What would a fighter versatile out of combat look like?

[Quickleaf]

Mostly going the "mythic" route I see though there are a few "use allied resources" entries and the Rogue's player is using player actions rather than in-character assets. That pretty much matches my earlier list.

Huh, we must have different definitions of mythic. Maybe near-mythic for some of them... let's see of the 12 examples I gave (and this is high-level D&D we are talking, so presumably at least 11th level or up), I'd say 2 strike me as mythic and I'm not entirely happy with them, the paladin & the fighter examples for surviving underwater.

For the paladin it actually is something that kind of makes sense, since great saints were known to live without food and water for incredibly long periods of time, and there are mystics who could slow their breathing down immensely. Back that with the power of D&D faith, and ok, I can buy Sustained by Faith. Using it to venture underwater flies in the face of what I normally associate with a paladin doing, but it also could be used to, say, survive torture while imprisoned by the blackguard king who betrayed you - and that feels like a paladin!

Now, the fighter example is totally mythic, I'll grant you that. If we were going to make it more realistic I would give the fighter with the right talent (and performing proper preparation exercises) a maximum breath hold time of 20 + their Constiution modifier minutes; after that they begin drowning. Stig Severinsen, a German free diver, held his breath for 22 minutes back in 2012, so let's hold that as the limit of human capability. Of course, he didn't move at all in those 22 minutes, but let's assume the high-level fighter with the appropriate talent can do what Stig Severinsen did while fighting underwater and getting stabbed! It's a little hard to believe, but we can imagine it withing the realm of possibility for a character who is repeatedly cut, bludgeoned, impaled, poisoned, chewed on, fried with magic, and otherwise damaged as part of their daily career.

So compared to the 3e water breathing spell which lasts 2 hours per level, this may seem insignificant. However, if the system limited the water breathing spell in a way that 3e does not, there would be some parity there. As long as the adventure only involved a brief bit of exploration and a fight or two underwater, the fighter could hold his own.

An alternative would be to add a Lady of the Lake type figure which a fighter could take a talent for. Personally, I love this idea, though it may be more assumed setting in rules than some GMs want.

 

[Quickleaf]

Similarly, if having a fighter search a village house-to-house requires the player of the fighter to actually resolve that on a granular level, plotting his/her PC's movements on the town map and resolving the interaction with each inhabitant, it is going to take forever to play out even if in purely probabilistic terms it is equally efficient, and even if, in terms of ingame time, the fighter's search only takes a few hours while we give Discern Location a casting time of 1 day.

To make non-magical versatility in exploration viable at the table, mechanical traditions have to be departed from.

Hmm, I don't think I agree with you. Maybe I half agree, half disagree.

Hirelings have long had a place in D&D and so has domain management. My BD&D Rules Cyclopedia on page 133 even has a list of hirelings that includes the Spy! For "500+ gp per mission" the spy "may be hired to spy on a group the character wants more information about." True to BD&D form, it leaves the rest in the DM's hands, but that's approaching territory pretty darn close to [MENTION=23935]Nagol[/MENTION]'s example with the fighter organizing a search party with his hirelings,

The attempt to balance fighters in combat along these lines turns out to have not been so popular. It may not be any more popular, for the D&D audience, if adapted to out-of-combat versatility.

Really? I mean, don't dispute that it's probably true, since many players like to feel like there's parity between their characters & the rules that reflect those characters (heck, I'm one of them! )...I'm just wondering what source you have in mind when saying this? Was it something from the 5e playtest?

I think there is an elusive middle ground which players enjoy, somewhere between player actions and character actions, and that mechanics can walk that line in a way that is not a least common denominator compromise but actually meets the gaming needs of both player types. For example, the player might choose a fighter ability called Pledge (Lady of the Lake) that has story implications...how the fighter made that relationship and was choosen by the Lady can handled in the same way the GM handles multi-classing from 3rd level fighter to a level in wizard, or taking a orestige class, that is with either some RP time for it in the gaming sessions or handling it "offscreen." Pledge (Lady of the Lake) might allow the fighter to enter the Plane of Faerie instantaneously by swearing to perform a martial quest for the Lady. Effectively, the player just got a limited version of planewalk/instant travel, but it's all hidden in story elements built into character building with its own sort of logic.

 

[pemerton]

Hirelings have long had a place in D&D and so has domain management. My BD&D Rules Cyclopedia on page 133 even has a list of hirelings that includes the Spy! For "500+ gp per mission" the spy "may be hired to spy on a group the character wants more information about." True to BD&D form, it leaves the rest in the DM's hands

Spies are in Gygax's DMG too. I can't remember now whether they use their own table or the assassination table for success chances.

But the rules for spies (and assassins) in the DMG at least do have something of an implication that they will be resolved more granularly than casting a Divination spell - especialy if it is the PC doing it him-/herself. (Sages, in Gygax's DMG, don't have such an implication - you just roll. I like that better.)

I'm just wondering what source you have in mind when saying this?

I was thinking of 4e, which balances fighters et al against casters by giving them baked-in "drama points" for combat via encounter and daily powers.

For example, the player might choose a fighter ability called Lady of the Lake that has story implications...how the fighter made that relationship and was choosen by the Lady can handled in the same way the GM handles multi-classing from 3rd level fighter to a level in wizard, or taking a orestige class, that is with either some RP time for it in the gaming sessions or handling it "offscreen." Lady of the Lake might allow the fighter to enter the Plane of Faerie instantaneously by swearing to perform a martial quest for the Lady. Effectively, the player just got a limited version of planewalk/instant travel, but it's all hidden in story elements built into character building with its own sort of logic.

That's not going to cause any headaches, I agree - it's a version of [MENTION=23935]Nagol[/MENTION]'s suggestion of having a caster as a friend/henchman.

It's the purely martial solutions - searching houses, walking long distances without getting tired or killed, etc - that I think are desirable but are hard to do within the received framework of D&D tradition.

 

[Quickleaf]

It's the purely martial solutions - searching houses, walking long distances without getting tired or killed, etc - that I think are desirable but are hard to do within the received framework of D&D tradition.

Huh, so you're making a different argument than the "feats of mythic proportion" dilemma. It appears to be that D&D treats spells and non-spell actions with different degrees of granularity or, to use a metaphor, lens zoom...is that right? Maybe I'm just so outside-the-box with my gaming that I'm having trouble grasping this

I do get your comment now about 4e's encounter/daily powers being unpopular. I actually think 4e's initial release insisting that all classes use the AEUD model was a bit shortsighted; for example, a similar effect (limited uses of great power) could be achieved with a fatigue system to boost powers, an "adrenaline generation" system to unlock boosted powers in the midst of a fight, a system with combat-based prerequisites to stronger powers, etc. AEUD approximates those sorts of systems but does so in a way that is artificial, and unnecessarily so. I suspect that if they renamed fighter powers "maneuvers" and went with at least one of those 3 alternatives I listed which more closely made to fictional models of the Fighter, that the 4e fighter would have been better received. Like so much of 4e, the fighter class is brilliant, and brilliantly underdeveloped.

 

[Manbearcat]

Actually, I've never really played FATE and I don't know what Stargazer is. Wait...does LoA stand for Legends of Anglerre? It's based on a comic series? I remember reading a review that made it sound fantastic but I know nothing about it. @Celebrim I think mentioned that some of my ideas were like a "less creative version of FATE's keywords", so it sounds like something I should check out!

Errrr...I meant Starblazer. Legends of Anglerre/

I admitedly tend to get confused by conversations about "abstraction", since abstraction is a matter of degree and is happening all the time in a game.

I'll try to clarify my point below.

Spies are in Gygax's DMG too. I can't remember now whether they use their own table or the assassination table for success chances.

But the rules for spies (and assassins) in the DMG at least do have something of an implication that they will be resolved more granularly than casting a Divination spell - especialy if it is the PC doing it him-/herself. (Sages, in Gygax's DMG, don't have such an implication - you just roll. I like that better.)

<snip>

It's the purely martial solutions - searching houses, walking long distances without getting tired or killed, etc - that I think are desirable but are hard to do within the received framework of D&D tradition.

Pemerton has the right of it here. Consider the widely used tropes of "perilous journey" (PJ) and "information gathering" (IG). The resolution of these two aspects of gameplay have potential consequences inherent to (a) "how long does it take to do it" (temporal) and (b) "how much stuff is in the way of the attainment of the goal" (spatial).

A mundane performing IG (say searching houses or knocking on doors), suffers potential "in-fiction" fallout from both (a) and (b). The GMing principles say to work "off-screen". How long does this take to get done (a)? Several hours or longer. Well that is plenty of time for "facts on the ground to have changed such that the intelligence is now stale", "for the bad guy to have slipped through the dragnet/blockade." How much stuff is in the way of the goal (b)? Oh lots. Therefore, we need to mechanically resolve each part of this stuff rather than abstracting a check for the whole effort. The thinking here being (i) "because that is how it would get done in real life...several discrete actions/efforts" and (ii) "the mechanics say I need to roll random, complicating encounters every % of time/space covered." The same applies to a PJ (perhaps a trek through treacherous badlands).

Whereas the Wizard can reduce the fallout from (or completely circumvent) (a) and (b) and its attendant (i) and (ii) by way of "I cast <insert Divination>" or "I cast Teleport, Fly, Wind Walk, Plane Shift" etc. Temporal (instantaneous vs a fair stretch of time). Spatial (nothing of consequence - or nothing at all - vs lots of stuff). Relatively Assured and Safe Fiat (or simplistic, virtually assured resolution) vs lots of tasks to resolve (and proportional, accompanying opportunity for failure/fallout/random encounters).

However, if they are on the same resource scheme (as I mentioned above) using the same conflict resolution framework, and the granular accounting for time and space is much more abstracted and relaxed (such that off-screen consequences for time endured and space/stuff crossed/encountered aren't disproportionately punitive for mundanes), then you're able to achieve a level of parity between spellcasters and noncasters.

 

[pemerton]

Huh, so you're making a different argument than the "feats of mythic proportion" dilemma. It appears to be that D&D treats spells and non-spell actions with different degrees of granularity or, to use a metaphor, lens zoom...is that right?

Traditionally, yes, I think so. Skill challenges in 4e are an exception, of course, but they seem quite unpopular within the D&D community.
[MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] above this one elaborates some of the relevant considerations, I think, as well as pointing to one obvious mechanical solution - equally-resourced conflict resolution. But this is just the skill challenge by another name, and hence has the popularity issue. (In Marvel Heroic RP, the Punisher crashing through a building in the Battle Van and then grabbing big guns from the back to blow everything up is handled, mechanically, much the same as Dr Strange trying really hard to blow up Dormammu with a spell: both are just a bonus die in a pool. D&D hasn't traditionally handled such things as mechanically equivalent.)

Maybe I'm just so outside-the-box with my gaming that I'm having trouble grasping this

Or maybe I'm wrong in my sense of what the audience wants?

For instance:

a similar effect (limited uses of great power) could be achieved with a fatigue system to boost powers, an "adrenaline generation" system to unlock boosted powers in the midst of a fight, a system with combat-based prerequisites to stronger powers, etc. AEUD approximates those sorts of systems but does so in a way that is artificial, and unnecessarily so.

When I look at AEDU I see it solving a couple of problems elegantly: it allows interesting stuff, on a metagame/plot point rationing basis, and even if one power is a bit over-powered it can't be spammed endlessly.

When you go for a adrenaline-surge model you either have to go very vanilla (Essentials with Power Strike) or run the risk of broken spamming of good options (I haven't seen psionics in play, but I gather it is prone to this and I'm not surprised).

So AEDU to me looks like the obviously better solution. But it seems that both the Essentials and the psionics routes would have been more popular with the audience, even though they seem to me to lead to obviously more boring play (vanilla or spamming). I (and the 4e designers) even seemed to have on our side the fact that most 3E players see wizards (more options, but less spamming due to memorisation requirements) as more interesting than sorcerers.

So my sense of what people will and won't like is probably not very reliable!

 

[Nagol]

Huh, we must have different definitions of mythic. Maybe near-mythic for some of them... let's see of the 12 examples I gave (and this is high-level D&D we are talking, so presumably at least 11th level or up), I'd say 2 strike me as mythic and I'm not entirely happy with them, the paladin & the fighter examples for surviving underwater.

Here's how I see the examples.

1. Cloud castle

The Ranger has the World Pillar Mountain talent letting him know the location of a magic mountain said to climb so high it touches the realm of the cloud giants; they need to take a longer treacherous journey (than the Wizard's mass fly spell), but the advantage is the BBEG won't necessarily see them coming. (player resources affecting world)

The Paladin can consult his Celestial Allies who grant him and his companions the use of pegasi or celestial griffons if he is in good standing with his faith; if his faith is shaken he may need to perform an act of atonement or undertake a quest first. (use of in-game resources -- faction/organisations)

The Rogue happens to have the Get In Anywhere talent and it's up to the player to come up with a story about how she managed to get into the cloud castle... However first the rogue will have to devise some means of getting a really long rope down to her companions, or otherwise help them find some means of getting up to the castle. (mythic -- the Rogue can get in anywhere without requiring in-game resources to accomplish the task so long as an entertaining story can be delivered)

The Fighter has the Issue Epic Challenge challenge, which he can use to goad the BBEG to negotiate a mutually agreed location for a final violent confrontation. Even if the BBEG sends a lieutenant, all the fighter and companions need to do now is defeat the lieutenant and question him/her for information on how to enter the cloud castle. (mythic -- the Fighter can issue a challenge heard and accepted by his target without question or consideration)

2. Other Plane of Existence

The Ranger knows how to identify the Faerie Byways from natural signs and the general laws one must observe to reach the Plane of Faerie. There will be challenges along the way, however, but these challenges may also offer insights and tricks (true to fey lore) that help the heroes later on. (this could be any one of the three. If the faerie byways are part of the original world then it is using in-game environment and resources. If the player is adding the by-ways then it is player action and/or mythic depending on how the action is resolved)

The Paladin's steed at high-level has gained the planeswalking ability, so getting into Faerie is as easy as going for a quick ride; he can take one companion with him but that's no more, and he won't be able to use his horse to leave Faerie for 24 hours...hopefully they don't need to travel to a fey realm where time is distorted! (in-game resources)

The Rogue has the In Hot Water talent which lets her be taken by an extra planar creature who is angry with her or who wants her for some reason. Hopefully she can negotiate with her fey abductors long enough for the rest of her companions to arrive in Faerie, and there may be a price to her freedom, but at least she got to Faerie free of charge! (player affecting world)

The Fighter might have the Champion of the Seldarine reputation reward for a service he performed for the Elf Queen that won her favor; calling on a favor, he makes a Reputation check to determine whether the Elf Queen helps him for free or if there's a price attached to her aid (and how steep it will be). Other classes could have this reward too, true, but the fighter would get bonus reputation rewards at high level. (either in-game resources if favour part of backstory/earned during play or player affecting world)

3. Surviving Underwater

The high-level Ranger has the Survive Anywhere talent so this is a cakewalk for him, and the player comes up with the explanation of using a oxygen-emitting moss as a form of rebreather. The GM smiles, that's cool. (mythic)

The Paladin draws on his Sustained by Faith talent which will let him get by without air, food, or water, but not forever and afterward he will be fatigued. (mythic)

The Rogue uses her Just the Tool for the Job talent to pull out a hat of underwater breathing, the player nervously asking the GM who she stole it from. The GM calmly informs her there may be a high-level Elementalist who is rather put out with her now, and before the rogue can call upon the talent again she will need to resolve the situation with the Elementalist. Great. But she is underwater. (player affecting world)

The Fighter draws on two talents to keep up with his companions, Epic Endurance and Delay Affliction. The first lets him achieve feats of free diving at a level that surpasses mortal limits, while the second lets him avoid having the pay the price if he starts drowning until after the fight...victory could cost the fighter his life, but it's better to die in battle. (mythic)

Don't get me wrong; all three options are viable but they all have downsides.

The only option traditionally presented in D&D is in-game resources. The downside of this one is the game mechanics can undercut it as a factor in emergent play. That's what I found happening in 3.X. The codification of the Leadership feat cut at henchfolk and the default assumptions around magic item creation, cost, and availability undercut utility items as resources. Those game mechanics and assumptions were baked into 3.X for a reason though -- they were part of an attempt to curb some types of gaming excess and deliver a more consistent and fun experience at more tables.

Mythic makes some players of fighter-types uncomfortable as the PCs feel more super-powered than Conan-esque. It introduces mechanisms that the scenario designer needs to take into account because the attributes bypass obstacle placement by their very nature. D&D modules are already notorious for designers hand-waving magical obstacle clearance (the following list of spells don't function here because *mumble mumble*).

Player action developing the narrative or world-shaping outside the character works very well in some games like Strands of Fate or Leverage but I find it jarring and out of place for the experience I seek as a D&D player.

 

[Nagol]

Spies are in Gygax's DMG too. I can't remember now whether they use their own table or the assassination table for success chances.

But the rules for spies (and assassins) in the DMG at least do have something of an implication that they will be resolved more granularly than casting a Divination spell - especialy if it is the PC doing it him-/herself. (Sages, in Gygax's DMG, don't have such an implication - you just roll. I like that better.)

I was thinking of 4e, which balances fighters et al against casters by giving them baked-in "drama points" for combat via encounter and daily powers.

That's not going to cause any headaches, I agree - it's a version of [MENTION=23935]Nagol[/MENTION]'s suggestion of having a caster as a friend/henchman.

It's the purely martial solutions - searching houses, walking long distances without getting tired or killed, etc - that I think are desirable but are hard to do within the received framework of D&D tradition.

I think the purely martial solutions are hard on a several of levels.

Solutions involving world resources require prior placement of those resources. The inclusion of such resources can increase the burden of DMing for those who haven't normally gone down that path.

Purely martial solutions to problems normally tackled via magic typically have a potential cost, higher time resolution, and greater chance of complication/consequence. Providing guidelines to help standardise these can go a long way to making the options viable -- sort of like page 42ing the player's attempt at resource utilisation.

Purely mundane solutions --primarily because of the time component -- bump into other game mechanics like random encounter, provisioning/survival, etc. They also directly attack scenario placing and time pressure design. This gets to [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION]'s granularity issue. A magical and mundane solution to the same problem use the same granularity when compared against the in-game time element, but that drives dramatically different risks/costs for the player action/resolution calculus.

How do you encourage player use of such resources? In my experience, players look to their characters first, their companions second, and to the wider world infrequently. Players that look to their surroundings and attempt to utilise available resources first are relatively rare.

Some obstacles have very limited mundane methods of attack. Magic can let you run across the lava surface to reach the McGuffin, but coming up with a plausible mundane solution is going to be tough.

 

[Quickleaf]

I'll try to clarify my point below.

Ah, ok thanks, I get it now. And I have a rejoinder...

Pemerton has the right of it here. Consider the widely used tropes of "perilous journey" (PJ) and "information gathering" (IG). The resolution of these two aspects of gameplay have potential consequences inherent to (a) "how long does it take to do it" (temporal) and (b) "how much stuff is in the way of the attainment of the goal" (spatial).

Yes, [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] made the point very well! I think I'll limit my rejoinder to the Information Gathering scenario he and [MENTION=23935]Nagol[/MENTION] were discussing. I'll leave the Perilous Journey for another post.

The short version of my rejoinder is (a) smart, tough, but mostly fair adventure design, and (b) recalibrating divinations.

A mundane performing IG (say searching houses or knocking on doors), suffers potential "in-fiction" fallout from both (a) and (b). The GMing principles say to work "off-screen". How long does this take to get done (a)? Several hours or longer. Well that is plenty of time for "facts on the ground to have changed such that the intelligence is now stale", "for the bad guy to have slipped through the dragnet/blockade." How much stuff is in the way of the goal (b)? Oh lots. Therefore, we need to mechanically resolve each part of this stuff rather than abstracting a check for the whole effort. The thinking here being (i) "because that is how it would get done in real life...several discrete actions/efforts" and (ii) "the mechanics say I need to roll random, complicating encounters every % of time/space covered." The same applies to a PJ (perhaps a trek through treacherous badlands).

Ok, first off I'm assuming this is a significant element of an adventure - say, tracking down an urban adversary like a crime boss, a murderer, or a political dissident - and not simply an impromptu trying to find a criminal not important to the adventure. Because in the latter case I would run it as an opposed Streetwise check. In other words, it is something with some design work devoted to it (even if it's the DM's chicken scratch notes) and thought about stakes, consequences for failure, and the adversary's strategies.

So *how* the adventure design treats this scenario is really important. Adventure design needs to take into account common "adventure breaking" abilities of PCs of that level, then the designer needs to decide how to respond to those abilities. Usually this should be to challenge them, but not negate them. I'll talk about Divinations shortly, but let's start with a mundane example... the Streetwise skill... so what happens when they start asking around about the BBEG? Why doesn't one check crack the whole case? Who has the clues they need to find him? It needs to be more than just one NPC and more than one clue. What's the advantage to piecing these clues together? The players should learn about the BBEG and his defenses/traps/resources, as well as the greater situation. If a binary question ("is the bad guy here?") is all the information the players want then I'd argue that the adventure design has failed to add enough story details to make learning about the BBEG compelling. There should always be a sense of exploration of the unknown and curve balls thrown at the PCs. Basic storytelling guideline that also applies to adventures, right?

Whereas the Wizard can reduce the fallout from (or completely circumvent) (a) and (b) and its attendant (i) and (ii) by way of "I cast <insert Divination>" or "I cast Teleport, Fly, Wind Walk, Plane Shift" etc. Temporal (instantaneous vs a fair stretch of time). Spatial (nothing of consequence - or nothing at all - vs lots of stuff). Relatively Assured and Safe Fiat (or simplistic, virtually assured resolution) vs lots of tasks to resolve (and proportional, accompanying opportunity for failure/fallout/random encounters).

Divinations, at least as they are presented in 3e/d20 are overdone. Here is one of my favorite quotes (from Harbinger of Doom) about divination magic in D&D that explains my philosophy about them:

What we're really talking about is a means of asking questions of the universe (rather than a person); effects are generally divided according to what kinds of questions you can ask, what it costs to ask the question, and how clear of an answer you get; more rarely there are distinctions of chance to succeed in asking and other kinds of limitations. The central question is the breadth of divination powers, and how the flow of both story and game intersect with those powers.

So, back to casting our Scry spell to find the BBEG. What I would expect such a spell to require to make sense in the narrative is:

• A component/focus which is closely related to the BBEG. Using the magic principle of familiarity (which many games like Ars Magica, Mage, and True20 do), this would be something the BBEG was in contact with for a long time like a favored penknife, a drop of his blood or some of his fingernails, or a relative (living or dead). So the PCs would need to acquire the component first, and that may take time.
• Next the PC needs to be able to name the target they're scrying on. True name principles of magic require that it be the target's actually given name, which the PCs have uncover thru...other footwork. Of course, if they knew where the BBEG was already they could just cast Scry at that location, but the whole point of this adventure is finding the BBEG so obviously they don't have that info yet.
• Casting the spell shouldn't be like turning on the TV and getting an absolutely clear picture - that just doesn't feel right, and strikes me as the kind of thing a crystal ball should help with ("clearing the image" as it were). So there's some check or roll like 4e rituals involved to determine the extent of details the image of the BBEG picks up.
• From what they're able to gather of the area and people around the BBEG during the duration of the spell, the PC needs to deduce the BBEG's location using...you guessed it...other clues they've gathered. Since this is an adventure for PCs at a level to access Scry, it needs to present some specific guidelines about what the spellcaster sees/hears.
• And if there are countermeasures that work against scry, like rotating your bricks with blood of a blind man for example, whether the BBEG has any of those implemented. Probably not, but it depends on the BBEG.

So there are several steps to casting the Scry spell the way I've conceived it that still make it seriously awesome (and maybe give a better sense of it being *magic*), but all put it into the context of a greater investigation happening. Scry is a strategy not an adventure-ended: the rogue gives the wizard a funny look when he starts blathering about discovering "the given name of The Shadow" and finding "the principle of familiarity", but the rogues eyes light up when the wizard concludes with: "...so that's why we need to visit the whorehouse he frequents and shake down his thugs."

 

[Quickleaf]

Yeah, I can get you not wanting player actions affecting the world in D&D. Let me ask a question about this example...

The Rogue happens to have the Get In Anywhere talent and it's up to the player to come up with a story about how she managed to get into the cloud castle... However first the rogue will have to devise some means of getting a really long rope down to her companions, or otherwise help them find some means of getting up to the castle. (mythic -- the Rogue can get in anywhere without requiring in-game resources to accomplish the task so long as an entertaining story can be delivered)

Is there anything that would make something like this more palatable to you? Or is it wholy anthemic to your sense of gaming when playing D&D?