D&D 5E L&L 8/19/13: The Final Countdown

[JeffB]

If people are going to judge an edition's Merit based on adventures produced by WOTC for that edition, then late era 2e, 3e, AND 4e suck

 

[ExploderWizard]

Given that all resolution in 4e is based on DCs, plus (in combat, but not in skill challenges) damage and conditions, then guidelines for DCs, damage and conditions pretty much cover the field.

Thus we get to the root of the problem. There is literally nothing for the players to accomplish that isn't simply pushing a button (rolling a die).

To me, at least, this suggests poor GMing. Of course players will try to have their PCs deploy their best skills relevant in the situation - trying to engage your best skill is no different from an AD&D magic-user preferring to use magic rather than muscle when feasible.

If a GM wants the player of the fighter with low CHA to make a Diplomacy check, s/he has to frame that PC into a situation where a Diplomacy check is required. There are plenty of threads around this place providing examples of how this can be done. The fundamental techniques are no different from those used in other games with tight scene-resolution mechanics (eg HeroWars/Quest, Burning Wheel Duels of Wits, Marvel Heroic RP, Maelstrom Storytelling, etc).

As it pertains to playing D&D, this made me throw up in my mouth a little.

I ran a 4E campaign for over a year, sandbox style and never needed a single skill challenge. There was certainly skill use when required. More complex situations were simply roleplayed out. The chief determining factor in the resolution of those situations was active player input. Meaningful contributions by the players is what maintains interest and investment in the game. I really hope WOTC learns this lesson before closing the design of Next.

You read wrong. I said I think it is the best of the TSR/WotC RPGs to combat railroading.

I read correctly then and simply disagree. B/X has more helpful DM advice in this respect in its meager 128 pages than the whole library of 4E DMGs.

Of non-TSR/WotC RPGs there are many that do this, and the 4e design team very clearly learned at the feet of some of them.

I don't know how familiar you are with the scene-framing techniques in the RPGs I mentioned above, that 4e also relies upon. They don't have any connection to railroading, because a new scene cannot be framed until the previous one is resolved.

Those games are not D&D.

What you describe here has nothing to do with 4e as I read the rulebooks, play the game or see it discussed around here by others who play it. You seem to be assuming that 4e encourages GMs to ignore players' declarations of action for their PCs. I don't think that can be found in the books, and nothing else encourages it (if anything, the game has been criticised for encouraging GMs to "say yes" to declarations of action by players for their PCs).

I never said 4E encourages GMs to ignore action declaration. It does (at least as the published adventures I have read indicate) limit those action types depending on the framed scene. If the adventure says "this is a skill challenge" then the choices are limited to the use of skills in the challenge.

Simply put the phrase "framing a resolution scene" has no business being in a published D&D product.

 

[DEFCON 1]

If people are going to judge an edition's Merit based on adventures produced by WOTC for that edition, then late era 2e, 3e, AND 4e suck

And let's also be honest here... even Basic and 1e adventures tend to blow too.

I mean... White Plume Mountain? Makes absolutely no goddamn sense. Bunch of traps lined up willy-nilly and monsters just hanging out in tiny rooms for absolutely no reason and no conceivable way for them to survive.

But because they came out back when many of us were kids and also before coherent adventure design was an actual thing... we look at them through rose-colored glasses.

I mean hell... I've looked through dozens upon dozens of them trying to see what I could scavenge and put into several of my campaigns... and most of them are just dungeons or locations where a monster or two just "hangs out" and where you're expected to just go and kill it. That's it. That's the adventure. "Here's an old ruin where it's rumored MacGuffin X can be found"... and you go there and run into a bunch of monsters to kill and a trap or two to avoid before you find X. An adventure that anyone could really create using a map and a random monster generator.

I think the idea that the "old modules were better" is for the most part a fallacy. The only difference is that there were a crapton more adventures published back then... so getting one or two that actually were good was more likely to occur just from sheer numbers. But you had to sift through a pile of dung to find them.

 

[Imaro]

And let's also be honest here... even Basic and 1e adventures tend to blow too.

I mean... White Plume Mountain? Makes absolutely no goddamn sense. Bunch of traps lined up willy-nilly and monsters just hanging out in tiny rooms for absolutely no reason and no conceivable way for them to survive.

But because they came out back when many of us were kids and also before coherent adventure design was an actual thing... we look at them through rose-colored glasses.

I mean hell... I've looked through dozens upon dozens of them trying to see what I could scavenge and put into several of my campaigns... and most of them are just dungeons or locations where a monster or two just "hangs out" and where you're expected to just go and kill it. That's it. That's the adventure. "Here's an old ruin where it's rumored MacGuffin X can be found"... and you go there and run into a bunch of monsters to kill and a trap or two to avoid before you find X. An adventure that anyone could really create using a map and a random monster generator.

I think the idea that the "old modules were better" is for the most part a fallacy. The only difference is that there were a crapton more adventures published back then... so getting one or two that actually were good was more likely to occur just from sheer numbers. But you had to sift through a pile of dung to find them.

I think you're looking at it wrong here it's about execution. I think for most people and the average casual player... they aren't concerned with whether the adventure makes sense or is coherent in design as much as they are concerned with how much fun it is to play through... and honestly 4e's KotS with it's combat after combat after combat after combat (especially in the beginning where you continuously fight kobolds) coupled with how long it takes to resolve a fight, even at low levels in 4e. wasn't just incoherent (though it was also this as well) but was the type of adventure that at a certain point made my group want to shoot themselves in the head because it became so repetitive and boring... IMO, being a boring adventure is worse than being slightly incoherent in design.

As a counterpoint, my group enjoyed playing through The Sunless Citadel for 3.x, not because it was some breakthrough in coherent design (because when looked at closely it falters in a few areas as well) or because it made perfect sense... but because it had interesting and varied encounters, plus at low levels 3e tends to resolve combats quickly and thus they don't become repetitive slog fests in the same way 4e fights can when run one after another with the same monsters. In other words The SUnless Citadel was fun... KotS wasn't for my group.

 

[Salamandyr]

I love White Plume Mountain. Like a lot of the old published modules, they are remnants of an earlier time, and generally were designed as tournament modules more than coherent stories.

For me, the big draw for a module is the story. Do I feel like my character has interesting and adequate motivation for being there. White Plume Mountain has that. Against the Giants has that.

The Sunless Citadel doesn't. As I recall, the premise is something like, this village has been happily trading for magic apples with goblins for years, then suddenly the goblins up and stop bringing apples, so now it's time to hire adventurers to track the goblins back to their lair and murder them in order to get the apples the goblins have stopped trading. Along the way, could you also slaughter all of these kobolds who haven't been doing anything to anybody?

Yes, we often joke about D&D characters being itinerant murder-hoboes, but usually we've got a better justification for doing so than that! If the module had set up the kobolds and goblins as attacking the village, killing people and stealing the magic apples, then boom...story. But what we got...it's almost a parody.

KotS, is actually pretty good from a story perspective. And I think the structure's not bad either. It suffers though from a few really hard encounters that don't feel like they ought to be hard, and a few too many filler encounters in the middle of the dungeon. Thanks to how long some of the encounters last, and our inexperience with the system, the module took far longer than it deserved to take.

That's a good criticism of the early D&D modules. Few stories deserved dungeons with 50 or sixty rooms to clear in order to tell a simple story.

 

[DEFCON 1]

As a counterpoint, my group enjoyed playing through The Sunless Citadel for 3.x, not because it was some breakthrough in coherent design (because when looked at closely it falters in a few areas as well) or because it made perfect sense... but because it had interesting and varied encounters, plus at low levels 3e tends to resolve combats quickly and thus they don't become repetitive slog fests in the same way 4e fights can when run one after another with the same monsters. In other words The SUnless Citadel was fun... KotS wasn't for my group.

Eh. Well, in every case it comes down to the DM and the group playing it. I DM'd KotS and my players had absolutely no issues whatsoever with it. Did I run the module exactly as written? No, of course not. We had quite a lot of roleplaying and social interaction (both inter-party and with NPCs) in and around all the combats the game presented. Did I "add" these into the module? To the extent that the module didn't specifically call out "this kobold will talk to you if you don't kill it" and give you several bits of boxed text to read... sure. But that's absolutely no different than any other prior D&D module where an NPC or monster gets presented as not strictly "attack on sight". It was always presumed that the party could talk to them if they so chose... even if a bit of boxed text wasn't specifically written.

I mean, the Caves of Chaos? If run as written, that's as grindy and monotonous as you could get. A bunch of caves with a bunch of monsters just hanging out... and which for the most part have no real difference in how they fight because they're nothing but an AC, a weapon, and some hit points. It's only when the DM decides to provide roleplaying bits and bobs to treat the humanoids as different behaviorally when they interact with (rather than fight) the PCs that it becomes an more interesting adventure.

Point being... most adventures do nothing but present the written encounters as combat encounters and it becomes the DM's job to decide when they become something else. If the DM doesn't do it, of course they'll end up seeming grindy or samey.

 

[Imaro]

The Sunless Citadel doesn't. As I recall, the premise is something like, this village has been happily trading for magic apples with goblins for years, then suddenly the goblins up and stop bringing apples, so now it's time to hire adventurers to track the goblins back to their lair and murder them in order to get the apples the goblins have stopped trading. Along the way, could you also slaughter all of these kobolds who haven't been doing anything to anybody?

There were 3 hooks to get PC's involved in The Sunless Citadel... and this was not one of them.

Simple Adventuring: You are eager to make a name
for yourself. The legend of the Sunless Citadel is well
known locally, and stories indicate it is a perfect site for
heroes intent on discovery, glory, and treasure!

Contracted: Another party of adventurers, locally
based, delved into the Sunless Citadel a month past. They
were never seen again. Two human members of that illfated adventuring party were brother and sister, Talgen
Hucrele (a fighter) and Sharwyn Hucrele (a wizard). They
were part of an important merchant family based in the
town of Oakhurst. Kerowyn Hucrele, the matriarch of
the family, offers salvage rights to you and your team if
you can find and return with the two lost members of
her family—or at least return the gold signet rings worn
by the missing brother and sister. She also offers a reward
of 125 gp per signet ring, per PC. If the PCs bring back
the Hucreles in good shape (of good mind and body),
she offers to double the reward.

Solving a Mystery: The goblin tribe infesting the
nearby ruins (called the Sunless Citadel, though no one
knows why) ransoms a single piece of magical fruit to
the highest bidder in Oakhurst once every midsummer.
They've been doing this for the last twelve years. Usually, the fruit sells for around 50 gp, which is all the
townspeople can bring themselves to pay a goblin. The
fruit, apparently an apple of perfect hue, heals those who
suffer from any disease or other ailment. They sometimes
plant the seeds at the center of each fruit, hoping to
engender an enchanted apple tree. When the seeds
germinate in their proper season, they produce a twiggy
mass of twisted sapling stems. Not too long after the
saplings reach 2 feet in height, they are stolen—every
time. The townsfolk assume that the jealous goblins send out thieves to ensure
their monopoly of enchanted fruit. You
are interested in piercing the mystery
associated with how wretched goblins
could ever possess such a wonder, and
how they steal every sprouting sapling
grown from the enchanted fruit's seed.
Moreover, you wish to find this rumored
tree of healing, hoping to heal an ailing
friend or relative.

 

[Imaro]

Eh. Well, in every case it comes down to the DM and the group playing it. I DM'd KotS and my players had absolutely no issues whatsoever with it. Did I run the module exactly as written? No, of course not. We had quite a lot of roleplaying and social interaction (both inter-party and with NPCs) in and around all the combats the game presented. Did I "add" these into the module? To the extent that the module didn't specifically call out "this kobold will talk to you if you don't kill it" and give you several bits of boxed text to read... sure. But that's absolutely no different than any other prior D&D module where an NPC or monster gets presented as not strictly "attack on sight". It was always presumed that the party could talk to them if they so chose... even if a bit of boxed text wasn't specifically written.

I mean, the Caves of Chaos? If run as written, that's as grindy and monotonous as you could get. A bunch of caves with a bunch of monsters just hanging out... and which for the most part have no real difference in how they fight because they're nothing but an AC, a weapon, and some hit points. It's only when the DM decides to provide roleplaying bits and bobs to treat the humanoids as different behaviorally when they interact with (rather than fight) the PCs that it becomes an more interesting adventure.

Point being... most adventures do nothing but present the written encounters as combat encounters and it becomes the DM's job to decide when they become something else. If the DM doesn't do it, of course they'll end up seeming grindy or samey.

Well I think there's a big difference in feel of grind and boredom when you have 10 back to back encounters that take 10 to 15 mins each to resolve vs. 10 encounters that take 45 mins to an hour to resolve but different strokes for different folks.

 

[Salamandyr]

There were 3 hooks to get PC's involved in The Sunless Citadel... and this was not one of them.

It seems you remember the module better than I do. Were the villagers trading with the goblins? Had the goblins hurt anyone who didn't deserve hurting? Was there any reason to justify invading the goblins home?

 

[DEFCON 1]

Well I think there's a big difference in feel of grind and boredom when you have 10 back to back encounters that take 10 to 15 mins each to resolve vs. 10 encounters that take 45 mins to an hour to resolve but different strokes for different folks.

True enough. Although also to be fair... part of what took the combats in KotS so long to run were that for most people it was the first time they were actually ever playing with the new 4E rules. They were learning what their PCs did while at the same time working through the encounters.

If you were to run those initial couple of kobold encounters now with people who have been playing 4E this entire time? They'd fly by. Heck... the first encounter is three "real" kobolds and 5 minions. An experienced group of 4E players could mow that encounter down in probably seven or eight minutes.