Minor game stuff from around the web for commentary...

[Kaelik]

Any player who is going to start every single social encounter, regardless of context, by whipping out a lute is being an asshole. It's treating the world like it's a computer game and disrespecting your DM by assuming he's a mindless rules robot.

Introducing shitty rules which make the world seem like a computer game is disrespecting to your players. How you can say, "Well first I make this rule that sucks, then I blame you for using it, because that is they kind of dick I am." with a straight face is beyond me.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Respecting spontaneous choreography, especially when explicitly encouraged by the rules, doesn't exactly sound like jerk behavior to me. Sounds fun to imagine, in fact.

It's seriously like getting upset at basketball players for trying to score points.

You guys are trying to snark hardcore here, and I approve, but you need to keep in mind that there's a not-insignificant number of people who would secretly admit to getting upset at basketball players trying to score points.

You've seen these assholes sharting around in other hobbies. They're the ones who throw tantrums about people trading strategies for fighting games, they're the ones who whine and filibuster and beg for extra cash if they're knocked out early in a Monopoly game, they're the ones who throw a temper tantrum if everyone else brought a paintball gun while they're stuck with rentals, they're the ones who pout and throw a long bitchfit when they're dominated in team-based first-person shooters, they're the ones who get genuinely and personally offended when their sports team gets fairly outplayed.

I wish these little shits had a name more specific than 'childish asshole'. Because they deserve it.

[schpeelah]

Maybe if you want your game to be silly in nature, then it's fine. If you're going for something serious, you want to have some respect for story.

Just imagine an episode of Cops where the police come to the scene and start asking questions. So one dude, instead of answering the cops questions, decides he's going to ignore the cops, whip out a guitar and start playing a song. There's no way that's going to net him a reaction bonus.

Funny. It sounds like you're saying the rule is bad and should not be used. Except you're taking the side of bad rule-creators blaming players for using their shitty rules.

[Chamomile]

I wish these little shits had a name more specific than 'childish asshole'. Because they deserve it.

How about "Larry?"

[Prak]

Actually that makes perfect sense in the usual D&D setting.

I could totally see the night watch rolling up on some bard to question him about his involvement in the slaughtering of a respected member of the community who just happened to be a lich, and him deciding to answer their questions in song.

I generally try to be charitable towards Zak, because he's had some good ideas, and I don't feel the need to be an asshole to someone just because they wrote bad rules*, but it's reached kind of a critical mass here for several reasons-
1) He isn't a game designer, because he doesn't understand game theory or game design, and would do best to stick to fluff ideas (like the Snakes are Books thing, or the minions of Tiamat he did recently), running games, and working in an industry I can only dream I was attractive enough for.
2) He doesn't actually understand what the typical D&D game is like (because he says this isn't a problem if the players are in fact having fun, which I can say would be 90% of the cases, even if only anecdotally, and thus the number of cases where his observation, ie that the induced boringness would keep use of this rule to a minimum and only "appropriate cases," isn't valid even if it were true, which it's not, as we've tried to explain)
3) He refuses to admit that actual people act the way they do, and seems intent on only writing rules for and playing with people who are behavioural hipsters, who intentionally act in non-rational ways out of some fear of being "too mainstream"/min-maxers.

I'm genuinely interested in what an actual game is like in his group. I imagine it's a lot of dice-associated MTP, which isn't a bad thing if his players have fun, and I know at least one person who would, so I can believe he could have a group full of them, but I'm just done with his mechanics.

*much like how, I think, AH doesn't do drunk rant reviews because he feels if he let a game make him drink, he'd never have a good reason to not drink, I can't be an asshole to someone just because their rules are bad, because then I'd never have a reason to not be an asshole to someone

[souran]

Which is pretty much the bottom line as to why this idea presented by shitmuffin is a shitty idea and why shitmuffin's complaints about the people responding to his idea make him a terrible person and a terrible DM. If you institute a rule that gives people mechanical bonuses for entering social encounters with musical accompaniment, then you have made your game into a musical. Period. That is what you have fucking done. And while that's fine, getting upset that people respond to being told that they are in a musical by behaving as if they are in a musical is completely fucking insane.

-Username17

And now we get to the point where the Den does start waving its A-hole flag.

Giving benefits to social interaction from music does not mean you have converted your game into a musical. The NPCs haven't seen the bonus list, nor do they resolve their actions between each other with dice rolls unless the DM wants the interaction to have a random result.

Honestly, if the DM WANTED a setting where the genre conventions of a musical are followed this wouldn't be a terrible rule. In that context it begins to look like a way to try and get a player who has made a "just kill things character" to embrace "D&D THE MUSICAL!" by transfering a little bit of their ability to defeat monsters to the settings conciet of expressing feelings through song. Its not good but in that context it moves from bad to just insufficient.

On the other hand, jumping to the "it turns your game into a musical" conclusion may be the exact thing that Cook was arguing against. That is not the logical conclusion AT ALL.

That still doesn't make cook right. If you wrote up a bunch of rules that required players characters to make idiots of themselves, crossdress and wear clown makeup, and for that they got a bunch of even meager bonuses you would quickly find that all your groups were made of crossdressing clowns performing british comedy routines. No amount of "its stupid" if applied to the CHARACTER will EVER prevent a player from doing it over and over.

On the other hand, if you require that the player show up cross dressing, in clown make-up and doing a silly walk you probably wouldn't get more than 10% willing to do so for a +1 bonus.

[radthemad4]

working in an industry I can only dream I was attractive enough for.

Ever considered directing, or choreography or something (or possibly animation since you can draw)?

[Kaelik]

I can't be an asshole to someone just because their rules are bad, because then I'd never have a reason to not be an asshole to someone

You get used to it.

[darkmaster]

Actually, arguably the world being a musical if you give mechanical incentives to be musical in social settings is the logical conclusion. For all of Cyberzombie's bitching about treating the GM like a video game you seem to be agitating for treating the setting like a video game where the NPCs just pop out of existence when you leave town. The problem with this is not even video games assume this about their setting. Yes, in the code NPCs get loaded out in order to save memory, but there is always the assumption in world that you could turn around and walk back in and everyone would be there.

If you want a world to feel alive it has to be alive and everyone in it has to play by the same rules, the rules may be stupid, but they need to be consistent or else your world is actually insane and it becomes impossible to make decisions in the context of that world. So if the incentive is to sing your proposal to the king then everyone has to do that and if that is not how you want your setting to function then don't incentivize doing so.

[schpeelah]

Giving benefits to social interaction from music does not mean you have converted your game into a musical. The NPCs haven't seen the bonus list, nor do they resolve their actions between each other with dice rolls unless the DM wants the interaction to have a random result.

Every rule is a statement about the game world. The rule discussed here says that anyone non-hostile and able to appreciate music does appreciate any good performance, putting the performer in a more advantageous position for anything resolved with diplomacy rolls. I wouldn't really call it a musical - the singing in musical is generally understood to be not really happening in-character, Les Miserables isn't about an alternate France where everyone sings all the time - but it definitely is a world where kings open negotiations with rock-off challenges.

Also, you can take your 4e NPCs don't have stats not in combat bullshit and go away.

[codeGlaze]

Respecting spontaneous choreography, especially when explicitly encouraged by the rules, doesn't exactly sound like jerk behavior to me. Sounds fun to imagine, in fact.

It's seriously like getting upset at basketball players for trying to score points.

You guys are trying to snark hardcore here, and I approve, but you need to keep in mind that there's a not-insignificant number of people who would secretly admit to getting upset at basketball players trying to score points.

You've seen these assholes sharting around in other hobbies. They're the ones who throw tantrums about people trading strategies for fighting games, they're the ones who whine and filibuster and beg for extra cash if they're knocked out early in a Monopoly game, they're the ones who throw a temper tantrum if everyone else brought a paintball gun while they're stuck with rentals, they're the ones who pout and throw a long bitchfit when they're dominated in team-based first-person shooters, they're the ones who get genuinely and personally offended when their sports team gets fairly outplayed.

I wish these little shits had a name more specific than 'childish asshole'. Because they deserve it.

Immature, socially undeveloped, spoiled, unsportsmanly, poor loser, bratty, pampered... I can't think of the other word used for people who have everything given to them and aren't ever challenged.

[Chamomile]

I would contend that music granting a diplomacy bonus wouldn't turn your game into a musical, but only because music is used to accomplish so much more than just persuasion in musicals. It's not a musical until you can also fight, chase, and sneak with the help of showtunes.

[Prak]

working in an industry I can only dream I was attractive enough for.

Ever considered directing, or choreography or something (or possibly animation since you can draw)?

No, I meant specifically porn. I've heard all the "it's not as glamourous as you think" stuff, but that's usually people who work for the big corporate names, and Penn Gilette talking about how show business is literally less work than any other job speaks a lot louder in my mind.

[Chamomile]

Porn has directors.

[Prak]

I can't be an asshole to someone just because their rules are bad, because then I'd never have a reason to not be an asshole to someone

You get used to it.

Yes, but you actually derive enjoyment out of being a colossal asshole. I only derive enjoyment from it when I'm in a really terrible mood

I wouldn't really call it a musical - the singing in musical is generally understood to be not really happening in-character, Les Miserables isn't about an alternate France where everyone sings all the time - but it definitely is a world where kings open negotiations with rock-off challenges.

Actually it's pretty close to a Scott Pilgrim thing.

Porn has directors.

Hm, now I'm wondering how one breaks into directing porn...

[radthemad4]

I'm genuinely interested in what an actual game is like in his group. I imagine it's a lot of dice-associated MTP, which isn't a bad thing if his players have fun, and I know at least one person who would, so I can believe he could have a group full of them, but I'm just done with his mechanics.

The first time I ever tried gaming was using Pathfinder. I couldn't resolve all the rules fast enough to prevent my players (none of whom knew any of the rules or wanted to learn them) from getting bored (yeah... I realized that they're not really into crunchy tabletop gaming (either that or I ran the games terribly, which is quite likely as my ridiculously slow rules adjudication might do that to people who didn't know or care about the rules) to the same extent I did (one of their complaints was that I liked to spend more time researching the game than running it, and this was true I think) and I stopped forcing them into sessions a while back, though I'll try again once I can resolve actions fast enough). For a while I used 'roll a d6 and I'll pull a DC out of my ass based loosely on the rules'.

I tried Risus once, but I had no idea how to adjudicate say, Mage (4d) summons Tidal Wave (what's the TN for that? I have no clue.). My players sometimes seemed to enjoy it, but my inability to come up with TNs really bothered me. So, I too would like to learn the art of MTP

[codeGlaze]

working in an industry I can only dream I was attractive enough for.

Ever considered directing, or choreography or something (or possibly animation since you can draw)?

No, I meant specifically porn. I've heard all the "it's not as glamourous as you think" stuff, but that's usually people who work for the big corporate names, and Penn Gilette talking about how show business is literally less work than any other job speaks a lot louder in my mind.

cracked.com has a recent article written by a porn star/director. From the male PoV of the industry.

...at least I think it's recent.

[radthemad4]

I read somewhere (I think it was a Cracked article) that porn is optimized to be fun for viewers, and that the participants are often quite uncomfortable. IIRC the article was about treating your girlfriend properly or something (that bit was about not asking her to try some of the crazier things you see in porn I think)

[Prak]

Well, and then there's the fact that, well, it usually takes all day to film one scene in even a normal movie. Now imagine that with something lodged in your ass.

I still wish I were attractive enough for sex work.

...but I digress. Rad, check out Zak's site, you might like some of the stuff there for what it is. The biggest problem is when TGD tries to analyze Zak's rules, because his Rule 0 is the MST3K Mantra.

[Laertes]

The NPCs haven't seen the bonus list, nor do they resolve their actions between each other with dice rolls unless the DM wants the interaction to have a random result.

While I commend your otherwise fine rant, I need to haul you up on this point. We (NPCs in a game God is running) know the bonus list. We've reverse engineered it over the course of our lives. That's why we make bridges out of steel instead of spaghetti, and why people who live in Siberia wear more clothes than those who live in Barbados. Similarly, the NPCs in any game will have an understanding of their game's system.

You could run a game in which that isn't true, but then players will wreck it even worse than they would nornally.

[Zak S]

the people who want to accumulate the tiny bonus even if they don't want to play a musician and roleplay musician-situations are assholes. As are the people who demand that rules be made to account for these assholes.

Surely you'd agree that if the bonus for playing a musical instrument were sufficiently large that they make accomplishing something that they do want easy, then people will do that thing.

I don't care that they will do a dumb thing.

I care about kicking them out if they do a dumb thing because it exposes a wider personality flaw. The game doesn't cause them to be a dick, but (like freedom of speech) is a rule which allows people to abuse it and therefore clearly signal they have always been a dick.

If they play scenes that bore them just to get a mechanical bonus, they need to be kicked out of a game.

It's important to never play with people who are willing to make the game repeatedly unfun in order to (basically) survive or level up faster. They are assholes.

[Josh_Kablack]

I wish these little shits had a name more specific than 'childish asshole'. Because they deserve it.

"Scrub" is the term you are looking for.

[Zak S]

I'm genuinely interested in what an actual game is like in his group. I imagine it's a lot of dice-associated MTP,

Nope. We do games with a lot of fictional-positioning-based problem solving and awesome drawings of unicorns.

[souran]

Every rule is a statement about the game world. The rule discussed here says that anyone non-hostile and able to appreciate music does appreciate any good performance, putting the performer in a more advantageous position for anything resolved with diplomacy rolls. I wouldn't really call it a musical - the singing in musical is generally understood to be not really happening in-character, Les Miserables isn't about an alternate France where everyone sings all the time - but it definitely is a world where kings open negotiations with rock-off challenges.

Also, you can take your 4e NPCs don't have stats not in combat bullshit and go away.

No this is a patently STUPID interpurtation of rules. To the NPCs the rules fundamentally CANNOT exist or it is the very defintion of breaking verisimilitude.

The life of NPCs that are not "on camera" must, by definition, be NON RANDOM, it must be a casual otherwise the very abstraction that the rules are trying to build and display becomes non-sensical.

The Kings of your fantasy land don't open negociations with Rock Battles because there skills are a reflection of their ORGANIC learning. They were not built, instantly as 12th level nobles, they grew from children, learned the skills, develped their talents, and made choices based on social pressures. This is the exact OPPOSITE of the way PCs are built where they appear, suddenly, with a fabricated childhood, and skills that are probably designed to compliment those around them instead of being an organic outgrowth of their existance.

Kings don't make "run the kindgom" rolls, they take actions that are simply not described to the players. They hold meetings, set tax rates, plan urban development, donate to charties etc. They don't do these things to aquire bonuses to rolls to get instant results. They do these things because their existance is casual. They plant seeds in the spring and harvest in the fall and the result has NOTHING to do with game mechanics.

It is always the players who will take actions like this because they will see instantly the success or failure of every action they take. There is no opportunity cost, no explaining to relatives why you have to take your guitar everywhere, and loss of job or friends associated with acting this way because the actor can see that the rules didn't cover all that other stuff.

The more often the rules are used to describe the setting, instead of being the abstraction that communicates action between the player to the setting, the more non-sensical both the rules and setting get.

[Cyberzombie]

On the other hand, jumping to the "it turns your game into a musical" conclusion may be the exact thing that Cook was arguing against. That is not the logical conclusion AT ALL.

Yeah, that's pretty much exactly the kind of thing he was talking about. Where the game designer basically has to be super careful of literally anything he writes, because even the smallest bonus could be exploited to stupidity.

Personally I think the fault lies in rules robot DMs who are all too willing to abandon common sense.