Libramarian, that's a very rich post - thanks - and a very interesting perspective on the "encounter building design" thread. It all seems pretty plausible to me, though I don't have the experience with the sort of "community sandbox" you describe (either in D&D or in MMOs, which I've never played), and so am judging plausibility mostly by intuition.
I just read the example of play in the AD&D DMG again and I was struck by how richly the PCs interact with the fictional space; I found it inspiring. Although I thought it was unfair to give the spider a free attack just because the player touched it to throw it to the ground.
On the free attack - this does seem roughly consistent with the rules for initiative and free attacks for unarmed attacks (DMG p 73), though that's not to say that it's also a harsh ruling, especially when a hit = save or die.
As an example, I personally don't find it inspiring, but that's really just reiterating that I'm not into that sort of play. But that's not what my crossword/sudoku comment was about.
pemerton said:
And another rough intuition: if the gamist part of play becomes too much like a crossword or suduko (ie seeing how the available resources can be properly distributed across a roughly pre-given set of encounters) then some of what is distinctive about RPGing has been lost.
I think this is part of why 4e shifted so much of the gamist/resource-management element of play to taking place within the encounter, which itself is strongly encouraged and supported (via movement, terrain, transform-on-bloodied, etc rules and techniques) to generate a somewhat unpredictable but engaging space for resource expenditure choices. It's a bit like condensing a classic dungeon exploration (open-ended, though within some broadly foreseeable constraints) into a single combat.
Could you say more about what you mean here?
Maybe. I've reread it and I'm not 100% sure what I was trying to get at, though I can sort-of work myself out.
It's related to the point in the previous post where I worked out what you were getting at with the "optional" encounters: gamism benefits from a degree of open-endedness, which allows the players to choose how hard they push (and the better or luckier players can demonstrate this by pushing harder and getting through more content, thereby - everything else being equal - accruing more rewards).
In 4e, a lot of this happens
within the encounter: the players choose how hard to push the encounter, how safely to play it, etc - and the game gives them lots of tools to show off these choices, and gives the GM lots of tools to create encounters where that showing off can take place (mobility, terrain, transformation-on-bloodied, different sorts of healing with different action economy and resource consumption implications, etc).
The resulting gamism is in some ways relatively light rather than hardcore - the game doesn't inherently reward a group for finishing an encounter with N surges left rather than half N, and because I think the game plays at its best when the GM modulates the future encounters in part in response to this resource consumption, it's not as if pushing encounters hard and cleverly necessarily makes you more likely to avoid a TPK. But nevertheless there is the satisfaction of knowing that the group played well, and you can certainly read onine accounts of play and TPKs and the like and think "Well, we did better than that!", and between themselves the players can see who is holding up his/her end and who is not such a contributor.
And (at least in my experience) the game lends itself well to
repeating this, with the resource constraints getting more narrow each time (because surges and dailies deplete) but there still being meaningful scope for clever play and encounter victories. This is due to the game's interesting (and relatively symmetric, across PCs) balance between encounter and daily resources.
And the group can then remember the time that (say) they pushed through 8 (or howevermany) on-or-greater than level encounters without an extended rest, and think "We played well through that series of encounters!"
And (at least as I've found it) this doesn't tend to produce the pressure on the GM and the GM's rulings that you've pointed to - maybe because, in the way you talk about, there are a lot of decision points
in the play that are (in themselves) relatively low-tension but that combine, over the course of a 6 to 8 to 10 round encounter (4e likes and supports many-round encounters) add up to different outcomes that reveal something, to the players even if not in a statistically meaningful sense, about the cleverness and pros/cons of their play choices.
Now to contrast: what I mean by "sudoku" or "crossword puzzle" play is where the choices are all (largely) known in advance, and so is the framework within which they have to be made, but there is a question about how it all actually fits together. Eg "We're going to have to blow our fireball in one of these encounters that's coming up, but which one?" If you do it early, your anxious that you've hosed yourself for a later encounter; but if you hang onto it, there's that chance that when you get to the end-point fireball doesn't suit (eg the enemies in that last encounter are all dispersed) and you've needlessly underpowered yourself for the whole thing.
I'm sure that plenty of 4e players have experienced this playing through adventure-path/linear scenarios; but I don't think it's an
inherent or necessary risk in 4e, because if the fireball is an encounter power than nothing is lost by using it early, while if the group has dailies left at all, the GM can just keep piling on the encounters without too much risk of breaking the game, or the balance between the PCs, or TPKing. (This feature of 4e - the inter-encounter rather than intra-encounter dymamics - is clearly a different sort of open-endedness from the classic dungeon-crawl, because 4e tends to rely on the GM, rather than the players, to choose the pacing/sequencing of "scenes".)
But in 5e, if you pile on more encounters in response to the pattern of player resource use or conservation, you do risk breaking the balance between classes (short rest vs long rest), or TPKing (because there is not that ready reservoir of encounter powers to provide some sort of guaranteed minimum that a clever party will use to pull their PCs out of the fire), etc. Which in turn can undermine player/GM dynamics by looking adversarial or unfair. (Which I think is much less of a factor in 4e, because of the way that game's resource suites work - [MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION] has had some similar experiences with 4e compared to other resource schemes, I think.)
Which is why, I think, that 5e does lend itself a bit more to the crossword/sudoku style - we know there will be 6 (or so) encounters, and we have to use our fireball
somewhere in those, but how do we optimise that? And to me that reduces, to an extent, what RPGing is about - instead of engaging with the fiction and making choices on that basis, there is a more "meta" element to the resource management and play of the game, and the fiction has become a little bit more secondary to that, as just providing the framework or squares into which the resource choices have to be fitted.
I don't know if the longer version is any clearer. And it could be wrong-headed - I'm trying to express a rough feeling more than a developed thesis - but maybe you can see a little bit what I'm trying to gesture at.
I'm not convinced 5e is poorly suited for the classic style of play, but I'll have a stronger opinion on that in a few months.
I'm not convinced either.
But I think you have to be prepared to break the balance between classes, or allow the players to negotiate that among themselves. And I think that is where the adversarial/unfair GMing issue might arise.
This can be an issues in the classic style too, but I think the contrast between classes in that style - MUs are
so physically weak, thieves are
so specialised and no one else operates in those specialty areas (at least until a MU gets to the point where fly and invisibility spells become fairly easily available), clerics don't get the magic swords or multi-attacks of fighters, etc - can make the issue of balance less pointed. And the classic style emphasises exploration (in the nteract-with-the-fiction sense) so much that player resources based on class features aren't always at the forefront of play.
Whereas when I look at 5e, and in particular see the non-traditional dice spreads for spell damage and the non-traditional spell memorisation charts, the stress on class balance (especially across damage output) seems very great. Which creates pressure on the GM to manage the encounter sequencing in a way that upholds that balance. Which creates pressure to pre-prepare 6 to 8 encounters, and then more-or-less push the PCs through them. Which creates pressure to set up linear scenarios within the fiction that will make sense of that. Which pushes towards what I have called the sudoku/crossword style of resource management, as well as the bickering-with-the-GM that you've identified.
I don't think that has to be inevitable, but it seems to me to be a challenge for 5e GMing. If, after a few months, you've got practical experience that address this, make sure you start a thread on it!
