Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7005470" data-attributes="member: 42582">They're also designed to produce finality in resolution, in the same way that D&D's combat rules produce finality - ie it's not just that we know the PC hit, but now the GM has to decide what the consequence of the hit is. We know that the PC hit, and that the monster's hp were reduced to zero, and hence the combat is over and has been won by the PC. Or vice versa.The idea that the sort of finality RPGs have traditionally associated with combat resolution (under D&D's influence, which is itself a legacy of wargames) can be extended to the non-combat arena is something that indie RPGs in particular have picked up on. Although, in fact, one of the earliest examples of a non-combat resolution procedure that produces finality is the classic D&D wilderness evasion rules - which, for some reason, the game has largely abandoned in the intervening 30-odd years.Classic D&D also has quite a few "no retry" rules (eg bend bars/lift gates, several thief abilities) - another way of achieving finality out of combat. But more recent iterations have tended to abandon this because it's "unrealistic" - skill challenges, influenced by indie RPGing, reintroduce that idea of finality. Just as, in combat, if your PC drops to zero hp you don't get a retry - the GM is entitled to narrate "Sorry, your guy failed to dodge the blow and went down!", so in a skill challenge if the players rack up 3 failures the GM is entitled to narrate "Sorry, your idea for a brilliant plan didn't work out because of XYZ - now the situations looks like this [ . . . GM describes the results of the PCs faling to achieve what they hoped to achieve . . .]".Presumably the adventurers would love it if all the goblins just handed over their loot as soon as they were asked for it, if magic items grew on trees, etc. But that may not make for a fun game for the players.A player who wants combat encounters to be more interesting isn't speaking from the point of view of his/her PC. S/he is speaking from the point of view of someone who wants to have fun engaging in a leisure activity.That seems like an argument for having a very simple combat resolution system (say, opposed checks). There are a number of RPGs that have this.I tend to agree with Gygax that, in a combat system that uses hit points and AC rather than a RQ or RM-style system, hit location and the like are not germane. It's all bundled up into the stats (so not wearing a helmet should be like not carrying a shield - a -1 or -2 penalty to AC - and that's it).But as far as blinding someone by throwing sand in their eyes, or knocking someone out, this is the sort of thing which in D&D has traditionally been handled by mechanics for the infliction of conditions. (In a system like Cortex+ this can be handled quite abstractly, because the mechanics for inflicting and quantifying "debuffs" like "blinded" are identical to the mechanics for inflicting and quantifying physical injury, but it's a very different resolution system from D&D.) And it's fairly well recognised that if there's no rationing, it can be overpowered (we don't let clerics cast Cause Blindness at will) but if the rationing takes the form of called shot penalties than it's easy to make it underpowered (it's basically impossible so not worth it) or overpowered (if the penalty turns out to be too easily ignorable, as some argue for the -5/+10 feats) or just plain swingy (which can be undesirable from the point of view of sustaining viable PCs over long term play).This is the sort of thing I would expect an improvised action system to tackle (as 4e's did) or to be handled by some other form of mechanical guideline (eg as the battlemaster's manoeuvres do).Presumably red dragons didn't evolve at all. Presumably they are creations of Tiamat (or some comparable divine or demonic being).But in any event I don't find an ingame perspective very helpful for these sorts of game design questions. My starting premise is that I want playing the game to be fun. If that means that the heroes live implausibly (though genre-sanctioned) interesting lives, so be it. If that means that the 1st level PCs never happen to accidentally draw the ire of Demogorgon, who for whatever reason tends to focus his attention on epic-tier PCs, well so be it.Managing the story elements of the game so as to engage the players and maintain interest is one of the most important parts of GMing, in my view. The mechanics of monster design, encounter building, DC setting, etc are all tools to be used to this end. On the way through they should also make it easy to determine what is happening in the fiction, but that's a byproduct of them serving their purpose well. I don't want to subordinate the goal of supporting interesting play to fidelity in world building. (Roger Musson in particular stresses this point in some articles on dungeon and scenario design in a series of very early 80s White Dwarf articles. Those articles have certainly influenced my GMing since I first read them over 30 years ago.)Really,  . Yes the rules need to support tactics, and the idea that some people are better than others, and that you have different weapons, etc.I have no idea what this is about.Maybe you think of the rules for turn-by-turn resolution and action economy as an accurate model of a strange, stop-motion world. I don't. They're a resolution device. Dragons breathe fire. They do so when they're angry, and/or when they want to barbecue people. They don't do it with metronomic regularity. The "recharge and use when bloodied" rule is a device for introducig some dynamism into the turn-by-turn round system. (Hence it would be unnecessary in classic D&D, which doesn't use turn-by-turn resolution; or in Rolemaster or RQ, which aspire to systems very close to continuous resolution.)I also don't understand your remarks about "evolution". Ancient dragons are the embodiment of the primal fury of their element. Getting so hot, when riled up, that everyone and everything around them is scorched by the heat, doesn't seem like any sort of genre violation to me. As I posted upthread, it seems consistent with JRRT. The fact that early editions didn't model this particular feature of dragons is (in my view) neither here nor there. They didn't model all sorts of things (eg rogue's deftness at hiding behind cover, as per Cunning Action) but that's an artefact of rules changes. There was a first time, after all, that some GM decided that setting a spear against a charge does double damage - but no one thought that this reflected some change in the physics of the gameworld! Nor that the abolition of this rule in 5e signals a reverse change.</blockquote>

Verification