skeptic said:
First, IME, incoherence in D&D is the main reason for much of the problems at the table and the endless debates on these boards.
As you know, I agree at least to an extent.
skeptic said:
PHP p.8 : When you play your D&D character, you put yourself into your character’s shoes and make decisions as if you were that character.
A character (and his shoes) is 4E is defined by his ability scores, his class, his race, his feats, etc. but also with an alignment, an appearance, some mannerisms, some personality traits and some background features, and in some case a patron deity (PHP p.24).
However, on p.18 (PHB) we find this: D&D is a roleplaying game but not necessarily an exercise in improvisational theater. Sometimes, the role you play is defender or leader—the character you’re playing is engaged in combat and has a job to do so that your team comes out victorious.
Following these two advices may put a player in a “lose-lose” situation, either he put his character’s shoes and do action A or follow his Combat-Role and do action B.
A simple solution is to always follow Combat-Role first, and then finds an appropriate way to rationalize that decision vs. the character’s shoes, including changing them to reflect an evolution of the character.
One good thing: in the levelling section, players are not asked to follow some kind of organic progression of their character when choosing new powers/feats.
If there is an incoherence here I agree with your resolution of it. It can perhaps be saved from incoherence by noting that the "as if" is ambiguous as between simulationist "as if" (player is slave of pre-defined PC) or author-stance "as if" (player is allowed to narrate character in a way that is interesting and serves narrative or gamist purposes, but is conscious that this narration is constituting the character as a distinct persona). In that case, the "in the shoes" language could be read as an implicit way of warding off pawn stance.
skeptic said:
Metagame section on p. 15 (DMG) : Discourage this by giving players a gentle verbal reminder: “But what do your characters think?” That’s the same as “character’s shoes” and it is fixed in the same way.
This can be read as a reminder to avoid pawn stance, but again your suggestion of incoherence is plausible. It's a bit problematic, also, given that big parts of 4e (hit points, healing surges, martial daily powers, minions, etc) require a degree of metagame thinking to get the narration right. Does the DMG or PHB say anything useful about this issue?
skeptic said:
On PHP p.6 we find : The adventure is the heart of the D&D game. It’s like a fantasy movie or novel, except the characters that you and your friends create are the stars of the
story.
<snip>
Can a story arise from a 4E adventure/campaign? Yes. Does a story will arise each time? No. Why? Because a G agenda while fun and player-engaging, is known to often lead to a meaningless ending (TPK in the middle of an adventure) or to a dead-end after one or more failure (3E was terrible on this, because it was hard to create new challenges on the fly).
D&D players who absolutely wanted to have a story as the result of their efforts usually switch to an S agenda, giving the DM a “storyteller” role. Usually, this is done in an awkward way, for example by fudging dice rolls.
DMG p4 : Although the DM represents all the PCs’ opponents and adversaries—monsters, nonplayer characters (NPCs), traps, and the like—he or she doesn’t want the player characters to fail any more than the other players do.
and…
DMG p4 : The DM’s goal is to make success taste its sweetest by presenting challenges that are just hard enough that the other players have to work to overcome them, but not so hard that they leave all the characters dead.
This can be interpreted by DMs as “make sure the players don’t fail, but make them believe it can happen”.
I think this is a bigger problem than the PC/player issue, because gamism can handle illusionism or even railroading about world and plot, but not illusionism about challenge. The solution is to hope that the encounter builiding tools are robust enough that it is possible, almost all of the time, to design encounters that fit the specification.
If the encounters are working in this fashion, then it won't be fatal to the gamist experience that the GM railroads a story out of it. If the encounter design tools are not as robust as advertised, then the problem becomes more serious.
skeptic said:
The reward system works when the players succeed, but it is not as easy when the players fail.
The problem is to be sure that success lead to faster advancement than failure .
For example, if a failed skill challenge to walk trough as maze is failed and the players then face encounters that give them more XP than a first success would have given, something is wrong.
The key of handling failure is given in DMG but is not underlined: A failure must be followed by a higher risk of “TPK”, i.e. a hard encounter.
As harder encounters give more XP, we need Quests XP to balance it out; failures meaning that fewer quests will be successful.
<snip>
Many D&D groups have put XP as reward away, leading to an S agenda where levels are only a way to place boundaries on Exploration.
I think this is also tricky. One thing that you don't seem to have taken account of, however, is the treasure component of reward. Maybe failure leads to less treasure, making the PCs slighly underpowerd for their level? I also like your idea of Quest XP as the equaliser - is that your own work, or does the DMG expressly address the issue?
A broader consideration is this: players who enjoy gamist D&D often don't want the encounters to become easier - the way that they enjoy their advancement is by getting to do more (tactically and game-mechanically) complex stuff. But characters who don't advance as quickly still get to do stuff that is challenging for their level. So where's the penalty for losing? Again, an answer might be to reduce treasure on level-up. Hence, presumably, the GP cost for the Raise Dead and other healing rituals, for rituals that allow skill challenges to be won or bypassed without having to engage in as clever play, etc.
Anyway, an intersting post. And I agree that illusionist/railroading simulationism is the monster under D&D's bed. It's a shame that 4e hasn't unambiguously exorcised it.
Terramotus said:
D&D is the gateway drug of RPGs. Some people will escalate in their usage, some won't. These blurbs give the people who might pick up the core rulebooks or some sort of starter set at Toys 'R Us some idea of what they're trying to accomplish. The incoherence allows them to branch out and figure out what they like about roleplaying while still staying with the D&D system. WotC likes this, as did TSR, even if they didn't articulate it in such a way.
I agree with this to an extent. But I also think that WoTC have an interest in those who play D&D for the first time having a fun experience. And (at least in my opion) railroading GMing (and related sins like beating players around the head with the "Your character wouldn't do that" stick) is one of the reasonably common causes of an unhappy D&D experience.
I think how-to-play text that was more upfront about giving players the right to decide
during play who their PC is, and which was also more upfront about the players' responsibility to produce a story by keeping their PCs alive via good tactical play, wouldn't necessarily hurt. And such text might reduce the abashedness that Skeptic is diagnosing.
