Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="CuRoi" data-source="post: 5470072" data-attributes="member: 98032">You use the analogy of first learning to drive a car. I'd like to use a different example - learning to ride a bike. At what point do you lose the training wheels, especially if the system never presents the concept of a "bike" to move on to?  I do still feel that while it may be a helpful concept to frame skill challenges with an encounter-style mechanic, but it ultimately sets things back a step without providing a framework to "move on". Yes, it loosely approximates what any decent DM might do when creating opportunities for skill use and player interaction in their worlds. But often what the rules lay down is simply accepted as "the final truth". 3e IMO encouraged a crop of rules heavy players that found it hard to accept things that weren't in a book somewhere (because the rules appeared to have an answer for even the smallest minutae) and a group of DMs that were so innundated with rules that adding anything else was a chore. I've seen this displayed with players at my table and through a host of comments on this message board and others. If it wasn't in the rules, they firmly believed (or decided out of expediency) that it could not happen.  However, the one area where the 3e DM was fairly free to improvise was in out of combat situations. Sure they had an NPC reaction table and a few skills gave some DCs, a few spells had some effect, but there wasn't book after book of non-combat feats and abilities. Nor was a non-combat situation presented in a structured "roll initiative and takes turns whacking on the bad guy" vein. Now that both combat and non-combat are being presented in very similar skins it makes it very difficult to distinguish one from the other. Mechanical trappings make for mechanical solutions in most cases. I mean, can you seriously describe a rules transparent 4e combat? It was hard enough with 3e, but I think it is simply not possible with 4e.  So, I would argue presentation is extremely important regarding whether skill challenges necessarily support a rules-first mechanic or not. Experienced DMs can possibly move beyond this "rules first" presentation (though I never could do this with 4e combat) but less experienced DMs and players will not necessarily ever do so. And as you say, the novice DM may start out putting the rules up front, but what inspiration do they have for ever altering that mechanic? I wouldn't be surprised that as a novice 4e DM's style expands, they'll go looking for a different RPG or maybe even play it "old school" with earlier editions to run the type of games they want. Exactly as you say, every group will find its own style and edition (or RPG) and settle into whatever play style they like. Our group just never felt we could get 4e to fit our style. I mean, I can see playing 4e as the DnD Encounters is rolling it out - an ad hoc 2 hour "hey join anytime" sort of game where you face off against a proscribed encounter. I think it is perfect for that. But as an ongoing RPG campaign? Just not really my style and it is specifically due to the difficulty of balancing the fiction and the mechanics. IMO, YMMV and all that <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

Verification