When Adventure Designers Cheat

[Psion]

I don't think it's fair to damn D&D to not living up to LotR or Conan any more than it is to damn LotR for not living up to Conan, or vice versa.

Though inspired by those classics, D&D, like fantasy novels, is its own thing. And it has to fulfill different functions, which is all the more reason we should expect it to be different.

 

[pemerton]

I don't think it's fair to damn D&D to not living up to LotR or Conan any more than it is to damn LotR for not living up to Conan, or vice versa.

Though inspired by those classics, D&D, like fantasy novels, is its own thing. And it has to fulfill different functions, which is all the more reason we should expect it to be different.

I agree entirely. I said:

Either sort of game can be a fun way to spend one's time, but I do think it is hard to combine them: resource-management play does not tend to produce very realistic medieval simulation, nor simulation of any of the main literary genres: neither LotR nor Conan stories involve the protagonists making choices guided primarily by resource considerations.

My point was that, unless we are explicit about what those functions are that D&D has to fulfill - ie what is the principal player goal, for example, and how does this relate to character activities and character goals - we can't really say what counts as good or bad module design.

And by player goal, I mean something more precise than "have fun". This is the goal of most amateur sport, and also of most amateur collecting, but sports magazines and collecting magazines read pretty differently.

I think that D&D (in its 3E form) has as the principal player goal a type of tactical pleasure, in resource collection, management and deployment. The DMG rules for encounter design, XP, treasure awards and so on all support this goal. They also ensure that character goals overlap closely with player goals: the way players get resources to use and manage is by having their characters use their resources to kill monsters, thereby getting treasure.

D&D doesn't tend to work as well when character goals are varied from the above. Oriental Adventures, for example, recognises that the sorts of characters it helps players build will not be interested primarily in amassing treasure by killing monsters, and tries to compensate by saying that the daimyo will award the characters with treasure instead. But this will tend to break the verisimilitude - if the daimyo has so much wealth, why does he need to send 4 3rd-level losers out to do his bidding, as opposed to buying a staff of solar summoning?

I want to stress again that this is not a criticism of D&D; it is simply noting a system limitation. Other systems which try to overcome the limitation face different problems. HARP, for example, seems to assume much the same player goal as D&D, but has a goal-based XP system, which means that players can amass character-development resources without having resource-accumulation be the goal of their characters. But it has a degree of incoherence in its character development system: it can't decide whether character development reflects learning and training (preserves verisimilitude, but fits well with a goal-based XP system only for a narrow range of character goals) or is purely metagame (fits well with the XP system, but not with the broadly "realistic medieval immersion" flavour of play the game tries to cultivate in other aspects of its mechanics).

It's also a natural consequence of this alternative mechanical approach that the role of treasure, and especially magical treasure, be downplayed (Conan D20 takes a similar approach here). But this removes one of the obviously fun bits of D&D, its wide range of wakcy and powerful magic items.

Returning to the discussion of D&D modules: if players have 3E expectations, then I would think that White Plume Mountain has a good chance of sucking for them. I think 1E probably cultivated a slightly different set of expectations - resource-type play was less important, and meta-game cleverness, outwitting the DM and so on more highly emphasised. I think this is also what is going on in the design of the Tomb of Horrors. It's personally not a style of play I enjoy, but to each their own!

 

[Endur]

A lot of this stuff gets explained by the power of artifacts, but in too many cases, "artifact" is just code for "here's a way to cheat and screw the party over, since the author is a hack who can't design a fair challenge for high-level PCs."

Gee, I think I know which campaign you are talking about.

Authors shouldn't use artifacts lightly. Strange magical effects should be based on the rules.

 

[Celebrim]

Alternative solutions are fine - but D&D doesn't support them as a principal method of conlfict resolution...

I think that's fair, in the sense that D&D provides a detailed method of combat resolution but the rules for other types of conflict resolution (even just flight rather than fight) aren't nearly as detailed.

That said, I don't think alternative solutions are rare in D&D, and indeed much of this thread actually revolves around a discussion of whether DM's are justified in breaking the RAW in order to enforce alternative solutions to a problem that they present.

Glamdring and Foehammer not artifacts?

I think that it is safe to say that Glamdring the Foehammer and Orcrist the Goblin Cleaver are not artifacts. They are rather famous swords, and they are the sort of thing that you don't need much bardic lore to recognize, but they are 'merely' ordinary works of Noldor skill and not items of the same stature of the Valar and made with thier power (or equivalent).

Perhaps not, but D&D doesn't support non-artifact level unique items very well.

And I think that that is entirely unfair. D&D supports non-artifact level unique items quite well, the problem is that most DM's don't. But there is no reason at all that a sword +3 shouldn't (or couldn't) have a name and a history, and every reason that it should.

If Glamdring is just a sword +2, why do the goblins flee in terror from it

First, because it is famous. Maybe, goblin matrons tell thier whelps to be good our the foe hammer will get them. Or, depending on how you interpret the mythology, some of the goblins present may have actually seen the foe hammer back when it was wielded by the Noldor. In any event, when Gandalf draws Glamdring in the midst of his pyrotechnic display, and Glamdring blazes with a blue flame in the midst of the goblins - they recognize the sword as the sign of doom that it is. Secondly, because just because Glamdring isn't an artifact, doesn't mean that it is 'just' a sword +2. Maybe it is a keen adamintium bastard sword +4 with the special quality of being able to detect goblin-kind within 300'. That's a pretty significant sword even if it isn't an artifact. Thirdly, because the 'DM' telling the story is good at his job, and he's more concerned with setting a scene than maxmizing the tactical advantage of the goblins. The NPC's don't act like robotic killing machines.

Beyond that, we (the players of the game) have gotten awfully casual about the barrier between DM and player knowledge, and between character knowledge and player knowledge - far too casual in my opinion - and as a consequence we are losing something important. The character certainly doesn't know he has a +2 sword. The player knows this, though even that is something that I don't think should be casually presented. What the character knows, and maybe all that the player should know, is that he has a magic sword which is significantly more powerful than an average magic sword.

*Treating +5 items as prestige items that are not easily accessible will, I think, hurt the balance of high-level 3E D&D.

I don't see how? It's up to the DM to provide player's with oppurtunity to get the resources that they need to survive the challenges he intends to present them with. But that doesn't mean that he needs to provide the magical equivalent of Wal-Mart for one stop shopping for all your non-artifact level magical item needs. For one thing, that really nerfs the item creation feats. For another, it totally blows the atmosphere of the game. And for another, it renders swords +2 'just swords +2'. What is wrong with players getting thier swords +3 and mythril chain mail coats the old fashioned way - as part of the horde of treasure that the find after overcoming the challenge.

And in this way, the Hobbit is a better D&D game than the one you are suggesting should be run.

Picking up on a more general point raised by your post: one could use the D20 mechanics to play a game which ignores D&D rules for encounter design...

Just stop there. There are no 'rules' for encounter design. There is no rule that says you should present characters with four encounters of EL X, followed by an oppurtunity to rest and rince and repeat. There are some guidelines and suggestions on encounter design in the 3rd edition text intended to help new inexperience DM's create challenges of the appropriate difficulty. But there are no 'rules' for encounter design, except that people should have fun. Whatever game you are playing? It's not the game I've been playing the last 20 years. Maybe its not 'D&D' by your (rather narrow and hidebound) definition, but I've enjoyed it and never realized I needed to call it something other than D&D. In fact, listening to you I wonder whether D&D has gotten a bad name because people insist on living up to its negative sterotype.

 

[Crothian]

I think that D&D (in its 3E form) has as the principal player goal a type of tactical pleasure, in resource collection, management and deployment.

D&D is what the DM an dplayers make of it. While these are possibilities they are far from the only options. I do tend to see people that limit the game to just these though. I think one can find many examples of games around EN World though that go beyond the basics presented. I know many of my own games do.

 

[pemerton]

<snip good defence of flavour in magic items>

Secondly, because just because Glamdring isn't an artifact, doesn't mean that it is 'just' a sword +2. Maybe it is a keen adamintium bastard sword +4 with the special quality of being able to detect goblin-kind within 300'. That's a pretty significant sword even if it isn't an artifact.

<snip>

What is wrong with players getting thier swords +3 and mythril chain mail coats the old fashioned way - as part of the horde of treasure that the find after overcoming the challenge.

This is a good sword to get from beating three trolls which are probably the equivalent of Hill Giants with extreme daylight vulnerability.

And in this way, the Hobbit is a better D&D game than the one you are suggesting should be run.

<snip>

There are no 'rules' for encounter design. There is no rule that says you should present characters with four encounters of EL X, followed by an oppurtunity to rest and rince and repeat. There are some guidelines and suggestions on encounter design in the 3rd edition text intended to help new inexperience DM's create challenges of the appropriate difficulty. But there are no 'rules' for encounter design, except that people should have fun. Whatever game you are playing? It's not the game I've been playing the last 20 years. Maybe its not 'D&D' by your (rather narrow and hidebound) definition, but I've enjoyed it and never realized I needed to call it something other than D&D. In fact, listening to you I wonder whether D&D has gotten a bad name because people insist on living up to its negative sterotype.

This is where we have different views about what constitutes 3E D&D. The DMG is called a Core Rulebook, and it has rules for encounter design and treasure by level. Of course, one can house-rule these away, as one can Rule Zero anything else.

I was talking about the 3E play experience. Once you change the play experience to a different sort of game, who knows what will happen!! Maybe you get a game like OGL Conan, although I think that game has its own problems in its reward system, as I outlined above.

I find it interesting that, on another recent thread I was attacked left and right for suggesting that the FAQ could be useful for those interested in playing with the RAW, while here I assume that the game will be played with RAW and get told I'm not talking about the true D&D.

As I said in an earlier post, there is a tendency on the part of D&D to present itself as a ruleset suited to any variety of gaming. This leads to an assumption that you can change the reward and encounter structure willy-nilly, while holding character design and action resolution rules constant, and still be playing the same game. I think this assumption is false. I think its falsity is born out by the fact that what some people on this thread are calling good adventure design, others are calling bad. That is because they are, in effect, playing different games, with different expectations about the relationship between player goals and character goals. The fact that one part of the mechanics - namely, the character builds and action resolution - is shared does not make the games the same, anymore than OGL Conan or D20 Cthulhu is just a D&D variant.

The final few sentences of your post almost seem to say that, if one plays 3E D&D out of the box as written, including the rules for encounter generation and treasure by level, you get a bad game. If that is true, that is a harsh criticism of a pretty significant part of the D&D ruleset. As it happens, I don't think it is true. While I find a lot of the WoTC adventures built in accordance with the rules a bit lame, I think some of Monte Cook's work (to pick on a well-known author whom I happen to like) shows that D&D can be made into a pretty fun play experience.

 

[pemerton]

D&D is what the DM an dplayers make of it. While these are possibilities they are far from the only options. I do tend to see people that limit the game to just these though. I think one can find many examples of games around EN World though that go beyond the basics presented. I know many of my own games do.

I'm sure they do. But for that sort of game, I find that D&D runs into problems that other systems do not. For example, D&D is balanced mainly around tactical play, and especially combat. In politically-themed games, I find it makes Enchantments and Divinations too easy, and alignment can tend to get in the way as well. For detailed immersion play, with a lot of political and religious thematic content, I actually prefer Rolemaster: (1) because of the detail in character development it allows, which thereby really allows a character's personality and inclinations to come through in his or her mechanical representation; (2) because powerful characters in RM are not as powerful as powerful characters in D&D, particularly when it comes to physical toughness and Raise Dead, which means that political problems, even if they only involve ordinary mortals, can't always be cut through simply by brute force at little personal risk.

 

[Odhanan]

Creating special circumstances in a module isn't "cheating". It's cool to have situations in which the common, accepted standard gets bent for a reason, the keyword being here a reason: there would have to be a reason for the designer to place such an element in a module, a reason increasing the fun of the module which furthermore would have to have a logical, believable explanation within the context of the module.

Just designing an effect to get rid of an ability annoying to the designer (Find the Path doesn't work just because) is bad. If Find the Path shouldn't work for the module to be more fun, then don't design the module for character levels that can use the spell in the first place.

 

[pemerton]

Creating special circumstances in a module isn't "cheating". It's cool to have situations in which the common, accepted standard gets bent for a reason, the keyword being here a reason: there would have to be a reason for the designer to place such an element in a module, a reason increasing the fun of the module which furthermore would have to have a logical, believable explanation within the context of the module.

Of course, what counts as "increasing the fun of the module" depends upon the expectations of the player group. 3ED&D, played by the book, generates expectations that may be at odds with some of the "cheats" being talked about in this thread.

 

[Crothian]

I'm sure they do. But for that sort of game, I find that D&D runs into problems that other systems do not.

D&D does not do everything the best, but it can still do all these things. I think divinations and snchantments actually helps politcal games, and alignment is a great tool to use in these games as well. I though do perfer to find ways to make D&D work instead of just accepting theat D&D does these things poorly. It is not always easy, but it is easier then trying to get some players to play other games.