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?
What you've described is actually something like the ranger in my game. Perhaps, to an extent, it's the player rather than the class!
Because my party has only a hybrid cleric and a paladin, healing is always at a premium,
and thus questions of sacrifice versus selfishness (not to the point of PC death, but certainly to the point of PC disadvantage in a given combat) come up fairly regularly without me having to do anything much other than set the machine in motion.
The DMG talks about setting up encounters with "front lines" of soldiers and brutes, and the ideal for a PC party seems often to be expressed in terms of a "front line" of defenders. But I tend to find that the encounters I set up rarely have a straightforward front line. This is in part because a number of the PCs have significant movement abilities, and use them, it's in part because our chaos sorcerer has a habit of rolling 1s and pushing everyone, and it's in part because of the sorts of terrain I use - more open terrain and fewer rooms.
What that means, then, is that quite often the players have to make decisions about who will engage what, who will move where to support whom, and so on - and the main thematic content that comes out these decisions, I feel, is a consideration of honour and shame - who is doing the right thing, who is pulling their weight, who is unreasonably grandstanding (this accusation is levelled mostly at the sorcerer, who is also a drow, and who is often cavalier in his use of darkness to shape the battlefield in a way that maximises his chance for success and glory at the expense of other PCs), etc. Sometimes this is fairly lighthearted, but sometimes - for example, in the encounter where the party played it too safely and failed to rescue the prisoners in the ritual circle early enough, allowing one to be sacrificed by the gnoll ritualists - it can be a bit more serious. Sometimes I will use the monsters and develop the situation in such a way as to play this up - for example, deliberately focus on targetting the wizard or sorcerer to see how the defenders respond - but sometimes it's driven by the players.
I think honour and shame - which can also tie in to related values like courage, self-sacrifice etc - as the focus of intraparty rivalry is also one way in which rivalry can flourish, and play out in an interesting way, without actually breaking up the party play in a way that doesn't really work for D&D. (And I think my approach to GMing this is probably influenced by the superhero team comics - especially the X-Men - that I used to read back in the day).
An example from my session on Sunday: the PCs had been staying with some witches who had helped them, and whom they had helped. The situation was less than friendly, but certainly stable (the result of an earlier skill challenge). To help the PCs and witches work together to explore a site on the Shadowfell, the PCs had agreed to send an Animal Messenger (via ritual) to summon a fourth witch from her tower, who (the other witches assured the PCs) has expertise in matters Shadowfell-related.
I took the view that the players, by willingly participating in bringing this new complication into the situation, had opened the door to me reopening the result of the earlier skill challenge. (And in practical terms, they had certainly benefited from both mechanically and in the context of the fiction. So to reopen it would hardly be to rip them off.) The fourth witch (a Night Hag) therefore attacked them when she arrived in the middle of the night. At first the other witches hestitated to take part. The PCs (and the players) were taking a keen interest in this, making Insight checks and so on from the first round in order to try and size up the situation. Instead of trying to dissuade the other witches from taking part in the attack, however, they took the approach of waiting and seeing - and two of the other three decided to participate in the fight. I kept the third witch out in part for encounter balance reasons, but also because, of the three, she was the only one who had actually had her life saved by the PCs - and it therefore seemed proper that she of all the witches show the most loyalty to them.
So far I've talked about setting up a combat situation in such a way as to make honour, loyalty, shame etc relevant - in the combat itself this played out in the way the PCs oriented themselves towards the undecided - and later committed - witches, in terms of defensive positioning, responding to their attacks and so on. There were also more immediate and somewhat self-contained episodes, like when the tiefling paladin charged through a wall of fire that one of the witches had summoned and then made an Intimidate roll against a second witch, a Howling Hag whose blasphemous whispers (a damaging aura) included rantings against tieflings, drow and the like as part of the self-justificatory story she was telling about her own betrayal of them. This charge was a self-contained display of grandstanding, as well as a response to the overall situation of betrayal by the witches.
At the end of the encounter, the PCs negotiated with the witch who had not joined in the betrayal, letting her keep the spellbook with Wall of Fire (the 10th level fire tome from Arcane Power) and suggesting to her a nice place to set up shop in a forest several days travel to the south. So I thought that there was an interesting balance between honour/loyalty and shame/disloyalty in the way the players resolved the conflict - clearly a type of self-interest in letting the witches join their newcomer sister in the fight without much attempt to dissaude them, motivated in part by the desire not to have to share with them any proceeds from the Shadowfell venture, but also a degree of magnanimity in the way they dealt with the witch who did not betray them.
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.
Agreed, but the basic skeletons in the MM (decrepit skeletons, 3rd level soldier skeletons, even the blazing skeletons) don't really give mechanical voice to this in the way that (for example) the zombies do.
* 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.
All good stuff. The second idea could be implemented via something like the wight's "horiffic visage" power.
For what it's worth, I think 4E is pretty good for improv, at least for me.
There are a couple of ways I think 4E achieves this. (Not trying to make comparisons here, just how it works for me.)
- I find it easy to resolve "actions the rules don't cover" by using set values for Fort, Ref, and Will.
- DCs are set by level; I know, as DM, that a 3rd-level monster will have the right DCs to be a 3rd-level challenge, and I can use that handy table on page 42 to set appropriate DCs.
- I can base any action on the appropriate stat.
- NPC attacks use a simple formula - level + 5 vs. AC and level + 3 vs Fort, Ref, or Will.
- I can set the amount of damage any action does by using that table on page 42.
I don't think I use these features in a manner typical to most 4E DMs. A quick example: in a recent setting, the PCs were fighting near an icy river. The level of the hex was pre-determined to be 2. When anyone got pushed into the river, it was simple to determine if the icy waters chilled them to the bone (+5 vs Fort, 3d10+3 damage). When characters try to swim out of the river, I know what the DC is (15).
What you describe here seems pretty similar to how I do things. Except instead of hexes having levels, I set the levels of hazards/monsters/traps etc based on the encounter-building guidelines in the DMG (and so would set the level for the river based on these considerations, and defaulting to the PCs' level).
Also, when the situation is one of exploration rather than tactical combat, I tend to use skill checks by the players rather than attacks against PCs by the terrain/hazard. So while in a combat I might use the river in the way you describe (in my last session, it wasn't an icy river but rather prismatic walls), in an exploration context I'd be more likely to call for an Endurance check against the appropriate DC (with loss of healing surges as the consequence).
I am reminded of an adventure from my first 3E campaign:
<snip adventure details>
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.
Good story.
And it sounds pretty "story now" to me. I agree with Ron Edwards that narrativist play is more common than is often thought, and that it's a mistake to get to hung up on how deep the thematic material is or how self-conscious the play group is in putting into play and working with it. For me, rather than looking at self-consciousness, I think about all the typical ways that the play in question would be shut down by simulationist priorities - "You're not playing your character properly" or "You're violating your alignment" would be the standard shutdown techniques for the scenario you describe.
Here are some quotes from
here and
here:
Narrativist character creation in some games requires a fair amount of back-story, just as some Simulationist play does, but in the former, it's about establishing a chassis for conflict, metagame, and reward, and in the latter, it's about Coloring the character and providing oppportunities for GM-created hooks. I rank the conflict between these concepts, during play, among the highest-risk situations for the survival of a gaming group. Strategies to resolve this conflict, whether social or design-oriented, are currently not well-developed in the hobby...
In Simulationist play, morality cannot be imposed by the player or, except as the representative of the imagined world, by the GM. Theme is already part of the cosmos; it's not produced by metagame decisions. Morality, when it's involved, is "how it is" in the game-world, and even its shifts occur along defined, engine-driven parameters. The GM and players buy into this framework in order to play at all...
when you-as-player get proactive about an emotional thematic issue, poof, you're out of Sim. Whereas enjoying the in-game system activity of a thematic issue is perfectly do-able in Sim, without that proactivity being necessary...
[There are r]ole-players who play Narrativist already, but who think what I'm describing must be harder or more abstract than it is. Since they can identify Exploration of Character and Situation in their play preferences, they think they must be playing Simulationist. "That's Narrativist? But we do that, using a plain old well-known role-playing game - it can't be Narrativist!"
Your story also reminds me of something that happened early in my career as a Rolemaster GM. In Rolemaster most victories in combat are by disablement of the enemy rather than killing - because of the way concussion hits and crits work in that system - but there is always the chance of killing an enemy with a high crit roll. So it wasn't until many sessions in that the paladin PC killed his first human in combat. The player has his PC go into a grieving period, and head out into the wilderness to meditate. I rolled a random encounter (as the rules told me to!) and, via the slightly bizarre collection of tables that govern RM random encounters, ended up rolling a moderarely low level demon.
I had the demon come up to the meditating paladin and start taunting him about his moral failings in having killed a man. I assumed that the player would respond by having his PC attackg the demon and regain confidence in himself, on the grounds that no demon can speak the truth. But instead the player took the view that the demon was a punishment sent by his god, and therefore took no defensive actions as the demon proceeded to pummel him into unconsciouness - at which point I decided that it got bored, realising that this paladin's spirit wasn't going to be broken, and therefore left him alone.
This was in 1990, and I didn't have any terminology to describe the difference between the game I was running - and enjoying running and playing in - and the 2nd ed AD&D game from which I was a refugee, and the games similar to that that were going on around me. (I'd now describe them as moderately dysfunctional high concept simulationism - moderately dysfunctional because of the excessive and clunky GM force being used to keep the exploration on topic). And at that time I also prioritised a tight correlation between system and gameworld much more than I do now (hence, in part, my choice of RM as a system) - in practice, that early RM game was probably as much purist-for-system as narrativist in its focus. But RM doesn't have alignment or moral "reality" built into the system as part of its simulationist mechanics, and I think this - together with the approach to play that we all took as a group - made it easier to play in a narrativist fashion without having the rulebooks jump up at us to tell us that we were doing it wrong.
Well, it can and it can't be formed out of their actions. It all depends on if the players even want to get involved in that overarching plot or not. But it is there because it WILL effect the players somehow simply because it will effect the entire campaign to some degree. I always include some sort of "bigger than you" plot or scheme for the players to encounter. Why? Because thats what good stories are about. If I wrote campaigns about players doing their laundry and looking for work between sparse "adventure" the game would sorta suck dont you think?
I can imagine a campaign wrought completely on the fly from whole cloth, but unless the players are really driven and focused, it would quickly get stale. In this case, the players went about flying from job to job and every now and then would brush up against this meta plot. A little taste here and there. It was the "big hook" and they were nibblign on it as they sandboxed the universe. 
