[D&D] Hot elves, morality, and the missing initiative roll
Callan S.:
I'm pretty sure John didn't do so by sheer personal power - he used a series of tools and techniques (often housed within rules) and I think he's asking for more rules on the matter because he knows that's how it worked.
Daniel B:
Quote from: Meramec on February 03, 2010, 06:15:36 AM
Here is a more refined version of what I’m talking about when I say I want the rules to help me resolve dilemmas. Give moral dilemmas a sort of stat line like monsters. They would have a Severity, Scope, and Persistence score. Then there is a table which gives creative bits to work with. One entry may be “a disgruntled swordsman; a bloody necklace; and a broken, wasted dream.” So in a high Severity, Scope, Perisistence resolution this could become a high-level warrior, clutching the last memory of his wife who was murdered as a direct result of the PC’s misdeed, who is going to remain a thorn in the side of the PC for a while. In a low Severity, Scope, and Perisistence resolution it could be an 80-year old beggar who gave up his adventuring ways too early who is jealous of the PC’s status and who interferes with him in some personal way, perhaps calling the local guard on him accusing him of stealing a necklace.
Oooooy, this goes strongly against my GM instincts. The fact that genuine moral dilemmas can't be statted is part-and-parcel of what makes them juicy! For the people to whom stats matter more than moral content, the Severity, Scope, and Persistence numbers will be just more numbers, and won't make them feel anything. (In fact, it would probably cause the reverse effect!) For the people that care about the morality of the Lizardfolk situation, the numbers won't make any difference to their own emotional response. I don't care what "Severity" number the book assigns to killing a baby .. it's high in my book! That's an extreme example, but you get my point I hope?
Quote from: Meramec on February 03, 2010, 06:15:36 AM
The table provides the seed content to aid my creativity, the stat line for the dilemma itself provides the parameters for the resolution to help give my creative decision regarding its interpretation some boundaries that everyone playing understands BEFORE the action is undertaken (this is the part that is vital to making this part of “the game” and not just “OK, John is doing his own thing now, when are we getting back to the adventure?”)
Then, the players would be all like, “OK, setting lizardfolk children afire, what are the stats on something like that?” And I’d go, well, Severity is pretty high because it’s wrong, but Scope and Persistance could be low because it’s a remote area and they are Chaotic after all. Then they go “OK, great, the treasure’s worth it! Burn ‘em!” And I get to roll on the table and they look forward to the resolution because now it’s an actual part of the game and not just the DM imposing his own unpredictable sense of justice on their character’s actions while detracting from the “real game” of exploring the world and problem solving.
This gives those who are not interested in moral dilemmas a way to engage them through resource management and it allows those who do like to engage them to be confident that their choices will be reflected in the game.
And then you make the table work out somehow so that the outcomes aren’t always purely negative so that "doing bad things" isn't always equivalent to "bad tactics", and you have yourself a new way to completely engage the players in activities traditionally relegated to “oh, that’s just role-playing and DM judgment.” Now decisions made outside of combat and skill check type situations involve rolling dice to determine in part what is imagined next, just like decisions made during combat involve rolling dice to determine in part what is allowed to be imagined next.
To further explain, I think what you're effectively trying to do is make people engage in morally sticky situations, but by putting it in the rulebook to give it that level of authority which even the GM traditionally must respect most of the time (despite "rule zero") as well as giving it some sort of rules structure so that the GM is not at a loss to handle it. (If you're trying to engage the players in emotional content through resource management .. well .. that's like trying to include a video-game obsessed child in active sports by giving him a Soccer video game!)
You didn't impose your "own unpredictable sense of justice on their character’s actions". The adventure came with the stats of Lizardfolk mothers and children included. The players set the fire. One player made it worse. The players themselves all judged the morality of the situation, without the question being imposed upon them. This is where I think the magic comes from, and what boosted your adventure from a run-of-the-mill dungeon-crawl to a memorable one that they'll think back on in the future.
I'm not claiming that some sort of support from the rulebook wouldn't be helpful; I just don't think it could come in the form you're suggesting. How about a "burning sandbox" approach? (where by "burning sandbox", I mean that the PCs have the same freedom as in D&D, but their environment is set up to be a lot more emotionally incendiary, and likely to burn them, or at least cause unexpected emotional fallout. It's just a suggestion!)
Would your experience ever have occurred if the "lizardfolk mothers in a fire" result were listed in a table? Even worse, if the players had access to that table?
Dan B
Callan S.:
Hi John,
Opposite to Daniel assuring you you didn't impose anything, I'm thinking you want to, to some extent, impose your sense of justice. BUT within a set of rules, rather than just doing things that nobody has consented to. That way they know your just working the rules system rather than getting in the way of a familiar and fun set of rules. Am I understanding you to any degree?
contracycle:
I agree with the view that the Lizardman situation pretty much played out well enough as is, but I sympathise with the idea of there being some sort of systematic prompt for this sort of thing. In all probability, this incident was invented not to create a moral problem, but to create a tactical one. Of course, the tactical problem implies a moral issue, but thats probably not the reason it was introduced. Similarly, I agree that the hot elf can be reintegrated in any number of ways that makes the player's invention of her relevent, and thus give her a bit more presence than a run-of-the-mill NPC.
But, I would probably have blanked out on the hot elfs possibilities, just as I would probably not develop the lizardman scenario any further. At best, what I might do is stage some sort of revenge attack on the party by outraged lizardmen, but without revealing to the players why this happened it will be experienced with no more significance than a random encounter. If you GM in a framework of What Would Happen, as I do, and even I suspect if you do so in terms of challenge, these alternate and more dramatically interesting ideas don't necessarily occur to you.
I'm not too keen on the systems so far proposed, as I'm not convinced they're really appropriate for the reasons others have mentioned. But as the OP suggests, having some sort of prompt for this sort of thing would be useful, would be more likely to prompt an idea than my relatively dry and mechanistic habits of thought. Maybe, in my revenge attack, I would include some sort of clue indicating what motivated it, but that will still rely on the players being perceptive, lucky and interested enough to notice the clue and realise the relation. Whereas if I borrowed something from the much-maligned 3-act play structure principle of "get them into trouble, get them into more trouble, get them out", I would probably end up with something meatier and more engaging. But it is not intuitively obvious to me how I would actually do that, or structure it so that the players were aware of it.
I don't think that any of this sort of intervention goes against the general grain of my/our play style. Even working within the framework of What Would Happen, sooner or later you need to select between different possible things that could happen. Selecting for the more interesting and engaging option does not necessarily undermine the general practice; it certainly could happen that the hot elf goes on her way and is never seen again, but it would be less interesting than if she returned in some way. Thus. this is not significantly about moral choices or anything ofd that nature, it's really a sort of sense of the suitably dramatic.
athornton:
Oh, maybe I see something here I didn't before.
We can all name systems in which the mechanics are designed to push the players into situations where there's a lot, emotionally, at stake, and reward putting it on the line. Vincent Baker is one of my favorite designers for games like this: Dogs in the Vineyard seems like it could be used to play this sort of moral conflict with a lot of mechanical support (so could Poison'd).
But....can you do this, and still be playing D&D? That I don't know about. That is, is there a way to keep the things that make D&D D&D (and what would those be? Six stats with a range of 3-18? Classes and levels? d20, roll high, to hit? Saving throws?) and still provide mechanical support for moral (as opposed to tactical) conflict?
Hackmaster introduced the Alignment Audit, and just like the rest of 4th edition Hackmaster it was a joke on one level, the sort of crazy over-the-top crunch that you'd add to AD&D if you were an obsessive-compulsive chart-maddened designer on a meth binge (I mean, really, the thing used vector algebra to figure out what happened to your alignment), but on another level it was sort of eerily compelling. I took it as a parable of why Gygaxian Alignment doesn't work if your players are optimizing the gamist rather than the narrativist elements of play, but it could as easily be a pointer towards "look, if you're going to try to take alignment seriously, here's what you're going to have to do." As an aside, Hackmaster 4th is really very interesting to read as a deconstruction of late-1st and 2d edition AD&D.
I thought I had a point when I started this post; now I'm not so sure. I guess my point, if any, is "can D&D be made to do this? Or once you've bent it to be able to do that, is it no longer D&D anymore?" I think that's going to be a very subjective call, since I don't think there's going to be any real way to come up with an unproblematic consensus on what Essential D&D is.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page