D&D 4E Mike Mearls on how 4E could have looked

[doctorbadwolf]

I had the impression that psionic basically didnt have any reason to actually advance and do anything different ... just do more of the same. A bit like the ranger so it has precident but also not a wonderful design.

Eh, that only tracks from a strongly CharOp perspective. I’m fine with Twin Strike being the best ever, bc it’s a choice to care about that, and the game plays just as well if your ranger chooses Marauder’s Rush and...I don’t have my 4e books here but there are plenty.

 

[Garthanos]

To get broken imbalance in 4e, you have to combine the most powerful OP stuff with options like a standard Vampire or Binder. .

I sometimes feel we have to explain what we mean by broken in reference to 4e... it just doesnt match up to broken in any other system. A Battlerager could wade through and ignore at-tier minion and soak ongoing damage in its first incarnation some didnt even see it as a problem there is an at-tier daily power that does basically the same thing for any fighter. If they had halved the soak or changed it to only gain more points from an attack if the attack delivers real hitpoint damage it would have left the same flavor and massively brought it back to functional levels. The edit changed it from being a hulkish pain resistance style response to being attacked to something else.

 

[Manbearcat]

Maybe I'm not understanding what fiction first means... if 4e has tiers and those tiers are defined by fiction and said fiction then informs resolution... is that fiction easily disregarded or changed? And if so what is the difference between that and 5e as some posters such as [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] and [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] discussed earlier in the thread?

Oh, I don't think it is different from 5E at all on the narrative front, other than presentation and some details of numbers.

Right. Both are designed to put story first. You can always choose to ignore story ala massive dungeon crawls that make little sense from pretty much any fictional standpoint.

This is Vincent Baker's Apocalypse World. What do you guys think about this GMing advice and how it relates to "fiction first" GMing?

* Make your move, but misdirect. Of course the real reason why you choose a move exists in the real world. Somebody has her character go someplace new, somebody misses a roll, somebody hits a roll that calls for you to answer, everybody’s looking to you to say something, so you choose a move to make. Real-world reasons. However, misdirect: pretend that you’re making your move for reasons entirely within the game’s action instead. Maybe your move is to separate them, for instance; never say “you missed your roll, so you two get separated.” Instead, maybe say “you try to grab his gun”—this was the PC’s move—“but he kicks you down. While they’re stomping on you, they drag Damson away.” The effect’s the same, they’re separated, but you’ve cannily misrepresented the cause. Make like it’s the game’s action that chooses your move for you. This is easy if you always choose a move that the game’s action makes possible.

* Make your move, but never speak its name. Maybe your move is to separate them, but you should never just say that. Instead, say how Foster’s thugs drags one of them off, and Foster invites the other to eat lunch with her. Maybe your move is to announce future badness, but for god sake never say the words “future badness.” Instead, say how this morning, filthy, stinking black smoke is rising from somewhere in the car yard, and I wonder what’s brewing over there? These two principles are cause and effect. The truth is that you’ve chosen a move and made it. Pretend, though, that there’s a fictional cause; pretend that it has a fictional effect.

* Together, the purpose of these two principles is to create an illusion for the players, not to hide your intentions from them. Certainly never to hide your NPCs’ actions, or developments in the characters’ world, from the players’ characters! No; always say what honesty demands. When it comes to what’s happening to and around the players’ characters, always be as honest as you can be.

 

[Garthanos]

Eh, that only tracks from a strongly CharOp perspective. I’m fine with Twin Strike being the best ever, bc it’s a choice to care about that, and the game plays just as well if your ranger chooses Marauder’s Rush and...I don’t have my 4e books here but there are plenty.

I suppose the rangers you read about online are going to have strong CharOp influence...

I generally like Xena as one of those Marauder rangers ... LOL

(my player was a rather boring in combat archer ranger who most definitely used Twin strike)

 

[Garthanos]

This is Vincent Baker's Apocalypse World. What do you guys think about this GMing advice and how it relates to "fiction first" GMing?

* Make your move, but misdirect. Of course the real reason why you choose a move exists in the real world. Somebody has her character go someplace new, somebody misses a roll, somebody hits a roll that calls for you to answer, everybody’s looking to you to say something, so you choose a move to make. Real-world reasons. However, misdirect: pretend that you’re making your move for reasons entirely within the game’s action instead. Maybe your move is to separate them, for instance; never say “you missed your roll, so you two get separated.” Instead, maybe say “you try to grab his gun”—this was the PC’s move—“but he kicks you down. While they’re stomping on you, they drag Damson away.” The effect’s the same, they’re separated, but you’ve cannily misrepresented the cause. Make like it’s the game’s action that chooses your move for you. This is easy if you always choose a move that the game’s action makes possible.

* Make your move, but never speak its name. Maybe your move is to separate them, but you should never just say that. Instead, say how Foster’s thugs drags one of them off, and Foster invites the other to eat lunch with her. Maybe your move is to announce future badness, but for god sake never say the words “future badness.” Instead, say how this morning, filthy, stinking black smoke is rising from somewhere in the car yard, and I wonder what’s brewing over there? These two principles are cause and effect. The truth is that you’ve chosen a move and made it. Pretend, though, that there’s a fictional cause; pretend that it has a fictional effect.

* Together, the purpose of these two principles is to create an illusion for the players, not to hide your intentions from them. Certainly never to hide your NPCs’ actions, or developments in the characters’ world, from the players’ characters! No; always say what honesty demands. When it comes to what’s happening to and around the players’ characters, always be as honest as you can be.

I think this relates to my thinking about how one describes minions

ie I have long presented them as being virtually bloodied in a non physical fashion without a "heroic/leader/dominator" they are fully vulnerable to intimidation and even if there is no hp loss on a miss that is besides the point largely they took something like what others did and even with a leader that is going to be treated as bloodied as will loss of half their allies. In that vein the desperate fighting style of minions is something you can describe with them lurching between too defensive and over aggressive (while leaving openings for a killing strike).

 

[Manbearcat]

On Minions:

All TTRPG mechanics are proxies. All of them (even Wandering Monsters in Basic; a clever proxy for "the ticking time-bomb, the desperation and urgency inherent to taking stuff from a dangerous environment that doesn't want that stuff taken.")

All GMing is artifice. All of it.

Minion status is just a proxy for "less capable/more vulnerable adversary" or "delta in the dominance hierarchy of its peer group". A proxy.

Deciding on Minion status as a GM is merely deploying an expeditious device to convey the above within the fiction and through the mechanics (proxies).

 

[Manbearcat]

I think this relates to my thinking about how one describes minions

ie I have long presented them as being virtually bloodied in a non physical fashion without a "heroic/leader/dominator" they are fully vulnerable to intimidation and even if there is no hp loss on a miss that is besides the point largely they took something like what others did and even with a leader that is going to be treated as bloodied as will loss of half their allies. In that vein the desperate fighting style of minions is something you can describe with them lurching between too defensive and over aggressive (while leaving openings for a killing strike).

This hooks in well with what I've written above.

 

[Shasarak]

You've got this backwards. It's fiction first. Those who can't envisage the touhgness of an ogre without knowing what it's real hp total is are the ones who put mechanics first.

No thats not how it works in 4e. You have your level and that determines everything else modified by the type. Fiction really has nothing to do with it.

Now if you were talking about 5e then you would be right, fiction first.

 

[Aldarc]

Minionization does not strike me as odd or inconsistent with notions of in-game naturalism. It's not as if humans have the same stats in this world. Some humans take more or less hits to go down in this same universe. Not all NPCs are heroes. Not all NPCs have classes. Game Master adjust the stats of creatures all the time consistently in inconsistent ways. Minions are simply one method for GMs to adjust the stats of monsters to reflect different monster strengths.

 

[pemerton]

No thats not how it works in 4e. You have your level and that determines everything else modified by the type. Fiction really has nothing to do with it.

What is the everything else?

Level is a mechanical device. It informs the referee about appropriate mechanics to use, via the monster/NPC-building rules and the DC-by-level chart.

Tier of play is a notion about fiction, and that informs what the fiction is. And we choose fiction first, then mechanics.

First, the fiction: I shove my hands into the forge to hold down the hammer so the artificers can work it. Then, the mechanics: The DC for that Endurance check is such-and-such.

First the fiction: The dwarf who can hold down hammers in furnaces comes across a hobgoblin phalanx. Then, the mechanics: That phalanx is a 16th level gargantuan swarm.

The reason an ogre is a standard for 8th level PCs and a minion for mid-paragon ones is because the mechanics follow the fiction.

Now if you were talking about 5e then you would be right, fiction first.

No one in this thread has given a consistent account of how DC-setting works in 5e, as far as the relation between fiction and mechanics is concerned.

But as far as I can tell it is mechanics first: we don't have a prior, in-fiction conception of how tough a 15th level fighter is, and then set DCs and stat up creatures that respond to that. We don't know how tough a 15th level fighter is until we see what s/he can do, taking certain mechanics published in the MM as given.

That's not fiction-first. It's mechanics first.