Flavour First vs Game First - a comparison

[Delta]

Pff. Die Hard is way too talky to be anything like 4E.

That xkcd always makes me think of "The Chase", the 90 minute all-car-chase movie: The Chase (1994)

 

[Allister]

Maybe we should just bite the bullet and rename the game "Die Hard d20" (given all the John McClane this, John McClane that, that seems like the primary justification for 4E rules changes, good grief).

Heh...personally, I originally saw Healing Surges most closely resembling Indiana Jones.

Remember the 1st Indy movie where he gets worked over during the day and then has a night of passion but the very next day, he's right as rain? To me, that mapped effortlessly onto healing....

Another of my friends argued it was more akin to the aura effect that anime shonen heroes tend to display where they take massive shots and everything yet they only have a little scratch...

Personally, the suggestion of lingering wound is even more of a non D&D element. I really, REALLY, think Death spiral mechanics are so not D&D given my experiences in other games like Alternity and SR.

Death Spiral mechanics tend to make melee guys very unpopular AND the mechanic iself vastly changes how the game is played.

 

[Hussar]

/snip

So, in the end you will still have a 4E like game play effect, but the mechanics map closer to the fictional game world. But here I say: WHY? Why go a more complicated route to achieve exactly the same igameplay effect? Where is the real benefit at the game table? Players have to juggle more numbers and effects and still play the game mostly the same way?

Is it really harder to play-pretend and guesstimate or schrödinger your wounds (together with pretending to be an elf or pretending to fight a dragon, only armed with a sword and a shield), then to do each step of the more "advanced" system to get a closer model of the game-world? And be honest - you go through the numbers every attack, every hit, every round of a combat. But the "play-pretend" - you do that only occassionally, when it feels meaningful, like when you drop a foe, bloody him (4E D&D only), or when you make a critical hit, whenever something special happens.

Bingo! This is exactly the point I was trying to make. Thank you for saying it better than I've been able to. In a "game first" model, look at the results, rather than the method. Since the results are the same, why use a more complicated system?

Maybe we should just bite the bullet and rename the game "Die Hard d20" (given all the John McClane this, John McClane that, that seems like the primary justification for 4E rules changes, good grief).

Die Hard is a good example because everyone (or at least most people) have seen it. But, can you honestly say that you've never seen the same effect in pretty much EVERY action movie? If Die Hard bothers you, then go with Lethal Weapon. Or Rambo. Or any Jackie Chan movie you care to name. or or or. Let's face it, it's a pretty standard trope in action movies.

And, stories as well. People have pointed to various narratives where the hero needs extended rest to come back. But, what works in stories doesn't work in the game. Conan never, not once, suffers a debilitating wound that prevents him from carrying on with the plot. And, despite fighting with hundreds of opponents, never suffers from a permanent wound.

In Steven King's Gunslinger series, the protagonist Roland loses a couple of fingers. Ok, but, why? The point of him losing the fingers is to force him to seek help from the other characters, thus drawing everyone together. His loss of fingers is a plot point.

Loss of hit points in D&D is never a plot point. Trying to mix the two is very difficult.

 

[howandwhy99]

Bingo! This is exactly the point I was trying to make. Thank you for saying it better than I've been able to. In a "game first" model, look at the results, rather than the method. Since the results are the same, why use a more complicated system?

Just dropped into read the last post and noticed this little error. In an RPG, there are no rules for the Players to remember (and therefore slow down play). It's all just description of the world. Sometimes abstract, but still just description. A 5-year-old can play an RPG. They just need to know how to role-play. There is never a need to know rules from a Player POV. Rules are for the DM/Referee to help operate the world. They are the ones who use as few or as many rules as necessary.

That's why d20 is a rule-playing game, like Chess, Poker, or any kind of board game. The players operate almost exclusively inside the rules. You cannot play the game without thinking inside of them, so why not force everyone to know them? As if somehow memorizing rules makes one a good role-player (vs. a good game player). 4E's advancement over 3E is "allowing" little excursions outside of this closed system to be ruled upon thereby giving the DM greater influence over the game than the designers alone (unlike a boardgame).

It's an inversion of an RPG. Instead of playing people in a hypothetical place with rules assisting a DM/Referee to unbiasedly extrapolate the consequences of PCs n the world, we now have the world, and even play, as result of the rules. Many rule-playing games are now designed to force players to role-play in certain manners vs. allowing them to choose how to role-play for themselves (i.e. "hybrid" games).

 

[GlaziusF]

Just dropped into read the last post and noticed this little error. In an RPG, there are no rules for the Players to remember (and therefore slow down play). It's all just description of the world. Sometimes abstract, but still just description. A 5-year-old can play an RPG. They just need to know how to role-play. There is never a need to know rules from a Player POV. Rules are for the DM/Referee to help operate the world. They are the ones who use as few or as many rules as necessary.

Haha, wow. So sweet, so green, so naive.

All games have rules. That's why they're games - there's a way to resolve disputes that doesn't involve arguing or beating the other party unconscious. Sure, I guess all rules could reside in the central rules depository, but then at the first sign of contention the game would turn into an elaborate farce on "Mother May I" where the rules arbitrator is asked for a judgment on absolutely everything.

That's why people learn rules, you know? So they don't have to ask what they are whenever they want to do something that not everybody agrees on.

 

[Delta]

And, stories as well. People have pointed to various narratives where the hero needs extended rest to come back. But, what works in stories doesn't work in the game...

Oh, please. In the 1E DMG under "Monsters and Organization", the base assumption was that a party would attack once, and then retreat and regroup for one full week before attacking again. 2 pages and 6 examples were devoted to helping the DM decide what the monsters might do in the meantime.

I want that kind of gaming experience back, and I want rules that directly support it. Not an action movie, not a plotted story. And I can find such rules for D&D that do support that in numerous places: OD&D, BECMI, 1E, C&C, my own DimD20 rules, etc.

Frankly, one of my primary griefs in the 3.5/4E era is that D&D seems to have been taken over by people who, while liking the idea of killing monsters with swords & spells, really actively disliked D&D to a large extent.

Examples of the responses of six different types of monsters follow. The situation will be the same in each example: The "party" (whose composition and levels are unimportant for the example and would obviously vary in each situation anyway) will be attacking the monsters in the examples in two situations. SITUATION 1 (S1) is where encounter occurs for the first time, and while the party inflicts casualties upon the monsters, victory is denied; the party then leaves with its wounded, regroups, and returns one full week later to finish the job. SITUATION 2 (S2) is where the party, rested, healed, and ready for action, has now re-encountered the monsters in question. In both situations the response of the monsters concerned will be detailed so you can use the examples in handling actual play.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Just dropped into read the last post and noticed this little error. In an RPG, there are no rules for the Players to remember (and therefore slow down play). It's all just description of the world. Sometimes abstract, but still just description. A 5-year-old can play an RPG. They just need to know how to role-play. There is never a need to know rules from a Player POV. Rules are for the DM/Referee to help operate the world. They are the ones who use as few or as many rules as necessary.

You might be describing role-playing, but not an RPG (Role-Playing Game).

 

[AllisterH]

Oh, please. In the 1E DMG under "Monsters and Organization", the base assumption was that a party would attack once, and then retreat and regroup for one full week before attacking again. 2 pages and 6 examples were devoted to helping the DM decide what the monsters might do in the meantime.

.

THIS actually is one of the reasons why I think both 3e and 4e are definitely better designed games. They actually consider what happens at the table and not just "how it should be".

Your example of taking a full week to recover was something that never occured in our games and I have a hunch didn't happen in MOST games either.

What would ACTUALLY happen was a) players take one day, cleric blows all spells on healing and then, we're good to go.

So by the day after, the players were ready to go and most situations, the den of the evil enemies wouldn't have time to change...

It's the same thing with the healing for me....Pre 3E, healing was EXTERMELY slow as a way to make it seem flavourful that adventuring and combat was dangerous.

The result though of this rule? Either the downtime was handwaved away thus not giving the players any sense of time being spent OR the more likely fact that almost every party HAD to have a cleric thus actually forcing a player to take a class (or having the DM to provide one) just for the game to function...

 

[Delta]

THIS actually is one of the reasons why I think both 3e and 4e are definitely better designed games. They actually consider what happens at the table and not just "how it should be"....

The result though of this rule? Either the downtime was handwaved away thus not giving the players any sense of time being spent OR the more likely fact that almost every party HAD to have a cleric thus actually forcing a player to take a class (or having the DM to provide one) just for the game to function...

And that's why I think 3E and 4E are, in that regard, much worse designed games. They don't take into account what happens in the game world, and believe that game world and at-table experiences should be unrelated.

Look, in OD&D/ Basic clerics had no spells at first level. From OD&D -> 2E, clerics had no healing spells in the 2nd or 3rd level slots. The breakdown you describe is one of the backfiring results of 3E not thinking through its implications.

If you believe that earlier editions had similar problems, then my solution would be to not exacerbate the breakdown or capitulate to it, but step back further to OD&D-level healing levels. Or even back to the Chainmail milieu where there were no clerics at all! (As I did in my DimD20 rules.)

 

[Hussar]

And that's why I think 3E and 4E are, in that regard, much worse designed games. They don't take into account what happens in the game world, and believe that game world and at-table experiences should be unrelated.

Look, in OD&D/ Basic clerics had no spells at first level. From OD&D -> 2E, clerics had no healing spells in the 2nd or 3rd level slots. The breakdown you describe is one of the backfiring results of 3E not thinking through its implications.

If you believe that earlier editions had similar problems, then my solution would be to not exacerbate the breakdown or capitulate to it, but step back further to OD&D-level healing levels. Or even back to the Chainmail milieu where there were no clerics at all! (As I did in my DimD20 rules.)

Yes, but in AD&D, 1e forward, my 1st level cleric had THREE cure light wounds spells per day. A week of healing? For 1st level characters? Why? You only, at best, have about 12 hit points. Maybe 14 if you're really, really lucky (or cheating ) Even if you had three characters down to negatives, the longest it would take to heal is a couple of days. A week? Gimme a break.

Never mind if your group has two clerics. Or, y'know, a friendly cleric in the Keep who might heal you. Or any number of other sources of healing. And that's just at 1st level.

Sure, you don't have 2nd and 3rd level healing spells, but the PC's have considerably less hit points as well. You're not dealing with double digit levels very often. 50, 60 hit points is a lot for a 1ed character. By 4th level, the cleric has 3 base spells, +2 for a 14 wisdom (not a big stretch for a cleric), giving 5 cures per day. No group needs a full week to rest. Or certainly not very often.

Never minding all the stories of EGG's groups actually resting in the dungeon as well. How could they possibly do it if they were taking a week to heal.

This is what bothers me the most about these sorts of conversations. The schizophrenic nature of 1e. The DMG says one thing but actual play is almost completetly different - keep the PC's poor but we'll make modules with tons and tons of gold for the taking - combat is incredibly lethal but the monsters only do 1d6 points of damage and have a hard time hitting you on and on.