Negflar2099
Explorer
As a DM I'm all about encouraging creative thinking in my players, after all in my opinion that's what the game is about. What concerns me though is how many of the people I've played with (and by a small sampling of various RPG boards a great deal of other people) seem to be so focused on a quest to find what I call the Unbeatable Trick.
What is the Unbeatable Trick? Well it depends on the situation but it's whatever trick you can use, again and again to foil the situations the DM throws at you. For example if the DM allows you to use Tensor's Floating Disk to float above a hazardous terrain, doing that once is creative thinking, but when you go back to it again and again, you have on your hands an Unbeatable Trick. The expectation is that it will work every time. The DM is forced to either disallow it (which can lead to frustrating arguments), allow it once and never again (same as above but now the DM's established a precedent), allow it but try to come up with something to get around it after letting it work once (which can lead to a dangerous game of DM-Player one upmanship) or allow it but stop using that particular threat against the PCs from then on in (so a DM in our example could never use hazards against the players ever again).
You see this mostly in combat where there is this need for something beyond just simple min-maxing or optimization, something where you get to an exploit or loophole or combo that lets you hit every time or make a thousand attacks or do insane damage.
I have seen the Unbeatable Trick emerge in every edition of every roleplaying game I have ever played. You might ask what's wrong with the Unbeatable Trick. After all it is, fundamentally about player creativity right? Wrong. I mean yes it's creative when you first come up with it (assuming you came up with it and didn't just crib it off the net), but when you use it a second time it's not creative anymore, it's just about relying on your same old trick. It may seem like a good idea but well imagine if in your typical action movie the hero did the exact same move every single battle and it worked every single time. I mean Legolas was cool when he stabbed an orc in the eye with an arrow and then shot another orc with the exact same arrow, but he only did that once. If he did that in every battle it would have gotten really boring really fast.
So given that, why is there so much interest in finding all of these Unbeatable Tricks? Why is there so much interest in "beating" the game of role-playing games? What do you think?
What is the Unbeatable Trick? Well it depends on the situation but it's whatever trick you can use, again and again to foil the situations the DM throws at you. For example if the DM allows you to use Tensor's Floating Disk to float above a hazardous terrain, doing that once is creative thinking, but when you go back to it again and again, you have on your hands an Unbeatable Trick. The expectation is that it will work every time. The DM is forced to either disallow it (which can lead to frustrating arguments), allow it once and never again (same as above but now the DM's established a precedent), allow it but try to come up with something to get around it after letting it work once (which can lead to a dangerous game of DM-Player one upmanship) or allow it but stop using that particular threat against the PCs from then on in (so a DM in our example could never use hazards against the players ever again).
You see this mostly in combat where there is this need for something beyond just simple min-maxing or optimization, something where you get to an exploit or loophole or combo that lets you hit every time or make a thousand attacks or do insane damage.
I have seen the Unbeatable Trick emerge in every edition of every roleplaying game I have ever played. You might ask what's wrong with the Unbeatable Trick. After all it is, fundamentally about player creativity right? Wrong. I mean yes it's creative when you first come up with it (assuming you came up with it and didn't just crib it off the net), but when you use it a second time it's not creative anymore, it's just about relying on your same old trick. It may seem like a good idea but well imagine if in your typical action movie the hero did the exact same move every single battle and it worked every single time. I mean Legolas was cool when he stabbed an orc in the eye with an arrow and then shot another orc with the exact same arrow, but he only did that once. If he did that in every battle it would have gotten really boring really fast.
So given that, why is there so much interest in finding all of these Unbeatable Tricks? Why is there so much interest in "beating" the game of role-playing games? What do you think?
