Handle Animal
Funny story. The original version of this script called for Lumberjack Explosion, Brick, Allie, and Snowflake careening around an aviary and freaking out. Laurel flatly refused to illustrate that many critters. I think I may have spent my political capital making her draw everyone back in “The Full Party.”
Any dang way, today’s comic comes directly from our megadungeon campaign. The party was trying to cross one of those the-floor-is-lava rooms, and so the usual slew of flight spells came out. There was your basic fly, overland flight, a carpet of flying, and even a specialized version of floating disk that was part of the room’s dungeon dressing. And then there was our cavalier’s mount. The phrase, “My riding gecko activates her winged boots,” prompted some logistics questions. Like… Would both boots go on the back feet? The front feet? Do they lace up properly? Can one’s noble gecko steed still climb effectively while wearing boots?
And let’s not even ponder the difficulties of teaching a non-sentient creatures to accept unfamiliar powers. If you’ve ever seen a cat in zero-G, that’s more or less my mental image. While I respect rules-based objections like fly gives you an intuitive understanding of your new movement capabilities, I can’t shake my real-world experience. And that experience tells me that horses are friggin’ dumb. They’ll freak out at tumbleweeds, plastic bags, other horses, the wind, or even especially threatening jackets. Snowflake does an excellent job illustrating how I think it would go down.
If your table is anything like mine though, practical questions like these will usually take a back seat to ease-of-play. I mean, who actually wants to spend a week teaching the receive spell trick to their horse? At nine tables out of ten you’ll just cast the spell, point your lance skyward, and declare a charge.
Or if the whole flying mount thing is too esoteric, consider the weirdness of unfamiliar items in general. There’s a reason that weapon proficiency is a thing. And if the item in question is from a particularly exotic culture, the basic rules might not even cover you. For example, the Starfinder module I’m running at the moment features this interesting little sidebar:
If you want to simulate the “alienness” of [alien] equipment, you can impose a –2 penalty on the relevant checks or rolls for PCs who use a piece of [alien] gear or weaponry. After handling an item for 24 hours, the PC can attempt a DC 14 Intelligence check to familiarize himself with it and remove the penalty.
Is this kind of mechanic more trouble than it’s worth? Very likely. But as an optional “flavor rule,” I love the crap out of it. I mean, I’m pretty sure I’d need those 24 hours at minimum before figuring out a bat’leth. Sure the penalty is a bit of a pain, but it also goes a long way toward making the setting feel more real.
What do the rest of you guys think though? Do you like spicing up play with a little training time for the sake of verisimilitude? Or do you just want to gear up and get to combat without worrying about the practicalities? Tell us all about your in-character learning curves (or lack thereof) down in the comments!
ADD SOME NSFW TO YOUR FANTASY! If you’ve ever been curious about that Handbook of Erotic Fantasy banner down at the bottom of the page, then you should check out the “Quest Giver” reward level over on The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. Twice a month you’ll get to see what the Handbook cast get up to when the lights go out. Adults only, 18+ years of age, etc. etc.
To be the devil’s advocate, wouldn’t Snowflake be LESS likely to freak out because she is sentient? The non-sentient horses would be the ones freaking out, not the magical ones.
Does being sentient automatically make you less prone to panicking? Would paladin’s aura of courage help with that? Do hooves count as feet?
…all enigmas humanity may never know the answer to.
Maybe the other horses have air walk cast on them, not fly? But that does make the caption nonsensical…
But being sentient, Snowflake has studied. And in studying, she must have learned that man is mortal. So she must put the ground as far from herself as possible, so I can clearly not choose the flight spell in front of me.
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/EZSx3zNZOaU/maxresdefault.jpg
NEVER CROSS A SUMMONED STEED WHEN DEATH IS ON THE LINE! AHAHAHAHA! HAHAHA-
flump
I think the issue here is that the other horses are phantom steeds, which are magical flying mounts, already ‘pre-trained’ for flying and more like robots/constructs than actual living horses.
The other interpretation is that Snowflake’s sentience makes her overthink her actions, which makes her more clumsy at it until she memorized and trains the skill of flying.
It’s like how a person who is only learning how to drive and thinks hard about it carefully, is a worse driver than one who acquired muscle memory for driving and no longer needs to ‘think’ about things like ‘press the gas pedal’ or ‘go into second gear’.
This is more or less what I was going for.
That makes sense.
For me, it heavily depends on what type of campaign your running whether or not training time should be a part of the game. If you’re knee-deep in world-saving duties, with each objective completed revealing a new one, it’s always going to feel too “high-stakes” to spend time coming up with a secret language for the party, or learning how to use a new piece of gear. Even in the case of the Starfinder rule you mentioned, where you don’t even have to stop adventuring to learn it, players won’t take the penalty on a high-stakes mission.
On the other hand, there are adventures that are more about exploring the world and being roaming vagabonds then it is about being on a set path to destiny. In those adventures, players taking time to learn new skills is a great task to be able to do, plus it can encourage them to spend time in a single town and get to know it. Again, even in the Starfinder example, in a campaign like this there will be more low-stakes missions to use as a training exercise, meaning players won’t feel as bad about taking the penalty.
This is a situation where I desperately hope for an unambigiously worded ruling in the Player’s Handbook or DM’s Guide. One without those caveats (“If you want to…”). I’m not a game designer, I’ve no idea how Reality™ ought to be portrayed in a way that is enjoyable.
I’m quite sure that I’ve yet to see a “realistic take” that actually is enjoyable. It’s realistic that one needs time to practice new skills, languages etc. But it also eats up an enormous amount of in-game time. In 5e it takes ca. 8.5 months to learn a new skill (250 days). Usually 1-5 in-game days pass during a 3h adventure. If my rather large group gets into combat, 18 in-game seconds pass in nearly an hour. The point is I’m never letting players acquire skills via Training during the adventure, because it’ll take anywhere from 150h to 900h of non-stop sessions for them to learn one.
But if I let them learn those during downtime I hit another snag. 5 days of downtime is the usual award for a 1-3h adventure. So I’m looking at about 50 sessions until the players have the requisite downtime to spend on learning just that one skill. The one time my players wanted to use that Training option my solution to all of this was a time-skip of 9 months.
I know, right? Yes, DM freedom is important, but you need to consider both positive and negative liberties—the negative liberty of not being told they can’t do something, and the positive liberty of being well-informed enough to actually do it! It’s so frustrating when professional game designers dump that responsibility on GMs without any real guidelines. That’s the kind of junk we pay them for!
I thought about that so often, especially during Out of the Abyss where it really feels like a ton of homework is dumped on me instead of an oven-ready adventure (“Roll on these 4 tables to find out what and in what number is or isn’t attacking you, in what location and for what reason”).
Maybe I have expectations that are different to the rest of WOTC’s customer base. I have no interest in sandboxes where “You can do whatever you want”. Or dozens of sidebars telling me how to incorporate this specific sandbox into Ravenloft, Greyhawk or Mystara, to make the different settings even more indiscernible from each other.
What I really want is a well-crafted narrative. Meaningful conflict. A guiding thread connecting all the parts of the adventure together. A climactic finale. An antagonist that has been built-up from the beginning. And when I open another official 5e adventure and see 80 pages of sandbox description, followed by quests which amount to “And then walk from one part of the sandbox to another”, I really really want my money back.
You can always tell me that it’s my job as a DM, or the task of a group as a whole, to provide or gradually develope all that. But why should I pay for this “adventure” in that case?
If four old actor dudes can learn to stage-fight with Bat’leths, I’m sure it shouldn’t be a problem for me, if push comes to shove.
(Seriously, watch the episode ‘Blood Oath’ from Deep Space Nine if you never have… It’s awesome, especially if you recognise the characters.)
Why are the non-sentient horses pictured not freaking out even more ?
In my mind there are two separate – but related – issues:
A) The creature is placed in an unfamiliar situation in which its normal movements no longer give the expected feedback, possibly causing a panic, as it is now not able to move well, and might be more vulnerable to predation. A non-sentient creature’s instinct in such a case would be probably kick in, put them in fight-or-flight mode, and cause the creature to try to flee. This is a survival strategy – its probably usually a survival benefit, and has been instilled by evolution.
B) The does not have an intuitive understanding of how its new abilities (fly, etherial jaunt, astral projection, telekenisis, etc) work, and so will have trouble utilizing them to the fullest.
I would argue that a sentient creature (exp: Paladin found steed) would not at all deal with A if they understand that their situation is not life-threatening. B, however, even sentient creatures have to deal with, and some are better than others. Probably an ability that requires more of an intuitive insight would require a wisdom check, while an ability requiring abstract modeling/understanding would require an intelligence check. There should be a bonus or advantage if the creature is being actively assisted in a calm, non-threatening environment. Also, perhaps some bonus for prior experience, including observing the effect on others, or having it explained to them. The bottom line here is that all creatures – sentient or not – have to deal with B, but more sentience probably helps. Finally, note that there might be special abilities stemming from how the sentient creature is associated to the party. For example, the telepathic link and bond of trust that a found steed shares with the paladin surely would have a tremendous effect if the paladin is present and fully focused on assisting them.
So, I can not imagine a case where sentience would hinder learning a new ability relative to non-sentience.
I wouldn’t say not at all, but it’s probably fair to assume that “more sentience probably helps”. Humans aren’t perfect at suppressing their instincts, but they’re at least capable of sometimes recognizing they should.
The caption is odd.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/207698/100-Phobias-from-the-real-world-for-all-RPGs
When someone decides that they should be able to use a weapon without training, I think of that scene from Mask of Zorro where Anthony Hopkins just smacks the sword out of Antonio Banderas’s hand.
Training is the best option, specially if done on the down time 🙂
A game should be realistic only until it gets is front of the flow and fun of the game. In that case defenestrate realism 🙂
Almost everyone plays RPGs for fun, profit and glory, not for an accurate representation of a fantasy world :/
By the way, if someone… lets say… pushes Paladin from his mount while flying… how much you-deserve-this-for-what-you-did-with-necromancer fall damage would he take? 😛
I run GURPS so I already hand out Familiarity Penalties like candy on Halloween. However I do like the idea of recalcitrant Familiars and animal Allies not wanting to put up this horseplay and deciding to nope out of certain spells or effects.
I mean sophont doesn’t mean compliant…
If it is an item that seems like it should just sort of “make sense” then we just move along, but every once in awhile, there is a situation that the whole table agrees when the DM says “roll an intelligence check” to see if our characters can figure out the logistics of a situation.
My favorite example comes from the flying broom. First of all, our DM made our wizard “train” with it for a few hours to get used to how to ride on it. Makes sense. Then later, one of the features of the broom is that you can tell it to go to a specific place (within a mile I think) and we were doing some stealth stuff that required us to fly up and over a camp and into a dungeon undetected… one by one, and for every time we sent the broom back to the next party member, the DM had our characters roll an intelligence check to see if we could “mentally figure out how to direct the broom back to the location”. Needless to say, some of us are “smarter” than others and the broom had a little trouble making it back on a couple occasions.
It was a learning experience for all of us, and later on our journey, during a bit of travel downtime, we spent time “training” with the broom on how to give it directions, so that if the situation ever came up again, we would not have to struggle like that again (or “as much”).
Of course, as is the way with things, it has yet to come up again XD
In the end, I do like the idea of struggle for really weird or unfamiliar situations. It makes a certain kind of sense to be unfamiliar with the unfamiliar. As to how to do it mechanically, it sort of depends on the situation. I think the simple advantage/disadvantage system makes things nice and easy for that, but which skills or abilities one uses kind of depend on what is being attempted.
I’m running an Iron Gods-derived Pathfinder campaign at the moment (it is basically Iron Gods’s lore, locations and tech pushed into the plot of the Second Darkness AP, which works surprisingly well), and I have occasionally struggled to figure out a good way for the PCs to identify and use alien technology. In Iron Gods proper, you can go to certain vendors and the like for information about technology, because Numeria has been dealing with this for centuries and people have generally figured out how the basic stuff works. In my campaign, however, basically no one has ever seen this technology before (and the few who have aren’t sharing). This has led to some wacky hijinks like the metal mace with a glass end (that’s clearly just a flashlight), but it still sometimes gets in the way of “here’s cool loot, go use it!”. One PC has also decided to learn the Kasathan language, which he did by spending a skill point on Linguistics when he leveled up. But because that seems so insufficient to learn a language he did not know existed a week ago, we added on some justifications – he’s spent time with a Kasathan who they’ve talked with with Comprehend Languages and Tongues spells; he’s received the notes of an academic who has studied fragments of this ancient civilization; and even then his Kasathan is REALLY rusty – it’s more like a guy with a tourist phrasebook than someone who actually speaks it. Mechanically, that hasn’t affected anything yet, but flavor-wise I think it has improved things. (There’s another PC with a good Disable Device skill and an e-pick who has devoted herself to becoming Golarion’s first electrician!)
Isn’t this strip (and the example ‘flying gecko’ story) more a matter of fly checks (which are an absurdly complicated mess of their own, and often forgotten/ignored) than anything? The skill exists for that reason – to gauge how good you are at flying.
And fly (the spell) indeed offers a ‘free’ bonus to the skill, but you’re still left to luck if you’re not class-trained or born with flight abilities already and whether your can auto-succeed that ‘hover’ check.
So what we’re seeing in this strip is Snowflake flubbing her roles compared to her better-rolling (or pre-trained) associates. Shouldn’t have put so many points in diplomacy, intimidation and perform, Snowflake!
The little Gecko mini-art is hilarious. Are there any other such campaign snippets or in-jokes Laurel has drawn for your campaign(s)?
We threw a couple of others on the Handbook socials this week. Hit the Facebook or Twitter link and you’ll find ’em easy enough.
There are also a bunch of sketch extras over on the Patreon.
Feet? Snowflake, don’t be silly, you have hooves, not feet. You should know this by now, if you’re indeed a horse and not a shapechanger pretending to be a horse (which would bring up additional questions in regards to her attraction to Lumberjack Explosion’s social identity).
I see your link to cats in zero-G, and raise you some mice in zero-G. They even adapt to it over time!
I’m a big fan of verisimilitude in play. Limitations and additional challenges,in my experience, serve to make players feel extra-cool when they overcome them. Cutting training time out of my D&D games would be like cutting the montages out of Rocky movies, besides which the requirement for training to perform even magically-enhanced abilities (and its associated irksome realisms) helps to put some limit on the extent of the insanity that magic can bring down upon an internally-coherent game-world.
So do mages literally have to go visit the Tower of the Masters or something before they get new spells in you game?
A couple of years ago I ran my players through a version of Temple of the Frog. To keep the powergamers at the table from instantly figuring out what was what, I repurposed illustrations from Expedition to the Barrier Peaks or drew some simple looking shapes with finger holes and no clear up/down/front/back. Every item had a DC to use, and the DC for every individual vs. a specific device dropped with each use, more for a successful use. In the end, only the human monk was willing to experiment with the blaster, and two sets of crushed fingers and an accidental self-immolation later, he became the only party member with “unbreakable brass knuckles that cast scorching ray [x] number of times.”
lol. Nicely done!
One of these days I’m going to have to dip my toes into some OSR games. I’ve only come across Temple of the Frog in my historical documents, but it would be fun to actually slog through that silliness.
Actually, I like that optional rule from Starfinder. I’ve been thinking something of like ‘having to take one day with combat encounters at penalty to earn free proficiency feats with the equipped items’ as a great way of doing trial by fire training.
Go for it! My only warning would be to take the “significant enemies” rule into account:
https://www.starjammersrd.com/game-mastering/combat/#Significant_Enemies
You don’t want players taking advantage with the old “boil an ant hill” routine.
Jokes on them. I scale all encounter to their power levels.
Boil an ant hill? Prepare to face the Wrath of the Fire Ants and their vast and storied subterranean empire, led by the mighty Fae Queen Ant, championed by the mighty Ant’Tagonist, empowered by the fearsome god Antideluvia!
No dice. Your players will just use ANTi-magic.
No they won’t. I have addressed the arms race situation with the clever use of slightly veiled threats.
“You don’t want to get in an arms race with the GM. You will lose.”