D&D 5E D&DN going down the wrong path for everyone.

Ratskinner · Apr 3, 2013

AbdulAlhazred said:
Yeah, I'm not so sure about that... I think when you take people who've spent years playing classic D&D and drop FATE on them, yeah, they tend to be pretty lost. Give FATE or some simpler equivalent to some kids? They'll go crazy with that, they only need 5 minutes of coaching to get the idea. I have found that adults who haven't played RPGs before also find it quite natural.

That's very true. I'm just not sure how much of an audience (as in regularly paying audience) there is outside of people who have already tapped into D&D or any number of computer rpgs (which generally follow D&D's lines in this regard.)

AbdulAlhazred said:
I don't either, but 2 round fights can't generate any real tension, preclude even the most basic tactics, and impede the framing of cinematic scenes because what's the point of all the running around and using the scenery, etc. when clearly the trivial response is to just kill everything dead since it will clearly be <snippage>

I think what you're talking about here is just a difference in dramatic scope. That is, any ongoing story (like a campaign or TV series) has to go through repeated cycles of building up story threads to climaxes, discovering the next thread, etc. I think they are taking that research as indicating that most of the audience doesn't want that cycle to be contained within a single fight. That is to say, a fight may be the climax, but every fight doesn't need to have a climax. I think a good system should handle both well, but I don't think that fits well with D&D's (any edition) core mechanics out-of-the-box. That's one of those things that DM's seem to figure out how to finagle over time. Then of course there's also those that don't want any such "meta" plotting at all. They're ambivalent about whether or not a fight plays out with tension or not and resent that kind of manipulation (rationally or not).

AbdulAlhazred said:
I mean, if you want a game where you stay in STORY mode, what would possibly be better than a FATE-like narrative agenda storytelling system? I know D&D is never going over to the dark side entirely, but 4e certainly demonstrated how you can walk a line between the two successfully. That sort of design can easily be re-worked in a lighter-weight form. So much promise but so little delivery!

FATE is my personal system of choice, for pretty much these reasons. In comparison, I don't or rather didn't find that 4e was all that successful as a narrative game. (Probably more so than previous editions.) Having discussed it on various thread with [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] and co., I can see that it might have more potential in that regard than I gave it credit for (or that it managed to convey in its initial releases.)

pemerton · Apr 3, 2013

[MENTION=58197]Dausuul[/MENTION], the proven technology for delivering both is multiple resolution systems - simple and complex. Burning Wheel uses this approach. So does HeroWars/Quest. So do various 4e hacks that use skill challenges or something similar for quick-and-dirty fights.

This can be hard to implement in a traditional D&D system, though, because it requires allowing a single set of ingame events to be modelled by two different resolution systems - with the choice of system depending on metagame context, not ingame considerations. That could be pretty controversial. Though I was just reading 2nd ed Combat & Tactics for the first time, and it has a system a bit like this for duelling, so there is at least than one pre-4e-precedent for the two parallel resolution options.

Ratskinner · Apr 3, 2013

pemerton said:
I remember @LostSoul posting something similar to this, last year (?) - that he was finding a lot of players don't want to have to make real choices in RPGing, but want the GM to make the choices for them.

It might well be true - I've certainly played with this sort of player, though I think the causation is a bit chicken/egg - by which I mean the desires perhaps can be the product of a certain GMing style, as much as the reason for it, and take them into a different style and they can enjoy exercising a bit of authority. (As I was typing this I see the AbdulAlhazred made a similar point in his post.)

(I have a pet theory that part of the popularity of baroque PC gen rules are that these are one domain where even AD&D 2nd ed conventions tend to permit players to exercise authority with comparatively little GM oversight or override.)

Its very hard to tell. Especially with the rise of computer rpgs, people get exposed to the idea or rpgs much earlier and much more universally than when I was a kid. As we talked about before, I'm increasingly skeptical of Edward's theory of that great untapped narrative gamer market. (Its there. I'm a part of it, but I'm not sure its either "great" or "untapped".)

pemerton said:
And again, as I've been typing, I see a couple of posters have made a similar point.

...happens to the best of us.

Dausuul · Apr 3, 2013

pemerton said:
@Dausuul, the proven technology for delivering both is multiple resolution systems - simple and complex. Burning Wheel uses this approach. So does HeroWars/Quest. So do various 4e hacks that use skill challenges or something similar for quick-and-dirty fights.

I agree that this is the obvious solution, but I'm not convinced it's the best one. It draws far too much attention to the metagame during play, and it's very difficult to design a dual combat system in which the choice between "simple" and "complex" does not significantly affect the likelihood of victory. That's the sort of thing that would wreck immersion for me, and I think for a lot of people. Yes, there are precedents in D&D, but there's a reason those precedents never made it out of the optional sourcebooks and into the core.

I'd say a more promising avenue would be to focus on the opponents rather than the combat rules. The one way I found to make skirmish fights work in 4E was to rely heavily on minions. So, design "skirmishers" and "bosses," where skirmishers have high damage-to-hp ratios (in other words, they hit hard but die easy) and simple abilities, and bosses have low damage-to-hp ratios and complex abilities that change over the course of combat. Then skirmishes and boss fights will arise naturally depending on what type of monsters you put in. D&DN has already taken some steps down this road, but I think there's room for a lot more.

Nemesis Destiny · Apr 3, 2013

I wanted to touch upon some points that were made earlier in the thread, namely 1) that WotC "ruined" the lore of D&D, and 2) that the hype leading up to 4th had people excited for a big let-down.

Point 1, is highly subjective. I get that for some people, it is a form of sacred cow, but for me, and probably others, the lore of traditional D&D is inconsequential. I don't play FR, I don't read FR, so I don't care one whit about it. I was completely well and truly shocked by the changes they made and thought to myself at the time that it was going to go over like a lead balloon, and for the most part that is precisely what happened. It was far more contentious a change that even the Time of Troubles (which was controversial as it is).

So they probably should have left FR alone. I get that they wanted a way to introduce dragonborn and tieflings and all their other fluff changes, but I think they should have adapted their game constructs to work within the flavour of the setting, rather than force the setting to adapt to rules changes. That's what I had to do in order to adapt the material to my ongoing campaign world, and it was actually pretty easy to the point where some of the 3e changes were harder. Though, to play devil's advocate, as a creative person, I recognize that sometimes in order to create, you have to destroy things first. Tends to piss off the fans though. *shrug*

As a final point, I actually prefer the fluff changes they made to the cosmology, since I don't much care for the traditional one. I really liked the implied setting in the 4e books. If I didn't already have a campaign I like, I'd use it. I will say though that even though I liked it, the hype material leading up to launch oversold these elements, which leads directly to my next point...

...that people were stoked for this product and then had a huge let-down when they finally saw it. I will say that I must have been in the minority then. By the end of 3.x I thoroughly hated the system, was beginning to hate D&D, and had a strong dislike growing for WotC. I felt betrayed by the promises of 3rd edition, and how they completely didn't work out for me. I wanted desperately to move on, to find a magic bullet that would "fix" all that was broken about the game and yet was still "D&D" enough to continue my campaign world. I looked to many different games and many different systems, but nothing had everything I wanted, and I certainly didn't want to give WotC any more of my money, because after all, 4e is a cartoonish game of dragonboobies, emo devil-people, and video-boardgamey tactical nonsense.

I downloaded the intentionally leaked printer's copies of it, and had decided how awful it was without actually playing it. It couldn't possibly be any good with those races in the core, and no bard, but WARLOCKS?!? Awful, just awful. One of our group though, wanted to at least try it out. I agreed that the lead-up pdfs for settings & monsters looked really good, and he promised that he could run a game where the kind of flavour we wanted could work, but use the 4e engine. I was highly skeptical to say the least. I even picked the most annoying combo that I thought was possible - a tiefling warlock.

After only a few sessions we were sold. The game "reads like crap, plays like gold" was a new saying at our table. It had little to do with the DM - normally I can't stand his style, as its usually quite pretentious and dis-empowering to players (it still was, but the 4e rules actually gave us a semblance of "control" over our own fate). So I went in expecting a big let-down, and ended up getting really excited about it. It was because of all the changes they made, not despite them. WotC would have lost me as a customer had they continued to do the same old thing, and it was only because 4e was so different that I'm still a paying customer (DDI).

I know that I'm not every gamer, and probably in the minority here, but I felt that I should point out that sentiment about the 'changes' is far, far from universal.

billd91 · Apr 3, 2013

Nemesis Destiny said:
As a final point, I actually prefer the fluff changes they made to the cosmology, since I don't much care for the traditional one. I really liked the implied setting in the 4e books. If I didn't already have a campaign I like, I'd use it. I will say though that even though I liked it, the hype material leading up to launch oversold these elements, which leads directly to my next point...

<snip>

After only a few sessions we were sold. The game "reads like crap, plays like gold" was a new saying at our table. It had little to do with the DM - normally I can't stand his style, as its usually quite pretentious and dis-empowering to players (it still was, but the 4e rules actually gave us a semblance of "control" over our own fate). So I went in expecting a big let-down, and ended up getting really excited about it. It was because of all the changes they made, not despite them. WotC would have lost me as a customer had they continued to do the same old thing, and it was only because 4e was so different that I'm still a paying customer (DDI).

I know that I'm not every gamer, and probably in the minority here, but I felt that I should point out that sentiment about the 'changes' is far, far from universal.

I don't mind some cosmological changes. The metaphor of the astral sea was a pretty nice one.

But I'd have to venture that my experience is about the opposite of yours. I liked 3e up to the end (still do which is why I play PF) but I was interested to see what WotC would do with 4e since they'd been so successful with 3e. But the more I learned, the less I liked of it. When we finally got the materials, I thought that the books were very well laid out and there were some nice changes in presentation - in other words - the game read pretty well and clean from a rules standpoint (even if it didn't have the fantastic atmospheric text of 1e). One of my fellow players was totally stoked to play a Dragonborn paladin of Bahamut - he'd be wanting to do something along those lines ever since Dragonlance, I suppose.

And so we played. And several months later, after getting tired of the combat grind and dizzying array of fiddly powers, we ditched it in favor of other games including Star Wars Saga Edition and D&D 3.5. So for us, it read better than it played, enthusiasm was reasonably high at the outset and declined as we just didn't find the game supported the way we wanted to play.

AbdulAlhazred · Apr 3, 2013

Dausuul said:
There are two kinds of fights in D&D. There's the kind of fight you have where you walk into a 10x10 room and an orc is guarding a chest, and there's the kind of fight you have where you walk into a gargantuan throne room in the Abyss and Orcus is guarding the artifact that will suck all life from the world. Or, to put it another way, there are minor skirmishes and there are big boss fights. And what most of us want out of each type of fight is very, very different.

For a minor skirmish, two rounds is plenty. A skirmish doesn't need internal decision points; the main decision point is simply, "Do we have this fight or not?" Once that decision is made, everybody chooses their opening-round tactics and things are decided in 10-15 minutes of play time. This is typical of BD&D, 1E, and 2E combats, and to some extent 3E as well.

For a big boss fight, two rounds is far too short. The fight should be an Event, with the kind of narrative structure AbdulAlhazred describes above. There need to be multiple decision points, unexpected reversals, and fresh challenges midway through. This is what well-executed 4E combats are like.

The problem is that an adventure really wants both types of fights, and no edition to date has done this very well. The old-school editions were superb at allowing players to battle their way through labyrinths full of lurking beasties, but when you got to the giant monster at the heart of the maze, the final battle often fell flat (unless the DM cheated shamelessly, which a lot of us did). Conversely, 4E could deliver some truly epic clashes, but the labyrinth full of beasties didn't work at all--you simply can't give every little skirmish the epic-clash treatment. "Keep on the Shadowfell" was a perfect example. It was a 4E adventure designed with a pre-4E mentality, and while it had some very memorable boss fights *cough*Irontooth*cough*, most of the module consisted of a brain-numbing slog through endless minor encounters.

My dream is that D&DN will find a way to deliver both. It's a pretty tall order, though.

I think the issue with 4e wasn't one of being able to deliver both of those. I mean a large range of these things actually ARE exactly like that in 4e. If you meet an orc in a room the fight is going to last at most 2 rounds, and even setting up a grid is redundant. We do those 'fights' in 5 mins, at most, maybe 15 if there's some really significant reason not to just open fire (IE some negotiation or some weird situation). You can also of course use minions, a level 1 party running into 5 goblins (4 cutters and a warrior) will have a nice quick 15 min fight, at most, and while it is not even a 'level 1' fight there are still stakes in story terms or attrition. Its FIVE goblin warriors in a room that doesn't really work, BUT if you have that many valid opponents then its worth adding interest, terrain, goals, traps, etc. at which point the 4e fight is GOOD, but it took knowing to do it.

I think the main thing that would be useful would be for things like surprise and flanking, and terrain benefits, to be bigger (which Advantage would do) so that a WEAK group of monsters could get the jump on the PCs, present a real threat for about one round, and then be beaten down. That would allow a whole class of fun encounters that in 4e are really the ones that work the least well. It also rewards the players for general common sense tactics.

Streamlining all aspects of play in combat and providing fewer simpler more distinct options is also perfectly valid, but it has to be done VERY carefully to preserve the essence of the thing. IMHO making combats 2 rounds long as Mike seems to imply is 'good' is a terrible idea. While D&D certainly isn't all about combat it is still the central activity of the game ultimately, the realities of which shape all the rest of play.

AbdulAlhazred · Apr 3, 2013

Dausuul said:
I agree that this is the obvious solution, but I'm not convinced it's the best one. It draws far too much attention to the metagame during play, and it's very difficult to design a dual combat system in which the choice between "simple" and "complex" does not significantly affect the likelihood of victory. That's the sort of thing that would wreck immersion for me, and I think for a lot of people. Yes, there are precedents in D&D, but there's a reason those precedents never made it out of the optional sourcebooks and into the core.

Given that it would be optional, why not include it in the game. For people who purely want to play a very non-abstract procedural game and won't ever, or will almost never, use a simple resolution system its presence seems pretty innocuous. I'd say at SOME point everyone finds a desire to figure out what happens when you fight 100 goblins or whatever silly thing anyway, and such a system can always provide solutions in that area as well. So, I think it COULD be useful for a wide variety of players, at least now and then. Heck, even if I DO normally play only with the 'complex' system there may be times when I want a very quick paced game or to just focus on some specific thing in a one-shot, etc.

I'd say a more promising avenue would be to focus on the opponents rather than the combat rules. The one way I found to make skirmish fights work in 4E was to rely heavily on minions. So, design "skirmishers" and "bosses," where skirmishers have high damage-to-hp ratios (in other words, they hit hard but die easy) and simple abilities, and bosses have low damage-to-hp ratios and complex abilities that change over the course of combat. Then skirmishes and boss fights will arise naturally depending on what type of monsters you put in. D&DN has already taken some steps down this road, but I think there's room for a lot more.

Well, I'm not sure how much less meta-game that is. It is just more diffusely meta-game. Instead of concentrating the game-related choices into "which combat system do we use for this fight" you spread it out and it becomes a factor in the design of all the monsters in the game. I'm not OPPOSED to that necessarily, but it could be awkward. It could also be more off-putting in some sense than [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]'s suggestion. I'm also not sure you really get super interesting tactics when every group of monsters is so hard-fitted to their role. I mean 4e monsters have roles, but minions aside, they're not the overriding consideration in how the monster is built. Anyway, its not the sort of question that I'd answer without a bunch of playtesting. It COULD work.

AbdulAlhazred · Apr 3, 2013

Nemesis Destiny said:
I wanted to touch upon some points that were made earlier in the thread, namely 1) that WotC "ruined" the lore of D&D, and 2) that the hype leading up to 4th had people excited for a big let-down.

Point 1, is highly subjective. I get that for some people, it is a form of sacred cow, but for me, and probably others, the lore of traditional D&D is inconsequential. I don't play FR, I don't read FR, so I don't care one whit about it. I was completely well and truly shocked by the changes they made and thought to myself at the time that it was going to go over like a lead balloon, and for the most part that is precisely what happened. It was far more contentious a change that even the Time of Troubles (which was controversial as it is).

So they probably should have left FR alone. I get that they wanted a way to introduce dragonborn and tieflings and all their other fluff changes, but I think they should have adapted their game constructs to work within the flavour of the setting, rather than force the setting to adapt to rules changes. That's what I had to do in order to adapt the material to my ongoing campaign world, and it was actually pretty easy to the point where some of the 3e changes were harder. Though, to play devil's advocate, as a creative person, I recognize that sometimes in order to create, you have to destroy things first. Tends to piss off the fans though. *shrug*

As a final point, I actually prefer the fluff changes they made to the cosmology, since I don't much care for the traditional one. I really liked the implied setting in the 4e books. If I didn't already have a campaign I like, I'd use it. I will say though that even though I liked it, the hype material leading up to launch oversold these elements, which leads directly to my next point...

...that people were stoked for this product and then had a huge let-down when they finally saw it. I will say that I must have been in the minority then. By the end of 3.x I thoroughly hated the system, was beginning to hate D&D, and had a strong dislike growing for WotC. I felt betrayed by the promises of 3rd edition, and how they completely didn't work out for me. I wanted desperately to move on, to find a magic bullet that would "fix" all that was broken about the game and yet was still "D&D" enough to continue my campaign world. I looked to many different games and many different systems, but nothing had everything I wanted, and I certainly didn't want to give WotC any more of my money, because after all, 4e is a cartoonish game of dragonboobies, emo devil-people, and video-boardgamey tactical nonsense.

I downloaded the intentionally leaked printer's copies of it, and had decided how awful it was without actually playing it. It couldn't possibly be any good with those races in the core, and no bard, but WARLOCKS?!? Awful, just awful. One of our group though, wanted to at least try it out. I agreed that the lead-up pdfs for settings & monsters looked really good, and he promised that he could run a game where the kind of flavour we wanted could work, but use the 4e engine. I was highly skeptical to say the least. I even picked the most annoying combo that I thought was possible - a tiefling warlock.

After only a few sessions we were sold. The game "reads like crap, plays like gold" was a new saying at our table. It had little to do with the DM - normally I can't stand his style, as its usually quite pretentious and dis-empowering to players (it still was, but the 4e rules actually gave us a semblance of "control" over our own fate). So I went in expecting a big let-down, and ended up getting really excited about it. It was because of all the changes they made, not despite them. WotC would have lost me as a customer had they continued to do the same old thing, and it was only because 4e was so different that I'm still a paying customer (DDI).

I know that I'm not every gamer, and probably in the minority here, but I felt that I should point out that sentiment about the 'changes' is far, far from universal.

Yeah, we're not everyone, but I did have a pretty parallel experience. We played a LOT of 1e back in its early days, but then got a bit jaded by the time 2e came out, and while we played a couple fairly extensive 2e campaigns we were really off onto other games and other things by the time 3e came around. I READ a 3e PHB, but didn't much like what I saw. There were a lot of things that desperately needed reworking and 3e did rework a lot of them, but I just never could see it working well, the MCing and general caster power bloat was off-putting.

So eventually along comes 4e after years in the wilderness and I just thought the Cosmology was great (it actually is so close to the one in my long-standing campaign home-brew that I should sue WotC for plagiarism, lol). I never really 'got' the D&D Cosmology, it always seemed arbitrary and contrived, didn't seem like it was built to tell stories with, and had NOTHING to do with any real mythology to boot. I can't say I 'hated' it, but I sure did ignore it. I thought it was nice that 4e's designers seemed to have gone down the same road and asked the same questions and gotten the same answers. It was one less thing about the system to ignore!

Anyway, we had no qualms about the content of the game. I was a bit dubious about the presentation, but we started up a game and sure enough people picked classic archetypes, the roguish spy, the dour dwarf warrior, the flirty elvish wizard, etc. Things played pretty OK from the start, but I did find that the game was less forgiving in terms of knowing how to put together a good adventure. It really took me a couple years to FULLY appreciate the almost-Pemertonian degree that you could push it into open narrative type play (and for the record I assume this sort of play was not really anticipated by the 4e developers, in fact I'm skeptical they have yet cottoned to this style of play at all, maybe Chris Perkins has).

So, yeah, I don't know if 4e is 'ugly but plays well'. In some ways it isn't ugly at all, but OTOH the presentation of a lot of the elements and ideas is inconsistent or misses some really interesting aspects of the game. This is all a major reason why I'm more interested in what can be done with 4e than in Yet Another DnD-Like which is what DDN seems to be. It just doesn't spin any wheels for me. I can do what DDN seems to be aiming to do using 2e and have been able to since before many younger players were even born! lol.

Dausuul · Apr 3, 2013

AbdulAlhazred said:
Given that it would be optional, why not include it in the game. For people who purely want to play a very non-abstract procedural game and won't ever, or will almost never, use a simple resolution system its presence seems pretty innocuous.

I'm not opposed to having the option, but I'd prefer it if this wasn't the go-to solution for mixing quick skirmishes and big boss fights.

AbdulAlhazred said:
Well, I'm not sure how much less meta-game that is. It is just more diffusely meta-game. Instead of concentrating the game-related choices into "which combat system do we use for this fight" you spread it out and it becomes a factor in the design of all the monsters in the game. I'm not OPPOSED to that necessarily, but it could be awkward. It could also be more off-putting in some sense than @pemerton's suggestion. I'm also not sure you really get super interesting tactics when every group of monsters is so hard-fitted to their role. I mean 4e monsters have roles, but minions aside, they're not the overriding consideration in how the monster is built. Anyway, its not the sort of question that I'd answer without a bunch of playtesting. It COULD work.

Hmm, your point about playtesting is a good one. If only they were running a huge open playtest over an extended period...

I wouldn't radically alter a monster's stats to fit this model. But I think it's useful when considering how to "express" a monster concept. It's really not much different from 4E's minion/regular/elite/solo classification--and as I said, we've seen some of this already in D&DN.

Let's say you're designing the standard-issue orc. The "skirmish monster/boss monster" approach would suggest that the standard-issue orc should have a few simple abilities without a strong tactical focus (e.g., nothing that depends on exact positioning), should deal solid damage, but shouldn't have a lot of hit points. You consider this and ask yourself, "Can I build a monster like this and have it still feel like an orc?" I would say that none of these traits is in conflict with the orc concept, so that's the way to go.

Then you design the standard-issue dragon. If you figure a dragon is typically a boss monster, you're looking at high hit points relative to damage output, and an array of tactically interesting abilities. Can you build a monster like this that feels like a dragon? Again, I would say yes, so there you are.

Where it gets challenging is in the case that you're building, say, a lich. Liches are certainly "boss monster" foes. You'd never expect to fight a lich and have it be a trivial skirmish! At the same time, the lich is primarily an arcane spellcaster, and it feels wrong for arcane casters--even undead ones--to have hit points on par with dragons and giants. One of the defining traits of D&D spellslingers is (relative) physical frailty. So the lich would have to be designed more creatively, perhaps giving it an array of defensive powers that allow it to hold the party at bay for several rounds.

The other difficulty is when you're making something like an ogre, which could be a boss monster at low levels and a skirmish monster at high levels. I'm not sure how to address that. 4E's solution was to have the same monster represented by different statblocks depending on what level you're fighting it at, but I really dislike that approach.

D&D 5E D&DN going down the wrong path for everyone.

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