Do YOU nod to "realism"?

[UngainlyTitan]

I think i would echo Crazy jerome, people have a lot of different ideas of what is realistic. Some of the ones floated in this threads make me go "What!"
However, i realised this many years ago before 3e and I decided the sensible approach was, would the after battke report sound ok in an action movie.
If so go with it. I have not played any rpg that sounded realistic to me in the action resolution mechanics but some of them are ok to retro-fit the narrative.
The thing about realism is that it brings to mind Napoleon's comment about how he prefered lucky generals to good ones.

For every William Marshall or Egill Skallagrimsson there were a 100 more equally gifted that died of a random arrow or bout of dysentry. It is no fun playing those guys.

 

[KarinsDad]

I think another way that 4th edition walked away from the realism aspect is how the game is designed around the players and not vice versa.

It used to be that the players would need to prepare for what could come their way. Now the players really don't have to worry about that because they are essentially going to be able to handle anything.

...

I actually like the older way because if my usual tactics didn't work i had to sometimes think outside the power.

This is a direct result of there not being many good utility spells in combat anymore. A player cannot throw up an illusion that will hold the monsters off for a few rounds as the players retreat. He might be able to throw up a wall, but even that often isn't quite the same.

Although the situation sometimes allows for mundane ways to overcome a combat challenge (such as knocking the crates down onto the group of bad guys), the very thing you mention here (always having a power that is applicable) has trained 4E players to not think outside the box. They have an unlimited supply of damaging powers, so there is no need to ever knock the crates down on the bad guys like in earlier versions. Yes, there is the once in a blue moon player that tries something like that, but it rarely happens anymore IME. Players just spam their damaging powers for the most part like pushing the buttons on an X-box controller. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I do think that an earlier D&D feel (specifically where thieves could set area traps and spell casters could control the battlefield with darkness spells and other non-damaging but effective effects) was seriously minimized in 4E.

 

[Hussar]

Wow, KarinsDad, I have to say that you have some really, really crappy players. You are just so jaded about 4e mechanics.

We've been playing 4e pretty consistently for about a year and a half now and virtually every single fight there have been "Drop crates on the baddies" situations. Whether it's pushing the Calzone Demon into the oven, using terrain effects or whatnot, I'd say that virtually every single encounter we've had has featured "out of the box" non power mechanics.

I have no idea why your group has fallen into this trap. We certainly haven't.

 

[Unwise]

I actually really like coming up with ways in which my characters powers do make sense. I pretty much only play martial characters. Magical characters really don't have any issues here.

I mostly play an Eladrin who has all sorts of odd abilities. Things like Blinding Barrage, I picture as her stepping between realms, firing the Xbow in the real world, reloading in the feywild, then firing again in the real world etc. The time does not flow exactly the same in each realm. The end result is that it looks like she blurs out and fires a Xbow like a machine gun. Matrix style fighting.

She has lots of abilities that make her invisible, or close to. These are visualized as stepping between realms too, she is only slightly in the real world, enough to interact with it, but not enough to be seen properly.

The Hunter is an interesting one, as they use arrows to slide people. Trying to picture the Hunter hitting a prone person and sliding them a few squares requires a little imagination. I always picture it as either shooting the guy in the knee as he tries to stand back up, or shooting a trail of arrows like you see machines guns do in movies; forcing the bad guy to move in a certain direction or die.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This is a direct result of there not being many good utility spells in combat anymore. A player cannot throw up an illusion that will hold the monsters off for a few rounds as the players retreat. He might be able to throw up a wall, but even that often isn't quite the same.

Although the situation sometimes allows for mundane ways to overcome a combat challenge (such as knocking the crates down onto the group of bad guys), the very thing you mention here (always having a power that is applicable) has trained 4E players to not think outside the box. They have an unlimited supply of damaging powers, so there is no need to ever knock the crates down on the bad guys like in earlier versions. Yes, there is the once in a blue moon player that tries something like that, but it rarely happens anymore IME. Players just spam their damaging powers for the most part like pushing the buttons on an X-box controller. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I do think that an earlier D&D feel (specifically where thieves could set area traps and spell casters could control the battlefield with darkness spells and other non-damaging but effective effects) was seriously minimized in 4E.

Well, I agree that 4e's sort of default mode is that you can muddle through with your inherent resources. Any given encounter is likely to be balanced such that at worst you can go full out and you should win, and the DM isn't encouraged to go beyond that point. The DMG really should have talked about this (amongst other things, gosh that thing should be 1000 pages, eh). My solution is that you often run into encounters that simply aren't beatable by whacking things on the skull harder. You've got to get across the chasm of fire before the endless droves of skeleton minions from the black cauldron overwhelm the party, or you have to rescue the princess and the only way to do it is to cut the rope, slide down the ramp, and jump in the boat, or whatever. Now, players will find ways to use powers or (if you get them to gather some intel ahead of time) rituals, etc to get around those things, but that's fine too.

The funny thing is that while combat works brilliantly in 4e, all the best fun is still had when killing stuff isn't really the main aspect of the situation. THAT IMHO is where good old AD&D was at. You really didn't want to solve problems with your sword. It wasn't that you couldn't. It just wasn't efficient. It was a fallback plan or at most one element of something more elaborate.

The rules could be tweaked to make this more the case in 4e, but at the same time, it is not really necessary to do that. The DM just has to understand what to focus on. There is just very little real guidance there, and frankly it is a lot easier to put together 5 encounters of melee combat and call it a day than to make a really good action adventure.

 

[KarinsDad]

Wow, KarinsDad, I have to say that you have some really, really crappy players. You are just so jaded about 4e mechanics.

We've been playing 4e pretty consistently for about a year and a half now and virtually every single fight there have been "Drop crates on the baddies" situations. Whether it's pushing the Calzone Demon into the oven, using terrain effects or whatnot, I'd say that virtually every single encounter we've had has featured "out of the box" non power mechanics.

I have no idea why your group has fallen into this trap. We certainly haven't.

Yes, because your group is special and my group is crappy. snort

I rarely see this type of thing. It does happen, but I've never heard of a group that does it nearly every encounter and I expect that many posters here haven't either. I've heard these types of fantastic claims from time to time of how wonderful someone's players repeatedly do these types of things, but I've gamed a lot (both PBP and table games), and read quite a few story hours and PBPs, and I've come to the conclusion that people who make these types of claims are either exaggerating a lot, or must be purposely setting up the situation as DM and leading their players to the proper in game conclusion. IMO.

Weren't you just claiming yesterday that invisibility combined with summoning would allow you to crush opponents all on your own without the aid of your party? So far, I consider your claims to be a bit suspect.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Whereas I have found, over many years, with at least 4 different groups of players, that if you challenge them firmly and strongly, but do not push every encounter and situation to the maximum challenge, the players will respond with hunting for interesting things to do, and usually do them.

The exceptions are when they are tired or burned out from real-world responsibilities, where upon the mode changes to "kill stuff".

This has been true in 4E, and it was also true in other systems. With 4E, it is simply less work to set up the situation so that this is the default.

...must be purposely setting up the situation as DM and leading their players to the proper in game conclusion

Setting up the situation where it is possible, yes. Leading, not very much, if at all. But your skepticism does not surprise me.

 

[Incenjucar]

KarinsDad, while nobody has numbers on this sort of thing, there really are very very many groups who use creative methods in their games on a regular basis. It happens at least once in every single normal game I play in. It happens moderately often at the Encounters games I play in (and would happen more often if the they weren't so hard-coded). They happen very often in the games I run.

Your group is not unique, but they are not representative. I am sorry that you and your group do not share the same play preferences. If you ever visit Seattle on a day I'm running a game, or when my FLGS runs Encounters, you're more than welcome to join us and see for yourself that what you find myth, others find normal.

 

[Argyle King]

@Johnny3D3D

I don't know man. I think you play with a group of people that, as much as they may not be raving jerks about it, are extreme optimizing players. .

To be fair to 4th Edition, I would say that the Saturday group tends to have a much better grasp of working together and unit tactics than other groups I play with. However, with the being said, the sessions we have today do not seem to be much different from the sessions we had at the beginning of 4E. In fact, with the old monster math, it was far worse. During the first campaign to 30, I was playing a warlord character. I remember challenging myself to see how many encounters I could go without using a daily and without really using any of my good healing abilities; eventually I started to use dailies simply because it was boring watching the party beat on a bag of hitpoints after the fight turned into a foregone conclusion.

I think the most recent campaign was our 3rd or 4th time going from 1-30.

I will openly admit that particular group tends to optimize more than I would prefer. I've had to learn to optimize a little to keep up. Not because I try to make crap characters, but because I went into playing 4E with the group with the ideals I had about making characters from elsewhere. I prefer to make choices because they are the choices I want to make rather than make choices due to needing to keep up with the math of the system.

All of that being taken into consideration, my experience has not been very different elsewhere. I do notice that for some reason the players seem to have a tough time when I'm running a game. I'm still somewhat baffled as to what I am doing differently; I'm not trying to be overly harsh on them. It just seems as though something (I'm unsure what exactly) about how I'm running things seems to make the game turn out differently. I have a few theories, but that's not very relevant to the thread.

While that group might be the most extreme example, my experience with the default RAW version of the game is that the players tend to stomp the monsters most of the time. I went to synDCon last year. I was excited to go to a con both because I had never been at one and because I was hoping to be exposed to different playstyles. The results of the games I had the priviledge to sit through were not much different. Personally, I did struggle a little, but I chalk that up more to the pregen character I was given being built very poorly. (Even as someone who does not place a priority on optimization, it was still obvious that there were some rather questionable choices made.)

Getting back to the idea of choices... I think part of the problem is that there are too many 'no-brainer' choices in 4th Edition. Even as someone who does not try to CharOp very much, there are still levels at which I feel as though I'd be an idiot to not take certain choices. When the expertise feats came out, I did not need them, but I would have been a fool to not take them. Even thinking from my character's point of view, it did not make sense to learn something else. If I can learn a sword technique which gives me a better chance to hit my enemy with every swing, why would I bother learning a technique which gives me a better chance to hit my enemy, but only on a Tuesday, when I have a rubber boot on my left foot, and I am using a sword enchanted with frost magic? +1 all the time versus +1 only during a very specific set of circumstances is a no-brainer choice; even if you don't need the +1. Realistically, if living in a world where those are the choices, why would anyone ever choose the latter choice?

That leads me to another point... I understand why the concept of encounters is the central focus of 4E, and in many cases I agree with putting more time into making the combat system better. However, I think the structure of 4E -at times- puts so much emphasis on the idea of the encounter that choices which enhance what a character can do during an encounter virtually always trump other choices. It's a style choice; I have no ill will toward the style which (I feel) 4th Edition chose to embrace. I simply feel that other choices would be more valid if other methods of task & conflict resolution were brought more on par with the encounter & combat.

I believe I would have a better ability to accept other actions as being believable if they were made more believable by virtue of being supported better. If my choices are to participate in a convoluted set of skill checks which might possibly lead to victory versus swing my sword and win, the latter seems like a more believable and 'realistic' choice (most of the time) for somebody living in that world.

Yes, I love action; I love adventure, and I even enjoy a good hackfest from time to time, but what I miss from other games when I sit and play 4th edition is the sense of 'realism' and the sense that I'm living a world that makes sense. I miss the times when I am capable of being a hero not because I hacked my way through 1000 orcs with ease, but because I had to choose between eating my last ration or giving it someone else; because I had to give an inspiring speech to rally my troops in the face of overwhelming odds; because -while I might have been scared to lose life or limb- I chose to risk myself to rescue the damsel in distress who was the love of my character's life; because I had to make the hard decision between the oath I swore to my family and my code of honor . Yes, I can do those things and act those things out in 4E; I can, but I often don't feel the tension which makes it real for me. I wouldn't say it's a fault with the system, but maybe a fault with me. I'm not sure.

All I can say is that I find myself having an inability to buy into it the same way because of how the game world is presented. Maybe my mindset has been brainwashed a little bit because of the people I game with as well as the experiences I've had with how 4E was presented to me elsewhere; I just can't seem to look at the game the same way. I think making a more 'real' connection between what the story says is happening and what the game mechanics say is happening would help me get back to where I'd like to be with D&D. Likewise, I would like to see encounters grow out of a world which is supported; not a world grow out of an encounters based playstyle.

Part of the 'realism' I would personally want which would help me feel a better connection to the game would be to re-evaluate the concept of levels. I am starting to dislike the idea that going up in levels means we have to continue to inflate the numbers involved with the game. I'm not sure if this statement will make any sense, but why can't an increase in level mean a little more horizontal growth and involve broader play, and less of the vertical growth which leads to the same linear play with simply bigger numbers? How I feel that would enhance realism is to create characters and creatures which grow as part of the game world rather than characters and creatures who evolve in a way which defies the baseline assumptions of the world so much.

 

[D'karr]

Although the situation sometimes allows for mundane ways to overcome a combat challenge (such as knocking the crates down onto the group of bad guys), the very thing you mention here (always having a power that is applicable) has trained 4E players to not think outside the box.

I don't think it's a matter of training as much as a matter of visibility. A power is something a player has written on his character sheet in one form or another. The improvised actions/effects are not something they think about much, because they are not clearly visible to the player.

I ran into this issue with my normally creative players when I noticed that they were simply overlooking the stuff that did not appear in their character sheet. I solved this issue by making the solution visible to the players. It radically changed the dynamic of the game when I did that. My players went back to using creative solutions to problems.

I have written about this before, and I even provide my solution here. Feel free to use it and tell me how it works for your group.