D&D 4E The Best Thing from 4E

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

Isn't the answer here simple? You build a boat. One way or another your character, determined to succeed, manages to construct a boat. Given that it has no narrative weight beyond adding a boat to your equipment inventory there's no need to roll dice for it. Pay the GP cost of a boat and its yours. You can then narrate that your character spends his next several weeks of downtime working on the project. While 3.5 generates an 'exact' time, its really no more exact than 'it takes a while' and with no real time pressure or whatnot the details shouldn't matter, right?

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.

Well, as of some very early 4e errata, all SCs fail after three failures, and the complexity of the task determines the successes required, anywhere from 4 to 12 successes. There aren't codified types exactly, though by example there are some 'patterns' you can follow. So, yes, the players would know that an easy challenge, something important but well-within their abilities, is 4 successes before 3 failures, with all 4 being moderate DC checks. A typical challenge has 7 associated skills, 2-3 secondary and the other 4 or 5 primary. It is of course up to the DM which is which, but in an easy challenge it wouldn't matter much. This might correspond with a party in a village building a boat where they have access to advice, tools, and materials.

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.

The exact situation will dictate. Endurance would be good if say the boat must be built very quickly. If OTOH there's no real time pressure I'd say its not germane. Players CAN suggest skills, but the idea is that the DM designs encounters (and an SC is an encounter). So the DM should pick roughly 7 skills, though less might be appropriate in some cases. Several will be primary, about 4-5 typically. These are skills that can be exercised again and again to advance the challenge, though the DM is free to use narrative to impose some restrictions here, insisting that for instance an Athletics check succeed to drag the trees to the water before a Perception check can be used to find the best parts to cut planks from. The other 2-3 skills are considered secondary, they might contribute at most one success, or they could 'unlock' other primary skills, give a bonus to a check, etc.

Anyway, the Rules Compendium has a pretty clear and fairly straightforward writeup that players should read up on if they're interested in system mastery. It also talks about 'advantages', which are a resource that the PCs can 'play' to help them succeed (again with some sort of narrative justification required), and some quantity of hard DC checks the DM can impose. Its definitely not all perfectly cut and dried, a DM can 'make things harder' on a party, but only within the prescribed limits.

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 DM is free to construct narrative complications, but all of the action in an SC really SHOULD be related to a single overall goal or event. After all its one challenge, it would be incoherent for it to cover multiple unrelated goals. The example you give seems OK, but remember that SCs and challenges in general are meant to apply to a group. The advice is N+2 skills, where N is the number of characters, with 2-3 being secondary, but in a case of 1 solo adventurer I think we'd stick to one secondary skill and 2 primary, with 1 being social and the other being physical or knowledge related. I think DMs need to carefully consider when challenging a single character, this is definitely a bit outside the mainstream of the SC guidelines, though you can make it work OK.

As for if complications are 'just for the sake of drama', I'm not sure what that means. The whole idea that the task is challenging is fundamentally dramatic in origin. People have been building boats with zero drama for ages. Consequently we must assume that as part of an adventure the building of this boat is in some way challenging and dramatic.

I would note that skills aren't the ONLY resources that characters have. The 'hermit druid' for instance has an animal form, and probably rituals and powers that allow him to summon and talk to animals, sneak around, etc. He might not be all that bad at getting back his tools!

 

[Sadras]

5 minute workday? This is not caused by 4e,

No it wasn't, but that doesn't mean I didn't experience the 35 minute work day during 4e. So it was better, but marginally so.

By the accumulation of failures in an SC, which might be precipitated by doing things which require time. This creates tension directly through the SC mechanics AND obviates the need for the DM to do some highly subjective time cost assignments.

I was speaking more along the lines of a longer scenario than a simple skill challenge. I have used and I'm quite familiar with skill challenges for exploration and time constraints.

Heck, in the time-keeping scenario the DM says "well, you took a whole half hour to get lunch" but where's the tension? The players may have a sense that this is poor, but they don't KNOW the deadline exactly to the minute, maybe half-an-hour isn't so bad, maybe its game over, they don't even know. At least my players have a sense of building tension.

LOL. Reread the synopsis of my campaign instead of making ridiculous examples and trying to supplant then as my own to come off better.

Back in the late 80's I conceived a campaign... (snip)... It was first of all a VAST amount of work, 1000's of hours of work...

I would imagine, back in the 80's you were younger and less experienced than I am now. You took 1000's of hours and I certainly do not take 1000s of hours do draft a forward timeline for 30-50 days. However the above campaign you described is closer to the current campaign-arc I am currently running.

You missed his point entirely.

I described my campaign how did I miss his point entirely?

You can call the outcomes 'only better or worse results' but what we're discussing is how do the players know which choices are better or worse?

Through the in-game fiction based on the information the characters become privy too, the players decide which choices are better or worse for their characters.

I think what you'll find is that the really exciting games take drama much more into account.

Perhaps, but your comment seems to suggest that time as a constraint detracts from drama which I don't agree with. Forgive me, but given that your judgment of time as an element in RPG is based on your experiences of over 25 years ago and that you had spent a considerable amount of time in the prep work of that particular game (which I do not), I respectfully do not share your opinion on the matter.

I don't think anyone is saying that the left/right choice is never significant and they're just always going to re-arrange things. It can be quite significant, and it can be quite significant in 4e as much as any other edition. It just doesn't HAVE to be.

To refresh, this is not about 4e, we were discussing Illusionism. I was asserting that Illusionism includes the fudging of maps. Do you agree or don't you?

Following from your comment above, fudging on a die roll might be significant or it might not be. If it is not, do you believe no Illusionism has taken place? How about the Hit Point adjustment of the enemy during combat? Do you perhaps only attribute Illusionism to significant matters?

 

[D'karr]

And in a system that only has basic attacks, that might be sufficient. When one attack does "[W] +2 damage, and the target is stunned for a round", and another attack does "[W] +4 damage, and the target can't make opportunity attacks until your next turn", then you need significantly more detail to explain how you got there.

Off the top of my head without looking at anything I can make up descriptions for those, almost in seconds.

• Your attack knocks the snot out of your foe. His stunned look advertises an opening for further attacks.
• Your attack puts your foe off-balance, preventing him from easily reacting to things around him.

The point is that descriptions don't have to be hyper-detailed, just enough so that the flavor and the mechanics mesh. I found 4e to be quite good at making the description and mechanics support each other, and because the descriptions were open-ended (malleable) if I found the description a poor fit, I could easily change it.

When I read Basic D&D (Moldvay) most things were detailed in much less detail, and we still had a blast making stuff up. Consequently the less bolted on description the more the game descriptions can be open-ended.

For example did Fireball in Moldvay set things on fire? Not according to the description, that was entirely left to the DM and players. In other editions Fireball even had rules for melting gold. Something that is absolutely ridiculous when the melting point of gold, and the length of time that the fire effect is in place is taken into account.

I prefer the open-ended effect to the highly detailed one for one main reason, it keeps the game in the DM and player's hands instead of a game designer that knows nothing about us or our games.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Real-world verisimilitude isn't all that important. The important thing is that the player and the DM are on roughly the same page - that the DC of the check depends on the difficulty of the task, following these guidelines for relative complexity. I guess there's a chance that you or the DM might actually know a lot about boat-building... in which case you might decide that it's a slightly different DC, still probably between 15 and 25. If the player knows a lot more about boats than the DM does, then the DM will probably defer to player judgment in this case (not that they're going to be very far apart either way).

So what I'm saying is that the player can predict what the DM will decree, with a fair degree of certainty. The system in place for that is fairly well-codified. You know what type of check you need to make, and roughly the DC. You know how long it will take, and how much it will cost you in raw materials.

Honestly, I don't strongly disagree with any of this, but how is this superior to the situation in 4e where you get a check that is almost certainly going to be between 8 and 19 (level 1 easy to hard DC) and most likely a 13 (medium DC) with the time taken being either governed by an SC or left unstated because it isn't important beyond "it'll take a few weeks" for color? All that mass of skill machinery in 3.x doesn't really do much TBH. The most salient effect is so the DM can say 'no' because you don't have the requisite skill, which you have to degrade your characters important adventuring skills to get for the uncertain benefit of what, 2 or 3 uses in a whole campaign, IF you're lucky? 0 is more likely. I'm not sold.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

IIRC, Craft was not a trained-only skill (I could be wrong). Resolution of any Craft skill was based on the gp value of the item. Full Plate, for instance, took something like a year and a half to make, because it was expensive. So if you're in a hurry to build a boat, build a cheap one.

Fair enough, but if people are going to just use it untrained because basically unless the campaign is very boat-oriented 'boatwright' is unlikely to be a skill anyone takes, then we're really just talking about an ability check, right? Yeah, 4e doesn't give the CHANCE of being a boatwright explicitly, buy you could STILL pick it as a background element (and get a +2 to your ability check when you build the boat). Its much like the Musical Instrument stuff, you don't really need to spend rules on this beyond a very general framework that can apply to almost anything.

 

[Tony Vargas]

You don't need the narrative description to figure out the mechanical resolution. You need the narrative description to figure out the narrative resolution.

No, you don't, you just need an imagination.

There's a narrative description, which leads to a mechanical effect, which gives a mechanical resolution, which converts back to a narrative resolution. In order for it to make any sort of sense, you need all of those steps to be in place.

Maybe you feel a need for that. What you're describing is a mandatory 1:1 relation between each narrative description and a unique mechanical effect. Each description implies one mechanical effect which, in turn, models only that description. That's /extremely/ limiting in both game design and play - problematic, even.

If we were to hold, to recycle an example, weapon attacks to that standard, then decapitating a goblin would need a different mechanic from stabbing one through the heart, because you need to be able to map from narrative to mechanic and back.

In your attempts to manufacture a problem where none exists, you've inadvertently resorted to requiring an impractical standard.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Maybe you feel a need for that. What you're describing is a mandatory 1:1 relation between each narrative description and a unique mechanical effect. Each description implies one mechanical effect which, in turn, models only that description. That's /extremely/ limiting in both game design and play - problematic, even.

You can have multiple narratives that all lead to the same mechanical effect - you can stab or slash someone for 8 damage, as easily as you can shoot or blast for 8 damage. The only thing I'm advocating is that, where you have different mechanical effects, they must follow from different narratives.

You can't have the exact same narrative action result in different mechanical expressions, because the whole point of having a codified system is that it tells you how to convert a narrative description into a mechanical result for the purpose of adjudication. A mechanical effect, bereft of the narrative description which invokes it, would be entirely pointless!

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Honestly, I don't strongly disagree with any of this, but how is this superior to the situation in 4e where you get a check that is almost certainly going to be between 8 and 19 (level 1 easy to hard DC) and most likely a 13 (medium DC) with the time taken being either governed by an SC or left unstated because it isn't important beyond "it'll take a few weeks" for color?

There's also the chance that you could fail, even if it's not important to the plot and there are no narrative stakes involved. If I want to build the boat, and the DM just agrees and says that I build the boat, then I didn't really accomplish anything. There's a lot that you can do with a boat. It opens up a lot of options. If I don't put points into that skill, then making the boat is essentially a non-option because it will take so long (and I'll ruin so many of the materials) as to make it infeasible. (And the player would know that it's infeasible, because the rules are so transparent.)

Although it's possible that the question is irrelevant, since 4E doesn't really concern itself with the possibility of down-time. If a 4E game is supposed to keep moving forward at all times, then the only time it would ever come up is during a narrative-driven Skill Challenge, to accomplish some other goal. Kind of like how Basic was only ever concerned with dungeon environments.

Actually, now that I think about it, the more relevant part might be that NPCs in a 3.x game are constrained to the same rules as the players. A player can use knowledge of how the Craft skill works to estimate how long an NPC might take to build something, which might matter in a lot of cases.

 

[D'karr]

Except that at no time does 4e espouse mechanical effects bereft of their narrative description or vice versa. So as Tony Vargas mentioned this is manufacturing a problem where there really is none. Spiteful Glamor which is the example you mentioned has a name, a flavor text description, and a mechanical effect as well as particular keywords. All these things map out to create a particular game effect (flavor supported by mechanics).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I was speaking more along the lines of a longer scenario than a simple skill challenge. I have used and I'm quite familiar with skill challenges for exploration and time constraints.

I don't think there's intended to be any constraint on the duration or scope of a skill challenge. It could regulate getting a door open, or a 6 month sea voyage.

LOL. Reread the synopsis of my campaign instead of making ridiculous examples and trying to supplant then as my own to come off better.

I see nothing ridiculous about it. My example was quite clear. The nature of time as an imprecise resource measure renders it less than totally effective as a tool of dramatic tension, and my comment explained exactly why. For that matter Tony Vargas explained it once already upthread as well. This is a discussion of general techniques and what 4e brought to the table, so your campaign isn't the only thing that is relevant, nor do I see anything about the technique I have outlined which wouldn't work in your game AFAIK.

I would imagine, back in the 80's you were younger and less experienced than I am now. You took 1000's of hours and I certainly do not take 1000s of hours do draft a forward timeline for 30-50 days. However the above campaign you described is closer to the current campaign-arc I am currently running.

I was quite accomplished as a DM at that time, with more than 10 years of experience. I don't take 1000's of hours either, anymore, but my point is that even with spending vast time on that project it was impossible to account for time adequately enough to make a completely timeline based drama function well. That's what I learned. Sure, if I, for some reason, was to decide to revisit obsolete campaign design techniques and make a timeline based game now I wouldn't spend anything like that amount of time on it, because I know it won't work! That was my whole point.

Through the in-game fiction based on the information the characters become privy too, the players decide which choices are better or worse for their characters.

Sure, assuming they can become privy to enough information to be able to make informed choices. That was the whole point of Tony's statements about timelines, and what I was reinforcing. Again, I go back to the example you decry above, it explains quite succinctly why timeline-based tension OFTEN doesn't work. Its not IMPOSSIBLE to make it work, there are cases where you could just give the players perfect information, they KNOW that at the stroke of midnight on December 31st the world will end if they don't appear at the Fulcrum of Fate and stop the Ritual of Destruction. Even then they'd need to know ahead of time how their time resource can be spent and what the relative values of the different options are. Again, you can tell them, but if you don't then they're just left guessing and while there may be ANXIETY in that, there's not the same dramatic tension.

Perhaps, but your comment seems to suggest that time as a constraint detracts from drama which I don't agree with. Forgive me, but given that your judgment of time as an element in RPG is based on your experiences of over 25 years ago and that you had spent a considerable amount of time in the prep work of that particular game (which I do not), I respectfully do not share your opinion on the matter.

No, I just think it shouldn't be used directly as an in-game resource in most cases as others have suggested it. There's nothing at all wrong with having time constraints, but its better to transform them into something else that is a bit more abstract that the players can manage and avoid the awkward questions like "just how long did lunch take, and did that blow the time budget". Even this judgment isn't ABSOLUTE, you can do a 'race against the clock' where the PCs KNOW all the variables involved, then at worst they are hoping to get enough good die rolls on checks to 'make it in time' or something like that, perhaps adapting their plans as required. That's fine, but it CAN be handled with an SC in a broader range of situations is all. You seem to be aware of that, so I am not sure what you're objecting to here.

To refresh, this is not about 4e, we were discussing Illusionism. I was asserting that Illusionism includes the fudging of maps. Do you agree or don't you?

The whole thread is about 4e...

Illusionism can include the 'fudging' of anything, including maps. That's different from 'fudging a map IS Illusionism'.

Following from your comment above, fudging on a die roll might be significant or it might not be. If it is not, do you believe no Illusionism has taken place? How about the adjustment of Hit Points of the enemy during combat? Do you perhaps only attribute Illusionism to significant matters?

I think it could be irrelevant. In that case the social contract of the table seems to be intact IMHO and I don't think it really matters what we call it. If the fudging has some minor effect that has no plot consequence, then again it seems like it isn't worth arguing about what its called. Its when the DM is railroading the players by juggling numbers, plot elements, maps, whatever and the players aren't in on it, then its Illusionism. I think this coincides pretty much with [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION]'s definition and [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]'s definition, though we all seem to have very slightly different ways of saying basically the same thing.