D&D 5E Legend Lore says 'story not rules' (3/4)

[Nemesis Destiny]

This was my honest reading of what you wrote. If I misunderstood or mischaracterized your position, which it appears I have, then I retract and appologize.

I accept. I want no ill will or feuds with anyone on these boards. Some folks make it harder to do than others.

I also apologize if my response was not clear in its intent.

To be clear about it, the intent of what I said was that high-sim game systems, in my opinion, largely need a reality check, because most of them don't hold up, or aren't being truly honest about their intent to model "reality." Just my opinion, based largely on the inconsistencies these systems have compared to reality as we know it, nicely illustrated by that post of Balesir's that I was referring to.

I don't wish to really flog this horse with you any further since I don't think it would be pointful for either of us, but the remark was directed at the system(s) them/itself. Not those who advocate for those systems, nor those who use them. I characterize it as a failing of those systems, not its users.

I guess it gets back to the old dichotomy between what is jarring for one player can be pure immersion gold for another. My main question was about why, in the context of D&D and Next specifically, this mutual exclusion is necessary. I still see no reason why the underlying mechanics can't be designed in a way that supports both (and other) styles, but they haven't done that. Instead what we have is a system that does the same job of supporting sim as many prior editions, with a nod to narrative but without supplying the tools needed to really make it work. No amount of add-on module will fix that short of rewriting many of the underlying components of the game. I could be wrong; I'm no game designer, but this is the direction it seems to be heading, and I don't like it.

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

they can at times align, but I think its really hard to have both occupy the same space. I may be narrow sighted here, but if the GM or the system is producing results based on what is good for the story or what is good for the genre, that is going to trump realism i believe. Neither one is better or worse but I do think they are different.

This is something I just find utterly confusing. All the fiction we read is based on some kind of reality, so within the context of that reality, genre tropes are realistic. Or at least they can be. And lots of stories have been written about these things. When you read a book, do you often find your immersion destroyed by what happens in the narrative?

 

[Bedrockgames]

The problem with putting things like that in a separate book, from my perspective, are twofold.

First, you have the issue where as a "module" it will just feel "tacked on" and not supportive of the playstyle from a fundamental level. We already have a system that does this, so why would I buy a book that does a less-good job of it? People seem to think that you can please 4e fans by throwing them a bone in the form of a "tactical" module and "they'll be happy," when this really only scratches the surface of what makes 4e a great system to its fans.



Second, by publishing it in a separate book, it silos the options into a convenient location that people can point to as a collection of "bad" things, not even to be considered. It sounds ridiculous, but mark me, if that's how it goes to print, then that will be a common outcome. I wouldn't even suggest it if we hadn't seen a lot of that happening in late period 3.x. Bo9S got a lot of flack and disregard from people who never even cracked its covers based on preconceptions alone. And this was not a small part of the community at the time. I'd know; I was one of them.

then I am not sure what the solution is. I mean, i dont expect my style to appear in the core, i expect to need the advanced rules to do what I want. But if they load up the basic game with all that 4E stuff, it seems like it will be a lot more difficult to subtract than to add it back in. To me, putting ut a very simpe core and offering basically one 3E module and a 4E module seems fair. I am hoping they release a third that is more my style as well (or that the 3E module has enough 2E stuff to work with). I just dint see how a simpe core game can satisfy everyone. Yes, they need to listen to 4E players, but if they load up te core with 4E stuff wont it just drive away the folks they are trying to bring back?

I don't even see it as being built around the issue, at least, not for that express purpose. I think it's more a side-effect in that it makes bad GMing more difficult. Why shouldn't that be a goal of any ruleset? There are some smart minds on the project, surely they can come up with rules to satisfy that criteria as well.

because I find such efforts end up constraining good GMs. Its just my experience that such systems rarely appeak to me. I dont need measures in place to prevent bad GMing

Who hasn't played with a bad one at one time or another? Most of my early experiences were bad. Really bad. It's somewhat surprising that I even continued in the hobby, frankly. I can't be the only one, though we may never hear from the others, since they might have long since given up on the idea of playing an RPG.

My experience was very different. This just has never been a problem I wanted a solution for. I have had bad GMs, but they just made the good ones seem that much bbetter.

I'd personally rather play a game that, rather than assume a competent GM, assumes that people want to play a competently designed ruleset that includes leeway for GM creativity, without as many of the traps that the bad GMs get caught on.

We just want something very different and that is okay.

 

[Ratskinner]

Well, you talk about this more below, but I don't see why MHRP couldn't for example do something similar to 4e. You'd have a more defined set of character options probably, but that depends on how close you wanted to get to the same experience. It could certainly be tooled up to do an FRPG that had the power range of 4e (IE quite capable but still mundane -> totally super powered immortals).

I suppose you could, especially since the same system is used for Leverage. It would be trivially simple to start with a Leverage-style game and then (as play advanced) end up more MHRP-ish. Although, honestly I don't think 4e actually goes "all the way down" to mundane level. Even low-level heroes in 4e are quite a bit above Joe farmhand. (As opposed to previous editions where sometimes they demonstrably weren't much better off than Joe wielding a sword.) However, its a heroic genre, and even in those versions the PCs don't stay mundane for very long.

I guess my first response, though, is..."Why would anyone want to do that?" I mean, in some ways, 4e is an attempt to add some of that indie stuff to a D&D engine...with limited success, mostly due to factors inherited as legacy demands. The only thing adding all those defined descriptors could possibly do is slow down play. If you have a group of likely players who all want to play within D&D genre-conventions you don't need the rules to force it.

Well, it seems to me, sticking within basically a d20-ish framework, that you could steal Advantage/Disadvantage from DDN and use that as your basic consequence. Then a power would impose this consequence, and also a SPECIFIC narrative consequence, the enemy is entangled by vines, your character can make mighty leaps on his transformed frog legs, etc. You could then have more major consequences potentially if you needed them, damage, ongoing disadvantage, greater narrative constraints, etc. You could add in a step up capability as well, so you could gain advantage using an action/power to amp it up, but failure would be worse and success might be complicated, etc. Now you don't need conditions like 'restrained' or 'unconscious', HOWEVER, you may still want to have those keywords and use them as you see fit. There's no reason why 10 different powers need to repeat the text for unconscious. It just needs to be made clear that these are not a list of all the possible narrative states that exist, just ones that work for many situations. Of course you lose the ability to do things like errata Dazed or add a "you cannot be dazed" ED feature, etc. There are trade offs there. Maybe the conditions could be voided of mechanical impact and simply be keywords. Entangled by vines "restrains" the target, but they might have a way to avoid being restrained, like going out of phase or whatever.

That seems like a recipe for getting the worst of both worlds.

 

[Bedrockgames]

This is something I just find utterly confusing. All the fiction we read is based on some kind of reality, so within the context of that reality, genre tropes are realistic. Or at least they can be. And lots of stories have been written about these things. When you read a book, do you often find your immersion destroyed by what happens in the narrative?

Not usually, but in a game, my expectations are different. In fiction I am following a story written by a writer. But in am rpg, i feel like somebody else explporing a new world. I dont want it to flow ike fiction, in want it to flow more like real life.

Another way of looking at ths is knowing what genre you are going for. Leaving raw realism aside, would you agree its disruptive when gandalf shows up in an episode of 24? I have an image of the world as pretty real in many of my games so if a bunch of james bond stuff starts hapoening in my gritty counter terrorism game, then its a problem. A lot of people dont seem to understand we dont all approach D&D as fiction, or as a particular style of fantasy.

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

then I am not sure what the solution is. I mean, i dont expect my style to appear in the core, i expect to need the advanced rules to do what I want. But if they load up the basic game with all that 4E stuff, it seems like it will be a lot more difficult to subtract than to add it back in. To me, putting ut a very simpe core and offering basically one 3E module and a 4E module seems fair. I am hoping they release a third that is more my style as well (or that the 3E module has enough 2E stuff to work with). I just dint see how a simpe core game can satisfy everyone. Yes, they need to listen to 4E players, but if they load up te core with 4E stuff wont it just drive away the folks they are trying to bring back?

Neither of us is talking about the 'basic game' here. I am not saying the game needs to be a basic version of 4e either, I'm not saying that at all. I also don't expect the basic game to satisfy everyone. We likely have not seen the basic game; more like basic with 'standard' extensions.

What I will put forward though, is that I'm not seeing much room to add to the game the things that I like about 4e without extensive reworking (which they are not likely to do). Conversely, it would be far easier to tack on 3.x stuff, since the basic assumptions of the Next design cleave much closer to 3.x than they do to 4e.

My point is that if their idea of a 4e module is to simply tack on a 'tactical' module and call it a day, then they've really missed the mark of what that edition is all about (like many people did).

because I find such efforts end up constraining good GMs. Its just my experience that such systems rarely appeak to me. I dont need measures in place to prevent bad GMing

I don't find that to be the case at all. A good GM would not let a game system dictate any kind of constraints to them; a bad GM might not know any better, so at least if the game is competently designed, this shouldn't be much of an issue. Really awful GMs won't care what the system says anyway, but there's nothing you can do about them. I don't see why a system shouldn't be designed to be playable with an average GM though. Maybe I'm missing something...

My experience was very different. This just has never been a problem I wanted a solution for. I have had bad GMs, but they just made the good ones seem that much bbetter.

This is nudging dangerously close to an Oberoni fallacy. Just because you never had any issue, does not mean the issue was not a valid one. Designing things better from the start does not necessarily mean you don't get what you want. You don't need helpful rules and good advice, but some people do, so that's why they put them in the book. That still doesn't prevent you from playing how you like though.

We just want something very different and that is okay.

I agree. Even if it means I don't have any reason to run Next. That's for WotC to deal with.

 

[Bedrockgames]

To be clear about it, the intent of what I said was that high-sim game systems, in my opinion, largely need a reality check, because most of them don't hold up, or aren't being truly honest about their intent to model "reality." Just my opinion, based largely on the inconsistencies these systems have compared to reality as we know it, nicely illustrated by that post of Balesir's that I was referring to.

and just to be clear, i am not looking for high sim. I am looking for some basic believbility that isnt grounded in fiction or movie conventions. But I definitely want to kep it simple. Essentially I dont want things that, for me, present stark believability issues (like HS or mundane encounter powers). I am not saying those cant be believable but for me they present issues.

I guess it gets back to the old dichotomy between what is jarring for one player can be pure immersion gold for another. My main question was about why, in the context of D&D and Next specifically, this mutual exclusion is necessary. I still see no reason why the underlying mechanics can't be designed in a way that supports both (and other) styles, but they haven't done that. Instead what we have is a system that does the same job of supporting sim as many prior editions, with a nod to narrative but without supplying the tools needed to really make it work. No amount of add-on module will fix that short of rewriting many of the underlying components of the game. I could be wrong; I'm no game designer, but this is the direction it seems to be heading, and I don't like it.

i dont see the core as very sim. First they had the hd mechanic. Then they talk aboutone hour heals. There were definitely other things in there that felt highly non sim to me. It is also not hevily 4E. But it does feel like a compromise from my point of view. I would think if the base is simpe enough you can stack just about anything on to it. But there is give and take when you try to build a core intended to accomodate many styles. Wouldnt be just as probleatic to build the core around 4E assumptions?

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

Not usually, but in a game, my expectations are different. In fiction I am following a story written by a writer. But in am rpg, i feel like somebody else explporing a new world. I dont want it to flow ike fiction, in want it to flow more like real life.

So what you're saying is that you want D&D to behave like historical fiction rather than fantasy fiction? I'm not following you; to characters in a fictional world, that IS real life. Do you play D&D in a world without magic? Because nothing about D&D or fantasy fiction says 'real life' to me. There are monsters, magic, gods whose power actually manifests, etc.

Another way of looking at ths is knowing what genre you are going for. Leaving raw realism aside, would you agree its disruptive when gandalf shows up in an episode of 24? I have an image of the world as pretty real in many of my games so if a bunch of james bond stuff starts hapoening in my gritty counter terrorism game, then its a problem. A lot of people dont seem to understand we dont all approach D&D as fiction, or as a particular style of fantasy.

I don't know what '24' is, so I can't speak to that, beyond that it is a TV show (I guess?).

If you use D&D for something other than fantasy, I might suggest that there are better systems for it, but even so, nothing about the way a game is designed should prevent you from running a toned-down game, if that's what you want.

I don't see why 'a bunch of James Bond stuff' would even enter into your gritty counter-terrorism game in the first place. I'm really not sure what point you're trying to make here.

 

[Bedrockgames]

This is nudging dangerously close to an Oberoni fallacy. Just because you never had any issue, does not mean the issue was not a valid one. Designing things better from the start does not necessarily mean you don't get what you want. You don't need helpful rules and good advice, but some people do, so that's why they put them in the book. That still doesn't prevent you from playing how you like though.

No it isnt. I am not advocating bad rule design that the GM can undo on the spot. I am advocating good rule design that makes use of an rpg's big asset: the human referee. I dnt think design shoud be careless. But I do not want a game like 4E, which to me feels like it was written as a direct reaction to 3E. Their solutions to perceived problems, were themselves problems for me.

 

[Bedrockgames]

So what you're saying is that you want D&D to behave like historical fiction rather than fantasy fiction? I'm not following you; to characters in a fictional world, that IS real life. Do you play D&D in a world without magic? Because nothing about D&D or fantasy fiction says 'real life' to me. There are monsters, magic, gods whose power actually manifests, etc.

.

no. I want myth and magic. But i want mundane things to behave believably. And i dont want to feel like am a character in a story,but a person in a living world (so i dont want things like scenes, story structure, etc). You feel differently, and that is fine. Inm not trying to conver you.