4th edition, The fantastic game that everyone hated.

[S'mon]

Well, I hope/think I can help de-baffle you. I see several factors being important here:

First, 4e was initially presented (particularly online) as pretty finely engineered for balance, and that "messing with it" would surely break your game.

It was presented as 'well balanced' (truthfully, in terms of intra-party balance). In 3e terms that translates as 'mess with this at your peril!' - but they never actually said that. Indeed my experience was very quickly that 4e's GM-side design structures were extremely robust and welcomed messing around; in utter contrast to 3e's glass-pane design. For instance in 4e the DM can hand out five times or one fifth as much wealth per level as recommended, and that translates into an average +1 or -1 on the numbers; either is completely doable and has minimal effect on the campaign. Try handing out x5 or 1/5 wealth in 3e - I'd done the 1/5 and it was horrible how it massively weakened the already weakest classes (the non-casters) while leaving casters almost unaffected.

 

[S'mon]

I played it for what I saw it as - a supers game with a fantasy skin. It's very good at what it does, but I suspect it's harder to drift than previous iterations.

There's specific advice to players early in the 4e PHB to think of your PC as an Action Movie Hero - NOT a superhero - "You can't break through 3" thick steel doors with your bare hands!" Personally I find that thinking of 4e in terms of Hollywood Action Movie works very well, it's actually much less Superhero-comic than prior editions, and doesn't really verge into Superhero territory until Epic, at least. Whereas 0e-1e's designation of the 8th level Fighter as Superhero was entirely apt.

Edit: I guess I think of 'Superhero' as the DC characters, or maybe the Avengers-level Marvel ones. I can see Pemerton's point about lower-powered superheroes like the X-Men fitting with 4e's style - although Pemerton is talking about narrative concerns, the sheer power level of characters is also a factor in the kind of stories that get told.

 

[Neonchameleon]

And (unless I'm mistaken), stats you spent no time writing.

What do you mean no time writing? That was my character not a stock NPC. There's one other line he needs - why he's the mark. (Been using the bank's position to foreclose on people nefariously, needs to be stopped by the end of the week.)

Nor would you necessarily need to prepare such a stat block to play a game in which that character was used.

If he was used as a supporting character later I'd need an even smaller one.

3e is not a rules-lite system and does have extensive stat blocks. However, the amount of time that one could spend writing detailed stat blocks and the amount of time that one does are not the same thing.

On the other hand to fill out a 3e statblock takes a minimum amount of time. The other point about a statblock in 3e is it is half pointers. You write something like a feat or spell's name, and then need to look up that feat or spell.

Nor is stat block generation the primary form of preparation. You could (if you wanted to) spend hours mapping out an intricate heist for your Leverage game.

Actually, as fixer, I couldn't. How they run the heist is up to the players. And there is absolutely no way to prepare for the flashback scenes to put the heist back on the rails.

Thirdly, 4e was a fairly drastic change in focus away from Simulationism, which is not clearly presented in 4e's first 3 books.

As I've said, I consider 4e a better simulation than 3e. Hit points as stun makes them no longer ridiculous in a simulationist sense, and people finally move properly and have a decent OODA loop so they think reasonably. What it isn't is a world-sim.

Fourthly, a great number (not fraction) of 4e fans online purport themselves as fairly traumatized by 3e's imbalances or "brokenness". It seems to me that they reflexively resent or reject any attempt to modify 4e in order to preserve its finely-tuned engine.

[Citation needed] What 4e doesn't respond well to is ill thought out tweaks because they stick out like a sore thumb.

I think this attitude became slightly contagious, especially in reaction to the edition wars. Modifying any of 4e's general principles was wrong, because doing so was a tacit admission that 4e might not be utterly perfect. (Aid and comfort to the enemy, so to speak.)

You mean no one's hacked healing surges, hacked the rests, hacked rituals, made up new powers, hacked inherent bonusses long before Dark Sun? The one thing people don't mess with is AEDU. In the last couple of weeks on RPG.net I've read something like "You can put all your 3.X houserules unmodified into 4e and the game will still be less broken than it would in 3.X".

See, Ratskinner, this is what I don't get. If you played a Sim game, why on Earth were you playing D&D in any incarnation? D&D is about as far from Sim as it gets. Gamist? Sure, no problem. Totally buy that. Virtually every element in the game is Gamist in nature.

This. Although the 3e DMG did put a veneer of simulationism on D&D. Although even by 2001 people were asking "How many chickens in Greyhawk" based on the 'what you could buy' table pushed to its limits. That said, The Alexandrian (as mentioned above) was defending 3.X as sim in 2007 (at about the same time he kicked off the edition wars with his 'Disassociated mechanics', something that seems to have lasted unlike the other opening shot of 'The Tyrrany of Fun'.

I think this makes a certain degree of sense. If the rules are meant to be sim, and you can see a better sim by tweaking them, then you tweak. But if the rules are meant to deliver a certain play experience that will satisfy some non-sim urge, and you tweak them, maybe your tweak will block the production of that experience - a bit hard to know until you try! So you don't try.

Or you don't try unless you know what play experience you want to deliver. See Apocalypse World and its hacks Monsterhearts, Dungeon World, and Monster of the Week. All very different experiences.

That said, slowing down the recovery rate for extended rests is an utterly trivial tweak whose impact on the play experience looks completely transparent to me.

Me too - and I think it was one the game designers foresaw - which is why they called it an 'Extended Rest' not an 'Overnight Rest'. I think the default "Extended rest = overnight" was a throwback to keep players of wizards happy with their spell recovery.

Oh, I would have pegged Paranoia as very much not Gamist - it's Sim with a side order of Dramatism. Who plays Paranoia to 'win', unless you're defining 'win' as 'most entertaining death'? It's absolutely not at all a game about facing & overcoming challenges-to-the-player. According to the design notes it's about 'fear'.

Um... which edition of Paranoia were you playing? Because the intended game style varies from edition to edition; Paranoia XP goes into this and to keep fans of all editions as happy as possible has three suggested playstyles, "Zap" (about the same aesthetic as Tom and Jerry), "Classic", and "Straight" (which it sounds as if the edition you have encouraged).

As for playing paranoia to win, I was always told the win condition was being able to walk into the debriefing room and say "I speak without fear of contradiction." At which point the GM would give everyone else one of the debriefing officers to play.

 

[I'm A Banana]

It's very good at what it does, but I suspect it's harder to drift than previous iterations.

4e is hard to drift. By design, it is hard to drift -- the GSL provides some insight into the fact that they wanted a strong branding on 4e, such that everyone could play the same game.

Of course, one of the big realizations of the 4e era is, I think, that not everyone wants to play the same game, and if you don't provide people the ability to easily tweak the game to their tastes, you're not going to see a good return on your investment, however strong your brand might be.

So now we see 5e, a game whose existence is almost predicated upon the idea that everyone plays differently. The only question there is whether or not it can woo people who already are playing in a way they like. It's an open question, but weirder things have happened.

 

[billd91]

This. Although the 3e DMG did put a veneer of simulationism on D&D. Although even by 2001 people were asking "How many chickens in Greyhawk" based on the 'what you could buy' table pushed to its limits. That said, The Alexandrian (as mentioned above) was defending 3.X as sim in 2007 (at about the same time he kicked off the edition wars with his 'Disassociated mechanics', something that seems to have lasted unlike the other opening shot of 'The Tyrrany of Fun'.

And Justin Alexander was right about the elements of simulation in D&D. But you're making a huge logical error in arguing that simulation in some aspects of the game (designing in reasonable DCs for thing like breaking down doors) means the same level of simulation has to exist over other aspects of the game like currency supply. It's a fallacious argument. The game sets out to simulate some things but not others.

 

[Neonchameleon]

And Justin Alexander was right about the elements of simulation in D&D. But you're making a huge logical error in arguing that simulation in some aspects of the game (designing in reasonable DCs for thing like breaking down doors) means the same level of simulation has to exist over other aspects of the game like currency supply. It's a fallacious argument. The game sets out to simulate some things but not others.

Indeed. Just like 3.X which in no way simulates such important things as wounds. Instead, if 3.X sets out to simulate anything it sets out to simulate Dungeons and Dragons in some sort of recursive loop. I fail to see how I'm making a different logical error from those who claim that 3.X was simulationist.

 

[billd91]

Indeed. Just like 3.X which in no way simulates such important things as wounds. Instead, if 3.X sets out to simulate anything it sets out to simulate Dungeons and Dragons in some sort of recursive loop. I fail to see how I'm making a different logical error from those who claim that 3.X was simulationist.

You're compounding the error further. You are continuing to operate as if the game, as an integrated unit at the highest level, must be simulating something as a whole when the question of simulation is better answered at numerous micro levels.

Do hit points simulate something? I find they lead to a pretty good simulation of the combat from the John Carter of Mars books, I seem to recall a particularly strong impression of that in Chessmen of Mars (though it has been years since I have read it). But in those books, the superior swordsmen (higher level, one presumes) are able to withstand lots of minor cuts from less skilled ones - and even recover fairly quickly with the administration of green men medicines.

 

[Balesir]

Oh, I would have pegged Paranoia as very much not Gamist - it's Sim with a side order of Dramatism. Who plays Paranoia to 'win', unless you're defining 'win' as 'most entertaining death'? It's absolutely not at all a game about facing & overcoming challenges-to-the-player. According to the design notes it's about 'fear'.

And ignorance - don't forget the ignorance!

More seriously, I thought in Paranoia the last to die was the winner? Or was that "the last to die is a sissy!"?

 

[Neonchameleon]

You're compounding the error further. You are continuing to operate as if the game, as an integrated unit at the highest level, must be simulating something as a whole when the question of simulation is better answered at numerous micro levels.

No I'm not. I'm merely pointing out how incoherent 3e's claims to simulate things are. If it's simulating John Carter in one place, HP Lovecraft in a second, and My Little Pony in a third, what is it actually simulating? Unintegrated simulation is merely rules and bloat.

Do hit points simulate something? I find they lead to a pretty good simulation of the combat from the John Carter of Mars books, I seem to recall a particularly strong impression of that in Chessmen of Mars (though it has been years since I have read it). But in those books, the superior swordsmen (higher level, one presumes) are able to withstand lots of minor cuts from less skilled ones - and even recover fairly quickly with the administration of green men medicines.

Hit points combined with healing surges simulate that. With the protagonist being able to take wounds and after a short rest keep going with injuries that are largely cosmetic. But once in a while being pushed right to their limits to the point that all the little wounds actually add up to something that's almost debilitating (i.e. low on healing surges). Hit points without healing surges on the other hand mean that John Carter is exactly as ready to keep going at the end of a giant fight with the Red Martians as he is after the victory feast later that night, rather than tired, bruised, and slowed but needing a break to recover.

4e is therefore a much better simulation of this than previous editions. But mysteriously although there is no one thing you think your "simulationist" game should be simulating you'll label the worse simulation the simulationist part.

 

[LostSoul]

4e is hard to drift. By design, it is hard to drift -- the GSL provides some insight into the fact that they wanted a strong branding on 4e, such that everyone could play the same game.

I don't know if that's true. I think you could drift 4E into the classic AD&D-style play with 1 rule change (extended rests) and then status-quo-ing the "setting elements": dungeon level = encounter level = treasure parcel level = DC level. Mmmm, maybe you'd want to do something about passive perception as well, though that's probably easy (beat the DC, locate the secret door, now explore in order to find out how to open it). But maybe I'm not in the best position to judge.

Combat would still be pretty long, though.