D&D 4E How did 4e take simulation away from D&D?

[Crazy Jerome]

Yeah, that's fine.

What I am trying to wrap my head around is the chimes of, effectively, "Of course a good GM will not let someone move like that!" (despite the rules allowing it), when said movement is hardly the most difficult narrative gap to fill (or fantastic "mundane" occurance happening).

If I was running 4e, it would be because I didn't care if the rules simulated the fictional reality (i.e., substituting narrative to fill the gaps as you suggest), or because the fictional reality was of the type that the rules simulated (like Mallus' extremely clever concept for a 4e campaign milieu).

The point is, I don't imagine that I'd even raise an eyebrow at the jump. Certainly not in comparison to everything else.

So, what am I missing?

You are missing that DM advice wimp out I mentioned. The DM advice is all heavily geared towards going with the latter option. You say yes and let the players go with the fictional reality produced by the rules.

It's not even really bad advice, giving the dedicated effort in the text to make the game as beginner friendly as possible, giving the complexity of the rules. It is also not bad advice giving the historical tendency of new DMs to get a little carried away and strident with, "No." And it never hurts for even experienced DMs to see if they can't find more ways to say, "Yes."

But there are a lot of "exceptions" in the DMG which are unwritten in the DM advice but implied in the nature of the rules. This heavily favors not confusing beginners over showing the options for growth as a DM. A good, experienced DM is, of course, going to look around, realize that this particular table will have a more supple game with filling in the narrative, and go with that. If his players screech when he says, "No" or even "only if you tell me how in a way that satisfies most of us here"--then he will have to bring them along.

Warning--Gross Generalization: This is the Robin Laws versus Luke Crane dichomoty. Laws is all improvisational "Say Yes" all the time, make them succeed, etc. Be nice to your players and thus help them tell the story they imagine. (Read the rules for Faery Tale Deluxe some time.) Crane is rat bastard DM, where "Say Yes" is give on thing A that doesn't matter so that you can get to nasty thing B all the faster, and make them sweat. Instead of saying, "No," you say, "Only if you tell me how to screw over your character if you fail". Be really mean and pushy to your players and thus help them tell the story they imagine.

4E is a game more supple in the hands of someone who leans towards Crane, with advice that leans heavily towards Laws. But you can't do both at the same time.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

That would make a fine House Rule, but it is not RAW. Per RAW, the character can jump the chasm, change direction in mid-air, and land on his feet.

It's not reasonable to argue that "the rules are fine, since I can ignore/expand/alter the rules."

It is rules that assigning penalties (and bonuses) is in the hands of the DM. It is the DM advice that encourages overly literal fidelity to said rules. It is very reasonable to say that the rules themselves are fine, but the supplemental advice is poor on how to apply them to solve particular issues.

You don't have to agree with the reasonsing, but the reasoning is not that fallacy you alude to.

 

[delericho]

Sure, but it's not reasonable to posit that the guy with the highest bonuses got the 20 on competition day. If the guy with the highest bonuses rolls a 16 that day, the record goes to somebody else.

The key difference is that we're not asking "who won this competition", but "who won the World Record" - what are the conditions of the best ever result. Since no-one has done better in 20 years, that really suggests to me that it has to be a '20' on that roll.

Also, examining competition results means restricting yourselves to the rules of the competition. There are at least three rules that Joe can disregard, to his advantage:

1)Placing any part of the foot past the foul line disqualifies the jump. Joe can certainly have part of his foot over the chasm when he makes his jump.

Joe has a hard limit to how far forward his foot can be. Indeed, given the requirements of leverage, he's actually better not having his foot "over the line".

2)Jump distance is measured to the body part landing closest to the starting line. Joe doesn't need to land both his feet on the opposite side, just his front one, which he can then use to pull his other foot up.

This is true, but I'll bet that World Record jumper didn't land standing on his feet. Per RAW, Joe does.

3)Jumps are disqualified if supported by a tailwind of more than 2 m/s. Joe has no such limit.

This, however, is true, and is a point I will concede.

However, even given this, Joe is still superhuman. That World Record jumper was an extreme specialist in that one event. Joe can swim, climb, run (and high-jump) just as well as he can long jump. He doesn't even need to rest between these many feats.

Now, the game doesn't support these extreme specialisations, and rightly so. The more narrow the categories become, the more things get excluded (since there isn't infinite page count). But it does give rise to the problem that 1st level characters aren't just "a cut above". They really are superhuman.

And Joe isn't even a terribly unusual 4e character. The game assumes that an '18' in the primary stat is the norm, with a '20' being common. So we get a game where every Fighter is The World's Strongest Man, every Wizard is an Einstein, every Bard is an Elvis, and every Warlord is a Julius Caesar. And all this at 1st level, before they've done anything! (Still, I suppose that does negate those "1st level Warlord" arguments we had back in the day.)

So, yeah, I'm going to stick with my assessment that this sort of performance by 1st level characters is an absurdity in the rules.

 

[MrMyth]

Would that same DM ask the fighter how he knocked an ooze prone? Or how he forced the greatest of giants to move off a cliff into lava? Or how he convinced the genius with an entrenched position to come out and fight like a man?

The more a ruleset encourages you to not penalize players for confounding common sense in some circumstances, the more likely it is you will not confound them in others. IMHO, and IME. I mean, is that jump actually more mind-boggling than any of these other things?

Maybe yes, maybe no.

For myself, I've always just assumed that you had to jump in a straight line if you didn't have access to anything that would let you change direction. Even if not in the rules, that feels natural to me.

None of those examples really feel comparable, at least at a system level. The oft-cited example of Come and Get It is a problem with the power, not the system - the problem is it automatically moving people, rather than requiring an attack vs Will to start it off. If it did that, I think most objections would be missing.

Not sure what the giant reference is too. As for the ooze and prone, that doesn't bother me - I can see the value of having prone replaced by some other 'hindered' condition for oozes, as described in whatever imaginative fashion one desires. I can also see the value in oozes that can't be knocked prone, and have no problems giving that ability to them - there are creatures in 4E with similar immunities.

The system's general goal is "Don't make players feel useless". That's cool with me. That doesn't mean everything has to always work, but I think it is a good philosophy to start from.

And by and large, most of these examples are corner cases rather than some core structural integrity lacking in the system. Some amount of the game will always be unrealistic - it took me years to get over the silliness of the hitpoint system - but the rest of it works well enough.

And when you do come across some part of the rules that isn't strictly delineated and leads to a silly example... the DM can step in. Honestly, I've found 4E more supportive of DM rulings that 3rd Edition was - though even there, the difference is slight. I'm not likely to let someone jump across a field in circles in 4E, even if the rules don't explicitly prohibit it, any more than I'm likely to let high level PCs survive falling from orbit, simply because the rules say they only take 20d6.

 

[samursus]

Just for fun: three of my favourite 4e rules absurdities put together.

Joe is a 1st level Human Fighter, with a 20 Str, trained in Athletics, and with Skill Focus(Athletics), for a total skill modifier of +13. Here's the layout:

 1....J.....
 2..........
 3....A.....
 4.......... (Chasm)
 5.......... (Chasm)
 6.B..D..... (Chasm)
 7.......... (Chasm)
 8.......... (Chasm)
 9....C.....

Joe starts his turn at position J, with a dragonet (or other Small-Medium flyer) at position D.

Per the rules, it is valid for Joe to move to position A, jump diagonally to B, and then on to position C, thus jumping around the dragonet without risking an AoO.

Using the assumed scale of 1 square = 5 feet, that's a 30 foot jump, which is just over the current World Record. If diagonals had their 'real' length, it would be considerably more. And, of course, it's impossible to jump in that manner.

At 1st level, per the rules as written, Joe has a 20% chance of success (DC 30, means he needs to roll a '17' +13 or better).

The three absurdities:

1) At 1st level, Joe can jump further than our World Record holder. At that point, at 1st level, he's already superhuman.

2) The diagonal thing, as we've discussed here.

3) There's no rule that you can't change direction in the middle of a jump. This is actually a necessary trade-off - since you can't move diagonally around hard corners, one could build a 5ft wide corridor with a turn, place a pit trap at the corner, and nobody could jump across!

Obviously, this is an extreme (and silly) example. I just thought it would be fun to think about for a moment.

3.5: 1st Level Fighter with 4 ranks in Jump, 18 Str and the Run feat (+4 running Jump) = +12 bonus

30ft Jump = DC 30

%15 chance of success...don't see much difference

After a quick read through of the SRD, I didn't see anything that precluded changing direction mid-jump either (I may have missed something).

 

[Nytmare]

I see the argument over diagonal movement as akin to a geocentrist's insistence that the Earth is the center of the universe.

Hit points: they're abstract. Measurements of time: abstract. Distances?

In game reality is a lot easier to swallow if you stop trying to use the battlemat as a scientific laboratory.

 

[bganon]

I'm still trying to figure out what's so absurd about the jumping example.

You have one of the strongest humans who ever lived, who has specifically trained in running and jumping much of their life to this point. Faced with a chasm that is 25'-30' across, at least 20' wide (B->D distance), and "guarded" by a single flying drake, they can manage to (barely) clear the jump without getting too close to the drake.

So what? I just don't understand why this provokes more disbelief than, say, fighting a giant floating eyeball that shoots death rays from a dozen little eyestalks.

 

[Raven Crowking]

You are missing that DM advice wimp out I mentioned.

No. That isn't relevant to my question. Perhaps I am wording my question poorly, or perhaps you are seeing a need to defend the edition that doesn't exist (at least, not to answer my question). I am sure that similar questions can be asked of any edition.

1. We have a system that allows all kinds of wonky things to happen.
2. Those wonky things are not seen to be a problem in general.
3. Something less wonky than those other things is brought up.
4. Suddenly, "no rational DM" (who would presumably allow those more wonky things) would allow this less wonky thing.

It's rather like having a 1st Ed DM who has no problem with commoners being killed by cats and squirrels (look up the stats!), but cannot accept the same commoners being killed by goblins or bugbears.

The "WTF? Meter" starts to ping.

Or, to paraphrase bganon, within the context of the system itself, I'm still trying to figure out what's so absurd about the jumping example.


RC

 

[bganon]

And Joe isn't even a terribly unusual 4e character. The game assumes that an '18' in the primary stat is the norm, with a '20' being common. So we get a game where every Fighter is The World's Strongest Man, every Wizard is an Einstein, every Bard is an Elvis, and every Warlord is a Julius Caesar. And all this at 1st level, before they've done anything! (Still, I suppose that does negate those "1st level Warlord" arguments we had back in the day.)

So, yeah, I'm going to stick with my assessment that this sort of performance by 1st level characters is an absurdity in the rules.

"Norm" and "common" for PCs, who are supposed to be nearly unique in the game world. In fact, a PC with both training and skill focus is going to have better skill checks at their level than pretty much anything in any monster manual, and certainly better than any NPC unless the DM specifically breaks this assumption. Yes, a 4E fighter is the World's Strongest Man, or pretty close to it.

The 4e designers were pretty explicit from the beginning that PCs are exceptional, so I don't see why this is a surprise or an absurdity. In the jumping case, it's not even much of a break from the way 3e/3.5e did things; the "exceptionalism" is more apparent in things like HP and monster difficulty.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

It's rather like having a 1st Ed DM who has no problem with commoners being killed by cats and squirrels (look up the stats!), but cannot accept the same commoners being killed by goblins or bugbears.

The "WTF? Meter" starts to ping.

Or, to paraphrase bganon, within the context of the system itself, I'm still trying to figure out what's so absurd about the jumping example.

Nothing in inherently absurb about the jumping example. But I guess I'm making two distinctions:

1. There aren't that many people saying killer cats are acceptable but killer kobolds are not. There are plenty of people exercised about the cats but fine with the kobolds. And there are plenty of people exercised about the kobolds, and the cats are just a special extreme case of the same annoyance. However, people get assumed into camps they are not in based on passing comments.

2. Jumping to CAGI or those other 4E examples is not a cats to kobolds parallel. If people were mad because you could (made up example) jump 30 feet in the dungeon but fine with jumping 45 feet outside, that would be parallel.

It is hard to make parallels between "I jumped a really long ways on a somewhat implausible path" versus "The net result of what I did got some people near me to get a little closer than was healthy for them." The only way you could determine if such a comparison was out of whack would be to know all the relevant assumption at the table where it happened.

If the assumptions are (as when I play) that 5' is a rather nebulous concept strictly useful for making the grid work, and not necessarily tied to distance in the game world, then you get rather a lot of slack. 30 foot jumps become a lot more plausible when you think of a "square" as somewhere between 2.5 and 7.5 feet, on the edges. So a jump of 6 squares is 20 feet for the four middle squares and somewhere between 5 and 15 feet for the other two. You barely missed and two other athletic characters made it to the lip? I guess it was a foot longer than you thought it was. Naturally, I could not care less about the 1-2-1-2 or 1-1-1-1 diagonal movement issue. (And no, I don't care about repeated actions by different characters, either. I throw away consistency concerns there as "unnecessary handling issues.")

With CAGI, among other "sucker them in" rationales that I'm not going to skip here, I'm also conscious that it is an artificial construct that people move in turns, and that exact placement is rather vague. So it is not hard to see how people "near" the fighter move such that the fighter gets a shot at all of them. I find it far more implausible that 6 goblins might all get a shot at said fighter, and not only not hinder each other but actually get a bonus for flanking. YMMV.

It is true that in my case the "nebulous distance" part feeds into both the jumping and the CAGI rationales, but there are enough other factors in the latter such that another person could reasonably accept or reject either rationale for their table.

A hierarchy of pings on the WTF meter is, by definition, somewhat arbitrary once you leave the table where it takes place, except for things that are really tight, such at the killer cat and kobold bit.

Bah, that was an incredibly long-winded way to say, "they accept one and not the other because their assumptions of what is plausible are different than yours." I hope it was worth it.

Edit: The biggest WTF ping I have ever gotten from my current group was in a 3E game, and had nothing to do with mechanics. They were in a kingdom where they were told that every pledged citizen of the realm was scrupulously loyal to the royal family. Even the crooks. They couldn't find an exception. The two real-life lawyer/law enforcement ladies were giving me that, "what were you smoking last night?" look. It was a key plot point that this loyalty was divinely enforced, but it took awhile for them to dig that out.