Justifying high level 'guards', 'pirates', 'soldiers', 'assassins', etc.

[pemerton]

It may be a metagame term, but that doesn't mean it's effects are unobservable by the PCs. If you give a monster a +1 AC without granting the PCs an offsetting +1 Attack, you've changed the world in a measurable way. You made something harder to hit. It's different. Ergo, your game world is inconsistent if you did that for a reason that maps to the story you're telling rather than an "in game" cause & effect.

Like, for instance, if you promoted a city guard from 3rd level soldier to 10th level minion just so your players could have a fight with a little risk in it. His Attacks and AC are higher. A 1st level PC would have great trouble hitting his AC. The world is inconsistent.

You seem to be saying that the gameworld is inconsistent anytime the game-mechanical likelihoods of some outcome do not correspond to the ingame causal probabilities.

On this notion of consistency, any game with a Fate Point mechanic, or with a mechanic such as TRoS's Spiritual Attributes or HeroWars's Relationships delivers an inconsistent gameworld.

Needless to say, I don't accept that the gameworld is inconsistent anytime the game-mechanial likelihoods of some outcome do not correspond to the ingame causal probabilities. For example, the game-mechanical likelihood of an PC in my game dying from a heart attack on the toilet, or from falling out of bed after waking up in the morning is zero. That does not correspond to the ingame causal probabilities which, I assume, are the same as in the real world. It doesn't follow that the gameworld is inconsistent. Rather, for metagame reasons (eg thematic significance) certain things that are possible in the gameworld never actually happen.

 

[Rangoric]

It may be a metagame term, but that doesn't mean it's effects are unobservable by the PCs. If you give a monster a +1 AC without granting the PCs an offsetting +1 Attack, you've changed the world in a measurable way. You made something harder to hit.

Harder to kill. Not harder to hit, harder to kill.

If you have to hit them 2 times to kill them and you need a 11 to hit, it's about the same as 1 hit to kill and a 16 to hit isn't it?

Giving a monster 1 hit point but making them harder to hit does about the same thing. The PCs deal enough damage now to kill them in one hit, but getting that one hit is harder.

This way damage doesn't have to scale up OMG FAST to generate that 1HKO.

You are looking at it very close up and detail oriented (great for 3e/3.5e) while 4e is more end result oriented.

 

[pemerton]

You are looking at it very close up and detail oriented (great for 3e/3.5e) while 4e is more end result oriented.

I agree with this. One implication is that the mechanics can't be taken as being in literal correspondence with ingame causality - because for the same ingame causal process we have multiple mechanical implementations available.

 

[Delta]

You seem to be saying that the gameworld is inconsistent anytime the game-mechanical likelihoods of some outcome do not correspond to the ingame causal probabilities.

On this notion of consistency, any game with a Fate Point mechanic, or with a mechanic such as TRoS's Spiritual Attributes or HeroWars's Relationships delivers an inconsistent gameworld.

Well, yeah, I'd agree with that. Or at least it's too complicated a game. Anytime a game wanders in a direction where people have to distinguish at great length between "in-game" and "out-of-game" terms and numbers having different meanings, it's gone more complicated than I care to deal with. Same with Fate Points, etc.

For example, the game-mechanical likelihood of an PC in my game dying from a heart attack on the toilet, or from falling out of bed after waking up in the morning is zero.

I think that example fails because the probability is "undefined" inasmuch as the game rules don't simulate that one way or the other; it's actually not part of the game. I'd need to stick to actual events simulated by the game rules to have definable game-mechanical likelihoods.

 

[S'mon]

Also, the notion of "advancing the plot" has nothing to do with narrativist play as that phrase is generally used. It seems connected to what The Forge calls high concept simulationism.

Well, almost no one uses Narrativism to mean what Edwards says it should mean. It's usually used to mean Dramatism in the threefold GDS model, which as you say the Forge model shoehorns into Simulationist play, ignoring that games like Buffy the Vampire Slayer have very different design goals from Twilight: 2000 or Runequest.

 

[Irda Ranger]

You seem to be saying that the gameworld is inconsistent anytime the game-mechanical likelihoods of some outcome do not correspond to the ingame causal probabilities.

That's part of it. The main point I'm getting at (as have been said 10 time already) is that it's "inconsistent" when city guards show wild swings in competency relative to the PCs' level without any rhyme or reason within the game. It's inconsistent if guards > PCs, and PC > dragon, and dragon > guards. That's my sole argument on this point. End stop.

On this notion of consistency, any game with a Fate Point mechanic, or with a mechanic such as TRoS's Spiritual Attributes or HeroWars's Relationships delivers an inconsistent gameworld.

I'm not familiar with those, but you could be right.

For example, the game-mechanical likelihood of an PC in my game dying from a heart attack on the toilet, or from falling out of bed after waking up in the morning is zero. That does not correspond to the ingame causal probabilities which, I assume, are the same as in the real world. It doesn't follow that the gameworld is inconsistent. Rather, for metagame reasons (eg thematic significance) certain things that are possible in the gameworld never actually happen.

There are a billion^34 things that are outside the rules. I don't expect the rules to model everything. But they things they do model they should model in a way that doesn't make my brain hurt. Minions do. So does making your players fight and strive for +'s while handing them out like candy behind the DM screen to every little pirate and city guard. Do you even remember why we started this thread?

 

[pemerton]

The main point I'm getting at (as have been said 10 time already) is that it's "inconsistent" when city guards show wild swings in competency relative to the PCs' level without any rhyme or reason within the game. It's inconsistent if guards > PCs, and PC > dragon, and dragon > guards. That's my sole argument on this point. End stop.

Right. And my response is that this is true only if certain assumptions are made. You want to describe those assumptions as "consistency in the gameworld". I disagree with this - the assumptions can be abandoned, yet the gameworld remain consistent, if the mechanics are allowed to depart from being a strict model of the gameworld.

I don't expect the rules to model everything. But they things they do model they should model in a way that doesn't make my brain hurt.

What's being discussed here is, in part, what the +0.5/lvl models. Just because a game is played in which it doesn't mean the same thing every time for every different PC or monster doesn't mean that the gameworld is inconsistent. But once that sort of liberalisation is introduced into the game/metagame relationship, than it may become false that guards>PC, PC>dragon therefore guards>dragon. (One example - the PC is Bard Bowman, who is able to kill Smaug with a single arrow although still vulnerable to town guards.)

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

I'd rather not justify scaling such foes like that. I think it's rather more interesting once the PCs hit high level if each of them has personal power equivalent to that of a small nation - and then examine the consequences of this.

But then again, I have been playing Exalted a lot.

 

[GlaziusF]

If you want to call it "shock" in your game, peachy, but that's neither the official interpretation nor the consensus opinion (from what I can gather).

Okay, how does "shock" fail your simulation?

I know. But making up a story about stuff isn't determinant of the stuff. I can tell a story about how a rock ended up in my front yard, but it wasn't the story that put in there.

On the contrary.

All you will ever have is a story about how a rock ended up on your front yard.

It may or may not be consistent with a later story about your investigation of the rock in your front yard and what you found there.

It's better if it is consistent, or if you retell it to be consistent, because that makes it easier to remember.

Yeah, there is. It matters whether cause comes before or after effect.

Hahaha, 'cause and effect'. Next you'll be talking about 'reality' and 'time'. None of those things actually exist, though I find it easier to act as if they do as it's very convenient.

On a differently philosophical bent, there's really no difference between a narrativist who plots out the world and a simulationist who stats it out. Both are establishing relationships between ideas, the narrativist with applied set theory (that is, language) and the simulationist with numbers. And it means the same thing when the narrativist's plot is inconsistent and the simulationist's numbers prove unworkable - there's a problem with the relationship.

My litmus test here is: what happens to the monster if you swap out the PC (or have both the 5th level and 22nd level version of the PC in the same room)? If suddenly the monster implodes under the inability to be two different things at once, different monster.

Can I riff on the whole 'cause and effect' thing by introducing the idea of 'simultaneous quantum superposition'?

The monster's waveform collapses when it comes into contact with PCs, under the assumptions of the "damage continuum -> binary hit and miss with random damage" conversion. If you have a 5th level and a 22nd level PC together, somehow, the assumptions of the conversion are violated and the waveform doesn't collapse. Facing, say, the level 14 version of the monster, the level 5 never hits and isn't missed, and the level 22 never misses and isn't hit, and in neither case do they deal or take an appropriate amount of damage. If we had access to the complete and complex rules for the underlying simulation then we could run the monster encounter anyway, at the expenditure of disproportionate time and effort for everyone involved, but we don't so we can't.

The guidelines for party composition and encounter design are there to make sure the assumptions of the conversion to binary hit and miss hold. When you violate the assumptions, of course you get an unworkable encounter. It would be surprising if you didn't!

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

It may be a metagame term, but that doesn't mean it's effects are unobservable by the PCs. If you give a monster a +1 AC without granting the PCs an offsetting +1 Attack, you've changed the world in a measurable way. You made something harder to hit. It's different. Ergo, your game world is inconsistent if you did that for a reason that maps to the story you're telling rather than an "in game" cause & effect.

I don't believe it is observable by the PCs. The PCs observe: "I swung at the monster, it parried the attack at the last second....if only I'd been a bit faster." That's all they observe. I don't believe every PC has a probability detector that lets them know that THIS time they only had a 35% chance of hitting instead of the 40% they had last time. Nor do I think that PCs look at an Ogre and think, "Wow, something has to be wrong, the last Ogre I fought I killed easily and THIS one is hard, even though I've gotten better. This world is totally inconsistent, all Ogres should fight exactly the same."

All those ideas are entirely metagame thinking. They have nothing to do with in game consistency and everything to do with out of game consistency.

Like, for instance, if you promoted a city guard from 3rd level soldier to 10th level minion just so your players could have a fight with a little risk in it. His Attacks and AC are higher. A 1st level PC would have great trouble hitting his AC. The world is inconsistent.

It is if you have 1st level characters involved in the fight. And even then from the characters point of view all they know is that the guards fight better than the blacksmith or an average goblin. On the other hand, in the average D&D game where all the PCs are the same level and the action revolves entirely around them, no one should notice.

Luck being what it is, sometimes less skilled opponents beat more skilled ones. Most people accept that as a fact and are willing to accept that the town guard managed to get a lucky shot in on the dragon because they closed their eyes, pointed their sword in the direction of the dragon and it charged in and didn't see the sword in time. It happens rarely, but I don't think anyone in my group would be yelling at me for a lack of consistency if they were able to beat the guard. There's no good in game way of measuring "skill".