D&D 4E Presentation vs design... vs philosophy

[Lanefan]

Turning undead. Climbing walls. Evasion out-of-doors. Listening at doors allows retries. Opening normal dungeon doors allows retries. I'm pretty sure picking pockets allows retries.

Turning undead is an odd one, in that if you turn a bunch of undead and they wander off and then return you can try turning them again. But, once you fail you're done; you can't turn those particular ones again. (honestly not sure if this is RAW or a houserule but it's how we've done it since forever)

I'm not sure what work "makes sense" is doing here. If what's behind a lock materially changes, the game doesn't give me a new chance to roll to successfully pick it. Nor if I buy new thieves' tools. The game says I have to gain a level.

If what's behind a lock materially changes, that's 99.9% of the time irrelvant to the actual picking of the lock. But under the heading of "makes sense", I'd consider new tools - particularly if they were somehow an upgrade to what you already had - to be a material change and allow another try; though I'd really frown on someone gaming the system by carrying ten sets of tools around.

* - the other 0.1% being if something behind the lock actually does something to the lock e.g. uses a key to open it from the other side.

If I lose a fight to some goblins and survive (eg I run away or my friends carry my unconscious body of the field), I'm allwoed a retry although nothing might be materially different.

Many things would be materially different. Both your party and the goblins would be more aware of each other's capabilities (and presence!) and likely adjust tactics accordingly (e.g. if the goblins saw you go down easily the first time they might spiral on you the second time, knowing you're easy to take out of the battle); if anyone in either group didn't survive the first go-round they're unlikely to be available for the second; long-term injuries might not have recovered; any broken or lost equipment or fired ammunition isn't available, etc., etc.

I think it's very hard to find any consistency in the AD&D rules over what calls for one roll, multiple rolls with cumlative effect, the possibility of retires with or without cost (in the form, say, of wandering monster checks), etc. Which goes back to the claim that it is more flexiible than a uniform system because of its variety of sub-systems. I'm really not seeing any evidence in favour of that assertion.

One example: I find roll-under-stat to be far more useful in various situations than roll-vs-DC or equivalent, and I-as-DM can use either one as long as I'm consistent about which happens when e.g. if I use roll-under for something once then I should use it every time the same situation arises again.

Also, the whole retries issue is one of meta-philosophy in some ways: whether one sees it as important that someone with the theoretical capability to succeed at something eventually will succeed no matter what, or whehter theoretical ability to succeed does not mean success will inevitably come. In short: does one like the binary nature produced by take-20 (which is what infinite retries boils down to) or not?

Personally, I rather despise take-20. To me, in many cases the roll for whatever you're trying to do represents the best you can do in the time you have, or allow yourself, to do it (even if that time is forever), and that simply having enough ability to theoretically get a roll up to 25 when the DC is 18 doesn't guarantee that you ever actually will. Sometimes the simplest of things defeat those who should ace them every time - how many times have you tried to open a stuck jar and failed only to then have someone much weaker come along and pop the thing without any effort at all?

Well, if granularity is imporant, why not (as someone suggested upthread) use d1000? Or d10 rather than d6 for intiative or surpise? I'm honestly not sure there's any answer to this question in the logic of AD&D's design. Much of it seems rather arbitrary. (And I believe some of it was driven by a desire to sell polyhedral dice.)

Heh - you're probably right about the dice-selling. And I don't mind that; I've got the dice now, might as well put 'em to use.

"It ain't a good game of golf (D&D) unless you used every club (die) in the bag!"

One quite flexible system that I mentioned upthread is Cortex+ Heroic, which uses polyhedral dice from d5 to d12 and does have a logic to it (in the sense that both mechanical inputs and resulting effects are measured in die sizes, and stepping these up or down is an important aspect of resolution).

On a related note, have you ever checked out DCCRPG?

That system uses about 15 different die sizes ranging from d2 to d30, and they way it applies penalty or bonus to a roll is often to, instead of applying a flat + or -, make you roll a die that's one step bigger or smaller than what you would have used before.

Thus, if something normally calls for a d20 but you're at bonus, you'd roll a d24. If at penalty, it might be a d16; a second penalty would force this down to a d14, and so forth. High rolls are always better.

This doesn't affect granularity - you're still trying to hit a target number - but it does affect the odds of hitting it, and it's a useful-looking mechanic that I've yet to really implement.

Unfortunately, but true to designer form, having hit on this interesting mechanic the DCCRPG designers then shoehorned it into every aspect of the game even where it doesn't make sense to do so.

Of classic systems I think Classic Traveller is certainly as flexible than AD&D, and probably moreso, and it uses 2d6 as it's most common throw for resolution. It has multiple subsystems each with its own bonus structure - one feature that tends to lessen its flexibiity - but one effect of 2d6 is that even a +1 is significant. To me at least there does seem to be a clearer logic to Traveller's systems than to AD&D's.

Using 2d6 introduces bell-curve results, too, and yes - a flat + or - there carries far greater implications particularly if the tipping point between success and failure is near the middle of the curve.