Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 2391808" data-attributes="member: 2205">I do--that's how I play d20.  buzz and others can talk all they want about players need to know how to ballpark Jumps across chasms (although I think Ourph sufficiently demonstrated that setting DC's in 3e "RAW" can be just as arbitrary as any other task resolution system with which I'm familiar) but that's not how it works in my game.There's a few reasons for this.  1). A chasm on the battlemap isn't a very interesting challenge.  Jumping between two airships that are bucking in a storm thousands of feet above the surface with slippery, angled decks is more like the kind of challenge I'd be likely to use.  And the description of modifiers in the Jump skill write-up is notably more vague on those type of things, making my various situational modifiers more important, and the "RAW" less so.  2).  The idea that players "need" to know more or less where their modifers are going to end up on their own, and don't want to be subject to the vagaries of GM interpretation is a personal preference.  In my group, we don't need to know that.  We have no problem either asking the GM how hard it would be to do something, or just attempting it anyway based on our understanding of how hard it looks to be in real life and trusting that the DC will accurately reflect that.  The first is an issue of player/GM communication, the second is an issue of player/GM compatibility.  3). buzz's argument seems to hang its hat on being wary of such player/GM compatibility.  In point of fact, I know what DC's are likely to be just based on the fact that I know my group, and all of us GM at times.  We all GM in a very similar style--we like having the rules of d20 handy if we need them, but in practice, we do a fair amount of handwaving and eyeballing of things rather than strict computations of them.  If we need to use a rule subsystem with which we're not very familiar (such as, say, sundering an opponent's weapon) we'll attempt to look it up.  If it can't be found in, oh, 30 seconds to a minute or so, we discuss it for a few seconds, come up with a solution that we all think is reasonable, accept it and move on, while the affected player may continue to search for the actual rule while waiting for his next turn, just so we can all know better next time.To get back to Ryan Dancey's point, for a moment if I may, we do have more discussions about rulings in rules-heavy games, mainly because we don't exactly remember what all the rules are, especially subsets that aren't used very often.  We don't have discussions about the "arbitrariness" of rules-lite scenarios because 1) we don't argue anyway, so we'd all accept the GM's ruling without argument, and 2) we're all on the same page, so to speak, and we also don't argue with GM's rulings because they seem natural and intuitive to us as well--i.e., if we were GMing that same situation, we'd handle it the same way.Since we seem to fit the profile of rules lite players in many ways, it's perhaps surprising that in general we all prefer to play d20, but play it somewhat fast-n-loose with a "rules lite" style.  But we like the robustness of the system.  We like that there's rules for lots of situations and scenarios that can be adapted to whatever happens to come up.  To use an example of mine from earlier in the thread, swinging on a rope from the fo'c's'le to hit the orc pirate in the face and knock him over the railing into the briny deep, for example, is not covered by the d20 rules, but it's easy to make up a DC on the fly for your Use Rope check (or whatever skill you think appropriate) for the swing, and if it's successful rule that you can then make a Bull Rush attack with a +4 circumstantial bonus, or whatever.The robustness and completeness of the rules is a feature we can use to cover all kinds of situations, even those that aren't necessarily specifically spelled out in the rules.  They are not a constraining force for us that we feel bound to follow to the letter, though, especially when it's slowing down our pace, for which we have much less patience than for the occasional DC that's off by a point or two because we didn't calculate it exactly.</blockquote>

Verification