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

[EzekielRaiden]

So, here's elegance as a measure in action.

The initiative system alone takes two and a half pages to describe? Really? Is turn order really that interesting a part of the game?

At risk of sounding flippant: The magic system in 5e requires something like a dozen pages to explain. Is "area of effect" really such an interesting part of the game?

My main point being that, even though I agree with you that this alternate initiative system looks needlessly complex, the argument as given may not be entirely sound.

Sure, but I'm not quite following. In the context of my conversation with the poster to whom I replied, plus the thread history including my participation, I really don't think anyone was uncertain about what I was trying to convey.

It was not entirely clear to me that that was what you meant, and I have generally been following your participation in the thread.

 

[Monayuris]

I came into this thread to respond to your claim that:

This statement is not true. There are not two situations that one ends up with. As I posted, there is a third possibility which does not lead either to limits or to rules bloat.

You may or may not like that - though presumably you don't care how others play - but you might acknowledge that it exists.

Reread my post. The two situations are about hard-coded rules. I am making a point against games with hard coded rules. I'm promoting games that allow for GM rulings to handle situations outside of the rules. The only time you get to the situations you describe is when the game is dependant on hard-coded rules.

Maybe my problem is that I don't understand the play-style. I don't understand how you run games. Maybe it would be better if you explained it to me. For example, if the player group decides to do something completely unexpected... how do you handle that?

If the skill challenge is 'supposed' to be the epitome of role-playing game design, then how should it be done?

Do you design skill challenges as a part of your prep? What if the players do something out of left-field... how do you handle a group not following what you intended?

What if the players do something completely unexpected. Do you design a skill challenge to handle it? How successful has that been? Do you ad-hoc skill challenges? How do you do that? Do you design the difficulty, primary skills, secondary skills, and the effect of each on the fly? How long does it take to do that? Do you design them ahead of time and force your players to play it out? Do you go more 'on the fly' and stop play for a bit to design the skill challenge on the fly ( designing difficulty, designating primary skills, secondary skills, and their effects) and have your players wait for you to be ready?

To be honest, I think skill challenges are just a formalized form of DM adjudication. It is a formalized form of DM rulings. I mean when you build a skill challenge, it is DM decisions to decide difficulty, primary skills, secondary skills and so on. I don't see the difference. GM rulings and GM designed skill challenges are for all intents and purposes the same.

 

[Monayuris]

It's worth noting that there are still some things which modify saves, but they're relatively rare,, or at least it's rare for them to be persistent effects. The Monk Diamond Focus talent would be a very tempting option even if it didn't allow delays in form progression, for example, because it's a flat +2 to saves when not staggered.

And yeah, I'd call that a pretty controversial opinion, given stuff like OUTs and the like. If it's an OSR game, it's a very odd one.

Great post.

I don't know how much I can add. I guess I will hold to the idea of a sort of strange meta-congruence between taking an action as a player playing a game and a character taking an action in the world.

This is why I'm not so sold on universal resolution mechanics.

I like the idea that making a weapon attack is different from trying to turn undead and so the mechanics are different. When you take such an action as a player the different mechanics reinforces the idea that you are doing something different.

Maybe that makes little sense but it is a feeling I have playing D&D.

 

[Lanefan]

Even using our fairly streamlined version of 1e combat fights could still take a LONG time to resolve. Like when you got into the 12-14th level range it would be HARD to end any non-trivial fight in under 2 hours.

We've just come to accept that as a fact of life.

Longest and messiest combat I've ever run, in terms of time taken to play through, was about ten or eleven hours spread over three sessions. A large party of 13 or so characters (about 8th-10th level) taking on a mostly-underground stronghold full of probably 30-40 significant opponents including numerous people with lots and lots of class levels, a few into the mid-high teens.

And it quickly got spread out into several smaller battles all over the complex, but I had to run them as one great big one as something done in one fight might have immediate repercussions in another (e.g. someone sent fleeing in terror here might run around a corner and right into another battle there)

Admittedly if you only play at say 1st to 6th levels, things will often go quick, until you get someone doing some fancy tactics. If we had to deal with multiple initiatives per fighter, etc. as you're outlining? Ick!

That part goes well once you're used to it. We use d6, so after everyone's rolled I ask for 6s from the players - we do those, then I sort out the opponents' 6s (with the understanding this all happens at the same time in the fiction; if a tie really needs to be broken we roll sub-initiatives); then I call for 5s, and so forth on down to 1s.

If there's only a few players (no matter how many characters) it goes quick. If there's more players it slows down, often because - as also happens in turn-order games - people check out when it's not their turn at bat.

Yes, it is true that d20-ish combat doesn't really have 'simultaneous actions' (except interrupts in the case of 4e). Still, you can hold your turn and inject actions anywhere in the sequence.

What it completely abandons is the trope of two warriors simultaneously taking each other out with their final swings, and things like that, which to me is kinda sad.

I don't think rerolling is a BAD idea, but OTOH I always wanted initiative to reflect something. Like can you get inside the other guy's decision loop? That is the military science definition of initiative, and it is interesting. Not sure how to implement that in an RPG though. It would either be complicated, or subjective...

I'm more trying to replicate a fog-of-war setup than anything scientific.

 

[Lanefan]

Edit: It really wouldn't be too hard to integrate interrupted casting within the standard D20 cyclic turn structure.
You just say this:

• Spells take a round to cast. You begin casting a spell and it goes off on your turn next round.
• When you cast a spell you can immediately begin casting another spell - so you're not acting every other turn.
• At the end of the initiative count for a round, if you no longer wish to cast the spell you may stop without losing the spell before the next round begins.
• You can hold a spell in mind ready to cast before combat begins (this is considered concentration) so that you may cast a spell on the first round of combat.

Of course you'd, again, probably need to design the spells around it from the ground up.

Am I reading the third bullet point right, that a caster can voluntarily interrupt herself if she no longer wants to cast a spell she's already started? And that doing so doesn't use up the spell slot?

That's crazy generous! AFAIC once you've started a spell you've burned the slot and you're committed to finishing it.

And in the second bullet point, should it read "when you resolve a spell you can immediately begin casting another..."? As you wrote it here it reads as if a caster can be casting two or more spells at once, which don't seem right somehow.

 

[Don Durito]

Am I reading the third bullet point right, that a caster can voluntarily interrupt herself if she no longer wants to cast a spell she's already started? And that doing so doesn't use up the spell slot?

That's crazy generous! AFAIC once you've started a spell you've burned the slot and you're committed to finishing it.

And in the second bullet point, should it read "when you resolve a spell you can immediately begin casting another..."? As you wrote it here it reads as if a caster can be casting two or more spells at once, which don't seem right somehow.

Yes. But there's two reasons for that.

In the first case, situations can change, and it sucks enough to waste an action to begin casting a spell that you're not going to use without losing the spell as well. So not that generous - you just lost an action.

And the second is so that you're not stuck acting every second round. Believe me, I've played a caster in Earthdawn where you did that, it was tedious. The very idea of spell interruption already assumes your acting throughout the combat round otherwise there would be nothing going on outside your turn to interrupt, so it makes sense that once you've got one spell off, you immediately begin casting the next. (As it says in the first bullet point - spells take 1 whole round to cast - not 2!).

The goal here is to make casting spells take long enough for the tactial concerns of interruption, or the party working to avoid interruption, meaningful; might as well not make that even more painful to the player of the caster than it needs to be to achieve that goal.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Of course (see eg my posts and @AbdulAlhazred's upthread). But these are deliberately no longer a part of D&D!

Yes, I took this as a hint as to whether or not I was the intended audience for 5e... lol. I thought it was a bit much, really.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Reread my post. The two situations are about hard-coded rules. I am making a point against games with hard coded rules. I'm promoting games that allow for GM rulings to handle situations outside of the rules. The only time you get to the situations you describe is when the game is dependant on hard-coded rules.

Maybe my problem is that I don't understand the play-style. I don't understand how you run games. Maybe it would be better if you explained it to me. For example, if the player group decides to do something completely unexpected... how do you handle that?

I think the FUNDAMENTAL area where we all are not on the same page is in terms of the purpose of the rules. The rules of D&D, mostly, seem to be intended to act as aids to a GM in determining what happens in the fictional game universe. Some of the rules (IE levels, hit dice, classes) may be 'game constructs' which don't directly correspond with things in the game world, but they are still aimed at telling the GM how that world works. That is the purpose of rules in a 'Gygaxian' system.
In Dungeon World, for example, the rules are ENTIRELY about how to manage the STORY. None of the rules of Dungeon World relate concretely to things in the game world, although some of them are pretty close (PCs have an inventory for instance, though at times a GM might 'hard move' part of it out of existence, and this would not be a 'dick move' as it would in say AD&D. This is why it is impossible to 'break' Dungeon World, at least in the way @Lanefan seemed to be proposing. To 'break' DW would require something more like spitting in the GM's face... Since ANY action a character is going to take will be related to the fiction in some way, there's no action that the rules don't cover, because they cover "adding to the fiction", not "actions PCs take."

If the skill challenge is 'supposed' to be the epitome of role-playing game design, then how should it be done?

Do you design skill challenges as a part of your prep? What if the players do something out of left-field... how do you handle a group not following what you intended?

What if the players do something completely unexpected. Do you design a skill challenge to handle it? How successful has that been? Do you ad-hoc skill challenges? How do you do that? Do you design the difficulty, primary skills, secondary skills, and the effect of each on the fly? How long does it take to do that? Do you design them ahead of time and force your players to play it out? Do you go more 'on the fly' and stop play for a bit to design the skill challenge on the fly ( designing difficulty, designating primary skills, secondary skills, and their effects) and have your players wait for you to be ready?

To be honest, I think skill challenges are just a formalized form of DM adjudication. It is a formalized form of DM rulings. I mean when you build a skill challenge, it is DM decisions to decide difficulty, primary skills, secondary skills and so on. I don't see the difference. GM rulings and GM designed skill challenges are for all intents and purposes the same.

Well.... I don't know that the 4e SC system is the epitome of resolution systems for fiction. I have called it out and mentioned its function several times because we all have some understanding of what it is, and yet at the same time I suspect many people never really understood what its role in (at least story game people's) 4e play was. There are MANY other mechanisms which accomplish similar things. DW moves, BitD clocks, FATE's leveraging of traits (also shared with several other similar systems), etc. I have a super lite system that I have used, PACE, which uses the spending of tokens as a sort of 'cash' to alter the fiction. There are lots of ways to structure rules which work on the level of narrative structure vs in-game process. Most games mix the two to at least SOME extent, though PACE is pretty much entirely on the "rules are about how to construct the narrative" side...
But to answer your questions: Yeah, I can create SCs on the fly. Admittedly there is some element in which the GM is going to exercise judgment. However I will note that I've run my SCs by, essentially, the 4e Essentials RC version for a long time now. While that means that the GM gets to decide "primary and secondary skills" the PCs also get 'advantages', which they can use to either erase failures, or bend the conditions. I interpret these as chits to be used to inject their own narrative elements. So a player can invoke an advantage, and invent some situation in which they suddenly get to use their best skill, even though it isn't a part of the SC (IE, we're negotiating, but all of a sudden I use my DEX to take a check to skewer a deadly scorpion which was about to sting an important NPC, an assassination has been thwarted, SUCCESS!).
I go much further in my own system. Players can use my version of "inspiration" to leverage a character trait in order to alter the fiction. Later they can alter the fiction in a way which adds an impediment to their goals to get that inspiration back. Also the purpose of 'Rituals' in my system is to simply change which ability you use for a check. A 'true seeing' ritual would substitute Arcana in place of Perception, for example. When casting these rituals (not all are magical either, @Garthanos!) you can also pay a supplementary cost to pass the check automatically. Of course, the resource costs for this are usually pretty significant, so its actually a way of indicating what is most important to your character, with the intent being you're going to lose out somewhere else (IE because you are now broke or very tired, etc.). By the time you layer these sorts of devices onto the system it becomes pretty fluid in practice. Its main purpose, as I have stated, being to nail down what the criteria for closing out the challenge are. Otherwise players are totally at the mercy of the GM to say if and when they have won or lost.

 

[Bacon Bits]

So, here's elegance as a measure in action.

The initiative system alone takes two and a half pages to describe? Really? Is turn order really that interesting a part of the game?

That was my take on it, too. RAW initiative is extremely simple: everybody rolls once and then you're done for the whole combat. Adding a ton of rules and rolling or calculations is just a waste of table time. And all it adds is maybe some different variance? Pass. It's my same complaint with 5e surprise: it's heavier than it needs to be.

If I were to replace initiative, I would do something that involves no rolling at all like the alternating initiative from Modiphius 2d20.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I think the FUNDAMENTAL area where we all are not on the same page is in terms of the purpose of the rules. The rules of D&D, mostly, seem to be intended to act as aids to a GM in determining what happens in the fictional game universe. Some of the rules (IE levels, hit dice, classes) may be 'game constructs' which don't directly correspond with things in the game world, but they are still aimed at telling the GM how that world works. That is the purpose of rules in a 'Gygaxian' system.
In Dungeon World, for example, the rules are ENTIRELY about how to manage the STORY. None of the rules of Dungeon World relate concretely to things in the game world, although some of them are pretty close (PCs have an inventory for instance, though at times a GM might 'hard move' part of it out of existence, and this would not be a 'dick move' as it would in say AD&D. This is why it is impossible to 'break' Dungeon World, at least in the way @Lanefan seemed to be proposing. To 'break' DW would require something more like spitting in the GM's face... Since ANY action a character is going to take will be related to the fiction in some way, there's no action that the rules don't cover, because they cover "adding to the fiction", not "actions PCs take."

Well.... I don't know that the 4e SC system is the epitome of resolution systems for fiction. I have called it out and mentioned its function several times because we all have some understanding of what it is, and yet at the same time I suspect many people never really understood what its role in (at least story game people's) 4e play was. There are MANY other mechanisms which accomplish similar things. DW moves, BitD clocks, FATE's leveraging of traits (also shared with several other similar systems), etc. I have a super lite system that I have used, PACE, which uses the spending of tokens as a sort of 'cash' to alter the fiction. There are lots of ways to structure rules which work on the level of narrative structure vs in-game process. Most games mix the two to at least SOME extent, though PACE is pretty much entirely on the "rules are about how to construct the narrative" side...
But to answer your questions: Yeah, I can create SCs on the fly. Admittedly there is some element in which the GM is going to exercise judgment. However I will note that I've run my SCs by, essentially, the 4e Essentials RC version for a long time now. While that means that the GM gets to decide "primary and secondary skills" the PCs also get 'advantages', which they can use to either erase failures, or bend the conditions. I interpret these as chits to be used to inject their own narrative elements. So a player can invoke an advantage, and invent some situation in which they suddenly get to use their best skill, even though it isn't a part of the SC (IE, we're negotiating, but all of a sudden I use my DEX to take a check to skewer a deadly scorpion which was about to sting an important NPC, an assassination has been thwarted, SUCCESS!).
I go much further in my own system. Players can use my version of "inspiration" to leverage a character trait in order to alter the fiction. Later they can alter the fiction in a way which adds an impediment to their goals to get that inspiration back. Also the purpose of 'Rituals' in my system is to simply change which ability you use for a check. A 'true seeing' ritual would substitute Arcana in place of Perception, for example. When casting these rituals (not all are magical either, @Garthanos!) you can also pay a supplementary cost to pass the check automatically. Of course, the resource costs for this are usually pretty significant, so its actually a way of indicating what is most important to your character, with the intent being you're going to lose out somewhere else (IE because you are now broke or very tired, etc.). By the time you layer these sorts of devices onto the system it becomes pretty fluid in practice. Its main purpose, as I have stated, being to nail down what the criteria for closing out the challenge are. Otherwise players are totally at the mercy of the GM to say if and when they have won or lost.

I don't think this is very correct, or a useful distinction. There are lots of rules in DW that correspond to specific enough things. Hack and Slash, for instance, is pretty analogous to the attack action in 5e -- there's really not much of a distinction to the role H&S has in the game to that of the attack action.

In fact, contrary to earlier statement, I think 5e has a good tool to resolve the toy example of setting a shed on fire while orcs are running a bucket brigade -- it's right up front in the core playloop, the PC states the action, the GM determines if it's uncertain and, if so, sets a DC and asks for an attribute roll which the player can modify with appropriate proficiencies. This handles the toy problem, and many other issues similar to it, at least mechanically. And that is, to me, the big distinction between a game like 5e and one like DW -- the difference between the mechanical bits, or tech, and the way those are meant to be used, or the principles of play. DW has tech which is different from 5e, but not sufficiently to elicit the play of DW on it's own. What makes the big difference are the principles that DW presents not as game tech but more as meta-rules for play, and these directions on how to use the tech make the biggest difference in play. 5e doesn't really provide any principles of play, leaving it up to individual tables to both define and apply their own -- usually picking up from established and unstated principles from the D&D zeitgeist. This means that while 5e has the tech to solve the firing the shed toy example, it doesn't really work well unless a given table has set principles of play that enable it to work. Likewise, if you try to play DW without the principles of play, or using the principles of play common to D&D, you end up with a mess -- and we've had a thread fairly recently that illuminates this exact issue.

To bring this to skill challenges and 4e, I do not think that 4e was intentionally designed to work as it's being presented in this thread. It certainly wasn't clearly laid out that way, and the necessary principles of play to make it work that way were not presented. If you already held those principles, or were familiar with them, then the design of 4e worked well with them, but not, I think, intentionally. And I say this because the printed adventures for 4e do not embrace this approach, and how many tries it took to get skill challenges to work. Even then, the presentation of the skill challenges is one where the GM is the primary driver of the play, selecting both the goal of the skill challenge and the primary (and secondary) methods to achieve it. This is still solidly within the traditional play of D&D. Unless you ignore that, and bring in some of the principles common to other games, like Burning Wheel and PbtA, skill challenges are still a stilted, GM driven and GM may I tool. If you do bring in those principles, primarily the ones regarding fiction following play rather than leading it and honoring the results of the tech, then skill challenges aren't the tool their being presented as here, or even in the rulesbooks of 4e.

That said, I love the tech of skill challenges, but do not even bother assigning skills to the challenge -- it's entirely open ended. The concept, to me, works more as a tool for the GM to determine overall success in a complicated task than a way to codify that tasking. It gives me, the GM, the framework to be able to describe the necessary hard and soft consequences to failure at different points in the challenge, and also the consequences of success -- and this is done using the number of successes and number of failures alongside the current fictional state and the player's declared actions. It's a loose framework to help establish appropriate framing and outcomes throughout the challenge. The rest of the 4e tech -- primary and secondary skills, advantages, etc. -- I toss and just use the normal 5e resolution loop: action declaration, uncertainty determination, DC setting and attribute check, outcomes.