Game Fundamentals - The Illusion of Accomplishment

[Celebrim]

Why is the previous period between challenge and reward better than now? Why is delayed gratification better?

I don't know that I would say that delayed gratification is better, because that would be like saying 'RPG's are better than video games' or something like that. It's just an opinion.

But I will say that a PnP designer chasing after an immediate gratification cycle like you have in a video game is on fool's errand because you can never really compete with a video game on that level. You are playing against the strengths of a PnP game and into its weaknesses. If PnP games are to start offering comparable experiences to video games as a goal of design, they are going to lose out to video games every time.

To give an obvious example, in multiplayer video games no one necessarily needs to wait for his turn. It's always your 'turn' in a real time video game. There is no wait to return to when the attention is on you. But in a PnP game, there is no way that the referee can give his attention to every player simultaneously. Chasing after the experience that is the side effect of it always being your turn as in a video game at best will never get there, and at worst will end up with mechanics ill-suited to the tools and needs of play in a PnP game

Just as bad, when you gear your game toward offering that experience, you are almost invariably going to create an experience which is invariably inferior to that can be offered by video games. If you look at the big RPG boom in the late 70's and early 80's, RPGs actually offered the best 'ego gamer' experience that was widely available. Computer RPGs either weren't available because of the entry fees and rarity, or they were primitive solo games, or they were non-primative adventure games (like the classic Infocom games) that weren't primarily offering the short feedback cycles you got with 'swing and hit' from oD&D, AD&D, etc but which tried to offer PnP's 'puzzle solving' experience (from which we get terms like 'pixel bitching'). But that isn't the situation now. If you try to compete with modern video games now on there terms, with the massive processing power we have now and the hundreds of man years of artwork involved you are going to lose. A play group that moves into RPGs now without mentoring is going to percieve the PnP game as an inferior computer game - an experience obseleted and outdated by modern technology.

If I really wanted to criticize WotC's handling of 4e, it wouldn't be over the mechanics - even though I think those mechanics moved away from where I wanted to go. The real criticism I would offer of 4e is the same one I think is the biggest single problem with 3e - WotC did not seem to believe that modules were important and IMO invested far too little into them. If people start listing great modules, they invariably end up listing primarily old school stuff and if not, then they list third party products (by Paizo, for example). But even though you can't make alot of money on modules, they are the heart and soul of building up a player base because the module is what builds new game masters. I'm increasingly of the opinion that D&D's historical dominance is D&D's association with the lowly and sometimes deprecated art of module writing. I can't think of another game system that is in the same league when it comes to offering products that, in isolation from a mentor, help tutor up and inspire game masters.

What's 4e got in the module department that is memorable? What did late 2e do or late 3e do but recycle the great modules of the past? This almost deserves its own thread and I'm probably side tracking the conversation again, but I'm bringing it up here because its part of this whole notion of 'game mastery' which is core to the PnP experience and which I think is increasingly depricated in the design of games. Part of the problem with the whole notion of 'what makes a game fun' is that the whole short action/reward cycle assumes that everyone important at the table is a player.

 

[Bluenose]

However, while 4e is not 'that game', 4e is more in that direction than earlier editions of the game. To list just a few examples, 4e scales everything with level, 4e has no long term status effects, 4e cures pretty much everything with a single long rest, 4e tried to speed combat as a primary goal, 4e gives everyone self healing, greatly boosts power at 1st level so that everyone starts with 'the awesome' immediately, 4e 'fixes the math' (or at least attempted to do so) in the same sort of way games like Diablo fix the math (hense the complaint about 'must numbers always go up?'), 4e refreshes most of your powers on an encounter cycle, 4e tries to make everyone's turn have more options and more interaction, etc.

In earlier editions of the game, saving throws went up constantly so that by high levels most characters were highly unlikely to fail a save (OK, that's not the same in 3e). In earlier editions of the game, THAC0/BAB went up faster than the AC they targeted, making misses less and less likely as levels got higher. In earlier editions of the game, spellcasters got both increased power and increased versatility as they gained levels. One thing scaling the maths by level does is ensure that people are failing at high level as often as they fail at low level, assuming opponents are relatively the same level. It doesn't seem to me that 4e goes any more in the direction you dislike compared to earlier editions. In some ways it does, but in others it's almost exactly the opposite.

 

[Celebrim]

In earlier editions of the game, saving throws went up constantly so that by high levels most characters were highly unlikely to fail a save (OK, that's not the same in 3e). In earlier editions of the game, THAC0/BAB went up faster than the AC they targeted, making misses less and less likely as levels got higher. In earlier editions of the game, spellcasters got both increased power and increased versatility as they gained levels. One thing scaling the maths by level does is ensure that people are failing at high level as often as they fail at low level, assuming opponents are relatively the same level. It doesn't seem to me that 4e goes any more in the direction you dislike compared to earlier editions. In some ways it does, but in others it's almost exactly the opposite.

Oh good lord, can we stop trying to turn this into an edition war?? Just once?? I mean, I know we all have deep emotional stakes now in defending our favorite edition, but can we just assume that I'm perfectly happy to let anyone play what they enjoy? If I could divorse this from concrete examples and just make this a completely theoretical conversation about how you could approach game design and the different direction you could take completely theoretical games, I would, but people then criticize me for not offering 'proof' and 'concrete examples' as if this was a formalized study like geometry or something. I certainly haven't spent the last five years or so compiling references in preparation for this thread, nor do I intend to spend several months collecting such evidence. If my treatis doesn't seem like scientific proof, its because I never intended and don't intend to provide you with it.

If I told you that in my 'version of D&D' (based off 3e), saving throws go up faster than DC's so that high level characters are (much like in 1e) increasingly less likely to fail a save, would it do anything to convince you that you might be missing the point? I don't want to get dragged to deeply into a discussion of 4e's particular design because then its just going to be another 4e vs. earlier editions thread, and I'm trying to ask people to consider the possibilities of PnP games in a holistic manner. So stretch out a bit, ok?

 

[Garthanos]

One thing scaling the maths by level does is ensure that people are failing at high level as often as they fail at low level, assuming opponents are relatively the same level. It doesn't seem to me that 4e goes any more in the direction you dislike compared to earlier editions. In some ways it does, but in others it's almost exactly the opposite.

If you dont scale the adversaries and challenges ... then the accomplishments feel inconsequential in real life.

I find it quite realistic as my abilities have progressed throughout my life. The challenges that I remember and find most noticeable and become a part of my lifes story are not .... lesser non-challenges that used to be challenges I dont even remember/bother with those anymore I dont take a simplistic job by choice... my abiity is most definitely enhanced.... but life hasnt gotten easier.

Perhaps its a fantasy that growing up makes things easier... but if that were true I wouldn't find life as rewarding.. well maybe it might be rewarding in some sense but definitely not as interesting.

 

[Dausuul]

I never played the game again. I never even played with my new stuff. The 'illusion of accomplishment' had been destroyed. I realized I wasn't actually doing anything any more. I played through Diablo II once with one character. I couldn't even manage to push myself to go through the game a second time.

A few months ago, I started playing Diablo II again after a long hiatus - started building up an account's worth of characters from scratch. I'm finding that I play a character for exactly as long as there are new and interesting challenges. My pattern has been to take a character of each class through Hell difficulty, beat Baal on Hell, and then never play that character again. Every so often I find a different type of challenge (trading for runes on the Realms, magic finding) and do that for a bit; but once I feel I've mastered whatever it is, I get bored with it. Sometime in the not too distant future, I'm going to give away all my high-powered gear, delete all my characters, and quit the game for another few years, until enough time and patches have passed to make things seem new again*.

I think this is instructive for PnP, because it illustrates one of the places where tabletop gaming can really shine. A tabletop game offers the potential for near-infinite variation, endless new challenges, because it's got a human DM and human players testing one another's skills. The question is, how can D&D (or any tabletop game) best nurture that potential?

4E has made great strides in this area in some regards. The clarity of the underlying math, and access to tools such as the Monster Builder, are a godsend for the homebrewing DM.

At the same time, I think the drive to "standardize" mechanical systems - especially combat mechanics - is a dangerous road to go down. There has been a steady push across the editions toward putting everything into the basic encounter/hit point model, where all combats boil down to a single challenge: Grind away all of the enemy's hit points before the enemy can grind away all of yours. Challenges that don't fit into that model, from long-duration status effects to monsters that don't care if you hit them with a sword, are minimized or eliminated.

I've recently come to believe that, while this is perfectly workable as a "standard model," trying to shoehorn every combat into that model is a Bad, Bad Thing. I'm doing a lot of thinking now about alternative challenges... swarms modeled as terrain hazards, golems with resist all 50 (effectively immune to attack damage) that must be lured into deadfalls or pushed off cliffs, incorporeal undead that vanish when you hit them but reappear a couple rounds later unless you destroy the object to which they are bound.

I would like to see some stuff like this in WotC published materials. More than that, however, I would like to see tools and guidelines for building this sort of thing, to help me create new and exciting content for my group**. D&D's greatest strength has always been the creativity of DMs and players. The game should strive to build up that strength.

And of course that's just the combat side. There are still immense opportunities for growth on the exploration and social-encounter fronts. 4E took a few tentative steps in this direction with skill challenges, but the mechanic as written takes a lot of hand-tuning to make it work in play.

[SIZE=-2]*Or, more likely, till Diablo 3 comes out.
**Please note: I am NOT claiming that I am not perfectly capable of doing this stuff on my own. But WotC has a whole staff of professional designers; I would like the benefit of their professional expertise while I'm homebrewing.
[/SIZE]

 

[Fifth Element]

Oh good lord, can we stop trying to turn this into an edition war?? Just once?? I mean, I know we all have deep emotional stakes now in defending our favorite edition, but can we just assume that I'm perfectly happy to let anyone play what they enjoy?

Wow. I don't read Bluenose's post as edition-warry at all, unless you consider your post that he was responding to to also be edition-warry. Which I don't.

 

[STAT]

If I could divorse this from concrete examples and just make this a completely theoretical conversation about how you could approach game design and the different direction you could take completely theoretical games, I would, but people then criticize me for not offering 'proof' and 'concrete examples' as if this was a formalized study like geometry or something. I certainly haven't spent the last five years or so compiling references in preparation for this thread, nor do I intend to spend several months collecting such evidence. If my treatis doesn't seem like scientific proof, its because I never intended and don't intend to provide you with it.

You want to know why people are asking for proof? It's because you claim there's a trend in gaming towards instant gratification. If there isn't actually a trend towards instant gratification gaming then you're trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. That would be a somewhat silly thing to do. So if people are asking you for examples of this trend it's because you've anchored the whole discussion to whether it exists or not.

 

[Bluenose]

Oh good lord, can we stop trying to turn this into an edition war?? Just once?? I mean, I know we all have deep emotional stakes now in defending our favorite edition, but can we just assume that I'm perfectly happy to let anyone play what they enjoy? If I could divorse this from concrete examples and just make this a completely theoretical conversation about how you could approach game design and the different direction you could take completely theoretical games, I would, but people then criticize me for not offering 'proof' and 'concrete examples' as if this was a formalized study like geometry or something. I certainly haven't spent the last five years or so compiling references in preparation for this thread, nor do I intend to spend several months collecting such evidence. If my treatis doesn't seem like scientific proof, its because I never intended and don't intend to provide you with it.

If I told you that in my 'version of D&D' (based off 3e), saving throws go up faster than DC's so that high level characters are (much like in 1e) increasingly less likely to fail a save, would it do anything to convince you that you might be missing the point? I don't want to get dragged to deeply into a discussion of 4e's particular design because then its just going to be another 4e vs. earlier editions thread, and I'm trying to ask people to consider the possibilities of PnP games in a holistic manner. So stretch out a bit, ok?

Fair enough. Let's disregard all versions of D&D in this question and only consider other RPGs. I think that the trend you believe you see exists only in your mind. That regardless of whether the RPG is new or old the range of competence among characters is just as variable as it always was. I can pull out Runequest or Traveller editions from the 1970s where starting characters succeed (at the things they're good at) most of the time, and do exactly the same thing with the current versions. To persuade me that there's any trend towards personal gratification in modern RPGs that wasn't there in older ones, you need to show multiple related data points, and you need to be able to show that older games didn't do the same sort of things.

 

[SKyOdin]

As it is, this entire discussion is rather pointless. All of the theorizing in the world is pretty empty unless it can be backed up by concrete proof and then be used to suggest concrete changes. Celebrim, unless you actually suggest something like "5E should have such and such features", then your arguments on this thread will remain empty and pointless. Furthermore, it is only when concrete examples and suggestions have been made that people can actually start to discuss things in a constructive manner.

As far as game design is concerned, abstract theorizing about vaguely defined things like "cycles of gratification" (a phenomena I have never heard brought up in actual game design discussions) is useless. Besides, even a game that follows a sound theory perfectly can still end up being bad due to poor execution, and games that follow bad theory can still be surprisingly fun.

 

[Benimoto]

However, while 4e is not 'that game', 4e is more in that direction than earlier editions of the game. To list just a few examples, 4e scales everything with level, 4e has no long term status effects, 4e cures pretty much everything with a single long rest, 4e tried to speed combat as a primary goal, 4e gives everyone self healing, greatly boosts power at 1st level so that everyone starts with 'the awesome' immediately, 4e 'fixes the math' (or at least attempted to do so) in the same sort of way games like Diablo fix the math (hense the complaint about 'must numbers always go up?'), 4e refreshes most of your powers on an encounter cycle, 4e tries to make everyone's turn have more options and more interaction, etc.

I'd like to rebut these things point by point for the record, since they're a good example of how misconceptions of 4e drive things down the edition war road.

4e does not scale everything by level, and certainly does not do so in the way Diablo does. 4e scales hit points, attack bonus, saving throws (now called defenses) and AC by level. It does so largely in the same way as 3rd edition does, with the exception of AC.

Furthermore character depth increases by level (in a non-linear way). To give an example, at 1st level the PCs may be fighting goblins that that take 3 rounds to defeat and at 28th they may be fighting Balors that work similarly, but that's because the Balor is a brute, which is designed to be the simplest part of an encounter. For a contrasting example, look at the Pit Fiend. The Pit Fiend, just by itself (and it's only one part of the encounter) is a flying monster with a damage aura, an attack debuff aura, a minor-action attack that lowers defenses severely, the ability to summon 2-8 more creatures, and fairly standard leader-type and melee-type abilities. So in a typical Pit Fiend encounter, the Pit Fiend will be flying out of melee reach, letting its passive auras damage and debuff most of the party, while spending it's actions both teleporting allies to advantageous positions and severely weakening the defenses of anything that can threaten it. Since it isn't the only part of the encounter, typically the controller it's grouped with will lock down one or two of the PCs with weakened defenses, while the summoned War Devils will move leaders or strikers out of the defender's sphere of influence so that the monster skirmishers can pick them off with little interference. It's a machine that, even if the numbers were appropriate, would generally annihilate 1st level PCs. 1st level PCs lack the resistances, the flight capability, and most importantly the depth of resources needed to take on such a threat.

Back to the point-by-point, 4e does have long-term effects in the way of diseases (and the "death penalty" for being raised from the dead). I find these generally last as long as 3e long-term effects such as curses or ability damage, and have most of the same effects (although they are rarer.) What 4e is missing is the fixed-duration medium-term effects, like fear or paralysis, that lasted just long enough to remove a PC from the entire rest of the combat. These aren't missing from the game mechanics entirely, as there's still support for rare effects that last the entire encounter. They're just missing from the standard monster list, and hence from the "culture" that arises from it. (The few effects like this that made it into the MM1, such as the Oni Night Haunter or the Night Hag's sleep effects were treated as errors and erased in game updates.)

4e does cure 99% of the conditions in a single long rest, but again in my 3e experience, wands of cure light wounds and a few "remove whatever" scrolls had the same effect. You may have gamed with a group that frowned, or was completely unaware of such things, but that wasn't the system, it was the culture.

I had a home campaign for most of 3rd edition, but I also played a lot in RPGA games, typically as a convention judge (as, contrary to what my messageboard persona may project, in person I'm an easygoing, generally entertaining guy with a knack for system mastery and delivering authoritative rulings). In the RPGA games, a sort of "best practices" developed, which involved the continual manufacture, acquisition, and replenishment of items such as cure wands or "remove condition" scrolls. My players played at conventions occasionally too, and would take their favorites of these "best practices" home with them, or find them on message boards such as this one. So even before 4e codified the culture shift against long-term negative effects into the default monster manual monsters, that cultural shift existed in at least some groups.

4e does give everyone some self healing, I can't refute that.

While you see 4e giving people 'the awesome' at 1st level, I see the designers trying to boost low-level survivability so that players can make characters and immediately become attached. Again reflecting a culture shift away from the harem of interchangeable heroes that some people describe 1e as having and towards having a single, well-developed character from the start. Which is something, that if I'm reading your posts right, I think you support.

The complaint again about 4e "fixing the math like Diablo" is, as I mentioned, a mischaracterization of 4e (and arguably not entirely accurate about Diablo even).

Your final points, about 4e refreshing powers on an encounter cycle and trying to make everyone's turn have more options and more interaction, etc. I have no particular objection to (but I'll try harder to come up with some if you'd like )

Yay for one more wall of text in a wall-of-texty thread.