Old School : Tucker's Kobolds and Trained Jellies

[Andor]

Of course, the question of creativity has nothing to do with old-school or modern roleplay. I wrote that because the OPs posts have the tendency to assume that mordern roleplaying is in any way less creative.

He wrote for example:

The notion that the modern way of gaming leeks out any sense of creativity out of roleplay is, of course, not true.

True. I did not mean creativity in it's full sense. Creating a narrative, creating a character, creating a good time with friends, etc, etc. All of this can be done as well with 4e as with any other game system.

I'm using the more narrow meaning of creative problem solving and invoking the phrase "Necessity is the mother of invention." Early D&D gaming styles necessitated looking beyond the character sheet to solve problems, and each successive edition of D&D reduced that need by placing more and more tools onto that character sheet.

BECMI had the fewest tools. AD&D had more developed classes and the barest nod to out-of-combat task resolution. 2e gave us formalized NWPs and kits. 3e placed a strong set of simulationist tools onto the sheet. 4e placed an even stronger set of gamist tools onto the sheet. (Gamist meaning a defenders abilities are there because they allow him to perform his in-combat game function and are driven at the meta-game level.)

Tools are good, up to a point. I think probably 3e was past that point, although it's my personal favorite edition to date, the data load required of GMs and high-level players was considerable. 4e skills are probably closer to the ideal, but for a variety of reasons I think it's combat tool/powerset needs some pruneing.

 

[ExploderWizard]

DnD is heroic fantasy game. If I want to play a non-hero character, I play Harnmaster.

Later editions have certainly been geared toward this but D&D has traditionally been about characters potentially becoming heroes rather than being handed that label at character creation.

 

[Andor]

You put the question very bluntly. "Idiot" is such a strong word. But I think that "unfairness" does not make a better game, no.

Not unfairness per se. A lack of the expectation of fairness is closer to what I am trying to get across. If the PCs are never really at risk, how are they heros?

Wandering monsters rolled out of a table with no connection to the story make a much lamer game to me. They serve no purpose at all. In my opinion, stuff like this makes for C movies, which are a waste of precious lifetime.

Also, a TPK is not something to be proud of unless it serves a story purpose. You know, the valiant heroes all die a meaningful death. But: "Oh, you all died because you could not climb the wall" serves no purpose. This is meaningless.

I almost agree with you on the first part, except that the story is whatever happens to our characters. If they get eaten by a bear, then that is the story, perhaps it will serve as a cautionary tale to the next adventurer. If the monster encountered is ill fitting to the world, then I agree with you completely. I would be severely annoyed if my party was wiped out by a random group of Drow in the middle of a desert at high noon. Because sun hating drow running about at high noon is sufficiently out of character for the world that it requires narrative justification. However if I was hunting bear in a cave and a troll came up from behind and ate our minstrel, then there is not much to complain about as trolls are known to inhabit the mountains, are fond of caves, and probably eat bears. It was my own damn fault for not posting a guard behind us.

As to the second you are missing my entire point. It's when you are confronting an unscaleable wall to the front while certain death persues you from the rear that the moments I'm looking for come from. This is when you find the clever way out, or use the solution the GM never thought of. And if you don't and you die, the purpose, the meaning of it is this: Adventuring is hard, dangerous work. Only the cleverest, the bravest, the luckiest should dare it. And those that try and fail shower glory on those that succeed.

Without that risk you might as well play Arnold, the heroic door-to-door insurance salesman.

I have experienced two TPK in 25+ years of gaming and none of them are talked about in a funny or nostalgic way. Instead, everybody says: What a very crappy way to end this game (they say "scheisse" in german).

I'm not saying TPKs are fun, I'm saying that it's more fun to escape from a potential TPK by using the players brains, rather than the characters "avoid TPK" spell.

 

[Leatherhead]

You're exactly wrong; either you haven't read the 4e DMG or you never reached pg 42.

I have read page 42. And I actually read the page, not just glossed over it.

It goes out of its way to highlight and encourage practices that discourage the use of improvised attacks. Such as using multiple checks to resolve an attack (more checks means more chances of failure), and using damage expressions or effects that are worse than what encounter (or even some At-will) powers can muster. Why would players ever improvise something when it's all but guaranteed to be less effective and harder to pull off than what their own powers can already do?

I just don't understand how people can tout it as some kind of awesome cure-all for doing stunts, when it is, if anything, the opposite.

 

[Hassassin]

I can buy that, in the sense that 4ed forces you a little in the role of actor and director while in other games you can focus more on just being the actor. Of course that only applies to actions taken in combat and I would argue that most role-playing happens out of combat.

I'm not touching "most role-playing happens out of combat", as that's specific to a playing group. There are daily utility powers that extend out-of-character resource management outside combat. That's in addition to the rest/retreat decision that is usually made outside combat (in the exploration pillar, I'd say).

Also, I hope you don't describe any edition of D&D as "focused on method acting". Runequest, maybe. GURPS, maybe. D&D never tried hard to have one to one correspondence between players' decisions and PC's decisions. (HP, AC and levels all interfere).

Focused was probably the wrong word, but I don't feel the core mechanics of D&D hinder method acting at all. I merely meant that choices and resource management should happen in-game.

 

[Mattachine]

Leatherhead, that is why the combat stunt rules came out in the DMG2.

Like so much of 4e, the best stuff was not in the first three books.

 

[TheFindus]

I almost agree with you on the first part, except that the story is whatever happens to our characters. If they get eaten by a bear, then that is the story, perhaps it will serve as a cautionary tale to the next adventurer. If the monster encountered is ill fitting to the world, then I agree with you completely. I would be severely annoyed if my party was wiped out by a random group of Drow in the middle of a desert at high noon. Because sun hating drow running about at high noon is sufficiently out of character for the world that it requires narrative justification. However if I was hunting bear in a cave and a troll came up from behind and ate our minstrel, then there is not much to complain about as trolls are known to inhabit the mountains, are fond of caves, and probably eat bears. It was my own damn fault for not posting a guard behind us.

I think I understand your point.
About the troll and the bear cave, though: What is the story here? The bear, the cave or the troll? The main problem I have with wandering monster tables is that most often in my experience, they distract from the actual story. So if the story in your example is a cave in dangerous wilderlands and you are trying to make the danger an issue, then why add a troll to an already dangerous bear? Why not present just the troll as the dangerous opponent? Why is a roll on a wandering monster table neccessary here? If the story is the bear, that, for example, needs to be protected or something like that, all of a sudden the troll makes sense as a story element. Because now the heroes have to protect the bear. But again, no wandering monster table roll neccessary here.
What I am trying to say is that because wandering monsters are randomly picked, I find it very hard 90% of the time to see a need for their existance storywise.
In the Warhammer 1st edition Doomstone Campaign the heroes are travelling through a mountain range full of dangerous creatures. The adventure designers wanted to bring across just that danger of the environment. So they installed several combats with wilderbeasts across the heroes' track. In that way, all those creatures served a story purpose. No wandering monster table was neccessary.

As to the second you are missing my entire point. It's when you are confronting an unscaleable wall to the front while certain death persues you from the rear that the moments I'm looking for come from. This is when you find the clever way out, or use the solution the GM never thought of. And if you don't and you die, the purpose, the meaning of it is this: Adventuring is hard, dangerous work. Only the cleverest, the bravest, the luckiest should dare it. And those that try and fail shower glory on those that succeed.

Without that risk you might as well play Arnold, the heroic door-to-door insurance salesman.

I think I get your angle.
I like scenes like the one you are describing. And I have played them in all varieties of roleplaying situations. So I think the scene itself is not part of old-school gameplay by itself. What I do consider part of old-school gameplay, though, is your explanation for an incurring TPK: the players (!) were not smart enough and adventuring is dangerous work.
And this is the part that I do not like anymore. Because what is so exciting about playing a scene like this is the danger for your character. If that character dies, it is very anticlimactic and the scene will be remembered by anybody that I know not for the suspense, but the TPK, which nobody will laugh about. And it will not help them with their next characters, either. Because what are these next generation characters going to do? Go back to the same wall? Killing them off will stop play right there. And if you are true to your new character's experience and stay within that new character's state of mind, he will learn nothing from that experience of the old character, because he did not encounter it. The player does, though, and will be working outside of that new character's mindset when he is experiencing his own "I am at the wall" scenario. That, to my taste, is not a good thing.
Plus, how to make room for a sucky GM that will not accept some of the stuff the players come up with? Especially when playing modules that have a very specific solution in mind to begin with?

So, to quote 4E: to say "yes!" in situations like this and not expecting players to solve a scene based on their own but on their character's experience, I find is a more delightful way to GM. I think it more challenging for the player, too, because you really have to block out the stuff that is not your character.

I'm not saying TPKs are fun, I'm saying that it's more fun to escape from a potential TPK by using the players brains, rather than the characters "avoid TPK" spell.

I hate those spells, too. "Teleport without Error" comes to mind. Especially because those spells tended to make non-spellcasters look and feel weak and make encounter design more difficult at higher levels. But that is a totally different subject.

 

[Andor]

I think I understand your point.
About the troll and the bear cave, though: What is the story here? The bear, the cave or the troll? The main problem I have with wandering monster tables is that most often in my experience, they distract from the actual story. So if the story in your example is a cave in dangerous wilderlands and you are trying to make the danger an issue, then why add a troll to an already dangerous bear? Why not present just the troll as the dangerous opponent? Why is a roll on a wandering monster table neccessary here? If the story is the bear, that, for example, needs to be protected or something like that, all of a sudden the troll makes sense as a story element. Because now the heroes have to protect the bear. But again, no wandering monster table roll neccessary here.
What I am trying to say is that because wandering monsters are randomly picked, I find it very hard 90% of the time to see a need for their existance storywise.In the Warhammer 1st edition Doomstone Campaign the heroes are travelling through a mountain range full of dangerous creatures. The adventure designers wanted to bring across just that danger of the environment. So they installed several combats with wilderbeasts across the heroes' track. In that way, all those creatures served a story purpose. No wandering monster table was neccessary.

I think this comes down to, not a gamist vs simulationist rules system, instead sandbox vs narrative playstyle preference. If every encounter is there to drive the main plot then random encounters have no place. Personally, I hate this, becuase it brings with it the sense that the world is revolving around my PC, and it all seems like an exercise in solipsism. I hate solipsism with great passion.

So one of the purposes of random (or at least story-unrelated) encounters is to allow me to feel that the world is not revolving around us PCs, that there are other beings out there pursuing their own agendas who couldn't care less about my quest for the Triangle of Zinfab. Yes, there is irony here, ces't la vie.

Random encounters are never truly random. They are there to illustrate the veracity of the world and should therefore be appropriate to the place and time. And (strange as it may sound coming from me in this thread) they should not completely ignore the concept of balance. If the encounter is in no way related to the plot, then it is indeed a stupid time to kill the PCs. It might be perfectly logical for an Ancient Red Dragon who happens to be flying by to eat the PCs, but if there is no chance of survival or escape all that is happening is that the GM is allowing the dice to destroy his game. The old modules with random encounter tables were not oblivious to this. You might find a troll on the table in a module for 2nd level characters, you will not find the Tarrasque.

As for the Doomstones campaign, I happen to have it sitting next to me. It contains some listings of appropriate optional encounters the PCs might come across as they travel overland in different sections of the game. The ONLY difference between this and the 'wandering monsters' sections in a D&D module is the lack of a numbered table to allow the GM to pick one if he doesn't have a preference. In both cases the module includes a short list of the sort of things the PC might encounter while in a particular section of the world. In both cases they are tailored to describe the area, and are roughly appropriate to the PCs power level. One has a table with numbers and the other does not. Aside from that, it's the same thing.

 

[KesselZero]

I think this comes down to, not a gamist vs simulationist rules system, instead sandbox vs narrative playstyle preference.

I think this is really the heart of the old-school/new-school divide, at least as I see it. Around the time of 2e the focus of D&D shifted from dungeon/hexcrawling to telling a coherent, epic story starring the characters. I read a good essay somewhere about how this started with the Dragonlance campaign, which let the players play the characters from the novels-- including, for the characters who get killed off in the novels, knowing exactly when, where, and how your PC will die.

So if your focus is on telling coherent stories and making the mechanics of the game fit them, then yes, nicely balanced encounters and no random monsters make sense. But if your focus is on letting the dice fall how they may and having stories arise from the game, then that element of randomness, balanced by player skill, makes more sense.

In both cases, the game tells a story. In old-school gaming, the story arises from the situations the game creates. In new-school gaming, the situations of the game are created to fit a pre-existing story. I personally love both styles of play, and think both can be taken to dangerous extremes.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

I have read page 42. And I actually read the page, not just glossed over it.

It goes out of its way to highlight and encourage practices that discourage the use of improvised attacks. Such as using multiple checks to resolve an attack (more checks means more chances of failure), and using damage expressions or effects that are worse than what encounter (or even some At-will) powers can muster. Why would players ever improvise something when it's all but guaranteed to be less effective and harder to pull off than what their own powers can already do?

I just don't understand how people can tout it as some kind of awesome cure-all for doing stunts, when it is, if anything, the opposite.

page 42 was a nice idea. And it should work, but your point is valid.
When you take into account, that you lack magic items, proficiencies and expertise for those stunts, chances that you succed are actually ver low.

Also the phrase that was overuse in 4e was "reskinning" if the flavour text does not fit the circumstance. And by the notion, that every power should work in every situation, you stop thinking out of the box. I tried, but got sucked in it all the time. If I DM, and if I play. That stupid 4e is just that coherent and good if you stay within the power system.
So 4e fails at improvising, because of two subsystems not working well together. Or as you state: One inherently superior to the other!

The executioner assasin in fact is the class i could imagine as the base for 4e. You have your base attack. Your bread and butter. You can use the right stat with the right weapons. And you can pull off your tricks (use your powers at-will) if you can set up the playing field in the perfect way.