OOC II

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Rusty Tincanne
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Re: OOC II

#201 Post by Rusty Tincanne »

I see the benefits of both:

GMs rolling can streamline a game, increasing it's pace and, if I am pressed for time, it is easier to just read the updates.

Players rolling allows a player to narrate their successes and failures themselves, instead of always relying on the GM to tell the story.

In a game where I know the rules fairly well (like LL basic), I am a fan of rolling my own dice. It makes me feel more attachement/ownership of my character.

If you have strong feelings on the matter, though, I'll go along with it. Maybe you'll prove me wrong. How long is "temporary"?

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Re: OOC II

#202 Post by onlyme »

I dont care either way. If it is a bad roll, I have someone to blame. If it was a good roll, I am sure I would have done the same. :)
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Re: OOC II

#203 Post by dmw71 »

Bluehorse wrote:...with the one reservation that we are able to request it back to normal later if we begin to feel awkward...
My initial thinking is that I'd like to see how it would play out over the course of at least a week or two. Longer if it's working, or there haven't been many opportunities for rolling, or shorter if it quickly reveals itself to not work.
Bluehorse wrote:...and perhaps if those not interested would still be able to roll their own.
I probably wouldn’t allow individual exceptions – this will be an all-or-nothing experiment.

As there’s at least one vote in strong opposition (which is fine), I won’t be implementing it here in this game. It’s something that I will want to test out before starting my next game, whenever that will be.
Rusty Tincanne wrote:I see the benefits of both:

GMs rolling can streamline a game, increasing it's pace…
This is one of the things I’m interested in testing.
Rusty Tincanne wrote:Players rolling allows a player to narrate their successes and failures themselves, instead of always relying on the GM to tell the story.
This, I’ll admit, is something I’m hoping to prevent.

When a player knows the outcome of their actions, it influences their update. I would much rather read the detailed intentions of what a character wants to do than a simple “he swings and misses” when the roll is low.

There are other advantages I can think of as well.

For one, I don’t think the outcome should be known to the player. Say a fighter encounters a band of orcs, all of them wearing leather armor. With their first attack, the player rolls a 12 which hits and kills the first orc. They roll a second 12 with their second attack against a different orc… a hit, right?

What if it misses? What if the same roll result has a different outcome against just this one orc? The player is automatically tipped off to the fact that something is up even though all things are seemingly equal in every other regard.
Rusty Tincanne wrote:In a game where I know the rules fairly well (like LL basic), I am a fan of rolling my own dice. It makes me feel more attachement/ownership of my character.
I wonder if/how your feeling of ownership would change if you no longer needed to supply your own rolls? You’ve been really good at playing AdaRue, so maybe not?
onlyme wrote:I dont care either way. If it is a bad roll, I have someone to blame. If it was a good roll, I am sure I would have done the same. :)
Ha! Yes, there is always this.



I’ll admit, as a player, I’m not sure how I’d feel about giving up that agency. How I felt about my character dying would maybe change, too?

I don’t know.

What I do know is it is something I am interested in trying. Sometime.

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Re: OOC II

#204 Post by Zhym »

dmw71 wrote:
Rusty Tincanne wrote:Players rolling allows a player to narrate their successes and failures themselves, instead of always relying on the GM to tell the story.
This, I’ll admit, is something I’m hoping to prevent.

When a player knows the outcome of their actions, it influences their update. I would much rather read the detailed intentions of what a character wants to do than a simple “he swings and misses” when the roll is low.

There are other advantages I can think of as well.

For one, I don’t think the outcome should be known to the player. Say a fighter encounters a band of orcs, all of them wearing leather armor. With their first attack, the player rolls a 12 which hits and kills the first orc. They roll a second 12 with their second attack against a different orc… a hit, right?

What if it misses? What if the same roll result has a different outcome against just this one orc? The player is automatically tipped off to the fact that something is up even though all things are seemingly equal in every other regard.
Huh. I see this as a feature, not a bug. I want my update to reflect my roll. I think it makes for (or can make for) richer, more interesting player posts. I like being able to describe my own attack results, and I think it's more fun to narrate your own story than to have it told to you.

Having to wait to see how a roll turned out is an artifact of PbP. At the table (or Skype/Roll20 or other "table simulators"), the DM tells you the result of nearly every roll immediately after you've rolled it. In PbP, you have to wait. The question is whether you should have to wait—is there some dramatic or gameplay benefit to making players wait to find out if an attack hit? Certainly there may be a benefit to making other players wait to see the result of a roll, otherwise they can predicate their actions on the results of supposedly simultaneous events. But if the player cannot change an action once made, I'm not sure there's a benefit to preventing that player from knowing the result of an action as soon as the player has committed to that action.

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Re: OOC II

#205 Post by dmw71 »

Zhym wrote:Huh. I see this as a feature, not a bug. I want my update to reflect my roll. I think it makes for (or can make for) richer, more interesting player posts. I like being able to describe my own attack results, and I think it's more fun to narrate your own story than to have it told to you.
Until you roll a 2. Then it is easy to check out and throw out a simple "he misses" update. That can only happen if you already know the result.
Zhym wrote:In PbP, you have to wait. The question is whether you should have to wait—is there some dramatic or gameplay benefit to making players wait to find out if an attack hit?
I get the issue of timing, and needing to wait for an outcome. Is it necessary? Certainly not. I imagine that is how 99% (if not 100%) of games here are run.

I'm just curious how this alternate style would play.
Zhym wrote:Certainly there may be a benefit to making other players wait to see the result of a roll, otherwise they can predicate their actions on the results of supposedly simultaneous events.
This.
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Re: OOC II

#206 Post by Zhym »

dmw71 wrote:
Zhym wrote:Huh. I see this as a feature, not a bug. I want my update to reflect my roll. I think it makes for (or can make for) richer, more interesting player posts. I like being able to describe my own attack results, and I think it's more fun to narrate your own story than to have it told to you.
Until you roll a 2. Then it is easy to check out and throw out a simple "he misses" update. That can only happen if you already know the result.
Actually, I think I more creatively narrate near-fumbles more than strong hits. "Tippin's sweaty finger slips and he barely avoids firing the arrow into his own foot," that sort of thing. It's easier to narrate something you know doesn't actually have any effect on events. With a hit, you can't really say much if you don't know the result (i.e., "Tippin fires an arrow into the goblin's eye" is a prediction even if the damage roll was 8).
dmw71 wrote:
Zhym wrote:Certainly there may be a benefit to making other players wait to see the result of a roll, otherwise they can predicate their actions on the results of supposedly simultaneous events.
This.
To that I shrug. It's part of PbP. The slow pace makes so many other things that are easy at a table hard that I don't worry much that people can base actions on the result of other people's actions.

Where I have seen it become an issue, though, is in game pacing. I've been guilty of waiting to see what other players will do before posting my own move, either because it's safer, conserves resources, or because I'm not sure what to do next. On the other hand, that sort of waiting helps avoid having three different people cast sleep at the same three goblins. You could even rationalize that as the PCs being able to see what the others are doing and adjusting accordingly. Going back to the tabletop vs. PbP comparison, in a tabletop game it's easy for people to discuss strategy in mid-combat before rolling. It takes longer in PbP, so being able to see what others are doing is some compensation for the fact that strategy discussions and coordination are more cumbersome.

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Re: OOC II

#207 Post by Alethan »

Some of that could be mitigated with the 6 P's guide, Zhym.
Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance

If there are three casters in the group, then the three should make discussions at the start of each day (or immediately after rest periods) to determine who has what spells memorized and when offensive spells will be used.

Personally, I think the large amount of in-combat discussions about who is going to do what detracts from the game. In my younger FtF gaming days, the DM never allowed that during combat. We could plan all we wanted when we were in Turns. But the moment we went to Rounds, discussion was very minimal, if allowed at all. It usually consisted of us calling out short sentences during our combat turn if we wanted to direct the others to take some new action or if they were going to indicate what they wanted to do.

If the three casters all have sleep prepared and they know that Player One is going to use Sleep the first time they fight something with numbers, then the other two know not to use their spell and stick to ranged weapons or cowering in the back of the group or whatever they're going to do.

I get that people want to make their own rolls. It's fun (when they go right)! But there DOES end up being quite a bit of delay when waiting for players to make their actions.

I'm in a game on another forum where the players don't make attack rolls. Or any rolls, for that matter. And at the beginning of combat, players declare their actions for several rounds (as long as they don't die or something unusual doesn't happen) and the DM plays out several rounds at a time. This significantly decreases delay by players.

It's certainly a different sort of game. And it took a while to get used to not making rolls. But... I honestly don't think about it anymore. I didn't even remember it until just now when I was thinking of Dave's experiment and realized it has been tested in a game for about 6 years now and seems to work just fine.

So... to make a long post short, I'm still up for it in a different game, Dave, if you ever get that going.

And I'm happy to make my own rolls in this game still.
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Re: OOC II

#208 Post by dmw71 »

Zhym wrote:It's easier to narrate something you know doesn't actually have any effect on events. With a hit, you can't really say much if you don't know the result (i.e., "Tippin fires an arrow into the goblin's eye" is a prediction even if the damage roll was 8).
The focus would need to be more on the actual action taken and not the result. Not knowing whether he will hit or miss, Tipping would still need to decide what to do in a given round of combat -- it is detailing this, the action taken, that I'm thinking could lead to more interesting updates.
Zhym wrote:Where I have seen it become an issue, though, is in game pacing. I've been guilty of waiting to see what other players will do before posting my own move, either because it's safer, conserves resources, or because I'm not sure what to do next. On the other hand, that sort of waiting helps avoid having three different people cast sleep at the same three goblins. You could even rationalize that as the PCs being able to see what the others are doing and adjusting accordingly.
Good points for sure. Without the benefit of knowing the roll, you could still know that another character is casting 'sleep' and elect to not cast a second instance of it... reserving it for if the first spell fails. Likewise, in melee, it's also possible to see that two characters before you are attacking the ogre. Do you want to add a third attack or focus your efforts elsewhere?


Little things, and quite possibly not worth even bothering over. I'm just curious.
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Re: OOC II

#209 Post by dmw71 »

Alethan wrote:I'm in a game on another forum where the players don't make attack rolls. Or any rolls, for that matter. And at the beginning of combat, players declare their actions for several rounds (as long as they don't die or something unusual doesn't happen) and the DM plays out several rounds at a time. This significantly decreases delay by players.
I'm embarrassed to admit that I never even considered the possibility of resolving multiple rounds at the same time. It's kind of redundant for a player to, round-after-round, have to keep posting what the obvious action for their character is.
Alethan wrote:So... to make a long post short, I'm still up for it in a different game, Dave, if you ever get that going.

And I'm happy to make my own rolls in this game still.
I'm on the fence about it. It definitely won't be this game, but there's a strong chance I will at least test it out if/before I start another game to see how I feel about it, and whether it's something I want to actually establish as the rule for the game before it begins, so players know what they're getting into.
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Re: OOC II

#210 Post by Zhym »

Alethan, what system is your game on the other forum in? And what kind of a game is it? Dungeon crawl? Sandbox? Something else?

A game in which the DM makes all rolls and runs multiple rounds of combat at once would emphasize player decisions instead of rolls (duh). But that seems like a poor fit for a basic D&D dungeon crawl, where most decisions boil down to tactical combat decisions, which door to open, and whether to leave when injured. Having the DM make all rolls and do multiple rounds of combat at once sounds a little like watching the game instead of playing it. It'd really suck in a single-track railroad game (I'm looking at you, Dragonlance). But I could see it working in a different game that isn't as combat-focused.

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Re: OOC II

#211 Post by Zhym »

dmw71 wrote:The focus would need to be more on the actual action taken and not the result. Not knowing whether he will hit or miss, Tipping would still need to decide what to do in a given round of combat -- it is detailing this, the action taken, that I'm thinking could lead to more interesting updates.
I don't find that terribly fertile ground for interesting updates. There's only so much that can be going through a character's mind during combat aside from "kill the thing" and "don't get killed by the thing." That's especially true in a game system that abstracts the actual mechanics of combat, as D&D does. I mean, combat isn't exactly a time for deep introspection about philosophy or the PC's past. That comes in the interstitial scenes.

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Re: OOC II

#212 Post by Alethan »

Zhym wrote:Alethan, what system is your game on the other forum in? And what kind of a game is it? Dungeon crawl? Sandbox? Something else?

A game in which the DM makes all rolls and runs multiple rounds of combat at once would emphasize player decisions instead of rolls (duh). But that seems like a poor fit for a basic D&D dungeon crawl, where most decisions boil down to tactical combat decisions, which door to open, and whether to leave when injured. Having the DM make all rolls and do multiple rounds of combat at once sounds a little like watching the game instead of playing it. It'd really suck in a single-track railroad game (I'm looking at you, Dragonlance). But I could see it working in a different game that isn't as combat-focused.
It's using Delving Deeper rules, which are a re-write of the original Dungeons and Dragons rules and I think they pull some Chainmail in, as well.

http://forum.immersiveink.com/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=113

The game is called the Hinterlands.

http://forum.immersiveink.com/viewforum.php?f=4

It originally started on the ODD74 forum, but Ways of the Earth moved it to his own Immersive Ink website a few years ago and ported all of the old threads. So I think the oldest threads have the proper dates, but the poster is all WOTE because he ported them.

It is a sandbox design, but focuses on a specific area he has somewhat planned out.
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Re: OOC II

#214 Post by Zhym »

Zhym wrote:"Yikes!" exclaims Tippin as he stabs at the fire beetle with his short sword. "How'd I end up in front?"
That? Right there? Famous last words. :D

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Re: OOC II

#215 Post by Zhym »

SEE? DID I TELL YOU?

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Re: OOC II

#216 Post by dmw71 »

:lol:

Sorry, man! It's funny, but it's not funny.
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Re: OOC II

#217 Post by Zhym »

Yeah, I liked Tippin. We basically screwed up by splitting the marching order.

Oh well. PC death is the roller's way of telling you to pay more attention to work (or school).

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Re: OOC II

#218 Post by AleBelly »

Bummer about Tippin and Hastin.
Bluehorse wrote:Mila

Doesn't argue Canun's logic... but if it comes down to her, AdaRue, and the cleric, she will likely push Canun to the beetles and beat it back to town while the bugs chew on his righteous blubbery ass.
Me: :lol:

Canun: :x :(

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Re: OOC II

#219 Post by AleBelly »

dmw71 wrote:Round 3
The beetles continue their quick, ferocious behavior. The near dead beetle snaps its mandibles down on Junius and manage to strike an artery! The dwarf stifles a scream, but the final moments of his life are spent in excruciating pain as he bleeds out.
Damn, Dave...can't even give Junius a quick painless death! :lol:

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Re: OOC II

#220 Post by dmw71 »

AleBelly wrote:
dmw71 wrote:Round 3
The beetles continue their quick, ferocious behavior. The near dead beetle snaps its mandibles down on Junius and manage to strike an artery! The dwarf stifles a scream, but the final moments of his life are spent in excruciating pain as he bleeds out.
Damn, Dave...can't even give Junius a quick painless death! :lol:
It was kind of quick. At least I didn't have the beetle latch onto his arm or leg and begin dragging off his screaming body.

These things are proving to be a much tougher challenge than expected. Poor Junius. He hit his twice, but the damn thing had 9 hit points!
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