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Awesome. Thanks for the reply Sean.

@Sean's rant:

I love Myrealms and am glad we have them in the campaign. Any work done to improve them, keep them up-to-date, and able to maintain credibility within the community is much appreciated. I absolutely think myrealms are worth the time.


As for the 5xp with max gold mods, I think as long as people are adventuring in the realms with their characters for 4-5 hours (a normal adventure time), whats wrong with that? Maybe your PCs just want to walk around Baldurs Gate and talk to people or help out the local citizenry with problems that don't involve killing monsters. You could walk old ladies across the street or rescue cats from trees.  You could investigate the strange noises coming from the Skyrider Mtns in Chessenta and find out its a dragon with a thorn in its claw.  When skill challenges seem too much like a forced mechanic, you can still reward PCs for roleplaying the game.

Feb 3, 2010 -- 4:10PM, KarmaInferno wrote:

You cannot fault the player base for using an allowed option.

I can, and I do.

Living Forgotten realms is a co-operative environment where rule developers, module designers, game masters, and players work together to produce a system that is fun and balanced.

When players deliberately seek to create an imbalance between themselves and the other players that unbalances the system. That imbalance impacts the module designers because they have to take into account the expanded difference between character capabilities. It impacts the game masters because they have to provide an environment that is challenging to the MYRE exploiter and the other players at the table. It serious impacts the other players because the characters that they built by going through LFR adventures are now underpowered in comparison to the MYRE  charaters.

This is not a competitive environment. You don't need an edge to "win".

Given this, punishing players, for using what you as the rulemakers have stated is allowed, is a futile and arguably unfair act. Not only will it create a negative reaction from the player group, but it also does not address the real problem.

The MYRE exploiter is already punishing the other players by making their convention time less fun. They're making life harder for the designers, developers, DMs, and everyone else. They have already committed the unfair act and created the negative reaction from the player group. They ARE the real problem.

This is a co-operative environment, not a competition. I have no problem with blaming a player who can't cooperate in a cooperative environment.

As an example, I'm willing to let the rules lie. The rule I would like to add is simple:
"MYRE rewards free table"
This table is for characters that have received no rewards from MYRE adventures.

That doesn't require any changes to MYREs, any changes to the specific case of rust monsters, or any other loopholes players find in the future.

Feb 4, 2010 -- 3:37AM, Mind_Flayer_Monk wrote:

As for the 5xp with max gold mods, I think as long as people are adventuring in the realms with their characters for 4-5 hours (a normal adventure time), whats wrong with that?

It creates a large imbalance between the character that has orders of magnitude more gold than the other characters at the same table. It impacts everyone else's enjoyment in a negative manner. In short, it's no fun for everyone else. I'd rather that player went to another table with people just like him.

Feb 3, 2010 -- 10:34PM, soccerref73 wrote:

OK, so the message has been received by the Global Admins.  ... I leave you with the assurance that we did not intend for people to use rust monsters in MYRE adventures to sell items at 100% of market price, and that we will issue a ruling to cover this situation.

Spoiler: Show

The monster destroys items by making attacks.  By definition it is a hostile creature.  In order to exploit this loophole you have to assume that either the rust monster is domesticated (whereupon the PCs are committing murder against an innocent and harmless creature if they actually want to get their residuum) or the player characters are prescient enough to know that they should stand still for the first 10 rounds of combat and not defend themselves while the rust monster chews their magic items to bits, and THEN kill the monster so that they can get the residuum out of its guts.  

Frankly, I don't see either of those assumptions as being anything other than a cheap metagame excuse to justify doing something that people intuitively realize is against the spirit of the rules.  

If that sounds harsh, then I'm sorry, but let's take this argument to its logical conclusion.  If you aren't willing to go all the way with the one truly egregious MYRE abuse that will always and forever be out there -- "kill one 1st-level minion for 5 XP per PC, end of adventure, get full gold, repeat 200 times" -- then why are you willing to try and break the game in other ways that you know are against the spirit of the rules?  

If rust monsters were supposed to be a way to sell magic items at 100% of market price, why would we hide that seemingly important fact behind another, far more obvious, rule that says you can only sell items at 20% of market price?  Yeah, you caught us, we were just kidding about that whole 20% thing, that's for the rubes -- what we really mean is, magic items can sell for 100% of market price but only if you know the super extra double secret handshake.  Are the published campaign rules supposed to be like the 3rd Edition Dodge feat, a trap for the unwary player who doesn't know any better?

Does anybody really think we are that subtle? Because I assure you, we are not that subtle.  Those who have met me should be well aware that I am nowhere near intelligent enough to even try and be that subtle.  

Seriously gang, if we had intended for people to have the standard option to sell magic items at 100% of market price we would have just written a rule that says everybody can sell their magic items at 100% of market price.  We wouldn't write a fake rule saying items can only sell at 20% and we wouldn't bother trying to come up with a random justification for the secret unwritten 100% rule (like every town has a friendly neighborhood rust monster who eats items and spits out the residuum as a public service).

When it comes to the campaign rules, we like to think that we just need to hit the high points.  We believe that you folks are smart and honest and will do the right thing ... because we all want to have fun, and the right thing is usually pretty darn obvious.  This system is not perfect, because we are all human and we are not perfect.  When we fail to write rules that actually hit all the high points, or when "doing the right thing" turns out not to be so obvious, then we assume you will tell us, and we'll fix those things, and the circle of life will be complete.  But we are not going to try and proactively codify every conceivable "creative interpretation" that someone can dream up.

If things ever reach the point where we decide that we have to write a million little corner-case rules and we have to try and explain everything in infinite detail just because a few people insist on exploiting the loopholes, we've already lost.  There'd be no point in having My Realms adventures at all, because we would have to fence them in with so many restrictions and caveats and don't-do-that clauses that it just wouldn't be worth the trouble.  Even closing the "minion gold mine" would only be the start of a slippery slope.  If we decide that we simply must say that it's bad to give out 5 XP and max gold, does that mean that we therefore think it's OK to give out 10 XP and max gold ... because we only explicitly mentioned the 5 XP option as being disallowed?  I don't think anyone can ever win the battle of trying to spell this stuff out in infinite detail so long as we are playing a fantasy roleplaying game where the whole point is for people to make stuff up as they go along.

By and large, I am in the camp of not caring overmuch what people choose to do with their own characters as long as it doesn't impact other people's fun.  I don't believe that "keeping people from cheating" is worth the extra paperwork and annoyance and wasted time and awkward interpersonal moments that are required in order to try and enforce a no-cheating zone (and even then determined cheaters will find a way to get around those obstacles).  I believe if we say that you're on the honor system and we know you'll do the right thing, the vast vast vast majority of you will do exactly that.  Note that the beauty of this belief is that it accommodates slightly different but equally defensible versions of what "the right thing" is, which is a big help in those cases where it would be impossible for us to ever sufficiently codify the details (such as the whole "rebuilding your magic items when the core rules change but your items didn't change" clause that we added).

So normally I probably wouldn't even weigh in on this whole rust monster thing.  However, after reading the thread, this particular issue seems to rise to the level where even honest players are saying that they feel like there is really no point in bothering to follow the rules if the rust-monster people are going to be able to gain such a gigantic benefit for their characters by using this loophole.  I don't like ruling on things that I think are covered by common sense, but I do admit that if we let it go too far, then at some point we might as well just not have any rules at all.  Although I favor having the minimum necessary number of rules, I don't think that the minimum necessary number of rules is zero.  At least, not for this campaign.

End of rant.  Thanks for listening and thanks for playing (yes, even you rust-monster types, I still believe that you can be saved).  

Standing ovation, sir.  I would also like to thank all of the doody-heads who decided that the intent of rules is meaningless, since their stubborness makes more work for the volunteers who do all of this for our enjoyment.  So thank you for taking away time from the admins, thank you for encouraging more rules that could wind up with unintended consequences for those of us who already followed the spirit of the rule where the word was vague.  Thank you for being the kind of person that everyone knows, and no body wants to.

Sean, rock on!

For those of us actually concerned with the campaign, thats all we wanted. So thank you to whatever admin responded to this. And thank you to Atras for being incredibly rude to people who just want to make this a fair and balanced campaign. We appreciate being chastised for trying to get a problem dealt with.

To begin, I say the following as someone who does not like the idea of rust monsters giving anything back at all.

Heck, I don't like the free re-trains every level either.

Feb 4, 2010 -- 7:19AM, bons wrote:

Feb 3, 2010 -- 4:10PM, KarmaInferno wrote:

You cannot fault the player base for using an allowed option.

I can, and I do.

That is, quite frankly, an outmoded way of thinking.

Game design has evolved for a reason. It's not actually that useful to think of the player base as individuals. Treating them as a single group entity is more productive. Group dynamics are predictable. Individuals are not.

Feb 4, 2010 -- 7:19AM, bons wrote:

Living Forgotten realms is a co-operative environment where rule developers, module designers, game masters, and players work together to produce a system that is fun and balanced.

When players deliberately seek to create an imbalance between themselves and the other players that unbalances the system. That imbalance impacts the module designers because they have to take into account the expanded difference between character capabilities. It impacts the game masters because they have to provide an environment that is challenging to the MYRE exploiter and the other players at the table. It serious impacts the other players because the characters that they built by going through LFR adventures are now underpowered in comparison to the MYRE  charaters.

This is not a competitive environment. You don't need an edge to "win".

Would it help if I called the players what they really are? Customers.

It is not the customer's responsibility to make sure the rules are balanced, nor to guess the intentions of the rules makers.

Competitiveness is irrelevant. The player base will use all available options. They simply will. They will ALWAYS try to maximise the most optimal choices. As I said, it is inevitable. Centuries of group dynamic analysis has borne this observation out.

You might as well blame mice in a maze for taking the shorter path to the cheese.

That it might offend your sense of 'justice' or 'ethics' is also irrelevant. Assigning blame for legal but questionable acts is inefficient and unproductive to the game system as a whole. Attempting to invoke punitive measures on something that isn't actually illegal is not only arbitrary and unfair (How is a player supposed to know that this powerful looking legal thing wasn't 'intended' but that one is? Not everyone thinks the same or has the same opinion of what is overpowered), but it requires more time, effort and resources to go after so-called 'offenders'. It is, quite simply, a total waste of time.

More than that, apparant arbitrariness in punishment can and does result in a player base that loses confidence in fairness or impartialness of the arbitrating rulesmaking body. This damages goodwill and trust. It hurts the system.

Simply put, punishing for acts that are not actually illegal is always a bad idea.

If you don't want such an act to take place, make it explicitly illegal. Then if someone still commits the act, THEN you can smack them down without appearing to be arbitrary.

Kinda how the way REAL WORLD laws work in most of the civilized nations, neh?

I mean, imagine getting dragged into court and fined or jailed. Only to be told, "No, what you did wasn't illegal, but we INTENDED for it to be illegal, so we're going to punish you anyway". How long would it take for the citizenry become distrustful and lose respect for a governmental system that behaved this way?

Note that under the current game design paradigm, rules changes and updates are expected to be constantly added. Such a system only works if the rules evolve to quash 'bugs' that pop up. You cannot anticipate all future problems. So you alter the rules as you go along as the problems pop up.

This does mean that until a new rule is established to remove a problem, some individuals will gain the advantage of using that problem in the short term. This is normal and expected. It is pointless to worry about these minor cases. Fix the rule and move on.

I will concur with the earlier comment that if a player finds some option that seems just 'too good', they would be wise to anticipate a future adjustment to that option.

Feb 4, 2010 -- 7:19AM, bons wrote:

Given this, punishing players, for using what you as the rulemakers have stated is allowed, is a futile and arguably unfair act. Not only will it create a negative reaction from the player group, but it also does not address the real problem.

The MYRE exploiter is already punishing the other players by making their convention time less fun. They're making life harder for the designers, developers, DMs, and everyone else. They have already committed the unfair act and created the negative reaction from the player group. They ARE the real problem.

This is a co-operative environment, not a competition. I have no problem with blaming a player who can't cooperate in a cooperative environment.

No, they are a symptom of a malfunctioning rule or option. They are a reaction to a problem. Reactions cannot by definition be the causitive element.

If you really want to assign blame, well, let's say I was making a rules set and allowed an option. If a player takes that option, it's not his fault. It's mine for allowing it in the first place. Any negative fallout, among judges, players, whatever, is all ultimately my fault. Not the players.

Again, cooperative and competitive is irrelevant. It is a group activity, and therefore falls under the behavior that people will normally engage in large groups.

You get large groups of people together, and certain behaviors will always manifest on a group level.

You either account for this, or your system eventully breaks.




-np

Feb 4, 2010 -- 3:37AM, Mind_Flayer_Monk wrote:

As for the 5xp with max gold mods, I think as long as people are adventuring in the realms with their characters for 4-5 hours (a normal adventure time), whats wrong with that? Maybe your PCs just want to walk around Baldurs Gate and talk to people or help out the local citizenry with problems that don't involve killing monsters. You could walk old ladies across the street or rescue cats from trees.  You could investigate the strange noises coming from the Skyrider Mtns in Chessenta and find out its a dragon with a thorn in its claw.  When skill challenges seem too much like a forced mechanic, you can still reward PCs for roleplaying the game.

It's not the "reward PCs for roleplaying" part that I have a problem with.  It's the "only giving them 5 XP" part that constitutes an exploit, unless you also reduce the gold award proportionally.  We *want* PCs to earn XP and gold in My Realms adventures.  If we didn't want PCs to earn rewards from My Realms adventures, we wouldn't have put rewards in My Realms adventures.  Instead, we would have just said hey presto, here's a way that you can sit around a table for five hours and pretend like you are playing Living Forgotten Realms but you really aren't.  Doesn't that sound like fun?

For the record, I have no problem with any of the ideas that you listed.  Nearly every Baldur's Gate regional adventure (if not all of them) already features at least one scene where you walk around the city talking to people on the street.  So clearly we are good with that concept.  A My Realms adventure where you walk old ladies across the road (while goblins chuck javelins from the buildings on both sides) or rescue cats from trees (which are actually treants) or investigate the strange noises coming from the Skyrider Mountains and find a dragon with a thorn in its claw (which has to be subdued before you can take the thorn out) all sound like they could be good fun.

I'm not the idea police and frankly I don't care what you want to write your My Realms adventures about... so long as you don't use them to circumvent the spirit of the campaign rules.  The staff not having to care what sort of adventures you want to write with My Realms was kind of the whole point of giving you My Realms in the first place.  But when you abuse the concept and use it to make a mockery out of the players who are trying to play fair and abide by the rules, then it becomes a problem.

If people want to write My Realms adventures with zero combat and 100% skill challenges, or zero combat and zero skill challenges and 100% roleplaying, I say, more power to you, as long as you are having fun.  But if your objective is to "reward PCs for roleplaying the game" then you should actually do what you say and reward them.  Specifically, you should reward them with the full XP (or whatever they earned assuming you threw legitimate challenges at them), not some token amount like 5 XP.  We deliberately did not specify how you have to award the XP, so that you can award it for whatever you want.  

But if you drastically reduce the XP award to a token amount and don't reduce the gold award, you lose the right to claim that you are doing anything other than metagaming.  That has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with "rewarding PCs for roleplaying the game."  That is about nothing more than trying to break the level/gold curve and create characters with more power than what the rules intend.

Feb 3, 2010 -- 10:34PM, soccerref73 wrote:

OK, so the message has been received by the Global Admins.  Rust Monsters in the LFR campaign are wonky enough that we need to take a look at whether or not it makes sense to allow them at all, and if we do allow them, we need to issue some rules for how they work.

I would suggest a broader ruling in the rewards section, something along the lines of:

"If you manage to gain ritual components during an adventure through some means other than buying them at full price, such as by killing a rust monster who has eaten a magic item or because you were given them by an NPC, your character is not able to keep those ritual components unless taken as part of a treasure bundle, any rituals performed using those components does not have any lasting effect beyond the end of the adventure and any items created by such a ritual cannot be retained by the character when the adventure is over.

The sole exception to this rule is that a character whose magic item has been turned into residuum by a rust monster or similar creature is allowed to use that residuum in an Enchant Magic Item ritual performed before or at the end of the adventure to create the exact same item that was destroyed."

I think it's important to put the rule in such a way as to indicate that using rust monsters to create residuum and then craft items you take from the module is not only not allowed, but has never been allowed as an interpretation of the rules.  It would be a mistake to do a non-retroactive "Well, you can't use rust monsters now, but hey, if you already did so, well, good catch, feel free to keep the rewards of that behavior."

Regarding MYRE adventures, I think adding a statement of intent to the Treasure section would be sufficient, something along the lines of:

"Treasure award should be proportionate to the amount of risk faced and effort required by the characters, as measured by the amount of experience awarded.  If you choose to create a My Realms adventure that only awards half of the maximum experience, you should only award half of the maximum base gold."

Of course, there is the issue that the DM does not have discretion to change the 'more gold' amount, so if you want to run a low-challenge MYRE that only gives out half-XP, you can modify the base gold amount, but the 'more gold' treasure bundle is still standard.

Then again, you don't even really need MyRealms modules for this.  Since the "more gold" bundle option lacks any ability to be modified or restricted by the DM, a player could sit down at a table, earn 0 xp for refusing to go on a mission, take the "more gold" amount for his 30 seconds of play and walk away.  You would, at least, need DM connivance to do this without getting ostracized, but given that, normal modules will work to break the gold curve so long as you don't run out of enough ones you can actually earn XP on to gain levels.

What if you have Rust Monster as a mount and the Mounted Combat feat?

Sean has already said what I want to say, with less swearing, but in addition to saying "What he said" I just have to impart a little bit of wisdom as far doing this sort of thing in the future goes. There are two significant problems with the "We are going to go against the spirit of the rules, but follow the letter, in an effort to FORCE the admins to do something."

1) WOTC/Hasbro folks read these forums. They don't run the campaign, but they do allocate money to make sure it can happen. When people write about things like how they are going to use rust monsters to break the campaign xp/gp ratios and show everyone how stupid something is, the WOTC folks' response is not "Well let me get on the phone and make sure the Globals do something about this." Their response is more likely to be "These LFR people are nuts and bad ambassadors for our game and we should STOP FUNDING LFR!" I'm not saying that they have said this to us, I'm just saying that is one of the impressions players who do this sort of thing with rust monsters (or other corner cases) create.

2) Forcing the Globals to spend more and more time codifying ever corner case (rust monsters, the fool's gold ritual, 5 xp and full gold in a MYRE) makes the rules document HUGE! And it also forces us to spend our time doing rules interpretation work instead of actually writing or editing adventures. It means you WILL get less adventures on time. We are generally fairly clear about our intent (though far from perfect I admit) and following the letter rather than the spirit is just being pain in the behind because you can. Especially now that the Globals will be doing the LFR CCG and rules from now on, I believe you are more likely to get a clarification into the rules with polite emails rather than hosting conventions where the sole event is a My Realms with a friendly rust monster. When I was small, my Grandmother to me that if you want to be treated nicely, you should others nicely. It worked on the playground, it works as an adult.

Feb 4, 2010 -- 9:52AM, KarmaInferno wrote:

It is not the customer's responsibility to make sure the rules are balanced, nor to guess the intentions of the rules makers.

Last I knew, I was not a customer. I'm a member and trusted to behave in a manner consistant with the goals of the organization. I am capable of being responsible. I expect the other members to also be capable of being responsible. I refuse to buy into the argument that the RPGA is a group of people who have no self control, no sense of responsibility, are are smart enough to find a loophole and too dumb to realize that it's a loophole.

The LFR Global admins seem to share that view. They have better things to do with their time than to spend the effort in assuming all their member are irresponsible morons. Their posts in this thread indicate that they expect their membership to have some level of intelligence, responsibility, honesty, and a sense of fair play.

Kinda how the way REAL WORLD laws work in most of the civilized nations, neh?

Actually, in the real world, if society decides that what you did was a crime even though no one bothered to write a law in advance, they still punish you as if that law had already been written. When PGP was declared a munition, Phil Zimmerman's life got very interesting.

Dude. This is D&D. For decades players have been trying to find every nook and cranny to break the game. It's been like that since the beginning. Everyone has their cheese for their character.

I'm just surprised no one realized this when MYREs were put out.

I'm not ranting about trying to find some cool combo for your PC's niche. I'm ranting about the mentality that if you think something is broken or unclear, the right response it to abuse it the most blantent way against the spirit of the rules in an effort to force change.

And I understand and know exactly what you are talking about. The people doing that are just as wrong as the people who abuse rust monsters.

In fact since I first posted in this thread I never denied that I had a rust monstered character. I even admitted that I ran multiple P1 MYRE for a group of players who requested a rust monster mod. Hell, I've even was pointed out by posters on this thread as being someone who they knew having played a Rust Monster MYRE (Though I don't have +4 Bloodiron and 2 War Rings - I have a Jagged +4 and +4 Dwarven Armor... get it right!).

That's just between myself and local groups I regularly play with. If I go to a Con or non-local group, or if a rule is posted that undo's the Rust Monstering, then I'm perfectly fine with that.

Nothing changes on my character but flavor. My AC is still the same, my attack bonus is still the same. My HP, surges, NADs and resistances are all the same. I just lose a free daily surge and 19-20 crit.


But in the end, spirit of the rules and letter of the rules are two seperate entities and only one is the actual rule. And if the rule can be broken there will be players who will take advantage of it. It happens everyday in life and this is no exception.

Feb 4, 2010 -- 11:35AM, Hibiki54 wrote:

But in the end, spirit of the rules and letter of the rules are two seperate entities and only one is the actual rule. And if the rule can be broken there will be players who will take advantage of it. It happens everyday in life and this is no exception.

You are correct, and it remains just as wrong. People convince the elderly or the mentally challenged to hand over all their money, and in some cases it may still be legal, but just because it is legal doesn't mean you should do it. Nothing stops me from buying a hunting liscence and shooting the daily bag limit every day (and wasting lots of bullets on each animal because I enjoy blowing them to pieces) and leaving the bodies to rot in the woods, but most folks would realize that's not what a hunting season intended in the spirit of the law, despite what the rules allow.

But all of this is not relavent to my original point. Bending/twisting the rules and making a big show in order to force change is not the way to do it.

Feb 4, 2010 -- 11:06AM, bons wrote:

Feb 4, 2010 -- 9:52AM, KarmaInferno wrote:

It is not the customer's responsibility to make sure the rules are balanced, nor to guess the intentions of the rules makers.

Last I knew, I was not a customer. I'm a member and trusted to behave in a manner consistant with the goals of the organization. I am capable of being responsible.

Of course you as an individual are capable.

The problem with your assertion lies in the fact that you are not a large group.

Feb 4, 2010 -- 11:06AM, bons wrote:

I expect the other members to also be capable of being responsible. I refuse to buy into the argument that the RPGA is a group of people who have no self control, no sense of responsibility, are are smart enough to find a loophole and too dumb to realize that it's a loophole.

Your refusal does not change the reality of how people act in large groups.

I'm not making the stuff I was talking about up. These kind of group dynamic phenomena are well documented and studied.

Individuals can be smart and responsible and discerning.

Groups act and react differently. This is the key.

I'm not talking about how smart or responsible individuals people are. I'm talking about behaviors that occur in groups no matter how individuals in that group might be like.

I'm also stating that punishment of individuals for acts, that are not actually against the rules, is potentially more harmful than just letting it go.

Feb 4, 2010 -- 11:06AM, bons wrote:

The LFR Global admins seem to share that view. They have better things to do with their time than to spend the effort in assuming all their member are irresponsible morons. Their posts in this thread indicate that they expect their membership to have some level of intelligence, responsibility, honesty, and a sense of fair play.

I'm not stating that the Admins need to micromanage anything.

Just that issues will pop up. Fix the issue and move on. Dwelling on who's to blame for what serves no useful purpose.

Feb 4, 2010 -- 11:06AM, bons wrote:

Kinda how the way REAL WORLD laws work in most of the civilized nations, neh?

Actually, in the real world, if society decides that what you did was a crime even though no one bothered to write a law in advance, they still punish you as if that law had already been written.

Patently false.

You explicitly cannot be criminally charged with an act if it was not illegal at the time you commited it. To do so Ex Post Facto is specifically forbidden by the US Constitution, and by the laws of most other civilized nations.

Feb 4, 2010 -- 11:06AM, bons wrote:

When PGP was declared a munition, Phil Zimmerman's life got very interesting.

Not analogous.

Prior to PGP's release, all crypto systems above 40-bit were ALREADY illegal to export outside the United States. PGP is a 128 bit system, and therefore was illegal to export the moment it was created. It wasn't 'declared' to be anything - it already was.

In any case, in the end Zimmerman was never charged with any crimes and had no penalties applied to him.



-karma

Feb 4, 2010 -- 11:35AM, Hibiki54 wrote:

I have a Jagged +4 and +4 Dwarven Armor...

An amazing advantage!

The campaign will be very unlikely to provide any +4 items as a regular P1 bundle. While a 17th level item is plausible by the rules for a P1 High table, the campaign is trying to limit power creep. Thus, you won't see +4 items until P2 (unless some admin slips up and fails to catch one going through, or a special exception is made based on the adventure/item).

More importantly, MYRE for P1 allows an item of PC's level or lower. So, you would have to be 17th level to get that item in a MYRE... meaning it would be a P2 (probably High tier MYRE) or P3 (probably low tier) adventure!

You are off the expected curve in all sorts of ways. Your PC is absolutely having an unfair advantage. I frimly believe you (and your group) should remove those items from your PC and change them into items that fit both of the limits explained above (which ends up being an item of your level). I don't frankly understand how you and your group ever thought this was ok. I'm not trying to flame in any way, but it is just hard for me to understand how these situations even come up...

Feb 4, 2010 -- 12:13PM, KarmaInferno wrote:

I'm not talking about how smart or responsible individuals people are. I'm talking about behaviors that occur in groups no matter how individuals in that group might be like.

There are groups that get rid of the members that lack self-control. It should be noted that when these groups cease to get rid of and punish the members who can't control themselves, respect for these groups dives like a rock.

I'm also stating that punishment of individuals for acts, that are not actually against the rules, is potentially more harmful than just letting it go.

Getting rid of individuals who feel the need to abuse the system is not more harmful then letting it go. Letting it go encourages, and could be consider as forcing other people to also abuse the system. In this case, letting it go basically means the admin have to do a lot more work over the long run or encourage those people who can control themselves to go elsewhere. That's where the harm really lies. I fully believe MYREs were created to allow freedom to responsible people. Your standpoint is that LFR cannot allow freedom or they should discourage responsible people from being members. Neither of these results is a good thing for LFR.

If people can't control themselves, the larger group either needs to get rid of them or it will naturally rid itself of the people that can control themselves. You can guess for yourself which of the two groups will get a decent reputation.

I want to say one more thing.

At DDXP I overheard an admin talking to a friend about how they no longer judge tables. They can't mentally cope with what they see as the changing attitude of players towards self-serving behavior.

I have separately spoken to another in the campaign that feels that these types of issues burn them out.

Here's how it works. You come home from the end of a long day at work. You have to edit x number of adventures, review y number of adventure proposals, maybe work on one of your own, plus answer questions from other admins and maybe others above and below you. You pop in on the forums and see these types of things going on. Of course it burns you out.

We are absolutely responsible for our behavior. It absolutely impacts those involved with the campaign. It always has. I had the fortune of being close to some of the LG Triads and watching them deal with player issues... it is absolutely demoralizing for the creators/admins to see players do these types of things. You hurt the game and everyone involved when you break or bend the rules, especially if you go out of your way to create tension/grief around it. They bust their behinds to create MYRE for everyone and then they get this for it?

The reverse is true when players praise and thank those involved, when they volunteer to help, when they act with reason and responsibiility, when they help reduce workload, when they help create a great shared experience. Every person gets to decide if they will be part of the solution, neutral, or part of what negatively impacts a campaign.

Feb 4, 2010 -- 12:32PM, bons wrote:

Feb 4, 2010 -- 12:13PM, KarmaInferno wrote:

I'm not talking about how smart or responsible individuals people are. I'm talking about behaviors that occur in groups no matter how individuals in that group might be like.

There are groups that get rid of the members that lack self-control. It should be noted that when these groups cease to get rid of and punish the members who can't control themselves, respect for these groups dives like a rock.

You are not getting what I am saying.

There is no 'lack of self control'. There is no anything. People in large groups will simply act a certain way, regardless of who is in that group.

This is not just opinion. This is group dynamics. This is the nature of people in large numbers. There is an entire science devoted to the study of group behaviors.

Feb 4, 2010 -- 12:32PM, bons wrote:

I'm also stating that punishment of individuals for acts, that are not actually against the rules, is potentially more harmful than just letting it go.

Getting rid of individuals who feel the need to abuse the system is not more harmful then letting it go. Letting it go encourages, and could be consider as forcing other people to also abuse the system. In this case, letting it go basically means the admin have to do a lot more work over the long run or encourage those people who can control themselves to go elsewhere. That's where the harm really lies. I fully believe MYREs were created to allow freedom to responsible people. Your standpoint is that LFR cannot allow freedom or they should discourage responsible people from being members. Neither of these results is a good thing for LFR.

If people can't control themselves, the larger group either needs to get rid of them or it will naturally rid itself of the people that can control themselves. You can guess for yourself which of the two groups will get a decent reputation.

There is no choice involved. There is no encouraging or anything involved.

Large groups will seek to optimize their play. It always, ALWAYS happens. Individuals might choose to not abuse an overpowered option, but in a large player base, the abuse, the optimization, ALWAYS occurs.

Once agan, how groups behave is not the same as how individuals behave.

And going after individual 'legal' abusers might appeal to your sense of justice, but does not actually help the system.

Punishing for things that are not illegal is by nature arbitrary. It is based on gut feelings and unvoiced intention, not any specific measure or rule.

Arbitrary punishments dilute authority. If your player base gets the sense that they can be smacked down for anything at all, they stop respecting authority. Punishment MUST always stem from clear, unequivocal rules being actually broken. Not arbitrary "well, this is what we REALLY meant" justifications.

If there is a problem rule, fix the rule and move on.



-karma

Feb 4, 2010 -- 12:30PM, Alphastream1 wrote:

Feb 4, 2010 -- 11:35AM, Hibiki54 wrote:

I have a Jagged +4 and +4 Dwarven Armor...

An amazing advantage!

+4 Harsh Song Blade  and +4 Summoned Armor, one of which is a regular item and one is accessed via story reward.

Feb 4, 2010 -- 12:30PM, Alphastream1 wrote:

You are off the expected curve in all sorts of ways. Your PC is absolutely having an unfair advantage. I frimly believe you (and your group) should remove those items from your PC and change them into items that fit both of the limits explained above (which ends up being an item of your level). I don't frankly understand how you and your group ever thought this was ok. I'm not trying to flame in any way, but it is just hard for me to understand how these situations even come up...

World Wide Game Day for MM2. It featured a Rust Monster. That's like... a year and some change ago. All this talk about MYREs and Rust Monsters are barely coming out now. That's what surprising.

I don't purposely try to break the game, but if something clearly shows itself in front of me as a viable way to gain access to items I don't have access to, then unless there is a rule that says I cannot do it, then I will do it.

MYRE + Rust Monster + Master Crafter Artificer = $$$$$

Feb 4, 2010 -- 1:11PM, Hibiki54 wrote:

World Wide Game Day for MM2. It featured a Rust Monster. That's like... a year and some change ago. All this talk about MYREs and Rust Monsters are barely coming out now. That's what surprising.

I may not be entirely accurately following your line of reasoning here...but...are you saying that you played an LFR character in the MM2 WWGD adventure?  I may be mistaken, but my impression was that the WWGD adventures have been standalones, with pregenerated characters, and specifically *not* LFR adventures.

Feb 4, 2010 -- 1:11PM, Hibiki54 wrote:

I don't purposely try to break the game, but if something clearly shows itself in front of me as a viable way to gain access to items I don't have access to, then unless there is a rule that says I cannot do it, then I will do it.

MYRE + Rust Monster + Master Crafter Artificer = $$$$$

Does your principled stance extend to identifying yourself in order that those DMs and players who disagree with your tactics can avoid playing with you?

Feb 4, 2010 -- 1:58PM, kenobi65 wrote:

I may not be entirely accurately following your line of reasoning here...but...are you saying that you played an LFR character in the MM2 WWGD adventure?  I may be mistaken, but my impression was that the WWGD adventures have been standalones, with pregenerated characters, and specifically *not* LFR adventures.

No. I was saying that players and DMs who played that particular game day discovered the loophole that is in question at this moment.

And I don't have a particular stance and I identified myself as one of the particular plays who people know of or played with earlier in this thread before now. And considering it was during the earlier post I have played with the posters accusing me on many occassions so it doesn't really matter.

And as I already stated it doesn't really change anything about my character as my defenses, health and attack bonus doesn't change. I either Crit on 19-20 for 12 Ongoing damage or I Crit on 20 for +4d8 extra dmg. All it really changed was giving me a free surge or not having to both rolling extra damage. And flavor. Can't forget that.

So if players want to avoid playing with me, that's fine. Because Rust Monstered or Non-Rust Monstered, I'm still enjoying the game.

I can't believe I'm doing this but I have to defend Hibiki.

Using MYREs and rust monsters in this way is clearly against the spirit of the rules but so is, in my opinion, old avengers, hybrids, and Dice of Auspicious Fortune. Should I call them out at tables I run and tell them they can't play? Making judgement calls on things like this is inherintly flawed because 'intentions' are based on personal opinions unless they come from the mouth of the designer himself. If I ran games using the system of thinking many of you are suggesting I would be rejecting half of the players in my area.

At what point is something that is advantageous too good to where we should excercise 'self control'?

I don't blame the rule makers (the campaign administration) either. They are mostly volunteers and doing the best they can with the time/energy they have. All that I ask is that as these kinds of problems are brought to light they be addressed and fixed in a timely manner.

Feb 4, 2010 -- 2:48PM, Ferol_debtor_of_Torm wrote:

If I ran games using the system of thinking many of you are suggesting I would be rejecting half of the players in my area.

If everyone refused to take players who abused MYREs, there'd be fewer players abusing MYREs. Promise you that.

What mostly bugs me is that the easiest way for the admins to fix this loophole is to remove MYREs from the equation. Boom, problem solved, along with all the other problems that can arise from MYRE abuse. As has been pointed out a million or so times, rust monsters aren't the real issue -- MYREs can be abused in many, many ways. So if we collectively demand that the problem get fixed via hard guidelines, it's going to get fixed rather painfully.

Feb 4, 2010 -- 2:45PM, Hibiki54 wrote:

No. I was saying that players and DMs who played that particular game day discovered the loophole that is in question at this moment.

Thank you for clarifying.

But, given that, in what way would they have "discovered the loophole" in a one-shot adventure?  Even if there were a rust monster in it, was there a Master Crafter Artificer among the pregenerated PCs?  And, was there the opportunity within the adventure for that character to use the residuum from the rust monster's attack to create new items?

It's more common sense than anything else.

Rust Monster eats stuff. Kill it for full residium.

Hi! I'm an artificer and I make stuff my level + Int. Got extra money and I'll make something cool.

Dude, I totally got a sweet weapon now!

Feb 4, 2010 -- 12:51PM, KarmaInferno wrote:

People in large groups will simply act a certain way, regardless of who is in that group.

Not when the large group decides to get rid of all the people who can't behave themselves as individuals.

We've already seen in this thread that there are two groups of people, those that MYRE for an advantage and those people who don't want to be in the same group as them. You can claim that the lack of self control happens. That doesn't mean anyone has to accept it.

There's no law that says people have to shower or bathe. But large groups get rid of the people who refuse to. If your group lets them and their stench in, under the claim that there will be people like that, then I think your group needs to rethink it's policies. We have a much better group without people like that. It's much more enjoyable without them.

Feb 4, 2010 -- 3:03PM, Hibiki54 wrote:

It's more common sense than anything else.

Rust Monster eats stuff. Kill it for full residium.

Hi! I'm an artificer and I make stuff my level + Int. Got extra money and I'll make something cool.

Dude, I totally got a sweet weapon now!

The problem is that there is no proviso in the CCG to allow for taking any of the residuum you just picked up from the dead rust monster. This would be an interesting way for an evil DM to screw a party...

Feb 4, 2010 -- 3:03PM, Hibiki54 wrote:

It's more common sense than anything else.
Rust Monster eats stuff. Kill it for full residium.
Hi! I'm an artificer and I make stuff my level + Int. Got extra money and I'll make something cool.
Dude, I totally got a sweet weapon now!

Odd. In no other LFR mod did I get to keep cool stuff just because a monster dropped it or someone crafted it. Regardless of the amount of magic items the monsters carried, we didn't get to keep all of it. We got, at most, one piece, and that was only if we wanted to spend the slot for it.

Why, in your MYRE, did that policy go out the window? Where was your common sense?

It seems to me that a much more likely consequence was that you lost your armor and got some amount of gold in a reasonable ratio with the XP granted. Not the kind of adventure I'd want to be a part of.

The alternative is that they just lose the item.

Is that any more reasonable?

Chris has recognized this exploit as legit. Sean has confirmed that the PtB are working on an interim solution. If this simply didn't work they could simply say, 'that doesn't work' and we wouldn't need a rules update.

Feb 4, 2010 -- 3:20PM, Ferol_debtor_of_Torm wrote:

The alternative is that they just lose the item.

Is that any more reasonable?

Yes. I find that very reasonable. Then they can go beat their DM over the head for putting a dang rust monster in the MYRE. He deserves a beating over the head for that.

Feb 4, 2010 -- 3:20PM, Ferol_debtor_of_Torm wrote:

The alternative is that they just lose the item.

Is that any more reasonable?

Chris has recognized this exploit as legit. Sean has confirmed that the PtB are working on an interim solution. If this simply didn't work they could simply say, 'that doesn't work' and we wouldn't need a rules update.

It's better supported by RAW.

Feb 4, 2010 -- 3:20PM, Ferol_debtor_of_Torm wrote:

Chris has recognized this exploit as legit.

Do we have a cite for that?

If that's an actual reflection of Tulach's statement, then my feelings would shift to "I still don't like it, but it's the campaign's own damn fault it's happening."

I would tend to think that, when asked if something you feel is unequivocally bad for the campaign is legal, the proper response from campaign staff should be "No, it's not... but I might have to get back to you after I have the chance to sit down and study the rules to come up with, er, tell you exactly why not." not "Yep, that's completely legal and within the rules, but we're just hoping no one does it, or we'll have to glare at them disapprovingly and hope that makes them feel bad."

Feb 4, 2010 -- 4:49PM, bgibbons wrote:

Feb 4, 2010 -- 3:20PM, Ferol_debtor_of_Torm wrote:

Chris has recognized this exploit as legit.

Do we have a cite for that?

If that's an actual reflection of Tulach's statement, then my feelings would shift to "I still don't like it, but it's the campaign's own damn fault it's happening."

I would tend to think that, when asked if something you feel is unequivocally bad for the campaign is legal, the proper response from campaign staff should be "No, it's not... but I might have to get back to you after I have the chance to sit down and study the rules to come up with, er, tell you exactly why not." not "Yep, that's completely legal and within the rules, but we're just hoping no one does it, or we'll have to glare at them disapprovingly and hope that makes them feel bad."

That's essentially falling into lawlessness. When a person's feelings are allowed to come before the rules, why bother having rules? Looking for ways to make people guilty (rather than cleaning up rules loopholes to prevent the behaviors you want to discourage) just leads to cliques where judges who have friends on campaign staff can get their pet problems declared illegal.

I don't like pacifist healers with Astral Seal asking people to hold off on killing enemies until they can squeeze the maximum number of hit points out, but I don't ask for it to be declared illegal. I'd rather do something like changing the target of the power to "One enemy" so that enemies who surrender aren't legal targets. The same sort of solutions can be found for most game elements, and some game elements which don't work in LFR (e.g. Fool's Gold and rust monsters) can and should be banned from use.

Feb 4, 2010 -- 9:57AM, soccerref73 wrote:

But if you drastically reduce the XP award to a token amount and don't reduce the gold award,

Why not just make the intended XP/gold ration of LFR a hard rule for Myrealms?

Feb 4, 2010 -- 11:10PM, Mirtek wrote:

Feb 4, 2010 -- 9:57AM, soccerref73 wrote:

But if you drastically reduce the XP award to a token amount and don't reduce the gold award,

Why not just make the intended XP/gold ration of LFR a hard rule for Myrealms?

Doesn't help. "Oh, look, it's another 3x3 room full of minion brutes." 

Feb 4, 2010 -- 3:20PM, Ferol_debtor_of_Torm wrote:

The alternative is that they just lose the item.

Is that any more reasonable?

Chris has recognized this exploit as legit. Sean has confirmed that the PtB are working on an interim solution. If this simply didn't work they could simply say, 'that doesn't work' and we wouldn't need a rules update.

Hmmm.... interesting. I was actually sitting on a couch with Tulach watching Zombieland (good movie) when I read this off my iPhone. Chris clarified to me that he indeed said no such thing, so this "citation" is definately incorrect. As for what Sean said, the Globals are indeed talking about how to deal with people breaking/stretching/bending the rules to walk away with more gold from a MYRE adventure than you are intended to legally earn.

Feb 4, 2010 -- 12:43PM, Alphastream1 wrote:

Here's how it works. You come home from the end of a long day at work. You have to edit x number of adventures, review y number of adventure proposals, maybe work on one of your own, plus answer questions from other admins and maybe others above and below you. You pop in on the forums and see these types of things going on. Of course it burns you out.

We are absolutely responsible for our behavior. It absolutely impacts those involved with the campaign. It always has. I had the fortune of being close to some of the LG Triads and watching them deal with player issues... it is absolutely demoralizing for the creators/admins to see players do these types of things. You hurt the game and everyone involved when you break or bend the rules, especially if you go out of your way to create tension/grief around it. They bust their behinds to create MYRE for everyone and then they get this for it?

Thank you, my friend, for having the empathy to understand this and the willingness to mention it.

Everything that really needs to be said was already said by Sean Molley earlier in the thread.  I do feel it important to clear up a couple things.  I was in charge of creating the MYRE adventures, and I also wrote the Ecology of the Rust Monster article for Dragon.  I was acutely aware of the existence of rust monsters, and I was aware of how they could be used by the type of people who give gamers a bad name and make life difficult for others.  Both in the Ecology article and in the MYRE text, I had added text on how LFR should deal with rust monsters (and with the questionable types who feel the need to break the pretty obvious spirit of the rules in regards to them).  All such text never made it into the final versions.

The common assumption was simple: the LFR rules already handle this.  There is already a cap on how much treasure you can take out of an adventure.  You walk in with wealth equal to x gold pieces.  You leave the adventure with x + y gold pieces, where y equals no more than the maximum gold plus a bundle wealth. 

The other rule was "Don't be an idiot."  I would say that a surprisingly vast majority of the players have no trouble following this rule.  They understand that this is a game, and that the admins really bust their humps trying to provide content for the players and DMs to use to make this one big, homogenous campaign.  It's one thing to need to know how certain core rules work.  It's another entirely to go out of your way to be "that guy" and exploit every corner case, and fly in the face of common sense, and do things that are obviously not intended by the rules.

"But you can just add a paragraph here or there," says people, "and then it will be so clear."  Maybe.  But just adding one more paragraph here or there quickly turns into a page, and then 10 pages, and then 100 pages.  I've seen it happen.  And now this game that we are trying to grow and nurture becomes something new players actively avoid because not only do you have to learn the D&D rules, but they have to read that 100-page document covering all of the corner cases.  So the know-it-all, rules-lawyer types get what they want (the campaign staff wastes hours and days dealing with the problem and the know-it-alls can feel superior) at the expense of hundreds or thousands of potential players.

As others have said, this isn't really about the problematic nature of rust monsters.  There is an endless amount of hinky cheating that can be done.  This is about a tiny subset of players who embody some of the negative stereotypes of gamers: socially inept, thinking only of themselves within a context of a narrow set of rules, unable or unwilling to conceptualize the effect of their actions on others and on the campaign as a whole.  It is really just like the gamer hygiene problem, except for the fact that is a lack of intellectual and social hygiene rather than physical.  But it doesn't lessen the stench.

Excellent post, Shawn.

That would seem to be the end of both the "It's Legal" and "You can't chastise people" arguments.
I think both of those defenses have failed their saving throw, possibly with a critical failure.

Sean,

Brilliant post. Thank you. 

Feb 5, 2010 -- 4:31AM, Thanlis wrote:

Doesn't help. "Oh, look, it's another 3x3 room full of minion brutes." 

Why wouldn't that help? The problem is not with getting as much gold as they want, only with getting any gold at all without the accompanying XP and thus getting ahead of the XP-Gold-Curve.

So if they want to get their gold from rooms full of minions or even from skill-challenges without risk of losing a single hp that's not a problem at all as long as they have to take the appropriate for each piece of gold.

Wow, two great posts in less than 24 hours. Excellent.

Thanks Sean for your time. While I/we have your attention maybe you could clarify some other parts of this for us.

How should things work for a player that has an item rust monstered?

If my +4 Harsh Songblade gets oxidized. What are my options?

A) Have the table Artificer/Wizard/Swordmage with Master Crafter make me a +4 Bloodiron Weapon and collect my 2200gp + bundle or more gold.

B) Walk away with 2200gp + bundle or more gold and the rest of the residuum from my oxidized weapon is simple gone.

C) Use the residuum to reforge my +4 Harsh Songblade and collect my 2200gp + bundle or more gold.

Option A is still very open to abuse. Option B seems contrary to the spirit of LFR in that you are essentially just screwed out of an item. Option C seems the fairest but how does that work when there are no Master Crafters available? Can we assume that there are NPC spellcasters available for hire with the feat?

Also, how would you (and the campaign as a whole) like to see judges handle other issues where RAW seems to conflict heavily with RAI? A poster a few posts up mentioned not liking Astral Seal I happen to not like Dice of Auspicious Fortune. Should judges be making rulings directly contrary to RAW when we believe it to be in the spirit of RAI?

Lastly, how should the offending players in this situation fix their characters and their logs? How should judges of those players (as I mentioned there is a number of them in my area) adjudicate dealing with these players when we judge for them in the future?

Mr. Merwin,

I have a request.

At your earliest convenience, can you please post that guidance on how LFR should deal with Rust Monsters.

It is to satisfy my own curiousity.

When I first saw the rust monster and MYRE, I just couldn't believe no one saw the potential problems at the time that this would cause but if some verbage was deleted upon publishing it could explain alot to me.

Thank you in advance for your attention regarding my request.

Aribeth

The documentation is important.  If the documentation needs to be longer, it needs to be longer. This isn't about people trying to stroke their ego with the need for pages and pages of rules. This is about an organization having clearer methods and goals.   Campaign leadership must then communicate these goals to the rest of the organization.  

We have already had campaign leadership demonstrate not being able to communicate their goals with the DM Empowerment issue we had on these boards.  What is it? What is it supposed to be? What is ok?  There were so many questions and campaign leadership didn't communicate how they wanted it to work. 

In addition, re: Skerrit's post. 
There is no way Ferol is making anything up. That guy never lies, ever.  

But can you blame Ferol for posting it? So much of how this campaign deals with problems boils down to someone asked Tulach about x issue at Gencon or Wolfstar sends him an email.  

Summary:

Rule 1: It's a game. Have fun.
Rule 2: Don't be an idiot. 

I think that just about covers it.   

Feb 5, 2010 -- 9:42AM, Mirtek wrote:

Feb 5, 2010 -- 4:31AM, Thanlis wrote:

Doesn't help. "Oh, look, it's another 3x3 room full of minion brutes." 

Why wouldn't that help? The problem is not with getting as much gold as they want, only with getting any gold at all without the accompanying XP and thus getting ahead of the XP-Gold-Curve.

So if they want to get their gold from rooms full of minions or even from skill-challenges without risk of losing a single hp that's not a problem at all as long as they have to take the appropriate for each piece of gold.

You make a good point, and on reflection I agree -- it would help a fair deal. You'd still be able to mow through an arbitrary number of modules in a very short space of time without taking magic item bundles; the abusive result is a bunch of paragon tier characters with 11 magic item slots created over the course of one or two weekends.

But you could do that with a complicit DM and official modules. "The monster decides to take a total defense action this turn." I think that mostly highlights the fact that there is nothing at all you can do to prevent abuse from a determined group, MYRE or not.

Feb 5, 2010 -- 9:52AM, Ferol_debtor_of_Torm wrote:

B) Walk away with 2200gp + bundle or more gold and the rest of the residuum from my oxidized weapon is simple gone.

Option B seems contrary to the spirit of LFR in that you are essentially just screwed out of an item.

Just so I'm clear, what was it about Rust Monster in a MYRE that sounded like a good idea to the Herald, the DM, and the players in the first place?



Why was the rust monster put there in the first place and why didn't you run?

Feb 5, 2010 -- 10:24AM, Mind_Flayer_Monk wrote:

In addition, re: Skerrit's post. 
There is no way Ferol is making anything up. That guy never lies, ever.  

But can you blame Ferol for posting it? So much of how this campaign deals with problems boils down to someone asked Tulach about x issue at Gencon or Wolfstar sends him an email.  

Oh the horrors of hearsay. I'll see about getting my source to post the exact conversation.

It does seem to be a general problem though that too much of the communication from our leadership is through hearsay at conventions or random internet postings (twitter much?).

Feb 5, 2010 -- 10:45AM, bons wrote:

Just so I'm clear, what was it about Rust Monster in a MYRE that sounded like a good idea to the Herald, the DM, and the players in the first place?

It seems like it must have been the irresistable smell of cheese.

Just so I'm clear, what was it about Rust Monster in a MYRE that sounded  like a good idea to the Herald, the DM, and the players in the first  place?

We've already established that this was being done to exploit the system.

Alternatively, it is possible to have a story that involves Rust Monsters that isn't necessarily meant to exploit them. I know in Nor Cal I read about a MYRE where the PCs are brought in to deal with rust monsters that are threatening a dwarven hold - a story that makes perfect sense.

Why was the rust monster put there in the first place and why didn't you  run?

Since we're judging things by intent, can you think of a single monster in 4e that you are intended to run from or suffer long term damage?

Feb 5, 2010 -- 9:53AM, -Aribeth- wrote:

At your earliest convenience, can you please post that guidance on how LFR should deal with Rust Monsters.

I have no official guidance.  While I was an LFR admin, it wasn't my call.  Now that I am not, it still isn't my call.

Some suggestions that an 8-year-old child could (and did) come up with after about 2 minutes of consideration:

--Don't use Rust Monster in MYRE adventures.  They are problematic in a shared-world campaign.
--If you use them, why are you doing it?  Is it to break the obvious spirit of the rules?  If so, no amount of rules or documentation can help.

DMs who are honestly using rust monsters with no intentions of breaking the rules should be able to handle the issue in a variety of ways: access to rituals that can recreate the lost items, only 20% return on items PCs don't really want, etc.  The main thing is that PCs should not be rewarded for succumbing to a rust monster.  They should not be used a shortcuts to gain gold, get better items, or otherwise circumvent the rules of the campaign.

Complaints about communication and the need for documentation may or may not be valid, but they are completely irrelevant here.  Immature people hurt the campaign by doing things that are obviously wrong, that they know are wrong, and they act like they are some kind of justified rebel trying to make a point.  They ain't Rosa Parks.  There's courage and grace in the face of injustice, and on the complete opposite end of the spectrum there's them.

Simple solution - - pretend you never had the item eaten by the rust monster. Restore the item to original form.

(And before you ask, if you only took an original bundle with the intent to exploit the system, return the item and restore the slot.)

Moving forward, don't look for ways to use MYRE to exploit/cheat the system.  (Use them as intended - if at all - to enhance the story, not to gain a mechanical advantage or exploit the system.)

Have fun!   

I think I like the new "unmuzzled" Shawn . . .  

Feb 5, 2010 -- 6:46AM, smerwin29 wrote:

Spoiler: Show

Thank you, my friend, for having the empathy to understand this and the willingness to mention it.

Everything that really needs to be said was already said by Sean Molley earlier in the thread.  I do feel it important to clear up a couple things.  I was in charge of creating the MYRE adventures, and I also wrote the Ecology of the Rust Monster article for Dragon.  I was acutely aware of the existence of rust monsters, and I was aware of how they could be used by the type of people who give gamers a bad name and make life difficult for others.  Both in the Ecology article and in the MYRE text, I had added text on how LFR should deal with rust monsters (and with the questionable types who feel the need to break the pretty obvious spirit of the rules in regards to them).  All such text never made it into the final versions.

The common assumption was simple: the LFR rules already handle this.  There is already a cap on how much treasure you can take out of an adventure.  You walk in with wealth equal to x gold pieces.  You leave the adventure with x + y gold pieces, where y equals no more than the maximum gold plus a bundle wealth. 

The other rule was "Don't be an idiot."  I would say that a surprisingly vast majority of the players have no trouble following this rule.  They understand that this is a game, and that the admins really bust their humps trying to provide content for the players and DMs to use to make this one big, homogenous campaign.  It's one thing to need to know how certain core rules work.  It's another entirely to go out of your way to be "that guy" and exploit every corner case, and fly in the face of common sense, and do things that are obviously not intended by the rules.

"But you can just add a paragraph here or there," says people, "and then it will be so clear."  Maybe.  But just adding one more paragraph here or there quickly turns into a page, and then 10 pages, and then 100 pages.  I've seen it happen.  And now this game that we are trying to grow and nurture becomes something new players actively avoid because not only do you have to learn the D&D rules, but they have to read that 100-page document covering all of the corner cases.  So the know-it-all, rules-lawyer types get what they want (the campaign staff wastes hours and days dealing with the problem and the know-it-alls can feel superior) at the expense of hundreds or thousands of potential players.

As others have said, this isn't really about the problematic nature of rust monsters.  There is an endless amount of hinky cheating that can be done.  This is about a tiny subset of players who embody some of the negative stereotypes of gamers: socially inept, thinking only of themselves within a context of a narrow set of rules, unable or unwilling to conceptualize the effect of their actions on others and on the campaign as a whole.  It is really just like the gamer hygiene problem, except for the fact that is a lack of intellectual and social hygiene rather than physical.  But it doesn't lessen the stench.

I don't know why you guys just don't add this to the CCG:

"While adventuring in this Living Campaign, on the chance that an item that you have found from a parcel bundle is lost, stolen or destroyed by some means throughout the course of the adventure it is returned in its entirety at the conclusion of the adventure. i.e - Your +4 Harsh Song Blade is eaten by a Rust Monster and becomes an equal amount of residium. Enchant Magic Item can restore it to any enchantment you wish for the remainder of the adventure, but at the conclusion it is restored to its original form."


And on a side note for Shawn: Show

Feb 5, 2010 -- 10:49AM, Ferol_debtor_of_Torm wrote:

Oh the horrors of hearsay. I'll see about getting my source to post the exact conversation.

It does seem to be a general problem though that too much of the communication from our leadership is through hearsay at conventions or random internet postings (twitter much?).

A conversation with anyone doesn't equal a rule (though I suppose you might clarify a specific situation involving yourself or your table with someone). All the rules SHOULD (and I realize this hasn't been perfect in the past, but now that the Globals are the only ones in charge now, it should improve) be published on the RPGA website or the LFR community page by a Global Admin.

As an aside from this thread, I also think people are confusing shawns/seans. Shawn Merwin was a Global Admin and was in charge of the MYREs when he was. Sean Molly is still a Global Admin and he's generally overworked and abused.

Feb 5, 2010 -- 11:56AM, smerwin29 wrote:

--If you use them, why are you doing it?  Is it to break the obvious spirit of the rules?  If so, no amount of rules or documentation can help.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't try. There have been plenty of good suggestions on how fix this problem within the rules. Those in charge could implement any number of them to help deal with this.

Feb 5, 2010 -- 4:31AM, Thanlis wrote:

Feb 4, 2010 -- 11:10PM, Mirtek wrote:

Feb 4, 2010 -- 9:57AM, soccerref73 wrote:

But if you drastically reduce the XP award to a token amount and don't reduce the gold award,

Why not just make the intended XP/gold ration of LFR a hard rule for Myrealms?

Doesn't help. "Oh, look, it's another 3x3 room full of minion brutes." 

Well, if you're going to worry about easy encounters, that horse left the barn a long time ago. There are enough official easy LFR adventures that you could easily level up a fair ways playing only the easy adventures. I'm not knocking those adventures--some of the easier ones such as Corm 1-1 are actually among the better LFR adventures--but if you are worried that players will level up to X/Y/Z point without facing "sufficient" risks, players and DMs who want to do that can do so even without MYRE adventures.

If the xp/gold ratio were a hard rule for MYRE adventures and rust monster exploits were eliminated, it would at least get rid of the primary means to use MYRE to generate characters with excessive wealth for their level. And that is what is potentially a problem. If Joe Schmoe turns up at a game day with a character who played to level 8 without facing any really challenging encounters, whether he did that in MYRE or standard adventures, he's still got a level 8 character which should be in the same ballpark as all the other level 8 characters at the table. He may get himself or his party killed because he doesn't know how to play the character when his decisions actually matter, but that's a separate problem.

Feb 5, 2010 -- 10:24AM, Mind_Flayer_Monk wrote:

The documentation is important.  If the documentation needs to be longer, it needs to be longer. This isn't about people trying to stroke their ego with the need for pages and pages of rules. This is about an organization having clearer methods and goals. Campaign leadership must then communicate these goals to the rest of the organization.  

We have already had campaign leadership demonstrate not being able to communicate their goals with the DM Empowerment issue we had on these boards.  What is it? What is it supposed to be? What is ok?  There were so many questions and campaign leadership didn't communicate how they wanted it to work.

This. Very much this.

I've posted a number of times about campaign responsibilities and needs. I don't speak from a position of some peanut gallery sideline quarterback - having been the 'rules guy' for two different living campaigns, I know damn well it's a lot of work.

It's also a part of the job.

Sometime the work just needs to be done.

I know it sounds perhaps rude and unappreciative of the existing work the LFR folks have done. But realise the criticism stems from a real concern for the campaign system.

I reiterate my earlier comments in this thread.

My earlier comments about the futility of 'chastizing players' for doing stuff that isn't actually againt the rules isn't from the perspective of someone who might be affected as a player. It's a viewpoint from someone's who's been on the prosecuting end of the equation.

You must assume that if an option is allowed, it WILL be used. This has nothing to do with how 'good' or 'bad' players behave. This is simply the nature of game systems. Allowing the option and then hoping folks won't use it is simply foolish. If you don't want the option to be used, don't allow it in the first place.

You punish for actual infractions. Doing otherwise weakens your position of authority, and damages the trust and respect the player base has for you. This is not about "letting people get away with it". Punitive measures must always come from actual rules, not from arbitrary nebulous "intended" ones.



-karma

This is where I come in and say:


And a banana congac, [Insert 5 letter word]!!!!!

Mr. Merwin,

Thank you for your response to my request.  I actually thought you had actual written guidance when I first read your first post but the response you posted will suffice.

To:  The Powers that be, Global Admins, LFR Community

To put one more log in the fire, I do hope that you all realize that this issue of MYREs and Rust Monsters is only the tip of the iceberg which I personally call the "Perfect Storm of Brokeness".  I personally believe in the future that there will be more situations like this because as LFR matures and accepts every single bit of support material that WOTC puts out, there will be components benign individually but when combined become another storm of brokeness.

In all my years of playing and DMing, one thing always rings true:  Never underestimate the resourcefulness and ingenuity of the player.

Leadership and communication are your friends, being naive that player behavior will 100% be honorable though while well intentioned, is a path to the abyss.

Feb 6, 2010 -- 7:43AM, KarmaInferno wrote:

You punish for actual infractions. Doing otherwise weakens your position of authority, and damages the trust and respect the player base has for you. This is not about "letting people get away with it". Punitive measures must always come from actual rules, not from arbitrary nebulous "intended" ones.

Care to tell me HOW we will punish players? Ultimately we can implement all the rules we want, but at some point all we are doing is punishing the honest players who don't need the rules in the first place and the casual player who don't even care about these corner cases but see a 100-page long document. Mind you, there is this rule about not being a jerk at the table and that rule applies to a supprisingly amount of things some of you demand a specific rule for.

As for the rustmonster issue, what arbitrary punishment? All we are saying that using the rustmonster to generate wealth is against the spirit of the rules. You are not helping this campaign if you do abuse the rule for the reasons cited by the other globals. People talk about social punishment, but that is no different from how most players around here react to those "jerk"-situations (people stop playing with you). Nobody mentioned anything about campaign wide punishment.

Feb 7, 2010 -- 1:25PM, -Aribeth- wrote:

In all my years of playing and DMing, one thing always rings true:  Never underestimate the resourcefulness and ingenuity of the player.

Leadership and communication are your friends, being naive that player behavior will 100% be honorable though while well intentioned, is a path to the abyss.

The abuse of a specific campaign component (in this case MYRE) is not the same as the inclusion of material that creates "broken" combinations. The first is something campaign management can try to deal with, but only up to a point. The second is something that is in the hands of R&D. The Organized Play gamers' experiences are communicated to R&D, hence the big errata like you saw just before Christmast, but that is the extend of our influence. Ultimately though I prefer to focus on the average gamer. If the power-gamer wants a challenge to have fun that is as much their own responsibility as that of the DM, authors and campaign management.

Feb 8, 2010 -- 4:07AM, Madfox11 wrote:

If the power-gamer player* wants a challenge to have fun that is as much their own responsibility as that of the DM, authors and campaign management.

To me this points to the root of many if not all problems we find ourselves debating. 

For a group of people (hopefully a vocal minority, yes I cherish my naivety) there seems to be no sense of shared responsibility anymore. It has been replaced by a sense of consumerism and entitlement where the expectation, nay demand, is to be taken care of and pampered in any way possible. Anything wrong, broken or not fully how they want it must be fixed by the DM, the Campaign management or WOTC. And it must not only be fixed, they will tell you HOW it should be fixed.

Honestly, it is getting old. If there is anything to be fixed I feel that is it. 

* - change to replace power-gamer with player is mine.

I (recently found out) know a few of the players that did the rust monster mod, and none of them are jerks at all. They are all nice guys, good people to have around the table, and very helpful to new people.

I have DMed for and played at tables DMed by these people. No problems, everything went well. They also police each other to make sure everyone has their numbers right.  

While its true some of their PCs can knock your monster prone and slide it 7 square when it provokes OAs, many people can do that. To think these people are jerks or antisocial is incorrect.

They DM and help make LFR work in their local community.  If I make conventions and game store play a hassle for everyone because I decided to stop playing with, refusing to DM for, or not play at tables these guys are DMing at, I am making myself a jerk.  Or I could just walk away and not play at all, but I don't want to punish myself like that. 

Feb 7, 2010 -- 1:25PM, -Aribeth- wrote:

To put one more log in the fire, I do hope that you all realize that this issue of MYREs and Rust Monsters is only the tip of the iceberg which I personally call the "Perfect Storm of Brokeness".  I personally believe in the future that there will be more situations like this because as LFR matures and accepts every single bit of support material that WOTC puts out, there will be components benign individually but when combined become another storm of brokeness.

In all my years of playing and DMing, one thing always rings true:  Never underestimate the resourcefulness and ingenuity of the player.

Leadership and communication are your friends, being naive that player behavior will 100% be honorable though while well intentioned, is a path to the abyss.

Thank you for making my point for me.  Let me walk you through how I see this issue working, based on my experience working on 3 different Organized Play campaigns over the last 10 years, and as a player and DM in countless home campaigns since about 1978.

To the best of my knowledge, LFR and other Organized Play offering exist to provide content to players and give those players a reason--and more importantly an avenue--to play the game and buy product.  Chris Tulach, who is the Organized Play Content Manager on the RPG side of WotC, every year has to justify to the higher up who approve the budget and the programs he oversees.  Part of that justification involves nice shiny charts that show how many players are playing Organized Play content.  Then that information gets displayed in various ways: brand new players, returning players, players who play x number of times a year, etc. 

From what limited information I gleaned over the last 10 years, and this is my own opinion, there were three major obstacles to getting and keeping players in the previous Organized Play campaigns: getting enough DMs to run games, offering too much content that was unavailable to all players, and producing a vast amount of rules and paperwork that acted as a barrier to entry.  With LFR, WotC attempted to remove as many of those barriers as possible.

And I think it is safe to say that it has been an overwhelming success.  The play numbers, which WotC seemed to be happy with in previous campaigns, grew even more.   I heard countless players saying that the barriers that kept them from playing previous campaign--be it paperwork or too many rules or whatever--were no longer there.  Most of the relief and happiness at the new direction of LFR was tied to moving the "DMing duties" from the campaign staff to the people actually running the games at the table: empowering the DMs to make changes to the adventure to make a better play experience, giving DMs the ability to create their own adventures to help create a more organic campaign experience, let the DM decide how unclear rules items will work at their tables, etc.

For literally 99.9% of the LFR players, this is exactly what they want.  They want to have the ability to take a pre-existing adventure and some very basic campaign rules, and they want to have a D&D game for 4 hours without a lot of overhead.  If problems come up at the table, they want to be able to handle those problems at the table without the need to refer to page 127 of the "Guide to how D&D should be played in LFR."  It is that 0.1% who, for whatever reason, cannot take part in an enjoyable game without turning the session into a prolonged rules debate.  So they clamor for the campaign staff to make a ruling on just this one thing.  And then just this one other thing.  And then this other thing.  (By the way, the campaign staff does not "accept" every bit of rules that WotC puts out.  The word "accept" implies there is a choice.  What is, is.)  Of course, those 0.1% really don't want an answer most of the time.  They just want to move the argument from the table to the forums because the argument is the hobby for them.  :-)

If any sort of case-by-case rules explication ever happened in the campaign, then all of the gains that have been made by LFR in reducing overhead and eliminating barriers to entry get reversed.  Now new players not only need to learn the D&D rules, but they need to learn 10 pages, 50 pages, and then 150 pages of extra stuff.  We have seen it happen in other campaigns.  It isn't pretty, and it ends up choking a campaign.  If there is really a path to the abyss for a campaign, that is the route to take.  And trying to call making more rules "communication" is not fair, because it is the opposite of what communication is supposed to do.

No one is naive enough to expect all players to do the right thing.  The question is, do you drive 1000 people away from the campaign with extra rules to handle something that a few people are doing willfully doing wrong.  The rules lawyers--and by that I mean the type of people who come to these forums to argue that "asking permission" is not the same thing as "gaining permission"--are like parasites on a healthy organism.  The campaign staff could try to eliminate them by killing off other parts of the organism, and by doing so lose players.  The problem is that these parasites never stop.  The more rules you make, the more they have to feed on.

If you are running or playing in a home campaign with 7 people, and 1 person is being an argumentative jerk, the first step is indeed to communicate with the problem player.  However, if that person continues to be a jerk, I think most reasonable people would say to jettison the 1 player so that the game isn't ruined for the other 6 people.  LFR should be no different.  The campaign staff should not ruin the game and drive away hundreds of potential players by heaping on restrictions and making thousands of extra words of required reading just to deal with a few people: a few people who would just take those thousands of extra words and just find a way to be jerks about those anyway.

When I mention the "jerk"-rule I do not only refer to misbehaving at a table. I am referring how a player treats the game as a whole. These players are giving them selves an unfair advantage over other players and as such they can ruin the fun of others at the table. Mind you, behavior like this is also a sure sign that the player does not like the same gaming style as I do and hence chances are there is going to be friction from other things as well.

As for being a jerk myself when I would refuse to DM/play with certain players that all depends on the dislike I have for somebody. Nobody is served when a player is constantly gritting their teeth when playing a game of D&D. It has a tendency to ruin the game for all at the table, even more so when that player is the DM. Luckily I am pretty tollerant as a DM, which I suppose is true for all people who regularly run games at gamedays and conventions.

Feb 8, 2010 -- 4:02AM, Madfox11 wrote:

Feb 6, 2010 -- 7:43AM, KarmaInferno wrote:

You punish for actual infractions. Doing otherwise weakens your position of authority, and damages the trust and respect the player base has for you. This is not about "letting people get away with it". Punitive measures must always come from actual rules, not from arbitrary nebulous "intended" ones.

Care to tell me HOW we will punish players? Ultimately we can implement all the rules we want, but at some point all we are doing is punishing the honest players who don't need the rules in the first place and the casual player who don't even care about these corner cases but see a 100-page long document. Mind you, there is this rule about not being a jerk at the table and that rule applies to a supprisingly amount of things some of you demand a specific rule for.

The 'how' is a seperate issue. I was discussing 'when'.

My point is fairly simple. I thought I stated it clearly, but here goes again.

- If players violate an actual rule, they are at fault and deserve whatever 'justice' comes their way.

- If the players use a legal rules option that happens to be problematic, it is the RULES that are at fault, not the players.

I don't tend to blame player choice in using what legal yet "clearly not intended" because

- a) What is "intended" is subjective depending on your point of view - I don't know of that many people that considered Avengers wearing leather was "unintended", for example. It is simply unwise to assume that everyone else thinks the same way you do. If you intend for a rule to mean "A", make the rule say "A", don't assume players will magically "get it".

"Don't be a jerk", while perhaps laudable, is entirely subjective. The tolerance for what it means to "be a jerk" varies. Some groups are fairly intolerant of funny business. Others embrace it wholly and may actually expect it. Most vary somewhere in between.

Likewise, the idea of the "spirit of the rules" is also subjective. Get ten people in a room to discuss the spirit of the rules, and you will end up with thirteen different opinions. Many of those opinions will be reasonable, even if they are different.

- b) I subscribe the the concept of sociology and herd behavior. People in groups behave a certain way and really cannot be faulted for such behaviors. In the specific arena of games, players will always end up utilizing 'optimal' allowed rules options to some degree. Such behavior is simply inevitable in groups. Railing against such behavior is therefore futile. Rulesmakers need to expect such behavior, not blindly pretend it won't happen.


I can understand the desire to have a simpler rules set. If you want a simpler rules set, that's fine. However, simpler rules sets have one signifiant drawback - they inherantly do not address details well.

Either you increase complexity to deal with these cases, or you simply must accept that some stuff will fall through the cracks.

Refusing to address these detail cases within the rules, but still complaining that they happen, is just futile.

Feb 8, 2010 -- 4:02AM, Madfox11 wrote:

As for the rustmonster issue, what arbitrary punishment? All we are saying that using the rustmonster to generate wealth is against the spirit of the rules. You are not helping this campaign if you do abuse the rule for the reasons cited by the other globals. People talk about social punishment, but that is no different from how most players around here react to those "jerk"-situations (people stop playing with you). Nobody mentioned anything about campaign wide punishment.

I was not addressing the campaign staff specifically.

There have been a few people here and elsewhere that have expressed a desire to see such folks face justice in some way. I was addressing those folks.

I do have sympathy for the campaign staff for one thing (among others). They aren't completely in control. Much of the rules set is in the hands of WotC and the campaign staff has little say in changing or altering those rules.



-karma

Well, I am going to jump on this early and reply to smerwin29.

I disagree with you. I don't think 1000 players will be scared away by a larger campaign document. I think most people are going to use the document as a reference.  I am not attacking you here, but only your logic.

The size of the dictionary has not scared me away from using the English language.
The size of my math textbook has not scared me away from learning how to use the chain rule for taking derivatives. 
The size of the readme.txt has not scared me away from using it to solve installation problems.
The size of the FAQ has not kept me from seeing if my question is answered in it.
The campaign documents never scared me away from Living Greyhawk/Spycraft/Arcanis/Pathfinder.

If I am not using MyRealms, I probably won't look at its rules. If I am using them, I will.

People are posting here because people want to argue? People are posting here because problems are out there and we need help. I realize this is a neverending circle-similar problems came up in LG as well and in pretty much any living campaign.  These problems are not going to disappear. 

I know campaign staff probably didn't want to write anything here as well because they probably figured it would just turn into some long time consuming back and forth post with people that like to argue. You can call this arguing if you want, but I consider this post a request for help.  
I only want to help make this campaign work.

Feb 8, 2010 -- 6:40AM, smerwin29 wrote:

If any sort of case-by-case rules explication ever happened in the campaign, then all of the gains that have been made by LFR in reducing overhead and eliminating barriers to entry get reversed.  Now new players not only need to learn the D&D rules, but they need to learn 10 pages, 50 pages, and then 150 pages of extra stuff.  We have seen it happen in other campaigns.  It isn't pretty, and it ends up choking a campaign.

Which is why the "correct" response to the specific issue of  Rust Monsters isn't a Rust Monster rule.  But that doesn't mean that clarifiying the treasure bundle rules ("treasure bundles are the only allowed way to obtain magic items above your level", "treasure bundles are the only way to increase your character's net worth") wouldn't still be a good idea.

(I agree, keeping the word count down is crucial)

And I disagree that informal communication is a bad idea... You can't require customers to keep up with some message board to play, but that doesn't mean there can't be additional engagement for customers that want it.

In a way, I wonder if the final solution to this will simply to abandon Living Whatever's Next presence at conventions.

I don't think anyone would feel the need to get a ruling on any of this if we knew we would never be playing in the same game as the people in another region who do things a different way. Region X likes rust monsters and hates challenges. Region Y skips roleplay, skips challenges, and gets serious on the tactical aspect. Region Z plays by a style that seems closer to the Admin playstyle.

If the whole goal was to get people playing, provide them some support in the forms of adventures designed around a time limit with consistent variety (a couple RPs, a couple skill challenges, a cople fights and a xp/treasure bundle), maybe it's best just to abandon any expectation that these people want the same things out of it and the expectation that these people are capable of sitting together at a table at a convention and having a good time.

Seriously, if some of these people were at my local gamestore, we'd just stick them in a table together and ignore them. I suspect in some of their regions, there are players who don't like their style and order mods for their home groups themselves instead of going to the store where these people are. (Which, if it's an accurate suspicion, makes the "public first" changes less than desirable.)

It's funny. I joined the local LFR because I wanted my son and I to play characters together at cons and while I like the local LFR people and have a surprisingly good time with them, my desire to play a LFR game at a national convention is pretty much non-existent at this point. I simply don't want to sit at the same table with someone who wants to rust monster their way past having modules be challenging. Neither me nor that player is going to have a good time playing with the other. I'll keep going to the local group because I like them, but I think we'll find something else to do at larger conventions.

Feb 8, 2010 -- 7:47AM, bons wrote:

It's funny. I joined the local LFR because I wanted my son and I to play characters together at cons and while I like the local LFR people and have a surprisingly good time with them, my desire to play a LFR game at a national convention is pretty much non-existant at this point. I simply don't want to sit at the same table with someone who wants to rust monster their way past having modules be challenging. Neither me nor that player is going to have a good time playing with the other. I'll keep going to the local group because I like them, but I think we'll find something else to do at larger conventions.

I wouldn't worry too much about this.  I played a LOT of games at DDXP, and had a really good time.  If anyone had artificially twinked up their characters, I really couldn't tell.  I think what you are seeing here is a small but very vocal minority trying to get people to admit that they are oh-so-clever.

This year was my first time going to a convention, and my only regret about going to DDXP this time is that I didn't bring my son.  I'm going to start putting money aside now so that I can afford two plane tickets next year, the actual people playing there were all great, even though some cleric builds make fights a bit too easy.

Hi Bons,
I think LFR and Pathfinder are actually significant draws for the conventions so I don't think they will be abandoned (did you mean you personally will abandon them?).

I think convention play is very rewarding and fun. I look forward to it and always have a good time. Also, on Saturdays, you tend to get many more casual players that are new to LFR and just looking to get in on a casual game in between the dealers room, lunch, and an authors presentation. This is a chance to explain lots of good things about LFR and how it can be integrated into a home campaign in all kinds of neat ways. Or what local FLGS is having events, what group meets at the StuckeyBowl for a game day once a month etc.

Lots of these people come back to play again and I always found this one of the most rewarding things about convention DMing.

Also your post reminded me of another post regarding the Living Greyhawk finale and some problems people had with it. I think you would find it interesting. Its rather long, but still interesting I feel.
community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/758...

Make sure not to post in the thread, prevent thread necromancy!
 




 

Feb 8, 2010 -- 8:09AM, Atras wrote:

Feb 8, 2010 -- 7:47AM, bons wrote:

It's funny. I joined the local LFR because I wanted my son and I to play characters together at cons and while I like the local LFR people and have a surprisingly good time with them, my desire to play a LFR game at a national convention is pretty much non-existant at this point. I simply don't want to sit at the same table with someone who wants to rust monster their way past having modules be challenging. Neither me nor that player is going to have a good time playing with the other. I'll keep going to the local group because I like them, but I think we'll find something else to do at larger conventions.

I wouldn't worry too much about this.  I played a LOT of games at DDXP, and had a really good time.  If anyone had artificially twinked up their characters, I really couldn't tell.  I think what you are seeing here is a small but very vocal minority trying to get people to admit that they are oh-so-clever.

This is my experience as well, and what I used too many words to try to say earlier.  I go to local public game days, and I see people having fun and handling rules questions gracefully.  I go to large conventions, and I see people having fun and handling rules questions gracefully.  I get invited to some local private events to run games, and I see people having fun and handling  rules questions gracefully.  In these places, there are never any "calls for help" that need to be answered to make LFR run smoothly.  They were able to handle the original incarnation of "DM Empowerment" without any clarifications.  They can write and run and play MYRE adventures without needing to try to give the concept a bad name.

The campaign staff is forced to deal with the problem children, because no good deed goes unpunished.  I do feel bad for the members of the LFR community who are forced to deal with these people on a regular basis, and in my experience it does help to tell them that their style of play might be better suited at a table with people like themselves.  That way, as was mentioned already, they can hopefully all end up at the same table to twist the rules and argue about how things should be done (and then meeting on the forums to discuss it further), and letting the people who just want to have fun playing the game have fun playing the game.

Well I am a frontliner in this LFR organization and I am not posting anything because I am trying to feel clever or can't figure something out.  I deal with "troublesome players" here and there I try to make everything work for everyone.  I could just walk away and play with a group of players I like, it happens all the time ask Grandpoohbah.

I have far more to lose than smerwin by hanging my neck out here in public as a nobody. 

This is a problem thats come up so I feel its worth posting about. The problem can be solved by writing up some clearer documentation.

 

It's only a minority of players and players who regularly playtest for LFR -- you know; some people that I know in the community -- that actually see this whole rust monster thing as a big problem.

(Look, I can mention people that I know, also)

In my case a +4 Harsh Song Blade and +4 Summoned Armor became +4 Jagged and +4 Dwarven -- a down grade and upgrade (18 to 17, 16 to 17 level). This is hardly what I call "Perfect Items" for my character build.

Feb 8, 2010 -- 9:30AM, Mind_Flayer_Monk wrote:

The problem can be solved by writing up some clearer documentation.

Amen to that.

Seriously, instead of having a lot of silly arguments about RAI vs RAW (rules as intended vs rules as written), how about we just take it that the rules as written ARE the rules as intended?

Because you know, it's like - when someone tells you something, rather than trying to twist whatever they say around and put some weird spin on it, sometimes you should just take what was said at face value.  This is what I consider "normal" for regular discussions, but especially so for manuals and rulebooks!

At DDXP, I brought this up, but I kept running into what I and some others refer to as the kool-aid mentality - which is "hey, it's not a problem, because we say it is not a problem, just have fun!"

I think, though, that as easy of a solution that is, that there is a problem in that rules as INTENDED are really NOT what is actually WRITTEN.  Heck, game designers walking around at DDXP kept saying "that's not what I meant."  and heads of various departments kept saying "Oh, but that's just not cool, people shouldn't do that." (in spite of what they are explicitly allowed to do in terms of what was written).

In the end, I think we can't really have a productive discussion based on what was INTENDED, because there will be god-awful number of interpretations of intent!  Only when the rules are tightened up and run based on what was WRITTEN can we have relatively argument-free games - in a context in which you are getting players that approach the game from different mentalities.

I know clarifying rules won't end argument, but I think it's a step in the right direction.  A big, good step.

Now - I know that Shawn Merwin commented recently on this thread - I will say that he did mention earlier that the stuff he WANTED to put in for rust monsters got edited out.  And as he mentioned, editors have to deal with page limits, etc. etc.  So I think that really, people ARE aware of the problem.

The question is, what can be done to fix it?  I'd say - email Customer Service!  I think that's the correct and appropriate response.  Discussion on forums is well and good, but forum discussion hasn't changed things so far.

--

In response to those that say "oh, rust monsters ruin my realms" - look.  As a power gaming optimizer myself, I can tell you that rust monsters really are not going to break My Realms open.  Oh, there's a fair advantage in gold, but all in all - it doesn't break characters as ridiculously as you might think.  At low level, you don't want to change your items to residuum (sp?) anyways.  At medium to high level, your low level items still maintain their utility - and by the point you really get high enough to cash in your low level magical item that you didn't want, the 80% gold difference is - well, not inconsequential, but it isn't anything to compare with your current magical item value.

Frankly, it's the *system itself* that is open to exploitation - consider that you can have MYRE adventures written so players are awarded full treasure but half XP, effectively breaking the XP-gold ratio anyways!  As I think Shawn Merwin, or perhaps that mind flaying monk pointed out.

At any rate - I think we all understand that the system is open to abuse.  Can we really shame the players for taking advantage of the system?  I say - no.  As long as it is allowed by the rules, the players aren't doing anything wrong.  Change the rules, change the game.

Personally, I think WotC made a step in the *right* direction with the new retraining rules.  Oh, it allows for some cheese, but nothing's worse than realizing your build sucks after you poured 200 hours into a character, and realizing it's basically unsalvageable.  I know some players that are going to be able to use their 14-in-main-stat characters now - and it's NOT just one or two I know that are like that.

So in sum -

1.  Rust monsters are OK, I say.

2.  If people want to change the rules, they should try to agree on what strictures they want to put on the players, then try to gather some support, then email Customer Service.  I think there *may* be a gap between RAI and RAW, but that's not so much a "Rust Monster" problem as it is a *Rule* problem.

3.  Shawn Merwin did teh My Realms.  I would send a cake, because I think My Realms is Teh Greatest Idea Evar.  (But seriously.  Cake.  Also, serious about great idea.)  Don't have an address though . . . or know Shawn's preferences in cake . . .

Feb 8, 2010 -- 10:28AM, Newpaintbrush wrote:

In the end, I think we can't really have a productive discussion based on what was INTENDED, because there will be god-awful number of interpretations of intent!  Only when the rules are tightened up and run based on what was WRITTEN can we have relatively argument-free games - in a context in which you are getting players that approach the game from different mentalities.

Or people can go all the way back to the first rule: The DM is the arbiter of the game.  If the DM and the player view an unclearly written rule differently, the DM should make the decision on how it will work, and the player should move on.

"Cheese"-cake.

Feb 8, 2010 -- 7:11AM, Mind_Flayer_Monk wrote:

Well, I am going to jump on this early and reply to smerwin29.

I disagree with you. I don't think 1000 players will be scared away by a larger campaign document. I think most people are going to use the document as a reference.  I am not attacking you here, but only your logic.

Did you play LG?  It had pages of "this is not allowed", "you can't do that" or "you can do this only if you have access".  All in an attempt to better balance the game.  It didn't work.  People still managed to find highly effective builds and combinations.  Meanwhile we had to read through pages of documents when building characters and had to haul around boxes of documents with random signatures to "prove" our characters were legal.  The "living paperwork" syndrome of LG drove a lot of people away.

Getting 100% agreement amongst gamers is virtually impossible.  More documentation just leads to more arguement about correct interpretation of the documentation.

Allen.

Feb 8, 2010 -- 10:45AM, aljergensen wrote:

More documentation just leads to more arguement about correct interpretation of the documentation.

Allen.

Allen, I think you're arguing a different point.  Who said we need to lug around crates, or write reams of documentation? All I think is being asked for is some carefully edited, concise documentation so these problems of ambiguity can be resolved.  Which is something I very much agree with, and that I think, on reflection, you'll agree with too. 

For Atras - yes.  But as correct as you are, I for one, would prefer that the rules be clarified.  Rules errata are getting rather long, but I think it's *far* better that we *have* them than *not*.

Feb 8, 2010 -- 10:28AM, Newpaintbrush wrote:

At any rate - I think we all understand that the system is open to abuse.  Can we really shame the players for taking advantage of the system?  I say - no.  As long as it is allowed by the rules, the players aren't doing anything wrong.  Change the rules, change the game.

People keep saying this -- but it doesn't get any more true by repetition.

Let's look at MMOs; those are fun. MMOs have perfectly defined rules which apply to every player in the game in the exact same way. There are no questions of interpretation, because the rules are code. You can't say "oh, that weapon was supposed to do frost damage." It either does frost damage or it doesn't.

Sometimes the engineers who code MMOs make mistakes. Every MMO ever released has bugs. Everyone knows this, everyone accepts it. Sometimes those bugs allow players to do things that weren't intended.

Blizzard is the biggest MMO company in the world. They have 11 million players; in comparison, LFR is a tiny teeny little group of people.

When you take advantage of a bug in the game, Blizzard doesn't say "oh, it was allowed by the rules we put into the game, so you aren't doing anything wrong." Blizzard bans you. Blizzard believes that its players are capable of distinguishing between intended behavior and unintended behavior, and it expects its players to make that distinction and act appropriately. If you are playing at a high level, and you fail to make that distinction, you get banned. You probably complain about it, and sometimes you have a valid point, but you're still banned.

WoW also has Terms of Service. Those terms say, among other things:

Certain acts go beyond what is "fair" and are considered serious violations of these Terms of Use. Those acts include, but are not necessarily limited to, the following... anything that Blizzard considers contrary to the "essence" of the Game.

Now, that's language which is open to interpretation. But you know whose interpretation counts? Blizzard's. 

A few posts ago, Sean Molley told us that rust monster abuse was "a cheap metagame excuse to justify doing something that people intuitively realize is against the spirit of the rules." WotC is not going to ban anyone for rust monster abuse; I'm not sure there's any practical way to do that. But it's ridiculous to pretend that people who know what he said and who continue to abuse rust monsters shouldn't be ashamed of themselves. It's also ridiculous to claim that you have to outline every single possible rules violation. The biggest MMO company in the world doesn't do that, and life proceeds just fine.

Mr. Merwin,

Even though I understand your opinion, I do disagree with the notion of pages and reams of rules that need to be added to LFR.  As Newpaintbrush points out, I think myself and others are looking for some concise documentation to address this thread's issue as well as others that may appear in the future.

Thanlis,

Your point is well taken but let me direct you to another point from your Blizzard example.  Blizzard also FIXES the bug which we are discussing here with MYRE/Rustmonster issue... a fix for that.

Just for the record, I do acknowledge this issue as something to discuss but it is my opinion that it is not really a big deal, because I take the attitude that if a player needs to go that length of action to keep up with me at the table, let them.  I will get mine eventually... usually through superior play.

Feb 8, 2010 -- 11:49AM, -Aribeth- wrote:

Your point is well taken but let me direct you to another point from your Blizzard example.  Blizzard also FIXES the bug which we are discussing here with MYRE/Rustmonster issue... a fix for that.

Sure, but Blizzard is never going to define "anything that Blizzard considers contrary to the essence of the game." The catch-all will always be present.

Also, I pay Blizzard fifteen bucks a month, as a result of which Blizzard can employ a staff of hundreds if not thousands of people. WotC is currently giving me hundreds of thousands of words of content for free, which is quite a different state of affairs. 

Feb 8, 2010 -- 11:25AM, Thanlis wrote:

When you take advantage of a bug in the game, Blizzard doesn't say "oh, it was allowed by the rules we put into the game, so you aren't doing anything wrong." Blizzard bans you. Blizzard believes that its players are capable of distinguishing between intended behavior and unintended behavior, and it expects its players to make that distinction and act appropriately. If you are playing at a high level, and you fail to make that distinction, you get banned. You probably complain about it, and sometimes you have a valid point, but you're still banned.

Actually, they started out that way years ago, but they really don't do that anymore. They realized the same thing I did when I was campaign rules-guy for Procampur and Shining Jewel.

They have, as have most other MMO companies, switched largely to a "fix the problem and ignore the few players that abused the problem before we fixed it" attitude. At most they've been removing rewards from folks that didn't earn them properly. Actual punishments, banning and the like, are being reserved for actual rules infractions.

Not too long ago there was a bug that mistakenly made some high end gear available for free or very cheaply. There was of course a huge run on said items. The servers went down a few hours later to 'hotfix' the problem.

The offending gear simply vanishd from player inventories. No bans were handed out. The most you saw was some folks on the forums there complaining "Aww, my stuff is gone."

The Terms of Service are still the same because they want to be ABLE to ban when they feel like it. In practice, they hardly ever do so for bug exploiting these days unless it's MASSIVELY egrarious.



-karma

Feb 8, 2010 -- 12:22PM, KarmaInferno wrote:

Actually, they started out that way years ago, but they really don't do that anymore. They realized the same thing I did when I was campaign rules-guy for Procampur and Shining Jewel.

They have, as have most other MMO companies, switched largely to a "fix the problem and ignore the few players that abused the problem before we fixed it" attitude. At most they've been removing rewards from folks that didn't earn them properly. Actual punishments, banning and the like, are being reserved for actual rules infractions.

You're somewhat misinformed. On Feb. 4th, 25 members of Ensidia (arguably one of the top five guilds world-wide) were banned for 72 hours for exploiting during a world-first kill. This is a particularly interesting case insofar as the specific exploit was quite possibly accidental; one of their rogues was tossing crafted consumable explosives non-stop during the fight, which is currently a normal way to raise one's DPS. However, this interacted with the specific encounter in an unexpected way which trivialized the fight. 

Blizzard doesn't ban en masse, but they do ban when they think it's necessary, and they do not accept "we didn't know" as a justification. This does not appear to harm the popularity of their game in any significant way.  

Yeah, that one was interesting, but it also serves to reinforce one of my other notions about what it takes to get Blizz motivated to react - public spectacle.

Blizz has a history of smacking down folks that publically admit or expose a bug. It seems strange, but I've seen a lot of cases where the public whistleblower got banned, but folks that were quietly exploiting bugs simply saw the bug go away with no punitive effects. Which leads me to the suspicion that Blizz hits the public examples because they are, in fact, public, and can be used as a example to keep the other players in line.

Their consistency of punitive action seems schizophrenic at a lot of times.

Now that I think about it, this really does reinforce my comment about punishing only for actual rules infractions. Over in WoW, bug exploiting IS specifically against the rules.



-karma

This thread got me thinking to back when I was an aforementioned Rules Guy.

I used to have these group of players in the campaigns I helped out in I privately nicknamed "woodpeckers".

Woodpeckers are annoying little birds, especially for homeowners. They make a huge banging racket hammering their heads on my house and making holes in the wood siding.

Like the woodpeckers, the players in question were annoying. They were the most hardcore optimizers. They'd push the rules to extreme limits.

Woodpeckers, however, don't bang on houses for no reason. They're after insects and grubs in the wood. You can't blame them for banging away, it's in their nature.

Similarly, those players push the rules to optimize, because that is part of their preferred style of play is. It's in their nature. The actual people in this group changes all the time, but such groups are in every large scale game.

I ended up keeping an eye on these players, like I ended up actually watching out for woodpeckers, not because I wanted to punish them, but because they'd invariably lead me to the locations of probems. Rules problems in the case of the players, insect problems for the woodpeckers.

I don't mind either of 'em much anymore. Since I know they're both inevitable, and I know their natures, I can plan for them, even use them.



-karma

Feb 8, 2010 -- 1:09PM, KarmaInferno wrote:

Now that I think about it, this really does reinforce my comment about punishing only for actual rules infractions. Over in WoW, bug exploiting IS specifically against the rules.

Yah. I don't think anyone should be banned for rust monster abuse, and I don't think WotC does either. I'm just saying you don't have to outline every rules infraction specifically in order to hold people responsible for abusing the spirit of the campaign. 

Feb 8, 2010 -- 11:21AM, Newpaintbrush wrote:

Feb 8, 2010 -- 10:45AM, aljergensen wrote:

More documentation just leads to more arguement about correct interpretation of the documentation.

Allen.

Allen, I think you're arguing a different point.  Who said we need to lug around crates, or write reams of documentation? All I think is being asked for is some carefully edited, concise documentation so these problems of ambiguity can be resolved.  Which is something I very much agree with, and that I think, on reflection, you'll agree with too. 

For Atras - yes.  But as correct as you are, I for one, would prefer that the rules be clarified.  Rules errata are getting rather long, but I think it's *far* better that we *have* them than *not*.

The problem is that one person's "clear and concise" is another person's "vague and full of loopholes".  The admins could spend weeks rewriting the LFR guidelines and someone would complain they weren't clear.  They can't win.  

Take the rule on not hitting fellow pc with AOE attacks.  I think it's pretty clear ... but some people insist that you only have to ask, you don't have to get permission.  

As far as comparing D&D to WOW.  It's like comparing apples and oranges.  They're fruit and someone may have painted my D&D orange red when I wasn't looking but that's about it.  I like playing D&D *because* the DM has some flexibility to apply common sense.  When WOTC charges $15/month and has millions of subscribers, they can afford to have a staff of people to answer all of the questions and hold our hands, but until then I'm thankful I get a ton of free mods to play.

Allen.

Feb 8, 2010 -- 10:45AM, aljergensen wrote:

Did you play LG?  It had pages of "this is not allowed", "you can't do that" or "you can do this only if you have access".  All in an attempt to better balance the game.  It didn't work.  People still managed to find highly effective builds and combinations.  Meanwhile we had to read through pages of documents when building characters and had to haul around boxes of documents with random signatures to "prove" our characters were legal.  The "living paperwork" syndrome of LG drove a lot of people away.

Getting 100% agreement amongst gamers is virtually impossible.  More documentation just leads to more arguement about correct interpretation of the documentation.

Allen.

Hi Allen,
You have some good points. I did play LG and it did have several large documents you in general had to know what was going on in. It had pages full of ARs and it was the most popular of all the campaigns that required you to level up.  

Other RPGA events that were designed to be easier access such as the Dungeon Delves, Game Day events, and the Eberron campaigns had very little documentation and were much easier to jump into. These brought in a different kind of player. Maybe its some guy trying to use up a generic ticket at Gencon. If your this kind of player, you don't want any documentation at all. You just want to be able to pay your dollar for a pregen character and sit down and play the module and leave at 6pm to have dinner and the house pale ale at the RAM with your friends.

I don't think putting this kind of player and players of the campaigns with stricter rules works.

Edit: I retract what I said. If your goal is to convert as many group B players into group A players as possible, then you should give group B players what they want. If using a 50 page campaign document keeps them away, dont write a 50 page campaign document.

Feb 8, 2010 -- 2:45PM, aljergensen wrote:

Take the rule on not hitting fellow pc with AOE attacks.  I think it's pretty clear ... but some people insist that you only have to ask, you don't have to get permission.  . . . Allen.

It is pretty clear.  You do only need to ask permission.  It isn't just that people insist on having their own personal interpretation of the rule; that's just what's written.

If the rule had been written "Player characters cannot target other PCs with attacks unless the player of the PC being attacked gives the player making the attack permission", then the rule would require consent.  With some well-considered phrasing (better than just what I would write off the top of my head), it would hardly take up more room than it does now.

It's simply a question of what's there in black and white.

I know, though, that a lot of die hards insist on intent, though, so I'll give another example -

If you bought a toy for your kid for Christmas, assembled it strictly according to instructions, then found that you had an irreparable heap of junk - then went online, posted on the toymaker's forums, and had the writers of the manual tell you "clearly no one would EVER want to put sprocket A into doohickey B; that's just crazy talk!  The INTENT is clear; people that don't follow the INTENT are the ones that are wrong!"  would you feel more or less than sympathetic to the makers of that toy?

Oh, I know it's not a parallel situation.  But it has certain similarities.

My proposed fix?  Rather than having rules book writers that rely on the *intent* of their message getting across - have writers, or at least editors, that hack things apart and make sure the *intent* comes across in what's *written*.  I know this would require having someone with knowledge of game design, able to communicate effectively with others, that knew how to mince words, assemble them into coherent sentences, and serve them up piping hot.  But that's what's really required to have a high-quality product.  WotC does have a pretty good-sized staff.  Surely they could get one or two people on QC!

That said - since I run things By The Book,  here's how I handle the question of PC vs PC attacks.

If the player says "Oh, I only need to ask; you don't want me to do it; I'm doing it anyways!" (and it has happened),  and say a player really really doesn't want his or her PC attacked - then I say "That's absolutely correct, by the book.  Now, by the book, I am telling you as your judge that that's unsportsmanlike conduct."  Then I whip out the 9 year old (or however old it is) RPGA guideline, and point to "Unsportsmanlike Conduct".  This has always settled the matter so far.

(edit) - hey, I know we're getting off the topic of Rust Monsters . . . it's more just "monsters" we're talking about now.  Ah, my bad.  Anyways.  I think the rust monster is fine, and I think most other players do too.  It's the *guidelines* that need to be clarified, I'd say, to keep the *intent* in line with what's *written.

Feb 9, 2010 -- 12:47PM, Newpaintbrush wrote:

WotC does have a pretty good-sized staff.  Surely they could get one or two people on QC!

Except that they don't. No one from WOTC works on the LFR campaign anymore. It's all volunteers. Chris Tulach is the sole WOTC employee in the D&D OP (and truthfully he did write those rules), and he was fairly overworked doing 100% of everything for LFR as far as oversight went. That role, as of DDXP, has been passed onto the LFR admins (so there will now be more eyes on the rules document), but I don't think we should expect 100% perfection out of volunteers who have real jobs and try to help us put out fun gaming content in their spare time.

As for other player's PCs attacking someone without their consent and arguing its what the rules say, I've made that joke at my tables too. Hopefully the unsportsmanlike conduct comment, or simply the fact that there under that rule interpretation there is no reason you can't murder another PC in their sleep as long as you ask first (even if they don't consent); is reason enough to get the offending player to behave in a reasonable manner. That said I will add fixing the wording of that rule to my list for CCG 2.0.

Feb 9, 2010 -- 1:46PM, Skerrit wrote:

 That said I will add fixing the wording of that rule to my list for CCG 2.0.

Might I suggest this as a wording fix...

If you are in control of your character and have an attack that includes PCs in its effect, always ask the players controlling the affected characters if it’s OK to damage or otherwise hinder their character before you make the attack. And yes, this means you actually have to get their permission first as well. Duh! 

Feb 9, 2010 -- 1:49PM, ibixat wrote:

Feb 9, 2010 -- 1:46PM, Skerrit wrote:

 That said I will add fixing the wording of that rule to my list for CCG 2.0.

Might I suggest this as a wording fix...

If you are in control of your character and have an attack that includes PCs in its effect, always ask the players controlling the affected characters if it’s OK to damage or otherwise hinder their character before you make the attack. And yes, this means you actually have to get their permission first as well. Duh! 

If you are in control of your character and wish to make an attack that includes other PCs in its effect, you must obtain the permission of the players whose PCs are in the attack's effect - otherwise, you cannot make the attack.  Violation of this rule is grounds for "Unsportsmanlike Conduct" penalty to be applied to the offending player by the judge or head judge of the event.

Feb 9, 2010 -- 1:46PM, Skerrit wrote:

Chris Tulach is the sole WOTC employee in the D&D OP (and truthfully he did write those rules), and he was fairly overworked doing 100% of everything for LFR as far as oversight went.

True, but I think it's a fair complaint that he did not need to shoulder the burden on his own.

There are a lot of player who would be willing and able to help tear down rules and help rebuild them to the betterment of the campaign.  Leaving them with no option but to tear down the rules after the fact doesn't really help anyone.

For the next CCG, I would suggest a lengthy process (heck, no reason not to start now), with a draft by the global admins, revisions based on comments from the regional admins, and then a public posting of the draft doc with a RFC period.  For that matter, you could simply put the draft document up on a wiki and get comments that way.

My suggestion would also be that 'fixing wording' is the wrong way to go.  The current CCG is a Frankenstein-like creation that reeks of orphaned language and concepts.  Optimally, CCG v 2.0 would be written anew, starting from scratch and writing it from the bottom up.

As far as the particular issue at hand, personally, I think the entire discussion of whether you have to listen or just ask misses the point.  The point of that whole paragraph is that it's a cooperative game and you shouldn't be a jerk.  The point is not that the hand of god comes down and stops you from being a jerk in one very limited instance of directly damaging another PC, the point is not to be a jerk in general.

If I'm running, and someone uses an area effect spell, it gets resolved however the standard D&D rules say it gets resolved.  If there's a dispute between players, we handle that outside the game, either afterwards or (if serious enough) right then and there.

I read that sentence as saying "Being a good gamer means you talk to your teammates before doing something that harms or hinders their character."  I think that's a true statement whether we're talking about dropping a fireball on the party, dropping a cloud that puts the enemy in obscured terrain or charging into the midst of the enemy and screwing up the rest of the party's tactics.

From my POV, reading this as "You are not physically able to cast a fireball spell that includes a member of your party in its area of effect unless that member has verbally consented to being included" misses the point as much as reading it as "Before casting a spell that could harm another PC, you must ritually say the words 'May I?' before casting the spell, but need not pay any attention to any response."

Now on the point of "friendly fire", my sorerer bard hybrid tossed an area effect right on top of a rash companion who had charged forward and gotten in the center of 7-8 enemies.  In another case where I was just one of the players, another player got a third player in the area of effect, critted, and killed him, in a case where the party was about to be swept off the board.  In neither case was the opinion of the victim allowed to rule, tho I am not sure that either objected too hard.  The potential benefit for the party was simply very large, if the dice behaved.  [Of course, in neither of these cases did the dice bounce in favor of the party, so there is always a serious risk to consider.  I soothed my victim with a cure.]  There simply are plenty of cases out there where taking the risk can turn a potential TPK into a cakewalk and we do not want the player to have an absolute ability to outirght ban a highly party-useful action.  We want his opinion considered, and a careful look to make sure this is not a trigger-happy caster who wants to wrack up some kills to his personal total, but in the end, if the odds look good and the benefits great enough, our back row caster should have the right to shoot and yell "Duck!"

    Now back to the Rust Monster.  This is a creature that has always terrified the high level PC with lots of expensive goodies.  An extended battle with one could leave your character as pretty much unplayable, much worse off than dead.  4.0 might have been wiser just to forget it, but it's so much fun to have the entire party running in terror from this critter that sometimes could not cause a hp of damage.  So they tried to make a little less distrous to meet one, and overdid it. 
    But they didn't overdo it that much.  You still only get items of your level or lower as a result, and by the original plans, you were supposed to be walking around with several items above your level.  But with the growth in classes/races/weapons/armor/etc, the chance of getting something you really want has gone way down.  So this fiddle does not make the PC way more powerful than was intended.  You still have to respect the monsters, unlike several spells and combos that pretty much break an encounter.