Mearls' Legends and Lore (or, "All Roads Lead to Rome, Redux")

[CuRoi]

Thing is, RPGs are not life. Many people play them to get away from real life. Like me, for instance. Having at least one game that supports that style of play is an awesome thing.

I am the type of DM who can react to what players do, or anticipate their possible actions, such that system-mastery systems present no problem for me. When I have the time and energy for them. In recent years, I just want to sit down and play the game and not have to worry about that stuff.

I completely agree with you and everyone should play whatever RPG they choose in any way they choose to play it as long as the whole group is having FUN! However, there are a ton of RPGs out there. If you want to play an RPG and use only the first 100 pages of the rules, do it. But it isn't fair to complain that a system is poor because the system broke somewhere in the other 200 pages you didn't read.

If someone wants to play a game where they don't really need to read a 315 page PHB (DnD 3.5 AND 4e...) there are some awesome alternatives. I've mentioned FUDGE before, there's AMBER if I remember correctly (it's diceless even) - both are fairly freeform and require almost no time investment to get a feel for the rules. There are some great alternatives if time and energy are a concern which I'm sure those of you into the indie RPG scene can tell us about.

Also, I will again admit I am in the minority in that I take even my hobbies a bit too seriously It's just something I'm driven to do. I'm terrible at the sitting on the beach sipping pine coladas type of relaxation, heh. I need to be moving, progressing, improving, doing...something.

 

[CuRoi]

My ability to just make a declarative statement about what spell I was casting and utterly deflate the challenge limited his options when it came to what situations he presented to the players.

Again, give me an example here if you could. Not trying to be annoying or anything but that's the X time I've seen a "PCs have I win DnD" spells sort of declarative and no real substantive example. Besides, campaign stories are really fun to read.

Are you starting to get what Heinsoo was talking about yet? You tried to make it mean that 4E handles only a scripted approach and that Heinsoo believed improv DMing was bad. And then you tried to equate the players not having crazy session destroying abilities as limiting possible DM skill because they're not forced to compensate for spells and abilities that deflate a given challenge.

Both your interpretation and Heinsoos claim designated the "good DM" qualifications, not mine. I just built on what was stated.

That said, once again, we're talking about "session destroying abilities" and as a wise poster mentions - we're both talking from different experiences. I haven't had a "Session destroying" ability show up in my game when it comes to a standard action I win DnD. As I've tried to make clear, I react and adjust and have fun with it.

I also think I made it clear, I DO see some session destroying abilities when the term "System Mastery" is taken to mean someone doing silly stuff like "Pun-Pun" which is technically sound, but unequivocally game destroying. I DO agree 3e in that sense got very silly and efforts in any pre-3rd edition to limit things like that is a good idea. However, again, IME, IMO etc, etc. I've never seen the "I win DnD" spell.

While your response might be for them to get better and be more like you, that's hardly going to help them run a good game tomorrow night. A much better suggestion is to find a system that doesn't limit their choices in terms of challenging situations and require massive amounts of compensating for the player characters abilities.

Put that way its a bit Lawful Evil sounding eh? Heh. But I intended no draconian ultimatium. What I intended to say was for anyone (Heinsoo etc) to assume that say Divination spells and other abilities which allow the player to take control of the scenario in powerful ways are a massive problem for DMs is a "problem" that needs to be fixed, is a bad assumption.

I agreed I may be in the minority to concede the point, however I have no clue about actual statistics. Frankly, I've never, from personal experience, seen a DM say it was such a huge problem it needed fixing. Have I seen DMs say certain spells/feats/items or combinations thereof were broken? Sure. Again, in the sense that system mastery means someone cherry picking stuff from the dozens of available books and making a super powered PC, I readily agree there were things that needed to be fixed.

Improv DMing is so much easier in 4E than 3.x. And can be accomplished by DMs of a range of skill levels when using that sytem. Your earlier assertion that it's for running scripted games where players can't have meaningful impact on the story is just plain wrong. It certainly works for those who want to use it that way, but that doesn't mean the conclusions you read into Heinsoo's words are at all accurate.

If you took that from my assertion I apologize. What I have always maintained throughout this debate is that I felt 4e, IMO was well suited for dungeon romps and the like. It seemes again IMO very well designed for that. Much better than 3.5.

The fact that some people think I am attacking 4e because I make this claim is irrational. As pointed out, I loved the earlier editions of DnD where a good dungeon romp in a rail car was par for the course. Check out some old modules. I've got one right here that says at several points things like "the players CANT capture the Big Bad Guy at this point; he disappears in a puff of smoke." Its at the very root of the game we all play! Somewhere though, my style completely diverged from that.

My point has been that I see 4e going back to these roots more so than 3.5 which was built on the world exploration / simulation which 2e started to divert to. For me, this was a welcome diversion. As such, for me, going back is not a sign of progress. Strip away some of the rules complexities of 3.5 and streamline some things? Sure. I have not problem with that. Strip away the wildly creative, world exploring, earth shattering type stuff which goes beyond just pushing figures around a battlemat, I'm not so down with.

 

[LostSoul]

But I definitely agree that focusing on flavor the characters is the key. The mechanics themselves, in a perfect world, should be as invisible as they are not just to someone reading The Return of the King, but even as invisible as they are to Frodo.

I think that this is one of our big differences in our approach to RPGs; I enjoy having clear or transparent advancement mechanics, and basing my choices on those. I don't mind obvious action-resolution mechanics either, I just want the details of the game world to play an important role in them.

I'll try to keep this discussion in mind if we ever end up butting heads again. Sometimes I find it difficult to really understand someone's position because they're coming from a point-of-view that I'm not considering.

Has this been achieved perfectly? No - with respect to classes, the archer-ranger is in my view a rather boring class which brings very little to the table in thematic terms, and with respect to monsters I would say that skeletons, for example, don't really bring much either.

If I understand how you achieve Story Now in 4E, I think the archer-ranger could have potential. I can see a PC whose backstory is pretty simple - town destroyed by orcs, survived on their own by keeping at range and using the "slippery" powers that Rangers have. When playing the game, there will be times when you have to decide if you want to save your own hide or if you trust these guys you've been fighting with enough to take a hit or two.

How do you (pemerton) set up situations where this will come into play?

As for skeletons, I think they can carry a lot of thematic meaning. They're undead, so they used to be someone who was once alive. They were either raised by horrible necromantic rituals or by a source of necrotic energy.

* A group of soldiers who vowed to defend a keep until the return of the True King; the keep has fallen into ruin and the soldiers have died long ago, but the power of their vow has kept them in a state of undeath.

* Recognizing the skeletons as people that you once knew; perhaps your PC sent them on a scouting mission. Now they're back as skeletons. That could carry a punch.

I think that there are two difficulties that this sort of approach faces, though. I wouldn't say that they're insuperable, but I don't think they're trivial either.

I am reminded of an adventure from my first 3E campaign:

The PCs had previously failed to save a young woman from a demon that could control a person (by living in the victim's stomach). It had taken control of a seedy town, taking advantage of a power vacuum created by the PCs. It agreed to speak with the PC Fighter/Paladin face-to-face. It taunted him, telling the PC that there was nothing he could do to save the town or the woman; if he made any move, the charmed (or was it hypnotized?) villagers would carry out its orders to burn their town to the ground, and the demon would forcibly rip itself from its host body, killing the woman in the process.

The player decided that his PC was going to attack the demon. It carried out its plans, though the woman was saved (Lay on Hands or Goodberry, not sure which; that game didn't have any clerics).

In response I asked the player how his PC felt about his actions. I let the player decide which powers he lost, if any. I believe he gave up a few of them - Cure Disease for sure. I used the loss of that power to drive a future adventure.

I also let the player decide when he regained the use of his abilities.

I'm not sure that was Story Now; that game took place in the fall of 2001, a long time ago! We did play fast-and-loose with the rules in order to get a slightly different experience, and I think those decisions had a big effect on the game.

 

[CuRoi]

So in fact, in order to frame credible challenges, I don't need to know what powers my players have given to their PCs. All I really think about when designing challenges is what roles those PCs occupy in various respects - combat roles, trained skills, etc - and (more importantly) what the various interests of my players are in respect of the story of the campaign.

Which is something I find interesting about 4e. So many people complained about 2e that "no one wants to play a cleric because they just stand around and cast cures". So 3e created the IMO, too versatile cleric. Now with 4e we swing the pendulum back a bit and make every class fill a "role".

Again, I have limited experience with the system, so fill me in on how this works exactly. If I am a "striker" like say a ranger, can I have an interest in being a self sacrificial type who takes it on the nose for the party when I can? Or do I need to play say a fighter for that. I realize one will be more optimal for the situation than the other. But is it feasible for a player to decide they want to "Defend" but not play a "Defender" class? If not, how does that effect the players choice of interaction with the ongoing story? Curious more than anything.

I also can run this sort of game. I have GMed high level D&D and high level Rolemaster. The point is that it is limiting. Once powerful divination is available, there are no mysteries.

I'll take your word for it with Rolemaster, I've never played it.

I find it interesting that you say that you don't have planned or scripted scenarios, and yet your "pit the PCs against foes". That, to me, suggests a degree of scripting - namely, the GM has scripted who shall be the PCs' foe.

You lost me here. Yes, my PCs fight foes. Their foe happens to be whoever they decided to attack . Yes, I did make some assumptions when I created the campaign based on what I knew of the players and the character ideas. I assumed they would eventually confront the "big players" or at least contact these forces in some way.

In general, my (edit) DnD campaign has players progress to very high levels of ability. In the campaign world as constructed, once you get to say 10-12 level, you are a force to be reckoned with and whether you like it or not, you will start drawing he attention of powerful forces in the game. Whether you join them, fight them, backstab them and take their position, I don't care. However I can easily make some rudimentary assumptions that a) players with these "I win DnD" spells people keep worrying about won't be ignored by powerful forces in the game and b) The players would stick with the campaign until that time.

If this asserts scripting, I'm guilty as charged. However - I'm not sure how one even runs a campaign if you start completely blank slate with no idea of the major factions and personas and an assumption that the PCs will never get involved enoough in the world to interact with these major factions and personas.

So yes, for my "railroading" I usually at least detail a fairly sophisticated world for players to explore first. At the very least, I outline a meta-plot of sorts that is running in the background as we play and the players occassionally bump against that meta plot (I did this recently with a Serenity campaign using the Cortex system. And yes, the very last few games were a complete railroad but it was consensual, heh. Everyone was buckled in for the ride and loving every minute of it. So again, I hope people don't think I have something against "railroading" when the story or players for that matter demand it - but its a useless term IMO as interpretations vary.)

I don't run scripted scenarios.

Sorry if it seemed I suggested you did. Definitely was not my intention (well, unless you enjoy scripted scenarios and as I have been trying to point out - there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.)

And - contrary to what you suggest about 4e in what I've quote - 4e does not lend itself to scripted fight scenes.

Your mixing words here - I don't think I ever said the Fight Scenes themselves were scripted (a tleast I did not mean to). That implies telling the players "ok you swing at this person now" etc. I said that 4e IMO lends itself to a scripted adventure quite well. Again, if players can't move outside the box and they must confront the bad guys at the time and place the DM prefers then it at least feels more scripted IMO than if the players have the OPTION to teleport in a smack someone around whenever they please.

You seem to be running together what, upthread, I tried to distinguish, namely, situational authority and plot authority.

Right, the GM frames a scene - all the "situations" if you will and the players must resolve them within the scene limits established by the GM and without help from potentially "scene breaking" spells and the like. I'm pretty sure I get what you are saying. Which leads me to my original point:

Obviously you are a very enlightened DM. You keep talking theory discussing game theory as proposed by people outside the 4e community to defend the constructs of 4e. Who's to say you aren't the DM Heinsoo refers to in his statement? As I've said from the start, I have no issue with how you run your game and it sounds exceptional. What I do think is I have to go back to the "Water to Wine / Wine to Water" comment I made at the start of the debate. I'll wager 90% of the potential DMs that pickup 4e will not at all be thinking of situaional and plot authority. They'll pick up the book, run players through Skill Challenge A and Encounter B, find their plans are never evolved by what the players do, only advanced by what the players do, and be all warm and fuzzy about it. If they stay in that comfort zone and have fun, awesome.

Look, leave the theory aside. I dont see it in the DMG. Now, let yourself be that "new DM" that picks up a DMG. You read the skill challenge section. You see advice on how to set up a skill chellenge, you read the section about "consequences". There is a Success and Failure section. There is no mention of relationship maps and diagrams and what some emminent (edit) game designer says about how to use it.

You get the Succes section for the examples which is one sentence. This is essentially "you win". Its cut and dry just as if you took out a foe in a combat. Next you get the failure section which does allow for more amibiguity but is always telling you that the results will push you toward the final quest objective, just with more skill challenges in the way (which, IMO makes the game more fun so losing seems to be the way to go...)

New DM absorbs the info and probably (but not always) walks away with the following: Players win scenarios I have explicitly created without their input and then they move along toward my intended plot goal. If they screw up, they still get there, I just have more challenges which I have created.

How anyone can keep saying you can't string these together with combat encounters into a good dungeon crawl is completely beyond me. Its made for it. Sounds great to me frankly.

So far from being a "rigidly defined module", this is a paradigm example of collaborative storytelling. And it also obilges me to, at some time in the future, frame at least a couple of new scenes - namely, the ones in which the PCs travel to that neutral city and arrange to pay the ransom.

Are the PCs really fighting hobgoblin slavers at 10th level? If my players chose to do that, cool - they'd steamroll them most likely and free the slaves in record time for the 100 gold or so. Then I'd need to consider the hobgoblin society a bit (if I hadn't fleshed this to some extent already) and figure out if anyone further up the food chain is upset by this and tries to come put a stop to it. Sounds fun to me.

Collaborative storytelling

Players use all powers and abilities at their disposal. They teleport in and free the slaves in record time and they all pat themselve sont he back, collect their gold and move on.

Slavemaster Brackas is not at all pleased. He holds the Duergar ransom thinking they must have been somehow involved. Really, how else would dozens of slaves just disappear from a fortress? Its unthinkable that they didn't free them or at least plan to accept payment and run. The Duergar are outraged, they demand the return of their people. Meanwhile a Duergar sorcerer who employs the imprisoned slave traders begins consulting Diviners about what happened to his "cargo". He pays a hefty sum for the Diviners who in turn cast theri "I win DnD" spell and discover that a group of 4 motley surface dwellers was involved.

The same day, Blasto the wizard happens to look up and notice a scrying sensor floating in the sky above him...

Hey look - we just collaborated on the shared plot, shared story, shared scene and we still all have lots of fun

 

[BryonD]

BryonD, there seems to have been needless disagreement/semantic confusion here. (Not on your part, or not on your part solely. Mutual confusion as between the two of us.)

Fair enough.

As I said, you and I specifically debated the terminology I am using before. My bad for assuming you were still on that.

But it's also why I'm still interested to see someone's actual play account of running a game with 3E that is narrativist (in the Forgist sense).

I guess. IMO it doesn't represent a meaningful segment of the market. But that is just that, my opinion.
It seemed pretty clear to me that 3E was never a top rank game over at the Forge. Is 4E?

And I'd still say that WotC made it massively clear that they were targeting non-gamers with 4E as game with casual fan appeal. The Forge is the ultimate extreme opposite of "casual fan". So I don't see how the Forge stuff is meaningful in any way other than pure academic conjecture.

 

[BryonD]

I think that this is one of our big differences in our approach to RPGs; I enjoy having clear or transparent advancement mechanics, and basing my choices on those. I don't mind obvious action-resolution mechanics either, I just want the details of the game world to play an important role in them.

Not all roads lead to Rome.

The fighter doesn't know that he is 6th level working on 7th level, so he shouldn't modify his behavior quite so knowingly. Now you can always have things like karate belts, or formal wizard training or whatever the analog may be. And if the story does lead that way, then I will strongly tend to support leveling in a manner that reflects it. But those are narrative leading mechanics elements.

On the other hand, I certainly know the fun of leveling. I know my players always give a little cheer about it. And I recall when my daughter was younger she would jump out of her chair and run around the house shooting "YES!!!" Fun for the PLAYER is the ultimate goal and they DO know. So I respect that.

I don't claim simulation is any bit better than gamist. I just claim they are different and I have a personal preference.

I'll try to keep this discussion in mind if we ever end up butting heads again. Sometimes I find it difficult to really understand someone's position because they're coming from a point-of-view that I'm not considering.

You consistently provide thoughtful, interesting comments. I LIKE to argue. So I will.

I'm not sure that was Story Now; that game took place in the fall of 2001, a long time ago! We did play fast-and-loose with the rules in order to get a slightly different experience, and I think those decisions had a big effect on the game.

Heh, I've lost count of how many 3E campaigns I've run. But I doubt there have been any two that did not have some fundamentally important house rule difference. Not that they were falling far from the tree. A new player could be in any one in minutes. But the experience always changes a bit.

 

[Beginning of the End]

You're the one who introduced notions of rules and mechanics as pivotal notions in the discussion.

This particular thread of conversation originates with post #449 in this thread. A post which you wrote several iterations of conversation before I even engaged these topics.

And in that post you wrote:

When 4e came out, I really thought that WotC must know something that I didn't, and that Ron Edwards had only speculated about, concerning the popular viability of a (at least somewhat) non-traditional game with metagame mechanics built in at ground level (eg Come and Get It) and mechanically structured but non-simulationist conflict resolution mechanics (eg skill challenges, and even healing surges and warlord healing).​

Claiming at this late date that you were never talking about mechanics until BryonD and I brought them up as some sort of non sequitur is absurd.

Honestly, I find it an exhausting waste of time to have to go rolling back through the pages of this thread to find the quotes necessary to have you argue with yourself.

So, to sum up by way of conclusion: You're wrong about the actual rules of 4E. You're wrong about the actual rules of 3E. You're wrong in most of the things you claim 4E does that 3E doesn't. You're frequently wrong about what other people have said. You're even wrong about the things you've actually said.

I'm happy that you're able to ignore large and significant chunks of the 4E rules in order to find a structure that you find useful for running games of "heroic protagonism".

But it has very little (if anything) to tell us about 4E as it exists on the page.

 

[CuRoi]

I just reread this thread from front to back. Here's what I learned:

Hats off to you there!! I'll admit to skimming several *ahem* of the 600 or so posts

These people that play games you don't like. They're gamers like you. They're not in some rival camp that you need to do battle with. It's okay for people to like different things than you.

Right! I just wish we could constructively discuss things regarding each edition because it's a worthwhile endeavor in my opinion. I hope I haven't come across as "attacking" anyone or anything in this debate. I enjoyed our exchange, hopefully it was beneficial to the greater discussion?

Spirited debate nowadays often seems to get automatically misconstrued as an "attack" - its not just limited to RPGs. A lot of forums you can't even discuss religion and politics for instance because people get immediately worked up about it. This does everyone a great diservice because it implies religion and politics isn't a place for finding common ground and that assumption only fosters a closed mind - IMO

Maybe I'll go start a 3.5e "bashing" thread, cause I really have LOTS of problems with that system

 

[BryonD]

Maybe I'll go start a 3.5e "bashing" thread, cause I really have LOTS of problems with that system

Bring it on buddy!!! I'll kick your butt!!!

Unless you, like, talk about things I, like, house-ruled or other things where 3X, like, has problems. Cause, then you would be, like, right and stuff....

 

[nnms]

Again, give me an example here if you could. Not trying to be annoying or anything but that's the X time I've seen a "PCs have I win DnD" spells sort of declarative and no real substantive example. Besides, campaign stories are really fun to read.

Well the classic one that still has my friend (who was DMing) pissed off is Speak With Dead. Imagine what modern murder investigations would be like if you had that spell. That was a pretty blatant "solve mystery" moment. Looking at the particulars of the spell, in order to compensate for it, a DM would have to either always have murder victims die unaware of their killer, prepare cryptic answers to nullify the spell or have the murderers cast it on the corpse before they leave the scene to confound magical investigation.

Now a cleric doesn't have a set spell list like a Wizard that the DM can just read and try to anticipate. They could prepare any spell available to their level when they pray after resting, so trying to anticipate every possible "gotcha" is a bit more work than many DMs want to do.

In this case, Speak With Dead limits the DM to having murder mysteries specifically designed to nullify the spell and cuts them off from using situations that aren't specifically designed to confound the use of that spell.

That said, once again, we're talking about "session destroying abilities" and as a wise poster mentions - we're both talking from different experiences. I haven't had a "Session destroying" ability show up in my game when it comes to a standard action I win DnD. As I've tried to make clear, I react and adjust and have fun with it.

It's enough of a problem for enough DMs that they wanted to make it less of an issue with the latest edition. All I can say to the above is that I take my hat off to you for some excellent DMing. And for the more average or casual DM, there are other games on the market.

If you took that from my assertion I apologize. What I have always maintained throughout this debate is that I felt 4e, IMO was well suited for dungeon romps and the like. It seemes again IMO very well designed for that. Much better than 3.5.

After playing 4E since release, I think that 3.5 with a properly paired down list of feats, spells, items, etc., might actually do a better job at dungeon delving. 4E seems to be better suited for scene based play with hard scene framing focused on a story. Now you can do that in a dungeon where the exploration bits are simply scene framing. The 4E Rules Compendium even uses pretty hard scene framing by the DM as an example of how to handle dungeon exploration.

As pointed out, I loved the earlier editions of DnD where a good dungeon romp in a rail car was par for the course. Check out some old modules. I've got one right here that says at several points things like "the players CANT capture the Big Bad Guy at this point; he disappears in a puff of smoke." Its at the very root of the game we all play! Somewhere though, my style completely diverged from that.

I don't know if you've been paying attention to any of the proponents of the "Old School Renaissance" or read any of the Q&A articles with the old guard of the early TSR days on Dragonsfoot.org, but there's definitely very divergent approaches to how to game very, very early on. In old school dungeon design we have examples of extreme railroads and precursors to the very modern idea of a DM setting up the situation but never the plot. I know many, many current players of OD&D, BECMI and AD&D would talk about dungeon crawling as the least railroading form of play.

My point has been that I see 4e going back to these roots more so than 3.5 which was built on the world exploration / simulation which 2e started to divert to. For me, this was a welcome diversion. As such, for me, going back is not a sign of progress. Strip away some of the rules complexities of 3.5 and streamline some things? Sure. I have not problem with that. Strip away the wildly creative, world exploring, earth shattering type stuff which goes beyond just pushing figures around a battlemat, I'm not so down with.

Built into BECMI (and other older versions of D&D) was a lot of very different game elements that don't rely fit into this characterization any more than 4E does.

I found 4E so refreshing on release because it was more like pre-2E versions of D&D. Far, far better suited to improv based play and low prep play than 3.x and it's universal system of simulation. I like it because it supports wildly creative, story/setting exploring, earth shattering type stuff that goes beyond just pushing figures around a battlemap.