D&D 4E 4e: the new paradigm

[delericho]

Note: I haven't read the whole thread, so I'm probably repeating some others here...

Are the two approaches that incompatible?

Somewhat. Simplicity will always trade off against 'realism', and believability will trade off against abstraction. Fun probably operates on a sliding scale along with all other measures: go too far towards realism and fun is diminished, but move too far from it and fun is also diminished. The key is to find the happy medium that best suits you. (And, in game design, that probably means that the best way to please the most people is something of a toolkit approach, allowing people to tailor the game to taste... but that's much harder to do, and to do well, than to define a set of baseline assumptions and design accordingly.)

More specifically:
- Isn’t there any other way to balance mundane classes vs spell-casters than the per encounter martial powers?

Yes, as seen in previous editions (with limited success, it must be said).

Personally, if we're dropping the Vancian magic and going for per-encounter balancing, I would have gone with a Mana system for spellcasters (ideally, where the caster starts encounters with a half-full pool, and can take actions to replenish the pool. He then gets the trade-off of casting a realtively weak spell every round, or taking time out to build his pool and then nova-ing with an encounter-ending effect).

I would have coupled that with a stunt mechanic for melee characters, where characters gained 'stunt elements' from the selection of skills and feats, and put together stunts on the fly. Each stunt would require certain elements to be attempted at all (so, Legolas' shield-surfing would require the balance, movement and archery stunt elements), and require a single stunt roll to accomplish. The first time any stunt was performed, a hefty bonus would apply to the roll, as the muse of entertainment bores easily.

I suspect balancing such a thing would be a monster, though.

- couldn’t powers make more sense than “teleport or heal every time you off someone, just because you’re a striker or leader” and still be cool? really, i’ve seen Magic cards with more narrative consistency.

I'm not fond of a lot of these powers, although I do like the greater emphasis on movement in 4e. The answer to your question is, "yes", but I suspect we'll also see a range of other powers in the PHB, and certainly in other books. Once a few supplements are out there, the DM should be able to disallow the powers he doesn't like (for whatever reason) without damaging the game.

how would you have fixed HP depletion and the ensuing rest periods without the 2nd wind mechanic?

Here, I'm inclined to split the hit point pool into two, a Quick pool and a Dead pool. The former would represent being lucky, favoured of the gods, or in good cheer, while the latter would represent more serious wounds. At the end of each encounter, I'm inclined to replenish the Quick pool entirely (without the need for Clerical healing, healing surges, or any other such things).

The Dead pool, however, I would not replenish except with the use of healing magic, or though long-term rest. Essentially, once those hit points are gone, they are gone until the end of the adventure.

(I should note that I happen to like the "Second Wind" mechanic. It does represent something that is seen in the source material quite often, that being the ability of the hero to take a beating, take a moment while the enemy is gloating to pull himself together, and then get back into the fight.)

Or why would AC as damage reduction bog down or imbalance the game?

AC as DR is nice in theory, but the implementations I've seen either bog the game down (extra rolls as in Iron Heroes) or are unbalanced (static DRs make Power Attack unbalanced, especially when combined with two-handed weapons (under 3.5e rules).

 

[MichaelK]

Okay, as I understand it the 4e fighter gets these spells they can cast once each per encounter and a couple of others they can cast per day and a few they can cast at will. However these spells are the only interesting thing they can do other than an attack roll.

This is cool and all, (I love Bo9S), but doesn't sound like it will fix the "every battle is the same" problem since it sounds like their spell selection will be completely set and all the standard combat options like disarming, tripping etc are becoming spells.

I agree with you. Thousands wouldn't.

Hm. Actually, I wouldn't agree with you either. Oh well!

That's okay, I don't mind being the only one who is right

 

[lutecius]

I think this is the problem. You want the martial classes to "make sense" or at the least, seem to want to restrict them to a) things they were capable of at 1st level and or b) just better than stuff they were doing at 1st level.
[…]
There's also the weird dichtomy that non-spellcasters are expected to deal with the decidely non-mundane with mundane methods. In a realistic world, there's just no way that a human fighter is fighting evenly versus a Hill Giant in melee. That just isn't possible and that's one of the most mundane creatures above level 6 you can encounter.

I'll just pull up one example: the fighter vs the wizard... Yeah, it makes sense that the wizard is just so much more awesome than the fighter. and that all the fighter can do (basicly) is hit whack stuff while the wizard is off chucking fireballs, unlocking doors and turning invisible, etc.

So the fighter is pulling off tricks that are nigh-impossible under the constraints of real world physics? So what? She's fighting a giant whose skeleton can't support his weight while her wizard friend throws imaginary fireballs and that non-existent elf sneaks up from behind. There's no reason to draw a line and portion this side of the game world as magical and free to act as it pleases, and that side of the game world as mundane and constrained by arbitrary standards of "realism".

Personally, it ruins my experience more when people are falling asleep at the table since this round of combat will be exactly the same as the round before it except for the wizard.
[…]
If I was sitting down to simulate some sort of reality then I would be perfectly willing to accept the fact that I, as the fighter, don't know how to cast spells...and magic is powerful so I should expect to be weak and have to do the same things over and over again.

Which is why the non-spellcasters have always been limited compared to the spellcasters.

I'll give an example. Compare the Weapon Focus - Weapon Supremacy (PHB II) path for the fighter. Weapon Supremacy at the end basically doesn't do anything differently. It is a natural outgrowth for the Weapon Focus tree The fighter has the same options but he gets a little better at doing what he has done at 1st level.

Contrast this with the Alter Self-Shapechange path for wizards. Not only is it way more flexible (spells versus feats) but it also as a path highlight the entire fundamental difference between spellcasting and melee.

What bugs me in “per encounter martial powers” is the “per encounter” part, not the “powers”. I hoped some of my previous posts had clarified that.

It’s physical action being treated like ammo that I find unrealistic.

Past a certain level, I have absolutely no problem with warriors going all Xena and jump around the battlefield cutting heads off on the way. I realise that superhero action may be the only way to keep up with the spell-casters. It is consistent with the genre.

 

[KarinsDad]

???

I've always considered it the weakest of the psionic disciplines since it couldn't affect so many creatures due to so many creatures just being plain immune to mind-influencing effects.

Or am I totally messing up my disciplines?

Maybe you are thinking of the Telepath.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

This is a serious problem if it happens, I agree.

I mean, I exaggerate a decent amount. People fall asleep, but its mostly because we decide to game in the one time our schedules all overlap, normally ending up with at least one of the players having only 4 hours of sleep before the game or is showing up after working for 12 hours straight.

But this is exactly why we need to keep the game moving and keep everyone concentrating on the game. When the game gets slow or as soon as a player feels their actions are useless in the combat they either fall asleep, start talking to the person next to them, start asking the whole group what they are doing on the weekend, etc.

I'm not saying that 4e will SOLVE this. It certainly won't. But it helps.

I've had a player happily play half-elf pure fighter to 12th level, finish off a 5 level paladin-type prestige class and go back to fighter until 22nd level. They never once fell asleep at the table and had just as much fun as the human Arcane Trickster (Rogue/Sorceror) or the Elan Egoist.

Near the beginning of 3e, we saw some of those builds. Recently, however, no one in my group would be caught dead playing something that bad. My characters are severe min-maxers. I have one player who is notorious for making a new character EVERY session since if he discovers ANY problem with his character at all he asks to bring in a new, better one. Sometimes he just changes characters cause he gets bored with the one he's playing and wants to try something new. I'm hoping that 4e will give him more interesting options in one character that he'll go at least 4-5 sessions in between wanting to make a new character.

Okay, I'm years too late, but here's some advice on running 3.x combat. Try to make fights set in unique memorable locations or against unique memorable creatures.

I know. I just never write my own adventures. I admit, I'm too lazy. I haven't even attempted to come up with my own idea for an adventure since shortly after 3e came out and my players derailed my plot so badly I couldn't recover it. I realized that it was much better for me just to run adventures from Dungeon or ones I bought. Or playing and running in Living Greyhawk mods.

However, not every battle is unique. Some of those examples seem like cheap excuses to remove people's powers or make it so they can't play their characters. I'm all for interesting environments. I'm not about inventing monsters with abilities to counter the players or environments specifically created to make a player stop what he's been doing. If he's been doing it, it means he likes to do it. I'd just like to make it more fun for him by giving him better options.

These 'insta-win' combos look great in the shop window, but when put through their paces in an actual campaign with creative environments (which aren't even specifically designed to violate their abilities, just to be interesting) they are a lot less useful than people think.

I'm the first to admit that the tripping combo isn't all that effective in actual play. However, I see designing the tripping combo as the player's way of saying "I want to play a fighter that doesn't just Full Attack over and over again. Now I'm doing something different."

I see that most of my players eventually turn to spellcasters rather than fighters. Even one of my players who loves fighters decided that it was better to create a self-buffing favored soul than it was to create a fighter or barbarian. He could fight just as well and had so many more options.

My players universally declared Warblade from Bo9S to be way cooler than the fighter.

But you seem to be thinking that everyone is suffering terribly under the cruel yoke of D&D 3.x's simulationism, cursed to play chain-wielding tripping fighters. That hasn't been my experience for the last 8 years and it won't be for however long I continue to play 3.x.

That's not true. I love 3.5e in a lot of ways. If I was just focusing on what ends up being a problem in my 3.5e games, it's almost always the same couple of things:
-A focus on simulationism causes the game to constantly grind to a halt as all of my players start discussing whether a particular rule is "realistic" enough. Example: The multiple hour long argument we had over whether someone could cast spells underwater due to water being in their mouths and possibly throat when they were trying to recite the verbal components(and I was on the simulationst side of that argument. My players were all "It's a game, it's no fun if water ruins all my abilities, let's just have fun." I wouldn't listen. Wasn't realistic enough for me).
-A focus of the game rules on simulationism causes there to be all sorts of small rules that are exceptions to the normal rules. This causes players to forget them on a regular basis. This causes the rest of the players to constantly point them out. Example: Charging needs to be in a straight line and there can't be an obstacles between you and the square you are charging to, and you must stop at the first space you can make an attack in. Someone almost every sessions says "I charge" and the rest of the players point out at least one of the reasons they can't. This point is a big one for me. This is just one example, but there are probably hundreds of these things that come up each session.
-A focus on the game being a toolkit causes players to overthink their character choices and attempt to combine classes together to make the "ultimate" character. Causing players to ask to bring in new characters on a regular basis and to make extremely weak characters in failed attempts to powergame. Example: The warmage/scout someone made who figured they could get 1d6 extra damage from skirmish by taking a level of scout with their orb spells. And make up for the caster level with Practiced Spellcaster. However, once they were one level of scout, the higher level abilities looked pretty good as well, so they took a couple of more levels in scout. No need to worry, they were actually INCREASING the damage dice of their orb spells as their caster level kept going up and their skirmish got better. However, every time the group needed a spell that wasn't an orb spell, he refused to cast it since his character didn't do that. And slowly his lack of higher level spells showed more and more until he was the running joke of the group as the most useless party member.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

AC as DR is nice in theory, but the implementations I've seen either bog the game down (extra rolls as in Iron Heroes) or are unbalanced (static DRs make Power Attack unbalanced, especially when combined with two-handed weapons (under 3.5e rules).

I have also experience with AC as Damage Reduction equivalents in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and Das Schwarze Auge / Black Eye, and in neither I can claim to be happy with the results. Typically becoming well armored is the most important thing to do in the game. That might be what is realistic, but it definitely limits what is a "viable" character. Probably yet another example where finding the balance between realismn and abstraction is neccessary for the sake of fun.

 

[Charwoman Gene]

Board is acting wonky

 

[CleverNickName]

It’s physical action being treated like ammo that I find unrealistic.

An excellent point.

 

[AllisterH]

What bugs me in “per encounter martial powers” is the “per encounter” part, not the “powers”. I hoped some of my previous posts had clarified that.

It’s physical action being treated like ammo that I find unrealistic..

I suspect that this is a classic fight between "what's good for the game" and "realism". I remember a while back (must've been around the release of B09S) that someone also hated the manoeuvers being akin to ammo and Mearls pointed out that initially, he had the encounter system setup so that each manoeuver could be done all the time but you would just take a cumulative -1 penalty for each manoeuver you did to the same opponent.

He noticed that unless the penalty was high enough, players would simply repeat the best power (which itself is somewhat unrealistic. Even a dumb game AI nowadays doesn't fall for the same trick repeated endlessly) and that it also increased the amount of bookwork on the parts of the players and balancing on the parts of the designer you had to do.

This is one of the advantages of the slot system over the mana system as ironically, the mana system is MUCH easier for a computer to handle than a player (subtraction is considered actually harder for people to understand than even division by math teachers/mathematicians. Amazing and I personally didn't believe it at first but something that math school teachers swear by)

Simplicity trumps realism I suspect is the same reason why this time around, you can't even refresh your encounter manoeuvers a la Bo9S.

The same thing might also explain the lack of "long-term injury" that the 4E game has. From this thread and the actual thread which institued/asked "long-term injury in 4E", a large majority of the answers/solutions adversely affect the non-spellcasters and also get circumvented easily by magic (in 1e/2e, you healed 2 hp/day thus technically, a high level fighter might be out for several weeks. In practise though? Healbot blows all their spells on 1 day of rest and fighter is back to good by the early morning).

Past a certain level, I have absolutely no problem with warriors going all Xena and jump around the battlefield cutting heads off on the way. I realise that superhero action may be the only way to keep up with the spell-casters. It is consistent with the genre.

That's good. It always made me shake my head that people complained that fighters were unrealistic since they were jumping around yet didn't even blink that spellcasters shapechanged into a dragon.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

What bugs me in “per encounter martial powers” is the “per encounter” part, not the “powers”. I hoped some of my previous posts had clarified that.

It’s physical action being treated like ammo that I find unrealistic.

Past a certain level, I have absolutely no problem with warriors going all Xena and jump around the battlefield cutting heads off on the way. I realise that superhero action may be the only way to keep up with the spell-casters. It is consistent with the genre.

- Player decides what his characters wants to do given the circumstances as described, and then rolls the dice to see if it succeeds. The decision the player makes is usually also a decision made by the player.
- Player decides that the circumstances allow the character (party/enemy) to do something, and then rolls the dice to see if he succeeds. In the game world, the character sure didn't decide the circumstances, he just decided to try it, and it was the players influence to change the circumstances so that the character could try what he tried.

"Metagaming-Wise", it's still an ammunition. (which isn't exactly new - actions are already like "ammo" when we think about "how many actions can I take per round - after I made one attack and one move, my action ammo is empty and I reload only at the beginning of the next round)
In the game world, it's definitely not.
Note: There is also a follow up post on this quote above, going into a little more detail on how to describe the game mechanic effects in the game world...