D&D 4E The Best Thing from 4E

[Manbearcat]

Bringing this back around to the original topic.

Oh man do I love the Minion rules. Quick example of how useful they are:

Combat on a flat-boat in the middle of a bay in the dead of night. Little girl and her father are outside the walls, fishing on the bay during hours strictly forbidden by the island settlement's elder. Many-tentacled sea monster attacks said boat.

1) Tentacles are minions with their own suite of actions (slide/grab riders) and synergy with the Elite Sea Monster body (and of course 1 HP and 0 damage on miss damage).

2) Little girl is a minion with various abilities to evade her own death (Squirm allowing her to shift and an attack vs Will to evade being a target of attack UEoHNT).

3) Her father is a standard with a temp HP encounter power, a standard attack with mark rider, and an interrupt to eat an attack for her instead (and then MBA).

Couple that with the rules for hindering terrain, water, forced movement for getting allies back on board the boat when they're overboard and for when the Sea Monster "bumps the boat" (one of its powers), and drowning. Absolutely awesome combat where the stakes are "does the little girl survive?" A generous portion of such an awesome combat with legitimate stakes that the player gets to decide the outcome of (without GM force) is on the back of the Minion rules.

Another example of the fantastic tactical depth, player agency, and diversity of available thematic conflict in 4e. Basic game engine. No GM Force required.

 

[Cristian Andreu]

Simplified monsters are by far my favourite thing about 4e. It makes improvising monsters (something I do basically every session) much easier.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

That would be wrong.

"Orcs break into your room and begin attacking. Roll for initiative"

"Rocks fall from the ceiling and this path is blocked, choose another path" is a pretty easy way to compel them to action.

"You try that and it fails" - another way. ((the easiest form of this is to simply pile on checks until the party inevitably fails))

"That action is very much out of keeping with your alignment. If you do that, it will have consequences".

I could keep going. There are a million and one ways for a DM to compel actions.

None of those compel action. They all create consequence for PC action or inaction. Consequences are part of the world and withing a DM's area of control. What the PCs do about it is supposed to be entirely within the player's control. This may seem a trivial point but it's really important in thinking about this topic. Extending your incorrect premise to more complex situations is exactly what causes the problems others are objecting to.

 

[TwoSix]

None of those compel action. They all create consequence for PC action or inaction. Consequences are part of the world and withing a DM's area of control. What the PCs do about it is supposed to be entirely within the player's control. This may seem a trivial point but it's really important in thinking about this topic. Extending your incorrect premise to more complex situations is exactly what causes the problems others are objecting to.

I think you and [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] may be using different meanings of "compel". If someone holds a gun to my head and tells me to give them my wallet, sure, the choice of what to do next is technically mine, but I'd sure argue that I'm being compelled.

 

[pemerton]

None of those compel action.

I think if the GM tells the players to roll for initiative, then the players are obliged to.

That may not correspond to anything in the actual gameworld, however - I incline to the view that initiative is almost purely metagame device rather than a model of any event that occurs in the fiction.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think if the GM tells the players to roll for initiative, then the players are obliged to.

That may not correspond to anything in the actual gameworld, however - I incline to the view that initiative is almost purely metagame device rather than a model of any event that occurs in the fiction.

It might correspond in a somewhat abstract way. The term, and artifice, of initiative in wargames didn't spring out of nowhere, it is a concept in military science as well. It is meant to indicate when a particular combatant has seized control of the flow of events, and of course we use it in a similar way in everyday English when we say someone has 'taken the initiative', but it just naturally implies having control in a conflict situation where clearly if YOU have the initiative the other guy DOES NOT and you get to dictate the course of events. It really did make some sort of sense in AD&D as a concept, though the fairly arbitrary nature of the ebb and flow of initiative was a bit contrived perhaps. In 4e the turn order probably could have a different name, and the term initiative might then be returned to its more abstract meaning, and having or not having it would be a description of the situation and not a mechanic. Anyway, I agree that 'turn order' is not really a representation of anything at all in the game world, just it is different from old-fashioned initiative even though they share a term.

 

[Campbell]

I'm fairly late too the party. What I love most about 4e doesn't come down to any one feature. Rather what I enjoy most about 4e is that the game is focused on immediate and visceral play. From setting material to rules to play advice what matters most is what is currently happening. Playing 4e is immediately immersive too me because the focus is on coupling the character and player's perspective from an emotional rather than intellectual/cognitive standpoint.

 

[pemerton]

[MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION], better late than never! Welcome to the thread.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

It might correspond in a somewhat abstract way. The term, and artifice, of initiative in wargames didn't spring out of nowhere, it is a concept in military science as well. It is meant to indicate when a particular combatant has seized control of the flow of events, and of course we use it in a similar way in everyday English when we say someone has 'taken the initiative', but it just naturally implies having control in a conflict situation where clearly if YOU have the initiative the other guy DOES NOT and you get to dictate the course of events.

That's not how I understand the phrase. From what I understand, to take initiative means to move toward action instead of waiting around to see what happens. In that way, your initiative score is merely a measure of how good you are at deciding to act, rather than just sitting there and doing nothing.

 

[pemerton]

What I love most about 4e doesn't come down to any one feature. Rather what I enjoy most about 4e is that the game is focused on immediate and visceral play. From setting material to rules to play advice what matters most is what is currently happening. Playing 4e is immediately immersive too me because the focus is on coupling the character and player's perspective from an emotional rather than intellectual/cognitive standpoint.

In relation to this, I thought I might cross-post something from the current "Why 4e failed" thread.

In the context of that thread, it's part of a discussion about so-called "dissociated" mechanics. In the context of this thread, it's an attempt to elaborate on (my understanding of) Campbell's point, in relation to the limited-use abilities (hp, healing surges, encounter and daily powers, etc) that are found in 4e:

There are some readings of hit points where they model skill, talent and knowledge - for instance, the more-or-less Gygaxian treatment, where they reflect accrued combat skill and expertise.

On this picture, the character can block, dodge, get lucky etc (but not get significantly worn down, as shown by the lack of exhaustion and wound penalties) until s/he can't, as the last few hit points are taken away. There's a hard limit to luck and skill, which isn't systematically correlated to anything in the fiction. Rather, the fiction has to accommodate itself to the mechanics: suppose the defending character has 6 hp left, and the GM rolls a 17 to hit for the attacker (which is a good roll by any measure) and then the GM rolls the damage die (let's say it's 1d8+2): we don't know whether the PC got lucky/parried etc, or instead his/her luck ran out, until the result of that die is seen. Nothing in the fiction constrains or affects that answer.

I think if you see hit points this way, then daily martial powers - mechanically hard limits where the fiction has to accommodate itself to the mechanics - are perhaps less counterintuitive, though the limit is reached as a result of player choice rather than random rolling.

I have seen posters in the past (names escape me) who have expressed a preference for dice-rolled limits/refreshes rather than player-chosen limits/refreshes - if someone held that preference, then my hit point analogy would break down because hit points aren't a player-chosen/fiated limit but rather a randomly determined limit. I think this is probably part of why 13th Age goes for more random dice rationing rather than player-chosen rationing: it's catering to the preference I just described.

Flipping it round the other way, though, if someone likes the idea of player-chosen rationing rather than random dice rolls determining the rationing, they might also like the healing surge tweak that 4e adds to the traditional hit point system, which reduces the importance of random dice rolls (without eliminating them altogether) by increasing the number of decision points a player has to regulate his/her PCs own hit point total (by choosing to spend surges, within the mechanical frameworks that permit doing so).

From the point of view of "association"/"dissociation", for me the emphasis in 4e on player choice reinforces the connection between player and character because when the character really wants to pull out all the stops and try hard, the player can do the same thing (by choosing to spend these rationed resources), rather than simply have random dice rolls determine whether or not the character is really trying hard enough to win.

And sometimes - if all the dailies have been spent, all the surges gone, etc - the player looks at his/her sheet, wanting to try hard again, and finds that there's nothing left in the tank. That's an experience I can relate to from running and cycling, trying to push myself harder, and finding that my body has nothing more to give. Simply being delivered that information about my PC by a random die roll ("Oh, look, the damage die was a 5, so that's 7 points of damage - I'm down" or "Oh, look, I needed a crit to take down that orc but rolled a 1, I guess my guy wasn't up to it") tends to disconnect me from my character - because instead of inhabiting my character and his/her efforts I'm learning about them via an external, random agency.