Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 6065231" data-attributes="member: 6696971">I'm not sure if it would look much different than your game, Bob's game, @<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/member.php?42582-pemerton" target="_blank">pemerton</a>      's game, or Sally's game.  The only advantage that it provides for my table (with respect to our preferences/agenda) is coherency.  We don't only know vaguely what we want out of play (conflicts & adversity, conventions & conceits, mood/tone, pacing), but we know with specificity.  That helps us understand, empathize and play off of each other.  It mirrors the way I do most things in real life.  I'm one of those (obnoxious) people that needs to know all of the angles, all of the potential outcomes, all of the answers before I commit to something.  I have to think it out, unravel it in my mind, extrapolate the future and regress back to the beginning.  Completely neurotic and averse to stones left unturned, avenues left unexamined.  I often wish that I could purge myself of that mental structure (and I've tried to relax it) as it makes most moments (mundane and otherwise) of my life stretch out into hours...but its an affliction that is embedded too deeply in my neural network to be diffused.In light of all of that, our games are quite spontaneous and filled with improv.  If I were to put a pathetic analogy to it (and this is truly pathetic), I would say that if we were building a house, it would be akin to getting to know the architectural tastes, preferred floor and wall finishings (colors, textures and materials) of the 3 players and DM present and interfacing those with the available tools and materials, relevant building codes, zoning laws, HOA bylaws, property taxes.  If we know the former as well as possible, and discuss how we can accommodate each other in our building project, we can then find out how best we can accomplish our task given the confines of the latter.  Truly a disgusting analogy and I should probably be beaten unmercifully for it, but there you have it.  There are alternatives to the above but the one that scares me most (and the reason for the pro-active measures - overmeasures? - to protect against it) is "totally winging it" and the potential for resultant incoherency in creative agenda (genre, mood, pacing, PC stance and how the mechanical resolution toolset promotes or works against those things).Finally, I've had the same 3 players for an awful long time and I've had plenty of wall-flowers (one of my 3 players is primarily a wall-flower but is great in that niche) and (willful) chemistry antagonists come and go in my group.  We're at the point in our lives where we have a considerable amount of experience with "problem players" or "players that don't fit our table" and the element of "subtraction by addition" they produce.  It has helped us understand each other such that our chemistry and creative agenda is synched making game prep a ridiculously easy (and minimalist) thing.I have done this.  4 month game with two players with a limited, but eclectic, experience (I believe some 1e D&D, Vampire, Classic Traveller, and Cthulu back in the day) and my normal 3.  We just did a "fly by the seat of our pants" test drive of the system back in 2008.  It was completely incoherent from two angles;- Those new players (to be quite honest) didn't know what kind of game they wanted.  They expected a game world rooted in simulatory, hard-core causal logic and PCs solely in actor stance (with no metagame).  However, they also had this dissonant expectation of "on demand" genre logic (where they kind of drifted into the metagame...but otherwise were very hostile to it) for "cool" outcomes.  When those "cool" outcomes couldn't be delivered "on demand" (because I was trying to give them a metagame neutral experience; random sandbox tables instead of my own metagamed objectives), one of them became passive-aggressively hostile (the worst and most immature kind).  The other sort of drifted back and forth between "wall-flower disinterest" to excitedly engaged to quiet supporter of his passive-aggresively hostile friend.  12 sessions in (3 months), when myself and my 3 original players tried to drift it toward what I thought would help them achieve what seemed to be their "cool outcome" based interests (where I felt 4e was well suited - metagame intensive Gamist/Narrativist hybrid), holy moly was the pushback even worse.  So, to keep score...they wanted the anarchic gamble of process based simulation but "on demand, cool outcome based results"...without engaging the metagame.  I switched back after 2 sessions...played 2 more...and we all agreed to call it a day.- They were definitely expecting 1e, extra-encounter, operational play.  Balance and resource scheme at the encounter level made them both twitch horridly.  Further, none of us were proficient or experienced enough with the 4e ruleset to leverage Rituals and Condition Tracks to help those extra-encounter, operational play interests along.  And, given that we didn't really talk through the system or our agenda, we didn't get that done until the next campaign.So, to answer your question;  Yes, 4e is:- worse than 1e in absolute fidelity to extra-encounter, operational play, ToH style dungeon crawling.  Its doable at some levels (eg; you can work out the resource ablation angle but its done at different vectors with different pressure points).  However, if talking through the tactile exploration of a room for secret doors/levers with a DM, flying thieves tethered by ropes, spiked doors to avoid random encounters built to stop resource refreshing, 10 ft poling corridors for pressure plates is the experience you're looking for, 4e is not good at it.  It also doesn't support the swinginess of character creation, campaign altering effects based on one roll of the dice, or the "EUREKA" or "AHA" moments where one word or statement outright circumvents an obstacle/content/etc.  However, contrary to popular though, it certainly can support the overall lethality of 1e play and do it with surgical precision (L + 3 or more as standard encounters/traps).- worse than all the other editions at allowing totally unbound strategic play (specifically power plays driven by magic) dictate outcomes.  - worse than 3.x (but I do hold that they are not as far apart as folks think...again, different vectors and different build scheme decision-points and the willingness to refluff keywords) at PC archetype rendering in some areas.  In some areas its better merely due to the relative functionality of the archetypes (eg 4e does it much better).- worse than 3.x at strident adherence to granular process simulation (but I don't hold that 3.x is a good process simulator compared to systems built strictly for it).- worse than all of the other editions at having a veneer and certain resolution tools that they are accustomed to (unification of resource schemes such that a meme is created that fighters are "casting spells", the arbiter of the adventuring day moving from HPs to Healing Surges, narrative mechanics that allow PCs to enter author and director stance to impose their vision upon the fiction, friendliness toward the metagame, a tactical depth that is unparalleled and profound enough such that by virtue of its potency it can convince folks that "4e is just a tactical skirmish game", saving throws changed, etc).TL;DR. So, in total.  Yes indeed.  I absolutely believe that 4e is worse than earlier editions at certain things and those things + a heaping helping of "other stuff" explain the anti-4e sentiment.  Wow.  Sorry for the long post.  And Merry Christmas!</blockquote>

Verification