If the point of the game is to explore a theme/address a premise (what The Forge calls narrativism) then I don't want a real risk of failure to do that. I want to sit down at the gaming table and do it. Certain rules can facilitate or impede doing that. The possibility of PC death to trivial encounters is an impedence. Hence the preponderance of "say yes", "mook rules", "fate points" etc in RPG design. These are nearly all various devices to ensure player protagonism and thereby permit narrativist play (in some cases, I'll admit, mook rules may also be genre simulation).Wolfspider said:
The Reduction of Uncertainty
- Thread starter Reynard
- Start date
re
I allow that kind of roleplaying. So if a player wants to have some fun during the cleanup, I let them. I don't let everything be decided by die rolls. If I did, then DnD wouldn't be a roleplaying game first.
Crashy75 said:I always liked the 'clean up'. Of course, I almost always play evil characters.
EDIT: There is meaning in this. I get to freak the other PC's out with my bullying/torturing ways. (hey, that goblin might know something!) It can create an interesting party dynamic.
![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
I allow that kind of roleplaying. So if a player wants to have some fun during the cleanup, I let them. I don't let everything be decided by die rolls. If I did, then DnD wouldn't be a roleplaying game first.
Remathilis
Legend
Wolfspider said:So your group complains when they don't win all the time?
What's the point of playing if there isn't a real risk of failure?
If you don't want to fail sometimes, don't play a game that involves chance.
This depends on what you define as "failure".
There is an undercurrent of players (and DMs) who think only death = failure. That is, a PC cannot "fail" without first being reduced to -10 (or whatever the 4e number will be). This then leads to its correlary: every combat the PCs walk(run) away from is a success. When viewed in this light, if a PC merely survives the encounter, he has "won" it and thus it becomes the DM's mission to introduce "failure" (IE death) into the game in order to keep the game "balanced" or "fair" or "challenging."
Of course, this is built atop the premise that death is the only way to fail. Most reasonable DMs know there are other ways to fail: failing to meet a time limit, loss of equipment/wealth, loss of social status, imprisonment, slavery, death of important non-PCs, etc. Sure, are plenty of combats where loss should equal death (there is no concept of ransoming amongst mind flayers, for example) but against many other threats, death is not only failure.
The trick is to create for at least the PCs (and perhaps the players, depending on player maturity level) the illusion of risk: bad things WILL happen if they don't succeed, even if they don't affect me personally. Its a difficult trick to manage, but with a good group, it works well. Death shouldn't be the only element of failure, just one of many.
Haffrung Helleyes
First Post
Wow, I remember when this chart came out...I was in grade school then. We got a lot of laughs out of the 'head pulped and splattered over a wide area' line!
Arduin...what a trip.
Ken
Arduin...what a trip.
Ken
DeathMutant said:
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
If the point of the game is to explore a theme to the extent that the unexpected loss of a key character or item derails the whole thing, there's a problem. In a role-playing game partly based on chance, starting with the end in mind - in this case, starting with full DM knowledge that the key protagonators will survive to the pre-planned end - is or should be pointless. Sure, you can hope the PCs survive, and further hope the players don't throw you a curveball by deciding on a whim to abandon the adventure jump on a boat and sail across the sea...but you can't force these things. Not, that is, without destroying believability.pemerton said:
As a player, I expect the DM to have things well-enough designed to handle any action our party may take, no matter how wacko. Sword of Mighty Swordiness? Hell, let's throw it in the lava pit...I bet it'll blow up *real* good! As a DM, I expect to have to change things on the fly and would be mildly disappointed if I never had to; I'm not about to marry myself to a storyline or theme to the point that it dictates how the game is played.
For my next campaign, intended to be another very long one, I sat down the other day and quasi-storyboarded the campaign in terms of adventures I'd like to run, plotlines I could use, and so on - representing maybe 5-10 years of potential play - in full knowledge that what I was doing would probably not survive first contact with the players...and nor should it, really.
I will, however, be interested to look back on it after the campaign's done and see if my ideas now have any resemblance whatsoever to what actually ends up happening.
Lanefan
shilsen
Adventurer
Lanefan said:
Why? There are a whole lot of ways to play the game, and if it suits some people to game that way, presumably doing so isn't a problem for them.
As noted above, it's clearly not pointless for the people gaming that way. Presumably playing in a manner which would make the game less enjoyable for them would be a lot more pointless.
Also, note that deciding the key protagonists should be there at the end doesn't mean that you have the end pre-planned. For example, I've almost completely taken death out of my game, and as long as my players want to play their particular PCs there'll be a way for them to play those PCs till the end of the campaign, but I have absolutely no idea where/how the campaign will end. And when I started the campaign I had absolutely no pre-planned plot.
For example...
Sure you can. Especially since different people have different things which destroy believability for them and because what one defines as forcing is usually personal and often arbitrary. For example, having rules which allow PCs to survive from 0 to -9 hit pts can be viewed as forcing by someone who thinks PCs should die at 0 hp. And, as noted above, pre-planned plots and PCs not dying are neither the same nor necessarily related. As I mentioned, PC death is almost off the table in my game. But my game is also one where the PCs at one point did decide to just abandon everything they were involved with, jump in a ship and take off to another continent. Which I rolled with. But because the PCs are free to do just about anything in my game doesn't mean I think PC death is important or useful.
Reynard said:
I can see the same statement and come to a different conclusion. Uncertainty is not bad. We have dice to determine things that are uncertain, and rarely do I hear people who complain about getting to roll dice in D&D. Too much uncertainty, or rather uncertainty with dire consequences as it's big brother can cause problems in a game.
"Fixing the Math" to me, means looking at each level and making sure the percentages are where they want to be, rather than where they fell in 3.5.
Good, Average, and Poor BAB in 3e is an example of this.
- First Level Characters
- Good BAB +1
- Poor BAB +0
- Net Difference: The Good BAB character has a +5% chance to hit over the Poor BAB character.
- 5th Level Characters
- Good BAB +5
- Poor BAB +2
- Net Difference: The Good BAB character has a +15% chance to hit over the Poor BAB character.
- 12th Level Characters
- Good BAB +12
- Poor BAB +6
- Net Difference: The Good BAB character has a +30% chance to hit over the Poor BAB character.
- 20th Level Characters
- Good BAB +20
- Poor BAB +10
- Net Difference: The good BAB character has a +50% chance to hit over the Poor BAB character.
You'll notice that they just made a progression. The first level fighter may be amazingly better at hitting things, but the chance at first level is pretty much negligible compared to the wizard's chance to hit. While the Good Progression for BAB is in fact the best of the BABs, it doesn't reflect that the fighter is good at hitting things until he's significantly high level.
The system they are using for 4e, on the other hand, is that every class gets +half level. It scales the same. So if you want a fighter to have a 30% better chance at hitting than a wizard, you give him a static +6 to hit. That way at no matter what level you are at, he'll always be better at hitting than the wizard.
Also, if you want to give the fighter a significant bonus at first level, but show that he hones it even farther than the original, you don't need a formula of BAB to do that over many levels. If the Fighter is supposed to have a +30% chance to hit over the wizard, he gets +6 at first level, and at 6th level he gets a class feature to increase his class bonus to +7, and at level 12 he gets a class feature to increase it +8, and at 18th level it increases to +9.
The reason this works is because you now have a system that you can say "We want the rogue to be this much better at doing X than Y" And the way you do that is have everyone scale the same way, and then add a static bonus. No matter how high level you get, you have that much better of a chance than another character.
It's not so much taking out uncertainty, but designing the proper level of uncertainty, as opposed to it being an arbitrary number that the game's math fell into, like with 3e.
Reynard said:
I see the same thing, and again come to a different conclusion. The die will still hold the same power as it once held. But the abilities it's tied to are designed to have an overall less impact. In a way, it draws it out and gives you more opportunity to respond to the poor rolls, rather than dictate that you can't do anything in response to the horror that the dice unveiled.
In some situations, I see the outcome of a die being more important. In the cases where a wizard had a 5% chance to hit, or you had a 10% chance to do a skill check, or a 95% chance to do a skill check or hit, it's being normalized to where if you're poor you'll have a 30ish% chance to hit as opposed to 5%, or a 40% chance to do a skill check as opposed to a 10%, or an 75% chance to hit instead of a 95%. What you roll won't be as expected, due to the fact there's more room to succeed when it's not your focus, and there's actually a chance to fail (which means you're actually challenged) when it is your focus.
"Fixing the Math," with the way I interpreted it, meant fixing the abnormally high numbers and abnormally low numbers due to poorly conceived formulas, and their effects when they panned out too high. There's a reason 3e epic level BAB and saves are normalized - because otherwise the variance between good and poor progressions would be even greater.
In a way, the game design lets you play your character when something bad happens as opposed to take the control out of the players hands and put them into spectator mode. After all, we all play to actually play the game, right?
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
True enough...shilsen said:
OK, you've taken death out, and that works well for you by the sound of things. However, there's others here who'd go a step or three further; not just keeping key characters alive but also keeping key story items safe from harm or loss, hence my example of what happens to the Sword of Mighty Swordiness. (the more times I type that, the more I realize I just *have* to chuck an item by that name into my game...)
Different breed of animal. Players (and by extension, their PCs) don't usually have choice over the game *rules*. But they do have choice over the game *story*. Almost unrelated.
Fine. But I'll go out on a limb here and guess you did away with PC death for reasons of player enjoyment, rather than to save the story.
Nice!
Good on them for doing it, and good on you for rolling with it.
My argument here is not necessarily with removal of PC death in general (that's a bigger and different issue); not, at least, this time. My argument in this particular thread is that removing PC death *because it is inconvenient for the DM's story* is wrong, just as not allowing the PCs to throw the Sword of Mighty Swordiness (ha! got it in again!
) into a lava pit is wrong for the same reasons.Lanefan
Lanefan, Shilsen mostly said what I would have. But for the sake of completeness I'll engage in mostly pointless repetition.
For you, yes, given what I've discerned over many posts about your playstyle. But not necessarily for others.Lanefan said:
Not necessarily, because the chance can contribute by helping to determine various matters in the gameworld, introducing unexpected elements, determining the outcome of conflicts, etc. But this sort of uncertainty need not be the sort of uncertainty that I think Reynard was referring to (and you're advocating) - broadly, uncertainty by the players about whether their efforts at protagonism will pay off in any way at all (as opposed to uncertainty about exactly what that payoff might be).Lanefan said:
True. But the rules can give the players the means to force these things. By reducing uncertainty of a certain sort.Lanefan said:
If it's all understood as metagame, then it need not destroy believability (although, for some players, it may disturb immersion).Lanefan said:
Agreed. Although it can make for a better game if the players give the GM some idea of the direction they want the game to go.Lanefan said:
Sure. But if the players set the theme or point, then they are less likely to want to diverge from it. And I can concentrate on building the game around that theme or point.Lanefan said:
I think what you're saying is broadly right about 4e. I think a natural implication of it is that non-combat (skill-based) challenges have to involve multiple skill checks (as combat involves multiple rolls) to avoid a player getting hosed by a single bad die roll.Sphyre said:
Hence the logic of social challenges, encounter traps, environmental challenges etc.
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