D&D 4E The Best Thing from 4E

[The Crimson Binome]

I'm not sure what you mean by this. For instance, if a player wants to have his PC create an item by internalising the chaos magic emanating from a firedrake an a nearby portal to the Elemental Chaos, but the GM decides that this is not possible within the gameworld, then the player is not free to do that.

Clarification: The players can attempt anything they want, and the DM has no power over their free will. The only influence of the DM is in determining the natural laws of the world, and running any NPCs who might show up.

The DM creates the world. The PCs explore it.

 

[Zustiur]

Just to be clear: do you object to the solo - elite - standard progression?

Cause it's one thing to dislike minion mechanics, and another thing to dislike the progression.

People _loved_ when I put out a couple dozen dragons in my Epic game, because they were so high level that those solos they remember from Heroic were chaff in the wind before their might.

That's a very good question. I know for certain that I don't like the minion mechanics, even when damage thresholds are used. I never actually encountered solo - elite or elite - standard, so I can only extrapolate. I don't think it would suit me because it would still have the same flaw as minions, namely; the change in ease of killing them has nothing to do with the actual character getting more powerful and everything to do with the dm changing the monster while calling it the same name. I get the point of it. As a dm I'm all for it, but as a player it really feels like a let down.

It's one of those mechanic to story disconnects. The characters in the story have become super powerful, but the monsters are the ones whose mechanics changed. The roles try to give the illusion of character advancement without actually advancing the characters. I wasn't able to believe the illusion, I saw through it from the start with minions and think that I'd see through it with other rank changes also.

Thinking about it, I'd have been happier with some sort of multiplier effect where you deal extra damage to creatures of a much lower level while keeping those creatures with their original HP.

 

[pemerton]

Clarification: The players can attempt anything they want, and the DM has no power over their free will. The only influence of the DM is in determining the natural laws of the world, and running any NPCs who might show up.

The DM creates the world. The PCs explore it.

Thanks, the clarification helps.

The last paragraph, though, obscures things a bit for me, because the first sentence is in out-of-game language ("The DM creates the world") but the second sentence is in in-game language ("The PCs explore the world").

If we translate the second sentence into out-of-game, real word, language, what do we get? "The players find out what the GM was thinking?" is one option, but I suspect that's not the translation you would want. I'm interested to hear what you think the translation is. (In Gygaxian D&D, I think it's mostly "The players get to find out what the GM wrote on his/her map and key, but only if they come up with clever moves that, by the rules of the game, oblige the GM to tell them.")

 

[pemerton]

I hadn't considered that someone might try to run an entire game, without so much as developing a theory about how magic actually works - at least well enough to answer anything that the PCs attempt.

I have been a DM of D&D games starting with OD&D and Holme's Basic back in 1976, built several settings, and run 1000's upon 1000's of games across probably 50 campaigns. I have no idea how magic works in any sort of conceptual sense.

<snip>

In no case have I seen it involve the elaboration and invention of detailed theories of magic as a requisite of DMing expertise.

I think the number of sessions I've run is in the hundreds rather than thousands (maybe a little over 1000), and I started with Moldvay in 1982, but otherwise my experience is pretty similar to AbdulAlhazred's.

Here's an example I just came up with off the top of my head: if I polymorph an ant into a human being, can it then be used as the sacrifice for a cacodemon spell? Or, to flip it around, does a human reincarnated as a badger or fox (which is therefore still sapient, per the rules of the spell on Gygax's PHB p 64) count as a possible human sacrifice?

And that's an example that involves something for which AD&D actually has rules, namely, souls and spirits!

If I think of examples from literature: the sword being trapped in the stone and able to be drawn out only by the true king; Siegfried bathing in dragon's blood and therefore being able to talk with birds; Achilles being dipped in the river and thereby becoming invulnerable - how should an AD&D GM handle any of them? If the answer is simply "they can't be done" then I guess that's easy, but it doesn't suggest that D&D is doing a very good job of emulating the source material!

The idea that a GM would sort all this stuff out in advance strikes me as pretty implausible, unless the sorting out in advance basically means decreeing nothing but spells in the form they're found in the PHB.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Here's an example I just came up with off the top of my head: if I polymorph an ant into a human being, can it then be used as the sacrifice for a cacodemon spell? Or, to flip it around, does a human reincarnated as a badger or fox (which is therefore still sapient, per the rules of the spell on Gygax's PHB p 64) count as a possible human sacrifice?

And that's an example that involves something for which AD&D actually has rules, namely, souls and spirits!

If I think of examples from literature: the sword being trapped in the stone and able to be drawn out only by the true king; Siegfried bathing in dragon's blood and therefore being able to talk with birds; Achilles being dipped in the river and thereby becoming invulnerable - how should an AD&D GM handle any of them? If the answer is simply "they can't be done" then I guess that's easy, but it doesn't suggest that D&D is doing a very good job of emulating the source material!

The idea that a GM would sort all this stuff out in advance strikes me as pretty implausible, unless the sorting out in advance basically means decreeing nothing but spells in the form they're found in the PHB.

Yeah, and this is why 4e's very generalized system was so welcome to me. Something like what Pemerton was describing is SO EASY in 4e! It has very few strictures. The different mechanical elements are very easily brought together in different combinations to support the fiction. You can employ large swaths of the vast array of crunch that the game puts at your fingertips to support any given narrative. It is really a very very flexible game that lets you quickly compose solid responses to player actions, to anticipated or unanticipated plot developments, etc.

And honestly, as an exploration game, there's nothing wrong with it. Sure, the equipment lists are not so specific and exhaustive as they were in say 1e AD&D, but there's no shortage of the basic key materials needed to send characters out into the wilderness and have them try to survive a hexcrawl. The DM will probably approach some of the mechanical chores a little bit differently, maybe employ the SC rules instead of random monster checks and generated encounters to see what happens, but I've done it, it was fun. In my first 4e campaign the PCs spent ages working their way through the vast forest hex by hex. Eventually the story arc of that game went on to other things, there's still a lot of unexplored forest, but they had many memorable hours of pretty old-fashioned fun fighting with goblins, giants, spiders, old lost crypts, etc. I've moved on a bit in my employment of 4e to a little more dynamic style now, but the game was reasonably suitable to that kind of employment as long as you paid attention to designing encounter locations in a way that avoided the dreaded rooms full of monsters paradigm.

Honestly, for all the theory that gets bandied about in various places, I don't think 4e is REALLY at heart super far off from its ancestors. It has tools for more types of situations, but in actual spirit its just doing what 2e couldn't mechanically manage to pull off, which 3e could only do if the players really cooperated closely with the DM, and which 5e perhaps does even better in a more narrow sense. Its just that by being so flexible and yet making all the parts work in a balanced way together, it became a system that could go beyond where D&D was really ever able to go before. Its the gestalt of all those things that really makes 4e great. I really don't think the poll works TBH. 4e needs all of the things it lists (pretty much anyway) to be what it is, they aren't separable from the whole. This is why 5e doesn't push any of the same buttons for me even if it has some '4e-like elements', it isn't the whole package.

 

[Balesir]

The only consideration is "Does it make sense, in this world, for the situation at hand?"

But, as [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] says, this must involve a good measure of personal aesthetics and expression of belief, since not every conceivable situation in the world can be imagined in advance, surely? This boils down to the players guessing what the GM's aesthetics and beliefs about the world are (the real world, that is, as that inevitably informs a good chunk of how we imagine fantasy worlds to work).

Really? I hadn't considered that someone might try to run an entire game, without so much as developing a theory about how magic actually works - at least well enough to answer anything that the PCs attempt.

Count me as another who has run many, many games with only, at best, a fairly cursory outline idea of how magic works in the world. In fact, from what I know based on conversation and correspondance with him, count Robin Crossby, the maker of HârnWorld as another, and one who designed game world elements professionally!

The DM creates the world. The PCs explore it.

I held to this as a theoretical paradigm for many years. I no longer believe it works (or even that it would be desirable if it did).

As for the rest of it, and genre conventions? The DM should know how the world works. You created the world, after all. You have responsibility for adjudicating these things. If the action makes sense to you, in your mental model of the world, then the players can do it within the world. If your vision of the world is not one where chaotic energies can be channelled into an item, then the world doesn't work that way. (And the characters, who have lived in this world for decades, should have a pretty good idea about whether such things make sense for that world; there should be no need to actually play out such an inevitable failure.)

You describe a situation where a player explores a complete and fully described world made up by the GM, but is that ever really a possibility? We do not have a complete and comprehensive understanding, collectively and with the full record of several hundred years of scientific enquiry, of this one world in which we live! We do not even have any very coherent explanation of how our own minds work, despite recent progress concerning the nature of memory and perception - it has become clear that we are barely scratching the surface, so far. So what is the chance that we can conceive of a fully realised world that is significantly different to this one? I would say the chance is slim indeed!

But I also think such a situation, at best illusory, is unnecessary. Other posts in this thread have crystallised one way that 4E gets around the problem, even, with its "say yes (to rolling the dice)" mantra. It seems to me that this can become quite analogous to the scientific method, but for a game world. Even better is that, as GM, I get to do some exploring of my own! As the participants in the game imagine potential possibilities, we do the equivalent of experiments. These experiments either work or they don't, as determined by the dice results, and just as with scientific experiments these results build the theories concerning how the game world works. You can think of the dice here representing not so much the variability of character skill or circumstances, but as the "voice of the world" telling us whether our theories concerning the "laws of nature" have weight. Just as with real-world science, a successful experiment on its own is not necessarily a deal clincher; we might say that future attempts to duplicate the experiment (or something similar) require a similar roll. Our grasp of the theory is still rudimentary and perhaps partial. But a failure of the experiment might say more; in 4E terms the initial experiment might involve a Moderate DC, but a second after a failed first becomes Hard - evidence is accumulating that our theory is wrong! Eventually, the DC for a duplication of what has worked before might become easy. In time it might become another established Power. Thus the "reality" of the world is established by all involved - and without any need to break immserion in the game world at all.

It's interesting that, in the context of such a system, DCs related to the "experimenter's" level actually have some logic behind them. After all, the roll is not intended to represent skill or power - it represents whether the world is really as the character conjectures it to be. Of course, the characters will, to some extent, appear to shape the world via this technique, since only those conjectures they choose to make will be tested - but is that not precisely the same with scientists in the real world?

 

[Argyle King]

I actually really liked a lot of the 4E cosmology.

I also liked the encounter design ideal of having more moving pieces involved... a party of pcs versus a group of monsters; I liked that a lot more than how 3E encounter design tended to work.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

If we translate the second sentence into out-of-game, real word, language, what do we get? "The players find out what the GM was thinking?" is one option, but I suspect that's not the translation you would want. I'm interested to hear what you think the translation is.

The players play characters, who explore the world. That shouldn't have been ambiguous in any way.

In many fantasy worlds, of the type which D&D can readily model, there are plenty of interesting things out there to explore - monsters, treasure, magic, etc. As the characters travel, they discover what/where/why the monsters and other NPCs are, and they change the course of events which otherwise might play out differently. If they want, the player characters may choose to explore the nature of magic, which had better have some sort of underlying principles and not just be "because it's magic" because that's not a real answer. (Most characters will probably be content with exploring the mundane matters of the world, just like most people in real life don't care how the laws of physics work.)

 

[Tony Vargas]

Honestly, for all the theory that gets bandied about in various places, I don't think 4e is REALLY at heart super far off from its ancestors. It has tools for more types of situations, but in actual spirit its just doing what 2e couldn't mechanically manage to pull off, which 3e could only do if the players really cooperated closely with the DM, and which 5e perhaps does even better in a more narrow sense. Its just that by being so flexible and yet making all the parts work in a balanced way together, it became a system that could go beyond where D&D was really ever able to go before. Its the gestalt of all those things that really makes 4e great. I really don't think the poll works TBH. 4e needs all of the things it lists (pretty much anyway) to be what it is, they aren't separable from the whole. This is why 5e doesn't push any of the same buttons for me even if it has some '4e-like elements', it isn't the whole package.

You make 4e sound decidedly unique and wonderful, and possibly even irreplaceable, there.

While 4e is, of course, unique (and is not unique in that, at all), and may seem exceptional when you consider only the set of RPGs bearing the D&D nameplate, not /everything/ (not every detail) that made it so is really needed to make a good game. At least, not each in that particular form. If a game is functional, balanced (ie gives players many meaningful & viable choices), and clearly presented, it can be pretty good. It needn't copy AEDU, any consistent balanceable class structure could do as well. It needn't have minions, any playable mechanism for modeling 'lesser foes,' might do as well, and so forth.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

But, as [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] says, this must involve a good measure of personal aesthetics and expression of belief, since not every conceivable situation in the world can be imagined in advance, surely? This boils down to the players guessing what the GM's aesthetics and beliefs about the world are (the real world, that is, as that inevitably informs a good chunk of how we imagine fantasy worlds to work).

Such is the role of the DM, and a good example of that is in the description of HP loss. As pointed out in 5E, different DMs like to describe HP loss differently, mostly based on what makes sense to them on what's going on in the narrative; it creates a very different tone for the game, when the DM describes an arrow which digs into your back (-5 HP, no penalties) vs one that you narrowly dodge (-5 HP, no penalties). When you agree to let one person run the game, you agree that his or her aesthetic will shape much of the world. It's perfectly fine for a player to back out of a game because you don't like the way that the DM describes stuff. (I seem to recall that one of that stated goals of 4E was to bring different DMs into line and reduce table variance, so that a player could be guaranteed of a more standardized experience regardless of who is running it.)

You describe a situation where a player explores a complete and fully described world made up by the GM, but is that ever really a possibility?

The DM never really needs to fully set the entire world in stone, though. One of the tricks is to just assume that non-immediate regions take care of themselves, so you only need to figure out the specifics before it would become relevant. As long as you know yourself, and how you will make those determinations later on, it should all work itself out in a consistent manner.

These experiments either work or they don't, as determined by the dice results, and just as with scientific experiments these results build the theories concerning how the game world works.

Emphasis mine. If you try to detail a world in this manner, you get a world where the laws of physics are literally determined by playing dice.

The laws of physics cannot possibly work that way. The real laws of physics - even in a fantasy world - must be true regardless of your belief in them (barring extreme circumstances where they actually are shaped by your belief, but that's a degenerate case). Sometimes, the correct answer of someone who does everything right must be that an idea is wrong. Most science goes toward disproving theories.