D&D 5E Legend Lore says 'story not rules' (3/4)

[Nemesis Destiny]

and just to be clear, i am not looking for high sim. I am looking for some basic believbility that isnt grounded in fiction or movie conventions. But I definitely want to kep it simple. Essentially I dont want things that, for me, present stark believability issues (like HS or mundane encounter powers). I am not saying those cant be believable but for me they present issues.

There is also no reason that you couldn't run a game with all those things stripped out, if that's what you're after. I don't think adding them in will be all that easy though if the system wasn't designed from the ground up to accept them (and so far I see no evidence that it is).

i dont see the core as very sim. First they had the hd mechanic.

Yep, and now it's gone from the playtest. Too 4e, I guess.

Then they talk aboutone hour heals.

This is a very retro-style rule whose dial was just turned up to 11 for simplicity and speed of play. Like pressing fast-forward on a rule that was very much grounded in AD&D-style sim.

For 'basic' this might work. I'm not interested in it though.

There were definitely other things in there that felt highly non sim to me. It is also not hevily 4E. But it does feel like a compromise from my point of view. I would think if the base is simpe enough you can stack just about anything on to it. But there is give and take when you try to build a core intended to accomodate many styles.

Fair enough, I guess, but if they compromise too far, I won't have a reason to buy in. If the playtest is what we're getting then it's long past that point already.

Wouldnt be just as probleatic to build the core around 4E assumptions?

I don't know. I don't think so, but we'll never get to find out now.

Just mentally spitballing, it would be pretty easy to design a game based on 4e with bounded accuracy, no healing surges, no Action Points, slow healing, and no martial powers. You could easily even run a game of 4e with those changes. It's not a game I'd be interested in (little player agency outside of playing a magic-user, class imbalance based on power-source), but it's do-able. It would still retain all the good things about the edition though, which they've tossed out the window when building Next.

 

[Ratskinner]

Not usually, but in a game, my expectations are different. In fiction I am following a story written by a writer. But in am rpg, i feel like somebody else explporing a new world. I dont want it to flow ike fiction, in want it to flow more like real life.

Another way of looking at ths is knowing what genre you are going for. Leaving raw realism aside, would you agree its disruptive when gandalf shows up in an episode of 24? I have an image of the world as pretty real in many of my games so if a bunch of james bond stuff starts hapoening in my gritty counter terrorism game, then its a problem. A lot of people dont seem to understand we dont all approach D&D as fiction, or as a particular style of fantasy.

enhh? Surely D&D (yours, mine, anyone's) is a particular style of fantasy? I think you might have misspoken in the last line there.

I can understand your feelings in the first paragraph, but help me square them with some questions WRT your second paragraph. I don't mean this as a challenge, but as serious questions...more on that later.

So, you're exploring a world, right? This world, we pick up our exploration with some counter-terrorism experts and we're working a case. Now, in the process of making our way through the case, we come across some fairly weird "high-tech" that verges on James Bond. Our second case, we find some more. Eventually there's a whole bunch of whacky tech, and we're tracking terrorists that have a Tony-Stark style genius working for them. How would that strike you? Would you need to be notified ahead of time that the DM wanted the campaign to turn that way? Would that not diminish your exploratory experience?

Now we do the same thing....but this time we discover Aliens. ...or Cthulu cultists. ...or an underground of Wizards, Demons, Vampires, etc. I think with these its a bit easier, because I would suspect that we agreed ahead of time that its a "mundane" world we're exploring. So saying, "I want to explore a gritty WWII world" makes sense.

However, when it comes to fantasy...I'm a lot less certain about it. I have difficulty imagining a "generic" fantasy world, other than that as defined by D&D as generic. IME, its very difficult to create a "sandbox" world like that without running into puns, anachronisms, and jokes a la Gygaxian adventures. Gritty is hard to do with magic unconstrained by story. Have you found this to be an issue?

 

[Bedrockgames]

enhh? Surely D&D (yours, mine, anyone's) is a particular style of fantasy? I think you might have misspoken in the last line there.

e?

Mall I meant is it encompasses several styles and genres. If you tailor it to one in particular or force one set of sub genre conventions (or front load it with narrative mechanics) I think it will drive a lot of players away.

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

No it isnt. I am not advocating bad rule design that the GM can undo on the spot. I am advocating good rule design that makes use of an rpg's big asset: the human referee. I dnt think design shoud be careless. But I do not want a game like 4E, which to me feels like it was written as a direct reaction to 3E. Their solutions to perceived problems, were themselves problems for me.

Those 'problems' were real, whether you experienced them or not, which is why I said that your statement was nudging close.

I agree that it probably was written as a reaction to 3.x, and I was glad for it, because I did experience many of the issues that 4e solved that previously required a whole lot of Rule-0.

I think with a greater degree of modularity, 4e could have satisfied more gamers, but sadly, they didn't support that model.

no. I want myth and magic. But i want mundane things to behave believably. And i dont want to feel like am a character in a story,but a person in a living world (so i dont want things like scenes, story structure, etc). You feel differently, and that is fine. Inm not trying to conver you.

Your first item is easily solvable with greater modularity at the system level. Next keeps talking about providing this, though I haven't seen anything that satisfies what I want from it.

Your second point is more of a playstyle and aesthetic that is solvable at the table level, or behind the screen. You can run any edition in the manner you describe.

 

[Bedrockgames]

.

So, you're exploring a world, right? This world, we pick up our exploration with some counter-terrorism experts and we're working a case. Now, in the process of making our way through the case, we come across some fairly weird "high-tech" that verges on James Bond. Our second case, we find some more. Eventually there's a whole bunch of whacky tech, and we're tracking terrorists that have a Tony-Stark style genius working for them. How would that strike you? Would you need to be notified ahead of time that the DM wanted the campaign to turn that way? Would that not diminish your exploratory experience?

?

i wouldn't mind a James Bond campaign but if we were playing our standard gritty counter terrorism game and it suddenly became what you describe I would find it jarring. It is all about knowing what the expectations are.

 

[Balesir]

I've had experiences both good and bad, and most of the bad revolved around (arguably bad) GMs producing experiences based on what is "plausible" and it certainly wasn't immersive, because most people are bad at eyeballing physics and psychology (though the latter is harder to prove faulty). I often see you post about how process-sim and setting fidelity are the sole route to immersive experiences, but my experience bears out that it is often not the case, so clearly this is something in the eye of the beholder, rather than a property inherent to the rules.

I don't perceive this as what [MENTION=85555]Bedrockgames[/MENTION] has been saying, but I do think this is an interesting topic.

Personally, I find that 'realistic' games (which I think split two or more ways - more below) are actually less easy to immerse in because they only really work well when played collaboratively as regards the rules. Basically, you either need a GM who is better informed about every aspect of the topics that will be interacted with in play than you are, or you need to collaborate to make sure that the rulings selected represent "reality" to the best of everyone present's knowledge. This second one is essentially what we do when playing Hârn - it can be great fun as well as fascinating and educational

To play "immersed" I find it actually easier to have clear rules that define the game world, so that I don't have to worry my little head about how "unreal" it all is.

Getting back to "realism", though, I think this comes in (at least) two "flavours". Type I realism (as I'll call it) asks for each rule in the game to reflect something identifiable and plausible. Freeform or "light" types of rules suit this demand best, generally, since opinions on what is "unrealistic" are so heterogeneous; having fewer rules just means there is less to object to!

Type II realism, on the other hand, isn't bothered about what each rules element is meant to represent; as long as the outcome feels unforced and satisfying, it's less important what abstractions and approximations were used to get there. I think HârnMaster does this extremely well. The rules are certainly noy "light" and in many places they are somewhat abstracted, but they get results/outcomes that feel "natural". They tend to be a lot less decisive and produce much more "messy" outcomes than most RPGs - and for a certain type of "explorative" game, I like that a lot. And yet you roll randomly for hit location in combat, and craft skills all use the same basic scale of competence... It's subtle, but it's actually a different aesthetic in play in the two "Types" of "realism".

 

[Raith5]

Just mentally spitballing, it would be pretty easy to design a game based on 4e with bounded accuracy, no healing surges, no Action Points, slow healing, and no martial powers. You could easily even run a game of 4e with those changes. It's not a game I'd be interested in (little player agency outside of playing a magic-user, class imbalance based on power-source), but it's do-able. It would still retain all the good things about the edition though, which they've tossed out the window when building Next.

When DDN was first mentioned I thought that this was the way they were going to go because the underlying game mechanics of 4th ed were so sound and smooth to use in practice. I guess that one of the key reasons that WOTC did not go down this path is that DDN needed to not only be different to DDN, but also be seen to be different as possible.

However I can fully see that many of the elements of 4th ed were based on assumptions that narrowed the game and were not easily able to be ignored. FWIW while I do personally prefer high fantasy gaming, I do think that 4th ed had 1st level PC that were too heroic and the tone of the game was too focused on high fantasy styles which were baked in to the game (other styles really needed explicit space).

So while I enjoy 4thed's focus on high fantasy I see its partial coverage of fantasy styles as a real problem and welcome the broader ambit of DDN, except the underlying game mechanics of DDN seem to just reverse the problem in favour of baking in other fantasy styles. I just cant believe that they think that DDN as it is currently structured is going to be any more inclusive.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I don't perceive this as what @Bedrockgames has been saying, but I do think this is an interesting topic.

Personally, I find that 'realistic' games (which I think split two or more ways - more below) are actually less easy to immerse in because they only really work well when played collaboratively as regards the rules. Basically, you either need a GM who is better informed about every aspect of the topics that will be interacted with in play than you are, or you need to collaborate to make sure that the rulings selected represent "reality" to the best of everyone present's knowledge. This second one is essentially what we do when playing Hârn - it can be great fun as well as fascinating and educational

To play "immersed" I find it actually easier to have clear rules that define the game world, so that I don't have to worry my little head about how "unreal" it all is.

Getting back to "realism", though, I think this comes in (at least) two "flavours". Type I realism (as I'll call it) asks for each rule in the game to reflect something identifiable and plausible. Freeform or "light" types of rules suit this demand best, generally, since opinions on what is "unrealistic" are so heterogeneous; having fewer rules just means there is less to object to!

Type II realism, on the other hand, isn't bothered about what each rules element is meant to represent; as long as the outcome feels unforced and satisfying, it's less important what abstractions and approximations were used to get there. I think HârnMaster does this extremely well. The rules are certainly noy "light" and in many places they are somewhat abstracted, but they get results/outcomes that feel "natural". They tend to be a lot less decisive and produce much more "messy" outcomes than most RPGs - and for a certain type of "explorative" game, I like that a lot. And yet you roll randomly for hit location in combat, and craft skills all use the same basic scale of competence... It's subtle, but it's actually a different aesthetic in play in the two "Types" of "realism".

I think this gets at the question of realism pretty well. I think I would add an option for more detailed approaches like Millenium's End, which if I am not mistaken had some kind of vital organs functions chart (i could be mistake but do seem to recall that). But the key division you have seems right. And I think it is important to observe because people really do mean different things when they call for more realism (it very rarely means crunch heavy sim these days).

 

[Bedrockgames]

Those 'problems' were real, whether you experienced them or not, which is why I said that your statement was nudging close.

absolutely. I dont dispute they are real problems people have. But if you are me, and dont have those problems, why would you want a game that addresses them?

I agree that it probably was written as a reaction to 3.x, and I was glad for it, because I did experience many of the issues that 4e solved that previously required a whole lot of Rule-0.

Oh and I am not a rule zero advocate. I agree 3E had problems, and rule zero wasnt a good solution (just like page 42 of 4E never really helped me with that edition). I think I just wanted them to dial a few things back on 3E, when 4E came out I was pretty surprised with how far they took the redesign.i didnt want a whole new game, just some key improvements.

Your first item is easily solvable with greater modularity at the system level. Next keeps talking about providing this, though I haven't seen anything that satisfies what I want from it.

Your second point is more of a playstyle and aesthetic that is solvable at the table level, or behind the screen. You can run any edition in the manner you describe.

i agree modularity will help with this. That is why I dont mind one hour heals if I can just dial it up to a day or week.

I think with the story stuff it depends. If they embed it in the mechanics, like some story games do, it can be harder to deal with at the table since it is part of the system. But I dont think they will do that (at least not in a comprehensive way, they may have some light things in there like luck points or something).

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

absolutely. I dont dispute they are real problems people have. But if you are me, and dont have those problems, why would you want a game that addresses them?

Because you want to improve the popularity of a game you like? Because you want to bring more people to the table?

There are many games that I play whose issues I've worked around, but at the same time, I remain completely open to fixing them in a newer version.

Unfortunately, with Next, the pendulum is swinging too far back the other way for my tastes. If they keep designing games in a reactionary fashion, they're going to keep driving people away from it. I had high hopes when it was announced, which have been constantly eroded by backpedalling, insults, and hodge-podge design.

Oh and I am not a rule zero advocate. I agree 3E had problems, and rule zero wasnt a good solution (just like page 42 of 4E never really helped me with that edition). I think I just wanted them to dial a few things back on 3E, when 4E came out I was pretty surprised with how far they took the redesign.i didnt want a whole new game, just some key improvements.

For myself, and probably not a small amount of other folk, the only thing that kept me in the brand was how different it was. I don't envy them; they've got to make business decisions on a knife-edge.

i agree modularity will help with this. That is why I dont mind one hour heals if I can just dial it up to a day or week.

Whereas for me, that mechanic doesn't accomplish and really can't accomplish all the things I put surges to use for in my games.

I think with the story stuff it depends. If they embed it in the mechanics, like some story games do, it can be harder to deal with at the table since it is part of the system. But I dont think they will do that (at least not in a comprehensive way, they may have some light things in there like luck points or something).

4e was guilty of this to a point, but not to the point that a lot of folks make it out to be. More dials and modularity would have helped this as well. Or at least being more clear about (and supporting) ways that the game could be changed to suit different play styles.

A Unearthed Arcana 4e on the same scope as its other namesakes' would have been amazing.