A Demon Haunted World

[nockermensch]

The player says "The character will now do science at the problem." and then the character does science, and the problem is solved or it is not solved. But it is solved or not solved due to the intelligence of the character, not the player.

Yea; that's the exact thing I called out as having high potential to be dissatisfying to people at the table. [snip]

Lets talk about dissatisfying experiences at the table:

Let Alice be a powergamer that comes to the table with an Int 8, Cha 8 Barbarian. Because Alice is smart and competitive, she has her character solve problems, lead the party and influence NPCs. Also, because she knows all the books in and out, her characters always react in appropriate ways to adventuring challenges (aka: bringing fire to a troll hunt). This also means that when her characters have a plan, these just to happen to be good plans. At which points should the rules interfere with what Alice is doing?

Now let Bob be a filthy casual that comes to the table with an Int 18, Cha 18 Beguiler. Because Bob is mostly there because his friends also play the game, he's content to just follow along and doesn't talk much, except to agree with other people's ideas or declare his actions. And because he's a total newbie, he will for instance try to Color Spray skeletons. At which points should the rules interfere with what Bob is doing?

I think that in the interest of keeping the shared universe making sense, a game should have some rules to stop type A players from bringing out of character abilities and knowledge to the table, while at the same time helping type B players to play characters with abilities they don't have. But I also think that we want type B players to become type A, because the game just flows better when the players know what they're doing. Therefore, the game has to recognize and reward at least some of Alice's behavior.

What do?

[Username17]

I just don't see how very much of that kind of thing could work in something as granular and predefined as a common D&D-type dungeon crawl. The space isn't there.

I just genuinely don't see the problem. Even within a reasonably rigidly defined D&D scenario like a premade adventure, there's simply a lot that's undefined. More, I would say, than what is defined.

If the character (rather than the player) is supposed to be smart, they should be able to take advantage of terrain features, avoid triggering traps, and negate magical defenses. How do you do that when the maps are basically doodles on grid paper, the traps don't have exhaustively defined internal mechanisms, and the magical physics is barely even acknowledged? You make shit up, that's how!

A character who has smarts finds their plans working. And they work because details about the setting that make them work are improvised to cause that to be the end result. Catwoman's player doesn't get a topo map with all the areas of shadow pre-defined so that she can play a timed maze pathing game, the player just fucking says she wants to sneak to Point B and whatever shadows are needed for the action are written into the story and retconned in if for some reason it was implied they didn't exist previously.

The reality is that most of the stuff you interact with in a fantasy game is made up bullshit, and whether any particular plan would work or not is 100% asspull on somebody's part. There's a sepia snake sigil, what do you do about it? Throw some flour on it? Does that make it go off? Does that make it so it can't go off? It's an asspull either way. Normally people say "That's a DM call" meaning that essentially whether the plan works or not is about how well you can sell it to the MC. But honestly, fuck that. Why shouldn't the determination of whether the plan works or not be in the hands of the dice, or in the player whose plan it is, provided they have abilities that make it so?

-Username17

[angelfromanotherpin]

Stuff on the scale of individual skill checks can indeed work out, but those aren't really plans, they're the interior details of a couple of skill checks.

There was a joke about the differing expectations of MMO players and tabletop RPG players. A group of MMO players is playing tabletop for the first time. The party sees a fortress with an open gate and some guards posted outside. The PCs plan to use arrows to aggro the guards into a prepared ambush. The MC has the guards respond to the arrows by going inside the fortress, barring the gate, and sounding an alarm.

How does that play out if one or more of the PCs is in-fiction 'good at plans?' At what point does the relevant roll happen? Does the player or the MC call for it, and what if they forget to? What if the encounter is in a published module and the guards' general response to attack is prewritten?

[Mord]

If the character (rather than the player) is supposed to be smart, they should be able to take advantage of terrain features, avoid triggering traps, and negate magical defenses. How do you do that when the maps are basically doodles on grid paper, the traps don't have exhaustively defined internal mechanisms, and the magical physics is barely even acknowledged? You make shit up, that's how!

A character who has smarts finds their plans working. And they work because details about the setting that make them work are improvised to cause that to be the end result. Catwoman's player doesn't get a topo map with all the areas of shadow pre-defined so that she can play a timed maze pathing game, the player just fucking says she wants to sneak to Point B and whatever shadows are needed for the action are written into the story and retconned in if for some reason it was implied they didn't exist previously.

You're right that all narration for such things is necessarily handled ex post facto and therefore the narrative can be shaped to both the outcome and the nature of the test, but I feel like that's kind of disappointing and in lieu of doing better somehow, it would be better to avoid the question entirely. What I'm shooting for here is to play out Coraline and the Beldam at the table with a not-so-fast-thinking fellow player without it turning into this conversation:

MC: The Beldam has the only key to the door.
Player: I want to trick her into opening the door with a cunning ruse.
MC: OK, opposed Intelligence check.
*roll roll roll*
MC: 18.
Player: 22.
MC: OK, you did it. What's your ruse?
Player: ...
Player: ... uh...
Player: ... Coraline says "there's candy behind the door."
MC: (sigh) The Beldam says "Candy? I love candy!", coughs up the key, unlocks the door, and swings it open.

Describing the character of Coraline as "smart" after that vignette just rankles me, even though she did, according to the dice, trick the Beldam into opening the door and in-universe no one would have any reason to doubt that Coraline is good at smarting.

On reflection, maybe this is something that can only be resolved by not playing with IRL idiots.

What do?

IMO: don't make INT or CHA stats. Obviously you have to have attributes on your character sheet that affect die rolls, but there is no reason that your check bonuses need to be described as "important things about your character as a person," which is explicitly what D&D Ability Scores are described as.

Perhaps for your game with Alice & Bob, you have a stat array of Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Puzzles, Perception, and Anal Circumference. Now it's OK for Alice's Barbarian to make good plans, know stuff about trolls, and lead the party, because it's in not internally inconsistent for a person who is described as having a shitty Puzzles score and a tight anus to demonstrate cleverness and leadership in the same way it would be inconsistent for a person who is described as being stupid and socially off-putting to do so.

Additionally, another angle from which you can attack this problem is by untying your key combat attributes from Ability Scores. Bob probably didn't put an 18 into INT because he wanted his character to be a genius, he probably did it because that's how you get +4 to your spell DCs. If your save DCs were tied to level rather than Ability Score, Bob could have been just as effective at the table and put his Ability Scores into stuff that actually interested him from a character perspective. The same goes for Alice - she would be gimping herself to play the 18 CHA Barbarian because Barbarians don't actually use CHA for any of the stuff they're good at, but if you let Barbarians swing axes good as a factor of level rather than stat array you open up the world where Alice gets to play the character she really wants to play: the Barbarian who is good at puzzles and has an anal sphincter that gapes like a sewer pipe.

[maglag]

Perhaps for your game with Alice & Bob, you have a stat array of Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Puzzles, Perception, and Anal Circumference. Now it's OK for Alice's Barbarian to make good plans, know stuff about trolls, and lead the party, because it's in not internally inconsistent for a person who is described as having a shitty Puzzles score and a tight anus to demonstrate cleverness and leadership in the same way it would be inconsistent for a person who is described as being stupid and socially off-putting to do so.

The problem with that is that it doesn't allow Bob to play his fantasy of a super smart/charismatic character while Alice still gets to play her fantasy of super strong/fast barbarian.

Demanding that the player themselves needs to be smart and charismatic for their character to also be it is as retarded as demanding that the players can only be a warrior if they themselves are ripped people trained with weapons in real life.

And super smart/charismatic characters are a quite common fantasy trope. Your game needs to make that a viable option for everybody, not only for metagaming veterans.

TL,DR: if your game rules can't simulate a character being smarter/more charismatic than the player themselves just as well as they can simulate a character being stronger/faster than the player, then your rules are fail.

[Foxwarrior]

TL,DR: if your game rules can't simulate a character being smarter/more charismatic than the player themselves just as well as they can simulate a character being stronger/faster than the player, then your rules are fail.

I disagree about rules making a character smarter than their player. D&D and related TTRPGs are about improv acting, small-scale tactics battles, and engaging with surreal hypothetical situations in a somewhat concrete manner. Of those, the latter two get actively undercut by having the dice do the thinking for the player.

Even for improv acting: Having read/watched plenty of stories about super-smart characters, I can be pretty confident that the stories in that vein written by stupid authors tend to be bad, and they should stick to writing about other things. If someone wants to play a smart character, they absolutely should study for their role.

Rules to substitute for player charisma are somewhat less problematic; sure, it's more fun to play with someone who actually knows how to roleplay saying things in a convincing way, but at least "convince [person] to do [thing]" is a tool that can be used within tactics battles and surreal hypothetical situations rather than substituting for them.

TL/DR: if your game rules substitute rules for player intelligence, your rules are stupid and make your players stupider.

edit: Angelfromanotherpin's example sounds fun though

[Whipstitch]

Thank god you're not running my old rigger's shadowrun games then, because I'd be super, duper fucked.

[maglag]

TL/DR: if your game rules substitute rules for player intelligence, your rules are stupid and make your players stupider.

That only happens if you make Int the god stat that can solve everything. But very smart people aren't good at everything.

For example Albert Einstein was a genius but would've probably been folded in a direct fight.

In the other hand the players should be allowed to perform feats of super-intelligence well beyond the average player.

Stuff like identifying, crafting, disabling and making forgeries of complicated items. Knowing ancient/obscure/forbidden lore. You can't expect a player to know how to disable a complex trap (in particular if it has magic components and real world physics are out the door), but a smartish character should.

[Chamomile]

Rolling a die, getting a high number, and subsequently being told what to do by the GM does not make me feel brilliant. It makes me feel like I looked up a strategy guide. Likewise, rolling a die, getting a high number, and the GM subsequently reducing the NPC's intelligence down to the point where I overshadow them without even trying doesn't make me feel brilliant. It makes me feel like I have the power to zap NPCs with an intelligence draining ray or something.

On the other end of things, I as GM really hate making important, named NPCs act like gullible morons, especially when they're major antagonists, characters the players are most likely to want to be able to fool. It's hard to build up a villain as a threat when the players periodically force that villain to fall for tricks as stupid as "I know we've been fighting you for months and have repeatedly foiled significant schemes or turned the tide of decisive battles against you, but we want to be evil now, so please let us inside your doom fortress with all our gear and allies so we can be friends." A villain who falls for that is a joke.

I also really dislike handing my players a solution to the strategic problem I'm confronting them with. I am right now writing a book where the main hook is that each chapter the characters are confronted with some new strategic puzzle, which they then solve in what is hopefully a fun and interesting way. When I show up to run D&D, I don't want to be doing the exact same thing for 3-6 people when I could just be writing more of that book for an arbitrarily large audience.

[maglag]

When Alice's barbarian character swings around an oversized greatsword, does Alice herself feels super strong and skilled at arms?

And when Alice has her barbarian attack an enemy who's supposed to be a master swordsman, do you describe the enemy's fencing skillz in a "fun and interesting way" and then tell Alice that her attack won't work unless she can describe a way to bypass the enemy's fencing skillz?

What about a grapple? Do you force Alice to describe the correct martial arts positions and where to apply pressure? What if her character's trying to grapple something with extra legs and arms? Do you pause the game to have a discussion about how you would even grapple something with an exotic anatomy?

Well you can I guess, but most DMs will just go "Ok, you rolled well enough and succeed, [insert description of the end result]". And I've honestly never seen a DM describe how the rogue disables the trap. The rogue simply disables the trap if they roll good enough. That's the key part. You don't need to describe the proccess in detail, only the final result. Same for bluff/diplomacy/intimidate. The player declares what they want to happen and if theyir stats and rolls are good enough you just assume the character was really charismatic to make it happen, skipping over the details.

If you're writing a book with detailed descriptions that's great for you, but a book isn't a tabletop game.

[Pariah Dog]

You're right that all narration for such things is necessarily handled ex post facto and therefore the narrative can be shaped to both the outcome and the nature of the test, but I feel like that's kind of disappointing and in lieu of doing better somehow, it would be better to avoid the question entirely. What I'm shooting for here is to play out Coraline and the Beldam at the table with a not-so-fast-thinking fellow player without it turning into this conversation:

MC: The Beldam has the only key to the door.
Player: I want to trick her into opening the door with a cunning ruse.
MC: OK, opposed Intelligence check.
*roll roll roll*
MC: 18.
Player: 22.
MC: OK, you did it. What's your ruse?
Player: ...
Player: ... uh...
Player: ... Coraline says "there's candy behind the door."
MC: (sigh) The Beldam says "Candy? I love candy!", coughs up the key, unlocks the door, and swings it open.

Describing the character of Coraline as "smart" after that vignette just rankles me, even though she did, according to the dice, trick the Beldam into opening the door and in-universe no one would have any reason to doubt that Coraline is good at smarting.

Conversely it'd be almost amusing to do this kind of thing with physical stats as well. "If you can deadlift that barbell over there your character can bend the bars allowing you to squeeze through."

[Harshax]

There really isn't a reason to have multi-hour or multi-week planning sessions. Sometimes those are cool, but mostly they are frustrating because shit doesn't get done. The way to represent deep planning is absolutely to get the fuck on with things and have players break in and retroactively declare that their character totally had a plan the whole time. And once you realize that this is obviously the way things should work, putting numeric values on the character's ability to contingency plan is neither onerous nor weird. It's simply obviously the way things should work.

Blades in the Dark let's players retcon elements into the game to account for "The Plan". This is called a Flashback. It causes damage (Stress) that can only be healed between sessions. Characters who take critical levels of Stress damage suffer psychosis and eventually give up the life of a scoundrel and retire from play.

This pool of Hit Pointsdoesn't improve with character Level, which means the MC only needs to consider whether the Flashback is something a character could reasonable have orchestrated. Stating that you staked out a bar before a meeting between rival gangs, hiding weapons in the rafters costs less than something more Byzantine like poisoning the specific foods prepared for the Boss, served and consumed at the precise moment you intended to strike. Characters have to have been capable of orchestrating the Flashback in the first place, having the right dough and resources. So if you wanted to claim you poisoned the Boss Monster's food with a 10,000GP insta-kill poison, then you had to have already owned it or were otherwise capable of acquiring it.

You could waste more paper than Kant trying to come up with the DCs necessary to do any number of Cleverness Tests and still not have enough to account for all the interesting ways a player wants to throw a spanner into the works, so it would be a bad idea to tie retcons to a particular Attribute. Since parties should make plans as a group, what would stop the character with the highest cleverness from piggybacking on the dullard's idea and retconning something far more extravagant and effecting that he could succeed at? When have you not seen a player ask the MC if they could try to do the same thing the player to their left failed to do?

[Chamomile]

You could waste more paper than Kant

I love this phrase.

[Username17]

Since parties should make plans as a group, what would stop the character with the highest cleverness from piggybacking on the dullard's idea and retconning something far more extravagant and effecting that he could succeed at?

Making plans as a group can be entertaining, but for the most part is a giant waste of time. I participate in multidisciplinary team meetings at work, and I wouldn't do them if I wasn't saving lives and being paid by the hour. No one expects me to go to multi-hour planning sessions for fun, and it's basically incomprehensible to me that so many RPG writers think that you should play out the action of heist planning montages in real fucking time.

In a movie, you would pretty much never present a full three hour heist planning meeting in real time. The idea is so absurd that I can't even imagine that getting filmed. You either present a highly condensed montage that planning is taking place and then have the story unfold as if the characters have a much more detailed plan than was shown, or you go one step farther and have flashbacks just before or after major twists where you show that the planning session had surprising things in it that weren't particularly alluded to earlier. That is how the fiction that the cooperative storytelling games are emulating actually works, and it's important to remember that these stories are actually read and written in an even more retconnish manner than that. Super smart characters in stories have the authors actually decide what their plans are only after deciding what the results are. So regardless of what order the plans are revealed to the reader, they are actually written in the context of knowing how they work out. Asking the players to do all the planning before the action starts is not only dull and a giant waste of time, it's actually bad genre emulation for all genres, and bad at being a cooperative storytelling element for all kinds of stories.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

Attributes serve a couple of purposes.

First, they enable characters to stand out from the extras. So Cernobog the Orc Assassin is mighty, which means that when a bunch of wogs with spears show up, he is +4 stronger than they are.

Second, they're a dimension along which to define characters who play against type. If Paladins are always mighty and charismatic while Assassins are always agile and clever you wouldn't need attributes, you could just fold them into the class packages.

For that purpose you want relatively few of them, because you don't want to support Assassins who are against type in that they invest in Craftmanship, Perception, Communication, Personality, Power, Education, Cool or Bloodtinge. In After Sundown where competing parliamentary speeches are a major aspect of problem solving, it makes sense to have physical, social and mental attribute pairs. In your D&D heartbreaker, you really only want physical and mental pairs. Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence and Charisma are what you want even if you want to rename one of them.

Once you've got a draft of character progressions that match to your challenges, consider adding sub-attributes if you really need them.

So you might want both Might and Athleticism in Strength; both Agility and Deftness in Dexterity; both Awareness and Lore in Intelligence; or both Will and Charm in Charisma. Maybe you want these subattributes but you need a fairly fleshed-out system before you can even decide if it's worth the complication, because you don't want to promise people that higher-Lore lower-Awareness Assassins are going to be viable against level-appropriate challenges! If you do have sub-attributes, they should handed out fairly narrowly for a few characters to play to type, so you can have absent-minded loremasters or whatever.[/list]

[virgil]

Attributes serve another purpose. To give you an idea of success at a task for which they have no training or possibly unable to have training, like climbing a tree or tossing a card into a basket

[OgreBattle]

You could waste more paper than Kant trying to come up with the DCs necessary to do any number of Cleverness Tests and still not have enough to account for all the interesting ways a player wants to throw a spanner into the works

For D&D the benchmark seems to be spells. So "Actually I Just As Planned a..." could be quickly used to replicate a level appropriate spell effect.

Like if something was rigged to explode then it does fireball damage of that level, if you had an antidote on hand you do a cleric healbot spell effect. Predicting the enemy's movements to strike them with your True Strike, etc. This is a super dumb solution but it's what comes to mind with minimal work.

"I have a tool for that" is also a simple solution, you just happen to have alchemists fire/grenade, rope, water breathing apparatus, etc.
---
FrankTrollman's mentioned retroactive prep time as a core component of Asymmetric Threat but I forget if rules were actually written.

[MGuy]

About the dice rolling into being smart thing... Going off of the 'ruse' example above That's more of a charisma thing and not so much a 'smarts' thing I'd say. Beyond that I usually ask what the ruse is before the die is rolled in order to get modifiers. Asking after the dice is rolled seems like you're making more trouble for yourself. It'd be like a player asking to convince an NPC of something and asking 'what' that something is AFTER you've declared their success/failure. That's just weird.

In DnD a 'smart' character is just someone who has a high intelligence. I think Int is best kept to just 'knowing' things. Harshax has the right of it in that writing in a cleverness attribute, check, or whatever would be impractical. So all you have to do to make a player with a high Int character feel the impact of that is to have a lot of info they can just have access to.

I've never really thought about the 'make a plan to make a heist' thing. On the extremely rare occasions where I've had players actually plan any sort of thing out thoroughly they seemed to just 'do' that without any prompting for me. I've found that it brings the game's pace down quite a bit but as long as the players are all engaged in it, and their efforts pay off, no one seems to mind or care. I've never had that sort of thing last more than 30 minutes, maybe an hour in a few instances over the years. I think I'd like to try out the flashback thing instead in future though. I had an idea about allowing characters to generate content for the game based off of a meta currency and that seems like another good use for it.

[Harshax]

For D&D the benchmark seems to be spells. So "Actually I Just As Planned a..." could be quickly used to replicate a level appropriate spell effect.

Like if something was rigged to explode then it does fireball damage of that level, if you had an antidote on hand you do a cleric healbot spell effect. Predicting the enemy's movements to strike them with your True Strike, etc. This is a super dumb solution but it's what comes to mind with minimal work.

"I have a tool for that" is also a simple solution, you just happen to have alchemists fire/grenade, rope, water breathing apparatus, etc.

Are you suggesting then that every PC is a Flashback sorceror, in that each has a number of slots to mimic spell effects that support the narrative of the Flashback?:

"I have that item!": Slot used is the cost to make a scroll equal or greater than the value of the item you happen to have. Lots of mundane equipment would be a Level 1 effect. (25gp or less) ... [Edit: subject to circumstance, encumbrance or keister capacity]

"A clever ruse": Slot of the most applicable spell effect. A Target is affected by poison at the right moment. Level 3 (Poison).

"It's a sabotage!": Specific item breaks at the right moment. Level 2 (Shatter)

"It was the butler the whole time": Enemy Ally revealed to be a PC Ally. Equivalent of Summoning Spell that could conjure an ally of that HD and a Disguise Spell to mask the Ally's appearance and possibly, a Slot for nondetection or some-such to prevent the Ally's mind being read during the ruse.

"In reality. It's a simple turnip!": McGuffin Enemy claims to have acquired is a mundane item with Magic Aura (Level 1)

"I only wanted you to think that": Information the Enemy had is misleading. Misdirection (Level 2)

The PC has X slots based on level, with bonus slots for high Cleverness. Then the PC invokes a retcon and the target makes a saving throw that represents their ability to plan a step ahead of you.

How then would this mechanic affect spell casting classes? How many twists and turns could be invoked in any scene? What's the refresh mechanic? What happens to the action if you can keep popping back to a Flashback sequence.

Just sprinting with the idea here. Not sure if this is exactly what you were suggesting.

[Username17]

First of all, I think it's important to consider the existence of the EGO stat in Champions. It only affects the attack and defense profiles of and against mental attacks. That is literally 100% of what it does. You don't make EGO related skill rolls, you don't roll untrained EGO checks, none of that shit. If you don't have any mental attack powers and you aren't currently being attacked by Alakazam, it doesn't do anything at all.

Now with a reductionist goal, such a thing is clearly an abomination. There is absolutely no reason that Psions and Jedi couldn't be using stats that actually do things in other contexts. They could be using Charisma or Intelligence or Perception or Luck or something that had defined in-game effects when used by people who didn't have access to Ego Whip or Suggestion powers. But it's important to realize that from a game design standpoint, such a stat is entirely defensible. The effect of having such a stat would be that everyone would dump stat the fucking thing except Jedi and Psions, and then Mind Blast would be a power that had a high hit-rate against all humanoids who weren't Psions or Jedi. And that is a reasonable paradigm, so having that kind of otherwise useless stat is fine if that's how you want psychic attacks to work out.

Having stats that are relevant to powers that also do other things is in effect tying those other things to the character classes who get those powers. If you have Oratory use Charisma and you have Bards and Paladins use Charisma for their key class abilities, you have in essence declared that Bards and Paladins are all reasonably good at Oratory.

Second, they're a dimension along which to define characters who play against type. If Paladins are always mighty and charismatic while Assassins are always agile and clever you wouldn't need attributes, you could just fold them into the class packages.

For that purpose you want relatively few of them, because you don't want to support Assassins who are against type in that they invest in Craftmanship, Perception, Communication, Personality, Power, Education, Cool or Bloodtinge.

I agree that attributes are a means for characters to play against type. I disagree that this implies that you want few attributes. This is actually an argument for more attributes, not less.

Let's consider the ultra-reductionist model where we have two stats: Mind and Body. Clearly in such a model we can guess that the "expected" build of the Fighter is to put all their points into Body, and the "expected" build of the Wizard is to put all their points into Mind. And equally clearly we can see that there isn't much room for a Fighter to put their points in Mind or for a Wizard to put their points in Body. Playing against type is simply wrong.

On the other hand, if we have a model where there are lots of stats and you are expected to have several good stats, there is room for a character to still have core competencies yet still be playing against type. The Paladin can take the Charisma they need in order to activate their main abilities but take Agility or Perception or Intelligence or some fucking thing instead of Strength. The character still probably won't be as good as a Paladin that was made the "right way," but it won't have to drop all of its core competencies the way you would in a reductionist model where there are few enough stats that characters only have one good one.

In After Sundown where competing parliamentary speeches are a major aspect of problem solving, it makes sense to have physical, social and mental attribute pairs.

It's not actually important whether your stats are pairs, triplets, heptads, or whatever the fuck. Indeed, they don't need to be equally distributed across whatever categories you have, and the stats don't need to be abstractly equally useful. Different stats are presumably going to be differently useful to characters of different types, and presumably none of the players are going to play an untyped character - whatever the fuck that would even mean.

However, if stats are expected to play an important role in basic adventuring tasks - which seems highly likely considering how much character action is defined by having thumbs and the ability to speak - the stats should be divided up among the expected play space as evenly as possible. As mentioned with the EGO example, it's perfectly possible to design a game where one of the stats is literally only rolled for power activations, but if players are spending a lot of time interacting with the world without using powers it becomes pretty boring if you spend all of your time rolling Competence and none of your time rolling Bloodtinge.

This means that the decision to include Appearance and Manipulation is a lot more defensible in Vampire: the Masquerade (a game about trying to have weird sex with goths) than it is in Dungeons & Dragons (a game about Dungeons and also Dragons). An edition of D&D might have Strength, Agility, Intelligence, Charisma, and Perception - but it wouldn't have multiple social stats.

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

Are you suggesting then that every PC is a Flashback sorceror, in that each has a number of slots to mimic spell effects that support the narrative of the Flashback?:
....

Just sprinting with the idea here. Not sure if this is exactly what you were suggesting.

For jamming into D&D3e yeah something like that. Maybe have the party share this resource as a whole so you don't have 6 guys each declaring a Just As Planned moment.

In my heartbreaker I have a Trickster (or Hunter, I waffle between those two names) class that does "Just As Planned" stuff by first marking things (observing like an assassin, using basic attacks, scouting an area before hand) and then spending marks to go "I had a trap set up", "I had filched his scroll when I attacked him"

[Username17]

In any case, monsters imply the existence of defenses against the attacks of monsters. But here's the thing: defenses are not equally valuable and it's ridiculous to even attempt to make them so. Yes, when you make the monsters you could design it so that exactly one third of them attacked your Chutzpah, exactly one third attacked your Absorbency, and exactly one third attacked your Sex Appeal, you are not in fact going to do that. What's actually going to happen is that virtually all monsters are going to be able to make some kind of basic physical attack that targets basic physical defenses, and some subset of monsters are going to have special attacks that target any other defenses people have in your system. Yes, you could have ghosts of various flavors and persuasions that literally only attack special defenses and cannot make a normal physical attack - those are always and forever going to be a tiny minority of the expected opposition unless you call your game Spirits & Sorcery or something. Fuck, even Nymphs and Rusalka can punch you, if that is for whatever reason something they want to do.

There's a couple ways you can make special defenses closer in value to plain old Armor Class. You could make the specialist attacks much more dangerous than the standard ones, for example. 3rd edition does that so hard that the pendulum goes the other way and at high levels Will saves are straight up more important than AC because combats are won or lost with fear effects and stun blasts and shit long before claws and swords can do enough HP damage to make anyone give a shit. I find such a paradigm unfortunate, and largely leads to characters feeling useless because not having the right defense ends up being instantly disqualifying in a lot of encounters.

A more reasonable plan is to simply not give a shit that the basic physical attacks are far more common than other kinds of attacks. Indeed, such a thing is a good piece of leverage, as it means that you can make it so that having "Good Armor Class" is a no-shit advantage over having "Good Mental Defense" or whatever. That is the kind of thing you could tweak with in order to give different classes reasonable overall productivities against expected opposition.

Which is not to say that you shouldn't make an effort to cordon off monster abilities into special defenses. You definitely should! There's nothing stopping you from making Frost Breath be an attack that is resisted by the same defense as the Winter Wolf's jaws, but things are more interesting if those attacks target different defenses. It is also one more means by which you could plausibly tweak one character to be balanced through making their defenses better or worse in small subsets of encounters.

How does this all work out? Well, let's go through the 6th level encounters:

• Clay Golem, Mind Flayer, Mind Flayer, Toad Fiend, Gorgon
  Tree Folk, Wyvern, Night Hag, Hungry Fog, Dire Bear
  Osyluth, Dustwight, Ammit, Sand Vortex, Behir
  Specter, Wyvern, Succubus, Nosferatu, Hungry Fog

So assuming that Clay Golems, Dire Bears, and Wyverns don't shoot laser beams out of their eyes, we can safely assume that those creatures only target Armor Class (though the Wyvern has a rider effect that targets your poison resistance if its stinger gets past your breastplate). Hungry Fog and Specters presumably only target some sort of special defenses. All the other creatures have some mixture of attacks that target Armor Class and at least one other thing. Some of those creatures try to attack special defenses by preference (Succubus, Mind Flayer, Gorgon), some of those creatures try to attack Armor Class and have a backup attack that targets something else (Treefolk, Ammit, Toad Fiend). But it's important to note that those creatures that have special attacks generally target different kinds of defenses. The Mind Flayer does a mind blast, the Gorgon does a petrification blast. The Treefolk has a plant entangle, the Ammit has a soul strike.

This means that getting a big AC would be a large advantage against 2 or 3 enemies in each encounter group, getting entanglement resistance would be an advantage against zero or 1 enemies in each group. In turn, this means that you could give out "I'm The Juggernaut" to the Berserker or the essentially equivalent ability "Freedom of Movement" to the Psion at 6th level to slightly tweak how many monsters they are ownzoring for game balance purposes.

-Username17

[RobbyPants]

How does this all work out? Well, let's go through the 6th level encounters:

• Clay Golem, Mind Flayer, Mind Flayer, Toad Fiend, Gorgon
  Tree Folk, Wyvern, Night Hag, Hungry Fog, Dire Bear
  Osyluth, Dustwight, Ammit, Sand Vortex, Behir
  Specter, Wyvern, Succubus, Nosferatu, Hungry Fog

Is the idea on these lists that each line is a single encounter?

[Username17]

Yes.

[Foxwarrior]

So, what sacrifices are going to be made so that the DM's side of the board isn't more than twice as hard to run as the players' in these superhero team fights?