"Oddities" in fantasy settings - the case against "consistency"

[Lanefan]

In the real world, there are people who are the best in their field: mathematicians who prove the theorems that no one else has been able to prove; sprinters who can outrun anyone else in the world, except perhaps a handful of comparable individuals who have the chance of staging an upset at any given meet; boxers, and chess players, and so on of whom the same is true. Judges who are almost never overturned on appeal; and who, on a multi-member court, are almost never in dissent.

These individuals are statistical outliers. A system of PC generation that doesn't become more fine-grained than one-in-36, or one-in-216; or a resolution system in which success is determined by rolling a d20 and adding a number between 0 and 18; is not going to generate these sorts of cases.

Yet they are real phenomena in our real world.

Agreed; and in an ideal situation, char-gen would be granular enough to account for these things.

Practicality, however, then rears its ugly head and tells us we have to streamline the process a bit.

 

[Faolyn]

In theory, yes. In practice, when Joe the Fighter is known to be a cheating thieving bastard who'd rip your heart out if it made him a few g.p. and yet he's the best sword in the region,

...then you get the second best fighter, because no matter how good with a sword he is, he's not going to be worth it if he cheats you or steals from you or rips your heart out for just a few gold.

Unless his player has expressed a desire for a redemption arc which he plans to stick to.

We neither see nor flag mind control as evil, and nor does the game as written (in any edition). It's just another tool in the box, and often considerably less harmful to the target than the alternatives, as in:

--- we need to get info from this prisoner now; we can torture him and later kill him, or just kill him now and cast lots of Speak With Deads, or charm him and later let him go.

Torture is evil, and torturing for info doesn't actually work in real life; since you care about realism (or at least verisimilitude) in things like falling damage, you should also not have torture work. And speak with dead doesn't guarantee true answers at all, especially if there was hostility between you and the corpse. So this is evil and pointless.

--- we need to rein in this otherwise-useful guy's gonzo stupidities; we can charm him and keep him around, or we can stand back and watch him kill himself while hoping he doesn't drag the rest of us down with him.

And again, this prevents another player from playing their character freely, which is a dick move. If you don't like their actions, have in-character talks with them or make their character leave. If the player continually plays characters who do "gonzo stupidities," this is a player problem and needs to be dealt with out-of-character. That's why I have been sure to ask the GM to let me know if I have Rime go too far in her hijinks; I don't want to be a jerk.

--- we've got this Orc who surrendered to us; we can kill her now, or haul her around as a captive, or charm her and let her help us.

Or, you can let her go. If the GM insists on playing orcs as mindless, rabid monsters who will always attack, even after surrendering, then that's on them, and a good example of bad worldbuilding.

Also, there is no "charm her and let her help us." Your forcing the orc to help you against her will. You've enslaved her, and worse yet, you're making her smile through the slavery.

And I honestly don't care if the game marks it as evil or not, because the game was written by someone who unironically used "nits make lice" to say that paladins won't lose their paladin status or stop being lawful good if they kill unarmed captives and orc babies. This is not an ideal to be upheld.

Odds are high to extreme that none of these NPCs will be with the party after this adventure ends, though. The Orcs will be repatriated to their clans, the Thief is long since fed up with this crew and can't wait to leave (and may or may not rip them off on her way out, that's still TBD), and she'll probably end up taking the prisoner with her and try to get her into the Thieving trade.

I wouldn't say high to extreme. In one game I was in, a PC married an NPC. In this current D&D, one NPC is a long-time friend of a PC and will almost certainly be by his side long after the adventure ends, assuming one of them doesn't die first.

We've had characters leave parties for similar reasons. We've also had more stubborn characters stay in and keep arguing.

And unless all the players are enjoying the arguing, that's a player issue that should have been dealt with out-of-character.

And usually the overriding reason to work together comes down to realizing two things: the whole of a well-rounded party is greater than the sum of its parts, and the "ka-ching" payoff is better.

I greatly prefer that in-character problems and disagreements be solved in-character. The moment it spills over to the table, that's when the real problems begin.

If the problem is purely in-character, I agree. But it's often not.

So here, if the boss is being too pushy it's on the secretary to push back in-character, or to go on strike, or to quit the job. No table discussion needed, just play the characters true to themselves and let the chips fall where they may.

Or, you know, you can play as decent people and not end up being pushy in the first place.

Which means you're allowing metagame concerns to trump your being true to your character; and while I do understand the motivations and rationale behind this, it's still - along with pretty much any other metagaming - not something I want to see in a game.

But slavery is OK to see in a game. Huh.

Nope, sorry. I respect and care for my friends too much to try to force them to act against their wishes.

 

[Bedrockgames]

And its those same reasons that tell me they shouldn't be available to NPCs either, because if an NPC can do it a PC should also be able to do it.

But then you run into a very serious problem: characters that ought to exist in the setting, can't, because character creation says so. If I have a system where the only way to get 60% on Pick Pocketing is to be a 10th level thief (not saying this is the case in any edition of D&D, it is just an arbitrary example), but I as a GM imagine a fighter who is a capable fighter and learned to pick pocket, and I think his pick pocketing skill should be about 60%, but I don't see him having any other thief skills, abilities, etc, why can't I just attach 60% pick pocketing ability to him? I would even make the same argument for magic. Maybe I have a character whose father was a wizard and while she never became a mage herself, her father made a point of teaching her to cast fireball so she could protect herself. In all other respects she is a non-leveled character, but this background detail, to me would justify giving her fireball without making her a 5th level wizard.

 

[pemerton]

Agreed; and in an ideal situation, char-gen would be granular enough to account for these things.

Practicality, however, then rears its ugly head and tells us we have to streamline the process a bit.

But then either you have an unrealistic world, where no one is a genius, or ridiculously strong, or whatever; or else you allow for ad hocery outside of the standard PC build rules.

 

[Maxperson]

AD&D character creation rules have things to say about whether or not a character is a king or duke: a character can't start owning a castle, for instance, nor with the sort of money that would be typical of a king or a duke.

Lots of other FRPGs also deal with this as an aspect of PC creation: noble status might be something that costs points in a point buy system, for instance.

In D&D 5e noble status is simply a matter of taking the noble background.

 

[Maxperson]

But some NPCs in the setting are kings (barons, dukes, princes, etc) with d6 (or whatever) hit points; whereas in most approaches to D&D that I'm familiar with, a PC has to be somewhere above 1st level to become a king.

There is no pathway I'm aware of that will enable a D&D player to play a character the same as one of those NPCs.

The Birthright setting says hi.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

In the real world, there are people who are the best in their field: mathematicians who prove the theorems that no one else has been able to prove; sprinters who can outrun anyone else in the world, except perhaps a handful of comparable individuals who have the chance of staging an upset at any given meet; boxers, and chess players, and so on of whom the same is true. Judges who are almost never overturned on appeal; and who, on a multi-member court, are almost never in dissent.

These individuals are statistical outliers. A system of PC generation that doesn't become more fine-grained than one-in-36, or one-in-216; or a resolution system in which success is determined by rolling a d20 and adding a number between 0 and 18; is not going to generate these sorts of cases.

Yet they are real phenomena in our real world.

Why? What if the GM conceives of a hobbit who is the Arnold of the hobbits in the setting. Surely it is manageable for a hobbit who is exceptional or trained harder than most other hobbits, to be a 17, maybe an 18. There are all kinds of reasons the GM might want to create edge cases like this, and they have to do with fidelity to setting. Character creation can only establish setting parameters so far before you start to run into issues where the game, at least to me, starts to feel more like a preprogrammed video game than an imagined world

But then you run into a very serious problem: characters that ought to exist in the setting, can't, because character creation says so. If I have a system where the only way to get 60% on Pick Pocketing is to be a 10th level thief (not saying this is the case in any edition of D&D, it is just an arbitrary example), but I as a GM imagine a fighter who is a capable fighter and learned to pick pocket, and I think his pick pocketing skill should be about 60%, but I don't see him having any other thief skills, abilities, etc, why can't I just attach 60% pick pocketing ability to him? I would even make the same argument for magic. Maybe I have a character whose father was a wizard and while she never became a mage herself, her father made a point of teaching her to cast fireball so she could protect herself. In all other respects she is a non-leveled character, but this background detail, to me would justify giving her fireball without making her a 5th level wizard.

PCs tend to already be pretty exceptional. If the PC rules cannot produce such heroic, interesting and exceptional characters that exist in the setting, there is something wrong with the choice of PC creation rules.

 

[Sepulchrave II]

Well, see above for the basis for my view.

In the end, all we have is that NPCs and monsters, like PCs, have attack numbers and saving throws determined on a chart, and have a certain number of HD (of some or other size) rolled to determine hit points. There is some loose correlation between attack numbers, saving throws and HD but it is not precise and in some cases is not even straightforward to work out for that particular NPC or creature.

How does this 1980 supplement fit in? The preamble on the cover seems to suggest a certain methodology was assumed and prevailed:

No longer will you the Dungeon Master need to spend precious time laboring over the task of generating non player characters. This valuable booklet contains hundreds of non player characters of all races and types, complete with alignments, sex, personalities and much more.

The race, sex, alignment, six ability scores, hit points, AC, attack bonus, damage bonus, dexterity bonus, save bonuses, reaction attacking adjustments during surprise, and a sketch of the magic item palette are provided for each character. They appear to be consistent with the PHB method.

 

[Lanefan]

But then you run into a very serious problem: characters that ought to exist in the setting, can't, because character creation says so. If I have a system where the only way to get 60% on Pick Pocketing is to be a 10th level thief (not saying this is the case in any edition of D&D, it is just an arbitrary example), but I as a GM imagine a fighter who is a capable fighter and learned to pick pocket, and I think his pick pocketing skill should be about 60%, but I don't see him having any other thief skills, abilities, etc, why can't I just attach 60% pick pocketing ability to him?

Simple, in my game anyway: there's no way said Fighter could learn pick-pocketing to that extent without either a) formal training (pretty much only available from Thieves' guilds) or b) becoming old and gray with all the many years it would take him to self-train. And no guild would train him in picking pockets without also training him in the other Thiefly skills, thus making him a double-class F-T.

I would even make the same argument for magic. Maybe I have a character whose father was a wizard and while she never became a mage herself, her father made a point of teaching her to cast fireball so she could protect herself. In all other respects she is a non-leveled character, but this background detail, to me would justify giving her fireball without making her a 5th level wizard.

That same end can be achieved in my game but it's a very long process:
--- become a mage and advance to at least 5th level
--- learn the fireball spell somewhere along the way
--- let your mage class decay* for several years until it's gone, other than remembering and practising how to cast fireball

And now you've got someone who can cast fireball but nothing else, and is otherwise non-levelled.

* - after meaning to do so for literally decades, I finally wrote up some formal mechanics last year to handle decaying class skills and abilities.

 

[Lanefan]

...then you get the second best fighter, because no matter how good with a sword he is, he's not going to be worth it if he cheats you or steals from you or rips your heart out for just a few gold.

Which does exactly what you say below that you don't want: denies the player of the nasty Fighter the ability to play that character.

And I'm fine with that: if the rest of the party decide not to take him in, then so be it.

Torture is evil, and torturing for info doesn't actually work in real life; since you care about realism (or at least verisimilitude) in things like falling damage, you should also not have torture work. And speak with dead doesn't guarantee true answers at all, especially if there was hostility between you and the corpse. So this is evil and pointless.

We have it that Speak With Dead gives true answers if it works, as (with very rare exceptions) the corpse can no longer think for itself to the extent required to lie.

And again, this prevents another player from playing their character freely, which is a dick move. If you don't like their actions, have in-character talks with them or make their character leave.

Driving the character out of the party deprives us of said character's useful elements, which we may or may not be able to replace. Sometimes, those useful elements make keeping the character around the clearly-best option; even if it means having to charm or otherwise control it in order to keep it and us safe.

Or, you can let her go. If the GM insists on playing orcs as mindless, rabid monsters who will always attack, even after surrendering, then that's on them, and a good example of bad worldbuilding.

Depending on the situation, letting her go might be the cruelest option of all: she'll be on her own in dangerous country.

Also, there is no "charm her and let her help us." Your forcing the orc to help you against her will. You've enslaved her, and worse yet, you're making her smile through the slavery.

The current party I'm running has gone through 5 Orcs this adventure. Of those, only one was charmed (and the charm broke before long due to extended separation); and that one brought in the other four. Four of these (including the ex-charmee) became loyal to the party, loyal enough to kill the fifth when he suggested turning coat and attacking. Of the remaining four, one died in a random-encounter combat a while later but the party's heroic-if-futile efforts to save him only served to reinforce the loyalty of the three who were left.

The interesting thing about all this is that even though the party's original mission out here was to wipe out these Orcs to stop their annual raids on the border villages, the end result is the party may well end up advocating on the Orcs' behalf in the coming war.

I wouldn't say high to extreme. In one game I was in, a PC married an NPC. In this current D&D, one NPC is a long-time friend of a PC and will almost certainly be by his side long after the adventure ends, assuming one of them doesn't die first.

Well, in the case of the three Orcs, high-to-extreme became certainty in tonight's session: they're going home...with a retiring party member in tow as a negotiator and go-between. The rest of the party are (finally!) heading for town, where they know they'll also lose their ex-prisoner and their now-level-drained Thief.

And unless all the players are enjoying the arguing, that's a player issue that should have been dealt with out-of-character.

Nah - I'm very much a let-'em-fight DM, as long as it stays in character.

But slavery is OK to see in a game. Huh.

Slavery is an accepted practice in parts of my setting, and frowned on in other parts.

Nope, sorry. I respect and care for my friends too much to try to force them to act against their wishes.

Forcing a game character to act against its will and forcing someone at the table to act against theirs are not the same thing; assuming a healthy level of detachment between player and character emotions.