Stun/Paralysis effects

[Celebrim]

Okay. . . I'll bite. Perhaps I am an idiot, which has yet to be disproven, but could you help me understand how I attacked myself here? I seriously am not seeing it.

You seemed to be make an anti-save or condition statement. Yet, your statement so illustrated the claims of the pro-save or die position, that I had a hard time deciding whether you were making it in irony or not.

Some would claim that the experience of running scared from 5 mind flayers leaving a trail of urine in your wake was valuable, memorable, and desirable to have in a game, that a game that lacked this experience would be less than complete, and that it would be difficult or impossible to recreate it if the game system didn't make the blast of a mind flayer suitably harsh, and hense 'scary'.

 

[Raduin711]

Honestly, I disagree with the use of the word 'fun' in this case. I don't think things should be changed to because they were not fun for the players. You are correct that there are some players who go so far as to think failure is not fun.

IMHO, D&D should be fun, period.

Also, failure is actually not anethema to fun. I went to a hockey game a couple weeks ago (for the first time) and actually had a LOT of fun. Even though my team lost.

Now, the thing is, obviously I didn't know whether my team was going to win or not. It wasn't until the tail end of the game that it became clear. But after the game, I just shrugged my shoulders, said "you can't win them all" and decided that I should go to another game in the future.

Failure we can handle. Really. Honestly. Truly. It's being asked to step out of the auditorium for 45 minutes because the opposing team scored a point that is a little hard to swallow. We come to the table to participate and to have fun. Drama is fun too, but only if you can still participate. Even failing can be fun.

 

[I'm A Banana]

4E designers seem to think that the solution is to remove the oppurtunity for failure entirely, completing RPG's departure from literature and reality into its own realm with its own entirely internally justified rules and logic - like most any other game.

You're still ignoring the points:

#1: Bad things should happen to the character, not the player. Not being able to play is bad.

#2: Failure should be fun.

No one wants anything handed to them on a silver platter, but when I show up to play D&D, I expect to PLAY D&D, and I expect to enjoy myself even if all I do is roll 1's all night.

 

[Celebrim]

I'm also astonished that you don't seem to recognise the distinction between player involvement and PC involvement that has been made earlier in this thread. It seems to me and most of the other participants in the thread to be a very useful (and true) distinction which is germane to the topic at hand.

I recognize the distinction. I don't recognize the distinction as particularly germane.

It is not as if the the 4E design team has said, "We intend to remove paralyzation effects from the game because we don't want to turn players into observers." That is one stance, and if you make it, then I'll argue against that. But, the removal of paralyzation and the nerfing of stuns is occurring in much larger context. Lots and lots of conditions, many of which don't in fact force the player to spend time as an audience are being removed from the game on the grounds that they are not 'fun'. For example, 'energy drain' is going away, and it would be difficult to advance the argument that energy drain causes non-participation in the same way that paralysis does. So I can concede that there is some value in keeping players involved by not taking thier characters away from them without in any fashion thinking that really describes the big picture here.

The big picture is that 'not participating' is just one class of things that are being called 'not fun' and hense removed. So far in this thread, we've listed a whole variaty of things which can limit your participation. Things that are equivalent to non-participation can include: fear effects, paralysis, unconsciousness, domination, being pinned or confined, being mazed, being stunned, and death. Alot of other things are quite similar to non-participation in that the player loses much of his free will, and these can include suggestions, polymorph, being confused, or being feebleminded or similarly having your effective stats reduced to the point of being a zombie or vegetable. This already covers a broad swath of the things that can happen to a character, but to that we list have to add things that only potentially limit participation which are being nerfed or removed like ability damage and energy drain, but which in small amounts don't actually do so. To that we probably would need to add exhausition and various long term curses which are comparable to ability damage, in that while they don't end participation create any sort of high burden on the character that the players ability to participate might well be comprimised. All these things are touched on by the argument that bad things can happen to characters, so long as the don't impinge on the participation of the players.

But that's just the beginning of the problem. Just as 'paralyzation' is just a subclass of the effects being talked about as 'unfun', 'not participating' is just a general subclass of the various things that can happen to a character that impact a players fun. Very quickly this argument can become, and in my opinion already has become, a substitute or special case for the more general claim, "Bad things can happen to characters, just so long as bad things don't happen to players."

There is no sense in countering that I'm inventing this slippery slope, since we are already rapidly sliding down it. Compare EGG's perspective of thirty years ago with the perspective being offered by most of the thread, and then take a look at some of the even more radical statements being offered in other threads.

There is nothing wrong with making the game have mechanics similar to Toon, except that there is everything wrong with it if what you are trying to capture is an experience very different than Toon.

Let me go a step further than just arguing against the slippery slope. I don't even think a player with a paralyzed character is reduced from participating to the degree that the character is. Yes, he is reduced for a time period to an observer status, but so what? I enjoy watching good roleplay, in much the same way I enjoy watching good theater, only more so - because these are my friends. Observer status is not the same as no participation. To claim that it is, is to claim that a sports fan at a stadium is not participating in the event because he isn't on the field, or that the players on defence aren't participating because the offense is on the field. There are obvious bad things involved in not being able to participate in a game for a long period of time, but its a risk I think worth taking - especially given the ease of healing and restoration and even ressurection in D&D. It's not like the person is forced to go into the other room and wear a blindfold for the duration.

But maybe I'm just too 'old skewl'.

 

[Celebrim]

Failure we can handle. Really. Honestly. Truly. It's being asked to step out of the auditorium for 45 minutes because the opposing team scored a point that is a little hard to swallow. We come to the table to participate and to have fun. Drama is fun too, but only if you can still participate. Even failing can be fun.

Interesting analogy. I made a similar one without reading this post, but came to a very different conclusion.

 

[Celebrim]

You're still ignoring the points:

I'm not ignoring them. I understand them quite well. I just don't agree with them. That's not the same thing.

#1: Bad things should happen to the character, not the player. Not being able to play is bad.

Are you sure you understand my points? For example:

1) The distinction you make between bad things happening to the character, not the player is not as easy to make as you make it. For one thing, it is subjective, in that I read the story about running in terror from the 5 mind players and thought, "That sounds like a really good time.", whereas the story teller apparantly told it to illustrate how un-fun it was. So, when my character fails a saving throw vs. fear and runs out of the room, I might well enjoy it (indeed, I have enjoyed it, because it has happened to me), whereas another player might think that its incredibly lame.

2) Not being able to 'play' is bad. But its not absolutely bad, especially if it is temporary. There are alot of times when I've played RPG's when I wasn't actively participating, but I enjoyed either my passive participation or improvising comedy or something else out of 'a bad situation'. There are alot of things that are 'bad' at one level or the other, but which we would find we can't do without because doing without these things is also 'bad' at one level or another. For example, any honest player will tell you that character death sucks. It's sucks hard, especially when its a character you've invested serious time in. But, if I was playing a game knowing that character death wasn't a possibility, that in itself would be 'bad' and 'unfun' at some level. You can't necessarily fix things that have problems by removing them, because there absence is also a problem. It's as shallow as the argument, 'We shouldn't have done X, because some bad thing happened.' Well, yes, and that's tragic, but what about the bad things that might and probably would have happened had we not done X.

#2: Failure should be fun.

Failure should be fun, but there is nothing we can do to make failure fun all the time. Sometimes failure is going to suck, otherwise, it's not failure. It's like giving a prize to everyone. You can't lose, and you can't fail. You can't 'win' either. I think whether or not failure is fun depends more on the maturity of the players than it does on the game mechanics.

No one wants anything handed to them on a silver platter, but when I show up to play D&D, I expect to PLAY D&D, and I expect to enjoy myself even if all I do is roll 1's all night.

Tell you what. Just for the fun of it, play 'normally', but 'Take 1' for every roll you make one night. Tell me how much fun you have.

 

[Midknightsun]

You seemed to be make an anti-save or condition statement. Yet, your statement so illustrated the claims of the pro-save or die position, that I had a hard time deciding whether you were making it in irony or not.

Some would claim that the experience of running scared from 5 mind flayers leaving a trail of urine in your wake was valuable, memorable, and desirable to have in a game, that a game that lacked this experience would be less than complete, and that it would be difficult or impossible to recreate it if the game system didn't make the blast of a mind flayer suitably harsh, and hense 'scary'.

Okay, I see what you're saying, and perhaps I didn't clarify my point. The point I was attempting to make, is that we, as players, knew from a previous encounter with two mind flayers that the law of averages was against us. We got blasted repeatedly in that first encounter until half of us were down. . . . and pretty much removed from the fight for its entire duration. It was only my character (an Elan Fighter/Psion), and the Psion (Nomad) who were left after the first round of blasting, the other two out of the fight before they began. This wasn't tense, it sucked because one bad roll meant we were helpless for a good 1/2 hour or more of game time. Had it been a couple rounds, then I might not see it as as much of an issue. It was, IMHO, overkill as far as the duration that one was stunned on one bad save against a (fairly high DC) mind blast. It was a virtual foregone conclusion that 5 flayers would have eaten us for lunch, no ifs, ands, or buts. There was no challenge or tension in meeting 5 flayers. There was only "you gotta be kidding?" ringing through our heads. Our odds of succeeding, or even living through that scenario was a virtual zero. When the odds are stacked aginst me in that obvious of a manner its not a tension inducing moment, its a damn shame. Had he dropped Terrasque in front of us, it wouldn't have been a far cry worse. The DM letting us run away was purely a judgement call on his part, as we were surrounded and maybe an admission that we were in over our heads. He could have easily called for initiative and probably zapped us before we got out the door. Now perhaps he didnt intend for us to take them on, but in talking to him, I don't think that was the case. I think he vastly overestimated our capability to succeed over and over again against a repetitive attack that, once failed against, completely took a player (and eventually all players) out of the action. And, as our numbers inevitably dwindled from incapacitation, and with Minotaurs behind us, there was just no way. . . period, short of a major fluke of nature in our favor (and if you knew our group, you'd realize this wasn't in the cards). Now, if that mind blast lasted 1d4 rounds, I might not feel the same way. At least there would have been a fair chance of someone snapping out of it to rejoin the fray at some useful point in the combat, but as it is currently, there is only tension up and until you fail that save, and then you're done for the combat (and for our other two players, it meant they didn't even get to participate in the only fight of the night other than to make one d20 roll.)

Now, as long as it doesn't happen often, I can suck up having to run for my life like my mom just found out a broke her favorite vase, but the pure feeling of complete and utter inability to even participate as a player after one failed roll, for the entirety of a D&D combat (which are often far too long for my tastes) is just not fun. That's why we ran. And, yes, it was mostly a metagame reason. Were combats more easily resolved, it might lighten my dislike of this a bit, but 3-12 rounds of sit out and watch isn't particularly fun to any of our players, nor to me.

 

[I'm A Banana]

But, the removal of paralyzation and the nerfing of stuns is occurring in much larger context. Lots and lots of conditions, many of which don't in fact force the player to spend time as an audience are being removed from the game on the grounds that they are not 'fun'. For example, 'energy drain' is going away, and it would be difficult to advance the argument that energy drain causes non-participation in the same way that paralysis does. So I can concede that there is some value in keeping players involved by not taking thier characters away from them without in any fashion thinking that really describes the big picture here.

Each of these has other problems, too.

Energy Drain: Forces massive re-calculations as you "level down." A lot of time spent trying to remember what you picked up a month ago when you got this level, a recalculation of XP, and a halt to the enjoyment of character advancement. Negative levels are fine, (penalties building up to demise), but actual level loss is something that is a massive hassle.

Ability Drain/Damage: Forces massive re-calculation of the cascading effects of your ability scores. Damage Strength, and you might not be able to carry your backpack or use your Power Attack feat, as well as getting penalties to melee attacks and damage. Damage Dexterity, you loose Initiative, you loose ranged to-hit, you lose AC. These cascading effects require you to keep too much information in mind about your ability damage/drain. Better just to give you an initiative penalty or an AC penalty or a damage penalty.

So those fall into the category of "Memorize these rules and do math" area of not-funness.

It STILL has nothing to do with giving players easy rewards.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Some would claim that the experience of running scared from 5 mind flayers leaving a trail of urine in your wake was valuable, memorable, and desirable to have in a game, that a game that lacked this experience would be less than complete, and that it would be difficult or impossible to recreate it if the game system didn't make the blast of a mind flayer suitably harsh, and hense 'scary'.

But they could decide to run, and did it. They didn't stand in the middle of a room and get themselves mind-eaten.

The same could have been achieved if they fought a close battle with a Dragon, where nearly everyones hps was close to zero at the end, and a few rooms later, they see the angry Dragons mother.

 

[pemerton]

If we were to write to a modern audience, it would probably never occur to us to justify how generous a saving throw is. We'd spend all of our time justifying how harsh they are that they provide an oppurtunity for failure at all. The 4E designers seem to think that the solution is to remove the oppurtunity for failure entirely, completing RPG's departure from literature and reality into its own realm with its own entirely internally justified rules and logic - like most any other game. To me, this makes RPG's into something more like rpG's rather than RPg's. It transform the game experience into something that is for me more similar to playing CivII or Starcraft wear I manage abstract resources than to one which is more like imaginative play or reading a story.

<snip>

I think the game is beginning to load the dice in favor of success, to the point that it comes easily.

<snip>

Now it seems like the pendalum has swung to wear anyone who expects hardship is disdained.

<snip and segue to subsequent post>

Let me go a step further than just arguing against the slippery slope. I don't even think a player with a paralyzed character is reduced from participating to the degree that the character is. Yes, he is reduced for a time period to an observer status, but so what? I enjoy watching good roleplay, in much the same way I enjoy watching good theater, only more so - because these are my friends. Observer status is not the same as no participation.

I think there are a lot of complexities surrounding comparisons between contemporary play and early D&D and AD&D play.

For a start, back in the day it was very common for each player to control multiple characters (henchmen and hireling rules being a big part of both the PHB and the DMG). So the implications for a given player of "save or don't act" were less severe.

Furthermore, D&D emerged out of a particular sort of gaming culture, associated with wargaming and a certain type of boardgaming, which takes for granted that the ratio of payoff in play to time spent playing will be rather low. The risk of tedium in setting up the situation whose resolution produces satisfaction is taken for granted, and indeed for those who are into this sort of gameplaying watching the situation get set up is not necessarily tedious, even if one is not directly participating in it (wargaming can be a spectator sport, after all, if not a mainstream one).

My impression is that this culture no longer exists in any widespread fashion. People who turn up to play games typically don't want hardship. They want the fun of playing a game. And I don't think as many players, now, get pleasure from watching the game played as they once did. For better or worse, expectations have changed.

Now I agree with you that this change in expectations has a tricky relationship to the rewarding of skill in play. If the game is to reward skill at all, it has to be the case that some players - the ones who are less skilled - get less reward. But there are various ways to do this.

In AD&D (and this is emphasised in the PHB and DMG for 1st ed, and also in early articles by such authors as Lewis Pulsipher) the unit of play over which skill is tested is the dungeon expedition. Saving throws can fit into this sort of play, especially with multiple characters per player. If a PC has to make a saving throw then to a significant extent the player has already played badly (or been very unlucky), because part of the measure of skilled dungeoneering is avoiding the triggering of saving throws.

But when players have only a single character under their control (as has probably been the norm since at least the mid-1980s) and when attitudes to time spent playing change away from those of wargamers, this becomes untenable. And as the unit of meaningful play contracts down to a single character in a single encounter (which is where 3E has arrived at, and what 4e is premised on) then save-or-die no longer works. It gets in the way of satisfactory play.

What remains to be seen is what constitutes success in 4e. My feeling is that it is no longer leaving the dungeon alive. Rather, it is optimising one's mechanical performance in resolving an encounter. The ultimate consequence of failure will be PC death (or inaction) through loss of hit points - but the expectation is that players will tolerate this, because they will realise that it resulted not from bad luck, but from their own poor play during the encounter (hence the need for such tight encounter balancing rules, because otherwise the players will blame the GM and not recognise the contribution to failure of their own poor play).

And if success in encounters depends upon skilled play during the encounter then save-or-lose has to go, because such saves do not test skill in play. Whereas in AD&D success in the dungeon is the intended measure, and one mark of a successful player is the player who avoids having to make saving throws, this is no longer the case where the premise of successful play is already being in an encounter.

(Interestingly, I think 4e may also support a type of narrative play where the success condition is very different again from the gamism described above - something like "worthwhile thematic development during play".)

Just as 'paralyzation' is just a subclass of the effects being talked about as 'unfun', 'not participating' is just a general subclass of the various things that can happen to a character that impact a players fun.

<snip>

There is nothing wrong with making the game have mechanics similar to Toon, except that there is everything wrong with it if what you are trying to capture is an experience very different than Toon.

The last sentence above is true. But I don't think it's a fair characterisation. I think the mechanics will make the player work for his or her fun, and certain sorts of failure will be implicitly accepted, within the framework of the game, as consistent with fun, even though they are not fun when they actually happen. I've tried to sketch above what I take to be this implicit social contract intended to underpin 4e. This will mark a difference from Toon.

It is not as if the the 4E design team has said, "We intend to remove paralyzation effects from the game because we don't want to turn players into observers." That is one stance, and if you make it, then I'll argue against that. But, the removal of paralyzation and the nerfing of stuns is occurring in much larger context. Lots and lots of conditions, many of which don't in fact force the player to spend time as an audience are being removed from the game on the grounds that they are not 'fun'. For example, 'energy drain' is going away, and it would be difficult to advance the argument that energy drain causes non-participation in the same way that paralysis does.

<snip>

Things that are equivalent to non-participation can include: fear effects, paralysis, unconsciousness, domination, being pinned or confined, being mazed, being stunned, and death. Alot of other things are quite similar to non-participation in that the player loses much of his free will, and these can include suggestions, polymorph, being confused, or being feebleminded or similarly having your effective stats reduced to the point of being a zombie or vegetable.

As KM said, I think energy drain is going for different reasons (and ability damage likewise, which was never a huge part of the game before 3E). But that still leaves a lot of your argument intact.

I imagine that the conditions that will remain will be conditions that are fairly easy to apply (as in they directly affect a single important number like Defence, To Hit or Damage), that don't require duration tracking (so they will either have D:1 encounter, or an X% chance to be shed each round, or similar) and that do not remove the PC's capacity to take actions (which is I think the relevant notion, rather than a more amporhpous notion of "participation").

I think confusion will probably go. I would expect there to be more explicity discussion of how a player should continue to participate if his or her PC is dominated or charmed or the victim of a suggestion.

Fear is very traditional, especially from Demons, Devils and Dragons, as is being petrified or polymorhped for fantasy as a whole. I won't predict how these will be handled in 4e.

How does all this fit within the framework for play I sketched above? The mechanics have to permit the avoidance, or throwing off of, conditions through skilled play. Hence the importance of not stopping players taking actions, because the only way the player can affect the situation during the encounter is via his or her PC taking actions (eg swift actions for a Second Wind).

(One exception to this may be the expenditure of APs - hence the feat that allows the taking of an action in a surprise round by spending an AP - and note that inaction in a surprise round is one condition that we know they are leaving in.)

(Note also that in the above couple of paragraphs I am buying into the "privatisation" of the play experience that 4e presupposes - a player's capacity to affect things by giving good advice to his or her fellow players on how to help his or her PC does not satisfy the requirement that the player be able to affect the situation. This sort of privatisation of success and failure I think is part and parcel of the gamism that 4e is oriented towards.)

If the designers don't include these sorts of mechanisms, for overcoming conditions via skilled play, they will have failed to satisfy what is (for me) the only discernible logic of their design.

You're No one wants anything handed to them on a silver platter, but when I show up to play D&D, I expect to PLAY D&D, and I expect to enjoy myself even if all I do is roll 1's all night.

Which is to say, you do want a fun game handed to you on a silver platter. As did AD&D players back in the day. The point is that expectations as to what counts as having fun in a game have changed (on the whole, not necessarily for every single person).

But maybe I'm just too 'old skewl'.

Speaking without any irony, given the obvious design logic of 4e, I think that this may be the case.