De canistro textrinum

[nockermensch]

Listen nineball if your party dies to all the monsters than you're going to have a hard time playing a game largely about killing monsters. So when you're rolling up a character it may be a good idea to make sure that you can solo at least half the monsters in your CR bracket (i.e. actually make a CR X PC).

This is the baseline, yes. But then again, if you're DMing and you realize you don't have SGT50(TM) Certified characters in the party, then you don't challenge them with enemies of that CR. There, problem solved.

I'm starting to wonder if my gaming group was actually uncommon. Once we had a campaign more or less "by the book". Everybody made valid (3.0) characters and the DM more or less threw the monsters at us. So dice fell, people died, got brought back to life and everybody had a generally good time. Then that campaign ended and for the one starting next we decided that the characters would be descendants of the former PC party. So right from the start the new party consisted of:

1. Princess, because of course one of the PCs got to conquer a country.
2. Half-golem, because another PC was a wizard with strange ideas.
3. Half-god, becase yet another PC... well, you got the idea already.
4. Goddamn regular, no-frills PC (and a human, and a Fighter, to boot) because some people actually can only play one kind of character. Call him Fighter Fightersen.

That campaign went to strange places, but people still had a generally good time. The chassis under those outrageous characters were still valid PCs (princess = rogue, half-golem = tripstar fighter, half-god = sorcerer) and while most of the encounters where still by-the-book D&D, there was some extreme MTPing at work that would probably get The Den's rumored typical poster's drop their monocle in shock. I mean, for Shinki's sake, there was an actual Magical Princess with the party (I think you can count the magical items on her to qualify as "magical") and she strongly favored having tea with whoever tried to kill them, so there's was Literal Magic Tea Princess(es), in a D&D game. Yet another time we decided that the situation would call for a time skip, and since everybody was an elf or otherwise immortal, that time skip was of 40 years. Cue to goddamn Fighter Fightersen (not his actual name) who solved the problem of having a human character keeping up with that by adding "Jr." to his character name (keeping the rest of the sheet intact). And that was hilarious.

With the fact that playing lose with the rules is fun and awesome out of the way, lets talk about two important caveats:

1) You require mutual trust to do that. I can't imagine coming with a character sheet that has written "God of War's son" on it to a strangers table. In the rare circumstances I couldn't trust the DM and the other PCs to go along with the insanity du jour, I went with something nice and safe like "Cleric". So knowing how to make characters that play at a certain baseline competence is actually a good skill to have, while obsessing at milking the best possible competence from each build enters the "missing the point" territory.

2) You still need a consistent system that's, uh... shenanigans agnostic. You'll notice we had the MTP heavy campaign after the more or less by the book one. It's important that everybody have a good feel for the system, on the things that are common, uncommon, rare or plain fucking impossible, so that people can react properly when you start to fuck with the rules. You can't have a "...he did WHAT to that dragon?" moment without shared common expectations of exactly how badass dragons are (well, you can, using narrative, but in my experience the response is even better with people whose characters already fought dragons before).

[Mistborn]

Listen nineball if your party dies to all the monsters than you're going to have a hard time playing a game largely about killing monsters. So when you're rolling up a character it may be a good idea to make sure that you can solo at least half the monsters in your CR bracket (i.e. actually make a CR X PC).

This is the baseline, yes. But then again, if you're DMing and you realize you don't have SGT50(TM) Certified characters in the party, then you don't challenge them with enemies of that CR. There, problem solved.

No you sure as hell don't do that.

What you do is still send standard encounters at the party and let them be crushed brutally by the game. Then you set their artfully woven baskets on fire and gind their faces into the ashes. They signed up to play D&D and if you let them play pretend when D&D is too hard for them you enable the kind of person who makes the hobby worse for everyone.

If you want to have a magic tea party why are you spending $ on RPG books. You could have run your campagin just fine without them.

[RadiantPhoenix]

No, what you do is you ask, "so, I noticed your characters have a {lower/higher} CR than their levels would indicate. Would you like me to {take it easy on you / step things up to your level}?" And if they answer yes, you do what nockermensch said, and challenge them with creatures that are appropriate, and if they answer no, you do what LM said and throw out enemies according to what their level indicates to {crush / be crushed by} them.

[Roog]

This is a Poet's Law moment for me.

[Mistborn]

No, what you do is you ask, "so, I noticed your characters have a {lower/higher} CR than their levels would indicate. Would you like me to {take it easy on you / step things up to your level}?" And if they answer yes, you do what nockermensch said, and challenge them with creatures that are appropriate, and if they answer no, you do what LM said and throw out enemies according to what their level indicates to {crush / be crushed by} them.

I assume that people don't want to be told flat out that they are not tall enough to ride this adventure and should play on easy modo instead. It really isn't that hard to achieve minimum competence. I did it on my third character.

Seriously it's unforgivable to play on easy mode unless your in elementary school or something.

[K]

This is a Poet's Law moment for me.

Poe's law?

[Roog]

Poe's law?

Yes. Although now that I look into it, I may be using the phrase somewhat loosely.

[Mistborn]

Yes. Although now that I look into it, I may be using the phrase somewhat loosely.

Who exactly is the Poe in your scenario

[Roog]

Yes. Although now that I look into it, I may be using the phrase somewhat loosely.

Who exactly is the Poe in your scenario

Your first post.

[John Magnum]

I did not know there there was a Moral Imperative to play D&D at some minimum difficulty level, and that failing to do so is unforgivable.

[Prak]

[Mistborn]

Yes. Although now that I look into it, I may be using the phrase somewhat loosely.

Who exactly is the Poe in your scenario

Your first post.

If your going to play D&D "rules light" the way nocker advocates why are you bothering with D&D at all. Just letting people play pretend when the game is too hard for them breeds the sort of entitled assholes found on theRPGsite. As well as the sort of culture that TGD exists in opposition to.

The truth is everyone wants to be awesome the difference is that optimizers are willing too put in effort while people like nocker want the DM too hand success to their character even when they have no ability to succeed.

[erik]

And if you don't play D&D effectively then it is just pretend.

[Roog]

If your going to play D&D "rules light" the way nocker advocates why are you bothering with D&D at all.

Did you read Nocker's post? He already answered that question.

Just letting people play pretend when the game is too hard for them breeds the sort of entitled assholes found on theRPGsite. As well as the sort of culture that TGD exists in opposition to.

But if you didn't have people like that, who would you have to blame for wrecking Roleplaying?

[Kaelik]

Mistborn, you are completely wrong. It is totally fine to play D&D with less powerful characters who face less powerful challenges.

Saying that it is objectively wrong to have level 10 parties facing EL 7 challenges is exactly the same as saying that it is objectively wrong to have level 7 parties facing EL 7 encounters.

What is unforgivable is not knowing you are doing it. As long as you know you are doing it, it is not any different from houseruling the game to remove infinite free wishes at level 11.

It is just you choosing to play the game a different way.

[Maj]

The truth is everyone wants to be awesome the difference is that optimizers are willing too put in effort while people like nocker want the DM too hand success to their character even when they have no ability to succeed.

Has the thought ever occurred to you that maybe some people don't find making a character fun, but they enjoy playing the game?

[Roog]

(double post)

[nockermensch]

Seriously it's unforgivable to play on easy mode unless your in elementary school or something.

It's decided: We're friends from now on.

But on the more general case, the reason I opened this discussion on another thread is to avoid the trolling going on the winning on D&D thread. I wanted to discuss what's the best way to deal with the "fuck the rules, here's a pony" moments on games. Yet again, the reason behind this is because these moments aren't, for the time being, reproductible in videogames and therefore remain something unique to the TT-RPG genre. They also happen to be very fun when done well.

I'll provide another example besides the literal magical princess tea party one: In a short lived campaign I DMed, I arbitrarily gave one PC an Artifact, right on the first adventure. The character found a nondescript gold coin, that happened to attract other coins. That's it, everytime that PC opened her purse she found more money on it. The bad side was that whenever she tried to spend that money, the people on the receiving side suffered some disaster, of a kind proportional to the amount spent. So she figured by the second adventure that paying for food/lodging with 1 gp caused the innkeeper to trip and sprain his ankle, paying for a horse caused a fire to start on the stable and destruct some property, etc. All the events were, as far as the party casters could tell, natural accidents. At their power level, all they could figure was that the coin detected as magic and was obviously cursed, since it returned to the purse whenever spent or throwed away. All the other coins it generated left for good when spent, but one single, damned coin was always back. Finally, the accidents never hurt the rogue. (kind of obvious when the fire in the stable spread in all directions but hers).

I gave that Artifact as an explicit experiment on "let's break the wargame side and see how far lateral thinking can go." the campaign sadly didn't last long due to among other reasons that very player having to leave to work on another town, but for the 4 or so adventures it lasted, that cursed money became a rather nice part of that game. The players did the logical thing and started to hoard the cursed money to spend as bribes to people they didn't like. By the third adventure, they got over a roadblock set by ogres by giving them the few thousands of GPs the purse had accumulated so far. The resulting landslide destroyed the encounter and the PCs went on.

Now, that it's exactly the kind of thing that I can only pull when playing with friends, but in my experience, they're exactly the things that become memorable later. Years later, that player still asks if I want to DM the "campaign with the cursed coin" again, and so on.

So it's not just something in my head, that stuff like this is fun and memorable. The question then is two-fold: 1) Do you also appreciate things like this in your games? and if you do, 2) how do you deal with it?

[Mistborn]

Mistborn, you are completely wrong. It is totally fine to play D&D with less powerful characters who face less powerful challenges.

Saying that it is objectively wrong to have level 10 parties facing EL 7 challenges is exactly the same as saying that it is objectively wrong to have level 7 parties facing EL 7 encounters.

What is unforgivable is not knowing you are doing it. As long as you know you are doing it, it is not any different from houseruling the game to remove infinite free wishes at level 11.

It is just you choosing to play the game a different way.

I don't think many games are played that way as it requires that all the people involved admit that their characters aren't tall enough to play D&D. Anyone smart enough to learn that is smart enough to learn basic optimization.

The first time I played my character only got anywhere due to improperly rolled stats and DM fiat. Once I realized this I revamped my spell selection until I could actually accomplish something.

The thing is that people who get by on DM pity become DMs themselves and then get butthut when people bring characters that do not require DM pity.

Has the thought ever occurred to you that maybe some people don't find making a character fun, but they enjoy playing the game?

[Mistborn]

since DSMatticus is moving that post

The real concern is not that any individual character is balanced with respect to a given set of monsters (because the monsters you are facing are totally arbitrarily, and can be changed). The real concern is that characters are balanced with respect to eachother, because if they aren't then it's impossible to present meaningful challenges; they will either be too easy for some or too hard for others.

It's perfectly fine to play hyper-optimized games, and at that point your characters are genuinely a higher CR (insofar as CR means anything) than their level suggests, and the enemies they face should be appropriately higher. And the reverse is true; if you're introducing four people to the hobby, they're going to be a lower CR than you'd expect from their level, and the enemies they face should be appropriately lower. The real problem is when you put an unoptimized and an optimized character next to eachother, because there's nothing you can do that will keep both players engaged. And if the actual goal is for 4-6 people to sit down at a table and have fun playing a game together, that won't work.

I sort of on board with this.

The thing is that when the PCs are outclassed the common response is not to lower the difficulty it's to break out the magic tea and players become acclimated to getting by on GM fiat. Then when they GM the assume that that's the default and that creates bad games for LM.

As for mixed optimization parties it varies. Sometimes people act like kindergarteners and rage about not having an equal slice of the awesomeness cake and they start calling people munchkins. The thing is that peoples "munchkin radar" rarely works and is often set off by even unoptimized characters (see also AERSiB). On the other hand I play optimized Conjurers in non-optimizer parties and I almost never get complaints.

[Whipstitch]

I don't think many games are played that way as it requires that all the people involved admit that their characters aren't tall enough to play D&D. Anyone smart enough to learn that is smart enough to learn basic optimization.

They're also probably smart enough to realize that life is about trade-offs and that in many games you can mix things up and open up a lot of previously ignored play space by having everyone agree that old dominant strategies are now off-limits. Frankly, I'm pretty alright with essentially arbitrary power level restrictions as long as everything is above board and they are not being punitively inflicted on people in a fit of MC pique.

[DSMatticus]

I wrote this up in the other thread before I realized there was a new thread about the specific quote I responded to. My original response, which is kind of irrelevant because conversation has moved past that:

Listen nineball if your party dies to all the monsters than you're going to have a hard time playing a game largely about killing monsters. So when you're rolling up a character it may be a good idea to make sure that you can solo at least half the monsters in your CR bracket (i.e. actually make a CR X PC).

The real concern is not that any individual character is balanced with respect to a given set of monsters (because the monsters you are facing are totally arbitrarily, and can be changed). The real concern is that characters are balanced with respect to eachother, because if they aren't then it's impossible to present meaningful challenges; they will either be too easy for some or too hard for others.

It's perfectly fine to play hyper-optimized games, and at that point your characters are genuinely a higher CR (insofar as CR means anything) than their level suggests, and the enemies they face should be appropriately higher. And the reverse is true; if you're introducing four people to the hobby, they're going to be a lower CR than you'd expect from their level, and the enemies they face should be appropriately lower. The real problem is when you put an unoptimized and an optimized character next to eachother, because there's nothing you can do that will keep both players engaged. And if the actual goal is for 4-6 people to sit down at a table and have fun playing a game together, that won't work.

Hah. This post is now after Mistborn's response.

If your going to play D&D "rules light" the way nocker advocates why are you bothering with D&D at all.

Strawman. "Less difficult challenges" is not the same as "less rules." Those are two entirely separate discussions that for some reason nockermensch decided to have at once. Fuck you, nockermensch, you made all our lives harder. Didn't you realize that was perfect strawman ammunition?

I don't think many games are played that way as it requires that all the people involved admit that their characters aren't tall enough to play D&D. Anyone smart enough to learn that is smart enough to learn basic optimization.

It happens in games where the MC is proficient and the players aren't. That's... most of the games I've MC'd. It's usually not admitted and discussed so much as observed. You can ramp up the difficulty as they get better. If you aren't MTP-ing and they're actually overcoming challenges using consistent rules, then they will learn how to leverage those rules to achieve success.

[K]

If your going to play D&D "rules light" the way nocker advocates why are you bothering with D&D at all. Just letting people play pretend when the game is too hard for them breeds the sort of entitled assholes found on theRPGsite. As well as the sort of culture that TGD exists in opposition to.

Poe's Law has been mentioned because you are coming off as entitled asshole who is ranting about how other people are entitled assholes. Irony much?

Here's a hint: The Gaming Den is only about people trying to talk seriously about games. The only culture that it stands in opposition to is the one where people use bullshit arguments to talk about games.

For example, your argument that people should actively try to drive away other players from DnD out of some elitist morality is a bullshit way to talk about improving games. Driving people out of the hobby is literally the worse thing you could do if you wanted people to enjoy it and your idea is both stupid and cruel.

Honestly, I think you are a troll because it's pretty obvious that you care more about being considered elite than about gaming.

[nockermensch]

Who exactly is the Poe in your scenario

Your first post.

If your going to play D&D "rules light" the way nocker advocates why are you bothering with D&D at all.

Dude, since we're friends now, at least read my entire posts instead getting all butt-rangered by the very premises.

Kids playing cops and robbers have to adjudicate everything. This is a lot of work. In a RPG with more people playing, having to do that would simply cut down the fun. Therefore, I want the legacy material of D&D that me and my group tend to consider cool and iconic (races, classes, spells, wacky polearms, you name it) AND I want to discard whatever parts of the same material that I feel that detract from the fun. This kind of having the cake and eating it too is a completely possible position in this situation. Case in point, I want games where somebody casts Bigby's Crushing Hand and people gasp at the badassness just implied, but then if the story demands there's some appropriate asspull that destroys the hand. You can only break expectations if you build them first.

Yet another character I played was an extra life of another character. Yet again, that started as a "let the dice fall" kind of game, where the DM ran a hard meatgrinder adventure that kind of obviously ground our party down to one surviving PC. Since we were in a hardcore/oldschool mood back then (in fact, since that was way back to 2e days, I think it was not an "oldschool mood", but plain "authentic oldschool"), we laughed at the gruesome deaths, thought that that was awesome, made more characters and came back for more. The result was that the same character survived again, for pure luck (and/or the help of his Bladesinger kit, but since we were like level 2, in 2e and with the enemies casting evocations, mostly luck).

That was when we decided that the situation was precious enough to merit a story: That character was obviously Marked by Fate for some Great Goal. The next chracters rolled were adapted to play that story. My own character was sent by the goddess of fate to watch over "the chosen one" and had the special ability to die irrevocably to grant the hero another chance in life. We had some serious fun with that, and that extra life character is still my favorite character after all those years. She was a surly evoker that absolutely hated the guy she had to protect, but still jumped to guard him at every chance. With that being 2e, a Dex 19 darts throwing evoker could raise some serious hell and yet, about 6 adventures later, she sacrificed herself so that the chosen one could revive. Then I rolled a fighter that got the girl in the end.

When we compare and contrast games like that one (I'm not the only one with experiences like that, right? Right?!) with the Den's favorite target, the self-entitled basketweaver, I think the actual culprit is the lack of communication in a group. If say, a player tried to pull that "chosen one" story on a table without people who were already his friends, that would sound weird and merit accusations of touching the DM's penis. But the inverse is also true, as my new friend knows too well. If you arrive with a character made to play "by the book" to a game where people are busy weaving baskets, there will be conflict, RL drama and hurt butts.

Finally, the SGT50(tm) is an useful tool at the game's designing stage. It's a very cool test that should be used before the actual game ships, so that people can be sure that every class/build is about the same level. It can even be used as an "you have to be this tall to play here" ruler, on games where everybody is alright with that. But it's certainly not a gateway to the Correct Way to Play D&D, mostly because D&D "as is" is unbalanced as hell, and people still had their fun with it.

[Mistborn]

Poe's Law has been mentioned because you are coming off as entitled asshole who is ranting about how other people are entitled assholes. Irony much?

Here's a hint: The Gaming Den is only about people trying to talk seriously about games. The only culture that it stands in opposition to is the one where people use bullshit arguments to talk about games.

For example, your argument that people should actively try to drive away other players from DnD out of some elitist morality is a bullshit way to talk about improving games. Driving people out of the hobby is literally the worse thing you could do if you wanted people to enjoy it and your idea is both stupid and cruel.

Honestly, I think you are a troll because it's pretty obvious that you care more about being considered elite than about gaming.

Don't confuse me with GC. What I've been saying is that people who want to play magical fairy princess rather than D&D should not be coddled. I didn't spring into existence with all my optimization skills I learned and so can other people.

I was able to turn my first character into something functional even if I made a lot of bad choices at character generation, my third character was fairly good, and by character seven I had mastered basic optimization. That was at age 14-15 without getting advice from the internet. I find it impossible to believe that other people can't pick up just as quickly. There are even sites to give people the 411 on stuff.

The thing is that players of TTRPGs have been conditioned to rely on GM pity and hate optimization. I'm guessing those attitudes drive more people away from RPG than anything I've ever done.