The Gaming Den

A number of people here would call it railroading, cheating, or lieing to your players if you start to fudge rolls, dumb down enemies or use a deus ex machina. I mean the idea touted around here by them seems to be "players make choices, those have consequences, the GM won't meddle with either ...

Picking enemies that actually are a challenge for the PCs, and organized so that they make sense, is not that easy once you leave the low levels behind. Especially when it comes to justify the defenses a king would have. Even more so if you have lots of rules to follow in building encounters. Even o...

And no, there's no way you'll have all NPCs statted out in advance to cover any and all possible combat encounters. Especially not if you actually plan to have challenging fights and not TPKs or pushovers. Eh, close enough: Official 3.5: http://www.d20srd.org/indexes/monsters.htm Homebrew 3.5: http...

If you decide to do an action your DM certainly never planned on, like answer the king's call for adventurers by attacking the king and robbing his treasury instead of doing his quest, you can't do that in a rules heavy system... Sure, in the ultimate literalist sense you can perform the action mec...

Secondly CRPG's absolutely do not have a "complete set of rules". I don't even know what that means. If I'm not allowed to refuse the quest to kill the BBEG then I've been railroaded into that. If they wrote code (rules) for what would happen if I refused the quest then that would be LESS...

I don't understand why you think that obvious railroading won't be called out for being obvious railroading. The key feature of objective difficulties is that the DM is very obvious when he railroads. Objective rules keep everyone honest. I didn't say it wasn't obvious. Though if you don't trust yo...

The core of actual documented mechanics is that players can make meaningful decisions based on objective facts and probabilities. Sure, the DM can set opposition that is too powerful to face, but then the players have actual proof that the DM is railroading them. Meaningful decisions are an illusio...

I submit that PCs' ability to affect the setting via documented mechanics is inversely proportional to involuntary railroading. I submit that this is entirely up to the GM, since he sets the stats for the Opposition. I also submit that CRPGs, despite lacking a GM and having a complete set of rules ...

Well, would the upper end be immunity? That's the question. We really need more concrete numbers from the various systems proposed.

What happens if the NPC tries to force a diplomacy Phase on an entire party and the diplomancer PC resist while the fighter pc doesn't? Is there still a phase? If no, then that would mean the fighter defenses do not matter, all that counts is that one resists. But then, the PCs might simply get enou...

Why the fuck do you care? Your suggestion was that anyone could just decide to plonk an extra 3 minutes into the world while they called time and had a genteel conversation in the middle of a roiling combat or chase scene and everyone had to fucking tap their feet until it was done whether they wer...

If you're particularly concerned with your character being forced to act or not act by the frightening presence of major villains, buy yourself some fucking presence defense. And to what degree can you expect this "social defense" to work? Can you get immune to the point no one can force ...

And how can PCs counter this? Rolling better? If the Vampire Countess stabs you with a sword and you take damage, how can the PCs counter this!? If you're talking about opposed ability rolls that might not even fucking work, running around with your hair on fire that there's no way to stop it is ju...

And how can PCs counter this? How can a PC stop the diplomacy phase and start stabbing? Or is this impossible? Spells usually can be resisted with a saving throw, can be SRed, one can be immune to them, or they can be dispelled. How can you foil a villain's plan to diplomancy until his "summon ...

I still haven't gotten an answer from any RR proponent as to how PCs can go from diplomacy to combat if they really do want to kill stuff. Do they need to diplomance the opposition so they can start stabbing them? Or can they simply start fighting? And where's the verisimilitude there?

So when a rogue is halfway resolving their sequence of five attacks, is that how you spell the end of their round to go straight to your paladin's charge? Because that is how it sounds and PL is obviously trying to equate the two as if they're the same, which deserves all sorts of mockery atop his ...

Pressing to end a social phase early is a huge difference from a character shouting "bored now!" as they abruptly stab people in the face. Or is that going to require multiple pages of you spazzing out and ignoring cognate facts? I would assume that shouting "bored now!" and att...

I mean. Frank DID just flat out say on this page that "press" to end a social phase early is a thing characters can suddenly do with their mandated social phase actions. Pressing to end a social phase early is a huge difference from a character shouting "bored now!" as they abru...

One could argue that going from "Kill on sight" to "Listen, don't kill yet" is an attitude change already. Can this be done to the PCs too? Can an NPC force a diplomacy round on PCs? If no, why not? If yes, how? And what if it's just to stall untill the ritual Ends? For the veris...

We've found the easiest change is just to decide when to 'level-up' instead of tracking XP. XP costs aren't particularly meaningful and the accounting portion is about as much fun as tracking encumbrance. So we advance when it 'feels right'. It's usually about once ever 3-4 sessions. The majority o...

This isn't an arguement, it's a real question about premises: Is there a reason other than realism that minutes-long conversations can't happen in combat rounds? Verisimilitude. It isn't a question of realism, it's a question of simulation. If two assholes have a three minute conversation while som...

On the other hand, some People will complain that this gives GMs "too much power" by letting them decide how long a combat actually took in real time, in cases where it matters such as response times or ticking bombs or time-sensitive rituals. Usually they will conveniently ignore that the...

The problem is, if you make combat rounds longer, you kill "realism". "I can only shoot my bow once a minute? Are you serious?" etc. etc. Also, "can I get back to town in one hour" can easily be answered, as long as one doesn't try to reverse-engineer overland speed fro...

Abstract combat time seems a good way to stay true to a number of genre conventions, without rigid "first comes talking, then comes fighting, and never shall the two meet" systems.

Ah, Frank's insane view of how old countries are. His utter failure to understand the difference between annexiation and occupation. His insane opinion that the French Republic "was founded 1945, when it gained its independence from Germany"...