Do you let your players...?

[ichabod]

I let my players table talk, within limits. As long as the combat is moving along smoothly and no one who isn't there is giving advice, I assume it's just characters talking to each other. I mean, I'm not going to let them take five minutes discussing a six second action. And one time in college we were playtesting a convention round, and a dead character kept giving advice, leading to the ever memorable "You're awfully talkative for a dead hobbit" line.

 

[Henry]

I allow it, as do our other DM's. It's a more relaxed atmosphere when we game, and we rationalize it by the fact that the "gestalt" helps the fact that our characters are MUCH better than we are at combat. The characters been doing it longer than the players have, and the clerics and wizards have scores in intelligence and wisdom that are higher than ours.

 

[Umbran]

Yes the wizard may have a 22 Int but that doesn't mean he's going to be cold and calculating and totally together in a dark antechamber with half a dozen minotaur priests and fighters trying to kill him and his friends.

IMHO...

Unelss you are playing Call of Cthulhu, or Godlike, or some other game with a mechanic for "courage underfire", the player has the right to expect that his or her character's stats will be in full force in such times.

The player has invested a goodly amount in that intelligence. But you null and void it at the very time he needs it most? That's prettt mean. Under stress, do fighters in your game suddenly become weak in the knees, unable to lift their greatswords? Do your bards suddenly become tongue-tied and unable to impress crowds? Do rogues drop their lockpicks when they know there's likely a trap involved?

A 22 intelligence represents smarts of Einsteinian proportions (literally - imagine Albert as born with an 18 Int, in the prime of his scientific career - a middle aged Expert of about 10th level). The character's ability with thought, mental calculation, and retention of information are pretty much without peer. He's probably well above 1st level, so he's been trained in the school of combat. You want to take such a strong defining characteristic, and force the player to throw it away and try to represent it with his (relatively) middle class mind and education?

If you don't want the hints to come from the other players, fine. But then, they should be coming from you, the DM. It is your job to see that the character's abilities are represented accurately and fairly.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

In our group, we use the term "penguin" in some of these situations, especially when the player`s character is not present...

Player: "Maybe you should ask him about the Darien Prime Cargo Transfer Job"
"Thanks, Mr. Penguin. Now, take this fish and go away"...

Mustrum Ridcully

 

[MarauderX]

IMC the players help each other out or else they might end up dead in a fight. I throw some heavy critters at them that make some want to run away, or at least come back after a level or two. Usually they win if they cooperate, and having a new player that starts tagging other players or himself isn't helpful to them at all. If a PC goes down in battle, no more talking from that player OoC.

Then again, I have had the know-it-all player that wants to direct every action in battle, who can't shut up. I think most people have run into that, and that's when I would think your way, undershot, would be best. If something bad happens to the PCs cause of other PC actions, so be it. Let the players cringe - silently - and take the lumps they get. Let them discuss the battle afterward to learn from the mistakes that were done.

 

[boxstop7]

Personally, I'm not a huge fan of my players calling out tactical advice during combat. I look at combat as a very fast-paced and dynamically shifting situation. Decisions in the combat round must be made quickly. There is no time for real deliberation. If you're engaged in trying to keep the enemy's sword out of your gut, you're probably not going to have the time to say "You know...if you cast the spell right here...". It's a pet peeve of mine. Even though it goes turn by turn, all actions are actually happening simultaneously. And I prefer to remind my players of that fact.

Having said that, I will allow it under certain circumstances. Characters with a higher intelligence and/or who have had military training will get away with tossing out tactical advice. The character with an intelligence of 10 or 11 can try, but the smarter characters will probably just ignore him/her. If my players want to discuss tactical issues in combat, they may use their free action every round to yell out some piece of information to the other characters. It's gotta be short, sweet and directly to the point, not to mention spoken in character. But in those circumstances, I'll allow it. When they start metagaming or discussing out of character, I usually try to step in.

~Box

 

[Mercule]

We pretty much frown on it in our group. IC is fine, but OOC isn't. We don't worry too much about using exactly the right "voice" for our advice, but the implication is that anything stated from one player to another translates to an in-character statement at an appropriate volume.

Somewhere in the PH, it says that you can only say about 6 words as a free action. We aren't Nazi's about this, but if a speech gets too long, the character is determined to have spent their action talking. Likewise, to keep things moving, players are only allowed about 20 seconds to start declaring their character's actions for the round.

And counting off squares isn't allowed for distances and once a figure is moved, the movement is spent. About the only time people get caught by AoOs is when they aren't paying attention, anyway.

Again, we aren't too strict on these rules. It just sets the baseline for play. Players are only called on them when the game starts to drag.

Advising is probably the strictest rule we have and it's a strict no-no OOC. The way around this is that we've recently implimented an anti-tangent system similar to Piratecat's, only it's XP rather than cash. If you want to advise someone, it counts as a tangent. Last session, I decided 80 XP was a fair price to advise the Cleric on how to best save our bacon when we were ambushed and badly wounded.

 

[Numion]

It's frowned upon in my group. Combat is a major part in our game, and if the more tactics savvy people are allowed to give much advise, they'll en up controlling other players characters. As the characters are the only part of the game that by all means belongs to players, I think it's fair to let each player control his own character.

Another point is that the DM is already overstressed to play all the monsters with adequate tactics. If players act as a some kind of 'hivemind' it just makes things that much more difficult.

We aren't very tight about this thing though; usually people try to give stern looks or more obvious cough*GRAPPLETHEMAGE*cough

 

[Garmorn]

In my games it depends on the experence of the player being adviced. If they have not played a wizard or socrcer before then general advice on how to use their magic is fine. If the player is expenced playing that class like the one playes bards alot then it is not allowed out of character.

When our newbie player shows up she gets lots of suggestions on general effectiveness along with more detailed help when she asks for it and have a general ideal what she wants to do.

So again dempends on the experence of the player.

 

[Azlan]

One of them casts a fireball, and someone else will say "if you put it here, you won't fry any of us".

One thing I've realized from playing and DM'ing in numerous Neverwinter Nights on-line campaigns: It is far too easy to inadvertently catch your comrades along with your opponents in your area effect spells (fire ball, entangle, web, etc.). This is especially true when combat is real-time, and you don't have the advantage of a completely unobstructed bird's-eye view, with an overlay of 5' squares for measuring with.

In fact, it is so common for a sorcerer or wizard to accidentally catch his comrades in his area-effect elemental damage spells, the group's cleric often casts Endure Elements on the front-line fighters before going into combat, as a safeguard.

This makes me think that some kind of rules should be implemented for spell-casters trying to place area-effect spells at exact locations. Like, maybe this should be based on a skill, and if the skill check is failed, then the spell's center point should be moved by one 5-foot square for each number that the check was missed by. (The direction would be determined randomly.)