Is there a Relationship between Game Lethality and Role Play?

[Ariosto]

I can't speak for billd91, but some things come to mind. They are related in complex ways, though, and this is very much a matter of perception and temperament as to whether a design is a help or hindrance.

(A) The equation of lots of number crunching and dice rolls with "support" does not hold for everyone. It can even be seen as distancing players from engagement with a situation via role-playing. This is a common response to 4E, and not always a negative one; many people prefer to see "challenges" directed at their numerically quantified characters rather than at them as players.

(B) The premise that all other aspects of play are but ways to set up combat scenarios does indeed get pushed a bit in 4E, as it was in 3E. However, the pre-2E game was much more clearly nuanced. If combat played too little a role, then much of D&D might be wasted; experience levels, magic and monsters were primarily (but far from exclusively) directed at combat. However, the primary game-oriented objective was gaining experience levels, and the overwhelmingly essential means to that end was securing treasure.

Wandering monsters, lacking treasure, were profitably avoided. Monsters with but little treasure posed a question of risk and return on investment in dealing with them at all, and to get the treasure without a fight was not only preferable but sometimes very feasible.

Monsters standing unavoidably between adventurers and an especially rich hoard (gems, jewelry, magic) posed the significant combat challenges.

Traps were generally to be avoided at least as much as wandering monsters. Sometimes, though, they guarded worthy treasures. Sometimes, bypassing them opened a way to bypass a fight.

Exploration was essential to forming sound strategies. The rich treasures had to be located before one could make an efficient plan to acquire them. Without knowing the disposition of monsters and traps, one could hardly plan and prepare for an assault and extraction. Optimal spell selection depended greatly on intelligence regarding the situations to be dealt with.

Moreover, there were puzzles to solve, both in the "games and puzzles" sense and in the broader sense of mysteries. Either sort might veil advantages, and solutions might entail widely dispersed clues.

(C) The real-time factor is a key practical consideration. The amount of play time demanded by a combat in 4E leaves so much less time per session for anything else -- including multiple fights. That makes wandering monsters and other distracting skirmishes a much greater penalty than formerly.

 

[ExploderWizard]

I can't speak for anyone else, but IMHO speed of play is a real issue, in all WotC editions of D&D. If an average combat takes X time in the real world, and an average session lasts Y time, then X/Y determines the number of potential combats in the game.

Should the potential number of combats be very high, because combats play quickly, then there is more time in each session to devote to traps, tricks, exploration, role-playing, etc. Nobody feels gypped that this material takes away from bopping some orcs on the noggin. IOW, the weight of a satisfying session is balanced among many encounters, so each can be its own thing without dragging the whole down. Like wearing snowshoes.

However, if X/Y yields a very low number, then the weight of a satisfying session is balanced on relatively few encounters, and each encounter must be that much more capable of supporting a satisfying game session by (or nearly by) itself. Like wearing stilts in deep snow. In a game like D&D, this often means combat encounters, at the expense of all other type of encounters.

A low X/Y also means that these combat encounters will often fall within the same "threshold". If it takes half a minute to defeat a giant rat at 10th level, the 10th level character may well encounter a giant rat without thinking it a major waste of time. If it takes 20 minutes, though, things are different. This is why "combat grind" in 4e becomes a source of complaint.....Or why many high level combats in 3e become dissatisfying.

(IMHO, this is the direct result of pushing a grid-based combat system; itself a direct result of WotC's marketing research, which pointed out that a gamer who buys minis tends to spend over 40 times the amount of a gamer that does not.)


RC

I must spread some XP around before giving any to RC again.

The story of my life here lately.

 

[ExploderWizard]

whole post

You must spread some XP.....blah...........blah. This is getting old.

 

[Ariosto]

There appears to me a curious feature in 4E, that XP awards depend overwhelmingly on purely statistical odds of failure. In other words, "working smarter, not harder" is counter-productive!

This comes to the fore when people get into difficulties considering whether XP ought to be awarded for "avoiding an encounter." In the old days, avoiding monsters or other difficulties in order to get treasure posed no more of a philosophical problem than avoiding the other team's defensive line to score a goal in a ball game.

 

[Ariosto]

Actually, my statement regarding "the old days" is not quite accurate. The original set suggested pro-rating experience awards for characters of higher experience level than a dungeon level. The AD&D DMG got a bit more detailed in considering the monster-slaying aspect, which obscured for some readers the subjective nature of the broader topic.

The really fundamental consideration presented was overall degree of challenge posed to players, not merely to game-mechanical resources such as those afforded by character levels. Magical resources facilitating other approaches tended to increase along with fighting power. In general, it might be expected that even if a more cunning scheme were likely to be very much less risky or costly, it would require enough more ingenuity to effect as to make for an appropriate challenge. Creative thinking might be valued more highly than brute force, compared with an assessment in terms of odds of success.

The point of pro-rating was to discourage "XP farming" via trivial pursuits. Personally, I have not found it necessary (which avoids some potentially awkward book-keeping). Simply placing treasures appropriate to the general and relative difficulty of acquiring them seems to work well enough, given the rough doubling of requirements most steps up to "name" level (and the huge numbers needed thereafter). I think the attitude of players counts for much, though. Those preoccupied with scoring XP above all else may have a higher tolerance for dull undertakings than I have seen.

 

[Mallus]

There appears to me a curious feature in 4E, that XP awards depend overwhelmingly on purely statistical odds of failure. In other words, "working smarter, not harder" is counter-productive!

My experience is that XP awards are most often determined by the DM, following their own XP muse, rather than the guidelines laid out in rules, whatever they might be. Most DM's I know stopped explicitly following XP guidelines somewhere back during the 1e era to discourage players from random peasant murder and the decimation of the local badger --insert another 1/2 to 1 HD monster here-- population whenever a PC was on the cusp of leveling.

For instance, our 4e DM rewards creativity and thought (with emphasis on the former, I must admit). I suspect we're not alone (though we are probably alone in our attempt to settle a deadly feud with musical theater).

 

[Raven Crowking]

I suspect we're not alone (though we are probably alone in our attempt to settle a deadly feud with musical theater).

I could settle a deadly feud with musical theatre. At up to 500 paces, my singing can cause people's ears to bleed. Admittedly, this is because they jam sharpened pencils in them to stop the horrible sound, but the point stands.

 

[Umbran]

There appears to me a curious feature in 4E, that XP awards depend overwhelmingly on purely statistical odds of failure. In other words, "working smarter, not harder" is counter-productive!

Ah, but you see, there is where DMs come into play. Only they get to say what is "smart" rather than "hard".

The XP awards suggested in the books are, I expect, based on the statistical odds of failure, assuming a party that works reasonably well together, but does nothing particularly interesting other than use their basic tactics moderately well.

If you know your tactics really well, you can beat the odds. If you are creative such that the DM gives you situational bonuses, you beat the odds. If you beat the odds, you get more XP for less work.

The 4e DMG says you get XP for "completing" or "overcoming" an encounter. The DM gets to decide what counts as overcoming an encounter - generally it means you have to take some risk. If you completely avoid all risk, then no XP.

 

[jensun]

The 4e DMG says you get XP for "completing" or "overcoming" an encounter. The DM gets to decide what counts as overcoming an encounter - generally it means you have to take some risk. If you completely avoid all risk, then no XP.

It is also pretty explicit that you should be giving out xp for completing quests. It wouldn't be too difficult to expand that to make all xp awards quest based which leaves the method of both completion and advancement entirely in the hands of the PC's.

 

[Ariosto]

Making all XP awards "quest" awards could indeed perform the same function as the old XP for treasure. By the standard scheme, XP for a quest are only 10% of what's needed, or 25% of the award for an encounter of the same level.

Otherwise, there is a very basic flaw with -- or, depending one's preference, feature of -- the whole "encounter" concept in 4E. It's compounded by the notion that whatever is not a combat is a "skill challenge", and further by the nature of the skill challenge formalism itself.

An advantage for some is that, because it is incumbent on the DM (or scenario writer) to set boundaries of "encounters" and define what "overcoming" them means, the players are by default heavily directed.

Thus, if one wants to impose a lesser frequency of combat, then simply defining fewer "combat encounters" can go far to do the trick.

What I have seen in play is that players are quickly trained to look to the DM for cues as to the conditions particular to the latest discrete sub-game, taking a reactive role.

One could of course break that mold, but it seems to be a key binding structure in the design and presentation of the game.