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Fighters vs. Spellcasters (a case for fighters.)
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<blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 6245031" data-attributes="member: 6696971"><p>Good to know. I'm confident further play would have borne that out even further for you.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>- Conflict Resolution versus Task Resolution. </p><p></p><p>- Scenes versus Open World</p><p></p><p>- Resolution of action by way of a zoom-out on intent and stakes versus a zoom-in on the facility/aptitude of target when attempting a specified task. </p><p></p><p>- Subjective DCs that focus on the outcome of inducing compelling conflict for the PC/group (while expecting the GM to scale the conflict toward the genre tropes that should challenge the PCs of n level) versus Objective DCs that focus on modelling physical aspects of the game world.</p><p></p><p>- Evolution of fiction and ultimate outcomes of conflicts derived by the conflict resolution framework's parameters (especially win/loss conditions) versus evolution of fiction and win/loss condition prescribed by GM/adventure path, forced by GM, or inherited/earned by strategic PC play (or by a combination of any of those 3).</p><p></p><p>Very, very different play experiences.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>I'll try to address your example (perhaps not satisfactorily, but I'll try). Consider your use of it for the dogs as an Intimidate augment to your Nature check. You ended up cowing/wrangling the beasts with an aspect of territorial domination until their masters gained control. No damage. </p><p></p><p>I can't recall exactly how it was resolved in your Transition Scene but I beleive you were successful and therefor your intent should be realized. If you just want push a foe, cow a foe, intimidate a foe, challenge a foe, and the keywords and mutable ficton of the power (and the fictional positioning external to you) allow for it, you've earned the realization of your intent. </p><p></p><p>If we're breaking out the combat resolution mechanics and you want to knock someone out or don't want the NPC damage to be meat, you are free to stipulate that. They'll still take "HP damage" as a metagame resource to adjudicate the resolution of the conflict. However, you've earned the right to stipulate what that HP damage means.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>I truly with the DMG2 was the initial DMG released for 4e (and that Neverwinter Campaign Setting found its way into canon early on). </p><p></p><p>I said in another thread that when I initially read 4e's rule texts, it reminded me of a d20 effort at Dogs in the Vineyard with crunchy tactical combat (and I wondered why Skill Challenges didn't provide XP only for failures in conflict; eg Conflict Fallout in DitV). Because of this, when I began to play it, I put those those techniques and principles to use rather than the Gamist (pawn stance) techniques I honed and principles I learned when GMing 1e dungeon crawls and the GM force techniques/principles I learned from 2e and the process sim I learned from Classic Traveller and 3.x.</p><p></p><p>When I tried to use it for my 1e dungeon crawl games, those guys balked (as did I). I could make it work and it was ok, but it wasn't even close to <em>right</em>. I could, however, play a nice game of Appalachian/Oregon Trail attrition with 4e and heavy-handed use of the condition track (that would deny Extended Rests), considerable pressure on Healing Surges, and extremely difficult Exploration Skill Challenges. Playing it as process-sim was functional but certainly not great. And why would I want to use GM force when there are these unique buttons, levers, and widgets in the system that protagonizes the PCs, empowers the players and makes it easy for me to compose thematic challenges and let the mechanics and fictional positioning adjudicate the results? </p><p></p><p>So I defaulted to techniques and principles that I felt matched the system, that I felt matched what I thought the designers were trying to convey (either sloppily or in a "speak-easy" fashion for fear of grognard backlash if certain buzzwords were used) and then confirmed it with DMG2. </p><p></p><p>By my way of looking at it, Skill Challenges are just a conflict resolution system whereby the GM dicepool is a passive, mean roll (to keep challenges tension-inducing and climactic) and the player dice pool is the d20 version with augments by way of perishable powers/healing surges (rather than perishable extra dice).</p><p></p><p>I may never be able to convince you that my way is the designers intention (even if you read DMG2 and NCS start to finish), but I think I could convince you that its an awesome way to play that is so functional with respect to the RAW ruleset that the apple couldn't have fallen too far from the tree <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink ;)" data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>I agree. It would be horribly disfunctional for 3.x style of play. I GMed 2 long campaigns in 3.x, from its embryonic stages in playtest through late 2006. I played these while I was learning and honing indie techniques with Sorcerer and Dogs in the Vineyard (after having played Over the Edge prior).</p><p></p><p>Truth be told, I don't feel at all that the 2 playstyles advocated for by the designers in the 3.x DMG are in any way the right approach for the ruleset; the 1st being "kick in the door/back to the dungeon (<em>step on up</em>) nor heavy GM force play. 3.x runs extremely well from level 3 to level 10 as a process-sim sandbox. The ECL system is very functional, the objective task DCs and the math of the system are in-line, iterative attacks aren't demanding non-stop deployment of a FAR (full attack routine) thus turning combat into "stand there and hit the HP tofu to death", novas aren't out of control for all parties, BBEG can still kinda be martial characters, Spell DCs versus Saves math isn't borked, the game hasn't turned into 50 % acounting and 50 % play (and 100 % agony as I try to predict spellcaster rocks and scissors and paper to my paper conflicts), and PC spellcasters aren't utterly dominating play (topical!). </p><p></p><p>If you can have a gentlemen's agreement to keep WoCLW out of the game, then level 3 - 10 play is a delight to run as sandbox, process-sim.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>This is very insightful commentary and I'm glad you brought this up.</p><p></p><p>Its a decent bit of GMing principles and how I run 4e; "escalate, escalate, escalate" and "every moment, drive play toward conflict." I find that the best 2 gears of 4e are Die Hard and Indiana Jones.</p><p></p><p>That being said, a decent chunk of your sense of this was also the PBP platform that we had to work with. My home games certainly have trasition scenes with regrouping and reflecting, specifically after a notable campaign win or loss.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>I'm also glad that you brought this up. Part of this, I think, is (i) dispirate thematic content embedded into the PCs such that premise to be addressed was "up for grabs" and interest and (ii) lack of formal Minor and Major Quests. Players and GM composing those tier-spanning stakes and objectives together make for clearer, tighter forcus.</p><p></p><p>Further, we were as close to "no myth" setting as possible. Almost everything was "up for grabs" here and I was working off of specific background cues and in-play cues to compose conflict and adversarial situations that I thought would "push play toward conflict" that people wanted to engage with. </p><p></p><p>Ultimately we needed an antagonist because it didn't appear that we had the commitment to see the conflict through to the dragon. That antagonist needed to have meaning. Where did I find meaning? I found it in Thurgon's backstory on the shadow passing over the Iron Tower and the nebulous circumstances of the immediately preceeding Lord Commander. I found it in Lucann's extremist, xenophobic backstory and the loved ones he left behind to master that side of himself once he confronted that he felt his current ideological leanings were wrong.</p><p></p><p>There is your adversary for our short play.</p><p></p><p>You I wanted to find out if Thurgon was a man you could believe in and follow and we'd only find that out in play. Quinn I wanted to find out if he could be inspired to believe and tempted to hope or if he would succumb to his dark, nihilistic leanings and become a villain (I secretly hoped the rushing waters of the hazard would throw him over the edge...and he would "die"...and I could use him as a primary antagonist later, resurrected in the same dark form as the dryad!). We would also only find that out in play.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>You may want to give 13 Age a spin. I would suggest Dungeon World but I'm not sure it has enough crunch for you (given you are drawn to 3.x). Having GMed it a fair bit at this point, in play, it is considerably different than 4e; "fail forward" but no noncombat conflict resolution mechanics and combat is considerably less dynamic. Thematic hooks comes from Icons, One Unique Thing, and Backgrounds (all which deliver some measure of authorial control to players) rather than Backgrounds, Themes, Paragon Paths, Epic Destinies and Quests.</p><p></p><p>It may be your thing.</p><p></p><p></p><p>I'm sure your reflection isn't poor. But I do agree with you. It just lacks full resolution as this was a one-off and tainted by certain PBP (sometimes frustrating) nuance. That notwithstanding, I think your observations are keen and fair.</p><p></p><p>I wish I had a solution to that. I don't know what your local prospects are for a functional 4e game. I would certainly run a live game for you if I could. As I said above, I would suggest checking with your players and see if they're interested in a 13th Age game. I think there may be a decent bit there for you.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>This is also something else I wanted to address. I don't know precisely how play would have turned out if we had continued. Quinn may have evolved into an antagonstic figure and become either an anti-hero or @<em><strong><u><a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/member.php?u=386" target="_blank">LostSoul</a></u></strong></em> may have groomed him to be a climactic villain and given him to me later (while he composed a new PC for play). Perhaps Lucann would have been able to rally the Eladrin to aid the humans. Perhaps not. Would the PCs have been able to save the large number of refugees from the flooding Undercity? Don't know. I doubt that you guys would have been able to save a large percentage of the refugees while simultaneously beating back the dragon in the Royal Tower. However, I'm quite sure that if Thurgon and Theron would have been able to fight back the dragon in the towar and rescue the King (again), the city's defenses would have been renewed. I'm quite sure Thurgon would have driven play toward a reckoning to be played out in the following days whereby the PCs (likely with the King) rushed into the breach, beat back the sieging forces and confronted the dragon in a final showdown in an outlying watchtower with crumbling battlements (or something like that) as it refused to give up the battle it should have rightly won by then. Beating back the siege would have likely been a hard Complexity 5 Skill Challenge with nested challenges if you split up for whatever reason (eg Quinn and Campbell on stealth missions to destroy enemy artillery/siege engines or slay generals). And the Dragon BBEG fight would have been difficult and dynamic in the extreme (probably with recharging harpoon ballista to ground the dragon (save ends) or something). It would have been cool.</p><p></p><p>How the city, their armed forces, their relationship with the Eladrin of the Feywild, and their king faired after all of that, I know not.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Manbearcat, post: 6245031, member: 6696971"] Good to know. I'm confident further play would have borne that out even further for you. - Conflict Resolution versus Task Resolution. - Scenes versus Open World - Resolution of action by way of a zoom-out on intent and stakes versus a zoom-in on the facility/aptitude of target when attempting a specified task. - Subjective DCs that focus on the outcome of inducing compelling conflict for the PC/group (while expecting the GM to scale the conflict toward the genre tropes that should challenge the PCs of n level) versus Objective DCs that focus on modelling physical aspects of the game world. - Evolution of fiction and ultimate outcomes of conflicts derived by the conflict resolution framework's parameters (especially win/loss conditions) versus evolution of fiction and win/loss condition prescribed by GM/adventure path, forced by GM, or inherited/earned by strategic PC play (or by a combination of any of those 3). Very, very different play experiences. I'll try to address your example (perhaps not satisfactorily, but I'll try). Consider your use of it for the dogs as an Intimidate augment to your Nature check. You ended up cowing/wrangling the beasts with an aspect of territorial domination until their masters gained control. No damage. I can't recall exactly how it was resolved in your Transition Scene but I beleive you were successful and therefor your intent should be realized. If you just want push a foe, cow a foe, intimidate a foe, challenge a foe, and the keywords and mutable ficton of the power (and the fictional positioning external to you) allow for it, you've earned the realization of your intent. If we're breaking out the combat resolution mechanics and you want to knock someone out or don't want the NPC damage to be meat, you are free to stipulate that. They'll still take "HP damage" as a metagame resource to adjudicate the resolution of the conflict. However, you've earned the right to stipulate what that HP damage means. I truly with the DMG2 was the initial DMG released for 4e (and that Neverwinter Campaign Setting found its way into canon early on). I said in another thread that when I initially read 4e's rule texts, it reminded me of a d20 effort at Dogs in the Vineyard with crunchy tactical combat (and I wondered why Skill Challenges didn't provide XP only for failures in conflict; eg Conflict Fallout in DitV). Because of this, when I began to play it, I put those those techniques and principles to use rather than the Gamist (pawn stance) techniques I honed and principles I learned when GMing 1e dungeon crawls and the GM force techniques/principles I learned from 2e and the process sim I learned from Classic Traveller and 3.x. When I tried to use it for my 1e dungeon crawl games, those guys balked (as did I). I could make it work and it was ok, but it wasn't even close to [I]right[/I]. I could, however, play a nice game of Appalachian/Oregon Trail attrition with 4e and heavy-handed use of the condition track (that would deny Extended Rests), considerable pressure on Healing Surges, and extremely difficult Exploration Skill Challenges. Playing it as process-sim was functional but certainly not great. And why would I want to use GM force when there are these unique buttons, levers, and widgets in the system that protagonizes the PCs, empowers the players and makes it easy for me to compose thematic challenges and let the mechanics and fictional positioning adjudicate the results? So I defaulted to techniques and principles that I felt matched the system, that I felt matched what I thought the designers were trying to convey (either sloppily or in a "speak-easy" fashion for fear of grognard backlash if certain buzzwords were used) and then confirmed it with DMG2. By my way of looking at it, Skill Challenges are just a conflict resolution system whereby the GM dicepool is a passive, mean roll (to keep challenges tension-inducing and climactic) and the player dice pool is the d20 version with augments by way of perishable powers/healing surges (rather than perishable extra dice). I may never be able to convince you that my way is the designers intention (even if you read DMG2 and NCS start to finish), but I think I could convince you that its an awesome way to play that is so functional with respect to the RAW ruleset that the apple couldn't have fallen too far from the tree ;) I agree. It would be horribly disfunctional for 3.x style of play. I GMed 2 long campaigns in 3.x, from its embryonic stages in playtest through late 2006. I played these while I was learning and honing indie techniques with Sorcerer and Dogs in the Vineyard (after having played Over the Edge prior). Truth be told, I don't feel at all that the 2 playstyles advocated for by the designers in the 3.x DMG are in any way the right approach for the ruleset; the 1st being "kick in the door/back to the dungeon ([I]step on up[/I]) nor heavy GM force play. 3.x runs extremely well from level 3 to level 10 as a process-sim sandbox. The ECL system is very functional, the objective task DCs and the math of the system are in-line, iterative attacks aren't demanding non-stop deployment of a FAR (full attack routine) thus turning combat into "stand there and hit the HP tofu to death", novas aren't out of control for all parties, BBEG can still kinda be martial characters, Spell DCs versus Saves math isn't borked, the game hasn't turned into 50 % acounting and 50 % play (and 100 % agony as I try to predict spellcaster rocks and scissors and paper to my paper conflicts), and PC spellcasters aren't utterly dominating play (topical!). If you can have a gentlemen's agreement to keep WoCLW out of the game, then level 3 - 10 play is a delight to run as sandbox, process-sim. This is very insightful commentary and I'm glad you brought this up. Its a decent bit of GMing principles and how I run 4e; "escalate, escalate, escalate" and "every moment, drive play toward conflict." I find that the best 2 gears of 4e are Die Hard and Indiana Jones. That being said, a decent chunk of your sense of this was also the PBP platform that we had to work with. My home games certainly have trasition scenes with regrouping and reflecting, specifically after a notable campaign win or loss. I'm also glad that you brought this up. Part of this, I think, is (i) dispirate thematic content embedded into the PCs such that premise to be addressed was "up for grabs" and interest and (ii) lack of formal Minor and Major Quests. Players and GM composing those tier-spanning stakes and objectives together make for clearer, tighter forcus. Further, we were as close to "no myth" setting as possible. Almost everything was "up for grabs" here and I was working off of specific background cues and in-play cues to compose conflict and adversarial situations that I thought would "push play toward conflict" that people wanted to engage with. Ultimately we needed an antagonist because it didn't appear that we had the commitment to see the conflict through to the dragon. That antagonist needed to have meaning. Where did I find meaning? I found it in Thurgon's backstory on the shadow passing over the Iron Tower and the nebulous circumstances of the immediately preceeding Lord Commander. I found it in Lucann's extremist, xenophobic backstory and the loved ones he left behind to master that side of himself once he confronted that he felt his current ideological leanings were wrong. There is your adversary for our short play. You I wanted to find out if Thurgon was a man you could believe in and follow and we'd only find that out in play. Quinn I wanted to find out if he could be inspired to believe and tempted to hope or if he would succumb to his dark, nihilistic leanings and become a villain (I secretly hoped the rushing waters of the hazard would throw him over the edge...and he would "die"...and I could use him as a primary antagonist later, resurrected in the same dark form as the dryad!). We would also only find that out in play. You may want to give 13 Age a spin. I would suggest Dungeon World but I'm not sure it has enough crunch for you (given you are drawn to 3.x). Having GMed it a fair bit at this point, in play, it is considerably different than 4e; "fail forward" but no noncombat conflict resolution mechanics and combat is considerably less dynamic. Thematic hooks comes from Icons, One Unique Thing, and Backgrounds (all which deliver some measure of authorial control to players) rather than Backgrounds, Themes, Paragon Paths, Epic Destinies and Quests. It may be your thing. I'm sure your reflection isn't poor. But I do agree with you. It just lacks full resolution as this was a one-off and tainted by certain PBP (sometimes frustrating) nuance. That notwithstanding, I think your observations are keen and fair. I wish I had a solution to that. I don't know what your local prospects are for a functional 4e game. I would certainly run a live game for you if I could. As I said above, I would suggest checking with your players and see if they're interested in a 13th Age game. I think there may be a decent bit there for you. This is also something else I wanted to address. I don't know precisely how play would have turned out if we had continued. Quinn may have evolved into an antagonstic figure and become either an anti-hero or @[I][B][U][URL="http://www.enworld.org/forum/member.php?u=386"]LostSoul[/URL][/U][/B][/I] may have groomed him to be a climactic villain and given him to me later (while he composed a new PC for play). Perhaps Lucann would have been able to rally the Eladrin to aid the humans. Perhaps not. Would the PCs have been able to save the large number of refugees from the flooding Undercity? Don't know. I doubt that you guys would have been able to save a large percentage of the refugees while simultaneously beating back the dragon in the Royal Tower. However, I'm quite sure that if Thurgon and Theron would have been able to fight back the dragon in the towar and rescue the King (again), the city's defenses would have been renewed. I'm quite sure Thurgon would have driven play toward a reckoning to be played out in the following days whereby the PCs (likely with the King) rushed into the breach, beat back the sieging forces and confronted the dragon in a final showdown in an outlying watchtower with crumbling battlements (or something like that) as it refused to give up the battle it should have rightly won by then. Beating back the siege would have likely been a hard Complexity 5 Skill Challenge with nested challenges if you split up for whatever reason (eg Quinn and Campbell on stealth missions to destroy enemy artillery/siege engines or slay generals). And the Dragon BBEG fight would have been difficult and dynamic in the extreme (probably with recharging harpoon ballista to ground the dragon (save ends) or something). It would have been cool. How the city, their armed forces, their relationship with the Eladrin of the Feywild, and their king faired after all of that, I know not. [/QUOTE]
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