De canistro textrinum

[Fuchs]

How many here actually play D&D with a regular group? Yes, you can refuse the adventure prepared by the GM. Though why would you do that, unless it's a shitty GM and a shitty adventure (according to the first scenes of course), or it totally fails to give you any in character reason to go on an adventure (which would lead to shitty GMing again)?

The only reason to refuse to go on an adventure prepared by a decent GM and presented in a way so you have enough reasons to accept as a character is to because you want to be a dick.

[Fuchs]

With regards to Nockermensch: Sandbox RPGing can be a lot of fun, but even there a minimal amount of cooperation is usually required. If you're playing a thief trying to take over a city's underworld, yes, you can shape your own adventures - or start them - to some degree, but if you decide to abandon the goals of your character after the GM prepared allies and opponents, opportunities and obstacles to your take over plans, and decide to go to Mechanus and expect the GM to roll with it with a smile on his face, then you're again a dick.

[Korwin]

The problem is not the refusing of the adventure, but the subversion of it.

When the players have another idea in how to proceed its a good thing and they should not be forced back on the rails. If you love your rails so much, write it, maybe I'll even read it.

[Mistborn]

The problem is not the refusing of the adventure, but the subversion of it.

When the players have another idea in how to proceed its a good thing and they should not be forced back on the rails. If you love your rails so much, write it, maybe I'll even read it.

Essentially this.

The fuck this we're going to Mechanus thing actually happen in one of the games I've been part of (and probably the best examples of a good RPG storyline I've ever seen) we beat the adventure the DM had planned ahead of schedule and we decided to go plane hopping.

One of the main reasons is that you can't have plots like single author storylines is that PC not only lose fights they were meant to win but also they can win fights they were meant to lose (or possibly were not even meant to start). LotR is dumb as an adventure in that there is only one solution that is allowed/doesn't result in a completely different story than the DM want's to tell.

PC tend to be nothing like standard fictional characters what with their partially justified hubris, frequently selfish motivations, and brutal efficiency.

Edit

First, it's hilarious when you boast that your character can set aside the story prepared for them, in a discussion about the validity of the Monomyth. You're a walking newbie joke.

once again nocker is a fucking idiot and failed to understand my point. When the hero refuses the call 9 time out of 10 he gets railroaded in accepting anyway regardless of what he wants. This is a bad thing in a game that's supposed to be cooperative. Get your head out of your ass nocker.

[nockermensch]

The problem is not the refusing of the adventure, but the subversion of it.

When the players have another idea in how to proceed its a good thing and they should not be forced back on the rails. If you love your rails so much, write it, maybe I'll even read it.

Man, absolutely. If the players are running along quietly with the "default" options, I start to get worried. My expectation is that they will surprise me at every moment. If I was DMing the LotR campaign, I'd be as much in the dark about how exactly the PCs would arrive in that volcano as the players. I'd roll with whatever they suggested and if their suggestion is "lets consult Elrond" then Elrond would tell what seemed better for him at that situation. However, I'd ban giant eagles beforehand, because I'd be planning for a campaign and not an one-shot.

The storytelling that works in a RPG is more subtle than the heavy handed plot rails that people love to get angry about. You take whatever choice the players make as input, check it against a background of genre tropes, and then apply the trope(s) that seem more appropriate. In many times, this is made post-facto.

So, in Misty's case: his character is a heartless hardass that ignores the call and goes to Mechanus. This immediately generates a subplot where the everybody will have to deal with the consequences of that. Maybe one of the first bosses the party meets is an enemy that Misty's character could easily shut down, maybe he gets work offers by the villains and when his path crosses again with the main story he's working for the other side. Or maybe in Mechanus he stumbles into a macguffin that will completely change the balance of power of the main quest and now the quest for everybody becomes "get into Misty's character good side."

Whatever seems more dramatic at the moment. Unlike in a sandbox videogame, ignoring the main story doesn't mean the main story ignores you.

[Korwin]

In my group the Goal would shift sooo fast from defeating Sauron to replacing him...

[virgil]

What the hell are you people yakking on about? Have we moved past the jerk-face stance of punishing people who play differently from you and liking things you don't like? Are neckbeards still arguing against homebrew campaigns that deviate from D&D's schizophrenic canon where vrocks are required to be CR 9+ entities who may or may not be allowed to have debuffs? Are we now yakking about the player's freedom to disrupt the entire game by deciding to deliberately run into the least prepared area of the campaign, or is it the more noble motive where the DM is not the sole voice in a cooperative storytelling game and that player input is expected to be encouraged?

Or is it just Misty being frozen fast about losing his GC comfort blanket and trying his best to fill such flaming shoes?

[Mistborn]

I'd roll with whatever they suggested and if their suggestion is "lets consult Elrond" then Elrond would tell what seemed better for him at that situation. However, I'd ban giant eagles beforehand, because I'd be planning for a campaign and not an one-shot.

What if the PCs want to use the Ring.

So, in Misty's case: his character is a heartless hardass that ignores the call and goes to Mechanus. This immediately generates a subplot where the everybody will have to deal with the consequences of that. Maybe one of the first bosses the party meets is an enemy that Misty's character could easily shut down, maybe he gets work offers by the villains and when his path crosses again with the main story he's working for the other side. Or maybe in Mechanus he stumbles into a macguffin that will completely change the balance of power of the main quest and now the quest for everybody becomes "get into Misty's character good side."

Whatever seems more dramatic at the moment. Unlike in a sandbox videogame, ignoring the main story doesn't mean the main story ignores you.

Wait what. If someone want to go off on a solo adventure you sure don't allow that. Rule one of RPGs is don't split the party for a reason you know.

So your willing to allow your precious storyline to be derailed because one PC is uncooperative but not because a PC bit it an inconvenient time?

[Fuchs]

In my group the Goal would shift sooo fast from defeating Sauron to replacing him...

My current D&D campaign once started as a "let's drive those invaders out of this country" After a "let's join them to infiltrate them" plan started they ended up joining the invaders for real, crushed the resistance against the invaders, and are now taking over themselves.

I am not concerned about players not following the rails, but I get pissed if I prepare something in response to player intentions and the players then abandon their own plans. Its not even as much the improvising, but the wasted time on the adventure preparation.

I am content with "If you don't want to go on this adventure I expect you to at least provide me with an adventure seed through your character's own actions". But changing the direction of the whole campaign? That's something not done without players and GM agreeing If I am willing to run a desert-themed campaign of conquest and intrigue it doesn't mean I am willing to run a plane-hopping treasure hunt through planes I am not familiar with or outright hate. A game should be fun for everyone, the GM included.

[nockermensch]

I'd roll with whatever they suggested and if their suggestion is "lets consult Elrond" then Elrond would tell what seemed better for him at that situation. However, I'd ban giant eagles beforehand, because I'd be planning for a campaign and not an one-shot.

What if the PCs want to use the Ring.

Man, I'd totally go along this. Gandalf or whatever NPC would gravely let you know that wishing to control the ring and then using it will take you to a battle of wills with sauron where you'll almost certainly will be mindfucked and lost (become an evil NPC). So there's that.

But if you take steps to beef up your will save and research for ways of subvert the ring, then surely, that's a campaign idea, right there. It'd involve running from the usual enemies AND from Gandalf and co. (once they wised up to your plans) and that could result in you becoming a new power inside Middle Earth. Nobody said the hero from the Monomyth has to be an upstanding kind of guy.

So, in Misty's case: his character is a heartless hardass that ignores the call and goes to Mechanus. This immediately generates a subplot where the everybody will have to deal with the consequences of that. Maybe one of the first bosses the party meets is an enemy that Misty's character could easily shut down, maybe he gets work offers by the villains and when his path crosses again with the main story he's working for the other side. Or maybe in Mechanus he stumbles into a macguffin that will completely change the balance of power of the main quest and now the quest for everybody becomes "get into Misty's character good side."

Whatever seems more dramatic at the moment. Unlike in a sandbox videogame, ignoring the main story doesn't mean the main story ignores you.

Wait what. If someone want to go off on a solo adventure you sure don't allow that. Rule one of RPGs is don't split the party for a reason you know.

So your willing to allow your precious storyline to be derailed because one PC is uncooperative but not because a PC bit it an inconvenient time?

Have you considered that the actual precious thing is creating interesting situations and seeing that the players have fun? Storylines are precious because they serve to that. Croaking to random orc #237 is very anticlimatic because nobody (including me) expects heroes to die to mooks. But if everybody wants to ignore that the Burning King is rising an army of CR 1 fire giants to enslave the peaceful Bladereach, then sure, the adventure is now about about being shopkeepers in Mechanus or whatever rocks your boat. Because actions have consequences, your initial decision means that Bladereach is now the Burntreach and you somehow got a recurring enemy based on that (the grandparent of one of the characters is now a vengeful ghost!) but I'm sure everybody can still have a good time, and whatever I created for that first campaign can be reskinned to fit the new situation (say, those CR1 Fire Giants* threatening a peaceful village can now be CR1 Vrocks* threatening a peaceful monodrone's mining operation, and you have to defend that if you want to refill your shop's stocks of gears) or at worst put in a binder of "cool, unused stuff" that I can use on other campaigns. If I hadn't a chance to use the fire giant blackguard (the burning king) as the last boss in that campaign, nobody will be sad if a giant exactly like him appears as a mercenary boss later in the Shopkeepers in Mechanus! campaign.

* those creatures chosen mostly to pull the leg of people in this thread. In a real game I'd rather use hobgoblins or dretches.

EDIT: Fixed the spelling of important locations. I somehow mixed Black Marches with Bladereach.

[quanta]

I suggest reading every mention of "CR 3 vrock" as "CR 1 fire giant." Every argument made so far to justify stealth-nerfing vrocks can be used just as well to justify a two-story-tall burning jotun being killed in face-to-face combat by a couple of house cats.

That's really a problem with the accidental power of a housecat and just the general mega-crappiness of level and CR 1; not a problem with the idea of scaling fire giants down to be killed by lower level heroes. Although I'm pretty sure a reasonable scaled down jotun would take at least 4 housecats to kill in melee combat. It's barely more ridiculous than the few housecats it'll take to kill a level 1 wizard in melee combat.

There's something very amusing about people bothered more by CR 1 fire giants than by CR 3 vrocks (conceptually speaking, not because level 1 is a broken sack of crap; actually, wait, that's probably why they are more bothered). Conceptually, fire giants are big, throw big rocks, and swing big swords. Combat wise, they are already just a smarter ogre that can throw big rocks. They already fight like a level 1 fighter (well level X fighter for any X really).

[infected slut princess]

Indeed. So there is certainly no issue at all with having level 1 demon princes, level 1 tarrasques, level 1 pit fiends, level 1 great wyrms, level 1 titans, level 1 death gods, level 1 liches, level 1 solars, level 1 gods, level 1 greatest heroes of all time, level 1 boners, etc.

[Wrathzog]

I thought we'd already established that leveling things down wasn't going to work for every situation... you just gotta be smart about it, as opposed to retarded.

Like, I'll agree that a level 1 Tarrasque is a pretty dumb idea (and Quanta raises good points as to why level 1 anything is a dumb idea), but that doesn't mean that we can't knock it down to like a CR 10 encounter or so. In fact, I'd argue that we could go down as low as 6 or 7, considering that the Tarrasque doesn't bring anything tactically interesting to the table beyond NOT DYING WITHOUT SPECIFIC ITEM/SPELL.

[quanta]

Indeed. So there is certainly no issue at all with having level 1 demon princes, level 1 tarrasques, level 1 pit fiends, level 1 great wyrms, level 1 titans, level 1 death gods, level 1 liches, level 1 solars, level 1 gods, level 1 greatest heroes of all time, level 1 boners, etc.

Level 1 sucks though, so you just run into the same problem all over again.

And sometimes it's better to do what K said and make it an EL 1 encounter.

I mean, smaug is pretty old (hundreds of years old, he's probably anything from a mature adult dragon to a great wyrm; obviously different setting so no spells but still) in The Hobbit and had leveled a town and defeated an entire dwarven stronghold, but he gets punked by a single arrow in his weak spot. That seems like a story precedent for an extremely low EL fight with an old dragon.

And people (K, Fuchs, etc.) are talking about leveling down a god to CR 7 for a campaign (set in the time of troubles or whatever). Or leveling down an encounter with a Vrock. Or lowering the level of Fire giants for a one-shot with some players who probably can't handle the complexity of level 10 PCs but really want to fight some fire giants.

No one is advocating permanently changing the core MM to put everything at CR 1.

[fectin]

You're dead wrong. D&d is a game of defeating opponents you cannot defeat. That is the Gordian Knot at the heart of the game. Anything else is easy mode, a tutorial at best.

Irony.

I presume you are now against anything that punches above it's weight class? Rogue tier dungeoncrawls only, final destination? Because you're arguing against targeted application of asymmetric power, which is wizards' one and only trick.

[Foxwarrior]

Does "you can only defeat opponents you are able to defeat" not sound like a tautology to you, Fectin? It sure does from where I'm standing.

[fectin]

It does, but I was willing to accept it as trite instead.

His point was that if you have to sandbag challenges to defeat them, you haven't really defeated them. That's like the degenerate form of Randianism (not even up to Objectivism), layered on top of delusion. At the end of the day with sub-Randian self-justification though, you still have your fornicatorum, whereas here you have the satisfaction of pretending to be an elf in ways that are subjectively better than imaginary other people who pretend to be elves. But I digress.

My answer back in similar "koan" form pointed out that the essence of any strategic effort was judicious use of asymmetry.

Somehow, I think he may have missed the point. Quel shock.

[Slade]

What if the PCs want to use the Ring.

Are you a Halfing or Goblin?
No?
Then we have to figure out what the ring grants you beyond long life span.

Remember the power of ring depends your race: sneaky races got invisibility.

Elves get superior magic.

Are you a human?
A Tom B? (I wonder what the would get)

[Korwin]

What are you smoking? The One Ring, to enslave them all, etc.

[Mistborn]

"In D&D you can only defeat the opponent you are able to defeat."

If anyone can figure out what that means themselves they're a step closer to understanding why victory by MTP is meaningless.

Well it looks like everyone in this thread has failed to understand what I was saying.

Perhaps a better way of saying it would have been "In D&D you can only defeat the opponent you have been made able to defeat". That koan is supposed to encourage people to think about how they are gaining the ability to defeat what is in front of them and to remind them that regardless of playstyle if you've won an RPG fight you probably went in knowing you were going to win.

Now when you fight Orcus (as an example) and win you can win for a number of reasons. It could be because your party are badasses who are capable of killing Orcus. Or it could be because the warm motherlike DM is handing out artifacts like candy. Or nocker could be your DM and the gods themselves descend from the heavens to help you defeat Orcus. (in this thread nocker seriously suggested pulling literal deus ex machina as a DM so apparently he's as bad at storytelling as he is at D&D)

Now one of those is not like the other. In one of those example the party is winning solely because of their own actions and decisions. In the others not so much. Once you start relying on the DM for victories then you have in a major way forfeited your agency as player characters. It means that the DM is responsible for both setting the challenges and giving the PC the ability to defeat them thus those challenges are only cleared when and how the DM want them too be. And that's terrible.

This attitude is creates 90% of the problem players I've had to deal with and 100% of the problem DMs I've suffered under. If the DM is responsible for your success then he's also responsible your their failure. I've had more than one player throw tantrums at the table, rage quit or accuse me of being out to get them all because I didn't hand them victory. The reason bad DMs rage when people come to them with character prepared to not suck is they don't have the DMs permission to not suck. That's 70% of what went wrong in the Expeditious Retreat campaign I did not have the DMs permission to be awesome and yet I was still more awesome than his favorite player.

When the default is that the part sucks until the DM fiats them into not sucking the DMs start to think that the PCs need his permission to not suck. This is the ultimate cause of 90% of all bad DM stories.

@fectin:Over all grade F, most creative way I've seen to fail at reading my posts hope to see you in the fall semester.

[ModelCitizen]

I'm kind of curious why you have to use low power vrocks in the first place? Wouldn't half-fiend kenku get you all the diabolical birdman you need? With the added advantage that you can just plug that combo into most monster generators on the web and have it spit out the result in less than a second?

They don't want some random CR 3 bird-man. If that was all they wanted there'd be nothing to argue about because the DM can homebrew as many new kinds of bird-men as he wants. I don't even give a shit if the DM does it by taking the Vrock entry and changing it until it's unrecognizable, because the end result isn't supposed to be a vrock.

They specifically want to use vrocks because they're iconic D&D monsters. Given the whole reason they want to use vrocks is because they appear in Monster Manuals, it's incredibly weird that they don't want to use them at their actual Monster Manual power level.

[Mistborn]

They don't want some random CR 3 bird-man. If that was all they wanted there'd be nothing to argue about because the DM can homebrew as many new kinds of bird-men as he wants. I don't even give a shit if the DM does it by taking the Vrock entry and changing it until it's unrecognizable, because the end result isn't supposed to be a vrock.

They specifically want to use vrocks because they're iconic D&D monsters. Given the whole reason they want to use vrocks is because they appear in Monster Manuals, it's incredibly weird that they don't want to use them at their actual Monster Manual power level.

My guess is they want to lie to their players and have them think that they are facing enemies that are far more powerful than they actually are. K has repeatedly accused people who are against CR 3 Vroks of being pro-metagaming.

Why don't you basketweavers explain what it is about CR 3 Vrocks that's so wonderful that your willing to defend it so vigorously over the internet?

[Fuchs]

Why don't you explain why exactly you should be able to boost the CR, but not lower it, when the rules offer opportunities for both?

Why are you house ruling "you can't have a vrock as a CR3 encounter"?

[Kaelik]

Why don't you explain why exactly you should be able to boost the CR, but not lower it, when the rules offer opportunities for both?

Why are you house ruling "you can't have a vrock as a CR3 encounter"?

No one is objecting to lowering CR within the fucking rules. We've been over this.

But as previously established, you can't make a Vrock CR 3 within the rules, because: 1) EL is different than CR. 2) You can't make an EL 3 encounter with a Vrock either, no matter how many negative levels you give it, because it still has the same spores, Mirror Image at will, SR 17, DR 10/Good, and resistance 10/Immunity.

[Surgo]

I can't stand people who go on about the monomyth, academics included, because it always comes down to this sort of weird inverse No True Scotsman thing. It's exactly like Randroids going on about objectivism.