Im going to assume this is honest miscommunication because I do often say things unclearly.
I am not trying to claim I have never in my life made an assumption about what another player's character can do. I am not trying to claim that assumption has never been correct. I am saying there's no
meaningful benefit.
In my real world experience by the time I went from newbie that really didn't know a wizard can't cast healing spells to veteran (meaning I knew what all the core classes abilities are mostly off the top of my head) other people's character stopped being level 1 Core only Barbarian and started becoming Barbarian 1/Class I never heard of 2/Class I heard of but never read 2. And once you started adding feats/spells outside the core I wasn't even going to try to keep up.
Usually this didn't matter though because there'd be group creation and or people would introduce their characters and overview relevant shit like "Is this guy a spellcaster?" and "does he dabble in necromancy?" So yes sometimes I have directly asked a player to do something specific because
I already knew what they could do.
Sometimes though I have come to a game blind or wanted to do something almost unheard of like make use of forgery where I didn't already know there was a character capable of doing this. In those cases I did not turn to who I assumed was the most likely candidate. I just threw a question/request/idea/whatever out there and seen what response I got.
FrankTrollman wrote:
Asking the table is asking every person at the table. You are asking each person to check their character sheets and give you an answer. It requires you to get the attention of every player and then get an answer from every player. You may accept a certain time of silence as a "No" or whatever, but that does not in any way change what you are doing.
This isn't how real people have a conversation in a group situation in my experience. Even if you direct your question to a specific person youre usually going to do it so loud anyone can hear and anyone can respond anyways. So even if I ask John do you cast healing spells? If he says "no" everyone else doesn't sit around and not mention "hey I do!"
This argument where I ask the table. "Hey can we raise dead?" and every single person has to carefully check their sheet, because they don't know off the top of their head that
they don't cast spells is pretty obviously disingenuous.
So I don't see this magical efficiency benefit where
maybe you save a couple seconds.
wrote:So by your own admission you don't ask the entire table. And you don't do that because stereotyped character abilities is a thing that has value and imparts real information to other people playing the game. Because K and I are right and PhoneLobster is wrong.
-Username17
I hope I cleared up that I do not
always ask the table because I usually know the answer already.
Except it doesn't impart information it imparts
expectations which may or may not be accurate.
You mentioned HERO which I am not really familiar with but I do play M&M3e which seems very similar. They have archetypes like Brick and Martial Artist yes but this is because it is human nature to label things. It helps newbies to have a jumping off point. But how much does martial artist really tell you? That they probably fight without manufactured weapons... Probably.
I had one player who likes to play Martial Artists pretty much exclusively. He's made multiple characters with that name. They've all been different. One was an Avatar(cartoon show) copy. One was like Bruce Lee+Superman(who could be called a Brick), a tattooed mystical magic guy and in a low powered game an agent that knew KungFu/Krav Maga etc. The agent was still a good shot with a gun. A Brick is just a super tough fucker. What incredibly valuable and vast, yet helpfully specific, information that imparts to me instantly! Why I clearly need not ask that player anything to find out what they are capable of.
