Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6725244" data-attributes="member: 6787650">Sure, let's talk about Diplomacy. I've only played it once or twice, but I recall a great deal of rules support for diplomacy in the game. Agency, in the sense I'm using it, refers to the ability of a player to act as an effective agent, by having choices and the ability to predict the consequences of those choices. (Rock/scissors/paper is a game without much agency, for example: you make choices but the outcomes are random, to a first approximation.) In diplomacy, alliances and treachery are both possible because you and your allies can predict the short-term results of the orders you issue during the current turn. The clarity of the rules provides a framework for your diplomacy. You know what's at stake (in the short term), you know the possible ways things could go wrong, you know who the players are. You know, for example, that Diplomacy is a game of perfect information, and you know that whoever your allies are, they have at least not betrayed you up to this point--there is no hidden mole in your kingdom who has been sabotaging your war plans, because Diplomacy doesn't allow that kind of thing."Crafting hit points" isn't on the table (I find the concept of applying combat terminology to construction as distasteful as you seem to), but the equivalent of Diplomacy is to supply the players with a framework that tells them what is at stake and what they need to get there: here's how much wood costs, and you need to pay property taxes annually, and the house will get termite-eaten or bear-infested if there isn't someone living in it, and by the way you can make it larger or smaller, etc. There's three levels of detail you can play at:1.) Full verisimiltude based on real-world expert knowledge of the specific problem domain (treehouse construction vs. road construction).2.) Rough abstractions based on general type of activity (construction vs. politicking).3.) Handwaving based on whatever is quickest, just to get the activity out of the way before returning to more interesting activities ("okay, you build a treehouse").#3 needs no rules. Rules for #1 would be redundant and unnecessary except in corner cases (such as inventing a detailed treatment procedure for a disease which does not actually exist in real life). If #1 and #3 cover your interests, great!Scenario #2 is a bit lacking in 5E at the moment from my perspective. I'm sympathetic to those who, like @<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/member.php?u=1207" target="_blank">Ristamar</a>, are "glad there are not established rules for economic, political, and social conflict and interactions." I even agree that it's a good thing WotC didn't try to create such rules, both because it would waste space in the DMG and because WotC always does a bad job at those kinds of things (see the Mass Combat rules for example). However, unlike Ristamar, I also see potential value in providing rules to my players so that they can act with more agency and predictability (more on this in a second), and whether that means me making up rules myself and creating handouts for the players, or importing rules from other systems, or buying third-party products that I consider to be of high quality, the result is the same: my players will have rules available to them.About predictability and agency: the end goal is for players to be able to put themselves into the game world and consider decisions the way their characters would, by thinking things through. Without rules you have to rely on the DM as a black box oracle. Instead of thinking through the consequences of your action, with rules that you already know from experience, you're obliged to stop and ask the DM, "What would happen if I did this? Is there any way for me to do that?" or else to just declare your action and hope that it works. For short-term goals that might be fine, but I doubt there are many DMs who'd let you just declare a long-term goal like, "I foment a civil war between the kingmen and the republicrats." Instead, they'd probably want you to give specifics about how you go about fomenting such a war, who you talk to, how you influence them, and now you're right back in scenario #1: applying real-world expert knowledge. That might be fine from the player's perspective, but here's my problem with that as a DM: I don't have real-world expert knowledge at fomenting civil wars. Anything I make up will be at least as abstract and error-prone as a scenario #2 solution would be, so I might as well make up gameable rules for politicking that seem roughly plausible and give them to my players (e.g. example DCs for certain tasks and a list of names of people of influence), instead of letting them flail around trying to figure out if their rough idea of secret warmongering matches up with my half-baked imagining of secret warmongering.TL;DR: Making up or buying gameable rules is a middle ground designed to preserve predictability and agency for the players without requiring them and me to become experts in every field of human endeavor.</blockquote>

Verification