D&D 4E 4e: Death of the Bildungsroman

[Fanaelialae]

Well, that is why you would stop using them about level three or so. Kind of like that fifteen seconds of invulnerability you get in side scrolling video games.


No, I get it. Why did you rush into combat? Or, if you were surprise ambushed, why didn't the DM let you get away when things turned ugly?


I am not arguing against DM fiat. It needs to be exercised every once in a while. For example, the goblin targeting your wizard. Did the DM roll for a random target, and it was your wizard?

I appreciate that your playstyle works for your group, except when you raise a concern where it doesn't. It sounds a lot like that DM is abdicating several decisions to the dice that they should be making themself, to keep the game flowing.


No, there are plenty of wild animals that will simply attack hard enough and long enough to protect their young or their territory. Intelligent creatures will have further motivations, but largely, engaging an opponent until your entire raiding/hunting party is slaughtered is silly.



I don't think my suggestion to use these ideas until approximately level three constitutes 'ever'. For example, triple starting hit points, or even triple max starting hit points, but that is all they get until level three, then they can start rolling normally again. If that seems to much, don't roll crits for weapons until they hit 3rd level then all bets are off. The part where I qualify the suggestions with until third level is the important part, if the issue in question is 'starting level combat is too swingy'.


So, why is adding more hit points in previous editions a bad idea, again?


I was continuing the example.


Who decided to shoot an arrow at the wizard?

This is what I am talking about. If your group has decided to roll out in the open for everything, then you will have to take your lumps. That DM was more interested in applying the rules evenly than making sure the group was having fun. Having fun seemed to be more of a priority for you, but the DM decided the goblins would attack everyone the same amount, and prevented themself from being able to adjust the outcome of the attacks.

That DM was refereeing a game. You were trying to tell a story. The problem isn't with the rules, they are with the clash of expectations.


I suppose I can guess at some of them, but that doesn't mean it is still the best playstyle for that group. Things change.


I thought that was the issue that 4e fixes.


I agree, there are good suggestions. None of them are particularly simple, however. Tacking on some extra hit points seems to be the fix people are looking for because... Well, that is what 4e is doing, isn't it?


Wait, I thought the critical hits and such were what made it drastically imbalanced to begin with. Adding a buffer to that, as you mentioned above, should bring it closer to balanced, not imbalanced in another direction. It certainly could, I will grant, if you go totally gonzo with the extra hit points. As I mentioned above, you aren't really giving them extra anyway, just borrowing the next two levels worth, and doing things normally after third level.


I have seen the new monsters. Their larger hit points isn't much of a balancing factor, when their damage output is greatly reduced.


But, was she a barbarian?


It sounds like she wasn't. How do you reconcile letting a non-barbarian gain a barbarian rage bonus with 'didn't fudge a single roll'?


Honestly? 'Wizard died from a critical arrow hit' doesn't exactly mesh with 'suits my group well'. If the first part was more along the lines of 'We were swarmed by gobbos, and my Wizard went down in the first round from an arrow! My next guy was a...' But it isn't. Clearly you were not pleased with the outcome.


But, in order to avoid houserules, the game would have to be something like flawless. If the game isn't flawless, and house rules to correct the problems generally result from years of experimenting, how can new DMs be expected to run a reasonably enjoyable game?

From your responses I get the impression that our two playstyles are VASTLY different from each other. You appear to be missing my meaning almost entirely (perhaps I am missing yours as well), which leads me to believe that we're approaching this concept from two completely different directions. Differing points of view are great, but if you have one guy who only speaks Hungrian and another who only speaks German, the two are likely to have very little luck communicating concepts to each other.

Nonetheless, I'll try this one more time, in the absolute simplest way that I can think to phrase it.
My group's dynamic works very well for us 99.999% of the time. 4e seems to have fixed the problems that we experienced the 0.001% of the time. My group is looking forward to 4e.

 

[Lacyon]

No, they will die just as often, because the DM will feel at greater liberty to throw harder monsters at them. As shown in DDXP, the reports seemed to indicate characters going down with about the same frequency, so what has it fixed?

They will die less often. This is because Fifth Element's DM isn't Mike Mearls, out to prove that Death Can Still Happen (tm).

In other words, the system is now (assuming it works as advertised) consistently likely to provide you the lethality you desire at any level by fudging the encounter-building guidelines during game prep rather than fudging the combat rules during the game.

That is a desirable thing to me.

 

[PrecociousApprentice]

On the terminology - The Forge regard "railroady/illusionist narrative" as not narrativist at all, because the story does not emerge in play but has been predetermined by the GM. If it has to be given a GNS label, it can be labelled as a type of simulationism (all the play is aimed at exploration of the GM's predetermined story) but I think this is not very helpful, because it is nothing like either purist-for-system simulationism (RM, RQ) or high-concept simulationism (CoC, Pendragon). I prefer to think of it as its own (and in my view uniquely unappealing) appraoch to RPGing.

So for me, this is the area that the GNS system needs to work on. The Narrativist concept seems to be all about empowering the players to create/play the characters/stories/themes that they want. The Gamist concept seems to value the fun/challenge of the rules more than modeling anything in particular. Simulationist seems to be a catch all for everything else.

Since there are many different things that can be "simulated", I feel that the artificial triangle of the GNS system should be broken up a little to better segregate the different types of "Simmulationist" play. Just my opinion though, and in reality, I have learned a lot about the purposes of gaming for different people. I haven't memorized all the different terms because I have more important terms to memorize (I am in medical school).

Any which way, I think that the Adventure Path idea is generally brilliant, and I think it could be expanded a little by creating whole worlds that preserve the "mystery" and the feeling of the "flight into darkness" of literature, along with the obviously desired bildungsroman effect. To get a consistent narrative in a fun gamist style game, I am willing to deal with a moderate amount of railroad if the ride is fun. My feeling is that simmulationist games are unfun, a pain to run, and eventually fail at the goal that they set out to achieve when played by inteligent players. Railroad is only really bad when it is unfun or not desired by the players.

 

[Dausuul]

If a car breaks down regularly, but you can prevent the breakdown by the special secret trick (which is mentioned nowhere in the owner's manual) of turning it on and off three times before you hit the gas--guess what? It's still a problem with the car. The onus is on the car designer to make it so the car doesn't break down, not the owner to get on the Internet and learn about the special secret trick.

Also see "Oberoni fallacy."

 

[Ashrem Bayle]

Bildungsroman? That's what GURPS is for. It can model a character from the womb to his ascension to god-hood.

D&D is D&D and is meant only to be D&D. It's its own thing these days, and doesn't really model any other form of tale-telling without extensive modification. That was the way of 3e, and looks to be the way of 4th.

And I can't wait to play some D&D again!

 

[Hussar]

No, I get it. Why did you rush into combat? Or, if you were surprise ambushed, why didn't the DM let you get away when things turned ugly?

I am not arguing against DM fiat. It needs to be exercised every once in a while. For example, the goblin targeting your wizard. Did the DM roll for a random target, and it was your wizard?

I appreciate that your playstyle works for your group, except when you raise a concern where it doesn't. It sounds a lot like that DM is abdicating several decisions to the dice that they should be making themself, to keep the game flowing

How could he have prevented that? He was killed in a single attack before his turn. There is nothing he could have done. And, as far as targetting the wizard goes, well, should I play with kid gloves and never target someone because I might kill them? Isn't "get the wizard" a pretty understandable tactic for humanoids?

Or maybe my humanoids should all just stand in a nice neat line, attacking the party one at a time using pointy sticks?

I don't get it. A mistake has consequences? It's possible for single hit to drop a PC?

YES. It's been shown to you multiple times. A single hit from a monster can kill a PC. Give an orc a greataxe and he can do 45 points of damage in a single hit. That will kill any PC up to about 3rd level.

Now, it won't happen a lot, but it WILL happen. Say 10 encounters per level, 4 rounds per encounter, 4 attacks per round (roughly). That's 400 attacks against the party per level. And that's a pretty low assumption. That's 20 threatened criticals per level. Assume that half succeed. That's 10 crits by monsters per level.

Now, all of a sudden, it's not all that out of line for a PC to die before making a single die roll. Heck, out of 400 attacks, it's quite possible to make back to back criticals. The creature has a claw/claw/bite routine, crits twice and hits all three times. PC dies. At almost ANY level.

I averaged a PC death every three sessions the last time I DM'd, because I played by the rules. Rolled in the open, didn't fudge, and didn't cheat. That's WAY too lethal. The reason we see Action Points in 3e is to mitigate this. Never mind other concepts to reduce the lethality. 3e combat is extremely lethal if you don't fudge.

 

[drjones]

Even 4e can be lethal without encounter fudging. Every time the DM decides not to shoot the wizard who is already bleeding out on the floor to finish him off (a very wise tactical move if the enemy knows you have any kind of healing) you are fudging in the players favor.

In all the playtests I have run if I was really playing the monsters at their best the cleric would have been killed every other encounter. You don't have to be an Elder Brain to know the healer must go down and stay down.

But the game is not about blindly following rules. It is about having fun with your friends. Most people will find some risky situations that most of the time turn out for the best to be the most 'fun'. That's why part of the DMs job is to make sure things don't get too needlessly punishing or put everyone to sleep with a walk through candyland. Th new rules seem to be really trying to make this more easy for the DM, hope it works.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Even 4e can be lethal without encounter fudging. Every time the DM decides not to shoot the wizard who is already bleeding out on the floor to finish him off (a very wise tactical move if the enemy knows you have any kind of healing) you are fudging in the players favor.

Of course, there is a really easy rationale behind why monsters don't kill all downed people. In a battle it is simply more pressing to attack the guy swinging a sword at you than the one on the ground bleeding to death. Plus it is ALSO being nice to the players.

 

[Hussar]

Even 4e can be lethal without encounter fudging. Every time the DM decides not to shoot the wizard who is already bleeding out on the floor to finish him off (a very wise tactical move if the enemy knows you have any kind of healing) you are fudging in the players favor.

In all the playtests I have run if I was really playing the monsters at their best the cleric would have been killed every other encounter. You don't have to be an Elder Brain to know the healer must go down and stay down.

But the game is not about blindly following rules. It is about having fun with your friends. Most people will find some risky situations that most of the time turn out for the best to be the most 'fun'. That's why part of the DMs job is to make sure things don't get too needlessly punishing or put everyone to sleep with a walk through candyland. Th new rules seem to be really trying to make this more easy for the DM, hope it works.

Oh, true, and nothing I said really disagrees with this. However, there's two different issues going on here.

Targeting the guy who'd bleeding on the ground to finish him off is a valid tactic, but, is not in any way written into the rules. And, while it might be valid, it's not more valid than using your attack to put a second enemy down too. Besides, it might be difficult to tell, in the heat of battle, if that guy that's fallen down is dead or just bleeding a lot. Unless you start having bad guys hitting corpses as well, I'd call shenanigans.

But, that doesn't really change my point. Written directly into the 3e rules, at almost any level, is the statistical possibility of killing a PC in one full attack. It might not be a high possibility, but, it's certainly there. A given creature can usually do 10xCR/round as a max. (give or take) Lots of PC's, including the front line fighter types, may have less than 10xlevel in hit points. Add in the chance of crits and it's not terribly difficult for the dice to declare you dead, despite the fact that you have done nothing wrong. Made no mistakes. The dice gods hate you today and you die.

To be fair though, we've wandered pretty far from the topic of the bildungsromans.

 

[pemerton]

So for me, this is the area that the GNS system needs to work on. The Narrativist concept seems to be all about empowering the players to create/play the characters/stories/themes that they want. The Gamist concept seems to value the fun/challenge of the rules more than modeling anything in particular. Simulationist seems to be a catch all for everything else.

Since there are many different things that can be "simulated", I feel that the artificial triangle of the GNS system should be broken up a little to better segregate the different types of "Simmulationist" play.

I agree. I don't think that there is anything all that common between (for example) Rolemaster and Pendragon in terms of the sort of play experience they deliver. But I work with the theory that I've got.

You know, if a putative universal theory of RPGs fails to explain the popularity of the majority mode of play, that theory may need a little work....

But the theory is not a theory to explain popularity - it explains the relationship between rules and playstyle.

To analyse adventure paths without expressing an evaluation of them: the players get to explore character (ie within limits imposed by the GM's world and the adventure designer's plot hook presuppositions the player gets to build and play a particular PC) and also settting, and they may even get to add a little colour here and there.

I also think that the theory predicts what experience reveals to be the case: that if the railroading GM does not allow these areas of player choice (eg character behaviour, PrC, or at least armour and style of weapon) then there will be playgroup conflict (and multiple threads about plot-breaking PrCs/whining players/unreasonable GMs), because very few game players want to be completely passive in the playing of the game. I think 3E is probably quite a good ruleset for railroading play because it gives the player so much choice in character build and in the minutiae of action resolution, even if the GM is asserting totally control over the gameworld and the plot.

If the choices the players get to make also permit them to exhibit a type of aesthetic sensibility or inclination (such as a special showboating schtick) then the railroady game might even deliver something in the neighbourhood of what narrativist play is aimed at.

Anyway, 4e will enhance these player-empowering features, and so may deliver even more railroading fun. Personally, however, I'm attracted to its features that look able to deliver vanilla narrativist fun.

Railroad is only really bad when it is unfun or not desired by the players.

Agreed. But I think gaming texts that advocate it need to take care to avoid encouraging abusive GMing that completely disempowers players. I think AD&D didn't do a very good job in this respect.

To get a consistent narrative in a fun gamist style game, I am willing to deal with a moderate amount of railroad if the ride is fun.

As long as the narrative doesn't get in the way of the game, fair enough - but even on this thread we can see how some posters are complaining that the GM fudging the rolls (ie spoiling the game) in order to preserve the narrative (no PC death) would ruin their fun.

My feeling is that simmulationist games are unfun, a pain to run, and eventually fail at the goal that they set out to achieve when played by inteligent players.

I don't agree with the last point - RM doesn't fail at its goal. But it does have a lot of painful features. It also has a lot of attractive features, including (after low levels) providing a half-decent simulationist chassis for a type of very lowkey vanilla narrativism. (Especially because of the metagame richness of its character build rules.)

(Have I mentioned Robin Laws yet? Can I? Huh? Huh?)

But surely you're not surprised that an academic who works in two literary disciplines (law, and social and political theory) prefers GNS, despite its inadequacies, to Robin Laws!