Beyond Old and New School - "The Secret That Was Lost"

[pemerton]

The player essentially chooses a programmed action from an available list.

That's not a correct account of 4e play, either as I described it or as (at least) I experience it.

The player has an avialable list of resources - but speaking at this level of generality, that is not interestingly different from an AD&D player, who also has an available list of resources: stats, equipment, perhaps spells, perhaps thief abilities, etc.

Once the vehicle has been constructed (the character "build" is complete) the actual play of the game is largely an automated process.

This is not correct either. Even something as simple as positioing in combat is not automated. But typical 4e play involves more decision-making than simply positioning in combat.

The game world itself is a two-dimensional overlay "skin" draped over the mechanical engine.

This may not be the thread to revisit the issue of fictional positioning in 4e, but again what you say is not correct. For instance, how does one know what to say to an NPC in order to be entitled to make a Diplomacy check to influence them? How does one know whether or not an object can be set alight with a fireball spell? This is determined by fictional positioning.

The biggest irritating thing about the whole process- nothing of consequence takes place without a mechanical process.

This is "say yes or roll the dice". It's pretty central to a core style of "indie" play. The alternative to mechanical processes is fiat. Indie play is generally hostile to GM fiat; and sceptical of player fiat when matters of consequence are at stake.

 

[ExploderWizard]

That's not a correct account of 4e play, either as I described it or as (at least) I experience it.

The player has an avialable list of resources - but speaking at this level of generality, that is not interestingly different from an AD&D player, who also has an available list of resources: stats, equipment, perhaps spells, perhaps thief abilities, etc.

In your last 4E session how many player decisions that had a significant impact on the outcome of play didn't involve the use of a power, feat, skill, etc?

 

[pemerton]

Umbran, as I wrote before, you're taking a single quote ("tree") and missing the total argument ("forest"), and then repeating that same mistake. No offense, but that's what politicians do when they're trying to smeer their opponents - they take quotes out of context to make them look bad.

[MENTION=177]Umbran[/MENTION] is not misrepresenting your assertion, which was nothing like the example you gave.

In the OP you didn't simply use the following words in some larger context. You asserted them:

I do think that old school games better facilitate the imaginative experience

Are you now repudiating that assertion? If not, then I think Umbran is entitled to express his disagreement with it.

For what it's worth, I disagree also (though maybe from a perspective that differs from Umbran's). Perhaps you have had your most imaginative RPGing in old school games. But I certainly haven't.

 

[Mercurius]

I am a great fan of Boorman's Excalibur. But I don't think it tells us anything about the relationship between OSR RPGs, 4e and imagination.

It is virtually impossible to play a game with the feel of Excalibur using Moldvay Basic....

This wasn't my intention for talking about Excalibur at all, or what edition is best for simulation the feel of it. Rather I was looking at the quotes around the "secret that was lost," which in the context of RPGs is the experience of imagination - and how to best inspire and evoke that, not the feel of the movie itself.

The reasons for WotC's commercial decisions in relation to 4e I leave for others to work out - though I think it must be obvious to anyone that Essentials was an incredibly poorly conceived set of products, even if some of the individual design elements (especially the MV monsters) are very nicely done.

I very much agree.

But 4e is not populated by "detailed descriptions" - nearly all its books are either lists of potential player build elements, or lists of potential antagonists for the GM to introduce. The only new, large scale action resolution subsystems introduced outside of the PHB and DMG are vehicle rules in Adventurers' Vault, and Martial Practices in Martial Power 2. I think nearly eveyone ignores the latter system, and I'm guessing vehicle rules aren't used that often either.

Again, you're taking what I wrote too concretely, too literally. I'm using "detailed descriptions" as an isomorphic analogy - not as a one-to-one comparison. I am saying that the density of rules systems in 3e and 4e is similar to they detailed descriptions in more recent fiction, that it "fills the space" in a similar way.

4e's core resolution system is in fact incredibly simple (and indie): GM describes situation; player nominates method - skill and/or power - by which his/her PC will overcome challenge, based on the interaction between the mechanics of that skill/power and the fictional positioning of the PC in the GM-described situation; the GM sets a DC; the player rolls the di(c)e; if the check succeeds the player gets what s/he wanted, and if the check fails then the adverse consequence is narrated by the GM.

Yes, but that's pretty similar to almost any edition of D&D, any RPG really. The question is, how is this process done, and that's where the specific rules come in.

But the AEDU system is a good case in point, because it provides pre-made packets for the player to use without having to envision their own maneuver within the mindspace of the world. The focus is on the battlemat and the player looks at their list of powers and decides which one to use. It is a further abstraction away from the Theater of Mind in which the player envisions themselves as the character in the situation and then acts directly, which must then be translated into rules. I feel that 4e, by and large, has it the other way around - players chose which power to use, which then was translated into imagination. The problem, though, is that it was very easy to stay within the world of abstract rules and not enter "imaginative immersion."

I'm not saying that it isn't possible to have a richly imaginative experience with 4e, but that it is more difficult than it could be because of the way that the rules guide the experience of imagination. As Marshall McLuhan said, the medium is the message. The form of the rules largely defines, or at least guides, the experience of the game. I can't tell you how many times I've heard people, on forums or in real life, talk about how 4e is like playing two games, the "old version" of D&D when you're in the Theater of Mind, and then combat, in which you switch to a battlemat game of tactics and 4e essentially becomes an augmented war game. I know that some have had success incorporating Theater of Mind into combat, but by and large the medium of 4e combat has made it very difficult for many/most to do so.

The main difference in resolution systems between 4e and a typical indie game is its mechanically incredibly heavy combat resolution system. (Though no heavier, I think, than some other systems like say Burning Wheel.) If you don't enjoy the detailed mechanical resolution of combat, 4e is probably not the game for you! But while admittedly my knowledge of WoW et al is 2nd hand, I don't see much similarity between 4e combat resolution and those systems. For instance, fictional positioning is key in 4e - and the whole of p 42 is built around that - but is not in a computer game.

I did enjoy it for awhile but, as I said above, I found that I missed the "old school" approach of Theater of Mind.

People often cite page 42 as if it somehow negates all of the other pages of 4e in which a very different paradigm is fostered.

The problem detractors of 4e often have with the game is that they (and I, to a large extent) feel that it has it backwards, it has put the proverbial cart before the horse. The "cart" is the AEDU power system, which is a lot of fun for what it is, but is a very specific and tightly focused approach, and one that makes other approaches and styles difficult. The "horse" is the core resolution system coupled with page 42.

What I'm hoping to see with Next is that they put the cart back behind the horse, and then you can pick and choose which cart to attach to your horse. So we have:

Horse - simplified d20 core mechanic, page 42-esque free style play, classic D&D tropes and feel
Cart(s) - modular options and rules sub-systems for different game styles (e.g. skills, powers, advanced combat, etc), variant D&D tropes and feel

The dissatisfaction with 4e that I read on these boards, at least, most often relates not to its excess of description but rather its lack thereof - eg what is happening when Come and Get It is used, or when an attack does damage on a miss? - and to its indie-style transparency ("player entitlement").

The sort of "imagination" that you seem to be talking about is that of a player "imagining" what the ingame situation of the PC is like. I prefer not to have that be imagined. I prefer to have that be experienced. Of course it can't be experienced immediately, but I believe a good RPG can be designed so that the player experiences the at-table situation in a way that is comparable to, though obviously not immediately identical with, the PC's experience of the ingame situation. I think 4e does as good a job of this as any version of D&D - in fact, in my personal opinion, a better job.

I'm not sure what you mean by "experienced" or how you differentiate it form "imagined." I see imagination as a form of experience.

I pulled this out because I think the change in saving throws is perhaps the single biggest symbol of change between AD&D and 3E. Saving throws go from being a metagame device with fortune-in-the-middle resolution (ie roll the dice, then narrate something about how your guy shrugged off the dragon breath or sucked out the poison) to being a process-simulation model of a PC's Fort, Ref or Will. Apart from anything else, this killed fighters - and therefore Excalibur - stone-cold dead.

I'm not following you. Can you explicate this further?

4e restores mechanical support for strong-willed fighters (because WIS is a secondary stat for many fighter builds, and the role of CON in hit point and surge numbers makes a high CON much less essential), and also restores FitM to many parts of the game, including its saving throw rules and also its rules for healing and for dying.

The only edition of D&D that permits scenes like that in Excalibur, where the arrival of Lancelot on the field of battle restores the fighting vigour of the troops, or that in Peter Jackson's The Two Towers, when the memory of Arwen restores Aragorn to consciousness, is 4e with its inspriational healing.

None of this post is meant to imply that 4e is an RPG in the same category as Prince Valiant. But as far as editions of D&D are concerned, it's the closest thing there is.

I actually really liked healing surges and felt that they "fixed" hit points because they clarifed that they are not "body points" but are more of an abstraction that combines stamina and the ability to avoid real (bodily) damage. I hope that 5e provides for them as a variant rule; if not, I might slot it in.

 

[pemerton]

In your last 4E session how many player decisions that had a significant impact on the outcome of play didn't involve the use of a power, feat, skill, etc?

Not very many. But that is relevant to your complaint about "nothing of consequence without mechanical resolution". Which I agreed with (though for me it's not a complaint).

But it doesn't have any bearing on your claim that "players choose programmed actions from available lists". Skills, feats, powers etc are resources - like equipment in AD&D. They are not actions. They are things that are used to perform actions.

 

[Mercurius]

@Umbran is not misrepresenting your assertion, which was nothing like the example you gave.

In the OP you didn't simply use the following words in some larger context. You asserted them:

Are you now repudiating that assertion? If not, then I think Umbran is entitled to express his disagreement with it.

For what it's worth, I disagree also (though maybe from a perspective that differs from Umbran's). Perhaps you have had your most imaginative RPGing in old school games. But I certainly haven't.

I won't repudiate that statement because I think its generally true. Absolutely true? Of course not.

Umbran's definitely entitled to express his disagreement, but he was/is - as you are now - taking one quote out of context - and I'm entitled to say that! There was a lot more to the OP than what he, and you, quoted. Its a tree/forest thing. That was the point of the basketball analogy.

That said, I will say that it would be a huge over-simplication to simply say "old school D&D better facilitates imagination" and then stop there. There is much more subtlety at work, and numerous factors which have to be taken into account.

To be clear, I'm not saying that 4e-style D&D (or any specific style) should be done away, but that as I said in the previous reply, 4e got the cart before the horse, and the cart of 4e is rather specific - too specific for a large number (most, I think) D&D players. Maybe some - like yourself - find it more conducive to evoking imagination. I won't disagree with what you say that you yourself experience. But I'm talking about generalities, which I'm basing off my own personal experience and what I've heard from others.

Another way to put it is that I think the problem with 4e is that it is too flavor-specific for a wide number of D&D players. Even 3e was more open ended, not quite as specific in style. But 4e was like an ice cream shop that only carries Rum Raisin. If you love Rum Raisin, you're in luck; but the problem is, most people don't love Rum Raisin, and for those such as myself who like it, it has a shelf-date. In other words, I don't always want to have Rum Raisin every time I eat ice cream. I want different flavors, I want options.

This, again, brings me back to what I feel like is the "optimal" approach for 5e to take: a core simple "horse" with modular "cart" options. It remains to be seen whether they can really pull it off, but it seems the only way to please as many people as possible.

 

[Manbearcat]

Manbearcat, I'm a bit confused by your word usage - cognitive styles, resolution, structure, granularity, boundaries, etc. Are you using them within a specific system of thinking or in an individualistic way? My main familiarity with cognitive styles is from psychology and education (I'm involved in both fields professionally). A cognitive style could be related to styles of learning, multiple intelligences, personality types, or something like Kirton's inventory (adaptive vs. innovative).

I was using cognitive styles and strategy as the orthodox usage within the field. I'm specifically using it with respect to the burgeoning research on creativity and papers I have read.

As far as structure, granularity, and boundaries, I'm using them within the general orthodox in their sentences.

Resolution has many meanings. My usage here is "the quality and quantity of information conveyed within a defined parcel/space."

With respect to the latter portion of your rejoinder, I will just say that by no means to I believe that we inhabit a subjective world whereby the quality of Miles Davis versus the quality of Miley Cyrus is unknowable , specifically when parameters of judgement are well-defined and you can collate legitimate data (which you can with music, food, rules systems, et al).

However, I wasn't so much speaking to general preferences (this kobe hambuger is tastier than this ground beef hamburger) as I was focusing on how creativity bears itself out with respect to overarching structure, hard boundaries, and a continuum of resolution in the space between the boundaries. This is why I brought in Cormac McCarthy versus Stephen King. They diverge dramatically from one another with respect to the information overtly conveyed to the reader. Stephen King saturates you. Cormac McCarthy gives you little in the extreme (willfully obviously). However, there is no default measurables with respect to the output of creativity and imagination by the readership by proxy of the authorial inputs. You don't get "The Road" and "No Country For Old Men" is conducive to a broad and rich imaginative experience while "The Shining" and "The Dark Tower" lead to a more narrow and less provacative imaginetive experience.

I think that can be mapped to RPG theory easily enough. Regarding imagination, some thrive with less, or opaque, ruleset structure and higher resolution settings while, conversely, others thrive with tighter, more overt, ruleset structure, lower resolution setting but thematic exemplars to anchor their imagination to.

In total, I'm certainly not disputing that quality of (anything) can be discerned using precise metrics. I'm merely disputing the premise (at least what I think it is) that some systems (and their component parts; eg overt ovarching structure, information resolution, codified boundaries)universally provoke imagination and creativity better than others.

 

[pemerton]

4e's core resolution system is in fact incredibly simple (and indie): GM describes situation; player nominates method - skill and/or power - by which his/her PC will overcome challenge, based on the interaction between the mechanics of that skill/power and the fictional positioning of the PC in the GM-described situation; the GM sets a DC; the player rolls the di(c)e; if the check succeeds the player gets what s/he wanted, and if the check fails then the adverse consequence is narrated by the GM.

that's pretty similar to almost any edition of D&D, any RPG really.

I don't think so. In classic D&D, and in D&Dnext as currently written, the player cannot nominate the resource whereby a challenge will be tackled, unless either (i) the challenge is a very straight forward combat one, and the player is nominating an attack, or (ii) the resource the player is deploying is a spell. Otherwise the player has to specify an action that his/her PC might like to attempt, and wait for the GM to nominate a relevant resource (eg a stat check in Next, or a d% roll in classic D&D). I don't know what the 3E norms are in this respect.

Also, in versions of D&D other than 4e the only case in which success on the check results in the player achieving his/her declared goal is combat - a hit delivers damage. But otherwise non-4e versions of D&D use task resolution, not conflict resolution.

And yet furthermore, in most versions of D&D (including I think 3E, and Next at least as written), there is an expectation that a player can succeed at a check and yet fail overall due to secret fictional positioning known only to the GM (see the long discussion of the king and the chamberlain on the 1000+ post "Fighters vs Casters" thread). Whereas this is not a signficant feature of 4e.

The three points above were all elements of my characterisation of 4e resolution which do not differentiate it from the typical indie RPG but do differentiate it from many other RPGs, including various versions of Next.

I think these features of 4e are pretty central to the play experience it delivers.

the AEDU system is a good case in point, because it provides pre-made packets for the player to use without having to envision their own maneuver within the mindspace of the world.

This tells me that 4e doesn't, in general, care about the details of combat manoeuvres as inputs into resolution (other than positioning, about which it cares a great deal). Which is true - much like AD&D doesn't care about the details of how one defends against dragon breath in resolving a saving throw. Which is to say, these are fortune-in-the-middle mechanics.

I think the change in saving throws is perhaps the single biggest symbol of change between AD&D and 3E. Saving throws go from being a metagame device with fortune-in-the-middle resolution (ie roll the dice, then narrate something about how your guy shrugged off the dragon breath or sucked out the poison) to being a process-simulation model of a PC's Fort, Ref or Will. Apart from anything else, this killed fighters - and therefore Excalibur - stone-cold dead.

I'm not following you. Can you explicate this further?

While saving throws were fortune-in-the-middle, we could think of fighters as tough, and resilient, in the Conan or Aragorn model, and therefore give them appropriately robust saving throw numbers, without worrying, at the point of design, what that toughness correlates to in the fiction. Indeed, in his DMG Gygax offers as an example of a successful save vs dragon breath the possibility that the PC ducked into a narrow (and hitherto unnarated) crevice in the rock. That is, Gygax endorsed (i) Schroedinger's crevices, and (ii) that fighters are more likely to encounter and get the benefit of them than magic-users.

Once you decide to frame everything in process simulation terms - and with the exception of the core hp and action economy mechanics 3E tends strongly in this direction - then fortune-in-the-middle abilities are ruled out. And without those sorts of abilities, fighters start to look pretty weak, because their abilities will be modelledon real-world human physiological and psychological processes, which are not adequate to the task of fighting dragons or resisting mental domination by vampires.

That was part of my point: because without viable fighters who can stand up against dragon breath and vampires, Arthurian romance-style RPGing is impossible.

But I was also alluding to a broader point: that process simulation mechanics close of a range of narrative possibilities that we can very easily imagine, and that conversely FitM can open such possibilities up.

The problem, though, is that it was very easy to stay within the world of abstract rules and not enter "imaginative immersion."

I'm not saying that it isn't possible to have a richly imaginative experience with 4e, but that it is more difficult than it could be because of the way that the rules guide the experience of imagination. As Marshall McLuhan said, the medium is the message. The form of the rules largely defines, or at least guides, the experience of the game.

I'm sure this is true. If the imaginative experience that people want in RPG combat is imagining the difference between a thrust and a slash, 4e will not deliver that. (Mind you, I'm not sure that classic D&D will either.)

4e shifts the focus elsewhere - to who the PC is, and how s/he is going to engage this situation (alone or in concert; boldly or cautiously; etc).

The rules don't force this focus. That's why I said upthread that the players have to build certain sorts of PCs, and the GM frame certain sorts of encounters.

I'm not sure what you mean by "experienced" or how you differentiate it form "imagined." I see imagination as a form of experience.

It is. But not all experience is imagination.

When a character is low on hit points, and is in danger of being killed, and the players are wondering whether the player of the cleric can pull of a sequence of moves that will both (i) defeat the monsters, and (ii) save the dying PC, that is not imagining fear, and tension, and hope, and the possibility of leadership. That is experiencing those things. There is real fear that the PC might die, real tension arising from the uncertainty of the situation, real hope in the capabilities of the cleric player, and the real possibility of that player displaying leadership, turning the situation around and bringing his/her friends back into the action.

A game needs a fairly tight design to produce these experiences. If outcomes are foregone, there will be no tension. If all the big deals depend on GM fiat, there is no hope and expecation in relation to one's fellow players. (If the GM lies, there might be hope and expetation based on the illusion of possibility. But an illusion of possibility is not the same thing as actual possibility. Illusions are also prone to being dispelled.)

Playing Call of Cthulhu - which is the only really satisfying GM-driven RPG I'm familiar with - hope, and expectation, are all oriented towards the GM. And the situation itself is simply imagined. It is like being in the theatre.

At least in my experience, 4e does not play like that.

I was looking at the quotes around the "secret that was lost," which in the context of RPGs is the experience of imagination - and how to best inspire and evoke that, not the feel of the movie itself.

In my view the problem with this is that Arthurian romance, and related literature like Tolkien, is essentially reactionary. But while this sort of reactionary fantasy can itself have great aesthetic appeal, I'm not sure it makes for a good theory of aesthetics.

In other words, just because a certain aesthetic experience is (or has become) unsatisfactory, I think we should be very cautious of inferring that this is because something has been lost.

The change may well have another cause, whether some new external factor or some change in us. Or perhaps both.

And flipping it around, from aesthetic dissatisfaction to aesthetic satisfaction - part of the point of my post was to make a case that if you want an aesthetic experience in RPGing that captures the feel of reactionary fantasy of the Excalibur sort, it may be that more avant garde techniques are what is required.

 

[pemerton]

4e is rather specific - too specific for a large number (most, I think) D&D players.

<snip>

Another way to put it is that I think the problem with 4e is that it is too flavor-specific for a wide number of D&D players.

<snip>

This, again, brings me back to what I feel like is the "optimal" approach for 5e to take: a core simple "horse" with modular "cart" options. It remains to be seen whether they can really pull it off, but it seems the only way to please as many people as possible.

My own view is that classic D&D is also quite specific. And 3E/PF also. Something can be more popular without also being less specific. It's just that more people happen to like that other specific thing.

This has come up on the religion thread that's ongoing at the moment. Many posters, when they talk about "imagining religion in D&D play", are looking for details about rites, and holy days, and the like. For me that is quite secondary. When I'm playing a religious PC, I don't particularly care what his/her rites are - I'll make them up as we go along if I need them. What I want is mechanics + situation that will have me praying to my god, in character, in order to resolve some ingame crisis, and feeling the urgent longing of prayer conjoined with the unshakeable hope of faith. If a system can't give me that - for instance, because it's framing and resolution mechanics don't differentiate between a devotee seeking help from a god and a rogue hoping to get lucky while playing at dice - then it is not going to give me the sort of immersive experience I am looking for, now matter how much detail it provides about the wording of my prayers or the shape and colour of my dice.

Anyway, I'm yet to see much evidence that D&Dnext can be all things to all people. At this stage I haven't even seen much about how they intend to do that - the closest they've come, perhaps, is the interaction system. Plus a few rather tepid steps with things like damage on a miss.

 

[Minigiant]

Oh, and I think the OP shot the messenger in his original post, in that 4e made abundantly manifest that there are many differing tastes amongst D&D players, some not compatible. IMO this has been the case since the beginning of the hobby, but concealed by the lack of internet and popularity of houserules making every game individual.

Two of the biggest things that happened to D&D was at the late 90s early aughts: Increased access to the internet and Advancement in Video Gaming. It opened everyone's eyes of new ways to play.


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Every edition had their own restriction of imagination due to their mechanics.

In OD&D, my favorite character, a half elf ranger who was sneaky and casts mage spells, didn't exist. Rangers came in a magazine article which put spell casting high level and had no skills in the class. Half elves didn't exist, forcing me to ask the d&d for a house rule for the race. Still wasn't sneaky. In AD&D, many of the same issues. Oddly enough this was my starting point for D&D and the DM made no concessions for the "noob" in creation or roleplay. 3e had similar issue with complexity and useleessness but with creation restriction and DM reliance lowered. 4e was the first to make the half elf ranger/mage not dead weight or require 10 levels but it forced archetypes very hard.

I played the same PC is multiple editions and the experience and playstyle drastically changed. This altered the way I thought about my character, how others saw him, and how he was imagined. Not bad, but different.