Simulationists, Black Boxes, and 4e

[JRRNeiklot]

In general, 3e leaned towards process-response models, particularly when it comes to modeling characters and monsters. If you wanted to make a more powerful version of the regular monster, you had to advance it to more hit dice, or give it character levels, or give it a template. Each of these is complicated and has all sorts of side effects.

Why? If I wanted an orc who was sneaky, I just gave him +10 to hide and move silently. If I wanted him to be a great swordsman, I gave him +5 to hit, if I wanted him to be tough without getting a tpk, I gave him 30 extra hit points. Yeah, it breaks the rules, but who cares? He's gonna last 3-5 rounds anyway. Change stuff however you like, give the red dragon a vorpal bite, he's blessed by the god of very sharp pointy teeth, maybe. It's not something the players should be analyzing. They just want to kill him and take his stuff.

 

[Wormwood]

Yeah, it breaks the rules, but who cares?

You had to ignore huge swaths of the 3e rules to do so. Presumably, you will be able to achieve the same effect in 4e using the tools you paid for.

And while I agree that breaking the rules to get what I want out of a game is perfectly fine, it's nice to see a system that actually mechanically accomodates my desires as the default.

 

[Kraydak]

I hardly think the 3e monster design system can be described as "easy". Building a high level monster from scratch is a hell of a lot of work.

I don't really think it's all that robust either, at least not in the way that matters most: CR versus actual power in combat. Building or modifying a high level monster is pretty much a crapshoot, you may end up with something that will TPK your party with ease, or something that's little more than a speedbump. Now, a lot of this has to do with 3e in general (particularly it's underlying math and some of the assumptions about what capabilities a party will have) rather than just the monster rules, but I don't think the monster rules help.

And I never said that 3e had the ideal monster design system. I merely said that getting the right base stats is easy enough that there is no real advantage to going black-box. 3e suffered from being the first DnD edition that tried, and it had bugs. 4e could have fixed the bugs, with a result that takes about the same amount of time as in actual 4e, *but* with "sourced" stats (i.e. you know where the numbers are coming from so if the players do things outside the box to remove/gift gear or otherwise buff/debuff them the DM can adjust easily).

That assumes that adjudicating something on the fly is more difficult than applying the rules. At a certain point the rules become so complicated that it's easier to fudge it. Grappling is the classic example of this, a player or monster decides to start wrestling and the game grinds to a halt while the DM flips through the rulebook and players start trying to figure out how their current buffs affect their grapple check.

Yes, 3e grappling was a mess. Cleaning up grappling poses no real difficulties though. Fiddly rules cause slow-downs and should be simplified, but non-rules can cause flat-out game breakdowns (player/DM disconnects that devolve into arguments are the worst, but DM freezes are pretty bad, and often result *because* the DM has to come up with a good enough solution to not cause DM/player arguments).

Again, a "3e has a poorly designed rule" is not justification for dumping design work onto the DM's shoulders, or putting the DM in the position of having to say "no" to players, causing social friction (4e economics, say).

Unless your players don't read the rulebook, then it seems to me that the designers are the ones telling the players these things.

Telling, enforcing, I wasn't being specific.

So, it comes down to the tradeoff between the complexity of a process-response model and the limitations of a black box model. Like I said, whether you like 4e is going to depend a lot on how you view this tradeoff.

Very true. I know that *every* group I have played in (and not just because of me) would/will have more social friction and longer game stoppages because of corner cases. I also forsee huge newbie-DMing problems because without either lots of experience or self-consistent rules, being forced to make house-rules is a recipe for disaster. Which is why I am interpreting 4e as WotC designers designing a game for themselves: as DM, they are experienced enough that the game system doesn't matter too much and can handle some rule-boundary pushing and as players, they agree philosophically with the more restrictive rules and won't push the boundaries.

 

[Blackeagle]

Why? If I wanted an orc who was sneaky, I just gave him +10 to hide and move silently. If I wanted him to be a great swordsman, I gave him +5 to hit, if I wanted him to be tough without getting a tpk, I gave him 30 extra hit points. Yeah, it breaks the rules, but who cares? He's gonna last 3-5 rounds anyway.

You certainly could do it this way in 3e, and I think that's the way a lot of people played. Which is probably why they're changing the 4e rules to be more like that. WotC has explicitly said that one of the design goals was to change the rules so they reflected how people actually play the game.

 

[Lizard]

You should know exactly what Immobilized means because the term is well-defined, AFAIK.

It is.

However, when the rules come into conflict with player expectations, that's where the problem lies. An immobilized character can't move, and CAN do anything else. This makes sense if, say, he's immobilized by a glue trap. But if he's being grappled/held, and does something which, intuitively, he shouldn't be able to do in that situation, you get arguments.

"OK, you've got the hobgoblin in your grip. He smashes you with his two-handed battleaxe. Take 12 points of damage."
"Wait, how does he swing it when I'm holding him?"
"Nothing in the rules says he can't."

(And here the argument starts. So, fine, I houserule that he can't. A week later, the grappling PC is himself grappled. He wants to attack the monster holding him. I say, "You can't." He says, "But I'm only using a tiny dagger! I should be able to!" So another house rule is made. And another, and another...and soon the "simple" rules become a complex hodge-podge of ad-hoc rulings. Or, you could just say, "Suck it down. The hobgoblin hits you. Who's next in the initiative?" but that has its own problems...)

There will only be arguments if one or more of the participants is unwilling to accept the rules.

Well, yes, and if it's not day, it's night. Not really sure of the relevance here.

My personal preference is to shrug and accept the RAW. If an elephant grappled by a halfling can't move, so be it. If soldier with a pike is just as effective using it when being held, so be it. Game balance will mean these things will tip for the players as often as against them.

 

[gizmo33]

Big picture/fine detail isn't the only place where simulationists might grimace with 4E. Speaking for myself, I also look for consistency between the rules. And consistency between the rules and a plausible/assumed fantasy world. For example the NPCs should behave in ways that are at least vaguely recognizable to those of us familiar with real-world human beings.

And I know it's a fantasy world but pricing salt at 5 gp/lb is foolish and one would have to conclude that the sea does not contain usable salt. I'm sure heavy-handed DM fiat can invent some last minute rationalizations for these things but IMO it's clumsy and unconvincing and hurts the versimilitude of the setting. The "gamist" thing to do IMO is to not talk about the price of salt in the first place and if you feel that you must, then some reasoning and perhaps some research IMO is warranted. Otherwise your just being lazy and making up numbers off the top of your head which is something that I, as a consumer, don't need to pay someone else to do. Nor do I see the point in taking up space in a rulebook with stuff like that.

 

[Blackeagle]

Fiddly rules cause slow-downs and should be simplified, but non-rules can cause flat-out game breakdowns (player/DM disconnects that devolve into arguments are the worst, but DM freezes are pretty bad, and often result *because* the DM has to come up with a good enough solution to not cause DM/player arguments).

Very true. I know that *every* group I have played in (and not just because of me) would/will have more social friction and longer game stoppages because of corner cases.

My experience is very different. It's been a long time since I've seen the sort of arguments between players and DMs that you're talking about. When those kinds of arguments did happen, they're not really about the rules, they're about personality conflicts between the player and the DM. In a rules-light system the player does something that pushes the boundaries, the DM makes a decision and the player argues with his decision. In a rules-heavy system, the player pushes the boundaries, the DM applies the rules and the player argues with his application of the rules.

I also forsee huge newbie-DMing problems because without either lots of experience or self-consistent rules, being forced to make house-rules is a recipe for disaster. Which is why I am interpreting 4e as WotC designers designing a game for themselves: as DM, they are experienced enough that the game system doesn't matter too much and can handle some rule-boundary pushing and as players, they agree philosophically with the more restrictive rules and won't push the boundaries.

See, I look at the 4e rules we've seen so far and see the opposite. They're not designed for the grognards, they're designed for new players and DMs. Having an exhaustive set of rules for everything means having to figure out what the correct rule to apply in a given situation is and how to apply it properly. I think fudging is much easier.

I think this is more a playstyle issue than anything, you're more comfortable working within a comprehensive ruleset, I'm more comfortable winging and fudging. I don't think either is necessarily better or worse for a newbie DM.

 

[Blackeagle]

However, when the rules come into conflict with player expectations, that's where the problem lies. An immobilized character can't move, and CAN do anything else. This makes sense if, say, he's immobilized by a glue trap. But if he's being grappled/held, and does something which, intuitively, he shouldn't be able to do in that situation, you get arguments.

"OK, you've got the hobgoblin in your grip. He smashes you with his two-handed battleaxe. Take 12 points of damage."
"Wait, how does he swing it when I'm holding him?"
"Nothing in the rules says he can't."

I think the problem here is getting the player's expectations to match the rules. When the DM describes grappling the hobgoblin, it should be something along the lines of:

"OK, you've got your arms around the hobgoblin's body but he's squirming around too much for you to trap his arms. He smashes you with his two-handed battleaxe. Take 12 points of damage."
"Ouch, that hurt. But now we've got combat advantage on him, so the rouge can sneak attack. Skewer this bad boy!"

 

[LostSoul]

However, when the rules come into conflict with player expectations, that's where the problem lies. An immobilized character can't move, and CAN do anything else. This makes sense if, say, he's immobilized by a glue trap. But if he's being grappled/held, and does something which, intuitively, he shouldn't be able to do in that situation, you get arguments.

You get those arguments when people can't agree to use the rules.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

It is.

However, when the rules come into conflict with player expectations, that's where the problem lies. An immobilized character can't move, and CAN do anything else. This makes sense if, say, he's immobilized by a glue trap. But if he's being grappled/held, and does something which, intuitively, he shouldn't be able to do in that situation, you get arguments.

"OK, you've got the hobgoblin in your grip. He smashes you with his two-handed battleaxe. Take 12 points of damage."
"Wait, how does he swing it when I'm holding him?"
"Nothing in the rules says he can't."

(And here the argument starts. So, fine, I houserule that he can't. A week later, the grappling PC is himself grappled. He wants to attack the monster holding him. I say, "You can't." He says, "But I'm only using a tiny dagger! I should be able to!" So another house rule is made. And another, and another...and soon the "simple" rules become a complex hodge-podge of ad-hoc rulings. Or, you could just say, "Suck it down. The hobgoblin hits you. Who's next in the initiative?" but that has its own problems...)

Well, maybe I am just showing the imperfectness of the 3E rules, but example: Why does a prone creature keep their reach? I mean, they are in a impractical position to use their long arms. Or what's with an Entangled Creature?
This could lead to the very same kind of rules argument.
Off course, a designer could predict this, and also describe this case. But this just leads to rules bloat, and people always having to look up rules instead of memorizing them. Some people might return to wing this stuff, but some might explicitely not do this, since they know there is a right answer, and they hate doing it the "wrong" way.