D&D General Alternate thought - rule of cool is bad for gaming

[Thomas Shey]

I don't think either choice is in general more or less likely than the other. It depends on the situation and the personality of the PC.

I think enough people have been taught running is a loser (or at least were many years ago) that it largely trained that out of them as a solution. And that's not even counting the people who are unwilling to throw some of their fellow characters under the bus.

 

[Lanefan]

Nope! Because, at least in DW, when you do that...it's obvious. The player always knows what they've rolled (GMs only roll damage dice, never roll for moves), so they always know if they've gotten a failure. And when the GM makes a soft move...the player knows what that is, or they're going to find out sooner rather than later. There is no possibility that the player just...doesn't ever know what the consequence was. The whole point of moves is to resolve an unresolved question in the fiction--which means that the output of a rule must always produce something in the fiction that the players can observer, know, or learn.

Which is, to me both as player and DM, rather limiting. Sure it's nice as a player to always know what you've done and-or caused, but realistically this wouldn't always be the case. Say I'm messing around somewhere and I find a lever in the wall. Hoping to cause the wall to open I pull the lever and while the lever in fact moves, the result = failure.

From what you're saying here, any consequences to that failure have to become known to me-as-player right now. This means, for example, that my pulling of the lever can't have shut all the power off on the next (yet-unexplored) level down as I've no way of knowing or observing that right now and there's a high likelihood I'll never make that connection (or even have reason to try) later.

Sorry, but that takes away too many options for my liking.

 

[Lanefan]

Sure, but sometimes your options are just bad and that's all there is to it, and the kind of terrain you have to deal with locally doesn't allow you to avoid that. As long as things outspeed you or have ranged weapons, and you don't have really long abstracted turns, you're going to have a problem in the environments I mentioned, and there are parts of the world where those environments are more common than not.

Which merely goes to say that adventuring in those terrains is likely to be damn dangerous, and if you/your party can't yet handle those dangers, perhaps it's best you go adventure somewhere else.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Which merely goes to say that adventuring in those terrains is likely to be damn dangerous, and if you/your party can't yet handle those dangers, perhaps it's best you go adventure somewhere else.

I realize this is a D&D thread, but its not the case that there's always anywhere else to go to get to in any practical time frame that's both better in that regard, profitable, and not significantly more dangerous in the first place.

Simple example: back in the OD&D days if I had to deal with the encounter table for plains or the encounter table for mountains, I'd choose the former every time.

 

[Lanefan]

So this might open up a huge can of worms...

Let's argue for the sake of this thought that the DM is a neutral arbiter AND that he will roll fairly and abide all results. He rolls that ancient red dragon encounter (or any creature that outguns the PCs). So now we're going to negotiate.

I once had just this situation come up in an old game of mine: a low-ish level party stumbles on to a big ol' Red Dragon and (aided by the Dragon's reaction roll) decides to negotiate, or at least chat, kind of in Bilbo-vs-Smaug style.

How are we handling this? The fair arbiter says some sort of reaction roll/charisma check is best (removing any bias from the DM) but that's a sterile approach to a role playing situation. Can the encounter just be RP'ed though and if so, how does the DM adjudicate that fairly without bias? A player with good speaking skills could theoretically outtalk the DM and win such encounters. A player who is not good at oratory might not. Regardless, the DM is applying a form of Cool (how persuasive is the players/characters words) to the scenario. Perhaps a mixture of both? Well, that could create a scenario where a player can give an impassioned speech or negotiation and fumble the die roll. Likewise, the player can give a terrible performance and crit the reaction roll. Either way, the two parts (roll and role) have little impact on each other unless the DM is again making a judgement call all awarding the player a bonus (or penalty) for good/bad RP.

Or, as happened in my case, the gonzo-style chaotic players take away any chance for me to make such judgment calls: while some of the party exchanged pleasantries with the dragon, some others in the party (unbeknownst to those chatting) used the talking as a distraction, crept around behind the dragon, and (surprisingly successfully!) attacked it from the rear.

Its first reaction, of course, was to breathe forward; meaning those who had innocently been talking all got fried. It then turned on its attackers, but by this time (and 1e Dragons being the glass cannons that they are) it was already in a world o' hurt. End result: they lost half the party but did kill the dragon.

They never found its hoard, though, as the Dragon was AFB at the time.

 

[Maxperson]

People forget that encounters don’t necessarily mean combat. If you roll a dragon for a random encounter, the encounter could consist of the players sighting the dragon in flight moving towards or away from them. Most tables I’ve seen give zero context to the encounter, leaving that completely within the DM’s control.

That's true, and I will sometimes have that dragon as a non-combat encounter. In my game, though, dragons are very rare, so they just don't show up as often as encounter tables usually assign to then. That means I need to ignore a lot of those rolls.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think enough people have been taught running is a loser (or at least were many years ago) that it largely trained that out of them as a solution. And that's not even counting the people who are unwilling to throw some of their fellow characters under the bus.

Well...their call, I suppose.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I realize this is a D&D thread, but its not the case that there's always anywhere else to go to get to in any practical time frame that's both better in that regard, profitable, and not significantly more dangerous in the first place.

Simple example: back in the OD&D days if I had to deal with the encounter table for plains or the encounter table for mountains, I'd choose the former every time.

Maybe such a group should stick close to town then, to be honest.

 

[Maxperson]

If the PC can't jump farther in feet than its STR score and the chasm is wider than that, doesn't the resolution then immediately turn to falling-damage mechanics?

The problem is that 5e says that you can use the athletics skill to jump farther that your strength score, but gives zero guidance on how to do it. Every DM has to come up with their own method of enacting that "rule."

 

[tetrasodium]

The problem is that 5e says that you can use the athletics skill to jump farther that your strength score, but gives zero guidance on how to do it. Every DM has to come up with their own method of enacting that "rule."

sure it does. The jump just needs to be classified as easy medium hard very hard or nearly impossible by the GM for someone the GM decides to use as the model of some level the GM chooses completely unguided using some guess the GM comes up with lol