D&D 4E 4E's New Direction: Giving the game back to the DM.

[TerraDave]

How long until published adventures come in a box set, and that box set includes "DM cards", cards not for the DM, but replacing the DM. Sort of a choose your own adventure meets playing cards thing?

Of course, I plan on getting it.

 

[Scribble]

I don't think there's a secret plot to eliminate DMs from the game.

I think WoTC is just finally deciding they can market to a much larger audience of play styles.

They're not trying to take anything away. They're doing the opposite- adding more to their list of what they can offer you.

 

[P1NBACK]

I'm pretty sure Mike Mearls mentioned something about "DM-less" D&D during one of the Tome Show Gen Con podcasts.

It's hard to find a DM sometimes, so those board games are a way to get your fill when you don't have a traditional group. Secondly, they wanted to present a product for those situations where you want to play D&D but don't want to go through the whole ordeal of creating characters and having a DM prep scenarios etc... That just doesn't scream "party game". So, these board games are a good "go-to" when you want D&D but lack a DM or time for a traditional adventure.

 

[Solvarn]

Different tone

The two major problems with 4E have been risk and reward.

The philosophy changed with magic items when the decision to print them in the PHB instead of the DMG was made. This was a mistake from a reward standpoint.

The problem or issue with magic items in 4E is that they are essentially a secondary leveling mechanic, where gold = secondary XP. The sheer variety of items and combinations available has made balancing and testing their different combinations very difficult for Wizards to successfully do, and has revealed probably the second largest design flaw in 4E.

The levels and treasure bundles were a very good and more concrete idea of character wealth for a DM to go by as a baseline. The job of handing out magic items should largely be the fiat of the DM, and this info should have been in the DMG from the onset.

Magic items shouldn't be balanced against each other to the degree that powers are, and I'm glad this has been realized. They shouldn't be homogenized either. They are extraordinary, and for many, they are the reason to play. At the same time, the DM should be fully enpowered to hand them out in a way that helps to prevent abuse or specifically prepare adventurers for the challenges they have in place.

This does not mean that a DM should be deaf to requests from their players. It just means they should be the final word on the subject.

This is a move in the right direction.

 

[Greg K]

Too true. Look at the way that prestige classes were done in the 3.0 DMG and how they were handled in all the 'splatbooks' that came after, and the change in conception for 3.5 DMG was complete.

Yet, even in March 2002, Andy Collins was telling DMs in Dragon Magazine about limiting prestige classes based on the campaign world. He included a questionaire for determining if a PrC belongs in the campaign and gave examples of tailored lists by campaign world. By this time they had already released the class splat books (e.g, Sword and First, Masters of the Wild). And, if I recall correctly, those class splat books mentioned the stuff being optional and ask the DM.

In my opinion, the player entitlement issue, initially, came from several different factors:
1. players like options and request to use something new and many DMs were afraid or uncomfortable telling their players "No" allowed it rather than have a confrontation.
2. Some DMs just had an attitude that if wizards published it, it was ok to add it without question.
3. many players and DMs used the SRD rather than the rulebooks assuming the SRD was everything. What they missed was the advice, options and DMs position.
4. many DMs with the DMG did not actually read the DMG. They skimmed it and did not know that they had the power to say, "No" per the rules.
5. the online community with players on certain sites saying how much DMs suck for not letting them use whatever particular thing they found in a WOTC book. With players outnumbering DMs, this goes back to and reinforced #1.

With 3.5, we did, in my opinion, start to see more of a change from WOTC. The removal of Rule 0 was a big one. Then, the designers moving away from encouraging the toolkit mentality (e.g., Andy Collins in Sibling Rivalry column on WOTC's site telling DMs to to try and say, "Yes" and make room for player requests for races, classes, etc.).

 

[P1NBACK]

With 3.5, we did, in my opinion, start to see more of a change from WOTC. The removal of Rule 0 was a big one. Then, the designers moving away from encouraging the toolkit mentality (e.g., Andy Collins in Sibling Rivalry column on WOTC's site telling DMs to to try and say, "Yes" and make room for player requests for races, classes, etc.).

Yeah.

So, let's try to bring this back around to 4E. I'm specifically talking about the change of direction in 4th Edition and while the tone in 3E and previous editions may be useful references, what I'm really concerned about is how 4th Edition has evolved over its lifespan.

Just as it has evolved in terms of rules, do you think WotC is starting to change gears as far as player entitlement and DM authority in the game?

What does this mean for new products down the road? Is the new [ame="http://www.amazon.com/Mordenkainens-Magnificent-Emporium-4th-Supplement/dp/0786957441"]Mordenkainen's Magnificent Emporium[/ame] a supplement for DMs? I'm sure it'll be for both players and DMs, but will there be a "DM" section for those rare items?

 

[shamsael]

Apocryphal, but I've heard of games in my town where everyone is expected to have a DDI subscription during play and are required to use Character Builder and its character sheets.

Players are actually discouraged from buying books so they don't fall behind with Rules Updates and cause conflict at the table because of it.

I've heard of them, because the DMs left playing Encounters and started DMing their own "friends-only" Wednesday night games and a few of the "friends" defected back to Encounters. I've also read some threads about these type of games right here on Enworld.




I don't know that even DMs are buying books anymore. They have DDI accounts too, and get their fluff from Dragon and Dungeon and illicit PDFs. (Dark Sun Campaign Setting has been available all over the usual locations since at least the release date, OCRed and chaptered.)

I'm the (volunteer) D&D Encounters coordinator at my FLGS. Players and DMs are not shy at all about talking about using PDFs instead of buying books. Inside the FLGS. I'm afraid I'll divert the conversation by bringing this up, but at least locally the use of illicit PDFs is widespread. Coincidentally, 4E book sales here have been pretty mediocre. Maybe the Barnes & Noble is moving some units since they only carry 4E anymore; quite a change from 2-3 years ago when they had a huge variety & selection of systems and associated splatbooks to choose from.

I'd say the boxes are a response to a combination of three things:

• Most of the content of the books is available in digital form for much less than the MSRP for the hardcover.
• Retailers, who are a huge promotional/marketing venue in addition to their role as point of sale, are upset they're losing business because you can get the three $20-$40 books that came out that month, plus every book ever released, for $10 a month. And that $10 doesn't go through them, it goes straight to WotC.
• WotC and Retailers upset they're losing business because you can get everything for free in an extremely nice to look at (DDI Compendium and Character Builder don't have any art and are subjectively ugly) and convenient to use digital format.

The value of the box sets will be the physical bits that are hard to reproduce at home in decent quality: round tokens, big, shiny, poster maps, the box itself, hefty dungeon tiles, "non-collectible" cards on nice, shuffle-able cardstock, etc.

When I DL a book, it's specifically because I don't intend to use it but want to be aware of what's in it in case another player or DM brings it up. Books, that I need for my game, on the other hand, I tend to purchase rather than rely on my DDI account.

For example, I'm setting up to run a Dark Sun campaign. I would not dream of attempting this without physical copies of the Campaign Guide and Creature Catalogue.

 

[TerraDave]

Regarding the DM in 3E:

we did with the core rules...we tried to "take the DM out of the equation" as much as possible.

From the lower part here. I have seen this POV in other insider accounts of 3E design.

 

[ExploderWizard]

You could consider that 'more DM control' (if the DM didn't already have total control. Or, more accurately, more 'explicit' DM control. What it really is, though, is incomplete design. Rather than settle on one way or another of doing things, the designer off-loads a decision about the product to the DM (the customer). That's not bad - sometimes it's the only way to expand the apeal of the product - but it's not good /for it's own sake/.

I believe that it IS good for it's own sake at times. Why shouldn't a game driven primarily by the imagination of it's participants feature a good portion of user generated content?

Original D&D was an incomplete design- by design.

Yes, I've been noticing this trend. Magic item rarity puts the responsibility for imbalanced magic items on the DM - WotC /is/ going to create imbalanced 'rare' items that /might/ wreck your game, so you're going to have to be vigilant. Essentials puts the 'class balance' ball back in the DM's court - no longer are classes mechanically balanced out the gate, the DM will have to adjust encounters and campaign factors to achieve balance among the PCs depending upon what classes are being played.

I can do all that - I've been running D&D for 30 years, I can do a whole lot more than that - so it's not hurting me, as a DM. It /is/ hurting me as a player, because there are a lot of other, less experienced, more enthusiastic DMs out there - who could be running games for me! - who won't be able to do all that, but could have run a perfectly good 4e game prior to these changes.

Why can't they do that still, and why have a DM at all if everything is done for him/her right out of the box. Autopilot game rules might get you a DM faster but will it get you a good one? I don't think it's fair for a game to offer such rich choices and options for all participants save one and expect that person to approach the game with enthusiasm.

Making 4e /very/ easy to run straight out of the box was a great thing, because it meant more DMs, which meant more games, which meant more and more engaged players. And, it didn't take away from more experienced DMs, because we could still change things around all we wanted.

That's the key. Keeping the game easy to learn and easy to run is more important than making it more 'flexible' for the experienced DM or rewarding the 'system mastery' of the experienced player.

A core stack of almost 900 pages of material spread across 3 hardback books does not scream 'easy to learn, easy to run' for the complete newb IMHO. To a new potential rpg player, having to commit to that amount of material before getting to play is an unrealistic expectation. Remember that the 4E initial product releases were primarily aimed at existing gamers.

My concerns with the redbox basic set approach have to do with the old bait and switch game. The level of complexity in such a basic box compared to the game it introduces seems more like an advertisement than a game. What I mean by this is will a complete newb get the redbox, play with it, think that they know how the game works and be completely blindsided by the content in the rest of the products?

Compare this to the 1983 redbox. The game was simple, only covered levels 1-3 and was priced well for easy entry into the game. The rules in that set remained the basis for the D&D game thereafter, meaning that the content in the redbox was still relevant after future releases. No product followed the redbox saying "oh yeah here is another 45 pages of rules explaining how combat really works.

I think some people are entirely too eager to be pleased by Essentials - and others are entirely too eager to be outraged.

This is undoubtedly true.

On the whole, I don't like this apparent feature of the Essentials design.

I've had a lot of experience playing a game which puts a huge burden on the GM to determine and adjudicate the ruleset - namely, Rolemaster - and one appeal of 4e was it indie-like promise of delivering a good game played as written right out of the box.

And for my group it has come very close to delivering on that promise - a few tweaks to some powers, action point options for skill challenges and some monster revisions have done the job.

One part of the game that I've quite liked, and that works well with "treasure parcels" and "wishlists", is the explicit incorporation of magic items as part of a PC's build. If Essentials is moving away from this, and putting more burdens on me as a GM to oversee my players in building their PCs, then I'm not that keen. I want balanced game elements that my players can pick and choose between as they see fit. If I wanted a system where the character build rules only work when the GM exercises tight and ongoing oversight, I'd be playing Hero or GURPS or something like that.

If 4E works for you as is then you can ignore essentials and keep going right? That's what 3.5 fans were told about 4E and it's still true.

Of course everything being balanced has it's own price too. Unrestricted magic items means that they have to suck so much that nobody cares about them anyway.

The wisdom in the 1E DMG is still holding up IMHO. " That which is obtained too easily is often held in contempt."

I'm going to throw out an iconic item here to test the theory.

vorpal weapon

Think about your level of excitement upon hearing the DM announcing the discovery of such an item in a 1E game, then compare that to the excitement that would be felt at a 4E game.

Balance must sometimes be sacrificed on the altar of awesome in order to produce the kind of excitement this game has to offer.

 

[Greg K]

See my above post for a couple examples as to why that was. But it wasn't JUST that. In 2e there weren't rules for a LOT of things. How grappling worked changed from DM to DM. There were rules for weapon type vs armor type but they were optional and most DMs didn't use it. Some DMs used the optional rules from Skills and Tactics, others didn't. Some DMs allowed kits, others didn't. Each and every rule was optional. Mostly because a lot of them made no sense or were completely broken. Some kits made you easily twice as powerful as a normal member of your class. It was all a hodge-podge of optional rules...some of which contradicted others so you had to choose which of the 3 rules for something you'd use.

And 3e has a lot of options too. Many of them are right in the core books

PHB: Both editions had a section on class variants

3e DMG (I don't own the 3.5 DMG so I cannot comment):

P.25-26 Modifying Classes
- Modifing Character Classes
- Spell Lists for Variant Spellcasters

P.27 Prestige Classes
"Allowing PCs acces to prestige classes is purely optional and always under the purview of the DM"

" Prestige classes are idiosyncratic to each campaign, and DMs may choose to not allow them or use them only for NPCs"


P40-42 Variant 1st Level Multiclass Characters

P41 Advancing Levels
- Access and Training
- Variant Learning Skills and Feats
- Variant Learning New Spells
- Researcing Original Spells
- Variant Gaining Class Abilities
- Variant General Downtime
- Variant Gaining Fixed Hit Points

p.66 Combat: Damage
- variant Clobbered
- variant Death from Massive Damage Based on Size
- variant Damage to Specific Areas

p.161-164 Building a different world

p.167
- Variant : Faster or Slower Experience
- Variant: Free Form Experience
- Variant: Story Awards


In some of the splats you had class variants (e.g., Urban Ranger)

In 3.5, you also had things like
a. Unearthed Arcana
b. Urban Wilderness skills replacement (Cityscape web enhancement)
c. Spellless Paladin and Ranger variants in Complete Warrior and Complete Champion

But leading up to 3e coming out there were articles being posted that said "Unlike 2e, we have rules for the things you wanted rules for and had to make up yourself" and "Unlike 2e, we playtested the rules for balance and tried not to balance a combat advantage with a role playing disadvantage".

And when we got the rules, they were well organized, there was ONE rule for each thing, they appeared balanced, and there didn't appear to be any reason to ban anything outright. Even in play, most things appeared to work fine. So, it was rare that a DM felt the need to change or ban anything. It became the exception instead of the rule. It's so much easier to not have to constantly make rulings about stuff.

How is this a bad thing? if it works for a group that is a good. However, while it may have stopped you and many others from houseruling, it did not stop myself and others. There were active and are active houserule sections here, on WOTC's boards, Monte's boards, and Sean Reynolds' boards along with plenty of websites. Andy Collins, Monte Cook, Sean Reynolds and other designers would post house rules/options on their own sites.

I think WOTC managed to develop trust amongst the DMs by putting out fairly balanced stuff that didn't horribly unbalance people's campaigns and rules that made more sense and caused less headaches than 2e. Once you have that trust, most DMs are willing to give you the benefit of the doubt with a new book that comes out. Why not let players take that cool new class they want? WOTC hasn't published anything TOO broken in the past, I doubt they will this time.

If they built trust that is cool. There is nothing wrong with that. Personally, I didn't like most of their supplements (Unearthed Arcana, Fiendish Codex I and a few other supplements withstanding). More often than not, I didn't like the flavor or the mechanics and would say no based on that (and would offer some UA variant, third party alternative, or houserule instead if it fit my vision of the campaign I was running). Heck, there are some issues with core that I didn't like and changed or banned.

As for , there are a lot of people that might disagree too- Codzilla if you

Players got used to asking for stuff and hearing yes.
But there's a side effect of having rules that are the default. You need to consciously say "No" to each rule you don't like. In 2e there were no rules for what to do when grappling someone. So whatever the DM said went..

There weren't rules for grappling someone in 2e? What about those funky and ,imo, lame charts (or did they first appear in Complet Fighter's Handbook)?

Regaring conciously saying, "No", you should be conciously saying, "No" to rules you don't like and want to change or ignore. If it is concious, you are aware why you are doing it, you explain your reason to your players, and, hopefully, work towards a suitable fix to ensure everyone is on the same page. However, having a default is good for those players that may want or need it.

There were no rules on how many magic items you should have by the time you were level 10. Nor how powerful they should be. If your DM never gave you more than +1 items by that level, then that's what you should have.

I agree this can be an issue. However, pointing out what is expected is good for newer DMs, those running (and not wanting to modify) published adventures, and those doing Living campaigns. It is also good to note for DM, who might want to deviate from the standard assumptions by making them aware of them.

However, I don't see it as a problem for an experienced DM provided that the player's don't feel a sense of entitlement. The DMG tells the players that they can change the assumptions.

Amongst our group of friends, the prevailing philosophy was one of "Well, if the designers of the game say you should have a +2 item by level X then there is probably a good reason for it. Likely you won't have enough pluses to hit to defeat monsters or you'll come across monsters that require a +2 weapon to hit by them. Better to leave it as is in case there was a good reason for it." The math behind the game was so arcane and convoluted that no one could figure out exactly WHY some rules were there...but they trusted WOTC that there was good reasons for them.

Among my group of friends and gamers that I know, houseruling is a given. If the DM does not like something or feels it doesn't fit the campaign, it gets changed. Players are very accepting- especially, those that DM themselves.

The one exception was a friend that had never DM'd before and took over DMing an existing campaign for a 3e group with whom he was first introduced to D&D. Still a newbie, he did not know that he could ban problem items or tell players "No" if they were abusing the system . He thought he had to say, "Yes" to whatever WOTC published until he talked to me about the problems in his game. However, he never fully read the DMG.

The first thing that I did was show him the same passages I quoted in this thread and then talked to him. Then, we discussed the problems he was having, the campaign that he wanted to run, and some options he had to tailor it (admittedly, I don't like or have much experience with 3e past 10-12th level so the advice that I could give him on the last point was limited). His eyes lit up when he saw he could make changes and take control to reign in the campaign and tailor the game for future campaigns.

We also take into account the characters we have (as suggested in the DMG) when building adventures. We take into account the magic items given when it comes to monsters. We take into account skill bonuses when designing encounters. This might be one reason we didn't have some of the problems people had with disparity in bonuses between characters.