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General Tabletop Discussion
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The Stakes of Classifying Games as Rules Lite, Medium, or Heavy?
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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8472795" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>The Rolemaster supplement Rolemaster Companion II introduces a variety of spells that block or mislead scrying. One of them creates an illusory result that the scryer receives in place of the truth of the protected individual or place.</p><p></p><p>One of my players realised that this could be used to circumvent range limits on other information-conveying spells: rather than use an <appropriate range> Mind Speech or Long Whisper spell, for instance, a character could create a "false scrying" of themself writing a message, and then the another character could use an <appropriate range> scrying or detection spell, of lower level than the Mind Speech spell, to scry on the scrying-protected character, thus learning the message.</p><p></p><p>We established a "gentlemen's agreement" at our table to ignore this loophole. But it remained technically open, because closing it, while maintaining the intended utility of the "false scrying" effect, was a far from trivial technical endeavour. (Which became increasingly clear as changes were made to clean up other issues with the protection-from-scrying effects that couldn't just be set to one side.)</p><p></p><p>In the context of modern D&D, a well-known loophole which can be ignored by way of "gentlemen's agreement" is the "peasant rail gun" that arises out of the "stop motion" adjudication of declared actions. But there are contexts where this loophole comes into play. For instance, if one character piggybacks (or otherwise carries) another on their turn, and then the carried character takes their turn subsequently in the same round, the second character can end up moving further than normally possible not for any reason that makes obvious sense in the fiction, but because of the action economy and its "stop motion" application. This happened occasionally in my long-running 4e D&D game. There is no straightforward way to close this loophole that I'm aware of, and when it did happen I think we mostly just ignored it or laughed about it - it was never pervasive enough to seriously threaten anyone's overall sense of the fiction and its relationship to the mechanics.</p><p></p><p>I doubt that I'm particularly unusual in having had these sorts of experiences in RPGs with complicated rules systems and resulting interactions, of just ignoring (in different sorts of ways) rather than trying to fix consequences that are broken or otherwise make no sense.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 8472795, member: 42582"] The Rolemaster supplement Rolemaster Companion II introduces a variety of spells that block or mislead scrying. One of them creates an illusory result that the scryer receives in place of the truth of the protected individual or place. One of my players realised that this could be used to circumvent range limits on other information-conveying spells: rather than use an <appropriate range> Mind Speech or Long Whisper spell, for instance, a character could create a "false scrying" of themself writing a message, and then the another character could use an <appropriate range> scrying or detection spell, of lower level than the Mind Speech spell, to scry on the scrying-protected character, thus learning the message. We established a "gentlemen's agreement" at our table to ignore this loophole. But it remained technically open, because closing it, while maintaining the intended utility of the "false scrying" effect, was a far from trivial technical endeavour. (Which became increasingly clear as changes were made to clean up other issues with the protection-from-scrying effects that couldn't just be set to one side.) In the context of modern D&D, a well-known loophole which can be ignored by way of "gentlemen's agreement" is the "peasant rail gun" that arises out of the "stop motion" adjudication of declared actions. But there are contexts where this loophole comes into play. For instance, if one character piggybacks (or otherwise carries) another on their turn, and then the carried character takes their turn subsequently in the same round, the second character can end up moving further than normally possible not for any reason that makes obvious sense in the fiction, but because of the action economy and its "stop motion" application. This happened occasionally in my long-running 4e D&D game. There is no straightforward way to close this loophole that I'm aware of, and when it did happen I think we mostly just ignored it or laughed about it - it was never pervasive enough to seriously threaten anyone's overall sense of the fiction and its relationship to the mechanics. I doubt that I'm particularly unusual in having had these sorts of experiences in RPGs with complicated rules systems and resulting interactions, of just ignoring (in different sorts of ways) rather than trying to fix consequences that are broken or otherwise make no sense. [/QUOTE]
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