"Which is why I'd prefer the rules to be sensible and support a good narrative, rather than creating cases where the different colors end up pulling against each other."
That is the job of the gm.
I can't think of any reason why I should require the rules to explicitly state that a player can't make a man his friend while murdering his beloved daughter. It is so ridiculous, the rules shouldn't need to explicitly deny it.
As for colors pulling against each other, ther is no such thing as complete harmony here. It wasn't the rules that had got me yelled at for acting in character. It wasn't the rules that expected me to identify potions now, while marching through hostile territory with a bunch of strangers met only hours prior with reason to distrust them rather than wait until camp is made. Those things weren't rules issues. Those things were conflicts between perspective and gameplay expectations and desires. No mechanics can reconcile these types of issues. The gm is supposed to handle this, either by explicitly stating one way or the other as the expected playstyle, or by comprising and mediating the players, such as saying the party rests for 10 minutes to munch on rations and thus can identify the potions then.
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"Which is why I'd prefer the rules to be sensible and support a good narrative, rather than creating cases where the different colors end up pulling against each other."
That is the job of the gm.
I can't think of any reason why I should require the rules to explicitly state that a player can't make a man his friend while murdering his beloved daughter. It is so ridiculous, the rules shouldn't need to explicitly deny it.
But they explicitly allowed you to do it. So in this case, the rules and the narrative are conflicting. It's not the GMs job to have to rewrite the rules of the game for it to be functional (yet ironically, I'm a GM literally rewriting the game for that very reason so YMMV :P).
As for colors pulling against each other, ther is no such thing as complete harmony here.
*shrugs* I'm still the turd-color.
Turd is life. Turd is love. :PIt wasn't the rules that had got me yelled at for acting in character. It wasn't the rules that expected me to identify potions now, while marching through hostile territory with a bunch of strangers met only hours prior with reason to distrust them rather than wait until camp is made. Those things weren't rules issues. Those things were conflicts between perspective and gameplay expectations and desires. No mechanics can reconcile these types of issues.
That's correct. But mechanics can reconcile issues that spring up like how rogues in Pathfinder are pretty much inferior to Rangers and Bards. We can't make a horse drink the water, but we can totally ensure that there's water to drink, and lead them there. :)
The gm is supposed to handle this, either by explicitly stating one way or the other as the expected playstyle, or by comprising and mediating the players, such as saying the party rests for 10 minutes to munch on rations and thus can identify the potions then.
Well, a GM doesn't control the PCs, so if the PCs decide to not munch on rations they just don't munch of rations, right?
In all seriousness, I feel like we're talking about different things. Having a well designed system that makes it easier on everyone involved won't solve all social or style issues. It can help them though, since it can ensure that nobody feels like the gimp because they picked the wrong class, or having mechanics that don't require you to break the rules to do cool heroic stuff. :)
"I'd rather players be able to do things like glide between trees ala Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon because they're high level badasses, not because they had to get magic boots"
The point is, low level characters can't do it either way without magic, but while boots of floating allow a low level to glide between trees, the high level character no longer needs those and trades them in for better ones because their ranks are high enough to not need boots.
"Of course. But either way a disable device check is rolled and if it failed, you did too. Frequently when my players succeed at such a check, I might narrate a way they foiled it, or if they want to, they can. But that's just fluff on the mechanics."
Not just fluff. If they players don't have or think of some way to jam the pressure plate, they'll have try something else. Or they the chance to just out of the way of the darts amd set it off, or use a ladder to make a bridge over the plate. With the narrative, some options will gain that circumstance bonus/penalty the gm is supposed to pass out, or potentially avoid needing to roll at all. And a purple player is looking to get past the trap, but is not looking to beat the trap's dc via automatic dice roll.
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Not just fluff. If they players don't have or think of some way to jam the pressure plate, they'll have try something else. Or they the chance to just out of the way of the darts amd set it off, or use a ladder to make a bridge over the plate. With the narrative, some options will gain that circumstance bonus/penalty the gm is supposed to pass out, or potentially avoid needing to roll at all. And a purple player is looking to get past the trap, but is not looking to beat the trap's dc via automatic dice roll.
The only issue I have with this is...
I don't expect the warrior's player to be able to benchpress a stallion.
In the same way, I don't really expect the party's trap expert to actually have any clue how to disarm a trap IRL.
In the same fashion, if they CAN benchpress a stallion IRL, that doesn't mean their 7 Str mage can. And just because they ARE engineering experts IRL, doesn't mean they can simply bypass the trap with their good idea.
They roll to Disable and we'll see how well their character implemented their plan.
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The point is, low level characters can't do it either way without magic, but while boots of floating allow a low level to glide between trees, the high level character no longer needs those and trades them in for better ones because their ranks are high enough to not need boots.
But players want boots. I don't really see what would be bad about boots that would allow them to be better at doing things with a skill they understand how to do.
For example, if you have some +5 boots, it just adds +5 (+25% success chance on a d20) to your checks. That means that you're better at going unseen. And when you hit a level where you can hide behind someone as cover (literally hiding in their space by shadowing them) it still makes you harder to spot, even though you're hiding in a way that would have been considered impossible some levels ago.
The same boots make you harder to notice either way. They aren't required for you to do the cool thing, so there's no reason to throw away your cool boots when you reach a level to do the cool thing. They're your special boots. They love you, and you love them back. (Q_Q)
"But they explicitly allowed you to do it."
Not quite. They provide a general case and rather than enumerate all possible exceptions (an impossible task), they leave it to the gm to use common sense in allowing or disallowing checks.
The core books are riddled with instances of encouraging the gm to use his/her judgement and to change/adjust rules to fit the situatiin at hand. The rules are designed for the gm to adjust on the fly. In fact the books even claim themselves to be guidelines. Heck, the 3.5 book even suggests allowing a paladin player to trade in her mount ability for something else if she doesn't want the mount. Yet gms won't do it, because it isn't in the rules (only in the instructions on how to use the rules).
"Well, a GM doesn't control the PCs, so if the PCs decide to not munch on rations they just don't munch of rations, right"
Wrong. The gm can go "Hey players, we have an issue here, instead if bickering lets comprise. How about this solution, would this idea of mine be acceptable to everyone?"
I am out of time for today. I'll be back later.
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"Well, a GM doesn't control the PCs, so if the PCs decide to not munch on rations they just don't munch of rations, right"
Wrong. The gm can go "Hey players, we have an issue here, instead if bickering lets comprise. How about this solution, would this idea of mine be acceptable to everyone?"
I am out of time for today. I'll be back later.
But that's just asking the players to do something. It's not a solution that has anything to do with the system, and the GM still doesn't have the ability to make a PC do anything because it's...a PC. >_>
Players don't godmode NPCs, and GMs don't godmode PCs. That's just the way it works.
As for the rules being filled with "as you see fit", well...no. There are quite a lot of rules that just strait up say you can do things (like with the diplomancer, it literally gives you the rules for turining someone who is actively hostile into your friend, and it gives rules for things you spend resources in to do it in a standard action, and so on and so forth).
This is textbook oboroni fallacy. Rule 0 doesn't indicate that there is no problem. In fact, I would dare say the more rule 0 has to be invoked to overrule the system, the more issues the system has. I think that's a reasonable assessment.
Unless the system is explicitly designed for use with rule 0, common sense, the rules being explicitly called out as guidelines, and example after example of the gm adapting the rules to better fit the players and campaign on the fly. It is the intended way for the system to be used, I don't believe any set of mechanics can avoid this in any significantly better way (except to become almost exclusively orange style, like chess or minitures warfare games), at least not without becoming so completely bloated that it becomes such pain to use that no one plays it.
Edit, a guideline is a general case rule with the expectation that it will be subject to common sense.
Unless the system is explicitly designed for use with rule 0, common sense, the rules being explicitly called out as guidelines, and example after example of the gm adapting the rules to better fit the players and campaign on the fly. It is the intended way for the system to be used, I don't believe any set of mechanics can avoid this in any significantly better way (except to become almost exclusively orange style, like chess or minitures warfare games), at least not without becoming so completely bloated that it becomes such pain to use that no one plays it.
I'll have to be most diligent then. :)
Also, I'm not sure that any system that deals with characters doing superhuman pseudo-magical things can use "common sense" as a metric. We're talking about a game where you're literally expected to be able to stand in lava while fighting a red wyrm, 'cause their breath weapon will actually turn the very ground you stand on to magma.
Common sense would tell you that some dudebro with some plate mail and leather shoes can't stand in lava and not instantly die. But we're talking high fantasy dudebros here. :P
Perhaps "plausible within the game world" woukd be a better metric, at which we return to my earlier question, is the game world supposed to reflect the mechanics, or are the mechanics supposed to reflect the game world? In either case, the gm is the arbiter of handling the translation between mechanics and game world.
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Edit, a guideline is a general case rule with the expectation that it will be subject to common sense.
What good is a "guideline" that serves no purpose? I mean, if a rule or "guideline" tells you that its function is to turn hostile people friendly, and that's literally its only purpose, why have it since that by it's nature is out of the realm of what you deem acceptable by "common sense" (which isn't a real metric as it varies widely from person to person)?
A system that has rules that aren't intended to actually work is a system with some fundamental design problems, no?
Perhaps "plausible within the game world" woukd be a better metric, at which we return to my earlier question, is the game world supposed to reflect the mechanics, or are the mechanics supposed to reflect the game world? In either case, the gm is the arbiter of handling the translation between mechanics and game world.
I'm no expert but...
Given that traditionally it's the campaign settings that change to conform to the changing rulesets, I'm going to have to say that history would suggest that the worlds reflect the mechanics.
"What good is a "guideline" that serves no purpose?"
Umm, now you are using a fallacy (not sure which one). Having an exception or several that crop up only a minority of the timem= does not negate the purpose of a rule, it merely means the rule us general case rather than absolute.
Perhaps "plausible within the game world" woukd be a better metric, at which we return to my earlier question, is the game world supposed to reflect the mechanics, or are the mechanics supposed to reflect the game world? In either case, the gm is the arbiter of handling the translation between mechanics and game world.I'm no expert but...
Given that traditionally it's the campaign settings that change to conform to the changing rulesets, I'm going to have to say that history would suggest that the worlds reflect the mechanics.
I would suggest it is the choice of the group and/or the setting creators, and thus not absolute.
Further, choosing to adapt to the rules in general does not mean you need to adapt the rules completely. There is space for a mixture there. For example, a setting might adopt the vancian that isn't actually vancian spellcasting system, but yet also decide that magic is more common and cheaper than represented in the rules.
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At what point is being able to spend 6 seconds to turn a hostile person in combat with you into your best friend within the common sense clause of your hypothetical system?
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What are the practical issues that can happen when players think they can become Diplomancers? I mean, aside from the obvious one.
One of the practical issues I see is that players may be expecting their skills and abilities to do a thing their skills and abilities explicitly say they do, in the context they say they do them in, so when they buy those feats, invest those ranks, craft those items, pick that race, or any combination thereof and when they actually use the ability as it is described it doesn't do anything because of GM fiat.
That's a problem. Now, people can argue until we're all blue in the face about whether or not it's the fault of the player, the GM, or the system, but I'm of the opinion that it's a varying combinations of all three, but it's always the fault of the system that put this thing out for you to use.
This is also the heart of the caster/martial disparity issue. Simply using your spells and such as they are written to be used can leave your fellows twiddling their thumbs or feeling like they're the hobbits next to Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas.
Well...you shouldn't have to not use your abilities to "play nice" with everyone else, and you shouldn't ever expect that your version of "common sense" is going to mesh with somebody else's version of "common sense" to play in a game. Just as I noted before, one guy might think human beings standing in molten magma is too far beyond common sense, but another thinks that's fine, but being so amazingly godlike at influencing people means you can request the brother of the woman you just murdered in front of him to be your friend and be a dear and wash the knife for you since you really need to start wrapping the body up to dispose of it. But for someone else, that might seem plausible because to them, their version of common sense says that that +50 diplomacy modifier represents a sort of social prowess that is godlike and beyond anything that mortals are truly capable of comprehending, akin to a sort of fantastic power of its own.
I'm....not really sure what we're talking about anymore. I think it had something to do with my project, and some colors, and I'm a rainbow-turd, but I've kinda wandered off the trail somewhere. (o_o);
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I think we just established that good mechanics mitigate causes of conflict instead of starting them :D
Yaaaay! Progress! \(0-0)/
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>wench being useless in a bar fight
I don't think Ashiel's point was that any character has to be useful in every situation, and you misunderstood it by a rather large margin. Instead, I think she was saying that in a good system it has to be impossible for some character to end up useless in every situation a party might encounter on an average adventure, or useful only by virtue of others going out of their way to make them useful. People have to be awesome due to being inherently awesome.
>"it's GM's job"
You know, gm's aren't robotic aliens from outer space (Ashiel is still suspect, investigation currently ongoing), and have such human things as limited attention, limited endurance, limited creativity, biases and so on. Making their job easier is a nice thing to do if nothing else, and saying "back in my day, we had to walk to school 50 miles in the snow uphill both ways and we bloody well liked it, and so should you" is kind of assholish if nothing else.
To Ashiel: are you a robotic alien from outer space by any chance?
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>wench being useless in a bar fight
I don't think Ashiel's point was that any character has to be useful in every situation, and you misunderstood it by a rather large margin. Instead, I think she was saying that in a good system it has to be impossible for some character to end up useless in every situation a party might encounter on an average adventure, or useful only by virtue of others going out of their way to make them useful. People have to be awesome due to being inherently awesome.
>"it's GM's job"
You know, gm's aren't robotic aliens from outer space (Ashiel is still suspect, investigation currently ongoing), and have such human things as limited attention, limited endurance, limited creativity, biases and so on. Making their job easier is a nice thing to do if nothing else, and saying "back in my day, we had to walk to school 50 miles in the snow uphill both ways and we bloody well liked it, and so should you" is kind of assholish if nothing else.
To Ashiel: are you a robotic alien from outer space by any chance?
Given that we're all made of matter that comes from stars, and are technically biological robots...in a really roundabout way? :P
In the more traditional sense, no. Though, I sure feel like one talking to people sometimes. (o_o);
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Wow I missed a lot. Curse my biological need for sleep!
I'll never understand the "it's fine the way it is" logic when people start talking about creating a new rule set. If it works for you, then continue to use D20 as is. It doesn't work for Ash, as he's stated numerous times, and given solid examples of why it doesn't work. His work with Aratrok and his brother to streamline rules into a new system doesn't harm or hurt anyone else, nor prevent them from using the game systems they currently enjoy. Is it perceived as a personal attack of some sort? Weird.
Just my 2 cents.
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Back to the subject of racial traits...
I'm also kind of on the fence.
On one hand, I don't want the race to be yet another possible list of poor choices. Choosing the race for a Pathfinder character is the hardest choice for me during character creation.
Currently, there aren't races to fit every character type. It always seems that, especially at first level, the stat mods and sometimes the racial traits themselves (holy crap Elan, survivable much?) are critical for surviving the first few levels (maybe 5) where the characters are most vulnerable to one-shots or other things beyond their control. As somewhat of an optimizer, I want to make sure that I make the best choices for my character concept, to not only aid mechanically, but to help ensure survival. Obviously, a list of playable races that fit every stat or beneficial racial trait would be prohibitively large, so while a gripe, there really is no fix for it, other than to homebrew a race, and beg your DM to allow it. So, alot of times I have to hold my nose and choose a race that fits concept and story the closest, or default to Aasimar again. This isn't cool, and makes the game less fun, for me at least. So, the solution seems to be, jsut have races as "skins" that only have culture and appearance fluff, and have stat mod choices unrelated to race, but to background that a player can make. Cool?
On the other hand, I like there being noticeable, mechanical, differences between the races that back up any fluff the "skin" provides.
What is the solution?
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What do you think about skill synergy?
Not necessarily the way it was implemented in 3.5e, just generally stuff like a character with both Perform(Oratory) and Diplomacy maxed out having a much easier time at convincing a crowd of something than a character with only one of the two.
I think it's a shame Pathfinder doesn't really have mechanics for any of this (except for one particular interaction between bluff and diplomacy).
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Back to the subject of racial traits...
I'm also kind of on the fence.
On one hand, I don't want the race to be yet another possible list of poor choices. Choosing the race for a Pathfinder character is the hardest choice for me during character creation.
Currently, there aren't races to fit every character type. It always seems that, especially at first level, the stat mods and sometimes the racial traits themselves (holy crap Elan, survivable much?) are critical for surviving the first few levels (maybe 5) where the characters are most vulnerable to one-shots or other things beyond their control. As somewhat of an optimizer, I want to make sure that I make the best choices for my character concept, to not only aid mechanically, but to help ensure survival. Obviously, a list of playable races that fit every stat or beneficial racial trait would be prohibitively large, so while a gripe, there really is no fix for it, other than to homebrew a race, and beg your DM to allow it. So, alot of times I have to hold my nose and choose a race that fits concept and story the closest, or default to Aasimar again. This isn't cool, and makes the game less fun, for me at least. So, the solution seems to be, jsut have races as "skins" that only have culture and appearance fluff, and have stat mod choices unrelated to race, but to background that a player can make. Cool?On the other hand, I like there being noticeable, mechanical, differences between the races that back up any fluff the "skin" provides.
What is the solution?
Well, a couple of things that might help part of that problem is that characters are going to be noticeably sturdier at 1st level than in vanilla d20, and save DCs scale a little gentler too (spellcasters are also using a +1/2 level for DCs, which means that they scale at about the same pace as saves), so being an Elan to survive the first few levels wouldn't be a must have to avoid getting one-shot by some dude two-handing a longsword. :P
Aratrok and I were discussing it last night and one of the things that we'd be interested in toying around with would be reducing the flat ability modifiers of races and focus more on features of the races instead. I gotta gotta take a nap (got nightshift tonight so I was up all night so I'd sleep today and re-align my schedule for it) but I'll try to write up some prototypes or something at the first opportunity.
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What do you think about skill synergy?
Not necessarily the way it was implemented in 3.5e, just generally stuff like a character with both Perform(Oratory) and Diplomacy maxed out having a much easier time at convincing a crowd of something than a character with only one of the two.
I think it's a shame Pathfinder doesn't really have mechanics for any of this (except for one particular interaction between bluff and diplomacy).
It's something worth considering. I kind of liked skill synergies in 3.x, albeit they were usually just ways of getting better at things you were already going to be better at, or investing enough ranks to get your synergy bonuses and jumping ship...
At the moment we don't have any plans for a synergy system of any sort, but that might change as we decide how some things are looking in play.
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What do you think about skill synergy?
Not necessarily the way it was implemented in 3.5e, just generally stuff like a character with both Perform(Oratory) and Diplomacy maxed out having a much easier time at convincing a crowd of something than a character with only one of the two.
I think it's a shame Pathfinder doesn't really have mechanics for any of this (except for one particular interaction between bluff and diplomacy).It's something worth considering. I kind of liked skill synergies in 3.x, albeit they were usually just ways of getting better at things you were already going to be better at, or investing enough ranks to get your synergy bonuses and jumping ship...
At the moment we don't have any plans for a synergy system of any sort, but that might change as we decide how some things are looking in play.
Maybe some kind of a weird progression of unlocked-by-rank abilities?
E.g. a character with 10 ranks in Diplomacy and 10 ranks in Perform(Oratory) would be able to do the same unlockable abilities as a character with 15 ranks in only one of those two skills.Or something like that.
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There are 40-something skills in the game as is. If you only devise ranked talents for each of those skills, you need ~160-ish ideas(4 per skill). If you also include synergies, you need 1600-ish. It's a lot of work for not a whole lot of gain.
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There are 40-something skills in the game as is. If you only devise ranked talents for each of those skills, you need ~160-ish ideas(4 per skill). If you also include synergies, you need 1600-ish. It's a lot of work for not a whole lot of gain.
I guess that that would indeed be difficult.
But, even then, simple rules could imaginably cover that.Say (just an idea off the top of my head, I'm not claiming this would be a good idea or balanced or whatever), making people qualify for unlockable abilities not by rank in that skill alone but by that rank + half the highest rank in a synergistic skill or something like that. So 10 ranks in a skill would give +5 ranks in terms of unlocks to synergistic skills.
After that, it could be simply followed up with a table of synergistic skills, which isn't hard to make.
That increases rules complexity, which is something Ashiel wanted to crack on. I don't see this as something that is going to improve the game significantly, so it would be better left as an optional system/pure houserules, and at that point, you are better off improving other parts of the system instead of this one.
I guess you're right.
I guess you're right.
Nothing stops you from doing all the work yourself, if you really want something of the sort.
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It's true that I'm trying to reduce a lot of the rules complexity without losing a lot of its richness. When I say I want to reduce "complexity", I'm specifically talking about...
1) Rules scattered all over the place in the manuals. I want to try to keep rules more or less self-contained when possible, or point you directly to the place you need to go. For example, you shouldn't have to stumble across critical rules such as "you cannot use Stealth when in an area of bright light" in the Environmental Chapter and not in the Stealth skill description (this is actually a thing in Pathfinder, go check the Environment chapter of the official PRD and you'll find a thing where it explains you can't use Stealth in bright light but it makes no mention of that in the Stealth skill, saying only that you can Stealth if you have cover or concealment).
2) Things that add lots of extra stuff to keep track of but doesn't add much to the game itself (I fear most synergy systems might fall into this part, so I might try looking into actually including functions of certain skills in the descriptions of others, such as noting things like "You can use the Bluff skill along with this to do a thing you couldn't normally" or something like that.
3) Being as clear with rules as possible and then in the case of complex rules providing an example, either in parenthesis if it's a minor explanation, or in a separate sentence of paragraph for major examples, of how that rule actually works in play.
For these reasons, a lot of the legwork for D20 Legends is in fact the re-editing of the standard d20 core (which is why we haven't moved into proper production of classes and such), because so much stuff has to be tweaked, revised, scrapped, re-written, or added anew. I project that it'll probably not be much smaller though since I have a habit of adding new stuff when I gut tons of old stuff.
For example, in the spellcasting tradition chapter, I ended up gutting many paragraphs of text that were no longer relevant or could be said in far fewer sentences. Something that replaced them was an overview of spellbooks, a standard system for determining spellbook cost, hardness, hit points, capacity, and weight, and a chart that shows the effects of getting spellbooks made of or reinforced by different mundane materials (such as hide, wood, stone, iron, mithral, or adamantine) and the effect on the book's cost, hardness, hit points, and weight (most of the mundane things like hide, wood, and stone are cheap to the point that they really only modify the weight of the book, while iron is probably the go-to for a lot of paranoid adventuring sorts).
(Note: Prepared casting is more of a choice and I use the term "wizard" in this post to denote anyone who has opted to use prepared casting rather than spontaneous casting, and "sorcerer" as anyone who opted for spontaneous casting.)
I added new ways to learn spells, including actually witnessing them being cast or having someone instruct you in their usage. This means there isn't a huge issue with having to ensure that there are places that wizards can learn their spells from in the campaign. Even if they are a minority class, they can learn their spells while adventuring, sometimes by even seeing other magical creatures casting spells, or by learning spells from a spontaneous caster.
So like if you want to have a mage's college in your campaign where mages go to learn magic from other mages, like how Tolfdir teaches you basic ward spells in the college quests of Skyrim, that's actually a thing. The rules actually support having more experienced mages giving tutorials, lectures, and mass demonstrations of magic to groups of students (you see other examples of these sorts of things in games like Dragon Age: Origins, such as when you're walking the halls and watching an instructor teaching one or more apprentices how to actually use certain spells effectively, and I feel it's a common enough trope).
I'm also going to re-write spell research so that it's actually functional and can be used to discover spells when nobody is around to learn them from. The costs in money and time will be a little more practical, and I'd like to use Spell Research to allow sorcerers to retrain their spell selections.
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For anyone curious about the spellbook thing.
Adamantine's price is a placeholder. We haven't decided how much adamantine is going to be worth per pound but we're going to. We're also going to include adamantine, mithral, and other core exotic materials as trade goods but that's a bit off from right now.
We'll include some default spellbooks in the equipment chapter, with their individual descriptions. For example, a standard spellbook with 100 pages with a leather/hide/parchment binding would cost 10 gp, have 12 Hp, hardness 2, and weigh 4 lbs.
I'm also setting the market value of a spellbook w/spells in it to equal the cost of the spellbook plus twice the cost of scribing the spells into the book yourself, which will happily normalize the value of said books, which will make copying, selling, buying, and trading spell books easier to deal with.
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I guess you're right.Nothing stops you from doing all the work yourself, if you really want something of the sort.
Well, I'm trying to build d20 legends to be highly customizeable. I'll probably release a pdf with it that explains the design decisions and concepts behind the mechanics, why we went with what we did in different places, and including other ideas that we had, and ideas for tweaking it in different ways for different purposes (such as if you want to play a gritty low-fantasy game, remove magic entirely, stuff like that).
At what point is being able to spend 6 seconds to turn a hostile person in combat with you into your best friend within the common sense clause of your hypothetical system?
Simple.
"Well look at that. I just killed eight of your buddies in as many seconds. But you know, I'm kinda feeling generous, so if the two of you tell me what I want to know, I'll let you live."
We see this a lot in movies. The hero does some kickbutt stuff and the remaining guys think it is better to cooperate. Or other times where hired thugs get offered more money to walk away or turn on their former employer.
Sometimes there is a misunderstanding where the good guys attack other good guys thinking they are bad guys, but the ones who are attacked know it and want to call for peace.
There is also a sadly common issue of people who are rescued attacking their rescuers.
So yeah, several possibilities here.
I think we just established that good mechanics mitigate causes of conflict instead of starting them :D
Within a given playstyle, when everyone understands the playstyle to be played.
You can not design rules that achieve this for all playstyles, and understanding the playstyle you are aiming for can seriously help improve your results.
"People have to be awesome due to being inherently awesome."
First, some like situational awesome, rather than character awesome.
Second, everyone has different ideas of awesome. Given the right gm, playing a school marm can be awesome even without any capacity to help in epic barfights.
Third, you don't need awesome characters at all to have fun. The sims are fun to play despite lacking any awesome factor at all. This may be rp, but awesome is not a requirement for fun for all people. It is a matter of preference. This ties back to understanding your playstyle. Orange likes awesome big time, but purple can enjoy the game with or without awesome.
Wow I missed a lot. Curse my biological need for sleep!
I'll never understand the "it's fine the way it is" logic when people start talking about creating a new rule set. If it works for you, then continue to use D20 as is. It doesn't work for Ash, as he's stated numerous times, and given solid examples of why it doesn't work. His work with Aratrok and his brother to streamline rules into a new system doesn't harm or hurt anyone else, nor prevent them from using the game systems they currently enjoy. Is it perceived as a personal attack of some sort? Weird.
Just my 2 cents.
This is not my argument at all. It is a difference of opinion about what needs changed and how.
I've also tried to point out that playstyle matters, that some arguments may valid for one style but not another.
In fact I found way to say it earlier,
Orange players see the mechanics as the game, and story as window dressing to make the game interesting.
Purple players see the story as the game and the mechanics simply as a tool to make play easier.
When there is a conflict between story and rules, orange players change the story while purple players change the rules.
My stance on gm fiat and rule 0 is that it should never be needed for general use, but is perfectly fine to rely on for corner cases. I do not believe there is any point in trying to make rules that work as needed 100% of the time, nor should corner cases all be enumerated and handled in the rules (for many reasons including bulkiness, complexity, difficulty of use, high bar to entry, impossible to balance, rule lawyering loophole opportunities, etc).
In my opinion, good rules have fewer corner cases, but that doesn't change the usefulness or acceptability of relying on rule 0 when those corner cases do pop up.
There is also me being a primarily purple player seeing the bending of rules to accommodate an interesting concept that wasn't thought of in the rule design phase as perfectly fine as well.
"You know, gm's aren't robotic aliens from outer space"
Which is exactly why we shouldn't expect them to blindly follow the rules like a robot following it's programming, nor expect them to require explicit programming to cover everything.
Onto races,
You might try also splitting race and culture. Each can then be less and thus easier to design, while still giving lots more possibilities.
I also loved the bloodlines from unearthed arcana. Of course, then you still have classes, but rather than dictating job or role, they dictate access to racial abilities and such. Strangely, I'm fine with that as long as picking elf doesn't deny my ability to wield a naginata and cast spells.
"Is it perceived as a personal attack of some sort?"
Nope. It is a discussion. The sort of thing I actually enjoy, and hope the others involved enjoy as well.
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"People have to be awesome due to being inherently awesome."
First, some like situational awesome, rather than character awesome.
Second, everyone has different ideas of awesome. Given the right gm, playing a school marm can be awesome even without any capacity to help in epic barfights.
Third, you don't need awesome characters at all to have fun. The sims are fun to play despite lacking any awesome factor at all. This may be rp, but awesome is not a requirement for fun for all people. It is a matter of preference. This ties back to understanding your playstyle. Orange likes awesome big time, but purple can enjoy the game with or without awesome.
>some like situational awesome, rather than character awesome.
And some like being nailed in the butt by 20 old fat men at the same time. What's your point and why this is relevant in the discussion of a general ruleset of an RPG?
>Given the right gm...
Yeah, f~#* all those gms who aren't Ashiel-tier, who needs them anyway, we won't make their job easier for them. Given the right GM shuffling papers 8 hours a day can be interesting(see Papers, Please), that doesn't mean general rules should allow that to happen.
>Which is exactly why we shouldn't expect them to blindly follow the rules like a robot following it's programming, nor expect them to require explicit programming to cover everything.
------My point------>
-----Your head------
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Seriously, Ashiel is designing the game he thinks will be the most fun for everyone, and you seem intent on making him design the game that will be the most fun for only you.
Straight up, it s far better to have rules for the game, than not have rules. Green and Purple players can play in games with rules, but Orange players can't play in games without rules. It's far better, for everyone, to make rules for the game instead of leaving it vague. It's one of the faults of the older editions is vague rules that never get answered for one reason or another.
I'm not telling him to do anything particular. I'm discussing what works for what, and why.
Look back at what was actually said,
I initially described the playstyles to make discussion easier and to give some orientation to how particular design choices work better or worse for different playstyles, so thus ash can take something helpful regardless of how heavily he/she balances things in one direction or another.
For example, my initial post mentioned how classes and class feat trees are more helpful to orange style, then presented an idea for really going heavy orange and separating fluff from abilities completely and allowing players to explain their abilities in a variety of ways.
Then I mentioned how having a gimp and a god together is less of a mechanics issue and more in need of getting the group on the same page and that the gm should handle minor tweaking between players.
I recommended not bothering to call it a d20 mod because with how heavily things are changed it really won't be d20 anymore.
I commented on martial caster disparity and how the intended system waa meant to be balanced, and why, and gave a recommendation to start from scratch to eliminate 15 minute workday and the martial caster disparity.
All with a focus on orange style play.
All this other stuff inbetween about orange vs purple is just fun debate and clarifying. Also trying to delve into how alternate methods can work and trying to improve understanding of purple methods because the core d20 is designed for purple play, not orange (though many supplements go towards orange). And understanding the intent and philosophy of the game to modified/used as reference will allow better decisions on how to make use of the original content.
">some like situational awesome, rather than character awesome.
And some like being nailed in the butt by 20 old fat men at the same time. What's your point and why this is relevant in the discussion of a general ruleset of an RPG?
>Given the right gm...
Yeah, f!#~ all those gms who aren't Ashiel-tier, who needs them anyway, we won't make their job easier for them. Given the right GM shuffling papers 8 hours a day can be interesting(see Papers, Please), that doesn't mean general rules should allow that to happen."
My point is that while these rules may be theme/genre neutral, they aren't general as playstyle needs to be considered and balancing between orange and purple does both less well than focusing more on one of them can do that one better.
">Which is exactly why we shouldn't expect them to blindly follow the rules like a robot following it's programming, nor expect them to require explicit programming to cover everything.
------My point------>
-----Your head------"
Not the most helpful comment. And killing the good spirit here as well. This is supposed to be an enjoyable and intellectual discussion. Comments of this sort don't fit well with either, and implies you are getting angry and insulted over nothing.
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A game with a strong narrative focus is not negatively impacted by a tighter mechanical rule set. There is no correlation to be made here. I also fail to see why this school marm thing keeps coming up. If someone is dead set on making a dud character, then just get them to use an npc class that suits them.
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Okay, back! Thanks, everyone, for the interest and support. :)
Also, I appreciate the excitement, but let's everyone in the thread be nice to everyone in the thread. (^-^);
A game with a strong narrative focus is not negatively impacted by a tighter mechanical rule set. There is no correlation to be made here. I also fail to see why this school marm thing keeps coming up. If someone is dead set on making a dud character, then just get them to use an npc class that suits them.
Well, I think the issue is that in D&D/Pathfinder, you might be set on making a gunslinger but end up with the school marm. I think that's where some of the issues are coming in.
So, even though I'm a turd-color character so my views on this whole purple vs orange thing is probably a little screwy, here's my best shot at explaining what I mean by that.
Theoretically, the purple guy isn't going to be super hung up on the mechanical things like names and abilities, and it wouldn't really matter to them if a rogue was made of fail or made of awesome as long as they can be some guy who is a sneaky scoundrel.
Theoretically, the orange guy is going to want...well, I don't really understand the orange thing since as described this would just be wanting the rogue for whatever the rogue has good for it and wanting to play the rogue in a sort of tabletop minis game or somesuch.
I say theoretically, because this is not what I actually see displayed in the groups I'm a part of (but then, they may be made up of a lot of turd-colored players like myself). What I actually tend to see "in the wild" is the people who fit the purple side of things often seem to place more emphasis on the mechanics (such as naming conventions, the names of skills, and so forth), so they pick Rogue because "I want to be a sneaky scoundrel" and they cannot wrap their heads around the idea that you don't have to married to mechanics because they say "rogue" on the label.
Contrastingly, the more "orange" people I see get upset because the label lied to them because they wanted to make a sneaky scoundrel that does everything that the label says, but what they got was a bait and switch. Afterwards, they come into conflict with the purple players because the purple player has in an attempt to play a gunslinger, played a school marm, and the two start arguing over whether or not you can play a gunslinger even if it says "Cowpoke" on the label.
If this is too far off, my apologies, because this is just one person from tursdville's perspective on it. :)
In any case, I see this as a problem. People should be able to trust the labels on their mechanics. If it says "I'm a highly mobile master of unarmed combat" and what they get is "I have to stand still and punch a lot and fight worse than other martial classes who've picked up the Improved Unarmed Strike feat", well...that's an issue.
In turdsville, the mechanics support the narrative. They're like the laws of the universe. Physics, if you will. A good system helps to construct a good story and produces a world that you can really sink your teeth into because it is consistent, which improves your suspension of disbelief. You have a good idea of what you can do and when you can do it, which encourages exploration.
For example, if you've got a +10 climb modifier and you know how hard it is to climb a tree, it's much more likely that you simply declare "I climb to the top of the tree and try to see where we are", because you could climb a tree last time, and you should expect to next time, assuming nothing has changed (barring things like wet branches).
And in turdsville, the narrative supports the mechanics. Rather than just having a bunch of abilities that aren't fluffed at all and just adding your own fluff to them, they do have a little of the fluff married to the rules, but this marriage is to improve the verisimilitude of the story.
For example, in D20 Legends, magical abilities are magical abilities. While they may have different traditions (spellcasting, psionics, SLAs, PLAs, Supernatural abilities, etc), they're all magical. Because they are all magical, they all share certain rules (like they don't work if someone's created an antimagic field). So if your plan was to claim that your burning hands spell is actually just a clever party trick using fireworks or otherwise describe it as a purely mundane thing, well, you'll need to decide why it doesn't work where magic doesn't work. So there's a limit to how much refluffing you can do, because no matter what, it's still magic.
However, beyond that, fluff away. If you want your burning hands spell to look like blackened hellfire, or actually be you spewing hundreds of little spider-like fire elementals out in a wave from your mouth, go for it. Ham it up. Add some panache to it. :D