D&D 4E Throwing ideas, seeing what sticks (and what stinks)

[AbdulAlhazred]

No worries - I understand perfectly : I've had games where about half (I'm exaggerating for effect) the rules are just in my head.

Head-space has a way of being organized in many dimensions - putting that on paper usually requires a 2 or even 1 D approach and the translation can be... difficult.

I've tried using mind-mapping, but the learning curve to get to "effortless ease" is always too long for my (lack of) patience... Maybe in a few years when I update my computer and get a touch screen that'll ease the process...

Yup. I have toyed a little bit with mind mapping a couple times too, but it just never clicked. I agree it has a decent learning curve. It might work better for adventures too, but I'm not sure. In any case, I'm sure I'll do some work on the whole thing and eventually it might work its way out. I'm sure there aren't any really revolutionary ideas in there in any case, lol. I think about the most I can claim is perhaps a little significant is replacing XP and treasure with 'boons'. Even there all the pieces exist in 4e, it was just never quite expressed the way I have (as getting the boon is what flags you to do a level up). You could certainly run 4e stock that way already just by ignoring XP (which many of us do) and coincidentally putting the level ups where you acquire significant items. You can just call benefits of leveling up 'boons' for that matter too, its all semantics really. I just like thinking about it in that sort of backwards way.

 

[Tony Vargas]

So, yes, 3.0 is the first edition where 20 is a hard limit, but even there I believe they then produced some sort of Epic Level Handbook, correct?

I think it was 3.5, but, yes, it didn't stay 20 for long. 5e's back to a level 20 limit. We'll see how long that holds up.

I think putting that at level 20 and simply rescaling things such that level 21+ are 'godlike' is simply a minor redesign intended to reduce the need for added levels of 'filler'.

Nod. I'm just thinking about the human preference for round numbers. 10 or 20 levels divided into 3 tiers doesn't come out even. 12 or 15 or 30 levels do break evenly into three tiers.

for any one character, there are always a goodly number of those levels that aren't all that interesting. Often you find that 2-3 different levels provide encounter or daily powers that are largely just slight variations and scaling that exist mainly to fill out the choices at that level.

I never did get a handle on what a power of a given level 'should' be, so I get that aspect of it.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

On the level number and range and such my recent revelation has been this : accept to restrain the campaign.

I've come to the realization that what I want is usually for the campaign to have a certain feel - in standard 4e, the feel changes a great deal (as it should!) during those 30 levels. It's way to much work crunching or spreading the crunch - it's better to just be up front and say "this game is going to be level 13-18 : they're way above average, can mow down squads, but they can't take on the entire castle by themselves yet." Or something to that effect and just play with progression rates and methods.

All this being said, respecting these kinds of ideas is harder than keeping your new year resolutions - so, you know, I'm going to keep hacking in about... aaannndd I've gotten an idea (I kid you not - it happened as I typed!)

But the initial point stands!

I see ~5 kinds of games (or actually, "feel" would be a better term) in 4e - it's just a matter of choosing the one you want and then not shooting yourself in the foot! But then again, hacking the game is just so much fun!

As to 13th Age - I agree, it does feel pretty "squeezed". On the other hand, it's the kind of game where they might even had gone with 9 levels with every 3rd having massive jumps in power. IMO it's the kind of game where "I gain a level" is supposed to be a game changer.

It's like 10 is too narrow for a granular progression, but then, it's to big for what should really be a "3 levels" game with a small number of "sub-levels".

... now I'm liking this "3 levels" thing... It would have beautiful parallel with creature construction : solo to elite to standard to minion. Ok, maybe a 5 level game so the initial solos could be faced as minions. And... if you add in 6 sub-level of granularity to each level, you get... (suspenseful drum roll) 30 levels! ... and we're right back at the start...

Sorry for the ramble - but then again, this is my ramble thread! (Also, feel free to ramble as well, I don't have a monopoly on ramblings - I won't judge you for it here.)

How interesting this would be : a thread where once you type, you can't take it back. The spelling would likely be horrendous (), but it would be very interesting to see all the starts and stops in all the ideas and propositions...

Yeah, 13a is fine, I mean I have no business criticizing them for what they did. I just found it odd that they had 10 levels and then they started telling you to do 'intra-level power ups' because the jumps are so big. Seemed like it begged for 20 levels. I think their reasoning is "people will be more likely to progress through 10 levels than 20" perhaps? I dunno, we could ask them I guess!

You could certainly have 3 levels with say 3 levels in each one, that would be 9, and I LIKE the rule of threes. But now you're back to 9 levels... So I figured 20, though 18 would be a perfectly OK number as well. IMHO though 4e's Epic suffered from too many levels. It was HARD to generate 2-3 story arcs and continue that tier for 10 whole levels. That's 100 encounters worth of epic stuff, and epic encounters are no cakewalk, they need some work to really come off. I hate 'filler' encounters too, so it becomes a LOT of story! I really think 3 epic levels is enough, one to develop the epic story arc and get the characters moving in their destinies, one level of rising tension, with a major setback probably coming somewhere in those first 2 levels, and then the 3rd level for the save and climax. You could probably make a case for 5 levels too, but 18-20 seems pretty solid, and that leaves you with 9 heroic levels, and 8 paragon levels, which are IMHO PLENTY for those tiers as well, and really enough to allow for a whole campaign that stays in either of them. You can do a 6-15 for instance, or 6-18, or a 12-20, or a 1-12, and you'll get a pretty nice chunk of at least 2 tiers in a length of game most campaigns can survive for.

My typing IS pretty much stream-of-consciousness always, lol. Well, aside from backing up to fix typos. I just hammer on my nice old Model-M keyboard with the clickety clack buckling key switches and spit out a couple 100 WPM (and take back half of it because it looks like gibberish, my typing teacher wouldn't be impressed).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think it was 3.5, but, yes, it didn't stay 20 for long. 5e's back to a level 20 limit. We'll see how long that holds up.

Hehe, yeah, well, at WotC's current staffing levels it will be a few years before we get an Epic handbook...

Nod. I'm just thinking about the human preference for round numbers. 10 or 20 levels divided into 3 tiers doesn't come out even. 12 or 15 or 30 levels do break evenly into three tiers.

18 would give you round numbers, but I still think Epic begs to be a shorter capstone than heroic/paragon. 15 levels with 5 each might be another sweet spot, perhaps. That would give you a 5-act structure for each tier, which isn't bad.

I never did get a handle on what a power of a given level 'should' be, so I get that aspect of it.

Yeah, its rather arbitrary really. And that last FR campaign certainly illustrates the ease with which you can rescale the entire game. Truthfully 'classic' D&D doesn't play more than passably at best past 12th anyway. So in a sense 4e added a LOT of granularity. In effect it turned those 12 levels into 20 and then recast what was levels 13-20 as 'Epic', which wasn't entirely clear in previous editions and rather varied from one to another. I mean BECMI really didn't hit 'Epic' until much higher even.

 

[MwaO]

Yeah, I'm not saying you can't generate an encounter that has the flavor of 'some wimpy goblins ambush you!" and mechanics that make it dangerous. I think its just something that 4e doesn't HELP you do, in the sense that using stock monsters won't cut it.

In a sense, but what 4e might respond to that is that it isn't really important to run such combats, just to know the possible outcome of them. Basically, what's the meaningful bits of the combat - did you demolish the goblins or did they maybe inflict a wound or two. Did you manage to sneak away from the overwhelming combat or did you charge in foolhardy and just manage to get away for your lives or did you insist on actually fighting it because you were that overconfident?

i.e. such combats are ideal for being converted into a skill challenge. If I wanted to represent the Mines of Moria, as an example, the PCs aren't equipped to fight the Balrog nor the swarms of orcs. The question is whether or not they can get away fast enough before being overwhelmed. But there might be moments of relative calm where they fight some tough groups who they can't simply just run from - and an obvious timer - hey, fail to defeat this group quickly and that swarm of orcs might catch up to you and kill you...

And other than being a sacred cow of D&D, it really isn't clear why actually running out unbalanced fights are important to a good roleplaying experience. If anything, they're kind of boring.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

In a sense, but what 4e might respond to that is that it isn't really important to run such combats, just to know the possible outcome of them. Basically, what's the meaningful bits of the combat - did you demolish the goblins or did they maybe inflict a wound or two. Did you manage to sneak away from the overwhelming combat or did you charge in foolhardy and just manage to get away for your lives or did you insist on actually fighting it because you were that overconfident?

i.e. such combats are ideal for being converted into a skill challenge. If I wanted to represent the Mines of Moria, as an example, the PCs aren't equipped to fight the Balrog nor the swarms of orcs. The question is whether or not they can get away fast enough before being overwhelmed. But there might be moments of relative calm where they fight some tough groups who they can't simply just run from - and an obvious timer - hey, fail to defeat this group quickly and that swarm of orcs might catch up to you and kill you...

And other than being a sacred cow of D&D, it really isn't clear why actually running out unbalanced fights are important to a good roleplaying experience. If anything, they're kind of boring.

While I agree that this is possible, I think the problem is that 4e discounts the significance of such tactical advantages in favor of more 'chess piece' sort of tactics using powers during combat to gain minor advantages. I think preparation and basic tactical acumen should count for more. Beyond that, while you could just say, "run it as an SC, its trivial" or 'gloss over it', what I'm really talking about is that situation that comes up during the process of play where one side or the other, through the logical consequences of the narrative "gets the jump" on the other and presents a much greater GENUINE threat.

Its not that there's a major inadequacy there in 4e, its simply that moving to a model that more closely reflects a realistic value weighting of these factors is better, assuming you can retain the desirable play characteristics you wish to have. It feels more natural and you produce narratives that feel more true. Players rely more on narrative logic and less on gamist assessments of how things will play out. Again, assuming you can retain a solid 'rally narrative' etc. IMHO what I'm offering is a tweak. It has a fair number of consequences at the very detailed level of how exactly do you write each power and such, but the overall genre feel of 4e, crazy action adventure with fun tactics SHOULD ideally remain intact. Not that I'm claiming I've accomplished this mind you. I was just pointing out my thoughts and experiments, as a contrast and/or validation of what our sheep-loving thread host has written

 

[MwaO]

While I agree that this is possible, I think the problem is that 4e discounts the significance of such tactical advantages in favor of more 'chess piece' sort of tactics using powers during combat to gain minor advantages. I think preparation and basic tactical acumen should count for more. Beyond that, while you could just say, "run it as an SC, its trivial" or 'gloss over it', what I'm really talking about is that situation that comes up during the process of play where one side or the other, through the logical consequences of the narrative "gets the jump" on the other and presents a much greater GENUINE threat.

Its not that there's a major inadequacy there in 4e, its simply that moving to a model that more closely reflects a realistic value weighting of these factors is better, assuming you can retain the desirable play characteristics you wish to have. It feels more natural and you produce narratives that feel more true. Players rely more on narrative logic and less on gamist assessments of how things will play out.

Speaking from a movie PoV - there was a time when they didn't use cuts the way that they do today. If a movie wanted to show that someone arrived at their house and went to straight to bed, they wouldn't just show them the necessary scenes. They'd show them climbing the stairs. Now they'd cut right to the character going to the bathroom to find some aspirin or getting a washcloth, then lying down to bed. As long as there's an establishing shot of the house being two stories say, we know where the character is. Or if you watch any TV show, when a character picks up the phone, they'd say hello, instead of going to right to the narrative of the show as they do today. No one calls this mechanical or gamist - it simply reflects that good storytelling, especially the collaborative kind that happens in RPGs or moviemaking, needs to pare away the uninteresting stuff.

i.e. realism or gamism is only valuable when it serves the narrative. Having a wide variety of meaningless combats in order to have the possibility of a suddenly exciting one isn't anywhere near as interesting as having a much faster skill challenge to represent them and failure at the skill challenge creating an unexpectedly interesting combat.

As an example, let's say the PCs have just defeated a regular group of monsters and did badly at the skill challenge at some point. Right when they begin their short rest and are mostly drained of encounter powers, a low level group of Orcs gets a surprise round on them, raining arrows on them from above. They're minions, but they're spread out and have good position. Or maybe it gets reversed - the party starts the fight against the hard to get to minions, but then a regular group of monsters then attacks them. Those could both be exciting and have meaningful effects on play - and to be clear, I generally run minions as having 5+level hp - most of the time, they function the same way, but they're hard to simply pop with a power that doesn't have a damage roll.

Good skill challenges create interesting results when failure happens - and failure should be something that happens regularly.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Speaking from a movie PoV - there was a time when they didn't use cuts the way that they do today. If a movie wanted to show that someone arrived at their house and went to straight to bed, they wouldn't just show them the necessary scenes. They'd show them climbing the stairs. Now they'd cut right to the character going to the bathroom to find some aspirin or getting a washcloth, then lying down to bed. As long as there's an establishing shot of the house being two stories say, we know where the character is. Or if you watch any TV show, when a character picks up the phone, they'd say hello, instead of going to right to the narrative of the show as they do today. No one calls this mechanical or gamist - it simply reflects that good storytelling, especially the collaborative kind that happens in RPGs or moviemaking, needs to pare away the uninteresting stuff.

i.e. realism or gamism is only valuable when it serves the narrative. Having a wide variety of meaningless combats in order to have the possibility of a suddenly exciting one isn't anywhere near as interesting as having a much faster skill challenge to represent them and failure at the skill challenge creating an unexpectedly interesting combat.

As an example, let's say the PCs have just defeated a regular group of monsters and did badly at the skill challenge at some point. Right when they begin their short rest and are mostly drained of encounter powers, a low level group of Orcs gets a surprise round on them, raining arrows on them from above. They're minions, but they're spread out and have good position. Or maybe it gets reversed - the party starts the fight against the hard to get to minions, but then a regular group of monsters then attacks them. Those could both be exciting and have meaningful effects on play - and to be clear, I generally run minions as having 5+level hp - most of the time, they function the same way, but they're hard to simply pop with a power that doesn't have a damage roll.

Good skill challenges create interesting results when failure happens - and failure should be something that happens regularly.

Sure, but I fail to understand why the scenario that I outline is in your mind "uninteresting". The Characters, through some sort of process (maybe failures in an SC, unwise choices, etc) find themselves suddenly set upon by a group of weaker but determine foes, who catch them flat-footed. Now, the suggestion has been made that this is handled by constructing a specialized and specific combat scenario in which tougher monsters or some form of abstraction (swarms, leveled up creatures, etc) is employed, or as a skill challenge instead of an encounter. While these are perfectly fine general 4e suggestions for encounter design, they assume that the scenario is set up beforehand (as it would require some significant time to generate stat blocks for swarms, etc, probably not something you WANT to do in 2 minutes during the flow of the narrative) or that it follows some substantially abstracted mechanics. I'm suggesting that the combat IS interesting, that it should be possible to run it using the stock stat blocks, and that in order for that to be the case things like surprise should take on a more realistically significant place in the combat system.

And again, by bringing the mechanical aspect of the system closer to providing the basis for a natural narrative, you improve the entire flow of play and produce a more satisfying experience. Its ALWAYS easy enough to add in elements and allow for ways to have the amazing over-the-top exploits of the PCs come out.

 

[MwaO]

Sure, but I fail to understand why the scenario that I outline is in your mind "uninteresting". The Characters, through some sort of process (maybe failures in an SC, unwise choices, etc) find themselves suddenly set upon by a group of weaker but determine foes, who catch them flat-footed.

And again, by bringing the mechanical aspect of the system closer to providing the basis for a natural narrative, you improve the entire flow of play and produce a more satisfying experience. Its ALWAYS easy enough to add in elements and allow for ways to have the amazing over-the-top exploits of the PCs come out.

Three basic problems:
It isn't clear why 4e doesn't already do this. You have a skill challenge, you fail the skill challenge, some encounter results because of it.

Worlds have rules and need to be uniform. Surprise shouldn't just be possible with small encounters, it should be possible with big ones too. The PCs should be able to surprise monsters. The problems here start to get endless - the players realize that if they're all somewhat stealthy, every encounter gets surprise instead of a small percentage. There's advantages in making 5000 perception checks. Big encounters get unexpectedly swingy towards a TPK. Those are not good things IMO.

It isn't clear how the wimpy goblins have an actual threat level unless they're a real encounter, they're added onto an already happening encounter, or they've got some sort of 'gotcha' effect that has an impact far beyond expected on an unusual roll. The 1st and 2nd are easy to do and I find the 3rd type of encounter really unrewarding, both as a DM and as a player. That they might have a threat level if they roll well just isn't really worth my time - let's just call it a healing surge or two and move on.

Mind you, I co-wrote NETH4-1 for LFR, so my style's a bit on the weirder side.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Now, the suggestion has been made that this is handled by constructing a specialized and specific combat scenario in which tougher monsters or some form of abstraction (swarms, leveled up creatures, etc) is employed, or as a skill challenge instead of an encounter. While these are perfectly fine general 4e suggestions for encounter design, they assume that the scenario is set up beforehand

Absolutely. For instance, if you were going to go all old-school and have a random encounter table, you'd want stats for everything on that table available before you ever rolled against it.

I'm suggesting ... that it should be possible to run it using the stock stat blocks,

I suppose the fact relatively few monsters are statted with more than one secondary role (the same monster presented as, for instance, an heroic-level solo, Paragon-level standard, and Epic-level minion), has to do with wanting to keep the game 'fresh' even while extending the 'sweet spot' over all 30 levels, and, also to keep a sense of advancement in spite of the treadmill - thus spreading the monsters out over 30 levels. Were it not for that, the mechanics lend themselves to a monster having a stat block for most secondary roles (plus swarms) and thus at least one version suitable for almost any level.

and that in order for that to be the case things like surprise should take on a more realistically significant place in the combat system.
And again, by bringing the mechanical aspect of the system closer to providing the basis for a natural narrative, you improve the entire flow of play and produce a more satisfying experience.

It's sounds like we're circling around the idea of supporting the style of Gygaxian 'skilled play,' in which player decisions, driven by player experience with & knowledge of the game, more significantly impact the outcome of challenges. 4e de-emphasizes the player as a component of the resolution system, keeping the character front-and-center.

It's easy enough to execute the scenario: a group check or two determine surprise or a Skill Challenge determines whether the PCs go into an encounter at a more significant advantage or disadvantage, or even whether or which encounter they face next. But the PCs' abilities still remain very relevant in determining that.