D&D 4E The Best Thing from 4E

[D'karr]

I started playing with Moldvay Basic, so I never had an issue with the minimalist approach to instructions, spells, etc. In Basic the spells were mostly a name, and at most a couple of sentences with mechanical information and possibly some flavor information. The DM and players pretty much made up the rest. When people talk about creative use of spells that's what I think of since spells were mostly open-ended.

In 4e there were so many elements that would point me to a reasonable interpretation that I didn't need the huge flavor text interspersed with mechanical trappings.

If something had the keyword psychic it was affecting the mind, if it used keyword fire it could light things on fire if desired, etc. So when I saw an effect with psychic, fear, push, etc. it was easy to correlate those things because the mechanical effects mapped to the flavor text, or the name of the effect.

 

[TwoSix]

Now I would hope that an action declaration such as OMG MY INTIMIDATE IS SUPER HIGH SO I INTIMIDATE TWO TREES INTO LAYING DOWN SO I CAN SKI DOWN THE RIVER WOOT or OMG I HEAL THE PAINFUL CRACK IN THE EARTH WHERE THE RIVER FLOWS SO THE MOUNTAIN IS NOW MY FRIEND AND REACHES UP WITH ITS MOUNTAINY HAND AND WALKS ME TO THE NEAREST VILLAGE are bad faith, uncredible (and the second one is mechanically untenable) action declarations that are wholly unsupportable by the system and by anyone purporting to care about either fictional positioning or genre coherency. Both of which 4e advocates for in its PHBs, both its DMGs, Neverwinter/Feywild and every online article in Dungeon ever.

This. I've said it before, but to be succinct: If you use player empowerment techniques to empower a bunch of dicks, your game is going to get swamped by dickishness. If you do have to play with those people, by all means, railroad, illusion and DM force away.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Read them as both player and character are aware and yes the players know their decisions to delay things will affect things. I remember I became frustrated in 4e when the urgency of the in-game fiction for the characters did not carry through to the players - so they would declare rests often and refresh their abilities. It forced me to design every combat encounter challenging enough to warrant their rests. I'm curious, did no one else experience this or have a problem with it?

Short or long rests?

I ask because short rests were genuinely short, and neither were exactly new ideas.

More long rests than the 'fiction' would seem to indicate were already an endemic issue with D&D, since the very beginning. The 15min workday was familiar from the early days of the game when the party would run out of hps and the Cleric's few Cure Light Wounds spells and have to take a 'day' (4 hrs + 15 min/spell level or 8 hrs depending on the DM) off for the Cleric, at minimum, to get more spells, possibly two or more cycles of memorizing & casting all Cure Light Wounds. Nothing much happened to change the 15min workday in 2e, and in 3e it was ameliorated only by the prevalence of WoCLW (while further abetted by 'nova' tactics). 4e still had daily powers - and, while it had fewer of them, overall, all classes had them, so there was little net reduction in the 5MWD impulse, it just didn't impact class balance as severely.

Short rests go back to 1e, though it was never anything unusual for parties to stop and loot bodies, dole out healing, and search rooms and so forth after every battle. In 1e, dungeon exploration progressed in 10 minute turns. If there was a combat, it consumed a whole turn, even if it was over in less than 10 rounds - the remainder of the time was assumed spent resting, mending armor, binding wounds, &c. It was a fairly obscure rule, but it was there. The WoCLW brought back short rests with a vengeance, in 3e, and in 4e they were a formal, but fairly simple part of the system.

Yes, 4e assumed a short rest after most, if not virtually all encounters. Short rests were genuinely short, and re-charged very important resources, so it would take severe time pressure to make skipping them a good idea. It would also take severe time pressure to make them incongruous in the fiction.

Long rests should have been a lot more subject to any sense of urgency in the fiction, since they were 96 times as long.

5 minute workday? This is not caused by 4e, its been a thing, witnessed by the existence since early days of the term '5 minute workday' since the first dungeon was drawn. It was a primary motivating factor for the invention of wandering monster checks. Frankly I thought 4e's inclusion of a 'short rest' during which some limited recovery could take place, plus milestones (rather lightweight, but a help) and just the whole design of surges etc was the best antidote the game has yet seen.

That and AEDU putting everyone on about the same resource schedule, so that, even if the campaign did fall into a 5MWD rut - or a much more unusual overly-long-day rut - /class/ balanced wasn't unduly impacted.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm all for transparency, but I fail to see how 4E achieves that in any meaningful way, compared to something like 3.5 or Pathfinder. As I was saying before, I have no idea what sort of check or Challenge would be required to complete any given task (described in narrative terms), when the difficulty of a task depends not only on quantifiable details like the bonus on your check, but also the DM's perception of how difficult something should be, both in an absolute sense, but also relative to your power level. If I want to build a boat, then the systems in place for that are fairly straightforward in 3.5, but I couldn't even begin to guess what the DM would ask me to do in 4E. Part of that is probably down to familiarity, of course, but could you tell me what kind of check it would require? Would a conference of seven DMs, each with substantial 4E experience, be able to agree on what was required?

Sorry, I don't mean this to be confrontational, but you're looking at 3.5 through rose-colored glasses. There is NOTHING AT ALL WHATSOEVER in that system that sets a DC for building a boat. There is a generalized 'Craft' skill, in which you select a subcategory, but the subcategories are largely undefined. There is thus no SPECIFIC skill in 3.5 that equates to 'boatbuilding'. It could be its own thing, or it could fall under carpentry or maybe even something else.

Beyond that there is NO DC for building a boat. All there is is a list which says 'very simple', 'typical', 'high quality', and 'complex or superior' and gives a DC for each (which BTW all fall within a fairly narrow range of 15 points that the game blows right past for typical skill bonuses within a few levels). I don't know if a boat is a 'typical' item, a 'high quality' item, or a 'complex' item. What if I decide to build a superior boat, is that harder? Because the time required is based on cost and complexity I can't judge that either! 3.5's Craft skill is nothing BUT DM judgement!

4e makes it much simpler. Narratively you build a boat. If doing so even requires any sort of mechanical adjudication (because presumably some sort of conflict is involved) then all or part of the conflict can be resolved using a skill challenge. While the skills and DCs involved are 'arbitrary' in some sense, they are no more so than the arbitrary Craft DCs in 3.5, which themselves are likely to need to be supplemented by other, also arbitrary, skill checks to obtain supplies, etc in any case where the whole thing is important enough to warrant mechanics.

The end result is that in 3.5 there's an ill-defined sequence of checks to be passed at ill-defined DCs with overall success arbitrarily determined by the DM when 'enough' checks have passed or failed. Meanwhile in 4e there's a defined process for structuring this sequence of checks as an SC and the actual DCs aren't any MORE arbitrary than in 3.5. In either case the DM could simply assign them based on judgment alone to begin with "Gosh, a trained boatsmith is a 0-level guy, maybe with 5 ranks in craft. A boat costs N gp, so its logical it takes him X days to build it, lets see... DC 12!"

A giant chart could exist for DCs like this, and boats might well be a common enough theme that they would get a mention (even though 3.5 doesn't mention them in its craft skill), but in general MANY things will NOT be listed, and that only covers the actual check for the boat, not anything else surrounding that or leading up to it. I don't strongly object to the equipment rules maybe having something like that in them, but its not a real high priority in my view because such a list simply cannot answer all questions and cannot possibly be more than a couple 100 items long at best, out of 1000's of items that PCs may build in the course of a game.

The one area where everyone seems to hail the transparency of the mechanics is in the monster creation rules, which will quickly and reliably give the DM stats that allow an NPC to perform its given role within the story, but is that even really transparent? Not to the players, I would argue. After all, as a player, I can't see combat roles or enemy levels. My character can see what armor someone is wearing, or the thick hide of a beast, or how many teeth something has, but those are all meaningless since they don't actually correspond to anything. The upshot is that I have even less of an idea of what's going on than is typical for a game where class levels mean a mortal human can wrestle a t. rex into submission.

And that's different in 3.x or AD&D? I don't think the monster rules of 4e guarantee transparency anyway. They assure playability though, to a greater degree than in past editions. Given that role doesn't matter IN COMBAT I don't think putting it on each creature would change transparency. I can tell you 'this guy is a brute' and you won't learn much if you can't say what level he is.

Its vital that DMs give players clues about what is what. They need to describe the characteristics of monsters such that the players can gauge what sort of beast it is. Does it have a high AC, a weak reflex, etc. Note that Monster Knowledge checks, a very thoroughly described 4e system, codifies how the characters can learn this information pretty nicely. They may well not get exact (or any) answers, but they can observe and learn something about each creature.

Overall you have the same thing you had in every edition, the table convention that if the players follow the breadcrumbs or at least look for the clues they will be able to match themselves against appropriate opponents. In 4e that means the monster's level will be in a certain range, and thus its stats will be in a certain (wider) range. Coupled with knowledge checks and just logic based on description the PCs should get what they need. Its not the epitome of transparency, you could have the party handed the XP budget of the encounter and told every detail, but there are other considerations.

 

[Manbearcat]

This. I've said it before, but to be succinct: If you use player empowerment techniques to empower a bunch of dicks, your game is going to get swamped by dickishness. If you do have to play with those people, by all means, railroad, illusion and DM force away.

And by railroad, illusion, and GM force them you mean throw them in a woodchipper. Feet first.

Its agreed.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Seriously, I have no idea what happened. The player declared which Power was being used, and nobody had any idea how to narrate it, so we just moved on with the game and I think I stopped using that Power since it left gaps in the narrative.

Dire Radiance - "You cause a shaft of brilliant, cold starlight to lance down
from above, bathing your foe in excruciating light. The nearer
he moves toward you, the brighter and more deadly the light
becomes."

Eldritch Blast - "You fire a bolt of dark, crackling eldritch energy at your foe."

Eyebite - "You glare at your enemy, and your eyes briefly gleam with bril-
liant colors. Your foe reels under your mental assault, and you
vanish from his sight."

Hellish Rebuke - "You point your finger, and your foe is scoured in hellish flames stoked by your own anger and pain. If you are injured, the flames
burst into life one more time before they fade away."

Those are all the 4e PHB1 Warlock at-will powers flavor texts. I don't see any of them as inadequate. They're typical of flavor texts for 4e powers in general. Its not at all clear to me that these things were designed 'mechanics first'. The mechanics generally reflect these descriptions reasonably well.

TBH I've had this discussion MANY times with people who make this type of statement. There is simply no fact behind it. Every 4e power has a description and the mechanics reflect that description, every one. Maybe a few of them are not all that evocative or feel poorly written or ambiguous, there are 1000's and 1000's of powers, so surely the quality varies to some degree. Still I know of only a very few powers where the mechanics might, in some situations, leave you asking questions.

However NOTHING in the 4e rules or any other associated material EVER instructs the players or the DM to ignore narrative and apply the rules unconditionally. The DM is described as the arbiter of how the mechanics work and is explicitly granted permission to rule in any way, or to change the narrative in order to achieve whatever is desired at the table. That some people chose to play the game in a certain way, refusing to ever reconcile mechanics and narrative, and then heaped scorn on the game for their issues is utterly puzzling to me. All they had to do was play how they wanted. It was that simple.

At least with a sword, you know that you cut the enemy. You might have slashed or stabbed it, in any number of ways - you might have hit armor, or skin - but you definitely applied the sword directly to the goblin and then the goblin died. This Power didn't give you anywhere near that level of detail. The best we could figure out was that maybe I gave the goblin a funny look, before it keeled over.

It's an issue of degree to the abstraction. There are an infinite number of ways that you can kill a goblin by attacking it with a sword, even if you don't have the freedom to narrate it as shooting lasers or causing the goblin to have a sudden heart-attack. At our table, getting hit by a weapon only meant that you got hit by the weapon, and you could still narrate the specifics as unique. Likewise, burning hands might require the same gestures with every cast, but the flames could catch the enemy directly in the chest or the face, or barely hit a limb as it quickly recoils.

Yeah, I don't see a difference here. The real difference I see is that 4e powers have more specific effects in general. They inflict keyworded damage, often have fairly significant effect lines, and tend to emphasize their mechanical resolution more than some old-time spells. 4e is VERY heavily dependent on keywords, and this is something many people seem to forget. Hellish rebuke doesn't TALK about fire, beyond mentioning 'hellish flames', but it has the Fire keyword, and does fire damage. If it were used on a wooden object, presumably it would burn that object, possibly igniting it and causing it to continue to burn (I would treat this as a page 42 type use of the power). This doesn't have to be spelled out in every power as it did in AD&D where very fire spell indicated how or if it set things on fire (if you were lucky, many just left it to the whim of the DM).

I do get that 4e has a 'style' of description and that its powers evoke a certain type of imagery in general, which is often somewhat different from that of AD&D magic, but I'm not convinced they are 'detached from narrative' as some would put it. 4e just gave you a lot more freedom to think about how the two relate.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm not following your logic here... you brought up weapons as an example of an insignificant detail, not me... but now you seem to be back-tracking and claiming yest weapons are important because D&D has a combat focus to the game... well then why did you present them as an example?

No, what I'm saying is that EVEN THOUGH IT IS A FOCUS of the game, the actual choice of one weapon over another is relatively unimportant. Yes, there are some details broken out for weapons, but my point was that given that musical instruments are FAR less important than weapons, they certainly merit far less consideration, like not much at all for the most part.

Again your analogy falls apart... we have weapon proficiencies in 3e, 4e, 5e and even earlier... so if it's not a resource and doesn't add capability to a character why are there weapon proficiencies in every modern edition of D&D? Because it grants you capability in said weapon, in the same way tool proficiency in a musical instrument grants one capability in said musical instrument...

Again, see above. There's just not enough importance to instruments to NEED a set of proficiencies for them on the order of what exists for weapons (in some editions, the majority of D&D editions have weapon proficiency as at most an optional rule, though this type of thing has come more to the fore with later editions).

Well no I want it to be under one pretty clear skill as opposed to multiple DM fiat based applications of other skills...

Again, this is not arbitrary, the social skills have fairly specific functions and any use of music would probably fall under them (I can think of a few corner cases, like a 'Close Encounters' style message or something, but you can still use an ability check or some other skill for that.

This all seems rather arbitrary... so a player can decide he's a master musician... but not a master in the rapier without expending resources... why? According to you the rapier didn't grant him any more capability and yet in 4e it is a Superior Melee Weapon and thus resources must be expended to use it.

Only because 4e focuses very heavily on combat. There's simply no need to regulate ordinary non-magical use of music in the same way as rapiers. Even so the resource used to be good with a rapier (assuming it isn't just granted in bulk along with other weapons by your class) is not all that huge. Do you really think the average character should have to pay a feat to use the Lute? Really?

My issue with your claims of D&D not focusing on playing music is that D&D (at least in 5e) has 3 major pillars... exploration, social and combat... I have seen tons of genre examples where the protagonists ability to play a musical instrument impacts at least 2 of those pillars (social and exploration) and possibly the 3rd, combat (though admittedly in fantasy stories it's often used to avoid this pillar)... In other words the abiliity to play a musical instrument can impact the game just as much as any other skill depending on the DM and players involved. I understand your personal preferences but your personal likes or dislikes don't make the game objectively incoherent...

And I said, if the character is going to be deploying some sort of magical effects via music, if the playing itself is a power, etc then indeed this should be, and in 4e is, regulated. If its just a vehicle to deploy an existing skill or ability check then it doesn't need to be so regulated. Honestly, music doesn't come up THAT often in our games. I don't think it needs feats and skills and etc burned on it.

So basically just let the DM throw a skill out there and hope you're good enough at it... though you are a "skilled" musician... So how dexterous I can play doesn't matter... how well I can recall the notes of the song don't matter... basically nothing surrounding the actual playing of an instrument matters... got it.

If you miss a note its really going to spoil the whole performance. Elton John doesn't get out on stage and completely bungle a piece. If you really are skilled, then maybe you hit a flat note once in a great while, like anyone, but the power of your playing isn't in one note. We can assume that if you have 'can play lute' on your sheet then you can play it 'well enough'. As I've said several times, if its really that critical a part of the plot it won't be a single skill check roll anyway.

I'm assuming if I went through the effort of making the skill of playing an instrument a part of my character... I do care how well he plays. Now in a game where no one cares... it's probably not going to get picked as a proficiency and the DM is probably never going to frame challenges around it because, like you said who cares. Personally I don't think it should be eliminated from the game because a sub-section doesn't care about it... since they can choose not to take it.

Its not eliminated from the game though. Its simply relegated to a very peripheral place where it doesn't require a resource to designate it. Nobody is suggesting that players should be dropping 'can play lute' onto their sheet at the instant it becomes advantageous and retconning their characters. Its something they will have chosen, presumably because they like the idea or whatever, and then maybe they'll choose to bring it into play as a part of the narrative. If it is instead a proficiency that the players HAVE to spend a precious slot on, then they're MUCH less likely to bring it into play at all, since it is still no more useful than before.

Eh, I would say different strokes for different folks. Again you personally not liking something does not make it objectively worse for another thing... apparently many people didn't like 4e's ...focus on "effect" and disregard of "way" For you maybe it works but for me it's simpler, faster and connects more logically when one of my players says he plays his lute to soothe the savage beast and I say ok... add the proficiency bonus for your lute to your Charisma... or he says he competes with the court musician to see who can play the fastest without messing the song up and I say okay roll Dex + lute proficiency...

OK, but you've just ended all debate of any sort on any game rules at all! Its all 'preferences' because its all just a diversion we pursue in our spare time. Unless you're a pro game designer its all 'academic'.

No it's not one "technical" ability... but cover the proper usage of the tool in accomplishing what you are trying to do... You on the other hand are claiming it's more coherent to call on wildly disparate skills to play the lute... yet never is the actual ability (an all that this entails) used to play.

The skills I suggest, no they aren't 'used to play' in the most literal sense, they are used to gauge the character's ability to play the right thing, in the right way, at the right moment etc in order to achieve his goal best. Even if the character is playing for the incredibly picky music critic of a King he's still going to want to find the music the King will react to best (Insight), one that is culturally acceptable (History), and that doesn't piss off anyone in court (Streetwise), and to play it in the style most likely to gain approval (maybe Insight again, or a Cha check). You might also include a DEX check to avoid making some technical mistake that this particular person is sensitive to since they're such a critic. For an ordinary room at the tavern I don't think you would ever need to worry about the technical playing ability you have.

So your "Background" would be houseruled I believe... is this correct? Because I though the rules for Backgrounds were that you apply a +2 to one skill... I also find this strange because what you're proposing here (a floating +2 when an instrument is used) is doing exactly what the musical instrument tool proficiency would do... add a prof bonus anytime he uses an instrument to accomplish his task... the only difference is that prof bonus in 5e doesn't stack so you don't add it to a skill... but instead to an attribute.

No, read the sidebar in PHB2 at the end of the backgrounds section. It talks about the application of bonuses to any situation that falls within the background's area. Nothing about this is houseruled at all. The player is perfectly within his rights to select entertainment and playing an instrument as a background element. Nothing STRICTLY SPEAKING says that the player couldn't specifically ask for a +2 to 'playing musical instrument checks' as his one character-wide background bonus. Its non-standard, but the background rules are stated as open-ended WRT these bonuses, the DM would simply have to say 'yes'. Admittedly this part of 4e's rules are LOOSE, but that's how they were designed.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Sorry, I don't mean this to be confrontational, but you're looking at 3.5 through rose-colored glasses. There is NOTHING AT ALL WHATSOEVER in that system that sets a DC for building a boat. There is a generalized 'Craft' skill, in which you select a subcategory, but the subcategories are largely undefined. There is thus no SPECIFIC skill in 3.5 that equates to 'boatbuilding'. It could be its own thing, or it could fall under carpentry or maybe even something else.

There's a guideline, which makes sense, with examples. Is a boat as complex as an iron pot? Or is it like a bell? Mechanically, it's probably between a bell and a lock, so worst-case scenario is DC 20. So it's a Craft (boat) check, with a DC around 20. If I have Craft (carpentry), then that might apply, though the DM would likely impose a -2 penalty to the check. Note that the appropriate skill exists, even if it's not listed; there was never any intent to create an exhaustive list of all possible Craft and Profession skills. But this is consistent, and the players should easily be able to infer the existence of the Craft (boat) skill.

This is exactly the level of abstraction as is required with any other task. Whenever you want to do something, the DM decides which skill or ability score applies, and the required DC for that check. The DC of a task has a well-defined meaning, with DC 10 being easy and DC 20 being hard.

A rowboat costs 50gp, or 500sp. I need to supply one-third of that cost in raw materials, and then get to work. Each week, I make a Craft check against a DC 20. If I succeed, then I multiply my check result by the 20 to see how many SP worth of progress I've made. If I roll a 25 on the check, then I've successfully crafted the boat. The only vagary that I might not know is the exact DC for the check, in which case my best guess will still be pretty close.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

How would they fashion a boat and/or repair it? It just so happens that this has occurred 3 times in the course of my GMing 4e. In all cases, it was pretty intuitively managed simply by following the fiction and managing the resolution mechanics. Here is an example below. This follows directly from the Extended Rest after the Find a Natural Shelter Skill Challenge that I relayed above.

That's not what I asked, though. I just want to build a boat. I have no further motive in this action. There's nothing in the narrative which impels me to build a boat, though I might foresee that I would want one in the future. There is zero narrative weight associated with this action.

Your answer is to frame it based on its place in the story, as a Skill Challenge, which is what I expected. So let's pretend that I have some good reason for why I would care about building a boat right now. Would any other DM agree with your choices? As to how many successes, of what difficulty, with which relevant skills, before how many failures? I mean, maybe I missed something where there are only a handful of codified Skill Challenge types, and the players would pick up on this quickly. Maybe an easy one is always 6 checks (2 of which are medium DC and 2 of which are easy DC) before getting two failures, and the player would know that. That didn't seem like the case, though. It seemed like the number and sequence of checks would be determined by the DM, after you decide that you want to try it anyway.

And which exact skills would be tested? The feeling I got - and remember, I only did a few Skill Challenges before we gave up on them altogether - is that the players would suggest which skills they wanted to use, and the DM was expected to agree whenever it would be reasonable. Like you said, one of those checks in your example was an Athletics check for some of the physical crafting, but I honestly would have expected an Endurance check based on the sheer volume of work required. As a player, I just don't know what you're going to ask for.

And because it's framed as a Skill Challenge, it might catch me entirely off-guard, like maybe a thief has stolen my tools and I need some detective or social-type skills in order to get them back. But I'm playing a hermit druid type character, and I have no social skills, so my whole endeavor is derailed because I fail all of those checks, even though I succeed on every check that's actually related to the crafting. Again, though, that's not based on first-hand experience. If you could tell me that I'm wrong on that point, and that the DM isn't expected to make narrative complications in a Skill Challenge just for the sake of drama, then I would welcome that news.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

For powers, specifically, those little italic blurbs of description are just examples. The jargon of the power block describes in detail exactly what the power does (accomplishes), it doesn't need the description to clarify it.

Which was my original complaint: They used the fact that the description is mutable as an excuse to provide less detail than would otherwise be required in order to explain how the narrative effect leads to the specific mechanical effect.