D&D General The Player's Quantum Ogre: Warlock Pacts

[Micah Sweet]

That's fair. Everyone should play at tables that support their own preferred play style. I, for example, don't want to play in a game where every warlock must hit the exact same narrative beats in every story, or where every possible plot hook must be on screen and relevant in every campaign.

I might, for example, want to play a warlock whose patron is the vestige of a dead god, sealed away in a prison beyond time and space. Through a confluence of mystical circumstances, I'm the only being in existence who can access the prison, and my patron is completely at my mercy. It teaches me ancient magical secrets so I can one day restore it to life using epic-level magic. In the mean time, a cult of the dead god wants to capture me and siphon off my mystical connection to their deity's prison.

But, of course, that narrative contradicts the flavor text some DMs require of the warlock class (Faustian bargains with patrons currently active in the world), so I can't play that character at every table.

I noticed how your description of my opinion is substantially less flattering to me than mine. Also less accurate.

 

[Micah Sweet]

It SHOULDN'T be normal. But personal experiences and whole subreddits full of DM horror stories that say it's less uncommon than it should be. And frankly, I feel the movement from DMs having mechanical justification to screw with their players (ie classes where role-play can have mechanical consequences) is helping disarm a lot of bad DMs and bad DMs-in-training.

I don't miss the whole "my DM took away my paladinhood again" discussions from 3e and earlier.

Love to see the DM side of those almost certainly player-instigated discussions.

 

[VHawkwinter]

About warlock pacts...

If the idea of making a pact with some supernatural power in exchange for power is a key part of the fantasy, why are so many warlock players vehemently against the notion of that pact ever being a part of the actual fiction of the game?

For example, if the patron makes a request or demand of the PC, the player can and will refuse. Or if the patron even threatens to undermine the PC's power, the player gets mad.

The pact is treated as entirely one-sided and permanent and anything suggesting otherwise is rebelled against or attacked.

When the Warlock was introduced in 3e, IIRC it was that the Patron gave you a minor spark of magic and made you like, an Artificial-Sorcerer. Everything after that was you yourself building upon what you got. It was a small one time payment for services rendered. A lot of people don't like the more recent change to making them Devil-Clerics.

So which is it? Is the pact the central theme to the character and should be included in the fiction of the game or is the pact simply a light coating of irrelevant story over the game mechanics that we should never really bring up?

IMO it depends if your player wants to be an Artificial-Sorcerer or a Devil-Cleric.

Personally, I would rather eliminate the class, and tell people to roll up either a Cleric or a Sorcerer, and adapt some Pact options to the class they pick, but that's an off-label application of the rules.

 

[WanderingMystic]

I only have 2 horror stories between the DM and his players, one in d&d and one on Warhammer. On Warhammer the DM put us in a tomb with an unkillable enemy from which there was no escape. We were later told that their was a secret chamber which by the time we entered the tomb was sealed and could never again be entered held the only way we could defeat our enemy.

The other time was a d&d game where the DM insisted on 40 hours per level down time with a higher level npc per level to level up, so 40 hours to level from 1 to 2, 80 to move from level 2 to 3 and so on. That in and of itself was not bad, but our home village was raised to the ground, our party was hunt d non stop by enemies and could not get to appropriate trainers. I was a Solomnic Knight and had to return to Solomnia to level up which I was told by the DM wa practically impossible. I had enough for a level 8 character but we had the stars of a level 4-5 character.
The dm focused on what he felt was a focus on the setting and fluf overrided the players fun in the experience. (We also didn't know our abilities, skill modifiers, saving throws ect since a real person doesn't know that type of information.)

Both time the DM placed what he thought would work thematically over the mechanical rules of the system and both times it cause the players to quit the group.

Now I personally loved not knowing my stats only a vague 1-6 rating of best to worse and during 3rd Ed I insisted that players needed to find a way in game to gain a prestige class however if a player told me that they wanted to join one and it made sense for the second thing they would find someone who could teach them. This differs from other games where I might say I wanted to become a knight at character creation only to find that the knightly orders were no where near where our characters would be.

 

[Epic Meepo]

I noticed how your description of my opinion is substantially less flattering to me than mine. Also less accurate.

I'll concede I may have misinterpreted your prior posts and been ungenerous as a result.

I got the impression you were referring to baseline warlock class features as "cool super powers" as a way to imply the gamist approach to the warlock class is cartoonish when compared to a narrativist or simulationist take on the class.

If I'm reading too much into that, I apologize.

 

[RoughCoronet0]

I feel like this topic is just one of many examples of different people having different expectations/preferences to how the fantasy/story/immersion/"whatever else you want to put here" of there games are achieved. I have played in games where Warlock pacts/patrons are not important at all in a campaign, and I have played in games where warlock pacts/patron are very important to the game is some form or another. They have all been fun games, partially because the DM and players communicated about their expectations and desires upfront in the beginning so we were all able to make informed decisions about what we want to play.

For the current campaign I'm running, in the current homebrew world I'm using warlock pacts are not one and done things, but a continuous contract between the PC and patron in question. What that contract actually is can vary wildly, and it's something I talk about with each warlock player before the campaign starts and keep talking to them about as the campaign goes on. It has worked well for my group so far, and a couple other DMs have done the same for their warlock players in their campaigns too.

In truths, several classes in my current homebrew world can have connections to external forces that they can interact with in positive, negative, or neutral ways that can potentially affect their powers and progression such as Clerics, Rangers, Barbarians, Druids, Paladins, and of course Warlocks. Even certain subclasses from the other classes can form such connections too depending on the story elements.

As with anything else, communicating these things is a must.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I'll concede I may have misinterpreted your prior posts and been ungenerous as a result.

I got the impression you were referring to baseline warlock class features as "cool super powers" as a way to imply the gamist approach to the warlock class is cartoonish when compared to a narrativist or simulationist take on the class.

If I'm reading too much into that, I apologize.

Faith enough. I never said or meant cartoonish, but I do value the sim and fiction first approaches over the gamist one, pretty much every time I can practically get away with it (and following the warlock class narrative is one of those times). I won't apologize for that opinion.

 

[Seramus]

I only have 2 horror stories between the DM and his players

I have so many horror stories I could write a small book! Got mugged at knifepoint by the DM's older brother one time. Been punched in the face by a player. One player described having sex with a sheep to get a free level up from the DM. Tipped back in a chair until it almost touched the floor by a player, who instructed me to "Scream!" because he wanted to impress a girl with how edgy he was. DM made me trip running up stairs with a lightsaber, where upon I fumbled and killed another PC. One DM kept slipping Nazi propaganda into the game - turns out, he was a Neo-Nazi (or just really wanted to be?). I can't even count how many completely inappropriate slavery scenes, or DM's that let other players run around with sex slaves.

Things were wild in a bad way.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Which is fine in my view, so long as the player actually did know that.

My assertion is that, all too often, they don't.

Because the GM assumed that that was part of the "social contract" and thus beneath discussion, and the player couldn't have possibly known to ask, because nothing in the rules makes even a hint of the possibility, and the fluff text is fluid and ambiguous to begin with.

That's--again--why the "social contract" argument falls so flat. It is functionally saying, "All the rules we need are completely obvious to every single person at the table, so we can just never say anything about them, and everything will be fine." No, everything will not be fine. A lot of things will go wrong, actually, because you're going to be constantly bumping into things that one side or the other thought were so boneheaded obvious that no one could ever even theoretically think differently, and the other side literally never even conceived of the possibility that that someone might think that way.

Because yes! I have seen this. Many, many times. Far too many to think that it is somehow a bizarre trait I personally have. Far too many times from friends, acquaintances, reports on the internet, discussions on this forum and others, etc.

Communication is absolutely vital. It is the only way anything actually gets figured out. Rules are one of the tools--arguably the most important tool--for how we communicate anything about a game. "Social contracts" are inherently hidden from view, invisible, unspoken. Trying to navigate by a map you can't see is not going to produce very many safe landings.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

A bad DM would be bad regardless of if the rules supported them taking away a PC's powers or not.

This ignores the possibility that rules can help, by saying that unless rules are perfect defenses, they are useless. This is a perfect solution fallacy: since the solution isn't perfect, it is necessarily useless and should be ignored.

Rules can do things like:

• Make it much more obvious when a GM is behaving nefariously
• Give players a justified standpoint for providing criticism
• Help well-meaning but inexperienced, unwise, or wrongly-taught GMs see the error of their ways
• Help a "bad DM" realized that they are being a "bad DM" and, thus, potentially desire to change

All of those are worthwhile things to have happen, even if rules fail to provide an absolute, perfect defense against GM misbehavior.

Now, of course, I am speaking in hypotheticals--things rules could theoretically do. So it is valid to say, "Well, not all rules can do that, so this doesn't prove rules are better." And that would be correct--but I'm not arguing rules are guaranteed always better. What I am arguing is that this attitude--that because rules cannot perfectly shield against bad GM behavior, they're worthless for doing anything about bad GM behavior--is wrong and harmful. There are tools we can employ which would help. There are structures that could make significant progress, and even (ideally) actually help convert a few bad GMs. It is worth our time as players, and as (armchair) designers, to talk about how rules can help, even if they'll never solve.

After all, isn't that exactly the argument folks like @Micah Sweet have made in defense of pursuing verisimilitude? There is no ruleset that can achieve perfect verisimilitude--it is provably impossible, even--but that is no excuse for abandoning the quest for it. It just means we must temper our expectations, and focus our efforts on the places which achieve the most gain for low and/or acceptable cost.