D&D 4E 4e Dungeon Design - New Article
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grimslade
Krampus ate my d20s
The problem with parsing anything out of these blog posts is we have no idea of what 4E entails. We have redacted examples of combat that seems to be overly complex while the designer is talking about how streamlined combat is. We examples of a dungeon encounter with no idea of how challenge level is evaluated. We make suppositions and extrapolations but in the end I think we are all off base. Sure is fun though. 
I think the designers are pointing out that DMs should not be afraid to heap on more of a challenge. Go for broke, push the PCs to use all their per day abilities in a fight. Chunk up your encounters to make your DMing easier. A 1st level PC is already heroic, let him show it. Compared to encounter design in the 3.5 DMG, it is an evolutionary step not revolutionary. And it goes up to 11. ;>P
I think the designers are pointing out that DMs should not be afraid to heap on more of a challenge. Go for broke, push the PCs to use all their per day abilities in a fight. Chunk up your encounters to make your DMing easier. A 1st level PC is already heroic, let him show it. Compared to encounter design in the 3.5 DMG, it is an evolutionary step not revolutionary. And it goes up to 11. ;>P
Celebrim
Legend
Fobok said:
You raise so many different points I don't know how to respond. Let me pick out what I think is your main point, namely that you don't like how in 3rd edition players tend to clear a few rooms between 8:00 am and 10:00 am then hole up somewhere for the 'night' to replenish thier resources.
The problem with that is that the problem is not the result of bad mechanics, but the result of bad story design. In any edition of D&D in particular and in any game system in general, the smartest tactic is almost always hit and run. Go in, smash up a few things, then get out before the enemy gets organized and before your limited resources run out. Repeat until necessary. (In a certain sense, this is a realistic tactic for commando forces, so its hardly surprising to see it in a even the loosest simulations.) I've seen good players do this 15-20 years before 3rd edition even existed. I did this in a more ad hoc manner when I first ran through KotB 25 years ago. "I'm running low on hit points, time to go."
You can't 'fix' this problem if you are having this problem with mechanical changes in any game with resource management. You may change the meta-game, but you won't invalidate the tactic. It's still going to be a smart tactic. Mearls said that wizards that spent all thier daily spells would be at about 80% power. Smart players will decide that this isn't good enough, and will (perhaps after blowing all of thier daily resources on one big bash) decide to hole up for the night just in case.
The problem is not with the game mechanics. The problem is with the adventure design. Unless the players are facing a deadline (We have to get the mcguffin before the eclipse occurs!) or are facing a pro-active intelligent enemy, they just don't have a reason to risk going into an encounter with less than 100% of thier resources. When you play a solo crpg that doesn't have a timeline, you pretty much always rest up to 100% hitpoints whenever you have the chance. For this reason, computer rpgs are almost always designed so that the plot moves on without you if you don't intervene, to the point that in some of the better designed ones if you don't hustle, then you lose.
Well designed pen and paper rpg plots are like this too. You ask why the orcs don't get organized? Well, why don't they get organized? Why don't they set up ambushes? Why don't they try to counter-attack and hit thier attackers while they are in thier camp? Why don't they just take the treasure and run away, so that when the PC's show up the next day, they are just gone? In other words, why don't they act as actively and proactively as the PC's would in the same situation?
And why do the PC's have all the time in the world to save the village/country/world/universe? Smart players are only going to take risks if they have reasons to do so. They aren't going to take risks because they won't to look cool. They know that ultimately, the guy that looks cool is the one that isn't a corpse at the end of the day. This is going to be true regardless of how they change the game system. Average players might momentarily take a while to adapt to the new meta-game tactics brought about by changes in the mechanics. They might get carried away with themselves and get in over thier heads a time or two. But pretty soon, rest assured that everyone is going to be playing in the same way if the dictates of the story allow it.
So, once again, trying to fix a problem I don't have with tools like rules that really don't actually get to the root of the problem.
No, the problem is with the game mechanics. In 3E, you simply cannot design an adventure where the PCs are up against a tight deadline unless you are sending them against very weak opposition. The reason for this is that, in the 3E system, a CR-appropriate encounter is designed to consume 20-25% of the PCs resources, meaning they'll have to rest after every four CR-appropriate encounters. Now, good planning and tactics on the PCs part may extend the deadline somewhat, and as a DM, you can always drop healing potions into the adventure, but the fact is that their resources are going to run out, and probably sooner rather than later.Celebrim said:
If you try to do a "We have to get the mcguffin before the eclipse occurs!" adventure in 3E, you're probably going to end up with the bad guys destroying the world while the PCs are in the middle of a nap. It's the way the system is designed.
Maybe so, but unlike in 3E, you as a DM will have the option of adding in a deadline to the adventure to prevent this. Characters at 80% power are still perfectly playable, and can face threats that are almost as dangerous as the ones they can face when they're at 100%. And, if your players know they have a deadline, they probably won't blow all their per-day resources in one big bash, because in 4E, they'll have other options.Celebrim said:
Celebrim
Legend
Grog said:
And yet, people managed to design just these sorts of adventures for 3rd edition. How did they manage it?
And the fact is, we don't really know if any of this has changed. All we really know is that characters never run so far out of resources that they are required to drop thier role. Spell-casters will always have something to cast. That's not necessarily a bad thing (it's not necessarily a good thing either), but it doesn't really apply to this discussion. Because, we certainly don't know amongst the little we know whether a CR appropriate encounter no longer is designed to consume 20-25% of the PC's resources, or whether the PC's will have to rest every four encounters or every ten or every one. But, for all that, it doesn't really matter, because we are talking about something that is completely relative. We'll just slide the scale.
Suppose that in 4E a CR appropriate encounter is designed to consome just 10% of the PC's resources, meaning that they can go much longer before they have to rest. Isn't that really just another way of saying that CR appropriate encounters in 4E are comparitively weaker than CR appropriate encounters in 3E? All you really emulated is simply the adventure with 10 slightly weaker encounters (each with a larger number of relatively less threatening monsters) rather than 4 slightly tougher ones (with one or two truly threatening monsters)? True, these encounters will involve more monsters, but if a 20 goblins and thier leader is something equivalent to CR 2 in 3rd, its easy to imagine how you could keep the game going for a long time with lots of small encounters that consumed comparitively few resources. But, this isn't really an innovation in the mechanics, because, as you said, I could have designed the same thing in 3rd - I just might not have had the flexibility to do it at 1st level without making the threats potentially humorously small.
Celebrim said:
No. You're still thinking in 3E terms. 4E is different because many abilities will now be usable either at will or on a per-encounter basis. Mearls said that wizards who use all their per-day spells will be at 80% power; if that's true, it's vastly different from 3E, where wizards who use all their per-day spells are at 5% power or so (barring magic items, which will exist in 4E as well). A wizard might be able to get through a fight using only his at will or per-encounter abilities, and even if he eventually has to use up his per-day spells, he'll still be perfectly playable afterward (like I said, a PC at 80% power plays just fine - it's a far different situation from a 3E wizard who's used up all his spells).
A given encounter in 4E could be equally difficult in a relative sense to a similar encounter in 3E, but because of changes in the design paradigm, it doesn't have to push the PCs anywhere near as close to their next rest break as the 3E encounter did.
The big question in my mind is how they're going to handle healing. In 3E, I've seen groups continue adventuring after the wizard had used up all his spells on multiple occasions, but the second the cleric runs out of healing, everything stops. So, if they want to significantly change the way D&D adventures work, they're going to have to change the way healing resources work, and I'm very curious to see how they're going to do that, because it's going to be a critical design issue.
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Well, we now know that the Cleric will be taking a leadership role in the party. I imagine that they'll have more buff abilities, though with the other recent notes I'm not sure how those will work, but it sounds like clerics will be more interesting to play. (Though, the one time I ever got to play, rather than DM, 3e I played a healing-centric cleric and had quite a bit of fun.)
