Game vs Game System

[jaer]

Complete Tangent: The idea of social challenge rules bugs me, mostly from the perspective that role-playing is one of those player-based skills, like tactical acumen, that is best left out of the rules system. I mean, would you let a player roll his character's Tactics skill to know how to better position his mini to avoid a AoO, or let the wizard roll Spellcraft to better choose which spell to prepare and/or cast?

Yes, absolutely I do. Not all the time, but as needed.

I like acting out characters. I like getting into the feel of it, the nitty-gritty socialization and back and forth. But I'm not about to spew out "Low, who does walk through this night?" and expect my players to reply in kind. Won't happen, nor do i think it should. One of my players is a Baron's son, a paladin. Charisma out the wazzu, and high Knowledge Nobility. Do I expect the player to know how how to address the Duke or the appropriate way to call up the Countess of the neighboring court? No. But his character does. Why should I expect and force my character to make a compelling arguement or story or speech to rally the peasents? He'd get bonus points for doing so, but character had a Diplomacy score for that.

I don't want him to say "I'll rally the peasents. I rolled an 18, so I got a 34. Are they with me?" I want to know what he is doing, how, and in what way. But after that, it goes through the "charisma filter" and comes out as a flowing elegant speech. I don't require the fighter to really know how to swing a sword or the bard to sing...why should the diplomat really need to be good diplomacy? That would restrict people who aren't good at thinking of such things quickly from playing that type of character.

I certainly have had characters say "I'm casting this spell" and me reply wiht "Make a spellcraft check. Yeah, that's good enough for your character to realize that that won't work on something like this" or "your int check was high...you realize your ally would be caught in the radius of the fireball." "With your wisdom, you realize that you are probably within the giant scorpion's reach; you'll need to be careful about how you move."

I don't require my players' stats and abilities to supercede their characters' in some situations and not others. Now, in one of the last games I played, a load of shadows got hit with a mass heal, reduced to 1 hp. The wizard cast scorching rays at all of them instead of a magic missil at each. He had been there during the fight, he knew they were incoporeal and he still made a bad choice. I do make them accountable for things (and incidently, he only got 1 of the 4 shadows and felt completely stupid when two other people in the party shouted out "Magic Missile the darkness!")

 

[jaer]

I'd like to weigh in of the "setting specific fluff" discussion. I personally like it. I like that they have organizations, and even that they tided PrCs in 3.5 to those organizations. It gave a certain amount of life to the PrC and gave me something to plunk into my homebrew if I wanted. One of my characters wanted to make a Knight Phantom, so we found a way to add it to the world...no big deal! Another character has levels in the Exersist of the Silver Flame (Eberron PrC); we didn't even both making it a church or organization. The powers of the PrC fit in line with something else, so it made sense else where. We didn't rename the PrC to fit the new organization...why would we need to? Just because the Silver Flame as an organization doesn't exist, the PrC is not useless or pointless. What is written on her character sheet does not impact how her character interacts with the world. She plays a priestess who is specialized to fight demons, and her powers reflect that.

Similarly, the GWA feat/organization. I like that they created one. Will I use the organization? Maybe. Even as a complete world builder, it's nice to have the option of not needing to come up with everything! Will I change the name? If i see fit to do so. Will that confuse anyone? No.

Even if the organization does not exist in my world, I can freely use the feat without confusing the players. Feat names, just like PrC names, are for meta-game usage anyway. It's so a player knows what his character can do, and if a player can't recall what a feat is (and doesn't write it down on their character sheet) then they need to look it up, and they better not slow down the game to do so. I'd rather the feat be called something intuative, but it shouldn't stop a world builder from using it even if the GWAs don't exist.

After all, do you really think the characters talk like:
"I can't believe I was able to over-come that creatures spell resist. Good thing I learned Spell Penetration."
"Yeah. Lucky for us I could Power Attack and get through the Damage Reduction."
"Good thing I'm an Arcane Trickster - I never would have hit it's normal ac, but that touch AC made it easy to get my sneak attacks in!"

No, that's how players talk. If the player write's down GWA in his feat selection, it makes no impact on the game whatsoever over than the mechanics of the feat.

The arguement always seems to come down to two sides:
A) "I don't want the fluff because I am a homebrew world-builder. I won't use it."
B) "I do want the fluff because I use the settings provided, and it's nice to have a more fleshed out world."

If you are A, then it should be easy enough for you to toss the fluff and make whatever you like. You dislike the background and name of the GWA, kick them out! Make something else, or don't. The fact that the name is still in a feat change what the feat does; you shouldn't even need to change the name of the feat. Toss the fluff, build your world. How does it hurt you that the fluff is there? How does it make it harder for you to homebrew something just because the DMG lists organizations that you aren't using?

If you are B, then the fluff really helps.

 

[pemerton]

if the classes are all designed to appeal to the same play preferences, what that means is that they are designed to appeal to a single kind of player. Now, anyone who has been around the table for very long knows that players are a wierd and varied lot, often frustratingly so. But with different play experiences built right in to the core classes of the game -- the 1E fighter vs 1E wizard is perhaps the most striking example, but both the thief and the cleric provided a different play experience, as well -- your appeal to different kinds of people is broader and your get a more "cosmopolitan" pool of players at any given table. The alternative as 4E seems to present it is to have all Butt Kickers or Armchair generals (or whatever Lawsian type we want to call them). This might provide for a more consistent play experience across classes, but doesn't do anything to preserve the, um, "charm" of gathering together a diverse set of your wierest friends for an evening's gaming.

The above is at least partially true. It may not be fully true, because it may be that the common mechanics which deliver common play experiences may deliver a common experience only relative to a given (type of) player: that is, it may be that the mechanics offer something to players of type A and something different to players of type B, but what A gets is the same (more or less) across all classes (or all classes of a given role) and what B gets is likewise the same across all classes. So things wouldn't be as grim (from your pont of view) as you suggest.

Whether the mechanics will have this property I don't know - it looks like a hard design challenge, but there are some pretty good designers involved.

Putting the above to one side, there is another upside that you don't mention: in a fantasy RPG, it is a problem (at least IMO) if only a small subset of players can enjoy playing the fantasy elements. Yet this is the case in 1st ed AD&D because of the peculiarities of the play experience of the Cleric and Magic-User. 4e seems to offer a great deal of democracy in terms of the accessibility to a wide range of its players of the fantasy aspects of PC building and playing.

 

[pemerton]

At 1st level, in AD&D, a house cat has a very good chance of killing a mage. And let's not forget the myriad of 'save or die' posions and special creature attacks. It's a fallacy, utterly and wholly, that D&D has never supported high lethality play.

I never said it didn't. I said it doesn't support grim & gritty play. My evidence (which Reynard noted and responded to) is that mid-level fighters can beat great cats in hand-to-hand, unarmed combat. As it happens you've given me another example: any human being being killed by a house cat in a standup fight isn't grim & gritty - it's just (blackly, perhaps) comical.

Of course you can threaten mid-level AD&D fighters by attacking them with Ancient Red Dragons breathing 88 hit point fire cones. But just like the wizard vs house cat cage maatch, that isn't grim & gritty play, even though it might be highly lethal. It is superheroic play.

You're deliberately ignoring these things in past editions of D&D (and, similarly, ignoring the heroic elements of systems like Rolemaster) to build your strawman.

I don't think I've ignored anything.

Tell me - what is your view of the unarmed fighter vs great cat combat? And what heroic element of the (non-magical parts of the) RM mechanics allow mid-level fighters to reliably defeat great cats unarmed? The only ones I can think of coming close would be a good combo of Adrenal Speed/Strength and Stun Resistance - but these are (i) the most controversial aspects of the RM skill system among long-time RM players, and (ii) given the Bare Hand attack table in Arms Law, may not be enough to pull it off.

The absence of X does not prove or necessitate the existence of Y, where Y equals the opposite of X.

If by "opposite" you mean "contradictory", then in fact not X does entail Y (assuming a standard logic in which excluded middle holds). So by "opposite" I assume you mean "contrary". Then what you say is true. But not obviously relevant to my post, for a couple of reasons.

First, if we are talking about something like genres or playstyles, there are only a (reasonably small) finite number of them that are relevant. So showing that one is not facilitated may licence an inference to another being an implicit premise of the game, especially if some reasons are given for ruling out further alternatives, or if it is taken to be obvious why those further possibilities can be ignored (which is not a fallacy - enthymetic arguments are incomplete, but not therefore fallacious - and in ordinary disocourse they make up the overwhelming bulk of all arguments presented - only mathematical logicians normally make all their premises explicit).

Second, I claimed that the absence of facilitation of a particular playstyle entails limits on the scope of a game's facilitation of playstyles (and thus refuted the claim that the game is generic) - which is a (sound) inference to the contradictory rather than a (fallacious) inference to the contrary.

As I noted in my follow-up post, there is a question of degree about the limits, but I think I have already dealt with that. (Perhaps not to everyone's satisfaction, but that is not an issue of fallacies but detailed questions of evidence and interpretation.)

Try a High School physics textbook. Look up "gravity" in the index.

I would expect that to tell me more about Newton, Keppler and the gravitational constant than about logic.

Perhaps I should apologise for being overly rude, but I do get frustrated when posters on forums try to rebut through alleging fallacies that aren't there, rather than actually discussing the evidence and interpretation offered and pointing out the actual errors (the latter is what Henry and Reynard both did). Most people, when they are wrong, are wrong because of substance, not form.

 

[The Little Raven]

But if you read the 3e core books, how much about Greyhawk could you really glean from them?

- There's this dinky cosmology called the Great Wheel (ugh), which makes huge assumptions about nature of the setting, including an attempt to neatly tie everything up according to alignment.
- Orcs and elves hate eachother because Big Daddy Orc (Gruumsh) was de-eyed by Big Daddy Elf (Corellon).
- The Lower Planes have been consumed by a conflict called the Blood War.
- Mordenkainen, Bigby, Tenser, Melf, Rary, and Otiluke are all famous, if not powerful, wizards.
- Pelor is the most common human deity, among a list of Greyhawk-specific deities.
- Dwarves undergo cultural training to dodge Giants (due a history of fighting them) and training to kill orcs/goblinoids, elves undergoing training for certain weapons, immune to sleep, etc.
- Sigil and the Lady of Pain.
- Orbs of Dragonkind assume a history that includes "the great Dragon Wars."
- Shield of Prator assumes a history that includes the "Battle of Three Hells."

I find all these equally as "intrusive" as the descriptions of fallen empires and primordial wars in 4e's fluff. And instead of just throwing things that are obviously tied into setting (dwarves get a dodge against giants) and trying to claim them as generic ("We're not trying to tell you that dwarves and giants war with eachother, but..."), they're actually giving explanations for it to have consistency. This won't stop worldbuilders from doing anything (if it does, it's just an excuse for their inability to be creative), but will help new players who will benefit from a consistently presented game, as opposed to the slighty-insane patchwork quilt of previous editions.

 

[Reynard]

Putting the above to one side, there is another upside that you don't mention: in a fantasy RPG, it is a problem (at least IMO) if only a small subset of players can enjoy playing the fantasy elements. Yet this is the case in 1st ed AD&D because of the peculiarities of the play experience of the Cleric and Magic-User. 4e seems to offer a great deal of democracy in terms of the accessibility to a wide range of its players of the fantasy aspects of PC building and playing.

Spellcasters are hardly the only "fantasy elements" of D&D. After all, isn't Conan the most iconic of fantasy characters? He had no magic at all. Or perhaps it is Aragorn, who knew a few tricks as a ranger and an elf-friend but would hardly be what we might call a spell caster. The idea that fantasy only exists for those that wield magic is a flase one, I think. The fantasy is in the world that the characters interact with, however they choose to do so.

 

[Hussar]

And heartily.

Look at it this way -- if the classes are all designed to appeal to the same play preferences, what that means is that they are designed to appeal to a single kind of player. Now, anyone who has been around the table for very long knows that players are a wierd and varied lot, often frustratingly so. But with different play experiences built right in to the core classes of the game -- the 1E fighter vs 1E wizard is perhaps the most striking example, but both the thief and the cleric provided a different play experience, as well -- your appeal to different kinds of people is broader and your get a more "cosmopolitan" pool of players at any given table. The alternative as 4E seems to present it is to have all Butt Kickers or Armchair generals (or whatever Lawsian type we want to call them). This might provide for a more consistent play experience across classes, but doesn't do anything to preserve the, um, "charm" of gathering together a diverse set of your wierest friends for an evening's gaming.

The problem with this is that by creating specific classes to appeal to specific playstyles, you lock those playstyles into specific roles.

If you're a butt kicker, for example, why should you be locked into fighter? Why not make, say, clerics easier to run (without all those fiddly bits) and appeal to them too. Why force people who like to play "face" characters to play rogues? Why can't fighters be face characters too?

By reducing the specific appeal of specific classes, or at least allowing other classes to appeal as well, maybe not equally, but still appeal, then you get the broadest number of happy players.

Now, I can play that friendly fighter who can chat up the locals. Maybe not as well as the rogue or the bard, but, he can still make a decent stab at it. You protect classes by making them the best at something, not by making them the ONLY option.

 

[Campbell]

I might be wrong, but I believe pemerton was adressing the view that the spellcasting classes should be 'advanced' classes while martial classes are meant for beginners and casual players. I think there is a very real problem with this approach. By placing the onus of the majority of the game's mechanical complexity and meaningful tactical decisions on the onus of spell casters you alienate players who prefer one type of character on a conceptual basis but are forced to play a different class if they want to satisfy their kick. By spreading the mechanical complexity around, offering more options to martial types, and offering fewer to spellcasters it is more likely a given player will be able to choose a class that they prefer conceptually and get their kick at the same time.

There is a price exacted for spreading around the mechanical complexity in this manner, espicially if the degree of mechanical complexity in each class doesn't strike the right balance. You could possibly alienate some players who prefer a higher or lower degree of mechanical complexity than 4e offers.

 

[pemerton]

Campbell, that's right - though I'm not sure "advanced" captures all the necessary properties of a successful player of an MU in 1st ed.

I also agree with your second paragraph. But I think that's a risk the game can take a reasonable chance of running. What proportion of players will quit the game because they're losing all the fiddly bits of Vancean spell casting, specialisation etc? It's not outrageous to think that that's a pretty small number.

 

[Dausuul]

There is a price exacted for spreading around the mechanical complexity in this manner, espicially if the degree of mechanical complexity in each class doesn't strike the right balance. You could possibly alienate some players who prefer a higher or lower degree of mechanical complexity than 4e offers.

Possible, but unlikely IMO, because very few players in my experience actually want mechanical complexity for its own sake. Some players, me included, want depth to D&D mechanics, but that's a very different thing.

In fact, I find that past a certain point, complex mechanics reduce tactical depth. Any given gaming table has only so much time they want to spend on combat. The more time is spent crunching numbers and processing mechanics, the less time is spent considering and executing tactics.