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Colonel Cool posted:Personally I try to avoid thinking in terms of "balance" for the most part. I just sort of come up with concepts that seem interesting, and then represent them in ways that make sense to me and let the players sort it out. I'm not sure about this. "Making a story out of whatever the players choose to do" seems like an equal form of balance, because it implies that the players will encounter a story arc as expressed in difficulty no matter what they do - I think this was mentioned earlier, as "it doesn't matter which way we go, we will meet 3-4 of balanced level and 1-2 magic items".
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Aug 9, 2021 17:58
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We are playing a game, not just roleplaying; and so, a game needs to happen, yes. If your game's mechanics require the GM to balance encounters, then that is a task for the GM, yes. If the mere act of creating balanced encounters that challenge the party pierces the veil so much that you can't enjoy it - which, really, abstracts out to any game providing mechanisms by which the players must make interesting choices - it may be that games aren't fun for you, because either you're doing this or a game designer is doing this, it's an unavoidable aspect of organized play. You could choose to play games that don't give "power games" the capacity to significantly steer the entire party's needs, of course. But I don't think that's really what you're angling at. You're still struggling with this business of the GM having a responsibility to react to the player's choices in ways that either do or don't validate those choices, and you're always going to have to do that. Even at the most trivial level, like, my player has chosen Shemitish as one of her languages, and it's up to me to decide whether an encounter will include someone who speaks Shemitish (...how convenient!) or not (...gently caress, I should have picked Puntish!). Your players either are willing to suspend disbelief and politely ignore the implausible coincidences that lead their characters to situations that they're uniquely suited to, and struggle through situations their characters are poorly suited to; or they aren't, and you guys need to find a different way to occupy your time.
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Aug 9, 2021 18:42
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Leperflesh posted:Even at the most trivial level, like, my player has chosen Shemitish as one of her languages, and it's up to me to decide whether an encounter will include someone who speaks Shemitish (...how convenient!) or not (...gently caress, I should have picked Puntish!). It's not so much about the implausible coincidence that lead them to situations they're suited to, as the ones they're unsuited to. If the whole party has built such that they're almost helpless against undead, for example, then the implication is that there must either be no undead encounters or they must be bypassable. But that implies that whatever advantages they got from that build, they get for free. Likewise, if one player has built that they're almost helpless against undead, you get the reverse decker problem. In order to avoid victimising or excluding that player, there must be a limited number of undead encounters, they must be nonessential for that PC and they must not take too long. So again, it's free points if the system works that way.
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Aug 9, 2021 19:31
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hyphz posted:It's not so much about the implausible coincidence that lead them to situations they're suited to, as the ones they're unsuited to. The bypassing can be a fun challenge. quote:Likewise, if one player has built that they're almost helpless against undead, you get the reverse decker problem. In order to avoid victimising or excluding that player, there must be a limited number of undead encounters, they must be nonessential for that PC and they must not take too long. So again, it's free points if the system works that way. That's not true! Any team-based game is probably going to have specializations, means that not everyone can dominate every challenge.
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Aug 9, 2021 19:58
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Absurd Alhazred posted:That's not true! Any team-based game is probably going to have specializations, means that not everyone can dominate every challenge. "Not dominate" is not the same as "be useless against".
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Aug 9, 2021 20:49
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hyphz posted:"Not dominate" is not the same as "be useless against". Could you provide a specific scenario where one character is completely useless against a challenge while another isn't? Maybe it's a lack of imagination but I'm struggling to picture it.
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Aug 9, 2021 20:55
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hyphz posted:It's not so much about the implausible coincidence that lead them to situations they're suited to, as the ones they're unsuited to. If the whole party has made themselves unable to deal with something, whether that's undead or traps or dogs or goblins or anything else that would be an expected part of the game they are playing and then they complain about it when that thing comes up and they're useless? They made a bad party and part of playing some games is that when you make a bad choice something bad happens and so they should make better choices in future. Again, one of the solutions is straight up saying "hey, you've made a party/character that can't deal with X thing, do you have plans beyond calling me an rear end in a top hat when X thing shows up? If no then adjust your character or come up with something please"
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Aug 9, 2021 21:45
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hyphz posted:I'm not sure about this. "Making a story out of whatever the players choose to do" seems like an equal form of balance, because it implies that the players will encounter a story arc as expressed in difficulty no matter what they do - I think this was mentioned earlier, as "it doesn't matter which way we go, we will meet 3-4 of balanced level and 1-2 magic items". I don't think it implies that at all. In a very basic form if you make the world and populate the three areas with "tiny kobolds, medium sized skeletons, and huge giants" if the players go to the kobolds then it's a story about them stomping kobolds, if they go to the skeletons it's a story about a hard fight against skeletons, and if they go to the giants it's a story about how they tried to sneak into the giant's castle to steal the golden egg laying hen but got caught and turned into bread. Obviously that's a massive oversimplification and in reality the players would have a massively expanded list of things they could do with each of those areas, and presumably there's many more areas to even choose from. Just build the world with things that seem interesting and then run it honestly based on whatever the players choose to do.
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Aug 9, 2021 22:21
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EthanSteele posted:If the whole party has made themselves unable to deal with something, whether that's undead or traps or dogs or goblins or anything else that would be an expected part of the game they are playing and then they complain about it when that thing comes up and they're useless? They made a bad party and part of playing some games is that when you make a bad choice something bad happens and so they should make better choices in future. I think this is why intel-gathering needs to be made a more substantial part of fantasy genre TRPGs. In Shadowrun, charm, bribery, blackmail, stalking, intimidation, casing, hacking, magical scouting, physical infiltration, and relevant knowledge skills are all legitimate ways of anticipating the types of security or threats that players should be able to expect. If the PCs refuse to do any legwork before an op/heist, they can't rightly blame a GM if they get trounced. But at minimum, a Shadowrunner party that lacks both magic and hacking, for example, should be capable of at least figuring out how much plastique they need to buy and which barriers they'll be able to blast through without turning civvies or the corporate asset they've been sent to exfiltrate into bloody flesh-confetti. The PCs' getaway van might almost brick due to the corporate spider hacking their vehicle, and their cybered warrior had to be tazed and shot with elephant tranquilizers after getting possessed by the elemental, but the intimidate checks, knowledge rolls, and other interactions they applied during their preparations let them circumvent enough of the security to get the job done without too many injuries. And hey, their sense of victory can be multiplied since their characters have legitimate ideological RP reasons for not wanting to make use of mana. Combat-wise I don't think "dogs or goblins" are very good examples of something that could hard-counter an even moderately eccentric party composition. Traps should have options for circumventing them via traversal abilities if they can't be disarmed, or the option to just decline the disarm attempt on a tough-seeming check. Groups with poor perception might make use of the 'ol 10-foot pole, invest in more substantial danger-sensing devices/services, or various flavors of trip-wire fodder. There should always be interesting (and potentially costly) options for dealing with hard-counters in your game world as long as you're not playing a doom-pilled genre like most Cthulhu stuff. Undead are a broad category too. In most cases they're soft-counters at worst, like with skeletons resisting piercing damage or whatever. Incorporeal undead that end up rightly routing your thuggish, non-magical PCs could be an excellent RP opportunity however, and if, like most traditional ghosts, it's only haunting a local area, you'd be completely justified in letting the players limp away without a TPK. The low-Wisdom brutes having to get reflective about why they were trespassing in those tombs in the first place, or having to swallow their pride long enough to apologize to the only local NPC priest able to bless their weapons would be great chances for character development. And all the while, they're having discussions revising their goals, tactics, and party ethos. If the PCs fail the dialogue check with the indignant priest after they refuse fantasy-baptism or whatever, maybe they go to the tavern and carouse, in-character not looking for intel, but finding opportunities for it anyway. It's a local scribe's coming-of-age day and the PCs set up an improvised hatchet-throwing contest to boost the kid's confidence and let his scholastic frustrations out on a braced shield. A few drinks later, he agrees to help them research other methods of placating poltergeists so they can finally get the MacGuffin. I think providing players with multiple intel "channels" like the ones I highlighted in my first paragraph is a key for really quality GM'ing. Only deploy a sneering "Oh, poor babies didn't expect psi-golems?" if it was reasonable for them to have anticipated at least one aspect of the nature of an upcoming enemy or obstacle. There are several notorious encounters in Pathfinder: Kingmaker where many players seemed to agree that a tough, particular threat wasn't really reasonable to anticipate. For me, getting ambushed by the Will-o-Wisps incinerating my party in seconds with lightning bolts was the worst, since buying multiple scrolls of group resistance toward a specific element was what eventually let me slog through the area. When meta-knowledge of the game is the only way to anticipate a threat that requires very specific solutions, something's gone very wrong. All that said, I think it's reasonable to make proper counters costly if they're not "native" to the party. In the Pathfinder PC game, that can take the form of scrolls of resist energy if you lack a caster with that spell. In Dark Souls and Sekiro, rare phantom enemies can be immune to attacks without expending a specific item that coats your weapon in ghost-gibbing juice for a short period of time. In TTRPGs where player death isn't expected to be common or arbitrary-seeming, I think it's reasonable for players to expect that they'll have means of anticipating those kinds of threats and at the very least being able to circumvent the thing by means of traversal, stealth, social interaction, or costly/rare items and services. Making intel and Ocean's 11-esque legwork important can really serve to give a scenario/mission's difficulty a nicely-shaped bell curve instead of lame "gotcha"-seeming moments. Even barely-literate boxers know the value of watching their opponents' fight tapes. Your PCs should be doing analogous stuff. Ceramic Shot fucked around with this message at 11:14 on Aug 20, 2021 |
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Aug 19, 2021 20:10
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It's also possible to steal and adapt Blades in the Dark's flashback mechanic to retroactively do this at the expense of some other resource, although that might spoil the fun for some.
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Aug 19, 2021 20:28
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I don't think intel gathering really solves the problem. If the PCs learn in advance that the mission contains something that they know they can't get passed, then they just go home and say they can't do it, and the game falls flat.
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Aug 19, 2021 22:34
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hyphz posted:I don't think intel gathering really solves the problem. If the PCs learn in advance that the mission contains something that they know they can't get passed, then they just go home and say they can't do it, and the game falls flat. i have never had this happen in any game i've run are you exclusively playing with people who have oppositional defiant disorder or something?
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Aug 19, 2021 22:35
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hyphz posted:I don't think intel gathering really solves the problem. If the PCs learn in advance that the mission contains something that they know they can't get passed, then they just go home and say they can't do it, and the game falls flat. Why can't they get past it? Why can't they just go hire someone to take care of that specific thing if it's absolutely impossible for them to do anything about it at all, which again, I would like for you to give me an example of because I just have a hard time picturing it.
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Aug 19, 2021 22:52
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Let's play a game where we have to use our imagination and creativity to solve interesting and challenging problems! oh wait, this dungeon has a Lich and none of us are clerics. Better give up and do something else.
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Aug 19, 2021 23:00
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hyphz posted:I don't think intel gathering really solves the problem. If the PCs learn in advance that the mission contains something that they know they can't get passed, then they just go home and say they can't do it, and the game falls flat. That seems like another situation of viewing an adventure as a purely linear set of tasks and skill checks that must be completed in order to progress. If it turns out the dungeon has a lich in it and the party doesn't have the resources to defeat one in combat the discussion then becomes "How do we get around/avoid/circumvent this lich?". If the dungeon is predicated on only a single solution to complete, then it's not a well-designed dungeon. punishedkissinger posted:i have never had this happen in any game i've run I'm really starting to suspect hyphz desperately needs to find a better group to game with. The assumed player mindset brought up in this thread, coupled with some of the stories he's told in other threads do not paint the picture of a fun group of people he's gaming with...
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Aug 19, 2021 23:10
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hyphz posted:I don't think intel gathering really solves the problem. If the PCs learn in advance that the mission contains something that they know they can't get passed, then they just go home and say they can't do it, and the game falls flat. Yeah the answer to this is actually no, they definitely don't do that. In part because you never presented them with something they "know they can't get past", you presented them with something they "expect to have special difficulty with," and it's an RPG where challenges are an expected part of play and where players never have an absolute answer like "this is impossible" when presented with a challenge. "We don't have a hard answer to ethereal undead" does not tell the party they will have to just abandon their quest to defeat the bad guy, it tells them they need to exercise some creativity or use some resources or both. The problem you presented before was the dilemma a GM faces in choosing exactly by how much to directly challenge individual character's weaknesses when they're hyper-specialized; this expands that challenge out to the party level, but it's the same thing. And what it's saying is, 1, you don't have to blindside the party (for anything, but including blindsiding them by opting to challenge their weak point in this encounter) because in a roleplaying game, you can make intel-gathering a routine part of adventuring. And 2, you can have that out of character conversation with one player or all the players in which you reach a consensus about whether and how much the GM expects to be intentionally focusing on, or avoiding, presenting material that the party has specialized for or chosen to be vulnerable to. So when your party of The Energy Team is pitted against Dr. Null whose lair is in the Negazone, they're not calling bullshit that all their energy powers are useless, because you already decided as a group that this was a play option for you as a GM, and, they already found out what Dr. Null's powers and lair are about, and, they have in-game options for mitigating their weakness, via resources, NPCs, knowledge, and creativity. A good party is likely to surprise the GM with their ingenuity. It happens a lot. You didn't think that they'd figure out a way to lure Dr. Null out of his lair, but they construct a (fake) Anti-Cube artifact that he'd find irresistible, and they hire The Tinkerer to build them a Null Mirror that turns their energy beams into anti-energy that works perfectly in a Null Zone. Coool. And the next adventure is about fighting Giraffe Lady, the mortal enemy of The Tinkerer, because you know, the whole anti-energy theme was fun for a three-session adventure but it's time to let the heroes just blast poo poo with their eye beams etc. and also they owe The Tinkerer a big favor. This is part of just making judgement calls and reading the mood of the table. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 23:19 on Aug 19, 2021 |
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Aug 19, 2021 23:16
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punishedkissinger posted:Let's play a game where we have to use our imagination and creativity to solve interesting and challenging problems! oh wait, this dungeon has a Lich and none of us are clerics. Better give up and do something else. Well, to be fair, that is a particular problem with that aspect of fantasy - typically the only background given for magic is that "anything that is not magic will do nothing to it" and that there is no defined framework for how a problem is solved with magic. (Try dealing with grappling a Demilich..) And this actually raises a question - is it fair for a GM to present a problem for an "imaginative solution" if the GM can't think of any solution? This is not to say that the GM has to make the solution they think of be the only one that works, but that they should be able to think of something that would meet the criteria to work?
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Aug 20, 2021 02:51
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the GM needs to find a way to reward decisive, well-motivated action. if the players are unable to find that motivation the GM needs to work with the players to give them one. it is easy for people to reach these sorts of impasses though for sure. Especially if the system encourages it.
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Aug 20, 2021 03:02
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You need feasibility as well as motivation. How many times have you seen in fiction the device where the hero only realises how hard the task is at the point where they can’t back out, because if they’d known from the beginning they wouldn’t have tried it? That’s difficult to use if the PCs do extensive information gathering.
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Aug 20, 2021 04:52
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the players are Heroes in most rpgs so feasibility really doesnt need to be all that strict.
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Aug 20, 2021 04:54
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hyphz posted:...typically the only background given for magic is that "anything that is not magic will do nothing to it" and that there is no defined framework for how a problem is solved with magic. (Try dealing with grappling a Demilich..) How is that typical? It's not really productive to making sweeping statements like that. There's a reason people are demanding specifics. What do you mean by "magic" here? Spellcasters? Magic items? Curses? Other barriers? A "framework for how a problem is solved with magic" is usually part of a game system where magic is common enough for players to be able to build characters who can interact with it. I'm assuming you know that dispelling/counter-magic is a common thing in fantasy RPGs. Or are you talking about MacGuffins like the One Ring? (In which case: aren't the fires of Mount Doom mundane or at least ambiguous in terms of whether they're supernatural?) In what particular system is "grappling a Demilich" a particularly dumb move? They're usually corporeal undead and it sounds like a great way for a fighter to immobilize it while the rogue shoots an exploding arrow at its phylactery. And come to think of it, wouldn't liches and other tough undead in general be a great example of how important intel is? The location of a phylactery or vampire's coffin are just about the best examples of valuable intel you can conceive of in fantasy. In high fantasy settings like D&D where magical weapons are expected to eventually be acquired as a matter of course, it's not too unreasonable to introduce enemies that soft-counter unenchanted stuff at the appropriate level. And again, intel-gathering could be applied here. If your research/social interactions in town reveal that the piratical undead of Bleak Cove are tough frost skeletons that resist slashing damage, your scimitar-specialized fighter might temporarily switch to an oil-soaked oar or other improvised flaming/blunt weapon. The return voyage might take longer, but you'll have a neat story to tell to the grateful villagers now. Maybe they'll even memorialize the busted oar by putting it on display in the tavern. hyphz posted:And this actually raises a question - is it fair for a GM to present a problem for an "imaginative solution" if the GM can't think of any solution? This is not to say that the GM has to make the solution they think of be the only one that works, but that they should be able to think of something that would meet the criteria to work? This depends on if the difficulty and complexity of the task matches the expectations of the genre/system/group. Ideally the system, particularly character creation, will provide means to build characters who can contribute to more than one "channel" of resolving tough problems. Shadowrun provides very broadly for this. Contacts, money, knowledge skills, languages, cyber-ware, magic, combat ability, hacking, reputation, traversal/infiltration abilities, social skills, vehicles, drones, disguises, drugs, rapport in the spirit world, and probably lots of other things are all available to the PCs before the first session even begins. Pathfinder 2e also has a pretty robust selection of non-combat skill feats (that nonetheless should have the potential to be used to change the circumstances of combat encounters). If only one of those means of problem-solving is the path to success, some arbitrary GM-fiat junk is likely going on. None of those things should be able to "solve" the reawakening of Cthulhu according to the conventions of cosmic horror, however. Nor should the vast majority of Shadowrun ops existentially threaten a mega-corp. Knowing the scope of what constitutes a victory within the genre is really important to consider as well. I would add to Leperflesh's comment "A good party is likely to surprise the GM with their ingenuity" that your system/setting needs to be able to provide an appropriate level of resources that allow for ingenuity. Most TTRPGs are a bit beyond the scope of something like "You're shipwrecked on an island. Try to survive!" I had a bad experience recently with a GM who gave our party the genre-equivalent of flint spears, coconuts, and a belligerent local populace where our task was stopping an interdimensional horror from manifesting. Information-wise, we were mostly stone-walled at every turn. Resource-wise, we were allowed only three of the items we bought upon character creation after being jailed at the start. Combat-wise, we were often outmatched and spared by arbitrary enemy retreats. Attempts to do something more interesting than move and attack during combat were invariably a waste of an action. Give your players a broad palette of problem-solving "channels" and they're more likely to paint you something non-monochromatic!
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Aug 20, 2021 11:11
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Ceramic Shot posted:How is that typical? It's not really productive to making sweeping statements like that. There's a reason people are demanding specifics. What do you mean by "magic" here? Spellcasters? Magic items? Curses? Other barriers? A "framework for how a problem is solved with magic" is usually part of a game system where magic is common enough for players to be able to build characters who can interact with it. I'm assuming you know that dispelling/counter-magic is a common thing in fantasy RPGs. Or are you talking about MacGuffins like the One Ring? Dispelling and countermagic is a common thing but it's usually abstracted heavily into a single roll, or based on matching a spell slot. There's no way for anything that isn't magic to counterspell, at least not in most classic fantasy. (In D&D 5e you have to have a specific feat to even do it by hitting the mage with a sword!) And because there's no framework for how magic actually works, it's difficult to come up with situational improvements. Like, if you can cut footholds in a surface first, it might give you a bonus to climbing. What do you do first, to get a bonus to cancel out a spell? quote:In what particular system is "grappling a Demilich" a particularly dumb move? They're usually corporeal undead and it sounds like a great way for a fighter to immobilize it while the rogue shoots an exploding arrow at its phylactery. In the game in question, a Demilich was just a floating skull, and a fighter grabbed it to prevent it flying away. Because it's just a floating skull, it has no strength; but on the other hand, it doesn't use strength to fly. And it doesn't suffer effects from flying through different mediums or in different conditions of gravity that would be appropriate if its flight was based on physics. So what happens? I think I actually let the Demilich be grabbed in the spirit of "say yes", then next round the melee fighters surrounded the grabbed and grounded demilich and beat it to death in a few rounds with AoO defeating its attempts to teleport away (this was 3.5e so spellcasting provokes by default), so the fight was way too easy and dull. A pretty good example of why I'm sceptical about the "say yes" rule. At least I avoided the situation with the group on Reddit who apparently spent 4 hours arguing if tipping a bucket of water over a fairy would kill it.. quote:And come to think of it, wouldn't liches and other tough undead in general be a great example of how important intel is? The location of a phylactery or vampire's coffin are just about the best examples of valuable intel you can conceive of in fantasy. I didn't say that gathering intel isn't important, but it changes a lot of the nature of the narrative. It creates something much more like a heist than a classic dungeon crawl, which might be good, but might not be. quote:If your research/social interactions in town reveal that the piratical undead of Bleak Cove are tough frost skeletons that resist slashing damage, your scimitar-specialized fighter might temporarily switch to an oil-soaked oar or other improvised flaming/blunt weapon. ... Or by RAW he won't be able to hit them because he's using an unbalanced weapon he's not proficient with. This is heavily dependent on the system, of course, but many games will suggest creative solutions to problems while massively penalizing them in the math. More importantly, it'll only take one or two rolls where the proficiency/unbalance penalty or missing bonus made the difference between missing and hitting for the player to feel either that it was a bad idea or they've been screwed by circumstance. (One of the worst of these was when someone else ran the elemental cults module for 5e - Princes of the Apocalypse I think? - and one of the cults had weapons that inflicted extra damage to unarmed foes. It made no difference to anyone except the monk, whom it rendered completely useless (or even more useless. He eventually just didn't turn up when we were doing that section. Mind you, it was a terribly structured module and the "no, it's fine, we're enjoying it" dam broke after a few weeks and it was canned) quote:I would add to Leperflesh's comment "A good party is likely to surprise the GM with their ingenuity" that your system/setting needs to be able to provide an appropriate level of resources that allow for ingenuity. It's a difficult one, though, that. While it might be true in the first game or so in a particular genre, by the time there have been a few campaigns the PCs will likely be reusing solutions. They won't surprise the GM anymore, but it will be tough to argue that they wouldn't surprise the NPCs. So they probably ought to work IC, but with nowhere near as much of the OOC spark of interest that they generated when they first came up. And while the GM could say they don't work in the hope of getting that spark back with another ingenious solution, that's never guaranteed to happen because people don't have inspired ideas on demand.
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Aug 20, 2021 17:36
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hyphz posted:
I would have adjudicated some kind of grapple rolls here but this sounds great tbh
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Aug 20, 2021 17:45
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The phrase "most systems" is doing a whooole lot of pretending you're not just talking about D&D. Because you're "mostly" talking about D&D. Which is fine to a point, but if you really just want to know how to let your fighter character have fun when the bad guys are powerful magical spellcasters, I think you already know what the majority of TG will tell you to do.hyphz posted:It's a difficult one, though, that. While it might be true in the first game or so in a particular genre, by the time there have been a few campaigns the PCs will likely be reusing solutions. They won't surprise the GM anymore, but it will be tough to argue that they wouldn't surprise the NPCs. So they probably ought to work IC, but with nowhere near as much of the OOC spark of interest that they generated when they first came up. And while the GM could say they don't work in the hope of getting that spark back with another ingenious solution, that's never guaranteed to happen because people don't have inspired ideas on demand. I think "my group and I know each other so well that we're no longer able to surprise each other" is a pretty infrequent problem, and also not really a refutation of the solutions you've been given to "how do I judge when to challenge a character/the party's weaknesses they created during character creation." If you've become so predictable through multiple campaigns of the same game system that you're just retreading the same tropes, perhaps it's time to switch things up and play a different game. However, I also guess that maybe you're inventing this as a problem you think is going to happen, rather than a problem you've actually hit a lot, after running multiple campaigns with your group. Right?
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Aug 20, 2021 17:54
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Leperflesh posted:The phrase "most systems" is doing a whooole lot of pretending you're not just talking about D&D. Because you're "mostly" talking about D&D. Which is fine to a point, but if you really just want to know how to let your fighter character have fun when the bad guys are powerful magical spellcasters, I think you already know what the majority of TG will tell you to do. Well, yes and no. Pathfinder 2e goes a way to dealing with this by making fighters absolute damage machines and giving them many more options, so they're much more fun to play. But it doesn't deal with the underlying issue of magic being a black box in the setting with its only trait being "no non-magicians allowed". I'm not aware that any game does that very differently other than by giving everyone access to the black box, but it's still a black box. Urban fantasy games like Unknown Armies are much better at asking what's inside the black box. quote:I think "my group and I know each other so well that we're no longer able to surprise each other" is a pretty infrequent problem, and also not really a refutation of the solutions you've been given to "how do I judge when to challenge a character/the party's weaknesses they created during character creation. It's not that we can no longer surprise each other, it's that we can no longer do it regularly, which is a problem because I can't just set up an adventure and hope that one of those magic moments spontaneously happens at the table to save the PCs from getting stuck because they just aren't that common. I think that's what Edwards called "ouija board gaming".
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Aug 20, 2021 18:13
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hyphz posted:Well, yes and no. Pathfinder 2e goes a way to dealing with this by making fighters absolute damage machines and giving them many more options, so they're much more fun to play. But it doesn't deal with the underlying issue of magic being a black box in the setting with its only trait being "no non-magicians allowed". I'm not aware that any game does that very differently other than by giving everyone access to the black box, but it's still a black box. Urban fantasy games like Unknown Armies are much better at asking what's inside the black box. Maybe I'm just being dense but I'm not sure what you mean by black box, now. The word "magic" is a descriptor for supernatural things and abilities; by definition, they're not explicable using real-world physics, so in that sense yes, magic is always fantastical and not concretely founded. But there are loads of fantasy games and systems where enemies who have supernatural characteristics or abilities are not hard counters to characters who simply don't. That's a feature or "feature" of D&D and it's derivatives (which includes Pf2e) intentional design decisions. The question you've raised is "what if the character or party can't get past this thing" and if you're the GM you can make sure the character or party can get past the thing, by not bottlenecking your adventures with a pre-decided one and only one approach for success. That holds true even in D&D (maybe especially in D&D) where even fighters can still buy magic equipment or ask their wizard friends to win the adventure while they tag along. And to answer your earlier question, yes, I think it behooves a GM to think of more than 1 option to get past a given obstacle, even if the players wind up finding one you didn't think of; the exercise of writing down 2 to 3 ways to get past this bottleneck may help you to recognize whether you're being reasonable... if they're both obscure, or require a success on a die roll that could roll a failure, or require the party to talk to someone they might not think to talk to, etc. then you're making an error. quote:It's not that we can no longer surprise each other, it's that we can no longer do it regularly, which is a problem because I can't just set up an adventure and hope that one of those magic moments spontaneously happens at the table to save the PCs from getting stuck because they just aren't that common. I think that's what Edwards called "ouija board gaming". So you're saying if the players need something from the sheriff, you already know in advance how they're going to approach that problem - they're definitely going to try to blackmail him because that's what they always do? They always try to find a back door into every castle, that sort of thing? You can fight them by intentionally blocking their most threadworn approach, but I think it's better to have an out-of-game conversation. "Hey guys, I've noticed whenever there's an NPC you guys need something from, you go with blackmail. Isn't that getting boring yet? Why don't you all try brainstorming a new approach before next week's game. You know you're going to need something from the sheriff, and I'm not saying you're not allowed to blackmail him, but the game might be more interesting and fun for you all if you try a new tack."
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Aug 20, 2021 19:08
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hyphz posted:In the game in question, a Demilich was just a floating skull, and a fighter grabbed it to prevent it flying away. Because it's just a floating skull, it has no strength; but on the other hand, it doesn't use strength to fly. And it doesn't suffer effects from flying through different mediums or in different conditions of gravity that would be appropriate if its flight was based on physics. So what happens? I think I actually let the Demilich be grabbed in the spirit of "say yes", then next round the melee fighters surrounded the grabbed and grounded demilich and beat it to death in a few rounds with AoO defeating its attempts to teleport away (this was 3.5e so spellcasting provokes by default), so the fight was way too easy and dull. A pretty good example of why I'm sceptical about the "say yes" rule. If this was 3.5, how did the Fighter get around the Demilich's Paralyzing Touch to grapple it? And why couldn't the Demilich attempt to use its Trap the Soul supernatural ability on the Fighter to escape the grapple? Or on any of the magic users who surrounded it as supernatural abilities don't provoke opportunity attacks like spells or spell-like abilities? hyphz posted:
This is a problem mostly specific to D&D, and D&D 3.x in particular. While I've run into a similar problem (A one-shot about fighting ghosts a friend ran ended up getting completely derailed by the cumbersome rules for dealing with ethereal enemies and none of the players were proficient in the type of weapon he included that could overcome the monsters' resistance), my group didn't blame the nature of RPGs as a whole for the problems, we blamed 3.x having needlessly convoluted and fiddly mechanics. hyphz posted:(One of the worst of these was when someone else ran the elemental cults module for 5e - Princes of the Apocalypse I think? - and one of the cults had weapons that inflicted extra damage to unarmed foes. It made no difference to anyone except the monk, whom it rendered completely useless (or even more useless. He eventually just didn't turn up when we were doing that section. Mind you, it was a terribly structured module and the "no, it's fine, we're enjoying it" dam broke after a few weeks and it was canned) That's not a problem with system design or philosophy, that's a problem with that particular module. No amount of game design will be able to fix a module that makes bad design decisions, just as it can't fix the DM making bad calls. I feel like what you're searching for is a GM-less game, since your expectations seems to be th at the system needs to make all adjudication decisions on its own. hyphz posted:
Or you throw the players into new situations where the existing solutions they've come up with aren't applicable. That's part of DMing: Subverting your player's expectations and presenting them with new challenges so they don't become bored with the gameplay loop.
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Aug 20, 2021 19:14
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hyphz posted:Dispelling and countermagic is a common thing but it's usually abstracted heavily into a single roll, or based on matching a spell slot. There's no way for anything that isn't magic to counterspell, at least not in most classic fantasy. This is straight up untrue. Give an example of this that isn’t some inbred descendent of D&D. In things from before 1977 lots of gribblies and witches are defeated by mundane means, or when it needs a specific thing to be slain/cowed it’s silver/a specific plant/True Love/Pelor’s Sainted Rutabaga/etc. Where the latter is conspicuously not just any magical geegaw the hero had in their pocket but something thematically related.
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Aug 20, 2021 19:29
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Literally defeating Medusa with a mirror, killing Achilles by stabbing his vulnerable heel, etc. How many times does Conan, a man who is completely averse to all forms of sorcery, defeated or at least gotten past a sorcerer or a giant writhing monster from beyond space and time? How many movies have the big magic wizard guy get taken out by a well-aimed crossbow bolt? "Counterspell" is a very specific Wizard Battle trope, and it has its place, but it's hardly an all-consuming theme. D&D's problems with wizards are that they are absurdly overpowered compared to non-magic classes, not that magic intrinsically always trumps nonmagic.
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Aug 20, 2021 19:34
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Leperflesh posted:The word "magic" is a descriptor for supernatural things and abilities; by definition, they're not explicable using real-world physics, so in that sense yes, magic is always fantastical and not concretely founded. But there are loads of fantasy games and systems where enemies who have supernatural characteristics or abilities are not hard counters to characters who simply don't. That's a feature or "feature" of D&D and it's derivatives (which includes Pf2e) intentional design decisions. In system terms, yes. But if you look at UA, it'll have some kind of general principle like that magic is based on paradoxical beliefs held by the population or sympathetic resonance and that gives a lot more ability to come up with funky ideas that fit into that system. I don't think I've ever seen a fantasy game do that. They tend to do "it's inexplicable! here's a 20 page spell list!". Ok, that's more D&D legacy but still. quote:And to answer your earlier question, yes, I think it behooves a GM to think of more than 1 option to get past a given obstacle, even if the players wind up finding one you didn't think of; the exercise of writing down 2 to 3 ways to get past this bottleneck may help you to recognize whether you're being reasonable... if they're both obscure, or require a success on a die roll that could roll a failure, or require the party to talk to someone they might not think to talk to, etc. then you're making an error. Which makes sense, but requires the GM to be at least as good at thinking of things as the players are (otherwise, an obstacle that the players might think of a great solution to, might get removed at the editing stage by the GM because they couldn't think of any solution) quote:So you're saying if the players need something from the sheriff, you already know in advance how they're going to approach that problem - they're definitely going to try to blackmail him because that's what they always do? They always try to find a back door into every castle, that sort of thing? You can fight them by intentionally blocking their most threadworn approach, but I think it's better to have an out-of-game conversation. "Hey guys, I've noticed whenever there's an NPC you guys need something from, you go with blackmail. Isn't that getting boring yet? Why don't you all try brainstorming a new approach before next week's game. You know you're going to need something from the sheriff, and I'm not saying you're not allowed to blackmail him, but the game might be more interesting and fun for you all if you try a new tack." Not necessarily as direct as that, but the thing is that if the players come up with the idea of trying to blackmail the sheriff it won't be anything like as satisfying a "creative idea" as it was first time. And there's no guarantee that they even can come up with a new tack, because creativity is not an infinite well that can be drawn from on demand and instantly, and it winds me up when RPGs try to pretend that it is.
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Aug 20, 2021 19:37
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hyphz posted:Which makes sense, but requires the GM to be at least as good at thinking of things as the players are (otherwise, an obstacle that the players might think of a great solution to, might get removed at the editing stage by the GM because they couldn't think of any solution) That's not true. In a traditional game the GM has an important advantage over the players - they know what's going on in the module, because they wrote/read it before play. Most guides to module/adventure design stress that you in fact need to make things even easier for the players than your baseline prejudices suggest because they are going to come at it without the foreknowledge that you have.
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Aug 20, 2021 19:46
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hyphz posted:In system terms, yes. But if you look at UA, it'll have some kind of general principle like that magic is based on paradoxical beliefs held by the population or sympathetic resonance and that gives a lot more ability to come up with funky ideas that fit into that system. I don't think I've ever seen a fantasy game do that. They tend to do "it's inexplicable! here's a 20 page spell list!". Ok, that's more D&D legacy but still. That's a D&D legacy. In Modiphius 2d20, sorcery is a combination of effects that players can combo creatively, which derive from demonic or otherworldly or powerful sorcerous patrons, who demand prices for their favors. A junior sorcerer knows one spell, a very very powerful one might know four, and in each case the expectation is that they'll creatively use modifying options (which come with costs in difficulty and resources and risk) to suit the situation. How many fantasy game systems have you reviewed? quote:Which makes sense, but requires the GM to be at least as good at thinking of things as the players are (otherwise, an obstacle that the players might think of a great solution to, might get removed at the editing stage by the GM because they couldn't think of any solution) Baffling. No. This isn't a competition of being-good-at-thinking-of-things, its fundamental to RPG gamemastering. Are you telling me you can't think of ways for characters to work an NPC to get them to do what they want, or ways to gain entry to a castle, or ways to defeat a lich? The game tends to give GMs support for these things (some more than others) but I right now just do not believe that you are actually stymied by this stuff. I just don't believe you. quote:Not necessarily as direct as that, but the thing is that if the players come up with the idea of trying to blackmail the sheriff it won't be anything like as satisfying a "creative idea" as it was first time. And there's no guarantee that they even can come up with a new tack, because creativity is not an infinite well that can be drawn from on demand and instantly, and it winds me up when RPGs try to pretend that it is. It's fine for sometimes the party just wants to go ahead and take an unsatisfying routine answer to a challenge. If the party is doing this with every challenge, there's a table problem, and that table problem isn't coming from the rules, or from the nature of RPGs. It's fatigue. Plain and simple. Stuck in a rut because your group is exhausted with this game, or this group, or the time of day you're gaming at, or whatever. Roleplaying games run on creativity. They are, fundamentally, games that require players to creatively play roles.
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Aug 20, 2021 19:47
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KingKalamari posted:If this was 3.5, how did the Fighter get around the Demilich's Paralyzing Touch to grapple it? And why couldn't the Demilich attempt to use its Trap the Soul supernatural ability on the Fighter to escape the grapple? Or on any of the magic users who surrounded it as supernatural abilities don't provoke opportunity attacks like spells or spell-like abilities? It's a long-rear end time ago, and it wasn't the standard Demilich, it was a custom written one in Rappan Athuk (which had a bunch of errors in its monster descriptions in the original printing, like a monster that was supposed to be immune to everything but blatantly wasn't). But a touch attack isn't the same as "something that happens any time you come into contact with it" and there might have been additional restrictions on using Su's while grappled, and it can't escape because that's a Strength/Athletics roll and it has no Strength stat? Or maybe it was something like the Demilich has to fly above someone to trap their soul? I can't remember the exact situation, but the general principle of "saying yes can result in a short-circuit and make the game worse" is more of a concern. quote:Or you throw the players into new situations where the existing solutions they've come up with aren't applicable. That's part of DMing: Subverting your player's expectations and presenting them with new challenges so they don't become bored with the gameplay loop. I get that's part of the goal, but it's also difficult while maintaining a coherent world, since "X won't work on this guard because it worked on the last 3" isn't really an in-world justification, especially if the last 3 were in a different campaign.
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Aug 20, 2021 19:51
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hyphz posted:I get that's part of the goal, but it's also difficult while maintaining a coherent world, since "X won't work on this guard because it worked on the last 3" isn't really an in-world justification, especially if the last 3 were in a different campaign. What's stopping you from saying "all right, you've blackmailed the guard, let's move on, what do you do next?" Structure your game around that having been done. Expect to jump beyond that, or maybe roleplay it for funsies, but knowing that there's not much left there. It's also not coherent for people to remember every single time they walked to the store - eventually you can do this almost automatically, and what you remember is the nice bug you saw on Colton and 3rd, or that you almost got run over by a firetruck after coming out with a full bag. There's no reason to play through parts that are boring, just background them and focus on interesting new challenges or threats.
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Aug 20, 2021 19:55
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So the Demilich example again sounds like a problem with a module you were running and not with the game as a whole. Just looking through the Demilich's statblock in the SRD it has a bunch of abilities that would have been viable options to get out of that grapple. And you can come up with an in-world justification for almost anything. Let's take the Demilich example: Your players previously trivialized an encounter with a Demilich by throwing it in a sack and smacking it with hammers. That won't work the next time because the next demilich they encounter is wearing a pickelhaube whose spike will puncture the sack, so they either have to think up a new strategy or find a way to get that helmet off the Demilich. And then if they fight another Demilich with a pickelhaube their previous strategy to get the helmet off won't work because someone super glued it onto his head, etc... If you're worried about maintaining consistency about ad hoc adjudications of what will or will not work in a given situation just get into the habit of writing those calls down when you make them so you can refer back to those notes later. It sounds more and more like the problem isn't the game design, it's that you and your group are burned out on RPGs and need a break. Maybe take a few months off and do something else as a group until you're feeling it again?
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Aug 20, 2021 20:02
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Or, y'know, this guard turns out to not have any dirt on him. Or he's principled and simply refuses to cave to blackmail. Or he thinks the PCs are bluffing and calls them on it. Or he panics and instead of letting the PCs into the castle, he slams the door and runs for his horse and rides off into the sunset, never to be seen again. This is what I mean by creativity. You don't want boring routine at the table, generally, and so your choices include just eliding that boring part ("your characters blackmail a guard as usual. You're in the back kitchen, what do you do now" to start the scene) or you creatively redirect the situation by having their routine approach not work the same way this time, or you talk to the players out of character and ask them nicely to try something new. What you don't do is throw up your hands and say "welp, roleplaying games rules require me as the GM to always say 'yes, and' and since the players always say 'we blackmail the guard' I guess my hands are tied!" because that's misunderstanding what that principle is about. It originates in stage improv but it presumes that the improvisers are genuinely trying rather than phoning it in. If your seventh improv sketch in a row has Barbara adding in that her character is a dead clown, at some point you stop going "yes and" to her dead clown poo poo and tell Barbara she's either gotta come up with something new, or she's out. Maybe Barbara is just super uncreative or exhausted; maybe she's not suited to being in the improv group. Y'know? It's just not that hard to think of a second thing to be that isn't a dead clown. By extension, it's just not that hard, as a GM or as a player, to think of a different way to get past a guard besides blackmail. If the GM's sitting there staring at four players who, having been told blackmail isn't working, are just staring at their shoelaces silently, maybe the GM can gently suggest "perhaps you could try climbing up the wall to an open window, or maybe you could trick the guard into thinking you're kitchen staff, or perhaps you could slip a sleeping potion into the beer barrel, or maybe you could just bribe him." Is thinking of five other ways to get past a guard really beyond your capabilities, Hyphz, or is it just an example of a more general anxiety you have about hitting creative blocks during play? Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 20:10 on Aug 20, 2021 |
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Aug 20, 2021 20:06
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Leperflesh posted:That's a D&D legacy. In Modiphius 2d20, sorcery is a combination of effects that players can combo creatively, which derive from demonic or otherworldly or powerful sorcerous patrons, who demand prices for their favors. A junior sorcerer knows one spell, a very very powerful one might know four, and in each case the expectation is that they'll creatively use modifying options (which come with costs in difficulty and resources and risk) to suit the situation. Not that many, it's true, and I wasn't aware much of Modiphus 2d20. I suppose the other big one in that category is Ars Magica. quote:Baffling. No. This isn't a competition of being-good-at-thinking-of-things, its fundamental to RPG gamemastering. Are you telling me you can't think of ways for characters to work an NPC to get them to do what they want, or ways to gain entry to a castle, or ways to defeat a lich? The game tends to give GMs support for these things (some more than others) but I right now just do not believe that you are actually stymied by this stuff. I just don't believe you. I can think of trivial ways to do it, but the problem is thinking of ways that have sufficient narrative weight to actually make the obstacle convincing, that wouldn't rate a "super easy, barely an inconvenience" jibe if the story was on a Pitch Meeting.
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Aug 20, 2021 20:07
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People buy into the game. Don't worry so much about being narratively convincing. Unless the fantasy medieval castle guard pulls out a laser pistol and a walkie talkie and calls in his buddy Iron Man to help him, the players are going to play along. And as a GM, assume any given encounter could take five minutes to two hours depending on what the players do. The only time I worry about an encounter being trivialized is when it's the final encounter in an adventure, and for those cases, I put more work into having options to bring in to extend the encounter if they're needed (reinforcements, complications, etc.)
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Aug 20, 2021 20:12
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Something I have been thinking about recently, especially in regard to differing styles of play between older and more modern style games, is the fact that everyone who plays these games are filling the role of both director and audience. Games like D&D tend to lean more towards players as audience, with hidden info, lesser player involvement in world-building, etc. GM-less games fully embrace this by having everyone be equal parts audience and director, and storygames do very firmly plant the ST as the one directing things, the players are all undoubtedly writers who get input and direct agency in the story being told, and even the ST is "playing to find out what happens" I think this is a framework that can be used to further explain some other tendencies in the hobby, like some people really like random arbitrary player death because without it they feel like the story is weightless, yet others (like myself) want death to be more of a matter of player choice so it can happen in dramatic and appropriate moments. The first is much more of an 'audience' approach and the second is more of a 'director' approach. And to be clear, nobody is ever totally one or the other, DMs always will get surprised by dice rolls or player actions, and players always get some directorial power by means of choosing what their characters do. What do ya'll think, useful? interesting? wrong?
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Oct 12, 2021 14:59
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It’s useful. Edwards used to call these “stances” and he listed four: director, author, actor, and “pawn”. The only catch is that he left out the fourth person stance which is very important.
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Oct 12, 2021 15:45
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