From the WotC Boards: Mearls on 'Aggro'

[Celebrim]

Is collision detection really that hard?

Yes. It's not an impossible problem to handle, but it is a really really hard problem.

 

[GSHamster]

The solution is to change things so that it's not the best strategy (as 4e is doing), or assume that it is the best strategy and balance things around it so it's fun anyway (as Guild Wars did). Requiring that all enemies fought act in the same predictable but insanely stupid way is... not a good solution to the problem.

Change things how? Give an example of a realistic change that would make attacking the mage a non-optimal strategy?

Is collision detection really that hard? Guild Wars doesn't seem to have any problem with it, and they don't even have monthly fees from all their players to support their server expenses. Player-griefing is easily solved by letting players not hostile to each other pass through each other.

Guild Wars isn't an MMO in the traditional sense. All areas outside of towns which are instances specifically created for your group, and only your group. It's closer to a lobby + game instances philosophy than a shared world. Since your group are the only people in the instance, there's no opportunity for griefing.

As for letting players not hostile to each other pass through, would this apply in combat as well? Should I be able to move through my own party members? Also, that's why you would drag a relatively weak monster over to the doorway and slowly fight it there. Sure, people might be able to move through you, but they won't be able to move through the monster.

 

[Gloombunny]

But it's chosen at least in WoW to use a traditional warrior holding off the enemy system with classes. And plenty of people enjoy it, but no game is for everyone.

I actually did enjoy playing a tank in WoW. However, I would never want to see anything like it in an actual RPG, because it makes no sense from an in-character perspective. I can accept it in WoW only because I don't roleplay when playing a video game.

 

[Gloombunny]

Change things how? Give an example of a realistic change that would make attacking the mage a non-optimal strategy?

AoO's are a start. Giving fighters ways to punish people who move past them, or block such movement altogether. Give them abilities that make them much more dangerous to people who ignore them, like that feat I mentioned way back at the beginning of this thread. Make the soft targets less soft or harder to get at. (Anything from letting the healers wear armor to giving the wizards spells like mirror image.) That sort of thing.


(I had started to write a reply to the rest of your post, but I ended up deleting it 'cuz we're getting really far off-topic for this thread.)

 

[Celebrim]

If you are an archer and two enemies are charging you, an orc with a greataxe and a goblin with a stick. Which one will you attack first? That's the aggro/threat mechanism. It's in our judgement, but it exists.

Which is precisely why its obvious that monsters shouldn't need a simple scipt forcing them to do this or that. You explained it yourself. A script that would be suitable for a computer game is a huge step backward from the powerful tool that we have in the form of 'our judgement'. No computer game has an AI for its actors which is as flexible, powerful, and interesting as what referees provide to pen and paper games. Computers games should be (and are) striving to be more like the pen and paper experience in this area, not the other way around. That isn't to say that there aren't things that the CRPG experience can't teach the PnP designers, but it should be pretty obvious that AI replacing a DM isn't it.

Back to the aggro/threat rules, we COULD have some guidlines regarding some types of monsters. If the group faces some unintelligent beast, which one will it attack first? The largest character? The smallest? Will it run away? How does a creature with Int lower than 5 makes that kind of choice, or other choices like fighting to death, running away when "bloodied", etc. Do orcs fight to death? Or trolls? What about a dragon? We could really have better rules or just guidelines concearning monsters behaviour in combat.

But if these are rules, then they are step backward from relying on the DM's judgement in this matter, or else they are suggestions which I might write into an encounter if I was trying to communicate to another DM how I intended the encounter to play out. Or else, presenting questions like this would be part of the text where I would be trying to teach new DMs how to be thoughtful in thier play when running an encounter.

More to the point, the sort 'aggro/threat' rules that MMORPGs implement are implemented for reasons that don't really apply to Pen and Paper, and if we want to achieve some sort of goal like 'making sure that a tank build can meaningfully protect a blaster build', we have other more subtle and more interesting tools with which to do it. For example, we have, as Cadfan put it, 'better collision detection'. A tank can make it hard for a monster to get around him, and we can punish monsters for trying to avoid the tank by giving the tank AoO or bonus if the monsters 'attention' goes elsewhere. We can make it logical for the monster to deal with the tank if the tank can correctly position himself.

 

[Celebrim]

Change things how? Give an example of a realistic change that would make attacking the mage a non-optimal strategy?

Suppose we have a class called 'Tank'. The 'Tank' class draws an AoO on any character it threatens if that character attacks any other character. In addition, it gains bonus damage (equivalent to the rogues sneak attack, so say +10d6 for a 20th level tank) on subsequent rounds if the monster it attacked in the prior round has not attempted to attack it before the Tank's next action.

 

[DandD]

That sounds very good, and I guess that the 4th edition fighter might actually do something like that.

 

[FadedC]

I actually did enjoy playing a tank in WoW. However, I would never want to see anything like it in an actual RPG, because it makes no sense from an in-character perspective. I can accept it in WoW only because I don't roleplay when playing a video game.

Yeah I can understand that, I always imagined the warrior just imposing himself in the way of the baddies in WoW, but admitedly it makes little sense when the creature is a titanic dragon. I've come to accept that people don't like to roleplay in CRPGs, although I do like (a certain sense of immersion in them, and WoW does a halfway decent job at that.

Don't think anyone is arguing that it's unlikely aggro would work in D&D, just that it never hurts to try. I can think of a few cases when I heard of a rule that sounded horribly and obviously bad, but in practice it turned out to work really well.

 

[Victim]

This seems to be a paradox to me.

If the fighter is just as dangerous as the mage, the monster should attack the mage because the mage is more fragile. If the fighter is less dangerous than the mage, the monster should definitely attack the mage because it poses the greatest threat and is more fragile. If the fighter is more dangerous than the mage, I feel very sad for the mage.

So why should the monster attack the fighter? Wouldn't the superior tactic in all cases be to attack the mage?

Put a party of skilled PCs against a similar party of NPCs. Watch what they do. Most of the time, they will target the healer and wizard types first, because that's the best strategy.

Generally, you deal with that via positioning and buffs.

Sure, given the choice between attacking a wizard, and attacking a fighter, it might be a no brainer to attack the mage (depending on what defensive spells he has up). But what about when the choice is a single attack on a caster or a full attack on a fighter? Or if you have to double move into attack position against the mage? Against foes without super movement abilities, the mage can get some decent protection by making sure charge lines are blocked and staying more than a single move away. At higher levels, movement options increase for getting around characters and terrain, but the wizard picks up some new tricks too. For example, using Anticipate Teleport can prevent short range 'ports to jump to the mage (or used to port other characters into attack positions), and cross classed Tumble denies full attacks against most foes.

Tactically, if the enemies are so eager to get to grips with your casters, it's not all that difficult to separate them from their allies with battlefield control spells. Then it's one whole group against the elements of the enemy that won initiative.

Also, buffing spells can render the mage harder to attack or shift some of his share of dangerousness onto other characters. Mirror Image can shut down lots of attacks. Hasting the fighters makes them more dangerous, and thus changes the threat assessment.

In my experience, battles between similar groups of characters ended up with casters trying to stay away from the more dangerous melee guys, and the melee guys splitting between trying to get to enemy ranged characters, and trying to keep opposing melee guys from crushing our casters. Spiking out enemies with concentrated attacks is a huge advantage. That's one of the big advantages of archery - it's easy to deliver full damage to whatever target seems important without having to worry about positioning. When our characters skirmished a rival party of adventurers, our sorcerer got nailed in the first round with Sudden Maximized Chain Lightning and a bunch of arrows from their ranger.

 

[Lurks-no-More]

I think it's sad that they even had to consider incorporating computer game "aggro" mechanics.

I think it's very sad that you and so many other D&D gamers seem to think that computer games rot your brains, wither your spine, grow hair on your palms and make you blind.

Was Merls & Co. testing the possibility because the latest generation of DMs is so brain-addled that they can't imagine what a combat opponent will do without a bunch of programmed rules? Or because there are so many players now who expect their enemies to respond like they do online?

Or perhaps because they're aiming for 4e to have more monsters per fight than 3e, so that a simple rule system for morale and/or aggression might help a DM, especially a novice, to keep the game fluid, fast and fun?

Or that they want the "defender" role to be meaningful, in that fighters and other defender characters can engage monsters and keep them from going for the soft, crunchy guys like wizards and rogues, thus actually defending their fellow party members? This is something (A)D&D has never been able to do well; reach weapons and AoOs in 3.*e are the best attempt so far, and they remain quite flawed.

Or maybe it is that they aren't mentally blinkering themselves by refusing to consider sources of ideas outside of what some fans think as appropriate, and are willing to try out interesting ideas, judging them by the actual, tested feasibility of those ideas in D&D context instead of some ill-conceived yearning for non-existent "pure D&D" which has never existed?

I don't know. But what we do know is that the designers took an idea from MMOs, applied it to D&D, tried it out, found it wasn't doing what they wanted, discarded it and replaced it with something else, which in their opinion is much better in terms of options and fun.

And despite this, most of the complainers in this thread are focusing on the first step and latching on it like gravehounds onto a meat golem, unable or unwilling to let go.