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PurpleXVI posted:I've always felt that "combat as a failure state" is an attempt to introduce "mechanics" that early D&D didn't really have, or had in very poor ways. Huh this is a pretty good point, that its not so much a substantive argument as a cowardly rearguard action. Whats interesting is that I can't think of too many RPGs where combat is, broadly, a failure state. You can absolute make a character/party in BITD or Blowback where combat is a failure state because nobody took any Skirmish/Commando, but that's just that the game accommodates that kind of skew rather than the game itself having a broad stance that you should be trying to not fight. Oddly, combat is kind of a failure state for Nice Marines, because you always win without rolling, so its very rare that you ever really get a problem where the solution is "kill it."
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Dec 31, 2022 00:40
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Combat is a fail state in all D20 games because it's boring as gently caress.
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Dec 31, 2022 00:48
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Yeah, I feel like "fail state" is kind of a bad term because it doesn't clarify whether the failure is for the character, the player, or the overall story. There's a big difference between, say, "combat is high-lethality/high-consequence to characters, but characters are disposable and turnover is fine" (stuff like DCC funnel games), "combat is high-consequence and this can actively derail the story, so players should pick their fights" (think something like Unknown Armies), and "combat is discouraged for the players by just making it really unfun," which... doesn't seem like good game design in general!
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Dec 31, 2022 01:08
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Antivehicular posted:Yeah, I feel like "fail state" is kind of a bad term because it doesn't clarify whether the failure is for the character, the player, or the overall story. There's a big difference between, say, "combat is high-lethality/high-consequence to characters, but characters are disposable and turnover is fine" (stuff like DCC funnel games), "combat is high-consequence and this can actively derail the story, so players should pick their fights" (think something like Unknown Armies), and "combat is discouraged for the players by just making it really unfun," which... doesn't seem like good game design in general! I wish in the times I played RPGs we were smart enough to just embrace being a massive fuckup so the failure state could be more readily enjoyed. That woulda been so much more fun than being slightly sad that your hacker got killed in Mexico 3000 miles away from her best friend.
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Dec 31, 2022 01:25
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I suspect that combat-as-failure-state went along with dungeon-as-heist, where the goal was just to get as much treasure as possible and leave. Combat was a failure state not because you'd lose, but because winning would use up your scarce resources and mean you had to leave with less loot, which was a less successful outcome but still a partially successful one - unlike the modern interpretation that anything other than getting right to the bottom of the dungeon and defeating the boss is a failure. And yea, now that the Tucker's Kobolds article has actually been posted, reading it made me call BS as well. Nobody had any fire resistance? Heck, in a vague attempt to search for AD&D 2nd Edition spells, it seems there was a 1st level Affect Normal Fires that could have just put out everything in a 10' radius.
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Dec 31, 2022 01:41
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Antivehicular posted:"combat is high-consequence and this can actively derail the story, so players should pick their fights" (think something like Unknown Armies) e: Actually UA is the only game I've played where I'd have actually been sad if my character died, instead of something like Delta Green or D20 where it was either irritating or funny. Magnetic North posted:I wish in the times I played RPGs we were smart enough to just embrace being a massive fuckup so the failure state could be more readily enjoyed. That woulda been so much more fun than being slightly sad that your hacker got killed in Mexico 3000 miles away from her best friend. mellonbread fucked around with this message at 01:52 on Dec 31, 2022 |
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Dec 31, 2022 01:48
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Magnetic North posted:I wish in the times I played RPGs we were smart enough to just embrace being a massive fuckup so the failure state could be more readily enjoyed. That woulda been so much more fun than being slightly sad that your hacker got killed in Mexico 3000 miles away from her best friend. I've been juggling on and off with the idea of a card-based RPG where you just play the cards with the results you want, though you may not have a "success" in your hand, or you may lack the metacurrency to play a "success" without also playing a consequence of some kind. So you might get into a fight, and play a "success" and a "collateral damage" card. So you kill that guy you're aiming at, but what you does also blows up some bystanders or injures an ally. Or maybe it's a "success" and an "extremely noisy" card, so you blow up the guy but he wails for like five minutes at full volume, attracting unwanted attention. Or maybe you decide to embrace being a total fuckup and just play "extremely noisy" and "collateral damage" without a "success" to get some more metacurrency. You completely miss your target, but you hit a container full of explosives, blowing up the rear wall of the building and burying several passers-by under the falling debris. The idea would be that ultimately the player might sometimes have to fail, but they would always have control over which flavour of failure they ended up with(successes and failures would fall into broad categories like "violence," "knowledge" and "stealth." Collateral damage would make sense for violence, but not the other two, for instance.). I've just always kept getting caught up on how to prevent people trivially blowing off their failures, farming metacurrency and free successes, or exactly what kind of categories would be simultaneously broad enough to not make everything fiddly, but also narrow enough that their success and failure cards would make sense for everything under their umbrella. hyphz posted:I suspect that combat-as-failure-state went along with dungeon-as-heist, where the goal was just to get as much treasure as possible and leave. Combat was a failure state not because you'd lose, but because winning would use up your scarce resources and mean you had to leave with less loot, which was a less successful outcome but still a partially successful one - unlike the modern interpretation that anything other than getting right to the bottom of the dungeon and defeating the boss is a failure. I feel like there's absolutely an interesting dungeon-crawling RPG to make where combat is a very dangerous outcome generally to be avoided if you can make a profit without it, but it also requires solid non-combat mechanics for avoiding getting into fights and something like tying advancement to wealth instead of fighting. I.e. say you get XP not for killing things, or acquiring valuables, but for spending money, to encourage players to make the sort of absurd and wasteful purchases at later levels that would drive further adventure and plot hooks on their own. I would absolutely love to play that game, in fact. I just feel like claiming any edition of D&D is this game is false.
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Dec 31, 2022 01:49
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PurpleXVI posted:I feel like there's absolutely an interesting dungeon-crawling RPG to make where combat is a very dangerous outcome generally to be avoided if you can make a profit without it, but it also requires solid non-combat mechanics for avoiding getting into fights and something like tying advancement to wealth instead of fighting. I.e. say you get XP not for killing things, or acquiring valuables, but for spending money, to encourage players to make the sort of absurd and wasteful purchases at later levels that would drive further adventure and plot hooks on their own.
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Dec 31, 2022 02:00
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mellonbread posted:UA combat is probably my favorite of any game. It's blazing fast and full of interesting tactical decisions that don't rely on positioning (which would require maps and miniatures). It's easy to get killed, but they don't call it the Occult Underworld because everyone there lives forever. Yeah, that's what I mean -- combat in UA is often a failure state for the character (because generally your goals involve remaining alive and not in prison), and sometimes a failure state for the story (because deadly combat is less likely to achieve goals in UA than in a lot of other games), but not necessarily a failure state for the player (because it's still fun to play as long as you're cool with the narrative consequences).
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Dec 31, 2022 02:13
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PurpleXVI posted:I've been juggling on and off with the idea of a card-based RPG where you just play the cards with the results you want, though you may not have a "success" in your hand, or you may lack the metacurrency to play a "success" without also playing a consequence of some kind. Otherkind dice work this way. I don't own Otherkind, but I own Psi-Run, which uses the same idea. You have a dice pool and a set of boxes into which you put the dice after you roll. The player decides where to put the good and bad dice, but one way or another, must live with the way the dice came out.
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Dec 31, 2022 02:19
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mellonbread posted:In a team based game where everyone is working toward a shared objective, screwing up to support your own characterization feels like you're not holding up your end of the bargain, so nobody wants to do it. It's hard to get everyone on the same page that nobody is "counting on you" out of character to succeed at everything, it's ok to gently caress it up if it creates a more entertaining outcome. Outside of games like Fiasco, which don't have a pretense of the player characters cooperating beyond a few loosely systemized relationships. Yeah, I was more thinking about how success is typically narratively inherent to both classic heroic characters and uninteresting power fantasies. So I'm talking about screwing up in "I'm going to get rich / get revenge / be super cool" more than "We are going to slay the dragon and save this sleepy village." But yeah, that's fair that some of the social pressure to succeed comes from trying to be each other's supportive teammates in their narratives, which is a good thing. Also, apparently, I'm repeating myself from another thread: Magnetic North posted:I'd love to try FIASCO some day. I feel that farces are something that sings to each of our own inherent nature as fuckups. At least, the idea of Fiasco appeals to me.
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Dec 31, 2022 02:34
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mellonbread posted:Combat is a fail state in all D20 games because it's boring as gently caress. No it isn't, dummy.
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Dec 31, 2022 02:37
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Plutonis posted:The kind of powerplayers that Tucker's Kobolds is usually invoked to be used as chastisement against would 100% gently caress them up. Yeah, like I like charop and I try to play fairly well, but honestly even at that level I'd be like "Hey so how many turns do these guys get before we get one" about it.
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Dec 31, 2022 03:07
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mellonbread posted:Combat is a fail state in all D20 games because it's boring as gently caress. There are many games where it rules actually, seems like you just played the bad ones.
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Dec 31, 2022 03:11
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bewilderment posted:seems like you just played the bad ones.
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Dec 31, 2022 03:27
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"combat is a fail state" is a reflection on how [early] D&D's combat works out in practical terms. in the very first edition(s) of the game, you rolled a d6 for hit points, and the smallest attacks were also rolling a d6 for damage. This is obviously a problem, because if you ever tried to fight on "even" terms, you're fairly likely to die as we get into later editions of D&D, this gap would widen: you'd get additional HP from high Constitution, other classes would roll larger than a d6 for HP, damage rolls would vary in die size, you might have better AC and attack rolls to begin with, and so on, but for a long time characters were still quite frail. You wouldn't even get "always take the maximum die size for your level 1 HP" until D&D 3rd Edition and because characters were so frail, the idea was that in any situation where you encounter a potentially hostile creature, you would or should do whatever you can to avoid taking a straight fight: parley with the creature, try to lure some of them out, have the Thief/Rogue sneak around to either take the treasure without a fight or take them by surprise, have the Wizard cast sleep to bypass the encounter entirely, and so on of course, some of these methods didn't have rules to define them, and so it tended to be a bit of storytelling and "negotiation" between the players jockeying for an advantageous position and the DM trying to inject a bit of chance and uncertainty into it. As a corollary, one might also say that the evolution of D&D from the original 1973 incarnation was based on Gygax formalizing the methods and processes that he encountered and adjudicated as he played games with people - someone would come up with something, Gygax made a rule to define it, and those notes would end up in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, but I digress having said all that, I don't think "combat is a fail state" was an explicit design goal, or an explicit principle or observation made at the time, but rather a retrospective as people played OSR-style games and put them under a lens
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Dec 31, 2022 04:57
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PurpleXVI posted:I feel like there's absolutely an interesting dungeon-crawling RPG to make where combat is a very dangerous outcome generally to be avoided if you can make a profit without it, but it also requires solid non-combat mechanics for avoiding getting into fights and something like tying advancement to wealth instead of fighting. I.e. say you get XP not for killing things, or acquiring valuables, but for spending money, to encourage players to make the sort of absurd and wasteful purchases at later levels that would drive further adventure and plot hooks on their own. I think the original basic D&D tied advancement to wealth. At least one of the games I played with the goon group did too. It may have been Best Left Buried?
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Jan 1, 2023 00:36
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hyphz posted:I think the original basic D&D tied advancement to wealth. First and second edition had xp coming directly from money recovered.
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Jan 1, 2023 07:05
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sebmojo posted:First and second edition had xp coming directly from money recovered. 2e didn’t. It’s a listed optional rule but it’s heavily discouraged in the text.
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Jan 1, 2023 07:25
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Advanced Dungeons & Dragons had you getting 1 XP per gold coin's worth of treasure. Red cover Basic did not: that game had XP values for monsters, and you got them for "defeating" them (including capturing & then releasing, explicitly, but not including monsters that flee). I don't know if earlier versions of D&D did that.
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Jan 1, 2023 08:47
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Arivia posted:2e didn’t. It’s a listed optional rule but it’s heavily discouraged in the text. I mean it's still there as an option, it just says "don't overuse it". I agree it's not the expected method of progression any more by second ed.
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Jan 1, 2023 09:03
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Leperflesh posted:Advanced Dungeons & Dragons had you getting 1 XP per gold coin's worth of treasure. Red cover Basic did not: that game had XP values for monsters, and you got them for "defeating" them (including capturing & then releasing, explicitly, but not including monsters that flee). I don't know if earlier versions of D&D did that. Huh? Mentzer (I think that’s what you mean by “red cover”) Basic explicitly says the PCs get 1 XP per 1 GP of treasure recovered, it’s on page 12 in both booklets. This is in all printed versions of Basic I’m familiar with, from Holmes to the 90s versions. OD&D has the same-ish rule, with a weird ratio of character level to dungeon or monster level applied, on page 18 of Men and Magic. You’ve always received XP from GP recovered and monsters defeated. This only changed in 2e and then completely went away in 3e. Arivia fucked around with this message at 09:33 on Jan 1, 2023 |
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Jan 1, 2023 09:28
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Arivia posted:Huh? Mentzer (I think that’s what you mean by “red cover”) Basic explicitly says the PCs get 1 XP per 1 GP of treasure recovered, it’s on page 12 in both booklets. This is in all printed versions of Basic I’m familiar with, from Holmes to the 90s versions. I actually checked before posting. Red cover D&D DMG page 12:  For shits & giggles, I've pulled out my pink box basic, and it doesn't give XP values. So I guess it changed between 1981 and 1983? e, OK interesting, the red PHB page 12 says you got XP for the treasure and for killing monsters in the intro adventure. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 09:43 on Jan 1, 2023 |
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Jan 1, 2023 09:40
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Leperflesh posted:I actually checked before posting. Red cover D&D DMG page 12: It’s two paragraphs below the one you have highlighted. I don’t know what you mean by pink box Basic, sorry.
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Jan 1, 2023 09:42
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Arivia posted:It’s two paragraphs below the one you have highlighted. I don’t know what you mean by pink box Basic, sorry. lol oh my god, it is I swear we never did that, I think we completely whiffed on that, wow pink box basic on the left:  It's got pink sides, the art fills the whole top of the box. I never played that edition, but I have one now that I got somewhere. The box is beat up but the books inside are in perfect mint condition, and it still has the dice, although the crayon is missing.
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Jan 1, 2023 09:44
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Leperflesh posted:lol oh my god, it is No worries, we all miss stuff. That’s 1981 Moldvay Basic. It’s supposed to be red but it looks like most are pretty sunbleached.
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Jan 1, 2023 09:49
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Arivia posted:No worries, we all miss stuff. It's like bright fuschia. Been pink since I was a kid. Here's my copies, side by side:  e, I'm looking at the xp values and treasure values and LOl no wonder we never loving leveled up, dear god
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Jan 1, 2023 09:52
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Leperflesh posted:It's like bright fuschia. Been pink since I was a kid. Yeah my bad.
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Jan 1, 2023 09:54
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My dad had a copy of the pink box, I was 11 when he bought me that red box on the left and that's when we first played. Of course he taught us, and now I'm wondering if the source of the screwup over XP was him. He was our GM, me and my best friend, and sometimes the whole family although my stepmom and older sister lost interest pretty quick. My strongest memory is of my first character, Vimp the Wimp, a thief with 1 hit point, dying by falling into a pit trap in the entrance of the Keep.
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Jan 1, 2023 09:57
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Leperflesh posted:My dad had a copy of the pink box, I was 11 when he bought me that red box on the left and that's when we first played. Of course he taught us, and now I'm wondering if the source of the screwup over XP was him. He was our GM, me and my best friend, and sometimes the whole family although my stepmom and older sister lost interest pretty quick. My strongest memory is of my first character, Vimp the Wimp, a thief with 1 hit point, dying by falling into a pit trap in the entrance of the Keep. Daaad did you know you messed up one rule in D&D 30 years ago and ruined my life and made the internet laugh at me to start 2023
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Jan 1, 2023 10:01
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Just looking it up, in red box basic, a goblin is worth 5 xp, and has 2-12 electrum pieces, so a goblin's life is worth slightly less gain of personal power than the average goblins' wallet
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Jan 1, 2023 10:12
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hyphz posted:I think the original basic D&D tied advancement to wealth. What level is Elon Musk?
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Jan 1, 2023 16:09
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"Combat as failure state" works if you look at the game as one of resource management - which, given D&D's roots in wargaming, isn't unrealistic. Hit points are a limited resource. If you're expending them, you're losing. If you can make progress without expending hit points you're winning.
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Jan 1, 2023 16:14
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Cessna posted:What level is Elon Musk? Monsters didn't get XP values listed, we just went over this.
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Jan 1, 2023 16:27
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Cessna posted:"Combat as failure state" works if you look at the game as one of resource management - which, given D&D's roots in wargaming, isn't unrealistic. The problem is that D&D for a long span of its existence had extremely sparse or often no, rules for a lot of common non-combat scenarios. When the majority of the mechanics are centered around combat, it's more like "playing the game" is a failure state.
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Jan 1, 2023 16:32
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PurpleXVI posted:The problem is that D&D for a long span of its existence had extremely sparse or often no, rules for a lot of common non-combat scenarios. Well, yes. It was a wargame. Role playing was still being invented. It seems a bit silly to criticize a game for having a "long span of existence" without things that it hadn't invented yet. ("Medieval France went a long time without ice cream!")
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Jan 1, 2023 16:36
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Cessna posted:Well, yes. It was a wargame. Role playing was still being invented. Fellows, I have invented the skill roll and the reaction check. It is a new enlightened age! Cast off the shackles of this book being like 75% combat mechanics. Book becomes 85% combat mechanics. Ah! Nevertheless!
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Jan 1, 2023 16:44
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theironjef posted:Book becomes 85% combat mechanics. I'm on vacation and don't have my stuff here to cite page counts, but no, the D&D books aren't 85% combat mechanics.
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Jan 1, 2023 16:59
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Cessna posted:Well, yes. It was a wargame. Role playing was still being invented. I'm not criticizing early D&D for not having sufficient non-combat mechanics, because I don't think the "combat is to be avoided"-thing was intentional, that's just later-era rationalization of D&D's combat mechanics being pretty bad. I am absolutely criticizing early D&D for having bad combat mechanics and balance, though, as well as the groggy attempts to avoid accepting that their favourite nostalgia game has issues. I like 2e AD&D and I freely admit it has shitloads of issues. Just embrace that you can like a thing that's got issues!
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Jan 1, 2023 17:00
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PurpleXVI posted:I am absolutely criticizing early D&D for having bad combat mechanics and balance, though, Oh, agreed. It wasn't even a particularly good wargame when it was Chainmail. D&D's combat mechanics are poor at best, and this is even more true of earlier editions.
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Jan 1, 2023 17:09
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