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Wednesday, October 27, 2021

My take on take-backs

This post over at Monsters & Manuals prompted this response:

No Take-Backs?

It itself is a response to this post:

Game-enhancing powers, game-ruining powers, and yet more magic items

In any case, this quote is from Monsters & Manuals:

"Is it ever legitimate for a DM to say to the players: "This power you now have is ruining the game by making everything too easy and I should never have made it possible to have it. Let's say that tomorrow you wake up and it mysteriously no longer works"?"

Yes.

In my games? Of course it is. It's a game. We're playing it to have good times with one another as our paper men do imaginary things to other paper things. Sometimes when we do this, we make decisions over rules and results and powers that have repercussions we don't expect.

Sometimes those are awesome.

Oftentimes, they suck the fun out of something. Or they, retroactively, destroy the canon of the game by making something we've already decided is this way or that not actually valid given this new thing.

In the case of awesome, we keep them. In the case of the others, we talk them out and figure out a better approach that doesn't make the game less fun. Generally we'll let results stand - almost always in my DF game. But we'll go back and revise powers. We'll revise rules when they don't seem to do what we want - like our XP rules or spell learning.

Remember when we changed missile spells to have larger explosion radii and a whole bunch of NPCs got blown up? But then we realized it wasn't really so great. We changed the rules to a different set. We didn't take away the ability but we nerfed it a bit. It needed doing.

Importantly, we do these by consensus whenever possible. Sometimes it's clear to me that it'll screw up the game from my side of the screen, and I'll just go and change it. But if at all possible, I'll do a 'take-back' with the whole group on board. We all want a challenging but fun game. If something we've put in the game makes that less so . . . yeah, we'll change it.

3 comments:

  1. Bossmandango, your linky to "No Take Backs" is missing the final 'l'.

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  2. "Remember when we changed missile spells to have larger explosion radii and a whole bunch of NPCs got blown up?"

    That reminds me, I need to add "radius of Explosive spells double/triples/etc" to my 'Wild Surge" chart... my next campaign will employ Wild Magic, not as an 'always ongoing thing' but roving pockets of Wild Storms and other natural phenomena will cause magic to go awry in semi-unpredictable ways.

    IE, with the right skills they'll be able to feel if magic is being dampened, increased, or if specific Realms (colleges by another name and changed spell listings) are being affected or if it's all magic. And your post has reminded me I haven't done anything specific with missile spells yet, so I should find some unique ways to play with them...


    "Importantly, we do these by consensus whenever possible."

    And I think that is a key to the longevity of your game. Your Players have buy in and it isn't all Fiat From On High.

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    Replies
    1. I'm glad I inspired a weird magic effect for your game!

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