4th edition, The fantastic game that everyone hated.

[S'mon]

A friend of mine who also DMs had similar issues; he found that players fell back upon "well, let's break it/kill it" as a strategy too often because of how good their characters were compared to the world around them. He once commented to me that he no longer saw the point in trying to run social encounters because too many of his players would attempt to just kill the other side if negotiations didn't go their way.

It's weird, my experience of 4e is the exact opposite. I was used to 1e with its F0 men-at-arms, and 3e with its default Warrior-1 men-at-arms (according to Monte in the DMG); basically a world where non-BBEG NPCs were by default utterly helpless vs high level PCs. 4e doesn't work like that at all; my 10th level 4e PCs see a dozen tough-looking guys ahead and they are still nervous, just as they were at 1st level. I find social interactions in 4e are far more reminiscent of the real-world than in any previous edition. Recently my group overthrew a small monarchy at 8th level; the Bandit King Boris of Llorkh who had a couple hundred men. In 1e an 8th level PC group could easily have wiped out Boris and all his men. In 4e it meant political shenanigans by Esmerelda the PC bard (believed by many Banites to be the long-prophesied Bane Child), getting the Banite faction within the bandits on-side, whipping up outrage over the death of Boris' mage-seer Olaris Vlakos due to Boris ignoring Olaris' prophecy re time-travelling ogres in the catacombs... a final confrontation in the throne room where the PCs had the numerical advantage, and a dramatic duel between Boris (Brawler Fighter elite Soldier 9) and his PC-supporting Banite fanatic daughter Kitana (elite duellist Soldier 8). Boris KO'd her, but was eventually himself KO'd by the PCS & weight of numbers.

 

[S'mon]

Which is one of the things that always puzzles me, whether it's 4e or 3e (or any other game for that matter) involved. Why do that? When a game plays in a particular fashion, it seems like a lot of work to change it to play in a different fashion when you could instead play a different game - one that wouldn't need anywhere near the amount of work to make it fit. I don't play 3e for Lankhmar or 4e for Game of Thrones; there are other games that do that well, and leave me time to get the campaign together rather than wrestle the game into submission.

Heh heh, I've just been working on an idea for a Game of Thrones inspired 4e campaign, 'Lords of the Vale'. My idea was to centre it around the Markelhay family of Fallcrest as PCs, with Fallcrest as the stand in for Castle Stark, and lead up from local events in the Nentir Vale up to large-scale diplomacy and warfare. I was thinking Threats to the Nentir Vale ought to work brilliantly for that, and some of the shorter WoTC published adventures. King of the Trollhaunt Warrens might be useable if I emphasise the diplomacy with Therund and the warfare, and cut down on the warren-crawling, but that might not be worth the effort.
Out of interest, why would you not use 4e for GoT? I can see issues with running GoT in a high-magic system like 3e, but I'm not seeing an issue with 4e, Heroic Tier at least.

 

[Bluenose]

Out of interest, why would you not use 4e for GoT? I can see issues with running GoT in a high-magic system like 3e, but I'm not seeing an issue with 4e, Heroic Tier at least.

It's the diplomacy and warfare parts that bother me. They're a major part of GoT, and I don't think 4e is a particularly good game for dealing with them. I'd also like a game which supports Passions, and that's not something 4e does. The emotional commitmens people have that make them do things even when they know it's a bad idea - those need to be in, and there need to be rules for people to manipulate you through those. If I was trying to do it, I'd take some of the Domain/Mass Combat rules from Basic D&D, and then add a system of passions like that in Pendragon on top.

 

[S'mon]

It's the diplomacy and warfare parts that bother me. They're a major part of GoT, and I don't think 4e is a particularly good game for dealing with them. I'd also like a game which supports Passions, and that's not something 4e does. The emotional commitmens people have that make them do things even when they know it's a bad idea - those need to be in, and there need to be rules for people to manipulate you through those. If I was trying to do it, I'd take some of the Domain/Mass Combat rules from Basic D&D, and then add a system of passions like that in Pendragon on top.

(Re Passions) Hm, I have Pendragon, but telling players what their PCs do always feels wrong to me, too author-stance perhaps. In my Southlands game the PCs made some terrible decisions as the Balkans-style Nerathi-vs-Altanian ethnic warfare escalated, but I was never forcing them to (eg) execute the captured noblewomen, the wrong things they did emerged entirely from their own motivations without a clear player/PC divide. I go for a kind of deep-immersion actor stance, and forcing PCs by Passions in the Pendragon style would not work. Modern game systems that hand out rewards for acting on flaws might work for me though - those games where an Alcoholic PC gets a Benny for acting on his alcoholism, thus dissolving the player/PC motivation divide. Likewise handing out bennies/rewards (4e dice rerolls, maybe) for PCs acting treacherous/honourable/etc according to their nature could work, though going by my Southlands experience I'm not at all sure it's necessary. Still, thanks for the thoughts.

 

[S'mon]

It's the diplomacy and warfare parts that bother me. They're a major part of GoT, and I don't think 4e is a particularly good game for dealing with them.

Diplomacy - I prefer to freeform it through internal aspect on NPC motivations. I think 4e works as well as any other game for that. 3e had a big problem with the broken Diplomacy skill, 4e fixed that though.

Warfare - I was thinking the encounter/scene-based approach of 4e ought to work well for a literary/cinematic style. In Southlands 4e campaign I used the Mentzer d% War Machine rules for the mass battles - War Machine works brilliantly in pre-4e D&D but with 4e I found it insufficiently dramatist - there was an unhappy disjunction between the outcome of the PCs' own battlefield encounters and the results of the War Machine, even with +30% for PC Heroic Achievements etc.
So in future I would model my 4e mass battles on the kind of close-in-focus approach you see on TV, in particular the 'Sharpe' ITV Napoleonic War series, which unlike HBO's Game of Thrones does a good job of portraying mass warfare on a limited budget! This would work much like 3e Heroes of Battle; basically stay focused on the PCs, and their battlefield achievements will typically determine the course of the battle, or at any rate determine the outcomes important to the PCs - in 'Sharpe's Waterloo' the actions of the protagonists did not determine the outcome of the climactic Battle of Waterloo with its 200,000+ men on the field, but they did shape which of them lived and died, and various other things important to themselves.

 

[Balesir]

King of the Trollhaunt Warrens might be useable if I emphasise the diplomacy with Therund and the warfare, and cut down on the warren-crawling, but that might not be worth the effort.

I may be misremembering/slanted remembering, but the warren crawl parts didn't seem that dominant when I ran KotTW. The characters were early Paragon, and rituals really started to come into their own to shortcut a fair bit of "general hassle" using things like Travellers' Camoflage and Teleport. I expanded the wilderness skill challenge in a way that, though experimental to me at the time, made it good fun and...

Spoiler

there is a Black Dragon who can be negotiated with to give a shortcut straight to the middle of the warren - the PCs did this the second time they went to the warren when I ran it.

Some of the run-up to the "grand finale" is a bit lame - in retrospect I would alter the placement of those, maybe even removing one entirely - possibly replacing it with an appropriate "exploratory" skill challenge.

 

[NewJeffCT]

Diplomacy - I prefer to freeform it through internal aspect on NPC motivations. I think 4e works as well as any other game for that. 3e had a big problem with the broken Diplomacy skill, 4e fixed that though.

I agree - 3E's social skills were broken - not just Diplomacy, but Bluff & Intimidate as well. I gave an example a while back on here about a high level bard bluffing the king (an equally high level aristocrat) into eating a pile of cow dung & dying, even though it was fantastically unbelievable. 4E's overall skill system was better in that you had to make a skill check that took the opposing NPC/character's level into account.

However, I like having to make rolls overall for social skills because it allows a person that is not naturally sociable to play a social/charisma-based character (bard, sorcerer, etc) Though, all gamers are social butterflies, in my experience...

 

[Imaro]

Sales of core books are supported by a desire for a more refined product. But the sales of the core books alone do not sustain the Pathfinder franchise. I gave you an apparently different answer because you asked an apparently different question. The original claim was that Pathfinder was selling quite well. The secondary claim was that Core books for Pathfinder show high sales. The causes of these can easily stem from two different reasons. Considering that that non-core splat and adventure books make up a significantly large sum of Pathfinder products than the Core books do, it's reasonable to surmise that there's a significant demand for them beyond simply a big book of rules corrections(which is what I largely find Pathfinder's Core books to be).

No one claimed the sales of the corebook alone sustained the Pathfinder franchise... You made a broad claim that those who played 3.5 were not interested in revised rules... the fact that Paizo sells a revised rulebook and it is always in the top 3 for sales on their website (as well as being the top seller for the company on Amazon) is evidence (though admittedly only partial) that you are wrong, what you haven't shown is any evidence to support your first assumption, that 3.5 players are more interested in support than in revised (or errata'd as ypu put it) rules. So again, where is the actual evidence that 3.5 players didn't or don't want a set of revised rules? Because where I'm standing quite a few do. Of course this is not incompatible with them also wanting support... one does not preclude the other.

Sure, in which case I fully anticipate WOTC death squads to break down their doors and burn their old books.

Not even sure how this is relevant, since I don't think anyone has argued that they are being forced to play any particular system...

It is a leisure activity though some people take it far too seriously. Few products last forever(even Twinkies die apparently!) so it's fairly unreasonable to expect WOTC to make one edition of D&D and then stop. The fact that you don't like the new edition means nothing. You've still got the edition you enjoy, so there should be absolutely no harm in there being a new one. If you do enjoy it, great, now there are two editions you enjoy, or more!

I'm not saying Wizards rebuilt the system with the intent of greater enjoyment either. I'm suggesting Wizards rebuilt the system out of sheer necessity. I'm suggesting that there was so much clutter and gunk piling up and spilling over from edition to edition that the outlook of continuing that trend was dire, the game would eventually become so convoluted as to be worthless and irreparable. So Wizards built a new system with the goal not of making a singular, superior game, but of clearing the waters for the future of the game.

I think we can conjecture all day about why WotC decided to drop the 3.5 rules set. There might have even been a necesity to create a new system... though I think Star Wars Saga, the various OGL games (including some like True20 or FantasyCraft that are relatively well balanced), etc. ...show that there was still alot that could be accomplished by revisiting and revising the base 3.5 rules... the thing is either way there was never a necesity to create 4e as that new rules base, that was a choice, and it was a choice a large number of fans, for whatever reasons, were dissatisfied with. In the end WotC is about making money and marketshare and I tend to believe, especially with a continuing revenue source like DDI, that if they hadn't loss considerable marketshare they wouldn't be creating a totally new edition this soon after the release of 4e.

I did. Browse through this thread. There's 20 pages here and I'm not really interested in re-skimming it and re-quoting all my rebukes.

Fair enough, if I have time I'll go back and look for them myself.

I'm generalizing gamers based on trends and experiences.

See this is also exactly what you're doing when you claim 3.5 players are more interested in support than in revised rules. The problem about making large generalizations of groups of people when you don't have any evidence to back it up is that it's usually wrong and even if it's correct it isn't not taken seriously. Anecdotes are just anecdotes.

 

[Imaro]

Well, they did that with 3e. And plenty of people discovered very quickly that all the claims about how things converted turned out to mean that you could play the same way you always used to and get different results. Or you could play a different way and get different results. But you couldn't get the same results, and the game wasn't the same. At least this time they tried to be honest.

Tried to be honest about what? That the game was the same? IMO, they weren't being honest.

I may be remembering incorrectly, but I don't think WotC ever claimed that 3e played the same as previous editions and if I am remembering correctly, even recommended that you start a new campaign with 3e. As I recall it was the fans who wanted conversion guidlines (which they got) but no claims of how the game would play were made for 3e... In fact as I look at the conversion manual it even says it is designed to help you keep the best of your old campaigns... not to re-create them or to play in the same way. Like I said earlier the Dragon mag article laid out the mechanical changes and left the aspect of how it would play pretty much up in the air which is, again IMO, alot more honest than saying it's the same game like they did for 4e.

 

[Imaro]

@Ratskinner , great post at #215, but can't XP.



Many of those 4e fans, though, demonstrate a clear knowledge of the other games around (be that Burning Wheel, HeroWars/Quest, FATE, etc) and how 4e does or doesn't resemble them. I don't recall ever seeing a post that advocates 4e for narrativist play, and the player has never even heard of non-traditional games.

What I tend to find odd is people who advocate 3E for sim play and then it turns out they've never even looked at RQ, RM, C&S, or similar late-70s/80s vintage sim fantasy system.

I thik you're being disingenuous here... I rarely see anyone besides yopu, manbearcat, Balesir and neonchameleon go in depth about narrativist games and their relationship to 4e. I'm sure just as many or more people on this board are familiar with at least one of the games you are citing.

Who needs to read a textbook to play "Pemertonian" 4e? I didn't, I just ran the game like I'd been running my RM game but adding in the DMG advice on the tactical/mechanical side of encounter building, and taking advantage of p 42 for mechanical improvisation.

Wait, I thought you played 4e in a non-sim manner... but you just cited RM as a simulationist game. So were you running 4e in a sim-manner or not?

Since 2009 I've been posting on this forum explaining how I play 4e, how it clearly lacks the sim trappings of 3E but supports a different playstyle pretty well, etc. While some posters seemed to disagree, arguing that rather than playing 4e as written I was doing some sort of weird Forge drifting of it, some others have obviously found what I posted helpful.

Let me first say that I have found some of your posts useful, but your tendency to post long multi-paragraph explanations and examples, as well as your choice to use a multitude of Forge jargon limits the amount of your material I am willing to spend the time reading (thus the textbook comment). I think if you could be less verbose and more to the point with your explanations and guidance... more people might find it useful.

I know for a fact that you supplement your knowledge of how to run 4e with advice from Heroquest (and possibly other "indie" games)... I also know that you have repeatedly affirmed the notion that the expectations and guidance for 4e play was not well expained in the corebooks... so is it any wonder people get this idea that you are doing some sort of "weird Forge drifting" of 4e when you're citing information and guidance that isn't actually in the corebooks?

I've never said everyone should like 4e. What I've objected to over the past 4 or so years is being told, repeatedly and often, that because I'm playing 4e my game must be a serious of vacuous tactical skirmishes linked by meaningless freeform roleplay.

Well given the OP I find this just a little ironic. That said I've never been one to tell you that you were running such a game. I have mostly argued with you about claims you've made as to the limitations of 3e in runnig crtain types of games that you say you run with 4e and this has mostly been in an (largely unsuccessful) attempt at understanding the differences of the playstyles between the two systems that I still don't totally get.

There seems to be a bit less of this these days, though, as more people recognise that - whether or not they personally are interested in it - there's a type of heroic fantasy RPGing for which 4e offers genuinely solid support.

I agree... the problem is how hard it can be for some to discover what type that is... before either getting frustrated with the sysytem, realizing their playstyle doesn't jive with what the rules emphasize or realizing the style it supports could already be done with some other game that they already have the invested knowledge and time in.