Flavorless 3e- Advantage- players

[jasamcarl]

Nope. No hypocracy. And I'm being quite consistent. I simply haven't yet managed to get my message across.



There's this thing called "tact". You can speak "truth" and generally not offend, if you use it. It is especially good for use in online situations, because frequently "truth" is based on incomplete information - you generally must make a large number of inferences and assumptions before you can say much about the character of people in these situations. Baldly speaking the "truth" is apt to be met with derision because of that. Tactfully speaking what you believe may be true is more likely to be given leeway.

I myself have, on occasion, chosen to be blunt in the name of clarity of presentation. However, there's a line betwen blunt and insulting - it really does pay to not cross it. If you insult (intentionally or not, "truthful" or not), people tend to stop listening to you. If your actual goal is to teach, you want them to listen.

The current bent of the thread stands as a bit of evidence for this. Your tone has caused people to not consider what you say, but how you say it. That, in and of itself, should serve to show you that your current tone (no matter how much you like it) is not terribly functional as a mode of discourse.



I do no such thing. I don't address how strong your relative positions seem to me. I note that if you took the same position without the insulting tone, your position would seem stronger to the audience.

I say, "Your oponent's position stands on it's own merits". Perhaps it would have been more clear to write "stands or falls on it's own merits". I mean that an attack on things other than the position's own merits don't actually address the subject. If you are presented with a house that you want to dismantle, you deal witht the physical structure of the house - insulting the man who built the house doesn't bring the house down.

All that, and a return to the original point - you've been around here enough to know the rules. Long enough to know that they apply to you no matter what the other guy does. I'd prefer this thread not get closed because you choose to not follow them, because there were some good things here before you started calling people babies and hypocrites.

Ah, thanks for clarifying. I don't believe this holds here though. In most of my post I used 'seems to me' and 'i think' to qualify all of my remarks. And given that this is primarily a discussion of perception (i.e. 'flavor'), I think the mindset of the poster is a perfectly reasonable subject of inquiry. He chose to be offended, threw some complelty irrelevant comments my way, to which I responded by noting how irrelevant his insults were to the topic at hand. In all those cases I was making an argument, either about the actual topic or what relevant to that topic. He was simply venting. Again, the truth (as I percieve it) can hurt, and often hurts because it is true. Not speaking it would be to censore myself or, worse, be condescending to the current posters. I just assumed enworld posters were smart enough to look past their immediate emotional response and to the substance as it stands. 'Insulting' to the person to identifies to closely with his campaign perhaps.

Which brings us back to the question of rhetoric. I find that those who are too touchy automatically loose credibility because they are unable to or unwilling to face inconvenient arguments. If I post something that is equal parts irrelevant and substantive (which I do not concede i did), the mature individual would ignore the former and address the later. The person to ducks out completly just looks weak. Of course this depends on the larger audience, but I have no reason to believe that those who posted sympathy for the original, weak poster are representative of the larger messageboard community. If he is a lost cause, others might have easily taken something from my bluntness.

Oh, and 'baby' and 'hypocrite' only came into the equation after i was referred to as something else. So while technically correct, the more defensible statement on your part would be 'there were interesting posts before the original poster started calling people prick'; but I don't blame you for not being consistent given your love of rhetoric. Are you now denying that there are hypocrites on this board? Curious position...

 

[swrushing]

A few comments...

My 3e game just conclided a three year run from levels 2-15. neither I, nor AFAIK my players, found it flavorless, video gameish, too easy, or saw any lack of hardships at higher levels. it was enjoyable and some of my players referred to it as the best campaign they had been in.

So, i have to reject a number of the assertions about the things and styles the system has to lead to.

I think, from my own experience, that in any game in any system a lot of the flavor comes from the GM (in the way he brings his stories to the table and brings life and personal interest to his player's characters) and the players (by how willing they are to run interesting characters and give them "real" personalities.)

Some specifics...

"Ease of ressuraction" or lack of punishment for PC death or even lack of permanence in PC death has never been a problem for me. I know some GMs believe that players should expect to lose characters and start new ones and they often coddle that reasoning in "well, if the risk of pc death isn't real, they wont have any fun" but i never bought it. A "really dead" PC is typically the end of a story and many of the storylines it has been developing. I like things that produce more story over things that produce less.

In my recent campaign, one of the things i did to make death more than just a temporary impairment, the 6 seconds of downtime being bandied about here, was to make it an experience and show some long term differences. For example:

1. Everyone had their afterlife scene. This involved interacting with spirits and the like and always dealt with a very intimately personal aspect of their character and a choice of direction. In each case, while chosing between life and death (whether to answer the raise dead call or not) it also forced them to deal with the question of "why are you going back" and get them to focus in very clearly on what they wanted to do. The answer to "why not continue on to your eternal reward" is significant. Sometimes the answers they came up with were surprising even to them and led to new directions of character development. Sometimes, information was gained which spawned entire campaign arcs. (getting key info from a trip to the land of the dead is fairly tarditional mythic fodder after all.) The scenes were so enjoyable and such good roleplaying (on their part) that those who avoided PC death lamented the fact after the campaign because they missed out on their afterlife scenes.

2. i introduced people within the world for whom death and back again was not trivial. one cult believed that those who came back were an affront to the goddess of death and went after those who they saw to be returned dead. If you did not meet their standards, and no one ever did, they were going to "right the wrong" and that meant sending you back to the other side. A second cult (of the same goddess) believed that anyone who had come back from the dead were sacred having been "cradled in the goddess' arms" and that the brief contact gave them insight. They sought those people out to recruit them and train them in harnessing their "mystic abilities". (Think of a PRC with "been dead, got better" as a prereq. and gradual access to powers like speak with dead and so forth.)

So, with a little storyline stuff and without a bunch of penalties and long term whammys, death and ressurection were not just flavorless "accounting attacks" but which were significant events which spawned interest, character development and spurred story.

Now, that all said, our game did end at 15th level so perhaps things change drastically when access to 9th level spells kicks in. I cannot say one way or the other. maybe miracle and wish do horrible nasty things to campaigns or perhaps they are just convenient boogetmen scapegoats for campaigns which fail due to other factors.

But, if indeed they are real trouble for some types of campaigns, my advice would be simple... don't run those campaigns at those levels. At 5th-15th level, wishes and miracles by PCs are not a problem typically. The type of challenge and type of threat you wish to put to your PCs in the story DICTATES where the levels should be. A chasm over a lake of acid tells you to put this encounter at lower levels, because after the PCs have ready access to fly spells its not that big of a deal.

Thats all for now.

 

[Storminator]

You aren't helping him, because as soon as you insult a person, your credibility and ability to teach drops precipitously. As soon as you make your audience annoyed at you, the amount of attention they pay to your content decreases, and the amount of attention paid to your tone increases. They cease treating you as a source of wisdom, and start treating you as an adversary - a person to be beaten or avoided, not a person to learn from.

This is certainly true. I've put jas on my ignore list because of this thread (not that he'll care), and it wasn't even me he was insulting.

There isn't anything of value in his posts.

PS

 

[kamosa]

Likewise with Turning - if a PC doesn't recognise something as undead, naturally they won't try to Turn it. If the PC ought to have recognised them as undead the GM should have descibed them as such.

That was my point. The GM wouldn't describe them as undead and wouldn't answer our querries as to whether or not they were undead. So, essentially he just took away our powers by making the world special.

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

That was my point. The GM wouldn't describe them as undead and wouldn't answer our querries as to whether or not they were undead. So, essentially he just took away our powers by making the world special.

I can see at least one outlet for this to still be cool. You could, theoretically, be encountering a new type of undead that hasn't yet been described, or is so utterly rare that the K (Religion) check to recognize it has an ungodly DC.

Otherwise, it should be reasonably obvious that a monster is undead, esp. since, at most levels where turning is actually useful for things other than Divine Might, you're seeing skeletons, zombies, wraiths, ghouls, etc., stuff that's pretty obviously undead. A low-level vampire in a tavern might be hard to identify, though.

Brad

 

[The Freak]

jasamcarl and umbran, could you please email your comments to each other instead of filling this thread with off-topic posts?

Anyway, I think that the "taint" idea is fine, but you should give the spells you're penalizing a boost. After all, if using these spells is so dangerous, then there should be a little reward as well.

On topic, my opinion is simple:

D&D is a system for playing a generic fantasy game. Don't play the system's D&D. Make the system play your D&D.

 

[Anubis the Doomseer]

jasamcarl and umbran, could you please email your comments to each other instead of filling this thread with off-topic posts?

Anyway, I think that the "taint" idea is fine, but you should give the spells you're penalizing a boost. After all, if using these spells is so dangerous, then there should be a little reward as well.

On topic, my opinion is simple:

D&D is a system for playing a generic fantasy game. Don't play the system's D&D. Make the system play your D&D.

I'm going to leap frog over the flames here and say that this leads directly into the original poster's problem, and to a degree I think the problem can be broadened somewhat - that players (and DMs) put different spins and preferences over rules created by the DM and those published in a book (either Hasbro core or by some third party) with players putting a greater emphasis on the latter and generally being suspicious of the former.

I think this might be because, as an earlier poster pointed out, books, in order to sell, play to the player - they add things they can do, and detract from consequences of actions (here's a new prestige class that removes the restrictions you took when you multiclassed, here's a magic item/feat/McGuffin that overcomes a weakness built into this feat/class/spell/skill description precisely because otherwise it becomes abusive). DM's tend to approach house rules (generalizing here from my own experiences on both sides of the screen here) on setting limitations into place - in order to better tailor the rulesset to the setting or plot they wish to do.

Now where this becomes obvious is where such restrictive house rules become published and the moment they are all of a sudden they are okay. Scarred Lands has some interesting "house rules" about how the races interact, the class system meshes with the setting details and so on. No one (that I've known) has gone on to complain about the 'wizards generate heat' or the 'sorcerors carry Titan blood' or even the 'all Druids are titan worshippers' setting concepts - and yet, by sheer circumstance I happened to be in a game around that same time where the DM made similar (bordering on exactly the same) house rules but the players who had read SL material without blinking were now up in arms about how "unfair" such rules were.

The solution, is as always, discussion within the group. Communication is key, but people do need to move away from the "if it didn't come out of a book it's bad" mentality.

- Ma'at

 

[Numion]

I wouldn't even have told the players about this. I would have let them discover it the hard way.

Learning houserules midgame is one of the number one DM gripes players air on forums by my observations. I wouldn't recommend doing this, unless you're looking to alienate players.

 

[Belen]

First let me say that this is a general comment about GM created special rules and my past experiences. I don't know the specfics of your game and wouldn't want to pass judgement, even if I did.

I know in the past, I always disliked it when the GM deviated from the books greatly because it reduced my ability to understand the game world. Let me explain.

When the rules are written down in the book, I can look them up, read about them in my own time and contemplate how to create and guide a character under those rules. When the GM makes up rules I am often caught off guard by how they affect my character.

Example: I had a GM that wanted to make undead strange and different from the types listed in the players hand book. On the surface this seemed very cool. Smoke wraiths and sewer ghouls are cool, I like the concept. However, because I had no access to these monsters and the GM would never tell me when I was facing undead, my turning power became useless. I couldn't recognize them as undead because they were special.

The ranger that had as an enemie undead wouldn't get the +2 to attack because we didn't know they were undead. Etc.

Afterwards the GM would chastise us for not using our powers and it would piss me off.

Let me reiterate, I liked the idea of cool, strange undead. But in practice it stunk. Changes to the core system can be used as weapons against the players. When this happens, or if the players have had this happen in the past, they can become very ardent against home rules or GM creativity.

After my experience I have warning bells that go off every time a new GM starts off describing her world by saying "It's all different..."

FYI I've been a GM for close to 20 years now and had several long campaigns that lasted years and years. IE, it's not that I don't understand the GM process that causes me to mistrust whole sale changes to the rules.

I agree with you. This is why I place all the rules on a website that they can view at will and why I ask for their feedback. Usually, I end up revising new rules based on their criticism, if I find that they have a point.

As for the monsters that your GM threw against you, I agree with him in part, but would have allowed you to roll a knowledge or intelligence check for a chance to identify them and thus use your powers.

 

[Belen]

I'm going to leap frog over the flames here and say that this leads directly into the original poster's problem, and to a degree I think the problem can be broadened somewhat - that players (and DMs) put different spins and preferences over rules created by the DM and those published in a book (either Hasbro core or by some third party) with players putting a greater emphasis on the latter and generally being suspicious of the former.

I think this might be because, as an earlier poster pointed out, books, in order to sell, play to the player - they add things they can do, and detract from consequences of actions (here's a new prestige class that removes the restrictions you took when you multiclassed, here's a magic item/feat/McGuffin that overcomes a weakness built into this feat/class/spell/skill description precisely because otherwise it becomes abusive). DM's tend to approach house rules (generalizing here from my own experiences on both sides of the screen here) on setting limitations into place - in order to better tailor the rulesset to the setting or plot they wish to do.

Now where this becomes obvious is where such restrictive house rules become published and the moment they are all of a sudden they are okay. Scarred Lands has some interesting "house rules" about how the races interact, the class system meshes with the setting details and so on. No one (that I've known) has gone on to complain about the 'wizards generate heat' or the 'sorcerors carry Titan blood' or even the 'all Druids are titan worshippers' setting concepts - and yet, by sheer circumstance I happened to be in a game around that same time where the DM made similar (bordering on exactly the same) house rules but the players who had read SL material without blinking were now up in arms about how "unfair" such rules were.

The solution, is as always, discussion within the group. Communication is key, but people do need to move away from the "if it didn't come out of a book it's bad" mentality.

- Ma'at

Funny enough, I just made the same argument to my players. I told them that they should not consider them house rules, but consider them world specific rules.

Basically, they have become too complacent. They expect to get their way, and I think, they are unhappy that I am taking a strong stance in creating the rules for Elisan.

What I find hilarious, is that I make up things on the spot all the time and they never have trouble with it. However, if I actually prepare them by sending the rules for comment, then they get really worked up about it.

I do find it quite funny that they will complain about a rule that affects none of them, but does affect a class (specialized wizard) that they do not intend to play.