The double standard for magical and mundane abilities

[pemerton]

And yet it won't happen, ever, unless the PC takes a rest of the appropriate length. And it only ever happens to fighters

This just isn't true. Characters will be charged by their enemies all the time! And not just fighters.

Of course only fighters of a certain measure of skill are able to cut them down as they charge. But that's more-or-less tautological.

If you're a player who doesn't accept director-stance mechanics, such as myself or E, then it's easier to just skip that edition entirely

Who's ever asserted otherwise? Emerikol is the one, though, who is calling me an upstart and telling me that I don't love D&D as much as he does. And you are the one who, in the other thread, is saying that hit points, and mechanics more generally, must be correlated with ingame causal processes.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

And you are the one who, in the other thread, is saying that hit points, and mechanics more generally, must be correlated with ingame causal processes.

Hit Points and other game mechanics must correlate with in-game causal processes if you are to maintain internal causality, because the game mechanics inform (at least some of) the things that happen in-game. By definition of "correlation".

Not everyone is required to care about maintaining internal causality. Some people prioritize making a fun game, or telling a cool story.

 

[pemerton]

Hit Points and other game mechanics must correlate with in-game causal processes if you are to maintain internal causality

Only for a particular, somewhat idiosyncratic notion of "internal causality", which probably already includes the notion of "mechanics correlating with in-game causal processes".

In your post above, you noted that the gameworld is not less believable because the NPCs charge the fighter. In other words, using CaGI it doesn't undermine the consistency of internal causality - there is nothing that we knew about the gameworld that makes it causally improbable, or impossible, that the NPCs would charge the fighter.

To conclude that CaGI it violates internal causality, you need to add some additional interpretive idea, such as that a decision by the player counts as a decision by the character. But that is just a particular application of the general correlation thesis. Of course if you affirm it the more general thesis will follow; but that tautology doesn't show that correlation is the only way to maintain internal causality.

The other way you do it is, as you identified in relation to CaGI, to make sure that no action declarations generate outcomes that causally contradict the already-established state of the fiction. Because, in RPGing, so little of the fiction is ever actually specified in detail at one time, it turns out that this task (of avoiding causal contradictions) isn't that hard.

 

[Emerikol]

You asked about a 'happy solution,' and, very honestly, I replied that the happy solution would have been to adopt a live-and-let-live attitude back in 2008.

So you get to keep the D&D name and the rest of us can go play the off brand. Even though every edition prior to yours was designed with our own preferences more in mind. If D&D wants to buy out Pathfinder or start openly supporting 3.5e again then we could agree on this point.

Fans of 3.5 have been playing well-supported 3.5 all this time - they could have done so without the edition war.

The edition war was about a bunch of brand new ways of doing mechanics that people didn't like. Saying you don't like them and then getting viciously attacked was the edition war. Sure a few people were perhaps too vociferous in their statements of dislike but people saying the dislike the current edition for X reasons did not start a war.

Of course they're major changes. 3e made major changes, too. For the most part, both were very much for the better - and long overdue, since D&D had been stagnating for 20 years.

While I agree that 3e had some philosophical changes, 4e had a completely new philosophy. There is a difference. And to be honest, I dislike most of the philosophical changes in 3e except for the idea that the game should be a system and not a list of rules exceptions.

That you keep thinking I'm a 'narrativist' because you identify as a 'simulationist' and figure it's the opposite shows just how little you understand the issues, even after /years/ of this back and forth.

It doesn't matter. Tony's way or Emerikol's way. Call it whatever you want. It's obvious that 4e introduced a bunch of new things that cause half the playerbase to jump ship. Classify those things however you like.

 

[ExploderWizard]

Correct. This is exactly how you run a game based on fiction and genre first, with the mechanics subordinate to that and used to allow players to choose genre-appropriate narratives that fit within whatever parameters the mechanics might determine.

Except for those playing a game instead of telling a story. In that case the mechanics are subordinate to the setting and the situation. The narrative/fiction is a byproduct of actual play not the purpose of it.

 

[TwoSix]

Sure. For many of us D&D becaomse a better game with 4e. What's your point?

He has the silent majority of 4e-haters behind him, of course.

 

[Emerikol]

Let's clarify.

Many of the ideas and methodologies put forth by 4e were upstart ideas in the world of D&D. 4e specifically closed off avenues of play available in every single other edition of D&D. That was my point and it was an explanation of why people had an emotional reaction to that edition.

It was an upstart design philosophy. I am aware and have been that some people even from the earliest days of D&D loved 4e. I've wondered in some cases if they were self hating masochists all those years prior to 4e from the way they talk about those earlier editions.

The irritation for me is that there seems to be a deliberate attempt to hijack a popular brand primarily to assure a less popular way of playing is available to a subset of people even if that means knocking D&D off it's #1 sales position.

My point about indie games and others is that they've been targeting other playstyles for some time. They realize that D&D owns the middle of the road player so they target the fringe interests on purpose. In some cases those fringes are big but still fringe relative to D&D.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Let's clarify.

Many of the ideas and methodologies put forth by 4e were upstart ideas in the world of D&D. 4e specifically closed off avenues of play available in every single other edition of D&D. That was my point and it was an explanation of why people had an emotional reaction to that edition.

You say 'upstart.' I say 'innovative.' Obviously, I think my loaded term is closer to the truth than your loaded term.

Maybe 'new?'

Then again, maybe all three terms miss the mark. It's not like anything 4e did was that innovative for the industry, just new to D&D.

It was an upstart design philosophy. I am aware and have been that some people even from the earliest days of D&D loved 4e. I've wondered in some cases if they were self hating masochists all those years prior to 4e from the way they talk about those earlier editions.

It's true that D&D stagnated for a long time before 2000 when 3.0 finally shook things up and adopted a coherent 'core system' (d20), like Chaosium's Basic Roleplaying, GURPS, Hero, d6, Interlock and so forth had in 80s. But, if you loved the game, knew it really well, and were always tinkering with it, that stagnation was far from intolerable.

The irritation for me is that there seems to be a deliberate attempt to hijack a popular brand primarily to assure a less popular way of playing is available to a subset of people even if that means knocking D&D off it's #1 sales position.

Interesting conspiracy theory. Who were these upstart hijackers? 4e was created by WotC (not an 'upstart' unless 3.0 was created by upstarts, as well) developed by Rob Heinsoo (who had been playing D&D since 1974 - one of that cohort of gamers you asserted, upthread, 'own' D&D), James Wyatt (also a gamer since the 70s, starting with D&D and getting into writing for D&D starting in '94), and Andy Collins (also starting his gaming career with 0D&D at an early age, and working for WotC since '96). Nobody hijacked D&D. They tried to improve on it, using the feedback provided by the community at the time (the 3.5 era). It's hardly surprising they focused on balancing the game, reining in casters and finally giving the fighter some nice things - you weren't on the old Gleemax boards paging through "Fighter SUX!" threads, so maybe you don't realize what that feedback must have been like.

Then, as now, they were trying to deliver a game that would, hopefully, be successful. The bar for success, thanks to certain WotC/Hasbro politics might have been a /lot/ higher, but they were aiming to make the game better and more successful in both cases.

Still, I can see how that change (even if technically for the better in many ways) was not what a lot of folks wanted. The 'happy solution' to that divergence still could have been to live-and-let live, with 3.5 fans continuing to enjoy ongoing support for their favorite game, and 4e fans able to enjoy the somewhat more modernized version of the same game unmolested.

So you get to keep the D&D name and the rest of us can go play the off brand. Even though every edition prior to yours was designed with our own preferences more in mind. If D&D wants to buy out Pathfinder or start openly supporting 3.5e again then we could agree on this point.

No, WotC keeps the D&D name, because they own it.

D&D 3.5 remains D&D 3.5 - Pathfinder is just among the 3pp product lines offering ongoing support for it. AD&D is still D&D too. Playing Pathfinder is no less playing D&D than playing AD&D with lots of house rules. Even 4e is still D&D, in spite of the edition war and being superseded by 5e - it's just D&D that can't be legally cloned & supported going forward the Paizo is doing for 3.5 with Pathfinder.

The edition war was about a bunch of brand new ways of doing mechanics that people didn't like. Saying you don't like them and then getting viciously attacked was the edition war. Sure a few people were perhaps too vociferous in their statements of dislike but people saying the dislike the current edition for X reasons did not start a war.

Sure for the sake of hypothetical amity, let's pretend the war really was 'started' by the defenders. My answer to your 'happy solution' question still stands: adopt a live-and-let-live attitude in 2008. So, imagine that the defenders in the edition war weren't impolite in pointing out the hyperbole and inaccuracy in the attacks on 4e, and the attackers, therefor, stated their case and let it lie rather than escalating, and instead went back to enjoying 3.5 and all it's 3pp products.

Wouldn't that have been a solution? Both sides have what they want: a game that matches their preferences. Neither side claims imagined 'ownership' of D&D - it's legally WotC IP, afterall. How would that not have been a positive outcome?

While I agree that 3e had some philosophical changes, 4e had a completely new philosophy.

If you want to talk philosophy, there were not a lot of philosophical changes from 3e to 4e. Both were fairly player-focused and rule-focused - one reason you had the unlikely alliance of 3.5 fanatics and grognards who hated 3.5 on the same side of the edition war. The main tweak was abandoning the idea of 'rewarding system mastery' in favor of more consistent balance.

And to be honest, I dislike most of the philosophical changes in 3e except for the idea that the game should be a system and not a list of rules exceptions.

Not one I really noticed in 3e, actually. It consolidated a bunch of rules into the d20 core mechanic, which was a great idea, making the system more approachable, clear & consistent - a trend 4e continued and which even 5e hasn't entirely abandoned (just more sorta started over as if it were 2000 again).

It doesn't matter. Tony's way or Emerikol's way.

Seriously, I don't claim anything as 'my way.' I don't play in just one style, so I don't feel threatened when one style is no longer 'supported' (over-rewareded) at the expense of another. I appreciate the things 3e and 4e did well - and the things D&D has always done well in all editions. I'm not advocating for a style of philosophy, I'm just a hobbyist who's more than a little analytical and pedantic, and who dives into the minutia of the system, including looking critically at it's quality. That often puts me at odds with people who use other criteria for judgement - even to the point that I find myself arguing against both those criticizing a version of D&D (for unsupportable or invalid or questionable reasons), and those boosting it (using similarly flawed reasoning or just out of unquestioning enthusiasm).

I do have an affection for that first RPG that brought me into the hobby, so yeah, I spend more of my time on it rather than other, more innovative or more diligently designed systems that might be more deserving. I'm not immune to a little emotionalism, either.

It's obvious that 4e introduced a bunch of new things that cause half the playerbase to jump ship. Classify those things however you like.

Jumping ship remained the choice of that faction, nothing 4e did could force anyone to do anything. 5e has reversed a lot of the progress made by D&D in the last 14 years, and has only a few bright spots here and there to give us cause to hope that it'll ever get back on track. From my PoV, that's a larger and more negative change than anything you could find, or even imagine, between 3e and 4e. I'm not jumping ship. Next week we do character generation for the new Encounters season and my table will be 5e, thankyouverymuch, and I hope my running it and trying to create the best first experience for the players I get helps my FLGS sell some PHs and maybe even ushers some new folks into the hobby. Even though, thanks to the reactionary fallout of the edition war, that system may be making it /harder/ to deliver that experience in some ways - I've run successful sessions with far worse rulesets.

 

[ThirdWizard]

I don't think we're too different in our goals, except in that I <em>need</em> consistent rules for PCs and NPCs in order to establish context.

If my character has Athletics/Climbing +15, then what does that mean? She has an 80% chance to climb a wall that's DC 20. So what does that mean? Where does it come from? Why is the bonus +15, and not +10 or +20? Is +15 even <em>good</em>? What's the default chance for some random merchant to climb a wall?

If the answer, anywhere in there, comes down to the fact that my character is a PC rather than an NPC, then that's a problem. The designation of PC or NPC isn't a thing that exists in-game, (unless it's something like Exalted, where it does). Attributing an in-game characteristic to an out-of-game factor would violate causality, and it's literally impossible for me to suspend disbelief that far and still take the game seriously.

Oh, I definitely agree that if you're going to have a resolution mechanic for NPCs then it should mirror the resolution mechanic for PCs. That's not really what I was referring to.

Take a game like Dread for example. It's a horror game where the resolution mechanic is if the PC tries to do something that the GM thinks may succeed or fail, then they pull a block from a Jenga tower. If the tower falls then the PC dies. If the tower doesn't fall and they get the block then the PC succeeds. The GM never pulls because there would be no tension there. In fact, the GM pulling would draw away from the player tension, thus going against the goal of creating a frightening game mechanic. The GM simply isn't participating on the same level as the PCs.

In a game like that, where there is only one resolution mechanic and it is either success/death, then NPCs have no resolution mechanic at all. So, the GM has to make decisions on what happens with NPCs. But, he isn't making these decisions in a vacuum. The goal of the game is genre emulation, which means the GM is actually constrained by tropes of the genre. The GM tries to match what they think would happen if the group was watching a horror film of the appropriate type, mood, style, etc. that the group is trying to emulate. Thus, you don't need a resolution mechanic for NPCs so not having one doesn't really detract from the experience.

Except for those playing a game instead of telling a story. In that case the mechanics are subordinate to the setting and the situation. The narrative/fiction is a byproduct of actual play not the purpose of it.

I'm an avid boardgamer. I love boardgames! I record every play with who was playing, who won, and by how much in a record book.

You know why I play RPGs, though? Because they have fiction associated with them. They have plots and intrigue and characters interacting in amazing and unpredictable ways. They have plot lines that can come up, drop off for a while, then leap back and kick you in the face. They have monsters that are more than just pieces moving around a board, and player characters who can interact with all these story elements that I just described in any way they want. Roleplaying games are awesome because of the story for me.

Because what you end up with at the end of the night isn't just a line in my book. It's a story. That's the entire point for me.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

In your post above, you noted that the gameworld is not less believable because the NPCs charge the fighter. In other words, using CaGI it doesn't undermine the consistency of internal causality - there is nothing that we knew about the gameworld that makes it causally improbable, or impossible, that the NPCs would charge the fighter.

The controversy with CaGI isn't necessarily that it violates causality, just in itself. The controversy with CaGI is that it gives player some authorship power, in violation of maintaining actor-stance, which some players care strongly about. You need that authorship power, in order to maintain internal consistency.

And that authorship power is limited by in-game circumstances that the character controls. So, in a very literal sense, the determination of whether or not these chumps will fall for your feint is in a causal relationship with whether or not the player character has completed the requisite rest. If the PC didn't have that rest, then the enemy background motivation will not be such that it will fall for the feint; if the PC did, then the enemy will be the type of person who will fall for it.