D&D 4E The Best Thing from 4E

[The Crimson Binome]

You may not be grasping the nature of the beast, but that doesn't mean it isn't there, and those RPG developers who ignore it can only really produce good games in a hit-and-miss fashion since managing drama is the single fundamental functional component of RP.

Drama is only really important if you're telling a story. The 90s were full of so-called Storytelling Games.

Do not conflate all games, or all Role-Playing Games, with Story-Telling Games.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Random encounters?

I mean, random encounters reflect the fact that dangerous areas full of dangerous creatures are a part of the world. They're an avenue by which the PCs may be challenged without the DM just deciding that it is the case. You can also have set encounters which are placed in the act of world-building, rather than story-building.

It's the difference between the PCs being attacked by a dragon because they wander into its cave, or the PCs being attacked by a dragon because the DM wants them to be - because it would be fun or exciting or whatever.

Any non-combat activity can be resolved with either basic skill checks, or with a Skill Challenge. You can either follow step by step, and the DM can call for checks where they make sense (and not call for checks, where none would be required/allowed), or the DM can decide to resolve it as a Skill Challenge with a budget of medium and hard checks. If the DM decides to make it a Skill Challenge, then it's driven by some ulterior motive - to make the story more dramatic, or whatever.

Which I guess is fine, if the players buy into the idea that it's the job of the DM to make things more dramatic and exciting than they would otherwise be.

Random encounters. I don't see how they upset anything about the concept of drama. If the Players didn't want to have characters adventuring in a world where they might be attacked by dragons presumably they'd play Pens & Paperclips and take the roles of office workers in an industrial technological society Now, a game where the plot can be summarized as "the characters wait around in the inn drinking until someone attacks them." might be considered a bit THIN, but there's still a story there, and some antagonists (the random dragon certainly counts!). More realistically, in all the games I know of, the PCs either have some explicit foe, problem, or need, or they go off looking for trouble as a matter of course, probably also because they have some dramatic need (again, plot is thin if the need is just "we're bored", but it still works).

If the DM 'injects a skill challenge' then presumably the purpose is to further a plot, generate some narrative, and develop some color in play. Since DMs have been coming up with ways to 'get things moving' in games for literally about 40 years now I don't think 4e's putting some such device into the game, if that's what SCs are there for, is any big deal. Frankly I just thought they existed to give the DM an alternative to a combat encounter. In the simple case you open the door, and have a skill challenge. What exactly is so big an imposition about that?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Drama is only really important if you're telling a story. The 90s were full of so-called Storytelling Games.

Do not conflate all games, or all Role-Playing Games, with Story-Telling Games.

Show me an example of RP where there is no story. It doesn't exist and you cannot. I'm not 'confusing' anything. I was there in the 70's, the 80's, and the 90's. I've played all these different sorts of flavors of RPG, they all have stories.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

The fiction is read off the mechanics. You don't need a translation manual - or, at least, I don't.

Whether you attack someone with a sword or with a bow is fundamental to describing the outcome. The game mechanics might just say that the creature takes 6 piercing damage, but that's not nearly enough for the DM to narrate what happened.

In a freeze-frame room, the GM's description has the PCs entering in the midst of some interesting event (the prisoner about to be tortured or sacrificed was an example in the book; the dinner scene in G1 is an example [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] gave upthread).

Because it is fun for the PCs to resolve heroic confrontations.

That's a bad reason. Or, it's a good reason if you buy into the idea that PCs are protagonists in a story, who find themselves in all sorts of improbable situations due to narrative causality. Which is a fundamental element of Story-Telling Games, rather than Role-Playing Games.

Of course you can. Just like Gygax and Moldvay have codified systems for moving, for searching, and for fighting.

You're right; I'm selling myself short here. I could easily come up with a table for determining how long it takes to eat lunch. It's just probably not worth the effort, when the outcome is unlikely to matter and the DM could come up with a better answer based on existing elements of the fiction.

How does the GM decide? Saying "without bias" does not describe a method for making a decision.

Imagination? The DM thinks about everything he or she knows about the world, and tries to imagine what the scene looks like. Or throw dice at a dart board. Read tea leaves. It doesn't really matter, as long as it's consistent with everything that came before, and doesn't factor in meta-game elements like if someone is a PC or where the camera is looking.

And what sort of world is it where you never bump into old acquaintances by chance, because that is never a likely thing to occur? My answer - it is a Spartan world of the sort that I have described upthread.

Fiction is constrained by plausibility, where reality is not. *shrug*

GMing involves making decisions. One important element of decision-making is to introduce dynamic elements into the game, with which the players can then (via their PCs) engage.

So say you. And I suppose, so say whatever other person may have written a book, with the goal of spreading your agenda.

If my PC is Conan, then how will I get the water spirit to give me aid? Or turn the stone to mud? I think I'll take my chances at sneaking and confronting, thanks very much!

This is a legitimate criticism of the D&D ruleset, in every edition prior to 4E. In AD&D or 3.X, the best tools that allowed for creative problem solving were always in the hands of the wizard or cleric; the fundamental criticism of the sorcerer was that, with so few spells known, they didn't have access to the huge toolbox of highly situational abilities. And of course, physical-types were relegated to the sidelines during that aspect of play.

I'm surprised that Rituals didn't make it onto the list of favorite things about 4E, because they're a real game-changer.

For me, personally, the main point of playing RPGs is not to apply the system so as to minimise risk.
[...]
So it's all about jumping in feet first, responding to and pushing the narrative, and relying on the system design, and the many player resources that it provides, to make sure that you can meet the DCs that come your way.

Well, different rulesets promote different gameplay experiences. It just so happens that 4E is way better at promoting your style of gameplay than other editions have been.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Show me an example of RP where there is no story. It doesn't exist and you cannot. I'm not 'confusing' anything. I was there in the 70's, the 80's, and the 90's. I've played all these different sorts of flavors of RPG, they all have stories.

That's the thing. Story happens, whether you try for it or not. Even a story as boring as the one I described, about going into the tomb and avoiding traps and never getting hurt; in all probability, everything won't go as planned, and someone will fail in an interesting way. And if everything does go according to plan, then that's your twist ending, which catches everyone off-guard.

You don't need mechanics to promote story. If you try to promote story, then it kind of kills the integrity of the story. Like the difference between hunting deer in the wild, or hunting deer in an enclosed area that's been specially stocked to provide a Genuine Hunting Experience (tm). Except without the unnecessary killing of wild animals, obviously.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

That's the thing. Story happens, whether you try for it or not. Even a story as boring as the one I described, about going into the tomb and avoiding traps and never getting hurt; in all probability, everything won't go as planned, and someone will fail in an interesting way. And if everything does go according to plan, then that's your twist ending, which catches everyone off-guard.

You don't need mechanics to promote story. If you try to promote story, then it kind of kills the integrity of the story. Like the difference between hunting deer in the wild, or hunting deer in an enclosed area that's been specially stocked to provide a Genuine Hunting Experience (tm). Except without the unnecessary killing of wild animals, obviously.

THERE IS NO WILD, that's the WHOLE POINT of what Tony -in particular- has been saying about the inevitability of DM Bias, actually maybe it was even Pemerton that emphasized that the most, whatever. We've all said it in one form or another.

Once you stop pretending that there's some sort of objectivity in any phase of RP then you realize that the only sensible goal is to make the story fun. Now, fun may involve a lot of realistic-seeming material to you, and maybe it involves lots of over-the-top action to me. I get it, but you still have a story, you have characters in that story, they have dramatic needs, and they're driven into conflict in order to fulfill those needs. Its really as simple as that.

And still I don't know what about an SC would go against your simulationist agenda particularly. We might be a little abstract, perhaps, but not even necessarily. A failure can represent losing some spokes from the wheel of your chariot in the big race. Get enough successes you've passed all the other racers and won! Get 3 failures, the wheel falls off your chariot. Lots of SCs can be fairly concrete, and even when they're not super concrete they're often measuring something that is in any case abstract or intangible like people's attitude or something like that. I simply cannot grasp how it is that having a set of rules for one sort of encounters, combat, is REQUIRED, but somehow having rules for any other sort of encounter is 'forcing story on the game'. It makes zero sense to me. The story was already there. You can choose to put some rules to its adjudication or not, it won't matter to the existence of the story.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Show me an example of RP where there is no story. It doesn't exist and you cannot.

I disagree: RPG campaigns were nothing happens have definitely existed.

THERE IS NO WILD, that's the WHOLE POINT of what Tony -in particular- has been saying about the inevitability of DM Bias, actually maybe it was even Pemerton that emphasized that the most, whatever. We've all said it in one form or another.

I think Saelorn really needs to play in a campaign that's /exactly/ what he says he wants. Once he's played through the lives of a few completely-random, non-biased, not-destined-to-be-heroes people who live out long, unremarkable, lives (or die in infancy), I think he might start to get it.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Once you stop pretending that there's some sort of objectivity in any phase of RP then you realize that the only sensible goal is to make the story fun.

Perfect objectivity might be impossible, but that's no reason to abandon the goal entirely. Close is usually good enough. Not actively diving into the deep end of narrative causality is the absolute minimum I expect from any game, if it is to be salvageable.

Game mechanics can help here. Instead of providing tool to promote and direct the drama, rules can be made to mitigate sources of bias. Random tables are an example of a tool to improve objectivity.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I think Saelorn really needs to play in a campaign that's /exactly/ what he says he wants. Once he's played through the lives of a few completely-random, non-biased, not-destined-to-be-heroes people who live out long, unremarkable, lives (or die in infancy), I think he might start to get it.

I have. Many times. In both 2E, and 3.x. Attempts to repeat the process in 4E met with failure.

It makes for a much more satisfying experience to succeed at being a hero when you aren't destined for it. Even dying unremarkably is more satisfying than being a destined hero.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I have. Many times. In both 2E, and 3.x.

You rolled up characters, straight 3d6, in order, randomly determined when & where they were born, to what social class, and of what gender, diced to survive infant mortality, and then played through their lives in a process that was in no way weighted towards them becoming heroes?

Maybe you don't realize what you're /saying/ you want. But, if you've played a game where all the PCs got together, went on an adventure, encountered monsters, acquired treasure & items and rose to become heroes, you played in a game where the system and the DM made many, many of the kinds of assumptions that you claim you don't want made. Maybe you don't want to think about the ways in which an RPG weights things in favor of your character becoming like a 'protagonist,' or builds genre tropes and story elements into itself, but they're there, even - especially - in games like 2e. If anything, 2e is one of the most setting-centric, 90s-storytelling-style editions of D&D.

It makes for a much more satisfying experience to succeed at being a hero when you aren't destined for it. Even dying unremarkably is more satisfying than being a destined hero.

Except, played straight and unbiased, you won't 'succeed at being a hero' with one character out of thousand. Most will just never have an opportunity to be heroic, few of those with the opportunity will survive acting heroic.

The kinds of careers PCs have, the wild series of challenges they face in a short period of time to rocket up the level charts, are absolutely implausible, virtually impossible, really. Not just to survive, but to happen at all.