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: 6232022" data-attributes="member: 42582">Of course. The question is whether the game encourages - in its rules text, in its advice text, in its examples of play, in its published modules, etc - the running of scenarios that fall within or without the scope of what it can handle.4e really doesn't have the mechanical resources for running a game of fantasy merchants. But nor do any of its text suggest that you might use them to run this sort of game.2nd ed AD&D doesn't have the mechanical resources to adjudicate an encounter between a PC and a town guard, or a patron, or a princess - unless that encounter is a combat encouner. But its text 100% suggests that you might run just this sort of thing in an AD&D 2nd ed game.Classic D&D doesn't have any sort of universal resolution mechanic. Neither classic D&D nor 3E has the relatively tight calibration of DCs, damage and levels that 4e does, that allows page 42 to exist and operate as it does in 4e. So my view is, no, this can't be done effectively in earlier versions of D&D.It's like Robin Laws just cutting and pasting the pass/fail cycle material from HeroQuest revised into the 4e DMG2 - the techniques simply can't be applied in 4e (or any other version of D&D, for that matter) as they are in HeroWars/Quest because the mechanical "spine" of the system is so different.Similarly, there is no analogue of p 42 for Burning Wheel, because it uses a fundamentally different technique for setting DCs (they are set "objectively" or "realistically", not on a metagame basis) and for adjudicating the effects of successful actions (there is nothing like the "level-appropriate damage" of 4e).If you think the difference between choosing tropes and choosing outcomes is a hairsplitting difference, OK. I don't agree. When we all sit down to play (say) a core 4e rulebooks fantasy D&D campaign, we have settled on a whole heap of tropes: dwarves, elves and orcs are in; cities with steel skyscrapers and rayguns are out. But nothing is yet known about what events will occur within the game.DMG p 42:Shiera the 8th-level rogue wants to try the classic swashbuckling move of swinging on a chandelier and kicking an ogre in the chest on her way down to the ground, hoping to push the ogre into the brazier of burning coals behind it. An Acrobatics check seems reasonable. This sort of action is exactly the kind of thinking you want to encourage, so you pick an easy DCThere is the "credibility test: - "the classic swashbuckling move", "this sort of action is exactly the kind of thinking you want to encourage", "an Acrobatics check seems reasonable".Key features include the determining of what is "reasonable" not by reference to real world physics but rather genre considerations - "the classic swashbuckling move" - and the setting of DC based on metagame genre considerations - "this sort of action is exactly the kind of thinking you want to encourage - rather than ingame causal process considerations.The only difference I can see from the process described in the HeroQuest revised or MHRP rulebooks is that application of a credibility test is part of every action declaration in those games, whereas in 4e it only comes into play with p 42. When players are using their powers, they are performing actions which have been "pre-declared" to be credible within the genre.</blockquote>

Verification