How Does "The Rules Aren't Physics" Fix Anything?

[LostSoul]

Still no good. It has to be a mechanic tied to your development. As long as the mechanic of development is class levels there has been no solution yet.

Fruitful void.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Certainly. Not everyone suddenly had these problems at the same time the 4e team mentioned it. It just didn't seem to have the traction that something like CoDzilla had until recently. So, I would say it wasn't a glaring problem for most people. What triggered me is the 'this is so much better' posts, when it was really no different at all, mechanically.

Mechanically, it IS different though. Following the rules as they were written(as I did in 3.5) meant that nearly anyone who died during an adventure would be brought back to life: nobility of all sorts lived in or near cities which had ready access to the components and people necessary to cast raise dead and they had the political power to make it happen.

If the PCs were involved, they would have the resources necessary to do it themselves. And the rules said that the only time the spell wouldn't work is when the recipient was unwilling. So, being bound by the rules I have to allow them to be brought back since they DO want to return.

Knowing that, I have to make sure my plots don't revolve around someone staying dead. Either that or I have to give every assassin the ability to steal the souls of their victims.

With the new system it says that the ritual only brings back those whose souls are still on the Shadowfell. The amount of time someone stays on the Shadowfell before moving on to their final destination varies from person to person. Most of the time it is near immediate and sometimes it takes a while. Mostly it depends on the strength of their soul and whether the "universe" or the "impersonal forces" or whatever creates destiny are attempting to keep them around longer.

I can follow these rules and am perfectly within my right to say "He doesn't come back...he's gone." So, mechanically, I see a big difference.

 

[Lord Zardoz]

Responses to Storm-Bringer

- Poison doing ability damage causes poisons to be much more dangerous than they need to be.
As opposed to poisons that arent' very dangerous at all? I mean, of the poisonous substances in the world, a good many of them are simply lethal. No saving throw. Certain spider poison will cause necrosis of tissues for months or years after the initial bite.

Creatures with poison in 3rd edition essentially do not scale well with the given assumptions of how a characters durability changes as they increase in level. Because they elected to use ability damage, spamming a bunch of creatures able to do some ability damage circumvents HD. If I apply the Swarm template to something like common snakes, or create a situation where I can circumvent AC, the players will likely get wiped out. While the system does a good job of keeping poison dangerous, it does not really add much entertainment to the game.

On top of that, you get the fun of forcing your player to recalculate a bunch of stuff on the fly. Saving throws, attack and damage modifiers, AC, HP, and Spell save DC's for casters is just the obvious stuff. Encumberance and skill checks can also come into play (Dex poison vs mounted combat, etc) A Str poison also affects your Grapple modifier. All these things can be overlooked.

- Grappling giving a size bonus meant that large creatures would nearly always succeed on grapple checks since they would also have very high strength values and a CR appropriate Bab.
So, an Ancient Dragon should have roughly the same chance to grapple as a Kobold?

Based on Bab, no. But should grapple be able to function as a "Screw the Player" button for the DM?

- It uses a melee touch attack, so you disregard most of a front line fighters AC.
- Spell casters generally suck at grapple, so you shut down casters.
- Front line fighters tend to specialize in a non light weapon. If you grapple, that weapon cannot generally be used. Against a 10th level opponent, that will have a huge affect on damage (especially if the player uses a 2 handed weapon) and attack roll (you lose the +X enhancement bonus, weapon focus, and weapon mastery).
- Players cannot break the grapple unless they roll great AND you roll crappy if the size bonus is from a Huge or larger creature. Against large creatures, front line fighter types can probably still break out reasonably often, but for all other classes, its still a longshot.

- Ability bonuses being tied into so many different things that changing a score via a buff or a poison / ability drain would require a bunch of recalculation.
Only when you used them. I understand 4e has a crapload of overlapping auras and such that need to be adjusted and re-calculated during combat. Much higher handle time.

The problem was never Str + X. The problem was determining Str + X + Y, and then applying that to WpnDmg + A + B, and Bab + N. Just way too many different modifiers that could reasonably come into play.

My understanding is that for 4th edition, there will be fewer things in play which can affect your stats directly. You may be right though. We will find out in June I guess.

- Monsters playing by exactly the same rules would often result in more book keeping than would be ideal.
DMs who are forced at gunpoint to stat out every goblin child in the game world will be faced with a great deal of bookkeeping. DMs who wisely stat out major NPCs only will not have a substantial task ahead of them.

No one is talking about statting out every goblin child in the game. And I think I should have used a phrase other than book keeping to describe what my intent was. But the current system does indeed have flaws when statting out high level NPC's. A good example is applying the 4th level INT increase to acquired skills, and working out a reasonable spell selection for an arcane caster that avoids looking like the last 6 such casters you used. If you multi-class, you also get to flip around the book to work out the saving throws and attack rolls.

A better point worth making is that "Having the monsters use the same rules as the players has unintended consequences". The players are meant to be a balanced part of a team. That is not the case for monsters. But it is pretty hard to create monsters that are a viable tactical threat to the players without them being screwy in some way. Solo Monsters will often have much better Fort saves than intended because the only other way to kick up the HP is to add Hit dice, which will kick up all saves as well as Bab.

A DM is perfectly entitled to just skew things, at least on paper. If I want to have a Hill giant that can go solo against the party, I could just kick up the AC a few points and kick up the HP a great deal, as well as improve some of the saves. But many people are leery of disregarding the rules as written, especially when they do not have a clear understanding of how the underlying system is meant to work.

- Monsters getting abilities that make sense flavor wise but are meaningless in actual game play.
Such as?

A good example here would be the spell like abilities of Outsiders, as well as some dragons. How often does the Black Dragons ability to befoul water come into play? How often do you give Juvenile dragons 1st level spells other than Shield and Mage Armour? Do you even use the dragons Cantrips?

- A skill system that guaranteed it would be impossible to have a skill based challenge that would be reasonable for everyone in the party to have to attempt.
How is that bad? Is Rope Use really applicable when negotiating with a sphinx? Will Diplomacy really help you detect a trap better?

Your counter examples are deeply flawed. How about these skill challenges:
- Narrow and slippery walkways calling for a Balance check
- A chase scene that puts a river in the path of the party. Crossing could greatly help, but it calls for a difficult Swim check. Could also be a cliff and a Climb check. Or a gap with a Jump check.

Oh, and on that subject, a Swiss Army Knife wizard tends to render many good skill based encounters moot due to having spells that allow you to skip them entirely.

- The implementation of Disarm / Sunder / BullRush essentially being crappy.
In your estimation. Much like Grapple, some have problems, others don't.

The problem with Disarm and Trip are that the consequences of failure make them not worth trying unless they were guaranteed to succeed. Grapple is a bit over complicated. Sunder is actually pretty good aside from the sudden book keeping of Item HP, and having to look up item hardness.

- Mounted combat that leads to a 'kill the horse' strategy always being the best.
Which, historically, was the best strategy. How is this a problem?

If you had a cleric in every fight against the party open with casting silence on the weapon of some cannon fodder type, and than having that fodder opponent stand within 15 feet of a spell caster, it would get old fast. Why build a spell caster at all if he will suddenly be nerfed? Do you always disarm the guy who put alot of feats into weapon spec / weapon focus / weapon mastery? Probably not, but at least you have access to better defences against that tactic, such as better saving throws / opposed rolls.

But mounted combat suffers because your mount is very damn easy to neutralize with Area of Effect spells and will probably have a very low AC. It ought to be a good strategy, but it should not be trivial to counter a character concept that put at least 3 feats and a bunch of skill points into a character being skilled at it. Tying the mounts defenses to the rider would not have been difficult and would not have harmed the game.

END COMMUNICATION

 

[Mallus]

Yes, and it always drove me nuts.

Did it stop you from playing? If not, perhaps it's not so suspension of disbelief shattering after all. I mean, there are always going to be places where the priorities of the game system rub up uncomfortably against the fictional space created using the game system.

If I want to wander around in a world where everybody but my character is a souless, nameless cipher I will play a computer game.

You'll note this has nothing to do with the mechanics used to create and/or govern an NPC. Conversely, fulling statting an NPC does nothing to guarantee they won't come off in play as a nameless cypher.

If I walk into the closest 7-11 and start talking to the clerk they will have a name, a family, hobbies, and opinions. In a RPG I expect my character to experience that same degree of verisimilitude.

And depending on the particular DM, you might get it.

Yes, my character (past a few levels) can take a crossbow bolt to the chest and the clerk probably can't. So what? At the start of his career the character couldn't either.

The point is that there is a fundamental difference between an NPC clerk and a PC hero. The reason for this has to do with playability issues.

What there is not however, is laws of physics that work for me but not for other people.

That's because you aren't a PC in a role-playing game. The world is a comprehensive simulation of itself. RPG's are a comprehensive simulation of... not much.

If an NPC can perform a trick with a weapon, I expect that my PC weaponsmaster, with the same or greater strength and dexterity, can also learn that same trick.

Why? People have different talents. Since verisimilitude seems so important to you, why would you expect that you're character can automatically emulate an NPC's skill, without regard to the NPC's background and training? Perhaps it took the NPC 10 years to master the 5 Points Exploding Palm Technique...

 

[Lacyon]

Certainly. Not everyone suddenly had these problems at the same time the 4e team mentioned it. It just didn't seem to have the traction that something like CoDzilla had until recently. So, I would say it wasn't a glaring problem for most people. What triggered me is the 'this is so much better' posts, when it was really no different at all, mechanically.

It seems likely to me that one of the reasons it didn't get much 'traction' before that, is that the people who were bothered with it knew they could apply houserules and guidelines to get what they wanted, and there wasn't any point in complaining about it on a messageboard, except maybe to get suggestions on how to modify it*. Now that they don't have to, a lot of them are openly breathing a sigh of relief, so you get a lot of posts along the lines of "this is so much better," because the game these people want to play is more closely aligned with the game that's written in the rulebook.

*(My personal answer would be to have all the Raise Dead spells use a component like Psionic Revivify's XP cost that scales up in cost each round after the body dies and can be shared between the caster and recipient, so that PCs can typically Raise each other in or right after combat, but if I want the king to not get raised, he only has to be dead for a couple of minutes before the XP cost gets high enough that he's gone for good. Adjust costs and time period by spell level and to taste.)

 

[Andor]

Did it stop you from playing? If not, perhaps it's not so suspension of disbelief shattering after all. I mean, there are always going to be places where the priorities of the game system rub up uncomfortably against the fictional space created using the game system.

I played because playing a game with annoying bits is better than not playing at all. However playing a game without annoying bits is better yet.

That's because you aren't a PC in a role-playing game. The world is a comprehensive simulation of itself. RPG's are a comprehensive simulation of... not much.

We're on fundamentally different pages here. What is an RPG? If it's an exercise in creative joint storytelling then I don't need rules at all. If it's a tactical game of combat then I don't need named characters and local towns and economies. I play an RPG to assume the identity of a character in a world, and both the character and the world have to feel real to me. That does not mean the world has to be like our world, but it does mean it has to be internally consistant enough that I can empathise with the viewpoint of a character within that world.

Why? People have different talents. Since verisimilitude seems so important to you, why would you expect that you're character can automatically emulate an NPC's skill, without regard to the NPC's background and training? Perhaps it took the NPC 10 years to master the 5 Points Exploding Palm Technique...

Where did I say my PC should be able to do it automatically? I said "can also learn". If it took the NPC 10 years to learn, then having it take 10 years for my PC is perfectly fine. Saying, no that's NPCs only, is not.

 

[Storm-Bringer]

But by the wacky rules of the D&D economy, they do./

Not really.

In other words, a Small City or larger should easily be able to produce the goods required for a raise dead spell.

I bolded the important part. While not crippling, that is still a limitation. Also, the text refers to mundane items. Not in the context of 'non-magical', but in the context of 'every day items'. I am pretty sure diamonds are not an every day item for most inhabitants of a small city. In other words, while there may very well be 5000gp in diamonds around a city, they are not likely to be sitting in a pile on the burghermeister's desk.

Of course, I would be extremely hesitant to have 5,000gp worth of easily transportable gems of any kind in a city. That is the kind of thing that traveling rogues and bandits live for. I would have a harder time believing several fistfuls of gems always remain with their rightful owner than someone being raised from the dead.

 

[Mallus]

However playing a game without annoying bits is better yet.

No argument there.

What is an RPG? If it's an exercise in creative joint storytelling then I don't need rules at all. If it's a tactical game of combat then I don't need named characters and local towns and economies.

Both of those elements are part of my working definition, with some others, including 'naked adolescent power fantasy', and by naked I mean unbridled, not unclothed.

I play an RPG to assume the identity of a character in a world, and both the character and the world have to feel real to me.

OK. Sure. But what goes into creating that sense of a real world? Personally, having protagonists and antagonists governed by the same algorithms just doesn't do it for me, verisimilitude-wise (in part because I try not think too much about said algorithms when I'm playing. Ironically, that damages my suspension of disbelief, kinda. A little.)

A game world is satisfying real to me if it's reasonably rich in detail and populated with reasonably well-motivated and well-characterized characters, and more so the latter than the former. The rules that under gird the faux physical space and faux population, not so much.

I said "can also learn". If it took the NPC 10 years to learn, then having it take 10 years for my PC is perfectly fine. Saying, no that's NPCs only, is not.

Given a typical campaign structure, explain the difference between telling a player "it'll take 10 years of dedicated training" and "no you can't" in something other than philosophical terms.

 

[Cadfan]

I play an RPG to assume the identity of a character in a world, and both the character and the world have to feel real to me. That does not mean the world has to be like our world, but it does mean it has to be internally consistant enough that I can empathise with the viewpoint of a character within that world.

A certain amount of whether the game world feels real to you is a function of the rules. But perhaps a larger portion is an act of will. This is the lesson which Hong has endeavored to teach you, but as his efforts at instruction through zen koan have failed, I have an alternate solution- thou shalt go forth, and play a game of Og: Unearthed with thy drinking buddies, and then a game of Faery's Tale with your eight year old niece. Observe how your drinking buddies accept the game world and revel in it precisely because the rules are highly abstract, and how your eight year old niece accepts the game world simply because it pleases her to do so.

This shall cleanse thy spirit, and thou shall be renewed.

 

[Storm-Bringer]

I can follow these rules and am perfectly within my right to say "He doesn't come back...he's gone." So, mechanically, I see a big difference.

But you always were within your rights to deny an NPC revival.

Also, while you may see a big difference, Charwoman Gene has confirmed that, in fact, there is no mechanical difference.

Bill Slavicsek told me access to raise dead is not restricted to PCs. It is really not much different for 3e, except the "ritual" is needed as opposed to it being someones class ability

I believe the general assumption is that a 'ritual' takes anywhere from 1 minute or more. Possibly hours or days. While that does entail a bit of a limitation, it's not like your dead PC will be pre-occupied with the adventure for a bit.