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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Balesir" data-source="post: 6112803" data-attributes="member: 27160">You could imagine the game world working that way, if you wanted to, but it wouldn't change the rules one iota and it would be much simpler to just take the words as having their normal meanings. How is that anything but a strength? Unless you rely on wordsmithing to warp the rules to your advantage, I can't see how it can be.Why not? They certainly can do if I'm running the game.It's nothing to do with being a "jerk", just people having different views of the same situation. You need only read a chunk of this thread to see how possible that is! The DM can describe a scene such that the player thinks there is an opportunity in it; if the DM agrees, then they can take advantage of it, but if the DM isn't thinking in the same "groove" then the opportunity may not "really" exist.Example: suppose a GM describes a scene as a small giant guarding a prisoner and stood near a chasm. Now, maybe the GM is thinking the giant is a clever sod who is stood close enough to the cliff to throw troublesome teenies over it but not so close as there is any chance that he will himself be shoved over. Meanwhile the player thinks "hey hey! small giant, big cliff - I'll topple the lummox in!"In 4e the actual chances of the ploy succeeding are available to the player; the dice add uncertainty, but the viability of trying to shove, pull or scare the giant over are known from the system. The player can make informed choices and pick actions in the game world based on those "game world facts".Now, take a "rulings not rules" case:Player: "I charge and topple the giant over the cliff!"DM: "Hah - no way that works! He may be a small giant, but he's still a giant, and he's not so dumb as to stand so close to the cliff that you can just tip him over. He'll try to opportunity attack you, though..."Both have a point; both are not unreasonable ways to envision the situation. But where does this lead? IME it leads to the player thinking "well, OK, so I need to consider that the situation described may be slanted against me in ways I don't immediately see. So maybe I need to think primarily about how this GM likes to set stuff up, and wordsmith my action descriptions to make them sound plausible to how this GM views the world and what s/he thinks of as powerful forces." All of a sudden, it's a game about exploring what the GM thinks and how the GM views the world. This is pretty much inevitable where the "how the world works" is all left to "how the players think the world should work, with specific veto and casting vote power to one individual".This is made necessary whenever a game element is not described in game terms (as opposed to game world terms). For example, durations of effects measured in "minutes". How long is that in the real world, exactly? How much can my character achieve while the effect is still up? The answer, inevitably, is "however much the GM thinks they can". It puts the rules in a position where either they define every conceivable action in terms of how much game time they require to perform (totally unrealistic as a rule system), or the GM just guesstimates it. 4e just says "until the end of the encounter", and it's mostly sorted. More broadly, make the durations, refresh times and so on relevant to game situations, not game world timings and the rules system is genuinely shared, rather than the sole province of one guy. And when the game rules are genuinely shared, the game can be genuinely shared, becuase everyone knows what they are doing rather than guessing and relying on the one individual who actually has access to the full rules (because they are making them up as they go) for validation of everything they (try to) do.I don't know how to make this any clearer; as a GM, I want rules I can share with my players so that they can take a full and active part in the game, knowing what they are doing based on the rules of the game. I want them to be able to make fully informed choices that they know are valid, not choices that it's up to me to confirm or deny.</blockquote>

Verification