"No battle plan ever survives first contact with the enemy”-- Helmuth von Moltke, 19th-century Prussia
Well, it isn’t always well thought out or reasonable either.
In a 3.5 D&D game, this guy liked to play Psions because in his mind he could fuck with NPCs endlessly, and even if they made their save, they would never know it was him. Not one person in the group agreed with him. But of course, to him, being denied this was the above mentioned “assholery”, because at one point his entire plan revolved around that, and then it wasn’t allowed, and of course, when the plan met the enemy was in the middle of a non-combat encounter that quickly became hostile.
There IS a good reason to.
The rules-lawyers play like it’s them against the DM. They need to pull out all the stops, come up with tricky ideas that the DM never thought of before, otherwise the DM will win. As though the DM is actually trying to “win”.
Which he isn’t. He’s trying to craft an exciting adventure story. If he wanted to win, he’d parachute 500 trolls onto your party, or after you beat the Big Bad, he’ll just put a Bigger Badder (same guy +50% everything) on the other side of the next door. Yup, that treasure you just got? Totally fake, the real stuff is behind door #2 (which I just created).
Find one weird trick to soup up your players? You didn’t accomplish anything but make the DM work harder to create the balance necessary for the storyline. That and spend 20 minutes trying to convince everyone that this technique of yours will totally work even though you never practiced it before and want to implement it smack dab in the middle of a fight to the death.
Accomplished nothing? Not if something original was thought up and added to the game. Even if it can’t be allowed to happen again, this is the stuff of great short stories and novels.
As long as people aren’t being jerks about it.
Well, I can sort of get his point - I had a similar scenario happen to me in a recent Pathfinder game where I play a Witch. If you don’t play PF, Witches are basically Wizards that trade (quite) a bit of versatility and raw power in exchange for use of thematic at-will supernatural effects called hexes - generally buffs or debuffs, minor utility spells, that kind of thing.
Our group was involved in a kind of “diplomatic dance off” where our group was squaring off against champions of another city in a variety of peaceful but competitive contests - archery, horse riding, tale-telling etc… Now, one of my hexes happens to be Misfortune, which does what it says on the tin : I look at somebody and suddenly they get shit luck for a while (mechanically, they get to roll 2 dice for every d20 roll and pick the worst result, for N rounds. It’s fucking awful to be under, and I love it to bits). In my mind that was the perfect way for me to help the group where I otherwise couldn’t because I can’t shoot a bow, ride a bloody horse and I sure as shit don’t have ranks in Perform(Storytelling).
And I really figured it was a perfect crime - I mean, even if you notice that the gypsy-goth chick has been looking at you funny the entire evening, it’s not even remotely a spell. There’s no gestures, no chanting, no sound, no CGI effects, no nothing. It’s just giving people the stinkeye. And bad luck is just, well, bad luck. I’m not messing with their minds, or altering their perceptions, or anything that could be noticeable or even quantifiable. In my mind it’s the most subtle alteration of reality there could possibly be. Shit just happens sometimes. I just give shit a little nudge, is all.
But since there’s room for interpretation, I asked the DM about it before “evening the field” my way. The DM ruled that since the power allows a Will save, the victim somehow must know it’s happening, and it’d be perceived as a hostile action. I was a bit disappointed, but I could grok his reasoning so, OK. I guess in magicland you can tell when your mojo is being all fucked up :).
So I offered to challenge their tale-teller at double-entry bookkeeping instead, under three separate tax regimens at the same time. Because while I don’t have Perform(Storytelling), my Appraise is real as **hell **! 
And that’s what we all felt, but he didn’t. When you’re doing Charm, Detect Thoughts, Suggestion and other 3.5 Psion Telepathy abilities directly on people, if they make their save, they know you’re fucking with their head, even if they don’t always know exactly how or what (we reasoned that would depend on their experience with magic and such things.)
His reasoning was that in a battle or a crowded Inn, no one should know it was him, they just knew someone in the room was doing it.
No, it’s to make the fight last long enough for the players to feel they got their money’s worth.
Your statement that this involves ignoring the players is wrong. It most emphatically does not, but it interprets the information differently than the rules assume you will. There’s also one other reason for it: it allows everyone to play a meaningful role. The strict rules - not that surprisingly - are grossly broken in half when you don’t follow the exact power curve of the books. (This is a huge issue I’ve actually written an article or two about, and even talked to Monte Cook to see if he wanted to comment.) If you don’t constantly question the players and their plans, you’re apt to be surprised by the amount of power discrepancy which shortly appears. Different players are interested in different things, make different choices, and prioritize differently. This tends to have big impacts on the firepower they bring to a battle.
I prefer to give everyone something useful to do, and so I do.
Besides, it’s completely legal according to the rules. All the villains had the special super-evil-dagnasty-bastard-only extraordinary magic effect of Quantum Evil Health, which gives them just enough health to exactly die when the plot said so.
I do not know Pathfinder, but in 3.5 this is actually covered. 3.5 PHB, page 177, explains that if a creature successfully saves on a spell then they feel a hostile force or tingle, but they don’t know what was attempted nor do they know who did it unless they can discern it through other means (like the guy waving his hands around).
The problem with attitudes like this, from my point of view, is that you’re bypassing much of the game part of the RPG. Really, why bother having the rules if the rules are going to be secretly reinterpreted so that they do not mean the same thing? That’s not a fair game. It’s not fun to know that I may put in effort to think about things and plan my character, and have that effort nullified because the DM doesn’t feel like acknowledging the rules as we have agreed to play by.
If all of this is stated beforehand, fine, that’s good. It should be explained beforehand. I may choose not to play, then, because perhaps I would not find that enjoyable. That’s the problem with the attitude of doing things secretly to mess with your players - you’re failing to take into account that some people do not find that enjoyable, and denying them the ability to choose to say, no, this isn’t a game I will find enjoyable, I choose not to play, by tricking them into thinking it is what they expect. If I do choose to play, at least I don’t have expectations of something completely different.
Freeform roleplaying is a thing, it’s a fine and fun activity and some people enjoy it, but others absolutely don’t. If you’d rather have the bad guy die ‘when the plot says so’, then you shouldn’t present the players with rules that lead them to believe that the enemy will have clearly defined statistics that they can understand (even if they do not know the specifics). That’s deceiving them into thinking things work one way, when you’re secretly having them work otherwise.
And of course, whether it’s acceptable for the opponents to know that depends on the context. If you’re in a crowded bar and just want to cause a barfight (maybe a distraction for something going on at the other end of town), then it’s probably fine if someone figures out someone cast a spell on him, as long as he doesn’t know who it was. On the other hand, in a “dance-off” that’s part of diplomatic negotiations, even just knowing that someone is trying to tip the scales might be enough to cut short the negotiations: The other side might conclude that even if it isn’t the PC’s nation doing it, it’s mercenary casters hired by them, and that amounts to the same thing.
Munchkin != Number Cruncher.
Number crunchers don’t cheat. The whole point is to stay within the rules.
So if you’re trying to argue that number crunching is necessarily a bad thing, can you leave the straw men out of it.
Step it back a little. You’re the one drawing that equivalence.
Speaking as a number-cruncher, my purpose isn’t beating the GM, it’s realizing my character as I envisioned him in the creation process.
Back in the second edition days, I created an Elven mage/thief (spellfilcher kit), and envisioned him as a happy-go-lucky treasure hunter, recovering unusual items for his elven kin. The first time we visited an elven city, I was told my character had to be marked with a painted blue dot on his face, to mark him as a spellfilcher, while within the bounds of the city - indicating that his people did not trust those in his profession. That made me unable to play the character as I’d envisioned him, and retroactively invalidated the way I’d imagined his existence up to that point.
My character refused to enter the city, and I quit the campaign on the spot.
The GM’s little flourish was at odds with the fluff in the source material that I relied upon when making the character.
Another GM I know was pitching a Pathfinder-converted Planescape campaign, and most of us were practically salivating at the prospect. I had in mind a genasi/sylph bard whose concept was simply “well-liked, has friends in every tavern in Sigil”.
Thank god the GM started talking about the way he planned to run the game in advance - barely. We ended up not starting the first session of the game due to an absent player, so he decided to tell us about some of the stuff he was bringing in from the old setting. He mentioned the reaction roll penalties from second edition, and - sensing trouble - I pressed him to explain. He was planning to convert those over and give people penalties on interaction skills based on the old inter-racial reaction roll penalties from second edition. And inexplicably, the cosmopolitan population of Sigil who deal with demons on a daily goddamn basis have a huge dislike of the genasi, resulting in a massive penalty on reaction rolls, because they’re “unusual”.
It made no sense in 2nd Edition. It was absolutely idiotic to convert it to Pathfinder. But once I learned that was his plan I was able to head off trouble at the pass and say “Thanks, but I’ll sit this one out.” Since it would have completely torpedoed the character concept.
The problem HERE is that if you need to superoptimise (Y’know, what we’re talking about here) to create your character, then you’ve envisioned something the game doesn’t really support. If you want a character who succeeds a lot, the answer is not to have a game that requires you to pore over hundreds of pages of rules and find loopholes to allow you to play the character you want. The answer is to use a rule set in which characters succeed a lot.
Honestly, I’m not sure what this has to do with anything under discussion, since it has nothing to do with playing the game by the rules, by the numbers, or otherwise. It’s basically you being upset that your personal headcanon didn’t match the GMs when apparently neither of you could be bothered to discuss it when making your character. Did I mention how annoying it is that people in this hobby never seem to discuss stuff?
Because you can only have one character concept per game or something? I mean, yes, no gaming is better than bad gaming, but “I can’t play the first character concept I came up with, so I’m taking my dice and going home” isn’t exactly what most people mean by “Bad gaming”.
Well, unfortunately some people are like that, and some times DMs make stupid decisions.
Many years ago I attempted to dial back the growing issue of a gazillion PC races all magically getting along and causing no issues in any society by drawing up a more limited landscape. Humans were predominant, with smaller numbers of Dwarves, an even smaller Gnomish community, and actively hostile Elves. Orcs were the hated enemy of all. I said you can play Human, Dwarf of Gnome and you’d better have a damned good justification for anything else and put up with any hostility and restrictions if, for example, you stupidly insisted on playing a half-Orc, who would be hated everywhere he went and not allowed inside most towns.
So what do two potential players come up with, knowing the setting?
Player one decided that he wanted to play a Half-Orc Cleric/Monk. He railed hard against being treated as a hated enemy and decided to try to counteract this by being a pacifist. How he thought this would help, I dunno. Then on top of it, he demanded to make up his own god and create his own feats to make his character cooler. When I flat out rejected the concept, he threw a tantrum.
Player two asked to play a half-troll. :smack: When I said no, he asked to play a half-ogre. :smack::smack::smack:
I shitcanned the setting and decided against running a game with that group, as none of us would be happy.
I’m playing a 5th Edition game right now, and I’ve found that an Eagle Totem barbarian wearing Boots of Striding and Leaping can be a very effective - and very fun. Take a running jump, inflict death from above, and dash back out of combat.
I had a great moment with him just last week. Passing though a town, we found our party’s halfling thief arrested and brought before the local Halfling Tribunal. We went to the courthouse, and after some tense Persuasion checks, convinced the magistrates to let her out so we could talk to her. So there we were, a tense standoff in a narrow alleyway covered by a squad of halfling archers, listening to a bound, pleading halfling surrounded by a bunch of tough-looking gnome deputies.
Now, we could have started a fight. In fact, the DM had a whole little adventure planned for when we did. But my character was a good guy, basically, and it didn’t seem right to start slaughtering a bunch of innocent cops who were just doing their jobs, even if, as the halfling insisted, she was being railroaded. So I sheathed my sword, strapped by shield to my back, and walked away. 10 feet away, to be precise. Then I turned around, dashed forward, grabbed the halfling in one hand, shrugged off the deputies’ disadvantaged attacks of opportunity and leaped 25 feet straight up to the rooftop. I vaulted over the shocked archers, tucked the halfling under my arm like a football and with a shout of “Parkour!” I was off.
I had, of course, neglected to tell the rest of my party what I was about to do. Fortunately, gnomes don’t run very fast.
My DM had to think up a new adventure real fast.
On the OTHER hand, THIS is an example of where no gaming is better than bad gaming. Clearly, they were unwilling to play the game you were offering.
When I was playing 2nd Ed. our group would take turns DMing and our characters had gotten to the point where we worked so well together and at a high enough level that they were practically demi-gods. I decided to introduce them to dragons. With a modded set of attacks courtesy of Dragon magazine and a few flourishes. The group had no problem dealing with an ancient red dragon and I felt that wasn’t right, so the dragon got claw/claw/bite/tail sweep/breath each round. and limited charm and psionic abilities. The party won, barely alive at the end of it with most of their possessions torched. The payoff was one of the best games I ever ran, the party got massive xps/treaure and a new respect for “mere dragons”.
It’s all about balance.
Because I had already generated the goddamn character and fully filled out the character sheet, and had it not been for a fluke, we’d have started the campaign that very evening? And I wouldn’t have found out about the massive penalty to my social rolls until the first time I tried to use them?
Why would I generate a second whole character to play with a jackass who didn’t even know what rules he wanted to use, or bother to communicate with us?
Nah, I have to “superoptimize” to balance my crappy luck - my average roll on a d20 is a 5. Gimme a fistful-o-dice game any day.
And it doesn’t help that a lot of game developers really, really suck at math & probabilities. Even a cursory look at things like ECL should tell you that.