me at the last moment. That seems like a pretty miserable situation.
Yes. That's why I don't like to play or GM that sort of game, and instead prefer games with more robust mechanics, that support more robust techniques, that work rather than break down when players and GM are overt about what's going on.
