You select the level of abstraction for different things based on what is and isn’t the most fun to delve into. If your group enjoys poking every surface with a 10 foot pole, it’s not wrong to play with that level of granularity. It’s just that all the interesting things you can do with a 10 foot pole are pretty mined-out after 50 years so we tend to direct our attention elsewhere.
Yeah… It’s important for the group to be on the same page about what’s fun.
Me, I don’t really want to do a blow by blow conversation with every NPC. I just want to say “I dazzle him with my brilliant smile and wit, and after some small talk try to learn about what’s going on with the royal stable”. I emphatically do not want to roleplay that small talk.
Some people, that’s the whole point they show up.
I wonder if there’s an RPG out there that has complicated and precise rules for diplomacy, but then once combat starts you just make one roll to see who wins.
Dramasystem?
I’m not sure it scratches the itch for you, but you can play Shogun: Total War this way. You can manually direct your army in battles if you want to, but it makes the game take waaay longer (and I usually do poorly). Or you just auto-calculate the results of the battle and you get back to farming resources and taking over your neighbor’s territory.
Be the change and send me a copy
One idea I had for diplomacy is to have a triangular battlemap where the corners represent logos, ethos, and pathos, but I’m not really sure what to do beyond that. Should there be some kind of elemental rock paper scissors going on? Or people are just weak to certain types of arguments? As much as I like the idea of making a complicated system for arguments, I’m sure someone else has done it better and I don’t know how to find it.
There is Dungeons and Discourse, based on this and this comic. One version here and another here.
First part hard yes, but that’s actually explicit in OD&D. The slow adventuring pace in the dungeon accounts for probing etc.
Last part hard no, you just need to get more creative with obstacles. Like “traps” don’t have to be hidden pitfalls. They can be wizardly match stick puzzles of doom and so can a 10 foot pole be incorporated into the puzzle by delicate magical manipulation by a magic user giving you a free move?
I’m not very creative, I just steal from media I like, but the sky is the limit when you stop playing character sheets and start playing the characters that the sheets abstract the wrote bits of.
Nothing is more fun than guessing what arbitrary macguffin the DM has in mind. Or tirelessly asking if you see anything in this corner or that corner, or over there, or under the desk, or behind the tapestry.
In my experience, it pays to have a conversation with the DM out of game time to tell them that they should probably describe whatever there is to see in the room.
If there’s no time pressure and no traps, there’s no reason you can’t just say “I rummage through every shelf in NPCs personal library in search of the book!” or something.
It’s all about balance. Looking under the desk and behind the tapestry area fun is you’re not tired out from specifically looking in every corner. GM should mention important details and players can interact or not. There’s not only extremes of gotcha hidden info and “roll investigation and survival to do the adventuring for you.”
Nothing is more fun than rolling for perception.
Oof
Instant classic. I have both these players in my group.
Resource tracking is a drag, unless every single member of the party is into it. Because of they’re not, then inevitably it will come down to one guy who gets to be the accountant for the whole group, and that leads to disputes where he gets to decide who got what reward when and what’s in their damned pockets.
