The Gaming Den

Absentminded_Wizard wrote:Now, on to Crissa's famous question which never gets a meaningful answer. I'll try to phrase it in a less open-ended manner and see if it gets anywhere.

I'll take a whack at it as well...asking, not answering.

Gameplay and setting are two distinct things. Gameplay is mechanics, crunch. Setting is fluff and choice of options.

D&D is a game. d20 Modern is a game. Eberron is a setting.

If I want to play Savage Worlds, that's a game. If I want to run a campaign where the PCs are Greek minotaurs fighting a demonic invasion, that's a setting. The two are very distinct.

Given the above, and recognizing that settings are infinitely mutable and there's no one right setting...

In what way do subpar options - that are presented as being valid - improve the game?

Talisman wrote:In what way do subpar options - that are presented as being valid - improve the game?

With "that are presented as valid" being the important words there, I'd personally say that they do not. Just to make sure we're on the same page here, could you give me your opinion on it's companion question?

In what way to do subpar options - that are explicitly presented as not valid - make the game worse?

Gelare wrote:

Talisman wrote:In what way do subpar options - that are presented as being valid - improve the game?

With "that are presented as valid" being the important words there, I'd personally say that they do not. Just to make sure we're on the same page here, could you give me your opinion on it's companion question?

In what way to do subpar options - that are explicitly presented as not valid - make the game worse?

I would say that they limit certain possibilities. If, for instance, we give minotaurs the "no wizards" tag, it becomes much harder to tell a story about a mad minotaur archmage. Not impossible; just harder.

Also, if something is a subpar option and isn't mechanically valid, presenting it is just a waste of ink and paper and brainpower. In the time it took to read the half-elf mechanics I could have read the [other, better race] mechanics.

MHO, of course.

Saying that X exists does NOT mean that it will ever come up in the hands of a PC.

Taking pikes again. Pikes are sucktastic weapons for adventurers.

There are still people in the setting who use them, because 20% of the time (or 30% or whatever), they're useful.

So my philosophy is

I'm not sure why people are freaking the fuck out over all of this. If a trollgre has a -10 to Intelligence, and a player wants to play a wizard, I'm not sure how retarded he has to be to realize that it's going to fuck him in the ass for spellcasting. Level adjustment is one thing, as that's trickier for new players, but pure stat adjustments? Come on. Give the players a little credit.

Meanwhile, MOST of the time, being an elf/dwarf/anything else in the PHB should not be a disadvantage. Okay, an elf is a better archer than you. Deal. However, you're probably better with something else. So his "can contribute to the party" is not higher, particularly since he paid for that archery skill by losing out on something else equally important.

However, just because an elf is better at ONE THING IN PARTICULAR does not mean that a dwarven ranger (to repeat, dwarves as bad rangers is hypothetical.) is weaker ADVENTURER.

So yes, the elf scouts and tracks better, and shoots better, and those are big ranger things and not so big fighter things as a rule.

As for limiting certain possibilities: What if we -want- to eliminate the mad minotaur archmage?

However, nothing that is presented as playable (half-elves, I'm looking at you) should ever just suck. If a half elf is bad at one of the options, that's fine. If a half elf doesn't have anything to contribute besides suckiness, its not a playable race.

Doesn't mean that there would be no half elves, however.

Still. If it is presented as valid to be a dwarf with ranger levels or a half elf with levels in anything, there has to be SOMETHING that they get that DOES compensate for their weaknesses, whatever they are. Worse archer means something else equally important to "Adventurer" in combat. It may not be a particularly "Rangery" thing to be good at mechanics, but it ought to be something the dwarf can do well enough to compensate for not being so good at tracking and scouting.


And in a brief answer: The mechanics are only relevant to the extent they represent the setting/s. If they're not representing that elves are good archers, that minotaurs are big and tough fighters but bad wizards or whatever we want them to represent, they fail.

So all options that fail should be presented as "If you want to be challenged, you can do this. This is not advised."

Since "good with a bow" is presumably not the most important thing in the setting, elves being good there and nonelves being bad there means that nonelves are good somewhere else and elves bad somewhere else.

Not that elves > nonelves, all day, every day. If I wanted that, I'd give elves a LA and make them a nonstandard race.

As for limiting certain possibilities: What if we -want- to eliminate the mad minotaur archmage?

Then like I said earlier, you should man the fuck up and either A) get ahold of the rules put races on the rails or B) if you can't fix the rules, tell your players you don't want them playing minotaur archmages. None of this pussy-ass stealth nerf shit.

Still. If it is presented as valid to be a dwarf with ranger levels or a half elf with levels in anything, there has to be SOMETHING that they get that DOES compensate for their weaknesses, whatever they are. Worse archer means something else equally important to "Adventurer" in combat. It may not be a particularly "Rangery" thing to be good at mechanics, but it ought to be something the dwarf can do well enough to compensate for not being so good at tracking and scouting.

Look, if you fuck dwarves on the core ranger skills (archery, tracking, scouting) but give them benefits in some unrelated area, you're not going to get dwarf rangers. You're going to get a dwarf who picked some other class.

Halflings have some very distinct strengths that any fighter would love to have, despite sucking at a fighter's core schtick. But guess what? Halfings didn't become fighters, they became rogues or wizards or something else where their bonuses synergized.

Handing out racial consolation prizes does NOT encourage race/class combinations. Quite the contrary.

It is not "stealth nerf" to say "Hey. This class is based on doing something my race sucks at."

We don't want minotaur archmages, and we want minotaurs to have weaknesses that limit them in some areas, so one of those areas is that minotaurs are too dumb to do wizardry.

If you cannot tell that -4 to Intelligence blows for being a wizard, then get off the acid and read.

If you cannot tell that -4 to Intelligence blows for being a wizard, then get off the acid and read.

If you think that a -4 penalty to intelligence is such an obvious sign that minotaurs shouldn't be wizards, why don't you just say flat-out in the description of the minotaur that they can't become wizards? Why are you being such a fence-straddling sissy, trying to make it seem like your setting has the possibility of minotaur archmages while ensuring that anyone with half of a brain won't be one?

Because "can't" is an arbitrary "NO. NO MINOTAURS CAN BE ARCHMAGES." even they somehow become smart enough, the -4 is that they don't become smart enough.

If you have an 18 (- racial modifiers) Int, you can do all the things an Int 14 human can.

The fact that if you, the player, have an 18 to put somewhere and want to play a minotaur you won't be putting it in Intelligence doesn't mean no minotaur has ever had that happen ever.

Should a race with a penalty to use bows have a rule that they're not allowed to use bows? That'd be stupid.

"You're not proficient. Therefore, you cannot use this weapon. At all. You can't even pick it up except for the amount of time it takes to put in your pack, because if you do, it will BURN YOU!"

Stupid.

Maybe because it's easier than going down the list of all 40+ published classes and saying, "A minotaur cannot be a wizard, archivist, warmage, truespeaker, psion, wu jen, bleah, bleah."

Also because plenty of classes don't require a high Stat X, but do benefit from it. Where do those fall? Are they allowed or disallowed?

Clerics and Charisma, f'rinstance.

I'd say a half orc would be a fine cleric (or should be, system issues with half orcs being just plain weak are another story).

+2 to Strength is useful, -2 to Charisma is penalizing.

Slightly better to have Charisma than Strength as a cleric, but if half-orcs had anything that -was- useful, they'd be fine clerics.

So get thee to a church, half-orc. Its one of the things you can do reasonably well.

Half-orcs need to be rewritten.

Psychic Robot wrote:Half-orcs need to be rewritten.

Well, duh.

Maybe because it's easier than going down the list of all 40+ published classes and saying, "A minotaur cannot be a wizard, archivist, warmage, truespeaker, psion, wu jen, bleah, bleah."

If I was going to do this calvinistic bullshit, here's how I would do it.

From now on when you select your race you also choose a racial archetype keyword. You have archetypes such as Graceful, Brute, Soldier, Smartypants, Tricky, etc. Some races don't have certain racial archetype keywords: for example half-orcs don't have the Graceful and Smartypants ones.

All classes from now on can only be selected by someone with the appropriate racial archetype keyword. You can only be a fighter if you have the Brute or Soldier keyword. You can only be a wizard with the Smartypants keyword, etc.

Because "can't" is an arbitrary "NO. NO MINOTAURS CAN BE ARCHMAGES." even they somehow become smart enough, the -4 is that they don't become smart enough.

You just said that no player would be smart enough to select a -4 intelligence penalty for their archmage race.

But now you say that you believe that some characters should be allowed to, under circumstances, be archmage minotaurs. That's an obvious and rather damning contradiction of your earlier statement, but whatever.

So once they meet these hurdles, you turn around and fuck them because they could've been an elf or whatever and been that much better!

Don't you see how you're fucking players over essentially a roleplaying choice?

Seriously, if you impose a huge fine on people parking in the wrong spaces, you don't get to claim that you don't mind people parking in front of fire hydrants in certain circumstances. There is no 'well, if someone has a lot of money then it's okay for them to park in front of a fire hydrant!' You're pretending to be openminded about certain possibilities when you're really not and I'm not going to let you get away with that.

No, I'm saying that "Yes, you could do this. It would be a BAD CHOICE, but it is possible, like writting with your left hand (for those of you who are right handed)."

Saying "NO! YOU CANNOT BE AN ARCHMAGE!" does nothing other than pretending that things that are inferior don't exist.

If you want to play a gimped character, you're welcome to do a gimped character. If you're too dumb to tell that a race with an Intelligence penalty will probably be gimped to the point of level inappropriate at being a wizard, then I'm not going to take over your brain and compensate for your blindness.

Saying "NO! YOU CANNOT BE AN ARCHMAGE!" does nothing other than pretending that things that are inferior don't exist.

If you want to play a gimped character, you're welcome to do a gimped character. If you're too dumb to tell that a race with an Intelligence penalty will probably be gimped to the point of level inappropriate at being a wizard, then I'm not going to take over your brain and compensate for your blindness.

Hey, you know what? With that mentality, why stop there?

Why bother fixing the barbarian and fighter races? Everyone knows by now that they suck hedgehog cock, so there's no need to fix them at all. If you pick one of those classes then you deserve to be inferior, even if your choice was motivated by roleplay. Wizards and clerics, yo'.

Because they're not supposed to be nonviable options.

Just because there are such options doesn't mean we need to or should make all things we dislike (or simply don't like) them.

Everyone with a brain can see that fighters suck. Therefore they're intended to suck. Players who wanna suck can choose them for that. Are you happy, citizen?

Designing the game so that some choices that should be legitimate are not is a problem.

If D&D was meant to be about wizards and clerics and everyone else was inferior, then it needs to be built around that as how it presents what the game is, instead of winding up with fighters looking like they have a role (and are able to fill that role) but failing on both.

However, "using your off hand" is not something that should be a viable option for the nonambidexterous, so unless the genre assumes everyone is ambidexterous, it should suck.

So certain kinds of nonviable options are okay, but others aren't? Interesting.

Saying "NO! YOU CANNOT BE AN ARCHMAGE!" does nothing other than pretending that things that are inferior don't exist.

Saying that X exists does NOT mean that it will ever come up in the hands of a PC.

I think we agree on this second point. However, I believe that things that should never come up in the hands of PCs shouldn't be permitted as choices to PCs in the default rules.

Correct. Making "A guy who disdains using weapons and armor" in a gritty represention of Dux Artorius would be stupid and should be stupid.

Its not prohibited, however. You could run around naked and unarmed. No one is forcing you to grab a sword and maille.

So I'm not sure what you do to "deny the choice" for those. If its stated that they're worse options, and someone wants to suck, why are we supposed to forbid sucking?

I want to know why saying 'No, you can't play an Archmage Minotaur' is the same as saying 'there are no archmage minotaurs'?

-Crissa

Oh, I don't know...maybe because sucking...you know sucks.

Absentminded_Wizard wrote:I think we agree on this second point. However, I believe that things that should never come up in the hands of PCs shouldn't be permitted as choices to PCs in the default rules.

Elennsar wrote:Correct. Making "A guy who disdains using weapons and armor" in a gritty represention of Dux Artorius would be stupid and should be stupid.

Its not prohibited, however. You could run around naked and unarmed. No one is forcing you to grab a sword and maille.

So I'm not sure what you do to "deny the choice" for those. If its stated that they're worse options, and someone wants to suck, why are we supposed to forbid sucking?

"The rules should say A, therefore B"
"Correct. The rules should not say A, therefore B"

I want to know how many posts this will go on for.

Easy to just not choose to suck. Do I have to magically mind control you to be unable to touch fire for you to not try to grab hot coals from a barbeque?

Of course, this requires it to be just as obvious that a minotaur wizard or a guy without weapons or armor or whatever sucks.

But that's not in dispute.

The rules do not need to say "You cannot" to say "you should not".