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Message: <blockquote data-quote="woodelf" data-source="post: 2294390" data-attributes="member: 10201">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?</blockquote>

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