Legends and Lore - Nod To Realism

[Incenjucar]

I know why the mechanic works the way it does in a metagame sense. My point is that it's incomprehensible in terms of what's going on in the game world. You don't stop using a winning tactic because it's boring.

In a story, you sure as heck do. 4th edition is cinematic. Repetition is not cinematic. The game world is cinematic.

(I should also add that from a metagame perspective, it's lazy design. It's an attempt to impose variety by fiat; you want people to not use the same power over and over, but instead of putting some thought into designing powers that are useful in different situations, you just disallow using the same power twice.)

That would just be a lazy way to hide that your powers are encounter powers.

 

[Dausuul]

I think 4e actually relies a lot less than past editions on the mechanics informing the in-game. During real play many, many powers across classes are not described, and certainly not tyrannized, by the flavor text or mechanics.

It's interesting that you think of this as being "tyrannized," where I see it as "supported." To me, one of the fundamental tasks of the mechanics is to inform the in-game. That's the difference between Magic: The Gathering, where the flavor elements are there as decoration, and D&D, where the flavor elements are the beating heart of the game.

On occasion in the early days of 4E, I heard statements from the designers along the lines of, "We're not going to tell you how to flavor mechanic X. You get to do that yourself!"

That's like Dell saying, "We're not going to tell you how to install your operating system. You get to do that yourself!" I don't want to do that myself. Part of what I'm paying Dell* for is to do that for me so I don't have to deal with it. I may tweak a few settings from the factory standard, but I don't want to have to install the entire OS from the ground up. Likewise, I may tweak the flavor a bit on this element or that, but I don't want to have to make up flavor for all of D&D.

I think a lot of non-4e players are looking for direct correlations between mechanics like encounter/daily, or half damage on a miss, or losing healing surges and the game world, and I'm not sure many 4thers really play that way.

I play and run 4E. The game's strengths in other areas are enough to overcome my annoyance with dissociated mechanics. Those strengths include rock-solid game balance, first-rate support for the DM, resource recovery between encounters, lack of having to flip back and forth between books, the elimination of instant-death mechanics, and tight control on "world-breaker" elements like flight and invisibility.

But if I could get those strengths and not have to deal with the dissociated mechanics, I would be an exceedingly happy camper.

4e mechanics have whatever in-game affect you want them to. 4e is huge on reflavoring and personalizing. I really believe it a strength.

It's a strength if that's something you want to spend your time doing. If it isn't, it's a weakness.

[size=-2]*Not that I actually buy my computers from Dell. But you get the idea.[/size]

 

[Dausuul]

In a story, you sure as heck do.

In a story, you sure as heck don't. If you give your protagonist an awesome power, and she's in a situation where that power would be just the thing, and she doesn't use that power, you give a reason why, if you don't want readers rolling their eyes and thinking, "What a moron." Do enough of that, and you start losing readers because your protagonist has the Idiot Ball chained to her leg. It's why I quit watching "Heroes."

 

[pemerton]

Even though I don't prioritise immersion while playing D&D, I think 4E's "bloodied" condition actually can help with this a good deal. In 4E other players will pretty much never need to know anything about another player's character's hit points except "are they/you bloodied" and "are they/you hors de combat (<0 hp)". And I think both of these are very easily "justified" in the fiction:

- Bloodied is when the damage becomes visible; before bloodied the creature looks no different from when it started the fight, but when bloodied it has scratches, bruises and other signs of damage. Or maybe just its hair is mussed up - or Captain James T. Kirk's tunic is torn, now...

- At <0 hit points the creature is out of the fight; not, necessarily, literally unconscious, but no longer able to act.

This fits with my experience, and is how it works for NPCs in our game, but the players in my game go into more detail than that with their hps, in order to more optimally ration their healing. It doesn't both me (or, I assume, them, given that they do it!) but I do think it breaks immersion.

I think the term 'Bloodied' might carry some baggage with it at this point in 4E's life though. When I GM, I usually describe a machine or construct as being 'oily' instead of bloodied or I might say that a part of a zombie's body has fallen off. I change the term if I feel doing so fits the theme of the creature better; though, if I sense player confusion, I follow it up by clarifying that I mean the creature is 'Bloodied' as in the game mechanics term.

AFAIK, many 4E groups treat 'bloodied' as a pure metagame construct with no simulationist element, and I agree that this would usually have to be true (which is exactly why it's non-immersive for me).

My experience is Johnny3D3D's - we don't treat bloodied as pure metagame, and I narrate zombies, golem's etc as Johnny describes it (with the mechanical clarification following the narration).

In addition to above, this eliminates the possibility of drawing first blood on the 1st round, then deducting morale/luck/stamina/karma hit points afterwards.

First blood can be drawn on the first round - a crit by a striker can do it, for example.

I'll agree it's not that common with a non-minion.

 

[Aenghus]

The 4e rules support the bloodied condition being known about, as all condtions are public information, and both players and monsters can act on this information.

In my gameworld "bloodied" means the creature concerned is visibly beaten up and starting to suffer from it - depending on the creature and situation this could be anything from cuts and scrapes to a nasty gash on a living creature to a lack of energy to physical damage and bits falling off on corporeal undead and constructs, to a tattered look for incorporeal creatures.

I actually don't make all conditions completely public, I make some judgement calls, there are situations where PCs or monsters know some effect is in play but don't know the details.

I've never had a problem with describing the condition, and have seen no players who have problems understanding the concept, for what anecdotal evidence is worth.

This is a good example of the fragmentation of the player base. People can have strong opinions for or against every element of setting and mechanics, and the chances of finding compatible players get smaller and smaller the longer and more detailed this set of likes and dislikes gets.

And the emergent properties of any particular set of preferences can get so complex that meaningful discussion gets very difficult, the further the preferred game is from the theoretical unhouseruled baseline.

 

[Walking Dad]

I haven't read the whole thread, but my two cents:

- realism isn't as important to me as verisimilitude and consistency of the "gameworld reality".

- I hate "realism" as an excuse to disallow cool and powerful things for "martial" characters. If their power is cut, because it is "unrealistic" to be that powerful and able to do things, but the others can change reality at a whim because it is "magic", you create different tiers of power. IMHO, this is a bad thing, even in cooperative games. If you reduce the martial abilities because of realism, you should use the same power level for magic. Because you find it more realistic to create a new plane of existence than jumping far in plate armor doesn't mean this would be a good game. Reduce what magic can do keeps it "realistic".

 

[pemerton]

they differ very significantly from narrative control cards in that they have to be played at a particular time by a particular character and cause that character to lose their standard action.

If the PC is spending an action and having an effect, I really want the causality to be fairly clear. I don't want a PC action to generate some other narrative effect not related to the PC's action.

If I want any actions to have a non-PC caused narrative effect, I want it to come from the player not from his avatar in the game setting.

I don't see it as giving narrative control cards to the player. It's giving them to the character and uses a character's actions to achieve an effect not directly related to any cause the character could effect.

But the decision to treat it as a PC resource and not a player resource is entirely in your hands. The action economy, likewise, including opportunity and immediate actions, is a player resource and not a PC resource - if you treat it the other way round, then immersion must be impossible, and verisimilitude lost, because you'd have to immerse yourself in an absurd stop-motion, turn-based world.

But it is incredibly jarring that suddenly the massively intelligent wizard with a huge will who doesn't even speak my language decides to come up close and smack the big huge fighter with his dagger. That is atrocious and unbelievably bad fiction.

Has this ever happened in your game? Or anyone else's?

In my game, a massively intelligent wizard has never decided to suddenly close with the fighter to attack. But the wizard (or archer, or ...) has found himself wrongfooted by the fighter, and in melee when he didn't want to be, or has tried to fall back but found no clear path and ended up next to the fighter, or . . .

My point is that it's incomprehensible in terms of what's going on in the game world. You don't stop using a winning tactic because it's boring.

Again, martial dailies generally don't represent a winning tactic. They represent a luckier/cleverer move. Every attack the fighter makes, s/he intends to be a brutal strike. Once per day, the player can make his/her own luck and specify that an attack, if it hits, really will be a Brutal Strike and do 3x damage.

Other players cannot encourage the PC to get up with a shout. Why can't the Heal skill be used at range to do this?

At the metagame level - because it's about a balanced distribution of capacities.

In the fiction - that's just how it plays out - no PC is ever roused by dreams of a non-warlord. It's like in HeroWars/Quest - everyone can have friends, but only those PCs with Relationship attributes will be able to get augments from those relationships.

As [MENTION=3887]Mallus[/MENTION] said, and as I've said in the past - these powers often don't correspond to manoeuvres performed by the PC, but action/fate points expended by the player. They are player metagame resources, used to manipulate the fiction.

In a moment, that PC might be dead due to failing death saving throws. He goes from being dead to being "just a flesh wound" because the Warlord asks him to get back on his feet.

Again, it's not a change in the fiction. It's a fortune-in-the-middole resolution of something as yet unsettled at the metagame level. It solidifies the fiction one way or the other.

The way Inspiring Word SHOULD have been worded is temporary hit points.

This is true if you want the game to be simulationist in its mechanics. My objection to Monte's column is that he just assumes that this is how the game should be designed without even canvassing other sorts of design. Which is just bizarre, given that he's working for a company whose flagship game uses a different, non-simulationist sort of design.

Ah. Mind Control without a roll (pre-errata).

Why are you interpreting what is clearly a metagame matter as if it involves ingame causation by the PC doing something?

You have to really stretch the fiction to get to your conclusions.

I don't see how it's stretching the fiction to say that a PC recovers because of an inspiring dream, or seeing something inspiring through half-closed eyes.

And let me turn it around - how can a game like Runequest or even 3E replicate either of the scenes I mentioned - Aragorn recovering with a dream of Arwen, or a fallen fighter recovering from a wound/swoon as s/he first sees, and then hears, her leader calling upon her to get back up to her feet.

 

[pemerton]

In a nutshell, my point is that D&D4 has many (most) of the ingredients required to build a believable fictionnal reality... But it takes quite a fair amount of energy from the user (GM and player) to make them surface.

I agree with this. 4e needs much better advice (especially to the GM) on how to handle the story in light of the mechanics - at the moment, especially when you compare it to the terrific mechanical/tactical advice on encounter building.

On occasion in the early days of 4E, I heard statements from the designers along the lines of, "We're not going to tell you how to flavor mechanic X. You get to do that yourself!"

Thankfully, they were mistaken. But, once again, the rulebooks don't help out in the way they should.

The anchor between mechanics and fiction is keywords. The flavour text at the top of a power is (in my view) really neither here nor there, but the keywords are crucial. So a deathlock wight or an enigma of vecna, when it pushes a PC with its fear effect, isn't literally pushing them: the forced movement corresponds to the PC fleeing out of fright. (That's what the fear keyword tells us.) Similarly, a fireball can set fire to a barn, but not freeze a puddle, while icy terrain is the opposite, because one does fire damage and the other cold damage.

Unfortunately, the rulebooks only talk explicitly about the mechanics-to-mechanics roll of keywords, not their role as a bridge between mechanics and fiction. The only place I know of in the rules where this second role is mentioned is in the discussion of object damage.

Firstly, gameplay changed from 1st person perspective to a bird's eye view or 3/4 perspective and someone forgot to tell me! It wasn't until a few years ago I suppose that I learned about non-Actor stance on Enworld. Maybe other people were always playing with a 3/4 perspective pre-4E and I was clueless otherwise. Why this focus on narrativist playstyle wasn't even mentioned in the 4E preview I have no idea.

This is very interesting, because while I agree that 4e's advice/commentary could be a lot better, I thought that the way the game should be played was pretty obvious from how the mechanics were written. This is the first post I can think of where I've seen someone say not just that they don't like it, but that it wasn't clear. Yet more evidence that WotC writers need to steal more from better game manuals!

Btw, I don't think you have to abandon actor stance. The player of the paladin in my game plays almost constantly in actor stance (although will talk about his PC in third person style during breaks in play), and can use metagame mechanics without breaking actor stance because he describes it in terms of what his PC ("I") am experiencing/seeing/doing. On the other hand, the player of the wizard said a few weeks ago that one thing he likes about 4e is that he can "play" his PC rather than "be" his PC, and he likes that - he said that, over the years, he has discovered that he prefers the "playing" to the "being" approach.

I think part of why the game can support this is because it entangles its player resources with PC resources (in terms of powers, hit points etc) so different players can deploy those mechanics in different ways and with different attitues. I think that, at least in this way, 4e is pluralist rather than monistic in its approach to supporting playstyles. (As [MENTION=98255]Nemesis Destiny[/MENTION] said in post #127.)

I remember one of the first games in which I went from 1-30. Part of the campaign took the party into The Nine Hells. I forget exactly which level it was (I've played a lot of D&D since then, so the details are fuzzy,) but there was a giant black gate which was the barrier between the level of hell we were on and the next one. Our goal was to seek an audience with Asmodeus, so we need to walk to his layer. Supposedly the gate was this super material we could not break -based on fluff; a few at-wills later, and the party was on the other side.

<snip>

Granted, back then a lot of powers were not yet given errata, and the monster math was weaker than it is now; I do not deny that was part of the issue. Still, the most recent game just wrapped up, and -even with using the new material- the same result was achieved: the PCs easily crushed most things in their way.

I suppose a good fiction example would be to say that I would find it equally as jarring if Frodo had not needed any help at all in LoTR.

I couldn't XP your reply to my post, but wanted to respond just to this point.

My game hasn't got to Epic tier yet, so I don't have the same sort of experience you're describing here. But what your post makes me think is that something was going wrong with the fiction - the mechanics were delivering a story about a group of heroic demigods scourging the Hells, but in the fiction the PCs weren't being conceived of in that way by the participants in the game (I also get this feeling from your comparison to Frodo - Frodo was not a demigod).

I don't know if you read the latest D&D Outsider, but it talked about incorporating paragon paths and epic destinies into the fiction. This passage struck me in particular:

Demonskin adept? Hey guys, you all saw me sewing together that cloak made of demon skins, ok? Because I need those. And totally had them.​

I was struck by this because one of the PCs in my game is a Demonskin Adept, and from 8th level on, every time the PCs would fight and beat demons, the player would make a point of mentioning his PC collecting the skins. And for all but one of the other PCs, there were events in play leading up to their paragon paths.

I think the game needs the GM and players to work together to produce the fiction that the mechanics reflect. If the fiction just remains at the "adventurers raiding dungeons" level, or the fiction doesn't change to reflect the PCs as paragon and then epic figures in the world, then it won't work. (I don't know if this is how your game was - it's the vibe I got from your post, but of course I could be misunderstanding.)

The most sensible only if the goal of the game is collaborative storytelling.

The whole point of narrativist game design - which is what 4e is influenced by in respect of the mechanics we're discussing - is to allow a story to emerge from play without collaborative storytelling. See the discussion here.

 

[Hussar]

Story elements are added to the story, which can be told after play is concluded.

I would point out that this is one way to play, but hardly the only way to play. Story elements being added during play is the meat and potatoes of a whole slew of games. Even D&D - with Action Points being a prime example.

Impossible. I was referring to the design of a theoretical D&D game that provided mechanics and options for both styles of play.

Honestly, I do agree with you here. You're just not going to be able to include both sides of the coin into the same game. Previous editions were much more on the "Story elements are added after play" and 4e has leaned a lot more on some of the more Indie games and added lots of "story elements are added during play" stuff. Trying to reconcile the two into one game just won't work.

Someone along the line mentioned a sort of core Savage Worlds style book for the base mechanics and then two or three separate DMG's designed to speak to the different playstyles. I do think that this is the right way to go.

 

[KarinsDad]

In a story, you sure as heck don't. If you give your protagonist an awesome power, and she's in a situation where that power would be just the thing, and she doesn't use that power, you give a reason why, if you don't want readers rolling their eyes and thinking, "What a moron." Do enough of that, and you start losing readers because your protagonist has the Idiot Ball chained to her leg. It's why I quit watching "Heroes."

I see this in books a lot to the point that I don't read books as often as I used to.

I roll my eyes and say "What an idiot." (I like the word idiot better than moron, I also like using the personal term Audiot due to an extremely idiotic Audi driver who ended up having my daughter spontaneously create this word with the phrase "What an Audiot!" ). The George R.R. Martin Song of Ice and Fire series comes to mind (as does the Wheel of Time series). I'm immersed in the story and suddenly a character does something either totally stupid given their abilities, or the character does something totally out of character, and I'm suddenly realizing that I am reading a book.

This can happen in movies or TV shows (Heroes is a good example) and it can definitely happen in 4E. It also happened in 3E and earlier versions of the game, but 4E is a bit more jarring about it.