@Nzall which is actually a good thing, as it unifies what otherwise would be several classes (paladin, antipaladin, blackguard) and allows for more build flexibility
@Shalvenay sorry, I didn't play those versions. What does "rulings first" entail? Does that mean that instead of trying to create a game rule for everything, players have much more freedom?
@NautArch in case it helps clarify, chat rooms don't get auto created unless someone clicks the link, and they can ignore the link and continue commenting instead.
also there might not have been enough ABAB to trigger the link?
the thing about a CRPG is, even a fairly free-form system can be dealt with pretty well through flexible game mechanics. Have you played Divinity: Original Sin, for example?
that's a pretty free-form RPG, where instead of a set of rules that tries to cover everything like in 3.0 and 3.5 games (like Neverwinter Nights), they have a set of interactions between various components spells are built out of
For example, instead of a rule "if you cast a fireball at an acid pool, the acid pool turns into an acid cloud", they have an interaction: "heat can turn liquids into gas"
I mean, the computer is the GM in this case, so a flexible GM that thinks in interactions, rather than rules can probably make pretty good decisions
@Nzall Computers are very good at handling hundreds of interacting atomic rules like that though. RPGs not so much. Although there are ones that have tried, like Phoenix Command and Aftermath!, the fact that those are from the 80s and out of print speaks to how well that method works for most people.
@SevenSidedDie yeah, but I'm not talking about a P&P RPG that works like a computer game. I'm talking about making a computer that has the main rules of 5e as a basis, and then uses interactions to figure out the corner cases
@Nzall I agree that a GM can be good at that though. It's just impractical to vest that in the rules rather than in the judgement of the GM (and investing it in the judgement of the GM is something a lot of players don't like).
@Nzall Oh I see! That's what happens when I come in partway through a conversation and don't read back far. ^^;
like, if you have a CRPG system where A) wood can burn to lose strength; B) every ceiling has a weight defined and C) mineshafts have wooden supports, you can have a CRPG where you can collapse a mineshaft on top of an enemy without having to explicitly state that's possible
@Nzall You must prepare the mineshaft though. You have to explicitly state that the stone is unable to hold itself and rely on the wooden supports, unlike everywhere else in the game, otherwise breaking the wooden supports has no effect.
I'm pretty sure there is just no way to implement the rule of cool properly.
@nwp Actually, what you say is that if something has a weight, it needs to have something strong enough between it and the ground to stay off the ground
because you won't just use that rule for mineshafts, but also for buildings, monsters, objects,... effectively, you write the law of gravity into your game
And then you start with the fun bits of designing huge caverns in such a way that they don't collapse on themselves
The fun part is when those rules start interacting and creating a world where from time to time random cat corpses appear
I fear there would be interactions that could be exploited. Like as a standard procedure you build a fan at the entrance of the mines and repeatedly cast poison cloud in front of it and kill all non-poison immune creatures in the whole dungeon.
That would just be lame and a real DM would find a way to make that not work, especially the second time it is attempted.
@nwp games have encountered, AND solved that problem as well. Left 4 Dead 2, a co-op zombie survival shooter, has an AI director that learns the playstyle of the players and adapts the environment and enemies you face to give you a proper challenge, just like a GM would do
It would work the first time, and the second time, you'd find that the cave has been adapted to deal with it
And who says such interactions are a bad thing? I mean, we get plenty of questions on this site where such interactions are found by players (throwing a boat at enemies, the medieval orbital cannon,...) and the question is how to deal with them
@Nzall That probably also means you can only collapse a mineshaft once. It becomes a game of throwing novel-enough ideas at the game at the right moment.
@Nzall They don't say "We could collapse the mineshaft and kill the goblins, but if we do that the mineshaft will adapt. Let's instead kill them manually and collapse the mineshaft on the boss".
@nwp Honest question: would you, as a GM of a D&D 5e game allow your players to collapse a mineshaft on both the goblins and the boss?
Phrased differently: would you permit NPCs to exploit the same mechanics over and over because it's the easy way out?
Exploit as in repeatedly do the same thing with them, not as in abuse
Like, you probably would let them do it the first time, then say something like "you see the macguffin hanging around the neck of the boss." The players would then probably realize that burying the boss would make them lose the macguffin
@Nzall Depends on how cool it is. If they go in, see goblins and try to collapse the mineshaft I'd make the support beams harder to destroy than the goblins. If they lose to the goblin boss and run away in an epic chase a regular arrow will collapse the mineshaft, especially if there is no precedence.
@nwp conditionals like that are tricky to deal with. In this case, you could realistically say that the beams have been weakened by the battles near them and an arrow could take them out
And I agree situations where something should happen differently based on what's going on are a challenge for CRPGs. However, I think such things reveal a difference between a CRPG and a P&P RPG. in the P&P RPG, there must be a lot more flexibility, but a CRPG generally has more railroading. Running from a boss doesn't really happen unless the game wants you to
