Legends and Lore - The Temperature of the Rules

[LurkAway]

Although your description of why an Epic wizard has a +15 to break down doors makes perfect sense, and is how I understand what is going on in the gameworld, it is not really simulationist in the purist-for-system sense. The mechanics aren't exhibiting ingame causal logic. Indeed, the very same mechanic - a uniform level bonus to skill checks - represents something different for each of the wizard's skills (with Arcana, for instance, it's not the subtle use of enhancement magic but rather greater learning and proficiency in the magical arts) and something different for different PCs (for a fighter, the +15 to athletics checks means something different from what it means for the wizard).

What your description of the +15 bonus does do is show that there is no trouble, in adjudicating 4e, in explaining what is happening in the fiction that is reflect by the action resolution mechanics. The game is therefore not "gamist" in the pejorative sense used by some ENworlders - meaning roughly, I think, that the mechanical outcomes have no fictional meaning. (This use of "gamist", it might be added, has nothing to do with the way the word is used by The Forge.)

A gamist rule is only simulating fiction if the player decides that there is an explanation that suffices for him/her. Otherwise, it's not simulationist.

If you say 4E's simulation "makes perfect sense" and that there is "no trouble" in explaining what is happening, then all the power to you. I completely disagree. But really, I don't want to derail multiple pages of this thread with that.

I can point that there is a world out there where Pathfinder heroes do not all get better at each of door bashing, climbing, sneaking, etc. at a equal minimum rate. There are probably other RPGs, and the majority of film, literature, and real-life where that is just as true.

So by agreeing to the 4E simulation as "making perfect sense", that means you didn't allow the Pathfinder hero into your worldview. You didn't allow epic Raistlin into your worldview. You didn't allow adventurers and heroes in literature and movies who developed different skillsets at different rates and some who sucked or improved slowly at certain things throughout all their adventures.

You've accepted a certain stereotype about heroes, and by doing so, you're divorced from any fictional positioning that contradicts that stereotype.

So it's not that you haven't or can't find a reason to support a gamist abstraction. It's that you haven't sought an explanation that "makes perfect sense" but which may exist outside the stereotype. And yes, I do mean to stereotype as defined as a conventional, standardized, and oversimplified conception.

And not to have everyone think that this specific problem drives me nuts and leaves me awake at nights. But it's a good example as any of a gamist element added to D&D which informed the fiction from the top down, dictating the pattern by which heroes act and evolve in the story, instead of using the rules to build for yourself from bottom up how the heroes behave in the story.

As long as some people keep insisting that there is always a good peg to fit in the hole provided, they will never, ever understand the desire to design a bigger hole, or a more stretchy hole (innately, not by exception-based houseruling) or an official build-your-own-hole into the game system.

off the top of my head everything else I find lacking in 4E, can be described and justified in a vacuum.

To me the real problem (at least this specific problem) has NOTHING to do with that the wizard can and does have a +15. The problems are that EVERY character of that level has the same +15 bonus and there is no such thing as making that character WITHOUT the +15 bonus.

Bingo! Perhaps more specifically (I'm not sure), that the designers didn't seem to care that someone would even conceive of the idea of making a character without that +15 bonus (even though gamers were doing it in systems like 3.X, still are, and probably always will be)

 

[pemerton]

A gamist rule is only simulating fiction if the player decides that there is an explanation that suffices for him/her. Otherwise, it's not simulationist.

I don't really understand this. In particular, I'm not sure what you mean by "simulating fiction". To the extent that a game is being played as an RPG, the action resolution mechanics should be producing changes in the shared fiction. The question of (purist-for-system) simulation is about whether the action resolution mechanics themselveve model the causal processes of the fictional world.

Imagine a rule that says - if there is conflict between two players as to what will happen in a scene, each rolls a d6, and the higher roll gets to narrate, but does not get to change any prior narration, nor to violate the expectations of genre or common sense. A rule like this could potentially be the kernel of an RPG (I'm thinking The World, The Flesh and the Devil), but it obviously wouldn't be simulationist - the rolling of the d6 wouldn't correlate with anything taking place in the gameworld.

If you say 4E's fiction "makes perfect sense" and that there is "no trouble" in explaining in explaining what is happening, then all the power to you. I completely disagree.

What do you mean by "4e's fiction"? Each 4e game has it's own fiction, and I'm not sure how you know that none of them makes sense.

I have no trouble following the fiction in my game, and nor do my players as far as I know. I've got a number of actual play threads on both the General and 4e forums that explain how the mechanics have produced that fiction.

I can point that there is a world out there where Pathfinder heroes do not all get better at each of door bashing, climbing, sneaking, etc. at a equal minimum rate. There are probably other RPGs, and the majority of film, literature, and real-life where that is just as true.

So by agreeing to the 4E simulation as "making perfect sense", that means you didn't allow the Pathfinder hero into your worldview.

<snip>

Perhaps more specifically (I'm not sure), that the designers didn't seem to care that someone would even conceive of the idea of making a character without that +15 bonus (even though gamers were doing it for 3.X, still are, and probably always will be)

I'm not sure I follow this either, and to the extent that I do, I disagree.

First, it sems to me obvious that the designers conceived of the idea of making PCs without a +15 bonus. They just decided not to make a game in which such PCs can be built. (There reasons, I think, were that they thought the existence of such PCs got in the way of smooth encounter design.)

Similarly, Gygax conceived of priests using spears and swords (and his Greyhawk game contained such priests). Nevertheless, he published a game in which such PCs cannot be built (his reason, I think, being that cleric PCs with access to bladed weapons would be overpowered).

Many players have conceived of wizards who don't memorise their spells, or who don't memorise them in the Vancian fashion (see Rolemaster, Runequest, Arcana Unearthed/Evolved, etc) but such PCs cannot be build in AD&D and not all of them can be built in 3E.

4e is not unique in putting limits, via its PC build and action resolution mechanics, on the sort of stories that it supports. This doesn't show that there is anything incoherent in the fictions it produces, that that fiction fails to make sense.

But it is a mistake to say that 4e heroes always get better at doing things. All that is true is that, as they go up in level, things are more likely to go their way. The rules leave it an open question whether this is because they are better, or luckier, or watched over by a supernatural being, or whatever. To put it another way, the rules leave it open whether to treat the +15 bonus as a PC ability, or as a player resource. (Like winning the 1d6 roll in my example RPG described above.)

You've accepted a certain stereotype about heroes, and by doing so, you're divorced from any fictional positioning that contradicts that stereotype.

I don't know what you mean by "fictional positioning" here.

4e permits heroes who are incompetent but lucky - this is one variant of the "lazy warlord" build (the so-called "princess warlord"). And the mechanics will not produce any outcome which contradicts the fictional position of the hero in question as incompentent.

If the complaint is that 4e won't produce gritty stories about heroes, even epic heroes, who try but get unlucky at opening ordinary doors, that is true. But all that tells me is what I already knew, namely, that 4e is a game of ultra-heroic high fantasy. If I want a gritty fantasy game I'll play one of the many other systems that delivers it - Runequest, Rolemaster, HARP, Burning Wheel etc.

 

[S'mon]

A gamist rule is only simulating fiction if the player decides that there is an explanation that suffices for him/her. Otherwise, it's not simulationist.

If you say 4E's simulation "makes perfect sense" and that there is "no trouble" in explaining what is happening, then all the power to you. I completely disagree. But really, I don't want to derail multiple pages of this thread with that.

I can point that there is a world out there where Pathfinder heroes do not all get better at each of door bashing, climbing, sneaking, etc. at a equal minimum rate. There are probably other RPGs, and the majority of film, literature, and real-life where that is just as true.

4e effectively simulates a world (& fiction) where heroes get better at almost everything as they ascend towards a sort of divine or semi-divine state. Some fiction is like this. My impression is that American superhero comic fiction (Marvel & DC) is like this (with the characters already semi-divine) - eg even superheroes who are not supposed to have superhuman strength, resilience etc never seem to get shot/knocked out/bones broken by the kind of damage that would cripple a mundane human.

Lots of other fiction is not like this.

You prever one sort of fiction to another. 4e is apparently a poor sort of tool for modelling the sort of fiction you do like. That does not mean it's a poor tool per se.

As someone 'once' said, you should play what you like.

 

[S'mon]

Bingo! Perhaps more specifically (I'm not sure), that the designers didn't seem to care that someone would even conceive of the idea of making a character without that +15 bonus (even though gamers were doing it in systems like 3.X, still are, and probably always will be)

4e is not well designed to accommodate 30th level PCs who can't break open mundane locked doors, yup. Clearly it was not intended to accommodate such play.

OTOH I see a lot of design articles where the designers never give hard-coded DCs, eg in the PC Strongolds article from Dragon 395, by Schwalb:

"Defensive Walls Level 10 Common
You surround your stronghold with a thick, outer wall.
Stronghold Component 5,000 gp
Property: Defensive walls are stone, 10 feet high, and 10
feet thick. A creature must succeed on an Athletics check
against a moderate DC of the creature's level to climb the
wall."

If you apply this approach consistently to setting DCs, breaking open a particular door can always be "a moderate DC of the creature's level", in which case the Wizard PC will never get better at breaking it open. Which is closer to what you apparently like.

(Personally I think this is a terrible design approach, far better not to be giving a level bonus then cancelling it out with a scaled DC. IMCs climbing that wall will always be DC 20. But the scaled approach does give the fictional result you want.)

 

[LurkAway]

Imagine a rule that says - if there is conflict between two players as to what will happen in a scene, each rolls a d6, and the higher roll gets to narrate, but does not get to change any prior narration, nor to violate the expectations of genre or common sense. A rule like this could potentially be the kernel of an RPG (I'm thinking The World, The Flesh and the Devil), but it obviously wouldn't be simulationist - the rolling of the d6 wouldn't correlate with anything taking place in the gameworld.

Right. So giving 1/2 character level bonus to skill checks is like that d6 roll. If you fluff it to explain why EVERY PC gets better at EVERY skill check for whatever diverse reasons, then you've made it simultationist (which is what I understand is what some were attempting to do, at least on a case-by-case basis). So when I don't buy in on that explanation, it remains un-simulationist for me, like that d6 roll. But if I did buy into it, like some people do, they call it simulationist.

...I started to type up replies to the rest, but I found I just was repeating myself. And so it goes, the curse of Enworld, a strange pocket dimension where some of us repeat ourselves over and over and over... a strange place this is.

 

[LurkAway]

4e is apparently a poor sort of tool for modelling the sort of fiction you do like. That does not mean it's a poor tool per se.

Yes, and I never say this again... this is NOT about 4E for me. I don't care about 4E, sorry, I view this a 5E thread. Please stop making this about what you think I want out of 4E.

 

[S'mon]

Yes, and I never say this again... this is NOT about 4E for me. I don't care about 4E, sorry, I view this a 5E thread. Please stop making this about what you think I want out of 4E.

There is no 5e. You can explain that you don't play 4e. You can say that you personally want the future 5e to be more like 3e and less like 4e, that's fine. But we are talking about an article on WoTC's 4e D&D game site, read mostly by players of that edition; naturally 4e is the first point of reference for most people, and realistically 5e is likely to be a development of 4e.

Personally I'm happy with both the 4e approach (PC ability and task DC both auto-scale with level) and I'm happy with the 0e-2e approach (no scaling of PC ability or task DC), for reasons I have given above. I don't like the 3e approach though (task DCs scale, PC ability may or may not scale), again for reasons I have given, and I hope they don't go with that.

What edition do you play - Pathfinder? Pathfinder's skill/task system IMO tones down the more egregious problems with the 3e task resolution system, but I still like 0e-2e 'roll under attribute' quite a lot better, and the 4e system a bit better too. I don't see much prospect of them going back to 0e-2e though, so I hope they stick closer to 4e than to 3e.

 

[S'mon]

Bingo! Perhaps more specifically (I'm not sure), that the designers didn't seem to care that someone would even conceive of the idea of making a character without that +15 bonus)

This is clearly a statement about 4e, BTW.

 

[S'mon]

Right. So giving 1/2 character level bonus to skill checks is like that d6 roll. If you fluff it to explain why EVERY PC gets better at EVERY skill check for whatever diverse reasons, then you've made it simultationist...

More talk of 4e rules mechanics. If you don't like people discussing 4e with you, don't discuss it!

 

[LurkAway]

This is clearly a statement about 4e, BTW.

Ah, nitpicking, I missed you so much. That was used a reference for extrapolation. And pemerton addressed that designers knew about it.