Where is my Freaking Mule?!

[Greg K]

That's not to say your playstyle is bad or anything, just to say it's very niche.

And, you base the above upon?

 

[Imaro]

It's got nothing to do with experience. A new gamer is just as likely to make something up as not, simply because they've never been told that they can't. Likewise, experienced gamers aren't always confident in making stuff up, as evidenced by this very thread.

Eh, how about we just agree to disagree here, as neither of us can objectively prove that expereince or lack of makes people more or less willing to make things up in their game. However I will say that when approaching a new game for the first time, whether rpg or anything else, and something unexpected arises it has been my experience that most people turn to the rules for guidance first... not just create something out of thin air. YMMV of course.

 

[Imaro]

Tried every bloody one of them. I've got four or five different d20 naval supplements sitting in a box right now. Plus a couple of non-d20 ones as well. It's not like I didn't try. But, thanks for assuming that I tried one thing and then gave up.

I apologize for the assumption, though I do feel you could have made it a bit clearer that you had tried numerous rule sets as opposed to just one since the way you presented it certainly seems like you picked one rule set that didn't work out for you and that was it... as opposed to trying many and finding them all unsatisfactory for what you were trying to achieve... especially since earlier you asked Gnomeworks the same question about D&D by making the same inference from the information he had given.

I do find it strange that out of the numerous ship to ship combat rules, even some published by WotC themselves, that you were unable to find a single one that was fun or interesting in implementation.

Actually, I agree with you. I don't have an answer to the problem. And I do see it as a problem. As I said, I don't play D&D to be a spectator. I have zero interest in sitting around for an hour waiting for someone to get done something. Ten minutes is about my maximum tolerance any more before I start getting antsy. Call me ADD if you will, but, my tolerance for wasting my very limited free time is very low anymore.

Maybe if I was 15 again and playing for hours at a time. But, now I get my 3 hours a week and I want to play, not watch someone else for half an hour.

I think the answer is simple... DM pacing. You don't play out the entirety of a scene/combat/etc. with one player for 15, 20 or 30 minutes. Maybe it's my experience with nWoD where this situation can come up quite often but if you're moving from character to character instead of resolving each character's scene before moving to the next it actually works out quite well. Now someone who can't wait between 2 to 4 minutes for their turn probably won't be able to deal with this type of situation either and I guess at that point it really becomes a question of playstyles and whether someone who has to be doing something all the time is the type of player that is beneficial or detrimental to the type of game everyone else is interested in.

 

[GnomeWorks]

How do you not have the choice though? All you have to do is not participate. You can choose not to act. However, if you lack the ability, you also lack the choice.

You play 4e, don't you? You do things on other peoples' turns because you are forced to by the system. If you did not, the whole group suffers. You have a choice, yes, but you will irritate the other players and would not be playing the game the way it was designed if you chose not to participate.

I am beginning to suspect that the whole "I don't want to be a spectator, everybody does stuff on everybody's turns" is a direct result of the perceived problem in d20 with druids and their ilk taking forever to determine their actions (whether or not it was a real problem is something I can't comment on, not having experienced a mid- or high-level druid). I think a more reasonable answer, however, is to get rid of the whole "action economy" idea on a player's turn and reduce it to one action. Your turn, you do one thing, period. That significantly reduces the time a player uses to take an action (I have seen this in action in the system I'm working on, and it works beautifully for reducing combat length in terms of real time).

As I said, I don't play D&D to be a spectator. I have zero interest in sitting around for an hour waiting for someone to get done something. Ten minutes is about my maximum tolerance any more before I start getting antsy. Call me ADD if you will, but, my tolerance for wasting my very limited free time is very low anymore.

I would call a DM who completely resolves one character's personal actions - which the rest of the group has no impact on - in one go a poor DM. As Imaro mentioned above, the DM for this kind of situation should switch between the players relatively frequently, essentially reproducing the turn order found in combat.

I do this kind of juggling all the time, because my players have a tendency to not stick together in some situations. This requires me to split my attention, and I attempt to chunk it into - at most - ten-minute segments, with the understanding that sometimes a player's "turn" will take more time, sometimes less.

 

[Greg K]

I concur with Imaro and GnomeWorks. Then again, how to handle pacing when the party splits up is the type of things, imo, WOTC should have been adressing to help make people better DMs rather than, mechanically, trying to protect players from bad dms.

 

[BenBrown]

Eh, how about we just agree to disagree here, as neither of us can objectively prove. . .

Can I just paste this quote into every one of these threads?

 

[Lanefan]

Tried every bloody one of them. I've got four or five different d20 naval supplements sitting in a box right now. Plus a couple of non-d20 ones as well. It's not like I didn't try.

I ended up inventing my own system for ship-vs.-ship stuff, and I'll be the first to say it's no better (and in fact is probably worse) than any of the others out there; for me the only advantage it has it that because I dreamed it up I know exactly how it works and thus I can run it more smoothly.

Actually, I agree with you. I don't have an answer to the problem. And I do see it as a problem. As I said, I don't play D&D to be a spectator. I have zero interest in sitting around for an hour waiting for someone to get done something. Ten minutes is about my maximum tolerance any more before I start getting antsy. Call me ADD if you will, but, my tolerance for wasting my very limited free time is very low anymore.

Maybe if I was 15 again and playing for hours at a time. But, now I get my 3 hours a week and I want to play, not watch someone else for half an hour.

Others have suggested - and I have to agree - moving away from a strict turn-based system into something more free-form. Even re-rolling initiatives each round, and-or using a smaller initiative die (d6 or d10) and allowing simultaneous actions, and-or having spells take time within the round to cast, and-or having movement be an ongoing process rather than all happening at once on your "turn"; all can give things a more organic feel and give more reason to be involved at times when it's not your turn. That, and speaking in character is or should be a free action at any time unless for some reason speech is impossible.

System makes a difference too. Turn-based obviously works better in a system where each character's turn can be resolved quickly and easily.

Lan-"in ship-to-ship combat, a 'round' should be about 3 minutes unless spells are involved"-efan

 

[Hussar]

You play 4e, don't you? You do things on other peoples' turns because you are forced to by the system. If you did not, the whole group suffers. You have a choice, yes, but you will irritate the other players and would not be playing the game the way it was designed if you chose not to participate.

Well, I've played 4e for about a month, so, well, yes, I play 4e, although I'm hardly experienced. I did play 3e for about nine years, so, I have to ask, how do you avoid the whole group suffering when you choose a character that cannot contribute to combat? IME, 3e combat is LETHAL. Monsters of a given CR can generally kill an equal level PC in a single round of full attacks. Having one player ride the pines during combat results in dead PC's and would lead to some pretty pointed comments in most groups I've seen.

How do you avoid it?

Lanefan - totally agree. It all comes down to how much you want to abstract away. To keep a complete round of two ships firing and moving (with possibly around a hundred combatants total) under three minutes is a serious challenge. It really doesn't help that I've never managed to find or come up with decent platoon sized combat rules for 3e. I could adapt the Skirmish rules which were an adaptation for the mass combat rules for 1e, but, my players were not terribly interested in me adding on yet another system.

My problem was that a system either abstracted things to the point where everything is cinematic (Stormwrack is a good example of this) or micro-managed everything down to an almost Squad Leader level of detail (Broadsides!! I'm looking at you). I tried system after system. One I haven't tried that has caught my eye is Corsair that unfortunately came out pretty late in 3e (or at least I didn't see it until late) and by then I wasn't doing naval campaigns.

 

[pemerton]

I don't think this problem can be eliminated without having characters with the exact same abilities. My entire group doesn't want to jump on the bandwagon when my Wizard and Swordmage are doing magical research... my arcane characters don't want go research martial techniques and esoteric disciplines, and my Rogue actually wants to start his own guild of assasins soon. IMO, all of these things fall under the heroic fantasy genre.

I agree that they do. But D&D has, historically, tended to handle them in a way that (using Hussar's phrase) turns them into "solo minigames", whereas other mechanical options are available which help keep them oriented towards party play. For example, the assassin's guild could mechanically be modelled as playing some sort of role in skill challenges eg a bonus to Streetwise and Intimidate checks, and if someone in the party fails a social skill check then (at the risk of incurring blowback of some sort) the guild can be used (perhaps once per challenge, like a magic item) to cancel that failure (by eliminating the offended party).

Magical research, similarly, seems to be spending money to get future bonuses on Arcana checks (the DMG2 has some suggestions in respect of this).

On the other hand, if the magical research or assassin's guild aren't being used to further the overall party quests, but rather are ends in themselves, then I'm not sure how the game is meant to play at that point.

I think the answer is simple... DM pacing.

Perhaps. But to what end? If each player is playing a different game - the research game, the guild game, etc - and they don't interact, then I'm not sure it helps in the end that the GM moves around the table from game to game at a quick pace rather than a slow pace. You're still running half-a-dozen solo games. But if each of these endeavours is oriented at the party goals, then it should be feeding into skill challenges in the sort of ways I mentioned above.

 

[Imaro]

I agree that they do. But D&D has, historically, tended to handle them in a way that (using Hussar's phrase) turns them into "solo minigames", whereas other mechanical options are available which help keep them oriented towards party play. For example, the assassin's guild could mechanically be modelled as playing some sort of role in skill challenges eg a bonus to Streetwise and Intimidate checks, and if someone in the party fails a social skill check then (at the risk of incurring blowback of some sort) the guild can be used (perhaps once per challenge, like a magic item) to cancel that failure (by eliminating the offended party).

Magical research, similarly, seems to be spending money to get future bonuses on Arcana checks (the DMG2 has some suggestions in respect of this).

On the other hand, if the magical research or assassin's guild aren't being used to further the overall party quests, but rather are ends in themselves, then I'm not sure how the game is meant to play at that point.

Perhaps. But to what end? If each player is playing a different game - the research game, the guild game, etc - and they don't interact, then I'm not sure it helps in the end that the GM moves around the table from game to game at a quick pace rather than a slow pace. You're still running half-a-dozen solo games. But if each of these endeavours is oriented at the party goals, then it should be feeding into skill challenges in the sort of ways I mentioned above.

Ok, I might be interpreting this wrong... but are you implying that characters should only have "party goals"? That you don't understand the purpose of PC's having individual goals, desires, and aspirations for their characters outside of things that are wanted by the entire party? This baffles me, and I just want to clarify before I reply.