Same rules or different Rules (PC vs NPC)

[pemerton]

If you're playing D&D, you've adopted the conceit that a living creature is defined by certain attributes that can be represented in numerical form. Working within that conceit, every living creature should in theory have those stats.

I believe that this is true of AD&D and of 3E. It is not true of 4e as I run it, although there are other 4e players who post on these forums (at least [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION] and [MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION]) for whom it is true.

One well-known example - many 4e players take the view that the very same creature can be statted as a minion, a standard or a solo monster, depending which level you are statting it at. Which would, in turn, be influenced by the level of the party form whom you as GM are preparing that encounter/scenario.

Now I assume that 5E is going to go back to the more classic assumptions, because that would fit with the general retro vibe that is circulating in respect of it. But that is a design choice. It is not a conceit that is a given of playing D&D.

What happens if he is standing there in his bare chested AC41 glory and his twin brother walks into the room sporting his brand new starmetal mystical full plate and magic shield? What is his AC?

<snip>

To me the character is what he is. If his narrative description doesn't change then his stats don't change either, PC level notwithstanding.

I agree with your last sentence, although with two caveats that for me are minor but I assume for you are not.

The first is this: I am quite happy with the minion/standard/solo equivalence. In fact, to give a smooth play experience 4e almost depends on it. This equivalence then requires treating defences, attack bonuses, damage etc as non-particular elements of an overall gestalt of combat ability. In the case of a solo, it also requires treating the action economy in that fashion. This doesn't bother me (in fact, I find this an essential way to treat the action economy in order to avoid the sense of a stop-motion world), but I imagine it would bother you.

The second is this: if the backstory of a creature - say, a demon lord - is that it is "powerful" and only epic heroes could hope to challenge it, I will cheerfully hold off on statting it up until the PCs are about to fight it, in order to cash out "powerful" at the right degree of difficulty. (Of course, other narrative considerations could also figure in here. If the demon lord is known to have bested Yeenoghu in hand-to-hand combat, for example, and I have Yeenoghu's stats already and have based things in the game on them, then that is going to set some minimum parameters for my new demon lord.)

I would be surprised if the second caveat is as bothersome to you as the first. And to bring in another comparitor - the Burning Wheel Adventure Burner is strongly against my first caveat - a monster's stats are a monster's stats, simulationist-style - but actively encourages my second caveat - keep your powder dry and don't stat too early, in order to minimise the risk of a dramatic misfire.

And a further comment about the twin with the armour, which is probably a minority approach in 4e GMing although supported by the DMG (in its discussion of monster building) - if the demon lord puts on the breastplate, raising its AC by 1 is fine. But if the magical armour is a heap better than that, then I am probably going to look at adjusting the demon lord's level, in order to keep my maths, XP etc all in sync. Like the minion/standard/solo progression, this relies upon treating the individual numerical components as flexible elements of a gestalt whole. (The actual narration is fairly easy - "Wearing a new starmetal breastplate, the demon lord casts defensive manoeuvres to the wind and starts belting everything within reach with a redoubled fury!")

someone said earlier that PCs and NPCs should interact with the same game engine, I can get behind that. NPCs should follow the same rules, attacks, damage, HP, jumping, moving... etc.

But does "playing by the same rules" necessarily need to mean the same stat generation methods?

To create an NPC do they need to be generated in the same manner as a PC? or is itenough that they play by the same rules as in they interact with the world the same way?

I like having different rules, but I believe the two different branches of rules (PC & NPC) should interact with the 'physics engine' of the game world in a consistent way.

I'd much prefer using NPCs with 4e-style stats... at least for combat. When it comes to non-combat, I'm a little bit less certain, because I feel that 4e NPCs don't usually have enough skills or non-combat abilities to make them very interesting outside of a combat encounter.

I agree with this as a starting point: different build rules for PCs and monsters/NPCs, but ending up with the same sorts of numbers that interact with the action resolution mechanics in the same way.

This is what Runequest has, and what AD&D, Rolemaster, Tunnels & Trolls and other games from that era lack.

But 4e is actually contradictory in this respect, or at least evinces a degree of tension, because for non-combat action resolution the standard approach is the skill challenge, in which the players roll all the dice and the stats of the monsters/NPCs dont' factor in in detail, but only influence the setting of DCs from the DCs by level chart.

I'm one of the few who quite likes the skill challenge mechanics, but I do sometimes wonder what exactly I am meant to be doing with those Bluff, Diplmacy etc scores on my NPC and monster stat blocks.

Whichever way it goes, I would like 5E to avoid this incoherence and be more upfront about how it thinks action resolution in social interactions (and similar non-combat conflicts) is meant to work.

conflicts are easier to resolve when everyone uses the same rules.

What is the evidence for this claim? I find conflicts pretty easy to resolve in 4e, and as I've just noted the default mechanic - the skill challenges - uses a "players roll all the dice" approach.

Conversely, in Rolemaster everyone uses the same rules - both PCs and NPCs roll skill checks in social conflict, for example - but such conflicts are actually hard to resolve, beause there is no mechanical system to tell you when the conflict is over and the position that has been arrived at is the settled position from which the game then moves forward.

We're not talking about presentation of the statblock at this point, we're talking about how we got there.

<snip>

in general I think it's necessary that the PCs and NPCs follow the same rules, to give a sense of fairness.

To give an example, I once had a DM who tormented us with an illusive mage who kept disappearing whenever we got near him. It seemed incredibly unfair because his actions seemed like things that no PC mage would ever be allowed to get away with-he wasn't required to roll initiative before acting, for instance.

In D&D a first level NPC can be king, with thousands of gp worth of treasure and items, but a first level PC cannot be. The rules put fairly strict caps on first level starting money, and any adventure that resulted in a starting PC becoming king would be guaranteed in nearly any iteration of D&D that I can think of to result in the PC becoming at least second level.

Is this unfair? Or is it a constraint that we all live with for the obvious metagame reasons?

NPCs with access to powers and abilities to which the PCs also lack access is much the same thing. The problem I see with your example illusive mage isn't that s/he had abilities that the PCs didn't and couldn't. It's that one of those abilities - namely, the ability to ignore the initiative sequence (in 3E or 4e terms, the ability to perform unlimited and powerful free/immediate/opportunity actions) - was broken.

 

[pemerton]

A system that reaches my standards of creation can also have short cuts so that people who just want conflict resolution can skip to that with relative ease.

This claim is controversial. I personally don't believe that it is true.

Balance is an interesting subject. I like to think of it in this way: game balance exists when players are faced with multiple options and they aren't sure which one is a better choice.

What I don't believe game balance to mean is in the way some people describe game balance in 4E - if we go into the Tomb of Horrors or if we go into the Dungeon of Despair we'll face encounters that are our level, so we know it's balanced. (I don't believe 4E classes are balanced in this way - that is, that all classes are balanced with each other so the choice of which class to play doesn't carry a cost - because the way a party is built can have a major impact in play.)

I strongly agree that party builds can have a major impact on play. So can individual PC builds. The sorcerer in my game wields a Staff of Ruin, has Implement Focus and Superior Implement Profieciency with the accurate staff, is a Dual Implement Wielder, and a Merciless Killer who has ample techniques for gaining combat advantage (including a multi-class to gain access to Stealth). That's 5 feats, plus maybe others I've forgotten, devoted to boosting his combat output.

The wizard, on the other hand, has such might feats as Deep Sage, Skill Traning (Dungeoneering), and multi-class invoker so that he could gain access to the Divine Philosopher paragon path (despite WIS being 6 points below INT).

As between the players, there is still a degree of balance because the wizard can do things that the sorcerer can't, both in and out of combat. And because neither hogs all the story focus.

The choice of which scenario to pursue - Tomb of Horrors or Dungeon of Despair - is only one of many sorts of choices that can come up in a game session, and even if both scenarios are level-appropriate the choice can still matter - in operational terms, for example (what sort of equipment do we need) or in more story-oriented terms (which one of those dungeons are the prisoners hidden in?).

Anyway, to me that's not really a choice unless the narrative of the Tomb vs. the Dungeon makes a difference to the game; and in 4E there's no mechanical - or "game economy" - that suggest it does.

This is true - quest XPs are the closest, and they don't go anywhere near to carrying this sort of load.

I believe pemerton would disagree with me on this point, insofar as 4E is concerned.

My view on this - and it relates to my disagreement with BryonD above in this post - is that finding a system to support a pretty vanilla narrativism is not as easy as it might seem.

In my experience, it is very easy for a system to push the focus of the participants' attention away from those elements of the fiction that are relevant to the story (theme, plot etc) and onto matters that are irrelevant to that - accounting, shopping, tedious searching, worrying about healing, etc, etc. All the stuff that is bog-standard to operational D&D play and tends to be incorporated by default in mainstream fantasy RPGs.

A related problem, which strongly simulationist mechanics in particular can produce, is of making it almost impossible to bring a scene to a conclusion without either (i) having the GM just suspend the action resolution mechanics, or (ii) having the PCs all go to sleep. (And in a game like Rolemaster, which has a range of magical and non-magical PC abilities that trigger on sleeping, even this is ofen not true!)

When these two tendencies converge, and especially if you are playing with players who were raised on that style of RPGing, then (in my experience) play can slow to a crawl.

My view of 4e is that it dispenses with all these issues through a simple moves - skill challengs for non-combat conflict resolution, the short rest as a "healing" mechanic for most "damage", cutting most of the traditional magical buffs that drag out the ending of scenes, or create pressure for "continuous" play rather than "punctuated" play, etc etc.

Getting this stuff out of the way creates a space in which vanilla narrativism (or vanilla gamism) can emerge.

Which I consider a flaw of 4E - if they wanted to provide that sort of play experience, they should have made those narrative choices more explicit in the game's advice and in the reward system. Dropping XP for monsters and replacing it with Quest XP only, then tying Quests to Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies would have been my suggestion.

On the XP front, I tend to award XP as per the rulebooks, but including the DMG2 advice for XP per time spent in sustained free roleplaying, and also being fairly ad hoc and liberal in Quest awards, which as I apply them are closer to goal awards in HARP.

In practice, my game would (I think) play no differently if I just said "Every 3 sessions, you all level." And in my view this is consistent with 4e's approach to XP (as I read it), which is basically (especially with the DMG2 included) awarded on the basis of time spent playing, at around 1 encounters worth per hour or so of play. The continued use of XP measures is, I think, just a hangover from the expectations of long time mainstream fantasy RPGers.

But because I don't think the rewards of 4e play come from what the rulebooks call "rewards" (XP for the reasons just stated, and treasure because it is a factor of level which is in turn a factor of XP which is, as I've said, not really a reward) I don't think the drift to narrativism is any harder than the default (or drifted?) gamism - at least [MENTION=27160]Balesir[/MENTION]-style "light gamism" - which is also vanilla. In neither case do the game mechanics support the playstyle with any sort of reinforcement or feedback mechanism.

The rewards in Balesir's approach don't come from earning XP or treasure. They come from showing off by doing cool things. ven if 4e PCs don't do much cool stuff, and just slog through encounters, the XP will be earned and the PCs will level. (It's not like Gygaxian play in this respect, where PC level might be expected to correlate, in some loose sense at least, with player skill.) The rewards in my "light narrativism" don't come from earning XP. They come from taking the story where you want to take it, using your PC as the vehicle for that.

But as I tried to explain above, the system doesn't get in the way of any of this. So if everyone is rougly on the same page as to play expectations, the vanilla approach works reasonably OK (or so it seems to me). And when it came to choosing paragon paths in my game, for example, none of my players expressed any surprise at my incorporating these developments into the game both in the lead up to and in the aftermath of achieving 11th level. I wasn't surprised when the player who wanted his sorcerer to become a Demonskin Adept started describing his skinning of defeated demons (somewhere around 7th level or so). And that player, in turn, does not get upset when I treat his PC's wearing of demonskins under his robes as something that comes into play from time to time in social situations.

I think these reflections also have some relevance for a "unity" edition. If 5E is intended to support not only simulationist, or exploration-heavy gamist (ie operational Gygaxian) play, but also vanilla narrativism or vanilla light gamism, the designers need to avoid just defaulting to what was, up until 4e, D&D's norm of "simulationism + hp".

EDITED TO ADD: 4e has an endgame (the Destiny Quest and Immortality) but no mechanical means of "forcing" the endgame. I anticipate this being the biggest GMing challenge for my 4e game. How will it be done without using the sort of GM force that is (by my lights) unacceptable? Luckily I don't need to worry about this for a while yet.

I wonder if 5e will have an endgame? Probably not.

 

[S'mon]

I believe that this is true of AD&D and of 3E. It is not true of 4e as I run it, although there are other 4e players who post on these forums (at least [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION] and [MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION]) for whom it is true.

One well-known example - many 4e players take the view that the very same creature can be statted as a minion, a standard or a solo monster, depending which level you are statting it at. Which would, in turn, be influenced by the level of the party form whom you as GM are preparing that encounter/scenario.

I do do that though - eg in the early part of my Wilderlands campaign I statted Altanian Warriors as 2nd level standard monsters, but now the PCs are 8th level I stat those guys as 8th level minions. Likewise I use 9th level Orc Warrior minions where once I would have used 2nd or 3rd level standard Orcs. Once the PCs reach Paragon Tier I'd stat 6th level standard Ogres as 14th level ogre minions. Also if I'm running a mass battle I'll convert the bulk of the standard monsters to minions, typically 6-8 levels higher.

I'm definitely not a hardcore rules-as-physics guy.

 

[Hassassin]

This claim is controversial. I personally don't believe that it is true.

Why? You could add e.g. NPC classes on top of 4e as an alternative way to build NPCs, and still wouldn't lose the ability to use current 4e monsters and NPCs.

 

[Balesir]

Which I consider a flaw of 4E - if they wanted to provide that sort of play experience, they should have made those narrative choices more explicit in the game's advice and in the reward system. Dropping XP for monsters and replacing it with Quest XP only, then tying Quests to Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies would have been my suggestion.

On the XP front, I tend to award XP as per the rulebooks, but including the DMG2 advice for XP per time spent in sustained free roleplaying, and also being fairly ad hoc and liberal in Quest awards, which as I apply them are closer to goal awards in HARP.

In practice, my game would (I think) play no differently if I just said "Every 3 sessions, you all level." And in my view this is consistent with 4e's approach to XP (as I read it), which is basically (especially with the DMG2 included) awarded on the basis of time spent playing, at around 1 encounters worth per hour or so of play. The continued use of XP measures is, I think, just a hangover from the expectations of long time mainstream fantasy RPGers.

Lots of good stuff in these and other posts, but I'll just make one comment sparked by these selections:

I think the 4E xp system is actually functionally quite compatible with both of these ruminations - but it would have been useful to see some comments on "alternative ways to think of the xp economy" in a DMG.

For Nar play, for example, I would think along the lines of letting players come up with character aims and goals, along with how much of the plot arc/how many levels they expect/wish them to take. This then translates directly into a DM budget (in 'xp worth') for the challenges and obstacles that will face the PCs in reaching that goal. Add treasure items in to suit, and voila - one player-driven plot arc. Adjust as play proceeds and stuff happens...

In a similar fashion, a more "Gygaxian" game can set up treasures (with rumours about them) that have, as a result of their level-appropriateness and value, an xp budget for their protection. Add in "detour" encounters that are not required to get the treasure and which the PCs get no xp for, and you have fairly hard-core vanilla Gamism.

 

[pemerton]

In a similar fashion, a more "Gygaxian" game can set up treasures (with rumours about them) that have, as a result of their level-appropriateness and value, an xp budget for their protection.

A technical problem facing this in 4e is that XP scales at x2 per 4 levels, and treasure at x5 per 5 levels, so you can't just assign a treasure value to an XP value - a higher level party tackling the same encounter is, per the rules, entitled to more treasure.

Add in "detour" encounters that are not required to get the treasure and which the PCs get no xp for, and you have fairly hard-core vanilla Gamism.

This is really clever and I can't believe it's never occurred to me! Not my sort of game, but just the sort of option the rulebooks should be canvassing.

 

[pemerton]

I do do that though

<snip>

I'm definitely not a hardcore rules-as-physics guy.

Sorry, I didn't mean to misrepresent you. I was remembering a conversation we had, probably a few months ago now, where we were discussing whether or not bigger numbers on the PC sheets/stat blocks equated to better abilities of the personae in the fiction. My memory is that you say yes. I know that I say no - or, at least, not always.

In my post upthread I talked about hit points, defences, attacks, damage etc going together to create a sort of "gestalt image" of the NPC/monster's combat ability. As I understand it, your view is that the gestalt itself is constant, even if its components get shifted around (by minionisation, solo-isation etc). Whereas I'm prepared to treat the gestalt itself as pretty flexible - eg sometimes I'll scale up antagonists to better fit with PC level gain without necessarily treating this as corresponding to any change in the fictional capacities of the antagonists.

 

[pemerton]

Why? You could add e.g. NPC classes on top of 4e as an alternative way to build NPCs, and still wouldn't lose the ability to use current 4e monsters and NPCs.

I may have misunderstood him, but I don't think that this is what [MENTION=957]BryonD[/MENTION] was suggesting. If it was - that is, if he is talking about a distinct subsystem for building antagonists which, in its upshot, produces statblocks that are (more or less) indistinguishable for action resolution purposes from 4e-style statblocks - than fair enough.

But to me, the idea of a BryonD-friendly system with shortcuts for others suggested that non-simulationists, in order to generate the story elements (including the antagonists and other monsters/NPCs) for their games, are expected to piggyback in some fashion on an underyling simulationist ruleset.

Now I have nothing per se against simulationist rulesets. But my experience with them suggests that they are not always good at producing story elements that suit non-simulationist play. And my starting assumption is that shortcuts built around them won't be very good for this either, because those shortcuts will still inherit the simulationist prioritisation of exploration of the gameworld over other goals of play.

To generalise slightly - in my reading of his posts over several years now, I feel that BryonD tends to talk about non-simulationist play as if it is a type of derivative or "poor cousin" of simulationist play, with exploration toned down so that other things can go on. But while this is true as far as it goes, it misses that those "other things" can also benefit from mechanics to support them, or at least to not get in their way, and achieving this isn't always just about taking shortcuts through the simulationist mechanics.

 

[S'mon]

Sorry, I didn't mean to misrepresent you. I was remembering a conversation we had, probably a few months ago now, where we were discussing whether or not bigger numbers on the PC sheets/stat blocks equated to better abilities of the personae in the fiction. My memory is that you say yes. I know that I say no - or, at least, not always.

Yes, that (IMC PCs get objectively better as they level up) is a different issue from NPC statting though. Obviously I don't take the same orc and make him standard-3 when PCs are 3rd, standard-8 when PCs are 8th - that would be the "hold PC power constant" approach. PCs advance in power, the orc does not, he just restats from standard-3 to minion-9 for gameplay convenience.

 

[S'mon]

As I understand it, your view is that the gestalt itself is constant, even if its components get shifted around (by minionisation, solo-isation etc). Whereas I'm prepared to treat the gestalt itself as pretty flexible - eg sometimes I'll scale up antagonists to better fit with PC level gain without necessarily treating this as corresponding to any change in the fictional capacities of the antagonists.

Yes, that's right. Although I personally think "in-world" not "in-fiction". It's a fictional world, but I'm statting a world, not a story.