D&D 4E The Best Thing from 4E

[JamesonCourage]

OK, just to be clear, we both agree, a DM in ANY game can simply railroad events in any direction he or she sees fit, either by mechanical means (fudging dice) or narrative means (rearranging the goal posts). I would argue that even in your own RPG, which I have to imagine has a VERY long list of specific DCs that there are situational modifiers and questions of whether or not an action is feasible, what its actual results will be, how the NPCs react, etc. So IMHO the idea that this is system dependent is hard to justify. It may be that different systems are more or less encouraging different things, but you cannot fight City Hall, the DM wins every time.

Agreed.

So, of course its easy to run a railroady 4e game. What my friend the railroady DM did was often reinterpret the way something would work. So you'd assume that a particular spell would do X, but today it might do Y, something a little bit different. He'd explain it in terms of the situation, but somehow it was always a case of however it worked out made his plot work. You won't get away with that in 4e. Every power is very cut-and-dried, skills do quite specific things, etc.

I think you lost me already. Unless the rules for the spell were vague in the system, I'd have a problem in both that system and in 4e. And as far as cut-and-dried powers and skills go, that hasn't been my observation or experience. I routinely hear about things like pemerton having players use Twist of Space (I think) to have an NPC teleported out of a mirror they're trapped in or Come And Get It to direct water (I think). And, from personal experience, skills seem anything but quite specific. They have a couple of specific uses (using Heal on a dying companion, or Perception to notice stuff), but outside of that, I am always winging things for how they want to use skills.

Of course there's a world of leeway for things outside of effect clauses and such to be fudged, but you can be pretty darn sure that in 4e when you use 'Rain of Blows' that a specific thing will happen. This is what people generally mean when they talk about the level of 4e player empowerment through control.

And that talk I completely agree with. Player empowerment through powers makes total sense. It's transparent, and it's in the hands of the players. That makes sense. It's the rest of the stuff I mentioned that I find cloudy (skill challenges, subjective skill DCs as determined by the GM, stunt feasibility and page 42 being determined by the GM, skill uses outside of what's in the book).

I get where you are coming from, but IMHO its an unachievable goal, and 4e, by setting down precise mechanics for things, did the achievable, which was to eliminate a lot of messy grey areas in PCs abilities. You may not be able to predict how many orcs will come through the door, but you can sure predict exactly what Hunger of Hadar will do to them!

Which is awesome! I really enjoy that about 4e. I just want it in stuff outside of combat, too. Because I don't find that stuff all that transparent for players.

And personally I find all the figuring out what DC something is at the table to be the easiest and most fun part of DMing. I don't have an agenda myself, so I just run that part of the game as it was designed to run. I found it the most effortless of games to run in that respect. In fact I went back and ran a CoC game and I was truly dismayed at how much more work it was than 4e, and CoC is a pretty simple system.

It's not that it's a hard task, but it's just one more thing that I have to stop and consider. It's another few moments while the players play twenty questions with me ("how hard would it be if I did this? Can I try this? If I did, what DC would it be? Could I do it faster if it was harder? If yes, how much faster?"). I've experienced that when the players go into planning mode, and I'm not a fan of it, honestly. But that's just me. Thank you for taking the time for such thorough replies, so far

 

[JamesonCourage]

Awesome. I've been waiting for you to post a lengthy analysis of your jaunt into 4e for some time now. I'm glad you chose to do so as I respect your opinion and very much respect your sincere and earnest effort in running the game. This thread has been one of the few interesting threads to post in on here for some time and the direction of this conversation is now penetrating some mysteries of our silly hobby. Enough with the touchy feely crap!

Thanks for the kind words! Not that I mean that in a touchy feely way...


I love you

So many of the posts that followed yours do a fantastic job of breaking down the issue in ways that I think illuminating. pemerton's post following yours captures my general position on things quite well. I think I'm going to take a different approach. Tomorrow or Saturday I'll break down a few play examples from the recent 4e game (playing IRL now) and current Dungeon World game I'm running on here to display how the overt machinery and GMing principles of those game create transparent play procedures that are anathema to illusionism. I think play example analysis is typically more helpful than anything else.

Sweet, please point me to those examples when you have them. I'm interested in seeing what you mean in practice.

OK, just to be clear, we both agree, a DM in ANY game can simply railroad events in any direction he or she sees fit, either by mechanical means (fudging dice) or narrative means (rearranging the goal posts). I would argue that even in your own RPG, which I have to imagine has a VERY long list of specific DCs that there are situational modifiers and questions of whether or not an action is feasible, what its actual results will be, how the NPCs react, etc. So IMHO the idea that this is system dependent is hard to justify. It may be that different systems are more or less encouraging different things, but you cannot fight City Hall, the DM wins every time.

Agreed.

So, of course its easy to run a railroady 4e game. What my friend the railroady DM did was often reinterpret the way something would work. So you'd assume that a particular spell would do X, but today it might do Y, something a little bit different. He'd explain it in terms of the situation, but somehow it was always a case of however it worked out made his plot work. You won't get away with that in 4e. Every power is very cut-and-dried, skills do quite specific things, etc.

I think you lost me already. Unless the rules for the spell were vague in the system, I'd have a problem in both that system and in 4e. And as far as cut-and-dried powers and skills go, that hasn't been my observation or experience. I routinely hear about things like pemerton having players use Twist of Space (I think) to have an NPC teleported out of a mirror they're trapped in or Come And Get It to direct water (I think). And, from personal experience, skills seem anything but quite specific. They have a couple of specific uses (using Heal on a dying companion, or Perception to notice stuff), but outside of that, I am always winging things for how they want to use skills.

Of course there's a world of leeway for things outside of effect clauses and such to be fudged, but you can be pretty darn sure that in 4e when you use 'Rain of Blows' that a specific thing will happen. This is what people generally mean when they talk about the level of 4e player empowerment through control.

And that talk I completely agree with. Player empowerment through powers makes total sense. It's transparent, and it's in the hands of the players. That makes sense. It's the rest of the stuff I mentioned that I find cloudy (skill challenges, subjective skill DCs as determined by the GM, stunt feasibility and page 42 being determined by the GM, skill uses outside of what's in the book).

I get where you are coming from, but IMHO its an unachievable goal, and 4e, by setting down precise mechanics for things, did the achievable, which was to eliminate a lot of messy grey areas in PCs abilities. You may not be able to predict how many orcs will come through the door, but you can sure predict exactly what Hunger of Hadar will do to them!

Which is awesome! I really enjoy that about 4e. I just want it in stuff outside of combat, too. Because I don't find that stuff all that transparent for players.

And personally I find all the figuring out what DC something is at the table to be the easiest and most fun part of DMing. I don't have an agenda myself, so I just run that part of the game as it was designed to run. I found it the most effortless of games to run in that respect. In fact I went back and ran a CoC game and I was truly dismayed at how much more work it was than 4e, and CoC is a pretty simple system.

It's not that it's a hard task, but it's just one more thing that I have to stop and consider. It's another few moments while the players play twenty questions with me ("how hard would it be if I did this? Can I try this? If I did, what DC would it be? Could I do it faster if it was harder? If yes, how much faster?"). I've experienced that when the players go into planning mode, and I'm not a fan of it, honestly. But that's just me. Thank you for taking the time for such thorough replies, so far First, very generally on system. If nothing else, illusionism GMing is enabled by GM latitude. Where does this latitude come from in RPGs? I would say it comes from a few sources working in conjunction:

1 - Opacity, incoherency, and/or too much open-endedness with respect to the resolution mechanics.

2 - The ruleset being silent, noncommittal, or nebulous on GMing best practices/principles/techniques.

3 - Instead of "first among equals" or "the GM is just another player", the ruleset overtly cites the "It's the GM's game" imperative as the most important and overriding facet of play (eg historical D&D rule 0 and WW's Golden Rule)...and then the ruleset backs it up with 1 and 2.

4 - Either the ruleset's designers or the greater culture surrounding the game takes a strident position of metagame aversion at the table.

5 - Setting or metaplot primacy rather than theme or player hook/premise primacy.

Any thoughts on that before I get go into play examples tomorrow or Saturday?[/quote]
Hmm... thoughts on 1 in regards to 4e. I feel like skill uses ("can I do this?"), stunts ("can I do this?"), skill challenges ("can I do this?"), and subjective skill DCs (possible inconsistency, definitely open-ended) all suffer from your 1. I feel this very strongly after running that 4e game.

So maybe you can show me you don't think that's the case (if you do in fact believe that)? Pointing towards addressing that would be very illuminating. You know, it'd clear things up, make them more transparent.

** and just so we have clarity, I tried to convey in my initial post that I'm personally aware of people who enjoy tables that feature illusionism GMing and that some players are willing participants in it, acutely aware of what is going on. While I'm not a fan and I have spent a lot of thought (and words) on the subject, I can empirically back up your claim.

I feel you, no worries I love you

 

[S'mon]

I don't think Rule 0 per se encourages Illusionism. I think GM advice "fudge to ensure desired outcome" encourages Illusionism. I can & do use Rule 0 - I houserule - without Illusionism.

 

[pemerton]

I have also been experimenting with "swarms" or mobs of lower level creatures at higher levels. I even think that reasonable battle scenarios should be possible with units of troops having damaging auras and Area and Close Burst attacks with their weapons; character "leaders" could even "ride" these swarms using the rules for Mounts with the odd tweak.

I haven't taken swarms this far. I have used them for hobgoblin phalanxes (at mid-Paragon) and for hordes of demons (at upper Paragon and low-ish Epic), and did use auras, close bursts, etc.

But building in leadership in the way you describe is an extra clever step that I hadn't thought of myself!

 

[pemerton]

Am I the only one who didn't find the solo - elite - standard - minion demotion of monsters over levels satisfying (as a player)? Hmm. To me it was a terrible thing because killing 6 minions of something you previously fought was patently not the same as killing 6 actual creatures. The was no sense of accomplishment.

I suspect you're not the only one . . .

But it doesn't seem to have bothered my players.

Here is my conjecture as to why:

* The real-world 'accomplishment' of killing monsters in 4e is, at least to a significant extent, a type of mathematical, or at least problem-solving accomplishment. It involves optimising power use, spotting and exploiting synergies, etc. The presence of minions, solos, elites etc in a combat is just more grist to the overall mill. If the GM frames the 4th level PCs into an 8th level combat, and the players come out of it with healing surges and daily powers remaining, then the players have done well, regardless of how many minions or solos or whatever were part of that encounter.

* The in-game 'accomplishment' of killing monsters exists in the fiction, of the PCs defeating their enemies. In the fiction a high level minion githzerai is one of the most skilled martial-artists around, and when url=http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?421018-Among-the-Githzerai-and-into-the-Room-with-No-Doors]the fighter PC in my game[/url] beat 20 of them (plus their sensei, who mechanically was an elite) that created a sense of accomplishment in the fiction, which significantly coloured the subsequent events in which the PCs had to choose which of the githzerai factions to side with.​

For the fictional accomplishment of killing the monsters to depend upon the precise mechanical details in which an encounter is framed seems to require a type of merging together of the game and meta-game that, at least at my table, I think doesn't happen.

 

[pemerton]

as far as cut-and-dried powers and skills go, that hasn't been my observation or experience. I routinely hear about things like pemerton having players use Twist of Space (I think) to have an NPC teleported out of a mirror they're trapped in or Come And Get It to direct water (I think). And, from personal experience, skills seem anything but quite specific.

I can't speak for [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] (obviously).

But speaking from my own experience, I think there is a huge difference between a 3E or Rolemaster-style system and 4e's system.

In the former, there are spells with detailed effects, and skills with detailed DC charts. Detailed effects can be both mechanical (a fireball does X damage) and fictional (a wall of stone spell creates a stone wall of such-and-such dimensions). DC charts typically link fiction (eg well-built lock) to mechanics (eg DC 30 lock-picking check).

Because the GM is generally in charge of framing the initial fiction of any particular challenge, the GM has a lot of control over determining what the DCs are that must be achieved (or the hit points of damage delivered, or whatever). Which means that the utility of detailed mechanical effects, and of skills defined in terms of DCs, is heavily determined by the GM.

Spells which have effects defined in primarily fictional terms tend to be more open-ended. Hence the threads on "creative spell-casting", and the gaming culture that grows up around the adjudication of those spells (of which adversarial GMing of wish spells is perhaps the most obvious example).

These systems almost never have non-magical abilities defined in primarily fictional rather than mechanical terms, for reasons that aren't fully clear to me but probably combine process-sim ideals (eg only magic can "just create" something without having to roll the dice that model the ingame process of manufacturing it) plus worries about how to ration non-magical abilities ("A fighter can swing his/her sword all day long").

In 4e, the GM still typically has the authority to frame the initial fiction in any particular challenge (some less orthodox suggestions in DMG2 notwithstanding). But this fiction doesn't then correlate to detailed DCs (or other mechanical requirements). If the challenge is a combat, there are default expectations about what the DCs, hit points, etc are of the enemies. A GM can push those expectations, but the players will notice ("We've done 200 hp of damage and it's not bloodied yet!"), and hence be able to respond.

The response might be at the meta-level (accusations of GM cheating) but if the social contract is healthy the response should be at the play-level: the players recognise that the challenge is a hard one, and bring their resources to bear - and then the system of powers, power rationing, action points etc gives them a lot of flexibility to do this (taking some of the best of classic D&D wizard play but making the novas more tactically interesting while extending the approach to all the players).

That's transparency in combat, and associated player empowerment.

If the situation is non-combat, there are also default expectations about DCs, which are somewhat decoupled from the details of the fiction. (Not completely, because of Easy/Moderate/Hard.) So the players are free to propose ideas and approaches, based on their conceptions of their skills plus their powers (which, per both the PHB, the DMG and the DMG2 are expected to be relevant to skill challenges), which first get negotiated at the stage of permissibility in the fiction, but then either get blocked with no resource cost to the player or change in the fictional position of the PC ("OK, the GM doesn't think I can jump to the moon even though I'm a demigod, so I guess Athletics isn't going to help at this stage") or else gets resolved against a DC which - if the maths of the game haven't broken down (and in my experience the maths mostly doesn't break down) - the player has the capacity to meet, between skill bonuses plus various buffs/augments that might be brought to bear.

For me that's transparency in non-combat resolution, and associated player empowerment. If the GM is going to block, for instance, the GM has to make it clear that s/he is blocking at the level of permissibility in the fiction. The GM has to be upfront that s/he is exercising authorial authority; there is no hiding behind (for instance) an "objective" DC 50 that "makes sense". Being upfront is a form of transparency; the negotiations that it can lead to create the space for player empowerment.

Also, because - once negotiations are resolved - the DC is taken from the appropriate chart, the player has a real chance (plus the ability to use buffs etc to help make it happen). There is nothing analogous to trying to pick the lock without knowing the DC, perhaps expending resources on an attempt that the GM knows is futile all along, etc. This is mechanical transparency reducing the scope for a type of player disempowerment that I associate with 90s-style RPGing.

Recently I've been GMing a bit of Burning Wheel. In some of its elements it resembles 3E/RM eg fairly trad skill and spell lists, detailed DC charts with "objective" DCs, etc. But it uses a variety of other techniques to stop illusionism dead in its tracks: a fairly narrow range of DCs, combined with a range of devices whereby players can choose to increase their dice pools (but often have reasons not to want to do so to the maximum extent, because of how the advancement system works); as an upshot of the dice-pool building rules, which include a very permissive rule for "synergy"-style augments, a strong emphasis on negotiation around the fiction and what is possible within it, rather than just "common sense" as applied by the GM; no secret DCs; and strong constraints around narration of successes and narration of failures.

Rolemaster could probably be played in more of a BW style (and HARP, a lite-ish version of RM, tends just a little bit more in that direction), but work would be needed (eg RM's existing rules for similar skills don't allow augmenting a check using one skill with another related skill) and frankly you're just better off playing BW because the work's already been done and it has a lot of the 'grit' of RM (complex and rich PC builds, long skill lists, non-hp-based injuries, etc) built in.

I don't think 3E could be easily played BW style, at least not without a lot of work (maybe building on E6), and so I don't see that it can be used to produce an experience that rivals 4e for transparency and empowerment while sticking to the objective DCs, detailed spells, etc approach.

 

[pemerton]

I'm trying to follow along, but I think I'm confused on a major point regarding illusionism. Is the illusion supposed to be that the players are actually contributing in any way, while the DM is just stringing them along in order to tell a story - where freedom of choice is the illusion? Or is the illusion supposed to be the honest attempt of the DM to create a living and breathing world, where the characters exist as people (rather than narrative constructs), and interact without influence from outside (metagame) factors?

The crux of illusionism is the first that you mention: the GM manipulating the game (either the fiction, or more crudely the mechanics eg fudging dice) in order to generate the fictional outcome that s/he wants.

The illusion is that the players' choices, mechanical decisions or die rolls, etc actually make a difference to the shared fiction.

But illusionism is non-trivially related to the second thing that you mention: if the shared fiction is not going to be changed by the players' metagame desires - eg if they not allowed to make decisions and generate outcomes because they would be fun, or exciting, or whatever - then there are likely to be two options. The first is that the game is rather boring, because the players play their PCs method-actor style, the GM runs the world sim-engine style, and not a lot happens. Some Runequest play can fall into this, and I suspect some Harn play too though my experience there is more limited - [MENTION=27160]Balesir[/MENTION] might know. In non-fantasy RPGing, some Classic Traveller play has this problem also.

The second is that the GM takes steps to make sure that play is interesting, eg by manipulating random encounter rolls to make sure exciting options come up, or by manipulating NPC reaction rolls to make sure that interesting confrontations occur, or by manipulating the fiction to introduce elements that are engaging rather than boring. But these are all time-honoured illusionist techniques! What this second path can tend to lead to is that the GM, in effect, becomes the game, manipulating mechanics and fiction to entertain the players.

Done overtly in a sensible context - and I find that Cthulhu is the best for this, because the lack of player protagonism reinforces the experience of being a victim of impersonal forces and the madness of the Great Old Ones - it can be a lot of fun. (But at that point is no longer illusionistic because overt - "participationism" is one word that is used to describe this sort of play.)

Done covertly in a context where player protagonism is part of the game's promise - which includes most fantasy RPGing - and for me, at least, it is terrible.

You say that transparent game mechanics are anathema to illusionism, but the way 4E deals with transparent game mechanics, the thing they are anathema to is immersion. When I know that this giant's stats depend on its role in the story, rather than its innate characteristics, it makes me extremely aware that I am playing a game.

Immersion arising in the way that you describe, and illusionism, are closely related.

If a player wants to pretend that the fiction is real, and wants not to have any input into what happens in the fiction, then illusionist techniques are just what the doctor ordered. (Again, technically, this would be participationism because the player knows that s/he is not a co-author, and is choosing this different status.)

But if your immersion depends upon the giant's stats not being related to its role in the story, then you need the GM not to be making choices about placing giants (rather than, say, orcs) out of a sense of dramatic need. Which goes back to the pure sim, with no metagame, that I described above. And the question then becomes, how to avoid boring games? If no one - GM or player - ever makes a metagame-motivated decision, what differentiates RPGing from a purely mechanical simulation? How does it differ from rolling up some PCs, rolling up a world, feeding all that data into a computer and pressing play?

Those questions aren't rhetorical. As I said upthread, the challenge of answering them is what has led many RPG systems which started out with pure sim aspirations to drift, over time, over editions, and in their play cultures, into illusionist play: there is a pretense of pure sim, but in fact the GM is manipulating fiction and/or mechanics to reflect considerations of dramatic need. (Or similar aesthetic concerns.)

The way that 4e (or BW, or other strongly anti-illusionist RPGs) generates immersion is quite different. They typically use mechanical devices to align the players' metagame concerns and motivations with their PCs' concerns and motivations so as to produce immersion on the back of emotional investment by the player that correlates to the PC's emotional investment within the fiction.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Am I the only one who didn't find the solo - elite - standard - minion demotion of monsters over levels satisfying (as a player)? Hmm. To me it was a terrible thing because killing 6 minions of something you previously fought was patently not the same as killing 6 actual creatures. The was no sense of accomplishment.

The only bits of 4e that I particularly like are the monster stay blocks. Those were well designed.

Yeah, you like what you like, as Scrivener said. I don't know the particulars of the game you were in. They worked out really well in our game because the PCs were like super heroes. You know how Batman comes crashing into The Penguin's lair and there are all those guys with tommyguns that just don't matter? Yeah, those are minions. When the 14th level PCs came crashing into the bad guy's lair all the orcs were minions, except the biggest baddest orc, and he was a standard monster (he actually faced down the fighter for one round before being summarily dispatched).

You probably play a quite different feeling game than this. 4e doesn't do the old gritty kind of game of OD&D style that well. Its just not meant to. Its meant to be story and action heavy in a sort of 'Indiana Jones' kind of way. You don't look too carefully at the Nazi's, but every once in a while one is a real bad-ass when the plot demands it. The rest, they're just mooks that go down as soon as someone shoots in their direction. If they hit someone, its a flesh wound.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

It is certainly interesting to look at multiple sides of these things.

Right, the powers (generally "in-combat") are generally very player-empowering. This is the part I wish was the case with out of combat stuff.

I'm unsure how to take this. Isn't that the point of those details? As a player, it's your responsibility to account for them. All the details that you need to account for are all in the open. If you don't account for them, some things will be blocked.

An easy example: say you make players write down what gear they have. I think this is something that many tables do (we'll say 50%). The party comes up against a cliff they must climb down. The get the idea to get a rope and tie it to something at the top to help anchor people who scale down. The GM asks if anyone has a rope. The party checks, and nobody does. The party therefore can't use their rope plan.

This is a roadblock of that plan. And it's because of a detail. But now you get to see what they do. Do they all climb down individually? Does that mean one of them falls and gets hurt? Does that mean a healing spell is used? Does that mean they have one less spell when they need it later?

The only way to know just how important the impact of a detail is is to see what happens when the players account for it (or don't). Forgetting that rope could lead to a PC death, for all we know. And that's just one example. There are many that I'm sure I make my players keep track of that not even 50% of tables do (outfits, bedding or tents [in case it gets cold], arrows, daggers, food, etc.). All these things can lead to very interesting situations. Players that run out of food might actually decide to find pesky goblin tribes in the area to barter with or loot so they don't starve. Or, hell, they might have to eat goblin. Or slow down while they hunt and gather food, which might have other effects (what with weather, the setting continuing to evolve, etc.).

And these are just basic exploration details. While 4e has some rules on these sorts of things, I'd definitely consider the non-combat rules ill-defined, especially by comparison to it's fairly concrete combat rules (outside of the huge realm of stunting). And that's a shame, because I'd really like my players to be more empowered when making decisions instead of everything being filtered through me.

Well, there is obviously a few other perspectives. For me all those details are just boring. I'm not playing or GMing D&D to deal with accounting for each arrow and ration of hard tack. You can empower people just as much by, for instance, letting them make checks to determine what they did or didn't realize they would need. Crossing the desert? Nature check to see if you brought enough water. Maybe a Streetwise check to see if you picked up a good map in the last town, etc. I don't think everything needs to be that abstracted, the plot may well demand that the PCs negotiate for the treasure map with the local thieves, etc. but any details which haven't been filled in could simply be left as part of the undifferentiated background of the game which is subject to the dice when it might have an impact in play. This of course leads to a 'test the character' type of play, at the very least. I find it well-suited to a fast action-adventure type of game where non-action scenes are framing and pacing mechanisms, so you don't necessarily HAVE to go through hours of table time with "OK, we go to the market, and lets make a list of every item we could use in the desert, and how much it weighs and costs so we can make sure we get the most useful stuff we can carry within our gp budget." That's not a bad kind of game at all, but in my preferred kind of game those scenes are just one-liners "we stock up on supplies!" and then I describe the marketplace and maybe there's some intrigue or something, but the actual mundane details of it don't intrude, so the game maintains a quick focused pace.

Anyway, I think this is no less empowering to the players. They know how it works and they're well aware of how likely their character is to remember to bring along the rasher of bacon. If they're especially concerned about some particular thing, they can be specific about it, which also serves to nicely enable the players to easily help direct the story focus and plot.

I agree that the skill challenge is a good system. Many, many people have problems with it, but I feel I can get it to shine in actual play in both 4e and in my RPG. And yet, I feel that it might be even stronger in my RPG, where the skill DCs and uses are spelled out to players. They know the DCs, they know their bonuses, and they can make (and even plan for) very informed decisions about what they want to do.

It's very transparent, just like 4e combat. And I wish 4e had done that more with it's non-combat stuff.

The problem is how could you do that? You would literally have to define THOUSANDS of powers and somehow manage who has which ones. Its just not something that any game can practically accomplish.

This is an interesting point to make, because it is definitely harder to make it abstract once it's detailed than go the other way around (without writing up a couple sets of rules). I can see how this would indeed be a big point in its favor for certain groups that prefer that approach. It just makes the rules seem very... clouded. And very "rulings, not rules." And I'm not much of a fan for either, honestly.

True, it can lead to this. I think the flip side is that the abstract rules make it so that player actions might now be filtered through the GM, and that's not something I much like (because I'm lazy!). But I definitely understand why people would like the more abstract approach. I guess I just don't see it as transparent still. Thank you for the reply

I think everything is already filtered through the DM. It seems to me that the DM is always the universal interface to the whole world for the players at all times and places. Nothing ever escapes from DM purview, and by extension nothing isn't subject to DM manipulation at some level. I'm entirely certain that if I gave your RPG to my old AD&D DM that he would still totally railroad every session of every game. It wouldn't even be a speedbump. Now, for YOU, knowing what you want you are perfectly well-served by your own system. The designers of a game that is going to be played by EVERYONE OTOH don't have that luxury. Knowing that DMs can simply do as they wish in every game all they can really do is present a set of rules that gives everyone tools to do things at some level in some way. I don't think 'player empowerment' in the sense that you use the term is really within their realm to consider. Its totally up to the DM to grant or deny.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Agreed.

I think you lost me already. Unless the rules for the spell were vague in the system, I'd have a problem in both that system and in 4e. And as far as cut-and-dried powers and skills go, that hasn't been my observation or experience. I routinely hear about things like pemerton having players use Twist of Space (I think) to have an NPC teleported out of a mirror they're trapped in or Come And Get It to direct water (I think). And, from personal experience, skills seem anything but quite specific. They have a couple of specific uses (using Heal on a dying companion, or Perception to notice stuff), but outside of that, I am always winging things for how they want to use skills.

Hmmmm, I started playing way back in OD&D days, and back then spells were just a couple sentences and a name. Even after 1e was introduced and they got a bit more formalized most spells left a vast array of open questions, especially the higher level ones. Even a lot of low level spells didn't address basic stuff though. OTOH 4e powers are VERY nailed down. Each one is very specific. However you're correct that the DM COULD allow them to be extrapolated on. 4e's rules are pretty much silent on this though. The DM could also make situational rulings like "fireball doesn't work under water", although that one would probably raise a few eyebrows.

And that talk I completely agree with. Player empowerment through powers makes total sense. It's transparent, and it's in the hands of the players. That makes sense. It's the rest of the stuff I mentioned that I find cloudy (skill challenges, subjective skill DCs as determined by the GM, stunt feasibility and page 42 being determined by the GM, skill uses outside of what's in the book).

I think where I get lost is the notion that it is POSSIBLE to codify 'non-combat' like that. Non-combat to me is a gajillion things. My mind can't even bend around the possibility of codifying them like combat is. I can imagine that if a game is very focused on certain specific things, like say a game that focuses very heavily on climbing and such, that you might make up very elaborate subsystems for that one thing. There will STILL at some level have to be a highly generalized task resolution system for all the rest of the things that come up. I just cannot imagine anyone designing or running a game where even half of the stuff that comes up in every session in our games would already be accounted for in some very specific way.

I think we have different table cultures. My players, in the last several groups I've run, have all been very laid back. I don't make a lot of eyebrow raising rulings and they do the more wacky and outrageous things in a consultative way. We've all DMed a lot, so we all know how to make things work smoothly.