Speculation about "the feelz" of D&D 4th Edition

[Parmandur]

Oh, there were plenty of people who, ridiculously, claimed 4e "wasn't D&D" and blah blah blah blah blah. That Mearls quote is being stretched pretty far too. Mike never EVER said HE didn't think 4e was D&D or that it DID 'replace D&D fans with new ones' or any other such ridiculous thing. He was just addressing such hyperbole. Then he goes on to say that he wants to provide such people with a game they will like. That's all well and good, and I think its pretty clear, as you have pointed out, that Mearls himself wanted some other version of D&D for his own personal reasons.

Honestly, IMHO, it is a terrible business mistake to put in charge of your product line a person who doesn't believe in your product, and WotC never should have made Mike Mearls its head D&D guy in the 4e era. However it was just par for the course of execrable business decisions WotC has made in the D&D line. I don't know if the people who made those are still around, it was obviously a level above Mearls or the people who came before him, but I expect they have to have changed something at higher levels, because they certainly are at least clear now on what they're trying to do. Perhaps that is just a result of management leaving D&D to figure its own way out, and at least now Mearls has a game he LIKES, much as it chaffs me that he did such a bad disservice to my own preferred game.

Well, he may have gotten the gig because he was able to explain to the bosses why he thinks matters went south at the time; not unheard of. Mearls is the great hero of D&D in my book, for giving me the game I want, at only a slightly faster pace than I can keep up with, while telling me that my play style is in fact the norm (in college, I thought my group was weird; not so, according to the surveys...): but I'm biased, I suppose.

He did try and turn 4E around from the broken business model and books that turned folks off...but too little, too late. If Essentials was what came out in 2008, 4E may have had a fighting chance...

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[AbdulAlhazred]

It gives the same tools folks have been using to do TotM for decades; the same tools we used in 3.x to do it that way. Many top RPG Twitches play 5E in TotM, it ain't hard.

Well, lots of people do lots of things, but 5e STILL has ZERO design features that facilitate TotM. It lacks any system for dividing the stage up into different areas where action takes place, it has no non-grid-dependent means of measuring movement or areas of effect, no rules which define things like zones of control in non-grid-dependent terms, NOTHING. It in fact defines everything in terms of a measurement system which necessarily must assume that you have a precise idea, in X, Y, coordinates, where everything in play is located.

Because 5e is so much less tactical in detailed sense than 4e it is very true that simply 'guessing' and not bothering to actually follow the 5e rules on where stuff is and what areas effects cover, etc has less overall effect on how combat plays out. So in that sense 5e is less sensitive in some ways to being played TotM. Casters are still disproportionately advantaged (at most tables, DMs tend to be forgiving creatures) when you play this way, but its no worse (or better really) than playing 2e or 1e the same way.

In fact I would say 2e is more ideally suited to TotM than 5e. With its more abstract round-based system and dynamic initiative, coupled with its rules for engagement, missile fire, and casting it actually makes considerable concessions to TotM sorts of play (though it certainly also schizophrenically intrudes many grid-based concepts at the same time).

Having played 5e a good bit and used both grids and simply winged it at different times I am thoroughly convinced that 5e's rules pretty much presume there is a grid. You can kinda ignore a bunch of it and it works OK, but having also played 13A, which REALLY IS built for TotM, I can't give 5e any real credit in that department.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

He did try and turn 4E around from the broken business model and books that turned folks off...but too little, too late. If Essentials was what came out in 2008, 4E may have had a fighting chance...

Essentials was just a huge wrong-headed mistake made by someone who neither understood nor believed in the product he was in charge of. It made no sense either business-wise, nor game-wise. Some of the Essentials material wasn't bad, but it in no way improved 4e. There were plenty of ways that could have been done, but it wasn't.

I will agree in a sense with one aspect of what you're saying. The time when actions would have made a difference was 2008, not 2010 or 2012. 4e shouldn't have been released in 2008, it simply was premature, but I've already made that case in earlier posts, so why rehash it. I also tend to think the game could have been flavored and had a few tweaks that would have pushed it a little more in the direction of seeming less radical a departure from previous editions in certain senses without really damaging the essence of the game.

For instance it seems like Druids and barbarians could have been in PHB1. Going further why was it a 30-level system and not a 20-level system, which is what all except BECMI and its successors have basically been. There could have been some more attention played to classic monster lore, and a few other things that could have just made things easier from a game design perspective.

 

[Parmandur]

Well, lots of people do lots of things, but 5e STILL has ZERO design features that facilitate TotM. It lacks any system for dividing the stage up into different areas where action takes place, it has no non-grid-dependent means of measuring movement or areas of effect, no rules which define things like zones of control in non-grid-dependent terms, NOTHING. It in fact defines everything in terms of a measurement system which necessarily must assume that you have a precise idea, in X, Y, coordinates, where everything in play is located.

Because 5e is so much less tactical in detailed sense than 4e it is very true that simply 'guessing' and not bothering to actually follow the 5e rules on where stuff is and what areas effects cover, etc has less overall effect on how combat plays out. So in that sense 5e is less sensitive in some ways to being played TotM. Casters are still disproportionately advantaged (at most tables, DMs tend to be forgiving creatures) when you play this way, but its no worse (or better really) than playing 2e or 1e the same way.

In fact I would say 2e is more ideally suited to TotM than 5e. With its more abstract round-based system and dynamic initiative, coupled with its rules for engagement, missile fire, and casting it actually makes considerable concessions to TotM sorts of play (though it certainly also schizophrenically intrudes many grid-based concepts at the same time).

Having played 5e a good bit and used both grids and simply winged it at different times I am thoroughly convinced that 5e's rules pretty much presume there is a grid. You can kinda ignore a bunch of it and it works OK, but having also played 13A, which REALLY IS built for TotM, I can't give 5e any real credit in that department.

It uses feet...

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[AbdulAlhazred]

It uses feet...

So? In order to measure feet you still need to have your minis laid out on a surface, have some scale factor, and measure distances and translate them to feet. Otherwise how do you know that the orc is or is not within the radius of the fireball, or actually even where exactly the origin point of the fireball IS relative to all the other elements in play? There is no provision WITHIN THE RULES OF 5e to avoid needing to make this determination, and the only supported way to do so is measurement!

The notion that describing things in an in-world measurement system using feet somehow makes it 'TotM' simply doesn't wash. It may sound better to you, and that may improve your game experience, but it doesn't in any way support a game process of playing without some sort of map (though it is certainly true that 5e doesn't describe things in terms of a grid, which was also true BTW of AD&D for the most part).

 

[Tony Vargas]

It gives the same tools folks have been using to do TotM for decades; the same tools we used in 3.x to do it that way. Many top RPG Twitches play 5E in TotM, it ain't hard.

You've said that twice, and it's still true. 5e gives you the same rules in support of TotM as every other edition: none. And you can totally run an RPG TotM even if none of it's rules support that, it's not hard (it's not exactly the easiest way, either, though - since visual aids can be pretty helpful).

It uses feet...

Lol. Uh-huh. And 3.x used feet at 5' to the square, 4e used squares at 1 sq = 5', and 1e used scale inches at 1 inch = 10' or 10 yards (readily convertible to feat @ 1:3), depending. So, yes, every edition used feet. Rather than, say, meters. That's not support for TotM, quite the contrary, it's unneeded granularity that only complicates application of the technique.

 

[The Fighter-Cricket]

I sense that there is a misunderstanding of what theater of the mind really means. Parmadur is saying (correct me if I'm wrong) that totm is simply smth like "taking the miniatures game from the table into the realm of the thoughts". The other side believes that totm is truly more abstract in that it does away with measurement and specific distances. It is more of a Final Fantasy style of battle where we have the baddies on the left and the PCs on the right in an abstract space. Is this correct?
I feel that we really should define what we are talking about here when we discuss TotM.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I sense that there is a misunderstanding of what theater of the mind really means.

It means a set of LARP rules from WWGS. Oh, no, that was Mind's Eye Theatre. Sorry.

Parmadur is saying (correct me if I'm wrong) that totm is simply smth like "taking the miniatures game from the table into the realm of the thoughts".

That's, probably not exactly it (he can speak up), but sounds basically OK. You're not using minis (or any other sort of visual aid), you're still trying to use the rules of the game to resolve what happens.

The other side believes that totm is truly more abstract in that it does away with measurement and specific distances.

That's not a definition of TotM, just a general idea how a system might support TotM. Make distance/area/positioning/etc more abstract in some way so that it's easier to track without using a play surface or other visual aid.

There may some talking past eachother going on, as Parmandur talking about playing a game TotM (he's run 3.5 & 5e that way - I've run every edition I've run at all TotM at least some of the time, and run Gamma World, Hero, & Storyteller that way quite a lot, too), while we're talking about system attributes that facilitate that (which D&D has never really had that I noticed). There are game that do tailor their mechanics to TotM, Storyteller, FATE, 13A, even HoL (an RPG parody), have more support for TotM than D&D in that sense. FWIW.

Essentials was just a huge wrong-headed mistake made by someone who neither understood nor believed in the product he was in charge of. It made no sense either business-wise, nor game-wise. Some of the Essentials material wasn't bad, but it in no way improved 4e. There were plenty of ways that could have been done, but it wasn't.

But, in context, if the game had progressed from Essentials to 4e, it would have felt more organic*, and been less offensive to the sensibilities of h4ters. It makes sense, but ignores that the edition war started before the books even hit the shelves.










* the 'evolution' of D&D has been anything but smooth & steady. [sblock]For 25 years, through multiple editions and the two-pronged approach it barely changed. Then in just 12 years it whip-sawed all over, now it's back, not where it started, but about where TSR left off. If given to alien forensic game-archeologists from the future, working only from the mechanics, D&D's editions could be plausibly placed in an evolutionary time-line something like 0D&D>BECMI>1e>2e>5e>3e>PF>Essentials>13A>4e. If pressed on what other games might have been contemporaries of the editions it might go something like:

0D&D: Spawn of Fshawn
1e: Traveler
2e: Rolemaster
5e: RuneQuest/BRP
3e/PF: GURPS
Essentials: Champions!
4e: Over the Edge

Yeah, in 40 years, D&D has clawed it's way from '74 to '92 and slid back to '79.

And that's said with affection. I love the game, but, I have to admit how stodgy and backwards it's generally been.
[/sblock]

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I sense that there is a misunderstanding of what theater of the mind really means. Parmadur is saying (correct me if I'm wrong) that totm is simply smth like "taking the miniatures game from the table into the realm of the thoughts". The other side believes that totm is truly more abstract in that it does away with measurement and specific distances. It is more of a Final Fantasy style of battle where we have the baddies on the left and the PCs on the right in an abstract space. Is this correct?
I feel that we really should define what we are talking about here when we discuss TotM.

I don't think I agree with this. If it was just basically mentally running a game in your mind on a grid that you visualized, then what support would be needed? It would simply depend on the player's ability to keep this virtual grid in their heads and operate on it consistently. I'd expect a simplified grid type of system for this, and putting things in feet vs squares wouldn't be helpful to that.

So, we must conclude that TotM is indeed a more abstract mode of play. HOW abstract is of course open to question. I mean, lets imagine the next less concrete sort of play than a grid. That would be some kind of approximately tracked positions where an X, Y space is still held to exist, and things have a position on it, but there's some degree of 'fuziness' as to where exactly a given thing is within this space. So the GM can say "well, there's some orc archers over thatta way about 100' near some trees and they're firing at you." He might further decide these orc archers are all within 20' of each other. This last point might only be elucidated at the time a fireball is cast at them by the wizard.

Does 5e have 'support' for this level of abstraction? Well, the first question there is why is it using such a fine-grained position indicator as feet? Given that position is fuzzy wouldn't a more coarse measure of distance be simpler to use? Lets pass over this as the answer could be "yes, but we chose color over convenience." It would further seem to me that if this was the intent that more abstract formulations of AoEs would also be useful, something more close to 4e's bursts, blasts, and walls for example. Given that positions are a bit fuzzy anyway, why bother with exact statements of widths of arcs or paths instead of just reasonably quantified statements like "Everything in front of you" or "Everything in a straight line between you and X" or such? Again, you can argue "color", but this argument is getting a bit old isn't it? The best we can conclude is 5e supports 'color' but doesn't especially support TotM! In fact the easiest way to play it seems to be to actually put the figures on the table and measure things! I know from experience that we found this to be true.

Contrast this with 13th Age (a good contrast being a D&D-like with otherwise fairly similar rules). Here the rules for TotM are quite explicit, things are grouped into areas with relations between them depicting proximity and AoEs are described in these terms. Its more abstract than 5e's system, but quite easy to run without a map (indeed there's little advantage to such a map, though a few counters to help track lots of enemies can be helpful). You can still 'map' things pretty clearly though in terms of where they are narratively and work out the practicalities of moving and whatnot without a lot of pain. The point being you can make it MORE concrete if you want without boshing it up.

The point is, TotM isn't simply holding the grid in your head, it MUST include at least some form of abstraction. 5e (and 4e too) ALLOW such abstraction, but don't facilitate it in any real way.

 

[cavalier973]

"It uses feet"

One way to save mapping time is to describe the map in terms of squares rather than feet. Such a description is easier for the mapper to follow, since the mapper need not translate feet to squares before drawing the map. Scale is very important when giving directions in terms of squares.

Dungeons & Dragons Basic Rules, 1981 (Moldvay Edit).