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

[Faolyn]

Failing a saving throw can get you killed, but we accept those, and that's about as permanent a removal of character volition as you can get.

(I'm not trying to strawman you here or anything, I'm just noting that there are mechanical processes far more far reaching in effect than whether a character failed a morale check when confronted with something that evoked one. That doesn't mean that kind of thing can't be poorly handled, but then, so is "fail one climbing check and you fall to your death" and some people and systems seem to think that's appropriate too. That's just a case of really bad implementation in both cases).

I disagree here. Killing a character is permanent, yes, but taking them over and making them act in ways contrary to what the player wants is kind of worse. It's akin to mind control in a way, made worse because it's not caused by a magical effect.

 

[Faolyn]

I know this is a not-uncommon line some folks draw (and to be clear, I understand why its one as it involves buy-in from the player), but in a lot of cases those sorts of things aren't all-or-nothing (I don't remember if they are with GURPS but I suspect at least some of them are modifiers). They still accept that not every decision is going to be entirely within the player's choice. After all, even if you took a "Trusting" disadvantage, there still needs to be some sense on the GM's part of what the limits of that are (it at least shouldn't be completely unlimited), and at that point how is "The opponent is convincing because it says so right in this skill they bought" not okay when you don't have trusting, but someone much less capable able to pull it off is okay if you did? There should be cases in both examples where its just not going to work, its just more likely in the case of the Trusting character than the one who isn't (and probably even less with someone who's bought some ability that makes it hard for them to be played).

It just seems a very binary view of the process to me.

My point is that with games like GURPS and other games with traits you buy or make for yourself, you're choosing to buy that trait. With GURPS, there's a roll, and when you buy the disadvantage, you choose who severe it is, which affects the difficulty with the roll. In SWADE, a trait like Yellow gives you a penalty to your Fear check. With a game where you make up traits for yourself that have no mechanical impact (such as many narrative games) you still have a choice as how you deal with the triggering event.

But here's the thing: if in D&D, the GM says "This guy seems like he's telling the truth" (and assume the PCs make Insight rolls to back that up), the players can still choose whether or not they believe him or are willing to do what he says. Even if the GM is not very good at actually delivering such a speech like that for real, they can still roll for the NPC's Performance or whatever and say "you can feel your pulse quicken as you listen to his very convincing points" and still leave it up to the players to decide if they want to bite the hook or not.

 

[el-remmen]

If those odds are too steep then just lower the original DC

So basically back to what Snarf originally described.

 

[pemerton]

Consequences are unknowable to the player unless you include negotiation

Why can't the GM say: "If you fail, then <whatever> will happen"? @hawkeyefan gave an example upthread, along the lines of "Sure, you're confident you (the PC) can climb the cliff, but if you (the player) fail the roll, it will take longer than you hope (in the context of a dark ritual being performed at the top of the cliff)".

 

[Maxperson]

This is exactly what I've been railing against: your 10-14 bracket turns a fail into a success, which dishonours the original 'fail' roll!

Should instead be, using your ratios and if the DC is 15:

20 and higher: success
15-19: success with complication
14 or lower: failure. (maybe failure with extras on 1-4 as well)

If those odds are too steep then just lower the original DC.

What you are arguing is 6 in one, half dozen in the other. There's no significant difference between.

DC is 15:

20 and higher: success
15-19: success with complication
14 or lower: failure. (maybe failure with extras on 1-4 as well)

And...

DC is 15:

DC 15 and higher: complete success
DC 10-14: success with complication
9 or lower: failure.

The point being made was that the DC for complete success was 15. If it makes you feel better to shove that DC in front of the 10-14, do it.

 

[pemerton]

But that’s just terminology. It doesn’t matter.

But . . . but . . . my results table goes to 11!

 

[Maxperson]

But . . . but . . . my results table goes to 11!

On a scale of 1 to 10? That would be rocking!

 

[Pedantic]

Why can't the GM say: "If you fail, then <whatever> will happen"? @hawkeyefan gave an example upthread, along the lines of "Sure, you're confident you (the PC) can climb the cliff, but if you (the player) fail the roll, it will take longer than you hope (in the context of a dark ritual being performed at the top of the cliff)".

I don't see how that solves the problem. If you don't allow the player to change their again declaration in response, then there was hardly any point to informing them in the first place, or if they can, you're back to negotiation as they fish for different consequences.

 

[Hussar]

You can't just arbitrarily change the scope. The player has only 1 PC and has lost control over 100% of the characters he controls. The same cannot be said about mine, since I control billions and have only lost control over 1 whatever billionths of the NPCs I control.

It's not about length of time. It's about percentage of characters you have the ability to play. So no, it's not a microfractional percentage of the characters the player controls. It's all of them.

The reason you are in the minority, is that most people don't like losing all of their agency and being forced to roleplay in a very out of character manner.

Edit: And yes I am absolutely being forced to act out of character at least some of the time. It's always going to be a 100% loss of agency, but some of the time I will be persuaded to do something my character would never do, or not do something he would do 100% of the time. In those moments the "direction" the mechanics are providing for me to interpret, require 100% of those interpretations to be out of character. Sure I have the option of figuring out how I act out of character, but I don't have the option to refuse the result of the die roll, which would be the ONLY way to act in character.

Do you allow players to persuade NPC's to do things that that NPC would never do? Through a simple die roll? Do you allow PC's to mind control NPC's through skill checks? No?

Then why would you do that to PC's?

There is a rather alarming level of straw in this man.

Never minding the failure in math. Losing a tiny slice of control over the course of a session or campaign is no different than losing control over an NPC for the entire time that NPC is on screen but will only be on screen for a tiny amount of time. In both cases, the argument for loss of control is the same - it's a tiny, tiny amount of the entirety of the campaign. That's just the way math works.

You keep trying to play silly buggers semantic games here. An arbitrary die roll to create an encounter is both quantum and not quantum at the same time. If the DM rolls it, it's not quantum, but, if the player rolls it, suddenly it's quantum. If an NPC is convinced to do something by a skill check, that's not a significant loss of agency because it's only one NPC among all that you play during a campaign, but, allowing a PC to be convinced to do something by a skill check is a 100% loss of agency despite the fact that it's only a tiny fraction of the actions you will take over the course of the campaign.

The goalposts here are on rocket skates.

 

[Faolyn]

In fairness, I've DMed and played with one or two players who seemed constitutionally incapable of doing anything the least bit gonzo, and always tried their best to analyze down to the best/most optimal option. Great for their characters' survival odds, awful for the entertainment value.

I do have to wonder if this mentality is due to crazy ideas being hindered, vetoed, or outright punished by the GM.

Edit: I don't (necessarily) mean you, unless you are the only GM they've ever had.