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

[Crazy Jerome]

It's going to be incredibly difficult to make a set of deep, interesting, rules to that can cover these and more scenarios. I could make different rule system around each one, inventing various possible actions, reactions, rolls, and countermeasures against events. Each would be vastly different and allow the PCs to do completely different things.

The task isn't trivial, but it is hardly that hard. The main problem with skill challenges is that they don't have enough axes for the player and DM to manipulate--both narratively and through the mechanics. Since most of the narration is supplied by the people at the table, a group that gets this can cover that side of the deficit. But mechanically, they will always be weak as long as everything is essentially a series of skill checks.

But just because you need more axes, it doesn't follow that it has to mirror combat complexity and length. We don't, for example, necessarily need to have "skill challenge" defenses and hit points, which are whittled down slowly as skill checks are made, as a more mechanically involved replacement for avoiding three failures--though that would provide more mechanical room to play. It would be better to have something that has a mechanical basis and does not directly tie into the skill checks out all.

For a quick example off the top of my head: Add "culture" and "resources" as narrative elements with mechanical backing. Then make the skill checks in the base system a bit more difficult than they are now. (You might steal some generic culture ideas from Runequest and some generic resources ideas from Burning Wheel, but what you won't steal is any mechanics that directly tie into skill checks.) Culture can be fed by actual culture of the character, background, race, etc. Resources are fed by station/profession in life, money/material poured into this axis from adventuring, favors, etc.

When you make a culture or resources checks (however those are done), what you are trying to do is avoid a skill check that is high risk and/or low reward and bypass/change it to another check more to your liking. Intimidate is your best skill and the skill challenge is infertile ground for such a check? Pick another high skill, or use culture or resources to move the ground where Intimidate makes sense.

I'm sure that good DMs are already doing essentially that--just most with not a supported and explained structure. If the wannabee intimidator arranges to spend some gold or a favor to bribe the duke's steward, when intimidate doesn't work so well on the duke, he can.

 

[Ryujin]

Taking simulationism to what might be considered a reasonable degree can detract, a great deal, from a simulationist experience. Does anyone remember "Aftermath"? Do you really want to detail your armour in THAT many locations?

How about "Space Opera"? I loved that game, but did anyone ever actually keep track of the TWO DIFFERENT WAYS that you could be too tired, to do anything?

And "Twilight 2000." Sure, I understand that some people want to record their ammunition, but it starts to get silly when you need to track your vehicle fuel, food supplements, etc., etc., ....

You spend so much time looking at the stitches, that you lose the thread.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'd look at powers in general strictly as plot coupons. There is no in-world explanation for why the barbarian can only make a mighty sword blow once per day, he simply DOES manage to do that. The player gets to decide when and where that happens. There doesn't need to be an in-world explanation at all. Why simply isn't relevant.

If it were something random that was controlled strictly by the dice then it would have to be an uncommon occurrence. The player would lose all narrative control of that process. Given that most enemies are fairly run-of-the-mill and many of them are no more than mooks (minions) it would most likely happen at a completely irrelevant point in the narrative. As it stands now the player gets to do it when he's about to put the killing blow on the BBEG or at some other interesting point in the narrative.

Sure, healing is unrealistic in 4e. Players are however inevitably going to withdraw when they don't have their full resources. This was the problem in previous editions, the party simply had to spend 7 days or whatever healing up, which was a big narrative wet blanket. Besides, in reality all it meant was there had to be some magic interjected to sidestep the healing rules. 4e just made the process more elegant and organic.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The task isn't trivial, but it is hardly that hard. The main problem with skill challenges is that they don't have enough axes for the player and DM to manipulate--both narratively and through the mechanics. Since most of the narration is supplied by the people at the table, a group that gets this can cover that side of the deficit. But mechanically, they will always be weak as long as everything is essentially a series of skill checks.

But just because you need more axes, it doesn't follow that it has to mirror combat complexity and length. We don't, for example, necessarily need to have "skill challenge" defenses and hit points, which are whittled down slowly as skill checks are made, as a more mechanically involved replacement for avoiding three failures--though that would provide more mechanical room to play. It would be better to have something that has a mechanical basis and does not directly tie into the skill checks out all.

For a quick example off the top of my head: Add "culture" and "resources" as narrative elements with mechanical backing. Then make the skill checks in the base system a bit more difficult than they are now. (You might steal some generic culture ideas from Runequest and some generic resources ideas from Burning Wheel, but what you won't steal is any mechanics that directly tie into skill checks.) Culture can be fed by actual culture of the character, background, race, etc. Resources are fed by station/profession in life, money/material poured into this axis from adventuring, favors, etc.

When you make a culture or resources checks (however those are done), what you are trying to do is avoid a skill check that is high risk and/or low reward and bypass/change it to another check more to your liking. Intimidate is your best skill and the skill challenge is infertile ground for such a check? Pick another high skill, or use culture or resources to move the ground where Intimidate makes sense.

I'm sure that good DMs are already doing essentially that--just most with not a supported and explained structure. If the wannabee intimidator arranges to spend some gold or a favor to bribe the duke's steward, when intimidate doesn't work so well on the duke, he can.

Skill Challenges are supposed to be narratives, the die rolling aspect of the whole thing is simply a general accounting mechanism. There is no expectation that players will NOT change the context of the SC. In fact that turns out to be the most interesting part in any decent SC already. The issue really is that people have become convinced that an SC consists of the players simply using skill checks over and over to rack up successes in a static scenario.

Advantages are one way that WotC has given us in the most recent SC rules to easily represent this kind of thing mechanically. A player takes actions which change the situation in his favor, he gets an advantage, maybe a check becomes easy, or making the hard DC gives an extra success, or a check can remove a failure. These are all possible ways to quickly and easily represent this. There are more sophisticated ways as well, like unlocking new skills.

 

[eriktheguy]

Re: daily recovery of HP in 4e

I think the main reason Wizards did this is that recovering HP in 3e was stupid. Basically, once you got to a certain level HP became an encounter resource. Assuming you could afford a wand of CLW, and at least one party member could use it (and assuming you were rules-savvy enough to figure it out), you could max out everyone's HP between every fight.

HP went up linearly, and wealth went up as a square function of level. For 250gp a wand of CLW could recover 275 hp. At very low levels this cost was significant, but at higher levels it was trivial.

Wizards basically changed the rules so that daily healing was available for everyone, rather than just for people who 'got' the system. The idea that daily healing is exclusive to spellcasters sucks. It's a very 3e concept, but conficts with the philosophy of 4e.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Re: daily recovery of HP in 4e

I think the main reason Wizards did this is that recovering HP in 3e was stupid. Basically, once you got to a certain level HP became an encounter resource. Assuming you could afford a wand of CLW, and at least one party member could use it (and assuming you were rules-savvy enough to figure it out), you could max out everyone's HP between every fight.

HP went up linearly, and wealth went up as a square function of level. For 250gp a wand of CLW could recover 275 hp. At very low levels this cost was significant, but at higher levels it was trivial.

Wizards basically changed the rules so that daily healing was available for everyone, rather than just for people who 'got' the system. The idea that daily healing is exclusive to spellcasters sucks. It's a very 3e concept, but conficts with the philosophy of 4e.

I don't think it was really INTENDED to be that way. I think there really just WAS no (well very little) overall design in 3.x (or earlier editions of D&D either). The game was a hodge-podge of little individual subsystems that were tacked on by various people at various times, but the ship never really had a captain. Then once something got tacked on and it created issues or significantly changed the overall way the system worked it was just sort of ignored. Later hacks would be layered on over that or a different version of an overlapping subsystem would just get dropped in beside it. Nobody ever asked "how should game play work overall, and how do we fit different elements together to make that happen?"

 

[ThirdWizard]

The task isn't trivial, but it is hardly that hard. The main problem with skill challenges is that they don't have enough axes for the player and DM to manipulate--both narratively and through the mechanics.

I would say that the main problem is the lack of defined options. In KarinsDad's example, there are many ways to deal with a PC at 0 hit points in combat. In a skill challenge its a Heal check with a set DC. Beyond that, in combat restoring the PC has non-tangible (or at least not readily defined) benefits. Now that PC can attack, block an incoming enemy, pull a lever, etc. In a Skill Challenge, you get a tick next to the success line instead of the fail line. If a Skill Challenge were to have the same depth, then one option would have to lead to more options.

It can work like that. But it doesn't have to. Some of my most successful Skill Challenges have been flowcharts, with one success not giving a tick on a column, but opening up more options that can be used in a process. But, there's still the problem of the skill limitation. Not that it has been an impediment to my games, but if you're trying to open it up to a complete system like above, that will be a real limiting factor.

Perhaps that's how they should have been defined in the books, but I think people would have been even more lost. If I recall correctly, the concept of the skill challenge was difficult for some people to really and truly grasp when it was first presented. It probably was not in WotC's best interests to further complicate it. ENWorld is not exactly their target audience.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Advantages are one way that WotC has given us in the most recent SC rules to easily represent this kind of thing mechanically. A player takes actions which change the situation in his favor, he gets an advantage, maybe a check becomes easy, or making the hard DC gives an extra success, or a check can remove a failure. These are all possible ways to quickly and easily represent this. There are more sophisticated ways as well, like unlocking new skills.

And those are all bad design choices, or at least no answer whatsoever to problem I am addressing. It may or may not be a good idea to tweak/complicate how skills work, but doing so adds no appreciable mechanical depth to the system. And it would still resolve into defacto numbers that have predictable chances of success.

Perhaps that's how they should have been defined in the books, but I think people would have been even more lost. If I recall correctly, the concept of the skill challenge was difficult for some people to really and truly grasp when it was first presented. It probably was not in WotC's best interests to further complicate it. ENWorld is not exactly their target audience.

And this is why it is a bad idea. You don't want a lot of complication for a little payoff, and you want the depth you put in to be ignorable at times.

Look at combat. Having extra hit points does not make you hit harder. When you go to resolve your attacks, it doesn't even matter how many hit points you have. Now of course it matters a lot in the fight as a whole, but hit points are on mainly a different axis from hitting. This produces, with relatively little complexity, all kinds of interesting decisions, changing from round to round, such as, "should I run over there and smack that guy, when I'm not sure if I can handle it if his two friends try to smack me back?"

Skill challenges, to give XP, should really have multiple types of levers with which to move things, and these levers should have different costs and risks. Then you quite easily get interesting decisions like, "If I bribe that guy now, we will get an easy in to the palace, but I won't have the money later, and we'll waste my pal's high bluff ability to lie our way through. On the other hand, if he blows the roll, we'll start out behind, and this is already a tough nut to crack. Hmm...."

Like I said, I'm sure a lot of DMs already do that. I certainly do. I'd rather have more mechanical heft backing me up, given what skill challenges are trying to accomplish, though.

But mainly my point was that it does not need to be complicated to have depth. Pawns in chess are easy. An 8 year old can learn how to move them in five minutes. Yet people play for decades without really unlocking all the depth in pawns. Thoughtful, simple rules on different axes often produce that result in game design.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

And those are all bad design choices, or at least no answer whatsoever to problem I am addressing. It may or may not be a good idea to tweak/complicate how skills work, but doing so adds no appreciable mechanical depth to the system. And it would still resolve into defacto numbers that have predictable chances of success.

I don't think they are bad design choices. Depth in SCs isn't mechanical. It is provided by narrative supported by whatever appropriate bits of mechanics are needed. I'll echo what was said above, I cannot conceive of a set of mechanics which could even begin to address a small fraction of all the things I'd do with an SC.

So for instance the PCs are climbing a cliff, one falls, another catches him. This might erase a failure, but leaves them in a precarious situation requiring a hard DC check to get out of. Or maybe the catch works with a medium DC but with a hard DC also provides a success (the catching PC slings the falling one back to a ledge). The player could creatively attempt that action, and the DM can respond. The narrative is the 'glue' of the challenge in all cases. The checks can push things down different branches, and/or the PCs can come up with new tactics which might do that and which could be entirely independent of any specific check.

And this is why it is a bad idea. You don't want a lot of complication for a little payoff, and you want the depth you put in to be ignorable at times.

Look at combat. Having extra hit points does not make you hit harder. When you go to resolve your attacks, it doesn't even matter how many hit points you have. Now of course it matters a lot in the fight as a whole, but hit points are on mainly a different axis from hitting. This produces, with relatively little complexity, all kinds of interesting decisions, changing from round to round, such as, "should I run over there and smack that guy, when I'm not sure if I can handle it if his two friends try to smack me back?"

Skill challenges, to give XP, should really have multiple types of levers with which to move things, and these levers should have different costs and risks. Then you quite easily get interesting decisions like, "If I bribe that guy now, we will get an easy in to the palace, but I won't have the money later, and we'll waste my pal's high bluff ability to lie our way through. On the other hand, if he blows the roll, we'll start out behind, and this is already a tough nut to crack. Hmm...."

Like I said, I'm sure a lot of DMs already do that. I certainly do. I'd rather have more mechanical heft backing me up, given what skill challenges are trying to accomplish, though.

I'm just not convinced I could generate a set of mechanics that would reflect all the hundreds of ways that trade offs could be made in all of the situations where SCs are possible. I totally agree that an SC needs some 'tactical depth' and I wouldn't rule out the possibility that some extra mechanics could exist in the rules that would be useful in a lot of places, but again I think the advantages are intended to fill that role. The players should be looking for ways to invoke them. It may have been a mistake for the rules to state that SC of difficulty X should always grant N advantages. I consider that more of a guideline as to how many opportunities to present for them to exist than anything else, and some of the specific ones aren't always very usable.

But mainly my point was that it does not need to be complicated to have depth. Pawns in chess are easy. An 8 year old can learn how to move them in five minutes. Yet people play for decades without really unlocking all the depth in pawns. Thoughtful, simple rules on different axes often produce that result in game design.

Yes, and my engineering mind pretty much agrees with you. My story-telling mind simply isn't grasping what mechanics would do that in the vast set of potential situations that SCs encompass. Anyway, it is certainly something that could be explored in more detail. I've seen a few proposals, but they always seem either not very simple or not very widely applicable.

 

[Alex319]

I agree with some of the earlier posters that it doesn't make sense to talk about whether 3e is "more simulationist" than 4e or vice versa, if "simulation" is defined as simulating the real world. After all, neither system comes even close to simulating the real world (even the parts that aren't explicitly magical).

So I think the appropriate definition of "simulation" to use is not whether it simulates the *real* world, but whether it simulates *a* self-consistent world. Of course the problem with this definition is that *any* set of self-consistent rules by definition simulates a self-consistent world, if you just assume the rules are what govern the world.

A better way of thinking about it is to imagine: "what would the world that the rules simulate actually be like?" True, you would have absurdities like healing to full after a night of rest, etc. But I don't see that as really a problem, because we already accept that things like that are possible because of magic, and if the whole debate about what parts need to be realistic or not just boiled down to which things have the label "magic" on them, I don't see why it would be such a big deal.

But there is another category of things that are issues, and that is: what do the rules imply about what is a part of the world? That causes other problems. For instance, consider the power "Own the Battlefield" (another power that causes problems similar to Come and Get It) that moves every enemy three squares (I think) but only works on enemies, even if you wanted to do it on allies. The most commonly cited problem is that there's no "explanation" for how it works. This doesn't bother me; there's no "explanation" for how magic works, either (and if this were a wizard instead of warlord power it wouldn't be complained about as much.) The bigger problem is that it implies that "whether you're an enemy" is always clear. For instance, let's say you're in a busy tavern and you think there's an assassin disguised as a regular patron. Activate Own the Battlefield, try to move everyone three squares to the left. The one who moves is the enemy. I can think of lots of situations (more than two sides, a Mexican standoff, all-out confusion) where it's not clear who the enemy is.

3.5e also has examples of this, in particular the ability to detect alignments. That implies that, for example, "evil" is objectively measurable, which supports an ethical theory that not everyone would agree with.

A while ago, I wrote another post along these lines, more focused on combat and powers specifically, here:

http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/255663-power-system-combat-rest-game-2.html

(scroll down a bit)

Another reason I think that these "simulation" discussions often end up with people talking past each other is that everyone has very different ideas of what is important to simulate, as well as very different experiences that inform what they notice. For instance, I'm a computer science and math student, and a lot of computer science and math is figuring out what you can deduce from a set of information. So I tend to follow those chains of implication ("if you have Goggles of Aura Sight which measures hit points, and there's a power that does a constant amount of damage equal to your wisdom modifier, you can figure out how wise someone is by having them use that power and measuring the damage output...")

On the other hand, I don't really have much experience with combat or medieval history, so I don't notice things related to that ("tactic X was mainly used to help people using weapon Y overcome their inherent disadvantage against armor type Z, so if Y doesn't have a penalty against Z there's no reason tactic X should even be in the game").