D&D (2024) The Problem with Healing Powercreep

[pemerton]

I keep hearing this same kind of refrain you make here and yet it’s never been about whether one is authoring their Pc under some definition of author. Of course one is.

Instead what’s really trying to be said, to be brought to light is HOW one authors the PC. (The process and techniques used, etc). Not whether one is authoring the PC.

Yes. You can probably find me posting this point on these boards 15 years ago.

Why the seeming insistence that all methods of authoring a character are the same and make for the same experience when they are not and do not?

Insistence by whom?

 

[Lanefan]

That would have been the "munchkin" part.

Again, how?

In character the mage sits down in the morning and memorizes two Magic Missiles, one Grease, one Hold Person and one Web. She knows that's what she memorized because she sat there this morning with her spellbook and did the studying.

Which means in character the mage knows that today she's already cast her Web and her Grease in prior encounters, thus when asked what she has left her saying "Two Missiles and a Hold Person" has nothng munchkin about it - she's speaking in character and saying exactly what the character would say.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

This is an empirical conjecture. I deny it.

It is not conjecture, it is simple logic. If character decision and rule decision are associated, then they're just one decision. If they're separated, they're two different decisions. Thus in former case you can focus solely on the character perspective, as making decisions as the character automatically makes the rules decisions needed for the play. If they're separated this does not happen. You need to make separate meta decisions regarding the rules.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I've done freeform RP.

RPing a mother whose child was suffering wasn't the same as being a parent whose child is suffering. At least in my experience of those two things.

But if it was not at all similar, if you did not get a glimpse how that would feel, then, in my opinion, you were doing it wrong.

 

[Chaosmancer]

This is a little aggressive. No one expects the game to change; it's already been published. I'm struggling to see who you're angry with and why.

Yes, it was a little aggressively toned.

No, that does not mean I am angry.

 

[tetrasodium]

That would have been the "munchkin" part.

I'm going to second or third what others have said, how it acknowledging them munchkinism?... The original inspiration for Vancian casting/prep was literally a series of books.

Some of the early episodes of goblin slayer (two or three maybe four☆) even has a scene where one character asks another character what spells they can cast & what they have prepared. Having that type of spellcasting in a fictional world not be treated for what it is would be like soldiers not being trained to count their bullets individually.

☆There is a scene where GS asks priestess after rescuing her. I think that there might be a similar bit of letting the group know with the doomed wizard/sorcerer among the doomed party earlier too but those goblins are (warcrimes style)baaaaad in E1 & that doomed party didn't realize it was a funnel.

 

[pemerton]

But if it was not at all similar, if you did not get a glimpse how that would feel, then, in my opinion, you were doing it wrong.

But you can't "get a glimpse of how that would feel", except metaphorically. Because you're not peering through a window. You're imagining.

Some people's imagination is accurate. Some is not. There are some things where, for most people, imagination is probably not all that reliable.

Here's some examples, pertinent to adventure-oriented RPGing: how would I react if I had the chance to rush into a burning house and save someone? or if I had the chance to throw myself in front of a gunman to protect a loved one? By chance, stories of this sort have features on our national news recently (well, I'm in Australia so no gunmen, but there was a kindergarten teacher who died saving kids from a truck crashing into the kindergarten). Two people did heroic things. But obviously there are times when people don't do heroic things. Which sort of person am I? What would the experience and the choice be like?

I can imagine, but I can't "glimpse" it just by introspecting and drawing on my knowledge of Spider-Man comics.

 

[Chaosmancer]

The thing I bolded is what group storytelling is. Each participant fitting their part together with the whole. Just because it's collaborated and lacks a premade plot doesn't mean it isn't storytelling. It's just collaborative and serialized. Lots and lots of stories are collaborative and serialized.

It's not at all dodgy unless you insert the assumption (which I have pretty soundly rejected multiple times in this thread) that your contributions are irrefutable and absolute. Collaboration requires real dialogue, give-and-take, reciprocity. You're cooperating with others, not shouting commands at them.

Nobody can expect their stuff to be automatically irrefutable. But, by that same token, everyone should quite validly expect to have a hand in "the story the campaign is going to eventually tell." They're going to have something they're interested in seeing, and that something is what will drive their decisions like "would this character swallow their pride this time, or would it get the better of them yet again, despite what they've learned?" and "now that the rage and vengeance that drove this character is gone, what does drive them now?"

Those are questions characters cannot just "answer", even if we grant a much more robust idea of "independently existing" characters than I am normally willing to grant--because the whole point is that the character doesn't know. But those are questions worth answering, and the answers could very easily change as a result of play. That--that right there--the story of finding out how the group and the adventure and the world change this person, and how this person changes the group and the adventure and the world, IS the awesome story I'm talking about.

It's still a story. It's just a story that results from multiple people working together to find out what happens.

To kind of build a little bit off of this. People react differently to different people.

I was making a character for a game that hasn't started yet. They were going to be a very battle-lusting type of character. Then I found out that my six ft five orc was going to be the only character above 3 ft tall. So, I immediately realized that this character would have called to the other people in the arena to put her on the team with this group, to give the other teams a handicap. And then, when we get out of the Arena, we've already got angles on how my character is going to view and react to the other members of the group. Behaviors that did not exist in my original idea, that came about because of who and what the other characters are going to be.

 

[Chaosmancer]

And that's fine, but I've never run it that way, even going back to 2nd edition. I always narrated spellcasters as being aware of their diminishing magical reserves, but not to the level of knowing how many spell slots they had left. Inserting game mechanics into the fiction like that ("I have two webs left and a magic missile!"), to 1990s me, always seemed vaguely munchkin. It's one reason I gravitated towards some of the alternate casting systems in the PO:Spells and Magic book.

I didn't have the words for it when I was young, but I always played back then with the assumption that I knew what the fantasy setting SHOULD be like, and that the rules were, at best, an imperfect model of it.

Not pointing this out to disagree with your preference, but there are now multiple fantasy genres that go in the opposite direction. And they have some very very good stories and incredibly interesting fantasies that lean on the concept that stats, scores, and ect are real, tangible things that the characters are fully aware of.

Just as a top of my head example, there is a story about a "Demonic" Tree in a Chinese setting who is the main character and growing their power to deal with various threats to themselves and the only person they have in the world. I don't see how that story could WORK with a sentient but unmoving tree, if they didn't have the system to pull on to give concrete points of progress for the story to use as milestone markers.

 

[pemerton]

It is not conjecture, it is simple logic.

Here's what you posted that I replied to: "I want the rules to be aligned with the fiction, is because then I can only think about the fiction, and the rules will follow. But if you disassociate them, then you end up thinking about the rules more"

It's an empirical conjecture, about the way some mental and physical processes work, and about the nature of rules.

If character decision and rule decision are associated, then they're just one decision.

Suppose the GM describes a wall. Then the player decides, and declares, that their character climbs the wall. Now, how is that resolved? Suppose that they first ask the GM - "Can I climb the wall?" And then the GM asks what their Climbing rating is. And then the player looks up a number on their PC sheet, and tells the GM. And then the GM tells them to make a roll, and the player rolls a die and then does some arithmetic. And then tells the GM. And then the GM consults a chart or table or other reference, and tells the player what happens next in the fiction.

What I've just described could happen in AD&D (using thief abilities), in more modern D&D, in Rolemaster, in RuneQuest.

Here's an alternative: the GM describes features of the situation, including "Sheer Cliffs d10". The player decides that their PC wants to climb the wall, reviews their PC sheet, and sees their rating Climbing d10. And so the player says to the GM, "I've got Climbing d10, so I'm spending a Plot Point to climb the cliffs". And the GM responds "OK", and then goes on to tell the player what happens next in the fiction.

What I've just described is based on Marvel Heroic RP, but something similar might happen in other RPGs.

The latter approach would be classified as "disassociated" by you and @Emirikol, as best I can tell. But (i) it doesn't require the player to do anything but play their PC, and (ii) it is more quickly resolved, with less reference to the rules, than the more "simulationist" example.

I've played a lot of Rolemaster, which is a very simulationist RPG. And it's not a game in which only a little bit of time is spend thinking about the rules and rules elements.

If they're separated, they're two different decisions. Thus in former case you can focus solely on the character perspective, as making decisions as the character automatically makes the rules decisions needed for the play. If they're separated this does not happen. You need to make separate meta decisions regarding the rules.

The two examples I've just posted show that this analysis is not true in general. Perhaps you are contrasting two particular RPGs? I don't know which ones you have in mind.

But it is not a matter of "logic" because "decision" as you use the word is ignoring all the "decision" and cognition involved in rolling dice, doing maths, performing look-ups, and other stuff which happens at the table but has no correlation to anything the PC is doing in the fiction.