D&D 5E With Respect to the Door and Expectations....The REAL Reason 5e Can't Unite the Base

[Crazy Jerome]

Very true, but I think the base may really need to be even more ....generic (?) in order to truly bring in a majority. I'm not sure they can though and still keep a fully functional "core" system that plays fully by itself with any set magic system. There's enough people that hate Vancian and don't want at-will, etc. that might short-circuit the whole shebang.

Yes. That's the distinctions between a game framework, a core system, and modules. And then you also have distinctions between modules, too. Me, I think the only thing that will meet their stated intent is something close to:

1. Fairly complex framework, well designed.
2. A "core system" that uses a portion of that framework to deliver a BECMI/RC type experience.
3. The "core system" is packaged, early, with a few key modules to provide as wide a scope as possible, such as non-Vancian and Vancian options.
4. Supplements then provide more options, which fully explore the complex framework.

That's a tough order to do from scratch, as it assumes a lot of work to get to your first customer product, the packaged "core system" + key modules. In essense, the "core system" has to be entirely compatible with a sophisticated framework, but not directly express large chunks of it in the interest of simplicity. Systems like GURPS and Hero could be used to do this now (if the owners wanted), but then they have the benefit of already working out the framework and core system over multiple versions. WotC has the playtest to get the framework and core system right, while expressing it as an evolving, packaged product.

We are more likely to get the typical Microsoft result. It's a mostly workable thing, and you can kind of see where they are headed, but you know that major pieces of it are gonna get overhauled entirely in versions 2 and 3.

 

[Hussar]

Just another point about actor/author stance. Even in earlier edition D&D, it was rarely that cut and dried. Many of the things that a character might try make virtually no sense from the character's point of view, yet, I, the player certainly want to.

Take the often mentioned swinging across the room by the chandelier. Now, this is, from the character's POV, ridiculous. It's very dangerous, doesn't really achieve anything and practically suicidal. No one in their right mind is going to do this. But, from me, the player's POV, it's really, really cool. It makes for a great scene and it's something I'd totally want to try. There's a reason it happens in the movies.

So, here we have a fairly clear case of the player and character motivations being at odds. Yet, everyone at the table would likely applaud me (the player) for trying it, and lots of high fives if I actually succeeded. From the character's perspective, it's totally ludicrous. But, on the Cool Scale, it's a winner!

Players are, in many, many events in the game, stepping outside of their character's POV to take actions that are either more pragmatic (I'll move away from this guy, get stabbed, so I can finish off that guy, because I know he's down lots of HP), more cinematic or just outright batguano crazy, because we're playing a game, and being "cool" makes for a more interesting game.

Or, to put it another way, when faced with the big button that says, "Never, under any circumstances, push this" players will almost aways push that button.

 

[Emerikol]

At least some portion of the 4e base is the bandwagon fans. D&D being so popular has those who will stick with the brand. Since 4e is practically tied with Pathfinder (which doesn't even include all the 3.5e and earlier players) I think it is safe to say the potential is there to do better in 5e.

I've never said I'm against anyone having fun anyway they want in an rpg. I do believe that prior to 4e, it was possible to play without dissociative issues and with 4e it was not. So I'd like a game where I can play in the style I prefer. If that game is also usable by others with different playstyles thats fine by me.

Hussar your example is silly. If my player wants to swing from a chandelier then my character wants to do it. You may have issues but it's not dissociative. I can swing from a chandelier all day long as many times as I want.

 

[Nagol]

Just another point about actor/author stance. Even in earlier edition D&D, it was rarely that cut and dried. Many of the things that a character might try make virtually no sense from the character's point of view, yet, I, the player certainly want to.

Take the often mentioned swinging across the room by the chandelier. Now, this is, from the character's POV, ridiculous. It's very dangerous, doesn't really achieve anything and practically suicidal. No one in their right mind is going to do this. But, from me, the player's POV, it's really, really cool. It makes for a great scene and it's something I'd totally want to try. There's a reason it happens in the movies.

So, here we have a fairly clear case of the player and character motivations being at odds. Yet, everyone at the table would likely applaud me (the player) for trying it, and lots of high fives if I actually succeeded. From the character's perspective, it's totally ludicrous. But, on the Cool Scale, it's a winner!

Not really. There is a sense of genre convention that exists and infects the world and characters. I may think swinging across a room on a chandelier is a suicidally stupid maneouvre, but my swashbuckling character in a pulpy pirate campiagn thinks its a right and natural way to get the drop on the enemy.

Players are, in many, many events in the game, stepping outside of their character's POV to take actions that are either more pragmatic (I'll move away from this guy, get stabbed, so I can finish off that guy, because I know he's down lots of HP), more cinematic or just outright batguano crazy, because we're playing a game, and being "cool" makes for a more interesting game.

Or, to put it another way, when faced with the big button that says, "Never, under any circumstances, push this" players will almost aways push that button.

Comes down to the players, the characters, and the game's quality (genre, level of comedy, expected coolness, etc.). Characters in Teenagers from Outer Space or Tales of the Floating Vagabond should expect to act differently and have the world react differently than characters in The Morrow Project or Runequest.

 

[pemerton]

No, he's saying that planning out an adventure that is mostly social, storytelling, lacks multiple combats or "one big fight" and overall is light on resource consumption ISN'T bad adventure design, or at least shouldn't be. If the system makes that sort of adventure bad design(as 5E is proposing to do) that is a problem with the system.

A different perspective on the same issue: if resource management is so central to the game, then why does social and exploration activity not also consume resources?

When Mearls said in a recent L&L that such activity won't consume resources to the same degree as combat, he may as well have been saying that these other two "pillars" aren't really pillars at all, but more like the fake columns popular on some neo-classical facades.

 

[pemerton]

Take the often mentioned swinging across the room by the chandelier.

Hussar, that's a lovely example and I'm sorry I can't XP you for it.

Some people want to play D&D in the first person, and some people prefer to play in the third person. Neither is wrong, but people who want to play D&D in the first person seem to take an aggressive stance and have trouble seeing or refuse to see things from the other perspective.

True.

Also, there is no special correlation between actor stance and first person. "Actor stance" means making all decisions for the PC from the PC's own perspective. This is perfectly compatible with third person narration of the PC.

And vice versa. A player might make decisions in author stance (ie from some metagame perspective) but then narrate it in the first person. Hussar's example of the chandelier is a great one for this: the player decides it would be cool to have his/her PC swing on the chandelier - an author stance decision - and then narrates in first person "I leap off the balcony and grab hold of the chandelier!"

Some people, my group among them, play most roleplaying games in a constantly shifting voice.

<snip>

That kind of radical shifting is probably very uncommon. I seriously doubt that playing in 3rd person is.

I doubt that the shifting you describe is that uncommon either. I see it all the time at my table: author stance in 1st person, author stance in 3rd person, actor stance in 3rd person, actor stance in 1st person. It's not as if Hussar's example - which is just the sort of thing that triggers these sorts of shifts - comes from way out of left field. It's just that many players (including, in my view, a number of "immersionists") don't really analyse their play particularly thoroughly.

Perhaps ALL metagame mechanics are "dissociated" until they are connected to the game world. In which case, the mechanic was dissociated until the player associated it to the Raven Queen's power of intervention.

There is a perfectly good, non-pejorative name for such mechanics: fortune-in-the-middle. Part of what irritates me about the Alexander blog is that instead of building on the very interesting work done at the Forge (and elsewhere?) on how such mechanics work, he coins his own pejorative phrase for them and then uses that as a premise in his characterisation of 4e as a tactical board game punctuated by freeform improv.

And yes, 4e is chock full of FitM mechanics. D&D has always had its fair share though, with hp being Exhibit A. (You can't narrate the meaning of a damage roll until you know how many total hit points the target of the hit has, and how many actual hit point s/he will have left after the damage is inflicted.)

A sim mechanic (a "descriptor" as you once put it IIRC) is connected to the game world at the design stage, so it's already associated before the session.

Yes. I've mentioned something about this in a reply to you in the other thread (the balance one, I think).

But then the former mechanic (originally dissociated, then associated) could be dissociated yet again if the players start thinking or asking awkward questions about the scope of the Raven Queen's interventions and other polymorph-like spells that end so quickly as the adventure continues.

This sort of thing is handled through negotiation and give and take at the table - as one aspect of the general implementation of "yes, but . . .".

I think one of the big issues with 4e for many people who don't like it is that 4e expects you to jump back and forth from 1st person to 3rd person and I believe for many people that is more immersion breaking and irritating than fun.

Well one... it's forcing a playstyle on people that is not traditionally associated with D&D. So I guess the general problem is/was the expectations set vs. reality

All you say here may be true. It doesn't go one step, however, towards showing that 4e is a tactical skirmish game punctuated by freeform improv, which is the main contention of the Justin Alexander blog.

Hence the reason why that blog remains rather contentious.

 

[Emerikol]

A different perspective on the same issue: if resource management is so central to the game, then why does social and exploration activity not also consume resources?

When Mearls said in a recent L&L that such activity won't consume resources to the same degree as combat, he may as well have been saying that these other two "pillars" aren't really pillars at all, but more like the fake columns popular on some neo-classical facades.

Wouldn't a fly spell or a knock spell help with exploration? Wouldn't a charm spell or a suggestion spell help with social? I'm assuming your resource management PCs will have resources they can use to facilitate play. Even light adds to the exploration part of the game.

 

[Nagol]

A different perspective on the same issue: if resource management is so central to the game, then why does social and exploration activity not also consume resources?

When Mearls said in a recent L&L that such activity won't consume resources to the same degree as combat, he may as well have been saying that these other two "pillars" aren't really pillars at all, but more like the fake columns popular on some neo-classical facades.

That was my take as well.

For the three activities to act as pillars, each should require a similar level of thought and consideration as any other.

If one of the pillars is exceptional and specifically calls out for additional player consideration and adventure design thought than the others one has to wonder how equal the pillars will be.

It's still too early to tell definitely. It is entirely possible that the "pillars" were aspirational considerations and present complexity in play beyond the designers' desire to include.

It also possible they have been converted into pillars of adventure design and we'll see a reduced reliance on "set piece" combats/pre-configured challenges in published supplements.

 

[Manbearcat]

I've never said I'm against anyone having fun anyway they want in an rpg. I do believe that prior to 4e, it was possible to play without dissociative issues and with 4e it was not. So I'd like a game where I can play in the style I prefer. If that game is also usable by others with different playstyles thats fine by me.

I'm going to substitute (i) "metagame mechanics which I do not like as they force me out of actor stance and/or I refuse to leverage post-hoc "genre-logic" in author stance even though the mechanic in question was never devised with the pretension of process simulation as arbiter" for your "dissociative issues". I've read the article in question and the hubris and circular/tautological reasoning was so extraordinary that my mind literally had to strike-through most of the effort therein to compel me to his side that, in the end, all that was left was (i).

What is interesting is my issues, and I expect others, run 180 degrees counter to your own. My agony after DMing DnD for over 20 years now has been my increasing awareness of its extraordinary deficiencies, in both settings and mechanics, to properly simulate (when examined under intense scrutiny) a model, with any fidelity, that is supposed to be constrained by real-world biophysics, atmospheric drag, musculoskeletal kinesiology. Without severe hand-waving (indifference), shallow or inefficient scrutiny (lack of awareness), or the imposition of meta-game "genre logic" as a kludge or a combination of all three, rigid DnD process simulation becomes an exercise in madness. My DMing style and tastes have both changed over the years as a direct response to this. As much as anything, this exercise in madness has bulwarked me toward the implacable conclusion that when someone says they do not like a specific DnD mechanic because it is "too gamist" or "too meta-gamist" or the new "dissociative", it is really because of (i). I just think, "oh, ok...the idea of a fighter marking an opponent (extraordinarily easy to rationalize through real-world opponent/defender or combat dynamics logic if you must) is too gamist or meta-gamist, thereby infringing upon your sense of the games fidelity to the model simulation...but you can get behind:

- Atmospheric drag being being non-existent or hand-waved (or perhaps less gravity?...but that brings up an abundance of other issues that would then undo the model's fidelity).

- Thrust being hand-waved.

- Lift being hand-waved.

- Violation of Conservation of Mass and Conservation of Energy with respect to spell-casting...or it being hand-waved or some never explained cosmological phenomenon intervening.

- If spells do not violate CoM or CoE then where does the energy/mass come from? Is it nuclear fusion or fission? Then chalk up hand-waving the impacts of radiation on a localized ecology.

- An abundance of biology/biophysics issues that must be hand-waved. The most painful being (because the implied setting is rife with them - Giant spiders, Giant scorpions, Ettercaps, Driders and every other creature with an exoskeleton) the unbound size of arthropods. In the real world, their physical size is severely constrained due to the perils of molting, the force of gravity, and the percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere. What's more, a fully hardened exoskeleton needs to be scaled appropriately to the dimensions of the organism to prevent it from collapsing. Since strength is proportional to the square of the linear dimensions, whereas mass is proportional to the cube of the linear dimensions, the skeleton needs to become ever thicker as size increases. At a certain point, the design becomes impractical, and deadly, as the creature becomes paralyzed and is crushed by its own weight.

- Synergy between Strength and Dexterity being non-existent due to the siloing away of mechanical effect of ability scores. This must be hand-waved and, to a lesser extent, Constitution's synergy with them must be hand-waved as well (See my secondary long post in the Swashbuckler/Bravo/Duelist thread if you need the long version of this).

There are plenty more than that but I'm tired of writing. I haven't even touched on the mechanical system and its numerous, (necessary) built-in abstractions (as have been canvassed a thousand times over) that require post-hoc rationale infill or "DO NOT SCRUTINIZE AND/OR HANDLE CAREFULLY AS THIS WILL BREAK - social accord" as kludges if you want to maintain the <cough> internal consistency of the model...and, I guess, immersion.

A different perspective on the same issue: if resource management is so central to the game, then why does social and exploration activity not also consume resources?

When Mearls said in a recent L&L that such activity won't consume resources to the same degree as combat, he may as well have been saying that these other two "pillars" aren't really pillars at all, but more like the fake columns popular on some neo-classical facades.

Great point and great comparison. If DnD is an edifice, and 3 pillars are truly meant to load-bear the weight of the structure, then we need character resources/resolution mechanics that interface with and adjudicate adventure conflict.

 

[pemerton]

Wouldn't a fly spell or a knock spell help with exploration? Wouldn't a charm spell or a suggestion spell help with social? I'm assuming your resource management PCs will have resources they can use to facilitate play. Even light adds to the exploration part of the game.

Combat pillar is a resource management game for every PC - hit points are the principal resource being managed.

Your description of the social and exploration pillars make them sound as if they are important parts of the game for spellcasters, but not others (who have no resources to bring to bear in order to do better or worse).

I think that confirms rather than dispels my worry, doesn't it?