Flavour First vs Game First - a comparison

[Beginning of the End]

Disclaimer - I'll state this right out at the front. I think game first is superior design. I'm going to try to be as even handed as I can here, but, I do feel that game first is the better way to go.

I don't think it really matters what you start with, as long as you end up with non-dissociated mechanics that are fun to use.

Generally I design a world and then make mechanics that both (a) work and (b) describe it, because I think it's generally more interesting to start with the awesome and then make the numbers work, rather than trying to figure out ways to make numbers sound awesome.

But, is there a class that has caused more problems at the table than the paladin? From day 1, the paladin has caused all sorts of issues at the table. Frustration and outright hostility quite often. The flavour says that the holy knight should only work with other good characters.

Plus, I think your thesis is kinda broken. D&D started out by kitbashing a wargame -- it was hardly a "flavour-first" design methodology.

For example, paladins were weighted down with lots of limitations because they were considered a superior class. So what you're claiming is "flavour-first" design was, in fact, "game-first" design.

But, then you hit the table. And the poor rogue player is sitting in the corner twiddling his thumbs because his one main combat ability is nerfed entirely by about a quarter of the creature types out there. In a tomb raider scenario, quintessentially D&D, the rogue is reduced to the role of well armed commoner by pretty much any monster most likely to inhabit a tomb.

But, on the flip-side, all of the rogue's non-combat abilities (finding traps, opening locks, etc.) are at their most useful during a tomb raider scenario.

To me this complaint about the rogue not being able to backstab everything in sight is like the arcanist complaining that some creatures have spell resistance.

You can't use your bestest ability all of the time?

I weep you for. They're crocodile tears, mind you. But I weep for you.

The other problem was in PrC design that narrowed the focus based on the flavour. Knight of the Chalice (at least the 3e version) is a poster boy here. A PrC that gives you massive bonuses against demons, because that's their purpose - kill demons. But, what if the DM doesn't use a lot of demons, just some?

Then you probably shouldn't be playing a Knight of the Chalice in that campaign. Ditto to your Ranger complaint.

Similarly, if you're playing in a campaign without a lot of combat, you shouldn't play a fighter. If you're playing in a campaign set entirely with an antimagic zone, you shouldn't play a wizard. If you're playing a campaign in which the PCs are an elite team of political assassins, you shouldn't play a paladin.

Yada yada yada.

Some people apparently want all classes to be all things at all times. Personally, I find that lack of variety pretty boring.

 

[Wyrmshadows]

So to tease out more of what I did this morning: why do I play D&D instead of, say, A Link to the Past (which, for my milage, is one of the Best Games Ever (tm))? I could go fire up my old SNES right now and have the time of my life scuttling around Hyrule whacking things with a sword. The game works perfectly, the story is there enough to justify it, I don't have to worry about anyone else, and I have no pre-prep work to do. I just flip on my game and I'm there, enjoying myself.

In fact, I've got a D&D game scheduled for this Sunday. Why don't I say I'd rather play A Link to the Past? Surely I won't have any headaches trying to play 4e without a minis board. I won't have to travel the hour to get to where we're gaming. I won't have to put up with some weird friend tension. I won't even have to get dressed in the morning. I could just wake up, play the game for an hour or so, get bored, and do something else. Maybe look for a better job or surf ENWorld and amuse myself in theoretical design debates. All are plenty of enjoyment for me.

So why am I going to D&D?

Because D&D offers me something, in the gameplay, that none of that does: the ability to evoke a story with friends.

So why isn't this important? It is, essentially, the justification of the existence of, if not the entire PNPRPG industry, at LEAST of D&D.

I don't play D&D just to have fun. I'm a 21st century digital boy. I've got a lot of toys (apologies to Bad Religion). I'm lousy with fun. Furthermore, I'm of legal drinking age, and have ready availability of a legal hallucinogen, so I can make staring at the wall and giggling fun. More fun than D&D could ever be in it's wildest, wettest, most scantily clad dreams.

What makes me choose D&D over these other toys is not "fun." It is a particular style of rarely-had fun that I very much enjoy: interactive, spontaneous storytelling.

Wherever D&D fails to deliver me that, it fails to deliver me the brand of fun I am seeking, and so I'll either seek it elsewhere, or just content myself with a decade-plus old videogame and save myself some time and effort.

In sacrificing everything on the altar of "game-first" you forget that the game itself is "story-first." Without Legolas and Conan, there never would have been a D&D.



Actually, your argument seems to be fluff-and-crunch at its core because you specifically argue that starting from fluff gives you bad crunch, while starting from crunch gives you good crunch and can fudge the fluff. I'm arguing that crunch and fluff are two things that you need to get right, regardless of which one you start with.



Any mechanic that causes the game or the play to be less enjoyable is a bad mechanic. It doesn't really matter what the reason behind it is, it's bad. A flavor concept can give you some dynamite rules. Heck, that's basically what a class is -- a flavor concept.



The mechanics that cause problems come from all sorts of places, and 4e is no stranger to any of the "problems" you bring up. A bad mechanic is a bad mechanic, and trying to muddle out the motives of dead and aged gaming designers is pointless when addressing the problem of bad mechanics.

Though I think the fact that two rational people can look at one mechanic and one person think it's "flavor-based" and another think it's "game-based" means that your terms are probably too vague to be useful in the first place.

At the highest level of "Why am I doing this?", the game and the flavor, the fluff and the crunch, become one experience that compliments itself. It helps me tell a story in a way that isn't clunky or difficult.

A lot of people who have rejected 4e do so because the "flavor" they're looking for has failed to be supported, while it could be supported with earlier editions. The ability to ban paladin and the inability to ban healing surges scratches the surface of part of why this is.

Damn Kamikaze!!!

This!

You have stated for me, more clearly than I ever have, exactly why I don't like 4e. D&D has always had strong gamist elements but IMO 4e ups the gamist ante dramatically.

For me, 4e feels like a boardgame, a game whose gamist elements do not easily allow me to immerse myself in the "reality" of the RPing experience. All these conversations about whether or not martial class powers are magical exist bcause there is absolutely no in-game rationale for how they are supposed to work and every argument I have seen yet boils down to....don't think too much and have fun.

Well it isn't fun for me if there is too much dissonance between gamist, narrative and simulationist elements. Its as if fun means, just shut-up and kill something, shut up and roll some dice. For me and my players, the fun is actually the setting, the fluff, the story and mechanics that support those things first.

If I wanted endless gamist fun, I can play my Xbox 360 or Risk. PNP games have, for many of us, allowed us to get into the world and be there. Yeah, the model provided by any PNP RPing game is flawed, it always will be, but their at least seemed to be a desire to give a nod to versimilitude but now even that is gone.

I have played the game....DM'ed it actually....for a few sessions and even though mechanically it is a strong game, stylistically I find it uncompelling and won't be playing it again. D&D 3.5 has demonstrated repeatedly its ability to be successfully modified to reflect different kinds of fluff, from horror (ravenloft), survival horror/fantasy (Midnight), Grim and Gritty (Conan D20), traditional High Fantasy (Dragonlance), to super-magical High Fantasy (Forgotten Realms). It is the fluff that came first in these settings/3.5 variants with the mechanics supporting the core setting concepts.

Mechanics first can IMO make every world setting exactly the same.

To add: To show this is not an edition war thread, I must say that IMO both True20 and Mongoose Runequest's mechanics are more my cup of tea than any version of D&D to date.



Wyrmshadows

 

[Herremann the Wise]

First of all, you can be up and running in 5 minutes after you've been "beaten within an inch of your life", assuming you have either 4 healing surges or a slightly smaller number and a friendly leader archetype. Faced with your own initial story of what happened - "I was a pile of mangled limbs 5 minutes ago and now I can do cartwheels" - why do you conclude that the underlying mechanic must be flawed, rather than admit the possibility you need to tell a new story?

Consider this: hit points do not represent what you think they represent - they are not a spectrum between perfect health at full and a mangled pile of limbs and organs at -CON. That's what they may represent for NPCs after facing the business end of a bugbear ranger with serrated swords, but for PCs hit points are simple: they're your will to fight. This isn't Journey to the West, where Goku and Gojo pound on each other for 20 hours before one of them starts to get tired - fights take seconds, perhaps a minute or two. You don't die at 0 hit points, you pass out because you can't take the shock. Sometimes, yes, people can't recover from a shock and the body shuts down. But when you go from full hit points to single digits you only take the single bleeding wound that represents your getting bloodied - perhaps it's the only strike that even lands straight on.

That's my story of hit points.

Interesting. This is how D&D has interpreted it.

Each character has a varying number of hit points,' just as monsters do. These hit points represent how much damage (actual or potential) the character can withstand before being killed. A certain amount of these hit points represent the actual physical punishment which can be sustained. The remainder, a significant portion of hit points at higher levels, stands for skill, luck, and/or magical factors. A typical man-at-arms can take about 5 hit points of damage before being killed. Let us suppose that a 10th level fighter has 55 hit points, plus a bonus of 30 hit points for his constitution, for a total of 85 hit points. This is the equivalent of about 18 hit dice for creatures, about what it would take to kill four huge warhorses. It is ridiculous to assume that even a fantastic fighter can take that much punishment. The same holds true to a lesser extent for clerics, thieves, and the other classes. Thus, the majority of hit paints are symbolic of combat skill, luck (bestowed by supernatural powers), and magical forces.

Hit points mean two things in the game world, the ability to take physical punishment and keep going, and the ability to turn a serious blow into a less serious one. For some characters, hit points may represent divine favour or inner power.

Over the course of a battle, you take damage from attacks. Hit points (hp) measure your ability to stand up to punishment, turn deadly strikes into glancing blows, and stay on your feet throughout a battle. Hit points represent more than physical endurance. They represent your character’s skill, luck, and resolve—all the factors that combine to help you stay alive in a combat situation.

Dying: When your hit points drop to 0 or fewer, you fall unconscious and are dying. Any additional damage you take continues to reduce your current hit point total until your character dies.

It's interesting how the interpretation of hit points has changed over the various editions. However, even under what the 4E is telling me (it's interpretation of my dying character 1hp from death, not mine by the way), I think the possible rapid turn-around from death's door to complete health without any sort of magical healing is unrealistic/artificial. Your story and your interpretation of hit points does not convince me otherwise that this is a serious disconnect between mechanic and flavour.

By the way in my original post, I included hit point issues from 3E and 4E so as not to appear as if I was bashing one edition of the game over the other - I did not want some one to grab hold of them and start an edition war. As such, I'll just say that my interpretation of what 4E is telling me is different to yours. If you can come up with a flavour fix that makes sense to you then cool. It doesn't mean though that that flavour fix is going to jive with all of the myriad of D&D players out there. Telling my I need to admit to the need to come up with a different story when my character is 1hp from being dead (that is 1hp from his negative bloodied value) was a little trite by the way. Perhaps you need to understand where a poster is coming from first before posting such comments.

Best Regards
Herremann the Wise

 

[I'm A Banana]

Damn Kamikaze!!!

This!

You have stated for me, more clearly than I ever have, exactly why I don't like 4e.

I aim to please. If I want to hack some stuff up, I've got Diablo III comin' out soon. If I want to do that with friends, I've got an internet connection.

If I want to craft an interactive story, PNPRPG's are pretty much the only place I can turn to.

Mechanics first can IMO make every world setting exactly the same.

Good examples of mechanics-first systems that have no concern about flavor at all? True 20. GURPS.

I'd still rather play D&D most of the time (though T20 is good for when I'm doing something wacky).

 

[Delta]

Perhaps, but perhaps not. Hit points are overloaded in that they measure physical damage as well as the ability to turn serious damage into less serious damage (through either skill, luck or whatever). However, I don't see where skill or luck is going to help you if you fall 200 feet. All of that damage is straight to the head - unless obviously you are of high enough level to survive (and continue fighting actually at one's peak ability too). The UA fix is exactly that. An inelegant solution to cover such a situation. The issue is in the disconnect between the hit points mechanic, its flavour and the myriad of anomalies that follow from that disconnect.

Again, I entirely, fully agree with the first 80% of your comment, right up to "an inelegant solution". IMO the UA fix is the most elegant solution, and I apply it to all environmental-based damage (falling, cold, heat, starving), thereby washing out the "skill or luck" component of hit points in those cases. For me that elegantly solves all my problems on that end.

 

[Wyrmshadows]

Good examples of mechanics-first systems that have no concern about flavor at all? True 20. GURPS.

I'd still rather play D&D most of the time (though T20 is good for when I'm doing something wacky).

True20 is really a toolbox and with the additional books like the Warrior's and Adept's Handbooks, it is an excellent toolbox indeed that a GM can use to run nearly any genre of game. Personally, I always use it for fantasy. I couldn't imagine playing True20 "out of the box" and don't know anyone who hasn't used the True20 mechanics to reflect the "fluff and feel" they were trying to emulate.

True20 without a setting in mind is IMO akin to an erector set without instructions. Lots of cool pieces without any focused purpose.



Wyrmshadows

 

[I'm A Banana]

True20 without a setting in mind is IMO akin to an erector set without instructions. Lots of cool pieces without any focused purpose.

Right. Which, I guess, is better for some than 4e's instructions for something they don't actually want to build.

 

[Wyrmshadows]

Right. Which, I guess, is better for some than 4e's instructions for something they don't actually want to build.

LOL

Good point.


Wyrmshadows

 

[Delta]

Which is probably why Gygax wrote that essay in the 1e DMG about how D&D isn't intended to represent the "reality of the game world."

There is no such quote in the 1E DMG, and that is not remotely the subject of the essay on hit points.

What there is: a specific and concrete interpretation of what hit points represent. It's not left ambiguous, it never mentions PC morale or will-to-fight, and it's certainly not "don't think about it".

You may disagree with that interpretation -- I can fully respect that! But in 1E it's not left unspecified, nor without connection to the game world reality.

 

[Reynard]

There is no such quote in the 1E DMG, and that is not remotely the subject of the essay on hit points.

What there is: a specific and concrete interpretation of what hit points represent. It's not left ambiguous, it never mentions PC morale or will-to-fight, and it's certainly not "don't think about it".

You may disagree with that interpretation -- I can fully respect that! But in 1E it's not left unspecified, nor without connection to the game world reality.

I think Gygax is misquoted more than the Bard himself.

(BTW, the quote The Little Raven was thinking about was the one in the first couple of pages where Gygax is saying that AD&D combat is not intended to be a simulation of historical combat -- that's it. Not "AD&D isn't intended to be a simulation" -- especially since it very obviously was given the content of the DMG.)