Monsters are more than their stats

[gizmo33]

I honestly don't know how to answer that.

I mean, I know what the difference is. The former is an act of roleplaying that depends on the personalities and interactions between two characters. The latter is an attack roll.

I don't know how to explain the difference to someone who looks at the two and insists that he can't tell them apart.

Ok - well I'm not honestly trying to throw you off. Obviously there is a difference between throwing a rock and using a social skill. But there's also a difference between throwing a rock and climbing a wall. So IMO the relevant question is what are the *significant* differences between rock-throwing, wall climbing, and seducing, and do such differences warrant an entirely different methodology for determining success in one case but not the others? Isn't my ability to convince someone of something a skill that's affected by circumstances in the same general way as me trying to hit them with a sword?

Yes, there are a seemingly limitless set of circumstances that could affect a seduction die-roll. But then realistically hitting someone with a sword is also very complex - it's just that DnD settles on a certain set of standard modifiers when it comes to sword swinging and all other realistic circumstances are ignored. For example, no one seriously considers the chance that a sword breaks during the swing - even though a DM could be obsessive about such complexity in the case of interpersonal skills.

 

[gizmo33]

Are we talking about 4e still or some theoretical debate that doesn't have anything to do with 4e anymore? I'm a bit confused.

Theoretical - I'd be quoting chapter and verse if it were otherwise.

 

[ThirdWizard]

Theoretical - I'd be quoting chapter and verse if it were otherwise.

Phew. I thought I had missed something very important!

 

[gizmo33]

But you can, in general, assume that the challenge is going to be something like level-appropriate, no?

Actually IMC no, that's not the case at all. If you jump off a cliff, the damage you take is not going to be level-appropriate. What I have is a set of objective guidelines (in this case "1d6/10 ft") and I apply modifiers (ex. "+2d6 becuase you're landing on glass"). Whether you're 1st level or 10th level is not a factor. In fact, the point of getting to 10th level is somewhat lost on me if the challenges immediately and arbitrarily increase as well - but maybe I've misunderstood your implication here.

Why are you assuming no guidelines?

(The succubus' archery skill isn't described at all, but it's still easy to extrapolate from the basic system - Dex attack versus AC).

I'm assuming very little guidelines beyond flavor text because that's what I thought was being advocated here. Something like - "A succubus' seduction ability is too complex to adjucated with well-defined rules and/or will only happen off screen so we don't need rules" or something to that effect.

 

[Lacyon]

Actually IMC no, that's not the case at all. If you jump off a cliff, the damage you take is not going to be level-appropriate. What I have is a set of objective guidelines (in this case "1d6/10 ft") and I apply modifiers (ex. "+2d6 becuase you're landing on glass"). Whether you're 1st level or 10th level is not a factor. In fact, the point of getting to 10th level is somewhat lost on me if the challenges immediately and arbitrarily increase as well - but maybe I've misunderstood your implication here.

So if you're jumping off a cliff and expect to survive, it's level-appropriate (or less), no?

Nothing holds you back from saying "this is a level 9 challenge, and as such I expect my first-level PCs to fail at it and my 20th-level ones to waltz through it with no trouble."

And, y'know, since the succubus is a level-9 monster, that seems like a fine baseline to work with.

I'm assuming very little guidelines beyond flavor text because that's what I thought was being advocated here. Something like - "A succubus' seduction ability is too complex to adjucated with well-defined rules and/or will only happen off screen so we don't need rules" or something to that effect.

Some small number of people are probably actually advocating that very position. For many, I suspect it's a shorthand for "the succubus' ability to seduce doesn't need to be totally well-defined because its actual implementation is going to vary so widely - only give us the guidelines we need instead of the thorough definition we're so likely to just throw out anyway. Spend your valuable design and development time on getting the stuff we are likely to use with some frequency out of the box to work well."

 

[bramadan]

I would argue that the confusion here stems from the rules specialization in DnD which is (and always has been) very difficult for some people to accept.

DnD is not a system for simulating all the interactions in a (pseudo-fantasy) world. It is not even a system for simulating all the possible *interesting* interactions in such a world.
It is, and always has been since the first Gary Gygax booklet, game of fantasy combat within the context of a role-playing narrative.

A hint that this may be so is the page-count of abilities and rules devoted to combat in every edition of DnD thus-far compared with page-count dedicated to any other interaction.

Over time designers of DnD have introduced certain amount of secondary rules to the game (utility spells, proficiencies, skills etc...) to enhance the narrative aspect of the game but have quite consciously retained original philosophy of DnD as a combat-game and of characters defined by their combat abilities.

It is therefore utterly pointless demanding that a social (non-combat) situation gets nearly as much attention within DnD rules as a combat one.

The social conflict (Sucubbus against the Bard-y type PC for the attention of the King) is very far from the original "core competency" of the DnD game and will thus *by design* be much more open to the DM adjudication then the physical conflict would be.

A great virtue of DnD4 is that it explicitly recognizes this fact and is striving to make all characters combat-balanced meaning that none of them lose out on what is squarely heart of the game, but it does not mean that the previous edition put any more actual emphasis on the non-combat interactions.

I have worked myself on a game where social conflict resolution is given as much emphasis as the combat and I can tell you - it is a *very* different beast from DnD, from the way PCs are constructed down to the sort of narratives that play out.

For good or bad, if you play DnD you better accept that non-combat interaction will always be reasonably ad-hock affair.

 

[Lizard]

Unless you instead fall back on the skill challenge rules provided with 4E, for example.

This is fair. You could use Diplomacy to win the king back, Arcana to learn of a powerful Word Of Liberation, Nature to brew an herbal concoction to weaken the spells magic, or Intimidate to try to get the succubus to back off ("The power of Pelor compels ye! The power of Pelor compels ye!") (Or would that be Religion?)

So, how many successes do you need to break a succubus' charm? How many failures until the king tells you to get lost and orders his guards to attack you?

THAT'S the kind of mechanical detail needed to make the system work -- and that's what the OP views as an anathema (and the MM doesn't seem to think of as necessary).

As a caveat, it might be the Charm spell itself contains this data, but I'd like to think a succubus was better at it than J. Random Wizard.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

This is fair. You could use Diplomacy to win the king back, Arcana to learn of a powerful Word Of Liberation, Nature to brew an herbal concoction to weaken the spells magic, or Intimidate to try to get the succubus to back off ("The power of Pelor compels ye! The power of Pelor compels ye!") (Or would that be Religion?)

So, how many successes do you need to break a succubus' charm? How many failures until the king tells you to get lost and orders his guards to attack you?

This might be hard to swallow, but this depends a lot on how important the task is for the story you want to tell. If your entire adventure has the goal to uncover the Succubus deception, then you will probably have a lot more detail (even beyond that of a skill challenge. Stuff like finding contacts that tell you something, minions send by the Succubus to deal with you, a skill challenge to get access to the neccessary counter-ritual (assuming there is need for that) and so on) then when it's only part of your goal to win the King over to lend you troops in battle against the Orc camps. Heck, for the very "player-empowered minded", the Succubus could actually something that was created on the spot during a skill challenge.

And that's why it's ultimately not part of the Succubus entry. The only level of detail for 4E that is fixed is if you want to go to combat with someone. But everything else can be detailed to the extend the DM desires to. Ideally, the DMG will provide him with the tools (rituals, challenges, adventure hooks etc.) to make this easy for him, compelling for the group and fair to the players.

 

[LostSoul]

So, how many successes do you need to break a succubus' charm? How many failures until the king tells you to get lost and orders his guards to attack you?

THAT'S the kind of mechanical detail needed to make the system work -- and that's what the OP views as an anathema (and the MM doesn't seem to think of as necessary).

I think of the # of success/failures as a pacing mechanic.

 

[Lacyon]

This is fair. You could use Diplomacy to win the king back, Arcana to learn of a powerful Word Of Liberation, Nature to brew an herbal concoction to weaken the spells magic, or Intimidate to try to get the succubus to back off ("The power of Pelor compels ye! The power of Pelor compels ye!") (Or would that be Religion?)

What's more, you can use a skill challenge to find out what's up with the king's wacky new edicts. Or you can combine the two things into one skill challenge, but spread out (some of) the relevant rolls over a month-long sequence of adventures involving

So, how many successes do you need to break a succubus' charm? How many failures until the king tells you to get lost and orders his guards to attack you?

THAT'S the kind of mechanical detail needed to make the system work -- and that's what the OP views as an anathema (and the MM doesn't seem to think of as necessary).

I won't speak for the OP, but why would the MM tell you what the DC and number of successes required for a level 9 skill challenge is? More to the point, why would it repeat that information, since it's so likely to be in another rulebook, published at the same time?

As a caveat, it might be the Charm spell itself contains this data, but I'd like to think a succubus was better at it than J. Random Wizard.

I still don't think it even needs to be a spell.