D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[AnotherGuy]

The implementation meant that I could take them out by slapping them with a rubber chicken.

Sometimes things can be improved upon - I've done that with every edition, 4e is not the exception.

 

[Maxperson]

Nope.

AD&D monsters most certainly CANNOT have classes. That wouldn't happen until Casle Ravenloft (the module) was released and a monster actually got class levels.

It happened in the 1e MM with liches being magic users or clerics. Couatls are magic users, clerics or both. Vampires in the 1e MM retained their classes. Locathah had fighter members. Ixitxachitls had clerics. And there were more.

And also, in the DMG when talking about monsters as PCs, Gygax says why he didn't include monster classes in the DMG, but said that it's up to the DM.

So yes, in AD&D monsters could have class levels.

 

[Micah Sweet]

While I take a little bit of umbrage with the presentation, the core concept--yeah. I don't trust a GM just because they sit on the other side of the GM screen. I don't trust a rule solely because it was written by somebody.

I do think that when one is exposed to a system one has not yet played, one should give it a reasonable space to show its rules. I've heard of more than a few people ripping the guts out of 4e without ever having played it, inventing replacement rules on the spot, and then decrying the whole game as fundamentally broken when their massive house-rules break down horrifically. (Sometimes 5e too, different people of course, but still.) Most hilarious example I ever heard was a GM outright deleting healing surges, making every surge-based heal usable whenever you like, and then decrying the system as a broken mess because characters were "unkillable". Of course they're unkillable, you MADE them unkillable!

And, now that I think about it, that's my stance on GMs too. If it's someone I don't know yet, they haven't earned my trust. But they do merit patience, the opportunity to earn trust--they must be allowed to present evidence through their behavior. Rules are the same. The creators worked pretty hard to make them; that warrants giving them a chance to show their nature.

Part of why I had such strong opinions on 5e at launch is because the public playtest had made very, very clear what the rules were going to look like more than eight months before publication. Which, of course, folks vociferously denied. I got the straight-up slippery slope of excuses. "You can't complain yet, you'll get the tactical combat module in the next packet." "Oh, you can't complain yet, they've said tactical stuff is hard, they're saving it for the final packet" (y'know, ignoring the fact that that means it only gets a single editing pass...) "Oh, you can't complain yet, they'll put the 4e-like rules in the finished DMG." "Oh, you can't complain until it's been out for a couple years first" (Yes, I was LITERALLY told that by a user on another forum, that I literally wasn't allowed to have a negative opinion of 5e until it had been out for at least two full years.)

5e, as "D&D Next", had already said loud and clear what kind of game it was. Folks just buried their heads in the sand about it so they could pretend they were being open and positive toward others' interests without ever lifting a finger to actually support the "big tent" claims the designers constantly made during the playtest.

For the record, I spent a year and a half playing 4e straight and several years doing the same with 5e before I changed anything (or dropped it in the case of 4e).

 

[Micah Sweet]

Though I will note, it has emulated pulp stories in a variety of ways, as I use the term "emulation". Which is one of the reasons why I think emulation and simulation need to be separated.

"Simulation" is specifically about modeling. It's about trying for an accurate representation of a situation. That's why people always bring up the "physics engine" thing, even though very few sims are ever anywhere near that detailed. That's the heart and soul, what it dreams to be, even if it cannot actually be. Things like genre conventions, themes, motifs, style, do not have a place in "simulation". That gums up the works, that gets in the way of modeling a world that runs on systematic rules.

And that's where "emulation" comes in. Emulation is about those things. Sometimes, the genre conventions will include substantial efforts toward realism, or at least the superficial appearance of it; that's where we get hard sci-fi, for example. Larry Niven's Known Space oeuvre, for example, is an effort to reconstruct space opera, a naturally VERY unrealistic genre, under hard sci-fi requirements. (Some will dispute it being true hard sci-fi, since Niven invents unrealistic materials like scrith to resolve physical problems with the ring, but that he cared about explaining it in the first place is close nough for most folks.) "Dark fantasy" works, particularly political-focused ones, form another genre that aims to inject the unhappy, problematic, off-putting sides of how IRL medieval history worked (though they often go overboard into "Dung Ages" territory, following the false and hollow pop-history perspective on what the Medieval Period was like.)

Both things have stuff in common. Both emulation and simulation place a pretty high premium on some kind of mechanical exploration that isn't really present in other approaches. Both aim for an open-ended sort of feel, where something (a thematic experience for emulation; an authentic process for simulation) should just naturally drop out of play when you follow the rules, if the rules are well-written. Both have a skeptical eye toward, for example, openly gamist elements that are there only to make raw gameplay easier/smoother/more enjoyable without directly contributing to the thing-that-drops-out-of-play.

But because their aims are different, even though they share some methods/concepts, lumping them together leads to more confusion than separating them, IMO and IME.

Early D&D wanted to emulate the feeling of the stories from Haggard and Burroughs and Dent (and Tolkien, though Gygax himself apparently did not like Tolkien's work.) It encodes genre conventions from these things, not all of them, but a lot of them. GP=XP is one of the biggest, and that has subtle effects across the system (like the fact that armor is functionally an XP penalty you wear in order to increase your survival--as are hirelings who will demand payment.) The inclusion of Alignment, an otherwise pretty massive intrusion in violation of the alleged absolute sanctity of player control over their characters, is another great example, there to emulate the enforced, grey-and-grey morality in Moorcock's work (we want a balance, one that favors Order over Chaos...but doesn't snuff out Chaos.)

But these things, despite being emulation tools rather than simulation tools, have become so hard-coded into the cosmic microwave background of what it means to be "D&D", that people no longer see them as that. They see them as necessary simulation tools, when they're nothing of the sort.

I wouldn't call them necessary simulation tools (you can certainly do without them) but I generally have no problem with their presence.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Setting aside the mechanics, I worry about the trope of dozens of lives of our demonized enemies being worth less than one of ours. So I'm not generally aiming to support the play envisioned in the 4e text on minions. The game plays perfectly well without them.

It sounds like you are now laying a moral judgment on the narrative purpose of minions, and seemingly by extension those in favor of that narrative purpose. A valid opinion, but one liable to ruffle some feathers.

 

[Maxperson]

Oh, I'd forgotten about this one.

Conan at no point was EVER a weak fighter. He was never 1st level, nor did he get particularly better or stronger from day 1. He was a pulp hero - which means he was a superhero from the outset and stays that way in every story. He gets freaking crucified in the first story and lives - a feat no other human could perform.

D&D has never simulated pulp stories, like at all.

Of course he was 1st level. He didn't get captured from his village as the Mighty Conan. He was taken as a no character class kid and then trained in the slave pits. That training involved him going to levels 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. until we see him as the might slave fighter who went on to all those heroics, including surviving that crucifiction.

 

[Micah Sweet]

That problem is already way, way, way too much embedded in the nature of D&D as it is. You don't need minion rules for that.

Or did you think that the Acolytes, Goblins (of numerous types), Cultists, Kobolds, or Xvarts--all of which have less than 10 hit points--were not somehow "dozens of lives of our demonized enemies [are] worth less than one of ours"?

It's already there. Decrying minions as somehow injecting a thing already there sounds like special pleading, like inventing a special exception for why this usage is bad but all the other usages of the exact same thing, but with more steps, is somehow good. That if we make it so you have to roll a die and might sometimes fail to kill a fellow sapient in one hit, that somehow validates their existence and makes them not lesser but equal. That it is the difficulty of how one brutally ends another sapient life which indicates that we have shown respect for that life.

I dunno about you, but it seems to me that the issue is the brutally ending sapient lives, not the amount of gameplay time spent doing so. That we show, or lack, respect for sapient lives based on whether we kill, not on whether it is effortless or laborious.

To be fair, the mechanics and narrative purpose of minion rules are quite explicit, and pretty much holler @clearstream 's point at the top of their metaphorical lungs. The general combat/monsters rules IMO were not explicitly written to support the power fantasy of tearing through oodles of nameless bad guys, but the minion rules absolutely were.

 

[AnotherGuy]

That problem is already way, way, way too much embedded in the nature of D&D as it is. You don't need minion rules for that.

I tend to read @clearstream's comment as one said in jest, not for serious discussion.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I've played all editions of D&D. 4e was by far the most restraining on what a character could do.it was obvious a goal was to have consistency from one table to the next.

For some reason. I really don't see why that kind of consistency is important to the IP holder. We all play our own games.

 

[Aldarc]

Conan, Elric, Fafrd and the Grey Mouser, Tarzan, on and on. These were never "just off the turnip cart" level characters. They sprung out, fully fledged, right from the word go and were stronger, faster, and straight up better than any normal human. None of the pulp stories are ever "Zero to Hero" journeys. That's Tolkien and later fantasy.

I'm not even sure if I would say that Tolkien even really did much zero to hero with exception of his hobbit characters.

I don't have the books at the moment but I remember it being presented as "This is the way." Obviously the WOTC police aren't going to bust down your door if you ignore the rules. But if consistently ignoring the rules is the answer for rules I don't like (and I don't recall anything encouraging house rules in 4e), then it's still an issue with the rules.

FWIW, there is a section in the 4e DMG called "Creating House Rules." It's in the chapter entitled "The DM's Toolbox." It doesn't beat you over the head with the usual platitudes that it's your game to do with as you will, but it's pretty open about the reality of house rules. It just advises DMs to think about why and how they go about making these adjustments.

At what point is that fault on you if you didn't read it? But even if the issue is that you read it but forgot it, the advice on making house rules is still there in the books.

I've played all editions of D&D. 4e was by far the most restraining on what a character could do.it was obvious a goal was to have consistency from one table to the next.

YMMV, but I played a game of 4e D&D, then 5e D&D, and then played a game of B/X mixed with 1e D&D. This is not to mention all of the OSR games that I have played. I felt like my characters were far more restricted in what they could do in these older games than what they could do in 4e D&D. Again, your opinion differs. That's fine. But if that's the case, then it's no more truth than mine.