Old School : Tucker's Kobolds and Trained Jellies

[Scribble]

Good times in an rpg will always come down to the people you share them with.

I agree.

A rules heavy system may help a fledgling DM learn how to walk, but not how to fly.

Neither will a rules lite system though.

 

[Mattachine]

Defined abilities, chosen by a player for his character, where there is an opportunity cost (choose this, but not that), should be examples of the optimal way to perform some stunt. Having a codified action provides a great guideline. So, if an 11th level rogue has a "disarm opponent and shift power", and a fighter has a 13th level "disarm opponent and do damage" power, then you have a guideline for another PC attempting a disarm (no shift, no damage).

Without such guidelines, there is the strangeness of a stunt being too good. I once ran a game where the thief player (AD&D) resorted to carrying around bags of sand to throw in the eyes of enemies, because I had ruled it could blind for one round. After a few sessions of such ridiculousness, I rescinded the ruling.

 

[Savage Wombat]

Without such guidelines, there is the strangeness of a stunt being too good. I once ran a game where the thief player (AD&D) resorted to carrying around bags of sand to throw in the eyes of enemies, because I had ruled it could blind for one round. After a few sessions of such ridiculousness, I rescinded the ruling.

That was certainly always my experience.

 

[Harlekin]

Back in the old days, when we hewed our dice out of dinosaur bones and the rules were printed on clay tablets, there was a convention that where the rules did not contradict specifically, things worked just like they do in reality.

That's not correct. At best, things worked out like the DM thought they would in reality. And by reality, you actually mean "the type of story the DM is trying to emulate."

And that sets up a lot of potential miscommunications:

The Player and GM could disagree how things would play out in reality.
The Player and the GM could disagree about the type of story they are emulating.
The Player and the GM could disagree how the story genre applies to the situation at hand.

To avoid a bad experience, the player either has to read the DM's mind or ask before committing to an action what the likely outcome would be.

 

[D'karr]

I once ran a game where the thief player (AD&D) resorted to carrying around bags of sand to throw in the eyes of enemies, because I had ruled it could blind for one round. After a few sessions of such ridiculousness, I rescinded the ruling.

You should have just had all your creatures also carry bags of sand. After the entire party gets blinded 6-7 times by their own cheap trick they will understand your frustration... LOL

 

[JonWake]

I think we're talking about two different things. You're talking about having a set of standards for doing stunts. This is good. Most every game out there has something like this, from Runequest stacking of ability throws to Feng Shui's stunt system. There was weirdness in AD&D because there wasn't any simple way to resolve a question like that. There were at least three different systems, none of which really interacted well.

Now, if you're using the same 'throw sand in eyes' trick over and over and your DM is naive enough to let you do it, that's on you.

What I'm saying is that 4e, far more than any other edition, reversed the order of operations for resolving these stunts. Instead of looking at what your imaginary character wants to do in this imaginary world, THEN trying to address this with the rules, 4e looks at the rules and game effects FIRST, then narrates the outcome. It is a significant change from most every other RPG ever made.

 

[Incenjucar]

What I'm saying is that 4e, far more than any other edition, reversed the order of operations for resolving these stunts. Instead of looking at what your imaginary character wants to do in this imaginary world, THEN trying to address this with the rules, 4e looks at the rules and game effects FIRST, then narrates the outcome. It is a significant change from most every other RPG ever made.

Which is one of the fantastic things about 4E. By determining a reasonable range of effect, DMs don't have to alter reality when players start exploiting the game world repeatedly.

 

[D'karr]

What I'm saying is that 4e, far more than any other edition, reversed the order of operations for resolving these stunts. Instead of looking at what your imaginary character wants to do in this imaginary world, THEN trying to address this with the rules, 4e looks at the rules and game effects FIRST, then narrates the outcome. It is a significant change from most every other RPG ever made.

I honestly don't even know how to address this. I've been running 4e since it's beginnings and I've never run into a situation like what you describe here.

If one of my players wants to attempt a stunt, they describe what they want to do and I adjudicate how to do it. This is no different than how I've run games of D&D since 1979.

The advantage I have with 4e is that I have a solid rules framework to "hang" my adjudication on. This provides a more consistent experience for my players.

In the past if I wanted to do that I'd end up houseruling something, and if I wanted to keep it consistent I'd have to make that a "written" houserule so I didn't forget how to adjudicate it in the future.

 

[Hussar]

I'm sorry you had bad experiences but the same rules light systems that were in use for your bad experiences also produced some of the best DMs.

Ahh, we're back to the "training wheels" argument. Rules heavy systems are the RPG equivalent of "T-Ball" where DM's learn the basics before graduating to more "mature" games.

Jerks are gonna be jerks, its a fact of life. I had a few bad games myself but the good far outweighed the bad, at least for me. In any event I can connect terrible games to people much easier than to rulesets. I have had good times playing with rules that I'm not overly fond of and bad games playing with rules I really like.

Now this is true. But, since, as you say, the quality of games is not related to the mechanics, then why would you believe the following:

Good times in an rpg will always come down to the people you share them with. A rules heavy system may help a fledgling DM learn how to walk, but not how to fly.

Since you say that the quality of games is not dependent on the mechanics, then why would a rules heavy system like, say, AD&D, not let a DM fly?

The joke here is that people want to believe that D&D, in any iteration, is a rules light system. Outside of maybe Basic D&D (which only covers 3 levels) and OD&D, D&D has never really been a rules light system. It's often been a rules absent system, but, that's not rules light. That's just holes in game design.

However, in later editions, instead of the DM just "winging it" and hopefully coming up with something that's playable (and frequently missing the mark and watching games implode because of it), the game designers have actually learned a thing or two about what makes a game work and gives the DM a reasonable framework for adjudicating effects outside of specific mechanics.

3e started this and 4e simply carried it further.

 

[ExploderWizard]

Ahh, we're back to the "training wheels" argument. Rules heavy systems are the RPG equivalent of "T-Ball" where DM's learn the basics before graduating to more "mature" games.

Hardly. Its more like a world never explored than anything else. The exact opposite mentality was commonly employed in the early days. AD&D had a lot more rules and things to keep track of than OD&D so naturally it was the superior game. I mean, it says Advanced right there on the cover doesn't it.