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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4012878" data-attributes="member: 42582">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".)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.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.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).Speaking without any irony, given the obvious design logic of 4e, I think that this may be the case.</blockquote>

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