Munchkin Opposition

What is the point of the Opposed Check mechanic in Warhammer 3rd?  I only recently figured out the answer to that question, and until I did so, I hated the mechanic. Now, I realize it's kinda awesome and absolutely vital to the health of the game.

The point of that rule is certainly _not_ to provide results where both parties' stats have equal weight. Not by a long shot. Blue dice and purple dice just don't have anywhere near mirrored results, and really there is no accurate conversion ratio (because Chaos Stars complicate all the math). Even if they did equate better, the initiating participant in the challenge would still have the advantage of Green, Red, or Yellow dice, none of which are available to the opposing participant in the roll. The defender's stance makes no difference, and the defender's skills are devalued in comparison to the aggressors.

So there must be some other reason for using the opposed mechanic.

Having run a lot of math (see below), I've come to a likely answer to the above question. The answer is interesting, and it's a shame that the designers over at FFG never discussed it in something akin to one of those "Behind the Curtain" sidebars you sometimes see in D&D books. Why does the Opposed Check mechanic exist, and work the way it does? For the singular purpose of preserving character niche for those who didn't take a 2 in Fellowship and Intelligence.  It's main point is to ensure that the wacky non-combat careers in Warhammer (such as Agitator, Courtier or Scribe) actually have a relevant specialty that isn't easily encroached upon by the brute-force combat types just throwing 2 XP at a non-career skill.  Tangential to this, the Opposed Checks ensure that those who optimized their stats actually pay some trade-off for those 5 or 6 blue dice they're getting in their best areas -- there are some things they just can't do at all.

To elaborate: Warhammer 3rd is a game where characters generally begin with a high degree of competence. Starting characters can readily get above a 90% success rate from their best skills and actions. Even if something is well outside your focus, you've still almost always got a better than 50% chance of success for a standard roll.

There's two areas where this high success rate isn't true:

• one is Opposed checks by characters with a low stat,
• the other is arbitrarily high difficulty ratings used on plot-relevant checks specifically called out in published adventures. 

The later exist as speed-bumps to prevent PCs from whistling through a scenario due to dumb luck in a way that's not dramatically satisfying. If the PC does manage to short-circuit drama by grasping at straws / thinking outside the box / spamming some random skill at every NPC, the drama that was lost by short-cutting the plot is (hopefully) replaced by the thrill of having beat a high-difficulty (often 4 Purple) check.

The former, those Opposed checks when one side or the other has a 2 in the relevant stat, is there only to make sure that if you put a 2 in your Fellowship or Intelligence you will never succeed at a default roll of that stat. It does this to protect the character niche for those who did invest in Fellowship or Intelligence.  Tangential to this it also makes the person with the 2's occassionally and infrequently get brutally pwned by NPCs with high stats. Said pwnage is just the icing on the cake, it's not the main point of the opposed checks. The game already puts high success rates on the high-stat (N)PCs and if providing PC vulnerability was your only goal you'd solve it with something less like opposed checks and more like the elegant 1-purple of vs Target Defense rolls. There's easier ways to empower GM's manhandling of PCs, but there's not easier ways to protect character niche.

That's probably a good point to segue into all that math I alluded to. After I broke down the success-rate percentages of the official opposed check rule and the most common house-rule to replace it (many GM's use purple dice = opposed stat minus 2), I got a comment from one of my players that perhaps the problem with those numbers was due to the minus two, and the way it zero'd out the difficulties at the low end. If I did 1/2 or 1/3 the stat as purple dice, and any remainder as blacks, maybe that would fit a more reasonable curve. So a 5 in the opposed stat would always produce either 2 purple and a black, or 1 purple and 2 black depending on which variant I used, and a 1 in the opposed stat would always be a single black die no matter how high or low the aggressors stat was. That was actually pretty close to a house-rule I actually used in my first couple one shots, but had eventually dropped because I wanted to try a campaign with a minimum of house-rules to see how the game ran by the books.

Anyhow, I ran a bunch more numbers, and here (after a weird gap that blogger insists on inserting before all tables) are the results:

Opposed Stats	original success rate	Purple = Stat -2	Purple = Stat / 2, Remainder = Black	Purple = Stat /3, Remainder = Black	1 Purple
2 opposed by 1	44%	75%	58%	58%	44%
2 opposed by 2	25%	75%	44%	44%	44%
2 opposed by 3	14%	44%	33%	44%	44%
2 opposed by 4	8%	25%	25%	33%	44%
2 opposed by 5	8%	14%	19%	25%	44%
2 opposed by 6	8%	8%	14%	25%	44%
2 opposed by 7	8%	4%	10%	19%	44%
3 opposed by 1	88%	88%	75%	75%	60%
3 opposed by 2	59%	88%	59%	63%	60%
3 opposed by 3	38%	59%	49%	59%	60%
3 opposed by 4	24%	38%	38%	49%	60%
3 opposed by 5	24%	24%	31%	40%	60%
3 opposed by 6	14%	14%	24%	39%	60%
3 opposed by 7	14%	9%	19%	31%	60%
4 opposed by 1	94%	94%	85%	85%	72%
4 opposed by 2	72%	94%	72%	76%	72%
4 opposed by 3	72%	72%	63%	72%	72%
4 opposed by 4	51%	51%	51%	63%	72%
4 opposed by 5	37%	37%	43%	53%	72%
4 opposed by 6	37%	23%	37%	51%	72%
4 opposed by 7	37%	14%	29%	43%	72%
5 opposed by 1	97%	97%	92%	92%	81%
5 opposed by 2	97%	97%	81%	85%	81%
5 opposed by 3	81%	81%	73%	81%	81%
5 opposed by 4	81%	63%	63%	73%	81%
5 opposed by 5	63%	46%	55%	65%	81%
5 opposed by 6	46%	32%	46%	63%	81%
5 opposed by 7	46%	21%	39%	55%	81%
6 opposed by 1	98%	98%	95%	95%	88%
6 opposed by 2	98%	98%	88%	91%	88%
6 opposed by 3	88%	88%	82%	88%	88%
6 opposed by 4	88%	72%	72%	82%	88%
6 opposed by 5	88%	56%	65%	75%	88%
6 opposed by 6	72%	42%	56%	73%	88%
6 opposed by 7	56%	30%	49%	66%	88%

See how every variant I tried* resulted in far more favorable numbers for those with a 2 in the relevant stat? It's a feature, not a bug. It was as if the designers had specifically chosen the official method just to screw with people who had 2's.  It's not monsters they're trying to hamstring, as a quick glance through the NPC stats and PC's Action cards will show you that even the most dim-witted beast has Willpower enough to resist any opposed check the PCs want to throw at them (it's almost always easier to stab a monster than to intimidate or charm it). The only rolls that these opposed mechanics specifically penalize are rolls only PCs ever make: haggling checks, all-or-nothing improvised social rolls, and intution checks to determine NPC motive. PCs with high stats are (as expected) very good at them, but PCs with low stats are terribly handicapped (far more so than a low-strength character swinging a sword).

* = (EDIT: running some more numbers, I just stumbled across a version that probably would work. More about that in a future blogging, as adding it here now would further bloat an already unreasonably-long post.)

Every character in the game needs a decent (at least a 3, and really it should be a 4) Toughness and Willpower, or else they'll spend most of the campaign carrying around a dangerous number of critical wounds and insanities, and slump over at the first sign of Fatigue or Stress. 2's in either of those stats will kill you. You also need either a high Strength, or a high Agility, to power your attacks. Wizards can get away with a high Intelligence + Willpower, and (at least some varieties of) priests can get away with a high Fellowship + Willpower. Between Strength and Agility, whichever of those stats you don't focus on, the other can be dropped down to a 2 with almost no associated downside or penalty. Likewise, each party needs a single character good at Fellowship, and a single character good at Intelligence, and everyone else could effectively dump those stats down to a 2 as well.

The opposed checks mechanic exists only to make that sort of min-maxing dangerous, and to reward the one person per party that decided to invest in the stats everybody else is ignoring. Opposed checks generate unfair results that double-dip on the stats and penalize those with 2's and 3's. Because the game fails to ever discuss the logic behind this, it strikes most readers as a bug. The moment you realize that Hans the shy dockworker can't ever pull a fast one on his coworkers, but Prof. Moriarty can always pass a Guile check vs Sherlock Holmes, you feel like you've just found a shocking loophole that the designers somehow missed. You didn't. That the system works like that was actually the entire point of their design.

There's one thing I'll say about FFG's crew: somebody over there (probably Jay Little) really knows their math. Words aren't always their strong suite, but numbers clearly are. The stance dice, and their complex interactions with the two sides of the action cards, are absolutely brilliant. There is a lot of very complicated math going on behind the scenes all throughout this game system, and so when I see something where the obfuscated math does something very pointed and unusual, I can only assume that it was put there for a reason.

As it turns out, if opposed checks it didn't work like that, there would be no downside to having a 2 in Fellowship. The game has such low difficulties across the board (outside of a low-stat Opposed check) that anyone can try their hand at any non-opposed check. If you're using the default difficulties for non-opposed checks (which is usually around 1 purple), anyone can reasonably do anything. "I absolutely suck at this" means I've only got a 62% chance of success. Unless it's an opposed check, that is.

While the game makes some nods towards Social encounters and progress trackers moved by "Influence the Target", the obvious truth is that most social situations likely to come up in play will be solved by a single roll of a single social skill. GM's might like the idea of building intricate social encounters, but it's a lot of work to do so, and is not an easy thing to improvise and still make it fun. The game is rather light in concrete examples of it in action, and off the top of my head I can't think of a single published adventure that has a really good one at it's core. If there is a good example, it's probably in the adventure from Lure of Power, but that came out very late in the game's development cycle.

This is Warhammer. The game has several-decades of reputation as the game where your party includes the dregs of the Empire. The party is more likely to be a ratcatcher, a blacksmith and a coachman than it is to be a knight, a wizard and a healer. That's a vital part of the setting and product identity, and FFG wasn't about to eliminate it entirely (even though they were interesting in making the game more cinematic and heroic than the previous editions). Part of the fun is being the unlikeliest of heroes. The spoiled nobleman fop, the illiterate peasant, or the malpracticing barber-surgeon that is thrust into the deep end and has to make do. Someone was going to draw those careers, and feel compelled to invest in non-combat stats just to be true to the character.

It's not fun for those players if everyone else (especially those lucky few who drew legitimate warrior careers) can sink those same points into killing things faster, and then still get by when forced to roll their one non-combat check of the session (because the difficulties are always low and success means the puzzle or social encounter is over). To make those colorful non-combatant careers worth playing at all, it was necessary to make 2s in non-combat skills suck.

The lengths the developers went to in the attempt to make these wackier careers worth playing is actually kinda cool and commendable. A vague framework of a social encounter system that takes a lot of GM prep time? That's to give the nobleman or agitator a chance to shine, and if you don't have one at the table the GM can skip it in favor of a single die roll. Obnoxious rarity and haggling system that relies on too many opposed checks? That's so merchants and conmen have an area where they feel needed, and if you lack that sort of character you can handwave it. Byzantine healing rules that involve a million die rolls? That's so barber-surgeons and physicians can be vital to the party, but if you don't have one, a liberal dose of GM fiat will whisk it all away.  All the clunkiest, most annoying parts of the rules exist just to make players of certain careers feel good. The only problem with all this is that FFG is so tight-lipped about design philosophy, they never actually say "skip this if you don't have a character at the table who cares about it."

Maybe I'm wrong and they don't intend you to skip them -- it could be that they expect high PC mortality rates to make all those careers relevant eventually -- but we'll never know because FFG never explains their motives or decisions.

---

Arcane Afterthought: Wizards and Priests sort of break this dynamic I was just raving about. They both use a non-combat stat as a combat stat, and so get a large number of spotlight moments both in and out of battle from that single investment. The game tries to compensate for this by making 1st rank spells and blessings weaker than default actions, so they don't come into power until late in the campaign. The game also makes them vulnerable to a bad channel/curry roll, so they have to invest in a second stat (Willpower) to fuel their effects. Intelligence has the most skills, so Wizards in particular are also subject to nasty miscasts (there are also thematic reasons for this, but that's beside the point) and minor restrictions on armor. Priests avoid those downsides, but require extra XP investment to unlock their "magical" abilities in the first place, so they trail behind wizards in the early game (at a time when wizards themselves trail briefly behind others in combat at least). None of which really manages to bring wizards or priests back in line with the other characters in a long campaign -- any Wizard (and any Priest of Rank 2 or higher) has tons more options and spotlight moments than a similar-rank scholar or merchant.

Honestly, the biggest thing keeping this in "balance" there is the low frequency of these character types. To be a wizard or priest, you have to get that one particular career card as one of your three random draws from the pile of 50 basic careers (and not have anything of greater personal interest on the other two cards). If none of the players get a lucky draw on day 1, it's a non-issue. If you have every expansion and follow the character creation rules as written, there's a less than 25% chance of even having an apprentice wizard in a 4-player campaign.

Obviously this mitigating factor goes out the window if the GM lets players pick any starting career instead of drawing randomly, but even then it's a least partially mitigated by the lesser chance of anyone playing the random non-heroic careers who get eclipsed early on by Priests and Wizards. Even in these circumstances, a min-maxed caster will eventually grow to be better than everyone else at nearly everything, but you'll get 20-30 sessions of balanced play before that happens.

So again, perhaps the designers just figured the game's high lethality and grimdark grittiness would prevent characters ever living long enough for that to be an issue.

Driving Your Players Crazy

Lately, I've been having a lot of experience with PCs going bonkers. There's a couple different ways to handle it, depending on what your goals are.

In 3:16 Carnage Amongst The Stars,  I just drove the whole group crazy. Hallucinations, multiple realities, glaring inconsistencies, characters and situations that obviously couldn't exist, etc. It was almost all improvised, and I made no efforts to correct "mistakes" or obvious contradictions. Each week I just dove down whichever rabbit hole struck my fancy. This works really well when you're okay with the game not being taken 100% seriously, and when you're not really focused on long-term viability of the campaign. Honestly, I never expected that campaign to run as long as it did.

My Gumshoe Continuum campaign, on the other hand, is one I take very seriously, and hope to be running for a couple more years at least. We're about a year and a half into the campaign at this point, and just last Wednesday, I finally revealed that one of the PCs was crazy. He'd technically been nuts for about six months, but we played it real subtle. There was a scene where he nearly got Fragged Out (think of Back to the Future when Marty's hand starts to fade away: Frag's kinda like that, but it'll drive you crazy, too) , took a lot of mental Stability damage and snapped. So, the other players and I (as GM) decided on his specific brand of insanity, and warped the campaign around it. (That is, after all, the way the Gumshoe insanity rules work.) There was a minor NPC, who (coincidentally) had only ever interacted with his PC. So we decided she didn't exist.

Her name was Beverly, and she would eventually be nicknamed Beverly the Wallflower. When she was first introduced, I had every intention of her being a real character. The PC, whose name is Declan McGee, met her at a speakeasy in 1928 New York. She was just a bit of local color, introduced to establish a scene and was but one of like 50 details added just to make 1928 feel really different than modern day. 1928 was the PCs first major trip back in time more than a decade, and so I put some effort into making it interesting and "real". I had Declan run across Beverly the Wallflower a couple times, and was considering introducing a subplot where she starts stalking him, but hadn't really put much work into it yet. Like I said, none of the other PCs had met her yet (though one had most likely seen her across a crowded room).

Shortly thereafter, Declan failed the big Stability test after being Fragged (zapped by paradox), and the rest of the group got to conspire behind his back about what manner of madness had afflicted him. My wife suggested the awesome notion that perhaps her character hadn't actually seen Beverly across the crowded room, because maybe Beverly didn't exist. It was brilliant, and especially devious because it's not something anyone would see coming. If I introduce a character in September and in December your PC fails a stability test, you don't expect the consequence to be that the scene back in September didn't happen. But indeed, that's what we ret-conned behind the delusional character's players back. Effectively, we decided that he'd dreamed up an imaginary friend. He met his imaginary friend this one night in 1928 at a bar where he was feeling a little left out. From there it followed that every time the PC felt left out, lonely, or imperiled, Beverly would show up out of no where to make him feel safe and loved, even if he wasn't.

What can I say? I'm a bit of bastard (and while I'm at it, I'll add that the Gumshoe insanity rules rock). After a few sessions, good ol' Declan McGee was alone for a bit chasing a personal project while far away from 1920's NYC, and Beverly showed up to keep him company. Of course this was a shock to him, as nothing in those first few scenes with her indicated she was a Spanner (time-traveler). So he of course asked about this, and so she (or rather, his subconscious, played by me) filled in details of how they were being kept apart by her direct superior, Alexander Graham Bell. Yes, that Alexander Graham Bell.

Why was Bell keeping Beverly away from Declan? There's a minor rule amongst the Continuum that Spanners are not supposed to procreate with one another. Imagine a small child with the power to invert causality, or worse yet a baby that can teleport out of the womb. Scary stuff, so the rule is fairly reasonable. Beverly explained to Declan that Mr. Bell, her mentor, was concerned at her obvious affection for Declan, and feared she lacked the willpower to keep things platonic. This is why should could only visit Declan rarely, and on the sly.

To his credit, my player chased after this plotline with gusto. He started up a relationship with Beverly, and would tastefully ask to skip ahead to the next morning whenever they were alone together. Which is something I'm very thankful about, because it means we aren't left wondering what was really going on in any compromising scenes. They snuck around outside of the watchful eyes of The Continuum, made secret dates, and complained about how A.G. Bell was forcing them to be all cloak & dagger.

As GM, I just kept upping the dramatic ante. Beverly eventually showed up (all in Declan's mind) as an Exalted (one of the top ranks of the Continuum) based out of Atlantis (a big floating prehistoric battle platform to protect mankind from the time-traveling bad guys). Or so she said. There were a couple bits that didn't quite add up, and so Declan decided to get Further Information. I believe the player wanted to make sure that his sweetie wasn't a Narcissist (essentially a temporal terrorist), but the in-character motivation was basically to confront A.G. Bell and get everything out in the open. You know, pursuit of maximum drama. :) So he tracks the inventor of the telephone down, and starts interrogating him about Beverly.

"Who?!" Alexander Graham Bell asks.  "Young man, I'm afraid I have no clue of whom you speak."

So Declan goes off on him. Lots of in-character yelling, and then a couple sessions dedicated to proving that A.G. Bell was lying to him. As that seemed to fail, he asked some NPCs for help spying on Beverly to make sure she wasn't up to no good. As you can imagine, hiring private eyes to investigate someone who doesn't even exist eventually lead to help of another sort. Some Psyches (time-travelling psychiatrists) caught up with Declan and took him somewhere remote to get some much-needed rest and counseling.

One of the awesome things about a time-travel RPG is that you can advance the plotline or timeline for one PC without it affecting the others. If you were playing some other RPG and one character went nuts, you'd either have to retire the character, or come up with some miracle cure. Instead, Declan spent 3 years in therapy in a Boxed (really really really remote, both temporally and physically) facility, conquering his own inner demons. We talk a bit about therapy, introduce a few NPCs he meets at the asylum, and then, 3 years older and wiser, he spans right back down to just a couple seconds after he left the party. That's a useful tool / implication of time-travel that has never before proven as immensely useful as it did last session. What could have been a campaign-wrecker instead became a puzzle with a quick and painless solution.

Now, it occurs to me there's a lot more I could have done to keep the truth from him. As I understand about schizophrenic delusions, most people inflicted with them go a long ways towards rationalizing and justifying their visions. Anyone who tries to tell them they're crazy stands a good chance of being labeled "part of the conspiracy". But ultimately, that would make this entire campaign a game about how this one PC went nuts. I just recently did a game (3:16) about people going nuts. I didn't want to tank or warp this campaign entirely around it, unless it was really an exciting concept to the players.

So, rather than come up with more convoluted defenses for Beverly (as if "I've been spending time in Atlantis because Alexander Graham Bell doesn't trust me around you" isn't convoluted and ridiculous enough), I decided to just throw things in the player's court. If he wanted the quick 10-minute solution, which he did, it would just cost a couple years of his character's life. If he'd instead told me "No, I want to be like Baltar", then I would have continued to play his imaginary friend on-and-off, but kept it secondary to the plot, just a minor character quirk. In the real world, when you can't tell reality from imagination, it's all but "game over", but this being an actual game, I need to make sure it only enhances the fiction. This may be Gumshoe, but it ain't Trail of Cthulhu, and I feel no need to ride the road to madness and despair in a streetcar named tragedy... at least not if it's not what the whole playgroup thinks would be the most fun. When the insanity is over, the game must go on.

Meanwhile, one of my other PCs is busy having The Last Supper with Christopher Marlowe and Derren Brown, but that's a tale for a whole other blog post some other time...

Savagely Tricky

Here's what the Savage Worlds rule book should have said about Tricks, but didn't:

Tricks are only really worth it if your character has a low Fighting die but a high Agility or Smarts, and the enemy has a Parry higher than your average attack roll.

Despite what you might have inferred from the concept and fluff text of Tricks, they are not actually intended to model crafty or sneaky fighters. Any character who has actually invested points in their Fighting score and related combat stats will be more effective making normal attacks than wasting their time and actions throwing sand in the opponents eyes, or telling the enemy to look behind them.

What tricks do well is they enable typically non-combatant characters (such as gadgeteers, healers, and spellcasters who've run out of power points) to contribute to the group's success during a fight scene. Tricks are most effective against foes with a low Agility or Smarts, so they're better against Extras and henchman than against a named criminal mastermind that's intended to be a challenge for the whole party.

Even then, the best benefit of a trick will be felt only if someone is prepared to follow it up with a normal attack before the tricked foe acts again. Players should coordinate tricks so that one PC sets it up, and someone else acting right after them takes advantage of it. If you cannot guarantee this sort of situation, only use Tricks if you're the last PC acting in the round, as then a lucky initiative draw may allow the trick to be in effect when yourself of an allied character acts next round. If no one is positioned to follow up on your trick, the low-Fighting character is generally better off firing a pistol at a distant foe than using a trick on an adjacent one.

One exception to needing teamwork, however, is when a character that is not combat-oriented at all is stuck in melee and just wants to flee. With a lucky back-to-back initiative draw, you might be able to use a trick followed by an attack to shake a foe and get away without provoking a free attack. This is of course a desperate move, one best used when the alternative is probably the death of your character. If you succeed at the Trick escape, the GM should proceed to use the Chase mechanics instead of normal movement rules, as without the special Chase rules most foes will be able to automatically catch up with you again if they successfully unshake on their turn.

Honestly, no one writes rule books like that, but I really wish they did. If every game book discussed mechanics so frankly it would improve performance at the table for the casual gamer, and eliminate much of the advantage that can be gained by rules lawyering and munchkinism.

My buddy Erik recently did an amazing mathematical analysis of the Trick mechanic in Savage Worlds. Here's the link. Go ogle his charts and probability graphs for yourself. My proposed text above is really just a straight-forward summary of his discoveries and hard work. I've been meaning to provide a link for the past two weeks, but wanted to find the best way to summarize the heart of his findings. Thank you Erik, it was really helpful to me to see these things spelled out clearly!

Sherlock's Combat Monologues - in Gumshoe

Yesterday my wife and I saw the new Sherlock Holmes movie, and I have some ideas of how to use parts of it in the Gumshoe RPG System. What I liked most about the movie was the clever way they converted Holmes from "merely" a cerebral character to an action hero, without losing any of his genius along the way. He has these awesome internal monologues where he figures out the badguy's weaknesses and how best to fight them. He's no slouch in the Physical Attribute arena, but it's clearly his Mental Attributes that win the fights for him.

As I was watching it, I kept thinking how easy it would be to work some of that in to Gumshoe, the system used in Esoterrorists and Trail of Cthulhu.

In the Gumshoe system, one could argue that attacks, particularly gunfire, aren't quite as damaging as they could (or should) be. Your typical character can take a gunshot or stab wound and be just fine. That's great if you're running a cinematic adventure game, but most of the rest of Gumshoe is geared towards bookish investigator types and gritty realism. So, a method of situationally boosting your combat effectiveness might not be a bad thing. Putting in a Holmes-inspired system is overall pretty simple and elegant.

Here's how it works: For each NPC, the GM comes up with 1 or 2 weaknesses, and the corresponding skills that could be used to ferret them out. In the film, you might argue that Holmes only used Medicine for this (or only used Evidence Collection, depending on your point of view), but for a campaign it'd be important to spread it around so that no single Investigative Skill suddenly becomes a combat powerhouse.

For these weaknesses, the GM assigns one of the following opportunities:

• The weakness represents a way to incapacitate, or more severely harm the NPC. On a successful hit, you may make an appropriate skill spend to get +2 damage.
  Example: A //Use// of the Medicine skill reveals that the foe has a trick knee. If you hit the foe, you may immediately //Spend// a point of Medicine, Scuffling or Weapons to further injure the knee. If you do, you deal an extra 2 points of damage.
• The weakness represents a whole in the NPC's defenses. If you //Spend// a point of an appropriate skill while attacking, it provides a +2 bonus to hit.
  Example: A //Use// of the Outdoorsman Skill allows you to recognize the specific camouflage pattern the sniper is wearing. Armed with that knowledge, it's easier to tell him from the background as you return fire. When shooting you may now spend a point of either Outdoorsman or Sense Trouble on each shot, and if you do you get +2 to the attack roll.
• The weakness represents a limitation to the NPC's attack capability. An appropriate //Spend// can increase your own Hit Threshold, versus their attacks only, by 2. Whenever you do this, the affect lasts until your next action, and if you wish to maintain it beyond you must continue to pay Spend points.
  Example: A //Use// of Weapons has revealed the weakness of his fighting style. He over-relies on a handful of moves, and always telegraphs his attacks. You may //Spend// Weapons or Athletics to boost your Hit Threshold to 5 against his next melee attack.

Of course, you'd need the plot or situations suggest to the PCs that using skills to size up the opponent is a good idea. In the first of my examples, you might narrate a slight limp when the character walks. In the last example, you might have part of the investigation take place at a dojo or gym, and the PCs arrive while the NPC is sparring with someone.

If the GM is feeling adventurous, and really trusts the players, you could also do this more free-form. Allow the above abilities to be something the PCs can invoke with their spends, and in fact make up on the spot, at any time. Just say to your players: "At any time you can spend a skill point to create a weakness in any NPC that doesn't already have one. Spend an appropriate skill, narrate in the NPCs flaw, and it becomes part of the character." There's some potential for abuse there, in that a player could build their PC in a very min-maxed way and then always give every foe a flaw that can be exploited with their one particular maxed-out skill. If you think that's likely to happen with your group, then fall back on the first system I described, where only the GM defines the weaknesses.

Star Trekkin

Starting last week, I'm now playing in a Star Trek game every-other-week. I'm playing a Tellerite astrophysicist. I'm a little nervous about taking on such a mentally-focused role, given Trek's mutable scientific (and temporal) laws that wobble from episode to episode. On Trek the characters seem to solve everything by reversing polarity or channeling energy through the main deflector, even when that makes no sense.

I think this will be a good learning experience for me, though. Either the GM will come up with clever ways to make the science-related challenges work, or I'll learn by trial and error what doesn't work. Either way, I expect my own GMing of sci-fi games will improve because of it. So, I'm kind of excited. Plus, it's a good group, these folks are a lot of fun.

The system being used is PDQ#, which is nicely flexible. It's less fiddly than Savage Worlds, but more defined than Risus. I think it's probably a c8 on my crunchometer, but I'll know better after I've played it more.

The era of Trek that is our setting is 5-10 years before Next Generation. There's been promise that Tholians the Gorn will show up, both of which have always been personal favorites that I wish the good series (not Enterprise) had done more with.

*Sigh* Why did the weakest Trek series have to be the only one that followed up on the most interesting aliens? I know those episodes exist, but the rest of Enterprise sucked so badly I'm afraid to watch them.

Phys Soc Men

I've said it before, but an experience tonight really drove it home.

Here's my open request to GMs and game designers: If your RPG is going to have different attributes, such as Physical/Social/Mental, you need to have all of those categories carry roughly equal weight, or else make the lame stats cost less. If, as so many systems seem to do, only Physical ever gets rolled, then you really don't need the Social or Mental traits at all. They should be significantly cheaper, or just not exist.

(Amber, for example, has no social trait, and it's only mental trait is just a measure of psychic power. And that system works just fine. Matters of problem solving and intelligence are left up to roleplaying and the player's craftiness. That's much better than saying "you plan to role-play that you're smart? Well then you have to spend half your XP on stats you'll never roll.")

If you insist on charging the same amount for the three stats, they need to be roughly equal in their functional ability to solve problems.

In tonight's one-shot at Wayward, the system had those 3 traits: P/S/M.

• I had Physical as my primary stat, and my character worked great and I had lots of fun. Someone else had literally nothing but Physical, and he did insanely well, too.
  
• Everyone else (5 other PCs) had some measure of points wasted in Social and Mental, and had varying degrees of frustration.
  
• The ship's Captain got creamed, because his maxed out social trait was unable to prevent any of the three fight scenes, and his correspondingly minimized physical trait meant he got hit again and again.
  
• Even the two psychic characters only got to roll their psy powers twice each. Compare that to my Physical stat, which paid off at least a dozen times, in melee, ranged, and starship combat.
  

That's not intended in any way as a slam on the GM. It's an easy trap to fall into, because of the nature of how most RPGs are run. Here again is a link to a rant I wrote last year on this topic, which discusses the issue from a different (but relevant) angle.

Composure, Resolve, Reflexes

(at the Scion Forums) kagetora0 wrote:

In my gaming group, we have decided to experiment with two things: using the nWoD stats (Basically, nixing Appearance and Perception, and adding Composure and Resolve, as social and mental 'resistance' stats) and then using those stats to make a social and mental "DV"
...
The main trouble we've run into is knacks. It's been a challenge to come up with a variety of knacks for Epic Resolve and Epic Composure; and equally a challenge to slide the old Appearance and Perception knacks in again.

Another option would be to go for a 12-stat system instead of 9-stat.

You'd keep Appearance and Perception, but still add Composure and Resolve.

For the 12th Stat, you could add "Reflexes". Reflexes is about reaction time, speed, and gross/full-body movement. Dexterity would remain the stat of precision and accuracy.

In this way, you'd break up attack pools and DV to be based upon two different stats. This would allow for more variety amongst PCs as well as making it easier for the GM to craft antagonists that were hard to hit or good at hitting, but not necessarily both. This could solve a lot of Scion's problems.

Of course, it would have other impact, and you'd need to make some other tangential rulings to support it:

1. At character creation, you'd get 10/8/5 (Or maybe even 11/8/6) points for Attributes.
2. At template/upgrade you'd get 6/4/3
3. Possibly raise the standard per-session XP award by 1 since your points have to go a little further to shore up all your weaknesses.
4. You'd still need plenty more knacks for Composure and Resolve, plus a couple extra for Dexterity and Reflexes (assuming the original Dex knacks were now split between them)
5. Numerous boons would need their dice pools altered to make the new stats worthwhile
6. I'd be tempted to base starting Willpower off Highest Virtue + (Average of Composure and Resolve)

I kinda like that. I think it would solve a lot of the systemic flaws of Scion. Unfortunately, it's too sweeping a change to implement to my campaign at this stage.

Epic Willpower

Note: while this starts off all annoyingly nitpicky, it really does get around to being useful eventually. If you're sick of the whining, just skip down to the part is large bold letters.

If I had it all to do over again, I'd massively revamp the Scion rules prior to having started my campaign. There's a lot of things (that didn't look terribly problematic back when all we had was the Hero book) which are now rearing their heads at late Demigod.

One of them has to do with Willpower.

There is no Epic Willpower. Instead, Willpower runs on a scale from 1 to 10. There's technically nothing that stops a legendless mortal from buying it up to 10, which is also the highest the most stubborn and self-centered God can achieve.

This was clearly an intentional design decision. Instead of having a wider Willpower scale, PCs and immortal NPCs have access to a variety of Knacks that replenish Willpower. All involve someone else using them to replenish your Willpower for you. This seems intentionally crafted, likely so that PCs have to work together. Many of those work better on mortals than Scions or Gods. This was also intentional, intended to keep PCs from effectively having infinite Willpower, yet still allow the Knacks to be powerful in certain circumstances such as swaying the masses and raising armies. The unfortunate side effect is that a mortal backed up by Scions can access more Willpower than a Scion backed up by Scions, and that a PC without backup has no more Willpower than a Legendless Mortal.

One solution to the conundrum above is a Knack from the wiki: Refuge in Logic. It's a "must have" knack for the moody friendless God, even though it still only works once per story. With a few dots of Epic Intelligence and that knack, a god effectively has more Willpower than a mortal.

But that's only part of the complaint. Let's examine the rolls involved in most mind-influencing powers. The aggressor / brainwasher rolls Attribute + Skill and adds their corresponding Epic successes. The defender typically rolls Willpower + Skill (almost always Integrity, but sometimes Fortitude) + Legend.

At Legend 2, that means the aggressor rolls (at most) 10 dice + 1 autosuccess. The defender rolls (again, at the maximum for Legend 2) 17 dice. More realistically, the defender probably rolls around 12 dice. Point being that an average L2 Scion has a 50% chance of shrugging off the powers of a built-to-maximize L2 hypnotist.

At Legend 12, the math is very different. The aggressor could be rolling 16 dice + 46 autosuccesses. The defender is now rolling at most 27 dice. Which means success is automatic. Against mortals that'd be no big deal - Gods should always beat mortals. But those 27 dice are actually the max for a defending God. Which means no wonder Loki gets away with most anything - the Gods can't hope to resist his smooth talking.

There's a knack (Blockade of Reason in Scion: God) that solves this, by allowing the defender to add his Epic Int successes to the Willpower + Integrity + Legend roll. So now 16 dice + 46 successes are potentially countered by 27 dice + 46 successes. If the defender is Int-based, the odds have totally flipped, from being impossible to resist, to being nearly impossible (I haven't carried the math far enough, but I'd eyeball it at less than 10% probability) to fall for it. The boost is so much that Blockade of Reason is a must-have knack. Even if you only take Epic Int to 4 - 7 dots it's still a huge defensive swing (+7 to +22 successes) against most tricksters and brainwashers.

Better balance would have been achieved by making Blockade of Reason add dice instead of successes. Admittedly, no one ever wants to roll 40 or 60 dice, but at least then there'd be chance of failure. If the GM allows both Blockade of Reason and Contempt of the Superior Mind, the better purchase is always Blockade, but having both would make you truly immune to manipulation (58 successes instead of 46).

Given the system as it stands, there's really no good solution, but then Scion is full of lopsided conflicts, and you can choose to not see that as a flaw. I think better balance would have been achieved if they'd broken from the World of Darkness / Exalted template for Willpower.

Possible house-rule: Epic Willpower
One option would have been to make Willpower function like Attributes. Give it an Epic version, (possibly complete with Knacks). Limit your mundane Willpower to the higher of 5 or your Legend Rating, like Attributes. Then make brainwash powers roll aggressors Att + Skill + Epic vs defenders Will + Skill + Epic Will + Legend. The result would be always favoring the defender, but by a small margin that keeps with the "Primacy of Defense" concept of the game.

A campaign using this would likely not allow the Blockade of Reason knack from Scion: God, but may use the Contempt of the Superior Mind knack from the wiki.

Here's a handful of Knacks for Epic Willpower. Those intending to use this for a campaign will no doubt want to come up with more.

• Righteous Empowerment: Whenever you spend a Willpower to channel a Virtue, you also gain an autosuccess on that roll, as if channeling a Virtue and spending Willpower for guaranteed success on the same roll (which normally isn't allowed).
• Brow-beating: When making a Manipulation roll to influence people, you may add a number of bonus dice equal to your dots in Epic Willpower. You may only use this on rolls that represent extended arguments and unflinching force of personality. In other words, it can't apply to any roll where the target wouldn't know they'd been manipulated or at least verbally abused.
• Hidden Reserves: A number of times per story equal to your dots of Epic Willpower, you may regain 2 Willpower by meditating. Doing so takes at least 10 seconds of focus and inner reflection. Unless you have the Wits Knack "Meditative Focus" you cannot do this during combat or while otherwise under the threat of immediate harm or death.
• Master Of My Own Domain: If you attempt to fail a Virtue roll so as to resist taking a course of action, but score one or more successes (and so must normally do what the Virtue demands) you may pay 1 Willpower or 3 Legend per success to cancel them out and retain control of your character. Alternately, you can pay only enough to cancel some of the successes, so as to prevent a Virtue Extremity but not ignore the virtue entirely.
  
• All Things In Moderation: You are immune to the addictive quality of drugs, even those of the magical variety. While this does little to boost your resistance to their short term affects, you at least know you won't end up craving them again later. In addition, for any poison (or drug) that has a tolerance value based on Stamina (or Fortitude), you may spend a Legend to determine your tolerance by Willpower (or Integrity) instead for the day.
  

Brains Over Brawn - Wits Knack

This has been back-burnered for a long time. It's a knack idea aimed at boosting Mental-focused Scion PCs more helpful in combat. The idea has been that I wanted some way for lots of Perception, Intelligence or Wits to be as useful as lots of Strength or Dex. The problem has been that doing so always undermined the importance of those physical stats. However, I figured out a way finally for cleverness to be devastating about once per fight scene without it outperforming Physicals on every attack.

Brains Over Brawn - Wits Knack - No Prerequisites

Your quick thinking and clever stratagems make you a deadly force in battle. You find clever ways to use scenery and situation against your enemies, or to exploit their weaknesses.

When stunting on an attack or damage roll, you may spend a Willpower to use any Mental Attribute (and the corresponding Epic Attribute) in place of Dexterity or Strength. Which Mental Attribute to use is your choice, though it should make at least some sense to the situation. For two-die and three-die stunts, if you spend a Legend as well, you can use a different Mental Attribute (and corresponding Epic) in place of the other Physical Attribute.

Example: Fred, Scion of Thoth, is facing a vampire. His stunt involves impaling the villain on a wooden fence. For a willpower, he could use Intelligence (instead of Dex) on the attack roll to lure it into position. Alternately, he could justify using Perception (instead of Strength) on the damage roll because he lined up the shot with the vampire's heart. If he spent both a Willpower and a Legend, he could do both.

In most circumstances, you may only do this once per scene. Having fallen victim to your clever traps (or having watched their comrades or henchmen fall victim to it), they become more cautious and are unlikely to leave you an opening a second time. However, if a foe is in the throes of a Virtue Extremity (or has 0 dots in one or more Mental Attributes) they may leave themselves open repeatedly, at the GMs discretion.

How do you deal with Epic Mental Characters?

From a thread on the Scion Forums...

One thing I do is allow my players to "poll their epic wits" - that is, PCs with epic wits or intelligence may ask the other players for feedback and ideas. Players can butt in at any moment: "speaking as your epic wits, you might want to try..." As long as they are quick about it, that is. I don't want (and usually won't allow) 10-minute strategy debates every third tick, but I do allow a lot more tabletalk for Scion than any other RPG I've run.

Also, if I see the PCs making a mistake or falling into a trap, I resist the temptation to spring it on them. (Of course, if the trap was set by someone with more epic intelligence or epic manipulation than them, then I'll sit quiet and watch the fun - but that doesn't happen very often.) Instead, I point out that they're so clever they deduce that their intended course of action was about to cause some massive trouble for them. Depending on the situation, I may briefly summarize the likely consequences so they can choose whether or not to go ahead with it.

For example, next session will likely begin with me telling one of the PCs the following:

"As the ship sails back to Dakar, you think about the situation you're facing and realize that you're effectively delivering your own personal declaration of war to a goddess. If you go mess with Tlazlteotl in the way you're planning, her reaction will be drastic. The fact that you're one of the main characters of the story won't necessarily save you - you may just be another Greek Tragedy."

Hopefully, that'll make the player think for a moment and try a slightly less direct approach to the conflict at hand. If not, at least it'll make for a good story.

Amber Mentalism Power

A common character concept for Amberites PCs is "The Psychic". While Psyche can accomplish some of what said players are looking for, I've found they often want more. For game balance issues (Psyche's buff enough as-is) I've found it best to make a separate power available to cover such abilities.

Mentalism: 15 Points
Mentalism is a form of Magic that closely mirrors depictions of psychic/psionic powers in a variety of modern earth media, from the X-Files to Star Wars. It is NOT a “natural outgrowth of a high psyche”, but instead a codified version of magic that, like Power Words or Sorcery, must be learned and studied. Acquisition of this Power more closely resembles Power Words than other forms of magic, however, as a student learns more from introspection and meditation than from the study of arcane tomes.

The effects of Mentalism fall into a few primary categories. These are Awareness, Suggestion, Telepathy and Telekinesis. The strengths and weaknesses of these effects are detailed below.

Awareness: The Mentalist has honed thier mind to be more accutely aware of their surroundings, and in particular the ebb and flow of shadow and magic about them. By taking a moment to concentrate, the Mentalist can discern any of the following:
How well Magic (or any other familiar Power) functions in the current shadow environment.
The buildup or use of other Powers or magical energies.
The likely immediate Destiny of the Shadow they are currently in.
The location of nearby Shadow Paths or recent Trails/Wakes through Shadow.
The presence and emotional state of nearby Shadow Folk or Creatures.
In all these cases, solid reality is defense against the Mentalist’s Powers. For example, you can read a Shadowling’s mind, but not a Chaos Lord’s. You can determine the Destiny of a Shadow-World, but not the fate of Amber itself. Further, a shadow-being with Psychic Barrier, Psychic Neutral or a Psyche Rank higher than your own may well be undetectable by this aspect of Mentalism.

Suggestion: The weak-willed beings amongst Shadow are easy for you to manipulate. By merely meeting concentrating upon a nearby shadowling, you may bend their desires to match your own or give them temporary instructions.
This aspect of the Power works only upon the unreal, any Amberite or true Lord of Chaos will be quite resistant to it.
Also, any adversarial shadowling will require a psychic struggle to affect. The trick here is to use this power on them when they are calm or unsuspecting, not when they are pointing a gun at you.

Telepathy: You may broadcast thoughts to Shadowlings you know well. This is purely a one-way transmission, your Mentalism does not grant them the ability to respond in any way. However, it is an effective way to send silent communication, summons, or even suggestions.
This telepathy is limited in range based upon your own Psyche, and is unable to extend more than a few worlds away for even the First-Ranked character.
As with suggestion, this Telepathy is a form of shadow-manipulation, and any “real” person will be unaffected and unreachable by this method.

Telekinesis: You may reach out to have physical effects upon the shadows. With only partial focus, you may cause slow deliberate motion in smaller inanimate objects, defying gravity or other weak opposition. Stronger concentration will allow you to increase the speed of motion or the mass moved.
You may even target specific portions of a target, causing stress fractures or collapsing internal organs.
Telekinesis may be resisted with Strength. In general, to affect someone you will need a higher Psyche ranking than their Strength ranking.
Again, as with the other aspects of Mentalism, this Magic is very difficult to perform against anyone of reality. You probably won’t be able to gift yourself with Flight or crush Corwin’s trachea, but with some cleverness, you’ll find ways to use your surroundings as tools or weapons.

---

Mentalism & Attributes:
Psyche is the most important attribute for most Mentalism tricks, as it determines the extent of your Awareness, the power of your Suggestions, the range of your Telepathy and the mass you can lift with your Telekinesis. Many applications of Telekinesis will also employ Warfare for targeting, locating vital organs or maintaining balance. If you want to hurl people around in combat, you’ll need Psyche and Warfare.
Mentalism is not a high-energy-drain Power, so Endurance is somewhat less vital than with most other Powers. That said, if you intend to use your Mentalism while fatigued or wounded, you’ll need a bit of Endurance.

Mentalism vs other Powers:
Mentalism is very good at detecting other Powers, but not so great at resisting or battling them. This Power will allow you to detect and track your enemies through shadow, but not travel freely on your own.
Pattern is much stronger at shadow manipulation, but suffers from time constraints. Mentalism is faster than Pattern, but given time to wear you down the Pattern Initiate will eventually undo your work and twist your worlds against you.
Trump connections (particularly when matched with a strong Psyche bid) are much more effective and powerful than Mentalism’s Telepathy. Again, however, Mentalism’s advantage is speed. You can do suggestions upon anyone you meet, whereas the TrumpArtist would need to study and paint them first.
Sorcery is more open-ended and ultimately more flexible than Mentalism, but also requires much more prep time and maintainance. When time is precious or the current events couldn’t be prepared for, Mentalism will prove itself more useful. When facing a sorceror in combat, try to predict thier actions. Mentalism will strike home more often than sorcery, but when sorcery does connect it’s terribly powerful.
PowerWords are faster than Mentalism, but not as flexible in the moment. Should the two powers come into direct conflict, Attributes will determine the winner.

Combining Mentalism with other Powers:
In general, Mentalism combos nicely with Pattern, Mentalism handling the short-term immediate changes, and Pattern working for the long-term and large-scale transformations. A similar relationship exists between Mentalism and Sorcery, where each Power covers the other’s weaknesses. In addition, several specific instances and combos are noted below...
Awareness: Helps Sorcerors determine the local laws of magic, tuning their spells to the local environment.
Awareness: Enhances the “Pattern Lens” ability of Advanced Pattern, enabling truly powerful scrying.
Awareness: Speed’s shadow-movement via Entropy.
Suggestions: Can be made permenant by application of Pattern or Conjuration.
Suggestions: May be delivered at greater range via Trump.
Suggestions: Application of Entropy can lower a target’s resistance to Mentalism and vice versa.
Telekinesis: Can be Invoked as a Micro-Spell, allowing Telekinesis to aim or fuel Sorcery.

---

Advanced Mentalism?
So many Powers in Amber have an Advanced Version, and fiction is rife with examples of high-end psychic powers. Throw some extra points this way at character advancement, and you might well end up any manner of other psionic/jedi powers. This is uncharted territory, so there’s no telling what you’ll get. Feel free to make suggestions to the GMs, but ultimately it’s their call as to what exactly you get.

Paranoiac's Positioning - Wits Knack

The following Scion Knack was, of course, inspired by the description of first rank in Warfare in the Amber Diceless RPG.

Paranoiac's Positioning - Wits Knack - Prerequisite: Opening Gambit

To say you're just a touch paranoid would be an understatement - though you like to think of yourself as merely prudent. You expect ambush at all times, and constantly reposition yourself to prepare for it. You never sit with your back to a window or door, and constantly occupy the most readily-defensible part of the room unless forced to abandon it.

At the start of every battle (even before you act) you are assumed to be in the highest degree of cover logically possible, on the highest ground that wouldn't create social distress, with your back to a wall, if at all possible. As such, you typically get +2 to your DV, and are immune to higher ground penalties from non-flying foes. The number of people who can attack you at once in close combat is reduced by one. Effectively, treat this knack as if the player were constantly saying "I use my Epic Wits to find the most defensive location in the room. Then I stand over there." If the locale involves some feature that could give better defensive benefits, the GM should point them out and offer them to the PC.

These conditions last until someone forcibly repositions you, or you clearly and intentionally move to a lesser position. Actions taken that might possibly result in the preservation of these bonuses are assumed to automatically do so. The GM is required to explicitly notify you before you commit any action that would reduce or negate these bonuses. Should he or she forget to mention such, they must either let you retract the action, or claim the bonuses (at least until your next action) anyway. The ST cannot remove your Cover bonus unless you are standing on a featureless empty lot - if there's any terrain around at all, you'll keep it between you and the enemy.

This knack assumes you have full access to your senses and locomotive powers. Should you be blinded, restrained, or Inactive, you are at the mercy of the GM's common sense.

Subvocalization - Perception Knack

Subvocalization, aka "The Scion Whisper" - Perception Knack - Prerequisite: Broad-Spectrum Reception

You have practiced the fine art of subtle subvocalization. You may speak without moving your lips, at frequencies and volumes so low only those with Epic Perception can hear you. Two characters with Epic Perception and this knack may thus carry on a conversation totally unnoticed, even under close observation.

If speaking at subsonic frequencies, Scions with Broad-Spectrum Reception, high-quality microphones, nearby seismographs, and certain non-human creatures might pick it up, at the Storyteller's discretion. On the plus side, however, you can have such a conversation at any volume without mortals noticing, and can carry it on despite significant background noise.

If speaking at subvolumes, only those with Epic Perception can hear you. You can even set the level of Epic Perception needed to hear you, though you can't pick a level greater than your own Epic Percep. However, when using subvolumes, any significant background noise will totally drown you out.

Subvolume and subfrequency can be combined to make for a very selective conversation.

Pet Peeves regarding Attributes

One of the things that really bugs me about RPG systems is how much easier it is to play a character that's stronger (than you) then it is to play a character who's smarter (than you).

For example, let's say you need to get into a building:

If I'm playing a character with Human Maximum strength, I just tell the GM that I'm ripping the door off it's frame, and make a die roll.

If I'm playing Mr Dexterity, I just tell the GM that I pick the lock, and make a die roll.

But if I'm playing a mental or social-based character, depending on the game and the GM, I may be out of luck.

I could be playing the suavest most charismatic PC that ever walked the earth, but if the GM's hell-bent on making me role-play through the discussion with the guards out front, I'm probably not getting in. (See, while I, the player, do have Charisma, I'm about human minimum in Manipulation. People don't see me as an authority figure, and I'm no good at lying. I am fun to be around, but that's not so useful for getting past armed guards).
Chances are the GM makes me act through at least a bit of it. If he's a good GM, and I do a decent job of roleplaying, and remind him of the character's social skills, he'll eventually let me roll. But that still means my ultra-suave character is limited by my acting and social abilities.

Worse yet, let's say I'm playing a character whose physical and social skills are mediocre, but he's got the greatest analytical mind known to history. Can I get past those guards, through the window or over the wall with a single Intelligence roll? Probably not.
Even if the GM lets me make a roll, it's at best going to result in a few hints on how to get in. Definitely my ultra-clever character is limited by my own real-world cleverness. And if things don't go so hot, I may say or do something foolish that a spy/techie/wizard with years of training and experience would never do. That's usually when the GM pounces. I know I do it all the time - most recently just two nights ago.

All GMs let you roll dice instead of actually climbing a wall.
Some (but definitely NOT all) GMs will let you make a Charisma-check instead of having to talk your own way past the guards.
But few indeed are the GMs who will let you roll Intelligence for the character to come up with a plan that gets them inside, without the player having to figure out at least the basics of the plan themselves.

Don't get me wrong. The way things are makes perfect sense on many levels. The game is less fun (and greatly unbalanced) if any one attribute (in this case, intelligence) solves everything. And in a role-playing game, there's a natural desire to make the players role-play or act. But that immutable paradigm has pissed me off on more than one occasion, and is a contributing factor in why I GM more often than I play.

So I try to be a good GM. I let the players try things. When they make horrible tactical blunders I prompt them with "are you sure you want to do that?" If their character sheet reflects a quick thinker and/or super-intelligence, I try to give them a few more seconds to think about their action. I generally let people roll Charisma before I start emoting the NPCs reaction to the crazy thing they just said. And I only kill characters when the players have repeatedly ignored the warning signs I've given them.