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Anyhoo, I've an actual question for Ashiel, too. Pertaining to a classic problem in DMing;
When the rules do fail (and they will fail eventually), how do you handle these conflicts as they appear on the table? Do you roll a die, take a vote or something similar?
Typically, if the rules do fail to cover something, I'll generally do the following.
1) Explain that it isn't covered in the rules.
2) Quickly try to ad-hoc an idea for how to handle it in the moment if we're trying to press on (such as in combat), using existing mechanics as a benchmark if at all possible.
3) Open discussion about it (when no-one is in a hurry, typically between sessions) and come up with a solution to use going forward (which is often the birth of a new house rule).
When presenting an ad-hoc idea in the moment, I'll usually ask everyone if they're okay with the ruling, and if not, why, and try to come up with a general consensus. If the ruling would result in someone's PC dying or something, I'll usually be more lenient and create or revise the rules later.
Sometimes, especially when deciding on a final ruling for future cases where it comes up, you also have to harden your heart a bit and do what is most balanced (Ms. Raital Latral is often veeery allergic to anything that she may remotely perceive as a 'nerf' to anything she is interested in, and I have to admit that after a while, her shrill cries are kind of amusing to me :P).
Also, should rulebooks provide tips and tricks for new GMs on how to solve conflict situations quickly and easily? We see a lot of DM guides and rulebooks focusing on the creative processes, but very rarely examples of the usual problems and how to deal with them.
Oh definitely. I really want to try to improve the approachability of the game over previous incarnations, discussing good ways of resolving issues when they come up; suggestions for how to create your own house rules and mods (without the system imploding); and most importantly, how to get the most out of the system (such as having sidebars in the combat chapter that explain how to play the game better, such as when is a good idea to use certain actions, or why it's helpful to do things like dive behind cover, etc).
Honestly though, the best advice I could give is communicate with your group and players. Nobody is always right (players or GM) and listening and discussing things helps everyone get where they want to be faster.
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"People have to be awesome due to being inherently awesome."
First, some like situational awesome, rather than character awesome.
In D20, the two are very rarely much different. Because what your character can do in any situation is based on...what they can do, in that situation.
In things like D&D/Pathfinder/high-fantasy games, awesome is the reason that people are playing the game. You are going out and doing heroic fantasy things. If you can't do heroic fantasy things, then there is a problem. Same for other sorts of fantastic RPGs such as Star Wars. Or much of anything else. Characters having the ability to do awesome things directly leads to awesome situations.
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.
Let me put it another way. Say we're going to play a D&D-style adventure. It involves...wait for it...adventuring. Adventuring in a fantasy land involves things. Surviving things. Overcoming obstacles. Meeting challenges. And so forth. There is a reason the barmaid doesn't go on adventures. If she did, she wouldn't be a barmaid for very long.
Nobody wants to wait half an hour so the schoolmarm can roleplay teaching her students in class, or watching the barmaid player wait tables. In the same way the barmaid doesn't want to watch all the rest of the players for the rest of the game while they're doing adventuring stuff and she sits around doing nothing.
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.
But we're literally talking about high level characters doing high level things. Being able to do high level character things doesn't hinder RP at all. But NOT being able to do those things hinders gameplay tons.
Given that this was discussing the pros and cons of a skill unlock system for high level characters and the awesome things they can do, I don't really see what your point is. I think you'll need to re-explain it to me from a different angle.
Because being a high level by its nature implies that you are supposed to be awesome. Because you are supposed to be on par with beings that are pure awesomeness. o_o
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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.
Except it's entirely possible for everyone to be aiming at the same page and end up with the god and the gimp on accident. It's called the core rulebook. Literally three of the classes in it are absolute garbage while the rest play more or less nice with each other.
I recommended not bothering to call it a d20 mod because with how heavily things are changed it really won't be d20 anymore.
How far do you have to go to no longer be d20?
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.
When you say "start from scratch", could you give an example?
All with a focus on orange style play.
But...but I want to focus on turd-style gameplay. (T_T)
Maybe that could be an alternate name for the RPG system, since "D20" wouldn't be cool.
1st EDITION
Ah, right, a thing I wanted to mention.
When looking at the stuff you posted about weapons (perhaps, I looked at something outdated, so I may be wrong here), I noticed crossbows have longer range than longbows, which is entirely against how they work in real life.
Literally the biggest advantage of longbows over pretty much anything was the massive range, crossbows were immensely worse at shooting far. Crossbows really had two advantages over bows to compensate for the lower range: the fact that they're much easier to use and the fact that if a crossbow already has a bolt nocked, shooting it is very trivial and quick.
Seeing crossbows have enormous range (120ft range increment compared to 100ft of bows) is kinda jarring.
To clarify: crossbow bolts were generally significantly shorter (and thus lighter) than arrows.
This meant that they lost speed (and thus penetrating/killing power) during flight much faster.
As result, a longbow could still reasonably kill a well-armoured dude from 400 metres away, while a crossbow bolt would ping off harmlessly from 100 metres away.
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I see. :o
I was basing them off how crossbows in D&D/Pathfinder work. In the core rulebook, light crossbows have an 80 ft. range (vs 60 ft. for shortbows) and heavy crossbows have a 120 ft. range (vs 100 ft. for longbows).
That equipment file is in dire need of some revisions though. It's old, ugly, and merely a prototype. EDIT: Also grossly incomplete.
Which is actually one of the reasons I haven't been posting much of anything concrete (save for a few screenshots here and there) for people to play around with. I'd much rather get everything neat and tidy before handing it out for viewing, because I feel it would only muddy the waters since so much stuff is subject to change. >_>
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Speaking of that, I kinda like the idea of bows and crossbows having different in-game niches:
As a couple example suggestions, bows would be the uncontested kings of long range combat, with their damage and armour piercing capability not suffering much from distance, but crossbows would have close range advantages like, perhaps, the ability to threaten some reasonably small radius around you (like 15ft or whatever) while a bolt is nocked and not provoking by shooting (but probably still provoking while reloading).
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Which animal is your favourite? What if the selection was narrowed down-favourite amongst vertebrates and another favourite amongst invertebrates? What if we narrowed it down even more-what is your favourite bird, reptile, mammal and an arthropod?
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Would you rule Psicrystals in Pathfinder gain feats with master levels or not? The wording in DSP Psionics supplements looks a bit ambiguous to me:
For the purpose of effects related to number of Hit Dice, use the master’s total level in psionic classes.
The 3.5e wording was much clearer and definitely in favour of Psicrystals having feats:
Its Hit Dice are equal to its master’s Hit Dice (counting only levels in psion or wilder)
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Also, subquestion:
If Psicrystals make it to D20 Legends, which of the two options (featless or feated) is more likely to be implemented there?
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Which animal is your favourite?
...
What if we narrowed it down even more-what is your favourite bird, reptile, mammal and an arthropod?
I've never picked a favorite animal of any type before. Always seemed like too many great animals to choose from. However, in the attempt to give an answer... :D
Bird: Owls.
Mammals: Humans.
Reptiles: Snakes.
Arthropod: The Mantis.
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Would you rule Psicrystals in Pathfinder gain feats with master levels or not? The wording in DSP Psionics supplements looks a bit ambiguous to me:
For the purpose of effects related to number of Hit Dice, use the master’s total level in psionic classes.
The 3.5e wording was much clearer and definitely in favour of Psicrystals having feats:
Its Hit Dice are equal to its master’s Hit Dice (counting only levels in psion or wilder)
Yes, because feat acquisition is an effect related to number of hit dice. Specifically, you cannot have 3 HD and not have 2 feats, because having 2 feats is directly tied to having 3 HD. Thus if you have 3 HD for effects relating to HD, you now have 2 feats, because gaining feats is an effect related to HD. There is no way to extricate feat acquisition as an effect of having more HD.
Same with familiars.
If they didn't intend for this, they shoulda wrote it better. If it were intended to only be in concern to spells and such that targeted based on HD, then simply saying "Spells and abilities treat the familiar or psicrystal's hit dice as X".
Also, subquestion:
If Psicrystals make it to D20 Legends, which of the two options (featless or feated) is more likely to be implemented there?
Feats.
The familiar rules are somewhat odd here and can appear at first contradictory. It says familiars keep their own hd, then it says for effects relating to hd it uses the higher of it's own or it's master's. This however requires that it's own hd and it's master's hd be tracked separately. It is also questionable whether gaining feats can be considered an effect.
That said, I've had long discussions about familiars and how to handle them. I.E. nothing in the rules says a familiar can't advance itself, and since it becomes sentient, why would it not?
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.
Actually a narrative game can be negatively impacted, in fact, will most certainly be. Mechanics focused games go for balance, but balance is fake and breaks the rules of plausibility. A narrative game cares more about following plausibility to avoid breaking the narrative.]
I.E. I just read another example of folks using silent image to make a cr 13 encounter a cakewalk for a party of lvl 6.
You also get idiotically arbitrary rules, like how prestidigitation can't be used to distract an enemy or hinder the enemy in any waym but can be used to make crude temporary items. These are contradictory. You can't narratively allow creating even crude items without allowing that ability to distract, harass, and even set traps. This is a major problem game for balance though, because it is something that is supposed to be minor that doing something much greater.
Basically, player creativity exponentially enhances the power of abilities through narrative, thus allowing a creative player to use a simple low level ability to greater effect than a less creative player might use a much higher ability.
In essence, you can't balance creativity. And a purple player feels that throwing a crude toy at the bad guy's face is distracting, even the toy vanishes upon impact instead harming him. But the rules allow an actual crude toy to do this, but then says your magical yet indistinguishable one can't.
An orange player wants balance and is willing to sacrifice narrative power to achieve it. And sacrificing narrative power is essential to making it balanced.
A purple player wants narrative plausibility and is willing to sacrifice mechanical balance to achieve it. Sacrificing mechanical balance is essential to maintaining narrative plausibility.
Enforcing mechanical balance requires limiting narrative options, oftentimes in arbitrary ways which are unfair in ways other than mechanical balance.
As for the school marm, the concern is making a dud by accident. However, a character being a dud is dependent on the creativity and desire of the character's player. Also, as creativity vastly unbalances any system regardless of mechanical balance, part of the gm's job is to keep the players happy and balanced, not always mechanically, but in terms of spotlight, and achieving what they are each seeking from the game, which is different for each player.
Also, I don't think ash would be happy with a player bringing a dud to his game, and would not adjust very well to incorporating that player into his game.
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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.
Actually a narrative game can be negatively impacted, in fact, will most certainly be. Mechanics focused games go for balance, but balance is fake and breaks the rules of plausibility. A narrative game cares more about following plausibility to avoid breaking the narrative.]
Those are not automatic correlations. Those are correlations between specific systems instead of types of systems.
The presupposition that "balance is fake and breaks plausibility" makes assumptions that aren't inherently true about balance. Certainly balance can make systems that strain credulity and plausibility, but that is not an inherent part of balance in general.
If that is your premise, than you need to realize that you're specifically asking for a system that explicitly and inherently makes characters un-fun to play in certain styles.
If, on the other hand, you have a system that comes with balance built-in, you may always either avoid using those inherently balancing systems or make a purposefully substandard character. Nothing prevents that. I could still make an NPC-classed warrior with a high intelligence and low physical scores and wisdom, and put all my ranks into craft (underwater basket-weaving) and profession (school marm) and similar skills and have a great 'gimp' character on purpose... or I could just make a Core rogue and do the same thing accidentally and feel totally frustrated. A GM may well be able to fix that, but it's not a guarantee, and most of the time, they can't outside of very specific play-styles that may or may not be something they're skilled at.
In a system that's balanced, doing the "right" thing will come naturally, but making weaker characters is still possible by mild adjustments.
I.E. I just read another example of folks using silent image to make a cr 13 encounter a cakewalk for a party of lvl 6.
That's not an artifact of balance being fake in general, that's an artifact of balance being fake for spellcasters v. martial-style creatures, which is something Ashiel is explicitly handling in-system.
(Though I'd love to read that story, if you've got a link, because a CR 13 that has a suck Will save is not a good CR 13.)
You also get idiotically arbitrary rules, like how prestidigitation can't be used to distract an enemy or hinder the enemy in any waym but can be used to make crude temporary items. These are contradictory. You can't narratively allow creating even crude items without allowing that ability to distract, harass, and even set traps. This is a major problem game for balance though, because it is something that is supposed to be minor that doing something much greater.
This is explicitly not a fault of "tight" rules systems, it's a problem with a tight rule system with specific wording that harms its own internal consistency.
Basically, player creativity exponentially enhances the power of abilities through narrative, thus allowing a creative player to use a simple low level ability to greater effect than a less creative player might use a much higher ability.
That works for some styles of play, not all.
In essence, you can't balance creativity. And a purple player feels that throwing a crude toy at the bad guy's face is distracting, even the toy vanishes upon impact instead harming him. But the rules allow an actual crude toy to do this, but then says your magical yet indistinguishable one can't.
Again, that's a specific system, not a general truth.
An orange player wants balance and is willing to sacrifice narrative power to achieve it. And sacrificing narrative power is essential to making it balanced.
That isn't an automatic correlation at all. It's a broad assumption about people based on arbitrary standards that I've never heard of before this conversation.
A purple player wants narrative plausibility and is willing to sacrifice mechanical balance to achieve it. Sacrificing mechanical balance is essential to maintaining narrative plausibility.
That isn't an automatic correlation, either.
Mechanical balance can lead to narrative dissonance... but it doesn't have to.
Enforcing mechanical balance requires limiting narrative options, oftentimes in arbitrary ways which are unfair in ways other than mechanical balance.
That has... no evidence for being true, from what I can tell. Please give multiple examples of where this has been proven?
As for the school marm, the concern is making a dud by accident. However, a character being a dud is dependent on the creativity and desire of the character's player. Also, as creativity vastly unbalances any system regardless of mechanical balance, part of the gm's job is to keep the players happy and balanced, not always mechanically, but in terms of spotlight, and achieving what they are each seeking from the game, which is different for each player.
That's not true at all.
"Player creativity" can't overcome everything, regardless of the system, unless the rules are, "let's make believe, and whoever does that the best according to <arbitrary rules> wins" but at that point, you're going by player skill in <specific thing> and thus artificially restricting who can enjoy your game.
Also, I don't think ash would be happy with a player bringing a dud to his game, and would not adjust very well to incorporating that player into his game.
... that is a very specific guess. It may well be true. But you're presupposing on his skill level in a negative way.
One of the interesting things that this ignores is that Ash does things very well with comparatively little via tactics - and he has been indicated to be quite capable of adjusting those "down" when necessary (at least, according to his stories).
The problem is when you have one creative player and one not-as-creative-player. How would you handle that in a system that isn't balanced? Have the less creative do nothing, even if that's not fun? Tell the creative player to specifically play "down" even if that's not fun?
You're saying, "You shouldn't design for balance, because that automatically harms narrative" but I don't think you're talking about balance - I think you're talking about symmetry.
That's specifically about video games, but it applies to other things. 3rd edition and 3.5 and Pathfinder aimed for asymmetric balance, but it didn't work out so well in specific ways. Older systems never even tried - asymmetry and unbalanced were considered the same, and so you had characters who sucked at first level but were godlike later (mages), and characters who were godlike at early levels and sucked later (martials). This was partially inherited but much lessened in the d20 systems... though some classes got comparatively worse more or less accidentally.
4E just went another way entirely. 4E decided that everything had to be symmetrical (and thus had at-will/encounter/daily/support abilities in the same quantities and at roughly the same damage values or styles for everyone at specific levels. This can lead to things feeling "samey" - often misidentified as overly-balanced - but even in that symmetry there was still imbalance - not due to creativity, but due to mechanics.
The end result is that we've never seen either a symmetric or asymmetric system with genuine balance in D&D systems. It might not be possible. But with a greater degree of relative balance, it may be possible to make a coherent self-consistent world (like d20) that has a greater degree of balance, but less symmetry. I dunno, but that's what Ash is shooting for. Telling him, "That's a bad idea and you should feel bad." isn't really helpful, nor does it provide relevant points.
And before you note you haven't said, "That's a bad idea and you should feel bad." allow me to point out:
Enforcing mechanical balance requires limiting narrative options, oftentimes in arbitrary ways which are unfair in ways other than mechanical balance.
<snip>
Also, I don't think ash would be happy with a player bringing a dud to his game, and would not adjust very well to incorporating that player into his game.
... is basically implying something akin to that, intentionally or not. I recognize that it's not your intent to make such statements, and you're certainly not trying to be unpleasant, but the way that you represent some of your arguments doesn't hold up and does imply that anyone who disagrees is inherently doomed to failure, without providing examples for why - the only reference you've made is to a system of gradient that I've never heard of prior to this conversation... and one that isn't inherently true, as it presupposed directly opposing goals that aren't inherently directly opposing.
First, I'll put this here as it pertains to this discusdion and is written far better than I could hope to write,
http://www.thealexandrian.net/creations/misc/balance-types.html
Second,
Take this example,
"r example, consider a football game in which a character has the One-Handed Catch ability: Once per game they can make an amazing one-handed catch, granting them a +4 bonus to that catch attempt.
The mechanic is dissociated because the decision made by the player cannot be equated to a decision made by the character. No player, after making an amazing one-handed catch, thinks to themselves, “Wow! I won’t be able to do that again until the next game!” Nor do they think to themselves, “I better not try to catch this ball one-handed, because if I do I won’t be able to make any more one-handed catches today.”
It comes from a discussion on dissociated mechanics, but I'm going to use it too illustrate my point.
"take our One-Handed Catch ability, for example, we could easily say: The player activates his gravitic force gloves (which have a limited number of charges per day) to pull the ball to his hand. Or he shouts a prayer to the God of Football who’s willing to help him a limited number of times per day. Or he activates one of the arcane tattoos he had a voodoo doctor inscribe on his palms.
These all sound pretty awesome, but each of them carries unique consequences. If it’s gravitic force gloves, can they be stolen or the gravitic field canceled? Can he shout a prayer to the God of Football if someone drops a silence spell on him? If he’s using an arcane tattoo, does that mean that the opposing team’s linebacker can use a dispel magic spell to disrupt the catch?"
As he mentions, the moment you marry the narrative to the ability, you open a can of worms in terms of consequences. And here is where creativity becomes unbalanced.
Consider for a moment if creativity had it's own stat. Most players would then have a creativity of 10 or 11. Because they get a +0, they will gain X power from an ability as they consider mostly similar uses for that ability as thought of by the designers. And even if the designers do think of greater uses, they need to design the game around the fact that most players have creativity of 10-11. When the player comes along however that has a creativity score of 12-13, they get a +1. Unfortunately the power the gain from that ability isn't X+1, nope, instead it is X^2 (because it was X^1 and the +1 added to the exponent), this is because the more creative player sees more things to use with that power, they see farther down that chain of consequences for all the uncountable things, both in the mechanics and in the narrative that can work out a plan.
Basically, some players are Mcgyver and can use what everyone else sees as common everyday junk, and produce a miracle out of it. Thus the designer has the problem of needing a power to be usable at a set power Y, so that any player taking that power gets the same benefit. But the mechanics are unable to account for the player's creativity.
Additionally, there are two sets of mechanics you must deal with, the game mechanics, and laws of physics in the game world. But you can't just say whatever you want about the results of those fictional laws of physics, because each thing you say about them has a million consequences, and a player that has higher creativity sees more of those consequences for every ability they have, and thus have a hugely greater number of ability consequences to work with, meaning that every one mechanical ability they gain is a dozen additional tools.
So player with a creativity score of 10 has 10 abilities, and they gain 1 ability, they gain 10 tools, for 110 tools total and gain 1100 two tool combo uses, for a total of 12100 combo uses.
Compare to the player with a 12 creativity, they have 10 abilities amd just gained 1, they gained 12 tools for 132 tools, and gains 13024 two tool combos, for a total of 17,424 two tool combos.
Now consider the innumerable abilities inherent and inseparable from being a living thing in the game world, such as breathing, or having gravity (an ability that can be used), each of which provides tools to use.
A designer has to consider that most players will get power X from each ability, but some players will get X^2 from each ability. Some players will simply be smarter, more creative, and just in general more Mcgyver-like in their ability to use their abilities in different ways.
A test in psychology for creativity is to give someone one minute to come up with various uses for a newspaper. Most people get 3-4. Things like to read it, use as protective covering, or swat flies. There is one kid we were told about in class who came up with 52 uses for newspaper and had forgotten about the most obvious use of reading it. 52, that is like almost one every second. How can you balance a system such that one player gets 13 ideas for each idea amother player gets? or for each idea the designer gets for that matter?
This is why I say that players are unbalanced in a way that can't be fixed with mechanics, and why thus a gm needs to be able to keep players in line with each other.
Further complicating things,
Orange players focus on the mechanics and how they can combine mechanic A with mechanic B. They will still look beyond that, but their primary viewpoint is that of the mechanics. This requires mechanical consistency, thus saying that the mechanics don't apply because those mechanics don't mesh with the laws of nature in the game world causes problems.
A purple player ignores the mechanics per say. They think in terms of what the character can do as narratively described, and what the natural forces around their character are that can be taken advantage of. This however requires narrative consistency. Saying that the laws of nature don't apply because of the mechanics, totally ruins things.
Problems arise because it is not possible to design a fun game in which the mechanics perfectly match the game world's laws of nature. Even more so when heavily orange or green players don't care about the game world's laws of nature (allowing mechanics to override the narrative for sake of fun), but the purple players do care (disallowing mechanics to override the narrative because that would disrupt the fun).
Oh, I've just been watching Spy (2015). Another use for diplomacy in combat, the agent gets discovered as being not what she was pretending to be, and was about to be shot, but she talked her way out of it, saying that she was undercover, but not for the cia. She claimed she was undercover for the villian's father, tasked to protect the villian but without being noticed by the villian.
She also was the only one who could fly the plane.
So, in combat and making the enemy about to kill her into a "friend."
"the rules attempt to create a milieu that works as logically and realistically as that in which we actually live." from gygax's book roleplaying mastery.
From the same book, "To identify the spirit of the game, you must know what the game rules say, be able to absorb this information, and then interpret what the rules imply or state about the spirit that underlies them.
The spirit of a game cannot be expressly defined in a sentence or a paragraph, and any game designer who attempts to do so is defeating his own purpose. The spirit of an RPG pervades all the statistics, mechanics, and descriptions that make up the actual rules; it is everywhere and nowhere in particular at the same time. A game master or player who simply absorbs all the rules and uses them to play out a game adventure may be able to achieve exper- tise in the play of the game, but in the final analysis, he is doing no more than going through the motions-unless he also perceives, understands, and appreciates the spirit that underlies all those rules."
Does this not sound like a purple player? Concerned with the world implied by the rules, rather than the exactness of the rules themselves?
Consider this as well from another Alexandrian article,
". Wizards of the Coast had assembled three incredibly talented game designers – Jonathan Tweet, Monte Cook, and Skip Williams – to rework the system, and they had succeeded brilliantly. They stayed true to the roots of the game and captured the best parts of it, while shedding decades of detritus and poor design. There were still a few quibbles here and there, but they had taken advantage of the largest and most expensive design cycle for an RPG ever conceived and used it to deliver an incredibly robust, flexible, and powerful system.
One of the most impressive things about 3rd Edition is the casual realism of the system. You can plug real world values into it, process them through the system, and get back a result with remarkable fidelity to what would happen in the real world."
They stayed true to the root of the game, what Gygax called the spirit of the game.
They also did what, modeled the real world plus a few fantastic elements.
As Alexandrian says elsewhere, new players often say what they want to do without the mechanics, and the gm can just process it within the rules structure and describe the result. This means that the system can handle play without any real knowledge of the rules themselves just based on intuition and experience with the real world, and the system can handle it. He considers this a good thing, as do I. But it also says something about what he considers a benefit of the rules, the ability to use them without knowing them, because they model the world which is the game. It also is the gm taking a situation and using the appropriate rules as a tool rather than being constrained by the rules. The say how to do something, which is different from saying what you can and can't do.
You should probably read lots of the Alexandrian, especially you ashiel, as he gives all kinds of advice including fixes for problems like save or die spells, martial vs caster disparity, the cheapening of death, how the presentation of rules can make things harder or easier, and many other things.
http://www.thealexandrian.net/creations/creations.html
So. Starfinder. Guess we'll see where that goes, huh?
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Would you rule Psicrystals in Pathfinder gain feats with master levels or not? The wording in DSP Psionics supplements looks a bit ambiguous to me:
For the purpose of effects related to number of Hit Dice, use the master’s total level in psionic classes.
The 3.5e wording was much clearer and definitely in favour of Psicrystals having feats:
Its Hit Dice are equal to its master’s Hit Dice (counting only levels in psion or wilder)
Yes, because feat acquisition is an effect related to number of hit dice. Specifically, you cannot have 3 HD and not have 2 feats, because having 2 feats is directly tied to having 3 HD. Thus if you have 3 HD for effects relating to HD, you now have 2 feats, because gaining feats is an effect related to HD. There is no way to extricate feat acquisition as an effect of having more HD.
Same with familiars.
If they didn't intend for this, they shoulda wrote it better. If it were intended to only be in concern to spells and such that targeted based on HD, then simply saying "Spells and abilities treat the familiar or psicrystal's hit dice as X".
Feats.Also, subquestion:
If Psicrystals make it to D20 Legends, which of the two options (featless or feated) is more likely to be implemented there?
In your games familiars can get feats?
Can they get item crafting feats? What about Leadership?
Stuff about TheAlicornSage:
>Basically, some players are Mcgyver and can use what everyone else sees as common everyday junk, and produce a miracle out of it. Thus the designer has the problem of needing a power to be usable at a set power Y, so that any player taking that power gets the same benefit. But the mechanics are unable to account for the player's creativity.
>the designer has the problem of needing a power to be usable at a set power Y
Stop right there. You are presuming a very narrow design philosophy which may or may not apply in this case. I certainly know some games where that sort of logic wasn't used by the designers, and yet the result was more balanced because of it.
>Additionally, there are two sets of mechanics you must deal with, the game mechanics, and laws of physics in the game world. But you can't just say whatever you want about the results of those fictional laws of physics, because each thing you say about them has a million consequences, and a player that has higher creativity sees more of those consequences for every ability they have, and thus have a hugely greater number of ability consequences to work with, meaning that every one mechanical ability they gain is a dozen additional tools.
Why would you need to say whatever you want about the results of those fictional laws of physics in the first place?
>So player with a creativity score of 10 has 10 abilities, and they gain 1 ability, they gain 10 tools, for 110 tools total and gain 1100 two tool combo uses, for a total of 12100 combo uses.
>Compare to the player with a 12 creativity, they have 10 abilities amd just gained 1, they gained 12 tools for 132 tools, and gains 13024 two tool combos, for a total of 17,424 two tool combos.
Where are you getting these arbitrary numbers? I understand your point, that while one player might see a room full of Hufflepuffs and think that there is nothing that they can use in combat, another player sees a room full of Hufflepuffs that "also contain bones that can be removed, sharpened, and used to stab someone.". That doesn't mean that balance is impossible to achieve, since that isn't what balance in an RPG is about.
>How can you balance a system such that one player gets 13 ideas for each idea amother player gets?
By making them work together. It's not rocket science. As long as the non-creative player is actually useful, they will easilly have their place in the spotlight without the GM having to jump through hoops.
> Or for each idea the designer gets for that matter?
Ashiel is a creative person herself and has a fair number of creative friends, each of whom is able and willing to try and make the system break. They also have an arbitrary amount of time before the final release to try their hand at it. I would be very surprised if any obvious exploits would be left within the rules by the end of it, like drowning someone by making water appear in their lungs with Create Water.
>This requires mechanical consistency, thus saying that the mechanics don't apply because those mechanics don't mesh with the laws of nature in the game world causes problems.
Mechanics are supposed to reflect laws of nature, otherwise, what's the point?
>A purple player ignores the mechanics per say. They think in terms of what the character can do as narratively described, and what the natural forces around their character are that can be taken advantage of.
Mechanics are natural forces around them.
>Problems arise because it is not possible to design a fun game in which the mechanics perfectly match the game world's laws of nature.
Lord Kelvin, a world-renown physicist, thought planes were impossible to design. Got any proof?
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In your games familiars can get feats?
Yes. Because they are an effect related to HD.
Can they get item crafting feats? What about Leadership?
If they can get a caster level (there are a few ways to do this, with the basic method being taking the Extra Traits feat and picking up something like Alluring which gives a CL that scales with your HD). Leadership is also possible, though it's only been joked about at our tables. I don't ban Leadership, yet very rarely does anyone take it. It's weird actually, 'cause you'd think it's one of those things that every powergamer would want but the last time anyone in our group was so much as thinking of taking it was our party's Paladin because he wanted to make one NPC his official waifu squire.
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Assymetry. :)
"You are presuming a very narrow design philosophy which may or may not apply in this case. I certainly know some games where that sort of logic wasn't used by the designers, and yet the result was more balanced because of it."
Examples? Cause, the only games that don't worry about how powerful an ability is are games that rely on a GM or the players for balance instead of the rules, such as fiasco or that simple marvel superheroes system (I might have the name wrong). They aren't balanced, they don't seem so out of whack because they have rules that explicity rely on judgement calls, but all that does is leave the responsibility for balance in the hands of the players. Then again, balance isn't exactly important to those games either.
", they will easilly have their place in the spotlight without the GM having to jump through hoops."
Relying on the gm does not equal making them jump through hoops. The best rules are the ones that leave the gm free to adjust things as needed with a good set of guidelines and benchmarks to make it easy for the gm to do so.
"I would be very surprised if any obvious exploits would be left within the rules by the end of it,"
Obvious is the key word here. What is obvious to one is not obvious to another. Even simple things that would seem obvious , such as a misspelled word, can be missed (in one case it was missed by nearly two dozen people and wasn't spotted until after the trial printing, mere hours before the first full print run was about to start.). To harry, using those bones was obvious.
And why do you call them exploits? I generally see exploits as referring to when the rules allow a really power option in the mechanics that shouldn't be allowed according to the narrative. Narrative is not and can never be balanced mechanically.
People like to think of themselves as creative, and maybe they are, but compared to someone far above them, they won't seem like it.
"Mechanics are supposed to reflect laws of nature, otherwise, what's the point?"
Because for many there is a desire for a more gamist sort play, something more like chess or checkers. They want something where the gamefield is level, so they can win through through better strategy, better intellect, or smarter character creation. That is why is has become common for most encounters to be equal lvl. Originally, it was expected that encounters would vary in difficulty, expected that mid lvl players would spend most of their combats fighting low level mooks. But orange is the popular way to play, and orange likes balanced.
Truly reflecting the laws of nature would not be balanced. For purple, that is acceptable, but not for orange.
"Mechanics are natural forces around them."
No they aren't. The forces of nature are like thhe game of life. It is a very simple game. Each cell is either alive or dead. If 2-5 neighboring cells are alive, then the cell lives, if 6-8 neighboring cells are alive, the cell dies. Very simple, though the things that can be done with this are better than minecraft. But to use those rules, you need to calculate every cell dozens of times. Not good to play with manually, not to mention doing a bunch of boring comparisons.
Consider for a moment that we use reality as a baseline. Gravity exists and works just like real life, unless we are told otherwise, in which case you need to accurately describe how it works, and not just the effects on players, but the underlying structure. For any change you make, you must consider how the world stays together, how we orbit the sun, how do the tides work, how do people walk, and a million other details. But rules don't do this. They tell us only things we can or can't do, or how we can do them.
For example, in d20, the rules aren't there to tell us we can pick locks, we intuitively know locks can be pickes. We look to the rules for how to handle picking locks. Besides, what law of nature in the real world or the narrative world allows us to pick locks? There isn't one. That ability is inherent in the existence of locks. But the rules don't say "locks in this world can be picked" instead they say "if you want to pick a lock, you do X."
"Got any proof?"
The real world is made up of electrons, protons, and neutrons, electricity, magnetism, gravity, and the two atomic forces. We could smaller, but we don't really need to. We could write a book perfectly describing how these three things mesh to build all of everything. But the book would be unfun to play because we would have to build everything from the atomic level all they way up to the level we want to play at with people and objects. But it alao leaves us to notice and figure things out for ourselves, like the fact that water spins counterclockwise on one half the planet and clockwise in the other is not written into the rules of gravity or atomic structuers. It is a derived fact. The extreme amount of work to go from atoms to the real world is far too much and is not fun.
On the other side, describing all these derived nuances of the world would take a massive book that would weary even the most dedicated of rules lawyers. It would be too many rules and far too complicated to be enjoyed. Even l5r, all pf gurps, and palladium wrapped together would be like tic-tac-toe in comparison. Not fun.
So what do we do. We limit the scope of our rules to what will be useful in the playing of the game. but this means that much is left out, and we can't always predict all the nuances of how the world's workings might affect the outcome of the game, particularly when creative players start trying to use either derived capabilities or capabilities from outside the scope selected for the rules to be written.
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>Assymetry
More like perfect symmetry .
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First, I'll put this here as it pertains to this discusdion and is written far better than I could hope to write,
http://www.thealexandrian.net/creations/misc/balance-types.html
The short version is simply, "I disagree".
The long version is...
The problem with concept balance is that it requires you to severely limit either (a) flexibility of character creation; (b) the scope of gameplay; or (c) both.
Wrong. The best balanced classes in the core rulebook that share the same sorts of roles are Barbarian, Paladin, and Ranger. All of these classes offer different kinds of flexibility and entirely different systems for doing things.
Playing a Barbarian, Paladin, and/or Ranger is noticeably different from one-another, especially at higher levels. However, each of them is able to contribute pretty equivalently to being martial characters and supporting in their own ways. They each excel at different things, but they are very balanced between each other.
Interestingly, these classes are in fact infinitely more flexible in character creation and scope of gameplay than the classes that are generally seen as weak and imbalanced like Fighter, Rogue, and Monk.
So based on my observations, I simply disagree with the premise.
Further...
A simple example of this is the difference between a campaign focusing on lots of melee fighting in the tightly confined quarters of a typical dungeon (favoring Conan) and a campaign focusing on lots of ranged fighting in the wilderness (favoring Robin Hood). A more complex example of this was the subject of my essay "Death of the Wandering Monster" -- certain types of campaigns allow the spotlight balance between fighters and wizards to skew one way or the other.
Is an expression of why well designed mechanical systems are good. Looking again at the Paladin, Barbarian, and Ranger, none of them are wholly reliant upon a given method of combat. They can specialize, sure, but they don't simply fold when they aren't in their best element (like a Fighter folds if they've invested 9/10ths of their feats into archery and someone casts fickle winds), they are provided a good range of options to get creative with.
That is a direct result of them being better designed from a mechanical standpoint. They are designed from the ground up to be good at adventuring (or it happened accidentally through an evolution of tweaking weak spots, either way the result is more or less the same).
I otherwise agree with the issues of spotlight balance and natural balance and pretty much think they can die in a fire. D20 Legends is being designed around the idea that your level means something. Assuming that you are level X, you are going to be roughly equivalent to another level X. This doesn't mean that you'll do the same things but you'll pull your weight in your own ways.
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Ashiel is a creative person herself and has a fair number of creative friends, each of whom is able and willing to try and make the system break. They also have an arbitrary amount of time before the final release to try their hand at it. I would be very surprised if any obvious exploits would be left within the rules by the end of it, like drowning someone by making water appear in their lungs with Create Water.
Funny you mention this, for two reasons.
I'm super looking forward to people trying to run my system through a grinder. Aratrok and I, already try to figure out great ways to break and bend stuff as it's being written, then sometimes that leads to more tweaking until it's patched. The big work will come during the playtests, and we want them to try to shatter this thing.
The second is the create water thing. See, an old friend of mine tried similar things all the time. In fact, he suggested that you could use a druid spell that allowed you to control a piece of wood to hit someone with a marred club, give them a splinter, and then instant-kill them by casting that spell and moving the splinter into their brain through their bloodstream and giving them a stroke.
But, of course, the mechanics of the game make that impossible. Because even if the club did lodge a splinter into somebody, they lack line of effect to the splinter (because it's inside somebody) and thus couldn't do that.
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Because for many there is a desire for a more gamist sort play, something more like chess or checkers. They want something where the gamefield is level, so they can win through through better strategy, better intellect, or smarter character creation. That is why is has become common for most encounters to be equal lvl. Originally, it was expected that encounters would vary in difficulty, expected that mid lvl players would spend most of their combats fighting low level mooks. But orange is the popular way to play, and orange likes balanced.
Actually, unless you're stepping outside the expectations of the system, you're not going to get a balanced fight. I discussed this in this post. Here's an excerpt.
Why Pathfinder isn't Fair - OR - Why CR Favors PCs: One of the reasons that the game is slanted in the PC's favor in terms of building encounters is that even "fair" encounters will typically lead to a very short campaign. Now, when I say "fair", I mean more or less equal with everyone playing by the same rules. However, that's not how it works in Pathfinder.
Pathfinder defines an average encounter as a party of 4 PCs vs a CR equal to the average party level (take note). It defines an epic encounter as Average Party Level +3 with the warning that it's very likely that one or more PCs will die and it can turn into a TPK with a little bad luck. The thing is, none of that is fair. It's all slanted in the favor of the PCs. To see this, we just have to look at the party's challenge rating and it becomes clear.
A heroic classed character with PC WBL (e.g. player characters) has a CR equal to their level. So a 5th level wizard w/ PC WBL is CR 5. Two CR 5 creatures equate to a CR 7 encounter. Four of them equate to a CR 9 encounter. This means even in an "epic encounter" where the CR of the enemies is APL(5)+3, the encounter is CR 8 or still 1 CR lower than the CR of the collective PCs. That doesn't seem fair, right? :o
Well, to understand why this is, we need to understand why fair fights are bad for the game. In a fair fight, you've probably got roughly a 50% chance for it to go either way. With a 50% chance to lose the fight, unless there is some sort of mechanic in place to allow easy escapes when things turn bad, roughly every other encounter is going to require PCs to re-roll characters or even an entirely new party. It would take 5 encounters to gain 1 level in a "fair" fight but you're statistically likely to never make it past 4, and you absolutely must rest between fights.
Also, for the record, a lot of these color descriptions sound like you're talking about unicorns and fairies, or the most extreme examples of players possible, as I've met little to none that fit the descriptions you've laid out thus far.
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Ashiel is a creative person herself and has a fair number of creative friends, each of whom is able and willing to try and make the system break. They also have an arbitrary amount of time before the final release to try their hand at it. I would be very surprised if any obvious exploits would be left within the rules by the end of it, like drowning someone by making water appear in their lungs with Create Water.Funny you mention this, for two reasons.
I'm super looking forward to people trying to run my system through a grinder. Aratrok and I, already try to figure out great ways to break and bend stuff as it's being written, then sometimes that leads to more tweaking until it's patched. The big work will come during the playtests, and we want them to try to shatter this thing.
The second is the create water thing. See, an old friend of mine tried similar things all the time. In fact, he suggested that you could use a druid spell that allowed you to control a piece of wood to hit someone with a marred club, give them a splinter, and then instant-kill them by casting that spell and moving the splinter into their brain through their bloodstream and giving them a stroke.
But, of course, the mechanics of the game make that impossible. Because even if the club did lodge a splinter into somebody, they lack line of effect to the splinter (because it's inside somebody) and thus couldn't do that.
And that is a good example of a mechanic that easilly stops a lot of similar "creative" solutions. You could still create water inside someone's mouth as they were yawning, though, and that's going to be quite distracting for them.
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Also, with no intended hostility to the majority of GMs in the world, I must say with all honesty...
The majority of GMs are s&*! GMs.
They're probably great people but they're s*!+ GMs. Because you have to grow out of being a s@#~ GM. Relying on a GM to ad-hoc and fix issues in a ruleset is relying on GMs to not be s#@@ GMs. More often than not, when your average GM tries to "fix" something, they break the game horribly. Most haven't the foggiest notion about real balance or what the classes are capable of doing. They probably think Fighter and Rogue are OP because they beat up their owlbears a lot.
Minimizing rule 0 means having a better game. Because most GMs are s~#+. I was s~$~. Some days, I'm probably still a little s@*~. I'd rather leave rule 0 for solving really random corner cases, not for making the game function in normal play.
And that is a good example of a mechanic that easilly stops a lot of similar "creative" solutions. You could still create water inside someone's mouth as they were yawning, though, and that's going to be quite distracting for them.Ashiel is a creative person herself and has a fair number of creative friends, each of whom is able and willing to try and make the system break. They also have an arbitrary amount of time before the final release to try their hand at it. I would be very surprised if any obvious exploits would be left within the rules by the end of it, like drowning someone by making water appear in their lungs with Create Water.Funny you mention this, for two reasons.
I'm super looking forward to people trying to run my system through a grinder. Aratrok and I, already try to figure out great ways to break and bend stuff as it's being written, then sometimes that leads to more tweaking until it's patched. The big work will come during the playtests, and we want them to try to shatter this thing.
The second is the create water thing. See, an old friend of mine tried similar things all the time. In fact, he suggested that you could use a druid spell that allowed you to control a piece of wood to hit someone with a marred club, give them a splinter, and then instant-kill them by casting that spell and moving the splinter into their brain through their bloodstream and giving them a stroke.
But, of course, the mechanics of the game make that impossible. Because even if the club did lodge a splinter into somebody, they lack line of effect to the splinter (because it's inside somebody) and thus couldn't do that.
Yeah, if their mouth counts as a receptacle. Though since the spell doesn't force a save vs drowning or something, you'd just come off as more of a prankster unless you could get them to drown in a more traditional fashion (like holding their head under the water or something).
Speaking of create water...
Create Water, continued.
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What happens if someone casts Mount, cuts off the legs of the horse, makes a stew out of them and eats it? Do they die from transfiguraiton sickness when the spell wears off?
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What happens if someone casts Mount, cuts off the legs of the horse, makes a stew out of them and eats it? Do they die from transfiguraiton sickness when the spell wears off?
I'd strongly suspect cutting the legs off the horse would reduce it to less than 0 HP and cause it to vanish since it's a summoned creature... >_>
That said, there's nothing that I know of that makes eating summoned creatures somehow poisonous, or even anything that suggests you couldn't game some sort of nourishment from them. I mean, a vampire who drinks blood from a summoned creature is still fed even if the creature later vanishes.
Also, holy fack, I just realized vampires should just eat summoned monsters. o_o
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You'd think that every part of the summon dissapears, including the blood the vampire drank, and that is now doing...something inside their body.
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You'd think that every part of the summon dissapears, including the blood the vampire drank, and that is now doing...something inside their body.
Magic is weird. :P
I mean, if you summon a venomous viper and it poisons someone, and then you kill the viper, the poison doesn't vanish either. I guess it works a lot like create water in that sense.
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You'd think that every part of the summon dissapears, including the blood the vampire drank, and that is now doing...something inside their body.Magic is weird. :P
I mean, if you summon a venomous viper and it poisons someone, and then you kill the viper, the poison doesn't vanish either. I guess it works a lot like create water in that sense.
That is a good point.
"TheAlexandrian wrote:
The problem with concept balance is that it requires you to severely limit either (a) flexibility of character creation; (b) the scope of gameplay; or (c) both.
Wrong. The best balanced classes in the core rulebook"
You misunderstand. What is meant by saying that character options must be limited, aka lack of freedom at character creation, is more along the lines of that fact that you can't have a school marm and a combat god. (and quite honestly, having a school marm be helpful in a combat encounter is just plain wrong on so many levels. I'd consider it broken to have a school marm be even nearly equally viable in physical encounters)
Basically, the fact that you try to squish aragorn and boromir into pc realm and hobbits into npc realm is limiting character options. The fact that you feel there is even a need for it stems from the very narrow scope of what you consider a fun game. It is just hard for you to see the difference because the difference is not explicitly encoded in the rules. It isn't something overt that can be pointed to. In fact, the difference for all the massive effect it has on games is one of the most subtle concepts I've ever dealt with in any aspect of life.
"The majority of GMs are s+#@ GMs."
I agree. But gms don't get better by taking it easy or being lazy. Frankly, I'd write a book on better gm if I thought I could write it well enough, but good writing lies outside the purview of us autistics.
If you want better gms, you need to A, give them guidence, and B, push them to their limits.
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"The majority of GMs are s+#@ GMs."
I agree. But gms don't get better by taking it easy or being lazy. Frankly, I'd write a book on better gm if I thought I could write it well enough, but good writing lies outside the purview of us autistics.
If you want better gms, you need to A, give them guidence, and B, push them to their limits.
Given that one of my favorite collaborators is autistic and I tend to like the stuff he writes, I'm gonna have to disagree with that one too. (^~^)
"as I've met little to none that fit the descriptions you've laid out thus far."
I am using more extreme examples because that usually makes things clearer. I don't think it is quite working though.
Then again, 95%+ of players I've met are in the orange zone. Very few actually play purple. Rare enough you may have never actually seen even a mostly purple game. In which case it would be much more difficult to really see it.
Of course, I have also studied psychology, so maybe helps my perspective a little, but I first played purple. It was my first group.
I only ever played in one group after that that was even remotely purple. Everyone else I have ever gamed with has been between orange and just slightly orange.
If all you've ever known was white people, then imagining someone who was black would be difficult (and kinda funny to watch. Saw this in basic training. One guy had literally never seen a black person before except on tv. He couldn't stop staring. As he said, it was the weirdest thing for him to see.). If you've never seen it, then likely the only difference you can judge is the range of orange you've actually dealt with. Sometimes, things are invisible until we see a contrast.
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"TheAlexandrian wrote:
The problem with concept balance is that it requires you to severely limit either (a) flexibility of character creation; (b) the scope of gameplay; or (c) both.
Wrong. The best balanced classes in the core rulebook"
You misunderstand. What is meant by saying that character options must be limited, aka lack of freedom at character creation, is more along the lines of that fact that you can't have a school marm and a combat god. (and quite honestly, having a school marm be helpful in a combat encounter is just plain wrong on so many levels. I'd consider it broken to have a school marm be even nearly equally viable in physical encounters)
The problem is that the school marm can happen accidentally.
Basically, the fact that you try to squish aragorn and boromir into pc realm and hobbits into npc realm is limiting character options. The fact that you feel there is even a need for it stems from the very narrow scope of what you consider a fun game.
I disagree. Because I don't think that you have to be strong to have a fun game, but I do believe that you need to be able to participate in the game to have a fun game. And if the group is trying to play a high fantasy game where they go off and do heroic things and fight dragons and demons and such, then you don't want to be the guy who accidentally made a school marm while trying to make a badass.
Narratively, if you do decide to play a mundane character, such as a school marm in Deadlands or a commoner in D&D/Pathfinder, either your character is going to sit out while the rest of the players do heroic stuff, or you're going to die, or you're not going to be a commoner for very long.
It is just hard for you to see the difference because the difference is not explicitly encoded in the rules. It isn't something overt that can be pointed to. In fact, the difference for all the massive effect it has on games is one of the most subtle concepts I've ever dealt with in any aspect of life.
You're making a lot of claims and assumptions about me, but I haven't seen any evidence to support either. Could you perhaps elaborate more?
PF doesn't really follow cr properly anyway. At each level, different DCs have different base chances for success. In the design of the game, you have a range of expected values for DCs. So in developing an encounter, you want to be able to predict where in that range the opponents are. That is point of cr, you can quickly see the you're not sending an enemy against the pcs that will not fail any save snd won't be hit by any attack (unless you are going for that).
Thus pf's cr thing is not right.
Besides, you get alot of complaints about tpks for some reason.
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"as I've met little to none that fit the descriptions you've laid out thus far."
I am using more extreme examples because that usually makes things clearer. I don't think it is quite working though.
Because it's creating an unrealistic scenario, I think.
Then again, 95%+ of players I've met are in the orange zone. Very few actually play purple. Rare enough you may have never actually seen even a mostly purple game. In which case it would be much more difficult to really see it.
Of course, I have also studied psychology, so maybe helps my perspective a little, but I first played purple. It was my first group.
Meaning?
I only ever played in one group after that that was even remotely purple. Everyone else I have ever gamed with has been between orange and just slightly orange.
Still failing to comprehend the definitions here.
If all you've ever known was white people, then imagining someone who was black would be difficult (and kinda funny to watch. Saw this in basic training. One guy had literally never seen a black person before except on tv. He couldn't stop staring. As he said, it was the weirdest thing for him to see.).
Imagining an albino person wasn't particularly difficult. I did it as a kid. Turned out, I wasn't far off, since I later met an albino person (which while more or less literally a 'white' guy, he wasn't a 'white guy').
I can imagine purple people and blue people too. I bet it'd be really cool to see one in reality, and I might stare in wonder for a bit and say "Wow, I've never seen someone with hair/eyes/skin/whatever shades like that before. It's cool" (since hey, eye-catching hair dye draws my eye pretty well), but it's not like it's even vaguely hard to imagine.
If you've never seen it, then likely the only difference you can judge is the range of orange you've actually dealt with. Sometimes, things are invisible until we see a contrast.
I've seen RPing without rules. I usually get bored because it either means conflict doesn't occur or there's no way of resolving the conflict unless the conflict's outcome is already predetermined.
I've also seen people that see the rules as being very mallable, and frankly I hate gaming with GMs who are constantly bending or twisting the rules or making stuff up off the top of their heads, because it always shatters my sense of immersion because the world doesn't feel alive or real at all, it feels like a bad dream that keeps changing randomly.
"to participate in the game to have a fun game"
Not actually true. For example, in my last we had one player who shunned the spotlight and always played second fiddle. He wanted to. Why? Because he liked the socializing, and he liked watching, and him playing was more about just being part of the group. He didn't or want to be a hero or do important things, or participate more than a very minimal amount. He would have been to just play the comic relief character that does nothing but get saved by everyone else.
As for the last part of that post, I'll answer later. I need sleep and that will require finding a hunch of stuff to quote, not to mention a couple hours of typing.
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PF doesn't really follow cr properly anyway. At each level, different DCs have different base chances for success. In the design of the game, you have a range of expected values for DCs. So in developing an encounter, you want to be able to predict where in that range the opponents are. That is point of cr, you can quickly see the you're not sending an enemy against the pcs that will not fail any save snd won't be hit by any attack (unless you are going for that).
DCs are a very small part of the battle process. In fact, it's very possible to win a battle without ever really testing against a target number.
Thus pf's cr thing is not right.
Hm?
Besides, you get alot of complaints about tpks for some reason.
Who does?
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"to participate in the game to have a fun game"
Not actually true. For example, in my last we had one player who shunned the spotlight and always played second fiddle. He wanted to. Why? Because he liked the socializing, and he liked watching, and him playing was more about just being part of the group. He didn't or want to be a hero or do important things, or participate more than a very minimal amount. He would have been to just play the comic relief character that does nothing but get saved by everyone else.
That's essentially a guest NPC. Someone who's not gaining treasure, not gaining experience, and isn't going to be factored into encounters since they aren't there to participate in them. If the game is not the source of their enjoyment, then it's irrelevant either way, because the game's design has 0% influence since their interest is just to sit around with everyone else.
Also, I'm not designing a game for people who aren't interested in playing the game. That'd just be dumb. (o_o)
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> I do believe that you need to be able to participate in the game to have a fun game.
Shouldn't that be "you need to be able to participate in the game to have a game"? I mean, game:an activity that one engages in for amusement, according to the dictionary.
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> I do believe that you need to be able to participate in the game to have a fun game.
Shouldn't that be "you need to be able to participate in the game to have a game"? I mean, game:an activity that one engages in for amusement, according to the dictionary.
Aye. XD
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On a side note, did you by chance notice that I'm adding a "wet" condition? :P
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On a side note, did you by chance notice that I'm adding a "wet" condition? :P
No, but it makes sense. Does it make you vulnerable to being frozen if hit with cold damage?
>Narratively, if you do decide to play a mundane character, such as a school marm in Deadlands or a commoner in D&D/Pathfinder, either your character is going to sit out while the rest of the players do heroic stuff, or you're going to die, or you're not going to be a commoner for very long.
I can see a mundane character as a sort of crazy long-ranged support structure, I suppose, who doesn't engage in battles directly(and thus doesn't need saves, HP, AC and other statistics to get to heroic levels) but rather supports the party from outside the dungeon, being the HQ of sorts. They could have vision and sound on the party with some sort of custom magical item, have a way to look up a literal library worth of information if the party needs to know something about any particular monster, might have various vision types through the same magical item to help party with detection if needed, might craft items that the party later would pick up and use and so on.
Notice how they still wouldn't be useless like a waitress in a dungeon, though-they would be useful in an entirely different way. I agree with Ashiel that useless characters won't participate in the adventures though.