Execution, execution, execution!

[Treebore]

There is actually a lot of interesting ideas being put forth for 4E. What has me so hesitant to get excited is how they will actually pull into all together. IE, how well executed will this all be?

So my biggest reason for hesitancy is wondering how well they will put all of these ideas together. Will they get it right? Or will they think they are doing it right and then we think its a big dud.


I seriously hope the execution on 4E is superb.

 

[Geron Raveneye]

I seriously hope the execution on 4E is superb.

Exactly.

OFF WITH ITS HEAD!!!

Sorry, couldn't resist...my Will Defense was too low.

 

[Doug McCrae]

I've been realising more and more recently how much like a puzzle box or jigsaw a roleplaying game is. The parts must all fit together. This has been particularly a problem for 3e. Change one aspect of the game without changing others, and the sacred cows you failed to fix gore you from behind.

An example is PC death. It wasn't a big deal in early D&D because players controlled several PCs each plus henchmen and it was easy to create a new character. So the system could afford to be deadly. But these days deadliness is a big problem because players have one PC each and it's increasingly hard to create a new character the higher up the level track you go. Raise dead doesn't quite work because it costs too much gold and has a level loss, which players hate, encouraging them to make up a new PC instead. Also many players and DMs dislike coming back from the dead as it is too weird.

Changing one aspect of the game - ease with which a character can be created - caused a knock-on effect which needed to be considered, perhaps by making death much less likely, but wasn't.

 

[Green Knight]

I thought this thread would be about 4E encouraging the execution of monsters who surrender to the PC's. Damn.

 

[Hammerhead]

I thought this thread would be about 4E encouraging the execution of monsters who surrender to the PC's. Damn.

Nah, that was the earlier editions that did that, when they would only give you full XP if you killed your opponents (IIRC).

 

[Geron Raveneye]

I've been realising more and more recently how much like a puzzle box or jigsaw a roleplaying game is. The parts must all fit together. This has been particularly a problem for 3e. Change one aspect of the game without changing others, and the sacred cows you failed to fix gore you from behind.

An example is PC death. It wasn't a big deal in early D&D because players controlled several PCs each plus henchmen and it was easy to create a new character. So the system could afford to be deadly. But these days deadliness is a big problem because players have one PC each and it's increasingly hard to create a new character the higher up the level track you go. Raise dead doesn't quite work because it costs too much gold and has a level loss, which players hate, encouraging them to make up a new PC instead. Also many players and DMs dislike coming back from the dead as it is too weird.

Changing one aspect of the game - ease with which a character can be created - caused a knock-on effect which needed to be considered, perhaps by making death much less likely, but wasn't.

And in the background, it's the mindset with which the game was created and marketed. After all, nobody keeps people from going into a dungeon with a handful of henchmen and a backup character in tow...but somehow, 3.X places even more emphasis on the single character hero that the concept of taking a backup along already gets weird looks. And really, it's not THAT much longer to create another 1st level character, in case the one you just play gets offed. Anything more complicated, like character background, can be dealt with in case the replacement survives better than the original.

 

[Treebore]

I've been realising more and more recently how much like a puzzle box or jigsaw a roleplaying game is. The parts must all fit together. This has been particularly a problem for 3e. Change one aspect of the game without changing others, and the sacred cows you failed to fix gore you from behind.

An example is PC death. It wasn't a big deal in early D&D because players controlled several PCs each plus henchmen and it was easy to create a new character. So the system could afford to be deadly. But these days deadliness is a big problem because players have one PC each and it's increasingly hard to create a new character the higher up the level track you go. Raise dead doesn't quite work because it costs too much gold and has a level loss, which players hate, encouraging them to make up a new PC instead. Also many players and DMs dislike coming back from the dead as it is too weird.

Changing one aspect of the game - ease with which a character can be created - caused a knock-on effect which needed to be considered, perhaps by making death much less likely, but wasn't.

Exactly. Its not an easy task to put all of these game mechanics together and make them work. Hopefully they learned their lessons from 3E and the earlier editions and do put this together just right.

 

[Irda Ranger]

I've been realising more and more recently how much like a puzzle box or jigsaw a roleplaying game is. The parts must all fit together. This has been particularly a problem for 3e. Change one aspect of the game without changing others, and the sacred cows you failed to fix gore you from behind.

There's something to be said for the pre-3.x systems where all the rules sub-systems were arbitrary and unrelated. Yeah, there was no over-arching structure to help make sense of it all, but you could tear out whole rule systems and replace them with home-brew rules, and the rest of the system just kept on chugging. That's much less true these days.

More and more, as the games get more complicated, I find it harder and harder to write good house rules that actually work. It's a real project now.

Which is why i'm cautiously hopeful that 4e will be "just right" out of the box (or with only minor tweaks or DMG options), so that I won't have to do all that hard rule writing.

 

[EyeontheMountain]

There's something to be said for the pre-3.x systems where all the rules sub-systems were arbitrary and unrelated. Yeah, there was no over-arching structure to help make sense of it all, but you could tear out whole rule systems and replace them with home-brew rules, and the rest of the system just kept on chugging. That's much less true these days.
.

I really do not think that is an accurate way to look at older systems. Unless you mane they did not really work well on any level, and changing parts of it did no harm to the faltering whole.

In 1E and 2E, in my experience, the game needed a lot more houseruling, and it was a detrimental to the main game as it is in 3.x. Actually I have found it far easier to join 3.x games because more of them are closer to the main rule set. Lots of 1E and 2E games are way out there rules wise.

 

[Malhost Zormaeril]

Well, I'm sure the 4e rules won't be perfect, but they have certainly benefitted from the Golden Age of RPG design -- designers often understand much better now what exactly they're doing when they create a ruleset than even when 3.0 first came out.

It's a bit like writing compilers in the late 70s, after automata theory developed. Writing the buggers stopped being the black magic it used to be and an age of simpler, more reliable compilers followed. It's the same thing with 4e; perhaps that's even why the playtest time could be shortened? Regardless, I have faith that the execution is going to be much more straightforward than we think. At least, we see the designers with a very good idea of what they want and how to get there.