Challenge the Players, Not the Characters' Stats

[MerricB]

one thing i remember also was the thorough room searching we did. it wasnt just roll a d20 and and your search skill vs. a dc. our dm made us look in every nook and cranny.

Indeed. Many of the people here experienced that sort of adversarial DMing... and have sworn off it. DM vs player isn't really that much fun for many people. "Can I guess what the DM is thinking?" is truly an awful way of playing the game.

The hybrid system which I prefer can be described as: If you specifically say you look under the rug, you find the treasure without a check, otherwise you need to make a DC 20 Search check to find it.

It is certain that for some skill challenges, although they can be resolved just by rolling dice, you can't abandon all thought. For instance, the Negotiation example in the DMG has all Intimidate checks immediately fail, and the first successful Diplomacy check has the Duke mentioning something that, to an alert player, allows a History check. The lines of where you put roleplaying vs. rolling are very, very much up to you.

Cheers!

 

[MerricB]

But my general thought is that to die due to poor player skill you'd have to do something really really stupid, where as in previous editions much less stupidity was required to die. Thus reducing the importance of player skill to survive.

The problem is that you can easily reverse that: skill didn't matter as much in 1e because even if you were smart, you could die from an unlucky roll.

I've seen enough deaths in 4e to say with confidence that it can be quite a deadly system if you want it to be, and that the deaths have come from stupid player actions for the most part (staying and fighting too long... or getting cut off from the rest of the group).

Cheers!

 

[Delta]

You suggested that you don't keep player and character knowledge separate. To me, that means that either a/ Verys knows Krunk is a doppelganger because you do, or b/ the DM has to ensure that you don't know Krunk is a doppelganger until Verys does. Anything else requires keeping player and character knowledge separate.

Yes. Thank you for the direct reply this time. Almost all the time I will choose (a). Presumably other members of the party tell Verys as soon as he wakes up, anyway. Anything else is too complicated to bother with, IMO. Which is just reiterating my prior post.

 

[joethelawyer]

i dont know if this will help explain anything about my point of view on combat and feats and powers and detailed spel descriptions affecting combat in limiting creative tactical options, but i'll give it a shot.

i dont like chess. while i find it give a person a great opportunity to develop tactical thought processes, i believe it also is limiting in a sense. i understand that in the game certain pieces have certain moves. but i feel frustrated that i cant move my pawn 4 squares to get the queen sometimes.

in a real world situation, i love trying to figure out a way to do the impossible, or improbable, and be creative to the extreme and surprise someone in how i achieve something.

i like that same flexibility in dnd. to the extent that certain skills, feats, powers, and spells give a player predetrmined tactical moves, with predetermined results in some instances, i feel limited.

i feel in the older style of play, the shorter les definitive spell descriptions left more to the imagination in what you could do with them. the social skills especially were non existent, social interactons were a matter of how the player pulled it off in their acting ability. the feats and didnt exist obviously.

i feel that with feats, and i guess with powers (since i never played 4e, correct me if i am wrong here) you get certain tools in your batman utility belt that you can pull out. since their effects are predetermined and their utility a matter of some predictability, it dis-incents people from making up their own wacky combat maneuver or creative spell use. the predictable becomes the safer route. also, the bad guys are using the same moves against you. it makes sense to counter a known move with another known move. you feel they are supposed to be balanced against each other in some way.

i like making up the tools in the utility belt as i go along.


dunno if that made any sense. its midnight here and i'm tired.

 

[MerricB]

dunno if that made any sense. its midnight here and i'm tired.

It makes sense. To a very large extent, in 4e you can play in that style if the DM's prepared to referee in such a manner. That's what page 42 is for; it frees up the players actions whilst giving guidelines for the DM to prevent them becoming overwhelmingly good.

It should be noted that you can be very creative even with the powers as written; combinations of powers or terrain can give quite surprising results even without going beyond what's on the page, but the option to do so is there for those creative enough to use it.

Note that I knew many a player in AD&D who only ever hit the enemy with the sword, since it was the only manuever the books described. For such players, the basic 4e combat manuevers are liberating and allow more variety!

Cheers!

 

[joethelawyer]

The problem is that you can easily reverse that: skill didn't matter as much in 1e because even if you were smart, you could die from an unlucky roll.


Cheers!

i like that aspect of it. makes it more realistic. hell, i could walk down the street and get hit in the head by a rock from a guy mowing his lawn and die on the spot. unlucky roll. gives it a bit of spice to me to have the save or die/unlucky roll in spite of all the precautions a player takes in there.

i had a paladin 13th level who died from a disintegrate spell a few months ago. save failed, and he had high modifiers. i think there was like a 90% chance to make the save, and he didn't. oh well. we have a policy of no resurrectons in our game, so he was gone for good.

 

[Freakohollik]

The problem is that you can easily reverse that: skill didn't matter as much in 1e because even if you were smart, you could die from an unlucky roll.

The skill in 1e was finding ways to avoid having to make those rolls. The most obvious ways to do this were to avoid combats or to gain an advantage before the combat (knowledge of the enemies and surprise mostly).

The perceived lack of required player skill in 4e comes from those elements of player skill no longer being required.

 

[joethelawyer]

It makes sense. To a very large extent, in 4e you can play in that style if the DM's prepared to referee in such a manner. That's what page 42 is for; it frees up the players actions whilst giving guidelines for the DM to prevent them becoming overwhelmingly good.

It should be noted that you can be very creative even with the powers as written; combinations of powers or terrain can give quite surprising results even without going beyond what's on the page, but the option to do so is there for those creative enough to use it.

Note that I knew many a player in AD&D who only ever hit the enemy with the sword, since it was the only manuever the books described. For such players, the basic 4e combat manuevers are liberating and allow more variety!

Cheers!

ahh. i do see your point then when coming from the perspective of "you mean i can do more than just swing??!"

i guess the other aspect of it for me is that i prefer a narrative/descriptive form of combat, without miniatures and grids. depending on the group i play with, the only time we resort to grids is when the number of combatants is so large that we cant keep track of it in our collective heads. the limitation to me is that if something is on a grid, it's pretty much set in stone what you can do to a certain extent.

for example, if it is narrative, yet some aspect of the combat has not been verbalized/described in detail by the dm yet, the player can announce a creative action which the dm can agree to let the player try, even though it goes against whatthe dm had in his head but hadn't yet verbalized.

the dm usually lets the player take a chance and make the move if it's success would have been the topic of much talk over beers the next day. the dm would just asign it a dex or str check or some combination of the two with appropriate dm determined difficulty modifiers. this way the player's actions go more towards creating an interesting story of the fight, rather than just rolls and how many natural 20's the player rolled.

 

[Filcher]

My experience, and I suspect that of GROGNARDIA, with 4e is that the tactical combat doesn't really take much player skill. If there is no skill required for combat, and now no dungeon navigation skill required, there is little skill left.

My anecdotal (and only that) experience is the opposite. Groups of players that don't have the skill to play as a team get waxed in the tough encounters. It's a different skill, true (less about paranoia, more about knowing team tactics ala chess), but it is a player skill all the same, I'd say.

I love me a 1E game but the "save or die contact poison on the inside of the cloak" trick, was often arbitrary.

 

[joethelawyer]

The skill in 1e was finding ways to avoid having to make those rolls. The most obvious ways to do this were to avoid combats or to gain an advantage before the combat (knowledge of the enemies and surprise mostly).

The perceived lack of required player skill in 4e comes from those elements of player skill no longer being required.

well said. especially the PERCEIVED lack part. its a perception based on the edition's component parts. if as merricb says it doesn't have to be played that way, then i'm glad it allows that flexibility. a good group of dm and players can always turn the lemons of any system into lemonade, i always say.

i guess thats what necromancer games says they will be bringing to the table with their most recent announcement, huh? more tools to do what we have been talking about here?