Player Control, OR "How the game has changed over the years, and why I don't like it"

[Lanefan]

And here we open up an even broader aspect to this whole discussion:

It isn't that the game breaks down if the polearm wielding fighter can no longer trip snakes. It is that one player might feel sidelined if he's built to flip enemies over and take advantage of their weakness, and suddenly they have entire adventures in which everything is immune to his core function.

This.

To some, including (I think) the designers of 4e, this is a problem.

To me, it is not. I repeat, Varying Degrees of Usefulness Are Not A Problem.

As long as everyone has their periods of value to counterbalance their periods of lesser usefulness, who cares? Take, for example, the 1e Illusionist. If an adventure was spent fighting nothing but undead the Illusionist was mostly useless. But if the next adventure is spent fighting dumb Ogres the Illusionist becomes the most useful member of the party (and by far the most fun to play)!

So if the polearm-banger gets into a fight against snakes and finds himself not as useful for a while, so what? Next battle might be one where only the polearm guy can reach the enemy at all, or where 'trip' is the only way to slow 'em down...

Lan-"mostly useless from time to time"-efan

 

[LostSoul]

This is a false dilemma. Goals of play are not exclusive to "winning the system" or "maintaining world consistency". Both can be significant goals, and those goals can be just two among many that the players at a game have.

I don't disagree. I outlined one way to achieve both: you have an impartial arbiter whose job it is to maintain that consistency. That doesn't need to be the DM in all games. (I can imagine a DM-less game that solves this problem by giving players turns in which their responsibilities shift.)

The reality is that while you (the DM, typically) may not be able to envision what's happening to the snake, your players might! In fact, they could have a totally reasonable scenario already playing out in their heads!

Yeah. One way to do this is to have the player describe the action the PC is taking in the game world, and have another player - whose job it is to make judgement calls without bias - act as the authority on what's reasonable and what's not, given the game's setting.

The problem with making the same person responsible for both overcoming challenges and maintaining consistency is that you have a conflict of interest. You have to pick one or the other. Not in all cases, but in many. 4E gets around this problem by removing the relationship between the game world's consistency and mechanical effects. That can be a problem, for some, in itself; the imagined content of the game and the economy of the game don't have as much overlap as they desire. (That's where I sit.)

 

[Dannager]

As long as everyone has their periods of value to counterbalance their periods of lesser usefulness, who cares? Take, for example, the 1e Illusionist. If an adventure was spent fighting nothing but undead the Illusionist was mostly useless. But if the next adventure is spent fighting dumb Ogres the Illusionist becomes the most useful member of the party (and by far the most fun to play)!

I daresay that your average gamer is not willing to trade one Saturday afternoon of useless boredom watching his friends do cool things for another Saturday afternoon where he feels totally awesome while his friends suffer through their own bout of useless boredom and watch him be cool for a day.

Everyone should feel like they have something significant and unique to contribute to every encounter. They don't have to be the star of the show every time, but they shouldn't feel like the cheer squad either.

 

[Aus_Snow]

Everyone should feel like they have something significant and unique to contribute to every encounter. They don't have to be the star of the show every time, but they shouldn't feel like the cheer squad either.

Just for the record: I'm not currently playing D&D of any stripe, and frankly, I couldn't care which one "wins" at any time, regardless. Aaanyway...

Is there any correlation between the "truthiness" of your claim and the typical (average?) duration in real time of encounters?

Just curious. I think there might be - what do you think?

 

[Dannager]

Just for the record: I'm not currently playing D&D of any stripe, and frankly, I couldn't care which one "wins" at any time, regardless. Aaanyway...

Is there any correlation between the "truthiness" of your claim and the typical (average?) duration in real time of encounters?

Just curious. I think there might be - what do you think?

I'm not quite sure what you mean here, but addressing the idea of encounter length (in real time), the system needs to hit a nice middle ground between an encounter that is so short that some players don't get a chance to meaningfully contribute, and so long that the action becomes senselessly repetitive and the outcome completely predictable (as a side note, when people discuss encounters being too long because it's already obvious who is going to win, it's worth noting that winning or losing isn't the whole of the outcome of an encounter; resource expenditure is part of an encounter's outcome as well).

In my experience, 4e hits this sweet spot more consistently than any system I've played around with to date.

 

[Aus_Snow]

I'm not quite sure what you mean here

Sorry, I could've been clearer, yes.

What I mean is, *I* suspect that significantly longer (in real time) encounters might be more subject to your proposition - that "[e]veryone should feel like they have something significant and unique to contribute to every encounter. (etc.)" - while significantly shorter encounters might be less so.

That is, if an encounter (in which any given participant might, um, not be one, all that much if at all) is dragging on, I could see that your case might well apply. Otherwise, or more particularly, if an encounter is brief... not so much?

That was all. So, essentially, I was wondering whether brevity of say, combat resolution, for example, correlates directly. Assuming your position is well grounded, even then. Which sounds more or less reasonable for some as yet undefined percentage of folks.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I agree about the difference between broad-based balance and knife-edge balance, but I don't think that 4e is a racecar, or that it is as transparent as you think. The racer has been computer modeled to hell and back. 4e has been altered and errata-ed to hell and back. Transparency would not require so much errata.

I couldn't disagree more. Transparency is the very reason it does have so much errata. Creating is a lot harder than criticising - and the transparency of 4e allows far, far easier than criticism.

You are making a lot of assumptions here about who is at the table, and what they want from a role-playing game.

Outstanding among those assumptions is that the DM is making changes "to no good purpose", and is involved in "petty quibbling".

I am making the assumption that at the table in the course of play the DM is arbitrarily deciding that snakes can not be knocked prone. 4e DMs can change whatever they want - but that is the example under discussion.

Can I hold you guys to this the next time a "Say Yes" discussion comes up, and it is claimed that it doesn't mean a DM can't say No to knocking a snake prone, playing a Warforged Ninja in a PotC setting, etc.?

A DM can say no. He just shouldn't without damn good reason. (And for the record I'd probably say no to the Warforged Ninja in the PoTC setting - but if the player was sufficiently inventive to make it work then I'd say yes).

Neither "Say Yes" nor "Say No" should be the default.

The default should be: "Say what you think will make a better game".[/QUOTE]

Which is far more of a judgement call. And IMO what will make a better game is taking what's around and running with it (i.e. saying yes) 9 times out of 10.

The collective understanding of whom?

You are playing in a game where the DM is allowed to adjudicate the use of your powers, or anything else in the game. That's the collective understanding from where I sit. It has been since Holmes. AFAICT, the 4e rulebooks explicitly support that collective understanding.

Oh, the DM is still allowed to. The DM is also allowed targetted metiorite strikes with no collateral damage or to turn characters into slugs with no chance of failure.

Then some wonky corner case shows up (blinding a bat, proning a snake, etc)

Blinding a bat is fine. They have blindsight in 4e (at least the only ones I found in the monster builder do). Now deafening a bat is far more interesting.

and no one at the table blinks when it is adjudicate. Indeed, the DM seldom has to declare "you can't do that, it doesn't make sense to ME" because the players automatically self-adjudicate out of creating those wonky corner cases in the first place.

Indeed. Which is why when the DM does adjudicate it's problematic. There's automatically at leas one person at the table who thinks you can.

It's arbitrarily

Given lessons from improv drama and Indy games, I'd hardly call switching to the IMO superior default of "Say yes or roll the dice" arbitrary.

and uncollectively changing the understood social contract that I object to.

You mean that WoTC should take the attitude "As it was under Gygax, it is now and ever shall be, game without end"? Because there is no way you can ever have the social contact indicated by the rules for D&D changed if that is your criterion. (Polls of the entire D&D community being impossible). Part of the publisher of D&D's role is to keep the game current. And that includes taking account of the changing nature of the community and what is coming out of e.g. the Forge.

Moreover, while I am fine with you arbitrarily and uncollectively changing the understood social contract for your group, I very much challenge the notion that you -- or WotC -- or anyone else -- can do so for the rest of us.

All WoTC can do is change the default for groups. You can change yours straight back.

I say No.

And I say I'm glad to, after all these years, see a version of the dominant RPG in existance that supports much of what I want to see in an RPG. Which includes a ruleset good enough that the DM can use it without often needing to overrule it.

We're talking about two ways to do this; I'm sure there are more. The first is the way 4E deals with it: allow the player to describe the outcome of his PC's action, but don't give that description any mechanical effect. The description of the action doesn't feed into the economy of the game. This maintains the challenge. We limit the methods the player has to achieve his goal ("success") to what the rules say his PC can do. By doing so, we give the player meaningful choices to make, because he's limited to a few choices that are balanced against each other.

This works well. The problem is that the description of the action doesn't have anything to do with why we are playing the game in the first place. Imagining the game world doesn't feed into our goals of play. There's no feedback loop.

I strongly disagree. The fiction determines what and how you can do, and secondly you change the fiction when you act. There is the feedback loop there. Movement and positioning are critical parts of the feedback loop. But unlike e.g. GURPS, 4e fiction is lose-grained. Positioning works in multiples of 5ft. Combat rounds are 6 seconds, and the system assumes that you are smart enough to pick your moments within those seconds to do things when they are possible. There are monsters that are immune to being knocked prone in 4e - but they are those that are absolutely immune to prone, not just those you'd have to pick your moments for. The game encourages you to manipulate the gameworld - but the law is not concerned with trifles.

Do you want to focus on the imagined game world, or is that not that important?

I want them to. It's simply a matter of "Don't sweat the small stuff."

I daresay that your average gamer is not willing to trade one Saturday afternoon of useless boredom watching his friends do cool things for another Saturday afternoon where he feels totally awesome while his friends suffer through their own bout of useless boredom and watch him be cool for a day.

Everyone should feel like they have something significant and unique to contribute to every encounter. They don't have to be the star of the show every time, but they shouldn't feel like the cheer squad either.

This. (Can't currently give you XP). But everyone having something significant to contribute is good. (Although it may be part of why 4e combat is slower).

 

[Raven Crowking]

Given lessons from improv drama and Indy games, I'd hardly call switching to the IMO superior default of "Say yes or roll the dice" arbitrary.

You begin with a goal, and you then ascribe tools to achieve that goal. If you take the next step, and assume that your goal applies to everyone, you've blundered.

My point was not that "As it was under Gygax, it is now and ever shall be, game without end" but rather that WotC's, or your, desire to change the social contract does not make the social contract changed for anyone else. Nor should it. It does not change the default expectations, it does not make adhering to the previous social contract an "arbitrary change".

WotC has power over the D&D trademark. It has no power whatsoever over the default social contract for groups. WoTC cannot change the default for groups -- it lacks both the necessary authority and power. There is no need to "change yours straight back".

I am not willing to give anyone outside my table any authority whatsoever over what our social contract is. Not WotC. Not the ghost of Gary Gygax. Not Neonchameleon. Not even Piratecat.

And if you allow me to have authority over your table's social contract -- or WotC, or the ghost of Gary Gygax, or even Rel, well, good luck with that.

And I say I'm glad to, after all these years, see a version of the dominant RPG in existance that supports much of what I want to see in an RPG.

And, while I am sorry that D&D wasn't your cup of tea, I am glad that you now have a game that is. I'm even glad that that game is also D&D. And, when 5e or 6e swings the other way, I'm glad that you will still get use out of those books.

The biggest reason I don't play 4e, though, is that it does not include a ruleset good enough that the DM can use it without often needing to overrule it......for what I want out of a game. If I used the 4e ruleset, all I would do is overrule it. I would have to call the game "Page 42".

There are much better games for what I want.

And now there is a much better game for what you want, compared to what was available before.

That's a good thing. We both win.


RC

 

[Fifth Element]

Prostrate also means face down, but as I already quoted above, in actual usage prone means face down.

Cherry-picking the definition doesn't change that one bit. Prone does not mean, "flipped on your back."

Using a definition in the dictionary is cherry-picking? I could say the same about you: you're using the one that supports what you say, while ignoring the other more general one. I wouldn't say that, because English words often have more than one meaning, some more precise and some more general.

 

[Fifth Element]

Seriously, words actually mean things, and their errant usage by so-called professional writers is really inexcusable.

So they looked in the dictionary and saw that one definition of prone is "lying down". They certainly couldn't use supine, since that word doesn't seem to have a more general version in its definitions and "kocking prone" in 4E does not necessarily mean the target ends up on its back.

What should they have used? Recumbent?

Perhaps keeping up with changes in language usage is what really needs to be done here. Forsooth, I am afeard that thy critism of yon "so-called professional writers" is a bit hasty.