Something that 4e's designers overlooked? -aka is KM correct?

[Otterscrubber]

Because you are trusting chance to provide you with the outcome you wish for. It sure may be bold, courageous and strong-headed, but smart, on a tactical level? I don't think you can really make that case, all other considerations/variables being equal.

In this game you roll dice to determine the success of most of your actions, therefore you are pretty much always trusting chance to provide you with the outcomes you are wishing for. Unless the action is so simple you are almost guaranteed success, you have a shot at failing at pretty much anything even if you plan very well.

I like the resource management (as far as powers go anyway) in 4e much better than previous editions as before some classes were front loaded and others didn't get much better till later. I always found playing a 1st level wizard ridiculous in prior editions, waiting for that absolute best time to throw your single first level spell you have prepared and throwing daggers most of the time. Hoping you never, ever get hit because you only have 4hp. Things are more even now and all classes have a chance to have options on what they can do from 1st level up to 30th.

The resource management as far as inventory goes, is pretty much the same as in prior editions as far as I can tell. There is room to prepare as much as you want or as little. Whether you live or die is still up to the DM when things get ugly, and if things don't get ugly very often that is not the fault of the system, but the person setting up the challenges. In this case, don't hate the game, hate the player (DM in this example).

 

[JoeGKushner]

But a lot of Sword and Sorcery is full of bad DMing too.

The heroes get knocked out. "And then things grew dark and I knew no more."

They get saved. "Thank god you showed up and knocked out the enemy at the last moment!"

They find things that no one would ever find before or after.

Jierel of Jory for example, is the most useless swordswoman ever. Seriously, the mother of female battle maidens never really wins any fights of sword play on her own, relies on the deus ex machina time and time again and is generlaly useless. Some great writing and fantastic vibes in the stories but that's one character I'd hate to be.

I agree that some of the strategic, resource management aspects of the game have been lost, in favor of emphasizing other kinds of play. But they aren't completely gone. You can still track torches and rations if you like. And nothing's been done to negate the importance of things like intelligence gathering or simple prudence. Smart play, as well as foolish, still exists (and they're both still extraordinarily subjective, but there's nothing to be done about that. D&D will never be chess).


This is spot-on. What's interesting to me, however, is how this new focus matches with a great deal of D&D's source material. Swords-and-sorcery protagonists were all about the 'tactics of the now'. They survived deadly scrapes using their swords and wits, not their detail-oriented management skills. Many classic S&S stories feature heroes thrown into situations where careful planning was impossible --I'm thinking now of the 2nd John Carter novel. These characters were all about using their environment to their advantage, but rarely did they kit up like members of an IMF (that's Impossible Mission Force, not International Monetary Fund) team.

The careful, strategic, planning-heavy mode of D&D play always struck me as being at odds with much of the fiction that inspired the game. 4e in particular, does a much better job emulating pulp S&S stories, due in large part to it's focus on immediate tactics over long-term strategic planning.

 

[xechnao]

In this game you roll dice to determine the success of most of your actions, therefore you are pretty much always trusting chance to provide you with the outcomes you are wishing for. Unless the action is so simple you are almost guaranteed success, you have a shot at failing at pretty much anything even if you plan very well.

I think the difference is that in 4e you either succeed or fail. In previous editions there were other options that had to do with how you behaved with your PC in respect with the others. As a player, playing your PC was mostly on about influencing party decisions -or to be more precise "decisions of party members"- rather than if your party won the encounter or not.

 

[Odhanan]

In this game you roll dice to determine the success of most of your actions, therefore you are pretty much always trusting chance to provide you with the outcomes you are wishing for. Unless the action is so simple you are almost guaranteed success, you have a shot at failing at pretty much anything even if you plan very well.

Not when you actually don't have a roll for everything, no full-blown skill system to speak of, no stat or mechanical representation for anything and everything under the sun... as in the case of OD&D, for instance.

It is part of my way of running the game to challenge the players' wits and smarts instead of rolling dice for everything.

When you still are rolling dice (for attacks and such), you basically have a choice between trusting in a great variation of outcomes by accepting random, uncontrolled, unchallenged circumstances PLUS random dice results, or try to mitigate the outcomes of said events by trying to control the circumstances and let the die fall where they may, when required. It's not an "either/or" type of choice, but an "and" type of choice.

 

[awesomeocalypse]

Maybe you're luckier then I am... but my luck in real life is rarely as good as those in the books I read,, and movies I watch... So it was more a string of failed farmboys, as opposed to the tales of the farmboy turned hero.

This pretty much gets it for me.

In fantasy fiction, heroes generally overcome impossible odds, get insanely lucky, pull insane comebacks out of their ass, etc. This is part of why they're "heroes" and not chumps--it is understood that 99.9% percent of people, if faced with the odds the heroes face, would die.

There are two basic approaches to handling this.

One, which older editions take, is to simulate the world in which virtually impossible odds are just that, insane luck really is a remarkable appearance, and when faced with a million to one chance at surviving something, 999,999 people are gonna die in that situation. The "hero" who overcomes all that must do so naturalistically, i.e. he must actually be really lucky and whatnot. Heroism is determined after the fact--going into a dungeon, you have no idea whether your character will end up a chump or a hero, and odds are good you'll be a chump. Getting to play a character who functioned naturalistically the way that heroes do in fiction was a rare and extraordinary thing.

Fourth edition instead steps back and looks at things from a much more "meta" perspective--the heroes in fiction aren't heroes because they get lucky, they get lucky because they're the heroes. If they were just chumps who'd die in random and unimportant ways, then they never would have been main characters in the first place. The very fact that the writer has designated them as the hero predestines them for greatness. In 4e, you play the designated heroes. it is assumed that you will get "impossibly" lucky, have miraculous comebacks, etc. In fact, the system is specifically designed to create those sorts of scenarios consistently.

In other words, old editions say, "okay, you're a farmboy who wants to be a hero, let's see if you get lucky enough to actually be one"

Fourth editions says "okay, you're a hero, and by virtue of that fact you WILL get lucky enough to function as such."

I prefer the 4th edition approach because, well, I want to be the main character from day one. I don't want to roll up a guy and then play for a while to find out if he has what it takes/is lucky enough to be the legendary hero I want him to be.

But I understand why, if you liked the idea of "earning" your heroism, the notion that any PC could just as easily be a faceless mook as a great hero, 4th edition would turn you off.

 

[xechnao]

snip

I see it and set it in a different way:

Older editions: You are not a hero. You are an adventurer. Perhaps you can become a hero in various unpredictable ways depending on chance and luck but if you are to become someone-anyone- you must master the art of compromises and negotiations of an adventurer. Now live by this: live the life of an adventurer. When you may wish it, if you are lucky enough, you could be able to retire in peace -whatever this takes in the world of swords & sorcery.

4e: You are made of doing heroic stuff. Ok, if you can see to learn how to do it you can just do it. Now you can do this again and again and again till you beat the final boss. If you are lucky enough to have a great storytelling DM and you are willing to appreciate it, you could also have fun doing it.

 

[Odhanan]

Or:

Older Editions: Campbellian Hero.

4e: Comics Superhero.

 

[MerricB]

Or:

Older Editions: Campbellian Hero.

4e: Comics Superhero.

Wow. That's one of the worst comparisons I've seen.

It's so astonishingly bad. It requires a misunderstanding of the differences between the editions, as well as not knowing what a Campbellian Hero is as well as assuming that a Comic Superhero isn't part of the Campbellian type as well.

Consider this article, which discusses in part how Spiderman fits the Cambellian Monomyth, also Superman.

Campbell isn't concerned with whether or not a character begins weak or not. He's concerned with story structure. The character leaves an "ordinary" existence for a life of adventure. This is something most games of D&D pass over; by the time the game begins, the ordinary life has been left behind. It doesn't say anything or not about whether the character was ordinary beforehand. Superman can hardly ever be considered to be "weak"! However, he has to make the decision to cross into the world of heroes and villains, rather than staying as Clark Kent and ignoring it all.

From here, many D&D campaigns don't really progress much further. The hero has left the ordinary world, and faces challenge after challenge... but there's really no resolution. In AD&D, there's no structure dictating that the story progress further. Conversely, both BECM D&D and 4E D&D give a structure that, if the game progresses to its utmost, the hero accomplishes a great deed and passes into immortality, legend, or some such. Both of those editions have a structure that facilitates the monomyth.

Does this mean that AD&D is incapable of following the monomyth? By no means. One of my favourite AD&D PCs left home, had a lot of fantastic adventures (including defeating Zuggtmoy and Vecna) and eventually returned home with great power to guard his homeland and his family. I'm pretty happy with that hero's journey.

Does that mean that a 1st level AD&D character and a 1st level 4E D&D character play the same way? By no means. But using the term "Campbellian" to describe AD&D characters is misleading at best.

 

[MerricB]

1st level fourth edition characters are buffed compared to former editions.

what has been lost, in my opinion, is the ability to narrate the path leading to a hero... with the POL philosophy if you are level one you are already a hero.

i don't like it... (but I can deal with this and play it anyway).

Ahem. In AD&D, no normal person can cast sleep. This is one of the great "take-down" spells which allows the lone magic-user to defeat an Ogre. The characters - in comparison to the normal populace - are already far above the norm. Add in Weapon Specialization and exceptional strength? Hoo boy.

What you certainly don't have is a period where the character is exceptionally vulnerable. To be fair, a lot of the AD&D's character's life finds them vulnerable to single round deaths, usually though special abilities (save or die!), but at 1st levels you're certainly looking at a single swordblow killing many PCs.

What 4E definitely removes is this exceptional vulnerability of characters - at all levels. Are they still defeatable? Certainly. However, the way combat works, it's more likely to become evident before the killing blow, allowing the choice to retreat, rather than the single critical blow or failed save that in previous editions would cause a great deal of swinginess.

Whether this is good or not I leave to personal taste.

Cheers!

 

[Odhanan]

Campbell isn't concerned with whether or not a character begins weak or not. He's concerned with story structure. The character leaves an "ordinary" existence for a life of adventure.

Here I was indeed conflating living an "ordinary" existence with being a farm boy, aka level 1 in AD&D, where there's not much differenciating you from other characters in the world. You are leading an ordinary life, and choosing to answer the call to adventure. You go on to go through all sorts of trials, and raise in levels as you confront these different challenges and learn from them. As for a resolution, a learning experience and a return to the ordinary world to share this experience, I agree this is a flaw in the way the game's set up, regardless of editions.

In 4e, you start as a Hero. Boom. You're already there.

You choose to not see it that way, that's fine by me. You add a piece about the way Superman would fit the Monomyth? By all means, fine by me too. But "astonishingly bad"? "misunderstanding of the differences between the editions"? "not knowing what a Campbellian Hero is"? Thanks... but no, thanks.