D&D 4E The Best Thing from 4E

[Manbearcat]

I feel like a winky face is wholly inappropriate here.

I'll parry with nerdface!

Well, yes, but it's the GM that's empowering the player, in my opinion, not the system. The GM is the one setting DCs, setting self-imposed rules about how the DCs will be set, and then passing that information onto the player. None of which is required by the system. You doing this definitely empowers the player, yes. And the system (with its transparent math) helped you take action to empower the player. But the system itself is not empowering the player, in my opinion. The GM is.

Or am I missing something?

Do you feel the mechanics enforce this view, or is this something that you do, as an individual GM, to empower the players? I think that might be the heart of what I'm getting at.

Again, this seems mostly decided by you, as GM. If this was in the PH, with the player having these rules set so that they could leverage them, I would find that player-empowering.

I really appreciate the replies. It seems like this is all the power flowing from GM to player rather than from book to player, but I'm not 100%.

As far as illusionism, these guidelines being front and center certainly do look like they would hamper illusionist play as you've described it, I agree. So I get where you're coming from in terms of the style of game you run hampering it, and how the rules back you up, at least. So thanks for talking me through that. Looking forward to a write-up if you get around to it

I bit above I responded to S'mon about en(dis)able versus en(dis)courage. I think that is pretty much where the evaluation for rulesets should be. I think 4e did a whole lot of things that frustrates the hell out of hardcore simulationists and/or illusionism GMs. I think you can look to those things as component parts that discourage process simulation and, while not totally disabling, severely undermining an illusionism GM's latitude. Taken as a whole, I understand why hardcore process sim folks and illusionist GMs went so balls-out in the edition wars.

For instance, James Wyatt has designer notes right up front talking about a GM's role in the game. He talks about how he lets his players handle the rules-related affairs (eg confirming DCs, gaining stealth requirements, etc) of the game and he frames the fiction, pushes the conflict-buttons, and plays the monsters/adversary. Off-loading rules related stuff on players (from rules handling, to quest creation, to keeping track of rewards/milestones - etc, magic item handling, etc), reducing total GM overhead, is a big part of 4e as a whole and it is pretty roundly cited for it (both by the designers in the books, by its proponents, and certainly by its detractors!). That approach by itself is very, very adversarial to illusionism.

Further, the invocation of transparency (Mearls even has an article in DMG2 regarding skill challenges...which is pretty wishy washy but certainly highlights the merits of letting players see under the hood with free access to the metagame) and the approach in the books (Quests...the Rewards Frequency table...Rest and Recovery...Magic Items all being in the PHB) is pretty significantly adversarial to illusionism. (I'm just going to call it ) Laws' DMG2 really invokes letting players see under the hood, passing authority over to them (letting them frame some of their own conflicts and then playing the adversarial components...akin to the Dog's initial trials in DitV), and offloading overhead to them. The run-up and early-on designer notes articles really invoked GM transparency as a virtue and several Dungeon articles did the same.

I guess I'll just say that GMs can certainly try to make the veil between the machinery of the game and the players as opaque as possible in 4e...but I think the system will fight them very hard...to the point that they will probably give up (and many did!). And I guess I'll also just say that transparency and off-loading overhead onto the players is definitely a thing that doesn't have to happen, but 4e encourages/enables it by making it easy and the designers certainly at least tacitly invokes it as a virtue. I think you see the full-fledged incarnation of it (outright championing transparency and admonishing opacity) in 13th Age by Heinsoo (4e is his baby) and Tweet. I think that is also telling.

Alright, going to be a busy day but I'm going to attempt to break down an exploration encounter in 4e and a social encounter in DW and illustrate why the games would render illusionism untenable. I will likely have to do one at a time.

 

[S'mon]

I don't disagree with any of your substantive comments - the timelines in Middle Earth are ridiculous when compared to timelines for comparable cultures in real life - but don't you think there is something a little odd about the quoted sentence? (A bit like [MENTION=87576]Scrivener of Doom[/MENTION] saying Gygax was a terrible game designer. It comes out oddly.)

Guilty as charged.
Yeah, it's just the timeline that is really really weak. The stuff in the book is very evocative. He does do nice versimiltude stuff like have the hobbits in Mordor spot a distant slave farm growing crops for Sauron's Orc minions.

 

[S'mon]

I'll parry with nerdface!
I bit above I responded to S'mon about en(dis)able versus en(dis)courage. I think that is pretty much where the evaluation for rulesets should be. I think 4e did a whole lot of things that frustrates the hell out of hardcore simulationists and/or illusionism GMs. I think you can look to those things as component parts that discourage process simulation and, while not totally disabling, severely undermining an illusionism GM's latitude. Taken as a whole, I understand why hardcore process sim folks and illusionist GMs went so balls-out in the edition wars.

For instance, James Wyatt has designer notes right up front talking about a GM's role in the game. He talks about how he lets his players handle the rules-related affairs (eg confirming DCs, gaining stealth requirements, etc) of the game and he frames the fiction, pushes the conflict-buttons, and plays the monsters/adversary. Off-loading rules related stuff on players (from rules handling, to quest creation, to keeping track of rewards/milestones - etc, magic item handling, etc), reducing total GM overhead, is a big part of 4e as a whole and it is pretty roundly cited for it (both by the designers in the books, by its proponents, and certainly by its detractors!). That approach by itself is very, very adversarial to illusionism.

Further, the invocation of transparency (Mearls even has an article in DMG2 regarding skill challenges...which is pretty wishy washy but certainly highlights the merits of letting players see under the hood with free access to the metagame) and the approach in the books (Quests...the Rewards Frequency table...Rest and Recovery...Magic Items all being in the PHB) is pretty significantly adversarial to illusionism. (I'm just going to call it ) Laws' DMG2 really invokes letting players see under the hood, passing authority over to them (letting them frame some of their own conflicts and then playing the adversarial components...akin to the Dog's initial trials in DitV), and offloading overhead to them. The run-up and early-on designer notes articles really invoked GM transparency as a virtue and several Dungeon articles did the same.

I guess I'll just say that GMs can certainly try to make the veil between the machinery of the game and the players as opaque as possible in 4e...but I think the system will fight them very hard...to the point that they will probably give up (and many did!). And I guess I'll also just say that transparency and off-loading overhead onto the players is definitely a thing that doesn't have to happen, but 4e encourages/enables it by making it easy and the designers certainly at least tacitly invokes it as a virtue. I think you see the full-fledged incarnation of it (outright championing transparency and admonishing opacity) in 13th Age by Heinsoo (4e is his baby) and Tweet. I think that is also telling.

Alright, going to be a busy day but I'm going to attempt to break down an exploration encounter in 4e and a social encounter in DW and illustrate why the games would render illusionism untenable. I will likely have to do one at a time.

Cool post, I should go read my DMG2 again.
Because I always prioritise player immersion, I haven't been getting my players to add stuff to the fiction in-game per DMG2 (out of game is fine); I don't think my 4e group would be big in to that - funniy enough I think my Pathfinder players would like the idea a lot more, two or three of them seem more the indy hippy Nar types.

 

[Manbearcat]

Cool post, I should go read my DMG2 again.
Because I always prioritise player immersion, I haven't been getting my players to add stuff to the fiction in-game per DMG2 (out of game is fine); I don't think my 4e group would be big in to that - funniy enough I think my Pathfinder players would like the idea a lot more, two or three of them seem more the indy hippy Nar types.

I think [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] did a great job of carving out the nature of immersion in 4e. It is very much of the indie variety vs classic D&D. 4e prioritizes goes straight for pushing the buttons of emotional investment rather than sensory experience and then using that as a proxy/prism for emotional investment. GMed correctly and played vigorously, it pushes the players toward getting wrapped up in the dramatic momentum and fallout of conflicts that they (the players) have overtly signaled they wish for their PCs to engage in.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I just don't like assuming table dynamics when talking about game design. Like, I'm honestly glad that it works for your group so well (and the majority of posters in this thread, I'd imagine), but I've had players where that wasn't the case, even in 4e (the Warpriest's last 4e campaign before mine, the Monk's last 4e campaign before mine, my friend who played as a Cleric in one campaign before I ever even ran 4e).

Yeah, we are just VERY different, and I think your variety of game preference is pretty idiosyncratic. I've gamed with people who similarly had very unusual tastes and game culture. Usually, like you, they end creating a whole system that only works for them. Its cool, and maybe there are aspects of it that are more generally interesting. However, I think the success of a group like yours depends heavily on the fortune of finding a core group of players that your style suits very well. I don't think it happens too often. One could argue that the original D&D system and Gygax is an example of the same thing, except applied to wargaming. The whole RPG concept was of course potent enough to break out into a bigger mainstream thing and escape the constraints of its originator. Sadly for us latter day GMs we play in a smaller arena!

In any case I think the very empowerment of 4e is the total transparency coupled with a simple generalized system that lacks over-specificity. That allows the players to look at the fiction and, without many constraints, imagine how their character's mechanics can be applied through some narrative to that fictional situation. If there were a vast number of detailed procedures and checks specified for every conceivable thing, then each character would be very tightly bound in terms of which things he or she could do or not do, and it would tend to be quite difficult to color outside the lines.

If that last sentence of yours was a rule, then that would be player-empowering. Some sort of system where they get to choose the DC (Easy, Moderate, or Hard), but there's consequences on each. Maybe Easy is "partial success" where the GM has the right to hold something back, tack on a catch, or throw in a complication. Moderate could be a standard success (you got what you wanted), while Hard would be great success (something extra, etc.). That'd definitely be more empowering to the players, in my opinion.

Well, there are plenty of game engines which work this way. I agree, you could reconstruct 4e, or something like 4e, as a story-telling kind of system with each player given some sort of plot power resource that was used to invoke powers, take extra actions, raise the stakes on checks by modifying the fiction, etc. This is all quite doable. Honestly I suspect Pemerton is going to say "Yeah, BW does a lot of that", and it probably does (I've only played one game that used a BW-derived rule set and only very briefly, so I'm a bit unschooled on the details of it).

However, what I've found is that the common player in most games has a hard time absorbing the full story telling kind of player-driven plot thing. I ran and played some DW, another game where players don't exactly control the fiction but they use it to actively drive things forward, and its hard as heck for 50% of the people I got at those tables to absorb that. In my own 4e-hack there are 'Vitality Points' (maybe they should get a new name) that serve as both HS, AP, and general plot coupons (they can recharge certain powers for instance, if I keep elaborating the system I'll probably make a longer list of things players can specifically do with them). However, its still at its core a pretty standard D&D-like classic RPG. The more stodgy players I have can play it a lot like 4e with a few rough edges ground down, and the more adventurous can color outside the lines if they wish.

Anyway, the upshot is that we have a bit different ideas about player empowerment. IMHO your approach wouldn't work for most tables. I think in particular that more casual or less rules engaged players wouldn't find it approachable enough to work for them, but its hard to say. Maybe someone will publish a game along the lines you seem to be suggesting and we'll find out.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This describes my 4e game too. I've used underground locations - drow, duergar, a small maze with gelatinous cubes - but not the classic style that @S'mon described.

There was one location that was like an extended dungeon, but it still had a pretty tight theme (minotaur burial catacombs).

Oh, the jelly cube maze was my best! The walls were invisible and electrically charged, so when you bumped into them you took a couple points of damage. Then of course the 'cubes are invisible too, so it was pretty horrifying for the PCs! They ended up bumping into 3 'cubes during one combat at one point, and all but one PC was floating around in one or another! They spent the entire rest of that campaign terrified of jelly cubes. I finally had to create a massive demonic jelly cube for the end of the big story arc just to get us off the concept, lol.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

That's kind of sad, really. I think most settings mostly make sense, if you give them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe I'm just overly optimistic on that point.

I'm just realistic about what is humanly possible. Economists in the real world have very close to no clue how economies actually work. Ecologists have only the vaguest knowledge of how ecologies actually work. Beyond that, even if they have good models for those things, the devil is in the details. The reason there's forest over here and not over there might for instance be due to some small difference in soil chemistry, which is in turn due to some geophysical considerations, etc. Likewise with cultures, languages, etc. What makes this even more true is that we're talking about fantasy worlds that work on unknown and largely undefined principles. Nobody can make a logically consistent world, we're human beings, not gods.

So, what is it we REALLY do, we make a bunch of setting material that describes a world much like the one we're familiar with, except it has magic spells, dragons, elves, etc added to it. Maybe we salt it with some weird cultural details usually pilfered from popular descriptions of remote or ancient cultures, and we sprinkle in some made-up history, social structures, etc, all designed to serve the purpose of making an interesting adventure location. None of it is really consistent, if you could assemble it into an actual world using some advanced technology or a huge computer could run it all then undoubtedly it would implode in some completely weird way on day 2. Half the inhabitants would starve because nobody designed a working agricultural infrastructure, or dragons would eat all the peasants, or whatever, and then etc etc etc.

These worlds are exactly as real as the dressing people put on a set to do a play. They are suggestive, and where the action demands it they play a role in the story, but they don't have a life of their own. Nobody has to actually walk the streets of Fallcrest or feed its people, etc. except when the DM decides that would make an interesting addition to the story.

It might make for a tactical game that's more interesting, but it's one of the big sticking points on trying to write a logical world setting (the problem of trying to imprison an Eladrin, with the solution that it's just impossible so you'd better kill them all instead of even trying). I guess that's probably why you chose that example, though.

I think the problem is you're not really trying to grasp the true extent of complexity and interaction between the parts of a real world. Your issue with eladrin fey step -not what I was referring to when I mentioned teleport, but anyway- is a tiny nit. How do the eladrin FEED THEMSELVES, why doesn't everyone just grow components and use them to create food with a ritual? Why does it matter if eladrin cannot be put in jail, what are the consequences? Nobody can answer these things with any certainty.

Maybe it's because I'm optimistic, and like to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, that I find it hard to accept when they explicitly work against those ideals. Like you said, they fundamentally don't care if it makes sense for building a consistent or sustainable world, aside from its direct impact on the PCs. That's just not cool by me. I'm fine with the occasional plot hole, because everyone makes mistakes, but I'm not fine with the designers not caring if they introduce plot holes; that just seems really disrespectful of them.

No, I think setting designers KNOW they cannot even hope to achieve 1 billionth of the work it would require to make a consistent sustainable world design if they spent 1000 lifetimes at it! And if they did, who would really find it interesting? People don't care about that stuff and couldn't absorb it or comprehend it if they did care. What they want and need is a set, a place that lets them simply depict the actions of a group of heroes (or whatever) that includes interesting descriptions of the things that the protagonists interact with. Something that is evocative and deep enough to allow you to imagine it in your mind, but small and tractable and easy enough to arrange and rearrange as the participants needs change.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't understand what the problem is - keep them in a dark room, put bags on their heads, hold them in rooms with no openings - it's not as if any of this is very challenging, and much of it is a fairly typical feature of human techniques of imprisonment.

I'm not sure what you mean by "plot hole", especially given that you are not an advocate of plot.

When @AbdulAlhazred says that most fantasy worlds are not logical or consistent, I don't think that he is talking about overt contradictions in the surface descriptions. Avoiding those is fairly easy, and 4e has only one that I can think of (confusion over Asmodeus's backstory).

He is talking about whether or not the surface description describes a world that is actually feasible, from the point of view of history, sociology, economics, technological development, etc.

The classic example of this in traditional D&D is dungeon and wilderness ecology - what do all those dragons eat?

The standard 3E example is demographics and economy.

In Tolkien, the economy of the Shire is a mystery to me. They live surrounded by wolf and goblin-infested wilderness, and seem to have no mines of their own, so where do they get all their metal from? Likewise the elves of Lorien, or the dwarves of Erebor - what do they eat?

I'm not sure what fantasy worlds you have in mind as "mostly making sense", but none of the D&D ones I'm familiar with (the B/X "Known World", FR, Greyhawk, Kara Tur) fit this description. Greyhawk and Kara Tur come closest, because they are basically bits and pieces of real-world history and geography with the number plates changed, but even then the role of routinized magic is not adequately accounted for, and there is still the puzzling biology and ecology of monsters.

I think AbdulAlhazred's point, which I agree with, is that treating fantasy worlds as coherent models of possible human realities is hopeless from the start. Better to do what authors like Tolkien, Ursula LeGuin, REH, etc do and recognise that they are backdrops for fictional events - that the proper frameworks for thinking about them, from the point of view of design, are literary and authorial rather than scientific and causal.

Once again, Pemerton hits the nail squarely on the head.

Just to SLIGHTLY expound, no amount of literary and authorial detail and care to attention will make a world that 'works'. It can make a world that we can explore and imagine might work, but we simply cannot know what would really happen if we could 'set it in motion' because its scientific and causal underpinnings simply don't exist. We would have to define them, or at least define some vast and complex model of them at some level of abstraction. No game world even does that AFAIK. I don't think one could!

The best a GM desiring to set his world in motion can do is to take authorial control of it and posit certain events, to just declare that in his view logic dictates that thus-and-such happens next, and given his human limitations and needs he can only do that for a tiny part of the world which does or may impact the PCs. The rest must simply be assumed to remain largely static or simply be revised from time-to-time to present some illusion of the passage of time.

The key point here is that said GM must, perforce, have GREAT LEEWAY in terms of what he could reasonable posit as both consequences of the actions of the PCs and natural evolution of this imagined world. Given that, it stands to reason that said GM will shape his description of such events and happenings in a way that creates an interesting story or otherwise advances his agenda. This is simply the natural process of people living their lives, they advance their agendas.

There's no question of 'impartiality' here, no such impartiality exists NOR CAN IT EVEN EXIST WITHIN THIS DOMAIN. The GM could have an agenda of 'even handedness' where sometimes the imagined course of events works in favor of the player's agenda, and sometimes it works counter to it, at least at a superficial level. Some GMs, usually accounted 'bad' ones, are less concerned with the other participants and in various ways get wrapped up in their own agenda. This usually leads to all the various sorts of toxic game situations.

Really great GMs can make a world seem to come alive, but they're NOT the ones IME that try to actually pretend it is an 'objective simulation', they're the ones that have a good grasp of dramatic needs and agendas and the creativity to translate those into game play (or to facilitate that process in whatever way, there are many paths to good games).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Sounds good to me! If the DM decides to create a world with giants rather than orcs, and there's an in-game reason for there to be giants rather than orcs, then that's not meta-game.

A meta-game decision would be if the DM hadn't decided whether there were giants or orcs in a particular region, but made the decision based on what level the party was when they got there.

OK, so what if the DM simply calculated ahead of time as he was writing up his setting what level the PCs would be at when they got to location X and put monsters of that level in that location? Is that not meta-game? What I am proposing is that this is EXACTLY WHAT ALL SETTING DESIGNERS DO. They may not follow that exact linear process. They may instead do various things. They might say "I'd like to have some giants in the game, lets see where a good place to put them would be" and then they put them far from the town in the mountains where the PCs won't go until they reach level 8, and to make it even more explicit he plants a rumor that giants are in the mountains at the tavern (maybe ahead of time, maybe he thinks of it when the PCs go in for a drink and ask around). The point is that in all these cases there's some sort of consideration that goes outside the bounds of the game world itself and speaks to the dramatic needs of the game as a game. This is an inevitable and unavoidable part of the process and it shapes all such activity. In fact I would posit that it is the overwhelmingly dominant factor in such activity.

That seems more like an RP thing, and you don't need random tables in order to RP. One of the jobs of the DM is to play NPCs, tracking their activities and motivations (individually, for important ones, and collectively for the masses).

A friendly NPC turns up if an appropriate one exists and has a reason to do so. Is there a particular member of the nobility who is in need of your services? Are you a hero of the people, such that they might band together to help you in your time of need (by hiring a mercenary, I suppose, in this case)? These are things that the DM should already know. It shouldn't even require much consideration, because most of the time it should be obvious (to the DM).

But examine this whole example closely. The 'town' might include several thousand inhabitants. The DM/setting designer will have probably detailed the personality and motivations of 2 dozen or less of them, to some varying degree. The rest aren't more substantial than the overall population figure for the town. Maybe at best the DM has an idea of the realities of agriculture in the real world and knows that about 90% of these people must of necessity be agricultural workers. Does he have enough detail about their interrelationships to have any idea whether or not one of them is likely to come to the PCs for help with some problem or have some motivation to get them out of jail? Of course not. Instead he addresses the DRAMATIC NEED of the moment and decides that yes indeed he can invent some reason for someone to do whatever the plot requires. He invents some uncles and cousins of whomever, makes up a story about how that time the PC rescued a villager from goblins it was their cousin, etc etc etc. and cooks up a plot. That's how it works. There's nothing objective about it, the world isn't running itself, its just a toolbox for meeting dramatic needs.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't disagree with any of your substantive comments - the timelines in Middle Earth are ridiculous when compared to timelines for comparable cultures in real life - but don't you think there is something a little odd about the quoted sentence? (A bit like @Scrivener of Doom saying Gygax was a terrible game designer. It comes out oddly.)

What fantasy world has inspired more atlases, bestiaries, and emulators than Middle Earth? What fantasy world has been more spectacularly and convincingly visually realised (in pictures, and then in moving pictures by Peter Jackson)? It's unparalleled, and the fact that its economics don't make sense doesn't change that.

(On Minas Tirith's food - notionally there are farms in Lebennin and the rest of that coastal region south of the White Mountains.)

Well, just as an interesting aside, this is why I thought that ME actually makes a pretty terrible place to set an RPG. Its a world that is not really fleshed out, it exists only in very exaggerated broad brush strokes. When you actually start to zoom in on it in any detail you have two choices. You can either break it, that is it simply makes no sense as it is described and you literally cannot play in it because there's nothing there to interact with. Alternatively you can fill in all the blanks and bend things a bit here and there to fit (IE the halflings in LotR are ignorant of even the existence of Bree, and dwarves are practically a myth to them, so plainly they aren't engaged in any trade with either one if you take everything in the books literally, instead you have to imagine that somewhere there actually are hobbits who travel or at least meet foreigners).

The problem with the later course of action is it tends to destroy the tone of the setting. Middle Earth is about big picture, world shaking events, terrible foes, indomitable (though humble) heroes, the great sweep of history, etc. When you ask where the toilet is located it just spoils the effect. I never could stomach games like MERP for that reason. If I'm going to play in a necessarily mundanified ME then I'll just play in WoG instead, it is infinitely better suited.

You could make a plausible game where you assumed the roles of the great heroes of ME history, or perhaps their top cohorts, and maybe walk the line, just focus on big picture events and gloss everything else, much like the novels do at times. Its not the same as a generalized RPG though. Much more like that TSR Indiana Jones game where you just played one of the characters from the movie and there weren't any other choices.