D&D 4E The Best Thing from 4E

[Jeff Albertson]

Save ends. The pre-4th Ed thing of getting stunned for 3d4 rounds was seriously not cool.

 

[pemerton]

On the question of whether you can get story without mechanics, or having someone (eg the GM) pay attention to it, this passage by Ron Edwards seems relevant (the title is "Ouija-board roleplaying"):

How do Ouija boards work? People sit around a board with letters and numbers on it, all touching a legged planchette that can slide around on the board. They pretend that spectral forces are moving the planchette around to spell messages. What's happening is that, at any given moment, someone is guiding the planchette, and the point is to make sure that the planchette always appears to everyone else to be moving under its own power.

Taking this idea to role-playing, the deluded notion is that Simulationist play will yield Story Now play without any specific attention on anyone's part to do so. The primary issue is to maintain the facade that "No one guides the planchette!" The participants must be devoted to the notion that stories don't need authors; they emerge from some ineffable confluence of Exploration per se. It's kind of a weird Illusionism perpetrated on one another, with everyone putting enormous value on maintaining the Black Curtain between them and everyone else. Typically, groups who play this way have been together for a very long time.

My call is, you get what you play for. Can you address Premise this way? Sure, on the monkeys-might-fly-out-my-butt principle. But the key to un-premeditated artistry of this sort (cutup fiction, splatter painting, cinema verite) is to know what to throw out, and role-playing does not include that option, at least not very easily. . . .

Rarely, another person participates and (horrors!) actually overtly moves the planchette, or discusses how it's being moved. That person is instantly ejected, with cries of "powergamer!" and "pushy bastard!"​

Not very far upthread, [MENTION=85870]innerdude[/MENTION] asked "So what it is it about 4e that so uniquely pushes characters into fictional positioning "spaces" that allow for this kind of play?" I don't know about "uniquely" - 4e isn't the only "story now" fantasy RPG out there.

But what it has is lots of ways for players to overtly move the planchette. Choices of build elements (race, theme, paragon path, epic destiny). Choices during action resolution (when to us which powers for which effects; when to use an action point; etc). For instance, when a player spends a daily power, uses an action point, and spends another daily, s/he is saying "I care about this current situation, and I'm going to make a difference to it!" We're not just rolling the same old dice and hoping they come up 20 rather than 1.

There's other stuff on the GM side, too, in particular how the rules get out of the way of the GM framing scenes and managing the backstory in a way that promotes rather than impedes dramatic play. But on the player side I think that's pretty much the gist of it.

EDIT:

Here's an email exchange between me and one of my players yesterday:

Another thought, namely, Jett's paragon path.

If you stay with Demonskin Adpet, you really are choosing to go down the dark path, as there is no longer any mediation - Jett would be aligning himself with the raw forces of the Demonweb.

If Jett wants to go down another path, a quick review of PHB2 and Arcane Power suggest Voice of Thunder and Essence Mage as possibilities.

Thoughts?

************************

Jett has been chasing power to accomplish his great goal. With Lolth defeated, he will be a drow redeemed. Voice of Thunder, thanks be to Great Father.

Updated Jett attached. With the multi-class, power swapping and paragon path he’s nearly half bard.​

That's PC build elements being used to overtly move the planchette!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

For me, 4e just doesn't meet my minimum levels of internal consistency and causal logic. The metagame "proud nails" of 4e are just too frequent and obvious, though at this point I frankly can't even swallow "core" D&D-isms like armor class, hit points, and "Vancian" magic, let alone be bothered to deal with AEDU.

But ultimately, my journey to Savage Worlds was largely driven by the same impulse---I don't want "process sim," I want character-based fictional positioning where the characters have real stakes with what is happening in the fiction. And as you noted, @Manbearcat, that is a wholly independent aim as a GM than simply driving "realistic" results. I've discovered that I'm not terribly interested in "realism"---what I'm really after is "plausibility." And that plausibility may be a result of character interaction with the game world, it may be based on genre tropes, it may be based on mechanical interactions.

So what it is it about 4e that so uniquely pushes characters into fictional positioning "spaces" that allow for this kind of play? Because even having thoroughly engaged with much of @pemerton 's descriptions, I still have a hard time understanding how players selecting a bunch of powers/exploits/spells drives this.

I know Savage Worlds works in this way because 1) the underlying core mechanic makes plausible "process sim" elegant and easy, and 2) characters generally have more freedom to build their character the way they want (free-form, skill-based advancement vs. class and level). If a character doesn't fit into the player's "vision" it's absolutely no one's fault but their own; there's no "accidental" choosing the wrong class, etc. Players get to really define their own vision for a character, and resolving those character actions mechanically is fast, elegant, and produces plausible results the majority of the time.

Because I'm not worrying about mechanical resolution issues, I have huge amounts of freedom as a GM to focus my energies on the fiction.

But how does 4e do it?

Its hard for me to answer since I don't actually know how SW's mechanics differ from 4e's. 4e is a pretty straightforward system, mechanically, with quite clean core mechanics that depend heavily on hooking into keywords to achieve coordination with narrative and variations in mechanics. SCs build on that system, as does combat, to produce easily explicated and relatively transparent mechanical resolution and mapping to narrative elements. The reverse element, mapping from narrative to mechanics is left largely up to the DM and players, but keywords are huge here. For example its quite easy to decide that 'fire' has certain interactions with water, flammable materials, etc. and at that end of things 4e doesn't require any specialized terminology, you can simply work with normal ordinary definitions of words.

Exactly how those interactions are mechanically manifested (IE what happens when you fireball under water) is open. While this could be an entry point for DM force and Illusionist play it is heavily mitigated by the fact that everyone can agree on what's going on, you're underwater, and you're casting a fireball, and nobody will be able to argue about similar situations when they come up in the future. If the DM argues that the power fails, then when an NPC starts casting underwater fireballs any DM bad faith is going to be right there in player's faces. Frankly I think no system can do much better than this anyway, as there are virtually infinite possible interactions like this, you can't provide a full accounting, nor are we all likely to entirely agree on how each one should work (IE many people are fine with underwater fireballs, its magic after all).

The way the skill system is so general and focuses on both ends and general concerns vs any sort of process-sim type of focus is exceedingly valuable as well. Its rare to be unclear as to which skill applies to something, or find that the choice seems awkward.

Beyond that 4e's 'say yes' is a pretty good deal. The DM is being discouraged from being a roadblock and encouraged to use the 'rule of cool'. It could go further, there's no explicit advice to 'fail forward' but you also do have APs and HS which are at least partly a meta-game resource that can be further leveraged.

Finally, the system is just both very fine-grained in terms of providing a huge array of options that let you do most anything with a character, AND very loose and general in terms of how they work fictionally, which means that in practice you can get what you want out of your character. There's not a lot of "oh, gosh its really hard to map this narrative into the character sheet" unless you're really unusually pedantic about reflavoring things or bending the character build rules in small ways when it suites the story. My example of the 'Axe Mage' works here. Just throw out the "you have to use a sword if you're a swordmage" restriction for that character. Its not a hard thing to do and a DM should be able to gauge the mechanical repercussions of such a thing without much trouble. Its remotely possible some feat can combine with that in some odd way, but maybe that's cool too, unless your player is a complete tool.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I never said that I would consider him to be a good DM. After all, as you say, the numbers given on his various tables would imply a world that could not sustain itself.

I think my point was that Gygax was an EXCEEDINGLY accomplished and successful DM. He also wrote the rules that are usually understood to be the core of D&D simulationism. Yet he held probably almost nothing of your theory of gaming. He might at some level favor a more 'neutral' approach by contrast to what Pemerton does, but I'm not even sure that's true. From what I can see Gary evolved with the rest of us, though his contributions in the form of game rules and such much after 1985 is too fragmentary to say exactly. In any case I haven't made a close study of post-1985 EGG, but I don't get the impression he was all that interested in simulationist play, his shtick was always FUN AFAICT.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

That all makes sense.

Thinking about this more, what I would say is that there is a 'planning horizon' somewhere (and it will vary from situation to situation). Within that horizon the players have acquired information and made plans, and they should get what was coming to them within that scope. So if they offer to go loot the catacombs of the Dead Kings and do a bunch of research and find out what to expect, and pack in a bunch of rituals and potions and stuff designed to help with that scenario, then probably they should meet the expected legions of undead. They could be presented with options to bring other things into the picture or diverge into some other activity, that's cool, but the undead should probably not all of a sudden be reformulated to resist their tactics just because they found some way to kick ass that never occurred to the DM.

I would instead favor just descoping that activity, turn it into an SC, or skip to the one or two challenging encounters, or whatever, and then maybe spend the extra time saved with some more interesting aspect, like maybe Orcus noticed how badly you cleaned up that mess and sends something worse after you, etc.

But notice, that worse thing would fall outside the originally planned horizon. It might take the form of an element added to the catacomb story, an object the party picks up that's a trojan horse, or something like that, but there will be some decision point, foreshadowing, something to let the players know that they're into new and uncharted waters, and whatever they're getting into next will constitute another horizon.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I think my point was that Gygax was an EXCEEDINGLY accomplished and successful DM. He also wrote the rules that are usually understood to be the core of D&D simulationism.
[...]
From what I can see Gary evolved with the rest of us, though his contributions in the form of game rules and such much after 1985 is too fragmentary to say exactly.

As I said, I started with 2E, post-1985. He was accomplished and successful and made many significant contributions to the game, but I don't think I'd have fun with him as the DM.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

As I said, I started with 2E, post-1985. He was accomplished and successful and made many significant contributions to the game, but I don't think I'd have fun with him as the DM.

Yeah, who knows. I don't get the impression he was super interested in catering to people. He had his way of playing, and maybe it was more or less flexible, I don't know, but I don't believe he was going to just run a game to suite others. As before, his position on things is of course only interesting in being foundational. I think he WAS interested in a certain degree of 'fairness', and often placed himself in the position of 'role playing' the antagonistic dungeon, and tried to do it fairly, much as if he'd been refereeing a minis battle and playing one side he'd have considered his referee duties to require even-handedness.

 

[Sadras]

You weren't asking me, but I've used a HeroQuest extended conflict (which has a close analogue in the 4e Skill Challenge) to resolve an eight month siege in a few minutes of rolling and description. Depending on what the players found interesting I'd be perfectly prepared to resolve a war in the same fashion.

As would I if I were so inclined.

 

[Sadras]

I really can't relate, no, because the difference between getting to do something cool maybe 1/encounter (as you level up 2 or even 4 /different/ things) vs either never (pre-3e) or every round (most 3.x feats) seems like more variety, not less.

If I have one card in my hand and I keep playing it every encounter, I will feel like a one-trick pony. For our group it was not about doing something cool, it was about doing the same cool thing every encounter. It never felt like that for my players in 3e or 2e, without 'cards in their hands' they felt 'mentally' free to do what they desired.

In a sense, sure. Using 'perceived' the way you do wrongly implies that the problems were similar in nature and validity.

Disagree. That is your perception of my use of the word 'perceived'.

So, no, you can't say that 3e->4e and 4e->5e both represent 'evolution' of the game.

Disagree. I do not choose to limit my use of the word evolution to 'revolutionary changes'. Substitute whatever word makes more sense to you. But the game evolved (changed) because of external and internal influences.

The party line, as I recall it, was that KotSf was designed in parallel, and sent to the printers first, so it ended up using unfinished guidelines to create it's encounters.

So based on the first module of the edition the designers never new the strengths of the edition 4-5 years in? Okay

 

[Sadras]

What evidence do you have that they DID understand how to write for 4e and consequently what kind of play it was suited for?

Dungeon Master's Guide 2 and Monster Manual 3...etc

Your argument is a huge excluded-middle. Nothing is so simple.

From what you added here, nothing seems to contradict what I wrote so I guess I didn't miss anything. You think you knew 4e strengths better than the designers, period, and it is ok I guess. I'm just pointing out that many people feel that way when their game evolves/changes (substitute any word that you feel comfortable with) and that is natural. There is nothing unique about it. I felt the same about 2e and 3e.

No, I'm saying that a lot of those things can be addressed within the context of 4e, starting over and regressing back to a game that has an only goal of emulating 2e wasn't my idea of the best answer.

Sure, that comes down to a matter of taste. My personal preference would be to go more NWoD.