D&D 4E Mike Mearls on how D&D 4E could have looked

pemerton · Nov 18, 2018

Jay Verkuilen said:
Darn, I was waiting for a Moldvay Basic quote.

2nd ed AD&D and 5e players don't have a monopoly on what counts as playing D&D, even though they frequently post as if they do.

(And 100s of words of flavour text doesn't count as stat blocks and essentially no other information. I know some D&D players prefer demographics and ecology to social structure, history and theology, but that doesn't mean the latter is no information.)

Lanefan · Nov 18, 2018

pemerton said:
I can't tell if you're being deliberately obtuse, or just completely missing the point.

Neither. I get the point, and disagree with it to such an extent that AFAIC it might as well not exist.

(1) The toughness is established in the fiction. The mechanics are subsequent to the fiction, nor prior to it. They are a device for resolving conflict between the ogre and a PC which reflect the relative toughness of ogre and PC.

The mechanics and the fiction are symbiotically locked together. For an RPG to be playable one really cannot exist without the other. The fiction drives the mechanics, and then the mechanics drive the fiction, and then the fiction drives....it's a mobius loop.

And within the fiction each creature (including PCs!) has absolute - not relative, but absolute - mechanical values that reflect or back up what the fiction is trying to tell us about it. A typical Leprechaun is among other things small, not very tough, difficult to find and difficult to hit; and its mechanics and stats reflect that. A typical Ogre is among other things large, pretty tough compared to a human but not when compared to a Giant, not usually very smart, but knows a bit about hunting and fighting and can bring the pain; and its mechanics reflect and back these things up.

(2) In mechanical terms, a creature in D&D has many components - AC and other defences/saving throws, hit points, special resistances, to hit bonus, damage on a hit, number of attacks per round, etc - all of which contribute to its toughtness.

Agreed.

Roughly speaking, if you step up a creature's defence while stepping down its hp, and step up its to hit bonus while stepping down its damage on a hit; or, alternatively, step down its defence while stepping up its hp, and step down its to hit bonus while stepping up its number of attacks per round; then you can model a constant toughness in various mathematical ways.

No I can't, because things that should be mostly constant e.g. hit points, damage per hit, etc. are being wildly changed.

(3) Of the various mathematical options, which to use? 4e says: Vs a low level party, use the one with many attacks per round and high hp but low defences. That is a solo. Vs an upper heroic party, use the one with one attack per round and modest hp and defences. That is a standard. Vs the mid-paragon Sir Lancelolt, the one with one attack per round at a higher bonus but lower damage, and higher defences but 1 hp. That is a minion.

So in short, morph the creature to suit the PCs in front of it.

Codswallop, I say. Mechanics are absolute values, not relative. The only place relativity enters into it is when absolutes are compared.

The creature is what it is. If it's a 47 hit-point ogre when my 1st-level PC meets it and runs screaming it's a 47 hit-point ogre when my PC's 18th-level knight sister meets it. This ain't rocket science. The mechanics are reflecting the fiction that this ogre can take a certain amount of punishment before dropping; and that amount doesn't change based on who's giving said punishment out.

It occurs to me also that if monsters are morphing to suit the PCs in front of them that's probably contributing to the already-too-steep power curve in 4e: low-level things that could still be a mild threat become basically none at all once minionized; while high-level things that might be handled by a low-level party become impossible once elite-ized.

You use the word fiction without thinking about what it means. Being 18th level isn't a property of a knight in the fiction; its a mechanical representation. Having 73 hip left isn't a property of an ogre in a fiction; it's a mechanical representation.

Mechanics in these cases that are simply translating the fiction into something we can play at the table. They're still locked together.

So your question, restated in terms of the fiction, is this: a group of low level PCs are fighting an ogre and a high-level knight rides by and offers to help. How to resolve this? And the answer is - the GM can do this in a number of ways, drawing on the various mechanical tools available.

One way, and to my mind the most natural: the presence of the knight turns the context from a combat to a non-combat one, where the players (as their PCs) beseech the knight for aid. If they succeed (eg via a Diplomacy check or skill challenge or however the GM frames it) then the GM just narrates the knight killing the ogre.

Another way, which to my mind is less interesting because it involves the GM playing with him-/herself, is to stat the 18th level knight up as a low-level solo with 4 strong melee attacks per round. Now the knight can kill the ogre in one round with 3 or 4 solid hits.

The knight would be, if required, statted up as an 18th level character of its class; using the same generation system as a PC would. End of story.

A third way, if the GM is using the knight as a rescue device to save the PCs from a TPK, is just to narrate the knight riding in and beheading the ogre.

Or if the whole point of the exercise is actually to bring the party and knight together for whatever reason...

(It's always worth remembering that there is no such thing as a knight just wandering along. No edition of D&D has rules for making wandering monster checks during the course of a melee. So the timing of this knight's arrival is the GM's choice, for whatever reason.)

Just because there ain't a rule for it doesn't mean it can't happen. It's simply the flip side of the PCs stumbling on to a combat already in progress.

With respect to 1, that's a matter of taste. Is it more fun to play 2 or 3 rounds of combat in which the ogre does nothing interesting except on a roll of 20? Or to play 2 or 3 rounds of combat in which a gang of ogres might whittle away Sir Lancelot's hp while he beheads them? Tastes differ; 4e made a call.

It did that. But even Sir Lancelot should have to worry about being dogpiled by a gang of Ogres just due to sheer numbers.

With respect to 2, once again you seem unable to distinguish fiction from mechanics.

If the mechanics aren't consistent then the fiction isn't either. If the fiction isn't consistent then the mechanics aren't either. They're locked together.

And using the same mechanics for a certain process, or pretending that events that occur in the fiction that are sheer narration were in fact yielded by mechanical process A or mechanical process B, has nothing to do with the internal consistency of the fiction. It's a type of mechanics fetishism.

It has everything to do with the internal consistency of both the fiction and the game.

Let's try another example. Earlier this evening I watched a hockey game, Montreal beat Vancouver 3-2. Shortly after this another game was played which I didn't watch; I later learned Calgary beat Edmonton 4-2 in that one. It's quite reasonable for me to assume that the mechanics and rules used in the Calgary game that I didn't watch were basically the same as in the Vancouver game that I did watch, right?

Now let's make that two battles in a game world. In the one our PCs are in and that we played through we beat a group of six ogres without losing any characters. Shortly after this another battle was fought elsewhere that we weren't involved in; we later learned another adventuring party lost a character while also beating six ogres. It's quite reasonable to assume the mechanics used in that battle that we didn't play through would be basically the same - had it been played through - as those used in the battle that we did play through, right?

You've got this backwards. It's fiction first. Those who can't envisage the touhgness of an ogre without knowing what it's real hp total is are the ones who put mechanics first.

Its "real" hit point total is the only one that matters. The fiction wants to tell me that this ogre is likely tougher than a bear but less tough than a giant, and to reflect this the mechanics give me a range of possible hit point totals - i.e. the range of results I can get by rolling its hit dice and adding its con bonus - it can have. Once I've determined that number by whatever means, I know its actual toughness relative not only to the average bear and average giant but to all the other ogres in its pack (for whom I've also determined h.p. values) and to the PCs - of any level! - that might fight it later.

Lan-"tougher than the average bear"-efan

Lanefan · Nov 18, 2018

pemerton said:
Huh? G1 has orcs in the Steading. D3 has bugbears on the encounter tables. Maybe what you say is true of 3E - I don't know that edition so well - but isn't true of the canonical AD&D adventures.

1e had a much flatter power curve than 3e, and so Orcs could still be relevant at higher PC levels particularly if encountered in numbers or - as in this case - with powerful backup.

The world in 4e is constant. As I've said, it's a type of mechanics fetishism to assume that you can't represent a consistent world while changing the combat stats for an ogre.

One of those sentences is a lie, because they are in direct contradiction and thus cannot both be true.

If the same ogre has one set of stats against these guys and another set of stats against those guys then it - and by extension the game world it inhabits - is not constant.

It's not mechanics fetishism (which seems to be your favourite phrase today). Mechanics absolutism, perhaps.

A minion actually doesn't hit that hard - eg a 10th level minion does the same average damage on a hit as a 1st level standard.; a 20th level minion does the same average damage on a hit as a 6th level stanard.; a 30th level minion does the same average damange on a hit as an 11th level standard.

Further steepening the power curve.

And I've made the point that "Gygaxian naturalism" has nothing to do with how combat stats are established for a monster. Gygaxian naturalism is about the "secondary reality" and it's naturalistic character. The issue [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] and (maybe) you have with minionisation isn't about naturalism but about a certain sort of prioritisation of mechanics over fiction - ie for whatever reason you can't think about how tough an ogre is compared to a town guard or a knight without first assigning AD&D-type stats to each of them.

They all have stats no matter what. I just see those stats as being locked in no matter who or what any of those individuals might be dealing with, if anyone at all. If the town guard has a maximum of 12 hit points while he's walking home from the pub then he's got 12 h.p. when he's standing on the wall and 12 h.p. if and when he ends up trying to hold that wall against an onrushing dragon. He doesn't suddenly have 35 h.p. when arresting a street urchin, nor does he suddenly only have 1 when the dragon gets near.

The relative differences are still there - the street urchin would have a hard time doing much harm to this town guard while the dragon will blow him to oblivion without a second thought - but I don't and shouldn't need to change anything mechanics-wise about any of these creatures to reflect that relative difference any further than it already is.

It's as if JRRT couldn't have written LotR without first assinging AD&D stats to each principal character and then dicing it out!

Poppycock.

First, a novel author only has to answer to him-herself. An RPG has to answer to everyone at the table; and this demands a much greater level of mechanical consistency in order that everyone's playing the same game and can get a handle on what's going on.

Second, a novel author uses imagination to determine what happens and his-her own words to describe it. An RPG uses a combination of imagination and mechanics to determine what happens and then quite often several people's not-always-agreeing words to describe it.

Thirs, a novel author has the huge advantage of knowing how things will end up before writing what comes earlier. An RPG rarely if ever has this level of certainty (and if it did I'd be able to hear your cry of "railroad!" from Australia to Canada) and as a result is in effect "writing its story" somewhat blind.

Obviously. I already posted this somewhere upthread. But that has nothing to do with "naturalism" or "internal consistency". And thinking that it does has everything to do with mechanics fetishism - an inability to see beyond one particular type of RPG design.

It's one thing not to enjoy something - I don't really care for Tunnels & Trolls. But it's another thing to misdescribe it because you don't like it. The idea that 4e has "1 hp" ogres who can't take the rought and tumble of their fellows is a misdescription.

Viewed through the lens of 'consistent fiction backed by absolute mechanics', it's not a misdescription at all. It's simply taking the mechanics as presented and extrapolating them to the non-PC-facing rest of the game world.

The idea that 4e doesn't and can't support a consistent fantasy world is a misdescription.

Viewed through the lens..., as just above.

Wondering as a GM how to mechanically set up a situation (eg how to stat an ogre) likewise has nothign to do with naturalism. There's no naturalistic answer to this question. Game mechanics are, by definition, artifice.

Game mechanics are by definition an artifice. With this I agree.

But let's at least try to make them a consistent artifice where we can!

I have my own view on what the real issue is, and it's also come up in this thread: some people want to play a RPG in which the GM has domiant and even overwhelming control over how the fiction unfolds.

Not bad - took 985 posts for this to come up. Beats my over-under mark by a bunch!

Particularly for non-combat resolution. (The combat/non-combat contrast, I think, is nothing but an artefact of D&D's wargame origins, but has stuck very strongly.) 4e is not well-suited to that sort of game: it puts the players front and centre in shaping the fiction, by making their mechanical resources crystal clear; and it makes the role of the GM in framing situations for the players to engage crystal clear (eg via devices like miniosation). A 4e GM can worldbuild all s/he likes, but no 4e GM is going to think that designing a combat encounter or adjudicating a skill challengeis a piece of worldbuilding, because s/he has to make choices which are obviously about gameplay - what stats to use, what DCs to set, how to integrate a player's conception of what makes sense in the fiction into the GM's own understanding of the fiction.

So if I'm reading this right, a 4e DM isn't supposed to design encounters or stats or DCs neutrally and impartially?

How the heck does one possibly run a proper sandbox site-and-exploration-based campaign in 4e if that's the case?

And how the heck is anyone supposed to write and publish a mass-market 4e adventure module without first knowing the players and-or PCs that'll be playing through it at every table?

I think that that sort of approach to RPGing and GMing is completely consistent with classic dungeon design and adjudication, which was self-evidently about gameplay and not worldbuilding. But it's basically the opposite to the approach to RPGing and GMing that became dominant post-Dragonlance and almost ubiquitous from the late 80s through the 90s at least, and seems to be the received approach for playing 5e.

Classic dungeon design very often involved worldbuilding as well as game-play. I think you tend to overlook this because if memory serves you often (or always?) used canned settings for your AD&D games, which have done 98% of the worldbuilding for you.

Garthanos · Nov 18, 2018

Lanefan said:
Its "real" hit point total is the only one that matters.

See mechanics first

pemerton · Nov 18, 2018

Lanefan said:
Neither. I get the point, and disagree with it to such an extent that AFAIC it might as well not exist.

I think you're running together preference and analysis. The fact that you don't like a system isn't a reason not to acknowledge how it works.

Lanefan said:
The mechanics and the fiction are symbiotically locked together. For an RPG to be playable one really cannot exist without the other. The fiction drives the mechanics, and then the mechanics drive the fiction, and then the fiction drives....it's a mobius loop.

And this is exactly how 4e works. The fiction tells us what the mechanics are (eg is the ogre a minion, a standard or a soloe). The mechanics then generate new fiction (eg is the ogre dead or alive). Etc.

Lanefan said:
And within the fiction each creature (including PCs!) has absolute - not relative, but absolute - mechanical values

This makes no sense. An ogre has an absolute degree of toughness. But not absolute mechanical values. Mechanics aren't part of the fiction. They're devices for resolving action declarations and thereby - as per your loop of play - working out what happens in the shared fiction.

Lanefan said:
A typical Leprechaun is among other things small, not very tough, difficult to find and difficult to hit; and its mechanics and stats reflect that.

A typical ogre is, among other things, big, tough compared to a town guard but not compared to Sir Lancelot, and a brute; and its mechanics and stats reflect that. Vs a group of low level PCs its a solo whom they can't possibly defeat unless they work together. Vs an experienced heroic tier hero it's a standard. Vs mid-pargaon Sir Lancelot it's a minion.

Nothing in 4e contradicts what you have stated here.

Lanefan said:
A typical Ogre is among other things large, pretty tough compared to a human but not when compared to a Giant, not usually very smart, but knows a bit about hunting and fighting and can bring the pain; and its mechanics reflect and back these things up.

Correct - that's why, vs Sir Lancelot, I stat the ogre as a minion.

(By the way, when you say "pretty tough compared to a human" I assume you mean an ordinary human - Sir Lancelot is a human but an ogre is not tough compared to him; in AD&D an ogre is pretty weak compared to a high level fighter; etc.)

Lanefan said:
The creature is what it is. If it's a 47 hit-point ogre when my 1st-level PC meets it and runs screaming it's a 47 hit-point ogre when my PC's 18th-level knight sister meets it. This ain't rocket science. The mechanics are reflecting the fiction that this ogre can take a certain amount of punishment before dropping; and that amount doesn't change based on who's giving said punishment out.

A creature is what it is. But having 47 hp isn't a description of the creature in the fiction. It's a purely mechanical device.

That the ogre is a 1hp minion when confronted by Sir Lancelot reflects the fact that the ogre can take a certain number of blows from Sir Lancelot, namely, none! And of course that number changes depending on whom the ogre is fighting - it can take (let's say) a dozen or so blows from a town guard.

It's not rocket science.

Lanefan said:
things that should be mostly constant e.g. hit points, damage per hit, etc. are being wildly changed.

So in short, morph the creature to suit the PCs in front of it.

There's no reason why those things need to be constant. They're mechanical devices. An ogre is tough compared to five low-level heroes: stat it with 100 hp (that's a fine measure of toughness). An ogre is barely a speed bump to Sir Lancelot: stat it as a minion.

You may not like it, but (i) it's very clear how it works, and (ii) it produces no inconsistency in the fiction - which is what you asserted. That's what I disagree with. I'm not very interested in whether or not you like it - that's a biographical fact about one RPGer. I'm talking about RPG design. And I'm also responding to the (unwarranted) imputation that my game is inconsistent in it's fiction.

Lanefan said:
Mechanics are absolute values, not relative.

As a description, that's obviously false - 4e is a counterexample.

As a design preference, whatever. That's what you enjoy, so play AD&D or 3E or 5e or whatever floats your boat. That doesn't mean that people who are using different systems are playing games with incoherent fiction.

Lanefan said:
It occurs to me also that if monsters are morphing to suit the PCs in front of them that's probably contributing to the already-too-steep power curve in 4e: low-level things that could still be a mild threat become basically none at all once minionized; while high-level things that might be handled by a low-level party become impossible once elite-ized.

This is why I say that you are not looking at things fiction first.

When you say "could still be a mild threat", how do you know? I am telling you - I know from the fiction that an ogre is no threat to a mid-paragon knight. Hence I stat the ogre as a minion. Likewise I know from the fiction that a town guard has no chance to survive a fight with a pit fiend.

That's what it means to play a RPG fiction first. The shared fiction tells us what is feasible; then we use appropriate mechanics to model this.

Lanefan said:
even Sir Lancelot should have to worry about being dogpiled by a gang of Ogres just due to sheer numbers.

Twenty minions might threaten a single PC. A gargantuan elite swarm might threaten a single PC. This isn't rocket science - I've even given (repeated) examples (hobgoblin phalanxes, flights of vrocks).

Lanefan said:
If the mechanics aren't consistent then the fiction isn't either.

<snip>

It has everything to do with the internal consistency of both the fiction and the game.

And again, this is what I'm objecting to. Just because you don't like the system doesn't mean that it produces inconsistent fiction. What is inconsistent about a dwarf fighter of 4th level being able to (just) beat a hogbolin chief in hand-to-hand combat; and then at mid-paragon (around 15th level) being able to defeat a phalanx of hobgoblins?

Answer: nothing.

What's the real number of hobgoblins a 15th level fighter can defeat? Answer: the question makes no sense. You can play mechanics first; or you can play fiction first. The former doesn't produce true answers, though. It's just a different approach.

(Your hockey game example just reiterates the confusion of mechanics and fiction. People win hockey games, and win battles, by doing things with their bodies, not by having other people roll dice and record numbers on bits of paper. Here's a better analogy: there may be some people who get confused by the fact that a day can be both 86 degrees and 30 degrees; but most people recognise that it's possible to use more than one scale (different numbers, and different separations of temperature between the numbers) to measure temperature. Likewise there may be some RPGers who get confused by the fact that sometimes the ogre is said to have 100 hp and sometimes said to have 1 hp; but many can recognise that a different mechanical framework (adjusting the defences, the to hit and damage, the hp, etc, so as to hold the overall toughness constant while generating the desired gameplay and fiction) can be used depending on context.)

EDIT:

Lanefan said:
pemerton said:

The world in 4e is constant. As I've said, it's a type of mechanics fetishism to assume that you can't represent a consistent world while changing the combat stats for an ogre.

Click to expand...

One of those sentences is a lie, because they are in direct contradiction and thus cannot both be true.

Seriously? Now you think I'm lying?

I'll repeat: the world is constant. A hobgoblin soldier is a hobgoblin soldier - tougher than a town guard, but not heaps tougher. A 15th level fighter can tackle a phalanx of them. How do I know? From the fiction - that's what it means to be a mid-paragon fighter, and the toughest dwarf around. Mechanically, how do I set up this situation: I write up a 15th level hobgoblin phalanx as a swarm. (It can even absorb an adjacent hobgoblin minion to heal, and leave behind some minions when defeated - cute design in my opinion.)

Lanefan said:
If the same ogre has one set of stats against these guys and another set of stats against those guys then it - and by extension the game world it inhabits - is not constant.

It's not mechanics fetishism (which seems to be your favourite phrase today). Mechanics absolutism, perhaps.

I'll let you explain the differecne between "absolutism" and "fetishism" in this context. But your claim is wrong. The stats of an ogre aren't measurements of anything. They're a gameplay device. A different set of devices can be used to resolve action declarations involving the very same ogre.

You don't like it. That doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

Lanefan said:
They all have stats no matter what.

Says who? Qv mechanics fetishism.

Lanefan said:
a novel author only has to answer to him-herself. An RPG has to answer to everyone at the table; and this demands a much greater level of mechanical consistency in order that everyone's playing the same game and can get a handle on what's going on.

(1) This is bizarre - a novelist doesn't have to have any mechanical consistency. There are no mechanics involved in writing a novel.

(2) Do you think that everyone at my 4e table couldn't get a handle on what was going on when they fought hobgoblin phalanxes? I was there, and I can tell you that they could.

Lanefan said:
a novel author uses imagination to determine what happens and his-her own words to describe it. An RPG uses a combination of imagination and mechanics to determine what happens and then quite often several people's not-always-agreeing words to describe it.

And do you think that my table had any trouble using the mechanics to work out what happened when the mid-paragon warriors engaged the hobgoblin phalanxes? The mechanics were crystal clear.

Lanefan said:
a novel author has the huge advantage of knowing how things will end up before writing what comes earlier. An RPG rarely if ever has this level of certainty

And what makes you think this was any different in my 4e game? This is a complete non-sequitur. 4e's combat resolution system can resolve a combat involving a solo, a standard creature, a minion or a swarm. It's versatile like that!

Lanefan said:
Viewed through the lens of 'consistent fiction backed by absolute mechanics', it's not a misdescription at all. It's simply taking the mechanics as presented and extrapolating them to the non-PC-facing rest of the game world.

That's just ridiculous. It's like me complaining that you're wrong when you tell me its 86 degrees because I refuse to acknowledge that you're using degrees F and not degrees C.

It would be like complaining that, in 5e, armour makes you easier to hit because it makes your AC number higher rather than lower.

Everyone knows that degrees F is measured in different numbers that scale at a different rate (relative to temperature) than degrees C. Everyone knows that in 5e AC goes up, not down, as it gets better. And everyone knows that in 4e the hp of an ogre correlate to the in-fiction relation of prowess between the ogre and its foe.

There is no "viewed through the lens". I can't view 5e AC "through the lens" of AD&D. That would just make me a silly person. There is no viewing degrees C "through the lens" of degrees F. Primary school students learn that. And there is no viewing of 4e "through the lens" of "mechanics absolutism". That's not how the system works. It's incoherent and frankly a bit puerile.

Lanefan · Nov 18, 2018

Aldarc said:
Minionization does not strike me as odd or inconsistent with notions of in-game naturalism. It's not as if humans have the same stats in this world. Some humans take more or less hits to go down in this same universe.

Yes. But any one given human usually takes about the same amount of punishment before going down, and usually reacts to pain in a consistent way, and usually has roughly the same "stats" (str-int-wis-etc.) from one day to the next. None of these things change based solely on whether that person is confronted by an angry kitten or by an angry tiger. The same applies to all creatures...and by logical extension should thus apply to all creatures in the fantasy world as well.

Not all NPCs are heroes. Not all NPCs have classes. Game Master adjust the stats of creatures all the time consistently in inconsistent ways. Minions are simply one method for GMs to adjust the stats of monsters to reflect different monster strengths.

GMs adjust things, sure. But once those adjustments are done and something's locked in about a particular creature it stays that way as an absolute value unless something in the fiction changes it. (e.g. an Ogre with strength 19 will always have strength 19 until and unless it gets hit by a ray of enfeeblement which knocks it down to 15 for a while, or until and unless it eats a bad bit of meat and gets sick for a few days)

This sort of thing then runs into the same argument surrounding GMs who change the opponents' h.p. on the fly in mid-combat because the fight's turned out too easy or too hard - which also invalidates the setting's consistency in a bunch of bad ways.

Manbearcat · Nov 18, 2018

Garthanos said:
See mechanics first

It seems, in this discussion, people keep smuggling in “HP are meat”, likely even unbeknownst to them.

We’re likely having a stealth “HP are/n’t meat” discussion with the Minion conversation.

HPs aren’t fiction. They aren’t physics. They aren’t absolute.

They’re just a proxy for “staying (relevant) power” for things in the fiction. Kind of like the guy who is severely outclassed on the weekend basketball game. He shows up, gets crushed, leaves, never returns.

Minions, like him, don’t have much staying power.

Garthanos · Nov 18, 2018

Manbearcat said:
It seems, in this discussion, people keep smuggling in “HP are meat”, likely even unbeknownst to them.

We’re likely having a stealth “HP are/n’t meat” discussion with the Minion conversation.

LOL nothing stealthy about it ... tis there

Manbearcat said:
HPs aren’t fiction. They aren’t physics. They aren’t absolute.

They’re just a proxy for “staying (relevant) power” for things in the fiction. Kind of like the guy who is severely outclassed on the weekend basketball game. He shows up, gets crushed, leaves, never returns.

Minions, like him, don’t have much staying power.

Some people like authority... its not just staying power, Mearls refers to it as narrative staying power ie story driven.

pemerton · Nov 18, 2018

Lanefan said:
So if I'm reading this right, a 4e DM isn't supposed to design encounters or stats or DCs neutrally and impartially?

How the heck does one possibly run a proper sandbox site-and-exploration-based campaign in 4e if that's the case?

And how the heck is anyone supposed to write and publish a mass-market 4e adventure module without first knowing the players and-or PCs that'll be playing through it at every table?

Plenty of people have run sandbox 4e. They just don't use minions in the way we've been discussing in this thread. (Woah! Who would have thought that 4e could be modular too?)

I personally don't think 4e is terribly well suited for that sort of RPGing - I think it doesn't get the best in the system. But it's no skin of my nose if others want to play 4e games like that.

As to whether there can be 4e modules - plenty were published (and many of them featured minions and solos). I don't think many were terribly good, but for that reason I didn't use them. Selling modules is probably important for WotC's commercial success; it's irrelevant to whether or not I want to run a game using the system.

I think 4e works best for scene-framing play, which makes maximum use of its strong features such as a focus on the encounter as the site of drama, and skill challenges as a non-combat resolution system, and also draws on the rich cosmology which is there in the default fiction. In that sort of play there is no "neutrality" in framing situations. To quote from Paul Czege:

"Scene framing" is a very different mental process for me. Tim asked if scene transitions were delicate. They aren't. Delicacy is a trait I'd attach to "scene extrapolation," the idea being to make scene initiation seem an outgrowth of prior events, objective, unintentional, non-threatening, but not to the way I've come to frame scenes in games I've run recently. . . .

[W]hen I'm framing scenes, and I'm in the zone, I'm turning a freakin' firehose of adversity and situation on the character. It is not an objective outgrowth of prior events. It's intentional as all get out.

The idea isn't to create a "neutral" puzzle for the players to solve. It's to present a situation that will force consequence-laden choices, where the consequences are significant not as moments of resource depletion, or mechanical failure, but because of what happens in the fiction and why the players (as their PCs) care about that.

pemerton · Nov 18, 2018

Manbearcat said:
It seems, in this discussion, people keep smuggling in “HP are meat”, likely even unbeknownst to them.

That's an aspect of it. How can the ogre's hit points change - its bodyweight hasn't!

There's also the failure to engage with what AC means. In D&D AC and hp overlap a lot (a 5e barbarian has hp - high meat - and AC based on CON - more meat doing a different mechanical job). 4e trades the two off to support playabilitty, combining a traditional D&D scaling (contrast eg DW or BW with less D&D-style scaling) with a DW-like focus on keeping success chances in a good place.

Offensive ability is the same: to hit, damage, and attacks-per-round are all different mechanical features that (collectively) represent a single property of a creature, namely, its ability to lay its opponents low.

As I understand it - and certainly in genre fiction - skilled combatants can take down multiple unskilled foes (eg me and my clones) easily, while they might need all their effort to deal with a single foe of equal prowess. So why is a 5e fighter (of whatever level) unable to strike more blows against puny kobolds than mighty giants? Dunno - except that the system builds this into the fighter's hp resilience, so that s/he can stand longer against the goblins than giants, thereby taking them down - so it's a bit like the familiar trope except under a weird time dilation.

AD&D/5e doesn't hve the only mechanical solution to this, and the one actually chosen doesn't do a terribly good job of emulating either genre or (as I understand it) reality. That 4e is flagged as less consistent is, to me, a sign of fetishising the AD&D mechanics.

D&D 4E Mike Mearls on how D&D 4E could have looked

pemerton

Legend

Lanefan

Victoria Rules

Lanefan

Victoria Rules

Garthanos

Arcadian Knight

pemerton

Legend

Lanefan

Victoria Rules

Manbearcat

Legend

Garthanos

Arcadian Knight

pemerton

Legend

pemerton

Legend

Similar Threads

Related Articles