Fighters vs. Spellcasters (a case for fighters.)

[LostSoul]

It's okay for the DM to rewrite the rules for anyone, for any reason.

Why do you think that? Or rather: In what way does it best serve the game?

The secret door thing is an odd little rule that works differently from the way any other perception abilities do. It's also a very small niche ability. What are the odds that in an actual game session, an elf character will come within 5 yards of a secret door (that goes somewhere worth noting) and not be searching for it?

In many games that I've played, that ability is not a "very small niche". It's been an important part of exploring a dungeon.

Normally we'd handle it like this:

Player: (Thinking there's a secret door nearby) Do I, as an elf, notice a secret door?
DM: If you did I would have told you. (In that he already made a secret roll - or not, if there is nothing to be found.)
Player: Okay, let's spend a turn searching this area. Who wants to be on guard?
Elf PC: Well I have a better chance for surprise so I'll head down a bit down the corridor, using my infravision.

 

[Ahnehnois]

What sort of game are you playing? If it's a classic dungeon crawl, then the odds are pretty high.

If it's a classic dungeon crawl (which is a niche itself), then the players are probably moving slowly and searching everything, so the elf ability is unlikely to come into play. Even if you have an elf in the party, he doesn't get a search check to notice other things (like traps), so the party should still be searching. As in this example:

Player: (Thinking there's a secret door nearby) Do I, as an elf, notice a secret door?
DM: If you did I would have told you. (In that he already made a secret roll - or not, if there is nothing to be found.)
Player: Okay, let's spend a turn searching this area.

Here, the player rolled a Search anyway. AFAICT, the free check he was entitled to affected the order in which events were narrated, but not the actual outcome. If there was a door and the player beat the DC, he would have found it, otherwise not.

The elf ability only matters when there is a secret door and no one is looking for it. It could come into play if the characters are in some non-dungeon building and there is a genuinely secret door that no one expects, or if they're in a hurry for some reason and don't have time to search every inch of wherever they are.

Moreover, the thing with secret doors is that in general, it's in a DM's interest for the player to find things that he takes the time to create, so if he does take the trouble to create one, he probably will let the players find it one way or another. That might not be the case if we're assuming an antagonistic DM who is genuinely testing the players to see if they can find things. Which again is fine but is not what everyone does.

And, of course, there's a first level spell that finds secret doors without a check. If you're expecting them, that's probably going to override the whole elf thing.

Why do you think that?

That's what a DM is, definitionally. See the "final arbiter" text or various other examples that are posted elsewhere in this thread.

Or rather: In what way does it best serve the game?

A lot of ways. For one, an individual DM knows what is going on in his game better than the writers of the game do.

Such as whether there are likely to be secret doors in his game, how he is interpreting the search rules, what the temperaments of the players are, whether he wants to play the game in such a way to make these elements matter, and so on. So deciding how specific permutations of the perception rules work is a perfectly rational exercise of his discretion.

Another benefit of having the DM control the rules is it makes the game run faster. If the conditions described above are not true, and the elf ability is not going to be relevant, it's a waste of time to think about it, and a wise reason to let it go.

 

[LostSoul]

[MENTION=17106]Ahnehnois[/MENTION] - thanks for the reply. Very succinct. I think you've covered why/how you'd want to make such rulings. (I like to play what you'd call antagonistic DMing, so our preferences differ.)

I wonder - how do you feel about D&D Next's exploration rules? I imagine it'd be along the same lines - to use or not to use at the DM's discretion - but I wonder if you feel if they're an improvement on what 3E/d20 does. (To me they seem bulky; I think d6 rolls for surprise & searching are probably better. Sub-systems aren't always a bad thing.)

 

[Ahnehnois]

[MENTION=17106]Ahnehnois[/MENTION] - thanks for the reply. Very succinct. I think you've covered why/how you'd want to make such rulings. (I like to play what you'd call antagonistic DMing, so our preferences differ.)

Again, there's nothing wrong with antagonistic DMing. It doesn't work for me personally, but it's an obvious and perfectly natural approach to the game. I suspect it does bring out a lot of conflicts that I ignore.

I wonder - how do you feel about D&D Next's exploration rules? I imagine it'd be along the same lines - to use or not to use at the DM's discretion - but I wonder if you feel if they're an improvement on what 3E/d20 does.

It seems like more detail than I like to put into that side of the game. I'm usually inclined to handle those sorts of things by handwaving or freeform narration and I don't need that much rules detail. Nothing jumped out at me as being offensive about them, just the sort of thing I'd skim and ignore most of the time in play.

 

[LostSoul]

Again, there's nothing wrong with antagonistic DMing. It doesn't work for me personally, but it's an obvious and perfectly natural approach to the game. I suspect it does bring out a lot of conflicts that I ignore.

Good point.

It seems like more detail than I like to put into that side of the game. I'm usually inclined to handle those sorts of things by handwaving or freeform narration and I don't need that much rules detail. Nothing jumped out at me as being offensive about them, just the sort of thing I'd skim and ignore most of the time in play.

I mostly agree. I am not sure there's much to be gained by using them. I'd probably end up hacking together something my own. (In 3E I just make the rolls behind the screen. A pretty simple hack, if you can call it that!)

 

[Cadence]

So, what's the difference here? What's the difference between the player with a passive ability that expects that ability to be used by the DM and a player with diplomacy who expects the DM to follow the rules for diplomacy, or a player with a spell who is following both the letter and the intent of the spell? To me, there's no difference here.

This is why I argue about Calvinball. How is the player supposed to know when the DM is going to start playing silly buggers with the rules?

<snip>

So, in the end, why are you not all jumping behind Shidaku here? He's doing exactly what you all have been advocating for a hundred pages or more. And, we've even got other DM's agreeing that the player is the problem. Do you agree? Is the player the problem? Shidaku has followed your advice - taken ownership of the game and made sure that his vision of the game is the dominant one. What's the problem?

What is the understanding between the players and DM about how the game is supposed to run? It seems to me that there is a big difference between a DM who has given every impression that everything goes by RAW and how the die falls and then pulls this, versus one who let the players know he will alter things on the fly when he thinks it will work better.

In the case of the elf finding secret doors, if the hypothetical DM (whether a RAWer or a fudger) found it annoying/hard to keep track of then he should have mentioned that to the hypothetical player when it first came up. If it was at character creation, then that seem like a standard part of the DM setting what rule set he'd like to run. If the players hate part of the proposed set-up then they can bring it up . If the DM doesn't want to change it they can either not play elves (in this case) or someone else can volunteer to DM. I'm not sure why the hypothetical DM has such trouble keeping track of it (a pre-rolled list of numbers he can look at whenever the elf walks by the secret door), but if it throws him off his game it doesn't seem like such a big thing for the player to give up. If it only came up after play began, the DM could just have explained to the character that he was having a hard time keeping track (for whatever reason) , say it would be nice for the elf player to bring it up once in a while when he thought it was important, and apologize in advance for not rewriting history to fix it if he missed one.

If the player reacts by saying sure, I'll point out when I'm searching and then has the elf become a wall-hugging constant-checking jerk the entire rest of the adventure, then hasn't the player become the problem at that point?


And I can't XP it, but I like what [MENTION=17106]Ahnehnois[/MENTION] says in the second part of 1902 (assuming the DM lets the players know the general set of rules and amount of on-the-fly alteration he generally engages in before things start).

 

[N'raac]

I'm not sure why the hypothetical DM has such trouble keeping track of it (a pre-rolled list of numbers he can look at whenever the elf walks by the secret door), but if it throws him off his game it doesn't seem like such a big thing for the player to give up. If it only came up after play began, the DM could just have explained to the character that he was having a hard time keeping track (for whatever reason) , say it would be nice for the elf player to bring it up once in a while when he thought it was important, and apologize in advance for not rewriting history to fix it if he missed one.

If the player reacts by saying sure, I'll point out when I'm searching and then has the elf become a wall-hugging constant-checking jerk the entire rest of the adventure, then hasn't the player become the problem at that point?

First off, how far is "five feet"? In a 10' wide hallway (which, in real world terms, is a pretty wide hallway), it seems reasonable to just assume the elf will pass within 5' of both walls all the way own the hallway. In a room the party is investigating, it does not seem unreasonable that the elf would pass within 5' of the wall throughout the room. That eliminates any need for the elf player to move his miniature parallel to the wall throughout any investigation scene.

 

[Campbell]

One of the things I've been learning about myself as a player in both [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION]'s PbP and my Sunday night Scion game is that my enjoyment of both games is not really based on mechanical balance between character types as much as the feeling that my thematic choices when making a character have meaning, that I'm playing basically the same game as everyone else, and that the choices I make have an impact on the fiction. My avenger feels like an intractable, resolute combatant mechanically with strong hooks into the fiction (elf as outsider to human society, priest as spokesman for an old faith and old accords, distrust with hope). I've also felt the pinch of every daily power, every encounter power as well as my choice to save character build resources for deployment of rituals.

Although the Scion game I play in is by far less mechanically balanced than 4e I get a similar vibe. The character I've built reinforces the concept of a rock star brawler with the soul of a poet. Although my character is charismatic, he's not really a charmer/smoozer. Rather through careful selection of knacks he functions as our group's leader in combat. I can channel legend to inspire willpower in groups big and small, use my Command skill to coordinate attacks, and channel my Willpower into Courage and Expression. All of which leads to a play experience where my character's personality really shines through the mechanics of play. He feels direct and to the point in play.

Of course Scion cheats its way past process simulation concerns. Since every PC is a supernatural child of the gods you can justify legend as a thing in setting. Because they got to define the entirety of the fiction, White Wolf was able to define PCs as equals in terms of inherent fictional positioning.

 

[Hussar]

Moreover, the thing with secret doors is that in general, it's in a DM's interest for the player to find things that he takes the time to create, so if he does take the trouble to create one, he probably will let the players find it one way or another. That might not be the case if we're assuming an antagonistic DM who is genuinely testing the players to see if they can find things. Which again is fine but is not what everyone does.

And, of course, there's a first level spell that finds secret doors without a check. If you're expecting them, that's probably going to override the whole elf thing.

Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...-(a-case-for-fighters-)/page191#ixzz2mKBR3IEi

Now, this is a very different approach to the game than I would take. I have no vested interest in what the players find, so, if they miss a secret door, or find it, either is perfectly fine with me. I would never bother putting in secret passages only to fudge my way into letting the players find it. I'm not sure if I would characterize that as antagonistic. The players can find it or not find it, that's up to them.

I'd be more inclined to call the DM who "guides" his players into finding secret doors a DM who is treading very close to rail roading. For me, rail roading is negating player choices. Whether those are good or bad choices doesn't really matter. If I choose to speed through an area and skip over stuff, that's on me. OTOH, if I play a character who is into finding secrets, I wouldn't want the DM to be fudging in my favor either.

As far as the "well a 1st level spell fixes that" I think you've just won this thread. Isn't this precisely the same thing I commented on about casting Charm Person to get past the chamberlain? What's the difference? The player's resources are being trumped by the caster.

 

[N'raac]

As far as the "well a 1st level spell fixes that" I think you've just won this thread. Isn't this precisely the same thing I commented on about casting Charm Person to get past the chamberlain? What's the difference? The player's resources are being trumped by the caster.

It certainly returns us to the initial discussion. The 1st level spell requires concentration, has a 60' range and lasts one minute per level (maximum). It takes two rounds to locate the secret door. Unlike the elf, however, it's infallible, and can determine the opening mechanism. So, you can only move at half speed (concentration to maintain a spell being a standard action), your concentration can be disrupted, you can cast no other spells without losing concentration, and you get a few minutes for each spell you use.



Spells are a limited resource. The Elf's ability works all day, does not slow him to half speed and does not otherwise restrict his activity. The spellcaster either needs a god idea where that secret door is, or needs lots of time to keep exploring and re-memorizing the spell (and whatever slots he uses for the spell are unavailable for other uses).

The spell and the elf's ability are different, certainly, but the spell does not render the elf's ability worthless. Personally, I'd much rather let the elf locate secret doors and I'll preserve my more limited magical resources for other uses.