Kitchen Sink Roleplaying

[Username17]

The model of fair play and death and dying has to exist for the PCs and the NPCs alike. Otherwise you get the whole "PCs are Speshul" thing that 4e has got going on.

If you want to minimize your own losses, hit-and-run makes sense. If killing is the only way to significantly impact your enemies' resources, it makes sense to focus your efforts on killing. You end up with drive-by murder machines.

However, if you can impact your enemies' resources in other ways, the focus might not be on killing. In actual warfare, the 'ideals' are seriously injuring (but not killing) your enemies, because injured soldiers take up more resources than healthy ones and yet provide nothing. You also want to destroy their food and ammunition, because they probably can't magic up more. In a straw man RPG, none of those matter: you are at full health after every engagement, you can cast hero's feast, and you can shoot unlimited fireballs.

Pretty much, yeah. The goal is to have players want to take territory, seize supplies, and injure or capture enemies. In short, all the stuff that's important in actual war that people don't do in any edition of D&D because none of that shit matters.

Th goal of both sides of the conflict should be to get the most concessions at the end of the war - not to commit genocide on the other faction.

-Username17

[TavishArtair]

You can have people start each encounter at something approximate to full health, though, and still operate under those assumptions, as long as they expended resources to return to full health that matter. Such as, yes, healing surges, or healing counters (which I think I like more).


Fraaaaank, your quotes are funny.

[Koumei]

I should have clarified: getting taken to "Defeated" would stop the fast healing.

But yeah, personal victory ("We win!") > military victory ("Our kingdom wins!") in my books, so not starting at basically full power means I'm willing to say "Know what? Fuck the siege. I'm going back to town to sleep this off." I imagine many other players are the same, because their PCs are more important to them than any number of NPCs.

[Mask_De_H]

Wait, when were we working under the conceit that the setting took place under wartime conditions? Because if we're dealing with small groups of adventurers killing people and taking their stuff like pirates, then the ideals of war doesn't make as much sense. I mean, general fantasy heartbreaker material tends to focus on the micro more than the macro battle, except for certain cases.

However, if the KFS setting is supposed to be Alliance vs. Horde and your average group of PCs are a strike force or a band of mercenaries, then disregard, cocks, etc.

[TavishArtair]

Because a merry band of adventurers seriously amounts to King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table going to beat someone's head in, and so depending on the opposition, such as an ogre, a villainous knight, a faerie warrior, it does in many ways resemble an ancient aristocratic war party. So while the group may not necessarily be a king and his knights, they can conceivably pull about as much diplomatic weight as such a band, and treating for the release of their allies is not unreasonable (happens all the time in source material, even, though so does "we're busting you out!").

[Username17]

I should have clarified: getting taken to "Defeated" would stop the fast healing.

But yeah, personal victory ("We win!") > military victory ("Our kingdom wins!") in my books, so not starting at basically full power means I'm willing to say "Know what? Fuck the siege. I'm going back to town to sleep this off." I imagine many other players are the same, because their PCs are more important to them than any number of NPCs.

The goal of any resource system is to make sure that doesn't happen. And one of the ways to do that is to define victory in terms of completed quests and accomplished objectives rather than total number of murdered monsters divided by the actual amount of narration you have to go through.

So if you are rewarded by "kills" then obviously you are just going to find someplace to camp with a sniper rifle and make head shots, and if people locate you, you'll leave and grab a health pack and set up somewhere else and do it again. And again. And again and again and again. On the other hand, if you are rewarded by successfully retrieving the flag, then you're going to make assaults on the enemy fortress, either by sneaking around or rushing the gates while setting off some distractions.

How the game defines success defines how players will interact with the game. And D&D's standard definition of "kill 13 monsters in cold blood to get the level up music to play" is about the worst fucking definition I can imagine in terms of actually getting people to play a game of heroic adventure. It would be vaguely OK for "Serial Killer the RPG" but trying to murder creatures one at a time without getting spotted by the cops is actually pretty damn non-heroic. And yes, encourages people to sit around and lick their wounds after every battle. The goal then, is to make running in and killing a dude ad then going off to sleep it off in a rope trick be worth very little in terms of victory. It could even be worth less than nothing in the case that the enemy is allowed to actually accomplish things on a day to day basis rather than sitting around waiting to spawn when the PCs kick in the door.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

How the game defines success defines how players will interact with the game.

I imagine many other players are the same, because their PCs are more important to them than any number of NPCs.

Your motivation redefinition still hasn't solved this problem, Frank.

19 times out of 20, I would rather let the kingdom burn down or have to deal with the indignity of my family becoming prostitutes for Mephisto than have to tear up my character sheet.

Sure, in stories we look down on cowardly protagonists, but that's because A) we don't have as much emotional or physical investment in the heroes in literature as we do on tabletop and B) the tabletop certainly isn't over if the heroes slink off from the ruins of Boatmurdered with their tails between their legs.

Heroic Fantasy needs some kind of bottom pit safety net. There has to be some kind of resurrection.

[Username17]

How the game defines success defines how players will interact with the game.

I imagine many other players are the same, because their PCs are more important to them than any number of NPCs.

Your motivation redefinition still hasn't solved this problem, Frank.

19 times out of 20, I would rather let the kingdom burn down or have to deal with the indignity of my family becoming prostitutes for Mephisto than have to tear up my character sheet.

Sure, in stories we look down on cowardly protagonists, but that's because A) we don't have as much emotional or physical investment in the heroes in literature as we do on tabletop and B) the tabletop certainly isn't over if the heroes slink off from the ruins of Boatmurdered with their tails between their legs.

Heroic Fantasy needs some kind of bottom pit safety net. There has to be some kind of resurrection.

That's just capture and release.

If the goal is victory rather than genocide, it becomes plausible that the PCs could lose and still go on to adventure some more.

It's all one problem. The problem is that players are incentivized to murder enemies one at a time at little risk and go take vacations every time they get a paper cut - reducing the game to a series of 15 minute work days and snipe hunts. And that is boring narratively.

• Players need a victory condition that makes running into the bank, shooting a security guard, and then running away again at least as fucking retarded as it is in the real world.
• Players need a safety net in which they can take genuine risks without having this result in [GAME OVER] screens all the time.
• Players need to be able to feel the attrition and desire to conserve resources rather than blowing them all in a 15 minute workday or just ignoring them altogether.
• Players need to be able to continue from one point to another without it being "suicide."

And of those points, there's only a slight conflict between 3 and 4. The others all play ball perfectly. The D&D Murder Reward Assumption cuts both ways. It makes people not care about taking risks because they don't have to take any to "win" and it makes them afraid to take risks because if they lose at any point it's GAME OVER. That shit is retarded. It produces results that are neither historical, heroic, or interesting.

-Username17

[ggroy]

[RobbyPants]

Players need a victory condition that makes running into the bank, shooting a security guard, and then running away again at least as fucking retarded as it is in the real world.

In the real world, this is dumb because there is powerful forces (law enforcement) that will track you down after the fact, even if they couldn't stop you in the first place.

I'm not sure what the analog is for this in a fantasy RPG. If you're talking about stealth killing gnolls and ogres and ghouls, then I don't really think there is an analog. You'd literally need some powerful, organized coalition of Team Evil to track down the PCs after the fact for this tactic to be dumb in the same way that it is in the real world. In most cases, I don't see this working or even making sense.

I agree that victory conditions other than "kill everyone on the other team" can be a nice thing, but the more and more monstrous your opponents become, other strategies become less viable...

...or are we only talking about intelligent monsters here (not the ones that want to eat you or use you to swell their undead ranks)?

[Kaelik]

In the real world, this is dumb because there is powerful forces (law enforcement) that will track you down after the fact, even if they couldn't stop you in the first place.?

In the real world it's also dumb because you risk some amount of pain and death for literally zero gain.

If you risk slightly more in order to obtain the contents of the bank vault, that provides you with some actual reason to care.

[violence in the media]

Players need a victory condition that makes running into the bank, shooting a security guard, and then running away again at least as fucking retarded as it is in the real world.

In the real world, this is dumb because there is powerful forces (law enforcement) that will track you down after the fact, even if they couldn't stop you in the first place.

I'm not sure what the analog is for this in a fantasy RPG. If you're talking about stealth killing gnolls and ogres and ghouls, then I don't really think there is an analog. You'd literally need some powerful, organized coalition of Team Evil to track down the PCs after the fact for this tactic to be dumb in the same way that it is in the real world. In most cases, I don't see this working or even making sense.

I agree that victory conditions other than "kill everyone on the other team" can be a nice thing, but the more and more monstrous your opponents become, other strategies become less viable...

...or are we only talking about intelligent monsters here (not the ones that want to eat you or use you to swell their undead ranks)?

What if there was some sort of an accepted premise of reinforcements? Maybe even a mechanical representation of such?

Let's say you need to rescue the elven merchant's family from the hobgoblin slave pits. If you just run in there, whack a few guards, and retreat to rest, then the next time you go back, you'll find the total guard contingent restored to the original number, doubled, and that they'll have dogs and ranger teams ready to track down any assassins. If you take too long, maybe the merchant's family gets sold, or eaten, or killed. If you keep harassing the hobs, maybe they send a strike force to burn down the town you're operating from.

Now, obviously for beasts and other dumb enemies, this has a limited application. Maybe if you're exterminating a pride of dire lions one at a time, after once you've killed 2 or 3, the next time you come back there's an angry druid there too. Some situations are going to simply lend themselves to PCs carefully stalking their enemies, and that's okay as long as that tactic doesn't work every time and in every situation. You don't want there to be arbitrary monster generators in the world like Gauntlet, but where reinforcements are plausible, they should be expected to happen in a rising scale of response.

[Koumei]

Indeed, the higher level you get, the harder it generally is to do something other than "rush in and attack everyone!", especially if we assume not everyone is a rogue-type. But let's say in this situation, any rewards hinge on completion of the quest: rescuing the president from ninjas. Who are also gnolls. And the leader is actually a ninja wizard gnoll lich. Or whatever. And they have a cool fortress thing.

So you have to rescue the president to get your monies and XP and all that.
If you take too long, they'll just kill him or your people will be forced to hand over [a thing] to them.
If you start causing trouble and then wander off/are defeated in the process, they will kill him, so once you start, you're in it for the whole thing unless you elect to forfeit this mission. This means you can't have a little nap halfway and also win.

This seems pretty reasonable. So let's say you've snuck into the fortress, bypassing the ninja guards at the front (they're good at sneaking, not stopping others from sneaking), and struck up a conversation with their butler, learning the layout. You make your way up a few floors, and end up getting ambushed and have to fight them, possibly taking prisoners or letting them flee in a direction other than the one you're running in. Time is now a factor!

But you're down to half health, with the boss fight still to come. If you leave now, you lose. If you sit down here and rest, more will come and you'll certainly lose. If you keep going, it's all or nothing: you'll either save the president, or you'll be defeated, losing and being captured or killed.

"Fuck the president, I'm going home and having a nap. They can kill him, whatever. He's a boring NPC anyway, it's not like I even care, or that my character has strong connections to him. Better to cut the losses here than to risk anything else, and unless the campaign ends here we'll just get another mission we can try."

The whole "Wand/Trap of CLW" thing might have been a bug for 3E, not a feature, but ultimately it's one that I liked. And got very used to.

[RobbyPants]

So, what's the idea? To force the PCs to engage in the type of behaviour we want with time critial missions and/or powerful forces that will kill/arrest you if you don't play by the rules of war?

I mean, some of these ideas are cool. I like the idea about having threats of defeat that aren't always death. The idea of catch-and-release stuff is nice. I just have two problems with it:

1) We've spent a page discussing how to incentivize taking prisoners insteat of CDGing your foes. This is all well and good, but it starts to look contrived.

2) Some foes will always kill you. Animal-intelligence monsters are probably just looking for a meal or defending their territory. They will likely eat any fallen foes once the battle is over. Shadows and wights and wraiths all hate living creatures and want nothing more than to swell their ranks at the expense of the living.

So, it just seems like even if we design clever rules to incentivize capturing instead of killing, there are still going to be situations where it won't make sense. Is this an acceptable limitation to the system? I'd say yes, because I don't want to get rid of stories involving dire bears and wraiths.

[Username17]

The idea is that the additional concessions you'll have to drop on the Baron for having tried to free the mayor and failed aren't going to be amazingly less than the extra concessions you'll have to drop if you try to free the mayor ad fail and also get captured. Which means that the utility function usually favors pressing on rather than cutting your losses.

The only reason bugging out is favored in D&D's 15 minute workday is because the penalty for pressing on and losing is very high (lose all your equipment and possibly have to make a new character), and the benefits of pressing on and winning are very low (get some more XP and treasure). But since you can just adventure tomorrow for XP ad treasure, or the day after that, it's not even a rational comparison.

Now move the utility function. You've just attacked the dungeons. You are injured and you don't know if you can beat the black knight. Here are your options:

• Leave. Probably escape, but repeating the mission will be more difficult (higher alert status), and you are going to be out a certain amount of concessions for having failed in an attack against them.
• Press on and win: Now the Back Knight owes concessions back to you and you get quest rewards.
• Press on ad Lose: you get taken prisoner and ransomed back, ad you are faced with increased concessions to the Black Knight.

In short: if you don't care whether the mission can be succeeded or not, the "Ah fuck it, let's keep going." option looks pretty good compared to buggering off. Th only time slinking away looks good is if you had a run of bad luck and you think trying again tomorrow against more guards would actually be better than continuing on the present clusterfuck.

In short, if you keep saying "The D&D utility function favors 1 minute workdays!" as if that was any kind of insight, I am going to be forced to openly make fun of you - because that shit doesn't mean anything the very moment you swap the utility function for something else.

The fact that D&D gives you incremental awards for each guard you stab along the way and punishes you with ultimate penalty if and only if you run out of steam - means that yes, it encourages you to start and restart raids over and over again. If on the other hand, you give rewards only for seeing a mission through to the end, and provide penalties that are fairly comparable for retreating and running out of steam - then the encouraged behavior is of course going to be different.

-Username17

[RobbyPants]

Okay, so it looks like you're just talking about "basic" D&D, not counting in any special story elements the DM adds, correct? We're basically analyzing the XP reward for killing stuff vs the typical resource expenditure of combat. In this case, I agree that "basic" D&D encourages the wrong type of behavior. Although, a lot of this can be fixed just by the DM adding in extra elements to the mission ("you have to do X in a certain amount of time", or "even if you can Resurrect her, the king doesn't want the princess getting killed", or whatever). I see all sorts of creative advice on various forums when new DMs ask how to handle Rope Trick. Of course, this tends to lead to nothing but time-critical missions and/or monsters familiar with this tactic who get reinforcements, but at least the DM's being creative.

Regarding your black knight example: lets say the PCs lose and have to pay the black knight to get the captured party members back. How do you handle a second defeat? If the PCs have to ransom off valuable gear to get back their buddies, they'll be weaker for the next fight. At what point does the black knight say "fuck these guys. They haven't learned their lesson." and just kill them?

It seems like a nice bit of advice to give DMs for certain encounters, but after a while, it seems like the whole capture-and-release thing would start to wear thin or seem implausible.

[Koumei]

I'm not arguing with you there, I'm saying that being low on HP (more than any other resource, really) really incentivises me to say "I don't care about concessions of the mayor against the Baron. It's not like I own the kingdom, what do I care if we pack up and leave and the mayor's people have to hand over additional concessions and lose the overall war? We'll be off doing something else, somewhere else."

So they bugger off, get zero XP or treasure, and head over the mountain to where something else is happening, and fight the giant spiders or whatever.

Which means the mayor still gets abandoned when things look grim unless one of the following is true:
1) Somehow you're forcing the party to stay involved in this shit. Maybe the war is the only important thing in the world, maybe you're specifically picking NPCs they care about, whatever. This can't be relied upon.
2) HP just recharges, and presumably everyone enters every battle at full power, or people have some degree of "X per day badassery" so they enter with less actual power but at full HP. It's probably a psychological "These are my life points" thing but acknowledging that doesn't make me change it - I still heal up that 6 damage from 106,000 HP between battles in Disgaea, and that's a OHKO game.
3) Players can reliably jack their offensive or defensive abilities off the RNG so they know they can avoid these situations by simply having big numbers. (Also the Disgaea approach. "They're level 25 and I'm too far in to risk losing? Okay, I'll tackle it with a level 200 character.")
or 4) Similar to 1), it will always come back as a penalty. So the mayor loses, and gets bitter about it and blames the adventurers for not saving his sorry ass, so now that he's the evil Baron's slave, he turns to necromancy, dedicates his unlife to killing the PCs, and sends an army of the dead after them.

I seriously think 2) is going to be the easiest solution here, even though 1) is generally desirable anyway.

[MGuy]

If the players decide to run off , abandoning their mission, wasting whatever perishables the trip cost them, ruining their reputation, and possibly making an enemy of their former employer, etc then they would be suffering the penalty of "next mission, and possibly everything else, will be harder now". This is essentially the same penalty they would face by pressing on and losing (if I am interpreting what Frank is saying correctly). So there is nothing that prevents you from abandoning the quest other than the penalties you face for losing but just the same you would face those penalties if you pressed ahead and lost but at least by pressing on (or coming back late if that is an option) you have a chance for success.

[RandomCasualty2]

[*] Leave. Probably escape, but repeating the mission will be more difficult (higher alert status), and you are going to be out a certain amount of concessions for having failed in an attack against them.

The problem with this is that that's generally not the way it goes in D&D. This isn't Shadowrun where the black knight is going to go and make a commcall to get in reinforcements from a city over and have them flown in that night. Chances are what he has in his castle is basically all he has, at least within a few days journey anyway.

Even if he does have other dudes he can call in, his resources are finite, so running a war of attrition against him pretty much works in D&D, because if you're careful, you won't lose anybody and you can keep up constant hit-and-run harassment perpetually until he runs out of followers. And in fact, you probably thwart whatever evil plan he's got, since he has to pull any followers back to his castle to guard it, instead of razing the town or whatever. Attrition raids are actually one of the most potent and unstoppable tactics D&D has to offer.

[Blicero]

But even then, it's way easier to attack an unalert enemy than an alert one. If the bad guys know that there is an enemy who has attacked before and is likely to do so again, they're more like to a) be extra watchful for the slightest hint of threat, b) wear their bigbad armor and carry their bigbad weapons with them, even if said armor might be too bulky to wear normally and they'd really prefer to leave their sword on the kitchen counter while they go take a dump.

And, if the Black Knight really feels threatened, he probably has some favors or whatever he can call in. Summoned demons, nearby buddies, etc.

[Parthenon]

In the same manner as trying to encourage people to carry on fighting rather than buggering off, what is there to encourage people to have a stand up fight rather than kill them in their sleep or when one soldier goes to take a piss?

Surely the ambushes by one or two of the party are encouraged mechanically just by fact of choosing ground and having huge starting advantages, so you need something to make the party fight in a way that uses the whole party and is what is expected of the genre.

So rather than tie Lu Bu down in his sleep and then kill him, fight him on the battlefield. Or rather than poison them horribly and run away while they die painfully, challenge them to a duel in front of the army.

[Orion]

Note that if the Black Knight is trying to destroy the world, he should probably be on a full alert war footing already, and should have called in everything he can call in.

So this only really works with less cartoonish villains.

[Blicero]

Not necessarily.

If he's trying to destroy the world, he might have a significant portion of his minions out doing important but not essential tasks. (maybe rounding up additional allies, killing people who might be a problem later on, etc.) These missions, while useful, are almost certainly secondary to the goal of Not Dying. If the Black Knight is given the choice between Not Dying and maybe having it harder down the road cuz he had to pull back his troops before they had time to assassinate the Elf King, and Dying because he let his troops stay out and assassinate said Elf King, I imagine he'll choose the former, even if he's deranged or whatever, because he'll want the option that has the greatest chance of him fulfilling his evil plot.

[Vnonymous]

It seems to me that "limit breaks" could actually be a good way of dealing with the "why do people fight on low hp" question. Having bonus powers might actually make it a viable tactic to keep on going despite having sustained various injuries already.

While it doesn't have to literally be omnislash or some over the top super move, giving people a benefit for fighting when they're low on hp could help solve this problem.

[Kobajagrande]

What a bunch of pussies.