D&D 4E The Best Thing from 4E

[JamesonCourage]

I'm just going to leave all the rest of this to rest because it seems to be getting contentious and I feel like you're arguing from a base of experience that simply doesn't mesh with what I've seen over the years.

Yeah, YMMV and all that.

Yeah, I'd say the same thing, 4e IME is extremely simple and straightforward to GM. Often I can just wing it, there's not big need to do a lot of prep, though I do like to jot down some sketches, pre-select some stat blocks, etc. Its in any case a very easy game to run, vastly easier than 2e was, though I don't think 2e was anywhere near as laborious as 3.x would be.

I prep more than I did for 3.X (which I winged almost completely), but I don't think that's the typical experience. For prep-heavy GMs, 4e would definitely be easier the vast majority of the time, in my opinion.

 

[pemerton]

I'm not sure. I mean it is pretty hard to say since we cannot delve into the minds of either of the games originators by asking them.

<snip>

So it sounds to me like there was a direct consideration of exactly what PC mechanics served what agenda and a debate about what that agenda exactly was, with Gary coming out on top. This might at least partly explain why Dave's contributions to the game ceased pretty early on, he simply had different objectives and he clearly would have known that D&D, as published, wasn't really suited to them.

"True" to the first paragraph, and because of that, "perhaps" to the second.

 

[JamesonCourage]

So, unless the monster has something like % is liar

Is it bad I kind of want this as a social chance for NPCs?

 

[Tony Vargas]

I was wondering if anyone would catch the reference.

 

[pemerton]

So, unless the monster has something like % is liar or no appearing or something of that nature, the completely different way in which they're generated, lack of feats, and completely different stat block don't matter, because you could mash a PC into something like a really long monster stat block?

OK.

I'm not sure what you think I'm saying that you disagree with.

I am distinguishing build rules from stat block. PCs in 4e have very different build rules from monsters and NPCs; but the stat blocks are the same (except high level PCs have many more powers; 1st level ones don't, though). This is a clear difference from AD&D or B/X, where - even ignoring the ecology stuff you mention like % in lair and number appearing - monsters don't have the same stats as PCs (no STR, CON, DEX, WIS or CHA; INT as a range rather than a number; or in B/X no ability scores at all, and a morale stat).

The fact that PCs and NPCs have the same stats doesn't tell us much about dramatic agenda, though. In 4e the stats are the same but PCs are protagonists - roughly speaking, they get more stuff on their power lists, and more healing surges. Put crudely, their numbers are systematically bigger. This isn't generally true in RQ.

Relating that to [MENTION=336]D'karr[/MENTION]'s point about Shadowrun, from the fact that PCs and NPCs record equipment or cyber enhancements in the same way, it doesn't follow that there's no protagonistic difference - maybe the game gives PCs systematically longer and better equipment lists, just like 4e gives PCs longer and better power lists, and Marvel Heroic RP gives PCs better numbers in their dice pools.

Conversely, even though in B/X monsters and PCs are statted differently (and NPC stats straddle both approaches without a great deal of clarity), I'm not sure this tells us much about the game's agenda with respect to drama.

Overall, I think the "same stat template" thing is mostly (maybe not completely) orthogonal to questions about PC protagonism, which depends more on the build rules and the resolution rules than the way in which the inputs to resolution are organised and labelled.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Recharge on a roll is a difference of power-mechanics, though, not stat block (not many PCs in 3E have frightful presence or recharging breath weapons, but that isn't really ground for saying dragons and PCs are statted the same way).

PC and NPC/monster stat blocks have defences, hit points, save adjustments, action points, immunities and the like, init bonuses, stats and bonuses, skill bonuses (where these differ from stat bonuses), equipment lists, languages, alignment and power descriptions.

PC character sheets carry extra information, typically, because they record build mechanics as well as the stats that those mechanics output - so they often list feats, assign powers to class and level, etc. But that is not necessary to actually run a PC from a stat block.

Having designed PC stat blocks to fit on one sheet, for ease of play, the main practical difference from monsters is the number of powers that PCs get compared to NPCs/monsters (especially at high levels). But the categories of information on the sheet, and its mechanical meaning, are the same. This is a contrast with (say) B/X, where monsters have a morale entry that PCs don't have, or from 1st ed AD&D, where monsters have no stat other than INT, and that is given as a range rather than a number.

Yeah, this is PRETTY MUCH true, there are systematic differences though, monsters have a very different hit point total, and because the mechanical processes of creating a PC vs an NPC/Monster are so radically different (they actually share almost nothing in common actually) the RESULTS are quite different. No NPC ever really 'looks like' any PC would, except pretty superficially. Other things are actually never really stated in the case of NPCs, like whether or how they heal, if they can take rests, etc. One may assume these things work like they do for PCs, but the rules never really say they do, so that's another difference (and in fact the death and dying rules explicitly do NOT apply to NPCs unless the DM decides they do).

So, I would say that stat blocks in some very limited way are very much the same for PC/NPC, but in effect things are pretty different. Its a fine distinction.

 

[pemerton]

Yeah, this is PRETTY MUCH true, there are systematic differences though, monsters have a very different hit point total, and because the mechanical processes of creating a PC vs an NPC/Monster are so radically different (they actually share almost nothing in common actually) the RESULTS are quite different.

Yes.

To some extent this is also true in RQ - the results for what are generally accepted as PC-playable character races are all within bounds that are not true for monsters in general, and there is also the Fixed INT/Free INT distinction.

But I agree the differences in 4e are bigger.

A game like MHRP is interesting in this respect, because its build rules are identical for heroes and villains, and the same character sheet ("datafile", in the jargon of the game) can be used for either. The differences are simply (i) the one I mentioned above, that second-tier villains step back a certain bunch of dice in their pool, and (ii) the resource system for powering abilities is different on the player and GM sides. But these differences are enough to support a strong protagonism agenda.

My take-away lesson from this is that there are a lot of viable pathways in game design, which contribute to various agendas in different ways, and just looking at one of them (eg do PC and NPC equipment lists look much the same), or just looking at the in-fiction details, won't really tell you what is going on.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah, YMMV and all that.

I prep more than I did for 3.X (which I winged almost completely), but I don't think that's the typical experience. For prep-heavy GMs, 4e would definitely be easier the vast majority of the time, in my opinion.

hehe, you definitely have a pretty unusual style IMHO because I've never heard of anyone winging anything in 3.x. I mean sure, you could ad-lib low-level stuff probably, "here's some orcs, have fun!" or some fairly simple running around town, etc. Most of the more challenging NPCs and monsters though will be spell casters at the very least, which I'd expect need quite a bit of prep, even if you just guesstimate their stats.

My common trick in 4e is to literally print out 20 or 30 stat blocks from online or wherever and then just start throwing them out there, drawing maps, and tossing some crazy twist into the mix and see what happens. I just describe them any old way that sounds like fun too. If anything seems to be off-kilter a bit I just crank up the pace and move on to a new scene, new situation, new conflicts, and it pretty much works. I admit, this is not the ONLY style of DMing I can use, and isn't the most perfect for all situations, nor the style I ran my earlier campaigns using, but 4e's numbers just take care of themselves, beyond knowing that around 25 levels of level 3-7 monsters will be a good match for the 5th level party kind of thing.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

"True" to the first paragraph, and because of that, "perhaps" to the second.

I guess we could get a copy of "Adventures in Fantasy" and find out what Dave was after, though it wouldn't be conclusive proof that he wanted to design D&D exactly that way.

 

[Argyle King]

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.

Yes. In 3e you could theoretically use CR to design a larger combat by 'breaking up' the assumed one same-level (or higher level) monster into more lower-level ones. In practice, it didn't work out too well. Similarly, in 5e, bounded accuracy favors the side with greater numbers so profoundly that combats where the PCs are outnumbered become problematic, thus the default monster-exp = encounter-exp-budget brings us back to the single same-level monster as the default encounter.

Not always beating up on some poor monsters you outnumber did help 4e PCs look a little more heroic, or at least a little less home-invadery.

I liked the Dawn War and the divide between Primordials and Gods; in particular, I liked that the conflict wasn't clearly "good vs evil." Some of the Primordials were 'good,' it's just that the world they wanted to exist would likely be uninhabitable by mortals.

I also liked that the Feywild and Shadowfell gave a reason for some of the redundant D&D monsters to have a place and be more defined.

I didn't always like the fine details of 4E, but, storywise, I liked the broad strokes of how the background was painted.

In the beginning, I liked the "points of light" idea; however, I didn't feel that the 4E mechanics were a good fit for the kind of story which comes to my mind when I hear "points of light" described as a concept. I had hoped 4E would turn out more like sword & sorcery; less like mythic fantasy.