Explain Dungeons&Dragons to me?

The Game Room
21

Heck, half the time I pass notes they say something along the lines of:

“This note intentionally left blank.”

or

“Hello GM. How are you today?”

Mainly because I don’t want anyone to know when I actually pass a note of substance. Particularly in games like Paranoia where half the fun is trying to screw over the other players.

But as a general rule, passing notes shouldn’t be treated as suspicious. Majority of the time players won’t be trying to screw each other over, especially in a long term campaign. Because the campaign falls apart when the party works at cross-purposes.

There’s a common and false paradigm that evil characters are easier to play. That’s not true if you have a good GM. While evil characters will have less self-imposed restrictions, civilization tends to have real issues with them, and as their reputation grows, they will find themselves at best unwelcome in most locations and at worst a bounty placed on their heads where the person doing the paying doesn’t care if the body is brought back dead or alive.

(Paranoia, on the other hand is usually run as a series of one-shot adventures. Because dying early and often is largely the point and while you have 6 incarnations of your character, you can reasonably expect to lose at least 3 lives in the standard adventure. If you make it with at least one clone left and all your goals accomplished, that’s about the best that can be expected.)

But these days most of my role-playing, aside from Play-by-Post, is of the Live Action type. I don’t really do much table-topping anymore.

22

I played a wizard in a 3rd ed tabletop. The monk and rogue gave me carte blanche to toss fireballs in their general direction if either (or both) was engaged in combat with creatures who would be much less able to survive the attack.

So fireballing your allies for fun and profit can be a smart strategy. But clear it with them first.

23

You say solanum, I say po-tah-to :slight_smile:

24

I do that in my LARP, too–on both sides of the boom.

My mage frequently teams up with a seriously tankish fighter; we slap an elemental protection on him for good measure, and I center the booms on him, dealing damage to everything around him and knocking them down while leaving him unscathed. He usually mops most of them up before they get back to their feet.

My monk’s job description could probably be described as “deployable decoy”. He’s even harder to kill than the fighter, and I make a point of trying to draw all the nastiest area attacks onto him, and the mages are actively requested to drop a nuke on him any time he’s surrounded.

25

The explanation for that is that Monks and Rogues have very high Reflex saves, and if you make your save against such things, you take no damage (most of the time). So you can, for most practical purposes, keep dropping fireballs on top of your Rogue and they’ll just keep dodging them and never get hit. I’ve seen that done, hell, I invited the same thing when I played a Monk/Rogue in 3.5. Reflex save? Got it covered. Fire away.

When we first moved to 4e, we had a boon that gave us Resist Fire 10, so we had no issues during several sessions when we were escorting an NPC Fire Wizard and she would drop 4e fire effects on us. We only took small amounts of damage until the one time when I ran her, dropped a major fire effect right on the group when we were all extremely bloodied, rolled maximum damage (‘ghetto crit’), dropped most of the party, and it turned out most of our enemies were Devils in disguise, immune to Fire or with much higher Fire resistance - and so were completely unaffected. Would have been a TPK except that the city watch was already on the map at the time.

But that was the same guy with the overpowered encounters, and we would have been down that round regardless once the Devils took their turn.

26

Now I’m wondering if I could convince a GM to give a +1 or +2 to the reflex save bonus if the tactic was planned by the party in game ahead of time (a “you were prepared” modifier).

27

The general DM rule of thumb (in both 3.x and 4E) is that a +2 circumstance modifier (or penalty) is a reasonable thing to apply in such circumstances. So, if the party has a “fire word” (i.e., the wizard says “Daisy” before dropping a fireball), I might be willing to grant that +2 bonus to fellow party members caught in the blast.

28

I’ve always lowered the GM’s Will save with a pan of lasagna or a plate of cookies first. YMMV. Just determine your GM’s weakness and go after it, as you would any other opponent. :smiley:

29

Go here and enjoy. In particular read Sagiro and Sepulchrave. Both have synopses posted.

30

So if most gamers stay in character, why did both DM of the Rings and Darths and Droids make a big deal out of there being a specific player type that can’t not use out-of-game information?

31

It’s not just D&D, it’s any pen and paper RPG. As I mentioned in the Warhammer 40k thread, I GM a Rogue Trader (space Privateers and British East India Company!) game, and play in a Deathwatch (Space Marines!) game. Our group is three people. I GM RT for the other two, one of my players GMs DW for me and the other player.

As mentioned upthread by Clockwork Melon, my co-players and I see it as a collaborative story we’re telling. So we try to keep our meta-knowledge out of the game where possible, because metagaming will spoil the story, and the story is the ultimate goal. Some people don’t like doing that. They’re of a mindset where “winning” the game is the ultimate goal. These are the meta-gamer, the minmaxers, the munchkins and roll fudgers. The guy who will dick over his co-players to try and get his character the best of everything. A good GM will rein in “That Guy”. A poor GM will often be steamrollered by “That Guy” because he has read the rules back and forth and can quote chapter and verse to try and baffle everyone else with bullshit.

And yes, most gamers will stay in character and avoid meta-knowledge as much as possible, but as with any group of people you run the risk that one or more of them is going to have an ulterior motive (“winning” the game, or worse foisting their fetishes off on other players. But that’s a whole 'nother rant) that is at odds with everyone else who is playing.

And for that reason, in the game that I run, “Rule of Cool” is the king of actions. If you can give me a good, well-thought-out, cinematic (“Cool”) reason for taking an action, I’m more likely to allow it or fudge things so you have a better chance to succeed. That’s how one of my players managed to derail a whole plot-driving combat by succeeding on an improvised weapon attack with so many degrees of success that it was just too awesome to force him to fail (as it would have done by RAW).

I have discovered, however, the best way to avoid metagaming and plot derailing is to NOT have a fixed plot in mind. Have scenarios that can link together in any number of ways and then let your players have their heads. They can’t derail the choochoo if the choochoo grew a 4wd and went offroad three sessions ago :slight_smile: But that takes a lot of ability to think on the fly, and most importantly knowledge of your players (in case you haven’t realised, it’s fine for GMs to metagame, but that’s because you’ve got to prepare this shit in advance, or the story goes NOWHERE).

With regards to moving and combat, the 40k RPGs break it up into “Narrative Time” and “Combat Time”. Narrative time you’re just describing what you’re doing, you might have the occasional skill check if you do something out of the ordinary (for example just walking and looking around a marketplace, you can say you’re doing it and I’ll describe what you see. However if you want to look for something in particular, or want to check for something that is being hidden from your sight, then I’ll ask for a skill roll and describe what you see based on how well or poorly you do on that). Combat time is the turn-by-turn “I move x metres, I stop, I shoot/hit something with my sword/ run away like a bitch”. I’ve had sessions where in 8-10 hours, we’ve had no combat whatsoever then I’ve had other sessions where in the same amount of time it’s almost wall-to-wall rolling and combat. It all depends on where we are in the story at the time.

32

I’ll try to field this one.

When playing, the most important thing anybody needs to know is what the GM has planned up his sleeve next.

Generally, there are a few ways to get that knowledge in character. First is by sheer experience. A beginning adventurer might not know that chests in dungeons tend to be trapped, but after eating a few poison needles to the face he might be more cautious in the future.

Second, you create a character whose personality would be conducive to certain types of behavior. Leeroy Jenkins is obviously going to charge in before everybody is ready and cause a Total Party Kill, but it’d make more sense for Hannibal Lector to scope out his enemy and make a detailed plan of action.

Third, you need to have the right skills in order to be able to figure out whether something nefarious is going on. Knowledge (whatever) checks are, well, checks to see “what is this thing that is trying to kill us and how do we kill it first instead?” Gather Information (I think it’s folded into Diplomacy now, I’m not sure) is “what’s going on in this area and who shouldn’t we piss off?” Perception is “is there something sneaking up on us right now?” Sense Motive is “is this guy being truthful?” And so on.

Fourth, there are also divination-type spells that give you supernatural knowledge. For example, the Detect (Alignment) spell is basically an enemy radar for creatures of specific alignments, Detect (Magic) is for magical items and spells, etc. There’s also spells where you can ask questions like “Where is the Big Bad keeping his lair?” in character and you could get them answered if there are no other means of getting it.

In summation, there is no such things as “using out of game information” for your character, as long as you can justify it.

Here’s an example of something that just happened in my campaign:

  1. The adventuring party has entered into a catacombs and come across a sarcophagus.

  2. The players, having run into this sort of trap before, know that there’s probably something in there that can kill them. They discuss it among themselves and decide to send the Monk, who has the highest saves against bad things happening, to open it.

  3. Sarcophagus is opened. To nobody’s surprise, there’s something in there, but as far as the game mechanics go the Monk is still considered flat-footed because she’s too “busy” opening the sarcophagus to dodge out of the way of an attack. She has to make a fortitude save, but she fails, taking a negative level (very bad).

  4. Bard makes a Knowledge (Religion) check. It’s a Wight–an undead creature whose attacks do Energy Drain, explaining the negative level. The Bard also rolled high enough to get the defenses of the creature, letting the party know how accurate they have to be with their weapons.

  5. Combat begins. Because of the party knows what they’re dealing with, they make optimal decisions based on that. (For example, the Monk steps outside of melee range and begins shooting the Wight full of arrows.)

  6. The party overcomes the obstacle. The Wizard of the party casts Detect Magic on the Wight’s equipment, both because the player knows from experience that a combat of this difficulty would result in magic items as loot, but also because the Wizard obviously desires magic items to use. He rolls high enough to determine that the weapon is indeed magical and, though not very useful for anyone in the party to use–it’s broken, and it’s a dagger that does piddling damage otherwise–it can be sold for a high price once it’s been properly repaired.

33

When it’s about Monsters or environment, it’s going to be one of the Knowledge skills: Religion, Nature, Dungeoneering, Arcana, depending on what it is.

If you’re trying to get information from others in an urban setting, it’s Streetwise.

34

Ultimately, D&D, and any other tabletop role-playing game is a social exercise. It’s about interacting with people who are telling each other a story and enacting bite-sized performances. So, really, it’s about the personalities of the people you’re with, and it is based on the type of refereeing that your DM prefers to do. My favorite groups have been ones in which die rolling is only left to those instances in which you really want to leave things to chance. Very often the DM will just decide on his own what happens, based on what makes the best story. I was never in groups that had very much note-passing.

35

True enough, and I’ve played with people at both ends of the spectrum on that. People who only show up because it’s a social event and are only peripherally involved in the game; and people who aren’t really involved in the socialization at the table and are only there for the game aspects. I tend to fall in the middle of that. If either the social aspect or the game aspect sucks, I won’t stay long.

I haven’t been at too many tables involving note passing either. It always came across as really juvenile.

36

My point was that the “game aspect” is social. D&D or any role-playing game is ultimately about a group of people telling each other a story. That’s a social exercise.

37

Because it’s easier to create punch lines around characters (players) with flaws.

38

Not to mention that the DM in DMotR was a horrible DM who wanted all his players to follow his idea of how the campaign should go. He ran the epitome of an “on the rails” campaign. Every participant in that comic was meant to be a caricature of some of the worst aspects of gamers and DMs, as Shamus (the author) frequently mentioned.

Never got around to following Darths and Droids, though.

39

The DM of Darths and Droids was essentially written to be the antithesis to the DMotR DM. Kind, fair, works players ideas into the story. Perhaps his only real flaw is that he’s a bit of a pushover. The DM (and to a lesser extend Annie) tends to play the “only sane man” to the group, where everybody else is either some degree of airhead or a munchkin (again, perhaps excluding Annie).

40

Gosh, all I can say is that I wish I could play in an adventure with y’all.
Seriously, I’m going to DM over the winter here in the valley because … well it gets pretty boring when it gets really cold up here.
But, I would like to test out my chops so to speak before then.

Oh well.

But thanks for the insights.
Passing notes is very odd to me unless there is a REAL need for a PC to talk to the DM.