Blog post on the feel of D&D (marmell, reynolds et all)

[The_Gneech]

I'm sorta baffled by the assertion that 3.x was "rules for everything" and 4E is not. "Exception-based design" means precisely "everything is its own rule".

-The Gneech

 

[Crosswind]

You also have the problem of "You can't do that, there's no rules for it!", which is a common response.

That's sort of the counterpart to "I have to be able to do it, there's a rule for it!", isn't it? The sentence you quoted leaves the power in the hands of the DM. The sentence I quoted leaves the power in the hands of the player.

The reason I, personally, prefer the latter system is because, in my experience, good DMs are those who like to say "Yes." to their players, and let them try things. And there are a -lot- of players who like to try to find odd rules and exploit them - 3E supports this. For a lot of DMs, it's tough to say "No. The rule says you can have it, but in my game, you can't.". This leads to arguments, ill-will, etc. Making sure that all rules in the game are balanced, and letting DMs fiat the other ones helps solve this problem.

But the difference between "You can't do that, it's not in the rules!" and "I have to be able to do this, it's in the rules!" ...well, those are the bad sides of 4E, and 3E, respectively. There's certainly room for people who prefer each.

I tend to agree with you on what the flavor of D&D is, but I've never really taken anything but mechanics from the PHB. So I wouldn't say that 4E is going to deprive my campaign of any flavor. Your objections are, however, perfectly reasonable.

-Cross

 

[TerraDave]

I made a pretty nasty comment in another thread on this guy based on a simlar blogpost...and I really should not do it again...but has he played 1st or 3rd edition!!?!

Ok, I'll stop there.

I ran my first 4e game last night. My overall impression? It felt more or less like running other versions of D&D. Sure, how you determine which bonus to add to the roll might be a little different in cases, but it's more or less the same game from a DM's point of view. I should note that perhaps I was doing a lot more of the improv and on-the-spot rules decisions in 3e than some people were, and 4e seems designed to make that easier, but I honestly can't say that it's "not D&D."

Cheers,
Cam

You should start another thread. People want to know.

 

[Cam Banks]

You should start another thread. People want to know.

I probably should, yeah. I think I'll wait until session #2, however, because I want to shake it out a little more before I expand on my initial impression.

Cheers,
Cam

 

[JeDiWiker]

Like Sean, I'd just like to set a few things straight.

First, the post many of you are quoting is actually the third in a series of posts. The first was made while I was playing the "Raiders of Oakherst" scenario, and concluded with "The final verdict? None of us are convinced that we want to play 4th Edition D&D; we need to see more before we can decide. But it's late, and I need to sleep on this before I can emphatically say I liked it or not."

I posted again the next day, saying the jury was still out. A week later, it finally dawned on me what was bugging me, which prompted the "It doesn't feel like D&D" post . Now, although I think I've clarified over and over on my own blog, it doesn't feel like D&D to me. If it feels like D&D to you, great. Maybe I'm wrong. I'll be happy to find out I'm wrong. As a freelancer, it's in my best interests to play a lot of 4th Edition D&D; I'd like to enjoy the experience. But, with the minimal information I have on the game so far, it doesn't look like I will. You might, and that's cool. Why? Because it really is a good game? Not necessarily. More likely, you might enjoy it more than I do because we're different people, with different likes and different expectations and goals.

Do I think that you shouldn't commit to playing 4th Edition D&D? Well, yes, but not because I think the game sucks (which I don't), but because I think that everyone should make an informed decision before making a purchase of over $100. And if I have a problem with Wizards of the Coast over 4th Edition, it's that they are not giving us enough information to make informed decisions. We're getting opinions of people who have seen just a slice of the game (at the D&D Experience, at best, or, like me, from the fan-written "Raiders of Oakherst" and 4E PHB Lite). Most people who have seen it think it's a great game, but that doesn't make it true. If my opinion can be wrong, so can theirs. I don't think I owe anyone an apology for having a dissenting opinion, but, if it turns out that I enjoy 4th Edition more than 3.5, then I'll happily admit that I was wrong.

Really, though, I think that Wizards could do themselves a world of good by releasing more information, officially, on their own website, that explains, in detail, how more (not all) of the game works. Right now, they're just showcasing the stuff which addresses concerns that people had with 3.X (and, by extension, previous editions), but that really only serves to convert the people who weren't happy with 3.X. To sell 4E in the face of alternate efforts like the Pathfinder RPG (which may not appeal to you, but may appeal to people who want to play D&D without tossing out their previous $100-plus investments), then Wizards should be doing more to speak to the people who don't have a problem with 3.X. (For the record, I have plenty of problems with 3.5, and there are things in 4E that I think fix them elegantly. But I think they can also be fixed within the context of the 3.5 rules.)

And by "doing more," I don't mean hiding snippets of the rules on the Internet, or giving them out only to specific interviewers, or giving each member of the design team one thing they can reveal about the game. That kind of marketing may appeal to some people--but others, like me, find it annoying. I didn't go out of my way to pursue clues about Lost, Heroes, or Cloverfield, because, while I find such bits clever, I'm not looking for a mystery metagame; I'm looking for confirmed facts. (Which is why I read ENWorld's 4th Edition news more than I read Wizards' own web page on 4E; Wizards gives hints, ENWorld finds corroboration.)

As for the throwing salt thing, that was just an example; I'm not trying to replicate that in 4th Edition. In fact, I haven't tried to replicate it since 1st Edition. I don't even recall how my DM adjudicated it back in 1982, except that I made an attack roll, and sometimes my opponent was blinded, losing his action for a round. And I didn't use the salt trick all the time because salt in the eyes wasn't going to kill an orc; all it did was buy me a round when the orc didn't get to attack me. None of the other players bothered with it, because they were more effective than my character (a 1st Edition monk, remember) was at fighting. In fact, I started using that trick--and several others, when appropriate--because monks were so weak under those rules. Do I want to play 1st Edition rules again? I have the rulebooks still, but I don't like the rules. What I liked was the sense of discovering new things, and using my imagination to deal with them. Playing a monk probably forced me to think more "outside the box" than others in my own group--and I had an excellent DM, who was able to make good rulings on the fly and remember them later ... and retcon the rules if he later decided they didn't work a well as he wanted.

I'll be the first to agree that, while I'm entitled to an opinion, I shouldn't go out of my way to condemn 4th Edition--especially based on a fan-written adventure--which is why I went to such lengths to remind everyone that not only were these only opinions, but that I *want* to see more of the rules before I make a final determination. I'm not condemning 4th Edition, and I think you have to try pretty hard to come to the conclusion that I am. I'm just saying that I don't yet see what makes 4E indisputably superior to 3.5. Feel free to prove to me that it is superior to 3.5, but, remember, opinions are not arguments, so, really, the only way to prove it to me is to show me the 4E rules--which, by the same token, is the only way I can prove to you that 4E is inferior to 3.5. That is to say: Neither of us can prove at this time that our respective perceptions are accurate.

Have I covered it all? No--two last things. One, I consider myself a hack RPG designer. I'm not a design genius. If you like my ideas, fine. If you don't, that's fine, too. At best, I can say about any given ruleset "I wouldn't have done it that way." But I do find it interesting that at least one of the things I proposed back in 1999 (which Jonathan Tweet rejected) found its way into 4E, in one form or another. (I suggested that turning undead should only work on one undead creature at a time, and that it should deal some kind of damage--fairly close to the 4E version on the Erais character sheet.)

And as for vitality points in Star Wars? Not my idea. Andy Collins came up with that, and, though we brainstormed some ideas for how they should work, the original idea was Andy's.

Finally, let me just state for the record: I want to like 4th Edition. And there are things about it I like. But I can't make a final decision until I see the whole thing--and I want Wizards to do a bit more to convince me (and the rest of the audience) that we need a new game, when the old one, despite its faults, runs fine.

JD Wiker
Feel free to come argue with me at jediwiker.livejournal.com

 

[Lacyon]

(You also also have the problem, as some have noted, of having some actions be 'easier' because there's no explicit rules, even when they should be harder. If 'trip' is a per-encounter exploit available only to trained fighters, then "swinging on the chandelier and kicking the thug into the fireplace while yelling 'What ho!'" ought to be a high level daily power, at best -- but the 4e rules paradigm seems to make it an at-will 'roll vs reflex defense' which any shlub can attempt, simply because there's no explicit rule FOR it, if you follow me.)

How many times per day do your games tend to feature a chandelier, fireplace, and thug positioned just so?

In other words, complex stunts not covered by the rules become EASIER than simple actions which ARE covered -- and which are balanced properly.

Seems doubtful, for a couple of reasons: complex stunts use the exact same mechanics (X attack vs. Y defense) as simple ones, but they're complex. They're generally only possible if the situation's been set up to make them possible anyway - in other words, the DM put that thug, chandelier, and fireplace there specifically so that shoving his sorry butt in the oven was a possibility.

Meanwhile simple actions not covered by the rules are likely to be strictly worse than their counterpart powers. Speculation: The trip power you refer to earlier is likely to deal damage as well as knocking someone prone, just as Tide of Iron inflicts damage as well as pushing someone back. Your basic, untrained, knock-someone-on-his-ass attempt could be pretty easily resolved as a Str-vs-Ref or Str-vs-Fort, and it still won't be as good as the per-encounter, trained-only power. (You still have the possibility that it's too good because knocking someone prone is too good - I hope that they give us some good guidelines on the relative potency of various status effects and roughly how to penalize attempts to inflict them).

Depends on what you mean by 'classic'. If you mean, in terms of rule structure, no. But I never liked the actual D&D *rules* until third edition. I liked the *feel* of D&D -- a huge world of ancient magic, countless races, characters who rose from being pathetic losers to god-slaying heroes, and a sense of scale and scope no other system really had. (I mean, come on -- the abyss had 666 *infinite* layers! There was a para-elemental plane of Ooze!)

Fourth edition feels bland, constrained, and mechanistic to me. It looks and feels like something designed by committee and controlled by marketing. To that extent, it reminds me of 2e -- a watered down, flavorless, version of the prior edition, stripping out mechanics, options, and soul. There are some good ideas here and there, but the thing as a whole grabs me not.

I'm not seeing the constraints. I'm not seeing designed by committee or controlled by marketing (well, the flow of information definitely seems to be controlled by marketing, but that's at least part of what marketing is about). I'm not even seeing the stripping out of mechanics.

The thing as a whole is precisely what grabs me, though I confess I'm filling in a lot of the blanks myself at this point.

I know some people will look at that last sentence and say that I shouldn't be praising what I haven't seen of the rules. They're wrong. It's precisely because so many of the blanks are so easy to fill in that I can be reasonably certain of having a fun game even if the game designers decide not to do that work for me in every case (or even if they get it wrong in some cases).

 

[Lizard]

How many times per day do your games tend to feature a chandelier, fireplace, and thug positioned just so?

As often as the players ask if there is one and I think it's a good idea.

Meanwhile simple actions not covered by the rules are likely to be strictly worse than their counterpart powers. Speculation: The trip power you refer to earlier is likely to deal damage as well as knocking someone prone, just as Tide of Iron inflicts damage as well as pushing someone back. Your basic, untrained, knock-someone-on-his-ass attempt could be pretty easily resolved as a Str-vs-Ref or Str-vs-Fort, and it still won't be as good as the per-encounter, trained-only power. (You still have the possibility that it's too good because knocking someone prone is too good - I hope that they give us some good guidelines on the relative potency of various status effects and roughly how to penalize attempts to inflict them).

And these 'guidelines' differ from 'rules' how, other than by being vague?

Personally, I think "Let players do things with a simple check provided what they do is less effective than anything for which there are actual rules for" to be REALLY bad design, and I strongly doubt that's how the game will actually be written.

I just see a lot of confusion. Either "non rules actions" are always inferior to "rules actions", in which case, hardly anyone will use them, or they're a badly exploitable loophole ("Why waste a pick on 'Trip' when I can just make an attack vs. reflex?")

I keep telling myself we've seen only a dozen or so pages of rules out of 600+. There's got to be a lot more real crunch in those books than we're seeing.

 

[Zeborah]

The big question with such freeform stunts have always been: What happens when they get close to the defined stunts, who may be restricted in some way: require purchase, have limits on usage, etc. Do you suddenly prohibit that particular freeform stunt because it duplicates something you otherwise have to pay for? In the above example, the table kick is awfully close to doing a Trip, which you (A) have to buy as a power, and (B) is limited to once per encounter.

And what happens when new splatbooks come out with new Powers? Will those further restrict the freeform stunts availabe to you?

My answer is almost always no. A situation-specific freeform stunt can always be attempted, regardless of whether something similar is covered elsewhere in the rules. When you're playing in a rules-heavy system, everything's going to be covered somewhere eventually.

Now, if a player wants to invent a new, recurring schtick for their character? I'm in favor of that, so I like to give it mechanical support. In D&D 3.5, the usual solution was a new feat or magic item. In 4e, it looks like it may well be a custom power.

 

[mhensley]

Really, though, I think that Wizards could do themselves a world of good by releasing more information, officially, on their own website, that explains, in detail, how more (not all) of the game works.

QFTMT

 

[Lacyon]

Personally, I think "Let players do things with a simple check provided what they do is less effective than anything for which there are actual rules for" to be REALLY bad design, and I strongly doubt that's how the game will actually be written.

Sure. They just need to not be strictly better than attacking, and conditions which are more debilitating than others should be comparably more difficult to inflict. Using salt in the eyes to inflict the blinded condition is a lot more potent than having it just grant combat advantage.

I just see a lot of confusion. Either "non rules actions" are always inferior to "rules actions", in which case, hardly anyone will use them, or they're a badly exploitable loophole ("Why waste a pick on 'Trip' when I can just make an attack vs. reflex?")

I'm not sure why you think this is an intractible problem.

You can take a power that's better than the default attack vs. reflex (because it deals damage as well as inflicing X upon your enemy), or you can take a different power, that does a different thing and fall back on the attack vs. reflex when the specific situation makes knocking something prone particularly effective (like getting to knock two guys prone with one action because they're both standing on the same table that you're kicking over, or when you're trying to demonstrate your superiority over a character that you vastly outmatch without necessarily hurting them).

The "non rules action" only has to compete with the powers your character actually knows; it can be situationally useful even if it's strictly less good than the "rules action" that requires you to have picked power X and have it available.

Likewise, tripping/bullrushing/grappling is sometimes a good idea in 3E even if you don't have the Improved Whatever feat. In fact, a damaging trip power is quite comparable to the Improved Trip feat (which gives you a free attack against a now-prone opponent if you successfully trip). In either case, you're only going to use one with significant frequency if you spent some character-building currency on making yourself good at it.

The currency seems to have changed, the subsystems unified, and the status effects rebalanced, but there's no reason that all the same concepts can't be kept.

I keep telling myself we've seen only a dozen or so pages of rules out of 600+. There's got to be a lot more real crunch in those books than we're seeing.

Exactly.