Why Must I Kludge My Combat?

[Goonalan]

Jumping in at the end also, although I've read parts of the thread along the way.

If you check out my sig you can see a stats based story hour that catalogues who did what to who, and to what effect. A turn by turn account of what happened when a group of mostly noobs (4 from 5 had never played a PnP RPG before) played their way through KOTS.

If grind is meaningless combat then we've had some of that, although not at the point I'm at in the story so far, it comes later.

Why it didn't feel like grind at the time, by which I mean dull, was because-

1) Players were into the system, and in the space of KOTS they leveled up several times, and got 'cool' new powers or skills, which they couldn't wait to try out.

2) The monsters do cool things too (sometimes), which unless you're a DM & Player (or 4e experienced) then you weren't expecting. When the Ochre Jelly split in two I was faced with a wall of blank stares and open mouths.

3) Combat doesn't mean the narrative has to stop. So the Goblins (in translation), scream for Balgron the Fat to help them. Or else make disparaging remarks about various individuals and/or races- make it personal.

4) Have the PCs discover something at the end of the combat, yes a magic toy is nice, but better is info from a prisoner, or the hint of something which foreshadows future events.

5) Finally provide direction for the combat- 'the Goblins look anxious, keen to escape your spells and steel, several of them glance at the far door- it's obvious that they want to get away, or worse still get reinforcements, not only must you defeat them quickly but you must prevent them from retreating.' I'm not adverse to throwing a few encounters together to make a big mess, and if you do this once or twice then combat becomes something that takes a bit of thinking about, and the use of big guns (Daily/Action) and/or the use of 'cinematic' cool actions.

I used to play with another group and we house ruled that any crazy stunt- Dwarf Fight leaps onto Spined Devil, hovering over twenty foot drop into water, and attempts to bear it down and drown it... for example gained a +2 bonus on all rolls needed to attempt. Obviously the monsters got the same bonuses- made for some hilarity.

We don't have any problems with Level +4 fights either, yes they take longer but generally the reason for this is because the PCs are struggling- swinging and missing, and getting chopped down- whispering to each other about the possibility of abandoning the fight.

In hindsight their are many turns which are just attrition, particularly with Solo creatures, however on paper these look dry (at times), when I think back to them I remember the PCs being desperate to make the bad guy/monster go away (die). Thinking back to the fight in KOTS with the Blue Slime (their first Solo scrap) the PCs were terrified of the thing after it weakened and slowed all but one of them even before it appeared. They just dumped Daily Powers and Action Points in some frightened frenzy.

I'm not working out the stats for average encounter times et al much in advance in the story hour, so some of the results are going to be a surprise to me (perhaps). The PCs are only 4 combat encounters in so far so it's pretty early in the piece.

I've played up to Level 13 in 4e, I've not kludged a fight yet, am I playing the game wrong? And yes, we've even played through the H series Wizards adventures.

Cheers

 

[Raven Crowking]

As you know, I have been reading your thread with interest.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

I seem to be very late to the party, but I wanted to point out that the entire discussion of relative difficulty is ignoring individual differences and trying to set up a fallacious objective standard. To wit...

Because, in the end, what it comes down to is that EITHER doing without the grid is easier in 1e than 4e, OR the grid offers the same degree of helpfulness to both.

No, it doesn't.

I'm going to take the apparently heretical position that 1e is harder to run as written gridless than 4e. For me, facing and volumes alone would be enough to make this the case. By comparison, opportunity attacks and flanking are substantially more vague in their meaning and application.

Along these lines, I wish I could give Umbran xp for this:

Well, maybe you have to kludge it. Or maybe you can learn some from the folks around who do find it to be faster and simpler than the 3.x line. Find how they differ in who they are and what they're doing, and maybe you can learn things that speed matters up that don't have to do with changing the rules.

This is important. The rulesets abstract slightly different things and abstract them in different ways. Therefore, for some people, 1e is going to be harder, and for others 4e is going to be harder. For me, without a grid to abstract volumes and a mini to show facing, I'm going to have a seizure. And don't give me measurements in inches and then not expect me to go insane trying to find miniatures at the right scale.

On the other hand, while I don't particularly like handwaving "Push 3" and "Close burst 5", I can do so without wanting to hurt game designers. "Can I get there while avoiding an AoO?" is a bit more irritating, but I've learned to live with that, too.

If I wanted to learn how to run 1e gridless, I would be in for an uphill slog, whereas running 4e gridless is just sort of annoying.

Many other people have the exact opposite reaction, because they have different histories, preferences, and skills.

I would also point out that I never, ever saw anyone run 1e or 2e as written. Since everyone was throwing out rules they found inconvenient, that might have made running 1e gridless much simpler, but I don't think the RAW necessarily supports that analysis. Leastways not as an objective standard that can be applied to all people.

This stretches back conveniently to the disparities earlier in the thread, where some people have seen their time spent per round drop dramatically going from 3e to 4e, while others have seen these horrific rises in time spent per round. There's a case to be made that, cognitively speaking, some people simply get along with better with certain abstractions and ways of chunking information, which may be driving that disparity to seemingly absurd degrees. Or maybe it's not a raw cognitive disparity, but some people are simply over-trained in a "3e way of thinking" and are forcing a way of thinking onto 4e that is hindering rather than helping.

It's like translating in your head as you take a test in another language. The process itself eats up cognitive resources, and you do worse on the test than you would have on the same test in your native language.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

This was a ways back, but I can't seem to let this go by....

I can only speak to 3e, but it isn't just the DM tracking elements. The players pitch in and once the combat is underway it isn't like the battle field is redrawn from scratch every round, so the battle tends to unfold in a sequential way which makes it easy for everyone to keep up with where everyone is at. It all sort of just flows.

Emphasis mine.

Actually, when you are running a battle inside your head, it is exactly like that. In fact, every time someone takes or contemplates an action aloud, the battlefield is redrawn. That's how memory works. If you are very good at chunking information, perhaps only the immediate area is affected, but accessing a memory always, always, always rewrites it. This is a fact.

I could cite dozens of papers on this. Memory is a trainwreck. Spatial memory is slightly better than narrative memory in the short term, but not all that much. If you're not noticing this in your games, it's because (a) we're all bad at it, and easily influenced by the memories and suggestions of others; and/or (b) your DM is simply the best at the table at it.

 

[Raven Crowking]

I'm going to take the apparently heretical position that 1e is harder to run as written gridless than 4e.

I was, of course, looking at the logical problem I was presented with in this thread. You are, however, absolutely correct -- I should have said EITHER doing without the grid is easier in one edition than the other, OR the grid offers the same degree of helpfulness to both.

The problem relates to the idea that the grid is somehow both more helpful in one edition, while the cost of losing that help is not greater. The problem here has nothing to do with which edition gets more mileage out of adding a grid.

Good catch!


RC

 

[Raven Crowking]

I could cite dozens of papers on this. Memory is a trainwreck.

To be fair, though, I imagine that those papers don't take trained memory into account. We are used to using memory aids, such as a grid or writing things down, and this is bound to affect how we process memory. OTOH, there is strong anecdote to suggest that preliterate peoples had better memories than we do, especially if those memories were trained.

I would also suggest that, if you run your game gridless, you have probably trained your memory to some degree, making your memory for this task more reliable than average.


RC

 

[IronWolf]

This was a ways back, but I can't seem to let this go by....

I can only speak to 3e, but it isn't just the DM tracking elements. The players pitch in and once the combat is underway it isn't like the battle field is redrawn from scratch every round, so the battle tends to unfold in a sequential way which makes it easy for everyone to keep up with where everyone is at. It all sort of just flows.

Emphasis mine.

Actually, when you are running a battle inside your head, it is exactly like that.

Er, not sure why that portion of a statement was singled out and taken to mean that I was trying to define the inner workings of the mind.

The battle field is not being redrawn every round. The participants in the combat are not suddenly being tossed up in the air every round and placed in completely different locations and situations. Because of this, in round one of a combat if I have to ask the DM "will I take an AoO if move away?" and he answers yes and then I proceed to *not* move in away in that round and the enemy does not move away, then come round two I don't have to ask that question again. As the scene has not changed to the degree that I need to ask that again, the circumstances surrounding an AoO are the same as they were in round one and I know the answer.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

Er, not sure why that portion of a statement was singled out and taken to mean that I was trying to define the inner workings of the mind.

Wasn't meant to be applied to you personally. Just a pet peeve that you happened to hit on since I was last at a computer and able to respond to the thread.

Human beings are quite bad at this kind of thing, so large numbers of people insisting they can do it with something resembling accuracy is always on the border of amusing and irritating to me.

It's like how less then 5% of people can talk on a cell phone while driving without performing like they are drunk, but 90% of people act like they're in that 5%. These disconnects are jarring to me.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

The problem relates to the idea that the grid is somehow both more helpful in one edition, while the cost of losing that help is not greater.

Indeed. And I think the answer will vary from person to person and table to table, especially in games like 1e/2e with so many optional subsystems. Depending on how many of those are in play (and which ones), you may well see one table losing nothing with the loss of grid, and another losing much.

 

[Raven Crowking]

It's like how less then 5% of people can talk on a cell phone while driving without performing like they are drunk, but 90% of people act like they're in that 5%. These disconnects are jarring to me.

This, I believe, is because they don't really care about how the consequences of their actions affect other people.

Like crocodiles; both live in de Nile.



RC