The Dresden Files > DFRPG

The First Law of Magic In-Play: Semi-Official Advice

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Tedronai:
Then again, it's a lot easier to 'miss' with a 'bazooka' and still inflict meaningful harm than it is with your fist.
Just because the dice say that you 'hit' doesn't mean they actually took a rocket propelled grenade to the face.  It could easily have hit a few meters to the side, hitting them only by way of debris and shrapnel, which is very easy to justify as being highly variable in effect, and thus not necessarily lethal.

devonapple:
Ultimately, DFRPG is not intended as a First-Person Shooter (I love First-Person Shooters, myself - especially Thug Simulators). It is designed to tell a story (which most FPS' are terrible at doing), so a lot of the mechanisms which appear to be about causing damage are actually about balancing and resolving story elements, as part of a shared narrative. It isn't HERO system, where you have regular attacks and Killing Attacks.

We even have Evil Hat's lead developer telling us that Weapon damage and damage shifts are intended to be abstract measures of plot effect, and they can be as "mortal" or not as is called for in the shared fiction each group is creating at their own game tables.

So, if the shared narrative at a particular gaming table is that anything above Weapon:3 is a killing blow, with commensurate consequences for indiscriminate use, then go for it, and have a great time!

But it isn't an oversight on the part of the game creators: it has been explained as a deliberate choice. One we are free to houserule, of course.

sinker:

--- Quote from: KOFFEYKID on March 16, 2011, 01:14:18 AM ---All Im saying is that in some situations it makes more sense for there to be a death than to give some wildly implausible reason for survival.

--- End quote ---

Thought I'd chime in here. I can agree with this a bit. However there is never, ever a situation where it's ok to destroy another player's fiction without their consent. Forcing a lawbreaker on someone can do that. That kind of thing can destroy the trust at the table and can separate long time friends. If you're playing a game where everyone agreed to this rule before hand then maybe it could be ok, but that still doesn't perfectly justify it. Perhaps they agreed without thinking about the consequences. People do that. Doesn't mean that they want their character destroyed from their perspective.


--- Quote from: LCDarkwood on March 16, 2011, 12:22:32 AM ---That said, of course it's totally fair to call ninja bullshit on a player who's all like, "Woo! 12-shift gravity hammer, eat it!" and then backtracks and goes, "Uh, but I totally pulled it enough not to kill them. Honest." You just have to judge the situation on the ground and use your people skills. No set of rules can substitute for that.

--- End quote ---

Emphasis added. Gming is all about knowing your players, knowing what they want and telling a story that everyone enjoys. If forcing a lawbreaker power on someone is going to be good for the story and for all the players then by all means, though it may come up on it's own if that's the case. Otherwise you might want to relax a bit and just let the fiction be what it is.

MorkaisChosen:
That 12-shift Attack spell could be any number of things, and it's not unreasonable, even with something like a blast of fire, to go with a Taken Out condition like "Badly burned and unconscious." It might seem like playing the system a bit- but if someone seems to be rather less than appropriately careful than they should be, you can always Compel...

Taer:

--- Quote from: LCDarkwood on March 15, 2011, 11:19:44 PM ---Though, theoretically, the GM could also propose it as a compel if you have "Anger Management Problems" or whatever as an aspect.
--- End quote ---

This feels like a mean thing to do.

Yes, Aspects should lead to interesting and fun drama. Compels should lead to dramatic things, things that could be very, very bad to characters.

But this is different from most compels.

Wizardly characters tend to skirt the edge of NPC-dom as far as Refresh in a lot of cases. In the face of a compel like that, a player cannot do anything but resist, if he wishes to continue playing his character.

Or in other words, compels should lead to bad things happening to the character, not to the player. To me, this kind of compel would feel more or less like 'rocks fall and you die unless you spend a FP to resist'. You certainly can have(and should) have anger influencing a character's magic, but not to the point where you compel him to use black magic.

It's sort of like the difference between compelling a RCI to feed vs. compelling him to kill. The first is valid and can lead to all sorts of interesting drama. The second is forces you to either surrender FPs or, well, lose the character.

Anyhow, just my 2 cents, I simply don't think this should be in semi-official gameplay advice.

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