D&D 4E DM Fiat Supreme in 4e

[WyzardWhately]

This is sort of tangential to the thread, but stay with me. I think one of the things that most initiated my knee-jerk FIAT reflex was Mearls talking about social encounters. Essentially, there are rules for resolving them, but the GM sets up what success and failure mean. I wasn't too fond of that in my initial reading, for a couple reasons. Firstly, as a player, I want to be able to set the agenda somewhat. I want to be able to decide my character's goal, and use his skills to accomplish those. Sometimes I come at a problem sideways. Secondly, as a GM, I don't want to make adventures and NPCs that run on rails.

Fortunately, I thought about it for a while, and realized it's fairly easy to do this exactly the way I've always handled skill checks ever since I ran The Burning Wheel for a while (incidentally, it's a brilliant but very divisive RPG that I highly recommend everyone take a shot at if they ever get a chance.) Stakes-setting. The PCs tell you what they want to accomplish. The GM explicitly states the consequences for failure and what the difficulty is going to be. The player can choose whether or not to pursue that course of action.

It sounds so simple as to be inane, but it's brilliant. The PCs are encouraged to try and use their abilities in novel ways. The GM is given a tool for handling it. The ability to add explicit consequences for failure makes the checks more important, and lets the players make an informed decision (arguably it's metagame knowledge, since the character might not know what's likely to happen, but this has not as of yet been a problem.) It's eminently tweakable, and I think it's going to be how I'll run 4E social encounters.

The players are going to tell me what it is they're going to try and talk an NPC out of. I'll set up consequences for failure and a relative difficulty by how outrageous the request is, and what else they can bring to the table. Roll out social combat.

Now, potentially, that's exactly the advice that's going to be in the DMG. Or near to it. But the point is that negotiating with the players, while seemingly anathema to the nature of the GM-hat, can really solve a lot of the problems with a system that seems to require too much fiat.

 

[Steely Dan]

Well, a lot of people complained that 3rd Ed was the player-pleasing/DMs-go-screw-yourself edition…

 

[Wormwood]

Well, a lot of people complained that 3rd Ed was the player-pleasing/DMs-go-screw-yourself edition…

3.5 is a game I love to play, love to tinker with, and love to discuss.

But DM it again? Not on your life.

 

[Drammattex]

As a DM, I often felt my hands were tied with 3e rules.

My goal, coming to a gaming session, is to provide a really good story where really badass stuff happens, which results in the players calling and e-mailing me relentlessly throughout the next couple weeks to freak out about how awesome the game is (meanwhile, they conspire with each other on how to thwart me).

The thing is, oftentimes really badass stuff doesn't get to happen because of some rule or other. Once, the bard wanted to sound burst some opponents on the other side of a window. The fight was pumping, blow for blow the heroes were matching the enemy, the atmosphere was tense. I described the bard emitting a shriek that moved through the air like a rippling wave, shattered the window and collided with the new adversaries gathering outside.

Then a player called an objection and informed me that he didn't think the sound burst should be able to pass through the window because it was a solid object. The game stopped. We got out the PHB, we sorted through the rules and tried to figure out whether the bard could target those adversaries outside the window. We judged that she could see them, so she had line of sight. I think I eventually ruled that if the sound burst damage could penetrate the window's hardness, then the spell could pass through and affect those on the other side. So then we looked up the hardness for glass...

All to affect a crowd of 7th level commoners.

I mean seriously... how important was that? How important was it really?
Not so important. Would the game have been seriously affected if we hadn't stopped for 15 minutes to page through the rules? No. The sound burst would have shattered the glass, fragments flying everywhere, cutting the skin of the brutes gathered outside as they clapped their hands over their ears and cried out in pain. And that would have been awesome. But unfortunately, it ended up being rather pedantic and boring as we cross-checked the rules.

On another note...
Don't ask about the 7th level commoners. Apparently in 4e, monsters of a given level have similar stats; had that been the case in the aforementioned game, I wouldn't have been scaling commoners up; I would've just grabbed the stat line for a creature of that level, slapped "town brutes" on it, and called it a day.


This is all just to say I think a looser system may empower DMs to focus on showing their players a good time, not getting bogged down in boring minutae.

 

[jaer]

I don't agree that there's a significant change here between 3e and 4e.

One example: In 3e, skum are created by aboleths from human stock. Feasibly this is something that could happen to a PC. However there are no rules for this whatsoever. Aboleths have no powers or SLAs which do this. The fluff text says it happens but the how is left entirely to the DM.

This looks exactly like a 4e monster's 'plot powers'.

The significant change to me is that of DM designed powers for NPCs/monsters. No longer are powers pure HD- or level-based, or so it sounds. From the talk, things are a bit more easily modifiable if the DM wants, and certain abilities can be added or taken away or adjusted to suite the NPC. They keep talking about how NPCs are easier to create because you just give them what they need to fill the roll.

If that becomes the standard opperating procedure, and it is very visible that that is how NPCs are done, that helps me as a DM in dealing with my players.

As it stands, my players expect that any elf they meet is like them, and that the only progression the elf has is through classes with the same feat and skill selections they have (and the potential template). They expect an elven wizard to have spells that they can have and an elven fighter to fight the same way their fighter does, because the game is set up that way, with very specific permeters as to how such a creature is advanced.

My players know these rules, and therefore, when something happens that is not within the bounds of rules, they view me as cheating. In their mind, an NPC elf should not be able to have a build/powers/feats that an PC elf could not also have (if they so chose).

My players don't desert the game because I take libreries with such things...but it is a matter of expectations. If Ogre A is slightly different than Ogre B and C, my players immediate expect a reason (different feats, a magic item, he took a class and therefore has more HD, BA, saves, etc). They might never know the reason, but because of how 3e is set up, they expect there to be one.

4e, rather, seems to say, if you want an ogre A to have a slightly different set of combat options then ogre B and C, just switch them out! Once my players get in the habit of realizing things can just be different, then they stop trying to dissect everything (this guy must be be a rogue 3/ranger 3/assassin 2/ barbarian 1/fighter 1 to do all of this stuff!) or feel cheated when an NPC does something they never could.

I like the idea that PCs != NPCs, but in 3e, my players did not buy into it. In 4e, it sounds like the very basis of DM tools.

 

[Steely Dan]

3.5 is a game I love to play, love to tinker with, and love to discuss.

But DM it again? Not on your life.

Yep, that's where I'm at – 3rd Ed looks great on paper, but after DMing it consistently for 2 years, whoa, Nelly!

 

[Henry]

Well, a lot of people complained that 3rd Ed was the player-pleasing/DMs-go-screw-yourself edition…

In my opinion, in some ways it is. The larger the momentum of the gamer mindset that all supplements should be allowed, then the harder the DM's job of reigning in all of the player options to a manageable level. No one can know the balance of all classes, feats, items, etc. or its effect on the game. This isn't a Magic the Gathering card selection; heck, even for MtG they have developers whose sole or main job is figuring out how a new prospective card breaks all the other cards in rotation! Plus, there's no "in rotation", other than 3E vs. 3.5 vs. 4e, and even by David Noonan's admission in one article, it's hard for game designers to remember what they themselves created, sometimes.

So when a DM says, "listen, I'm only allowing character options on a per-case basis," I've observed a subtle growing cultural pressure to just open ALL the supplements, all the time, because "If WotC says they're balanced then it's true." This can lead to not only some really whacky game rules combos, but can really bog down the game as the poor DM and players try to figure out how spell A reacts with creature B, or how feat C changes the whole nature of the grappling rules.

If 4E can elminate some of that, even with their new definition of "core," then I'm all for it.

 

[Wormwood]

The game stopped. We got out the PHB, we sorted through the rules and tried to figure out whether the bard could target those adversaries outside the window.

The more rules, the more lawyers.

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

DM fiat seems to be regaining power in 4e, back I would argue to its 1e roots

Sure, player rules are far better codified by the looks of it, but narritive imperitive seems to have taken front stage again, rather than DMs building in the same rule set as players..

This begs the question, will playing in different groups be more difficult?

With more DM fiat will players accept that DM A does something different from DM B?

In 3e players had near equal ownership of the rules, not having that anymore may be difficult for players weened on 3e

I think it all very much depends upon the people in the group. I played in several different groups using 3.x - each was very different from the others in terms of house rules etc. Heck the rules changed within a group when DMs swapped, and everyone was OK with it.

As for DMs building in the same rule set as players, when I DMed my 3e campaign, I did this really strange thing - I didn't follow the rules. I built NPCs with the features they needed and didn't bother with stuff that was irrelevant. I didn't necessarily concern myself if an NPC had all the required prerequisites for a feat because the players would never know that anyway. Some people might say I was cheating, but now I know I was just ahead of my time and already using 4e ideas.

I had one player who challenged me about an "illegal" NPC build. I explained to him that I didn't have the time to stat out everything to the RAW and just wanted to make an interesting challenge for the players. I asked him if he was enjoying the game, he said he was, and whether he wanted to take a turn at DMing, which he said he didn't.

 

[Steely Dan]

I asked him if he was enjoying the game, he said he was, and whether he wanted to take a turn at DMing, which he said he didn't.

Yeah, that always gets them.


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