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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3882799" data-attributes="member: 4937">Which is precisely why its obvious that monsters shouldn't need a simple scipt forcing them to do this or that.&nbsp; You explained it yourself.&nbsp; A script that would be suitable for a computer game is a huge step backward from the powerful tool that we have in the form of 'our judgement'.&nbsp; No computer game has an AI for its actors which is as flexible, powerful, and interesting as what referees provide to pen and paper games.&nbsp; Computers games should be (and are) striving to be more like the pen and paper experience in this area, not the other way around.&nbsp; That isn't to say that there aren't things that the CRPG experience can't teach the PnP designers, but it should be pretty obvious that AI replacing a DM isn't it.But if these are rules, then they are step backward from relying on the DM's judgement in this matter, or else they are suggestions which I might write into an encounter if I was trying to communicate to another DM how I intended the encounter to play out.&nbsp; Or else, presenting questions like this would be part of the text where I would be trying to teach new DMs how to be thoughtful in thier play when running an encounter.&nbsp;&nbsp; More to the point, the sort 'aggro/threat' rules that MMORPGs implement are implemented for reasons that don't really apply to Pen and Paper, and if we want to achieve some sort of goal like 'making sure that a tank build can meaningfully protect a blaster build', we have other more subtle and more interesting tools with which to do it.&nbsp; For example, we have, as Cadfan put it, 'better collision detection'.&nbsp; A tank can make it hard for a monster to get around him, and we can punish monsters for trying to avoid the tank by giving the tank AoO or bonus if the monsters 'attention' goes elsewhere.&nbsp; We can make it logical for the monster to deal with the tank if the tank can correctly position himself.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 3882799, member: 4937"] Which is precisely why its obvious that monsters shouldn't need a simple scipt forcing them to do this or that. You explained it yourself. A script that would be suitable for a computer game is a huge step backward from the powerful tool that we have in the form of 'our judgement'. No computer game has an AI for its actors which is as flexible, powerful, and interesting as what referees provide to pen and paper games. Computers games should be (and are) striving to be more like the pen and paper experience in this area, not the other way around. That isn't to say that there aren't things that the CRPG experience can't teach the PnP designers, but it should be pretty obvious that AI replacing a DM isn't it. But if these are rules, then they are step backward from relying on the DM's judgement in this matter, or else they are suggestions which I might write into an encounter if I was trying to communicate to another DM how I intended the encounter to play out. Or else, presenting questions like this would be part of the text where I would be trying to teach new DMs how to be thoughtful in thier play when running an encounter. More to the point, the sort 'aggro/threat' rules that MMORPGs implement are implemented for reasons that don't really apply to Pen and Paper, and if we want to achieve some sort of goal like 'making sure that a tank build can meaningfully protect a blaster build', we have other more subtle and more interesting tools with which to do it. For example, we have, as Cadfan put it, 'better collision detection'. A tank can make it hard for a monster to get around him, and we can punish monsters for trying to avoid the tank by giving the tank AoO or bonus if the monsters 'attention' goes elsewhere. We can make it logical for the monster to deal with the tank if the tank can correctly position himself. [/QUOTE]

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