Monsters are more than their stats

[Lizard]

This might be hard to swallow, but this depends a lot on how important the task is for the story you want to tell.

Taken far enough, this makes player levels and skills meaningless.

How tough is the wall to climb? DC=Highest Athletics score in the party +8. One size fits all!

It's like Morrowind, where the monster toughness always scaled with you, so you never felt like you were getting any better.

And thus, we're back to my belief that if that's the playstyle you want (and There's Nothing Wrong With That TM), then you're better off diceless. Theatrix, for example, expliclty has success and failure based purely on story need, not on character skill. If the villain needs to get away, there's nothing players can do to stop him; if he needs to be beaten, the players can't lose.

 

[gizmo33]

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.

I would suggest that you will always find that people have a difficult time accepting the universal truth of something that's largely a theoretical construction of someone's imagination. Specifically:

DnD is not a system for simulating all the interactions in a (pseudo-fantasy) world.

So you say. The objective truth/falseness of this is not obvious to me.

It is not even a system for simulating all the possible *interesting* interactions in such a world.

I would never argue, on logical grounds alone, that anything simulates "all possible" anything.

It is, and always has been since the first Gary Gygax booklet, game of fantasy combat within the context of a role-playing narrative.

Maybe - but the earliest booklets had rules for stronghold construction, prices of weapons, loyalty of hirelings, and so forth, so I think you're overstating the simplicity of the situation or the intentions of the original designers. It's not hard to find rules in ODnD that have nothing to do with combat, and the fact that the DnD rules grew out of wargaming rules would be a significant thing to consider before suggesting that every element of the design was intentional. Wandering monster tables, for example, have nothing to do with combat resolution.

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.

I would agree with the objective part of what you're saying here, but I'm very skeptical about the cause/effect that you propose.

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.

A universal set of rules for climbing or surprise, for instance, did not exist in rules prior to 3E. Are you therefore arguing that such things have no effect on combat? Whether or not a king likes you could have a lot to do with whether or not your character gets killed - IMO there is no basis for labeling some resolution as being "combat related" vs. "narrative related" and suggesting that there's some fundemental difference between the two regardless of circumstances.

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

I'm not sure anyone is suggesting this. My actual opinion is more subtle than this, but I'm not sure that anything I say that doesn't use the words "utterly" or "100%" is comprehensible in the internet culture of hyperbole.

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.

IMO it's a bit bold to suggest that DnD's "core competency" is combat. It's not hard to find a game system that came about as an "improvement" over what was seen as pretty lame by some. Consider people's objections about the realism of DnD hitpoints or armorclass for instance. Basically, what you've done is accepted a very abstract model for resolving combat, a model that ignores a myriad of circumstances that would exist in reality. It ignores them in favor of simplicity and game-play. But now somehow you're suggesting that there's a logical basis for saying that such a model (with the attendant abstractions and simplifications) is somehow impossible for non-combat situations. I'm not convinced.

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.

Take an RPG that advertises itself as a "realistic combat simulator" and I'm sure you'd find that a very different beast from DnD as well. But there's no reason IMO to logically assume that because you played out a situation according to a particular system, that there's something fundemental about that situation (combat, social interaction, etc.) that requires that it play that way.

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

I better do what? I would prefer to accept what makes sense to me. You may not have thought this out completely, so advice about what I better do and not do is probably best deferred for a later time. Your very speculative/presumptuous about the design goals of the original DnD designers, for instance. I think this is unwarranted but seems to be the basis for your argument.

 

[Lacyon]

And thus, we're back to my belief that if that's the playstyle you want (and There's Nothing Wrong With That TM), then you're better off diceless. Theatrix, for example, expliclty has success and failure based purely on story need, not on character skill. If the villain needs to get away, there's nothing players can do to stop him; if he needs to be beaten, the players can't lose.

Here's a radical thought: what if some people want the difficulty settings to be story-driven, but still not have guaranteed success or failure?

Diceless systems don't help these people. Abstracted dice-based systems do.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Taken far enough, this makes player levels and skills meaningless.

How tough is the wall to climb? DC=Highest Athletics score in the party +8. One size fits all!

It's like Morrowind, where the monster toughness always scaled with you, so you never felt like you were getting any better.

And thus, we're back to my belief that if that's the playstyle you want (and There's Nothing Wrong With That TM), then you're better off diceless. Theatrix, for example, expliclty has success and failure based purely on story need, not on character skill. If the villain needs to get away, there's nothing players can do to stop him; if he needs to be beaten, the players can't lose.

Taken far enough - in the meaning of "to far", yes.

But that doesn't mean there shouldn't be a baseline for level X skill challenges.

It also depends on what you want - does it make sense to have the DC of climbing a specific wall scaling with level? Off course not.
But, it might make sense to put a little more difficult to climb walls against a higher level party. A 1st level party can cover a 30 ft wall with conveniently placed foot holds. A 20th level party might encounter a 150 ft wall with some randomly distributed foot holds, some of them giving in if you look sternly at them, during a tornado.
Not dissimilar to how a 1st level party will usually avoid encountering an mature Dragon and fight Kobolds or Goblins, while a 20th level party might actively seek out and hunt down the Dragons.

Or in other words, skill challenges need a level just like monsters. And just like you tend to assemble encounters appropriate for the PCs, you will try to create skill challenges appropriate for the PCs. And if you combine a monster and a skill challenge, it might make sense to give them similar levels. It definitely makes sense if the skill challenge is about dealing with the monster.

 

[Mallus]

It's like Morrowind, where the monster toughness always scaled with you, so you never felt like you were getting any better.

When it comes right down to it, hasn't D&D always scaled like that? Get tougher, face tougher monsters. Learn to teleport, start encountering dungeon rooms/whole fortresses made of teleport-proof bricks. Besides, the scaling-problem is a DM issue, not a system issue. A good DM varies the difficultly of challenges so the players experience their characters increased wahoo.

If the villain needs to get away, there's nothing players can do to stop him; if he needs to be beaten, the players can't lose.

Note that very crunchy d20-based systems like Mutants and Masterminds also feature mechanical support for stuff like that. Diceless isn't the only way to go for those who favor story...

 

[GoodKingJayIII]

It's been said a few times already, but I think it's worth repeating.

If you're looking for help with monsters, you go to the Monster Manual.

If you're looking for help with plot resolution, you go to the Dungeon Master's Guide.

So if you're looking in the MM for ways a succubus uses men as her puppets, or how many skill successes a PC needs to make to defeat her, you're looking in the wrong place.

 

[Storm-Bringer]

If you're looking for help with plot resolution, you go to the Dungeon Master's Guide.

And with this latest assurance that the contents of the DMG Will Explain Everything(tm), I think the final tally will be something like 15,000 pages.

 

[Imp]

If you're looking for help with monsters, you go to the Monster Manual.

If you're looking for help with plot resolution, you go to the Dungeon Master's Guide.

So if you're looking in the MM for ways a succubus uses men as her puppets, or how many skill successes a PC needs to make to defeat her, you're looking in the wrong place.

That doesn't say anything. If you want information on how, specifically, a succubus uses men as her puppets, a Monster Manual is a pretty logical place to look for it. It sure beats crossreferencing.

A different angle: while it's certainly possible to make up this sort of thing out of whole cloth, consider that it's also pretty easy in 4e to make up the whole entire monster out of whole cloth: level x, role x, fiddle with stats a little, add a couple special abilities, you're good to go. It almost seems easier than statting up individual instances of customized monsters from the Monster Manual entries in 3e! So then, more than before, the 4e Monster Manual entries have to sell themselves. A succubus! Why use it? Well...

 

[bramadan]

I would suggest that you will always find that people have a difficult time accepting the universal truth of something that's largely a theoretical construction of someone's imagination.
...
So you say. The objective truth/falseness of this is not obvious to me.

I agree that one can take whatever one wants from the RPG but when discussing objective truths it is as safe bet as any to go by the words and actions of the designer(s).

Here is a quote from 3.0 DMG on styles of play:

Kick in the Door:
...
This style of play is straight-forward, fun, exciting and action oriented. Very little time is spent on role-playing non-combat encounters...
...
Rules and game balance are very important in this style of play... If you are using this style be very careful about adjudicating the rules.
...
Deep Immersion Story Telling:
...
This style of gaming is deep complex and challenging. The focus isn't on combat but on talking, developing in depth personas and character interaction.
Whole gaming sessions may pass without a single die being rolled
...
Rules become less important in this style. Since combat is not focus, game mechanics take back seat to the character development. Skills take precedence over combat bonuses and even then the actual numbers often don't mean much. Feel free to change the rules....

He then goes on to say how normal DnD is usually a mixture of the two and should be treated appropriately.

3rd ed DMG is pretty much explicitly making my point for me here: Rules of DnD are for primarily combat related, less emphasis there is on combat (under the DnD ruleset) more adjudication is required by the DM.

Similar caveats are given in both 1st and 2nd edition DMGs and I will be very surprised if we do not find something like it in the 4th.

I would never argue, on logical grounds alone, that anything simulates "all possible" anything.

I am not talking about weird special cases here. Even such action-fantasy tropes as chases are virtually absent from the RAW DnD and require heavy DM adjudication to run under any edition up to this day.

Maybe - but the earliest booklets had rules for stronghold construction, prices of weapons, loyalty of hirelings, and so forth, so I think you're overstating the simplicity of the situation or the intentions of the original designers. It's not hard to find rules in ODnD that have nothing to do with combat, and the fact that the DnD rules grew out of wargaming rules would be a significant thing to consider before suggesting that every element of the design was intentional. Wandering monster tables, for example, have nothing to do with combat resolution.

There was always some degree of non-combat rules but they were neither very deep nor very complete. We tried very much to run a feudal baron/mercenary company game using the stronghold/henchmen rules from 1ed ADnD. To say that considerable houseruling and DM adjudication was needed would be an understatement.

Wandering monster tables on the other hand were integral part of the game from the beginning and they were/are all about combat. If anything they are the perfect example of the basic kick-in-the-door style Monte speaks about above that is combat/rules heavy.

I would agree with the objective part of what you're saying here, but I'm very skeptical about the cause/effect that you propose.

I am not sure what other sort of cause/effect relationship could there be between preponderance of combat rules over rules for everything else, and designer intent to make a combat-based game. if you need further insight into how designers imagined DnD will be played take a look at any given published adventure from ODnD to the present day. Ratio of expected time spent in and out of combat in pretty much any one of those will illustrate it.

A universal set of rules for climbing or surprise, for instance, did not exist in rules prior to 3E. Are you therefore arguing that such things have no effect on combat? Whether or not a king likes you could have a lot to do with whether or not your character gets killed - IMO there is no basis for labeling some resolution as being "combat related" vs. "narrative related" and suggesting that there's some fundemental difference between the two regardless of circumstances.

Surprise rules existed in ADnD2 and I am fairly confident they existed in ADnD1 as well.
Climbing rules did as well - they were just fairly simple rules (as they limited smooth surface climbing to one class only and assumed everyone can climb ropes).
Reason for this is exactly that climbing does not have great overlap with combat. DnD3 climbing rules are better but still infinitely simpler then DnD combat rules though I would argue that the actual process of rock/wall climbing is not much less complex then fencing or archery.

In the second half of your statement you are mixing up outcome and the process. Fact that non-combat and combat encounter can both kill you does not make them a same thing.
If king sentences my character to death I can plead for mercy or I can fight the palace guard. One will (under DnD) involve a diplomacy skill check roll and/or free form DM adjudication and will take 2 minutes. Other will involve lots of rules (initiative, armor, damage, BAB, etc etc...) and can take up to an hour. Not the same thing at all.

IMO it's a bit bold to suggest that DnD's "core competency" is combat. It's not hard to find a game system that came about as an "improvement" over what was seen as pretty lame by some. Consider people's objections about the realism of DnD hitpoints or armorclass for instance. Basically, what you've done is accepted a very abstract model for resolving combat, a model that ignores a myriad of circumstances that would exist in reality. It ignores them in favor of simplicity and game-play. But now somehow you're suggesting that there's a logical basis for saying that such a model (with the attendant abstractions and simplifications) is somehow impossible for non-combat situations. I'm not convinced.

I grant you that DnD is over-all very abstract RPG. Yet for all its abstraction, DnD combat system is by far the least abstract part of the game. If DnD combat were as abstract as its skill system it would be resolved by one opposed d20 roll, modified by BAB with the high roller winning and killing the opponent. There would possibly be a table with modifiers DM can apply based on some common circumstances.

I am not arguing that it is impossible to create the game that provides same level of abstraction in other things PCs may do that would be on par with DnD combat. I am just claiming that DnD is not has never been, and has no demonstrated intention to become that game.

I better do what? I would prefer to accept what makes sense to me. You may not have thought this out completely, so advice about what I better do and not do is probably best deferred for a later time. Your very speculative/presumptuous about the design goals of the original DnD designers, for instance. I think this is unwarranted but seems to be the basis for your argument.

If the 3ed DMG guide is not enough I will provide more designer quotes as to the point that DnD rules are to be used primarily for combat situations and are to be heavily supplemented by DM fiat outside the combat situations. It is not speculation, it is stated intent of the makers of the game. Complaining about it is about as futile as complaining about the offroading performance of the Vespa.

 

[Argyuile]

You don't need (or even want) rules for how often a vampire can create spawn or how long term out of combat sebducus abilities work because:

Chaos theory does not apply to PC's

Lets take the vampire. If I have an encounter setup with the vampire and 5 minions and hes been there 10 days I guess he makes 1 minion every 2 days right? If he has 10 minions I guess he makes 1 every single day right? maybe he only made 2 and he brought 3 with him from Transylvania. Does it matter? Only insomuch as it matters to the story. He creates as many minions as I need to make challenging encounters.

Lets say the PC's come across a merchant and talk to him for 5 minutes stopping his progress instead of just letting him pass. In the real world I've just created a butterfly effect. Now that merchant is 5 minutes later. maybe because of that his food arrives late and because of that some little boy starves, and because of that his father swears vengeance against the merchant, the merchant blames it all on the PC's and now the Father wants the PC's dead. Do I need a subset of rules for this crap? Absolutely not. It only matters where the PC's are concerned. If I need some justification for some villain maybe I say thats why it happened. If not I don't. I don't need a table that says.

Father Vengeance for childs death
01-45 Gets over it
46-72 Hates the PC's but to pansy to do anything about it
73-00 Swears vengeance

OMG he swore vengeance but HOW

01-20 Becomes a rogue, tries to poison
21-30 Becomes SK decides to raise army
31-56 Becomes SK decides to kill in single combat
57-80 Becomes necro decides to make traveling undead circus
81-00 Dies trying to get necromancer to mentor him.

Bah rolled a 98 there goes that plot! Guess I'll have to work on something else.

Like my post in another thread about the breading habits of orcs. I don't need rules on orc sex so I can decide how big a tribe of orcs is. Its exactly as big as it needs to be for the story. The vampire makes enough spawn to make the encounter interesting.

Justifying more or less spawn is easy.

More: he brought some with him, he made some on the way, he has a cult that follows him around and he makes them spawn to. Whatever

Less: He had a headache that day, he didn't want to attract to much attention, he just didn't have the opportunity. Whatever.

I shouldn't have to adjust my story to fit some arbitrary set of out of encounter BS rules with 80 billion tables. I don't need to know how often the king and queen have sex and what the probability of them producing an heir is and whats the probability that it will be a boy vs a girl. They will have a child when its important/interesting to the story and it will be a boy or a girl based on whatever I happen to need.