In response to the Update from the Crypt of Luan Phien, Poe asked me:
Out of curiosity, do you rely solely on the players expertise when developing maps or do you use some form of skill checks to indicate a character expertise in determining what is going on with an unusual map situation like this one?
In the case of that particular map, it was primarily player expertise that crunched out the workings of the crypt. But Poe’s question got me thinking about the wider question of how GMs make rulings while running a roleplaying game.
First, I prefer to use systems which offer broad mechanical support for GM rulings. Some people prefer pure GM fiat, but I like having a mechanical base to make rulings from because:
- It allows me to make a ruling of uncertainty. (Instead of saying “that definitely happens” or “that definitely doesn’t happen”, I can say “that sounds likely, let’s see if it happens”.)
- It allows for varying character capacity to have a meaningful impact on events.
- It can provide guidance when I’m not certain how to rule.
- The mechanical outcome is an improv opportunity, often spurring me to create things which I would not have created otherwise.
- It provides a consistency to similar rulings over time.
And so forth. In general, badly designed rules act as unreasonable straitjackets. Good rules, on the other hand, enable new forms of play and expand the scope of the game.
With all that being said, my general approach to making rulings as a GM basically looks like this:
- Passive observation of the world is automatically triggered.
- Player expertise activates character expertise.
- Player expertise can trump character expertise.
PASSIVE OBSERVATION IS AUTOMATICALLY TRIGGERED
Passive observation may include stuff that’s obvious to everybody (like walking into a room with a giant ball of flame hovering in the middle of it), but it might also include reactive mechanics for determining whether or not characters notice something that isn’t automatically apparent. In OD&D this would include surprise tests. In 3rd Edition, this would include Listen, Spot, and Knowledge checks (although these skills can also be used in non-reactive ways.)
(Why am I including Knowledge skills here? Imagine that the characters walk into a room with a large heraldic shield painted on the wall. Do the characters recognize that as the archaic heraldry of King Negut III of Yrkathia? If they do, the players shouldn’t have to ask if they recognize it — they just recognize it.)
But now we get to the real heart of the matter. This is where a player says, “I want to do X.” And you need to make a ruling about how to resolve the outcome of X.
PLAYER EXPERTISE ACTIVATES CHARACTER EXPERTISE
What I mean by this is that the characters don’t play themselves. With the exception of purely passive observation of the game world, players have to call for an action which requires a skill check in order for the skill to be activated.
If we consider a simple example, like:
Player: I check the chest for traps.
GM: Make a Search check.
This may seem self-evident to most of us. On the other hand, I have seen games where GMs will respond to “I open the chest” by calling for the Search check. You may have also heard players say things like, “My character is a 12th level rogue. She would have known better than to open a chest without checking it for traps first!”
I can see the potential legitimacy of the philosophical question being raised. Regardless of which approach we take, there is a point at which the player’s control of the character seems to stop. Consider that simple Search check again: The player decides to check the chest for traps, but then we’re allowing the mechanics to determine how, based on the character’s expertise, that search happens. But could we not, with equal validity, say that when the player decides to open the chest, we should allow the mechanics to determine how, based on the character’s expertise, that happens?
In general, however, I would point out that an integral part of roleplaying is, in fact, playing your role — i.e., making choices as if you were your character. When you turn meaningful choices over to the game mechanics instead of making them yourself, I would argue that you are no longer roleplaying.
Of course, on the other end of the spectrum you have a variety of pixel-bitching. Here you’re never allowed to turn the resolution of an action over to your character and searching the chest becomes a litany of detail:
Player: I check the chest for traps.
GM: How do you do that?
Player: I check under the chest for a pressure plate.
GM: How do you do that?
Player: I run my fingers around the perimeter, looking for any edges. Then I’ll pour some water around to see if it sinks into any sort of depression. Then I’ll very carefully lift one corner of the chest just high enough that I can slide a piece of parchment under there and see if it strikes any sort of spring-loaded trigger that’s rising with the chest.
(Or, if you’re playing with GM bastardy: “I check under the chest for a pressure plate.” “You lift the chest to look, triggering the pressure plate!”)
There is certainly some art in figuring out where the “sweet spot” is for activating the character’s expertise. But 99 times out of 100 it’s going to be fairly self-evident. When in doubt, look for the meaningful choice. Or, rather, never assume that a character is doing anything which requires a meaningful choice unless the player makes that choice.
PLAYER EXPERTISE CAN TRUMP CHARACTER EXPERTISE
On the other hand, you also don’t want to negate meaningful choices by insisting that certain actions must be handed off to the character’s expertise. That’s why I say that player expertise can trump character expertise.
Sticking with our chest-searching motif, consider a scenario in which there is a hidden compartment in a chest which can be accessed by lifting out the bottom of the chest. We’ve determined that the hidden compartment requires a DC 17 Search check to discover. The player says:
- “I search the chest.”
- “I check the bottom of the chest for hidden compartments.”
- “I take my axe and smash open the bottom of the chest.”
- “I check the chest for traps before opening it.”
- “I check the lid of the chest for hidden compartments”.
The first example is vanilla. You’ve handed the resolution over to the mechanic and you get a flat Search check against the DC of the hidden compartment. A success could generate a number of different responses (ranging from “yup, there’s a hidden compartment” to “you notice that the exterior of the chest is several inches deeper than the interior of the chest”).
The second example is more specific (and happens to coincide with what’s actually there to be found). I would tend to grant something like a +2 circumstance bonus to the Search. If there were other things to be found in the chest, I might also allow the Search check to find them (but since you’re specifically looking for something else, such a check would have a penalty applied to it).
In the third example you’ve taken an action which would automatically find the compartment. No Search check is required. (Player skill has completely trumped the mechanic.)
The fourth and fifth examples demonstrate that trumping character skill isn’t always a good thing. In the fourth example, you have no chance of finding things hidden inside the chest if you’re limiting your search to the exterior. Similarly, in the fifth example you’re specifically looking in the wrong place.
As another example, consider a hallway with a pit trap in it. The pit trap has a 50% chance of activating whenever someone steps on it and it requires a DC 17 Search check to find it. The player says:
- “I search the hall for traps.”
- “I proceed carefully down the hall, tapping ahead of me with my 10-foot pole.”
- “I summon a celestial badger and have it walk down the hall in front of me.”
- “I pour a waterskin onto the floor to see if it runs down any seams or gaps.”
The first example is, once again, a straight forward Search check. The second and third examples bypass the Search mechanics, and instead grant a 50% chance that the pole or summoned creature will trigger the trap.
The fourth example, on the other hand, could be handled in several ways. One could easily rule that such a technique would automatically find the trap (particularly if the player specifies exactly which section of corridor they’re checking). I’d probably grant a hefty bonus (say, +10) to the Search check for using an appropriate technique.
In many ways, this comes back to meaningful choice: We assumed before that characters don’t take actions which require meaningful choice unless the player makes that choice. Here we assume that any choice the player makes is probably meaningful and take the specificity of those choices into account when we make our ruling.
THE CRYPT OF LUAN PHIEN – AN EXAMPLE FROM REAL PLAY
Let’s consider the specific example of mapping the Crypt of Luan Phien, a segmented dungeon in which each section periodically rotates independently in order to change the layout of the dungeon.
At the high end, we can imagine a player saying, “I make a Knowledge (dungeoneering) check to make a map of the dungeon.” To which my answer would be, “No.” (They’ve failed to achieve the necessary specificity to activate their character’s expertise.)
In actual play, the mapping of the dungeon was solved almost entirely through player expertise. They simply observed which rooms connected to each other and slowly built up an understanding of the possible configurations of the dungeon. (The sole exception would be late in the process, when they started checking corridors to find the wall seams which would confirm their understanding of where the breaks between segments lay.)
But I can think of several ways that they could have activated their character’s skills:
- Check the curvature of the stone walls that periodically blocked various hallways in order to determine (at least roughly) the circular diameter of each section.
- Try to determine the direction in which each section was rotating.
- Try to figure out how much stone would slide past an open corridor between sections in order to determine how far each section was rotating.
- Use a compass or spell to determine orientation before and after a shift.
And so forth.
THE ART OF RULINGS
Part 2: Intention and Method
Part 3: The Fiction-Mechanics Cycle
Part 4: Default to Yes
Part 5: Skill and Difficulty
Part 6: Fictional Cleromancy
Part 7: Vectors
Part 8: Let It Ride
Part 9: Narrating Outcomes
Part 10: Fortune Positioning
Part 11: Narrative vs. Action Resolution
Part 12: Hidden vs. Open Difficulty Numbers
Part 13: Hidden vs. Open Stakes
Part 14: Group Actions
Addendum: Let It Ride on the Death Star
Rulings in Practice: Gathering Information
Rulings in Practice: Perception-Type Tests
Rulings in Practice: Social Skills
Rulings in Practice: Sanity Checks
Rulings in Practice: Traps
FURTHER READING
The Art of Pacing
The Art of the Key
Gamemastery 101
As a player I hate accidentally making my character better than they should be. For example, during a recent Exalted game I deduced something that, on reflection, my character probably wouldn’t have, but was unable to retract it having said it in character. Obviously intelligence is a difficult stat to roleplay if its not the extremes: “grah, ogre smash” or “elementary my dear water elemental”, as deciding what your character should or shouldn’t know is difficult. Its also something that the GM should usually avoid policing, unless the brainless imbecile ogre keeps explaining the villains plan to the other players.
In regards to the “rulings” topic: Our group has always been a fan of the GM fiat. In situations where we’d be forced to look up rules that are less than simple, we get a group consensus and handwave it with that. We make a physical (non-mental) note to look up the rule later for future reference. Typically, this ruling is looked up by the player involved as soon as they have the opportunity (during the next player’s turn, if during combat, for example). Because we have a large group of players (we’ve had 11 people before), expediting unclear rules like this is essential or we’d never get anything done.
In regards to characters, taking actions, and being descriptive: We usually stick very solidly to the rules but allow the player to be as descriptive as he wants. What I mean by this is, if he says he searches the chest for hidden compartments, but doesn’t specify that he also looks for traps, according to the rules, all he is doing is making a search check. According to the rules, success on the search check indicates that he finds both. Thus, we go with the rules approach, rather than the poor wording used by the player and the GM says something like “while looking for compartments, you find one and happen to notice a trip wire in the process”.
We’re also pretty strict when it comes to being explicit with your actions and inactions. We handle this in a way that is similar to when you can add action dice to a roll which is “only before the GM reveals the result of that roll”. If the player doesn’t explicitly specify that his character searches the chest for traps, he can change his actions all he wants until the trap goes off in his face. If he didn’t say it before then, there’s no going back and there are no exceptions to this rule. Being so strict about this rule has lead to players doing a better job of thinking things through and making better decisions overall. Occasionally, if the situation is dire enough, we’ll occasionally give hints that the player may want to consider his options one final time before committing to a specific course of action. When we do this, we give a simple “Is that your final answer?”
-Brad
I handle “Intelligence” as “the ability to see patterns.” The argument there is that very intelligent people lack common sense, and some very common sense wise people are not able to do math quickly or well, put together puzzles quickly, or deduce riddles and such. Moving Intelligence into a task-based approach frees up the role playing and reduces passing judgment on player capacity.
pixel-bitching?
This is how we play, ideally. With the check (FT) for backup. Is there something wrong with this detailed approach?
The corollary is that it’s not just random crap. It’s vague crap that gets more specific as you take a closer look. Chests themselves are markers of the specific crap – being able to detail all of these things is the point of my interesting treasure/tricks, empty rooms, and trap design documents.
This is something I’ve given a lot of thought to, and if the game isn’t in the tactical combat, I’ve sort of come to the conclusion that it is in the very pixel-bitching you deride.
Thanks for your analysis, btw. Like I said it’s something I thought a lot about and your perspective is eloquent and something I would recommend for most games.
I think there is a point at which everyone will say, “Enough is enough.”
“I put the key into the lock.”
“With how much force?”
“As gently as possible. Then I turn it.”
“Which way?”
“Left.”
“It doesn’t turn left.”
“Okay, then I try to the right.”
“How far?”
“Let’s start with 10 degrees.”
“Nothing happens.”
“Let’s try another 10 degrees.”
“You feel some slight resistance.”
“I’ll just a little more force, but just enough to keep the key turning.”
“How far?”
“Another 10 degrees.”
“Okay, you begin to feel the tumblers turning.”
“Okay, I turn it the rest of the way to a full 90 degrees.”
“You hear the lock click open.”
“I leave the key in the lock and begin examining…”
Is the question of, “How far do you turn the key?” meaningful or interesting to you? If so, then you shouldn’t skip past it. If not, then being required to dwell on that question every single time you want to use a key is probably not going to result in entertaining play.
(I suspect we’re actually closer in our agreement on this issue than you think.)
My approach has largely evolved out of trial and error, but as I put it to analysis I suspect one of the reasons it works is because it tends to naturally find the right “sweet spot” not only for everybody involved, but for the particular situation under consideration. As a GM I set a relatively high threshold of “that’s enough specificity for me to make a ruling”, but if the players want more specificity than that — if there are more detailed choices that they feel are meaningful to the situation or to their character — then they are free to make those choices. (At which point I will assume they’re meaningful and take those details into account.)
So for a typical chest they might just say, “I search it for traps.” And I say, “Okay, that’s enough specificity. Let’s roll it.” But later on there might be another chest that they’re feeling particularly paranoid about, and so they say, “I’m going to start by very carefully checking the floor around and under the chest for pressure plates.” or “I’m doing a thorough visual inspection of the chest before I ever touch it.”
The one place where the system falls down is when I, as the GM, want more specificity than the players want to give. This is actually a problem I’ve lightly run into while running OD&D: Because there are frequently no mechanics for me to turn particular actions over to, I’m forced to ask for more details in order to make any kind of informed ruling.
There are many people who would say that’s a feature. (Details are good! You’re making them really think about the game world!) But when it forces players to focus on choices that they don’t find interesting or meaningful (like whether to check the left side or the right side of the chest first), the experience is just frustrating.
Though it is true that when there is any doubt about whether it is safe or not, it is always amusing to ask “Which hand do you touch it with?”
I think the most important issue is the one you mention above in the comment section: the meaningful decision and the focus of the game at hand.
For one group of players searching the chest or traps in a number of ways is the fun and the focus of the game, and in those cases, bypassing the entire thing with a Search check or a simple dice roll makes the game “less fun” for them, because it is a key element of that gaming style.
For others, the chest and the traps might as well be just an accesory, and therefore they decide to fasten the process with a dice roll. Or apply a mix bag like this great article shows. But the important decision is whether or not the task at hand is an important part of the game. Is convincing the dragon to let you pass an important moment of the session? Then a straight Diplomacy roll isn’t appropiate, the players are supposed to roleplay that and then apply a bonus to the roll.
As for myself, I usually apply the rules as the article, the player must do something in order to activate the skill, if he/she has a very good idea, then I go from a bonus to an automatic success. HARP has a very handful set of rules to solve all those things, for example there’s a skill for Knowing about traps, so a succesful roll adds a bonus to the Disarming Trap skill.
“5. It provides a consistency to similar rulings over time.”
I ran into an interesting problem with this when running Traveller.
– Me: You need 9+ to succeed at that.
– Player: But last time it was only 7+!
The problem is that in the instance the task was harder for reasons the character was unaware of. I realised that telling the players what the success threshold is had some values and drawbacks.
It gives them an idea of odds, so they can decide to attempt it or not.
It allows them to make the roll and assess the outcome, leaving the GM free to multitask a bit.
But its also dissociative, the character doesn’t actually know what the real odds are.
In the example from play, a theoretical player wants to create a map using their dungeoneering skill and as the GM, you would say no due to their lack of specificity.
Other than the examples of player knowledge being acceptable, what would you need to allow the player to make a map? Would mentioning using the compass and other associated tools be enough for a player who doesn’t know much of dungeoneering?
[…] d’actions suivantes puisse être proprement déclaré. (Les seules exceptions sont quand le MJ sent qu’ils n’ont pas assez d’information pour résoudre l’actio… ou si l’action déclarée semble se baser sur une mauvaise compréhension de la situation. […]
[…] l’Art de trancher j’ai écrit « En cas de doute, cherchez un choix significatif ». Et le […]
First, thanks a lot for this series. I’ve really learned a lot. I’m posting my question under this introductory post as it’s transversal… It covers multiple topics detailed in the various essays of the series, so better put it here.
So here’s it. When it comes to player expertise trumping character expertise, it should be noted that depending on the action, players are more or less likely to have expertise in the first place… And the variance in expertise between players will not always be the same. This creates a problem with social interaction: it’s a challenge where players have largely varying degrees of expertise. Unlike, say, casting a spell, or even swinging a sword in an appropriate way; virtually no one knows how to do that, so mechanics tend to take precedence in combat, and outcomes are mostly determined by character’s expertise (e.g. skill with a sword). By contrast, you’re morel likely to let a good argument trump a bad Diplomacy roll.
Now imagine an extreme example. At your gaming table, there’s an introvert player who’s not very good with words and making arguments, and this player plays the charismatic paladin who acts as the party’s “natural” leader. Then you’ve the sullen, gruff dwarf played by a lawyer who’s also a casual actor. In any social challenge, the latter player will often have a hard time refraining himself from making good points and framing them in a convincing way. Meanwhile, the former player is never going to shine in that regard (while his character should). If you allow player expertise to trump character’s expertise, then the dwarf will be as if not more efficient than the paladin in social interactions. This creates a dissociation as skill disparity between players replaces skill disparity between characters.
So, how do you deal with that? Possible solutions I’ve thought about:
1. Players brainstorm ideas, then the party’s spokesman states them as best as he can. In our example, the lawyer would come up with the clever points and phrasings, and the introvert would get to rephrase them the way he likes. His character makes the skill check.
2. Treating the social challenge as a group action. Every character gets to make a point if they so wish, and they’re either piggybacking on the leader (the high-charisma paladin, here) and making their own piggybacked checks (the dwarf would then get a bonus due to his player making good points in the debate), or influencing the leader’s check (in which case the dwarf’s good points give a bonus to the paladin’s check).
3. Resorting to Fortune at the Beginning, provided players accept to be constrained in their arguments by how well the check went. That is, whatever technique you used for the check (piggybacking, assistance to the leader…) determines the course of the social challenge. If the roll is bad, the lawyer should refrain himself from making too good points, or finding some way to botch the attempt. It could work well but not all players are always willing to behave “sub-optimally” for the sake of role-play.
Again, the root of this problem is the discrepancy between player’s expertise and character’s expertise in social interaction. In some cases you’ll have people wanting to roll Persuasion with as much role-play as if they were casting a mind-altering spell (“I want to convince the Duke. Can I roll Persuasion? Great, that’s a 19, +10 from my modifiers. I surely went a long way toward changing his mind”). Such behavior is pervasive in combat and not that much of a problem, but in social challenges such mechanics-only gameplay is vastly more immersion-breaking.
In other cases, players are much better negotiators than their characters and this results in the situation above.
To Magean’s point above: personally, I most enjoy something like #1, maybe with shades of #2. I once explained it to a fellow player as a “hammerspace of ideas”, where ideas or brainstorms that don’t make sense for a particular character are instead attributed vaguely to the party as a whole. It also works for other “mental” skills — if we’re in a dungeon featuring a math puzzle, and my character is a hermit ranger who was literally raised by wolves and has an INT of 10, she probably won’t be much help, even if I the player will. And if the guy who’s playing the genius wizard happens not to find puzzles fun and isn’t engaged by that, then, well…maybe in-universe the wizard figured it out, even if it was actually the ranger’s player who did.
And that goes double for party strategizing — I don’t like the idea of shutting yourself out of contributing to the team decision-making process because your character “wouldn’t be smart enough” to think of a particular thing. Maybe in-universe the party had one of those situations like on “House” where someone makes some unrelated comment and House goes “I just solved the case!” because they used a certain word and it led him to a flash of insight. That is, even if Rowan the Ranger doesn’t have the intellectual ability to come up with the plan I just did, maybe she said something that gave Walter the Wizard or Belinda the Battlemaster the inspiration to follow through and come up with it.
(That said, when it’s not a party thing, the situation is different. If Rowan the Ranger finds herself talking to some NPC all on her own, with nobody else there, then I agree that she should stand or fall on her own diplomacy rolls and my own choices about what to say. And in the “rules vs. rulings” post that this post links to, Justin talks about a player “playing his 6 INT to the hilt” and I totally support that in individual decision-making.)
Additionally, I’ve been thinking about “player expertise trumping character expertise” ever since I read this post a few years ago, and I’ve come to find it more useful to think about player *choice* trumping character expertise. The player who smashes through the chest with the axe succeeds because they chose to take that action, which may or may not represent something that we can call “expertise”. (And it might backfire on them in some other situation, like if the secret compartment contains potion bottles and those get smashed too.) Similarly, my GM might decide that if I choose to have Rowan the Ranger appeal to the duke’s empathy for the poor when she pleads with him, or whatever, then that’s the kind of argument that that NPC would take seriously even if I didn’t do so with great skill. (I could be making that choice because what we’ve heard about the duke’s personality in previous sessions makes me think that he’d be receptive to that; or, on the flip side, I could be making that choice because I’ve decided that empathy for the poor is what *Rowan* cares about the most, and the fact that the baron accepts it is just a lucky coincidence.) And a failed roll with a good argument might mean that rather than dismissing it out of hand, the NPC says something more like “I see your point, but you’ll have to do something for me first. Prove that you’re serious about this by doing X, Y and Z, then I’ll consider helping you.” (Where a success might have meant he was convinced immediately, or that he asked for something less onerous in return.)
The other thing I find myself doing is gravitating toward playing characters who are generally likely to do things that mesh with my own playstyle and what I personally find fun. I’ve been the introvert playing the paladin before, because I used to think that playing characters totally unlike myself was somehow better or more pure, or more escapist. But it ended up kind of feeling like a chore, so these days I’m happy to leave playing the super charismatic face characters to other people who have more fun and success with that. Right now I’m playing a cleric who sees it as part of her “job” to pay attention to religious and arcane lore on the party’s travels (among other things) — which is something I’d enjoy doing anyway. And when I played a ranger, I leaned way into being an explorer because I enjoyed doing that, and so on.
I’d be super interested to hear other people’s thoughts (and it might be an interesting future post topic for Justin?).
There is an easy approach to this.
Ask your player:
“What do you do and describe to us how?”
Instead of just telling what to do, the player is encouraged to tell HOW he/she is doing it. And the “describe to us” part activates him/her to create more detailed story, because “us” is the audience.