A Leap over Boiling Lava onto a Flying Wyvern

[Iron Sky]

The closest we've come to something like that in 4e is when a bomb dropped by a rocket-warforged blew the gnome sorcerer out of their flying contraption and the piloting PC dived after him, catching up to the falling gnome the round before he would have hit the ground and died.

We also had a point when they were trying to capture one of the enemy's flying transport ships and another of the rocket-warforged blasted both of them off a cliff. The blazewyrm they had tamed was luckily nearby to try to catch one of them, but it couldn't figure out which one to save. I rolled randomly and it snagged the goliath warden (who had a daily power that would have negated the damage) instead of the bloodied wizard.

Needless to say, the wizard died. The party was too busy escaping in their stolen airship to scrape his remains (and loots) off the rocks too... perma-dead.

Come to think of it, this encounter was pretty neat too.

 

[ColonelHardisson]

Nowadays? Nowadays?

That implies the existence of "thenadays", when apparently we didn't do things because they were cool.

I double-dog dare you to identify these thenadays. The thenadays when we (gamers, broadly) didn't do these imaginary things in large part because they were way, way cooler than anything we'd do in real life.

I'm pretty sure it wasn't in the Gygaxian Age - Fireball-tossing wizards and Conan-knockoffs wielding improbably huge two-handed swords against demons and dragons sure seems like reveling in coolness to me.

Wait, maybe it was in the White Wolf Age! That game was all about the acting and emotional immersion, right? Except the majority of folks were playing ancient undead ten times more suave, sophisticated, and steeped in cool than the lives of the people playing them. Those who weren't playing cool vampires were playing werewolves that were bundles of barely controlled righteous and bestial rage (sounds pretty cool), or magi struggling over the very essence of reality (what, maybe that's not cool?)

Nope. I'm pretty sure you won't be able to document any days where coolness wish fulfillment was clearly not a part of the RPG scene. We play "Dungeons and Dragons" because dungeons are cool, and dragons are cool. We don't play "Papers and Paychecks" because, however easy it'd be to immerse in such a world, the things in it are lame and mundane.

I had to delurk just to post "rock on!" I played back in "thenadays," and the original post seems like pure old school fun to me, the kind of stuff that made me fall in love with D&D way back then.

 

[The Shaman]

A near miss like that practically demands a "saving throw" - else "fridge logic" would eventually cut in and everyone - players and GM - would be saying later "yeah, but if you were falling down a cliff you'd instinctively make a frantic grab for anything to break your fall" - and by then it'd be too late to "rewrite" the character's survival.

A few years ago I was working on an extensive list of modifiers for the actual value table for speculative cargo, based on the planet's trade codes, for a Traveller game I was running. The idea was that I could roll on a table, and maybe the price would come down because an Agricultural world experienced a bumper crop, or a bad harvest drove up the price, for a Non-industrial world a price would drop as a demand decreased for a particular mineral or increased due to scarcity, and so on and so on.

I shared my tables with another Traveller referee, someone I really respect. He looked over my work, then pulled a pair of dice out of a drawer and rolled them. He's look at the result, then say, "A mining accident created an artificial scarcity," to explain a high roll, or, "The local technology matured, driving down the price," to explain a low roll. Over and over he could look at that roll of the dice and tell me why the result was what it was for a given cargo on a given world.

What he was telling me is that the roll on the table already included all of the information I was trying to add if I simply interpreted the roll instead of fiddling about with additional granularity.

So, the roll of twelve? That already includes the desperate scramble to hold on, the last ditch grab for a wing or a limb, and the agonizing terror of the fall, at least by my friend's logic.

Just something to consider.

 

[Uder]

Yet you don't believe that "fudging" in favour of the PCs is cheating and you advocate its use. My mileage certainly does vary.

I think there's a fine line, and you have to be careful or you can help make the players reckless. I just think the line is even finer when it comes to my side of the screen, since I already get to decide 99% of the game details without rolling a single die. The details that the dice cover? I try to stick to them.

If there's a specific rule that covers the situation, it's obviously not fudging. I don't run the latest edition of D&D so I'm not aware of its finer points. It's starting to sound like the OP's situation was 100% within the rules, even though they didn't know it at the time... but the called shot thing? I guess I misunderstood and thought you presented that as a situational call, and not some hard and fast rule. If there's a rule, fine. Let the dice fall where they may. I guess that's the problem with talking about D&D in General, since there are so many versions and derivatives of the game.

 

[Wolf1066]

A few years ago I was working on an extensive list of modifiers for the actual value table for speculative cargo, based on the planet's trade codes, for a Traveller game I was running. The idea was that I could roll on a table, and maybe the price would come down because an Agricultural world experienced a bumper crop, or a bad harvest drove up the price, for a Non-industrial world a price would drop as a demand decreased for a particular mineral or increased due to scarcity, and so on and so on.

I shared my tables with another Traveller referee, someone I really respect. He looked over my work, then pulled a pair of dice out of a drawer and rolled them. He's look at the result, then say, "A mining accident created an artificial scarcity," to explain a high roll, or, "The local technology matured, driving down the price," to explain a low roll. Over and over he could look at that roll of the dice and tell me why the result was what it was for a given cargo on a given world.

What he was telling me is that the roll on the table already included all of the information I was trying to add if I simply interpreted the roll instead of fiddling about with additional granularity.

So, the roll of twelve? That already includes the desperate scramble to hold on, the last ditch grab for a wing or a limb, and the agonizing terror of the fall, at least by my friend's logic.

Just something to consider.

You must spread some Experience Points around before giving it to The Shaman again.

Drat!

Brilliant post raising an excellent point.

Two totally different styles of game-play, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. Pretty much boils down to GM's personal preferences and what the players like/expect.

I think the only way to go wrong would be to mix 'n' match 'em at random - or use one for the players and the other for the NPCs.

 

[Saeviomagy]

So, the roll of twelve? That already includes the desperate scramble to hold on, the last ditch grab for a wing or a limb, and the agonizing terror of the fall, at least by my friend's logic.

The main issue with that is that there's no point in the roll where the character makes a last-ditch grab for a wing or limb and succeeds at it: if he made the original roll, he travels the desired distance and lands on his feet ready to keep running, if he fails by 1 point he plunges to his death. The DM simply added that additional region to the roll. It's an issue that D&D in general has: no degree of success.

 

[ExploderWizard]

If I were that player, then I would have preferred to do a bellyflop right into the lava screaming " MY PRECIOUSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!......................" all the way down.

That would simply be more fun for me.

As the DM I would have laughed and perhaps given him the chance to take the wyvern down with him. If you're gonna go out with a bang then make it count.

 

[Fifth Element]

That actually doesn't sound like it has any bearing on the situation - the 3.5 rule quoted elsewhere sounds closer in spirit and letter.

It does have a bearing, since 4E grants a save when you're in danger of (for example) falling into lava.

The fact that there's a precedent in 3.5 just makes it even stronger. Though I'm not sure how the "letter" of a 3.5 rule would have any bearing on a 4E game.

 

[Fifth Element]

I think there's a fine line, and you have to be careful or you can help make the players reckless.

Of course, reckless may be how the players like to play, so it's not necessarily an undesirable result.

 

[ExploderWizard]

Of course, reckless may be how the players like to play, so it's not necessarily an undesirable result.

I love playing reckless. Success feels great and a spectacular failure can be just as satisfying.

Players who claim to enjoy being reckless and complain when they fail to make it through impossible situations on a routine basis are a problem.