Naz, you misunderstand: Killing the players is still on the table, only I'd prefer I (the GM) be the one in control over when and how that happens, not the book.  

Maw: Yeah, I figured we would be on the same page.  We just come at it from different sides I think.

Spike, you kill the players? I thought my old crew was hardcore for leaving pentagrams and goat entrails outside their windows and chanting in black robes...oops...blew my cover. Never mind.

Quote from: J ArcaneSo, umm, you tell them?  I'm not aware of any rule present in any game that says the GM has to be some kind of mysterious black box that spits out only short answers to questions.  There's nothing stopping you from explaining your reasoning.

A capital idea! One I dedicated most of my last post to, in fact. In fact, let me say, "Fucking-a."

Quote from: J ArcaneAnd again we're back to having to dig for that one page in the book where it's discussed, and gameplay gets slowed down.  Because I don't find that players are any more likely to remember these sorts of special rules than the GM, barring the occasional rules lawyer.  


To the latter examples regarding falling, I'd point you to Spike's post above, as a great way of resolving matters, and one which realyl requires no formal rules for.

I would actually suggest that you James Bond example is perfect for what I was talking about.  Complex special rules for falling damage are incompatible with a genre and style of play high on action and short on thought.

Leaping out the hotel window becomes a lot less fun process when it requires digging through a rulebook, height calculations, die rolls, the works, everytime someone gets a bit cavalier.  

THAT more than uncertainty, will inhibit player action.  Players do all kinds of crazy crap, if they think it'll be fun.  

If it's instead an excercise in bad trigonometry, it ain't gonna appeal.

... not sure where you're getting the idea that falling rules would need to be complex.

I'd want rules appropriate for the genre -- so for a fast-moving action/adventure game, I'd want rules that

1) Gave a falling hero/important villain a good chance of living, even of not being wounded
2) Resolved that quickly with a minimum of fuss (and considerably less realism)

Doesn't sound like a disconnect there -- why does everyone assume that falling rules would need to be a physics textbook problem? That's an assumption I don't think is warranted given the (overtly) abstract nature of virtually all RPGs... but it's an assumption that pops up over and over again.

Since you're making it, maybe you can explain?

I, on the other hand, don't like Spikes's idea about cheating and "only telling the players a little bit."

That's not the first time I've seen that kind of PoV in this thread -- is one of the objection to rules for things like drowning and falling that they make-specific something that most GM's would rather rule based on discretion?

For less-important situations, making a quick ruling is fine, but for something that might kill a PC, I'd like to be as explicit and concrete as possible.

Even if that means taking a bit more time.

Cheers,
-E.

Quote from: -E.Out of curiosity: If someone did try to light an enemy or a crime scene on fire in your game, what would you do?

It would really depend on the circumstances.

Mostly, I'd make a judgement call based on the means for creating a fire and the flamability of what is being lit.  Rubbing two sticks together to start a campfire?  You'll probably need to make a Survival role or something similar.  Trying to dispose of a dead body by dousing it with petrol and using a lighter?  Well, I'd judge that to be an automatic action.

The thing is, there are so many variations, so many possibilities for using fire that I can't imagine how any rule system can adequately cover them all without becoming ridiculously detailed.

So why have incomplete rules on fire?  Why not just have no rules on fire at all?  It serves the same purpose.

QuoteOff the top of my head, I can think of several possible reactions, but from what I'm getting, most of the folks who dislike / don't need formal rules of any kind for this sort of thing would make a ruling on the fly -- effectively creating  a rule to cover the specific situation.

Is that what you'd do?

Pretty much.  Out of interest, what game systems do you play?

Quote from: SpikeI'm strongly tempted to put falling/drowning/firey deaths down to simple yes/no equations. In fact, that's almost always how I would run it.

Yeah, it's idiot simple and can be a bit cruel, but given that it's fiated, you don't get players thinking their character can take a shortcut down to the ground by leaping out of a jetplane without a parachute, simply because they have enough hit points, so it hasn't really come up very often.


Then again, I'm the fucking poster child for ignoring the RAW and playing it by ear.  I'm constantly amazed by the rules that the players will apply to themselves without my asking them too.... :what:

For non-life/death situations, I don't think a quick rule-it-and-move-on approach is bad.

Also: for situations where the outcome is obvious there's no reason to roll anything or consult the rules... (I think I said that above, but repeating it here, just to be clear)

But in my experience, non-obvious situations come up quite a bit (e.g. falls that might or might not be very damaging) and even more likely: PC's will attempt something based on their understanding of the possible worst-case scenario...

In my games, it's not uncommon for a PC to wonder, "I'd like to try to swing across the room -- what are my odds of pulling that off? And if I fall, how badly will I get hurt?"

If I tried to make a spot ruling with very little consideration, I don't think I'd be very consistent (something that's important in my group) and I doubt I'd end up saving much time overall -- the ensuing discussion would probably take longer than looking up a rule.

But it does look like I have a significantly higher tolerance for knowing / using the rules than most of the folks here. I'll let you in on my secret weapon: I have players who have virtually memorized the rules books and are able to accurately provide the rules on-demand.

If care about playing by the rules-as-written at all (and I know you said you don't really -- but if that ever changes), I highly recommend you get some players like that

Cheers,
-E.

Quote from: Tyberious FunkIt would really depend on the circumstances.

Mostly, I'd make a judgement call based on the means for creating a fire and the flamability of what is being lit.  Rubbing two sticks together to start a campfire?  You'll probably need to make a Survival role or something similar.  Trying to dispose of a dead body by dousing it with petrol and using a lighter?  Well, I'd judge that to be an automatic action.

The thing is, there are so many variations, so many possibilities for using fire that I can't imagine how any rule system can adequately cover them all without becoming ridiculously detailed.

So why have incomplete rules on fire?  Why not just have no rules on fire at all?  It serves the same purpose.

Pretty much.  Out of interest, what game systems do you play?

1) Completely agree that no set of rules will be even close to comprehensive. What I want is a framework and a lot reference points.

Since, in my group, most complex / really important rules calls that are outside of hard-and-fast rules (E.g. many of them) are discussions (rather than simple GM-fiat-and-move-on) having the game provide a common ground is very helpful.

• I'd like a fire system to cover odds of setting things on fire (so a concrete bunker is, ahem, much harder to burn than, say, a log cabin)
• I'd like a fire system to cover the damage fire does, both to living things and to inanimate objects, and some rules to determine if a fire 'goes out' or not
• I'd like a fire system to cover the way fire spreads (in general), using the rules for setting things on fire.
• For things like the dangers of smoke inhalation, I... well, I'd just use the drowning rules

That's asking a lot: I wouldn't be terribly unhappy with rules a lot more basic than that...

2) I play D20 (Modern and some other variants), D&D 3.5, GURPS. I ran a good deal of M&M and a little Exalted last year (about one or two sessions). I haven't played Hero in ages, but it more-or-less informs my opinion of what a well-designed game should be (not that it's perfect -- far from it -- but in terms of what it covered and how it approached gaming, I think it was and remains brilliant)

Cheers,
-E.

Quote from: CalithenaSpike, you kill the players? I thought my old crew was hardcore for leaving pentagrams and goat entrails outside their windows and chanting in black robes...oops...blew my cover. Never mind.

Hey, how do you think I afford the post game BBQ?

E: Regards to cheating. It's shorthand, really.  I play without a GM's screen, my dice rolls are open, my notes entirely in my head, so my players are under no illusions that I have some arcane secret method I use to run the game.

If you are inclined to pull out the Jargon, you could say that our social contract is reasonably clear cut and easy to grasp. I run the game, they run their characters.  I roll my dice, they roll their dice and I interpret the results.  

It's only cheating as far as the rules in the book are concerned, cause I'd rather have the play moving forward then get bogged down trying to figure out if a burning arrowhead canonically does more damage than a simple broadhead, or what have you.  Thus they trust me not to kill them arbitrarily, and when they do die, at the end of the day they realize it was some foolish thing they did that got them killed, not the cold inflexible application of rules.

And yes, if I have a player who has memorized the rules and wants to play by the book, I have no problem tapping that knowledge when it affects their character.  On the other hand, my expirence with 'rules lawyers' is that often their knowledge of the game can be as flawed as my own, when you actually look things up.

Then again, if you check my AP thread here, you'll see that my players seem more interested in trying to cut notches in bedposts than acts of derring do...:confused:

Quote from: -E.But in my experience, non-obvious situations come up quite a bit (e.g. falls that might or might not be very damaging) and even more likely: PC's will attempt something based on their understanding of the possible worst-case scenario...

As a player, I can appreciate it being important to have a common frame of reference with the GM.  This either comes from explicit rules as written, or by open discussion with the GM.  Here's what I mean...

My character starts climbing a rope up the side of a mountain when he fails his climbing check and falls.

Scenario One - The GM consults the rule book and tells me I'll take 3d6 damage (or whatever), based on the height I've fallen from.

Scenario Two - The GM makes a judgement call (either because the rules to support this scenario, or because no-one can be bothered to check them) and tells me I'll take 3d6 damage.

In Scenario Two, I have to take it on good faith that the GM has made a reasonable judgement.  And if 3d6 is enough to kill my character, could well be pissed off.  But in Scenario One, the GM can point to the rules as a fallback - I knew the risks of climbing because they were clearly articulated in the rules..  I have no recourse to complain.

When I GM, I try to be explicit up front over judgement calls I make.  So in Scenario Two, I would tell the players up front that a fall could do as much as 3d6 damage.  Yes, I've made things up... but the end result is the same.  They then have as much information available to them to make a decision as if the rules had been explicity written for that scenario.  

What about consistency?  I rarely find it to be a problem, except with difficult or argumentative players.  So someone falls while climbing the side of a ridge and I decide they take 3d6 damage.  Several hours later, another character falls from the same height as the party traverses the ridge only this time I deem the damage to be 4d6.  Maybe this area is particularly rocky, with sharp, jutting edges.  Or maybe it's just that little bit higher.  Again, as long as I'm up front with the players it isn't usually a problem - "Hey guys, as you move along the edge of the ridge, you notice it's actually getting higher.  And there are some nasty looking rocks below.  Are you sure you want to continue this way? A failed climbing check will be really nasty."

QuoteIn my games, it's not uncommon for a PC to wonder, "I'd like to try to swing across the room -- what are my odds of pulling that off? And if I fall, how badly will I get hurt?"

If I tried to make a spot ruling with very little consideration, I don't think I'd be very consistent (something that's important in my group) and I doubt I'd end up saving much time overall -- the ensuing discussion would probably take longer than looking up a rule.

No offence to either you or your players - but this reminds me of the way I used to play in high school.  Or at least, the way my group used to play in high school.  I recall some absolute ding dong arguments about how hard it would be to complete certain tasks.  I remember a player arguing for almost an hour over the difficulty of traversing a greased pole.  He even went home to get a tub of butter so he could try it out.

I'd like to think I've matured since then.  And (hopefully) so have the people I play with.  

Quote2) I play D20 (Modern and some other variants), D&D 3.5, GURPS. I ran a good deal of M&M and a little Exalted last year (about one or two sessions). I haven't played Hero in ages, but it more-or-less informs my opinion of what a well-designed game should be (not that it's perfect -- far from it -- but in terms of what it covered and how it approached gaming, I think it was and remains brilliant)

I figured I'd see GURPS and Hero in your list.

About the "burn the evidence" scenario, if there was any doubt I'd be tempted to get sort of Forge-y and treat it as a contest between the PC's expertise and that of the police, with modifiers for the amount of evidence, its combustibility, and the availability of accelerants--instead of working on an intermediate step of calculating the precise damange.

Aside from that, -E, I do think you're onto something interesting with your earlier comment about games picking up specific rules when the rules as written offer only vague treatment (or none at all) for activities that the group does a lot of. But I've had several hacks at expressing my thesis, only to give up without posting. I'll have another go later.

My issue with such rules is what I call the Dropped Lantern Table Syndrome. That was a little table back in RuneQuest, getting you to roll the dice to see what happened to the lantern after you dropped it, presumably to draw your sword to fight some monster in the dark.

Who the fuck ever used the Dropped Lantern Table? It's a detail no-one ever uses.

And if there's a Dropped Lantern Table, and drowning and setting-things-on-fire rules, then you also should - just to give equal detail for something just as likely to happen - have rules for lack of sleep, different fatigue levels dependent on temperature and clothing, adjusted by quality of diet, and of course distance covered during overland hiking, and perhaps some chances of pregnancy, too?

I don't mind these rules - but they never get used. I remember a while back I asked on the SJGames forums, who uses reaction rolls? Suposedly when your character meets someone for the first time, the GM does a reaction roll to see how inclined to co-operate with you they are. If your character is ugly or charismatic or whatever, that's supposed to adjust the roll. So I asked, does anyone use these reaction rolls? And the answer was: "Nope." So players are paying for Dis/Advantages which grant RR bonuses - and they're never used. They're paying or gaining xp for nothing.

Looking around, it doesn't seem anyone is using the GURPS 4e rules for lack of sleep, fatigue due to high temperature, and so on.

Why have rules no-one uses?

It reminds me of the intro to an edition of Harnmaster, where they said that it seemed like a lot of attributes for a character, but they guaranteed that each one would be used at least once in the campaign. Once in the campaign? Fuck that. I don't need rules for things that happen once in a campaign, I need rules for things that happen each session, or every few sessions. The once-a-campaign stuff, I can wing that, I'm not stupid.

Rules no-one uses are just wasted pages. There could be more interesting stuff there - say, examples of task difficulties for each skill - or maybe they could do a pocket edition of the game. No, not GURPS (or whatever) Lite, but GURPS Actually Used.

Fuckin' Dropped Lantern Table!

This sort of stuff, when you look at the individual rules, you go, yep, that's fine, that makes sense. But when you look at them as a whole... there's a lot that could be cut away without really affecting most game sessions.

Ah, but there you're getting to the point I am struggling to put into words.

That dropped lantern table was undoubtedly produced because at some point, dropped lanterns became really important in the way the designers played the game. Maybe once, maybe several times, maybe every session, who knows? But by showing how the group dealt with that, the table suggests an important element of RPG design & play--at least what was big in the era of RQ II/III. Namely: if an event or attempt was worth much effort describing, it was worth representing mechanically. None of this "fortune at the middle" stuff where you make a generic roll and then indulge in story-time descriptions to explain how it came out that way; nor the approach (carried to the extreme in Wushu) where your description matters, but only trivially, in that any old thing will do as long as you say enough of it. No: announcing the action & rolling the dice is the action (in a sense), and either hard & fast rules or an external intellect (in the form of the GM) would ensure that whatever you described your character doing would be considered fairly, in resolving the outcome.

Quote from: SpikeE: Regards to cheating. It's shorthand, really.  I play without a GM's screen, my dice rolls are open, my notes entirely in my head, so my players are under no illusions that I have some arcane secret method I use to run the game.  

It's only cheating as far as the rules in the book are concerned...

And yes, if I have a player who has memorized the rules and wants to play by the book, I have no problem tapping that knowledge when it affects their character.  On the other hand, my expirence with 'rules lawyers' is that often their knowledge of the game can be as flawed as my own, when you actually look things up.

Then again, if you check my AP thread here, you'll see that my players seem more interested in trying to cut notches in bedposts than acts of derring do...:confused:

Gotcha. I wouldn't call that "cheating" -- clearly what you're doing is above-board and works for your players.

The un-clarity wouldn't work for me; since we're all playing in a world that doesn't really exist I find that clarity about how things work, what I'm thinking, etc. helps everyone get into the game more.

And (in case it isn't clear)

• I appreciate and prioritize speed-of-play over just about everything else
• Except...
• Life-or-death situations, where I prefer to slow things down and double check that everyone's on the same page in terms of risk and potential outcomes
• And...
• Issues of consistency or fidelity, where I'm setting a precedent and want to think things through more completely

Cheers,
-E.

Quote from: JimBobOzFuckin' Dropped Lantern Table!

Brilliant!

01-30 lamp goes out completely
31-70 lamp burns on, unbroken; roll for beam direction if dropped.
71-85 lamp breaks and spreads all over the floor, leaving a very slick surface.
86-00 lamp breaks and spreads burning oil over floor; treat flames as a small fire (see below)

Where the fuck are the rules for beam direction?!? And 'if dropped'?!? THIS IS THE DROPPED LANTERN TABLE MOFO!

Another favourite from the same page of RQ2:

A candle is a stick of wax with a wick that burns.

No fucking shit! And if dropped, it goes out when the referee rolls 06-00 on D100. Woohoo!

LOL! Even better: Torches are sticks which burn on the end. They go out less rarely when dropped though: 96-00.

And yes, rules for drowning and falling are on the same page too.

- Q

Quote from: Tyberious FunkAs a player, I can appreciate it being important to have a common frame of reference with the GM.  This either comes from explicit rules as written, or by open discussion with the GM.

In Scenario Two, I have to take it on good faith that the GM has made a reasonable judgement.  And if 3d6 is enough to kill my character, could well be pissed off.  But in Scenario One, the GM can point to the rules as a fallback - I knew the risks of climbing because they were clearly articulated in the rules..  I have no recourse to complain.

When I GM, I try to be explicit up front over judgement calls I make.  

What about consistency?  I rarely find it to be a problem, except with difficult or argumentative players.  

I do the same up-front thing -- exactly: "If you fall from here, you'll probably take 'X' damage."

I also try to explain the ruling (quickly; for the purpose of giving everyone insight into what I was thinking moreso than to justify my position), and I find it's hard to make a coherent explanation that doesn't involve both game-terms (dice of damage) and real-life terms (distance of the fall, what's at the bottom, etc.)

This is because if there *is* any further discussion (usually there isn't, sometimes there is), it helps for people to know what I was thinking.

Which brings me to your next point...

Quote from: Tyberious FunkNo offence to either you or your players - but this reminds me of the way I used to play in high school.  Or at least, the way my group used to play in high school.  I recall some absolute ding dong arguments about how hard it would be to complete certain tasks.  I remember a player arguing for almost an hour over the difficulty of traversing a greased pole.  He even went home to get a tub of butter so he could try it out.

I'd like to think I've matured since then.  And (hopefully) so have the people I play with.  

I think the maturity shows in the reasons for having the conversation and the tone of it, as well as how everyone presents and adjusts their positions.

Here's my thinking (illustrating my description of my point above)

• We've all sat down to play "let's pretend" but with dice
• Not only are we pretending in a fantasy world, but often the action involves things that we have no direct experience on (killing things with swords, for example)
• The only way to negotiate (in the 'navigate') this is to communicate
• Hence talking about how easy or hard something is doesn't strike me as fundamentally less mature than RPG-ing in general

That's not to say that this kind of conversation necessarily goes well -- my experiences in high school parallel yours -- but today the conversations are fast, focused and productive. They help everyone get on the same sheet of music and move on.

Fundamentally, My Assertion: Discussing how hard it is to drive a starship through a star is fundamentally no more or less mature than pretending you're an elf. In both cases maturity shows up in *how* and *why* you're doing the thing.

Quote from: Tyberious FunkI figured I'd see GURPS and Hero in your list.

I've often wondered how I come off on-line. Apparently I present an image that's not only elite, and sublimely brilliant, but also incredibly good-looking...

Or maybe you had different stereotypes about GURPS and Hero players?

Cheers,
-E.