Confirm or Deny: D&D4e would be going strong had it not been titled D&D

[Erechel]

In post #246, you comment that fighter daily powers would bug you if you were playing 4e but you make no mention of fighter encounter powers. Which is a common trend among 4e critics; it's always the dailies that get argued over while the encounter exploits get pretty much ignored. Which is odd to me, because by my way of thinking, if someone has a problem with one I'd expect a problem with the other; and if someone is okay with one I'd expect no problem with the other. Which is why I speculated that tradition (aka precedent) is the difference.


Encounter powers aren't quite so nebulous as that -- much like a caster can't refresh his spell slots without a good night's sleep, encounter powers can't be refreshed until you take a 5 minute breather. It would have been more accurate to call them '5-minute powers,' but I'm guessing the 4e team went with 'encounter powers' due to it rolling much more readily off the tongue.

Encounters themselves are as nebulous as always, but encounter powers are well-tied into the game world.

Actually, I call the AEDU mechanics "Vancian for All" (It kinda sounds like an election promise). I really do not buy the encounter mechanics also, it's vancian mechanics in a tigher frame, but without any logical assumption. Encounters, as you said, are a nebulous concept after all. What defines an encounter, exactly? An amount of time? How could you differentiate one encounter from the next? And mostly, how the EP are well-tied to the world? Are they defined by player or by party? If I'm invisible, and run away for a minute while my companions are still fighting, I recover my powers?
They remind me to the game Pillars of Eternity: if you kill every foe in immediate sight, you recover all EPs immediatly, even when a foe is in the blight. This is what I don't buy. The very definition of encounter is pure metagame, and I can make decisions about this that, story wise, have not truly any sense. I can buy that the moon or the cycle of the day, or even exhaustion and the body cycle pose a limit to what a player can do (as the barbarian's rage, but also the wizard's spells), but a more nebulous concept as EP is problematic. If you want to limit your resources, you can make that the Daily powers aren't unusable afterwards, but they take a toll on your body (as barbarian rage), and every time that you use it, you are exponentialy damaged. That mades sense (to me, at least). Encounter powers are redefined in 5ed as powers between short rests, and Daily as between long rests.

 

[Hussar]

I don't know, ask your friend who has been invoking the name of the guy who called everyone brain damaged for liking white wolf or for using a theory that essentially dismissed immersion and simulation as viable things in RPGs.

Interesting. So because Pemerton references Ron Edwards, which you find perjorative that justifies your use of a term which 4e fans find perjorative? Nice.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Interesting. So because Pemerton references Ron Edwards, which you find perjorative that justifies your use of a term which 4e fans find perjorative? Nice.

I don't consider it a pejorative. I consider it a useful concept.

 

[pemerton]

That's not strictly true though... he fell because the player rolled low.

I assume that's meant to be a joke? Given that the die roll happens in the real world, not in the gameworld, and is no more nor less a game device than the rule that says "you can't use this power more than once without a short rest".

The problem arises, in my opinion, when the demands of the mechanics so override the possibilities of the fiction that the participant feels a discord between expectations and delivery.

That sounds like a sensible opinion, and I think I share it.

A key word is "expectations". That word refers to mental states (beliefs, hopes, etc). It use is very consistent with my characterisation of "dissociated" mechanics as being about psychological experiences that certain players have playing certain games, rather than inherent feature of mechanics. For instance, if someone's expectations changed (which happens from time to time, at least for some people) then whether or not a mechanic "so overrides the possibilities of the fiction that that participant feels discord" might change. Hence, a mechanic which used to be "dissociated" for that person might cease to be so.

If the power allows the fighter, for instance to charge in screaming bloody murder, scaring his foes, then why can't he do it once and then do it again if another group enters the room sixty seconds later?

As I said, this has to be narrated. The mechanics don't tell us. Much as they don't tell us why the thief fell.

As for retries, lots of RPGs limit retries. For instance, in AD&D a character who misses on an attack can't retry until the next round (putting higher level fighters and monks to one side), which is a minute later. Why not? Because the game rules say so: one attack roll per round. But what is the ingame explanation? None is offered: in his DMG, Gygax simply says that we deem it to be the case that no one gets more than one decent opportunity per minute of sparring. Similarly, 4e deems it to be the case that the fighter, in your example, can't get his dander up more than once without resting for five minutes.

The design logic in both cases is the same: it is a rationing of moves intended to facilitate game play. In both cases the mechanics provide the same degree of answer, namely, none. Neither is a case of ascertaining fictional possibilities by reference to the in-fiction circumstances. Rather, we have to narrate the in-fiction circumstances (such as the chance to get in a good shot coming up only once a minute) in a way that accords with the dictates of the mechanics.

3E boosts the attack rate to one decent opportunity per 6 rather than 60 seconds, but the same basic issue still arises: the action economy is a metagame artefact, and no ingame explanation is offered. Why does moving stop a high-level 3E fighter making a full attack - no matter how many attacks in that full attack, and no matter the distance moved (beyond 5') relative to total movement allowance? Again, the mechanics offer no answer to this question. Again, this is a case of the in-fiction circumstances having to accommodate the dictates of the mechanics. Contrast, say, Rolemaster's mechanics, which handle this issue very differently: in-fiction circumstances such as movement rates absolutely affect the relationship between how far someone can travel in a round, and how many attacks that person can get off and at what sort of penalty. Or contrast DungeonWorld's mechanics, in which there is no action economy and whether or not a player is allowed to declare a particular action for his/her PC is determined entirely by the GM's adjudication of the fictional positioning (so it is like traditional D&D non-combat resolution, even in combat).

I guess there is a numerically significant group of RPGers who don't find their expectations upended by the rationing of actions and turn-taking in combat resolution, although that is a subordination of fiction to mechanics, but do find their expectations upended by the rationing of technique deployment. My gut feeling is that that group very much overlaps with the group of people whose expectations as to how combat should be resolved, in an RPG, have been shaped by playing D&D, and especially 2nd ed AD&D and onwards (which is where individual turn taking in combat really becomes a default aspect of the game).

That seems to me to say as much about their expectations, though, as it does about the mechanics they do and don't like.

 

[pemerton]

That's because it speaks to us and coins a label to common dislikes of 4e.

I take it, then, that you don't think it's unreasonable to refer to Ron Edwards' analysis just because [MENTION=85555]Bedrockgames[/MENTION] doesn't like it?

I don't consider it a pejorative. I consider it a useful concept.

And obviously I consider Ron Edwards a much deeper thinker about RPG design than Justin Alexander.

I don't know, ask your friend who has been invoking the name of the guy who called everyone brain damaged for liking white wolf or for using a theory that essentially dismissed immersion and simulation as viable things in RPGs.

Next time feel free to mention me - though I'm not sure that I'm [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s friend; I've never interacted with him except on these forums.

Also, Edwards didn't say that people were brain damaged for liking WW. He said they were brain damaged by playing WW - and after he then apologised for having done so.

As for whether he dismissed simulation as a viable thing in RPGs, I guess this is what you think is a dismissal:

Simulationist play looks awfully strange to those who enjoy lots of metagame and overt social context during play. "You do it just to do it? What the hell is that?" . . .

The key issues are shared love of the source material and sincerity. Simulationism is sort of like Virtual Reality, but with the emphasis on the "V," because it clearly covers so many subjects. Perhaps it could be called V-Whatever rather than V-Reality. If the Whatever is a fine, cool thing, then it's fun to see fellow players imagine what you are imagining, and vice versa. . . .

For play really to be Simulationist, it can't lose the daydream quality: the pleasure in imagination as such, without agenda.​

Personally, I don't think that's dismissive at all. It seems to me to capture perfectly the spirit of early RQ, early Traveller, and the sort of game that a contemporary RPGer like [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION] is aspiring to. Edwards is writing an essay directed at a community (The Forge and its antecedents) who were sceptical about the existence or feasibility of simulationism, and telling them that it can be done and explaining how. That's not dismissal; that's inclusion.

When it comes to particular systems, in the same essay Edwards says:

Pound for pound, Basic Role-Playing from The Chaosium is perhaps the most important system, publishing tradition, and intellectual engine in the hobby - yes, even more than D&D. It represents the first and arguably the most lasting, influential form of uncompromising Simulationist design.​

Again, that is not a dismissal of simulationism.

He also very accurately describes the key goal, and challenge, of simulationist design:

In Simulationist play, cause is the key, the imagined cosmos in action. . . .

What makes [mechanics] Simulationist is the strict adherence to in-game (i.e. pre-established) cause for the outcomes that occur during play. . . .

The causal sequence of task resolution in Simulationist play must be linear in time. He swings: on target or not? The other guy dodges or parries: well or badly? The weapon contacts the unit of armor + body: how hard? The armor stops some of it: how much? The remaining impact hits tissue: how deeply? With what psychological (stunning, pain) effects? With what continuing effects? All of this is settled in order, on this guy's "go," and the next guy's "go" is simply waiting its turn, in time.

The few exceptions have always been accompanied by explanatory text, sometimes apologetic and sometimes blase. A good example is classic hit location, in which the characters first roll to-hit and to-parry, then hit location for anywhere on the body (RuneQuest, GURPS). Cognitively, to the Simulationist player, this requires a replay of the character's intent and action that is nearly intolerable. It often breaks down in play, either switching entirely to called shots and abandoning the location roll, or waiting on the parry roll until the hit location is known. Another good example is rolling for initiative, which has generated hours of painful argument about what in the world it represents in-game, at the moment of the roll relative to in-game time.​

(For anyone who thinks Edwards is exaggerating about initiative, I point you to the history and multiple iterations of initiative and action-economy rules for Rolemaster.)

My puzzle with simulation and D&D players is this: I am a 20-year Rolemaster GM and player. I have played RuneQuest and Stormbringer and CoC more, I think, than most posters on these boards. I understand simulationist gaming. But what all those games have in common is that they reject most of D&D's non-simulationist elements (they even try to avoid metagamed action economies, although not entirely successfully). If simulationism is such a big thing for D&D players, why aren't they all playing HARP (or RM, or RQ - GURPS and HERO might be a bridge too far in virtue of their thorough-going points-buy PC build).

4e, on the other hand, rather than rejecting those non-simulationist elements of D&D, embraces them and develops them in interesting and in some cases powerful new directions. Yet gets derided for being non-D&D. Mechanically, I find it truer to what makes D&D D&D than 3E, which to me is a pale shadow of AD&D's non-sim combat engine combined with a pale shadow of RQ or RM ultra-sim skills.

That's not to say that anyone has to enjoy anything ahead of anything else. But for someone like me who has spent a long time playing and enjoying serious simulationist RPGs, and who went to them in part out of dissatisfaction with the non-sim mechanics of D&D, to see 4e attacked for not being a sim game is somewhat bizarre.

 

[pemerton]

Encounters, as you said, are a nebulous concept after all. What defines an encounter, exactly? An amount of time? How could you differentiate one encounter from the next?

<snip>

If I'm invisible, and run away for a minute while my companions are still fighting, I recover my powers?

In the 4e context, the answer to these questions is found on pp 263 and 278 of the PHB:

A short rest is about 5 minutes long. . . .After a short rest, you renew your encounter powers . . .

Conditional Durations: These effects last until a specified event occurs. . . . Until the End of the Encounter: The effect ends when you take a rest (short or extended) or after 5 minutes.​

In case that's not nebulous enough, I can restore your faith in the awful whimsicality of 4e's approach to timekeeping and resource renewal by quoting this passage from the DMG 2 (James Wyatt's sidebar on p 55, in the context of a discussion of pacing):

Closely related to these methods for pacing encounters between extended rests is the question of how to handle rapid-fire encounters that don't allow characters to take short rests. . . .

To create these long encounters, you can allow characters to refresh themselves in the middle of the fight. Devise specific objectives and turning points in the battle, and give each one an associated refresh. . . .

[Y]ou might give [the characters] one or more of the following benefits.

* Each character can choose one expended encounter power and regain its use.

* Every character regains the use of his or her second wind or can spend a healing surge (even if unconscious).

* Each character gains an action point and can spend it later in the encounter, even if he or she already spent an action point in the encounter.

* Each character gains another use of a magic item daily power as if he or she had reached a milestone.

* Each character can regain the use of an expended daily power.​

I've used this technique once that I can recall, in this long encounter. In a later encounter, I used a 13th Age-style escalation die.

 

[pemerton]

I think the return to spell slots (even in its modified form) and the non-siloing of utility/ritual effects (returning all magic into spells, rather than breaking it up over 5 types of powers) is a big factor. As is damage scaling (casting for greater effect) over replacing powers with leveled-up variants after certain levels.

I agree with spell slots. I also think the 5e approach here owes more than a bit to 3E psionics (which perhaps also influenced 4e): fixed damage plus augmentation, as part of a balancing mechanism in a context of the ability to repeat uses of the same ability.

I think 4e would have been better (obviously so, I think) if powers had had default scaling where that made sense. This is especially obvious in some cases like the Heroes of the Feywild Bard, which has powers at the various levels which are just scaled-up versions of lower-level ones.

You also get oddities in the current system, as well as inefficiencies/duplication: the PCs in my game just reached 29th, and the fighter player upgraded Sudden Opportunity to Sudden Onslaught. The latter is basically a strict boost on the former (they are both free action attacks when a foe is bloodied or critted), except that it changes the range of the attack from weapon reach to adjacent - which is relevant to this character who is a long reach polearm fighter. We are running the power as written, but it's not clear that this was deliberate or just a mark of careless editing - whereas just presenting the powers in upgrade form would make it much clearer which changes between lower and higher level versions are deliberate and which are not.

4e would have been much more successful if had looked like Essentials (IE familiar to older players) than the rather radical departure it took in the PHB.

That may well be so. Personally I probably wouldn't have touched it, though, so I'm glad it came out in the form it did!

 

[pemerton]

4E has some radically different mechanics, primarily the AEDU scheme. I think the designers were trying to change the mechanical approach of D&D going forward to future editions, with ideas about "modernizing" the design. In this they failed. 5E is mechanically much more similar to the previous editions. Many players would not accept the change, and as a result WotC reverted it. This is a relief to me, but I'm sure many 4E fans were very disappointed.

As I've explained a little bit upthread, I think the debt of 5e to 4e (especially in respect of its PC build rules) is much greater than you seem to be allowing here.

Where I personally feel that 5e is closest to previous editions (especially 2nd ed AD&D and 3E) is its overt reliance on the GM to manage adventure pacing to a degree that pre-Essentials 4e simply doesn't need (because in pre-Essentials 4e there are no asymmetric resource suites that give some PCs the power to nova, which in turn opens up the possibility of intra-party imbalance in the course of an "adventuring day"). Combined with the move away from skill-challenge style non-combat resolution, this seems to emphasise the role of the GM in driving the game forward. (In classic D&D dungeon-crawling the GM doesn't need to handle this so much, because the wandering monster rules take care of it.)

Not that the GM isn't important in 4e, but there is not the same responsibility to manage pacing and the flow of events keeping these particular considerations in mind.

 

[billd91]

I take it, then, that you don't think it's unreasonable to refer to Ron Edwards' analysis just because [MENTION=85555]Bedrockgames[/MENTION] doesn't like it?

Have you ever stopped? You're like the Billy Mays of Forgeyness around here.

 

[Hussar]

I don't consider it a pejorative. I consider it a useful concept.

Of course you wouldn't. That's kinda the point.