Mearls' "Stop, Thief!" Article

[Journeymanmage]

.... I'm not saying going out and playing <The Game that shall not be named> is going to help, but playing earlier editions of D&D and similar systems can be pretty instructive.

I've heard reference to "that game" and that "it shall not be named".

as to the OP:
The rules are a framework for playing the game. You (the gms/players) then try to fill in the rest and see what works for you.

 

[LostSoul]

ANY amount of the fiction can be made relevant to action resolution. I can't speak for others, but my position has always been that the players and DM will decide exactly how and when the fiction has an affect on the mechanics. The rules cover the typical situations and generally form the basis for further adjudication. Some people might enjoy the rules aspect of the game more and just say "the snake is prone, it suffers x,y,z" and others might say "well, we'll just apply a little salt to this, the snake is discomfited but we'll ignore x because it doesn't match what we're imagining." Really, all the gnashing of teeth on this subject I've heard over the last several years seems extraordinary to me. Every RPG works this way. Some rely on it more than others, but sooner or later you're going to make these choices.

Yeah. I'm too hard on 4E. There is a reason I chose to use it as the base for my hack. I saw the potential within the system to easily adjudicate any action. What I didn't see was much use of "actions the rules don't cover" in play.

The "fiction first" elements of my hack are an attempt to bring that potential to the forefront. I keep posting about the one specific way I used to do that because it's in my mind, and I think that's what causes me to debate one side of this issue too strongly.

I also agree with AbdulAlhazred's paragraph in the quoted post on the quality of the narrative. I never had the goal, in writing my hack, to bring about better "quality" of fiction; I don't know how I'd even attempt to do that!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah. I'm too hard on 4E. There is a reason I chose to use it as the base for my hack. I saw the potential within the system to easily adjudicate any action. What I didn't see was much use of "actions the rules don't cover" in play.

The "fiction first" elements of my hack are an attempt to bring that potential to the forefront. I keep posting about the one specific way I used to do that because it's in my mind, and I think that's what causes me to debate one side of this issue too strongly.

I also agree with AbdulAlhazred's paragraph in the quoted post on the quality of the narrative. I never had the goal, in writing my hack, to bring about better "quality" of fiction; I don't know how I'd even attempt to do that!

Oh, I think it is quite likely that different people are inspired by different tools to do better or worse art. I can throw a moderately interesting pot, but I can only paint a very bad oil painting. One day we'll just invent perfect telepresence and all play together (online just ain't the same, as much as it does help get me my RPG fix).

 

[wayne62682]

What I've noticed is that 4e and to a lesser extent 3.5 did feel like different games when in combat and out of combat. I remember even in 3.5 having the "board game mentality" only when we broke out the minis and drew a battle map because the rules of the game encouraged that type of thought since IMO you had to think in those terms to be effective and it was distinctly less optimal to not take it into consideration.

For instance, in 3.5 and now it's optimal to count squares in the right fashion to let you move without provoking opportunity attacks; you *could* just move forward but you put yourself at unnecessary risk to do so. 4e is more guilty of this since even at the power level it focuses on the metagame of "squares" and conditions, but this isn't a new indictment. The last version of D&D to really support the fiction and the narrative was 2nd edition pre-Combat & Tactics, because even in combat it was entirely abstract. You could just say "I rush up to the Orc and hit him with my axe" and it was largely irrelevant how you got up to him, as long as it was in reason. Starting with 3rd edition you had to be aware of the "how" and not just the "what" because the "how" had a distinctive effect.

To be honest as much as I enjoy 4e, and enjoyed 3.5 before it, as as a result of the vast choices in combat, I do sometimes miss the abstract days of 2e where there wasn't such a rules-centric focus at the combat level (although I don't miss the "DM as Tyrant" aspect). However, the overall focus on combat as a mini-game isn't something completely new to 4e, although 4e has focused the most on it.

 

[pemerton]

terrain hazards which occur when you enter a space as "something which happens in the fiction and is constrained by the fiction" happen in Snakes & Ladders, too. That seems to lend support to P1NBACK's post

My drawing a contrast between the facing/prone issue, and the movement over the battlefield issue, is very deliberate. Accepting AbdulAlhazred's point that this is at best a generalisation of tendency, it is true as a general rule that 4e is indifferent to the fiction of facing etc. Just as AD&D (like 4e) is, as a general rule, mechanically indifferent to whether or not a PC is left or right handed (though a post in the Dragon magazine Forum somewhere around issue 90 to 100 suggested a way of overcoming this mechanical indifference). I think AbdulAlhazred is right that, even if a given piece of fiction may in principle become salient at any time, in most RPGs for most of the time quite a bit of the fiction is merely colour.

But 4e is very obviously not indifferent to the fiction of terrain on a battlefield. Terrain on a 4e battlefield is a fictional element that PCs routinely interact with as the players constitute a shared imaginative space with respect to it, and thereby generate consequences for the mechanics (cover, lighting, distance, concealment, etc).

The comparison of this to Snakes and Ladders is, I think, no more apt than comparison of 1st ed AD&D stronghold building to Monopoly (which is to say, in my view, not very apt). I don't think Snakes and Ladders supports players trying to disintegrate the snakes, or climb back up them. When the focus is on terrain, rather than facing and body shape, I think that 4e demonstrates precisely the traits that P1NBACK is using to distinguish a RPG from a board game.

Back in the day I was a fan of "realistic" combat systems.

<snip>

Then I saw some professional recreators fighting with bastard swords in the style they had recreated from medieval fighting manuals. I suddenly realised that just about everything I had been assuming about how fighting with such swords worked was wrong.

<snip>

My lesson from this is that we all have a picture, a model in our minds, that is vast and complex and represents how we think the "real" world works. But it's not necessarily accurate for any specific case - and, overall, it's most definitely not accurate for all cases. It's an aesthetic.

Balesir's point about expert knowledge and aesthetics is also something I find interesting.

LostSoul's posts about 4e before he started running his hack taught me a good chunk of what I know about how to run it. His posts since he started running his hack are very interesting too, but are in some ways less useful to me because I don't know much about positioning in combat and have no particular interest in improving my understanding. For me it is just colour, and I'm quite happy that way.

On the other hand, many RPGs treat politics, society, religion, ethics and myth as just colour. But this is the subject matter that I do care about, and that is a good chunk of what actually appeals to me about fantasy RPGing. This is where my aesthetic sensibility and my expertise overlap. This is what my game tends to focus on. The function of combat, for me, is to be a locus of and representation of conflict (just as the classic Hulk comics from the 70s are about the Freudian conflict theory of the mind, although they use 4-colour punch ups to represent this). Given this, I'm somewhat indifferent to how the fiction treats or responds to facing, or handedness. 4e's emphasis on terrain, on the other hand, gives me easy material to work with - to give some very obvious examples, it makes it easy to set up situations where rescue scenarios, or "Do I move myself into this dangerous situation?" scenarios, can be vividly brought to life. It also supports party play in combat - whether that's party harmony or party conflict - very nicely, because physical proximity/separation is an immediately accessible and interesting aspect of interpersonal interaction.

There are other games that could also give me what I want, I'm sure, and in certain respects might be even better (though perhaps in others not as strong). But the notion that fiction, and fictional positioning, are irrelevant to 4e because facing, body shape, etc typically don't have a mechanical impact, is one that I really can't agree with.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Well, in all honesty pemerton, I don't think P1NBACK is really implying that 4e is a board game. I think he's arguing there is some kind of continuum where one direction is 'less RP and more reliance on game mechanics' and the other direction is the opposite.

I don't hold with that personally. I think instead there's a continuum from more flexible and open-ended rules to more closed and fixed rules. Either type can incorporate RP, but the quality of choice and ease of identification with a character will be greater in the more open case. I just don't think openness of the rules is gated by how many rules there are, but by whether or not you have access to a generalized resolution mechanism. Chess doesn't have that, ALL classic RPGs have it to the extent that they have at least an implicit 'rule 0'. Some games go a step further and have something like 'page 42'. Finally you have a variation between games with very few precise rules and abstract representations, like Sorcerer, and something like 4e which has some very precise rules and concrete representations. That last variance definitely plays to different player preferences and may encourage a player to engage in somewhat different styles of play. I'm just not at all convinced that RP is fundamentally different in either one. In fact I'd postulate that once the rules are open-ended that RP style and rules style are largely decoupled.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Whereas, I understood him to be claiming that some methods of rules/fiction interaction tend to encourage role-playing more than others. I.e., the more the board becomes the fictional space (rather than the less it is a representative, if even used, of a shared fictional space), the more removed the characters become.

Not only does the 4e ruleset seem to focus on the board more than any previous version of the game (unless you count 2e's Combat System, which I would claim has the same problem), but the arguments related to 4e consistently centre around the idea that the rules should take primacy over the fiction.

When the statement of a character's action is intended to be both (a) what is occurring in the rules and (b) what is occurring in the fiction, as is the case with "I attack" or "I attempt to disarm", role-playing identification is reinforced.

When the statement of a character's action is decoupled from what is occurring in the fiction, role-playing identification is to some degree disengaged as well. "I use power X. I miss, doing Y damage. Well, it isn't really a miss, or isn't really damage, is it?" or "I use power Z. The snake takes W damage and is knocked prone. How can it be knocked prone? Well, what I really did was flip it on it's back....."

YMMV.


RC

 

[pemerton]

Well, in all honesty pemerton, I don't think P1NBACK is really implying that 4e is a board game.

I entirely agree with this - P1NBACK introduced the board games point to explain the idea of a roleplaying game, but not to label 4e as one. Like I said on my first post on this thread, I tend to agree with P1NBACK, although on the particular issue about fiction and battlegrid I think we've had different experiences. I think my main point of disagreement with P1NBACK (and also LostSoul) is as to where the issue with 4e and fictional positioning lies - they think it's in the mechanics - especially the battlegrid mechanics - whereas I think it's in the guidelines for playing the game.

 

[Dausuul]

I entirely agree with this - P1NBACK introduced the board games point to explain the idea of a roleplaying game, but not to label 4e as one. Like I said on my first post on this thread, I tend to agree with P1NBACK, although on the particular issue about fiction and battlegrid I think we've had different experiences. I think my main point of disagreement with P1NBACK (and also LostSoul) is as to where the issue with 4e and fictional positioning lies - they think it's in the mechanics - especially the battlegrid mechanics - whereas I think it's in the guidelines for playing the game.

I'd put it somewhere in between, but leaning toward the mechanics, because my experience--both as a gamer and as a software developer--is that hardly anybody reads guidelines, and those who read them seldom remember them. People default to doing things the easy way; if the easiest way to do combat is to treat the battlemat like a board game, that's what most players will do, even if the books are plastered with warnings saying "THIS IS NOT THE WAY!" Conversely, if the easiest way to do combat requires imagining a fictional reality, players will do that instead.

One can, of course, overcome this tendency; either by a sustained effort (usually on the part of the DM), or by having players so accustomed to a different style of play that they bring those habits into 4E. But in the absence of either of these, I think board-gamey play is the most likely outcome.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Whereas, I understood him to be claiming that some methods of rules/fiction interaction tend to encourage role-playing more than others.

Well, whether it's that or positing a continuum of RP-dependence on one end and rules-dependence on the other, I can't agree.

RP is independent of rules. Completely. You can RP with no rules. You can RP while playing Monopoly. The ability of a gme to encourage RP comes down to little more than having the book say 'please role-play, this is a role-playing game, afterall' somewhere. A game can positively whine and lecture at you about the importance of RP, or it can barely deign to mention it. But, the actual mechanics don't make a bit of difference - unless you want to think they do, then, of course, they may make a difference to you. Even mechanics that provide for RP 'bonuses' or 'rewards' just encourage lip-service to RP, not the real thing (depending on the enclination of the DM judging whether the award is received, they could even discourage many sorts of RP).

Where rules do make a difference is in charater-definition. If a ruleset gives you a lot of freedom to create a character that's close to your concept, you can RP /that/ character. If the rules are klunkier, you may end up RPing a character that's notably different from the one you had in mind - but you can still RP it all you want.


So to everyone who says 'such and such system encourages/discourages RP,' no, it doesn't. If you hate a system, maybe you're so distracted by hating it that you can't get your RP on, and if you like a system, maybe that added comfort makes it easier to get into an RP grove.