D&D 5E Fixing the Fighter

I'm one of those who - based on a combination of reading/theorycraft and experience - thinks that 4e is not that well suited to sandboxing. So it's interesting to see that people are using it for that.

All the more reason for GMing advice to be ecumenical, but also clear and honest rather than waffling. I'm not a marketing expert by any means, but I think it has to be to WotC's advantage to make it easy for people (i) to play the style they want to play, and (ii) to have a good experience in doing so.

Sometimes I see this idea that good RPGing experiences are hard to get. But, at least as far as mechanics and facilitation are concerned, I think they can be easily achieved (assuming the group members are giving it an honest go). Good, upfront advice is part of that, I think.

Libramarian said:

[MENTION=22779]
I don't want to argue like it's 2009, I want to talk about how DDN can potentially have really good advice text for Gygaxian sandbox gamism AND Paizoian adventure paths AND the sort of non-railroady scene-framing [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION], [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] and I think [MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION] do with 4e.

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Yeah, I suppose I do do that now. My first (2009-10) 4e campaign was more the Gygaxian sandbox Gamism, though. I don't think it worked too well. OTOH there have certainly been sandboxy elements in my subsequent two 4e campaigns, even though they took a Dramatist, scene-framy turn. I see Pemertonian scene-framing as orthogonal to the sandbox-AP continuum. Which I believe Pemerton recently said so himself, probably more elegantly.

Fair 'nuff. I was more responding to the point that you were saying that 4e is somehow antagonistic to sandboxing. I just don't see it.

As far as advice goes, yeah, totally in agreement here. They have to be very, very careful not to be too strong voiced in the DMG, unfortunately. Without a strong voice, you wind up with the "stereo instruction manual" approach that 3e had to its books. Almost completely without flavour material in the DMG and PHB. The 3e DMG and PHB are so generic that there really is no voice to them at all.

Which is great if you don't want to annoy anyone. It's not so great for actually engaging the reader. I mean, I read and reread my 1e DMG over and over again, because it was interesting to read. Gygax, for all his faults, did write something that was interesting. The 4e DMG as well engages the reader. It's not shy about saying, "Hey, this is where the game will work the best". And, again, I read and reread the 4e DMG.

The 3e DMG? I don't think I ever actually read it. Just cherry picked sections as needed. Once the Hypertext SRD came out, my 3e (and 3.5e) DMG, gathered dust on the shelf. It was just not interesting to read.

S'mon said:

I see Pemertonian scene-framing as orthogonal to the sandbox-AP continuum. Which I believe Pemerton recently said so himself, probably more elegantly.

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Yep, I agree that it's orthogonal - and very flattered for it to be "Pemertonian", but I learned to theorise it from reading essays, posts and rulebooks by Ron Edwards, Paul Czege and Luke Crane (though had started to do it myself in a theoretically less informed way, and not always consistently, back in the mid-to-late 80s).

Hussar said:

They have to be very, very careful not to be too strong voiced in the DMG, unfortunately. Without a strong voice, you wind up with the "stereo instruction manual" approach that 3e had to its books.

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I don't think it has to be that way. I recently picked up a 20th anniversary edition of Over The Edge. Its GMing section has a very clear discussion by Jonathan Tweet of (paraphrased and summarised)"


Frankness is key.

pemerton said:

Yep, I agree that it's orthogonal - and very flattered for it to be "Pemertonian", but I learned to theorise it from reading essays, posts and rulebooks by Ron Edwards, Paul Czege and Luke Crane (though had started to do it myself in a theoretically less informed way, and not always consistently, back in the mid-to-late 80s).

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Well I've read a bunch of Edwards at least, but never related it to my own experience of D&D or 4e D&D until I read your posts. Edwards has a lot of baggage concerning heavy Dramatic Premise, but with 4e my group are definitely not cooperatively setting up Dramatic Premises for Resolution in the Narrativist play style (I did play a real Nar cooperative storygame last year and it was much different from you-are-the-hero D&D). My idea of GM-led Pemertonian scene-framing, from what you've discussed is a much lighter concept:

1) GM sets up scene that derives from prior events but is framed to be interesting - as opposed to process-simulation where scenes are not 'framed' but derive from procedural generation, eg random encounters, d% event tables.
2)Resolution of the scene is left entirely open and up to the players - as opposed to hard railroading where there is a required scene resolution. And
3) Future scenes are largely determined by player choice/action in past scenes, as opposed to linear AP style play where scenes are pre-written along the set continuum of the adventure. But in looping round to #1 the GM is guided more by what would be a cool/interesting/fun result than by Simulation concerns - though for a D&D world the two may not be hugely different.

The way I've been doing Pemertonian scene-framing it mostly resembles Sandbox play quite closely, with occasional elements of AP style linear play where I'm using a linear adventure (Heathen, Orcs of Stonefang Pass) more or less as written. But I try to open up those adventures for more of a Pemertonian approach, eg I tweaked the dramatic climax of Heathen to create more of a Narrativist style dramatic moment that raised questions of actual moral choice for the PCs, and I inserted a dragon into Stonefang Pass that led to a great dramatic moment when a player 'stepped on up' and talked it down.

[MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION], that sounds right to me.

I agree that my game is much lighter than thinks like Life With Master or even Sorcerer (as I understand it - a game I know about but don't know).

But I think the connection between Edwards' technical account of narrativism, and thematically heavy and avant garde premises, is purely an accident of what those designers were up to aesthetically. And the "tell" in Edwards' own essays is his categorisation of The Dying Earth as a narrativist game - though it's thematically very light, as you'd expect.

In your description, the "premise" comes in at (3) - "the GM is guided more by what would be a cool/interesting/fun result than by Simulation concerns". Jonathan Tweet talks about the same sort of approach in Over The Edge - which leads Edwards to classify it as pioneering narratitivst design. (And Over the Edge is a little bit avant garde, but not really that heavy in its themes.)

I also agree with you that in a certain sort of D&D the gap between "cool" and "simulation" may not be that big! I think this is part of the charm of D&D, and it's similar to how the classic megadungeon design closes the gap between "gamist challenge" and "simulation" by internalising metagame requirements like levels, monsters in discrete bunches, treasures to loot from them, etc into ingame features of the world. The Dying Earth RPG is pretty similar in this respect too (unsurprisingly, given D&D's historical connection to Vance) - the world is wacky enough that light-heartd wit results just from engaging with it!

One difference between Pemertonian subjective scene-framing I use in 4e and the kind of objective content generation I used in eg my Pathfinder Beginner Box game is that in the scene-framing approach the encounters are subjectively tailored - when my 4e Forgotten Realms Loudwater group met an Ettin, it was because I thought an Ettin would be a good encounter for them (there was foreshadowing of its presence and they could have avoided it, mind you) in all the circumstances. It was a tailored encounter.
Whereas when my PBB group met a Gray Ooze, it was because that was what the system & environment generated - it was a status quo encounter.

IME, the two are often not very different in-play, but over time tailored encounters lead to a much lower lethality level and less of a revolving door of PCs. I still kill PCs in Loudwater - first session TPK, another 2 temporary & 3 perma-deaths in the 32 sessions since - and scenes can be framed as "today is a good day to die", as at the climax of my Southlands campaign where the PCs had repeatedly screwed up and were left making a hopeless last stand at the bridge against a thousand Horde Ghouls and their Necromancer overlord (note that they chose to make the last stand, to give their allies time to evacuate the doomed town). But the general level of random PC death with scene-framing is much lower than with status-quo Simulation, tends to come at moments of dramatic climax*, and so often feels dramatically appropriate when it does occur.

*There was that one time both GM (me) and player screwed up what should have been a low-lethality encounter- I levelled up an encounter with wolves by stupidly making them all Elites; the Wizard player won Init, stepped forward in front of her allies and cast Burning Hands on the whole pack in round 1... *ouch*.

pemerton said:

I also agree with you that in a certain sort of D&D the gap between "cool" and "simulation" may not be that big! I think this is part of the charm of D&D, and it's similar to how the classic megadungeon design closes the gap between "gamist challenge" and "simulation" by internalising metagame requirements like levels, monsters in discrete bunches, treasures to loot from them, etc into ingame features of the world.

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Yup, good point on the Gygaxian Megadungeon's Gamist-Simulationist nexus. Hence Gygaxian Naturalism in a world of Mad Demigod Wizards.

Now I'm thinking of it like this: the gamist dungeon and the Pemertonian scene-framing technique are both sort of anti-simulationist; they're both solutions to the "20 minutes of fun in 4 hours" thing that happens when you just try to simulate a fairly mundane medieval fantasy world with D&D. The solution of the gamist dungeon is to make the game world an unrealistically fun place, so you can just let the players roll up some characters and wander around in a very relaxed, intuitive, non-metagamey way without it being boring most of the time. It's like a back-end solution. The scene-framing approach is like a front-end solution: it focuses on teaching the DM how to direct the game in a way that you skip over the boring parts and get to the fun (but in an improvisational way that doesn't involve actually planning out the whole plot beforehand). I don't think either of these approaches are trivial or "just good storytelling". They both involve sophisticated rules, tools and techniques.

I've been reading some old 4e Design & Development articles today, and the one on the DMG makes it clear that they were concerned about this:


Also, just because I have to point this out as well, I think this puts to rest the question of whether or not DCs are meant to scale with character level in 4e

Libramarian said:

Now I'm thinking of it like this: the gamist dungeon and the Pemertonian scene-framing technique are both sort of anti-simulationist; they're both solutions to the "20 minutes of fun in 4 hours" thing that happens when you just try to simulate a fairly mundane medieval fantasy world with D&D.

<snip>

I don't think either of these approaches are trivial or "just good storytelling". They both involve sophisticated rules, tools and techniques.

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Couldn't agree more. This is why I think Ron Edwards is right when he identifies gamism and narrativism as strongly akin (though with differing conceptions of what "fun" means), and both at odds with simulationism.

(EDIT: I also think this makes it easy for play, at the table, to move back and forth between a light-hearted narrativism and a low-competition gamism.)

Libramarian said:

I think this puts to rest the question of whether or not DCs are meant to scale with character level in 4e

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In 4th Edition, we tell you to set the DC to avoid slipping based on the level of the characters, using the Difficulty Class and Damage by Level table.

<snip>

Does that mean that high-level characters encounter Epic Cave Slime that's objectively slipperier than the Heroic Cave Slime they encountered in their early careers? Maybe. It doesn't matter. What matters is that the DM has permission to use terrain that's relevant to the characters, regardless of their level -- and has a table supported by solid math to make sure it's relevant.
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The passage you cite should have been in the DMG!

Here is a passage from Maelstrom Storytelling which (in general content, if not all its details) is nearly identical (and written in 1994, so 14 years earlier):


In terms of making the narrated fiction match the mechanics, I think there are two basic ways of going. Either you follow the lead from the DMG door table, and narrate the slime as objectively more slippery (I remember a thread a few years ago in which someone coined "Astral Teflon Slime"); or you treat the increaes in the numbers on the character sheets as pure metagame, and so narrate both the difficulty and the PCs' abilities as unchanged.

For physical challenges, in my own game I tend to take the "door table" approach (and similarly follow the jumping and falling rules in the skill sections of the PHB/Rules Compendium). For social/mental/spiritual challenges, I tend to mix the two approaches: the PCs might be getting a bit better, but also a lot of the number-creep is pure metagame (in order to keep all the maths on the same track) and doesn't necessarily correspond to such dramatic changes in the fiction.