D&D 4E Where was 4e headed before it was canned?

[JohnLynch]

I found 4e didn’t encourage improvisation. I found if you didn’t have a power you just didn’t try. Likewise I found Pathfinder didn’t encourage improvisation either. If you didn’t have a feat or class feature then you just didn’t try. 5e might have required more improvisation. But on,y because you get so little.

Now that isn’t to say there was no improvisation. There was. I just found the rules discouraged rather than encouraged.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The problem with mistakes like that is that they are considered decisions, actually. Whole books have been written about this, but here is one example summary of the state of psychological studies on the predictive value of snap judgement:

"Evidence points to accuracy in some of the snap judgments we make about other people. Telling whether someone is extroverted or shy is easy. Multiple studies have shown that judgments of someone’s extroversion made by looking at that person’s photograph (even for just 50 milliseconds) predict how extroverted he or she actually is. But we’re also quick to make accurate judgments about facts that seem a lot more difficult to predict, such as the amount of money a chief executive is going to make for the company in a given year, or someone’s romantic attraction toward us. For example, personality traits inferred from the faces of executives predict their leadership skills, measured in terms of bottom-line profits, and the effects are just as strong whether the photo is current or was taken in the leader’s college days."

"Studies have shown that women’s sexual attitudes and behaviors can be accurately judged from 5-minute video clips and even from photos of their faces. Along similar lines, seeing a flash of a face for just 40 milliseconds — 10 times faster than the average eye-blink — was all many study participants needed to tell if a man was gay or a woman was a lesbian, and thinking about it longer actually made their so-called “gaydar” less accurate. Experimental participants who saw faces for a fraction of a second were just as accurate as those who were given all the time in the world. When they were told to think carefully about their decision (versus going with their gut) they choked, producing results no better than chance guessing."

Snap-Judgment Science

You've spent hours preparing for the job interview. You’ve tried to anticipate everything your potential new employers may ask you. You think hard about every detail: Remember to sit up straight, look them in the …

www.psychologicalscience.org

Point is, a simple system of snap-judgement based tiered difficulty like 5E will work very well for most people to improvise actions and reactions, as proven by years of people using the system as such.

I don't think DM judgements ARE an example of 'snap judgement' of the type you are describing, and IME of 40+ years of playing RPGs GMs are notoriously bad at sorting out cost/benefit analysis at the table. This is, IMHO, closely related to how bad people are at cost/benefit IN GENERAL, something anyone familiar with investing is quite aware of (people tend to count costs approximately double their real weight vs benefits). As was pointed out a bit earlier, most game designers seem to naively balance a bonus and a penalty as if they exactly match, while in fact (at least in terms of hits vs damage in 4e or 5e) a -1 to-hit should match against an approximate 10% increase in damage.

 

[Parmandur]

Well surely the question is encouraged for whom? Observations by whom of whom?

In my own D&D experience 4e encouraged far more improvisation than AD&D. I don't have enought 3E or 5e experience to make comparisons to those systems, but by comparing the systems they present with my own experiences of how 4e encouraged improvisation I wouldn't expect them to differ very much from AD&D.

Here's one hypothetical but in my view relatively plausible causal pathway: a participant in a 4e game (player or GM) contemplates improvisation but feels paralysed by their lack of grasp of the resource structure of the game. Suppose such a thing were to happen, and that the participant in question therefore attempts more improvisation in 5e - that will hae no bearing on my own play experience, which is not with players who have trouble with resource systems.

My personal experience of 5E is identical on this front to my formation in 3E. And indeed, this is likely arising from differences in temperament and taste.

 

[Parmandur]

I don't see this. Most (all D&D except 4e with some very niche exceptions) D&D rules sets have no definition of the 'scope' of a success. I'm not sure of the exact wording in 5e, but 3e certainly lacks any requirement that a check 'advance the game state' or that a success should produce any specific increment of advancement in overall situational success. For example, to take @Garthanos specific example: There is no indication that a 'swim' check produce a result such as "survive the current episode of swimming or else begin drowning". Thus a GM is free to decide that any given arbitrary number of such checks are required. Often GMs attempt to follow "game rules as world physics" type logic and extrapolate from (or maybe the action is part of) a combat situation and require a check every round, with the character progressing some distance to his/her goal derived from a tactical movement system. Even if the checks are 95% success, the best possibility that leaves any chance of failure, 5 such checks in a row leaves a 12% chance of drowning. I think most GMs won't realize this and would think of this as a reasonable test for crossing 5 movement actions worth of water. Yet in 4e such a distance is only 150' for most PCs. This is basically a trivial amount of swimming which normal people can easily achieve with virtually no peril, assuming they are of average fitness. In 4e it would be cast (hopefully, if the GM is really following the spirit of the rules) in terms of an SC where it would represent a single check.

Again, I'm not sure exactly how 5e couches this, but it did discard the SC system, which is, AFAIK, the only system that D&D has ever had for gauging the number of checks which should ideally result in the party advancing out of the encounter and on to the next 'scene'. Without that, or at least a Page 42-like mechanism to structure ad-hoc action, I don't really see how anyone can say that 5e is really facilitating this kind of play in the way 4e does. IME of 5e play, it doesn't. You really cannot rely on knowing how feasible IN ITS ENTIRETY something is until you start negotiating with the DM, and often you need to help them understand what exactly the consequences are of how they are employing the mechanics. The game really seems to give very little solid guidance here. It may relate the 'say yes' theory, but the theory by itself isn't enough for a lot of GMs.

The wording does say to avoid rolls where significant failure isn't a likelihood, and leans heavily on avoiding rolls where possible and multiple rolls aren't really a developed thing.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm going to suggest a point, which may or may not be what Garthanos is talking about....

4e, and 5e, have spaces where the rules do not strictly say what happens - the player and GM are allowed to figure it out. Whatever the player can convince the GM will work can work. So, instead of "playing by the rules" the player, 'plays by the GM" - learning the GM's personal style, and what the GM is willing to allow, or not, and how much oomph the result will have by intuition.

This is different than, for example, how FATE manages a similar issue - the rules do not in the same way say strictly what happens, but gives a definitive process for how it goes, and gives the player some idea of exactly what kind of bonus or oomph the result will have for a given investment of Fate Points to make a thing happen.

So, 4e and 5e have areas without rules, structures, or well-defined processes. FATE has a structure for resolving things the rules don't stipulate exactly.

Now, some players are fine with the "blue sky" approach, willing to push for anything in the hopes of it working out. Others, one may dare to say many, are not interested in investing effort when they don't know what the result is likely to be, and so will not engage with such gaps.

Right, now IMHO, 4e is a lot closer to FATE than 5e is in this respect. That is, I believe, what Garthanos and others were saying, at least partially (I know, it was a few days back, sorry). 4e has SCs, which ARE a very generalized and open-ended, but structured, resolution system. It has a system of 'points' which act as a resource, although it is fair to note that 4e doesn't REALLY clearly spell out the fungibility of HS.

In fact, again IMHO, 4e's sin is not in lacking an excellent capability to support free-form play with a solid 'story game' type of approach. It is that it simply was written in a style where the authors were either too shy to really put it forward in clear terms, or actually didn't put all the pieces together until AFTER the core books were published (DMG 1 particularly of course). DMG2 definitely seems to cautiously lean in the 'right' direction, but it was definitely too timid. I assume that WotC feared re-interpreting their own system in mid-stream and chose to leave a lot of the implications of 4e's mechanics latent. The problem is, in the final analysis, much of the audience wasn't familiar enough with more cutting-edge (or just non-D&D) RPGs to catch on. Thus they tried to play 4e as if it was just a slight variation of 3e, and found it very difficult to actually use the rules to best advantage.

 

[Garthanos]

• The lack of meaningful long term status conditions like poisons, diseases, and curses.

Afflictions were an element that never got fully developed. But the disease tract is there for a DM that cares to use it.

See I want immune adversaries to actually be special not a line in the Monster Manual. Like how you would tackle Grendel. The technique for enemy who requires "special weapon" or "special method" to defeat Starts with revealing the enemies impossible to defeatedness. (inducing a skill challenge escape) and having npcs as fodder to dy maybe. Followed by a miniquest/challenge to find the solution to strip the enemy of that over the topness or provide tools that will harm that specific monster (not monster type make it mysterious Grendel was enchanted by the Dragon) Followed by a battle where they discover they failed the earlier challenge and have to run again or where they win the day. because you know unarmed attacks do not count against immune to weapons after all. (or they found the ritual and gathered a hair from the beast with hit and run non-fights to reduce its perfect immunity)

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Sure, but that was also the way people played when the game was big in the 80's. It is what works for people.

BUT, what I would say is that this is exactly how people played 4e IME. Games were very 'ad-hoc' in terms of where the action went and what players were going to attempt to do, and the game was VERY open ended. I think this is very similar to the experience that people like @pemerton had (judging from his rather extensive play descriptions and postings).
In fact, in the game I ran at least, there was very little worrying about details of rules and fiddling with rule mechanics. People utilized the rules as a baseline, and fairly often a PC would simply invoke a power or something like that, but the types of situations and narrative that were evolved out of it, and how the narrative fed back into the system, were very loose and open-ended.
Part of this is because we evolved an approach to play which, IMHO, is best suited to 4e. It is a very 'gonzo' kind of 'action movie' type of play where there are constantly things happening and the scenery changes constantly. Everything is very dynamic, there is loads of plot associated with everything that is happening, etc. You NEVER just get some kind of encounter where the PCs run into 'some orcs' or something like that. There are always stakes, there's always narrative points being decided, goals to achieve, etc. So if you ran into orcs then you've got some sort of agenda, to negotiate, to make sure they don't do something, to get something from them, whatever. It is never really just a matter of "kill or be killed" except maybe in a very few cases where that becomes dramatically appropriate (IE maybe in a boss encounter or something).
Generally the action is heavily, or exclusively, driven by player choices and expressed interests. It isn't normal in this sort of play to have the GM simply interject some situation because he thinks it 'should be there' or something like that. There's logical narrative consistency, but there's also the agenda of play.
That agenda is very much "have fun". The rule of cool is pretty close to the prime directive of this kind of play. I should point out that 4e, as written, at least hints at this kind of thing. It talks about 'skipping to the action' and eschews complex rules to adjudicate things like exploration, while leaving plenty of material there so that when exploration is relevant and important and interesting that you can manage it (IE probably with an SC).

 

[Parmandur]

BUT, what I would say is that this is exactly how people played 4e IME. Games were very 'ad-hoc' in terms of where the action went and what players were going to attempt to do, and the game was VERY open ended. I think this is very similar to the experience that people like @pemerton had (judging from his rather extensive play descriptions and postings).
In fact, in the game I ran at least, there was very little worrying about details of rules and fiddling with rule mechanics. People utilized the rules as a baseline, and fairly often a PC would simply invoke a power or something like that, but the types of situations and narrative that were evolved out of it, and how the narrative fed back into the system, were very loose and open-ended.
Part of this is because we evolved an approach to play which, IMHO, is best suited to 4e. It is a very 'gonzo' kind of 'action movie' type of play where there are constantly things happening and the scenery changes constantly. Everything is very dynamic, there is loads of plot associated with everything that is happening, etc. You NEVER just get some kind of encounter where the PCs run into 'some orcs' or something like that. There are always stakes, there's always narrative points being decided, goals to achieve, etc. So if you ran into orcs then you've got some sort of agenda, to negotiate, to make sure they don't do something, to get something from them, whatever. It is never really just a matter of "kill or be killed" except maybe in a very few cases where that becomes dramatically appropriate (IE maybe in a boss encounter or something).
Generally the action is heavily, or exclusively, driven by player choices and expressed interests. It isn't normal in this sort of play to have the GM simply interject some situation because he thinks it 'should be there' or something like that. There's logical narrative consistency, but there's also the agenda of play.
That agenda is very much "have fun". The rule of cool is pretty close to the prime directive of this kind of play. I should point out that 4e, as written, at least hints at this kind of thing. It talks about 'skipping to the action' and eschews complex rules to adjudicate things like exploration, while leaving plenty of material there so that when exploration is relevant and important and interesting that you can manage it (IE probably with an SC).

My limited 4E experience isn't that different, in terms of continuing on as before, except we just stopped playing after a bit.

 

[JohnLynch]

You NEVER just get some kind of encounter where the PCs run into 'some orcs' or something like that. There are always stakes, there's always narrative points being decided, goals to achieve, etc. So if you ran into orcs then you've got some sort of agenda, to negotiate, to make sure they don't do something, to get something from them, whatever. It is never really just a matter of "kill or be killed" except maybe in a very few cases where that becomes dramatically appropriate (IE maybe in a boss encounter or something).

If only WotC had written their adventures like that. LFR in particular was very much "4 combats and a skill challenge". There were often no stakes. Just fight your way through the combats to get to the end.

 

[Umbran]

Right, now IMHO, 4e is a lot closer to FATE than 5e is in this respect.

That could be argued one way or the other, I suppose. However... it is kind of like saying that Orlando is closer to McMurdo Station than Boston is. It may be true, but... both the cities are still on the wrong continent to be called close...