The thing is, I don't think it does fall apart. When the view of hit points is that their inflation is caused by the increasing skill/magic/luck of the target - it is for all humanoids - then 4e minions make some sense, in that they're supposed to be employed only when their "base form" is thoroughly outclassed by the PCs. The tricks they've learnt to avoid dying aren't good enough any more, and their hit points drop accordingly. Very simply, competing in your own class gives even results, competing against much weaker or much stronger opponents and you'll look like a god/chump accordingly. So, Minions (and Solos and Elites).
Be honest, how long would it really take you to notice all of this stuff...?
The thing is, I don't think it does fall apart. When the view of hit points is that their inflation is caused by the increasing skill/magic/luck of the target - it is for all humanoids - then 4e minions make some sense, in that they're supposed to be employed only when their "base form" is thoroughly outclassed by the PCs. The tricks they've learnt to avoid dying aren't good enough any more, and their hit points drop accordingly. Very simply, competing in your own class gives even results, competing against much weaker or much stronger opponents and you'll look like a god/chump accordingly. So, Minions (and Solos and Elites).
Neonchameleon
Legend
No they aren't. Not even close. There are a few RPGs that try to run under rules-as-physics, GURPS being an obvious example, and it being a not unpopular approach in the 80s. Try and play D&D this way and you get The Order of the Stick which, while funny, isn't how I imagine any sort of game world to work. As for an RPG being a world simulator, nope. No RPG I am aware of with the arguable exception of Kingdom tries this (arguable that it's an RPG). And when you try to force D&D to be a world simulator you get weird results. Results where a Lawyer (Profession (Lawyer)) makes the same amount of money as a Shoe Shine Boy (Profession (Shoe Shine Boy)) - something that's barely acceptable for PCs who get their money from adventuring and the profession skill is just there for a flash of colour, but is risible if you try to run the entire world using these rules. (Or pick any two other professions you care to name that have an obvious status disparity). And for the average person from day to day your income from your profession is much much more important than your BAB.
Actually, no. Comparing a PC to a PC and an NPC to an NPC is much more pertinent - what they do in play is a whole lot more similar. Comparing a fighter to an orc or giant is only needed for the one scene you find them together in - and for that scene the 4E rules work well.
Your analogy is flawed. Hit points are not objects. Hit points are a map, not the territory. The rules are not a physics sim. Surely you understand the difference between google maps in its map mode, its satellite mode, and in Google Street View? And that all three of these are different from the actual place in question?
Hussar
Legend
Swimming upthread and putting these together.
This is a case where I think Ahn is both right and wrong at the same time. Yes, rocket tag - as in whoever wins initiative wins the fight - is balanced. But, it's only balanced within that single encounter. We don't play D&D that way though. We are going to have dozens of encounters over a campaign and that's why rocket tag is unbalanced. It would be like playing Chutes and Ladders where one player has ten pieces on the board while everyone else just has one and whoever gets to the end wins.
D&D combat is not ever balanced on a 50:50 chance of PC fatality. There's a reason that most encounters should be EL par and only eat up 20-25% of party resources. If you go higher than that, the lethality of the campaign increases to the point where it becomes pointless - endless PC death is not a good campaign and the game certainly isn't based on that idea.
Balance should never, ever be discrete from how enjoyable a game is. The whole point of balance is to increase the enjoyment of the game. Again, this is why Chutes and Ladders is considered a terrible game. It's entirely random and no amount of skill will help you. That's why balance is so important and when balance breaks down, the game becomes unenjoyable.
Ahnehnois
First Post
Well, no. The chance of PC fatality is dependent on the difficulty level and the actions of the players. The rocket tag moniker again simply indicates combat that is fast and swingy, but that can still be slanted in the players' favor.
Endless PC death sounds pretty archetypically D&D to me. It also matches up pretty well with the biggest fantasy show on TV right now. It's hardly a non-starter. But regardless, it's something that happens because of the difficulty of scenarios and how players approach them.
Swinginess is marginally disfavorable to the PCs if you adopt player-centric conceits, but the game is always going to have some swinginess to it. That is to say, if you're going to roll dice at all, sometimes the dice will decide things.
But it is discrete from it. Many games have no conception of balance at all. Others have purposeful and extreme imbalances. Balance is only really critical for pure games of strategy, like chess (which even then has purposeful imbalances between the pieces built in).
And D&D is not a strategy game, it's a roleplaying game, to which balance between player choices is somewhere between a tertiary consideration and completely irrelevant. Only because of D&D's wargame heritage is it even mentioned.
So it's perfectly balanced and there's no system mastery. And it's a terrible game. The parallel here is pretty obvious: if 4e is what you say it is, it's pretty much the same.
Of course, though it has its limitations, not everyone thinks that Chutes and Ladders (or 4e) terrible because they're deriving enjoyment from something other than the exercise of skill to sway the odds in their favor.
Neonchameleon
Legend
It is also dependent on the rules of the game and how lethal things actually are.
To me only if you play in some modes. It's almost anathema for Dragonlance and 2E - Dragonlance literally telling you to fudge the dice.
Balance is information. Nothing more, nothing less. An imbalanced game doesn't actually tell you how strong threats are. This is a problem.
The two are not mutually exclusive. D&D is a roleplaying game about players who prepare for then go into ridiculously deadly and unrealistic environments and scavenge what they can. That second part is a strategy and logistics game with life on the line.
Who says there is no system mastery to 4E? Whoever does is simply wrong. 4E did not set out to reward system mastery. Unlike 3.X. This is because rewarding players for system mastery is like rewarding players artificially for being tall when they are playing basketball. The advantage of being tall on a basketball pitch is inherent. The advantage of system mastery is inherent. You can not get rid of it. Artificially further rewarding it through obfuscation is like giving more money to the people who are already rich and taking from the poor to fund it.
In both 3.X and 4E I derive enjoyment from the exercise of skill.
In 3.X I derive enjoyment from the exercise of skill in character creation. But I end up feeling as if I need a shower afterwards - the ways to build a strong character are well known and obvious (spells > mundane, ability to pick saving throw targets is huge). I also derive enjoyment from efficient tactical play - how few spells can I win the battle with and how little will it take to rig the odds in our favour.
In 4E I derive more enjoyment from the exercise of skill in character creation because I don't end up feeling dirty because using my skill to either create an offbeat build or redline a build won't have me completely overshadowing others. Further I don't feel anything like as cramped when building a 4e character as when building a 3.X one. I derive enjoyment from complex tactical play - using tactical positioning and exploiting both deliberately provoking the enemies and the scenery to completely change what is going on in a way I couldn't in different scenarios. I also derive enjoyment from flamboyant tactical play; tactics I can tell my group hasn't seen coming because only a madman or someone who had an exceptional grasp of the situation would try. And efficient play in 4E involves taking the enemy down fast and at low risk rather than seeing how many spells I'm not using. (On the other hand playing 4E with a slow group drives me right up the wall).
Your claim that there is no enjoyment from the exercise of skill in 4E is simply false. I find there to be many more ways to excercise skill in 4E than 3.PF or 3.5 and it to be more rewarding when you do so.
Savage Wombat
Hero
Still sick of people willfully misinterpreting one sentence by Monte Cook, to imply that 3e deliberately created "bad" feats as some sort of trap for players.
Neonchameleon
Legend
I'm pretty sure that:
Has only one form of misinterpretation going on. And that's that Monte Cook doesn't understand Timmy, confusing it instead with Skill Tester Cards - something MTG no longer bothers wasting paper on.Monte Cook's deservedly notorious article on Ivory Tower Game Design said:
Tequila Sunrise
Adventurer
I actually get a lot of amusement out of D&D fans 1) making this claim, 2) deriding 4e as a world-sim failure, and 3) holding up any particular edition as more simmy than the others. It's like hearing a boy scout brag about his go-cart's amazing speed to his boy scout pals. During the Indy 500.
Having a strong simulationist streak, I'm probably unusual among 4e fans, but in any case, I find it much easier to use 4e as a world-sim than any other edition. Whatever sim-issues that 4e presents, I actually find the sim-issues of other editions much harder to reconcile.
Neonchameleon
Legend
You aren't alone here. 4E is the only version of D&D I consider any good as a world sim at all. Which certainly isn't a criticism of oD&D any more than a cat not barking is a criticism. The dungeon environment is deliberately very artificial for the purpose of good gameplay.
Savage Wombat
Hero
But you aren't referencing what Monte said, you're referencing an article that's also misinterpreting what he said.
Yes, it is a M:tG influenced idea, but the principle is that you can't have every card/feat perfectly balanced due to sheer math. It's not possible. And if the only feats/cards you print are ones that are average or better, then the average inexorably moves up over time. So you have to have some feats that are slightly sub-par, or you get power creep.
Monte's point was that this is OK - a feature, not a bug - because it rewards system mastery. This is not the same thing as "we deliberately make trap feats to trick people who don't min-max their characters correctly".
I don't mind if you disagree with him - but I resent the 3e bashing of "trap feats" the same way some 4e defenders get sick of people mentioning "weapon expertise feat tax" or whatever the phrase is.
I suspect that 5e will also have some abilities or feats that the player base will decide are too weak to use, but as long as no one makes the mistake of saying what Monte did, it'll avoid the same argument.
