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

[Garthanos]

Eh, its easy enough to do fairly detailed resource games with heroic 4e. Toss the 'sun rod' which obviates all considerations of lighting or running out of light, and the rest of the equipment rules are pretty similar to earlier editions of D&D, though the equipment list is a little lean it has the most important stuff.

Kind of funny but in my 1e game their was a culture with convenience magics and in every elvish community that was true... ahem... a fairly reliable light source was a dime a dozen commodity among the nobility and ahem players if they had even one member with social background and contacts.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah, that latter is how my experience of D&D is; I find it awesome, the Encounter model doesn't really do it for me.

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Here's what's weird about other versions of D&D. Take 'classic' D&D for example, there's NO EXPERIENCE at all for anything you do, except fighting. You get XP for treasure of course, but you could explore an entire dungeon level, map it all out, etc, and if you don't have an encounter (or happen upon some unguarded treasure) you will literally get ZERO XP by the rules, even if you disarm traps, figure out puzzles, find secret doors, sloping passages, and whatever else.

Now, 2e DOES address this, and I think 5e does too (not sure what all you get XP for besides fighting in 3.x), but 4e uniquely is the only D&D where just plain ADVENTURING is explicitly worth XP and its measured out in some degree of mechanically indicated way. 2e and 5e at least HAVE XP for 'doing stuff', but its not at all clear how much to give out or when or even exactly why.

Amusingly we stopped bothering with explicit XP, but even in just a spiritual sense the idea of character's learning from all the challenges they take on and things they achieve makes great sense, and we always progressed the characters based on that idea.

 

[Neonchameleon]

But the beauty of the system is that it allows the DM to set everything up and make common sense calls: pick a DC off the screen and roll. Easy as pumpkin pie. No muss, no fuss.

Tools are meant to be open-ended; what the group and DM want to do with them, same as languages.

What's a common sense call? Whose common sense?

My textbook example here is tightrope walking as it's a litmus test I frequently use for skill systems. In 3.5 tightrope walking is DC 20 (it's balancing on something less than 2" wide) and walking on a slackrope is DC22. Clearly someone thought this was common sense for difficulty.

In the real world commoners without a big skill investment or a high DEX practice slackline yoga. And if someone thought DC 22 to just walk a tightrope was "common sense" I hate to think what they'd think that some of the Cirque du Soleil's stunts were. For that matter I don't know what I'd consider the common sense DC for stunts that are utterly divorced from common sense. And there's a reason that ENWorld came up with the "That's unrealistic retort compendium".

But that's not why I find 4e vastly easier to improvise with than most other RPGs. I've told this story before - but why I do goes back to my second or third ever sesssion DMing 4e and I'd not run anything else since I was a teenager in the 90s. I was running War of the Burning Sky - and due to a string of natural 20s on diplomacy checks at exactly the right time the PCs had managed to turn a dragonrider riding a wyrmling. So I did what any good DM would do - gave them another problem. Asked them how they were going to get this dragon rider to a safehouse when it was across the city that was being bombed by a flight of dragons. And got a response along the lines of "We're going to disguise the dragon as a plague cart. Steal a cart, throw a horse blanket over it and put its two back legs in the cart, light lanterns, and tell everyone to stay back using the darkness to disguise it."

This was my third time DMing as an adult. (Or possibly my second.) This scene is nowhere near the adventure path (I'd already rewritten the encounter). And how the hell? I took a swallow from my drink and hoped the players wouldn't notice I didn't have a clue what to do next.

And by the time I put my drink down I realised what skill challenges were for. For giving me the tools to handle complex tasks like that - a pacing tool and a tool to know when to make things more complex and what sort of overall difficulty an off the wall screwball plan like that should have. And it's something 4e handed me on a platter that literally no other RPG I'm aware of does.

4e has also come to my rescue when I've completely forgotten my rulebooks. The 4e MM3 on a business card gives me everything I need to create monsters on the fly. I certainly don't have to look up a monster statblock -and then look up half its abilities in the MM.

 

[Parmandur]

Here's what's weird about other versions of D&D. Take 'classic' D&D for example, there's NO EXPERIENCE at all for anything you do, except fighting. You get XP for treasure of course, but you could explore an entire dungeon level, map it all out, etc, and if you don't have an encounter (or happen upon some unguarded treasure) you will literally get ZERO XP by the rules, even if you disarm traps, figure out puzzles, find secret doors, sloping passages, and whatever else.

Now, 2e DOES address this, and I think 5e does too (not sure what all you get XP for besides fighting in 3.x), but 4e uniquely is the only D&D where just plain ADVENTURING is explicitly worth XP and its measured out in some degree of mechanically indicated way. 2e and 5e at least HAVE XP for 'doing stuff', but its not at all clear how much to give out or when or even exactly why.

Amusingly we stopped bothering with explicit XP, but even in just a spiritual sense the idea of character's learning from all the challenges they take on and things they achieve makes great sense, and we always progressed the characters based on that idea.

Well, all three main dudes at WotC have admitted they don't do XP in their own games, just DM fiat leveling by story dictate, as seen in the published adventures.

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[Garthanos]

What's a common sense call? Whose common sense?

My textbook example here is tightrope walking as it's a litmus test I frequently use for skill systems. In 3.5 tightrope walking is DC 20 (it's balancing on something less than 2" wide) and walking on a slackrope is DC22. Clearly someone thought this was common sense for difficulty.

Had a DM in 1e who couldnt swim everyone was making Dex checks or take damage immediately when swimming...

The saying goes common sense is not so common.

 

[Parmandur]

What's a common sense call? Whose common sense?.

The DMs, certainly; if the table doesn't trust the DMs call, why would they play the game...?

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[Garthanos]

The DMs, certainly; if the table doesn't trust the DMs call, why would they play the game...?

Friendship? because he owns the books and introduced everyone to it... of course then the game comes off as being as bad as his poor common sense and you go to a game with better built-in assumptions less reliant on this magical uncommon thing misnamed common sense? Happened in yesteryear assume it happens now.

 

[MwaO]

What's a common sense call? Whose common sense?

My textbook example here is tightrope walking as it's a litmus test I frequently use for skill systems. In 3.5 tightrope walking is DC 20 (it's balancing on something less than 2" wide) and walking on a slackrope is DC22. Clearly someone thought this was common sense for difficulty.

Mine is now a DC 17 Iron Shod Door as an example of verisimilitude from the Bounded Accuracy article. Except a 16 Str PC could only open it 35% of the time and a 10 Str 20%. If the door is that stuck, such that a strong PC can only open it a 3rd of the time, a normal str person isn't opening it a fifth of the time.

Beyond silly - "We're extolling something as realism without actually checking to see if it feels realistic in play."

And by the time I put my drink down I realised what skill challenges were for. For giving me the tools to handle complex tasks like that - a pacing tool and a tool to know when to make things more complex and what sort of overall difficulty an off the wall screwball plan like that should have. And it's something 4e handed me on a platter that literally no other RPG I'm aware of does.

Right. 4e can do some really fast improvisational exploration, where the players define what they want, the DM guesses at how hard it is to get there, and then the overall pacing is set up for you.

 

[Garthanos]

Well, all three main dudes at WotC have admitted they don't do XP in their own games, just DM fiat leveling by story dictate, as seen in the published adventures.

Wouldnt it be nice if that was you know how the game was designed anyway instead of being something you had to muck about with bookkeeping and all that stuff get annoyed with it and eventually figure out on your own.

 

[Parmandur]

Wouldnt it be nice if that was you know how the game was designed anyway instead of being something you had to muck about with bookkeeping and all that stuff get annoyed with it and eventually figure out on your own.

Honestly, the core books are pretty upfront on the topic. But they leave XP in there, because it's popular.

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