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"Hot" take: Aesthetically-pleasing rules are highly overvalued
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<blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8114075" data-attributes="member: 16814"><p>I don't think this is very correct, or a useful distinction. There are lots of rules in DW that correspond to specific enough things. Hack and Slash, for instance, is pretty analogous to the attack action in 5e -- there's really not much of a distinction to the role H&S has in the game to that of the attack action.</p><p></p><p>In fact, contrary to earlier statement, I think 5e has a good tool to resolve the toy example of setting a shed on fire while orcs are running a bucket brigade -- it's right up front in the core playloop, the PC states the action, the GM determines if it's uncertain and, if so, sets a DC and asks for an attribute roll which the player can modify with appropriate proficiencies. This handles the toy problem, and many other issues similar to it, at least mechanically. And that is, to me, the big distinction between a game like 5e and one like DW -- the difference between the mechanical bits, or tech, and the way those are meant to be used, or the principles of play. DW has tech which is different from 5e, but not sufficiently to elicit the play of DW on it's own. What makes the big difference are the principles that DW presents not as game tech but more as meta-rules for play, and these directions on how to use the tech make the biggest difference in play. 5e doesn't really provide any principles of play, leaving it up to individual tables to both define and apply their own -- usually picking up from established and unstated principles from the D&D zeitgeist. This means that while 5e has the tech to solve the firing the shed toy example, it doesn't really work well unless a given table has set principles of play that enable it to work. Likewise, if you try to play DW without the principles of play, or using the principles of play common to D&D, you end up with a mess -- and we've had a thread fairly recently that illuminates this exact issue.</p><p></p><p>To bring this to skill challenges and 4e, I do not think that 4e was intentionally designed to work as it's being presented in this thread. It certainly wasn't clearly laid out that way, and the necessary principles of play to make it work that way were not presented. If you already held those principles, or were familiar with them, then the design of 4e worked well with them, but not, I think, intentionally. And I say this because the printed adventures for 4e do not embrace this approach, and how many tries it took to get skill challenges to work. Even then, the presentation of the skill challenges is one where the GM is the primary driver of the play, selecting both the goal of the skill challenge and the primary (and secondary) methods to achieve it. This is still solidly within the traditional play of D&D. Unless you ignore that, and bring in some of the principles common to other games, like Burning Wheel and PbtA, skill challenges are still a stilted, GM driven and GM may I tool. If you do bring in those principles, primarily the ones regarding fiction following play rather than leading it and honoring the results of the tech, then skill challenges aren't the tool their being presented as here, or even in the rulesbooks of 4e. </p><p></p><p>That said, I love the tech of skill challenges, but do not even bother assigning skills to the challenge -- it's entirely open ended. The concept, to me, works more as a tool for the GM to determine overall success in a complicated task than a way to codify that tasking. It gives me, the GM, the framework to be able to describe the necessary hard and soft consequences to failure at different points in the challenge, and also the consequences of success -- and this is done using the number of successes and number of failures alongside the current fictional state and the player's declared actions. It's a loose framework to help establish appropriate framing and outcomes throughout the challenge. The rest of the 4e tech -- primary and secondary skills, advantages, etc. -- I toss and just use the normal 5e resolution loop: action declaration, uncertainty determination, DC setting and attribute check, outcomes.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Ovinomancer, post: 8114075, member: 16814"] I don't think this is very correct, or a useful distinction. There are lots of rules in DW that correspond to specific enough things. Hack and Slash, for instance, is pretty analogous to the attack action in 5e -- there's really not much of a distinction to the role H&S has in the game to that of the attack action. In fact, contrary to earlier statement, I think 5e has a good tool to resolve the toy example of setting a shed on fire while orcs are running a bucket brigade -- it's right up front in the core playloop, the PC states the action, the GM determines if it's uncertain and, if so, sets a DC and asks for an attribute roll which the player can modify with appropriate proficiencies. This handles the toy problem, and many other issues similar to it, at least mechanically. And that is, to me, the big distinction between a game like 5e and one like DW -- the difference between the mechanical bits, or tech, and the way those are meant to be used, or the principles of play. DW has tech which is different from 5e, but not sufficiently to elicit the play of DW on it's own. What makes the big difference are the principles that DW presents not as game tech but more as meta-rules for play, and these directions on how to use the tech make the biggest difference in play. 5e doesn't really provide any principles of play, leaving it up to individual tables to both define and apply their own -- usually picking up from established and unstated principles from the D&D zeitgeist. This means that while 5e has the tech to solve the firing the shed toy example, it doesn't really work well unless a given table has set principles of play that enable it to work. Likewise, if you try to play DW without the principles of play, or using the principles of play common to D&D, you end up with a mess -- and we've had a thread fairly recently that illuminates this exact issue. To bring this to skill challenges and 4e, I do not think that 4e was intentionally designed to work as it's being presented in this thread. It certainly wasn't clearly laid out that way, and the necessary principles of play to make it work that way were not presented. If you already held those principles, or were familiar with them, then the design of 4e worked well with them, but not, I think, intentionally. And I say this because the printed adventures for 4e do not embrace this approach, and how many tries it took to get skill challenges to work. Even then, the presentation of the skill challenges is one where the GM is the primary driver of the play, selecting both the goal of the skill challenge and the primary (and secondary) methods to achieve it. This is still solidly within the traditional play of D&D. Unless you ignore that, and bring in some of the principles common to other games, like Burning Wheel and PbtA, skill challenges are still a stilted, GM driven and GM may I tool. If you do bring in those principles, primarily the ones regarding fiction following play rather than leading it and honoring the results of the tech, then skill challenges aren't the tool their being presented as here, or even in the rulesbooks of 4e. That said, I love the tech of skill challenges, but do not even bother assigning skills to the challenge -- it's entirely open ended. The concept, to me, works more as a tool for the GM to determine overall success in a complicated task than a way to codify that tasking. It gives me, the GM, the framework to be able to describe the necessary hard and soft consequences to failure at different points in the challenge, and also the consequences of success -- and this is done using the number of successes and number of failures alongside the current fictional state and the player's declared actions. It's a loose framework to help establish appropriate framing and outcomes throughout the challenge. The rest of the 4e tech -- primary and secondary skills, advantages, etc. -- I toss and just use the normal 5e resolution loop: action declaration, uncertainty determination, DC setting and attribute check, outcomes. [/QUOTE]
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