GM only toys? Player only toys?

radthemad4 · Post by **radthemad4** » Thu Dec 13, 2018 4:30 pm

So there're some abilities that a lot of folks feel like players shouldn't have (at least at low levels) like say, at will invisibility, being incorporeal, at will greater teleport, etc.

Are there also some abilities that should be player only? Like um... Save or Dies (at low levels before resurrection is a minor inconvenience)? I feel like a monster dying is business as usual, but I suspect people wouldn't be particularly happy if a GM started throwing Tome Soldiers around with the save or die stance at players. Also by RAW, PCs are immune to diplomancy.

Anyway, what do you guys feel should be player only and/or GM only (at least at low levels)? Or do you feel like it should be an everybody or nobody kinda thing (e.g. no one should get teleport till level/CR X)?

deaddmwalking · Post by **deaddmwalking** » Thu Dec 13, 2018 5:08 pm

Because of the nature of the game, if something exists both PCs and Team Monster should be able to access it. There's no reason that Team Monster can't be a PC class; nor is there anything that inherently prevents PC vs PC actions. There are some things that will be level-locked (they require a character with a specific class/option and that isn't available to low-level characters), but you can't really put something in the hands of the PCs without expecting monsters to have it, too.

There's also not necessarily a problem with low-level invisibility or low-level teleport. The major issue arises when an ability negates one or more character's ability to make contributions. If a creature can remain invisible and the wizard needs to see the creature in order to target it with a spell, the wizard is basically useless. If the creature (or PC) had to use a standard action to maintain invisibility, they could use it for sneaky shit but wouldn't be able to attack while using it. Teleporting into secure vaults and stealing treasure might be a problem, but 'displacing' to nearby spaces somewhat randomly might be a teleport effect that you could have at low-levels.

If a PC can choose an ability that will make them invulnerable, they'd be crazy not to do so from a player or a character perspective. Creating a defense that cannot be beaten by level-appropriate opposition is a problem. Creating an attack that destroys level-appropriate opposition without risk is also a problem - and that's true on both sides of the fight. If these things are going to exist, they need to be very limited - using invulnerability through one boss fight might be fun, but using it every time the combat music starts won't be.

erik · Post by **erik** » Thu Dec 13, 2018 5:29 pm

Only monster only feature that comes to mind is damage type immunities that turn an opponent into a puzzle monster. Like swarm immunity to weapons. Doesn’t work with players because then they become immune to 95% of monsters.

Only player feature that I’d be wary to give to monsters is massive damage outputs, either high crit multipliers or just raw damage. Yeah I can make a spirited charge guy who lays down Avg 40 damage per hit out of a Level 3 goblin. But players are gonna feel betrayed when they die to that garbage.

Foxwarrior · Post by **Foxwarrior** » Thu Dec 13, 2018 7:58 pm

The thing that bothers me the most about the concept of player- or monster-only toys is that it seldom has more than the flimsiest justification. If a player is playing a character whose full in-world description is "a goblin wizard", and the party encounters a character who is also a "goblin wizard", then it makes the game world very messy and hard to visualize if the two characters aren't very similar.

Monster-only toys I normally accept with the most grudging of tolerance because it's convention for the DM to be allowed to say "no, you can't play as a swarm of bees and five deserters from the town guard" (although yes, I did make an RPG about the DM not being allowed to say that).

If we were playing an RPG where the premise involved the players playing characters who were fundamentally special in-setting (like, they were the only characters touched by fate to save the world or whatever), then that would make me much more willing to accept the player- and monster- only toys.

jt · Post by jt » Thu Dec 13, 2018 9:35 pm

It's really a problem with the character advancement system, isn't it? Like if we assume something with X monster levels is a good opponent for players with Y player levels, there will be certain abilities that make X and Y go up at different rates. This is fine if getting physical damage immunity makes you gain more player levels than monster levels. But you can't actually decouple those as long as you're assuming that killing 14 orcs lets you advance both of those numbers by one.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Thu Dec 13, 2018 10:24 pm

You can do anything if you stick with one-shots or short campaigns where being a cloud of sand that exterminates the orc colonists with ease is a PC power

Dogbert · Post by **Dogbert** » Mon Dec 17, 2018 5:55 am

I don't believe in "he can because he's an NPC" shit. Not only a game's rules are the world's physics, I'm a firm believer that what's good for the goose is good for the gander.

4E was built on the sand castle of having a completely different set of rules for PCs and NPCs, where is 4E now?

nockermensch · Post by **nockermensch** » Mon Dec 17, 2018 5:11 pm

It's actually very easy to write "monster-only powers". You just need to tie the power to something PCs don't want to do.

Having [NPC-only power] requires that the character...
a) ...stays put at a very limited place
b) ...be a slave to [DM's dick NPC]
c) ...have no possessions
d) ...betrays/sacrifice their companions
e) ...be a total pacifist
f) ...die
g) ...become mad, cursed or to suffer some kind of condition that would be a pain to the rest of the party
etc.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Tue Dec 18, 2018 7:04 am

Some of d) and g) there is bad if the results are worth having, Nockers. Being a pain to the rest of the party is in fact seen as an upside to certain players, and they should not generally be rewarded for it.

Also, "everyone wait here for a year while I get infinite power" being available to PCs is a problem if the other players are not the sort to tell them to get fucked. So is "refuses to contribute toward party goals" like e) in certain types of campaigns.

Even things like "this might explode the campaign world and we'll have to all start over" is totally something certain types of players will just do to solve even fairly small problems they haven't thought of another way to solve yet.

Drawbacks like that existing means the bad guys will also just be doing that stuff all the time. That's fine. That's often very good for building heroic adventure out of. But the sort of power you get from it should be something the PCs don't even want.

Not because it's bad for the group dynamics or the campaign, because lots of players just ignore that, but just not even a powerful or interesting thing to have.

PC power: 1d6/level boom, drawback "this is very rare outside the PCs".
NPC power: 1d4/level boom, drawback "steals and eats babies on the blood moon, also loses any PC powers".

That's how you do PC and monster powers. The PCs are better but usually have to play nicely within the group dynamic required for the game, where the monsters are worse but more common and also cause the sort of problems the PCs can solve.

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Tue Dec 18, 2018 4:52 pm

nockermensch wrote:It's actually very easy to write "monster-only powers". You just need to tie the power to something PCs don't want to do.
...
d) ...betrays/sacrifice their companions

I don't know. I've seen players be complete assholes to the party just because they could, and it was "in character". Giving them a mechanical incentive to do so is probably a bad idea.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Wed Dec 19, 2018 1:59 am

The problem with DM Only Toys is that if it's particularly interesting or cool, players will want that toy and then people kind of new to it will do the only possible thing to play with that toy: they'll run a campaign that is actually being run for themselves, with other players along for the ride. It will be The Adventures of Jim's Illithid Savant (or whatever) And Also His Friends. Or a dragon-themed campaign where you don't seem to be spending much time killing the dragons or even their cultists but seem to be spending a lot of time around the various named and fleshed out dragons.

erik · Post by **erik** » Wed Dec 19, 2018 3:16 am

I think the "at low levels" clause of the OP is important.

At low levels you can justify having tools separate in the player and NPC boxes. Players don't have access to lots of tools yet, and it's okay for them to fight a rat swarm but not okay for them to have a rat swarm's invulnerability to weapons. Yet.

Eventually you get to the point where fine, all tools are on the table. But at low levels it's shitty both for players to be invulnerable and also for monsters to do massive damage, like have scythe wielding 1/2 CR orcs whose crits will wreck their intended low level opposition (min 24 dmg, avg 36 dmg).

jt · Post by jt » Wed Dec 19, 2018 6:43 am

It seems like GM-only abilities fall into one of three categories.
[*]High-level thing that can be applied sub-optimally and become low-level appropriate. A giant hornet that flies around stinging people is fine at low levels, but give it a ranged attack (shoots acid out of its stinger) and the minimum level shoots up quite a bit. Give a player flight and they'll immediately make a flying archer.
[*]Lets you cheese your way out of standard adventures. Flight, teleport, invisibility, and burrowing all break the idea that you're going to have an overland adventure followed by a dungeon crawl.
[*]Things we'd like villains to be able to do while still being able to kill the villain. You should probably be able to stop the villain with a legion of undead or who's trying to complete a ritual that'll throw the world into the Abyss before you're able to do those things yourself.

For the first - people seem to accept that sort of thing from monster-monsters but not humanoid monsters. While you could defeat a flying monk earlier than you defeat a flying ranger, people would be happier if you stuck with a giant hornet. And this evens out with higher levels, so the number of novelty monsters you need to fill in with isn't huge.

For the second - I assume we have some conception of what people do other than overland adventures to dungeon crawls, but would be sad if they were immediately trivialized. We can make the somewhat awkward compromise of waiting until higher levels so people can get their fill. (Though if your game is really Dungeons & Dragons with emphasis on the dungeon part, you probably should remove these options outright.)

For the third - if you need to be an 20th level cleric to raise a proper legion of the dead and that implies you could crush an entire 10th level party in personal combat, that breaks a bunch of stories. This is fixed by ACKS-like power curves where at some point high level characters stop becoming better at individual combat and instead grow their global influence. (There may be other solutions but this sure is one.)

JonSetanta · Post by **JonSetanta** » Thu Dec 20, 2018 6:26 am

IMHO the same rules should apply to both GMs and players alike.

The spells and attacks that monsters and PCs both use should be the same.

If one side has Death effects, the other should too.
If one side can't have Death effects, well... you know the rest.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Dec 20, 2018 9:45 am

There are always going to be things that belong on one side of the DM screen and not the other.

Let's imagine for the moment that your game has immobile creatures. Carnivorous Plants. Water Weirds. Living Volcanoes. Fucking whatever. Such creatures could appear as antagonists, but they obviously can't be player characters. Same for mindless creatures. Or creatures that can't survive outside a small selection of potential adventuring locales. Such creatures can obviously exist, and they can be reasonable challenges in their appropriate contexts, but they can't be player characters in any meaningful sense.

Now once you've accepted that it is necessarily true that the MC is going to have access to creatures that can be antagonists that are simply incapable of being protagonists, the argument against other forms of NPC-only abilities becomes much more tenuous. There is no universal principle that a creature or ability that appears behind the DM screen must be able to appear on a character sheet.

So if you have creatures like Wraiths require very specific means to defeat, that's obviously problematic to appear on the player side. It invalidates much of the potential opposition. But it's not necessarily a problem for such things to show up on the MC's roster. If the player characters have access to the puzzle solutions, it's totally OK for them to face off against puzzle monsters. But playing puzzle monsters would still be really disruptive.

-Username17

Blade · Post by **Blade** » Thu Dec 20, 2018 9:55 am

There are also some rules that are mostly relevant to PCs. For example you don't really care if a mook is "really dead" or just "out of commission", while you need to know it for the PCs.

erik · Post by **erik** » Thu Dec 20, 2018 12:22 pm

I only disagree with Frank to the extent that all those monsters and their abilities eventually can show up in player rosters by way of being minions/summoned/controlled or whatever.

Wraiths being an obvious one where it is bs to have a wraith on your team at low levels but at higher levels totally predictable.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Sat Dec 22, 2018 11:26 am

How would you do a wraith PC campaign? I figure you could have the first session be "look at how those orcs can do nothing against you!", then they bring in anti-undead/incorporeal support or the PC is now targeted by ghost killers

erik · Post by **erik** » Sat Dec 22, 2018 1:03 pm

A good inversion for high level play may be that the party becomes more like a dungeon monster. The party has lots of treasure and a known reputation so opponents often come to them with assembled teams that can counter some of their strengths.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Sat Dec 22, 2018 2:36 pm

Ah, the party would also gain a reputation if they show all their cards, like "Yeah their wizard is a powerful illusionist that casts ___ so we will do ___ to counter"

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Sat Dec 22, 2018 4:18 pm

Most of the issue with NPC-only abilities is that they're usually bullshit, one-off artifacts or abilities that PCs would like to have, and which there is no real justification for them not being able to have except by convoluted shenanigans that amount to "No."

So like in Dragon Kings, you could theoretically become a dragon, but you could not start your own group of Templars because <bullshit>. In Shadowrun, you can't play an insect magician because those are on the no-no list. Now, there are legit reasons why you might not want to play an insect magician (it basically involves a lot of murder and a spiral down to insanity and getting eaten), but mechanically there's no reason why not except that that designer fiat is that insect magicians are NPC-only.

And part of the reason for that might be the Sabbat - whom we've talked about at length, but they were originally NPC-only with NPC-only abilities, and then they became PC options, and you wonder why they were NPC-only to begin with.

Mostly, it has to do with giving NPCs a leg up on PCs - if not mechanically, then in terms of abilities that are exclusive to the NPCs, just so that they're outside of the PC's power-gaming hands. But I think that's a bullshit approach to gaming in general.

JonSetanta · Post by **JonSetanta** » Sun Dec 23, 2018 12:59 am

I played in a Sabbat campaign once. Lasted one session before we were wiped out.

Iduno · Post by **Iduno** » Wed Dec 26, 2018 3:58 pm

If the power is an immunity, you need few enough of them available to any one player or monster that anyone else would be able to still fight them. Which either means everyone has several different attack types they can use, or metagaming will negate the immunity. The only other alternative is telling someone to go sit in the corner with their thumb up their ass while everyone else plays. If that someone is team NPC, the game gets boring real fast.

For an attack, it has to have enough drawbacks that you don't just want to use it as often as possible. The PCs have to win/survive at least most of the time, because they don't get replaced like NPCs do. The drawback will probably end up being more onerous for the PCs than the NPCs, and the attack should ideally not just kill a PC when it's used.

Dogbert · Post by **Dogbert** » Thu Dec 27, 2018 4:11 am

Mind you, in a current WoD games I'm running I'm about to use spirits... thing is, I can't find my M:tA book, so I'll probably just pull approximations out of my ass... so that would count as GM-only toys, I guess.

Mechanically, the only vital thing to remember in my case is that spirits only have Rage, Gnosis, and WP, and their combat charms are rolled with Rage.

...on that note, if anyone has a list handy with all spirit charms, that'd be much appreciated.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Thu Dec 27, 2018 7:00 pm

So like in Dragon Kings, you could theoretically become a dragon, but you could not start your own group of Templars because <bullshit>. In Shadowrun, you can't play an insect magician because those are on the no-no list. Now, there are legit reasons why you might not want to play an insect magician (it basically involves a lot of murder and a spiral down to insanity and getting eaten), but mechanically there's no reason why not except that that designer fiat is that insect magicians are NPC-only.

Point still stands of course but was that not changed?
Better example i think would have been the NPC HMHVV people and the PC HMHVV Monsters.

*coughghoulpureecropdusterplanecough*