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

[pemerton]

4e's black-box ability style discourages thinking out of that box. There's no help in adjudicating odd interactions, no mental model of how something's supposed to work. E.g. spells in 3e were often useful out of combat not merely because that was their intent, but also because their supposed functioning in-game was clear, and thus even if there wasn't an exact match with the normal scenarios (e.g. no enemy), you could reasonable rule on the effects. In 4e, that's harder - not impossible, but harder.

<snip>

You don't use powers when their fluff is thematically appropriate, you use em when they're tactically sensible

I'm not sure I fully follow the contrast in the last sentence - apart from anything else, I think 4e does a better job than many mainstream RPGs of making combats combine tactical sensibleness with thematic appropriateness.

In AD&D, the choice of whether to use Fireball or Hold Monster is a tactical one - trading off damage-even-on-a-save against save-or-lose - and to make it a thematic one instead requires bracketing what is a real tactical question. In 4e, because the mathematical/mechanical balancing of powers is (in my view and experience so far) much tighter, these sorts of question can be approached in a much more "theme-first" way - if I decide that my guy will try and pacify the foe, for exzmple, rather than kill it, I don't have to forego tactical rationality to do so, becaue I can be fairly confident that the mechanics support me either way. (This came up for me in actual play not so long ago, and was discussed here.)

As for the broader issue of whether 4e supports or hinders interesting play, I opt for the former - page 42 (ie DC tables, damage tables, a general structure of skill check for outcome) gives me a strong support for all sorts of stuff that I would have found harder to resolve in other systems (eg the paladin cursing a wight in the name of the Raven Queen in order to get combat advantage against her, or the wizard using an Arcana check to "minionize" an NPC so he could kill him in one Magic Missile while the other PCs were distracted by a temple collapsing all around them).

The characters are mechanically varied, and this results in a fun tactical game. But there's nothing there beyond the mechanics. If you're doing a close burst 1 that does damage and pushes 1, it doesn't matter how you do so - so much so that a power name is just some meaningless label to attach to a tactically interesting option.

People aren't fireballing, they're doing an area burst attack that does damage.

Some individual spells are less open-ended, but nothing really implies that is because they can't be adapted by a clever player, particularly when again there is a nice unified resolution system and guidelines for 'stunts' (IE what is the Arcana DC to make my Stinking Cloud flow down the manhole and kill stuff in the sewer below?). This makes it a pretty flexible toolkit and exercising equal creativity with either system will produce similar results.

All older style spell descriptions did was give casters license to find peculiar off-label uses for their spells, which 4e certainly allows as well with some checks or whatever the DM requires. Works fine.

let's say you're in a prison cell and the keys are hanging on a peg well out of reach. You've already skinned your Spider Climb as turning your character's arms and legs into those of a spider; now you can reach out and grab the keys, something you couldn't have done before.

I'm on AbdulAlharzed's side here. And it's not just about fluff. Fireball, Flame Spiral etc have the fire keyword and deal fire damage. Straight away that mechanically differentiates them from other area attacks, in a way that has relevance for action resolution. For example, when the wizard PC in my game was using Flame Spiral (? a low-level wizard enemies-only encounter power) in a library, Arcana checks were required to avoid setting books on fire. Whereas the fighter using Sweeping Blow in the same situation was doing something different (Acrobatics maybe?) to avoid knocking over cases of scrolls.

I've also had the wizard use Twist of Space (7th level wizard teleporting encounter power) to resuce an NPC from being trapped inside a mirror. (Details of some of these episodes in this actual play thread. This one has some more, including improvisation using Come and Get It to plug a spring which was powering a water weird.)

As for LostSoul's question about Spider Climb, I think it is trickier. Most improvisation in my game plays on mechanical effects of the power that express the fluff (the fire or teleportation keywords, for example, or the fact that a power allows forced movement or an area attack of some sort). Because Spider Climb doesn't have the polymorph keyword (I don't think) I would be disinclined to let it play out in the mooted fashion.

Is this going to be another discussion of Come And Get It? Because almost all the powers do have reasonable fluff backing them.

So if a character employs Come and Get It in a situation where the power's stock effect might not make sense there are a whole array of things that come into play. First the player could simply narrate it in such a way that it does make sense. This might not always be possible, but given that a power is a 'plot coupon' the player really should have a fair amount of leeway, narratively. Thus the player could for instance retcon the narrative "no, those goblins didn't really make it out the door, instead they turned and fought" (a situation where no mechanical significance exists to the exact positioning of the creatures in the meantime). The player could request to change the mechanics in some fashion, this will normally require a page 42 type check, though if the alteration gives little or no advantage the check might be forgone. Finally the DM might simply alter the mechanical effect for whatever reason (rule of cool, better narrative, etc).

I'm a big fan of Come and Get It - as opposed to an embarassment for 4e, I think it puts the game's understanding of the relationship between fiction and mechanics front and centre for all to see - and AbdulAlhazred's discussions in this thread, especially about how to interpret the pull as in fact a "movement negation" for fleeing NPCs, has only made me a bigger fan.

I don't see a lot of ACTUAL PLAY similarity between the wizard and the fighter, sorry. Different power selections, class mechanics, options, etc make for characters with a great deal of variety.

This fits my experience. Different effects with different keywords, and with interactions between different choices for each class that only compound those differences over the course of play. In my session yesterday, for example, the dwarven halbedeer stood in a narrow doorway and held two stone golems trapped inside the next room, while the wizard cast Bigby's Icy Hand and a Wall of Fire over his shoulder. As the golems would try to escape, the dwarf would use his forced movement powers to push them back into the fire again, or into range of the hand. (And in the spirit of improvisation, he also spread some oil he had found in an earlier adventure over the floor of the golem's room - before the oil got burned up the wall of fire, he managed to use it to increase the distance of one of his slides on a golem from 1 two 2 squares, thereby triggering his Polearm Momentum feat and knocking it prone. I resoved the oil pretty straightforwardly from the DC charts: Acro check of 13 down slide to solid obstacle (the walls were 3 or 4 squares away), 14 to 17 slide +1 square, 18+ and no effect. It required a standard action to place it - which the player spent an action point to do.)

I don't see where you're getting this; 4e gives virtually no support whatsoever. It gives you encouragement saying: try this! Then it leaves the DM completely in the dark, pretty much without any further hints

And then there are lots of little design decisions that hurt believability without gaining simplicity or plot balance in return. E.g. the wishlist-based item distribution. The monster design that's dissociated from fluff.

the wishlist based system

<snip>

Now I need to both explain away wishlists and actually pick items (work and work), or in general expend more effort linking in-game to meta-game

I like 4e monster design a lot, and myself find that the mechanical design supports description. (The first creature power that really drove this home for me was the wight's Horrid Visage, which really gave me a feel for what a wight is and how to present it in the game.) I think I'm in a minority, though, in favouring the MM1 approach to flavour text over the MM3 approach.

I also like the wishlist system, but I'm not quite sure what your criticism of it is.

Where it IS a BIT more freeform is in terms of defining things like what non-adventuring stuff your character is good at, how to do things that are really setting related (encounter tables, building a castle, hiring henchmen, running a business, etc). Really I personally like that, the players and DM are more free to make these things work in accordance with the way they want to play.

I agree with this, and think it's a good thing. As has been discussed a bit on the Wizard vs Warrior in Literature thread on General, once you make the sociology and economics of the gameworld another part of the game mechanics that the players are expected to engage, all the sorts of concerns that Balesir has been expressing really come to the fore - not to mention other nonsense like using Decanters of Endless Water to make fortunes out of the inhabitants of deserts, or discovering that castles are highly vulnerable to rationally trained and equipped flying armies.

To get a mainstream fantasy experience, you need to keep the setting in the background. Which is not to say that it's irrelevant - the world of LotR is background, but hugely relevant - but it's not itself another mechanical lever for play. To try and illustrate - the notion that Tolkein's Shire - a small, autarkic community - could enjoy, as it appears to, the same material standard of living as 18th or early 19th century England, which was a centre of world commerce and production, is from the economic or sociological point of view absurd. But as long as the setting remains background rather than another mechanical lever for play, the absurdity can be disregard. Build in domain rules of the AD&D/Expert sort, however, and exactly these sorts of absurdities, and others (like the Decanter) are brought very prominently into the foreground.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I'm a big fan of Come and Get It - as opposed to an embarassment for 4e, I think it puts the game's understanding of the relationship between fiction and mechanics front and centre for all to see - and AbdulAlhazred's discussions in this thread, especially about how to interpret the pull as in fact a "movement negation" for fleeing NPCs, has only made me a bigger fan.

Here here. I have to say that 'Come & Get It' is the epitome of what martial powers /should/ be. It's dramatic, it's effective, it's familiar from every chambarra and action flick where the mooks politely mob the hero one-by-one to be cut down in a flurry of cool moves.

 

[eamon]

In 4e, because the mathematical/mechanical balancing of powers is (in my view and experience so far) much tighter, these sorts of question can be approached in a much more "theme-first" way - if I decide that my guy will try and pacify the foe, for exzmple, rather than kill it, I don't have to forego tactical rationality to do so, becaue I can be fairly confident that the mechanics support me either way.

Because 4e's fluff is left open, it's easy to describe a story around the mechanics - changing the in-game meaning of a power from situation to situation to fit well. I believe AbdulAlhazred refers to this idea as "plot tokens", an apt analogy. That works well with 4e, and wouldn't if mechanics and fluff were more strongly linked.

As for the broader issue of whether 4e supports or hinders interesting play, I opt for the former

We're on a 4e forum here - by framing the discussion as being pro vs. anti 4e and putting me in the anti-4e camp you're basically saying that I'm wrong no matter what.

I'm on AbdulAlharzed's side here. And it's not just about fluff. Fireball, Flame Spiral etc have the fire keyword and deal fire damage.

I've got several problems with this already. First of all, with "fireball, flame spiral, etc.". That's a problem. I don't want that etc. - there are too many powers, and that makes each individual power stand out less. At wills are an example that mostly avoid this issue - there aren't so many (but even there you've got Vicious Mockery and Illusionary Ambush and others), and that makes them more memorable and unique. The second problem is that they're even less unique than they seem, because "fire damage" means little, which you address as follows....

Straight away that mechanically differentiates them from other area attacks, in a way that has relevance for action resolution. For example, when the wizard PC in my game was using Flame Spiral (? a low-level wizard enemies-only encounter power) in a library, Arcana checks were required to avoid setting books on fire. Whereas the fighter using Sweeping Blow in the same situation was doing something different (Acrobatics maybe?) to avoid knocking over cases of scrolls.

That's a creative solution - respect for pulling that off. I'm not typically going to manage that. First of all, there are too many powers; I don't know each and every power the PC's have. Secondly, respect where it is due - this is a neat idea, but it's your idea; the game doesn't suggest such a thing. In fact, what with for example the suggestion to allow oozes to fall prone, I'd say the game suggests quite the opposite - to treat combat as abstract and describe the story around it.


On the topic of wizard vs. fighter, and that AbdulAlhazred sees great play differences:

This fits my experience. Different effects with different keywords, and with interactions between different choices for each class that only compound those differences over the course of play.

Nobody's contesting that. Firstly, since though many classes are very similar, they are mostly those of the same "group" (controller, defender, etc), so not wizard and fighter. Secondly, even between classes that have powers and effects that are largely identical, small differences can lead to large differences in tactics - the 4e setup ensures that. That makes the game fun. But tactical complexity doesn't mean the fluff feels different. You can have a fun game of close-bursts 1 between story lines, but I just don't feel much difference between one close burst 1 and another (assuming they've similar effects, of course).

I don't think what I'm saying here is actually controversial. 4e is unashamedly combat-centric. To quote the DM-kit's book on modes of the game: "Encounters are the most exciting part of the D&D game. They have tension and urgency about them and a chance of failure. They involve tactical thinking and rolling dice, and are where most of the rules of the game come into play".

The game achieves that. And with some creative plot-token thinking, you can even make the fantasy somewhat consistent and vivid; but that part depends on the players, and for example doesn't work for me. I need internal consistency to suspend my disbelief - and many retconned power fluffs raise more questions than they answer, to typically start with "if he can do that now, why not in situation XYZ?".

So, I honestly confess that your skill checks to save scrolls+books vs. close bursts with a sword or with fire sound evocative. (Sounds like a recipe for great recaps, btw, do you have a link to any?) But if I try that kind of thing I end up more annoyed than happy. I'd prefer to focus on the tactical challenge in combat rather than face awkward questions of consistency. Of course I still fluff things, but it's not the focus, and most fluff thus occurs out of combat.

In my session yesterday, for example, the dwarven halbedeer stood in a narrow doorway and held two stone golems trapped inside the next room, while the wizard cast Bigby's Icy Hand and a Wall of Fire over his shoulder. As the golems would try to escape, the dwarf would use his forced movement powers to push them back into the fire again, or into range of the hand. (And in the spirit of improvisation, he also spread some oil he had found in an earlier adventure over the floor of the golem's room - before the oil got burned up the wall of fire, he managed to use it to increase the distance of one of his slides on a golem from 1 two 2 squares, thereby triggering his Polearm Momentum feat and knocking it prone. I resoved the oil pretty straightforwardly from the DC charts: Acro check of 13 down slide to solid obstacle (the walls were 3 or 4 squares away), 14 to 17 slide +1 square, 18+ and no effect. It required a standard action to place it - which the player spent an action point to do.)

I also like the wishlist system, but I'm not quite sure what your criticism of it is.

That ties back to the consistency thing - they don't make any sense. Oh, and they're also too much work. I prefer random loot, with bits of thematically appropriate stuff.

[...] once you make the sociology and economics of the gameworld another part of the game mechanics that the players are expected to engage, all the sorts of concerns that Balesir has been expressing really come to the fore - not to mention other nonsense like using Decanters of Endless Water to make fortunes out of the inhabitants of deserts, or discovering that castles are highly vulnerable to rationally trained and equipped flying armies.

I don't have a problem with that. I find it's quite doable to construct such worlds, and in any case, there's a difference between in-you-face consistency of the everyday means and possiblities of the characters in the story you're running, and the background consistency - the latter being much less important, and much easier to retconn. For example, "you don't know" is often a perfectly fine answer to the latter, but not the former.

You don't need to work out everything in the background, but those things that you do, should be consistent.

To get a mainstream fantasy experience, you need to keep the setting in the background. Which is not to say that it's irrelevant - the world of LotR is background, but hugely relevant - but it's not itself another mechanical lever for play. To try and illustrate - the notion that Tolkein's Shire - a small, autarkic community - could enjoy, as it appears to, the same material standard of living as 18th or early 19th century England, which was a centre of world commerce and production, is from the economic or sociological point of view absurd. But as long as the setting remains background rather than another mechanical lever for play, the absurdity can be disregard.

It's also simply not very absurd. Perhaps plants simply grow faster. Or they lose less to strife - they looked like a peaceful bunch, them. Or low-level magic, trinkets they don't even consider magical allow greater effectiveness than medieval times would have. The PC's don't know, so you don't need to work it out to maintain consistency. Heck, we don't know lots about the world around us, but I still assume it's consistent ;-).

 

[pemerton]

We're on a 4e forum here - by framing the discussion as being pro vs. anti 4e and putting me in the anti-4e camp you're basically saying that I'm wrong no matter what.

Sorry, I didn't mean that, nor mean to imply it in such strong terms. But I did want to disagree with you (hopefully not in too combative a way). I think my disagreement is more along these lines, which I hope don't characterise your view as unfairly: I don't feel that 4e's tactical rules get in the way of the fiction in the sort of way I take you to be suggesting. And often I feel that they facilitate the fiction.

I've got several problems with this already. First of all, with "fireball, flame spiral, etc.". That's a problem. I don't want that etc. - there are too many powers, and that makes each individual power stand out less.

I'm in two minds about this. Sometimes I agree that this is true, and that it would be better to have common pools of powers, which different classes then gave access to. On the other hand, in practice it's my players rather than me as a GM who have to manage the power bloat - I only have to know the powers on their sheets, and most of the time it's clear what's going on when they use the power. (If something looks weird to me, especially when it's one of my players who I know is weaker on the rules minutiae, I'll get them to show me the power description.)

That's a creative solution - respect for pulling that off.

<snip>

this is a neat idea, but it's your idea; the game doesn't suggest such a thing. In fact, what with for example the suggestion to allow oozes to fall prone, I'd say the game suggests quite the opposite - to treat combat as abstract and describe the story around it.

<snip>

(Sounds like a recipe for great recaps, btw, do you have a link to any?)

Thanks - I got the idea from the "Rule of the Ming Vase" in the oldschool primer (link to that, and also the recap is here). I don't myself agree with your last sentence, because I think page 42 pushes in the other direction. But I can see where you're coming from. I think it really depends heavily on how central you think page 42 (understood broadly and richly) is to the game. And I definitely agree that the guidelines could be better.

Firstly, since though many classes are very similar, they are mostly those of the same "group" (controller, defender, etc)

My party has a sorcerer and ranger, and a paladin and defender, and I still feel the differences. But I certainly haven't seen the full range of classes played. Maybe there is sameiness that I haven't encountered yet. Or maybe my threshhold for sameiness is higher - I think playing a lot of Rolemaster, where classes are often different only in rather narrow ways, might have that effect.

 

[Tony Vargas]

|Pemerton|======================================================
Straight away that mechanically differentiates them from other area attacks, in a way that has relevance for action resolution. For example, when the wizard PC in my game was using Flame Spiral (? a low-level wizard enemies-only encounter power) in a library, Arcana checks were required to avoid setting books on fire. Whereas the fighter using Sweeping Blow in the same situation was doing something different (Acrobatics maybe?) to avoid knocking over cases of scrolls.
===============================================================||

That's a creative solution - respect for pulling that off. I'm not typically going to manage that. First of all, there are too many powers; I don't know each and every power the PC's have.

One oddity of 4e is the way powers are targetted. Virtually all powers target creatures or enemies. Vanishingly few also target objects (Force Orb is one I've used that I remember could do that, Light is another). None that I'm aware of target terrain features.

It might make a lot of sense for some powers, like Fireball, to target "all creatures & objects in burst." But, they don't. It's not like it would've been hard or game-skewing to give them such a target line.

So, I guess the intention is that the vast majority of attacks are specifically designed to harm creatures, not objects (that you might want to take as booty) or scenery (that you might want to claim after the fight). That's not exactly crazy.

If you want consistency within the game world, rationalizations can work fine.

The game achieves that. And with some creative plot-token thinking, you can even make the fantasy somewhat consistent and vivid; but that part depends on the players, and for example doesn't work for me. I need internal consistency to suspend my disbelief - and many retconned power fluffs raise more questions than they answer, to typically start with "if he can do that now, why not in situation XYZ?".

Now you're getting into a genre bit. In just about any fantasy (or adventure or action) genre, you have a character, at some point (often at several points) pull out some power that, had they just used it earlier or more often, would've obviated most of the challenges presented in the story to that point. This drives nerds crazy. (I should know, I'm a nerd, and it drives me crazy every time). But, it's part of how people tell engaging stories.

RPGs face the exact same problem. If you can just unleash the uber-attack, why not just lead with it and end the fight before you get hurt? 4e did away with save-or-dies, in part, to reduce the genre-crushing answer to that question: 'no reason, blast away in the surprise round.'

Because RPGs tend to emulate literary (or entertainment) genres more than they do reality, they have to model at least some genre conventions, even when they're totally arbitrary and indefensible. Very often, something happens in a story only because the author's story /needs/ it to happen. Often, it's done well, sometimes it's clumsy and obvious, but it's done, a lot. When you rub up against a mechanic or a fluff/mechanic interactin that seems 'inconsistent' to you, take a step back, imagine it in a book or movie, and see if you can't see how an author might need to 'make it happen that way,' to keep the story flowing.

This is, BTW, speaking more to the 'why can't he do it again'/'didn't he do it earlier' sort of dissonance, than the 'how do you knock a gelatinous cube 'prone' one (which I think has been handled fine, actually).

 

[Crazy Jerome]

I don't think what I'm saying here is actually controversial. 4e is unashamedly combat-centric. To quote the DM-kit's book on modes of the game: "Encounters are the most exciting part of the D&D game. They have tension and urgency about them and a chance of failure. They involve tactical thinking and rolling dice, and are where most of the rules of the game come into play".

Not quite. 4E is unabashedly action hero-centric. It wants to be Raiders of the Lost Ark, but not, say, Second Hand Lions. That naturally means a strong dose of combat encounters, at least on average, but any good action scene will do in the 4E scene economy. Quite moments are for changing the pace.

4E is distinguished from 3E not so much by how you try to run the combat scenes. Sure, there are major differences going to a more tactical mindset from the previous emphasis on stategic resource management. But in a certain sense, those are simply "implementation details." If you have Indy fighting the Nazis in Egypt as a model, then in the right hands you can bring out different elements of those scenes with either tactical or strategic play. Where the two games differ more is in their handling of Indy running from the boulder, dealing with his competitors, his love interest, etc. The intentions are very similar in both games, but the handling is different.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah, this is all good.

Personally I don't find things like pemerton's library example to be too hard to pull off. I think eamon is right that there probably are too many different powers in 4e. I think pools of powers would have been smarter design, and maybe they also should have been less 'balkanized' into so many different levels. The old 9 level spell level system was good that way, it limited the number of different bins that had to be populated with unique spells. I think it is interesting to look at Matt James' discussion of Themes and layered design on that point.

Tony hit it really well on the whole genre thing. I agree that you're really never going to make more than the barest illusion of a consistent world. My experience was always that mechanics applied at that level rarely made a lot of sense. They might work in a given situation but then they'd be way off in the next situation. There are some arguments in both directions here. Things like Domain rules might be useful inspiration for some DMs, but I think they really should exist strictly as guidelines. I recall the old stronghold rules from AD&D. Honestly, while they suggested an interesting possible arena of play, they never really worked. They didn't, and couldn't, take into consideration the nature of the individual character, the details of the setting, etc. By making them rules attached to the class they created an awkwardness in the way the system worked. Truthfully I can remember very few situations playing AD&D where we even bothered with them. At best they were suggestive and I think would have been much better written as a set of DM guidelines in the DMG that just explained the concept and provided some parameters for what might work well.

 

[Barastrondo]

Personally, I see a big contradiction between "immersive adventures . . . [and] good world setting", on the one hand, and "10th level heroes being killed by regimens of 2nd level guards" on the other. The latter sort of scenario isn't my idea of immersive adventures in a good fantasy world setting.

Heh. Me too, though largely it's because terms like "10th level heroes" and "2nd level guards" are being compared to one another. Once you've started comparing levels, it's stopped being about "what would this look like from the perspective of rules-blind observers within the world?"