[D&D] Hot elves, morality, and the missing initiative roll

[Callan S.]

I'm pretty sure John didn't do so by sheer personal power - he used a series of tools and techniques (often housed within rules) and I think he's asking for more rules on the matter because he knows that's how it worked.

[Daniel B]

Quote from: Meramec on February 03, 2010, 06:15:36 AM

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Arthur: "It's times like these that make me wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was little."
Ford: "Why? What did she tell you?"
Arthur: "I don't know. I didn't listen."

[Callan S.]

Hi John,

Opposite to Daniel assuring you you didn't impose anything, I'm thinking you want to, to some extent, impose your sense of justice. BUT within a set of rules, rather than just doing things that nobody has consented to. That way they know your just working the rules system rather than getting in the way of a familiar and fun set of rules. Am I understanding you to any degree?

[contracycle]

I agree with the view that the Lizardman situation pretty much played out well enough as is, but I sympathise with the idea of there being some sort of systematic prompt for this sort of thing.  In all probability, this incident was invented not to create a moral problem, but to create a tactical one.  Of course, the tactical problem implies a moral issue, but thats probably not the reason it was introduced.  Similarly, I agree that the hot elf can be reintegrated in any number of ways that makes the player's invention of her relevent, and thus give her a bit more presence than a run-of-the-mill NPC.

But, I would probably have blanked out on the hot elfs possibilities, just as I would probably not develop the lizardman scenario any further.  At best, what I might do is stage some sort of revenge attack on the party by outraged lizardmen, but without revealing to the players why this happened it will be experienced with no more significance than a random encounter.  If you GM in a framework of What Would Happen, as I do, and even I suspect if you do so in terms of challenge, these alternate and more dramatically interesting ideas don't necessarily occur to you.

I'm not too keen on the systems so far proposed, as I'm not convinced they're really appropriate for the reasons others have mentioned.  But as the OP suggests, having some sort of prompt for this sort of thing would be useful, would be more likely to prompt an idea than my relatively dry and mechanistic habits of thought.  Maybe, in my revenge attack, I would include some sort of clue indicating what motivated it, but that will still rely on the players being perceptive, lucky and interested enough to notice the clue and realise the relation.  Whereas if I borrowed something from the much-maligned 3-act play structure principle of "get them into trouble, get them into more trouble, get them out", I would probably end up with something meatier and more engaging.  But it is not intuitively obvious to me how I would actually do that, or structure it so that the players were aware of it.

I don't think that any of this sort of intervention goes against the general grain of my/our play style.  Even working within the framework of What Would Happen, sooner or later you need to select between different possible things that could happen.  Selecting for the more interesting and engaging option does not necessarily undermine the general practice; it certainly could happen that the hot elf goes on her way and is never seen again, but it would be less interesting than if she returned in some way.  Thus. this is not significantly about moral choices or anything ofd that nature, it's really a sort of sense of the suitably dramatic.

[athornton]

Oh, maybe I see something here I didn't before.

We can all name systems in which the mechanics are designed to push the players into situations where there's a lot, emotionally, at stake, and reward putting it on the line.  Vincent Baker is one of my favorite designers for games like this: Dogs in the Vineyard seems like it could be used to play this sort of moral conflict with a lot of mechanical support (so could Poison'd).

But....can you do this, and still be playing D&D?  That I don't know about.  That is, is there a way to keep the things that make D&D D&D (and what would those be?  Six stats with a range of 3-18?  Classes and levels?  d20, roll high, to hit?  Saving throws?) and still provide mechanical support for moral (as opposed to tactical) conflict?

Hackmaster introduced the Alignment Audit, and just like the rest of 4th edition Hackmaster it was a joke on one level, the sort of crazy over-the-top crunch that you'd add to AD&D if you were an obsessive-compulsive chart-maddened designer on a meth binge (I mean, really, the thing used vector algebra to figure out what happened to your alignment), but on another level it was sort of eerily compelling.  I took it as a parable of why Gygaxian Alignment doesn't work if your players are optimizing the gamist rather than the narrativist elements of play, but it could as easily be a pointer towards "look, if you're going to try to take alignment seriously, here's what you're going to have to do."  As an aside, Hackmaster 4th is really very interesting to read as a deconstruction of late-1st and 2d edition AD&D.

I thought I had a point when I started this post; now I'm not so sure.  I guess my point, if any, is "can D&D be made to do this?  Or once you've bent it to be able to do that, is it no longer D&D anymore?"  I think that's going to be a very subjective call, since I don't think there's going to be any real way to come up with an unproblematic consensus on what Essential D&D is.

[JoyWriter]

I can understand that moral puzzle angle, I actually think it's a more healthy way to approach moral situation; where if you see a trade-off you try and subvert it so you can get both sides, or avoid both dangers as much as possible. All too many moral dilemmas that people pose presuppose no compromise solution, which I think is a pretty dangerous thing to teach people. But this bit is more important:

Quote from: Meramec on February 02, 2010, 10:02:41 PM

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[Meramec]

athornton: <Daniel<Callan:<contracycle:<JoyWriter:

[Callan S.]

Callan:<

I didn't mean impose absolutely your sense of justice - I mean imposing an influence. Imposing it to a degree. The amount you can impose it being limited by mechanics and so your going no further than the mechanics they know are there.

This is what you did with the lizard women and children carrying the treasure - as you noted, you realised you were pushing a pressurised issue toward the players. Because their responce and how it turns out is interesting.

I mean, I think your sensing that if you impose too much you'll determine that responce yourself, which makes play pointless. But if you don't impose at all you wont get pressurised situations. I'm thinking your looking at mechanics to help regulate that? Or does it seem way off?

[athornton]

athornton: <

Bah!  (See below)

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[Daniel B]

athornton: <

O_O   .. yow! Very interesting!

A quote from Ron Edward's essay System Does Matter:

I have heard a certain notion about role-playing games repeated for almost 20 years. Here it is: "It doesn't really matter what system is used. A game is only as good as the people who play it, and any system can work given the right GM and players." My point? I flatly, entirely disagree.

"Whoa," you might say, "my GM Herbie can run anything. The game can suck, but he can toss out what he doesn't like and then it rocks." OK, fine. Herbie is talented. However, imagine how good he'd be if he didn't have to spend all that time culling the mechanics. (Recall here I'm talking about system, not source or story content material.) I'm suggesting a system is better insofar as, among other things, it doesn't waste Herbie's time.

When I first started reading this post, I was of the opinion that the juicy narrative stuff necessarily *had* to be at least considered beforehand, if not outright fully prepared for, because of the limitless possibilities for such things. Therefore it was pointless to build rules for their resolution, lest you risk building parts of "system" that a lot of Herbies out there must waste their time culling.

However, you make a great point!! Your comment on trying to link the systems without losing the souls of either really struck me. Not an ugly mongrel of game and narrative, but an economic and aesthetically-pleasing union of the two such that the two halves complement each other to make a whole greater than the sum of it's parts.  If I may propose: the gamist rules should be like a swiss-army knife, handling all the mechanical issues quickly and efficiently, but should neatly sliiiide out of the way when the players (and GM) collectively decide the encounter is more elegantly handled "narrativistically".

How interesting would your game have been if the battle with the bandits began fully within the game system, maybe with a touch of the narrative system to handle the budding romance between a PC and the hot elf adventuress bandit (and with some link handling it's effect on the battle), before switching fully into narrative mode when the bandits escape into the forest, since the normal gamist rules simply fall flat in this domain.

Quote from: Meramec on February 10, 2010, 05:49:46 PM

JoyWriter: <

I like this. It's something I've strongly believed in for a while. If even the GM is not engaged and entertained by the very game he's running, the players certainly won't be either. You're right; if the system itself provides little nuggets of content into play that the GM wasn't expecting (outside of the content introduced by the players'), it certainly would be a breath of fresh air.


Thanks again for the original post, Meramec

[contracycle]

Seems to me the lizardman situation is a classic Revenge plot.  Or at least, it could be assumed to be a revenge plot, although it could also be a "falling prey to cruelty" plot.  That kind of stuff is easy enough to determine, and could be selected from an appropriate list (such as those lists of plot archetypes that already occur).  What is much less clear is how you actually go about building a revenge plot such that it is more than just another simple encounter.

I think the same applies to the chase situation.  Chases by their nature demand immediate creation of setting elements, and usually elements more interesting than "the road stretches out before you endless and straight".  Anyone who has, say, played for example Grand Theft Auto will be aware that the are in which the chase occurs produces different kinds of hazards, and can spill over from one area to another.  But this is very difficult to systemtize in RPG, and would need to be contextualised not just for setting as a whole but for small local regions within a setting.

In both cases the key problem, IMO, is content creation rather than system or even conflict resolution.  The conflict res mechanics of HeroWars, for exmaple, do not IMO serve any better at producing interesting content for chases, even if the mechanical problem of the chase is much better represented by a conflict res mechanic.

[LostSoul]

You might want to check out Kellri's Encounter Reference .pdf.  It's got a ton of random tables for all sorts of different things.

Here is the link to the blog (the .pdfs are on the right hand side): http://kellri.blogspot.com/

[Callan S.]

But, in some sense, all RPG rules are really just Dumbo feathers.

I think they're dumbo feathers as much as a guitar is a dumbo feather to a guitarist - as if he could do what he does without the 'dumbo feather'. Some people might want to treat rpg rules that way (which at it's full philosophical extension is air guitar, AFAICT), but I'll leave a dissenting view against the idea that all of roleplay and it's rules always and only work/exist in a dumbo feather way.

[Meramec]

Daniel,

I think you've nailed what I'm getting at here with your comments about rules that come into play when needed and recede when they are not and rules to help engage the DM.

I the end, this post was for me to discuss and work through some issues that crop up in my play that I want a game to address.  Like most gamers, I am working on my own "design", and I firmly believe the rules affect the play.

You read a lot on "old school D&D" forums things about "superior players and DM's will generate awesome play" regardless of rules.  But I think rules can add value considerably.

Take one example:  say a game has a social skill.  Now, lots of games have these.  In WOTC's first D&D offeirng, you roll your diplomacy or intimidate check and consult a table for the result.  What if instead you roll your check and, depending on your success, you were given "points" to spend during the social engagement as a PLAYER.  You could spend a point to say "wait, I didn't know the guard was going to attack me if I made fun of his armor, let me say something else isntead" or you could spend a point to ask "how do I think this guy will respond if I ask about why his wife hasn't been around lately?"  Things like that which actually add ot the game but retain the nearly freeform nature of a social encounter.  I think with such a ruleset in play you could have markedly superior "role-playing" encounters than you can without (at least with some segment of players), because the "game" would now officially cover such things in a way that empowers the PLAYER, not the character.   In fact, I think one of the greatest things a ruleset does is direct how a player thinks, and having rules that get a player to actively think along more dimensions is a plus.  So putting some "tactics" or "resource management" into things like talking to the barkeep after the latest foray into the dungeon seems desirable to me.  It allows more easily for the possibility that danger, excitement, imagination and story may emerge from sources not statted with hit dice and AC's.

Anyway, this is the direction I'm heading with most of my "resolution" notions.  The idea that you roll a die, add your modifiers, and consult a chart for resolution bores me these days.  I want something else.  I love the "old school" D&D's focus on player skill and flexibility (the canonical example being the searching for traps sequence), but I think there are ways to capture that with technology much different from that found in 70's era games.   

Thank you all for your comments, and thanks to everyone who helped my thought process here.  I'll try to post more on the Forge, although learning the jargon used here will take some time. I still have no solid idea what is being said on many of the threads here!

Take care and game on!

John

[Jeff B]

John,

I'm really late seeing this thread, but wow!  What a fantastic account, and a DM expressing so many of the key issues in making an experience great.

As others have noted, I was also struck by your approach to rolling the melee round and avoiding the person-by-person interrogation about their actions, which constantly leads to a waste of time.  I remember so many games where, after 10 minutes of bickering, my turn FINALLY came around.  I'd roll a 6, of course.  "Miss".  There it was -- my 3 seconds of active play time for the hour. 

Great thoughts, and I'm keeping your idea of "everybody roll melee attacks!" for use later.  Many thanks.

Isn't it contradictory how source material is good, but over-documented game systems are bad?  Just look at what you did with a tiny book, tiny preparation time.  Eight million volumes of the latest edition sourcebooks were simply not needed.  On the other hand *something* was needed to help with those high-potential moments in the game.  It is not possible for the DM to think of everything, and there is no time for him to sit and wonder -- the game must go on.

In exchange for your great insights, I'll trade one back to you that I hope you will find thought-provoking.  I am determined to construct a resolution system in which the DM never rolls any dice.  Instead of the DM frantically playing 10 goblins and rolling dozens of dice (doing the work of several players), the DM instead says, "The goblins attack.  Roll melee defense.  John and Judy, you have two goblins each on you.  Fred, Estelle, Louise, you have only one goblin each to deal with."  And my rules system will essentially do the rest, leaving the DM free to absorb the combat results, mark damage to his many goblin monsters, move figurines perhaps, and the zillion other mental tasks a DM is engaged in.  Who knows, it might even give him time to throw color and flavor into the encounter!   The whole fight is resolved without the DM touching a die.  Instead of rolling for a trap that might spring, the DM says, "Joel, roll vs. trap avoidance".  I think you get the gist of it -- old habits and language patterns will have to change, but I think it's the way of the future.  The trick is, a simple resolution has to determine which party was hit (if either) and how much damage was taken.  But I'm confident I will eventually solve that problem.  I think making the DM diceless is part of next-generation RPG gaming. 

Thanks again for sharing your terrific experience...you sound like a great DM!

Jeff