D&D 4E Pemertonian Scene-Framing; A Good Approach to D&D 4e

[S'mon]

I think there is another option - at least if you go "full sim" - which is to abandon the idea that the PCs must "go adventuring". It's fairly involving to do, but can be very satisfying to set up situations to explore that are not predicated on going "adventuring" but arise as a part of everyday life in the imagined world. This is, perhaps, easiest for one-offs; I have done various Hârn convention/one-off scenarios that were done this way, including my early "Hallmoot", done in response to criticisms (of Hârn) that "all you get to play is some peasant". In Hallmoot you do exactly that - you play a peasant. If you get into any sort of combat or similar "heroic" stuff, you probably die. But several groups have had good fun with the scenario, nevertheless. I think Traveller can also work really well this way, as can RuneQuest (see some of the stuff about the Greydog clan in Tales of the Reaching Moon).

For "adventurer" style games, though, I agree with you completely.

Oh sure, you are definitely right. You're describing the Simulation style that Edwards called 'Right to Dream' AIR. It emphasises the actual experience of inhabiting the fantasy world, and can be the most immersive style of all. It's different from the Gygaxian 'Gamist-Simulationist Nexus' style I was talking about, where a robust world-simulation is there to create the basis for effective Gamist, challenge-overcoming, play.

 

[S'mon]

I wouldn't have called you a grognard. Merely someone who has found something he likes. There's a difference And while some interesting stuff was written in the 90s (Robin Laws' Feng Shui springs to mind) I don't think 90s games are in any substantive way better than 80s games. If that's when you were looking around in earnest, settling on D&D (see my comments on White Wolf, above) is very understandable.

RPG-wise I'm a child of the '80s, starting in 1984 with Fighting Fantasy, playing quite a lot of different games ca 1985-19991 (Paranoia, Star Wars, Judge Dredd, Call of Cthulu, a bit of Dragon Warriors) - but always mostly and predominantly 1e AD&D. I certainly found the '90s a grim time for RPGing, and while I ran & played some stuff occasionally I had lots of fairly poor experiences and I only really came back to the hobby fully with 3e D&D in 2000. Since 2000 I've played very little that was not D&D-related.

 

[Neonchameleon]

RPG-wise I'm a child of the '80s, starting in 1984 with Fighting Fantasy, playing quite a lot of different games ca 1985-19991 (Paranoia, Star Wars, Judge Dredd, Call of Cthulu, a bit of Dragon Warriors) - but always mostly and predominantly 1e AD&D. I certainly found the '90s a grim time for RPGing, and while I ran & played some stuff occasionally I had lots of fairly poor experiences and I only really came back to the hobby fully with 3e D&D in 2000. Since 2000 I've played very little that was not D&D-related.

Ah. I wasn't born until the early 80s and my only RPG experiences that decade were Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks. I started in the 90s, oddly enough with mostly 80s games; GURPS, MERP* (sometimes with added Arms Lore), WFRP, Paranoia, Cyberpunk 2020 and *shudder* RIFTS (one of my friends was a fan). The only one of the major 90s continuous streams of books at my FLGS to impress me at all was GURPS (the others being TSR Shovelware at about five books a month, World of Darkness, and RIFTS), and I spent most of the 90s being disappointed by the gap between what I thought RPGs could be and what they were mechanically. Of them, GURPS was my favourite system.

When 3e came out I flirted with it. At last here was a version of D&D that almost matched the design of WFRP and was in sight of GURPS which was to me the high point of RPG design when they weren't flirting with absurdity. And had both the player base of D&D and was Open Source (what can I say? I was a teenager and that was a smart piece of marketing). In the early 00s, I had a look at The Forge, read the essay on Simulationism (which was the creative agenda that the RPGs I liked at the time followed through on), realised Edwards had mangled his understanding of things in the parts I knew, and from there came to the conclusion that if he understood things that badly I expected the promises to be as empty as the ones I'd found the World of Darkness to offer in practice. So I left them well alone.

I initially ignored 4e - I wasn't into gaming at the time. Then I split up from a long term girlfriend and needed more hobbies. I picked up the 4e books and was hooked. Finally the PCs and monsters moved properly. (I'm a kinaesthetic learner and used to dance a fair amount - the way people moves matters to me). And I neither felt as if I was cheating by playing a wizard nor hamstrung by playing a fighter. Then I started looking around the RPG market again in earnest and it bore only a passing resemblance to what I was expecting, in the best possible way. What I'm seeing now actually follows through on the promises the 90s gave in both writing and play. And the Forge I'd dismissed, along with a lot of other people, turns out to have produced a number of works of genius (and no few turkeys but that's to be expected as no one's ideas are good all the time).

For the record if I want to run a game of Buffy, I'm not sure whether I'd reach for Monsterhearts or Smallville. Both, I think, could do it pretty awesomely in different ways. Smallville I think - Buffy isn't normally quite messy enough for Monsterhearts.

* For those who don't know, MERP = Middle Earth Roleplaying and is basically Rolemaster Lite. Something that IMO massively improves Rolemaster.

 

[Blackbrrd]

I have just read the first two pages but I must say I really appreciate the discussion and examples. I love the idea of just rolling with your players ideas. It might feel a bit cliche, but at the same time it's obvious that there is more to the world than the 128 pages of the premade module that a campaign can become if you don't use player input and run dry yourself.

I am going to run Madness at Gardmore Abbey as the backbone of a campaign and I have gotten some very good ideas on how to run it from this thread. There is a lot of material in the module to get me started and with my players ideas I will hopefully be able to keep the game running without going out of ideas - since I will be siphoning off my players.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I haven't gone into the other thing that modern games are doing right that almost wasn't through the whole of the 80s and 90s. To begin with the illustration, SteveD on RPG.net posted a deconstruction of Les Mis under Smallville rules. Which ends with the line "Eponine is a mothering powergamer. But nobody gives a damn because in Smallville, powergaming = drama." And that's another thing that's changed in the past ten years. Power gaming (as opposed to munchkinery) is not a destructive impulse. It's the impulse to understand what the game and system wants, and to do it as well as possible.

A lot of 90s era games (WoD I'm looking at you!) look down on power gaming, which means they look down on people trying to understand the system and use it to best effect. To me, this is anathema. I'm always going to try to understand what is going on within the rules; this to me is a positive. And treating people trying to understand what you have actually done as a negative is a mark of pretty awful game design; people who are proud of what they have done normally want to show it off. Also hamstringing myself mentally do I don't use system mastery is a pretty negative play experience.

FATElike games or Cortex + games (Smallville being the third (or rather first) in that family), or most Storygames make my desire to actually use the system into a positive experience for eveyone (in oD&D using the system and the world to your advantage - i.e. player skill - was part of the point). If I turn up to a Vampire game I know to be political and start using Obtenebrate to stealthily blood bond half the room and Dominate to make them drink, it's going to be a sucky experience for everyone not me. If on the other hand I turn up to a Monsterhearts game as a Mortal and throughout the session manage to tangle everyone up with strings while running an effective XP engine we're all going to have a blast. Not only is the DM advice much more effective, player advice and player incentives are too.

 

[S'mon]

I haven't gone into the other thing that modern games are doing right that almost wasn't through the whole of the 80s and 90s. To begin with the illustration, SteveD on RPG.net posted a deconstruction of Les Mis under Smallville rules. Which ends with the line "Eponine is a mothering powergamer. But nobody gives a damn because in Smallville, powergaming = drama." And that's another thing that's changed in the past ten years. Power gaming (as opposed to munchkinery) is not a destructive impulse. It's the impulse to understand what the game and system wants, and to do it as well as possible.

A lot of 90s era games (WoD I'm looking at you!) look down on power gaming, which means they look down on people trying to understand the system and use it to best effect. To me, this is anathema. I'm always going to try to understand what is going on within the rules; this to me is a positive. And treating people trying to understand what you have actually done as a negative is a mark of pretty awful game design; people who are proud of what they have done normally want to show it off. Also hamstringing myself mentally do I don't use system mastery is a pretty negative play experience.

I sympathise, but I have some kind of perverse thing with 3e D&D/PF where I can only really enjoy it if I'm playing a Fighter and trying to make the poor bastard an effective PC. I had to play a Cleric in Pathfinder recently and I just couldn't enjoy trawling the rulebook for spells. Using Command & stacked Spiritual Weapons to defeat the BBEG in the final battle was fairly satisfying, but beating her to death with a greatsword would have been a lot better.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I sympathise, but I have some kind of perverse thing with 3e D&D/PF where I can only really enjoy it if I'm playing a Fighter and trying to make the poor bastard an effective PC. I had to play a Cleric in Pathfinder recently and I just couldn't enjoy trawling the rulebook for spells. Using Command & stacked Spiritual Weapons to defeat the BBEG in the final battle was fairly satisfying, but beating her to death with a greatsword would have been a lot better.

I did something simmilar with the 3.5 Bard as a class. It was said by so many to be the weakest so I learned it inside out. And the 3.5 Bard (as distinct from either 3.0 or Pathfinder) is one of the parts of 3.5 that genuinely gets better the harder you look at it.

 

[pemerton]

A lot of 90s era games (WoD I'm looking at you!) look down on power gaming, which means they look down on people trying to understand the system and use it to best effect. To me, this is anathema. I'm always going to try to understand what is going on within the rules; this to me is a positive.

I can't remember if this thread is the one where you were ragging on Rolemaster and its Table Lore, but one nice thing about Rolemaster is that, on the whole, it does deliver a better experience the more the players understand it and try to use its features.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I can't remember if this thread is the one where you were ragging on Rolemaster and its Table Lore, but one nice thing about Rolemaster is that, on the whole, it does deliver a better experience the more the players understand it and try to use its features.

Indeed. I may mock Rolemaster a bit in the same way I mock GURPS (and especially GURPS vehicles) but I'd never argue that either wasn't a competently designed game if that was the experience you were looking for, and I've used both. (I'd argue that using Rolemaster for Middle Earth in MERP was a complete mismatch, but that's a whole different kettle of fish).

 

[pemerton]

I'd argue that using Rolemaster for Middle Earth in MERP was a complete mismatch

That almost goes without saying! (But I can say from experience that it does Greyhawk pretty well, and with a bit of spell-list limiting - eg no teleports - it can do high-magic Oriental Advantures too.)