D&D 4E Ron Edwards on D&D 4e

[Charlaquin]

"Story now" is a label used to describe an approach to RPGing where (i) the goal is that play should produce a story in the standard sense of that word (ie not just a series of connected events, but something with rising action, climax, character development, thematic significance, etc), and (ii) that first goal is to be achieved with no one having to actually write a story.

It contrasts with (i) story before - where someone (typically the GM or the module author) writes the story which the players play through - and with (ii) story after - where there can be war stories after the event, but play itself does not have those characteristics of a story. (A lot of wargaming can produce these sorts of war stories; but wargaming is not a "story now"-oriented hobby.)

The phrase "story now" comes from Ron Edwards and The Forge. Another label used for the same thing is "narrativism" - but on these boards (ie ENworld) "narrativism" is normally used to mean "story before" and so that term can be a source of terminological confusion.

I will say, while I think GNS theory is a load of nonsense, I do think story now/before/after is an interesting and useful model.

 

[Baron Opal II]

We were at the same university when he was getting his PhD. Had coffee a few times, and some great conversations.

 

[overgeeked]

Thank you for the reply.

"Story now" is a label used to describe an approach to RPGing where (i) the goal is that play should produce a story in the standard sense of that word (ie not just a series of connected events, but something with rising action, climax, character development, thematic significance, etc), and (ii) that first goal is to be achieved with no one having to actually write a story.

It contrasts with (i) story before - where someone (typically the GM or the module author) writes the story which the players play through - and with (ii) story after - where there can be war stories after the event, but play itself does not have those characteristics of a story. (A lot of wargaming can produce these sorts of war stories; but wargaming is not a "story now"-oriented hobby.)

Where would something like player-driven hexcrawls fit in? My assumption is "story after" as there's not necessarily anything approaching a pre-written plot, though the world is filled with hooks (story before), but your description of "story now" seems to mostly mean a combination of player-driven and play itself being shaped like a story. But those aren't identical. You can have player-driven games that don't look like a story during play.

The phrase "story now" comes from Ron Edwards and The Forge. Another label used for the same thing is "narrativism" - but on these boards (ie ENworld) "narrativism" is normally used to mean "story before" and so that term can be a source of terminological confusion.

The phrase "story now" is coined in the early 2000s. One of the first games written to be played in this sort of fashion - and predating the label by more than a decade - is Greg Stafford's Prince Valiant. But Edwards has always emphasised that this sort of play was happening using other systems not specifically written to support it - sometimes this gets labelled "vanilla narrativism". Ie playing story now without any fancy mechanical trappings. I've done this sort of play using AD&D: OA and an all-thieves campaign. I mention those details because they're pretty relevant: OA characters, and thieves, bring "baggage" and context/connections to the setting and situation that generate a drive/trajectory for play that not every AD&D character does, and that sort of drive or trajectory is necessary for story now play to happen.

So it's player-driven. But then what about the "shaped like a story" aspect? Something like HeroQuest 2 with its pass/fail cycle seems like it's infinitely closer to "story now" than 4E.

4e supports "story now" play pretty well because most PCs bring thematic heft/trajectory (not all - archer rangers are a bit of an energy sink by default),

That seems to be mostly a function of the player rather than the character class.

it has mechanics that strongly encourage players to proactively engage the system,

Don't all games?

it uses scene-based resolution which supports pacing and stakes-setting

Supports, but is not limited to.

(necessary for rising action, climax, theme, etc),

Necessary, yes. But not sufficient.

and at every point where traditional D&D has favoured GM-driven "story before" (adventure hooks; deciding what the treasure is; etc) 4e encourages a player-driven approach instead (player-authored quests; magic item wishlists; etc).

Huh. That's absolutely not my experience with 4E. 4E permitted those things...if the DM chose to run the game that way. But they were presented alongside the quite standard DM-driven stuff.

So if I'm reading the thesis correctly, it's more that 4E had elements that could be used to play in a "story now" fashion. Not necessarily that it was a "story now" game by design or even that it necessarily played that way.

 

[Charlaquin]

Where would something like player-driven hexcrawls fit in? My assumption is "story after" as there's not necessarily anything approaching a pre-written plot, though the world is filled with hooks (story before), but your description of "story now" seems to mostly mean a combination of player-driven and play itself being shaped like a story. But those aren't identical. You can have player-driven games that don't look like a story during play.

A hexcrawl could be any of the three, depending on how you run it. Do you have a bunch of pre-planned stuff in every hex that the players’s decisions simply determine the order it gets revealed in? Probably largely Story Before. Do you ask the players what they find when they enter a new hex? Probably story now. Do you roll on random tables when the players enter a new hex, and determine the “story,” such as it is, only in retrospect? Story After.

Also, a game doesn’t have to be entirely one or another; Edwards might have accused games that don’t commit entirely to one “incoherent,” which I think is rubbish, but the reality is most games probably involve a mix of all three, though they may focus more heavily on one or two.

So if I'm reading the thesis correctly, it's more that 4E had elements that could be used to play in a "story now" fashion. Not necessarily that it was a "story now" game by design or even that it necessarily played that way.

I think 4e played best when run in a Story Now style. I think a lot of people who it clicked for did so, whether consciously or not, whereas when you tried to run it like you would have run 3e (often very Story Before focused), it lead to a lot of frustration.

 

[pemerton]

The Forge definitely isn’t popular around here, but I definitely don’t think that liking The Forge is associated with hating D&D.

On that, then, our experiences differ.

4e is controversial here, as it is most places, but there are many of us here who liked it a lot, and I don’t think we would be accused of hating D&D.

I'm thinking more about the 2009 to 2012 period, when 4e was actually a going concern from the "mainstream" point of view. Liking 4e ceased to be a lightning rod about the time that 5e got off the ground.

there are plenty of OSR folks here who don’t play 5e, and I don’t think any of them would be accused of hating D&D either.

I think this is true. OSR gets a type of "pass" as a legitimate mode of D&D play that is different, in that respect, from 4e.

 

[Malmuria]

I think 4e played best when run in a Story Now style. I think a lot of people who it clicked for did so, whether consciously or not, whereas when you tried to run it like you would have run 3e (often very Story Before focused), it lead to a lot of frustration.

Why is that the case? How does 4e lend itself more to story now? What did 4e modules look like? Sorry, very basic questions...I don't have a lot of experience with 4e.

I am familiar with Dungeon World, which is what I would have said is a "story now" type of fantasy game, in that it is almost emulating the genre of a dungeon crawl, and so the resolution has to do with collaboratively producing a dungeon-crawl type story if that makes sense.

 

[pemerton]

Why is that the case? How does 4e lend itself more to story now? What did 4e modules look like? Sorry, very basic questions...I don't have a lot of experience with 4e.

4e modules are, on the whole, awful. Some people like some of the later ones; they may speak up in this thread.

The essence of scene-framed play is this: situation (normally authored, at least to a significant extent and in 4e D&D to a great extent, by the GM) that responds to the players' evinced interests/hooks/thematic concerns (ie while the GM is the one who frames the scene, it is the players who implicitly or explicitly set the stakes); action declarations from the players for their PCs that engage the situation (which they should be able to do by just playing their PCs, assuming the GM has done his/her job properly at the framing stage); typically there is some sort of back-and-forth of success and failure and emerging consequences (this is the rising action); then there is the resolution and pay-off of the scene, which may do any or all of the following: lead to a change in the characters (eg one of my players decided that his dead human wizard, when raised, would return in his "true" form as a deva invoker - but not all changes need be as big as that); lead to a change in the setting (eg now the hags are allies of the PCs rather than enemies; now the djinni are reconciled with the gods rather than getting ready to fight against them in the Dusk War); lead to some new conflict or challenge (eg now that you've defeated Torog, there is no one holding back the Elemental Chaos - oh, and you sealed the Abyss too? So now all that chaotic energy and matter is not getting siphoned down into that well of nothingness, it's just overflowing into the world!)

The framing of the next scene has to have regard to the fallout from the previous scene. Otherwise it wasn't really fallout, it was just meaningless froth and bubble. But the approach of the typical D&D module is to ensure that no fallout ever matters - and often within a story before framework, so (eg) if the PCs kill a particular antagonist early, the GM has advice on how to keep the villains going in any event, or if the PCs miss a crucial clue the GM has advice on how to make sure they get the information in any event, etc.

The 4e modules I own are mostly like this. I used bits and pieces of them for maps, characters, stat blocks, and ideas for particular scenes or antagonists. But not as written.

The single best 4e adventure I used was Heathen, from one of the early - and free - 4e-era Dungeon magazines. I cut away some of the cruft. But in its basic structure it resembled the excellent Prince Valiant episode The Crimson Bull - which is the best example I know of a multi-site, multi-event scenario for a scene-framing-based game.

The core structure of both these scenarios is to use the early episodes to reveal aspects of the antagonist, and elements of the stakes, so that in structural terms they form part of the framing of the final climactic scene even though - in the fiction - they occur at earlier times and places.

Anyway, on the back of that account of how scene-framed play works, here is why 4e lends itself to it: most PCs have rich hooks built in which the GM can respond to in framing scenes (as I said, there are some exceptions - archer rangers don't bring much energy to the table by default, and I think halflings are the same of the PHB races); the mechanics give the players a lot of capacity to impose their will on the fiction through robust action declarations that really make things happen and with little to no GM gatekeeping; and there is tight scene-based resolution for both combat and non-combat (skill challenges are the key mechanic for the latter).

If you look at the thread I linked to earlier - D&D 4E - Pemertonian Scene-Framing; A Good Approach to D&D 4e - you can see all this discussed in quite a bit more detail.

 

[pemerton]

I am familiar with Dungeon World, which is what I would have said is a "story now" type of fantasy game, in that it is almost emulating the genre of a dungeon crawl, and so the resolution has to do with collaboratively producing a dungeon-crawl type story if that makes sense.

Dungeon World is not a scene-based game. It is a PbtA-based game. Here's my most recent post explaining the difference in these approaches (from the current AW thread):

When is a check called for? In AW, there is no "say 'yes'" rule: if you do it, you do it. So certain sorts of choices by players - to act under pressure/duress/fire, to try and intimidate others, to try and grab things or people, etc - mandate a check, and hence create this possibility of failure which obliges the GM to make a move that follows from the fiction and is as hard as they like.

Which means that the action resolution mechanics are also the pacing mechanic and the complication mechanic.

This is a big difference from more wargaming-based and classic skill system designs (eg AD&D, 5e D&D, RQ), where action resolution may have no connection at all to pacing or complication-introduction; and also from scene-framing designs (eg HeroWars/Quest, Burning Wheel, 4e D&D) where action resolution often feeds into complications, but there is a distinct layer of scene-framing and implicit (sometimes explicit) stakes-setting. Scene-framed play needs a "say 'yes' rule" to avoid boring scenes and cut to the action.

I think the AW approach is perhaps less different from the more classic approach than scene-framing play - because it doesn't introduce that distinct layer and doesn't need a "say 'yes'" rule - but it requires the GM to be ready to understand the established fiction as binding. I think that last thing can be a big deal for some RPGers whose mechanical framework is essentially "classic" but whose play ethos is more like late-80s/90s "storyteller" or the more recent but in some ways comparable "adventure path".

Here's one way the difference plays out in the 4e vs DW context:

DW relies on each check to be a possible source of complication - and the pacing considerations of success vs failure are managed via the use of the 6- equal "the GM may make as hard and direct a move as they like" together with the 7-9, which is a success but normally also licences the GM to make some sort of move, which may be quite hard (eg deal damage) though from a constrained list.

In 4e, there is generally only success or failure on any given check, because that balance bewteen failure and success and what that means for pacing is played out over the whole of the resolution of the scene. So in non-combat, individual checks in a skill challenge may fail, but the challenge itself is lost only if 3 failures occur - so the end-state of the challenge is success, success but with some failed checks which will mean some things happened that the PCs didn't like, or failure. In combat, similarly, individual PCs may suffer damage or even die, or suffer in other ways (eg lose or have to spend equipment, or suffer a disease or curse, or have someone they care for like a NPC be killed). So even though each check is binary the end-state is just like for a skill challenge.

Other games that use a scene-framing approach to "story now" that is very similar to 4e's, rather than the PbtA approach, are HeroWars/Quest (one of the earliest systematic scene-framed RPGs), Cortex+ Heroic (and I suspect Cortex+/Prime more generally - @Aldarc will know). Prince Valiant and Burning Wheel are also scene-based games, but probably not quite as close in their core structure to 4e as those other ones. (That said, the best GM guide I read for 4e was Luke Crane's Adventure Burner for Burning Wheel.)

 

[Aldarc]

What did you find interesting about the interview with Edwards?

(1) His discussion of how there are various frameworks in the game for player-driven play (e.g., quests, skill challenges, epic destinies, etc.).

(2) How the tactical elements of 4e actually led to greater inter-player/PC interactivity and roleplaying in combat than his prior non-4e D&D experiences.

(3) In general, the fact that 4e is being talked about in a mostly positive light. (That's always a welcome change of pace on the internet for me.)

4e modules are, on the whole, awful. Some people like some of the later ones; they may speak up in this thread.

The best ones: The Madness of Gardmore Abbey and Reavers of Harkenwold

 

[Rob Kuntz]

But you can say the same about anything--politics, sports teams, competing sports (consider the tribalism of gridiron vs fútbol), brand loyalty, competing fiction franchises (consider the B5 vs DS9 brouhaha), anything with a tribal character. Religions and politics tend to be about deeply-held beliefs regarding the nature of things, people, and the world. Sports, brand loyalty, and fandom tend to be about much more lightly-held preferences and taste. Maybe if we're going to make comparisons referencing tribalism, it is more respectful to reference things that are about preference when talking about games, which are by definition a leisure-time activity, than about things that at least should get to the heart of a person's ethical judgments.

Particularly when religious tribalism is such an incredibly serious issue in the world right at this very moment, so making a comparison to the tribalism of geekdom runs the risk of sounding like one is trivializing religion and its importance to real, living humans, rather than elevating gaming to its level (which I think most people would consider a fairly ridiculous notion.)

Everything is fair game within the haphazardly cast net of rhetoric compared to the purposefully wound rope of philosophical inquiry.