Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5780577" data-attributes="member: 42582">This claim is controversial. I personally don't believe that it is true.I strongly agree that party builds can have a major impact on play. So can individual PC builds. The sorcerer in my game wields a Staff of Ruin, has Implement Focus and Superior Implement Profieciency with the accurate staff, is a Dual Implement Wielder, and a Merciless Killer who has ample techniques for gaining combat advantage (including a multi-class to gain access to Stealth). That's 5 feats, plus maybe others I've forgotten, devoted to boosting his combat output.The wizard, on the other hand, has such might feats as Deep Sage, Skill Traning (Dungeoneering), and multi-class invoker so that he could gain access to the Divine Philosopher paragon path (despite WIS being 6 points below INT).As between the players, there is still a degree of balance because the wizard can do things that the sorcerer can't, both in and out of combat. And because neither hogs all the story focus.The choice of which scenario to pursue - Tomb of Horrors or Dungeon of Despair - is only one of many sorts of choices that can come up in a game session, and even if both scenarios are level-appropriate the choice can still matter - in operational terms, for example (what sort of equipment do we need) or in more story-oriented terms (which one of those dungeons are the prisoners hidden in?).This is true - quest XPs are the closest, and they don't go anywhere near to carrying this sort of load.My view on this - and it relates to my disagreement with BryonD above in this post - is that finding a system to support a pretty vanilla narrativism is not as easy as it might seem.In my experience, it is very easy for a system to push the focus of the participants' attention away from those elements of the fiction that are relevant to the story (theme, plot etc) and onto matters that are irrelevant to that - accounting, shopping, tedious searching, worrying about healing, etc, etc. All the stuff that is bog-standard to operational D&D play and tends to be incorporated by default in mainstream fantasy RPGs.A related problem, which strongly simulationist mechanics in particular can produce, is of making it almost impossible to bring a scene to a conclusion without either (i) having the GM just suspend the action resolution mechanics, or (ii) having the PCs all go to sleep. (And in a game like Rolemaster, which has a range of magical and non-magical PC abilities that trigger on sleeping, even this is ofen not true!)When these two tendencies converge, and especially if you are playing with players who were raised on that style of RPGing, then (in my experience) play can slow to a crawl.My view of 4e is that it dispenses with all these issues through a simple moves - skill challengs for non-combat conflict resolution, the short rest as a "healing" mechanic for most "damage", cutting most of the traditional magical buffs that drag out the ending of scenes, or create pressure for "continuous" play rather than "punctuated" play, etc etc.Getting this stuff out of the way creates a space in which vanilla narrativism (or vanilla gamism) can emerge.On the XP front, I tend to award XP as per the rulebooks, but including the DMG2 advice for XP per time spent in sustained free roleplaying, and also being fairly ad hoc and liberal in Quest awards, which as I apply them are closer to goal awards in HARP.In practice, my game would (I think) play no differently if I just said "Every 3 sessions, you all level." And in my view this is consistent with 4e's approach to XP (as I read it), which is basically (especially with the DMG2 included) awarded on the basis of time spent playing, at around 1 encounters worth per hour or so of play. The continued use of XP measures is, I think, just a hangover from the expectations of long time mainstream fantasy RPGers.But because I don't think the rewards of 4e play come from what the rulebooks call "rewards" (XP for the reasons just stated, and treasure because it is a factor of level which is in turn a factor of XP which is, as I've said, not really a reward) I don't think the drift to narrativism is any harder than the default (or drifted?) gamism - at least [MENTION=27160]Balesir[/MENTION]-style "light gamism" - which is also vanilla.  In neither case do the game mechanics support the playstyle with any sort of reinforcement or feedback mechanism.The rewards in Balesir's approach don't come from earning XP or treasure. They come from showing off by doing cool things. ven if 4e PCs don't do much cool stuff, and just slog through encounters, the XP will be earned and the PCs will level. (It's not like Gygaxian play in this respect, where PC level might be expected to correlate, in some loose sense at least, with player skill.) The rewards in my "light narrativism" don't come from earning XP. They come from taking the story where you want to take it, using your PC as the vehicle for that.But as I tried to explain above, the system doesn't get in the way of any of this. So if everyone is rougly on the same page as to play expectations, the vanilla approach works reasonably OK (or so it seems to me). And when it came to choosing paragon paths in my game, for example, none of my players expressed any surprise at my incorporating these developments into the game both in the lead up to and in the aftermath of achieving 11th level. I wasn't surprised when the player who wanted his sorcerer to become a Demonskin Adept started describing his skinning of defeated demons (somewhere around 7th level or so). And that player, in turn, does not get upset when I treat his PC's wearing of demonskins under his robes as something that comes into play from time to time in social situations.I think these reflections also have some relevance for a "unity" edition. If 5E is intended to support not only simulationist, or exploration-heavy gamist (ie operational Gygaxian) play, but also vanilla narrativism or vanilla light gamism, the designers need to avoid just defaulting to what was, up until 4e, D&D's norm of "simulationism + hp".EDITED TO ADD: 4e has an endgame (the Destiny Quest and Immortality) but no mechanical means of "forcing" the endgame. I anticipate this being the biggest GMing challenge for my 4e game. How will it be done without using the sort of GM force that is (by my lights) unacceptable? Luckily I don't need to worry about this for a while yet.I wonder if 5e will have an endgame? Probably not.</blockquote>

Verification