Speculation about "the feelz" of D&D 4th Edition

[Parmandur]

So? In order to measure feet you still need to have your minis laid out on a surface, have some scale factor, and measure distances and translate them to feet. Otherwise how do you know that the orc is or is not within the radius of the fireball, or actually even where exactly the origin point of the fireball IS relative to all the other elements in play? There is no provision WITHIN THE RULES OF 5e to avoid needing to make this determination, and the only supported way to do so is measurement!

The notion that describing things in an in-world measurement system using feet somehow makes it 'TotM' simply doesn't wash. It may sound better to you, and that may improve your game experience, but it doesn't in any way support a game process of playing without some sort of map (though it is certainly true that 5e doesn't describe things in terms of a grid, which was also true BTW of AD&D for the most part).

That's what a DM is for...?

Sent from my BLU LIFE XL using EN World mobile app

 

[Parmandur]

I sense that there is a misunderstanding of what theater of the mind really means. Parmadur is saying (correct me if I'm wrong) that totm is simply smth like "taking the miniatures game from the table into the realm of the thoughts". The other side believes that totm is truly more abstract in that it does away with measurement and specific distances. It is more of a Final Fantasy style of battle where we have the baddies on the left and the PCs on the right in an abstract space. Is this correct?
I feel that we really should define what we are talking about here when we discuss TotM.

Yup, pretty much; with DM adjudication.

Sent from my BLU LIFE XL using EN World mobile app

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

"It uses feet"


Dungeons & Dragons Basic Rules, 1981 (Moldvay Edit).

Well, whether true or not, the tradition in the old days was for the DM to describe things in 'in-world' terms (IE feet, not squares). In fact I never heard the term 'squares' used during a game until 4e did it. There wasn't anything very difficult about saying "10 feet" and the mapper extending the line representing the wall one more square on his graph paper. Dialog was usually of the form "the hall extends another 40 feet to the east, and turns 90 degrees to the south in the last 10 feet"

Maybe people who played Moldvay Basic did it different, we never used those rules (We used the Holmes version at one point). I suspect it was a statement that was little noted and not long remembered by most.

 

[Parmandur]

I don't think I agree with this. If it was just basically mentally running a game in your mind on a grid that you visualized, then what support would be needed? It would simply depend on the player's ability to keep this virtual grid in their heads and operate on it consistently. I'd expect a simplified grid type of system for this, and putting things in feet vs squares wouldn't be helpful to that.

So, we must conclude that TotM is indeed a more abstract mode of play. HOW abstract is of course open to question. I mean, lets imagine the next less concrete sort of play than a grid. That would be some kind of approximately tracked positions where an X, Y space is still held to exist, and things have a position on it, but there's some degree of 'fuziness' as to where exactly a given thing is within this space. So the GM can say "well, there's some orc archers over thatta way about 100' near some trees and they're firing at you." He might further decide these orc archers are all within 20' of each other. This last point might only be elucidated at the time a fireball is cast at them by the wizard.

Does 5e have 'support' for this level of abstraction? Well, the first question there is why is it using such a fine-grained position indicator as feet? Given that position is fuzzy wouldn't a more coarse measure of distance be simpler to use? Lets pass over this as the answer could be "yes, but we chose color over convenience." It would further seem to me that if this was the intent that more abstract formulations of AoEs would also be useful, something more close to 4e's bursts, blasts, and walls for example. Given that positions are a bit fuzzy anyway, why bother with exact statements of widths of arcs or paths instead of just reasonably quantified statements like "Everything in front of you" or "Everything in a straight line between you and X" or such? Again, you can argue "color", but this argument is getting a bit old isn't it? The best we can conclude is 5e supports 'color' but doesn't especially support TotM! In fact the easiest way to play it seems to be to actually put the figures on the table and measure things! I know from experience that we found this to be true.

Contrast this with 13th Age (a good contrast being a D&D-like with otherwise fairly similar rules). Here the rules for TotM are quite explicit, things are grouped into areas with relations between them depicting proximity and AoEs are described in these terms. Its more abstract than 5e's system, but quite easy to run without a map (indeed there's little advantage to such a map, though a few counters to help track lots of enemies can be helpful). You can still 'map' things pretty clearly though in terms of where they are narratively and work out the practicalities of moving and whatnot without a lot of pain. The point being you can make it MORE concrete if you want without boshing it up.

The point is, TotM isn't simply holding the grid in your head, it MUST include at least some form of abstraction. 5e (and 4e too) ALLOW such abstraction, but don't facilitate it in any real way.

There is no gamist abstraction, no, but real measurements facilitate the imagination easily enough. That 13th Age jive sounds waaaay too fiddley versus "it's twenty feet away."

Sent from my BLU LIFE XL using EN World mobile app

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

That's what a DM is for...?
QUOTE]

But again, see my entire analysis of what 'support' would mean, and what 'TotM' really involves. Just putting the grid in people's heads isn't really TotM, its just an exercise, like playing chess without a board (something that many chess masters are fully capable of doing).

What would the 'DM be for' if not to actually create a different process, since the normal process is objective and doesn't require a DM to do anything (IE in 4e the DM has no role in determining positioning except as one of the players of creatures on the battle map). BY THE RULES of 5e the DM has no more role than this, as every AoE and the position of every creature and its 'space' are pretty clearly spelled out. Thus this role you suppose for the DM is what? Just adjudicating the inevitable disputes that will arise about what the state of the 'mental battle map' is? I don't see how 5e is 'supporting' this, or even suggesting it as a procedure really.

 

[Parmandur]

That's what a DM is for...?
QUOTE]

But again, see my entire analysis of what 'support' would mean, and what 'TotM' really involves. Just putting the grid in people's heads isn't really TotM, its just an exercise, like playing chess without a board (something that many chess masters are fully capable of doing).

What would the 'DM be for' if not to actually create a different process, since the normal process is objective and doesn't require a DM to do anything (IE in 4e the DM has no role in determining positioning except as one of the players of creatures on the battle map). BY THE RULES of 5e the DM has no more role than this, as every AoE and the position of every creature and its 'space' are pretty clearly spelled out. Thus this role you suppose for the DM is what? Just adjudicating the inevitable disputes that will arise about what the state of the 'mental battle map' is? I don't see how 5e is 'supporting' this, or even suggesting it as a procedure really.

Sure, a good DM to male rulings is needed.

Sent from my BLU LIFE XL using EN World mobile app

 

[Scrivener of Doom]

"It uses feet"

Dungeons & Dragons Basic Rules, 1981 (Moldvay Edit).

The more things changes, the more things stay the same....

 

[cavalier973]

Sure, a good DM to male rings is needed.

Sent from my BLU LIFE XL using EN World mobile app

The genderization of rings really kills the verisimilitude for me.

 

[Darkness]

... the groundswell of immature, many of them 50+ so no excuse...I know some, fruit loops endlessly unleashing their jilted lover ire such that their teapot tempests seemed a great noise indeed ...

Please keep it civil. Insulting those who happen not to share your opinion isn't cool.

 

[pemerton]

the D&D Adventures engine they are still using for board games isn't exactly 4E in full: but it is a "Basic" version of it. The gameplay part is the same

No.

4e is a RPG. The fiction matters to the resolution. Wrath of Arshadalon et al are board games, which is to say the fiction is merely an overlay of flavour, like Monopoly or M:tG, and doesn't matter to resolution.

The gameplay is very much not the same.

This difference in gameplay can also be seen in differences in resolution and scenario-design procedures. The starting points for elaborating those resolution differences would be that the boardgame has no skill challenge system, no p 42, no section on damaging objects (which is a key adjunct to p 42 in the 4e DMG), and uses purely algorithmic processes for determining monster/NPC actions. For scenario-design procedures, one would start with the absence from the boardgames of the "quest" approach to adventure design and of a whole host of informal devices for player flag-flying (eg race, class, background, theme, paragon path, epic destiny).

It gives the same tools folks have been using to do TotM for decades; the same tools we used in 3.x to do it that way.

It seems to me that those tools are nothing but movement rates, ranges and AoEs. 4e has them too.

AD&D has very little forced movement, and (subject to [MENTION=55664]ABDULa[/MENTION]lharazed's caveats that there is no single AD&D, given its incoherence/incompleteness) once melee is joined position doesn't really matter (of course flanking and rear attacks matter, because they negate various bonuses to AC, but these are worked out based on number of foes vs a single figure, not via tracking individual movement and facing round-by-round). Hence ToTM is not too hard to manage in my experience. (For melee, that is; for AoE spells it generates all the usual arguments about who is where - long before 13A introduced technical rules for rolling dice to see how many targets you get, I remember assigning probabilities to various targets being in our out of the AoE and then rolling to see how it panned out.)

(In post 122 [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] makes some similar obvservations about the contrast with AD&D.)

But 5e's action economy and resolution mechanics track individual figure position just the same as 3E and 4e, and it seems to have quite a bit of forced movement. The only difference I can see from 4e is that it expresses everuthing in multiples of 5' rather than squares - if that is what counts as ToTM support (qv post 124), though, then I'm a bit surprised! Is multiplying by 5 all that stands between 4e's rulebooks and legions of TotM 4e-ers?