D&D 4E Mike Mearls on how D&D 4E could have looked

Garthanos · Nov 12, 2018

darkbard said:
That's some pretty creative thinking there, Garth!

Thanks

Garthanos · Nov 12, 2018

Note I picture wrestling death as what herakles did getting sloshed on really expensive liquors in spite of having an incredible resistance to them so he was seeing things stumbling to the side of the very recently dead person and catching death (not Hades) as he arrives to carry off the soul. If there were a party involved most of them might be fighting blind they see the Herakles type picked up and thrown by invisible forces and going wait I thought he was just drunk... and they start trying to help fight death who has become concrete because of the herakles like character.... it would likely involve karma points and expensive liquor not incense and the like. The damage death deals would be akin to healing surge costs.

I think it could be inserted in many stories without utterly interrupting them

This is not the journey to the other world but that can happen any time it has a narrower window of opportunity and follows similar tropes about doing it for non-heros being easier (hence less karma and similar)

Bringing it all together you get Fallen hero / Flashbacks / Mourning including excess drinking that climaxes with an extra fail forward battle - not necessarily an otherworld journey...

But what if as the DM I wanted to have that bigger interruption and they really don't have the Karma points handy? maybe when the death angel slips out of his grip while he is wrestling and pulls the soul into the other world the Herakles type dives through the invisible gateway.... do the other heros follow in the moments it remains open? If not maybe they get someone else to suss out the path into the other world to try and get both back when they realize Herakles might have bit off more than he can chew.

Shasarak · Nov 12, 2018

Hussar said:
It's just not going to happen. What will actually happen is that the player will say, "I want to wrestle Death" and the DM will say, "You got a magic item for that? No? Sorry, you can't."

Just thinking about this point a little.

Can you force the DM into doing anything? Maybe. Your Magic User gets the spell Fireball and then, by coincidence, all of a sudden no two enemies are ever positioned close enough together to hit more then 2 or 3 at a time. Wotc releases a book that has Gnomes and Monks and then, by coincidence, all of a sudden all the Gnomes and Monks get eaten by the DM Grudge Monster.

Frankly it would be easier to just get a good DM then trying to rules lawyer a bad DM into throwing some crumbs.

Garthanos · Nov 12, 2018

Shasarak said:
Frankly it would be easier to just get a good DM then trying to rules lawyer a bad DM into throwing some crumbs.

I believe we arent talking about good vs bad dms I mentioned earlier when it was brought up that I think balancing the non-combat abilities of paragon and epic heroes with those explicitly defined ones given to casters is not something trivial that one is going to be able to do easily without having recommendations and guidelines (and yes explicitly defined ones can help too) nor do I really think a paragraph in the DMG counts... without something more.

4e didnt even have if fully functional in my opinion so bringing up that fact just has me shrug and say yes we can do better but 5e didnt. (or sure doesnt seem like it did)

Shasarak · Nov 12, 2018

Garthanos said:
I believe we arent talking about good vs bad dms I mentioned earlier when it was brought up that I think balancing the non-combat abilities of paragon and epic heroes with those explicitly defined ones given to casters is not something trivial that one is going to be able to do easily without having recommendations and guidelines nor do I really think a paragraph in the DMG counts... without something more.

I think at the heart of the discussion, yes we are talking about good vs bad DMs or at least people like Hussar are. They need something written down that they can point to so that they get to do "the fun thing" whatever that may be. So they dont have to play the "Sir, may I?" game. And I do sympathise.

4e didnt even have if fully functional in my opinion so bringing up that fact just has me shrug and say yes we can do better but 5e didnt.

I am not the one to talk about what 5e did well.

Garthanos · Nov 12, 2018

Shasarak said:
They need something written down that they can point to so that they get to do "the fun thing" whatever that may be. So they dont have to play the "Sir, may I?" game. And I do sympathise.

I think having things written down also can inspire good DMs or teach ones that need experience for instance I am writing the Martial Practices in a way that they are not prescriptive of what might be improvised and parallel rituals usually without being identical. I am including descriptions of without the practice to show how a similar thing might be done more on the fly by a character.

Some DMS of 4e have commented that is how they started looking at practices as fodder for thinking about those on the fly rulings and I think that is useful.

Jay Verkuilen · Nov 12, 2018

Garthanos said:
Gygax talked bout it honestly it isnt a new thing to pay attention to the workday it is introduced by having different characters having different scaled resources. (long rest - dailies whatever)

Yeah, I guess I should say I don't think it's as big an issue as people think, but resource management is always an issue given the game design and it's an issue with really varying classes' need for resources.

In 4e it hardly mattered what workday you had Wizards were still the best Dailies but only by a small amount everyone if the day was known to be short could pull out bigger guns. In 5e its back.

The whole "milestone" mechanic was obviously there to encourage longer workdays so I'd say WotC was worried about it then, too.

I am curious about this. Those are really sound like they might be corner cases - we have a lot of character classes out now and none of those were phb. <...> Bards can be so incredibly variable could you elaborate?

Bards were problematic due to their propensity to act off-turn, at least in the original version (not the Skald rebuild). Off-turn actions really mess up other people's turns and lead to a lot of confusion. There were groups that could manage it, I agree, but many others just couldn't. Any class that could attack on a minor action was also problematic. Barbarians and Avengers both seemed to have those abilities, though I confess I never played one of either so I can't say for sure just from observation. By contrast, the Fighter's Cleave attack (I think that's what it was called) was pretty good, at least from a game mechanical standpoint. It was an attack that had a bit of splash damage, just right to kill a minion or finish off a really weakened foe. More to the point, it was automatic, so it didn't involve parsing any conditions or rolling extra dice. It just happened, move on.

Again, a lot of this is from a game play and speed perspective. If you took at turn and then had to wait twenty minutes to take another turn, that's not good. It's just way too slow to keep interest and focus up.

Garthanos · Nov 12, 2018

Manbearcat said:
On (1), one way to systematize it would be to mechanically gate every spell that is cast by an Intelligence (Arcana), Wisdom (Religion), Charisma (Perform), maybe Constitution (Endurance).

Depending on how it’s subsequently systematized, there could be a few different emergent properties. One approach could be a success let’s you cast the spell normally, a success with a cost/Complication means you get your spell, but you have to throttle back it’s effects or take disadvantage on your next spell cast or lose HP/HD or something, a hard failure could be a roll on a thematic surge table that mostly brings adverse effects upon the fiction; a gate to the Far Realm is opened, a Fire Elemental is summoned on the grounds of a nearby township where roads and roofs are made of dry thatch, your arm briefly transmutes to a viper (attacking you initially, but allowing you to attempt to control it and use it as a weapon until x duration, but closing out spellcasting for that duration), etc.

I invoked “non-combatant action resolution”, because that is the classic site of play where parity of archetype contribution is most frustrated.

Such an approach would (a) mitigate that lack of parity and (b) satisfy the verisimilitude or realism contingent that are always frustrated with the absurdities of player fiat over the supernatural (in the way of no action resolution for the mundane component of conjuring these otherworldly effects) in the same way that they’re preoccupied by martial heroes’ vertical jump and chin-up output (yes, that was a joke...they belabor the latter and utterly disregard the former).

On (2), I agree. Care (in maths, in output, and in dealing with the compound probabilities that martial characters have long suffered from in non-combatant action resolution that doesn’t entail certain techniques, such as Fail Forward, and/or conflict resolution subsystems) must be taken for sure.

Somehow I missed this first time around ... Wondering if this thinking applies as much in 4e context.

Right now I am thinking about rewriting many rituals with a paradigm if you pay a price you should achieve a value. And wondering if utilities should remain completely separate as they are now or not.

Jay Verkuilen · Nov 12, 2018

Garthanos said:
I think having things written down also can inspire good DMs or teach ones that need experience

Absolutely. it's a balance between writing so much down you tie the hands of the DM and the players ("I want to do XYX... well, there's a feat/power/class feature/practice for that... sorry") and not having enough to really scaffold new DMs or inspire experienced ones. It's one reason I think the Skill chapter in the PHB 5E is underwritten. They provide almost no suggested or example uses for most skills. An experienced DM can come up with them, but it would often be nice to have a few laid out examples. (I'm sure this is going to draw some aggro.)

Garthanos · Nov 12, 2018

Jay Verkuilen said:
Yeah, I guess I should say I don't think it's as big an issue as people think, but resource management is always an issue given the game design and it's an issue with really varying classes' need for resources.

The whole "milestone" mechanic was obviously there to encourage longer workdays so I'd say WotC was worried about it then, too.

Sure it wasn't ignored in the design I am saying it was not problematic in play AND milestones were actually to allow people to have longer days if they wanted so basically those and encounter powers allowed how many encounters in a day could be more driven by the narrative and not as much by the daily resource anyway that is how I see it. It allowed you to have spikes in ability.

Jay Verkuilen said:
Bards were problematic due to their propensity to act off-turn, at least in the original version (not the Skald rebuild). Off-turn actions really mess up other people's turns and lead to a lot of confusion.
.

Ah to a degree off turn actions seem a reminder that the game is in narrative sense a bunch of people all acting at once. My personal games have averaged 2 or 3 players a lot less confusion less people waiting and so on and so forth.

D&D 4E Mike Mearls on how D&D 4E could have looked

Garthanos

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Shasarak

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