4E Consequences: Being passive, cautious, or a loner is now unoptimized

[Spatula]

I think that the cautious style of play began to lose effectiveness back in 3E before 4E was ever written. It depends more on a group's playstyle rather than the RAW of course, but the mindset of players can change when the style of play moves from dungeons being places filled with strange creatures and traps to areas containing a number of challenges with an X difficulty rating.

The mentality of caution begins to lose ground once the notion that "these are challenges designed for us to deal with" takes over.

So would you send 1st level characters into the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth (frex), or would you instead follow the adventure guidelines (levels 6-10) and assume that the challenges are appropriate for the suggested levels?

Anyway, encounter design guidelines are a tool for DMs, not carved into stone. If the players are getting hammered because they refuse to act like a team, reduce the difficulty of encounters. Or let them die. This applies to every edition - working in concert has always been the most optimal path to defeating foes. The only difference is that 3e and 4e give you tools to measure how effective a group of theoretical characters will be against a particular monster.

 

[Janx]

It's been my experience in group play, that players who strongly exhibit cautiousness, passiveness, or loner style of play tend to lower the average fun for the group.

In the cautiousness, passiveness, the problem is more localized to the single player (as they tend to be less involved in the game, they try to avoid anything happening to their PC, and complain about it).

The loner style tends to come at the expense of everyone else, usually because of GM hogging, and antagonism towards the party.

As a result, for group play, I don't have a problem with a system that punishes those styles of play.

 

[Ed_Laprade]

or going solo and behaving with no regard for what everybody else is doing, achieve bad results and can even result in a TPK.

Ok, this thread is 4 pages long already, and I've only read the OP. But I'm gonna say what everyone else has, or should have: Loner characters have never been an optimal choice in D&D, and they've always been a potential source of TPKs.

 

[ExploderWizard]

So would you send 1st level characters into the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth (frex), or would you instead follow the adventure guidelines (levels 6-10) and assume that the challenges are appropriate for the suggested levels?

Would I send them there?, probably not. Would I let them go if they wanted to? You betcha.

Anyway, encounter design guidelines are a tool for DMs, not carved into stone. If the players are getting hammered because they refuse to act like a team, reduce the difficulty of encounters. Or let them die. This applies to every edition - working in concert has always been the most optimal path to defeating foes.

Working together in any edition increases the survival rate, thats true. Things like challenge ratings, and encounter xp budgets are DM tools, but thier use can permeate the feel of a game. Once upon a time, caution wasn't about tactics in combat but rather the consideration given to entering combat in the first place.

The only difference is that 3e and 4e give you tools to measure how effective a group of theoretical characters will be against a particular monster.

Those tools became necessary because the stats on both sides of the screen became too bloated and complex to just eyeball it.

 

[Spatula]

Working together in any edition increases the survival rate, thats true. Things like challenge ratings, and encounter xp budgets are DM tools, but thier use can permeate the feel of a game. Once upon a time, caution wasn't about tactics in combat but rather the consideration given to entering combat in the first place.

Those tools became necessary because the stats on both sides of the screen became too bloated and complex to just eyeball it.

I don't agree that that's the reason why encounter guidelines exist, nor do I believe that the game designers responsible for such guidelines would accept your rationale. 2e had already made some faltering steps in that direction, by basing monster XP off of a very rough estimate of the creature's power & defenses. And even 1e had a nod towards rating challenge, as monster XP is directly related to HP totals (more HP = more XP). In that sense, XP was a indicator of monster threat, albeit a not-very-accurate one. Of course, in 3e a monter's CR is its XP value, and 4e works similarly (monster level + status = CR = XP). In both 3e and 4e, the total XP of an encounter determines the "challenge level" of the encounter.

The issue in older editions, a DM wants to design an encounter (say, the capstone to an epic adventure) that will tax but not overwhelm the players. That the game offers no real tools to help the DM in this endeavor is a flaw, not a feature. Giving the DM more information is always a good thing.

Metagaming has always been an issue. If my 8th level character is playing through a level-appropraite adventure in any edition, I don't expect to run into the tarrasque. Nor should the tarrasque be anywhere near a bunch of 8th level PCs.

 

[jeffh]

One thing that is not helpful in this convo:

"I'm glad that 4e killed your playstyle, it was badwrongfun anyway, and now 4e won't have any of your type in it!"

Dudes, their style might not be your style, but that doesn't make it an invalid style. 4e doesn't decide what the right way and wrong way to play D&D is, no matter how hard it may or may not try to do that. Playing Loner-type characters, or cautious characters, is a valid kind of play that 4e doesn't really support. It's a fair cop: 4e can't be used by people who want those kinds of characters and those kinds of games. The schadenfreude over someone who is having a problem with their games is entirely unhelpful. More helpful might be something like "I happen to like that it encourages group play, and if most groups are like mine, 4e is probably better for most groups, even if it doesn't work that well for yours. You might want to try X (Paranoia? CoC? Dread? 2e?) instead."

Should 4e support all playstyles? Maybe it should have been more of a toolkit system. Maybe the focus is good because it helps D&D be more distinct as a game (I'm of this mind). Why might 4e have chosen to emphasize this style? What did they gain with it? What did they lose?

These are interesting avenues of conversation.

"Your way of playing sucked anyway" really isn't.

It's not badwrongfun if everyone at the table is enjoying it, but I take the people who have said things like that to be making the observation that, far too often, that style is very bad for the enjoyment of part - often a majority - of a given group. This has, as a matter of empirically observable fact, certainly been true at my tables. Spotlight-hogging powergamers often make everyone else feel like they might as well not have bothered to show up, and that's a horrible feeling and defeats the whole purpose of an activity that's supposed to be about shared enjoyment. Too often, the people who are drawn to such characters are either unaware of or actively insensitve about this.

If it's different at your table, or thecasualoblivions, or someone elses, more power to you. It's certainly conceptually possible for such a style to work out well in something other than a one-on-one game. But I submit that it's probably rather rare.

(Having read the OPs description of the player in question, I have to say my sympathies are not with that individual. The key sentence - "I'm not sure he even pays attention to what the others are doing when we play." It's my opinion that such individuals are, all else being equal, not nearly as much fun to play with as people who do pay attention to what's going on. It's a fact that 4E is a very poor choice of system if, for whatever reason, you do wish to accommodate such players.)

 

[StreamOfTheSky]

Does 4e discriminate against loners? God, yes. And it fits perfectly within 4e's gamist paradigm. The goal of a loner character is to go do awesome things by himself. If he's having fun playing a loner character, he's doing so at the expense of the rest of the group, because every minute of gameplay he's doing fun things is a minute of gameplay four other people are doing nothing fun at all. It's a grossly unfair distribution of activity, and fits right in with the other "you don't get to play" mechanics that 4e eliminated. (Charm, confusion, save or die effects, etc.)

A friend of mine once said that 4e isn't World of Warcraft; it's Final Fantasy Tactics.

I hate to break this to you, but eventually in Tactics, you get this character called Orlandu, and...

[sblock]Mustadio, Worker 8, Cloud, and some others are almost as nasty and show-stealing if done right, and the game is chock full of effects to lose your turn or sit out the combat. It also has enough speed boosting abilities that I've had characters getting three consecutive turns at times...[/sblock]

 

[StreamOfTheSky]

It made things open, but using a system where 90% of all characters who multiclassed weren't all that viable.

Your ad hoc percentage is wildly exaggerated. And what do you mean by multiclassing? Do dips count? Prestige classes? Generally, except for full casting classes (and in this instance, the bard doesn't count, as losing some casting doesn't hurt as much for him), if a second class will give an ability you want, or adds an already high stat to something like saves or AC, it's in no way underpowered to take some levels in it.

Even for full casting classes, I don't buy it. Most people agree that by mid to late levels, casters are stronger than warriors. So take Fighter and Wizard. Make a little rating bar, Fighter 20 on one side, Wizard 20 on the other. Now, take different level combinations of the two, like Fighter 2 / Wiz 18. You should find the more wizard in the progression, the closer you end up to the wizard side, and vice-versa for Fighter. If your problem is with class imbalance, that's a valid concern, but it seems to me like caster multiclassing works fairly well for what it's supposed to do.
A Fighter 19 / Wizard 1 lost some martial ability, but can self-buff and use ANY wand/staff from the wizard list. So, he's become marginally more powerful. A Wizard 19 / Fighter 1 has a bit more hp and fort saves, and much better proficiencies (useless at the end, but darn nice early on) at the expense of a CL, which means a little less powerful than full Wizard (you'd need W18/F2 for the BAB to change in the end). Roughly,and other combination will fall between there. How much more balanced can it freaking get?

And this is ignoring prestige classes to make caster multiclassing work even better....

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Your ad hoc percentage is wildly exaggerated. And what do you mean by multiclassing? Do dips count? Prestige classes? Generally, except for full casting classes (and in this instance, the bard doesn't count, as losing some casting doesn't hurt as much for him), if a second class will give an ability you want, or adds an already high stat to something like saves or AC, it's in no way underpowered to take some levels in it.

Yes, I include PrC and dips. I come from playing Living Greyhawk as my primary D&D with 1 or 2 home games ongoing throughout the years.

However, in LG, the encounters you went against were DEADLY or a regular basis. We were use to the difference in winning or losing being a couple of points in either direction(either to AC, hitpoints, damage, attack bonus, healing or whatever).

So, you ask if it was unplayable if a fighter 10 took a level of wizard? Probably not, but the party is a lot weaker. 1st level spells won't help us at all playing APL 12 adventures. Is the same fighter who is 10 fighter 5 wizard unplayable? Yep. He lost so much BAB that he will miss too often to be a good fighter. He'll have too few hitpoints to protect the party and his AC is either way too low or he has way too high an arcane spell failure to even use his spells.

There are actually very few multiclass choices that are viable. The general rule in our group was: If you are a spellcaster and can't cast spells at least one level lower than a pure spellcaster of your level, you are not viable. If you are a fighter type and you ever lose more than 3 points of BAB in 20 levels, you are not viable. If you are any levels of Bard, you are not viable(ok, that's mostly a joke...but semi-serious).

That means that the combinations that come up with viable combos are far and few between. The thing is the tradeoff in multiclassing. Almost every multiclass out of your primary class was bad unless it was a dip into a class that made you better at what you do. You could justify a 1 level dip into Barbarian if you were a fighter because it gave you more hitpoints, the ablitiy to rage, and still gave you the BAB you'd get for going up a level in fighter. In fact, it mostly just made you better.

One level of wizard might be able to help, if you had the actions to waste on spells. Most of the time the extra hitpoints and BAB, and possibly feat helped you more at what you were actually doing: Attacking enemies with your weapon. The thing is, a 1d4+1 damage magic missile does nothing to a high level enemy. You might be able to find a spell that made up for what you lose, but that's my point. If there are 2 spells that make up for the loss, and 50 more 1st level spells in the game then everyone who takes the 1 level of Wizard who doesn't take those 2 spells is hurting themselves badly. Since all of those are "multiclass options", 90% of all Fighter 19/Wizard 1 builds are bad.

If you carry that across all classes, you get that there are HUGE numbers of multiclass builds that are worse than their single class counterparts designed to play a similar role. Worse yet, the reverse is true. If you were able to take 1 drops creatively based on which class gave you more than your normal class, then you could be way more powerful than a single classed character.

Back on the original topic, this is why there could be a lot of loner characters who worked just fine in 3e. Power varied so much in 3e that a group who was used to multiclassing as the norm often became fairly below average power. The DMs in these games compensate by using lower CR creatures. If you are using mostly CR 8 or 9 creatures against your APL 10 group, someone who was really good at powergaming could easily abuse multiclassing to be the most powerful person in the party, and able to consistently one or 2 shot enemies.

And when you're that much more powerful than the rest of the party, it lets you do the loner thing really well. You can ignore the tactics of the rest of the party, because whatever you attack dies in one or two shots. If the party disagrees with you, you can threaten to leave and they beg you to stay because of how powerful you are.

This is, of course, assuming the DM doesn't get frustrated at all his monsters dying in 1 hit and increase the power of the enemies accordingly....and kill off the rest of the party.

 

[thecasualoblivion]

Back on the original topic, this is why there could be a lot of loner characters who worked just fine in 3e. Power varied so much in 3e that a group who was used to multiclassing as the norm often became fairly below average power. The DMs in these games compensate by using lower CR creatures. If you are using mostly CR 8 or 9 creatures against your APL 10 group, someone who was really good at powergaming could easily abuse multiclassing to be the most powerful person in the party, and able to consistently one or 2 shot enemies.

And when you're that much more powerful than the rest of the party, it lets you do the loner thing really well. You can ignore the tactics of the rest of the party, because whatever you attack dies in one or two shots. If the party disagrees with you, you can threaten to leave and they beg you to stay because of how powerful you are.

This is, of course, assuming the DM doesn't get frustrated at all his monsters dying in 1 hit and increase the power of the enemies accordingly....and kill off the rest of the party.

This.

I had an experience similar to this with the loner player I described earlier. He tended to be this sort of powergamer playing alongside largely inept and newbie players. The other players and DM didn't really have enough system mastery to match him or deal with him. The thing is, he's one of the best players around when we aren't in a competitive or tactical situation. When I joined, our games largely became an arms race, as I had the ability to match him in system mastery, and it bothered me that he dominated the game to the extent he did. I powergamed in response, and began powergaming everyone else's characters on their behalf. At that point, we had powergamed beyond our DM's ability to deal with the game. I became the full time DM at this point.