TheRPGSite

So, another thread mentioned the use of skill or attribute "tests" in combat in lieu of attacking, and I wanted to discuss how more games are including these options (and why I find them generally unsatisfying).  Of course, the title of this thread frames the question as an absolute (primarily because there is a group of posters on here who just lose it every time someone posts an absolute... and it's amusing to watch the 'tards "Reeeee!"), but I'm interested in games that have created a viable non-attack option in combat... because I just haven't seen one yet.

To set the table, I want to make sure we're all on the same page as to my assumptions and assertions.  So I want to lay the following assumptions out before we look at the present iterations of skill tests:

• I am focusing on mechanical results, and not subjective or narrative results --- Sure, you can do a backflip to awe the enemy so that your partner might kill it, and the DM can rule that you impress the spectators enough that you boost your standing with the locals... but that's not a mechanical result and it's not doing anything to help with the actual combat
• I am focusing on the most efficient resolution of fights --- sure, there are any number of ways to use skills to prolong, delay, and change the nature of a fight.  But unless the tactic can result in an equal or less cost in resources, time, damage, etc., then it is considered "sub-optimal" for the purpose of this discussion (an additional note: "optimal" results don't mean some kind of nefarious min-maxing.  They actually make the most sense in character as well as in the game.  What character will prefer to lose half his hit points in a fight when the option was available to lose only one quarter?  No rational human is ever going to choose the tactic that costs the most of anything, except in rare enough circumstances that don't really address the main issue here)
• I am talking about situations where violence either has or will imminently break out and the only choice is to defeat the enemy, either by killing, wounding, capturing, or scaring off.
• I am assuming enemy combatants are equal or greater in number than the player characters --- this is a bit of a narrowing assumption, but just because it comes up very frequently in most of the RPGs I've played, and because a highly unbalanced action economy in the players' favor doesn't seem like it is a true test of utility.

OK, with that out of the way, my primary hypothesis is as follows: Any kind of non-attacking skill test or challenge will never be more effective than degrading the enemies' hit points via attacks, and will often be much less efficient.  So, how do I come to this conclusion?  Well, let's look at combat tests from probably two of the most popular game systems right now: D&D 5e and SWADE.  In 5e, a player may perform a "help" action, which gives the helped creature advantage on the next attack roll against the chosen creature.  In SWADE, a character may use the support action (resulting in a +1 or +2 bonus to a fighting roll for an ally) or perform a test, which results in either a distracted or vulnerable (-2 or +2 respectively to opponents' rolls or allies' rolls) with the possibility to make the target shaken on a raise.

Now, either of these options are almost always going to be worse than attacking the target.  I don't want to get too far in the weeds to figure out how much better your skill would have to be as opposed to your chance to hit in order to make the test viable (getting to do something, even if it's not really helping, as opposed to just missing every turn), so let's assume a relative parity in chances to hit and pass the test.

Now, I know that an argument against that is that tests allow a player to build a character that is not combat facing, but still useful in combat.  But, I think, based on the following points, that "useful" may not be accurate, and that this illusion helps to make unbalanced (and even min/maxed) parties more viable and likely because of the lip service paid to tests.

So, what ends a fight?  All enemies are one of the following: dead, incapacitated, or fled.  Just sticking to the mechanics related in the games, none of the skill tests create a chance of flight.  Sure, you can house rule it, but that's not really confirming the utility of the mechanics as they stand... since you're having to change it.  Incapacitation might be possible due to some kind of grappling, but you haven't removed the threat; you've just delayed having to remove it (and if there are more enemies than players, you still have active combatants that can kill you while you try to keep your target out of the fight).  But grappling is its own thing, so I'm not really talking about that in this case.  So that leaves killing/rendering unconscious due to damage as the primary goal.  And tests suck at this.

I'll note that a similar argument has been proffered previously by many folks when it comes to damage or healing.  Generally speaking, healing is less efficient than doing damage, as it spends resources without reducing the threat or capacities of the enemy.  The best healing is the healing that revives or keeps a character in the fight, as it preserves damage output and shortens the fight.

What most skill tests seem designed to do is allow one character to give up a chance to do damage in order to make another character slightly more likely to do the same damage that he would have done without the test.  To be viable (i.e. to actually reduce the time in combat), a test would need to guarantee a least as much damage as both characters would inflict on average.  Now, this will only happen when one character has a huge disparity in accuracy or damage over the other (an extremely unbalanced party), or in a case where one party member's contribution is unneeded in the fight (and I know we all want to feel like that player!).  It makes one player into a sidekick in the combat realm, which I think most players aren't too keen on as a permanent role.

You could argue that a player who uses his character's action to worsen the chances of an opponent to hit might be worthwhile.  But, once again, the reduction in damage needs to be enough to make up for the increased time the fight goes because of the lost damage from the helping character.  I'm not going to crunch the numbers here, but I would suspect the damage reduced needs to be very large to pay off (or the helping character must be highly outclassed by his party-mate).

So, in the end, it comes down to the fact that the chance to do damage is always going to shorten the fight by an amount that doesn't make the usage of skill tests valid.  If anyone knows of a mechanical approach that defies this analysis, I'd love to hear about it.  Because, otherwise, I feel like skill tests are directed towards players with a dramatically underpowered character (with respect to the rest of their group).  So a mechanic to address a Session Zero problem.  And, outside of a few rare cases (which you don't need to recount, because a few singular examples don't disprove the general trend), skill tests just seem to be meant to make the useless character in combat seem to have a purpose, even when they don't...

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 13, 2023, 04:27:14 PM
Any kind of non-attacking skill test or challenge will never be more effective than degrading the enemies' hit points via attacks, and will often be much less efficient.  So, how do I come to this conclusion?  Well, let's look at combat tests from probably two of the most popular game systems right now: D&D 5e and SWADE.  In 5e, a player may perform a "help" action, which gives the helped creature advantage on the next attack roll against the chosen creature.  In SWADE, a character may use the support action (resulting in a +1 or +2 bonus to a fighting roll for an ally) or perform a test, which results in either a distracted or vulnerable (-2 or +2 respectively to opponents' rolls or allies' rolls) with the possibility to make the target shaken on a raise.

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 13, 2023, 04:27:14 PM
I'll note that a similar argument has been proffered previously by many folks when it comes to damage or healing.  Generally speaking, healing is less efficient than doing damage, as it spends resources without reducing the threat or capacities of the enemy.  The best healing is the healing that revives or keeps a character in the fight, as it preserves damage output and shortens the fight.

In my experience of 5E, though, healing is vital. Obviously, the best healing should be tactically applied rather than randomly -- but when it is tactically important, healing is incredibly useful. In my experience, heal is a common intelligent action for healing-capable PCs.

I rarely see the generic "help" action in 5E, but I do often see use of spell or special actions that give advantage or disadvantage. Spells like Bless, or the monk's stunning strike, etc. Sometimes the special attacks do a little damage in addition to setting up the target, but it's often the non-damage effect that is the most important.

Just as in healing, the tactical situation matters. If there is a high-damage but low-hit-chance enemy like a clumsy giant, then giving him disadvantage can make a huge difference. Against a hard-to-hit opponent, a lower-damage character like a bard might be better off giving advantage to the high-damage rogue.

I'm still coming up to speed on SWADE, but I think tests are similar. If they're not important enough, then I might house rule to make them more important.

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 13, 2023, 04:27:14 PM
So, in the end, it comes down to the fact that the chance to do damage is always going to shorten the fight by an amount that doesn't make the usage of skill tests valid.  If anyone knows of a mechanical approach that defies this analysis, I'd love to hear about it.  Because, otherwise, I feel like skill tests are directed towards players with a dramatically underpowered character (with respect to the rest of their group).

I find that healing-focused clerics in 5E are incredibly useful, and not at all underpowered. Opinions differ on bards, but I've had a lot of players who were happy with them. In my experience with older tactical systems like the HERO System, moves like grab, takedown, entangle, flash, etc. were often popular and interesting options compared to straight damage.

I think tests shouldn't be the default best option, but it's good if a system has them as sometimes the best move for a particular tactical situation.

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 13, 2023, 04:27:14 PM

• I am focusing on the most efficient resolution of fights

...
So that leaves killing/rendering unconscious due to damage as the primary goal.  And tests suck at this.

Eh, no, tests don't suck at this, skills do, simply because there isn't a skill that kills or renders your opponent unconscious. If there were, a "test" for it would be perfectly good at ending fights. Attribute tests are just informalized "skill" rolls.

Honestly, this whole thing seems like a giant strawman. Attribute tests are designed for things other than combat-ending tactics.

My own system uses opposed rolls for all actions -- so for example, a successful Climbing action can prevent taking damage from the missile attack directed at you while you're doing it. Not exactly what you're asking, but it does make skills more potent in combat.

Well, with actual examples, it is hard to judge, but I agree that in the confines of "assuming enemy combatants are equal or greater in number than the player characters" it is true MOST OF THE TIMES.

There are still cases (in 5e) in which giving adv is more useful than attacking. Say, against a foe that in unharmed by nonmagical weapons if you don't have one.

Also, if you're helping a paladin with a holy avenger to get a crit, or helping a rogue, etc. This would require a high AC and a tough monster in general, which is rare if "assuming enemy combatants are equal or greater in number than the player characters".

It seems you're assuming all PCs to have similar damage output which isn't necessarily true, especially against monsters with some resistance - or worse, immunities!

Also, depending on the game, a skill might let you FIND OUT if the monster has a weakness etc.

If I understand the parameters correctly, the first counter example that springs to mind is a well-timed intimidate. Depending on the system, that could be part of a skill and/or attribute test.

A third of the enemy orcs are dead.  Your buddy with the great axe has just lopped of one's head. The GM narrates that the orcs flinch as the head goes bouncing through the ranks.  You step up next to your buddy with your sword poised and ask, "Who wants to be next?"  If the GM calls for a test, and another third of the orcs run, then that's more fled than your attack was likely going to kill. 

Granted, it depends on how the GM runs it, and whether there is such a skill supported.  In my own system, the orcs have a morale check, with rules such that such a scenario might either result in a small minus to that morale check (so not a skill check) or allow a skill check to put them over the edge into checking morale when they weren't quite there before.  Arguably, killing one of them with your sword might also put them over the edge.  However, that's based on details the players don't fully know.  A more direct case is rallying your own side when they fail a morale check, which in my system is nearly always a good use of leadership skill if you have it, because making half your team fight better or at all the next round is likely to inflict a lot more damage than what you do yourself.

The devil's always in the details.  Fantasy Hero and Flash was mentioned.  I ran a version with skill-based powers.  I had to ban Flash, because it was so overpowered.  That's not about the skill, though.  It's about skill-based access to a magical effect priced for a superhero system, where blinding several people for a few rounds was much more powerful than it was when killing the enemy with swords was the alternative, as opposed to knocking them through a building. It's a quirk of the way Hero System powers function.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on June 13, 2023, 06:22:34 PM
If I understand the parameters correctly, the first counter example that springs to mind is a well-timed intimidate. Depending on the system, that could be part of a skill and/or attribute test.

A third of the enemy orcs are dead.  Your buddy with the great axe has just lopped of one's head. The GM narrates that the orcs flinch as the head goes bouncing through the ranks.  You step up next to your buddy with your sword poised and ask, "Who wants to be next?"  If the GM calls for a test, and another third of the orcs run, then that's more fled than your attack was likely going to kill. 

Granted, it depends on how the GM runs it, and whether there is such a skill supported.  In my own system, the orcs have a morale check, with rules such that such a scenario might either result in a small minus to that morale check (so not a skill check) or allow a skill check to put them over the edge into checking morale when they weren't quite there before.  Arguably, killing one of them with your sword might also put them over the edge.  However, that's based on details the players don't fully know.  A more direct case is rallying your own side when they fail a morale check, which in my system is nearly always a good use of leadership skill if you have it, because making half your team fight better or at all the next round is likely to inflict a lot more damage than what you do yourself.

The devil's always in the details.  Fantasy Hero and Flash was mentioned.  I ran a version with skill-based powers.  I had to ban Flash, because it was so overpowered.  That's not about the skill, though.  It's about skill-based access to a magical effect priced for a superhero system, where blinding several people for a few rounds was much more powerful than it was when killing the enemy with swords was the alternative, as opposed to knocking them through a building. It's a quirk of the way Hero System powers function.

QFT.

I don't build characters who aren't proficient with at least one social skill that can get them out of a jam. The OP posted that '... none of the skill tests create a chance of flight ...' That's incorrect in terms of how intimidation works in most games that have that skill available for characters. It's literally creating fear in a target, which done successfully means the foe flees, or at least backs off.

And skills are mechanical aspects of the game, not fluffy narrative junk. Not for nothing, but when I see people complaining about skills it usually means they aren't any good at using them  ???

A squishy character fighting defensively, thus likely foregoing dealing damage, to block an enemy from ganging up on the party's primary damage dealer is meaningfully contributing to the fight. Suppression is also a thing, a shower unlikely to deal damage of projectiles would still prevent a combatant from forgoing defenses to maximize damage output. Optimizing combat also leads to an issue where it would run more optimally if one player was controlling all friendly characters. It's the individual risk reward balance against the needs of other characters or the party that makes combat decisions meaningful and interesting. Moreover, if the combat is reduced to HP attrition then nothing but HP attrition will matter, as opposed to movement, positioning, suppression, fatigue, or morale.

I think the most general answer to this type of question is in how it relates to the action economy.

If your PCs are facing more powerful foes, the opposing side usually has fewer actions than the PCs. In this case, damaging is less important than denying them actions.

If your PCs are facing less powerful foes, the opposing side usually has more actions than the PCs. In this case, damaging is more effective than denying them actions.

Pathfinder 2's system actually heavily encourages you to deny opponents actions, rather than using all of your actions on attacks.

Pure hp attrition is really boring.  If inflicting hp damage is always optimal then the system.needs an overhaul.

The best action in most turn-based games irrespective of the details (and even real life) is to either improve your action economy faster than the opposition can, or hinder the action economy of the biggest threats in the opposing force faster than they can respond. Or both, if you can achieve it. Of course, a dead enemy has the worst imaginable action economy. So unless the details of the game make it worth debilitating the enemy, simply burning the opposition's HP down as fast as possible will also happen to be the best option for destroying the opposition's action economy.

Just allowing characters to give each other a small bonuses by helping with a skill or attribute test by comparison is almost never viable, I'd agree. Some people said it best earlier in the thread though: there are exceptions when it's so risky and pointless for your character to try to do direct damage that you're better off just pumping up an ally who has better odds. That can be really unfun too though, if that's a regular occurrence.

To prevent direct damage from being the best way to approach a combat, I think you need to either:

• Tune the math so it's sometimes more risky to go for direct damage than to help an ally who has better odds.
• There are too many opponents or they may arrive in unpredictable order/waves so you can't just nova the enemy to death.
• The enemy that is least-likely to be killed with direct damage is also the one that represents the most active and dangerous enemy in the opposing force (like a dragon).

It helps if debilitating conditions also enable more effective basic actions on those debilitated targets. It's gamey, but something like a mark that can be exploited by different powers can make certain combinations of powers or certain tactics more beneficial from time to time.

Quote from: Old Aegidius on June 14, 2023, 04:07:27 AMOf course, a dead enemy has the worst imaginable action economy.

Nitpicking:  Charm.  Dying friend that isn't dead yet.  Both can contribute to a negative action economy, not just add nothing.  ;D

When reading the original post, I thought about systems where defensive actions, like dodging or parrying, are distinct actions from attacking. So you can choose a defensive action or an offensive action.

From my experiences with fencing and medieval combat simulations, I found that dichotomy inaccurate. A fighter can smoothly combine defensive and offensive actions. For example, fencers will try to follow a parry with a riposte attack. The actions flow together and take a split second. I wonder if a system could allow the player making a successful defensive action a chance to immediately add an attack.

Quote from: warwell on June 14, 2023, 08:33:49 AM
I wonder if a system could allow the player making a successful defensive action a chance to immediately add an attack.

Harnmaster does this with the "Counterstrike" defense (though on equal levels of success both combatants hit each other). Stormbringer/Elric! allow for ripostes on a critical parry when using weapon + shield or two weapons. There are probably other such systems.

tanking of different kinds comes to mind as a possible net benefit in some situations. if one can utilize the environment and/or use dodge, rage, taunt, patient defense, what-have-you to draw the attention away from and/or absorb some incoming damage for the squishies in the party - who are often high damage dealing glass cannons as well -  that might be better than just doing damage.

Many good points on both sides of the issue have been made here. To wit, no one has addressed the greater issue which is game design based upon the encounter. WOTC began with this model, and despite several iterations of implementation, has never abandoned it. In original D&D, which many dismiss due to combat being deemed too deadly, having to roll the dice for ANY reason, was a sub optimal choice. Remember that combat XP awards were paltry compared to that for discovering and looting treasure. Almost every modern iteration of the game has been all about die rolls. Die rolls to do this, do that, almost anything you can think of besides taking a shit. Anytime you roll for something, you are putting your fate in the hands of random chance. Over time, the game has removed agency from both DM and player, and subordinated it to the whims of fate. Players seem to have a gleeful time constantly shooting craps for their characters fate. The deadliness of OD&D combat was a feature not a bug, and very few appear to realize that. In the same way that thief skill chances were misunderstood and implemented ( because they were poorly communicated in the rules), they were taken as a hard measure of even attempting any of the described activities. The intent was that nearly anyone could attempt to be stealthy and possibly succeed based on how intelligent their attempt was. The thief skills table was designed as a saving throw mechanic for these specialists to succeed even when their careful plan was thwarted because they were that good. After all, it isn't as if stealth operations were absent from the game when there were only three classes. The communication mistake was made because the popularity of D&D beyond the relatively small wargaming community was very unexpected. Things that the designers assumed everybody knew were incorrect once the game left that wargaming community.

So, returning to the original topic, the game has moved further from clever decision making by the players being the largest determinate measure of success to an ever increasing reliance on the whims of fate due to encounter focused design. A great cinematic representation of this can be seen in the movie Heartbreak Ridge. The platoon tells gunny Highway that their current location is THE ambush spot, to which gunny replies "who the fuck says we are going to ambush them here?" This kind of illustrates the difference of clever play vs the adventuring environment and encounter based design.

Quote from: jhkim on June 13, 2023, 05:23:30 PM

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 13, 2023, 04:27:14 PM
Any kind of non-attacking skill test or challenge will never be more effective than degrading the enemies' hit points via attacks, and will often be much less efficient.  So, how do I come to this conclusion?  Well, let's look at combat tests from probably two of the most popular game systems right now: D&D 5e and SWADE.  In 5e, a player may perform a "help" action, which gives the helped creature advantage on the next attack roll against the chosen creature.  In SWADE, a character may use the support action (resulting in a +1 or +2 bonus to a fighting roll for an ally) or perform a test, which results in either a distracted or vulnerable (-2 or +2 respectively to opponents' rolls or allies' rolls) with the possibility to make the target shaken on a raise.

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 13, 2023, 04:27:14 PM
I'll note that a similar argument has been proffered previously by many folks when it comes to damage or healing.  Generally speaking, healing is less efficient than doing damage, as it spends resources without reducing the threat or capacities of the enemy.  The best healing is the healing that revives or keeps a character in the fight, as it preserves damage output and shortens the fight.

In my experience of 5E, though, healing is vital. Obviously, the best healing should be tactically applied rather than randomly

Please explain "tactically".  I would argue that healing is very powerful after an encounter, but worthless during the encounter unless it is necessary to keep a character in combat.  So any healing that occurs that heals the character so that they have more than 1 hit point at the end is wasted (in terms of that particular encounter.  In terms of the overall adventure, especially if it restricts resting, it might be more important for the next encounter, but that's not the topic at hand).

Quote from: Zalman on June 13, 2023, 05:30:08 PM

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 13, 2023, 04:27:14 PM

• I am focusing on the most efficient resolution of fights

...
So that leaves killing/rendering unconscious due to damage as the primary goal.  And tests suck at this.

Eh, no, tests don't suck at this, skills do, simply because there isn't a skill that kills or renders your opponent unconscious. If there were, a "test" for it would be perfectly good at ending fights. Attribute tests are just informalized "skill" rolls.

Honestly, this whole thing seems like a giant strawman. Attribute tests are designed for things other than combat-ending tactics.

Except, many of the recent, popular RPGs include a "test" or "help" action directly in the rules as an option.  I'm trying to find out if they are actually useful outside of edge cases.  So I don't see how quoting the rules directly is a "straw man".

Quote from: Eric Diaz on June 13, 2023, 05:30:50 PM
Well, with actual examples, it is hard to judge, but I agree that in the confines of "assuming enemy combatants are equal or greater in number than the player characters" it is true MOST OF THE TIMES.

There are still cases (in 5e) in which giving adv is more useful than attacking. Say, against a foe that in unharmed by nonmagical weapons if you don't have one.

Also, if you're helping a paladin with a holy avenger to get a crit, or helping a rogue, etc. This would require a high AC and a tough monster in general, which is rare if "assuming enemy combatants are equal or greater in number than the player characters".

It seems you're assuming all PCs to have similar damage output which isn't necessarily true, especially against monsters with some resistance - or worse, immunities!

Also, depending on the game, a skill might let you FIND OUT if the monster has a weakness etc.

These are good points.  Especially the finding monster weaknesses one.  That would make a good "test" to include in a ruleset.  But the generic "help" action still seems to be wanting...

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on June 13, 2023, 06:22:34 PM
If I understand the parameters correctly, the first counter example that springs to mind is a well-timed intimidate. Depending on the system, that could be part of a skill and/or attribute test.

A third of the enemy orcs are dead.  Your buddy with the great axe has just lopped of one's head. The GM narrates that the orcs flinch as the head goes bouncing through the ranks.  You step up next to your buddy with your sword poised and ask, "Who wants to be next?"  If the GM calls for a test, and another third of the orcs run, then that's more fled than your attack was likely going to kill. 

Granted, it depends on how the GM runs it, and whether there is such a skill supported.

I agree.  What you've described would be a good use of a skill to shorten combat.  But, outside of personal/homebrew systems, I just can't see much support for it.  It's not in 5e or SWADE, as far as I can tell (neither listed as options or illustrated in examples of combat).  All they have are "help" actions that give small bonuses to attack for other party members.  Which seems quite useless...

Quote from: Theory of Games on June 13, 2023, 07:19:15 PM
That's incorrect in terms of how intimidation works in most games that have that skill available for characters. It's literally creating fear in a target, which done successfully means the foe flees, or at least backs off.

OK, which games are those?  One of my questions in the OP was for games that did these actions correctly.  Which ones boil into the combat (with mechanics or examples) those usages of skills)?  I'm looking for a rulebook that I can hand to a brand new player or GM that will encourage this kind of skill use.  Otherwise, your advice is "be a more experienced GM," which isn't necessarily helpful to the kids I'm trying to bring into the hobby...

Quote from: Zelen on June 13, 2023, 08:52:49 PM
I think the most general answer to this type of question is in how it relates to the action economy.

If your PCs are facing more powerful foes, the opposing side usually has fewer actions than the PCs. In this case, damaging is less important than denying them actions.

If your PCs are facing less powerful foes, the opposing side usually has more actions than the PCs. In this case, damaging is more effective than denying them actions.

That's kind of where I was in interpreting the situation.  When the enemies outnumber the players, reducing the size/capabilities of the enemy force seems to be the most optimal.

Quote from: Old Aegidius on June 14, 2023, 04:07:27 AM
The best action in most turn-based games irrespective of the details (and even real life) is to either improve your action economy faster than the opposition can, or hinder the action economy of the biggest threats in the opposing force faster than they can respond. Or both, if you can achieve it. Of course, a dead enemy has the worst imaginable action economy. So unless the details of the game make it worth debilitating the enemy, simply burning the opposition's HP down as fast as possible will also happen to be the best option for destroying the opposition's action economy.

Just allowing characters to give each other a small bonuses by helping with a skill or attribute test by comparison is almost never viable, I'd agree. Some people said it best earlier in the thread though: there are exceptions when it's so risky and pointless for your character to try to do direct damage that you're better off just pumping up an ally who has better odds. That can be really unfun too though, if that's a regular occurrence.

To prevent direct damage from being the best way to approach a combat, I think you need to either:

• Tune the math so it's sometimes more risky to go for direct damage than to help an ally who has better odds.
• There are too many opponents or they may arrive in unpredictable order/waves so you can't just nova the enemy to death.
• The enemy that is least-likely to be killed with direct damage is also the one that represents the most active and dangerous enemy in the opposing force (like a dragon).

It helps if debilitating conditions also enable more effective basic actions on those debilitated targets. It's gamey, but something like a mark that can be exploited by different powers can make certain combinations of powers or certain tactics more beneficial from time to time.

I agree with all off this.  I find it interesting that few games (at least to my knowledge) take this into account in their mechanics...

Quote from: rhialto on June 14, 2023, 09:13:06 AM

Quote from: warwell on June 14, 2023, 08:33:49 AM
I wonder if a system could allow the player making a successful defensive action a chance to immediately add an attack.

Harnmaster does this with the "Counterstrike" defense (though on equal levels of success both combatants hit each other). Stormbringer/Elric! allow for ripostes on a critical parry when using weapon + shield or two weapons. There are probably other such systems.

Worth looking into (I haven't played Stormbringer since it came out; time to reread).  Thanks!

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 14, 2023, 10:29:19 AM

Quote from: jhkim on June 13, 2023, 05:23:30 PM

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 13, 2023, 04:27:14 PM
I'll note that a similar argument has been proffered previously by many folks when it comes to damage or healing.  Generally speaking, healing is less efficient than doing damage, as it spends resources without reducing the threat or capacities of the enemy.  The best healing is the healing that revives or keeps a character in the fight, as it preserves damage output and shortens the fight.

In my experience of 5E, though, healing is vital. Obviously, the best healing should be tactically applied rather than randomly

Please explain "tactically".  I would argue that healing is very powerful after an encounter, but worthless during the encounter unless it is necessary to keep a character in combat.  So any healing that occurs that heals the character so that they have more than 1 hit point at the end is wasted (in terms of that particular encounter.  In terms of the overall adventure, especially if it restricts resting, it might be more important for the next encounter, but that's not the topic at hand).

In my experience, serious fights in 5E will bring at least one character down to zero hit points. If no one is in danger of going to zero, then the fight isn't threatening. This might be a difference in how the DM handles enemy tactics. Unless they are mindless, I usually have my enemies behave tactically. They focus on taking down one PC at a time, just as PCs usually focus on taking down one enemy at a time. That means that the PC under assault goes down quickly, so keeping them in the fight is vital.

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 14, 2023, 10:29:19 AM

Quote from: jhkim on June 13, 2023, 05:23:30 PM

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 13, 2023, 04:27:14 PM
Any kind of non-attacking skill test or challenge will never be more effective than degrading the enemies' hit points via attacks, and will often be much less efficient.  So, how do I come to this conclusion?  Well, let's look at combat tests from probably two of the most popular game systems right now: D&D 5e and SWADE.  In 5e, a player may perform a "help" action, which gives the helped creature advantage on the next attack roll against the chosen creature.  In SWADE, a character may use the support action (resulting in a +1 or +2 bonus to a fighting roll for an ally) or perform a test, which results in either a distracted or vulnerable (-2 or +2 respectively to opponents' rolls or allies' rolls) with the possibility to make the target shaken on a raise.

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 13, 2023, 04:27:14 PM
I'll note that a similar argument has been proffered previously by many folks when it comes to damage or healing.  Generally speaking, healing is less efficient than doing damage, as it spends resources without reducing the threat or capacities of the enemy.  The best healing is the healing that revives or keeps a character in the fight, as it preserves damage output and shortens the fight.

In my experience of 5E, though, healing is vital. Obviously, the best healing should be tactically applied rather than randomly

Please explain "tactically".  I would argue that healing is very powerful after an encounter, but worthless during the encounter unless it is necessary to keep a character in combat.  So any healing that occurs that heals the character so that they have more than 1 hit point at the end is wasted (in terms of that particular encounter.  In terms of the overall adventure, especially if it restricts resting, it might be more important for the next encounter, but that's not the topic at hand).

I mean yeah, getting folks up is pretty big in 5e, even with healing being weaker than say in 3.5 I'd argue due to not only the short/long rest paradigm but also just it not keeping up with damage and status effects/buffs/etcetera and the like usually (I do say usually, we'll get back to that). Healing Word is amazing. Also Lay on Hands because getting them to 1 hp is so damn cheap. But there are also instances like, well, Lay on Hands dumps where you can heal 5 hp per level in a single action. That can oftentimes outpace damage, and add security or even just plausibility to your side's chance of victory. Or mass heal healing pools ala Life Cleric or mass per turn Temp HP buffs like Twilight Cleric Domain's Channel Divinity (*Cough* Broken *Cough*). These can matter. Heck, even healing that can't keep up with damage can matter if it's the difference between somebody going down in one turn or in two. Better to waste a turn for the opponent(s) and give your friend that extra turn. Also healing paired with friendly damage mitigation through AC, resistances, high saves and the like can I feel be bigger than it is in a vacuum. Much like how straight DPR is usually stronger with vulnerability or the like than if the enemies are resistant to what you have or harder to damage. Healing almost always works, but attack damage is often gated behind rolls and contingencies.

Other games sometimes have similar mechanical importance to healing, I guess. Self-healing is big in VTM, which I have to admit I have indeed played. (Unrelated, I actually like the idea of dice pools because the better you are at something the more consistent your performance and typically the less chance you have of screwing up. Also you can more reliably differentiate between how many successes somebody of a given skill and attribute level can put out than in instances where a single D20 roll leads to much greater variation, which I think is helpful for DM difficulty arbitration and verisimilitude at times.) Also, healing can combine with defense in a lot of systems to become more than it would otherwise be, and full defensive actions can be pretty optimal in games of the White Wolf kind especially where self-healing, resource expenditure and the like is big. (Their company has gone off the deep end even more so than originally, tho, so I wouldn't necessarily recommend buying their stuff. Good mechanics at times, but I don't like the politics.) Though Exalted 2e gives a good example of where sometimes defense alone can be optimal and fights where the only goal is to kill can occasionally become wars of attrition if played smart, with everything ending in one or two hits and faster than healing would typically matter outside very specialized soak/heal builds.

There's also just more generally preventing folks from bleeding out via ability and skill checks. Like Heal/Medicine. That can determine degree of victory/perceived loss in a fight, so I feel like it can matter. One might not care whether they took down minion 5 on round 7 or 8, but they will almost certainly remember losing their buddy or escort target.

Some healing systems also rely on skill checks to determine whether you can medic somebody back into the fight, like some PbtA systems. So there investment can matter to healing's potential relevance to action economy and the like as you note.

Also healing in things like D&D can remove crippling debuffs that either remove you from a fight, or dramatically reduce your effectiveness. So it can be good as a counterplay to save or sucks.

Well, I have some other stuff I might say, but I think this is most of it with respect to healing.

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 14, 2023, 10:31:34 AM

Quote from: Zalman on June 13, 2023, 05:30:08 PM

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 13, 2023, 04:27:14 PM

• I am focusing on the most efficient resolution of fights

...
So that leaves killing/rendering unconscious due to damage as the primary goal.  And tests suck at this.

Eh, no, tests don't suck at this, skills do, simply because there isn't a skill that kills or renders your opponent unconscious. If there were, a "test" for it would be perfectly good at ending fights. Attribute tests are just informalized "skill" rolls.

Honestly, this whole thing seems like a giant strawman. Attribute tests are designed for things other than combat-ending tactics.

Except, many of the recent, popular RPGs include a "test" or "help" action directly in the rules as an option.  I'm trying to find out if they are actually useful outside of edge cases.  So I don't see how quoting the rules directly is a "straw man".

I don't think it's a strawman. That said, "killing/rendering unconscious due to damage" may be shifting the argument a bit tho.

There are lots of attacks that aim to cripple or take an opponent out of a fight entirely without any hp damage, or even without referencing hp unlike killing word. Basically the entire save or suck paradigm.

There are also debuffs that may or may not count as attacks in that they are guaranteed to land and don't do damage so much as prevent damage, or in the case of stuff like Faerie Fire allow allies to do more damage or hit more frequently or whatever.

Also, there are attacks like grapple/shove/feint/whatever that test skills to screw over an enemy in ways that can be advantageous. Like, you can grapple drag to mess with positioning and exploit the environment in 5e, or in 3.5e just grapple to force them to focus fire on a tank that wasn't a huge threat damage-wise but will suck to attack. Grapple shove is also a big one in 5e, in that you can give all allies and yourself advantage on all attacks until they break the grapple and stand up. There's also shoving off of cliffs, ranged shoves via things like echo knight, and blah. Feinting is also fun if the action economy is cheap or if you're fighting a solidly defended foe or sacrificing accuracy for power on your main attack, or just really need a limited ability or whatever from yourself or an ally to land. Feats like Silver Tongued in 5e also show how feints reliant on skill checks can be used for kiting or a disengage in addition to accuracy boosting, and plenty of other systems allow their use defensively. Heck, mounted combat often involves ride checks in systems like Wheel of Time and certain D&D editions, and that can actually be pretty big to a mounted build.

Also a lot of systems don't segregate skills and combat so you wind up having to use your skill check bonuses and/or dice pools to attack.

So I guess what I mean to say is that attacks aren't always just about hp damage, and moreover there are attacks that meaningfully use skill checks.

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 14, 2023, 10:46:44 AM

Quote from: rhialto on June 14, 2023, 09:13:06 AM

Quote from: warwell on June 14, 2023, 08:33:49 AM
I wonder if a system could allow the player making a successful defensive action a chance to immediately add an attack.

Harnmaster does this with the "Counterstrike" defense (though on equal levels of success both combatants hit each other). Stormbringer/Elric! allow for ripostes on a critical parry when using weapon + shield or two weapons. There are probably other such systems.

Worth looking into (I haven't played Stormbringer since it came out; time to reread).  Thanks!

Harnmaster is great and I love how Counterstrike can make any attack without adequate speed or personal defensive capabilities a gamble if the foe is crazy/determined enough. Not least because injuries matter in Harn bigtime.

Also, much though I don't necessarily agree with all of this thread's premise, I have to admit this is a pretty awesome thread conversation topic and it really got me to thinking.

Here's how I've seen the idea handled slightly differently:

-Mythic: you're rolling repeatedly for "Do I go next? Do I hit?" and then "Do I do damage?", but since it's all about asking questions, you could follow up "Do I go next?" with a different question like "Can I trip him?"
-Ironsworn: in combat there's a status of you having "the advantage" or not, so that simply taking the "hit a guy" move is non-optimal unless you can take and keep advantage. Because it doesn't work with turns, the option to take some other action like casting a spell or moving to high ground doesn't waste a turn and give the enemy an un-answered attack on you. So, actions other than straight attacking might be efficient.
-Open Legend: failed attacks still give you some small benefit like slight damage, pushing an enemy, or boosting an ally's attack, so that attacking with less than full force might be worthwhile.
-Worlds Without Number: prominent rules about morale, instinct, and reaction rolls mean that intimidation and negotiation should play a major part in how a battle plays out. A scary or even just confusing action should be able to force NPCs to do something non-optimal, and this is more effective than hitting a guy sometimes.

TBH, I don't know if it's a problem with 5e core, how it's presented, or if modern players are just missing something.  Fighting isn't necessarily how you handle every encounter.  If you don't have the debate periodically about whether to negotiate, sneak around, or fight when coming across a new creature, you're missing a large part of D&D dungeon crawling experience.  I think at least part of the problem is that PCs are so hard to kill that players develop the mentality of "shoot first, ask questions later."  It's sad to see gaming degenerated so badly.

In the old days, not everything you met in the dungeon was a mindless attack zombie.  Sure, it might be but it could be a greedy little SOB that will be happy to show you the secret door for a silver coin.  That dragon could be evil or he could be just a sweet good boy doggy with a really bad case of mange.

Quote from: BadApple on June 14, 2023, 05:35:42 PM
TBH, I don't know if it's a problem with 5e core, how it's presented, or if modern players are just missing something.  Fighting isn't necessarily how you handle every encounter.  If you don't have the debate periodically about whether to negotiate, sneak around, or fight when coming across a new creature, you're missing a large part of D&D dungeon crawling experience.  I think at least part of the problem is that PCs are so hard to kill that players develop the mentality of "shoot first, ask questions later."  It's sad to see gaming degenerated so badly.

Good point.

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 14, 2023, 10:41:41 AM

Quote from: Theory of Games on June 13, 2023, 07:19:15 PM
That's incorrect in terms of how intimidation works in most games that have that skill available for characters. It's literally creating fear in a target, which done successfully means the foe flees, or at least backs off.

OK, which games are those?  One of my questions in the OP was for games that did these actions correctly.  Which ones boil into the combat (with mechanics or examples) those usages of skills)?  I'm looking for a rulebook that I can hand to a brand new player or GM that will encourage this kind of skill use.  Otherwise, your advice is "be a more experienced GM," which isn't necessarily helpful to the kids I'm trying to bring into the hobby...

D&D Rules Cyclopedia: "Intimidation: This is the ability to bully nonplayer characters into doing what the player
character wants them to do. Success means that NPCs are intimidated into doing what the character wants."

The WoTC Game (5e): "Intimidation. When you attempt to influence someone through overt threats, hostile actions, and physical violence, the GM might ask you to make a Charisma (Intimidation) check. Examples include trying to pry information out of a prisoner, convincing street thugs to back down from a confrontation, or using the edge of a broken bottle to convince a sneering vizier to reconsider a decision."

Mutants & Masterminds: "Make an Intimidation check, opposed by the target's insight or Will defense (whichever has the highest bonus). If your check succeeds, you may treat the target as friendly, but only for actions taken in your presence. That is, the target retains his normal attitude, but will talk, advise, offer limited help, or advocate on your behalf while intimidated. The target cooperates, but won't necessarily obey your every whim or do anything that would directly endanger him."

GURPS: "The results of a successful Intimidation attempt depend on the target. An honest citizen probably cooperates, sullenly or with false cheer. A low-life might lick your boots (even becoming genuinely loyal). A really tough sort might react well without being frightened: "You're my kind of scum!" The GM decides, and roleplays it. If you rolled a critical success – or if the subject critically failed his Will roll – your victim must make a Fright Check in addition to the other results of the Influence roll!"

Shadowrun: "Intimidation is about creating the impression that you are more menacing than another person in order to get them to do what you want. The skill may be applied multiple ways, from negotiation to interrogation"

Call of Cthulhu: "Intimidate - The use of threats (physical or psychological) to compel someone to act or reveal information"

Blades in the Dark: "When you Command, you compel swift obedience. You might intimidate or threaten to get what you want. You might lead a gang in a group action. You could try to order people around to persuade them (but Consorting might be better)."

Savage Pathfinder: "Intimidation is the art of frightening an opponent so that he backs down, reveals information, or flees"

Whew! My hands are getting tired from listing all these games  ::) This is just some of them, of course. In the OP you stated your 'hypothesis' as "Any kind of non-attacking skill test or challenge will never be more effective than degrading the enemies' hit points via attacks, and will often be much less efficient." I've used Intimidation in-character to run off characters in ONE ROUND. How long does it take to 'degrade the enemies hit points'?  ;D

Quote from: BadApple on June 14, 2023, 05:35:42 PM
TBH, I don't know if it's a problem with 5e core, how it's presented, or if modern players are just missing something.  Fighting isn't necessarily how you handle every encounter.  If you don't have the debate periodically about whether to negotiate, sneak around, or fight when coming across a new creature, you're missing a large part of D&D dungeon crawling experience.  I think at least part of the problem is that PCs are so hard to kill that players develop the mentality of "shoot first, ask questions later."  It's sad to see gaming degenerated so badly.

In the old days, not everything you met in the dungeon was a mindless attack zombie.  Sure, it might be but it could be a greedy little SOB that will be happy to show you the secret door for a silver coin.  That dragon could be evil or he could be just a sweet good boy doggy with a really bad case of mange.

My own experience suggests that players tend to feed back the energy they get from their DM. If a DM is animated and descriptive, they are likely to roleplay more. If a DM is dry and clinical, they are likely to approach the campaign as a tactical skirmish game. Etc. etc. I've observed the same players play radically differently in different campaigns, just based on a different style of DM-ing, and the same applies to whether they shoot-first or talk-first. I've even seen players switch from one approach to the other over the course of a campaign, as they realized whichever approach they started with wasn't being reciprocated.

All of this is to say that to the extent 5e players are more mindlessly violent than players of other editions (and I'm not sure they are) a likely culprit would be in the DM-ing style that game encourages.

Personally, I'd point the finger at the "adventuring day" concept and the generally attrition-based design of D&D. This has kind of always been a problem in D&D, but 5e characters are particularly designed to be very unlikely to be killed in their first encounter after resting. That design choice practically forces DMs to increase the number of mandatory combats in each adventure, if they want to give their players a reasonable challenge.  If I'm right about that, and players pick up on it, they will quickly start playing the odds and assuming every encounter is likely to be a violent one.

Quote from: ForgottenF on June 14, 2023, 07:42:13 PM

Quote from: BadApple on June 14, 2023, 05:35:42 PM
TBH, I don't know if it's a problem with 5e core, how it's presented, or if modern players are just missing something.  Fighting isn't necessarily how you handle every encounter.  If you don't have the debate periodically about whether to negotiate, sneak around, or fight when coming across a new creature, you're missing a large part of D&D dungeon crawling experience.  I think at least part of the problem is that PCs are so hard to kill that players develop the mentality of "shoot first, ask questions later."  It's sad to see gaming degenerated so badly.

In the old days, not everything you met in the dungeon was a mindless attack zombie.  Sure, it might be but it could be a greedy little SOB that will be happy to show you the secret door for a silver coin.  That dragon could be evil or he could be just a sweet good boy doggy with a really bad case of mange.

My own experience suggests that players tend to feed back the energy they get from their DM. If a DM is animated and descriptive, they are likely to roleplay more. If a DM is dry and clinical, they are likely to approach the campaign as a tactical skirmish game. Etc. etc. I've observed the same players play radically differently in different campaigns, just based on a different style of DM-ing, and the same applies to whether they shoot-first or talk-first. I've even seen players switch from one approach to the other over the course of a campaign, as they realized whichever approach they started with wasn't being reciprocated.

All of this is to say that to the extent 5e players are more mindlessly violent than players of other editions (and I'm not sure they are) a likely culprit would be in the DM-ing style that game encourages.

Personally, I'd point the finger at the "adventuring day" concept and the generally attrition-based design of D&D. This has kind of always been a problem in D&D, but 5e characters are particularly designed to be very unlikely to be killed in their first encounter after resting. That design choice practically forces DMs to increase the number of mandatory combats in each adventure, if they want to give their players a reasonable challenge.  If I'm right about that, and players pick up on it, they will quickly start playing the odds and assuming every encounter is likely to be a violent one.

That brings up two points:

1) As the GM, describe what the PCs are seeing. Not "four bandits" but "four tough-looking men sitting around the intersection and gambling". Description, especially including what the enemies are doing besides waiting to be killed, might help signal that other options are possible.

2) Limited healing can make players be more cautious. 4E D&D did that with "healing surges". Worlds/Stars Without Number has "system strain" that says no more healing beyond X limit, slowly recovering per day.

KrisSnow and ForgottenF,  Those are both perspectives worth looking at.  Like I said, IDK where it comes from but the kill first attitude is the reason why OP thinks skills are useless. 

Going forward, there needs to be a real effort to develop a full experience rather than fighting with interludes.  A GM problem, a game design problem?  IDK, but I don't like it because it robs everyone of a more complete and entertaining experience.

Quote from: BadApple on June 14, 2023, 05:35:42 PM
TBH, I don't know if it's a problem with 5e core, how it's presented, or if modern players are just missing something.  Fighting isn't necessarily how you handle every encounter.  If you don't have the debate periodically about whether to negotiate, sneak around, or fight when coming across a new creature, you're missing a large part of D&D dungeon crawling experience.  I think at least part of the problem is that PCs are so hard to kill that players develop the mentality of "shoot first, ask questions later."  It's sad to see gaming degenerated so badly.

In the old days, not everything you met in the dungeon was a mindless attack zombie.  Sure, it might be but it could be a greedy little SOB that will be happy to show you the secret door for a silver coin.  That dragon could be evil or he could be just a sweet good boy doggy with a really bad case of mange.

The vast majority of players these days never had experience with the original game. Most of us who have are dinosaurs now. They are used to all encounters being winnable just by kicking ass. The common D&D memes of kill, loot, profit are ingrained in the collective gamer consciousness. A big driver of this shift happened once acquiring treasure for xp was discarded. Encounter based xp encourages killing all that you can to rack up xp. That mentality is why when introducing players to an OSR style game, who have only played modern editions, they chew through characters complaining all the while that the game sucks because they try to bum rush everything that they encounter while simultaneously bitching that they don't have enough buttons to push on their character sheets. You can always spot an indoctrinated modern system gamer as a DM when you simply ask "what do you do?" and they gaze down at their character sheet as if they were perusing a menu in a restaurant. Hell I often do the same thing myself when playing newer systems because they condition you to choose menu options, because quite often these options are the only thing that has a chance of changing the situation. The system is so hung up on needing a die roll for everything that the DM will not be likely to know how to process an off menu option and will quickly equate it to one of the available options and call for a roll. That is the heart of the issue. The whole combat options dilemma stems from this. Combat encounters are designed to use up X amount of resources depending on difficulty. This is tied to the concept of the adventuring day. Clever solutions that neutralize the enemy or otherwise end the designed resource draining conflict that do not require these finite resources are eliminated. The rules enforce this. It is quite easy to prove. Show me a condition in 5E that prevents a target from attacking other than being knocked out (hit points ground to zero) or disable by a resource draining magical attack. Even being restrained doesn't prevent attacks, the target simply cannot move. This is due to the action economy structure that dictates that nothing short of the expenditure of limited magical resources can take a target out of action with the possible exception of intimidation if the target is subject to it. The whole concept of morale has been discarded from the core rules. Morale is a lifesaver in older versions of the game. Undead were super scary because they were terminators who would not stop unless successfully turned by a cleric. In the modern versions by the rules every creature is a terminator unless a specific effort is made to intimidate it. Joe the goblin along with his buddies Mack, Slim, Bob, and Jack roll up on some adventurers and decide that they are going to kick ass. In 5E if no specific action is taken to intimidate them, Mack, Slim, Bob, and Jack could be wiped out in round one and Joe would keep plugging away as if had a chance unless someone using their action intimidates him. At that point the party is winning handily so why bother. In an OSR game if three of them went down right away or if any of them were killed and failed to inflict any harm on the party they would need to check morale to carry on the fight. Getting their asses kicked was incentive enough to flee without deliberate PC initiation of an action. The whole kill everything protocol was also helped along by DMs who didn't award full xp for creatures that were not actually slain, meaning that running off opponents resulted in less xp thus the bloodthirsty habits.

Ok dinosaur ramble over.

Quote from: Theory of Games on June 14, 2023, 07:29:02 PM

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 14, 2023, 10:41:41 AM

Quote from: Theory of Games on June 13, 2023, 07:19:15 PM
That's incorrect in terms of how intimidation works in most games that have that skill available for characters. It's literally creating fear in a target, which done successfully means the foe flees, or at least backs off.

OK, which games are those?  One of my questions in the OP was for games that did these actions correctly.  Which ones boil into the combat (with mechanics or examples) those usages of skills)?  I'm looking for a rulebook that I can hand to a brand new player or GM that will encourage this kind of skill use.  Otherwise, your advice is "be a more experienced GM," which isn't necessarily helpful to the kids I'm trying to bring into the hobby...

D&D Rules Cyclopedia: "Intimidation: This is the ability to bully nonplayer characters into doing what the player
character wants them to do. Success means that NPCs are intimidated into doing what the character wants."

The WoTC Game (5e): "Intimidation. When you attempt to influence someone through overt threats, hostile actions, and physical violence, the GM might ask you to make a Charisma (Intimidation) check. Examples include trying to pry information out of a prisoner, convincing street thugs to back down from a confrontation, or using the edge of a broken bottle to convince a sneering vizier to reconsider a decision."

Mutants & Masterminds: "Make an Intimidation check, opposed by the target's insight or Will defense (whichever has the highest bonus). If your check succeeds, you may treat the target as friendly, but only for actions taken in your presence. That is, the target retains his normal attitude, but will talk, advise, offer limited help, or advocate on your behalf while intimidated. The target cooperates, but won't necessarily obey your every whim or do anything that would directly endanger him."

GURPS: "The results of a successful Intimidation attempt depend on the target. An honest citizen probably cooperates, sullenly or with false cheer. A low-life might lick your boots (even becoming genuinely loyal). A really tough sort might react well without being frightened: "You're my kind of scum!" The GM decides, and roleplays it. If you rolled a critical success – or if the subject critically failed his Will roll – your victim must make a Fright Check in addition to the other results of the Influence roll!"

Shadowrun: "Intimidation is about creating the impression that you are more menacing than another person in order to get them to do what you want. The skill may be applied multiple ways, from negotiation to interrogation"

Call of Cthulhu: "Intimidate - The use of threats (physical or psychological) to compel someone to act or reveal information"

Blades in the Dark: "When you Command, you compel swift obedience. You might intimidate or threaten to get what you want. You might lead a gang in a group action. You could try to order people around to persuade them (but Consorting might be better)."

Savage Pathfinder: "Intimidation is the art of frightening an opponent so that he backs down, reveals information, or flees"

Whew! My hands are getting tired from listing all these games  ::) This is just some of them, of course. In the OP you stated your 'hypothesis' as "Any kind of non-attacking skill test or challenge will never be more effective than degrading the enemies' hit points via attacks, and will often be much less efficient." I've used Intimidation in-character to run off characters in ONE ROUND. How long does it take to 'degrade the enemies hit points'?  ;D

So, do you have anything else for the actual point of this thread?  Sure, games will have Intimidate (though whether or not that works in combat is much more DM dependent ... some games will handle it via morale), but not all of those examples you posted directly refer to combat.  So, just like grappling or tripping, you've provided a specific skill that is game dependent, but you haven't addressed the other part of my question.

But note that I specified in the examples the "help" or support actions.  That's what I asked for evidence of games that handle this better.  You've supplied one skill.  So if I don't take intimidation, then what?  Are there any "help" action mechanics that are useful?  Any "giving aid to a friend" mechanics better than attacking?

Quote from: Exploderwizard on June 14, 2023, 09:47:13 PM

Quote from: BadApple on June 14, 2023, 05:35:42 PM
TBH, I don't know if it's a problem with 5e core, how it's presented, or if modern players are just missing something.  Fighting isn't necessarily how you handle every encounter.  If you don't have the debate periodically about whether to negotiate, sneak around, or fight when coming across a new creature, you're missing a large part of D&D dungeon crawling experience.  I think at least part of the problem is that PCs are so hard to kill that players develop the mentality of "shoot first, ask questions later."  It's sad to see gaming degenerated so badly.

In the old days, not everything you met in the dungeon was a mindless attack zombie.  Sure, it might be but it could be a greedy little SOB that will be happy to show you the secret door for a silver coin.  That dragon could be evil or he could be just a sweet good boy doggy with a really bad case of mange.

The vast majority of players these days never had experience with the original game. Most of us who have are dinosaurs now. They are used to all encounters being winnable just by kicking ass. The common D&D memes of kill, loot, profit are ingrained in the collective gamer consciousness. A big driver of this shift happened once acquiring treasure for xp was discarded. Encounter based xp encourages killing all that you can to rack up xp. That mentality is why when introducing players to an OSR style game, who have only played modern editions, they chew through characters complaining all the while that the game sucks because they try to bum rush everything that they encounter while simultaneously bitching that they don't have enough buttons to push on their character sheets. You can always spot an indoctrinated modern system gamer as a DM when you simply ask "what do you do?" and they gaze down at their character sheet as if they were perusing a menu in a restaurant. Hell I often do the same thing myself when playing newer systems because they condition you to choose menu options, because quite often these options are the only thing that has a chance of changing the situation. The system is so hung up on needing a die roll for everything that the DM will not be likely to know how to process an off menu option and will quickly equate it to one of the available options and call for a roll. That is the heart of the issue. The whole combat options dilemma stems from this. Combat encounters are designed to use up X amount of resources depending on difficulty. This is tied to the concept of the adventuring day. Clever solutions that neutralize the enemy or otherwise end the designed resource draining conflict that do not require these finite resources are eliminated. The rules enforce this. It is quite easy to prove. Show me a condition in 5E that prevents a target from attacking other than being knocked out (hit points ground to zero) or disable by a resource draining magical attack. Even being restrained doesn't prevent attacks, the target simply cannot move. This is due to the action economy structure that dictates that nothing short of the expenditure of limited magical resources can take a target out of action with the possible exception of intimidation if the target is subject to it. The whole concept of morale has been discarded from the core rules. Morale is a lifesaver in older versions of the game. Undead were super scary because they were terminators who would not stop unless successfully turned by a cleric. In the modern versions by the rules every creature is a terminator unless a specific effort is made to intimidate it. Joe the goblin along with his buddies Mack, Slim, Bob, and Jack roll up on some adventurers and decide that they are going to kick ass. In 5E if no specific action is taken to intimidate them, Mack, Slim, Bob, and Jack could be wiped out in round one and Joe would keep plugging away as if had a chance unless someone using their action intimidates him. At that point the party is winning handily so why bother. In an OSR game if three of them went down right away or if any of them were killed and failed to inflict any harm on the party they would need to check morale to carry on the fight. Getting their asses kicked was incentive enough to flee without deliberate PC initiation of an action. The whole kill everything protocol was also helped along by DMs who didn't award full xp for creatures that were not actually slain, meaning that running off opponents resulted in less xp thus the bloodthirsty habits.

Ok dinosaur ramble over.

You've raised a really good set of points in the last couple of posts.  When the game was focused on a majority of experience via treasure, the optimal process was gaining loot by avoiding combat.  Now combat has become a central expectation of progression, to the point where some DMs will even award less than full experience for an enemy that is bypassed or that flees.  So combat utility has taken on an outsized importance.  Because of this, performance in combat and optimization in combat have taken on an importance they didn't have in earlier iterations of the game.  Definitely food for thought...

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 14, 2023, 10:31:57 PM
You've raised a really good set of points in the last couple of posts.  When the game was focused on a majority of experience via treasure, the optimal process was gaining loot by avoiding combat.  Now combat has become a central expectation of progression, to the point where some DMs will even award less than full experience for an enemy that is bypassed or that flees.  So combat utility has taken on an outsized importance.  Because of this, performance in combat and optimization in combat have taken on an importance they didn't have in earlier iterations of the game.  Definitely food for thought...

I really do hope you start seeing the game play you really want.  Combat is best when it's meaningful, rare, and intense.  I personally don't reward players for killing monsters unless it's a job item.

If you're not the GM of your group, then do some one shots for your regular table.  Get some adventures that focus on investigation and diplomacy.  Set goals for XP like "completed quest" or "found lost girl" instead of "killed things."  Two adventures that worked well for me in this regard are Thicker Than Blood/Atlas Games/Cyberpunk 2020 and Murder on Arcturus Station/GDW/Classic Traveller.  (They are easily adapted to any system.)

Finally, even if your table is stuck in the murder hobo way of playing, you can adjust it by simply running a "The Witcher" type game.  They have to get a bounty on a monster before any reward will be given.  They need to find out what they are up against based on clues.  They have to find the monster.  They have to find the monster's weakness.  Any collateral damage results in losses from reduced payouts to full on getting chased by law enforcement.

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 14, 2023, 10:31:57 PM


You've raised a really good set of points in the last couple of posts.  When the game was focused on a majority of experience via treasure, the optimal process was gaining loot by avoiding combat.  Now combat has become a central expectation of progression, to the point where some DMs will even award less than full experience for an enemy that is bypassed or that flees.  So combat utility has taken on an outsized importance.  Because of this, performance in combat and optimization in combat have taken on an importance they didn't have in earlier iterations of the game.  Definitely food for thought...

This progression can be most easily tracked by the evolution of the thief. Originally the class was an exploration specialist that was relatively weak in combat. Now it is a full blown dps class that out performs the fighter in all ways except the number of hits the character can absorb. Especially in 3E where the rogue could flank and do damage that would put any fighter to shame if the opponent was subject to sneak attack. In 5E they even got rid of classes of opponents that are immune to sneak attack although they did limit the ability to sneak attack more than once per turn. All classes have the same proficiency modifier to hit so the fighter isn't anything special in combat. They just gave the fighter buttons to push like all the other classes. This was all born out of the focus on combat leading to having to make every class be able to kick ass in a fight. Fighters are not combat specialists anymore they are just one of the crowd of such characters. Its as if the modern D&D leverage team was made up of a half dozen Elliots.

Quote from: Old Aegidius on June 14, 2023, 04:07:27 AM
Just allowing characters to give each other a small bonuses by helping with a skill or attribute test by comparison is almost never viable, I'd agree. Some people said it best earlier in the thread though: there are exceptions when it's so risky and pointless for your character to try to do direct damage that you're better off just pumping up an ally who has better odds. That can be really unfun too though, if that's a regular occurrence.

To prevent direct damage from being the best way to approach a combat, I think you need to either:

• Tune the math so it's sometimes more risky to go for direct damage than to help an ally who has better odds.
• There are too many opponents or they may arrive in unpredictable order/waves so you can't just nova the enemy to death.
• The enemy that is least-likely to be killed with direct damage is also the one that represents the most active and dangerous enemy in the opposing force (like a dragon).

It helps if debilitating conditions also enable more effective basic actions on those debilitated targets. It's gamey, but something like a mark that can be exploited by different powers can make certain combinations of powers or certain tactics more beneficial from time to time.

A few more suggestions I would add to that list.

--Persistent debuffs: giving up one action to disadvantage an opponent is more worthwhile if it affects them for one more round. That shifts the profit-and-loss calculation more in favor of the non-attack option. A good example might be a "sunder armor" ability, like you get in MMOs.
--Fold the skill check into the attack action: Players would be more likely to chance the skill check if it didn't cost them their action at all. Essentially this would be a more involved version of the "reckless attack" or "fighting defensively" options you get in a lot of games. Of course it would have to be balanced out by a disadvantage incurred if you fail the skill roll.
--Multiple actions: Related but simpler. You just allow everyone to take an additional action each round, with the contingency that it can't be another attack/spell. If they don't need to move, and they have a spare action, they might as well try something creative. Again, you'd probably have to impose a penalty for failure.

The core problem is in making the non-attack option useful, but not so useful that it supplants the attack or becomes something the players do every round. I think most games over-correct and make all the non-attack options too ineffective, but there are some examples of it going the other way. Tripping in 3.5/Pathfinder comes to mind. Standing up in that game provokes an attack of opportunity, so if you outnumber an enemy and can trip them, all of your allies can get a free attack when they try to stand up.

Quote from: Exploderwizard on June 14, 2023, 11:02:45 PM

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 14, 2023, 10:31:57 PM


You've raised a really good set of points in the last couple of posts.  When the game was focused on a majority of experience via treasure, the optimal process was gaining loot by avoiding combat.  Now combat has become a central expectation of progression, to the point where some DMs will even award less than full experience for an enemy that is bypassed or that flees.  So combat utility has taken on an outsized importance.  Because of this, performance in combat and optimization in combat have taken on an importance they didn't have in earlier iterations of the game.  Definitely food for thought...

This progression can be most easily tracked by the evolution of the thief. Originally the class was an exploration specialist that was relatively weak in combat. Now it is a full blown dps class that out performs the fighter in all ways except the number of hits the character can absorb. Especially in 3E where the rogue could flank and do damage that would put any fighter to shame if the opponent was subject to sneak attack. In 5E they even got rid of classes of opponents that are immune to sneak attack although they did limit the ability to sneak attack more than once per turn. All classes have the same proficiency modifier to hit so the fighter isn't anything special in combat. They just gave the fighter buttons to push like all the other classes. This was all born out of the focus on combat leading to having to make every class be able to kick ass in a fight. Fighters are not combat specialists anymore they are just one of the crowd of such characters. Its as if the modern D&D leverage team was made up of a half dozen Elliots.

This is central to something I've been experimenting with a lot lately, not only in the system but in the adventure design and how I present it.  It's because I'm sitting in this gray area between old-school treasure for XP style and the more recent thing where combat is a blast.  One foot in each camp.  So I don't want to go complete fantasy Vietnam with getting the gold out be the only good way to advance.  Yet I do want treasure and general adventure success to be a lot more important than it is in, say, 5E.  Every test, I'm tinkering with the XP mix for different activities, and being rather explicit with what gets XP and what doesn't.  Don't even care if it is OOC right now, because I'm trying to find the balance that I like. 

What's surprising is just how finely balanced that act can be.  I've played up that combat is deadly (and it is, both in the system and how I run the foes).  I've explicitly mentioned multiple times per session that there is limited XP for wandering monsters, and that it degrades fast with each wandering encounter.  (You get something for being in the area and adventuring based on the kind of monsters that are there, but you get almost the same thing if you avoid them all as if you fight them all.  So after the first fight or two, the cost/benefit goes against the players.  Have fun, fight a few things, but don't hunt everything down.)  Even with all that, it's been hard to get WotC D&D habits knocked out--even having run my previous WotC games more old-school than the rules would suggest.

Last session, I was explicit that taking a chance on turning a captured bandit into a henchmen was potentially worth a fair amount of XP.  That was after we were playing back and forth in character, the players were debating whether or not to trust the bandit, and then knowing it was a play test, and what I'd been saying, one of the players flat out ask me.  When I explained how that could work, I saw light bulbs go off around the table.  I have also been explicit that recovering a treasure or rescuing prisoners or other such "goals" are worth a lot.  Last session, they really chased it, and finally got some solid XP from it.  We'll see how that translates next session.

That's a tangent from the main topic, but I think like the above quotes, it's relevant to the attitude the players bring to the game.  Grappling an enemy or getting them to surrender or putting them into a bad spot might or might not be skill tests, but they won't be tried just for combat.  Within the parameters of the OP, it's almost locked down.  There's got to be something different about how you want the combat to resolve before more "tests" start to look attractive, not only in the rules, but in the character actions within the conceits of the setting.

QuoteOK, with that out of the way, my primary hypothesis is as follows: Any kind of non-attacking skill test or challenge will never be more effective than degrading the enemies' hit points via attacks

From an action economy perspective, this is often not the case.  Even the most basic "support action"- healing- can be more effective if it keeps a valued ally alive one more round, assuming that round is substantially more important than what you are doing (and if it keeps them up two more rounds, then it's an easy win).  This is true even in systems where the amount of healing is broadly less than the incoming DPR- especially when you consider that a wounded ally can take actions that result in him taking up even more of the enemy's actions should they press the attack, such as 3.X's total defense or 5ed's dodge action (older versions had some other kind of shenanigan here too).

But there's more going on that that.  We have the baseline "help" action- brought over from 3.X's Aid Another, and represented in a bunch of OSR places too ("make a swarm attack" in Sine Nomine is a common sight in that gaming set).  You bring up that:

QuoteNow, either of these options are almost always going to be worse than attacking the target.

This isn't true!  In 5ed, help actions are generally provided by minions or familiars, sure- often upping the odds that someone with over triple your average damage is an easy sell- but there's plenty of cases where someone will be attacking and you are out of good stuff.  This math is often dependent on the amount of damage you can do, the amount of damage an ally can do, and the target number he has to roll, but it definitely happens.

But yes, overall, if two reasonable combatants are fighting some guy, neither one benefits more from 'help' instead of 'attack'- and if that weren't true, it would be a design failure in the system (by contrast a mage out of spells or preserving spells may well do better with 'help' than 'attack' or 'cantrip'- especially if the mage isn't just a pile of offensive cantrips and only has one or two attack cantrips, neither ideal for the case).

Which brings up the other big point addressed my many- there's a bunch of other types of support actions that can deny or mitigate enemy attacks.  If you are standing in a doorway with a good armor class and a sword, a dodge action may mitigate a lot more enemy actions than anything else. As could casting Blade Ward, as could some kind of object interaction or status effect, such as extinguishing lights, igniting a poured flask of oil, or casting something that denies or reduces the efficiency of actions, like Rainbow Pattern or Slow.

I think that in general, if you're making a D&D-like game, you probably want the general idea, in a perfectly even fight, to be straightforward- attacks or spells.  In a case of mundane characters swinging hard with weapons, you want that to generally be the best strategy, barring some complexifying options.  Because those complexifying options will exist.  Someone in 3.X will have taken two feats of disarming and anything with a weapon can't keep a grip.  Or someone has done some retarded trick with the grapple rules, acquiring a pile of pluses to the roll via some set of absolutely antilogical combination of things (the 5ed valor bard is a better grappler than the barbarian, because he gets expertise in athletics and can self-buff with Enlarge- and a lore bard is even better than that, because not only does he get the spell faster, he can shit talk the opponent with his bard power, applying a penalty to their grapple check).

Whatever the case may be, the non-complex case should reward directly beating on hit points, and then in actual combat simulation that will often not the be the optimal choice.

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 14, 2023, 10:13:53 PM
So, do you have anything else for the actual point of this thread?  Sure, games will have Intimidate (though whether or not that works in combat is much more DM dependent ... some games will handle it via morale), but not all of those examples you posted directly refer to combat.  So, just like grappling or tripping, you've provided a specific skill that is game dependent, but you haven't addressed the other part of my question.

But note that I specified in the examples the "help" or support actions.  That's what I asked for evidence of games that handle this better.  You've supplied one skill.  So if I don't take intimidation, then what?  Are there any "help" action mechanics that are useful?  Any "giving aid to a friend" mechanics better than attacking?

The actual point of this thread, according to your first paragraph, was "a viable non-attack option in combat...", and scaring off opponents was explicitly one of the options you gave in your assumptions; Intimidation absolutely fits the bill. Your "primary hypothesis" is clearly disproven by it. If you meant something else, the post is such a wall of text that the meaning is unclear.

Other options in my experience have been completely situational - just like non-damaging magic, forced movement. Drive/ride/boat for conveyances? Object interactions for things in the environment? All those 4e combat arenas are calling.... So, damaging attacks are the lowest-common-denominator, the things that you can do anywhere, but anything outside them is predicated on exactly the ruleset, the characters present, the environment, etc.

Not answering your question, but alluding to some of the other posters: even in my 5e game the players recently found themselves up against an enemy who wasn't hurt by nonmagic weapons, they were low on spell slots so only hitting with a couple of cantrips per round, and taking damage way too fast. They filled a pit with grease, set the grease on fire, forced the enemy into the pit, and held a boulder on top to try to burn him to death. No direct damage being done by anyone in the party for several rounds but it ended the fight a lot faster than direct attacks could have. (After a couple of attempts to escape the pit failed, the enemy turned to mist and retreated, the party pillaged his lair, and headed off, not seeming to think about the repercussions of having this enemy on the loose and his ties into the power structure, even when the next two sessions had reminders.)

XP for surviving encounters is quite an old idea. So fleeing successfully was like 1/4 XP in several D&D recommendations, letting the opponent flee was like 1/2 XP, and each defeated monster was full XP -- and that's defeated not killed, so surrenders counted. It changes the No Quarter attitude of play.

Further there was extra GM discretion ways to earn XP like clever use of Spell or Thief Skills. So if you could end a hostile encounter with that you get XP for clever usage, plus the XP for survival and whatever level of success it was. Then you add XP for GP treasure and you are awash in ways to learn from your experiences.

Point being a lot of these ideas of scaling down the butting-heads, tactical skirmish game was there from the earliest, from D&D and others. The challenge was having the table adjust their expectations. Texts conversed with the reader that whole encounters could be resolved fruitfully with little to no dice, because sometimes you could "win" in Surprise or Reaction stage of the encounter, surviving and gaining XP from a positive exchange or neutral exchange.

When you allow a simple bribe, apology, or fleeing action to succeed in at least part, suddenly the game is richer for the breadth. Not everything becomes dependent on combat balance, but becomes strange new mysteries or wild opportunities. It explains the wildly lethal or weird Rare and Very Rare slots in several adventure Random Encounter Tables. When you have more than hammers, you can build a lot of different stuff, and you stop hunting for nails.  :)

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 13, 2023, 04:27:14 PM
So, another thread mentioned the use of skill or attribute "tests" in combat in lieu of attacking, and I wanted to discuss how more games are including these options (and why I find them generally unsatisfying).  Of course, the title of this thread frames the question as an absolute (primarily because there is a group of posters on here who just lose it every time someone posts an absolute... and it's amusing to watch the 'tards "Reeeee!"), but I'm interested in games that have created a viable non-attack option in combat... because I just haven't seen one yet.

To set the table, I want to make sure we're all on the same page as to my assumptions and assertions.  So I want to lay the following assumptions out before we look at the present iterations of skill tests:

• I am focusing on mechanical results, and not subjective or narrative results --- Sure, you can do a backflip to awe the enemy so that your partner might kill it, and the DM can rule that you impress the spectators enough that you boost your standing with the locals... but that's not a mechanical result and it's not doing anything to help with the actual combat
• I am focusing on the most efficient resolution of fights --- sure, there are any number of ways to use skills to prolong, delay, and change the nature of a fight.  But unless the tactic can result in an equal or less cost in resources, time, damage, etc., then it is considered "sub-optimal" for the purpose of this discussion (an additional note: "optimal" results don't mean some kind of nefarious min-maxing.  They actually make the most sense in character as well as in the game.  What character will prefer to lose half his hit points in a fight when the option was available to lose only one quarter?  No rational human is ever going to choose the tactic that costs the most of anything, except in rare enough circumstances that don't really address the main issue here)
• I am talking about situations where violence either has or will imminently break out and the only choice is to defeat the enemy, either by killing, wounding, capturing, or scaring off.
• I am assuming enemy combatants are equal or greater in number than the player characters --- this is a bit of a narrowing assumption, but just because it comes up very frequently in most of the RPGs I've played, and because a highly unbalanced action economy in the players' favor doesn't seem like it is a true test of utility.

OK, with that out of the way, my primary hypothesis is as follows: Any kind of non-attacking skill test or challenge will never be more effective than degrading the enemies' hit points via attacks, and will often be much less efficient.  So, how do I come to this conclusion?  Well, let's look at combat tests from probably two of the most popular game systems right now: D&D 5e and SWADE.  In 5e, a player may perform a "help" action, which gives the helped creature advantage on the next attack roll against the chosen creature.  In SWADE, a character may use the support action (resulting in a +1 or +2 bonus to a fighting roll for an ally) or perform a test, which results in either a distracted or vulnerable (-2 or +2 respectively to opponents' rolls or allies' rolls) with the possibility to make the target shaken on a raise.

Now, either of these options are almost always going to be worse than attacking the target.  I don't want to get too far in the weeds to figure out how much better your skill would have to be as opposed to your chance to hit in order to make the test viable (getting to do something, even if it's not really helping, as opposed to just missing every turn), so let's assume a relative parity in chances to hit and pass the test.

Now, I know that an argument against that is that tests allow a player to build a character that is not combat facing, but still useful in combat.  But, I think, based on the following points, that "useful" may not be accurate, and that this illusion helps to make unbalanced (and even min/maxed) parties more viable and likely because of the lip service paid to tests.

So, what ends a fight?  All enemies are one of the following: dead, incapacitated, or fled.  Just sticking to the mechanics related in the games, none of the skill tests create a chance of flight.  Sure, you can house rule it, but that's not really confirming the utility of the mechanics as they stand... since you're having to change it.  Incapacitation might be possible due to some kind of grappling, but you haven't removed the threat; you've just delayed having to remove it (and if there are more enemies than players, you still have active combatants that can kill you while you try to keep your target out of the fight).  But grappling is its own thing, so I'm not really talking about that in this case.  So that leaves killing/rendering unconscious due to damage as the primary goal.  And tests suck at this.

I'll note that a similar argument has been proffered previously by many folks when it comes to damage or healing.  Generally speaking, healing is less efficient than doing damage, as it spends resources without reducing the threat or capacities of the enemy.  The best healing is the healing that revives or keeps a character in the fight, as it preserves damage output and shortens the fight.

What most skill tests seem designed to do is allow one character to give up a chance to do damage in order to make another character slightly more likely to do the same damage that he would have done without the test.  To be viable (i.e. to actually reduce the time in combat), a test would need to guarantee a least as much damage as both characters would inflict on average.  Now, this will only happen when one character has a huge disparity in accuracy or damage over the other (an extremely unbalanced party), or in a case where one party member's contribution is unneeded in the fight (and I know we all want to feel like that player!).  It makes one player into a sidekick in the combat realm, which I think most players aren't too keen on as a permanent role.

You could argue that a player who uses his character's action to worsen the chances of an opponent to hit might be worthwhile.  But, once again, the reduction in damage needs to be enough to make up for the increased time the fight goes because of the lost damage from the helping character.  I'm not going to crunch the numbers here, but I would suspect the damage reduced needs to be very large to pay off (or the helping character must be highly outclassed by his party-mate).

So, in the end, it comes down to the fact that the chance to do damage is always going to shorten the fight by an amount that doesn't make the usage of skill tests valid. If anyone knows of a mechanical approach that defies this analysis, I'd love to hear about it.  Because, otherwise, I feel like skill tests are directed towards players with a dramatically underpowered character (with respect to the rest of their group).  So a mechanic to address a Session Zero problem.  And, outside of a few rare cases (which you don't need to recount, because a few singular examples don't disprove the general trend), skill tests just seem to be meant to make the useless character in combat seem to have a purpose, even when they don't...

Intimidation is ONE of the solutions to your hypothesis and other posters have agreed. Now you're doing what everyone does by shifting the goalpost in a desperate attempt to be right. 

In The Art of War, Sun Tzu writes "The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting". But, you're suggesting fighting is the optimal choice. No  ;)

Quote from: Theory of Games on June 15, 2023, 09:40:22 AM

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 13, 2023, 04:27:14 PM
So, another thread mentioned the use of skill or attribute "tests" in combat in lieu of attacking, and I wanted to discuss how more games are including these options (and why I find them generally unsatisfying).  Of course, the title of this thread frames the question as an absolute (primarily because there is a group of posters on here who just lose it every time someone posts an absolute... and it's amusing to watch the 'tards "Reeeee!"), but I'm interested in games that have created a viable non-attack option in combat... because I just haven't seen one yet.

To set the table, I want to make sure we're all on the same page as to my assumptions and assertions.  So I want to lay the following assumptions out before we look at the present iterations of skill tests:

• I am focusing on mechanical results, and not subjective or narrative results --- Sure, you can do a backflip to awe the enemy so that your partner might kill it, and the DM can rule that you impress the spectators enough that you boost your standing with the locals... but that's not a mechanical result and it's not doing anything to help with the actual combat
• I am focusing on the most efficient resolution of fights --- sure, there are any number of ways to use skills to prolong, delay, and change the nature of a fight.  But unless the tactic can result in an equal or less cost in resources, time, damage, etc., then it is considered "sub-optimal" for the purpose of this discussion (an additional note: "optimal" results don't mean some kind of nefarious min-maxing.  They actually make the most sense in character as well as in the game.  What character will prefer to lose half his hit points in a fight when the option was available to lose only one quarter?  No rational human is ever going to choose the tactic that costs the most of anything, except in rare enough circumstances that don't really address the main issue here)
• I am talking about situations where violence either has or will imminently break out and the only choice is to defeat the enemy, either by killing, wounding, capturing, or scaring off.
• I am assuming enemy combatants are equal or greater in number than the player characters --- this is a bit of a narrowing assumption, but just because it comes up very frequently in most of the RPGs I've played, and because a highly unbalanced action economy in the players' favor doesn't seem like it is a true test of utility.

OK, with that out of the way, my primary hypothesis is as follows: Any kind of non-attacking skill test or challenge will never be more effective than degrading the enemies' hit points via attacks, and will often be much less efficient.  So, how do I come to this conclusion?  Well, let's look at combat tests from probably two of the most popular game systems right now: D&D 5e and SWADE.  In 5e, a player may perform a "help" action, which gives the helped creature advantage on the next attack roll against the chosen creature.  In SWADE, a character may use the support action (resulting in a +1 or +2 bonus to a fighting roll for an ally) or perform a test, which results in either a distracted or vulnerable (-2 or +2 respectively to opponents' rolls or allies' rolls) with the possibility to make the target shaken on a raise.

Now, either of these options are almost always going to be worse than attacking the target.  I don't want to get too far in the weeds to figure out how much better your skill would have to be as opposed to your chance to hit in order to make the test viable (getting to do something, even if it's not really helping, as opposed to just missing every turn), so let's assume a relative parity in chances to hit and pass the test.

Now, I know that an argument against that is that tests allow a player to build a character that is not combat facing, but still useful in combat.  But, I think, based on the following points, that "useful" may not be accurate, and that this illusion helps to make unbalanced (and even min/maxed) parties more viable and likely because of the lip service paid to tests.

So, what ends a fight?  All enemies are one of the following: dead, incapacitated, or fled.  Just sticking to the mechanics related in the games, none of the skill tests create a chance of flight.  Sure, you can house rule it, but that's not really confirming the utility of the mechanics as they stand... since you're having to change it.  Incapacitation might be possible due to some kind of grappling, but you haven't removed the threat; you've just delayed having to remove it (and if there are more enemies than players, you still have active combatants that can kill you while you try to keep your target out of the fight).  But grappling is its own thing, so I'm not really talking about that in this case.  So that leaves killing/rendering unconscious due to damage as the primary goal.  And tests suck at this.

I'll note that a similar argument has been proffered previously by many folks when it comes to damage or healing.  Generally speaking, healing is less efficient than doing damage, as it spends resources without reducing the threat or capacities of the enemy.  The best healing is the healing that revives or keeps a character in the fight, as it preserves damage output and shortens the fight.

What most skill tests seem designed to do is allow one character to give up a chance to do damage in order to make another character slightly more likely to do the same damage that he would have done without the test.  To be viable (i.e. to actually reduce the time in combat), a test would need to guarantee a least as much damage as both characters would inflict on average.  Now, this will only happen when one character has a huge disparity in accuracy or damage over the other (an extremely unbalanced party), or in a case where one party member's contribution is unneeded in the fight (and I know we all want to feel like that player!).  It makes one player into a sidekick in the combat realm, which I think most players aren't too keen on as a permanent role.

You could argue that a player who uses his character's action to worsen the chances of an opponent to hit might be worthwhile.  But, once again, the reduction in damage needs to be enough to make up for the increased time the fight goes because of the lost damage from the helping character.  I'm not going to crunch the numbers here, but I would suspect the damage reduced needs to be very large to pay off (or the helping character must be highly outclassed by his party-mate).

So, in the end, it comes down to the fact that the chance to do damage is always going to shorten the fight by an amount that doesn't make the usage of skill tests valid. If anyone knows of a mechanical approach that defies this analysis, I'd love to hear about it.  Because, otherwise, I feel like skill tests are directed towards players with a dramatically underpowered character (with respect to the rest of their group).  So a mechanic to address a Session Zero problem.  And, outside of a few rare cases (which you don't need to recount, because a few singular examples don't disprove the general trend), skill tests just seem to be meant to make the useless character in combat seem to have a purpose, even when they don't...

Intimidation is ONE of the solutions to your hypothesis and other posters have agreed. Now you're doing what everyone does by shifting the goalpost in a desperate attempt to be right. 

In The Art of War, Sun Tzu writes "The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting". But, you're suggesting fighting is the optimal choice. No  ;)

Greetings!

Very nice, Theory of Games! Your Sun Tzu quote reminded me of how in the West, the Roman Empire agreed. Officially, in the days of the late Republic, prior to Rome's conquest of Egypt and the Middle East, there were two kingdoms in the region, vying for power and dominance--The Ptolemy Kingdom of Egypt, and the Seleucid Empire of much of the Near East. Both of these realms were descended from generals of Alexander the Great, before. Now, they were engaged in war against each other. However, there was a new power on the rise. Rome had conquered Gaul, Spain, Greece, Illyria, and Carthage, which also included North Africa. Roman armies had already annihilated millions of people in Gaul, and had totally annihilated the Greek city of Corinth, and the city of Carthage, capital city of the great Empire of Carthage.

Tome had sent an ambassador to Alexandria, Egypt, in order to negotiate a peace treaty between the Seleucid Empire and the Kingdom of Egypt. Trade at sea in the Eastern Mediterranean had been disrupted by the war, causing economic loss and damage to Roman interests. In addition, smaller city states in the region, who had befriended Rome, had asked Rome to help them.

So, the Roman ambassador arrives in Egypt, and the Egyptian king meets with the Roman ambassador in the Royal Gardens at his palace. The Egyptian king delays and argues against peace, and ending the war, finally saying that he would think about the Roman proposal. The Roman ambassador gets up, and takes his stick and draw a circle in the garden sand around the Egyptian king, and says, "Fine. Take all the time you need to consider Rome's proposal. However, when you step beyond the circle, if you should chose not to cooperate and obey Rome--then the Legions of Rome are on the way."

When the Egyptian king stepped from the circle in the garden sand, he answered yes, he wanted peace, and would agree to Rome's peace treaty between Egypt and the Seleucid Empire.

Prior to the Roman ambassador setting sail on his peaceful diplomatic mission to Egypt, the Senate had ordered Roman armies to begin loading into the fleets, in preparation for war.

The Roman ambassador had successfully used his Intimidation Skill against the Egyptian King. ;D

Of course, the subtext unspoken--but certainly very well known by the Egyptian King--was that once the Roman armies arrived, Egypt itself would be annihilated, and all of Egypt would be made into a Province of Rome, forever under Roman might. There would be no mercy, and no forgiveness. ;D

That was how effective and brilliant Rome was at diplomacy. One man, unarmed, and speaking with the voice and authority of SPQR. ;D

I'm reminded of a Roman philosopher discussing the virtues and contributions of different nations at the time. He then said, "But what of Rome? What has Rome taught the world?

Rome has taught the nations of the world TO OBEY." ;D

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Quote from: Theory of Games on June 15, 2023, 09:40:22 AM

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 13, 2023, 04:27:14 PM
So, another thread mentioned the use of skill or attribute "tests" in combat in lieu of attacking, and I wanted to discuss how more games are including these options (and why I find them generally unsatisfying)...

Intimidation is ONE of the solutions to your hypothesis and other posters have agreed. Now you're doing what everyone does by shifting the goalpost in a desperate attempt to be right. 

Best faith interpretation: I think Erikrautha was trying to make a distinction between skill tests integrated into the combat system, rather than using them as a means of bypassing it. The only game I can think of that has tried to systematize intimidation as a combat option is 2d20 Conan. That game lets you use your Persuasion skill to make mental attacks against what are essentially "morale hit points". In theory, the tradeoff is that a weapon attack is more likely to eliminate a single opponent, but a mental attack affects a whole group. In practice, they fell into the aforementioned trap of underpowering the mental option, to the point that it almost never gets used in play.

Any game with an intimidation skill could theoretically support a version of that mechanic, but I'm not aware of it being in the R-A-W of any other game, and I suspect most GMs would be reluctant to homebrew it. A lot of GMs seem to regard using a skill check to win a fight as being borderline to cheating. 

Quote from: ForgottenF on June 15, 2023, 05:43:32 PM

Quote from: Theory of Games on June 15, 2023, 09:40:22 AM

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 13, 2023, 04:27:14 PM
So, another thread mentioned the use of skill or attribute "tests" in combat in lieu of attacking, and I wanted to discuss how more games are including these options (and why I find them generally unsatisfying)...

Intimidation is ONE of the solutions to your hypothesis and other posters have agreed. Now you're doing what everyone does by shifting the goalpost in a desperate attempt to be right. 

Best faith interpretation: I think Erikrautha was trying to make a distinction between skill tests integrated into the combat system, rather than using them as a means of bypassing it. The only game I can think of that has tried to systematize intimidation as a combat option is 2d20 Conan. That game lets you use your Persuasion skill to make mental attacks against what are essentially "morale hit points". In theory, the tradeoff is that a weapon attack is more likely to eliminate a single opponent, but a mental attack affects a whole group. In practice, they fell into the aforementioned trap of underpowering the mental option, to the point that it almost never gets used in play.

Agreed that I think this is what Erikrautha was talking about. In most games, intimidate is effectively GM fiat. I'm not saying that GM fiat is necessarily terrible, but it can be awkward to mix objective tactical rules for physical action and GM-fiat for mental actions.

Especially, there can be intermixes of physical actions and mental ones. i.e. The PCs expend a bunch of their resources and stretch their tactical position to take out the ideological leader of the enemy. Then they try to intimidate. There, the physical strategy is part of a mental strategy to demoralize the enemy.

Quote from: ForgottenF on June 15, 2023, 05:43:32 PM

Quote from: Theory of Games on June 15, 2023, 09:40:22 AM

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 13, 2023, 04:27:14 PM
So, another thread mentioned the use of skill or attribute "tests" in combat in lieu of attacking, and I wanted to discuss how more games are including these options (and why I find them generally unsatisfying)...

Intimidation is ONE of the solutions to your hypothesis and other posters have agreed. Now you're doing what everyone does by shifting the goalpost in a desperate attempt to be right. 

Best faith interpretation: I think Erikrautha was trying to make a distinction between skill tests integrated into the combat system, rather than using them as a means of bypassing it. The only game I can think of that has tried to systematize intimidation as a combat option is 2d20 Conan. That game lets you use your Persuasion skill to make mental attacks against what are essentially "morale hit points". In theory, the tradeoff is that a weapon attack is more likely to eliminate a single opponent, but a mental attack affects a whole group. In practice, they fell into the aforementioned trap of underpowering the mental option, to the point that it almost never gets used in play.

Any game with an intimidation skill could theoretically support a version of that mechanic, but I'm not aware of it being in the R-A-W of any other game, and I suspect most GMs would be reluctant to homebrew it. A lot of GMs seem to regard using a skill check to win a fight as being borderline to cheating.

Its a shame too that was one of the cooler idead from conan 2d20

Quote from: jhkim on June 15, 2023, 06:07:30 PM
Agreed that I think this is what Erikrautha was talking about. In most games, intimidate is effectively GM fiat. I'm not saying that GM fiat is necessarily terrible, but it can be awkward to mix objective tactical rules for physical action and GM-fiat for mental actions.

Especially, there can be intermixes of physical actions and mental ones. i.e. The PCs expend a bunch of their resources and stretch their tactical position to take out the ideological leader of the enemy. Then they try to intimidate. There, the physical strategy is part of a mental strategy to demoralize the enemy.

Quote from: ForgottenF on June 15, 2023, 05:43:32 PM
Best faith interpretation: I think Erikrautha was trying to make a distinction between skill tests integrated into the combat system, rather than using them as a means of bypassing it. The only game I can think of that has tried to systematize intimidation as a combat option is 2d20 Conan. That game lets you use your Persuasion skill to make mental attacks against what are essentially "morale hit points". In theory, the tradeoff is that a weapon attack is more likely to eliminate a single opponent, but a mental attack affects a whole group. In practice, they fell into the aforementioned trap of underpowering the mental option, to the point that it almost never gets used in play.

Any game with an intimidation skill could theoretically support a version of that mechanic, but I'm not aware of it being in the R-A-W of any other game, and I suspect most GMs would be reluctant to homebrew it. A lot of GMs seem to regard using a skill check to win a fight as being borderline to cheating.

Thank you both.  You are correct in my intent, and I appreciate you both helping with the phrasing and explaining.

Quote from: ForgottenF on June 15, 2023, 05:43:32 PMAny game with an intimidation skill could theoretically support a version of that mechanic, but I'm not aware of it being in the R-A-W of any other game, and I suspect most GMs would be reluctant to homebrew it. A lot of GMs seem to regard using a skill check to win a fight as being borderline to cheating.

HERO System has Presence Attacks, where the top result is "Target is cowed. He may surrender, run away, or faint." On top of that, you can add a Presence Attack into any other action (e.g. Batman bursting in through the roof light etc.).

I think the OP is based on a limited premise. It assumes a HP attrition model where targets have many HP and their combat effectiveness is only reduced by losing the last HP. In systems like that, focus fire is a good strategy, but other models of damage exist.

Savage Worlds was mentioned and there an enemy might have a high parry or toughness but still only be able to take the one wound. In that scenario, a character with little or no chance of hitting / chance of wounding (maybe both...) could well be better off helping their ally to hit the enemy, and if they hit with a raise then the ally will get more damage to potentially wound as well. Or the primary combatant might do wild swings which make them vulnerable; an ally distracting the enemy would offset this.

Also, SWADE allows for people tricking or taunting enemies which can make them Shaken with a raise. That might rob the enemy of their action, and it also makes it easier for physical attacks to cause wounds.

Another thing to bear in mind is the opportunity cost of making a character focussed on dealing direct damage. In pretty much any system there is a trade off for that. Investing in the ability to deal damage restricts your ability to invest in other skills or traits that might be more key to your character's primary focus. If, instead, you can leverage your character's strong suit to contribute to combat without dealing direct damage that might result in a more capable character overall. There are some more recent games which are carefully designed to give a character an attack based on their class's prime requisite but that is far from universal.

Mutant Year Zero uses a system where you use all four stats as seperate pools of hit points for different types of attacks.  Having your willpower broken will put you out just as clearly as taking physical damage.  It's a core aspect of play to find out what stat the enemy is and go after that rather than just brute force your way through with violence.

/Broken Record Time...

Savage Worlds implicitly has Skill Tests as part of Combat. Not only are they viable in lieu of direct combat, but while in combat they have *huge* impact. Intimidation *during* combat can be a weapon flourish/"The Look"/battlecry or whatever the PC wants it to be, and if he can pull it off, can slap a penalty on his target that depending on the scale of success could literally cause an otherwise powerful enemy to be vulnerable.

This is not only with Intimidate - it can be literally any skill, that a PC can justify in the circumstances to the GM. There is within the core mechanic of using a Skill to Test an opponent using their Stat corresponding with that skill as the contested check. This allows a player who understands that Goblins aren't too bright, to fall for Int-based Skill tests, or they're craven (low Spirit)- which makes them very susceptible to Intimidate etc.

You even have an array of effects - you can make them potentially Distracts them (penalty for them to hit), or Vulnerable (bonus to be hit). Both conditions have further consequences of cascading issues. Further, if the check is particularly good, it slaps them with the Shaken! condition, which is bad.

These penalties are not trivial - by comparison numerically it would be in d20 with being slapped with a -8 penalty to hit, or +8 penalty to be hit... *at minimum*. You can build an entire character whose sole purpose in combat (or even out of combat) to use their skills to put these conditions on opponents for your team-mates (or yourself) to finish off.

Quote from: Exploderwizard on June 14, 2023, 09:47:13 PM

Quote from: BadApple on June 14, 2023, 05:35:42 PM
TBH, I don't know if it's a problem with 5e core, how it's presented, or if modern players are just missing something.  Fighting isn't necessarily how you handle every encounter.  If you don't have the debate periodically about whether to negotiate, sneak around, or fight when coming across a new creature, you're missing a large part of D&D dungeon crawling experience.  I think at least part of the problem is that PCs are so hard to kill that players develop the mentality of "shoot first, ask questions later."  It's sad to see gaming degenerated so badly.

In the old days, not everything you met in the dungeon was a mindless attack zombie.  Sure, it might be but it could be a greedy little SOB that will be happy to show you the secret door for a silver coin.  That dragon could be evil or he could be just a sweet good boy doggy with a really bad case of mange.

The vast majority of players these days never had experience with the original game. Most of us who have are dinosaurs now. They are used to all encounters being winnable just by kicking ass. The common D&D memes of kill, loot, profit are ingrained in the collective gamer consciousness. A big driver of this shift happened once acquiring treasure for xp was discarded. Encounter based xp encourages killing all that you can to rack up xp. That mentality is why when introducing players to an OSR style game, who have only played modern editions, they chew through characters complaining all the while that the game sucks because they try to bum rush everything that they encounter while simultaneously bitching that they don't have enough buttons to push on their character sheets. You can always spot an indoctrinated modern system gamer as a DM when you simply ask "what do you do?" and they gaze down at their character sheet as if they were perusing a menu in a restaurant. Hell I often do the same thing myself when playing newer systems because they condition you to choose menu options, because quite often these options are the only thing that has a chance of changing the situation. The system is so hung up on needing a die roll for everything that the DM will not be likely to know how to process an off menu option and will quickly equate it to one of the available options and call for a roll. That is the heart of the issue. The whole combat options dilemma stems from this. Combat encounters are designed to use up X amount of resources depending on difficulty. This is tied to the concept of the adventuring day. Clever solutions that neutralize the enemy or otherwise end the designed resource draining conflict that do not require these finite resources are eliminated. The rules enforce this. It is quite easy to prove. Show me a condition in 5E that prevents a target from attacking other than being knocked out (hit points ground to zero) or disable by a resource draining magical attack. Even being restrained doesn't prevent attacks, the target simply cannot move. This is due to the action economy structure that dictates that nothing short of the expenditure of limited magical resources can take a target out of action with the possible exception of intimidation if the target is subject to it. The whole concept of morale has been discarded from the core rules. Morale is a lifesaver in older versions of the game. Undead were super scary because they were terminators who would not stop unless successfully turned by a cleric. In the modern versions by the rules every creature is a terminator unless a specific effort is made to intimidate it. Joe the goblin along with his buddies Mack, Slim, Bob, and Jack roll up on some adventurers and decide that they are going to kick ass. In 5E if no specific action is taken to intimidate them, Mack, Slim, Bob, and Jack could be wiped out in round one and Joe would keep plugging away as if had a chance unless someone using their action intimidates him. At that point the party is winning handily so why bother. In an OSR game if three of them went down right away or if any of them were killed and failed to inflict any harm on the party they would need to check morale to carry on the fight. Getting their asses kicked was incentive enough to flee without deliberate PC initiation of an action. The whole kill everything protocol was also helped along by DMs who didn't award full xp for creatures that were not actually slain, meaning that running off opponents resulted in less xp thus the bloodthirsty habits.

Ok dinosaur ramble over.

Meh, this is partly more OSR revisionism. The group I was introduced into TTRPGs with played Basic D&D and they focused on killing stuff and taking their things. A great deal of their game revolved around going into dungeons, going into every room, killing everything inside, then moving on to the next. Another group I played Basic with, who hated anything that wasn't Basic D&D (including AD&D), was the same way. This second group even ridiculed the idea of RP and joked that when I played video game RPGs I stayed in town clicking on the NPCs.

I was basically the one who introduced the idea of actual RP to my first group and doing things other than just killing stuff after I got my own books and started DMing. And I ran AD&D 2e, with its evil non-weapon proficiencies ruining TTRPGs for generations to come with added buttons for players to push on their character sheets, other than just the class abilities, the way Pundit's dice rolling god intended.

I also did away with XP for gold from my game—which was a thing for D&D till 3e, IIRC (yet people everywhere already focused on killing stuff in D&D way before that)—cuz I found the whole idea silly (whole other story I'm not going to get into about bad experiences I had with it, or how giving XP for treasure, which is already its own reward, makes no sense). And focused on XP for completed objectives and stuff like good RP or planning instead. Which is what most TTRPGs other than D&D focus on when dealing with XP/equivalent rewards.

Morale also rarely came up in any game I played in, other than the ones I ran. And even then players tended to slaughter everything, even if they fled. It's player problem, not a system problem. Players can't help but kill every faceless adversary in RPGs regardless of what the rules enforce. I used to bitch about it, but they did it anyways. Besides, those fleeing enemies (usually) have treasure. Even if you hand XP for gold (again, ridiculous idea), those are feeling belt pouches with extra XP on top of already being a reward by virtue of being money. Gotta catch them all, and 50gp (or whatever amount they have on them) are 50 less XP if you let them get away.

On the actual topic, I mostly agree with the OP (even the quip about people in these boards losing it every time someone frames something as an absolute—people on the other side of every argument I've been on here do it all the time, even if that framing exists only in their heads). But as some have pointed out it highly depends on the game and how it's run. And a lot of times it relies on GM fiat for non-attack rolls to have any real impact on the game. Even options like full round defense tend to suck, cuz they only give you a minor bump in AC in exchange for not attacking that round, which merely postpones the inevitable if that bump somehow saves you from being hit that round.

WAITAMINNIT!

Since when did going around killing monsters and bandits become a bad thing? It's the purpose of the game, otherwise why do the monsters have X.P. amounts? Sure you got (limited) X.P. for sneaking around 'em, but slaughtering them was far more noteworthy  ;D When did talking to my X.P. become a thing?

Oh. I remember: White Wolf.

"C'mon Gary! Put your fkn dice down and tell us how your character FEEEELS! Okay everybody: ACTION!"

Quote from: Theory of Games on June 16, 2023, 01:17:48 PM
WAITAMINNIT!

Since when did going around killing monsters and bandits become a bad thing? It's the purpose of the game, otherwise why do the monsters have X.P. amounts? Sure you got (limited) X.P. for sneaking around 'em, but slaughtering them was far more noteworthy  ;D When did talking to my X.P. become a thing?

Oh. I remember: White Wolf.

"C'mon Gary! Put your fkn dice down and tell us how your character FEEEELS! Okay everybody: ACTION!"

::)  The goal was to get gold (or credits, depending on the system and setting) and that was the direct or indirect way you developed your PC. The idea that you have to kill monsters to get your XP came from video games and is a pox on tables everywhere.

Quote from: BadApple on June 16, 2023, 01:39:07 PM

Quote from: Theory of Games on June 16, 2023, 01:17:48 PM
WAITAMINNIT!

Since when did going around killing monsters and bandits become a bad thing? It's the purpose of the game, otherwise why do the monsters have X.P. amounts? Sure you got (limited) X.P. for sneaking around 'em, but slaughtering them was far more noteworthy  ;D When did talking to my X.P. become a thing?

Oh. I remember: White Wolf.

"C'mon Gary! Put your fkn dice down and tell us how your character FEEEELS! Okay everybody: ACTION!"

::)  The goal was to get gold (or credits, depending on the system and setting) and that was the direct or indirect way you developed your PC. The idea that you have to kill monsters to get your XP came from video games and is a pox on tables everywhere.

This is more OSR revisionism. I don't know if the first printing OD&D books had them, but pretty much every old edition D&D I have seen, including Basic, had XP for killing monsters. And a lot of these are late 70s/early 80s books that came out years before video game RPGs became popular enough for TTRPGs to feel the pressure of copying them. And TTRPGs evolved out of wargaming to boot, which are pretty much games about faceless troops slaughtering other faceless troops. So the idea that wargamers would be adverse to slaughtering enemies as part of their win strategy or even as part of what they found fun in the game is absurd on the face of it.

Plus like I mentioned in my post above: Monsters ALSO have treasure. If you let them run you miss out on that loot XP. So you have to kill or incapacitate them (which in AFAIK is only possible in old D&D through certain spells, which allow a save, since the only other way to down an enemy is to get them to 0 HP, which in older editions means death) to get that XP award. And I've yet to hear any convincing case for why getting XP through Treasure, specifically, as opposed to ANY other means (like good planning, completing objectives, actual training, etc.) is somehow the most exalted method of advancement. And every other method is just a terribad affliction on the hobby. Cuz obviously being rich is the right way to "develop" your character.

Quote from: VisionStorm on June 16, 2023, 05:58:37 PM

Quote from: BadApple on June 16, 2023, 01:39:07 PM

Quote from: Theory of Games on June 16, 2023, 01:17:48 PM
WAITAMINNIT!

Since when did going around killing monsters and bandits become a bad thing? It's the purpose of the game, otherwise why do the monsters have X.P. amounts? Sure you got (limited) X.P. for sneaking around 'em, but slaughtering them was far more noteworthy  ;D When did talking to my X.P. become a thing?

Oh. I remember: White Wolf.

"C'mon Gary! Put your fkn dice down and tell us how your character FEEEELS! Okay everybody: ACTION!"

::)  The goal was to get gold (or credits, depending on the system and setting) and that was the direct or indirect way you developed your PC. The idea that you have to kill monsters to get your XP came from video games and is a pox on tables everywhere.

This is more OSR revisionism. I don't know if the first printing OD&D books had them, but pretty much every old edition D&D I have seen, including Basic, had XP for killing monsters. And a lot of these are late 70s/early 80s books that came out years before video game RPGs became popular enough for TTRPGs to feel the pressure of copying them. And TTRPGs evolved out of wargaming to boot, which are pretty much games about faceless troops slaughtering other faceless troops. So the idea that wargamers would be adverse to slaughtering enemies as part of their win strategy or even as part of what they found fun in the game is absurd on the face of it.

Plus like I mentioned in my post above: Monsters ALSO have treasure. If you let them run you miss out on that loot XP. So you have to kill or incapacitate them (which in AFAIK is only possible in old D&D through certain spells, which allow a save, since the only other way to down an enemy is to get them to 0 HP, which in older editions means death) to get that XP award. And I've yet to hear any convincing case for why getting XP through Treasure, specifically, as opposed to ANY other means (like good planning, completing objectives, actual training, etc.) is somehow the most exalted method of advancement. And every other method is just a terribad affliction on the hobby. Cuz obviously being rich is the right way to "develop" your character.

It's called "math."  The modules (which many folks used as metrics, even if they didn't run them for players) had a much higher amount of gold than monster xp (especially if you use the gp value of items found, which is isuggested n the DMG).  So in AD&D at least, you'd go up much faster by treasure than by killing monsters, and burgling monster lairs, etc. is far less dangerous that killing them straight up (and lair treasure is much better than the pocket change on the monster).  Sure, we killed stuff, but a 1000 gp haul did more than a half-dozen monsters at low level.  So this was not "revisionism."  It's the way almost all of the groups I was a part of in the early eighties played.  If you weren't there, you don't know...

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 16, 2023, 07:00:32 PM

Quote from: VisionStorm on June 16, 2023, 05:58:37 PM

Quote from: BadApple on June 16, 2023, 01:39:07 PM

Quote from: Theory of Games on June 16, 2023, 01:17:48 PM
WAITAMINNIT!

Since when did going around killing monsters and bandits become a bad thing? It's the purpose of the game, otherwise why do the monsters have X.P. amounts? Sure you got (limited) X.P. for sneaking around 'em, but slaughtering them was far more noteworthy  ;D When did talking to my X.P. become a thing?

Oh. I remember: White Wolf.

"C'mon Gary! Put your fkn dice down and tell us how your character FEEEELS! Okay everybody: ACTION!"

::)  The goal was to get gold (or credits, depending on the system and setting) and that was the direct or indirect way you developed your PC. The idea that you have to kill monsters to get your XP came from video games and is a pox on tables everywhere.

This is more OSR revisionism. I don't know if the first printing OD&D books had them, but pretty much every old edition D&D I have seen, including Basic, had XP for killing monsters. And a lot of these are late 70s/early 80s books that came out years before video game RPGs became popular enough for TTRPGs to feel the pressure of copying them. And TTRPGs evolved out of wargaming to boot, which are pretty much games about faceless troops slaughtering other faceless troops. So the idea that wargamers would be adverse to slaughtering enemies as part of their win strategy or even as part of what they found fun in the game is absurd on the face of it.

Plus like I mentioned in my post above: Monsters ALSO have treasure. If you let them run you miss out on that loot XP. So you have to kill or incapacitate them (which in AFAIK is only possible in old D&D through certain spells, which allow a save, since the only other way to down an enemy is to get them to 0 HP, which in older editions means death) to get that XP award. And I've yet to hear any convincing case for why getting XP through Treasure, specifically, as opposed to ANY other means (like good planning, completing objectives, actual training, etc.) is somehow the most exalted method of advancement. And every other method is just a terribad affliction on the hobby. Cuz obviously being rich is the right way to "develop" your character.

It's called "math."  The modules (which many folks used as metrics, even if they didn't run them for players) had a much higher amount of gold than monster xp (especially if you use the gp value of items found, which is isuggested n the DMG).  So in AD&D at least, you'd go up much faster by treasure than by killing monsters, and burgling monster lairs, etc. is far less dangerous that killing them straight up (and lair treasure is much better than the pocket change on the monster).  Sure, we killed stuff, but a 1000 gp haul did more than a half-dozen monsters at low level.  So this was not "revisionism."  It's the way almost all of the groups I was a part of in the early eighties played.  If you weren't there, you don't know...

This is the way I remember it.  Killing monsters was incidental to getting their loot.  Hell, I remember bargaining with some monsters. That was 40 years ago so some memories blur but we didn't kill monsters unless there was no other way or it seems we were so much stronger than they were that we would just kill them quickly as to not have to deal with them further.

The OP seems to come from a pretty narrow premise of wargames/skirmish-derived combat. One where the rules only give weight to direct physical attacks and everything else is either undervaluated or reliant on GM fiat (or both), which is true for games like D&D3/4/5, Pathfinder, Shadowrun, etc.

But there are LOTS of games that don't follow that mold, and actually favor non-direct physical attacks, or at least make them on par with other kinds of interactions. Like those that turn atributes into "mental hit points", or use abstract damage currencies like "stress", and allow verbal or psychological interactions to be as effective as physical ones (like Cortex, FATE, Mutant Y0, etc). Also, games that have clear cut/non-fiat based social rules like Exalted, Blades in the Dark and PbtA, Burning Wheel, Pendragon, etc.

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 13, 2023, 04:27:14 PM

(Shortened for brevity.)

So, in the end, it comes down to the fact that the chance to do damage is always going to shorten the fight by an amount that doesn't make the usage of skill tests valid.  If anyone knows of a mechanical approach that defies this analysis, I'd love to hear about it.  Because, otherwise, I feel like skill tests are directed towards players with a dramatically underpowered character (with respect to the rest of their group).  So a mechanic to address a Session Zero problem.  And, outside of a few rare cases (which you don't need to recount, because a few singular examples don't disprove the general trend), skill tests just seem to be meant to make the useless character in combat seem to have a purpose, even when they don't...

The technical word for this is opportunity cost. Spending a turn doing a support action means you lose the opportunity to do the next best thing, which is attacking and moving the encounter towards completion. If the attack always moves the encounter towards completion faster, then the opportunity cost of the support action outweighs the benefit.

This is an internal balance fault. I think the actual problem here is that the game isn't designed to need support actions; they are tacked onto a game which is fundamentally designed to be "I swing, you swing." If you are going to need support actions, you have to design them into the game at the ground level to need support actions. It's really hard to hack or homebrew fixes because you really need to make the game use them at the foundation.

My homebrew system isn't exactly a perfect way to avoid this, but I did design it with this problem in mind.

Selection's core gameplay loop is similar to a classic dungeon crawl where player HP resets after a long rest with a twist; the antagonist has schemes playing out in the world and whenever the players take a long rest, the antagonist gets free plot advancement on schemes the players already know about. My point is that, like a classic dungeon crawl, you can reduce the adventure to a string of encounters, and the players can get punished pretty viciously for taking too many long rests. This isn't a game about simply winning encounters; it's a game about trying to avoid damage. Taking damage forces you to take a long rest, which in turn gives the antagonist plot progress.

Now comes combat design. Selection has four health pools, each matching to an attribute. Invest a lot in Strength, you have a large Frame health pool. Your character has a lot of Agility? You have Nerve health. This means that some attacks pose no real threat to some characters and are immediately lethal threats to others. The idea is to encourage tanking, where players with a lot of health and DR in the correct type jump into the path of an attack aimed at a character with a small health pool and DR score.

Selection doesn't have healing magic. Its a fundamental limitation of magic in the setting that magic doesn't interact with biology. Instead, what you get are Intercept Spells, which apply flash Damage Reduction to a character while an attack is pending.

You put them together and you wind up with players constantly threat assessing attacks. "That's not dangerous. That's not dangerous. That attack is an immediate threat of character death; you jump into the path so it only deals some damage, and then I'll cast Frame Interceptor so it doesn't deal enough damage to force a long rest."


Is this perfect? No. Retraining players to jump into the path of an attack is a challenging bit of GMing, so this combat flow struggles to click with players. But it is an example of how you make support abilities necessary; you design the game from the beginning to require support abilities.

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 16, 2023, 07:00:32 PM

Quote from: VisionStorm on June 16, 2023, 05:58:37 PM

Quote from: BadApple on June 16, 2023, 01:39:07 PM

Quote from: Theory of Games on June 16, 2023, 01:17:48 PM
WAITAMINNIT!

Since when did going around killing monsters and bandits become a bad thing? It's the purpose of the game, otherwise why do the monsters have X.P. amounts? Sure you got (limited) X.P. for sneaking around 'em, but slaughtering them was far more noteworthy  ;D When did talking to my X.P. become a thing?

Oh. I remember: White Wolf.

"C'mon Gary! Put your fkn dice down and tell us how your character FEEEELS! Okay everybody: ACTION!"

::)  The goal was to get gold (or credits, depending on the system and setting) and that was the direct or indirect way you developed your PC. The idea that you have to kill monsters to get your XP came from video games and is a pox on tables everywhere.

This is more OSR revisionism. I don't know if the first printing OD&D books had them, but pretty much every old edition D&D I have seen, including Basic, had XP for killing monsters. And a lot of these are late 70s/early 80s books that came out years before video game RPGs became popular enough for TTRPGs to feel the pressure of copying them. And TTRPGs evolved out of wargaming to boot, which are pretty much games about faceless troops slaughtering other faceless troops. So the idea that wargamers would be adverse to slaughtering enemies as part of their win strategy or even as part of what they found fun in the game is absurd on the face of it.

Plus like I mentioned in my post above: Monsters ALSO have treasure. If you let them run you miss out on that loot XP. So you have to kill or incapacitate them (which in AFAIK is only possible in old D&D through certain spells, which allow a save, since the only other way to down an enemy is to get them to 0 HP, which in older editions means death) to get that XP award. And I've yet to hear any convincing case for why getting XP through Treasure, specifically, as opposed to ANY other means (like good planning, completing objectives, actual training, etc.) is somehow the most exalted method of advancement. And every other method is just a terribad affliction on the hobby. Cuz obviously being rich is the right way to "develop" your character.

It's called "math."  The modules (which many folks used as metrics, even if they didn't run them for players) had a much higher amount of gold than monster xp (especially if you use the gp value of items found, which is isuggested n the DMG).  So in AD&D at least, you'd go up much faster by treasure than by killing monsters, and burgling monster lairs, etc. is far less dangerous that killing them straight up (and lair treasure is much better than the pocket change on the monster).  Sure, we killed stuff, but a 1000 gp haul did more than a half-dozen monsters at low level.  So this was not "revisionism."  It's the way almost all of the groups I was a part of in the early eighties played.  If you weren't there, you don't know...

Except that it is revisionist, because the quoted post made claims about XP for killing coming from video games when it in fact started with D&D. And now you're moving the goalposts to add these additional claims about old D&D modules effectively granting more XP for treasure than for killing stuff with the way they were set up. But that still doesn't dispute the original claims. Or mean that that's the way that the game was played everywhere, particularly given how DIY the hobby is supposed to be, specially early on. Or even answer the bolded portion of my post about why progression needs to revolve around getting XP for treasure specifically, as opposed to any other number of things XP/progression could revolve around, like strategy, completing objectives, clever solutions, actual training, overcoming obstacles, etc.

Of ALL the non-combat things that could be used to handle progression it always has to come back to treasure for the OSR. Like treasure isn't already a reward by virtue of being treasure. And like grabbing loot in and of itself has any connection to getting better at stuff, outside of it being strictly a game convention that applies specifically to old D&D.

It basically amounts to: "It was that way in the old days. Therefore that's the best way to handle it and everything else is only a disgrace to the hobby."

And this isn't even getting into whether or not getting XP for killing is necessarily a bad thing, which I'm not sure it is. I just think that there should be other means of progression as well. But treasure specifically isn't one I'd consider, because it bears no relation to actually getting good at anything, and it's already a tangible reward. So getting it shouldn't be a basis for getting additional intangible rewards, like XP. Stuff like actually overcoming challenges should be. And that includes combat, but it should include alternate means of overcoming obstacles as well.

Treasure funds a downtime lifestyle that is conducive to training. There is only so much to be learned while roughing it on campaign and in seconds of vicious combat. Because combat entails risk to life and limb its already, it is the worst way to overcome an obstacle as a one sided slaughter would be the preferable form of applied violence. While it could be the only way to hone some combat skill, the situations in which such would be possible are rather specific. Rewarding quest completion is the only way to progress character levels without incentivizing a particular approach to overcoming obstacle.

Quote from: Itachi on June 16, 2023, 07:23:05 PM
The OP seems to come from a pretty narrow premise of wargames/skirmish-derived combat. One where the rules only give weight to direct physical attacks and everything else is either undervaluated or reliant on GM fiat (or both), which is true for games like D&D3/4/5, Pathfinder, Shadowrun, etc.

But there are LOTS of games that don't follow that mold, and actually favor non-direct physical attacks, or at least make them on par with other kinds of interactions. Like those that turn atributes into "mental hit points", or use abstract damage currencies like "stress", and allow verbal or psychological interactions to be as effective as physical ones (like Cortex, FATE, Mutant Y0, etc). Also, games that have clear cut/non-fiat based social rules like Exalted, Blades in the Dark and PbtA, Burning Wheel, Pendragon, etc.

It's really not about "combat" per se at all, but rather underlying principle of mathematics and game design. If your game system has a depleting resource which is a win condition then directly depleting that resource is usually going to be optimal. You have to actually do design work to make that not the optimal choice.

I'm honestly not sure what the OP is even talking about here.

I'm hearing if the goal is to end combat quickly, then you gotta go for damage. It's just that there are so many obvious counterexamples, I feel like I must be missing something.

I'm also not quite sure what to make of the pre-empting of certain arguments. It really feels like there's some shenanigans going on, where the conclusion is being smuggled through all these weird stipulations.

I can just speak to my experience. It's almost standard operating procedure in most Lejendary Adventure groups that you want to have a mage use QuickTime. It's basically just like Haste in D&D. Doubling the attacks of your front line fighters seems to be a "help" that speeds combat along. For sure, it's going to cut way down on the in-game time. But also if enemies are now only getting half as many attacks in relative terms, even in out-of-game time, you're getting through combat quicker by eroding away some of the enemy attacks. I'm pretty sure the only reason Haste is not used compulsively like this in AD&D is because the year of aging, which of course is a variable external to combat.

Now this is something all the cats I game with get. It's unanimous that this works and is effective. And that's worth something because not all of them are very astute when it comes to analyzing such things.

One time I was playing an Elementalist rather than a Mage. So I didn't have QuickTime. Instead, I used attack like Wind Lasso. The Low-Moderate version was castable in a single round and would bind an enemy for two rounds. Eh, big whoop, right? I mean I could technically alternate aiming it at two different enemies. And assuming I make all my checks (which I won't), at best I could keep two of them tied up at the expense of not being able to contribute to the party's damage. And this actually upset some of the dimmer-witted players in the group who felt my character wasn't contributing.

Thing is, not all enemies are homogenous goo. Sometimes there's one that hits substantially harder than the others. And by zeroing in on that one, I could actually take out a huge chunk of the enemies aggregate fire power. And that means all those dull-witted players who min-maxed prioritizing their offensive abilities over their defensive abilities are now not getting taken out by the big bad, and instead get to keep on dishing out their awesome offense.

Counterfactuals are invisible, and dimwits often have no concept of what would have been. Had my Elementalist not been there, dedicated on keeping the big bad from attacking, the front line with their first-rate offense, second-rate defense might have been in part or in full wiped out. And then all their damage dealing goes bye bye. What I was doing was every bit as effective as QuickTime. It's just less obvious.

And so I can't help but wonder if the OP isn't making that mistake that is so easy to make.

I dunno. Weird stipulations. Like if having low hit points is an edge case, then I would say a pretty large percentage of what happens in combat is "edge case." Which of course means none of it is really edge case, and it's just shenanigans to call it as such.

When I analyze 1E, look, if you know orcs are going around dealing d6 damage, then the difference between 6 and 7 hit points isn't just having 16.7% more hit points. It's having a guaranteed one-hit safety buffer. And yeah, I know it's not 5E, which gives more hit points. Then again, it also doesn't have crits. And it also isn't giving Strength bonuses to orcs. What exactly is an orcs max damage accounting for improved weapon damage, strength bonus, and crit multiplier? If 20 is the new 6 in terms of hit points, but also 20 is the new 6 in terms of maximum damage an orc can deal, then we're still qualitatively talking about the exact same thing. Maybe just different odds of it happening.

Anyway, when crybabies complain about 1E, "Waaah, waaah, why does my 1st level magic-user only get to do one thing but the fighter gets infinite swings," I say, well, really, the fighter only gets to do one thing, too. His one thing is to take a hit without dying. More than the fancy swords and armor, hit points is really what makes the fighter so effective. Because once he's below 7 hit points, he's a potential one-hit-kill, and standing toe to toe with things swinging a sword no longer seems like a great idea anymore. His spot light time is essentially over. Unless a cleric hits him with a heal and puts him back in the fight.

Like I say, if we're going to allow the parameters of the discussion to be such that this is called an edge case, there's no discussion to be had. Everything is an edge case, and we can all pack up and go home.

Because it's not just a hit point edge case. Let's talk about incapacitation. Because if you can incapacitate all your enemies at once, then when that last one goes down, that's not just increasing the quantity of enemies incapacitated by one. That's a qualitative shift to coup de grace-ville. Is that an edge case, too?

Absolute statements may make people reeee. But at least they're clear and concise. I wish there were a clear and concise statement of what's even being claimed here.

Quote from: Wisithir on June 16, 2023, 10:43:51 PM
Treasure funds a downtime lifestyle that is conducive to training. There is only so much to be learned while roughing it on campaign and in seconds of vicious combat. Because combat entails risk to life and limb its already, it is the worst way to overcome an obstacle as a one sided slaughter would be the preferable form of applied violence. While it could be the only way to hone some combat skill, the situations in which such would be possible are rather specific.

That's more of an ad hoc justification for getting XP for gold than the way things really work in reality. Actual on the ground experience is a much more effective way to hone skills and overall competence than living a pampered lifestyle (what people actually do when they have loads of money) or doing theoretical work. The only exception being if you're completely ignorant and are learning an entirely new thing outside your realm of experience. In which case you might need some schooling.

But even to the degree that a link between training and progression might exist, I don't think that it's the most central part. And there's no direct link between amount of money on hand, or specifically found during an adventure, and the quality of training you might get.

If being affluent on its own guaranteed skill development, people in the US would be the most competent people in human history. Instead they're being surpassed by places like India and China (granted, there are different factors why that's the case). And there's an overabundance of overly educated morons with crap like gender studies degrees, or who don't even have enough competency coming out of highschool.

The most competent people in the world are those who are out there doing things. Not those locked inside a classroom.

Quote from: Wisithir on June 16, 2023, 10:43:51 PMRewarding quest completion is the only way to progress character levels without incentivizing a particular approach to overcoming obstacle.

You could just award the same amount of XP regardless of the approach used. Then that guarantees that people will be creative or at least advance at the same rate regardless of how they go about doing things, even if there's no treasure in the end.

You know what's funny? When people are talking about elves and magic and dragons and somebody says, "But that's not the way it works in the real world."  ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

Quote from: Theory of Games on June 17, 2023, 07:51:53 AM
You know what's funny? When people are talking about elves and magic and dragons and somebody says, "But that's not the way it works in the real world."  ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

I really, really disagree with this common sentiment.  Always have.  The closer a roleplaying game is to real life, except for elements specifically designed to be different as part of the premise of the game, the better it works for quite a few reasons.

Quote from: Mishihari on June 17, 2023, 10:12:35 AM

Quote from: Theory of Games on June 17, 2023, 07:51:53 AM
You know what's funny? When people are talking about elves and magic and dragons and somebody says, "But that's not the way it works in the real world."  ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

I really, really disagree with this common sentiment.  Always have.  The closer a roleplaying game is to real life, except for elements specifically designed to be different as part of the premise of the game, the better it works for quite a few reasons.

It's also wrongheaded in multiple ways. Because not only does it ignore that verisimilitude is a thing, which is one of those pitfalls in discussions of RPGs or fiction that won't die. But it even ignores whatever we're actually discussing at any given moment in lieu of making pontifications that don't contribute anything.

We're not even discussing fact vs. fiction, but rather what works/makes sense or doesn't work/make sense in game mechanics. But we can't point out that something doesn't really work a certain way in reality when someone else implies that it does without someone else stepping in and pointing out: "What are you guys talking about? This is elf gaems. LULZ!"

Well I guess that we have to keep the crap game mechanics (assuming that I'm correct in my prior post) and not discuss ways to improve them because "elf gaems".

Quote from: Mishihari on June 17, 2023, 10:12:35 AM

Quote from: Theory of Games on June 17, 2023, 07:51:53 AM
You know what's funny? When people are talking about elves and magic and dragons and somebody says, "But that's not the way it works in the real world."  ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

I really, really disagree with this common sentiment.  Always have.  The closer a roleplaying game is to real life, except for elements specifically designed to be different as part of the premise of the game, the better it works for quite a few reasons.

I agree that the way the sentiment is most often brought up, it really is a total garbage throw-away line, generally intended to end conversation, and people who utter those words ought to be ashamed.

But the sentiment exists because there is a sense in which it is true. It's just that I rarely see the proper nuance applied.

Sometimes you get these "realistic" combat systems in RPGs that get elaborate with all these hit locations, crits that sever the left ring finger and such. The problem is, to get that level of "realism" in combat, you have to assume a real adversary. And in practice it means the combat is assumed to be between two humans. Even though wolves, snakes, alligators, and hippos are all real things, it's just usually these game designers weren't even thinking that far ahead. But obviously the hit locations are going to be very different for those creatures, and so usually whatever "realistic" rules there were for fighting humans go out the window at that point.

Then start piling on fantasy creatures, dragons, carrion crawlers, displacer beasts, amorphous blobs, aggressive plants, undead, and at some point we do have to face facts that this sort of realism clashes with fantasy and that the notion of just grafting fantasy onto a realistic basis is a pretty naïve sentiment. At the very least, it takes some reconciliation that isn't obvious. And I can give some examples of a reconciliation.

In Star Wars, the movies, not the RPGs, sometimes you're blasting at completely alien creatures. Or AT-ST's, or star ships. So if you're trying to model this in an RPG, you need a pretty generalized combat system. But then when it comes to the lightsaber duals, you've got hands being lopped off left and right. For that, a hit location system would be appropriate. And so you could just have a combat sub system specialized for lightsaber fights. And that would be totally on-brand and strike the right feel.

In RPGs, one of the places you see something this is in the 1E weapon vs armor adjustment tables. They only apply to man vs man combat, giving more detail there. Man vs monster just uses the generalized attack matrix raw. Same is true of initiative as well--all the "complexities" involving weapon speed and such are really only applicable in man vs man combat. So what you have is a simple generalized system that's not very realistic but is really the best you can do given the broad array of adversaries included in the game. But then you also have more detailed sub-systems for adding realism when confronting more realistic adversaries.

Dangerous Journeys reconciles it in a different direction. It has a hit location that is intended to be applied across the board. But it just uses abstract hit locations, non-vital, vital, super-vital, and ultra-vital. So if you're trying to emulate Alien Nation, you don't have to re-write the hit location system to reflect the fact that the aliens' gonads are under their arms. Super-vital is super-vital. You would just describe it as a karate chop to the arm pit rather than a knee to the groin.

Quote from: Zelen on June 16, 2023, 10:45:11 PM

Quote from: Itachi on June 16, 2023, 07:23:05 PM
The OP seems to come from a pretty narrow premise of wargames/skirmish-derived combat. One where the rules only give weight to direct physical attacks and everything else is either undervaluated or reliant on GM fiat (or both), which is true for games like D&D3/4/5, Pathfinder, Shadowrun, etc.

But there are LOTS of games that don't follow that mold, and actually favor non-direct physical attacks, or at least make them on par with other kinds of interactions. Like those that turn atributes into "mental hit points", or use abstract damage currencies like "stress", and allow verbal or psychological interactions to be as effective as physical ones (like Cortex, FATE, Mutant Y0, etc). Also, games that have clear cut/non-fiat based social rules like Exalted, Blades in the Dark and PbtA, Burning Wheel, Pendragon, etc.

It's really not about "combat" per se at all, but rather underlying principle of mathematics and game design. If your game system has a depleting resource which is a win condition then directly depleting that resource is usually going to be optimal. You have to actually do design work to make that not the optimal choice.

Yes, but that only makes sense in "closed box" systems, which make combat into this isolated, skirmish-like minigame, that don't interface well with other rules in the book. For these types of games, sure, it makes sense. But TTRPGs have so wide a design space at this point that the OP premise feels too narrow. There are bazillion games that break that mold and make it possible to deplete that resource in different ways, or have multiple different resources to be depleted. Some of those games were already cited above.

So, the OP premise sounds like: "Hey, in a game of Boxing there is nothing more optimal than a punch!". Well, that's obvious. But TTRPG at this point is like MMA, with a multitude of games that allow kicks, takedowns, choke holds, you name it.

Quote from: Mishihari on June 17, 2023, 10:12:35 AM

Quote from: Theory of Games on June 17, 2023, 07:51:53 AM
You know what's funny? When people are talking about elves and magic and dragons and somebody says, "But that's not the way it works in the real world."  ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

I really, really disagree with this common sentiment.  Always have.  The closer a roleplaying game is to real life, except for elements specifically designed to be different as part of the premise of the game, the better it works for quite a few reasons.

I'd say it that there needs to be "good enough" realism.  In practical terms, that will mean that a lot of things will be as you say, and quite a few others will edge slightly away from the it just to make the game run well or smooth out the discrepancies.  That is, if I've got flying, fire-breathing dragons, I typically want some lesser creatures that also couldn't exist in the real world,  but are closer to real-world creatures than dragons are. 

I think most of that argument isn't based on reason, though, but power plays.  It goes like this, with the instigator trying to avoid the conclusion:

Instigator:  I want to play a hobbit that uses a magical great sword with a blade thicker than my wrist and wider than my head, and jump around like a rabbit on crack cocaine in fights.
GM:  Doesn't fit my world.
Instigator:  You've got dragons that violate the laws of physics, this is no different.
GM:  In your world maybe  not, in my world it is.
Instigator:  You are stuck on realism.
GM:  No, I'm stuck on running a world that is realistic enough for me to enjoy running, that that doesn't stick my suspension of disbelief into a sack and use it as a pinata. 
Instigator:  But I really want to do this!
GM:  Knock yourself out.  You can make your own world whatever makes sense to you.

Greetings!

Quotation of Steven Mitchell:
"I want to play a hobbit that uses a magical great sword with a blade thicker than my wrist and wider than my head, and jump around like a rabbit on crack cocaine in fights."

*Laughing*--PRICELESS! ;D

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Admittedly, my naked halfling barbarian, Starkers the Enormous, wouldn't work as well in GURPS or Rolemaster as he does in D&D 5e.

Quote from: Lunamancer on June 17, 2023, 11:02:03 AM
Dangerous Journeys reconciles it in a different direction. It has a hit location that is intended to be applied across the board. But it just uses abstract hit locations, non-vital, vital, super-vital, and ultra-vital. So if you're trying to emulate Alien Nation, you don't have to re-write the hit location system to reflect the fact that the aliens' gonads are under their arms. Super-vital is super-vital. You would just describe it as a karate chop to the arm pit rather than a knee to the groin.

Dammit!  Once again EGG shows that he really understood the nature of RPGs and what they were attempting to do.  This is an approach worth considering...

Quote from: Mishihari on June 17, 2023, 10:12:35 AM

Quote from: Theory of Games on June 17, 2023, 07:51:53 AM
You know what's funny? When people are talking about elves and magic and dragons and somebody says, "But that's not the way it works in the real world."  ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

I really, really disagree with this common sentiment.  Always have.  The closer a roleplaying game is to real life, except for elements specifically designed to be different as part of the premise of the game, the better it works for quite a few reasons.

But the reality is the settings we play D&D & other rpgs in are completely different than reality. It's nonsense like "Oh, I prefer a game that has more realism during combat. I want it to feel REAL!" But, your character has Hit Points which have nothing to do with reality and if your PC gets killed the party can just have them magically revived. There is NO REALISM in rpgs, outside of (sometimes) how the environment works.

Quote from: VisionStorm on June 17, 2023, 10:57:36 AM

Quote from: Mishihari on June 17, 2023, 10:12:35 AM

Quote from: Theory of Games on June 17, 2023, 07:51:53 AM
You know what's funny? When people are talking about elves and magic and dragons and somebody says, "But that's not the way it works in the real world."  ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

I really, really disagree with this common sentiment.  Always have.  The closer a roleplaying game is to real life, except for elements specifically designed to be different as part of the premise of the game, the better it works for quite a few reasons.

It's also wrongheaded in multiple ways. Because not only does it ignore that verisimilitude is a thing, which is one of those pitfalls in discussions of RPGs or fiction that won't die. But it even ignores whatever we're actually discussing at any given moment in lieu of making pontifications that don't contribute anything.

We're not even discussing fact vs. fiction, but rather what works/makes sense or doesn't work/make sense in game mechanics. But we can't point out that something doesn't really work a certain way in reality when someone else implies that it does without someone else stepping in and pointing out: "What are you guys talking about? This is elf gaems. LULZ!"

Well I guess that we have to keep the crap game mechanics (assuming that I'm correct in my prior post) and not discuss ways to improve them because "elf gaems".

Exactly: it IS elves and magic and dragons and superheroes and psionics and extraterrestrials and laser-guns and everything else that isn't REAL. And no matter how hard you try, you can't call a "fantasy game" a "reality game" because you know that's craziness. Fantasy games can never accurately simulate reality. Ever.

Quote from: Theory of Games on June 17, 2023, 03:27:17 PM

Quote from: Mishihari on June 17, 2023, 10:12:35 AM

Quote from: Theory of Games on June 17, 2023, 07:51:53 AM
You know what's funny? When people are talking about elves and magic and dragons and somebody says, "But that's not the way it works in the real world."  ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

I really, really disagree with this common sentiment.  Always have.  The closer a roleplaying game is to real life, except for elements specifically designed to be different as part of the premise of the game, the better it works for quite a few reasons.

But the reality is the settings we play D&D & other rpgs in are completely different than reality. It's nonsense like "Oh, I prefer a game that has more realism during combat. I want it to feel REAL!" But, your character has Hit Points which have nothing to do with reality and if your PC gets killed the party can just have them magically revived. There is NO REALISM in rpgs, outside of (sometimes) how the environment works.

Quote from: VisionStorm on June 17, 2023, 10:57:36 AM

Quote from: Mishihari on June 17, 2023, 10:12:35 AM

Quote from: Theory of Games on June 17, 2023, 07:51:53 AM
You know what's funny? When people are talking about elves and magic and dragons and somebody says, "But that's not the way it works in the real world."  ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

I really, really disagree with this common sentiment.  Always have.  The closer a roleplaying game is to real life, except for elements specifically designed to be different as part of the premise of the game, the better it works for quite a few reasons.

It's also wrongheaded in multiple ways. Because not only does it ignore that verisimilitude is a thing, which is one of those pitfalls in discussions of RPGs or fiction that won't die. But it even ignores whatever we're actually discussing at any given moment in lieu of making pontifications that don't contribute anything.

We're not even discussing fact vs. fiction, but rather what works/makes sense or doesn't work/make sense in game mechanics. But we can't point out that something doesn't really work a certain way in reality when someone else implies that it does without someone else stepping in and pointing out: "What are you guys talking about? This is elf gaems. LULZ!"

Well I guess that we have to keep the crap game mechanics (assuming that I'm correct in my prior post) and not discuss ways to improve them because "elf gaems".

Exactly: it IS elves and magic and dragons and superheroes and psionics and extraterrestrials and laser-guns and everything else that isn't REAL. And no matter how hard you try, you can't call a "fantasy game" a "reality game" because you know that's craziness. Fantasy games can never accurately simulate reality. Ever.

Whatever dude. You're not even reading what's being said but firing off based on a SINGLE word that was used in passing and is completely besides the point of what's actually being discussed. And are doubling down when you're completely wrong about what the word "reality" means.

You can absolutely talk about "reality" in the context of fictional universes (which again, IT'S NOT EVEN WHAT WE WERE DISCUSSING specifically in this instance) because those worlds are still hypothetical "realities" that can still be discussed in terms of verisimilitude or speculation about what those worlds might be like if they actually existed. Not that I expect you to even read this, but I'm just putting this out there for the sake of my own sanity and anyone else who might be interested in discussing what's actually being said, rather than clinging to a single irrelevant word and your own narrow interpretation of what it even means.

Quote from: Theory of Games on June 17, 2023, 03:27:17 PM
Exactly: it IS elves and magic and dragons and superheroes and psionics and extraterrestrials and laser-guns and everything else that isn't REAL. And no matter how hard you try, you can't call a "fantasy game" a "reality game" because you know that's craziness. Fantasy games can never accurately simulate reality. Ever.

That's just nonsense, I can prove it with a simple example:  Can you imagine a fox?  Can you imagine a talking creature?  Can you imagine a talking fox?  In order for it to work, we might have to think about it a bit, because as soon as we say "talking fox" some people will imagine a standard fox that looks and acts exactly like a fox otherwise, while others will imagine an upright, humanoid fox with hands and opposable thumbs wearing a hat.  And either of those are fine, and quite a few things between them, too.  Depending on the setting.

What is not OK is imagining an upright cow-like creature with purple stripes that is giant size and happens to talk, and then calling that a "talking fox". Because unlike Humpty Dumpty, words mean things, and to be a talking fox, it's got to be in the vicinity of a real fox in at least some ways.

Which is, by the way, highly analogous to the issue of how and when and whether skill tests are good options in combat, because there needs to be some relation between what the skill does and the effect it produces that makes sense.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on June 17, 2023, 12:20:16 PM
I think most of that argument isn't based on reason, though, but power plays.  It goes like this, with the instigator trying to avoid the conclusion:

Instigator:  I want to play a hobbit that uses a magical great sword with a blade thicker than my wrist and wider than my head, and jump around like a rabbit on crack cocaine in fights.
GM:  Doesn't fit my world.
Instigator:  You've got dragons that violate the laws of physics, this is no different.

I think it helps to use real examples rather than hypothetical ones. In this case, the argument started over D&D XP-for-gold compared to XP-for-activity. Wisithir argued that XP-for-gold was more realistic.

Quote from: VisionStorm on June 17, 2023, 07:41:54 AM

Quote from: Wisithir on June 16, 2023, 10:43:51 PM
Treasure funds a downtime lifestyle that is conducive to training. There is only so much to be learned while roughing it on campaign and in seconds of vicious combat. Because combat entails risk to life and limb its already, it is the worst way to overcome an obstacle as a one sided slaughter would be the preferable form of applied violence. While it could be the only way to hone some combat skill, the situations in which such would be possible are rather specific.

That's more of an ad hoc justification for getting XP for gold than the way things really work in reality. Actual on the ground experience is a much more effective way to hone skills and overall competence than living a pampered lifestyle (what people actually do when they have loads of money) or doing theoretical work. The only exception being if you're completely ignorant and are learning an entirely new thing outside your realm of experience. In which case you might need some schooling.

In the bigger picture, I think neither of these D&D XP models are anywhere close to realistic development of skills.

If practice and training is the desired realism, then I'd think one would want an advancement system like classic Traveller - where one pays for such.

Quote from: jhkim on June 17, 2023, 09:16:43 PM
If practice and training is the desired realism, then I'd think one would want an advancement system like classic Traveller - where one pays for such.

None of you have ever played AD&D, have you?  Training was necessary to gain levels, costing downtime and money.  Heck, as the editions progressed, things like druids and monks required you to not only find a particularly high level member of your own class to train, sometimes you had to supplant or even defeat them.  The whole "xp crosses the magic number and suddenly you're up!" oozed over from video games.  Older editions of D&D weren't like that at all.

Quote from: jhkim on June 17, 2023, 09:16:43 PM

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on June 17, 2023, 12:20:16 PM
I think most of that argument isn't based on reason, though, but power plays.  It goes like this, with the instigator trying to avoid the conclusion:

Instigator:  I want to play a hobbit that uses a magical great sword with a blade thicker than my wrist and wider than my head, and jump around like a rabbit on crack cocaine in fights.
GM:  Doesn't fit my world.
Instigator:  You've got dragons that violate the laws of physics, this is no different.

I think it helps to use real examples rather than hypothetical ones. In this case, the argument started over D&D XP-for-gold compared to XP-for-activity. Wisithir argued that XP-for-gold was more realistic.

Quote from: VisionStorm on June 17, 2023, 07:41:54 AM

Quote from: Wisithir on June 16, 2023, 10:43:51 PM
Treasure funds a downtime lifestyle that is conducive to training. There is only so much to be learned while roughing it on campaign and in seconds of vicious combat. Because combat entails risk to life and limb its already, it is the worst way to overcome an obstacle as a one sided slaughter would be the preferable form of applied violence. While it could be the only way to hone some combat skill, the situations in which such would be possible are rather specific.

That's more of an ad hoc justification for getting XP for gold than the way things really work in reality. Actual on the ground experience is a much more effective way to hone skills and overall competence than living a pampered lifestyle (what people actually do when they have loads of money) or doing theoretical work. The only exception being if you're completely ignorant and are learning an entirely new thing outside your realm of experience. In which case you might need some schooling.

In the bigger picture, I think neither of these D&D XP models are anywhere close to realistic development of skills.

If practice and training is the desired realism, then I'd think one would want an advancement system like classic Traveller - where one pays for such.

In my experience a great deal of the skills I've learned that I actually used were learned mostly from actual on the ground experience. And even in the cases I had some training leading up to them, the actual "proficient" level of competency didn't kick in till I had actual on the ground experience. Every network admin and programmer I've worked with that went to college has mentioned that all the real work skills that they had were learned on the job and that all that they learned from school was theoretical BS that was often outdated and had no real world application. My experiences with web and graphic design have been similar.

Granted, I tend to rely a lot on free information found on the internet to learn a lot of things, particularly stuff related to using software applications, web design, etc. and even martial arts and a bunch of other stuff. Which wouldn't exist in a pseudo Medieval world. But there are many ways to learn things that don't involve paying huge sums on the order of magnitude of an adventuring party's treasure haul. Lots of people learn through apprenticeships, which is the opposite of paying for training. A character in a pseudo Medieval world could take an apprenticeship under a smith, for example, if they want to learn smith work.

Institutionalized training is overrated, and IMO, deeply questionable on its effectiveness, outside few very technical or academic areas of knowledge. And even then, you could probably learn a lot of that on your own through books, and many people have throughout history.

That being said "realistic" skill development is not necessarily the goal, at least for me, but more like a benchmark. And I don't think that could be effectively modeled in an RPG anyway. But I also don't think unrealistic methods of advancement, such as treating training as the be all end of of progression, should be enforced. Training in game should be more like a supplemental thing, or a way to gate very specialized areas of knowledge not available to everyone in the game world.

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 17, 2023, 11:14:18 PM

Quote from: jhkim on June 17, 2023, 09:16:43 PM
If practice and training is the desired realism, then I'd think one would want an advancement system like classic Traveller - where one pays for such.

None of you have ever played AD&D, have you?  Training was necessary to gain levels, costing downtime and money.  Heck, as the editions progressed, things like druids and monks required you to not only find a particularly high level member of your own class to train, sometimes you had to supplant or even defeat them.  The whole "xp crosses the magic number and suddenly you're up!" oozed over from video games.  Older editions of D&D weren't like that at all.

I just skimmed through a copy of Basic and Rules Encyclopedia and saw no mention of training being a requirement for advancement. If anything the phrasing implied that character simply are whatever level matches their XP total (i.e. it's automatic). And the only restriction mentioned was that characters could only earn enough XP to gain a single level at a time. So it looks like the whole "xp crosses the magic number and suddenly you're up!" oozed over from OG D&D.

Also, IIRC training requirements for advancement in AD&D were optional. Though, I never played 1e so I'm not sure.

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 17, 2023, 11:14:18 PM

Quote from: jhkim on June 17, 2023, 09:16:43 PM
If practice and training is the desired realism, then I'd think one would want an advancement system like classic Traveller - where one pays for such.

None of you have ever played AD&D, have you?  Training was necessary to gain levels, costing downtime and money.  Heck, as the editions progressed, things like druids and monks required you to not only find a particularly high level member of your own class to train, sometimes you had to supplant or even defeat them.  The whole "xp crosses the magic number and suddenly you're up!" oozed over from video games.  Older editions of D&D weren't like that at all.

You say "oozed" as if computer games and roleplaying games using each others best ideas (when compatible) was some sort of corruption instead of tabletop designers deciding that video game leveling was just a better system for play.

And that's if they even got the idea from crps and not the myriad other ttrpgs like Palladium that did away with training costs to level up. Given that many of these games date back to the early days of gaming and had already abandoned D&D "must spend gold on training to level up" I actually find the idea that this change came from video games to be a bit specious.

Regardless, the fact that it was widely adopted with only a tiny minority bitching about gold/training to level going the way of the dodo outside of some of the OSR adherents tells me that not all things old are automatically best.

Quote from: VisionStorm on June 18, 2023, 01:11:29 AM

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 17, 2023, 11:14:18 PM

Quote from: jhkim on June 17, 2023, 09:16:43 PM
If practice and training is the desired realism, then I'd think one would want an advancement system like classic Traveller - where one pays for such.

None of you have ever played AD&D, have you?  Training was necessary to gain levels, costing downtime and money.  Heck, as the editions progressed, things like druids and monks required you to not only find a particularly high level member of your own class to train, sometimes you had to supplant or even defeat them.  The whole "xp crosses the magic number and suddenly you're up!" oozed over from video games.  Older editions of D&D weren't like that at all.

I just skimmed through a copy of Basic and Rules Encyclopedia and saw no mention of training being a requirement for advancement. If anything the phrasing implied that character simply are whatever level matches their XP total (i.e. it's automatic). And the only restriction mentioned was that characters could only earn enough XP to gain a single level at a time. So it looks like the whole "xp crosses the magic number and suddenly you're up!" oozed over from OG D&D.

Also, IIRC training requirements for advancement in AD&D were optional. Though, I never played 1e so I'm not sure.

Nope, it was not optional. AD&D 1e level advancement required:
1. Defeat monster & bad guys
2. Collect treasure
3. Get training from a mentor/more-experienced character of the same class

Quote from: Chris24601 on June 18, 2023, 01:22:38 AM

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 17, 2023, 11:14:18 PM

Quote from: jhkim on June 17, 2023, 09:16:43 PM
If practice and training is the desired realism, then I'd think one would want an advancement system like classic Traveller - where one pays for such.

None of you have ever played AD&D, have you?  Training was necessary to gain levels, costing downtime and money.  Heck, as the editions progressed, things like druids and monks required you to not only find a particularly high level member of your own class to train, sometimes you had to supplant or even defeat them.  The whole "xp crosses the magic number and suddenly you're up!" oozed over from video games.  Older editions of D&D weren't like that at all.

You say "oozed" as if computer games and roleplaying games using each others best ideas (when compatible) was some sort of corruption instead of tabletop designers deciding that video game leveling was just a better system for play.

And that's if they even got the idea from crps and not the myriad other ttrpgs like Palladium that did away with training costs to level up. Given that many of these games date back to the early days of gaming and had already abandoned D&D "must spend gold on training to level up" I actually find the idea that this change came from video games to be a bit specious.

Regardless, the fact that it was widely adopted with only a tiny minority bitching about gold/training to level going the way of the dodo outside of some of the OSR adherents tells me that not all things old are automatically best.

Like I mentioned in my own reply, there was no mention of it Basic D&D, so it's just another case of OSR revisionism. Requiring payed training to advance is also inconvenient micromanagement that has no solid basis on reality, and is mostly just a game convention used as a money sink to reduce the ridiculous sums of money D&D characters get from a treasure haul. It was probably not used in the vast majority of other games and abandoned in every edition of D&D other than AD&D 1e (which apparently did require it according to Theory of Games) because people have better things to do with their lives than micromanaging excessive training beyond what people even need in real life for fictional characters in GAME that's supposed to be about fun and escaping the tedium of their lives, not add to it.

I can see training requirements work in some instances depending on the campaign, particularly to gate stuff like magic, or to allow characters to learn new skills well beyond anything in their background. But generally it's just an inconvenience that's not what normal people sign up for when they get into RPGs.

Quote from: VisionStorm on June 18, 2023, 08:55:25 AM
Like I mentioned in my own reply, there was no mention of it Basic D&D, so it's just another case of OSR revisionism.

Both Holmes Basic and AD&D were published in 77, with "Basic" being exactly that (a simplified edition only going up to 3rd level).  The DMG had training rules in 79.  Moldvay Basic was published in 81 with Expert soon after.  The Cyclopedia isn't until 91.  So, at worst, training rules were in the complete game contemporaneous with Basic.  Though, in reality, since Holmes Basic is just an intro module for AD&D (and was marketed as such by TSR... characters above 3rd were expected to switch to the AD&D rules) , training was there from before complete Basic or the Cyclopedia (which wasn't published until after 2nd Edition... which does include training rules, though as options).

So you keep using "revisionism" for stuff that happened before what you are citing.  Leading me to believe you don't know what that word means...

Quote from: Eirikrautha on June 18, 2023, 11:26:04 AM

Quote from: VisionStorm on June 18, 2023, 08:55:25 AM
Like I mentioned in my own reply, there was no mention of it Basic D&D, so it's just another case of OSR revisionism.

Both Holmes Basic and AD&D were published in 77, with "Basic" being exactly that (a simplified edition only going up to 3rd level).  The DMG had training rules in 79.  Moldvay Basic was published in 81 with Expert soon after.  The Cyclopedia isn't until 91.  So, at worst, training rules were in the complete game contemporaneous with Basic.  Though, in reality, since Holmes Basic is just an intro module for AD&D (and was marketed as such by TSR... characters above 3rd were expected to switch to the AD&D rules) , training was there from before complete Basic or the Cyclopedia (which wasn't published until after 2nd Edition... which does include training rules, though as options).

So you keep using "revisionism" for stuff that happened before what you are citing.  Leading me to believe you don't know what that word means...

Except that "Basic" vs "Advanced" were just marketing terms, and "Basic" D&D and related books were just a continuation of OG D&D, which apparently didn't have training rules, just like the vast majority of other old school RPGs other than AD&D (and maybe Traveler from what I've heard). And even AD&D didn't have training rules till the DMG came out years after the PHB, which makes me question how prevalently those rules were used in actual play, given that people had to wait for the DMG to come out to tell them it was a requirement. All of which means that advancement without training didn't originate from video games, making claims that it did actual historical revisionism.

But the fact that you still insist that it isn't, even after you tacitly admit that Basic had no training rules in your own posts makes me think that you're being intellectually dishonest and arguing for the sake of arguing, rather than because I'm wrong and you're right on this or any other issue you nitpick from me.