4E on the DM's Side of the Screen
Posted By: WotC_Rodney, 3/11/2008 12:42:33 AM
It's been a wild couple of weeks since D&D XP. Lots of people are excited. The cynics are still cynics. D&D 4E is great, it's fun, it's a board game, it's a CCG, it's ruining my childhood. The opinions run the whole length of the spectrum. By and large the response at D&D Experience was overwhelmingly positive, if the reports of event organizers and attendees are to be believed. It's a good sign, and I'm feeling very zen about the whole thing lately. It was getting to the point where I was just running over with frustration because so many conclusions were being jumped to and so many people were savaging a game they hadn't played yet. I realized that nothing I say or do will change any opinions on that, so I'm just going to go along for the ride and talk about what I'm enjoying about the game instead.
One of the most common complaints I've heard lately is that D&D 4th Edition is nothing but a combat game, or a board game, or a CCG. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that this is the conclusion people jumped to based on 1) a 30-minute delve format game, which (like every delve event run at every con) is a fast-paced survival game, and 2) two 4-hour adventures designed to teach people the ins-and-outs of the basic mechanics of the new system. Not surprised at all, though I'd hope that people who have been playing games this long realize that it's an inevitable part of the introduction of a new game that things are broken down into their simplest terms for the first showing of the game.
I find it particularly interesting that the areas where I feel we've improved the game the most aren't the ones we're showing off. Stephen Radney-Macfarland and I had a conversation some weeks back where we both agreed that while I think 4E improves on the player's side of D&D by this much [------], in essence building on much of the foundation laid by the excellent design behind 3E, the improvements on the DM's side of the screen are up by this much [------------------ ------]. Bad part is, that's harder to show off in neat, pre-packaged articles.
Thinking back to the pre-launch of 3E, many of the subtleties of DMing 3rd Edition weren't translated in those articles either. Mostly, I guess that on the DM's side of things there are many, many little improvements that all build up into a smoother play experience. I think we've made it easier to DM the game, both at the table and in doing prep work/adventure design. It's a thousand little things that do this, from the overhauling of conditions to the ease of monster creation, but the end result is that I think it's significantly easier to create good stories and fun challenges for your players in 4th Edition.
For example, encounter design. Mike Mearls and Dave Noonan talked about it a little bit in the last D&D podcast, but it's just gotten a lot easier to make encounters that are exciting and dynamic. The encounter design guidelines work well because they in turn are built on new monster design guidelines, which help reduce the chances of overmatching or undermatching your party. By making it easier to design encounter, it then becomes easier for the Dungeon Master to present minutes to hours of game time that keep the players engaged. This in turn leads to more successful gaming sessions, which leads to more successive gaming sessions, which leads to players getting more involved in their characters and in the story of the campaign. No single element can be taken in isolation, because many things build off of that.
Shifting gears away from combat for a while, JD Wiker had a discussion on his journal a few days ago about rewarding roleplaying mechanically, and how clearly 4E isn't going to do that (not his assertion, but an assertion that sparked the discussion). In this area, I disagree. We showed off skill challenges in the Escape from Sembia event at D&DXP. Basically, it boiled down to this: the heroes needed to escape from some Sembian guards, prompting a chase sequence. The heroes then had the option of using a variety of skills to escape from the guards, and the encounter was built using the non-combat encounters guidelines in the DMG. Basically, the players could use any skill they liked, so long as they had a good explanation for it, and the encounter gave rules on adjudicating those checks based on the likelihood that the attempt would be feasible. For example, one player I read about used his History skill to remember an old sewer grate from some ancient plans of the city, where he was able to had. Obvious skill choices allowed players to hide, climb on top of buildings, disguise themselves as passers-by, etc. Now, before I get jumped on, yes, these are all things you could do before. However, unless a skill check was specifically called out in the adventure, most adventures leaned back on the hard-coded skill DCs and results in the skills chapter. The difference isn't that you can do these things in 4th Edition, but that the default assumption in 4th Edition is that players should and will find creative solutions to problems, and the rules are designed not only to allow the DM to fairly adjudicate those assumptions but also to reward players for doing so.
JD's blog had an awesome quote in it that I want to use to highlight why the above is actually encouraging roleplaying: "Is there some insurmountable obstacle inherent in the mechanics that prevents designers from introducing a set of rules that lets players play their characters a certain way?" What the non-combat encounter system in 4th Edition does is it not only lets people play their characters how they want to, it rewards it. John Wick said: "That's what differentiates a board game from a roleplaying game, I think. A board game rewards players for making choices that lead to victory. A roleplaying game rewards the player for making choices that are consistent with his character." What 4E's noncombat encounter system does is it lets you make a choice that is consistent with your character AND lets you achieve victory with that (or, at least, some modicum of success). If I'm a fighter with no skills in disuise, bluffing, hiding, or other sneaky bits, my optimal victory condition in escaping the guards is to simply run away, and run away fast (or fight, but we're going to assume that we don't want combat to be the result here). But maybe I'm playing a student of military history, so I make that History check to recognize that in the last siege of the city invading forces used the sewers to get past the walls. Or maybe I'm a street tough who grew up in a rough part of town, so I make a Streetwise check to start a fight between some locals who I know are at odds with one another, providing a distraction so I can escape. Right there I've made a decision that simultaneously allows me to roleplay my character AND gives me the ability to be successful. Unless you believe Andrew Finch's assertion that roleplaying is just making sub-optimal choices (which I don't), victory and roleplaying should not be mutually exclusive.
As JD's discussion touched on, roleplaying games should reward roleplaying, and 4th Edition does that with its skill challenge system among other things. Really, though, rewarding roleplaying is only part of the equation, and I think that the idea of a reward is actually only the method, not the principle. A roleplaying game should reward roleplaying as a means of encouraging roleplaying, but it need not be the sole method of encouragement. Building in the possibility of success when roleplaying puts the potential of reward out there for the players, but giving the Dungeon Master the tools to determine the outcome of playing one's role is just as important. In my mind, if a game is to encourage roleplaying, it should do so by rewarding the players, making it easy for the Dungeon Master to adjudicate (and, by extension, plan for and design adventures around), and not punish the players too much (some is fine) when they make a roleplaying choice instead of a victory choice. I think 4E does this well, though you won't be able to believe me until you play the game.
Time for a combat example, though. Tonight we played in a bastardized continuation of Mearls' Scalegloom Hall adventure from D&D XP. I was playing the halfling paladin, and at one point I was knocked unconscious. As I lay dying on the ground, the kobold that speared me grabbed my shield and declared it his trophy, running off to engage the fighter. After some healing from the cleric, I got up and faced a choice: go back and get my shield (optimal choice, as it raises my defenses), or leap across the chasm to take out the kobolds that were attacking the party ranger. I decided to do the latter, because that's just like a paladin to go leaping across a chasm to save his stalwart ally, with no need of a shield with the gods on your side. We won (barely, I ended the fight with 3 hp), but I was able to do this and succeed because I had options that let me choose a course of action. I knew that I'd take more damage without a shield, but I also knew I had an at-will power that provided me with temporary hit points, effectively acting as a round-by-round buffer against death. I chose to go that route because I had the means to do so, and I think it was both roleplaying choice and a successful choice.
In the end, every D&D system as had optimal and suboptimal choices. New mechanics aren't going to stop you from making that suboptimal choice when you feel it's appropriate for your character, and (again, IMO) 4th Edition has so far proven to at least provide me with enough options that could potentially lead to success that I don't feel like I'm being unduly punished if I don't make what seems like the true optimal decision.
I think it's perfectly viable to have a system that lets you make roleplaying choices and still be rewarded for them. Some systems do this in an extremely overt manner, like a "perks and flaws" system. For the record, I hate perks and flaws. The flaws never live up to the perks, and they end up just being an abusable system by which you end up with a better-than-average character and rarely have to deal with your chosen flaws. Also for the record I've designed perks-and-flaws systems before, and I've never been happy with how they came out (see d20 Future's Mutations system, which I'm actually quite proud of, even though I'm not convinced it was the best way to go). Other systems bludgeon you over the head with the need to roleplay mechanically; the Serenity roleplaying game does this in a way I find extremely interesting, essentially rewarding you for bringing complications into the game with bonuses at the time they come up (so, like perks-and-flaws, only it actually has to come into play). Those are fine choices, but I think 4E's philosophy leans more toward letting the Dungeon Master say "yes you can!" to unorthodox solutions and giving players enough options (powers, skill choices, etc.) to make meaningful decisions without feeling penalized.
