NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Distracted DM" data-source="post: 9703235" data-attributes="member: 6894926">Back on-topic, "stop looking at your character sheet." This really depends on the system, and how much the PCs care about succeeding- because their characters are good at certain things, and bad at others.The simpler the system, the less there is on the character sheet, then yeah it's easier to just "be in the moment" and try stuff. But over time, over editions, we've codified the things that characters can do- given them cool abilities, features, the sort of things that would just be handed out or rolled for in simpler games. I don't think either is wrong- simple or complex sheets, but I can see why loving one means thinking the other is "the wrong path."Some OSR games say "try things! Throw a barrel, or tell the GM that you want to trip your opponent instead of just rolling to hit them! Disarm them, swing on a chandelier!" The GM makes the call for the rule of tripping the opponent, because there isn't one. Our character sheets are quite light- they don't have such rules on them.After repeat attempts, that rule is now codified- we know the process for tripping an opponent.Eventually, editions later, we get 3.5e's Tome of Battle, or A5E's martial maneuvers, which give a ton of options, codified, to do cool things in a fight. Our character sheet is heavier.A medium here is a game like Dungeon Crawl Classics: The warrior (and dwarf) have Mighty Deeds of Arms. Mighty Deeds says that the warrior can try pretty much whatever, and they roll- if their Deed Die is high, they succeed, and the GM adjudicates what the attempt actually does.But ... well, "trying things" is honestly hard. It's easier to just swing your sword and hope to do more damage... so DCC gives us a good list, several pages, of example Mighty Deeds. The hope is that these are just some examples, and the player will over time use the environment and try things.. but trying things is hard, and it's unreliable- your attempt at a cool thing might end up being less effective than doing what's on your sheet.And so we get a 3pp for DCC, the Book of Mighty Deeds! It's an entire book dedicated to codifying what you can do with the Mighty Deeds.Yes, the things I'm talking about here are combat-related, but they're examples. We can look to skills for another:Finding traps, treasures, hidden objects... this went from entirely player skill, not "looking at your sheet," literally having to ask "hey are there any holes in the floor? do i see any metal glints in the seams of the walls when i wave my torch around? is there the shadow of a wire under the door if i put the lamp down there? i move the tapestry aside, is there anything behind it?" to "I roll perception, do i see anything trap-wise? I roll investigation to find secret stuff, traps etc." (Yes, technically the player is supposed to first say "I look around for hidden stuff, and the GM then calls for the roll.. but after a while, the GM and players establish a repertoire and the players learn what rolls are typically called for what actions).So the thief in DnD, with its introduction, was able to roll to find traps was sort of in-between those two... they had find and disarm traps as character features. (Ofc did this mean that the other characters couldn't find traps anymore, since that's literally what the thief did? Well, it meant that the characters probably didn't roll for such.. but the players could still poke about).In short, and in my opinion... neither is "right," and it seems like we're trapped in a loop of starting with few rules, light character sheets, and winging it, but then we want things to be a bit easier to predict so we make more rules, with heavier character sheets... and then we have too many rules, so we want to go back to fewer rules.</blockquote>

Verification