New Legends and Lore:Head of the Class

[pemerton]

My experience is closer to yours, [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION], than to yours, [MENTION=2067]Kamikaze Midget[/MENTION].

The only PC in my game who knows rituals is the wizard. The player of that PC is pretty happy to use rituals - especially information gathering ones like Comprehend Languages and Object Reading, but he has also used Purify Water to dispel a water weird, for example, and last session used Remove Affliction to cure the insanity of a rescued prisoner who had been kept tied up too long next to a gibbering mouther.

I haven't found the rituals weak. I agree that money is probably not be the best way of rationing them - why should the players forfeit build options (ie items) for progressing the narrative? - but the amounts are modest enough relative to the cost of level-appropriate items that in practice I don't think this is such a big deal.

I think that there does need to be some sort of rationing device. For the reasons AbdulAlhazred gives, I'm not sure that surges or action points would work better, and casting time on its own is perhaps not enough. Essentials, for its Resurrection power, uses the occurence of an extended rest as the rationing device. This also has obvious cons as well as pros.

On skill challenges, I agree also with AbdulAlhazred that the answer to (1) and (2) is for dynamic encounter design and resolution, supported by the sorts of guidelines one finds in better books than the 4e DMG (HeroQuest, Maelstrom Storytelling, etc) - although DMG 2 makes a reasonable attempt at beginning to deal with issue (2).

As to issue (3), this is related to LostSoul's point that I made earlier - the GM gets no dice. Again, the solution to this is encounter design and resolution. The failure to deal with this is, in my view, one of the biggest gaps in the 4e GM's guidelines.

On the issue of "the encounter" vs "the adventure" - I like this aspect of 4e's design, and rather than turning away from it I would like to see more advice on how to handle traditional exploration within this framework, and how to integrate non-combat and combat action resolution more smoothly (at the moment this is very underdeveloped - there are a few throwaway remarks in the DMG 2).

I certainly don't find that 4e is all about comat. Even when combat is occurring - and the game does prioritise combat as a mode of conflict resolution - I don't think that the game is generally about that combat.

 

[Balesir]

I, too, am closer to [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION], I think, but I do nevertheless find Skill Challenges "under-funded", as it stands.

I think it boils down to SCs, even after some good advice and suggestion work by both WotC staff and bloggers/posters, being more like "traps" than like "full encounters". They sit there and either they get triggered or they don't; a succession of skill checks will disarm them, too many failures will trigger them.

Now, you can design some neat traps. Traps can have incremental failure costs, incremental gains for partial-disarming and some good fluff to describe how they work. But they lack all the other stuff that can make a "full encounter" interesting. They lack active opponents, terrain and environmental "landscape" effects, choice between the oppositional elements to tackle first (i.e., in combat, you can choose to kill the monsters in any order - and can even neutralise some while you kill others; with skill challenges or traps, not so much) and mechanisms for the situation to develop outside of the players' control.

If mechanisms were added - maybe even for specific classes of skill challenge - that introduced these possibilities into the non-combat arena it may be that non-combat equivalents of the trap-plus-monsters-in-interesting-terrain encounter could be done for non-combat, as well as combat, situations. That, in my view, would add to 4E in ways that new classes, powers, feats and so on never can.

 

[heretic888]

I, too, am closer to @AbdulAlhazred , I think, but I do nevertheless find Skill Challenges "under-funded", as it stands.

I think it boils down to SCs, even after some good advice and suggestion work by both WotC staff and bloggers/posters, being more like "traps" than like "full encounters". They sit there and either they get triggered or they don't; a succession of skill checks will disarm them, too many failures will trigger them.

Now, you can design some neat traps. Traps can have incremental failure costs, incremental gains for partial-disarming and some good fluff to describe how they work. But they lack all the other stuff that can make a "full encounter" interesting. They lack active opponents, terrain and environmental "landscape" effects, choice between the oppositional elements to tackle first (i.e., in combat, you can choose to kill the monsters in any order - and can even neutralise some while you kill others; with skill challenges or traps, not so much) and mechanisms for the situation to develop outside of the players' control.

If mechanisms were added - maybe even for specific classes of skill challenge - that introduced these possibilities into the non-combat arena it may be that non-combat equivalents of the trap-plus-monsters-in-interesting-terrain encounter could be done for non-combat, as well as combat, situations. That, in my view, would add to 4E in ways that new classes, powers, feats and so on never can.

Everyone brings up the DMG2 (which is a great resource for skill challenges), but I have found that SWSE's "Galaxy of Intrigue" to be just as useful for fleshing out skill challenges.

It introduces a new mechanic --- or, to be more accurate, formalizes a new mechanic that is hinted at in the DMG2 --- called "challenge effects". These can be things such as limiting the number of successes a particular skill can provide, allowing certain skills to remove failures, allowing critical successes to provide 2 successes to the challenge, and so on.

Most interestingly in light of the current conversation, one of the challenge effects is having an NPC (or group of NPCs) actively work against the party. Instead of X successes before 3 failures, its X successes before the NPC makes 3 successes. This can be very interesting.

Another challenge effect is X successes before Y number of rounds. In other words, putting a hard time limit on the skill challenge.

Both of these latter two challenge effects puts a strong incentive for everyone in the party to contribute.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Hehe, it almost goes without saying apparently that I have a virtually opposite perspective on a lot of this .

Which is fine! I'm not going to go crazy in-depth, but here's my considered reply:

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.

1. 
   
   That's just shifting the blame, I feel. The budget mentality exists, and Rituals completely ignore that it exists, and that's a problem for Rituals as they exist now.
   
   I think the treasure system could use a boatload of attention, too, of course. In my home games, I use Inherent Bonuses, and roll on 2e charts for random treasure. This treasure is all "award": It's unessential, unexpected, and it's all up to how you use it. Gold Pieces here are largely for mundane items and consumables, and are basically purely story items.
   
   The treasure system needs fixing of its own, and its problems do contribute to the Rituals problem, but it's not JUST a problem with the treasure system. You're essentially paying GP to make a skill check, and a lot of folks won't find that palatable, especially when skill checks can mostly do the same thing.
   
   
   

   [*]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.

   
   It enters into how dramatic you want your noncombat challenges to be.
   
   If you don't want them dramatic, if you just want to get them out of the way, 30 seconds and a skill check are exactly what you want.
   
   If, on the other hand, you want to consider them as part of the challenge of the game, 30 seconds and a skill check is basically like a Save-Or-Die effect. It's severely anticlimactic.
   
   That's part of why they're weak as noncombat elements go. They just get the check out of the way as quickly as possible. They don't work in a game that wants these moments to be dramatic and tension-filled, 'cuz you can't build a party's tension on a single skill check.
   
   

   [*]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.

   
   I've seen many crappy rules used surprisingly well by imaginative and engaging players and DMs. That doesn't mean the rule is good, that means the player or DM is good.
   
   Which, again, is a problem if you want this to be a major pillar of your adventure design. You want everyone to be able to participate without having to basically compensate for a rule that doesn't serve your purposes well.
   
   

   [*]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.

   
   It's not a problem with "long" casting times, it's a problem with meaningless casting times. "You just tick off an hour" might as well be "you just tick off 30 days" or "you just tick off twelve point five minutes." It's pure fluff. It needs not to be fluff (casting time: short or extended rest), or it needs to be excised as pointless.
   
   

   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.

   
   This is exactly the hinge of the problem, though. In a game that valued noncombat participation, rituals would not be simply narrative devices. They need to be part of the challenge and drama of playing D&D, of overcoming the challenge of the adventure, or else you're basically saying, "We don't care about that part of the game, it doesn't matter, move on to more important things that the game cares about, like combat."
   
   It is not good for a game that values exploration or roleplaying to have those things be simply narrative devices. If they don't matter to the game, then they often won't matter to the group. That's a problem, if you want interesting things to do outside of combat. A ritual is not an interesting thing to do outside of combat if it is just a plot device. It needs to be a dramatic challenge, like combat already is.
   
   

   [*]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.

   
   SCs ARE just about checks, mechanically speaking. The game does not care about your narrative. That is a problem, since the game should care about your narrative, if you want your narrative to be a big part of playing the game.
   
   

   [*]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".

   
   Again, I point to my point above about how bad rules are often compensated for by good players or DMs. Why don't D&D combats usually degenerate into 2x2 square rooms? And why do SCs degenerate into "Make a check....now make another one....now make another one...."? The rules can help ameliorate the condition by adding interesting variety, but they DON'T, which makes them not good rules if what you want is interesting variety. You have to add that manually, which means overcoming the bad rules.
   
   

   [*]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.

   
   Failing to encourage, reward, and enable good encounter design is a tremendous failure of mechanics.
   
   

   ""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.

   
   As above, a system that requires a "good DM" to be interesting is a bad system. There's nothing in the SC System that makes anything interesting or exciting. That's all in the group. That's a problem, since it means the SC system is no better than the FATAL rules: a good DM will run a good game with it, since a good DM trumps any rule.
   
   

   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.

   
   It's not exactly an edition comparison. It's specifically a weak point of 4e, and 4e stands or fails alone on this.
   
   If you want to force the comparison, the best analogue is probably the class system. In pre-3e D&D, certain classes provided you with things outside of combat, and other classes provided you with things inside of combat (and wizards usually provided you with both, though tending to favor noncombat). The thief class was not made for combat, for instance, it was made for exploration. If you wanted to explore, you played a thief, or possibly a wizard. If you wanted to fight, you played a fighting-man. If you wanted to interact, you played a cleric. The class system itself was the noncombat system.
   
   You also might look at the reward system, which rewarded you for treasure, specifically and only, which meant that the system was method-neutral for how you get that treasure. You could kill things and take their stuff, you could sneak past things and take their stuff, you could sleep things and take their stuff, and only one of those methods had anything to do with rolling initiative.
   
   Not that this was great or perfect or wonderful design, just that it provided more robust support than 4e's system does for doing things other than fighting.
   
   

   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...

   
   Combat takes too much mindshare, IMO, because individual encounters take too much mindshare. I need my D&D to be a game about the adventure, not about the encounter, and for that, I need noncombat systems capable of robust, long-term, varied, dramatic, tension-filled interaction, repeatedly.
   
   Neither the SC system or the Rituals system do that. They weren't really designed to do that. They were designed to give people a brief and easy answer to some of the noncombat problems they might face, and then to get them shuffled back into the stream of combat encounters. They work pretty OK for that. They do not work pretty OK as the focus of a game. They fail, because of all the reasons mentioned above.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

My experience is closer to yours, @AbdulAlhazred , than to yours, @Kamikaze Midget .

The only PC in my game who knows rituals is the wizard. The player of that PC is pretty happy to use rituals - especially information gathering ones like Comprehend Languages and Object Reading, but he has also used Purify Water to dispel a water weird, for example, and last session used Remove Affliction to cure the insanity of a rescued prisoner who had been kept tied up too long next to a gibbering mouther.

I haven't found the rituals weak. I agree that money is probably not be the best way of rationing them - why should the players forfeit build options (ie items) for progressing the narrative? - but the amounts are modest enough relative to the cost of level-appropriate items that in practice I don't think this is such a big deal.

I think that there does need to be some sort of rationing device. For the reasons AbdulAlhazred gives, I'm not sure that surges or action points would work better, and casting time on its own is perhaps not enough. Essentials, for its Resurrection power, uses the occurence of an extended rest as the rationing device. This also has obvious cons as well as pros.

On skill challenges, I agree also with AbdulAlhazred that the answer to (1) and (2) is for dynamic encounter design and resolution, supported by the sorts of guidelines one finds in better books than the 4e DMG (HeroQuest, Maelstrom Storytelling, etc) - although DMG 2 makes a reasonable attempt at beginning to deal with issue (2).

As to issue (3), this is related to LostSoul's point that I made earlier - the GM gets no dice. Again, the solution to this is encounter design and resolution. The failure to deal with this is, in my view, one of the biggest gaps in the 4e GM's guidelines.

On the issue of "the encounter" vs "the adventure" - I like this aspect of 4e's design, and rather than turning away from it I would like to see more advice on how to handle traditional exploration within this framework, and how to integrate non-combat and combat action resolution more smoothly (at the moment this is very underdeveloped - there are a few throwaway remarks in the DMG 2).

I certainly don't find that 4e is all about comat. Even when combat is occurring - and the game does prioritise combat as a mode of conflict resolution - I don't think that the game is generally about that combat.

Well, I agree, 4e isn't all about combat. However, I think combat got excessive 'mindshare' in 4e. There's perfectly good, indeed excellent, support for everything else, yet people continue to make this "4e is a skirmish game" statement. It can't be dismissed because half the world is saying it. So looking at it, why is it? I see 2 things. Many/most of the character build choices you make relate to combat. Most of the specific elements (powers, feats etc) are combat related. When you play these things may not be so important, but they do occupy player mindshare. You notice that many people claim that their players become obsessed with fighting when they play 4e. Again, I don't think it can be dismissed. Were I releasing a rehashed game I think I'd rectify that. It would have to be perforce mostly a subtractive process.

1. De-emphasize the prominence of roles in the rules. Just make them lower profile. Perhaps only mention them in the DMG and the intro block to each class and nowhere else. I realize they can be a tool to help beginners, but they also serve to focus people on the character-as-combat-device.
2. Drastically reduce the number of powers. Frankly I would flat out remove 90% of the attack powers from the game.
3. Drastically reduce the number of feats, again 90% would be a good target.
4. Integrate rituals more deeply in the rules. Provide item support for them, some form of 'pre-casting' feature (better than scrolls, which are almost worthless). Re-evaluate the costs and levels of individual rituals and make their costs scaling.
5. Integrate suggested non-combat uses of powers directly in their description and discuss this extensively. Do this the PHB, not just the DMG.
6. Put page 42 in the PHB and emphasize its general applicability outside of combat.
7. Reduce the number of items by 90% and balance them evenly between items useful in combat and other items that support exploration and other activities.
8. Turn the dial a bit back towards swingy and quick combat and streamline the combat system somewhat. This is a deeper topic, but 25% faster combat with a bit greater tendency towards 'thrills and spills' built in would be good.

I think this stuff can all be accomplished without wrecking any of the positive aspects of the game.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

@KM

Eh, yeah, I think we differ there. It seems to me if you look at rituals they ARE mostly useful for exploration purposes. I guess when I say 'narrative', maybe it would get the idea across better to use exploration, but then I tend not to be too stuck in the dungeon crawl paradigm, so I tend to see more things like intrigue, investigation, etc. Still, fundamentally those activities are a lot like exploration and fill the same conceptual space in the game. While the casting times are 'arbitrary' in the sense of an hour and 2 hours might not be meaningful distinctions that cannot be stated unequivocally. It really depends on what's going on. If the baron's daughter will be executed in 30 minutes then it is pretty important if it takes an hour to cast the ritual that will get you into the castle. There's no encounter related timescale that will work there, and there's a point to the hour casting time because it serves to define what your options are. Now, this is where pre-cast rituals would be interesting, or devices that allow you to perform quicker ritual casting (a scroll actually will work in this case).

While rituals are mechanically like a skill check my point is that when a ritual is what you need, that's what you need. No skill check will teleport the party, raise the dead, scry on an enemy, etc. They are an option.

Yeah, I wasn't trying to make an edition comparison except to the extent of contrasting them (or showing a lack of contrast). I think if you look at 3.5 you find that the two games spend about the same amount of resources on combat and non-combat for instance. The problem with pre-3.5 versions of the game IS exactly that hard separation. Fighter player sits on his hands until a fight starts, at which point the thief cowers in the back and hopes not to be noticed. It really doesn't work well at all.

As for the encounter design stuff. I disagree with you I guess. I think in every single edition of the game there is a dependency on the DM to make good encounters and run them well. That's the most basic straightforward aspect of DMing there is. 4e is no different from any other edition here. You can make every sort of encounter in 4e that you could in earlier editions and make them all work, and it isn't hard to do (or again no harder than it ever was). The fact that 4e gave you an ADDITIONAL tool in SCs is a freebie. I utterly fail to understand how it can possibly be other than a net gain. Again, just as you would make good combat encounters you have to make good SCs. Now, it is perfectly legitimate to point out that one is easier to do and the support for it is a lot more polished than for the other, but clearly good SCs can be made, and just as clearly you could simply not use SCs and you've lost NOTHING over previous editions.

SYSTEMS don't provide drama or tension. What 'system' in 1e AD&D provided drama and tension outside of combat? It isn't in any book I'm aware of. It doesn't come from books. It comes from the narrative. The rules provide resolution structures that give the players a device to use to move forward and resolve the tensions and play out the drama. All editions do that.

This is why I say the mindshare thing exists at the level of resources within the system, not the resolution structures. I don't care how much you tinker with the rules, if 75% of what the player's see on their sheet and 75% of the build decisions they make, and 75% of the items they get relate to combat, then that is what will have their mindshare.

 

[pemerton]

Well, I agree, 4e isn't all about combat. However, I think combat got excessive 'mindshare' in 4e. There's perfectly good, indeed excellent, support for everything else, yet people continue to make this "4e is a skirmish game" statement.

My inclination is slightly different. In some ways, I'm closer to what KM says here, but take a less negative view:

Combat takes too much mindshare, IMO, because individual encounters take too much mindshare. I need my D&D to be a game about the adventure, not about the encounter, and for that, I need noncombat systems capable of robust, long-term, varied, dramatic, tension-filled interaction, repeatedly.

Neither the SC system or the Rituals system do that. They weren't really designed to do that. They were designed to give people a brief and easy answer to some of the noncombat problems they might face, and then to get them shuffled back into the stream of combat encounters. They work pretty OK for that. They do not work pretty OK as the focus of a game. They fail, because of all the reasons mentioned above.

As designed - particularly on the character build side, and to an extent on the action resolution side (I don't agree with KM completely, but I agree with him that skill challenges to an extent, and rituals definitely, are subordinated to conflict as a mode of progressing the game) - combat is central to 4e.

What I think would improve the game is more discussion of how to make a game in which combat is the central method of conflict resolution more than just a series of tactical skirmishes.

Beowulf, Arthurian legends, the X-Men, Conan, etc are all works of fiction in which combat is a principal mode of conflict resolution. But they're not about combat, and most people who enjoy them wouldn't regard them as just recounts of a series of tactical skirmishes.

The only 4e book that tackles this issue from the point of view of using fictional elements in the right way in encounter design is Worlds and Monsters, which was a "preview" but should have been included in the core. (Perhaps by dumping some dross from the DMG, like random dungeons and the tedious discussion of adventure site personality.)

This wouldn't be the game KM is asking for. I think it would be mechanically much closer to existing 4e, but with better support for encounter design. In my view 4e needs this more than it needs new mechanics. (Although better ways of handling certain aspects of skill challenges would also be good.)

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

My inclination is slightly different. In some ways, I'm closer to what KM says here, but take a less negative view:

As designed - particularly on the character build side, and to an extent on the action resolution side (I don't agree with KM completely, but I agree with him that skill challenges to an extent, and rituals definitely, are subordinated to conflict as a mode of progressing the game) - combat is central to 4e.

What I think would improve the game is more discussion of how to make a game in which combat is the central method of conflict resolution more than just a series of tactical skirmishes.

Beowulf, Arthurian legends, the X-Men, Conan, etc are all works of fiction in which combat is a principal mode of conflict resolution. But they're not about combat, and most people who enjoy them wouldn't regard them as just recounts of a series of tactical skirmishes.

The only 4e book that tackles this issue from the point of view of using fictional elements in the right way in encounter design is Worlds and Monsters, which was a "preview" but should have been included in the core. (Perhaps by dumping some dross from the DMG, like random dungeons and the tedious discussion of adventure site personality.)

This wouldn't be the game KM is asking for. I think it would be mechanically much closer to existing 4e, but with better support for encounter design. In my view 4e needs this more than it needs new mechanics. (Although better ways of handling certain aspects of skill challenges would also be good.)

Yeah, combat is central to the game. Like you I don't see an absolute necessity to do a lot of mucking with the rules, but I think mucking with the rules AND doing what you suggest would be a 'full bore' solution.

I didn't read Worlds and Monsters, so I don't really know how they presented these ideas there. I won't disagree though that monsters are pretty much strictly presented in the core 3 4e books as encounter elements. There's some discussion now and then of plot and motive related to them, but it is probably the area that 4e spends the least on. I think the thing is that while the DMG could profitably discuss this, the greatest value would be provided with better adventures. DMs largely model their play on commercial adventures.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I feel like I might be getting a bit misinterpreted, so let me clarify:

I think rituals and skill challenges are good rules for what they were designed to do. Namely, resolving the occasional noncombat situation. They are pretty fine at doing that. GP cost is still kind of an issue, and sameness in SC's is still kind of an issue, but they are pretty adequate at doing the job they were meant to do.

I think what they were designed to do was the wrong thing to design them to do. I think they should have been designed to give drama, tension, and excitement to things that are not combat. They don't do that very well. This shouldn't be surprising, because they weren't meant to do that. I think that my criticisms of them for not doing something they weren't meant to do is a reaction to the following chain of events: I say "4e lacks effective noncombat rules," and people argue, "What about SC's and Rituals?," and then I have to explain why those aren't good enough for me, so in this instance, I just leapt ahead to why they aren't good enough for me.

But they're good enough for what they were meant to do.

They just weren't meant to do the thing that I need them to do.

While rituals are mechanically like a skill check my point is that when a ritual is what you need, that's what you need. No skill check will teleport the party, raise the dead, scry on an enemy, etc. They are an option.

The free, nonmagical alternatives to teleportation, raising, and scrying (moving over land, making a Heal check to stabilize the dying, or using Perception) are almost always better than rituals. There's a few corner cases of things you can ONLY do with rituals, but you could also play a game entirely without them and not miss them. Which is kind of a problem. Imagine playing the game without the combat system!

Fighter player sits on his hands until a fight starts, at which point the thief cowers in the back and hopes not to be noticed. It really doesn't work well at all.

I do agree with you here -- I think the idea in 4e of "everyone contributes" is a very good idea, since it makes the system neutral. I think that's definitely worth preserving going forward. I just thing everyone also needs to contribute in dramatic encounters that don't involve stabbing things (and that sometimes stabbing things is not so dramatic as to require an entire hour-long minis battle).

I think in every single edition of the game there is a dependency on the DM to make good encounters and run them well.

Yes, but the rules need to support a DM in doing that. 4e gives you great rules to support your combats -- monsters galore, a quick and fairly simple "monster design" engine, attacks that vary in damage, effects, defenses, ranges, usage times, a roles system that lets everyone contribute, even action points as a cherry on top. Even rituals and SC's support your combats, since they locate everything that's not a combat in an optional shadowland.

4e does not give you great rules to support your courtly intrigue or your trailblazing exploration or your crime scene investigation. SC's and rituals won't do that for you. A good DM might, but a good DM is independent of a system. The system is at its best when it encourages, rewards, and aids good DMing. 4e doesn't do that for an Eberron DM who is into making a fantasy version of L. A. Noire for his next adventure, for instance.

SYSTEMS don't provide drama or tension. What 'system' in 1e AD&D provided drama and tension outside of combat?

Outside of combat? XP.

Inside combat? HP.

Sanity systems in Call of Cthulu work similarly, and similarly raise the tension gradually.

Systems of character development and change like the "keys" XP system do it too.

I haven't played, but I've heard Burning Wheel does a great job of providing drama and tension.

That's just in tabletop RPGs. The betting system in poker provides drama and tension. The scoring system in golf does likewise. The rules about downs in american football ramp up the tension at almost a hilariously narrative rate. In Grand Theft Auto, the star ratings for alerting law enforcement are VERY effective drama-generators. In chess, each turn is a dramasaurus, because the system is so effective at generation tension. In Jenga, each turn is also very dramatic, since that tower ain't gettin' any MORE stable.

It's one of the basic arts of game design as I see it: using a ruleset to inspire a feeling. It doesn't have to be drama or tension, but that's one of the things that games, by their nature as being luck and skill based, are very good at inspiring. There are games that are built to inspire creativity, joy, satisfaction, laughter, and other things, too, though.

In D&D, I'm seeking the feeling of being "heroic," which means, in part, that I'm seeking the feeling of overcoming a difficult challenge.

A system that is essentially a coin flip (or a series of them) isn't very good at delivering that feeling. It isn't very good at delivering any feeling. It doesn't support a DM's decision to use it in a game where you want people to leave the table having felt something.

I don't care how much you tinker with the rules, if 75% of what the player's see on their sheet and 75% of the build decisions they make, and 75% of the items they get relate to combat, then that is what will have their mindshare.

Y'know, as much as there might be quibbles, I think ultimately we'd hit in the same general area. Giving the players more than just 17 skills and a binary d20 roll to affect the world outside of combat with would be a remarkable first step towards enabling the system to support things that aren't combat.

Of course, if these degenerate into "+2 to a skill check," then we're back at the level of YAWN.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I feel like I might be getting a bit misinterpreted, so let me clarify:

I think rituals and skill challenges are good rules for what they were designed to do. Namely, resolving the occasional noncombat situation. They are pretty fine at doing that. GP cost is still kind of an issue, and sameness in SC's is still kind of an issue, but they are pretty adequate at doing the job they were meant to do.

I think what they were designed to do was the wrong thing to design them to do. I think they should have been designed to give drama, tension, and excitement to things that are not combat. They don't do that very well. This shouldn't be surprising, because they weren't meant to do that. I think that my criticisms of them for not doing something they weren't meant to do is a reaction to the following chain of events: I say "4e lacks effective noncombat rules," and people argue, "What about SC's and Rituals?," and then I have to explain why those aren't good enough for me, so in this instance, I just leapt ahead to why they aren't good enough for me.

But they're good enough for what they were meant to do.

They just weren't meant to do the thing that I need them to do.

OK, I'm not sure I'm closer yet to the nuts and bolts of what you are missing. There IS drama in an SC where the player is trying to figure out if they can solve the challenge with a good skill and make that final toss when there are 2 fails on the table. I'm ready to believe there are refinements of course. Just haven't really managed to find someone who's clearly been able to articulate exactly what aspect of the system they're saying should work differently to refine it.

The free, nonmagical alternatives to teleportation, raising, and scrying (moving over land, making a Heal check to stabilize the dying, or using Perception) are almost always better than rituals. There's a few corner cases of things you can ONLY do with rituals, but you could also play a game entirely without them and not miss them. Which is kind of a problem. Imagine playing the game without the combat system!

Eh, you call them 'a few corner cases', but I haven't found that to be really the case. There are a number of types of rituals and they contribute in different ways, but many of them can do things that in a lot of situations are quite beneficial. You can buy a horse, if there's one around and if you have time, and if you don't need to cross water or go really fast, but in ALL of those later cases you can cast Phantom Steed and it is not expensive to do. I mean I can obviously give examples all day, and you can respond with cases where something else is better. OTOH ritual casting in general has both a lot of utility and can offer quite a number of unique capabilities. I actually think it is a strength of the system that it isn't the ONLY way to get from here to there in an overwhelming number of cases. It is still a hugely useful capability as my utility wizard has demonstrated many times.

I do agree with you here -- I think the idea in 4e of "everyone contributes" is a very good idea, since it makes the system neutral. I think that's definitely worth preserving going forward. I just thing everyone also needs to contribute in dramatic encounters that don't involve stabbing things (and that sometimes stabbing things is not so dramatic as to require an entire hour-long minis battle).

Yes, but the rules need to support a DM in doing that. 4e gives you great rules to support your combats -- monsters galore, a quick and fairly simple "monster design" engine, attacks that vary in damage, effects, defenses, ranges, usage times, a roles system that lets everyone contribute, even action points as a cherry on top. Even rituals and SC's support your combats, since they locate everything that's not a combat in an optional shadowland.

I guess it is the same question. How do you see non-combat conflict resolution mechanics as inferior? I've not figured out why everyone wants to relegate these things to the 'shadowland' by making them trivial parts of the adventure instead of making them central parts. I realize people seem determined to do that. I haven't yet discovered a reason why you can't. In fact, I do. I'd refer people to Pirate Cat's campaign threads as well, where all sorts of central issues seem to be worked out using a variety of 4e mechanics. I'm not sure what he would say about this and I sure haven't tried to add up how many combats there were, how many SCs, etc, and I can't really tell what level of drama they each involved at his table, but it does provide a pretty good narrative summary of use in a campaign by someone capable of seeing all the possibilities that are out there.

I always feel like the problem isn't bad mechanics, it is lack of someone finding a way to articulate them that all of the community identifies with.

4e does not give you great rules to support your courtly intrigue or your trailblazing exploration or your crime scene investigation. SC's and rituals won't do that for you. A good DM might, but a good DM is independent of a system. The system is at its best when it encourages, rewards, and aids good DMing. 4e doesn't do that for an Eberron DM who is into making a fantasy version of L. A. Noire for his next adventure, for instance.

Yeah, again, I'm entirely interested in hearing what things people believe are lacking in order to do that stuff. I know I've had intrigue, and exploration that worked well and seemed not to be particularly unsupported. I'm not all that strong on the mystery thing, but I think investigation using skills for basic 'do you know this fact' and 'do you spot the clue as you look around' kinds of things. The rest is probably narrative? I dunno, maybe there's a whole branch of RPG mechanics that I've just missed. Aside from very specific mechanics for specialized areas of knowledge (how to get a fingerprint kind of stuff, or knowing obscure forensic knowledge say) what are you looking for? I would argue that in a fairly generalist game where lots of possibilities exist that very specific mechanics probably belong either in the adventure that uses them (like the way Courts of the Shadow Fey uses illusions and social standing) or possibly in sub-genre supplements. I mean it is fine if the core books have room for some of that too, but the designers have to guess which ones to include or leave out.

Outside of combat? XP.

Inside combat? HP.

Sanity systems in Call of Cthulu work similarly, and similarly raise the tension gradually.

Systems of character development and change like the "keys" XP system do it too.

I haven't played, but I've heard Burning Wheel does a great job of providing drama and tension.

That's just in tabletop RPGs. The betting system in poker provides drama and tension. The scoring system in golf does likewise. The rules about downs in american football ramp up the tension at almost a hilariously narrative rate. In Grand Theft Auto, the star ratings for alerting law enforcement are VERY effective drama-generators. In chess, each turn is a dramasaurus, because the system is so effective at generation tension. In Jenga, each turn is also very dramatic, since that tower ain't gettin' any MORE stable.

It's one of the basic arts of game design as I see it: using a ruleset to inspire a feeling. It doesn't have to be drama or tension, but that's one of the things that games, by their nature as being luck and skill based, are very good at inspiring. There are games that are built to inspire creativity, joy, satisfaction, laughter, and other things, too, though.

In D&D, I'm seeking the feeling of being "heroic," which means, in part, that I'm seeking the feeling of overcoming a difficult challenge.

A system that is essentially a coin flip (or a series of them) isn't very good at delivering that feeling. It isn't very good at delivering any feeling. It doesn't support a DM's decision to use it in a game where you want people to leave the table having felt something.

But I just don't understand at all how 4e's mechanics are just a coin flip. Sure, there are dice involved, but the whole POINT of the SC is to draw out the situation and move it away from the single toss of a d20 that was all 3.5 really offered for mechanics. And really an SC SHOULDN'T be mostly about rolling dice. It should be mostly about working through what the situation is, and figuring out how to apply your skills, strategizing, trying things, seeing how the situation evolves and adapting to it, etc. I'm SURE the basic SC mechanics by themselves don't always do everything you want, but they're a really good start and work fine. Rituals? I think of them as lower level resources usually. You need to make a success in an SC and a ritual can accomplish it, bam.

Y'know, as much as there might be quibbles, I think ultimately we'd hit in the same general area. Giving the players more than just 17 skills and a binary d20 roll to affect the world outside of combat with would be a remarkable first step towards enabling the system to support things that aren't combat.

Of course, if these degenerate into "+2 to a skill check," then we're back at the level of YAWN.

Well, the thing is in a sense what are extra resources going to do? They're going to be bonuses (situational or otherwise), enablers (rituals or powers, etc), or they're going to be some kind of added resource tracking/spending thing of some sort. Unless we get into "personality mechanics" like the aspects in BW or something which are working on the level of motivation or goals and not means.

I'm kind of thinking that the issue here may be that some people like complex rules intensive mechanics and others like lightweight rules, sort of like the 'grid' vs 'imagination' combat debate. If a person like a good chunk of mechanics, then they'll really find 4e combat interesting, but they are likely to see non-combat mechanics as sketchy and incomplete. The reverse happens with people that like rules-light, they're likely to be OK with the 4e non-combat stuff and find combat slow, dull and overly complex.

So, reducing the rules heaviness of combat and trimming back its time requirement some seems key to me. The contrast between the two is reduced and since ALL D&D always has combat it will please the 'want more story' people. It will be a more balanced game. I'm leery though of non-combat rules in general. I like to play that fast and loose.