D&D 4E Dissociating what I (we?) like from the mechanics

Undrave

Legend
Regardless of edition, this is something that would annoy the hell out of me were I relying on the game to provide me with a setting rather than designing my own.

If I have to look all over the place for disconnected scraps of information about the default setting, what's the point of even having one? And how is this of any use to new or inexperienced DMs, or those who don't have the time or inclination to fill in all those holes and-or homebrew large parts of the setting?

Either give me a complete setting in one place that I can use and run right out of the tin, or give me nothing and honestly tell me up front that setting design is my responsibility.

Well I was mostly speaking on the Player facing side. It felt more immersive that, just as the characters themselves in the world, the Player only had an incomplete view of the setting's History.

The DMG had a more consolidated chunk of lore, but it also outright stated that the default setting was purposefully vague so that you could add your own things. The Points of Light setting, so to speak, was about giving you some of those points and you filled in the blanks. The DMG described the Nentir Vale and some important parts of History, the cosmology in broad terms, but it didn't detail the world beyond the vale with like hard geography and current powers and stuff.

A singular die rolled with a huge range and even distribution of variability gets to decide whether you succeed or fail in whatever you try to do in the game. Go ahead and call it luck or fate or randomness. Things happen, right? Absolutely! Is this game really supposed to be about chance? Not entirely, but the degree of probability we lend to chance is something we can mitigate. I like to think we can do better.
Well, when you do a thread about it feel free to add a link here!
 

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Aldarc

Legend
Regardless of edition, this is something that would annoy the hell out of me were I relying on the game to provide me with a setting rather than designing my own.

If I have to look all over the place for disconnected scraps of information about the default setting, what's the point of even having one? And how is this of any use to new or inexperienced DMs, or those who don't have the time or inclination to fill in all those holes and-or homebrew large parts of the setting?

Either give me a complete setting in one place that I can use and run right out of the tin, or give me nothing and honestly tell me up front that setting design is my responsibility.
The ironic thing is that this is there is significant overlap between how the OSR and 4e's Nentir Vale approaches setting creation. It's often sketched out with wide open spaces for the DM to hack for their personalization and then with additional details slowly gleaned through supplemental materials.
 

Blue

Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal
I love the list. And for the most part agree with it.

But I have an observation about the list that I want to couch in the most positive (+) way - every point on the list that focuses primarily on a single pillar of play focuses on combat.

Instead of Utility powers that could apply to combat or could apply elsewhere as a sort-of nod to "everything non-combat", I'd love to see progressions of powers for other pillars of play as well. Roles for other pillars of play. Which means have the same sort of tactical robustness to require mechanics and multiple approaches.

Heck, pick a power source and then pick a combat class, a social class, and a discovery class to match. That would be 4e, but more-so.
 

TwoSix

I DM your 2nd favorite game
Regardless of edition, this is something that would annoy the hell out of me were I relying on the game to provide me with a setting rather than designing my own.
All you really need to get a game going is a place to rest, a place to adventure, and some familiar fantasy tropes to give the players something to grasp onto and build off. The rest, you can riff.

If the book descriptions give the players a place name and a general image of what it means they they can use, all the better.

When I ran a 4e campaign, I used some ideas my players got from the books, a general sense of the surroundings from Eberron, and a bunch of planar stuff I stole from 2e Planescape.
 

TwoSix

I DM your 2nd favorite game
The ironic thing is that this is there is significant overlap between how the OSR and 4e's Nentir Vale approaches setting creation. It's often sketched out with wide open spaces for the DM to hack for their personalization and then with additional details slowly gleaned through supplemental materials.
Agreed. Other than detailing a couple of small towns (which isn't really different than, say, the Village of Hommlet), 4e focused primarily on the development of cosmological tropes and "deep history" lore. And if you wanted/needed a gazetteer type book, 4e had both FR and Eberron available.
 

Undrave

Legend
I love the list. And for the most part agree with it.

But I have an observation about the list that I want to couch in the most positive (+) way - every point on the list that focuses primarily on a single pillar of play focuses on combat.

Instead of Utility powers that could apply to combat or could apply elsewhere as a sort-of nod to "everything non-combat", I'd love to see progressions of powers for other pillars of play as well. Roles for other pillars of play. Which means have the same sort of tactical robustness to require mechanics and multiple approaches.

Heck, pick a power source and then pick a combat class, a social class, and a discovery class to match. That would be 4e, but more-so.
Ah that's a good observation! Hmm... I didn't have any sort of reflection on it but now that I think about it I guess I do? How about these:

Separation of combat magic and utility magic : Combat magic was all the instantaneous and short duration effect. Anything longer fell into rituals and used a different resource. Doing cool things in combat did not diminish your ability to over come obstacle, and rituals were also an avenue any character could explore if they wanted to. If you really wanted to spend on them, you could be more magical than normal, or you could decide to just rely on mundane means to solve out of combat problems (options for a martial/mundane equivalent to ritual would arrive alter in the edition).

Magic doesn't always do it better but is convenient: A Knock ritual was pretty expensive at low level, and it was loud, but it was a good replacement if you didn't have someone with the right proficiency, and if you DID have someone with the tools and skill to use them? Well then you just saved components for another ritual later down the line. Magic could be used to replace a missing skill or team member, but it wasn't cheap enough to do so every time all the time to the point of making mundane skills obsolete, but in a pinch it would be good enough.

I did float the idea of replacing Utility powers with Skill Powers, but having them more geared toward the non-combat pillars, but that felt too 'mechanical' for the point of my thread.

I don't think people would appreciate TOO much mechanics for social and exploration, but I think more is a good idea. I also had this character creation concept that I think could fill the 'social class/discovery class' space : First you pick your Ancestry (what you are, i.e. your race) and get your racial powers that way, then you picked your 'Hometown' (the place you grew up in, which could be built out of a mix of environment and cultural templates by the DM or by picking already created ones in the PHB), then you pick your 'Background' (what you did before being an adventurer) and only then do you pick your class. Each of those would basically add layers to your character and probably to their attributes and abilities outside of combat. I think it would be cool in that you could create vastly different characters that could still share one of those three elements across the party (like, everybody from the same hometown but one's a Dwarven Noble and the other a Human Artisan, etc).
 

Undrave

Legend
Agreed. Other than detailing a couple of small towns (which isn't really different than, say, the Village of Hommlet), 4e focused primarily on the development of cosmological tropes and "deep history" lore. And if you wanted/needed a gazetteer type book, 4e had both FR and Eberron available.
And they had the Nentir Vale stuff at the back of the DMG to act as a home base.
 

Lanefan

Victoria Rules
Well I was mostly speaking on the Player facing side. It felt more immersive that, just as the characters themselves in the world, the Player only had an incomplete view of the setting's History.

The DMG had a more consolidated chunk of lore, but it also outright stated that the default setting was purposefully vague so that you could add your own things.
Ah; I thought you were speaking from the DM's side. This makes way more sense. :)
The Points of Light setting, so to speak, was about giving you some of those points and you filled in the blanks. The DMG described the Nentir Vale and some important parts of History, the cosmology in broad terms, but it didn't detail the world beyond the vale with like hard geography and current powers and stuff.
Excellent. I've always meant to give the Nentir Vale setting a much longer look, though at the moment I've no pressing need for a new setting given that my current one should last me several years yet.
 

Lanefan

Victoria Rules
All you really need to get a game going is a place to rest, a place to adventure, and some familiar fantasy tropes to give the players something to grasp onto and build off. The rest, you can riff.
Indeed, but some (many?) new DMs kinda need a bit more than that, or will once the campaign gets going beyond that first adventure.
If the book descriptions give the players a place name and a general image of what it means they they can use, all the better.
Agreed.
 


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