D&D 4E The Best Thing from 4E

[pemerton]

I do see how this is transparent (like objective DCs), but I don't see it as empowering players. With objective DCs, skill list uses, powers, action points, etc., all the tools are in the hands of the players. That empowers them to act. That's why people in this thread have said they love powers and the power system.

On the other hand, while saying "I don't think you're powerful enough to do this" is transparent, it doesn't empower the players, does it? Or are you saying that once the PCs decipher the GMs (hopefully) transparent reasoning on allowing some things and not allowing them, they'll be able to declare more actions than they would before figuring it out (and thus gain more power)? I could see that argument, but my gut doesn't tell me it trumps direct player empowerment ("you, as a player, have the power to do X.").

I guess it depends on the skill. I don't think any of my PCs can hit a Hard DC in something they aren't trained in, for example.

I'm saying that once the GM is obliged to be open about what s/he is doing - for instance, that such-and-such a thing is or isn't permissible in the fiction - this opens a space for negotiation between the players and the GM. Which is empowering.

Whereas if the GM is simply pointing to an "objective" DC 50 that "makes sense", the player has no opening in which to express a contrary view of the fiction, and to engage the GM in discussion. (Or if s/he does try to do so, because of the terms in which the negotiations will be framed s/he is likely to be labelled a munchkin or a rules lawyer.)

Furthermore, in practical terms, once the GM is overtly negotiating permissibility within the fiction, and everyone knows that if the particular possibility is OKed (eg using Twist of Space to free someone from a trapping mirror) then there are a clear set of mechanics/DCs for handling it, the GM has no particularly strong incentive not to OK it. Or, if the GM's real concerns are not the colour/tone of the fiction ("Too gonzo!") but rather the plot implications, then it becomes much easier just to be upfront about that.

So the empowerment, at least as I have experienced it, lies in the change in the social dynamic that results from transparency about what the nature is of the decision that the GM is making.

On the issue of DCs: a Hard DC at level 1 is 18 (isn't it?) which is doable though hard for an untrained PC (the chance drops down to 10% for an untrained 8-stat PC). At higher levels the gaps grow but so do the opportunities for buffs etc.

This does give players an incentive to push for solutions in their areas of PC competence. I've seen this derisively described as "roll your best skill and make up some nonsense". For me, it's more about conceiving of situations in ways that speak to the personae of the PCs. The player of an 8 CHA, athletic PC will always be pushing for situations to be physical in their character and resolution (somewhat like REH's Conan). That's another form of empowerment, as a form of co-authorship.

Of course the GM can block. But this goes back to my point above: the GM's blocking is, overtly, a block around tone/genre rather than ingame considerations, and so has to be owned and defended on those terms. If the GM allows it -and why not, if the player wants to play a Conan-esque athletic character - then there won't be a mechanical block, but rather the standard chance of success or failure and narration of consequences either way.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

It's a simulationist-gamist nexus which is part of 3e, and in other editions of D&D, but definitely not part of 4e. In 4e I never feel the NPC guard is 'really' a 3rd level soldier, whereas in eg 1e AD&D
saying the guard is a 3rd level Fighter usually feels like you are saying something meaningful about the guard's
place in the (fictional) universe, not just his game-role. 4e is a big departure from that.

Yeah, this is huge, and it ties back into what I was saying to [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION]. 4e just gives you a LOT more sophisticated tools with which to construct the stage upon which the PCs enact their play. The problem with the highly simulationist mechanically fixed game systems IME was just that they shot you in the foot. As GM you felt like you had 2 choices. You could either let the gears grind on to their dull and inevitable TPK ending (or whatever), or you could 'break the rules'. EVERY breaking of the rules has to be either a collaboration with the players, or it has to be some degree of trespass on the social contract of the game. Given that these same simulationist games, by design, lack meta-game level mechanics to formalize the collaboration option they almost DEMAND some level of 'illusionism'. They don't just drift into it, they cannot exist WITHOUT it. In the best cases this is in the service of better play and a really good DM will work to support and validate the player's choices, but its a hard path to walk. Most games in the AD&D era IME fell into either pandering to the players, or being vehicles for the DM to push his agenda.

4e at least makes it easy to do the adjusting and lets everyone focus on the fun part, which are the agendas and characterization/roleplay, etc. I'd be happy to hear about even better tools, and ones that are even more compatible with, for instance, a more sandboxed style of play than 4e focuses on. I think 5e is actually not bad in this respect. It adulterates some mechanical aspects of 4e to its detriment, but its still a long ways ahead of any pre-4e edition in a lot of respects. I'm sorry that it didn't take this agenda further though, which is why I'm not really that interested in 5e.

 

[pemerton]

It's a simulationist-gamist nexus which is part of 3e, and in other editions of D&D, but definitely not part of 4e. In 4e I never feel the NPC guard is 'really' a 3rd level soldier, whereas in eg 1e AD&D
saying the guard is a 3rd level Fighter usually feels like you are saying something meaningful about the guard's
place in the (fictional) universe, not just his game-role. 4e is a big departure from that.

I understand the departure you describe - this is a feature that varies across different game systems.

As well as 4e, at the moment I'm running a Burning Wheel game, and that system uses "objective" DCs/stats.

The "accomplishment" thing remains a bit puzzling to me, however. The "accomplishment" of killing a 3rd level fighter, compared to a 20th level fighter with only 1 hit point, is purely mathematical/puzzle-solving. Changing the parameters of the maths/puzzle might affect the aesthetic, but I don't really get how it turns what would otherwise have been an accomplishment into a non-accomplishment.

Not all adventures are 'kill all the bad guys'. Some may be 'flee the bad guys'.

I've played in a few. Once it was a dragon, and another was just an evil wizard. The goal of the PCs (as well as everyone else) is usually to run away without being noticed, and spread the word to nearby villages so they can either flee or muster some sort of meaningful response.

These are the sorts of adventures that I think run the risk of the "boredom" problem I mentioned upthread. Alternatively the GM intervenes in some subtle way to inject the possibility of hope (eg find the McGuffin). Very prone to illusionism and/or overt railroading, in my experience.

I've also played in a campaign where cities over there were being obliterated by a powerful magical force, and the only difference between those two situations is where the PCs start in relation to the phenomenon. When your party is a hundred miles away, and have just received notice of the Big Bad, then some other party was probably right in its path.

To me, this is a paradigm example of metagame at work. Why is it not the PCs' city that gets wiped out? Metagame reasons - we need to play a game, and that demands living PCs.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

In this approach, the GM frontloads his/her "intervention" into world design. What exactly the expectations are for the players (what is their job, what sort of pleasure are they meant to get out of play, etc) will depend on individual groups, on what considerations inform the GM's world design, etc.

There were quite a few good parts to this, but I pick this one out because it relates back to my last post responding to [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION]. MUCH of what goes into the average 'sandbox' is really preloading of meta-game considerations. They are simply 'baked into' the setting. I didn't quote the later paragraph where you describe things like dropping plot hooks at the right moment, but this is all very classic DM behavior. Often it takes the form of a collaboration between the players (who obviously DO NOT want to stumble into a certain-death situation) and the DM. The PCs finish looting the 'starter dungeon' and go back to town to 'look for some action'. They hang around in various low-class dives plying their social skills until wonder of wonders a battered survivor of the last ill-fated expedition to the level 5 dungeon staggers in! I have yet to hear of the DM who had a guy stagger in and rolled randomly for which of the 20 nearest lairs he had a map to regardless of whether they were within the capability of the current party. No Sir, this guy JUST HAPPENS to have knowledge of a perfect place to go grab some better loot!

This is not to say that a group which is determined to achieve self-immolation cannot go off and trek into the distant giant-infested mountains and be slaughtered by galeb-dur at level 1. Of course you CAN, and there's some level of charm there, but in a sense the sandbox itself, by its very nature IS the illusion, not the reality. The reality would be much much less fun.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

In this approach, the GM frontloads his/her "intervention" into world design.

That's just the premise, though. You can't really question the premise, or else you wouldn't be playing the game in the first place. If you're playing a Supers game, then you've already agreed that you're playing in a world where super-powers are a thing. If you're playing D&D, then you must be playing in a world that is conducive to that ruleset, or else why would you be playing this game?

Why do the mercenaries happen to attack just now, when the 4 PCs are gathered together at the town inn ready and able to confront them? Why is the decades or centuries old megadungeon waiting to be looted right now, rather than having been looted by some other random person days or weeks or years ago? The "adventure paradigm" you've described depends upon framing the adventure opportunities around the geographic and temporal circumstances of the PCs.

It's a matter of narrative focus, which is a matter wholly external to the game.

Let's say that there are a dozen times, throughout the centuries, where the megadungeon is discovered and explored by someone; nobody else ever finds the place. The PCs could exist at any geographic and temporal coordinates within the setting, but they don't appear near the dungeon because they're PCs. They're PCs because we're paying attention to them, because they are in the right time and place for something interesting to happen.

In a 2nd ed AD&D game, where I am engaging in the trappings of protagonism - making choices for my PC, rolling dice, etc - but I know that the GM is manipulating the fiction and even some of the mechanics to make these trappings irrelevant - it is a bit less clear. Even if I am a willing participant, I don't know where the GM is wielding power and where s/he is not. So the extent to which I am a mere participant is itself unclear, or shrouded in illusion.

That part doesn't make sense to me. The DM should be neutral. The DM shouldn't be making your choices irrelevant. At least, that was the takeaway I got from 2E. I guess that would be pretty hard, if I didn't trust my DM to be honest, but there's also no real motivation for the DM to cheat, either. It's not the DM's place to try and shape the narrative.

I think I'm missing something here.

For instance, if I declare actions for my PC and the GM blocks (eg rope problems of the sort @Aenghus was discussing upthread), how do I know whether this is the GM adjudicating the action resolution rules - and so I have to declare more actions for my PC to work around the block - or the GM exercising power to shape the fiction in a particular direction - and so it is pointless for me to try and work around the block, and I should just sit back and wait to be told by the GM what happens? This sort of uncertainty, and hence practical impasse, is very common in my experience of 2nd ed-style play. Personally I hate it.

That particular example seemed really weird to me. I can't imagine a player not knowing if they have rope or not. And if you have rope, then the DM's job is to arbitrate the outcome, and everyone expects that result to be fair.

I guess if you're not tracking gear in any way, but that's not a playstyle with which I have any experience. I mean, it seems like it would run into exactly this sort of issue, more often than not. (Or if the PCs get captured, or someone gets into their equipment and sabotages it, how can you fairly determine what happened to the rope if you haven't even established whether the rope even exists? Do the PCs only have rope if they end up needing it, later? If they think of the rope thing for the second wall they need to climb, but not the first, do they retroactively realize that they were foolish because they must have had that rope the whole time?)

Once it is clear that the players' choices really do matter, and that they are capable of making a difference to the fiction in virtue of those choices, I think the experience becomes quite different from a movie or a book. Because the players become a species of co-author rather than mere audience.

I guess that's one way of putting it. The choices of the PCs should matter, and since the players are the ones making those choices (on behalf of the PCs), then players are kind of like co-authors in the narrative.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

On a tangent, I don't consider the real world to be remotely logical by the standards of a D&D setting. I mean, have you looked at the biology of Australia? Or the causes of World War 1? Or the way that we have this amazing resource called the internet and it's used mostly for pictures of cats?

Well, what you are really saying of course is that the 'logic' of a fully-realized world is so deep and complex that it cannot possibly be overt to a large extent. This is basically a variation of the Buddhist philosophy of Dependent Causality which points out that the proximate causes of things are only a very superficial part of the story and that reality is much more complex and textured than we usually give it credit for.

This is of course true, but one of its corollaries is that the task of building a coherent game setting is UTTERLY HOPELESS. The best you can do, even in theory, is to build a very shallow sham kind of logically consistent world, or else all you can do is just build a PLAUSIBLE world, neither makes sense at any deep level. Given that neither of these types of world can be 'run' except by an engine that inherently operates on meta-game considerations there simply IS, in your hypothesis, no hope of the logically consistent simulationist world. I don't know that we can prove you correct in a formal way, but I think your observation points to the heart of my opinion of settings. They are and can never be in any but a very trivial sense realistic.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

That's just the premise, though. You can't really question the premise, or else you wouldn't be playing the game in the first place. If you're playing a Supers game, then you've already agreed that you're playing in a world where super-powers are a thing. If you're playing D&D, then you must be playing in a world that is conducive to that ruleset, or else why would you be playing this game?

It's a matter of narrative focus, which is a matter wholly external to the game.

Let's say that there are a dozen times, throughout the centuries, where the megadungeon is discovered and explored by someone; nobody else ever finds the place. The PCs could exist at any geographic and temporal coordinates within the setting, but they don't appear near the dungeon because they're PCs. They're PCs because we're paying attention to them, because they are in the right time and place for something interesting to happen.

Hmmmm, the D&D equivalent of the Anthropic Principle. I've heard this line of reasoning before. It is a perfectly fine way of looking at things, but I don't think it in any way disarms the criticism. The DM still built the setting purely for gamist reasons. It isn't logical or consistent or anything else, its an arranged stage upon which the PCs can adventure. Why is it only 'fair' for the DM to do the arranging beforehand? Beyond that, your logic demands that from the moment the setting is set in motion there's no reason at all why things should fall out in a way that continues to facilitate the adventure, yet I don't think any competent DM will take the players input and 'run' the world in a direction that will make it less-and-less fun just because "well, that set of choices, unbeknownst to you leads to inevitable disaster which you cannot avoid" and yet much of the real world works in exactly that sort of way. Not only that but a lot of interesting plots and stories exist in that space and even if a pure simulation 'worked' at some level it can only sample a small part of the space of all interesting games.

 

[Balesir]

But illusionism is non-trivially related to the second thing that you mention: if the shared fiction is not going to be changed by the players' metagame desires - eg if they not allowed to make decisions and generate outcomes because they would be fun, or exciting, or whatever - then there are likely to be two options. The first is that the game is rather boring, because the players play their PCs method-actor style, the GM runs the world sim-engine style, and not a lot happens. Some Runequest play can fall into this, and I suspect some Harn play too though my experience there is more limited - [MENTION=27160]Balesir[/MENTION] might know. In non-fantasy RPGing, some Classic Traveller play has this problem also.

Well, Hârn is strictly speaking a game world that can be played using various systems (we are currently using FATE Core for one campaign)... but, assuming you are thinking in terms of HârnMaster (the "tailor made" system) then, yes, it is most certainly a possibility.

I have found, over the last several years, that the way to control this is to realise the nature of the desired play and not try to make it do things it's unsuited to. It seems to me, at least, that the essence of what is often described as "Sim" or "immersionist" play is exploration. It stems from the simple desire to explore, whether that be a personality, a situation, an idea or an imaginary setting. It is actually quite fundamentally unsuited to long-term "campaign" play; this is a feature that tends to die hard - it is a much beloved conceit that we can live through several lifetimes of "day in the life" exploratory gaming, but sadly it inevitably collapses under its own weight.

The functional methodology I have found for exploratory play is to swallow the limitations - however painful that may be - and aim for short, specific series' of play focussed on exploring some specific thing that the players (including the GM) want to explore. This gets around the "illusionism" issue by explicit participationism or by an agreed arena for exploration. Essentially, you set up a situation, a setting or a combination of characters (characters with "dramatic needs" are often helpful, here, however humdrum those needs may initially appear - as long as they are determined about pursuing them) that everyone is interested to explore and then set about exploring. Rules that do not punish mistakes terminally are useful, and it's helpful also to dispense with any notion of "adventuring" as a necessary focus for the characters' activities.

By way of examples, some of the most successful Hârn sessions I have been involved in have been focussed play through (1) a manor village Hallmoot, beginning the night before a particularly memorable one, with the village jurors discussing matters over a mug or two of ale, (2) the meetings, doings and manoeuverings of the Royal Family and Tennants in chief of the Kingdom of Kaldor just after the old king has died without issue and (3) the life of a sundry group of travellers from around Venarive in the hours and days after they have been marooned on a somewhat remote island following a shipwreck.

Basically, a multi-book series tends to work poorly in this sort of play, in my experience, but a gritty, focussed movie or short story of character exploration or the exploration of an idea in the tradition of good early sci-fi can be very fun indeed.

I don't agree with this, because player power is all filtered through the GM. Can you use the skill that way? The GM decides. Is it appropriate at this level, in this campaign, at this time, etc? The GM decides. Is it Easy/Moderate/Hard? The GM decides. None of that strikes me as player empowering. It strikes me as the opposite, in fact.

I do see how this is transparent (like objective DCs), but I don't see it as empowering players. With objective DCs, skill list uses, powers, action points, etc., all the tools are in the hands of the players. That empowers them to act. That's why people in this thread have said they love powers and the power system.

Apart from guidelines ("say yes or roll the dice") in the DMGs, the thing I think that really makes a difference with 4E skill challenges is that they are worth XPs. Taking this seriously really gives GMs pause before either (a) using serialised skill rolls or (b) expanding them ad nauseam. Basic questions are "is this really a challenge that the PCs need to overcome?" - if not then don't enforce a challenge, just say yes (the 13th age idea of a montage can work well, here) - and, if so, "what level and extent of challenge should it be?". The very fact that the non-combat challenge is a full member of the "challenges to beat" team means it has to be proportionate and deliberate, rather than ad hoc and arbitrary in difficulty.

As it happens, I would have loved to see some expanded non-combat systems for situations that come up as "challenges" commonly in adventure stories. I honestly don't think there are an unconquerable number of them; they commonly revolve around sneaking, tricking, persuading, building, mending or navigating - not that huge a number of situational classes to cover (and for the remainder you still have skill challenges). But, alas, it was not to be (and now most likely will not be for a loooong time...)

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

As it happens, I would have loved to see some expanded non-combat systems for situations that come up as "challenges" commonly in adventure stories. I honestly don't think there are an unconquerable number of them; they commonly revolve around sneaking, tricking, persuading, building, mending or navigating - not that huge a number of situational classes to cover (and for the remainder you still have skill challenges). But, alas, it was not to be (and now most likely will not be for a loooong time...)

I think the best way is to establish a series of archetypes for skill challenges. The Chase, The Race, The Puzzle, The Journey, The Negotiation, and perhaps a series of 'complications' (The Roadblock, Active Opposition, Secondary Goal, External Forces, etc). These could be combined in various ways. This allows production of a fairly extensive set of variations on an SC that will roughly fit many situations. The exact skills required and how the different elements precisely interact can vary greatly of course, but you could pretty much pull these off a table and use them.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I think [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION] is more strongly emphasising the social dimensions of illusionism - ie it is a type of cheating - whereas I was more strongly emphasising the techniques that are involved, and how they are related to the goals of play.

Sheesh. Did I not say I used the technique, myself? It's a legitimate way of dealing with a balky system. Yes, it 'breaks the social contract,' in theory but running a game that sucks does that too, and no one has any fun that way. With skillful illusionism, you can at least deliver a good play experience fairly consistently, in spite of the system.

That's just the premise, though. You can't really question the premise, or else you wouldn't be playing the game in the first place. If you're playing a Supers game, then you've already agreed that you're playing in a world where super-powers are a thing. If you're playing D&D, then you must be playing in a world that is conducive to that ruleset, or else why would you be playing this game?

I would venture to say that no one plays D&D because they actually wanted a hodge-podge of LotR and Dying Earth filled with ludicrous system artifacts, before they ever took the game off the shelf.

You play D&D because you thought you were going to get an experience something like that of taking in a fantasy story, but more participatory, or because a friend says 'you gotta try this game,' or because you can't find anyone willing to run/play some other game that you've been wanting to try, but you can always pop into an FLGS and play Encounters.