Mearls: Abilities as the core?

[Mark CMG]

You know I had the same logic about Pathfinder and expected it to fail, or at least to have a short spike and then decline. I thought "why would those who would stay with 3.5 pick up Pathfinder?". I was wrong. Now we could be talking about apples and oranges here, but people seem willing to do things like this.

I guess Pathfinder is a good gauge for what constitutes "different enough." I did not pick up the PF core book when it was first released though I played in a few games and ran the Free RPG Day adventures prior to this year (though I ran them using 3.5E). About a month ago a long time gaming group in the area asked me to jump behind the screen for their PF game because their regular GM was moving out of town. I've grabbed the core PF PDF, some monster cards off the PFSRD site, and have been spending time using that site and the PDF to bring myself up to speed, It seems significantly different. Of course, if WotC was going to build off the 3.5E engine rather than the 4E engine (which is even more removed already from 3.5 than PF, as anyone would agree), they'd either have to go in whole new directions or just build on the PF engine. I don't expect we will see that.

One way to build off the previous engine that I have experimented with is to focus more on RPGing during charatcer creation. I've often heard people compare any contemporary RPG that uses or makes provisions to use minis as drifting from the realm of RPGs into the combat minis games territory, along the lines of DDM with only a vaneer of RPGing tacked on. I've seen it, certainly, at gamestores, gamedays and conventions. Even in discussions with folks who were involved and who agree with what I poiint out as having been the manner in which they play, they will flat out say that the way they play the RPG is RPGing. Personally, one combat after another, after another with the only characterization being that one player tells another to watch his back. I swear I watched a three hour combat game, played using RPG rules, where this was absololutely the only thing even approaching RPing. A bystander might even argue that it was the player not the character but let's leave well enough alone. Some folks claim the problem lies in the heavy fcus on combat rules, often making up the bulk of the rules in any RPG system. I think it begins earlier than that in how character creation is presented and how it functions. I think there are ways to fix that that do not focus on core mechanics so much as on presentation and characerization. These articles don't make me believe they understand the spirit of RPGs let alone how to fix what they seem to now believe they have broken.

 

[Gentlegamer]

Providing possible ways to increase stats is not the same thing as being entitled to stat increases per the rules of the game.

Furthermore, like magic items, providing such ways to increase ability scores rewards in-game play rather than out of game "character building." Vastly preferable, in my opinion.

 

[Sammael]

Re: Burning Wheel skill system; unless I'm mistaken, Burning Wheel requires you to log every single skill test you've undertaken, including that test's difficulty, in order to know when to advance a skill. That falls under the "bookkeeping nightmare" category for me (and most players I've ever had the chance to play with).

 

[Keldryn]

Instead of trying to invent a better mousetrap for the umpteenth time, why don't they focus on consolidating, editing, re-presenting logically and balancing a prior edition? Imagine a balanced, unified, streamlined AD&D or 3E, with all the splat designed to work together and "knowing the existence of each other" from the start. In other words, an actual new edition rather than a whole new game masquerading as a new edition.

Apparently I need to spread more XP around before giving you any, but a thousand times "yes."

4e is a well-designed game, but it is essentially a brand new game and not a revision of of the original Dungeons & Dragons game. Yes, one can make long lists of changes between OD&D, B/X D&D, BECMI D&D, AD&D, and AD&D 2e, but those games all have a high degree of compatibility between them. Each successive game's lineage can be clearly traced back to OD&D, either with supplements (AD&D) or without (B/X, BECMI).

3e was, in my opinion, straddling the fence between being a revision of Gygax's D&D and an entirely new game inspired by Gygax's D&D. Without the familiar wizard and cleric spells, it would probably fall on the "new game inspired by" side of the fence. For some gamers, 3e was already no longer the same game.

A more streamlined and better organized AD&D, with modern game design sensibilities applied to iron out the rough patches, would be my preference. Even with some non-intuitive mechanics, TSR-era D&D had an accessibility that I've not been able to replicate with WotC D&D, primarily due to issues rising from character builds and highly tactical combat.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Re: Burning Wheel skill system; unless I'm mistaken, Burning Wheel requires you to log every single skill test you've undertaken, including that test's difficulty, in order to know when to advance a skill. That falls under the "bookkeeping nightmare" category for me (and most players I've ever had the chance to play with).

It is not a trivial issue, in that sometimes people have a bit of trouble adapting to it. But is not nearly as awful as it sounds coming from the persective of many other systems, since BW skill checks don't happen nearly as frequently. They only happen when they matter.

The problem for BW for some people, BTW, is not the bookkeeping of skill logging, but the time when the rules say you should do it--immediately. If you get that last test that advances your skills, by BW RAW, you get an improvement to the skill right then. In a "Fight!" or "Duel of Wits" you'll have more checks, but repeated checks of the same skill only count once, and thus don't matter for the rest of the scene unless you get the same check with a higher difficulty--easy to check if logging right away.

For some, this messes up the narration, because you might have a big scene taking 15 minutes where everyone averages only one test each, perhaps with some helping in there too. (Helping counts as doing the test, and needs to be logged.) So some forgo the "immediate" skill up opportunity and log the tests after the scene. Having tried it both ways, I prefer that too, as it creates a little pause in the action, and helps with players that don't know the rules as well. I might feel different in an all experienced group, where after all the player can log the tests while someone else is acting.

And of course BW is an extreme case. You could always go with some variant of RuneQuest skill "checks" if you want this kind of dynamic.

But the reservation is well noted. If you are going to use this kind of logging for advancement, you have to make sure that the handling time is not onerous, and that necessarily contrains how often checks can happen. BW makes this a virtue (actually, make checks infrequent anyway for other good reasons, and thus the checks aren't onerous).

 

[chaochou]

Re: Burning Wheel skill system; unless I'm mistaken, Burning Wheel requires you to log every single skill test you've undertaken, including that test's difficulty, in order to know when to advance a skill. That falls under the "bookkeeping nightmare" category for me.

I'm not going to go heavily into BW mechanics. But the skill system isn't really a book-keeping nightmare and it has a pay-off in the way it can shape play.

 

[3catcircus]

I really don't see anything wrong with the basic idea of rolling low with your ability score as the (unmodified) target.

Take a look at the (crying shame that it is now OOP) Twilight:2013's Reflex System:

You have skills at various levels. Those skill levels determine how many d20's you roll against the controlling attribute, with the goal of rolling below the attribute. The system uses the difference between your roll and the attribute as a measure of how successful (or not) you are - 5 or more below is a crit and 5 or more above is a fumble. For each die roll that is successful beyond the first one, you add 2 to your measure. Untrained skill use is fixed - roll 2 d20s and pick the highest of the two rolls.

How successful you are determines not only whether or not you hit, but how much damage you do, for example.

This system works really really well - the more skilled you are, the better your chances of success. The way you get more skilled is by spending your experience points to buy more skill ranks. Additionally, the system is self-limiting in that you have a maximum number of d20s you can roll, so the equivalent of a 20th level PC isn't exponentially more powerful than a 1st level PC, while also allowing for that 20th level fighter with the 16 Str to be more skilled than the 1st level fighter with the 18 or 19 Str, since an attack would be an opposed roll (with the defender's roll reflecting armor bonuses).

Would such a system (designed for a "realistic" modern combat system) work for a game like D&D? Probably, but you'd end up having to probably adopt that game's character generation system as well, which would kill the class/level sacred cow (which isn't necessarily verboten, in my opinion).

Magic items would neatly "drop in" - all those items that give a +1 - +5 to attributes or to your AC or to-hit rolls could easily fit in and would affect both the 1st and 20th level guys equally, so magic items that were valued early on would still be valued and wouldn't be overshadowed by the other bonuses and modifiers that currently occur in both 3.x/Pathfinder and 4e.

The other thing it would do is eliminate the to-hit/AC bonus arms race since armor and weapon bonuses would apply directly to your attributes, so a more-skilled 1st level PC could still effectively attack a less-skilled 20th level character.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I guess Pathfinder is a good gauge for what constitutes "different enough." I did not pick up the PF core book when it was first released though I played in a few games and ran the Free RPG Day adventures prior to this year (though I ran them using 3.5E). About a month ago a long time gaming group in the area asked me to jump behind the screen for their PF game because their regular GM was moving out of town. I've grabbed the core PF PDF, some monster cards off the PFSRD site, and have been spending time using that site and the PDF to bring myself up to speed, It seems significantly different. Of course, if WotC was going to build off the 3.5E engine rather than the 4E engine (which is even more removed already from 3.5 than PF, as anyone would agree), they'd either have to go in whole new directions or just build on the PF engine. I don't expect we will see that.

One way to build off the previous engine that I have experimented with is to focus more on RPGing during charatcer creation. I've often heard people compare any contemporary RPG that uses or makes provisions to use minis as drifting from the realm of RPGs into the combat minis games territory, along the lines of DDM with only a vaneer of RPGing tacked on. I've seen it, certainly, at gamestores, gamedays and conventions. Even in discussions with folks who were involved and who agree with what I poiint out as having been the manner in which they play, they will flat out say that the way they play the RPG is RPGing. Personally, one combat after another, after another with the only characterization being that one player tells another to watch his back. I swear I watched a three hour combat game, played using RPG rules, where this was absololutely the only thing even approaching RPing. A bystander might even argue that it was the player not the character but let's leave well enough alone. Some folks claim the problem lies in the heavy fcus on combat rules, often making up the bulk of the rules in any RPG system. I think it begins earlier than that in how character creation is presented and how it functions. I think there are ways to fix that that do not focus on core mechanics so much as on presentation and characerization. These articles don't make me believe they understand the spirit of RPGs let alone how to fix what they seem to now believe they have broken.

Eh, I don't think I buy this. There's plenty of 'fluff' attached to classes and races in the PHBs. There are also quite a few other RP hooks. More than in past editions from what I can see. People may get distracted by the shiny combat game and NOT RP, but I don't think the presentation of 4e discourages it at all. I think there are a few factors that have converged to create the 'people don't RP in 4e' trope. At some level WotC did it, but I think the story is not very straightforward.

1) They made a decision not to build a lot of adventures and in-depth settings. The system, particularly early on, was very heavy on crunch books. The adventures they did make were railroady hack-fests. None of this really helped.

2) Combat is always long and involved. I'm not sure I like the term 'too long', but it sucks up time and if you have players that like to fight you do quickly run out of time to get them RPing much. There are answers to this however, the DMG simply should have said more about it (I'd say they didn't understand the issue at that time though).

3) The encyclopedic rule system tends to discourage a lot of tinkering, or more importantly a lot of experimentation with story related game elements. An example would be cursed items. Usually they're problematic, so they aren't discussed in the rules, yet they are a perfectly viable tool to use. Most DMs simply avoid them because there is almost nothing 'official' on the subject.

There are a few other things in the same vein, but I'd also say that IME 4e allows for some exceptionally rich RP opportunities as the PCs have a hard time falling back on 'fixer magic' to deal with plot issues and such. Rituals, diseases (curses fall here), a good solid non-combat XP system, and the fact that the party will generally cover most non-combat capabilities pretty well actually makes doing this stuff quite easy and rewarding.

The genuine ease of building good monsters and opponents helps a LOT too. Being let loose from the old "well, lets see what magic user spell we can pound into this round hole" is good. Rituals again are a great boon here as they have no impact on opponent's combat capability (in general) but provide nice plot devices. Unlike AD&D where monsters were really SO different from PCs that it was hard to apply PC mechanics to them in 4e they have all the sorts of hooks that PCs do, so it is actually quite easy to borrow PC mechanics of almost any sort for them as well.

Thanks for the reply AbdulHazred. I agree the bonuses were potent in the context of the system. My only point was the numbers themselves were more contained than you had in d20 (wasn't thinking of 4E so much as 3E with modifiers going into the double digits routinely). Personally I prefered the more contained bonuses.

Yeah, I understand what you mean. There were certain characteristics of the way that worked. One was that generally a stat between say 8 and 14 didn't really matter. It COULD matter for ability checks, but IME those were actually used pretty rarely (but I'm sure that isn't everone's experience). One result was a character that was 'blessed' with all mediocre stats was pretty blah and they all tended to blur together after a while as 'Joe Anycharacter'. So in a sense I kind of like the fact that a 14 is materially better than a 12. OTOH the range from +1 to +4 is a pretty significant difference in to-hit (less so for skills, but it certainly matters there too). Add in the fact that characters ramp right on up to +8 or +9 at high epic and I agree that stat bonuses are a little steep. I'd ditch stat boosts myself, which would help.

 

[Spatula]

Providing possible ways to increase stats is not the same thing as being entitled to stat increases per the rules of the game.

Of course, Gygax did that, too, with the Cavalier...

Yes, but what you're not considering is that a bonus in AD&D does NOT mean the same thing as it does in 4e by a long shot.

There were VERY few ways to get a to-hit bonus for example. Also there were a lot less levels, meaning the maximum bonus you would get as a fighter in a typical game is likely to be +12 from level. An extra +1 was VERY useful, especially at lower level where it was virtually the only bonus you could get. Damage bonus likewise where you ACTUALLY did something like 1d8/1d12 or maybe 1d10/1d12 and the ONLY bonus you would get to that would be STR. Plus your opponents had what 4.5 hit points average at level 1 for an orc? +1 damage at level 1 in AD&D was much like getting around +5 damage today. The DEX bonus was a HUGE advantage too, since again it was unlikely you could up your defenses much by other means and it remained a big advantage throughout all levels. Getting +1 hit points is for most characters a 25% or more hit point advantage, again like getting an extra 10 hit points in 4e, and it kicked in at every level whereas 4e's bonus actually means a good bit less as you level up.

It is quite true that the bonuses kicked in at higher scores, but they were quite potent in the context of AD&D.

Which generally led, IME, to players feeling like their characters were crap if they didn't have at least one high ability score.

 

[KidSnide]

I agree that there has to be a mechanical implication, I just think the mechanical implication should be something other than "your character is mostly useless." As it is right now, a Str 12 fighter can't fulfill the defender role and is little more than a joke. But if you just use roleplaying and have a Str 18, then the character is inappropriately good at athletics and doesn't get the mechanical benefit of a high wisdom.

For an old fighter, maybe it's harder to wear such heavy armor, make those athletic checks (or maybe even do quite so much damage), but he can still hit (and land the "hit" based effects of his powers). And, he gets the benefit of being good at perception and unusually effective at fighter Wis powers. That type of character might be somewhat less effective than a pure Str fighter (who does consistently more damage), but it's an interesting, different and viable character.

A core goal of the character creation rules should be to allow players to create a variety of interesting, different and viable characters with minimal rules overhead. Right now, if you want to play a Wis-concentrated melee defender, you need to write a whole new class. Fighter has a minor in Wis. Why can't I use Fighter for that? The answer: because WotC gave too much importance to the primary (to hit) attributes, severely restricting effective character builds for little benefit.

This is called 'being more experienced' which means you're higher level. That's the advantage. Granted that you aren't as good as EQUAL level characters with high prime stats, which is the typical game situation, but I think you can ask any athlete whether an older guy or a younger guy with equally good training will do better. If the game can't model that at all it has problems.

As others have said, fluff it. You groan and moan about your aching bones, but when push comes to shove, you've got what it takes to get the job done. And really, you can build a fighter with a good score in any off stat without a lot of sacrifice. People like to say different, but a 16 STR works fine.

As I noted upthread, I agree that it's realistic to require fighters to have high strength to be effective. In real life, physical conditioning has a huge impact on performance in athletic endeavors. To pick just one example, Mark Spitz may be the most skilled swimmer ever (at least in his ability to convert physical energy into forward progress in the water), but his records have been overcome by less efficient swimmers who used modern weight-training techniques to become considerably stronger than athletes were in the 70s. Likewise, strength, size and speed make a huge different in combat capability, at least according to all the martial arts, boxing, wrestling and other combat style activities I've seen practiced.

And, yes, you can play with a 16 in your primary attribute, and an unobservant player might not notice the character's reduced effectiveness. To hit modifiers are a big deal. They are why we have all these expertise feats.

But that's not the issue -- I don't think that type of realism is a useful goal for a character generation system in a game like 4e and even a 16 is a huge cost in point buy if you want to play a genius warlord or a super-charismatic cleric.

I think that a core goal of the character creation rules should be to allow players to create a variety of interesting, different and viable characters with minimal rules overhead (quoting myself above). Because to hit modifiers are so important to a characters effectiveness (both in damage per round and in the ability to land important effects), WotC severely reduced the number of reasonably effective builds for little gain.

-KS