Dannager
First Post
That is false.
Am I the only one who doesn't like the arbitrary "boss monster" tag?
- Thread starter B.T.
- Start date
That is false.
billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him) 🇺🇦🇵🇸🏳️⚧️
Glad we agree.
The whole 4e math structure is balanced on a razor's edge, otherwise there wouldn't be so much consternation about feat taxes and math fixes. And I think the game's narrative space suffers for it.
You know, lets ignore whether or not 4E's math is based on a razor edge (it's not) or whether or not feat taxes are a good idea (they aren't, and never have been in any edition).
How does this damage the "narrative space?" I mean in what way does having solid mathematics cause the game to lose narrative space? Does the game gain additional narrative options when you have classes and options that are obviously terrible (the fighter next to the warblade, the ranger next to the druid, the monk next to an actual PC class)? Does the narrative space decrease if on-level monsters provide appropriate challenges for parties?
billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him) 🇺🇦🇵🇸🏳️⚧️
In games with more tolerance (like 1e/2e) and fuzzier balance, you have more options for groups adventuring with varying levels and capabilities. We used to run with characters ranging from 14th to 8th level back in 1e without appreciable problems. The math was bounded compared to 3e/4e so saving throws never were utterly out of reach, nor were defenses too good to hit. You can run a Fellowship of the Ring-style party in 1e fairly easily with a couple of high level characters, a few mid levels, and a few low levels and the low level characters will have more survivability and pull more weight than in either 3e or 4e.
In 3e and 4e (and I'd even say it's more of a problem with 4e because of the scaling of the defenses with attack values, even for mooks), that sort of game is a lot harder to accomplish. That style of narrative - gone.
I think GreyICE's reply here captures the important issues.
To the extent that 4e's math is balanced on a razor's edge, or a balance beam, or a 6" wide plank, what does this mean? It means that the game defaults to its smoothest play when the typical combatant has about a 60% chance of hitting a target.
But that's just a default. There can be any number of reasons for departing from it. The last combat encounter that I ran, for example, involved 2 22nd level Death Giants, plus a 17th level Eidolon, against a party of 5 17th level PCs - and this in a game in which we don't use Expertise feats, so the PCs are a point or two behind the maths even against matched-level opponents. The high defences of the Death Giants made itself evident in the course of the combat, as I could predict that it would, and that was part of the effect that I was looking for. I wouldn't do it for every fight - my default encounter is with larger numbers of equal or lower level combatants - but as a one-off to achieve a particular feel, it worked.
And this, I think, goes to the point about "narrative space". 4e's "razor edge" balance is, in reality, nothing more than transparent mathematics: it is easy to estimate hit/miss ratios, and therefore think about pacing considerations, because every level of creature is associated with a particular average defence number. It occupies the same functional space as, for example, the pass/fail cycle for setting DCs in HeroQuest revised. (Some of this HQrev stuff was then reproduced by Robin Laws in his work on the 4e DMG2. My disappointment with that is that no real effort was made to integrate it tightly with the 4e action resolution and monster building mechanics, which are very different from HQ.)
And reliable pacing tools, of course, do no damage to the narrative space at all - they improve it!
EDIT:
This is nothing to do with "razor edge balance". This is about scaling. AD&D has comparatively little scaling of AC and saving throw DCs. (Although Vault of the Drow comes up with a story kludge - magical drow items - to produce de facto scaling AC for the drow opponents - ACs well into the single digit negatives are rife, which no PC below 10th level would have any reliable chance of hitting.)
Change 4e by dropping the +half per level to attacks and defences, and it will run much the same as AD&D in combat. (If you also dropped the +half per level to skills you would have to revise the DCs per level table by the same modification.) I'm pretty sure there are some 4e players on these boards who do just that!
In other words, I think it is pretty trivial to eleminate the scaling from 4e and thereby render it comparable in this respect to AD&D. And the triviality is a direct consequence of the maths being transparent.
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Tony Vargas
Legend
Jumping off the 4e treadmill would not be difficult, and it's pretty close to what 5e 'bounded accuracy' does. It just removes much of the illusion of advancement, and advancement is a big part of the D&D mystique.
I actually posted on this very point in the "flat maths" thread:
The fun part of getting better in 4e isn't that the maths changes (it is flat, because of the uniformity and transparency of scaling); it's that the fiction changes. The fictional stakes become higher and more complex, although in many ways the mathematical stakes of action resolution remain largely the same throughout the game.
This is one of several respects in which 4e resembles some indie RPGs.
This is one of several respects in which 4e resembles some indie RPGs.
4e makes it completely transparent that there is no "vertical" mechanical advancement - though there is some "horizontal" mechanical advancement (high level PCs become more complex to play). The fiction bears the entire weight of delivering any genuine experience of getting better - hence the importance of tiers to 4e play. One obvious failing of some of the 4e adventure offerings from WotC is that they don't deliver on this: there are epic-level encounters the stakes of which aren't really epic at all.
But anyway, as I also said on the other thread, I think that D&Dnext will abandon this aspect of 4e, and will include "vertical" mechanical advancement (eg bonus items that aren't factored into "the maths"). What will be interesting to see will be whether they come up with other techniques for keeping combat interesting when success rates start to approach auto-hit or auto-miss.
That was part of the "perfect imbalance" mechanics in 2e and before. The game designers realized that some classes were much worse than others (rogues compared to wizards, for example) so they gave them a faster advancement. 3e made everybody use the same XP table, because, suposedly, the classes were all in the same power level now.
Neonchameleon
Legend
This is false. The 4e math structure is robust and with a lot of tolerance - and probably more robust than any other edition of D&D. The feat taxes are disliked mostly on aesthetic grounds - they stick out like a sore thumb.
This. Drop the +1/2 per level bonus (and many do) and things work a lot more like they do in AD&D.
Could you explain please? I've never seen a copy of HQ and associate the name with a Descent style boardgame.
old heroquest was a board game.
New HeroQuest is a RPG set in Glorantha, the world of original RuneQuest. The system is quite narrative and freeform (you don't have abilities, skills...) You create your character writing a story, then you can use a few words from that story as "backgrounds" and give them a score. For example, you write "My character is a divine warrior from the Bear tribe, far in the north." then you can use "divine warrior", "bear tribe" and "northmen", and give them scores. If you have "divine warrior" 14, you have to roll 14 or less in anything that is related to a divine warrior (like fighting, or knowing religion stuff)
There is a thing called "mastery", which bassically means you have more than 20 in a score (so it's an autosuccess). If you have 25 in a score, then you have 5m1 (5 mastery 1). The rolls are always opposed, and you add "successes" for every mastery you have (sort of, but it's easier to explain that way).
When you fight, you start to add your success margin, and then you can transform that into victory (damage, or whatever). You describe the action after rolling, not before (so you don't say "i try to disarm him" then check the maneuver, but you roll the attack, and once you see the results, you decide if you disarm him, or wound him, or whatever)
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