The PC is stunned and cannot take any action, until the event timer expires and he may resume autoattacking as normal.
I think it’s bad game design to tell a player, “You can’t play.” That’s common sense, I would hope, but I’ve seen a variety of effects of the stunned-state variety that render the character powerless to take action. World of Warcraft has a stunned condition like this, and last I played it, Lord of the Rings Online had it, too.
The goal of being able to stun a character is obvious. It’s a good combat tactic that suggests the character is overwhelmed, surprised, crippled, or what have you to such a degree that, for a short time, he has a reduced capacity to perform. It can be combat-related (as it is in most cases) or it can be some other special effect, such as being gripped by fear or ravaged by some exotic toxin. The situations they’re aiming to simulate — those are cool. But the non-system of “just sit there” is just short of criminal.
That’s the key: a reduced capacity to perform. Give the player a penalty to actions. Reduce his available options. Whatever you do, for the love of God, let the player continue to participate.
In most cases, the first time I encounter a stun that renders me completely unable to take any actions, I think hardware malfunction if it’s a video game. Thereafter, when I understand that it’s a game feature (in someone’s mind, I suppose), it just becomes frustrating. In a tabletop game that dictates I can take no action, I check Facebook on my iPhone.
I’m willing to suspend active participation during, say, exposition, or during a dramatic moment when my character is bound and captured and powerlessness is part of the tone being set. But a one-and-a-half second “nothing works! LOL” situation while leetle stars doodle-do around my head? Blow it out your ear. Or worse, at the tabletop, when multiple real-time minutes might elapse between my actions and my only participation is to sit there checking iPhone Facebook? That’s not game design, that’s do anything except play the game design. What possible motivation could exist for telling me I can’t play when I’m already playing?
I think the line that’s getting some people upset actually has nothing to do with gaming. He mentioned checking Facebook on his iPhone because everybody who has an iPhone must bring it up as often as possible. :) I think Apple rewards them with iTunes credits or something. Seriously, I don’t have a problem with sitting out for a short while. I don’t think it’s a broken game. Sitting out for a whole combat is a big problem. In a recent Scion game we faced an opponent that made one guy flee for the entire combat. That sucked. I understand the idea of having different conditions that reflect different effects, but sometimes you get knocked loopy for a few moments. It’s happened to me in real life. In fact it was worse because I fell down, too.
LOTRO still has little dazing effects, yeah. They’re so brief that they don’t really bother me (the longer effects can be applied to monsters to keep them out of the fight, and that’s fine). I mean, they’re frustrating, but a little frustration is meant to be the point — have that interrupt power ready to keep the monster from frustrating you for three seconds. In D&D, though, stunning effects are pretty bad. Stunned for one turn is one thing (which is to say, merely terrible), but a stun effect that save ends? If you’ll pardon me, fuck that noise. Dazing is much more interesting, mechanically, in that it restricts options but doesn’t utterly deny a player of their very title. At our table, we mostly avoid stun effects by avoiding monsters that cause them, though I’ll admit that the occasional solo monster (e.g., dragons and their fear) have gotten through, to see how they play out. But, in general, hell yes. If I’m playing, I should at least be able to play. At the very least.
My preference here would be to inflict Decision Time on the player when the character is stunned. Sure, you can do whatever you want, but you have a chance of making the situation worse. You might take more raw damagey damage; you might inadvertantly harm something or something that’s important to you while trying to accomplish your goal while gibbering. You could sit there and recover, which will be boring but safe, or you could take a risk. The risky move almost always leads to a more interesting story anyway.
I’d have to disagree. Stunned conditions in videogames are annoying – you just sit there futilely mashing buttons, not even paying attention to anything that’s going on.But in D&D, many of the most dramatic moments I’ve witnessed are when several characters are incapacitated, and the fight hangs on the actions of one or two PCs. Everyone watches with baited breath to see if they’ll pull through and save their comrades, if they’ll manage to heal everyone in time, or if this is the end for some or all of the party. When PCs are dying, rolling that death save every round is plenty of action for them. When they’re trying to save vs stun, again, it’s a d20 roll that huge amount hangs on – far more dramatic than the d20 roll they’d normally be making to attack.Sure, it can be overused. If weak enemies that the party is accustomed to mowing down with ease start stunning every other round, it’s an annoyance that gets in the way of your character’s chance to be awesome and smash some faces. But I don’t see stun on that kind of monster too often. It usually only comes up in the big dramatic fights.And I’m sorry, but this line sets me off a little:”In a tabletop game that dictates I can take no action, I check Facebook on my iPhone.”So you don’t care at all about the outcome of the fight? Your character’s life is on the line, and you’re not even engaged enough to follow the events that will determine whether or not you have to roll up a new PC. If one of my players did that, I would politely inform them that if they care that little for the game, I’d rather they leave and open up the spot for someone who won’t act like they’re wasting four hours of their life every weekend.
To be clear, I’m not saying that games shouldn’t have rules for incapacitation. I don’t believe that at all. Incapacitation is a consequence for choosing a particular course of action.I think D&D is a good example of doing things right, actually. While it does have rules for the exact sort of situation I’m decrying here, it has a wide variety of other negative status effects (dazing, to use Will’s example) that are perfectly evocative of various conditions. And as Will proposes, I’d just not use the ones that don’t behave in a manner that keeps the players engaged.That’s the point of it all. If a rule deliberately pushes me out of participation mode, it’s a bad rule unless my nonparticipation has an effect itself, which “You can’t do anything” doesn’t. If you don’t want my attention wandering, don’t tell me “Just sit there quietly and maybe you can do something soon… but I also demand that you care about what’s going on.”
@Jim, I’m in agreement that systemizing some risk to simulate a character’s reduced ability to perform is a good idea. I get to keep playing, and I may create a new dramatic situation that, while it might be bad for the characters, is at least compelling for the players.
“If you don’t want my attention wandering, don’t tell me “Just sit there quietly and maybe you can do something soon… but I also demand that you care about what’s going on.”"Do you also not watch movies? I know plenty of people who watch D&D games with no intention of playing them. Obviously it’s more fun (for most of us to play), but I find the idea that if you can’t be influencing the action every second of every scene, the game is totally irrelevant to you, really disturbing. When another character spends an hour of real-life time shopping for a sword in town, that’s boring. When another character is fighting for your character’s life and the lives of the party, that’s not boring. The entire game shouldn’t be you watching someone else act, but if you can’t even sit out a couple of rounds… I don’t even know how to finish that sentence. A game is an interactive story about your character and other characters. Just because your character isn’t the central one in a scene, and happens to be bleeding on the floor, doesn’t mean that the scene isn’t exciting and the story isn’t important.
Nowhere am I saying that any single player has to be the focal point of the action all the time. I’m saying that a player should be able to participate, and that a rule that takes away the player’s ability to make a meaningful choice is a bad rule. Also, a game is not a story. A game is a series of choices with interesting possible outcomes. You can tell a story with a game, or you can speak of a game’s events as a story, but the opportunity to choose must exist for the game to be a game.As well, players who are there to passively observe and not play aren’t players. they’re observers. If they’re not choosing, they’re not participating, and if they’re not participating, they’re not playing. Likewise, I’m not saying that’s a bad thing — if their enjoyment derives from observing, then good for them, and it sounds like they’ll be happy — but you can’t be a player if you’re not deciding and participating. And that’s why a rule that makes a player not participate is bad. It’s making him not choose, and thus not play.I do watch movies, sure, but watching a movie and playing a game are certainly not the same thing, for the reasons above.
You’re not saying a single player has to be the focal point, but I’m getting a feeling that you think /you/ have to be the focal point. Because otherwise you wouldn’t be completely and utterly disengaged by a couple rounds of inaction. You would care about what the other characters were doing, especially since it affects your character.
Justin, I see where you’re coming from. I really do, but I gotta side with Swordgleam on this one. Just because you’re not ‘at bat’ doesn’t mean you should ignore the rest of the game. The character may not be able to ‘do anything’ for a round or two, but you as the player can. Plan your next move, choice of powers, cheer on a teammate, drop a tactical hint (if your DM allows such input), etc, etc. And you need to be aware of the immediate situation to do those things.I do like the idea of limited actions during a Stun effect. I might either restrict the character to only free actions or allow them only one action each round and impose a stiff penalty (perhaps -5) to perform that action with a chance to really screw up. Can you say critical fumble anyone? BTW, when you get on your iphone (presumably at the table), not only are you disengaging from the game, but you are also a potential distraction to others. I’m not wagging a finger at you or anything, I’m just saying.
Unfortunately, D&D is not a spectator sport. Watching the endless deliberation and square counting is duller than ditchwater.
I like how Earthdawn handles stunning effects. Essentially, the first round you are stunned, you can only take defensive actions (going total defense, using the Avoid Blow talent and so on) and your Movement drops to 1. For the rest of the time you are Stunned, you can act normally but are considered Harried (-2 to Action Tests and -2 to Physical and Spell Defense). This is, I feel, a good compromise between D&D’s “screw you for a few rounds” stunning and making stunning completely ineffective. In D&D 4e, stunning is amazingly effective…too effective IMHO….against a solo monster.
I think it’s every GM’s hope that a player whose character is incapacitated (almost typed “a player who is incapacitated,” but my experience with those guys is that they still manage to play, sorta) will continue to be engrossed in the events because of group camaraderie and the thrilling events going on. I think it’s every player’s hope to be in a game where being unable to do anything doesn’t really make you that unhappy because you like watching what’s going on so much. But if I read Justin right, I believe he’s saying that you cannot mandate enthusiasm, and you cannot get angry at players who fail the “you can’t do anything, so do you still feel like part of the action?” test. I agree with that, even as I agree that it would be optimal that everyone has games so exciting and group chemistry so tight that the question never even comes up. But a lot of little things can affect player attention span, as anyone who plays on a weeknight after work knows. If you’re going to put that to the test with stuns and the like, you have to accept that someone’s not being a bad player if they happen to fail.
(or not necessarily being a bad player, at any rate. Some players are bad, of course.)
Good to see the conversation on both sides of this topic.When a rule specifically forces the player out of the ability to participate effectively in the game, I think it’s unreasonable to call him a bad player for turning to another entertainment in the short term. The game has specifically told him, “don’t play,” and he’s simply responding to that rule as it has affected him — he’s not playing.The player may of may not be affected by whatever else is happening at the table or the other players’ actions, but 1) there’s no guarantee that that’s true and 2) the rule has already marginalized him and told him that his input is not only unnecessary, but forbidden. The rule has negated his ability to participate. The game — which exists to be played — has told him explicitly “don’t play.”This is a flaw with the rule, not the player.The solution here is plain as day, and has been discussed above in the post and in the comments. The best resolution is to allow the player to continue to participate, albeit at a diminished capacity that represents the condition (stun, fear, etc.) that still allows him to be a player instead of an observer.I don’t think this at all suggests that a single player has to be the focal point. Rather, it places all the players on equal grounds as focal points, which is the whole point of playing a game: to allow the interactions of the players with one another and the game environment. A player — a person who has come to the table to play the game — should never be told not to play. Not playing removes from him the ability to make a decision, and a game is by definition a collection of decisions and their outcomes. A player who wants to participate is not a problem player.The converse, to me, is the sign of a game in jeopardy. When the players are simply thralls to the environment, and their actions have less significance than the game environment itself, places the players in a role subservient to the story or environment. This is the origin of the tyrant storyteller and the “killer GM,” who suffers the characters to exist only at his whim and places the integrity of the game environment over the participation of the players.Ethan’s point is notable here. Do you want your players enthralled with your story, their attentions raptly held? Of course you do. It signifies the ultimate relationship between participant and environment. But to achieve that, you have to let the player be a part of the situation, and not a participant only at the discretion of the dice or the designer.
I have to agree with Justin, and I can’t add much to what he and other have already posted.I’d like to point out that rounds of combat in tabletop are actually really long, especially in an advanced combat situation where special effects like stuns are being used. You are managing a lot of different rolls and rules, tables, charts etc. Even when it these things are organized you have other players caught up with decisions to make about actions (save party member, or kill big bad, or heal myself). Now if you are stunned for more than one of these rounds, you are starting to talk about time in tens of minutes. And what if this is your big bad boss? How will a player feel if he really didn’t participate in the finale of your chronicle?Also, from the standpoint of an MMO, the problem with stuns is not that you get stunned for three seconds so much as every class has a stun and in PVP these stuns get chained together so that you effectively have no control over your character until the character is dead. Also, the stun doesn’t accurately reflect the event occurring, such as a dirty fighting move, or even fear (where you don’t run away from the thing that feared you, but in circle of steps so that they can still hurt you). No one likes to be beaten because an intentional game design is “player can’t do anything while other player does 3 moves on him”.
Here’s another question I have been thinking about for tabletop rpgs.Why is combat highly detailed with rules and systems while the rest of an rpg is rather vague, with the most usually being a single die-roll to find out if somethign works or not?Interestingly, I have a couple players who always make combat heavy characters and skip out on the social skills. Their reasons are this: 1): Usually role-playing makes up most of the social interaction (so they are being kind of meta); 2): liek the reason above, you have only one die roll to say “you did your persuasion” or failed. In combat success is decided over several die-rolls. 3): They also noted that combat can resolve any conflict, it can even be social in the threaten a life sort of way.I understand that this makes them not the best role-player people, but it does bring up the inherant flaws with rpgs. The other side of that is having system for your social that are more-indepth, but then it feels like the role-playing is turned into mini-game. One of the things I did to resolve player issues was to put parameters around the character concepts (i.e. they were all high school kids in a contemporary suburban setting, prompting their imaginatiosn to focus on social cliques instead of special ops). However, this doesn’t solve the issue that described above with combat being a sstem and role-playing/social/non-combat being a simple die-roll. It’s almost like they have two character, the one on the sheet with the combat and the one they speak with. So what are the thoughts about this? Is this an inherent design flaw that rpgs will always carry simply because of the limitations of the medium?
@ Paul: I think a lot of it still has to do with the legacy of roleplaying games as outgrowths of wargames.I particularly like the way Pendragon handles the non-physical side of these system resolutions: It doesn’t touch them. You have no Intelligence or Wisdom stat, you’re as smart or wise or foolish as you choose to be. The character’s actions are shaped by the Passions he’s taken, which I think is a cool way of defining a character in terms of what he’s “like.”
Well, and also combat remains the most reliable way to get everyone in the group to focus at once. Getting the whole group to sit up and take notice when you say “Contessa Alghieri suddenly materializes from the crowd, takes Benedicto’s arm, and says ‘I must speak with you in private at once’” is something reliant on players who have learned to trust that whatever’s going to happen will be interesting to watch. It probably takes a lot of prior experience with GMs and players, be it you or whomever, that have taught them that the roleplaying will be a good payoff. It’s far easier to say “Roll initiative.” That tells everyone “Hey look, you might be about to take an axe to the face. Better pay attention.” And it takes much less time, and less reliance on high-quality fellow players, to learn that combat is going to “count.”
Hmm. . I’ll have to check out Pendragon then. Maybe a part of the issue is the balancing of “points” for combat and non-combat, and by remiving the non-combat, you rebalance how combat-y a starting character can be. Some of the best NWoD games I’ve played/ran have been mortal and people thought knew they could die. It’s also weird that player mindset changes a little, like they think about gettign caught for breaking into a house or something. I’ve actually like playing a character who said he was a psychic/occultist who didn’t have any sort of real authority on anything. He just made it up and tried to tie the events to his theory. I think maybe what I’m getting at is the uncertainty of mortals really adds to the role-playing/fun.Sorry about the tangent, but I think it is sort of related to combat, though not so much the original post.
I’m am so excited about this MMO. I think I’ve been wanting to play a WoD MMO ever sicne I played a telnet/MUSH/MUD back when I was a kid in 1996.I need to temper my excitement with the reality though, since I’ve built the impossible game inside my head. However, reading your design philosophies described in this blog has given me hope that we are gonna get a unique kind of MMO that “feels” like WoD. And I really enjoyed both Vampire video games that came out. They were unique rpg experiences.
@Skyra: In a tabletop environment, a good storyteller would skip to the point at which every character could again participate, unless she sees something to gain from the downtime, such as another playing a ghoul (and thus being able to exercise a unique advantage) or some such.As to MMOs, as much as I’d like to comment, I’m afraid I can’t. I’m worried that my answer would be either misconstrued and you’d feel lied to, or Ned and Val would slit my throat for breaching some aspect of the NDA. Believe me, once I can reveal a few more details as to what we’re doing, I’ll be happy to, but until then, I’ve got to respect the order of things as dictated by my shadowy masters.
You know, I wonder if that has something to do with the passion in the replies here. Would people have been as immediately polarized if I had suggested going out for a smoke (since I don’t smoke, it never occurred to me) or heading to the fridge to grab a soda?
A soda? You asshole.
Justin, would you extend this philosophy to include fixed day/night cycles in MMOs? That is, if a player with a vampire character wants to play during daylight hours, would that be considered an instance the “you can’t play” approach? Would it be better to present alternative play modes, like having them play their ghoul instead? You seem to have put a lot of thought into these kinds of things, and I want to know how you feel about it.