Please don't do this... don't substitute your assumptions for how I think the game plays for what I've really said. I've said that 4e is, IMO, designed to be based around gamist play. That is not to say it is relentless or monistic... as neither of those are a necessary quality of gamist based play.
I didn't mean to wrongly attribute opinions to you - my reference to "relentless monism" wasn't meant to be a general characterisation of gamist play, but to the impression I had received from your descriptions upthread of the imperatives of a certain, seeminlgy narrow, optimisation in both build and play of 4e PCs. I thought that you yourself said something along the lines of 4e being very narrow in the range of viable play, and I thought your reference to Irontooth was meant to reinforce your point.
If I've misunderstood you, it's not deliberate.
I'm not sure what you mean here. Instead of parsing a single sentence out of a comment by Balesir, why not just state simply and concisely why you don't think the reward rules support gamism?
I'm not meaning to be obtuse - I thought that you'd participated in this discussion on other, earlier threads (the various ones Mercurius started a few months ago). I may have misremembered - those threads tend to blur into one big mass in my memory.
In 4e, XP is awarded for winning combat encounters (which the rules are strongly designed to support occurring), for participating in skill challenges (this is the Rules Compendium update), for completing quests (which, as per the DMG, are encouraged to be player-initiated), and for passing time in story-propelling roleplaying (as per the DMG 2).
The typical combat is known to take around an hour, thereby awarding XP of one level-appropriate monster per 12 minutes of play. The DMG 2 award is at the same amount of XP per 15 minutes of play. Skill challenges can be a bit varied in the time they take to resolve, but half-an-hour for a typical complexity 2 or 3 challenge (6 to 8 successes before 3 failures) is probably in the right ballpark. So that's about the same XP reward per 10 to 15 minutes of play.
What, then, earns XP in 4e? Basically,
playing the game - advancing the storyline - at a rate of about 4 to 5 monster's worth of XP per hour (which makes for a base progression rate, for a party of 5, of about one level per 10 hours of play). And the more that in advancing the storyline one achieves quests (which are encouraged to be player-defined), the more XP per unit time will be received.
This doesn't look to me much like AD&D-style gamism, where XP rewards are intended to be highly responsive to the details of player choices, and a reward for "skillful play". Rather, it looks to me as if XP awards in 4e are intended to produce level-gains, and a resulting change in colour (assuming a GM is using something like the standard monsters out of the published sources), that means that the campaign over all will tell some particular variant of "the story of D&D", where players start out dealing with kobolds and end up dealing with Tiamat.
This also fits, in my mind, with the logic of paragon paths and epic destinies, which seem pretty clearly not to be intended as rewards for good play, but rather as tools to be used in driving the story forward (eg Heroes of Shadow, page 14, under the heading "Epic Destiny": "After twenty levels of adventure, it's time for you to assume your epic destiny and shape your legend in the universe forevermore. . . your choice of destiny offers extraordinary abilities that represent your journey toward your ultimate fate as you define it.").
Now consider the 4e approach to treasure: it is based on paced, level-appropriate parcels, with items determined in accordance with player wishlists. That is, the game treats treasure gain as an aspect of character-building - it is not a reward for good play any more than gaining levels, feats and powers is a reward for good play.
The interaction of the encounter-building guidelines and the treasure guidelines further militates against AD&D-style gamism, because it militates against "placed encounters": because XP-by-level for monsters doubles every four levels, but treasure values quintuple every five levels, the treasure placed with an encounter will fall behind level-appropriateness far quicker than will the XP value of that encounter. In practice, then, to run the game as the DMG guidelines suggest, a GM has to adjust the treasure awards associated with a given encounter if the party will be of higher level than anticipated when they come to it, in order to ensure that treasure awards are keeping pace with XP awards.
Further features of the game that tell against gamist play is the advice on handling absent players and PC death - award XP even to PCs of absent players (very anti-Gygaxian!) and bring in new PCs at the party level (so PC death is not a mechanical penalty).
The only respect in which 4e supports gamist play, as far as I can see, is the sense that Balesir has articulated on this (I think) and other threads: as level increases, PC complexity increases, and so the game poses the very low-key challenge of "OK, you could handle things at that level of complexity, but what about now when we amp it all up?"
It could also be played as merely a skirmish game rather than a RPG, with the story elements as mere colour, but I don't see any explicit support for this in the rulebooks - although I gather in practice this sort of play might be common. But like I posted upthread (in reply to P1NBACK), I regard this as drifting from the written rules and guidelines, and therefore doubt that changing the rules and guidelines will discourage such drift (other than, perhaps, by encouraging such players to find a new skirmish game).
I remember well how some folks defended 4e as not being "easier" than earlier editions.
Strange how 4e is both not "easier" and at the same time "less forgiving of suboptimal play" (paraphrases mine).
The paraphrase is a bit loose. My point is that 4e (i) allows players to build PCs who can succeed by adopting approaches that, in the real world, would be manifestly suboptimal (such as bringing a knife to a gun fight), and (ii) allows players to build PCs who are quite flexible and resilient in actual play, such that
there is no single optimal path for success.
I think that classic AD&D tends to make (ii) true but (i) false.
I think that Rolemaster tends to make both (i) and (ii) false. My feeling, based on a lot less play experience, is that sim-heavy points-buy games like GURPS and HERO will tend in this direction also, although they may permit certain builds that allow for (i) (eg presumably in Champions it is possible to build Hawkeye or Green Arrow).
I haven't played enough 3E to have firm views, but my impression is that it tends to make (i) false, and that at least for martial PCs it tends to make (ii) false also. To the extent that, at mid-to-high levels, it strongly encourages buff-teleport-ambush style play, that tells against (ii) across the board.
I think these features of various rulessets are orthogonal to the question of whether play is easy or not. I don't think 4e tactical play is especially forgiving of inattentiveness, for example, and a player who tries to play a wizard as a defender without thinking hard about what's going on probably won't have much luck with it.
But a player whose wizard PC has access to Thunderwave (close blast with push), Wall of Fire (a whole lot of auto-damage) and Expeditious retreat (a whole lot of shift) - just to pick a few powers I'm familiar with from my own game - has a wide range of options open to him/her. There is no "single optimal path" in general, nor even for any given encounter, at least most of the time. This significant scope for player decision-making, which is pretty orthogonal to the question of success or failure (because the decision is across a rather open-ended range of viable choices), is what I find makes the game interesting.
But it doesn't follow that, because there is an open-ended range of viable choices, that there is not also a wide range of non-viable choices (the in-play analogues of LostSoul's example of an invalid choice for PC-building).
I've played with M:TG players who not only can't build a tournament-viable deck, but who can barely build a casual-play viable deck. And who when given a viable deck to play, are unable to play it. These sorts of people might have trouble with 4e, I guess. But the fact that 4e presupposes a certain minimal competence at a certain sort of tactical gameplay doesn't mean that this has to be the
point of play. As I've set out at some length earlier in this post, I don't think the game is particularly well-designed to support that sort of gamist play.
Like I said upthread, I see the tactics in 4e as a means, not an end. The fact that the game
includes this means is one reason why I'm GMing 4e and not HeroQuest.
4e has a lever for setting the difficulty of a challenge... set it low and now all of a sudden, PC's aren't punished for sub-optimal builds and 4e is so much more forgiving and open to thematic play... set it at the high end of what they can handle and suddenly sub-optimal tactics and builds will get you killed with a quickness.
I think the issue of encounter difficulty - or, at least, numerical difficulty - is, again, somewhat orthogonal. The encounter I described upthread was, as I noted, a level 17 encounter. Here is the encounter roll:
Hobgoblin hand of Bane (10 elite soldier)
10 Hobgoblin warriors (9 minion soldier)
Hobgoblin beastmaster (7 controller (leader))
Spirehorn behemoth (9 elite brute)
Bugbear assassin (11 elite skirmisher)
Bugbear backstabber (9 skirmisher)
Bugbear strangler (10 controller)
Bugbear thug (10 brute)
Bugbear warrior (9 brute)
Tiefling heretic (10 artillery)
Tiefling occultist (12 controller)
Black Sun adept (10 elite controller (leader))
Twitch, imp (9 lurker)
Like I noted earlier, the majority, but not all, of these enemies are below PC level (eleventh). But the 10th to 12th level NPCs on their own make up 5400 XP, which is a slightly overloaded 14th level encounter.
The monsters are from a range of sources - MM, MM3, MV, Dragon Magazine Archive, FRCG. Defences, hit points and to-hit were all adjusted by me to reflect level advancement plus MM3 norms. Damage, and in some cases powers, were also adjusted by me to reflect those same norms.
And as I noted upthread, we are an Expertise-free group.
The party in question includes an elf ranger-cleric (not optimised beyond the obvious choices for an archer ranger like Twin Strike, Biting Volley and Attacks on the Run, with Greatbow Focus and Lethal Hunter), a human tome wizard (not optimised as described upthread), a tiefling CHA paladin (not optimised - he uses a +2 khopesh with Turathi weapon training but spent the combat fighting with a recently-discovered +3 shortsword, in order to learn more about it), a dwarf polearm fighter (somewhat optimised with Come and Get It, Deadly Draw, Polearm Gamble, War Priest paragon path) and a drow chaos sorcerer (the only fully-optimised PC in the party - Accurate Implement, Implement Focus, Dual Implement, Staff of Ruin, multi-class Cutthroat for extra Stealth chances and an extra Rattling Interrupt, etc).
One thing that I enjoyed about the encounter was that, even though it was fairly obvious to me from the get go that it was quite challenging, and even though this became obvious to the players pretty early on also, as the full range of forces arrayed against them (other than Twitch) became clear, it didn't force play onto any single predictable path. Unexpected things, that help build the story of the campaign and the stories of the individual PCs, kept happening: the sorcerer went out to face the bugbears expecting backup from his friends, but then got more-or-less abandoned due to miscommunication and dithering, and then ended up on the roof of a burning building where he went toe-to-toe with Twitch; the dwarf held the line against the bulk of the non-bugbear forces for two or three rounds on his own, and didn't even become bloodied; the wizard ended up nearly trapped inside a building by his own wall of fire, fighting off a bugbear and hobgoblins with his Sceptre of Erathis (a rod made out of 2 of the 7 parts) until the paladin came to help him; the ranger made perhaps half his attacks without the benefit of hunter's quarry, due to the difficulties of moving his behemoth into close enough range to use quarry; and so on.
I don't agree 4e is easier to DM for these outcomes... I think it gives a set of tools (with their own particular tradeoffs) that some people find easier to use in order to adjust the level of difficulty, just like others prefer Pathfinder/3.x's CR and EL... or even DM fiat.
Well, in judging what sort of play a system supports better or worse I can only speak from my own experience. Here is what it tells me.
A system in which death from a single blow - particularly a single suprise blow - is a distinct possibility - see, eg, RM, RQ, Classic Traveller, Classic D&D vs all very low-level PCs and against many thieves and MUs even into mid-levels - probably wouldn't permit the encounter I've described above. The dwarf couldn't have done what he did. Twitch would probably have killed the sorcerer. And the wizard would probably have died when trapped by his own wall of fire.
A system in which monster size is hugely determinative of combat prowess (RM and RQ exhibit this to some degree) also would play differently, because taking control of the Behemoth would become the overwhelmingly important consideration in winning the encounter, rather than one of a number of interesting and viable options.
This is not just about levels of difficulty. It's about making variuos sorts of choices viable or non-viable. In general, the more a system creates pressure to optimise build and tactics along real-world rational lines (ie pressure
not to bring a knife to a gunfight) then the more likely it is to create single best paths of action, I think, and therefore to reduce the likelihood of the sort of play I am looking for.
Heroquest gives you specific mechanics to enforce it's pacing advice (Level of difficulty is directly dependant upon how well or bad your party has already done) and thematic concerns (You are literally limitless in creating any character as long as it is genre appropriate... 4e doesn't.... DC is based on level not story concerns...character creation is limited to the available combat builds/roles that have been developed, and so on.
I agree that 4e is not identical to HeroQuest. But I don't think it's as different in the respects that you point to as you do.
On pacing - because 4e makes it very easy to set encounter difficulty, and therefore pacing not only across encounters but within encounters, encounters can be set up and resolved in a way that is directly responsive to pacing concerns. Robin Laws even gives some advice on how to do this (cribbed directly from his work on HQ) in DMG 2.
On limits in PC creation - I think WotC's business model is to sell us long lists of options rather than to create PC-build mechanics that don't require lists. (This is why, despite all the debate about the place of feats in the game, I don't believe that they'll drop feats, or at least not until they come up with some other element that supports the production and sale of long lists of options.) But those lists are pretty long. They cover a wide range of typical and unusual fantasy tropes.
And the choices made from those lists affect the way that a PC plays.
I think this speaks to a bigger issue I have with your ideas on 4e... they tend not to be supported in actual implementation of the game by the actual designers.
<snip>
the rules do stress building encounters as tests of tactics for the players. For the most part the DMG doesn't talk about designing an encounter in a thematic way it talks about designing it with the synergies of roles and monster powers in mind.
I agree with the last clause of the last sentence. But it doesn't talk about using these features to create "test of tactics" for the players. It talks about using them to make encounters that are interesting. Similarly with respect to the discussion of circular paths in DMG 2.
Here are some quotes:
Dynamic monster groups combined with interesting terrain and other features make for lively combat encounters. (DMG p 52)
The key to designing interesting and varied groups of monsters for an encounter lies in the monster roles . . . (DMG p 54)
Building an encounter is a matter of choosing threats appropriate to the characters and combining them in interesting and challenging ways. (DMG p 56)
An encounter that occurs in a small, bare dungeon room is hard to make memorable, no matter what the monsters in it are doing. To maximize the fun for everyone around the table, follow these guidelines when crafting the chambers, caverns, or battlefields for your encounters. (DMG p 60 - directly underneath this passage is the heading "Interesting Areas")
. . . terrain provides the context for an encounter. A mob of goblin archers is easy to defeat when only empty terrain lies between it and the party. Take the same goblins, put them on the opposite side of a wide chasm, and the characters face a much tougher challenge. (DMG p 60)
You’ll find encounters more dynamic and exciting when everyone changes position on their turn. (DMG 2 p 56)
The dominant motif here, for me, is
interest (liveliness, memorability). Challenge, where it is mentioned, seems to be envisaged as a means to that end.
AFAICT, the WotC 4e modules couldn't be farther from pemerton's preferred playstyle if they were shoved in a rocket and sent to Mongo. It is easier to find encounters in 1e where combat is not the optimal solution -- indeed, a whole module where combat is not the optimal solution -- than it is to find a 4e module where even a single encounter is centred around "conflict-via-combat driven thematic play, using traditional fantasy tropes".
Of course, I could be wrong. I haven't read every 4e modules. I look forward to reading of all the examples I missed.
Do majority of the modules from WotC center around "conflict-via-combat driven thematic play, using traditional fantasy tropes" or do they center around gamist challenge based play? I would argue it is gamist challenge based play.
I've never made any secret of my view that the 4e modules are, on the whole, at odds with the advice and examples in the rulebooks. Just to give one example, the Well of Demons (part of H2 Thunderspire Labyrinth) has a great circular path which the encounters, as written, do not exploit at all. (
Here I explain how I adjusted the map for the Chamber of Eyes, and the NPC/monster rollcall and behaviour for both the Chamber of Eyes and the Well of Demons, to make them into better encounters.)
But given that those modules don't even follow their own advice on designing encounter areas, the fact that they also have many boring story elements, plus a failure to successfully capitalise on their interesting story elements, I regard as evidence of little more than WotC's inability to produce a good module. (Contrast the campaign arcs in the Underdark and the Plane Above, which are full of good ideas about Torog, Erathis, Lolth, Tharizdun, journeying into deep myth (=heroquesting), etc, much of which I envisage becoming relevant as my game progresses into epic tier.)
WotC was equally capable of producing crappy modules in 3E. Bastion of Broken Souls is practically a poster child for a module that kills dead every interesting idea that it seems to want to enliven (an exiled god that does nothing but fight; an angel living gate who guards the only hope for humanity, who will do nothing but fight; a super-powerful dreamwitch who (from memory) will do nothing but fight; etc). I got a lot of good play out of Bastion of Broken Souls (in my second long-running RM campaign) but only by taking all its interesting story elements while completely ignoring its advice on how to use them. (As things turned out, the PCs befriended the exiled god and received significant assistance from him, they persuaded the angel to let herself be killed in order to open the gate, and they bargained with the dreamwitch in order to learn her secrets.)
Of the 4e modules I know, the one that comes closest to supporting my style of play is Heathen, which was in the first or second of the free Dungeon pdfs when 4e came out. It still has some obvious limitations, but at least has a serious go at linking theme, conflict-via-combat and fantasy tropes. Other modules that I have adapted in various degrees for my 4e game are Night's Dark Terror (for Moldvay/Cook D&D), Speaker in Dreams (for 3E) and Wonders out of Time (another d20 module). All offer varying degrees of interesting maps, scenarios and thematic material.
