D&D 4E The Best Thing from 4E

[The Crimson Binome]

No choice is still a choice. Every game has an agenda, even if its "don't ever mechanically favor anyone." The agenda may be a negative one, to NOT do something, but that implies the exclusion of say incorporating dramatic considerations in play. There's nothing inherently superior or more flexible about that approach.

I feel like this is a debate over whether or not zero is a number. We may just have to agree to disagree.

For now, I'll assume that most game designers are competent, and at least considered the question of whether PCs should have different rules, such that their omission would require a deliberate choice.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Except that Shadowrun definitely makes PCs different than NPCs by the use of different dice pools (Karma Pool, and in early editions the Combat Pool, and other different pools) that only PCs get preferential access to (higher number of dice).

Most of my experience is with 2E and 3E, but I'm fairly certain that NPCs had a Karma Pool (usually 1), and I'm even more certain that everyone had access to the Combat Pool.

When you talk about equipment you also talk about PCs being able to select top notch equipment from the start of the build process. Wired reflexes 3, some of the high-end armor, and some of the weapons (miniguns, sniper rifles, etc.) or high-end cyberdecks (Fuchis, Fairlights, etc.) are definitely not something that every NPC is going to have.

Those are all in-story differences, though. If you compare a PC street samurai with an Ares Alpha and Wired Reflexes 3 to an NPC street samurai with the same, they're virtually identical. Shadowrun doesn't have a method for distinguishing between PCs and NPCs (at least, not in the editions I played; I think it might have changed in more recent editions).

 

[Bluenose]

It's an FRPG, it's trying to model fantasy. Fantasy is a broad genre.

It's not impossible to argue that D&D only attempts to "model" a small portion of it, though. I'd argue that's not the case, and that it's not trying to model anything, but an FRPG can be quite specific in what it tries to do as well as very broad.

Its an illusion, there is no such system. That is what you eventually realize. Even if you could make that system, it wouldn't be the 'best' RPG possible. It might at most be the best for some certain agenda. Its a moot point however since such verisimilitude can only be achieved with greater and greater complexity, which undermines playability and overwhelms players.

It's only hard to have verisimilitude and process sim if you put a large emphasis on breadth as well. A narrowly focused game can handle a detailed Process without becoming too complex. I see that rather more in wargames than RPGs, which suggests something about how 'mature' (age wise) the miniature wargames community is compared to the RPG community.

I did like the idea of the Dawn War, very mythic.

I'm not so sure I liked taking the whole 'Points of Light' paradigm to the Astral Sea and having even the heavens screwed up as a result.

As Above, So Below. If there's upheaval on earth or in the heavens/hells then the others will reflect that. It's a concept I recognised instantly, having grown up with Glorantha, and it's also quite reflective of some oriental cosmology (and ancient Egyptian too).

The 4e cosmology is great. You FINALLY get a genuine 'land of the dead' and 'land of faerie' which D&D weirdly and annoyingly lacked for THIRTY YEARS!

Faerie was a fairly accepted location in Mystara during the BECM D&D era.

 

[Tony Vargas]

For now, I'll assume that most game designers are competent, and at least considered the question of whether PCs should have different rules, such that their omission would require a deliberate choice.

Deliberate choice would imply an agenda.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Deliberate choice would imply an agenda.

Right, that's what I'm saying. In modern games, which are designed by people who have played and read a variety of other games, the choice to not include literary weight would be a real choice in order to promote a certain agenda.

Back in the day, designers may have not even thought about it, and ended up drama-neutral as a default. There was no choice or agenda, because it never occurred to them that they should think about it.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I feel like this is a debate over whether or not zero is a number. We may just have to agree to disagree.

For now, I'll assume that most game designers are competent, and at least considered the question of whether PCs should have different rules, such that their omission would require a deliberate choice.

well, again, consider D&D, which is based on Chainmail, where nobody has much in the way of what we'd call 'stats'. In OD&D monsters are pretty much the same as in Chainmail, they just get hit dice and a numeric AC basically. PCs OTOH get ability scores, etc. Its no more symmetric than 4e, probably less so. Clearly Mr Gygax made a decision NOT to give monsters full stats. They are bit players in the world, not the equals of PCs. Heck, at least in 4e they have 'default' stats in the stat block.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Faerie was a fairly accepted location in Mystara during the BECM D&D era.

Yeah, and in the various MotPs there were Arvandor, the Happy Hunting Grounds, etc which were sorta kinda maybe fairy land. There just wasn't ever any official cosmological land of fairy, even though it was pretty much the model for 'other plane of existence'. I never really understood that. It was a lack that I felt acutely. The Land of the Dead was equally sort of not really spelled out, in GW cosmology maybe you just went 'wherever' to some outer plane or other, maybe. It wasn't quite as acute a thing though.

The amusing part, for me, was that I basically designed myself the 4e cosmology for my own homebrew setting, back in the 70's. It wasn't identical in all details, but it had the essential features. The gods rebelled against the Old Ones, which were beings of protean elemental force, the domains of the gods were 'planets' floating in the 'Star Sea', which was separate from the 'Primal Chaos', etc. Different in detail, but built out of the same considerations. So I was really happy to incorporate a lot of the 4e cosmological lore, it fit quite handily into the existing framework. Mostly it is just funny how the same solution often occurs to many people.

 

[JamesonCourage]

I dunno.

I do.

I think as a general system for anyone to use things are just as much in the hands of the GM in the longrun as in a 4e game.

It's not.

All the various factors you list are mostly things that GMs aren't going to be sure about ahead of time. Taking your foraging example; is the area 'lush'? What is meant by 'area'?

... the area being physically traveled through, where the PCs are attempting to gather food?

Is the character's expertise in swamps really applicable to a swamp in the Shadowfell, and to what degree?

If it's a swamp, then yes, it is. And completely. It applies to swamps, so unless this Shadowfell swamp is an entirely different terrain type (ie, not a swamp), it applies completely. At least, it does RAW.

There's thus this '20 questions' process that MUST happen in the vast majority of cases which is entirely open to GM judgement and fundamentally is the heart of the process.

Based on personal experience with both systems, I have no problem saying that your assertion does not match reality, as I've experienced it.

PERSONALLY, designing a system I would just talk about and emphasize the value of transparency as part of the GM instructions for pretty much everything, along with using a 4e-like design where transparent mechanics are the norm.

Cool. I want more than that.

I'm sure you get the results you are looking for, and I'm sure that if you carefully prime someone to run the system exactly the way you do, they can get similar results.

See, you keep downplaying the system, and that's bothersome. You don't know it. You have just the tiny bits I've told you. But I keep getting sweeping generalizations from you. GMs eventually grow out of a certain mindset; if you carefully prime someone just exactly right, it'll make it playable.

These aren't statements I find reasonable. They're way too broad, and in regards to systems you've barely heard about (like my RPG), you don't know enough. I definitely accept hearing things like "it wouldn't work for me" or "I don't think that goal's possible" or whatever (which I believe you've said as well in this conversation). But what you just wrote above? I can't say anything constructive about that. It's just an ignorant statement.

I'm just not convinced such a system could work for the general public that way, it would probably fare about as well as say 4e, where if you are a reasonably good DM and inclined to use the system as it was designed (but not always well explained) then you get good results, but you can easily get terrible results too, if you're a controlling freak of a DM.

It would do way worse than 4e. I've already said that it's a niche with our niche hobby. But, on top of that, 4e had the D&D name. I think if my system did, and it made a few concessions (building classes off the point-buy system rather than being point-buy, say), then it would fare nearly as well as 4e (though it'd still do worse).

IMHO I would rather spend my game designer/DM resources on other things than trying to nail down such a vast array of modifiers and conditions, especially when my assumption is that I'll be just setting most of them to fairly arbitrary 'common sense' values that may or may not work in practice unless I playtest the whole thing for years.

Most of the modifiers the players can handle, though. I don't have to spend my GM time on them. I've had players in my current campaign resuscitate a just-dead king, perform autopsies, create minor magical items, identify the owner of magical traces, make a speech to a crowd to calm them down while someone attempted to rile them up, research a magical ritual to root out a monster, etc. None of those required me setting the DCs. These are all things that they can take into their hands and either know completely because it's spelled out, have a really good guess at (some DCs are based on level of the opponent), or figure out completely with no wiggle room (with the Assess skill).

I lose more time to prep in 4e than I ever lost to thinking up modifiers and conditions. I don't even prep for my other game; I just write up stuff between sessions that fleshes out the world.

 

[D'karr]

Most of my experience is with 2E and 3E, but I'm fairly certain that NPCs had a Karma Pool (usually 1), and I'm even more certain that everyone had access to the Combat Pool.

I've been playing since 1e and each version has differences. 2e was a significant improvement and clarification on 1e and it was still a hot mess. 3e made significant changes to the Matrix, and 4e cleaned up the game significantly but went even further where everything was wireless creating all kinds of weird interactions, 5e toned some of it down and is actually a rather cleaned up game. I don't have any books in front of me but IIRC karma pool is used for advancement. NPCs have none. The NPC has access to a much limited combat pool depending on the edition, whereas the PC has an ever growing pool. A character might have millions of nuyen collected in a weird assortment of equipment, lifestyle, cyber, etc. The NPC is a super simplified assortment with only the basic details. Definitely not built like a PC.

Those are all in-story differences, though. If you compare a PC street samurai with an Ares Alpha and Wired Reflexes 3 to an NPC street samurai with the same, they're virtually identical. Shadowrun doesn't have a method for distinguishing between PCs and NPCs (at least, not in the editions I played; I think it might have changed in more recent editions).

Equipment might be an in-story difference but it's the mechanical function of that equipment that is actually relevant. A DM does not take option A for resources to build an NPC, then assign option B for racial, etc. He does no spend karma points to increase an attribute, or a skill. He simply assigns the NPC an abitrary (feels/looks okay) level of equipment and stats needed to survive a base skirmish. Or even easier picks one right out of the contacts lists and uses that.

We'll just have to agree to disagree on your characterization or NPC/PC build for SR.

 

[pemerton]

In 0D&D - as in every ed but 3.x (though even 3.5 had inferior 'NPC classes') - PCs and monsters were statted out quite differently. And, in the classic game (though maybe not so much in 2e, IIRC), 'monster' could include any foe the players met, including other people. 'Men' was a listing in the MM. Even when an NPC was nominally of a class, it would get a condensed set of stats that might (or might not) jibe with an actual full PC write-up of the same class.

But we know from examining the source material that OD&D HAD a stance. Its possible it was a largely happenstance, but it was a stance of some sort! The level names of PCs makes that clear, the fact that PCs were drawn from the exceptional singular figure rules of Chainmail, and the mere fact that they could advance whereas it was explicit that most NPCs didn't ever advance. While its possible to say that NPCs and PCs use the same rules (henchmen are built using PC rules for instance, as presumably are many hostile NPCs though it isn't really stated) PCs are consciously designed to promote the game's agenda, not 'just like NPCs'.

I don't know OD&D as well as I know AD&D, and my grasp of Chainmail is weaker again.

In 1st ed AD&D, as I noted in my post, all this is definitely the case. Looking at OD&D, 1st level fighters had 1D+1 for hit dice, whereas the "men" in Monsters & Treasure have 1D - so the PC is stronger. On the attack side, a 1st level fighter is "Man +1" which is better than a typical NPC. In the aternative combat system, though, there is no 0-level column like there is in AD&D (and in B/X, labelled "Normal Man" rather than 0-level).

I agree that PCs were built in a way to promote the game's agenda. I still feel that the issue of "dramatic weight", as part of agenda, hadn't been given the same attention in this early D&D design as a contemporary designer would give it.

I'd say it was games like RuneQuest that consciously decided to use the same stats to describe both PCs and monsters/NPCs

Yes. I'm not saying that OD&D used the same stats for PCs and NPCs/monsters. I'm saying that I don't think the element of "dramatic/literary" weight had been given the attention that a modern designer would give it.

Even in the case of RQ, I don't think the design was same stats in order to deliberately push an agenda of "no dramatic weight for PCs" - to the extent that that was a consequence, it was more of an unintended consequence, I would say. I think the motivation for the design was a view about "elegance" or "simplicity" of design.

I'd note, also, that 4e uses the same mechanical format for PCs and monsters/NPCs. It's just that the methods of generating those stats, and the details of them, give PCs a heft that monsters/NPCs lack. So I think the issue of "same stats" and the issue of dramatic weight, while not unconnected, aren't identical either.

Back in the day, designers may have not even thought about it, and ended up drama-neutral as a default. There was no choice or agenda, because it never occurred to them that they should think about it.

I think this is probably true of the very earliest D&D (by the time of AD&D, I think that design awareness was growing). But it is also somewhat orthogonal to your claim upthread.

Even if a designer builds a "drama-neutral" game by default, that doesn't mean that the game lacks an agenda, in the sense of a default playstyle towards which it will push participants. Upthread, you said "It's like the game is forcing its own agenda on you". Well, a "drama-neutral" game will have that effect too, whether or not the designer set out to achieve that effect, or noticed it in play him-/herself.