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Sometimes I think GURPS would actually work better with the D&D ability scores; one mental ability and three physical ones is probably too lopsided.
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Mar 15, 2024 04:10
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Mendrian posted:Like it's way cooler if elves can recall skills known by their past lives, which functionally makes them more intelligent without the danger of real world parallels. can't believe that i logged on to this site only to immediately run into some anti-past-life-regression nonsense
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Mar 15, 2024 04:11
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redleader posted:can't believe that i logged on to this site only to immediately run into some anti-past-life-regression nonsense
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Mar 15, 2024 04:21
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I just decided to look at the full GURPS skill list. It includes Falconry, Fire Eating, Main-Gauche, Smith (Copper), Smith (Lead and Tin), and Monowire Whip. Yes, I’m aware that you’re not actually supposed to use them all in the same campaign.
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Mar 15, 2024 04:25
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Silver2195 posted:I just decided to look at the full GURPS skill list. It includes Falconry, Fire Eating, Main-Gauche, Smith (Copper), Smith (Lead and Tin), and Monowire Whip.
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Mar 15, 2024 04:26
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Silver2195 posted:I just decided to look at the full GURPS skill list. It includes Falconry, Fire Eating, Main-Gauche, Smith (Copper), Smith (Lead and Tin), and Monowire Whip. Now look at the full Burning Wheel skill list. I learned a few words from that.
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Mar 15, 2024 04:58
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Silver2195 posted:More seriously, though, there are trade-offs here. Once you’ve removed the concept of “my character has a higher smartness than another character” from an RPG, you’ve removed part of the appeal of playing a wizard or a psychic or a detective or whatever. Apologies for essays but I'm just gonna keep loving this chicken, and I'm quoting you only because I think you've put fairly succinctly here exactly the thing that I'm railing against, not because I think you're a bad person or deserve to be yelled at. "Smart" is just another fake idea, a more colloquial word for "intelligence." It's trying to avoid the problem without doing so at all. I know, it is very difficult sometimes to accept the notion that of any two humans one is not "smarter" than the other, no matter what sort of abilities and/or disabilities they have, but it really really is the case. Because again, "smart" is a fake concept. You can get much much more narrow. I have better reading comprehension than a good friend of mine, who has dyslexia. My wife has demonstrated some kind of spatial reasoning advantage, in a handful of specific applications - getting more stuff in the back of the car - but in another specific area I think I have a small edge (getting more stuff in the dishwasher). There's a guy on youtube who has a basic conversational proficiency in something like 40 languages, he has probably some level of focus or short to medium term memory or maybe the language center of his brain is more efficient or maybe some combination of all three of those things and more, compared to me... language is complicated as gently caress, you can't even point to a single cognitive factor that determines how proficient a person will be at acquiring languages! And several of the determining factors come from or are heavily influenced by upbringing, access to education, and other environmental factors. I know games reduce human complexity for the sake of making it function as a game. You can have a "languages" skill and just declare this character is good at languages, or maybe don't and just let characters buy one or more languages, or maybe don't and just let characters know however many languages they want. What you shouldn't do though, I argue, is invent some base, underlying stat for why that is, a stat that also determines how good you are at math, how good you are at history, how good you are at astronavigation, how good you are at pedantry, and how good you are at magic spells. Not only because no such thing exists in the real world, but because racists have been arguing that it does and duping generations of non-racists into thinking it does and not even realizing that it's a fundamentally unscientific concept, widely discredited by neurologists and biologists and educational specialists for many decades now, so you know how about let's not even invent a fantasy concept for it and put it in our fantasy world. So that's kinda my point here. If you want to play a detective, write "detective" in the appropriate box on the character sheet. If you want portray your detective as especially clever, play them as clever in any of quite a few different ways you could portray that. A system can give them detective-related skills, powers, points, whatever, and at the table you can talk a good detectivy talk, notice all the subtle details, or maybe be super good at deductive reasoning and attention to detail, or maybe they're so good at reading people they can tell what other people are thinking, or maybe they always know when they're lying. Anything else you think is part of why your character is a good detective. I don't think it actually removes anything, to carefully avoid talking about relative intelligence of people or any proxy for that. In fact I think it opens the concept up far more: you can play a detective or wizard or pyschic who solves crimes or casts spells or reads minds for reasons unrelated to some bullshit unitary intelligence thing. In other words you can be a wizard without being clever, if you want. That should be allowed. Why not? You can be a diligent student, or just bully witnesses into compliance, or cast spells by rote memorization. Intelligence as a unitary thing is, literally, a historical proxy for racial superiority; the creation of the term IQ, the origin of the Stanford-Binet intelligence test, the (irrelevant, and also faked!) measurements of cranial capacities of the various races as compared to those of noble whites and their famous scientists, all of it did and still does serve as reasons to deny equality to people who deserve it, denigrate people for having different abilities, dismiss the validity and value of skills and capacities unrelated to advanced academic achievement in western university tradition.
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Mar 15, 2024 05:25
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Leperflesh posted:I know games reduce human complexity for the sake of making it function as a game. You can have a "languages" skill and just declare this character is good at languages, or maybe don't and just let characters buy one or more languages, or maybe don't and just let characters know however many languages they want. What you shouldn't do though, I argue, is invent some base, underlying stat for why that is, a stat that also determines how good you are at math, how good you are at history, how good you are at astronavigation, how good you are at pedantry, and how good you are at magic spells. Not only because no such thing exists in the real world, but because racists have been arguing that it does and duping generations of non-racists into thinking it does and not even realizing that it's a fundamentally unscientific concept, widely discredited by neurologists and biologists and educational specialists for many decades now, so you know how about let's not even invent a fantasy concept for it and put it in our fantasy world. very good
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Mar 15, 2024 05:39
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Silver2195 posted:Some RPGs do have ways to apply Intelligence or similar stats in an "avoids doing dumb things" (Common Sense in GURPS) or "able to deduce things quickly" (Idea rolls in Call of Cthulhu, IIRC) way. Though yeah, most don't, for good reason: it means the GM is playing your character for you. I think this is a matter of personal preference, but I tend to believe that these sorts of skills and abilities are valid play tools if you specifically want to play a character who has this sort of flash of insight. Tradgames almost universally allow for abstraction of physical acts by characters that are much more physically skilled than their players, and usually allow for Charisma checks to be abstracted for characters who are more eloquent than their players, so why force things like insight and problem-solving to be entirely dependent on the player's intelligence? Obviously this should be opt-in, so people who prefer to solve puzzles and the like fully on their own can do that, but I don't think it's unreasonable for a player to say "I want a way to get hints that my character might pick up on but I wouldn't."
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Mar 15, 2024 05:42
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I'd thought Stanford-Binet was originally developed as a way to check for subtle development issues so you could do educational interventions or other medical screenings, but I also think I got that out of a Stephen Jay Gould essay. His point was the same, and he had some good money lines on the topic. Antivehicular posted:I think this is a matter of personal preference, but I tend to believe that these sorts of skills and abilities are valid play tools if you specifically want to play a character who has this sort of flash of insight. Tradgames almost universally allow for abstraction of physical acts by characters that are much more physically skilled than their players, and usually allow for Charisma checks to be abstracted for characters who are more eloquent than their players, so why force things like insight and problem-solving to be entirely dependent on the player's intelligence? Obviously this should be opt-in, so people who prefer to solve puzzles and the like fully on their own can do that, but I don't think it's unreasonable for a player to say "I want a way to get hints that my character might pick up on but I wouldn't."
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Mar 15, 2024 06:03
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Nessus posted:I'd thought Stanford-Binet was originally developed as a way to check for subtle development issues so you could do educational interventions or other medical screenings, but I also think I got that out of a Stephen Jay Gould essay. His point was the same, and he had some good money lines on the topic. The Binet-Simon test was that; I'll quote wikipedia: quote:Lewis M. Terman, a psychologist at Stanford University, was one of the first to create a version of the test for people in the United States, naming the localized version the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scale. Terman used the test not only to help identify children with learning difficulties but also to find children and adults who had above average levels of intelligence. In creating his version, Terman also tested additional methods for his Stanford revision, publishing his first official version as The Measurement of Intelligence: An Explanation of and a Complete Guide for the Use of the Stanford Revision and Extension of the Binet–Simon Intelligence Scale (Fancher & Rutherford, 2012) (Becker, 2003). Binet-Simon was, at least, well-meaning. Stanford-Binet was an immediate perversion of the original intent, and intended explicitly to measure intelligence, by the scientists who were actively looking for ways to further advance the race science they'd been practicing for a century or more already. I also was first exposed to the depth and breadth of this subject by the late great Stephen Jay Gould, in his collection of essays titled "The Mismeasure of Man" - I read the revised edition that he published in response to The Bell Curve, which has an additional chapter or two specifically addressing the racist bullshit of which that book was chock full. Gould's book is in addition to an effective criticism a genuinely good and interesting read that I can recommend to anyone.
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Mar 15, 2024 06:24
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Cool cool, looks like I was right on the outlines even if the info got mooshed up. I have a lot of Gould's essay collections, as part of an inheritance! Thinking about the stuff that makes Intelligence scores 'seem to make sense' on the like, micro-level, I imagine it's a mix of 'some people appear to be more generally clever than others' and 'some people do have distinctive, memorable talents.' The first one is probably more about being adroit in various ways and having expressive habits, either through acculturation or random chance, that come off as clever and confident. If you dig down it's actually a number of different skills and perhaps the occasional neurological function, but once you're down to 'by random luck your working memory is much better than the human average - you can hold EIGHT items instead of SEVEN!' you're making a lot of hay out of not much grass. Of course, some of the unstated appeal might be that one identifies with such clever fellows, but I suspect attachment to that is weakening in the culture - 'nerds' and 'jocks' seem to have a great deal of overlap. The second one is just flavor in a skill system. Maybe you spend some kind of charop currency to have even more skill in particular things at the expense of purchasing eye lasers or Thaumaturgy.
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Mar 15, 2024 06:39
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I like the idea of framing attributes as attainable things... You're not Strong and Dexterous, you're Athletic because you work out a lot. You're not Intelligent, you're Knowledgable because you read a lot of books and poo poo. You're not Charismatic, you're... actually Charisma fits this already. Then you're attributes are not "I was born this way", they're "I chose to be this way".
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Mar 15, 2024 06:46
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Jimbozig posted:Kestral, you weren't directing your question to me, but I've been thinking about it seriously because I think it's a good question and I think it deserves an answer. And I would rather people just answer it than try to dodge the question while being hostile. I liked Nessus' answer. Jimbozig, I appreciate your actually trying to engage with this, but when we're at the point of people posting the literal words "intelligence isn't real" and getting no pushback, there's no meaningful discussion to be had here. The positions are irreconcilable. Kestral posted:I mean, you can't bring up the idea of different species having different stats in discussions around here without being called a racist, I imagine it's even worse for these folks. The idea has become toxic in the part of The Discourse where these people make their living. Behold.
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Mar 15, 2024 06:49
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Bucnasti posted:I like the idea of framing attributes as attainable things... or "I am this way, due to possibly many unexamined underlying factors" but you can explore one or more of those factors through play if you want. You're not Charismatic, you're flirty... or you're a good active listener... or you've got a rich, luxurious voice... or you're eloquent... or you've got really straight, clean teeth... or you're very well versed in the current popular culture... I'm Athletic, specifically I can run very fast although I'm not competitive at long-distance enduro, I've done a bit of javelin and pole vault but I don't have the grip strength for free climbing, and I literally cannot swim... I'm Knowledgeable in a broad basis of topics as taught at the cyberuniversity on Proxima Centauri, and I have a deep understanding of posinuclear antiphysics, but I actually like have a really hard time remembering people's names that I meet and I'm hopeless at chess... Or hell, I've been described as a super-genius as my peers in the Confederacy of Peril, because I masterminded each of our six most recent nearly successful galactic heists and outmaneuvered the pathetic fools in the Protectorate League, mwa ha ha ha, but despite my swollen braincase and throbbing forehead veins, I can't solve a rubics cube, why would I need to be good at spatial reasoning to do anything related to my job? Do I look like I load space barges for a living? A guy who looks like a fish snuck up on me and tied me up with a rope, foiling my plans, because I failed to realize that the fish guy would use the sewer system that's open to this planet's oceans would be a significant vulnerability, because who knows anything about how pipes work, really Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 07:05 on Mar 15, 2024 |
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Mar 15, 2024 07:02
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Leperflesh posted:I'm Athletic, specifically I can run very fast although I'm not competitive at long-distance enduro, I've done a bit of javelin and pole vault but I don't have the grip strength for free climbing, and I literally cannot swim... I do think part of the reason why some people grasp for a sort of "generalist ability score modifier" (and to be clear, I agree with the direction you've been taking this discussion so far) is that if we have lots of skills, with no "spillover" from one skill to the next, then it can feel bad to have to spread one's skill points so thin in order to meet a certain character concept, or to specialize in fewer skills than the concept might otherwise have wanted and then cutting the rest that said, I do not say this as a rebuttal or a counter-argument, that we should have "intelligence" as a fall-back, but that this problem could be tackled orthogonally: if sprinting, endurance running, javelin-throwing, and pole vaulting are all separate skills, then the group should come to an agreement as to how many skill points a character should have in order to convincingly frame a character within the scope of that skill list, even if it means more (or less) than what a straight reading of the rules might otherwise say or that maybe some of these skills could be culled or combined
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Mar 15, 2024 07:24
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Stat yourself in Blood, Courage, Grace, Sense, and Wisdom. Gain Iron or Doom depending on your playbook.
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Mar 15, 2024 07:28
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Kestral posted:Jimbozig, I appreciate your actually trying to engage with this, but when we're at the point of people posting the literal words "intelligence isn't real" and getting no pushback, there's no meaningful discussion to be had here. The positions are irreconcilable. Well, go ahead, then. Push back against "intelligence isn't real". This entire page is actually replete with very good, very thought(!!!)ful posts about precisely how to reconcile, on the one hand, the idea of some ur-measure of psychic power called "intelligence" and on the other hand the fact that some people are better at calculus than others. Where's your issue with what, say, Leperflesh's wrote?
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Mar 15, 2024 07:43
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I just think that, on some level, if you want to make a reasonable game (assuming that's still what being discussed), you HAVE to simplify the overall experiences of being a person into more basic, overarching categories or you end up with ridiculously bloated and unfun skill systems that make you spend points in extremely narrow specializations. Or, I guess, entirely narratively freeform systems with no points or the like. At the end of the day, it's a game, not an accurate model of an entire individual and it's fine to just have an Athletics skill instead of individual tiny little subsections of athleticism unless your game is explicitly about those (like some sort of Olympics based RPG or something). It gets a little tricky when it comes to intelligence because at the end of the day it's already a weird hard to quantify simplification of a bunch of different factors in and of itself but my position is that, if you're not trying to make some deep argument about the nature of rational thought, it's a useful and easy to understand shorthand everyone understands. Not that the discussions on the exact origin of the idea of intelligence aren't interesting, but they seem far, far too technical and in-depth for games of killing dragons and collecting fancy swords. When I play a TTRPG I don't want to be thinking about the disturbing and racist connotations of the idea of intelligence, I just want to say "my wizard is very smart so he knows exactly how to solve this ancient elven puzzle box" without needing to have taken specifically the Puzzles (Elven) skill.
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Mar 15, 2024 07:55
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Most pbtas sidestep it by identifying and measuring qualities the game is specifically operating on. In the Fellowship example I alluded to above, Blood is broadly comparable to strength but it's not just measuring purely physical ability. It's also measuring passion, hot-bloodness, and capacity for violence. Courage is willpower and tenacity but also your ability to survive in situations where you need to tank and hold aggro, and can be interpreted as physical resilience in some situations, or at least your ability to put mind over matter and push yourself past your limits. Grace maps to dexterity but also represents style and, well, grace, both physical and social. Sense is where logical ability falls under but also perception. Wisdom is actually where erudition and knowledge come into play, but it also measures your character's kindness, tact, and sincerity. As you'd notice, "intelligence" as a concept is again split into something+Wisdom but at least here there is more reasonable logic behind the split than, say, D&D. But yeah, in Fellowship these are the qualities that matter in the game and thus that's what's being measured.
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Mar 15, 2024 08:37
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Bucnasti posted:Then you're attributes are not "I was born this way", they're "I chose to be this way". Yeah, so if you don't have success in what you are trying to do, well, it's because you wanted to fail, or you didn't try HARD enough.
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Mar 15, 2024 09:31
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Runa posted:Most pbtas sidestep it by identifying and measuring qualities the game is specifically operating on. Yeah, I think the PbtA approach of theming stats around the flavor of the game is very useful here, because it lets you get away from the concept of a stat defining a single concrete aspect of a person's capability in a way that is often both reductionist and uninteresting. Apocalypse World's Sharp/Hard/Hot/Cool/Weird array is another good one, because it says a lot about how the characters will be expected to approach problems (with a focus on style and attitude instead of raw carrying capacity) and gives some specificity about character while also allowing the players to define exactly how and why their character is Sharp or what have you. It avoids the other pitfall of D&D-oid stats, namely that defining your character purely on stuff like muscle power and manual dexterity is often really boring.
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Mar 15, 2024 09:56
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YggdrasilTM posted:Yeah, so if you don't have success in what you are trying to do, well, it's because you wanted to fail, or you didn't try HARD enough. No, it's because you spent your time becoming good at something else, and if the system is well designed then that something else is equally valuable when it comes to doing the things that the game is about
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Mar 15, 2024 10:29
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Leperflesh posted:Apologies for essays but I'm just gonna keep loving this chicken, and I'm quoting you only because I think you've put fairly succinctly here exactly the thing that I'm railing against, not because I think you're a bad person or deserve to be yelled at. It all comes down to what ability scores are for in a system. If they're being added to the game to provide quick-build packages to help get your guy's baseline skeleton up and running using a few common archetypes for an intuitive baseline then having dials for The Muscle and Brains Of The Operation and Public Face and Second Story Man is a good way for people to quickly get a base character going. Calling them Ability Scores and labelling them Might, Smarts, Charisma, and Agility isn't going to inherently cause any problems, and neither will shuffling them around a bit to replace them with "Background Stats" labelled Health, Education, Socialisation, and Trouble. If it's some other reason in the format "design need -> maybe ability scores?" it's also probably fine, as is scribbling that out and writing "nah, use classes". If the reason is "...Well you gotta have ability scores" and everything else is post-hoc mechanical justification then the game is bad. If the reason is "actually a single axis numerical scale is indeed an accurate measure of someone's smartitude" then my ability scores are 5/5 lol and lmao E: lost track of the original point: yes, the concept of a single track sliding scale of "intelligence" is a dumb oversimplification, but determining the minimum level of complexity required for what your game is trying to do is a huge chunk of good game design. Sometimes a bunch of adjectives with numbers beside them is a perfectly acceptable simplification - assuming you're not being all WIS 8 about it. Splicer fucked around with this message at 11:21 on Mar 15, 2024 |
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Mar 15, 2024 11:02
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Nessus posted:I'm inclined to agree, although I would always have this be either a failsafe or possibly Professor Smartguy's player is like 'well I'm stumped, but Smartguy went to Science College, can I roll Idea?' (Or whatever the equivalent would be. Gumshoe fell flat for me, but I am sure there are many ways to skin this shoggoth) E: this works particularly well if the group is split up. "You realise it's shoggoths" is a great thing to write on a note to pass to the only guy who's not within shouting distance of the group of people about to get shoggothed. Splicer fucked around with this message at 11:40 on Mar 15, 2024 |
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Mar 15, 2024 11:36
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people who are chemically addicted to believing they're the smartest dude in the room have strong opinions on being able to mathematically prove on paper that their fantasy man is smarter than anyone else at the table
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Mar 15, 2024 13:23
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Ominous Jazz posted:people who are chemically addicted to believing they're the smartest dude in the room have strong opinions on being able to mathematically prove on paper that their fantasy man is smarter than anyone else at the table Hegemonic masculinity is the drug. No matter how low on the ladder masculinity you are, you can be on top of that rung. Ttrpg world so small you get to see it in real time and it’s so fascinating.
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Mar 15, 2024 13:33
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I'm pretty sure it's more my complete, utterly failure after 15 years of trying to work in academic world is because I'm, after all, just NOT as brilliant as the other around me, and not because "I didn't try enough", thank you very much.
YggdrasilTM fucked around with this message at 14:18 on Mar 15, 2024 |
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Mar 15, 2024 14:14
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Trad Games Chat: ALL WOMEN wield a dagger at an additional +1.
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Mar 15, 2024 15:00
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Antivehicular posted:I think this is a matter of personal preference, but I tend to believe that these sorts of skills and abilities are valid play tools if you specifically want to play a character who has this sort of flash of insight. Tradgames almost universally allow for abstraction of physical acts by characters that are much more physically skilled than their players, and usually allow for Charisma checks to be abstracted for characters who are more eloquent than their players, so why force things like insight and problem-solving to be entirely dependent on the player's intelligence? Obviously this should be opt-in, so people who prefer to solve puzzles and the like fully on their own can do that, but I don't think it's unreasonable for a player to say "I want a way to get hints that my character might pick up on but I wouldn't." Even with Charisma checks, though, I thought it was generally agreed that while players don’t need to actually be eloquent (or even to do any in-character talking at all), they should be able to explain to the GM what their character wants out of the NPC and the general lines of argument or whatever they’re using to do it, not just “I use Diplomacy on the guard.”
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Mar 15, 2024 15:18
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Kestral posted:Jimbozig, I appreciate your actually trying to engage with this, but when we're at the point of people posting the literal words "intelligence isn't real" and getting no pushback, there's no meaningful discussion to be had here. The positions are irreconcilable. The point people are making is that the aggregate construction we refer to as 'intelligence' is actually like a dozen things rolled into one and measuring this with a single statistical number is an arbitrary decision, likely rooted in constructs connected to hierarchal/prejudiced/racist thinking (if at a considerable remove; it is not as though playing a game with an INT stat means you must do penance before God). What does the mechanism actually mean? Even the old World of Darkness games had a stat called Intelligence, specifically for abstract reasoning, and on par with one reflecting 'perceptiveness' and another reflecting 'quick, fast thinking.' What D&D would call "Wisdom" was nowhere to be found (rimshot) but presumably would manifest in roleplay and perhaps the Willpower stat. Historically in D&D Intelligence means 'is good with magic, with some fringe benefits,' although there are a number of other popular splat-types which break this mould, albeit perhaps with a lower theoretical top end in Daffy Duck-like cosmic power.
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Mar 15, 2024 15:20
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Like to make another example, WFRP has separate stats for Weapon Skill (melee) and Ballistic Skill (ranged). Not only are these presented as stats on par with "Intelligence" and "Fellowship," they are essentially "ability scores." These stats are separate from Agility (natural athletics) and Dexterity (fine motor skills like lockpicking etc.) -- in many systems all of these things get rolled up into Dexterity, with a possible carve-out for Strength as an impactor on melee attacks. But why? What's your goal? In WFRP this creates at least a hypothetical space for defining a character differently: a guy might have a 50 Weapon Skill, 40 Ballistics Skill and 20 Dexterity. He drops his fork all the time, but boy does he hew him some Chaos.
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Mar 15, 2024 15:24
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Nessus posted:Perhaps you should take an INT increase at your next level up and read the posts 
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Mar 15, 2024 15:27
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YggdrasilTM posted:I'm pretty sure it's more my complete, utterly failure after 15 years of trying to work in academic world is because I'm, after all, just NOT as brilliant as the other around me, and not because "I didn't try enough", thank you very much. Oh no! Without knowing anything about your situation, I would hazard that the much more likely cause is that academia is bullshit. I mean, maybe you're just not cut out for it, but that's less often a "square peg round hole" problem and more often a "they keep making the hole a weirder and more pointless shape" problem. Look at the state of academic publishing. Look at what sort of work is incentivized by the grant process. At some point, you realize you have to quit and go a different direction because you don't fit, but that's not a matter of "brilliance" or effort.
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Mar 15, 2024 15:33
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Silver2195 posted:Even with Charisma checks, though, I thought it was generally agreed that while players don’t need to actually be eloquent (or even to do any in-character talking at all), they should be able to explain to the GM what their character wants out of the NPC and the general lines of argument or whatever they’re using to do it, not just “I use Diplomacy on the guard.” This is a spectrum and almost literally nobody is 100% on one side of it. The same people who will say that they want to roll to have their character solve a puzzle will not be happy if the GM says "I know the NPC's argument is patently bullshit, but I think your character might be dumb enough to buy it. Roll a die to see if you now have to side with the villain against your friends." And yet, if you took the character skill over player skill idea down the slippery slope to its illogical conclusion, that's where you would end up. And obviously in the other direction, you're just stuck trying to debate bro your GM because you have to be convincing rather than get to roll your skills. Nearly everyone just tries to pick a functional point in the middle, and it's mostly based on how much they value other things like agency. (You don't want the villain to be able to diplomacy your naive character with a roll because you want it to be your choices that determine in what way the character is naive. You do want to be able to diplomacy the naive NPC into things because that's why you invested points into charisma and smooth-talking.) Like you say, a lot of people rely on "you have to say what arguments your character uses to try convince the NPC so we can know where to go in the fiction, but whether you succeed is up to the dice." But puzzles and riddles are hard because there's to equivalent of "what is your character saying to convince them?" How is your character solving the riddle? Uh, she's standing there deep in thought, hoping for the answer to arrive in a flash of insight. I actually posted upthread a ways back about a fun way to do riddles that lets you rely on your character's skills while letting the players feel clever and have the fun that comes with solving riddles. Jimbozig fucked around with this message at 15:48 on Mar 15, 2024 |
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Mar 15, 2024 15:45
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Jimbozig posted:I actually posted upthread a ways back about a fun way to do riddles that lets you rely on your character's skills while letting the players feel clever and have the fun that comes with solving riddles. That's a good post, and it's basically how Inspectres does things but in a slightly different order (you would roll to solve the riddle and if you roll well you then get to say what the answer is) I really should run Inspectres again
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Mar 15, 2024 15:54
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This discussion reminds me of a  post I remember forwarding to people, oh, a decade ago? from Actual Racist Hellhole Stormfront, in which a chinless wonder explained that playing D&D helped reconcile the doubts he was having about White Supremacy after lived experiences in the real world; it's not that the racist swill he'd been raised on was wrong, it's just the natural variations between people that outweigh a +2 here and a -1 there.Thanks, D&D! Nessus posted:The point people are making is that the aggregate construction we refer to as 'intelligence' is actually like a dozen things rolled into one and measuring this with a single statistical number is an arbitrary decision, likely rooted in constructs connected to hierarchal/prejudiced/racist thinking Like all things measurable, it was immediately consumed by capital into Myers-Briggs astrology poo poo and used to "justify" managerial tummyfeel bullshit, like promotions and project distributions and "culture fits", because that is what capital does Runa posted:You know this all also tracks and just reminded me that Kara-Tur 'exists'  Note that this is from a supplement released after multiple other Kara-Tur books, including many art pieces showing signs and language that looked nothing like that
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Mar 15, 2024 16:48
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AmiYumi posted:This discussion reminds me of a I've never forgotten this since I saw it in one of the first grognards.txt threads and I think I end up referencing it at least once in every discussion like this one I've ever had. ...so that's what I'm doing right now!
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Mar 15, 2024 16:52
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AmiYumi posted:I mean, back when I was younger this was literally one of the academic consensuses, to the point that I've taken and administered tests measuring a dozen different "intelligences", including logical intelligence but also interpersonal and kinaesthetic intelligences e: Those stories may star ourselves as both the dumb AND clever person As for the kara-turan alphabet thing, I can only say: 啊
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Mar 15, 2024 16:53
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Silver2195 posted:Even with Charisma checks, though, I thought it was generally agreed that while players don’t need to actually be eloquent (or even to do any in-character talking at all), they should be able to explain to the GM what their character wants out of the NPC and the general lines of argument or whatever they’re using to do it, not just “I use Diplomacy on the guard.” What winds me up most about this is when you need to give context to the negotiation so it's clear you actually have leverage, but that context is not sufficiently defined in the game world, so it becomes either a gimme or a stonewall from the GM based on how they fill the context in. Splicer posted:That's the official use for Idea in CoC 7th IIRC. It and Luck (and one other?) are in-fiction hint buttons so the session doesn't stall out. IIRC it's also not supposed to be an "I win" button, like "you realise it's shoggoths" is bad, but "you remember seeing a police blotter last week about mysterious deaths in the oldtown district that matches these wounds" is good. Also I like it best when everyone rolls and the results indicate /who/ thinks of it not /if/ someone thinks of it, with maybe a bonus if the results are particularly good. This has a pretty standard problem though, whech is that the player might fail the Idea roll and then they.. get to be stuck some more.. until enough time has passed that the GM allows a re-roll.
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Mar 15, 2024 17:39
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