Elder-Basilisk
First Post
One thing that's worth considering--what are fourth edition published modules likely to do with this philosophy? There are two precedents that one should think about.
First D&D minis: There are only three released sets of stats and we already have sneak attack that works when confused for some creatures but that doesn't for others. We have at least two versions of the hide ability as well. (The astral stalker can hide behind its allies; some of the more recently released minis with hide can't). We've also been through two (or is it three iterations of lines and have an erratta document that at least seems longer and more significant than the official clarification for the first edition minis game was when I started (which was about three years after the game first came out--just before war drums). Part of the significance of the clarifications may be that now I am an experienced hand looking to get my third trip to the championships at Gen Con, and am combing through the rules in more minute detail. Part of it is also building off of resolution tools that were developed in the previous edition. (The attack resolution sequence, for instance, was not spelled out in as much detail as it currently is until after I started playing DDM). But I think that part of it is a function of the design philosophy. If you are going to have a very small set of core rules and options and a very large set of special case rules, you are going to spend more time cleaning up the special case rules than if you have a relatively large set of core rules and a small set of special case rules.
What does this have to do with the question? It seems to me that all plot abilities are falling into the area of "special case rules." There is no general rule for what a succubus needs to do to keep the king enthralled. It's a rule that is made up new for each succubus and each king. That can lead to interesting adventures because you don't know exactly what to expect, but it also leads to several challenges.
1. "These bears are are angry over the death of their druid and are immune to calm animals or charm animal spells." One of the best example of bad special case rules comes from an early Living Greyhawk mod I played. The PCs are attacked by bears with the special note written above in the modules text. As my friend (who actually ran that mod for me) commented, "Gee, I wish my barbarian could get so angry he could be immune to hold person. All he gets for raging is a lousy +2 to his will save." In short, special case rules may be designed to counteract abilities that should work (if calm animals isn't supposed to stop angry bears from attacking you, I don't know what it IS for) simply because the author didn't want the solution to be too easy. In the succubus example it would be "yeah, the mirror of Pelor doesn't work on this succubus because this succubus requires the green keycard instead of Pelor's mirrored keycard."
(For other examples of this kind of special case rules stupidity, see "the hydras are buried under the sand. If the players specifically say that their characters are looking for monsters buried under the sand, they get a spot check; otherwise the hydras get an automatic surprise round.") At least in the Theocracy of the Pale and the Duchy of Urnst regions, I know that Living Greyhawk triads worked hard to get authors to stop making special case rules like that and that, as a result of sticking closer to the rules, we ended up with generally improved mods.
Moving plot abilities to the realm of special case, exception based rules seems likely to encourage more "the hydras are buried under the sand" and "these bears are so angry" moments.
2. Oh shoot, they forgot to write a rule for this! I've been running the Lost Caverns of Tsjocanth mod for about four months now. One of the things that I noted in the second or third session was this: The mod said that a landslide had blocked the road along the Velverdyva river. Awesome. Then my players decided to try to cross it. With their horses.
The module gave no mechanics for adjudicating this. So I improvised. It is a steep slope of loose earth with rocks and trees--steep enough that it's easier for people to climb than horses. So, I made it require six climb checks at DC 15--DC 18 for horses. (Horses aren't supposed to be good at climbing, but the rules for a strength based skill make them good enough climbers that it would be trivial if I put the DC too much lower). Already you can see that I was using something of a 4e skill challenge model since I didn't decide how wide it was and how many feet of each climb DC were necessary, but instead made it six skill checks regardless of the fact that one character can climb four times as fast as another. (Human barbarian with lots of climb ranks--he can accelerated climb and still have a higher bonus than the halfling archer). The cleric cast wall of stone to make a ramp up part of it. I knocked three climb checks off the requirements. All well and good. But, I didn't do the math very well. Most of the horses needed a 15 to make the climb check. The chance that all six of the horses were going to make even the first climb check were very vers slim. The odds of them making all three--nearly nonexistant. As a result, after losing half their horses to a fall into the river (where I had decided scrags were waiting), the party came up with some tricks to dimension step the horses to the other side.
So, what does this have to do with using special case rules for adventure abilities? Obviously it can and does happen in third edition. First, I think it is more likely to happen in fourth edition. If ordinary narrative elements are handled by hand waving (I mean special case abilities) and that is, in fact, the norm for handling questions like "how does the succubus keep the king charmed?" and "what can break the charm?" the odds of players interacting with a narrative element that was insufficiently detailed get bigger. And if there were no mechanics underlying the narrative element to begin with, the odds of making good rulings on the fly are reduced.
3. Increased variation how modules handle NPCs plot element abilities lead to increased difficulty in stitching modules--especially from different sources--together. In some ways, this should go without saying. If narrative elements are exceptions determined by the individual writer or DM, then there will be more variation between two writers or DMs than there would be in a system that defines mechanics for narrative monster abilities. Consequently, I would expect that in some modules, I would need to get the mirror of Pelor to reveal the succubus because the writer wanted a "get the mcguffin" plot and in other modules I would have to lure the succubus onto holy ground or convince the king to accept a protection from evil (I mean protection from possession) ritual as a part of the preparation for some honor or other. The more that authors do this, the less likely it is that their various succubuses will seem like examples of the same monster and the more dramatically narrative monster abilties vary, the less modules from different sources will seem like they can be set in the same world and the more challenging it will be to stitch different modules together to make a single campaign unless they were specifically designed for that.
Once you move beyond the idea of a DM with a monster manual and a notepad creating his whole campaign from scratch and start addressing published modules, I think that the challenges inherent in a philosophy that has rules for killing things and taking their stuff but expects the DM to wing it for everything else become more clear. An individual DM may be able to put together a consistent world where such monster abilities don't seem arbitrary, but it will be much more difficult to accomplish across a world of adventures published by different authors through different publishers.
First D&D minis: There are only three released sets of stats and we already have sneak attack that works when confused for some creatures but that doesn't for others. We have at least two versions of the hide ability as well. (The astral stalker can hide behind its allies; some of the more recently released minis with hide can't). We've also been through two (or is it three iterations of lines and have an erratta document that at least seems longer and more significant than the official clarification for the first edition minis game was when I started (which was about three years after the game first came out--just before war drums). Part of the significance of the clarifications may be that now I am an experienced hand looking to get my third trip to the championships at Gen Con, and am combing through the rules in more minute detail. Part of it is also building off of resolution tools that were developed in the previous edition. (The attack resolution sequence, for instance, was not spelled out in as much detail as it currently is until after I started playing DDM). But I think that part of it is a function of the design philosophy. If you are going to have a very small set of core rules and options and a very large set of special case rules, you are going to spend more time cleaning up the special case rules than if you have a relatively large set of core rules and a small set of special case rules.
What does this have to do with the question? It seems to me that all plot abilities are falling into the area of "special case rules." There is no general rule for what a succubus needs to do to keep the king enthralled. It's a rule that is made up new for each succubus and each king. That can lead to interesting adventures because you don't know exactly what to expect, but it also leads to several challenges.
1. "These bears are are angry over the death of their druid and are immune to calm animals or charm animal spells." One of the best example of bad special case rules comes from an early Living Greyhawk mod I played. The PCs are attacked by bears with the special note written above in the modules text. As my friend (who actually ran that mod for me) commented, "Gee, I wish my barbarian could get so angry he could be immune to hold person. All he gets for raging is a lousy +2 to his will save." In short, special case rules may be designed to counteract abilities that should work (if calm animals isn't supposed to stop angry bears from attacking you, I don't know what it IS for) simply because the author didn't want the solution to be too easy. In the succubus example it would be "yeah, the mirror of Pelor doesn't work on this succubus because this succubus requires the green keycard instead of Pelor's mirrored keycard."
(For other examples of this kind of special case rules stupidity, see "the hydras are buried under the sand. If the players specifically say that their characters are looking for monsters buried under the sand, they get a spot check; otherwise the hydras get an automatic surprise round.") At least in the Theocracy of the Pale and the Duchy of Urnst regions, I know that Living Greyhawk triads worked hard to get authors to stop making special case rules like that and that, as a result of sticking closer to the rules, we ended up with generally improved mods.
Moving plot abilities to the realm of special case, exception based rules seems likely to encourage more "the hydras are buried under the sand" and "these bears are so angry" moments.
2. Oh shoot, they forgot to write a rule for this! I've been running the Lost Caverns of Tsjocanth mod for about four months now. One of the things that I noted in the second or third session was this: The mod said that a landslide had blocked the road along the Velverdyva river. Awesome. Then my players decided to try to cross it. With their horses.
The module gave no mechanics for adjudicating this. So I improvised. It is a steep slope of loose earth with rocks and trees--steep enough that it's easier for people to climb than horses. So, I made it require six climb checks at DC 15--DC 18 for horses. (Horses aren't supposed to be good at climbing, but the rules for a strength based skill make them good enough climbers that it would be trivial if I put the DC too much lower). Already you can see that I was using something of a 4e skill challenge model since I didn't decide how wide it was and how many feet of each climb DC were necessary, but instead made it six skill checks regardless of the fact that one character can climb four times as fast as another. (Human barbarian with lots of climb ranks--he can accelerated climb and still have a higher bonus than the halfling archer). The cleric cast wall of stone to make a ramp up part of it. I knocked three climb checks off the requirements. All well and good. But, I didn't do the math very well. Most of the horses needed a 15 to make the climb check. The chance that all six of the horses were going to make even the first climb check were very vers slim. The odds of them making all three--nearly nonexistant. As a result, after losing half their horses to a fall into the river (where I had decided scrags were waiting), the party came up with some tricks to dimension step the horses to the other side.
So, what does this have to do with using special case rules for adventure abilities? Obviously it can and does happen in third edition. First, I think it is more likely to happen in fourth edition. If ordinary narrative elements are handled by hand waving (I mean special case abilities) and that is, in fact, the norm for handling questions like "how does the succubus keep the king charmed?" and "what can break the charm?" the odds of players interacting with a narrative element that was insufficiently detailed get bigger. And if there were no mechanics underlying the narrative element to begin with, the odds of making good rulings on the fly are reduced.
3. Increased variation how modules handle NPCs plot element abilities lead to increased difficulty in stitching modules--especially from different sources--together. In some ways, this should go without saying. If narrative elements are exceptions determined by the individual writer or DM, then there will be more variation between two writers or DMs than there would be in a system that defines mechanics for narrative monster abilities. Consequently, I would expect that in some modules, I would need to get the mirror of Pelor to reveal the succubus because the writer wanted a "get the mcguffin" plot and in other modules I would have to lure the succubus onto holy ground or convince the king to accept a protection from evil (I mean protection from possession) ritual as a part of the preparation for some honor or other. The more that authors do this, the less likely it is that their various succubuses will seem like examples of the same monster and the more dramatically narrative monster abilties vary, the less modules from different sources will seem like they can be set in the same world and the more challenging it will be to stitch different modules together to make a single campaign unless they were specifically designed for that.
Once you move beyond the idea of a DM with a monster manual and a notepad creating his whole campaign from scratch and start addressing published modules, I think that the challenges inherent in a philosophy that has rules for killing things and taking their stuff but expects the DM to wing it for everything else become more clear. An individual DM may be able to put together a consistent world where such monster abilities don't seem arbitrary, but it will be much more difficult to accomplish across a world of adventures published by different authors through different publishers.
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