Tired of d20 yet?
- Thread starter Driddle
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Yes and no.Driddle said:
I'd be less tired of DnD/d20 if people would play other games once in a while ... or to be more specific, play the games I'm in the mood to play.
Part of what always buged me about DnD in general is how most gamers will get stuck in a DnD rut, mostly because I like some variety once in a while.
Driddle said:
Um, given that Psion just identified this thread as being one of them, which is what prompted my remark, i don't think i have much to prove.
massive edit: in fact, i'm just gonna snip all that other stuff out, and vent over in the Meta forum, where it [probably] belongs. I don't want to derail this thread, and what i've left above makes the only part of my point that is really in any way relevant to the current discussion: yes, i said it in a snippy, backhanded-complement sort of way, but my point was, nonetheless, that this thread is a perfect example of why not to shut down heated threads. Whether you agree or disagree on this point, pop on over to Meta if you want to argue it with me.
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Patryn of Elvenshae said:
woodelf said:
Patryn of Elvenshae said:
But 3 of them assumed no change in the situation. I was simply stating, above, that there are several ways to deal with the inconsistent ruling without changing the in-game situation, not whether those solutions would end up sticking with or overturning the inconsistent ruling. Now, it is true that, of those three, 2 ended up with the consistent ruling, and only one ended up with the inconsistent ruling--though, on rereading my post, i got my examples muddled: #3 was intended to be an example of the rule staying with the GMs inconsistent suggestion, without an in-game situation change.
It's not an in-game change, in the sense that it's not changing the initial conditions that led to the ruling. Yes, it leads to a change in the result--it's often the case when you give in to player whining, since very few players whine for a result that will be worse for them (and it doesn't generally take whining to go back to an established ruling).
Well, first of all, i was just typing those up as i went, not really thinking about what i actually wrote--in an actual RPG session, i'd consider the results more carefully. For that matter, i probably would *not* rely on standard defined conditions to model a different situation in D20 System, because i wouldn't trust myself to remember all the consequences of those conditions. I'd instead be explicit about the results: +4 to attack, no other bonus [when i wrote the "attack with surprise" bit above, i was thinking of AD&D2, where all it is is a +4 to hit bonus, rather than the whole flatfooted, vulnerable-to-tons-of-things, situation in D&D3E].
Secondly, if my players were sufficiently on-the-ball to notice the ruling difference, you can bet your chicken feet that they'd also immediately point out the disparity. They always do. So, even if i *did* make a revision i didn't intend, it'd still get fixed before the roll was made.
Third, this particular case is not an example of ad-hoc rulings being bizarre; it's an example of rulings in a system that the GM can't really keep track of being bizarre. That is, precisely because D&D3E (or, in my case, AU) is really a more-complex system than i can comfortably keep track of i (1) am more likely to end up making ad-hoc rulings, because i can't remember the official one and (2) am more likely to make inconsistent rulings, because i'm not aware of (or just can't remember) similar rules that i should be staying consistent with.
For a GM like me (just not good at keeping track of tons of little detail--much better at the big picture and general trends), a complex system actually increases inconsistency, i've found. I mostly have reduced myself to just a handful [like, 3] of baseline guidelines for modifiers, frex, and extrapolate everything from those, rather than sometimes extrapolating, and sometimes remembering there is a rule but not being able to find it so i extraplote anyway, and sometimes not remembering there is a rule when there is one so i extrapolate and come up with a different result than in the book. Simply sticking to +/-2 per "difficulty" hindering an action would probably result in a more-consistent game, and i'm gonna run that one by my players.
But, give me a broad, simple set of guidelines, and i'll be very consistent. Frex, in one game i run, i basically use an inversion of the Everway powers-rating structure to rate difficulties. This results in a difficulty from 0 to 3, or possibly higher. [For Everway, a power costs 0-3 points, depending on whether it is frequent[ly useful], versatile, and/or major.]
Oh, it also ignores a different standard of consistency that is appropriate for some RPGs: genre verisimillitude, rather than realism. I've both played and run games that were going for a particular style of play, so it was not merely accepted, but expected, that the superheroes are temporarily stopped by realitively minor mooks at the beginning of the story, yet able to defeat their much-more-powerful leader at the end of the story--despite no change in the characters' capabilities in the intervening time.
Well, the fact that D&D is frequently unrealistic is often dismissed as not a problem, because the gaming group doesn't want realism or they wouldn't be playing D&D. Why can't i turn that around and say that, if people wanted consistency, they wouldn't be playing with a system/GM that was inconsistent? That is, i know, from personal experience as well as 2nd-hand experience, that there are RPers out there who are no more concerned about strict consistency in their RPG sessions than they are in their action movies, so how is it unreasonable to point out that this can, perhaps frequently (if the popularity of action movies is any indication), make this whole issue a non-issue?
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Kanegrundar said:
It is, and it isn't--look at all the horror stories of bad GMs. Now, i suspect that, even in aperfect world, some of that is inevitable: you have to be a beginner at some point. But, the fact that people can learn to GM with D&D is not counter-evidence to the claim that they could learn better/faster with some other system (whether more structured, more realistic, more abstract, simpler, more narrative--whatever).
Mind you, if i were going to teach a new GM (and, actually, i might be doing just that, soon) i would give them copies of The Dungeon Master's Design Kit, Robin's Laws of Good Gamemastering, Uncle Figgy's Guide to Roleplaying, Uncle Figgy's Guide to Gamemastering, and either a middling-to-lite system, like cinematic unisystem or BESM or Blue Rose, or a lite narrative system, like Dust Devils or Sorcerer. The choice of system would depend on their abilities/style, and the genres they're comfortable with, and the systems they're familiar with. The most important part of system choice, however, would be a system that hte GM felt she was comfortable with--much more important than simplicity or actual mastery of the system is confidence, and the ability to not worry about the system and focus on everything else. If that meant D&D3.5E, so be it--i'd still give her all those other resources.
Psion said:
That's true. I guess partly it's just a matter of semantics: if an "easy" lock were DC10, but the only ones that actually came up were DC20+ (because who bothers to put a lock less secure than that on something? and why make the players roll for a DC10 lock?), i think it'd work better for me.
But it's also an issue of game play. My players took one look at the DCs for open locks and use magic device, and said "screw this" and never even put a single point into them, because of the number of points it would've taken just to be adequate. Now, if all skills had similar usefulness threshholds, this wouldn't have been the case--whether those thresholds were high or low. From a game-play standpoint, it seems like a problem when some skills require 5 points before you get to do Cool Stuff with them, while others require 15. Especially when, IMHO, the Cool Stuff in each case is roughly equally-cool.
Now, on the flipside, i agree with you: some things are just plain easier than others. And equivalencies are hard to draw. For someone who knows how to pick locks, is an "easy" lock easier than an "easy" climb is for a rockclimber? (speaking as a technical issue of skill, of course--it's pretty much a guarantee that the lock picking is gonna be less physical effort.)
Anyway, while i take your points [which i snipped] about this being a different sort of "consistency", i counter that i think they *are* intertwined. That is, IMHO, the consistency we're mostly talking about (consistent rulings), is, ultimately, grounded in one or both of (1) consistency of gameplay and (2) consistency with reality. The example of two different rules for swinging from a chandelier is mostly of the first sort, because the question isn't so much what it takes to do that in teh real world, as it is what it took to do it in-game last time. A counter-example of the second would be having the DC to climb a pinetree be higher than the DC to climb a brick wall. That is, i think that you, ultimately, want something that is consistent with your conception of reality, except where you explicitly want it to deviate to make the game better.
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