Gold Roger said:
"It's not in the rules s I can't do it!"
You know, that's an argument I just don't get. Imo no RPG out there can account for every situation. It's impossible to create such a game.
Agreed. However, extending your argument without qualification, if the sum of what you can do is in the head of the game referee, why do you need rules at all? Why can't the game referee just decide what happens all the time?
Obviously, either extreme is a little bit silly. As a game referee, one of the main reasons I want rules is that they reduce the amount of work involved in running the game. Instead of having to think deeply about every situation, I can rely on a trusted rules set to handle the most common situations. It's easier to use an established resolution process than it is to event a good one every time you need one.
For example, every character that will routinely want to sweep people of their feet will take the necessary powers. Now, there may occur situations where a rogue, cleric, monster or even wizard without such a power wants to knock someone to the ground. But that's an extraordinary circumstance. And I don't think we need rules for suxh extraordinary circumstances cluttering the corebooks in a game that has a DM.
I don't consider a combat manuever any 5 year old can attempt on the playground to be an 'extraordinary circumstance'. Nor do I consider a combat manuever any 5 year old on the playground can attempt to be a priviledged tactic of only certain highly trained individuals. It might require a high degree of training for it to work against someone else with a high degree of training, but that is a very different thing.
But there are worse problems with making this something you leave up to the DM, as your next example makes perfectly clear.
All we need is a system that allows us to easily adjucate such extraordinary circumstances. And we know from Massawyrms AIC review that ability vs defense can be used for such. He gives the situation of someone lying under a table who wants to kick it so two guys on it fall.
We can be sure he didn't have a power for that.
Ability vs. defense as a general system for resolving trips is a terrible choice. It may have worked as a quick and dirty method of resolving an extraordinary situation once, but that is not the same thing as working well. An obvious problem with using 'ability vs. defense' in this situation is from the perspective of the kicker, the really pertinant problem isn't the balance of the individuals on the table, but the total weight of the table and the combatants on top of it. If its a stone table, it makes a very big difference. If the table is a solid oak beam table crudely manufactured to be used by ogres, or a 20' long mahogany formal dining table, or pretty much anything other than a lightly built modern card table then we really need to take that into account. If we don't take such things into account in general, then in general we are going to have people attempting to trip foes every time it reasonably could be attempted (and not just when people are standing on tables) because we've made it so easy to do. Are ad hoc system will actually encourage rogues, clerics, monsters and perhaps even wizards to create 'extraordinary circumstances' all the time and it will very quickly cease to be creative or extraordinary to do so.
Sure, I can adjudicate anything on an ad hoc basis. There is nothing that I can't make the rules to cover. But there is a very big difference than adjudicating something and adjudicating it well. Even amongst good DMs, only a fraction of them are also good rulesmiths. Thats why you rely on good professional rulesmiths to craft systems for you to use which are hopefully universal enough to handle the majority of things you want to occur with some frequency in your campaign world.
