"Narrative Options" mechanical?

[Doug McCrae]

The main connection that Ron Edwards draws between FitM and narrativst play is that, in narrativist play, FitM preserves the player's conception of his/her PC - eg if you miss an attack, rather than narrating that as "I suck" - which you have to in RQ, say, because you can't narrate it as a parry by your enemy if the processing of the resolution never got to the parry stage - you can narrate it as "My powerful flurry of blows is parried by their equally awesome sword skills" - now instead of sucking my guy is so awesome that I'm in a duel with the best duelist in the country.

4e uses FitM to allow theme to emerge - eg when a PC goes down, we don't know yet what the "0 hp" means, because we don't know yet whether or not there will be a heroic recovery (from a warlord's inspiration, or a 20+ on the death save, or whatever). So the FitM allows the 0 hp to act as a prelude to/foreshadowing of either heroic recovery or tragic failure. I think that's another narrativst-ish deployment of FitM.

I hadn't got it quite right - I knew I was on thin ice trying to talk about narrativism!

My natural rpg-ing inclinations are fairly process sim, but I like both the techniques you describe. Currently I'm co-GMing a Star Wars game using HERO System, and a question arose regarding how best to simulate the limb lopping that's so frequent in the movies. I suggested that it could be handled by FitM - it's a possible consequence of being defeated, of having one's BODY stat reduced to 0. But imo this goes against the HERO System ethos, which seeks to describe everything important with a specific rules construct.

 

[N'raac]

Sure, but that seems only to confirm my point. The influence of alignment choice on player activity is itself an expression of "actor stance" RPing. The fact that much play was pawn stance, and that some saw this as a problem that didn't fit well with the game's alignment system, is shown by the effort that writers of the time (eg Lewis Pulsipher in White Dwarf, Gygax in parts of the PHB and DMG) to insist that alignment matters in ways that go beyond clerical spell selection and interacting with intelligent swords.

Primitive and limited though it was, alignment was an addition of personality to the game, moving PC's beyond simple pawns which take any action that seems most likely to achieve success to characters with personalities, strengths, weaknesses, flaws and foibles. In other words, characters with character.

"You see some orcs." "OK - I attack them." That's action resolution.

"You see some orcs." "OK - I polymorph them into chickens." That's scene-reframing.

I don't concur with that distinction. Both actions are means of resolving the threat created by the orcs. Kill them, graple them and tie them up, turn them into chickens, teleport them to the moon, negotiate/intimidate/bribe with them to allow safe passage, all are means of resolving the threat the orcs initially present.

"You see some orcs." "OK - They are all wearing party hats and cheerfully invite us to share some birthday cake" would reframe the scene. So would "OK - they are really Polymorphed chickens, and they chicken-walk around the room clucking rather than drawing the weapons on their belts." reframes the scene. "OK - I Hypnotize them into believing they are chickens, and they chicken-walk around the room clucking rather than drawing the weapons on their belts." or "OK - I Charm the Orcs so they cheerfully invite us to share their food" is back to scene resolution.

So is "OK - these Orcs must be too tough for us - I cast Teleport so we can escape." The scene has not been reframed. It has been resolved. If this is scene refaming, then so is "Orcs! Slam the door, run like hell and don't stop until I'm back in my room in the Inn, shivering under the bed. brrrr ORCS!"

The borderline can be murky, and depends heavily on tropes, mechanics and group expectations. For instance, in MHRP "You see some Skrulls." "OK, I teleport to another planet to get away from them." can be part of action resolution, because the game has mechanics to handle that sort of change of geographic location as part of the resolution of a single scene.

I would say, rather, that this is action resolution as the PC has taken action to resolve the challenge presented by the Skrulls. Was it resolved successfully? Good question - the skrulls are free to kidnap the teleporter's girlfriend or terrify his frail old Aunt into a heart attack. Or to activate their Acme Teleport Follower and reappear a few meters away from the PC's. But the PC has attempted to resolve the Skrull encounter by escaping the skrulls through teleportation to another planet.

In the other hand, in D&D "You see some demons." "OK, I Plane Shift to the Seven Heavens to get away from them." is scene re-framing rather than action resolution, both because the game lacks the mechanics to handle that sort of change of geographic location as part of the resolution of a single scene, and because the game lacks robust mechanics to regulate how much pressure the GM can place on a LG PC who Plane Shifts to the Seven Heavens, meaning that it can look like Viking Hat GMing to treat this as anything other than a "get out of jail free card", at least in the immediate term.

So how is any threat on the new planet in MHRP determined? There can only be a threat if the GM succeeds in a die roll, where the GM in D&D makes a decision on what, if anything, is happening in the Seven Heavens? And the fact that there is a die roll, rather than a decision made by the GM based on his knowledge of the Seven Heavens (as they exist, and as matters are progressing, in his game setting) means the former is "action resolution" and the latter "scene reframing"? Does the D&D activity change back if the Demons can plane shift as well, and follow the PC's even into the bastion of Lawful Goodness of the Seven Heavens?

I think everyone acknowledges that when a wizard uses polymorph to turn the orcs into chickens, that doesn't retcon the shared fiction (there's no denial, in your sense of that word). In the fiction, the orcs were orcs that got magically transformed into chickens. The point is that, at the table, the player didn't actually engage with the situation involving the orcs. That situation was not explored. Rather, in practical terms it was rewritten. (In a movie, this would be a moment of light relief, as what looks like a threatening situation actually reveals itself to not be one at all.)

Yes, he did engage in the situation involving the orcs. He Polymmorphed them into chickens. I don't see the fighter charging in, attacking one orc, it drops, Great Cleave to attack the second, it drops, Great Cleave to attack the third, it drops. The situation is no more explored. The threatening situation wasn't one at all.

The analogue for a fighter would be a token, or a "kill em all dead kwik" skill roll, that allowed the player of a fighter to equally simply, in mechanical terms, declare "Nope, no orcs here. I've killed them all!"

The wizard doesn't get a "they're all polymorphed" token. He must cast the spell (readied Orcs could attempt to disrupt the spell; "your spell component pouch is missing" [what? a goblin pickpocket was out in the hallway?]; an Orc shaman could attempt a counterspell, Dispel Magic or Silence spell, etc.), the Orcs get a save to avoid being polymorphed which may or may not succeed (they didn't get a save againt being cut down by that Fighter, but the Wizard did not roll to hit). And this ignores the fact that Baleful Polymorph is a one target spell. If the Wizard can only change one Orc into a Chicken, does that Polymorph your Scene Reframing back to Action Resolution?

There are RPG designs that exploit this contrast between engaging a scene and rewriting it. For instance, Burning Wheel and HeroWars/Quest (and probably other systems too) have simple resolution, in which a single roll from a player (whether of caster, or non-caster) resolves a scene and obliged the GM to frame a new one. The general advice in those systems is to use simple resolution to keep up your pacing and not get bogged down until something that really matters comes along - then you switch to the complex resolution systems and we're not longer talking about rapid movement from scene to scene but the players actually engaging a scene that the GM has framed.

I don't see the speed with which action resolution can take place changing it from action resolution to scene reframing. In a long past game, I recall the low level PC's reaching the BBG's lair. Initiative is rolled, one warrior rushes forward with his Two Handed Sword, rolls a natural 20 followed by maximum damage, BBG drops to the ground, killed with one blow. That did not, in my mind, change "combat as action resolution" to "scene reframing".

D&D seems unlikely to have this sort of simple resolution mechanic any time soon

Emphasis added - this is a quick/simple resolution mechanic, not a reframing mechanic.

The idea of a hit point threshold on spells like polymorph in early versions of D&Dnext seemed designed to make those spells lack their scene-reframing character - they become "closers" that you can only use after having engaged the scene for a bit and found out what it's about. But I think that's mostly gone now, hasn't it?

I'm not sure what "early versions" you are referring to, as I don't remember a hp threshold for anything other than Power Word spells in 1e/2e, however I would classify such a threshold as a means of preventing the action resolution being inordinately and undramatically shortened, not changing the spell from action resolution to scene reframing.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I don't concur with that distinction. Both actions are means of resolving the threat created by the orcs. Kill them, graple them and tie them up, turn them into chickens, teleport them to the moon, negotiate/intimidate/bribe with them to allow safe passage, all are means of resolving the threat the orcs initially present.

I think that things like teleport are both resolving the situation AND scene reframing.

The scene is framed by the DM. He says there are orcs, they are angry and want to kill you. This is the scene where a battle occurs.

The wizard who casts a teleport is essentially saying "Alright, that scene is now over. We are instead in a new scene where we are teleported into our inn rooms and we discuss a new plan for what to do next." You "resolved" the combat scene(whether it is a satisfying resolution to the scene is another story) while simultaneously framing a new scene.

It's still the player who is framing the new scene.

So is "OK - these Orcs must be too tough for us - I cast Teleport so we can escape." The scene has not been reframed. It has been resolved. If this is scene refaming, then so is "Orcs! Slam the door, run like hell and don't stop until I'm back in my room in the Inn, shivering under the bed. brrrr ORCS!"

Correct, both are scene reframing. However, one is immediate and can't be stopped. The other one requires the players to continue playing this scene until they can successfully escape and therefore have the opportunity to reframe the scene. It essentially requires the DM to agree to the scene reframing by allowing the PCs to escape(given the number of resources he has at his disposal to stop a fleeing party).

A teleport has no reasonable counter. It says "I'm leaving and you can't stop me except with a very specific set of circumstances that are likely very contrived. If you do them, we will know that you made a decision to specifically thwart my teleport".

Fleeing let's the DM say "Yes, BUT..." You successfully escape BUT in order to do so you need to defeat the 3 orcs guarding the exit. Which is much better than the 30 you were running away from. It also allows you to say no but without overtly trampling the decision. There could be 30 more Orcs guarding the exit, which FEELS naturally part of the narrative. It's more of a negotiation with the DM. More of a "I'd like to escape, tell me what happens" vs "I escape".

Yes, he did engage in the situation involving the orcs. He Polymmorphed them into chickens. I don't see the fighter charging in, attacking one orc, it drops, Great Cleave to attack the second, it drops, Great Cleave to attack the third, it drops. The situation is no more explored. The threatening situation wasn't one at all.

I think this is kind of the point. The TONE of a scene is part of the framing of it. When a scene is framed as a deadly combat and it turns out to be a scene instead about a bunch of orcs humorously being turned into chickens and the PCs walking away, you've successfully reframed the scene as something other than what it started as.

Especially when you are the only person in the group capable of changing the scene like that.

The wizard doesn't get a "they're all polymorphed" token. He must cast the spell (readied Orcs could attempt to disrupt the spell; "your spell component pouch is missing" [what? a goblin pickpocket was out in the hallway?]; an Orc shaman could attempt a counterspell, Dispel Magic or Silence spell, etc.), the Orcs get a save to avoid being polymorphed which may or may not succeed (they didn't get a save againt being cut down by that Fighter, but the Wizard did not roll to hit). And this ignores the fact that Baleful Polymorph is a one target spell. If the Wizard can only change one Orc into a Chicken, does that Polymorph your Scene Reframing back to Action Resolution?

It does if there is only one Orc. Also, although all those things are possible...none of them are likely except maybe the save. For a counter spell/disruption, the DM must predict your polymorph in advance, have a spell caster amongst the orcs, have the appropriate spell prepared and unused, and use up an enemies action betting that this is the round you are planning on using the polymorph. For a non-caster Orc to disrupt it, they need to still predict the spell in advance and waste their action betting on it but then hope you fail the(normally insanely easy) concentration check. "Your spell component pouch is gone" is just telegraphing the fact that you are attempting to screw over the wizard.

Of course, that's all assuming a 3.5e game. More generically, there were less ways of stopping that same spell in 1e/2e.

The key point here is that the spell skips the action resolution mechanics. It says "Battle is when both sides attempt to reduce each other's HP to 0". Spells like Teleport, Polymorph and the like say "Rather than playing the game everyone expects us to be playing, I'll skip that game and play my own. While the fighter has a 60% chance to deal 10 damage and will have to hit the enemy 10 times in order to kill it while avoiding enemies attacks, I will cast a spell that has an 80% chance of just winning outright or a spell that has a 100% chance of ending the battle immediately."

I don't see the speed with which action resolution can take place changing it from action resolution to scene reframing. In a long past game, I recall the low level PC's reaching the BBG's lair. Initiative is rolled, one warrior rushes forward with his Two Handed Sword, rolls a natural 20 followed by maximum damage, BBG drops to the ground, killed with one blow. That did not, in my mind, change "combat as action resolution" to "scene reframing".

It's not much of a "scene" if it ends so quickly. That's why you don't see a scene in a TV show where 2 people walk past each other in a hallway and say "Hi" and then cut away to a different scene. It feels incomplete. I don't like this when either fighters OR wizards do this.

Also see above, if a scene is reframed into a different scene quickly enough then the scene IS the second scene. In the same way that if a scene started in a movie and you saw the face of a vicious Orc with a battle helmet growling and it slowly zooms out until you can see that's all he's wearing and he's in a bathroom and looking into a mirror and starts talking about how he thinks he has the face down pat now....well, the scene was always meant to be a comedic scene with an Orc making faces in a mirror. It just made you think it was a battle scene for a couple of seconds to trick you.

It's similar with combats that get resolved by a spell immediately after it starts.

Once again, the key is tone. I believe the DM gets to set the tone as part of framing the scene(or at least gets to TRY to set the tone). The mechanics should allow the DM to set the tone he wants with the least number of abilities for the players to dramatically change the tone.

 

[N'raac]

I think that things like teleport are both resolving the situation AND scene reframing.

The scene is framed by the DM. He says there are orcs, they are angry and want to kill you. This is the scene where a battle occurs.

The wizard who casts a teleport is essentially saying "Alright, that scene is now over. We are instead in a new scene where we are teleported into our inn rooms and we discuss a new plan for what to do next." You "resolved" the combat scene(whether it is a satisfying resolution to the scene is another story) while simultaneously framing a new scene.

It's still the player who is framing the new scene.

Correct, both are scene reframing. However, one is immediate and can't be stopped. The other one requires the players to continue playing this scene until they can successfully escape and therefore have the opportunity to reframe the scene. It essentially requires the DM to agree to the scene reframing by allowing the PCs to escape(given the number of resources he has at his disposal to stop a fleeing party).

First off, teleport is neither immediate nor unstoppable. More on that below. Second, it doesn't seem like we are discussing which characters have narrative control so much as we are discussing the probabity of success in exercising such narrative control. If we accept, for the moment, that the ability of the wizard to Teleport the party away, then what mechanic do you propose to add in order to provide similar narrative control to a non-spellcaster (or spellcasters lacking access to the teleport spell)?

A teleport has no reasonable counter. It says "I'm leaving and you can't stop me except with a very specific set of circumstances that are likely very contrived. If you do them, we will know that you made a decision to specifically thwart my teleport".

OK, first you must win initiative to teleport before battle is joined.

Then, to whisk the party to safety, they must all be connected by physical contact. Were you walking through the dungen all holding hands in case of just such an event (and if both your hands are used in that manner, what are you using for somatic components?), or will you need to establish physical contact? "Great, the wizard just vanished again! Why do we even bring him along?"

The Orcs might reasonably choose to grapple unarmored, lightly armed adventurers. PC's recognize them immediately as arcance casters - why don't orcs? And what prevents their spell component pouch being Sundered, by the way? Or they may just want to ensure they are in close proximity so they get one or more AoO's that might disrupt the spell. What? You take a 5' step away from the orc? Can you still establish the Touch needed to bring targets along with you?

If the orcs also have spellcasters, Dispel Magic is an instant counterspell, and Silence is amazingly effective at preventing verbal components. Simple Darkness makes it tough to establish that "touch chain", and even harder to know it has been established (and can you target people you can't see?).

I think we're still a long way away from "contrived", despite that rather extensive list.

Fleeing let's the DM say "Yes, BUT..." You successfully escape BUT in order to do so you need to defeat the 3 orcs guarding the exit. Which is much better than the 30 you were running away from. It also allows you to say no but without overtly trampling the decision. There could be 30 more Orcs guarding the exit, which FEELS naturally part of the narrative. It's more of a negotiation with the DM. More of a "I'd like to escape, tell me what happens" vs "I escape".

Those 3 or 30 orcs will often be met with disbelief when the party had to walk through that area to get to this room and suddenly there is a contrived group of orcs that came from nowhere.

I think this is kind of the point. The TONE of a scene is part of the framing of it. When a scene is framed as a deadly combat and it turns out to be a scene instead about a bunch of orcs humorously being turned into chickens and the PCs walking away, you've successfully reframed the scene as something other than what it started as.

The characters are 7th level and you consier three orcs to be "framed as deadly combat"? If the Fighter says "Three orcs? I'll close my eyes and fight left handed so there will be at least a tiny bit of challenge", does that mean he now has that elusive "narative control"? He's reframed the deadly combat into a humerous scene about a bunch of incompetent Orc warriors biting off far more than they can hope to chew!

Especially when you are the only person in the group capable of changing the scene like that.

Are you? I think a 7th level anyone will make short work of the three orcs. In fact, the Wizard's Polymorph only gets one of them, so there's every chance someone else can deal with the orcs quicker.

It does if there is only one Orc. Also, although all those things are possible...none of them are likely except maybe the save. For a counter spell/disruption, the DM must predict your polymorph in advance, have a spell caster amongst the orcs, have the appropriate spell prepared and unused, and use up an enemies action betting that this is the round you are planning on using the polymorph. For a non-caster Orc to disrupt it, they need to still predict the spell in advance and waste their action betting on it but then hope you fail the(normally insanely easy) concentration check. "Your spell component pouch is gone" is just telegraphing the fact that you are attempting to screw over the wizard.

Addressed above. The three orcs are pretty dangerous, however, if the wizard is alone and casts Polymorph. Now the two Orcs remaining can grapple him.

Of course, that's all assuming a 3.5e game. More generically, there were less ways of stopping that same spell in 1e/2e.

I don't recall concentration checks in 1e/2e - your spell was disrupted if you were hurt while casting it, IIRC.

The key point here is that the spell skips the action resolution mechanics. It says "Battle is when both sides attempt to reduce each other's HP to 0". Spells like Teleport, Polymorph and the like say "Rather than playing the game everyone expects us to be playing, I'll skip that game and play my own. While the fighter has a 60% chance to deal 10 damage and will have to hit the enemy 10 times in order to kill it while avoiding enemies attacks, I will cast a spell that has an 80% chance of just winning outright or a spell that has a 100% chance of ending the battle immediately."

We won a battle the other day when a charcter Grappled our tiny opponent. I guess he must have had way more narrative control than I thought, since he clearly won without reducing the other side's hp to 0. And the spell still has to deal with resolution mechanics. The wizard has to roll initiative, and his spell can be disrupted. However, like the grapple, his spell has different mechanics from swinging a sword.

It's not much of a "scene" if it ends so quickly. That's why you don't see a scene in a TV show where 2 people walk past each other in a hallway and say "Hi" and then cut away to a different scene. It feels incomplete. I don't like this when either fighters OR wizards do this.

In this case, though, it was the fighter, so apparently he has the narrative control to cut the scene short as well. Let's look at this from another angle, though. You seem set against the Wizard winning the battle immediately, however if his spell fails, he doesn't have the option of casting it again for the next three rounds, and four more times in the next room. The fighter can swing that sword all day long. Different mechanics for action resolution does not mean some are not action resolution.

Also see above, if a scene is reframed into a different scene quickly enough then the scene IS the second scene. In the same way that if a scene started in a movie and you saw the face of a vicious Orc with a battle helmet growling and it slowly zooms out until you can see that's all he's wearing and he's in a bathroom and looking into a mirror and starts talking about how he thinks he has the face down pat now....well, the scene was always meant to be a comedic scene with an Orc making faces in a mirror. It just made you think it was a battle scene for a couple of seconds to trick you.

It's similar with combats that get resolved by a spell immediately after it starts.

By this logic, I see narrative control for the Fighter being "Never Outnumbered", either a feat or a skill trick which allowed him to intimidate a group. He's reframed the brave, eadly orcs into cringing, fearful orcs. Three orcs in one full round action (or one attack action with Great Cleave) also ends the fight immediately after it starts (if the fighter beat the wizard's initiative, anyway).

 

[I'm A Banana]

I think everyone acknowledges that when a wizard uses polymorph to turn the orcs into chickens, that doesn't retcon the shared fiction (there's no denial, in your sense of that word). In the fiction, the orcs were orcs that got magically transformed into chickens. The point is that, at the table, the player didn't actually engage with the situation involving the orcs. That situation was not explored. Rather, in practical terms it was rewritten. (In a movie, this would be a moment of light relief, as what looks like a threatening situation actually reveals itself to not be one at all.)

The analogue for a fighter would be a token, or a "kill em all dead kwik" skill roll, that allowed the player of a fighter to equally simply, in mechanical terms, declare "Nope, no orcs here. I've killed them all!"

There are RPG designs that exploit this contrast between engaging a scene and rewriting it. For instance, Burning Wheel and HeroWars/Quest (and probably other systems too) have simple resolution, in which a single roll from a player (whether of caster, or non-caster) resolves a scene and obliged the GM to frame a new one. The general advice in those systems is to use simple resolution to keep up your pacing and not get bogged down until something that really matters comes along - then you switch to the complex resolution systems and we're not longer talking about rapid movement from scene to scene but the players actually engaging a scene that the GM has framed.

You may be kind of conflating two things that are very distinct in my mind: a "rewrite" and a situation left unexplored. But I think I follow you in that essentially, the player (and, really, the character, too) says, "We're just going to do this the easy way."

I think it's important to remember that in D&D, at least, the "easy way" can easily fail (the other side of "save or suck" is that nothing happens), but, yeah, the impulse is to just jump over the struggle the DM has put in the way. It might be analogous to zooming OUT the level of focus in a FATE game -- turning what might be a true "conflict" into a simple single-roll scenario.

D&D seems unlikely to have this sort of simple resolution mechanic any time soon, given that 4e didn't fully embrace it despite coming the closest to these sorts of design sensibilities. The idea of a hit point threshold on spells like polymorph in early versions of D&Dnext seemed designed to make those spells lack their scene-reframing character - they become "closers" that you can only use after having engaged the scene for a bit and found out what it's about. But I think that's mostly gone now, hasn't it?

I think this is an area where I see a spellcaster/otherfolks divide in D&D, and it does have to do with the fact that, historically, a spell (being a limited resource in the fiction) can zoom out the action and turn a battle into a simple die roll, but that an attack roll (being a limitless resource in the fiction) can't. Kind of an interesting way to see magical power: it lets you control the pacing more than non-magical power. Certainly something that should probably be expanded to more than just magical classes.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Second, it doesn't seem like we are discussing which characters have narrative control so much as we are discussing the probabity of success in exercising such narrative control. If we accept, for the moment, that the ability of the wizard to Teleport the party away, then what mechanic do you propose to add in order to provide similar narrative control to a non-spellcaster (or spellcasters lacking access to the teleport spell)?

I wish I could propose such a mechanic. I don't know of anything that would have a nearly 100% success rate at getting the fighter to anywhere in the planet(or any other plane of existence) with one standard action that anyone would accept. My proposal would be to remove the ability from the wizard in order to equalize it.

If you absolutely had to add things rather than remove, I think maybe giving the fighter the ability to use scrolls that did most of what the wizard's did and allowed him to write new ones every day might work. But most people wouldn't accept that as a class feature of a fighter.

Also, it isn't so much the probability of success as WHO has narrative control. If the DM has the ability to easily and nearly 100% of the time stop an ability without players complaining that you are out to get them or having to come up with contrivances in order to prevent something then it isn't so bad.

"They are trying to escape, I'll just make the Orcs over here move to stop them" is perfectly fine and logical.

"They are attempting to teleport out of here....ummm, the orc cave has been warded against teleportation to prevent anyone from leaving" seems arbitrary and contrived.
OK, first you must win initiative to teleport before battle is joined.

Then, to whisk the party to safety, they must all be connected by physical contact. Were you walking through the dungen all holding hands in case of just such an event (and if both your hands are used in that manner, what are you using for somatic components?), or will you need to establish physical contact? "Great, the wizard just vanished again! Why do we even bring him along?"

We were walking in a marching order where we were all adjacent. Our DMs mostly let us touch each other as a free action that could be done out of turn. Sometimes we'd all have to spend our actions to get into position. Though the wizard would ready for the moment we were all together. Sometimes our Wizard would leave without us(or take whoever was next to him) when he realized we were all going to die. Then he'd hire another adventuring group(our excuse to roll up new characters).

The Orcs might reasonably choose to grapple unarmored, lightly armed adventurers. PC's recognize them immediately as arcance casters - why don't orcs? And what prevents their spell component pouch being Sundered, by the way? Or they may just want to ensure they are in close proximity so they get one or more AoO's that might disrupt the spell. What? You take a 5' step away from the orc? Can you still establish the Touch needed to bring targets along with you?

If the orcs also have spellcasters, Dispel Magic is an instant counterspell, and Silence is amazingly effective at preventing verbal components. Simple Darkness makes it tough to establish that "touch chain", and even harder to know it has been established (and can you target people you can't see?).

I think we're still a long way away from "contrived", despite that rather extensive list.

All I can tell you is what experience has taught me. None of these things happen. At one point when we were playing 3.5e, I was playing in 2 weekly games(about 4 hours a piece) AND running a Living Greyhawk gamesday once a week where we played 3 four hour adventures a week. About quarterly I was going to a convention where I was playing about 7 four hour slots over the weekend. We were also playing periodic Living Greyhawk on other days when we had nothing to do.

In an average month, I was playing or DMing close to 90 hours of D&D under a stable of 10 or so DMs. In an average year I'd play with about 60 DMs. I likely played at a table with at least 100 people a year. This was over a period of 5 years. I got to see a LOT of playstyles and personalities.

Having said that, I can tell you that the number of times that someone used a silence, dispel magic, or counterspell to stop a spell could be counted on one hand. It just isn't done. It wastes your action(which must be readied) 90% of the time(when the enemy spellcaster decides to cast a spell you don't actually want to stop, decides not to cast a spell at all that turn, and so on) so no player or monster is going to take the risk.

Sometimes we'd cast a silence on an object and we'd have one of our allies follow the wizard around to try to stop him from casting. However, casting it directly on the wizard gave them a save that they normally made so no one tried that. The wizard would often just move out of the area as his move action and cast, making silence mostly ineffective.

This is even assuming the monsters have a spellcaster of any kind. Sure, Orcs might have one...but out of all the adventures I played less than 10% of encounters had a spellcaster amongst the enemy.

Sundering says you can only target something someone is wielding. Most DMs didn't let you target spell components since they were in a pouch you were wearing. Otherwise it opened up the door to allowing people to sunder armor or belt buckles(and watching enemies trip over their own pants) or any number of other silly things. Which would only make combats take longer...and almost every DM I knew was looking for ways to make combats take less time, not more.

This is the same reason no enemies ever grappled. After the 10th or 20th time that someone grappling made a combat take an extra 30 minutes, we decided it was a bad idea. You have no idea how many combats where this happened:

"Ok, the enemy has 30 hitpoints. This should be over quickly. The barbarian does an average of 40 damage with his attacks and normally hits on a 3 with his first attack. Alright, the Barbarian....grapples him. The enemy attempts to escape...needs a natural 23 to succeed..and fails. The Barbarian continues to grapple him. The Wizard attacks the grappled enemy with a dagger for 4 points of damage. The enemy attempts to escape...and fails. The Barbarian maintains the grapple. The Cleric his the enemy for 8 damage with a mace. The enemy attempts to escape...and fails. and so on and so on."

After a while we had a discussion where everyone agreed not to grapple because it didn't help anyone. Most monsters died in 1 or 2 rounds of attacking them. Each round we were grappling them was a round we weren't attacking them. So all we were doing was extending combat without any benefit except maybe preventing 1 attack that we could have healed with a cure light wounds wand. Meanwhile it increased the length of the combats dramatically.

It was even worse when the monsters tried to do it: The orc attempts to grapple the wizard, he doesn't have improved grapple, you get an AOO. You hit? His grapple fails. If he had just attacked you, you'd be unconscious due to the damage he deals. Why did I make him grapple again?

Those 3 or 30 orcs will often be met with disbelief when the party had to walk through that area to get to this room and suddenly there is a contrived group of orcs that came from nowhere.

They don't have to come from nowhere. They could be a returning hunting party or visiting from a nearby tribe or guards that spotted the PCs entering and didn't move to attack since they wanted to trap them in there. Even if all that sounds contrived, it's easy to just have the Orcs follow the PCs when they run away. Without the magical power to teleport, most Orcs move the same speed as PCs. The point is the DM has real options to stop running PCs that work for nearly every type of monster.

The characters are 7th level and you consier three orcs to be "framed as deadly combat"? If the Fighter says "Three orcs? I'll close my eyes and fight left handed so there will be at least a tiny bit of challenge", does that mean he now has that elusive "narative control"? He's reframed the deadly combat into a humerous scene about a bunch of incompetent Orc warriors biting off far more than they can hope to chew!

I was trying to talk generically in terms of "a nasty encounter". Orcs could be replaced with any other creature. But let's say they are 3 9th level Fighter Orcs(a EL 11-12 encounter). This should be an APL+4 encounter against 7th level PCs, called out in the book as nearly guaranteed fatal. However, if the wizard has a spell that can kill or incapacitate all 3 of them in one action, it's a nearly guaranteed win. You just target their bad saves and it's nearly guaranteed to succeed as well.

Are you? I think a 7th level anyone will make short work of the three orcs. In fact, the Wizard's Polymorph only gets one of them, so there's every chance someone else can deal with the orcs quicker.

Once again, Orcs and Polymorph are both just examples. Maybe the encounter is against ONE CR 11 creature with bad Fort saves. It means that the Wizard has just used his Polymorph spell to turn a near guaranteed loss into a joke encounter with one action.

Addressed above. The three orcs are pretty dangerous, however, if the wizard is alone and casts Polymorph. Now the two Orcs remaining can grapple him.

My point isn't that Polymorph is the one spell that can get the Wizard out of anything. It's that there will be at least once spell he has prepared that can. The likelyhood of this increases each and every level.

I don't recall concentration checks in 1e/2e - your spell was disrupted if you were hurt while casting it, IIRC.

I was talking about 3.5e when I mentioned concentration checks. I was talking about all editions at once. Yes, your spells were disrupted while casting in 2e. However, you had to have a lower init than the wizard to have a chance to do so, otherwise it was already cast. Most weapons(if you use speed factors) were so slow that they had almost no chance to attack before a spell went off. Even then, it required you actually take damage. That's why stoneskin was up almost all the time on Wizards.

We won a battle the other day when a charcter Grappled our tiny opponent. I guess he must have had way more narrative control than I thought, since he clearly won without reducing the other side's hp to 0. And the spell still has to deal with resolution mechanics. The wizard has to roll initiative, and his spell can be disrupted. However, like the grapple, his spell has different mechanics from swinging a sword.

See above about my opinion of grapple. It is also annoying because it skips normal resolution. Also, he didn't defeat the enemy, he simply incapacitated it until he ended the grapple or his friends kill it while he grapples it.

The point is that we have 2 different players playing 2 different games. Which, to me is no fun. Especially when those games don't interact. I remember when we had a Wizard whose entire point was to reduce enemies to 0 Con to kill them. He's hit, remove 2 Con. Then the Fighter would hit and do 20 damage, then the Wizard would hit and remove 2 Con. The enemy ended up at about 1 con and 2 hitpoints before someone got he final blow. The battle took 3 times as long as it would have if they had both been doing HP damage because neither one was really helping the other kill the enemy(beyond the few HP he lost due to con modifier).

However, that's not really about narrative control. It's just annoying.

In this case, though, it was the fighter, so apparently he has the narrative control to cut the scene short as well. Let's look at this from another angle, though. You seem set against the Wizard winning the battle immediately, however if his spell fails, he doesn't have the option of casting it again for the next three rounds, and four more times in the next room. The fighter can swing that sword all day long. Different mechanics for action resolution does not mean some are not action resolution.

You are correct but action resolution isn't SCENE resolution. I can resolve my action to teleport or polymorph in a different method than resolving your sword attack(though I'd prefer not to). However, if the theme of this scene is "kill these monsters", turning them into bunnies or teleporting away isn't resolving that scene, it's changing it.

The fighter can attempt to negotiate or sneak past the enemy but the DM once again has the ability to say no to these things in easy ways(they don't want to talk to you...they attack). You can't say to a player "Your spell just fails because the enemy wants to fight you".

By this logic, I see narrative control for the Fighter being "Never Outnumbered", either a feat or a skill trick which allowed him to intimidate a group. He's reframed the brave, eadly orcs into cringing, fearful orcs. Three orcs in one full round action (or one attack action with Great Cleave) also ends the fight immediately after it starts (if the fighter beat the wizard's initiative, anyway).

This isn't that bad of an idea. I kind of like it as an ability. Though I'm not a fan of abilities which end combat early so I likely wouldn't use it.

 

[Balesir]

A teleport has no reasonable counter. It says "I'm leaving and you can't stop me except with a very specific set of circumstances that are likely very contrived. If you do them, we will know that you made a decision to specifically thwart my teleport".

Almost as an aside, I quite like the way HârnMaster handles teleportation. The equivalent of the teleport spell (it can also change plane, but that's kind of less of a big deal in the HM magic system) gets you where you want to go in a small number of steps. Picking the "shortest way in the n-space used by the spell" it gets you where you want to go in 2-5 or so "hops", meaning the GM can frame 1-4 or so impromptu "scenes" along the way before you get where you actually set out to get to.

Looking at the SR, I note:

- Scry lasts 1 minute per level. You need to observe the area for 1 hour according to Teleport.

Actually, according to Teleport you can observe the area for at least an hour or be able to see it as you cast. With a Scrying spell lasting at least 9 minutes (if you have the level to cast Teleport) and Teleport taking 1 standard action to cast, that should be pretty straightforward to arrange.

 

[N'raac]

I wish I could propose such a mechanic. I don't know of anything that would have a nearly 100% success rate at getting the fighter to anywhere in the planet(or any other plane of existence) with one standard action that anyone would accept. My proposal would be to remove the ability from the wizard in order to equalize it.

So are we looking to "equalization"? If the wizard can do it, the fighter must also be able to do it, so give an ability to one or remove it from the other? We should, then, have all characters with Poor BAB, d4 hp, Poor saves across the board, 20' movement, minimal weapon proficiencies, no armor proficiencies and no spells. There - everyone is equal, and no one got any new abilities. If the fighter can "use scrolls that did most of what the wizard's did and allowed him to write new ones every day", plus have full armor and shield, d10 hp, and full BAB, why should anyone play a wizard?

Also, it isn't so much the probability of success as WHO has narrative control. If the DM has the ability to easily and nearly 100% of the time stop an ability without players complaining that you are out to get them or having to come up with contrivances in order to prevent something then it isn't so bad.

So the players just resolve everything in the One True Way the GM has in mind? Maybe he can just send us an email telling us what our characters did.

"They are trying to escape, I'll just make the Orcs over here move to stop them" is perfectly fine and logical.

On the assumption the orcs can move to a location that stops them, yes. Otherwise, no.

"They are attempting to teleport out of here....ummm, the orc cave has been warded against teleportation to prevent anyone from leaving" seems arbitrary and contrived.

Now we are into the question of adventure design - if the PC's are able to teleport, the adventure should not be neutralized by that ability. Teleporting away is not getting us past the Orcs to rescue the kidnapped villagers, though.

We were walking in a marching order where we were all adjacent.

Really? To walk through a door? Every corridor is 10' wide to facilitate this? Did you have weapons out, or sheathed? Are you wearing shields (which make your hands less useful for that touch).

Our DMs mostly let us touch each other as a free action that could be done out of turn.

Are you dropping your sword to have a hand free to reach out? You said you were keeping it out after you had to draw it a few minutes ago and as a result could not make a full round attack, remember?

Sometimes we'd all have to spend our actions to get into position. Though the wizard would ready for the moment we were all together. Sometimes our Wizard would leave without us(or take whoever was next to him) when he realized we were all going to die. Then he'd hire another adventuring group(our excuse to roll up new characters).

"roll up new characters" is not the end of an adventuring success story in my view. If you need to spend actions to get into position, you are working with action resolution. Seems like a good hint to the orcs that the scrawny spellcaster is going to do something - should we be ready to disrupt it? Maybe this is a good time for a Bull Rush if they're trying to get into some odd formation. Of course, if you can take three other characters and you were hoping to also get those two prisoners home, that Teleport seems less beneficial, somehow.

All I can tell you is what experience has taught me. None of these things happen. At one point when we were playing 3.5e, I was playing in 2 weekly games(about 4 hours a piece) AND running a Living Greyhawk gamesday once a week where we played 3 four hour adventures a week. About quarterly I was going to a convention where I was playing about 7 four hour slots over the weekend. We were also playing periodic Living Greyhawk on other days when we had nothing to do.

So, basically, if we remove all of the actions that could be taken to prevent spellcasters from casting, nothing prevents them from casting. Oh, and we need some new rules to make the spellcasters less powerful! Will we actually use these rules, or will we ignore them as well and be surprised spellcasters are still overpowered?

In an average month, I was playing or DMing close to 90 hours of D&D under a stable of 10 or so DMs. In an average year I'd play with about 60 DMs. I likely played at a table with at least 100 people a year. This was over a period of 5 years. I got to see a LOT of playstyles and personalities.

All of whom played exactly the same way, apparently.

Having said that, I can tell you that the number of times that someone used a silence, dispel magic, or counterspell to stop a spell could be counted on one hand. It just isn't done. It wastes your action(which must be readied) 90% of the time(when the enemy spellcaster decides to cast a spell you don't actually want to stop, decides not to cast a spell at all that turn, and so on) so no player or monster is going to take the risk.

I rarely see Counterspells. Silence? Very frequent - but not "on someone" for the reasons you note. "The spell can be cast on a point in space, but the effect is stationary unless cast on a mobile object. The spell can be centered on a creature, and the effect then radiates from the creature and moves as it moves. An unwilling creature can attempt a Will save to negate the spell and can use spell resistance, if any." Given that, why would I cast on an unwilling creature? Every other spell cast targets a weak save, but not this one, even where a "no save" option exists? We used Silence in our last game and hedged the caster in its radius for the rest of the (fairly short) fight.

This is the same reason no enemies ever grappled. After the 10th or 20th time that someone grappling made a combat take an extra 30 minutes, we decided it was a bad idea. You have no idea how many combats where this happened:

"Ok, the enemy has 30 hitpoints. This should be over quickly. The barbarian does an average of 40 damage with his attacks and normally hits on a 3 with his first attack. Alright, the Barbarian....grapples him. The enemy attempts to escape...needs a natural 23 to succeed..and fails. The Barbarian continues to grapple him. The Wizard attacks the grappled enemy with a dagger for 4 points of damage. The enemy attempts to escape...and fails. The Barbarian maintains the grapple. The Cleric his the enemy for 8 damage with a mace. The enemy attempts to escape...and fails. and so on and so on."

So, basically, "let's use this tactic when it serves no useful purpose, but not when it would actually be useful". Great. Again, lets remove a whole bunch of effective options and complain that the ineffective ones we kept aren't working. Not to say that Pathfinder's streamlining of these combat maneuvers was not welcome - they needed the improvement.

After a while we had a discussion where everyone agreed not to grapple because it didn't help anyone. Most monsters died in 1 or 2 rounds of attacking them. Each round we were grappling them was a round we weren't attacking them. So all we were doing was extending combat without any benefit except maybe preventing 1 attack that we could have healed with a cure light wounds wand. Meanwhile it increased the length of the combats dramatically.

Gotta say, I can't see four thinking people deciding that, although this approach means we don't routinely get beaten, bludgeoned and cut, it takes longer, so we'll just suck up the beating so we can get done quicker. Of course, I would also be OK deciding that, with the target grappled and having little or no chance at escape, "With the enemy grappled, you are able to make short work of him." Mind you, my games do not feature enemies with "30 hp" tattoooed on their foreheads either.

It was even worse when the monsters tried to do it: The orc attempts to grapple the wizard, he doesn't have improved grapple, you get an AOO. You hit? His grapple fails. If he had just attacked you, you'd be unconscious due to the damage he deals. Why did I make him grapple again?

What's the wizard doing there? I thought he always Teleported away. If the opponent can just hit him and he's down, then I agree - why would he grapple? But, if the wizard easily hits in melee, the fighter should be going to town on this guy anyway. The wizard holding a dagger and a wand/scroll doesn't have a hand free for somatic gestures either, so I dont see a lot of wizards drawing weapons. I do see a lot watch the flow of the fight (delay) until a reason to use a spell comes along.

They don't have to come from nowhere. They could be a returning hunting party or visiting from a nearby tribe or guards that spotted the PCs entering and didn't move to attack since they wanted to trap them in there. Even if all that sounds contrived

It does, thanks.

it's easy to just have the Orcs follow the PCs when they run away. Without the magical power to teleport, most Orcs move the same speed as PCs. The point is the DM has real options to stop running PCs that work for nearly every type of monster.

Go ahead and follow us right back to the settlement. Of course, you are leaving your own lair unguarded while you chase us into an area unlikely to be friendly to Orcs.

I was trying to talk generically in terms of "a nasty encounter". Orcs could be replaced with any other creature. But let's say they are 3 9th level Fighter Orcs(a EL 11-12 encounter). This should be an APL+4 encounter against 7th level PCs, called out in the book as nearly guaranteed fatal. However, if the wizard has a spell that can kill or incapacitate all 3 of them in one action, it's a nearly guaranteed win. You just target their bad saves and it's nearly guaranteed to succeed as well.

7th level PC's - which spell(s) are you using , and what all spells are you carrying? Let's work out the DC's. 9th F is +3, -1 for a poor WIS is +2. DC 10 + 6 (20 INT is pretty good at 7th, but we'll go 22, or assume Spell focus) + 4 = 20 Orcs need an 18, so a bit less than a 40% chance at least one succeeds. Now, let them use one of their Feats on Iron Will and they get +4, so now they need a 16+, so we have almost a 60% chance one succeeds. That goes up if the spell level goes own, of course. That's not great odds for the orcs, but the deck has been stacked against them. A CR8 stone giant has a +7 will save, almost 80% likely one will save. CR9 Frost Giant only gets +6 (27.5% chance all three fail). I'm waiting to see the spells, though. Feel free to assume the Wizard has three 4th level spells (he can be specialize) so one can target each save.

You need a pretty effective spell with a high DC against each of the three save types. And I suggest that changing the Orcs to a Fighter, a Sorcerer and a Cleric Orc, played with some of the tactics a PC group would use, will make the encounter much less a cakewalk. If all the enemies are identical, the party's greater flexibility will typically make it easier. 3 9th level fighter Orcs, with their appropriate wealth by level, should have a pretty impressive array of abilities, and could certainly dedicate some to bolstering those weak Will saves. Pull out your own L9 fighter sheet and let's give them the same Will save. Or let's load them up (at least one!) on Mage Killer feats and see how that works out.

Once again, Orcs and Polymorph are both just examples. Maybe the encounter is against ONE CR 11 creature with bad Fort saves. It means that the Wizard has just used his Polymorph spell to turn a near guaranteed loss into a joke encounter with one action.

Seems more like the GM didn't consider the weaknesses of the opponent in light of his party's strengths. What does the wizard do if the save fails, or if there is another encounter? I suspect, also, that for every bad FORT CR 11 monster, we can find quite a few with spell resistance, magic immunities, etc. that render the wizard much less effective. And that's OK - he got to shine against the one with weak FORT saves, so it's someone else's turn in the spotlight!

I was talking about 3.5e when I mentioned concentration checks. I was talking about all editions at once. Yes, your spells were disrupted while casting in 2e. However, you had to have a lower init than the wizard to have a chance to do so, otherwise it was already cast. Most weapons(if you use speed factors) were so slow that they had almost no chance to attack before a spell went off. Even then, it required you actually take damage. That's why stoneskin was up almost all the time on Wizards.

As I recall, Stoneskin was not cheap, so it was not used universally. And spells had casting times - if I used speed factors, I definitely also used casting times.

See above about my opinion of grapple. It is also annoying because it skips normal resolution. Also, he didn't defeat the enemy, he simply incapacitated it until he ended the grapple or his friends kill it while he grapples it.

Grappled, then pinned, then tied up. Enemy defeated. "defeated" need not mean "killed". In the encounter I was referring to, the creature could be dragged to a pool and drowned.

You are correct but action resolution isn't SCENE resolution. I can resolve my action to teleport or polymorph in a different method than resolving your sword attack(though I'd prefer not to). However, if the theme of this scene is "kill these monsters", turning them into bunnies or teleporting away isn't resolving that scene, it's changing it.

So why is the theme "kill", rather than "defeat", the monsters? What is our actual goal, and why does it require their deaths?

The fighter can attempt to negotiate or sneak past the enemy but the DM once again has the ability to say no to these things in easy ways(they don't want to talk to you...they attack). You can't say to a player "Your spell just fails because the enemy wants to fight you".

Pretty sure that's why we got Diplomacy skills - to avoid the GM just neutralizing parley attempts, we get a "you have a chance - roll the dice" mechanic instead. "The monsters refuse to parley" is no more acceptable, as a universal issue, than "there's anti-magic fields everywhere", in my view. Your spell can fail because of good saves, spell resistance or immunity to certain spells or effects, as well.

This isn't that bad of an idea. I kind of like it as an ability. Though I'm not a fan of abilities which end combat early so I likely wouldn't use it.

IIRC, it is a Skill Trick from 3.5 Complete Scoundrel. Sure, there it is - http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/ex/20070105a&page=5

But, if every encounter must be played out as a combat slog, then why be surprised that players gravitate to abilities that cut those slogs short? It seems like half your comments above gripe about combat taking too long and the rest are complaints about things that shorten them.

 

[pemerton]

Currently I'm co-GMing a Star Wars game using HERO System, and a question arose regarding how best to simulate the limb lopping that's so frequent in the movies. I suggested that it could be handled by FitM - it's a possible consequence of being defeated, of having one's BODY stat reduced to 0. But imo this goes against the HERO System ethos, which seeks to describe everything important with a specific rules construct.

I think you're right about the ethos of HERO. It (together with RQ and Traveller) is just about the quintessential, primordial, process-sim ruleset!

I don't know HERO that well, but am interested to learn that it doesn't have rules for dismemberment. (Both RQ and Rolemaster, which are the proccess sim games I know better, do have those rules.)

 

[Doug McCrae]

I don't know HERO that well, but am interested to learn that it doesn't have rules for dismemberment. (Both RQ and Rolemaster, which are the proccess sim games I know better, do have those rules.)

There's an optional hit location system, which we're not using for this game, that does allow for limbs being disabled. I just had a look at the rule and it's GM's option whether a disabled limb has actually been severed or merely badly damaged, so HERO may have more scope for FitM than I thought. (Despite the system being amazingly crunchy and precise, appeals to the GM to make a judgement call are scattered throughout the text of the current rules, which I find a bit weird.) The other way to do it is a power called Transform, which potentially permits anything to be turned into anything, and is very much a fallback in HERO for when you can't think of any other way to represent an effect.

There is a level of abstraction in HERO. The same rules constructs can describe different effects in the game world - fire blasts, raw magical energy, lasers or entropic forces could all be represented by varying levels of the power Blast. HERO System uses the term 'special effect' for the game world aspect of a power. This mostly seems to apply at the character build stage though. Once it's decided what a power will be, that's what it remains, so it's a different kind of abstraction than FitM, I think.