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

[GothmogIV]

1,413 pages!?!?!?! Has anyone had their mind changed about...anything? I think I commented back on page 41 (such days we had back then, friends, such days!)

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Easy to just make DR cumulative per round, so if you've got DR 5 and take 12 points damage in a round you still take 7 whether it all came in one hit or from 12 different applications of 1 point each.

The other option is that the goblin and the giant have equal chances to hit, but the giant does 10 damage per hit and the goblin does 3. Now theoretically 3 goblins equals a giant, but DR3 simply means goblins are SOL vs plate armor. I don't see a problem with that. Lugging plate armor all over the place is impractical, so you may not be so equipped.

HomL works like this, it's not a problem, you should avoid giants! They're extremely scary opponents.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Interestingly, many of the skills in 5e do exactly what you're describing in regard to a "burglary skill".

I mean, Move Silently and Hide in Shadows used to be separate skills... now they're all covered by Stealth. Apparently, so would picking a lock quietly...

Listen and Spot used to be separate... now they're covered by Perception.

Climbing and Jumping and Lifting and so on.... Athletics.

Balance and Tumbling and so on... Acrobatics.

5e is already rife with these elements that are "focusing on the story, not the adventure", whatever that means.



Well, @Hussar 's point is that the mechanics dictating what happens is what would make it a simulation. So if they don't do that, they aren't simulating anything. He used harm to a specific part of the body as an example. D&D doesn't do that... it just says "you lose 12 hit points" which doesn't actually simulate anything.



Ignoring the use of "quantum" here, I'm just going to ask if, based on your description above and the importance it places on the GM and their notes, that perhaps you can see why some of us describe this style of game as being GM-driven or GM-focused.



That's pretty much my point. I could point to absurd examples of trad play to point out how it fails or leads to absurd results... but why would I do that if I want to engage in honest debate?

Personally I preferred 3e's more granular skill system, and to that end I use Level Up's skill specialization system liberally, and have devised it's opposite for when a PC may be especially poor at one aspect of a 5e-style skill.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The other option is that the goblin and the giant have equal chances to hit, but the giant does 10 damage per hit and the goblin does 3. Now theoretically 3 goblins equals a giant, but DR3 simply means goblins are SOL vs plate armor. I don't see a problem with that. Lugging plate armor all over the place is impractical, so you may not be so equipped.

HomL works like this, it's not a problem, you should avoid giants! They're extremely scary opponents.

There are a lot of games where larger and more damaging opponents don't hit better than weaker ones; in some cases they may hit worse. Even in D&D the correlation between to-hit chance and overall potency was mild until the 3e era.

 

[Micah Sweet]

The other option is that the goblin and the giant have equal chances to hit, but the giant does 10 damage per hit and the goblin does 3. Now theoretically 3 goblins equals a giant, but DR3 simply means goblins are SOL vs plate armor. I don't see a problem with that. Lugging plate armor all over the place is impractical, so you may not be so equipped.

HomL works like this, it's not a problem, you should avoid giants! They're extremely scary opponents.

Agreed. IMO plate is logically as simply making you impervious (or nearly so) to certain weaker attacks.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

So you are agreeing with me that it would be weird to do that (fail to suspend disbelief), right?

I'm questioning whether there's any need for anyone to claim one or another technique maps to more or less ability to do that. It's quite possible we agree. I've not had the time to track every single quote back. It sounded like you were advocating for a distinction there.

 

[Faolyn]

One problem with our examples is they tend to stop time, and here one needs to extend the example in time to see that "nothing happens" needn't be boring at all. It's just more granular.

Player "I attempt to pick the lock" [rolls and fails]
GM "Nothing happens"
Player "Righto, I take my crowbar and break a window"
Bedlam ensues...

Or whatever. The point is that stopping time at "nothing happens" doesn't adequately exemplify play of this sort.

Y'know, people keep getting hung up on the lock and/or cook, but in reality, this applies to anything. Fail to climb a wall, nothing happens. Fail to search a room, nothing happens. Fail to answer the riddle, nothing happens. Fail to convince the NPC, nothing happens.

The point isn't that you can take a crowbar and break a window. The point is when "nothing happens" prevents the game from continuing, and that's not fun.

 

[AlViking]

Interestingly, many of the skills in 5e do exactly what you're describing in regard to a "burglary skill".

I mean, Move Silently and Hide in Shadows used to be separate skills... now they're all covered by Stealth. Apparently, so would picking a lock quietly...

Listen and Spot used to be separate... now they're covered by Perception.

Climbing and Jumping and Lifting and so on.... Athletics.

Balance and Tumbling and so on... Acrobatics.

5e is already rife with these elements that are "focusing on the story, not the adventure", whatever that means.

All of the things you list are specific granular actions a character can take that does not require a specific type of goal or scenario. They can be used in a variety of situations or by multiple characters in the party. There's nothing wrong with a "burglary" skill, but it does aggregate a bunch of unrelated skills into one bundle. That bundle might be useful as part of a burglary but those individual skills are useful for many other things. More to the point, picking a lock doesn't imply any action other than picking the lock. It doesn't involve other people, it doesn't require sneaking quietly through a house or second story work. Those are separate things, separate actions judged individually.

I had a D&D that my character that was just a locksmith who isn't particularly good at any of the the other aspects of being a burglar. He wore armor that gave him disadvantage and didn't train in it so he wasn't very good at stealth, he never invested in acrobatics. He was good at locks because of his backstory but he was a fighter not a rogue. That flexibility is something I enjoy about D&D.

Well, @Hussar 's point is that the mechanics dictating what happens is what would make it a simulation. So if they don't do that, they aren't simulating anything. He used harm to a specific part of the body as an example. D&D doesn't do that... it just says "you lose 12 hit points" which doesn't actually simulate anything.

Not everyone accepts @Hussar's definition even if we understand it.

Ignoring the use of "quantum" here, I'm just going to ask if, based on your description above and the importance it places on the GM and their notes, that perhaps you can see why some of us describe this style of game as being GM-driven or GM-focused.



That's pretty much my point. I could point to absurd examples of trad play to point out how it fails or leads to absurd results... but why would I do that if I want to engage in honest debate?

If you don't want to use "absurd" examples, provide better examples.

 

[Faolyn]

Nope. Cook is not implicit in a kitchen at 2am, which has been identified as a feature of thenproblem scenario people are pushing back again. And no it is not about scene framing, as in the example people have a problem with the kitchen is described as explicitly empty on success.

The situations you have in mind are quite unproblematic situations. We have narrowed it down to a very spesific situation some think is problematic while some apear to not see the problem with though the number of the latter appear to be shrinking as people actually start understand properly the scenario and the problem with it.

Yes. And, many of us GMs might want to avoid using techniques that needs to be handled with care, as they allow and temp/push (but not force) the us to narrate incoherent fiction. I think that seem like an entirely sensible thing to do for someone taking on a role with a lot of things to handle already, to not complicate the job even more

Except that if the roll fails, neither the players nor the GM will know what would have been in the kitchen on a success. It's not like the adventure has the note "if failure, then cook; if success, then empty." There are people here who said that they would have come up with elaborate tables detailing every occupants' location at any given time period, but you know what? I'm not sure I believe that. That would be pages' of pages' worth of extraneous detail for a place that is probably not all that important in the long run, and since some of these people seem confounded at the sheer existence of a cook at at all, it's work that they probably wouldn't have thought to do in the first place.

And as many of us have said before, this is only one possibility. If you think it's a stupid idea that there would be a cook in the kitchen at 2 am, then pick another complication! Squeaky hinges, something in front of the door that gets bonked when the door is open, a cat or dog, a night patrol outside who sees them, a trap that the PC didn't search for, a broken lockpick, a lost item, it takes far longer than usual so they are at risk of running out of time, etc., etc.

 

[AlViking]

Y'know, people keep getting hung up on the lock and/or cook, but in reality, this applies to anything. Fail to climb a wall, nothing happens. Fail to search a room, nothing happens. Fail to answer the riddle, nothing happens. Fail to convince the NPC, nothing happens.

The point isn't that you can take a crowbar and break a window. The point is when "nothing happens" prevents the game from continuing, and that's not fun.

If nothing happens prevents the game from continuing then I consider it poor GMing. The specific action you took doesn't succeed, there should always be options, even if that means that you can't achieve your immediate goal.

There are many ways of ensuring the game doesn't come to a halt I just prefer different options than you do.