D&D 5E From Loose to Tight - the Oscillation of Editions and D&D Next

[S'mon]

Thanks guys, I think this thread is helping me to understand 4e a lot better (and by an extension not-4e, eg Labyrinth Lord). My 4e Forgotten Realms game has been going very well, but I occasionally worry that by using scene-framing* rather than a traditional simulation approach I am violating the tenets of good GMing. Manbearcat & Pemerton are giving me confidence that what I am doing is correct, for 4e.

*Scene Framing - the thing Pemerton taught me to do. Set up an engaging situation, but let the players determine how it turns out, based primarily on 'let's make a good story' Dramatist play. It's not linear AP type play because scenes/encounters are created more or less ad hoc, per session or within the session, and are not pre-determined. It's not sandboxy Simulation because scenes are determined more by 'what would be cool' than by process world-simulation. It has a Gamist element because scenes are crafted to challenge the players; there is game-conflict at the encounter level. But this is different from other forms of Gamism such as 0e-1e 'combat as war' strategic play ("the greatest victory is not to fight - just get the gold!") or 3e victory-through-effective-character-build play. The tailoring of encounters means it's very much combat-as-sport Gamism.

 

[S'mon]

I think I found 4e easier to understand because to me it signalled a whole host of departures from some traditional ways of playing D&D (like the adventure path or the dungeon/sandbox), and seemed very obviously influenced by indie ideas around thematically laden characters confronted by situations the GM has deliberately designed to speak to those thematic concerns.

If you look at the original, non-3e bits of the 4e DMG, it seems to me a lot like a sort of collection of early draft notes. It feels that Wyatt and co were struggling to understand and articulate what the game they had created was about, and how it worked. You came to it with an Indie perspective - I didn't, though I had read Sorcerer & Sword, and I did not see that in the DMG. I was primed for traditional D&D play styles and I could see the lack of support for those styles, but what was left just looked a lot like the worst sort of 3e linear adventurepathing, with a Fallcrest sandbox tacked on that did not fit with the whole AP style presented. But if I had not been primed to see that there...

In hindsight, the Fallcrest town section is rich with thematically engaging hooks, and hints at that quasi-sandbox but scene-framed style that I've found works perfectly for 4e. The GM can use it to run pretty much on-the-fly, framing exciting scenes in response to player input. Likewise the brief Nentir Vale gazetteer. The linear 4-encounters-in-row 'Kobold Hall' adventure can be treated as a bit of an aberration.
But what actually happened was that WoTC modeled all their adventures on Kobold Hall; they turned the hints from the Nentir Vale Gazetteer into a bunch of 10-30 encounter linear adventures. They produced very little 'Fallcrest' type material until Threats to The Nentir Vale, right at the end of 4e. And 4e failed.

 

[Manbearcat]

@S'mon

That looks spot on from where I sit.

Creative agenda - Maximize PC protagonism and player authorship of the fiction by way of:

1) Thematically-rich PC build structure which allows clarity/focusing of archetype such that the player:GM understanding of PC pressure points is coherent and overt.
2) PC-side resources (author and actor stance powers/features) and GM (outcome-based, focused, scene-framing) tools which are friendly toward the metagame allowing GM's to consistently construct challenges and adversity whereby the PCs can (and will with a measure of predictability given a proactive player and 1 above) take over and impose their thematic material upon the fiction. Rinse and repeat and insert feedback loop. You have a session and then a campaign from that scene-framing provoking theme > player decision-point and resource deployment relationship + the color, ephemera, and fortunes.
3) Clarity and transparency of rules such that all aspects of both 1 and 2 are easily divined and thus arbitration/fiat is limited.

I would all but guarantee that if I wrote out the naval commander PC that you would be able to easily enough divine his pressure points and immediately come up with several different off-the-cuff scenes to challenge his thematic material and resource scheme.

 

[S'mon]

Been reading over the Guards at the Gate thread from the start of this year; I found this quote here about 4e and Wyatt's 4e DMG:

Aberzanzorax:
I'm grateful to [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] for pointing out that it's not the system that is flawed (by focusing on encounters only), it's some of the advice about the system that is.

Right about pemerton, right about the system, right about the advice.

Edit: Rather than saying "Guards at the City Gate aren't fun! Skip to the Fun!" the 4e DMG should have said something like:

"You know how our annoying pre-release marketing said 'Ze Game Remains Ze Same?' Nope, that's not true. 4e D&D is designed for a very different approach than earlier editions. The recommended approach is aimed at creating an exciting story in play, through the GM framing scenes ('encounters'), but leaving their resolution open. How the scene turns out will usually determine how subsequent scenes are framed. There is a dynamic feedback loop between GM and players. Yes, this approach does take effort from the GM, but we provide you with lots of tools to help out..."

Then people would have understood what 4e was trying to do and could have decided if it was for them. They would have known when they were departing from the supported play style. They would have realised that the game was not designed for a linear series of fights (AP/railroad), nor for world-simulation sandboxing.

But either the 4e designers didn't know their own game, or they were scared that if they told the truth, people would not want to play it.

 

[S'mon]

Or here's LostSoul's advice on scene framing, much better than anything in the 4e DMG: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...e-Gate-Quote&p=5765952&viewfull=1#post5765952


Scene Framing

One of your jobs as DM is to keep the action moving. You want to put the PCs in situations where their players can make important decisions. Scenes where the players are not making choices that relate to their PCs or the Quests they've shown an interest in will drag. Fast-forward past the scenes where the players have no meaningful choices to make.

When you get to a scene that provides meaningful choices, jump right into it. Get excited. Describe the scene using all five senses. Describe the dangers the characters face. Once you've done that, sit back and let the players make their decisions and react to them.

How do you know which scenes to fast-forward through? A good scene is one that:
Includes challenges (both violent and non-violent) for the PCs to overcome
Reflects or explores features of the PCs (choice of class, race, paragon path, epic destiny, feats, powers, and role-playing characterization)
Leads to the conclusion of a Quest the PCs are interested in

Consider fast-forwarding past scenes that don't hit these points.

 

[S'mon]

Another product written by someone who clearly understood 4e was Ari Marmell's Neverwinter Campaign Setting. I did not like it though, I think because it focused on the broad, high-level thematic stuff I find easy to do, but neglected the ground-level nitty gritty that I need to be able to riff off. So in recent months I have actually been running my campaign out of 'Dungeon Delve' - it gives me statted NPCs, lots of sketched plots, and possible encounter areas (which I hate detailing). I take all that stuff, dot the dungeons around sandbox style, weave campaign threads around the material, and riff off it to create a dynamic campaign.

 

[Manbearcat]

We liked the player side stuff very much; the Themes, the Domains (features and powers), the Bladesinger. However, the setting stuff and adventure ideas were all over the place...it was like a vomitorium of amorophous, incoherent ideas. If they would have cut the "ideas" in half and focused the content on maximizing the rich thematic elements they had (both the themes and the tie-ins), it would have been a much better product.

 

[pemerton]

But either the 4e designers didn't know their own game, or they were scared that if they told the truth, people would not want to play it.

Ron Edwards commented on this being a problem in pioneering narrativist games:

All of these texts demonstrate an internal struggle to articulate means of addressing Premise, littered with trip-ups based on assumptions of GM-power and the utter lack of precedent in explaining the whole idea. Some of them slammed toward Simulationist texts upon second-edition revision and via supplements, probably to make it "more like an RPG."

. . .

Pitfalls of Narrativist game design

1. The Timid Virgin. The reasonably successful Narrativist-leaning GM is writing a game, and suddenly experiences a loss of nerve - he visualizes all those other players out there who obviously don't play in this fashion. One result is a kind of "but-but" motorboat effect scattered through the generally Simulationist-reading text: admonishments to keep non-GM participants from screwing up the apparently-Narrativist goals, usually by pleading, scolding, or imposing sudden and apparently out-of-place limits on the players' authority to provide input. . . Another sort of Timid Virgin effect is a full spin toward Force Techniques in isolated spots, which is less schizoid in terms of the reading experience, but perhaps more confusing in the long run. . . [this] characterizes many early-to-mid-90s game texts.​

It's a little odd that WotC had the same problem 10 years later - Mearls, at least, is familiar with the Forge, and presumably has read Edwards's essays!

Also, good to call out LostSoul. If you look at early 4e threads (second half of 2008) his posts are really standout ones. (And continue to be.)

 

[Remathilis]

For instance, AD&D 1E was very loose - it had a rambling rules system with all sorts of add ons. 2E tried to tighten and streamline, jettisoning certain "fiddly parts" and making the system more cohesive (actually, one could say that it goes back further, with OD&D being more open and B/X being more tightly woven).

3E initially seemed tightly woven in that it had a core mechanic, yet it was because of its core mechanic that it became very loose and open-ended, easily customized and, of course, the basis for tons of alternate rules and hundreds of OGL d20 games.

4E returned to a more tightly focused rules system. While it still followed the d20 mechanic, its secondary systems were all tightly woven around it; it is more difficult to pick and choose, to add or subtract - it was very streamlined and cohesive in its structure.
...

Which brings me to D&D Next. For me the big question is whether they can really pull off what they've essentially said they're trying to pull off: integrate the best of all editions, especially 3.x and 4E, and thus both "streams" of the dynamic I mentioned above: the more tightly focused and the more open-ended and freeform.

Every edition of D&D has been a game of codifying and/or streamlining things. OD&D is really a hodge-podge of rules and systems with very little uniting it except the D&D name and authors. Basic begins the process of streamlining and codifying. Advanced augmented the rules and codified things more (at the expense of streamlining), 2e streamlined 1e. 3e Codified and streamlined 2e. 3.5 codified 3e. 4e codified and streamlined 3.5. Each edition spelled out things that previously was left blank, vague, or given multiple conflicting ways handling. Essentially, the core features of the system are the same (until 4e, which jettisoned a lot of legacy crap for mechanical elegance).

I think "loose" and "tight" though are traps; 1e is sure loose because it many of the systems did not interconnect and thus could be added/removed/changed with relatively little detriment to the game. 3e on its own is not loose though; you can't remove elements of the core without replacing them or breaking other things (IE: you can't remove skills without breaking a whole slew of things) but the subsystems were replaceable 4e can do the same thing (witness the Essentials classes replacing the ADEU ones) but required a slew more work to do. But that is purely due to the interconnected elements. The trade-off for streamlining is difficulty in replacing things.

Next started out a game which felt like basic marries 3e, with the option off adding AD&D and 4e children to it. Its seeming more and more that it will be 3e wearing 4e's clothes (or vice versa) with AD&D tone and feel. Not bad, but not the loose system it was in playtest 1. Its the price paid for things like CE dice, maneuvers, etc. And we haven't even seen prestige classes, multi-classing, tactical combat, or supplemental classes (other than monk and a version of sorcerer and warlock).