Confirm or Deny: D&D4e would be going strong had it not been titled D&D

Zak S said:

An ideal stake (in terms of creating tension for the player) is one where one of the outcomes is dull or otherwise feels like a punishment to be avoided.

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Ah, okay, that makes sense. I guess I'd add a third option to that----"or has ramifications in the gameworld fiction that emotionally connects the player to the outcome."

I've definitely had visceral reactions to a character dying because it meant a villain succeeded, and I experienced a vicarious emotion for what would happen in the fiction as a result.

(Edit: Apparently I missed [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]'s excellent posts clarifying the same thing. My apologies, [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]!)

innerdude said:

Hmmm, your point about murderhoboing is well taken; a level 6 murderhobo is certainly a more effective murderhobo than a level 1 one.

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Effective or not, it's still a character with not only accumulated gear and ability, but also one with a name and a personality. And contra some interpretations of the now-disproven original GNS theory, you can care about "beating" scenarios AND what your character is like AND the direction of their fate all at once.

And this may be felt more keenly if your particular interest is gamist/Gygaxian skilled play. But that's by far the easiest hurdle to cross to get back into the scope of play---"Don't start my new character at a lower level, and give me equivalent magic items."

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Yes, but if you're interested in challenge you wouldn't WANT to alter the rules that way. You want dying to be a thing that causes real loss. (Real: you lose the ability to play a game in a certain way at a certain time-no more playing Gorg the veteran 6th level rhino-rider, now you have a new role as Ghork the Third, pony-owner.)

There is what you'd call "gamist" failure --Mario restarts at level 1. But until you take off the ONLY G/ ONLY N / ONLY S blinkers you aren't realizing that a level 6 murderhobo is not a mere echanical pawn to most players, even the most tactical ones. It is a character (in the full sense) with goals and which is interesting in itself.

You lose a whole fictional invention. Like taking a drawing you made and not only burning it, but vowing never to redraw and build on it.

A character is always a work in progress, and the uses to which a character can be put are not constrained day to day.

For example, Connie's character Gypsillia is the murderhoboest of murderhoboes. She's half-elf and can't even remember half what kind of elf half the time. She plays to win, or to start trouble, and has no long term goals. But she is also loved, she is drawn and redrawn on countless character sheets.

She wears a helmet made from a dead pig's head, she's going to be tattooed on the players thigh. She is an idea that the player likes to think about. This character is 5 or 6 years old. She has a storied history and connections to other PCs. She has a unicorn, she has a role in the group, she has in-jokes.

And taking her away would be a real loss, not a fictional loss. How? Like this:

If I go "You can't play D&D anymore" that's a real loss. A kind of game is closed to you.

If I go "You can't play X specific character anymore" I have described a narrower, smaller, but still real loss because each unique character is a way of playing the game, almost a new game in iteelf.

Just as saying to an actor "you can't be in Hamlet ever again" is a real loss, so is saying "You can't play Guildenstern in Hamlet any more, no matter how much you like it". Taking away a character is
real.

And "murderhoboes" are as real as any other character to the people who play them, even if you exist at such a remove from this playstyle that they all seem the same to you.

Okay, so going back to post 630, using Outcome #3 as a baseline (character fails, and cannot continue playing the current character role), which is a more interesting stake to the player?

1. PC fights an evil wizard, and in the course of play dies in combat.
2. PC fights evil wizard, and in the course of play surrenders, convincing the wizard that if (s)he becomes the wizard's slave, the wizard gets what he wants, and it prevents some truly awful consequences in the fiction.

The end result to the player is the same---"failure" to defeat the challenge, and an inability to continue playing the character.

But which one is the better "stake"?

Or is this something of a misnomer, because by convincing the wizard, it actually constitutes a "success"?

innerdude said:

Okay, so going back to post 630, using Outcome #3 as a baseline (character fails, and cannot continue playing the current character role), which is a more interesting stake to the player?

1. PC fights an evil wizard, and in the course of play dies in combat.
2. PC fights evil wizard, and in the course of play surrenders, convincing the wizard that if (s)he becomes the wizard's slave, the wizard gets what he wants, and it prevents some truly awful consequences in the fiction.

The end result to the player is the same---"failure" to defeat the challenge, and an inability to continue playing the character.

But which one is the better "stake"?

Or is this something of a misnomer, because by convincing the wizard, it actually constitutes a "success"?

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Depends what the player wants/likes.

If we assume a traditional player, in both cases the PC is removed from play (dies or "becomes an NPC" as Gygax so often put it in this sort of situation) and the end result is basically the same for them -- be frustrated, roll a new one.

If we assume a player who is invested in pushing the narrative in interesting directions, the second one might be worse (because the "awful consequences" would've been interesting) or better (because that's a satisfying, if tragic, end to that PC's story).

I am simply saying the first kind of player both exists and has a motive that is more complex emotionally and in terms of game design than people who don't play that way generally give them credit for.

innerdude said:

Okay, so going back to post 630, using Outcome #3 as a baseline (character fails, and cannot continue playing the current character role), which is a more interesting stake to the player?

1. PC fights an evil wizard, and in the course of play dies in combat.
2. PC fights evil wizard, and in the course of play surrenders, convincing the wizard that if (s)he becomes the wizard's slave, the wizard gets what he wants, and it prevents some truly awful consequences in the fiction.

The end result to the player is the same---"failure" to defeat the challenge, and an inability to continue playing the character.

But which one is the better "stake"?

Or is this something of a misnomer, because by convincing the wizard, it actually constitutes a "success"?

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I think 1 is a much bigger stake. The second allows you to continue playing your character and takes the campaign in a whole new direction, so from my point of view as a player, I haven't lost anything, I've gained new momentum. But if I die, my guy is gone.

I certainly think the outcome of number 2 is interesting as a campaign development. But if you are using that as a replacement for death, rather than having both possibilities on the table, I think you are missing out.

I don't think it's ever fair to say "I think you're missing out" in the face of someone else's preference.

It is fair to ask them about their ideas and emotions and why they think they prefer that thing, but "I think you're missing out" is sort of cutting off your curiosity right when it reaches the point where it has something worth being curious about: a genuine difference.

Zak S said:

I don't think it's ever fair to say "I think you're missing out" in the face of someone else's preference.

It is fair to ask them about their ideas and emotions and why they think they prefer that thing, but "I think you're missing out" is sort of cutting off your curiosity right when it reaches the point where it has something worth being curious about: a genuine difference.

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It came out harsher and less clear than I intended. I was just trying to say for me personally, I consider it less fun if both possibilities are not on the table. I do recognize that for another person this may not be the case, that they might genuinely enjoy a game where outcome 2 is on the table but not outcome 1. I was also trying to make the point that I think there are people like me, who used to avoid outcome 1 like the plague, and don't realize the fun to be had with it.

Bedrockgames said:

I think what many of us are pointing out is that taking death off the table has somehow become common wisdom

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I'm not really sure who you're speaking to here.

No one in this thread has advocated taking death of the table. (In fact, [MENTION=85870]innerdude[/MENTION] made a point of explaining that it remains on the table in Savage Worlds.)

This whole digression onto character death arose because innerdude and I were comparing thoughts on how 4e and Savage Worlds, via their PC build mechanics + action resolution mechanics, push players to take their PCs into unanticipated sorts of places in the fiction - heroics when the player intended a non-heroic PC, or holding the front line when the PC is far from heavy infantry in capabilities, or a player throwing his/her CHA-dump PC with few social skills into the thick of a social situation because s/he doesn't like the direction the "face" PCs are taking it.

In that context, I said (post 581) in relation to the latter two sorts of occurrence that:


My comment has nothing to do with whether or not PC death should be on or off the table, or makes for a good stake. On the latter, I think [MENTION=90370]Zak S[/MENTION] has given a good account of the power of PC death as a stake in a certain sort of game (from the outside, it sounds to me like a classic "skilled play" dungeon exploration game of the sort that Gygaxian AD&D and Moldvay Basic are aimed at - if I've got that wrong, I'm happy to be corrected). I've tried to explain why, in the sort of game that I like to play and run (from the inside, I would describe it as a game in which player identification with the PC is similar to the vicarious emotional experience to which dramatic fiction gives rise), PC death is not necessarily the ultimate or most powerful stake.

Going back to what innerdude and I were discussing: in a system in which the main, or at least ultimate, consequence of failed action resolution is PC death, two things follow. First, a player always has a reason to try and engage the ingame situation using his/her PC's best ability; second, if a player (due to rationing, or misadventure, or whatever) finds him-/herself engaging the ingame situation using a PC's weak ability, something has probably gone wrong. The upshot of these two things is that skilled players try hard to avoid (or at least manage the occurrence of) situations in which those weak abilities have to be used.

For instance, in Moldvay Basic if a MU PC ends up in melee, something has probably gone wrong. Good player recognise that sometimes even the MU might end up in melee, when all else fails, but they try to avoid those situations. And when they realise that such a situation can't be avoided, they try to manage it as sensibly as they can.

In a system in which failed action resolution doesn't necessarily mean PC death, or getting closer to PC death, then even if it remains true that a player always has a reason to try and bring his/her PC's best ability to bear (which generally remains the case in 4e), it doesn't follow that if some weaker ability is being used then things have gone wrong. Once outcomes other than PC death are on the table and highly salient, the reason a player has to deploy his/her PC's best ability can easily be overridden by other reasons to do with the fictional situation and the possible outcomes in the fiction. (Those other reasons will only arise if the player is sufficiently emotionally invested in the fiction to care about that range of outcomes. Hence my comparison, upthread, to dramatic fiction.)

It's possible for a system to go even further in this second direction by taking away the reason that players have to always bring their best abilities to bear. Burning Wheel does that, because its advancement system requires players to take on tasks that they can't succeed at - so a player has a reason not to always use a skill at the maximum bonus it could be used at.
[MENTION=85870]innerdude[/MENTION], how is Savage Worlds in this respect - do players ever have a reason to avoid bringing their full bonus to bear even if they could?

tomBitonti said:

4E rather took away much of the link between hit points and death.

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I'd probably replace "much" with "some", but otherwise I think this is right.

In 4e, hit point loss is much more about pacing and the tide of battle. In mechanical terms, hit point loss drives choices around resource deployment and action declaration; in fictional terms, this feeds into issues of risk, bravado, mutual support and cooperation vs going solo, etc.

pemerton said:

@innerdude, how is Savage Worlds in this respect - do players ever have a reason to avoid bringing their full bonus to bear even if they could?

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Hmmm, good question.

In terms of "hard" mechanics, no. There's no player-driven resource/feat that explicitly gives a player an incentive to mechanically play against type.

However, Savage GMs are highly encouraged directly in the rules to reward "good" or "interesting" play with bennies---playing against type, using a less-than-optimized skill because the fiction/scene calls for it, interjecting yourself into a conversation, taking a major risk for a team member. They can then use a bennie for any of its default uses --- reroll a single action, activate an edge, soak a wound, etc.

In the same vein, PCs broad capabilities in a number of areas makes a difference in the available actions. In 3e, most of the time it seems like players have an Option A, a distant Option B, and an even further distant Option C.

In Savage Worlds it's more along the lines of Option A, Option A-, Option B+, and Option B. For example, say a fighter-type character specializing in two handed weapons gets cut off from melee due to a poor tactical choice by the player for 2 or 3 rounds.

Depending on the character build, he or she could still try and distract the opponent (taunt), throw an obstacle in the way to affect terrain (agility trick), throw a weapon (unlike D&D of ANY variety, ranged/thrown weapons in Savage Worlds are highly, highly viable combat styles. In fact, someone who specialized in ranged, thrown weapons in a fantasy campaign would be downright deadly), make a combat tactics check to see if there's a way to gain a tactical advantage, make a running/movement check to try and get into position to give another player a gang-up bonus, even if they can't engage themselves (it's much, much easier to get a gang-up bonus in SW than it is to flank in D&D).

All of these are available to pretty much every character with even a minimal investment for their character build. And none of them require an edge/feat (though a character can take an edge to become even better at something through specialization).