A reason why 4E is not as popular as it could have been

[Krensky]

I'm happy to accept, then, that there can be no narrativist game which is, as such, a Star Wars game. Let's say instead that I want a game that uses the tropes of Star Wars, but leaves the resolution of the thematic issues to be settled by the players in the course of play. So it may turn out that "anger leads to hate" - but it may not. We won't know until we play the game.

I think that this is what LostSoul had in mind upthread.

As long you subscribe to Ron Edward's and Forge-esk non-sensical, quasi-academic redefinition of terms away from their natural language meanings, that's the case.

A narrative game is focused on storytelling and emulating the flow and feel of one, often at the expense of 'realism' or game balance. TORG, Paranoia, and Feng Shui are good examples. D6 Star Wars was very good at this too.

A gamist is focused on being a game, and often sacrifices support for narrative flow and realism for this. D&D in all it's stripes, but 4e provides an extreme example.

A simulationist game is focused on simulating a (often, nominally, our) reality. GURPS, Rolemaster, and Traveler are good examples.

These are the definitions I learned and were in common usage back on USENET before Ron Edwards started redefining them away from natural language meanings into his quasi-academic jargon.

The metagame in 4e isn't especially gamist at all. XP rewards arise on a more-or-less "per real time unit of play" basis. XP, even for indidivual accomplishments, accrues to the whole party. The GM is encouraged, by the encounter-buildig guidelines, to build encounters (both combat and non-combat) that enable the players to engage, via their PCs, in an interesting fashion. Treasure is also accrued on a more-or-less proportionate basis to XP (at so many parcels per leve).

This doesn't look all that gamist to me. Where's the competition? Where's the Step On Up?

It's gamist because it's focused being a game and not on emulating a story or simulating a world.

But as long as some of us are using the natural language, pre-Forge definitions of the terms and you keep on using Forge-based non-sensical redefinitions where what someone not steeped in their weird ideas calls a narrative style is redefined as something else so narrative can mean a third thing we'e not going to get anywhere.

Try making your arguments without Forge based word salad and we can try again.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Talk to a professional lockpick, they can tell you how a lock is made, why its easy to defeat and what the possible catastrophic failures are BEFORE they begin the pick. Like any professional, they make it look easy.

Oh yeah!

Got locked out of my car one time- one key sitting on the front passenger seat, one in the ignition- and my car had what were at the time "burglary resistant" locks new to the market.

The locksmith, on arrival, commented on my car having said locks...and was in my car in 45 seconds. I asked him what the difference was between what I had and the industry standard of the day. He responded, "40 seconds."

 

[Aldarc]

I'm gone for a few days and this thread is still going. Wow.

Reading through this later portion of the thread, I cannot help but feel somewhat amused by the discussion of whether or not 4E is "gamist," especially considering that D&D was, is now, and ever shall be a roleplaying game system. The very nature of D&D as a gaming system assumes an inherently "gamist" perspective. Narrativism has always been secondary. When reading through Gary Gygax's early D&D sessions, I can see a "gamist" perspective quite readily. Simulation just gives gameplay a touch of verisimilitude, but it does not necessarily create a better world or a narrative. IMO, a "narrative style" of gaming is not predetermined by the system, but by how the DM and players use the gaming system to recreate a narrative. Nothing stops any of the pre-4E editions of D&D from being played in "gamist" fashion, and nothing stops 4E from being a "narrativist" game.

 

[ProfessorCirno]

Staying with lockpicking...in 3.X, a rogue will eventually consider most mundane locks as mere speedbumps, not actual obstacles.

That 4Ed would want to have a system in which a powerful rogue might actually be challenged by a mundane lock seems...non-heroic.

Level appropriate.

It does not stand for "Ignore these words."

A mundane ordinary lock is not level appropriate for a level 30 rogue. At that point he is picking the great lock of the god Aracadia to open the vault which holds Fire.

 

[pemerton]

That 4Ed would want to have a system in which a powerful rogue might actually be challenged by a mundane lock seems...non-heroic.

Adding to Prof Cirno's reply - I said upthread that "Where the challenge is not the sort of thing that might appear on a battlemap - like the complexity of the lock - then the general expectation is that the difficulty will be level dependent, and for higher level PCs the GM will describe the lock as being more complex".

If you have a high level PC picking a lock that is a Moderate DC for his/her level, and the GM has described the lock as an ordinary mundane lock, then something has gone wrong. In particular, the GM has failed to describe the lock as being more complex. (What this shows is that it's not as if there's no connection between mechanics and fiction. It's just that the process of establishing and implementing that connection is somewhat different from 3E.)

At a certain point, I think there is an expectation that high-level PCs will pick low-level locks without a roll being required (this is a difference from Basic and AD&D, and possibly from 3E). Exactly when that point should come - at what point the GM decides that something is not a challenge but just scenery (just as PCs don't generally make Acrobatics checks to avoid falling over their shoelaces) - isn't spelled out by the books. It's left as an exercise for each table.

 

[billd91]

If you have a high level PC picking a lock that is a Moderate DC for his/her level, and the GM has described the lock as an ordinary mundane lock, then something has gone wrong. In particular, the GM has failed to describe the lock as being more complex. (What this shows is that it's not as if there's no connection between mechanics and fiction. It's just that the process of establishing and implementing that connection is somewhat different from 3E.)

You have to understand that some of us find this extremely unsatisfying. It's putting the description of the game world secondary to the metagame mechanics. The setting conforms to the rules, not the rules conforming to the setting.

 

[pemerton]

Billd91, I do understand that. One of my first posts in this thread suggested that WotC had overestimated the attraction to many potential customers of a metagame heavy, non-simulationist RPG.

My point was simply that Danny is wrong to suggest that high-level 4e PCs are as challenged by mundane locks as are low-level 4e PCs.

Note also that the game doesn't preclude high level PCs encountering mundane locks. It's just that such locks are scenery, not challenges, and wouldn't engage the action resolution mechanics (as I said upthread, the precise point at which this happens is left as an exercise for the individual group). In practice, therefore, 4e probably wouldn't be the best system to run a game in which demigods frequently have to deal with ordinary locks (on the other hand, I'm not sure how many people actually want to run such a game).

 

[ProfessorCirno]

You have to understand that some of us find this extremely unsatisfying. It's putting the description of the game world secondary to the metagame mechanics. The setting conforms to the rules, not the rules conforming to the setting.

Uhhh what.

2e rules have literally the same thing - advice and rules on how to add to or take away from the player's score for more or less difficult locks. So unless locks were so bizarre and incredibly that they actively altered your ability to pick locks, it was a metagame construct to better simulate stronger/weaker locks.

3e locks also had wildly varrying DCs.

I don't even see how this puts the description of the game world secondary to the mechanics, at least in comparison. A relatively normal lock for that level would have X DC. The only difference between that and "A hard lock has DC 20 and a very hard lock has DC 25 but you should add x to the DC for extra extra high locks" is that 4e at least gives a vague outline on what "hard" and "extra extra hard" should constitute as.

Nihil novi sub sole. 4e isn't the radical departure a lot of people think it is.

 

[pawsplay]

Billd91, I do understand that. One of my first posts in this thread suggested that WotC had overestimated the attraction to many potential customers of a metagame heavy, non-simulationist RPG.

My point was simply that Danny is wrong to suggest that high-level 4e PCs are as challenged by mundane locks as are low-level 4e PCs.

But not wrong to suggest they could be. While the presumption is that a higher DC lock is more complex, the DC will be higher whether or not the lock is defined as a mundane lock, if the situation is defined as a level-appropriate skill challenge.

I don't know if 4e benchmarks standard lock difficulties outside of such situations.

 

[pawsplay]

Consider the following quote from Ron Edwards, on one difference between narrativist and high-concept play:

Consider the behavioral parameters of a samurai player-character in Sorcerer and in GURPS. On paper the sheets look pretty similar: bushido all over the place, honorable, blah blah. But what does this mean in terms of player decisions and events during play? I suggest that in Sorcerer (Narrativist), the expectation is that the character will encounter functional limits of his or her behavioral profile, and eventually, will necessarily break one or more of the formal tenets as an expression of who he or she "is," or suffer for failing to do so. No one knows how, or which one, or in relation to which other characters; that's what play is for. I suggest that in GURPS (Simulationist), the expectation is that the behavioral profile sets the parameters within which the character reliably acts, especially in the crunch - in other words, it formalizes the role the character will play in the upcoming events. Breaking that role in a Sorcerer-esque fashion would, in this case, constitute something very like a breach of contract. . .​

Ron is off-based here. GURPS does formalize the bushido code, but whether the character adheres to it (as part of their "contract") or is forced to confront or break the code (as with the Sorcerer-esque situation) depends entirely on the preferences of the GM and players as to how to handle the moral situation. Ron seems to be saying that to explore the code thematically would be shifting into Narrativist play, but I don't think any shift should occur simply from moving from a fairly black-and-white morality system to a situation where codes were meant to be broken. In fact, the inevitibility of breaching the code in his Sorcerer example suggests that Sorcerer is just as straightjacketed in how it deals with themes as the hidebound game of GURPS. The only way to make bushido a non-issue in Sorcerer is to not make it a part of the character's makeup, which is the equivalent of not taking Code of Honor (Bushido) in GURPS.