D&D 4E The Best Thing from 4E

[Tony Vargas]

I agree that PCs were built in a way to promote the game's agenda. I still feel that the issue of "dramatic weight", as part of agenda, hadn't been given the same attention in this early D&D design as a contemporary designer would give it.

Well, sure, Gygax & Arneson were working up a new wargame, it would've been strange for them to think in those terms.

I'd note, also, that 4e uses the same mechanical format for PCs and monsters/NPCs.

Monster stat blocks seem pretty different. And, I don't recall many PCs rolling to re-charge powers just for one instance.

 

[exile]

Action economy

 

[pemerton]

Those are all in-story differences, though. If you compare a PC street samurai with an Ares Alpha and Wired Reflexes 3 to an NPC street samurai with the same, they're virtually identical.

But focusing purely on "in-story" factors won't tell you whether or not the game has an agenda of the sort being discussed here, and what its agenda is.

I don't know Shadowrun except by barest of reputation, so I'll use Marvel Heroic RP as my example.

In that game, the Black Widow (just to pick an example) can be played as either a PC hero or a NPC villain.

If she is played as a hero, then when building her dice pools she will get a d6, d8 or d10 depending on who else she is hanging out with (unsurprisingly, being a supers game, MHRP's resolution mechanics pay attention to the composition of teams),

If being played as an NPC, there is an option to keep those same dice, or - if she is intended to be a secondary character - to step them down, to d4, d6 and d8.

As a PC, certain abilities are activated by the player spending a token from a limited but replenishing pool. (The token are called "plot points". In D&D terms they straddle the roles of both action/fate points - ie metagame tokens - and spell/psionic points - ie heroic reserves that the character can draw upon.)

When the Black Widow is an NPC, those same abilities are activated by removing dice from the Doom Pool, which is the GM's resource bank.

If the Black Widow wants to acquire cool guns or tech, a check is required that involves building and resolving these dice pools, potentially spending these resources, etc. The overall mechanics of the game are set up so that as thse checks are made there is an ebb-and-flow between player plot points and GM's doom pool, but the economy slightly flavours the players (and hence the PCs).

There is no in-fiction difference between the Black Widow as a PC or an NPC - she could change statuses in the course of a scenario, for instance - but the game still has a strong agenda of PCs-as-protagonists. Black Widow with a cool gun as a PC is, in the fiction, no different from Black Widow with a cool gun as an NPC. But the mechanics for acquiring that gun, and of what she might do with that gun, favour PC protagonism.

As I said, I'm not familiar with Shadowrun's system, but I took [MENTION=336]D'karr[/MENTION]'s point to be that the PC build rules that the players are using, compared to the NPC build rules and scenario design rules that the GM is using, produce an outcome that supports (fairy strongly) the protagonist status of the PCs.

 

[pemerton]

Monster stat blocks seem pretty different. And, I don't recall many PCs rolling to re-charge powers just for one instance.

Recharge on a roll is a difference of power-mechanics, though, not stat block (not many PCs in 3E have frightful presence or recharging breath weapons, but that isn't really ground for saying dragons and PCs are statted the same way).

PC and NPC/monster stat blocks have defences, hit points, save adjustments, action points, immunities and the like, init bonuses, stats and bonuses, skill bonuses (where these differ from stat bonuses), equipment lists, languages, alignment and power descriptions.

PC character sheets carry extra information, typically, because they record build mechanics as well as the stats that those mechanics output - so they often list feats, assign powers to class and level, etc. But that is not necessary to actually run a PC from a stat block.

Having designed PC stat blocks to fit on one sheet, for ease of play, the main practical difference from monsters is the number of powers that PCs get compared to NPCs/monsters (especially at high levels). But the categories of information on the sheet, and its mechanical meaning, are the same. This is a contrast with (say) B/X, where monsters have a morale entry that PCs don't have, or from 1st ed AD&D, where monsters have no stat other than INT, and that is given as a range rather than a number.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I don't have any books in front of me but IIRC karma pool is used for advancement. NPCs have none.

Karma Points were spent for advancement, but Karma Pool was more like your level. Your Karma Pool went up automatically, with every 10 or 20 Karma Points that you gained, and could be temporarily expended for things like re-rolling all of your dice for one check.

NPCs didn't have Karma Points, for much the same reason you don't track XP for NPCs in a D&D game. NPCs did have a Karma Pool, though, for much the same reason that NPCs in a D&D game have a level (or effective level, such as Hit Dice or Challenge Rating, depending on edition).

Equipment might be an in-story difference but it's the mechanical function of that equipment that is actually relevant. A DM does not take option A for resources to build an NPC, then assign option B for racial, etc. He does no spend karma points to increase an attribute, or a skill. He simply assigns the NPC an abitrary (feels/looks okay) level of equipment and stats needed to survive a base skirmish. Or even easier picks one right out of the contacts lists and uses that.

NPCs don't conform to Karma advancement, because we're not tracking Karma Points for them. An NPC is as strong/fast/cybered as is necessary to represent what the character is within the world. If an NPC has the same story and background and place-in-the-world as a PC, then it will have identical stats.

PCs are supposed to be (nominally) balanced with each other. This limits the type of characters who are suitable to being PCs. For each character you can imagine as a resident of Seattle, circa 2050, there is exactly one mechanical way to best-represent that character, and this representation doesn't depend on out-of-game factors like whether it's a PC or an NPC. Only a small subset of these residents will conform to the character-gen method in use for the campaign, and only those individuals are suitable to being played by the players.

(This is in contrast to D&D 4E, or I guess the Marvel Heroic system, where you could have different numbers attached to the same character, depending on that character's current role in the story. Those systems definitely do take literary weight into account.)

 

[D'karr]

As I already mentioned the Karma Pool is a distinct pool earned by PCs (every 10 points puts one on their pool), and given to important NPCs. Not every NPC has it because not every NPC is significant/important.

However, every PC does have it. The game acknowledges the "protagonism" of the PCs by giving them a pool specifically designed as "luck". In doing so it also recognizes that some NPCs should also have this measure of "luck". Special NPCs get it, but a corner street punk does not.

That is my point. Therefore PC build and NPC build is acknowledged by the game to be different.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

As I already mentioned the Karma Pool is a distinct pool earned by PCs (every 10 points puts one on their pool), and given to important NPCs. Not every NPC has it because not every NPC is significant/important.

Taking it a step further, Karma Pool is a lot like level. Every PC starts at level 1. Not every NPC has reached level 1 yet.

 

[Tony Vargas]

PC and NPC/monster stat blocks have defences, hit points, save adjustments, action points, immunities and the like, init bonuses, stats and bonuses, skill bonuses (where these differ from stat bonuses), equipment lists, languages, alignment and power descriptions.

So they're in the same system...

This is a contrast with (say) B/X, where monsters have a morale entry that PCs don't have, or from 1st ed AD&D, where monsters have no stat other than INT, and that is given as a range rather than a number.

So, unless the monster has something like % is liar or no appearing or something of that nature, the completely different way in which they're generated, lack of feats, and completely different stat block don't matter, because you could mash a PC into something like a really long monster stat block?

OK.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm just going to leave all the rest of this to rest because it seems to be getting contentious and I feel like you're arguing from a base of experience that simply doesn't mesh with what I've seen over the years.

I lose more time to prep in 4e than I ever lost to thinking up modifiers and conditions. I don't even prep for my other game; I just write up stuff between sessions that fleshes out the world.

Yeah, I'd say the same thing, 4e IME is extremely simple and straightforward to GM. Often I can just wing it, there's not big need to do a lot of prep, though I do like to jot down some sketches, pre-select some stat blocks, etc. Its in any case a very easy game to run, vastly easier than 2e was, though I don't think 2e was anywhere near as laborious as 3.x would be.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I agree that PCs were built in a way to promote the game's agenda. I still feel that the issue of "dramatic weight", as part of agenda, hadn't been given the same attention in this early D&D design as a contemporary designer would give it.

Yes. I'm not saying that OD&D used the same stats for PCs and NPCs/monsters. I'm saying that I don't think the element of "dramatic/literary" weight had been given the attention that a modern designer would give it.

I'm not sure. I mean it is pretty hard to say since we cannot delve into the minds of either of the games originators by asking them. Certainly there wasn't a lot of 'plot armor' given to PCs in OD&D. Of course giving such would have undermined Gary's agenda for low level PCs, which was a sort of bloody training ground for higher level. My understanding was that Dave Arneson had arranged things quite differently with PCs much more in keeping with say 4e levels of toughness and heroism, but since it was Gygax who acted as editor things tended to get done his way in the published game.

So it sounds to me like there was a direct consideration of exactly what PC mechanics served what agenda and a debate about what that agenda exactly was, with Gary coming out on top. This might at least partly explain why Dave's contributions to the game ceased pretty early on, he simply had different objectives and he clearly would have known that D&D, as published, wasn't really suited to them.