D&D 4E In Defense of 4E - a New Campaign Perspective

Teflonknight · Jan 28, 2019

It was the DM’s choice to make the miners minions. Also there is nothing in 4e’s rules that ever required the use of minions. The DMG had a conversion guide so that you could convert to regular monsters. The use of minions in 4e, as with many rules in other versions, is completely optional.

The Crimson Binome · Jan 28, 2019

Immortal Sun said:
Well, then don't.

Don't what? Ever remove those NPCs from the one specific context where their stats make sense? Because that's easier said than done. It's not like I have any control over who the players fight, befriend, or engage in friendly sparring with.

Immortal Sun said:
This is all very good and corner-casey and all, but you essentially have two extremely niche examples here, one of which can be summed up as "This one time we did a thing and it didn't turn out like I expected and I didn't like it."

I strongly disagree. It may seem like a corner case, but it's extremely indicative of typical play. It's important to have stats that work well in different contexts, because you never know when those stats will come up. It's the same reason why published modules will give entire stat blocks for shopkeepers who probably won't ever get in a fight.

Imaro · Jan 28, 2019

Zardnaar said:
I think the no RP thing is more due to the combat length. For example in a four hour session we might do three or four combats plus rp explore etc.

In 4E those 3 or 4 encounters would eat up the whole session leaving no time for anything else. So you either had to reduce the encounters or split the adventuring day over 2 or more sessions IRL.

Alot of that was due to hit point bloat, debuffs and a relative lack of nukes to speed up combat.

I don't think it was intended kind of like the testers played 3.0 like 2E vs how it was percieved to be used. It's not that you can't RP in 4E but depending on hoow you run the combats/structure the game you might not have time.

If you spread what you could do in an older edition in one session over 2or 3 I don't see why 4E would be to different in regards to what you could do. If that doesn't work for you though that's a problem. Could even come down to how frequent your sessions are.

Yeah was just about to post something very similar to this about the roleplaying issues some had with 4e. It took me a while and some time reflecting on why my group and I weren't fans but I think alot of 4e's issues (at least for my group at the time) seem to stem from it's combat system. It really is a great system if you really enjoy intricate tactical grid-based miniature combat... if not 4e will probably leave you kind of cold.

The combat system really requires a level of engagement that I don't think any other edition requires...and combat takes so long that if you don't particularly enjoy intricate tactical grid-based miniature combat (or don't necessarily enjoy it as the main focus of your game) I don't really see how you can enjoy 4e. For my group I had a couple of bad experiences that are related to 4e's combat...

1. I had a player who traditionally played fighters in 3e/3.5e that transitioned to 4e and absolutely hated playing a fighter in that edition. Granted I will readily admit he was the type of player who enjoyed keeping his choices simple and doing as much damage as possible... Great guy to game with and genuinely funny and enjoyable as a plyaer but not one who found enjoyment from constant engagement with the rules of the game. The problem was that 4e required him to make constant decisions in combat, something he didn't find particularly enjoyable. Eventually he ended up leaving our group and kind of drifting away from D&D.

2. How slow our game moved when we switched to 4e. We tried to get in 3-4 combats per game session as well as exploration and social interaction and we just found ourselves slogging through combat for the vast majority of our time. Now this could have been my fault as the DM for not realizing that I couldn;t run 4e as I had previous editions but in all honesty the game wasn't transparent about this change at all and so I tried to run games as I had previously since supposedly..."Ze game remained ze same."

3. D&D Encounters... worst experience I and some of my players had as an introduction/maybe we're not doing it right so we should check out an official game experience. It was a couple combats strung together with minimal interaction, little to no exploration and often new players struggling with the powers on their pre-gen. Just not a good experience.

Eymerald · Jan 29, 2019

I love 4e, its a love thats pure and rare. 4e we know your legends real, 4e we know your love is real.

The Crimson Binome · Jan 29, 2019

Xeviat said:
Every time I see people complain about combat taking forever, part of me says "that's what I liked about 4E". Combat should be meaningful.

It's odd that you'd mention that, because 4E combat is rarely meaningful. No matter how badly a fight goes, you're going to be back near full HP for the next fight, and good as new by the next day. It would have been my biggest complaint about 4E, except for all of the other stuff, and the fact that combat is equally meaningless in 5E.

bert1000 · Jan 29, 2019

Saelorn said:
Not really, no. The only thing a low-level NPC has in common with a minion is that they can die from one attack. In almost every way that matters, a low-level NPC is different. For one thing, even if they have 4hp, they can survive the little bumps and bruises that we pick up in our daily lives. For another thing, their relative durability is based on factors that actually exist within the game world, rather than a meta-game descriptor of their relative importance to the narrative.

Minions work fairly well, in the context where many of them are facing off against the PCs in combat. The further you take them away from that context, the less sense they make.
As I said, the weakest possible PC has like 13hp, and a level 1 goblin has 25. The way these miners were described, they should have been tougher than that. They may even have been dwarves. Even if they were level 1 standard NPCs, their numbers should have been enough to turn the tide of combat; but since they had an invisible 'minion' flag, they all died meaningless deaths.

There was absolutely no way, whatsoever, for our characters to know that they were minions. If they were minions, it's improbable that they would have survived so long in an open mine. They would have stubbed a toe, or been stung by a bee, or fallen victim to any of a million other things that deal the minimum possible damage. The fact that they were still alive should have been proof enough that they weren't minions.

Of course, the same could be said of any minion. A level 21 giant minion could not feasibly have survived to adulthood without taking a point of damage at some point along the way. Treating minions as an objective aspect of a persistent reality is an exercise in futility.

I don't think you are playing 4e in good faith here. I think your original point was that you prefer simulationist rules because it 's easier for you to understand what's possible and not possible from the ruleset. Fair enough.

However, 4e rules help create play that emulates genre fiction. Period. They are not designed for you to intuit likelihood of dying from toe stubbing, and of course using them that way is futile.

There is no such thing as a "minion" outside the context of fighting heroic characters and monsters in encounters. The rules don't try to simulate accidentally hitting your head on a mine ceiling or stubbing your toe. When the miner is going about his daily business, he just is, governed by the abstract "rules" of the setting norms. Do miners survive toe stubbing in this universe, then yes they do.

This doesn't mean you can't have any clue about how the world works or work up cool plans. In this world, could you expect a group of miners to take on drow and be anything more than redshirts? You could ask the DM about this from your character's perspective. The DM should make the call based on the parameters of the fictional universe. DM: "The miners might help if in enough numbers but you know the drow are powerful and would probably cut them down easily. You might be leading them to their deaths." [make them minions] Or not, maybe they can help substantially as the drow of this world aren't that strong. Then the DM shouldn't make them minions.

Saelorn said:
Minions work fairly well, in the context where many of them are facing off against the PCs in combat.

There is no other context. Minion status is just the underlying mechanic to emulate outclassed foes that get mowed down easily by superior opposition in tactical combat encounters. It means nothing else and shouldn't be used for anything else.

If you approach the game under it's own umbrella it works much smoother.

Teemu · Jan 29, 2019

Saelorn said:
It's odd that you'd mention that, because 4E combat is rarely meaningful. No matter how badly a fight goes, you're going to be back near full HP for the next fight, and good as new by the next day. It would have been my biggest complaint about 4E, except for all of the other stuff, and the fact that combat is equally meaningless in 5E.

But what happens when you're down to 0-1 surges, and the party has yet to make their way out of the enemy territory to safety?

pemerton · Jan 29, 2019

On minions: AD&D and Moldvay Basic are full of characters (mostly NPCs, kobolds, etc, but maybe some PCs depending on what rule is being used for 1st level hp rolls) who have 1 hp. Yet have survived to adulthood, don't die from stubbing their toes, etc. I don't see why a minion ogre or whatever is a special case in this respect.

(Also, upthread [MENTION=29013]bert1000[/MENTION] and I think [MENTION=83242]dave2008[/MENTION] gave good accounts of the "relativistic" nature of minion stats.)

On combat and roleplaying: here are two links to actual play reports about how combat and roleplaying were intertwined! Woah - minds blown! (More seriously: Stan Lee noticed this possibility, ie of combining fisticuffs with character conflict and development, 50-something years ago.)

The Crimson Binome · Jan 29, 2019

bert1000 said:
I don't think you are playing 4e in good faith here. I think your original point was that you prefer simulationist rules because it 's easier for you to understand what's possible and not possible from the ruleset. Fair enough.

However, 4e rules help create play that emulates genre fiction. Period. They are not designed for you to intuit likelihood of dying from toe stubbing, and of course using them that way is futile.

There's a difference between playing in good faith, and playing to design intent. You can't blame anyone for not playing in good faith, when they bought the books and spent a year of their life trying to make sense of rules that seemed to defy all logic.

For many people, 4E represented an entirely new type of game, which they'd never seen before. Previous editions all worked by process simulation. Even competitors, like Palladium Fantasy and GURPS, were much the same. How would anyone even know to treat 4E as a genre-emulation engine, if they'd never encountered one before?

bert1000 said:
This doesn't mean you can't have any clue about how the world works or work up cool plans. In this world, could you expect a group of miners to take on drow and be anything more than redshirts? You could ask the DM about this from your character's perspective. The DM should make the call based on the parameters of the fictional universe.

Based on everything I'd seen of the world, the dwarves should have been able to hold their own, for at least a few rounds, with the PCs as a deciding factor that let them prevail. I guess I should have stopped and explicitly asked the DM whether or not they were minions? That's not something I would ever have considered. In any other game, that would be meta-gaming.

bert1000 said:
If you approach the game under it's own umbrella it works much smoother.

It would have been more helpful if that umbrella had been labelled, so I'd known what to expect. Labelling it as D&D was mis-leading, since that label was already well-established for a series of process-sim RPGs.

Zardnaar · Jan 29, 2019

pemerton said:
On minions: AD&D and Moldvay Basic are full of characters (mostly NPCs, kobolds, etc, but maybe some PCs depending on what rule is being used for 1st level hp rolls) who have 1 hp. Yet have survived to adulthood, don't die from stubbing their toes, etc. I don't see why a minion ogre or whatever is a special case in this respect.

(Also, upthread [MENTION=29013]bert1000[/MENTION] and I think [MENTION=83242]dave2008[/MENTION] gave good accounts of the "relativistic" nature of minion stats.)

On combat and roleplaying: here are two links to actual play reports about how combat and roleplaying were intertwined! Woah - minds blown! (More seriously: Stan Lee noticed this possibility, ie of combining fisticuffs with character conflict and development, 50-something years ago.)

Its more things like Ogres and other higher levelthings. an AD&D Ogre would have 4 hp minimum and that Ogre would be 1 in 4000 odd Ogres.

I don't expect D&D to be a hard core simulationist game but it can't be a hard core whatever 4E was trying either. Minions didn't overly bother me but I only used them in things like Goblins and Kobolds at low level.