D&D 4E What's so bad about 4th edition? What's so good about other systems?

[Pentius]

As fun as the "Blame the game, not the playa" pow-wow is, I tend to disagree. The DM influences the game in a lot of ways, many of which we tend not to even consciously think about. Now, I'm not calling anyone a Bad DM, but honestly, anyone who tells you he's a Perfect DM is lying through his teeth. We've all got something we could be doing better. I've seen a lot in these last few pages of "Here's the problems I'm having, but well, nothing I can do."

I propose a different solution. Do something.

You say the transition from non-combat to combat is too harsh? Soften it. I used to terrible about the transition. Things would be all Shared-Narrative Freeform, then combat comes. Wait, guys, I gotta sketch the map real quick on the whiteboard. I gotta grab the monster minis out of my case and arrange them. Can somebody write down initiative? It was bad. Then I played with a DM who did it better. He had the maps all pre-drawn on the battlemat, sections our characters couldn't see covered with loose paper. Monsters were placed as soon as we saw them, which was frequently well before combat. If it wasn't, he had them lined up behind the screen, ready to grab. When the Monster Vault came out, he put the monster tokens down under the paper and cleaned that step up even further. We got to the point where the transition was "Gentlemen, place your minis and roll initiative." and we could've trimmed it further.

You say the transition is harsh because the fiction suddenly takes a backseat to the mechanics? Play up your fiction, play down your mechanical descriptions. Don't just play up the fiction with description and dialogue, do it with situation. Don't send the players against orcs 178-183, who are probably all Evil and stuff. Send them against the bandits who have been plaguing the area, who are the reason the barmaid had tear lines through her makeup and the reason the PCs couldn't get dinner there, no matter how much coin they offered. Conversely, don't describe mechanics at all if you don't have to. Tell the players how much damage they take and whether they hit, and precious little else. Tell them the monster lurches forward, arms outstretched, not that it moves 4 squares. Players will generally follow suit with this sort of thing. Feeling like the fiction doesn't inform the system or the outcome enough in combat? Let it. Your monsters can use page 42, too. Have them hurl things, vault over balconies, pull rugs out from under feet and tip over the brazier to set the room on fire. Offer ad hoc page 42 effects when the player makes a good description. Heck, hand out cookies if you have to, but make it clear to your players that the fiction informs the system and playing the fiction first will have rewards.

You mentioned the levels being just a number treadmill, everything being basically the same across levels. Find where it's different, or where it could be different, and play that up. Go on an extra-planar journey. Hand out some really cool rituals. You know your party, I don't. Find the things they couldn't do at first, but are much better at now. Got a lot of AoE? Waves of minions/low HP monsters. Throw heavier effects at the players. Turn one to stone.

And if you really, really need to stop the 4e campaign to try other systems? Turn them ALL to stone. An NPC can unstone them later.

 

[Votan]

As fun as the "Blame the game, not the playa" pow-wow is, I tend to disagree. The DM influences the game in a lot of ways, many of which we tend not to even consciously think about. Now, I'm not calling anyone a Bad DM, but honestly, anyone who tells you he's a Perfect DM is lying through his teeth. We've all got something we could be doing better. I've seen a lot in these last few pages of "Here's the problems I'm having, but well, nothing I can do."

While this is a complex system (DMs and systems interact in a lot of ways), a good game system makes them easier on the DM to tell an interesting story. I find the real issue with 4E (and I am well into double digits on sessions, own at least half the books and have really given the system a chance) is that it supports some types of stories better than others.

This doesn't mean that you can't tell these other types of stories -- you can move your household with a VW beetle. Doesn't mean it is optimal for the task at hand.

In the extreme, a DM could develop their own system. Rules exist to guide and simplify. I find it perfectly fair to say that a game system supports some approaches better than others. Traveller, for example, is very different than Rolemaster. Both will make specific stories more or less difficult to tell. DM skill can do a lot, but good rules exist to make the job easier.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

In general, i'd argue, how much of that flexibility is realyl useful? In human beings, flexibility is actually derived from strength, and a solid system backing up the gm is what allows them to really explore entertaining ideas.

For instance, before 4e, a DM could claim that a combat could be a straight up battle, where the dice fall where they may, if that's what they and their players are after- but they'd basically be lying, because the combat system relied on too muhc fiat to ever, really do that. Endless choised and tweaks and hand-waves went into every moment of combat, and all the conditions that led to combat. Now in 4e, you really can do a battle like that, to a much greater degree.

You can also play around with other formats as well- the system is there backing you up, sharing the load. That's the idea i'd like extended to other areas. It's not about restriction, it's about giving the GM the support to genuinly push the envelope, while still keeping the game as a GAME, with the depth and variety that offers, rather than just the gm whimming everything into form, which to be frank, is not nearly as versatile a process as we DMs would like to believe.

Well, speak for yourself on what GMs can or can't do, cause I'm PERFECT! lol. I disagree though. Rules formalize our thinking about aspects of a game. If you introduce a set of rules for say the logistics of long distance expeditions then those rules will form a framework on which all thinking about that subject will take place. Now, for that kind of niche area of the game this probably isn't a terrible thing, but still it is likely to push other ideas about how to handle that element out of the DM's mind.

I don't think you can make an analogy to the human body that works. The 'strength' of a system, in terms of having definite concrete support for some element of the game and flexibility aren't either directly dependent on one another nor directly opposed. However more concrete support does serve to make a specific area of the game work in a consistent way, which can be good or bad.

I think the problem with these discussions of 'non combat rules' is that the people asking for them make a mistake in trying to equate combat and non combat situations as if they are simply 2 comparable situations, this is simply not true at all and I feel that any such argument is fatally flawed. In fact this is the nut of my position.

Combat is a specific situation and benefits from having specific rules (and even this is often argued long and hard, many times in this thread). In any case it is certainly a very restricted domain and rules can be created which are only applicable in that domain and only affect the rest of the game in a limited fashion.

Saying there should be rules for say social situations that have the detail that combat rules do seems odd to me. I don't think you can boil a social situation down to crass mechanical moves and whatnot like you can combat and retain the essence of it. I think a lot of areas of the game are like that, they simply aren't analogous. Having more rules for combat can make it 'better' in at least some sense up to a point. Having more rules for many other things IMHO simply makes them worse. You want the barest framework that you can hang conflict resolution on.

I would VERY much sooner use an SC to resolve combat than I would use some rules as elaborate as combat to resolve anything else.

I agree that the system i'm proposing would not directly hit on many of the issues with 4e combat, but it would hit on other issues with 4e combat.

I do thing that combat needs to be made a lot sleeker in any event, particularly by eliminating and cutting down a lot of key issues, like nonstandard interactions (conditional feats, ect), too much round by round book-keeping, the 4e christmas tree effect, and so on. I'm totally supportive of that kind of fix.

Which we mostly agree about. My feeling is with ANYTHING that a simpler and more elegant implementation of that thing is more desirable.

As an example of what i'd be after, i've had an idea for a while for a stat called 'penalty' or 'woe', which would be a standardised general abstract measure of how ed up your guy was. Somebody else mentioned an idea like this on this thread as well iirc.

It would be used instead of, or in conjunction with, a smaller set of negative effects, and most powers would not inflict such effects, but rather just inflict woe in addition to normal damage. It could be as simple as a value that ranged from 1-5, which acts as a persistant penalty to defences. This value would then act a bit like hit points, or just degrade by one point per turn.

Now there's all sorts of things a system like this could add, but the core idea is simple. Remove a lot of niggling minor effects and book-keeping, by folding them into a single semi-universal value.

I'm not opposed to that, and i'm not saying the system would replace that. It would just make things clear, and give another option as to how to resolve scenes and the give-and-take between players and GM.

Well, as a replacement for more complicated mechanics it might work. Sounds like something that would need to be worked up in more detail to see if there are any flies in that ointment, but I'd be OK with it.

You could easily for instance, signal that you're not going to catch this guy this time BUT- that alone is an opportunity. In other games, you can actually OFFER the players a bonus in exchange for that sort of thing- the villain getting away, or the heroes being captured, is the kind of thing a GM might offer a hero point for. Players can also VOLUNTARILY offer these complications in return for such points, giving them a way to hang their hyjinks on the story without being concerned that they're derailing the game.

And sure again, the GM is the final arbiter, but systems like this work really well. And it actually makes it easier for the GM to set up situations like, say, the villain escaping. Rather than having to manipulate the combat in order to make sure the guy gets away, AND probably deny players the full use of their powers in the process ("You immobilised him? Heh, well, good thing he has ANOTHING free saving thrown encounter power!") The GM can just be up front and say "the villain hurls a smoke bomb and dashes away, leaping onto a waiting griffon and soaring into the sky. You each recieve one hero point as you vow to hunt him down!"

And yeah, if the PCs save those hero points and make very clear they're going to spend them in the next fight with the villain, to get them the extra attacks and moves they need to bring him down? Well you as the GM should recognise the clear message your players are sending.

And again, on the flipside, if that's where they want to spend their resources, then it's good they have a clear, functional system to make those decisions. To decide what kind of impact they want to have on the world. This leads back to the idea of a points system, and how points can be used.

Hmmm, so basically what you're saying is instead of having the PCs powers mysteriously fail to stop the Plot Mandated Event, I give the players a cookie and THEN have their powers mysteriously fail to stop the Plot Mandated Event... lol.

I know the above isn't an entirely fair characterization of all uses of these kinds of mechanics, but it does get to the nut of the issue. People talk about things like 'hero points' or whatnot as a panacea, but they actually aren't. They are complicated things to use wisely and consistently, and they can easily undermine players sense of ownership of their character resources amongst other issues. Also my experience is that they tend to amplify the differences between stronger and weaker players. The dominant players (and every group has them to some extent) tend to end up reshaping the story in the direction they want, and now they have a mechanical way to do that. The utility of these mechanics also varies greatly from situation to situation and game to game, so you aren't going to easily create parity between different classes for instance, unless nothing else mechanically integrates with these points.

I hear you, but there is a lot to be gained from innovative design.

I'm not really sure what is that innovative about integrating late 1980's era RPG technology into 4e though, lol. I'd much rather see some real innovation if there HAS to be something new added. Why does D&D have to just play catch up? In fact it seems to me 4e is much more innovative than a hypothetical 5e that was trying to graft in mechanics similar to what V:tM introduced around the time 2e came out.

 

[Dannager]

Exactly!!

Oh for crying out loud.

You can't say "4e is boring and repetitive!" in one post and then in the next post agree with someone who says "Don't blame the game!"

I mean, at least try for some consistency.

 

[ForeverSlayer]

Oh for crying out loud.

You can't say "4e is boring and repetitive!" in one post and then in the next post agree with someone who says "Don't blame the game!"

I mean, at least try for some consistency.

Actually he was saying don't blame the player nor the game. Do you actually take the time to actually read the posts or do you just have a problem with reading comprehension?

Let me see if I can break it down for you. If you don't understand just ask some questions and I will answer them.

There are several factors that goes into who is actually to blame. Now the player can be blamed at times and the system can be blamed at times, but since we don't know all the factors then the best thing would be to actually not point the finger at anyone. You see, if you were trying to argue that 1 + 1 = 2 and he was trying to say that it was 3 then that person is to blame and not the math problem. Now, with what (nnms) was referring to was a combination of his fault as well as a fault of the system. Since 4th edition is something that costs money and it ceases to interest him then it has failed in what it was supposed to do and that was keep him interested enough to keep playing and keep buying the products. When you go to a restaurant and you order, let's say a steak, and they cook it the normal way that always do. Well you tell the waiter that they need to take it back because it's not cooked right. That waiter is not going to tell you no, even though that steak was cooked the same way as all the others. Yes it your fault because you don't like the steak which is a matter of opinion, but the cook failed because he didn't make you a steak that you liked.

Now when it comes to D&D, if enough people ,like you in the restaurant, don't like the way D&D the way it is and find that it is boring and repetitive and more people don't buy the game than actually do buy it then it becomes the fault of the game system because it failed to interest enough people to buy it.

If you seriously need help then I can point you in the right direction.

 

[Dannager]

Actually he was saying don't blame the player nor the game.

Yes.

That was the point.

Do you actually take the time to actually read the posts or do you just have a problem with reading comprehension?

ForeverSlayer, I was pointing out that you blamed the game, and then one post later agreed with a guy who said "Don't blame the player or the game."

Do you understand how that can come off as utterly inconsistent on your part?

 

[nnms]

Blame is a waste of time. In almost every part of life. And it's especially useless when it comes to something we are doing as a hobby for enjoyment. Analyze the situation? Yep. See what needs to change? Identify how to change it? All good. But blame? Waste of time. When we blame we tend to stop and not move forward because something else has been made the problem.

If I blame 4E for the lack of enjoyment I'm having, then I've made the responsibility lie with something outside of my control. 4E isn't going to change because I might think it's responsible for me not enjoying its features anymore. I guess if I really want to blame 4E I can become just another message board crusader in an edition war.

I can house rule and hack, and have, but 4E is fundamentally a certain way and drift only goes so far before I'd be better off identifying another system as the solution.

Everything I'm not enjoying about 4E right now is actually a strength of the system. All of it. And I have defended every one of them in the past as being good. Unfortunately, hacking them all to be something other than what they are would result in me not playing 4E anymore as they are core features of the game. I'm better off starting with a new foundation. I'm in the process of giving Savage Worlds a try.

I guess I don't care about culpability, but only responsibility. We often conflate them.

 

[Oldtimer]

Now when it comes to D&D, if enough people ,like you in the restaurant, don't like the way D&D the way it is and find that it is boring and repetitive and more people don't buy the game than actually do buy it...

Good thing this isn't the case then. Even if you seem to desperately want it to be.

 

[nnms]

As fun as the "Blame the game, not the playa" pow-wow is, I tend to disagree. The DM influences the game in a lot of ways, many of which we tend not to even consciously think about. Now, I'm not calling anyone a Bad DM, but honestly, anyone who tells you he's a Perfect DM is lying through his teeth. We've all got something we could be doing better. I've seen a lot in these last few pages of "Here's the problems I'm having, but well, nothing I can do."

I propose a different solution. Do something.

That's exactly what I'm doing. Right now I'm in the awkward position of having a bunch of players who are having a blast while I am not. And I'm finding that the features of 4E are not ones that I find attractive anymore. I need to transition the 4E game to having another person run it as it's not really fair of me just to end it and I'm only one participant in a larger group (I don't believe in DM primacy).

You say the transition from non-combat to combat is too harsh? Soften it. I used to terrible about the transition. Things would be all Shared-Narrative Freeform, then combat comes. Wait, guys, I gotta sketch the map real quick on the whiteboard. I gotta grab the monster minis out of my case and arrange them. Can somebody write down initiative? It was bad. Then I played with a DM who did it better. He had the maps all pre-drawn on the battlemat, sections our characters couldn't see covered with loose paper. Monsters were placed as soon as we saw them, which was frequently well before combat. If it wasn't, he had them lined up behind the screen, ready to grab. When the Monster Vault came out, he put the monster tokens down under the paper and cleaned that step up even further. We got to the point where the transition was "Gentlemen, place your minis and roll initiative." and we could've trimmed it further.

I do all those things. The Monster Vault tokens were my favorite purchase of the Essentials releases for exactly that reason. Another thing I've done is always have maps and dungeon tiles down. I have a huge collection of them and can prepare one for wherever they find themselves when a scene is framed.

You say the transition is harsh because the fiction suddenly takes a backseat to the mechanics? Play up your fiction, play down your mechanical descriptions. Don't just play up the fiction with description and dialogue, do it with situation. Don't send the players against orcs 178-183, who are probably all Evil and stuff.

In current game the players are now the ruling council of a kingdom. Everything they do is stuff they are interested in as players. Right now they're trying to free the human slave population of the neighbouring dragon ruled city states.

Feeling like the fiction doesn't inform the system or the outcome enough in combat? Let it. Your monsters can use page 42, too. Have them hurl things, vault over balconies, pull rugs out from under feet and tip over the brazier to set the room on fire. Offer ad hoc page 42 effects when the player makes a good description. Heck, hand out cookies if you have to, but make it clear to your players that the fiction informs the system and playing the fiction first will have rewards.

I see p42 as a pretty weak solution to a lot of improve issues. I use DMG2's recommendations about terrain powers and whatnot.

The main issue with p42 is when you use it to grant players powers they don't otherwise have access to while those who have them are at the table.

"You mean if I want to shift multiple squares I can just use my acrobatics skill and move over them? Why did I bother taking this tumble utility power? If the DC is low enough for the fighter to have just done it, I'm never going to fail."

That's a paraphrase of one of the players at the table. They like the 4E combat as it is and don't want their system choices invalidated by p42 improv moves.

Go on an extra-planar journey.

Did that at level 1. Just level down the creatures so that the attack, damage, defenses, etc., are all level appropriate. Try it. The game works for any story setting at any level. That's one of the features that I used to think was what I wanted out of an rpg.

People talk about paragon tier being more about interplanar stuff or whatever, but it's all just a smoke screen as the monster math and level system mean you can do it at any level.

And if you really, really need to stop the 4e campaign to try other systems? Turn them ALL to stone. An NPC can unstone them later.

You do know that time doesn't pass for fictional characters right? That I could just as easily put the game on hold and come back to it?

 

[ForeverSlayer]

Good thing this isn't the case then. Even if you seem to desperately want it to be.

If that keeps you all warm and fuzzy inside then you believe what you want.