Legends & Lore: Roleplaying in D&D Next

[jrowland]

Circumstance bonuses were maily tied to mechanical advantages. Inspiration is tied (loosely) to roleplaying.

which can be used for ... wait for it ... mechanical advantage, just like GMs Friend.

As for "at your table", the rulebooks aren't for "at your table"...that's what DMs are for. I think you're too focus on what YOU want specifically. That path is bound to lead to disappointment. I think the better approach is to look at what the game is in general, and how well we can adjust that to suit our specificity.

In general, I like inspiration/GMs friend/Fudge/Fate/luck etc etc but as to the specifics...well, I'll wait to see Inspiration and how it works in this game.

 

[Sunseeker]

[MENTION=94389]jrowland[/MENTION]; there will most certainly be many different executions of such a vague(which in this case is good) mechanic. From pure crunch bonuses (+XYZ) to cool exploits (You don't need to make an acrobatics check to do a flying leap through the air while charging) to plot promotions (due to your vicious fighting, you have earned a reputation from various mercenaries, who offer you free food and lodging at any of their posts, or the guards no watch you every step, even if you are generally law abiding).

We need to keep in mind that such mechanics are really not for us though, the long-term, RPGers(who know it well), nor the optimizers or power builders(who have no desire for it), but for those new to the game to help them gasp that it as much role play as it is roll play.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

1: There is nothing a 4e DM can't create. What next does to me as a DM is takes tools away from me. If I want to give a monster a given ability (or power) in 4e there is no reason I shouldn't. If I want to summon Orcus, or to set the DC to walk a tightrope as either 10 or 30 in 4e I can. The rules just tell me both are bad ideas.

I think this might be splitting hairs. In football, there are only 11 players on the field. The rules don't just say "it's a bad idea to have a different number", they say only 11 are allowed at one time.

In a similar way, the rules of 4e say not to set the DC of a tightrope to either 10 or 30. They have the DC for a tightrope listed(25 since it is less than 6 inches wide and 30 if the tightrope is unstable). If I set the DC to 10 in my game, you better bet one of my players will call me on it and I'll have to explain my reasoning and they'll likely reject that reasoning and insist I follow the rules.

My players like the rules because it gives them a central point of reference that we all agree to abide by and even the DM is bound to. They like the rules specifically because it prevents me from setting the DC at 50 just to screw them and prevents me from setting it at DC 10 and softballing it for them.

Also, there is a good reason not to suddenly give a monster a power. Possible story/flavor reasons. But also it likely makes the monster too powerful for its level. Messing with these things can cause major problems in fights. Even WOTC didn't know how to do it properly as was evident about the discussion we had in a Q&A panel a couple of years ago at GenCon where Mike Mearls said he was trying to find a solution to monsters with stuns being much more powerful than monsters without them. Plus, also the reverse problem where stuns were more useful against Solos than they were against other monsters. In the end he said they were likely just going to be "more careful" than they had been in the past about putting stun powers on monsters.

2: 4e actively puts a lot of power in the DM's hands that was taken away by 3e. In 3e a standard tree was DC 15 to climb.

What the 4e rules do is say "This is a good way to run things and how we suggest. Run it how you like, but running it in other ways will void the waranty."

I honestly don't see any difference in the way that the Athletics skill for climb and Climb in 3e are presented. Both give you a list of DCs. The numbers are slightly different, but other than that, they both tell you what the DCs are to accomplish tasks. 4e lists less examples, so I suppose that gives a DM slightly more leeway, but they are really close to one another.

Unless you mean statements in the books that say you can change the rules at any time. In which case both 3e and 4e have these statements. This is one area of the game that as far as I can tell stayed exactly the same between 3e and 4e.

I see the changes in 4e to be akin to "Here are some well balanced and working set pieces and processes. We provided a lot less of them than 3e because we promise this time thought went into balancing them. As the DM, we expect you decide HOW and WHEN to use these set pieces and processes but to leave the pieces/processes themselves unchanged and preferably not to add any new ones because it's a complex process that requires an entire team to balance."

Some players really like the fact that they can rely on the pieces and processes NOT to change. Which allows a solid foundation to play a game. However, since the DM is expected NOT to mess with these things and it is so difficult to mess with them without causing the house of cards to fall down, it essentially takes the DMs ability to mess with them away. Which reduces DM authority.

Then again, I believe that DM authority had already been taken away BY 3e in the first place. DMs haven't really had it since 2e.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I agree that there is (at least) a certain delicacy in reconciling 4e's p 42 and its powers. But that is (in my view, at least) mostly a consequence of 4e being very specific with its powers. Games like HeroWars/Quest, or Marvel Heroic, show how you can have systems which are at one-and-the same time exhaustive while leaving plenty of room for out-of-the-box situations.

I'm not entirely sure "exhaustive" is what I'd call Marvel Heroic. I've read through the rules as I was super excited to see how it did things after hearing so many good things about it. I've watched youtube videos of people playing it to see if I was missing something, but in the end all I can figure out about the game is that it's a dice adding game with a story attached.

Being Wolverine doesn't actually give you any benefits at all. Your claws don't do extra damage to enemies compared to people without them. Your regeneration doesn't have any real effect over someone's forcefield. All of them are just dice that get added together in a pool and your individual powers are inconsequential most of the time. If two dice pools get added up to the same amount, the powers that make up those pools don't effect the game more than the DM chooses to make them effect the game. Which is normally a short description about how you hit the enemy with claws or an energy beam.

The mechanics are so disconnected from the story they create that they don't seem to have any relationship at all. It's possible to have a mechanic that's completely exhaustive and handle out of the box situations when the mechanic is "Roll a d6, on a 4-6 you win". All you need is a DM to tell you what "you win" means in any given circumstance.

However, if your goal is to have mechanics that are more tied directly to the action you are attempting, then the more tied you are directly to what is happening the less they cover corner situations. If you say "All attacks follow this formula" then if you need to now decide whether each action taken is "an attack" so you can decide whether to use that formula or not. If an action is somewhere between an attack and something else then it becomes hard to adjudicate. Like the trip example. If you are just attempting to trip someone do you make an attack roll to do so? Or if you make a strength roll high enough to literally "pull the rug out from under them" do they just fall over automatically? What's the DC to pull the rug? I know my ruling would be something akin to "you can't trip him that way unless you have a power that trips them" so that I don't have to constantly come up with rules and I avoid making other players feel like their choices weren't worthwhile.

It's a bit of a tangent, but I think the problem with this is that the GM isn't doing his/her job. S/he isn't introducing complications, or developing the situation, in a way to which the players can respond. If the GM has nothing interesting to do with his/her NPC on a failed Diplomacy check, s/he shouldn't be running a skill challenge! (Robin Laws emphasises this point in HeroQuest revised, and that bit of the rulebook was cut-and-pasted into DMG2.)

The problem isn't that there's nothing interesting planned on a failed Diplomacy check. It's that a skill challenge has a distinct structure. You must succeed in, say, 12 successful checks before you "succeed". Often, it is hard to find an excuse within the game to even make that many checks.

In practicality, skill challenges just couldn't be done without it feeling "out of place" beyond a certain complexity level. You couldn't have a skill challenge to "convince the king" of something that required 12 successes because play degraded into continually rolling diplomacy checks. None of the other skills had a very logical reason to be used in this circumstance and any attempt to use other skills always seemed like a leap of logic and that the player was trying too hard.

Most of the time we attempted skill challenges they always turned into a guessing game: "I'd like to try...umm...religion to convince the king." "Sorry, he isn't that religious and won't be swayed by religious arguments" "Ok then...goes down the list...I attempt Perception to point out how beautiful something in the room is in an attempt to flatter him."

The best Skill challenge I ever saw used was SO disguised that no one knew it was a skill challenge. It took nearly an hour to run and involved going to 6 different locations, interacting with a bunch of different NPCs and a number of different situations all to "discover where the enemy's hideout was". But because it was so disguised, you has to reach a certain point in the narrative in order to succeed at the skill challenge anyways. Which meant you often had to get 10 or 12 successes before you got to the person who actually had the information though the skill challenge itself only needed 8 to succeed.

It felt like an unnecessary construct that only served to confuse the issue. If it makes logical sense within the narrative that you've found the hideout in 4 successes, let it take 4 instead of the 8 you had planned. But if you do that, then might as well just throw out the skill challenge as a concept and simply ask for skill checks when they are appropriate.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Ugh. There is so much screwed up in that I don't even know where to begin. Forcing a player to commit to something that risky without a general estimation of difficulty is wrong. At least a "chances are high that you will fall, still want to leap?" is in order. Not to mention the can of worms opened up if it does succeed and extra damage is scored. Enter endless hit location requests, specific wound effects, etc. The entire abstraction of HP breaks down with all that thrown in.

Oh, I agree. Though that doesn't stop it from happening. It's been years, but I remember that something very close to this argument actually happened in our group back in 2e.

Thus, we jointly agreed to no longer attempt "out of the box" actions because of the problems they caused. We agreed to limit our options because people's opinions on what what consider "part of the abstraction" or even just "part of genre emulation"(trips aren't offered as an action because people in this genre don't generally use that as a tactic) differed greatly.

Chess is a competitive strategy game. Due to competition and the lack of a referee, choices must be restricted in order for the game to be playable.

D&D is semi-competitive. Your characters are still attempting to defeat the monsters and avoid dying. Those threats are being controlled by the DM. The DM often wants to defeat you so having the rules be the arbiter between the players and the DM helps.

But even if we assume that's not an issue, there are MANY cooperative board games with rules that are restricted in choice. It's simply a matter of fact that in order to play a game you need to know your options. Those options also need to be balanced and fun. "You can do anything" doesn't really work because it sometimes causes Analysis Paralysis and also makes some options clearly superior to all others.

Thankfully, someone else here knows that genre emulation isn't roleplaying. I would XP you but I'm not allowed to right now.

I know this wasn't directed towards me, however, I think it is a form of roleplaying.

Or more accurately, I believe mechanics like this encourage roleplaying but AREN'T roleplaying themselves. If roleplaying is playing your character "correctly" for the world/society/genre he/she is in, then mechanics that encourage the player to make genre choices end up having the effect of creating better roleplaying.

It lowers "immersiveness", but doesn't reduce "roleplaying". I don't think "thinking like your character" is necessary for roleplaying. Only making decisions like he would have made if he was a real person. How you come up with those decisions is rather inconsequential.

 

[Li Shenron]

I want to focus on this tweet by Mearls, as I think it's very enlightening:

For instance, I can see some DMs handing out inspiration for players who embrace a flaw or use it make a non-optimal choice.

This was exactly my first thought about Inspiration use. You don't have to (and shouldn't, if you don't like it) grant the Inspiration bonus to a player just because he does funny voices, but also not just because he's a Paladin and does a good thing, which is also the right thing for the adventure. You can just say that's business as usual.

Instead, use Inspiration to compensate for those occasions when the player has to face the choice between doing what her PC would really do for ethical/moral reasons VS doing the more "effective" thing.

Remember the old "should Paladins kill orc babies" problem? Killing them is more "efficient" but raises the question on whether the end justifies the means. Some players only ever want to make the most "efficient" choices, because acting according to a character's alignment/code causes practical inconveniences. Then they distort the code itself to justify their actions, causing controversy at the table because other players will natural ask "why did you want to play a Paladin (or any other ethic-defined character concept) in the first place?"

Some adjustments to Inspiration rules may be necessary, but at least it's a starting point to tell those players only concerned with efficiency, that following your code/ethics will be rewarded (not just penalized if you go against them) and therefore may actually be efficient enough.

Also, the new Q&A article has very good clarifications on what "baked into the system" means: it does not mean it's mandatory.

http://community.wizards.com/dndnex...roleplaying_traits,_xp_as_reward__inspiration

 

[ExploderWizard]

The DM often wants to defeat you so having the rules be the arbiter between the players and the DM helps.

[Yoda]

That is why you failed.

[End Yoda]

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

[Yoda]

That is why you failed.

[End Yoda]

It's not why we failed. It is simply a way of playing.

It isn't "defeat" in the traditional sense. As a DM you want people to have fun. For many people it's fun to TRY to win without a guarantee that it'll happen. It's more fun for some players to die sometimes. If people don't die then there isn't a point of being careful and looking for traps. There's no reason to play tactically and figure out the best strategy to defeat monsters. These things are fun for people. In order to keep them fun, as a DM, you must sometimes TRY to defeat them.

Yes, as the DM you can win super easily, you have absolute power. But the key is finding the right balance of difficulty where if the PCs make poor decisions they might lose but neither winning nor losing is guaranteed. It's your role to push that difficulty up a bump or two in certain situations to get a certain tone across to the players(deadly dungeons, nasty BBEGs, etc). Not everything can be the same difficulty or it becomes monotonous. Some encounters need to be really hard. Some traps need to be really deadly.

Some DMs don't know where to draw the line, however, between "just deadly enough" and "way too deadly". Some by inexperience and some because they are more concerned with "realistically simulating a world" than they are with the fun of their players.

Which is why, as a player, you need to know that the rules have your back in terms of:

1) Educating the DM about what is the expected and likely difficulty of encounters and traps. Things like CR, and "Trap levels" help with this.

2) Setting expectations about how the rules work so they aren't changed arbitrarily because a DM is in a bad mood, or because a DMs perception of "reality" is different from everyone else's,

3) Creating balanced and predictable options so that monster difficulty CAN be accurately predicted.

What it comes down to is that for me, and many other people, D&D is two games put into one. It's a "storytelling" game where you find out what happens to your fighter when he goes into the unknown. It's also a tactical war game. The tactical war game needs enough rules(that both sides must adhere to) to make it fun. For the same reason no one would play Warhammer 40k if their opponent could just change the rules of the game any time they felt like it.

 

[Cyberen]

Majoru Oakheart, your experience corroborate mine on every point.
Relating to the topic, I'm sure extreme playstyles such as fourthcore could also benefit from something like Inspiration (spending your advantage wildcard wisely become part of the tactical game, like a TeamReRoll in Blood Bowl). I'm sad this week Rule of 3 waters down the concept. Like li Shenron pointed out in another thread, WotC guys seem to aim right at first, then degrade their concept because of bad feedback (due to internet flamectionning and miscommunication).

 

[Imaro]

Just wanted to say that those were a good round of posts [MENTION=5143]Majoru Oakheart[/MENTION] and are pretty much in line with how I saw MHRP and my experiences with 4e, including the point you made about players coming to expect certain things within a defined range in the game, regardless of whether the DM can change it or not.