The Gaming Den

So today I got into an argument with a friend. It was about whether or not racial penalties were really needed. His argument was that the -2 orc intelligence penalty (on a wizard) was important for the sake of the story so that people could triumph over adversity, whereas I argued that it was a stupid penalty designed to screw over players who chose to play something different. This came down to my supposed hatred of stories (admittedly, I despise "for the sake of the story" as an excuse) vs his GM needs powas view. So it got me thinking: Why the hell is there a huge divide between people who follow the rules and people who are into storytelling? Where the hell is the GM is God crap still coming from? Why is this the only hobby where knowledge of the rules is actually demonized? Does it really hurt anyone if some guy pretends to be a space alien while everyone else pretends to be an elf? And why do the "it's for the story" people usually have the worst stories?

Pointless nerd rant which I believe is linked to the decline of the hobby.

That and I hate the DM/player paradigm, for reasons which will be in the next post.

CapnTthePirateG wrote:why do the "it's for the story" people usually have the worst stories?

Because the people with good stories have better answers than that.

I must've missed a link, here, but how is "GM needs powahs" related to "orcs should have a -2 INT penalty?" Besides both of them being stupid and indefensible positions* that could plausibly be held by the same person.

As for why knowledge of the rules is actively abhorred by some of the hobby's fans (participants? Hobbyists?), it's for the same reason you abhor the storytellers. Because they're different and people are often good at one and not the other and humans like to split up into cliques and hate each other.

*Well, the first one is very easily defensible taken literally, but that's nit-picking.

You can play a retarded human struggling to be a wizard too. If your friend thinks that playing a wizard with a low intelligence is a fun way to 'overcome adversity', he should realize that having a racial penalty to the score (rather than just having a low score) is just a bigoted and unnecessary mechanical crutch for telling a good story.

CapnTthePirateG wrote:So today I got into an argument with a friend. It was about whether or not racial penalties were really needed. His argument was that the -2 orc intelligence penalty (on a wizard) was important for the sake of the story so that people could triumph over adversity, whereas I argued that it was a stupid penalty designed to screw over players who chose to play something different. This came down to my supposed hatred of stories (admittedly, I despise "for the sake of the story" as an excuse) vs his GM needs powas view. So it got me thinking: Why the hell is there a huge divide between people who follow the rules and people who are into storytelling? Where the hell is the GM is God crap still coming from? Why is this the only hobby where knowledge of the rules is actually demonized? Does it really hurt anyone if some guy pretends to be a space alien while everyone else pretends to be an elf? And why do the "it's for the story" people usually have the worst stories?

Pointless nerd rant which I believe is linked to the decline of the hobby.

That and I hate the DM/player paradigm, for reasons which will be in the next post.

Okay I'll bite. Games are fucking boring and stupid when there's no real story stringing together arbitrary, boring, uninteresting combat. Even when you have interesting combat, you need *something* to string it along and give a sense of achievement and continuity.

Think of the 5 best moments of your roleplaying experience. How many of those purely had to do with mechanics? I know none of my 5 would deal specifically with mechanics, and probably 3 of the 5 experiences had nothing to do with throwing dice. There were just moments of sheer awesomeness involving the plot, or characterization, or something said that was cool, or something. The mechanics are there to facilitate the plot, and the plot is there to keep the mechanics interesting and fresh. Otherwise you're just throwing a fucking D20 repeatedly and cheering when it rolls high.

In that respect, while I specifically and strictly try to stick to the rules to be as neutral of a MC as possible, if the opportunity arises where I can encourage one of those top 5 moments of awesomeness to occur, you can bet your sweet ass that the rules will go out the window just enough in the name of having fun.

I won't even get into the "why can't I play a space marine when you're playing a D&D elf" shit. While technically there's nothing stopping you, it's being deliberately anti-social if you're supposed to be in a fantasy setting and you decide to take a sledge hammer to the setting. Ask ahead of time, don't whine if the DM looks at you funny.

And finally, there's lots of games where DM interaction is low or even barely-existent. They're called LARPs. And you have the same problems as a normal TTRPG, you just have a gentleman's agreement to skip over them usually for the sake of not stopping gameplay to go get a DM to arbitrate.

TheFlatline wrote: In that respect, while I specifically and strictly try to stick to the rules to be as neutral of a MC as possible, if the opportunity arises where I can encourage one of those top 5 moments of awesomeness to occur, you can bet your sweet ass that the rules will go out the window just enough in the name of having fun.

This is usually not what happens. What I'm referring to is "no you can't play a drow" or "you all go to sleep, no save" shit, which I seem to see all the time.

"You can't play a drow" seems like a pretty reasonable restriction on the setting. I mean, they live underground and they're all either villains or Drizz't clones.

I'm trying to figure out why every setting must have orcs be as good at wizarding as everyone else.

Doom wrote:I'm trying to figure out why every setting must have orcs be as good at wizarding as everyone else.

Often because players have seen piles of Orc Wizards being thrown against them, and like the idea of being a non-fancy shamanistic special powers character. Shamanism being humanities longest spiritual tradition with a myriad amount of traditions and methods.

Lapplander caribou headdresses, dressing up as Oni, wearing antlered animal headdresses is thought to be one of the oldest things humans have done. Easily explaining everything from anthropomorphism in Egypt's pantheon to many "animal" peoples that show up in myths and folktales.

When you read about the "mountain eagle people" and if the yazata in question was a shaman; and they wore their people's traditional outfit, the corruption of a story from "man who wore an birds headdress" to "man who was a bird" is... not overly hard to have happen.

Maintainers of oral traditions are often prone to embellishment, omission, exaggeration and outright modification to try and tell a story that they want to tell.

So, "orc wizard" isn't just something that is a passing fancy in some person's mind. It's allegory for original human spiritualism, religious beliefs, and the religious representatives of different cultures.

Which has a ton more life behind it than "armoured fighter" or "sneaky rogue" do.

Very often "coyote" or "fox" or "raven" are the sneaky adventurers as well as the people in shamanistic costumes.

You can have orcs generally be terrible wizards, but what NPCs do is different from what PCs do and are capable of. How many super-sentient gorillas, hyper-strong midgets, and other such standard-breaking characters are there in stories? In any particular story, they're a rare or even unique deviance from their kind. PCs are the central protagonists, and stories with stuff like wizards lend themselves to players having more unique characters.

This is in particular that a -2 Int is a comparatively minor deviance. It's not something like saying orcs can't breathe underwater or have five arms (which as a concept can/has happened), it's "this orc is marginally smarter than the average bear."

CapnTthePirateG wrote:So today I got into an argument with a friend. It was about whether or not racial penalties were really needed. His argument was that the -2 orc intelligence penalty (on a wizard) was important for the sake of the story so that people could triumph over adversity, whereas I argued that it was a stupid penalty designed to screw over players who chose to play something different. This came down to my supposed hatred of stories (admittedly, I despise "for the sake of the story" as an excuse) vs his GM needs powas view. So it got me thinking: Why the hell is there a huge divide between people who follow the rules and people who are into storytelling? Where the hell is the GM is God crap still coming from? Why is this the only hobby where knowledge of the rules is actually demonized? Does it really hurt anyone if some guy pretends to be a space alien while everyone else pretends to be an elf? And why do the "it's for the story" people usually have the worst stories?

Pointless nerd rant which I believe is linked to the decline of the hobby.

That and I hate the DM/player paradigm, for reasons which will be in the next post.

Wait. So you don't approve of the rules because it gets in the way of freedom to play make believe... but you don't like DMs who are story oriented because they might sidestep the rules to be creative? Which is it? This sounds like authority issues at its core.

Doom wrote:I'm trying to figure out why every setting must have orcs be as good at wizarding as everyone else.

A setting doesn't have to but a setting-neutral game probably should. If my group doesn't want orc wizards and yours does, it's easier for my group to just not make orc wizards than for your group to change the rules.

In a setting specific game I could see good reasons to restrict spellcasters by race. But even then, slapping orcs with an Int penalty is equivalent to saying "orc PCs shouldn't be wizards." If the designer doesn't want orc PC wizards he should say that and make a case for why. The penalty approach is refusing to own and defend his choices. "Well you can still play an orc wizard, roleplayer not rollplayer blah blah retarded."

Any game needs meaningful choices. That is, every gamer needs to make decisions, these decisions need to have consequences, they need to be non-trivial and there need to be multiple viable choices to make. RPGs need a lot of stuff on top of that, but the mechanics all boil down to meaningful choices in the end.

Given this, permanent numerical bonuses are a horrible mechanic, at least in a dnd-like setup and especially for wizards. It ensures that one choice (orc) is strictly inferior to another choice (human), which is pretty similar to just disallowing certain combinations. It still leaves multiple choices available though (every race without an int penalty). Whats worse is a race with an int bonus. This invalidates every other race.

Now, even for wizards other stats than int have value, and it might be argued that a +/- 1 modifier is not significant, or that certain types of wizard may value stats other than int. But basically, numerical modifiers are a bad idea in most cases. Especially to something as crucial as int is to a wizard.

If instead of this orcs had a berserk ability that let them take half damage for a couple of rounds, dwarfs could reroll will saves once per day and elves could roll search checks without spending time to actually search there wouldn't even be a discussion about what race is the best for a wizard - which is at it should be.

The hobby is retarded because people have recognized many of the problems with the game but lack the basic will to fix them.

Seriously, when people are saying stupid shit like 'fighters need to be in the came because of tradition' or 'how can we keep stats relevant without making them define your character', that should be a big red flag that the game is going to wallow in its self-created cesspool for probably forever.

That applies to this board, too, by the way. Seriously, how many people are still wanking to Tome fixes even though the authors of that material have said that the game that they're based on needs to be rebuilt from scratch?

Lago PARANOIA wrote: That applies to this board, too, by the way. Seriously, how many people are still wanking to Tome fixes even though the authors of that material have said that the game that they're based on needs to be rebuilt from scratch?

...Because you can still have fun playing an imperfect game experience? And 3.T is still a wellwritten game? And writing a new game on the scale of 3.5 would mean copious amounts of work?

Also, fixing things isn't just a matter of will. Just because you can point to problems doesn't mean you know how to fix them. The expendable item problem has gotten a serious amount of thought thrown at it by a variety of able minds, and it's still intractable. I don't think it's a dilemma that can be stubborned away.

Doom wrote:I'm trying to figure out why every setting must have orcs be as good at wizarding as everyone else.

They don't. That said there is no reason a mechanical penalty to the race is the way to accomplish that. Watch. "In [krusk's fantasy world] orcs are rarely wizards. Orc society places a huge value on physical strength, and even their wizards spend some time training with weapons. As such, all NPC orcs will have one level of fighter before other classes." Done. All orcs now suck at wizarding in comparison to other races, and the PC who wants to play an against the grain interesting concept isn't screwed. He simply doesn't take that level of fighter.

Or you could make all race bonusses for npcs only and make pcs choose all their bonusses.

Or make pcs and npcs all choose their own racial bonusses and just state that orcs are less likely to take the int stat.

CapnTthePirateG wrote:So today I got into an argument with a friend. It was about whether or not racial penalties were really needed.

Of course they are not "needed." Every race can have that plain vanillia flavor. I'm not going to argue that the penalty has any signifiance one way or the other, but even with a -2 penalty you can roll up an orc that has more intelligence than the average human, even the average human wizard. You can't have the max intelligence of a human wizard, but I've never liked the absolute min maxing of attributes.

There's a whiff of "why PCs can't be Mary Sue unique snowflakes?" in here.

That out, once again it comes to the problem of wanting D&D to do everything. My suggestion: Make the standard D&D a mid-level Murder Hobo game, make another game line for the low-level Conan fighter adventures with special weapons and make yet another game line for the super special wizards that rape reality.

Can expand that to infinity, for example, a game line for Game of Thrones style of diplomacy.

Or you could man up and have actually racist races.

I personally would avoid that as too potentially uncomfortable, but if you want orcs to be troglodytes, make them troglodytes and stop beating around the bush. That also means you should fluff them as stupid brutes, not as noble savages.

(If I were going that route, I'd make elves stupid instead, because I'd rather tell stories about inner life vs. outer life than about supermen vs. submen.)

Gx1080 wrote:There's a whiff of "why PCs can't be Mary Sue unique snowflakes?" in here.

That's another reason why. Generally speaking, people only want to play a drow in the game because there aren't other drow in the party and this makes them special and unique and not like the other boring PCs.

If a player came up to me and said "dude I want to play a Drow because of this kickass story/personality I came up with" I'd listen to them.

If they say "I'm bored, I want to play a drow" I'll probably say no, because they'll get pissed if I run the game as normal (HOLY SHIT DROW KILL IT!) or they'll be pissed that I *won't* make a big deal of a drow tooling around.

What the player *actually* wants at best is to be a special unique snowflake without any of the consequences to their decisions. And as a DM I *hate* playing player favorites, since at that point I either have to open up the pantheon of creatures to all PCs or limit it to one person who gets to be "special". At worst, the player is bored and wants to disrupt the game. I can't tell for sure either way until I say "yes" and open pandora's box, so it's easier to just say "no".

I once played a drow, although I had no clue what they were about at the time. That was after getting a long list of other choices shot down -- Aasimar, human... It was a bizarre game, and if I remembered it more clearly, I might tell you more about it.

Doom wrote:I'm trying to figure out why every setting must have orcs be as good at wizarding as everyone else.

Because if it's an option that a player can choose - and it is - and if the survival rate of other people's characters is inextricably linked to how effectual that orc wizard PC is - and it is - then that option needs to be roughly as good as other options, because this is a fucking team game in which one person's shit character can shit all over your chances of survival.

Why does this have to be explained? It's the same fucking question with the same fucking answer as, "Why do high level martial characters have to be as good as high level spellcasting characters?"

Answer? Because they're both being played by people who are playing the same fucking game.

Orcs don't need -2 to INT to "overcome adversities", but because orcs are, on the average, dumber than humans.

And this only if in that specific game/setting orcs are dumber than human.

Exactly as a halfling should have a negative bonus in strength or a elf a bonus in dexterity.

(if you are one of those that consider adventurers a class apart from the standard members of their race (no pun intended) replace "orc" and "human" with "orc adventurer" and "human adventurer" respectively.)

Also, if the -2 to int is really a problem there is an easy fix

play a human character, but call him an orc. done.