Advice on a Feint Situation

[Greenfield]

I think we may be conflating what you've suggested in the past with what you're saying here.

In the past you've said that, for example, if a player could describe how to treat a wound, you'd let them RP through a Heal check instead of using the dice. You've made similar comments about RPing instead of other skill checks.

And while we all evolve as players and DMs, we might be seeing what was and not what is.

 

[Water Bob]

I think we may be conflating what you've suggested in the past with what you're saying here.

In the past you've said that, for example, if a player could describe how to treat a wound, you'd let them RP through a Heal check instead of using the dice. You've made similar comments about RPing instead of other skill checks.

And while we all evolve as players and DMs, we might be seeing what was and not what is.

Could be. I'm a roleplayer at heart. For all it's excellent points, Third Edition devolves into a dice rolling game for many aspects. I've had a journey over the last couple of years combining the roleplaying and the rolling of the game. It wouldn't surprise me at all if my earlier comments were all about roleplaying first and rolling dice second.

 

[Celebrim]

Could be. I'm a roleplayer at heart. For all it's excellent points, Third Edition devolves into a dice rolling game for many aspects.

I prefer to think that 3e gives the option of rolling the dice to decide the outcome, but nothing within the text requires dice rolling to be the only approach to anything in the game.

I've written on that extensively before, but this I the first time I've had the opportunity to address this criticism in the context of 1e.

I actively played 1e AD&D for about 14 years. I'm well aware of how the game worked, and I've since I think grasped even to a greater degree how it was supposed to work, what assumptions it made about play, and why it was written the way it was in the years since then.

And I don't understand the attempt at contrast here. Not only was 1e AD&D a dice rolling game in many aspects, but it was a dice rolling game that as written didn't even give opportunity to influence the results through play or spending character resources. The aversion that skillful 1e players developed to rolling the dice was a result of the fact that the AD&D mechanics were often arbitrary, unknowable, and rigged against you. Read or run modules like The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan (particularly the internalized swimming rules during floods) or White Plume Mountain (particularly the swinging platforms) and then get back to me about the dice rolling game. Not convinced? Look at the again and tell me how you resolve someone reaching out a hand to grab someone during the disasters?

When AD&D didn't devolve to a game of "If you can roll the high number seven times in a roll - you win!", it devolved into a metagame where the goal was to convince, conjole, and bully the DM in accepting there was no way your plan could fail, so he shouldn't even toss the dice but instead admit to your proposed outcome, validate it, and thereby make it so. Or often as not, it involved plugging in to the problem the same versatile under-costed 'I win button' spell-powers again and again and again, assuming your M-U could survive long enough to have them.

Now, I'm not saying that 3e radically departs from that, because so much of 3e is obviously intended to be familiar and retro to players of 1e who might have been frustrated by aspects of 2e, but I am a bit baffled at seeing a disconnect between 3e and 1e. Particularly with regards to dice rolling, the only real difference I see is that in 3e its possible that asserting character skill and knowledge won't require debate on what is 'realistic', won't require badgering the DM in any way, and has a reasonable chance of success and as such isn't always an approach to be avoided.

 

[Greenfield]

To the point, 1e didn't have a skill mechanic to influence. Diplomacy was strictly DM v Player, pure role playing.

So in the context of this discussion, 1e wasn't a "dice rolling game" at all, in that social situations had no associated dice mechanic.

Of course, in the *pure* context of the OT, there was no Feint mechanic to influence, no "flat footed" status to worry about and no Withdraw maneuver to abuse as described.

 

[Celebrim]

To the point, 1e didn't have a skill mechanic to influence.

Well, that's not entirely true. AD&D didn't necessarily have a balance skill mechanic or a swim skill mechanic either, but that doesn't mean that balancing on a log or swimming in a torrent were handled as things to purely roleplay either. For that matter, the game didn't have a real climb skill mechanic either, as only the thieves chance of climbing walls was specifically called out - and no chance assigned specifically to anyone else. What AD&D actually did in practice was ad hoc skill mechanics or chances of success whenever the DM felt one was called for. So for a skill of dexterity you might find randomly a flat percentage chance of success if the PC tries, success if the player rolls his dex or less on a d20, a save versus rod/staff/wands, or some elaborate ad hoc completely situational means of computing probability of success based on every fiddly modifier that the writer could think of that might influence the outcome. In the case of climbing a wall, dispute might arise over whether the chance of climbing as a non-thief ought to be zero, or whether it ought to be some fraction or portion of the chance of the thief, or whether in general because those were generally unworkable whether it was best to give a chance to climb the wall in addition to or cumulative with the chance a thief had. In some cases, the wall was simply designated climbable simply because the plot required it and the rules didn't provide a good solution.

Likewise, with regards to charisma you'd find things like percentage chances that monsters are hostile, or that NPC's will agree to bargains, perhaps even influenced by the loyalty modifiers to henchmen from the charisma chart.

In absence of having a system for handing doubtful propositions, one was invented. It just wasn't consistent or knowable, and often as not it wasn't playtested and basically screwed the players over with harsh chances of success. That can even be seen in the games first attempt at quantifying non-combat character skill in the thief, whose initial skills in roguish matters are so unreliable that no skillful player would rely on them. At best they can be considered a sort of saving throw, since failure to detect the trap, disarm the trap, climb the wall, and so forth often meant death.

 

[Greenfield]

DMs could make up rules to cover these things, or as you describe it, "ad hoc skill mechanics".

The RAW itself had nothing to cover these things. The decision to incorporate a dice roll or to handle through RP was up to the DM. The game rules themselves were silent on the subject.

 

[Celebrim]

The RAW itself had nothing to cover these things. The decision to incorporate a dice roll or to handle through RP was up to the DM. The game rules themselves were silent on the subject.

I guess that depends on what you consider the 'game rules'. The published modules were filled with this sort of thing. So either it is the case that these sorts of things were officially endorsed as rules, or else it is the case that the professional staff of TSR found it necessary to fill in the gaps in the rules and didn't assume that the situations could be handled by role-playing them out or describing them alone.

 

[Greenfield]

I consider "Game rules" to be the rule books, just for the record.

The problem with using modules as rule sources is that they often disagreed with each other in these situations. They were, in essence, a module writer's ad hoc way of handling it. Another module, even by the same author, might well have a different dice roll or mechanic.

I recall someone once trying to claim that the various Dragonlance novels were, in fact, rules supplements. He wanted to replicate some feat of daring do from a book, and the rules simply didn't allow for it.

In many cases we can see what might be considered "proto-rules" in modules, mechanics or rulings that later appear in an actual rule book, but only after they get fleshed out beyond the very narrow situation they first appeared in.

But I always considered those special situation rules from modules to be advice, a convenient way to handle something the rules didn't actually cover.

 

[Celebrim]

I consider "Game rules" to be the rule books, just for the record.

Sure, that's reasonable. I'm even more picky. I don't even consider all the text of the rule books to be the rules, but only a subset of it that is explicitly mechanical. The rest is just suggestions and advice.

But, whether or not you consider the published modules to be rules, the fact is that they profoundly influenced how people played the game - perhaps even more so than the actual rules, which many groups, despite having played for years had demonstrably never read and certainly never read fully. What most groups actually did was make characters, open a module and start playing according to the best of their understanding, and look up rules as needed. But what that really meant in practice is that many of them devised procedures on the basis of their understanding in play that weren't necessarily based on the 'rules' (and sometimes were in contradiction to them). But what they were based on was what was in the module.

The problem with assuming that the rules are what is written in the text of a rule book is that while this is technically true, it doesn't really clarify what's actually going on in play. In actual play by a group, there is no way to distinguish between these protorules and the rules because that's what the group is actually doing. 1e AD&D was marked by a high reliance on traps, but that doesn't necessarily come from the rules or the well defined examples and definitions of traps in the rules. What a trap was actually like was defined mostly by the modules. The DMG wasn't published until 1979, and I didn't have a copy until 1984. What I knew about the sort of things it covered during the period from 1982-1984 was largely defined by modules and to a lesser extent from my copy of the Expert Set (the 1981 blue box).

My definition of the rules is ultimately 'what is used in play'. I'd have to say that for me, from about 1982 to 1990, diplomacy per se didn't exist either mechanically or at the level of the metagame. Occasionally initial reaction rolls were made to decide if a monster was hostile or what prices a merchant were offered, but the idea of negotiation or persuasion really didn't exist. NPC's were on fixed sides - good guys and bad guys - and there wasn't much to negotiate over and I don't remember my groups doing so. Most players fit the model described in the DMG of attacking first and parlaying second (if ever), and the DMG told the DM that this should not be met with success. I can remember as a player with a new group attempting to parlay first and attack second, and it causing extreme confusion and consternation. Goblins were clearly on the 'bad guy' team by definition; one didn't parlay with them, you killed them and took their stuff. It wasn't until I got into college that diplomacy started to come to the fore as we started playing games where the number of teams multiplied and their interests and goals began to diversify. This culminated in a famous session (1994ish?) where we RP'd a political summit for 8 hours with no dice throwing.

It was intense and fun, and the players had a blast, but even then, because we didn't have a diplomacy mechanic I think that in truth we were actually playing out the details of something that I as a DM had more or less foreordained. I knew the motives of all the players, and was basically revealing to the players through play what those motives where and what side they'd ultimately end up on. Neither a metagame where players were attempting to influence me, nor a game where the dice influenced perhaps by the roleplay was really going on. If I had thought to run this scenario as a challenge, a notion that I didn't have at the time, I would have probably considered each of the NPCs a potential retainer of the PC and used his charisma score and the loyalty modifiers in the DMG accordingly. But I didn't really have a framework for thinking about it that way and I think correctly would have perceived that that approach was on some level potentially unconvincing.

Just as feints didn't happen in my games during the period because there were no tools for handling them, so I'm not sure diplomacy per se actually occurred in my games. I'd be interested to hear from other (older) players as to their experiences with how diplomacy was handled. But things that I had examples for in the modules did happen in my game (and regularly), and in that sense they were as much rules for me as anything else and it never would have occurred to me at the time that they weren't part of the rules.