D&D 4E Seeking advice for new 4E game inspired by Pemerton

[Derulbaskul]

Thanks! I've decided to call the game 'Fallcrest’s Ruination' and to use the Monster Vault: Threats to the Nentir Vale as setting. The game will begin immediately following the destruction of Fallcrest by a mysterious evil power: PCs need to save the last fragments of civilisation from total collapse while discovering what happened and how to stop it. That will be scene 1 anyway.

It feels very liberating to do this little work on the GM side. I must admit this is one of the factors which most attracted me to this style of play, as I understand it.

Great stuff and a great thread.

For a more alliterative title, why not Fallcrest's Fall?

 

[jacktannery]

@Manbearcat, thanks for the advice. I’ve been GMing 4E as PbP online for about eight years now so I’m pretty handy with the logistics of battle map (google docs drawing), hp/combat tracking (google docs spreadsheet) and managing combat rounds (off-turn actions banned; initiative streamlined). I totally agree with the importance of making everything transparent.

Thanks for reinforcing (5) – I’m going to try this. I’m especially grateful for (6) and (7): it’s very clear advice that I will be sure to follow. I’m really looking forward to this!

@pemerton, thanks for the links to the kickers. These concrete examples of stuff like this in action are so useful to me!

@Raith5, good insight about different motives, I’ll take that on board. I am really depending on the players to be providing impetus to push the story forward (which would be a huge change in my games, which have also relied on the GM for story up to this point).

@Derulbaskul, that's much better! I'll see if I can change it.

 

[Neonchameleon]

2.Improv lessons: collaborative approach with players and GM, YES AND. All players can contribute to the world/scene and establish facts about the world/scene so long as they do not take away what someone else said first. Fail forward, e.g. for skill challenges.

Be slightly careful with YES AND. It can easily be taken too far and lead to a game that is almost entirely mush with very poor storytelling. Individual scenes can work amazingly with improv, but longer stories take a lot more skill because to make a story you're using the wrong verb. To quote Trey Parker of South Park:

"Each individual scene has to work as a funny sketch. You don’t want to have one scene and go ‘well, what was the point of that scene?’ So we found out this rule that maybe you guys have all heard before, but it took us a long time to learn it. But we can take these beats, which are basically the beats of your outline. And if the words ‘and then’ belong between those beats… you’re f****d. Basically. You got something pretty boring. What should happen between every beat that you’ve written down is either the word 'Therefore' or 'but,' right? So what I’m saying is that you come up with an idea and it’s like ‘okay, this happens’ and then ‘THIS happens.’ No no no. It should be ‘this happens’ and THEREFORE ‘this happens.’ BUT ‘this happens’ THEREFORE ‘this happens.’ … And sometimes we will literally write it out to make sure we’re doing it. We’ll have our beats and we’ll say okay ‘this happens’ but ‘then this happens’ and that affects this and that does to that and that’s why you get a show that feels okay." ​

As GM the responsibility for this is mostly on your shoulders. You get most of it out of doing hard scene framing well and much of the rest out of treating skill failures as an opportunity for an AW-style Hard Move. But it's an easy balance to not get right.

Question One: should I wait until I get a full team before deciding on the overall setting (e.g. fantasy vs star wars or whatever) or should I just discuss this with the players?

Asked and answered As a player the pitch draws the eye as much as the planned style. Make a pitch setting.

Question Three: I was just going to use rules-as-written 4E but are there any rules adjustments (house rules) to make that would help achieve the goals above?

My normal house rules both help:

• An extended rest takes a long lazy weekend which means you can't just delay for a couple of hours. It adds pressure to the PCs in all the right places.
• A natural 1 should be used as in the Dark Sun weapon breakage rules as a potential fumble. Offer the PCs double-or-quits. They can keep the failure or they can reroll; keeping the fail is a fail, a pass is a pass, but failing the reroll tells you to do something special. (Weapon break in Dark Sun, hitting the wrong guy, or as creatively wrong as the skill could have gone).

 

[jacktannery]

Thanks [MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION] - great advice. I totally agree about requiring a really good rest to get an Extended Rest benefit.

Anyways, I started the game and got a great bunch of players. They all came up with great kickers and we started the first scene. Everything in the scene is based on the player kickers and their bonds/conflicts. It's really great for me as GM becaue it is all flowing so naturally, the players all seem really interested in it, and I'm thrilled I did this.

Here's our play-by-post game for those interested: http://www.rpol.net/game.cgi?gi=68522&date=1484961814

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

My normal house rules both help:

• An extended rest takes a long lazy weekend which means you can't just delay for a couple of hours. It adds pressure to the PCs in all the right places.
• A natural 1 should be used as in the Dark Sun weapon breakage rules as a potential fumble. Offer the PCs double-or-quits. They can keep the failure or they can reroll; keeping the fail is a fail, a pass is a pass, but failing the reroll tells you to do something special. (Weapon break in Dark Sun, hitting the wrong guy, or as creatively wrong as the skill could have gone).

These two things were transformative for my game when I started doing them. The first point more than the second, but both were certainly impactful. The extended rests thing should really have been better spelled out like that in the books. I think that DMs failing to properly leverage that one thing gave a lot of people the impression that 4e was easy mode (it still can be, but not a ton more than other editions).

 

[pemerton]

As far as extended rests are concerned, we haven't adopted any official house rule - but in practice I tend to end up regulating them, in my capacity as GM, because I am the one who controls the pacing of events. This becomes particularly straightforward at paragon and epic, where the PCs spend a fair bit of time in places like the Underdark or the Abyss where it's easy to assert that, absent special circumstances, the environment is not conducive to resting.

For me, the guiding principle in pacing challenges vs rests is always to keep the pressure and the players sweating - if the PCs have fewer surges left in the party than there are characters, and are facing an above-level challenge so that the players are thinking "How are we going to get ourselves out of this one?", then it's working well. To me, it's not really much like classic AD&D attrition/resource management. It's more like: (i) players have the job of managing resources within encounters, to try and achieve victory; (ii) I have the job of framing them into enough interesting and challenging encounters that they will feel pressured to use their daily resources while not wanting to be profligate with them; and (iii) if I'm doing (ii) properly, than (i) will become more intricate because the players will care not just about encounter but also daily resources.

The overall incentive that makes this structure work, at our table, is pretty informal: if the players blow all their resources and then can't handle another encounter or two before resting, they'll look like squibs and I'll make fun of the them! In other words, it's a set of "soft" social dynamics and expectations. Playing with strangers, or in a tournament-style environment, probably some more formal way of rationing extended rests would be necessary - I've never used the 13th Age approach (rest before making it through 4 level-appropriate encounters and you suffer a story setback), but it looks to me like one good way of introducing that formal rationing.

Be slightly careful with YES AND. It can easily be taken too far and lead to a game that is almost entirely mush with very poor storytelling. Individual scenes can work amazingly with improv, but longer stories take a lot more skill because to make a story

<sni>

[indent[ou come up with an idea and it’s like ‘okay, this happens’ and then ‘THIS happens.’ No no no. It should be ‘this happens’ and THEREFORE ‘this happens.’ BUT ‘this happens’ THEREFORE ‘this happens.’[/indent]

This is an interesting point.

I think the "therefore" or the "but" can be pretty loose, as long is everyone is on the same page. From the GM's point of view, though, it's easy to see (or, perhaps better, to project) a "therefore" which means nothing to the players because they're not privy to the backstory. Whereas I think if you anchor stuff that happens, and developments that occur, to the PCs - backgrounds, activities, goals, preferences, etc then the players can get into it even if it doesn't really make much sense.

That is, I think in a RPG - where the players are able to provide a lot of the drive and direction for events - the "therefore" can be a sort of "meta" therefore and the players will still respond to it. Like in my most recent Dark Sun session, when the Templar inquisitor tracked down the PCs with a psychic hound (modelled on the X-Men's Rachel Summers): if you look at the events through the lens of a Le Carre-style novel, or even a Raymond Chandler style novel, it's a bit obscure why the inquisitor wants to hunt down the PCs. But from the point of view of the players, (i) they're on the run from the Templars, and (ii) this inquisitor is the (ex-)handler of one of them who (in the PC background) was an assassin in the service of the Templars up until play started at the moment of Sorcerer King Kalek's death, at which point the character decided to break free of the hold his masters had on him.

So the "therefore" to the players is much more about the events speaking to the logic and rationale of their characters, then making a fully sensible plot that would work in a mystery story. I think this is a point where the requirements for GMing become a bit different from the requirements for writing; and also where you can get player-driven story-type action without needing to worry too much about "the story" in a bigger picture sense.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think you can kinda just be hand-wavy about that bigger story [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]. I mean, sure, the Templar's exact reasons and what actually took place to send him after the PC NOW aren't explicit, but that doesn't mean some logic doesn't exist. Gaps like these are in any case much like DW's admonition not to map everything ahead of time. Maybe the PC has some dirt on the Templar and doesn't even know it. Maybe his family did something horrible to the Templar which he doesn't even know about, and this is the final stage of his revenge, triggered by the disorder and collapse going on. There could be a 100 plots that could be drawn out of that void, many of them could be creations of the player(s). Over-elaboration of world and plot details is a problem, I never did like it that much.

 

[pemerton]

I think you can kinda just be hand-wavy about that bigger story [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]. I mean, sure, the Templar's exact reasons and what actually took place to send him after the PC NOW aren't explicit, but that doesn't mean some logic doesn't exist.

<snip>

Over-elaboration of world and plot details is a problem, I never did like it that much.

Agreed.

 

[Quickleaf]

[MENTION=6667121]jacktannery[/MENTION] Sounds like you're in good hands Just wanted to make sure you had the link to my 4e DM cheat sheet - http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?307923-4e-DM-Cheat-Sheet - useful for the kind of game you'll be running.