D&D 4E 4e Encounter Design... Why does it or doesn't it work for you?

Neonchameleon · Nov 20, 2012

Kamikaze Midget said:
HP is a resource. For HP to be balanced within the encounter, it needs to come back at the end of every encounter. If it didn't, the encounters wouldn't be balanced (they'd assume a level of HP that may actually vary depending on what part of the recharge cycle you have the encounter on).

That's because you're looking at the wrong dial. Hit points come back at the end of every encounter. Healing Surges don't. And damage taken to hit points also affects your healing surges, with only very rare types of magic being able to replenish surges. If you want things like one-off traps to matter, push the PCs hard enough that the limited resource of healing surges gets stretched for at least some of them; PCs who look as if they are about to run out of surges suddenly get very timid.

The design doesn't really care if you do that via wands or potions or hit dice or healing surges. The only reason 4e even has an "extended rest" is to give a nod to the fact that, pre-4e, the game was not as tightly defined around the encounter. 4e could be played with a "you gain all your hp back at the end of the encounter" hand-wave without any major hiccups -- 3e, too, but the only major difference between wands of CLW and healing surges is the implied flavor and control of the resource.

Not true. The reason 4e has an extended rest is because resource management is a part of D&D - extended rest recharges were missing entirely from Orcus and this was one of its major flaws (although not the crippling one). The reason extended rests are overnight is because in previous editions D&D magic works on an overnight rest. Not pressing hard enough that healing surges matter is the 4e equivalent to the 15 minute adventuring day, and both stem from the same problem; that outside a dungeon environment (where an 8 hour rest is suicidal) or something equally dangerous, resting overnight is just too easy. The solution is the same in both cases - either random ninja attacks, or make recovery harder.

However in my experience it's much easier to change the extended rest rules through a simple one line house rule than change the spellcaster recovery rules, apparently arbitrarily nerfing the casters while leaving alone (or even buffing) the non-casters.

So I don't see it as a localized "extended rest problem." It's a problem IMO because HP are defined as something you use in one encounter, rather than over the course of several.

This is true only if you ignore healing surges. Which, to be fair, many do.

Yeah, but it's still just roll the dice to see if the DM lets you win. Which doesn't work for everyone (and doesn't work for me).

Except that 4e is less like that than any other version. When you have a structure like a skill challenge it's not just on DM fiat. You might not be able to see the scoreboard, but having it there provides the neutral framework you are advocating for. And with three settings to the difficulty, and the ability to bring in different skills, you have an element of tactical skill in there if that's your thing.

I want a rogue to have as unique a contribution when they're exploring the dungeon or chatting up the townsfolk as when they're killin' goblins, and 4e defines rogues mostly in terms of how they kill goblins. It's meticulously balanced for that, but that's not what I've ever found most interesting and fun and engaging about my D&D games.

Once again, "Welcome to D&D". There was nothing unique about the 3e rogue out of combat except trapfinding and trapsense (and even that was shared with e.g. artificers). Everything else was on skill rolls. Out of combat the 4e rogue not only has his skills, but also has utility powers. The Cunning Sneak can also hide in places almost no one else can. Thieves no only can take an option to almost match the Cunning Sneak for hiding but can gain an out-and-out climb speed if they want to. The 4e Rogue therefore leaves the 3e rogue in the dust (or even the Pathfinder one; Utility Powers > Rogue Knacks). To be fair, the pre-3e rogues got some unique things.

And yet every game of 4e that I have played has had a MUCH bigger percentage of the time dedicated to combat than any of the things I find so much more fun, because 4e does not make them as fun or as interesting as earlier e's made them.

This isn't true. What 4e did was made combat a lot more interesting and take too long. There is little substantive difference between the 4e skill system and the 3e one (the skills are a bit more streamlined, but that's about it). The non-casters are more differentiated and more competent, and the casters less overwhelming (although the wizard is still one of the strongest out of combat classes). What 4e did was put a solid but not terribly assuming rules light skill and magic system that was an incremental improvement on earlier next to a Big! Awesome! Shiny! Flashy! Combat! Engine! that takes some time to build up steam - and the Big! Awesome! Shiny! Flashy! Exclamation! Mark! part of the game draws all the eyeballs and the attention.

And the two are a bit of a mismatch. The little engine that could next to the three ring circus. Or possibly a professional chamber orchestra trying to perform next to a Nine Inch Nails concert. That's where the seeming problem with 4e's non combat lies. Air on a G String is beautiful and the performers and instruments are better than ever - but appreciating it when there's a live performance of Closer going on next door and very little soundproofing can be a challenge.

Blackbrrd · Nov 20, 2012

Kamikaze Midget said:
In 4e, a skill check does whatever it needs to do to count as a "success," regardless of what skill it is or what character type you're playing as or what situation you find yourself in. It is removed from the actual activity and abstract, grounded in the balance of the game rather than the circumstances of the imaginary world.

I didn't get what you were trying to say here, care to elaborate? How is a stealth check in 4e different from a move silently check in 3e for instance?

LostSoul · Nov 20, 2012

Blackbrrd said:
I didn't get what you were trying to say here, care to elaborate? How is a stealth check in 4e different from a move silently check in 3e for instance?

I don't know what KM had in mind but this is what I see as the difference:

In a 4E skill challenge, if you get a success on your Stealth check (for example), that moves you one step closer to resolving the challenge.

3E's Move Silently/Hide check resolves whether or not your PC moves quietly or remains out of sight. It doesn't necessarily resolve the challenge you're facing (not without a judgement call from the DM).

In 4E there's only an abstract connection between what you're doing and resolving the skill challenge. An extra step is required: the players have to interpret the check and what it means in the game world. In 3E it's pretty concrete what you're doing, but what's left up in the air is if that check matters or not.

Stormonu · Nov 20, 2012

From the tone of Kamakazie's post, I'd say go back further to 1E/2E.

In those editions, the fighter/wizard/cleric CAN'T Stealth, short of multiclassing into rogue or using magic - such as a Silence spell.

Prior to 3E, there was a lot of siloing of abilities - a lot of niche protection. That's been whittled away in 3E and pretty much gone in 4E. Next seems to be eroding things even more with themes.

dkyle · Nov 20, 2012

Kamikaze Midget said:
Actually, neither provides the kind of gameplay I'm looking for, because both treat HP as an encounter resource rather than as an adventure resource, and I'm not looking to have people healed up to full HP after every encounter.

Why is it so important for HP to be an encounter resource? Why can't healing surges play the role you're looking for?

Those miss the point. HP is the tool with which one models "damage" and "life-threatening injury" in D&D because it's one of the few things that can actually kill your character permanently (running out of surges does not, unless you also combine it with HP damage).

This is barely any real distinction. If you run out of healing surges during a combat in 4E, you are in some pretty serious trouble. The net game effect is similar; choices made (and rolls botched) early in the day matter, even though you get your HP back.

And in any event, it's extremely trivial to adjust rest times if they produce a story pace that isn't compatible with the kind of campaign you want to run. It doesn't change game balance to make a short rest last overnight, and an extended rest into a weekend. It just adjusts the story pace. Rests are narrative elements, not gameplay elements.

Pre-4e there were rules that played to the archetype. Fighters could bend bars and lift gates. Wizards could charm people. Clerics could command. Rogues could hide in shadows. These were important abilities because other characters didn't really get these capabilities -- they were exclusive to your archetype. Their exclusivity was part of their power. More so than their raw bonus. Okay, Rogues can have the highest Stealth, but everyone else can hide in shadows too, with reasonable success chances, so now my rogue isn't unique, so his ability to hide isn't special, it's the same as everyone else, just more likely to succeed.

Well, this should really be "pre-3E", since 3E is where most class abilities stopped being exclusive, through feats and such.

But I think you're paying too much attention to what a "class" can do, when what really matters is what a "character" can do that makes them special. Sure, not only Rogues can hide in shadows, but it still takes build resources to build a character that can hide in the same kinds of shadows a Rogue can hide in. A character that can hide in shadows is still special.

In 4e, a skill check does whatever it needs to do to count as a "success," regardless of what skill it is or what character type you're playing as or what situation you find yourself in. It is removed from the actual activity and abstract, grounded in the balance of the game rather than the circumstances of the imaginary world.

That's not how it's supposed to work.

Skill checks do exactly what makes sense within the fiction, as in every past edition of D&D, PLUS they can count as a success towards a skill challenge. Skill challenges do not replace the game fiction. They provide mechanics to augment and support it, and give the DM a basis to say "OK, guys, your plan worked!" other than pure fiat.

Blackbrrd · Nov 20, 2012

You have pure skill checks in 4e, but in addition, you have skill challenges. Having skill challenges doesn't rule out doing simple binary skill checks like in previous editions.

Looking at it from the other side, I often ran encounters in 3e and AD&D where you had to roll multiple times. For instance:
DM: You hear some really loud clapping somewhere in front of you and to the right.
Player: I am going to check it out
DM: roll move silently (player rolls)
DM: as you move forward, you spot an ogre, just as a branch breaks underneath you
DM: roll hide in shadows (player rolls)
DM: the ogre turns around looks in your general direction and starts to sniff the air
Player: what is the wind direction
DM: it's blowing from you towards the ogre
Player: I am going to drop low and crawl to the right so the smell of roses doesn't get to the ogre
DM: roll move silently (player rolls)
DM: you hear the ogre sniffing without moving, but after you have crawled about 10 yards he stops and you here some shuffling sound.
Player: I want to get a look at what the ...
... etc

I ran it basically like a skill challenge, he failed the move silently check (1 failure), but it wasn't a total failure anyway. It's from an AD&D encounter I ran something like 15 years ago. Pretty similar to a 4e skill challenge, and you could run an encounter just like it with 4e.

I try to run my skill challenges in about the same way, trying to describe what is happening. I also allow smart ideas to alter the difficulty of a skill challenge. The main objective is to have fun and make the players actions really matter in such a way that they know I am not fudging (too much).

Klaus · Nov 20, 2012

Skill challenges aren't meant for every little skill use. They're meant for broad tasks that take over a long period of time and involve many different approaches.

So there are three kobold sentries. The PCs can try to sneak past them (using Stralth) or intimidate/bluff their way through (using the appropriate skill). There's a definite DC (Perception, in the case of Stealth). If the PCs succeed, they just move through, and the guards stay there. Same way it's always been in all editions of D&D. To claim that in 4e it has to be a skill challenge, or that the system breaks down, just doesn't make sense.

AbdulAlhazred · Nov 20, 2012

Kamikaze Midget said:
Those miss the point. HP is the tool with which one models "damage" and "life-threatening injury" in D&D because it's one of the few things that can actually kill your character permanently (running out of surges does not, unless you also combine it with HP damage).

But HP cannot be used for that when HP are an encounter resource because life-threatening injuries that are not also part of encounters cannot use HP to model the damage they do.

That's a pretty strong disconnect. It's something that 5e is still struggling with, because it wants to preserve HP as this easily-recovered resource, which isn't letting it be used to model damage and life-threatening injury, because those things are mutually exclusive.

I guess this just confuses me. I remember a dungeon I ran in 4e a while back. The rogue got rather mauled by some giant spiders early on. The spiders were easily dispatched but the rogue lost 4 of his 6 surges. He then went on to hit some trap or other in the next area and lost the other 2 surges before things were straightened out.

Now, if that rogue had taken more damage and gone below 0 hit points he would be D. E. A. D. Even though the next encounter he was at 'full hitpoints' he was cowering in the rear of the party throwing daggers while the paladin held back all the bad guys. The PLAYER seemed to have a good reason to believe that his character was seriously weakened. However you describe that it sure felt like there was a DAILY resource that was important there.

So I guess I'm confused as to why just because the surge and hit point pools are separate that this really changes anything very much. I didn't find that it did.

I like 4e just fine. But it's worse for me for non-combat for one big reason that I point out in the article:

there are not rules where I want them.

Pre-4e there were rules that played to the archetype. Fighters could bend bars and lift gates. Wizards could charm people. Clerics could command. Rogues could hide in shadows. These were important abilities because other characters didn't really get these capabilities -- they were exclusive to your archetype. Their exclusivity was part of their power. More so than their raw bonus. Okay, Rogues can have the highest Stealth, but everyone else can hide in shadows too, with reasonable success chances, so now my rogue isn't unique, so his ability to hide isn't special, it's the same as everyone else, just more likely to succeed.

The "grounded in believability" aspect of the rules helped make for interesting interactions of these abilities, too. Hiding in shadows was a good tactic against humans, but bad for anything that lived in shadows. Commands were useful for temporary reprieves, but had interesting possibilities in interpretation. Charms were useful to varying degrees, but also bad against elves. Breaking down barriers was good in a dungeon or in a locked room, but it attracted attention.

I can understand the idea that archetypes are weaker. Actually I think that in 4e the archetypes aren't even really all that operative in terms of class<->archetype. Instead classes are toolkits to construct certain archetypes, but they aren't exclusive. In other words I can make a fighter that meets the 'trickster' archetype, but fights in a 'fighterly' style as opposed to a 'roguish' style. Maybe that's not the perfect way for things to work, but I can make my sneaky guy. In AD&D 3 other players could have picked 'thief' for one of their classes and I wouldn't be unique either.

In 4e, a skill check does whatever it needs to do to count as a "success," regardless of what skill it is or what character type you're playing as or what situation you find yourself in. It is removed from the actual activity and abstract, grounded in the balance of the game rather than the circumstances of the imaginary world.

This I just don't understand at all. If you want to sneak past the gate guard and you decide to use Arcana to do so you had better come up with a good narrative explanation of how that works, backed up by some sort of resource or capability that your character has or some other explicit reason. NOTHING in 4e ever suggests that you can use any old skill to do any old thing.

Again, other editions aren't perfect, and I wouldn't say that everyone needs to play with them. But it's not right to say that 4e is obviously better in this regard. It isn't. It tried to be, but for a lot of players (like me), it failed. Denying that failure isn't going to improve anything. It works for others, and that's fine, too, but just because it works for you doesn't mean it has to work for everyone.

No, but sometimes when for instance people tell me there is only an encounter hit point resource or that a skill can be used for anything in 4e, I begin to wonder if the game is being criticized or there is some other underlying source of discontent and mechanical issues are just brought up because nobody on either side of this discussion really knows what the real issue is. It isn't that there aren't issues, but the issues seem to be entirely different from what is being said.

AbdulAlhazred · Nov 20, 2012

LostSoul said:
I don't know what KM had in mind but this is what I see as the difference:

In a 4E skill challenge, if you get a success on your Stealth check (for example), that moves you one step closer to resolving the challenge.

3E's Move Silently/Hide check resolves whether or not your PC moves quietly or remains out of sight. It doesn't necessarily resolve the challenge you're facing (not without a judgement call from the DM).

In 4E there's only an abstract connection between what you're doing and resolving the skill challenge. An extra step is required: the players have to interpret the check and what it means in the game world. In 3E it's pretty concrete what you're doing, but what's left up in the air is if that check matters or not.

I think this needs a bit closer look though I would say:

In a 4e skill challenge, if you get a success on your Stealth check, that changes the narrative in some way. In fact you'd engage the narrative FIRST, to tell the DM what you want to do, and then a check would modulate what the final adjudication of that was, you'd roll your Stealth check and either the ogre hears you or he doesn't.

Now given that you're discussing an SC, the SC mechanic just says that the chance of the whole overall encounter failing has increased, the ogre is now alert, its going to be harder to get past. Or of course you may be quite well hidden and the ogre starts to lose interest, you're now a bit closer to success, but you still have to figure out how to get the key and unlock the door!

Tony Vargas · Nov 20, 2012

Kamikaze Midget said:
HP is the tool with which one models "damage" and "life-threatening injury" in D&D because it's one of the few things that can actually kill your character permanently (running out of surges does not, unless you also combine it with HP damage).

Actually, if you lose a surge when you are out of surges, you take your surge value in hp damage. Very early in 4e that was not the case, and it made a final-encounter-of-a-tough-day with some surge-draining wraiths surprisingly easy in that second module, Thuderspire Labyrinth. Since then, that rule has been 'fixed,' and 'surge loss' is as potentially deadly as hp loss, just with less granularity.

But HP cannot be used for that when HP are an encounter resource because life-threatening injuries that are not also part of encounters cannot use HP to model the damage they do.

It's always been possible to heal up between encounters, it just took a lot of your cleric's daily spells. In 3e the amount of between combat healing available went up dramatically at some point because the magic item creation rules were cracked in a few places, but it was pointedly never fixed, and that changed the dynamic of the game a bit. 4e greatly increased between-combat healing with daily resources - plentiful surges everyone contributed, and optional & much less plentiful non-surge healing from the leaders.

That's a pretty strong disconnect. It's something that 5e is still struggling with, because it wants to preserve HP as this easily-recovered resource, which isn't letting it be used to model damage and life-threatening injury, because those things are mutually exclusive.

Hps have always been a poor model for very serious injury because hp loss carries no penalties. If you're rapidly bleeding to death you're going to become light-headed and weak and drop before you die. Until you're KO'd hp loss doesn't cause ongoing damage in any ed, so hp loss can't even represent wounds serious enough to cause rapid blood loss. Similarly, broken limbs, severed tendons and the like will greatly reduce your mobility, but no amount of hp loss does that. So hps can't even represent that severity of wound, at all - and such wounds aren't even necessarily immediately life-threatening.

So your 'problem' with 4e & 5e is actually one of those long-standing problems with D&D, one that even 4e didn't try to fix.

5e, though, has the opportunity to do so by adding some sort of optional wound delivery and tracking system, complete with long recovery times and death-spiral penalties if so desired. If we could maybe leave off bashing 4e from time to time, and instead try to learn from its successes, there's even a pretty good candidate for such a system. 4e uses a tracking system to handle the progression of or recovery from diseases. That system could be trivially adapted to track a wound that gives an initial penalty in combat, can 'realistically' worsen or even become fatal, or slowly heal over the course of days. And, since it doesn't use hps, such wounds can't be shouted or casually magicked away - though rituals or spells (if you want to trivialize wounds when the right caster is available) to do so could be included in the module.