[Very Long] Combat as Sport vs. Combat as War: a Key Difference in D&D Play Styles...

[billd91]

AD&D just sort of tossed you in the shark tank and let you swim or not. Some people got eaten, the rest have forgotten that they were ever in that boat. I'm not real sure what sort of advice 3.x DMGs gave there since I have never read them, but I suspect it was pretty much similar to the AD&D advice, not much at all.

So now we have this weird perception that 4e is only good for making these 'sporting encounters' where everything is always balanced in a certain way, and the best tools in the game gather dust or at least everyone is just using their nice 3 axis milling machine as a drill press. lol.

I'd say that 4e set that tone. The 4e DMG spends a lot of effort on the mechanical systems of balancing the encounters, spending an XP budget, creating interesting terrain, but it spends only a couple pages on varying the difficulty of encounters. And even then, the spread is still narrow.

If you haven't read 3e's advice, I suggest you look into it. The 3e DMG deals with the ideas of status quo and tailored encounters, includes a wider spread of encounter difficulties, discusses factors that may serve to make an encounter more or less difficult depending on character mix, terrain, and a variety of other factors. On the XP tables, there is a wide range of PC levels and NPC CRs. Taken together, I think 3e gives off a different tone than 4e in mixing up encounter difficulty variables.

That said, you still had a lot of people coming away with the impression that 3e was also about setting up sporting encounters (give the gamers an inch of a CR system and they try to make it go yards...) or at least encounters that didn't vary in difficulty much from the party's level. It's like everyone read about tailored encounter but skipped the bit on status quo ones. With 4e's initial tone, I don't see how it could have escaped the same impression. It didn't even work as hard as 3e did to escape it.

 

[Alzrius]

If you haven't read 3e's advice, I suggest you look into it. The 3e DMG deals with the ideas of status quo and tailored encounters, includes a wider spread of encounter difficulties, discusses factors that may serve to make an encounter more or less difficult depending on character mix, terrain, and a variety of other factors. On the XP tables, there is a wide range of PC levels and NPC CRs. Taken together, I think 3e gives off a different tone than 4e in mixing up encounter difficulty variables.

That said, you still had a lot of people coming away with the impression that 3e was also about setting up sporting encounters (give the gamers an inch of a CR system and they try to make it go yards...) or at least encounters that didn't vary in difficulty much from the party's level. It's like everyone read about tailored encounter but skipped the bit on status quo ones.

This isn't the first time I've heard this, and it sounds more and more true each time.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'd say that 4e set that tone. The 4e DMG spends a lot of effort on the mechanical systems of balancing the encounters, spending an XP budget, creating interesting terrain, but it spends only a couple pages on varying the difficulty of encounters. And even then, the spread is still narrow.

If you haven't read 3e's advice, I suggest you look into it. The 3e DMG deals with the ideas of status quo and tailored encounters, includes a wider spread of encounter difficulties, discusses factors that may serve to make an encounter more or less difficult depending on character mix, terrain, and a variety of other factors. On the XP tables, there is a wide range of PC levels and NPC CRs. Taken together, I think 3e gives off a different tone than 4e in mixing up encounter difficulty variables.

That said, you still had a lot of people coming away with the impression that 3e was also about setting up sporting encounters (give the gamers an inch of a CR system and they try to make it go yards...) or at least encounters that didn't vary in difficulty much from the party's level. It's like everyone read about tailored encounter but skipped the bit on status quo ones. With 4e's initial tone, I don't see how it could have escaped the same impression. It didn't even work as hard as 3e did to escape it.

Well, fair enough. As I say, I haven't read the 3.x DMGs (and don't have them and thus probably won't read them at this point). I'll take your word for it. AD&D said zip-nada about any sort of encounter design that I can remember, at least in terms of balance. The basic 1e assumption was dungeon crawl and thus the conceit was "you go to the dungeon level that will challenge you" and then maybe the DM will use some dirty tricks like sloping passages or whatever to make you take on tougher things. Given that 1e (and slightly less so 2e) characters were pretty much glass the party was pretty close to ALWAYS in over its head anyway.

Oddly in my neck of the woods we were always pretty conscious of challenge level though even back then, at least for lower level PCs. Character death was common enough, but no more so than it is in my 4e campaigns nowadays. You could, and can, get in over your head, and being clever is always a good idea. OTOH I'll telegraph to some degree, so you're not going to just run smack into a killer encounter without knowing you're going for the high risk option.

Like I say, it seems like as long as you're understanding what way is up as a DM 4e runs for us a LOT like 2e did. The world is a dangerous place, but it rewards intelligent play with reasonably achievable opponents. Now and then things do go bad for the party of course. I can certainly remember our mid 70's days though when my sister's group first went in my dungeon and died hard on like the 2nd encounter!

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

That said, you still had a lot of people coming away with the impression that 3e was also about setting up sporting encounters (give the gamers an inch of a CR system and they try to make it go yards...) or at least encounters that didn't vary in difficulty much from the party's level. It's like everyone read about tailored encounter but skipped the bit on status quo ones. With 4e's initial tone, I don't see how it could have escaped the same impression. It didn't even work as hard as 3e did to escape it.

I've read the full section in the 3e DMG. It says that encounters more than APL+4 should be immediate death for the party. It says encounters that are APL-10 or lower aren't worth XP at all because of how easy the fight is.

So you have a range for 15th level characters of EL 6 through EL 19. Which created a "range" around the PC of useable monsters. Then experience with the game system quickly showed me that encounters more than 1 EL below the Average Party Level took longer to put on the battle map and roll initiative than they took to kill and with no resources lost at all. And the amount of XP they gave meant we could spend an entire session fighting them and not really get significantly closer to next level...nor feel like we accomplished anything.

So, it created a range of "appropriate" encounters that was approximately EL 14 though EL 19. Which is a range of 6 ELs of monsters that you can use that follows the PCs around. And one of those ELs(the APL+4 one) was nearly certain death for most parties. Another one was still extremely easy(the APL-1 range), to the point where over 50% of them wouldn't result in one of the PCs using a single spell or taking a single point of damage. This meant that the practical range was instead 4 ELs.

 

[pemerton]

I think that anyone who shows up to play a game of D&D should at least be vaguely interested in playing the prepared adventure.

I mean, the alternative is really just doing nothing.

I try and approach it the other way - have the players hook the GM via their PCs, rather than the other way around. Assuming the players are serious about the game, I think this tends to work.

 

[billd91]

I've read the full section in the 3e DMG. It says that encounters more than APL+4 should be immediate death for the party. It says encounters that are APL-10 or lower aren't worth XP at all because of how easy the fight is.

So you have a range for 15th level characters of EL 6 through EL 19. Which created a "range" around the PC of useable monsters. Then experience with the game system quickly showed me that encounters more than 1 EL below the Average Party Level took longer to put on the battle map and roll initiative than they took to kill and with no resources lost at all. And the amount of XP they gave meant we could spend an entire session fighting them and not really get significantly closer to next level...nor feel like we accomplished anything.

So, it created a range of "appropriate" encounters that was approximately EL 14 though EL 19. Which is a range of 6 ELs of monsters that you can use that follows the PCs around. And one of those ELs(the APL+4 one) was nearly certain death for most parties. Another one was still extremely easy(the APL-1 range), to the point where over 50% of them wouldn't result in one of the PCs using a single spell or taking a single point of damage. This meant that the practical range was instead 4 ELs.

So why should not being able to get XP prevent the PCs from having the encounter? For that matter, why should imminent death (presuming the encounter heads south) prevent them from having the encounter either?

 

[pemerton]

Yeah, my feeling is that there was a level of miscalculation there at WotC. First they seem to have had a hard time coming to grips with exactly what the strongest points of and best ways to use the 4e toolset actually ARE themselves (witness all the terrible adventures). THEN perhaps they also didn't understand that 4e is different enough in specific ways from previous editions that there are a bunch of things that should have been stated up front.

Very true. But weird at the same time. When they've gone halfway, it doesn't seem to have worked, but actually hurt them.

Take Worlds & Monsters. This is the first D&D book I know of that explains, from the metagame/designer perspective, the play rationale behind including various monsters in the game, and what point these various story elements can serve.

And the MM roughly delivers on what W&M promises. But he DMG is then silent on this sort of stuff, and the MM only approaches the story from the ingame perspective, not the metagame perspective. So unless you read W&M, you're on your own working out what the designers had in mind with these various story elements.

Still, you've got this MM full of lore and cosmology - stuff about gods, and primordials, and the mythic history of the world - and you get complaint after complaint that it's fluffless because it doesn't tell you what flavour of sauce gnolls use on their elf pies!

As if gnoll condiments mattered more to play than the cosmological conflict into which the heroes of the piece find themselves thrown! WotC, if only you'd actually told people what the point of your game was!

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

So why should not being able to get XP prevent the PCs from having the encounter? For that matter, why should imminent death (presuming the encounter heads south) prevent them from having the encounter either?

The general reason is that the death of an entire party causes the game to end most of the time. No one is left alive who remembers the quest they were even going on(or the key information they found out to solve the quest). Especially if it is a really long and epic quest, like the gathering of the 7 parts of the Rod of 7 Parts. The pieces they already found are now lost again, likely the villains they were trying to keep them away from now have them. The game is over. You can hack in a reason for a new group to pick up off where they left off....but if you ask a group of people if they want to spend then next 4 months going after the same pieces of an artifact that they spent the last 4 months looking for...I bet most of them will say "Let's just start a different adventure". If you have notes prepared for the rest of the campaign all the work spent writing them is now lost. Or at least, that's been my experience.

As for no XP. It has an equal but opposite effect. Most groups will say "Really? These are just CR 1 normal Orcs? I fireball them. No, wait, it's not worth a fireball. They need natural 20s to hit us, we all hit them on a 2. We kill them with our minimum damage. Can we skip the rolling for initiative, writing down all the numbers, putting enemies on the board, moving to melee ranges and rolling attack rolls? If we do all that, it's going to be 20 or 30 minutes. And we get no reward for beating them so it isn't worth our time. Can you please just say, 'You beat the Orcs' and allow us to move on?"

I tried running a couple of these weak battles at the beginning of 3e before my players all got bored of going through the motions and *I* got bored of going through the motions. Now, if there's a story reason to have lower level creatures in the game, I will simply say "Also, there's a lot of lesser powerful Orcs here, they rush at you in wave after wave. You slice them all down as if they weren't actually there."

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I try and approach it the other way - have the players hook the GM via their PCs, rather than the other way around. Assuming the players are serious about the game, I think this tends to work.

Depends what you mean by serious about the game. Certain characters simply aren't "active" characters and are much more passive.

When you have a group of entirely brooding, dark, loners who like to sit in the corner of taverns and not talk to anyone....they tend to pick up absolutely no plot hooks at all. Because their character needs to be "convinced" to take an active role in anything. Otherwise, it's within their "character" to do absolutely nothing, to be self centered and not care about anything going on in the world unless it is directly related to them.

These are the characters that if they overhear someone in a bar saying "If only I could find an adventurer to do something for me...I have 1000 gp to give to them....but I can't seem to find anyone." would say "That has nothing to do with me, I'm not an adventurer...other people have their problems, that doesn't concern me."

But these same characters, if you have a person come to their table at the tavern and say "You have a sword, you look like you can fight! I'll give you anything if you help me. PLEASE!" will say "Alright, I suppose I can help you."

Unless the DM actively gives them a quest and appeals directly to them, they will not DO anything.

 

[billd91]

The general reason is that the death of an entire party causes the game to end most of the time. No one is left alive who remembers the quest they were even going on(or the key information they found out to solve the quest). Especially if it is a really long and epic quest, like the gathering of the 7 parts of the Rod of 7 Parts. The pieces they already found are now lost again, likely the villains they were trying to keep them away from now have them. The game is over. You can hack in a reason for a new group to pick up off where they left off....but if you ask a group of people if they want to spend then next 4 months going after the same pieces of an artifact that they spent the last 4 months looking for...I bet most of them will say "Let's just start a different adventure". If you have notes prepared for the rest of the campaign all the work spent writing them is now lost. Or at least, that's been my experience.

As for no XP. It has an equal but opposite effect. Most groups will say "Really? These are just CR 1 normal Orcs? I fireball them. No, wait, it's not worth a fireball. They need natural 20s to hit us, we all hit them on a 2. We kill them with our minimum damage. Can we skip the rolling for initiative, writing down all the numbers, putting enemies on the board, moving to melee ranges and rolling attack rolls? If we do all that, it's going to be 20 or 30 minutes. And we get no reward for beating them so it isn't worth our time. Can you please just say, 'You beat the Orcs' and allow us to move on?"

I tried running a couple of these weak battles at the beginning of 3e before my players all got bored of going through the motions and *I* got bored of going through the motions. Now, if there's a story reason to have lower level creatures in the game, I will simply say "Also, there's a lot of lesser powerful Orcs here, they rush at you in wave after wave. You slice them all down as if they weren't actually there."

Sheesh. Not every encounter has to be violent.