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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6092235" data-attributes="member: 4937">I mentioned earlier that I thought we'd eventually need to get into a discussion of what it meant to be creative and surprising to the DM, and I think that time is now.Has anyone noticed that just about everyone has given as their examples of creativity using a spell in a way that was novel to the table?  In other words, someone was saying that turning a monster invisible to escape its gaze attack was surprising and novel to at least the DM, and probably to the player because that particular use was deemed 'creative'.  So we have descriptions of things like blowing up all the missiles in a necklace of missiles at the same time as 'creative', even though that's completely old school just like dropping a cavern roof on the monsters head is totally old school.   And in general 'creativity' almost always seems to involve using spells.There are several things going on here and some of them are kinda unique to D&D as a game system.  One of them is this tendency to rely on spells as outlets of player creativity.  The reason for that is that D&D spells each represent a unique and often vaguely defined mechanic.   They are actually little tiny packets of narrative power that let the player grab narrative control and determine on a small scale and in a limited way what happens in the game.  Often D&D spells are written in absolute ways - "if you do this, this happens (no save)" - like the story about using a spell to cause the castle gate to simply up and jump out of the way.  They are in other words reliable propositions.  The player has a reasonable expectation that when a spell is cast, a certain outcome will occur in a way that isn't really true by default of anything else in D&D.These acts of 'creativity' are written into the game and 'surprising' to DMs because they are numerous and powerful.  It's easy for a DM to overlook potential applications and to be shocked by the implications.  Often because they are so numerous, they are fairly poorly thought out by the designers in terms of balance of play issues.  They allow players to push 'I win' buttons, and they have a tendency to a) cause experienced players to gravitate to spell casting classes and b) make DMs rather leary of the whole Vancian system particularly in high level play.   And because they are vague, and because it isn't clear that they are balanced, and because they allow players to grab narrative control reliably in a game that otherwise decidely puts narrative resources in the hands of the DM, they are a major source of table disputes and conflicts.But I would argue that for the most part, they aren't that 'creative' in that in many cases the 'novel' use that the player puts the spell to is written into the text of the spell and is hopefully anticipated at least by the designer and has probably been a usage independently discovered at many tables by many players.  It's not the creativity of the spell use that makes them really attractive to certain types players; it is precisely that they are reliable means of grabbing narrative control and that the real argument here is over the question of narrative control.   And it is precisely players that want to take narrative control reliably that feel frustrated when the DM presents any obstacle to that plan for any reason - whether it really is at stake is a backlash against the percieved challenge to the DM's authority or not.   The very thing that they like about the spell - reliable narrative control - is threatened, and this must be resisted.I think Cybit really was on the right track earlier when he said:Now I don't agree with where he took that thought.  I don't think that you need to hit back twice as hard as a DM.  But the idea here in that quote, that there is something that distinguishes 'good' 'creative' uses of character resources from 'power gaming the system' is I think very important to discussing this topic and understanding each other instead of making this a substitute or proxy for DM vs. player arguments that we are dragging from the tables to the forums.   In particular, what I would argue is that what makes it 'power gaming' is the desire some players have to not engage in a 'Yes, and...' dialogue between the players at the table, but to grab narrative control and dictate to the DM.   Now sometimes players have symapathetic reasons for wanting to do that, like for example prior experience with DMs that refuse to relinquish narrative control and dictate to the players, but I would argue that sympathetic though thier motives would be you are exchanging one sort of disfunctionality for another.</blockquote>

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