D&D General Discuss: Combat as War in D&D

[doctorbadwolf]

Alternatively: You might design an open-ended Skill Challenge (or just a "montage" part of the campaign, however long it runs) to see how many weaknesses the party can discover/exploit/create before she whittles away Bahamut's forces too hard to get you to the fight. Then, you generate a mechanical representation of the kind of threat she poses to the party, based on the spread of results from that process. As a result, a discrete spread of "possible Tiamats" could happen, all depending on what the party has done to prepare for the fight, whether by having tools/resources she's vulnerable to or actually sapping her power.

E.g., Tiamat is specifically the goddess of Greed and Envy, and her domains are Strife, Tyranny, and Vengeance. 4e deities are effectively living concepts, so things that are anathema to those concepts should weaken them. If the party is able to secure the Tears of the Martyr, a set of earrings made from the solidified tears of a martyred pacifist who forgave her killers as she burnt at the stake, then perhaps an element can be added to Tiamat's statblock saying that certain attacks simply can't hit someone wearing them--they literally embody the antithesis of Vengeance, and thus treat Tiamat herself as if she weren't there. Alternatively, if Tiamat is able to corrupt a powerful figure into seeking disproportionate revenge for a previously-forgiven error, she is empowered symbolically and therefore literally, because symbols literally are divine power. Etc. There's no need to shape the combat mechanics for what Tiamat absolutely is, because the party literally cannot encounter her outside of a specific, prepared-for situation.*

Yeah exactly that sort of stuff.

Hence @Lanefan why I am so on about "why should it be that there is one-and-only, eternal, ideal Ogre?" (or whatever else), that all Ogres necessarily are or necessarily deviate away from. There is no Platonic Ogre; there are only living ogres. Each living ogre exists in a context. Sure, there are common trends or patterns--they're mostly strong, mostly pretty durable, and mostly not very smart--but trying to make one Form Of The Ogre and acting like that gives you real insight about the workings of the world really does have negative consequences. The abstractions--HP, accuracy, defense, etc.--only matter for the context of kicking (or failing to kick) the PCs' butts. The other stats are either beholden to overall narrative concerns (consistency, as you call it) or to what you know makes sense.

*And, I argue, exactly the same applies to the ogre and the orc and the illithid and whatever else the party fights. If there are ogres in the place the party is adventuring, you should already know what their naturalistic attributes are (such as "how much can it lift?" or "what concepts can it understand?"), and most preferably should have already prepared a statblock specific to that context. You then prepare a different statblock if they return to that area later, because the context has changed; the monster itself has not changed, but the answer to the question, "what is this monster like in a fight?" has changed for this specific party.

And that's all a monster's (combat) statblock IS: the answer to "what is this monster like in a fight?" That answer can and does change as the PCs do. 4e's rules very conciously DON'T tell you what to do with the non-combat attributes of a creature, because you as DM should know better than they do what those are.

This 100%

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I won't speak for @EzekielRaiden here, but I don't see the 'game world' as a 'thing' at all. It is simply a stage upon which is set the activities of the game, at least the PC RP. The mechanics are simply a tool by which the narrative is evoked.

For my part, the world definitely exists in a "imaginary but concrete" way, but its manifestation in numbers does not, exactly in the same way that a map is not the territory itself but depends on a real territory existing in order to have meaning and purpose.

That concrete "existence" is necessary for players to be able to make informed decisions and adapt to the results of their choices. If there is nothing (imaginarily) "durable," no ontological inertia as TVTropes puts it, you can't really learn anything: there are no entities for you to learn anything about, no referents to hold the reference. But just because the world persists and has "durable" content, doesn't mean that the representation of those things in the abstractions is always identical, even for the exact same creature (e.g. not just the type "adult red dragon," but specifically Karithraxa the Inferno). Karithraxa has a specific history, specific non-combat attributes, etc. and those things can't be changed without justification (ontological inertia). (As always, as long as it really COULD be known, even if bad luck, coincidence, or lack of effort prevented it from actually being known.) But the question, "How much of a threat is Karithraxa the Inferno?" simply does not have a singular answer due to being context-dependent. That context comes from what the world is, but is not fixed in any meaningful sense. Just as "What is important enough about this location to include on a map?" is too contextual to give an absolute answer to, yet still arises from the durable, concrete nature of the territory itself. Every map is necessarily partial; if it is a good map, however, it is "partial" by way of being only the parts that are relevant to you when you're using it. A statblock is likewise: it is necessarily partial, contextual, but a good statblock is so by being only what information matters for the fight it appears in, nothing more and nothing less.

 

[Xetheral]

The philosophy expressed goes deeper though, to the heart of the nature of the game itself. I won't speak for @EzekielRaiden here, but I don't see the 'game world' as a 'thing' at all. It is simply a stage upon which is set the activities of the game, at least the PC RP.

For me, world-building is one the biggest draws of TTRPGs.

As a DM, developing an evocative, self-consistent world is what makes the prep time fun. And that time investment pays off again with additional fun at the table when I see the players engrossing themselves in my world to the point that they begin to interact with (and seek out interaction with) the established parts of the world that aren't immediately in front of them.

As a player, I love exploring (in the metaphorical sense, not just the D&D sense) evocative, self-consistent worlds created by other DMs. I like feeling that the world in which I'm roleplaying exists on its own--in fact, I find that feeling basically essential for immersion, and immersion is one of the experiences I most value as a player of TTRPGs.

An inconsistent mechanical representation of the game world makes it harder for a DM to make the characters feel like game world is itself self-consistent. This particularly matters in a CaW playstyle where the characters are encouraged to try to control encounter parameters themselves. With fluid encounter parameters, the "narrative role" of a given NPC or monster isn't necessarily fixed, which is problematic for planning purposes.

For example, kiting a narratively formidable monster into a tribe of Ogres to make them fight each other would be a decent (and fairly run-of-the-mill) CaW strategy, but with inconsistent mechanical representation of Ogres, the actual utility of that strategy is unknowable to the players. Will the Ogres be minions, wiped out in a single use of a breath weapon or other AoE ability? Or will they have enough hit points to occupy the monster for awhile? Or will the Ogres actually be able to hit the monster and be useful offensively instead of just as a delaying tactic? Sure, the players could just consult the DM: "Hey DM, we're thinking of trying kite this monster into that nearby tribe of Ogres. If we did, what narrative role would the Ogres be playing and what statblock would you use?" but to me that would entirely destroy the feeling that the Ogres are a part of the game world that I'm exploring. The success of any given strategy wouldn't even appear to hinge on the "reality" of the game world and instead would be explicitly a metagame decision by the DM.

Note that unlike @Lanefan, I don't personally care whether there is any substance backing up the appearance that the success of my CaW strategies depends on the state of the game world rather than the whim of the DM. The general appearance is enough for me, but that appearance is mandatory if I'm going to enjoy myself as a player in a CaW game.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

For my part, the world definitely exists in a "imaginary but concrete" way, but its manifestation in numbers does not, exactly in the same way that a map is not the territory itself but depends on a real territory existing in order to have meaning and purpose.

That concrete "existence" is necessary for players to be able to make informed decisions and adapt to the results of their choices. If there is nothing (imaginarily) "durable," no ontological inertia as TVTropes puts it, you can't really learn anything: there are no entities for you to learn anything about, no referents to hold the reference. But just because the world persists and has "durable" content, doesn't mean that the representation of those things in the abstractions is always identical, even for the exact same creature (e.g. not just the type "adult red dragon," but specifically Karithraxa the Inferno). Karithraxa has a specific history, specific non-combat attributes, etc. and those things can't be changed without justification (ontological inertia). (As always, as long as it really COULD be known, even if bad luck, coincidence, or lack of effort prevented it from actually being known.) But the question, "How much of a threat is Karithraxa the Inferno?" simply does not have a singular answer due to being context-dependent. That context comes from what the world is, but is not fixed in any meaningful sense. Just as "What is important enough about this location to include on a map?" is too contextual to give an absolute answer to, yet still arises from the durable, concrete nature of the territory itself. Every map is necessarily partial; if it is a good map, however, it is "partial" by way of being only the parts that are relevant to you when you're using it. A statblock is likewise: it is necessarily partial, contextual, but a good statblock is so by being only what information matters for the fight it appears in, nothing more and nothing less.

Yeah, I don't think there is any real disagreement between us. I'm not real worried about metaphysical debates about what the word 'exists' means, or what exactly we are saying exists, etc. There is certainly an agreed shared view of the fiction that the game's participants are working with. SOMETHING there is real, or else real has no meaning at all. 'Ontological Inertia' is good. For specific situations 'fictional position' also works.

And in terms of things like strategy, there is still the necessity that the fiction be 'cognizable' as well. That is if it is utter nonsense and nobody can draw ANY conclusions from anything, then you have nothing but mechanics applied according to some rules, but really no fiction related to it. Some games, like Toon, can get close to that, but there's always SOME sort of 'genre logic' or something at least. I think that things like 'CaW' can be seen as particular styles of applying a process to the fiction, in that case 'thinking about strategy'.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

For me, world-building is one the biggest draws of TTRPGs.

As a DM, developing an evocative, self-consistent world is what makes the prep time fun. And that time investment pays off again with additional fun at the table when I see the players engrossing themselves in my world to the point that they begin to interact with (and seek out interaction with) the established parts of the world that aren't immediately in front of them.

As a player, I love exploring (in the metaphorical sense, not just the D&D sense) evocative, self-consistent worlds created by other DMs. I like feeling that the world in which I'm roleplaying exists on its own--in fact, I find that feeling basically essential for immersion, and immersion is one of the experiences I most value as a player of TTRPGs.

An inconsistent mechanical representation of the game world makes it harder for a DM to make the characters feel like game world is itself self-consistent. This particularly matters in a CaW playstyle where the characters are encouraged to try to control encounter parameters themselves. With fluid encounter parameters, the "narrative role" of a given NPC or monster isn't necessarily fixed, which is problematic for planning purposes.

For example, kiting a narratively formidable monster into a tribe of Ogres to make them fight each other would be a decent (and fairly run-of-the-mill) CaW strategy, but with inconsistent mechanical representation of Ogres, the actual utility of that strategy is unknowable to the players. Will the Ogres be minions, wiped out in a single use of a breath weapon or other AoE ability? Or will they have enough hit points to occupy the monster for awhile? Or will the Ogres actually be able to hit the monster and be useful offensively instead of just as a delaying tactic? Sure, the players could just consult the DM: "Hey DM, we're thinking of trying kite this monster into that nearby tribe of Ogres. If we did, what narrative role would the Ogres be playing and what statblock would you use?" but to me that would entirely destroy the feeling that the Ogres are a part of the game world that I'm exploring. The success of any given strategy wouldn't even appear to hinge on the "reality" of the game world and instead would be explicitly a metagame decision by the DM.

Note that unlike @Lanefan, I don't personally care whether there is any substance backing up the appearance that the success of my CaW strategies depends on the state of the game world rather than the whim of the DM. The general appearance is enough for me, but that appearance is mandatory if I'm going to enjoy myself as a player in a CaW game.

Yeah, I don't know that you would find this to be such an extreme concern. I mean, it is going to vary amongst games, since some GMs/tables might practice a more extreme type of flexibility there. Still, as I said in my last post, no game can really exist where the logic of the story is not 'cognizable' to the participants. Some genre are closer to leaning on realism than others, but all of them have some sort of reliance on things that the participants know and agree on in order for play to function.

Now, a lot of the goal of narratively focused play, such as the kind of flexible scene-framing techniques that some of us use, with 'low myth' setting, is to focus on what the players are interested in doing. So, if they want to play tactical/strategic wargame, then the use of mechanics and situations should be catering to that. However it is going to be MORE LIKE a 'war story' than a 'war game' in some sense.

So, if the PCs kite an ogre into some goblins, then what happens? That depends! It could be that this is an end result of some great success by the players, they got good rolls, they expended their resources and took risks to make this happen, and payoff is the goblins gank the ogre, and maybe a bunch of the goblins are also offed in the process. I DON'T NEED MECHANICS to deal with this. In fact I never ever roll dice for NPCs. I just don't see the point. In this case the PCs are an interested party, they will probably see what happens and it will be described in a way that comports with the previous fiction, so they won't think "that makes no sense." Other outcomes are also possible of course, depending on narrative direction and dramatic need.

Maybe the ogre and the goblins look at each other and decide they would both rather eat adventurer tonight! Oops, out of the frying pan and into the fire! This is the sort of 'move' that Dungeon World GM might make (hard or soft depending on the immediacy of the threat and how it is surfaced). Again, this should be something that is at least potentially predictable, or maybe just a risk the PCs feel is worth taking. Maybe really smart PCs even hedged their bets somehow and have a response (IE they all pull out the potions of Giant Strength they bought just in case. Costly, but they can still win). Maybe the Ogre wins and laughs and tells the PCs he's had enough and heads back into the mountains with a sack full of goblin coins and a belly full of roast goblin, never to be seen again.

Presumably there is ALWAYS a range of possibilities out there in any game. Nothing in life is ever certain. Adventure is a specifically uncertain way to live...

In other words, I wouldn't suddenly change mechanics in a way that doesn't make sense according to the shared understanding of the fiction, and the sensibilities of the participants. I don't think you need some sort of hard-coded objective mechanical model of everything in the world to do that. In fact, I agree with the notion that such a model CAN and often DOES get in the way as much as it helps!

 

[Lanefan]

Point taken that situation matters, but solutions shouldn't be so perfectly unique that nothing whatever can be learned or generalized. Gamemastery is an art. So are cooking, drawing, and music--but there are principles and rules of thumb to all of them. Guidelines, obeyed not slavishly, but because obeying them almost always results in better work. That way, when you DO choose to break them, it's because you're confident things will be better for it. (You can never know for sure, that's part of the risk of making art.)

Which all sounds good until you stop and realize just how much of the world's best art, music, etc. has been put out by people who had yet to be exposed to any "guidelines" and just did what they did because nobody had told them it couldn't (or shouldn't) be done.

It's Pathfinder only. Spheres of Power replaces Vancian spells with Spheres, [... etc.]

Thanks for the explanation. I never did Pathfinder at all, hence my unfamiliarity with Spheres.

And my point is that that may not be as excellent as you claim. It forces you to ensure, for example, that no character of a certain level can do more than a certain amount of damage, otherwise an ogre isn't an absolute threat.

Well, the rules somewhat enforce damage limits. That said, I do have in my games a crit-hit system that can on the odd occasion produce stupendous amounts of damage. Over the years I can think of maybe five occasions where a weapon attack went off for over 100 points of damage, always from stacking multipliers (e.g. if a sword does double damage vs giants and you roll a triple-damage critical, you add up your damage plus bonuses and then multiply the result by six).

You don't actually "know" anything about how dangerous it should be or how it will behave in-world, because a first-level Fighter might blow it away or might get blown away with no meaningful way to assess the likelihood of other. A first-level Bard might be able to persuade a minotaur to abandon its monstrous lifestyle and take up selling fine ceramic dishware, or might not be able to convince it that the sun is shining when it can see sunlight coming in through the labyrinth's entrance.

Yes, extreme results from the ends of the bell curve can and do happen on occasion. I'm fine with this.

That's what I mean by enslavement to the numbers. You commit to those things in that way, and you end up with a trilemma:
1: You shackle what your players are allowed to do. (Some think this is what 4e did; I obviously disagree.)
2: You have a "system" that supposedly tells you what to expect, but is actually worthless for making any kind of prediction. (This is, demonstrably, what 3e did--CR is just the most obvious example thereof. "Diplomancy" is another.)
3: You have a "system" that says, "well, if it doesn't work, you figure it out, you're in charge after all." (Arguably what 5e does, and not exactly much of a "system" either.)

Not sure how-why the players are shackled by any of this. As for 2 and 3: if the system generally, vaguely, kinda sorta tells me what to expect that's all I want from it; I can worry about the rest myself. If it told me exactly what to expect things would get boring in a real hurry.

Okay. So why are you so hung up on the threat level presented by a monster always being a fixed thing? "Attack roll" is an abstraction. "Hit points" are an abstraction. "Armor class" is an abstraction. Why do these abstractions need to be turned into the unquestionable bedrock of reality, instead of being recognized as the abstractions they are and leveraged for what utility an abstraction can provide?

Hit points are only as much of an abstraction as you want them to be. In my case, particularly for most monsters, they're a direct reflection of how tough the thing is (i.e. they're almost all "meat" points) relative to everything else in the setting, including others of its own kind. It's only when you get to people with adventuring classes (PC, NPC, whoever) that the whole luck-fatigue-nicks bit comes in; and we've dealt with that by use of a body points-fatigue points system.

Armour class is simply a numerical way of reflecting how hard something is to hit and can nearly always be directly explained by what the characters see in the fiction.

Turning these things into amorphous abstractions such that a creature in the setting has different intrinsic toughness or defenses based only on who-what it is facing violates setting integrity and the setting's internal reality.

Pretending that an abstraction IS reality is exactly how we get the problems 3e has: players exploiting the fact that an abstraction, no matter how thorough, will never truly correspond to what they're abstracting.

No, pretending that the game world is and has its own reality is the end goal. The abstracted numbers just help translate it for us.

That's how you get "whack-a-mole" healing, for instance, because the only hit point that matters is the last one.

Unrelated issue, and a problem across all editions. It's somewhat fixable, but as those fixes aren't all that character-friendly they don't gain much traction when presented.

Yes, it does. It means that a low level character cannot do more than 45 hit points of damage in a single attack, otherwise ogres are pushovers. That, no more and no less, is my point. When you set these numbers, they shape the system: they define what players are allowed to do.

That's not just the ogre's hit point numbers telling you that. Unless you've got a heavy-duty crit-hit system the game rules for damage by weapon or spell are also telling you that, regardless whether you're using them against an ogre or a rat or your party's annoying Bard.

Or else they don't define what players are allowed to do, and thus abjectly fail to give you the reliable bedrock of "physics" to predict how things should go, whether because the system just tells you nothing (3e), or the system tells you to go with whatever your gut tells you to do anyway (5e).

The irony, of course, is that by having relative numbers, players can do whatever they like.

Within the limits of the game rules the players/PCs can do what they like anyway. I'm not sure what you're getting at here.

Why does it have to do that? Why do the numbers need to be what the creature physically is?

Because that's what the numbers are for: to numerically describe this individual creature in complete independence of anything else. Just the same as a PC's character sheet: all those numbers on it are there to reflect what that individual creature is and-or is capable of.

No, you DON'T, and that's one of the key problems here, something you're not getting. Schrödinger's lock is "this lock becomes whatever it needs to be to challenge the party when the party arrives to face it." THAT IS NOT WHAT I SAID. What I said was, "This lock is supposed to be hard for [typical] 5th level characters." Whosoever said that the party HAD to be 5th level when they find it?

Nobody. What you said, though - or at least, how I read it - came across as the lock's challenge being variable such that it would challenge whoever faced it.

Again: WHY DO THE NUMBERS NEED TO BE WHAT IT PHYSICALLY IS? These are abstractions! The physical entity has its physical properties, yes, but the abstractions are whatever we as creators decide them to be.

So you're asking for two sets of numbers for each creature, then: one to define it within the setting and another to define it only with regards to the PCs. That seems like complete overkill when the first set - the physically-defining set - are already enough.

Except that there ARE reasons, and OF COURSE the change isn't in the thing itself. You have presumed this whole time that these abstraction numbers--accuracy, defenses, combat endurance, etc.--need to be LITERALLY IDENTICAL to the creature itself.

Yes. They're locked in.

Why? We already know that, as Gygax himself put it, it makes no sense that a 10th-level Fighter has flesh tougher than a battle-hardened warhorse. A ten-ton lizard could not fly on wings of comparable length to its body, and certainly could not breathe ice on things, yet they do. These numbers and properties ALREADY deviate from what is physically true and predictable.

Agreed, which is why for characters and other levelled entities some sort of body-fatigue or wound-vitality system is IMO the only way to go.

As for a ten-ton lizard getting off the ground, two things: you're dealing with a setting that has an additional type of energy (that being magic) from what we're used to; and if a 747 can get off the ground I've no problem with a dragon!

Why should they be? You're not testing the whole setting all the time. The only thing you're testing regularly is the PCs. Yes, you can absolutely have things that are NOT Schrödinger's locks. (That, incidentally, was why I gave the example in the first place.) But for a rule system about playing a game as player characters, the only thing that matters is what the player characters do. Trying to keep a perfect simulation of everything against everything else is just....well, unnecessary effort, for one thing, and directly leads to many of the serious problems of 3e as stated above.

Sorry, but I build neither my game nor my settings around the PCs to that extent. Sure the PCs are the focus of play at the table, but the setting is bigger than just them and I'd rather they fit into the setting than have the setting morph itself to fit them.

The lack of TPKs is extremely surprising to me, given what I usually hear from other OSR-type fans. As in, having less than 1 TPK every five years would be surprising to most of those folks.

Long experience has taught me that while individual characters can be easy to kill, parties as a whole are shockingly resilient things; and it only takes one survivor to keep the party going.

Oh jeez, rolled initiative each round is just such a pain though. Talk about bloating fights up, I've seen that easily double the length of a fight. (It's why my W20 storyteller stopped doing that.)

If you're using 3e-4e-5e style d20 initiative with all the modifiers then yes, it's a pain (and also makes high Dex far too advantageous). We use an unmodified d6 for each attack/action, with ties and simultaniety allowed.

That definitely doesn't track with the way most people explain Combat-as-War. It's usually explained with references to Tucker's Kobolds (which, incidentally, were quite lethal according to the stories), flooding the enemy's stronghold so they all asphyxiate, and otherwise making it so tactics and advantages are overweeningly lethal when used by the enemy unless thwarted by even-more-lethal tactics and advantages exploited by the PCs.

I'm assuming situations where those sort of tactics have already been proven as unviable options.

But yes, flooding out the caves rather than going in and fighting everything is the obvious thing to do if you can...unless there's treasure in there that liquid can damage e.g. artwork, scrolls, books, etc....

 

[Vaalingrade]

Which all sounds good until you stop and realize just how much of the world's best art, music, etc. has been put out by people who had yet to be exposed to any "guidelines" and just did what they did because nobody had told them it couldn't (or shouldn't) be done.

So why have the game at all? Make believe is how art is created.

Also, despite the artsy, whimsical language us creative types like to use, it's actually a MASSIVE lie. The best art comes from additive imitation, which creates techniques, archetypes, tropes, etc which we gain via observation with or without formal education. The reason we have the 'uneducated artist' trope is not due to no having guidelines feeding creativity--it's due to a lot of teachers not encouraging said additive imitation.

A lot of, possibly most great art grows out of guidelines, not from the magical ether.

 

[Lanefan]

Hence @Lanefan why I am so on about "why should it be that there is one-and-only, eternal, ideal Ogre?" (or whatever else), that all Ogres necessarily are or necessarily deviate away from.

I think you're misreading me if you think I'm saying all ogres should be exactly the same. I'm not.

I'm saying that any one individual ogre should always be exactly the same as itself, rather than changing based on what it's facing.

Just like my 4th level character with 25 hit points - she has those same 25 hit points whether she's fighting a rat or an ogre or the demon god of tyrannical financiers. The same should apply to the ogre, and to any other creature in the setting.

*And, I argue, exactly the same applies to the ogre and the orc and the illithid and whatever else the party fights. If there are ogres in the place the party is adventuring, you should already know what their naturalistic attributes are (such as "how much can it lift?" or "what concepts can it understand?"), and most preferably should have already prepared a statblock specific to that context. You then prepare a different statblock if they return to that area later, because the context has changed; the monster itself has not changed, but the answer to the question, "what is this monster like in a fight?" has changed for this specific party.

Yes, because the party's capability has changed. That's no reason to change the monster itself, unless you're trying to suggest that the changes to the party aren't enough to reflect the difference you want; in which case we're just back to arguing about the steepness of the power curve.

One creature, one statblock. End of story.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

For example, kiting a narratively formidable monster into a tribe of Ogres to make them fight each other would be a decent (and fairly run-of-the-mill) CaW strategy, but with inconsistent mechanical representation of Ogres, the actual utility of that strategy is unknowable to the players. Will the Ogres be minions, wiped out in a single use of a breath weapon or other AoE ability?

The question is meaningless, because the 4e combat rules aren't what you use for this purpose. You would be using the Skill Challenge rules for that, or else handling things purely narratively. In either case, combat statblocks never even come up.

Which all sounds good until you stop and realize just how much of the world's best art, music, etc. has been put out by people who had yet to be exposed to any "guidelines" and just did what they did because nobody had told them it couldn't (or shouldn't) be done.

This does happen, but it is not nearly as common as you think. Most of the time, these people really were exposed to those "guidelines," they just never knew them as anything more than gut feelings.

Just as, for example, you (assuming English is your first language) know-without-knowing that the correct way to list English adjectives is, as Mark Forsyth wrote it, “opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac.” For a native speaker, one just knows that there's something "wrong" with the phrase, "That's a French lovely knife," even though that is theoretically a perfectly valid phrase.

In music, for example, chord progressions exist and are vital. In the vast majority of allegedly "only did good work because no one told them they couldn't" cases, the composer will either have an intuitive understanding of chord progressions (particularly cadences), or accidentally re-create them, or imitate the extremely popular ones they heard as a child/teen (e.g. the vast majority of "pop" music uses the exact same four-chord progression, as quite humorously parodied by Axis of Awesome.) The principle applies outward to other things: the basic principles of color theory, for example, is almost always ingrained into children at a very young age. It's why (for example) you see over and over and over again the "orange-and-blue" action-flick poster color scheme, because human skin is some shade of orange (brown is dark orange, after all) and azure is the complimentary color to orange (midway between cyan and blue).

Or, to use the extremely famous case of "that guy at some university who showed up late to class and found an important solution to a question because he didn't know it was unsolved"--yeah, it's a complete myth that he was "untrained" in the slightest. He, George Dantzig, was in a doctoral program at one of the most prestigious colleges in the nation (UC Berkeley) with one of the finest statisticians in the world as his doctoral advisor and teacher (Jerzy Neyman), having already completed a master's degree in mathematics. Yes, he did mistake two open problems for homework assignments, and did solve them. But it is not even slightly the dramatic reversal as shown in the movie it inspired (Good Will Hunting)--it took a decade of education and actual work as a statistician before he got to that point. I am not even slightly trying to disparage his achievement, he absolutely proved that a fresh mind that hasn't been told "you DEFINITELY CAN'T do this" can do things. But "guidelines" are not and never have been "you DEFINITELY CAN'T do this." They're "you shouldn't do this unless doing so is better than not doing it." Which is what I've said. Repeatedly.

Yes, extreme results from the ends of the bell curve can and do happen on occasion. I'm fine with this.

I'm not talking about bell-curve stuff. I'm talking about, "Because I have Feature X and Kit Y and Spell Z and Weapon W, I can obliterate ogres in one shot at level 1." This isn't "it might happen once a decade" stuff. This is "I can pull this off at least once a day" (or whatever the "you get back your resources" cycle is).

Not sure how-why the players are shackled by any of this. As for 2 and 3: if the system generally, vaguely, kinda sorta tells me what to expect that's all I want from it; I can worry about the rest myself. If it told me exactly what to expect things would get boring in a real hurry.

If "generally, vaguely, kinda sorta tells [you] what to expect" is all you need, why are you so hung up on an absolute representation then? The narrative part of a monster--the part that doesn't change, the part that is always true in the world, regardless of what abstractions we derive from it--tells you at least that much anyway. The combat mechanics don't need to.

Hit points are only as much of an abstraction as you want them to be. In my case, particularly for most monsters, they're a direct reflection of how tough the thing is (i.e. they're almost all "meat" points) relative to everything else in the setting, including others of its own kind. It's only when you get to people with adventuring classes (PC, NPC, whoever) that the whole luck-fatigue-nicks bit comes in; and we've dealt with that by use of a body points-fatigue points system.

...so...you're not even actually playing D&D, you're playing "the thing I made from D&D that includes several systems that were never part of any official D&D in order to make the things I want to make sense actually make sense"?

Come on, man. This isn't cool for a meaningful discussion about things. You can't substitute "the thing I built out of D&D which differs in key ways from every published D&D" for "D&D," no matter how much you might like to.

Armour class is simply a numerical way of reflecting how hard something is to hit and can nearly always be directly explained by what the characters see in the fiction.

Hard disagree, if only because there's absolutely no reason a character should be able to "see in the fiction" that an adult black dragon's scales are 2 points worse than an adult red dragon's scales--arbitrary differences that, while meaningful for what choices you might make, are only meaningfully available to the players if they read the statblock itself. Which is exactly what an abstraction is.

Turning these things into amorphous abstractions such that a creature in the setting has different intrinsic toughness or defenses based only on who-what it is facing violates setting integrity and the setting's internal reality.

Stop.

Stop right there.

I did not say it has "different intrinsic toughness." That's something YOU are bringing into this. Stop doing that.

I said its intrinsic toughness remains: but the way that intrinsic toughness manifests in any given context changes.

An ogre, for a 3rd-level character, should be very hard to hit with even a glancing blow, but even a glancing blow should contribute to taking it down. That's both a real, physical element of the world, AND a narrative, pacing element of the game. 4th edition manifests this as "to a 3rd-level character, an ogre is a powerful solo monster with higher-than-average AC and HP." To a 13th-level character, it is not only easy to hit an ogre for at least a glancing blow, it's reasonably possible that they could just cleave through its defenses with a single telling blow. But instead of trying to somehow force "AC 25" to simultaneously be super-duper-ultra-hard for a 3rd-level character AND super-duper-ultra-easy for a 13th-level character (a very delicate balancing act that, quite often, simply fails), it says: "Okay. When you land a hit on an ogre as a 13th-level character, it's not the same kind of thing as when you land a hit as a 3rd-level character. You hit an ogre at 13th, you're gonna kill it dead. Skip over all the complicated mathematical gyrations to make that happen, and just say it happens."

And that's what an ogre minion IS: it is recognizing that, BECAUSE a hit from a 13th-level character is simply so much more than a hit from a 3rd-level character, and BECAUSE the toughness of an ogre doesn't and shouldn't change, the mechanical representation MUST change in order to account for the new relative difference between the far-more-powerful character and the no-more-powerful ogre.

No, pretending that the game world is and has its own reality is the end goal. The abstracted numbers just help translate it for us.

I didn't say that. I said that pretending an abstraction is reality is the problem. "The map is not the territory." There IS a difference between "these are what the mechanics say about this monster" and "this is the absolute totality of what this monster IS." There has to be. No abstraction IS the thing itself, otherwise it wouldn't be an abstraction, and more importantly, it wouldn't be useful.

You keep projecting onto me the notion that the mechanics MUST be one, singular, only representation when I have explicitly rejected that notion and asked for you to demonstrate why it should be that way. Stop just steamrolling with that same assumption, and either justify it, or accept that you're bringing an assumption that is just, flat, NOT required.

Unrelated issue, and a problem across all editions. It's somewhat fixable, but as those fixes aren't all that character-friendly they don't gain much traction when presented.

Not at all unrelated. It is a problem that precisely and exactly arises from treating abstractions (HP) as though they really, literally, physically were the object being abstracted, and not merely symbols standing in for something. When you accept the abstraction AS an abstraction, you can then accept that modifications to that abstraction must also be understood as abstracted away from the actual, physical thing, and thus look for whatever actual situation is happening to have given rise to that abstraction in the first place.

That's not just the ogre's hit point numbers telling you that. Unless you've got a heavy-duty crit-hit system the game rules for damage by weapon or spell are also telling you that, regardless whether you're using them against an ogre or a rat or your party's annoying Bard.

Again, you are conflating weird edge-cases with consistent numbers, which is exactly what the problem with 3rd edition IS: that it sets hard numbers for things, and then almost immediately invalidates those numbers because players have the freedom to build their own solutions outside those limits. I'm not talking "dealing 45 damage on a crit." I'm talking "dealing 45 average damage." Because, believe it or not, sometimes it really is possible to achieve crap like that in 3e. You even see shades of it in 5e, despite the overall power-down of the system; for instance, IIRC, it was quite possible (20%or 25% probability, IIRC) for a commoner to deceive Asmodeus himself, while simultaneously being possible for an ultra-tricked-out hyperfocused Bard to fail to do so with roughly the same chance. THAT is the kind of enslavement to numbers I'm talking about: again, NOT weird statistical edge cases, but reasonably common events. (One in five commoners attempting to lie to the Prince of Darkness himself really shouldn't succeed.)

Within the limits of the game rules the players/PCs can do what they like anyway. I'm not sure what you're getting at here.

Not at all. Players are not permitted to fiat declare success, for instance. The rules can and do limit what players can do. With relative representation, however, the system no longer needs to set such rigid scaling, because it innately accounts for "you now deal so much damage that, if you even hit an ogre once, it just dies." So the players are free to employ their zany schemes without being shut down by "no, sorry, you can't do that, it's too much damage" or "no, that's an unfair advantage over the fighter" or whatever.

Because that's what the numbers are for: to numerically describe this individual creature in complete independence of anything else. Just the same as a PC's character sheet: all those numbers on it are there to reflect what that individual creature is and-or is capable of.

No, they aren't. The numbers are there to represent how the creature interacts with its current environment. They don't need--and have never needed--to represent the whole entirety of the creature as a natural object for all time. The numbers exist to enable actions, and to respond to the actions of others. D&D has never handled monster-on-monster action particularly well, and 4e was honest enough to admit that.

I mean, if we want to talk about gamist BS in editions, how about that explicit rule in...was it OD&D or 1e? where the instant a monster allies with the party, it loses its darkvision. Doesn't that pretty well put the pin in the idea that the abstractions were EVER meant to represent the sum totality of things, and were instead meant to represent the interactions between things?

So you're asking for two sets of numbers for each creature, then: one to define it within the setting and another to define it only with regards to the PCs. That seems like complete overkill when the first set - the physically-defining set - are already enough.

Nope. I'm saying one set of numbers for the creature--and then you make an abstraction from them whenever you need it, to represent what they are in a specific combat situation. You make these on demand, because the system has your back: you know exactly how to translate the stats in a useful way, applying your logic as DM to what kind of threat something should be and then following the formulae from that decision.

Yes. They're locked in.

Why? You keep saying this without justification or even admitting that it's an assumption; you act as though this is a self-evident truth and it's just...not.

Agreed, which is why for characters and other levelled entities some sort of body-fatigue or wound-vitality system is IMO the only way to go.

So you agree that you aren't actually playing D&D-qua-D&D then? Because D&D doesn't use "body-fatigue" or "wound-vitality" systems....except...well, you aren't going to like this, but 4e does. Healing Surges ARE a "body-fatigue" system. You can only squeeze so much healing out of a person before they just run out of juice, and even magic can't do much about that. (Daily powers can! ...but those come back in exactly the same way surges do, so it's a wash.)

As for a ten-ton lizard getting off the ground, two things: you're dealing with a setting that has an additional type of energy (that being magic) from what we're used to; and if a 747 can get off the ground I've no problem with a dragon!

A 747 is hollow and has engines. I'm pretty sure those work differently from flappy wings, and that dragons are not only not hollow, but have very heavy bones. Being flippant about this isn't brightening up the conversation.

Sorry, but I build neither my game nor my settings around the PCs to that extent. Sure the PCs are the focus of play at the table, but the setting is bigger than just them and I'd rather they fit into the setting than have the setting morph itself to fit them.

Who said anything about "morphing" the setting? You keep projecting these ideas. Please, please, please stop. I said that the RULES are about what the PCs do, not that the SETTING is about what the PCs do. The rules are not the setting, and the setting is not the rules. (Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to play homebrew settings with the same rules, nor established settings with alternate rulesets!) The rules are what tell you how to adjudicate the results of actions. The setting is what tells you what exists, and why. Applying the adjudication of the rules can, over time, alter the setting (that's what being responsive to player choice requires), and likewise things existing in the setting are the vital input information for the adjudication process. But the existing-ness and the adjudication-process are two distinct things, and always will be.

Because the human mind (and any other aids we might apply, like computers) is an imperfect rendering engine, we of necessity abstract parts of the adjudication process. We do not insert the entire world into the Navier-Stokes equations in order to figure out whether the Ranger can smell the scent of her prey on the wind, we make a highly-simplified abstraction which, we hope, reasonably approximates that interaction in that context. Translating between (as DW puts it) "the fiction" and the mechanics is vital for playing literally all roleplaying games. We are, inherently, making an approximation of an ogre when we make a statblock for one: the statblock is not, and cannot even potentially be, everything there is to say about any individual ogre or even ogres as a collective group.

Long experience has taught me that while individual characters can be easy to kill, parties as a whole are shockingly resilient things; and it only takes one survivor to keep the party going.

Whereas in my experience, a lone survivor of a party means the game ends, because no one has any meaningful notion of how you can bounce back from that sort of catastrophic failure.

If you're using 3e-4e-5e style d20 initiative with all the modifiers then yes, it's a pain (and also makes high Dex far too advantageous). We use an unmodified d6 for each attack/action, with ties and simultaniety allowed.

....again with this "using a term from common use, but to mean the very specific individual way Lanefan does things." If you're going to keep referring to your own game in such generic terms, you need to explain yourself, otherwise we're going to keep having these roundy-round dances, and I am already quite thoroughly tired of them.

I'm assuming situations where those sort of tactics have already been proven as unviable options.

But yes, flooding out the caves rather than going in and fighting everything is the obvious thing to do if you can...unless there's treasure in there that liquid can damage e.g. artwork, scrolls, books, etc....

I think you're misreading me if you think I'm saying all ogres should be exactly the same. I'm not.

I'm saying that any one individual ogre should always be exactly the same as itself, rather than changing based on what it's facing.

It is the same as itself. But what "one hit" means to that ogre is fundamentally different when that "one hit" comes from a 3rd-level character vs. a 13th-level character. The abstraction--"one hit"--shifts in order to match the physical fact of the PC's strength.

Just like my 4th level character with 25 hit points - she has those same 25 hit points whether she's fighting a rat or an ogre or the demon god of tyrannical financiers. The same should apply to the ogre, and to any other creature in the setting.

Why? If hit points are an abstraction--as I have said they necessarily must be, EVEN when you use a "wound" system or whatever else, because "a wound" is STILL an abstracted quantity of injury!--why SHOULD it be that "25 hit points" is the actual physical structure of the being, and not "this creature is pretty durable, but someone rising above the limits of mundane mortality shouldn't fear it." The latter seems a HELL of a lot more concrete--real, physical, true-to-the-world, learnable--than "25 hit points" ever could be.

Yes, because the party's capability has changed. That's no reason to change the monster itself, unless you're trying to suggest that the changes to the party aren't enough to reflect the difference you want; in which case we're just back to arguing about the steepness of the power curve.

Yes. That's exactly what I've been arguing. The power curve enslaves the numbers--unless you go to relative representation, at which point, the power curve can take exactly the shape you WANT it to take. Then the combination of "what exists in the world" (your setting-consistency requirement), logic, and extensible framework rules (like, but not having to specifically BE, Page 42 and MM3-on-a-business-card) are ALL you need to produce absolutely everything that could be mechanically relevant. Anything you might need to produce that goes outside those mechanics literally could not possibly be planned for, and thus SHOULDN'T be planned for by the rules--you as DM will know better than any rules ever could what you need for those situations, because you are a human who can make decisions and apply reason, which rules cannot do.

One creature, one statblock. End of story.

One creature, one situation, one statblock. THAT'S my end-of-story. You determine what the statblock should be when you need it; otherwise, you use its innate nature, which inherently precedes the mechanical-abstraction process.

The map is not equivalent to the territory. The territory comes first; you draw the map after, and you draw it based on what you need the map to accomplish. It is, I argue, just as needles to say, "One territory, one map. End of story." How could one map possibly be the correct answer for all situations a "describe the physical space" need might appear in, even if we only consider its use for navigating around?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think you're misreading me if you think I'm saying all ogres should be exactly the same. I'm not.

I'm saying that any one individual ogre should always be exactly the same as itself, rather than changing based on what it's facing.

Just like my 4th level character with 25 hit points - she has those same 25 hit points whether she's fighting a rat or an ogre or the demon god of tyrannical financiers. The same should apply to the ogre, and to any other creature in the setting.

Yes, because the party's capability has changed. That's no reason to change the monster itself, unless you're trying to suggest that the changes to the party aren't enough to reflect the difference you want; in which case we're just back to arguing about the steepness of the power curve.

One creature, one statblock. End of story.

IMHO the logic here is an extension of the "GM must always present exactly the dungeon maze which was pre-designed." The theory being that whatever the players have done to beat it is 'fair game' and nothing may ever vary in a contingent fashion (it is OK for their to be pre-defined 'triggers' for something, but the GM should never just invent some change in the dungeon on the fly, except as a direct physical consequence of actions taken, like breaking down a wall might cause a passage to collapse). IN THAT CONTEXT changing a stat block smacks of cheating as it deprives the players of 'fair access' to whatever the originally planned challenge was.

Frankly I think this is overly rigid, even in the case of a pure Gygaxian player test of skill dungeon maze. Nobody much would argue for instance that you can simply declare the last of some weak enemies who are sure to be beaten as dead to save time for something else. Right? Thus it seems plausible to make certain things into minions in some situations, does it not? We can go on from there...

Clearly we all agree that some things would 'not be cool'. I would say that if the players are 'playing strategically' then it would not be cool to ruin their strategy arbitrarily, whether that involved using an alternate statblock, or something else. I just don't think taking a threatening low level monster and making it a minion in high level play, and fictionally calling it 'the same thing' would qualify as ruining someone's strategy. If it somehow would, then don't do it, nothing is required!