How many Tools do you Need?

[Ulthwithian]

Having witnessed the discussions here and elsewhere regarding 'common sense' arguments, I tend to agree with Celebrim. Generally speaking, 'common sense' is used as shorthand for 'what I understand the rules to say'. This is useless and even counterproductive from the standpoint of a rules discussion. What we need is just a bit of morals. You know, stuff like 'friends don't like friends exploit rules loopholes'. Reason can only follow reason. Reason alone can never tell you what you ought or ought not to do. That is the job of morals.

Re: failure rates, you could make a foolproof system, or very nearly... if you have 50 redundant systems and failsafes. It's generally not very practical, though.

 

[Hussar]

Common sense' is a bloody complicated and preeminently confusing rule.

Now this I agree with. You cannot leave everything to the group to decide. That's how 1e, for example, tried to handle social skills. It was assumed that the players and the DM would just sort of do it. You talked it out. And in that way you would resolve the event.

It didn't work all that well IMO. It led to some raising rows around my gaming table anyway.

But, there is a very far distance between "just leave it to common sense" and "we must have a mechanic for every possible eventuality, no matter how nonsensical it is".

 

[Celebrim]

The point is, how far do you have to go to cover corner cases? How often does a situations have to come up for to be considered a "non edge" case?

My point was to answer this question by saying, "More is more."

Take falling into lava as an example.

Ok

Now, RAW is kinda silly really. If you swim in lava, you die. But, by RAW, lots of high level characters could swim a river of lava and come out the other side. So, we have a problem.

Do we? We only have a problem if the result - 'high level characters can swim in a river of lava and come out the other side' - isn't the desired result. In fact, we actually have the rule this way because for a great many 1e designers this was in fact the desired result. They wanted to feature lava in the environment for fluff reasons, but they also didn't want the lava to be simply instant death. So, they took lava fluff and non-lava crunch and married them to get what they wanted.

The real problem I see is that we never actually had a rule for what lava did. It was up to the individual designer. This meant that as a player, you never really knew how hot lava was. It might just do 2d6 damage per round. It might do 1d20 per segment. It might be instant death. That's not all bad because it meant that as a player you had to treat all lava as if it was absolutely lethal, but on the other hand it is confusing and the player doesn't know when lava is fluff or a cue to run away as fast as he can.

How often does lava feature in adventure design?

Alot.

How often do players deliberately act to circumvent the ruleset?

Everytime that they think they will be penalized for not doing so.

That's going to vary wildly from group to group. Should the designers design from the mindset that lava will come up all the time and make detailed lava rules?

I'm so glad you put it that way. This is exactly the heart of the matter. The two bookend cases are:

a) Lava doesn't come up in your campaign. In this case it doesn't matter if the rules are complicated. You don't have lava in your campaign, so you don't actually need or use or even need to know the rules for lava. In this case, you lose little to nothing for having detailed rules for how lava works. Is lava hard so that you can walk on it, or soft so that you swim in it? How much fire resistance do you need to survive contact with lava? How fast does it flow? You don't have to know any of these things.
b) Lava comes up in your campaign all the time. Several of the main dungeons have been in volcanos various states of dormancy. You go adventuring in the underdark, in the fane of the fire god, in White Plume Mountain, in a dormant volcano on a savage tropical island, and in a hideously trapped liches tomb. There is lava everywhere. You could use all the rules support you can get. Is lava hard so that you can walk on it, or soft so that you swim in it? How much fire resistance do you need to survive contact with lava? How fast does it flow? You have to know any of these things. In this case, not having a designer do the heavy lifting for you is a pain in the butt. You could use all the rules help you can get.

Hense, more rules doesn't hurt you when you don't need them and helps you when you do.

That's not to say that you can't have poorly written or designed rules, but you can have poor badly designed rules whether the rules are as terse as Hong or as discursive as I am.

Of course, most peoples campaigns will tend to be somewhere in the middle. For them, the best bet is to take only as much detail as they need at the moment. However, its always nice to have that extra detail available for when the need comes up.

Or should they say, "Here, these rules will work well enough, go forth and play?"

Yes, well, what does 'well enough' mean? I don't want something that works 'well enough'. I want something that works well.

It would be better to specifically empower the DM to make rulings to cover the corner cases.

No rule can disempower the DM from making rulings to cover the corner cases. It's part of the job. A rule can't keep you from the authority to break the rules, because you can just break that one too. It's far better to give the DM help if he wants it. If you aren't, then why try to sell books?

Put big bold letters somewhere in the PHB tellings players that the rules do not cover all eventualities and sometimes the DM will over rule the rules. Then, include a nice long section in the DMG telling DM's when to do this and why.

That well and good, and I'd put that into any RPG regardless of what sort of rules we had. It doesn't obviate the need for good rules.

 

[Imban]

But, isn't that the direction madness lies? Do we really need rules text to cover this?

Well, given that our starting point is madness, no, this is the direction directly away from it. Deciding on a specific rule is what's difficult, but not what shouldn't be attempted.

And, at what point do you stop?

That's what I'll need to figure out.

For example, what if your secondary target creature was larger and only half hidden by the wall? Would that make a difference?

Perhaps. I'd need to look at it on an actual map grid and run it by the people I play with once.

What if there was no wall but the secondary target was invisible?

Cleave isn't an area-of-effect attack, so I imagine that you have to actually be capable of targeting the secondary target. I believe the rules in the book will answer the question of "what if I can't target the 'secondary target' at all" quite adequately, with "he's not the secondary target then, now is he?"

On and on and on. At what point do you cut things off?

I'm really not seeing these issues.

I really think that Ulthwithian has a good point. There is an inherent trade-off between how much rules complexity you add and the actual return for that complexity. Obviously, as Howandwhy points out, some complexity is needed for a satisfying game experience. But, where do you decide to cut things off?

If either of you believe that trying for anything but the simplest of rules is doomed before it even gets off the ground, you would be wrong. I think I've stated previously my exact stance on where I cut things off, so imagining that I would prefer to go off into no-limit complexity and write spells with hundred-line descriptions left and right is mischaracterizing my goals.

 

[Mouseferatu]

Dude, were we reading the same 3e? 'Cuz I pretty much always had my imagination sparked, even if it was just a simple sentence like "Bodaks retain some vague memories of their past lives" in the MM.

I would assume so. Maybe you got the director's cut?

Seriously, I didn't say that 3E didn't inspire the imagination. I said I felt that 3E as written did so--for me--less so than any of the other editions.

This is, perhaps, to be expected, given that 3E focused on sourcebooks, which are by definition more mechanics-heavy, whereas 2E was the era of campaign settings and 1E the era of 25,897 adventures, both of which are obviously more flavor-based. Whatever the case, however, that's how I found it.

 

[Hussar]

I guess the main issue is the cut off point. We all agree that you have to have one. There has to be a point where you are no longer gaining in game play. I lean towards the middle point, I think. I want a fair bit of complexity (cover 90% of the likely situations) but I don't really want that last 9.9%.

4e Cleave, as written, is good enough for me to be honest. The amount of times you will have situations like what Imban has illustrate, IME, don't require addtional rules. YMMV obviously.

 

[small pumpkin man]

My point was to answer this question by saying, "More is more."

I'm so glad you put it that way. This is exactly the heart of the matter. The two bookend cases are:

a) Lava doesn't come up in your campaign. In this case it doesn't matter if the rules are complicated. You don't have lava in your campaign, so you don't actually need or use or even need to know the rules for lava. In this case, you lose little to nothing for having detailed rules for how lava works. Is lava hard so that you can walk on it, or soft so that you swim in it? How much fire resistance do you need to survive contact with lava? How fast does it flow? You don't have to know any of these things.

You lose pages that could have been used on things which help you.

b) Lava comes up in your campaign all the time. Several of the main dungeons have been in volcanos various states of dormancy. You go adventuring in the underdark, in the fane of the fire god, in White Plume Mountain, in a dormant volcano on a savage tropical island, and in a hideously trapped liches tomb. There is lava everywhere. You could use all the rules support you can get. Is lava hard so that you can walk on it, or soft so that you swim in it? How much fire resistance do you need to survive contact with lava? How fast does it flow? You have to know any of these things. In this case, not having a designer do the heavy lifting for you is a pain in the butt. You could use all the rules help you can get.

Yep, although...

Hense, more rules doesn't hurt you when you don't need them and helps you when you do.

That's not to say that you can't have poorly written or designed rules, but you can have poor badly designed rules whether the rules are as terse as Hong or as discursive as I am.

Of course, most peoples campaigns will tend to be somewhere in the middle. For them, the best bet is to take only as much detail as they need at the moment. However, its always nice to have that extra detail available for when the need comes up.

This really isn't true though. Having extra detailed rules for something that don't come up that, especially if it works differently to other systems, or isn't laid out really, really well is actually really bad, it bogs down play and causes confusion and arguments.

Simply "more rules is better" even in a situation where you have unlimited page space will still cause slowdown and annoys people who want enjoyable, fast action or resolution.

Or to put it more simply, the more rules you have, the more likely it is that you're going to have to look them up, and the longer that's going to take. The more time you spend reading the rules is less time you spend playing the game/roleplaying/whatever it is you use D&D for. Of course, not having rules for things has it's own problems, but a middle ground does have to be found.

 

[FabioMilitoPagliara]

The above, BTW, is why I consider Worlds and Monsters a solid and worthwhile purchase, even though it doesn't preview a single mechanic. The descriptions of the planes, combined with the artwork, inspired a veritable flood of campaign and plot ideas.

seconded!

I liked it very much

 

[Belorin]

As many as it takes, my tool box at home has screwdrivers, pliers, a hammer, wrenches and a tape measure, the basics. It also has a stud finder, battery tester, wire strippers, clamps and a set of files. I may only use them once a year, but it's nice having them, so I don't have to drive to the hardware store to buy them.
From what I gather the rules are take what you need and leave the rest, since they have to cover both newbie and experienced DMs, would you rather there be not enough for the newbie or too many for the old hand?

Bel

 

[med stud]

Having witnessed the discussions here and elsewhere regarding 'common sense' arguments, I tend to agree with Celebrim. Generally speaking, 'common sense' is used as shorthand for 'what I understand the rules to say'. This is useless and even counterproductive from the standpoint of a rules discussion. What we need is just a bit of morals. You know, stuff like 'friends don't like friends exploit rules loopholes'. Reason can only follow reason. Reason alone can never tell you what you ought or ought not to do. That is the job of morals.

Re: failure rates, you could make a foolproof system, or very nearly... if you have 50 redundant systems and failsafes. It's generally not very practical, though.

It depends. There are questions with some ambiguity to them, in those cases common sense is a bad foundation. But when there are obvious examples of silly exploits, I remain confident that common sense is enough. The main example I think about is the bag of rats. I know people who like to find these kinds of absurdities and who get some kind of ego-kick by trying to use them, but they are people I wouldn't play with in a million years. In their case, though, it's not about them not understanding, it's about them trying to abuse the system.