D&D 5E D&DN going down the wrong path for everyone.

[Warbringer]

Y
Well, lets imagine what would happen in a game more like 4e where the focus is on story and not simulating a dangerous environment. In that game the PCs still have decisions to make and clearly when they make choices those will have consequences. If the PCs fail to gang up on targets and kill them then they'll have low hit points later on, right? If they fail to avoid traps, likewise they will have too few HS later. Its not like decisions mean nothing. There's no reason such a game can't make you 'earn' things either. It isn't like the game is scripted out on rails and the magic choochoo wisks you along to the end, that's not how it works. In fact if you study [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]'s posts you'll quickly see that he doesn't script out ANYTHING ahead of time, he called it 'no myth', there's no specific story, the whole idea is to invent it as you go, so the players decide what sorts of things they want to do, either explicitly in some cases "we're entering the mausoleum" or implicitly in some cases "we stock up on silver tipped arrows and enter the Howling Forest". Depending on just how far you're dialing into player authority the players may even be making up the Mausoleum or the Howling Forest on the spot. You can be sure that Pemerton will have undead in the former and lycanthropes in the latter (or he may throw the party a twist if he wants, maybe the elf ranger hates orcs and he decides they've holed up in the Mausoleum, surprise!).

Oh trust me, reading these boards the last 6 months I've added far more author authority to my game, but I tend still to be more GM authority focused, like [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION].

I personally think the game benefits from shared narrative, and when the balance is struck it is neither pampering nor railroading, just damn good fun

 

[Warbringer]

I've never been able to figure out how that ignore function works. I truly wish I did. It would make my browsing much less annoying.

Can't ignore mods ...

 

[billd91]

OK, I'll try again.

Point spending creates divergent ranges. By 5th level optimization made skill checks simple or impossible: the difference between high and low spread was so high. Hence, point spends create unbalanced play.

They're not doing so in a vacuum. A more accurate statement would be point spending enables divergent ranges. Player choices are a necessary element.

 

[Warbringer]

They're not doing so in a vacuum. A more accurate statement would be point spending enables divergent ranges. Player choices are a necessary element.

Players in general gravitate to optimization; can you imagine if BAB had been point based?

I get specialization, and the point buy option (as an extension of NWP), my point is simply it created very strict roles (either you specialized or you didnt) that closed down player options, rather than opening them.

I know this is all IME, so I'm really not trying to preach

 

[pemerton]

I don't recall Beowulf scaling a cliff, or St George. Maybe they COULD, but there is nothing in there telling me they CAN for sure.

Given that Beowulf could rip the arms of monsters, fight Grendel's mother in her underwater lair, and fight a dragon, I actually have no doubt that, had the poet inlcuded a cliff in the narrative, Beowulf would have scaled it.

My intuition on St George is not quite as strong, but still fairly strong.

Where then is the purpose of the trope of the sage, or the guide? Players should no longer need to consult a sage because it is not coherent that a mage who is intelligent and can blast a dragon to bits yet cannot be knowledgeable in all things.

The odd thing is that, in AD&D the mage is knowledgeable in all things (by casting Legend Lore).

But in any event that is not what I said. I talked about a "modest cliff", not Mt Everest (which is the cliff analogue of "knowledgable in all things). I find a mage of the D&D scholarly variety who is not very knowledgeable in anything genre incoherent, yes.

If a party has the resources necessary to lop off a dragons head, then they probably have the resources to get over the cliff without much effort (like flying or levitating, or teleporting).

<snip>

4e attempted to deal with that in its own way, more on the metagame level, which is why you add level. It's assumed that a party will have the resources necessary to handle the challenge, so why bog down game play.

<snip>

I personally am not a fan of it, but I appreciate 4e attempting to deal with it. I would like a different system, one that makes skills more important rather than less important based on party resources, but that would require another thread

I've seen you run this line before. It's an interesting analysis.

So start the new thread, please! I'd like to see you develop this a bit more.

 

[billd91]

Players in general gravitate to optimization; can you imagine if BAB had been point based?

I get specialization, and the point buy option (as an extension of NWP), my point is simply it created very strict roles (either you specialized or you didnt) that closed down player options, rather than opening them.

I know this is all IME, so I'm really not trying to preach

Yes, those are huge assumptions - that players gravitate toward optimization is pretty contentious.

 

[ForeverSlayer]

OK, I'll try again.

Point spending creates divergent ranges. By 5th level optimization made skill checks simple or impossible: the difference between high and low spread was so high. Hence, point spends create unbalanced play.

(shoud have said "value" there, not "valuable")

If we're talking 3rd/Pathfinder then while you will good in some areas you will suffer in others and I like this approach.

 

[pemerton]

Nobody expects challenges to not rise as you go up in levels in 3e, but the difficulties of individual tasks aren't expected to rise with the level of the PCs. Using an acrobatic move to get on top of the triceratops should be expected to be the same DC whether PC is 1st level or 20th - how easy it is depends on how much he invests in his acrobatic skills.

4e isn't necessarily different in this respect. From the Rules Compendium, p 306:

Terrain effects are scaled . . . so that the terrains stats challenging as adventurers and monsters gain higher skill modifiers and more hit points. For instance, the cave slime found in the deepr reaches of the Underdark is thicker and more slippery than the thin sheen found in higher dungeon levels, so the Acrobatics DC to avoid falling prone is higher.​

I personally don't find cave slime all that compelling as a game or story element, but the point is I think still pretty clear. At 20th level you fight fiercer, tougher, bigger dinosaurs, which is why it's harder to vault onto their backs.

In a goal based game that wall would be appropriate for a well made town or castle wall while raining. If the PCs happen to be level 10 when they try to climb it is a different matter.

I still don't understand "goal based game". But anyway, if the DC for a wall confronted by 10th level PCs is higher, we can infer that it's a more challenging wall. More generally, 4e is predicated on the assumption that 10th level PCs will be going to more important towns with more world-shaking stuff going on. This is explicitly spell out in the PHB's discussion of Tiers of Play (also found on p 21 of the Rules Compendium).

A river or a cliff does not automatically become a trivial challenge to 9th level PCs because they don't get better at climbing/swimming automatically.

For me this goes to genre issues - either 9th level PCs can make rivers trivial challenges, as they clearly are for Beowulf; or conversely they find themselves confronting bigger, fiercer rivers like the ones in the Elemental Chaos or the Feywild.

In the end you still just have a scene with a generic obstacle. It doesn't even matter much what the obstacle is as everyone gets better at everything. The level of the PCs decide what door they face.

This isn't true in my 4e game, at least. The story element, the fictional positioning, is crucial - it's what marks the difference, for me, betweeen an RPG and a boardgame.

In AD&D the mechanics of hacking through a skeleton and hacking through an orc are pretty indistinguishable provided you have a mace (both 1 HD, I think both AC 7). But the story implications are pretty different. 4e is no different. A trivial example: if I open a door I have something I can shut to hold off pursuers; if I climb to the top of a cliff I am now vulnerable to being pushed back down by my enemy. These are differences that matter even if the resolution chance was the same for both.

 

[pemerton]

None. Attack rolls describe what happens when a character tries to attack. The attack either hits or misses. Likewise, hit points describe whether a character is alive or dead (or dying). There are certainly other ways of mechanically representing combat, but the ones you describe are not particularly prescriptive.

I don't really see how this is not "dictating outcomes", myself. The die roll, as interpreted via the to hit matrices (AD&D) or the BAB/AC rules (3E, 4e) dictate the outcome of whether or not you hit.

If one set of characters (the PCs, presumably) has systematically more hit points (or otherwise better mechanical ability) than another comparable set of characters (say, a cohort of equivalent-level monsters), then the larger outcome (who actually wins the battle) is being unduly influenced.

Doesn't this then generate a question of "who is comparable to whom"? For instance, in Gygax's AD&D a 4th level NPC mercenary captain is not capable of gaining levels, while a 4th level PC fighter is. To me, this shows that the two characters are not fully comparable.

In 4e, a 1st level skeleton minion (a Decrepit Skeleton) falls to one blow from any PC that hits it. That shows that, unlike the PCs, the skeleton is decrepit. In 4e, an 18th level ghoul minion falls to one blow from any PC that hits it - which will, given the encounter building guidelines of the game, not be a PC below 15th-odd level. That shows that the ghoul and the PC aren't comparable - the PC is able to hack through the ghould with ease, but not vice versa.

In 4e, a 1st level goblin minion will drop in one blow, but not all 1st level goblins are minions. This shows that we have two characters who are not comparable - my personal reading is that the minion is unlucky compared to the non-minion; other may read the minion as being physically more feeble.

the pcs must be free to make choices that meaningfully affect their odds of success.

With the proviso that I want the meaningful choices to be player ones - ie real life choices - rather than PC ones - ie in-fiction choices, I agree.

Agreed, but then the implication is that edition has something to do with that, and I simply don't see it.

I agree with this too. I run a 4e game in which the players make choices all the tmie that affeect their odds of success. Choosing to flank would be the most trivial example, but there are many more interesting choices going on than just that.

(I think edition does have implications for levelling, though, because of different XP rules in different editions.)

 

[Scrivener of Doom]

Yes, those are huge assumptions - that players gravitate toward optimization is pretty contentious.

From my own (subjective) experience, I find this to be true with only a few exceptions for 32+ years. I must admit, as the DM I tend to encourage it which is one of my many (many [many {many}]} faults as a DM. And the reason I tend to encourage it is that I expect the players to want to do it themselves anyway so we may as well start with an optimised group....