Legends & Lore: A Few Rules Updates

[TwoSix]

Ahhhh! All three in one character? That is truly terrifying.

But let's be honest. We all know a guy who would totally play that, right?

 

[TarionzCousin]

But let's be honest. We all know a guy who would totally play that, right?

Yes, and in 4E he would play the Drow Warlock.

 

[I'm A Banana]

The problem with that approach (such as it is a problem) is that it forces a consideration of environmental minutiae that I simply have no desire to bring into a game. Which, of course, is why I don't use things like mimics, or cloakers, or any other kind of "player wasn't being suitably paranoid" encounter. For my desires in a RPG, making the players paranoid sucks. Just give me a number that tells me who surprises who, thanks.

Yeah over-paranoia sucks. That's why there's a concrete cost to being paranoid: you are performing an action and consuming a limited resource (time, at least, which translates into rations and GP at least). It becomes a calculation: is it worth that cost to be that paranoid? If folks are being overly paranoid, the cost isn't high enough: increase the cost. Alternately, decrease the reward: if something hiding in the shadows can kill a PC in one blow, there's significant incentive to be paranoid, too. If the result is less binary, perhaps the calculation is different.

Why don't you pick all the flowers in the game of Skyrim? Well, there's a cost. Encumbrance. Time. Marginal usefulness.

Why don't you open all the trashcans in BioShock? Well, they don't have that much useful in them, and maybe you don't want to spend your time that way.

Why don't you cut all the long grass and bushes in The Legend of Zelda? Again, it doesn't give you much, and it takes a while. Generally not worth it.

These are all economic calculations, risk vs. reward, cost vs. benefit. You get the economy right, and players will weigh spending that time securing an area vs. spending that time going into new areas.

The paranoid party is, in part, a symptom of a low cost to paranoia (no significant long-term rationing), and big reward for it (you might uncover a creature that would've KILLED you!). Eliminating that paranoia is just a matter of getting the economics right (it's not the end of a character if you don't notice X, and trying to notice X is going to eat up something precious).

You could also play a game without hidden enemies or deceitful characters or mimics or whatnot. They're all really shades of the same thing, and it's fine to not have any hidden info that the players need to work to discover. It sounds like ignoring a big part of what makes adventures dangerous and risky to me, but I've never been too burned by overly inquisitive parties, so I'm speaking from a place of privilege.

More than not hitting a downside, though, I do like it when players engage with the world, especially if they're doing it essentially "in character" like this. In a world with halfling assassins and cloakers and mimics and liars and pretenders and doppelgangers and glamours and illusions being a little cautious where relevant should be a character trait for most successful adventurers. Forcing players to spend a resource to be cautious makes it a trade-off.

 

[TwoSix]

You could also play a game without hidden enemies or deceitful characters or mimics or whatnot. They're all really shades of the same thing, and it's fine to not have any hidden info that the players need to work to discover. It sounds like ignoring a big part of what makes adventures dangerous and risky to me, but I've never been too burned by overly inquisitive parties, so I'm speaking from a place of privilege.

More than not hitting a downside, though, I do like it when players engage with the world, especially if they're doing it essentially "in character" like this. In a world with halfling assassins and cloakers and mimics and liars and pretenders and doppelgangers and glamours and illusions being a little cautious where relevant should be a character trait for most successful adventurers. Forcing players to spend a resource to be cautious makes it a trade-off.

Fair points. My primary consideration is to avoid any form of, for lack of a better term, "pixelbitching". I don't want to waste time with the characters consistently stopping to examine the environment for possible missed rewards or unnoticed hazards. I don't mind deceit from relevant NPCs, I only mind it from random desks.

And I have more than enough plotters and schemers in my own game that I need to encourage a "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!" approach or the game will never go anywhere!

 

[I'm A Banana]

Fair points. My primary consideration is to avoid any form of, for lack of a better term, "pixelbitching". I don't want to waste time with the characters consistently stopping to examine the environment for possible missed rewards or unnoticed hazards. I don't mind deceit from relevant NPCs, I only mind it from random desks.

And I have more than enough plotters and schemers in my own game that I need to encourage a "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!" approach or the game will never go anywhere!

Totally! I think everyone kind of finds their own zen with this. And I find that ramping up the costs and down the rewards for "pixelbitching" helps a lot. Ye Olde School had random encounters (so yes, the thing in the shadows could kill you, but if you want to be careful and look it over, the thing walking the hallways could ALSO kill you, so pick yer poison). With 5e, something like an action economy might make more sense ("scouting" is a thing you do during an exploration turn that lets you make an active check that applies until your next turn; no one else gets a chance to see the invisible stalker).

I know for me, the idea is that a creature that is hiding is an encounter that I kind of want to surprise the party. The default state is, "the party is surprised!" If I wanted it to be a normal encounter, I wouldn't be using a sneaky critter. And I want them to do something to prevent that surprise, in an active way that costs them something and/or that says something about their character ("I know wood grains since I'm a carpenter, and that AIN'T wood!"). And I also want that surprise to be an interesting encounter if no one notices it, so curb-stomp shenanigans aren't much fun for me, either (Mimics don't kill you with contact poison, they just start a grapple and begin a combat with you in a disadvantageous position that you now must get out of).

That lack-of-instant-hidden-death, combined with a fairly high cost for the action (exploration rounds are a limited resource IMC) means that for most of my groups, the economics are pretty OK.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

But this does not necessarily translate to them being preternaturally aware of things hidden from them. They have no special skill and are taking no special action. They are on the lookout for things that look funny, but if such a thing is trying NOT to look funny, then they have no special capacity to notice that.

They don't have to be "preternaturally aware" of things hidden from them...just normally aware. If I look into a fairly dark room with minimal lighting and there is someone crouching behind some sort of cover but still visible because they aren't fully covered, it's likely that I won't spot them. I'll be looking around the room to see what's there and my mind just won't connect that the weird outline behind that desk over there is a person hiding. I'll likely write it off and some object that I'm not sure what it is because I can't see all of it.

However, someone else in that same situation might immediately pick out the silhouette of the person. Who knows exactly why? Maybe their brain is more trained to notice partial silhouettes of people in the dark. Maybe their eyes adjusted quicker to the change in lighting than mine did, maybe they have better dark vision, maybe they just randomly paid more attention to that portion of the room.

The same applies to subtle details. I look at someone and maybe I think "This woman is blond haired and skinny". Someone else looks at the same scene for the same amount of time and thinks "Oh, that woman is married. I see she has a wedding ring on." but completely doesn't notice the color of her hair since that's not where he's paying attention. Another person might look at the same scene for the same amount of time and since their mind is trained to quickly look and analyze a scene they see that no only is she blond, skinny and married, but that she's right handed since she's waving with that hand, that she has 3 weapons on her and that she is wearing the garb of a noble and that it is green and white.

I would think the same thing would apply in many other situations as well. One person might look into a room and see "Oh, that's a desk". Another might immediately notice that the desk lacks the dust of everything else in the room and that there is a subtle pattern of missing dust on the floor leading up to the desk as if someone had just recently pushed the desk into the position it is in. This gives him a warning that the desk might be a mimic.

I like having a roll that embodies the skill of being able to analyze things quickly with the luck of accidentally looking in just the right place to spot something hard to notice. I don't like bogging the game down with continual rolling of that roll, however. Passive Perception works well for that in my experience.

 

[ExploderWizard]

Funny... I always thought "passive" was gamespeak for "not wanting to listen to the players dictate the same laundry list of actions they're doing every 5 feet just to make sure they don't blunder into any stupid random trap that gets placed indiscriminately throughout the dungeon." It's kind of handy actually. This way the game can continue without the DM going insane after the first 20 minutes.

Tomato ToMAHto

 

[ExploderWizard]

Fair points. My primary consideration is to avoid any form of, for lack of a better term, "pixelbitching". I don't want to waste time with the characters consistently stopping to examine the environment for possible missed rewards or unnoticed hazards. I don't mind deceit from relevant NPCs, I only mind it from random desks.

And I have more than enough plotters and schemers in my own game that I need to encourage a "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!" approach or the game will never go anywhere!

For me it depends on the type of game being run. If XP is generated by running from encounter to encounter checkpoints then thats how it goes. If OTOH I'm playing D&D and XP is awarded for treasure recovered (as the game originally intended) then I'm going to search and explore as much as resources and time permit.

 

[Plaguescarred]

Passive Perception means any average creature can spot things easy (DC 10) to see, and harder ones the more wise or proficient it is. It also begs the question, how will it factor things like Elven's Keen Sense ?

Hopefully Passive Perception will be an optional rule working like Take 10 rather than a mechanic baked in the system so that people that don't want to use it can easily opt out of it.

 

[GX.Sigma]

Mike Mearls explained on Twitter that monsters and traps will roll to hide against the players' passive perception checks. This feels better to me, since it still cuts down on rolling (the DM rolls once, instead of every player rolling every turn), but it's still random (so one extra point in Perception isn't the end-all-be-all).

Hopefully they do something similar for PC stealth (since, IMO, players shouldn't know how well they're sneaking--they should always think they're being super stealthy).

He also said the Elf's advantage on perception is changed to a +4.