D&D 4E The Best Thing from 4E

[pemerton]

In my years both playing and DMing, there have been five situations where a PC was incarcerated and sentenced to death within three days. Of those, two ended with justice being carried out as intended, one ended up with the other PCs banding together to break the PC out of jail, and two ended with the party diplomancer going through the proper channels to have the PC released.

It probably would have been different if any of those had occurred in the jailed character's hometown, such that they had family or other allies who cared about the result. If that had happened, those characters probably would have tried to do something about it, but even then it's likely to come down to the PCs as the most competent/powerful individuals in the area.

What this suggests to me about your game is that a player will probably never be surprised by who turns up to bust his/her PC out of jail! Likewise for their PCs.

Which is to say, there will never be a scene comparable to Zenobia helping Conan in the Hour of the Dragon, or to Pablo helping Tintin in The Broken Ear.

This is the Spartan world I mentioned upthread.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

What this suggests to me about your game is that a player will probably never be surprised by who turns up to bust his/her PC out of jail! Likewise for their PCs.

Yeah, probably. It's easier to surprise the PC than the player, since the player of a jailed PC can observe the actions of the other players at the table, but it's unlikely that something entirely unexpected would happen.

I did once play in a Shadowrun game where a captured PC was offered a job by a Mr. Johnson from the corporation that caught her. That was unexpected.

Which is to say, there will never be a scene comparable to Zenobia helping Conan in the Hour of the Dragon, [...]

That depends on how you look at it. From what I understand of the scenario, were I to translate that scene into an RPG, then Zenobia would probably be a PC. That also makes sense for most D&D worlds that I've played in, where high-level characters are suitably rare.

As I said, the PCs are probably the only ones in the city who can break someone out of prison. If you change that assumption, then I have to reconsider a lot of the other assumptions that were based upon it.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

At the craps table, am I more empowered if I get to roll, or if the croupier does? Assuming the dice are fair and no one is going to try and cheat, it makes no difference. If I roll, there is at best the illusion of agency!

And yet, one of the reasons that characters were allowed saving throws against powerful spells and effects is that they should, in some way, have a say in their own fate. Coincidentally, that's one area where 4E differs from every other edition. I mean, I agree with your example, but there's still a (statistically meaningless) difference between the DM asking you to roll a save against death or the DM informing you that you failed your save against death.

Two more points. First, the players' educated guess will almost certainly involve metagaming (the players' sense of what the GM's inclinations and preferences are, what tropes are in play, etc).

The GM of an RPG is the god who created that world. The PCs live in that world. The PCs should be more familiar with how things work in that world than the players should. Just like it's not meta-gaming to ask how many HP someone has left, because the PCs actually can see whatever the in-game reality is which corresponds to HP.

Second, short of the GM telling the players that the writing will be in a foreign language, or that the sacrifice is going to happen right now, how are the players going to know that they will lose if they choose to go left?

They don't know. Just like you wouldn't know the outcome, if you were faced with that same decision in real life. The core of role-playing is imagining that you are the character, and making decisions from that perspective.

Ridiculous advice! If the GM doesn't want the players to explore these other worlds, don't include them in the module. If options are included in the GM's world, and from the perspective of the players there is nothing to suggest that interacting with them is a waste of time relative to the players' goals for their PCs, then a GM who configures things such they are in fact a waste of time is, in my view, hosing the players. And to then try to cover up for that by giving "discouraging clues" is just supplementing poor initial design with poor run-time technique.

I think that just goes to show how far out of touch you are from what the game was intended to be, and how the game is actually played.

The differences from real life are so many and varies it's hard for me to know where to begin. Probably the main one is that real life is real. It takes place in a world in which events really take place, constrained by and driven by causal laws.

This is not difficult for a skilled DM to emulate. The fictional world should also be constrained and driven by causal laws, even if the rules in the book only show us a sub-set of the ramifications of those laws, filtered by what is relevant to a sub-set of the population.

If the difference is not epistemically accessible to the players, then we are still talking about the players taking a gamble on the GM's secret backstory. If the difference is partially accessible, but the relationship between the choices and success is not epistemically accessible, then were are in the same general area as my modified example above: the GM's choices about how options connect and interrelate have become the pre-eminent determinants of the outcomes of play. It is a GM-driven game.

Very little within the game-world is not knowable to the players. It's just a question of what resources they care to spend on figuring it out. The GM creates the game-world, and populates it with monsters and NPCs and whatever else, but only the players can decide where the story goes. (By definition, the story is whatever happens around the PCs.)

To the extent that "mismatch between expectations" is in play, that seems to be an issue of metagaming - the players aren't able to read the GM's preferences for tropes, plotlines, narrative elements etc. Which strikes me as plausible, but somewhat at odds with what I took your preferences to be.

This sort of mismatch should sort itself out within a few sessions, and highlights the importance of talking about what kind of game it is before you start playing. I just wanted to cover the possibility that you might show up at my D&D game, and then not understand what your role in the game is supposed to be; you might feel that your choices don't matter, because you aren't asking the questions that would get you the information you might want in order to make informed choices later on.

If the GM decides that if the players choose to have their PCs go left then rocks fall, and if the players choose to have them go right then there is a chance of a PC victory (eg a combat will ensue, to be resolved via the combat mechanics), the players' action declarations for their PCs will affect the outcome of the campaign. But by my lights no meaningful choice will have been made.

As I've mentioned many times, no choice is ever truly random. If the left path leads to rocks falling, then there should be some way to determine that, or else it's a DM failure.

Suppose that the GM provides the players with three plot hooks, and one leads to B1, one to B2 and one to B4 - let's say that, in the inn, the PCs hear rumours of the Caverns of Quasqueton, they meet a rider from the Keep who mentions the Caves of Chaos, and they meet a mercenary captain wanting to hire guards for a desert caravan crossing. Is this meaningful choice? Not really - the players, at this stage, don't know what any of the adventures involve, what level of threat their PCs will confront, what treasures they might gain, etc. It's basically random.

The players have no way of knowing what any of those adventures will involve, or what threats or treasure might be there, unless they're meta-gaming (i.e. cheating). They have reason to believe that the first two options will involve some spelunking, and the last will involve a lot of walking. If any of them end up somewhere that the PCs don't want to be - giant spiders, for example - then they're free to abandon the quest and find a new one.

Of course. But how is that choice disrespected by the GM deciding that the mysterious stranger is also there (perhaps because she, also, likes mead).

The decision to visit Tavern X is a decision to encounter those people who have also decided to visit Tavern X. If you then decide that the mysterious stranger possesses this trait, then you are letting player choice dictate her backstory.

This is a total red herring. No one in this discussion is talking about player authorship of backstory. The discussion is about the basis on which the GM makes decisions about backstory and consequences.

If the DM makes decisions based on cues from the players, then the player is indirectly authoring the backstory. The player could cause other things to happen in the backstory, by asserting different preferences to the DM.

 

[innerdude]

Anyway, I think we all agree, 4e stands head-and-shoulders above that in the coherence department. That is really the central thing about 4e, the 'good thing' from which pretty much all else flowed. It consciously understands what sort of game it is and its built around making that understanding work. WotC hamstrung that with a lack of understanding of genre and tone which lead to some brick adventures, and some of the presentation in 4e was flawed, but as a system it is a huge step up from any previous edition.

I significantly disagree with most of this statement.

1. 4e was absolutely NOT coherent as initially presented in the "Core 3" release. For me it took radical amounts of meta-analysis by proactive 4e fans on this board to explain the nuances of the "indie" / "scene framing" vibe to make 4e sound even remotely coherent as a light narrativist / gamist hybrid with a specific style that worked for it. If it was coherent, we would have heard a whole lot less stories of groups throwing up their hands saying, "This really isn't giving me what I want...." and moving on.
2. The 4e designers CLEARLY did NOT understand "what sort of game it was," because they kept pushing the delve format over and over again. 4e is HORRIBLE for delve format gaming, because delve formats rarely include enough relevant stakes to frame scenes with. To be honest, I think 4e is very much hampered by its D&D roots. At it's core it's an "indie" game square peg forced into a round hole, but the designers didn't dare present it in an "indie" vibe way, because they knew they risked alienating the long-standing fans. Of course, they ultimately ended up doing just that anyway, so why not take more risks and play up the unique playstyle aspects?
3. SOME of the 4e presentation was flawed? SOME? In retrospect it's truly shocking just how badly Wizards of the Coast botched the ENTIRE core 4e presentation from its June 2008 launch until its final "gates closed" in August 2014. From the marketing, to the book formats themselves (remember, "The medium IS the message"--when your first player's handbook is basically 200 pages of powers, what does that convey to the reader? This book is about using all these cool powers), to the purposeful "tweaking" of players' noses about being tied to their sacred cows (dismissive "Running off to the faerie gnomes" comments during live presentations), to the yanking of PDFs, to the utter failure of the digital tools, to the abominable "relaunch" of the system using the incomprehensible Essentials formats, to the anime-inspired art style that was "controversial" at best to much of the player base (I personally never had a problem with it, but for others it was just that much more fuel), to the execrable adventures..... The level of inept decision making for the marketing design, branding, and promotion of 4e is truly mind-boggling. It's truly a "cluster-eff" of epic proportions. I'd actually love for a marketing researcher at a major university to do a case study of it as how NOT to successfully market a product. The 4th edition era was the FIRST, LAST, AND LIKELY ONLY TIME PERIOD IN D&D'S HISTORY where it was not the #1 selling and #1 supported RPG game system in a market it created and was the long-standing incumbent.
4. For a somewhat narrow playstyle, facilitated by a functional understanding of some of the "indie" roots of some of its subsystems, 4e was a step up, clearly, for some players/groups. For others it was unequivocally a move in the wrong direction.

I'm neutral-to-negative about the D&D brand at this point. I don't currently have a single TSR, WotC, or Paizo core rules product on my shelves (I do have some adventures and campaign settings). I'm actually very gratified to hear that many people still enjoy 4e. I've adapted much of the "scene framing" techniques it supports into my own gaming, so clearly there's some value and merit in it. The open discussions here, talking about 4e has improved my GMing. But claims that 4e is an "obvious step up from any previous edition of D&D" are biased at best, and willfully disingenuous at worst.

 

[pemerton]

From what I understand of the scenario, were I to translate that scene into an RPG, then Zenobia would probably be a PC.

Do you know the story?

Conan is locked up the evil sorcerer Xaltotun, in the dungeons of the capital of Nemedia.

A woman from the king's harem drugs the wine of the guards and steels the keys and brings them to Conan. At first he expresses surprise and distrust, but she explains that some years ago she saw him ride into the city (as king of Aquilonia) and fell in love with him.

Once Conan escapes from the dungeon, he leaves Zenobia behind and she does not figure again in the story until the closing paragraph, where Conan (once again victorious) has taken the king of Nemedia captive and states, as his ransom, the hand of Zenobia in marriage, to be queen of Aquilonia.

Because the Conan stories are mostly solitaire adventures a direct comparison to an RPG is tricky, but the role played by Zenobia is, in RPG terms, that of an NPC. She appears briefly in an early scene, confers a single plot-related benefit (the keys) and then plays no role in the rest of the action.

 

[pemerton]

4e was absolutely NOT coherent as initially presented in the "Core 3" release. For me it took radical amounts of meta-analysis by proactive 4e fans on this board to explain the nuances of the "indie" / "scene framing" vibe to make 4e sound even remotely coherent as a light narrativist / gamist hybrid with a specific style that worked for it. If it was coherent, we would have heard a whole lot less stories of groups throwing up their hands saying, "This really isn't giving me what I want...." and moving on.

When [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] says the game is/was coherent he does not mean "easily comprehended". He means "reliably delivers the play experience it was meant to deliver when played according to its rules and guidelines."

And I agree with him - the game is/was this. (At least at Heroic tier. At upper tiers, the MM3 damage fix is needed, in my view at least.)

The fact that many found those rules and guidelines hard to parse is a secondary matter - it goes to presentation, perhaps, but not to the coherence of the game system.

To be honest, I think 4e is very much hampered by its D&D roots.

I think that 4e utterly depends on its D&D roots! As I posted upthread, one of my favourite things about 4e is how reliably it produces the "story of D&D" in play without the need for outrageous GM force or fudging. If you follow the rules and guidelines, and use the default monsters, your PCs will start out fighting goblins and end up fighting Demogorgon.

If you follow the tier descriptions that are included in the PHB and DMG, and extrapolate from these plus the monster descriptions to broader considerations of genre, the fictional scope of the game will grow more-or-less organically as the game progresses.

Experiencing the story of D&D, without anyone having to bend or twist things to deliver the story of D&D, is (in my view) a mark of tight design.

At it's core it's an "indie" game square peg forced into a round hole, but the designers didn't dare present it in an "indie" vibe way, because they knew they risked alienating the long-standing fans.

You seem to be looking at D&D mostly as a set of rules and techniques. For me it is first-and-foremost the story I have just described.

But even when I look at techniques, 4e owes much to its D&D roots - it takes the ideas that Gygax stated in his DMG essays on hit points and saving throws and the activity that takes place in a 1-minute round, fully implements them, and extrapolates them to other parts of the game. The abstraction/fortune-in-the-middle that was always a part of D&D action resolution is fully deployed; and is done so in a way that is mostly (not fully) integrated with 3E-style non-abstract movement and positioning tracking!

when your first player's handbook is basically 200 pages of powers, what does that convey to the reader? This book is about using all these cool powers)

I just did a quick count, and make it 95 pages of a book more than 300 pages long. In my Beta copy of the PF core rules, the spells are 120 pages of a book that is just over 400 pages, and includes some DMG-y stuff that is absent from the 4e PHB.

I think the spells in the 1st ed AD&D PHB occupy around 60 pages of a 120 page book (though to be fair, there is even less DMG-y stuff in this version - the combat rules are all in the DMG).

Does that mean that AD&D or 3E is all about using these cool spells? Well arguably it is(!), but I think that takes us into one of the real debates around 4e, namely, how ought the capacity of non-magic-using characters to be mechanically expressed?

For a somewhat narrow playstyle, facilitated by a functional understanding of some of the "indie" roots of some of its subsystems, 4e was a step up, clearly, for some players/groups. For others it was unequivocally a move in the wrong direction.

For those who want to play a 2nd ed style game, 4e is particularly unsuitable. That has been the crux of the discussion for the past several hundred posts on this thread!

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Because the Conan stories are mostly solitaire adventures a direct comparison to an RPG is tricky, but the role played by Zenobia is, in RPG terms, that of an NPC. She appears briefly in an early scene, confers a single plot-related benefit (the keys) and then plays no role in the rest of the action.

So I guess what I'm saying, in that case, is that I wouldn't try to convert that novel into an RPG adventure. There are certain conventions which work well in novels, which do not translate well into the tabletop medium.

The story where Zenobia tags along for the rest of the adventure would be a story that is more likely to happen in a game. (One of the few areas where I'll admit that meta-gaming helps more than it hurts is ensuring that players at the table actually get to participate in scenes, because it's no fun for three players to sit around and not contribute for hours on end.)

 

[JamesonCourage]

First, for clarity: I am talking about a scenario in which (i) the players have a left and a right path to choose between, (ii) there is nothing that suggests either is an unreasonable choice, and (iii) if the PCs go down the left path, and try to examine the documents, it will be fruitless/pointless (foreign language, no info, etc) and the time taken will mean that when they then head down the right path the prisoners will be dead (or whatever - the players will have failed in their goal for that episode of play).

Okay, I believe I'm clear on this for our discussion.

In that situation, I contend that (1) the left/right choice is not meaningful

I don't get how you come to this conclusion, but more on that below.

and (2) the scenario has not been well-designed

I'm not going to respond to any of this, because I don't care what people think is "good design" for adventures (because I don't like pre-made adventures).

The reason it is not a meaningful choice, in my view, is because making the choice reflects no skill on the part of the players, nor does it reflect any values or commitments.

I think your definition of "meaningful" is extremely narrow, then. From thefreedictionary.com:

mean•ing•ful
adj.full of meaning; purposeful; significant.

With that definition in mind, I think you're (iii) proves that it's meaningful. Their choice is significant (it led directly to a failed goal). Narrowing the word down to player skill or values/commitments is not something that I agree with. If you want to use another word or phrase, I can continue from that point, but as far as "meaningful choice" goes, I'm stuck at "obviously it's meaningful." It's just not informed.

Choosing left rather than right is - under the conditions I specify - basically random. And so the players make an essentially random choice, with one of the choices meaning auto-fail.

If someone is going to flip a coin, and I get to call heads or tails (and on a wrong choice I die), that choice is meaningful, given the definition of the word. Just because I'm guessing, it doesn't mean that the choice isn't meaningful (it carries great significance).

The fact that the players' choice is what triggers the auto-loss doesn't make that choice meaningful, in my view.

Same. It's the consequences that make it meaningful.

Here's an analogy to explain why: the GM could have a black ball ("PCs lose") and a white ball ("PCs win"), and put them behind his/her back and then invite the players to choose left or right. The players' choice, in those circumstances, will causally determine the outcome in the fiction, but it is not meaningful as a choice: the making of the choice does not reflect or express any contribution (of reason, or value) from the players.

But the consequences make the choice meaningful (in that their choice is significant, since a wrong choice means they lose). This seems extremely clear. The choice is meaningful. It's just not informed.

If you flesh out the scenario somewhat then the situation is a little different, but in my view no better as scenario design.

I just want to reiterate, I don't care about scenario design. If you think I'm saying that I'm for or against this type of thing in scenario design, you're misunderstanding me. I don't care.

 

[pemerton]

With that definition in mind, I think you're (iii) proves that it's meaningful.

Obviously when I talk about "meaningful choices" I am talking about "meaningful in respect of some dimension that I think is of importance".

I could write an RPG in which the outcomes of player action declarations depend upon the variations in tweeting of a parakeet, or upon the notes played on the piano by my cat walking across it. In some tenable sense of "meaingful" I guess that would make these animal actions meaningful for play, but not in any sense I am interested in.

When I put "meaningful" into dictionary.com, the first definition it offers me is "full of meaning, significance, purpose, or value". Outcomes determined by animals walking across keyboards, or by players choosing a random black or white ball from behind the GM's back, are not "full of purpose", nor "full of value". They are in fact devoid of both. Which is to say, they are not meaningful in the senses that I think matter to RPG play.

 

[JamesonCourage]

Obviously when I talk about "meaningful choices" I am talking about "meaningful in respect of some dimension that I think is of importance".

Then discussion over for us. You'll always think that (and you have every right to). But I'm not interested in a discussion where it's basically "definitions as pemerton defines" which unsurprisingly leads to "this means that pemerton is right in how he frames things." I'm not interested in that discussion at all.

Of course you're right for your play style. I'm not arguing that. I'm arguing that an uninformed choice that has significant consequences is meaningful. It sounds like you agree (you just have a preference where you like a more narrow scope of play). That's cool.