D&D 5E Coming Around on the "Not D&D" D&D Next Train

[teitan]

Honestly, just reading essentials & how they emphasize improv and give excellent guidelines as well as variable interesting terrain with guidelines for how it can bee used by the DM to make encounters more interesting I find 4e works better at the example than previous editions at making encounters more interesting.

 

[Gorgoroth]

I know it's possible with p42, but I've never seen it used in three years of gaming with 6 different DMs.

It would be one thing if it were just one DM or player saying this, but it isn't. Whether the rules allow something buried deep somewhere, or encourage its use, are two completely different things. Kind of silly to have an eight page character sheet and use a lot of improvisation.

Be honest now, what percentage of time to you think is used to improvise stuff? 5% ? That's one in twenty actions. I doubt it's even half that. That's because you're invested in your powers, you took the time to select them, to boost their efficacy. I just don't see players throwing out all that effort and ignoring the powers on their 8 page character sheets very often.

For better or worse (worse, IMO), it encourages players to draw within the lines. A one- or two-page character sheet should be sufficient for any non-spellcasting class.

Anything more is already ipso facto codifies your action selection possibilities way too much, that was not required in any other edition. You might argue that more options and more pages don't force you to play this way, but in practice is results in that style of gameplay. I.e. on rails.

 

[Imaro]

nevermind

 

[Imaro]

As @teitan pointed out, this is just not true. I mean, the DMG has a section headed "Actions the rules don't cover" (page 42) and the Rules Compendium lists examples of improvisational uses of skills. With its standardised DCs and standardised damage values, the game absolutely supports improvised action resolution.

I only find this to be the case if you ignore or don't consider the fact that a power, ritual, etc. is an expenditure of a player resource in order for said player's character to be able to perform a particular action... if everyone can wield two weapons and attack twice improvisationally... why does the Ranger or Tempest Fighter build have to take powers in order to do it? If I can use Arcana improvisationally to do magical things... what are the point of rituals... and so on. If you're making these actions sub-optimal, well then why would I do them instead of using one of my powers?

I actually think 4e's improvisation through page 42 and the power structure of the game don't match up very well when it comes to setting player expectations for the game.

 

[Kinak]

I only find this to be the case if you ignore or don't consider the fact that a power, ritual, etc. is an expenditure of a player resource in order for said player's character to be able to perform a particular action... if everyone can wield two weapons and attack twice improvisationally... why does the Ranger or Tempest Fighter build have to take powers in order to do it? If I can use Arcana improvisationally to do magical things... what are the point of rituals... and so on. If you're making these actions sub-optimal, well then why would I do them instead of using one of my powers?

I actually think 4e's improvisation through page 42 and the power structure of the game don't match up very well when it comes to setting player expectations for the game.

I absolutely agree but, to pull this a bit back from 4e, I find 3.x and Pathfinder have much the same problem.

How good can you make improvised trip attempts before Improved Trip starts to look really stupid? How far can you let Prestidigitation go before other out of combat cantrips are pointless? If you let your players make Intimidate checks as free actions when they butcher enemies, did you just invalidate a chain of feats?

Every time you add a character option that says "if you spend X, you can do Y" it doesn't dictate but strongly implies that you can't do Y without spending X.

Cheers!
Kinak

 

[Imaro]

I absolutely agree but, to pull this a bit back from 4e, I find 3.x and Pathfinder have much the same problem.

How good can you make improvised trip attempts before Improved Trip starts to look really stupid? How far can you let Prestidigitation go before other out of combat cantrips are pointless? If you let your players make Intimidate checks as free actions when they butcher enemies, did you just invalidate a chain of feats?

Every time you add a character option that says "if you spend X, you can do Y" it doesn't dictate but strongly implies that you can't do Y without spending X.

Cheers!
Kinak

I agree with you to a certain point. There is a difference between 3.x/PF and 4e when it comes to certain actions. In 3e anyone can pick up two weapons and fight and they are well aware of the disadvantage of doing such unless one has the feats to improve it... in other words 3e says you can try this but you won't be that great at it...

4e on the other hand has no general rule for 2-weapon fighting, or tripping or other actions and at times even contradictory ways of expressing or resolving certain actions in the case of feats vs. powers which, IMO, suggests in an even stronger way that you can't even attempt this action without power "X" or feat "Y".

 

[Gadget]

I agree with you to a certain point. There is a difference between 3.x/PF and 4e when it comes to certain actions. In 3e anyone can pick up two weapons and fight and they are well aware of the disadvantage of doing such unless one has the feats to improve it... in other words 3e says you can try this but you won't be that great at it...

4e on the other hand has no general rule for 2-weapon fighting, or tripping or other actions and at times even contradictory ways of expressing or resolving certain actions in the case of feats vs. powers which, IMO, suggests in an even stronger way that you can't even attempt this action without power "X" or feat "Y".

IMHO, no one in 3e actually performed these suboptimal actions in practice though. It kind of made certain people feel better that they were there from a process sim point of view, but all 4e did was remove some of this simulationist clutter to give us a more streamlined and practical approach.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I agree with you to a certain point. There is a difference between 3.x/PF and 4e when it comes to certain actions. In 3e anyone can pick up two weapons and fight and they are well aware of the disadvantage of doing such unless one has the feats to improve it... in other words 3e says you can try this but you won't be that great at it...

4e on the other hand has no general rule for 2-weapon fighting, or tripping or other actions and at times even contradictory ways of expressing or resolving certain actions in the case of feats vs. powers which, IMO, suggests in an even stronger way that you can't even attempt this action without power "X" or feat "Y".

I thought 4e handled improvised actions quite well, and to answer [MENTION=6674889]Gorgoroth[/MENTION],s question we use them a lot, BUT you may have to decide what you consider 'improvised'. IMHO there is a perfectly fine way to handle 4e, if you want to do something that a power won't handle, then you need to make a check to determine if you can succeed. So when the other week the goliath barbarian wanted to charge the fire beetle that was down on the lower floor of a split level room he just leapt down as the movement part of his charge action, which he had to roll an acrobatics check to do successfully. If he had some sort of 'Leaping Charge' feat/power (there is one, but I forget the name) then he wouldn't need to make that check. Other things like 'dual wield' aren't really actions. There simply is no "attack simultaneously with 2 weapons" general action in 4e. If you have the Two-weapon Fighting feat, then an extra weapon grants a damage bonus, otherwise you need to have a power to make multiple attacks. You are of course free to spend an AP and attack with one weapon, and then the other weapon if you WANT, though it seems inefficient. If a player told me they were holding two weapons and wanted to improvise a "big nasty double attack" then we'd use page 42 for it, and you guessed it, they'd have to pass some sort of check to even make the attack.

Anyway, I still think 4e's methods here seem more cohesive than DDN's. In terms of what sort of 'DnD' DDN is, I don't know, but it certainly bugs me that it has significantly less elegant rules for resolving things. It feels a lot like late cycle AD&D in what it is aiming at. There are some good things about that, I thought 2e was a pretty well-written and presented game overall, but a lot of its conventions felt overly restrictive or stilted to me, which seems to carry over into DDN. I'd be good with DDN as another game in keeping with 4e's concept of obtaining first class quality game mechanics and the rest is all negotiable, there are some ideas to like both mechanical and potentially presentation-wise, but I just don't see the overall mechanical elegance of a 4e there. DDN needs to shed a lot of its AD&D-isms and get cleaned up. It COULD then stand alone as a solid game. Currently I'd rather just keep running 4e though.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

IMHO, no one in 3e actually performed these suboptimal actions in practice though. It kind of made certain people feel better that they were there from a process sim point of view, but all 4e did was remove some of this simulationist clutter to give us a more streamlined and practical approach.

Well, some of them weren't sub-optimal. The problem was kind of that because they were treated so differently from 'normal' attacks they were bound to be either a lot better or a lot worse, so in a given situation it was all or nothing. Coupled with that characters either optimized them or they weren't worth using, and you could only be good at a very few things (especially as a fighter). So you had the tripping guy that just ALWAYS tripped stuff, but was pretty much SOL against stuff that couldn't be tripped, etc.

This is why I felt that the 4e approach of doing things as attacks using powers, or at most as skill checks (which are very much like attacks and can be considered the same thing effectively) was so robust. It means that if someone can trip it will be roughly as good as other sorts of attacks, possibly good enough to be encounter or daily depending all the details, but in every case you'll look at your options and more likely pick that one for good tactical or story reasons vs just because its mechanically optimum. Characters without a specific power can then fall back on page 42, which is guaranteed to be either situational or slightly inferior to an encounter power in most cases. No system is perfect and in practice 4e's approach can be improved a bit, but I find it hard to endorse DDN when its only reaction to what was learned in 4e is to shun it for no discernible reason except it was in 4e. Sorry, DDN should do things for good design reasons, not "because 4e icky poo".

 

[Kinak]

4e on the other hand has no general rule for 2-weapon fighting, or tripping or other actions and at times even contradictory ways of expressing or resolving certain actions in the case of feats vs. powers which, IMO, suggests in an even stronger way that you can't even attempt this action without power "X" or feat "Y".

Yeah, I'm not really sure which is worse for stifling improvisation in combat.

But, in both cases, putting so much weight behind character build options ends up hedging in their options in combat. It's an interesting trade-off.

Cheers!
Kinak