Intense_Interest
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sinecure said:
Page 159
4E is for casuals, D&D is d0med
- Thread starter hong
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Page 159
OK, so you don't like games with metagame mechanics yielding player control over the narration. (And, by the way, you still haven't told me whether you regard games that are metagame heavy, like HeroWars and The Dying Earth, as RPGs.)sinecure said:
Ah, so Rolemaster and Runequest are not RPGs either (or at least not very good ones) because they have always had unified XP tables, unified skill lists, unified rules for magic use, etc.sinecure said:
And, by the way, there is a pretty signficant mechanical difference between Sleep and Force Orb (just to pick two 1st level Wizard powers).
OK, so you also prefer a game in which one of the main rewards of play - earning loot - is thwarted by the unidentifiability or unobtainability of that loot.sinecure said:
The 1st ed DMG is much better design, obviously, devoting page after page to magic items that the rules tell you not to let the PCs have, or not to let them use if they do get hold of them.
In AD&D nearly all poisons are the same (dead) and all petrification is the same (turned to stone - it's kind of definitional in this case). But not all 4e conditions have an identical effect - that's just nonsense.sinecure said:
I don't understand, for two reasons: you can't perform a Ritual of higher than your level (unless it's on a scroll, as is traditional for D&D); the difference between 1st level PCs having Raise Dead and Teleport or not is nothing to do with setting and all about play experience.sinecure said:
This is one of the more bizarre items on your list. The amount of loving mechanical detail given to the class attack powers, the class utility powers, the healing mechanics and all the related paraphenalia of combat mean that the game more than ever focuses on the thematic signficance and consequences of fighting.sinecure said:
And just think, Rolemaster has only a handful of conditions: must parry, stunned, stunned no parry and down. And it has 50' movement per round (only 5 squares on a 10' grid). And it has never had any decent multi-classing rules, only rather expensive dabbling or new base classes. It's a conspiracy!sinecure said:
Ah, 2nd ed AD&D - I miss that pinnacle of skill-based RPGs.sinecure said:
So just to be clear - what really makes a great fantasy RPG are it's equipment and transportation rules.sinecure said:
I don't know those games. Have more than a 100 people even played those? Why should I care if they are RPGs are not?pemerton said:
BINGO
And the DDM crew should be proud. Within combat rounds they have Magic card levels of variation. Got anything of worthwhile mechanically that isn't combat related? I mean, stuff where they'll be adding hundreds of new options? No? Huh.
You must live in a world of absolutes. Have you ever played D&D before? Do you really think before 2000 no one ever gained treasure or figured out with a magic item did? Try coming back with a real rebuke next time.
You should read books before you quote them. You do realize the 1E DMG had a system for distributing treasure, right? Not some "look at these, never let your players have these" tripe. What is wrong with you? You're purposefully mis-characterizing over 25 years of D&D play. Did you even like D&D before 2000? Answer that.
Compared to D&D before the great minimization of 3E, 4th has virtually no variation. Sorry if you actually believe a dozen or so options is somehow "freeing".
You aren't understanding me here. These things have no need to be level-based. Give them out for free to everyone everywhere and the game is still balanced as to combat. So why did they include level requirements again?
Why should it surprise me that you think this? Think of it as a side scrolling video game. We fight fight fight. Then rest before moving the side scroller to the next combat. Rinse and repeat. After every fight we are at full HP. After every sleep we are at Max Power Ups.
Let me repeat myself to be clear. There are virtually no consequences to combat in 4E D&D. After each one you are completely restored. Zero penalties. Zero relation to anything based remotely in reality. This is videogame think for what makes combat fun. This is the vast shortsightedness of the designers. Combat = everything in D&D. And they've sold this fallacy to their customers as something that "has always been that way". Study the history of the game. You might learn something.
Rolemaster and is disastrous design should have been a warning to the 3e crew. How long do we have to wait until they learn the lesson?
It isn't skill-based, that's why it actually functions better as an RPG.
There you go. Be dismissive. Your chosen game actually fails at something and you decide those elements have no place in fantasy RPGs.
You sound like half the guys here who buy 4e. As if RPGs have no need of any rules beyond a combat system. See Major Fallacy #1 again.
Mustrum_Ridcully
Legend
No offense, sinecure, but I have really problem trying to get what you're doing with your game and what your preferences are, and how they relate to the rest of the role-playing world...
Maybe my message board poster understanding muscles are sore, but does _anyone_ f4nboi, hat3r, fence sitter or hong really get what sinecure expects from a role playing game? And furthermore, does anyone share similar preferences?
Because I seem totally unable to get it. I can get all the s*mulat*on*st world builder desires, people that love Gnomes, hate Dragonboobs and Tieflings, or love the Great Wheel. But I don't get sinecure.
Maybe my message board poster understanding muscles are sore, but does _anyone_ f4nboi, hat3r, fence sitter or hong really get what sinecure expects from a role playing game? And furthermore, does anyone share similar preferences?
Because I seem totally unable to get it. I can get all the s*mulat*on*st world builder desires, people that love Gnomes, hate Dragonboobs and Tieflings, or love the Great Wheel. But I don't get sinecure.
I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
Pemerton said:
An RPG does, by the magic of DM authority (tinkering). The DM can say "gnomes are really nearly immortal beings; they use the elf table for determining age," and by that say something about his world and his gnomes that is unique to his game. Or to give an example 4e can't do so well, a DM could say "You can worship any god you want, but you can select amongst the domains of only the Evil gods." This, right in the rules, introduces a mystery into the campaign setting: only the powers of evil, though we can still worship good? Is good a lie? Are the evil deities really behind every good church? It says something about this setting and about this DMs game that is unique, and that he can't as easily do in 4e because 4e doesn't have the channel divinity feats for evil gods.
It goes a little something like this. There are three basic ways that a tinkering DM can shape his campaign: Adding rules, adjusting rules, and banning rules (in this, rules and options are largely synonymous).
#1: Making new rules is hard (for, I'd assume, most people).
#2: Adjusting rules is fun (for those who like to tinker, at least)
#3: Banning a rule is easy (for, I assume, most people).
4e, in providing less options and less "rules points" that you can adjust or ban, thus puts the tinkering weight on #1, which is the hardest to do. 4e makes certain elements of #1 easier to do than 3e did (monster design, for instance), but that doesn't fix the basic underlying fact that making new rules is harder than adjusting or nixing existing rules.
3e, in providing more rules points, and more options, allowed the tinkering weight to go to #3 most often ("I'm not using the weather rules or the random encounter rules or..."). 4e, in an effort to streamline and simplify, got rid of a lot of the rules that people most frequently banned. This means that tinkering with the campaign goes down, because ignoring a rule is easier than adding a rule, so most people won't go through the effort of adding a rule that they might need -- they'll just adjust their campaign to reflect the existing rules. If someone has need of the weather rules, they probably won't add them themselves, they'll just adjust their own games so that they don't need them.
In other words, banning dragonborn from a game that has them is always going to be more popular than adding dragonborn to a game that does not. It's easy to tinker with dragonborn if they exist in the first place.
Not that simply adding more rules is going to make it easier to tinker, because if the rules are interlocked and interconnected, or if they are wildly disparate subsystems where +1 means something very different in each, they will be harder to tinker with. But fewer rules doesn't make it easier to tinker, either, because creating rules is harder than messing with what's already there.
It's not about the trope, really. 3e told you how to play a Good Tiefling Warlock, too (or a good tielfing wizard who summoned demons, if we're sticking with core-only). A major issue for many is that 4e stopped telling you how to play a CN half-orc druid, because, apparently, those weren't as popular, even though it could have told you how to do that while still telling you how to play a good tiefling warlock.
It's not like they had to choose between them. They just elected to provide rules for the most popular (or projected-to-be-most-popular) things, while 3e elected to provide rules as a foundation for even blatantly unpopular things (like randomly generating weather), just in case someone needed it or wanted to use it or mess with it.
pemerton said:
At this point, I'm not interested in its success, just its attempt. That's enough to say that 3e more wanted you to tinker, while 4e more wants you to play.
That's not, of course, necessarily a bad thing. But it does alienate some of the tinkerers, just as a need to tinker is going to alienate some of the...well...players.
4e recognizes that there's probably more players than tinkerers, but that doesn't mean that 3e fans who loved the tinkering are wrong to feel abandoned and affronted, and they have every right to rant about how 4e took away their toolkit. I mean, a lot of people screamed about how 3e had monks in the core, and they were ultimately vindicated, too.
4e doesn't do it as well. It doesn't really try to. It nods in that direction, but 3e WANTED that direction......and now for something completely different....
II said:
I'm mocking an opinion that has no place in this conversation. "3e was bad, 4e is good" has no place in this conversation. In fact, it actively degenerates the conversation into pointless edition wars. I'm mocking it because you should stop saying that in this conversation, hopefully demonstrating the absurdity and uselessness of it.
I do this because I care.
The fact that you think this is a personal attack or attributing motives is...well...at best, a misunderstanding of what those things really are.
I absolutely do, and I think I've made that more than clear. I am not about to assume that a word that basically means "It's easy to pick up and doesn't require an obsessive interest" is somehow derogatory. Rather, I think you need to abandon the notion that "casual" is somehow inherently demeaning.
It isn't.
That sort of elitist snobbery is absolutely foreign to me and my gaming experience. "Hardcore" is not some sort of sacred land that every player should aspire to.
Have you read my posts addressing this? Because they're right there.
I'm getting more of a feel for what you mean by "tinkering", and I think that is making me more sympathetic to your point, but I have to say I'm more inclined than you are to focus on the success than the mere attempt (and I also want to say: why don't those tinkerers join we Rolemaster players? - it's a great game that could benefit from a bigger community, and it is a more robust platform from which to tinker, IMO, than is 3E!).Kamikaze Midget said:
I also think you're being a little uncharitable in the Half-Orc and Druid remarks. Half-Orcs, OoTS to one side, really are a little unpleasant in notion. And Druids (what with their shapechange and summoning) really are hard to get right, as 3E demonstrated over many years of trying.
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It's always hard to work these things out from messageboard posts, but I do get a sense of what Sinecure is looking for.Mustrum_Ridcully said:
S/he doesn't like RM or RQ - two classic, mechanics-heavy simulationist systems.
S/he hasn't heard of HeroWars or The Dying Eath - two more-or-less contemporary, mechanics-heavy narrativist systems (both Robin Laws designed, the former with Greg Stafford also).
S/he equates an interest in combat mechanics with roleplaying shallowness, and he thinks that 2nd ed AD&D supports non-combat scenarios in part because the game lacks non-combat skill mechanics.
S/he thinks that the game works best when the players don't have to interact with the mechanics at all (which are simply there to facilitate the GM's narration of a consistent world).
And s/he thinks that Tomb of Horrors is a great module.
From all this, I get a picture of Sinecure as a classic AD&D player. The purpose of play is (roughly) operational success in the adventure ("beating the module"). Action resolution is handled primarily by direct player-GM negotiation: players, speaking as their PCs, say "I do X", and the GM works out, based on the current state of the gameworld as narrated by him or her, whether or not X is likely to succeed. In this playstyle, "good play" does not mean mechanical mastery (there are virtually no mechanics to master, after all) but rather a good ability to grasp the GM's narrated gameworld, and to come up with ingame solutions to the operational challenges posed by the gameworld.
Some classic AD&D modules that are good for this sort of play are Expdeition to the Barrier Peaks, White Plume Mountain and Ghost Tower of Inverness. They suffer quite a bit from inane plot lines, however. Modules that are really intended to support the same approach to play, I think, but that do have more of a plot line include the Desert of Desolation series. (As far as classic D&D modules are concerned, I feel that Dragonlance really marks a turning point in the sort of play that modules are intended to support.)
Other ENworlders who play the game in a similar fashion, as best as I can tell from their posts and their online musings, include Philotomy Jurament (OD&D), Celebrim (I think he plays 3E in something like this way), Reynard, HowandWhy99 (who has expressly advocated the notion that in a good RPG the players should not need to know the rules in order to play, because they can just rely on the GM's narration of the gameworld), Robert Fisher (he plays Moldvay/Cook), Lanefan and (I suspect) Raven Crowking.
If I wanted to classify this style using Forge terminology, I'd say it's gamism with a very strong simulationist chassis supporting it. The gamism is not focused on a win at the encounter level, but at the adventure or even campaign level (hence the emphasis on "operational" rather than "tactical" play). The simulationism is purist-for-system, but the "system" is not really a game mechanical system (of the RM or RQ sort) but rather the presupposed constraints upon the GM's narration, which are delivered by a combination of (sparse) game mechanics and the inner logic of the gameworld.
The main action-resolution mechanic outside combat is very loosely-structured drama (ie the players and GM talk to one another) with the very occasional introduction of fortune (which, when used, is fortune at the end, not fortune in the middle). Even within combat drama is an important form of action resolution (eg what does it do to the Orc warrior when I start to gnaw on his skull? there is no dice roll to give the answer).
The most common problem with such play, in my experience, arises from the absence of any mediation or buffering by action resolution mechanics. This means that if the GM decides that what the players want their PCs to do can't work, the players have no recourse to the game rules to help them out. If they can't grasp the inner logic of the gameworld, they are in trouble. Indeed, this playstyle can easily fall victim to adversarial GMing.
Sinecure, I hope I haven't slandered you with the above characterisation. It is my best effort to make sense of your posts and thus to answer Mustrum Ridcully's question.
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pemerton said:
Apropos of nothing, you had a great post, except for the bit where you started delving into Forgeisms.
Really, you can't see how using words like gamism, narrativism and simulationism obscure more than they illuminate? Because, apparently, depending on the circumstances:
- Gamists like systems that are heavy on crunch, or light on crunch
- Simulationists like a game that emphasises a living, breathing world, or one that just dives into the action
- Similarly, simulationists like a game that is heavy on crunch, or light on crunch
- Narrativists like games that have the players making the story as they go along, or has the DM doing it all
Now, maybe you could say that you provided detailed critiques and rationales justifying why the circumstances in question produce these results; therefore, the GNS schema has succeeded in making you think about games. However, many people manage to think about games without using GNS. Similarly the detailed critiques can stand by themselves; while a classification scheme that gives rise to such outcomes can hardly be said to be useful.
Storm Raven
First Post
pemerton said:
I don't find this a particularly strong criticism of 3e - not all half-orcs are necessarily "unpleasant in notion". Yes, the classic version has them as the product of rape, but that's not the only plausible back story. I'll just say that there are a lot of people in the real world who are into a wide variety of very odd kinky things, and lusting after an orc would pale in comparison.
Also, why should something be excluded even if it is "unpleasant in notion". Does that automatically discount something as interesting or worthwhile to include?
I also have never found druids to be particularly problematic. I never seemed to have the problems others seemed to have with shapechange crop up, and summoning was never a problem (actually, I found summoning to be a very fun element of the class).
I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
Well, mostly I was only concerned with what they WANTED to do, not what they accomplished. I'm sure 4e has some unintended consequences of its own design scheme (the hassle of tracking conditions comes to mind) just as 3e did (what with the Jenga Tower of rules).
As for why they're not Rolemaster players...well, when a game dominates like D&D does, sometimes you don't get a lot of diversity.
I mean, a while back, a poll was run here that basically showed that people were more interested in the D&D brand than in what 4e offered mechanically. I remember that it surprised me, since ENWorld is pretty well-informed, and I would expect them to be less about the D&D name than they are about the game, but it turns out....the D&D name is very, very strong.
Well "CN Half Orc Druid" is a cipher for "Anything 3e did that 4e chose not to do." There are good reasons 4e doesn't choose to do it, but there were good reasons 3e DID choose to do it, and, one could argue, there are many ways to fix most of the problems without overhauling the edition to such a drastic extent (Pathfinder is seeming to argue that very thing!).
Certainly, however, there are good reasons that 4e made the choices they did. These reasons might just not be good enough for people who enjoyed whatever they did about 3e that 4e is abandoning at launch.
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