Bend, dont break.

[Andor]

I don't understand why you'd want to use static encounters that do not change, if only because it creates a lot of bookkeeping (X dead critters, critter Y has Z damage, critter B has a (save ends) effect that is dealing ongoing 5 damage so here's a few d20 rolls to see what happens to it when no one's around...), and jacks down the challenge of the game to cakewalk levels (blow all our dailies and encounters, run back to town, rinse, repeat).

Because sometimes that's the scenario? If you are investigating the Cave of Chaos with a dozen competing humanoid groups in a small area with plentiful and monsterous wildlife then leaving a cave empty is silly.

OTOH if you are in the middle of a lifeless desert and you stumble across a tomb full of traps and mindless undead then the adventure should be static because everything in it is static. How else? It's been sealed for a thousand years.

 

[Arlough]

So, one bit at a time:
[sblock=RE: Alrough]For this scenario, the party closing the rift would probably be the focus of the "adventure." To save the city, they assault the daelkyr clustered around the rift and pull it shut. The four-person party above might have to find the item that can seal the rift (exploration/interaction), and then fight off the daelkyr between them and the rift (combat) until they reach the goal, seal the rift, and get to take an uninterrupted rest. If the party rests before then, the daelkyr replenish, or the artifact goes missing, or they move the rift (or open a second one!).

You could also break it into smaller bits, if you wanted a longer event in the campaign. You could have them secure a part of the city, to defeat enough daelkyr and build enough fortifications and save enough townsfolk that they can mount a counterattack -- or at least get a night's sleep. If they sleep before they've secured the zone, they get attacked, or the daelkyr replenish.



For this one, you can do it a few ways, too. The first one that jumps to my mind is to say that the adventure ends when they reach a point at which they can rest easily for the night (like a fortified town), and then put the encounters in between them and their destination (6 bandits, 4 starving wolves, and a vicious thunderstorm!).

If the party tries to retire early, the adventure recharges by more wild creatures or dangerous highwayfolk finding the adventurers, either while they sleep, or during the next day.

You could extend the journey out for longer by putting multiple "adventures" in between the party and their destination. If rests are on the days/weeks timescale, you even can end up with something very much paced like LotR, with long periods of wilderness travel punctuated by occasional civilization where the party can recover for the next leg of their journey.

It's not meta-game -- a DM in designing an adventure probably should have goals for the party already (or the party should have given the DM goals, like "We want to go to the Free City of Greyhawk,"). All this is doing is saying that there's going to be a set of challenges (encounters) between you and your goal.
[/sblock]

*whew*

Time for a drink.

From what it seems you are saying, this is very much like what was intended for "day" where the DM determines when you can sleep/replenish. So this would be a nomenclature change (replacing "day" with "adventure", and "Daily Power" with "Adventure Power") more than a mechanics change, but I think it would effect the play of the game as it would explicitly place the refresh in the hands of the DM whereas it is, at the moment, an implicit duty.
I would accept that.

 

[I'm A Banana]

OTOH if you are in the middle of a lifeless desert and you stumble across a tomb full of traps and mindless undead then the adventure should be static because everything in it is static. How else? It's been sealed for a thousand years.

• Undead spontaneously reanimate, or be reanimated by whatever force animated them in the first place (or by more powerful undead).
• Traps can be repaired by these undead, or can be magically reset.
• You opened the tomb to enter it, so now other stuff can enter it, too.

As far as I can tell, nonreactive challenges are bad game (they unbalance the challenge, if ANYONE has any sort of recharge resources) and they're bad story (a slow whittling away of something that cannot pose a threat is a lousy narrative arc) an they're bad sim (it doesn't make sense that something wouldn't change over time, at least after the PC's start to get involved mixing up the status quo).

The trick is to make it easy to reset the adventure's challenge, and even fun to change it up when that happens, but I think a well-designed "third core book" can do that very well. But that's a controversial idea for another thread.

 

[pemerton]

Encounter-based design makes a certain minimum number of monsters in the encounter crucial to balance.

That's not true, though (unless you have very extreme contrasts of build between a multi-target blaster and a single-target striker). In general, variations in the number of monsters will effect the dynamics of play and pacing, but not the balance between PCs.

I don't understand why you'd want to use static encounters that do not change

<snip>

Using unreactive encounters in general is a pretty "advanced DM" move, and if a DM wants to do that for some reason, and is still very concerned about this strategy, they should be advanced enough to think to ban Vancian spellcasters as inappropriate for their campaign.

I don't think unreactive is especially advanced - Gygax, in his DMG, presents reactive encounters as sophisticated GMing.

As to why? The sorts of story reasons given by other posters.

It's not meta-game -- a DM in designing an adventure probably should have goals for the party already (or the party should have given the DM goals, like "We want to go to the Free City of Greyhawk,").

This whole thing is triggering my sensitivity to railroading.

Or to put it another way - I have a good handle on RPGing based on scene-framing, but I don't really get RPGing based on "adventure-framing". It seems to give the GM a lot of authority over plot.

Is there something here that I'm missing?

"Checks which require multiple successes" is not the same as "skill challenges."

<snip>

The nature of a "flatter math" system is that it relies on more die rolls to accomplish more difficult tasks, rather than just jacking up the DC.

<snip>

So 5 successful Charisma checks move the target from Hitting You to Helpful.

A Charm Person spell instantly puts the target at Helpful.

<snip>

If you get sent away, that's a sign you've failed that particular challenge.

Perhaps I'm wrong, but I don't think the same D&D/PF players who rejected skill challenges will embrace something like BW's Duel of Wits (or similar extended contest mechanics from HeroQuest revised).

But without something like that, I don't see how it's going to work.

The rogue persuading the king can't depend upon 5 successful checks in a row - even at 75% success rate, the odds of that would be less than 25%.

But failures and successes just pushing the king's attitude back and forth on the "attitude track" until you either reach the "Helpful" end or the "Leave my sight" end seems unsatisfying. Is the king arguing back (so we get something like and AD&D combat scenario)? Even BW or HQ, when it's just the rogue working on the king without any opposition, is going to use a single roll.

In combat, all other sorts of dimensions of advantage and disadvantage (like position, conditions etc) are used to make the play of multiple rolls interesting. Are you really envisioning this sort of thing for social conflict in D&Dnext?

At this stage, I'm still sticking to my hat-eating commitment: if, when D&Dnext is released, we really see things like rogue's wooing kings and poisoning guards' food as equal alternatives to charm person and combat, I will eat my hat!

 

[Zelda Themelin]

I really like 3.5 ed warlock and book of nine swords, binder sorta (but I think it's more feat pathÖ/template than character class).

I don't like magic users attacking with mundane weapons. Eldrich blast constantly csn get boring for some reason, but not for me. I even let my warlock players pick supernatural metamorphosis for eldrich blast so "magical rogue" doesn't have problems rolling badly against magic resistance or stupid checks to use their main attack.

I like the fact that spell casters have about that many magical tricks. And if they want have more they can play wizards with limitations.

There was also reserve spell system but that was way too uninuative and complicated. I used it too, but it was bit too wordly.

I want lot of magic in my magic games, but one that breaks rules aka physics of the universe should be intended rather than accidental.

Back to basic D&D I really liked my mostly morningstar wielding cleric who also had some divine given powers. But magic-user with 1 sleep spell or magic missile per day was painful.

I am not bothered at all some use magic instead of (un)fair social skills.

I don't play 4th edition but they did something right with at wills, but why oh why dailys. I hate 1/3/5 day limitations even in monster stat blocks.

I also don't like direction of converting all magic power into money and vice verse. Pathfinder does this and 4th edition does it with rituals. Gold is not meta to me. It has in-game value. Magic economy has problems but it's not greedy pc:s or magic markets.

 

[Steely_Dan]

Not all editions of DnD have been successes. There are actually quite a few versions that people don't talk about because they were that big a failure.

For example, I could summon up the original Saga DnD system (not the Saga

I could also remind the audience of the Amazing Engine system.

The Alternity was thought to be an attempt to update 2e but it failed too!

None of those games are an edition or version of Dungeons & Dragons, not sure why you brought them up.

Or are you just talking games produced by TSR, in which case Marvel Super Heroes, Metamorphosis Alpha, Gamma World, and Top Secret etc are all an edition/version of D&D to you?

 

[TarionzCousin]

Bend, don't break

 

[GM Dave]

No, I'm recalling from the time. Amazing engine went to great lengths NOT to step on D&Ds toes. That's why there was no D&D-like setting brought out for it. The first games were, what? Bug Hunt and Magitech? Bug Hunt was an Aliens inspired game of high-tech xenos stomping and Magitech was modern day with magic replacing technology sort of like Harrry Turtledove's "The Case of the Toxic Spelldump" but with fewer puns.

Nor does it use a d20 system. It has different stats and uses percentile dice in a stat + skill based resolution system, the core book is 32 pages with illustrations. Less like 2e D&D it could not be. (By coincidence I have it on my shelf atm along with Magitech and For Fearie, Queen, and Country.

Alternity was very d20ish to be sure.

I have the Amazing Engine on my shelf too, though, I did not buy the Faerie, Queen, and Country edition.

Amazing Engine came out in 93 which was 4 years after 2e (What is it with 4 years in the game market?). Sales for TSR were reportedly doing poorly. I know many people that had not been happy with the changes of 2e with the combining of various classes under 'blanket' classes. While clerics had done better things like Druids had done worse.

There was plenty of expectation that TSR was going to have to release something to replace 2e (I was buying far more Shadowrun and WoD source material at that time). Before the Amazing Engine books reached the FLGS there was plenty of thought that this would be a trial for some sort of generic replacement or something less tied to the current series of campaign settings (some of the boxed sets had interesting ideas but adoption rate in our group was low).

Dragonlance 5th Age. Saga ed. came out in 96. People thought that this would mark a return to the glory days of Dragonlance but the system never caught on and people preferred to stick to 2e. Though, the magic system was nice in that it was much more free form than in any other system. It was one of a few attempts to turn popular card games into RPG adopters. I have this game too on my shelves.

Alternity came out in 1998 when TSR was purchased by WotC after TSR was unable to pay the bills. With the change in company ownership it was thought this was going to be the test case of the new direction for roleplaying.

Many ideas that made it into 3e can be seen in Alternity.

Strictly speaking, they were not versions of DnD but they were attempts for TSR to regain market share of their products.

Interestingly, TSR had 40 million in sales in 1996 when it was purchased by WotC. You can be selling product and still not covering your bills.

None of those games are an edition or version of Dungeons & Dragons, not sure why you brought them up.

Or are you just talking games produced by TSR, in which case Marvel Super Heroes, Metamorphosis Alpha, Gamma World, and Top Secret etc are all an edition/version of D&D to you?

Please check back a page for my original response to this same point.

 

[Steely_Dan]

Please check back a page for my original response to this same point.

...no. *in the voice of Peter from Family Guy*

Just kidding, but yeah, I think you're reaching a bit, but SWSE (and ToB) were definitely a test ground for 4th Ed.

 

[Andor]

I have the Amazing Engine on my shelf too, though, I did not buy the Faerie, Queen, and Country edition.

If you can find it cheap, pick it up. It's well worth mining for ideas.

(I was buying far more Shadowrun and WoD source material at that time). Before the Amazing Engine books reached the FLGS there was plenty of thought that this would be a trial for some sort of generic replacement or something less tied to the current series of campaign settings (some of the boxed sets had interesting ideas but adoption rate in our group was low).

True. All the crying of the doom of D&D these days makes me think no one remembers just how badly D&D was doing when FASA was king of the RPG market with Shadowrun and Earthdawn. Not to mention White Wolf and the WoD stuff. The resurgence of D&D with 3e was amazing to watch.

But while all that was true, I have vague memories of discussions in Dragon about how TSR was keen not to compete with itself by releasing a D&Desqe worldbook for Amazing Engine and thus thin out the market further. It's true there was that speculation on the part of some gamers, but I truely don't think TSR ever saw Amazing Engine as competition for D&D.