D&D 5E Fixing the Fighter

[pemerton]

What would have pissed a lot of people off less would be if the DMG had been able to articulate sandboxing vs. adventure path vs. scene-framing Nar and explain how 4e works with each thing.

I know there is a reluctance to nail down different styles like this, lest we replace edition warfare with playstyle warfare (or just come across as weird and over-theoretical), but I think at this point it's necessary to be this clear, especially if you want to move D&D in a new direction. You have to put in a bit more effort to explain what you're doing and why.

It's my experience on these boards that there is a common tendency to treat sandboxing vs adventure path as a spectrum, which makes it hard to articulate scene-based play as a coherent alternative approach.

A related tendency is to favour the idea that the "central" storyline should be under the GM's control, and that player-initiated storylinesshould be secondary "side quests", because they only involve one player and (to paraphrase a poster on the current "encouraging roleplaying" thread) leave the others just sitting around eating pizza.

These tendencies make it hard, I think, for designers to exlain how scene-framing works, and how the GM can weave multiple player-initiated and player-driven story concerns into a series of coherent and engaging encounters. That's not a reason not to do it, but perhaps helps explain why they've not been very good at it.

Gamist dungeon sandbox is my "narrow" definition of D&D. It's what I kind of wish D&D meant. But I accept the reality is that for most people D&D means something much broader and vaguer, like "violent fantasy story roleplay game thing".

For me, this horse bolted in the mid-80s with Oriental Adventures, and I'm sure I wasn't the first.

I think it's somewhat inevitable that a game based around well-known fantasy tropes, deliberately echoing Tolkienesque and Arthurian romantic fantasy (among other things), will end up with people trying to use it to do something other than gamist sandboxing.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Just relooking over the encounters, I'm sure they would have less padding (no goblins, iron defenders, ochre jellies, etc) to fill the XP budget. Turning (esp in Pathfinder) would eliminate a lot the weaker undead, and ranged/magic attacks would be more important. A lot of the adventure was a pain trying to spend the XP budget.

That's not my reading of the adventure at all. My reading is that you wanted to pad what is essentially about a half-level adventure into a full level.

Turning the adventure into a scene based one, we have:

Pre-credit sequence: The hooks.
Scene 1: Addressing the Wild Rose. How the PCs do this is up to them - a 6 before 3 structure behind the scenes works, but this is a scene. If the PCs make it through they gain XP accordingly.
Scene 2: The Dark Knives Guild. The PCs know Duval was a member - and need to find out where and how he lies. If they botch this but have mentioned they want to find out where Duval lies, they get the combat - with the combat opening something like "You're looking for Duval's body? You're about to join him in the old crypt." Textbook example of Fail Forwards here.
Scene 3: The Complication. I'd base this on either the Dark Cabal or The Forgotten Dead - preferably the Cabal. Using the Dark Cabal version, with Duval around, undead are easy to raise, so the Dark Cabal has based itself here. They can be fought (they have treasure) or sneaked past as a group - but run the risk of being reinforcements for Duval. Terrain here: broken gravestones and open graves. If the PCs sneak past (or bluff/intimidate) each failure means that Duval gets a reinforcement from the Cabal attacking the PCs in the rear.
Scene 4: The Crypt. The Complication was near the entrance to the crypt. Duval is inside the large, open ossuary with skeletons sorted into piles by bone type. And some assembling themselves into literally a dozen decrepit skeleton minions. The skull pile bites anyone who passes through them (including Duval).
Epilogue: As before

The whole thing would at this point be worth half a level or so and could be run comfortably in a couple of hours.

Your version has, in place of the section of the adventure I called the Complication: Rotting Welcome Party (L3),Dark Cabal (L2), The Forgotten Dead (L1), Foul Things Grow (L3), Scavengers (L2), and Rat's Den (L3). Possibly also The Crypts Come Alive (L6). Not one single one of these encounters is more than extremely tangentally relevant to the plot of the adventure; they are merely there from your description so the PCs have half a level's worth of random monsters there to grind against for XP.

Put half a level's worth of random monsters into an adventure to make the PCs grind for XP and guess what? The PCs will feel as if they are grinding for XP.

The table on DMG p104 you were following says over the course of a level that the PCs should face an approximate mix of challenges; it doesn't say or even imply that this has to be one single adventure.

Edit: To sum up, the design process seems to have been.
1: Write a basic plot.
2: Pick a map at random ignoring the guidance in the DMG.
3: Add as much XP in the form of pure grind (monsters that are there for no other purpose than to be killed for XP) as was present in the actually necessary parts fo the adventure.
4: Blame 4e when points 2 and 3 don't work.

Explain to me in which editions points 2 and 3 would be a good idea please?

Sadly, by then it was probably too late for more than a fair share of players.

What doesn't help is the number of people who spread misinformation about 4e.

More constructively: why does 4e work poorly for dungeoneering and how can it be improved for such?

4e combat is big and cinematic. This is great for epic fights but not terribly good for dealing with an orc guarding a pie (4e dragons on the other hand seriously kick ass). There are two things to do.

Firstly: Minions and area of fights. I believe that at least one 4e conversion handles the entire Gatehouse of Hommlet as one single encounter full of minions.

Secondly: A Quick Combat Resolution System where you can wrap things up in only a couple of rolls. I've a homebrew where for unnecessary and one sided fights, or for serious pants-round-ankles ambushes damage is applied directly to healing surges. (PCs and monsters do 1hs of damage each - strikers 2, rogues 3 if they haven't attacked the previous round, leaders can prevent 1 hit, defenders get an interrupt attack, controllers attack 3 separate targets - most monsters have 4hs in this system and unaware* monsters take +50% damage, round up).

* Unaware isn't merely surprised. A monster or PC expecting trouble is never unaware; a guard dozing in a guard box or someone who's just sat down to dinner is unaware until either they have been hit or the end of the first round.

Edit: And to support Kraydak below, making attrition matter is the purpose of having damage go straight through to healing surges. Dungeons have been broken ever since the near-elimination of the wandering monster tables allowed wizards to recover their spells in the dungeon (one of the things they were there to prevent). 4e just made this carry through to hit points (which weren't a problem in 3e with wands anyway). Extended rests work IMO much better if they are narrative-appropriate rather than just a sleep for a few hours.

 

[Kraydak]

More constructively: why does 4e work poorly for dungeoneering and how can it be improved for such?

4e pushed DnD very far into the "start every encounter at full, no attrition" corner. This makes modest/weak encounter a painful waste of game-time (THE most important resource of all). You end up with smaller numbers of large, lavish set-piece encounters. It also makes failure a relative non-option since the only way to fail is to TPK on one of the set-pieces.

Dungeoneering does better with a range of encounter difficulties, attrition and the stress of "go another room or not?" You want the non-boss encounters to go with the boss encounters; and you want to have to decide whether it is worth killing the two cantankerous ogres guarding the bridge (which might cost hp!), or just to pay their (absurdly huge) toll.

 

[Remathilis]

That's not my reading of the adventure at all. My reading is that you wanted to pad what is essentially about a half-level adventure into a full level.

Turning the adventure into a scene based one, we have:

Pre-credit sequence: The hooks.
Scene 1: Addressing the Wild Rose. How the PCs do this is up to them - a 6 before 3 structure behind the scenes works, but this is a scene. If the PCs make it through they gain XP accordingly.
Scene 2: The Dark Knives Guild. The PCs know Duval was a member - and need to find out where and how he lies. If they botch this but have mentioned they want to find out where Duval lies, they get the combat - with the combat opening something like "You're looking for Duval's body? You're about to join him in the old crypt." Textbook example of Fail Forwards here.
Scene 3: The Complication. I'd base this on either the Dark Cabal or The Forgotten Dead - preferably the Cabal. Using the Dark Cabal version, with Duval around, undead are easy to raise, so the Dark Cabal has based itself here. They can be fought (they have treasure) or sneaked past as a group - but run the risk of being reinforcements for Duval. Terrain here: broken gravestones and open graves. If the PCs sneak past (or bluff/intimidate) each failure means that Duval gets a reinforcement from the Cabal attacking the PCs in the rear.
Scene 4: The Crypt. The Complication was near the entrance to the crypt. Duval is inside the large, open ossuary with skeletons sorted into piles by bone type. And some assembling themselves into literally a dozen decrepit skeleton minions. The skull pile bites anyone who passes through them (including Duval).
Epilogue: As before

The whole thing would at this point be worth half a level or so and could be run comfortably in a couple of hours.

Your version has, in place of the section of the adventure I called the Complication: Rotting Welcome Party (L3),Dark Cabal (L2), The Forgotten Dead (L1), Foul Things Grow (L3), Scavengers (L2), and Rat's Den (L3). Possibly also The Crypts Come Alive (L6). Not one single one of these encounters is more than extremely tangentally relevant to the plot of the adventure; they are merely there from your description so the PCs have half a level's worth of random monsters there to grind against for XP.

Put half a level's worth of random monsters into an adventure to make the PCs grind for XP and guess what? The PCs will feel as if they are grinding for XP.

The table on DMG p104 you were following says over the course of a level that the PCs should face an approximate mix of challenges; it doesn't say or even imply that this has to be one single adventure.

Edit: To sum up, the design process seems to have been.
1: Write a basic plot.
2: Pick a map at random ignoring the guidance in the DMG.
3: Add as much XP in the form of pure grind (monsters that are there for no other purpose than to be killed for XP) as was present in the actually necessary parts fo the adventure.
4: Blame 4e when points 2 and 3 don't work.

Explain to me in which editions points 2 and 3 would be a good idea please?

NC, I'm going be a civil as possible here.

I didn't design this adventure to fail. Now I realize that *GASP* I ran 4e and didn't like might shock your senses, but when I did I did it in good faith. Perhaps I didn't understand the Magic of 4e from its Holy Text in the DMG, but I designed a dungeon in the style I was familiar with. Small encounters, dungeons, etc. As the author of the work, I can say its honestly no worse than what WotC and Goodman was putting out at the same time, and that's a lot to say for an amateur. It wasn't my greatest work, but it was the one I typed up in full in an attempt to get a good handle on 4e.

And this module wasn't the reason I hated 4e. I played it until after PHB2 came out. I continued to use Dungeon adventures and homebrews until then. It got nominally better. We did have some good sessions. Honestly, people LOVED the story of this, but complained out the combat. We had the same complaint after running Spellgard in 4e Realms. The DM of that started cutting encounters left and right. That was "professionals" creating the same effect as my little amateur attempt. When WotC's modules fail to give us the experience we wanted and we found we couldn't do it ourselves, is it REALLY a stretch that we blame the system?

You know, I'm glad your a better DM than I am. Your understanding of 4e is so good that you can fix this. We tried, we disliked it. I don't fault you enjoying that system, there are people who ardently defend Rifts and Synnibar too. And the 4e found in Essentials might have worked for us. But not the 4e in the 2008 core books. So we rediscovered an RPG that cleaved closer to our style, and we enjoy it.

 

[Libramarian]

It's my experience on these boards that there is a common tendency to treat sandboxing vs adventure path as a spectrum, which makes it hard to articulate scene-based play as a coherent alternative approach.

A related tendency is to favour the idea that the "central" storyline should be under the GM's control, and that player-initiated storylinesshould be secondary "side quests", because they only involve one player and (to paraphrase a poster on the current "encouraging roleplaying" thread) leave the others just sitting around eating pizza.

These tendencies make it hard, I think, for designers to exlain how scene-framing works, and how the GM can weave multiple player-initiated and player-driven story concerns into a series of coherent and engaging encounters. That's not a reason not to do it, but perhaps helps explain why they've not been very good at it.

I dunno, I've never written a serious how-to gaming text so I don't really know how hard it is. The question is whether the DMG can explain different styles, draw some lines inside the big tent, without falling back on value-laden rule-of-thumb language that explains one style by implicitly dissing another (like get to the encounter, get to the fun!). It strikes me that there would be less of a need to steer the reader away from traditional DMing habits if these habits were already explicated and discussed constructively elsewhere (as part of a different style) in the text.

My thought (hope) is that this stuff is not really that complicated; it's just that when you're all coy about it and give the reader the sneaking suspicion that their way of playing D&D is not happening anymore they stop thinking and start whargarbling.

However, at the same time I also want the DMG to be shorter...so I'm probably asking for too much somewhere.

 

[Neonchameleon]

NC, I'm going be a civil as possible here.

I didn't design this adventure to fail. Now I realize that *GASP* I ran 4e and didn't like might shock your senses, but when I did I did it in good faith. Perhaps I didn't understand the Magic of 4e from its Holy Text in the DMG, but I designed a dungeon in the style I was familiar with. Small encounters, dungeons, etc. As the author of the work, I can say its honestly no worse than what WotC and Goodman was putting out at the same time, and that's a lot to say for an amateur. It wasn't my greatest work, but it was the one I typed up in full in an attempt to get a good handle on 4e.

Remathilis,

I'm going to be as civil as possible here.

As the author of the work, you are in no position to judge how good it is. And your work there doesn't even meet the bar set by the notoriously terrible Keep on the Shadowfell. You claim you followed the example of the initial 4e adventures - but you simply didn't - especially for encounter design. And were you to have done so your adventure would have been better.

I've mentioned three ways your adventure fails to be a good one.

1. An extremely cramped dungeon.
2. Two thirds of the fights are PCs vs 4 or 5 standard monsters with no interesting terrain.
3. Too many fights for that amount of plot.

Now Keep on the Shadowfell absolutely fails this last test - in fact the suggestion I've seen for fixing KotS is to cut the entire keep. On the other hand, Keep doesn't fail on point 1 or point 2. It does have five fights in it with about as many monsters as PCs. It even has two of those fights in a row at one point in the writeup. But most of the fights have piles of minions; a dozen or more bad guys to a combat is not exceptional.

This would all be irrelevant for most purposes. I don't care that you design adventures that are even worse in execution than Keep on the Shadowfell.

What I do care about is that the criticisms levelled at 4e are consistently accurate. And yours simply aren't. You claim there was no useful guidance in the DMG while ignoring the guidance to use wide open spaces. You claim your adventures were no worse than those being put out by WotC while not even measuring up to the standards of Keep on the Shadowfell. You make simply counterfactual claims about the fighters and knights. Your idea of civilised arguing includes some absolutely blatant strawmen. You believe for a PC to be offering another options on how and whether to move is beyond any sort of sensible limits and therefore the same category as CAGI. Your arguments about 4e routinely reach to hyperbole (remember your strawman earlier).

I know you don't like 4e and you don't get 4e. And I know (probably in part thanks to your not following WotC adventure writers and including lots of minions) your fighter was not terribly tactically effective or even imaginative. But rather than misrepresent it could you stop talking about it please? Having to go round correcting you post after post because until we stick to actually true statements we won't have a meaningful discussion and the well will be further poisoned is at least as tedious and annoying for me as it is for you.

It's not even as if there isn't plenty to criticise about 4e. The early adventures were crap. CAGI does divide the community. Essentials is 4e's own internal edition war. The initial release was not fit for purpose and the presentation of skill challenges is still IMO terrible. Combat is rigid and takes a long time. Not everyone likes either AEDU or the way Essentials left AEDU. The (non-artifact) Magic Items are ... uninspiring. And whoever said "Ze game will remain ze same" was ... imaginative. 4e isn't what I'm running at the moment (Cortex Plus).

 

[Remathilis]

Don't worry NC. I'm done here.

 

[Morrus]

Chill out, you two. There's a lot of low-level snarkiness sneaking in there. If you're trying to be civil, please actually be civil, not sarcastic.

 

[Hussar]

The 4e DMG is anti-sandbox in general. What would have pissed a lot of people off less would be if the DMG had been able to articulate sandboxing vs. adventure path vs. scene-framing Nar and explain how 4e works with each thing.

I'm sorry, but I don't see that at all. What makes you say this? Is it the quote about skipping past talking to the town guards? Because that's one very small quote out of a very large section. There's nothing making 4e any more or less sandbox friendly than any other edition.

I know there is a reluctance to nail down different styles like this, lest we replace edition warfare with playstyle warfare (or just come across as weird and over-theoretical), but I think at this point it's necessary to be this clear, especially if you want to move D&D in a new direction. You have to put in a bit more effort to explain what you're doing and why. You can't just imply that a traditional way of playing D&D sucks now. This is bound to cause problems.

OTOH, it would also be extremely helpful if people didn't simply cherry pick quotes out of context as "proof" that WOTC was piddling on a specific play style. The whole "dancing around fairy rings" thing that went on and on and on was ridiculous. Again, there really was far less moving D&D in any new direction.

Regarding dungeons: The dungeon as setting evolved codependently with the OD&D/Basic/AD&D mechanics and playstyle. I think the whole point of it is to be the best gamist sandbox environment it can be. If you're not running a gamist sandbox, then yeah I can understand why you wouldn't like dungeons very much. They're a pretty boring and dreary setting for scene-based fantasy adventure.

Actually that's a bit of an exagerration; the natural emotional terrain for dungeoncrawling is horror/creepy/weird. If you're running a scene-based fantasy adventure and specifically want to do that, then I can see utilizing a dungeon environment for a while. But if you're not doing that at all, then yeah -- if you feel like the whole dungeon thing is vestigial, trust your instincts and dump it. That makes sense to me.

As to whether or not it counts as D&D if you dump the dungeoncrawl, for me we've already left behind what I want to call D&D when we're not doing a gamist sandbox. The dungeon as setting is a secondary consequence.

Gamist dungeon sandbox is my "narrow" definition of D&D. It's what I kind of wish D&D meant. But I accept the reality is that for most people D&D means something much broader and vaguer, like "violent fantasy story roleplay game thing".

See, the thing is, there's nothing stopping 4e from doing a decent sandbox dungeon crawl. I'd much, much prefer to redo my World's Largest Dungeon campaign in 4e than try it in 3e again. It would work 10 thousand times better as a 4e adventure than it did as a 3e one. 3e required far, far too many hand waves and winks to make it work. 4e I could do the World's Largest Dungeon pretty much out of the box.

About the biggest issue with 4e would be combat time. Yeah, that needs to get cropped down. I think a simple form of morale rules would generally do the trick. That and MM3 stat blocks.

All I know is that I've been playing 4e in Dark Sun for the past year. In that time we've done about a dozen dungeon crawls. They've worked fine and been tons of fun. Has every minute been great? Nope, there's been some mis-steps. However, it worked very well as a dungeon crawling sandbox game.

 

[Libramarian]

[MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION], given that a few other 4e fans here agreed with my post (including XP comments that don't show up anymore) I'm not going to argue the point with you. However I will clarify that I didn't say nor do I think that it's IMPOSSIBLE to do gamist sandboxing in 4e. You can do whatever with whatever, it's just a question of how much work you're willing to put into it. I believe you when you say you do it.

I don't want to argue like it's 2009, I want to talk about how DDN can potentially have really good advice text for Gygaxian sandbox gamism AND Paizoian adventure paths AND the sort of non-railroady scene-framing [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION], [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] and I think [MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION] do with 4e. I accept that this is a legit thing now and I would like to see the best practices for it carried forward as long as it can be situated alongside the other styles and explained in a way that doesn't involve dissing them as bad old habits.