One way game systems have implemented insta-kills is with "mook" rules.

For instance, in Feng Shui, heroes can fight off waves of low-level baddies, in imitation of "heroic bloodshed" movies like A Better Tomorrow, or scenes where Bruce Lee beats up everybody in the building.

In Feng Shui, mooks are low level baddies, nameless and possibly faceless as well. Any successful attack one-shots them, and there are character classes with feats that allow them to attack groups of mooks in a single action.

The key is that mooks are a special underclass of antagonist who exist to be disposed of en masse. They're cannon fodder.

You can also have named antagonists who are the equals of the heroes, or bosses who can take on an entire party. They use the same rules as PCs, and can't be mowed down like blades of grass.

One nice thing about the way Feng Shui does it is that characters can be optimized to fight lots of low level guys, or they can be optimized to take on the high level Big Bads one on one, but generally not both. It gives you the ability to have different characters doing different things, and they complement each other and work well as teams.

I've often thought that a similar mechanic would work well for spy games. If an agent is sneaking into a base, they can take out nameless guards without raising an alarm, but a high-level henchman or mastermind is a different story.

Quote from: Lunamancer on October 09, 2022, 09:50:41 PM

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on October 08, 2022, 09:49:09 PM
Agreed. Part of the problem with current game philosophy is resistance to all the things that remind the players that what they're doing is playing a game. Dungeon crawls are boring stories because they aren't designed to be stories, they can't be built to rely on a dramatic character arc that intertwines with the plot.

Wait. What?

You start in the ordinary world. There's a call to adventure. You find out about the dungeon (perhaps from an actual mentor, or perhaps just someone filling the mentor role in this instance). You prepare--buy equipment. You step through the dungeon entrance crossing over into the underworld. You go through a series of trials that test your wits. As you do so, you learn how this strange new place works. If you don't give up, you face the dragon or whatever other thing that stands between you and the prize. If you succeed, you get the prize. Then you have the return journey to bring it back to the village.

In what bizarro realm is this not a story? It's the Hero's Journey in spades. Not only is the dungeon crawl a story. It is so on point in that capacity that you only have to fill in a few blanks and you're ready to go. And the game system itself even helps you fill in a lot of those blanks. The Dungeon Crawl the literal conception of the most dramatic symbolism and expressions of the most iconic of stories. Why do you think of all the board games, war games, Braunsteins, and improv games that existed the time, why did Dungeons & Dragons blow up the way it did? It hit all the right spots. It resonated. And the game's name set the tone.

What he means is, that modern games don't try to have you play the game as a game. An old school dungeon crawl is played as a series of decisions made by the player about how to balance a number of different resources, turns, time, and so on. It's almost like a board game in that respect. A story does come out of it, but first and foremost, it's a GAME.

The anti-dungeon ethos is more like... playing through a soap opera where your PC is one of the main characters. Mere resources and things like that aren't what matters, they're just a distraction. It's the character exploring facets of their personality and relationships that is what it's all about. In that sense, it's called a "story."

The player makes decisions as their character, which are not always optimal -- for example, someone might play a cowardly barbarian or one who frequently loses his head and then plays that to the hilt. If you did that in an old school dungeon crawl, well, I actually would encourage someone to stick to their character's guns, but I think most people here would just say that person isn't playing very skillfully because those old school games are more about the player outwitting the obstacle course placed in front of them rather than living out a character's life and their reactions to things. Am I wrong?

In that way, an old school dungeon crawl CAN'T exist for that type of game because it would swiftly kill those characters rather than enable them to achieve their ideal ending.

To put it in another way, old school dungeons are the survival horror genre while modern adventures are more like adventure movies like Indiana Jones or the Mummy. A character acting proper to one genre would be out of place in the other genre.

Ironically, the GAME as a GAME aspect does rear its head, but within the confines of character generation -- all the game interaction is moved inside the PC's world, and about what they can do.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic on October 10, 2022, 06:55:54 PM
What he means is,

I really have no intention of hijacking the thread here, but I found myself saying "Wait. What?" even more from your explanation. So I'm only going to address select points in hopes of shrinking this down and keeping it as a side bar that doesn't distract too much from the main topic.

QuoteThe player makes decisions as their character, which are not always optimal -- for example, someone might play a cowardly barbarian or one who frequently loses his head and then plays that to the hilt. If you did that in an old school dungeon crawl, well, I actually would encourage someone to stick to their character's guns, but I think most people here would just say that person isn't playing very skillfully because those old school games are more about the player outwitting the obstacle course placed in front of them rather than living out a character's life and their reactions to things. Am I wrong?

Maybe. I've got a little bit of a different idea as to a) what a dungeon is and b) what a personality is. And hopefully once I've explained it, you'll understand why I'm left asking, "Optimal play? What does that even mean?"

As I've already alluded to, the dungeon is one of the most dramatic representations of the extraordinary world or "the underworld" as it's often termed in the Hero's Journey motif. It's also thought of as a realm of chaos. One where the Hero--or the PCs--don't quite understand the rules because it's a world alien to their own ordinary world.

In economics terms (appropriate if we're going to kick around this idea of "resource management"), what we're dealing with when we step into the dungeon is conditions of radical uncertainty. And to unpack that a bit, economist Frank Knight drew a distinction between risk and uncertainty.

We as gamers are very familiar with risk. If you try to kick open a door, for example, you don't know whether you will succeed or fail. But you do know that given your Strength your chance is 2 in 6. You don't know the outcome, but you do know the probability distribution. This is frequently true of core mechanics. We can often figure out the opponent's AC and calculate our hit probabilities, for example.

Uncertainty is the DM adding in the possibility that the door might be locked rather than just stuck and you don't have any chance of success. Or that the door might not even be stuck at all and you don't have any chance of failure. Here, you have some concept of what might happen, but you as player do not know what the probability distribution is.

With radical uncertainty, the door might also be trapped, and the type of traps and its possible effects is limited only by imagination. Not only do you not know what will happen, not only do you not know what the probability distribution is, you don't even know what the range of possibilities are. That is radical uncertainty.

And that's what the dungeon presents you with. Right from the very first room. Do you go left? Right? Straight ahead? The darkness, the twists and the turns. It conceals all the information you need to arrive at an informed, rational, strategic, or "optimal" course of action. So it's beyond me how anyone can seriously claim that what characterizes an old school dungeon crawl is "optimal play."

Maybe that could be a thing in a pussy new school dungeon crawl (okay, maybe "middle-aged" school is more accurate). One where DMs adopt the idea that players need to be provided with sufficient information to make informed decisions. One where there should be adequate clues and warnings whenever something is dangerous. (Highlight this paragraph, because this does raise an issue that goes to the purpose of what's being asked for in the OP.) Yeah. Given that information, I suppose it is possible to start making optimal decisions.

But what if you don't begin with that? What's your strategy? Gather information? Sure. That's probably a good idea. But where are you going to look for it? It goes right back to the same question. What is your strategy? What does this "optimal play" I keep hearing about tell us about what we should do here?

It is my admittedly less-than-expert opinion that the reason evolution has created humans with a wide variety of different personalities is because they are all different strategies for solving how to survive and thrive in a world of radical uncertainty. If certain real world personality types keep getting killed, that's probably a DM problem. Not a feature of dungeon crawls.

Granted, sometimes players adopt unrealistic and downright goofy personalities. Personalities that do not exist or have no basis in reality. And that's fine. This is fantasy, after all. In a world with magic, there may very well be different personalities that have evolved and are viable. Me? I'm happy playing the neutral arbiter to test whether or not a new personality is viable in the fantasy world. Because I really don't know the answer to that. And I'm curious to see the answer. Other DMs might prefer to adapt to keep the personality viable and alive. A difference of tastes. Nothing endemic to Dungeon Crawls per se.

QuoteAn old school dungeon crawl is played as a series of decisions made by the player about how to balance a number of different resources, turns, time, and so on.

If we could hop in Bill & Ted's phone booth and go back to the old school times and drop in on a group doing a dungeon crawl and ask, "Hey, what are you guys doing? What makes it so much fun?" I think at most 1 time in 10 they might describe something similar to how you characterize old school dungeon crawls here. If that. The other 9 times out of 10, it will be something like "We're exploring a dungeon and fighting monsters in search or riches," or "We're facing off against the minions of the evil Douchebagmancer who seeks to cleanse mother earth." They're going to be people immersed in the fictional events, or "the story", not people who think they're trying to spend as little of their wheat was possible so that they can build a road right through the middle of the Evil King Dickhead's kingdom.

Quote from: Lunamancer on October 10, 2022, 09:04:35 PMIf we could hop in Bill & Ted's phone booth ... and ask, "Hey, what are you guys doing? What makes it so much fun?" I think at most 1 time in 10 they might describe something similar to how you characterize old school dungeon crawls here. If that. The other 9 times out of 10, it will be something like "We're exploring a dungeon and fighting monsters in search or riches," or "We're facing off against the minions of the evil Douchebagmancer who seeks to cleanse mother earth." They're going to be people immersed in the fictional events, or "the story", not people who think they're trying to spend as little of their wheat was possible so that they can build a road right through the middle of the Evil King Dickhead's kingdom.

M. Chaotic pretty much summed up what I meant, but I wanted to reply to this point specifically because I think you're half right: I suspect most groups (mine certainly included) never described how they engaged with the game in the game terms, because it's the unique narrative framework that gives RPGs their particular coolness factor. But at least half (if not more) of the in-game decisions, I suspect (and can confirm for my groups in practice), were made with an eye to what was the smartest decision for the situation under the rules, not to what was the most dramatically moving or plausibly in-character choice for the PC-as-protagonist under the plot.

You make an interesting argument that character effectiveness, in practice, manifests in ways shaped very much by the personalities producing it; if everybody's on the same page about it being the PCs' personalities, rather than the players', which are the source for this, then you do get something a little bit more like what I consider a "story". But I think in practice most groups don't put in this level of effort, partly because the structure of the game as a game doesn't incentivize it, partly because constantly staying in character for a long game begins feeling more like work than play for most players.

(For clarification, what I mean by "a story" is, a sequence of connected plot events where the protagonists make choices, in keeping with their characters, that affect the outcomes in meaningful ways, and are in turn affected by those outcomes in ways that show how plot and character are intertwined. Part of the reason I tend not to see dungeon crawls as producing stories is that dungeon crawls, as settings and plot sequences, are very seldom tailored to a specific envisioned character arc for the players' unique PCs, and in practice seldom produce one unless the GM puts a lot of preplanning work into it.)

QuoteI think where we got our signals crossed here is I think hit points DO represent in-setting reality. So I don't see them as a separate sort of meta-game mechanic that protects your character.

What kind of in-setting reality would you say they represent?  It can't be strict literal physical bodily capacity to tolerate injury, for reasons too many discussions have already (I think) well established.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on October 10, 2022, 09:44:01 PM
But at least half (if not more) of the in-game decisions, I suspect (and can confirm for my groups in practice), were made with an eye to what was the smartest decision for the situation under the rules, not to what was the most dramatically moving or plausibly in-character choice for the PC-as-protagonist under the plot.

So three points I have in response to that:
1) I can appreciate the distinction between "with an eye to what was the smartest decision" and the actual smartest decision. But I would also say if that's all it was, "an eye to" then we can't just assume it was a hose-fest for anyone who did decides they're just going to play their character instead. After all, they might stumble upon the actual smartest decision. It's fair game for all. That's the thing. I'm not sure if ever once in my entire time gaming I ever experienced a group that was homogenous as we assume in these sorts of discussions. The guy sitting next to you might legit have a different framework. If you can both paly in the same game simultaneous, the DM is doing a great job as far as I'm concerned.

2) What is "dramatically moving" or "plausibly in character"? I think the second one is easier. If a decision benefits the character, or at least seems to be the one most likely to benefit the character given only the limited information the character has, then I would say that is the plausibly in-character decision. Plausible characters act in ways that match their motives and priorities. And is something really "dramatically moving" if it seems contrived? They can cue up the dramatic music all the want. If the act is absurd, making no logical sense, the more the beat calls for drama, the more it comes off as comedy, parody, or satire.

3) The main point I hashed out with the whole radical uncertainty thing is that "the smartest decision" is just not ever a known quantity. It's hard to use that as a measuring stick, either for evaluating the reasonableness of role-play, or for evaluating the strategic quality of it.

QuoteYou make an interesting argument that character effectiveness, in practice, manifests in ways shaped very much by the personalities producing it; if everybody's on the same page about it being the PCs' personalities, rather than the players', which are the source for this, then you do get something a little bit more like what I consider a "story".

I don't concede to that condition. I'm actually not even convinced that playing your character is more "real roleplaying" than playing yourself but in your character's shoes. I think some of the things that emerge from different personality types is we tend to focus on different things. Therefore we tend to notice different things. So our information differs. And we have different rankings in our preferences. Therefore we find to be "optimal" varies. But what we all have in common is given what limited information we know, and given what we like the most, we all do tend to seek just that the best we can manage. As long as your perceptions and preferences are baked into your character's shoes (the former, at the very least, can be achieved via game mechanics or what the DM feeds your senses), then playing yourself but in your character's shoes I think is actually the highest, most genuine form of role play. And it works at least as good as aping different personalities in terms or differentiating the characters in the party from one another.

QuoteBut I think in practice most groups don't put in this level of effort, partly because the structure of the game as a game doesn't incentivize it, partly because constantly staying in character for a long game begins feeling more like work than play for most players.

Yeah. Sometimes. If I were to pat myself on the back, I think most people see me as a lot more interesting as the average person. The girls these days would say I'm not "basic." But overall, I would say I'm plenty boring enough with a boring enough life that it's not that hard to create a character that is a lot more interesting than me to play. I've found when I take my characters too seriously, you're right, I do get burnt out on them. And a part of that ties into what I call the kumbaya session, but that's a topic for another day. The flip side is, when my characters are more wild and free, sometimes I welcome the opportunity to be them rather than myself, and I don't have any problem at all staying in character.

Fucking Gartak, man. Gotta respect a dude who doesn't give a fuck about game mechanics enough to come up with the stupid idea of riding his shield like a surf board down a set of stairs while swiping at enemies with his scimitar as he slides down. When I chose to do that, I full well knew I was signing my ass over to the GM to fuck me over any way he saw fit. To this day, I still can't say for 100% sure whether it was a strategic advantage or disadvantage over doing something normal. I have no idea what was in the GM's secret notes, or how things would have played out otherwise. What I do know is, it moved the game forward. I had more fun playing my character, and so I kept on playing my character. And the game itself was more fun, so we all kept on playing. That meant more game sessions, more opportunity to earn XP. That meant bigger pay-off.

That's the thing of it. Even if you're playing a pussy enough game where you have enough information to make "optimized" decisions, if it's boring, it's going to be short-lived. And that itself makes it less lucrative and gives you a less chance of hitting a "high score" in the long run,  versus playing a bumbling ass who is only half as effective but is so fun you never want to stop playing.

Quote(For clarification, what I mean by "a story" is, a sequence of connected plot events where the protagonists make choices, in keeping with their characters, that affect the outcomes in meaningful ways, and are in turn affected by those outcomes in ways that show how plot and character are intertwined. Part of the reason I tend not to see dungeon crawls as producing stories is that dungeon crawls, as settings and plot sequences, are very seldom tailored to a specific envisioned character arc for the players' unique PCs, and in practice seldom produce one unless the GM puts a lot of preplanning work into it.)

Emphasis mine. This is both a worthy and a tricky point. In the Hero's Journey archetype, the goal is to get the magic elixir. There are some variations. Maybe it's gold. And of course in particular stories, it's almost always something very specific.

On the one hand, I'm tempted to say that the goal actually should be tailored to the specific character. Because it has to matter enough for the character to face the radical uncertainty of the dungeon. Those unfair 50' pit traps with poisoned spikes. And face the dragon or whatever alternate version of that we're talking about.

On the other hand, if you have the hubris to think you can run a much, much greater story. And I'm talking about one as compelling approaching the same cultural influence as the Christ story, then what you have to do is stretch your imagination to make that magic elixir the most sought after thing imaginable. Not necessarily something tailored to the PCs. And the dragon has to be the most intimidating and dangerous obstacle imaginable. Not necessarily an adversary tailored to the PCs. And the dungeon the most confusing, self-doubt sowing bunch of chaos imaginable. You get the picture. And then step back and see what kind of hero emerges that can succeed at this quest. Rather than the quest be tailored to the heroes, let the heroes rise to the quest.

Either one of those is perfectly kosher if you ask me.

QuoteWhat kind of in-setting reality would you say they represent?  It can't be strict literal physical bodily capacity to tolerate injury, for reasons too many discussions have already (I think) well established.

Eh, but I think too many of those discussions were entirely stupid, hashed out by morons who only seemed smart, and who made fatal assumptions without even realizing they were making assumptions. But I have what I think is a relatively simple response that doesn't involve backtracking through all of that.

Imagine everyone has 100 hit points. Whether you're a fighter or a mage, a dwarf or an elf, 1st level of 40th level. We're accepting the same, quite reasonable premise from which half-wits deride the notion of physical hit points as being stupid. That becoming better at deciphering Mesopotamian demonic fan fic written in cursive doesn't actually cause you to grow muscles out of your neck and suddenly enable your body to hold more pints of blood. I'm not arguing that. It's entirely off the table and removed from discussion.

So does that mean it's just as easy to kill Biff the 4th level Barbarian as it is Melvin the 1st level Mage? No. Biff's got some razzmatazz. That same blow that would have pierced Melvin's heart, Biff did a limbo maneuver and the sword only sliced his left nipple. So whereas it kills Melvin, dealing 100 hit points of damage, for Biff it only did like 10 hit points of damage.

Wouldn't it be cool if we had a system that did that? Where you got more skilled as you level rather than more beefy? And where that skill translated as damage reduction rather than more hit points?

I'll pretend you said yes so we can move forward and eventually get to the point. And maybe you already see where this is going.

I'm not going to do a standard armor absorb. It's not a 100-point blow and Biff had 90 points of limbo armor. Because the problem with that is if the blow was only half as strong, a 50-point blow, then Biff's 90 points of limbo armor would negate it entirely. Biff should at the very least lose a layer of skin if we said this was a hit. So what if instead of a flat 90 point reduction, Biff has a 90% reduction, taking 5 damage from the 50-point blow.

Now I remove the magic curtain to reveal these are not hit points I'm talking about but rather percentages of hit points. Melvin's got 4 hit points. Biff's got 40 hit points. The first hit is one that does 4 damage. The second does 2 damage.

And that's all that it is.

Percentages may have been cool in the 70s when even highschool drop outs could do double digit division in their heads. But in the soft, dull-witted, tail-between-our legs world of nerds, who are supposed to good at academics, in 2022 which is supposed to be more advanced in the 70's, division and percentages has become a bridge too far for RPGs. Only Gary Gygax had the vision to foresee this bleak future. And so he created the brilliant hit point system to do this math for us degenerates. The least we could do is be grateful for it.

Now it's not the only argument I have against the "hit points are not meat" Cathedral. There are many and more nuanced ones. But this one does stand pretty well on its own without needing a 40-page thread. So that's the one I'm going with no, reserving the right at a later point to specify why each and every "muh abstract hit points" theory goes wrong.

Quote from: Lunamancer on October 10, 2022, 11:24:49 PMI can appreciate the distinction between "with an eye to what was the smartest decision" and the actual smartest decision. But I would also say if that's all it was, "an eye to" then we can't just assume it was a hose-fest for anyone who did decides they're just going to play their character instead.

...The main point I hashed out with the whole radical uncertainty thing is that "the smartest decision" is just not ever a known quantity. It's hard to use that as a measuring stick, either for evaluating the reasonableness of role-play, or for evaluating the strategic quality of it.

A "hose-fest", no, but the entire point of the conflict between "approach the challenge as a game" and "approach the challenge as a story" is that there is conflict, that the most effective option from a tactical viewpoint (which requires skill at the game rules to spot) and the most interesting option from a dramatic viewpoint (which requires talent for cooperatively constructing improvised narratives) aren't the same. You're right that they don't have to be different, but in my experience, they almost always are. If they weren't, there wouldn't be so much discussion about how to handle it.

Can the smartest tactical decision sometimes be unclear? Certainly; if it was always clear the game wouldn't be tactically challenging. But the point of it being a tactical decision is that better knowledge of the rules translates into reliably better performance at selecting the best option.

QuoteI'm actually not even convinced that playing your character is more "real roleplaying" than playing yourself but in your character's shoes.

I'm not sure I agree, but I think that really is veering a little too far off the original topic, so I'll shelve that one and move on.

QuoteThis is both a worthy and a tricky point. In the Hero's Journey archetype, the goal is to get the magic elixir. ...Rather than the quest be tailored to the heroes, let the heroes rise to the quest. Either one of those is perfectly kosher if you ask me.

Sure, but you have to know which your players want first, and take into account that the structure of the game may itself tilt the likely outcome one way or the other. If what you want is a hero rising to a quest (and here we wind back to my original dilemma), a game that makes extremely anticlimactic conclusions to said quest not only possible, but likely, may not be the best choice of tool for that.

QuoteOnly Gary Gygax had the vision to foresee this bleak future. And so he created the brilliant hit point system to do this math for us degenerates. The least we could do is be grateful for it.

I have to admit that I don't see how your explanation of hit points renders them any less abstract than any of the others. If the point (no pun intended) is that each individual hit point represents a smaller and smaller fraction of bodily integrity as character level rises, then the individual points themselves are still sliding measures that have different values relative to different characters and creatures, which makes them pretty abstract to me.

Moreover, I don't see the point of insisting that HPs represent solely a physical thing for the character and then cheerfully ignoring all the subsidiary effects that would accrue to a character as his percentage of injury mounted. Gygax himself explicitly said in the 1E DMG that they represented more than purely physical injury (this is from page 82):

Quote from: DMGIt is quite unreasonable to assume that as a character gains levels of ability in his or her class that a corresponding gain in actual ability to sustain physical damage takes place. It is preposterous to state such an assumption, for if we are to assume that a man is killed by a sword thrust which does 4 hit points of damage, we must similarly assume that a hero could, on the average, withstand five such thrusts before being slain! Why then the increase in hit points? Because these reflect both the actual physical ability of the character to withstand damage - as indicated by constitution bonuses- and a commensurate increase in such areas as skill in combat and similar life-or-death situations, the "sixth sense" which warns the individual of some otherwise unforeseen events, sheer luck, and the fantastic provisions of magical protections and/or divine protection. Therefore, constitution affects both actual ability to withstand physical punishment hit points (physique) and the immeasurable areas which involve the sixth sense and luck (fitness).

The Wounds system in my own game was deliberately designed to be much closer to a more direct representation of physical damage as physical damage, and nothing else, but I am now running into the problem that since the limits on how far this can be improved are much stricter than the limits on how damage sources scale up, characters will get more fragile compared to their likely opponents as they get more powerful, not less. This was the issue I was trying to work around.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on October 11, 2022, 01:50:58 AM

The Wounds system in my own game was deliberately designed to be much closer to a more direct representation of physical damage as physical damage, and nothing else, but I am now running into the problem that since the limits on how far this can be improved are much stricter than the limits on how damage sources scale up, characters will get more fragile compared to their likely opponents as they get more powerful, not less. This was the issue I was trying to work around.

Phrased that way, I can answer that:  You've got to set the mechanics aside for a moment and revisit the math.  Then adjust the mechanics to fit the math.  How you adjust the mechanics will depend partly on the feel you are going for, and partly on the limits of what those mechanics can support, and partly on how much the cold reality of the math impinges on both.

You want one of three things:  Either low and high powered characters are roughly equally threatened by "mortal" (Wounds-dealing, life-threatening damage) or low powered gets a little boost early that erodes as the game's challenges get worst or high powered characters begin to get a handle on such things as they deal with the challenges.  If it changes over time, then the second question is, how much? 

I'll suggest two possible approaches (out of several) to illustrate.

1. The highly-limited, second set of Wound points track.  This is basically real physical hit points.  There can't be many of them (relative to the "feel" of typical hit points). Each one is precious.  They can't increase much.  Likely, they have to start somewhere higher than 1.  You can do a lot more with a range of 5-10 than you can with a range of 1 to 6.  The ideal range depends in part on the mechanics used to do Wounds.  With numbers that low, the typical Wound is 1 point, with a decreasing possibility of doing a few more (depending on just how deadly you want it).  If you really want a random roll that translates directly to Wound point damage (e.g. roll 1d6 for amount of Wound points done), then even that 5-10 range might be a bit too low.  Point being, you can fiddle with the margins here, maybe have a Wounds range more in the teens or pushing in rare cases into the low 20's, but there are limits in how far you can go with it. 

2. You have some kind of Damage Save or Soak or whatever works best for how you put it together.  Then the effectiveness of mortal damage escalates slowly and the ability to Save/Soak it escalates slowly.  Whether they escalate in tandem or one outstrips the other is back to that question of how you want it to work.  Then it's a matter of tying the math of that system into those goals, same as the first option.  It's a little easier to allow the one-hit kill with this, because it's a crap shoot.  I'm not getting worn down by the city watch with 20 crossbow bolts.  Rather, it's every crossbow bolt has a small chance of killing me outright, and I know that 20 of them with no cover and short range puts the odds of surviving into the "start making a new character while the GM resolves the action".

Me, when I set my Life points (same idea), I started with: "This is how many typical life-threatening hits a starting character can take on average, and the likelihood of a one-shot kill.  Then this other thing is the same calculation for an upper-end character.  Then double-check with a couple in the middle power levels.  Then check the edge cases for an extremely weak starting character and an extremely tough upper-end one."  Then I set the Life numbers to make that happen.  Which meant the first option was enough to get into the ballpark.

Then whatever way you go, you have to also factor in how the rest of the system plays with that.  Maybe, for example, low and high powered characters Soak mortal Wounds about the same, in a vacuum, but high-powered characters have access to better equipment that improves their effective Soak.  Or they have enough skills to not get into situations where the take mortal Wounds as often (e.g. better active defenses).  Or they have better medical care/magic/high tech/whatever for reacting in that brief window before mortal Wounds become truly mortal.  Or more likely, all that and a lot more. 

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on October 11, 2022, 01:50:58 AM
The Wounds system in my own game was deliberately designed to be much closer to a more direct representation of physical damage as physical damage, and nothing else, but I am now running into the problem that since the limits on how far this can be improved are much stricter than the limits on how damage sources scale up, characters will get more fragile compared to their likely opponents as they get more powerful, not less. This was the issue I was trying to work around.

I'm curious how you model physical damage given the range of uncertainty that exists. Rasputin had to be poisoned, stabbed, and shot, but then some unlucky bastard gets sucker punched, hits his head, and dies instantly. There are systems that deal with this by allowing critical hits to bypass armor and do maximum damage (often plus a roll on a table of serious/deadly wounds), so every human is one unlucky hit away from death. However, these systems don't contemplate super-human physiology.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on October 11, 2022, 01:50:58 AM
A "hose-fest", no, but the entire point of the conflict between "approach the challenge as a game" and "approach the challenge as a story" is that there is conflict, that the most effective option from a tactical viewpoint (which requires skill at the game rules to spot) and the most interesting option from a dramatic viewpoint (which requires talent for cooperatively constructing improvised narratives) aren't the same. You're right that they don't have to be different, but in my experience, they almost always are. If they weren't, there wouldn't be so much discussion about how to handle it.

I don't think there is a conflict. I never have from day one. I believe sometimes GMs drop the ball. I believe sometimes RPGs drop the ball. Sometimes sore losers will take their ball and go home. Fortunately that seems pretty rare in real life. Just because we sometimes fail to facilitate a mutually satisfactory accommodation does not mean there exists an irreconcilable difference. It just means sometimes we fail. In my experience it's rare with no evidence suggesting its endemic.

QuoteCan the smartest tactical decision sometimes be unclear? Certainly; if it was always clear the game wouldn't be tactically challenging. But the point of it being a tactical decision is that better knowledge of the rules translates into reliably better performance at selecting the best option.

In my experience, the opposite is true. Rules knowledges sometimes boosts performance marginally at best, in most cases not at all. And in many cases thinking in rules terms is counter-productive, impacting creativity and adaptability to in-game situations. I've got a lot of first-hand war stories where having a nose in the rulebook has been a detriment. But I'm guessing most experienced gamers have similar stories. What it all adds up and nets out to, is I saw a group of newbs with zero 1E experience go through the original Tomb of Horrors and survive just fine. They were scared but performed really well. And they caught on to some of the tricks and traps that veteran gamers fluent with the rules claim was impossible to figure out with what few clues are given.

The plain definition of "tactical" has nothing to do with rules. It's relating to or using or involving plans, actions, or maneuvers to achieve goals or objectives, and is characterized by ingenuity or skill. Good tactical play is about getting the job done. If your premise is that rules knowledge translates to reliably better performance, then yeah, I guess it would follow that tactical play is rule play. But if on net rule play is detrimental to performance, then tactical play is nearly the opposite of rule play. And that's exactly what we observed the second time ever that I played 3E.

Me and one of the experienced players were both playing thieves. We were separated from the rest of the group on a scouting mission. We came across something like 20 orcs. Far more than 2 thieves could handle. We saw them, they didn't see us. The other player, using rules knowledge, suggested we stealth up to a 30' range so we could get our sneak attack bonus with our bows. My suggested was to move further away, to the bushes in the center of a frozen fountain and fire our bows from there. That way it would take the orcs longer to close the distance, and they would have to negotiate the ice in a tense and threatening situation.

I didn't have the rules knowledge to know how many rounds of fire we'd get before the orcs closed the distance. But common sense told me the answer was more than we'd get at 30'. And I didn't know what the odds were of the orcs slipping on the ice. I used common sense to concluded it would tilt the odds in our favor by more than zero. Under any normal sense of the word, what I suggested was tactical. What the other guy was suggested was just playing the system. They are not the same thing. They could hardly be more different.

QuoteSure, but you have to know which your players want first, and take into account that the structure of the game may itself tilt the likely outcome one way or the other. If what you want is a hero rising to a quest (and here we wind back to my original dilemma), a game that makes extremely anticlimactic conclusions to said quest not only possible, but likely, may not be the best choice of tool for that.

What's an anticlimactic conclusion? If you aren't aware, sometimes in these classical stories, the heroes do fail. What makes RPGs an exceptionally good medium for re-telling these stories is that players are aware explicitly that the hero could fail. That makes the central conflict's stakes much higher than a scripted story.

QuoteI have to admit that I don't see how your explanation of hit points renders them any less abstract than any of the others.

I never claimed it did. Let's recap to put the goal posts back where they were. This was your question:

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on October 10, 2022, 09:44:01 PM
What kind of in-setting reality would you say they represent?

And that's what I answered. Every hit in my run down got a taste of physical hit points. But Biff gave up fewer of them because he had razzmatazz. Physical toughness and razzmatazz are in-setting traits characters might possess.

QuoteMoreover, I don't see the point of insisting that HPs represent solely a physical thing for the character

I never did.

Quoteand then cheerfully ignoring all the subsidiary effects that would accrue to a character as his percentage of injury mounted.

Ignored how? I didn't mention them because that issue was never raised. However, I never said or pretended they didn't exist.

QuoteGygax himself explicitly said in the 1E DMG that they represented more than purely physical injury (this is from page 82):

Try looking at the full context. He included this discussion for the sole purpose of justifying how a high level human could have more hit points than a horse. The implication is that the horse hit points are meat. Because if we declare the human is only 30% meat but then also make the horse is 30% meat, we still end up with humans having more meat than horses. It doesn't solve the problem.

So horses are all meat. Presumably that would extend to all animals and beasts. They're all meat. And monsters who physically resemble various animal forms? They're all meat, too. Giants? Meat. All normal (0th level) NPCs are meat as explicitly stated in that section.

When you take a step back and look around, just about all the hit points in all the living beings in the world world are meat. High level characters being the notable exception. And so the widespread misinterpretation was mistaking the exception for the rule. High level characters are the exception. We obsess over them because that's what we play as. But the rule is: Hit Points ARE Meat.

When we start conflating hit points in general, which are basically meat, with fanciful ideas like "plot armor" we've lost the plot (no pun intended).

QuoteThe Wounds system in my own game was deliberately designed to be much closer to a more direct representation of physical damage as physical damage, and nothing else, but I am now running into the problem that since the limits on how far this can be improved are much stricter than the limits on how damage sources scale up, characters will get more fragile compared to their likely opponents as they get more powerful, not less. This was the issue I was trying to work around.

Well, if you weren't so dead-set at arguing with me, the answer was up in there. Biff has razzmatazz.

What you're talking about here is exactly what we see in The Lejendary Adventure RPG. Now I'm not going to over-state the case that Health in LA is all physical damage. Health includes Free Will. Because, as a fantasy RPG, LA includes things like ghosts and poltergeists, things that have no physical form at all. But you can still blast them with magic. So we still need to know how hard they are to kill.

But for now, that's all immaterial (no pun intended). The relevant point is this. At "high levels" of play, when Weapons Ability exceeds 100, each skill point after that translates point-for-point into damage bonus. Your attacks are THAT precise. In the 101+ range, each point of skill costs 400 merits to raise. Whereas Health costs 1000 merits to raise a point. There's no way Health can keep up with Harm.

So LA gives Biff some razzmatazz. Soldiers, Nobles, and several other types automatically gain Luck Ability at high levels. And one of the things Luck Ability does is allow you one free dodge attempt each round. It starts at just 20-30%. But you can raise it at a cost of 250-350 Merits per point while it's under 100%. If you can get it to 100% by the time your equal adversaries can one-hit-kill you, you've got a near-guaranteed dodge rendering their oh so awesome attack near useless. It kind of forces the adversary to pivot to splitting the attack into multiple attacks. That has a minimum Speed requirement. It also takes a hefty penalty, and that penalty eats into that point-for-point harm bonus. So it sets the attacker way back. And in that time you can work up other defenses.

Other types of razzmatazz is there are three Abilities that build a degree of agility that works as damage reduction (just like my example where Biff was on percentile hit points). Or, if Biff either has high enough Speed or happens to win initiative that round, he can opt to use his attack to parry instead. And LA's got a really cool parrying system.

The general idea is, you can't just go all in on one thing because there are ways to bypass it. So you have to start building out laterally. That syphons off points that could otherwise be used to build damage vertically. It doesn't exactly slow down damage growth. But it encourages a slow down in damage growth.

Quote from: Lunamancer on October 11, 2022, 09:35:07 PMI don't think there is a conflict. I never have from day one.

Perhaps an example might help clarify what I mean. Let's say a party of adventurers has been contracted to remove a tribe of orcs that has holed up in a cavern network and is threatening the nearby village. A tactical solution would look at approaches like setting up ambushes, finding back entrances into the caves, and so on. But if one of the PCs is being played to a very strict level of lawful good because his player has decided he wants his character to multiclass into paladin, he might decide he won't countenance this approach, and instead argues for challenging the orc chieftain to a duel, claiming that if he can beat the chieftain he will become the de facto new chieftain and can order the tribe to withdraw.

Now the question is not which of these solutions actually is more likely to work (it could be either, depending on the GM and unspecified factors). The point is that one sees the most desirable approach as based on deduction about likelihood of success given the rules of ambush success probability, resources of missile weapons, to hit bonuses from surprise, and so on; the other sees the most desirable approach as one that plays to his PC's priorities, his sense of drama, and his assumptions (possibly unjustified) about the nature of orcs in the setting. This is the conflict between "narrative" and "tactical" I'm talking about ("tactical" meaning in this context purely what option will in fact maximize likelihood of success under the rules).

QuoteIn my experience, the opposite is true. ...I saw a group of newbs with zero 1E experience go through the original Tomb of Horrors and survive just fine. They were scared but performed really well. And they caught on to some of the tricks and traps that veteran gamers fluent with the rules claim was impossible to figure out with what few clues are given.

More power to them, but does that sort of thing really represent the average outcome? It certainly never did in my experience. And if they were complete novices, I doubt they were approaching the game with the level of detached analysis necessary to make a distinction between "more likely to succeed by the rules" and "more in-keeping with my character" to start with.

QuoteThe plain definition of "tactical" has nothing to do with rules. It's relating to or using or involving plans, actions, or maneuvers to achieve goals or objectives, and is characterized by ingenuity or skill.

Agreed. But when those plans, actions and manoeuvres have to have their success or failure determined at least in part through the mechanics of the game, knowing how those mechanics interact, and what rules-quantifiable inputs to the system produce the best chance of the optimal output from that system, is a critical part of that process. I've never found it not to be.

QuoteUnder any normal sense of the word, what I suggested was tactical. What the other guy was suggested was just playing the system. They are not the same thing. They could hardly be more different.

My point exactly. You suggested a solution that looked more effective from the narrative details of the situation. Your fellow player suggested one that looked more effective from what he knew of the applicable rules elements. By your own admission, you didn't know the rules well enough to know which solution actually had a better mechanical chance of success by those rules -- if, in fact, the game rules about the orcs crossing ice without falling would give you enough extra shots to offset losing the close-range sneak attack bonus -- and you had to make a decision about which way to go. That is the conflict I'm talking about.

QuoteWhat's an anticlimactic conclusion? If you aren't aware, sometimes in these classical stories, the heroes do fail.  ...That makes the central conflict's stakes much higher than a scripted story.

Of course, but seldom permanently and fatally. The whole point of the Odyssey is that Odysseus didn't die on his first stop outside Troy; he had lots of failures and setbacks, but they mostly killed his crew. The Odyssey wouldn't be remembered as a story (or at least it would be remembered as an entirely different kind of story) if Polyphemus had smashed Odysseus's head in with a lucky club blow in that cave. Hence my original goal at wondering how people tried to avoid this kind of outcome or handle it when it happened.

I agree with you that what gives RPGs their unique frisson is that sense of danger and high stakes, and that you have to have at least some chance of final permanent failure for those conditions to obtain. But my point is that that's exactly what makes RPGs games, not stories. And games where it's too easy to lose too quickly are just as boring as games where it's too easy to win.

QuoteThis was your question:

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on October 10, 2022, 09:44:01 PM
What kind of in-setting reality would you say they represent?

And that's what I answered. Every hit in my run down got a taste of physical hit points. But Biff gave up fewer of them because he had razzmatazz. Physical toughness and razzmatazz are in-setting traits characters might possess.

I think I see what you're talking about, and I do appreciate the point -- things that make it harder to land a damaging blow can be just as life-saving as things that make that blow less damaging when it lands.

The difficulty with relying on that kind of "razzmatazz" -- extra luck, additional armour, character abilities that allow for extra dodges, etc. -- to preserve the PCs is that, unlike hit points in the classic D20 system, it is very rarely something that automatically accrues, without extra cost, to every PC across the board as they get more experienced. The players themselves have to choose which if any "razzmatazz" options they take, and will usually have limits on which ones they can take or how well they can make use of them, based on class or previous character design optimization. And they can make mistakes about what will be more useful in practice -- the 3.5E wizard who takes an armour Feat in an attempt to bolster his survivability, based on his poor HP total, may only make himself and his party more vulnerable rather than less if his spells fail too often (due to the armour casting penalty) to be of any help.

The hit point buffer, by contrast, works against the vast majority of damage sources (not all of them, but certainly enough to be well worth having) and gives every PC as it accumulates at least a chance to avoid a one-hit kill, without requiring extra forethought to go into selection or deployment. It is becoming clearer to me through this debate (and your patience is appreciated) that if this is the kind of in-game acquired durability I'd like to implement for PCs, I may have to go outside my initial rule structure to find it.

Here is an example of the conflict, Lunamancer.

I run an OSR-adjacent game for some 5e players (specifically, it's a 5e game house ruled to be very OSR-like). Some of them take to it like water; others have pointed out that they feel like playing an actual heroic character, instead of a mercenary type, is punished by the game. If you want to play a character who revels in the glories of combat and wants to wade in to the fray, they will suffer. (This isn't actually that true in my 5e game but even the appearance of it is enough to raise people's hackles.) Or another example, wanting to play a character who gets up close in melee is punishing not just because of the danger but because the added weight they carry from armor makes them the slowest to be able to run away if retreat is necessary, and so they're punished for wanting to play a mighty warrior as compared to an archer or something.

These are not moment to moment tactical decisions but just the general concept of certain characters.

Another point raised is that because the consequences can be dangerous, you feel disinclined to play your character since not only is it hurting you, it's hurting your TEAM, and you don't want to be the one responsible for dragging everyone down. And so even if you might ordinarily want your character to do one thing or another, you'll just do the optimal thing even if it isn't necessarily what your character would really do.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on October 11, 2022, 11:04:07 PM
Perhaps an example might help clarify what I mean.

I appreciate the example, but I'm still at a loss here. I feel as though both are playing their characters. Neither knows which course is actually more likely to succeed. Both approaches I find interesting. It's not clear to me that either course is more dramatic than the other, or either is a more sound approach than the other.

And if this is what's meant by conflict, that two players disagree on the course of action, I don't know what to tell you. I've always assumed that was more or less a normal part of the game that players had hash out among themselves to figure out how to overcome.

I'm not sure why the players' "why" matters in any of this. You could have two different characters both coming from a tactical perspective but disagreeing on which plan they should go with. You could have two characters both trying to do dramatic things that conflict with one another. You could have one tactical and one dramatic but their actual implementations happen to work together well.

So I really don't understand the obsession with these categories.

Quote
More power to them, but does that sort of thing really represent the average outcome? It certainly never did in my experience. And if they were complete novices, I doubt they were approaching the game with the level of detached analysis necessary to make a distinction between "more likely to succeed by the rules" and "more in-keeping with my character" to start with.

My experiences with Tomb of Horrors are right in line with what I typically see when running my homebrew stuff. Rules players are seldom effective. And when I first read Tomb of Horrors, I knew that's exactly how it would go, because in Tomb of Horrors it is to some extent done by design. It was meant to challenge characters with inflated stats. But you don't want to just be writing for Monty Haul degenerates to the exclusion of good, solid fans of the game. So it also has to be beatable by characters without inflated stats. How do you do that? Obviously you have to de-emphasize or bypass the stats. I fucking LOVE save or die because it bypasses hit points. Bloated stat characters can kiss my asp.

QuoteAgreed. But when those plans, actions and manoeuvres have to have their success or failure determined at least in part through the mechanics of the game, knowing how those mechanics interact, and what rules-quantifiable inputs to the system produce the best chance of the optimal output from that system, is a critical part of that process. I've never found it not to be.

And this may be what's at the heart of our disagreement. I'm not going to say it never happens as you describe. But I am going to say something life has taught me is that for most problems and most situations, the significance of the things you don't know is greater than the significance of things you do know. Because that's how it goes when you live in a world of radical uncertainty. It raises questions of how to make good decisions. How do you work towards optimal outcomes under these conditions? It's somewhat of an open question.

Some people obsess over their limited information because it's the only thing they know. But if it doesn't actually correlate with good outcomes, which it wouldn't when it's the unknowns are driving the outcomes, this is information that is leading you down the wrong path. And that's what I see happening when it comes to rules knowledge. You don't know my dungeon layout. You don't know what tricks, traps, and puzzles are in there. You don't know what lives down there. Even ask you explore, you never quite gain the full story.

So what do you know? You know what's on your character sheet. And if you're a real fruitcake you have the Monster Manual memorized.

You don't know to search the rubble in the collapsed corridor. Nothing in the rules tells you to. You just have to be curious.

If you do, you find a strange, small, two-pronged silver magic wand. It's not in the DMG, so you don't know attempting to use it will cause the ceiling to collapse on you. You won't find that in the rules. But you might figure that out based on where you found it.

You might learn the hard way that using the wand is bad. Write it on your character sheet. Wand of Ceiling Collapse. Fucking cursed items! Fucking old school makes no goddamn sense! What wizard would go through all the work of creating a wand that makes the ceiling fall down on him?

You don't know to bring it to the statue room. You don't know to use it on the statue of the bard tuning his instrument. I thought using it was bad. That's what the character sheet says. Unless you deduce it's a magical tuning fork.

This is actually from one of my homebrew dungeon crawls. At every turn, following what you know will lead to bad outcomes. Trying to make sense of what you don't know will help you along. I didn't deliberately design it this way. I was just trying to throw in a cool, fun little thing. It's not like it's even hard to figure it out. You just have to be thinking about the things you find rather than thinking about how to gain a rules advantage.

QuoteMy point exactly. You suggested a solution that looked more effective from the narrative details of the situation. Your fellow player suggested one that looked more effective from what he knew of the applicable rules elements. By your own admission, you didn't know the rules well enough to know which solution actually had a better mechanical chance of success by those rules -- if, in fact, the game rules about the orcs crossing ice without falling would give you enough extra shots to offset losing the close-range sneak attack bonus -- and you had to make a decision about which way to go. That is the conflict I'm talking about.

Well, a couple of corrections.  True. I didn't know the rules. But reasoning alone can tell me things. Like the odds of the orcs falling on the ice is greater than zero. I don't know the exact odds, but I can surmise it will work at least a tiny bit better than not doing it. And that's enough of a basis for making a sound tactical decision. Likewise, I don't need to know orcs movement rates or rates of fire of our bows to be able to surmise that the number of shots we'll get before they reach is is greater at 180' than it is at 30'.

There was a third factor I didn't mention. The bushes. I didn't know whether or not the orcs had missile weapons. I surmised the probability that they did was greater than zero. And it turned out a small number of them did. Nostradamus much? And in that eventuality, I had also surmised that the bushes would provide some cover or concealment. I had no idea how much. But it knew it was better than no bushes.

So with three factors in our favor, I had little doubt that my idea had a much better chance of success. And I can tell you with absolute certainty that I was coming from a tactical mindset.

So how did you manage to confuse tactical for narrative? Well, I think obviously you wanted to try to frame this story to illustrate your point, and so maybe there was some hasty judgement involved. Not criticizing you. Just admitting that it would be premature for me to start running victory laps at this point. But an over-riding theme of my strong revulsion to RPG theory is I think it made an error in step one. And from there it's garbage in, garbage out. And this right here is the error that's always bugged me the most. There isn't a great big line separating narrative and tactical. You don't have a conflict. You don't have to choose between them.

I can tell you exactly what I did. What I do. I started recognizing that I can infer tactically important information and clues from the narrative. I recognized there is no conflict. In my view, both aspects of the game are BEST served in tandem with one another. And what I'm saying has enough transcendent truth to it that I can plop my ass down at the game table, not knowing any of the rules, and still pull off tactical play at a high level. I wouldn't be able to do that if I weren't onto something.

And by the way, the other player never argued against my plan. As soon as I laid it out, he was on board.

QuoteOf course, but seldom permanently and fatally. The whole point of the Odyssey is that Odysseus didn't die on his first stop outside Troy; he had lots of failures and setbacks, but they mostly killed his crew. The Odyssey wouldn't be remembered as a story (or at least it would be remembered as an entirely different kind of story) if Polyphemus had smashed Odysseus's head in with a lucky club blow in that cave. Hence my original goal at wondering how people tried to avoid this kind of outcome or handle it when it happened.

You should check out the prequel. It gets to a part where it just starts killing off all these Greek heroes, a lot of recognizable names. I was like, Holy shit!

QuoteI agree with you that what gives RPGs their unique frisson is that sense of danger and high stakes, and that you have to have at least some chance of final permanent failure for those conditions to obtain. But my point is that that's exactly what makes RPGs games, not stories.

When I'm packing up at the end of a really good game session and one or more of the players said to me, "That was a great story!" or when I ask players what it is they like most about playing RPGs and some of them answer, "It's all about a good story"--and they're not talking about some indy avant-garde horseshit. These are normal gamers. Not Ron Edwards incarnate. They're regular gamers who enjoy the good old fashioned bog standard traditional RPG. And they experience stories in real time. Then I jump on line to read people insisting it's not a story, we've got some serious wires crossed somewhere.

QuoteAnd games where it's too easy to lose too quickly are just as boring as games where it's too easy to win.

I don't know. I rather enjoy Blackjack. Hands are over real quick. Of course the fun comes over the course of several hands, trying to build up some winnings. I think that's a level of analysis that's often missed. It's not about the game. It's about the game of games. Imagine a TPK in one of the false entrances of the Tomb of Horrors. Okay. Maybe that game sucked. Then you come back with a new party. Players knowing full well what short work the Tomb made of those first guys. Now the tomb's reputation isn't just flavor text of fancy words and prissy pants drama. It's got real genuine street cred. And that's powerful context for the subsequent attempt where you actually get a few hours of great play out of it.

QuoteThe difficulty with relying on that kind of "razzmatazz" -- extra luck, additional armour, character abilities that allow for extra dodges, etc. -- to preserve the PCs is that, unlike hit points in the classic D20 system, it is very rarely something that automatically accrues, without extra cost, to every PC across the board as they get more experienced. The players themselves have to choose which if any "razzmatazz" options they take, and will usually have limits on which ones they can take or how well they can make use of them, based on class or previous character design optimization.

For what it's worth, LA is a skill-based game with optional class-like structures, but with a twist. You don't choose a class and that tells you your skills. You choose your skills and that determines the class and level you qualify for. You're allowed to learn and grow any skill you like. But as you meet the requirements for working up the ranks, the ranks provide extra benefits. To the extent you want to chase freebies, you prioritize the requirements, and this is what retains some semblance of the classes being meaningful even while allowing total freedom in customization.

A lot of the basic classes offer up "Luck" as one of the freebies at the higher levels. And I like it as a gateway defense ability because that's the one that can negate one but only one attack per round with a simple single skill check. And that's going to be frustrating for an attacker who's maxing out one big power attack. So that's the one most likely to prompt offense characters to start building out laterally. And that slows them down just enough to give players time to figure out their vulnerabilities and start picking up the supplemental skills that help.

QuoteAnd they can make mistakes about what will be more useful in practice -- the 3.5E wizard who takes an armour Feat in an attempt to bolster his survivability, based on his poor HP total, may only make himself and his party more vulnerable rather than less if his spells fail too often (due to the armour casting penalty) to be of any help.

For total newbs, you can just look ahead to the orders (classes), choose the skills according to the order requirements, and then as you work up the ranks. The orders most likely to be doing a lot of fighting--Forester, Soldier, Noble, and even the Demonurge--which sounds like a type of mage, but you learn powers to assume the form of a demon and start fucking shit up that way--will get you Luck as a freebie at the higher ranks. Once it's on your sheet, sooner or later it will save your ass. And when it does, you're like, wow, I should start putting a bunch of points into this. And that guides you along on your way.

Oh, and for what it's worth, armor and magic are not at all incompatible in LA. Armor can slow your speed. And a lot of magic-skills are Speed-based. By the Book, armor does not inhibit these skills at all. But people pining for D&D who want it to, it's easy to extrapolate what the penalty should be. Defensive magics often impact your speed even more than natural armor, but they have some pretty cool effects and grant special invulnerabilities.

QuoteThe hit point buffer, by contrast, works against the vast majority of damage sources (not all of them, but certainly enough to be well worth having) and gives every PC as it accumulates at least a chance to avoid a one-hit kill, without requiring extra forethought to go into selection or deployment. It is becoming clearer to me through this debate (and your patience is appreciated) that if this is the kind of in-game acquired durability I'd like to implement for PCs, I may have to go outside my initial rule structure to find it.

I can tell you, one of the things I liked early on about LA's imbalance between damage dealing and damage taking capacity, is I thought it had the effect of transforming high level play. Low level play is pretty much what you expect out of any RPG in terms of the amount of randomness involved. But at high levels, a lot of the variability is overwhelmed by high stats. But because the stakes are so high (one hit kills), there's still a lot of unpredictability. Think rock-paper-scissors. The stats on it have shown the outcomes are nearly perfectly random. But no element of it is actually random.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic on October 11, 2022, 11:05:26 PM
I run an OSR-adjacent game for some 5e players (specifically, it's a 5e game house ruled to be very OSR-like). Some of them take to it like water; others have pointed out that they feel like playing an actual heroic character, instead of a mercenary type, is punished by the game. If you want to play a character who revels in the glories of combat and wants to wade in to the fray, they will suffer. (This isn't actually that true in my 5e game but even the appearance of it is enough to raise people's hackles.) Or another example, wanting to play a character who gets up close in melee is punishing not just because of the danger but because the added weight they carry from armor makes them the slowest to be able to run away if retreat is necessary, and so they're punished for wanting to play a mighty warrior as compared to an archer or something.

These are not moment to moment tactical decisions but just the general concept of certain characters.

I run actual old school 1E for all sorts of players. And there has only ever been one instance of someone complaining that they felt they were being punished for being heroic. It was 25 years ago. And if I told you the details of the session, I'm pretty sure you'd say he was actually a tactical player, not a narrative player. Literally every decision he made as informed by the rules. So if you don't count him, it's zero. Zero times I've encountered this problem. How is it this can be such a common problem for you and others but zero for me?

I don't think it's a huge mystery. I assume when people sit down play a game that there's a good chance that at least some of them are going to learn the rules and try to play to gain the greatest advantage for themselves possible. And so if I'm going to run a game that's supposed to have heroic fantasy themes, I make sure doing those things is viable. It's not rocket science.

But I do recognize that if I end up with situations like the ones that you describe, that I've screwed up somewhere. I've done something wrong. And I mean wrong. Like objectively bad. It's something that needs fixing.

If I'm running OSR for 5E players, and the more tactical players are having fun but the more dramatic players feel they are being punished, I don't scratch my head and say, "Well, I guess this RPG appeals to tactical players. Can't please everyone. RPG theory tells me these are different styles and that this sort of conflict is inevitable." No. I admit, either I fucked up as GM. Or I exercised poor judgment in choosing a piece of shit RPG. Or some combination of the two. And I figure it out. And I fix it. And hopefully next time I do better. If I chalk every failure up to subjectivity and conflict, I'll never solve the problem.

One of the reasons I hold 1E in such high reverence is because it actually has solutions. Unlike the 20+ years of RPG theory wank. And you nailed one in your next example. Seinfeld had the close talker. You have the close fighter. Okay. How does he run away? This isn't exactly the problem I was trying to solve many, many years ago when I came upon a solution. I wanted to see if I could start with a 1st level magic-user, by the book, and solo dungeon crawl through the random dungeon generator in Appendix A.

Before I even started giving it a try, I realized right away that running away was going to be key. So I thought I should give the Pursuit & Evasion of Pursuit chapter of the DMG a thorough read. I wanted to have it down cold so I didn't have to be flipping back during play. What I found there was not even really rules. It was tips on handling things players might try to get away. And that was the key. The rules don't give you a fair chance at running a way. You have to make your own chance. And then it suddenly seemed easy. And it felt like better odds than doing some kind of stupid modern RPG opposed skill check. Like literally better off not having a mechanic.

Close fighter's player doesn't need to be a tactical genius or anything like that. In 2 minutes or less, you can give 1 or 2 or 3 simple tips that will be understood and absorbed immediately, and it will never be a problem again. With any luck, it won't be long before Close Fighter starts coming up with their own tricks.

And so here, this one is even more clear, there was never any conflict. Never. This had nothing to do with playstyles or types of players. The problem is just someone was playing badly. Or the GM was adjudicating badly. Or the RPG was bad at offering guidance. Or some combination of the 3. The point is something somewhere was bad. Objectively bad. Not subjectively different preference oriented. One quick fix, and everyone is having fun. No one is feeling punished.

QuoteAnother point raised is that because the consequences can be dangerous, you feel disinclined to play your character

I actually laughed out loud at this. I fact-checked myself with a dictionary just to make sure I wasn't just being a jerk about it. But sure as shit, part of the definition of a hero is one who risks their life or even dies. You can't say, "I wanna play hero. But game punish me for playing hero. Game make hero die. That make me not wanna play hero no more." If you weren't willing to take the risk, you never wanted to play a hero to begin with. Because that's what it means to play the hero. And that's fine if you don't want that. No judgement, not malice. Just understand, whatever it is you want to play, hero isn't it.

Quotesince not only is it hurting you, it's hurting your TEAM, and you don't want to be the one responsible for dragging everyone down. And so even if you might ordinarily want your character to do one thing or another, you'll just do the optimal thing even if it isn't necessarily what your character would really do.

Yes. I realize I cut you off mid-sentence. I realize there was more. And it was important. And that my interjection did not address that important bit. It was not a gotcha. It was something I needed to lay out before answering the main idea.

And here it is. When you finally figure out what it really means to play a hero, I assure you there is nothing sub-optimal about it.

The entire premise here assumes without evidence that you've got optimum play in one corner character play in the other and they're inexorably opposed or conflicted. I reject that premise. It's complete nonsense. Just like Close Fighter, the supposed conflict is really just the product of bad play. It can be corrected. But not if you're telling yourself it was never bad to begin with, and that it was just a conflict of different subjective playstyles. Once you admit it's bad, you can start figuring out how to make it better. And once you figure it out, suddenly everyone's having fun and there's no conflict.

I think the tactical vs narrative false distinction comes from mechanics first vs fiction first. The former insists that only that which is in the rules is possible and the rules must always be applied where the latter asks if the action is possible and capable of succeeding and test with application of rule may not be needed because the outcome is guaranteed to succeed or fail. That is to say, if a PC has the password to a computer system, one would call for a use computer test possibly allowing take 10, or 20, while the other one leaves no doubt that given a compute and the password to it a PC can input it and gain access. This leads to checking one's character sheet or the rules for mechanical interaction vs using one's imagination to develop an action within character's implied capability. Thus, a mechanics player might decline a social interaction due to a poor CHA mod and lack of skill bonus, deferring to a more mechanically favorable character, while a fiction driven played would just have the PC interact because there is nothing prohibiting it and it may be framed favorably to avoid a test, like asking for directions instead of persuade skill-ing for the info using knowledge local. Is in in the rules and how can I get the best bonus, vs can I justify achieving the desired outcome without testing for it.

Quote from: Wisithir on October 13, 2022, 01:52:03 AM
I think the tactical vs narrative false distinction comes from mechanics first vs fiction first. The former insists that only that which is in the rules is possible and the rules must always be applied where the latter asks if the action is possible and capable of succeeding and test with application of rule may not be needed because the outcome is guaranteed to succeed or fail.

Not so much "only that which is in the rules is possible" but more "where the rules are specific, unambiguous, and situation-relevant, they should be applied, or there's no point in having them". And once the rules are applied, knowing how the input factors of the mechanics affect the output probabilities is a more useful skill (from the point of view of maximizing game success) than knowing in the real world how a real person might implement the real actions those mechanics are simulating.

One of the great objectives of Simulationism, as a game design philosophy, was to create a ruleset not only as extensive and complete as possible, but as closely adherent to the reality it was simulating to the maximum degree possible still compatible with enjoyable playability. The kind of conflict I'm talking about tends to occur at the boundary of that zone between accuracy and playability.

Quote from: Jam The MF on October 05, 2022, 04:50:34 PM
Whatever the Dice Decide.

Can confirm.

I occasionally put something into the game that is not meant to be fought. My players are smart, and have gotten good at recognizing those situations, and retreated or parlayed rather than going "Leroy Jenkins!!!". However, sometimes the dice hate you. One PC took two crits that pulped both legs (he is now known as Lt. Dan). On the other hand, I had a Wizard crit his Magic Missile on the first round of combat and do 69 points of damage to the final-boss demon, blowing it back to the Abyss. And there have been a number of sessions where one or more PCs have been down to "take one more hit and you die", but were able to pull their bacon out of the fire.