Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 234 - Player vs Character Abilities

Episode Date: August 11, 2024

Our characters are good at certain things:  probably stabbing stuff, identifying magic items, discerning which berries are safe to eat and which ones will make you obliterate your large intestine.  Meanwhile our players are probably good at making characters, wiping out a bowl of popcorn and making fart jokes.  In this episode I encourage DMs to remember the difference between players and characters and not to punish characters for a player’s shortcomings.   #pf2e #Pathfinder #gmtips #dmtips #dnd

This week on the Taking20 Podcast. The DM pulled that puzzle box out for their players to solve. Can we agree that the player's ability to solve a puzzle box and the character's ability to solve that same puzzle box would be different? Thank you for listening to the Taking20 Podcast, episode 234, a back to basics episode discussing why GMs should remember there's a vast difference between player and character abilities. I want to thank this week's sponsor, Corvids. You know, ravens, crows, jackdaws, that kind of thing.

I looked out my old kitchen window this morning and I saw two blackbirds stuck together. I guess they were Velcros. Hey we have a coffee ko-fi.com slash taking 20 podcast. Please consider a one-time support donation to help keep the podcast alive. Speaking of which, I want to start with an announcement that will have a minor effect on how this podcast is delivered going forward. By random chance I how this podcast is delivered going forward. By random chance, I started this podcast just before COVID hit, and it's been going almost solid every week for four and a half years. About that same time, my wife started writing her book and we formed a little company called Publishing Cube Media that if you look at the podcast metadata, has been listed as the publisher of the podcast since the company was created.

Well my wife's published her book and I'm extremely proud of her for doing so by the way and it's in the, I'll call it the extended sales phase where she'll sell a few per month but we're not collecting a huge amount of revenue from it. Similarly, I made the conscious choice not to aggressively monetize this podcast, foregoing commercial ads each episode for good and ill. The good side of this is that you're not being accosted to support this VPN or that meal delivery plan or this other mental health service.

The bad side is that the podcast doesn't make money. Some of you have donated to support the podcast and have been longtime supporters. Brenton Galbraith, Robert Norez, Jason Mill, Michael Mills, Joe Goodwin, Kevin, Joe, Peter, Shane, David, Ross, Steven, and others that I can't think of right now have generously donated over the past few years to keep the podcast alive. I'm so very very thankful to all of you for donating your hard-earned cash to this old gamer from Alabama who just wants to spread the love of tabletop RPGs.

My goal has been to keep publishing the podcast every single week, but unfortunately, I think that's going to have to change going forward. I'm back teaching again this fall, and my regular cybersecurity job is chewing up more and more of my time. Keeping up a weekly release schedule for the podcast has become quite difficult over the past month and I'm concerned that as my available time has shrunk, my content is starting to suffer. As the great Ron Swanson once said from the show Parks and Recreation, don't half-ass

two things, whole-ass one thing. So that's what I'm going to have to do. In order to make sure I can deliver the highest quality episodes I can, starting in September, I've decided to shift my release schedule to every other week for the foreseeable future. I'm not about to start a discussion about whether that means that I am now publishing bi-weekly or semi-weekly because, whoo-hoo, but there are a lot of passionate people on both sides of that argument. I have no plans on closing up shop for the Techie20 podcast anytime in the near future.

I still have that fire to reach new players and new DMs and pass on the lessons I learned the very hard way in the hopes that maybe you won't have to. I still love interacting with listeners and fans on social media, email, and even at a couple of conventions every now and then. Who knows, it might mean that something slightly different appears in the intervening weeks, but for now I'm going to have to ask your forgiveness for the change in schedule. Given the choice between this and aggressive monetization of the podcast with ubiquitous advertisements, I think this is the lesser of the two evils. I do want to hear your thoughts though, and I'm going to put some posts up on Instagram and Facebook

to discuss it, and you can always email me your thoughts to feedback at taking20podcast.com. I would love to hear what you have to say about it. Thank you all so much for listening. I love you all. Now on to the episode. This week is another Back to Basics episode, which is a category of episodes that I roll in every now and then. These episodes contain what I consider basic building blocks for being a good GM or sometimes being a good player. This episode was born out of my being at my friendly local game store and I watched a game unfold for about 30 minutes.

While I was watching, in the game, the characters were investigating a temple and the DM told them they had found a puzzle box in the High Priest Chambers. Or behind the pulpit, or in the Dragon's Tookus, or wherever it was, I can't remember. Those details are lost from my brain, I apologize, but they did find this box. And with much pomp and circumstance the DM produced a puzzle box for the players and set it on the table. He then told them that in order for the characters to open the puzzle box in the game the players had to open it at the table. That got me thinking about one of

the very basic tenets of RPGs. Players are not characters and characters are not their players. As a reminder if you hit a character with a hammer they take 1d6 damage. If you hit a player with a hammer you will go to jail. Also as a reminder players and characters are vastly different from one another. Sometimes people play characters that are similar to themselves. They're tall and slight of builds. They play a similarly built elf or they're short and slight of builds. They play a similarly built elf, or they're short and stocky woman,

and they play a version of that. Maybe they play themselves as a half-orc, or a sprite, or a minotaur, or a lascenta, or fur-bulg, or whatever. But even then, if they're gonna play a version of themselves, that version is sometimes idealized, or maybe even sometimes a more vilified version of themselves. Novius

for example is a version of me that is more ruthless, self-serving and ambitious. The times when I've played a version of me though it's been a more athletic, a more intelligent, a more charming version of me. I don't want to just play me in an RPG. What, play a character with a bunch of middling level stats except for now that I'm older, my constitution score sucks. No thanks. Let's make me but a bit more athletic, a bit less soggy around the midsection, and let's get rid of the moobs. I'll probably have more fun playing that character than I would playing me. Most of the time players, including me, play characters though that just strike their fancy. In the past few years I've played an old druid going on one last adventure,

a half-orc fighter trying to prove brains are just as important as brawn, an unexpectedly undead cleric trying to carve out a life in this new reality they're in, a ranger trying to keep the poor of a small town from starving to death, and the list goes on. None of these have really been all that close to a version of me. I mean, Novius the Undead Cleric is probably the closest, but that doesn't mean he's all that close. These characters have histories, class abilities, ancestral abilities, skills, and feats that we as players don't have.

One of my current characters can heal someone from 30 feet away with an echo healing pulse that also cures hit points on a second target. I can't do that. I mean if I could I'd probably work in a hospital like my beautiful niece. And by the way I love you girl I hope you're listening I am so proud of you. You're probably sitting there saying no shit Jeremy you're not a six foot seven female half-orc fighter either. What are you talking about? Okay, well, it's not just these ancestral class and feat differences that are important between players and characters. Our ability scores would be vastly different as well. Let's take this idea back to the puzzle box.

The DM pulled that puzzle box out for their players to solve. Can we agree that the player's ability to solve a puzzle box and the character's ability to solve that same puzzle box would be different? I don't know these players, they may be a collection of hyper brilliant members of Mensa and are playing characters that are the same. Or the opposite. They're players that need three step instructions to pour water out of a boot, and probably their characters would as well. But by all probability, one or more of these characters are vastly different than the players

that they are sitting around the table. The players or the characters may have an easier or harder time solving that puzzle box compared to the other. Me? I love puzzles. I love tinkering with stuff. I love puzzle boxes. I used to love playing with Rubik's cubes and fidget spinners and the like while my brain was

active doing other things. However, my fighter Triven couldn't solve them. Probably never would solve them. Probably couldn't give two shits about solving them. She had a low intelligence score and was more interested in the pointy end of the sword goes into the other thing you need to kill kind of problems. All of this to say is that if you ask players sitting around your table to use their intelligence, whatever it may be, to solve problems presented to your characters who have a different intelligence score, you may be doing your players a disservice and depending on the player, you may be giving certain PCs advantages over others. I with a reasonable level of intelligence and roleplaying Triven who has an intelligence modifier of minus one. I am not claiming to be a genius, but I think my int is higher than that. Of course I also could be an idiot and grossly overestimating my intelligence and I might

be a living breathing example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. I guess we really never know, do we? The heart of what I'm getting at is that Triven and I have different intelligence scores. Handing me a puzzle box and asking me to solve it will have a different result than if you handed that same box to Triven. Why should Triven be able to use my intelligence score to solve a problem when that's not realistic? It's not like I can call up Triven and ask her to come lift up my car when I need to

change a tire, right? No, I can't use her if that way she shouldn't be able to use me in similar situations. Similarly, I've seen DMs ask players to roleplay a diplomacy or an intimidation or even worse, seduction with an NPC. I mean, sure, nothing wrong with roleplay, that's fine, except for possibly the seduction part. Ugh. Ugh.

Keep it in your pants, would ya? Anyway, here's where I could say the exact same thing. Triven has a charisma score and skill modifiers in intimidation and diplomacy, and hers would be different than mine. I've seen DMs give characters bonuses or penalties based on what the player said or did while roleplaying. As a player, what you said was awkward as fuck and I'm going to give your character a penalty to their role because of it.

Okay, hold up. Let me clarify with another example. Truven is attempting to bribe her way into an exclusive party. The DM asks me to role play the interaction. Sure no problem. So wow your armor is so shiny. What if I give you some shiny gold to help keep your shiny armor? Yeah? Big...boy? The DM looks at me and says, wow, you actually get a penalty to your role because I am dying from second-hand embarrassment.

The DM is penalizing Triven because I suck at offering bribes. Let's contrast that with another example, same situation. I tell the DM that Triven quietly offers the guard 25 gold pieces as a diplomacy check to look the other way as she slips into the party. The DM then gives Triven a situational penalty or bonus based on whatever. The guard is well paid so there's a slight penalty to the roll, or maybe the guard went well into debt to get that shiny armor and could use a little extra coin and therefore I get to make that check with advantage.

In the first example, the character check is being modified by player ability to roleplay and act and I would caution against that. In example B the check is being modified by situations the character and the NPC are in. That is well within the spirit of most tabletop RPGs. Let's take an extreme example. Suppose Triven wants to put her shoulder into a door and bust it open because it's stuck. Should the GM ask me to jump up and put my shoulder into the nearby storage door to see if Triven can open it? Of course not.

That doesn't make sense. And if that doesn't make sense, then penalizing a character because of a player's characteristics shouldn't make sense either. Oops! Triven ate some contaminated rations. Jeremy, go eat this moldy orange. And if you can do it without throwing up, then Triven makes her saving throw.

What in the fear factor, hunger games, Saw movie franchise bullshit is going on here? That doesn't make any sense in a tabletop RPG. Then if that's true, why are you expecting player charisma to equal character charisma and player charisma to equal character charisma, and player wisdom to equal character wisdom, and player intelligence to equal character intelligence? This all brings me back to puzzles and trick boxes and similar props that you hand out around your

game table for your players to solve. Listen, if everybody wants to play that type of game and they're not worried about the verisimilitude of it, then by Gorham's ashes you all keep doing what you're doing and have fun. However, if you're thinking about buying that finger trap puzzle and dropping it in the middle of the table, or giving your players a 16 block sliding puzzle and asking them to solve it to get out of the room filling with water, I would encourage you to think twice about that.

Instead, allow characters to do what characters do with appropriate roles and modifiers. You wouldn't ask little Timmy to use his strength score to bend the prison bars, so don't ask your players to do what your characters are trying to do with player intelligence and charisma. If you keep players and characters separate, I'd be willing to bet that you and your players would have fun doing it. Hey, please like, rate, and subscribe, and review the podcast wherever you happen to find it.

Tune in next week when I'm gonna expand on a topic I originally covered in 2023, December, I think. Villain motivations. This time not talking about during combat but overall in other words Why is your villain a villain? But before I go I want to thank this week's sponsor Corvids Did you know that a group of Ravens is called an unkindness of Ravens? I mean that's neat, but I tend to avoid large groups of black birds

I mean that group of crows out there is straight-up murder groups of black birds. I mean, that group of crows out there is straight up murder. This has been episode 234 reminding GMs about the differences between player and character abilities. My name is Jeremy Shelley and I hope that your next game is your best game. The Taking20 podcast is a Publishing Cube media production. Copyright 2024. References to game system content or copyright their respective publishers.