Confirm or Deny: D&D4e would be going strong had it not been titled D&D

[tomBitonti]

4e is a lot more versatile, genre-wise, than it is given credit for. For instance, the Feywild is rife with Dark and Fairytale fantasy themes that play right into 4e's machinery. Mechanically, the trick is knowing which knobs to turn. Those knobs typically being either making (1) Extended Rests more precious at the metagame level (eg, turn daily refresh into some other kind of refresh...like adventure or quest related). Alternatively, you can make it more difficult to come by at the level of the fiction. For the latter, you can treat it as the Dungeon World Recover move (you cannot rest and recover until you have both comfort and safety). Attaining that is typically by succeeding at a difficult, (2) ablative Skill Challenge (charge Healing Surges for all failures). Another knob that expressly induces the horror element is the (3) Disease Track. Because divine magic options to remove horror-related ailments, curses, or wasting diseases (magical and otherwise) are not as proliferate in 4e (and expensive to use if you have them), unnerving the players by leveraging the Disease Track is a potent tool. Then there is the precise (4) Encounter Budget. If I want to make borderline lethal (and exactly that) combats non-stop for the players, it is trivially accomplished.

That's very nicely described.

I wonder: What you've described sounds like the DM asserting control over the metagame, to a degree quite stronger than the game is run in its default settings. Here I am using metagame to describe the top level adjustments which were made, for example, adjusting when healing surges are available, and adding effects which cost healing surges.

Players are quite empowered by the combat round mechanics: Combat and round mechanics, and player and monster abilities are both very precisely defined, with the intent to give players complete freedom to engage in combat.

Are players ever confrontational about the metagame adjustments? I could imagine a player, springboarding over their knowledge of how player abilities works, expecting the metagame mechanics to be both precisely defined, and close in definition to the default definitions.

Basically:

Player: Ok, we put the wolf bodies to the side, then set down for a rest.

DM: You can't rest; its a bit wet and damp, and the forest is unnerving. You find you are unable to rest.

Player: Huh?

What you are doing sounds great, and some players will have no trouble engaging in the modified metagame. But, I am thinking, many won't.

Thx!

TomB

 

[Manbearcat]

I've read some Alexander, but only his Prydain and Chinese stuff.

I couldn't find any URL references to his "High Fantasy and Heroic Romance"; is that one primer, or are those two categories? (Help?)

Here you are.

Three things about the essay appeal to me with respect to clarifying 4e best practices:

1) The genre clarity in and of itself. Specifically, the expectant role and nature of heroism in Romantic Fantasy.

2) The nature of attachment to the genre by the participant. High/Romantic Fantasy inclines us toward an emotional attachment that may be difficult to undress under examination. Nonetheless, it is a very real (perhaps even child-like...not to be mistaken for "childish") quality within us that seeks out the mysteries of the genre's appeal. Hence, why you see ardent 4e advocates pursuing emotional inhabitation of PC and only considered with the PC's perspective on the causal logic of the world insofar that the player (not character...player) has the requisite agency to make informed action declarations. That agency will require play to meet their genre expectations as much, if not more, than it will require play to meet their internal consistency/causal logic barometer.

3) The emergence of tropes/characters by the mysterious will of the creative process, which is something of an entity unto itself with its own volition. While the author is never totally absent, the creative process must be allowed its authorial agency to surprise and satisfy with "what comes next." 4e, like all scene-based games, is best played pedal to the medal in this fashion. Cast off your "desperate insecurities from not knowing what is going to happen next" or how this all comes together. It will work itself out through the will of the game's play procedures married to the agency of the players. They'll surprise you with their own ideas of "what comes next" or "how this comes together" (just as Alexander discovered the trajectory of 'heard a voice in the back of his mind, plaintive, whining, self-pitying' in the midst of innocuously going about his day). You won't have to worry about forcing things. Just keep putting interesting, genre-coherent and continuity-driven, conflict-charged scene-openers in front of them and they'll do unexpected, awesome things with that thematic pressure you've put on them. Follow their lead to wherever things go and by the power of that "mysterious creative process" you'll surely end up somewhere unexpected and more satisfying than if you saw it coming.

That's very nicely described.

I wonder: What you've described sounds like the DM asserting control over the metagame, to a degree quite stronger than the game is run in its default settings. Here I am using metagame to describe the top level adjustments which were made, for example, adjusting when healing surges are available, and adding effects which cost healing surges.

Players are quite empowered by the combat round mechanics: Combat and round mechanics, and player and monster abilities are both very precisely defined, with the intent to give players complete freedom to engage in combat.

Are players ever confrontational about the metagame adjustments? I could imagine a player, springboarding over their knowledge of how player abilities works, expecting the metagame mechanics to be both precisely defined, and close in definition to the default definitions.

This is actually one of 4e's strengths to be honest. With its outcome-based design and its transparent metagame, each component has little to no mystery with respect to what it produces unto itself and where it fits in with the other system components. Further, being broad-descriptor-based, so much of the system is abstract and malleable. Healing Surges are heroic mojo. The Skills are broad areas of proficiency. The Disease Track is "stuff that sucks for PCs and has lasting effects." The Skill Challenge system is a generic conflict resolution system meant to create dramatic flow and climax (rising action, falling action, denouement) for genre-coherent, non-combat action scenes. The Rest mechanics are just a metagame recharge system with mutable fictional positioning that can be shaped for the need of the session, the adventure, or the entirety of the campaign. The DMG2 has more and better advice on flexing each of the components I mentioned above in order to achieve various tones, lethality, and genre expectations.

The key issue here is telegraphing, transparency, and commitment to social contract. The players in my game have pretty much full knowledge of the metagame. They know that every/single micro-failure in an SC will cost them an HS (loss of heroic mojo) and a macro-failure will cost the entire group an HS. The players in my game know if the Extended Rest mechanics will require something specific at the metagame level to achieve them and what that associates to within the fiction. That way, they can take strategic initiative and make informed action declarations (player agency) such that they aren't suddenly jarred by what appears to be (or outright is) a game of arbitrary or adversarial goal-post-moving (eg "Calvinball"). If I made opaque "metagame adjustments" out of the blue, and it negatively affected player agency, I would expect players to be unhappy and confrontational about it. I would hope they would be because that means they're invested in the thematic interests of their characters, their ability to advocate for them, the impact of that advocating on the trajectory of play/emergent story, and they believe it is my job to always observe those interests and maximize their agency to affect their sought ends.

 

[pemerton]

How well does 4e do suspense and horror

I've never tried to GM serious horror.

To me, the key to fun CoC play is a terrific GM who takes control of the over-arching situation, but who also buys in and plays along as the players start emoting and acting on their PCs' gradual descent into madness. For this sort of play, the 4e character sheet has about 10x the necessary mechanical information. (This relates to what [MENTION=7635]Remathilis[/MENTION] posted not very far upthread.)

I don't know much about horror play that trades on player agency, but it must exist (what is Trail of Cthulhu for, otherwise?).

I think 4e does suspense well. Here are two links to actual play posts from my 4e game: the first is suspense in the mode of exploration, and the second suspense in the mode of social interaction.

Suspense tends to happen on the non-combat side of the game, and so isn't necessarily leveraging all of the game's mechanics (which are at least moderately inclined towards the combat side) - though as the reports I've linked to illustrate, there is frequently opportunity for players to bring those resources to bear in non-combat contexts.

What you've described sounds like the DM asserting control over the metagame, to a degree quite stronger than the game is run in its default settings. Here I am using metagame to describe the top level adjustments which were made, for example, adjusting when healing surges are available, and adding effects which cost healing surges.

<snip>

Are players ever confrontational about the metagame adjustments?

The key issue here is telegraphing, transparency, and commitment to social contract.

Manbercat is correct here, in my view. I'll say a little bit about it from my own experience.

The use of HS as an ablative resource for out-of-combat resolution is expressly flagged, with a bit of discussion, in the 4e DMG. There is more discussion and mechanical advice in the DMG2.

In an early session of my game (maybe the fifth or sixth), the paladin of the Raven Queen was fighting a wight. The player asked if he could speak a prayer (Religion check) to get some sort of advantage against said wight. I offered a wager: if the check was successful, combat advantage; if it failed, psychic damage as the paladin's heart sinks because his mistress has not heard him. Similar sorts of trade-offs have been part of the game ever since. Because 4e gives players much more control over their hit point status than does AD&D, the use of hp/HS as a resource in the way Manbearcat describes isn't so much the GM punishing the players, but rather providing them with decision points.

The first time that I remember making an extended rest's availability depend upon the outcome of a skill challenge is a couple of sessions after what I've just described. This is not discussed in the rulebooks (as best I recall), but is a pretty natural outgrowth of the game's mechanical structure and GMing advice. I think this is further confirmed by the fact that multiple 4e GMs have hit upon it independently.

The players can see what is going on in these situations, and make their choices about resource use accordingly. The extreme transparency of 4e's resolution, resource suites and pacing dynamics is a big help in this respect.

To give a very rough analogy: in a Gygaxian dungeon crawl, the players (i) know their PCs will be safe if they make it out of the dungeon, but (ii) know that they won't just be gifted a path out of the dungeon; they have to actually achieve this. So they plan around it. It's not a "gotcha" from the GM, but a transparent part of the game (and feeds into the wandering monster mechanics, the trap avoidance mechanics, the pursuit mechanics, etc).

4e tends to default to a different fictional backdrop (a world rather than a dungeon), and so the resolution system is different (skill challenge rather than clever mapping and skilled dungeon crawling), but the transparency and the role of the GM as a referee is comparable when you look at it from a high-level perspective.

 

[innerdude]

Further, being broad-descriptor-based, so much of the system is abstract and malleable. Healing Surges are heroic mojo. The Skills are broad areas of proficiency. The Disease Track is "stuff that sucks for PCs and has lasting effects."

I generated a very long post addressing some talking points @pemerton brought up earlier, but my browser crashed and I lost it, but I did want to comment here.

Looking at the way you describe 4e like this, @Manbearcat, makes it seem very similar to what I'm getting out of Savage Worlds---you're turning "healing surges" (a pretty terrible keyword, if you ask me) into a "hero pool." That's exactly the same thing as Savage Worlds "bennies," a pool of resources that lets the heroes be "heroic." And in that light, I'm suddenly much more open to the idea.

Basically, the only difference between a "healing surge" in D&D and a "bennie" in Savage Worlds, at least in terms of being used as a healing mechanic, is that in Savage Worlds, it's damage prevention rather than healing after the fact. Making a damage "soak roll" in Savage Worlds is a narrative resolution mechanic, not a process sim one----how did the hero just avoid taking that massive hit right now? Dunno, but by spending a benny and making a successful Vigor check, the PC just avoided taking a sword stroke across the shoulder.

Change healing surges to "hero points," and turn them into damage prevention and suddenly it makes a lot more sense. I'm not having to justify in the fiction an hour after a fight how a fighter sits down for 10 minutes and spends a "healing surge." Instead I adjudicate that the damage never occurred in the first place in the immediate fiction. It's ultimately the same thing----it's exchanging one metagame resource for another based on a player decision point, it just changes the when and why. A "hero pool" also would have ramifications for the warlord class in 4e that would make it much easier for me to understand---a warlord power wouldn't give direct hitpoint recovery, it would give back "hero pool" points. (If the player chooses to use those hero pool points for damage prevention later, great---it's the functional equivalent of hit point recovery).

"Get on your feet, soldier! We can do this! Fight on!" Character gets up in the fiction (receives a hero pool point to spend). Two rounds later, character gets hit, but spends the hero pool point they just gained, and suddenly the damage is negated.

Mechanically, it's the same end result. Did I just prevent the damage from happening, or did the player "heal" after taking a short rest? Doesn't matter, the player's hit point total is exactly the same at the end of the fight. Yeah, it's still "dissociated" from the fiction, i.e., a narrative resolution mechanic. But I'm only having to "narrate" the damage avoidance fiction, which is a single decision point. I'm not having to play "Schrodinger's wounds" or come up with some elaborate reason why getting down to 3 HP, then going back to 30 works in the fiction.

Along those same lines, I think a basic change from player resource expenditure to fortune-based resource expenditure would also make a big difference for me.

Specifically for martial characters, strike daily powers, move everything to encounter powers, and set a "recharge" mechanic of some kind. In Savage Worlds it would be brutally easy----any time a player is dealt a Joker, for example. Or a player could spend a "bennie" / "hero pool" point to recharge an encounter power mid-fight. It's still not a perfect association to me, but causes vastly less mental gyrations for me than trying to justify how and why a martial daily works.

Seriously, if 4e had these things changed:

• Healing surges changed to a "hero pool."
• When used as "healing," a "hero pool" point acts as damage prevention, rather than post-factum healing.
• Martial daily powers removed and turned into encounter powers.
• Having a fortune-based recharge for encounter powers mid-combat, or alternatively "hero pool" expenditure to recharge mid-combat.
• Revision of some of the problematic powers for better fictional association.

That.....actually sounds like a really interesting game. Like.....I might actually be excited to play a game like that, especially if it involved fun tactical combat.

But then......we run afoul of the original premise, then don't we? Would D&D 4e have been successful if it had been called something other than D&D?

I don't think my suggested changes make it any more like "D&D."

 

[innerdude]

Double post.

 

[Hussar]

Innerdude, just out of curiosity, do you have the same reservations about 5e healing? After all, a 5e fighter, at first level, can take enough damage during the day to outright kill him, but, by spending short rests and Second Wind, he could not only have full HP, but also, not have spent a single character resource.

And if 5e doesn't bother you, why not?

 

[spinozajack]

Innerdude, just out of curiosity, do you have the same reservations about 5e healing? After all, a 5e fighter, at first level, can take enough damage during the day to outright kill him, but, by spending short rests and Second Wind, he could not only have full HP, but also, not have spent a single character resource.

And if 5e doesn't bother you, why not?

Second Wind is one of the things that started in 4e that should have stayed there. What game benefit is there when a fighter can go on fighting all day long without spending a single character resource and then going to sleep and being near full health when everyone else is depleted? Doesn't make sense.

A party of 4 fighters would be taking a massive penalty to lose one fighter to gain a cleric instead, after the first two battles of each day. Not only for total healing, but durability, damage, total HP.

If this is your idea of good game mechanics, I'd like to know what your idea of a bad one is. I can't understand why it was ever considered necessary to give fighters such crazy durability at low levels when every other class is totally wiped. Including parties with 3 clerics and 1 fighter. I bet you any money, if you ran the numbers, a 4 fighter group could outlast an N cleric + whatever group in durability up until about level 5 or so.

At least in 4th edition the entire party would be wiped and want to rest after about 4 encounters, including the defender.

 

[Hussar]

Well, [MENTION=6794198]spinozajack[/MENTION], that only works if the party can take unlimited short rests (at 1 hour apiece), so, forcing the all fighter party to expend resources isn't that hard. Plus, as the second wind doesn't really scale by level, that d10 healing gets left behind fairly easily.

 

[pemerton]

Basically, the only difference between a "healing surge" in D&D and a "bennie" in Savage Worlds, at least in terms of being used as a healing mechanic, is that in Savage Worlds, it's damage prevention rather than healing after the fact.

<snip>

a warlord power wouldn't give direct hitpoint recovery, it would give back "hero pool" points.

But if you play "hp as mojo" then hit points are damage prevention. And spending a HS when inspired by a warlord, or blessed by a cleric, etc, is regaining those points.

Which is to say, as far as I can see 4e is already where you want it to be!

I guess the difference is that if a PC falls (due to hp loss), we don't know whether that is a mere swoon, or something more serious, until the dying phase is resolved. (This is similar to 5e.) I like this, because it makes possible scenes like the one in the Two Towers film where Aragorn recovers from dreaming of Arwen. So it reinforces the importance of inspiration and commitment within the fiction.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Well, @spinozajack, that only works if the party can take unlimited short rests (at 1 hour apiece), so, forcing the all fighter party to expend resources isn't that hard. Plus, as the second wind doesn't really scale by level, that d10 healing gets left behind fairly easily.

Yeah, I can't help noticing that @spinozajack 's argument depends, pretty centrally, on being at-or-near 1st level. Second Wind is AMAZING there, because you can restore your entire HP pool in one roll (if you're lucky). Or you can restore 2 HP (roll a 1, +1 for being a 1st level Fighter). Get up to 3rd level--the point at which the game really "begins" because the training wheels have (more or less) come off--and it's not nearly so insane. Not only do Clerics get their 2nd level spells (and have twice as many 1st level spells), they've also--from 2nd level--picked up their CD power and Domain feature. Strangely, Life Clerics actually get the Domain Feature a level earlier (despite the table saying it happens at level 2 for all types).

Regardless. A 3rd level Fighter with, let's say 14 Con, has (10+2) = 12 HP from first level, plus (5.5+2)*2 = 15 HP on average from levels 2 and 3 combined (or 16, if you use fixed values), for a total of 27-28 HP. Said Fighter can restore up to 13 HP on a lucky roll of Second Wind, and a minimum of 4, average (3+5.5) = 8.5 HP per short rest. (8.5/27)*100 = 31.48%, or on a lucky roll (13/27)*100 = 48.15%. So the Fighter can regain roughly a third of maximum HP, assuming neither high nor low Con investment. With "pseudo-dumped" Con (10), the HP value decreases by 6, to 21, meaning the percentages change to 40.48% and 61.90% for average and max, respectively. Is it good? Sure, it's supposed to be, it's a Fighter feature. Is it enough to make the Fighter overpowered? I would hesitate to say that. Even with a short rest after every combat, regaining a third of your health is big, but not insane; going with the expected 2-3 per day means getting back ROUGHLY your total HP over the whole day.

That is: at level 11, the Con 14 Fighter has (10+2)+(5.5+2)*10 = 12+75 = 87 HP (92 if using static values). Using Second Wind regenerates 1d10+11 HP, or 5.5+11 = 16.5 HP on average, or 21 for a lucky roll. That's (16.5/87)*100 = 18.97% on average, (21/87)*100 = 24.14% if lucky.

I've done an analysis (elsewhere) of the amount of healing a Cleric can contribute even without the Life domain. It's...substantially more than that value, even if the non-Life Cleric contributes only ~half its available slots as healing spells. With the Life domain, all bets are off; Preserve Life alone becomes a dominant part of party healing experienced. By level 11, it restores 55 HP--the equivalent of more than 3 Second Winds at that level--twice per short rest, for a total of 110 HP restored per rest without expending a single spell. And the points can be divided smoothly and evenly between party members, ensuring that there are no losses to over-healing. Even at level 3, it's restoring 15 HP a pop, which is straight-up better than Second Wind even if the Fighter consistently rolled 10s (10+level < level*5 is equivalent to level*4 > 10, which means level > 2.5). So Preserve Life becomes *strictly* better by level 3, and *worlds* better by level 6 when the Life Cleric can use it twice per rest.

Second Wind, like a number of other things, looks incredible at low levels because...well, low levels are low. Sequences always behave funny and have high divergence from the expected value when you look at their earliest members (consider that the first three ratios of consecutive Fibonacci numbers are 1, 2, 1.5--both of the first two values are pretty far off from the expected value, the golden ratio, but the sequence settles down quite nicely once you move away from its beginnings). For Second Wind, the healing as a percentage of health on average(/max), for a Con 14 Fighter, goes:
6.5/12*100 = 54.17% (11/12*100 = 91.67%)
7.5/19.5*100 = 31.48% (12/19.5*100 = 61.54%)
8.5/27*100 = 22.97% (13/27*100 = 48.15%)
9.5/34.5*100 = 27.54% (14/34.5*100 = 40.58%)
10.5/42*100 = 25.00% (15/42*100 = 35.71%)

So by 5th level, what once would on average give you over half your health (and could bring you to full) now gives on average a quarter of your health and can't ever give more than about a third. While a Life Cleric, just one level later, can restore 30 HP twice per rest, literally doubling the BEST possible result for a 5th-level Fighter.

It's a nice thing. But it's definitely not broken, and it is DEFINITELY not true that the party categorically loses by replacing a Fighter with a Cleric--at least if it's a Cleric of Life. And that's assuming said Cleric of Life NEVER spends any slots on healing.

Edit: If any Cleric--Life or not--spends just one slot per level known on healing, things can get pretty crazy. Especially if they focus on maxing their casting modifier. Assuming, for instance, an 8th level Cleric with 18 Wis, that's 10*(4.5+4) = 85 HP. (I'm ignoring over-healing losses because those can apply to the Fighters just as easily as the Cleric spells.) Now, compare that to assuming 3 uses of Second Wind per day at 13.5 average HP per use. A party of four Fighters gains 12*13.5 = 162 HP in total, but only 40.5 from any one Fighter's contributions; even if we up it to four uses, it's still only 54 HP per Fighter. Thus, the generic Cleric (heh, rhyme) brings between 1.5 and 2 times as much healing mojo, with only 1 Cure spell of each spell level known, and can bring in other helpful spells to boot (and those precious high-level spells could be saved by swapping in an equivalent number of levels of lower spells, e.g. a 4th level slot can be adequately replaced by two 1st and one 2nd). If the Cleric had instead gone for 20 Wis at this point, it would actually be better to cast low-level healing spells, because then the casting mod (5) would exceed the average die value (4.5) and thus result in overall more healing per spell level spent.

Edit II: Okay so I forgot that Preserve Life is limited to damage below half of max health. That's a valid criticism that weakens it noticeably. However, it's still highly useful; ironically, this means that it's actually best to blow Preserve Life during or immediately after combat, and save Second Wind (which CAN take you over half) for right before you take a short rest!