D&D General "Hot" take: Aesthetically-pleasing rules are highly overvalued

[Bacon Bits]

Yeah, as I said, there's actually no specific fundamental underlying principle here. I just remember the day I cracked open a PHB1 in 2008, and as soon as I grokked what they had done, THE very first thought in my head was "this isn't scalable." I mean, I honestly don't even comprehend how anyone in WotC thought it WAS and why they made such a blazingly obviously bad strategic decision. I mean, it MIGHT almost work with 5e spell lists (as it did with AD&D ones) simply due to the fact that so very little additional material is planned, the lists were intended to BE complete as written. 4e was never intended to be so, it was designed, clearly and undoubtedly with near-infinite expansion as a central tenet.

I thought it was pretty straightforward how WotC expected it to scale. Digitally, with the required labor of evaluation of all the content expected to be magnified by the power of the Internet. The same way that video games with a similar quantity of choices scale. Since the devs were able to issue power level errata (i.e., nerfs) then anything viewed as a real problem would just be altered. (Like, there's a reason that the last 4e errata documents I still have are themselves long enough to be a hardback book.)

The central conceit was that they expected the Character Builder to be a uniform tool to manage all the content of the game. And, until it was abandoned, it actually did a pretty good job of that. When you made a character it presented you with the options actually available to you. If you were the type of player who loved to fiddle around and built characters, this was an amazing amount of fun. I probably created a two dozen characters for each character I actually played. 4e's character building minigame was a lot of fun.

IMO, one of the bigger nails in the coffin to WotC's business model for 4e was the ending of support for the Character Builder (never mind never getting it to work outside the Windows platform). Without that, the amount of content between class powers, alternate class features, races, paragon paths, epic destinies, magic items, and feats plus all the errata is very clearly totally and completely unmanageable. I'm sure there are tables that managed to play the game completely on paper with every book printed, but there are people who play Phoenix Command, too.

 

[Umbran]

D&D can't do races, either, or cooking competitions, or even high jump competitions (every thief acrobat ties with every other thief acrobat of the same level, every time).

coughskill challengescough

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Oh I see... I've never played with dynamic iniative like that, and I fear you need a very experienced DM to pull it off well. It's not something I expect newbies to seemlessly slip into without some mechanical aid.



Then I guess you have a very rigid vision of what Magic should be used for or what it can do, or what a fight should look like. I mean, why is there spells like Burning Hand and Thunderwave and Acid Spray if it isn't possible to use magic in melee combat? To say nothing of a Paladin's smite style spells and other self buff. Some spells should be just as fast as swinging a weapon.

In fact, why not do a little bit of reverse and apply the casting time concept to crossbows while we're at it? It takes time to prepare your shot. So in exchange for power you get a slight window of vulnerability compared to a bow that's instantaneous. So you'd have this clear dicothomy where 'acting at range' will usually take longer than 'acting in melee'.

Frankly, you make many good points, and this is another of the reasons I'm not REALLY enamoured of 'hodge-podge' systems like AD&D. Just take a gander at this insanity if you really want to see what 1e's combat system consists of (see attached monstrosity). As you point out, MANY spells make absolutely no sense unless wizards and clerics can indeed engage in spell casting in close proximity to the enemy. What this tells me is that, while Gygax might have initially built up this system where that was impossible, it was quickly abandoned by convention EVEN BY HIM, and the 'common default' of D&D reigned. The common default was that each side rolled initiative (after declaring actions) and then one side did its stuff, and then the other side did its stuff, pure and simple. No counting segments and WSF and any of that fantasmagorical silliness (playing with all those rules would be practically speaking, impossible). If one guy declared to cast a spell, and a bad guy declared to attack him, then assuming the attack was feasible, it was carried out against nothing but basic AC (not much for a wizard unless they had bracers, etc.). If you went to cast some really high level spell that takes a LONG time (and there are some that take several rounds) then you were probably asking for trouble. A quick Sleep, or one of the 'combat spells' like Burning Hands, well, you took SOME risk, but if you were playing that sort of wizard, maybe you better have a high DEX (we did adjust everyone's init die by their DEX, so some people could go first even if their side generally lost). Exact details of what any given DM was likely to include, or not include, was of course hard to say, but the pea soup of AD&D combat, where it isn't even clear that melee combatants HAVE a location on the map, is not even really a rule system. I rarely want to say much about "how it works" because it is really not possible.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

And I'm pointing out that there is still at least one spell that uses a non-d20 resolution mechanic. I'm surprised there isn't more.

Sleep was always a weird oddball spell. It has ALWAYS operated in an absolute fashion like this. No attack check, nothing.
There was a lot of grumbling about its 4e incarnation, which was a standard power, although EVEN THERE it had a very outsized absolute effect if the target managed to fail two saves (so about 25% of the time). Since it was an area attack (burst) there was at least a finite possibility of effectively ending encounters with one power use, though the full effect takes 2 more rounds to play out, so that was less earth shattering than some people made it out to be (but still, it was kind of the ultimate sneaky opener to an ambush/backstab type situation).

 

[Undrave]

Yeah, as I said, there's actually no specific fundamental underlying principle here. I just remember the day I cracked open a PHB1 in 2008, and as soon as I grokked what they had done, THE very first thought in my head was "this isn't scalable." I mean, I honestly don't even comprehend how anyone in WotC thought it WAS and why they made such a blazingly obviously bad strategic decision. I mean, it MIGHT almost work with 5e spell lists (as it did with AD&D ones) simply due to the fact that so very little additional material is planned, the lists were intended to BE complete as written. 4e was never intended to be so, it was designed, clearly and undoubtedly with near-infinite expansion as a central tenet.

I personally prefer the way powers were presented in 4e to the way spells are presented in 5e. When I reached a level in 4e I knew EXACTLY where to look for the new powers I could take. Flip to the class in the book, get to the level and BOOM! usually about four choices, all on the same page or two. None of that flipping and flapping back and forth that I have to do to compare 5e spells. It's why I wish spells were organized by level instead of alphabetically first! Picking a spell is a pain. First you go to the spell list, which, BTW, doesn't indicate which spells are rituals so you need to flip pages to each spell to see if they have the ritual tag... then you flip flip flip read, flip flip flip compare, oops was the other one concentration? flip flip flip... it's annoying as heck! At least make a page break at each letter if you're going to break them up alphabetically! And each spell should have an icon that tells you on which list it appears! Bleh.

Even if 4e was to pare down powers to a unified list, it would have been the best to have them reprint the specific ones a class can take on a per-level class list in the class section instead of having one power list in a far flung section (though I would assume it would be organized by level).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I thought it was pretty straightforward how WotC expected it to scale. Digitally, with the required labor of evaluation of all the content expected to be magnified by the power of the Internet. The same way that video games with a similar quantity of choices scale. Since the devs were able to issue power level errata (i.e., nerfs) then anything viewed as a real problem would just be altered. (Like, there's a reason that the last 4e errata documents I still have are themselves long enough to be a hardback book.)

The central conceit was that they expected the Character Builder to be a uniform tool to manage all the content of the game. And, until it was abandoned, it actually did a pretty good job of that. When you made a character it presented you with the options actually available to you. If you were the type of player who loved to fiddle around and built characters, this was an amazing amount of fun. I probably created a two dozen characters for each character I actually played. 4e's character building minigame was a lot of fun.

IMO, one of the bigger nails in the coffin to WotC's business model for 4e was the ending of support for the Character Builder (never mind never getting it to work outside the Windows platform). Without that, the amount of content between class powers, alternate class features, races, paragon paths, epic destinies, magic items, and feats plus all the errata is very clearly totally and completely unmanageable. I'm sure there are tables that managed to play the game completely on paper with every book printed, but there are people who play Phoenix Command, too.

Well, this all just reinforces my point. There was a lack of thinking things through. They had a game which was sold in the form of several books. What you describe (and this was born out in practice) is that the books were almost unsellable because they were obsolete from day 2. C 2008 WWW was simply not capable of supporting online tools of sufficient quality to make up for that (and WotC was frankly not competent to implement them). The .NET-based 'original' CB was one of the results, with all of the limitations and whatnot you describe. Beyond that, it was just unreasonable to expect most average players to fork out $7-10 a month for DDI. Given that they had no options! You could buy an obsolete book, or simply come to games and beg the geeks to do your character for you, maybe supplemented with some quick browsing of the DM's supplement collection (followed by the inevitable "yeah, it doesn't work that way anymore").
MMO games with huge budgets like WoW can afford to operate this way, yes, because they had the $100 million needed to write custom client software for every platform, and then the mass scale of the MMO to bring people in and get them to pay. D&D is not really a mass scale game, it is a game of many independent groups, and you will not get them to all expend the resources to be online, not even most of them.
So, the core design of 4e was not just inelegant, but that inelegance in the Power system (the heart of 4e) DOOMED it to being unscalable. This is what I saw on day one. There was incoherence between the design and the clear business and entertainment goals of the game, which in the end was pretty disastrous really. An elegant solution, one single unified list of powers (or at least smaller lists) would have mitigated that and allowed the game to scale much better. Heck, they could have just released supplements with ENTIRE REWRITES of ALL THE POWERS in each one! lol. (yeah, accusations of 4.1, etc. but so what).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I personally prefer the way powers were presented in 4e to the way spells are presented in 5e. When I reached a level in 4e I knew EXACTLY where to look for the new powers I could take. Flip to the class in the book, get to the level and BOOM! usually about four choices, all on the same page or two. None of that flipping and flapping back and forth that I have to do to compare 5e spells. It's why I wish spells were organized by level instead of alphabetically first! Picking a spell is a pain. First you go to the spell list, which, BTW, doesn't indicate which spells are rituals so you need to flip pages to each spell to see if they have the ritual tag... then you flip flip flip read, flip flip flip compare, oops was the other one concentration? flip flip flip... it's annoying as heck! At least make a page break at each letter if you're going to break them up alphabetically! And each spell should have an icon that tells you on which list it appears! Bleh.

Even if 4e was to pare down powers to a unified list, it would have been the best to have them reprint the specific ones a class can take on a per-level class list in the class section instead of having one power list in a far flung section (though I would assume it would be organized by level).

Yeah, I have wrestled with different organizational options in my rules, but then they're not really a 'product' so it is just a question of how easily I and a couple other people can reference stuff. Since we only generate PDFs, at least we have electronic searching capability. As long as you know the NAME of something, you can find it quickly enough. Given the narrative nature of power (boon) acquisition in HoML, you don't normally go through a process of evaluating a laundry list of options. So that part is less relevant. It does bite everyone at first level though, when you select your starting stuff.
If I was going to sell the game, I might treat the level 1 things in a different way. (I'd also note that I don't really gate stuff so much by level, there is a 'minimum level' for things, but I've moved away from the concept of 'fixed slots'). If you have access to a power, you can use it, but there are only so many boons you can have (gaining one raises you a level, so 20 is the max you can ever have).

 

[Monayuris]

And I'm pointing out that there is still at least one spell that uses a non-d20 resolution mechanic. I'm surprised there isn't more.

Misunderstood that. I apologize.

 

[Aldarc]

In general I find the idea that the game can be broken comes from 1 of 3 common conceits :

1. The game has fragile math that can be broken wide open through player chicanery,
2. It is the role of GM to constrain players so they do not "ruin" the story or the fragile setting.
3. It is the role of the GM to make sure each player has their moment in the sun.

I choose not to play games where any of these conceits are on the table. This is pretty much true for Dungeon World. The game cannot be broken because the math is tight and it is about whatever the players decide to have their players do.

On the moves front a character move in Dungeon World is not like a thing you can do. It's when rules apply. Anyone can attempt to steal something from an NPC. Only a Thief will have binding rules for it. If a Fighter or Wizard does it we just use fictional positioning and the GM gets to make as hard a move as they like.

I sometimes get the sense that the whole idea of "breaking the system" often comes from people who (1) have not been exposed to/played TTRPGs other than D&D, (2) cannot conceive that non-D&D games may not share D&D's frequent problems, and (3) often imagine that the implicit goal is "winning the game," hence why this sometimes coincides with discussions of meta-gaming as cheating, players using rules too effectively against the GM, etc.

 

[Umbran]

To quote a well-known Prime Minister of ours from 50 years ago: "Just watch me."

So, can you break a game of chess?

Sure, you can bring a mallet. And, when you feel like it, you can gleefully pronounce, "Look, I can break the game of chess!" and bring your mallet down hard on the pieces and board several times, demolishing them, and leaving the old guy in the park looking sadly at the shattered remains of the cherished chess set that his dearly departed wife gave to him on their 25th wedding anniversary...

I am not sure this is a thing you should put smiling emojis on.

So does this mean the wizard can't even try to hide? 'Cause that's exactly the sort of thing I mean: I'd be trying to do reasonable things that aren't on my list of moves if doing so made sense in the fiction.

I think he already answered this - either it fits under a move, or it has no mechanical effect. Period. Hiding probably fits under "Defy Danger", not under its own separate move. In such systems, the game mechanics actions available to you are generally very broad, and abstract. Your failure is to think that "hide" means only one thing. Like in the real world, hiding may have different effects, depending on the context.

F'rex - In Fate Accelerated, there are actually only four game-actions: Create Advantage, Overcome, Attack, and Defend. That's it. Your game-action isn't "Hide". The narration is , "I attempt to hide," which is required to justify your game-mechanics action:

GM: "The Ringwraiths are making their way through the woods, looking for you."
Player: "I try to hide under a fallen tree at an embankment or something, so they don't notice me." (Overcome their attempt to find you.)

GM: "The beholder is sweeping his disintegration-gaze across the room - it is about to look at you."
Player: "I hide behind the desk!" (Defend against the beam Attack)

GM: "You hear footsteps coming down the corridor.. probably a guard that's going to come looking in the room."
Player: "I hide behind the open door, and wait to see who it is..." (Create an Advantage, "Hidden" that you expect you may want to use on a future Attack, Defend, or Overcome action.)

Being me, I'd almost certainly at some point try gonzo or irrational things as well, 'cause that's just how I roll.

That's fine. Doesn't matter. In any system, when you try those gonzo things, you (character and player) have some desired result you hope to achieve, which you may or may not get, depending on the roll. You don't break the system unless you try to insist that there's some other desired result you are supposed to be able to achieve that doesn't exist within the system.

...Which is like trying to claim you broke the system when you whack it with a hammer from your toolshed.