D&D 4E Ron Edwards on D&D 4e

[pemerton]

4e is a very well-designed game for its purpose. I am actually envious of its functionality and wish its design competence had been translated to 5e; the relative sloppiness of 5e mechanics is something of an embarrassment for a game developed on the heels of 4e with a considerable playtest period. I recognize that 4e's design isn't for my tastes despite the overall technical skill displayed in the game (toward the end of its lifespan vs. the beginning, at the very least, and disregarding skill challenges entirely).

My grievance with the related comment was not to disregard your experiences with the system, only to remark that most RPG experiences depend on the players and GM, regardless of system quality. A solid system can provide foundational support, but inter-group variance is high. Always there are these D&D (and other tradgame) players who claim they've played whole sessions without rolling dice. That's nice and all, but it doesn't change that the game itself is largely a combat engine with some notes about roleplaying tacked on--which I feel very strongly pertains to 4e and, to a (marginally lesser) degree, all iterations of D&D.

I think you need the first bit I've bolded to get to the second bit I've bolded.

 

[Garthanos]

I think you need the first bit I've bolded to get to the second bit I've bolded.

Even if one didnt explicitly use the skill challenge mechanics reading the guidance surrounding them is also soundly pointing out what the game is about (Skill challenges are mentioned a large number of times in the DMGs especially I think DMG2).

Skill challenges at their base provided a mechanic foundation for adventuring that may never have to involve combat if you wanted and established expectations associated with skill use (and should be considered whether you used the structure or not). Arcana skill is even used to alter rituals making the open ended even more flexible.

For instance reading the skill challenge rules and flanking elements of the guidelines, very much shows how important and big skills are meant to be in 4e they are very much as big as class utilities/spells/rituals. That was demonstrated other places too with the empowered effects in skills off the bat (acrobatics that reduces falling damage for instance) and further with skill powers directly swappable with utility powers.

Further 4e started out with quite a few rituals and by the end the number is positively huge not to mention Martial Practices another element focused on "not combat".

The omg "its all combat" must have not read the DMGs at all (and probably ignored rituals too.)

 

[pemerton]

I suspect you could take the advice from Dungeon World, use that as your 4e GM advice, and it'd work better than anything WoTC ever put out. And I've not even read DW...

I used advice from Malestrom Storytelling, HeroWars and HeroQuest revised (both Robin Laws), Burning Wheel (including the Adventure Burner) as well as the DMG and DMG2.

the one time I inadvertently created a Meme The Guards at the Gate Quote

I just did a quick re-read of that thread. It plays out more-or-less as one might expect.

I'm a bit surprised that no one pointed out that Wyatt refers to an encounter with two guards, whereas your picture is of one guard, and having just reviewed my own copy of City of Thieves I've confirmed that the encounter there is either with one guard, three guards. Hence it hardly refutes Wyatt.

 

[pemerton]

Further 4e started out with quite a few rituals and by the end the number is positively huge not to mention Martial Practices another element focused on "not combat".

@pemerton is more a master of "Oh, you want to sacrifice that treasure so you can blow up the bridge, OK..." sort of thing, but I've since built that kind of stuff into the rules of my own game (and I admit, 4e doesn't quite do that).

Martial Practices were never a thing in our game. I guess they were introduced a bit too late and maybe seemed a bit to fiddly/granular and a bit unnecessary given skill challenges. But I know you (Garthanos) are into them.

But rituals were a big part of our game. And also using Arcana to manipulate magical phenomena, and using Religion to invoke the gods. And as AbdulAlhazred notes, sacrificing magical items in order to buff skill checks or otherwise open up possibilities that weren't part of the rules.

Here's an example:

Their planning was "Dunkirk and then Normandy" - the paladin fell back through the Arcane Gate, so the whole party was on the safe side of the river, and the fighter was brought back to consciousness. But the player of the invoker was worried about the salamander archers - he and the sorcerer are limited to range 10 attacks, and he didn't think the PC ranger could handle a long-range archery duel against the two on his own. So he unilaterally reconfigure the "Normandy" part of the plan: he permanently expended his Ritual Candle in order to shift the location of his already-cast Arcane Gate to another point within range, namely on the "safe" rock on the far side of the lava pool, so that the PCs could go through and lock down the salamander archers in melee. (Success was adjudicated using an Arcana check; the fictional logic was that the character sucked all the power out of the candle in order to use his knowledge of the Linked Portal ritual to close and reopen his Arcane Gate.)

This is the sort of thing that becomes easy to adjudicate when you have a uniform system of player-side resources and a DC-by-level chart.

 

[pemerton]

He specifically compares PoLand to Greyhawk, but I don’t know a whole lot about the latter.

I took his argument as being that PoLand fit the idea of Law versus Chaos; civilization versus wilderness; order versus entropy.

I think the comparison to GH publication history is a bit off-base, for the same reasons @AbdulAlhazred has posted. But I agree with the blogger that it is a fully D&D-themed DIY setting framework.

PoLand OTOH really didn't exist, even after the publication of the core 3 books, etc. It only slowly took shape. All we had was the Nentir Vale, and some names, Nerath, Bael Turath, Arcosia, and the cosmological structure it fit into. We only finally even got a 'world' map years later when the board game was published. Amusingly the canon is not coherent in a lot of spots either. There are a couple of different versions of the fall of Nerath for instance.

There are also different histories of the betrayal/fall of Asmodeus; different timelines for when the Giants enslaved the Dwarves; and I'm sure other stuff too. This is great - it reinforces that Old School as F*** feel! And it supports no myth/story now adjudication.

 

[Aldarc]

Hints and bits were the only thing really needed, because, as the DMG stated, “It’s your world”.

A few ideas to get you started. That is all PoLand was supposed to be; it was all it needed to be. But those hints and bits are wholly awesome, in my point of view.

Addendum: Matt Colville has a video called “The sandbox versus the Railroad”. In it, he describes a DM laying out a map in front of his players. They start excitedly asking questions.

“What’s that place?”

“That’s an elven stronghold.”

“Ooh! What is this woods?”

“That’s a haunted forest. Who knows what’s in there.”

“Look at this! A dragon!”

“Oh, that place is famous. It used to be a dwarven citadel, but it got wiped out by that dragon.”

That is what Nentir Vale is like to me, when I look at the map, and read the descriptions in the DMG. It is a place with all sorts of potential adventure sites, scattered across the hills and plains and woodlands.

And this is how I use the Nentir Vale. This is also why I often think that the Nentir Vale should be published in "sketched form" rather than fully fleshed out in the manner of Forgotten Realms. Let the table truly individualize the details of the setting. The themes and motifs of the setting's World Axis / Dawn War framework is robust enough to handle it.

 

[Garthanos]

Martial Practices were never a thing in our game. I guess they were introduced a bit too late and maybe seemed a bit to fiddly/granular and a bit unnecessary given skill challenges. But I know you (Garthanos) are into them.

But rituals were a big part of our game. And also using Arcana to manipulate magical phenomena, and using Religion to invoke the gods. And as AbdulAlhazred notes, sacrificing magical items in order to buff skill checks or otherwise open up possibilities that weren't part of the rules.

Sacrificing a magic item eh?
The DMG2 basically put an auto success on a significant skill check at 1/10 the cost of level appropriate magic item or 1 healing surge or 1 appropriate ritual. The latter however are cheaper and involve more specific premeditated strategic cost of learning the ritual and prep of ingredients (see also residuum to undermine that element). Martial practices were perhaps kind of too expensive effectively.(needed scaling which a skill check could do if the skill check works no healing surge cost) and you could do the same with spells if the skill check worked no ritual cost. But for the concept to really work at all tables we might have to have skill checks better under control (they are just potentially too optimizeable)

So sacrificing the right level appropriate item could be on the order of win this challenge in 4e.

Now if you are using inherent bonuses? I think the value of a magic item might be distinctly lower.

 

[Garthanos]

It occured to me that elements like Epic Destinies and Paragon Paths in 4e are most cool because of the story elements in general it isn't necessarily the mechanics I like about many ED though a few do an interesting job at branching reality and in some ways tearing the lid off ... Thief of Destiny. It is the ability to let players by choices invest in how the story line goes and what they experience. This is also an element of players having wish lists for their characters a communication tool to the DM. So of course 5e doesn't have any of that.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Even if one didnt explicitly use the skill challenge mechanics reading the guidance surrounding them is also soundly pointing out what the game is about (Skill challenges are mentioned a large number of times in the DMGs especially I think DMG2).

Skill challenges at their base provided a mechanic foundation for adventuring that may never have to involve combat if you wanted and established expectations associated with skill use (and should be considered whether you used the structure or not). Arcana skill is even used to alter rituals making the open ended even more flexible.

For instance reading the skill challenge rules and flanking elements of the guidelines, very much shows how important and big skills are meant to be in 4e they are very much as big as class utilities/spells/rituals. That was demonstrated other places too with the empowered effects in skills off the bat (acrobatics that reduces falling damage for instance) and further with skill powers directly swappable with utility powers.

Further 4e started out with quite a few rituals and by the end the number is positively huge not to mention Martial Practices another element focused on "not combat".

The omg "its all combat" must have not read the DMGs at all (and probably ignored rituals too.)

Here's an illustration of the kind of flexibility that is inherent in 4e's overall system.

The PCs were exploring an ancient lost dwarven city, and they ran into a big problem. All the various ducts and whatnot that ran around the place were infested with Jermlaine! In case you don't know, these are nasty little 1 foot tall humanoids, kind of 'mini kobolds' you could say, stealing and ambushing and then running away. So the party was never safe, and it was a big problem, they couldn't rest, would suddenly get tripped or their gear would be damaged, etc. even in the midst of a fight!

So, the wizard had Stinking Cloud, a daily power, but it is obviously not possible to cast it down into a bunch of ducts and whatnot where you can't really see, etc. It needs LoS and has a pretty limited range. So, her solution was to INVENT A RITUAL, as a skill challenge, and use it to create a 'Fumigation Ritual' that would pour poison gas down into these areas and drive out/kill the Jermlaine. This had to be repeated now and then, and required some checks and resources to cast, but it added a useful tool to her repertoire. Later she was able to trade this knowledge to some other people and thus it also became basically a treasure parcel.

I mean, yes, you COULD play this sort of thing out in a similar way in other editions. I'm not sure how that would be framed in 5e, I haven't really read all the magic item and spell research rules and whatnot. In 1e it would never have been possible as-written without some long and arduous task of great expense and entirely uncertain GM determined results. 2e seems even MORE bound and determined to make this stuff hard, advising that any such course of action must require strange and virtually impossible to obtain ingredients, etc. It might work in 3e, but who knows how easy or difficult the GM would make it? In 4e it was pretty clearly delineated, and my logic was it was a complexity 3 challenge, since in terms of absolute threat the Jermlaine were fairly weak monsters. It might have warranted more, but then narratively the scope of action for the challenge is kind of limited, its just magical research and such, and some improvising. So, the GM is going to have a place in deciding likelihood of success, but it is set up right up front at the start, and amenable to negotiation. Since the PCs didn't want to go back to town, some of the checks were hard for instance whereas in town they could have spent gold to access some books instead.

It is a really excellent system for this kind of stuff and this was the first D&D where I really saw much of it happening.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Sacrificing a magic item eh?
The DMG2 basically put an auto success on a significant skill check at 1/10 the cost of level appropriate magic item or 1 healing surge or 1 appropriate ritual. The latter however are cheaper and involve more specific premeditated strategic cost of learning the ritual and prep of ingredients (see also residuum to undermine that element). Martial practices were perhaps kind of too expensive effectively.(needed scaling which a skill check could do if the skill check works no healing surge cost) and you could do the same with spells if the skill check worked no ritual cost. But for the concept to really work at all tables we might have to have skill checks better under control (they are just potentially too optimizeable)

So sacrificing the right level appropriate item could be on the order of win this challenge in 4e.

Now if you are using inherent bonuses? I think the value of a magic item might be distinctly lower.

Right, so IMHO practices should be a bit scalable, and maybe that includes "pay more, get more" and I have linked them in my design to consumables, so a consumable is just a 'condensed practice/ritual' in effect (4e already has that with scrolls, I just assume that potions are similar, you can also consider them to be 'one time use boons').