D&D 4E The Best Thing from 4E

[Dannyalcatraz]

...I can forgive 4E all its sins for bringing the Warlord to my table. So I voted "Other".

I'm the brother with another "Other", except for me, it was the Warlock that came alive. Hands down my favorite class in 4th.

 

[D'karr]

My take on transparency is rather simple. With 4e the framework gives the DM the tools to repeatably (that's the first important part) make sensible (the second important part) ad-hoc rulings that work. In addition, a creative DM can still take that framework and bend or twist it for other purposes. The disease track is an example of a piece of the framework that can be used in ways the game never intended and it still works well.

With the 4e framework the decision is still up to the DM, but he has a working tool. Whereas with other editions ad-hoc rulings still had to be handled by the DM but the odds for a particular task were either somewhat nebulous (randomly selected by feel), or fixed (static DC).

With nebulous odds the DM has to come up with the likely chance (either % dice, roll under, or roll above) from whole cloth. He uses feel for the likelihood of the task succeeding. In other editions I used percentage chance to determine success. Based on what I felt was the likelihood for success. This works well for illusionism because I can make the odds whole cloth. I can make the chance easy, hard or impossible totally by feel.

With fixed odds the DM comes up with the likely chance from a number that doesn't change for the task, or from a table that does not leave anything open to interpretation, possibly with a penalty or bonus modifier (DMs best friend +-2). This framework is better for stability as it does not rely on feel, but it hardly scales well as it does not take the ability of the characters or the opposition into consideration. For example using tumble to avoid an AoO has a static DC of 15. For a low level character that might be difficult, but the task soon becomes trivial, and it does not take the skill of the opposition into consideration. Instinctively, tumbling past a high level skilled combatant should be more difficult than against a low-level unskilled mook.

These inconsistencies are addressed within the 4e framework (page 42). To determine the chance of an appropriate challenge for a character use their level on the p42 table. To determine the chance against the opposition use the monster's level or it's defenses, which are already scaled by level. The DM can also assign a difficulty shift if the task if easy, moderate, or hard. He can still use the DMs best friend (+-2) or even assign the level completely independent of the characters and opposition.

The reason this framework is better, IMO, is that I don't have to make things whole-cloth by feel without a frame of reference. The frame of reference is very important to make it scalable - to keep the challenges viable for different groups, level of player experience (casual gamers vs. power gamers), and feel of the game. In addition, the players might have character side resources that stretch, bend or bypass this framework.

Using Tumble, as an example, with the nebulous odds I might assign 30% one time, but 40% another time, and if I'm feeling generous 60%-70%. This might, or might not take the character's proficiency into account. With static odds the chance is DC 15. This is soon trivial as the character's progress.

With the 4e framework the range of options available expands. The player might deploy character side resources to "tumble" that have no chance of failing (monk, rogue, and skill powers with shifts come to mind). This is where 4e provides player empowerment for the action as the DM is not involved in the decision (chance to succeed) for the tactic. As an alternative the player can describe the action and the DM can use p42 to assign a DC using the character's level, the encounter's level, the opposition's level, or even the action's level as a base. Alternatively the DM can use the monster's defenses as a base (Acrobatics vs. Reflex).

That is what I mean about transparency. A functional expandable framework that does not obfuscate the mechanics and that provides multiple balanced options to determine outcomes.

The first time I used the framework it seemed like more work, as I was getting used to the feel of it. Now it is almost instinctive. As a matter of fact the framework is such that a creative and experienced DM can run a game with the p42 table as the only resource. I've done it on several occasions where we wanted to play and had close to nothing. Even monsters were ad-hoc constructs based on experience and using the numbers on the table for reference.

The only change I would make to the 4e framework is to make it obvious to the players that this is also a resource. In my game I provide them with an at-will and encounter "card" that is directly tied to the p42 framework. That way they don't forget it exists.

 

[pemerton]

I guess 5e design is vulnerable to Illusionism, if you want to run it that way. Surely it ought not to require the same level of illusionism as RAW 3e/PF does if you want Fighter types to not keep dying, though.

That seems right. On the PC-build side 5e looks to me reasonably close to Essentials - asymmetric but rough mechanical parity under the right assumptions about encounters per rest.

I definitely find 4e to be player-empowering both as a player and when GMing. It gives a lot of mechanical protection to PCs, and its skill system strongly encourages improvisation and creative play - which can be derided as 'mother may I' (a phrase I hate) by some, but 4e strongly encourages the GM to set reasonable DCs and allow effective creative use of skills and powers, albeit generally not to the extent of 'I win' buttons - 4e assumes that an Arcana check to open a warded portal is pretty much exactly equivalent to a Thievery check to open a mechanical lock, whereas 3e/PF tends to treat magic as far more effective.

This all seems right to me, too, and I think your "reasonable DCs" are closely related to [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION]'s idea of "transparency".

Also the lack of "I win" buttons tends to mean the GM doesn't have to manipulate the fiction in arbitrary ways to challenge the players. Which is also related, I think, to what Manbearcat was saying.

I find 4e to be very poorly suited for sandbox exploratory play

And it's a hat-trick!

I think that you can do exploratory play in 4e, though I don't think that will necessarily bring out the system's strongest features - four years ago now I deliberately ran an exploratory scenario, and posted about it here. But it wasn't a sandbox. It was improvised, which is what I think 4e favours with its robust but "subjective" framework for DCs etc, and it's leaning towards player empowerment.

5e's bounded accuracy should support a classic sandbox better.

 

[pemerton]

From the looks of the poll, if Heinsoo et al would have created 4e under a different brand, they should have named it "Monsters and Math!"

Monsters and maths both go to transparency of mechanical structure and ease of use.

Working on the theory that most respondents to this poll, in this sub-forum on this site, have a fairly serious degree of engagement with 4e, I think it's interesting and fitting that these features seem to be in the lead.

 

[Aenghus]

Anyway, I just wanted to chime in on this "transparency" thing, and how it relates to play. This:


This was just not my experience at all. In practice, 4e pushed a lot of rules onto me, forcing me to make way more rulings than I'd like to in any given session. Having played 3.X for years, I can kind of see where people are coming from, but I just don't think it's nearly as clean or clear or player-empowered as I hear its fans call it.

But that's just my experience. And I don't mean to go off on an anti-4e rant in a pro-4e thread. I have a long thread about my sessions running a 4e campaign on this site that I've maintained for a while now (coming up on two years this September: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...rage-s-First-4e-Session&p=6180484#post6180484).

I've had a lot of fun with 4e. But I'm still a little baffled by the claims to wonderful player-empowerment. I get the transparency, but player-empowerment seemed quite intertwined in Manbearcat's definition, and that just doesn't ring true to me.

But the reason I bring this up is to not only share my experience, but also to get some perspective on it from outside my own. Anyone have any thoughts to my entire-too-long post? Am I missing something? Am I wrong? Maybe. And I'm open to finding out.

I think a lot depends on how much one cares about successfully accomplishing tasks in the game versus the procedure of how one achieves success. Myself, I'm invested in the former, not the latter. In most editions of D&D there isn't much in the way of system for larger macro tasks, the systems are mostly for subtasks. In these editions the most critical part of the process is persuading the DM that your plan is viable. The advice in the earlier DMG's for this sort of thing tends to be awful, I vaguely remember such adversarial ideas as not giving the PCs a clue of their odds or even if the task is possible in the first place, or the consequences of failure. A body of precedent would slowly be built up, at least the games valuing consistency, and that precedent could be used to leverage success in tasks step by step. If the process steps that made sense to the DM didn't make sense to me I was highly unlikely to guess at a path to victory. I have experience of such games, and they are exactly as frustrating as I have tried to indicate above.

Skill challenges in 4e give a framework where the players can expect success or failure within a certain discrete number of steps
The more cooperative, less adversarial advice I find excellent e.g. it's ok to just permit success when the stakes are low. A qualified guarantee that success is possible within the rules without having to resort to selling a line to the DM or using broken magic spells is something I find very attractive.

4e cares about the ends far more than the means, it is true. If you care a lot about the means, you may have to make lots of rulings on them, as the 4e rules can leave them ill-defined, because they vary so much from campaign to campaign and to allow for easier reskinning.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

But the reason I bring this up is to not only share my experience, but also to get some perspective on it from outside my own. Anyone have any thoughts to my entire-too-long post? Am I missing something? Am I wrong? Maybe. And I'm open to finding out.

Hmmmmm, I don't know. I found 4e's rules very logical and easy to assess as both a DM and a player. The difficulties of things for instance were pretty easy to know. Yes a task might be easy or hard, but it wasn't really THAT tough to figure out which was likely to be which. Obviously the DM can bias things by making checks easier or harder, or making them higher or lower level, but the DMG and PHB actually spell out the actual DCs of a pretty fair number of the most common situations.

I don't understand your statements about stunts. In previous editions there were no really coherent rules about them at all. Certain classes had features that let them do specific things, and maybe there were in 3.x some slightly more generalized rules, but it was pretty much up to the DM and the tradition was you could just tell people to pick up any old dice and make a throw, it was basically open season on the players. 4e built on the d20 foundation of 3e and tamed it all. You have 17 specific skills, each of which covers a separate field and almost never overlap. You have a defined set of DCs and a recommended damage progression. DMG2 even formalizes this into 'terrain powers' for instances where the DM is pretty sure someone will attempt something. I don't think you could circumscribe things more MECHANICALLY and still be playing an RPG.

Which brings me to the only conclusion I can come up with, which is that you're not talking about mechanical certainty at all fundamentally, but about narrative certainty. 4e leaves the narrative much more up in the air, at least potentially. However I'm still unclear how this relates to the 'Illusionism' that was being discussed earlier, which IMHO was all about DMs playing fast and loose with the mechanics in order to rearrange the narrative to suite themselves.

Of course its a blurry line, such DMs also generally are controlling and keep the narrative situation in hand by other means as well. For years the main AD&D DM that I played with was like this. He was a great DM in terms of having a fun game and all, but you had to give up any notion that you were going to be allowed to affect the flow of events in an appreciable way. It just wasn't going to happen. At least it wasn't going to happen by the sort of usual means most players envisage. What your character did mattered, but more in terms of what the DM was inspired to do in reaction. If you were trying to bend his world to your will directly, it never worked. His style of play would just not work well at all in 4e. At least not without a good deal of evolution.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

That seems right. On the PC-build side 5e looks to me reasonably close to Essentials - asymmetric but rough mechanical parity under the right assumptions about encounters per rest.

With the caveat that spells are MUCH more open-ended than in 4e, generally speaking, and that non-casters are considerably more circumscribed, relatively speaking. A 5e fighter is pretty tough and is relatively more capable than a 2e fighter, or a 3e fighter, but the overall 'plot' asymmetry is very evident, and even low level 5e wizards tend to dominate combat from a level of overall tactics (IE my level 4 wizard would hold the bad guys at bay or consistently bottleneck them and set them up for the melee types pretty easily in the majority of fights).

This all seems right to me, too, and I think your "reasonable DCs" are closely related to @Manbearcat's idea of "transparency".

Also the lack of "I win" buttons tends to mean the GM doesn't have to manipulate the fiction in arbitrary ways to challenge the players. Which is also related, I think, to what Manbearcat was saying.

I think this was the prime impetus at the detailed level of 4e design, was the removal of 'I Win buttons' from particularly the casters. 3.5 in particular is rife with them, but even in 2e I recall that my wizard could pretty much end most encounters or at the very least 'ramp up' from 'let the fighters take care of it' to 'beat this thing to a pulp and win this round' mode.

And it's a hat-trick!

I think that you can do exploratory play in 4e, though I don't think that will necessarily bring out the system's strongest features - four years ago now I deliberately ran an exploratory scenario, and posted about it here. But it wasn't a sandbox. It was improvised, which is what I think 4e favours with its robust but "subjective" framework for DCs etc, and it's leaning towards player empowerment.

5e's bounded accuracy should support a classic sandbox better.

4e more clearly scales everything, and generally challenges remain relevant only over about 1/10th of the level range, which makes true sandbox play a bit hard. The DM has to thoroughly telegraph the expected difficulty of each area of the sandbox for it to work. You can do it in a limited extent, but the game works best where you have a number of small sandboxes linked together by an overarching plot that drives the action along.

The characters explore the nasty woods where they can find level 1-7 monsters, and then they move on to the pirate town where they can mess with levels 4-10 monsters, and then they deal with the dragon's minions at levels 7-15, and the dragon at levels 12-20, and the land beyond the portal in the dragon cave levels 17-24, etc.

I think 5e probably would work better for an absolute sandbox, though the difficulty with gauging encounters might thwart it somewhat, much like the same problem dogged older editions sandbox play (you just get LOTS of TPKs, Gygaxian meat grinder play in effect).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

4e cares about the ends far more than the means, it is true. If you care a lot about the means, you may have to make lots of rulings on them, as the 4e rules can leave them ill-defined, because they vary so much from campaign to campaign and to allow for easier reskinning.

Yeah, this to me is a very salient feature of 4e. If you think about the skill system for instance it is much less about what you know how to do, and much more about what you want to accomplish. You don't have a 'perform' skill that you use to convince the king to send you on the quest, you have a diplomacy skill instead, which you might employ by means of a performance. The skill relates to the character's modus, not his particular knowledge. A diplomatic PC convinces people of things and enlists them in his cause. An intimidating one cows them, a deceptive one fools them, etc. The exact means are pretty undefined. This leaves the actual narrative construction of the character largely up to the player in 4e. He picks skills that match his modus and creates a consistent explanation of his means out of narrative elements ("oh, I learned to play the lute as a child growing up in my uncle's castle. I will play the girl a song!") vs the 3.x simulationist version of that where you had to buy points in lute instead of pick locks.

 

[D'karr]

4e more clearly scales everything, and generally challenges remain relevant only over about 1/10th of the level range, which makes true sandbox play a bit hard. The DM has to thoroughly telegraph the expected difficulty of each area of the sandbox for it to work. You can do it in a limited extent, but the game works best where you have a number of small sandboxes linked together by an overarching plot that drives the action along.

I'm currently playing in the Kingmaker campaign from Paizo converted to 4e, which is a limited sandbox. It works well and we're having a lot of fun, but as you mentioned it is not a true open sandbox. Even in open sandbox play it is better for the DM to telegraph expectations ("Here there be dragons") rather than surprise the players.

However when I was running my campaign I was able to run an open sandbox by using the minion, standard, elite, solo progression of monsters, and that worked rather well. It is an artificiality of the game mechanics that a solo, or any monster role of much higher level is unhittable except on a 20. But there is a sweet spot variance that plays into the minion, standard, elite, solo continuum. So that an encounter 4-5 levels higher than the party is a very tough encounter, and by the same token an encounter 4-5 levels lower than the party is very easy. With that in mind you can adjust the existing encounter in the sandbox and still keep it interesting. I know that goes against the idea of a sandbox but it is a matter of what is going to remain interesting (mechanical illusionism if you will). The Elite Ogre the characters find a tough challenge at level 7 are really not much of a challenge to a 16th level party. So it is easier to make the adjustment from Elite to standard to minion than to do away with the encounter or to go for combat that might last long and still remain unsatisfying.

All IMO of course.

The characters explore the nasty woods where they can find level 1-7 monsters, and then they move on to the pirate town where they can mess with levels 4-10 monsters, and then they deal with the dragon's minions at levels 7-15, and the dragon at levels 12-20, and the land beyond the portal in the dragon cave levels 17-24, etc.

This is not much different than most sandboxes I've encountered. Even in 1e where most of our play was sandboxy most encounters were arranged in these concentric bands of difficulty. Similar to levels in dungeons, the deeper you went in the ground the more difficult the encounters, in the wilderness the further you strayed from civilization the more difficult the encounters.

I think 5e probably would work better for an absolute sandbox, though the difficulty with gauging encounters might thwart it somewhat, much like the same problem dogged older editions sandbox play (you just get LOTS of TPKs, Gygaxian meat grinder play in effect).

My limited play experience with 5e is that it follows a similar paradigm to 1e. However, gauging encounter difficulty has been a rather challenging chore.

 

[DMZ2112]

I thought the concept of power sources was extremely robust. I used to have impassioned arguments with folks that Wizards ought to fill out the power source/role grid.

Then Wizards made 84 gajillion arcane controllers and couldn't figure out a single martial controller and I lost interest.

The math and the tactical combat are both still a lot of fun.