The Game for Non-Gamers: (Forked from: Sexism in D&D)

[FireLance]

I think that I personally would like a game where you were required to act out/describe your character's actions or words before you could pick up the dice, and what your character is doing or saying is at least as important as your mechanically-expressed skill.

One of my proposed house rules to get more description into the game is to give the PC a +1 bonus to the roll if the player describes what the character is doing without the use of game terms. Under a system where the description is a requirement instead of a bonus, how do you think a player should be "punished" for the lack of description? Automatic failure? A penalty to the roll determined by the DM?

 

[I'm A Banana]

I personally would find generic skill powers to be more widely applicable, though - e.g. make a skill check and help an ally (grant a bonus, grant a reroll, etc.) as well as gain a success if you succeed, make a skill check and choose to either negate a failure or gain a success if you succeed, use your best skill in place of any other skill, etc.

That's kind of like what I'm toying around with for the FFZ version of this. I don't quite want to make it entirely generic -- I find that using the names of abilities and the description of abilities helps with the role playing quite a lot, and keeps different people using different skills feeling like they're contributing in different ways. You can always give the DM the behind-the-screen info for making new abilities. But it's certainly easier for a designer to give some broad guidelines and say "go for it."

KM, my personal problem with your system is that at no time does it require anyone to actually speak in character. The things that are actually said by the characters don't matter, only the dice rolls do.

Certainly a fair point. I do think that it's important not to penalize players for their own personality quirks. If you've got a shy player, acting out what happens isn't going to be very fun for him. If you've got an outgoing player, they might dominate the challenge with their own personal charisma. This is kind of like giving the players a puzzle that the characters are supposed to solve -- it's not about the characters anymore, so it can take you out of the role.

The way story informs mechanics here is a little more subtle. Intimidation stops them from responding; empathy taps into their basic animal trust; the way the characters' personalities are inform their skill choices and their abilities and what effects their abilities have. There's still room for description; just like with describing combat it's pretty essential, but it doesn't need to be persuasive or dramatic in and of itself.

The dice provide the direction, the players provide the dialogue.

This basically means an expanded player base. If a shy player dreads social encounters because she's not a social person, but can still play a social, outgooing character, I think that's a positive thing, because it lets her play her hero in her way without relying on what she can actually do (just as her hero's dragon-slaying powers don't depend on the player's ability to slay dragons).

It's not quite able to be totally reskinned, because the story ideas like "Intimidation makes you less likely to fight back" translate into mechanical ideas like "Intimidation abilities make counter-arguments harder", while story ideas like "Diplomacy makes people your friend" translate into mechanical ideas like "Diplomacy makes it easier to get successes!"

I do kind of wish it worked the other way around, where the player could think of something to say and then use the ability related to that thing, or just default to something equally useful if they didn't have a brilliant idea, but obviously the concept is still kind of raw.

 

[Bumbles]

Under a system where the description is a requirement instead of a bonus, how do you think a player should be "punished" for the lack of description? Automatic failure? A penalty to the roll determined by the DM?

Perhaps a request to "phrase your action in the form of a description, rather than a die roll?"

Though I've known some people who simply aren't glib enough to do that, for a whole host of reasons. Which puts them at a disadvantage because they couldn't persuade you that water is wet, fire is hot, or that the sky is blue.

 

[LostSoul]

Under a system where the description is a requirement instead of a bonus, how do you think a player should be "punished" for the lack of description? Automatic failure? A penalty to the roll determined by the DM?

I think that the roll shouldn't even be possible.

DM: Okay, so the Duke. "Get lost, you gutter-rat. I have better things to do than to sit here and be assaulted by your stench."
Player: I'm rolling Intimidate.

That will still work, we can still proceed, even though we don't know what's going on.

Imagine a game system where that wasn't enough information to resolve anything. We couldn't proceed with the game until we knew what the PC was saying. At that point we'd decide if we needed to roll dice or not.

I could be wrong - maybe the fact that the skill being used is "Intimidate" is good enough. I don't think so, but I'm willing to be proved wrong.

 

[Bumbles]

I think that the roll shouldn't even be possible.

DM: Okay, so the Duke. "Get lost, you gutter-rat. I have better things to do than to sit here and be assaulted by your stench."
Player: I'm rolling Intimidate.

That will still work, we can still proceed, even though we don't know what's going on.

Imagine a game system where that wasn't enough information to resolve anything. We couldn't proceed with the game until we knew what the PC was saying. At that point we'd decide if we needed to roll dice or not.

I could be wrong - maybe the fact that the skill being used is "Intimidate" is good enough. I don't think so, but I'm willing to be proved wrong.

Hard to disprove, with you not saying why it isn't enough other than a hypothetical game system that I'd have to imagine, and well, imagining it, I'm thinking it'd be more trouble than it's worth.

I have no problem with a player hand-waving over an interaction like that with something as simple as saying "I will try to intimidate him to do X" .

This is distinct from say rewarding a canny player thinking of something like..."I'd like to look around the Duke's office and see if there's anybody(or thing) it looks like he values, and threaten harm to that..."which could lead to a bonus if that skill check was met.

Besides, I really really hate that kind of behavior in real life. It's practically an automatic fail with me, and I'd seriously hate a player to be disadvantaged by my own personal failings. I also hate haggling, telemarketers, and the way clerks try to get you to buy their value card. But I recognize how important that can be in the game for some folks, so I would need a mechanic to handle it, and the less detailed they'd get, the less bothered I feel I'd be.

No reason every NPC should be a crotchety SOB just because I'm not able to mentally transfigure myself on a whim.

 

[Ariosto]

The points of my facetious GM/Player dialog were:
(A) to illustrate that there are many incremental steps one can take away from the pure abstraction of an algebraic formula; and
(B) to point up the fact that combat scenes take up a lot of time and energy in getting down to details; that in 4E they happen mostly to be self-referential within the game's mathematical abstraction itself does not alter the amount of data processing.

 

[Ariosto]

KM, my personal problem with your system is that at no time does it require anyone to actually speak in character. The things that are actually said by the characters don't matter, only the dice rolls do.

Ditto.

 

[Ariosto]

The cart keeps getting put before the horse here.

Confronted with a locked door, the thoroughly modern gamer's first response is likely to be, "What do I need to roll to open it?"

A normal person is more likely to look for a key.

 

[FireLance]

The cart keeps getting put before the horse here.

Confronted with a locked door, the thoroughly modern gamer's first response is likely to be, "What do I need to roll to open it?"

A normal person is more likely to look for a key.

Arguably, a normal person would not need to get through locked doors on a regular basis.

And for a certain subset of abnormal people (those with appropriate skills or strength) picking the lock or breaking down the door is probably more efficient than hunting for the key (unless the DM purposefully intends it to be otherwise).

I submit that the cart isn't being put before the horse - some of us just want the cart to move in the opposite direction.

 

[Bumbles]

The cart keeps getting put before the horse here.

Confronted with a locked door, the thoroughly modern gamer's first response is likely to be, "What do I need to roll to open it?"

A normal person is more likely to look for a key.

Depends on who I am.

Firefighter(or EMT or police)--bash the door open
Locksmith--pick the lock
Burglar--any of the above, or look for a key
Military--Explosives!
Pizza Deliverer--Doorbell
Student--Look for the RA
Homeowner--could be look for the key, could be the window, could be...
Bank Employee--find the Manager

Circumstances, both on the player's part, and on the description of the door given by the GM, much like the circumstances in real life. Which is a fine point, but I'm not sure if that's what you were meaning to say...