D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[pemerton]

Whether or not someone is in a room has zero to do with competence of a lock picker.

Whether or not a burglar opens the door while someone is there to see them has a lot to do with their competence as a burglar. At least it seems like that to me.

how many times have you seen a movie where the master thief is picking a lock and someone walks by and he has to stop and play it cool, or opens the lock and door to find someone behind it and has to shut the door quickly to avoid being seen, waiting until the person is gone?

Yes, as I have said, competent people make their own luck.

Now if you are telling me that your skill system can't differentiate between a burglar and a locksmith; or must resolve every twist of the lockpicks as a separate roll, rather than factoring in the need to stop and play it cool as part of the check, OK. But that's probably not a skill system that is very well suited for "fail forward" resolution.

And for clarity: it is not inherent to D&D that its skill system, or resolution system more generally, be like the one described in the previous paragraph. For instance, it's pretty clear in classic D&D that a roll to find a secret door encompasses a whole lot of discrete actions. And a class D&D thief's roll to pick a pocket seems to me to factor in all their stops and starts and making sure they don't get caught doing it.

 

[CreamCloud0]

I don't know any RPG where any PC can control the universe, so I'm not sure how this remark is meant to factor in.

I mean, competent people control more of the universe than incompetent people. That's inherent in their competence, and is part of how they make their own luck.

the point is competent people 'make their own luck' by making different choices and taking different actions which have better odds of succeeding or even no chance of failure, not simply by making it generically 'more likely' that the cook isn't going to be on the other side of the door.

the competent thief makes their own luck by if they hear the cook in the kitchen they instead decide to open the door around the other side of the house far away from the cook.

 

[pemerton]

t was several hundred pages ago that we established that differently quantum was the issue.

By "we" you might mean "you". There is no such thing as "differently quantum". That just means "quantum that I don't like" as opposed to "quantum that I'm OK with".

You clearly don't understand it if you are still calling it DM driven/centered.

I've played in the sorts of games that you describe. They're pretty conventional, and I know how they work. That's why I call them GM-driven/GM-centred.

 

[The Firebird]

Whether or not a burglar opens the door while someone is there to see them has a lot to do with their competence as a burglar. At least it seems like that to me.

But on a success, they are not deciding not to open the door because someone is there...it just turns out that no one is there. I went through these cases before:

Compare three cases:

1) A master thief with fixed world abilities would get a perception check, see the obstacle, and get a chance to proceed anyway or to try a different route. They could choose to wait 20 minutes and see if the cook cleared out. A poor thief would blunder in.

2) The player tries to pick the lock, succeeds--and because there is no failure, they achieve their intent in the way they wanted. They go in, no cook. Their high lock picking skill directly influences the odds of the cook being there. That's not representing character skill--it's not showing them being a master thief--it's them getting lucky.

3) Or, we bundle the rolls while maintaining a fixed world. The thief rolls to pick the lock and gets a success. The GM says--hey, you succeed, but there is a cook here. Being a master thief, you can tell they'll clear out shortly. You wait 20 minutes until it is clear, then enter.

I'd be fine with cases (1) or (3). But ime narrative games run more like (2)--and that seems more in line with your Pattycakes example. Am I wrong?

 

[pemerton]

the point is competent people 'make their own luck' by making different choices and taking different actions which have better odds of succeeding or even no chance of failure, not simply by making it generically 'more likely' that the cook isn't going to be on the other side of the door.

In AD&D, a thief has a chance to pick pockets, that goes up with level but goes down with the level of their target.

Clearly this doesn't just reflect the thief's ability to move their fingers. It also reflects the thief's ability to judge well, to hold back at the moment where acting would be rash, etc. The game doesn't call for the attempt to be broken down in a granular fashion into each footstep, each reach of the hand, each disarming pat on the arm or shoulder, etc.

There's no reason why a roll for a burglar to get through a locked door should be different.

 

[pemerton]

How precisely does a thief "making their own luck" result in an unknown cook sleeping soundly?

A competent thief doesn't wake sleeping people.

 

[CreamCloud0]

Unless you're playing a game where the rules tell you that a complication happens on a failure. In those games the world is not independent of the player.

i think this is part of the issue in the conversation, common-use word meanings are getting confused with the jargon-uses.

 

[The Firebird]

A competent thief doesn't wake sleeping people.

Ok, we are just repeating ourselves at that point. If you have anything precise to say about the specific examples above, then I would be interested. But this doesn't engage with the core premise, and until your posts do I don't think there is anything to add.

 

[CreamCloud0]

A competent thief doesn't wake sleeping people.

but when the failure option presented wasn't 'the cook heard you and woke up' but 'the cook just so happened to be in the kitchen at X-AM in the morning' that's a little harder for us to swallow as the consequences of the thief's actions.

 

[FrogReaver]

It alluded to one, though.

Then take mine as challenging the arbitrariness of your comparative class.