4th edition, The fantastic game that everyone hated.

[Keldryn]

And thank you. This is one of the major reasons I keep arguing here - most of the people actually arguing are unlikely to change, but the audience matters. You've made my day.

You're welcome! I thought it was important to say that the discussion was making a big difference on my perception of 4e.

I loved the two preview books and agreed with pretty much all of the design decisions outlined in them. I love the implicit setting in 4e and how the monsters and cosmology have been reworked to create a more coherent world. I've really wanted to like 4e, but my play experiences kept letting me down.

And your three issues are all genuine issues with 4e, but 2012 era 4e, especially including Essentials, has them less prominently than 2008 era 4e.

I hope so! I did start bringing in some elements of Essentials before my 4e game went on an indefinite hiatus, and it seemed to make a difference. Granted, we didn't actually get that much experience in playing/running 4e. I'm putting my brief history with 4e in a spoiler block so that it's easy to skip:

[sblock]
My first time running 4e didn't really count, as it was a single quick game while my wife and I were camping in 2009. She'd never played before, but was interested so I came up with an adventure on the spot and helped her create a ranger. A lot of stuff was handwaved, and there were no minis or battlegrid. My first real experience running 4e was in early 2010, just before my first daughter was born. We played two sessions of Keep on the Shadowfell, which didn't exactly leave a positive first impression.

I started up a new 4e game near the end of 2010 with two of the same players, and we ran through The Slaying Stone over 3 or 4 bi-weekly sessions. I knew about the upcoming Essentials releases, so I had one player running a slayer (first using the Red Box and then print-outs from the DDI Compendium). After we finished the adventure, 2 of the 4 players wanted to take a break from 4e, as they thought it played too slow and was too rules-heavy, so I ran a couple of games using the Mentzer Basic Set.

We tried picking up the 4e game again a couple of months later with Reavers of Harkenwold. I rebuilt my wife's ranger as an Essentials scout (again using the online Compendium), which she found a lot easier to play. We only made it through one session before taking an unplanned extended break, but it did seem to play more smoothly. [/sblock]

Time to play out an encounter

(Seriously, if you are thinking about trying 4e again pick up Monster Vault (previews) and probably also Monster Vault: Threats to the Nentir Vale (previews) - they are in my opinion the two best monster manuals for any edition of D&D). This has the effect of reducing the average combat length from five to six rounds to three to four.

I've got the Monster Vault, but I don't have Threats. I got the original MV for Christmas right after it came out, when I wasn't sure if I'd still run 4e or not; the counters would at least be useful for running any version of the game. I'll certainly pick up Threats if we start playing 4e again.

The second is that most Essentials classes have a lot less analysis paralysis.

It seems that way, at least for the martial classes. My wife was playing a PHB eladrin two-weapon ranger at the start of the campaign, and she didn't like having so many powers to choose from, as she didn't really understand how to determine which one was best to use and was afraid of making the wrong decision. Yes, Twin Strike was usually the right choice, but that's beside the point. Also, Hunter's Quarry is needlessly fiddly but forces the player to keep thinking about it nearly every round. She rarely remembered to use it. "I move here and attack" is very intuitive and nobody seems to have any trouble with it. "I move here, attack, and as a minor action... no wait, I move here, set my Hunter's Quarry as a minor action, then attack" is decidedly unintuitive. I think it's a terribly-designed feature.

Between the two, I expect to run an ordinary combat in about half an hour.

I think we managed to get through the first encounter in Reavers within about half an hour (Iron Circle brigands), and then the players decided to tackle the Toadswallow Caverns and those encounters took somewhat longer.

I've since determined another factor that had a significant contribution to slowing down encounter play time: some of my players are simply too conservative and cautious. For some reason, these players insist on saving their encounter powers for later in the battle, rather then using them early. There have been encounters where some of the players only used at-will powers. I think my sister's bard used her daily power ONCE in the entire campaign, and I can't remember her ever using her encounter attack power. Vicious Mockery doesn't exactly contribute a whole lot to the party's damage output.

4e encounters can really, really drag on when some of the players focus on healing and buffing defenses and routinely hold on to their encounter attack powers "just in case." If we pick up our 4e campaign where it left off, I think that I'll stress that 4e characters are pretty durable and that they don't need to play so defensively. Also, I'll suggest "retraining" some of their more situational encounter powers for ones that are more generally usable.

Bonusses and Conditions

This too has improved. Class design has got a bit better - but the main reason why it's improved is down to one single role. The Defender.

This actually wasn't a problem for us, as nobody was playing a defender. The prime offender was the Bard's Virtue of Valor enhanced with the Strength of Valor feat: granting 1 + Con Mod temp HP to an ally and +2 on damage rolls until the end of his or her next turn when that ally reduces an enemy to 0 HP or bloodies an enemy. The ranger (later scout) and slayer were the strikers in the group, and were both played by very casual players who really did not like this fiddly tracking (my wife got really annoyed by the frequent "don't forget your plus two to damage" reminders from the bard's player). So the striker classes, which are generally the most suitable and straightforward classes for new or casual players, are often the optimal targets for the leader classes' "until the end of his or her next turn" bonuses.

The two casual players' enjoyment of the game was significantly hindered by this issue. I think it's primarily the virtually unlimited, 1-round-duration, +1/+2/-1/-2 to attack/damage/defense effects that are behind this. It seemed as through every round they were adding a different number to their attack/damage rolls, and on top of that the numbers didn't seem big enough to warrant the mental effort of keeping track of them.

If we resume that campaign, I'll encourage any leaders to take it easy on the powers that grant these short-term bonuses.

Out of turn actions

The out-of-turn actions part was mostly about me as the DM. ;-) I was constantly neglecting the out-of-turn actions that my monsters were capable of, often when they were associated with its aura. The MM3-style statblocks should help with that, as they are better-organized. I probably need to do up an index card or post-it note for each encounter that lists all of the passive or out-of-turn actions/effects that any monsters have.

The triggered effects of PC powers aren't technically out-of-turn actions, but amount to the same thing. Again, it was the leader powers/features that were the primary offenders in our group.

I hope some of that was reassuring

It is reassuring that you can get through a typical encounter in about half an hour. That was the #1 complaint at my table; encounters were taking so long that some players would ask "so... what were we doing again" once the battle was finally resolved. On top of that, some of the players would just start getting bored halfway through the encounter. We were averaging bout 60 minutes per encounter, with a handful of them reaching 90 minutes in length.

I'm also happy to hear that most Essentials classes have a lot less analysis paralysis in play and don't just read that way. Of the Essentials classes, I've only really seen the slayer and scout in action.

The design and presentation of published adventures -- even the good ones -- had a negative influence on my gaming experience. The delve format is great for getting all of the necessary info to run an encounter in one place, but I found that even a fairly non-linear adventure like The Slaying Stone was dominated by combat encounters connected by somewhat glossed-over exploration of and travel through the goblin city. The one session we played of Reavers of Harkenwold started to feel the same way. Even when I know better, I start to forget that I can ignore the "monsters immediately attack and fight to the death" statements in many of the encounters. I forget to check to see if the monsters flee when the tide of the battle turns against them. Those nicely-formatted and well-organized encounter entries are quick to read at the table, and it would be a shame to not get to use what could amount to half the pagecount of the module...

The discussion about scene-framing reminds me that any "scene" which consumes a significant amount of play time should have a purpose relating to the overall goals and themes of the adventure, as well asits own self-contained goals. I've been stuck in the mindset of using encounters to wear down PC resources or to provide a change of pace (which backfired when I tried it, as it absolutely killed the pacing). I should design virtually every encounter to have a goal other than killing everything, and most encounters should have a built-in way to end them if that other goal is achieved. Given how little time we have for playing, and how often a bi-weekly game ends up being bi-monthly, framing interesting situations for the players is probably the best way to maximize our enjoyment of the game.

 

[Keldryn]

If the scene-framing/character advocacy style of play is what you're interested in, you may prefer a game that is unequivocally designed for it rather than 4e.

This style of play is a novel concept to me. I've paid virtually no attention to the indie RPG scene, and one quick reading of some Forge stuff years ago convinced me that it was a bunch of pretentious nonsense.

Incorporating bits of this style of play with a game and genre I've played for 25 years is a good way to start to learn about it.

I haven't engaged in any serious, regular RPG play since about 1994. I've been trying to get a regular D&D game going over the past couple of years, but having a toddler and a 6 month-old makes gaming a much lesser priority. So I tend to stick with what I know.

(Truthfully, I can think of a few reasons why someone would prefer to do this with D&D, and D&Disms, rather than try to take up a 600pg game that a lot of casual gamers have never heard of, but I'm bringing it up anyway because whenever someone expresses a preference for something simulation-y there's usually a 4e fan acting surprised that they're playing D&D at all instead of Harnmaster or some other ancient, hardcore process-sim game. Looking forward to DDN, I think it'd be awesome if it had focused advice/tools for this style, as long as this can be done alongside focused advice/tools for the more classic D&D sandbox exploration style, which I think could be possible actually.)

They're probably the same reasons that I would list. I can get people to play (or try playing) Dungeons & Dragons. Trying to branch out into less well-known games dramatically decreases the size of the pool of potential players (even ones who haven't played RPGs before, for some reason).

I don't want to give up classic sandbox exploration either, and a system that works well with both styles of play would be great.

 

[sabrinathecat]

MegaBloks, Cobi, and Lego are all compatible, but not the same thing.
Essentials and 4e, to me, are similar: compatible, but not the same. The retro rules from essentials that were thrown back into main 4E did seriously change the game.

 

[Neonchameleon]

You're welcome! I thought it was important to say that the discussion was making a big difference on my perception of 4e.

I loved the two preview books and agreed with pretty much all of the design decisions outlined in them. I love the implicit setting in 4e and how the monsters and cosmology have been reworked to create a more coherent world. I've really wanted to like 4e, but my play experiences kept letting me down.

I'm not surprised. 4e was released a year too early.

I've got the Monster Vault, but I don't have Threats. I got the original MV for Christmas right after it came out, when I wasn't sure if I'd still run 4e or not; the counters would at least be useful for running any version of the game. I'll certainly pick up Threats if we start playing 4e again.

Monster Vault you absolutely need and it's first class. Threats is a second monster book and nothing like as necessary - it's also superb for populating a sandbox setting.

I've since determined another factor that had a significant contribution to slowing down encounter play time: some of my players are simply too conservative and cautious. For some reason, these players insist on saving their encounter powers for later in the battle, rather then using them early.

That would do it. The faster you put monsters down, the less time they spend beating you up! That said, you often save your encounter powers against MV Solos as they often get really nasty once they are bloodied.

This actually wasn't a problem for us, as nobody was playing a defender. The prime offender was the Bard's Virtue of Valor enhanced with the Strength of Valor feat: granting 1 + Con Mod temp HP to an ally and +2 on damage rolls until the end of his or her next turn when that ally reduces an enemy to 0 HP or bloodies an enemy.

Ack! The temps aren't bad. The damage roll buff is fiddly there. And my recommended leader has pretty much always been the Warlord (I hit him ... with the barbarian!). A Warlord/Slayer combination is especially scary - the warlord in this case has approximately the damage output of the slayer (mostly because the slayer is making all the attack and damage rolls) - and a Bravura Warlord can give the Slayer three melee basic attacks on their turn when they action point. (Bravura Warlord: Think Leonidas in 300).

If we resume that campaign, I'll encourage any leaders to take it easy on the powers that grant these short-term bonuses.

And to go heavy on the attack granting powers - those are both effective and fun!

The triggered effects of PC powers aren't technically out-of-turn actions, but amount to the same thing. Again, it was the leader powers/features that were the primary offenders in our group.

The bard is one of the fiddliest classes (the Runepriest is the absolute worst). It's also one of my favourites, but then I'm used to running half a dozen monsters rather than a single PC.

The design and presentation of published adventures -- even the good ones -- had a negative influence on my gaming experience. The delve format is great for getting all of the necessary info to run an encounter in one place, but I found that even a fairly non-linear adventure like The Slaying Stone was dominated by combat encounters connected by somewhat glossed-over exploration of and travel through the goblin city.

Honestly, other than possibly Reavers, the Slaying Stone, and Madness at Gardmore Abbey I wouldn't run WotC adventures. Take something Aventure Pathy (Zeitgeist is good) - and only look at the statblocks once the combat starts. And it's easier to run an AP written for Pathfinder in 4e than it is in Pathfinder.

The discussion about scene-framing reminds me that any "scene" which consumes a significant amount of play time should have a purpose relating to the overall goals and themes of the adventure, as well asits own self-contained goals. I've been stuck in the mindset of using encounters to wear down PC resources or to provide a change of pace

The best way of wearing down the PCs I've found is one of the few house rules I use - extended rests only happen in a place of safety rather than on the road. (For a sandbox it would be your base town or a friendly one). Makes for much more risk/reward analysis and PCs feeling threatened.

This style of play is a novel concept to me. I've paid virtually no attention to the indie RPG scene, and one quick reading of some Forge stuff years ago convinced me that it was a bunch of pretentious nonsense.

Most of it was, but there were some really interesting ideas buried in there. If you're interested in seeing where things ended up, and read this in the next 25 hours, dropping $10 on the Fate Core PDFs in the Kickstarter is almost certainly far the best deal in tabletop roleplaying right now (I'm in for the Quartet). Especially if you're interested in rules light games and some great ideas to steal. And if you want a standby one shot game for a two hour session, I can't recommend Fiasco highly enough (assuming you don't mind a game in which all the characters will end badly).

 

[Manbearcat]

MegaBloks, Cobi, and Lego are all compatible, but not the same thing.
Essentials and 4e, to me, are similar: compatible, but not the same. The retro rules from essentials that were thrown back into main 4E did seriously change the game.

Did they? I've run two long term 4e games. The second game has 2 post-essentials era classes involved and is basically rules compendium, DMG 2, p42 and math revisions. The game hasn't changed at all mechanically; from (1) PC build rules (not schemes) and advancement (2) action economy to (3) conflict resolution to (4) scene/encounter/tier based play. None of those 4 have changed (which are the backbone of the game). It plays exactly the same as before. The only change was the optional PC build schemes for some classes, tightening up of the math, and a few pieces of errata/clarification; which none fundamentally changed any of 1-4.

Do you mean it felt different to some people because of the feel of the different resource schemes of the essential classes? I could buy that it felt different to some people who didn't like the unified mechanics of AEDU resource schemes. But putting "seriously changed the game" under the microscope with respect to 1-4, I don't see how that passes muster.

 

[FireLance]

MegaBloks, Cobi, and Lego are all compatible, but not the same thing.
Essentials and 4e, to me, are similar: compatible, but not the same. The retro rules from essentials that were thrown back into main 4E did seriously change the game.

My view is that it expanded the game, rather than changed it.

To continue your analogy, to me it's more like Lego Star Wars and Lego Galaxy Squad: you can use them together or separately, as you wish.

 

[MoonSong]

Amazing how fast this thread went crazy. More amazing how I read half of it after promising myself I wouldn't bother, anyway nice discussion.

Anyway. Don't get me wrong, in the past year I have earned a growing respect and liking for 4e. I even enjoy it (and lament how hard it is to DM it on pbp, it is a total nightmare). However for all of it's good things I still find it extremely rigid on places I was more used to flexibility and cannot help but feel it lacks support for many characters I enjoy on 2e and 3.5:

* A paladin/sorcerer (3.5), yes this pc is mildly disrupting to party dynamics, but he was it long before becoming a paladin. Originally he was a thug/conman/streetrat swashbuckling sorcerer, except for magic missile all of his magic was light-themed and based upon utility, and it was extremely raw and unpolished (and to the date he is still a total idiot with regards to arcane things), always sticking to weapons first (to the date he has only used magic missile twice over the course of many fights and levels). He was an extremely troublemaker, being big pals with the party rogue and a constant headache on the then resident paladin, however the sudden deaths of both characters along with witnessing the horrors and brutaliuty of an orc invasion sent him over the edge, he became a paladin without planning it (or even realising it). Still over the course of three paladin levels he has slowly discovered those new gifts he at first assumed were new and weird spells. Now a 4e hybrid palisor or a sorerer/paladin or paladin/sorcerer just lacks the slow and weird mix of abilities this particular character has, and rituals just don't cut the bill, because if there is anything this PC hasn't ever touched on his life is a book. (did I also mention this guy wears no armor at all despite being a frontliner, alternates dualwield with tripping weapons, is a decent archer and very acrobatic, while still doing all of the paladiny stuff, all of this by core alone?)

*A priestess of love (2e). Needless to say this particular priestess is completely pathetic on any form of combat that doesn't revolves around a bow or a lasso, yet she has managed to be valuable on a fight without having any weapon, spells preppared, or even any gear to speak off. The only reason this priestess isn't a pacifist is because that would preclude her from using a lasso for called shots (and that is too way damn fun to pass out). Any idea on how to have this kind of character work on 4e?

* the general non-killing healer (I have played many of these kind, rogue and bard are common multiclass combos) Actually I have received some advice on this same forums about how to convert this general concept to 4e. The only thing that keeps being missed is the lack of temporal/subdual/non-lethal damage and it's related set of feats and merciful weapons. This might not seem like a big loss, after all in 4e you just determine if you kill or subdue when you last hit an enemy. But it is a huge change, before you could take part on the battle knowing that short of massive damage (which would kill anything anyway) you were still contributing to the party winning without also contributing to the party slaying of another creature, now in order to get the same effect on 4e I have to tell the strikers how to paly their characters!. Needless to say that never before 4e I found someone telling "no thank you, your healing isn't welcome I'm just taking a long rest now" -and no matter how many times I hear "but wands of cure light wounds/lesser vigor made you moot too", I can't help but find those arguments as strawmans, yes it is possible, but if you as self-designated paramedic don't buy/craft these, my experience is that nobody else in the party will, they'll use their resources to be better at killing stuff rather than try to replace your main ability-.

 

[pemerton]

I've since determined another factor that had a significant contribution to slowing down encounter play time: some of my players are simply too conservative and cautious. For some reason, these players insist on saving their encounter powers for later in the battle, rather then using them early. There have been encounters where some of the players only used at-will powers. I think my sister's bard used her daily power ONCE in the entire campaign, and I can't remember her ever using her encounter attack power.

Your whole post was interesting, but this is what stood out for me.

I have found that as a 4e GM I have a lot of power to fine-tune my encounters in both building - the XP-budget rules applies in accordance with the DMG advice about level ranges, no level+5 soldiers! ,etc - and also resolution. By "resolution" I don't mean fudging - I don't use a GM screen, and generally roll my dice on the open table like the other players - but rather choosing who attacks whom. This can make a big difference both mechanically and thematically to how an encounter plays out - and the transparent and reliable maths tends to make it easy to choose deliberately and be confident that it will turn out more-or-less as you hoped.

On the player side, I find 4e PCs very resilient - as the going gets tough they can start to access their healing surges, and this means that as the ranks of the monsters/NPCs thin, the PCs are (mostly) still standing. And so the tide turns.

Because of this precision and flexibility on the GM side, combined with the resilience on the player/PC side, I find that 4e really rewards a "gung ho" style from the players. I'm not talking about being irrationally rash or foolhardy. I'm talking about giving it all you've got - throwing your PC into the thick of things and letting the monsters have it, and - if things start to go bad - relying on clever play by you and your friends to turn the tide. Whereas I can see how a very cautious, overly-anticipatory approach ('But what if what if what if . . .) would slow the game down.

I don't have any profound suggestions to help here, but maybe run an encounter or two where the PCs find themselve thrust into the thick of things despite themselves - eg they are talking to a dubious NPC, and suddenly she pulls the bell rope hanging from the wall and pits open under the PCs dropping them into the underground arena. You want to set up your geography/terrain so that the PCs aren't all together (ie there are monsters and/or hostile NPCs between them - monsters might work better, because that makes it easier to narrate away a lack of team precision among the adversaries) and therefore before they can regroup and start being cautious and fiddly, each has to bring his/her full suite of powers to bear. And set it up so that their encounter and/or daily powers will have very clear application - eg if one PC has a close burst encounter power, have minion spiders or skeletons or whatever closing on him/her from all directions.

The example is probably a bit klunky, but what I'm trying to get at is that you set something up that forces the players to really play their PCs, that also, and really obviously, rewards them for doing that, and that therfore show them that they don't need to play in a cautious way to survive and have fun, and in fact that the game is more fun when they play their PCs to the hilt every time.

Anyway, good luck with your RPGing!

A paladin/sorcerer (3.5

<snip>

a 4e hybrid palisor or a sorerer/paladin or paladin/sorcerer just lacks the slow and weird mix of abilities this particular character has, and rituals just don't cut the bill, because if there is anything this PC hasn't ever touched on his life is a book. (did I also mention this guy wears no armor at all despite being a frontliner, alternates dualwield with tripping weapons, is a decent archer and very acrobatic, while still doing all of the paladiny stuff, all of this by core alone?)

*A priestess of love (2e).

<snip>

* the general non-killing healer (I have played many of these kind, rogue and bard are common multiclass combos)

There are posters here with better build-fu than me, but here are some ideas.

For your paladin sorcerer I might try a STR/INT swordmage with paladin multi-class (requires 13 WIS - not too expensive) - you can build this as a dual-wielder, not necessarily tripping but other forms of control coming from your swordmagery, and you can be weapons first with your magic providing utility (though not via explicit buffing, but rather by giving you weapon attacks extra effects via your swordmage powers). Your armour would be leather by default, but Unarmoured Agility can give you the same AC in cloth for a feat. Your CHA won't be that high, so you won't have much in the way of Bluff; and your archery will suck. (You'll have to pick up Acro from a feat or a background; likewise Bluff.)

A bladesinger (from the Neverwinter book) has DEX/INT, and so good archery as well as melee attacks that are enhanced by at-will utility attack-buffs. Your CHA will still be low, and you'll have trouble with paladin multi-class (both the STR/WIS mins of 13+, and the stats for any other powers you ended up taking).

A paladin/swordmage hybrid (STR and INT) might be a little underpowered but not completely unviable, I would think. If your paladin at-will is Valiant Smite then even though you have it from 1st level there'd be nothing about it that would betray your paladin-ness. Then if you don't take paladin encounter, utility and daily powers until 3rd, 6th and 5th the whole "growing into it" story would be preserved. You'll have the same limitations as the swordmage/multi-class paladin as far as DEX and CHA are concerned.

For your priestess of love I'd try the lazy warlord route with cleric multi-class; or a hybrid pacifist cleric/lazy warlord, perhaps. The idea is that your cleric powers don't do damage, and your warlord powers buff and/or activate allies rather than involve you doing stuff yourself. The lasso is hard to build in, unless you go for powers that involve forced movement and reflavour them as lasso called shots - which might be a bit of a stretch (boom boom!). The archery you can get via Archer Warlord and STR, or if your lazy warlord can be built around the WIS you're using as a cleric (I don't know all the warlord options well enough), then you can just pump DEX as your second stat.

Pacifist builds for clerics are mostly in Divine Power - if you look through it the elements are pretty clear. You're correct that in 4e if others are attacking to kill then the fact that you want to subdue won't help. I personally like this change, as I think it makes the stake and the intra-party dynamics a bit more clear. That's just my taste, though.

 

[pemerton]

OD&D and its direct spawn largely reference a world that, while clearly unrealistic in all the ways that you mention, still has a basis in some sort of assumption of PC mundanity. In OD&D your character is very definitely just some ordinary human (albeit a relatively tough and hardened customer). The primary mode of play in early D&D was Gygaxian dungeon exploration. The PCs try to survive and acquire treasure in a hostile underground environment which is designed to challenge them. The less explicitly fantastical the PCs are the more easily they can be challenged and the less arbitrary ways they have to circumvent things. Spells, items, etc can be given away by the system as desired to relax the constraints on the PCs but the gist of play continues to always be fragile limited characters being challenged by the environment. This is neither highly simulationist, nor does plot/narrative play a particularly strong role. It would be possible to play this game with some sort of plot coupons, but they would simply be another resource like hit points and rather out of place WRT the goals of the game.

<snip>

Something like the Paladin's alignment thing existed within this. The idea of "just RPing a good character" assumes that there's some sort of significant long-term trajectory to the game in which the character's overall personality matters. The D&D paladin's mechanical alignment fit that paradigm well, in each largely disconnected scene of the game the character might have a 'good' or an 'evil' choice.

<snip>

Those things could come up, but you could exactly just hand-wave them. They didn't impact the game balance or goals of dungeon crawl.

Clearly 4e in particular has given short shrift to purely episodic dungeon crawl type play

<snip>

YOU are playing a game that involves characterization, heavy plot involvement of the world in the form of story arcs, lots of interaction between the characters at the world at multiple levels, and long term goal-oriented play with, certainly in 4e, the ultimate goal being the evolution and eventually apotheosis of the PCs

<snip>

The idea isn't so much to challenge them with a hostile environment as it is to play out their journey through the environment and how that journey leads to that apotheosis.

<snip>

4e still straddles the fence some in that respect, and seems to want to exist in a sort of halfway point where you can still run a dungeon crawly episodic game or you can play out something closer to an epic soap opera.

<snip>

Bedrockgames keeps insisting on his version of D&D that supports his sort of play. He's going to want hard-coded alignment rules and such because very simply alignment and good and evil etc are just more parts of the environmental puzzle to deal with, and PC characterization is simply scene-based, there's not some elaborate personal narrative around the character. If such a narrative evolves it is purely composed of individual incidents and maybe what areas of the sandbox the player decides to have that character dig in. Alignment and code of honor etc are simply rules that create certain challenges and their point is only to make the character behave in a certain way in each scene. Meanwhile you are injecting larger scale story arc based considerations. Your paladin requires rules that let him evolve a moral stance and follow a personal story arc that is under yours and the DM's control. While you will solve puzzles and whatnot through the lens of your character's alignment you want choices, not challenge mechanics.

This is ultimately why things like this thread and the whole giant edition war exist. There are simply fundamentally incompatible visions of what the game is all about.

I wanted to XP this but couldn't. Terrific post.

 

[Libramarian]

(On a more technical point, I also think 4e's social skill challenges have one mechanical strength over the Duel of Wits: in a DW it is possible to declare an action and resolve it without specifying what is happening in the fiction - though the rules say not to do this. In a skill challenge, a skill check can't be called for without the player first specifying what his/her PC is doing - without that, it can't be known what skill is required to be tested.)

Doesn't the DMG say that sometimes the player will tell you what skill they're using, instead of describing what they're doing and the DM choosing the skill, and that's OK?

Well, we can go back and forth over what is sufficient or not, but, even without the explicit explanation in the rules, that doesn't change the fact that there is more support for that style of play than ever existed previously.

But, how far can we take what you're saying though? If I want to play a robot jockey, a la Mechwarrior, isn't it fair to say, "Don't play D&D?" Certainly at the extremes, it's a perfectly reasonable thing to say.

Now, replace, "I want to be a robot jockey" with, "I want to play a process sim based game" and that's pretty much how I feel about the comments about 3e. So much of 3e (and even more in earlier editions) runs counter to this goal. Virtually every aspect of play will get in your way if you try to do this. About the only elements which might support this style of play mechanically, are some of the skills. Certainly not all. And certainly not something like Profession skills (which often get cited in these discussions) because Profession skills are about as far from Process Sim as you can get.

Roll the dice and you get this much money for this much time spent. That's ALL profession skills do, out of the box. Granted, it's not a big stretch to drift that, and that's fair. But, out of the box, that is all they do. So, how is the system promoting process sim here?

So, again, no, I don't see the comparison. 4e has several core elements that speak directly to the sort of play Pemerton talks about. The fact that many of these elements are the ones that people complain the loudest about, precisely because they are player advocacy/meta-game mechanics means that it's pretty clear to most people reading the rules that they recognize that these elements exist in the game.

3e has virtually no elements which support Process Sim play. Certainly very few of the baseline core elements do. You have to start monkeying with the mechanics right from character generation onwards in order to achieve even a semblance of Process Sim play. The whole, "I want to play a process sim game, so, I like 3e" is generally in the same category as, "3e is so video gamey" or "4e is so board gamey". A group of poorly thought out and poorly articulated arguments trying to justify why someone doesn't like a particular game. Scratch the surface and most of the argument falls apart.

I think if someone insists on doing something weird and uncharacteristic and difficult to pull off with D&D, just assume that they're here because of D&D's visibility and popularity.

I sometimes want to tell everyone who is very story-oriented to play some other game, because in the broader RPG context I see D&D as a quintessentially gamist dungeon crawler, but S'mon's and Pemerton's posts explaining scene-framing were so succinct and clear that it really helped to convince me that DDN could advocate and support a variety of different styles within one edition.

The existence of metagame mechanics does not automatically mean that the designers know what they're doing with them. My first impression of 4e (looking at the core 3 alongside Keep on the Shadowfell) was that the metagame mechanics were just kind of clumsily thrown in there because they were a hot new thing without the game clearly advocating the right metagame agenda to take advantage of them. I still find it hard to believe that the official adventures for the game, many of which were written by the developers themselves, could so badly misrepresent the style of play the game is designed to support.