@BrianBallsun-Stanton: personally, I thought the comment was more appropriate, and don't particularly think my answer is better than yours. I was just pointing out that "unless you build for it" means pretty much only "if you're an Apostle of Peace."
@BrianBallsun-Stanton: question, how would you feel, from a design perspective, about a game that had rules-heavy, mechanical combat a la D&D, but narrativist, rules-light non-combat skills and social encounters, a la FATE?
@KRyan I'm not Brian, but I'd be very tempted to just apply the skills and social encounter rules for combat as well. It would, if nothing else, vastly speed up the resolution of combat encounters.
Yes, indeed. I've seen VoP used in exactly that way (a druid that also used the variants that granted it monk and ranger features), and it was overpowered just as Zach described.
Heh. I'm reminded of the player who had terrible luck with d20s, and so I built him a PC who instead spent ALL his attacks granting his allies basic attacks as free actions. Alone he couldn't kill a fly, but with a party that had even a little basic-attack optimisation...
Reminds me of a battlemech I made once. Good armour (maxed out for a medium-sized one), nearly impossible to hit due to very high movement and jump jets (something like 7/11/7), and just a bunch of small and medium pulse lasers as weapon, just enough to be able to fire them all, jump max distance and still not overheat. If you ignore him, he'll jump in your back and crit you to death. If you attack him, you'll waste lots of time and ammo on lousy chances to hit, if any.
@Undreren I have very little experience with tanks in 4e, as one player has run the same PC for the entire time of play: a hammer-and-shield fighter whose every hit (including OAs and combat challenge attacks) pushes at least 7 squares and slows the target. He doesn't get hit as much as a tank is expected to, but neither does anyone else.
Yes. I love giving the party neutral terrain that starts out offering advantage to the NPCs, but the PCs can turn to their advantage.
We had a miniboss that spent the first three turns of combat clinging to the edge of a cliff before finally failing his save and falling... and then spent the next three rounds climbing back up while the party pushed his friends off too.
It wasn't the fight I'd hoped for, but it was still very satisfying, so that's a win.
@BESW about same concept I guess... My players tank could knockdown-then-teleport a fair number of times in the battle. Knocking an enemy down is the same as granting CA and taken their Move Action away
So, combat was really static, at least for the monsters. And not very fun to run as a GM
In 3.5 I found that if I gave each NPC roughly the GP worth of loot an NPC of its level should have according to the DMG, my party kept reasonably close to parity. But that may have to do with my party's loot tactics at the time.
In 4e I usually drop generic "at least two of you would find this useful" items, maybe one custom item per level, and expect the party to use its resources to get things it particularly wants.
Due to time constraints/burnout, I'm about to ask the players to take over the loot in our 4e campaign. I'll tell them "an item of this level/rarity drops," and they decide what it is.
I'm currently running a campaign (more than a year now) set in the far past during the war between the tiefling and dragonborn empires. The party is an Impossible Missions Force style team on the side of the dragonborn, and there's some Far Realm shenanigans that only the party is really noticing because everyone else is too busy with the war.
Acererak is in there too, because every campaign I've ever run has a lich somewhere regardless of if I originally intended there to be. I think it's a subconscious tic or something.
@Undreren Did the noble turn out to actually be a vampire?
@Undreren Adding as a GM "... which was usurped by a Lich Lord with a hatred for the whole 'noblesse' thing, but enough wisdom to not get rid of them alltogether, but instead try to manipulate them into recreating the kingdom into something totally radical and different: a parliamentary democracy. At which point he'd retire, if it wasn't for the meddling of those pesky PCs ...."
@MartinSojka Agreed. My players have gotten to the point of being suspicious of any villain who gives those as his motives.
Example: the tiefling empire's stated goal is world domination, but their actual goal is eternal warfare because their economy is war-based and war is the only way they can fulfill the diabolic pacts sustaining their power base without cannibalizing their own citizens.
(That's why the devils made the original tiefling pacts: either they get the entire world embroiled in eternal warfare, or the world falls apart economically and socially if warfare ever stops because Bael Turath finally won.)
@MartinSojka Kind of, except the rites are actually fueling pacts that keep their farms producing without lying fallow, and holding seas back to provide more land to the empire, and so forth. Failure to follow through on pacts would literally destroy the empire.
Bael Turath's propaganda of superiority is disguising a rising desperation: they can't stop fighting, and the only nation left to fight is an equally powerful empire.
This allows the PCs to step into the role of Hernán Cortés though, including very much the same strategy (showing their superior fighting prowess to the unhappy vassals of the empire, leading an uprising which brings it down). :)
The war between Bael Turath and Arkhosia is historically a tragic one: both fall, having been forced into terrible choices in the ending days of the war.
On a smaller level of realistic motives for antagonists, I recently had the party put down a rebellion that had legitimate grievances the party agreed with, but the party felt it would be an Archduke Ferdinand situation if allowed to continue.
@MartinSojka Yeah, the party's role in the war is actually to do the terrible things that an empire of Bahamut can't have its publicly-acknowledged soldiers do, but which are necessary in war. This helps justify the vicious nature of D&D groups within the structure of serving a lawful good empire.
(Complete with "If you are captured we will deny all knowledge of your actions.")
The players had to get rid of it before it tore the city apart. It would have murdered thousands of civilians and uncountable soldiers if not for the players
Narratively, the purpose of flying mounts is to be shot out from under their riders.
Yeah, we're coming up on epic level and the end of the war, so I want all kinds of terrible Geneva-Convention-violating war machines and spells on both sides.
We actually did have a dryad cleric PC who got kidnapped and had her healing powers used to heal people through slaad egg implantation to try and make them into supersoldiers.
...my plots tend toward the complicated sometimes.
@Undreren I re-skinned the Fist of Mourning adventure; it's my first 4e campaign, so I've been using a lot of pre-made adventure mechanics and re-skinning them for the plot I want.
I've noticed that Wizards' adventure developers seem to be supremely unconcerned about logic and reason, so I really have to take a hatchet to the adventures to make them work even without re-building the plot.
It was really about learning the new system's philosophies, though simultaneously being unconfident about the mechanics made me even more inclined to go to pre-mades for help.
I'm much more confident now, and after I'm done with the new Tomb of Horrors adventure I'll be entirely free-form for the rest of the campaign.
(Even the ToH is getting a heavy re-write though.)
I love 4e's philosophies about combat, but honestly Wizards isn't very good at implementing their own ideas.
@Undreren I only ever got a single session as a player in White Wolf (Mage), so I can't say much about that system except that my White-Wolf-tradition players had a hard time getting into the party-supports-each-other dynamic of D&D.
@Undreren do you also make your own monsters most of the time, or do you use Compendium monsters?
I'm having trouble designing bosses that I feel are the right level of challenge; it seems very intuitive without a lot of guidelines for evaluation aside from just throwing them into combat.
Which I find leads to pulling my punches too much in fear of killing the party by accident.
And Compendium solos, especially bosses, are so complex and weird that they slow down combat.
@Undreren urgh. I hate recharge dice. Possibly irrationally so. Again: idea great, execution clumsy.
I usually go for recharge at bloodied or something like that.
I'm settling into giving bosses an MBA with a debuff, an RBA with a debuff, a standard action to use several BAs, an opportunity action, and maybe something fancy. Then I drop in synergizing standards or terrain, and hope the synergy doesn't get OP.
Example: I'm currently building a fight where the cubic room turns every other round so one of the walls is the new floor, dumping the party prone on the new floor. The boss hovers in the air and gets bonuses to damage vs prone targets.
Unfortunately one of my players is very resistant to anything that's not very complete in the crunch of its rules, so trying out new systems isn't much of an option at the moment.
Maybe when he leaves island in the spring we'll get a chance to experiment more--we're looking at Dresden Files.
(He prefers things with a massive amount of splat content; he looks at building a PC like building a Magic: the Gathering deck. Which is fine, but limits the systems we can work in.)
@Undreren We had trouble with low-level play because the party was very small, so I couldn't do big fights without overwhelming them or overusing minions. We managed, but it was rough for a group that was just learning the new system. It didn't help that none of the PCs were typical: we had the leader who never attacked, the warlock who was really a controller, and the tank who was also really a controller. Fun, but hard to keep the fights interesting without being unnecessarily lethal.
@MartinSojka "without a normal moral compass" is the clarification, which seems sufficient.
The heading may be a little vague, but the details seem more in line with your idea. Though I must confess I recently had the party uncover a Secret Fire Cult that was actually a metalworkers' guild.
@BESW Not quite. A good conspiracy can even have roughly the same set of morals as the PCs. In fact, I prefer it when they do. For a real-life example of such an conspiracy, see: Operation Valkyrie
@Undreren I really only have experience in 3.5 and 4e. I've dabbled in SG-1 (d20 modern variant), Dogs in the Vineyard, My Life With Master, and a few others, but no more than two sessions of any of them.
@MartinSojka Sure, but what's the fun in uncovering a conspiracy you don't care about? I think the guide is trying to help you make a narratively compelling conspiracy for the party to dismantle, not a realistic one.
@BESW What's the fun in having conspiracies which the players aren't tempted to join, even just for a moment?
Also, read the link. If you live in 1944 and don't care about a conspiracy to kill Hitler and dismantle the SS and remove his cronies from power, ending the war, something's really wrong with you.
@MartinSojka That's where you have fun by either suppressing the moral qualm (the Equal Rights For Dragonborn conspiracy is actually a yuan-ti plot for reptilian dominance, but only the absolute leaders know the truth) and/or making it seem like a quirk ("sure, the local head of the ERFD is a bit rough in his manners, but the regional leader is leading an investigation; don't let one man sour you on our cause!").
@MartinSojka A conspiracy you join is great, but not the same thing at all. As someone who ran an entire campaign based on warring conspiracies that often didn't know who was on which side, or what the sides were, I can attest to that. I'm just really not getting the impression this essay has that in mind at all; it's limited a specific kind of conspiracy plot, or the blog entry would have to be a monograph.
@BESW I don't mean a conspiracy you join - just a conspiracy. The article is spot on on most of the elements (after all, Stauffenberg and friends tried to commit treason and murder, for example!), but blunders on the "no (normal) morals" part.
@Undreren Every conspiracy is evil from the point of view of the ones who are threatened by it.
@MartinSojka So, it sounds like you feel the article's statement that a conspiracy has no moral compass is an assertion that conspiracies have no consistent code of conduct. (I'm going to leave the 'subjective evil' thing alone; as someone with serious issues about the 3.5 alignment system I could write a monograph on that and I've monopolized the chat enough today.)
@BESW No. I just object to the idea that a conspiracy has to lack morals, or has to have morals which are "wrong" in the eyes of the player characters.
I think the article is trying to say that in order to make a conspiracy an antagonist (which is an implied assumption I'm getting from it) the GM should give it an ethos that eventually reveals it should be opposed.
@Undreren Okay, short soapbox. In many systems, including D&D 3.5, good and evil aren't subjective; you've got spells that detect them and clearly delineated mechanics that influence and are influenced by them. It's embedded in the system to the point that I nearly cheered when 4e abolished such things.
...so it really depends on the system and the ruling (a lot of 3.5 games play fast and loose with rule vs utilitarian morality, but that's house rules).
@BrianBallsun-Stanton We're not really talking about D&D alignments here though; just that I consider the "No (normal) morals" statement of this article about conspiracies to be false.
I just got into good vs evil as a side note on the 'advice to make conspiracies' discussion; the 3.5 alignment system is a pet peeve of mine and I tend to babble anyway.
@MartinSojka You are arguing from the assumption that he is writing an article on conspiracies in general, while he is in fact writing about how he runs them in his game.
@BrianBallsun-Stanton Yes. I used Operation Valkyrie (Stauffenberg's and friend's plan to kill Hitler and take control of the state and military to end the war in 1944) as an example of such a conspiracy. It certainly rejected the Nazi society.
While his advice largely applies to conspiracies in general, my reading of his reasoning for the advice is consistently concerned with antagonistic organizations--that is, that's how he uses conspiracies in his campaigns, so it's the PoV of his article and I'm taking his 'no normal morals' advice in that vein.
It's a short blog entry about conspiracies in RPGs, not an exhaustive monograph on the many types of conspiracy. I agree that sympathetic conspiracies are very compelling elements of campaigns, but are not within the scope of his article and so I don't expect him to discuss them.
And Operation Valkyrie is an excellent example of that sympathetic conspiracy. I may use that concept in my next campaign.
@BrianBallsun-Stanton I'd love to see that question asked, but as I apparently can't even ask a mechanical question without major miscommunication, I daren't even approach a topic like that.
@BESW well, let's work on the question here in chat, shall we?
Stick with necessary facts, state your objective clearly, make sure we can apply good-subjective, make sure it has standing, and a possible "best" answer.
@MartinSojka We agree on your premise; conspiracies aren't always evil and unsympathetic. But I think we disagree on the purview of the article. If I read it through your glasses, then yes; the "no morals" is bogus. But if you read it as how he portrays an evil conspiracy in his games, then you can't really argue with his logic. It would be like claiming that he is lying about his experience.
@Undreren If I saw that article as "this is how I portray evil conspiracies in my game" kind of article, I'd still consider it a wasted opportunity to write about something way more interesting.
Well, I'm currently running a game in which the party a secret operations team that does 'necessary' black ops work for a Lawful Good empire that needs plausible deniability. So I suppose I've got a game that's trying to be about a conspiracy of the type @MartinSojka is describing.
(My last campaign but one was about a conspiracy of the type described in the article, but it fell apart before they could uncover more than the second layer of it.)
Yeah, this Arkhosia vs Bael Turath campaign came from "we want dragons, and Indian half-orcs, and the Far Realm."
My typical campaign style is to sketch out a broad sandbox world, throw them into a corner of it that I've developed more closely, and then only develop more on what they show interest in.
I make NPCs with goals and plans (and backup plans) and then let the PCs run through the sandbox trampling all the NPCs' plans, and we see what happens.
@BrianBallsun-Stanton The campaign I plan to run this summer is probably more apropos to forumlating this question; unfortunately my plots are so convoluted I doubt it's suitable.
(A cabal of demons use artifacts to influence/possess people across the world in a subtle plot to further their chaotic ends; it's strongly based on the Denarians of the Dresden Files.)
[yawn] 11pm and I've got a meeting in the morning. Goodnight, all. It's been a ton of fun chatting with you.
@somori "I reject the concept of play without the equal of a map and miniatures together with solid rules covering the elements of range, line of sight, and terrain. Any other style of play is lazy and nothing more than dependence upon GM handouts. " ... Heh. Really?
@MartinSojka Really. I don't begrudge him his views (because I share a lot of them about certain types of games) but he's coming across as YOU'RE ALL PLAYING WRONG!.
I don't mind "solid rules for range, line of sight and terrain" (even if they consist of "You're in a space ship; you always have line of sight and there is never terrain in the way"), but map and miniatures? Why?
It's a gamist point of view - there is a game, with consistent rules, and we play that game, not a magical tea party of "oh, can I not do the exact same thing two rounds in a row"?
@MartinSojka It's not just the young generation :P Anybody who came to the RPG hobby from wargames may hold a similar point of view.
The "gamist" point of view (as we defined it back in the day in rgfrpa) is more in line of just asking for consistent, interesting rules. If they include maps and miniatures is only marginally interesting.
@somori Uh, I read it differently, it seems. In particular the part with "I reject the assertion that realism and simulation is impossible in game design."
In particular, the "rules are physics of the game world" is a very much simulationistic point of view.
@MartinSojka That may be down to the overloading of simulationism.
There's the kind which demands rules for everything (detailed encumberance rules spring to mind) and the kind which wants just enough rules to run what-if? scenarios.
Both tend to annoy gamists because of the lack of focus on the competitive aspects.
A gamist will accept rules that simulate reality so long as they provide for a situation that skill can take advantage of.
@KRyan It's certainly overvalued in the sense that some people hold it up as the Holy Grail of RPG design. It isn't; it's just one possible focus for it.
@KRyan Sounds about like I would reason if I designed it (... for a simulationistic game). You could take the vow; it would allow you to spend less than your social standing should demand but still not lose it, as long as your surroundings know about the vow and it's acceptable for their culture. It would also allow you to more easily integrate into lower levels of society. That's it.
@MartinSojka not sure I'm following, but it's my contention that doing that (making the player suffer for character's choices), you are no longer making a game
@KRyan I like Vow of Poverty for the flavour reasons. I didn't realise it was as underpowered as it is because everybody else was making similarly poor choices.
and while that might be a gamist perspective, I think ultimately it's unfair to be talking about Role-playing Games without having at least considering some gamist perspectives
@somori flavor reasons I can totally get behind, and I can suggest numerous alternate mechanics for getting them. Just, not Vow of Poverty. And yes, it is comparable to a character who makes very unwise choices with his money
@somori yes they do
@MartinSojka if I want to play an ascetic, I should be able to without suffering
the sacrifice of luxury and comfort is the character's choice, not mine
@KRyan Well, I certainly don't like dumbing down the game. In doubt, I'd just vote to enhance the mechanics which are important for your character and where he can contribute instead.
@MartinSojka I could get behind that but in the case of Vow of Poverty you might be looking at an awful lot of work
though perhaps not; one solution for this I'd suggested is a feat that allows you to donate magical items to charity, and gain "blessings" based on the price of the item (that just so happen to match the benefits of a magical item that cost the same as the sale value of the item donated)
@somori see, I'd delete the adjective "gamist" there -- I think any game needs to make options viable
@KRyan If I remember correctly, it just means you don't own anything. This doesn't keep you from participating in social challenges and might even give you an edge there, for example. You can't be bribed, you can move more easily between different social classes and so on.
@somori If people demand more details for the systems they are interested in in the name of "simulation" or "realism", they are simply misusing the terms.
It's things like "Success and Failure is dependent entirely upon their skill in play, or its lack." and "RPGs are games, and the rules should engage and interest the players." that show off the gamist-only perspective to me.
Success and Failure are assumed to be good and bad respectively. So, skill in play makes you good and lack of skill makes you bad.
Whereas a simulationist thinking in what-if? terms considers success and failure neutral terms. Getting the right to determine the logical outcome of an action is part of what-if? rulesets like The Shadow of Yesterday.
Pretty much, yes. Still I don't think that guys is anti-simulationism, he's just not making it his preferred game style. So his version of Fantasy FarmVille would have interesting and meaningful choices to make so that you don't have to starve to death - that doesn't mean it wouldn't include rules for proper three-field crop rotation. :)
@MartinSojka sorry, was referring to the recent question regarding 3.5's Vow of Poverty, didn't realize there were other systems that used exactly the same name (though it is unsurprising)
@KRyan The concept is universal, it's just interesting to see in what kind of games a character following such a vow works, and why it doesn't work in others. :)
@somori ... unless the magic items aren't considered "owned". For example, when all magic items are in fact various spirits bound to objects, and it's those spirits which decide who should hold and use them ...
It would be weird to have to keep all your magic items happy. And technically, you could have all those required magic items in D&D 3.5 as intelligent beings.
It'd be chaotic inside your head with all the voices though ;)
The magic items could level up, and they might withhold part of their power for some reason, like for example when they don't trust you or your motives quite yet ...
DnD alignment - any serious 3.5 players still using WotC definitions? I mean, PCs or DMs who have played an alignment heavy game and managed to make the RAW work not ambiguously?
@LitheOhm I think I can claim to have done that, but not for several years and it's possible that I imposed house rules while thinking I was using RAW.
Law and Chaos were basically Rule and Act Utilitarianism, respectively. Good characters valued the well-being and happiness of others over their own, and Evil characters did the opposite. These decisions were judged objectively, with little to no accounting for intent or perspective, as the existence of planes of absolute alignment and spells to detect such would be made pointless if Detect Evil couldn't identify someone who thought eating babies pleased Pelor.
Neutrality was a slight problem, as D&D has two versions of it: druid and fence-sitter. Druid-type neutrals deliberate choose actions that go against any imbalance along their neutral axis (introducing chaos to a law-heavy situation), while fence-sitters waffle situationally, influenced by their strong axis choice.
That said, I imposed this largely because the axis alignments were so firmly entrenched in the rules I couldn't pull it out without gutting the system. As flawed as the 4e alignment "line" is, it's not part of the spells and world in a way that I can't just ignore whenever we want to.
@BESW I think that's the best you can do with the 3.5 and earlier alignments.
It's a shame that it ended up underpinnning mechanics in the way it did, but it for to be internally inconsistent in that way was completely unhelpful.
@somori I worked with players who wanted to stay within the established ruleset as much as possible, but never felt like the alignment mechanics were the defining traits of their characters. So it worked, but just barely.
@BESW I think dropping it in 4E was a good choice for Wizards, then
@somori we houseruled law/chaos to be motive or intention (obey order higher than myself or obey my own order) and good/evil to be the methods for achieving one's ends
@BESW AL mechanics are less about the character itself and more about how the world/character interact. Detect spells being a good example, as well as smite, forbiddance, dictum, etc
@somori in theory it's worked, and it practice sort of. Lately I've been working on an AL heavy game - balance and save the world and all that. There was need to define something more objectively
for instance, my old GM still acts however he wants (CN), even when playing a lawful character. His code of conduct for his monks and paladins is six pages long and basically says "I will do what I like best at the time I would like best to do it."
I never got the chance to play in Planescape, but I liked the basic concept of the 3.5 multiverse. Unfortunately it got ridiculous through extrapolation: as expansion material proliferated, every tiny possibility needed its own plane, or demiplane, to represent it, and things got silly pretty fast.
I like the way 4e uses the Astral Sea and the Elemental Chaos to imply that most of that stuff can still exist, but without giving each little bit its own entire plane.
Part of the wibbly-wobbly Points-of-Lighty philosophy that lets individual DMs have more agency in world creation without fear of their players telling them it's wrong.
@Pyrodante Fair enough; I'm basing it on descriptions by my friends. [Sadly the His Dark Materials series soured me on infinite planes that I don't have complete control over, because they can spoil narrative right quick without a tight hold on the leash.]
