Mearls' "Stop, Thief!" Article

[UngeheuerLich]

[MENTION=27160]Balesir[/MENTION]:

I have to apologize too... i am having a very thin skin right now...

I like the gamist aproach of 4e. And Metagaming is in most cases undeirable... the good thing is: Many things in 4e have good ingame reasons to do so, and chances to accomplish your goals are (the DCs, now, after 2 erratas) very well.

Making strategicallly sound decisions is not necessarily metagaming, waiting for the leader to grant you a bonus to hit is also no metagaming... your character has good reasons to wait for the prayer...

On the other hand, i hate thinking along the lines of:

"Hmmh, it would be a good decision to disarm the foe instead of killing him... but i don´t have the feat, so i have to eat an attack of opportunity, and then i need to win the opposed check..."

Actually I would also hate:
"My thief would try to find traps, but my chances are so slim, that i better send the fighter, because he has the highest hp... (or for that matter, the cleric, because he is the most perceptive)"

Rules of 4e generally enable the character, which is why I like this edition. Once I got behind that kind of thinking, in the 3.0 or 3.5 era - lowering DCs to 10, 15 and 20 in general and making heavy use of take 10 and take 20 - the game was much more fun for level 1 characters, and suddenly skill points were abundant.

Not beeing able to disarm or trip by default is better than have a rule which you need to analyze so you notice that it actually means: no disarm here...
So I can accept the gamist approach here.

If you however had a power, that you can combine with terrain to make a trip attemt...
...like using mage hand to pull the rag away under your opponents feet,not thinking about chances for failure... it is a completely different matter...

(if you have in game reasons to assume failure it is no metagaiming at all)

 

[P1NBACK]

Not beeing able to disarm or trip by default is better than have a rule which you need to analyze so you notice that it actually means: no disarm here...
So I can accept the gamist approach here.

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with disarm. What happened was, the devs created a problem with disarm by forcing items into being "required" for the maths. Therefore, disarm suddenly becomes "tainted" because it means changing the math dynamic in the game.

Poor design.

Very poor design.

 

[mneme]

Pinback: Indeed. Like I said in another thread a while back, +X weapons (or armor, or, now, neck) are a sacred cow.

 

[D'karr]

It seems you see this as a flaw, but for the style of play I enjoy with D&D I don't. That the majority of actions the PCs perform are covered by the standard rule elements rather than the guidelines for adding new rules I see as good rules design for this type of game, not bad.

Just to clarify I didn't call it a flaw, and I don't see it as a flaw. Page 42 of the DMG and pages 101-109 of the DMB are both part of the standard rules.

The problem I described is not that the design is bad either. As I mentioned I believe that the basic rules of 4e are very good exactly because they are well designed.

The problem I describe is when players self-restrict to a subset of the standard rules and completely obviate others that can be applicable and open up more avenues for them. If a player restricts himself to only performing move actions on his turn, and never used standard, minor or immediate actions he would be missing a plethora of possibilities. When players limit themselves only to the things written on their character sheet they fall into the same trap. A D&D character is only limited by the imagination/creativity of the player. The page 42 rules are part of the rules design exactly to allow that imagination/creativity to be used, and still remain within the balance of that design. They open up entire highways of actions that cannot simply be described in the Powers Mechanic.

The designers of 4e wanted to have more options/action within the design space and they provided a very good way to do more. What they did not provide was an easy to remember way to "know you can" do more. I just added one thing that allows players to know they can do more.

 

[Herschel]

Like I said, you can "tell a story" over the Monopoly game, but it's not roleplaying (by my definition).

Over Monopoly, no, but Monopoly isn't all boardgames. In something like Akham Horror it works just fine. Instead of a DM you have an end goal and whatever monster is drawn. If I'm playing Mike McGlynn I'm dusting freaks so someone with sanity can close gates. I can play that role easy enough or I can just roll the dice. It works either way.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't think it is dismissive at all. I think it gets at the heart of the thing. RP is independent of the rules being used at the table, if any. Now, you can say that a game MUST allow for effectively unlimited options before you have RP, but many of us will have to disagree there. If I play a game of chess and I play it as an RPG what would I be doing? I'd be considering the motives and personality of my 'characters' (the pieces) and playing a game where I make moves in the game according to what I imagine their motives etc are. To me that's RP, definitionally. The rules of the game aren't IMPEDING that, they're just defining the options available in that world.

Now, in a dedicated RPG the rules serve a somewhat different purpose, they provide a means of adjudicating conflicts in the game, not to define the totality of options, so there's a significant difference, but the extent and thoroughness of those rules isn't limiting anyone's options.

Presentation is a somewhat different issue. I think what is being said here is that the PRESENTATION of 4e, as an example, is prone to stultifying people's thinking. Personally I haven't really seen that. I can't speak for anyone else's experience though. My feeling is that 1e's rules were MORE stultifying than the 4e rules are. Many of the mechanics were close to unworkable and in many cases effectively removed options from consideration. The thief with his 10% chance to hide in shadows was stultifying, no player would make a plan that involved hiding because it was so unreliable it would be a terrible plan (and contrary to some people's assertions a 1e thief only got to a reliable level with most of its abilities at quite high levels and didn't achieve those levels any faster than other classes due to the arithmetic progression of XP tables). Worse even than that the rules effectively disallowed ANY non-thief to even entertain the option to hide in a shadow, even if it made sense.

I can understand feeling that 4e provides too many options, but at least they are high quality options with well considered mechanics that actually cater to DOING things instead of telling you what you can't do or how bad you are at it. IMHO that promotes RP more effectively than the minimalist but largely broken 1e rules.

 

[P1NBACK]

Over Monopoly, no, but Monopoly isn't all boardgames. In something like Akham Horror it works just fine. Instead of a DM you have an end goal and whatever monster is drawn. If I'm playing Mike McGlynn I'm dusting freaks so someone with sanity can close gates. I can play that role easy enough or I can just roll the dice. It works either way.

Yeah, and I can "play the role" of the banker who goes 2d6 spaces and pays rent every time he lands on someone else's property.

Seriously. If we can't agree on this basic principle of roleplaying, it's no wonder we disagree.

I'm fine with that.

 

[P1NBACK]

If I play a game of chess and I play it as an RPG what would I be doing? I'd be considering the motives and personality of my 'characters' (the pieces) and playing a game where I make moves in the game according to what I imagine their motives etc are. To me that's RP, definitionally.

Great. How do you do that when you are "roleplaying" the White Knight who decides to turn against the White King and join the Black King's side?

You fundamentally have to break Chess' rules for this to happen. Fundamentally. Hence, Chess is not a roleplaying game.

How this is up for debate is beyond me...

 

[Herschel]

Yeah, and I can "play the role" of the banker who goes 2d6 spaces and pays rent every time he lands on someone else's property.

Seriously. If we can't agree on this basic principle of roleplaying, it's no wonder we disagree.

I'm fine with that.

I think there's a big difference in those two games though, just as an example.

Monopoly is essentially a stripped-down, straight competitive game. It's mano-a-mano.

Arkham is not only a more complex game, it's a cooperative game. The cooperative portion is a huge factor. It's also based around stories and a mythology. I play a character, not a thimble.

The rules of the game are fairly straight-forward, but is it really that much different than a "railroad" RPG module by a RAW-obsessed DM?

A lot depends on what you want whatever game you play to be and how obsessed you are going to be over rules. While it does go kaput if a boardgame turns in to Calvinball, there's still a lot of room for story even in some of those. The clear delineation between game types is rather blurred, for many reasons. I don't mind wielding the eraser myself when it makes something more fun.

Would it be my first choice for roleplaying? No way in heck, but when the group is right it can morph in to an RPG-type experience.

 

[Aenghus]

For me a good balanced set of rules improves roleplay. There is a relatively open and transparent model of how the world works, everyone gets a large variety of actions without having to step outside the box, there is less arguments and wheedling the DM for advantage or special privilege.

I think actions stepping outside the box should be uncommon. Wanting to do it too much is a symptom of bad rules, like in Mearls example (or a weak DM, but we won't go there). By being uncommon, going outside the box should feel special and unusual.

One reason for my opinion is that prefer to see a direct correlation between the rules representation of the game setting and the world itself. Rules aren't perfect and some houserules may be needed to tweak things, but by and large the rules describe the game world for me. I don't rules as an enemy to be wrestled, or something obfuscating the truth of the gameworld.

In any case I don't see a huge amount of roleplaying in combat scenes, in any system, and the bulk of 4e rules are about combat. I really think roleplaying is something that happens if the players and referee want it to, with a fair degree of independence from the rules used.

I know some other people have a concept of their setting more or less independent from the rules they are using. I don't really understand this point of view, though it's as valid as any other viewpoint.