D&D 4E How does 4E hold up on verisimilitude?

[Derren]

So why can't the fighter use his daily powers whenever the enemy is stunned or even helpless?
And why does having combat advantage have nothing to do with when you can use the powers even though it does represent the enemy not being able to defend himself properly?

 

[Shabe]

However, there was a logical progression from 0th to 1st level (and even an adventure designed such that you could RP your character through it if you so desired), and it wasn't that big a jump; about the same as from 1st to 2nd level, and so on.

4e takes that 0th-to-1st jump and makes it a quantum leap.

Or, let's try another angle: how, in 4e, can I generate a Human adventurer - of any class or none - that has 5 hit points? (hint: "you can't" is not an acceptable answer...)

Lanefan

Why would you want a character to have 5 hit points? Any monster would floor the character in one hit.

If you want to play as a peasant why don't you just remove all the powers and abilities of the class and leave them with the lowest hit point value and healing surges of the classes, ie the wizard.

Then as they hit "milestones" or the end of an adventure or what not just let them choose one or more of the abilities of their class. You could even go so far as giving them ability points and assigning a cost to them.
You just need to remember that monsters are written to be a challenge to 1st level characters so a lesser xp value of monsters should be used, and you should be fine.

 

[Shabe]

So why can't the fighter use his daily powers whenever the enemy is stunned or even helpless?
And why does having combat advantage have nothing to do with when you can use the powers even though it does represent the enemy not being able to defend himself properly?

Game balance?

Is game balance not important? because thats why the powers are done like that.

To address the issue of verisimilitude then no its not very believeable, I do believe that 4th ed has sacrificed verisimilitude for game balance.
This doesn't seem to have affected my players who just seem to be having fun running down kobolds and cursing them as they put up a good fight instead of going down after one hit.

 

[Derren]

Game balance?

Is game balance not important? because thats why the powers are done like that.

To address the issue of verisimilitude then no its not very believeable, I do believe that 4th ed has sacrificed verisimilitude for game balance.
This doesn't seem to have affected my players who just seem to be having fun running down kobolds and cursing them as they put up a good fight instead of going down after one hit.

And that is exactly the problem. Instead of trying to create a compromise, 4E only focuses on balance and forsakes verisimilitude.

 

[RSKennan]

As a GM who's all about immersion, I generally seek out games that are strong on simulation. This has led me to play things like GURPS lately. Until recently I thought immersion and simulation were the same thing, despite theory essays to the contrary.

Since 4e came out, I've realized that I'm not tied to simulationism as much as I'd thought. Immersion and simulation are two different things, though their venn diagrams overlap more than a little.

I'm finding that 4e's fast and loose design philosophy of square circles, low fluff mechanics, etc., is actually helping my imagination more than hindering it. Like others have said, it's a lot easier to see the game as an abstraction and not worry too much about it when the rules actually are abstract. In 3.x, I could make an argument against the statement that "The rules aren't the physics of the world", and while I'd feel uneasy about it, I'd have a case. In 4e, I don't have a case.

This also means that I don't have to worry about whether my setting details fit obscure "simulation-based" rules every time I have an idea. No more world building with my rulebooks, except when I want them.

This is liberating. I can refer to the rules when necessary, but focus on making my setting come to life in other ways.

All in all, 4e has brought back the wonder of GMing that I lost during 3.x. I thought I had just gotten older, but this edition has proven me wrong. I feel like a kid again.

 

[Shabe]

And that is exactly the problem. Instead of trying to create a compromise, 4E only focuses on balance and forsakes verisimilitude.

I don't believe that its a sacrifice of one for the other, i think its kind of a trade off between the two, there is verisimilitude in 4th ed it just trades some of it for game balance and (dare i say it*) fun.

From what i've seen of the threads around here people have been baiting for someone to say what i said, i just don't see what the problem is with the game being a little harder to imagine and also a bit more fair.

If a prayer doesn't work if i don't hit an enemy with my weapon, then a solution is the prayer just works like that, its not as if prayers are a scientically studiable thing or have anything to relate to in real life, the only thing you can compare it to is previous editions or other fantasy sources, and shucks they have changed their concept of how they work.
As stated by someone else it allows the cleric to be more than a band aid for the other characters and allows him to kick some of the ass.

Healing by encouraging someone with a few words is a bit trickier, but could be described by the wound looking worse than it actually was, to be honest its much like the example given by someone else of the cleric healing 8hps of damage to a first lvl rogue and healing 8hps of damage to a 20th lvl rogue, both the same spell result just one knits together a mortal wound and the other relieves some aches and pains.

All in all its a game, that game is D&D its not sim-fantasy. Heroes go down dungeons beat stuff up, take the loot and save the world.
Can you simulate political intruige? about as well as the previous editions.
Can you have gritty realistic style campaigns? yup as long as you can accept healing surges and what they represent (you don't even need a cleric or a house rule to heal up).

*The daring bit refering to the fact that someone is going to say its not fun for them.

 

[Archmage]

So why can't the fighter use his daily powers whenever the enemy is stunned or even helpless?
And why does having combat advantage have nothing to do with when you can use the powers even though it does represent the enemy not being able to defend himself properly?

Because possibly a given power depends on the target providing some form of momentum and using it against him. Maybe at the time in the fight when the enemy is helpless, the fighter just doesn't have the "oomph" of adrenaline needed to get it done. Because the target is not positioned right in relation to other combatants. On the rare occasions I spend time thinking about it, it's a combination of such things - the circumstances aren't right to pull off such an impressive effect as a daily power. The question is, why is this such a sticking point? If you want to come up with an explanation for it you can, if you don't want to come up with an explanation you won't. That's all it really boils down to. You apparently don't want to come up with an explanation that makes sense, but you want there to be an explanation that makes sense to you. If none of the examples that I and others have provided do it for you, and if it's that important, then clearly you either need to houserule so that that you can make fighter dailies make sense for you, or lower your standards for "realism" a tiny amount, or play a different game. I suppose this is dangerously near hong's flippant "stop thinking so hard about fantasy" posts, but I think that's actually a valid point in the case of debating the existence of fighter daily powers.

 

[McBard]

I have no idea why people play a FANTASY GAME and complain that it's not real enough. Its fantasy game... as in things are supposed to be FANTASTIC.

It's not that the 4E rules get in the way of my roleplaying realism or verisimilitude, it's that the 4E rules get in the way of my roleplaying fantasy. So, for me, it's not an argument of "verisimilitude" versus "fantasy"; it's an argument of "roleplaying game" versus "board game".

However, I'm also fine with D&D, and 4E D&D in particular, being more of a fantasy boardgame, and I'll probably play it with my gaming group with the same approach that we play Settlers of Catan or Robo Rally or Monopoly from time to time. In the case of 4E, we'll load up a ping pong table with dungeon tiles and have at it for 4 or 5 hours--but we'll have no more false presumptions about telling a story with it than we would with telling a story with Settlers.

On the other hand, when we want to play a roleplaying game and tell a story, we'll use something more like Chaosium's BRP.

 

[Mister Doug]

However, there was a logical progression from 0th to 1st level (and even an adventure designed such that you could RP your character through it if you so desired), and it wasn't that big a jump; about the same as from 1st to 2nd level, and so on.

4e takes that 0th-to-1st jump and makes it a quantum leap.

Or, let's try another angle: how, in 4e, can I generate a Human adventurer - of any class or none - that has 5 hit points? (hint: "you can't" is not an acceptable answer...)

Lanefan

I remember that adventure, though AD&D had been out for many years before "zero-level" rules were published, and those rules were very much a novelty.

But no matter how experienced zero-level PCs were, they never gained a level. Heck, they didn't have ability scores generally, and a fighter could attack one for every fighter level he had, meaning that a tenth level fighter could easily kill ten level zero guards, but only one of their level 1 fighter sergeants. If this isn't superheroic, then I don't get the definition of the word.

4e doesn't support some builds. A PC minion (what's the mechanical difference between 5 hp and 1 hp? Darned near none) doesn't work in the system. It isn't about playing minions. Feature, not a bug.

D&D has never supported all options. How do I build a nebbish bookwork adventurer who can't fight or cast spells but whose intelligence, research abilities, and good luck allow him to survive adventures in any edition of D&D? (The answer, you can't. This isn't even an Expert PC since they fight too well. A wizard with more skill points and no spells? You would have to house rule it.)

Back in the 80s, I left AD&D based on the class system (too narrow and restrictive), hit points (too unrealistic), the lack of a skills system and rules (too abstract and focused on combat.) Over the years, I have decided that many if not most of those things were the strengths of D&D, and not the weaknesses of the game, and that one of the problems of 3e is that it built of "solutions" to these problems that muddied the strong points of the D&D game such as simplicity and abstraction without really addressing issues of verisimilitude.

"Fixing" these problems (and I suspect that for many people, these were problems in play over time) would require deciding which way to go -- since D&D was trying to be several types of contradictory games in the 3e period, it seems likely to choose a direction and do it really well.

Of course, doing that will alienate customers who thought the mechanics I thought were muddy were actually an acceptable compromise between competing interests. This also seems reasonable.

 

[Knightlord]

And that is exactly the problem. Instead of trying to create a compromise, 4E only focuses on balance and forsakes verisimilitude.

Would you have preferred "unbalanced"?