D&D 4E Is there a "Cliffs Notes" summary of the entire 4E experience?

[TwoSix]

If anything, there should have been more powers like it added: a hundred or so, for a Martial Controller class, for instance.

A martial controller based around CaGI type powers would have been great. Kind of a quiet badass who warps the battlefield simply by being awesome. Sort the walking equivalent to the Inverse Ninja law.

 

[Remathilis]

A martial controller based around CaGI type powers would have been great. Kind of a quiet badass who warps the battlefield simply by being awesome. Sort the walking equivalent to the Inverse Ninja law.

And it would have kept it all contained in one, nice bannable class.

 

[Kraztur]

It's not that there's nothing that fits the definition devised for "Dissociative Mechanics," it's that the way that definition was applied in the edition war was inconsistent and selective

That's true, but in all fairness, the feeling of dissociation comes from the rule prescribing to the player one thing, and the player wanting or imagining something perceptibly different for the character.. It's inconsistent and selective because human desire is inconsistent and selective. Don't you think?

Is the problem that people's likes and dislikes are inconsistent and selective? If so, isn't it unrealistic to expect people to be rational? Or is it the definition that's inconsistent? I'm trying to tie this back to the claim of lack of legitimacy. Badly worded arguments might not sound legitimate, but I'm having trouble understanding the expectation of consistency. Also, words like "invalid" or "illegitimate" are strong words, and is it really proportionate?

 

[Alzrius]

Sure, but this thread isn't about dissociation, it's about 4e and summarizing the experience.

That's what the thread topic is, but that's not what you and I (and several other people) are talking about as an extension of that.

I agree, 90% of 4e powers don't require any sort "may be dissociative" trigger warnings. It's just a useful construct for the other 10% (and doesn't exclude the previous 90%).

I believe it's more correct to say that it's a legitimate point of critique for encounter and daily abilities that are based around physical powers, rather than mystical ones.

But that's kind of the point. The rules are about trying to generate cool combats, with lots of different things going on. That's the point of encounter powers, to create variance. No one logically expects a game with random elements and opposing sides to play out exactly how they would expect.

I recognize that that's what 4E wants to do. However, for a lot of people this variance is undercut if it's enforced by an artificial set of restrictions on what can be attempted.

Your response to this is that these attempts aren't restricted, but rather that these are limitations on how often you can use mechanics X to pull off these abilities, and the rest of the time use mechanics Y. I don't particularly agree that that's what the rules are trying to do, and find that to be a fairly unintuitive design anyway, particularly since that interpretation doesn't seem to be a common one that I've seen.

Not really. "Trip is now an encounter power" sounds like a restriction. There is no such restriction in 4e, you can try to knock someone down as often as you would like.

Again, that's not my understanding of the paradigm that 4E is trying to create. Even if it is, it's inefficient to such a degree that I find it to be a very poor method for trying to accomplish what it's trying to accomplish; sending a message of "you can do this super-cool thing as much as you want, but for no particular reason it's going to be more effective just once per fight" is trying to have your cake and eat it too, and doesn't work very well to my mind.

Why not? Because you don't want the player to do Spinning Hurricane Slash every turn. It's supposed to be special. So the system makes sure doing it more than once has disincentives.

Leaving aside that this sounds an awful lot like the GM imposing (fairly arbitrary) restrictions on the player in the name of what the GM thinks is special (about the player's character, no less), I should point out that the system doesn't have any disincentives to trying this more than once. Rather, it has a mechanism for doing it once, and is completely silent on the ability to do it otherwise. There's no particular guideline on how else to mechanically resolve an attempt to use the same power beyond the encounter or daily restrictions, and nothing that says that such an attempt should be more difficult and less effective.

Again, you may not like that aesthetic or disapprove of the design choice, but let's not pretend it's been done in error or doesn't make any sense.

We don't need to pretend; it doesn't make sense. The paradigm that you're suggesting - that you can attempt anything, and the encounter and daily restrictions are purely about what mechanics you use - is something that is, at best, presented in a highly unintuitive manner. I'm honestly not sure that it's actually presented in the rules at all.

Yea, except one does 1dX+Y damage and trips, and also succeeds on an 8+ on a d20, whereas the other just trips, and only succeeds on a 14+. Seems like a valid resource to me.

Just out of curiosity, did you make those rules up? Because it sounds like you deliberately set that to be less effective the second time around without any encouragement from the game mechanics.

And that's fine (for you). But that isn't what it HAS to mean. "I don't like it" is not the same as "doesn't make sense."

It's not a question of not liking it. The definition of a character resource is that it's a resource that the character has/can use. If the character can't, but the player can, then it's a player resource. That's intuitive, unless you get into areas of "all definitions are inherently subjective, so therefore this does mean whatever I say it means."

I've never thought as "actions" as being character resources. It would imply the characters are aware they exist in a stop-action universe.

Actions are very much character resources; that's why we refer to what you can do in a round as "economy of actions." That doesn't imply anything about the characters knowing they function according to turn-based combat - they just know there's only so much they can do in a set period of time.

 

[Ratskinner]

Were you told this in this thread and I mi

Possibly you did. Although I may be using "vancian" in a broader sense than you would, given your response.

If you were referring to clerics - I do remember some vague line from Gygax that the cleric might not get the spells he prays for - which would be like going to the quartermaster and saying "give me three frag grenades" and he says "not in your mission spec, take this radio".

The dissociation problem happens when the decision to cast the spell is made and not when he is granted/prepares it. This would indicate that the cleric is clearly unaware of what spells he has in his payload, or that he is mad.

I admit that that seems to go against the consensus interpretation of spell slots, etc. But its not my theory/proposition.

 

[Tony Vargas]

That's true, but in all fairness, the feeling of dissociation comes from the rule prescribing to the player one thing, and the player wanting or imagining something perceptibly different for the character.

In all fairness, the fluff side of powers, the text that described what's going on, as opposed to the rules mechanics that determine what the end results are, were explicitly changeable at the option of the player. So if the rules say you can do something, and you don't like the description of how you do it, you can change it. So a 4e power could really only be dissociative if you decide to /make/ it dissociative.

Maybe longtime D&Ders were put off by that because it was an inversion of how spells tended to be interpreted in the past. Many classic D&D spells would describe in detail what they did, but not provide clear mechanical representations, so you would argue from "this spell creates a sphere of 0-degree K matter" to the mechanical effects it might have apart from freezing water it rolled over. You could squeeze a /lot/ of extra effectiveness out of a spell that way. You could also lose effectiveness to the DM doing the same thing. In 4e, powers do what they do, mechanically, and if you argue the that the way the spell is described as doing it is somehow 'unrealistic' or something, then the way it does it changes, not the effect. So you can't talk your character into greater power, or screw with a player by undermining his character's abilities so much. Which, I guess, are options some folks miss - or just can't get used to not having to worry about (or compensate for) anymore.

Is the problem that people's likes and dislikes are inconsistent and selective? Or is it the definition that's inconsistent? I'm trying to tie this back to the claim of lack of legitimacy.

If you pinned down a definition of dissociative in the edition war, you could invariably find something in a prior ed that the person touting the definition had no issue with that fit the definition. That's indicative of the definition not really being relevant to the problem. Retreating into subjectivity was a common response - and an admission that the reasoning and definition were all just bogus rationalizations.

A subjective dislike is legitimate (for the person who holds it, alone), it's just not subject to rationality. A logically invalid rationalization of that dislike, however, is clearly not legitimate.

 

[I'm A Banana]

So, you chose "spells are dissociative "?

No, just their names, and not always. Bigby's hand? Super associative. Remove Disease? Ew. (But then I've always been an advocate for clerics to not have the same spellcasting mechanic that wizards have, and been a bit vague on what happens when clerics prepare spells)

I understand the whole desire to have all the mechanics "associated".

It is not nearly so manichaen. But I think one can fairly say that early 4e leaned pretty hard on dissociation as one of the key elements of The Way To Play, which ties back into the OP's request: dissociation was one of those elements that became a significant sticking point for folks early on in 4e.

My only real point is that it is real, it is legitimate, and it didn't HAVE to be such an important element of 4e overall.

I fail to see the difference between a 1e, 2e, or 3e first level caster trying but failing to cast a spent spell and a 4e fighter trying to use a spent daily. (Except that maybe the 4e fighter has a better shot via p42.) Can you explain this to me?

[sblock=Well, it's been 6 years, but sure]
Lets say that there's basically a mechanically identical daily power whose only difference is the fluff. Maybe it's a close burst 1 that attacks vs. Ref and renders all hit targets prone. The Fighter fluff is, "You spin around with your weapon out, knocking the legs out from under everyone next to you!" The Wizard fluff is "You explode with a violent wave of force, knocking over creatures close to you."

Both characters use their ability the first time without sweat. But then later, the Wizard's player says "I explode with force again!" and the DM says "Wait, how?" Per the story being told, that wizard gathered this power in morning by studying their spellbook, locked it away in their minds, and then released it. In order to do that again, they'll need to study their spellbook and get some rest, because those are the arbitrary ways magic works in this world.

And when the fighter's player says "I spin around with my weapon out to trip everyone again!", why can't he do that? Per the story being told, he's a talented warrior with elite combat training, he doesn't need to follow the arbitrary rules of magic, he just needs to spin around with his weapon. You can invent reasons on the spot why he might not ("there was no opening and you're tired"), but the mechanics don't really support those story reasons (the ability to use these powers isn't predicated on openings, and he's not too tired to use his OTHER powers). The mechanics say it's because you used that daily already, but a fighter's skill doesn't get "used up" with particular specific effects like that. The mechanic isn't modeling the same process that the character is following (though it might be modeling some narrative process that the player is following).

There are ways to model this process more closely and achieve the same basic mathematical effect. If you want to represent "exploiting an opening," key it off of crits or combat advantage. If you want to represent exhaustion, use a point pool mechanic. Get a little creative with the damage numbers, and this would be indistinguishable mathematically from having discrete, Vancian effects.

Ultimately, the upthrust is that the arbitrary rules for magic can be the arbitrary game rules, but the rules for when you can spin around and knock people over cannot be arbitrary because that's something that people can imagine themselves doing -- it has a higher chance to break you out of the fiction simply because we're all within Dunning-Kruger Distance of spinning around with a weapon out, but we have no context to understand blasts of magical force.
[/sblock]

I just feel kind of bad for them, because I find roleplaying to be most exciting when you switch from stance to stance, and I guess a lot of people can't do that seamlessly.

It's also "aren't interested in doing that." A gameplay experience needs to deliver on its core aesthetics, and the core aesthetics of storytelling or running a narrative are not the same as the core aesthetics of role-playing or pretending to be another person, and they are mutually exclusive: when you're doing one, you aren't doing the other (because people don't manipulate their world like that).

So someone who comes to D&D looking as a player to, as much as possible, pretend to be their fantasy character, to share minds, might balk at martial dailies (forex) because they don't reinforce those aesthetics. Someone who comes to D&D looking as a player to, as much as possible, help tell a story about the fantasy character they control, to make an interesting conflict, might embrace them, precisely because they do reinforce the core aesthetics that they are looking for. Someone who is looking for both might be fine with it in some instances and annoyed with it at others.

And, like almost all gamebreakers in D&D, it's a subjective thing. What kills it for one player is ignored by a second and is embraced by a third.

Which is, again, why the Right Way To Play vibe from 4e was, IMO, so destructive. If the game is telling you that you need to embrace this thing that breaks the game for you (either explicitly, like "talking to guards is no fun," or implicitly, like "fighter dailies are a thing you need to be cool with now"), most of those players are just not going to embrace the game. Like, if D&D required you to eat beets, most people who didn't like beets would just not play D&D rather than question their hatred of that root vegetable. But D&D doesn't have to require you to eat beets, and it doesn't require you to embrace martial dailies and it doesn't require you to like blink elves and it doesn't require you to play with inspirational healing, but 4e was pretty insistent that it did.

Your pity is misplaced, but I think most of us would appreciate a D&D that recognized that "likes beets and HP-as-morale" is a pointless barrier to entry.

 

[Kraztur]

In all fairness, the fluff side of powers, the text that described what's going on, as opposed to the rules mechanics that determine what the end results are, were explicitly changeable at the option of the player. So if the rules say you can do something, and you don't like the description of how you do it, you can change it. So a 4e power could really only be dissociative if you decide to /make/ it dissociative.

Not fair claim to me on two counts: 1) the "fluff" description isn't generally the problem for those afflicted with a feeling of dissociation, so your suggestion isn't solving their problem AFAICT, and 2) "decide to make it" dissociative is unfairly presuming (wrongly IMO) that a conscious purposeful decision lies at the foundation of the dislike in question. In a way, your argument feels like a kid is having some ice cream and doesn't like that flavour, and the father is admonishing the kid "If you don't like the taste of your ice cream, it's because you've decided to make it not tasty!"

A logically invalid rationalization of that dislike, however, is clearly not legitimate.

That's disheartening, but I guess it is what it is. May I point out that calling someone's rationalizations illegitimate isn't going to change anything anyway. I have never in my entire life, ever bought a product because someone spent 6 years arguing that my rationalizations for my dislike were illegitimate. Maybe after 6 years of marketing and advertising, but good advertising doesn't argue at me

 

[TwoSix]

That's what the thread topic is, but that's not what you and I (and several other people) are talking about as an extension of that.

True, but have we really nailed down the goals of this discussion? My point is that 4e has perfectly coherent explanations for its designed abilities, and that many of its design goals don't serve the interest of exactly defining what a character's abilities are, and how they should be narrated. Rather, they serve the interest of generating a certain kind of story, and leave defining the process of how it happened to the player and DM.

I believe it's more correct to say that it's a legitimate point of critique for encounter and daily abilities that are based around physical powers, rather than mystical ones.

To-may-to, to-mah-to. Most powers work in the trad framework, some don't is the main point.

I recognize that that's what 4E wants to do. However, for a lot of people this variance is undercut if it's enforced by an artificial set of restrictions on what can be attempted.

By artificial, you mean not flowing from the setting's physics, correct? There's no explicit "fatigue" or "divine providence" explanation for why the effects occur with the frequency they do?

Your response to this is that these attempts aren't restricted, but rather that these are limitations on how often you can use mechanics X to pull off these abilities, and the rest of the time use mechanics Y. I don't particularly agree that that's what the rules are trying to do, and find that to be a fairly unintuitive design anyway, particularly since that interpretation doesn't seem to be a common one that I've seen.

But the rules do work in that way. I've done it. You simply have to be aware of it.

Again, that's not my understanding of the paradigm that 4E is trying to create. Even if it is, it's inefficient to such a degree that I find it to be a very poor method for trying to accomplish what it's trying to accomplish; sending a message of "you can do this super-cool thing as much as you want, but for no particular reason it's going to be more effective just once per fight" is trying to have your cake and eat it too, and doesn't work very well to my mind.

Yea, but I get the feeling you don't want to accomplish that anyway. Do you feel that seeing a variance of martial techniques in a fight is a worthwhile design goal?

Leaving aside that this sounds an awful lot like the GM imposing (fairly arbitrary) restrictions on the player in the name of what the GM thinks is special (about the player's character, no less), I should point out that the system doesn't have any disincentives to trying this more than once. Rather, it has a mechanism for doing it once, and is completely silent on the ability to do it otherwise. There's no particular guideline on how else to mechanically resolve an attempt to use the same power beyond the encounter or daily restrictions, and nothing that says that such an attempt should be more difficult and less effective.

It's not the DM's imposition, it's the system's imposition by creating encounter powers in the first place.

And again, you're confused by conflating a "power" with "its mechanic of resolution". Which is understandable, because that's how previous editions do it. But "Spinning Hurricane Slash" is something that occurs in the fiction. The fact that sometimes it does more damage and knocks somebody down is something the player chooses, by using the power of the same name.

Look at the 4e Slayer as an example. He doesn't have weirdly named abilities. He just attacks. Once a fight, the player says "I'll use Power Strike to do more damage". You can view that as the Slayer decided to hit much harder that turn, or it could be that he just got a lucky hit in, or maybe he attempted a Spinning Hurricane Slash. Up to you, as the player. The 4e Slayer simply possesses a generic version of what the 4e fighter has as more specific named powers, the ability to narrate in an extra effect by cashing in a limited resource.

We don't need to pretend; it doesn't make sense. The paradigm that your suggesting - that you can attempt anything, and the encounter and daily restrictions are purely about what mechanics you use - is something that is, at best, presented in a highly unintuitive manner. I'm honestly not sure that it's actually presented in the rules at all.

Well, since my viewpoint makes the game coherent and run smoothly, and your viewpoint makes the game run poorly and incoherently, might I suggest my vantage point has certain benefits?

Just out of curiosity, did you make those rules up? Because it sounds like you deliberately set that to be less effective the second time around without any encouragement from the game mechanics.

Without a character in front of me, I extrapolated from the rules as I know them. I know there are fighter encounter powers that let you do 1[W] and knock prone. 8+ seems fairly typical for a non-minmaxed fighter facing a level-equivalent enemy.

As for the Spinning Hurricane Slash attempt with no encounter power, I typically allow at-will level effectiveness for stunts with a medium check. 14+ might be a little high, it's probably closer to 11 or 12. Or, if they wanted to do damage, that would be a basic attack, narrated as a Spinning Hurricane Slash.

It's not a question of not liking it. The definition of a character resource is that it's a resource that the character has/can use. If the character can't, but the player can, then it's a player resource. That's intuitive, unless you get into areas of "all definitions are inherently subjective, so therefore this does mean whatever I say it means."

Well sure, hard to argue with a mostly tautological definition. I just think of most of the crazy martial powers as player resources, not character ones. The fighter doesn't attempt CaGI, it just happens.

Actions are very much character resources; that's why we refer to what you can do in a round as "economy of actions." That doesn't imply anything about the characters knowing they function according to turn-based combat - they just know there's only so much they can do in a set period of time.

I don't think the character has any indication he can do three things in a turn, and he has a limited selection of options for each one. I think from the character's perspective, he just acts.

 

[TwoSix]

It's also "aren't interested in doing that." A gameplay experience needs to deliver on its core aesthetics, and the core aesthetics of storytelling or running a narrative are not the same as the core aesthetics of role-playing or pretending to be another person, and they are mutually exclusive: when you're doing one, you aren't doing the other (because people don't manipulate their world like that).

I don't know, man. People keep telling me that, but I simply don't find it that hard. And I've gotten pretty immersed. But, as you say, what works for player A doesn't work for player B.

Which is, again, why the Right Way To Play vibe from 4e was, IMO, so destructive. If the game is telling you that you need to embrace this thing that breaks the game for you (either explicitly, like "talking to guards is no fun," or implicitly, like "fighter dailies are a thing you need to be cool with now"), most of those players are just not going to embrace the game. Like, if D&D required you to eat beets, most people who didn't like beets would just not play D&D rather than question their hatred of that root vegetable. But D&D doesn't have to require you to eat beets, and it doesn't require you to embrace martial dailies and it doesn't require you to like blink elves and it doesn't require you to play with inspirational healing, but 4e was pretty insistent that it did.

Well, that's a pickle, there. I would say the RPGs n general benefit from knowing their audience and targeting players who like the playstyle they want to present. But that isn't necessarily a benefit for D&D, which needs to be a bit of everything to everyone. It's why 4e tends to be either your favorite edition or your least favorite, I know very few people for whom it's their second or third favorite.