Monte Cook is kind of like Paul McCartney. When he was teamed up with Jonathan Tweet on 3e, it was great, because Tweet used his fancy ideas but kept him in check. On his own, he's mostly done drivel.

His initial 'contributions' to 5e was a boatload of diva bullshit.

I prefer the rule of 3 when describing my character (or getting players to describe theirs):
What are 3 things that other people would know about you after knowing you for an hour?
What are 3 things that other people would know about you after knowing you for a month?
What are 3 things that are private to you?

This is less constraining, as it's mostly about what other people see, not what you actually are. And the truly personal stuff is "hidden", which I feel is less constraining.
I guess the first 3 things might be equivalent to the "Thing that does the thing with that other thing", but it's different enough foe me.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1117479His initial 'contributions' to 5e was a boatload of diva bullshit.

That is not true.  He did invent Passive Perception.

Quote from: Shasarak;1117504That is not true.  He did invent Passive Perception.

What a load of bullshit. He did not. You can go all the way back to original D&D, Dwarves, Elves, and Thieves  automatically received passive perception rolls to detect sloping passages, secret doors, and traps respectively. GM's have been making those or other attributes rolls vs. Intelligence or Wisdom for players to notice stuff and make observations in game, automatically rolling on behalf of players, since D&D and RPGs began.

Didn´t Hero Quest use the same type of one-sentence character description as Cypher? I seem to remember that much of it from Mythic Russia.

Quote from: GameDaddy;1117509What a load of bullshit. He did not. You can go all the way back to original D&D, Dwarves, Elves, and Thieves  automatically received passive perception rolls to detect sloping passages, secret doors, and traps respectively. GM's have been making those or other attributes rolls vs. Intelligence or Wisdom for players to notice stuff and make observations in game, automatically rolling on behalf of players, since D&D and RPGs began.

But in 5e passive perception is not rolled; it's a fixed target number like AC which stealthy opponents must beat to surprise the character. (For early D&D, I'd also mention surprise rolls as a common perception check.) (I don't recall that thieves got an automatic passive roll to detect traps, though, in Greyhawk at least.)

I don't know that it's that original even so; it looks to me like the take 10 mechanic from 3e but automatic. It does avoid a lot of dice rolling (of which you'd have to do extra spurious dice rolling to keep the players guessing).

I also don't think that it's that good a mechanic; the more perceptive character is never surprised unless the less perceptive one is also, and stealthy characters don't experience the swing of d20 vs d20 that grappling or other contests have.

Quote from: rawma;1117521I also don't think that it's that good a mechanic; the more perceptive character is never surprised unless the less perceptive one is also, and stealthy characters don't experience the swing of d20 vs d20 that grappling or other contests have.

But then again neither do combatants, yet the case could be made for a swingy Attack vs active Defense roll (as done in some other games), if we're judging action mechanics by their swingyness. You could even add opposed rolls for all ability checks and just treat difficulty as a modifier instead of a passive target number. You could also make passive perception rolls individual as well (the stealthy character needs to roll vs each observer individually) to add more variability between who notices or not the stealth (or equivalent--Bluff, whatever) attempt.

Personally I think it's a give or take, and either approach could work depending on how "swingy" you want actions to feel vs how fast you want them resolved. I'm also not sure how original this mechanic is, since I'm pretty sure I've seen it before (since decades ago), but don't remember which systems had it.

I never did opposed rolls much originally, except for strength checks for grappling. After 3e came out is when opposed checks became much more popular. Most of the passive perception rolls from the early days were made versus a privately determined target difficulty number which depended a lot on the situation at hand, and whether the players were being stealthy, and roleplaying cleverly or not. Such checks, I would add were rolled in secret behind the GM's screen. Most of the time the players thought I was doing a wandering monsters check, but in reality a lot more was happening behind the scenes, and I was using their character abilities and skills to determine how much information to give them about the situation they were currently in.

You can file this under ancient GM tips.

Quote from: VisionStorm;1117540But then again neither do combatants, yet the case could be made for a swingy Attack vs active Defense roll (as done in some other games), if we're judging action mechanics by their swingyness. You could even add opposed rolls for all ability checks and just treat difficulty as a modifier instead of a passive target number. You could also make passive perception rolls individual as well (the stealthy character needs to roll vs each observer individually) to add more variability between who notices or not the stealth (or equivalent--Bluff, whatever) attempt.

Personally I think it's a give or take, and either approach could work depending on how "swingy" you want actions to feel vs how fast you want them resolved. I'm also not sure how original this mechanic is, since I'm pretty sure I've seen it before (since decades ago), but don't remember which systems had it.

I can see a trap hitting everyone whose AC is less than, say, 15; that would be equivalent to trap or secret door detection where there's a fixed (or rolled in advance) stealth for the thing hidden. Players can make their passive perception an active roll by searching more carefully (and getting advantage adds 5 to passive perception).

Making a roll of d20+(AC-10) (that is, as if AC were a bonus to a default armor class of 10) versus the existing attack roll (although it wouldn't quite work the same, since matching numbers in a contest favor the status quo, which is presumably not hitting, but an attack roll that matches the "passive" AC hits, and of course d20 averages 10.5 rather than 10). (And once it's an actual roll, then there's the question of luck, guidance, advantage, foretelling and various other features that allow substitute rolls.) But for me bounded accuracy means there's still enough swing in combat, and making a roll on each side would slow things down.

The reason for making passive perception fixed is that if the character's current perception is constantly rolled, that's a lot of rolling which the players can interpret as something happening, or a lot more rolling in order to disguise which are actual checks. For surprise, since you're usually about to roll initiative, it doesn't seem like you're giving much away to the player (just determining if they can act, in which case they know what tried to surprise them, or they can't act, in which case knowing in advance of next acting is not really a benefit) or adding too much to the burden of total dice rolling. (Using the same roll for surprise/perception and for initiative would probably not quite work, as anyone who was not surprised would have a good initiative and the two rolls might have separate advantage/disadvantage.)

Curiously, TWERPS (1987) combat used opposed rolls of d10+strength; ties went to the defender in combat. Other things were resolved by a single roll against a fixed difficulty set by the GM.

Quote from: GameDaddy;1117542I never did opposed rolls much originally, except for strength checks for grappling. After 3e came out is when opposed checks became much more popular. Most of the passive perception rolls from the early days were made versus a privately determined target difficulty number which depended a lot on the situation at hand, and whether the players were being stealthy, and roleplaying cleverly or not. Such checks, I would add were rolled in secret behind the GM's screen. Most of the time the players thought I was doing a wandering monsters check, but in reality a lot more was happening behind the scenes, and I was using their character abilities and skills to determine how much information to give them about the situation they were currently in.

You can file this under ancient GM tips.

Still, you're talking about rolling; passive perception for traps, secret doors and so on does not involve rolling any dice on either side (although the DM may have rolled for the trap when populating the dungeon or whatever), and that's different from what was explicitly in early D&D rules, whatever a few campaigns might have done.

Early D&D did not use opposed rolls much, and you see additional one-sidedness in saving throws -- there was pretty much the same save versus a 1st level Medium and an 11th level plus Wizard, and a very few monsters had save with a bonus or a penalty. But we compared strengths to decide who would win at arm wrestling, say, even if the final determination was a single die roll. A common thing was to roll under an ability score (on 3d6 or d20) or to roll some multiple on percentile dice; I am pretty sure that some contests like that continued until one side succeeded while the other failed, which is like an opposed roll.

One thing that for us sort of acted like a pair of opposed rolls was reaction; while both d6's were rolled by the DM, we played that the charisma modifier could only modify the first die and we judged reaction based on considering the value of each die (so rolling 6 with +4 from an 18 Charisma could be offset by the low roll on the other die - 6+ on both dice were better than a total of 12+ from a modifier).

Monte spent his time mostly running his mouth, and every time he did so he said something that was guaranteed to outrage the old-school fans and worry everyone else.

Out rage the Old School Fans?  That is just Tuesday.

Quote from: Shasarak;1117614Out rage the Old School Fans?  That is just Tuesday.

I'll admit there are certain trigger-phrases that outrage the old-school fans. But the point is that for an edition that had as an explicit goal to achieve the return of those players, Monte was being absolutely disastrous for it.