Disguise
Today’s joke comes courtesy of 3.X D&D. For those of you who are more familiar with the latest edition of the world’s most popular role-playing game, here’s the relevant bit of rules text:
Your Disguise check result determines how good the disguise is…. If you don’t draw any attention to yourself, others do not get to make Spot checks.
This is a perfectly serviceable rule. It works well enough at the table. As I hope we’ve illustrated today, it is nevertheless absurd. Glue a pair of bananas to your head and you can walk unremarked among the minotaur warcamp. Throw a bucket of paint at Legolas and he’s a suddenly welcome through the front gates of Menzoberranzan. Staple some shoes to your pant legs, walk around on your knees, and suddenly you get to bust a move at all of this season’s hottest halflings-only dance parties.
Of course no sensible GM would allow this malarkey. Kick the suspension of disbelief in the teeth and it tends to get pissed off and kick back. But if you’ve read all ~250 pages of this comic, you may have picked up on the fact that there is a degree of humor to be found by taking rules to their illogical extremes. Same deal with the peasant rail gun, the bag of rats, and the legendary über-munchkin known as Pun-Pun.
Question of the day then. Have you ever abused a rule despite its blatant in-game illogic? Did your GM let you get away with it? Let’s hear it in the comments!
Discussion (36) ¬
I’d say that there is nothing absurd with that rule, just what exactly the DM calls drawing attention to yourself. From a distance the minotaur disguise work, but as soon as one takes a good look in your direction Spot checks are rolled.
The rule I’ve regretted allowing is Dragonfire Adept metabreath feat. Essentially, metabreath feats can’t be taken unless one has a breath weapon with a cooldown measured in rounds. The dragonfire adept class breath is usable every round so it doesn’t qualify. However, if a player picks a dragonborn with a racial breath weapon, that character can pick metabreath feats thanks to their racial breath and apply them to the class breath. It’s a wording loophole that most GMs change. I didn’t unfortunately.
I believe the phrase is “willfully obtuse.” Beat a sensible rule for long enough and it’s going to look pretty silly by the end.
Witness the whole “you can’t see the sun in Golarion” situation:
http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2tjj9?Perception-DC-to-See-the-Sun
Sometimes things look pretty silly right at the start. For example, unless you’re at a Carmen Miranda convention I would expect ANYONE wearing fruit on their head to “draw attention”. That’s like Saturday-morning-cartoons-for-kids-under-8 bad in terms of disguises. You can try it, because a high enough skill check is essentially magic, but personally I’m not giving anyone a break on the DC.
Unless maybe you’re in one of those cultures that has a taboo against disrespecting insane people because they believe they’re the mouthpiece of the gods.
Otherwise that’s the kind of thing I would expect as the result of a BAD roll.
Player: I’m going to disguise myself as a minotaur and sneak into the orcish warcamp!
DM: You’re a scrawny gnome.
Player: Yes.
DM: ….Ok, what’s your disguise check?
Player: *rolls* 8!
DM: Do you proceed?
Player: … … …Yes!
etc etc etc.
Skill checks are never magic, and the DC for disgusting yourself with a couple of bananas should be in the hundreds. The DM determines DC, not the book.
I can easily disgust myself with a single banana, provided it is especially black and slimy.
I’ve never pulled it off as my DM immediately shut it down when I brought up that it was possible, but Champion’s Bout http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/c/champion-s-bout/
Nothing says the creatures can’t fight others instead of each other. But others have to succeed a will save in order to affect the targets at all.
The English language is a tricky bitch.
I like the idea of “NPC spells” like this, but I kind of wish they were labeled as such. I mean, when is a PC ever going to take this? I could picture it as a cool scroll for that one time in the campaign when you actually want to use it, or perhaps as some kind of paired magic item. Bleh. Just seems like a weird implementation to me.
I think those are probably the cutest Gnolls I’ve ever seen.
I feel like there’s a lot of leeway in the “draw attention to yourself” bit. You’re kind of balanced on an edge there, where you either write rules that fit into a few lines and let GMs adjudicate the absurdity case by case, or you write rules that take up 16 pages and your players will probably figure out how to break anyway.
What should we call this design problem? Elegance vs. Thoroughness perhaps?
I call this philosophy the “Lesser of two Evils”. I offer to you 5e or SotDL, which have taken streamlining approaches and said “just do what you want, GM is the final say of what’s allowed.”
Then I offer Pathfinder for contrast, which has literal chapters on how things such as “magic duels” should work. The jist of a player wanting to have a magic duel will work in one of three ways:
1. The DM tells the player to rrad the chapter, neither of them actually read it, they do what’s fun and the DM shuts down any shenanigans. Basically just became 5e.
2. The DM says read it, the player doesn’t and the whole thing falls apart into either no duel happening at all, or constantly asking which end of the wand faces the enemy.
3. The player reads the chapter first, the DM does too, and the player proceeds to break the ever living crap out of the rules system.
Lesser of the two, Colin, lesser of the two.
Oh I dunno. We just tried out the barter system last night. Bottom of the page over here:
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/skills/diplomacy/
It was a learning experience all around, and there was definitely less flow than “the 5e method” (your option #1). However, the player came away with a little extra GP in her pockets, and there was some value in seeing the Appraise skill given a use. I’d probably use that system again.
I don’t understand. Why is the comic just a bunch of gnolls? Are these new characters?
Well played….
Clearly, they’re caving in to my demands for a monster girl party.
Could have used a harpy, though.
I see that the Handbook of Erotic Fantasy is leaking this morning, lol.
While I have yet to discover any spell combos in Pathfinder as dangerous as the Locate City Nuke from 3.5, there is one combo that I want to try at some point. Drop enemies in Create Pit or one of its ilk. Then make a Wall spell on top of it. Since Pit spells raise their ‘floor’ back to proper level over the course of one round after they expire, this potentially leads to some squished enemies.
Personally, I would put bolt holes in the wall to make fun play-dough shapes.
Heh. It’s been a while since I thought about this one. I think I’d decided to apply the Enlarge Person spell’s language about constrained spaces last time I considered the issue. No idea what RAW is supposed to look like though.
The classic case of the developers assuming players can apply common sense to the rules… and THOSE GUYS using RAW as an excuse to break the game.
I haven’t tried to abuse anything myself, but I have been caught in arguments regarding what “makes sense” and what “the rules say”. Particularly because I like me some stealthy characters, while Stealth rules in Pathfinder are as clear as swamp water, to say the least.
My gaming group tends to follow the rule of cool when appropriate… except for when I’m trying to do something cool involving stealth. That’s also rules-legal.
Might as well just make a wizard or whatever, go invisible and be done with it.
Oh man… The mounted rules though. That mess is the absolute worst for me. It’s the same deal as stealth, just a different flavor. My go-to at this point is, “Call it in the player’s favor. Life is too short.”
Why does magus look the most displeased about eating raw meat? She’s a humanoid that very closely resembles an obligate carnivore species.
I think the closest I came to really breaking the world’s logic is when I grappled a shark underwater, thereby reducing its speed to zero.
If you’ve ever been underwater and have seen a shark or a picture of one, you should know that this is exactly impossible without a solid object to hold on to, especially if the shark is a size category larger than you are (it was).
If you’re used to fancy feast…
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/delicious-trap
…It’s easy to turn your nose up at roadkill.
Shark grappling though… Yeesh. Can’t quite fit that one in my head. Maybe you were bending its tail back so that it couldn’t swim?
Rolled it onto its back, perhaps? Sharks can’t swim upside down.
I suppose cats are known for being picky eaters.
…Why are their shoulders bruised?
Gnolls are fighting type monsters. It’s best to use normal type moves like tackle against them. It’s super effective, but also a sure way to mess up your shoulder.
It’s a good thing this is Dungeons & Dragons, ’cause that’s the inverse of how it works in a certain other game franchise.
Interestingly enough, this happened very recently. What follows is my build: Badger Hengeyokai Fighter3/Barb1/FistOfTheForest2/Warshaper4/Primeval10 with Vow of Poverty.
So basically, I accidentally made a warrior that could not be hit by any AC-Attack (AC in Dire Lion form was 62), did massive damage when I hit the enemy (Strength of 60), and had a high enough will save (+12) that I passed about half of the DCs.
The solution to hindering me were the two spells Mark of Doom and End to Strife.
Mark of Doom makes the target (no SR or Save) take 1d6 points of damage each time it makes a melee attack (so every round I’d make 7 attacks and take 7d6 damage). End to Strife makes any creature in an 80 foot radius emanation take 20d6 points of damage when they make an attack. In one round, my final round, I made a full attack that did 7 attacks, and I took 147d6 damage. I took 521 damage when I had 346 left.
One of the benefits of the Vow of Poverty is “Regeneration (Ex)”. Any creature with Regeneration is not killed until the regeneration is cancelled, which defaults into Fire and Acid (so said the GM!).
With a high Fortitude save, however, I passed every Coup De Grace saving throw. The BBGG tried to Grapple me for some reason, but Vow of Poverty gives an “always-on” Freedom of Movement.
So realizing that he couldn’t kill me because of Regeneration and resisting Coup De Grace’s, he decided to just Bull-Rush me off the floating platform we were on in a mostly-featureless plane.
My character needed no food or water, and no air, and basically just drifted through space for the rest of his lifespan. But mostly he survived because of some absurd reading of the Regeneration rules.
Logically, the Regeneration should not have worked, since it only applied to the default “1 hp per level per night” healing, but it resulted in effective character death anyway.
3.5 is a silly beast, lol.
Couldn’t your buddies scry and save you though? Or was this a TPK?
It was the end to the campaign, and I’m fairly certain the party realized the Bull-Rush was an effective “character death”, though we could just use a “Discern Location” spell to find me, and perhaps if we’d gone into Epic levels could have used a side quest to rescue the character.
Interestingly, choosing a dramatic death over an anticlimactic resurrection is exactly the topic of tomorrow’s comic. Stay tuned, and good on ya!
I keep hoping to see Pun-Pun and his hilariously over the top Gurren-Lagann levels of ‘KICK REASON TO THE CURB’ logic in his character building addressed by webcomics someday, but alas, it seems he’s simply too ridiculous and complicated a concept to unleash.
Mr. -Pun is tough to get hold of. You’ve got to remember, for an inter-dimensional being existing on multiple planes of reality, scheduling can be a nightmare.
wearing shoes at a halfling-only dance party > is < drawing attention to yourself…
Do halfling ballerinas wear pointe shoes? Let us ponder the mysteries.
reminds me of Digger at the funeral of Skull-Ridges the Hyena.
http://diggercomic.com/blog/2008/04/01/digger-381/