D&D 4E The Best Thing from 4E

[Ricochet]

Action Points. Specifically, the way they were implemented in 4e, where an AP gave you an extra action.

This.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yes, I remember getting that feeling when I thought about running an ME game. It looks good from a distance but zooming in to anything (except the languages!) it breaks, there's no 'there' there. Swords & Sorcery settings don't tend to have this issue so much, perhaps because they tend to be based off the ancient or medieval world so closely.
As you say, to work Middle Earth needs a hell of a lot of mundanification - Arnor needs surviving human settlements and trade networks, Rohan a dependable non-Enty source of wood, Minas Tirith needs extra gates for the food wagons, etc etc etc.

And beyond that, can you imagine a typical D&D-type party in Minas Tirith? Is there a 'seedy side of town?', does it have strumpets? It just doesn't FEEL like Middle Earth, the tone is wrong. Yet if we think about it we know such things must exist. Only the Shire and Bree really came close to feeling like the real world, and that was probably because in a sense that's what they functioned as, sort of the gateway, a place that was both ordinary and part of the non-ordinary world of adventure.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

It's common in 4e for the Arcana skill to be able to manipulate magical forces - comes up a lot in the published adventures. Took me a bit of getting used to, too.
Recently IMC the treasure table I was using threw up a ring bound with 'living fire' from the Elemental Chaos, very very valuable but not officially a 'magic item'. The players naturally wanted to turn it into a real magic item, and there was some discussion & negotiation of how they could do this, and what it might be.They were able to get it turned into a fire ring, a rare item from Mordenkainens ME: not something I had planned in advance, but seemed reasonable.

The ritual system is fantastic for this. One time the PCs in my campaign were in the lost dwarven city and being plagued by Jermlaine that infested the ventilation system. Nobody could (or was insane enough to) go in after them. So the wizard sat down and used a skill challenge to take a couple hours to brew up a ritualized version of her Stinking Cloud power that would fill the shafts with poison gas. It worked and everyone was suitably impressed with her arcane prowess. The players did many similar things at various times, some of them with less stellar results...

 

[neobolts]

The best things about 4e were the ease of encounter building for DMs, minions, and the variety within a monster (i.e. goblins with various roles). Building solid, level appropriate encounters was a breeze in 4e. 4e was a solid RPG overall with both strength and weaknesses, even if it didn't feel like "D&D" to me as much as other editions. Some of the things on the voting list I would consider 4e's biggest follies: AEDU sameness between classes, an overemphasis on tactical combat powers and status effects, and the artificial and uninspired skill challenge system.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'll bite! (In a slightly tangential way.)

Some years ago now, @LostSoul pointed me to this blog piece, about "narrative technique" in RPGing.

The main point of the blog is that there is a tension between (i) player authorial power and (ii) player-driven, scene-framing-style play - namely, that if the players get to author their own solutions or outcomes via plot power, this undercuts the emotional power of engaging a challenge/crisis via your PC. Here is how the blog author (Eero Tuovinen) puts it:

[W]hen you apply narration sharing to backstory authority, you require the player to both establish and resolve a conflict, which runs counter to the Czege principle [an observation that "it’s not exciting to play a roleplaying game if the rules require one player to both introduce and resolve a conflict"]. You also require the player to take on additional responsibilities in addition to his tasks in character advocacy . . . nstead of only having to worry about expressing his character and making decisions for him . . . he has to make decisions that are not predicated on the best interests of his character, but on the best interests of the story itself.​

The author goes on to contrast narration-sharing with scene-framing-style RPGing:

The fun in these games from the player’s viewpoint comes from the fact that he can create an amazing story with nothing but choices made in playing his character; this is the holy grail of rpg design, this is exactly the thing that was promised to me in 1992 in the MERP rulebook. And it works, but only as long as you do not require the player to take part in determining the backstory and moments of choice. If the player character is engaged in a deadly duel with the evil villain of the story, you do not ask the player to determine whether it would be “cool” if the villain were revealed to be the player character’s father. The correct heuristic is to throw out the claim of fatherhood if it seems like a challenging revelation for the character, not ask the player whether he’s OK with it – asking him is the same as telling him to stop considering the scene in terms of what his character wants and requiring him to take an objective stance on what is “best for the story”. Consensus is a poor tool in driving excitement, a roleplaying game does not have teeth if you stop to ask the other players if it’s OK to actually challenge their characters.​

Burning Wheel allows more formal player backtory authority than does 4e - I've given the examples upthread, of using the Circles mechanic to bring NPCs into play. But it tries to use various devices to make sure that these don't lead to the problem just described. First, they require checks - so mechanically, they work out the same way as other action declarations, with the GM having control over failure narration. Second, the GM still has authority over framing the PCs (and thereby the players) into conflicts/challenges, so the players' introduction of backstory (in the form of "NPCs my guy would know", or "information about Greyhawk that my guy would know") is by way of response to those challenges, not establishing new conflicts for his/her PC.

Otherwise the basic mechanical play of BW is pretty traditional. It has some fairly simple "limit-break" stuff (various sorts of fate points that add bonus dice and can be used to dodge PC death). Otherwise the bells and whistles are in the advancement rules (which create incentives (i) not to always use your biggest possible bonus, and (ii) to take on impossible tasks) and the rules for earning the fate points, as well as "fail forward", "say yes" and "no retries" as key GMing techniques.

Right, I mentioned 'raising stakes', which COULD of course have something to do with introducing conflict, but most often wouldn't. It would be more likely to be something like "OK, you can't cross the burning chasm on the bridge in one round, and you don't think the door can hold back the fire giant any longer. Right! I just LEAP the whole chasm in one mighty jump! OK, but if you fail you're going down into the lava..."

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

That last bit after the comma is not helping, I don't think. The player in my game played his character in the setting within the limits of what the character could actually do.

But also - by drawing upon his conception of his character and of the setting - he conjectured that those limits included something which hadn't previously been discussed, established or explored.

If you are excluding that from the player role - and I agree that 2nd ed AD&D does exclude it - you are confining the player role in a way which is (in my view) not fully described by "playing my character within the limits of what the character can actually do". It is also precluding the player from testing those limits. The player has a certain degree of certainty about what the character can and cannot do - and consequently a degree of passivity - that I think is not necessarily verisimilitudinous, nor true to the experience of watching a movie or reading a novel.

For instance, it seems that the only way you can be surprised by what your character can do is if the GM reveals a new mechanic to you.

I think the key part for me here is 'exploration'. FOR ME, what [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION] is describing is a prohibition against exploration of the game world in some dimensions. He's allowed to enter an unexplored room in the dungeon, but he's not allowed to explore the edges of how magic works.

I guess there's an element of "It had to be determined ahead of time" in there. Presumably the room door will only open if the DM described its contents before the party even contemplated going there? This temporal dependency puzzles me somewhat. Is it absolute? Did the DM have to describe the room before the campaign started so he couldn't possibly say put a trap in there that he knew the thief would probably not find? I think clearly there's some sort of leeway here. So at what point do things have to be nailed down? Is the DM allowed to make up some rules about chaos energy and sorcery AFTER he knows the PCs have a wild magic sorcerer in the party and are hunting a certain dragon? Or is it only acceptable if he did it before that? Finally, how would the players be able to tell the difference anyway?

Just for myself I'd much prefer to be able to explore any dimension of the game world, and IMHO I can't possibly expect the DM to have invented it all beforehand, nor have some formal rule for generating every possible kind of thing I might explore.

For example I am now, in the guise of my character, exploring the politics and geography of my sister's campaign world in our 5e game. I'm sure lots of this is determined already to some degree, but I know for a fact she has to make up a lot of it just so I can play my character. That doesn't make it any less valid exploration. Yes, I know some of it will be shaped by dramatic needs which my character brings into the game at this point. If someone in another of the innumerable games set in this world were to have done this, it would probably shape the world differently. So what?

 

[Scrivener of Doom]

The ritual system is fantastic for this. One time the PCs in my campaign were in the lost dwarven city and being plagued by Jermlaine that infested the ventilation system. Nobody could (or was insane enough to) go in after them. So the wizard sat down and used a skill challenge to take a couple hours to brew up a ritualized version of her Stinking Cloud power that would fill the shafts with poison gas. It worked and everyone was suitably impressed with her arcane prowess. The players did many similar things at various times, some of them with less stellar results...

Similarly, in the first and best skill challenge that I ever ran, the bard used his staggering note at-will and an Arcana check to boost the vocal capacity of his ally who was seeking to sway the crowd against another faction. The enemy demagogue simply couldn't compete when the bard turned it up to 11....

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Just focusing on (1) - how does the GM decide? As in, what considerations are meant to be taken into account?

You've said upthread that you don't want your desire, as a player, to have your PC do this thing make a difference. So presumably, then, the GM is not meant to have regard to the fact that the player, having tentatively declared the action, wants to be allowed to attempt it. This is a clear difference from 4e, which encourages the GM to say yes to such requests.

But what other considerations are relevant? Genre ones, obviously, but most of the time that won't settle the question either way because engaged players tend to try and reinforce or build on genre rather than undermine it.

What else? (Not rhetorical.)

I'm thinking of this in terms of what was said about 2e earlier, where it was said to be 'out of genre' to have a wizard construct some magical effect on the fly. I don't think its really clear that this is the case, though certainly it is commonly held to be so. I think game balance was mentioned, and that's probably the main reason. With its roots in Gygaxian play 2e still tries to present each class as a finite 'menu' of options and attributes. You can try to apply them to different situations, but for Gygax it was all about 'use the tools you have', and making up a new tool wouldn't have fit well. So I can see why we think that way in terms of 2e, but its not actually spelled out per se in that game anywhere. There just isn't any mechanic for going outside that box (and there isn't even a defined mechanic for going outside other boxes like doing an athletic stunt, though interestingly 'mundane' things are assumed to be part and parcel of all characters, except the weird void of thief skills...). Overall 2e is a bit of a confusing game!

 

[bert1000]

While the spontaneous Chase turned out ok, I ended up discarding the strict "X successes before 3 failures" model because the logic of the PCs' actions dictated that they caught the fleeing villain before their target number of successes.

I have seen this happen when the DM and group do not shift the meaning of success/failure of a single skill check.

It’s not explained well in the material, but by accepting that this is a good situation for a SC, you are also accepting that you need multiple successes (x) to reach your goal. Therefore, a success on a single skill check can only mean incremental progress toward the goal (unless it is the last one needed). The meaning of a single skill check has changed and the way a player can dictate her intent has changed.

So, in a SC chase scene someone can always say –

Player: “I try to shoot the rope holding the barrels, so the barrels topple on the assassin and take him out”. Rolls a 20! “I got him right?”

Dm: “Uhh, I guess you did. That was a good roll. Forget this SC.”

No! That is the single roll paradigm where you are expecting to get what you want if you beat the DC. The DM in fact sets the DC based on your desired goal in the 'normal' paradigm and the player has a lot of say on what that goal is. SC says that’s not how it works – you always just get closer to your goal. You can not expect the barrels to stop the assassin if its the first success, no matter what the roll. It's just a different structure.

By accepting the situation is suitable for a SC, the player needs to accept that she can’t negotiate/expect an ‘all or nothing’ result from a single skill check. And the DM needs to describe the successes as helpful to the goal but not so helpful that reaching the goal seems inevitable without further action.

And there is almost always a fiction first way of showing this incremental progress.

So in a skill challenge:

Player: “I try to shoot the rope holding the barrels, so the barrels topple on the assassin and take him out”. Rolls a 20!

DM: “The rope snaps and the barrels come crashing off the rack. The assassin manages to dodge most of them but one barrel slams into his leg and he falls to the ground for a moment. He gets back up but you’ve closed some distance and you notice a slight limp. He’s not going to be climbing up on roofs anymore.. He makes a sharp left behind a building and out of sight.”

Players: "We follow him, running"

DM: "You turn the corner and see hundreds of people in the crowded marketplace. He could be anywhere."

So the success has as a gamest component (you’ve tailed 1 success), but it also has a fictional framing component--- the assassin is likely to switch tactics from acrobatics to subterfuge since his leg is messed up. This gives PCs strong in Perception, Streetwise, etc. the spotlight vs. those with strong physical skills. Shifting the focus of the scene midway -- another key to making SC interesting.

 

[Tony Vargas]

The best things about 4e were the ease of encounter building for DMs, minions, and the variety within a monster (i.e. goblins with various roles). Building solid, level appropriate encounters was a breeze in 4e.

4e did make DMing pretty easy. I was surprised at how quickly new-to-the-hobby players would feel confident to DM.