D&D 4E The Best Thing from 4E

[The Crimson Binome]

To me, this reinforces that your conception of player agency is limited to making action declarations for their PCs in a world entirely authored by the GM - which means, therefore, choosing among the options that the GM has provided. Frequently in circumstances of such little knowledge as to outcomes and impact that the choice is, for practical purposes, random or nearly so.
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The second sentence is correct - that is the whole point.
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You haven't answered - what harm, or wrong, does the GM do if s/he lets player choices dictate the backstory of the mysterious stranger.
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Correct. That's what I call a player-driven game.

I think you have a pretty thorough understanding of my style, by now. Players are players and the GM is the GM. The players each play the role of one character. The GM plays all of the NPCs, and designs the world which the PCs explore. It is not the place of the players to author any of the backstory of the world, aside from the backgrounds of their own characters, which must be negotiated with the GM to make sure they fit into the world.

It is similar to a sandbox-style video game, which is entirely created by (often professional) game developers in some dark office building. The roles of player and developer are extremely well-segregated. The major difference between a video game and a TTRPG is that the AI for the game is replaced with the actual intelligence of the GM, who can try to account for any possibilities that the players might come up with.

If players get in and start tinkering with the code of a game, it loses a lot of the authenticity. You didn't play Fallout 2, but you played your own hacked version of Fallout 2. You didn't play through Your Friend Jim's Campaign Against the Iron Giants, because you played in your own hacked version of that campaign.

This is one way to look at it. It's not my preferred way. When my players metagame off my preferences (most notoriously, my preference for demons and undead as enemies), none of us at the table pretends that this models the PCs' knowledge of the gameworld!

That seems weird to me. If your campaign setting has a history of being plagued by undead and demons, and not so much by giants or dragons, then it would make internal sense if that setting had more demon-slayers and undead-hunters than dragon-slayers and giant-killers.

I have lost track of your example. Do the players know that taking the left path will be a waste of time? Can they know, and if so, how?

They know that the right path is their ultimate goal of why they broke into this place, but they don't know what's down the left path. It could be a dragon, or it could be a dead end.

And if the GM has written into the gameworld this waste of time, why? What is the point of writing in an option which, if the players do choose it, means that they will lose? The question is not rhetorical - you have not actually stated a reason why writing such a thing would be good GMing.

Just as it is good role-playing for a player to imagine herself in the place of her character, and make decisions from that standpoint, so it is my place as DM to imagine what the Big Bad would do. If you have a lot of minions, then you're going to need an office to keep that stuff organized. It would be weird if that information didn't exist somewhere.

I don't understand this strong normative language, as if you somehow "are in touch" with how the game was "intended" to be. Intended by whom? Gary Gygax? You've already rejected him as an authority upthread, and in any event, to be blunt, I think I've got at least as good a handle as you do on how Gygaxian play works.

I don't know who wrote that module. As a general rule, I don't run modules and I don't like to play in them. I'm just saying, you seem to play in one style, and this official product seems to go against your style. If your style was common, or if the designers of that module had agreed with your style, then it wouldn't have been designed in this way.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Its just I thought NV was a little too mundane. 4e seems to best thrive on larger-than-life sorts of action. Once the character's transcend that one bit of the world then whatever, you are into MotP land or whatever, but until then it seemed a bit too restrained for me.

It was the setting of some low-level adventures, it would make sense that it's at the merely life-sized end of the scale.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

But again, the point is that if the players are choosing from ignorance, then their choices are basically random, and what choices they are presented with, if any, is the key determinant, even if they do have choices, along with what information the DM chooses to release.

And again, the point is that the player isn't choosing from ignorance. The player is choosing based on the information they were able to gather, both on what they chose to examine and the character's ability to notice things (with a relevant check).

As a tangential issue, the Perception skill is usually much more important than other skills, in editions of the game where it exists.

This is entirely possible. The question is whether or not the players can really anticipate what they need to know. Its possible to be infinitely cautious and meticulous to try to avoid any surprises, but that's part of what I see as the legacy of this kind of play, it tends to be very procedural and dragged out. The players conceive elaborate backup plans, arcane procedures for opening every door and traversing every hallway, etc. It does work OK in the tradition of Gygaxian 'skilled play' in a dungeon-type environment where the 'right questions' are pretty obvious and relatively stereotyped. D&D just failed to evolve a way to extend that into a more general type of play, which is why we perceive problems in 2e.

Again, that's something that should work itself out within a few sessions. If the players don't think to ask questions, and the DM really expects that they should, then the DM might want to prompt them the first few times until they get into the habit. It's not really how I would expect the game to be run later on, but it's just sort of a training-wheels segment to get everyone on the same page. Kind of like how you might run through a trial combat before you get to the real game.

The quickest way to make players (and characters) paranoid is for the DM to introduce an undetectable trap, or an undetectable cursed item. If the world is full of that sort of thing, then the PCs need to be paranoid in order to survive, and it takes an hour to play out walking down a hallway. If they never come across anything like that, then they never waste time checking (or feel bad for not checking), and you can get on with the game.

So, what is wrong with that choice being dictated by the rule of what is fun or interesting? In fact, isn't that what you are doing when you insure there's some way to figure out that rocks will fall?

I'm not deciding that there's some way to tell that rocks will fall. I'm relying on the fact that a path where rocks fall is inherently different from a path where rocks won't fall, and any difference between the two would have to be detectable (unless you're hiding the whole thing with an illusion... but illusions, themselves, are detectable).

You could have someone botch the Perception check to notice the fault, or botch the relevant Engineering check to determine stability, but that's just the way the dice go sometimes. Nobody ever said that you could succeed if your luck fails you, although trying to coordinate character strengths so that all of your bases are covered is a good way to minimize the risk of bad luck.

I think you mean something different by 'backstory' here. [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] is talking about whatever the player writes on his sheet to explain his character's background and history up to the point where the game started, and maybe beyond that the explanation narratively of the player's build choices and such.

The setting as a whole has a backstory, just like any given character has a backstory. The Big Bad and all of the relevant NPCs have their own backstories.

 

[Balesir]

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.

I followed it just fine, I think, having come accross similar concepts connected with Hârn, and it actually helped crystallise the source of something that has long bothered me - but I'll return to that below as [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION]'s post has a nice example to use.

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.

Hmm, I think I'm with [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION], here - I don't think the choice the players make is meaningful. You might say it's picky; clearly, there are meaningful consequences in the resolution that follows the choice, but the players (and, we imagine, the characters) did not make any choice concerning the death of the sacrifices at all; I would say that their death was a result of happenstance, not deliberate player/character decision. That, to me, makes the decision itself meaningless - it was just part of a set of unlucky circumstances, nothing more.

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.

OK, we have danced with this scenario a little - meeting the "random" stranger, overhearing the interesting conversation, etc. This has been bothering me and I think it's because it sits at the heart of what I begin to see as a key problem with "naturalistic" play.

The thing is, how many people do we encounter or conversations do we overhear from day to day? Speaking for myself, the answer is "loads". Most are inconsequential, a mere blip that barely registers on my memory "radar". Others are much more important. For some reason - often quite whimsical and sometimes totally unpredictable - they assume greater meaning than the myriad of others. But, how might we "model" this in a roleplaying game?

One way might be to mechanically (or at least consciously) represent each individual instance, each with a "realistic" chance of being relevant/of interest or whatever. This seems to present to serious shortcomings: (i) the number of such interactions for even a small party of characters is likely to be prohibitive if we are to present a world that is not, as pemerton puts it, exceedingly "spartan", and (ii) what happens if, through simple whimsy, a player decides to take an active interest in one such instance? Do we need to prepare systems or scenarios for every such instance, just in case? That sounds impractical.

One way around this might be to present only "representative" encounters, glossing over those we consider to be inconsequential. The problem here is that this removes some control of the character from the player, since it is the GM or the system, not the player, who is deciding what the character views as "interesting". Further, if the "representative" encounters are given only a "realistic" chance to be relevant to the current situation(s) of player interest, we will substantially underrepresent the number of such encounters (since it immediately implies that none of the encounters of which this is merely the representative example were of interest given the current situation if this representative one was not).

Let's suppose, then, that we decide to play out only "representative" encounters in the characters' lives, and that we allow an enhanced chance that such encounters will relate directly to the matters of interest to the PCs (since they represent only one of many instances notionally going on, and to gloss over an instance of direct interest with a "nothing to see, here" would be at least as much a distortion of the naturalistic world as plot-directed scene framing would be). The problem, now, is "how do we decide what topic of interest to the PCs do we relate the encounter to?" - are we not right into just what you say you don't want? To mould the presentation of the game world based on what the players state as "of interest" for their character?

In short, it seems to me that either we present a massive long list of random topics and ask the players for an indication of (lack of) interest in each one, or we cut out the tedious listing and just ask them - which you say you don't (want to) do.

I think this explains why pretty much every RPG I have ever played ends up basically framing a situation (an "adventure") around whatever the players are either expecting to do or interested in doing. The first is basically the GM or the system telling the players "this is what you should expect to do" (which they can either accept or decline), the second is the players (maybe in negotiation and definitely with a GM veto) selecting what the game should be about. The difference between the two seems slight, to me.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

The thing is, how many people do we encounter or conversations do we overhear from day to day? Speaking for myself, the answer is "loads". Most are inconsequential, a mere blip that barely registers on my memory "radar". Others are much more important. For some reason - often quite whimsical and sometimes totally unpredictable - they assume greater meaning than the myriad of others. But, how might we "model" this in a roleplaying game?

You can have the DM describe each conversation in vague terms as it is overheard, and only go into detail if the player indicates that they want to pay attention. Mention that there are some people over there talking about the weather, and someone at the bar who is drinking heavily and complaining about her boss.

If you get too many people in a room, it becomes difficult to tell what anyone is saying, so that problem is somewhat self-regulating. As long as there are few enough conversations as to be ineligible, the DM only needs to figure out what they're saying at the same rate as the players can ask, which isn't too difficult. (A problem roughly on par with coming up with names for these characters, should they become relevant.)

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

You can have the DM describe each conversation in vague terms as it is overheard, and only go into detail if the player indicates that they want to pay attention. Mention that there are some people over there talking about the weather, and someone at the bar who is drinking heavily and complaining about her boss.

If you get too many people in a room, it becomes difficult to tell what anyone is saying, so that problem is somewhat self-regulating. As long as there are few enough conversations as to be ineligible, the DM only needs to figure out what they're saying at the same rate as the players can ask, which isn't too difficult. (A problem roughly on par with coming up with names for these characters, should they become relevant.)

I think [MENTION=27160]Balesir[/MENTION]'s point is that we can extend this to every possible common situation which will now and then present some interest to the players. In fact in a real living world we are bombarded all day with a myriad of information. Today I've seen 1000's of cars, 100's of people, overheard 10 different conversations, talked to several people, heard a bunch of stuff on the radio, and observed a vast number of other rather mundane and trivial facts. Of course I am a pretty mundane person living in a mundane world, I'm not looking for things that are out of the ordinary or interested in getting into anyone else's business as a general rule.

What if I was an adventurer? Every day I hang around in streets and alleys and shops, frequent bars and taverns, talk to people both familiar and unfamiliar, and all in the course of some sort of agenda, while probably watching out for possible enemies, rivals, allies, etc. Clearly there is simply no way, not even close to any way, to reproduce the full texture and depth of life in anything but the most 'spartan' world. ALL YOU CAN DO is deal with the actually interesting cases, or at least some very small representative subset of possibly interesting cases, as Balesir has just outlined. In fact one of the primary difficulties with executing intrigue type plotlines is just the very fact that every single time the DM mentions someone or some fact the PCs MUST necessarily take it as significant. If it really isn't then they've become fixated on irrelevant trivia (a common pitfall in this sort of play), and if it is then clearly its had a big flag put on it saying so.

The best you can do is fall back on the Perception and related skills, but then you run into the same issue as the left/right choice where if the PCs fail a Perception check then the story goes in a less interesting direction. I don't think that framed play necessarily by itself solves all of this, and I understand the position that maybe it doesn't ALWAYS need to be solved, but I've seen a lot of sandbox games flounder on just this issue. I've watched several of them sink because the DM simply couldn't get anything interesting to happen at the table (or conversely the DM finally became so leading that the game lacked player engagement). Invariably these games quickly improve vastly as soon as someone takes charge and starts to really engage the players. I've taken over a couple groups like this and made this turnaround happen.

Anyway, I just noted the use of 'Naturalist' as a replacement for 'Simulationist'. I kinda like it, it seems like at least more of a reachable and definable goal.

 

[JamesonCourage]

I don't really understand.

I know you don't.

And see here we have it. Either we're following some ideal of 'neutral DMing' or at the very least process-sim with the players in charge of the process, or we're railroading.

Railroading, as I define it in the GM chapter of my RPG, is "ending with the GM's desired outcome, no matter the actions that take place." So, when you say (and what I replied to) "So, if the DM is deciding the players are wanting a fight, then why present any choice at all? I wouldn't" then you've railroaded them to that point. That's why I see scene-framing as light railroading (because you're forcing an outcome, but then letting it play out without GM force).

It's the same with "the players will arrive at the ritual at this specific point, no matter what choices they make." This is the GM's desired outcome, and it doesn't matter what actions the players take.

And again, I use scene-framing (light railroading) often in my other games (like my superhero one-shots). I'm not saying it's an inherently bad technique.

There's not one shred of railroading involved in what either I or Pemerton are doing.

Well, I disagree. But again, if players are cool with being on the rails at times, who cares? It's fun all around.

I'd also note this, JC, you've said something a couple times about 'adventure paths'.

And modules. Definitely both, yes.

I don't play published adventures, and I don't think to a large extent @pemerton does either from what I've heard.

As far as I can tell, pemerton makes extensive use of modules and scene-framing.

The problem is quite simple, they presuppose the players will follow some particular plot line. Heck they HAVE to, pretty much, or they'd be largely useless. There are very few adventures around that I would run because very few adventures match my agenda and even fewer match my own idiosyncratic style.

Right, that's a common problem with them.

 

[JamesonCourage]

I followed it just fine, I think, having come accross similar concepts connected with Hârn, and it actually helped crystallise the source of something that has long bothered me - but I'll return to that below as @Saelorn's post has a nice example to use.

Alrighty.

Hmm, I think I'm with @pemerton, here - I don't think the choice the players make is meaningful. You might say it's picky; clearly, there are meaningful consequences in the resolution that follows the choice, but the players (and, we imagine, the characters) did not make any choice concerning the death of the sacrifices at all; I would say that their death was a result of happenstance, not deliberate player/character decision. That, to me, makes the decision itself meaningless - it was just part of a set of unlucky circumstances, nothing more.

I just can't agree, given the definition of the word.

I think this explains why pretty much every RPG I have ever played ends up basically framing a situation (an "adventure") around whatever the players are either expecting to do or interested in doing.

That's basically what happens when the players pursue actions... because it's driven by them, yes.

The first is basically the GM or the system telling the players "this is what you should expect to do" (which they can either accept or decline)

I agree with this. My system doesn't have classes, and absolutely nothing pushes you to be a combatant. But I, as GM, might still say "I want to run this type of game" and then the players must agree or not (and then not play).

the second is the players (maybe in negotiation and definitely with a GM veto) selecting what the game should be about. The difference between the two seems slight, to me.

Yeah, the second one pops up more frequently than me saying what I want to run.

At any rate, I only skimmed your reply to Saelorn. Nothing on most of it spurs a particular reply in me.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

What if I was an adventurer? Every day I hang around in streets and alleys and shops, frequent bars and taverns, talk to people both familiar and unfamiliar, and all in the course of some sort of agenda, while probably watching out for possible enemies, rivals, allies, etc. Clearly there is simply no way, not even close to any way, to reproduce the full texture and depth of life in anything but the most 'spartan' world. ALL YOU CAN DO is deal with the actually interesting cases, or at least some very small representative subset of possibly interesting cases, as Balesir has just outlined. In fact one of the primary difficulties with executing intrigue type plotlines is just the very fact that every single time the DM mentions someone or some fact the PCs MUST necessarily take it as significant. If it really isn't then they've become fixated on irrelevant trivia (a common pitfall in this sort of play), and if it is then clearly its had a big flag put on it saying so.

I do tend to run a fairly spartan game, much for this reason. Out of curiosity, how would you feel about abstracting that all out to a Gather Information check (I think the 4E equivalent is Streetwise)? The players say what kind of information they're looking for, and the DM can return a general consensus about what people in town are talking about, and more specific information about that topic.

Of course, that sort of thing would make it difficult to play out the encounter with the mysterious stranger, since the act of playing out the encounter would reveal the fact that the NPC is important.

Anyway, I just noted the use of 'Naturalist' as a replacement for 'Simulationist'. I kinda like it, it seems like at least more of a reachable and definable goal.

I can live with that.

 

[pemerton]

And conversely, those exact activities ("railroading" plots, "rocks fall, you die") happen because of play agendas in which player agency is not the primary goal. If the goal is "simulation of the events of a realistic fantasy world", than walking up a mountain path could easily result in a "01" roll on the "random mountain weather" chart, which results in an avalanche which kills the PCs. There was SOME player agency ("Don't walk in the mountains!"), but the primary goal is to demonstrate to the players that things happen in the world which the PCs have no control over.

Upthread I asked for a clear statement of reasons for designing the left/right choice where the left choice looks reasonable, but if chosen is an auto-fail.

This is one possible answer: the reason is to demonstrate to the players that things happen in the gameworld which the PCs have no control over.

Now let's talk about how that relates to player agency. I would have thought that, virtually tautologously, it is antithetical to it.

Yet 4e fulfills the PROMISE of 2e almost completely. It delivers the story-driven play that 2e did nothing to deliver except to tell the DM to 'make it happen'.

Agreed, but I think there is an interesting divergence of play preferences here.

For some players, the fact that 2nd ed AD&D relies upon massive amounts of GM force, suspending/fudging the rules, etc to deliver dramatic fantasy play is a virtue. So 4e's innovations in this respect are actually setbacks.

Whereas for others (and I put both of us in this box!), 2nd ed was deeply flawed, and 4e corrects those flaws.

I think that [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] is correct that this is a big split in the D&D base. I think ENworld is, by default, in the "2nd ed's features were virtues" camp, with a side-dose of "we prefer Gyaxian gamism", and the "4e-crowd" somewhat bringing up the rear.

Ironically I thought the idea of the 'PoL' was much more in keeping with a 2e tone than a 4e tone. Its actual incarnation in Nentir Vale owes a bit more to 4e's tone, but its still not quite hitting the mark. Maybe MV:TtNV gets you there, I have never managed to get around to buying a copy.

I never used Nentir Vale - as far as I can see from skimming over it in the DMG and Essentials books it's a pretty generic starting setting. In my game I used the equally generic map and key from Night's Dark Terror - both have forests, a river or two, hills, mountains at the edge of the map, etc.

But the idea of PoL was important in my game. At Heroic and through the first half of Paragon, the fall of the Nerathi empire was a constant backdrop to the game, and gave context to events that I framed and to the way some of the PCs engaged with them. In the latter part of the campaign, those mortal events have been subsumed into (and in a sense become a local metaphor for) the bigger issue of the Dawn War, the failure of the Lattice of Heaven, and the seemingly impending arrival of the Dusk War.

4e seems to best thrive on larger-than-life sorts of action. Once the character's transcend that one bit of the world then whatever, you are into MotP land or whatever, but until then it seemed a bit too restrained for me.

For 15 levels the PCs in my game never left that map - which is around 200 miles wide and 100 miles high - although they did traverse most of it. Because of the downplaying of exploration in 4e, and the more metaphorical/symbolic/thematic role the setting plays, it wasn't necessary to expand further, although if the focus was on world creation then it would seem rather contrived that so much eventful stuff happened in this rather backwaters region of the world.