Pros and Cons of going mainstream

[D'karr]

Kimberly614
Kimberly614 is online now
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May 2013
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[S'mon]

Sure, but I am more interested in whether you consider them to be or not to be dis-empowering for the DM.

Stuff is disempowering for the GM when it tells the players "Your GM must do this". GM-facing advice is not disempowering IME. I find the Wish List idea really stupid and don't use it. If the 4e PHB said "Your GM will hand out X items per level" then that would be disempowering. As it is (stupid) suggestion in the DMG, it is not disempowering IMO. Likewise the books don't say "Your GM will allow anything" so it's not the books' fault if some player expects that.

One thing I find disempowering about 4e that is not in your list relates to magic items and the electronic character builder. The builder leads players to expect that any item I hand out is in the builder. Some players get really discombobulated at the idea of GM-created magic items that cannot be selected in the builder. Having the magic items be in player-side books like PHB likely contributes to that.

Conversely I find the 4e monster creation system is very empowering for the GM, it gives me all the flexibility I need, and support at least equal to pre-3e, better in some ways. It is a very welcome change from the nightmare of 3e monster build-as-PC-build.

Overall, I don't find irrational expectations of some players on bulletin boards to be objectively disempowering, only player-facing materials in the actual rules have the potential to be disempowering. 4e has a bit of that, but not a lot.

 

[S'mon]

...there's also story elements (Say as a DM my campaign world doesn't have psionics... but in 4e a psionicist is core and allowable if the player wants to play one, so...) this is, IMO, DM dis-empowerment regardless of whether psionics is overpowered or not.

I've also seen players, when things turn against them, start to grumble and make snide remarks or question DM's about whether an encounter is "appropriate". In fact I will say I've seen this more often in 4e games than in 3.x games... of course I admit that's purely anecdotal evidence. A better question I think is why is this even coming up if a DM has the right to set the encounters at any level he wants?

Most of my 4e campaigns don't use PHB3, I've never had any problem with players demanding to play psionic PCs. Nowhere in the 4e books does it say "Your GM must allow this stuff". Sure WoTC want me to allow it, just as Gygax wanted me to buy and use 1e Unearthed Arcana (I did, more fool me), but they don't try to force me to allow it AFAICT. I don't totally dismiss your experience BTW - I did see a player in another GM's 4e game complain that the GM was 'doing it wrong' by restricting sources, eg not allowing Eberron stuff in a non-Eberron campaign. But I don't think that is a 4e thing in particular, or the fault of 4e presentation. I've met dozens and dozens of players over the past five years, of course a few will be jerks.

Grumbling about inappropriate encounters -bad linear adventure design can cause this as a somewhat legitimate grievance: in a linear adventure the players may feel forced into the encounter that lies along the railroad line. If it then feels impossible to win, I understand why they may feel aggrieved. The best solution is to not run linear adventures. The second-best is to scale everything to the PCs. IME this is far, far more a problem in 3e and PF adventure paths because offense outstrips defence, encounter design is built on a knife edge, and what was designed as tough-but-winnable can easily become an unwinnable TPK waiting to happen.

If the GM is running a sandbox/open campaign and players still grumble about the potential existence of unbeatable fights, that would be a problem. It takes an aggressive misreading of either 3e or 4e encounter building guidelines to get to that point, though. Both allow for unwinnable encounters - 3e even says to include unwinnable encounters - so a player who has read the guidelines should be aware of their potential to exist.

 

[S'mon]

I will reiterate my opinion that while there have been change in rules there also had been a change in demographics and both of those have impact on gaming.

I think there has probably been a cultural shift over the past 20 years or so such that more people are growing up with a sense of entitlement. And maybe modern D&D caters to that
more - "This game is about you being awesome" rather than "This game is about you probably dying horribly and repeatedly". OTOH the intro to the 1983 Mentzer Basic D&D Red Box told players the game was about heroic solo dragon slaying, then gave them 1d8 hp and death at 0. At least 4e's mechanics match the promise of the fluff a lot more closely.

Personally, as a player I like* the Old School D&D challenge of being awesome in a game that is trying to kill me. But I also like it that 4e allows the average player to step up and 'be awesome' fairly reliably - it's possible for a sufficiently incompetent player to fail at that, but they really have to work at it.

*Exception -recently played Labyrinth Lord. I played it correctly - cautiously - and was repeatedly slagged off by a 'new school' player who thought my 4 hp Elf should have been charging into battle like a 4e PC, not lurking behind his wall of NPC spear-carriers. That player was not fun, though the game was.

 

[S'mon]

As far as the encounter, there seems to be absence of the concept of "status quo" as 3e DMG put it. Encounters have to be winnable.

4e does lack the concept of the status quo encounter, and for me this is certainly a problem and something I have wrestled with. It does not mean that encounters must be winnable. It does mean that the assumption is that non-winnable encounters have a story/dramatic purpose, not an environment-simulation purpose. 4e's GM-side design is a gamist/dramatist mix that is really hostile to simulationist play, and I've eventually learned that if I want to run a simulationist game I should use a different system.

 

[S'mon]

Sending a 18 level elite ( such as a lich) vs party of six composed of level 9 PC is not in 4th or 3rd, but acceptable in 2nd (DUN # 75 "Forgotten Man"). Is that the way to go? Matter of personal opinion.

In 4e, take 10 minutes to turn the level 18 elite into a level 13 solo, and it's a good 'very hard' encounter for your level 9 PCs. In 3e you have to nerf the Lich by de-levelling or by nerfed spell selection, so yes it's not really doable in 3e. 1e-2e it works fine, of course.

 

[pemerton]

I think there has probably been a cultural shift over the past 20 years or so such that more people are growing up with a sense of entitlement. And maybe modern D&D caters to that more - "This game is about you being awesome" rather than "This game is about you probably dying horribly and repeatedly". OTOH the intro to the 1983 Mentzer Basic D&D Red Box told players the game was about heroic solo dragon slaying, then gave them 1d8 hp and death at 0. At least 4e's mechanics match the promise of the fluff a lot more closely.

I don't know the Mentzer box but Moldvay Basic has the same dragon-slaying heroic stuff that the game can't really deliver.

Whatever the overall cultural shifts may have been, I'm a little sceptical of the idea that they explain some dramatic shift in RPG expectations. Fishing, or learning to play a musical instrument, may be hobbies that require discipline relative to reward. But I personally find imposing that model onto classsic dungeon crawling doesn't really work - unlike musicianship, the "discipline" of playing your first level PCs until one makes it to 3rd level and survivability isn't actually cultivating any talent or teaching you anything of independent value. (Of course, if you find this sort of play intrinsically enjoyable then go for it! But I don't accept that enjoying lethal dungeon crawling is a sign of some greater moral character.)

4e does lack the concept of the status quo encounter, and for me this is certainly a problem and something I have wrestled with.

I agree it lacks that concept. As you know, for me that's not such a big deal - and the scaling rules make it easy to adjust one's planned stuff pretty easily if necessary.

It does not mean that encounters must be winnable. It does mean that the assumption is that non-winnable encounters have a story/dramatic purpose, not an environment-simulation purpose.

I agree with this too.

I'm also interested in the notion of "winnable". In classic (Gygaxian) D&D, "winnable" means "able to extract the loot". In 3E presumably it means "able to kill the monsters". In Burning Wheel, "winnable" means something like "contains room for failing forward" - ie non-fatal to the PC.

Because D&D traditionally has no end-point for combat other than death, it puts especial pressure on the notion of "winnable" encounters. This is also complicated by the absence in 3E and 2nd ed AD&D (as best I know) of evasion rules - whereas these are fairly prominent in classic D&D, and can be handled in 4e as a skill challenge (although you have to wait for DMG 2, I think, to see this expressly flagged).

Encounters have to be winnable. Which is paradoxically not diferent from previus editions, just with the clear cut math there is different definition what is called so. Sending a 18 level elite ( such as a lich) vs party of six composed of level 9 PC is not in 4th or 3rd, but acceptable in 2nd (DUN # 75 "Forgotten Man").

In 4e, take 10 minutes to turn the level 18 elite into a level 13 solo, and it's a good 'very hard' encounter for your level 9 PCs.

I ran an encounter with a 15th(? - memory a bit hazy) level solo wizard against 12th or so level PCs in my 4e game. I narrated his high hit points as skill with his staff (having the LotR movies in mind), deflection magic, etc. And as a Vecna-cultist I gave him a way to steal the secrets of the PC's encounter powers to gain action points, which he could then use to cancel debuffs. Plus he could blind at-will, or close to it - the PCs ended up using their wish ring to wish that no one in the keep in which the were fighting could be blinded for the next hour, which depowered the wizard quite a bit and let them win the fight.

(The wish ring was a non-DDI item that they didn't object to writing down and tracking manually.)

Had the wizard won, he would have taken them prisoner (4e makes this easy with it's flexible rules for what 0 hp means), triggering a Conan-style "escape from the wizard's dungeon" scenario.

 

[Manbearcat]

On expectations of DM-empowerment and the implications on player-entitlement. This is all pretty intuitive to me but apparently its not a logical inference and requires written text to underscore it so some greater cultural movement of over-expectant players doesn't co-opt the table dynamic:

Page 5 (Putting it All to Use) of probably the best piece of 4e work to come out of the edition; the DMG 2 by Wyatt, Slaviscek, and Laws:

Start by knowing when to say no. If a player brings a new option to your table that doesn't fit in your game, it's okay to tell the player to hold on to that idea until this campaign wraps up and you (or someone else in your group) starts something new. Balance this, of course, with the advice to say yes as much as possible (see page 28 of the Dungeon Master's Guide), but know the limits you want in your game and don't be afraid to enforce them.

Do we really need rules advice that says "man up and put your foot down when necessary?" That would seem implicit. If an edition with lots of cool stuff player-side didn't have such text actually penned out would that then qualify it as "the edition that ushered in the Player Entitlement Plague"? I cannot imagine buying into that as if I did then I would have to force myself to then extend such reasoning to a whole host of other issues that I find equally implicit; don't do something foolishly perilous or negligent and then assume a 3rd party with little to no locus of control with respect to my action must then assume liability for the ill that befalls me.

But I suppose its moot because its blatantly spelled out in the 2009 DMG2.

 

[pemerton]

On the "saying no" issue - this is not a rules issue. It's a social contract issue.

For instance - a player in a group buy PHB3 and wants to play a Shardmind Psion. Whether or not this is acceptable isn't something that the rules can answer; who has authority over saying yes or no isn't something that the rules can dictate.

 

[Hussar]

Apparently you guys weren't very active on the internet over the last 10 or so years in which we witnessed lots of players complaining about GMs not following the RAW, disputes over what the RAW meant, dismissals of people who adhere to Rules as Interpreted as "house rules", as well as players complaining bitterly about GMs violating encounter creation guidelines, not upholding wealth by level limits, destroying their stuff with rust monsters setting them back on their WBL permanently, creating campaigns that disallow certain character concepts, enforcing paladin code violations, and otherwise saying no to them when they want to do something "cool".

Of course Mearls's theory isn't going to apply to every single game being played. He's not trying to say that games in which the players and GMs have a functional rather than dysfunctional relationship don't exist. He's trying to describe the zeitgeist of D&D with respect to rules vs rulings, rules vs GM authority. The pendulum has swung when you compare the 1e days to the 2e days to the 3e days to now (in fact, it's probably fair to say there are multiple pendulums all swinging around at once). And in some ways, that's deliberate. Part of 3e's philosophy, thanks to Skip Williams, was to put more of the rules in the players' hands so know what to expect out of the actions they choose to take. And while that may be reasonable, one of the blessings of turning things over to the general public is that you get people and groups who push reasonable to the point of unreasonableness. And that gets reflected here on the discussion boards where discussions serve to amplify differences more often than promote commonality.

You mean, the exact, almost word for word, identical discussions that we had throughout the 80's and 90's? I guess you haven't been around for Dragon Magazine articles through that time.