D&D General How Do You Feel About Randomness?

[GrimCo]

I'm talking about why it exists in THE game, not yours or mine -- in the meta-setting that the game implies via all its built in lore elements. That a PC can pay some dude to add another socket to his battle axe completely obviate the point of artifact weapons existing in the first place.

And don't get me wrong: I am not sayingvthat is a you problem. That's a system problem. Easy item creation changes the game significantly, and has consequences for the "lost treasures of a bygone age" that the magic items in D&D largely represent.

Sorry, but what meta seting and lore elements are you talking about? In our group we use mostly srd sites like pfsrd and Archives of Nethys, not books.

If we are sticking to holy avenger and pf1, there is nothing really special about it. You can craft it yourself if you want. One feat, one 8th lv spell, 60k gold an creator needs to have good alignment. That's it. There is nothing in the weapon description that says it's peace unique. Maybe in some book but again, i'm going by Archives of Nethys ( and 3ed srd).

Maybe it was different in 2ed and earlier it was different. But as you said, when you have solid rules for item creation and you can create "legendary" items, those just become regular magic items.

 

[Reynard]

Sorry, but what meta seting and lore elements are you talking about? In our group we use mostly srd sites like pfsrd and Archives of Nethys, not books.

If we are sticking to holy avenger and pf1, there is nothing really special about it. You can craft it yourself if you want. One feat, one 8th lv spell, 60k gold an creator needs to have good alignment. That's it. There is nothing in the weapon description that says it's peace unique. Maybe in some book but again, i'm going by Archives of Nethys ( and 3ed srd).

Maybe it was different in 2ed and earlier it was different. But as you said, when you have solid rules for item creation and you can create "legendary" items, those just become regular magic items.

::waves cane for emphasis:: Back in my day, magic item description, especially those of high power, included a lot of default lore.

 

[bloodtide]

Only if you roll infinitely many times. It is not guaranteed if you do not roll infinitely many times. I cited a person literally in this very thread who just said no one had ever rolled certain such things in their actual games, which they have been running for multiple decades.

I'm not sure what your talking about here?

I make a treasure table 1-20. 20 is a Sword of Sky Cleaving. If I roll on this table a couple times...sooner or later I will roll a 20. There is simply no way to roll on a table for many decades and never get every result.

Not remotely what I was talking about. Just because it is on the list does not guarantee you DEFINITELY WILL get one, except in the limit as the number of times you roll goes to infinity. It may be unlikely--it's definitely not impossible to never see it.

Sure, I guess it is possible for an individual. Like if they play one or two RPG sessions each year.....then sure they could go 20 years and never see a roll. But it's is an odd example. The gamers and players that play every week, will see everything rolled on the table quick enough.

Further, your objectively false claim, "In the balanced game the PCs will only ever find an amount of treasure set by the rules," remains objectively false. In a balanced game, the GM can reliably predict about how much impact a certain amount of treasure will have. There will, most likely, be guidelines for an amount that will produce the kinds of experiences the game was designed for producing, but you emphatically ARE NOT required to only give that and nothing else.

Right the Balance game will have a rule in the book telling the DM what and how to give out treasure. Often this is a very set in stone "value per level". Because in the Balanced game a 2nd level character can only ever find a set amount or value of treasure.

And a lot of DMs that like Balance, will only get out set amounts/value of treasure...as they want to maintain the balance.

 

[ichabod]

I'm not sure what your talking about here?

I make a treasure table 1-20. 20 is a Sword of Sky Cleaving. If I roll on this table a couple times...sooner or later I will roll a 20. There is simply no way to roll on a table for many decades and never get every result.

He's talking about probability. There is a way to roll on a table for decades and not get every result, it's just extremely unlikely. The only way to guarantee, or for there to be no way, is to roll an infinite number of times.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

He's talking about probability. There is a way to roll on a table for decades and not get every result, it's just extremely unlikely. The only way to guarantee, or for there to be no way, is to roll an infinite number of times.

Further, we're almost never talking about "one table with a 5% chance."

In the given context, AD&D-type treasure tables, there were a dozen or more such tables, and each had varying percentile chances of giving any particular result. Particularly distinct options like Holy Avengers being the rarest of rare, potentially even locked behind multiple layers of rolling (e.g. "96-100, roll again on table J-2" type stuff).

Under that sort of circumstance, no, there's absolutely no guarantee that you'll get one eventually. It's quite plausible to never get one at all, even if you roll on the appropriate table a hundred times. E.g., if you have a 1% chance of rolling a Holy Avenger on one particular table, then even if you rolled that table 100 times, you wouldn't even have a 2/3 chance of seeing one. And it's unlikely that you're gonna roll that table every time...and even less likely that you're gonna roll on a treasure table every session. It could easily take a thousand sessions or more before a single one appears--and that would be about 20 years of continuous, uninterrupted weekly gaming.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I don't get the fascination with the holy avenger. It's just a magic sword with a cliché name and blah paladiny theme.
If you want cool magic artefact weapons, I think they should be tailored to the setting and have unique names.
(And probably not rely on random treasure tables to be found.)

 

[Reynard]

(And probably not rely on random treasure tables to be found.)

This implies a sense of intentionality that isn't a great fit for all play styles.

An artifact weapon showing up.randomly will absolutely shake up a campaign. But if you are playing a sandbox, player driven game, this is a good thing. Roll with what happens.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I don't get the fascination with the holy avenger. It's just a magic sword with a cliché name and blah paladiny theme.

Not any Holy Avenger I'd ever be happy with.

If you want cool magic artefact weapons, I think they should be tailored to the setting and have unique names.

Sure. "Holy Avenger" is just a generic name, just as "grimoire" is a generic name for fancy magic books.

(And probably not rely on random treasure tables to be found.)

Well yeah, that was kind of my point.

This implies a sense of intentionality that isn't a great fit for all play styles.

All playstyles involve intentionality. Some just like to pretend that their intentional choices were forced by something or other.

An artifact weapon showing up.randomly will absolutely shake up a campaign. But if you are playing a sandbox, player driven game, this is a good thing. Roll with what happens.

An artifact weapon showing up in any campaign should shake it up. That's the whole point of it being "an artifact."

It's also why my personal preference is to go for (as said above) incomplete, damaged, partial, or budding artifacts rather than starting right off the bat with the genuine article or waiting umpteen weeks before seeing one. That way, you get all the benefit of the player feeling a special attachment (indeed, a growing attachment and satisfaction!) to the equipment, while embracing that the story will grow in the telling and you don't actually know where it will end. You still get to play to find out what happens, but you also know that, whatever happens, it'll be something juicy.

(Incidentally, "partial" = you have a disassembled artifact and need to put its parts back together, while "incomplete" = you have, say, one or two parts of a set of items that, collectively, act like an artifact but individually are just nice magic items. Similar effect, but one is a story of restoration, the other a story of collection.)

 

[Reynard]

All playstyles involve intentionality. Some just like to pretend that their intentional choices were forced by something or other

This is a BS, combative, intentionally skewed response that says nothing.

Yes, we all have intention. But we aren't pretending anything. If you can't imagine playing a open sandbox game, that isn't me trying to hide anything. It's your lack of imagination. Maybe work on that?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

This is a BS, combative, intentionally skewed response that says nothing.

Yes, we all have intention. But we aren't pretending anything. If you can't imagine playing a open sandbox game, that isn't me trying to hide anything. It's your lack of imagination. Maybe work on that?

I did not say I could not imagine that.

I am saying that you are making a distinction which does not exist, and which makes out that certain playstyles avoid doing something that cannot even in principle be avoided. EVERY playstyle contains significant, grounding intentionality. It is not possible to have anything even remotely like a "game" without that--and D&D is significantly more than the minimum required for something to be a game.

The idea that it is somehow possible to play an RPG, with a huge set of rules (written and unwritten), procedures (public and hidden), and principles (explicit and implicit), without having intentionality running through nearly every part thereof is simply ridiculous. Whether you keep the intentionality hidden behind a curtain or not, it's still there. By being a DM, running a game, you are an active creator of the experience. You cannot possibly not be. Fiction is creationist, and game-fiction doubly so, since you are creating both within the world and without.