Adventurers Be Trippin’
Remember that dream you had? The weird one where you spoke fluent Japanese to avian flu zombies who were also your freshman orientation guides? Now multiply that weirdness by the number of other people in your group. Getting on the same imaginary page is hard work for your average group of gamers. Unless you happen to be psychic, you’re not going to imagine exactly the same sort of fantasy world as the other guys at the table. I referenced this difficulty way back in Pit Trap, but today I’d like to throw a new wrinkle into the discussion. Depending on what system you’re playing in, the rules of the game get to dictate whose imagination is right and whose is wrong.
Here’s the example that got me thinking about this. In D&D 5e, the grapple rules say that “the target of your grapple must be no more than one size large than you.” In Pathfinder, there are several combat maneuvers that include similar “no more than one size category larger than you” language. You can’t push, trip, or overrun very large creatures. However, that language is conspicuously absent from Pathfinder’s grapple rules. That means you can’t push a dragon into a pit, but you are allowed to suplex Smaug to your hear’s content. (If that’s hard to conceptualize, then you haven’t read the legend of Los Tiburon.)
In terms of genre and content, these are very similar games. They’ve got the same heroes, monsters, epic quests, and magic items. They are forking branches of the same Gygaxian tree. Yet this very basic thing is explicitly allowed in one and disallowed in another. Whether or not you think it makes sense for Thursh the barbarian to wrestle an elephant depends on your individual conception of fantasy. However, whether or not you’re technically correct depends on the system, not the setting.
The easy solution is to say “leave it to the GM’s discretion.” From a designer’s standpoint, however, I’m less sure. Do you make it policy to avoid “you can’t do the thing” type rules, or is that a necessary part of a sensible system?
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I’d lean in favor of avoiding “can’t” rules. It would be better to rephrase such rules as stating what you *can* do. Then the GM knows what you’re supposed to be able to for sure do with X thing and is still free to say yes or no to stuff outside of it’s explicit boundaries without just telling the system that it’s wrong and it should feel bad and has to sleep in the crate.
It honestly doesn’t make sense to say you can’t perform grapple stuff on X size things. The size isn’t really as important as the shapes involved and the balance. Doesn’t really matter how big a two legged thing is, it can be tripped. Though this may require your plate armor wearing fighter to play the inglorious role of “unseen slippery rock underfoot”.
A new thought occurred to me this morning. What if the designers chose to remove size restrictions from grapple because big things WILL grapple small things, and the small things need a way to respond? In other words, if the giant picks you up and tries to stuff you in his pocket, it would suck to not be allowed to fight back due to size restriction rules.
That puts a new twist on a thumb war for sure.
This goes back to your posts on `common sense’. While imaginative and innovative players can certainly surprise you with their ideas, lets imagine Ahnold at his peak (consider an 18/00 Str in oldskool terms) trying to trip a slow moving car. Even in a fantasy world, there are underlying rules and basic physics. How do you grapple a giant whose finger is bigger than your body? You can’t even get your arms and legs around it. However, an artfully cast Web, Grease, or Entangle could conceivably cause virtually any size creature to stumble or trip. Magic can get around physics, and that’s why we allow Mages to tag along and eat our food. Fighter can’t grapple a giant and winds up stuffed in Gigantor’s pocket…fine. He uses his belt knife to cut a hole in the pockets and climb down giant legs hairs to freedom…or goes on the offensive and gets +Lots to perform an emergency vasectomy on the giant. The rules don’t usually say things like, “Acrobatics allow your character to leap an amazing distance, but he is unable to leap to the moon, even with a running start.’ Some things are just…you know…common sense.
Truth! The trouble is how uncommon common sense can be. Just the other day I had a guy with a human fighter wanting to attack an enemy who was flying 10 ft off the ground. Pretty clearly against the rules because he’s not in an adjacent square.
“But my guy is 6 ft tall and has a sword! I should be able to hit his feet!”
Sometimes, common sense and rules really do butt heads. That’s why the phrase “expect table variation” exists.
Just had something like this happen to me. We were fighting a gargantuan purple worm and the bastard had already swallowed one PC who had cut their way out. Now by RAW. it couldn’t swallow my character too, only continue holding him in its mouth and do damage that way. In a less severe situation, my character MIGHT have been able to make the check to cast a spell, but due to the size difference, the resulting check was WAY beyond what he could do and the resulting damage would wipe him out shortly. Fortunately he could still stab the shit out of the worm and his allies were doing the same.
Titan Wrestler from PF2e (https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=854) at Level 15 (since that’s the lowest level you can get Legendary in Athletics and as such do Trip/Disarm/Shove/Grapple on a Gargantuan creature as a Medium one) seems appropriate to point out here, but by the time you hit Level 15 it probably makes sense to have “can wrassle with a giant” in your Strength martial’s toolkit.
Good ol’ Paizo! A feat for everything and every build with its feats. 😀