D&D 4E How did 4e take simulation away from D&D?

[Crazy Jerome]

I think ideally feats should be kept focused on combat with a second system - I typically go with Talents - serving as the non-combat addons. Likewise, Utility powers could become Feat Powers and you would also occasionally gain Talent Powers.

I'd go the other way. Utility powers would be all combat. Powers would be all combat, or at least directly applicable in combat (i.e. sneaking while under observation). Then feats would be all non-combat.

Whatever math needed to be made up for combat would just be added to generic character advancement chart and/or class abilities.

 

[Barastrondo]

It's interesting to note how people think feats or skill powers are a sparse resource.

In my experience it tends to happen when you have a player dealing with a character in the right here-and-now, with no expectations of getting to 30th level. (Not every group plans to run all the way into epic tier, though the reasons behind that could spawn yet another thread.) This is particularly true when you have multiple games running at the same time, but you only play one or two a week. It's particularly pronounced in early paragon, when you have a lot of really interesting new feats opening up but also the need to take math tax feats is really kicking in.

Also, the change in the skill challenge levels happened about week 4 after 4E came out. It's hardly a new thing.

There's the DC changes that came out shortly after 4e came out, and there's the ones that came out last September. In these, the DC of a Hard check around level 28 is a 40 rather than a 33.

And really, the (once again, far from insurmountable) issues I have with that particular table is the principle of "As the character rises in level, we expect feat and item selection to provide an extra boost along the way". That's fine. My issue is when players subvert that expectation as a whole; and I think it's generally more sporting for the DM to adjust a DC table to fit a group's playstyle than to tell the players to adjust their playstyle to meet the expectations of groups they don't play with.

That one always pisses me off.

I wouldn't mind quite as much if they ever did it for other skills. Ie. if, when coming across an unstable cliff, using athletics (to try and climb) was an auto-fail, or coming across an angry beast diplomacy was an autofail, etc.

But nope, just intimidate.

Ugh, yes. Particularly hand-in-hand with "fighters get only three trained skills, and the only social skill they have access to is Intimidate." I suspect if they'd tested out the auto-fail skill with Arcana, things would never have gotten as far.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

It's interesting to note how people think feats or skill powers are a sparse resource.

In the 2E days, feats were REALLY scarce. They didn't exist.

In 3E, PCs going to the end of Epic tended to have a max of 11 or 12 of them (except for a few classes).

Now, all PCs get 18 or 19 of them if played to level 30 and it's still not enough.

I'm with you on that. There are points in the life of a character where they can seem pretty tight though. If you're level 7 say you have gained 4 feats (and might possibly at most have 6 with one being a class feature). So your typical fighter would want Expertise, Weapon Proficiency, and Weapon Focus, or similar feats. You could skip one or two of those but you probably REALLY have had one feat choice at that point that is totally free to take anything, and with some builds not even that. So it can seem pretty limited even though if you want you really can take whatever you want and have enough choices (and you have a lot more freedom beyond mid-heroic really).

It should be DC 10 15 20 at level 1-3 and the original 30 34 38 at level 28-30.


DC 5 is pretty much a joke, even for an untrained PC.

Rules Compendium P126, the DCs are now 8/12/19 at level 1 to 24/32/42 at level 30. So you really do have to crank some resources into skills to be acing hard checks at high level. It is 9 above the old DC33 hard at level 30, which pretty much accounts for the much more common ED +1 boost, Skill Focus, things like bardic bonuses, PP/ED fixed bonuses, and some amount of item bonus if you really want to be stomping on the rolls needing a 5+ like at level 1.

The skill challenge system is nothing of the sort. It's an exercise in rolling the dice where if the players pick trained skills (or Aid Another), they are pretty much a shoe in to win every skill challenge.

lol, not really. Also consider what you're saying. A level 1 party taking on a level 1 complexity 5 SC is the equivalent of combat with 5 level 1 monsters. Any party that doesn't have a practically 100% chance of beating that encounter has no business adventuring. You want a tough challenge, move it up to level 5. Now it's a bunch tougher (hard DC22).

Also when the hell was any game of D&D "simulationist" at all, like, in the slightest.

I'd really love to know where this comes from, especially in regards to 3e. Hell, 3e was advertised loudly as not being any for of simulation or any form of narrative. 3e was all about going back to the dungeon! and slaying dragons! and leaving the metaplot to those Vampire players!

3e was a direct rebuttal to White Wolf, and it was a game that very loudly and proudly announced itself as a game rather then a bizarre narrative/simulationist experience. When the hell did that get reversed?

Yeah, but then they added in all these highly complicated subsystems and complicated rules for things like climbing stairs and opening doors. It sure SEEMED simulationist, and really was in practice.

I'd note too that you may be the first person to ever link the words White Wolf and simulationist in the same sentence....

 

[pemerton]

I'd note too that you may be the first person to ever link the words White Wolf and simulationist in the same sentence....

Well, on the Forge, early-to-mid-90s White Wolf is pretty much the poster child for incoherent high concept simulationist design.

 

[KarinsDad]

Also of note: it looks like you missed the second revision to skill DCs. All your math is outdated. DCs at level 1 are now 8/12/19. DCs at level 28 are 23/30/40. Yeah, the old skill challenge DCs needed improvement. That's why they improved them.

Fricking WotC.

The new numbers came out in an article September 8, 2010.

The numbers I quoted were STILL in the updateCompiled.pdf that came out October 5, 2010 and in the Dungeon Master's pdf.

This just ticks me off that they fix their rules in September, but cannot migrate those new rules into the October update document 4 weeks later.

That's just so lame.

Thanks for pointing this out.


PS. I like these numbers a LOT more than either of the previous two sets. They take into account Easy working the same for untrained PCs from 1 to 30. They take into account Hard working tougher for trained PCs with all stat boosts because there are other synergies such as feats, skill powers, and items. I'm still not too keen on Medium because Trained PCs will almost auto-win Medium DCs (100% with a background +2), but it's a bit better than before.

It's about time they did it mostly right. Medium is still really lame (nearly 50% for many untrained, nearly 100% for many trained), but not as lame as before.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Well, on the Forge, early-to-mid-90s White Wolf is pretty much the poster child for incoherent high concept simulationist design.

Oh, you mean that giant hill of psychofantic nonsense? Lol, yeah. I think we can safely consign the Forge to the ashbin of history now. In fact I think we'd be doing the community a favor if we could go back in a time machine and erase it from the 1990's too.

 

[RHGreen]

My tuppence on the 1-2-1-2 versus 1-1-1-1 movement thing.

It is assumed that the 1-2-1-2 movement is more simulation and 1-1-1-1 movement is board game.

1-1-1-1 's merit is that it is far easier. Simple and less fuss.

1-2-1-2 's merit is supposed to be that it is a better simulation and more accurate. I differ.

1-2-1-2 movement does not take into account things like hesitation, reflex delay (stopping distance), stumbling, miss footing, decision making ability, micro-variations in terrain quality, movement curves, changing lines of sight and lines of free passage in an ever fluid and changing battle, etc.

Without taking all these other things into account the 1-2-1-2 movement has little or no value as a simulation aid and concetrating on such an anal unimportant part of movement is less realistic and more wargame/board gamey.

My point is this: 121, 111, movement debate is way way way down the list of why D&D movement (and any other RPG also) is unrealistic. If you can't fix the 100 or so other things higher up the list then I don't see why it is worth the bother of perfecting this.

It would be more realistic and simulational to ask the DM if you can move to a particular place and for him to adjudicate on the fly using intuition and guestimations if it can be done. This would, ironicly, be considered more storytelling than simulation, even though it would probably be better for both.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

My tuppence on the 1-2-1-2 versus 1-1-1-1 movement thing.

It is assumed that the 1-2-1-2 movement is more simulation and 1-1-1-1 movement is board game.

1-1-1-1 's merit is that it is far easier. Simple and less fuss.

1-2-1-2 's merit is supposed to be that it is a better simulation and more accurate. I differ.

1-2-1-2 movement does not take into account things like hesitation, reflex delay (stopping distance), stumbling, miss footing, decision making ability, micro-variations in terrain quality, movement curves, changing lines of sight and lines of free passage in an ever fluid and changing battle, etc.

Without taking all these other things into account the 1-2-1-2 movement has little or no value as a simulation aid and concetrating on such an anal unimportant part of movement is less realistic and more wargame/board gamey.

My point is this: 121, 111, movement debate is way way way down the list of why D&D movement (and any other RPG also) is unrealistic. If you can't fix the 100 or so other things higher up the list then I don't see why it is worth the bother of perfecting this.

It would be more realistic and simulational to ask the DM if you can move to a particular place and for him to adjudicate on the fly using intuition and guestimations if it can be done. This would, ironicly, be considered more storytelling than simulation, even though it would probably be better for both.

Yeah, it is quite similar to the way I feel about it. If you want a combat sim you are not looking in the right place. As for guestimation being more realistic, sure, this is generally true. One of the nice things about 4e being that in MOST of the game, they have stripped out silly attempted simulation kind of rules and left things up to the DM with a nice general resolution system to back it all up with.

Not that I would guestimate movement. There are other considerations more important than how realistic it might theoretically be possible to get.

 

[eriktheguy]

My tuppence on the 1-2-1-2 versus 1-1-1-1 movement thing.

...

It would be more realistic and simulational to ask the DM if you can move to a particular place and for him to adjudicate on the fly using intuition and guestimations if it can be done. This would, ironicly, be considered more storytelling than simulation, even though it would probably be better for both.

This is a great point. It's in line with a common theme in the 3e/4e simulation debates. 3e claims that it's rules reflect reality better than 4e. 4e points out that 3e's rules don't reflect anything close to reality so it can kindly shut its mouth. Many players that I know who play 3e use battle-maps sparingly. They prefer to occasionally sketch out approximate positions and distances on paper (without a grid). This is far less accurate than using 1-1-1-1 instead of 1-2-1-2.

In statistics, we often see two samples with different means. But we know that we cannot claim that the respective populations have different means, because the difference between the samples is small, and the samples do not represent their population perfectly. The difference between a sample and the population it was taken from is much larger than the difference between the two samples.

The same is true of D&D editions. The difference between 3e and reality, the difference between 4e and reality, is much larger than the difference between 3e and 4e. Neither of them estimate reality well, so pick the one that's more fun.

There is some trouble with 1-1-1-1 in higher dimensions though. A player with a fly speed of 6 can move 6 squares diagonal in 3-D. That's 52 feet of movement instead of 30. And what about when they travel to the far realm and there are four dimensions? Moving from corner to corner of a 4-D hypercube is actually 60 feet. They double their speed when they travel diagonally!

 

[Ajar]

3E is not an incredibly accurate reflection of reality, but it's a fairly detailed framework for simulating what life is like in a heroic fantasy world given parameters like Vancian magic.

The consolidation of skills discussed a few pages back is a good example. Climb and Swim used to be separate skills, so you could make an athletic character who was a sinker. You can't do that anymore. Of course, the trade-off was that every skill had unique DCs and adjudication rules, and there were a lot of skills.

Personally, I much prefer the ease of adjudication in 4E, but I can understand why some people feel differently.