Of course one could run 4E in a much more naturalistic way. Indeed, the later 4E was written much more that way, but the early 4E was very, very mechanical. Monsters had stat blocks and essentially no other information. The game made essentially no pretense to match up with a game world so while nothing stopped it, nothing really supported it either.
Thiis is obviously not true. I'll post two counter-examples, one from the PHB (p 37) and one from the MM (pp 135-36, 138, 140).
Dwarves
[sblock]Proudly proclaiming they were made from the earth itself, dwarves share many qualities with the rock they love. They are strong, hardy, and dependable. They value their ancestral traditions, which they preserve through the ages as fiercely as they defend the carved structures of their mountain homes.
Dwarves believe in the importance of clan ties and ancestry. They deeply respect their elders, and they honor long-dead clan founders and ancestral heroes. They place great value on wisdom and the experience of years, and most are polite to elders of any race.
More so than most other races, dwarves seek guidance and protection from the gods. They look to the divine for strength, hope, and inspiration, or they seek to propitiate cruel or destructive gods. Individual dwarves might be impious or openly heretical, but temples and shrines of some sort are found in almost every dwarven community. Dwarves revere Moradin as their creator, but individual dwarves honor those deities who hold sway over their vocations; warriors pray to Bahamut or Kord, architects to Erathis, and merchants to Avandra - or even to Tiamat, if a dwarf is consumed by the dwarven taste for wealth.
Dwarves never forget their enemies, either individuals who have wronged them or entire races of monsters who have done ill to their kind. Dwarves harbor a fierce hatred for orcs, which often inhabit the same mountainous areas that dwarves favor and which wreak periodic devastation on dwarf communities. Dwarves also despise giants and titans, because the dwarf race once labored as the giants’ slaves. They feel a mixture of pity and disgust toward those corrupted
dwarves who still have not freed themselves from the giants’ yoke - azers and galeb duhrs among them.
To a dwarf, it is a gift and a mark of deep respect to stand beside an ally in battle, and a sign of deepest loyalty to shield that ally from enemy attack. Dwarven legends honor many heroes who gave their lives to save their clans or their friends.[/sblock]
Goblins and relatives
[sblock]In common parlance, "goblin" refers to a specific sort of small, ill-tempered humanoid, but the word also refers to related beings of various sizes, such as bugbears and hobgoblins. Goblins are as prolific as humankind, but as a people, they’re less creative and more prone to warlike behavior.
Most goblins live in the wild places of the world, often underground, but they stay close enough to other humanoid settlements to prey on trade caravans and unwary travelers. Goblins form tribes, each ruled by a chieftain. The chieftain is usually the strongest member of the tribe, though some chieftains rely on guile more than martial strength.
Hobgoblins rule the most civilized goblin tribes, sometimes building small settlements and fortresses that rival those of human construction. Goblins and bugbears, left to their own devices, are more barbaric and less industrious than hobgoblins. Bugbears are dominant in a few mixed tribes, but hobgoblins tend to rise above their more brutish
cousins unless severely outnumbered.
A member of the goblin species has skin of yellow, orange, or red, often shading to brown. Its eyes have the same color variance; its hair is always dark. Big, pointed ears stick out from the sides of the head, and prominent sharp teeth sometimes jut from the mouth. Males have coarse body hair and might grow facial hair. . . .
Goblins' bellicose nature can be traced, in part, to their reverence for the god Bane, whom they see as the mightiest hobgoblin warchief in the cosmos. Some of Bane's exarchs are goblins. Maglubiyet, the Battle Lord, and Hruggek, the Master of Ambush, are most prominent among these. . . .
Hobgoblins once had an empire in which bugbears and goblins were their servants. This empire fell to internal strife and interference from otherworldly forces - perhaps the
fey, whom many goblins hate. . . .
Hobgoblins developed mundane and magical methods for taming and breeding beasts as guards, laborers, and soldiers. They have a knack for working with wolves and worgs, and some drake breeds owe their existence directly to hobgoblin meddling. All goblins carry on this tradition of domesticating beasts. . . .
Given their brutal magical traditions, hobgoblins might have created their cousins in ancient times: Bugbears served as elite warriors, and goblins worked as scouts and
infiltrators. The disintegration of hobgoblin power led to widespread and diverse sorts of goblin tribes. . . .
Big, tough goblins that love to fight, bugbears are the champions, picked guards, and muscle for more clever goblins.
Bugbears take whatever they want and bully others into doing their work. They hunt for food, eating any creature they can kill - including other goblins. . . .
A bugbear has little tolerance for talk and resorts to conversation only if the advantage of doing so is apparent. The most common situation is when foes are too strong to
challenge openly. . . .
Bugbears often decapitate their foes to honor their greatest hero, Hruggek, who is known to decapitate his enemies. . . .
Goblins are wicked, treacherous creatures that love plunder and cruelty. They're not very big or strong, but they're dangerous when they gang up.
Goblins breed quickly and can live most anywhere, from caves to ruins to a city's sewers. They survive by raiding and robbery, taking every usable item they can carry from their victims. . . .
Goblins are cowardly and tend to retreat or surrender when outmatched. They are fond of taking slaves and often become slaves themselves. . . .
Goblins sleep, eat, and spend leisure time in shared living areas. Only a leader has private chambers. A goblin lair is stinking and soiled, though easily defensible
and often riddled with simple traps designed to snare or kill intruders.
Hobgoblins live for war and bloodshed, killing or enslaving creatures weaker than themselves. More aggressive and organized than their goblin and bugbear cousins, they see all other creatures as lesser beings to be subjugated, and they reserve a special loathing for all fey, especially elves and eladrin.
Hobgoblins prize their possessions and make their own weapons and armor. Compared to their more brutish kin, they wear decent clothing and armor, and they maintain their
personal armaments with care. Hobgoblins prefer bold colors, especially crimson and black. . . .
Hobgoblins live to make war. A typical tribe includes a mixture of hobgoblins, goblins, and bugbears, with the mightiest hobgoblin holding the title of warchief.
A hobgoblin tribe is intensely protective of its reputation and military status. Meetings between groups from different tribes might turn violent if members aren't restrained. However, a common cause can make hobgoblin tribes set aside their differences for the glory of a great war led by a mighty leader.
Like their martial traditions, hobgoblin magical traditions severely test the limits of practitioners. Hobgoblin casters are expected to work well with hobgoblin soldiers.[/sblock]
Both of these obviusly provide far more setting information than is found in the AD&D PHB and MM. (I'm happy to post from those too if you like; and I'm happy to provide more 4e examples.)
pemerton said:
You do realise that the epic tier orcs in The Plane Above are Gruumsh's einheriar. They are not mortal orcs. That the paragon tier goblins in MM3 (I think) are drow goblin slaves, exposed to the radiations and travails of the Underdark. They are not ordinary goblins.
That's not true all the time, though, or if it is, a lot of time the reader is left to infer it.
What examples have you got in mind? Or are you just looking through the online database without actually reading all the descriptive text in the MMs?
(I assume that somewhere in all the 3E material there was a 15h level orc - an orc with lots of fighter or whatever levels. Is 4e forbidden from having such creatures? Or are you putting them to one side?)
4E was a highly player-facing design.
As opposed to one in which the GM plays solitaire?
Things that didn't face the players were, by and large, left out.
As I've already posted, nothing stop someone who has an AD&D MM using the demographic information about orcs and ogres in his/her 4e game.
In older versions of D&D, PCs tended to "graduate" out of monster types, so there was an implicit expectation that you'd stop fighting orcs entirely when you were, say, 5th or 7th level, those being left for lesser adventurers.
Huh? G1 has orcs in the Steading. D3 has bugbears on the encounter tables. Maybe what you say is true of 3E - I don't know that edition so well - but isn't true of the canonical AD&D adventures.
Furthermore, the design shifted focus pretty radically up the tiers, hence techniques like minionization, where the same monster (that poor ogre we keep bringing up) has different stats depending on the use in the fiction. The naturalism approach I've been explicating (not advocating!) generally comes at things from the opposite direction. The rules and stats provide a basic consistent (if illogical and often goofy) world while the other focuses on the fiction and shifts the tools to suit it, hoping to keep the action high, presumably.
The world in 4e is constant. As I've said, it's a type of mechanics fetishism to assume that you can't represent a consistent world while changing the combat stats for an ogre.
I don't know what you mean when you say
the design focus shifts pretty radically up the tiers - the design focus of 4e is in my experience tight and consistent at all levels of play - but you are correct that it focuses on the fiction. It is fiction first, not mechanics first.
The minion functions grossly differently than a non-minion, though. The minionized creature (who cares what it is) hits fairly hard, if highly consistently, and dies with one hit. The non-minionized creature, by contrast, has some staying power and often takes one or two hits but doesn't have the threat.
A minion actually doesn't hit that hard - eg a 10th level minion does the same average damage on a hit as a 1st level standard.; a 20th level minion does the same average damage on a hit as a 6th level stanard.; a 30th level minion does the same average damange on a hit as an 11th level standard.
In any event, these "functions" correspond to differences in the fiction: the reason the minion can be killed in one hit is because it is outclassed. That's not a mysterious notion. It might have a chance to get one whack in the meantime. That's not a mysterious notion either.
I raised the idea of Gygaxian naturalism as a way to understand why people are often bothered by minionization and other situational abstraction devices.
And I've made the point that "Gygaxian naturalism" has nothing to do with how combat stats are established for a monster. Gygaxian naturalism is about the "secondary reality" and it's naturalistic character. The issue [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] and (maybe) you have with minionisation isn't about naturalism but about a certain sort of prioritisation of mechanics over fiction - ie for whatever reason you can't think about how tough an ogre is compared to a town guard or a knight without first assigning AD&D-type stats to each of them.
It's as if JRRT couldn't have written LotR without first assinging AD&D stats to each principal character and then dicing it out!
In an RPG, the game rules are a big part of what creates the secondary reality.
Says who? That's not the case for Classic Traveller. That's not the case for Marvel Heroic RP. That's not the case for Call of Cthulhu. That's not the case for Tunnels & Trolls. That's not the case for HeroWars/Quest. That's not the case for Prince Valiant. That's not the case for AD&D Oriental Adventures.
Perhaps the most richly realised RPG setting of all time is Glorantha. It has multiple systems designed for play in it (RuneQuest and HeroWars/Quest).
In systems that propound simulationist-style mechanics, there are two main approaches to design. One is to have a very strong concept of the fiction, and use that a discipline for the assignment of mechanics. Luke Crane's Monster Burner for Burning Wheel provides an excellent account of this approach, and examples of it in application. On this approach, the designer - which may be GM, players or both working together - necessarily must have a strong sense of the secondary reality independent of the fiction.
The other approach is to build with an eye only on mechanics, and then to retrofit on some fiction. My view is that 3E exhibits quite a high degree of this. Some approaches to AD&D also exhibit it - I think this is often what people have in mind when they say that "D&D is its own genre".
In a sense, what I'm saying is that taking the manual stats as they are more or less base facts is how the game had always been. 4E turned that pretty much on its head.
Obviously. I already posted this somewhere upthread. But that has nothing to do with "naturalism" or "internal consistency". And thinking that it does has everything to do with mechanics fetishism - an inability to see beyond one particular type of RPG design.
It's one thing not to enjoy something - I don't really care for Tunnels & Trolls. But it's another thing to
misdescribe it because you don't like it. The idea that 4e has "1 hp" ogres who can't take the rought and tumble of their fellows is a misdescription. The idea that 4e doesn't and can't support a consistent fantasy world is a misdescription. And they're both pejorative misdescriptions at that.
Right, opponent-neutral description is, I think, how the old game (and 5E) was written. 4E's design premises totally turned that around. I understand that's what the system was designed to do. I just don't like it and prefer opponent-neutral description both as a player and DM.
Your preference, and @Landefan's, is crystal clear. I don't care about taste. I'm responding to a particular way of
framing that preference - that it is connected to consistency of the fiction, or to naturalism.
Those are the claims I'm disputing.
Neither approach is wrong but if you're more inclined towards naturalism, the 4E player-facing approach is... a big shift. I really disliked DMing it and I often felt as a player that I was guessing whether a monster was a minion or not, which was very meta thinking.
Whatever you mean by "naturalism" here, it is in my view clearly not what Grognardia meant by "Gygaxian naturalism", which uses the notion "naturalism" much as other fields of criticism use it. In that (typical) sense of
naturalism, AD&D apsires to a type of naturalism that (say) Tunnels & Trolls does not, just as LotR aspires to a greater degree of naturalism than The Hobbit, and both aspire to a greater degree of naturalism than a typical retelling of Little Red Riding Hood.
Wondering as a player whether or not a creature is a minion is basically analogous, in AD&D, to wondering about the HD of a newly-encountered creature (eg in D3, a drow might have 2HD, or be a cleric of double-digit levels); or in 3E wondering about whether or not the ogre has 10 levels of fighter on top of its base HD. Different tables use all sorts of different conventions around this. In all cases, the underlying question is "How tough is this thing". Thinking of it in terms of minion status is no more or less meta than thinking about it in terms of HD or levels. It has nothing to do with the aesthetics of naturalism.
Wondering as a GM how to mechanically set up a situation (eg how to stat an ogre) likewise has nothign to do with naturalism. There's no naturalistic answer to this question. Game mechanics are, by definition, artifice.
I just love it when someone online says "you're doing it wrong and let me tell you otherwise...."
Probalby nearly as much as I like it when someone tells me that my game is internally inconsistent and artificial rather than naturalistic and just like an MMO (that one's a pretty time-honoured comment in 4e discussions, of course). The difference perhaps being that the 4e books actually do have the advice I mentioned, which would mean that playing epic tier using heroic tier tropes and storylines is disregarding that advice.
A broader point: in 5e threads, when someone says "This isn't working for me", it's very common for many posters to point out how the game is meant to work, what the advice is, etc. That's even happened in this thread. But for some reason it seems to be regarded as improper for 4e proponents to point out that 4e, too, has pretty clear and robust advice on how it's meant to be played.
I have my own view on what the real issue is, and it's also come up in this thread: some people want to play a RPG in which the GM has domiant and even overwhelming control over how the fiction unfolds. Particularly for non-combat resolution. (The combat/non-combat contrast, I think, is nothing but an artefact of D&D's wargame origins, but has stuck very strongly.) 4e is not well-suited to that sort of game: it puts the players front and centre in shaping the fiction, by making their mechanical resources crystal clear; and it makes the role of the GM in framing situations for the players to engage crystal clear (eg via devices like miniosation). A 4e GM can worldbuild all s/he likes, but no 4e GM is going to think that
designing a combat encounter or
adjudicating a skill challengeis a piece of worldbuilding, because s/he has to make choices which are obviously about gameplay - what stats to use, what DCs to set, how to integrate a
player's conception of what makes sense in the fiction into the GM's own understanding of the fiction.
I think that that sort of approach to RPGing and GMing is completely consistent with classic dungeon design and adjudication, which was self-evidently about gameplay and not worldbuilding. But it's basically the opposite to the approach to RPGing and GMing that became dominant post-Dragonlance and almost ubiquitous from the late 80s through the 90s at least, and seems to be the received approach for playing 5e.
