I don't get the dislike of healing surges

[LostSoul]

A lot depends on how the DM runs things. I once played in a game where I was playing a Ranger/Barbarian in a party that moved 20'. I went 60' ahead of the party in stealth mode - moving at half speed - through the wilderness.

Next thing that happened was that we were all standing at the edge of a clearing making Will saves from the songs the harpies flying around a tree were singing. I'm not sure if we got to roll Init or not.

Didn't play with that guy again.

While for some people the lack of consistency in how to run a 3E game is seen as a benefit, in my case I don't like it much. I'd much rather a clear process - similar to what's found in B/X with its turn structure. Each action you take eats up time, which calls for a wandering monster check, which requires a reaction roll, which can lead into group initiative. Marching order and the role of the caller helped to cut down the "murk" that can arise between "free-play" - which 3E has a lot of - and structured play.

One of the most interesting games I played was with a 3E guy running 4E for the first time at a con; he ran everything in initiative order. Very clear procedures for play. Though not my preference, it was a good game and I can see how it helped the game proceed.

*

From what I recall of my AD&D days, aside from giants and the like (rarely encountered, we never hit high levels), the most dangerous foes were clerics with their Hold Person spells. The best defence was always the magic-user casting Magic Missile to spank each one for assured damage until the fighter could close - assuming we went first. (This is 2E, with its speed factors and such.)

 

[Wiseblood]

Wiseblood - IMO, the lethality in AD&D generally came from save or die effects which everyone and his bloody dog got. Outright combat damage? Not so much. 3e monsters are just so much bigger and output so much more damage than AD&D monsters. Never minding that at least by 2e anyway, the fighter types do considerably more damage while the monsters aren't typically (with a few notable exceptions - giants and dragons) much higher HP than their 1e counterparts.
.

Yeah, that is where I was going with my post, save or die effects. Well it was before I read upthread and I cought on.

I agree, damage was higher. It was also much more viable because of the low HP totals. I guess that's why there were so many SOD.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I have a very strong suspicion that these playstyles are being aided considerably by the playstyle of the DM. That the ability to play this way has a lot less to do with mechanics and a lot more to do with what the DM brings to the table.

Well, I'm pretty sure a DM who was willing to let an experienced PC die from drowning isn't exactly pulling punches.

We also had to deal with bosses who would escape encounters that were going badly and attacked us later. At least one fought us twice and ultimately got away.

And speaking as someone who also DMed for this group on other occasions and faced the same tactics, I can tell you that I didn't pull punches myself. Being a magic miser is very effective resource management, and makes it much tougher to challenge a party. A caster who only casts 1-3 spells per combat is damn near impossible to "bankrupt". He'll typically have 1-2 top ranked soells still available after encounter #4...and maybe even as the party sets up camp.

 

[Rogue Agent]

It is not so much that 4E does a lot to force one into a narrative style, though it does hint at it rather pervasively. If nothing else, the metagaming constructs create a vaccuum that, for anyone used to a narrative style, beg to be exploited by that style. See for example, the original Come and Get It. You have to really work to make that work in a traditional manner. If you want to narrate a broad variety of results, as partially determined by the situation at hand, then the vaccuum created in the story begs for you to pull something into it, rather than the mechanic pushing you to do that.

When I read that in the specific context of 4E, what I see is: "Since significant chunks of 4E aren't roleplaying mechanics, if you want to have roleplaying you'll need to pull it into the game through sheer force of will."

Which is true. And which is exactly what most of the 4E games I've played in have looked like. (I've also had a couple of completely miserable sessions where that hasn't been a priority for the group.)

So why isn't that good enough? Well, largely because the mechanics have become primarily a liability at that point. Playing 4E feels like an unnecessary wrestling match. I'm having to do a lot of heavy lifting to carry use over the gaps left by those large chunks of non-roleplaying mechanics.

But for those of us who wanted something more like this when we first played Basic D&D, it is more about the lack of narrative restraints than anything else.

Honest question here: Why wouldn't you prefer to use a system that actually supported your narrative goals? Or simply a system that was a hell of a lot less bulky than D&D4?

I mean, if the only thing the mechanics are contributing to your goals is that they mostly aren't in the way, what's the point of using them at all?

I think that skill challenges, as written obviously make fictional positioning important, becaue the GM has to frame the initial situation, and then reframe as part of each new skill roll (PHB p 259; DMG p 74):

I think this is the core of what I, honestly, read as the gaping fallacy in your interpretation of 4th Edition.

You seem to be saying, "Skill challenges require you to use fictional positioning because they'd be pretty for roleplaying/storytelling if you didn't do it."

But what mechanic wouldn't that be true for?

When you play 4E you seem to put a lot more into the game than what the game provides. And that's great. I'm not trying to diss that or dismiss that. I did the exact same thing when I ran 4E.

I just don't credit 4E for accomplishing those things.

 

[Aberzanzorax]

Take Az(sp)'s group. Nice group. The only problem is, eventually you're going to fail stealth checks. That's going to happen. And, when it does, this group is going to die. It has no healing beyond potions. The MT didn't memorize healing spells, so, no healing in combat. The party has AC's that are easily hit (unless the party is lazer beam focusing) and the first mass Will save and the MT is toast as the other three characters obliterate him.

Heck, Harpies would absolutely destroy this party, just as an easy example.

If you're regularly scoring surprise on every encounter, something funky is going on. There's just too many die rolls for you to succeed that often. This particular group would be Fine.. Fine... Fine... DEAD.

I have a very strong suspicion that these playstyles are being aided considerably by the playstyle of the DM. That the ability to play this way has a lot less to do with mechanics and a lot more to do with what the DM brings to the table.

Well, I don't know about the playstyle of the DM aiding us, as it was a module rather than a homebrew campaign. We played Return to the temple of Elemental Evil straight (DM didn't downscale or upscale monsters/traps/etc). That's why it was two players each playing 2 pcs (to make a party of 4 pcs total, which is what the module was designed for).

Perhaps a more wildernessy campaign might have been a problem for this group. As it was RTtToEE is an almost city-like complex, so our move silently checks were almost a secondary measure much of the time (it wasn't like humanoids were uncommon.

Also, though we didn't have healing, we did have dispel magic and such to remove conditions. People failed will saves, to be sure, but no more than other parties (and often less as spellcasters were our number one threat, and usually started the battle surrounded by us if we got surprise.)

Add in things like invisibility and move silently for those extra touchy/dangerous occasions, and it was relatively rare that we'd fail an important move silently or hide check when it really mattered.

Also, sometimes we ran. We retreated from some fights like mad, with the controller throwing up walls, held portals, webs, etc to get us away.


I don't know what to tell you, Hussar. I know you think something is up to allow this to have happened, or that it's outside the norm, and you're trying to quantify how we were able to do it. Maybe I'm leaving out an important detail I haven't thought of.

But the fact of the matter is that this group played through RTtToEE from start to finish, and in this fashion. That's real experience, not theory.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Honest question here: Why wouldn't you prefer to use a system that actually supported your narrative goals? Or simply a system that was a hell of a lot less bulky than D&D4?

I mean, if the only thing the mechanics are contributing to your goals is that they mostly aren't in the way, what's the point of using them at all?

I'm not a Forge-ite. I reject utterly the idea that a group must be focused on a given creative agenda at a given time, lest the game become disfunctional. I like peanut butter in my chocolate. I like my game play mixed heavily with metagaming constructs that move the story forward and "just enough" simulation of the world to ground the players in the setting. I don't want a great novel. I want a Fafhrd and Gray Mouser short story, with continuing characters.

No game really does exactly what I want. 4E does a pretty good job of actively supporting part of what I want, and staying the hell out of the way on most of the rest of it. (It's native magic items are a negative exception, but they are gradually moving the design to something more palatable.)

I like Burning Wheel, too. For a more hard-core version of what I like, BW works great. But there are two problems with it, for me:

1. I really don't like scripting, and I doubt the players in our group will ever master the mechanics enough to make it sing the way it is supposed to.

2. BW is high energy, all the time. Right now, I'm low energy, all the time. 4E requires a much lower expenditure of energy at the gaming table to make it work well. The ceiling is higher with BW than with 4E, but the floor is lower. I know my current limits.

I like Fantasy Hero and Runequest. Right now, too much prep work to make them sing, and there are a host of minor irritants in the rule set that I keep trying to tweak, but am never quite satisfied with. I'd rather deal with one big irritant of 4E magic items (which I can deal with), than a list of minor irritants that are like ants at the picnic.

I think the concept of "disassociation" is a fundamental misunderstanding of how 4E works, which like pemerton, I wrote what I had to say in the massive topic of that name. There is a sense in which anyone thinking that "disassociation" is a good concept has a mental block that will prohibit them from understanding why I would like 4E. I direct interested parties wishing to bridge that barrier to that topic, as I have already said my piece on it.

 

[JRRNeiklot]

Wiseblood - IMO, the lethality in AD&D generally came from save or die effects which everyone and his bloody dog got. Outright combat damage? Not so much. 3e monsters are just so much bigger and output so much more damage than AD&D monsters.

It's a matter of scale. 3e monsters do more damage, but 3e players have way more hit points. For instance, in my current game (it's Becmi, not AD&D, but statwise they are almost the same- hit dice are smaller, but bonuses are also easier to get), the 4th level cleric has 7 hit points, the 4th level fighter has the most at 17, and the elf has 6. One shot from an ogre's club can easily kill the cleric or elf. The elf can fall in a 10 foot deep pit and die. AD&D is slightly less lethal than Basic, due to not dying at 0 hp, but still way more lethal than 3e. 3e has crits, so it's occasionally very lethal especially at low levels, but not generally.

 

[pemerton]

When I read that in the specific context of 4E, what I see is: "Since significant chunks of 4E aren't roleplaying mechanics, if you want to have roleplaying you'll need to pull it into the game through sheer force of will."

<snip>

Playing 4E feels like an unnecessary wrestling match. I'm having to do a lot of heavy lifting to carry use over the gaps left by those large chunks of non-roleplaying mechanics.

I'm not sure what you have in mind here as your contrast. Are you contrasting 4e with other traditional fantasy RPGs (3E, classic D&D, RQ, RM etc)? Or with modern game designs?

If I think about AD&D, for example, I would say that significant chunks of the game - perhaps all of it, as far as PCs are concerned - are not roleplaying mechanics. It's principal action resolution mechanics - namely, it's combat mechanics - dont make fictional positioning very important except for facing, which can be treated purely mechanically via minis/token.

Resolving a host of spells in AD&D does rely on fictional positioning (I'm thinking of things like Rock to Mud, Stone Shape etc) but personally I don't really find the quibbling over the imaginary details of rock formations that these spells can tend to engender the height of roleplaying.

And as I posted upthread, even a modern game like The Dying Earth has goal-oriented roleplaying mechanics only indirectly, via its reward mechanicsm. And 4e has a not entirely dissimilar reward mechanism in terms of quest XP for player-determined quests.

I think this is the core of what I, honestly, read as the gaping fallacy in your interpretation of 4th Edition.

You seem to be saying, "Skill challenges require you to use fictional positioning because they'd be pretty for roleplaying/storytelling if you didn't do it."

But what mechanic wouldn't that be true for?

When you play 4E you seem to put a lot more into the game than what the game provides. And that's great. I'm not trying to diss that or dismiss that. I did the exact same thing when I ran 4E.

I just don't credit 4E for accomplishing those things.

Again, I'm not sure what systems you have in mind as the contrast with 4e.

If you're thinking of traditional task-based non-combat resolution systems (RM, RQ etc) then I know from my own experience that they don't produce the same results, in play, as a 4e skill challenge, because they don't create the "space" in which the challenge unfolds. (Maybe you could try and run one of those systems using Burning Wheel-style "intent and task" plus "let it ride" to try and get a different sort of play. I think that would probably require some tweaking both of target numbers and character advancement mechanics, but I'll admit I haven't thought it through in much detail and maybe am overestimating the issues. But still, why not just run BW?)

If you're saying that I could get the results I'm getting from 4e more easily playing a modern game, I'm not sure that's true. 4e makes mechanical encounter design very easy. I'm using the same approach to the thematics of encounter design as I would use running a game like HeroQuest or Maelstrom Storytelling or Burning Wheel. And I'm using the same techniques in skill challenge resolution as I would use in HQ or Maelstrom storytelling. (Including in the way that fictional positioning comes into play.)

Combat resolution would be quicker in a mechanically lighter game, true, but for my group 4e's combat resolution mechanics are a feature, not a bug. Which brings me to this:

Honest question here: Why wouldn't you prefer to use a system that actually supported your narrative goals? Or simply a system that was a hell of a lot less bulky than D&D4?

I will answer for myself here, even though the question was directed to Crazy Jerome.

I GM 4e because I and my players enjoy it. I see it a traditional/modern crossover game. It has the traditional emphasis on mechanics-heavy combat resolution and PC building, but with the metagame-oriented mechanics and situation-focused play of a modern game. My group likes complex PC build rules - the last game I GMed was Rolemaster - and likes mechanically heavy combat resolution. A game like HeroQuest or Maelstrom has the metagame mechanics and the situation-focused play, but not the complex mechanics.

Similar to Crazy Jerome, Burning Wheel would probably also be a good fit for my group, but it is gritty fantasy rather than gonzo fantasy, and at the moment at least my group is enoying playing gonzo.

In the end, I'm just not sure what game you're saying would produce the same result as I'm getting from 4e with less effort. If you've got a different modern game in mind, I've tried to explain why my group likes 4e's heavy mechanics (and upthread I've explained why I don't see these heavy mechanics getting in the way of story - many of them are thematically laden, and they are ripe for metagaming). If you've got in mind traditional games, I know from experience that they don't produce the same results, because the mechanics (i) compress or crowd out the narrative space, and (ii) get in the way of robust scene framing.

 

[Hussar]

It's a matter of scale. 3e monsters do more damage, but 3e players have way more hit points. For instance, in my current game (it's Becmi, not AD&D, but statwise they are almost the same- hit dice are smaller, but bonuses are also easier to get), the 4th level cleric has 7 hit points, the 4th level fighter has the most at 17, and the elf has 6. One shot from an ogre's club can easily kill the cleric or elf. The elf can fall in a 10 foot deep pit and die. AD&D is slightly less lethal than Basic, due to not dying at 0 hp, but still way more lethal than 3e. 3e has crits, so it's occasionally very lethal especially at low levels, but not generally.

This is why I find these discussions so difficult. I mean, 4th level cleric with 7 HP. Ok. Now, how in the world is that anywhere near average? A cleric, even in B/E get's d6 or d8 hp? I forget which. But, either way, 4d6 averages to 14 hp and 4d8 averages to 20. So, your lethality has a lot more to do with the fact that your characters are runnign around with HALF their average hp. Heck, even your fighter is significantly below average.

So, how does that show anything? Yup, if your characters are running extremely bad luck, they die more often. Well, that's 100% true I suppose.

OTOH, if we actually wanted to talk averages, 3ed characters up to 10th level have pretty much the same average hp (maybe slightly higher since they start at max hp at 1st level) as their AD&D counterparts. After 10th? Sure, no problem. 3e characters get a lot more hp.

OTOH, the monsters average FOUR TIMES more damage. Do 3e characters have 4 times more hit points on average? And, let's not forget to actually compare apples to apples and the presumed 25 point buy character. Now, you've got maybe a 12, 14 Con, for +2 per HD. My 3e character on average has maybe 20-30 more HP by 10th level. Given that CR 10 creatures in 3e can deal out over 100 points of damage in a single round (something that NOTHING besides unique monsters can do in AD&D) I'm thinking that 3e characters are really not more durable.

I'll stand by the idea that it's the SoD stuff that makes AD&D more lethal. Combat damage? Small potatoes.

----------

Just a point about discussing game presumptions. I'm not, in any way, denying that Az (sp) or DannyA had the experiences they had. I totally believe both of them. I do think that what they claimed happened in their games really happened.

What I'm trying to drill down to is how

Whenever this topic comes up, it can generally get pinned down to a combination of one or more of the following three elements:

1. Houserules. And, in here I'd include rule misinterpretations too.

2. Design choices by the DM. If the DM, in 3e, is using mostly classes humanoids, for example, then all the encounters are going to be on the weaker end of the CR scale. While the mechanics say a 5th level monk is a CR 5 encounter, I'm going to say it's not as dangerous as a Troll. There are loads of other ways the choices of the DM can facilitate specific playstyles.

3. Strength of the PC's. Point buy value is a good measure of this and I know I've harped on it a few times. When you have PC's that are running in the mid 30's (or higher) for their point buy value, they act at least a level higher than what it says on their character sheet. An entire group of this can really make a large difference, particularly up to about 10th or 12 level. Also, let's not forget group size which includes the PC's, NPC's, pets, helpers, and various other hangers on. This can also radically change how the group operates.

And, generally, these three elements do pin down most of the reasons why a specific group might have experiences which are different from the game assumptions. Look at discussions of 1e for extreme examples of all three.

 

[Wiseblood]

This is why I find these discussions so difficult. I mean, 4th level cleric with 7 HP. Ok. Now, how in the world is that anywhere near average? A cleric, even in B/E get's d6 or d8 hp? I forget which. But, either way, 4d6 averages to 14 hp and 4d8 averages to 20. So, your lethality has a lot more to do with the fact that your characters are runnign around with HALF their average hp. Heck, even your fighter is significantly below average.

So, how does that show anything? Yup, if your characters are running extremely bad luck, they die more often. Well, that's 100% true I suppose.

OTOH, if we actually wanted to talk averages, 3ed characters up to 10th level have pretty much the same average hp (maybe slightly higher since they start at max hp at 1st level) as their AD&D counterparts. After 10th? Sure, no problem. 3e characters get a lot more hp.

OTOH, the monsters average FOUR TIMES more damage. Do 3e characters have 4 times more hit points on average? And, let's not forget to actually compare apples to apples and the presumed 25 point buy character. Now, you've got maybe a 12, 14 Con, for +2 per HD. My 3e character on average has maybe 20-30 more HP by 10th level. Given that CR 10 creatures in 3e can deal out over 100 points of damage in a single round (something that NOTHING besides unique monsters can do in AD&D) I'm thinking that 3e characters are really not more durable.

I'll stand by the idea that it's the SoD stuff that makes AD&D more lethal. Combat damage? Small potatoes.

I thought the math you presented was over simplified.

First and foremost monsters in AD&D are encountered much earlier than they are in 3E. Second PC HP are not nearly as good nor do they have as good of a spell load (less healing). Last, attack bonuses are lower in AD&D and they have fewer attacks . A thief at 20th level has the equivalent of a BAB of +9 with a maximum ability score bonus of +1.

To compare a trio of Iconic Monsters.

AD&D Goblin Damage 3.5 (HP 4)

3E Goblin damage 3.5 (HP 5.5)

AD&D Chimera damage 21.5 (HP 40.5)

3E Chimera damage 39 (HP 67.5)

AD&D Storm Giant damage 24.5 (7th level ish One or more pc's will probably die) (HP 72)

3e Storm Giant damage 105 ( CR 13 would eat a 7th level party in one round maybe 2) (HP 199)

I should also point out the sheer amount of killing you had to do in AD&D. You were exposed to more threats.

AD&D Goblins slain to get to LVL 2 as Fighter (considering average HP)+1xp for gold.
105 (95 if you have 16 str)

3e Goblins Slain to get to LVL 2 as Fighter.
20