D20 'philosophy' cramping my style

[JRRNeiklot]

Why all the fuss? The DM, and thus the designer of the module is tantamount to god, so slap on some extra skill points. If the players bitch, call 'em on metagaming, dock them exp and move on.

 

[mmadsen]

The issue that I think Drifter Bob intended to be his central point, and the Bluff question as an example of it, was that he percieves D&D having gone down a road to railroading everything to adhere to the rules, and that the rules are ill-suited to the task. In short, he is worried that the 'tail is wagging the dog', which is to say that the story is being driven by the tenets of the rules, and thus stifling creativity. Further, he believes that this mentality will lead to D&D becoming unpopular once more, and the game and hobby as a whole will suffer.

Well said, WizarDru.

We have a number of very different, yet related, issues:

I have an imp, and I want him to lie, but imps don't have ranks in Bluff. What do I do?

There are a number of options: rule-zero that the imp simply has those ranks or has some arbitrary bonus, trade out ranks from another skill the imp won't need, give the imp a magic item, make the imp a quasit, give the imp a few levels of Rogue, etc.

There's a creature/character I'd like to use, but I want to add a skill/feat/spell/special ability -- without breaking the rules, and without going through any rigamarole.

Of course, there is no way to just add a skill/feat/spell/special ability within the class-level system -- although you can always arbitrarily "rule zero" whatever you'd like. What you typically can do, within the system, is to swap something else out, but if you don't want to do that, there's no way to just add that one skill/feat/spell/special ability (and increase the character's CR by less than one full point) -- which is something people do all the time in point-based systems.

Because D&D classes always grant hit dice, improved BAB and Saves, etc., "simply" adding a level or two of, say, Rogue means adjusting almost every number in the creature/character's stat block. If you don't like fiddling with the numbers for the sake of fiddling with the numbers, that's a hassle. (Granted, we're at a site full of people who do like fiddling with the numbers.)

Back when everything wasn't in the rules, I could just make common-sense judgments. Now everything's quantified -- and has to be quantified within the rules, ahead of time.

This, I think, is the core of Drifter Bob's complaint.

 

[mmadsen]

Kriegspiel

In my previous post, I mentioned what I thought was Drifter Bob's core complaint:

Back when everything wasn't in the rules, I could just make common-sense judgments. Now everything's quantified -- and has to be quantified within the rules, ahead of time.

This isn't a new problem. In fact, the Prussian military faced a similar problem with its Kriegspiel (lit. wargame) in the 19th century:

The nineteenth-century Prussian game started life with a rigid structure and copious formal rules. The two sides were each placed in a separate room with a model of the terrain or a map. The umpires moved from one room to another collecting orders from the players, and then retired to a third room to consult the rules and find the results of combat. A great deal of their time was consumed in leafing through voluminous sets of rules, consulting tables and giving rulings on fine legal points. By about 1870, however, this rigid system was starting to be thought rather clumsy and time-consuming. Quite apart from the many defects and loopholes in the rules themselves, it reduced the umpires, who were often very senior officers, to the role of mere clerks and office boys. clearly, such a state of affairs was intolerable.

It was General von verdy du Vernois who finally broke with this system, and abolished the rule book altogether. His approach to the wargame was the free kriegspiel, in which the umpire had a totally free hand to decide the result of moves and combats. He did not do this according to any set of written rules, but just on his own military knowledge and experience. He would collect the players' moves in exactly the same way as before; but he would then simply give a considered professional opinion on the outcome. This speeded up the game a very great deal, and ensured that there was always a well thought-out reason for everything that happened. This was a great help in the debrief after the game, and it allowed players to learn by their mistakes very quickly.​

(This ties in with the "I hate math" thread.)

 

[GSHamster]

Back when everything wasn't in the rules, I could just make common-sense judgments. Now everything's quantified -- and has to be quantified within the rules, ahead of time.

The problem is 'common-sense'. Those Prussian officers spent 20+ years, full-time, gaining the common-sense necessary to judge military matters.

I'm not entirely sure if I trust the 'common-sense' of the vast majority of DMs out there. Heck, I'm not even sure I trust my common-sense. Especially when we're dealing with a game that includes obviously 'un-real' elements.

 

[cdsaint]

There's a creature/character I'd like to use, but I want to add a skill/feat/spell/special ability -- without breaking the rules, and without going through any rigamarole.

(Granted, we're at a site full of people who do like fiddling with the numbers.)

Back when everything wasn't in the rules, I could just make common-sense judgments. Now everything's quantified -- and has to be quantified within the rules, ahead of time.

I suppose I can understand this point, though I am one of those who likes fiddling with the numbers. Not only don't I mind advancing creatures by the rules, but actually enjoy said fiddling. If you don't want to change the imp by swapping skills, adding intelligence, or one of the other methods then I guess you could just re-name it a "Lying Imp" or "Bluff Imp" or something and just give it a racial +4 modifier to bluff. This isn't a horrendous flouting of the rules, and at least you took the time to note that your non standard Imp is non standard.

I guess what is difficult for me to understand is why it is such a bad thing that there are rules for advancing creatures that are pretty comprehensive and allow a DM to be able to advance creatures in a fairly predictable way. one of the reasons I stopped playing AD&D was the fact that most creature advancement in AD&D was GM whim as much as anything else. Also left to GM whim and interpretation was almost anything that happened outside of combat. Depending on the GM's style lying to an NPC was almost entirely a matter of whether he /she wanted you to succeed or not. If the new 3x ruleset were not as comprehensive as it is I would never have come back to D&D at all. So to me, the reliance on the rules, as a DM or a PC is a positive.

I suppose that to some people I'll always be a rules lawyer, but my players know (and appriciate the fact) that if the creature they're fighting has 100 hit points, or the NPC they're trying to lie to has a +20 sense motive, that those numbers are arrived at by the same basic methods that they have to use when creating their characters. As a player (or DM) that just makes things seem more part of a coherent whole to me.

Chris

 

[mmadsen]

I guess what is difficult for me to understand is why it is such a bad thing that there are rules for advancing creatures that are pretty comprehensive and allow a DM to be able to advance creatures in a fairly predictable way.

I don't think anyone has said that it's a bad thing to have clear rules for advancing creatures, just that the rules could be more flexible and require less work.

For instance, if the Expert NPC class didn't grant hit dice, improved BAB and Saves, etc., you could add Expert levels without changing a creature's combat stats.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

I think my major problem with requiring this level of conformity to the rules is that it takes far too much time. The week (as a guess) that DB would need to make sure that every tiny thing in his adventure conforms to the rules would be better spent adding new areas to the adventure, refining the plot, looking for logical errors, or fleshing out the NPCs. These are things that would actually contribute to my enjoyment of the game, as opposed to following game conventions for monster generation, which I could not possibly care less about.

 

[TOWER]

I don't think anyone has said that it's a bad thing to have clear rules for advancing creatures, just that the rules could be more flexible and require less work.

For instance, if the Expert NPC class didn't grant hit dice, improved BAB and Saves, etc., you could add Expert levels without changing a creature's combat stats.

And that's what templates can do.

New template "Lair Lair, Pants on Fire"
All stats same as base creature.
Skills: Bluff is always a class skill. Creature gains a +4 racial bonus to Bluff checks (unless the creature already has a racial bonus to Bluff checks in which case use which ever is higher).
Feats: Creature gains Skill Focus (Bluff) as a bonus feat.
CR: +1/2. If the creature has a CR of 1 or more then this template does increase its CR in a major way.

Or something similar.

 

[Crothian]

templates are the way of the future....

 

[Elder-Basilisk]

And that's where the complaint really really rings hollow. To change four skill points on an imp requires maybe 10 seconds of thought and 10 seconds of typing then another 20-30 seconds of copy/paste or delete to get the SRD layout into proper statblock format.

If Drifter Bob were talking about statting out a 12th level wizard and her hell-hound familiar or advancing a CR 7 chimera to challenge a 14th level party, I'd be sympathetic. Those things take a significant amount of time. However, he's not complaining about that. He's complaining about the supposed difficulty of adding some bluff skill to an imp--something that is not difficult or time-consuming at all.

I've written a number of modules using the 3.x ruleset and generally it's creating the statblock in the first place that takes time, not moving a couple skill points from here to there. The level of conformity to the rules that's being discussed really doesn't take much more time than ignoring them.

I think my major problem with requiring this level of conformity to the rules is that it takes far too much time. The week (as a guess) that DB would need to make sure that every tiny thing in his adventure conforms to the rules would be better spent adding new areas to the adventure, refining the plot, looking for logical errors, or fleshing out the NPCs. These are things that would actually contribute to my enjoyment of the game, as opposed to following game conventions for monster generation, which I could not possibly care less about.