It seems unlikely that you're wrong. I think you might be missing something - or maybe two things.
The first is that you might be missing certain experiences. @
Manbearcat's comments resonate with me very strongly, as they do for @
Scrivener of Doom - including the description of the table atmosphere that accompanies illusionist GMing. It's something I absolutely associated with 90s RPGing, and with White Wolf and 2nd ed AD&D both as systems, and player cultures built up around those systems. I can see it, too, in the 2nd ed AD&D PHB, which is full of examples of PCs failing (but the players still having fun), of statements subordinating the players' agency to the referee's judgment, etc.
If you don't have those experiences from that time then the comments may not speak to you.
Definitely don't. But I'm in no way denying that others do, so I don't see how I'm wrong yet. But moving on...
I think the second thing that you might be missing - but maybe not, because perhaps it is in play in your brother's GMing that you describe - is what, for someone like @
Manbearcat (I think) or me (I know), is at the core of illusionist GMing. It is not GM ad hoc rulings around DCs or damage in the 4e style. It is GM manipulation of the
fiction in order to force outcomes. If this is what someone cares about, then a system of rigid DCs (such as 3E) doesn't matter, because the referee can just stipulate a fictional context which makes success impossible. Or can call for new checks, and new checks, until failure happens (in a combat context, this can be unlimited waves of foes; in a non-combat context this is a lack of what @
Manbearcat often calls "closed scene resolution").
Uh... as far as illusionism and manipulating the fiction goes, here's what I wrote about my brother in the post you quoted: "His techniques have changed over time (as have mine, and probably all GMs), and he's met somewhere in the middle. He rolls in the open (rather than behind a screen or his hand) and uses those results, but still fudges non-mechanical stuff to make things more interesting (in his mind... but to his credit, his games are still fun)."
That is me pretty much explicitly stating that he changes the fiction (fudging the "non-mechanical stuff") in order to achieve certain results that he finds interesting (which, based on your GMing techniques, I'd probably argue you do as well). At any rate, I don't think I missed what you're saying I missed.
4e's transparency is in relation to these elements: closed scene resolution (via skill challenges for non-combat, and via transparent encounter building guidelines for combat), "subjective" DCs which are (at least in principle, and in my experience reasonably in practice) correlated to the feasible range of PC skill bonuses, and the like.
At least, that's my take.
I get that it's your take, but it's entirely on the GM to call for skill challenges or combats. The GM could immediately call for another skill challenge or throw more waves at you, just like before. You can argue quite coherently that it's bad GMing, but the same goes for doing that in any game (like the endless waves or skill check after skill check example you mentioned).
Also, I think the math on skill checks and 4e's Easy/Moderate/Hard kinda goes outta whack pretty early on in terms of keeping checks feasible for everyone, but that's just my experience as well. But again, those subjective DCs are set by the GM; what you can achieve with those subjective DCs are set by the GM. This isn't player-empowerment, to be sure. The math is transparent (which is part of why I can somewhat confidently say I think it goes outta whack pretty early on), but so are set DCs, so I'm not sure what the big difference is there.
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 [page 42]. 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).
I agree that page 42 is incredibly useful. And I think your take on transparency in 4e is a great one. I agree with a lot of what you've written (but I still think static DCs are more player-empowering than subjective DCs), and can see why you like it. I think your "transparency" take resonates a lot more with me than Manbearcat's, but that might be because it involves a lot less player-empowerment stuff in it. Anyways, good post, have XP
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.
I'm following you so far. This does sound frustrating to my style.
Skill challenges in 4e give a framework where the players can expect success or failure within a certain discrete number of steps
This is also my experience from skill challenges in both 4e and my RPG (an extremely modified homebrew version of 3.X which also uses a different take on skill challenges [X successes before 3 failures]). In both systems, when I use skill challenges, I run them openly, and players know how many successes / failures they need and have. However, in my system, the DCs are static and explicitly called out in the book, and thus players can plan for them, making it seem more transparent than 4e from my experience in both.
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.
I missed something here. Is this still about transparency?
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.
I think much of 4e is ill-defined, and I've tried to use that as a strength to make the system fun for the players. And it's worked well. I just think that it sometimes makes it less transparent, and I certainly think it takes away from player-empowerment. But that's just my experience.
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.
Right, which helps. Anything that spells it out to the players and gives them concrete rules they can rely on is player-empowerment, and transparency for the players and GM. That's why I'm a proponent of that kind of thing happening a lot more often.
I don't understand your statements about stunts. In previous editions there were no really coherent rules about them at all.
Ah, I get why you might not get where I'm coming from then. Well, I'm coming at this from a mixed perspective of practical and theoretical. On a practical side, I'm not playing previous editions. I run basically one of three RPGs, and I've authored two of them (though one is only four pages long, and is used for one-shot superhero games once every few months). In both of my RPGs, stunts are mechanically accounted for. The rules are spelled out, ready for players to use.
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.
Don't get me wrong, I love page 42. I just wish it was open access for players to use without GM consultation. It's transparent, but it's not player-empowering. Which seemed strongly tied into Manbearcat's definition of illusionism and transparency, which is what I responded to.
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.
I feel exceptionally confident that I could play fast and loose with the mechanics in orderto rearrange the narrative to fit my whim with 4e. Easily. As GM, I get to set most skill DCs, choose when and what you're up against (and what level it is), choose when and how hard skill challenges are, choose who you meet and how they feel about you, and on and on it goes. It's easy to railroad in 4e. Just like any traditional RPG.
But, I do think mechanical certainty combats this to some degree. In my RPG, you can mechanically use skills (with set DCs) to affect how NPCs feel about you, to convince them to do things (or not do things), trick them or lie to them, etc. While these set DCs take into context the situation (if they're enemies and your request is outrageously bad for them, the DC might be very high and you might have to Intimidate them to bring it down or convince them you're not an enemy with Bluff, for example), they give the players a lot more control over the narrative in those areas.
No, this doesn't stop the GM from sending wave after wave of enemies, or calling for skill check after skill check (though getting the Consistent Skill feat means you can literally always take a 10 if you want to, so that one might not work either). But the more transparency and mechanical solutions you put in the hands of the players, I think the more the GMs hands are tied when he goes to railroad the PCs.
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.
Can you expand on why this wouldn't work well in 4e? My gut (after non-trivial experience running 4e, but only levels 1-11) tells me that it would be easy to run a game in that manner. I'm curious if you can expand on how you think the 4e mechanics in particular would combat a GM from stopping the players from affecting the flow of events in an appreciable way.
