D&D 4E Bridging the cognitive gap between how the game rules work and what they tell us about the setting

[GuardianLurker]

Actually, @Snarf Zagyg , your question of rounds, is I think another example where an in-depth examination of the concept breaks down. So game wise, it's easy to understand and apply the actions limit - "during my turn in the round, I can do these things". The problem is rectifying the turn-based sequencing and the stated time limit.

If I have 10 combatants involved, and a round is N seconds long, does each combatant receive N seconds to do their K things, and the period between a single combatant's actions is 10*N, or do all combatants act within the same N seconds, with each combatant's actions taking N/10 seconds? Something else?

It's something we all (probably) ignore during play, but it was something that could have been a problem even back in 1e, if you were strict about things.

 

[Bagpuss]

Now, a common refrain when this instance of the mechanics serving double-duty is pointed out is that hit points have always been multiple things, going all the way back to AD&D. "Just look," say people, "at page 82 of the 1E DMG! Gary Gygax flat-out says that hit point loss isn't just injury!"

And that would seem to suggest that 4E's presentation is, at the very least, no greater a cognitive gap than what D&D has previously seen.

The problem here is that, outside of one or two other places (i.e. the AD&D PHB p. 34) where Gygax makes the same claim, he never actually makes this point in the game's actual mechanics.

Ah so what you're saying is that 4E was actually a better implementation of Gray Gygax's vision for D&D.

Always suspected as much.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Ah so what you're saying is that 4E was actually a better implementation of Gray Gygax's vision for D&D.

Always suspected as much.

Based on certain cherry-picked statements, perhaps. The man was not consistent.

 

[Bagpuss]

It was and it wasn't a change.

It was fairly different from 3e where mechanics were fairly consistent for monsters and PCs.

For OD&D, Basic, and AD&D 1e and 2e monsters were different from PCs who also had some differences from NPCs.

A PC halfling has a Charisma score stat. A halfling in the monster sections does not. The 1e PH says that a PC dwarf cannot be a cleric, but an NPC one can.

Not forgetting in early D&D Fighters got one attack per level against creatures with less than one hit dice. They were effectively minions that fighters could wade through.

 

[soviet]

I mean, it's not just the problem of the hit points.

Fourth edition in its design loudly screamed at the reader, "IT'S JUST A GAME! STOP TAKING IT SO SERIOUSLY. ACCEPT THAT IT IS A GAME AND JUST ENJOY IT." And, on some level there isn't anything wrong with that. That an RPG is just a game and shouldn't be taken too seriously is undeniable. And certainly there is nothing wrong with that aesthetic paradigm. But it's a very different take on D&D than the historical one that Jon Peterson famously called "Playing at the World". As such, it shouldn't at all be surprising that 4e appealed strongly to players with very different aesthetics than 1e, 2e, or 3e. It likewise shouldn't be surprising, that if you pull a "New Coke" move with the biggest brand in the marketplace that you'll lose more customers than you win over. Whether or not "New Coke" tastes better than classic Coke or not is entirely subjective. But that people who are happy with their taste preference will be unhappy when you change it is predictable.

The biggest and most irksome thing about 4e is the people who insist nothing changed about its aesthetic paradigm. I have no problem with you claiming that 4e was a better game for you than any prior version but claiming that nothing had changed about how the rules related to the setting and that this was just another iteration of D&D strikes me as a complete lack of confidence in your own aesthetic preferences. Like what you like, but don't think you need to win this particular argument to justify you liking it to me. It's objectively true that 4e overturned so much about how D&D related rules to setting and also changed so much about the setting at the same time. This doesn't make 4e objectively bad, but it does make it objectively different.

Take for example the idea of "minions". Minions are most defined by the 4e rule: "Hit points: 1, a missed attack never damages a minion." Now I can easily understand what that represents in the game, what does that rule represent in terms of the in universe reality? These creatures are never injured. If they are hit, they are dead. Even the lightest damage kills them. A rat is more durable. OK, but then a minion can be of any level - that was the thing that made them as a game mechanic interesting. You could have 12th level or 15th level minions. Now try to imagine them living in the same world and same story as the PCs. Do they die when they burn their hands on hot soup? When they stay out for an hour in a sleet storm, is that fatal? Imagine for a second what hit points are supposed to represent and this otherwise highly skilled warrior who has trained for years has none of them, and indeed so few of them that one training accident or one tumble down a flight of stairs is always fatal. It would be one thing if you said minions had hit points equal to their level. That could be rectified. But the fact that they don't points to the real reason why minions have 1 hit point, and it's not anything to do with the game universe - it's to avoid having any bookkeeping. It's really an entirely out of game justification.

What you have to do to make this make any sense is say that the rules really aren't modelling anything about the game universe. The metarule here is "Things that are off stage or don't involve interacting with the PCs don't follow the games rules." The same character doesn't have a consistent set of stats and attributes, but rather acquires a different set of stats and attributes depending on its role in the envisioned story. The metagame is paramount, not the simulated reality. The same character has a different stat block depending on whether it is an antagonist, a side character, a NPC's minion, a PC's henchmen, or a PC. Stats weren't modelling any consistent reality in 4e. And again, there is nothing wrong with that, but it is a change. "It's just a game, so it doesn't need to model anything" is the real underlying paradigm of 4e. There is no "Mind the gap." in 4e. It's "The gap is intentional. Pay it no heed."

Good post.

I think the dividing line is 3e. Some people see/saw 3e as a fairly natural evolution of 2e combined with more modern design tecnhiques. So fundamentally they played 3e through a 2e lens and got a similar sort of experience. We know this is how some of the 3e playtesting went, and it's why clerics are so overpowered - because no-one really wanted to play them and when they did they ran them like they would have in 2e.

I think other people saw 3e for how it was written. There's a very strong flavour of gamist optimisation in the feat selections and multiclassing and so on, particularly if you are building characters from scratch rather than converting existing ones from 2e or otherwise choosing things for fluff reasons. Combat is also very tactical and has defined rules for most things you could try to accomplish. It's designed as a game, which is no surprise given the company that made it.

I think with 4e the designers looked at the second camp of 3e players and thought 'Oh, that's what you want is it? Well, here's an edition that fixes the main problems with 3e and is designed specifically to make that tactical, gamey, challenge-based play even more fun.' Obviously, they weren't quite right about how big the second camp was, or at least, they were too naked in their presentation of that experience to allow the people in the first camp to come along for the ride.

If you were in the first camp and you sort of played 3e as though it was 2e (or you skipped 3e altogether) then I can totally see how 4e was a shocking divergence.

If you were (like me) a bit more in the second camp and experienced 3e on its own terms, the shock about how different 4e was seems a bit misplaced.

 

[Celebrim]

If you were in the first camp and you sort of played 3e as though it was 2e (or you skipped 3e altogether) then I can totally see how 4e was a shocking divergence.

If you were (like me) a bit more in the second camp and experienced 3e on its own terms, the shock about how different 4e was seems a bit misplaced.

That may be fair. I've been playing since 1e AD&D and I'm record as saying that I loved 3e because it felt like someone had thought about all the problems my house rules were trying to solve and cleaned them up for me and built a clean unified system that was a natural extension of how I was already playing. I experienced a few problems translating my 1e game to 3e like gestalt multi-classed characters in AD&D didn't translate into the new rules system well and there was some things I was doing with NPC classes from Dragon magazine that didn't translate into Commoner, Expert, Noble, Adept or Warrior but on the whole it was a very natural translation between the two and I kept playing exactly how I had played in 1e AD&D - that "3e rules, 1e feel" thing.

I saw Clerics as OP because the design of Clerics and Rogues in 3e to me reflected how those classes had been too limited and too underpowered in 1e and in the case of the Cleric they erred in the wrong direction by way of over-compensation. To me though, there were some fairly easy fixes that brought the Cleric back down to tier 2 and within an acceptable power range.

Late 3.X totally turned me off, and I never really adopted 3.5 at all as by the time 3.5e came around I was already finding the problems in the system I wanted fixed and 3.5 wasn't moving in the same direction I was. But certainly, I could see where 4e was a natural extension of the design philosophies that were already creeping into 3.X by the end of its life cycle. However, unlike 3e being a natural evolution of how I played 1e, 4e was radically moving in the direction that I didn't play 3e.

As best as I could tell, 4e was designed based almost entirely on feedback from the 3e Living campaigns and so was fixing the problems you'd have trying to run D&D for a group of strangers where the primary aesthetic of play was tactical problem solving. And yeah, running a living campaign in late 3.5 without a ton of house rules would have been a horror show. 4e D&D was almost fixated on the idea of a "raid" in MMORPG terms and maximizing that as it's central aesthetic of play. It was not at all concerned with demographics and rules as physics and internal consistency of the fiction and anything I was interested in coming from a rules set.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Good post.

I think the dividing line is 3e. Some people see/saw 3e as a fairly natural evolution of 2e combined with more modern design tecnhiques. So fundamentally they played 3e through a 2e lens and got a similar sort of experience. We know this is how some of the 3e playtesting went, and it's why clerics are so overpowered - because no-one really wanted to play them and when they did they ran them like they would have in 2e.

I think other people saw 3e for how it was written. There's a very strong flavour of gamist optimisation in the feat selections and multiclassing and so on, particularly if you are building characters from scratch rather than converting existing ones from 2e or otherwise choosing things for fluff reasons. Combat is also very tactical and has defined rules for most things you could try to accomplish. It's designed as a game, which is no surprise given the company that made it.

I think with 4e the designers looked at the second camp of 3e players and thought 'Oh, that's what you want is it? Well, here's an edition that fixes the main problems with 3e and is designed specifically to make that tactical, gamey, challenge-based play even more fun.' Obviously, they weren't quite right about how big the second camp was, or at least, they were too naked in their presentation of that experience to allow the people in the first camp to come along for the ride.

If you were in the first camp and you sort of played 3e as though it was 2e (or you skipped 3e altogether) then I can totally see how 4e was a shocking divergence.

If you were (like me) a bit more in the second camp and experienced 3e on its own terms, the shock about how different 4e was seems a bit misplaced.

Yeah, that was me, solidly in the first camp. Never really left it, actually.

 

[Shardstone]

I've never understood the point of the Constitution ability score. Isn't that, or Strength, a convenient pool of "meat points" you could target through things like poison, wounds, etc? I think fear of ability score damage (which was unfun, imo, in older editions) gets in the way of using that same concept in a different way now.

 

[Shardstone]

I feel like the OP highlighted an interesting problem, but not the one they intended to highlight.

If Healing Word and Inspiring Word or whatever have the same exact mechanics, making them two separate powers is increasing the cognitive load the system requires, but it's doing so in a way that isn't helpful at all. If I'm doing the same thing as that person is but with a different line of text, then why does it need to be repeated for every class? What's the actual difference between us if we're achieving the same thing mechanically AND a similar thing in terms of narrative? After all, if "speaking words = heal someone" then Healing Word and Inspiring Word are really just the same thing pretending not to be.

This pretending is rife in 4E, and it turned a lot of people off. 5E does it a bit too, but they decided ultimately to call a spade a spade and to reuse their huge library of spell mechanics for various other mechanics. And that makes sense and does a better job at making the universe feel """"sensible.""""

So when it comes to cognitive gap, this is where it's actually at for 4E. Trying to remember all these different powers that are quite literally the same thing and then translating that into story and fun roleplaying is difficult. Tom is casting firebolt, Brad is throwing firesphere, Amy is praying for an emberarrow, and Mike is slinging a flamebullet. Pretending to be different but actually being the same just feels so much more hollow and inauthentic than just all doing the same thing.

 

[Celebrim]

This pretending is rife in 4E, and it turned a lot of people off.

Pretending is the right word, but not used here in the most useful context.

The problem with 4e is that you as a participant aren't supposed to do a lot of pretending. You are just supposed to invoke the powers and do the bookkeeping without worrying about what it represents in the fiction. There is a continuum here of course and it's not a binary qualitative difference from someone casting "Cure Light Wounds" without thinking about what that represents, but it is quantitatively different and more abstract and the percentage of times the players acts in character when evoking his character's ability probably drops a good deal further compared to prior editions.

I've had this same complaint come back to me without prompting from everyone who has ever played at my table and tried a 4e game (now up to at least 3 players). They don't spend as much time imagining the fiction. It's more of a game. And since that's what 4e clearly intended, the designers accomplished their purpose. As I've seen before in '+' threads about 4e, it's the most cleanly designed edition. It knows what it wants to be and it achieves it.