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

[Lanefan]

You are the one eliminating possibilities and saying that no justification which *allows* jumping more than three times may be included. We have all of the above, lets see what makes sense at the time. You have a prejudged absolute of three before your players ever open their mouths.

There is the old, very basic concept. You flip a normal coin three times and get heads all three times. What is the odds of getting heads on the fourth flip? The correct answer is 50%. In your game the odds of a fourth heads is 0% because you have used up the three heads for the day. You can make up reasons why it keeps landing on tails the rest of the day. I can too. But I REALLY don't want to.

Can someone clarify one little point for me:

I've been reading all this as though, to use the coin analogy, you only got three flips for the day regardless of outcome - three uses of the 'jump' ability whether successful or not.

The way you put it here, you can flip (or jump) to your heart's content but only until you succeed three times, after which you can still try it but you have to fail.

Which is it?

Lan-"jumping all over the place"-efan

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I still don't understand what all this talk regarding jump cards is about. Seems like a great debate about nothing. Are the jump cards supposed to represent Vancian magic? If so, then I guess I'm getting it.

If someone could actually talk about the thread topic... that would be great.

I think- but I'm not sure- that this is a side discussion about mechanics & logic. A mechanic for physical acts that limits something simple in a seemingly arbitrary fashion would presumably be a bad thing.

 

[pemerton]

I still don't understand what all this talk regarding jump cards is about. Seems like a great debate about nothing.

I don't agree with this. A PC in my 4e game, for example, has a power that lets him perform a Mighty Sprint (or Climb, or Jump) once per encounter. It's excatly like the hypothetical "jump cards" being discussed. So the discussion of jump cards has direct implications for how my game plays, and how it's play is to be understood.

Skill challenges are also like this, because after 1 use of a skill the DC increases for that PC using that skill again. So each PC only has one solid chance at gaining a success using a given skill. This is something like a "jump card".

And there's your physics. As long as it produces the intended results, you're golden.

Except that it's not physics. It's not part of the physics of Conan's world that combats are almost the most dramatic at the culmination of the story - that's a stylistic phenomenon of a story, not a physical fact about the Hyborian age. Likwise for HW/Q or TRoS.

It's absurd because the ease of jumping depends on how many times you do it.

You seem unwilling to distinguish between the probability of something happening in the gameworld, and the probability of it happening at the game table. Never once at my game table has the issue of defecation come up for a PC. Does it follow that the probability of defecation in my gameworld is zero? I don't think so.

On the other hand, the PCs in my game always bump into old friends or foes, or other exciting scenarios. Why? Because the likelihood of unusual things happening, while low in the gameworld, is high at the table. This tells us nothing about the physics of the gameworld. The Shaman has encounter tables especially designed to produce these coincidences, as part of a genre replication technique. It doesn't mean that it's part of the physics of The Shaman's semi-fictional France that coincidences are actually not coincidences at all!

But the reality of your system is that that events are not independent.

In the fiction they are independent. At the gametable they are not. Like The Shaman's coincidences.

What if a character spends twenty consecutive days in a hilly, region with lots of chasms.

In a game with limited jump cards, you might avoid setting encounters in hills, or at Olympic athletics competitions. Alternatively, you would look for ways to compress multiple actual jumps in the gameworld into a single skill check, or focus on only one or two crucial scenes in the overall 20 day episode. (I've posted on this before - that with these sorts of mechanics, one might look at multiple ways to resolve a given situation. And Eyebeams also mentioned this upthread.)

"Absurd" is kinda a loaded word. But will you at least agree that this is a perfect example of the narrative being forced to obey the mechanics?

I don't at all dispute that it's a non-simulationist mechanic - which is how I prefer to describe what I think you mean by "narrative being forced to obey the mechanics". That's the point of a mechanic which (as I put it upthread) places parameters on the narrative of the fictional situation.

Like Hussar, I tend to feel that your way of describing it elides the contrast with other mechanics, which also constrain what can be narrated (eg in AD&D, if I roll a 1, I'm obliged to say that my PC didn't hit the enemy). For maximum clarity: I'm not disputing the contrast, and never have, and have spent over two years on these boards asserting it. I'm just saying that I don't feel that the description you are using gets at the contrast. That's why I prefer my description. In the sort of game with "jump cards", the mechanics are not a model of the physics of the gameworld. Rather, they allocate and constrain the power to describe what is happening in the gameworld in a way that is independent of the ingame, fictional physics but is responsive to some other aesthetic desire of those playing the game. In the case of the "jump cards", part of that aesthetic desire might be a view that too much solving of problems by jumping makes for a boring game.

That's also why I think talk about "metagame" mechanics is kind of pointless; all mechanics work at the player - the metagame - level.

LostSoul, that's fair enough. I guess by metagame mechanics I mean mechanics (i) that aren't purist-for-system simulationist, in the sense that they don't express or model ingame causality, and also (ii) that can't be implemented in actor stance.

 

[BryonD]

In the fiction they are independent. At the gametable they are not. Like The Shaman's coincidences.

No. If you wrote short stories based on your adventures and some one read them all, had never heard of RPGs, and paid attention, they would eventually realize that no character in your stories could ever jump more than three times per day. It would become jarring and bizarre. And since we at the table KNOW that is the reason and don't have to look for the pattern, it becomes jarring and bizarre from the first time it happens.

Your fiction is not remotely independent. You are back-filling the narrative in ways which are intended to disguise the dependence. But pointing at your disguises does nothing to remove the fact that the absolute dependence exists underneath.

And when you are persistently forced to put these disguises on, and everyone at the table knows they are disguises, then the disguises start looking like a bad plastic spiderman mask with an elastic cord.

Yes, you have other alternates such as hand-waving that I jumped ten times and that was represented by three checks. You can absolutely do that. You can force the scene to change. But now you have just traded the spiderman mask for a batman mask. And it is bossy and has cracks in it. The point is, everyone at the table knows it is a cover.

Even if you decide that jumping is boring, the idea that you can decide before sitting down to the table that three is the correct number before boredom sets in is bizarre to me. In a narrative first game, you always have options for dealing with what is happening at the moment and moving things along. I'd rather adapt to deal with something that is starting to get dry than retrofit the narrative to comply with a preconceived mechanical demand.


No one is disputing that you enjoy this style of play.

But you seem to have a need to insist that using narrative devices to hide the fact that the game forces narrative dependence is no less "fiction first" than truly having no narrative dependence. You provide example after example, and seem to truly think you have made your case, and yet we are reading them and seeing proof after proof that you are NOT putting fiction first. You are constantly putting your thumb in leak after leak. That you can keep up with the leaks does not equate to not having to deal with the leaks.

 

[Than]

For me the "D&D experience" is best served with any system that is fantasy based, has distinct classes that are really distinct in the way they work not just in the "flavour text".

So for me this would not be 4th edition but would be amongst others systems like:-

AD&D, 2nd ed D&D, 3 and 3.5 ed D&D, Pathfinder, Cosmothea, Castles and crusades.

Well thats the ones i've played and I know there are lots of others.

But 4th edition although it gives an experience in the same genre as D&D, in that it is closer to D&D than say the traveller system perhaps, it does not give a close enough experience to D&D as the others I mention do.

And the reason 4th edition to me does not give a close D&D experiance is the classes are too samey.

 

[BryonD]

BryonD, I think that's a good summation of why someone would avoid a game like Prime Time Adventures.

For me, I can see why having a "Jump x 3" resource would work for a specific game, and why it wouldn't work at all for another game.

In other words, all roads do not lead to Rome.

I changed Martial Encounter Powers to work off of fictional triggers instead of once per encounter in my 4E hack because I wanted a specific sort of game. I can see why once per encounter can work better for the assumed game play of 4E.

Can't say much based on this little bit, but that certainly sound like an improvement.

edit: Oh yeah, I forgot to ask! ByronD, I have a lot of trouble understanding your posts - a failure of mine, I think because what we want from RPGs is fundamentally different. (RC has no problem understanding your posts, and his explanations of your posts clear up everything to me - but that might be because I've met RC in real life, and I know where he's coming from. Discussion over the internets is difficult!)

My question is simple: I'm not sure what you mean by "narrative". How does that work in terms of an RPG?

I think the problem may be that your calibration is off. My name is Bryon.
(just kidding, no actual offense taken or intended and no complaint)

The ideal of the perfect game would be like being inside a book or movie as it happens and the next paragraph has not been written yet.

This "perfect" game would have no mechanics at all and yet would remain consistent and reliable and mutually understood by everyone at the table.

I am an environmental engineer. I specifically do a large portion of my work directing groundwater remediation projects. Groundwater models are a common element of these projects. The ideal perfect model would be able to tell you that if a benzene molecule starts "here" it will travel to "there" in X time and then it will degrade, get sucked out of well, enter a river, whatever.

The subsurface is vastly complex and there is never enough data. The model provides a mathematical simulation of the subsurface and behavior of the benzene. The mathematical simulation includes estimates and approximations. It includes a lot of them. But the goal of a good model is to always shave those away and go back and shave them some more. The perfect model would be no model, it would just be knowledge of the behavior of the benzene. Any change to the model that increases the influence of the model's approximations is considered a bad thing. The results of the model will be somewhere between a total default rule of thumb approximation and and actual description of what happens. All changes must push toward the latter. In the mean time, the benzene has no idea that anyone is running a model. It just does what it does. Anything in the model that doesn't reflect that is error in the model and reality won't change to come to it. It is just error.

Game systems are mathematical models. They give both all the players an even understanding of how a reliable representation of a story should happen and they give all the systems within the game model a reliable system for interaction. When you say that a fireball deals 7d6 damage, you have introduced a mathematical approximation and there is error in that. When you read a fantasy novel, even a D&D-specific novel, the quantified damage or dice of damage of a fireball is nowhere to be seen. Any changes should work to make the players less aware of the 7d6 and more aware of just the story.

If three jumps and then no more jumps is the rule, the story is out the window and we are all about the approximation side of the model.
If you disguise that by saying that ten jumps happened, but three jump checks "represented" those ten jumps, you have sacrificed granularity, you have error in your system.

A perfect model is a model that no one knows exists. It is just the story - the narrative. 3E does not achieve that. But 4E moves explicitly in the direction of being in your face and saying "Hey, remember the model, this model itself is part of the fun. It protects you from the boredom of a fourth jump. It protects you from too much prep time, It makes certain that the math always works." None of these are goals that you would consider if you sat down to write a story. And, for me, they should not have any more attention than is absolutely required when making a game that is intended to be dominated by the story over all else.

Are we moving toward the being inside a totally game-less story end of the spectrum, or are we moving toward the rule of thumb mechanical approximations with narrative connections end?

 

[BryonD]

To be pithy:

3E tries to be a system for getting to the fun.
4E tries to be a system that IS the fun.

 

[Than]

H'mmm everyone's idea of what is fun is different though.

For me after the roleplay/combat the great distinctiveness of the classes in AD&D to 3.5 and other similar games were what enhanced the fun. 4th Ed classes samey, at least to me, so less fun.

Having said that with good players and a good DM a 4th edition game can still be good, so i'm not trying to knock it too much.

 

[BryonD]

H'mmm everyone's idea of what is fun is different though.

Agreed, but my pithy line does not presume any certain idea of fun. Whatever your idea of fun is, there is a difference between a system that tries to get you to it and a system that tries to BE it.

Even if someone's idea of fun IS exactly what 4E tries to be, that difference still exists. Obviously that person won't care. All they care about is that the system IS the fun they want. But the difference exists and that all gets back to not everyone trying to get to Rome.

"Everyone's idea of what is fun is different" is just another way of saying all roads do not lead to Rome.

 

[BryonD]

Having said that with good players and a good DM a 4th edition game can still be good

Absolutely 100% true.