Fighters Jumping on Dragons

[Kaelik]

Today is the day I learned that Kaelik shits all over player agency worse than Viking Helmets.

Even if it's not a dragon, fighting on top of an unfriendly beast should be something that could happen. Legolas did it with the Oliphants. Balance, Ride, Grapple - use whatever you think makes sense. It's to bad the rules don't have it, but that's no reason to go full auto-fail.

Uh... no. Legolas used it to do it to a creature that was unintelligent, not actively trying to throw him, and had a fucking basket for people to sit in on top, and ropes hanging down and it was stupid even then, and he only got away with it because everyone knows that LOTR elves are magicly magic.

It does not follow that you can jump off a cliff and ride giant dragon that is smarter than you, stronger than you, and tries to throw you off.

Look at the grab on rules.

"You may attempt to shake your opponent off as an attack action by making a check with a bonus equal to your melee attack or Escape Artist and a DC of 10 + the greatest of your opponent's BAB, Climb Ranks, or Ride Ranks."

A CR 10 dragon is attempting to make a DC 24ish at most attack with his +24 attack bonus. He succeeds on a 2. He might arguably even succeed on a 1.

Your definition of player agency is stupid Benoist agency. It isn't shitting on player agency when I don't let them track the dragon, then hide inside a waterfall and shoot arrows at it while it sits in front of the waterfall letting them.

They don't have the ability to do the things they claim to do. So they can't do them.

I mean fuck, did you shit on Spike's player agency by letting me put out torches and see him and cast icewall?

No, because player agency doesn't mean ignoring the monster's abilities.

[deaddmwalking]

But you've just reversed position from no way if there are no defined rules to totally acceptable but ridiculously difficult in most cases. That's a big difference.

I don't mean to advocate for the Benoist ideal. I prefer a robust rule set that covers most actions. I also like procedural rules where applying the rules to new situations follows from the existing rules. But eventually you'll come to a situation with no rules and you can either say 'no...just no' or you can try to figure out something that makes sense.

[Lago PARANOIA]

But eventually you'll come to a situation with no rules and you can either say 'no...just no' or you can try to figure out something that makes sense.

You see, that's just the fucking thing. What 'makes sense' to some DMs doesn't make sense to other DMs. Especially if you're going to bring realizms or even sorta-realizms into it. Some people see a non-ranged, non-phlebtonium'd fighter jumping on the back of a dragon and stabbing it to death as cool and knot-cutting and empowering. Other people see it as pandering and retarded and immersion-breaking. And in absence of a specific rule otherwise, who the fuck are you to say that me and Kaelik are wrong?

That's why a class whose balance point is MTP-style stunting, especially if they're supposed to be VAH-flavored stunts, is doomed on first principles.

[MGuy]

But eventually you'll come to a situation with no rules and you can either say 'no...just no' or you can try to figure out something that makes sense.

You see, that's just the fucking thing. What 'makes sense' to some DMs doesn't make sense to other DMs. Especially if you're going to bring realizms or even sorta-realizms into it. Some people see a non-ranged, non-phlebtonium'd fighter jumping on the back of a dragon and stabbing it to death as cool and knot-cutting and empowering. Other people see it as pandering and retarded and immersion-breaking. And in absence of a specific rule otherwise, who the fuck are you to say that me and Kaelik are wrong?

That's why a class whose balance point is MTP-style stunting, especially if they're supposed to be VAH-flavored stunts, is doomed on first principles.

So don't make it a class based ability or balance point? I thought 'fighters can't have nice things' was supposed to be a joke not something that anyone on here specifically enjoyed enforcing no matter how minor the benefit.

[Kaelik]

But you've just reversed position from no way if there are no defined rules to totally acceptable but ridiculously difficult in most cases. That's a big difference.

I don't mean to advocate for the Benoist ideal. I prefer a robust rule set that covers most actions. I also like procedural rules where applying the rules to new situations follows from the existing rules. But eventually you'll come to a situation with no rules and you can either say 'no...just no' or you can try to figure out something that makes sense.

You are a fucking idiot. I don't know if you can't read, or if you think Lago and I are the same person.

The very first thing I said about this stupid shit was saying that because there were no defined rules, I was comparing it to the ride skill, and based on the fact that a ride check for staying a bucking wild horse would have to be at least 30-40, that staying an intelligent dragon trying to shake you would be in the 90s. It isn't my fault that the thing you want to do is stupid and impossible, that is your fault for wanting to do something stupid and impossible.

I never fucking reversed position at all. I said, since I couldn't find rules, I went to the nearest source, and applied the appropriate adjustments for your attempt to do something that your character has no fucking ability to do.

So don't make it a class based ability or balance point? I thought 'fighters can't have nice things' was supposed to be a joke not something that anyone on here specifically enjoyed enforcing no matter how minor the benefit.

Are you smarter than the dragon? No. Are you stronger than the Dragon? No. Are you more skilled than the Dragon? No.

Your class ability better be magical sticky effects, because if not you have no reason to be able to do this at all.

Like, think about what you are insisting, you are insisting that you should have a 100% chance of succeeding on an action opposed against an enemy of apparently infinite CR, because you have given no reason to think your arbitrary must always succeed ability to ride on the back of your enemies would in any way be hampered by any possible attribute of the enemy.

If you are going to make your own class called "enemy rider" maybe you can get away with it, but if you think all the members of an NPC class should be able to do this you are a fucking idiot.

[deaddmwalking]

I probably did confuse your position with Lago's.

That said, I'm smarter, stronger, and more skilled than a flea, as is my cat. A flea can ride both of us pretty well. I don't think fleas count as particularly 'sticky'.

At some point, it may become ridiculous to think that you can do damage, but it would also follow that it can be almost impossible not to succeed. This has been all abstract, so far, but we're also talking about a fantasy situation that will never occur in real life.

I'm glad that Tome had rules for riding an unwilling creature - that's a good rule to have and one that comes up regularly enough to need a resolution function. Using the Tome Rule, a Huge Blue Dragon has a Touch AC of 8 and BAB of +21 (it's also CR 14). We're going to assume our VAH has 5 ranks is Ride and Balance for a +4 bonus from Synergy. So the 29 to 'hold on' is pretty easy - we should be ~+14 BAB in any case, and we should have a bonus to Attack from Strength.

The part that doesn't make sense to me for the 'shake off' is that the person holding on's Strength doesn't matter at all. Ie, it isn't BAB + STR or Climb + STR or Ride + DEX.

The same adult has a +27 Attack, so they could realistically be making a check against 24 (10+BAB). Strength bonus would take this out of the territory of 'auto-succeed'.

In any case, I do think this ties into the 'Martial Characters Can't Have Nice Things' - riding a surfboard is something that people do, and while it isn't easy, it can be done. Riding a bronco is something that people do, and while it isn't easy, it can be done. I don't believe that riding a dragon would necessarily be more difficult - if you fall while riding a dragon, you likely fall onto the dragon. A dragon, due to being the size of an elephant, may not be able to buck as much as a horse. There's no way I can see 'dragon riding' as automatically outside of the realm of possibility - not restricted to VAH characters. Heck, throw in 'Sovereign Glue' and I think you'd be totally okay with it. As soon as magic can be used to explain it, things go from impossible to 'cool'.

[MGuy]

So don't make it a class based ability or balance point? I thought 'fighters can't have nice things' was supposed to be a joke not something that anyone on here specifically enjoyed enforcing no matter how minor the benefit.

Are you smarter than the dragon? No. Are you stronger than the Dragon? No. Are you more skilled than the Dragon? No.

Your class ability better be magical sticky effects, because if not you have no reason to be able to do this at all.

Like, think about what you are insisting, you are insisting that you should have a 100% chance of succeeding on an action opposed against an enemy of apparently infinite CR, because you have given no reason to think your arbitrary must always succeed ability to ride on the back of your enemies would in any way be hampered by any possible attribute of the enemy.

If you are going to make your own class called "enemy rider" maybe you can get away with it, but if you think all the members of an NPC class should be able to do this you are a fucking idiot.

I don't think you know what I'm insisting. You're pulling out percentages, infinite CR horse shit, 'always succeed', and whatever other assumptions straight out of your ass. Most of what you're arguing against isn't even something I implied. What I'm insisting on is very simply that the game should be able to handle people jumping on things to attack them. That the rules say when X jumps on Y it does Z.

I've no idea why you're worried about how smart a dragon is because that sure as fuck doesn't have anything to do with whether or not someone can jump on them. I also don't know why you keep talking about classes because I just said, in the thing you quoted me on to 'not' make it class ability or balance point. So it's fine that there is an argument you made up to defeat and all but that's just your own fail version of it. It's good though that you can freely admit that your ideas are stupid.

[RelentlessImp]

deaddm you know the whole 'flea' thing is basically stupid, right? Fleas are built to hitch rides on things. That's what being a parasite is. That's like saying a tick isn't sticky because it bites into the skin to hang on and once the head's removed it has no particular ability to hang on.

[deaddmwalking]

No, I don't see that as stupid. Of course fleas and ticks can hold on. So can people. To a greater or lesser degree. Catching a tiger by the tail is a common idiom - the game should support it as an option. But I didn't mean to derail the thread.

[Kaelik]

That said, I'm smarter, stronger, and more skilled than a flea, as is my cat. A flea can ride both of us pretty well. I don't think fleas count as particularly 'sticky'.

I have noticed that I have a 100% success rate removing flees I can see from me. Although admittedly I haven't had any attempts since I was 10.

Flees also definitely count as fucking sticky, since like all insects that walk on goddam walls, they obviously have some ability that we don't.

In any case, I do think this ties into the 'Martial Characters Can't Have Nice Things' - riding a surfboard is something that people do, and while it isn't easy, it can be done. Riding a bronco is something that people do, and while it isn't easy, it can be done. I don't believe that riding a dragon would necessarily be more difficult - if you fall while riding a dragon, you likely fall onto the dragon. A dragon, due to being the size of an elephant, may not be able to buck as much as a horse. There's no way I can see 'dragon riding' as automatically outside of the realm of possibility - not restricted to VAH characters. Heck, throw in 'Sovereign Glue' and I think you'd be totally okay with it. As soon as magic can be used to explain it, things go from impossible to 'cool'.

You must have committed yourself to this stupid position, and now be doing anything you can imagine to rationalize it. I refuse to believe you are this fucking stupid.

A dragon flies 3-9 times faster than a horse runs. A Dragon can turn upside down while flying in the air. A dragon is intelligent and can take advantage of both that and flight to do things that would throw people that horses can't. The dragon is significantly stronger than a horse. When people ride bucking Bronco's they often have saddles, and even when they don't, they grip with their legs in a way that is impossible on a giant as fucking dragon. There is no reason to think Dragons can't buck as well as horses and that is stupid to even say. Dragons can probably reach back and bite your fucking arm off while you are on them. Even if Dragons can't buck at all, the shear fact of their ability to fly means they can apply significantly more acceleration changes than a horse.

There are so many reasons it would obviously be more difficult that I am fucking confused as fuck how even the dumbest forced dragon riding advocate could not see multiple of them.

I mean for fucks sake, a Dragon's back is basically a ceiling if they turn upside down, since they are so big you can't actually reach around them to grip anything. Do you think you deserve a chance to successfully cling to ceilings without being fucking spiderman just because you are a commoner 5?

What I'm insisting on is very simply that the game should be able to handle people jumping on things to attack them. That the rules say when X jumps on Y it does Z.

Then stop yelling at people who have proposed ideas of how the game should handle it, but where it handles it by telling you you fail 100% of the time to ride the dragon. Since they have done that.

I've no idea why you're worried about how smart a dragon is because that sure as fuck doesn't have anything to do with whether or not someone can jump on them.

I have no idea why you think it would be equally as easy to stay on an intelligent dragon trying to get you off as a stupid animal with all the same other characteristics. Generally speaking people recognize the concept that intelligence is a problem solving tool, and so the problem of "get this thing off me" is easier, all things being equal, for super geniuses smarter than the smartest living human than a fucking dumb horse.

I also don't know why you keep talking about classes because I just said, in the thing you quoted me on to 'not' make it class ability or balance point. So it's fine that there is an argument you made up to defeat and all but that's just your own fail version of it. It's good though that you can freely admit that your ideas are stupid.

I misread your post because pegging it on a class ability would be so many billions of times smarter than everything you have said about how you are so mad that the game won't let you succeed at force dragon riding. I was charitably assuming you were less of an idiot than you are.

[MGuy]

Uhh kaelik you responded to my post which was a response to Lago. I wasn't even talking to you in the post you fucking quoted. Yea, you obviously misread my post, attributed to yourself, then ranted about things I never fucking brought up. You even continue it by talking about how easily an intelligent dragon does bullshit. It doesn't matter how 'easy' it is for an intelligent dragon to realize what it can do to get you off because even if I gave a damn about the particulars of how non intelligent creatures deal with people riding them vs sentient ones it still wouldn't have dick to do about the fact that the rules should cover how those interactions go.

I know how much an idiot you get to be like whenever you fuck up so I don't expect an apology for YOU cocking up and being an idiot but at least if you're going to freak out about something because you hate fighters oh so much at least pay attention to what I ACTUALLY fucking said.

[Kaelik]

it still wouldn't have dick to do about the fact that the rules should cover how those interactions go.

You quoted a post that has literally nothing to do with that point, in order to argue that point. How was I supposed to know you were quoting a post in order to talk about something completely unrelated to what you were posting?

[Stubbazubba]

There isn't a specific DC for "stay on a bucking bronco" but whatever you would make up for that should be higher than 20

There's this, from the PHB: Stay in Saddle: You can react instantly to try to avoid falling when your mount rears or bolts unexpectedly or when you take damage.

That's pretty close, and it's only DC 5. Sure, a buck or a kick is a little more difficult than just rearing, but even a horse determined to get you off its back is not an unprecedented level of difficulty.

A bucking bronco competition involves a bunch of low-level cowboys, many of whom are teenagers, who stay on a bronc that has been specifically bred for bucking for an eight-second round and are only allowed to use one hand. That is at the very, very least a -2 circumstance modifier, probably closer to -4. Also, half the time there's no saddle. Teenaged bronco riders aren't mid-level NPCs, they're at best level 3. So they have a +6 Ride and they get +2 synergy from Handle Animal. That and their DEX bonus, less the one-handed penalty, is only giving them a total of +6-8 (or +4-6 if one-handed is a -4 penalty, and more like +1-3 bareback or even a negative mod if both bareback and one-handed is a -4 penalty). Even if all of them are not teenagers and may have a few more NPC levels, if half of those cowboys can still stay on, the DC is still obviously not above 20.

So, a CR 10 Red Dragon is a juvenile, which is a Large creature, the same as a horse, it would get no size modifier bonus, and is no more difficult to get your arms around/hold onto than a horse. Holding on while it tries to get you off shouldn't really be more difficult than staying on a bucking bronco. But even if you wanted to reflect the difference in STR score, that would be an extra +9 for the Red Dragon, still putting the DC somewhere between 20-30, tops, which is also roughly what the Tome rules end up doing.

Are you smarter than the dragon? No. Are you stronger than the Dragon? No. Are you more skilled than the Dragon? No.

1) These things apply to everything, so either the rules let you contest them or they don't and PCs fail at everything they attempt against a Dragon.

2) Not even going to deaddm's example of a flea, you know what's stupider and weaker than me but can still stay on me even as I try to get it off? A squirrel. And that's a much closer approximation of the size differences.

Like, think about what you are insisting, you are insisting that you should have a 100% chance of succeeding on an action opposed against an enemy of apparently infinite CR

No, no one has said 100% chance of anything. You're trying to lock any attempt to hold onto a dragon into a 100% chance of failure, but the opposite of that argument is not 100% chance of success, it's any non-zero chance.

But this isn't even the original contention. Lago's original point was that in a game without rules for Jump and Climb/Ride, whatever awful game that might be, he would never allow a DMF to ride a dragon, and that in a game with rules for that he would. Now I don't understand that at all, because if the game is that rules lite, there's almost no chance of magic having specifically defined outputs, either, but Lago would be OK with doing whatever that character wanted to try because that's sufficient "narrative justification" to him. It apparently doesn't occur to Lago that the DMF character is not a DMF until Lago denies him the ability to ride the dragon. He's putting the cart completely before the horse. A DMF is a conclusion, not the source of the problem that must restrain all undefined fiction going forward. And this is even evident from his look at Goku/Naruto; he concludes whether or not they are DMFs by looking at what they have been allowed to do (one of which is explicitly "do crazy stunts"), and then decides on that basis that they can both ride the dragon. IOW, they can do crazy stunts, so they're not DMFs, so they can try to ride the dragon. But his logic on the DMF in his hypothetical gets the opposite treatment: you're a DMF, therefore you can't do crazy stunts, therefore you can't try to ride the dragon. When you start with nothing but a conclusion, yeah, you're going to get back to it, but we have a word for that, it's "circular reasoning," and it's a bad thing.

You, OTOH, want to say that even with rules, it should be impossible, because screw DMFs. You're again starting from the same fallacious position Lago is, that we determine DMF based on label and thus deem that they can't do anything interesting, and make up whatever DC (93? Seriously?) to arrive back at our initial assumption. Even Lago doesn't go that far. He says he would follow rules that let it work.

DMFs are already useless at many things, but throwing out any attempt to actually use the rules in good faith and pulling arbitrarily high DCs out of thin air to make sure DMFs fail, is not how they become DMFs. If that's what you're doing, you may as well do the exact opposite and make everything easy so they actually have an impact on the world, like a lot of DMs do.

Edit:

A dragon is intelligent and can take advantage of both that

No, it can't. There are no rules for applying intelligence to anything involved with removing a rider. If you're going to just fiat that Dragon's characteristic X gets to help arbitrarily because you don't like the character concept of the PC fighting the Dragon, that is bad and you should feel bad.

When people ride bucking Bronco's they often have saddles, and even when they don't, they grip with their legs in a way that is impossible on a giant as fucking dragon.

Not necessarily, some hang on just fine without wrapping their knees around anything. And who's to say a dragon's back is perfectly flat?

There is no reason to think Dragons can't buck as well as horses and that is stupid to even say.

Horses evolved that capability to throw off mountain lions who attacked them from above. What threat similarly jumped on dragons regularly so they evolved that way? This is like saying elephants should be able to buck. No, they shouldn't, and saying that they should is stupid. There are reasons horses evolved to buck, those reasons don't exist for elephants, and they almost certainly don't exist for dragons.

Even if Dragons can't buck at all, the shear fact of their ability to fly means they can apply significantly more acceleration changes than a horse.

This is probably true, and wouldn't it be interesting if we had rules that actually did that? Making up arbitrarily high DCs because of your contempt for a character concept isn't a replacement for having rules that back you up. The former is invariably circular reasoning, the latter is actually useful.

[MGuy]

I quoted Lago making a point about what makes sense for some groups vs others and talking about how making the issue the focus of a class or a balance point is stupid. You followed up with your stupid rant about how letting fighters autosucceed in wrangling hyper intelligent flying lizards makes you cry. You claim I'm yelling at someone who is proposing an idea of how to handle it when I was in fact criticizing Lago for basically saying the game shouldn't handle it.

[Kaelik]

There's this, from the PHB: Stay in Saddle: You can react instantly to try to avoid falling when your mount rears or bolts unexpectedly or when you take damage.

No, your mount rearing to avoid damage is not even remotely fucking close to a non mount like creature trying to get you off, possibly by literally biting your arms off.

A bucking bronco competition involves a bunch of low-level cowboys, many of whom are teenagers, who stay on a bronc that has been specifically bred for bucking for an eight-second round and are only allowed to use one hand. That is at the very, very least a -2 circumstance modifier, probably closer to -4. Also, half the time there's no saddle. Teenaged bronco riders aren't mid-level NPCs, they're at best level 3. So they have a +6 Ride and they get +2 synergy from Handle Animal. That and their DEX bonus, less the one-handed penalty, is only giving them a total of +6-8 (or +4-6 if one-handed is a -4 penalty, and more like +1-3 bareback or even a negative mod if both bareback and one-handed is a -4 penalty). Even if all of them are not teenagers and may have a few more NPC levels, if half of those cowboys can still stay on, the DC is still obviously not above 20.

Just don't. For fucks sake don't. If your argument ever, at any point, involves talking about the "levels" and "skill modifiers" of real human beings in the real world, your argument is shit and you should just stop.

1) These things apply to everything, so either the rules let you contest them or they don't and PCs fail at everything they attempt against a Dragon.

The rules spell out how strength effects attack and damage. The rules spell out how these things work. You are asking me to just allow you to ride your opponent without any say for him, that is stupid, and it isn't going to happen when the monsters have all the necessary qualities to just not fucking let that happen.

2) Not even going to deaddm's example of a flea, you know what's stupider and weaker than me but can still stay on me even as I try to get it off? A squirrel. And that's a much closer approximation of the size differences.

How about this, I bet I can get a squirrel of me in 6 seconds, and that a squirrel can't ride me like I can a horse who lets me.

No, no one has said 100% chance of anything. You're trying to lock any attempt to hold onto a dragon into a 100% chance of failure, but the opposite of that argument is not 100% chance of success, it's any non-zero chance.

No it isn't. If you have some pathetic non-zero chance, then you immediately and without fail whine that it should be some larger non zero chance. The only reason you didn't start there is because this proposed "riding a dragon" is so fucking dumb that it basically should never happen.

You, OTOH, want to say that even with rules, it should be impossible, because screw DMFs. You're again starting from the same fallacious position Lago is, that we determine DMF based on label and thus deem that they can't do anything interesting, and make up whatever DC (93? Seriously?) to arrive back at our initial assumption. Even Lago doesn't go that far. He says he would follow rules that let it work.

No, I'm saying that "riding another creature with impunity" should be fucking hard when that creature is even remotely CR competent.

What do you think the appropriate modifier is for a ride check for a creature who fucking doesn't want to be ridden and is in fact a goddam monster is? How do you even have a modifier for that? You basically can't, because it needs to be different for Colossal Dragons and fucking pigs.

The entire fucking point of that example was to demonstrate that extrapolating from the riding rules doesn't fucking work, because the riding rules don't even have "bucking bronco" as a thing on a table, and even that would be so much easier than staying on a dragon that you are literally talking about several RNGs off.

DMFs are already useless at many things, but throwing out any attempt to actually use the rules in good faith and pulling arbitrarily high DCs out of thin air to make sure DMFs fail, is not how they become DMFs. If that's what you're doing, you may as well do the exact opposite and make everything easy so they actually have an impact on the world, like a lot of DMs do.

That is the point, I didn't pull out an arbitrary high DC. The actual DC tables have 20 for something that is way the fuck easier than staying on a bucking bronco. Something that is in turn orders of magnitude easier than riding a dragon who doesn't want to be ridden. Any reasonable not completely fucking idiotic shithead extrapolation from the ride rules is going to result in a zero percent chance, which is a reason to not do that.

EDIT: I typed something up for Mguy too, but it got deleted by accident.'

Spoiler alert Mguy, you are completely wrong, Lago said that in a game without the rules, both MTPs are equally valid. That has literally nothing to do with your ongoing argument with the wall that the game should have rules.

[Stubbazubba]

No, Kaelik. People have shown you two different ways to look at the rules and get not DC 93, and you have insisted that they are both wrong and that you should be several RNGs' worth higher, but have yet to go ahead and show that. Your system so far is "DMFs can't hold onto things, so DC 93. You failed? Oh, too bad." That is just as bad as "DMFs are awesome action heroes and should just be able to do this, so DC 5. You succeeded, awesome!" They're both starting with a foregone conclusion and working backwards. My take at the Ride check was completely cursory, but it lets cowboys do what you would expect them to do. I'm totally willing to abandon it if you have a better one, but you don't. What you have is "Staying on a Dragon should be impossibly hard because DMFs are stupid, so on the 'Impossibly Hard Because Stupid' table, that's DC 93." Pointing to possible reasons (Dragon's strength, intelligence, flight, and ability to buck) doesn't justify an arbitrary DC because you have yet to connect any of those characteristics to mechanics that make them matter, whether real or hypothetical. Do better.

On top of that you're shifting goal posts, trying to rephrase everything as a comparison to riding something that lets you. No one has even mentioned riding something that lets you. Your use of that comparison is nothing more than you trying to shift goalposts because you've lost. And you're weaseling out of your insistence that a Dragon's intelligence should mean no mere mortal can ever stay on it for a single round. Yes, the rules tell how strength affects attacks and damage, but 1) if you're handling it with Ride checks, neither of those affect an attempt to stay on when bucking, and 2) if you're handling it with Grapple, neither of those gets you anywhere close to DC 93, and 3) none of that has anything to do with intelligence. And you're doing it with the whole 100% chance thing, too. No one is saying you just get to negate the Dragon's abilities and ride it with impunity, that's you making up arguments to fight against. If you can't win the arguments straight on, at least avoid looking like you didn't even comprehend them in the first place by endlessly restating them incorrectly.

[Kaelik]

No, Kaelik. People have shown you two different ways to look at the rules and get not DC 93, and you have insisted that they are both wrong and that you should be several RNGs' worth higher, but have yet to go ahead and show that. Your system so far is "DMFs can't hold onto things, so DC 93. You failed? Oh, too bad." That is just as bad as "DMFs are awesome action heroes and should just be able to do this, so DC 5. You succeeded, awesome!" They're both starting with a foregone conclusion and working backwards. My take at the Ride check was completely cursory, but it lets cowboys do what you would expect them to do. I'm totally willing to abandon it if you have a better one, but you don't. What you have is "Staying on a Dragon should be impossibly hard because DMFs are stupid, so on the 'Impossibly Hard Because Stupid' table, that's DC 93." Pointing to possible reasons (Dragon's strength, intelligence, flight, and ability to buck) doesn't justify an arbitrary DC because you have yet to connect any of those characteristics to mechanics that make them matter, whether real or hypothetical. Do better.

You apparently have failed to read or understand my previous post. Please get back to me when you comprehend my actual points in my last post.

On top of that you're shifting goal posts, trying to rephrase everything as a comparison to riding something that lets you. No one has even mentioned riding something that lets you. Your use of that comparison is nothing more than you trying to shift goalposts because you've lost. And you're weaseling out of your insistence that a Dragon's intelligence should mean no mere mortal can ever stay on it for a single round. Yes, the rules tell how strength affects attacks and damage, but 1) if you're handling it with Ride checks, neither of those affect an attempt to stay on when bucking, and 2) if you're handling it with Grapple, neither of those gets you anywhere close to DC 93, and 3) none of that has anything to do with intelligence. And you're doing it with the whole 100% chance thing, too. No one is saying you just get to negate the Dragon's abilities and ride it with impunity, that's you making up arguments to fight against. If you can't win the arguments straight on, at least avoid looking like you didn't even comprehend them in the first place by endlessly restating them incorrectly.

Yes, when hypothetically using the Ride skill, I am comparing (or more precisely contrasting it) to uses in which your mount cooperates. Because that is a relevant consideration. Yes, the Ride skill does not have accounting for the strength of your mount making it harder to ride, because the ride skill assumes your mount is cooperating. Yes, if you are handling it with grapple you don't get DC 93, which is one limited reason that I didn't say you should have a DC 93 grapple check. Yes, intelligence is really fucking relevant when comparing a horse versus a dragon trying to get you off. Dragons are super geniuses who should be expected to make better tactical decisions. The fact that the ride skill does not take into account your mount being smarter making it harder to ride them is again, because the ride skill assumes cooperation.

It is almost like, for fucks sake, modelling your ability to cling to an opposing creature who doesn't want you to cling to them should not be modeled by a fucking ride check.

[deaddmwalking]

We've got a spectrum problem. If Dragons are one extreme and a cooperative horse is the other, we have lots of unwilling creatures that fall between them. A major plot point of the Piers Anthony novel Split Infinity was the protagonist riding an unwilling and intelligent unicorn. Breaking a Griffin is something we might expect players to do. How about jumping on the back of a flying eagle (again, uncooperative).

If you say yes to some but not others, it appears you have a criteria that can be extrapolated into a rule. This would be good because phlebotium will come up at some point. If the DMF can't do it, what about if he is large? What if his Strength is 38? What if he has slippers of spider climb ? What if he's wearing a ring of feather fall (if he falls slowly he might be close enough to grab on again)? What if he successfully got a lasso around the dragon's neck?

Straight fail is the wrong answer and it's obviously the wrong answer . Auto success and auto failure are both bad for basically the same reason - it let's the GM decide what they think is 'reasonable' without any call to rules. The difference between them is that auto-fail is usually reserved for GMs that worship on the alter of Gygaxian fuckery.

We haven't defined who is attempting the action specifically so there is no function to say 'the CR is too high - auto-fail'. If the level difference is too extreme, riding a dragon wouldn't be helpful anyway.

[OgreBattle]

Some of my favorite gameplay mechanics in Dragon's Dogma is being able to grab onto bestial foes, from flying griffons to bipedal cyclops

But if you're not careful something like a cyclops can snatch you off a location its hands can reach and eat you (instant death attack), unless your comrades can hit it in the hand to drop you.



More agile enemies such as the ape-like ogre can even jump into the air and land on its back if there's an adventurer latched to its back so there's many interesting interactions when it comes to colossus climbing.

But even if monster shakes you off, they're still taking time and action that could have went towards smushing the mage about to freeze them in a block of ice or the ranger about to unleash a full power shot into their eyeball or the other fighter who is now ready to full attack up the dragon's soft scaled anus.

Part of the value in having grab-on attacks against monstrous foes is not necessarily to finish off the monster but to distract it and buy time for someone else. Say the dragon is about to gobble up the princess but then a warrior manages to leap on high onto his face, giving the paladin enough time to ride by and grab the princes while the dragon is spending his action shaking off/eviscerating the warrior.

[tussock]

Kaelik, you're being stupid. Stop it. You could 1-hand insta-pin it on a lower check.


If someone's going to make one up a ride rule for hostile opponents, note that you get a -5 for a "very different mount" as griffon vs horse, -5 for checks made bareback, and if the dragon wants to throw you by biting or some shit they can do that on their own damn turn.

One can perhaps argue for the miscellaneous "impossible" modifier of -20 for being an "impossibly different mount", -5 bareback. But I'd save that for acidic puddings and the like, -10 maybe better. The dragon is constantly "bolting" so you need a DC 5 check at -15 (or mid-level riding skill to have any chance).

Then the dragon can just trip/dismount you as an attack, and you can oppose with your ride check at -15 or whatever if that's better (which it isn't). Or it can bite-grapple-swallow if it's big enough, or breathe on you. That's not part of the ride check though.


Like, DC 80-90 is officially for climbing a wall of force, or balancing on water, or fitting through a gap too small for your skull, training an exotic beast in an hour, pickpocket the king in person out of his throne room (and forcibly hide him in plain sight), read minds, ignore all illusion magic, or swim up a waterfall. Those DCs are all completely bullshit-high from the Epic Joke Book, but they'd let me make the dragon my buddy by chatting to it for a round, then a fanatic slave by singing it a quick song. I'm pretty sure staying in the dragon's square for a round is not on that level.

[Lago PARANOIA]

So don't make it a class based ability or balance point? I thought 'fighters can't have nice things' was supposed to be a joke not something that anyone on here specifically enjoyed enforcing no matter how minor the benefit.

In any case, I do think this ties into the 'Martial Characters Can't Have Nice Things' - riding a surfboard is something that people do, and while it isn't easy, it can be done. Riding a bronco is something that people do, and while it isn't easy, it can be done. I don't believe that riding a dragon would necessarily be more difficult - if you fall while riding a dragon, you likely fall onto the dragon.

Martial Characters Don't Have Nice Things not because there's somehow a conspiracy to keep the hard-working nonmagical proletariat down, maaaaaan. They don't have nice things because they're supposed to be bound by realism and exist in a universe that's supposed to model ours unless otherwise noted and they're up against characters who have a well-noted list of exceptions. Benoist tried to pull this same shit, that how a DM that didn't give the martials sufficient amounts of DM Pity even at the cost of breaking WSoD or causal logic was them being a fighter-hating tyrant. And it's just as convincing an argument now as it was then.

And like it or not, it's always going to be a balance point. Any TTRPG, no matter how humble, is going to have occasions where a player needs to or at least can stray outside what's written on their character sheet or defined in the rules in order to advance the story. And some character options will be superior to other options. A Magician or Super-Scientist superhero is always going to have an easier time with MTP than an Earthbender or a Firebender. And an Earthbender or a Firebender is always going to have an easier time with MTP still than Wolverine or Cyclops. It's just something that you have to account for unless you're willing to go partial or even full Captain Hobo.

Furthermore, deaddmwalking and anyone else, I am not interested in discussing your retarded hypothesis about how riding a dragon is supposed to be analogous to riding a horse. Even if you were somehow able to convince me of this -- and with your weak-ass special pleading equivocations, you're not going to be able to -- that still doesn't change the underlying point that what's plausible to one MC won't be plausible to another. Thus if your class requires the Maim Master to sign off on all of your major stunts but not on another character's stunts, then there's no chance for balance.

[virgil]

It looks like Kaelik's argument is that Ride is the wrong skill/mechanic for running up a dragon's back like Legolas...which I'm going to agree with.

[deaddmwalking]

that still doesn't change the underlying point that what's plausible to one MC won't be plausible to another. Thus if your class requires the Maim Master to sign off on all of your major stunts but not on another character's stunts, then there's no chance for balance.

That is the sound of goal posts being shifted.

If you can't imagine a high-level martial character riding a dragon, that is a problem with your imagination more than with any rules.

Obviously, if a fighter could stunt, a wizard should be able to as well, and probably better because magic. But when you draw a line and say 'non-magical characters can't do the things people do in real life because it doesn't seem realistic to me', you're doubling down on the 'fighters can't have nice things'. I don't know what you want to think of riding on the back of the dragon equivalent to, but it seems like there might be something in real life that serves as an example of it being possible. How about 'wing walking'?

[Ancient History]

I think the argument y'all are hitting is the grey area between exclusive abilities versus separate rulesets.

Exclusive abilities is the idea that certain powers, abilities, etc. are exclusive to a given class, race, or group. Separate rulesets is the idea that PCs and NPCs use different rulesets or stats for the same actions/abilities/etc.

The former is the hallmark of a lot of games; for example, in World of Darkness certain disciplines are supposed to be unique to certain bloodlines or clans. This gives those clans/bloodlines a particular cachet or niche, which gets watered down as soon as you introduce more clans/bloodlines/etc. that get to use their "unique" discipline - the same goes for what we might call key class features in D&D, like raging for Barbarians or Flurry of Blows for Monk (hey, I said exclusive, I didn't say doesn't suck) - and in D&D especially you can see how the friction between trends to keep some abilities unique to a particular class, set of classes, or race/class combination and the general desire to be able to mix'n'match - because, as deaddmwalking says, if it is physically possible to ride a dragon in the game, no one wants to be told they cannot ride a dragon just because they're wearing a dress a wizard. They might never ride a dragon, they might in fact dislike the thought of mounting up on a dragon, or have strong cultural reasons not to do it, but they dislike being told arbitrarily that they can't. Like you might be a druid who wants the ability to wear full plate armor; disadvantageous as that might be, there is no rule that says "thou shalt not wear plate armor as a druid" - they just load you down with penalties for it.

On the separate rulesets score it's...more complicated, I reckon. There are NPC-exclusive abilities, which I personally don't care for - that is, there is no in game justification for why only the NPCs can ride dragons, use necromancy and blood magic, etc., it's just the game designer's fiat that only the Dark Lord or Aztechnology can do such-and-such. The justification for that is that it reserves a certain cachet and mystery for the villains, rather than just making them arbitrarily powerful. Frank and I talked about insect magicians in Bug City and noted that aside from the whole "summoning insect spirits" thing they played by the same rulebook as everyone else. In previous editions of D&D you saw a lot of that sort of thing in little game-designer asspulls for making their villain-of-the-week arbitrarily a threat, like an artifact that only they can use (PCs being told to go fuck themselves if they try). However, when this kind of thing gets out of hand you end up with crap like D&D4 - where even the stats and abilities for the NPCs have no connection to those of the PCs. This is just poor game design; if you go through the trouble of building a system for building characters in a world, those stats should apply equally to PCs and NPCs alike.

[MGuy]

So don't make it a class based ability or balance point? I thought 'fighters can't have nice things' was supposed to be a joke not something that anyone on here specifically enjoyed enforcing no matter how minor the benefit.

In any case, I do think this ties into the 'Martial Characters Can't Have Nice Things' - riding a surfboard is something that people do, and while it isn't easy, it can be done. Riding a bronco is something that people do, and while it isn't easy, it can be done. I don't believe that riding a dragon would necessarily be more difficult - if you fall while riding a dragon, you likely fall onto the dragon.

Martial Characters Don't Have Nice Things not because there's somehow a conspiracy to keep the hard-working nonmagical proletariat down, maaaaaan. They don't have nice things because they're supposed to be bound by realism and exist in a universe that's supposed to model ours unless otherwise noted and they're up against characters who have a well-noted list of exceptions. Benoist tried to pull this same shit, that how a DM that didn't give the martials sufficient amounts of DM Pity even at the cost of breaking WSoD or causal logic was them being a fighter-hating tyrant. And it's just as convincing an argument now as it was then.

And like it or not, it's always going to be a balance point. Any TTRPG, no matter how humble, is going to have occasions where a player needs to or at least can stray outside what's written on their character sheet or defined in the rules in order to advance the story. And some character options will be superior to other options. A Magician or Super-Scientist superhero is always going to have an easier time with MTP than an Earthbender or a Firebender. And an Earthbender or a Firebender is always going to have an easier time with MTP still than Wolverine or Cyclops. It's just something that you have to account for unless you're willing to go partial or even full Captain Hobo.

Furthermore, deaddmwalking and anyone else, I am not interested in discussing your retarded hypothesis about how riding a dragon is supposed to be analogous to riding a horse. Even if you were somehow able to convince me of this -- and with your weak-ass special pleading equivocations, you're not going to be able to -- that still doesn't change the underlying point that what's plausible to one MC won't be plausible to another. Thus if your class requires the Maim Master to sign off on all of your major stunts but not on another character's stunts, then there's no chance for balance.

Or, and here's a thought, you just don't bound them to 'realism' as an excuse to not allow them to do amazing things. The only one in this entire thread pulling the 'martials must be realistic' excuse is you and I'm not sure why you're repeating this mantra with a straight face here. None of of are Benoist and so no one gives here gives a flying fuck about keeping martials realistic. You're the only one. Benoist wanted to make the claim that fighters can be both realistic and get special treatment. No one here is saying either of those things.