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

[Maxperson]

To calculate the most efficient DPR trade-off once you've determined the enemy's AC, especially if you're using and extra stuff that adds on modifiers, like Shock Trooper. It's not a wild idea, though a "spreadsheet" is a bit of hyperbole for what was mostly a set of benchmarks. I definitely had character sheets with reference numbers written down the side.

Huh. I never did that. Once I knew what AC the enemy had, I just used an acceptable(to me) amount of my base attack based on that number. It worked out well enough.

 

[FrogReaver]

To calculate the most efficient DPR trade-off once you've determined the enemy's AC, especially if you're using and extra stuff that adds on modifiers, like Shock Trooper. It's not a wild idea, though a "spreadsheet" is a bit of hyperbole for what was mostly a set of benchmarks. I definitely had character sheets with reference numbers written down the side.

I made one for the -5/+10 power attack feats for 5e. But mostly you overwhelmed the modifier with accuracy buffs such that your dpr was most always maximized by using it. So you rarely had to think about it.

 

[Faolyn]

Agreed; as DM I'd be all over this and would be fine with it as a player.

However, without rules to back it up a player has a legit case to argue that while gelatinous cubes and extreme cold damage people they do not damage rope, thus forcing the DM to either accept that argument or invent item-damage rules on the fly.

The breaking rope is purely flavor. If they don't like the flavor, they can come up with one on their own. It won't change the fact that they failed the climb.

Or you can always say. "Well, it's either you screwed up somehow or you can blame it on equipment. Which do you prefer?" I'm willing to bet that they will be happier with equipment failure. Especially if you explain it was purely flavor and not some hidden penalty to the roll.

 

[Maxperson]

Setting aside that there is surely more than one cleric in many settlements, I assume exactly the constraints on clerics that the latest version of the D&D rules specify. Remove curse is on the core spell list for clerics. I suppose some gods might forbid their clerics access to it, but I cannot think of a single one that does in the normal Faerun pantheon.

I think it's more about the roleplay than about the mechanics. My clerics of Mielikki and Tempus had cure spells on their lists, but if you expected them to be healbots you were going to be sorely(very sorely depending on hit point loss) mistaken. Their memorized spells represented their concerns based on their gods and their religious beliefs.

My cleric of Tempus was going to use his spells to wage war on you, not make sure his friends felt better.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I think that's more dogma than fact, but more importantly I think directionally wrong for design. Starting from an assumption that your game is necessarily incomplete and will be subject to adhoc rules design later encourages bad design thinking.

I don't think we fundamentally disagree here, I just think such extrapolation should be a deprecated rarity that prompts further design thought, not a norm of play.

I actually do disagree here. I think the salient features of a role-playing game are not embodied in having an incomplete or ill-defined ruleset, and that we should be looking elsewhere for them. Elevating that distinction to a medium definition limits the design space.

So I am not quite sure we understand "incomplete" in the same way. I think it is a salient feature of RPGs that you can try to do anything that you can imagine the fictional person you're portraying to try. I do not think we can have complete rules that do not require any adjudication (and thus can be perfectly knowable to the players) that cover every and all such eventualities, at least not if you want the rules to produce sensible results.* That being said, from this I would not conclude (like some designers seem to) that as we cannot cover every eventuality we should not endeavour to be comprehensive and have the rules to cover common (and hopefully many uncommon) cases. And doing so also makes those rare cases not covered more predictable, as we are at least operating within system that has benchmarks for comparison.

* Like rules that a player can declare any attempt, regardless of character capabilities and circumstances, and flip coin, on heads they do exactly as they say, on tails the character accomplishes nothing is technically "complete," but at least I see some issues with this.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Well, TTRPGs have a long tradition of having key play being structured. Early D&D could be played as a pure mechanical dungeon crawler with no negotiation (as demonstrated by the relative ease of computer adaptations). I can easily see a TTRPG being deviced so that hardly anyone would want to go outside the scope covered.

However as long as there are some way to break out of it, that way need to be handled. And before you know it there are some sub culture playing the game almost exclusively using this break-out handling, while treating the wonderful structure you built up as a mini-game to be mostly avoided

You can't avoid people using a tool for unintended purposes, or (as might be in practice) claiming they're using the tool when they aren't really. You just devise it for the intended purpose and move on.

 

[Pedantic]

So I am not quite sure we understand "incomplete" in the same way. I think it is a salient feature of RPGs that you can try to do anything that you can imagine the fictional person you're portraying to try.

I really don't think that's necessary, especially once you add some expected genre/structure constraints and zoom out the abstraction a little. More structurally though, I think you could absolutely have an RPG with very constrained actions as long as you have unbounded play time, player set goals, emergent victory/failure conditions and ongoing failure/victory evaluation.

I do not think we can have complete rules that do not require any adjudication (and thus can be perfectly knowable to the players) that cover every and all such eventualities, at least not if you want the rules to produce sensible results.* That being said, from this I would not conclude (like some designers seem to) that as we cannot cover every eventuality we should not endeavour to be comprehensive and have the rules to cover common (and hopefully many uncommon) cases. And doing so also makes those rare cases not covered more predictable, as we are at least operating within system that has benchmarks for comparison.

We're close enough to touch here, I'm just coming from the other direction. I'd rather set a stricter norm that fails more regularly in play than risk the design malpractice coming from the other direction encourages.

* Like rules that a player can declare any attempt, regardless of character capabilities and circumstances, and flip coin, on heads they do exactly as they say, on tails the character accomplishes nothing is technically "complete," but at least I see some issues with this.

Right, we can absolutely put that outside of the grounds.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think that's more dogma than fact, but more importantly I think directionally wrong for design. Starting from an assumption that your game is necessarily incomplete and will be subject to adhoc rules design later encourages bad design thinking.

I don't think that's necessarily true. If you accept that's going to happen at least in uncommon events, you can make sure to build your rules with extendibility in mind, and thus future-proof it to a degree. If you don't, you may well fall into the (to me) trap of doing a bunch of exception based design elements because you think they do something valuable in those particular cases, and then lead the necessary extension later to be a guessing game. This is very obvious in the early history of D&D with the way non-thief skill emulation ended up being done at least three different ways once people decided completely narrative operation didn't cut it.

I don't think we fundamentally disagree here, I just think such extrapolation should be a deprecated rarity that prompts further design thought, not a norm of play.

While I agree it should be a rarity, I'm not sure in most cases it warrants further direct design because there is overhead on that which may not be justified by the infrequency; the exception is a case where initial effort was skipped because it required a fair bit of coverage but was perceived to not be likely to be used by the majority of end-users (naval rules, for example); in those cases supplemental material seems a viable option.

I actually do disagree here. I think the salient features of a role-playing game are not embodied in having an incomplete or ill-defined ruleset, and that we should be looking elsewhere for them. Elevating that distinction to a medium definition limits the design space.

While I don't disagree with your general point here, I think it only works unlimitedly if you're willing to constrain the play-space more than is desirable in many cases.

 

[Maxperson]

The character only has the fictional ability to persuade. The player decides they will persuade the cleric to cast the spell.

I don't understand this. The character has the fictional ability to persuade the cleric to cast the spell. The player has no ability to persuade the cleric of anything, so deciding that the player will persuade the cleric to cast the spell doesn't make sense.

The player decides that the character who has the fictional ability to persuade, will try to persuade the cleric. In that way he is acting though his character to change the fiction.

Contras that with the runes example where the player is deciding to use his ability to potentially make the runes say whatever he wants them to say. All he has to do is succeed at a roll and have a relevant ability(cunning isn't relevant) on his PC. That's a purely out of game decision and roll. The roll to author the runes has nothing to do with what the character is doing. The PC on the other hand is only attempting to read the runes and hope that maybe they tell him how to get out. That hope has nothing to do with the authoring of the runes.

Those are two different decision spaces.

The dice pool for the complication always includes the complication, in this case a d12, and your effect if successful reduces the complication that many sides, making a d12 hard to reduce completely. Any 1s on your roll lets GM step the complication up, and stepping up from a d12 means they narrate how you're overwhelmed by it.

In this sort of way the check difficulty (chance of success) depends on the intent of what you wanted to do with the runes. Here players took quite a risk!

Yes. The player decision to author has risk involved, which is why it isn't really abusable the way unfettered authoring would be. If a player runs around trying to get advantage after advantage after advantage, he's going to miss a good number of rolls making the life of his character fairly difficult, perhaps fatally difficult.

That doesn't change where the decision spaces are, though. They still remain two different decision spaces. One for the player enacting the mechanic in an attempt to author, and one where the PC isn't doing that at all and is just trying to translate runes he hopes will help.

 

[clearstream]

Disagree with me on what? What you think my opinion on D&D spell rules is?

@Pedantic's "preferred play would involve them knowing the outcomes of their actions not through asking me about them, but by having internalized the rules structures for those actions (an impossibility in 5e, which does not have such structures). The abstract nature of any given action's impact to the gamestate is something I very much find to the game's detriment."

But on re-reading it could be that what is impossible in 5e is an ideal for knowing the outcomes of actions, which according to the ideal ought to come in whole from the rules structures. I don't know of any examples of that in TTRPG rules texts... does anyone?