D&D General Creativity?

[pemerton]

@Pedantic @Lanefan @EzekielRaiden @Manbearcat

Here's my attempt to elucidate the difference between (i) the concern about MUs/wizards violating @Campbell's principle, and (ii) garden variety action declaration that produces changes in the fiction, often advantageous to the position of the player who declared the action.

(ii) typically involves engaging meaningfully with the fiction, identifying a way in which the PC abilities, including the PC resource list/inventory, can interact with the fiction so as to produce the desired change. There is then, typically (not always) some sort of check/roll required to determine whether things work out as desired, which creates the possibility for things going wrong.

This is, in essence, playing the game.

(i) on the other hand is, in its actual working, basically indistinguishable from a fiat metagame ability. The player doesn't have to engage with the fiction beyond noting the initial description of the situation (eg a yawning cavern). There is no check/roll required to use the spell. The player just declares that the fiction becomes thus-and-so, and it becomes thus-and-so.

There is a type of play here, as the MU/wizard player has to be familiar with the various options on their spell load out - this is what creates the space for Manbearcat's possibility of "The Wizard player morbidly profligate + misplay-city". But while there is a fig-leaf of in-fiction rationale, the actual dynamic of play is the GM having to share control over the scene-framing with another participant - ie the wizard/MU player.

 

[Campbell]

I wanted to touch on our previous conversation:

I think we often confuse our preferences for how we prefer to run/play games with the ease or workability of different methods of play. On these boards for instance, it's often assumed that if you like to GM, it's because you enjoy setting design and/or deciding what play will be about / story telling. So, it becomes gospel that other ways to run roleplaying games, including ways that are fully compatible with more traditional games are more difficult to achieve.

At least in my experience, especially with people who have less experience with the game, setting the basic parameters and work to build the initial scenario/situation with the players in the game is a far more natural experience for me. I love being a GM. I don't like world building for its own sake. I like letting things play out. I like framing situations/scenes that are tailored to the player characters. The PCs are what I invest in when I'm running a game.

It would be very easy for me to assume that the more common process is likely to lead to frustrating results because it has for me in the past. I think the better takeaway is probably that multiple things work and for the most part most players are able to adapt to multiple approaches. That basically there's more than one way to skin a cat.

 

[Campbell]

One thing I will cop to is that I play and run exclusively home games with people I generally like and trust* with the exception of a few Discord games with people I also like and trust. Our local player pool of friends is around ~20 people. Our tastes on play techniques is all across the map, but people are willing to try different things. New players are usually recruited more from friends than like online or game stores. We value social compatibility over game compatibility for the most part.

We do have a much higher GM to Exclusive Player rate per capita than is the norm out in the wild, but most of that is a genuine effort to draft and develop within our own larger play group. It's also a thing where we try not to have people in our play group who exclusively GM.

*Always have. Always will. I need to be able to drink a couple beers with you if I'm going to spend hours of my life hanging out with you.

 

[Celebrim]

You’re literally describing “reconceptualize scenes” here.

The prior gamestate was “impassable obstacle so no access to gamestate > over there” to “obstacle obviated and gamestate/situation reconceptualized.”

And, as you go on, Wizards have a Swiss Army Knife of these loadouts and deployments and it gets progressively worse as we move through levels.

Well, sort of. I agree with the obstacle obviated part to some extent, albeit a non-caster could just jump across it at levels that wall of stone are applicable or climb down and then back up again, or perhaps depending on the situation skillfully set up a rope bridge with a grappling hook thrown javelin. (At least, in my campaign, that would be the expectation.)

But in my head "I cast Wall of Stone" is really no more reconceptualizing the scene than "I have a rope." Both are just using a tool that already existed in the scene. Wall of Stone is probably one of the most powerful tools in the game, which is why it's the first thing that came into my head, but it's still just a tool. If this was a sci-fi game it would just be just another sufficiently advanced piece of technology, and I probably put the chasm there knowing that one way to bridge it would be cast "Wall of Stone", which wouldn't bother me. It's not like that sort of obstacle represents a real challenge after a certain point. A DM wanting to play a strictly gritty game where players don't do fantastic things should probably limit the game to fifth level of below, and that includes even mundane classes who will eventually pick up super-hero abilities. That's the whole point of zero to hero (to demigod as the case may be).

But I have no idea what you are talking about in the following section, and you'll have to get a lot less abstract about it:

Trad GMs have an endless array of “throws” in the play-degenerating game of Roshambo to keep spellcasters in check. Not only are GMs not confined to the actual action economy of the game…but they aren’t confined to the options of Rock/Paper/Scissors! They can pull out anything from an alternative implement to a tactical nuke…because all of this overwhelmingly exists offscreen and is the exclusive purview of the GM’s pretense-to-simulation, extrapolation of setting/NPCs etc. A mental model that increasingly becomes untenable to both (a) run legitimately in the first place and (b) be sufficiently telegraphed in the actual play of the game such that the Wizard player can respond to the GM’s 3 x throw (to the Wizard players 1 x throw) of “block your spellcasting plays/moves.”

I mean that reads like spaghetti to me. To me, Wizards have always been too easy to kill to be too worried about them. Invariably they set off a trap or get in close quarters with a grappler or a tunneller or take a critical hit and then the glass cannon is suddenly very dead. In 1e I found straight wizard to be almost unplayable because they just never had the hit points to be out of being one round from death. In 3e it was barely better, albeit I was playing with some heavily modified house rules that prevented a lot of the win buttons RAW 3.X allowed.

But as far as the idea of me countering things like you are talking about above, I really have no idea what you are talking about. I think you are talking about things like Fly and Invisibility and Speak with the Dead and how, if you are going to have certain sorts of encounters or plots in your adventure you need to take into account PC abilities. For example, it's a good rule of play that at higher levels a monster that cannot fly and has no ranged attacks should not appear in an area without a ceiling low enough that the monster can reach anything in the room if you intend that monster to be a serious encounter, because you have to account for the possibility that the party will fly and take out the monster with ranged attacks trivially. I note this is good advice even the party doesn't have a wizard, as parties are likely to stash away potions of flying or other means of obtaining flight because of the obvious utility. I don't feel that's as huge of a burden or as big problem as you are making it out to be. Maybe I just don't get it, but your outline above doesn't ring any bells.

There are 3 realities once you hit level 9ish and above:

Not really. The biggest change at level 9 is "Raise Dead" comes online for the Cleric, and honestly, that's not an unwelcome thing because by this point players are heavily invested in PC's and having a way to keep them alive isn't bad for the campaign.

I really don't get where you are coming from.

 

[Pedantic]

@Pedantic @Lanefan @EzekielRaiden @Manbearcat

Here's my attempt to elucidate the difference between (i) the concern about MUs/wizards violating @Campbell's principle, and (ii) garden variety action declaration that produces changes in the fiction, often advantageous to the position of the player who declared the action.

(ii) typically involves engaging meaningfully with the fiction, identifying a way in which the PC abilities, including the PC resource list/inventory, can interact with the fiction so as to produce the desired change. There is then, typically (not always) some sort of check/roll required to determine whether things work out as desired, which creates the possibility for things going wrong.

This is, in essence, playing the game.

I don't see a problem with the framing here, except that the dice roll isn't particularly significant. That's not the game. The game was selecting the action to declare, knowing the percentage change of failure and deciding if the risk was worth it. Dice happen after you've played and before you start playing again, and merely add an additional element of risk to some action declarations.

(i) on the other hand is, in its actual working, basically indistinguishable from a fiat metagame ability. The player doesn't have to engage with the fiction beyond noting the initial description of the situation (eg a yawning cavern). There is no check/roll required to use the spell. The player just declares that the fiction becomes thus-and-so, and it becomes thus-and-so.

There is a type of play here, as the MU/wizard player has to be familiar with the various options on their spell load out - this is what creates the space for Manbearcat's possibility of "The Wizard player morbidly profligate + misplay-city". But while there is a fig-leaf of in-fiction rationale, the actual dynamic of play is the GM having to share control over the scene-framing with another participant - ie the wizard/MU player.

I don't think that's a reasonable framing of the situation at all. The MU simply has access to more and general higher impact action declarations, but ideally they are no functionally different in kind than non-magical abilities. Casting spider climb let's you move upward at a speed of X and climbing at a DC 15 let's you move upward at a speed of Y.

It's a bit frustrating that the athletics skill fails to keep scaling while spellcasting doesn't, but the actual resolution of the two propositions can be precisely the same. The actions are self contained packets of manipulation on whatever the scene is, that change it in specified ways.

 

[Celebrim]

Simply that the Wizard (as emblematic of full casters), to me, appears to be built on a form of recontextualizing the scenes they are in, while the Fighter (as emblematic of non- or low-casters) is effectively forced to exclusively work within the existing context.

Is "I can fly for 5 minutes!" more recontextualizing the scene than, "I can leap over haystacks!"? In both cases, that assertion being made is something that preexisted the scene. Neither character has discovered anything new about the scene. Each has just asserted what they could already do in the context of the scene. In the context of Superman is stopping bank robbers, "I am bulletproof!" is not recontextualizing the scene at all. Everyone knows at the start of the scene (except maybe the hapless bank robbers) that Supes is bulletproof. Asserting his bulletproofness or his ability to bend iron bars is asserting anything new about the scene.

I mean at some level there is more in the toolbox for casters than non-casters, albeit usually resource constrained and balanced by a general squishiness and ineffectiveness when not using magic (that some later editions break by over giving to casters to create more 'balanced' or at least uniform play styles across classes). But it's more a matter of the scope (quantity) of what they may assert casting a spell, particularly if spells are written in a very binary manner with few limitations (which low text terse versions of a spell usually suffer from) than it is a difference in kind.

The game I run is Dungeon World which (as Pemerton said, albeit about Apocalypse World) puts the recontextualizing right into the moves themselves, since that's literally what moves do.

I'm reading the Dungeon World SRD right now (again) just in case I missed something and I just don't see it. Dungeon World moves as written don't allow you to narrate any more than a D&D proposition would. In fact, they are just encoding the most common sorts of D&D propositions.

They resolve open questions and return new context for the fiction.

But so does any Proposition->Fortune->Resolution cycle.

 

[Celebrim]

I don't think that's a reasonable framing of the situation at all. The MU simply has access to more and general higher impact action declarations, but ideally they are no functionally different in kind than non-magical abilities. Casting spider climb let's you move upward at a speed of X and climbing at a DC 15 let's you move upward at a speed of Y.

It's a bit frustrating that the athletics skill fails to keep scaling while spellcasting doesn't, but the actual resolution of the two propositions can be precisely the same. The actions are self-contained packets of manipulation on whatever the scene is, that change it in specified ways.

Absolutely agreed. And in 3e, which is what I play, one of my early decisions was that the 3e designers had not been conservative enough about spells (removing many of the 1e restrictions on their usage) while at the same time being too conservative about skills (for fear presumably of the novel). So the first thing I did was scale back the scope of spells that looked problematic while working to ensure skills were bountiful and scaled well for non-casters.

 

[Pedantic]

So the first thing I did was scale back the scope of spells that looked problematic while working to ensure skills were bountiful and scaled well for non-casters.

I'd be interested to see more of your take on skills. I've got a work in progress document trying to map out everything I think a skill system needs by synthesizing a bunch of 3.x era systems, because I've given up hope on any modern RPG actually writing a complete and objective skill system. We've moved solidly away from "DC Y to activate C action" or even "DC Y to activate C action at X effectiveness," to either a set of generic difficulties or a level scaling DC model, which either do not serve to give players a meaningful game to play, or make that game trivial to play.

 

[Lanefan]

@Pedantic @Lanefan @EzekielRaiden @Manbearcat

Here's my attempt to elucidate the difference between (i) the concern about MUs/wizards violating @Campbell's principle, and (ii) garden variety action declaration that produces changes in the fiction, often advantageous to the position of the player who declared the action.

(ii) typically involves engaging meaningfully with the fiction, identifying a way in which the PC abilities, including the PC resource list/inventory, can interact with the fiction so as to produce the desired change. There is then, typically (not always) some sort of check/roll required to determine whether things work out as desired, which creates the possibility for things going wrong.

This is, in essence, playing the game.

(i) on the other hand is, in its actual working, basically indistinguishable from a fiat metagame ability. The player doesn't have to engage with the fiction beyond noting the initial description of the situation (eg a yawning cavern). There is no check/roll required to use the spell. The player just declares that the fiction becomes thus-and-so, and it becomes thus-and-so.

OK, decent summary. I'm with you so far.

There is a type of play here, as the MU/wizard player has to be familiar with the various options on their spell load out - this is what creates the space for Manbearcat's possibility of "The Wizard player morbidly profligate + misplay-city". But while there is a fig-leaf of in-fiction rationale, the actual dynamic of play is the GM having to share control over the scene-framing with another participant - ie the wizard/MU player.

Here, however, you lose me; in that in theory the GM has already framed the scene (or set the stage, whatever terminology works) before the wizard or anyone else has had a chance to do anything. Subsequent to that, interaction with the scene isn't so much a reframing as just the normal run of play...right?

Simple example: party opens a door and walks into a room.

The GM frames the scene/sets the stage by narrating what the PCs see in there including the room's size and (as necessary) lighting, exits, major furniture, significant other contents or features, and any occupants that might be present.

Now that scene is set for the players to interact with via their PCs should they so desire and, if they do, almost inevitably change in some way(s). This doesn't seem the least bit out of the ordinary or controversial, so what am I missing?

Unless you're talking about situations where the players through their PCs pre-emptively force a reframing of the scene before it ever gets narrated....? For example, before getting to the room scene above the wizard summoned some monsters who went in there first and made a mess of things, or the fighter threw a molotov cocktail in through the window and set some stuff on fire, in either case meaning the GM's initial narration of the room when the PCs/players first see it has to take into account what the PCs have already done to it.

 

[Celebrim]

I'd be interested to see more of your take on skills.

That's a lengthy topic best taken elsewhere if we are going to go on about it, but briefly it's necessary to also look at my take on Spells.

Consider this take on the classic spell "Spider Climb"

Spider Climb
Transmutation
Level: Sor/Wiz 1
Components: V, S, M
Casting Time: 1 standard action
Range: Touch
Target: Creature touched
Duration: 10 min./level
Saving Throw: Will negates (harmless)
Spell Resistance: Yes (harmless)
The subject gains a climb speed equal to their base movement rate. This gives them a +8 racial bonus to climb checks, allows them to take 10 on all climb checks even when under stress, may act as if their limbs where free while climbing, and allows them to rest on a surface without making a climb check to retain their grip. A spider climbing creature retains its Dexterity bonus to Armor Class while climbing and is not considered flat-footed while climbing in combat.
Material Component: A drop of bitumen and a live spider, both of which must be eaten by the subject.

Now that's a very useful spell but what it doesn't do is scale. In some ways, it's much more useful for the Wizard to cast it on the Rogue than it is to use it as a self-boost. It does allow the Wizard to traverse a basic climbing obstacle if needed, but it doesn't in anyway outshine what a highly skilled non-spellcaster might be able to do.

A simple way to talk about the difference between my skills and RAW skills in 3.5 is that in 3.5 standing up from prone as a free action was a DC 35 Tumble check. In my game, it's a DC 15 Tumble check. A more surprising example is that one of my skills just directly adds to movement rate: +10 bonus to the skill means that you have a base move +10' per round. And it's worth noting Rogue has 13 skill points at 1st level.