Player Control, OR "How the game has changed over the years, and why I don't like it"

[nedjer]

don't try and control things so much, it's really an invitation for you as a dm to be more creative. read about open hand power, it's about allowing someone else's force to hinder and frustrate them. It sounds to me like you are very forceful and that your players have figured out how to use it against you.

He's trying to mediate not mechanise. His players are confusing the normalisation of rules lawyering with player choice. Wik offers them intuition and they settle for mere arithmetic.

 

[Heathen72]

Flip it over onto its back?

Sounds to me like you just need to be a little more inventive when describing what happens in combat.

The alternative is the horror that was 3E Trip and Grapple rules. The words "I try to trip him" should not require pulling out the rulebook.

The alternative? You suggest that the only solution to Wik's woes is to revert to 3E. Wik made it quite clear that he didn't want for this thread to be edition war - he was pointing that for him the current system doesn't allow him to GM in a way that he enjoys, to the detriment of everyone's enjoyment of the game - so why make it one? Referring to an supposed inadequacy of a previous system doesn't resolve his issues with the current system. It's irrelevant.

 

[GSHamster]

The alternative? You suggest that the only solution to Wik's woes is to revert to 3E. Wik made it quite clear that he didn't want for this thread to be edition war - he was pointing that for him the current system doesn't allow him to GM in a way that he enjoys, to the detriment of everyone's enjoyment of the game - so why make it one? Referring to an supposed inadequacy of a previous system doesn't resolve his issues with the current system. It's irrelevant.

I didn't mean to make it an edition war. To me there are two ways you could go with something like Trip. Either say you can trip pretty much anything, and fudge exactly how it happens and "handwave" odd cases like oozes or carrion crawlers.

Or you can come up with a rules system that accounts for all the possibilities. You can't trip something that two sizes larger or smaller than you. The defender gets a bonus for each leg they have greater than 2. Etc.

To me, the gain in verisimilitude of the second system wasn't really worth the overhead it incurred.

 

[Lanefan]

I assume you mean in a competitive sport? D&D is not a competitive event (it is in fact collaborative, not combative, as a wise man said), so the analogy doesn't fly.

It certainly does fly, in that in either case you have someone (referee/DM) in a position of sometimes being able to make a ruling either in the player's favour or not. And it's only human nature to try and lobby that ruling to go your way.

Good players use strategy to fight monsters, they don't bully the DM into submission.

Wik did request no edition warring, and this strays awfully close in that it is an utter misrepresentation of how the game works in 4E.

What's 4e got to do with it. Diamond Cross' observation is perfectly valid for every edition.

Lanefan

 

[I'm A Banana]

What I HATE is that the game has allowed the players to say "no, do this". They have dailies that let them shut down the combat entirely. And while they ARE just dailies, there are enough of them that they can do this three or four times. Meaning, for three or four hours out of every in-game "Day", I'm sitting around having the players dictate a large part of the combat to me.

Yeah, giving every party member a daily, and making those daily abilities always do something, is kind of a new approach to things.

I wonder if some martial Essentials classes might go a little easier on you (at least in giving you less dailies!).

If I were to design the next MM, I'd probably think about including more "reactive" monster abilities, especially on solos and elites, so that you get to do something whenever the players go.

Except in 4e, that trip attack is generally something like "you knock the target prone" as part of the attack. And you can knock a giant prone with it. Or an ogre. Or a centaur. Or a millipede. Or an ooze. All with the same chance of success.

And if I say "well, it's a carrion crawler. How are you knocking it prone?" and refuse to allow it, I'm being a jerk GM or going against the rules and essentially nerfing a player ability. While I might still do that from time to time, I have to be really careful - if I keep nerfing that ability, I'm really just hosing the player.

Yeah, this can be an issue with effects-based mechanics (rather than cause-based mechanics), but it's pretty hard-wired into 4e to behave like that, so addressing it is....complicated.

 

[Heathen72]

And if I say "well, it's a carrion crawler. How are you knocking it prone?" and refuse to allow it, I'm being a jerk GM or going against the rules and essentially nerfing a player ability. While I might still do that from time to time, I have to be really careful - if I keep nerfing that ability, I'm really just hosing the player.

It's a reasonable question, and in my opinion if the player is unable to answer it then you should feel free to disallow it. This supposes that it is the player doing the describing, but why should the GM need to do so? It's the player's power - they should describe it. And if they are unable to do so in such a way to satisfy the GM then by all means nerf the power. Not that it should require much. In the case of the carrion crawler a simple "I flip it on its back like it's a slater" should suffice. The crawler would then spend a round getting back on its feet.

Having the players imaginatively describe the ways their powers work has been on the GM wishlist since gaming began. I give my players bonuses to hit for good descriptions. They responded with good descriptions, and so I raised the bar a little - they need to make great descriptions to get the bonus. And balance be damned.

In 4th Ed, the players gain more narrative control over the actions of their opponents. Fine. But they should describe how their character achieve it. Oh, and if you can't do this, and you don't like that you can't, perhaps 4th Ed isn't the system for you, as Wik has found...

 

[Fifth Element]

It certainly does fly, in that in either case you have someone (referee/DM) in a position of sometimes being able to make a ruling either in the player's favour or not.

The implication was that there's something wrong with the referee/DM favoring the players rather than being completely impartial. This is bad in competitive sports, but neutral in D&D in that it is not inherently bad. Some people play that way, some don't, and both are fine.

What's 4e got to do with it. Diamond Cross' observation is perfectly valid for every edition.

What's 4E got to do with it? Check the thread title and the OP. The implication is that the 4E power system allows/encourages the players to bully the DM.

 

[alms66]

I didn't fully read the thread, but to address the OP's dislike of "player empowerment", I think that this has become a reality in RPG's designed in the past decade, maybe a bit longer, due to - to put it plainly - crappy GM's. The players are at this game trying to have fun, trying to do what they enjoy only for the GM to crap all over their ideas making whatever the player is attempting ridiculously difficult to do or just flat out saying no.

As a player, that f'n blows. You're at the whim of the DM, pure and simple. That was the first 20 years of gaming and it sucked.

Then the new wave of games kick in and take some of that power away from the GM, and it's a good thing. I'm sure there are times where all GM's have been guilty of abusing their power and trying to impose their view of fun, or their pre-scripted plot, but simply put, their are more players than GM's at the table, and their fun should outweigh yours - in numerical terms, but ideally, everyone should be having equal fun, ideally.

It all comes down to everyone being on the same page in the end, and if everyone were, there would never have been the "revolution" of player empowerment. If everyone would just sit down an talk for even just an hour about what type of game they want to play and be brutally honest about it, including their likes and dislikes of all the RPG variables, I think everyone would be happier. It would prevent things like one player wanting to play an ultra-powerful wizard in a high-fantasy setting and the GM instead designing a ultra-realistic, low-powered setting and then trying to shoehorn the players into doing what he wants to do.

Spend the time to get everyone on the same page, and the game is much more enjoyable, or at least I've always found it so. Just my 2 cents.

But it seems nowadays everyone wants to make a character that has no tie-ins to the other characters and in fact many of the PC's would kill each other if played appropriately, then everyone jumps to the table and starts gaming in 20 seconds or less. How the F can that be fun? No one has agreed to anything, it's just a bunch of random characters thrown into a random setting and random plot - I'd rather play something else at that point - maybe it's just me.

 

[pawsplay]

In the Final Fantasy IV, there is a martial artist as a character. At one point, your characters battle a Ghost Train. It is difficult, but not impossible, for the martial artist to Suplex the Ghost Train. It's something to see, I'll tell you.

In an RPG, the purpose of a GM is to decide whether this is the sort of game where you can suplex a Ghost Train or not. While there is usually some sort of way to rationalize a power in 4e, or the situation can be considered in the abstract only, there are definitely situations where the characters suplex the Ghost Train. It's one of 4e's faults, in my estimation as a player.

 

[NoWayJose]

Many DMs sacrifice a lot of time and effort to run a campaign, and I think that generally speaking, they deserve and have every right to overrrule the rules, if they are well-intentioned.

I agree there are bad DMs and DMs that make mistakes sometimes, but is this really what the world has come down to, setting up safety railings and training wheels and danger signs, all for our own good, to coddle our soft vulnerable egos, to protect us from the risk of a bad DM? Soon, we'll all be bubble boys, protected from the evils of the world and all its possible abuses, all for the sake of fun. But how much fun can you really have in a bubble suit?