Spells that are resisted with a saving throw, work against one target and do nothing if the target passes are basically the most boring spells I can imagine because half the time you're spending a spell slot and an action to do fuck all. You don't even get to roll a dice!
if you can use your interpersonal skills to win a social encounter i should be able to wrestle the gm to win a combat encounter.
There are LARPs that work basically like that.
But in practice nearly every game or sport begins with deciding which real-life skills the game wants to test and which it does not. And then the players decide which test they want to try their hand at by choosing the game.
if you can use your interpersonal skills to win a social encounter i should be able to wrestle the gm to win a combat encounter.
This pretty comprehensively ends the debate I think.
To clarify: I'm not saying people should stop debating it, I'm not putting a mod foot down. I'm just saying that, as far as I'm concerned, this point is pretty much irrefutable.
if you can use your interpersonal skills to win a social encounter i should be able to wrestle the gm to win a combat encounter.
This pretty comprehensively ends the debate I think.
To clarify: I'm not saying people should stop debating it, I'm not putting a mod foot down. I'm just saying that, as far as I'm concerned, this point is pretty much irrefutable.
it's also why i never play in games where i couldn't suplex the dm.
Command, and its hilarious brother Murderous Command, see a lot of use at my Pathfinder tables.
Forcing people prone or drop their held items is pretty much a disable. Getting them to skip a turn by attacking an ally. Probably the best L1 offensive spells for clerics.
The big brother, Greater Command, you only get access to when spell resistance and mindaffecting immunities are common, but when it works, it is both awesome and potentially encounter ending.
The one time the entire cult failed willsaves and dropped their weapons, unwilling to pick them up, was hilarious.
The rule at our tables is that if you want to roll diplomacy, you have to be one of the people speaking and make that clear (you can't stay silent and then say 'I aid this roll') and you have to come up with an argument of angle. You don't have to present it well, but you do have to say something like "I try to explain to him how mutually beneficial it is to share this information' and the wrong or right argument gives circumstance modifiers on the check.
Of course it's often more fun if people first person roleplay their interactions, but it's not required.
It's always good when you can tie up 2 baddies with one Command
What word do you use?
Pathfinder commands are defined.
Drop means drop your held items
Fall is go prone
Flee is run away
Halt is stand still
Approach is come towards The caster.
Murderous Command is a separate spell where you attack your nearest ally.
All last until the end of the turn, so you can't drop and pick up in the same turn.
Greater command is multiple targets, rounds per level, save at the end of each turn. Language dependent, compulsion, mindaffecting, spell resistance is fairly limiting at level 9+ though.
And "fiats" are not a thing: if the players and GM can't agree that being hit int he chest with a 10' pole might knock you back, you can leave for a group that has a more similar idea of what constitutes commons sense.
Worth noting:
Basically every single major D&D designer and most actual-play podcasts use tactics this way. It's not an unheard-of from-Mars playstyle. The game was designed to accommodate and encourage alternative tactics (even though Hasbro has plumped for also enabling the ability to play _without_ them for a number of years recently, also low-lethality and more powers). Playing with a GM whose rulings you trust as much as you trust the game designer is super important to a fun game for many playstyles.
Playing with smart creative people who agree with you on things that 'make sense' makes for a really great group, but if you can all agree on how things should work each time, you don't really need the ruleset to begin with. The purpose of the rules is to paper over those disagreements and ensure fairness. If you have a GM and players who really love doing improvisational actions, it can be really fun - except for those players who aren't as good at that, or not as good at convincing the GM that what they are doing should work, or disagree with the GM on whether what their character wants to do is as reasonable. Especially if the GM tends to be better friends with certain people and is more aligned with their way of thinking. It can really lead to an imbalance where some people can do whatever they want, and some people can't. I've played D&D with theater people (as I am one) and with introverts, and they can be very different in how willing they are to do improv.
It's also really hard to find a group where everybody agrees like that. The ruleset can be thought of a like a social contract, where people may disagree on whether it all makes sense or is the best way to handle things, but is at least good enough, and consistent enough that everyone understands ahead of time how things work, and don't have to rely on people's whims at the time.
Telling people to find a new group is also basically always the wrong answer to any question about the game. It's one thing if it's a horror story about the other players and how they treat you, but quitting a group because they didn't agree with you on how effective your thrown objects should be just seems really petty.
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Captain Ultralow resolution pictures of birdsRegistered Userregular
It's always good when you can tie up 2 baddies with one Command
What word do you use?
Pathfinder commands are defined.
Drop means drop your held items
Fall is go prone
Flee is run away
Halt is stand still
Approach is come towards The caster.
Oh, they left it like 3.5--that's much worse.
5e and old school style it can be any word.
"Abdicate" is pretty awesome if you're fighting a king.
unless the kingdom has some sort of Dobby the house-elf style abdication process, I'm not sure how that one's gonna work in the 6 seconds the spell lasts.
Playing with smart creative people who agree with you on things that 'make sense' makes for a really great group, but if you can all agree on how things should work each time, you don't really need the ruleset to begin with.
No, it quite helps to have a ruleset even if you do improvise in the blndspots.
Rules aren't just there to ensure fairness, they are also there to take the burden of consistency (and therefore the reliability of cause and effect needed to plan tactics) off the players and GM.
Everything takes about 10 times as long if you have to make up every spell description and weapon profile on the spot and write it down and unless you do write it down it's hard to plan in advance. Does the crossbow do d8 or not? Do you need to reload it? It's nice to know in advance, and helpful.
It's always good when you can tie up 2 baddies with one Command
What word do you use?
Pathfinder commands are defined.
Drop means drop your held items
Fall is go prone
Flee is run away
Halt is stand still
Approach is come towards The caster.
Oh, they left it like 3.5--that's much worse.
5e and old school style it can be any word.
"Abdicate" is pretty awesome if you're fighting a king.
unless the kingdom has some sort of Dobby the house-elf style abdication process, I'm not sure how that one's gonna work in the 6 seconds the spell lasts.
Throw the crown down: "I abdicate the throne".
Especially good if the crown is the treasure.
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
It's always good when you can tie up 2 baddies with one Command
What word do you use?
Pathfinder commands are defined.
Drop means drop your held items
Fall is go prone
Flee is run away
Halt is stand still
Approach is come towards The caster.
Oh, they left it like 3.5--that's much worse.
5e and old school style it can be any word.
"Abdicate" is pretty awesome if you're fighting a king.
unless the kingdom has some sort of Dobby the house-elf style abdication process, I'm not sure how that one's gonna work in the 6 seconds the spell lasts.
Throw the crown down: "I abdicate the throne".
Especially good if the crown is the treasure.
And then the next several sessions are a protracted legal battle to deal with the right of succession
quitting a group because they didn't agree with you on how effective your thrown objects should be just seems really petty.
The point is not you immediately quit--the point is you realize your each are mutually relying on each other to have fun and the whole activity is a group activity and so involves paying attention to other peoples' desires and ideas and making consensus.
Then the thing to do is realize that, come to a compromise or other mutually satisfactory conclusion and play within those rules.
In practice, I've never in all these years ever seen anyone get in a fight over improvised tactics--because everyone knows the whole point is to play together and if you try something and it doesn't work then the game is to play within the parameters you get. Or else learn to make a better case--and that's a skill and it's a skill you signed up to have tested if you're trying to play that way.
But the idea of "GM fiat" suggests that the GM has a power they do not have to compel players to play their way. The GM is as dependent on players to be in the game as the player is on the GM to run the game. In practice, these people have to agree to have fun doing a thing together based on some shared sensibility (like in any communal activity whether it's going to the movies or scoring minigolf or deciding where to order food from) --so the idea that one has special power despite absolutely no engine of practical enforcement outside the game fiction is imaginary. And everyone can go "Hey GM, you're being a jerk."
And, yes some people are going to be better at telling their friends their being unfair than others, but that is the risk of any communal human activity, including games and sports. You can say not ordering any vegetarian options for the veggie is being a jerk. It doesn't mean there's something wrong with the design of pizza. You can be a terrible umpire in softball, too. It doesn't mean the game's poorly designed. It means if your friend is umpiring in a terrible way and maybe this is a symptom of a bigger problem--a mismatch between your idea of fun (and/or commitment to everybody having fun) and the person you're playing with.
Sometimes it means they're basically a jerk and that's that, and sometimes it means the two of you just shouldn't play that particular game together.
Not gaming is better than bad gaming.
As for the player who is less creative: they are in the same predicament as the person who plays baseball and is bad at throwing. They signed up to play a game where that skill is explicitly tested--so either enjoy the attempt to improve or invest in some other dimension of the game and enjoy that.
i cut persuasion from the skill list in the game i'm running at the moment. i feel like it should be up to the player to figure out what's most likely to persuade someone
i'm running 5e mostly as written and the fighter is working the way i described. there's just a lot of shit you can do with a good strength check
So, this is totally your prerogative to do this, but I kind of hate this line of thought in role playing games
You are playing a character that more often than not is wildly different from yourself, and that shouldn't just be physically, I've also had this line of thought applied to basically all mental skills (Terrible neckbeards saying it's impossible to play a character that is wildly more intelligent than yourself because you won't be able to properly roleplay it, etc)
If a player with straight up terrible interpersonal skills wants to play the party face, they should be able to do that and not feel like they need to personally supply the "Charisma", at best if a player DOES want to present a convincing argument, maybe give them a circumstance bonus to their check or something to encourage the player to act out their dialogue more fully
it depends on what kind of games you play, i guess
the ability to figure out what to say in a given social situation is specifically what my games are testing the players for. like, i try to design adventures that can only be solved effectively if the players deploy real-world social intelligence to figure out what the characters are thinking
so the persuasion skill bypasses the most interesting part of the game, for me
if somebody has terrible interpersonal skills i'm not going to be a very good DM for them. similarly, i'm not very good at tactical miniature games, so a DM who designs their adventures around tactics wouldn't be a good fit for me
Hey so, I really dig social systems in games and I think you should consider that the problem isn't 'persuasion solves everything social' and more that the system doesn't actually support good social play.
So, various things you could do, either as a house rule or examples pulled from other games:
1) Don't remove Persuade, swap it for a broader variety of social skills. Persuade has the issue where descriptively it kind of applies to most any social situation without actually being interesting. Instead consider:
Intimidate - STR based for when you want something and don't care how the other guy feels about the transaction.
Counsel - WIS based for when you're attempting to cheer up or guide someone based off of sage advice.
Perform - CHA whether entertaining someone to loosen their tongue or hamming up a fake injury so the guards will let you through Perform is a great substitute word for what's usually implied by persuade and comes with the implication of outlandish, excessive roleplay for players and characters that literally like to act out.
Negotiate - INT you know best, you're aware of the situation. You just need to tell people the facts (and maybe omit the less favourable ones) and they'll all see it your way.
Now, presumably in D&D you'e need to like, give out some more skill points or something for that but having that social suite both opens up social play to more than just a single trained 'face' and also immediately helps tell players why their character is the right screwdriver for this screw.
2) Beliefs/Convictions/Intimacies. Primarily from Exalted:
Everyone has reasons they do what they do. Good social systems should really be based around figuring out what those are and playing to or against them. While simple modifiers can do this job fine if you want to mechanically codify it as a Thing Players Should Do adding Convictions is a good idea.
Every PC and major NPC has two minor convictions and one major one. Minor NPC's just have a single minor one (you don't usually need to write it down, the guard wanting to do a good job/get a drink is usually easy to improv). So for example a particularly mercenary fighter might have:
Major: Coin Trumps Feelings
Minor: I'd kill for a good Drink
Minor: No one Gives [Insert Party member here] Trouble But Me
Mechanical effects are something I rather have to blag because I don't play D&D but from what I gather obvious things would be granting advantage/disadvantage (whatever roll 2 Keep 1 is called) for using your (or your targets) majors and a +/- modifier for the minors. Let players also invoke each belief once per session outside of social situations if you want them to really play to type.
Then to wrap it with a little bow let any player 'doubt' their convictions if they don't want to take a penalty when it's used against them. With the caveat that they have to pick a new conviction at the end of the adventure. In built character growth!
3) Reputations/Relationships from Urban Jungle:
These are simple, either give players reputations (of a dice value ranging from D4 to D12) or assign them relationships to NPC's/factions based on good or bad behaviour.
Whenever said relationships or interactions come up roll the dice along with the D20 and add or subtract the roll to the result as appropriate. If the dice rolls a 1 then the relationship/reputation is fading and downgrades by one die size. When it hits zero they've faded away.
Also I've being reading Polaris and might do a big dumb post about it because I really like it and want other people to like it too? It's very much a Shadowrun style reams of skills and gear system but with far, far more relaxed and well thought through rules.
Playing with smart creative people who agree with you on things that 'make sense' makes for a really great group, but if you can all agree on how things should work each time, you don't really need the ruleset to begin with.
No, it quite helps to have a ruleset even if you do improvise in the blndspots.
Rules aren't just there to ensure fairness, they are also there to take the burden of consistency (and therefore the reliability of cause and effect needed to plan tactics) off the players and GM.
Everything takes about 10 times as long if you have to make up every spell description and weapon profile on the spot and write it down and unless you do write it down it's hard to plan in advance. Does the crossbow do d8 or not? Do you need to reload it? It's nice to know in advance, and helpful.
This seems somewhat contrary to your conceit that the Fighter following the rules and attacking with a crossbow will lead to an party wipe thanks to orcs insta-killing two of four party members via "good GMing"
If attacking is the worst option and making up effects for those sacks of flour that I'm hauling around is more effective and better for aiding the party in their quest, then I do not need to know how much damage a crossbow does, I need to know how to persuade my GM that carrying bags of flour for blinding enemies is more practical than wielding swords for disabling foes.
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
Honestly I feel like throwing a bag of flour at someone is a maneuver that a rogue would excel at, as opposed to a fighter
If you want to go around throwing flour at people to blind them you should probably play a rogue instead
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
Anyways, the fighter, as a class, is as outdated as the magic-user and I am continually shocked that it still exists
It's Dungeons and Dragons, it's a game about fighting
A fighter could do that just as well, if they had the same Dex.
I'm not a fan of classes though. Or levels.
Levels are good in games that want to set up an existing world with layers of threats the PCs discover, investigate, and choose to engage with and avoid. Like a West Marches or a megadungeon. They're good for creating a sense of (oh god it's coming someone please stop me I can't--) versimillitude, and encouraging players to be cautious, to gather information, and to approach encounters in a way that allows for escape.
They are not good for games in which you're going to follow a story from A to Z (whether that's a railroaded story or improvised) or games in which you just want to let the players loose on the world. Which is kind of another way of saying "sandbox", but West Marches could be considered a sandbox so it gets messy.
Zonugal(He/Him) The Holiday ArmadilloI'm Santa's representative for all the southern states. And Mexico!Registered Userregular
I missed that entire Fighter discussion but did anyone mention how the Fighter has more options that just their full attack?
They can grapple, push, pull, trip, disarm, ect...
I'd also comment that a good DM will have described an environment in such a way as to provide a Fighter (or any player) additional options/ideas.
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
Overall I don't like levels - they have occasional uses, but most of the time they're just numbers going up, and that's boring to me. I want characters to improve and get better, but I want it to be more of a growing outward than a growing upward. I used to strongly dislike classes as well, but I've mellowed on that a lot. Part of this is realizing that I'm more anti-levels than anti-class, and another part is realizing that I actually just dislike multiclassing, not classes themselves.
I missed that entire Fighter discussion but did anyone mention how the Fighter has more options that just their full attack?
They can grapple, push, pull, trip, disarm, ect...
I'd also comment that a good DM will have described an environment in such a way as to provide a Fighter (or any player) additional options/ideas.
Well everyone can do those, but only the battle master fighter is good at them, at least in 5th ed. In all but the most extreme circumstances would i waste a full action trying to trip or disarm someone versus attacking them.
I need to reread if it's a full action or not for everyone else, unlike the superiority dice add on that the battle master gets.
I don't like classes because I find them needlessly restrictive
I don't like levels because I find them needlessly restrictive in a different way
Axiomatically I have no objection to restrictions in principle because otherwise you get to the point where you problems of the opposite type
But personally the DnD structure in that regard goes way too far for me
I find classes overly restrictive if the game is not restrictive enough.
That's a crazy sentence, so let me try to unpack it.
D&D, as it's written, is a wide world of fantasy melange. There are thousands of things that are happening in your average D&D world, and you can choose from ten classes to represent what you're doing in that world. It feels super limiting. Multiclassing and crossclass stuff is designed to make that better, but is generally linked pretty heavily to leveling (and also to powergaming, but that's its own thing).
Compare that to, say, Blades in the Dark. BitD, as it's written, has a pretty narrow focus on who you are and what you're doing - you're a criminal, and you're committing crimes. And you get to choose from seven different classes to represent that (plus a little bit of bonus flair based on your crew). But those seven archetypes there kind of do cover everything. You've got a fair number of choices within each - your Leech might be a bomb toting anarchist or a sawbones with a heart of gold - but those essentially cover it.
I've grown to prefer narrow focused games, over the years, and that's definitely turned me around a bit on classes. They have their purpose, but sandbox games are not it.
No, that's absolutely something I think is important. The broader a setting/game tries to be the more classes will chaff against what players want to do with it.
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admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
A big part of that is that there's a huge gap between what people expect D&D to be and what D&D is. D&D, mechanically, is a game about exploring dungeons or wildernesses and fighting most of what you run into with the aim of collecting XP and treasure. D&D, culturally, is a wide world of fantasy melange. The developers of D&D are trapped between not being allowed to push D&D outside of what people expect it to be mechanically, but having to support what people expect it to be culturally.
Or else learn to make a better case--and that's a skill and it's a skill you signed up to have tested if you're trying to play that way.
I think the source of this entire argument is that you are saying that you have ALWAYS signed up to play that way, and everyone else is saying that's not the case. Most people don't want to play D&D to have to argue with a dm or the other players, which is the way that will end up if everyone is not on the same page (I know because I've been there).
Your softball analogy also only works if you took the position that it's ok to turn softball into calvinball. Yeah, if people signed up for calvinball. But they probably didn't, they probably want softball.
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
I think the widening focus is an inadvertent side-effect of any game becoming big/popular, too. D&D is the best example, but in order to stop picking on it, let's look at World of Darkness instead.
Back in the 90s, a game called Vampire: The Masquerade was released, about a supernaturally infested modern world now known as the World of the Darkness. All of the player characters were vampires, and they had to exist in a world of humans and other supernatural creatures who were presented primarily as antagonists. About a year later, Werewolf: The Apocalypse was released, which allowed players to play as werewolves in that same world, and while they're definitely two different games you totally could play a werewolf and a vampire in the same game with only a little bit of work. Then a year after that came Mage, then Wraith, then Changeling. All of these things could technically interact with one another, and work in the same basic system, but everything built from that initial framework that was largely built around vampires.
World of Darkness has of course handled things differently than D&D did. Each separate setting book is designed to be a game in its own right, and doesn't have to be used with all of the other games. But there's still an element of that expansion and bloat that changes what the game is, and how the game is played.
And now when a future edition of a World of Darkness game comes out, all of that is already baked in. If there are vampires, then there are going to be werewolves and mages, and most likely wraiths and fey and mummies and whatever else. They might not be playable from minute one, but there is an expectation that they are a part of that world, with their own complicated structures.
D&D is the same way. Instead of vampires it was clerics and fighting men and magic users, but expansion added in thieves and bards and druids and what have you, and now those are an expected part of the game.
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admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
edited September 2017
I sort of agree with that but also disagree. The WoD example is a problem because the Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, etc games are fundamentally different. You're exploring different ideas of humanity and inhumanity, different parts of the human world and underworld, and so on. Merging all those together could be interesting, but it would form a fundamentally different game and you'd need an additional conceit to make that work.. Monsterhearts, for example, could be seen as a remix of the World of Darkness focused on high school. Urban Shadows could be seen as the same, but for urban fantasy.
But all the mechanical parts of D&D that get pulled in are still just D&D. Bards and Druids are no less dungeon-and-wilderness-exploring murderhobos than Fighters and Clerics, they just go about it in a different way.
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This pretty comprehensively ends the debate I think.
But in practice nearly every game or sport begins with deciding which real-life skills the game wants to test and which it does not. And then the players decide which test they want to try their hand at by choosing the game.
To clarify: I'm not saying people should stop debating it, I'm not putting a mod foot down. I'm just saying that, as far as I'm concerned, this point is pretty much irrefutable.
it's also why i never play in games where i couldn't suplex the dm.
One of my DMs weighs 28 stone
I'm not saying you couldn't suplex him just that it would be amazing to watch
Forcing people prone or drop their held items is pretty much a disable. Getting them to skip a turn by attacking an ally. Probably the best L1 offensive spells for clerics.
The big brother, Greater Command, you only get access to when spell resistance and mindaffecting immunities are common, but when it works, it is both awesome and potentially encounter ending.
The one time the entire cult failed willsaves and dropped their weapons, unwilling to pick them up, was hilarious.
What word do you use?
Of course it's often more fun if people first person roleplay their interactions, but it's not required.
Pathfinder commands are defined.
Drop means drop your held items
Fall is go prone
Flee is run away
Halt is stand still
Approach is come towards The caster.
Murderous Command is a separate spell where you attack your nearest ally.
All last until the end of the turn, so you can't drop and pick up in the same turn.
Greater command is multiple targets, rounds per level, save at the end of each turn. Language dependent, compulsion, mindaffecting, spell resistance is fairly limiting at level 9+ though.
As someone who has taken kendo and italian rapier classes and is now taking a german longsword class, I'm totally down with this line of reasoning :P
Oh, they left it like 3.5--that's much worse.
5e and old school style it can be any word.
"Abdicate" is pretty awesome if you're fighting a king.
have you ever run a game with a villain that can use Command on the players? I want to see what happens if I do that
Playing with smart creative people who agree with you on things that 'make sense' makes for a really great group, but if you can all agree on how things should work each time, you don't really need the ruleset to begin with. The purpose of the rules is to paper over those disagreements and ensure fairness. If you have a GM and players who really love doing improvisational actions, it can be really fun - except for those players who aren't as good at that, or not as good at convincing the GM that what they are doing should work, or disagree with the GM on whether what their character wants to do is as reasonable. Especially if the GM tends to be better friends with certain people and is more aligned with their way of thinking. It can really lead to an imbalance where some people can do whatever they want, and some people can't. I've played D&D with theater people (as I am one) and with introverts, and they can be very different in how willing they are to do improv.
It's also really hard to find a group where everybody agrees like that. The ruleset can be thought of a like a social contract, where people may disagree on whether it all makes sense or is the best way to handle things, but is at least good enough, and consistent enough that everyone understands ahead of time how things work, and don't have to rely on people's whims at the time.
Telling people to find a new group is also basically always the wrong answer to any question about the game. It's one thing if it's a horror story about the other players and how they treat you, but quitting a group because they didn't agree with you on how effective your thrown objects should be just seems really petty.
unless the kingdom has some sort of Dobby the house-elf style abdication process, I'm not sure how that one's gonna work in the 6 seconds the spell lasts.
No, it quite helps to have a ruleset even if you do improvise in the blndspots.
Rules aren't just there to ensure fairness, they are also there to take the burden of consistency (and therefore the reliability of cause and effect needed to plan tactics) off the players and GM.
Everything takes about 10 times as long if you have to make up every spell description and weapon profile on the spot and write it down and unless you do write it down it's hard to plan in advance. Does the crossbow do d8 or not? Do you need to reload it? It's nice to know in advance, and helpful.
Throw the crown down: "I abdicate the throne".
Especially good if the crown is the treasure.
And then the next several sessions are a protracted legal battle to deal with the right of succession
I like it
The point is not you immediately quit--the point is you realize your each are mutually relying on each other to have fun and the whole activity is a group activity and so involves paying attention to other peoples' desires and ideas and making consensus.
Then the thing to do is realize that, come to a compromise or other mutually satisfactory conclusion and play within those rules.
In practice, I've never in all these years ever seen anyone get in a fight over improvised tactics--because everyone knows the whole point is to play together and if you try something and it doesn't work then the game is to play within the parameters you get. Or else learn to make a better case--and that's a skill and it's a skill you signed up to have tested if you're trying to play that way.
But the idea of "GM fiat" suggests that the GM has a power they do not have to compel players to play their way. The GM is as dependent on players to be in the game as the player is on the GM to run the game. In practice, these people have to agree to have fun doing a thing together based on some shared sensibility (like in any communal activity whether it's going to the movies or scoring minigolf or deciding where to order food from) --so the idea that one has special power despite absolutely no engine of practical enforcement outside the game fiction is imaginary. And everyone can go "Hey GM, you're being a jerk."
And, yes some people are going to be better at telling their friends their being unfair than others, but that is the risk of any communal human activity, including games and sports. You can say not ordering any vegetarian options for the veggie is being a jerk. It doesn't mean there's something wrong with the design of pizza. You can be a terrible umpire in softball, too. It doesn't mean the game's poorly designed. It means if your friend is umpiring in a terrible way and maybe this is a symptom of a bigger problem--a mismatch between your idea of fun (and/or commitment to everybody having fun) and the person you're playing with.
Sometimes it means they're basically a jerk and that's that, and sometimes it means the two of you just shouldn't play that particular game together.
Not gaming is better than bad gaming.
As for the player who is less creative: they are in the same predicament as the person who plays baseball and is bad at throwing. They signed up to play a game where that skill is explicitly tested--so either enjoy the attempt to improve or invest in some other dimension of the game and enjoy that.
Hey so, I really dig social systems in games and I think you should consider that the problem isn't 'persuasion solves everything social' and more that the system doesn't actually support good social play.
So, various things you could do, either as a house rule or examples pulled from other games:
1) Don't remove Persuade, swap it for a broader variety of social skills. Persuade has the issue where descriptively it kind of applies to most any social situation without actually being interesting. Instead consider:
Now, presumably in D&D you'e need to like, give out some more skill points or something for that but having that social suite both opens up social play to more than just a single trained 'face' and also immediately helps tell players why their character is the right screwdriver for this screw.
2) Beliefs/Convictions/Intimacies. Primarily from Exalted:
Everyone has reasons they do what they do. Good social systems should really be based around figuring out what those are and playing to or against them. While simple modifiers can do this job fine if you want to mechanically codify it as a Thing Players Should Do adding Convictions is a good idea.
Every PC and major NPC has two minor convictions and one major one. Minor NPC's just have a single minor one (you don't usually need to write it down, the guard wanting to do a good job/get a drink is usually easy to improv). So for example a particularly mercenary fighter might have:
Mechanical effects are something I rather have to blag because I don't play D&D but from what I gather obvious things would be granting advantage/disadvantage (whatever roll 2 Keep 1 is called) for using your (or your targets) majors and a +/- modifier for the minors. Let players also invoke each belief once per session outside of social situations if you want them to really play to type.
Then to wrap it with a little bow let any player 'doubt' their convictions if they don't want to take a penalty when it's used against them. With the caveat that they have to pick a new conviction at the end of the adventure. In built character growth!
3) Reputations/Relationships from Urban Jungle:
These are simple, either give players reputations (of a dice value ranging from D4 to D12) or assign them relationships to NPC's/factions based on good or bad behaviour.
Whenever said relationships or interactions come up roll the dice along with the D20 and add or subtract the roll to the result as appropriate. If the dice rolls a 1 then the relationship/reputation is fading and downgrades by one die size. When it hits zero they've faded away.
Also I've being reading Polaris and might do a big dumb post about it because I really like it and want other people to like it too? It's very much a Shadowrun style reams of skills and gear system but with far, far more relaxed and well thought through rules.
This seems somewhat contrary to your conceit that the Fighter following the rules and attacking with a crossbow will lead to an party wipe thanks to orcs insta-killing two of four party members via "good GMing"
If attacking is the worst option and making up effects for those sacks of flour that I'm hauling around is more effective and better for aiding the party in their quest, then I do not need to know how much damage a crossbow does, I need to know how to persuade my GM that carrying bags of flour for blinding enemies is more practical than wielding swords for disabling foes.
If you want to go around throwing flour at people to blind them you should probably play a rogue instead
It's Dungeons and Dragons, it's a game about fighting
Literally everyone is a fighter
A fighter could do that just as well, if they had the same Dex.
I'm not a fan of classes though. Or levels.
Levels are good in games that want to set up an existing world with layers of threats the PCs discover, investigate, and choose to engage with and avoid. Like a West Marches or a megadungeon. They're good for creating a sense of (oh god it's coming someone please stop me I can't--) versimillitude, and encouraging players to be cautious, to gather information, and to approach encounters in a way that allows for escape.
They are not good for games in which you're going to follow a story from A to Z (whether that's a railroaded story or improvised) or games in which you just want to let the players loose on the world. Which is kind of another way of saying "sandbox", but West Marches could be considered a sandbox so it gets messy.
They can grapple, push, pull, trip, disarm, ect...
I'd also comment that a good DM will have described an environment in such a way as to provide a Fighter (or any player) additional options/ideas.
Off in the distance a rogue sings "Anything you can do I can do better."
I don't like levels because I find them needlessly restrictive in a different way
Axiomatically I have no objection to restrictions in principle because otherwise you get to the point where you problems of the opposite type
But personally the DnD structure in that regard goes way too far for me
Well everyone can do those, but only the battle master fighter is good at them, at least in 5th ed. In all but the most extreme circumstances would i waste a full action trying to trip or disarm someone versus attacking them.
I need to reread if it's a full action or not for everyone else, unlike the superiority dice add on that the battle master gets.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
Hey have you read Polaris at all? It's kinda like if Shadowrun ran on Infinity's dice system and it's real neato.
I find classes overly restrictive if the game is not restrictive enough.
That's a crazy sentence, so let me try to unpack it.
D&D, as it's written, is a wide world of fantasy melange. There are thousands of things that are happening in your average D&D world, and you can choose from ten classes to represent what you're doing in that world. It feels super limiting. Multiclassing and crossclass stuff is designed to make that better, but is generally linked pretty heavily to leveling (and also to powergaming, but that's its own thing).
Compare that to, say, Blades in the Dark. BitD, as it's written, has a pretty narrow focus on who you are and what you're doing - you're a criminal, and you're committing crimes. And you get to choose from seven different classes to represent that (plus a little bit of bonus flair based on your crew). But those seven archetypes there kind of do cover everything. You've got a fair number of choices within each - your Leech might be a bomb toting anarchist or a sawbones with a heart of gold - but those essentially cover it.
I've grown to prefer narrow focused games, over the years, and that's definitely turned me around a bit on classes. They have their purpose, but sandbox games are not it.
I think the source of this entire argument is that you are saying that you have ALWAYS signed up to play that way, and everyone else is saying that's not the case. Most people don't want to play D&D to have to argue with a dm or the other players, which is the way that will end up if everyone is not on the same page (I know because I've been there).
Your softball analogy also only works if you took the position that it's ok to turn softball into calvinball. Yeah, if people signed up for calvinball. But they probably didn't, they probably want softball.
Back in the 90s, a game called Vampire: The Masquerade was released, about a supernaturally infested modern world now known as the World of the Darkness. All of the player characters were vampires, and they had to exist in a world of humans and other supernatural creatures who were presented primarily as antagonists. About a year later, Werewolf: The Apocalypse was released, which allowed players to play as werewolves in that same world, and while they're definitely two different games you totally could play a werewolf and a vampire in the same game with only a little bit of work. Then a year after that came Mage, then Wraith, then Changeling. All of these things could technically interact with one another, and work in the same basic system, but everything built from that initial framework that was largely built around vampires.
World of Darkness has of course handled things differently than D&D did. Each separate setting book is designed to be a game in its own right, and doesn't have to be used with all of the other games. But there's still an element of that expansion and bloat that changes what the game is, and how the game is played.
And now when a future edition of a World of Darkness game comes out, all of that is already baked in. If there are vampires, then there are going to be werewolves and mages, and most likely wraiths and fey and mummies and whatever else. They might not be playable from minute one, but there is an expectation that they are a part of that world, with their own complicated structures.
D&D is the same way. Instead of vampires it was clerics and fighting men and magic users, but expansion added in thieves and bards and druids and what have you, and now those are an expected part of the game.
But all the mechanical parts of D&D that get pulled in are still just D&D. Bards and Druids are no less dungeon-and-wilderness-exploring murderhobos than Fighters and Clerics, they just go about it in a different way.