D&D 5E Simulation vs Game - Where should D&D 5e aim?

[pemerton]

If you want to define a "hit" in that manner, then that does not alter the interaction which is represented by damage and hit points. However you want to describe a hit, as long as it's consistent, then the objective fact is that it takes ~10 of those before Joe drops.

You keep making these general, modal claims as if they are self-evident. It does not follow from the fact that on one occasion Joe endured 10 arrows that on another occasion he would do likewise. On one occasion Joe may also have survived being struck by lightning, but does he really want to test his luck?

The only way such a generalisation could be supported was if the stats recorded on the PC sheet also corresponded to some property of Joe in the gameworld. But that is precisely what I deny to be the case, for my game.

 

[Neonchameleon]

It is an interesting criticism of 4e that the DM decides when a monster can be one shotted since most people criticize 4e for giving players too much power.

Heh. In 4e the DM has no less power than in A/oD&D. But what people see is that the non-caster players have more because the abilities are more clearly defined. (D&D casters have always had clearly defined abilities).

We've never used "weapon master" (double-specialization, I assume) but otherwise, fair enough.

I didn't realize this; thanks for the learnin' words.

Yup, and my pleasure

I'm not sure about the power-doubling in 1e every 4 levels (though it could be) - to me there's always seemed to be not that much power difference from about 1-3, then a significant jump through 4-5, not much to 6 but another jump at 7, after which it slows down a fair bit other than casters gaining later access to a few particular spells.

Fair enough. I was simplifying quite a bit (there's a jump in 4e at 11 and 21 as well).

I'll admit to not agreeing with you very often, but you got this one 100% right! May it always be thus.

Heh. In my experience you play a very different style of game from me but normally talk sense about it.

My limited experience with Forgey things leaves me thinking only that someone had too much time on his hands and spent it overthinking gaming theory to a near-absurd degree; and then writing it out.

The thing a lot of people don't get about the Forge is that it's fundamentally got very little to do with D&D. It comes out of the 90s and White Wolf promising things like "A game of personal horror" - and then delivering an experience that was fundamentally not terribly different from e.g. 2E D&D or even GURPS unless you used a lot of GM force to make it so. And a lot of the founders of The Forge (Edwards included) spent a lot of time not getting the game they were promised, and then trying to work out what had gone wrong.

And I don't think it's overthinking to a near absurd degree if it's lead to the number of good games that it has

Given everything you're writing here I don't think you have any experience with any actual game theory at all - except of course the Big Model.

I've a degree in mathematics. You're claiming I don't have experience with actual game theory. Riiiight.

Why on earth would I care about immersion? What have I ever said to give you that idea?

Then in your own words, what do you mean by playing a role?

There is no such thing as pawn stance. That's a theory, not anything that actually occurs in games. It's meant to pervert games to always be narratives as its author intended.

You can say there's no such thing as pawn stance. I've played games of D&D in it (generally when the DM was terrible and there wasn't much point emotionally engaging). One single counter-example shows claims of non-existence to be false.

And "always narratives" is because our monkey brains interpret events as a story even if there is no causal link between them. In any RPG there is generally a causal link between events even if you're using a Wand of I-Wonder-why-someone-invented-this.

Frankly I don't want to answer the rest of your tirade. You refuse to think out of the box. You're trapped in a philosophy and digging harder and harder in instead of trying to get out. I'm not offering "the" way out, I'm offering what I believe are better understandings of why D&D is designed and played as it was. And why it become so wildly popular.

But it is very obvious that whatever you understand about the version of D&D you play you are making counter-factual assertion after counter-factual assertion about games that don't fit your favoured version of D&D. You can accuse pemerton of not thinking outside the box, but you have no idea as to where the box is.

As for why 1980s D&D was so wildly popular, times have changed - and we no longer have Patricia Pulling and BADD giving free publicity to D&D. A lot of the appeal of D&D is fairly thoroughly covered by World of Warcraft and related games. Not all of it but a lot. Especially of the sort of D&D that runs using a referee rather than a GM. If the GM is not there making decisions, but measuring on the map and moving the pieces as directed while not interfering with actual players playing computers are about 1000 times as good at this as any human ever can be.

Game rules are directives followed, not resolutions. Choices (i.e. resolutions) are made by players when they encounter options within the pattern created by a game's rules. But for those choices to be part of a game they must be among the options predefined. IOW, just like D&D.

Here you appear to not know the history of D&D back to Braunstein. Dave Arneson invented D&D after a game where he took the predetermined options and binned them; his role was intended to be the Students' Revolutionary Leader in a banana republic, but outside the game he had a fake CIA badge printed, and convinced everyone he was a CIA plant. The appeal of D&D isn't that it's a boardgame or computer game with predefined rules. As I mentioned computers and e.g. World of Warcraft or EVE Online do that better. It's in taking the rules as a starting point and being able to break out of your predetermined options the way that lead Arneson to invent D&D.

There have been boardgames with predefined rules as far back as you can go. The appeal of D&D is that it's not one of those. Its something where you do not have to pick from the list of predefined options but can instead do your own thing. And because you have a living breathing human being as GM they are able to adapt to whatever you are trying to do rather than simply saying that you are trying something not on the predetermined list. And in D&D you have never had to stick to the predefined list. Mike Mornard played a Balrog in both Arneson's original campaign and Gygax's. I'm not aware you'll find that as an option in any book prior to Savage Species. For that matter Brown Box D&D has very few rules.

The appeal of D&D has always been "We made up some we thought would be fun" - and doing an end run round the rules because you have a DM who is more than a simple referee. It's that, not following the rules, that distinguished D&D from every other game on the market in the 1970s.

 

[Bluenose]

The appeal of D&D has always been "We made up some we thought would be fun" - and doing an end run round the rules because you have a DM who is more than a simple referee. It's that, not following the rules, that distinguished D&D from every other game on the market in the 1970s.

Though it might be worth noting that Free Kreigsspiel was already more than a century old, and left almost all resolution of everything in the hands of a "referee". I suspect they had some influence on early D&D, in much the same way as Braunstein games.

 

[Imaro]

Why would the GM do this arbitrarily (ie without reason)? S/he would do it for a reason - for instance, because the Monster Manual suggests that level-appropriate ogres for upper Paragon tier PCs are overwhelmingly minions. This helps to preserve a coherent fiction for the game, which in turn is part of ensuring the "objective reality" of the gameworld.

That's not the definition of arbitrarily I am using, arbitrarily can also mean...


1.subject to individual will or judgment without restriction; contingent solely upon one's discretion: anarbitrary decision.


Which is exactly where deciding a monster has morphed from standard to minion lies insofar as the DM is concerned. Guidelines are just that guidelines, not rules... and even then they do not give precise instruction on exactly when each monster should become a minion and so it falls on the judgement and will of the individual DM to make that decision...

On another note when you speak to minions and the coherence of fiction and the ensuring of "objective reality"... this seems to only apply if I play in the exact play style that 4e pushes... one in which the challenges are carefully tailored to party level. It seems to breakdown however for other play styles such as a sandbox where the threats aren't specifically tailored to the party level... Or maybe I am not fully understanding... so I'll ask...when and how should minions be used in that style of campaign?

 

[Imaro]

The problem is, in the context of this discussion, that 4e gives multiple models for representing one thing. Specifically 4 models gridded with six different monster roles.

Yeah and 3.5 gave variable hit points, equipment, a multitude of templates, classes, etc. to model different versions of a monster with... I'm not seeing your point as it pertains to what you quoted...

 

[Imaro]

There always was in any edition. A kobold was always a minion to everyone. An Orc quickly becomes a minion. As I go up levels gaining magic weapons and whatnot, more and larger monsters effectively become minions.

The only difference is that 4e bakes that right into the mechanics.

Disagree... first the randomness of damage means before 4e there was a minimum amount of power that had to be achieved by a player for his character before anything was ''always" a minion and this same randomness in damage and hp's also made it so that some things were never "always" minions in the 4e sense (i.e. taken out all the time by a single hit).

 

[LostSoul]

The "Big Dichotomy" is whether D&D will wise up and learn that it has no roots at all in Big Model games or whether it will sell its soul to a philosophy designed to make players who love D&D hate it and leave the hobby for another practice with the same name.

I think this is funny because I think everything you write seems to me to fall within the scope of the Big Model of the Forge. The reason why I think it's funny is because I can't understand why some people - those who have decades of RPG experience - read the exact same thing and come to wildly different conclusions.

I don't see anything about what you write that contradicts the Big Model; in fact, I think it reinforces it. When you speak about "game constructs" I think "that is how gamism treats the shared imaginary space." It all makes perfect sense to me: the DM has his "game pattern" behind the screen and the players play to try and figure it out. What the players are trying to do is figure out what lies in that shared imaginary space. The pattern - because it doesn't exist - I call "the fiction", but I can see why you don't: it lies in the mindspace of the DM and the rules of the game (most of which are made up over time by the DM). "The fiction" can be discovered by the players and is - no, it makes up - the game space; that is, the space upon which the players can make decisions.

So when I say, "You strike first because you have longer reach," I'm referencing the game pattern - the rules of the game - but also the fiction. I don't see a difference between the two.

I think what you say reinforces the Big Model because it's obvious that storygames should not be played in the manner of D&D. Those who want to play D&D in the manner of storygames should probably switch systems.

I can't see anything that contradicts the Big Model in any way at all.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Who is denoted by "you" in this sentence? When the players in my game wanted their PCs to kill a behemoth (= dinosaur) by driving it over a cliff, we didn't use hit points to resolve it: they made a successful check within a skill challenge.

Is that actually within the rules? I'm skeptical. Even if it is, the implications are unsettling. What happens when PCs start trying to circumvent the combat rules for other monsters.

This is simply not true. For instance, in AD&D and B/X monsters and NPC use moral and loyalty mechanics, but PCs don't. PCs all have ability scores, but most monsters don't. A fighter's hit points are expressly called out as more-than-meat, whereas the contrast is drawn explicitly with a horse, and might be drawn implicitly with a giant slug or dragon (and was by some commentators back in the day), whose hp are basically all meat. PCs use the levelling mechanics, but NPCs don't (not even all NPC fighters can gain levels - see eg the rules for mercenary officers on pp 30-31 of Gygax's DMG).

I knew I was playing 3e for a reason. My sense of the broader reality is that this is one of the many areas where 3e met demand and adopted the way people were already playing. At least in AD&D in my experience, DM's were always using exactly the same mechanics for NPCs as PCs.

Or at least so I was told. And certainly, if I'd found out that wasn't the case, I would have considered it quite a betrayal!

I can only answer your question for my own case: what determines what happens in the fictional world are the causal processes that operate in that world. My players and I understand them because we have a shared conception of the genre in which our game is set.

In other words, there are three sets of rules. There's reality, there's the PHB, and then there's your shared mindset. Which begs two questions: one, what if you try playing with someone who doesn't just intuitively agree with your conception of the world, and two, if you already have that shared understanding, what are the game rules really adding to the mix?

 

[Manbearcat]

A couple things for folks who appear to be citing firmed up backstory for the sake of internal consistency and who are decrying the various stages of creatures and the PC:NPC mechanical divide.

1) On backstory

I'm running a (slow-going) PBP for my S.O. on here. There is 0 chance she will read this (no time nor inclination to read these boards) so I risk nothing with spoilers.

We came into this game with very little fixed in terms of backstory. We have a few elements here and there, some ethos-guiding beliefs, the thematic components of her PC build, and the fact that she is from the Feywild and now lost in another world after an encounter with a moonlit encounter with a spectral stag. Ah hell, I'll spoil it just in case.

[sblock]I have thoughts on who the spectral stag is, where she is, and what choices she will have to undertake in the conflicts to come. I'm thinking that the relevance of her Ghost of the Past theme is that she is the restless spirit of an eladrin who died during the final, brutal moments of war against the lycanthrops of Brokenstone Vale (in the Feywild) before they gave up their homeland. From her invocation of her theme earlier, I'm thinking that she was a mother who died protecting her children from the lycanthropes (who in turn surely died). I'm thinking the spectral stag that brought her here is the Archfey leader of the Gloaming Court, the Maiden of the Moon, who is forever locked in a battle with the lycanthropes of the Brokenstone Vale but is bound by oath, and perhaps edicts by the Fey Courts, to abide by certain rules of engagement with them (basically a North/South Korea sort of Cold War). I'm thinking that, in order to get around that oath or those edicts, she is using the vengeful spirit of the PC as proxy. She has found the birthplace of lycanthropy and the means to travel back in time; a lost iteration of the prime world that the gods abandoned long ago after losing it to the Elder Primal Spirits.

The PC will have the potential opportunity to wipe the taint of lycanthropy from all future existence, undoing the horrific future of her restless spirit (and countless horrors for others). However, in order to do so, I will place her in conflicts that absolutely test the ethos cornerstones that she has devised (of most consequence is the law of nature outweighing the law of rulership) and the maternal protective spirit that has manifested in play (ironically, she will have to put the innocent, shapechanger children to the sword in order for her task to be assured - I don't think she'll do it).[/sblock]

This is all subject to change depending on how the game takes shape and what cues arise from her. I think about the only thing that is fixed is that of the identity of the spectral stag.

The fictional world (of course) doesn't exist and, as such, any backstory exists in a state of superposition until its manifested and is confirmed through play. Once it is in play at the table, it transcends that superposition and becomes fixed. Now, my question is, if she reads things differently (her purpose in being there, who she is, where she is) based on the results of our play, wouldn't it make for an internally inconsistent experience for the player if I were to shoehorn my preliminary thoughts onto the outcome of play and force her to play out my will (rigid backstory)? Isn't internal consistency only relevant to the surveyor (the players in an RPG)? If the results of our play yield an intuited perception for her that is (somewhat or wholly) askew from my own thoughts, yet I impose the transcendence of that superposition backstory toward my own vision (of which hasn't come about in play to her), what have I gained exactly (except for a jarring and less enjoyable experience for her)? In terms of fun and internal consistency, what have I gained? Fidelity to my originally envisioned model? If so, which is of greater import for the table?

2) On PC:NPC mechanical divide

Referencing the above again, she is in the throes of a conflict on a moonlit bay. As she emerges from the mouth of a river, she finds a father/daughter combo are out fishing in the deep twilight hours. They are attacked by a tentacle beast from under their flatboat.

Now, the immediate dramatic component of this conflict is the protection of the child from the nearly certain death of such an assault. So how is this accomplished. Well, in 4th edition, it is done through (i) minionizing the NPC daughter, (ii) providing her statblock with narrative and mechanical means that fortify her despite her minion status, (iii) providing her protectors (her father and the PC coming to their rescue) with the means to protect her and vanquish their foe that is beseiging the boat, (iv) an encounter budget and monster design that handles the dramatic pacing of such a conflict.

She has 1 HP as an of-level minion. She is utterly vulnerable. However, she gains bonuses to defense so long as she is adjacent to her father, she gains means to make herself untargetable against a singular foe, and some movement ability if things go very awry. Her father gains several means to protect her, including giving her 10 temporary HP as an encounter power and taking a blow for her so long as she is adjacent to him. Now the monster is manifesting round by round as 2 waves of minion tentacles (threatening to pull them off the boat and into the hindering terrain of the water - where they will be chomped and grabbed by the creature and potentially pulled down for a suffocation death) and then the final elite monster (which manifests 4 tentacles twice - immediately and at bloodied) in the 3rd round.

So you've got several iterations of creatures here all working to pace a dramatic fight and answer the question of whether the little girl (and/or the father) will be eaten and/or drown. I don't know any other system that could pull this off. The little girl actually has a chance to survive if the PC can get there quickly enough (she is poling her boat toward them while firing off arrows in between) and perform well enough to dispatch the beast and protect her. Without solid play from the PC and/or some bad luck (eg if the father goes overboard before the PC arrives, things will likely go pear-shaped quickly). I can't imagine how this combat could be pulled off (both the functionality and the dramatic pacing of it) if all of the component parts. The NPCC divide and the various iterations of a singular NPC in this single fight (the tentacle creature is waves of minions plus challenging terrain and then ultimately manifests as an elite monster) are paramount. I've yet to play any process simulation that can pull such a trope off. The girl would have level 0 defenses, no HP, and no thematically appropriate means to protect herself. It would be difficult for some (but not impossible) to justify the father's means to protect her. And monster mechanics that take the shape of two different iterations in one fight(?); minions + terrain and then a whole beast. Only outcome based design pulls something like this off with any level of guarantee of dramatic tension. The save the little girl trope only works in process simulation if the GM fudges rolls and funnels play toward the dramatic end they seek. It just doesn't manifest as a natural result of play and thus the PC's role in the "dramatic" outcome becomes peripheral.

I'm assuming that whatever internal consistency you feel is yielded by NPCC homogenization is worth the trade off of a heaping of dramatic conflicts/tropes that have little to no opportunity to become manifest in play?

 

[Hussar]

Disagree... first the randomness of damage means before 4e there was a minimum amount of power that had to be achieved by a player for his character before anything was ''always" a minion and this same randomness in damage and hp's also made it so that some things were never "always" minions in the 4e sense (i.e. taken out all the time by a single hit).

Meh. It was close enough to be true most of the time. Base damage goes up as characters gain levels. Either through equipment or later feats and whatnot.

Many monsters become effective minions over time. Heck why do you thing the Improved Cleave feat got included? If monsters never go down in one hit it wily be a pretty pointless feat.