New Legends and Lore:Head of the Class

[MrMyth]

ExploderWizard: "As far as I recall, a golem required a magical weapon to hit. Thus a fighter without such a weapon would be just as ineffective as the thief, and if both were armed with magic weapons then they could both participate fully."

Response: "They couldn't both participate fully - the rogue couldn't use sneak attack!"

ExploderWizard: Er, what I meant was... "The thief class was not primarily about combat." Not being able to participate fully was a good thing!

I mean, I can totally get having a preference for that style of gameplay - but this is a pretty clear shifting of the goal-posts, and it seems like that would be worth at least acknowledging.

 

[ExploderWizard]

ExploderWizard: "As far as I recall, a golem required a magical weapon to hit. Thus a fighter without such a weapon would be just as ineffective as the thief, and if both were armed with magic weapons then they could both participate fully."

Response: "They couldn't both participate fully - the rogue couldn't use sneak attack!"

ExploderWizard: Er, what I meant was... "The thief class was not primarily about combat." Not being able to participate fully was a good thing!

I mean, I can totally get having a preference for that style of gameplay - but this is a pretty clear shifting of the goal-posts, and it seems like that would be worth at least acknowledging.

Who exactly is doing the shifting? Trying to apply a 3E concept such as "sneak attack" to an example of a BD&D/1E thief seems more 'shifty'(TM) to me.

A basic thief could strike unnoticed from behind.

An AD&D thief could backstab under certain conditions.

A sneak attack could be performed by anyone who had the element of suprise.

 

[Mark CMG]

ExploderWizard: "As far as I recall, a golem required a magical weapon to hit. Thus a fighter without such a weapon would be just as ineffective as the thief, and if both were armed with magic weapons then they could both participate fully."

Response: "They couldn't both participate fully - the rogue couldn't use sneak attack!"

ExploderWizard: Er, what I meant was... "The thief class was not primarily about combat." Not being able to participate fully was a good thing!

I mean, I can totally get having a preference for that style of gameplay - but this is a pretty clear shifting of the goal-posts, and it seems like that would be worth at least acknowledging.

By this logic, any time a character cannot use any and all of his abilties/features/tactics in any given situation, it would be unfair and poor design. I think when there is a situation where a character cannot use a certain ability/feature/tactic (or more than one), and they need to use a different ability/feature/tactic, it is not merely a matter of preference for a certain style of gameplay.

 

[pemerton]

Well, to be clear, I'm not saying 4e is a game of "kill things and take their stuff"

Yes, that was very clear in your earlier post!

I think that the rewards, including story, magical items, and xp have increasingly focused on rewarding combat, not only by way of editions, but also by trends in adventures and from perspectives of people editorializing what their games are over time. I don't think this is driven by edition, but by an "evolution of focus".

Can 4e be used for a low combat, high intrigue, game wherein the players solve mysteries and dally in noble court politics?

On this point, I actually incline a bit towards NO - at least for the whole conjunction. That is, there can definitely be mysteries, intrigue and politics. But low combat makes a lot of the stuff in your rulebooks and on your character sheet redundant!

I think 4e is best for conflict resolution via combat - so the culmination of the mystery, the intrigue, and the politics is a fight! This is why - in my view - it is a core feature of the game that the arch enemies, like Lolth, Orcus, Vecna etc, are given combat stats. Because the narrative logic that the whole game seems to me to support is that, in the end, we will fight it out. (Like the X-Men and Magneto - the theme, at least in the movies and the best of the comics, is identity politics and collective self-determination, but the tropes and methods are combat.)

No doubt any individual group could play the game another way. But I think that is pushing a bit againt what it is good for.

And like I said earlier, I also think using 4e for a kill-and-loot sort of game doesn't seem that promising either, because the loot and XPs aren't a reward in the same way they are in AD&D (for example, the treasure gain, as written, is level-based rather than success based, and the XP gain, as written, is participation-based rather than success based - given that the mechanics together with the encounter building guidelines tend to ensure that nearly all fights will be won by the PCs).

I think that those who try to play 4e for this sort of game would fairly soon notice the lack of real rewards. (Is this why some people talk about having become jaded with 4e and turning back to earlier editions? Maybe.)

Rituals and skill challenges are very clumsy rule sets, in my opinion. Others may disagree, of course, but the fact that skill challenges have been errattaed/overhauled right out of the gate, and tweaked here and there since points that they're not perfect. But their not being perfect is glaring compared to the combat rules which are far more elegant. Here what I'm saying is the best rules in 4e are the combat rules. There ARE rules for lots of things outside of combat, but they're much clumsier.

<snip>

Things outside of combat might not be so balanced, and indeed, some may have options where others have none (like characters who can do rituals versus those who can't). There is a group pressure for everyone to be having fun rather than sitting on the sideline (in pretty much all games). Thus, combat becomes the obvious choice. It is the place where all characters can shine.

I think this is an interesting point.

Contra KM and you, I think rituals work fine. And because, at least in my experience, they're pretty quick to adjudicate, they don't really create a balance issue of the sort you describe.

Skill challenges are a different beast. Some of the post-printing errata is sorting out the maths. This is unfortunate, obviously, but at least to my mind goes to implementation rather than core design.

But some of the post-printing errata and tweaking does go to core design, and the balance issue. As originally presented, a skill challenge mandated participation by all PCs. This was dropped under errata. In my view, what was missing from the original mandate was an explanation of how the GM was meant to get all the PCs involved. I mean, in a combat all the PCs get involved because the monsters are trying to kill them all, and any PC who hangs back is a deadweight who is not soaking his/her fair share of damage, and not contributing to the final victory. A good skill challenge needs to be designed and run in such a way that similar considerations motivate all the players to get involved. Unfortunately, the rules don't talk about how to do this.

A related design issue with skill challenges, which I believe [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION] was the first on these boards to notice, is that the GM doesn't get to roll dice - only the players do. Or to put it less opaquely - the GM has no mechanical mechanicsm to inflict adversity on the PCs in a skill challenge. This has to be achieved, therefore - and thus the players motivated to engage with and resolve the challenge - by the GM narrating the situation, and its gradual resolution as skill checks are made, in a way that drives the challenge towards its culmination.

But the rulebooks give basically no advice on how to do this - they don't even seem to acknowledge the need for it - and in particular don't give advice on how to do this within a structure where a predetermined number of successes will bring the challenge to a successful conclusion.

The upshot is that I didn't learn to run skill challenges by reading the 4e rulebooks. I learned to run them - and then, retrospectively, to get a sense of what the 4e designers were gesturing at with their rules texts - by reading LostSoul's posts back in the early days of 4e, and by reading and rereading the rulebooks for HeroWars/Quest (especially extended contests), Maelstrom Storytelling and (to a lesser extent) Burning Wheel.

A treatment of skill challenges that adequately addressed this issue of design and resolution - giving it the same degree of serious attention as tactical encounter building, for example - would, I think, be able to solve the balance issue. (At least if the skill challenge is designed with a given party in mind. So long as the spread of skill development across PCs is allowed to be as flexible as it is in 4e, designing skill challenges for a generic party will be hard. But then I think this is true for combat as well, because in so far as combat is interesting because more is going on than just dealing and receiving damage, that extra will tend to be party-specific also.)

 

[Aberzanzorax]

Very interesting perspective on skill challenges.

I'm starting to think that perhaps what 5e will need is exactly what you're describing: more and better advice on how to use the out of combat rules (and perhaps some improvements on the maths and philosophy of the usage of these rules as well).

 

[Balesir]

Skill challenges are an idea with some fantastic potential, and there are plenty of good concepts and advice around for running them, but WotC seems just not to have really grasped the nettle on them, yet. If and when 5E comes along, I sincerely hope SCs have been at least largely realised by and with the new edition.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

I do not htink that, strictly speaking it is necesary to wait on 5e. The complete book of skill challanges could be published right now with an alternative set of rules and resources for running a skill challange (perhaps using a variant of one of the rule systems mentioned by pemerton) and i think people would be interested in it.
I know I would be.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'd prefer if to flip things around. Lay out all the options first and then give example/suggested builds afterwards. Players, if they wanted to dive right in, would just choose one of the suggested builds and follow the class progression.

A little off topic but I also like to see the definiton of feats nailed down a little more. The whole crossover of feats giving powers never seemed right in my mind. I'd also like to see feats split into feats and enhancements. Feats are things you do, they are situational bonuses (my character does an extra 1d6 damage when flanking). Enhancements would be those choices where you get permanent bonuses or abilities (languages, armor training, weapon training)

OK, I realize I'm skipping like 86 pages of this, lol...

I think ONE way to do it, and pretty much possible within the structure of 4e would be like this:

You have your class. Every level at which powers are specified for your class there is a class feature which is an alternative (this could be a default power too, but it isn't necessary to limit it to that). These class features can be designed to be quite easy to use, have basic immediate effects, and work reasonably whether or not you use various options, so such an option would work reasonably either with a "story telling" sort of combat, or with more tactical 'grid' combat. You can always retrain this feature for a power selection from your class later if you want.

Then we can have themes which do the same thing. A 'Knight' theme can provide some leadership bonuses, etc (as the current theme does, maybe its called Noble IIRC). Anyway, some power swaps can also be available as well, etc.

Now you can provide the Fighter (Knight) as a themed fighter with all the default non-power easy-to-use options selected. A small section can quickly summarize it so you can quick start. A pregen could be provided as well if desired.

All the combinations of class and theme will generally give you something simple you can use but at the same time not all combinations of them need to be spelled out as beginner options, just the most thematic. So you have your Fighter (Knight), your Fighter (Barbarian), your Fighter (Swashbuckler), etc. but you don't need to spell out Fighter (Ordained Priest). If someone takes that later one they'll still have a set of simple options, they'll just have to go look them up in 2 places and there won't be a pre-gen. Someone can always put out a book of pre-gens that has every feasible combination if they want.

If you start selecting powers, then you're more into the tactical game, at least for a fighter. With a wizard maybe it isn't quite as clear-cut, but in that case the built-ins can be automatic power selections that are mostly utilitarian in nature and again designed to work in a more narrative combat system, but will work anywhere. Attack power defaults could also be rather generic fluffable options. Instead of a Fire Blast you can have an Energy Blast default that you can pick an energy type for. I don't know exactly, but I think it could be worked out so you can have a modestly simple caster that doesn't depend on a lot of tactics you can play out of the box, but with the possibility to branch out.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Contra KM and you, I think rituals work fine. And because, at least in my experience, they're pretty quick to adjudicate, they don't really create a balance issue of the sort you describe.

I think they're good first drafts.

I think they have four big problems as implemented:

1. GP Cost: GP cost is a permanent cost. It's never coming back. Almost always, it's better to save it for a magic item than it is to spend it on a ritual, tactically speaking.
2. Only One Character Gets To Do It: Because they work on a basic skill check, only one character gets to use a ritual at a time. They are not dependent on the party, so they are not good to use in times where you want to involve the whole party.
3. Mostly Pathetically Weak: Partially as a consequence of the above, they have to be weak, limited, and unable to do much. They can't actually affect the game in any meaningful way, or else they're too powerful for one character to have.
4. Weird Timing Issues: Times in 4e are represented by rests: Short Rests and Long Rests. "1 hour" is nigh meaningless, rules-wise. Long casting times make them impractical to use in many circumstances.

They're not insurmountable problems. Turn the ritual into something any party member can participate in, that costs Action Points or Healing Surges, and that uses a sensible timescale, and that actually has a significant effect, and you've got a nice little silo for "noncombat magic" that can even be expanded. Perhaps a Diplomacy "ritual" that is cast over the duration of a conversation to make an NPC friendly toward you. I've talked a bit about this before.

Skill challenges are a different beast. Some of the post-printing errata is sorting out the maths. This is unfortunate, obviously, but at least to my mind goes to implementation rather than core design.

I think the bigger problems for skill challenges are these:

1. They don't let players contribute uniquely: Heal check is a Heal check is a Heal check. Highest one does it. Move on. Nobody does anything unique to contribute to success.
2. Success and Failure are binary, and often meaningless: There is no cost for winning, no chance to mitigate a failure. It's an either/or effect, and often the only penalty for failure is that the plot moves on slightly different rails for a little while. Individual successes and failures are often meaningless except as "you're getting closer to victory!"
3. The Opposition is passive: Static DC's that sit there and do nothing other than make you roll against them are boring. It is like fighting minions who do nothing but stand there and hurt you when you miss.

I've talked about this for a while, too. I think these problems are more structural. A system that relies on simply "standing in place and rolling d20's until you win or loose" is a weak system for anything dramatic or interesting or unique. You can add variety to it, but then it looses its defining simplicity and flexibility (which are its major virtues).

I think both problems are a symptom of something else in 4e, and that is valuing the combat encounter almost to the exclusion of the rest of the game, and ignoring the broader adventure. Rituals and skill use gain context in the broader adventure, used to overcome the challenges of that adventure, mostly used to overcome the challenges that are not combat. 4e lacks a satisfying way to contribute to challenges that are not combat, so it necessarily presents the problem of having all adventuring be all about combat, just based on what the PC's are actually capable of, and what the DM has solid (if very complex) rules for.

Balance, I think, needs to exist at the level of the adventure, and not just at the level of the encounter.

I do think it needs to exist at the level of the encounter, too, but 4e has no real concept of adventure balance, unlike the older school editions, which had no real concept of encounter balance. We've swung the pendulum all the way over.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think they're good first drafts.

I think they have four big problems as implemented:

1. GP Cost: GP cost is a permanent cost. It's never coming back. Almost always, it's better to save it for a magic item than it is to spend it on a ritual, tactically speaking.
2. Only One Character Gets To Do It: Because they work on a basic skill check, only one character gets to use a ritual at a time. They are not dependent on the party, so they are not good to use in times where you want to involve the whole party.
3. Mostly Pathetically Weak: Partially as a consequence of the above, they have to be weak, limited, and unable to do much. They can't actually affect the game in any meaningful way, or else they're too powerful for one character to have.
4. Weird Timing Issues: Times in 4e are represented by rests: Short Rests and Long Rests. "1 hour" is nigh meaningless, rules-wise. Long casting times make them impractical to use in many circumstances.

They're not insurmountable problems. Turn the ritual into something any party member can participate in, that costs Action Points or Healing Surges, and that uses a sensible timescale, and that actually has a significant effect, and you've got a nice little silo for "noncombat magic" that can even be expanded. Perhaps a Diplomacy "ritual" that is cast over the duration of a conversation to make an NPC friendly toward you. I've talked a bit about this before.




I think the bigger problems for skill challenges are these:

1. They don't let players contribute uniquely: Heal check is a Heal check is a Heal check. Highest one does it. Move on. Nobody does anything unique to contribute to success.
2. Success and Failure are binary, and often meaningless: There is no cost for winning, no chance to mitigate a failure. It's an either/or effect, and often the only penalty for failure is that the plot moves on slightly different rails for a little while. Individual successes and failures are often meaningless except as "you're getting closer to victory!"
3. The Opposition is passive: Static DC's that sit there and do nothing other than make you roll against them are boring. It is like fighting minions who do nothing but stand there and hurt you when you miss.

I've talked about this for a while, too. I think these problems are more structural. A system that relies on simply "standing in place and rolling d20's until you win or loose" is a weak system for anything dramatic or interesting or unique. You can add variety to it, but then it looses its defining simplicity and flexibility (which are its major virtues).

I think both problems are a symptom of something else in 4e, and that is valuing the combat encounter almost to the exclusion of the rest of the game, and ignoring the broader adventure. Rituals and skill use gain context in the broader adventure, used to overcome the challenges of that adventure, mostly used to overcome the challenges that are not combat. 4e lacks a satisfying way to contribute to challenges that are not combat, so it necessarily presents the problem of having all adventuring be all about combat, just based on what the PC's are actually capable of, and what the DM has solid (if very complex) rules for.

Balance, I think, needs to exist at the level of the adventure, and not just at the level of the encounter.

I do think it needs to exist at the level of the encounter, too, but 4e has no real concept of adventure balance, unlike the older school editions, which had no real concept of encounter balance. We've swung the pendulum all the way over.

Hehe, it almost goes without saying apparently that I have a virtually opposite perspective on a lot of this . I think the ritual system itself was pretty well crafted for instance. To counterpoint you:

1. The problem isn't the cost of rituals, they are just consumables like any others, and generally give good value objectively. The issue is with the parcel system, which by guaranteeing that you always get a fixed amount of treasure creates a 'budget mentality' in the minds of the players. In any case most ritual casting has utterly trivial cost.
2. There are 2 parts to this. The first is that in fact rituals allow the participation of multiple characters. Secondly is this a big deal? The caster makes a single check, which takes all of 30 seconds at the table, tops. It isn't as if the rest of the players are sidelined for an extended time. Nor is there anything unique to rituals about this, a lock picking attempt is functionally (and probably narratively) equivalent to a ritual, as is any other point in the game where a character makes a contribution.
3. Failure of imagination? I've seen many fairly cunning and significant uses of rituals. Much like the spells of older editions a lot of the power derives from thoughtful/clever application. Like with other elements of the game there are better and worse rituals, but many of them are VERY effective.
4. Long casting times exist to act as a guard against rituals becoming easy plot power and easy replacements for other character's capabilities. This was something earlier editions might constructively have tried. As far as 'odd times', an hour is a perfectly good narrative measure of time. Nor does it cause any issues mechanically, you just tick off an hour. I doubt you're intending to suggest that the whole rest of the game consists of nothing but encounters and rests. Most things PCs do happen in narrative time. Rituals ARE primarily a narrative/plot level system. It makes perfectly good sense that they operate in this space.

There IS a "diplomacy ritual", 2 of them in fact IIRC. In any case supposing the mechanics were more elaborate they would be analogous to a skill challenge. At that point what does the ritual itself mechanically DO? We can run an SC and have a ritual be part of it (IE basically pay 50gp to get yourself some +2s or whatever). We don't need new rules for this and as you notice the ritual fits right in. As for the surge type cost, this won't work for most rituals, because again they are plot/narrative level devices. A healing surge is no cost at all in many situations. In most others I personally doubt players are going to be more willing to burn an HS to cast a ritual than to pay a few coins. Again, any situation where they DO is probably one where they can anticipate that this cost is effectively no cost at all.

Looking at SCs...

1. I don't even see what this point is. You know that SCs are not just all about checks, right? Also the players have to come up with a narrative, the checks are just there to reflect character skill. There's no reason at all that an SC should involve multiple heal checks or that if it does they all serve the same identical narrative purpose or have the same narrative consequences.
2. This is a failure to comprehend the SC system. If you're designing challenges that consist of a static situation that requires rolling again and again to do the same thing over and over it is like complaining that the combat system is terrible because you fight all your fights in 2x2 square rooms. Don't do that, lol. There absolutely are potential costs for winning. For instance a power could be expended to get a success or a ritual could be cast, etc. These things are all suggested in the DMGs as possibilities. As for the consequences of success/failure on an SC, you as the DM determine this, not the mechanics. Go crazy, have a "you will die if you fail this SC".
3. Again, if your SCs are nothing but static 'punching bags' that isn't the fault of the mechanics, it is a fault of encounter design.

""standing in place and rolling d20's until you win or loose" is a weak system", indeed. The problem is you're not discussing the 4e SC system, except in the same degenerate level of case that a 20x20 room full of orcs would represent in terms of combat encounters. You don't have to add complexity to SC mechanics to make them work better. You need to write SCs that are interesting situations. Sometimes modifying the mechanics is OK. Honestly, the mechanics are so simple and open-ended that IMO you certainly don't have to go to the level of making it an ungainly complex system to make it do what you want. I'd venture that if you find such a situation you probably have an SC that should be reframed.

I'm not really sure what to think of your conclusion. Has some other version of D&D actually provided BETTER mechanics for resolving anything outside of combat? Honestly the systems in every edition are pretty much the same outside of SCs (which actually exist in 3.5 in rudimentary form). Every previous system was "make some kind of check whenever you do something significant where failure could happen." 4e has the same thing, it is just the core mechanic of the game! So I guess I just don't really comprehend. Toss out SCs and 4e and 3.5 are exactly how much different? Or really AD&D either for that matter.

I suspect all of this really devolves down to "combat takes too much mindshare", which I don't think I really disagree with. I just don't think it is a matter of any specific weakness of other parts of 4e. So maybe in the final analysis we actually agree, but I'm not sure...