Mearls: Abilities as the core?

[Mark CMG]

There's plenty of 'fluff' attached to classes and races in the PHBs. There are also quite a few other RP hooks.

Therein lies the problem with mechanics-first design for an RPG system (for any RPG system, though you seem to focus on but one), other things might be attached to the mechanics rather than the mechanics brought in as a way to enhance and stem from character creation concepts that are not necessarily an outgrowth of mechanics.

 

[Lanefan]

Of course, Gygax did that, too, with the Cavalier...

True, but the stat increment system he used was pretty slow; certainly not fast enough to "build" a character around.

We took that idea of slowly-advancing percentile stat increments and gave it to all classes in our 1e game, by the way - it hasn't hurt anything so far, 27 years later.

Which generally led, IME, to players feeling like their characters were crap if they didn't have at least one high ability score.

The way I look at rolling up a character, I want one high score to make it useful, one low score (single digit, preferably) to make it fun, and the rest can be whatever. The worst ones are those that end up something like 14-13-12-13-14-12.

Lan-"wisdom 9"-efan

 

[ExploderWizard]

While it's fairly typical of early D&D to be extensively houseruled, it's curious that the maker of the game did the same.

Why would that be curious? The game was designed as a framework from which individual DMs could construct unique campaigns. Gary was a game designer but also a DM. Why wouldn't he follow the logic of his own design and build his campaign like any other DM?

I would state that the difference between regularly allowing players to raise their stats and being "entitled" (What an interesting word you choose!) to stat increases per the rules is that in the first, you're breaking the rules when you play the game the way it was meant to be played.

Breaking what rules? The only rules that matter are the ones a particular group chooses to play by. Play the game the way it was meant to be played? When you are able to laugh at such a statement grasshopper then you too will be ready to sit behind the screen.

Old published adventures sometime featured unique methods of ability score increase (and decrease). Special blessings from a deity, eating magical food, activating an artifact, etc. These are not "regular" stat adjustments because they cannot be predicted or planned for. They are just part of events that might take place in a campaign.

Likewise a character might acquire certain abilities that are not part of any particular class package due to certain campaign events. The deity of Storms was grateful for the assistance your fighter gave him so now you have the ability to predict weather 1/day and shoot a 6d6 lighting bolt 1/day. There are no hard and fast rules for this kind of stuff and how much of it exists will vary from campaign to campaign.

Its really fun looking over old character sheets, seeing this oddball stuff and remembering how it all came about. Its the kind of fun that you can't get out of a rulebook.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

True, but the stat increment system he used was pretty slow; certainly not fast enough to "build" a character around.

We took that idea of slowly-advancing percentile stat increments and gave it to all classes in our 1e game, by the way - it hasn't hurt anything so far, 27 years later.

The way I look at rolling up a character, I want one high score to make it useful, one low score (single digit, preferably) to make it fun, and the rest can be whatever. The worst ones are those that end up something like 14-13-12-13-14-12.

Lan-"wisdom 9"-efan

Yeah, the UA stat increment system was pretty meaningless. And yup, a character with all middling stats was a real curse. We actually LIKED the characters with a low stat (or two) just so you had some RP inspiration since it really didn't do your character much harm. Obviously it was nice to have a high stat (or 2, very precious!). The bland characters usually ended up with names like Tribord #3 or something like that...

As I noted upthread, I agree that it's realistic to require fighters to have high strength to be effective. In real life, physical conditioning has a huge impact on performance in athletic endeavors. To pick just one example, Mark Spitz may be the most skilled swimmer ever (at least in his ability to convert physical energy into forward progress in the water), but his records have been overcome by less efficient swimmers who used modern weight-training techniques to become considerably stronger than athletes were in the 70s. Likewise, strength, size and speed make a huge different in combat capability, at least according to all the martial arts, boxing, wrestling and other combat style activities I've seen practiced.

And, yes, you can play with a 16 in your primary attribute, and an unobservant player might not notice the character's reduced effectiveness. To hit modifiers are a big deal. They are why we have all these expertise feats.

But that's not the issue -- I don't think that type of realism is a useful goal for a character generation system in a game like 4e and even a 16 is a huge cost in point buy if you want to play a genius warlord or a super-charismatic cleric.

I think that a core goal of the character creation rules should be to allow players to create a variety of interesting, different and viable characters with minimal rules overhead (quoting myself above). Because to hit modifiers are so important to a characters effectiveness (both in damage per round and in the ability to land important effects), WotC severely reduced the number of reasonably effective builds for little gain.

-KS

Eh, I think the system has to allow your character to excel BECAUSE of his strengths. We can agree you should be able to make pretty much any concept, but really that is largely true in 4e already. Perhaps to-hit should be removed entirely from the realm of any modifiers, since it is such an incredibly tempting optimization target. You could still have for instance a set of feats that gave out a non-stacking to-hit bonus, but just make sure there's one which is practical for every character to take, much like the Essentials expertise feats. Still, if a character is slow, weak, and frail it simply isn't cogent for the character to be an excellent fighter compared with stronger, faster, more durable PCs.

Honestly this brings me back to the idea of eliminating the whole half-level bonus thing from the game. This would make it much easier to have mixed level parties for instance and just generally put level as an attribute more on a par with other things. The 'treadmill' goes away, which means things are more organic. You could also remove ability score bonus as the basis for attack bonus from powers, so instead you'd for instance have all attacks with bows using dex or whatever. All of these things would pull back reliance on high stats a good bit. Removing stat bumps would help a lot too, as now a 12 in some stat is respectable instead of basically laughable at anything beyond heroic tier.

Sigh, I'm just going to have to write a mock-up of a system pretty soon and get all of this stuff out of my head... lol.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

It is curious that he build a game that he himself would not play.

Well, what would make you assume that Gygax wasn't just like any other DM? We all like to try out new things and we're always inventing new tricks. I mean Gary wrote 2 very distinct versions of D&D.

But the actual core rules themselves emphasized very strongly that attributes were static and unchanging. As I said, it's funny that the rules said one thing and generalized actual play said the exact opposite.

I remember no such statement. There were items provided in the 1e DMG which actually DID change certain attributes permanently.

There is a difference between adding things not in the rulebook, and adding things the rulebook tells you not to.

One thing AD&D (or really any version of D&D that I'm aware of) has NEVER done is tell you NOT to do something. 4e DMG has a section on houserules and homebrew. The 1e DMG and PHB reiterated again and again that the game was nothing but a framework, fun comes before the rules, all rules are just guidelines, etc etc etc. Beyond that TSR published a magazine which for MANY years published large quantities of material which was plainly labeled as unofficial and changed or added to the game in almost every possible way. In fact 90% of what is in 1e AD&D is just an edited version of articles from Dragon. Actually I don't think there is even one thing in the 1e PHB that wasn't a houserule before it became part of the official rules.

Now, that being said one of the main motivations for AD&D WAS to codify lots of material most people were playing with already in some form to make the game a little more consistent. Personally I think it is a good idea if you have mostly a consistent base game, and I don't think optional components should be too vital to the way the game plays for various reasons. Still, the spirit of the game has always been tinkering (even if it seems like that fell out of fashion somewhat after the TSR days).

 

[BryonD]

Therein lies the problem with mechanics-first design for an RPG system (for any RPG system, though you seem to focus on but one), other things might be attached to the mechanics rather than the mechanics brought in as a way to enhance and stem from character creation concepts that are not necessarily an outgrowth of mechanics.

Exactly.

I think this is at the heart of many of the complaints against 4E.

I've seen 4E fans praise the system for the fact that it is very easy to re-skin. You can take nearly anything and redescribe it and with no mechanical change it is something very different in terms of concept. And I can see how that would be appealing.

But the price is that the character isn't really married to the mechanics. So while it is 100% true that you can roleplay anything in 4E that you can roleplay in any other system, that effort is like a completely independent part of the experience. The "game" is over here and the "role play" is over there.

It gets back to the Andy Collins quote about not building classes based on concept.

Once "game" and "role play" are segregated then the experience changes. If you were already playing games more or less this way, then you won't see any loss. But if you weren't it really detracts.

There is an important difference between role playing a monk and having your mechanics be built first as an effort to portray some concept of a fantasy monk and playing a set of "compelling game mechanics" which are carefully established first as mechanically balanced and tactically distinct and simply applying a monk flavor overlying that mechanical group.

Just as 4E doesn't "stop" anyone from role playing, Descent doesn't stop anyone from role playing. But 4E is an RPG and Descent is not and the value of that experience is far less in Descent. That's the key, "being able to do it", and "getting the same response" are two different ideas. It is ridiculous to equate Descent to 4E just because you can RP Descent.

And 4E was described as "the math works", "not physics", "compelling reasons" for classes over "being" the concept. It achieves these things. But in doing so the fact that you can role play anything with it does not mean it is capable of providing all the same responses that some other systems can.

4E is much closer to 3E than it is to Descent. But it is still well down the spectrum in that direction.

Not everyone played 3E the same. I'd be surprised if everyone played 4E the same. But those people that already played 3E in a manner that put them in the area where 4E lives, don't see a difference. But if you are one of those people, here is the difference we are talking about. It is optional for playing, but it is mandatory for getting the best bang for the buck for many of us.

That doesn't make your game one drop less awesome. But your awesome 4E game is still different than some people's awesome 3E games. If you don't believe that then you are not grasping this point.

And none of this is a "slam" at 4E. If anything it is simply praise of 3E for doing what *I* want. What 4E intends to do, it does awesome.

The argument I am making doesn't challenge the fun 4E fans have, only the insistence that some 4E fans demand claiming that there is no meaningful difference in the experience and there is no way anyone anywhere could see 4E as being "boardgamey" to them.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Exactly.

I think this is at the heart of many of the complaints against 4E.

I've seen 4E fans praise the system for the fact that it is very easy to re-skin. You can take nearly anything and redescribe it and with no mechanical change it is something very different in terms of concept. And I can see how that would be appealing.

But the price is that the character isn't really married to the mechanics. So while it is 100% true that you can roleplay anything in 4E that you can roleplay in any other system, that effort is like a completely independent part of the experience. The "game" is over here and the "role play" is over there.

It gets back to the Andy Collins quote about not building classes based on concept.

Once "game" and "role play" are segregated then the experience changes. If you were already playing games more or less this way, then you won't see any loss. But if you weren't it really detracts.

There is an important difference between role playing a monk and having your mechanics be built first as an effort to portray some concept of a fantasy monk and playing a set of "compelling game mechanics" which are carefully established first as mechanically balanced and tactically distinct and simply applying a monk flavor overlying that mechanical group.

Just as 4E doesn't "stop" anyone from role playing, Descent doesn't stop anyone from role playing. But 4E is an RPG and Descent is not and the value of that experience is far less in Descent. That's the key, "being able to do it", and "getting the same response" are two different ideas. It is ridiculous to equate Descent to 4E just because you can RP Descent.

And 4E was described as "the math works", "not physics", "compelling reasons" for classes over "being" the concept. It achieves these things. But in doing so the fact that you can role play anything with it does not mean it is capable of providing all the same responses that some other systems can.

4E is much closer to 3E than it is to Descent. But it is still well down the spectrum in that direction.

Not everyone played 3E the same. I'd be surprised if everyone played 4E the same. But those people that already played 3E in a manner that put them in the area where 4E lives, don't see a difference. But if you are one of those people, here is the difference we are talking about. It is optional for playing, but it is mandatory for getting the best bang for the buck for many of us.

That doesn't make your game one drop less awesome. But your awesome 4E game is still different than some people's awesome 3E games. If you don't believe that then you are not grasping this point.

And none of this is a "slam" at 4E. If anything it is simply praise of 3E for doing what *I* want. What 4E intends to do, it does awesome.

The argument I am making doesn't challenge the fun 4E fans have, only the insistence that some 4E fans demand claiming that there is no meaningful difference in the experience and there is no way anyone anywhere could see 4E as being "boardgamey" to them.

I don't think anyone is claiming that 4e "is the same as" 3e. Clearly they are different games. Just as you obviously may favor one some people favor the other.

For myself I don't really buy, or care about, this theoretical argument that somehow 4e is mechanics that are just fluffed to this or that. Are you seriously saying that you think someone sat down and designed a neat package of mechanics, decided it should be named 'fighter' and then invented some fluff to support that? Seriously? I didn't think so...

In any case IMHO RPGing is about telling a story. I'm going to tell story X. Now, maybe one set of rules or another set of rules makes it easier to do that. I'm going to tell it and pull in the rules I want to use that will make that easy. I did that 35 years ago with Old D&D, and I do it today, and I did it with all the editions of the game in between. The process was different and the results were a bit different but really 4e still fits the same basic genre concepts that other editions did. I could really care less if saves work different now than they did before.

I don't think comparing 4e to a board game like Descent is really sensible at all. You can use almost any game as a 'role playing game' but so what? Again, if I want to tell a story with players playing characters in the story that isn't a board game. It makes no difference where we get our mechanics from and if for some reason stealing stuff from Descent worked really well so what? It has nothing to do with 4e, which quite obviously is intended to be used as an RPG from the start.

 

[The Human Target]

In regards to the original post...

I'd be all for with a system that used the ability scores as "skills" and divorced them from attack rolls and even defenses.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

I've seen 4E fans praise the system for the fact that it is very easy to re-skin. You can take nearly anything and redescribe it and with no mechanical change it is something very different in terms of concept. And I can see how that would be appealing.

But the price is that the character isn't really married to the mechanics. So while it is 100% true that you can roleplay anything in 4E that you can roleplay in any other system, that effort is like a completely independent part of the experience. The "game" is over here and the "role play" is over there.

This is the only part of the longer post where I think you really overstate the case. It is not that any mechanic can be easily reskinned into any concept. Rather, it is that there is "mechanic set A" which has a certain vibe, and because of that, it works pretty well for concept A, and always for A2 and A3. For B2, not so much.

So the "game" and the "roleplay" are not completely independent. They are more independent than in some other games, including 3E. (Though even 3E is more independent in this way than some games. Just inconsistently so. Some 3E things reskinn easily this way; some do not.)

Actually, I'd say the relative difference between D&D 3E and 4E is about the difference between GURPS 3E and Hero System 4th edition. (Not sure about later versions of those games.) GURPS 3E is more specific, but the underlying framework is pretty obvious, and thus easy to reskin, if you want. Whereas, Hero 4th is clearly a mechanic first, which you can then make it something suitable. It's not an exact correspondence, but I'd guess the relative distances are similar.

Also, the appeal for some of us, along similar grounds to your larger post, is not so much the modest increase in "game" and "roleplay" independence (though that is nice, too, when reskinning is handy), but rather that the "game" elements that we have to work with are, for us, a better representation of the "roleplay" we were trying to do with an earlier ruleset. To wit:

From the 3E to 4E wizard, you gain some independence on mechanics, and you definitely lose some flavor. You might like this because of the toning down of the wizard (a problem for some of us), and you might regain some of that flavor in various ways, but I don't think many people would argue that right out of the box, there is some flavor lost, along the grounds you have supplied.

However, from the 3E to 4E wizard, you gain some independence on mechanics, and you swap one kind of flavor (feat customization, mainly) for another kind (being really good at getting in monster faces). Overall, there is a strong case for the flavor at least being neutral. And of course, if you happen to value the "in your face" part more than the 3E-style customization, this is a net win. It's a strict preference though, and has nothing to do with the independence, whatsoever. The independence just means that if you want an in your face monster, you know how to reskin the mechanics to get one.

 

[ExploderWizard]

It is curious that he build a game that he himself would not play.

You mean, kind of like the way Mearls designs for 4E and plays OD&D .

First off, I've been DMing for years, so blow it.

Secondly, I for one did not enjoy the "old school" days where every table had their own binder of houserules you had to learn if you ever switched groups. If I'm going to buy a rulebook then throw out half the rules, why bother buying the rulebook?

Relax. Everyone has different things they enjoy about the game. I actually prefer different DMs games being something other than the same canned experience.

As for throwing out half the rules I don't know where thats coming from. When I run Basic D&D I don't need to throw out much at all. If anything I will add quite a bit to what is already there.

If the rules you begin with are simple then throwing half of them out becomes less necessary. YMMV.

But the actual core rules themselves emphasized very strongly that attributes were static and unchanging. As I said, it's funny that the rules said one thing and generalized actual play said the exact opposite.

Which rules would these be? The AD&D rules for aging in the DMG make it quite clear that attribute fluctuations were a normal part of play as the campaign advanced. There were magical artifacts that could alter attributes. Just because the rules did not include provisions for attributes to increase simply due to advancing level does not mean that they were meant to be static.

There is a difference between adding things not in the rulebook, and adding things the rulebook tells you not to.

I await a quote from a D&D rulebook that tells me I shalt not do X.