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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6203159" data-attributes="member: 42582">This statement, taken in its totality, is not true in my experience, because (again in my exerience) charop is a red herring.The use of Charm Person to deal with the chamberlain has nothing to do with charop, for instance. That is just the player of an enchanter PC using his/her resources to play his/her PC in accordance with a completely uncontentious conception of what it is that enchanters do (namely, enchant). Yet we have already seen in this thread that that is an action which gives rise to balance concerns, countering responses from the GM, etc.For me and the players I play with, an enjoyable game begins from the premise that every player is free to play his or her PC (i) hard, and (ii) in accordance with that player's conception of that PC. The fighter/caster issue arises because when the players of casters do this using the traditional D&D suite of spells they put serious pressure on the viability of this style of game. (Evokers less so - they're essentially a form of high-impact archer - but charmers, diviners and summoners are all more serious culprits; and even an evoker can have a potentially destabiising series of utility effects.)The sorts of spells I have in mind incude detection spells (that create privileged access to backstory), various forms of scouting/mobility (invis, fly etc) which create both privileged access to backstory and also opportunities for scene avoidance, charming (which allows reframing a scene from an encounter with a hostile entity to an encounter with a friendly entity), summoning (which allows breaking the action economy) and all the other usual culprits.If the GM pulls out "special measures" - like the king's own diviners to protect the chamberlain from Charm spells, or the replacement lizardman guard to get in the way of Magic Jar - then from the players' point of view, in my style of play, this is a type of ad hoc punishment for good play (@Manbearcat's Calvinball). If the player holds back him-/herself, then s/he is no longer going all out to bring his/her PC into contact with the fiction. S/he's voluntarily forfeiting the ability to deploy resources. For me, at least, this is insipid, and turns the player into a type of co-GM and the character into some sort of half-way thing between PC and NPC. That has little attraction for me.What I prefer is to tackle the issue of mechanical effectiveness, especially in those dimensions I emphasised, at the point of character build (eg redesign Charm so it is essentially a bonus to engage in Dipolmacy; redesign Invis so it interfaces more obviously with the Stealth rules; etc); and also to develop action resolution mechanics which can absorb and cope with, rather than crack under the pressure of, these sorts of abilities. In particular, this means shifting from ad hoc obstacles to the regulated and rationed introduction of obstacles in response to player checks. (This is Manbearcat's point about the difference between closed, genre-driven scene/conflict resolution, compared to open-ended task resolution.)</blockquote>

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