D&D is not a supers game.

[pemerton]

Roleplaying Games cant do any books*, period.


*or TV series, or Films, or anything else that's not an RPG.

That strikes me as true in the same sense that film can't do books, because they are different communicaive media. True, but not necessarily that important in this context.

Bryan Singer's X-Men films (in my view, as a person with a near-complete collection of the Claremont-era X-Men) do a terrific job of capturing and conveying the feel and thematic content of the X-Men. John Boorman's Excalibur, in my view, does an excellent job of conveying the feel and thematic content of Arthurian romance.

An RPG should be able to capture and convey the spirit of Conan, or A Wizard of Earthsea, or LotR. I certainly think that 4e captures something of the heroic and mythic spirit of epics like the Iliad, or the more over-the-top Wuxia films. (Also the Marvel Universe approach to magic and cosmology, with its myriad planes and other-planer beinge enmeshed in the fate of the world.)

 

[pemerton]

I don't think people like to have the rules of fiction spelled out in this way. They want to believe that the fictional world might be real, to see it thru the eyes of its inhabitants.

No doubt you're right, at least for a good chunck of players. (I always find it odd that such players choose D&D, though, rather than games like Runequest that have mechanics that are more "transparent" in this respect.)

My feeling - and I guess it betrays my Forge-iness - is that that sort of approach makes it hard to ensure a satisfying game. Because if everyone is busy being "in" the fiction, no one is responsible for making sure that it's worth being in.

It's not as if REH or Tolkien or Mallory just let their characters lose in the fiction - they contrived interesting situations that would put those characters to the test. I like the same sort of RPG play - a GM taking responsibility for framing interesting scenes, the players taking responsiblity for building PCs who, played in those scenes, will lead to exciting and unexpected stuff happening. Ultimately the mechanics are tools for achieving this.

To be an author is, in a way, to have fiction ruined for you because you can see all the techniques.

I don't write fiction, but I do write non-fiction. (I'm a humanities academic.) Maybe I just have a big ego! - but I can still be interested, even excited, by stuff I've written. The ideas and arguments intrigue, please, disappoint, sometimes even surprise me (the latter if it's been a while).

When it comes to GMing my game, it doesn't bother me that I've set up the situations deliberately to be interesting, and that the mechanics are designed to suppot this. Because the play that actually emerges from them is still engaging and often suprising. Like in my last session - the dwarf fighter-cleric was having his dwarven smiths reforge Whelm - a dwarven thrower warhammer, originally from White Plume Mountain - into Overwhelm - the same thing but as a morenkrad (the character is a two-hander specialist). I was adjudicating it as a complexity 1 (4 before 3) skill challenge. The fighter-cleric had succeeded at Dungeoneering (the closest in 4e to an engineering skill) and Diplomacy (to keep his dwarven artificers at the forge as the temperature and magical energies rise to unprecedented heights). The wizard had succeeded at Arcana (to keep the magical forces in check). But the fighter-cleric failed his Religion check - he was praying to Moradin to help with the process, but it wasn't enough. So he shoved his hands into the forge and held down the hammer with brute strength! (Successful Endurance against a Hard DC.) His hands were burned and scarred, but the dwarven smiths were finally able to grab the hammer head with their tongs, and then beat and pull it into its new shape.

The wizard then healed the dwarf PC with a Remove Affliction (using Fundamental Ice as the material component), and over the course of a few weeks the burns healed. (Had the Endurance check failed, things would have played out much the same, but I'd decided that the character would feel the pang of the burns again whenever he picked up Overwhelm.)

I've GMed a few item creation scenes over the years, in classic D&D, Rolemaster and 4e. While a relatively minor scene, this was probably the most intense I've GMed, and it certainly made the fiction - the dwarven artificers, the forge, the magic of the artefact, the prowess of a 16th level warpriest of Moradin - come to life.

It didn't hurt the experience that the rules (in this case, for skill challenges) have been deliberately designed to produce those outcomes. Because when play is actually going on, we're mostly not thinking at the meta-level - cetainly not the players, and not even me as GM, except when deciding the consequences for failing that Endurance check. We're thinking about the fiction, and what is happening. After all, it was my description of the situation, and the player "inhabiting" his PC and asking "What am I not? - an artificer" and "What am I? - the toughtest dwarf around", that led him to say "I want to stick my hands into the forge and grab Whelm. Can I make an Endurance check for that?"

I couldn't have run this little scene (maybe 15 minutes at the table) without mechanics that make improvisation and robust adjudication easy. That's not all of what I like about 4e, but it's a big part of it.

 

[Argyle King]

Given how often Conan (and the pulp sword and sorcery tradition more generally) is cited as the inspiration for D&D, it would be odd if D&D in fact couldn't do Conan. (That's not an argument, obviously. Just an observation.)

If I wanted to run something Conan-esque in 4e, I would overwhelmingly use minions. And I would be prepared to narrate mechanical hits as fictional misses. I started a thread about this a while ago. From "The Phoenix on the Sword":

The king took Ascalante's point in his left arm, and the outlaw barely saved his life by ducking and springing backward from the swinging ax. . . .

Ascalante leaped like a wolf, halted almost in midair with incredible quickness and fell prostrate to avoid the death which was hissing toward him. He frantically whirled his feet out of the way and rolled clear as Conan recovered from his missed blow and struck again. This time the ax sank inches deep into the polished floor close to Ascalante's revolving legs.​

Clearly when Conan is stabbed by Ascalante, he has (in D&D terms) been hit and suffered hit point loss (perhaps he's been bloodied). But what about when Ascalante ducks and springs backward, then falls prostrate, and then whirls his feet out of the way? To get Conanesque 4e, you have to narrate that as hit point loss. Hit points become almost pure "plot protection." (Except perhaps for giant slugs and the like.)

Most NPCs and monsters would be minions, though, and so have no hit points - reflecting the fact that Conan has a better than 50% chance to cleave their skulls on an attack!


The dynamism and active defence I would do via liberal use of out-of-turn powers (like the duelist in Dark Sun, or the various ranger powers that allow a shift in response to being hit).

The permanent injury can't be done in by-the-book 4e. You would need to introduce conditions of some sort triggered by skill challenge failures, as a result of being dropped to 0 hp, etc.

Good advice.

Though, I believe in the other thread where you originally mentioned the scenario you quoted, I detailed how I'd be able to handle that with a different game. For me personally, while D&D most certainly can portray that scene (and many others), I question whether or not it can do it well.

The thought also strikes me that I'm not necessarily looking to play Conan when I mention him in these conversations. I'll be quite blunt; Conan is one of my favorite heroes, and I love R. Howard. (I'm also quite fond of Kull and Bran Mak Morn.) However, one of my favorite things about reading Howard's stories is the way he conveys the world.

You're completely right in the post where you say Howard framed interesting scenes. Part of why his world is interesting to me is because of the language Howard uses to convey his vision as a writer to me -as the reader. While there most certainly are fantastic and unrealistic things happening in the story, he finds a way to make me believe it. I can feel as though I'm there, and the world outside of Conan within the stories is a big part of that.

For what it's worth, the preview materials for 4th Edition gave me a similar feel. Worlds and Monsters had be really psyched for 4th Edition and what I thought it would be. So psyched in fact that I bought into 4th Edition based on pure faith, and I continued to buy books up until around Manual of The Planes. I kept thinking 'well, it's a new system, so they might not have some of the things I want worked out yet.' I thought that for a while, but the vision the previews gave me never seemed to make it into the final game.

The previous paragraph is something which makes me wary of D&D Durango. I have high hopes for the game, but the designers have already said that some of the options I want won't be available until a long time after the game is released. I'm holding the playtest material in my hand and I've used it. I would say I enjoyed it, but the preview of 5E hasn't evoked the positive reaction for me that Worlds and Monsters did. I don't feel negative about it; the problem is that I don't really feel anything. I engage in conversations about it, but the faith nor the excitement is there. I'm starting to veer into a different topic, so I'll hit the brakes and steer back the other way for now.

To get back to where I was going with this post, I'll first say that I do not feel D&D does Conan as well as other games do. I'll then say that the most fun I had with 4th Edition was when I ran a game where I completely embraced the over-the-top nature of it. That seemed better suited to how the game was set up -even with the house rules I have.

 

[pemerton]

I believe in the other thread where you originally mentioned the scenario you quoted, I detailed how I'd be able to handle that with a different game.

<snip>

I do not feel D&D does Conan as well as other games do.

I think you're right - especially at name/paragon level I think D&D is more over-the-top than Conan.

And I'm sure there other stuff that's particular to your Conan experience, too, that D&D doesn't do as well as other systems.

Worlds and Monsters had be really psyched for 4th Edition and what I thought it would be.

<snip>

I'm holding the playtest material in my hand and I've used it. I would say I enjoyed it, but the preview of 5E hasn't evoked the positive reaction for me that Worlds and Monsters did. I don't feel negative about it

I loved Worlds and Monsters too, but happily for me I felt that 4e delivered. A lot of people didn't like the 4e MM, but it really inspired me.

I must confess I do have a negative reaction to the playtest materials. The PCs don't especially inspire me (Forbidden Lore is the highlight, but nothing in the scenario calls out Forbidden Lore for the players to engage with). And the action resolution mechanics are underwhelming.

 

[pemerton]

[MENTION=21169]Doug McCrae[/MENTION] - thanks for the XP comment. I wanted to add something to my session report that I think fits with what you were saying.

Namely - how did I know that the dwarf shoving his hands into the forge was a Hard Endurance check, rather than just outright folly, even suicide?

Unfortunately, the 4e rulebooks don't really answer this question. I answered it by drawing on advice in Robin Laws' revised HeroQuest rules - before setting a DC, you have to decide whether an action is possible, or not, based on the genre conventions in effect at the play table. So there is a type of social-contract-mediated, pre-mechanical stage to action resolution, before mechanics kick in. And that probably doesn't fit at all well with the "see the fiction through the eyes of its inhabitants" players.

What they would want is a set of rules that specify the heat of the forge, the dwarf's hit points/DR etc - whereas how I did it was to think "Well, this guy is a 16th level warpriest who, last week, defeated a phalanx of hobgoblin warriors singlehandedly - when he prays and shoves his hands into the forge, it will hurt him, but he will be able to hold down Whelm." It was a pre-mechanical judgement call made by me as GM, drawing on the image of the character and his place in the world suggested by earlier events in the fiction, and I didn't feel I needed more mechanical detail to help me make it.

The player certainly bought into it. He even used Figther's Grit (an encounter utility power that let's him ignore a range of adverse conditions) before shoving his hands in - for that I let him get +2 to the Endurance check.

A common slogan/dichotomy used by the non-4e crowd is "story before rules", and they criticise 4e for going the other way. But I think that's too simplistic - it was the story that was driving my framing of the scene, my player's request to make an Endurance check, his use of Fighter's Grit to help, my adjudication of the outcome.

My view is that the issue is not about the priority of mechanics to story, but about the correspondence between (i) the actual mechanical processes and decision points, and (ii) causation within the fictional gameworld. (That's not a view I came up with via my own observations. It's just a restatement of the Forge definition of simulationism, and especially purist-for system simulationism. But I think a lot of these debates bear it out.)

 

[Neonchameleon]

@Doug McCrae - thanks for the XP comment. I wanted to add something to my session report that I think fits with what you were saying.

Namely - how did I know that the dwarf shoving his hands into the forge was a Hard Endurance check, rather than just outright folly, even suicide?

Because the player thought it was a reasonable if risky plan? That says "Hard" to me. If it had been outright folly I don't think the PC would have tried it...

 

[pemerton]

Because the player thought it was a reasonable if risky plan? That says "Hard" to me.

That's part of it, but I don't think it's all of it. My take, at least, is that the GM has a special responsibility to vet the players in this sort of stuff - that in a certain sense it wouldn't be fair to put all the weight just on the players' shoulders, because then they would have to both (i) push their PCs to the limits and (ii) police those limits.

If you look at the GM's role in this sort of way, though, how do you avoid "mother may I" and outright adversarialism? For me, this is where there is a need for clear genre implications and limitations, which can help the GM make a decision that is as objective (or at least consensually intersubjective) as possible. 4e delivers those, I think - it strikes me as the clearest version of D&D in its genre, especially because it doesn't send mixed messages about gritty martial vs wahoo magic. And within the boundaries of genre/social contract, the action resolution rules need to be clear and robust, so the players knowthat they can push to the limit without being done over by GM fiat. 4e delivers these too.