I'm not so much accusing you of doing it wrong as I am entertaining the possibility that I have been doing it right, or at the very least in a way that does not create problems. That I do this using the rules, or a close enough facsimile thereof when I wing a calling, seems to me sufficient evidence of the validity of my own experience.
No one that I have read on this thread is asserting that you have a problem. What they are asserting is that
you are doing certain things which the rulebooks do not themselves prescribe which mean that you do not experience the problem. And that when they do different things that the rulebooks also do not prescribe (but equally do not proscribe) they
do experience the problem.
Hence my point that playstyle is a crucial determinant here. Different playstyles fill in those gaps in the rulebook in different ways. Leading to different sorts of experience with the game.
pemerton said:
The rules as written do not have rules for who gets to determine the nature of adversity (players or GM)
They most certainly do. It is the GM everytime in Dungeons and Dragons in all its variations.
This isn't clear at all. Yes, the GM is in charge of scene-framing, but isn't in charge of actually choosing the antagonists in all versions of the game. (The GM in Burning Wheel is in charge of scene-framing too, but the players help choose the antagonists by choosing their Beliefs and their Relationships.)
In sandbox AD&D, for instance, players can choose the antagonists (or at least choose which table will be rolled on to identify them) by choosing which wildernesses or which dungeon levels to enter.
In some approaches to 3E, the player of a ranger can choose some of the antagonists by choosing a favoured enemy.
In 4e, a player can choose Orcus and undead as antagonists by choosing to play a devotee of the Raven Queen.
pemerton said:
what principles are meant to guide the GM's adjudicatin of challenges during resolution (eg who should a given monster attack)
I'll give you that one, but I think its irrelevant to the discussion.
<snip>
GM adjucation is, by the nature of the beast, a matter of practice, experience and a certain level of feel and talent.
It's not irrelevant at all. 4e, for instance, has a fairly ubiquitous rule - marking - whereby the players of PCs who can mark get to significantly shape the choice of who is attacked by whom. Plus it has a wide range of abilities - much wider than 3E - whereby a player can render his/her PC invisible to the enemies, which also significantly shapes the choice of who is attacked by whom.
As for other dimensions of ajdudication, consider the scenario in which a PC is fighting on the edge of a dungeon ledge, and losing. The player asks the GM "What are the chances of me jumping over the edge and surviving by falling into an underground river at the base of the drop?" According to Moldvay Basic, the GM should adjudicat this by assigning a percentage chance of success based on his/her knowledge of the dungeon geography and the likelihood of any dungeon streams flowing through that very place. According to the 4e DMG, the GM should assign a skill check (probably Hard Acrobatics in this case) and assign damage from a combination of a table plus the falling damage rules (in this case, take falling damage if the check is failed - if the GM doesn't know how high the ledge is, perhaps assign the maximum level-appropriate height; taking level appropriate one-off damage if the check succeeds).
This is not just about "a certain level of feel and talent". It's about the game rules and expectations.
Yet another example is provided by the notion of "fail forward". 13th Age expressly incorporate fail forward as a maxim of adjuciation. It is implicit in 4e. It is basically absent from 3E (3E in this respect is much closer to classic skill-based games like Runequest, Rolemaster and Traveller). Burning Wheel, which was one of the pioneers of fail forward, has further GM direction, namely when adjudicating a failed skill check focus on "failure of intent" rather than "failure of the task". 13th Age picks upon this idea too, though without expressly stating it. 4e doesn't express a view, either pro or con, on that particular approach to fail forward.
This is not just about "a certain level of feel and talent". It is about deliberate techniques intended to provide a different game experience. For this reason, despite some similarities in their design (lifepath PC creation, skill-based character descriptions, skill advancement via use, gritty combat), RQ and BW are very different games in play.
I hope this is enough to show (i) that there can be rules in a game that set out expectations for GM adjudication, and (ii) that different rules of this sort can make a big difference in play.
there are guidelines within the structure of the game suggestive of some actions being the more correct ones. ie. animals are animals with low intelligence and their actions should model this. Experienced mercenaries in a fantasy world should act like they have a clue about flanking, magic, etc.
Now consider a different approach - suppose, for example, the GM decides that the animals should attack the druid PC, because s/he knows that the player of that PC is interested in a "nature red in tooth and claw" game. Or the GM has the mercenaries attack the fighter because s/he thinks that would make for a dramatic climax.
There are a range of possible reasons for making one choice rather than another. Not all GMs prioritise world simulation as you describe it, and I don't think the 3E rulebooks actually tell us which way is preferred. (Contrast Gygax, who does suggest world simulation as a priority in his discussion of running the game in his DMG.)
pemerton said:
how long rests are to be paced and who is to have control over that pacing, and innumerable other factors that contribute to the play experience
Again, this does not speak to game balance, but to experience in the art of GMing. Its irrelevant to the discussion of balance unless games must work exactly the same for everyone regardless of level of mastery. If that's the game experience you want, I suggest Chutes and Ladders, or Candyland. Anything more complex is going to reward some level of system mastery.
I'll ignore the suggestion that I'm not clever enough to play D&D or similar RPGs and should be focusing on Snakes and Ladders.
Instead I'll focus on your contention that the pacing of long rests, and control over that pacing, does not speak to experience but to the art of GMing. Consider 4e: the rules leave the issue of pacing open (and I know from reading ENworld threads that different tables play it differently), but the fact that (pre-Essentials)n all players have basically the same resource recharge rate means that the timing of rests makes no major difference to intraparty comparisons of effectiveness. There are some differences: wizard dailies tend to be stronger than those of other PCs, which means more frequent rests make wizards comparatively more effective; and more frequent rests also tend to mean that defenders don't feel the benefit of their larger supply of healing surges; but these differences are not as marked as in other versions of the game where resources recharge in wildly assymetric terms.
Consider 13th Age. Like classic D&D and 3E, and unlike (pre-Essentials) 4e, it has players with assymetric recharge rates for resources. But it resolves the balance issues via a mandated long-rest rule (p 171:
Fate, karma, or some other subtle and unseen force propels the heroes through their adventures. As heroes, they prevail when they press on, not when they retreat and lick their wounds. . . Lots of times, the characters take their heal-up by resting or by celebrating back in town. The characters have earned the heal-up and should enjoy it. Sometimes, however, the heal-up occurs in the middle of an adventure rather than at the end. Sometimes a paladin says pithy words over the fallen foes, and with that single sentence the battle-weary party regains the spirit and the strength to fight on. . .
The GM determines when the party has earned a full heal-up. Canonically, fighting four average battles gets you a heal-up. If the battles are tougher, you get the heal-up after fewer of them, and weaker battles means more of them between heal-ups. This rule helps the party manage its resources, because you know about how much opposition you’re going to need to get through. . .
This rule allows “per day” powers and spells to remain balanced relative to each other regardless of whether the party is fighting once per week or seven times a day. . .
If the party is short of a heal-up but is too beat up to press on, they can retreat, tails between their legs. Provided they can find some sort of safe place, they can get the heal-up that they haven’t earned in battle. But taking the heal-up entails a campaign loss. At the GM’s discretion, the party fails to achieve one of their goals, and they fail in some way that simply defeating the bad guys the next time around with your healed-up party won’t fix.
Here we see the pacing of long rests absolutely treated as a balance issue, and handled via metagame devices - the GM's adjudication of a "spontaneous" heal-up mid-adventure, or of a "campaign loss" if the PCs retreat to safety too soon.
The contrast with 3E - which has the assymetric resource recovery but not the rule for pacing rests - is very marked. Depending how any particular 3E table handles the pacing issue, the consequences for play are likely to be very significant. And by saying that it is about "GM experience" you seem to be implying what I and others have already noted upthread, namely, that the application of GM force is one important way for making 3E play smoothly.
Your implication that those who want this sort of thing handled via rules - such as the uniform recharge rate of 4e, or the metagame regulation of pacing in 13th Age - want the game to work exactly the same for everyone regardless of system mastery - is also misplaced. They (or, at least I, and those whose posting record I'm familiar with like [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION], [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION], [MENTION=205]TwoSix[/MENTION] and others) don't want the game to work exaclty the same for everyone. But they want some things not to be a matter of GM force, but to be resoved in other ways. Just as, in cananonical 3E play, the question of whether or not a declared attack hits is not a matter of GM force but rather resolved by comparing d20 roll plus adds to a predetermined AC. (System mastery itself is a red herring here. In any version of D&D, I will have a very different play experience if I play a thief compared to a cleric, regardless of my level of system mastery; and a skilled GM can produce very different experiences for the table whether or not the pacing of long rests is established via the rules, via GM force, or via some other mechanism.)
You're suggesting that if two players design characters that are different, the mechanics should either correct for or ignore those differences completely.
There's nothing that stops two players in 3e from building virtually or actually identical characters. You're suggesting that to accommodate these indie/wargamers, players have to be forced to do that, and that building characters of different power levels should be essentially banned. You're also suggesting that the in-game nature of those characters is completely irrelevant; a dirt farmer PC has every right to equal "protagism" as a demigod PC, simply by virtue of being controlled by a player. It's really quite a radical idea.
I am not suggesting that mechancs should ignore differences. But those differences can be realised in the story without making a difference to the degree of protagonism enjoyed by the players. And this is not a particularly radical idea; it's been around self-consciously in RPG design for 20 or so years, and implicitly for longer than that. It's implicit in Moldvay Basic, for instance, which implies to the player that you can start you game as Hercules, as Merlin, as Bilbo Baggins or as a backstreet thief and still have the same prospects of making an impact on the game. After all, the idea that dirt farmers (or gentlehobbits, or poor boys who trade cows for magic beans) can make an impact on the world is a pretty basic fantasy trope.
You're also suggesting that the role of the DM and the DM/player dynamic have to be essentially dissolved.
Where did I make that suggestion?
Furthermore, what do you even mean by "the role of the DM"? Are you talking about the role of the GM in running a Gygax-style shared-GM sandbox? The role of the GM in running a contemporary Paizo AP? The role of the GM in running the sort of play suggested by the mid-80s Oriental Adventures supplement (which was the book that led me to my own preferred GMing style)?
There is no single "role of the DM" in D&D. This has been recognised for decades too. Read early White Dwarf articles by Lewis Pulsipher, Roger Musson and Don Turnbull to see intelligent discussions about the different roles a GM can play in the game. (Pulsipher is a big advocate of harsh Gygaxian sandboxing with "let dice fall where they may" GMing. But he recognises that his style is not the only one going.)
In practice, these ideas are extremely destructive to other basic aspects of the game, including the simulatory aspect, the dynamism of meaningfully different characters, and the satisfaction of building an effective character in the absence of being defaulted into one.
D&D for me has never had a significant simulatory aspect (the desire for simulatory play is what led me away from D&D's system, though not its story elements, towards Rolemaster). So I don't regard that as a basic aspect of the game.
As for your other two "basic aspects", nothing in my playstyle undermines the existence of dynamism of meaningfully different PCs. You would only have to read any of my numerous actual play threads to see that.
And turning to the satisfaction of building a particular character, my preference is for a system which permits the building of a character who will have a certain mechnical capability in respect of certain aspects of the fiction, and which makes it clear what sorts of build elements will contribute to that. Roughly speaking, I want the bits to deliver as advertised. Conversely, stuff like Power Attack, which provides mechanical benefits which have no connection to the fiction but depend purely upon metagame-level calculations (in particular odds of hitting for particular attack bonuses relative to particular ACs, used to then generate expected damage numbers - all of which are simply an artefact of D&D's particular way of resolving combat via seperate to hit and damage numbers), is the sort of system mastery that I have no interest in. Likewise the sorts of feat and spell combinations that Cyclone_Jester talks about, which exploit purely metagame notions like spontaneous casting, initiative and the like, in order to make wizards counter-intuitively effective in domains which (in my view) should be the home of other character types.
I am saying that anyone who has an issue that the rest of us-who play with all sorts of styles-do not have is doing something unusual
It was virtually unheard of even in the charop boards (which I frequented) before WotC's marketing department took it and ran with it to try to give us a reason (any reason) to buy 4e. Still a minority opinion, and mostly an edition warrior's war call rather than the honest opinion of a current player.
I think you are generalising wildly here from your own experience.
That spellcasters are stronger in typical D&D play than fighters was commonplace among every D&D gamer that I met and played with between the mid-80s and the late-90s. It was a recurring phenomenon in my own play of D&D. (And also of Rolemaster.) The same idea is one I've seen as a commonplace on the internet since the days I used to read and post on the usenet boards back before 3E came out.
Discussions of how to balance casters and fighters are found in magazine discussions going back to the late 70s. (For instance, Lewis Pulsipher discusses it in very early White Dwarf articles.) Gygax also talks about it in his DMG, and - not very surprisingly - his recommendations include a heavy dose of GM force.
It's not even surprising that it should be an issue. The game - as Mearls discussed in an early Legends & Lore column - was designed so that fighters would be stronger and easier to play at low levels, but would be eclipsed by mages at high levels. This design itself presupposed other aspects of the approach to play that weren't fully spelled out in the rulebooks, such as that most PCs would start at or near 1st level, that players would play with a stable of PCs in a sandboxy worlds, and that player skill and PC level would be in some degree of correlation. As soon as expectations around play are changed - eg that each player has only one PC, that the goal of play is to shepherd that one PC from 1st to Nth level, that play will be in a non-sandbox environment in which the GM is expected to take steps both in framing and adjudicating challenges to help keep the PCs alive - but the basic PC build rules are left unchanged, no wonder some tables experience problems!
Well, if they prefer one game to another, then it does make sense, at least for me, that they should play the game they like best. If I don't like a game, I don't try to convince everyone that their game is "broken," I instead try to convince them to play the game I like upon occasion.
If we hated D&D we wouldn't bother with trying to fix it and be so critical of it. You're mistaking love for hate.
Wicht, I'm not famaliar with your posting history in relation to 4e. Ahnehnois on this very thread is attempting to persuade people, including me, that 4e is a broken and deviant version of D&D.
But I agree with ImperatorK. Those who observe that they experience balance issues in 3E, or PF, or other versiosn of D&D, in relation to fighters vs casters, aren't expressing hate. At least, not the ones I read. They like fantasy RPGing. They enjoy the basic tropes of D&D (roughly, that heroes in a fantasy world can achieve victory over the forces of darkness via the prosecution of violent conflict). They think that playing a warrior and playing a wizard should both be viable options within such a game. And they think that various versions of D&D do a better or worse job of satisfying this preference. (Gygax himself noted that the power up of fighters in UA, via weapon specialisation, was a deliberate balance device. Presumably the damage caps on spells in 2nd ed AD&D was likewise. Presumably the comparative power-up of fighters in PF was likewise. Despite Ahnehnois's claims to the contrary, it's not as if a handfull of quixotic posters on ENworld are the only ones to have experienced this issue.)
