D&D 4E Stephen Radney-MacFarland on Conversions and Adventures in 4e

[pawsplay]

"If you are a DM who uses or wishes to use the D&D rules for a physics of the world, where monsters and players always live by the same rules and building monsters and NPCs is a rigorous and time consuming as building PCs, the ease may make you feel a little queasy at first. "

:´(

I'm allergic to ease. Deathly.

Yeah. Of course.

 

[lbporter]

Now while he [Mearls] specifically said that you COULD go through the steps and build an NPC on the same rules platform as the PCs this was not the default setting of the game. The default was built around a set of tables covering approximate values for a specific role and purpose in the adventure at a specific level. Furthermore that monsters wouldn't even have this much, they were built randomly from the table values with no unifying mechanics. Anything beyond that was handwavery for monsters because there was no mechanical basis to tie them together.

Mr. Mearls approach is just how we did it in 1st and 2nd edition, without the tables. I am also pretty sure it is what you, and most DMs, do when you take the "short cuts" in designing NPCs, like approximating skills, adding only necessary feats (I often filled out the rest of the feats with Improved Toughness, as many times as I needed to, often throwing off the balance of a creature ) And granting abilities with story. There is nothing wrong with this. The thing 4e is doing (we assume) is giving you guideposts when doing this. Guideposts will really help novice DMs, and give the rest of us something to think about. The bottom line is no one from WOTC is going to come and take your books away if you aren't using the books 'correctly.'

 

[pawsplay]

Improved Toughness can only be taken once.

 

[Samuel Leming]

Things like 'simulationism VS gaminsm' is more pedant theory than reality, to me. Too ceberal, etheral things that don't fit the real world at times.

Things are more than easy labels or abstract concepts.

I'm no fan of GNS crap, but these differences in play style are not really just abstractions.

I welcome these looser NPC creation rules. I've not a single problem with them.

On the DM side, when building tools for the DM, Stephen Schubert (the ever-lovable, Shoe) created interesting ways to express game assumptions that grant a tremendous amount of flexibility on the DM’s part for creating and modifying challenges. Those revelations make it easier for DMs to tell stories while still supplying the gamist challenges that the majority of D&D players crave.

What I have a problem with is the explicit intention to cater to the more gamist player.

When playing a game of D&D, I like to relax, roll some dice, kick some orc ass, grab some loot, eat some pizza & drink some pop. I want to game with easy going people that are also there to have some fun and relax. Overcoming challenges using the tools available and the particulars of the situation are fun. I like to think during the game. The game is more fun if my fellow players approach the game the same way.

I don't like obsessing about my character's stats before the game. I want to have the fun of beating the situations I come up against, not building a character before the game designed to circumvent any reasonable challenge. Building a character to break the game is not fun. It's not intelligent. It's just vandalism.

I hate it when players show up with characters that make game sense but have no rational explanation in the game world. I also hate it when most of the game is argument rather than just playing. Sitting back and watching people bicker is not near as much fun as fighting imaginary dragons.

I like the 3.x rules, but not once did I play a good game of it. Not once did a single game go by without somebody ruining the game for over half the players at the table. Not rules problems. Player problems.

I'll take a "simulationist" system heavily seasoned with "gamist" any day over a game with a straight "gamist" bias just because of the kinds of players those games draw. I've had plenty of fun playing C&C and M&M in the last few years. Back in the old days I played many a good game of AD&D, Traveller, CoC, GURPS, Champions & even Toon.

I've high hopes for 4e. I've liked what little rules information I've seen(other than that silly thing about rings only being for 11th+). The fluff... hasn't been as encouraging, but I can change that myself. The PR? I'll forget all about that if I'm running a good game of 4e.

Once it's published, I'll give 4e six months. If I can put together a compatible group of players and they'd rather stick with 4e than switch to one of the many other fine games available out there(such as C&C, M&M, True20, Spycraft, etc.) than 4e will be for me.

Sam

 

[rounser]

I applaud what WOTC have done here, splitting the stats down the middle so that PCs lived by one dotted i's and crossed t's set and NPCs by another, more economical set was one of the core missions of improvement for the new game IMO.

Big thumbs up from me, if they'd done this and nothing else to the game then this alone would have been worth buying the new edition for IMO.

 

[HeinorNY]

Yeah, cause it was always annoying how I was always having to explain to my players how the Clerics "per day" abilities only worked during the daytime...


As far as we know "per encounter" means "takes five minutes of non-combat to recharge" not "can only be used in an encounter" not that "encounter" means "fight" anyway.

I know how encounter powers are meant to work in 4E, I'm not discussing them. It was just the easiest example that came to my mind to explain how sometimes rules can make the DM's job hard when he needs to give in-game rationalization to the characters. Per encounter powers are cool and I love them. I'm full of encounter love.

 

[HeinorNY]

I'm allergic to ease. Deathly.

Yeah. Of course.

I actually run my sessions, create NPCs, encounters, stories and even whole campaing plots on the fly, when the game is going on. When I take a time to actually "create" anything, out of the game session, usually crap comes out of it.
I just didn't like the sense of "this game is not for you" in that statement.

 

[Imban]

Mike Mearls has specifically said that we will still have the ability to give class levels to monsters.

But yet "orcs" won't exist - I'm almost sure some article revealed that we'll be getting something like 5 sorts of Orcs in the MM, Orc Minions, Orc Berserkers, Orc Shamans, Orc Archers, and... Orc Bloodsomethings? I'm still very worried about this.

(On the other hand, if every monster race for which it's reasonable has an "as a PC" writeup, the problem is solved. I'd also like it if special abilities available to the pseudo-classed monsters were also available, if not exactly then at least most of the way, to classed monsters of that race.)

 

[Nymrohd]

I on the other hand got the feeling we are getting 5 different orcs with full statistics we can drop into the game immediately instead of just a lvl 1 orc warrior. You can extrapolate statistics from those stats as you did in 3E. I mean they are intenting to do the same to the gnome, so if you cannot extrapolate statistics that means gnomes will not be playable as well though the MM.

 

[Imban]

I on the other hand got the feeling we are getting 5 different orcs with full statistics we can drop into the game immediately instead of just a lvl 1 orc warrior. You can extrapolate statistics from those stats as you did in 3E. I mean they are intenting to do the same to the gnome, so if you cannot extrapolate statistics that means gnomes will not be playable as well though the MM.

Well, with the new system, you can't "extrapolate" statistics - I mean, if it's legal you could certainly just slap class levels on top of a monster or let someone play that monster as a character or whatever, but there's not necessarily any mechanical common ground whatsoever between two different orcs - no "racial modifiers" or racial abilities necessarily inherent to orcs.