D&D 5E Blog Post by Robert J. Schwalb

[Hussar]

Exactly. Or the idea that the deeper you go the more dangerous the threats and the greater the rewards. I'm just saying that that attitude is different from what we have today.

Meh. I counter with things like Rappan Athuk and The Worlds Largest Dungeon. And all three 3e Paizo Adventure Paths. The attitude may be broader but not so different.

 

[Neonchameleon]

The difference is a 3e rogue without combat skills won't be able to get the flanks needed to take advantage of sneak attack (not without risking death).

None of which means that your 3.X rogue is other than a murder machine in combat when they dare use it. You have a lot of combat skill there. You've medium BAB and a lot of extra damage both at range and in melee. Being a glass cannon is very different to being actively incompetent at combat.

A 4e rogue who takes all social skills will still be very effective in combat as so many rogue powers add movement.

But this is not the mirror to your deliberately crippled 3e Rogue. You are setting out to ensure that your rogue has no movement abilities and not doing so for the 4E one. I have yet to see a system with meaningful choices where you can't anti-optimise.

Most of a class' combat effectiveness comes from their powers and not their skills and feats.

Feats are pretty important in 4e. As for skills, there is one skill in 3.0/3.5 that's a combat skill with no mirror in 4E. Is your argument really "Because Tumble is no longer a skill you can not cripple a rogue's innate melee ability in the same way"?

I'll repeat: there's variance in combat effectiveness but far, far less variance than 3e. When you look at the variance when comparing a 4e character and another 4e character it will look like a lot but when you compare the effectiveness of a low-damage 3e character and low-damage 4e the difference is.

You're confusing effectiveness with damage. And then you're throwing in misconceptions about archetype and optimisation.

A naively built 4e character is going to be significantly closer to an optimised character than in 3e. It is very possible, contrary to your assertions, to build a 4e character that sucks in combat. A rogue with Dex 8 is going to be a mess whatever you do. The core difference is that 4E is going to tell you that you are doing this and suggest you do something else. 3.X lets you shoot your foot off. So does 4E. 4E will just warn you first that this is what you are about to do. There's a world of difference between that and making it impossible to do it.

Oh, and in this instance I'm not a 4e detractor. IIRC I picked an example to try and expand Schwab's point about builds and system mastery, and tried to pick one that wouldn't cause an edition war. But just like Schwab, because it's slightly implied that there's a possibility that I might be being negative regarding 3e or 4e and suddenly everyone NEEDS to defend their beloved edition from the slight.

No. You picked two examples. The Sorcerer and the Rogue. The Sorcerer is literally the only example among the 13 3.0/3.5 PHB classes for which your claim is accurate. Your Rogue example is just simply wrong. You can cripple people in just about any game. But out of the box all classes in 3.X are designed to be good at combat and you can't actually take most of their combat ability away.

Now if you want to say Commoner 20, Commoner 1/Survivor 5, or some multiclass mash with no BAB and first level spells, that I can't disagree with,

 

[ExploderWizard]

Indeed. The attitude changed some time in the early 1980s when D&D moved away from wargamers and to sci-fi fans. DL1 (one of the most popular modules ever) had, of course, the Obscure Death Rule. The rule that said you couldn't die because you were too important to the plot. And by 1989 2E removed the XP for GP rule, devoted a lot of time to encounter based play and unless I'm completely mistaken suggested the GM fudge results.

It's been about 30 years since the dominant attitude in the hobby changed.

Thanks for the support.

I always thought at the time that gp for xp was a dumb rule. I've reconsidered my judgment after seeing where it has led us. Perhaps Gygax knew something or maybe he was just lucky.

So much changed when the focus of play began to be about fighting monsters instead of winning treasure. Neither approach works quite as well when the rules from the other game type are used. The original rules still work quite well for the type of game they were designed for.

It seems rather silly to have a class called 'fighter' in a game that is designed around all participants frequently having combat encounters as the primary way to advance. In this sense everyone is a fighter since everyone is expected to contribute to fighting more or less equally. 'Fighter' as it relates to "one who fights" well describes the entire party.

 

[Jester David]

No one is arguing that 4e doesn't make it harder to make a bad character.
They're just nitpicking your specific very flawed example

Funny thing... they were. That's why I brought up the specific example.

 

[keterys]

Hm, ok. Well, I'd not be surprised if I read the first few pages and the last several pages, so missed that part.

I will concede that rogues in 3e could also end up hideously ineffective if the DM really liked crit immune stuff. Similar to being a lightning sorcerer who suddenly finds he's going up against skeletons and wants to know why the heck they're all immune to electricity I think that's more of a system-wide approach to immunities and counter-immunities abounding, though.

 

[Balesir]

Well, another thread of the same old stuff.

Rob's blog was interesting, from a "so this is why 5E is as it seems to be" point of view, but I don't consider it "edition warring" as such. The only part of it that really gives me pause, because I think it describes a belief that I think is not only wrong but deluded in a way that is damaging to good game design, comes in this passage:

The prize for being the best player goes not to the creative mind, the cunning tactician, the burgeoning actor, but to the best mathematician.

Let's take a closer look at this.

The idea is that unambiguous rules - axioms for game play rather than guidelines intended to inspire "rulings" - do not allow or at least do not encourage creativity, cunning tactics or character acting. They promote nothing more than the (implicitly inferior) "mathematics".

Hmm.

In 1995 Andrew Wiles published a proof of what had become known as "Fermat's Last Conjecture" (or "Fermat's Last Theorem"). It had taken humanity as a whole since 1637 to figure this problem out. It required supreme cleverness, incredible creativity and, yes, some pretty cunning "tactics" to solve this most tricky of puzzles. And yet, according to this blog, this could not be. Mathematics is based entirely on axioms - rules that are precisely defined independently of observed reality, even though they mirror many things that happen in reality in ways that make mathematics of considerable practical use - and gives no recourse to "rulings" whatsoever.

The idea that situations - puzzles, games, whatever - that are based on firm axioms that control what may and may not be done in the activity cannot allow or even encourage creativity, tactics and cleverness is simply wrong. It is wrong both in that it is incorrect and in that it is damaging and misleading to suggest it. It leads, for example, to statements like this one:

He never says that you can't be clever, he says that the game doesn't reward that. Which is true. DM's reward clevering thinking. Or rather, good DMs reward clever thinking. The game however does not have rules for clever thinking. Rewarding clevering thinking is pretty much a house rule.

DMs cannot possibly reward "clever thinking" consistently, because they do not have any monopoly on knowing what "clever thinking" is. They reward what they regard as clever thinking. This is a different thing.

The same applies to the notion that there is a "world first" approach where the "rules of the world" trump the rules of the game. The game world does not exist (except in the sense that it "exists" in the imaginations of the players - meaning that it still cannot have rules since what is in our imaginations has only such rules as the containing mind imposes upon it). What we are really saying, then, when we say "the rules of the game world trump the written game rules" is that the model that the GM has in mind for the game world overrides anything that has been communicated to the players (in the form of "game rules").

In this context, what does "DM's reward clevering thinking" (sic) mean? It basically means that if your thinking happens to fit with the GM's model of the game setting (or happens to be something the GM considers "cool" or "clever"), then your thinking will be rewarded. If this is not so, tough luck. There is nothing particularly wrong with this style of assessment; individual aesthetic judgement is used in several other fields, ranging from beauty pageants and flower shows to Olympic figure skating and gymnastics. It would be good, however, to have clearly in view that this is what we are discussing, and not some sort of objectively measured "clever thinking". Andrew Wiles achieved genuine clever thinking in a way that can be assessed completely objectively, relying, as it does, on correctness against established axioms. Persuading someone that your idea is cool/appropriate, while quite praiseworthy in its way, is not really in the same league.

 

[Hussar]

The elephant in the room though is that 3e is the outlier here. Sure, you can cripple your character through chargen choices. Let's see you make a combat ineffective cleric in AD&D. Or 2e for that matter (note, I said CLERIC, not priest of a specific mythos). An AD&D rogue is always equally effective in combat, pretty much regardless of chargen choices. About the only thing you could do to cripple your AD&D rogue's combat abilities would be to dump stat Str and Dex really badly. Which, with class stat minimums, you can't dumpstat Dex.

Any of the fighter type classes will all be pretty effective combatants. It's pretty hard, barring simply refusing to fight, to make a combat ineffective character in AD&D.

The question that begs to be asked is, why should the system support players making characters that are deliberately acting against the system? It's D&D. Your character is expected to be an adventurer. Why should the system support you making a weaver? That's certainly not the assumptions of the game.

 

[Libramarian]

Indeed. The attitude changed some time in the early 1980s when D&D moved away from wargamers and to sci-fi fans. DL1 (one of the most popular modules ever) had, of course, the Obscure Death Rule. The rule that said you couldn't die because you were too important to the plot. And by 1989 2E removed the XP for GP rule, devoted a lot of time to encounter based play and unless I'm completely mistaken suggested the GM fudge results.

It's been about 30 years since the dominant attitude in the hobby changed.

Then Diablo happened and the tagline for 3e was "Back to the Dungeon"...

I think you should consider the false consensus effect next time you're about to make a rhetorical point by claiming that most people share your preferences.

In those senses, yes. I took you to be saying something like the GM's pleasure in the game is the most important. If you weren't, I misunderstood. If you were, I still don't think I agree.

I was, but in a game design sense, not a moral sense (should have made that clear in my comment on the blog; I think that part is where he decided I was trolling). Keeping the GM happy is most important for the health of the overall game.

I think this is a good example. In 4e to get that sort of creativity the players need access to a dominate effect (ie the potential is still there, but not in the Command spell). Using the Command spell creatively in 4e is going to be primarily about exploiting terrain and positioning - I don't think that's nothing, but I do think it is not as open-ended as what dominate permits. (I've sometimes seen it suggested that fictional positioning isn't part of this stuff, but that's not true in my experience - eg using forced movement to impale a beholder on a stalactite (actual play example) is certainly exploiting fictional positioning.)

4e is an odd mixture of tightly-defined combat rules (tighter than classic D&D - Command is just one example) and loose, almost free-descriptor, non-combat rules (much looser than classic D&D in my view). If you are looking for non-tactical creativity in 4e play, I think that is where it is most likely to be found. But even in combat there are options for creativity that are interesting and (I think) distinctive, such as using Intimidate or similar abilities to deal psychic damage.

I can see how using the forced movement to impale a beholder on a stalactite involves creative use of the fiction. That sounds cool. It just seems like such poor judgement to limit the Command spell in this way though. If 4e supports pushing monsters into stalactites with Command, I can't imagine that it would break anything to also allow the spell to force them to grovel or drop what they're holding, etc.

I think I said upthread it has to be through encounter-framing and rationing extended rests (and thereby resource recovery, hence resource availability).

If the GM doesn't frame encounters that will tax the players' resources then there is fiction, but not really much mechanical play - at which point the fiction really needs to be very engaging, because it will be the only source of pressure. In combat, taxing resources means taxing surges, action points and daily powers; out of combat that means taxing surges, action points, daily powers, rituals, and also encounter powers if the non-combat situation will not permit a short rest. You do this by putting something the players (and typically their PCs) want on the "other side" of the situation, and then mechanically framing the situation in such a way that they can't get to the other side without using those resources (eg fighting, persuading someone of something who really has a different opinion, getting somewhere that's hard to get to, etc). This is partly why the reliable encounter-building tools are so helpful - they give you the guidance you need in doing things that, as GM, you have to do (namely, frame encounters of known, typically high, levels of difficulty).

Interesting (can't xp unfortunately!). I think this is a good description of what GMs do in RPGs in general--give the players something to want (or guide them in choosing it) and then put obstacles in their way (or bring new implications of the thing they want to light so they have to reconsider whether/how badly they want it). It makes sense to me how you do that with 4e but I like how a lot of that is "baked into" classic D&D in a certain form. The players want XP, which they get mostly by finding treasure. To get it they have to go through a dungeon, and the game includes rules for building dungeons (better in Basic than AD&D).

Encounter balance is less consistent, but the appearance of a very tough monster/trap once in a while gives stretches of easy encounters more tension, because the players remember the last really tough thing and are wondering when the next one will show up. Consistent balance isn't necessary for consistent tension. I think this is really the idea behind the OSR "zen moment" of "forget game balance".

The disadvantage, of course, of baking these things into the game, is that it's the same thing every time you play. You can give the PCs other goals and things to care about (and I do), but long stretches of the dungeon-crawl treasure-hunting game will reduce the focus on those things. I think if someone dislikes 4e because too much time is spent on combat rather than developing "the story", they would probably be even more frustrated in my game, because dungeons in my game do the same thing and take even longer to resolve.

 

[Emerikol]

Meh. I counter with things like Rappan Athuk and The Worlds Largest Dungeon. And all three 3e Paizo Adventure Paths. The attitude may be broader but not so different.

Not sure about the 3e adventure paths from Paizo but I am sure the other two dungeons were very much laid out as old school intentionally.

The primary discussion point though was that prior to 3e there was less focus on perfectly balanced encounters. Not zero focus. Less focus. That was the original point.

 

[Hussar]

Not sure about the 3e adventure paths from Paizo but I am sure the other two dungeons were very much laid out as old school intentionally.

The primary discussion point though was that prior to 3e there was less focus on perfectly balanced encounters. Not zero focus. Less focus. That was the original point.

That's like saying in the early days of cars, there was less focus on emissions. Well, of course. The technology didn't exist to reduce emissions at the time, so, there wasn't much focus. AD&D's math was very ... organic, so, of course there wasn't the focus on "perfectly balanced" encounters.

However, the mistake you are making is that 3e or 4e focuses on "perfectly" at all. Balanced? Sure. Balanced in the sense that the encounters become more predictable because the math behind the game is far more transparent. But, there is absolutely nothing in the game which states that any encounters have to be "perfectly" balanced. In either edition. This is just a meme that critics of 3e and then 4e like to trot out to show the superiority of earlier editions.

I challenge you to find a single quote in the 3e or 4e DMG which states that encounters should be perfectly balanced.