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

[Warbringer]

Don't care for the terms, but a solid section in talking about the two key styles (sim doesn't work in DND) would be useful and in positioning the game caters to both styles would go a long way

 

[Obryn]

I tried to think of it but I don't recall...some thread here. I edited that comment out of my post though, since there's a chance I could be misremembering. But it's not a big deal regardless.

If so, I can absolutely guarantee it wasn't said with any degree of seriousness.

I don't find it silly, I found that sidebar pointlessly antagonistic to my preferred style of play. I say pointless because it didn't seem to have any sort of clear, take-home applicability to some other style of play. It seemed like just a dumb thing to include.

You see, when I read it, I thought, "Awww, that's cute. I can't wait to play D&D with my kids, when I have them." Now, years later, I have two, and though it will be many years before they are old enough for D&D with their dorky dad, I hope it will make as big an impression. I just can't understand how a cute story about kids playing D&D is antagonistic to a play-style. But then again, I'm still baffled by Gnomeageddon and Gnomegate, so...

I will say this - leaving aside the sidebar, the 4e DMG made me a better DM and improved my players' fun at the table. And that's largely thanks to the various advice about collaboration, improvisation, and giving my players some narrative control. (Also, reading up on FATE Core has given me a new outlook on gaming which I plan to import.) I think it's incredibly disappointing the guys who wrote the official adventures basically ignored the whole book - and likely experienced DMs did little more than skim it.

-O

 

[Hussar]

If you use it in a situation you haven't thought of before, it's creative already.
If you use it for a seemingly unintended purpose or application, it's also creative.
If you use it in combination with another action or ability (including another spell) for a special synergy, it's creative enough for me.

Maybe sometimes you achieve something more creative by exploiting what isn't written in the spell description.

But in general, are you trying to say that you can be creative only if allowed to use the spells in ways unwritten, such as adding effects that aren't explicitly allowed (e.g. setting fire to things) or changing them (e.g. teleporting an object instead of yourself)?

Personally I think it's also relative to the players. The first time I ever thought about using teleport on a short distance to get past a closed door, rather than using it for travelling, I felt bloody creative... I wouldn't feel the same in doing that now after 10+ years of playing the game tho.

There's a pretty broad excluded middle here I think.

But, yeah, I am going to say that using a spell specifically how it is intended to be used - such as teleporting the party from Point A to Point B is not a terribly creative use of a spell.

I could see the argument for Feather Fall to bypass the limitations of Teleport - that's creative. Cheesy, but creative.

Funny how that sort of optimization and rules lawyering is considered a very bad thing for 3e and later, but, done in earlier editions, it's "smart play".

 

[Hussar]

Pemerton, it's not I who concluded that fireballs only targetted creatures, it's the DMs I played with. It's easy enough in retrospect to point to this or that obscure passage (yes I have heard of p42...but only a year after every single gamer I know -- and I know and have played with dozens at the local gaming center and in several groups and campaigns - and they pretty much all quit 4e out of frustration and boredom).

It took a year for you to read the DMG and you wonder why your 4e games were perhaps not as fun as they could be?

I realize now that with a very good DM, 4e could be more relaxed/realistic and less cookie-cuttery and repetitive, but you gotta ask yourself, is a side bar of houseruling powers to do strange things likely to be used / referred to in most games? In my experience, no. DMs usually want a quick and consistent way to adjudicate these things, and find that if they deviate from RAW too much, they might set a precedent and get hit with a broken combo. The impression one gets from a 4e character sheet is not one of too many options, but too many rigid options, such that if you took the time to pick your at-will to combo with this feat and this encounter power and this class feature, that you should use those powers. I tried arguing with my DM before we even started our campaign, and he told me no, acid breath doesn't melt metal, and no, you can't turn on your torch or set that barn on fire and do ongoing HP damage to all objects inside for as many rounds as it takes for them to all be turned to cinder, because he'd be right...those powers are not balanced for that. They're balanced around a very limited, in-encounter ideology. It's like out of combat the world goes in 5 minute chunks, and in combat a 5 minute chunk of time can be 30 seconds or 10 minutes.

So, you had a crap DM and that's the system's fault?

And sidebar? Really? The Page 42 that people talk about isn't a sidebar, it's an ENTIRE SECTION of the DMG, complete with the rules for poison and disease, so, it's not like it's buried anywhere.

The point isn't that there aren't quirky sidebars and rare rules that you can dig up on the forums, but one of perception and practical usage. I've never, EVER seen page 42 used at a live gaming table. Not once. Maybe others here have, and maybe the DMs I played with all sucked at 4e, but the atmosphere at so many of those tables ended up being a game of one-upsmanship between the PCs trying out builds of classes they just got access to in this month's update and on the forums, and errata making their perfectly fine character completely borked when neither the players nor the DM thought it was OP. Of course, there are many broken things in every edition, but you cannot rely on a game so dictated by RAW back and forth arguments and updates having this sort of flexibility taken seriously. It's like going into court and with a stack of law books on the table, you cast all that aside, and ask for jury nullification in every case you try. Not gonna happen.

In other words, it's the system's fault that you played with a group of rules lawyers who were only interested in power gaming?

As for creative use of spells in AD&D, a "straight up" usage of Teleport was a game of russian roulette. I'm not surprised other creative mages came up with some similar tactics that I did, but that was before these forums were popular and certainly I got all my ideas by analyzing my spell descriptions like a lawyer would in between turns. Very bookish and studious...almost mage-like, you would say. Ask me how many times I've read over the powers on my 4e sheets. A few, but only in the edge cases.

Yup, it's pretty clear that you didn't read the 4e rules.

snip for brevity

 

[Obryn]

But, yeah, I am going to say that using a spell specifically how it is intended to be used - such as teleporting the party from Point A to Point B is not a terribly creative use of a spell.

I can sympathize with the position. I remember using a Flavor cantrip to get a giant toad to release my Magic-User in 2e.

But I really don't want to have another edition where spellcasters get a vastly wider range of potentially creative solutions than non-casters. I think it's kind of depressing that "being creative" in D&D so often gets reduced to "cast spells in a creative or unanticipated fashion."

-O

 

[Gorgoroth]

It took a year for you to read the DMG and you wonder why your 4e games were perhaps not as fun as they could be?



So, you had a crap DM and that's the system's fault?

And sidebar? Really? The Page 42 that people talk about isn't a sidebar, it's an ENTIRE SECTION of the DMG, complete with the rules for poison and disease, so, it's not like it's buried anywhere.



In other words, it's the system's fault that you played with a group of rules lawyers who were only interested in power gaming?



Yup, it's pretty clear that you didn't read the 4e rules.

Why should I read the DMG as a player...to have fun? I read parts of the DMG in some editions, not all of it. And it's pretty easy to say via the anonimity of the internet that DMs who don't allow on the fly house rules to player's powers are crappy DMs, because those same DMs were absolutely kick ass DMing other editions of the game. Quite often it wasn't the power gamers or rules lawyers getting fed up with the quirks of 4e, it was the casual gamers. Any edition that annoys both the power gamers AND the casual ones...at the same table, at different tables, over the course of three years, and many DMs with varying styles...I can only conclude the only common thing is that either a) they all sucked, b) I suck, and thus my recollection of all those arguments started over a "it would be cool to do that, but your power clearly says it does only this. if I allow that, then I need to allow X too next time. sorry" is spotty, or c) there is something that the DMG didn't get through to us, the players, OR the DMs I gamed with. You have a 6-8 page character sheet, a character builder, a rules compendium trying to codify every possible minutiae of things that can be done on the battle grid, and then you have this yes...obscure section of the DMG which nobody I gamed with ever heard of or paid any attention to ( I guess cause we all suck or were trying to follow the rules or something)..

page 42 I only heard of a year after I quit. And of my gamer friends, I spent probably the most amount of time reading the forums and getting system mastery out of it. Quite possibly, our DMs might even have read the entire DMG several times and chose to ignore it. I never grilled them on their system mastery, I played the game from the player's side of the table, across from many DMs, and very rarely were we allowed to house rule on the fly our powers.

If a power says "target = enemies" vs "target = creatures", can you not see that allowing the player to house rule that on the fly would be a DMing nightmare? I decide that character's my enemy for a nanosecond because I need to hit him to knock him out of his trance. I don't recall any other game forcing every action to be combed over like a lawyer before getting it approved by the supreme court of DM opinion. Having the Rules Compendium helped our groups a lot, but even after reading that a few times, I never got the idea that I could fudge my powers to do something else, because I didn't think my DM would approve it, and likely if I were DMing, I'd find house ruling stuff on the fly in such a fiddly uber balanced (in theory) system would bring the whole house crashing down.

What my main beef was...is that the game simply wasn't fun aside from power gaming the combat aspect of it. It just wasn't. It was an ongoing joke that players would want to RP a lot more in other systems, but in 4e it was like...combat takes too long, but on the other hand, out of combat is 2-dimensional and boring, so...when's the next combat? 8 pages of combat-centered powers. It's hardly a surprise that power gaming the system was valued so highly. Nothing else mattered much on your character sheet, nor took up as much space.

Projecting the flaws of a game system on bad DMing is kinda...meh. Those were good DMs...just not in that game system. They often spoke of the ease of creating combats, but the emphasis on combat over everything else, which made their plots and maps and worlds seem kinda...let's skip the cutscenes and get to the next battle. Same players, same DMs sometimes, different behavior. If I'd only seen it once, I'd say you have a point. But after seeing the same patterns multiple times...yes, I do blame the system and not the DMs or the players.

 

[Dragoslav]

What my main beef was...is that the game simply wasn't fun aside from power gaming the combat aspect of it. It just wasn't. It was an ongoing joke that players would want to RP a lot more in other systems, but in 4e it was like...combat takes too long, but on the other hand, out of combat is 2-dimensional and boring, so...when's the next combat? 8 pages of combat-centered powers. It's hardly a surprise that power gaming the system was valued so highly. Nothing else mattered much on your character sheet, nor took up as much space.

I see people say this a lot, and it always confuses me. So I'll just ask for your opinion: What do you think it was about 4e that made the stuff outside of combat less important/interesting than it was in earlier editions?

 

[pemerton]

Whoa! I'm not talking about anyone's game in particular. I'm not participating in the fireball conversation. I was just telling Gorgoroth that the type of game he was describing is the type of game I like

<snip>

I like the overall style of play he's describing.

OK.

Exploitation of fictional positioning, and leveraging resources (both player and PC) to do that, is pretty central to a lot of RPG play: though it can serve different purposes in different styles, I think.

But as my heated response to you signalled, I'm pretty fed up with this idea that somehow 4e is a fictional-positioning-free game. I'm prepared to believe, based on the evidence of these boards, that some people play(ed) it that way, but I don't know why they did. The rulebooks never say anything about that.

Funny how that sort of optimization and rules lawyering is considered a very bad thing for 3e and later, but, done in earlier editions, it's "smart play".

I can't really comment on 2nd ed - my own personal view of it is very close to Edwards' line on The Forge, that it's an incoherent mess with mechanics suited to one thing being used to do something quite different that is itself barely grasped.

Classic D&D, on the other hand (OD&D, AD&D, and at least one mainstream way of playing B/X) I think I get pretty well, though I'm not personally the biggest fan. And it relies heavily on this sort of one-upmanship between players and GMs. (I think that's why the tendency to adversarial GMing is built-in, though realisation of that tendency is not necessary in every case). It has some consequences, though - for instance, it affects replay value: once the players have worked out the clever/cheesy way to circumvent X (be X trolls, or the super-tetanus pits in White Plume Mountain, or whatever) you don't really want to do it again - you need to come up with some new X. I think it also requires a readiness to kill of PCs, suck their levels, wreck their gear, etc - if you're not prepared to conusme their resources (and in this style of play all those things are player resources for circumventing challenges) then you're not really challenging them, and the game will turn into your basic Monty Haul-ish super-cheese.

One criticism I would make of AD&D compared to OD&D is that it has features in its rules that are actually at odds with its gamist purpose. For instance, all the guff in the AD&D fireball spell description will have been adjudicated, in the course of play, by OD&D GMs coping with creative/cheesy play by their players. Why are those adjudications now being written into the rules? Better to leave the rules free and flexible, and give new GMs advice on how to adjudicate creative/cheesy play. One result might be that fireball works differently at my table from yours, but I think that's got to be par for the course (just as in my 4e game upper paragon Acrobatics can be used to ride a flying carpet into a purple worm's gullet, but another 4e game might be much less gonzo in its deployment of p 42).

This also relates to your question upthread - why D&D sim at all? Everytime the description of some game element - be it the fireball spell, the meaning of Lawful alignment, the content of the paladin's code, etc - gets written into the rulebook instead of being left simply as a product of one group's play experience, the pressure towards sim play increases, as play becomes less about playing fast and loose like the early players did, but rather slavishly adhering to their rulings and their adjudications in an attempt to recreate their experiences via karaoke. (I should add - this analysis, including the "karaoke" lable, draws heavily on Edwards.)

By the time you get to 3E, I think much of the tenor has changed, adherence to canonical adjudications has become paramount among at least a vocal part of the community, and hence what was once clever is now considered just cheesy. Widespread internet communication makes a difference too - if I was the first D&D player in Victoria (my home state in Australia) to think of surfing the doors over the super-tetanus pits then that's clever, even if dozens of people have already done that in the US. Once I'm reading cheet sheets and advice blogs on the internet, not so much. Wahoo gamist play depends at least in part upon challenges that the players deal with being novel ones.

I hope that makes some sense on the relationship between creativity and mere cheese.

I remember using a Flavor cantrip to get a giant toad to release my Magic-User in 2e.

Nice. In 4e I'd call for an Arcana check as part of the adjudication. (What I'd do with the result of the check is a bit variable - but partial success plus damage to the caster tends to be my default these days for less than a Hard DC.)

When a couple of PCs in my game recently were swallowed by a purple worm, the sorcerer raised a pillar of stone (the Heroes of Elemental Chaos utility) to force its jaws open. (The spell needs earth as a material component. When the player pointed out that the PCs had been pursing the worm for hours as it tunnelled through rock, I had to concede that there might be at least a teensy bit of earth inside its mouth.) This was a case where I called for an Arcana check, but the damage actually ended up being taken by the invoker who, concerned about excesses of chaotic energy, channelled it into his Rod of 7 Parts and ended up internalising the damage on a mediocre Arcana roll.

Once the worm's jaws were open the sorcerer got a bonus on his Acrobatics to escape, and the invoker was able to teleport out (because an open mouth gave LoS to the outside).

This is the sort of stuff that I think of as creative spellcasting, and I think 4e supports it as well as any other mainstream fantasy system (though it puts its own spin on it, eg with the DC and damage defaults that I'm using in my own adjudications).

But I really don't want to have another edition where spellcasters get a vastly wider range of potentially creative solutions than non-casters.

My solution to this is to go gonzo. In the "reforge Whelm into Overwhelm" skill challenge, the fighter got the final success in the challenge after Dungeoneering - to set up the forge; Diplomacy - to keep the dwarven artisans steady and focused on their task; and Arcana - to constrain the tremendous arcane energies - had been exhauseted, and prayers to Moradin had not helped (failed Religion - Moradin wanted to test the fighter's wortthiness, not just assume it!). Successful Hard Endurance check with a +2 from burning Fighter's Grit, and the PC shoved his hands into the forge and held the hamer down himself until the artificers could grasp it firmly with their tongs! (Remove Affliction was then used to cure the burns.)

The ranger riding the carpet into the worm to help his swallowed friend is another example.

I don't know any other way to balance martial with mid-to-high magical power.

I will say this - leaving aside the sidebar, the 4e DMG made me a better DM and improved my players' fun at the table. And that's largely thanks to the various advice about collaboration, improvisation, and giving my players some narrative control. (Also, reading up on FATE Core has given me a new outlook on gaming which I plan to import.)

For me, the non-D&D games that have influenced me amd my 4e GMing are HeroWars/Quest, Maelstrom Storytelling and Burning Wheel (especially the Adventure Burner).

I think it's incredibly disappointing the guys who wrote the official adventures basically ignored the whole book

Definitely.

 

[Gorgoroth]

There's a pretty broad excluded middle here I think.

But, yeah, I am going to say that using a spell specifically how it is intended to be used - such as teleporting the party from Point A to Point B is not a terribly creative use of a spell.

I could see the argument for Feather Fall to bypass the limitations of Teleport - that's creative. Cheesy, but creative.

Funny how that sort of optimization and rules lawyering is considered a very bad thing for 3e and later, but, done in earlier editions, it's "smart play".

Why cheesy? You and I have very different definitions of cheese. It would be cheesy to make an OP, broken character from this forum and bring it to a game table, but when I was playing AD&D, we didn't comb over forums looking up spell combos, we came up with them entirely on our own. And let me tell ya, my party thanked me for not risking their lives each time we needed to get somewhere far away that we'd never been to quickly, and they were generally reluctant to get magic used on them anyway, let alone poofed into mid-air half way around the world, to get near an enemy castle (but not too near to get hit by arrows or seen), and land safely. I may have gotten XP for creativity the first couple times doing it, but then it just made sense afterwards until we found rings of feather fall or whatever.

Casting Teleport to get from Point A to Point B, straight from the spell description, is literally rolling the dice to save vs death each and every time. Using it as is is instant-TPK. Of course people are going to figure out a way around it. Do you think airbags or seat belts are also "cheesy"? They didn't always exist, you know. Many people had to die before they made them mandatory.

As far as I'm concerned, finding a way around a limitation of a spell is what wizard playing PCs should be doing. Both in-game and out of game. In-game, the wizards know there is a chance of death each time, or their fireballs might set the granary on fire with them in it, or maybe TPK the entire party due to smoke inhalation like those poor kids in that night club blaze.

Try casting a fireball, at level 12, in-doors in 4e and see what the players say when the DM tells them their 5th level daily just murdered their entire party due to 2nd hand smoke from the granary they set on fire, and ask me if there wouldn't be a huge rules lawyering debate. In 2nd edition, a deadlier and much more realistic game, no oxygen = death. I had DMs who would routinely kills us when we did stupid things. But in 4e, you are protected from the mistakes of your own stupidity, so why be smart? Just pew pew and be done with it. If there is no residual damage described in the power block of your daily power, it doesn't happen! page 42 be damned. Why take all these powers at all when if I can add ongoing 10 to all my fire powers by putting greek fire on everything. If we're gonna be realistic...try and put out burning oil on you in one round. Page 42 pulls the legs out of every power on your sheet.

Why spend all this money on splat books for powers and feats and on the character builder when I can just make up my own on the spot? Page 42 is nonsense and that's why it's rarely used. It exposes the lie of your 8 page character sheets for what they are : "why have a power that says "go for the eyes"...and why can't I just do that at level 1? Why can't I throw sand in their eyes and with a lucky hit they are blinded, Save Ends? Because that's in a level 9 daily. Knockout is a level 9 daily. Imagine having a the strongest brawler in the world who couldn't knock out the lowliest kobold, no matter how hard he tries, then suddenly he can, because he now picked that power...meanwhile at the other table with his "Yes you can" DM, he's been knocking out creatures since day 1. Those "creative" uses of powers break 4e, because the power system is a deck of cards, an exclusionary system where you can only chose to "Go for the Eyes" OR Knockout, but not both. Or if you are a wizard, you can only ever cast Fireball once a day, never more...even if you don't want to cast any other spell.

Only one casting of a particular spell at a certain spell level....eeesh. I could never cast Fly on three people, three times during one day. Half of the cool things I've done as a spellcaster in other editions are literally impossible in 4e.

 

[Obryn]

Why spend all this money on splat books for powers and feats and on the character builder when I can just make up my own on the spot? Page 42 is nonsense and that's why it's rarely used. It exposes the lie of your 8 page character sheets for what they are : "why have a power that says "go for the eyes"...and why can't I just do that at level 1? Why can't I throw sand in their eyes and with a lucky hit they are blinded, Save Ends? Because that's in a level 9 daily. Knockout is a level 9 daily. Imagine having a the strongest brawler in the world who couldn't knock out the lowliest kobold, no matter how hard he tries, then suddenly he can, because he now picked that power...meanwhile at the other table with his "Yes you can" DM, he's been knocking out creatures since day 1. Those "creative" uses of powers break 4e, because the power system is a deck of cards, an exclusionary system where you can only chose to "Go for the Eyes" OR Knockout, but not both. Or if you are a wizard, you can only ever cast Fireball once a day, never more...even if you don't want to cast any other spell.

The stuff on your sheet is the stuff you have the ability to do without any DM intervention - it's direct access to the rules and the narrative results. Stunting (using p. 42 or otherwise) requires the DM to evaluate your plan and either approve it and set a DC or reject it. That's really the difference.

(And as for fireballs, wait a few levels and you can pick it up an identical spell as an Encounter power, just like you'd need to wait a few levels and pick up a few more fireballs if you wanted. It's still a bad selection in 4e unless you're a Pyromancer.)

The big thing for me is - a lot of the stuff you're talking about? This is the sort of caster supremacy I want to move away from for a new edition. (1) I don't like when there's a proper spell for every problem, and (2) wizards shouldn't have vastly more access to creative improv due to clever uses of their fiat capabilities than everyone else.

-O