Steely_Dan
First Post
1) Consistently, I live in England (but you still, hopefully, know what I meant).
2) What definition, what bad rules?
3) Exactly.
Convincing 4th Edition players to consider 5th Edition
1) Consistently, I live in England (but you still, hopefully, know what I meant).
2) What definition, what bad rules?
3) Exactly.
Good stuff. This is like my possession/mind reading example. Skill challenges - DCs plus the success/failure structure - give the framework for creativity without brokenness or endless arguments.
JamesonCourage
Adventurer
This conversation seems like two sides have decided to talk at cross purposes, explaining why their view is better because "it's more Fun this way." Fun is subjective. I just don't see either side convincing the other that "this Fun is better than your Fun." As always, play what you like 
This is a huge issue of controversy in RPG design and play.
I am not interested in playing an RPG where the GM is responsible for creating the story. (What are the players, then? Spectators? Viewers? Readers? Performers of the GM's script?) I want the story to emerge out of play.
<snip>
Ultimately, D&D is not a democracy. While a DM should be a benevolent dictator, his opinion is ultimately the only one that matters.[/QUOTE]Although the 4e rules are a little amibalent on some of these issues (contrast the PHB with the DMG and the DMG2) it is certainly not in unambiguous agreement with you.
Consider p 9 of the PHB:
The Dungeon Master has several functions in the game.
*Adventure Builder: The DM creates adventures (or selects premade adventures) for you and the other players to play through.
* Narrator: The DM sets the pace of the story and presents the various challenges and encounters the players must overcome.
* Monster Controller: The Dungeon Master controls the monsters and villains the player characters battle against, choosing their actions and rolling dice for their attacks.
* Referee: When it’s not clear what ought to happen next, the DM decides how to apply the rules and adjudicate the story.
*Adventure Builder: The DM creates adventures (or selects premade adventures) for you and the other players to play through.
* Narrator: The DM sets the pace of the story and presents the various challenges and encounters the players must overcome.
* Monster Controller: The Dungeon Master controls the monsters and villains the player characters battle against, choosing their actions and rolling dice for their attacks.
* Referee: When it’s not clear what ought to happen next, the DM decides how to apply the rules and adjudicate the story.
The first two of these functions vest the GM with backstory and scene-framing authority. The third and fourth establish the GM as playing a key adjudicative role in action resolution.
There is some ambiguity over where plot authority (ie authority over the unfolding of the story) lies, although I think the best reading of the game overall is that plot is expected to emerge out of actualy play.
There is nothing here about rule zero, or about the GM's view being the only one that matters.
The 4e DMG says this (p 189):
As Dungeon Master, you wear several hats: storyteller, rules arbiter, actor, adventure designer, and writer. Some DMs like to add a sixth hat to that stack: rules designer. House rules are variants on the basic rules designed specifically for a particular DM’s campaign. They add fun to your D&D game by making it unique,
reflecting specific traits of your world.
A house rule also serves as a handy “patch” for a game feature that your group dislikes...
Think carefully about the reason for changing or adding a rule. Are you reacting to a persistent problem in your campaign, or to one specific incident? Isolated problems might be better handled in other ways. More important, do the other players agree to the need for a change? You have the authority to do whatever you want with the game, but your efforts won’t help if you have no group.
reflecting specific traits of your world.
A house rule also serves as a handy “patch” for a game feature that your group dislikes...
Think carefully about the reason for changing or adding a rule. Are you reacting to a persistent problem in your campaign, or to one specific incident? Isolated problems might be better handled in other ways. More important, do the other players agree to the need for a change? You have the authority to do whatever you want with the game, but your efforts won’t help if you have no group.
Despite the reference to authority, this hardly implies that the GM's view is ultimately the only one that matters. And this is before we get to the discussions in the DMG and DMG2 of player-formulated quests, player contributions to scene-framing and stakes-setting, etc.
Well a set of rules can't require you in the sense of forcing you - unlike the law in the Australia or the US, for example, they lack police, courts and bailiffs.
But a game can certainly say, Follow the rules or this game won't work. B/X D&D doesn't say this - it talks about the rules as guidelines. Burning Wheel, on the other hand, strongly insists on the rules as written being crucial to the experience. Given that they are different games using different techniques to produce different play experiences, that's not surprising. And it's unrelated to the presence of a GM - Burning Wheel, like D&D, has a GM.
I think that, in this repsect, 4e is closer to BW than to B/X D&D. Its action resolution mechanics are a fairly tightly integrated whole. (But, as with BW, you can probably toy with some of the elements on the lists - monsters, weapons, spells etc - without destabilising things too badly.)
I agree with the need for judgement calls. I think that's what's going on in 4e when the GM acts as "monster controller" and referee. But I think rule zero, as it is typically (or often) used, is about something more than this. It's about a particular sort of GM authority over the ruleset, and perhaps also adjudication (a high degree of GM authority to suspend the action resolution mechanics, in the interests of the story, or to avoid unreasonable results - both notions that Ahnehnois has deployed above).
Agreed.
Crazy Jerome
First Post
I think a person much confused about the boundaries between player and character wants and agenda is incapable, by definition, of making consistently good adjudications as a DM, much less explaining them to anyone else. They might get by at it, the same way that people don't need to be perfect drivers to make it to work and back most days. That is, if there is no pressure, they can Take 10 on their DM adjudication rolls.
Tony Vargas
Legend
By that definition, every rule in every RPG is bad, because some people just don't like RPGs and would thus never have fun playing under any RPG rules of any kind.
'Fun' is very subjective - very nearly worthless as a criterion upon which to design a game, really. Which is ironic, when you consider that it's kinda the point.
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
If one wants to forget real-world physics and have the game world run on its own different physics as defined by the game rules, those rules are going to have to include an awful lot of pretty dry stuff about how said game-world physics actually work...think about it.
You can't really have it both ways. Either you use real-world physics as a basis for what the characters are experiencing in the game world (e.g. you fall because of gravity, fire doesn't burn without oxygen, solid-liquid-gas are the three states of matter, the characters are carbon-based lifeforms, etc.) and tweak them a bit to suit what magic does; or you start completely from scratch and rewrite physics to suit your game world and the universe that contains it.
And as every DM is probably going to end up with a different result, you're talking some mighty thick houserule books there.
Conversely, if a DM intentionally ignores a rule and a better game (i.e. more fun) results because of it, isn't that a good thing?
Problem is, for most of us pretty much any game system will have some aspects to it that some of us like and others that we do not; and they'll be different for every one of us. It's a lottery win if someone other than yourself writes what is for you the perfect rpg; and that same game might not work for me at all. And so we either have to accept a game that isn't what we really want, or we kitbash. I mean, I love 1e to pieces; but I suspect Messers Gygax and Arneson would be turning in their graves if they knew what I've done to its rules over the years.
So - and this is where 5e might really be getting it right, let's hope - modularity becomes the answer: a stripped-to-the-bone core framework on which can be hung any number of different modules and decorations, where each DM can choose which ones to use or not use.
And it's the DM who in the end has final say over whether a design is good enough for the group, as if it isn't she won't run a game; meaning either someone else has to take over or nobody plays at all.
Lanefan
It's been re-invented before. With every edition, for example. And every time someone altered it to fit a particular setting better. No reason not to do it again.
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Well, I don't think it was presented in the ideal way. Other people have commented many times on how at least some part of it should have been in the PHB, at least a reference to the concept if not the actual crunch part.
I don't think the damage expressions were too low actually, even for MM3 math. It kind of depends on what you want to do. For some simple repeatable tricks the damage IS low (IE the low standard damage expression) but the assumption is that the trick will be particularly appropriate to the tactical situation and thus have other benefits or will advance the story etc. You also don't really want the easily repeatable tricks to be too overly effective damage dealers. When you get to the really situational kind of stuff like something you can only do once in a very specific situation (due to terrain or some other unique circumstance) then the limited damage expressions can be pretty nice, surpassing encounter powers in a lot of cases. Again, the ancillary results should be the kicker. Remember too, you can always combine power use with tricks too in at least some cases. Using a spell in an unusual way, or an exploit, etc.
You do have to use page 42 some and get a feel for it. Like anything as flexible as that it won't work perfectly in every situation as RAW, but there's a good basis there. I think the main area they could have talked about would have been 'fail forward', which is only very sketchily talked about in 4e materials at all.
So, this would be an example of where 5e can apply polish to 4e. This is really what I want to see, a better 4e. There's plenty of room for improvement, and if WotC really wants our interest as 4e fans they'll stop trying to eviscerate it and just improve it. I could really care less about their marketing issues, it doesn't matter to me.
Bedrockgames
Legend
By that definition, every rule in every RPG is bad, because some people just don't like RPGs and would thus never have fun playing under any RPG rules of any kind.
'Fun' is very subjective - very nearly worthless as a criterion upon which to design a game, really. Which is ironic, when you consider that it's kinda the point.
I think the best approach is for designers to ask what is fun for most of our audience. The problem is there are a few areas where opinions are quite close but strongly divided so offering a change to please one group displeases another. In less mainstream rpgs with narrower audience this isn't a problem, you can easily design toward some sort of style, flavor and mechanical goal...with D&D the audience is so broad an overly focused system will only be able to appeal to a small section of players. So it gets a lot harder to say what is a good or bad mechanic in D&D.
I bet if we posted the question "what is a fun mechanic and what is unfun mechanic?" here we would get lots of contradictory responses. And my guess is that the more controvertial mechanics would be very closely split 60-40 or even 50-50. If half the audience thinks healing surges are fun and half don't, that is a tough spot (because it may also mean that the pro-healing surge players feel having no heaing surges is unfun). If half the crowd loves vancian and half hates it, same think. Just look at the debates over how fighters should function and what makes them fun in play.
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