D&D 5E New L&L for 22/1/13 D&D Next goals, part 3

[I'm A Banana]

It's possible you've been misled by the target line (Target: creatures in burst) but in this respect 4e follows the economy of OD&D and Moldvay Basic, both of which also describe the damage of Fireball as applying to creatures, and don't elaborate beyond that. 4e is like classic D&D in that respect - it relies on the participants at the table to join some of these dots between explicitly called out effect, keywords, and other consequences within the fiction.

It was enough for "DM to the stars" Chris Perkins to disallow the ability to affect objects. And it was enough for my DM when I played a pyromancer to put the kaibosh on me starting fires for anything other than damage with anything other than power-usage.

"Leave it up to the DM!" advice is sometimes like that. A 4e fireball might light a ganary on fire, if you're not in Chris Perkins' game, or my DMs game, and if what you're looking for in D&D is a consistent and believable world, 4e doesn't promise you that. You may get it, but it's not something the game is overly concerned about delivering. It's not one of 4e's goals in the way that it is a goal for previous editions. 4e says it might start the granary on fire, if the DM allows it, or it might not, if the DM doesn't think it'll be fun. Of course, saying that it's up to the DM already messes with some peoples' version of fun, and if the DM doesn't agree with the player on what's fun in the moment, it's a recipe for tension.

 

[pemerton]

when you award xp individually, the DM is charged with the extra responsibility of providing the same opportunities to everyone, which means she needs to adapt the adventures to the current PCs somewhat

I agree that individual progression changes the dynamic, but I don't think that it has to be "harder" for the GM, nor impose "extra responsibility". Provided the game has the requisite tools, it can just make GMing different.

For instance, if the game has the tools to empower players to drive their PCs' own stories, then the GM doesn't have to provide special opportunities, just adjudicate the players' attempts to have their PCs seize opportunities. This wouldn't fit with an "adventure path" playstyle, but could fit some forms of "old-school" playstyles, and also some "scene framing" playstyles too.

 

[pemerton]

In 4e, a genius-level intelligence makes far less a difference in the outcome of the game, simply because there are only so many permutations of slowing/pushing/pulling things around a chessboard you can achieve.

<snip>

In Pathfinder or AD&D or 3.5, the cool stuff you can do to affect the world around you with magic, is simply mind-boggling. What I meant about the "MMO" mindset is a template-based, cookie-cutter flow chart of predetermined, pre-approved outcomes to every decision point, every possible use of your powers (which usually implies just damage or you move this or that around the board). I'm just saying, I liked 4e but the strategy was rigid, like chess, and stifling after a while.

Obviously I don't know anything about your own 4e play experiences, but they're pretty different from mine. If you're interested, here's a link. You'll see some pretty creative stuff there that is a long way from "cookie-cutter flow chart of predetermined, pre-approvied outcomes" on a "chessboard". If a new edition of D&D doesn't have the mechanical sresource to allow those sorts of episodes to occur, it better be offering me something else pretty impressive!

I didn't like that a wizard can fly for maximum 5 minutes per day, at level 16. Eeek. Nerf city. That's one way to keep magic users' feet on the ground compared to melee classes, by literally keeping their feet on the ground.

I don't really see how this relates to creative or intelligent play. A flying MU can be fun, but there's nothing inherently creative about it.

 

[pemerton]

It was enough for "DM to the stars" Chris Perkins to disallow the ability to affect objects.

I'm not aware of the Chris Perkis episode involving a fireball.

The one I am familiar with involved adjudication of the drow's Darkfire ability; here are the relevant mechanics:

Target: One creature
Attack: [mental stat] +4 vs. Reflex
Hit: Until the end of your next turn, all attacks against the target have combat advantage, and the target cannot benefit from invisibility or concealment.​

For those familiar with pre-4e editions of the game, this is 4e's implementation of the classic drow Faerie Fire ability. It is not a damaging attack, and has no keywords other than and indication that it is an encounter power. It certainly doesn't have the fire keyword, because it produces no damage (fire or otherwise) and does not involve manipulating or creating any flames.

In the podcast I saw, one of the players tried to use Darkfire to burn down a door - I think they had misunderstood the power, perhaps being misled by its name. Perkins referred to the "target" line in explaining why the power had no effect - I assume he deemed this to be a more expedient path than taking the player through the power in detail. When you read Perkins' "DM Experience" column, there is no reason to think that he wouldn't let this power be used to (say) illuminate an object down a pit so one of the drow's allies lacking darkvision could see it and reach down for it.

A 4e fireball might light a ganary on fire, if you're not in Chris Perkins' game, or my DMs game, and if what you're looking for in D&D is a consistent and believable world, 4e doesn't promise you that. You may get it, but it's not something the game is overly concerned about delivering. It's not one of 4e's goals in the way that it is a goal for previous editions.

I personally think that what you say here is somewhat contradicted by, or at least in tension with, the following passages from the 4e DMG (pp 65-66):

Like characters, objects have hit points and defense scores (except for Will defense; see Object Immunities and Vulnerabilities, below). . .

Usually, it doesn’t matter what kind of attack you make against an object: damage is damage. However, there are a few exceptions.

All objects are immune to poison damage, psychic damage, and necrotic damage.

Objects don’t have a Will defense and are immune to attacks that target Will defense.

Some unusual materials might be particularly resistant to some or all kinds of damage. In addition, you might rule that some kinds of damage are particularly effective against certain objects and grant the object vulnerability to that damage type. For example, a gauzy curtain or a pile of dry papers might have vulnerability 5 to fire because any spark is likely to destroy it.​

It seems to me that the reason objects are invulnerable to Will attacks and psyhcic damage is that they lack minds, and that the reason they are invulnerable to poison and necrotic damage is that they lack functioning biological systems. (Which has an interesting implication that plants, in 4e, are not objects.) And the passage is quite explicit that the reason a pile of paper has vulnerability to fire is because of its flammability.

In all this I see nothing different from previous editions of D&D (though there is far more detail than in AD&D, OD&D or B/X), except that 4e is more precise in its use of keywords to correlate mechanics with fiction. The description of fireball as targetting creatures is simply (i) to set up the contrast with "enemies" (ie fireball can cause friendly fire) and (ii) economy - much like B/X, in which fireball is described as a burst of fire that damage creatures. But I've never heard of anyone playing B/X D&D having difficulty extrapolating fireball to the possibility of incinerating boats and libraries as well as goblins.

 

[I'm A Banana]

When you read Perkins' "DM Experience" column, there is no reason to think that he wouldn't let this power be used to (say) illuminate an object down a pit so one of the drow's allies lacking darkvision could see it and reach down for it.

I think your analysis is right, but his stated justification was still that the power doesn't affect objects because "objects" doesn't exist in the target line.

I've had several 4e DMs rule that a given power can't affect things not in its target line. I can't affect myself with a buff because the target line only says "allies." I can't burn down a bush with fire magic because the target line doesn't specify "objects." Perkins apparently wasn't an anomaly in his stated reasoning here.

I personally think that what you say here is somewhat contradicted by, or at least in tension with, the following passages from the 4e DMG (pp 65-66)

I think it'd be more accurate to say that those passages from the 4e DMG are in tension with the rest of the edition and a healthy chunk of those I've played it under. They're quite similar to the 3e passages on item damage, too, and just about as frequently used (ie: only hypothetically, never actually, IMXP).

 

[Tovec]

In all this I see nothing different from previous editions of D&D (though there is far more detail than in AD&D, OD&D or B/X), except that 4e is more precise in its use of keywords to correlate mechanics with fiction. The description of fireball as targetting creatures is simply (i) to set up the contrast with "enemies" (ie fireball can cause friendly fire) and (ii) economy - much like B/X, in which fireball is described as a burst of fire that damage creatures. But I've never heard of anyone playing B/X D&D having difficulty extrapolating fireball to the possibility of incinerating boats and libraries as well as goblins.

A. Did WotC MAKE AD&D, B/X or OD&D? No.
B. Does WotC make 4e? Yes.
C. Does WotC make Magic (The Gathering)? Yes.
D. In MtG does the card specify "target creature" or what not? Yes.
E. In MtG does that mean that it targets anything else in the room/battlefield? (Including equipped "artifacts"/creatures near it/objects on the floor?) No.
F. If a card is supposed to hit a person AND anything near it then would it say so? Yes. (Something like: Hits up to 3 enemy targets creatures for X damage. Destroys all artifacts on the battlefield. - or whatever.)

Therefore, is it possible that when WotC when making a similar product would assuming that NOT specifying something DOES exclude it? In my mind, if I'm wanting something TO target both a person (or people) and everything else in the room then I need to say it does - instead of assuming the DM will automatically allow it without it being said. I get that you like vague, but vague lacks consistency, and any semblance of order or reality. The DM may say it hits the paper on the floor, or they may say it excludes those papers because those papers are super important .. for some reason. Or may be the DM forgot the papers, because the spell doesn't specify, and now the players think the papers are important because they are fire-immune.

 

[pemerton]

OD&D doesn't do that, none of the spells refer to creatures - just areas effected. The stupid creature stuff turned up in basic iirc.

You're right - Men & Magic (p 25) just talks about dice of damage in proportion to level. But it also refers to Chainmail, and in Chainmail (p 31) fireball is described as affecting "men or creatures". There is no reference to damaging objects in the fireball rules.

That's not an objectin to OD&D or Chainmail - I think the game has always tended to specify damage and combat effects primariy by reference to creatures (the typical targets), relying on basic common sense for extrapolation to things like setting wooden towers on fire with a fireball.

A. Did WotC MAKE AD&D, B/X or OD&D? No.
B. Does WotC make 4e? Yes.

WotC made 3E using TSR staff - Monte Cook, Skip Williams among others.

4e was made using 3E staff (eg Andy Collins).

I think the discontinuities are not as great as you are implying.

C. Does WotC make Magic (The Gathering)? Yes.
D. In MtG does the card specify "target creature" or what not? Yes.
E. In MtG does that mean that it targets anything else in the room/battlefield? (Including equipped "artifacts"/creatures near it/objects on the floor?) No.
F. If a card is supposed to hit a person AND anything near it then would it say so? Yes. (Something like: Hits up to 3 enemy targets creatures for X damage. Destroys all artifacts on the battlefield. - or whatever.)

Therefore, is it possible that when WotC when making a similar product would assuming that NOT specifying something DOES exclude it?

I think there is not much evidence of M:TG design on 4e - certainly, there are a number of ways presentation could be tightened (and Essentials goes backwards as far as presentation is concerned).

As I said upthread, B/X and Chainmail - both of which long predate WotC - talk only about fireball damaging creatures. The assumption is that (i) creatures are the most common targets of attacks, and (ii) tables are capable of extrapolating that a huge ball of FIRE might set flammable things alight!

In my mind, if I'm wanting something TO target both a person (or people) and everything else in the room then I need to say it does - instead of assuming the DM will automatically allow it without it being said. I get that you like vague, but vague lacks consistency, and any semblance of order or reality. The DM may say it hits the paper on the floor, or they may say it excludes those papers because those papers are super important .. for some reason. Or may be the DM forgot the papers, because the spell doesn't specify, and now the players think the papers are important because they are fire-immune.

I find the AD&D and 3E specification of fireball radically overdetailed, and in places counterintuitive. I prefer the B/X, 4e and Rolemaster approach (Rolemaster just tells you which attack table to roll on).

There are many ways GMs can make errors or infelicities of adjudication - I don't know of any evidence that the detail in the AD&D fireball write up has struck major blows for better GMing!

 

[Hussar]

KM, I'd also point out that in the situation where your power didn't work, you were trying to set an entire tree on fire. The tree wasn't dead. And, in that case anyway, I think it had more to do with the DM not wanting to grind the game to a halt while he figured out what the heck a forest fire actually meant and how it should be resolved, than with any attention to setting fidelity.

Granted, I wasn't DMing that, but, I do recall the situation. I'd also point out that this was very, very early in everyone's 4e career. That particular event was what, two years ago, and we hadn't been playing 4e all that long at that point.

I imagine that if the same thing happened today, the answers might be different. For example, recently teleporting bad guys through walls, despite no line of sight. Not something that is technically allowed for in the rules, but, cool anyway.

 

[Gorgoroth]

I don't really see how this relates to creative or intelligent play. A flying MU can be fun, but there's nothing inherently creative about it.

Disagree wholeheartedly my good sir. The non-damaging utility spells I used in my 5 years playing an AD&D evoker were my most creative D&D years as a player, ever. And that includes roleplaying as well. See, damage spells were basically a death sentence in the realm we were in. Actually magic using in general was. Given these constraints, I found so many ways to influence events outside of pure damage that even as an evoker, I used more walls of X spells than fireballs or lightning bolts, although those were certainly punctuation on the cake. I prefer there to be serious in-world consequences to using your volumetric fireball, or aiming and calculating how many feet between you and that wall back there, so your lightning bolt doesn't hit you back but you can maximize the numbers of enemies killed. To this day, aside from Pathfinder, I find AD&D had the coolest spells. Pathfinder nerfed a lot of uber spells, in both duration and effect, but I still managed to have way more fun and creativity with my PF cleric than I did in earlier games and later on as a fighter type. I tend to play fighter types when the magic doesn't feel very special or require much thought to pull off. You have no idea how many times I teleported the entire party across vast distances, including our horses, and having to fly or feather fall us to TP 50 feet in the air so there'd be a 0 chance of us teleporting directly into the ground. Or the one time I shrunk our horses so they could get out of a basement I had TPed us all into (from a dream recollection aided by our psionicist and a magic mirror, to maximize our chances of surviving the TP).

A clever DM can find in-game ways to force players to be creative or die. It wasn't a perfect system, but a 5 minute, one pop a day utility spell at level 16 is GARBAGE. I will say it again and again...4e slew wizardry, dead.

 

[Hussar]

Umm, Gorgoroth, how is using a spell precisely the way it is worded creative? You used teleport in exactly the way teleport was meant to be used - transporting the party across large distances. You then cheesed your way out of the limitations of the spell by simply teleporting into the air and using feather fall because you knew the distance you could teleport off target.

I do not find this particularly creative, or interesting. YMMV of course. But, using a spell exactly the way it's intended to be used is not what I consider to be creative.