4th edition, The fantastic game that everyone hated.

[Dannyalcatraz]

Yet, I find these are the battles that tell the best stories. The cleric boldly holding off the wraith as the rest flee; the rogue who decided to use his UMD on a scroll of magic missile, the wizard who opted to cast mage armor on the fighter, etc. It saves the game from becoming stale; using well-worn tactics (I'll hold him here, you use your wand of lightning, the rogue sneaks in, cleric heals as needed).

I'm with you there.

It makes the players have to think, for one thing.

Its also a big deal in the genre fiction that inspires so many FRPGs- figuring out how to defeat something that shrugs off the best of what you got is ofttimes the core heroic act of the story. Personally, when my party ran into foes immune to backstabbing/sneak attacks while I was playing a rogue (Pre-4Ed), I always felt that the situation let me show off why my rogue was a hero. He had to use his wits to win, not necessarily his blades.

And what is more rogue-like than that?

 

[Imaro]

I just don't grasp the nerdrage part about mechanics. I mean I have some nostalgia about old 1e and earlier D&D, sure. OTOH I don't need to go on playing that version forever. Its just game mechanics. The essence of the game is hard to nail down, but its some combination of things, and 1e/2e/3e/4e all share in those things. They aren't the SAME D&D, but its not absurd to call them all D&D, and the same players that used to come to my 1e games in the old days come to my 4e games now. SOMETHING about it is working as 'D&D', whatever that means. Honestly, I'm not sure I could get the same people to play a 4e that wasn't called D&D. I think they play because it is the IDEA of D&D that they're into, not the details of if Fireball is 1d6/level 20'r 1" range/lvl save vs spell for half damage or daily arcane area burst 2 at range 10 INT vs FORT 3d6 fire damage/ half on a miss. The end results are pretty darn similar.

I believe it's this type of statement that leads some to believe that there are 4e fans who just can't accept that others tastes, priorities and desires differ when it comes to D&D and that they honestly don't like 4e. If mechanics don't matter in and of themselves... why do you ever buy a new edition? If you recognize that they do matter, then how do you not see that the differences in mechanics (and fluff ) that are associated with the various editions can and do matter to people, even if they don't matter to you personally?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

[MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]

I think I take it a bit less strictly overall. I think that 4e's rules are like previous edition's rules mostly, they tell you how you can mechanically handle things. So the Purple Worm battle sounds about right. As for say "You just get the Paragon Path at level 11" this is a literally true mechanical statement, and may well reflect play in many cases (LFR for instance). OTOH it is equally easy to see it as just the mechanical side of the instructions (IE, here's how you indicate on your character sheet that you have PP X and here's the mechanics for using it in combat). That says NOTHING about the STORY. HOW and WHY you got that PP and what the requirements or flaming hoops might be that are involved is not up to a set of game rules to invent. In fact every PP has a pretty hefty chunk of 'fluff' with it that fairly well describes how it might come to pass. Your Battlefield Archer constantly hones his archery through 100 (roughly) battles until finally he's so expert he gets some extra mechanics to represent that (on top of all the other ones that 10 levels of play gives him).

Obviously a game could be written in which all of the RP side of this stuff is all spelled out in extreme detail. It would mean building the game around a default world, but it could be a cool world. No DM is likely to extend the existing material this much on his own, it is simply a huge task. OTOH of the 10 or so PCs that have attained a PP playing in my campaigns all of them were built around the narrative story of the character and they each did something to achieve it. I think if you read Chris Perkins' reports on his Iomandra campaign it sounds like he's doing the same kind of thing.

I can see the distinction between skills and powers in terms of definiteness, but I don't think it is necessary. Your worm encounter illustrates this already. Powers can and will be heavily modified by circumstance, skills will be used in new ways, rituals, items, equipment, etc. Magic Missile may pretty much always just hit, and it may be less easy to be sure what Arcana can do, but I see it as a continuum. MM is something highly practiced, it will USUALLY work (but don't be shocked when once or twice in a campaign it doesn't "just work") and Arcana plus maybe a power/ritual is just 'winging it', less certain but when you're a skilled Arcanist you can have some fair trust in your own ability.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't think that's fair. Call of Cthulhu is a great game, and by all accounts so is Pendragon.

It is funny that you should say this... In the old days, sometime back in the early 80's, I ran CoC a bunch and it seemed from the standards of the time that it was a nice solid design. The skill-based mechanics, low durability of the PCs, and general simulationist bent of the system (outside the Mythos stuff) seemed the "obvious" design decisions.

Now, after playing any number of more modern BW/PACE/etc RP-focused Drama/plot driven games going back to CoC's BRP skill-based simulationist system was so painful we just gave up. A bag of fairly arbitrary skill picks where you have some mushy 50-70% success rate on any task at a grab bag of things felt so poorly character-defining that I had trouble identifying (and remembering) what my character was ABOUT from week to week. The system seemed to do more to hamstring the proper development of the story than to add to it in any way. The players properly divined that they needed to go to the library to learn more information, but then what? Do they roll some skill checks? Naturally they failed the checks, what does that tell us?

I ended up just rebuilding the whole scenario using PACE (a diceless system a bit like FUDGE/FATE where you define a couple of descriptive attributes for each character and then use plot points to leverage them to drive the story forward, perfect for scene framing I must say). THAT worked great. While I have fond memories of CoC I realize now that even in the day I was sort of aware of these issues, I just lacked enough conceptual framework to articulate them and had no idea how to devise a system that would overcome them (not being a game design genius in terms of pioneering anything new). Now that cleverer people have given me the tools I've realized a very nice little Mythos game. I get the impression that Gumshoe-based Trail of Cthulhu does something a bit similar.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I believe it's this type of statement that leads some to believe that there are 4e fans who just can't accept that others tastes, priorities and desires differ when it comes to D&D and that they honestly don't like 4e. If mechanics don't matter in and of themselves... why do you ever buy a new edition? If you recognize that they do matter, then how do you not see that the differences in mechanics (and fluff ) that are associated with the various editions can and do matter to people, even if they don't matter to you personally?

What do you mean why do I ever buy a new edition? There are fairly obvious reasons. I mean lets consider this at its extreme, the first rules I owned were the LBBs (Original D&D as some call it now). Of course I could have stuck with playing that, but it is a rather primitive game. It has its charm and its advantages, but 1e was a much more usable set of rules, and we all naturally bought at least some 2e stuff over the years. I will note however that I personally never did run 3e or 3.5e and don't own that material. I'm happy to play it, but note that AD&D remained perfectly adequate to many people. I don't have a really strong ideological reason for that either.

OTOH I found that 4e worked well, the material was useful, the rules were practical and covered the things that I wanted, so I bought it. My 2e books were pretty shot anyway, and we hadn't played in a while, so it seemed like a reasonably point to go try out something newer. As I say, not being hung up with one specific set of mechanics or fluff being somehow "more D&D" than another there was no ideological problem there.

I don't have to accept or not accept other people's tastes. I know when I say that I don't understand their tastes that this tends to translate to "I don't approve and think they should adopt my tastes" but I'm not saying that. Ramathilis need not justify his preferences to me. He will have to live with the fact that I don't understand how his brain works and for me the differences in fluff and mechanics between editions are not a pressing issue. I am running the same campaign world I invented for my Holmes Basic campaign in 1976 or so with 4e. It works fine. It feels like mostly the same world, and there are NPCs in it that were characters played back in that 1976 game. They actually translate reasonably well, at least in concept (and the concepts we were playing with back then were pretty basic).

 

[Imaro]

What do you mean why do I ever buy a new edition? There are fairly obvious reasons. I mean lets consider this at its extreme, the first rules I owned were the LBBs (Original D&D as some call it now). Of course I could have stuck with playing that, but it is a rather primitive game. It has its charm and its advantages, but 1e was a much more usable set of rules, and we all naturally bought at least some 2e stuff over the years. I will note however that I personally never did run 3e or 3.5e and don't own that material. I'm happy to play it, but note that AD&D remained perfectly adequate to many people. I don't have a really strong ideological reason for that either.

OTOH I found that 4e worked well, the material was useful, the rules were practical and covered the things that I wanted, so I bought it. My 2e books were pretty shot anyway, and we hadn't played in a while, so it seemed like a reasonably point to go try out something newer. As I say, not being hung up with one specific set of mechanics or fluff being somehow "more D&D" than another there was no ideological problem there.

I don't have to accept or not accept other people's tastes. I know when I say that I don't understand their tastes that this tends to translate to "I don't approve and think they should adopt my tastes" but I'm not saying that. Ramathilis need not justify his preferences to me. He will have to live with the fact that I don't understand how his brain works and for me the differences in fluff and mechanics between editions are not a pressing issue. I am running the same campaign world I invented for my Holmes Basic campaign in 1976 or so with 4e. It works fine. It feels like mostly the same world, and there are NPCs in it that were characters played back in that 1976 game. They actually translate reasonably well, at least in concept (and the concepts we were playing with back then were pretty basic).

Emphasis mine... We're not talking about accepting other people's tastes... it's about you claiming not to understand why mechanics are important to people... yet you listed them as a reason for switching to 1e and then later to 4e... so how do you not understand that rules can be important to people's preference in a system... you stated above they influenced your own choice in which D&D editions you chose to play

 

[Libramarian]

"De-protagonizing" is a neat little two-dollar term that translates to "I don't like this." Best to explain why a "de-protagonizing" mechanic is bad.

Well it's a narrativist term (i.e. we came here to author a story so maybe the game should stop arbitrarily denying me the ability to do that). I think in the context of D&D edition wars it's sometimes misused by people who are basically gamists but like their gamism really low-intensity and stacked in their favor because they can't handle temporary frustration. Which is rightly identified as being wussy (e.g. player entitlement), imo.

 

[Imaro]

Well it's a narrativist term (i.e. we came here to author a story so maybe the game should stop arbitrarily denying me the ability to do that). I think in the context of D&D edition wars it's sometimes misused by people who are basically gamists but like their gamism really low-intensity and stacked in their favor because they can't handle temporary frustration. Which is rightly identified as being wussy (e.g. player entitlement), imo.

I'm curious, so does the fact that the rogue is less effective against particular monsters "Deny the ability to author a story"? I mean there's still a story if he faces these particular type of creatures, and it can easily be one about how the Rogue survived an adverse situation where the odds were stacked against him (or it could be the story of how he failoed to overcome it I guess...). So is he really de-protagonized by that rule... or am I not grasping this concept correctly?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Emphasis mine... We're not talking about accepting other people's tastes... it's about you claiming not to understand why mechanics are important to people... yet you listed them as a reason for switching to 1e and then later to 4e... so how do you not understand that rules can be important to people's preference in a system... you stated above they influenced your own choice in which D&D editions you chose to play

I understand entirely why game mechanics matter in terms of what makes a game that is good and does what you want. Ramathilis' objection was purely 'ideological', he objected to the 4e fireball on the basis of "I think fireball should be like 1e fireball because that's D&D and 4e isn't D&D, its different." There's a huge difference there. If he says "for thus and such logic reasons when we play these rules DON'T WORK" that's one thing. I use 4e over 1e now because 4e's rules work better in some definable way. Ramathilis didn't want to use them because they're slightly different.

I'm NOT trying to invalidate anyone's tastes. What I am saying is that I just don't find the difference between 1e's fireball and 4e's fireball to be sufficient in my mind to call one of them such a different thing that it can't possibly be accepted as being close enough that all we need to debate is its suitability rules-wise, mechanically. If Ramathilis wants to draw a line and say "that's not D&D" I'm NOT criticizing that, but I am saying I don't get it. Both sets of rules depict a magical burst of fire that burns the caster's enemies in much the same way and used in much the same context. To me that's perfectly sufficient to call them the same thing.

Of course there are then all of the mechanical arguments, which break down into questions of suitability to play styles etc, which we have been discussing and which are all perfectly reasonable things to discuss. Again, it is only the "4e's fireball isn't a real D&D fireball" that vexes me, that's ALL.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Well it's a narrativist term (i.e. we came here to author a story so maybe the game should stop arbitrarily denying me the ability to do that). I think in the context of D&D edition wars it's sometimes misused by people who are basically gamists but like their gamism really low-intensity and stacked in their favor because they can't handle temporary frustration. Which is rightly identified as being wussy (e.g. player entitlement), imo.

I think it was just coined to mean "the player has to ask if his character can do X" (IE "mother-may-I") as opposed to a situation where the PC is in charge of his fate (IE an active protagonist) where you have precise rules for everything. That's what I got out of it anyway.

I don't think it is ESPECIALLY narrativist. A game of any agenda can still leave the player thoroughly informed about what the rules are and what their character can do without needing to refer to some other authority. In a highly simulationist game this may be impractical (IE the rules would be far to complicated to be a workable game if they have to cover a wide range of things), etc, but in principle it could serve any agenda.