R. Thompson : D&D still a sim/gamist RPG

[xechnao]

More than often*, the result of 3.x rm is the 15 min. day, how it is supposed to help Nar play ?


*Except in DM-hammered time-based adventure.

Some people keep mentioning this 15 min. day problem I personally haven't felt. I haven't ever actually significantly experienced this problem in the mentioned proportions. Even in D&D video games you couldn't usually safely rest unless you progressed up to a certain point. If with every step made you retreated, you then got respawning. In the tabletop game the 15 min day is made even unattractive by the rules themselves. Because of consumable resources and their costs (the most blatant example is spell components) that can only be restored with adventure progress and development.

 

[marune]

Some people keep mentioning this 15 min. day problem I personally haven't felt. I haven't ever actually significantly experienced this problem in the mentioned proportions.

If you have not discovered the pleasure of Scry/Buff/Teleport(without error) in your 3.x, I'm more than happy for you

Even in D&D video games you couldn't usually safely rest unless you progressed up to a certain point. If with every step made you retreated, you then got respawning. In the tabletop game the 15 min day is made even unattractive by the rules themselves. Because of consumable resources and their costs (the most blatant example is spell components) that can only be restored with adventure progress and development.

Spell components for spells like Raise Dead / Resurection ? Yeah, I could see it's a kind of protection agains't dungeon hit-and-run tactic. It is however, IMHO, far from supporting Nar play, maybe High-Concept Sim (the default D&D theme : adventurers risking their life in dungeons to become rich and glorious by killing monster and getting the McGuffin).

 

[xechnao]

If you have not discovered the pleasure of Scry/Buff/Teleport(without error) in your 3.x, I'm more than happy for you

Aren't they supposed to exist some possible encounter counter-measures against this tactic? Waiting for you, teleport impossibility, mobility of encounter etch.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Aren't they supposed to exist some possible encounter counter-measures against this tactic? Waiting for you, teleport impossibility, mobility of encounter etch.

Waiting for you only gets you to even ground - assuming the opposition knows when you'll arrive. (If not, short-term buffs favor the teleporting group)
Mobility of Encounter is an interesting idea. But too often, it doesn't apply to to "BBEG" against whose these tactic is typically employed. And Scrying can ensure that you are still fast enough at the intended location.
Other methods typically rely on "counter-magic" at work. This is a solution to the problem at hand, but means you need your enemies to rely strongly on magic (spells), which doesn't always fit. It would be nice if the rules would provide for non-magical ways to block teleportation (lead walls or tin foil hats? )

 

[JesterOC]

My example was the classic paladin already tortured by his G/S alternatives.

I don’t see how the paladin example has anything to do with G/S but rather G/N. I think they have already established that there will be Good and Evil Paladin just like good and evil angels.

And even if they did not paladins can be played quite differently from each other. I had one player years ago while playing 3rd edition who played a paladin that made everyone shudder. The guy was ruthless. Once when a group of Orcs surrendered he cut off their thumbs off of their right hands so they could wield weapons against ‘civilized folk’. He also was not very protecting of the party, he viewed himself as the most important hero in the party and kept all of the heals for himself. He also was the most reckless, always assuming his god would protect him as long as he acted brave.

All of these things were decided by the player. He was not being forced to act that way, and when other players played the paladin they did not act like him at all. There are very few things in D&D 3E that forces a player to act a certain way, in 4E it looks like there are even less.

JesterOC

 

[smathis]

I fail to see how 4E can be a boon to nar-play as long as we have XP gained for coherent behavior and good strategies.

If you reward doing X, don't ask people for doing Y wich is the opposite of it.

Edit : For example the paladin player doing a thematic choice getting bad reactions from both the G and S minded players around the table. (Hey, why did you not do X to help us win that fight! || What ? A paladin of Torm would never do that before a cleric of Bane!)

I don't really understand the example. I think I've been straightforward about what 4e gives us that makes it a far better vehicle for our Inner Narrativists than 3.x.

And basing whether or not a game supports a Narrativist playstyle based on the reactions of other players isn't valid. Even if you're playing HeroQuest, there's bound to be someone at the table who wonders why you didn't use your "Friend of the Duck Clan 15w" to augment your roll. Simply put, different players make different choices and there will almost always be someone who feels that said choice was sub-optimal in some fashion.

I don't think this says anything about how well a game supports Narrativist play.

As far as XP...

The reward system in 4e is much improved. Not only is XP awarded for non-combat in 4e but characters filling in their backgrounds is no longer penalized in 4e. You can be the son of a Blacksmith now, defining whatever that means outside of combat, without hampering your capabilities within combat (by taking away skill points you could have used in Search or Move Silently).

I think my first post pretty clearly defined the three improvements in 4e that make it vastly superior to any other edition of D&D for Narr play.

Again, does that raise D&D up to the level of Sorcerer?

No.

But it's D&D. And you'll now note that Warlocks in 4e are a lot closer to Ron's concept of them than any other caster in D&D history.

If I was trying to add a Nar play in D&D, it would be :

Still purely G during challenges (combat or social) and character creations, but N at the choices of adventures and at the choices of challenges.

See, I don't mind the G during combat/social challenges. I don't like G in character creation. I feel that hampers Narr play because it puts too much emphasis on optimal and sub-optimal builds. This is D&D. So having 15 ranks in Profession (Dirt Farmer) is vastly different than having those same ranks in Bluff or Acrobatics.

I don't think there's anyway around that.

As far as the choices of adventures...

It's no more difficult now to use something like the Oracles in Vincent's "In a Wicked Age" than it has been in any other version of D&D. If I were running a campaign, in fact, I'd use "In a Wicked Age" to build out the adventures and -- possibly -- alternate DM duties. I love the Owe List and the Oracles as means to empower players and define the story.

But it was unrealistic to expect anything of that sort in D&D.

That's like being disappointed because Dennis Kucinich wasn't elected president. I mean, he wasn't the last three times he's run. So isn't it a little foolish to think he'd win this time?

Same things go for choices of challenges, although the Non-Combat Encounter rules look very promising for just this sort of thing. Sure, players can't choose what monsters or traps they'll face. But where's the fun in that?

But they can initiate a Non-Combat Encounter, negotiate the stakes, pick any skill to roll against and then frame the contest.

How is that not a hyperjump forward for the game who's only in-game currencies in the last edition were first conceived in the mid 1970s?

From where you're sitting, you may be underwhelmed. And that's okay. But from where I'm sitting, it's like D&D stopped being this scrawny, annoying, pimply-faced Pollyanna and came back from summer vacation, like, FREAKIN' HOT!

I can accept that you don't see things this way. But I, for one, am going to ask 4e out on a date!

 

[Nytmare]

I fail to see how 4E can be a boon to nar-play as long as we have XP gained for coherent behavior and good strategies.

Is this how XP is going to be dealt with in 4th Ed? I was under the assumption that it was becoming a "show up x times and go up a level" system?

 

[Sojorn]

From where you're sitting, you may be underwhelmed. And that's okay. But from where I'm sitting, it's like D&D stopped being this scrawny, annoying, pimply-faced Pollyanna and came back from summer vacation, like, FREAKIN' HOT!

I can accept that you don't see things this way. But I, for one, am going to ask 4e out on a date!

Well dang it. I normally really, really hate doing this, but it's true.

lol

There, I said it. You nearly made me fall out of my chair laughing.

Anyway, yeah. What's with all the focus on the GNS terms? Can't D&D support many different playstyles successfully? Did someone crack some law of the universe that says if D&D supports these three playstyles equally, any given person will only like 33% of the game at most?

I'd argue that a well-designed game would be able to bring players of different styles together, everyone getting what they want from the game without harming the styles of the other players. If the blog in question is any indication, the 4th edition designers are aiming to do exactly that.

 

[smathis]

There, I said it. You nearly made me fall out of my chair laughing.

I'd argue that a well-designed game would be able to bring players of different styles together, everyone getting what they want from the game without harming the styles of the other players. If the blog in question is any indication, the 4th edition designers are aiming to do exactly that.

I'd say that the 4e design team is focused on making a good game. Some of them may be familiar with these indie games, but -- if Ryan Dancey is any indication -- the Forge isn't high on their radar.

There are a number of different ways to look at this GNS thing -- all of which spiral into a tornado of death. Despite efforts to the contrary, everyone's understanding of Forge-speak is truly their own. So no one can agree on anything really. Heck, even Ron contradicts himself from time to time. Or at least he used to.

Many moons ago, Ron was pretty consistent about admonishing Forgites for representing GNS as a category of games. Like saying D&D was Sim or Donjon was Narr. His point, at that time, was that GNS represented types of play.

There were good reasons he had at the time. But for the most part, I felt it was kind of an end-around the whole "Gamist systems being used Narratively" issue. Hence, games became these collections of currencies and mechanics that encouraged different types of play.

That said, I think there are a couple of ways to view GNS. One is from the standpoint of figuring out how you want a game to play (defining the game experience, so to speak) and using that as a foundation for a game's design.

This is good for building focused games and has led to a lot of innovative games over there. Although I'd hazard to say that many of the indie superstars on the Forge either don't care enough about the theory to keep up with it or take the theory about as far as it can go and then abandon it in favor of just designing something that is fun. I mean, heck, the Pool was designed practically in a bubble -- with very little exposure to GNS (in my understanding).

And other games come short of flying in the face of GNS. But it's all okay because games can't be G, N or S. Confused yet?

That said, there's a heretical (or at least it used to be) train of thought that RPGs should attempt to support all these playstyles together. Some people over on the Forge thought this wasn't possible or was somehow inherently incoherent. There were a lot of good reasons they felt this way, mostly revolving around Sim play running counter to one or both of the other two.

Fair enough on that.

In any case, I'll give people the point that a game that tries to support all three will be unfocused and inherently incoherent. A Kludge, if you will.

But I would point out that GNS as playstyles isn't a set of three exclusive modes of being. It's not like you're a Dwarf, and Elf or a Human. Nope, I look at GNS as a dynamic spectrum. Some people stay in one area almost exclusively. But others shift dynamically, even within the same scene or game. And their expectations shift too.

I mean, I can Narr the hell out of a game. But then I turn into a complete monster when the dice come out -- or not -- depending on my mood. Which I change about as frequently as Britney Spears changes psychiatrists.

That's why I think a game like 4e, which appears to throw a bone to all the GNSers, is actually stronger in the long run. Because if I'm playing Mountain Witch and all of a sudden I want Sim in a scene, I'm suddenly getting the feeling I'm in the wrong game. Or if I want to go all Gamist in a combat in the Pool, there's strangely very little meat on the bone.

Whereas 4e, in almost a happy cosmic accident, appears to isolate these facets of the RPG experience into different areas of gameplay. Sim play has become more flavor text, than anything. Probably where it's belonged all along, IMO. While Gamist play is most concretely focused on combat. Narrativist play can be enjoyed in Non-Combat Encounters or in the general PC-decision-making process (where it's always lived in exile in the D&D system). So here we have a game that appears to give way to all different types of play -- but at different points in the play experience.

So rather than try to reconcile one versus the other. We just switch modes.

But I don't believe this full spectrum approach for 4e was anything other than a happy cosmic accident. Unlike some of the Forgites, I don't believe Perkins and Slavicsek sat the team down with a map of the Big Model and GNS and decided to design a game around that. I think they were focused on making a fun and highly playable game that did things they either always wanted D&D to do or did them better.

And while I agree fully with the other big capstone of Forge theory ("System Matters"), I think it should come with a big caveat called "Kludge Matters a Little Less" -- in that these funky, incoherent systems that encourage people to tinker, house rule and otherwise DIY to mold the experience to their expectations have less of an impact than more coherent rulesets. Add that to the glossary.

I was really big into the GNS thing for a while but I'm not anymore. So a lot of this may already have been addressed on the Forge. I pretty much left the Forge about 4 years ago. There was a lot of Metastasizing Terminology (almost like you weren't anybody until one of your catchphrases made it into the glossary) and by that point GNS and such had given me just about everything it had to give.

I also got to start seriously playing some of these games about 5-6 years ago and was disappointed to realize how sub-optimal some of them were for group cohesion and repeated play. In some instances, it really was a situation where something looked so much better on paper than it was on the table. In others, it was just an instance of an RPG group taking a sharp right turn into a boardgame-style dynamic -- where each session we were starting over with some different, heretofore unheard of indie gem. So there was little investment on the part of anyone involved.

That said, I'm still a fan of indie games and support indie developers whenever I can. Despite my feelings on the shortcomings of many indie games, I still think some of our hobby's best innovations are coming out of the indie scene.

 

[Kraydak]

I kind of feel 4e is moving away from 3.X's:

1) Character design (roleplaying of a sort)
2) Encounter a situation (no roleplaying)
3) Determine a goal (lots of roleplaying)
4) Determine tactics and RoE (some roleplaying)
5) Dice rolling

towards (not entirely by any means, but significantly in the case of the skill challenges)

1) Character design (as above0
2) Encounter a goal (no roleplaying)
3) Determine what circumstances would allow your character to achieve that goal in the way most appropriate to how he wished he could act (roleplaying of a sort, I guess)
4) Dice rolling.

for a net massive loss of roleplaying. Your character isn't defined *by* his encounters, but by *how* he chooses to deal with them.