4e DM's rule call and 4e video game

[Nebulous]

Forked from: Dealing with a DM who takes things too literally

The DM always has the final say, that doesn't mean they're always right... Like in this case.

Asking how the man in armor pushes a giant is like asking how the man in the pointed hat shoots fire out of his hand. It just happens. You can explain it any way you like, in fact, that's a big part of the 4e DM's job.

The challenge for a 4e DM isn't to determine whether a martial exploit is reasonable in a given situation, it's to create a reasonable description of it occurring. It's a creative challenge, not a logical one.

If this doesn't work, point out that older editions of D&D aren't much different. A man armed with a dagger can kill a giant, presumably by stabbing it mightily in the foot (this is easier if your using the double-specialization rules from 1e's Unearthed Arcana). In Rolemaster I'm fairly sure you can punch someone with a cestus so hard that their spleen explodes, doing splash damage to everyone in a 5' radius (I kid... barely). Mention that David killed Goliath with a sling stone (more or less). There are plenty of example of successful and unreasonable actions in other games and heroic fiction in general.

I've been playing a lot of 3.5 Temple of Elemental Evil recently, and i've been hoping that at some point a 4e tactical game will come out. But this thread got me thinking about how Powers would look in a 4e video game. How much creativity goes into how a power is described, and how much is a flat mechanic? If a 4e video game WERE made, would they need a new animation for every class and power, across multiple splatbooks? How would a program animate pushing monsters into pits and over ledges? What about swapping places with a gelatinous cube? A computer program MUST take the rules literally, as it doesn't have the creative expression of a real person. In earlier editions of the game it came down to swing and hit/swing and miss, but now forced movement is a huge part of the game, and it can happen in circumstances that don't always make sense.

Is a 4e tactical videogame realistic, and how hard do you think it would be to make?

 

[AllisterH]

Is a 4e tactical videogame realistic, and how hard do you think it would be to make?

Ironically, 4e I think won't make a good videogame that companies would want to license from WOTC.

You listed of course all of the movement effects which play a bigger part in 4e than any other edition. Similarly, the use of interrupts and immediate reactions that a player can choose all mean one thing.

4e as a real-time videogame would pretty much have to nerf many of the classes. It would have to be a grid-based turn based videogame a la Disgaea and Final Fantasy Tactics.

Turn-based & grid-based RPGs is a decidely niche genre that right now only the japanese seem to produce for. As much as people say 4e is a MMORPG, it would make a horrible, absolute horrible real timed game due to those features.

 

[Silverblade The Ench]

well, lets just say, the games and movie industry have their heads up thier posterior orifices, when it comes to knowing what's GOOD and what even sells!
more and more folk are getting sick fed up with Hollywood's pap, it's getting worse, not better.

So, a turn based game could be great, the problem is, Atari had a hand in making Pool of Radiance 2 and ALL the Troika games bomb or have issues, by forcing them out too early and they were horribly unplayably bugged initially.
that is why folk think turn based games won't sell, but many fans want turn based games cause real time D&D blows chunks by comparison

NWN2 is awesome...but the actual game play in combat is...boring:
boom boom slash bang
meh, boring you cna't do real tactics bar simple knockdowns etc. You can pause it but you cannot really control it step by step, see how it's going, and SAVOUR that.
it's not anything like as much fun as TOEE.
However, NWN2 is gorgeously well crafted and plotted.
it's also the only D&D game in town....

so, the view on D&D and RPG vs Turn/Real-time mechanics is badly skewed. Turn based is *IT*, not real time!

 

[Blizzardb]

Is a 4e tactical videogame realistic, and how hard do you think it would be to make?

I think that a turn-based tactical RPG based on 4E is not only realistic, but has the potential to be the greatest game of this kind. I loved playing Jagged Alliance 1 and 2, UFO, even games like Dofus, and they all have combat systems that are (in my opinion) inferior to the combat mechanic of 4E, even when we are talking about computer gaming.

I work in the game industry and I know for a fact that it would be a blast to make such a game. And hard, of course, but making every ambitious game is hard.

Not likely I would ever have this pleasure, but surely someone out there will make the title and I hope they do it right .

 

[Nebulous]

I think that a turn-based tactical RPG based on 4E is not only realistic, but has the potential to be the greatest game of this kind. I loved playing Jagged Alliance 1 and 2, UFO, even games like Dofus, and they all have combat systems that are (in my opinion) inferior to the combat mechanic of 4E, even when we are talking about computer gaming.

I work in the game industry and I know for a fact that it would be a blast to make such a game. And hard, of course, but making every ambitious game is hard.

Not likely I would ever have this pleasure, but surely someone out there will make the title and I hope they do it right .

UFO and Jagged Alliance were two amazing, amazing games, X-Com especially, that's still one of my favorites to this day. I agree that a 4e game CAN be done, i just think it will be very difficult to pull off, and they'll have to massage it considerably from the pen-and-paper to get it to work digitally. I'd love to see Bioware take a crack at it...or Bethesda! But i doubt that will happen. A 4e tactical turn-based game set in Eberron would be awesome and break some new ground.

 

[ProfessorCirno]

Turn-based & grid-based RPGs is a decidely niche genre that right now only the japanese seem to produce for. As much as people say 4e is a MMORPG, it would make a horrible, absolute horrible real timed game due to those features.

Yes and no. Both the examples of that type of RPG you list make scads of cash, as do a lot of similar titles - turn based tactical games are pretty damn popular, as are super old school wizardry clones on the DS, and a well done 4e game, I think, could be really successful. The only problem is, it doesn't fit "the formula."

The genre isn't decidedly niche, unless you mean "American game publishers have no business sense, and have decided to make the genre niche, because of their allergy to money." I suppose that makes it "decidedly" niche as well ;p

 

[Blizzardb]

A 4e tactical turn-based game set in Eberron would be awesome and break some new ground.

Tell me about it. I wrote a concept about just such a game.

 

[AllisterH]

The genre isn't decidedly niche, unless you mean "American game publishers have no business sense, and have decided to make the genre niche, because of their allergy to money." I suppose that makes it "decidedly" niche as well ;p

*LOL* Doood, I'm with you there.

But honestly, ho many gamers know about Disgaea and La Pucelle Tactics? When people started calling 4e a MMORPG, there were only a few of us that said,

"Um, no. Closest videogame analogy is Disgaea and FFT" and I got responses like "You idiot, just because you think you're niche MMORPG is so cool doesn't mean it iisn't a WoW-clone"

Most people in Europe or North America have little exposure to this genre (especially given how turnbased games in both RPGs AND Strategy get mocked these days. Didn't help that games like ToEE was so bloody buggy)

I mean, X-com was 97, Jagged Alliance was '99 and Fallout Tactics was '01. (Has it really been 8 years since a great turnbased RPG?) I truly wish American companies would take up this genre but I think turn-based rpgs is firmly going to remain japanese primarily...

 

[ProfessorCirno]

*LOL* Doood, I'm with you there.

But honestly, ho many gamers know about Disgaea and La Pucelle Tactics? When people started calling 4e a MMORPG, there were only a few of us that said,

"Um, no. Closest videogame analogy is Disgaea and FFT" and I got responses like "You idiot, just because you think you're niche MMORPG is so cool doesn't mean it iisn't a WoW-clone"

Most people in Europe or North America have little exposure to this genre (especially given how turnbased games in both RPGs AND Strategy get mocked these days. Didn't help that games like ToEE was so bloody buggy)

I mean, X-com was 97, Jagged Alliance was '99 and Fallout Tactics was '01. (Has it really been 8 years since a great turnbased RPG?) I truly wish American companies would take up this genre but I think turn-based rpgs is firmly going to remain japanese primarily...

Man, never take gibbering baboons on the internet for an indication of the real world ;p

DS is the best selling, like, ANYTHING, for quite awhile now, and like I said, strategy games on it like the FFTA series have been making bank. The problem isn't with the gamers, it's with the publishers - when Blizzard announced D3 would keep a similar interface, one of the top guys in Bethesda criticized it for not being first person. One of the ideas for NWN2 that Obsidian had at the beginnin of development was to turn it fully turn based, but Atari refused.

The problem is that so many things go into making a successful game, and many publishers have no clue what those things are, so they just try to copy it verbotim. That's why you had the giant influx of really bad Diablo clones that never made any money, and the great big disaster that was Interplay when they tried making games such as *shudder* Brotherhood of Steel. It's why every other FPS that comes out tries to be as similar to Halo as possible - the publishers have no idea what made Halo a success, so they're turning it into a formula. And the funny thing is, most of the time, these formulas fail.

The problem with turn based games is that a lot of the hate from them comes from marketting, not from gamers. The gamers are just unintelligently aping what they've already been told. In fact, "marketing" is the source of almost all the problems with the gaming industry these days, so that shouldn't really be a surprise.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Videogame publishers are stuck in a Hollywood mindset: bank on what has come before.

That may change as indie games are on the rise through the console download markets (as well as online and free-to-play models).

Squareenix gets a pass because they can do whatever they want.

Yeah, 4e could totally have a good game like this.

But since they're saddled with Atari's boneheaded game design for a few more years at least, they probably won't.