The D&D Experience (or, All Roads lead to Rome)

[Raven Crowking]

Can someone XP ByronD for me?

Thanks!

 

[Gryph]

There is a lot of talking past each other and covering the same ground happening.

Fitting the story to the mechanics is different than fitting the mechanics to the story.

That does not mean one if remotely "better" or "more fun" than the other. But someone who likes one may not like the other, or, more likely, may like it notably less.

But they are different.

And I see people telling me that their orange is exactly the same as my apple, and then using a description of an orange as proof that it is an apple. So be it. To me that just means you are having fun and don't perceive the distinction that is important to me. And there is no remote need for that distinction to be important.

But when someone says that it doesn't look like Rome to them, they can be telling the truth, even if you don't see it.

Now this I completely agree with. I would even look at it from a step further back. First and foremost, to me, D&D and other RPGs are games and I play games to have fun. Fiction and mechanics are both secondary considerations to fun and so, at my table, neither is more important to the other.

I like the mechanics around skill challenges because my players find it more fun to include skill rolls on top of the rp when resolving those types of situations where I use them. Simple as that.

 

[Raven Crowking]

[MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]:

Just to be clear, by "fiction-first" I do not mean "story-first" or "plotline-first"; I mean "verisimilitude of the fictional setting-first".


RC

 

[BryonD]

I like the mechanics around skill challenges because my players find it more fun to include skill rolls on top of the rp when resolving those types of situations where I use them. Simple as that.

And I like the way I do it in my games because my players (and I) find it fun to have the narrative significance of the rp included when resolving all kinds of situations.
Simple as that.

 

[TerraDave]

This hypothesis has recieved official (if uncited) endorsement:


Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game Official Home Page - Article (An Introduction)


I am sure we can all agree that Mercurius should now win a large portion of the internet.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Just to be picky, I already pointed out that inappropriate rolls could clearly be discarded.

But it is still all an "underlying framework" when none is needed, and moreso, a lack of such is preferred.

Why? And just checking that you are intending to argue for diceless outside combat? Because that's what not having an underlying framework means. And I for one like having a framework there to give me a hand with pacing and so I don't need to worry about what or how much the PCs have to roll, allowing us to get on with the game. Skill challenges are scaffolding, not architecture.

 

[pemerton]

This example proves my point even more. It was simply another formulaic rules construct being exploited because it was known to provide a bonus.
Find a way to use combat power X in a non-combat challenge and receive a bonus to Y, oh, and you get a cookie.

I think that's a little harsh.

How come, in earlier editions, the paladin using his "Shout really loud in the name of my god" power to scare someone is creative spellcasing, but in 4e it's "receiving a bonus to get a cookie"?

I see this kind of thing more as a no brainer rather than inspired creative content. Hmm... a skill challenge is an encounter so find a way to shoehorn a combat encounter power into the situation, get an extra bonus, and profit. Hey no loss either as the power is refreshed right after the encounter.

As it happens, the PCs - while knowing that the temple they were in was somewhate damaged - hadn't though through the ramifications of using thunder powers. The same paladin PC later nearly got hit by falling ceiling blocks as he entered the room the bear had been in. (The vulnerability of the ceiling to various sorts of effects was a part of the 3E module text that was very easy to implement when I ran it for 4e.)

If the basic actions of the players and the decisions of the DM can be simulated in a computer game then then the lightning in a bottle, which is the core of the human D&D experience is lost.

This is definitely too harsh. If you come over to the Actual Play thread that I linked to earlier, I think you'll see that computer simulation is not an option on the table.

 

[pemerton]

[Just to be clear, by "fiction-first" I do not mean "story-first" or "plotline-first"; I mean "verisimilitude of the fictional setting-first".

I think that fits with what I had previously thought.

As I posted on my Actual Play thread, I think verisimilitude is itself a bit slippery, because other stuff going on can make parts of the gameworld become more or less salient. But my impression of your preferences is that you strongly prefer a world exploration game. And I'm on the record in numerous threads, including probably this one, as saying that 4e doesn't support world exploration. Even since I've been running a couple of exploration-focused scenarios (as I've been talking about in my actual play threads over the past month or two) I don't think of these as world exploration in what I understand to be your preferred sense.

You also seem to me to be saying something different from what BryonD is saying:

And I like the way I do it in my games because my players (and I) find it fun to have the narrative significance of the rp included when resolving all kinds of situations.

This implies, for example, that in a skill challenge approach the narrative significance of the RP is not included. Which I regard as false. What is true is that in a skill challenge approach the narrative signficance of the RP is not, on its own, determinative, because the structure of the mechanic obliges the GM to inject additional complications, and the players to inject their own responses to those complications.

But this feature of the skill challenge mechanic does mean that the world and its ingame causal logic are not determinative. Sometimes, at least, the complication that the GM injects will be purely metagame driven (as in the example skill challenge in the Rules Compendium).

I hesitate to say that this is at the expense of verisimilitude - the example in the RC doesn't break verisimilitude, for example. But it is at the expense of world exploration as a priority. Apart from anything else, there are these potential bits of the world - the complications that the GM is ready to inejct - that can't be known (and hence can't be explored) until the resolution mechanic plays out.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

This hypothesis has recieved official (if uncited) endorsement:


Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game Official Home Page - Article (An Introduction)


I am sure we can all agree that Mercurius should now win a large portion of the internet.

THE LINKED ARTICLE
"This may sound strange, coming from R&D—but it’s easy to mistake what Wizards of the Coast publishes as the core essence of D&D. We might print the rules for the current version of the game, or produce accessories you use at your table, but the game is what you, the community of D&D fans and players, make it. D&D is the moments in the game, the interplay within a gaming group, the memories formed that last forever. It’s intensely personal. It’s your experience as a group, the stories that you and your friends share to this day. No specific rule, no random opinion, no game concept from an R&D designer, no change to the game’s mechanics can alter that."

Personally, I think they're merely making the mistake of being overbroad and imprecise I criticized from the start.

I mean, the closing phrase of the last sentence is simply wrong.

 

[BryonD]

Why? And just checking that you are intending to argue for diceless outside combat? Because that's what not having an underlying framework means. And I for one like having a framework there to give me a hand with pacing and so I don't need to worry about what or how much the PCs have to roll, allowing us to get on with the game. Skill challenges are scaffolding, not architecture.

Nice try at imposing a false meaning that completely ignores the context of the statement.