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

[Igwilly]

I have to admire the fortitude you display in taking on such a fraught subject....

I’m a little insane, so that may explain it.

I don't dispute that if you use say 2e (which was getting very storytellerish in some ways), ignoring C&T, as the baseline, 4e is radically more 'tactical' (as well as better balanced, clearer, and more player-oriented, etc). But, IMHO, the tactical aspect was very much there in 1e (and I suspect 0D&D, wargame that it professed to be), area and positioning mattered /a lot/ in 1e, when spell AEs were tightly defined and dangerous to allies, for instance. Furthermore, that difference was one of evolutionary change. 2e pulled away from wargaming and dungeoncrawling roots and hedged a bit towards storytelling and setting-first. In spite of that 2e C&T brought in and re-emphasized tactics. 3e went 'back to the dungeon' and gave us more & better tactical aspects in combat, building on C&T. 4e further built on that.

1e and 3e? Not as much as 4e by a large margin. Well, 3e had stuff happening which would really need a grid, but this isn’t solely about grids. It does involve area effects and positioning, but this is not the only thing. It is also about how individual encounters are built, and how they fill the adventure. It’s also about short-term choices: usually, past editions had much more strategy than tactics. 4e tries to balance that. Combat duration (at least the intended one) is also a factor.
Even about positioning, before Attacks of Opportunity, you mostly could walk through the entire area without someone hitting you with a sword because of it. And the movement-dealing powers? Extra attacks? Tanking being a real thing, now? I could go on all day.
Combat & Tactics, however, seems to be a nice exception.

Also, 4e wasn't more focused on combat (tactical or otherwise) than past editions, in fact, it was the first edition to try to handle non-combat in a more whole-party-involvement, complex/interesting way.

Never said it otherwise.

Finally, strategy could come into 4e (…)

Also never said it otherwise.

That is an interesting insight, though.

Thank you. It took me some time to realize that.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Sorry. Posting while under the influence of Benadryl. The theorist comment was not personal. I meant to phrase in a general "osr theorists" way.

All good points and of course Greyhawk and beyond, stats became more meaningful. As a player of fighter types, the XP bonus and especially missle fire came in handy when we used Chainmail's man to man rules. +1 on 2d6 vs. 1d20. Extra attacks against the hordes as well. I often was 1 to 2 levels above the MUs in the party.

Hmmmm, actually you have a point there. If you were using the Chainmail-based combat system then a +1 is a bigger deal. Missile fire in general was a bigger deal in Chainmail than in later D&D just because it created casualties, which ALMOST always provoked morale checks, and really breaking enemy units was 90% of the fight with that system. So that may be a big reason why Men & Magic doesn't include anything but that one bonus. It becomes a lot less significant when using a d20, and Greyhawk obviously instated much larger bonuses as well as retiring the old 2d6 system.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I have to admire the fortitude you display in taking on such a fraught subject....

Heh, I gave him XP just for sheer chutzpah, but I think his point was pretty well argued. I'm not really up on 'Tactical RPGs' at all, but it is plausible, certainly as one of the many perceptions of 4e that fed into how it sat with players.

I don't dispute that if you use say 2e (which was getting very storytellerish in some ways), ignoring C&T, as the baseline, 4e is radically more 'tactical' (as well as better balanced, clearer, and more player-oriented, etc). But, IMHO, the tactical aspect was very much there in 1e (and I suspect 0D&D, wargame that it professed to be), area and positioning mattered /a lot/ in 1e, when spell AEs were tightly defined and dangerous to allies, for instance. Furthermore, that difference was one of evolutionary change. 2e pulled away from wargaming and dungeoncrawling roots and hedged a bit towards storytelling and setting-first. In spite of that 2e C&T brought in and re-emphasized tactics. 3e went 'back to the dungeon' and gave us more & better tactical aspects in combat, building on C&T. 4e further built on that.

This is one of those areas... 1e's combat rules are actually SO VAGUE that you can't say if they're tactical or not, if they are map-n-minis or ToTM, etc. You really cannot say ANYTHING about 1e's combat system, its just not coherent at all. It lacks any actual description of its own basic process, except one or two brief examples that ignore half the rules that were just laid out!

That being said, the 1e WE played, was very tactical. It involved minis, gridded maps, strictly measuring things, and many extra conventions which evolved to make it a workable tactical wargame in essence (though one can argue if it was a GOOD one or not). We, in fact, followed all the rules in the DMG and PHB pretty religiously, except weapons vs armor, but you could do that and play a very abstract game too.

2e actually has CLEARER rules, but it still never quite spells out every detail in terms of "this is how you lay out a combat on the table and play it" per-se. Its pretty clear, but you can definitely still just play it ToTM and its not like you can point to a rule that is broken by doing that (not to even get into 'rules are just guidelines' statements that AD&D made right next to its 'this is the one way to play' statements, lol). Honestly we played 2e just as '1e with some clarifications', but others maybe played differently!

I agree, 3e, 3.5e, 4e all introduced more tactical process and rules certainty to combat.

Also, 4e wasn't more focused on combat (tactical or otherwise) than past editions, in fact, it was the first edition to try to handle non-combat in a more whole-party-involvement, complex/interesting way.

I dunno, 4e is BOTH less and more focused on combat. It sharply segments the two, and then tackles each of them with a slightly different and somewhat overlapping set of mechanics. A LOT of people apparently just never even bothered with anything but combat.

Finally, strategy could come into 4e, it just didn't consist of winning chargen or presciently choosing the to memorize the right 'I win button' that morning.

Yeah, I think there WAS well-developed tactics in 1e (our 1e anyway) but strategically it was a lot too much like "just bring the right stuff to the fight and you can't lose". At least it got that way by 9th level. I think 4e could have been a little kinder to that sort of strategy, it really isn't rewarded much at all, but there certainly is a brand of strategy in 4e.

 

[Tony Vargas]

This is one of those areas... 1e's combat rules are actually SO VAGUE that you can't say if they're tactical or not, if they are map-n-minis or ToTM, etc. You really cannot say ANYTHING about 1e's combat system, its just not coherent at all. It lacks any actual description of its own basic process, except one or two brief examples that ignore half the rules that were just laid out!

I know most folks ignored great swaths of it. I have to wonder if the unfocused-seeming presentation wasn't typical of 70s wargames? From the little I've seen outside of Chainmail, it seems like it could have been the case.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I know most folks ignored great swaths of it. I have to wonder if the unfocused-seeming presentation wasn't typical of 70s wargames? From the little I've seen outside of Chainmail, it seems like it could have been the case.

Well, I think there were a lot of 'club games' where the core of the rules process was just understood and all that was written down was a bunch of tables, modifiers, specific processes for particular cases, etc. Chainmail pretty well spells out the whole game, though it isn't the best written thing. OD&D OTOH is a hot mess, it just provides a couple tables that are barely contextualized and basically says "use the chainmail rules for heroes, plug in these numbers and if X happens do Y" but its missing a LOT of details about how to integrate that with the whole rest of the D&D game process.

In STARK contrast, by the mid-70's counter and board wargames, particularly the offerings of Avalon Hill, but also SPI and a couple other vendors, were highly scientific designs with rules laid out from general to specific in detailed numbered paragraphs with consistent internal references and standardized wording such that they were as airtight as the rules of a game of chess. Pick up a copy of 'Rise and Fall of the Third Reich' and its got a rulebook that's 100 pages of dense text that is 95% mechanics. Sure, there were 3 editions and some errata published, but you know EXACTLY what to do when it comes to the Axis SR phase of 1941 in the 39-46 Campaign Scenario, there isn't any doubt about what procedures to follow, etc.

Obviously RPGs are different from board games, and even TSR managed to publish some fairly concise board game rules here and there, but 1e is clearly not concise, at all.

 

[Parmandur]

I’m a little insane, so that may explain it.



1e and 3e? Not as much as 4e by a large margin. Well, 3e had stuff happening which would really need a grid, but this isn’t solely about grids. It does involve area effects and positioning, but this is not the only thing. It is also about how individual encounters are built, and how they fill the adventure. It’s also about short-term choices: usually, past editions had much more strategy than tactics. 4e tries to balance that. Combat duration (at least the intended one) is also a factor.
Even about positioning, before Attacks of Opportunity, you mostly could walk through the entire area without someone hitting you with a sword because of it. And the movement-dealing powers? Extra attacks? Tanking being a real thing, now? I could go on all day.
Combat & Tactics, however, seems to be a nice exception.



Never said it otherwise.



Also never said it otherwise.



Thank you. It took me some time to realize that.

Think you are on to something here: my 3.x crowd, which rejected 4E, used miniatures to track combat once, maybe twice, in years of playing. Tactics were certainly an option in 3.x and earlier, but they could be done pretty smoothly in quick & dirty theatre of the mind fashion. 4E actualized "miniatures required" which was a bit of a style limitation...

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[AbdulAlhazred]

Think you are on to something here: my 3.x crowd, which rejected 4E, used miniatures to track combat once, maybe twice, in years of playing. Tactics were certainly an option in 3.x and earlier, but they could be done pretty smoothly in quick & dirty theatre of the mind fashion. 4E actualized "miniatures required" which was a bit of a style limitation...

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I think that was less hard-n-fast than it appeared though. I mean, as long as you were fine with the potential woolyness of how things work in ToTM you could just play 4e that way. The GM describes stuff, and the players point out when they think they can do something and do it, the GM decides who exactly is in the 'blast 3' and whatever. Its not qualitatively different than in earlier editions, though I think its certainly true that you probably want to emphasize different sorts of builds to make things really work smoothly.

I mean, we used to run some 4e encounters and we'd get lazy and not really bother to set everything up precisely. It was usually quite obvious what was going on, and if it got questionable then we'd just go ahead and sort it out on the grid, but usually nobody was that exercised by the question of if this or that orc got fireballed or not. I mean which square the orcs moved to and which square was the fireball blast center was probably slightly arbitrary anyway.

 

[Parmandur]

I think that was less hard-n-fast than it appeared though. I mean, as long as you were fine with the potential woolyness of how things work in ToTM you could just play 4e that way. The GM describes stuff, and the players point out when they think they can do something and do it, the GM decides who exactly is in the 'blast 3' and whatever. Its not qualitatively different than in earlier editions, though I think its certainly true that you probably want to emphasize different sorts of builds to make things really work smoothly.

I mean, we used to run some 4e encounters and we'd get lazy and not really bother to set everything up precisely. It was usually quite obvious what was going on, and if it got questionable then we'd just go ahead and sort it out on the grid, but usually nobody was that exercised by the question of if this or that orc got fireballed or not. I mean which square the orcs moved to and which square was the fireball blast center was probably slightly arbitrary anyway.

Strictly speaking, you are probably correct; in effect, however, the highly tactical game was not treated as avoidable...short of avoiding the game, which was the path chosen. Presentation is important...

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[AbdulAlhazred]

Strictly speaking, you are probably correct; in effect, however, the highly tactical game was not treated as avoidable...short of avoiding the game, which was the path chosen. Presentation is important...

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Yeah, I think the POINT of playing 4e is partly to be able to have these battles with lots of fun tactics. So its legitimate to question WHY you wouldn't play a less rules-heavy story game instead if all you really cared about mostly was other types of encounters and whatnot with combat being only now and then.

Still, you can play LESS combat-centered 4e. I'd say my games have had less combat over time, but more interesting combat. There's still plenty of fights though, which may not be true of some people's games.

 

[Parmandur]

Yeah, I think the POINT of playing 4e is partly to be able to have these battles with lots of fun tactics. So its legitimate to question WHY you wouldn't play a less rules-heavy story game instead if all you really cared about mostly was other types of encounters and whatnot with combat being only now and then.

Still, you can play LESS combat-centered 4e. I'd say my games have had less combat over time, but more interesting combat. There's still plenty of fights though, which may not be true of some people's games.

Well, because the game we had been playing hit the right spot for what we were looking for, though now with 5E it is a better fit than before: progress marches on.

It is interesting that the D&D Adventures board game line is still being maintained with the 4E-style rules, as that is kind if a "D&D Tactics" branch off...

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