Do YOU nod to "realism"?

[Hussar]

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.

Well, maybe you have your Posrep turned off, so, you didn't see that I was referring to 3e and not 4e and that was my mistake.

But, OTOH, unlike many people who make claims around here, I actually have transcripts of my sessions: The Games We Play - Home So, I'm more than willing to put my money where my mouth is. The evidence is right there.

 

[Hussar]

I find it hard to understand where you are coming from. Conjurations are generally so sub-optimal (mainly because they end up using your actions to use them) that most players will pass on them. They can be useful sometimes, but mostly they are not worth it. /snip

Funny enough. I take all this flack for making claims about the game, yet, "most players" apparently don't use conjurations, and that gets a pass because, apparently, it jives with some people's experience.

Again, this is no my experience. Our current Dark Sun campaign has a character that pops out a conjuration that he can see through (I honestly don't know what it's called) and can possibly cast through as well.

We had another character in an earlier campaign that constantly popped out a conjuration just about every combat.

Personally, I haven't done any because, up until my current character, I've been a strictly PHB only player. But, again, I've certainly seen conjurations being used quite frequently.

Look, I appreciate that you're not having this experience. That's fine. But, all I can say is that we are. So, since we're both playing the same game, I have to wonder why we're having such different experiences. By and large, I'd point to playstyle and the possible reason. People don't "think outside the box" because the DM doesn't reward it. People don't use conjurations because they've decided they are sub-par or cannot think of good uses for them.

However, just because YOU don't play with these, doesn't necessarily mean that the mechanics are flawed. My group does play with them and plays with them quite frequently. It works for us.

As I said before, if your group is constantly spamming at-wills, there's something wrong. They shouldn't be. But, you have to actualy REWARD thinking outside the box before people will do it. If dropping a box on someone's head is less effective than a straight up power, then of course no one will do it.

So, dropping a box on someone's head has to be more rewarding than a straight forward action if you want the players to do anything other than straight forward actions.

 

[Argyle King]

@ Hussar


How do you reward players who want to invest into the game world? By invest I mean purchasing land or a castle or something of that nature. I'm the type of player who gets into that sort of thing, but I've found that it's difficult for me to get the same level of depth I want out of the experience of doing those things while playing D&D. I also find it difficult to invest in the game world without hampering myself by not having the items and/or resources which my level says I should have.

I've seen some advice which advocates sneakily giving the player back some cash so as to keep them on par, but (from the player's side of the table) I'm not a fan of that because it makes me feel as though my choice to invest in the game world was an illusion rather than being meaningful.

 

[Hussar]

@ Hussar


How do you reward players who want to invest into the game world? By invest I mean purchasing land or a castle or something of that nature. I'm the type of player who gets into that sort of thing, but I've found that it's difficult for me to get the same level of depth I want out of the experience of doing those things while playing D&D. I also find it difficult to invest in the game world without hampering myself by not having the items and/or resources which my level says I should have.

I've seen some advice which advocates sneakily giving the player back some cash so as to keep them on par, but (from the player's side of the table) I'm not a fan of that because it makes me feel as though my choice to invest in the game world was an illusion rather than being meaningful.

Cool idea. Not sure what it has to do with nodding to realism, but still cool.

Personally there's a couple of takes on it. For one, I'm playing 4e right now, so we use Inherent bonuses - magic items aren't required anymore. Once you do that, you're basically in the same boat as you were back in 1e D&D where cash really didn't matter all that much.

So, go ahead and buy that castle. It's fun and interesting. It's not like the cash is really needed for anything else.

I also really like the rules in the 3e PHB 2 for associations. That, right there, I think should be ported into 4e wholesale. You gain certain perks as you advance up the association - possibly getting stuff done for cheaper, information, mooks sometimes, that sort of thing. So, why not do the same thing for land owning.

Your character buys an inn (for example). That's a pretty minor thing so, he maybe gets some free information checks once in a while. Maybe a Daily power - You heard it in the bar from some guy - that lets you succeed on a knowledge check or something like that. Something in keeping with a 3rd level daily.

As the character goes up level, presuming he continues to invest in his land, he gains more powers, similar to what you would gain from a magic item. Maybe later on you get the - People have stayed in your inn so they like you more - power that gives you a daily bump on a diplomacy check. That sort of thing.

So long as you keep the rewards in keeping with what's being invested in and in keeping with the power of the campaign, I don't see too much difficulty.

 

[ForeverSlayer]

I find 4th edition to play like Super Mario Brothers. I start at level one and I kill things, find items that help me along the way, defeat a boss at certain times, and move on to the final boss.

I don't think about setting up a base in level 2-2. It's all about killing things until I win.

In previous editions I felt like I was winning battles, not winning the game.

 

[Argyle King]

Cool idea. Not sure what it has to do with nodding to realism, but still cool.

Thanks.

As for realism, I asked because I've mostly seen two schools of thought on the subject. The first I alluded to with the idea of the illusion of choice. I'm well aware that illusion of choice is a DM tool, but it's not one I often like as a player. Especially when I'm trying to buy into the game world because it makes me feel as though I'm being told I should just worry about encounters and not make an effort to connect myself to the world. To me, a lot of plots make more sense or seem 'real' if I have reason to care.

The second is something of a spin off from the first. I've seen a lot of conversations about how to prevent a player gaining a benefit from investing in the world. By this I mean I've seen advice to "just tell the player that any profits/benefits are used up in trying to keep the place maintained." I understand the idea of keeping the wealth by level idea going, but it somewhat makes me feel (as a player) that I'm being hosed for trying to connect to the game world.

How I see that tying into realism is that a lot of campaigns I've played in take an extremely gamey position when it comes to that sort of thing. So much so that -even as a player who (I assume) gets into that aspect of rpgs more than most- it didn't interest me.

I haven't completely done away with magic item bonuses in the game I'm running, but I have houseruled that certain bonuses (the expertise feats for example) are automatic. I wanted players to make choices based upon what they wanted to pick rather than being so concerned with the numbers of the system. I'm also somewhat liberal about bending the rules to give out rewards based on back story. An example of that would be that the party's fighter (in the game I'm running) said he had spent some time in the military before becoming an adventurer; gaining a small amount of rank and becoming a squad leader. As such, I granted his character the Combat Leader feature from Warlord.

 

[Phaezen]

I find 4th edition to play like Super Mario Brothers. I start at level one and I kill things, find items that help me along the way, defeat a boss at certain times, and move on to the final boss.

I don't think about setting up a base in level 2-2. It's all about killing things until I win.

In previous editions I felt like I was winning battles, not winning the game.

And what would you consider "winning the game"?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

@ Hussar


How do you reward players who want to invest into the game world? By invest I mean purchasing land or a castle or something of that nature. I'm the type of player who gets into that sort of thing, but I've found that it's difficult for me to get the same level of depth I want out of the experience of doing those things while playing D&D. I also find it difficult to invest in the game world without hampering myself by not having the items and/or resources which my level says I should have.

I've seen some advice which advocates sneakily giving the player back some cash so as to keep them on par, but (from the player's side of the table) I'm not a fan of that because it makes me feel as though my choice to invest in the game world was an illusion rather than being meaningful.

There are a bunch of ways that these things work. It is just that they are all part of the game world, not hard-coded mechanics I'm expected to follow, which I actually like much better.

Land, and all the other possible social perks you can get in my world, are largely either intangible or non-fungible. You can get a house, but the world isn't a cash economy. It involves being able to get the rights to a house. You COULD do that with money, true, but you probably cannot sell that house. You have it because you established rights to it, got a deed from the local head honcho, convinced the community the house is in that it is a good idea for you to have it, etc. I'm also not too worried about money. It is VERY hard for PCs to have enough of it to even bend the game. With rarity in place maybe with a large pile of gold they can get some items that are almost as good as what they're likely to find tomorrow in some monster lair.

The other thing is that organizations and social connections are IMPORTANT. When the secretly evil priest of the local town accuses the PCs of devil worship to pin his deeds on them and get them run out of town they better have the credentials to avoid a mob with pitchforks and torches. If they want to learn the secret technique of the Rangers of Otillis they'll have to join and do the deeds that make them worthy of being Knights who are allowed to learn that technique. On the flip side if they ARE Knights of Otillis then there's going to be some adventure where having 10 Rangers come in the backside of the orc lair and draw off most of the guards is the only way they're going to successfully pull off an assault.

Buy in really requires world depth. IMHO it always did. A world that is a thin backdrop to a bunch of series of encounters isn't going to do that. This is one reason why I mostly just continue to use the setting that I invented way back when I was 15 years old. There's just a vast depth of that kind of thing. A character can become friends with some old PC from the 1980's, join organizations, discover lore piled on top of lore, and just generally be part of what is as close as anyone can get to a living world. I'm sure using really well-established commercial settings can do a lot of that too. You just have to chase down a lot of material from many sources with say FR that has been put out over the years. I'd use that kind of setting, but I just don't need to because I happen to have it already.

Of course I have had groups that could care less about all that and just hack their way through combat-heavy adventures too. Even then you can do things to encourage all kinds of OOTB thinking. The fighter takes the choke point, but there's another way around. Can the players figure out a way to block it up? Maybe destroying a pillar will cause a collapse, or whatever. Make things TOUGH too, so it isn't a matter of 'winning easier', but a matter of you need some edge to survive, or need to be clever to accomplish some valuable goal. Complex and interesting situations breed more crazy solutions to problems.

Once I had a guy standing on a platform resting on a giant ball of rock and he could roll it around squishing characters and pushing them around. So the rogue whipped out a grappling hook, snagged him and pulled him off it. That's a small example, but what I find is that fairly plain cut-and-dried situations usually get straightforward solutions. It makes sense, the PCs standard abilities are well suited to generic situations. They aren't well suited to a lot of the "real world" where odd problems and strange situations come up often.

 

[Argyle King]

@ abdul

What you describe is how I would much prefer to play. I've just found that for some reason it doesn't seem to come out of D&D 4E. I'm not saying this as an opportunity to bash the system. I'm simply say that -for whatever reason- the playstyle I've seen the most doesn't seem to be what you described. For some reason, I've noticed that there seems to be a certain expectation of a more straight forward playstyle when I show up to play D&D.

For the game I'm running, I've done some work to change this expectation. I've catered to the audience, but I've also made an effort to make things such as taking the Linguist feat actually have merit. Recently, there was an encounter which turned out easier because one of the PCs was capable of understanding what the orcs on the other side of the door were planning.

However, I've also found that I need to change some of the mechanical structure of the game if I want to have more of the experience that I want. In that regard, I think I might argue that there were/are some ideals which 4E is built upon which are at odds with my idea of realism and my idea of playstyle.

I will say that one area in which I feel 4th does much better at what you describe than 3rd did is making the power curve between levels less extreme. I remember taking the leadership feat in 3rd edition only to find that the difference of a few levels often meant my followers were completely worthless in any situation where my character was facing a level appropriate threat. I highly prefer the less extreme curve between levels. If there is a 5E in the works, I hope that's something the game takes further.

 

[KarinsDad]

You found them cool? I found them an undefined mess that were either grossly overpowerful or utterly useless depending on how well the player was able to persuade/bamboozle/seduce the DM. As a DM they were simply a mass of questions to which I had to invent or randomly determine answers (Assuming the enemy believe the illusion, how do they react? What did they expect to see? How well do they know what the illusion should look like? Do the players deserve a break, here? What do the players think should happen, and is that a reasonable expectation? If the illusion works as intended, does that set up any problematic precedents for future play?). Blegh - thank the gods I don't have to deal with that kind of crap any more.

Seriously, this is how I view your At Will "something cool" power as well.


The cool thing about illusions was that although they could be a bit nebulous, there were some rules for how a DM should handle them and how NPCs could react with them, so regardless of whether the DM was heavily persuaded or not, he at least had adjudication rules to guide him. And the bottom line was that something cool could come out of it in game.

I don't see that with your "you can do anything you want as long as the DM agrees" something cool powers.

The very thing that you are complaining about here, you created your own house rules to mimic, just not with illusions.