I've often heard people online who are defenders of 4e say that it should have been called "dnd tactics," or that the combat focus of the game made it the one most true to the wargaming roots of the hobby. Do you all agree with that?
You didn't quote me, but I'll weigh in on this too (since I was mentioned in one of those posts). Personally, I find this label somewhat derogatory. To resurrect an old meme, it feels like being told, "You are on this council, but we do not grant you the rank of Master." Sure, sure, 4e is a game people can play, but it's not
proper D&D, it's a tactical subgame.
I also dispute that 4e was as combat focused as people claim. Yes, combat was important--but combat has been a central focus of every edition,
including 5e. (E.g., subclasses like Battlemaster and, especially, Champion cannot "keep up" with the contributions of other classes unless they get
at least 6 combat encounters per day; anything less and classes like Paladin are simply superior, having equal combat capacity while still having spells for utility that those subclasses can't match.) 4e included mechanics for things that were essentially unrelated to combat, like Skill Challenges (which are oft-maligned but actually
really cool if used wisely) and player-driven quests.
Yes, 4e strove to offer a balanced combat system. For my part, that meant I personally could focus
less on combat, because I could gauge with reasonable confidence what things were strong vs weak, what things were wise vs unwise, etc. I could stop
worrying that I wasn't pulling my weight, and could thus put much more of my attention on enjoying the narrative and investigating the world. I didn't need to be constantly vigilant for stupid pitfalls or rookie mistakes.
From your description, it seems the game is not about combat per se, but about putting emphasis on the encounter as a means of pacing a narrative and creating distinct scenes within that narrative. Skill challenges, whether well-implemented or not, similarly seem to be a way to take free play make it into a more structured scene.
Yeah, I would agree with that. SCs, as noted, are often rather crapped on, when they can actually be quite good...they just weren't explained very well (and sometimes very poorly), and the examples were often lackluster or even bad,
especially in the adventure modules/paths.
If this is the case, I have two questions:
1. what is the relationship of what happens inside of initiative order and what happens outside of initiative, especially as compared to, say, AD&D or basic? For example, if I'm thinking of creating a player driven sandbox in AD&D, a lot of the player agency takes place outside of initiative, sometimes using a subsystem designed or heavily modified by the DM (spell research, questing for a magic item, training, random shenanigans, gen exploration, etc). From that perspective, a game that places a focus on the encounter while also heavily defining what a character can do within the encounter seems to be not player-focused, and yet you are saying that it is. (note: I'm not saying one or the other is good for roleplaying, but trying to understand what exactly hinges on rolling initiative and being in vs out of an encounter).
Originally, I wrote up a bunch about Skill Challenges, but maybe that's premature. I think you have a somewhat mistaken understanding of what 4e was trying to do. It is not trying to
make all situations into well-defined encounters; instead, it equips the DM with well-made tools for situations that
work as well-defined encounters, while also providing other tools for these (as you put it) "outside of initiative" situations. Things like Page 42 (
very rough gloss, "the page of numbers for adjudicating improvised things"), or "MM3 on a business card," or discussing player motivations so you can try to offer an experience everyone at the table can enjoy, even if their tastes aren't identical.
The relationship between "what happens outside initiative" and what happens "inside" it is...whatever makes sense. I know that's not much to go on, but...that's what it does. If it makes sense that something has changed about the encounter, 4e's monster-building tools (like the aforementioned "MM3 on a business card") help you to quickly alter an encounter and know pretty damn well exactly
how much you've altered it. If it makes sense that a skill check the party needs to make has become more difficult, Page 42 tells you what numbers should, in general, be difficult for a character of a certain level, and does so fairly accurately. Etc. The world can, and should, respond to the behavior of the player characters; as a result, "outside initiative" actions as you call them are supported via flexible frameworks, rather than bullet-point-like rules, and "inside initiative" (rather, combat-specific) things are supported with relatively fast, transparent, understandable systems.
Part of the reason I keep putting quotes around "outside initiative" etc. is that Skill Challenges can be run either way--and I've enjoyed both types significantly. All depends on (again) whatever makes sense in-context. Is it more sensible that people sometimes act back-to-back? Is it more sensible that you should work through things in a singular order? Perhaps it's more reasonable this time to have popcorn initiative. It all depends.
As another example of the "inside"/"outside" relationship: 4e explicitly and heavily embraces resolving conflict without violence. It is explicit in the rules that if the party manages to get past a combat encounter without fighting, they should get just as much XP as they would have if they'd fought it. Perhaps they find a sneaky means of evading the fight while still doing what they intended, or they successfully persuade (whether via roleplay, discrete skill checks, or an SC) their opponents to let them do that thing, or maybe they expend resources in a clever way that obviates the need for the combat encounter--all of those things are awesome, and deserve just as much reward as going in swords blazing. There's also the heavily player-driven Quest stuff, where players are explicitly encouraged to work with the DM to develop goals (whether concrete or abstract) that their characters are driving toward, and to reward progress toward those goals with XP, items, money, etc.--again, whatever rewards
make sense for the actions taken. Those Quests are, in principle, entirely "outside initiative," yet they often lead to various types of encounter that
do trigger an initiative roll.
1a. To take a specific example, the Dragonlance modules are lambasted for being railroads because the attempt to create a paced, high fantasy epic clashes with the AD&D's focus on picaresque freeplay. Would these type of modules feel more natural in 4e, where each bit of narrative could be treated as an encounter/scene?
Possibly? 4e isn't going to turn a heavy railroad into a rich player-driven experience, no more than any other tabletop game can. But given 4e's focus on making scenes really
work, and on giving useful improvisational tools for the connections between scenes, it's possible that the execution of a Dragonlance-style game could work better. I do know that, for example, the ENWorld-published adventure path
Zeitgeist, which has a very strong narrative core to it, was
extremely well-received and was originally written for 4e (with adaptations for Pathfinder and 5e produced later).
But I'd argue this is not really what 4e is "meant for," if that makes sense. As noted above, there seems to be a misconception here that 4e is about
pre-figuring all of these scenes and events so that they will be pleasant to experience when they happen. It's rather more the reverse: arming the DM with fast, reliable tools so that
when a "scene" makes sense, you can make the most of it, and when a "scene"
doesn't make sense, you can confidently improvise forward.
2. How does the encounter-as-scene dynamic of 4e compare with explicit storygames (let's say Dungeon World as a good fantasy comp)? It would seem that there might be some similarities, but dungeon world goes the other way and gets rid of initiative all together. Similarly, DW encourages us to "draw maps, leave blanks," as a way of keeping the story-now focus; would 4e work with this same advice?
Having run DW for a few years now, I would say absolutely yes, you can run a 4e game that way. In some ways it will be more effort, because 4e is intentionally more mechanically-heavy and thus has more moving parts to consider. But in other ways it will be less effort, as you can "offload" most of the math concerns to the system, because the system works very well. It's far from perfect, to be sure, but it really does succeed far more often than it breaks down.
I mean, for example, Dungeon World expects you to do some prep work--one of your moves is "exploit your prep," after all--and that includes things like monsters you expect the party to run into, traps they may need to navigate, and people or situations that may complicate matters and require solutions. That's what 4e is doing with its "scenes"/encounters: preparing
reliably functional combat encounters, environmental hazards, and other complications (social, magical, physical, whatever).
But those scenes don't exist in a vacuum, and they will usually not be
jammed right up against one another with nothing between. (Sometimes they will, e.g. a "chase the bad guys across the city" Skill Challenge followed by a "fight against the bad guys" combat, but more often they won't.) The threads connecting between "set piece" content are for improvisation and extemporaneous play. It's sort of like a higher-level-abstraction version of DW's "start and end with the fiction" concept. The "improvisational" parts of 4e are where you start and end, but sometimes those improvisational parts trigger the "scenes" that 4e has rules for, just as DW has "the fiction" that sometimes triggers the "moves" that DW has rules for. Whenever you aren't in the "scenes," you return to the improvisation--and, yes, sometimes the improvisation will mean you have to edit, rework, or completely delete a scene you had prepared for, just as sometimes the fiction in DW will mean modifying or negating prep you've done.
As an example of this for DW: in the game I run, the players once
completely outsmarted me, and turned what should've been a fairly epic fight into a sad-trombone non-event. They exploited an interaction I had failed to consider. I let them have it, even though I felt that was disappointing, out of respect for their cleverness. They still sometimes mention that fight, so I think I made the right call. As a 4e DM, you may be forced to do the same thing, reworking or even jettisoning a "scene" you prepared because it no longer makes sense. That's okay. The tools are meant to be sufficiently powerful, reliable, and quick (especially with the software tools) that you can adjust, remove, or replace as needed--and, as I mentioned above, overcoming a combat encounter without actually fighting
explicitly gives the same XP as the fight itself would, so the players lose nothing for their cleverness, pacifism, or whatever else.
