A Rekindled Glimmer of Hope

[Ratskinner]

The same thing goes for comments about rogues passing guarded gates by poisoning the guards' lunches rather than fighting them. Is this really going to be a regular part of D&Dnext, when it's never been a regular part of typical D&D hitherto?

And to be clear: I think it's completely feasible to design an RPG in which poisoning the lunches of the guards is just as viable (mechanically, and in the real world play environment at the table) as fighting them, and in which blocking doorways against hordes is as common as sleeping those hordes. But I don't think it's feasible to do this using traditional D&D mechanics.

My guys were doing it since 2e...some from before, depending on the availability of Dragon articles. "Traditional D&D mechanics" covers a lot more ground than BAB, AC, and HP.

Scene/situation/encounter based design has taken a while to emerge as a coherent approach to RPGing. But now that it has emerged, it turns out to be one of the most reliable and effective ways for generating non-railroading, player-driven, protagonistic, exciting RPG play.

I know plenty of folks who would argue the "exciting" part. Several who would argue the "player-driven" part, and a few who would argue the rest. At least as far as the way 4e did it. A lot of the folks I game with felt like that school of design gave every encounter an intolerable sameness that sucked the life, humor, and creativity out of the game. I know that there a plenty who disagree, but such is the situation the designers are in.

The key to this is that the scene/situation/encounter is not an arbitrary locus of action. The resolution of individual scenes - the pacing of them, the open-endedness of them when the players go in - is central to the emergence of plot/story out of play.

Provided that you deal with scenes equally well both in and out of combat, maybe. Recall that this game has 3 pillars. Combat tends to get the lion's share of treatment, but Interaction and Exploration are vital parts of the D&D "feel". Scene-based design tends to give short shrift to Exploration in a bad way. 4e lost many of the "Old-Schoolers" I know because of the Dungeoneering skill. "That's what we're supposed to do."

I think there is a type of desire for obscurity. It comes out in some of the "write flavoursome prose for adults" threads, too. I don't think it's about rationing expertise, though. It's about a conception of the rulebook as somehow being part of the play experience, the first step into immersion. A rulebook that is clear and metagame-y in its language breaks immersion, because it makes it transparent that the activity consists of real people sitting around a real table playing a game.

I dunno. Gamers are weird folk. We often like to pride ourselves on our KotOTU (Knowledge of the Otherwise Totally Useless.) I think its more along the lines of the catchet people feel from system mastery, rather than immersion. ::shrug:: Who knows, though?

 

[Ratskinner]

Speaking personally... my real issue with it as far as wizards are concerned is the thought of running out of magic and then doing something else functionally equivalent to magic (usually combat related) in its place. Which to me seems completely pointless.

I think that's just a matter of flavor. I can see it both ways, it just depends on the world you're trying to create. Which is why I hope both options are available.

Mechanically, you're absolutely correct, there isn't much of an effective difference. However, since D&D tends to heavily prescribe the narrative side of all its mechanics (often disdainfully referred to as "fluff"), this becomes something of an issue.

 

[Ratskinner]

While the wizard class exists, D&D is a high magic game.

That, I think, is a bit of presumptuous hyperbole. I know I've played in plenty of "low-magic" campaigns. Depending on the edition, its not necessarily hard to work out rules changes.

If you can do something 1/day with no blowback then you can do somethign easily and flippantly.

It's still about as common as me needing to go to the bathroom. Gandalf cast about half a dozen spells in the entire Lord of the Rings.

Which is the kind of thing that makes me wonder if the entire range of "Magical Rarity" couldn't be fixed by a having a "Spell Recharge Dial" or something. If recharging a spell slot took a week and a pile of resources...magic would really become rare again. Although, I suppose the dial would have to include some kind of compensation for casters loosing all that utility. That might be tricky, indeed.

 

[GM Dave]

When people talk on the 'good old days' of DnD and refer to things like 1e for being a Magic-User; I often think they have rosier lens than I do.

Sure, your DM roles you a decent spell book then you might have a chance to feel like a Magic-User.

I recently pointed out in the 'Have you seen a Wizard dominate?' thread that it was quite possible to dominate with the spells in the 1e game list.

It was also quite possible (and I played a couple) where your Spell book consisted of stuff like Push, Dancing Lights, Erase, and Read Magic.

Push might get a person to miss one attack on one round if they weighed 50 lb or less.

Dancing Lights might distract someone (dependent GM judgement) or give 2 min of light.

Erase won't work on Symbols or Explosive Runes. It only has a 50% chance of working on any sort of magical writing. On regular writing you can erase up two pages (though there are not many writings you want to erase on a regular dungeon adventure)

This means you are going adventuring likely with Read Magic!

I feel like a Wizard now!

Now you know why Wizards were good at throwing oil and torches. Many would risk a -5 Non-Weapon Proficiency and carry a Two-Handed Sword or a Halberd.

I have fond memories of some of the silly situations that we got into as a result of the rules but I am happy the game is better constructed now then it used to be.

 

[pemerton]

My guys were doing it since 2e...some from before, depending on the availability of Dragon articles. "Traditional D&D mechanics" covers a lot more ground than BAB, AC, and HP.

I've read a lot of published D&D modules and adventures (TSR, WotC and 3pp D20 ones) - admittedly not all of them , but many dozens, perhaps 100s - and have never seen one which is designed around the assumption, or even the significant possibility, that guards or soldiers will be bypassed by poisoning their lunch.

It's rare enough to see an assumption, or even recognition, that they'll be bypassed by talking to them, or by sneaking past them/tricking them.

And I don't think this is a coincidence, nor just driven by a preference for combat. It comes out of the action resolution mechanics. D&D has mechanics for sneaking (though non-thieves can tend to suck at it). It sort-of has mechanics for tricking and for talking, though this is somewhat edition dependent, and also has a tendency to be heavily GM-dependent. It has no mechanics for resolving an attempt to poison the guards' lunch. For a start, the timeframe over which this takes place - putting the poison in in the morning, then waiting for a couple of hours until the guards eat, then waiting more time until the poison takes effect - is not a timeframe that the action resolution mechanics typically handle that smoothly without need for a lot of GM-led narration to link it all together.

In none of this am I disputing what you or your guys have done. But the fact that you've done stuff isn't, on it's own, changing my view about the published default, or the default orientation or capability of the mechanics. But if there's a particular Dragon article you think I should look at, please point me to it. I liked the old (pre-WotC) Dragon!

Provided that you deal with scenes equally well both in and out of combat, maybe. Recall that this game has 3 pillars. Combat tends to get the lion's share of treatment, but Interaction and Exploration are vital parts of the D&D "feel". Scene-based design tends to give short shrift to Exploration in a bad way.

I agree that scene-based play can tend to make exploration something that emerges out of conflict resolution, rather than something in its own right. I think there are ways of designing to correct for that, but they probably won't give the classic D&D feel.

I'm not sure you can have the classic D&D feel, and have poisoning the guards being as robust an approach to action resolution as fighting them (or even talking to them).

 

[Sunseeker]

Tight plotting is part of the reason stories and games are very different. Tight plotting in stories helps you get to the action. Tight plotting in games is also called railroading, or linearity and is generally something to be minimized.

That depends HIGHLY upon the group. And honestly, the number of people who post here advocating for a D&D that is little more than LOTR makes me think a LOT of people like very story-heavy games.

HOWEVER, a story will be generated either beforehand, or after the game, in the end your game can only ever follow one path, even if you split up the party, the story still covers all their separate doings.

I like to create stories in my games, but I integrate them into the game-world as events that are going on. There's generally a rough sketch of how I think things might have to go if the group seeks to handle these events, a "plot" of sorts that would have to be generally followed to bring these events to a conclusion.

I don't consider this railroading, there are specific "sites" that the enemies are targetting, and the best way to stop the enemy is to engage them there. The further a party moves into engaging a specific enemy, or specific event, the less able they are to extricate themselves from the problem. I find the idea that the party can just up and grab their stuff after defeating half the Eladrin revolution, aiding the Wood Elf kingdom, and then just walk off into somewhere else. I do believe that by that point, their alliances and actions would have rippled far enough to cause serious consequences for failing to complete the event.

Anyway, again, how much of a railroad is enjoyable depends on the party, and how much of a railroad is tolerated, depends highly upon the cleverness of the DM.

I mean, ENWorld's own Burning Crusade campaign is highly linear, but it's still a very fun and engaging game to play. There's player-control when necessary, but again, there's no ability for the party to just take a boat to another land without serious consequences, or some heavy railroading keeping them in the game.

Can't recall one off hand... I have however sat back with my friends and talked about the different ways that we could... and for some, D&D provides that chance. I think you're presuming the goal of every group when playing D&D is to create a "story" that apes popular fiction. When in fact I doubt that's true for all, may be even most groups.

Again, a story is created beforehand, and followed. Or a story is created by the adventures of a group. As above, the further a party involves itsself into some kind of event, the less realistic I find it that they can just pack up without repercussions. From something as simple as the town being overrun by Kobolds, and then the families of the townsfolk send out assassins after the party that abandoned their town, or the King arresting the party as they try to leave for being traitors because they helped only so far, but decided to quit half-way through.

By mere existence in the game-world, the players are automatically invested in it's outcomes. It should be highly improbable, if not impossible, for them to simply switch paths half-way through. I believe some method of forcing players to engage their current events is highly preferable to a world which has no care for their doings or deeds.

 

[Tony Vargas]

"Over the course of the campaign" is probably too broad a balance spectrum.

"Over the course of an encounter" is probably too narrow.

Which is why "Over the course of a single session of play" (aka: The Adventure) is probably right on.

An 'encounter,' or a single 'challenge,' to bring skill challenges/interaction/puzzles/exploration into it, is a good atomic unit of gaming. You never know just how little a character might be played or how short a session might be. A single encounter/skill-challenge in the 4e sense or challenge in the 3e sense could take up an entire (relatively short) session. D&D Encounters is like that, for instance, an hour or two to cover one fairly substantial (usually combat) encounter.

A campaign could be 13 encounter or 390 encounters. It could be 12 sessions or 52 or 600. There's no way to 'balance across campaigns,' because they just vary too much. Similarly, balancing across a "day" is problematic, since a day could very easily have only a single challenge, or could have several or even a dozen or more. And "Adventure" is even more uncertain in length than a "day."

Even an encounter could balance very differently based on the number of rounds it takes or what other limited resources are available at the start of it.

Differential or serial balance simply doesn't work across a broad spectrum of campaigns, groups, adventures, DMs or play styles. Over-specializing characters or giving some powerful theoretically-limited abilities and others weak theoretically-consistent abilities will always amplify imbalances among characters when the campaign (or session or adventure or encounter or group or play style or DM'ing talent or story requirement) varies from whatever expected norms they're calibrated around.

Giving up balance in the encounter doesn't mean you give up balance everywhere. It just means the scope is broader.

There are different ways of looking at balance, of course. 4e isn't as well-balanced across encounters as it is across classes, for instance. The mere existence of daily powers throws off encounter balance, even when all classes have them and some attempt is made to balance them.

 

[Ratskinner]

I've read a lot of published D&D modules and adventures (TSR, WotC and 3pp D20 ones) - admittedly not all of them , but many dozens, perhaps 100s - and have never seen one which is designed around the assumption, or even the significant possibility, that guards or soldiers will be bypassed by poisoning their lunch.

It's rare enough to see an assumption, or even recognition, that they'll be bypassed by talking to them, or by sneaking past them/tricking them.

And I don't think this is a coincidence, nor just driven by a preference for combat. It comes out of the action resolution mechanics. D&D has mechanics for sneaking (though non-thieves can tend to suck at it). It sort-of has mechanics for tricking and for talking, though this is somewhat edition dependent, and also has a tendency to be heavily GM-dependent. It has no mechanics for resolving an attempt to poison the guards' lunch. For a start, the timeframe over which this takes place - putting the poison in in the morning, then waiting for a couple of hours until the guards eat, then waiting more time until the poison takes effect - is not a timeframe that the action resolution mechanics typically handle that smoothly without need for a lot of GM-led narration to link it all together.

In none of this am I disputing what you or your guys have done. But the fact that you've done stuff isn't, on it's own, changing my view about the published default, or the default orientation or capability of the mechanics. But if there's a particular Dragon article you think I should look at, please point me to it. I liked the old (pre-WotC) Dragon!

I don't disagree about things as published, but i think that how D&D (particularly 2e, in my mind) played, was far different than as presented in the published material. While the published materiel tended to focus mechanically on the combat and exploration modes of play, the interaction part was left almost completely to the DM's discretion. Many of the larger 2e adventures (IIRC, its been years) contained fairly useful sections on the motivations and possibilities with some of the major NPCs.

I agree that scene-based play can tend to make exploration something that emerges out of conflict resolution, rather than something in its own right. I think there are ways of designing to correct for that, but they probably won't give the classic D&D feel.

I'm not sure you can have the classic D&D feel, and have poisoning the guards being as robust an approach to action resolution as fighting them (or even talking to them).

I agree there about D&D's feel. Personally, I've explored a lot of other game systems, and D&D's simulation-but-not style seems to be the source of both its peculiar problems and its appeal. However, I think a focus on scene-based balance, combined with combat-heavy rulesbase leads to a certain prescriptive feel that had many people crying "its not D&D" about 4e. That's not the only issue that lead into it, not by a long shot, but I think it contributes.

Nonetheless, I'm not sure that the rules have to address poisoning the guards with as much detail as they address fighting the guards. For whatever reason, people seem much more accepting of things playing fast and loose outside of combat. Personally, I think the rules would do well to back off the prescriptive combat mechanics as well. I'm fair sure that's not a prevalent attitude, though.

 

[Imaro]

Again, a story is created beforehand, and followed. Or a story is created by the adventures of a group. As above, the further a party involves itsself into some kind of event, the less realistic I find it that they can just pack up without repercussions. From something as simple as the town being overrun by Kobolds, and then the families of the townsfolk send out assassins after the party that abandoned their town, or the King arresting the party as they try to leave for being traitors because they helped only so far, but decided to quit half-way through.

By mere existence in the game-world, the players are automatically invested in it's outcomes. It should be highly improbable, if not impossible, for them to simply switch paths half-way through. I believe some method of forcing players to engage their current events is highly preferable to a world which has no care for their doings or deeds.

I think you're missing the key point in my reply... The part about "that apes popular fiction...". In other words I'm not saying a story isn't desired or isn't created during play of D&D... I'm saying the specific story that you favor with it's specifc tropes (like not being able to avoid minions and ambush the BBEG through cleverness and guile) aren't necessarily the types of stories everyone wants to play in or create.

 

[I'm A Banana]

And folks want a class that doesn't.

I've never said that at-will magic shouldn't be an option, just that it should also be an option to NOT have that.

I don't think I've stuttered.

When I look at the name "Wizard" I see a master of magic. The sort of person who can manipulate magic at will, not the sort of person who's low enough magic that he never masters it and runs out. The wizard has always been the single highest magic in the game - and it would be turning back on history and on common sense to reverse that. Certain 4e classes can run out of magic - Skalds spring to mind.

And wizards from OD&D to 3e, being masters of magic, still resorted to crossbows and alchemist's fires, and AFAIK, people slogged along just peachy (or I suppose wizards would have been given at-will magic a lot sooner), and some people even enjoyed that high level of psychological risk.

At-will magic should be an option. I get that some folks want to be magical all the time, and I wouldn't begrudge them that -- that's the way I personally like to play more often than not. But it shouldn't be the ONLY option, and I still don't really understand why people are so abhorred by that idea that it must be purged from the game.

Some people really like the idea that magic is a powerful resource you can run out of, and it causes ZERO balance problems to let them toss vials of acid instead of letting them conjure acid. Loose nothing, gain a few folks who feel this is a sticking point for them. Everyone wins, 5e gets more players, and...what, someone who wants lots of at-will magic needs to use a different word to describe their toe-waggling gumdrop faerie gibberish man? Might need to select from a theme or several that have the options in them? The. Horror.