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General Tabletop Discussion
D&D Older Editions
Reconciling 4e's rough edges with Story Now play
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<blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 8991779" data-attributes="member: 6696971"><p>Hi [USER=7036985]@andreszarta[/USER] . I was notified about your thread by another party who pointed out another thread where some folks used it to passive aggressively, sneakily-yet-publically, simultaneously edition war and take shots at myself and a few others (which is apparently <em>the point of the thread! </em>What an excellent idea for a thread that is, right?). That reality is pretty dispiriting, tiresome, creepy (how old is this game? 15 years and this is still happening), and would make me disinclined to engage with your post to produce content for that embarrassing, cowardly thread…but I’m not the cowardly type so I’ll go ahead and engage! They’ll almost surely report this offering in the same embarrassing way they used your post as a springboard for sneaky, alt-channel sniping (its crazy that such a thing is allowed on the forum)! So this might be my last help for you! So be it! Don’t care!</p><p></p><p>I’m out of country for 2 weeks and change, but its late and folks are in bed so I’ll try to briefly contribute. <em><strong>Regarding skills and 4e and it’s idiosyncratic engine and play paradigm</strong></em>:</p><p></p><p>As I’ve written and said many, many times, 4e had a lot of cooks in the kitchen and clearly editorial voices that were at odds with one another. That is how you end up with the bold, inflammatory aggression of the 4e primer Worlds and Monsters, “skip the gate guards and get to the fun” (or “cut to the action”), making the game as encoded and player-facing as a game can be, defanging GM authority (with how player-facing it is, with magic item usage, with its advocating “say yes…or roll the dice”, with it giving expression to player-authored kickers in the form of players authoring quests that impel the trajectory of play, with Fail Forward + Change the Situation + codified noncombat conflict resolution, with Theme/Path/Destiny as premise, with its rejiggering setting/cosmology as broad brushstroke but conflict-rife as the default mileu for play) but simultaneously end up with a vehicle that can still support Trad and Neo-Trad play if you just use whats there (like objective Skill DCs), ignore that stuff above and maintain default authority distribution while obscuring the player-facing, encoded, “player entitlement” (as was the epithet that was routinely employed against the game) nature of the game.</p><p></p><p>So, regarding skills specifically:</p><p></p><p>* You can absolutely find support for an objective DC, not-Fail-Forward, “say no”, Sim-indexing architecture for scaffolding a Traditional orientation to play within DMG1 and PHB1. That isn’t an accident or incidental. It’s absolutely intentional design to make the play space amenable to that play (and surely to try to head-off the S-storm that they all knew was coming for them due to the radical redesign and approach…nice try but, as we now know…LAWL at that).</p><p></p><p>* However, consider that the Burning Wheel family of games (along with Mouse Guard and Torchbearer) have their game engine designed around objective DCs. Story Now games are quite diverse, so dice pool conflict resolution and/or snowballing fiction/gamestate via a “subjective” core move resolution isn’t the only way to skin that particular cat!</p><p></p><p>[HR][/HR]</p><p></p><p>What might be helpful to you is taking a look at some PBPs I’ve GMed on here (and one that I’m currently GMing. I’ll also tag [USER=1282]@darkbard[/USER] and [USER=20459]@Nephis[/USER] as they’re the players in the current one.</p><p></p><p><a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/the-chamberlain-the-king-and-the-dragon-drobe.347648/#post-6210868" target="_blank">Here</a> , <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/somewhere-else.353102/" target="_blank">solo game with my partner here</a> , <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/the-fey-the-far-and-the-ugly-space-in-between.365637/page-15#post-6715859" target="_blank">DW game that had a brief 4e remap interlude for funsies here</a>, <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/the-slave-and-her-sovereign.694228/" target="_blank">current game here</a> .</p><p></p><p>What also might help you is if I ran a brief 4e PBP solo game for you on here? Maybe enough content to resolve like 2 x Minor Quests and 1 x Major Quest at one of the three Tiers? I can do that for you when I return if you’d like?</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Manbearcat, post: 8991779, member: 6696971"] Hi [USER=7036985]@andreszarta[/USER] . I was notified about your thread by another party who pointed out another thread where some folks used it to passive aggressively, sneakily-yet-publically, simultaneously edition war and take shots at myself and a few others (which is apparently [I]the point of the thread! [/I]What an excellent idea for a thread that is, right?). That reality is pretty dispiriting, tiresome, creepy (how old is this game? 15 years and this is still happening), and would make me disinclined to engage with your post to produce content for that embarrassing, cowardly thread…but I’m not the cowardly type so I’ll go ahead and engage! They’ll almost surely report this offering in the same embarrassing way they used your post as a springboard for sneaky, alt-channel sniping (its crazy that such a thing is allowed on the forum)! So this might be my last help for you! So be it! Don’t care! I’m out of country for 2 weeks and change, but its late and folks are in bed so I’ll try to briefly contribute. [I][B]Regarding skills and 4e and it’s idiosyncratic engine and play paradigm[/B][/I]: As I’ve written and said many, many times, 4e had a lot of cooks in the kitchen and clearly editorial voices that were at odds with one another. That is how you end up with the bold, inflammatory aggression of the 4e primer Worlds and Monsters, “skip the gate guards and get to the fun” (or “cut to the action”), making the game as encoded and player-facing as a game can be, defanging GM authority (with how player-facing it is, with magic item usage, with its advocating “say yes…or roll the dice”, with it giving expression to player-authored kickers in the form of players authoring quests that impel the trajectory of play, with Fail Forward + Change the Situation + codified noncombat conflict resolution, with Theme/Path/Destiny as premise, with its rejiggering setting/cosmology as broad brushstroke but conflict-rife as the default mileu for play) but simultaneously end up with a vehicle that can still support Trad and Neo-Trad play if you just use whats there (like objective Skill DCs), ignore that stuff above and maintain default authority distribution while obscuring the player-facing, encoded, “player entitlement” (as was the epithet that was routinely employed against the game) nature of the game. So, regarding skills specifically: * You can absolutely find support for an objective DC, not-Fail-Forward, “say no”, Sim-indexing architecture for scaffolding a Traditional orientation to play within DMG1 and PHB1. That isn’t an accident or incidental. It’s absolutely intentional design to make the play space amenable to that play (and surely to try to head-off the S-storm that they all knew was coming for them due to the radical redesign and approach…nice try but, as we now know…LAWL at that). * However, consider that the Burning Wheel family of games (along with Mouse Guard and Torchbearer) have their game engine designed around objective DCs. Story Now games are quite diverse, so dice pool conflict resolution and/or snowballing fiction/gamestate via a “subjective” core move resolution isn’t the only way to skin that particular cat! [HR][/HR] What might be helpful to you is taking a look at some PBPs I’ve GMed on here (and one that I’m currently GMing. I’ll also tag [USER=1282]@darkbard[/USER] and [USER=20459]@Nephis[/USER] as they’re the players in the current one. [URL='https://www.enworld.org/threads/the-chamberlain-the-king-and-the-dragon-drobe.347648/#post-6210868']Here[/URL] , [URL='https://www.enworld.org/threads/somewhere-else.353102/']solo game with my partner here[/URL] , [URL='https://www.enworld.org/threads/the-fey-the-far-and-the-ugly-space-in-between.365637/page-15#post-6715859']DW game that had a brief 4e remap interlude for funsies here[/URL], [URL='https://www.enworld.org/threads/the-slave-and-her-sovereign.694228/']current game here[/URL] . What also might help you is if I ran a brief 4e PBP solo game for you on here? Maybe enough content to resolve like 2 x Minor Quests and 1 x Major Quest at one of the three Tiers? I can do that for you when I return if you’d like? [/QUOTE]
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