D&D 5E Legends & Lore 4/1/2013

[pemerton]

Despite my general dislike of Fourth Edition, I give it a lot of credit for knowing what it was. It made decisions about what classes, levels, skills, bonuses, hit points, damage, and training were and how they would be represented mechanically. I believe that that, more than anything, is the hallmark of a modern game.

Which is why I think 5E is doing a great job of threading the needle between tradition and modern by being an ability score based game with bounded accuracy. That's its solid modern core. The emphasis on the six ability scores is also very traditional, so it's a big win.

These are nice points.

I certainly think the stat/skill system - with skills detatched from stats, and so acting as semi-free descriptors - is the highlight of D&Dnext.

4th really was a different beast, its a miniature combat game, and less of a roleplaying game.

I'm not saying that the game "can't" be played in the vein of an RPG

Naturally it can be played in the vein of an RPG, for the same reason AD&D can - they're both RPGs!

I guess 4e could be played as a miniatures combat game, but you'd have to ignore all the stuff about playing a character in a shared imagined fantasy world where fictional positioning matters to resolution (contra some of [MENTION=10021]kamikaze[/MENTION]Midget's stronger claims about the oddly-named wrought iron fence made of tigers). I could also ignore much the same stuff in AD&D and play it as a miniatures combat game! (From memory, it was called Chainmail.)

I linked to a specific post. Read that specific post.

Here are the highlights of that post, for me:

In previous editions, NPCs used the same spellcasting classes as PCs, and even monsters' spells were drawn off the same list. . . In 4e, by contrast, a caster might be able to use a lore skill to get a rough idea of what an enemy mage might be capable of, but you're never sure, no matter how well you know the wizard's spell list. One of my favorite moments DMing 4e was when the party was about to ambush an enemy mage. They had fought him once before, but one player had been absent for that session, so he asked the others what the guy could do. The response was "Well, he's a mage. Last time we fought him, he used this black lightning sort of thing, and he could animate objects to attack us. Other than that, though...well, he's a mage. He could do anything." It was great. . .

There's just a lot of lore in 4e that I like. . . You look in the MM, and it gets a lot of slack for not including things like No. Appearing and Ecology info, and that's true. The MM doesn't tell you a lot about goblins eating habits or their ratio of males to females. Instead it talks about how hobgoblins used to have an empire where goblins and bugbears were their servants, and hints that that empire's fall was at least partially from Fey interference, and how many goblins hate the fey to this day. It talks of goblin tendencies to tame and breed creatures like drakes and wolves, and even hints that in ancient times, hobgoblins may have flat out created goblins and bugbears for their own purposes. . .

In 4e, characters started out with more hit points(something like 20-30, usually) and they had more ways, as a party, to combat being dead. In addition, Save or Die just isn't in 4e. . .

As a player, this is great for me. I feel like I'm in much more control over whether my character lives or dies . . .

As a DM, this has been great for me, because it allows me to adjust the lethality of a given encounter to more degrees . . .

This feeds into the dynamic combat angle. Fights in 4e tend to be flashy. People are moving around the battlefield, often pushing and pulling each other around. Terrain tends to be a big deal. . .

[W]ith Encounter and Daily powers, I can put the pedal to the metal and really have the mechanics back me up when I decide it's time to go all out. It's lame if my Fighter can't put any more effort toward going toe to toe with his arch-nemesis than he can with a random orc.​

I'd put all of that forward as key parts of the "4e feel", for me at least.

I would posit that there are a few things that many, perhaps even most, 4e games shared in terms of feel.

That's a good list too! It fits my experience - and that's interesting, because a lot of the time we have different preferences about how to approach RPGing. So I think you've done a good job of capturing a pretty widespread and shared "4e feel".

How does Tide of Iron give a player more "narrative control" than Charm Person?

Depending on how a particular GM treated Charm Person, it may not - but it may, because some GMs treat Charm Person as something to be adjudicated, ad hoc and moment to moment by them - so what exactly it will achieve is not known to the player - whereas the effect of Tide of Iron is clear from the rules, and doesn't depend upon GM mediation or adjudication.

Also, Tide of Iron is available to the players of non-magic-using PCs.

I was just curious; I never really understood it. I think I get it now

I'll direct you to the introductory section where the format for powers is described. Flavour Text is explicitly called out as being alterable by the player so long as the mechanical effects remain stable.

I'll avoid the poster child (CaGI) and stick with Tide of Iron. Tide of Iron, from memory, damages and moves the opponent on a successful hit. That effect is described as a shove but could just as easily be the opponent is knocked a bit off balance and shifts on his own accord to recover safely or a knick in the thigh that forces the opponent to involuntarily jump back, fancy footwork that causes the opponent to shift opening a hole in his defence and allowing the hit, or pretty much any other combat move / opponent response that provides the required mechanical effect.

Magic Missiles may be screaming skulls, iridescent translucent darts, or blaster fire from the palm of the mage. And that can shift round to round at the player's whim.

I don't think the reflavouring that Nagol describes is central to the sort of narrative control that I'm interested in with 4e. It's nice that players are able to contribute colour, but on its own that's not all that special.

A related phenomenon which is more significant is that the default assumption of 4e play is that the GM may not use colour to veto a player's use of a power, and hence the assumption is that, when a power is used, its colour must be narrated so as to fit the fact of its use, rather than presupposing its colour as already given and a constraint on its use. This isn't very important when it comes to Magic Missile, but can be relevant to Tide of Iron - when a fighter pushes an ogre with Tide of Iron the default assumption of 4e is not to say "Hey, that can't be possible, and ogre's too big to push" and rather is to say "OK, you moved that ogre with your shield, tell us how you did that."

But when The Jester says "Narrative control is explicitly shared to a degree never before seen in D&D. Powers, both attack and utility, help to let the pcs define the game more than ever before. At the same time, the dm is expected to provide more exciting and fantastic terrain than in previous editions", I don't think about reflavouring. I think about the fact that players (I think when The Jester said "PCs" he misspoke) have resources - like powers, but also skills, and rituals, and action points - and the resolution mechanics that those resources fit into - which let them shape the play, and the outcomes of play, in a way that is less subject to GM fiat and adjudication at every point.

Balesir summed it up well here, I think:

The players have actual agency and knowledge of likely outcomes under the rules. I, as DM, get to decide what the situation is the characters face, but I don't get to decide how they may (or may not) resolve it; that is down to the decisions of the players and the rolls of the dice. I find that infinitely more satisfying than thinking "do I let them succeed with this funky plan or not?"

The end result is we get situations where nobody knows where they are going to go, because the outcome will be a genuine fusion of the decisions of all the folk in the group, not just how the DM thinks it "should" work. Both as a player and as a GM, I find that liberating and refreshing.

This is what I understood The Jester to be getting at by referring to "narrative control". And it's what I think the poster on the WotC boards was getting at in referring to his/her fighter PC being able to "put the pedal to the metal when it's not just some random orce but his arch-nemesis".

Yeah, that's part of it. I feel like there's more to it, but I'm having trouble trying to articulate what I mean.

I hope I've captured the "more" at least a little bit.

 

[pemerton]

4e's iron-clad separation of story and gameplay.

There is no such iron-clad separation.

Here is one example that proves that point:

The rules constrain the narrative, though, so it's not "anything goes". You can't say Tide of Iron does Lightning damage all of a sudden. You also can't say that Tide of Iron is someone running towards you. The narrative needs to be consistent within the rules framework.

Generalising Obryn's point, the game has a whole host of keywords (some formalised as Keywords, other - like eg Push, Slide, Shift etc - not so labelled by nevertheless serving the same role). These establish an intimate connection between story and gameplay.

There are a further host of points of fictional positioning. For instance, if a character is standing adjacent to a chasm, and suffers a push effect, then s/he is in danger of falling down the chasm. And the distance fallen - itself an element of the shared fiction - determines the amount of damage taken, the time taken to climb or fly back up, etc.

There are further elements of fictional positioning that pertain to page 42-style resolution. For instance, if the GM narrates difficult terrain in the form of water, I can (via p 42) use my Icy Terrain power to change the nature of that terrain and thereby, if I have icewalk, negate the difficult terrain. Whereas if the difficult terrain were (say) rubble, Icy Terrain wouldn't have the same capacity.

I realise that you (that is, KM) prefer a game with a different approach to the relationship between action declaration, colour, fictional positioning and resolution that obtains in 4e. But I think it might make your expression of this preference clearer if you did so without pretty badly misdescribing the relevant features of 4e as a system.

For your specific example, the easiest solution is not to rely on the rules to dictate what you can and cannot affect.

<snip>

The effects that generate a "push" don't specify anywhere what types of creature they can and cannot effect, and the DM is given explicit permission and encouragement to make that decision for themselves.

<snip>

To achieve this, we're going to have to tolerate that each table is going to be different, and that at the table where the DM doesn't let it work against giants and the adventure is all about giants, the ability won't be very useful, and that's fine. You shouldn't pick that ability in that DM's game. Pick something else. Player are not entitled to have their abilities work the same at every DM's table worldwide (but a given DM may very well grant players that).

<snip>

people whose fun relies on always being able to use their given abilities won't play under certain DM's, but that's fine.

The absence of these features from 4e is part of what I (and I'm pretty sure [MENTION=27160]Balesir[/MENTION] and perhaps also [MENTION=1210]the Jester[/MENTION]) have in mind in talking about 4e giving players narrative control.

Whereas this sort of ad hoc GM adjudication has precisely the consequence that Balesir pointed to upthread: whether the players win or lose starts to turn not on their own choices about use of their resources, but upon the GM's opinion as to whether or not their plan should work.

And the problem can't be easily solved just by substituting "table consensus" for "DM" in your explanation of the approach, because players can't be expected to adjudicate the viability of their own plans as part of action rseolution - that is a conflict of interest that is very hard to overcome, especially in a crunchy game like D&D where rulings of this sort can have all sorts of downstream consequences for balance.

None of this is to say that 4e's approach is sacrosanct - there are a range of ways of handling resolution in an RPG, and its relationship to colour, action resolution, player resource deployment, fictional positioning etc. My point is a more modest one - that the connection between 4e's treatment of those issues, and its consequences in terms of player narrative control, is not an accidental one. It's inherent, tight, and a part of the "4e feel" that I can't easily see how D&Dnext will replicate.

 

[pemerton]

I like the idea of doling out your opening powers over three levels.

<snip>

For a new player, its training wheels. For a more experienced player, it gives him two levels to feel out his character (and see if he lives) before deciding on what paths he will go in further customization.

As I and some others pointed out upthread of your post, this looks like an attempted mixture of oil and water.

A certain sort of "old schooler" wants to play a low-complexity, low hp PC. Fine. But newbies should not be let anywhere near such PC builds! Newbies should not be using the system where you find out whether or not your PC lives as part of gettting a feel for him/her. If anything, newbies need more hit points, because they have less sense of what is required to avoid losing them and thus are in greater danger of doing so.

I think VinylTap doesn't understand, as I don't, the leap between "starting at 3rd level is confusing" and "fate points," especially when "start at 1st level instead" is still on the table as a perfectly valid choice.

I was the one who introduced the idea of "fate points" into the discussion.

Newbies need a system with (i) less complexity in player options, and hence in PC build, but (ii) more survivability than an experienced player typically needs in a starting PC. Those needs are not served by the system Mearls is proposing, because his system is based on the level paradigm, where low complexity is anchored to low level, which is in turn anchored to low hit points, which means the a newbie's first experience is likely to be having his/her PC die.

Hence my suggestion - newbies need a non-level based, parallel approach to simplying their PCs while preserving survivability; and one way to do that is to grant rerolls, Fate Points or something similar in lieu of PC abilities, because these are easy to use and improve survivability. The newbie can then trade these in for real class abilities as s/he gets a feel for the gameplay, but this can be done independently of levelling.
[MENTION=14391]Warbringer[/MENTION] made the additional observation that, in practice, many GMs of new and/or young players allow rerolls, fudge dice etc. And my suggestion would be a way of formalising that while shifting power over the PC from the GM to the player, and hence giving the newbie a truer taste of what RPGing is about.

 

[I'm A Banana]

There is no such iron-clad separation.

Here is one example that proves that point:

I could say that Tide of Iron generated bolts of electricity that somehow do normal damage and not Lightning damage, though.

Or that it generated peals of flame that dealt normal damage.

Or that it involved conjuring 1,001 tiny leprechauns from an extradimensional space to tickle the target, and that's how they take damage. From their giggles. HP are emotions in 4e, yeah?

The story is completely superfluous to the mechanics. Which has good points and bad points.

Generalising Obryn's point, the game has a whole host of keywords (some formalised as Keywords, other - like eg Push, Slide, Shift etc - not so labelled by nevertheless serving the same role). These establish an intimate connection between story and gameplay.

Nah, they're just more rules that interact with each other and don't care about how you justify it. All lightning damage comes from tiny frogs. Thunder is the sound of one hand clapping. Ninjas are summoned with martial powers to do the work for you. None of that affects the mechanics.

There are a further host of points of fictional positioning. For instance, if a character is standing adjacent to a chasm, and suffers a push effect, then s/he is in danger of falling down the chasm. And the distance fallen - itself an element of the shared fiction - determines the amount of damage taken, the time taken to climb or fly back up, etc.

Players don't make chasms.

There are further elements of fictional positioning that pertain to page 42-style resolution. For instance, if the GM narrates difficult terrain in the form of water, I can (via p 42) use my Icy Terrain power to change the nature of that terrain and thereby, if I have icewalk, negate the difficult terrain. Whereas if the difficult terrain were (say) rubble, Icy Terrain wouldn't have the same capacity.

Players don't choose to use Pg 42 or not.

I realise that you (that is, KM) prefer a game with a different approach to the relationship between action declaration, colour, fictional positioning and resolution that obtains in 4e. But I think it might make your expression of this preference clearer if you did so without pretty badly misdescribing the relevant features of 4e as a system.

I've been playing the thing since 2008 under different DMs and running it myself a few times. Lets not start assuming the other isn't being honest in their description.

The absence of these features from 4e is part of what I (and I'm pretty sure [MENTION=27160]Balesir[/MENTION] and perhaps also [MENTION=1210]the Jester[/MENTION]) have in mind in talking about 4e giving players narrative control.

Whereas this sort of ad hoc GM adjudication has precisely the consequence that Balesir pointed to upthread: whether the players win or lose starts to turn not on their own choices about use of their resources, but upon the GM's opinion as to whether or not their plan should work.

Yeah. And? If you play with jerks who like to screw you over, don't play with those jerks. No rule set is going to stop jerks.

If they're not being jerks about it, roll with it. It's just a magical elf game. It doesn't really matter if your plan works or not, assuming you trust the DM to play their part in giving the table a fun experience. If your GM knows consistency is important for you to feel like you're having fun being a magical elf, your GM should probably take that into account in your game. That doesn't have to hold true across every D&D game everywhere; it doesn't need to be hard-coded into the rules.

And the problem can't be easily solved just by substituting "table consensus" for "DM" in your explanation of the approach, because players can't be expected to adjudicate the viability of their own plans as part of action rseolution - that is a conflict of interest that is very hard to overcome, especially in a crunchy game like D&D where rulings of this sort can have all sorts of downstream consequences for balance.

The system doesn't need to care about the local unbalancing an individual DM may do or not.

None of this is to say that 4e's approach is sacrosanct - there are a range of ways of handling resolution in an RPG, and its relationship to colour, action resolution, player resource deployment, fictional positioning etc. My point is a more modest one - that the connection between 4e's treatment of those issues, and its consequences in terms of player narrative control, is not an accidental one. It's inherent, tight, and a part of the "4e feel" that I can't easily see how D&Dnext will replicate.

Again, I feel like the same buzzwordy term is being used for a lot of very very different behaviors of the game and at the table.

AbdulAlhazred mentioned that part of his fun was coming from the ability of players to describe their powers as whatever, because the mechanics didn't care. That's something 5e can accomplish. That's something that, to a much lesser degree, every edition before 4e had, what with the skull-magic-missiles and green fireballs and whatnot. Re-fluffing can be encouraged by solid math that you can then build on in whatever way you want (ie: good bones on the thing).

If there's some OTHER element of "narrative control" you're talking about here, you'll have to be more specific. It's sounding a bit like the adults in a Peanuts cartoon whenever someone drops a forgey buzzword 'round here the last few posts.

 

[Warbringer]

sorry ..can't remove attachment

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

See, the problem I have with all this is that in 5e you *can* play like 4e (if it's more than just a tacked-on tactical module), maybe, if the DM says so, and I think that's... just an awful compromise. Most groups *won't* because there will be rules to handle all kinds of sim BS like in 3.x where the "laws of physics" and fear of trampling on someone's "verisimilitude" are going to trump the "rule of cool" at most tables. No more pushing ogres and giants with fighter abilities because "that doesn't make sense" - or, you can *try* but with that -16 penalty, you'll most likely fail, so why bother? Swing with your sword again, fighter! But break out the maaaaaaaagic and watch the laws of physics do cartwheels.

*yawn*

I get why some folks and some tables don't like fighters shoving giants around willy nilly, but unless the books are *very* explicit about it being more than a little ok to ignore that crap if you don't want to use it, there will be this culture built up around those rules like ignoring them is somehow "cheating" and if you ask me that just precludes a lot of potentially good experiences, and possibly even potential players from signing on.

 

[pemerton]

I could say that Tide of Iron generated bolts of electricity that somehow do normal damage and not Lightning damage, though.

Or that it generated peals of flame that dealt normal damage.

Or that it involved conjuring 1,001 tiny leprechauns from an extradimensional space to tickle the target, and that's how they take damage.

No. None of those things is within the system's framework. There isn't any such thing as fire that deals normal damage (hence the role of a flaming sword). Or electricity that doesn't deal Lighting damage. Or a conjuration that lacks the Conjuration keyword. (You can even see the errata reflecting this - eg errataing Icy Terrain as a Zone, which they got wrong in the PHB.)

Tide of Iron is particularly constrained, because whatever the narration is it ought to involve your shield, given that wielding a shield is a prerequisite for using the power.

The story is completely superfluous to the mechanics.

<snip>

[Keywords]'re just more rules that interact with each other and don't care about how you justify it. All lightning damage comes from tiny frogs. Thunder is the sound of one hand clapping. Ninjas are summoned with martial powers to do the work for you. None of that affects the mechanics.

What page of the rules are you referring to here? The only relevant in the DMG occurs in its discussion of attacking objects (p ), which states:

Some unusual materials might be particularly resistant to some or all kinds of damage. In addition, you might rule that some kinds of damage are particularly effective against certain objects and grant the object vulnerability to that damage type. For example, a gauzy curtain or a pile of dry papers might have vulnerability 5 to fire because any spark is likely to destroy it.​

This implies the exact opposite of what you are asserting.

There is more discussion in the PHB (p 55):

[O]ther keywords define the fundamental effects of a power . . .

Charm: Mental effects that control or influence the subject’s actions.

Conjuration: Powers that create objects or creatures of magical energy.

Fear: Effects that inspire fright. . .

Illusion: Powers that deceive the senses or the mind. . .

Polymorph: Effects that alter a creature’s physical form. . .

Sleep: Powers that cause sleep or unconsciousness.​

That is all about fictional positioning, and the effect of the mechanics on the story - a person hit by a Fear effect is frightened, a Conjuration effect conjures things, etc. If I have a Fear power that induces forced movement, I can't narrate it as working instead by conjuring faeries to carry the target away inless I change the keyword, from Fear to (say) Conjuration.

Players don't make chasms.

I'm not sure what you mean - that is, PCs sometimes make chasms, whether by strength or magic, and hence players can sometimes have the power to make the presence of a cavern part of the shared fiction - but anyway that doesn't strike me as relevant. If - whether via exercise of GM or player authority - it has been established in the fiction that character X is adjacent to a 20' deep chasm, and I have my PC hit X with Tide of Iron, then the fiction is very clearly affecting the resolution: someone (the GM, if X is an NPC) has to roll a saving throw for X, and if X fails then down s/he goes, taking 2d10 damage in the process.

I'm not sure how you reconcile that with your claim that "the story is completely superfluous to the mechanics". To me it seems like a counterexample. As is the discussion of the vulnerability of gauze and paper to Fire damage. (The keyword constraints on narration of flavour work in the other direction - they are instances of the mechanics directly if not completely shaping the content of the fiction.)

Players don't choose to use Pg 42 or not.

You, or yours, mightn't. Mine do all the time: based on the keywords of their powers, and the broader fictional positioning of their PCs, they do things like use forced movement powers to impale beholders on stalactites, or use Thunderwave to blast open a rickety wall or shatter a statute, or spill oil on the ground to increase the distance they can slide an enemy with a polearm.

I've been playing the thing since 2008 under different DMs and running it myself a few times. Lets not start assuming the other isn't being honest in their description.

I don't doubt you're describing your experience. I'm questioning your treatment of your experience as a property of the game, particularly when in fact the relevant rules text - quoted above - speaks in terms directly contradictory to how you (or your GMs) are running the game.

To put it another way, if you run the game in such a way as fictional positioning doesn't matter, then of course you'll get that result. (My guess would be you also won't get much p 42 action, but that's a conjecture, not a proven result.) But the text never makes any such assertion, and in the relevant pages in fact points srongly in the other direction.

If there's some OTHER element of "narrative control" you're talking about here, you'll have to be more specific.

I did, in the post directly above the one you replied to.

Yeah. And? If you play with jerks who like to screw you over, don't play with those jerks. No rule set is going to stop jerks.

I didn't say anything about jerks. I talked about GM adjudication. I'm sure [MENTION=27160]Balesir[/MENTION] is a nice guy. But I don't want to play a game in which he decides if my plan works or not. I want to shape my own fate! In fact, I know from his posts that Balesir, as a GM, wants the same thing! And so do I! I don't want to decide if the players' plans work or not. I want them to go all out while I go all out with the NPCs and other antagonistic story elements, and let the mechanics tell us who prevails.

If they're not being jerks about it, roll with it. It's just a magical elf game. It doesn't really matter if your plan works or not, assuming you trust the DM to play their part in giving the table a fun experience.

So we've got to the point where D&Dnext will cater to all playstlyes, except for the ones it doesn't?

I mean, I could just sit back and let the GM narrate the whole story for me - perhaps dropping in my guy's tagline here or there to liven it up - but at that point I'd rather read a book or watch a movie. I don't play RPGs to enjoy the GM's amateur novel or screenplay, and I don't GM to share my amateur fiction with my players. Genuine, rich, joint creation of the shared fiction is pretty important to me. That needs rules that will mediate everyone's efforts at contribution, and that will be robust enough to do that even when what I'm trying to contribute is "The demons just wiped the floor with you and went on to destory your friends and family too" and what the players are trying to contribute it "On the contrary, we banished them back to the Abyss in the name of Erathis and the Raven Queen."

There are actualy existing RPGs that provide such rules. And at least one edition of D&D is among them! If D&Dnext is going to be an umbrella for all D&D play, then, it has to offer the same thing.

 

[Warbringer]

[MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]

perfect typo!!

"The demons just wiped the floor with you and went on to destory your friends and family too"

 

[pemerton]

Normally I'd edit, but I'll leave it there for the amusement of posterity!

 

[Li Shenron]

Different e's have been more blatant about supporting different styles (4e's protagonism, 1e's Gygaxian dungeon-crawls, 2e's storytelling style), so I think the best 5e can do is make a lot of room for a lot of different styles.

Totally hope so! I would add 3e's system mastery style to your list.