D&D 4E The Best Thing from 4E

[pemerton]

By the code of conduct to which I adhere, as a DM, I will not do this. I'm not going to meta-game, to guarantee that convenient coincidences actually happen. I will put that NPC where it makes sense for that NPC to be, and if the players find her, then great. If they don't find her, then so be it. It's not my place to force the encounter. The players must be in charge of their own fates.

When you say "where it makes sense for the NPC to be", that is not a very limiting constraint. The NPC could be anywhere! Because you, as GM, can write any NPC you like with any reason whatsoever for being in some place, or some other place.

A GM, you can decide whether or not the NPC wizard lives in a tower. You can decide whether or not the passages are vunerable to collapse by evocation spells (or, for that matter, whether or not there are passages at all). And you can decide whether or not there is a mysterious stranger with a particular relationship to the "big bad" at place A, B or C, writing the NPC's backstory in such a way as to ensure that it "makes sense" for her to be there.

It's not as if the NPC springs forth fully written from the head of Zeus and demands that you must incorporate her, with exactly that backstory, into your gameworld.

As for the players being masters of thier own fates: in what sense? If they don't know that the mysterious stranger exists, or where she is (and why she is there rather than somewhere else), then it is merest chance that they encounter her. For instance, you decide that she is staying at the City of Greyhawk's Green Dragon Inn. But for whatever reason, the players decide to have their PCs stay at the Wizard Hat Inn. (Perhaps one of the players read a vignette about the latter online, and liked the sound of it.)

In what meaningful sense have the players chosen not to encounter the mysterious stranger at the Green Dragon Inn? None that I can see. They weren't in charge of their own fate. They made an essentially random choice - in my version, based on some consideration that is irrelevant to the actual play of the game - and as a result never encounter this NPC you have authored, and never even know that she was there to be encountered.

As I said upthread, there may be reasons for running a game this way, but player agency doesn't seem to me to be one of them.

That sounds like meta-gaming to me. It's the DM controlling where the PCs end up, which is a huge violation of player agency.

<snip>

All of the choices are in the hands of the players, and only their outcomes are uncertain.

It's metagaming, but it's not controlling where the PCs end up. It's controlling where they start. The action resolution mechanics will determine where they end up.

For instance, if the players decide that their PCs will stay at the Wizard Hat Inn, then deciding that the mysterious stranger is there, rather than at the Green Dragon Inn or any other of the known inns of Greyhawk is not violating any agency. That was, in part, the point of [MENTION=27160]Balesir[/MENTION]'s hypothetical of the die roll; and [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION]'s much earlier remarks about random vs chosen encounters. Suppose that, as GM, instead of deciding that the stranger would be at the Green Dragon you had decided to roll a die to determine which inn she was at, and on a roll of 12 the answer is "the Wizard Hat Inn". Then if you rolled the die and it came up 12, having her be there when the PCs arrive would not violate any agency. Furthermore, given that the players know nothing of this stranger, and have made their choice of inn without any regard to any prospects of strangers being there or anywhere else, it wouldn't violate their agency just to forego the die roll and deem it to have come up 12. And furthermore, for the same reason, it woudn't violate any agency not to even bother with the random table, or the pre-determination of a location, and to simply decide "whichever inn the PCs go to, the mysterious stranger will be there."

What the players do about the presence of the mysterious stranger is up to them. That's where and how they exercise their agency - by deciding how their PCs engage the salient elements of the shared fiction, and then determining the outcome of that engagement via the action resolution mechanics.

In circumstances where the framing of conflicts is determined solely by the GM, without reference to any signals sent (implicitly or explicitly) by the players, the players don't get to make all the choices. Most of the choices have been made by the GM (eg the GM has populated the entire world, and so who the PCs will meet if they go to the Wizard Hat Inn rather than the Green Dragon Inn has already been decided by the GM). The players choices are confined to action declarations in relation to fiction authored by the GM.

It's a plot hook, possibly, but it's only a type of railroad if the players are forced to engage with it.

Sure, but what counts as "forced". I have witnessed, played in and read about plenty of games in which, if the players actually want to have a session of RPGing, they have to pick up on one of the GM's plot hooks.

If the GM provides three options then there is a choice of carriages, but I still regard it as a railroad.

More likely, they ignore her as irrelevant, only to recognize her much later on when she does her thing.

This is exactly the sort of play I try to avoid. As a general rule, it is not dramatically satisfying.

Really? I would find that quite satisfying, for all of those previously-ignored clues to suddenly click into place.

As a viewer of a mystery movie or TV show, or reader of a mystery novel, perhaps - though I'm personally not the biggest fan of the genre.

As a participant, not so much.

Part of the skill of authoring a mystery story is manipulating the audience so that they both see all the clues, but fail to put them together. In the context of RPGing, to me that smacks of GM domination of the story. If the players deem an NPC irrelevant through their play, then I generally don't want the GM to override that player choice by - N sessions later - suddenly springing that NPC on them as the lieutenant of the 'big bad'.

But perhaps you meant something else by "irrelevant"? I am talking about irrelevance at the table - the NPC gains no traction with the players. If you mean irrelevance in the fiction - ie the PCs reach the conclusion that the NPC is not connected to their goals - that is a completely different matter. If the PCs reach this conclusion because the players engaged with the NPC, perhaps talked to her, but failed in the relevant action resolution to learn her secret (eg poor Insight rolls) then that is a different matter. That is not an NPC whom the players have treated as irrelevant, if she has been a sustained focus in the course of play.

To give concrete examples from my actual play: I would never do any sort of "surprise reveal" for the tiefling sorcerers I mentioned upthread (allies of the cleric of Torog). They were of no interest to the players except as enemy artillery who had to be defeated in combat, and have played no role in any of the player that has occurred in the intervening 4-or-so years.

The patriarch who was a rival to the Baron, on the other hand, could be interesting to bring into play. The players (and their PCs) don't regard him as relevant to their larger cosmological concerns, but he was a NPC who figured in play, who was outwitted in a court case (resolved as a skill challenge), and who in that sense actually mattered to the players. If I brought him back into the game, the first question wouldn't be "Who are you talking about?" - whereas for the tieflings it would be.

That's on you, though. You shouldn't see it as a punishment, because you should trust that the DM is neutral on the matter. The DM never told you that the sacrifices would wait for you. The DM never told you what was or was-not in the library. You gambled that you had the time, and you gambled that you might find something useful, and you lost.

In what sense was the GM neutral? The GM wasn't neutral as between the options the players might take: the GM wrote in two paths, the left and the right, and choosing the left path meant auto-loss. With no clues as to that possibility - in my example I stipulated that the left path looked reasonable.

I don't think that's good scenario design. In fact I think it's terrible scenario design.

That's why I compared it to "rocks fall". The GM could make a "rocks fall" check at the start of every session, declaring that rocks fall on a 10% chance. That would be neutral, but not therefore fair or sensible.

Or the GM could have a secret notation in his/her backstory: the god of rock-falling will make rocks fall, so that everybody dies, if anyone says a particular phrase or sentence twice in a row. When one of the players, speaking in character, says that phrase, rocks fall and the PCs all die. The fact that the GM can show the table his/her secret backstory doesn't vindicate that as an episode of GMing.

If you do see it as a punishment, then that feeling would be based on your belief that the DM is supposed to contrive dramatically satisfying scenarios for you.

No. It's based on a belief that the GM is meant to author scenarios in which the players are able to make meaningful choices; not random choices where going left rather than right will be auto-loss.

See my example of the "god of rocks-falling" above: who would think that is good GMing? Putting in an auto-lose pathway is no different in my book.

 

[Balesir]

Presumably the players agree to trust my judgment on these matters, and that's why they're playing a game where I'm the judge.

OK, my confusion here is that I don't see how this is a situation where judgement is appropriate. I don't mean it's "wrong", but I see judgement as something that is appropriate where there is some sense that there are right and wrong answers - or, at the very least, where there is one or more "right" answers. If I trust someone's judgement to pilot a boat through a storm, I trust that they will give the best chance of the boat not sinking, for example.

In the case of "is dashing straight for the prize boldness or recklessness?" however, I don't see that there is a "right" answer. It's not a decision amenable to judgement; in the real world it would be essentially random which turned out to be true, however much value-judgement we choose to apply with the inestimable benefit of hindsight.

I actually think that, to me, a random determination would be preferable to some individual applying "judgement" to this situation.

If my rulings didn't make sense to them, then they would find some other game with a different judge. Thus, while my assumption may not be universal, or entirely based on actual reality, they should be understandable to everyone playing my game.

Kind of like how different authors have different styles, and you might not buy into the types of characters and stories favored by some authors, so readers end up sticking to authors that they like. The DM is the author of the game-world, so it should be no surprise when the story reflects this fact.

OK, so what I said about "exploring the GM's personality and preferences" is essentially what is happening? How does this equate, then, to a "neutral" world? That would seem to me to be a contradiction.

I guess I don't really believe in actual "random selection" really happening, even if players are uninformed. They may not know which way is better (since they have no knowledge either way), but they're probably basing their decision on something. Lucky number, a perceived pattern, guessing how the inhabitant's psychology works, a gut instinct, etc.

Hmm, it's quite possible that some heuristic would be involved, sure, a bit like when judging stockings. If you read that article, though, it seems highly unlikely that the decision process equates in any meaningful way with that which might be expected of the characters in the imagined situation. The myriad informational cues to be subconsciously evaluated by the players are not really comparable with characters in the situation imagined for the PCs. The decision might be based on some sort of expectancy cue picked up from the GM, a left-right bias in the players' minds or something based on recent availability (i.e. some recent, anchoring choice made successfully one way or the other). I don't think any of that enhances the fidelity of the game world, though, or even really relates to it.

That should have been "the GM has notes" and not "the GM has no notes." Sorry about that. I was worried I'd mess up while going out the door (with the copy-pasta modification), and apparently I did. My fault.

Aha - I see. OK, this, too, is interesting. Let me try out a hypothesis:

Might it be that the players' choice is actually acting a bit like a random number generator, here? It exists to "randomise" the game world for the GM? This would make the decision to roll the die in spite of the pre-existing plan quite directly analogous to "fudging the dice", in the sense that the GM is getting a result s/he doesn't like and is then re-rolling?

Some of the rest of your post (which I'm not quoting, as it doesn't raise anything new to say on my side, but it was an interesting read) suggests to me that this might be the case, and I can relate to it through one particular favourite computer game of mine - Crusader Kings II (CK2). CK2 is, or perhaps "originally was" would be more correct, a grand strategy game of the medieval age in which one plays a dynasty of lords (counts, dukes, kings and/or emperors) running their courts and lands. The degree to which vassals, courtiers and families are characterised and developed, however, make it a roleplaying game in many, many ways. As one player put it, "when you discover that your second wife is plotting to kill your eldest son so that her son will stand as heir and you have to decide whether to admonish, imprison, banish or execute her, tell me you are not roleplaying!"

CK2 is an extraordinary (and fun!) game, but there is no question of GM "drama objective" or heuristic bias - all the NPC decisions and world events are the output of a random number generator, at the end of the day. But is this sort of "impartial" game play what you are after? The setup and probability ranges are clearly "partial", in the sense that they are designed specifically to generate an interesting game, but the moment-to-moment decisions are purely algorithmic.

 

[JamesonCourage]

Hmm, it's quite possible that some heuristic would be involved, sure, a bit like when judging stockings. If you read that article, though, it seems highly unlikely that the decision process equates in any meaningful way with that which might be expected of the characters in the imagined situation.

I think that's probably true.

The myriad informational cues to be subconsciously evaluated by the players are not really comparable with characters in the situation imagined for the PCs.

Well, that's true, obviously. But they, as players, might be subconsciously processing queues or patterns that I give as GM, and responding to that (thus a "gut instinct" or something).

The decision might be based on some sort of expectancy cue picked up from the GM, a left-right bias in the players' minds or something based on recent availability (i.e. some recent, anchoring choice made successfully one way or the other). I don't think any of that enhances the fidelity of the game world, though, or even really relates to it.

I pretty much agree.

Aha - I see. OK, this, too, is interesting. Let me try out a hypothesis:

Might it be that the players' choice is actually acting a bit like a random number generator, here? It exists to "randomise" the game world for the GM? This would make the decision to roll the die in spite of the pre-existing plan quite directly analogous to "fudging the dice", in the sense that the GM is getting a result s/he doesn't like and is then re-rolling?

Well, I use dice to determine things, too, so I wouldn't be against rolling for stuff if it's not yet decided (in fact, I do that quite often). However, once it has been decided, and then a choice is naturally presented to the PCs (whether they go left or right), why would I change that? I want to see what happens based on their choice.

So, yes. If it was pre-decided, then rolling for it would be akin to fudging to me. I don't like doing that (I have no GM screen, my rolls are in the open, etc.).

Some of the rest of your post (which I'm not quoting, as it doesn't raise anything new to say on my side, but it was an interesting read) suggests to me that this might be the case, and I can relate to it through one particular favourite computer game of mine - Crusader Kings II (CK2). CK2 is, or perhaps "originally was" would be more correct, a grand strategy game of the medieval age in which one plays a dynasty of lords (counts, dukes, kings and/or emperors) running their courts and lands. The degree to which vassals, courtiers and families are characterised and developed, however, make it a roleplaying game in many, many ways. As one player put it, "when you discover that your second wife is plotting to kill your eldest son so that her son will stand as heir and you have to decide whether to admonish, imprison, banish or execute her, tell me you are not roleplaying!"

I've never heard of it -and I don't play many computer games- but that sounds like a fun game.

CK2 is an extraordinary (and fun!) game, but there is no question of GM "drama objective" or heuristic bias - all the NPC decisions and world events are the output of a random number generator, at the end of the day. But is this sort of "impartial" game play what you are after? The setup and probability ranges are clearly "partial", in the sense that they are designed specifically to generate an interesting game, but the moment-to-moment decisions are purely algorithmic.

Hmm. I think I used a mixture. I go for a "natural" sort of play, but allow much of it to be decided by dice. So, NPCs will act as I think appropriate. Events will be decided based on their mechanics and my perception of common sense, mixed with some rolls to see if anything outside of the ordinary happens.

So, let's take one series of events. I had rolled some dice, and I have rules for resolving things. If I get doubles, then something unrelated happens, and I roll for details on that. In this scenario, it looked like there was a plot against the king. The PCs were traveling around looking for a new mission (they're part of or work with an international magician order that tries to keep the peace). While talking to one specific magician, the idea of a potential plot against the king was revealed to them (I had rolled a combination of percentage dice and a skill check to determine if this NPC knew, and surprisingly, her did).

So, the PCs make their way inside the capital city, and there were two assassination attempts on the king's life (though the queen rules). They could have engaged, left, tried to ignore it, or whatever. But, the city went on lock down after the first attempt.

• So, if they'd decided to flee, they'd probably have to negotiate their way out (feasible for a party consisting of a magician from the international order and a noble).
• If they'd decided to wait it out, they could've found an inn, rented a place to stay, leveraged social status to secure a house for the interim etc. While waiting, they could have pursued other interests in the city, or just skip it and pass some time until they're able to leave.
• They decided to engage. They prevented the first assassination, and the noble/physician was able to restart the king's heart after they'd failed on the second.

Now, after they'd engaged, things got complicated. Evidence showed that the first attempt was made on behalf of the queen, who was the rightful ruler of the nation (though the act was still technically illegal). After finding out, the king rounded up forces and decided to take her into custody. To further complicate matters, the crown prince arrived, took a section of guards for himself, and went after the PCs (and the rogue-ish one in particular). Rather than engage with the royal free-for-all occurring, the players opted for an escape strategy, and went after that (I'll spare the details).

But, basically, what I'm doing is running things as "naturally" as I can. The players can then react to this ever-changing setting however they want. So basically I roll things to determine what's going on (which sometimes branches off to other things). I roll for nations, I roll for percent chance of things being possible (is there a specially crafted good waiting to be sold rather than commissioned in the city of 5,500 people? I'll roll to find out).

Then, based on what I roll, then I follow the mechanics (I have a d100 event chart for nations, for example, which usually branches off to 6 options each, and every bit of it has mechanics). After that, I translate how that might look in this particular setting, at this particular time, and incorporate that into the narrative. Then the players react to it however they see fit, and we resolve those events. And the cycle continues.

I know I get a little rambly, so sorry if this is confusing. But that's about the gist of it. And that's why I have a problem with "scene framing" with this particular style. It's basically self-defeating. It's not full-on railroading or illusionism, but it pushes both much more than I'd like for the style of fantasy game that I enjoy running most (which basically follows what I've outlined, above). I enjoy playing in other types of games, and even running more "scene frame"-oriented games outside of fantasy (especially things like my superhero one-shots). But I try to keep to the particular style above for my fantasy game.

 

[pemerton]

I don't really believe in actual "random selection" really happening, even if players are uninformed. They may not know which way is better (since they have no knowledge either way), but they're probably basing their decision on something. Lucky number, a perceived pattern, guessing how the inhabitant's psychology works, a gut instinct, etc.

The DM never told you that the sacrifices would wait for you. The DM never told you what was or was-not in the library. You gambled that you had the time, and you gambled that you might find something useful, and you lost.

Upthread I talked about the players gambling on the GM's secret backstory.

This is exactly what I had in mind.

In my preferred approach to play, the players making a bet that the GM's secret backstory is A rather than B does not count as meaningful choice, nor as genuine exercise of player agency.

 

[Tallifer]

Too many good things about the 4th Edition to choose only three. The more I play other roleplaying games, the more I realize how great our beloved edition was.

1. At-will powers
2. Encounters and short rests
3. Daily powers and dialy magical items
4. The variety of tactical combat effects
5. Clear math, thus allowing easy tweaking by the dungeon master
6. Healing Surges, Second Wind, Dying Saving Throws
7. Roles: Controller, Defender, Leader, Striker
8. Simplified Monsters such that the dungeon master can make one up on the spot
9. Passive defenses: AC, Fortitude, Reflex, Will
10. Paragon Paths, Epic Destinies, Themes, Backgrounds
11. Balanced classes
12. Action Points to gain an extra action
13. Standard/Move/Minor/Free Actions
14. Treasure Parcels and the overall approach to magical treasure

The only things I do not like are Skills (I prefer 5th Edition), too many specific Feats and the proliferation of almost useless magical items.

 

[JamesonCourage]

Upthread I talked about the players gambling on the GM's secret backstory.

This is exactly what I had in mind.

In my preferred approach to play, the players making a bet that the GM's secret backstory is A rather than B does not count as meaningful choice, nor as genuine exercise of player agency.

If that choice, however uninformed, has consequences (you went left and therefore the townsfolk were sacrificed), how is that not a meaningful choice? That choice had great meaning. The players just don't know how meaningful it is.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I actually think that, to me, a random determination would be preferable to some individual applying "judgement" to this situation.
[...]
OK, so what I said about "exploring the GM's personality and preferences" is essentially what is happening? How does this equate, then, to a "neutral" world? That would seem to me to be a contradiction.

This method is to trust the DM's judgment - the DM's opinion, if you rather - about how everything things work out. Literally, the things that happen are what the DM thinks should happen. Note that it's not what the DM wants to happen; the DM shouldn't want anything, other to present the world as honestly as possible. DM bias begets meta-gaming, which is anathema under this style.

To contrast, a "random" determination would be trusting the judgment of whoever designed the random table. It's equally unpredictable to the player, since you can't understand how some designer thinks any more accurately than you would understand how this DM thinks, but it can't take into account the situation on the ground - the designer can't account for any circumstances that would change the assumptions that went into creating the table.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

In my preferred approach to play, the players making a bet that the GM's secret backstory is A rather than B does not count as meaningful choice, nor as genuine exercise of player agency.

The thing is, it's not a pure gamble. It's more of an educated guess. They're betting on A rather than B, because they have some reason to believe that. If the DM is being honest about the world, and the players are engaged with the world, then the PCs should end up making the right decisions more often than the wrong ones.

If the players don't feel like their choices matter, then it could be a failure of the DM to present the world, or just a mis-match between player and DM expectations for the game. One of the problems with a strong-DM system is that it is prone to failures of the DM.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

In what meaningful sense have the players chosen not to encounter the mysterious stranger at the Green Dragon Inn? None that I can see. They weren't in charge of their own fate. They made an essentially random choice - in my version, based on some consideration that is irrelevant to the actual play of the game - and as a result never encounter this NPC you have authored, and never even know that she was there to be encountered.

The players don't choose to encounter the mysterious stranger. Encounters are determined by chance and circumstance. If the players could decide whether to encounter a given NPC, then that would require them to express agency within the game beyond that of just playing their characters.

That's kind of the definition of a Role-Playing Game. The players play the roles of their characters.

Granted, there have been games which attempt to blur the line between player and GM, by granting some authorial control to the players. I consider those games to really be missing the whole point of an RPG. Although, they seem to be popular of late, which implies a playerbase that sees a different point in playing such games.

Sure, but what counts as "forced". I have witnessed, played in and read about plenty of games in which, if the players actually want to have a session of RPGing, they have to pick up on one of the GM's plot hooks.

I think an important aspect of a railroad is that you can't steer it. There's a difference between players deciding to undertake actions - to pick up one of many plot hooks - and the DM deciding that something will happen regardless of player actions.

In what sense was the GM neutral? The GM wasn't neutral as between the options the players might take: the GM wrote in two paths, the left and the right, and choosing the left path meant auto-loss. With no clues as to that possibility - in my example I stipulated that the left path looked reasonable.

I never said that one path was auto-loss. I just meant to imply that they're different. The players could go right, or they could go left, and they would find different things. If they go left before they go right, then they might have a better result than if they just go right. (I did mean to imply that right was the known goal, and that the left path was an unknown; it may have been unclear on that point.)

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Generalising a bit, as GM I get to decide whether or not the gameworld contains towers, or passages that are vulnerable to collapse, etc. What should guide those decisions? In what I am calling a player-driven game, the choices made by the players, which signal what it is about their PCs that they want the game to force them to put on the line, provide the GM with guidance.
[...]
I think by "drive the action" you mean "make action declarations for the PCs". It doesn't sound as if they have a big influence on determining the content of the shared fiction.

That is certainly an opinion which can be held. I'm not saying that I agree with your name for the playstyle, or that I would want to play in or run such a game, but I can understand what you're saying and why you feel the way you do. Because of my perspective on matters, I would feel that such a play experience was kind of hollow, but that's just my perspective (and the perspective of anyone sufficiently like me to reach the same conclusion for the same reasons).

In a player-driven game of the sort I'm talking about, the players - through their choices in PC build, in backstory authorship, in the course of play - play the central role in deciding who is the Big Bad. Thus, in my 4e game, I'm not the one who decided that Torog, Orcus, Lolth and (ultimately) Vecna would be nemeses of the PCs. The players chose that.

As I see it, only the PCs can decide who their enemies are. Unless the DM creates a Big Bad who is completely unsympathetic, there should be some possibility that the PCs may shift allegiance as they learn more about the world and the situation. Or if the players are completely bored by the quest, they can abandon that quest and find something better to do with their time.

I know that's not really what you're getting at, but I wanted to highlight how there's some overlap between our different styles.