Canor Morum
First Post
Do you really need rules and tables in order to role-play?
Check out Skill Challenges.
Edition Fatigue
- Thread starter Korgoth
- Start date
Do you really need rules and tables in order to role-play?
Check out Skill Challenges.
"something in combat"... THAT is a good idea.
Everybody doing the SAME thing? Not so good.
I think 4E got carried away with their at-will structure and turned all the classes basically into the same class with different clothes on.
FWIW, I was attracted to 4E because Wizards have something they can do in combat. I became disappointed when it became apparent that there's very little now for out of combat activity.
What I am NOT saying is that DMs can't run non-combat scenarios with 4E. I'm saying it's not built into 4E like it was in earlier versions. And then add the Essentials books that almost throws it all out completely, and then the Encounters program that is just "pick up combat encounters" (not that it can realistically be much more; it just adds more to my perception of WOTC abandoning non-combat).
As was pointed out on Grognardia recently, designers of new RPGs tend to chuck out things that they can't see the point of and misidentify as weaknesses. It's the "I don't care if you like rolling on random tables, they are so two decades ago" kind of game design fashion syndrome that is just "different" dressed up as "better."
For instance, if D&D were designed from scratch today, it would probably be using all d10s. Never mind that polyhedrals of various types are fun, I can argue you black and blue why my unified percentile mechanic is all the game will ever need. And traps are unfair and I can't see a way to make them work, so let's exclude and ignore them. Oh, and my mechanics are suggesting this class which doesn't map to an archetype, but I think it's cool anyway or needed for rulesy reasons...let's attach an artificial name to it like "warlord" or "mystic theurge" and go to it, nevermind that it's difficult to use as a fantasy construction kit whenever gamist stuff like this sneaks in.
With game design, steps sideways or backwards seem just as common as steps forward, seemingly. And the human processors aren't any faster than in 1980, yet here we are trying to take on Moore's Law with dice.
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Two points.
1) Roleplaying is more than just having characters talk in a tavern. You need rules and tables for overland travel, acquiring resources, hiring services, and all the other non-combat activity that is prevelant in any story-based game.
2) Skill challenges help. But when I see how skills were so strong a part of 3E (characters could actually be built around their skills instead of combat abilities thanks to the leveling up process), 4E looks just a notch above what BECM was doing in the Gazetteers 20 years ago. Looks like DnD took a step backwards.
Canor Morum
First Post
I see what you're saying. I agree that more variety in individual class mechanics would be a good thing. They have tried this to some extent with psionics, fighter stances, and bringing back magic schools. Deviating from the standard AED power structure for certain classes would make them "feel" different.
I'm still not sure what you mean by wanting more out of combat rules. Beyond skill checks and pure role-playing I don't see the point. An imaginative DM can run non-combat scenes without rolling a single dice, referencing a table, or setting up visual aids. Descriptive narration and improvisation is all that's required.
Canor Morum
First Post
I'm pretty sure there are rules for some of those. Personally, I don't use them because my players don't find it interesting. To each his own.
Folks, I'm just flabbergasted that anything I'm saying is the least bit controversial. It's all pretty clear, all in black and white in the 4E books--and I have 23 hardbacks, all the Essential books, and several published adventures.
Just pick up, say, the Arcane Power book. Wizards overall are traditionally about as non-combat a class (certainly in the lower levels) as exists in the game (second only to Thieves). Yet vitually all the powers, feats, and Magic Tomes are combat in nature, or described in combat terms.
Only the familiars section and New Rituals are less about combat than non-combat... 11 pages out of 160.
Old timers know how to fill in those gaps and use 4E as a story-based game (that's very heavy on combat, in terms of playing time if nothing else) But I just don't see how anyone coming into 4E as their first DnD experience can see the game as anything but a combat game. That's about all that's been covered in the books.
Just pick up, say, the Arcane Power book. Wizards overall are traditionally about as non-combat a class (certainly in the lower levels) as exists in the game (second only to Thieves). Yet vitually all the powers, feats, and Magic Tomes are combat in nature, or described in combat terms.
Only the familiars section and New Rituals are less about combat than non-combat... 11 pages out of 160.
Old timers know how to fill in those gaps and use 4E as a story-based game (that's very heavy on combat, in terms of playing time if nothing else) But I just don't see how anyone coming into 4E as their first DnD experience can see the game as anything but a combat game. That's about all that's been covered in the books.
It ani't that simple and it is definitely no fact, it is your opinion. Now I cannot speak for 1E or 2e, I never owned the rulebooks, I just rolled the dice my DM told me to role. I just had a quick look at the Basic Red Box rule books, the whole players handbook is 64 pages. There is 8 pages of games concepts explained via an adventure narrative, followed by 5 or so pages on the character. There is a page on town business and a solo adventure that goes from page 14 to page 22. Page 23 to 47 is character classes and a couple pages of charts, sample character sheets, sample characters and a sheet of graph paper. Page 48 to 52 is how to create a character and the remaining pages are about mappers, callers, order of march, alignement, dividing treasdure, combat encounters, hirelings and a glossery and 2 pages of ads.
The DM book has 2 pages of introduction, 9 of sample adventure and the reat monsters, treasure and charts.
Aside from the couple of paragraphs on ability checks and the retainer ruls there is nothing in the Basic books I would call non combat rules.
Now the 3.0 phb 286 pages including glossery and credits and the 4e phb1 317 pages so we are clearly is completely different territory in terms of rules complexity. interestingly the combat chapters are about the same length on both.
I guess it all comes down to one's experiences. Most of my gaming experiences were as much about what happens between the fights as the fights themselves.
We never just showed up to an encounter. The travel was a big deal. It was a lot like Lord of the Rings. There was incredible danger involved in going from town across the mountains and swamps to get to the dragon's lair. We lived in fear of wandering monster rolls and running out of food/supplies. Getting wagons to the dragon's hoard was a serious challenge!
And we really didn't like our chances just being a matter of the kindness, or impatience, of the DM. We didn't like monsters to show up just because we hadn't made attack rolls in the past 45 minutes. It was just more real using the tables and taking our chances.
Maybe some players would get mad if their party got slaughtered on the way to the adventure. To me, it made the game stronger. More real. More fun. Any time a DM said "okay, you're there," I felt a little bit cheated.
Same with all the other types of inbetween activity.
To me, 4E reads as if it relies on a whole lot of "okay, you're there" expediency.
BryonD
Hero
This is the part where I play my broken record....
Players bring role play to the table. When comparing systems, things that the players bring to the table are not relevant. Only things that the system brings to the table are relevant.
Not all systems provide the same level of interaction between roleplaying and mechanics. For me personally, and apparently for a large number of other people who like a good level of "simulation" in their games, there are systems that do a vastly better job of creating that feedback between the mechanics and the roleplay. That doesn't mean you don't LOVE 4E and roleplay your hearts out on top of the system. It just means that there are perfectly valid reasons for people with other preferences to find 4E well down the list of games of preference.
Long before 4E existed I was using encounters that would be recognized as very skill-challenge-like. But, they also varied from event to event pretty substantially. IMO skill challenges put the mechanics to much in front of the roleplaying. The mechanics are set in and it is up to the players to describe how their characters meet the requirements. It is very similar to the use of powers in combat. I've seen many 4E fans praise the GREAT roleplaying perk of needing to come up with an on-the-fly explanation of WHY their power worked under the circumstances at hand. I can see how someone could enjoy that. But, for my preference, I want the mechanics to be as invisible as possible. I want the players to just roleplay their part and have mechanics that respond to that, not have the roleplay react to the mechanical expectations.
I don't want wizards to get better at climbing for no other reason than they gained levels. If the wizard is imagined as someone who can climb, then cool, but let the player make that call. In 4E the mechanics demand that the character have that aspect.
I want the AC of a pirate and a knight to be defined purely by the fact that they are a pirate and a knight, not primarily by the challenge level they are supposed to fit.
Over and over 4E is about mechanics first and then roleplaying to fit the allowances of the mechanics. I want my game to be about roleplay first and the mechanics do their best to keep up.
It isn't that you CAN'T roleplay 4E. Obviously you can. But the expectation is that the mechanics lead. And please, don't tell me you can ignore that any time you want. I agree 100% that you can, you can go off script and make the mechanics try to keep up. But you are now just doing a workaround that is counter to the system presumptions. The fact that you can go against the grain of the system is not a selling point for the system.
BECM is FAR more than just that red box DM's book! Oh my!
There is an abundance of non-combat material in the Expert, Companion, and Master sets. And then there are all those Gazetters (14 of them) filled with noncombat material. Plus the Almanacs.
1st Edition had two whole hardbacks dedicated to non-combat... the Dungeoneers Survival Guide and the Wilderness Survival Guide. Plus, a fair bit of the DMG.
2nd Edition seemed to have a book for everything, including all the noncombat aspects of the game. Several just on campaigns. Even a book for building and running a castle.
And I didn't just start posting after the first 4E books appeared. We've already run through most of what 4E will likely cover, and so far that we are already seeing "4.5" rulebooks (called Essentials) being done. And after all that, I just don't see much emphasis at all on the roleplaying (noncombat) side of the game.
Some people like the ok your are there expediency and some people like to replace the cross country travel with a skill challange but there is nothing stoping a DM from doing the wandering monster thing. Unlike 3.x any 4e monster can be run straight from the monster manuals, as is. No hit points to calculate and all powers are completly described in the statblock.
The thing is (IMO) wandering momsters made more sense in pre 3.x D&D because it attritted resources but in 3.x once you have aaccess to a wand of cure light wounds, the resource attrition becomes somewhat meaningless.
In 4e the resource one is attritting are healing surges not hitpoints. So it is a bit more potent but not as dangerousc as the wandering monsters in the older editions.
Spells and thief abilities alone put the lie to this, don't they? Basic didn't hive off everything non-combat into "rituals".
Oh and guys, despite game design fashion, you simply aren't likely to be going to encounter as many wandering prostitutes in a game which lacks a wandering prostitute table as in one that does, just as you likely won't have as much whimsy as in a game which lacks whimsical spells and items. This modern RPG design idea of relying on players to bring the main course whilst not even suggesting what the meal could be with some hors d'ouerves is, IMO, predictable but very shallow treatment of the subject.
Part of the job of the DMG is to teach the scope of the game in a non purely theoretical manner, else it will just get ignored. You need that scope to manifest in rules somehow (e.g. horse personality random tables, or a spell that fills a bathtub with hot bubblebath water) else people will tend towards what the rules suggest by default, it'll be reinforced by community culture, and the scope of the game will narrow except for those educated by games with wider scope suggested by the rules.
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Chainsaw Mage
First Post
Since you know what analogies are, I'm certain you know about faulty or false analogies.
There is a clear, qualitative, and easily quantifiable difference between the technology of Pong and, say, Halo.
No such difference exists between 2e and 3e. These technology analogies are about as accurate as "evolution" analogies or what I like to call "maid" analogies (ie, "D&D 3.5 cleaned up many of the messes in 3.0).
Not all analogies are useful.
CleverNickName
Limit Break Dancing
A while back, I had a "great idea" for a houserule. We were playing 3.5E, and I thought it would make everything a lot easier and fix a lot of problems if I made all spellcasters learn and cast spells the same way. Essentially, all of the spellcasters were bards who chose which spell list they wanted to use, and replaced Bardic Music with things like metamagic feats, wild shape, and turn undead. (I'm glossing over quite a bit here. Class skills didn't change, nor was all magic Charisma-based and arcane. Like any good 3.5E houserule, it was at least 4 pages long.)
It looked good on paper. Game-breaking high-level spells? Gone...all spell lists are capped at 6th level. Hours spent preparing and memorizing spells at the start of every game day? Gone...everyone is spontaneous now. Instead of a half-dozen different spell lists, we had one. Spellcasters all use the same BAT, have the same HD, and get lots of skills. It was streamlined, efficient. Everyone was excited about it.
Things were great for about three game sessions. Then it started to get boring. Everyone spent all of those extra skill points on the same skills. They all selected the same feats. They all bought the same equipment, and quarreled over the same pieces of treasure, because they were all essentially the same characters. When the only real difference between the wizard and the cleric is their spellbook, well...characters lost their identity.
We switched back after a month, and I learned an important lesson about streamlining.
It looked good on paper. Game-breaking high-level spells? Gone...all spell lists are capped at 6th level. Hours spent preparing and memorizing spells at the start of every game day? Gone...everyone is spontaneous now. Instead of a half-dozen different spell lists, we had one. Spellcasters all use the same BAT, have the same HD, and get lots of skills. It was streamlined, efficient. Everyone was excited about it.
Things were great for about three game sessions. Then it started to get boring. Everyone spent all of those extra skill points on the same skills. They all selected the same feats. They all bought the same equipment, and quarreled over the same pieces of treasure, because they were all essentially the same characters. When the only real difference between the wizard and the cleric is their spellbook, well...characters lost their identity.
We switched back after a month, and I learned an important lesson about streamlining.
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Because you mentioned the gazetters: Shouldn´t most of the non-combat stuff you´re talking about be moved from core to setting? Seriously, when you´ve got a more or less generic core and offer different settings for the flavour, shoudn´t the setting books include the parts of the rules that work with that flavour? I really can´t imagine Wilderlands of High Fantasy without brutally dangerous overland travel, wandering prostitutes and random encounters, they just don´t really fit in with my Eberron.
If WotC is to blame for something here, it´s the fact that the setting books are bland and missing the non-combat stuff, not the Core.
...... please, Judges Guild, make a 4E Wilderlands Box ...
MerricB
Eternal Optimist
The thing about streamlining... is that it works some of the time. AD&D could really do with some streamlining, especially in the nonsensical initiative rules.
Probably the thing that disappointed me most about the AD&D 2E change is the change to the wizard specialist - and the loss of the illusionist. The AD&D illusionist has character. The AD&D 2E illusionist is boring and with artificial restrictions: it's streamlining gone wrong.
4E shows an abundance of good design; it's just not always design for the same goals we have in a RPG. Quicker high-level combats compared to 3E? Fantastic! (I ran three level 21 combats on Sunday, each took under an hour, which is far, far better than what 16th level combat took in 3.5e). However, combat still takes a lot of time - and the time emphasis it has takes away from exploration and roleplaying.
Settlers of Catan has simple goals, but will it last another 20 years? It's a great family game, no doubt, and will maintain that going onwards, but state-of-the-art in gamer's games is changing. Of the Top 10 on boardgamegeek, the years published are as follows: 2005, 2002, 2007, 2006, 2004, 2008, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2005. (Sitting at #11 is 1995). Is this cult of the shiny?
There is that factor, but it's also very true that the best new boardgames are much better designed than those of the 70s. (I've played a few old AH games recently, and it's incredible to see the major design flaws they have. Some are still good games, yes, but they really needed some polish).
And people's tastes change. Titan recently got republished. A well thought-of game from 1980. It just takes too long in 2010 for most people to consider it.
Cheers!
Probably the thing that disappointed me most about the AD&D 2E change is the change to the wizard specialist - and the loss of the illusionist. The AD&D illusionist has character. The AD&D 2E illusionist is boring and with artificial restrictions: it's streamlining gone wrong.
4E shows an abundance of good design; it's just not always design for the same goals we have in a RPG. Quicker high-level combats compared to 3E? Fantastic! (I ran three level 21 combats on Sunday, each took under an hour, which is far, far better than what 16th level combat took in 3.5e). However, combat still takes a lot of time - and the time emphasis it has takes away from exploration and roleplaying.
Settlers of Catan has simple goals, but will it last another 20 years? It's a great family game, no doubt, and will maintain that going onwards, but state-of-the-art in gamer's games is changing. Of the Top 10 on boardgamegeek, the years published are as follows: 2005, 2002, 2007, 2006, 2004, 2008, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2005. (Sitting at #11 is 1995). Is this cult of the shiny?
There is that factor, but it's also very true that the best new boardgames are much better designed than those of the 70s. (I've played a few old AH games recently, and it's incredible to see the major design flaws they have. Some are still good games, yes, but they really needed some polish).
And people's tastes change. Titan recently got republished. A well thought-of game from 1980. It just takes too long in 2010 for most people to consider it.
Cheers!
Chainsaw Mage
First Post
This is one of the reasons that the 2e Monstrous Manual remains one of my all-time favorite monster books. Tons of material for each beastie on habitat, physical appearance, mating habits, care and feeding of young, and usefulness in chopping up body parts for spell components.
Seriously, the monster descriptions alone in 2e MM are rife with adventure hooks.
billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him)
I would say most emphatically NO. I want my core to cover general rules including non-combat travel and exploration. I want my core rules to be a tool kit that extends beyond the encounter and beyond combat. Setting books should cover specific concerns about their settings, sure. Perhaps with more sophisticated detail when it's important like the desert setting rules of Al-Qadim.
But what if I want to build my own setting? Shouldn't the core offer me some support? And shouldn't that support be shared as part of the core rules so that the general rules for my campaign world are similar to my friend Brian's, or Rob's, or Stephen's, particularly if we are all trying to play the same basic game?
No, general rules for all sorts of things I may want in the core. Specific overrides, extensions, or gloss-overs can be put in the settings.
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