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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6226925" data-attributes="member: 42582">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. I have complained about this frequently on these boards - the Foreword to Moldvay, with its example of the warrior dispatching the dragon tyrant with a sword gifted by a mysterious cleric, promises fantasy romance; but the only part of the mechanics not dedicated to exploration (and built-environment exploration at that, with all the stuff about doors and traps and light sources) is the Reaction Table, and even that is framed primarily in terms of encounters in dungeon between quasi-military units.Conversely, it is rather easy to play a game with the feel of Excalibur using 4e, provided that the players build the right sorts of PCs (more warlords, paladins and avengers; not too many halfing rogue worshippers of Avandra) and the GM frames the right sorts of encounters (avoid ankhegs, kruthiks and bulettes).This is because 4e is obviously influenced by indie RPG design, or at least some strands thereof: there's not a lot of Over the Edge in 4e (contrast 13th Age, where Tweet reprises several elements of OtE for the pleasure of an audience mostly ignorant of that earlier game); but there's more than a little bit of HeroWars/Quest, and of Ron Edwards's design ideas. Perhaps the single most important part of indie design to which 4e aspires (whether or not it always achieves) is to get rid of GM-created illusions, and to makes the stakes (i) real and (ii) transparent to the players.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.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.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.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.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 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.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.</blockquote>

Verification