Jonathan Tweet advices: let the players peek behind the screen

[TerraDave]

When running 4E for the first time, let the players see your numbers

More here.

 

[The Little Raven]

I agree. My friend is running KotS for us, and sharing all the math just makes us pick everything up faster.

 

[Scribble]

I wonder what his "secret assignment" is?

 

[Agamon]

Good advice. I'm running the demo for D&D day, I'll certainly be doing this. I'll do it for my group when we run a practice encounter. But once the actual campaign starts, the warm, fuzzy openness ends...

 

[mhensley]

I wonder what his "secret assignment" is?

Well he's already destroyed D&D, so that's out.

 

[sinecure]

This is really bad advice. It's as if the world is no longer understandable enough to interact with, players need to know the rules of it to play the game. That's just flat out wrongheaded.

Why would I show the players how a trap works before they... play with the trap to figure out how it works? Test it to bypass it? Or ignore the thing by blowing it up?

Wanna know a secret? Here's the answer, that should help you figure it out.

 

[Lanefan]

This is really bad advice. It's as if the world is no longer understandable enough to interact with, players need to know the rules of it to play the game. That's just flat out wrongheaded.

Why would I show the players how a trap works before they... play with the trap to figure out how it works? Test it to bypass it? Or ignore the thing by blowing it up?

Wanna know a secret? Here's the answer, that should help you figure it out.

Hear, hear.

Sense of mystery as a game feature and design concept seems to be intentionally going out the window one aspect at a time. But why?

Lanefan

 

[James Heard]

I did it for months when 3E came out, because I wanted everyone to get up to speed (and correct my own errors) as quickly as possible.

 

[hong]

This is really bad advice. It's as if the world is no longer understandable enough to interact with, players need to know the rules of it to play the game. That's just flat out wrongheaded.

Why would I show the players how a trap works before they... play with the trap to figure out how it works? Test it to bypass it? Or ignore the thing by blowing it up?

Wanna know a secret? Here's the answer, that should help you figure it out.

The most shallow, insipid, uninteresting type of secret possible is a game-mechanical secret.

 

[SweeneyTodd]

This is really bad advice. It's as if the world is no longer understandable enough to interact with, players need to know the rules of it to play the game. That's just flat out wrongheaded.

That's an interesting opinion and you're welcome to it, but I don't think you'll find it very helpful if you want to run or play 4e. Hey, you might, but it goes against the design of the game.

As I've said in probably too many places, one of the key things about 4e is that it is a game, and it is meant to be understood and played as a game. It does not try to model the physics of a fictional reality, so yes, it's pretty bad at doing so. This is not a bad thing, but it is a thing that some people don't like.

There are a lot of roleplaying games out here where getting the picture right in your head, so to speak, involves some discussion among the players at the table as to what the mechanical results "look like" in the fictional game world. D&D is now one of those, it wasn't before, and I can totally respect that it's a jarring change. It does require some slight changes in some groups' roleplaying styles to make it "fit the fiction", I suppose. This isn't that hard to do, but if you find the very concept of having to do so offensive, 4e is probably never going to make you happy -- because it really isn't trying to do what you want it to in that case.

Sense of mystery as a game feature and design concept seems to be intentionally going out the window one aspect at a time. But why?

My personal opinion as to why is because if you want a game that is intentionally obfuscated in order to have a sense of mystery, there are plenty out there. There are a lot of ways you can instill a sense of mystery in a roleplaying game, and in my own experience, anyway, keeping the players from understanding the rules of the game they are playing is the least effective one and the one that has the most unintended and sometimes unpleasant side effects.

Besides, the article is suggesting that the very first time you play 4e with people, it's a helpful learning tool to let them know the AC of the things they're trying to hit. Stuff like that, very basic "Here is how the game works" things. It's interesting, because that kind of advice is honestly less "out there" than a lot of the stuff in the DMG.