D&D 5E Clouds, cubes, and "hitting"

[pemerton]

Okay, so, what to make of the (snipped) example?

I put this into a separate reply because I didn't think it was really related to the main topic of the thread. As I'm writing it, though, maybe I'm wrong about that. But it can stay in a separate post.

As a GM, I could tell you were trying to "Say yes!" to the player, were trying to use the 4e powers/page 42 stuff to make a reasonable judgement call, were trying to let the resolution play out according to the player's stated action intent.

But bottom line, it was for all intents and purposes a case of "Mother, May I?" with a few rolls by the player interposed. There's no explicit rules in 4e that says you can allow players to expend healing surges to modify the fiction. And if you were willing to allow them to expend healing surges as a way to codify the properties of the spell he was casting, why make him roll at all? You're GM-fiat-ing the crap out of the scene at that point, what difference does it make if you just allow the player to win?

The last question here is odd to me. The PCs in your game confront some goblins and attack them - what difference does it make if you just allow them to win (rather than make the players roll dice)?

One is clouds-to-clouds (as in the OP diagram, no check is required for the PC to take the high ground). The other is clouds-to-cubes-to-clouds. The difference between the two is pretty basic to RPGing, isn't it? To pacing, to generating dramatic moments, etc? That's the whole point of "Say 'yes' or roll the dice" - if nothing dramatic is at stake, then actions succeed; but otherwise set a DC and have the player roll the dice.

That's what I did in this case. (If the invoker/wizard had tried it, it would probably have been an auto-success - it's impossible for that character to fail Arcana and Religion checks. But that character didn't want to be party to it. Part of the significance of the event, in the fiction, is who was doing it.)

I also think you're exaggerating the sense in which it is fiat. I used the DC-by-level table; that's not fiat. I set the DC at Hard; as I mentioned, that's consistent with the guidelines in RC. I allowed the spending of a HS, in circumstances where there was an appropriate cloud-to-cube arrow ("I'm an emergent primordial and mighty chaos sorcerer who is the new Lord of Entropy followng Ygorl's defeat"), to grant a bonus as per DMG 2 (p 86):

Give some thought to things the characters might do aside from using skills . . . A good rule of thumb is to treat these other options as if they were secondary skills in the challenge . . . Here are some options . . . sacrificing a healing surge.​

Secondary skills do things like "[g]ive one or more characters a bonus to a check" (DMG 2 p 85); and the PHB (p 179) and DMG (p 75) cap the bonus for assistance from others at +8 (= a maximum of four +2 bonuses; +2 is the default bonus for help or advantageous circumstances in 4e, as per PHB pp 179,279 and DMG pp 42, 75).

Allowing the use of Stretch Spell to allow the scheme to incorporate the darkness is also consistent with the advice in the PHB (p 259), DMG2 (p 86) and DMG (p 74):

Noncombat encounters focus on skills, utility powers, and your own wits (not your character’s), although sometimes attack powers can come in handy as well.

Using an encounter power that's not directly relevant to the challenge might give the character a bonus to a subsequent skill check

Characters might have access to utility powers or rituals that can help them. These might allow special uses of skills, perhaps with a bonus.​

In this case, use of the power made something possible (ie making the zone of entropy impenetrably dark) that otherwise would not have been.

As far as I can tell, this is exactly how p 42 and 4e skill improvisation is meant to work.

Here's another example (involving a physical challenge - leaping from a giant frosthawk onto Ygorl, as he tries to flee the PCs):

[sblock]

Ygorl was fleeing, double-moving through the Chaos at speed 8, while the PCs in the Tower were chasing him, also double-moving at 8

<snip>

The gap between the Tower and Ygorl alternated between 28 and 12 squares (28 sq after Ygorl's move, 12 sq after the Tower's move). To touch Ygorl with the Sceptre this gap had to be closed, which required reducing Ygorl's speed. The party had no way to slow him without also inflicting damage, which would drop him below zero hp and therefore trigger his attack negation ability. So they came up with a plan to grapple him instead, which would immobilise him, forcing him to double-teleport at 6, which would allow the Tower to close in three rounds (gaining 4 squares each time).

Grappling required getting someone close. Luckily, back on the elemental chaos the invoker/wizard had tamed a giant (roc-sized) Frosthawk, which itself had a speed of 8. So with a double fly taken after the Tower's move but before Ygorl's, they could catch up to Ygorl (go stop-motion action resolution!).

The dwarf fighter had the best chance to grapple. Ygorl's Reflex defence is 39. The dwarf had +14 from level, +4 from epic tier (a house rule to make non-enhancement-bonus attacks still viable at higher tiers), +8 from STR and +1 from the ranger's quarry on Ygorl (Battlefield Archer, flavoured as the Raven Queen's curse). So he needed a 12. The ranger and paladin decided that they would fly out with the invoker and fighter on the bird and help hurl the fighter onto Ygorl, giving +4 from Aiding Another. Which seemed fine to me, and reduced the target number to 8. In case of emergency, the fighter tucked the ranger's Flying Carpet into the top of his Handy Haversack.

The bird flew out with the 4 PCs riding it. The dwarf duly leaped onto Ygorl, aided by his brothers-in-arms, and the player proceeded to roll a 6. So he went tumbling, but with his minor action pulled out the carpet and with his move action flew 6 squares. That meant that, when his next turn came around Ygorl was 10 squares away (after double-moving for 16 - non-tracking of diagonal moving makes this 3-dimensional combat much easier to resolve!).

We then looked up the jumping rules. The character has +27 Athletics, and with Mighty Sprint can give himself another +5, and with his +10 daily Epic Destiny bonus to STR checks and skills was able to push the total to +42. So with a mighty leap he cleared the 50-odd feet between him and Ygorl. In my generosity I gave him a +2 to hit for combat advantage, because Ygorl was not expecting that. So he needed a 10 to hit. The roll was, once again, a 6.

This time the fighter had no Flying Carpet to pull out, and so kept falling.

<snip>

The STR of the paladin and the cleric-ranger was now compared: 14 (he's a CHA paladin) vs 12, (he's an archer-ranger) so the paladin was next in line to try a grab on Ygorl. The player was reluctant, deeming his chances of success too low, but the player of the invoker was egging him on (the word "coward" was thrown around a bit). He decided to try it, and the roll was 17. So Ygorl was grabbed, hence immobilised, hence reduced to teleport as a movement option. Ygorl used his Arcana to try to injure the paladin via dangerous teleports through the waves of chaos, but with 3 attempts succeeded only on 2 of his DC 40 Arcana checks, and only one of the resulting attacks hit the paladin's Fort defence. He took 30-ish (?) hp of damage.

[/sblock]One could equally ask here - why require rolls? They've come up with a crazy plan, so why not let them succeed?

My answer is that the rolls are what makes it a game rather than just a story told by the GM in response to questions and suggestions from the players. With rolls, sometimes even the best plans fail, and new ones have to be improvised:

[sblock]

This combat took the form of an aerial assault upon the tower, where the PCs were all in position on the crenellated roof.

<snip>

The white dragon did better, though. It had an aura 5 of 30 cold auto-damage, which was quite effective as it closed in, and a good initial breath did a bit of damage as well. It got blasted with AoEs by the sorcerer (action point for Blazing Starfall, plus standard action Blazing Starfall, plus quickened Blazing Starfall as a minor action, all admixtured with thunder to do a lot of damage), which hit the giant as well, but I had given the dragon a mount ability, to soak half of any burst or blast damage dealt to its rider, so the giant survived.

One of the Starfalls critted, which from a chaos sorcerer knocks the dragon prone, and also blinds it with a Glimpse of the Abyss. So it fell, but was able to recover before reaching the ground (they were about 300' up, and it succeeded at its DC 30 Athletics check after falling 100'), and then under the guidance of its giant rider was able to come up beneath the tower, gaining total cover from any attacks.

The invoker came up with a plan to blast it out of its cover: he conjured his imp (minor action), had it fly down to the base of the tower (move action), activated his third eye (another minor action: the imp has the Eye of Vecna in it, though now no longer under Vecna's influence, and when the invoker activiates his 3rd eye he can see through his imp's eyes and has LoS and LoE from there) and then spent an action point to attack with Thunderwave (encounter power as a multi-class wizard), the plan being to blast the dragon out from beneath the tower, so the ranged strikers could attack it, and to blast the giant of its mount so it would take 25d10 or so falling down to the bottom of the rift.

The invoker is also a Divine Philosopher (and so gets two attack rolls with an action point) and a Sage of Ages (and so gets to roll a bonus d20 at the start of each round, and substitute that into any roll desired). The bonus roll was a 1, so he ignored that. His two rolls against the dragon were a 3 and a 4. He needed a 12 to hits its Fort, and so was 8 short - but he has a d8 for Memories of 1000 Lifetimes, and a +3 from Insightful Riposte. So as long as he rolled 5 or more on his Memories roll he would still hit. So he rolled that, but got a 2. Then he rolled to hit the giant and rolled another 4, missing it.

So a valiant plan came to naught.

<snip>

Then on the dragon's actual turn, with its sight back, it encased the ranger in an icy tomb: stunned, immune to forced movement and OG 60 cold (SE all). Various other attacks - a breath weapon, plus more aura damage - were wittling away at the party and it looked like they might be going to lose. But then the players came up with a plan.

The dragon was flying about 2 squares away from the tower. So the fighter ran and jumped onto its back as a charge. The paladin was then able to blast it away from the tower with Strength of Ten, and the sorcerer used his high level Power Jewel to regain Demonsoul Bolts and used them to blast it further away. This got all of the PCs except for the fighter out of its aura. The paladin also used Divine Mettle to give the ranger a save at +8, which was successful, and so the power of the Raven Queen melted away his icy tomb, and he was then able to help himself, the paladin and the sorcerer with a Word of Vigour.

Around this time the dragon got bloodied, and the fighter did more damage to it with a jackal strike. He action pointed and pounded away (including with a Battle Cry which delivered more badly-needed healing), and there were ranged attacks also. The dragon hit him with its claws (including a crit) and got in a couple of bites too (though both did only miss damage), but his Battle Cry plus a Second Wind (2 surges with Cloak of the Walking Wounded) kept him up.

When the dragon tried to fly off carrying the fighter with it, he hit it with an OA which immobilised it (Pinning Strike feat), and then on his turn he hit it with something (I can't remember what) that knocks it prone. So it crashed, and this time - because it was no longer over the open rift but rather the icy ledge - it had no opportunity to recover before crashing. Both the fighter and the dragon took 26 hp from 50' of falling damage. (I gave the player of the fighter the chance to make an Acro check to ride the dragon down - half damage on a success, 1.5 damage on a fail - but he declined, and so they landed 5 squares apart.)

The invoker's turn then came up in the sequence, and he critted against the dragon with Mantle of the Infidel. It took 50-odd damage and had only 10 hp left after the fall, and so lost its chance to fly to freedom. The sorcerer then retook control of the tower, flew it down to the level of the ledge, and the dwarf hopped back on and they took a short rest.

[/sblock]I don't think that combat and non-combat are in wildly different compartments here.

 

[innerdude]

Most people would regard the combat example as traditional - the mechanics determine whether A can kill B - but would regard the circles example as "player narrative control" - because there is no causal connection between anything A's character did in the fiction and the fact that the old classmate has a habit of frequenting the Green Dragon. But you can't capture this contrast by looking at the distribution of arrows between cubes and clouds; nor by looking at the content of individual clouds.

Ah, okay ---- this getting closer to the heart of what I'm trying to get at. And you're right, the "arrow distribution" or state transference, as I labeled it, gives you no indication as to what the "cubes" side is doing.

The basic process of state transference (from cube to cloud, cloud to cube, etc.) is the same across RPG systems; what ISN'T the same is A) what's happening inside the "cubes," B) how much state change can take place from any given "arrow," and C) where the locus for state change originates.

The contrast between your two examples is fairly straightforward---in the case of attacking the goblin, the resulting state change in the fiction is a direct result of something C) the character actually does, has B) minimal repercussions outside the immediate scene, and is A) tightly bounded in the rules.

(As a side note, it's easy to see why dungeon crawling was the initial milieu in which D&D was introduced, because it almost completely eliminates B) from the equation. The GM simply didn't need to worry about anything outside the immediate scene.)

By contrast, while the Burning Wheel example demonstrates that the "Circles" mechanic is A) still bounded in the rules, the C) resulting fictional state change is in no way correlated to anything the character can actually do, and B) has dramatically broader scale implications for the downline fictional state.

Unless the character is a time-traveling chronomancer of exceeding power, he or she can't plausibly create the fictional state resulting from the "Circles" check through any action they themselves can perform. It's a metagame, player-controlled mechanic, and the resulting state change carries an exponentially larger "ripple" effect. Even though the "Circles" rule is just as codified as the combat rules allowing an attack with a sword, it's doing something entirely different.

Simply saying, "Oh look, we've introduced a State 2 / cube-to-cloud / left arrow transference" doesn't tell us much in and of itself. The fact that both examples produce a fictional state change is merely endemic to the fact that we're playing an RPG and not something else. (I think we've established pretty well by now that an RPG must assume State 2 / State 3 interactions. If there's no arrows moving between cube and cloud (in either direction), we're not playing an RPG; we're either playing a boardgame or a shared storytelling game.)

In this sense, as a game design exercise, the clouds/cubes model might be useful for visualizing the process of RPG play, but I don't know that it's all that useful from a GM adjudication standpoint. Even in games that give some form of explicit control of the fiction to the player (not necessarily to the character), ultimately it comes down to GM judgment call in the end. "How much latitude do I give to any given player proposed action to modify the fiction?"

In some cases, the rules specifically bind that latitude; in some cases, it's a pure judgment call; in some cases, it's something in between (some bounded rules extrapolated and interpreted). The question is how to apply that latitude and judgment in such a way that the resulting fictional state pleases as many members of the group as possible.

I think there may be another undercurrent here as well, which is, even if there are metagame mechanics that allow players to directly modify the fiction, the general social contract between players and GM should give rise to "appropriate" fictional state changes. When your player rolls his "Circles" check, it's generally assumed the GM doesn't also get to turn the PC into an archangel of infinite power; that falls outside the agreed upon "contract". When your player's character tries to close the Abyss, your player is assuming that you're going to act in good faith to provide a satisfactory conclusion, one that meets the desired levels of dramatic tension, stakes, and investment of the group.

 

[pemerton]

In this sense, as a game design exercise, the clouds/cubes model might be useful for visualizing the process of RPG play, but I don't know that it's all that useful from a GM adjudication standpoint.

Well, it wasn't put forward as an adjudication tool. It was put forward to analyse the relationship between mechanics and fiction (does the mechanical resolution impact the fiction? does the fictional state impact the mechanical resolution?), because Baker was trying to understand what had gone wrong in one of his designs (In A Wicked Age).

But I also think it sheds some light on D&D combat - there's a reason that classic D&D combat can turn into "number bingo" in a way that (say) RM or RQ combat can't. Which is because not only hp deductions, but also the to hit roll itself, can turn into cubes-to-cubes with no reference to the fiction.

I also suspect that this may helps explain why the view that combat contrasts with roleplaying, and that mechanics are a burden on roleplaying, seems a fairly widespread belief among D&D players.

When your player's character tries to close the Abyss, your player is assuming that you're going to act in good faith to provide a satisfactory conclusion, one that meets the desired levels of dramatic tension, stakes, and investment of the group.

Well, the player has an intent for the action declaration: seal the Abyss! My first question is, how do you propose to achieve that? He explains what his PC is going to do (as I posted upthread), which seems reasonable in the context of the fiction. There is then the generation of various rightward arrows: "I'm trying to seal the Abyss" - "OK, that's a Hard Arcana check"; "I'm going to give of my chaotic essence to help create this zone of ultimate entropy" - "OK, deduct the requisite number of surges/hp for +2 per surge/surge-worth to a maximum of +8"; "I'm going to use my ability to spatially manipulate my magic to stretch out my zone of darkness to fill the zone of entropy" - "OK, that requires expenditure Stretch Spell"; etc.

Of course that's regimenting it a bit more than the reality of the table, but it basically gets the structure of what happened. The fact that it rests on the GM's adjudicative discretion doesn't affect it, from the point of view of cloud/cube analysis. It's like the OP diagram, where being on the high ground (a state in the fiction) grants +2 to the attack roll (a mechanical state of affairs). That part of the diagram doesn't need to change, whether - as in some versions of AD&D - there is an express bonus in the rules granted for being on higher ground or whether - as in Moldvay Basic, or Burning Wheel - the GM would have to adjudicate the bonus as part of his/her job. (In the example of play in Moldvay Basic, when the hobgoblins come in Silverleaf says to them, in their own language, "It's OK, Gary sent us". The GM allows this to grant a bonus on the reaction roll. That's clouds ("friendly greeting") to cubes ("bonus on the reaction roll"), and not less so because it turns on ad hoc GM adjudication rather than some stipulated mechanic.)

When your player rolls his "Circles" check, it's generally assumed the GM doesn't also get to turn the PC into an archangel of infinite power; that falls outside the agreed upon "contract".

There's no need to make reference to any social contract here; it falls outside the rules.

A circles check is made to meet up with someone you know. The possible range of people you might know is settled by your lifepaths (which were determined during PC building) plus traits that can be earned during play and add new circles. And if the check fails, the GM is at liberty to narrate either (i) you didn't find the person you were hoping to, or (ii) you meet someone (perhaps the person you were looking for, perhaps someone else) who is opposed to you. If the GM opts for (ii) - "the enmity clause" - then that must fit into the fiction in an appropriate way.* So the mechanic combines backstory generation and reaction rolls into a single resolution framework.

It can no more be a consequence of a circles check that the PC becomes (or is revealed to be) an archangel of infinite power, then it can be a consequence of a roll to hit in D&D that a character plane shifts to the Nine Hells.


[size=-2]*Eg at one point the sorcerer in my game, being broke, made a circles check hoping to meet up with Jabal, the leader of his cabal, and be offered some work. The check failed, and so instead (as determined by me, the GM, activating the enmity clause) Jabal's hired help Athog turned up and told the PC that Jabal was instructing him to leave town, now!, because of a cursed item he was carrying.[/size]