Punji pits and an RPG blind spot

[mr_orgue]

Last night I ran a game of D&D 3.5, for a revived group of way-back D&Ders. As always, it gave me much food for thought, technique-wise. There's one aspect that I'm now turning into a post, in hopes it helps me make sense of it

Comments

[boxninja]

Maybe it's tied in to the "can of peaches" stuff and the shared imagined space. What in that space? Who put it there? What effect does it have? Is it backed by the belief of the group? What would give it credibility?

It seems that you decided the credibility of the pits, and the group allowed you to make that call?

I think some games try to make such contributions systemic. It might be that you narrate it in to a dice. In some systems it might be a trait like "Tactical" or "Engineer", say, and you can only bring it in if (a) you have it, or (b) can wangle something you do have to fit it. Or you might get to spend bennies to reinforce your colour as having mechanical "weight". Or it could just be, indeed, colour.

In trad games I'm not so sure all GMs would automatically react to the "colour" from a player and give it weight. After all, how well did you dig, position, prepare and hide your pits? Gimme a roll? Which skill or attribute? An Idea Roll? Luck Roll? You race just can, or can't, do that stuff well. You would like the pits in the SIS to be helpful, but, umm, are they? A lot of GMs might go to the dice.

In some D&D that might not be an option, but in later editions with Skills then it's a possibility. And the success level would re-inforce at what level the pits would have an effect.

[grandexperiment]

Interesting.

If the scene was for color only and the player involved knew this and the other players weren't invested either, then the traditional RPG approach is to gloss over the scene pretty fast.

If the scene had more meaning then an alternative is needed. D&D3.5e doesn't have anything designed for this. However, I have added mechanical effects on to deal with these kinds of things in the past.

FWIW I think D&D4e Skill Challenges could have handled this pretty well provided that everyone was interested in building defenses. Plus it isn't hard to bolt the skill challenges onto 3.5e.

Skill Challenge: Build Defenses around the Town.
Complexity: 2 (6 successes before 3 failures).
Success: The defences mean that there are 1 less Orc Squad (per net success) in the combat with the PCs.
Failure: The defences are inadequate and PCs start in disadvantageous position.
Primary Skills: Endurance, Diplomacy, Dungeoneering, History

Allow the PCs to set up scenes using their various skills to bolster the defences, highlighting various things they are good at. Following that, narrate the combat up to the PC battle and apply the Skill Challenge results to the PCs personal combat.

I have just been reading a scenario which handles an entire large scale battle as a Skill Challenge as the goal of the PCs is not to beat the opponent but to intgratiate themselves into the enemy's rank. It works very well.

Another system that would handle the above would be Burning Wheel. Simply set up the test to build the defences as a linked test for the later combat. The players are essentially creating their own mechanical advantage and the scene is the players justification of that. Again, there is no reason why this couldn't be bolted on to D&D3.5e.

[mr_orgue]

4E skill challenges still fascinate me. I've never used them in play, and I suspect they make me uncomfortable because they exist with one foot in a kind of play where what you do in the fiction matters, and the other foot in a kind of play where it doesn't matter what you do in the fiction. I don't think they balance these two well, but they're trying to do so and that is interesting.

I think the thing that is bugging me here is still present in a skill challenge version of the same; but in a slightly more refined form. Hmmm.

(See also my reply to Gregor.)

[grandexperiment]

I am not sure I really understood anything you said here :)

"In the process of framing a skill challenge and its consequences, it's ultimately the GM making a judgement call about credibility."

That's true to an extent. I tend to view a Skill Challenge as a GM created framework within which the players can decide what they want to focus on. As such, the GM is making a call to an extent but some of the narrative and mechanical weight is being handed over to the players.

Also, FWIW, I have tended to find in play that Skill Challenges are moments of negotiation between Players and GM. The GM proposes a Skill Challenge to resolve a situation (brings down the pain). The GM and players then discuss the success and failure conditions. The GM then decides which skills are most relevant and applies a complexity depending on how much focus is needed (again these can be negotiated) and off you go.

Some of this is not set out in D&D4e, and is probably a result of my dabbling with BW and other games. However, the process above has been the most natural application of the skill challenge rules for me.

So in your session last night, as GM when the player said they were going to dig pits you could have decided or thrown out to the group the idea of montaging the building of defence as a Skill Challenge. If everyone agreed then you would be able to transition from the straight narrative to the combat and provide an agreed method of giving those preparations some mechanical impact.

[mr_orgue]

"It seems that you decided the credibility of the pits, and the group allowed you to make that call?"

Ooh, this is close - because credibility scales. If we were tight-focused, everyone would agree on the credibility of the pits, because D&D 3.5 tells us about pits and spikes and spot rolls and reflex saves. But there's nothing in those rules that lets us scale up the credibility of those pits to deal with 100 pits and an army of monsters.

The credibility of the pits can perhaps be established by skill use, skill challenge etc. - but again, the rules don't help us much with this. In the process of framing a skill challenge and its consequences, it's ultimately the GM making a judgement call about credibility.

Conflict res type stuff doesn't have to worry about credibility, because the mechanics lead, and the fiction is just how we talk about the mechanics in fictional terms.

Note that I have no problem with making GM judgement calls, framing a skill challenge a certain way, etc.; that's fine, in fact it's essential in running games like D&D 3.5. But it is a violation of the principles of resolution in those games. Maybe that's also why it's so hard to "pull back the camera" in these games; players need to put everything on-screen, because the details should matter and bring mechanical weight with them. You can't montage the preparations for something, because you need to know what every preparation is so you can calculate its effect. At present, the players just have to trust that the GM's mental calculations (in the privileged GM Imagined Space) assign due value to everything.

The more I type, the more convinced I become that what is at issue for me is the process of transition between two kinds of resolution system, and whether it is possible to honour both of them on their own terms.