Charlaquin
Goblin Queen (She/Her/Hers)
But then “not trying to drive their fans away” is not a point of distinction between them. If WotC was able to drive fans away without trying to, so might Paizo.
The roots of 4e exposed?
- Thread starter Ancalagon
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But then “not trying to drive their fans away” is not a point of distinction between them. If WotC was able to drive fans away without trying to, so might Paizo.
I was watching one Matt Colville video where he was telling the story about how he was giving the Players the job of moving the enemy pieces around the battle map as well as keeping track of hp damage and such.
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
It won't effect game balance because there's only one resource management paradigm and all classes follow it. In classic D&D its a HUGE advantage to the wizard to have 5 minute workdays. He can expend spells with abandon and then just memorize them all again before the next day's encounter. Whereas the fighter and thief gain basically nothing, they can swing their swords all day and their effectiveness never varies, at least until they hit 0 hit points.
It will have an effect on the balance between PCs and monsters, but that's not the same thing. That is a question of favoring the party (IE smart tactics, or not). Pacing is again not related to changes in PC balance. That might be important to the story, but with its heavy use of encounter resources 4e provides plenty of wiggle room for parties to press on when it is dramatically appropriate. Its quite easy for the GM to induce this.
Again though, because of disparate resource management paradigms some classes benefit heavily from shorter days.
Maps are usually somewhat de-emphasized in narrative play, yes. The exploration is more in terms of 'plot' and 'character', than in terms of place. Dungeon World for instance advocates a technique where the GM makes 'maps with holes in them'. In other words he establishes a loose collection of facts, but leaves many of the details fuzzy and usually only constructs some information at the scale the PCs are operating on at the moment (so maybe a basic town map with lots of blanks in it, but no regional or larger maps until those elements come into play). Often things are described in DW in response to Discern Realities moves by the players, or Spout Lore, etc.
In a really Story Now game, there would be no maps, though the action could take place in an established milieu or some genre constraints could exist (IE in a King Arthur game Camelot is a place where the King lives and it contains a Round Table). Most things are decided on the fly as dictated by the need to challenge the PC's character traits/goals/etc. Pregenerating a map is usually considered to be unnecessary or even prejudicial to the story.
4e is definitely designed around the Encounter. However by giving every Daily powers then it is still not balanced around going indefinitely. It would be like a party of martial characters, none of whom have Daily abilities, adventuring indefinitely until they ran out of Hps. Sure you could do it in theory.
OK, so how would this game look like in practice? You have your Players all set ready to go and then what happens next in a Story Now game?
Moon_Goddess
Have I really been on this site for over 20 years!
All this talk about subscriptions, I still pay a subscription for 4e and don't even have a game just hope that I do someday
Do a search for Guild Living Campaign on roll20. Usually about 5 games a week on there, organized in the LFR format.
No. But knowing that you're in a skill challenge does help make decisions about what resources to expend (eg if I have a limited-used Nature buff, I might not use it on the first check if I'm still sussing out the fiction), and it helps you know what the payoff is for succeeding.
It also establishes a context for making choices about how to engage the fiction: if its a complexity 5 skill challenge, for example, then I know that my first few moves aren't going to win it for me, but will help lay the groundwork for later, likely more decisive, checks.
It will affect pacing, which is what I said ("It's purely about pacing"). But it won't affect game balance. Nothing comes unstuck if the players nova. No one dominates and no one gets overshadowed.
If the players choose to hoard their daily resources then the GM is free to respond to that as s/he thinks appropriate given the mood and expectations of the table, and what would be consistent with the logic of the fiction. That could range from reward/flattery by telegraphing an encounter that will allow the players to profit from the planned expenditure of their carefully conserved resources, to taunting/teasing by pushing them at every turn with adverse actions by NPCs and framings of situations that would be oh-so-easy to deal with by expending a daily, but become hard or costly (in story terms) when dealt with without such expenditure.
This sort of flexibility, and capacity for unfolding spontaneity of pacing and framing without needing to be concerned about intra-partiy balance, is (in my view, and based on my experiences) a big part of what makes 4e the most suitable version of D&D for any sort of "story now"-type RPGing.
But putting everyone on the same resource recovery suite is a huge]/i] difference from any other version of D&D. And it removes the need to worry about balance in terms of the "adventuring day" (look how often that comes up as a topic of discussion on the 5e boards!).
The short answer to the second question is No, there's no map that the GM knows and that the players learn about through play as one of the goals of play. That's not to say that there's no map; nor even that there's no map that (at the start) only the GM knows. But learning the map isn't a goal of play. If the players don't already know it (because the GM has shared it with them), then picking it up in the course of play is a side effect of other stuff going on. Eg in the Underdark phase of my 4e game I had a rough map sketched that located some of the key features that I thought might be interesting, and I didn't show it to the players from the start. But it wasn't used as part of the adjudication of action resolution - the PCs' movement through the Underdark was a mixture of free narration and skill challenges, and the map simply acted as a sort of "aide memoire" to help me narrate appropriate flavour. When I needed to change or interpolate stuff to support the unfoding ficiton, I did so.
In my 4e game, the overland map that I used was the one from module B10 Night's Dark Terror, and I shared it with the players from the start. Likewise in my Greyhawk-located Burning Wheel game, when the PCs are moving from place to place we all look at the map to work out where they're going, and it provides a source of flavour to support narrations (eg place names; "You journey for 5 days through the desert before arriving at the foothills"; etc). The players don't "discover" it, and they doubly don't discover it by working out how it is affecting the resolution of declared actions.
As to the first question, the exploration aspect is about discovering what comes out of play, or learning in play what the implications or significance of some setting element is - not players discovering stuff that the GM has already established.
Skill Challenges are just a tool and are not mandatory. Even within Skill Challenges, you can have many scenes that don't use die rolls to resolve or have it overarch an entire adventuring day or even longer.
They're just a narrative structure designed to get everyone involved and have meaningful, consistent definitions of success. There's no need for die rolls with most NPCs within a skill challenge. You talk to the librarian, she answers your questions. Don't go in the right direction in terms of questioning her, she might not give you the piece of information you're looking to get. And that might affect what direction the skill challenge goes.
Tony Vargas
Legend
hps were a per-day resource because healing spells were a per-day resource, if considered separately, it could take weeks to recover hps - it never did, it was a non-viable mode of play if any rival out there were burning spells every day.
There were the odd 1/turn magic item or special ability, and a turn (at 10 minutes) usually encompassed an encounter, with the DMG assumption that the balance of the 10 minutes not spend fighting would be spent resting, binding your wounds, and fixing up your kit so you're ready for the next fight. So 1/turn was essentially 'encounter' back in the day, not that that counts for anything.
Even so, 4e was a per-day 'gated' game, too. And, it didn't have the weeks-to-recover-hp disconnect, since hps & surges were also daily resources.
The main reason you could vary pacing wildly in 4e without screwing things up too bad was that the classes had comparable resources available, regardless of pacing. So the 5MWD made that sole encounter a good deal easier, but not a caster-dominated fiasco.
In a true "encounter based" game, you wouldn't run up against that. A closely related example is the 7th ("D&D") edition of Gamma World, in which there were no surges, you simple recovered all your hps with every short rest. There was one 'daily' in the whole game - probably a misprint.
4e certainly can work either way. IMHO, it works more smoothly with everything open and above board. (I'll tag minions as such, and generally give away approximate level and elite or solo, too - though, the way I see it, 'elite' or 'minion' is not really something the monster /is/, it's how the monster stacks up to the party - but, I won't give hp totals up front: I figure if the party pays attention to how much damage is accumulated and when it's bloodied, they'll have a pretty good idea, anyway.)
The SC structure does seem to be very much oriented on the PCs for resolution. It just assumes what the NPCs will be doing, whether the PCs are acting and the NPC re-acting, or vice-versa, it's the PC actions/checks that determine success or failure....
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