Extensive Character Sheets Are GM Oppression

Blue said:

The point I was making was that many mundane actions often mechanically match real world emulation as opposed to the appropriate genre emulation.

His claim that mechanically the average person in D&D were Olympic jumpers and that high level characters could (mundanely) jump at superhuman levels was one in many failed attempts to try to prove this wrong.

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This is why generally I go with the notion that ability scores measure exactly what they modify on rolls, nothing more or less. Want to play a genius with an Int of 10? Fine. You are just bad at memorizing facts and have no skill with magic, but you can play as smart as you want.

Wow... That title...

It's about expectations and mutual respect. You're playing a game together: the players and the DM, each person has it's own responsibility, but there is a shared ownership and not an absolute ownership. Not for the DM and not for the players. But if people want to and mutually agree that you want to play in an extreme adversarial game, have fun in that.

It's simple: If people don't have fun, they'll stop playing and everyone loses. That's true for the players and the DM. It's generally about meeting somewhere in the middle. If someone wants to be an adhoc wainwright, why stop that person from doing that? It's something different if someone misuses that constantly and is being a Jack of all Trades and Master of All just based off the PCs Int score, while min-maxing the heck out of their combat skills. You know the type... There are mechanical options for that in the game if you want to do something with that, just depending on ability scores is imho a little lazy. On the other hand, if the PC is spending their downtime constantly learning about wainwrighting, why not reward that with a tool proficiency?

If you can't give a little if you're a DM, you shouldn't be a DM imho. But you also don't have to dance to every player's whim. A simple solution is: Yes, you figure out how to put the wheel back together again, but if you actually want to repair the wheel, that's not not an int check, that's a Dex check without proficiency and if you don't have the appropriate tools, that's minus X. But you're a wizard, if you were interested in fixing stuff you would have taken Mending (1st level spell)... I know how a ball should go into a goal in the game of soccer, but knowing how it should be done and actually doing it are two very different things... Maybe that is also true for DMing?

And if a DM is being an arse about it... We have: ChatGPT please write a detailed 200 page background story for a wizard, please include wainwrighting skills in there somewhere...

Reynard said:

This is why generally I go with the notion that ability scores measure exactly what they modify on rolls, nothing more or less. Want to play a genius with an Int of 10? Fine. You are just bad at memorizing facts and have no skill with magic, but you can play as smart as you want.

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That's a bit of a tangent to what we were discussing. We were discussing mechanically supported actions. Not non-mechanically supported non-actions. That jumping happened to center around an ability score was mostly happenstance, that wasn't the center of the discussion.

It was that the mechanics of the game doing a good job emulating the genre of fantasy, often heroic fantasy, when it comes to anything magical, but when it comes to emulating fantasy with mundane actions it sometimes is on target, and sometime misses and emulates real world limitations instead of heroic fantasy ones.

Blue said:

That's a bit of a tangent to what we were discussing. We were discussing mechanically supported actions. Not non-mechanically supported non-actions. That jumping happened to center around an ability score was mostly happenstance, that wasn't the center of the discussion.

It was that the mechanics of the game doing a good job emulating the genre of fantasy, often heroic fantasy, when it comes to anything magical, but when it comes to emulating fantasy with mundane actions it sometimes is on target, and sometime misses and emulates real world limitations instead of heroic fantasy ones.

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My point was just that D&D attributes do not do a good job of describing anything about the way real humans operate, peak Olympic ability level or otherwise.

But to your point: this has ever been the case.

RPGs and their mechanics are usuall,y meant to be absractionsand character sheets are meant to be a

GMMichael said:

PC: I look at the broken wain. Fixing it should be easy. It clearly just needs to have some parts nailed back in place, reset this brace, and a support put here.

GM: Um, are you a wizard or a wainwright?

PC: Wizard. But my Mental score is 15. I can figure things out.

Who was I to tell the PC he's wrong? It's not my character. That's a GM's dilemma, right? None of the PCs are our characters. So I can't say something like, "sorry, you spent your whole youth locked up in a cell, with only spellbooks, food, and a chamber pot going in and out." Maybe his mother was a wainwright. Maybe he actually learned to be a wizard on a magic truck (see: food truck). I don't know. Not my character.

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I view this as a duty of the DM; not allowing the character to use an attribute to justify their character doing what ever they want. If in a more modern game a player said "My character has a high intelligence and is a biologist so I should be able to figure out and be an expert in all sciences" I would explain why that doesn't make sense. That's not to say a character can't try to do anything, I could try and build an F-16, but it's up to the DM to make the difficulty appropriate, just like I would fail at building a F-16.

Game mechanics are abstractions and it seems to me that the player is abusing that system. Has there been any indication during prior play that the character would have had the skill? Did he write up a biography for his character that might justify his action? DMs should be, among all of their other duties, keeping the game reasonable and that player's reasoning could lead to a real slippery slope.

Personally, I think if the GM is needing vagueness in a character sheet to manage the limits of what characters can do, chances are the oppression isn't aimed at them.

Thomas Shey said:

Personally, I think if the GM is needing vagueness in a character sheet to manage the limits of what characters can do, chances are the oppression isn't aimed at them.

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I took the OP to be saying that a certain sort of character sheet leads to the GM oppressing the players. Not that it's the GM who is oppressed.

@GMMichael?

Hex08 said:

RPGs and their mechanics are usuall,y meant to be absraction

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Game mechanics are abstractions

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I don't agree with this.

RPG mechanics are (part of) a process for determining who gets to say what happens next, and what they are permitted or obliged to say. The mechanics may do this by abstracting certain things (eg D&D movement rates do this) but there are plenty of mechanics that are not abstractions (eg the AD&D hp and saving throw systems are not abstractions, at least according to Gygax's DMG; the turn-by-turn resolution system in modern D&D combat is a pretty fundamental component of the rules, but is not an abstraction of anything).

pemerton said:

I don't agree with this.

RPG mechanics are (part of) a process for determining who gets to say what happens next, and what they are permitted or obliged to say. The mechanics may do this by abstracting certain things (eg D&D movement rates do this) but there are plenty of mechanics that are not abstractions (eg the AD&D hp and saving throw systems are not abstractions, at least according to Gygax's DMG; the turn-by-turn resolution system in modern D&D combat is a pretty fundamental component of the rules, but is not an abstraction of anything).

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They are all abstractions, because not one is literal. Your arguing semantics for no apparent benefit.

But what they are used for is as you say: to determine what happens next. How the authority is distributed to define that based on the mechanics is system dependent, of course.

pemerton said:

I took the OP to be saying that a certain sort of character sheet leads to the GM oppressing the players. Not that it's the GM who is oppressed.

@GMMichael?

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If so, I withdraw my statement and have to consider the question harder, though my instinct is "no". It might not be what a particular game is trying for in some cases, but detailed character definition is not intrinsically oppressive.