D&D 4E The Best Thing from 4E

[The Crimson Binome]

Roleplaying existed before 2nd ed AD&D, and metagaming was part and parcel of the game.

Hence my clarification. I think we're in agreement that 2E was a departure, in some ways, from earlier editions. The thing is, 2E was also fairly influential in the design of later games - there were a lot of players who took the no-meta-gaming thing to heart, and they later went on to create their own games.

If you pick up any game that came out after the early nineties, it's hit or miss on whether the rules will actually include a side-bar where they mention meta-gaming is bad. A lot of people think it's pretty important.

Well, upthread you said (post 735) that "You don't need mechanics to promote story." I was responding to that.

Oh right, that.

If you want a story in your game, the alternative to using mechanics to promote it is GM force - typically in the form of illusionism. Games like Dungeon World, Burning Wheel, HeroWars/Quest, and (I would say) 4e avoid the need for illusionism precisely because they have mechanics that promote story (pacing mechanics, resolution mechanics, scene-framing mechanics, etc).

What I'm saying is, if you want a story in your game, you don't need mechanics which promote pacing or scene-framing or anything because you'll always end up with a story anyway. It might not conform to the structure of traditional story-telling, but whatever happens, that's your story.

You could add mechanics which promote pacing and stuff, if that's your thing, but you lose out in other areas by doing so. You might not care about that other stuff, but there are people who consider that other stuff to be more important than pacing or whatever. It's all a matter of priorities in what you want out of a game.

 

[Manbearcat]

Great. We've established that I don't like Dungeon World. I don't think that was ever in question, though.

It's possible to pursue the same agenda via different means. There are a lot of games, both D&D and D&D-inspired, which share a similar agenda yet promote different methods for achieving that agenda. This is a good thing, since different people enjoy different aspects of gameplay.

In the 1st part:

We've established more than that. That was an exercise in bias detection. How we can both read the exact same cogent and colorless extraction and have extremely nontrivial differences in takeaway. The conversation at the table, the GM explaining the immediate situation and the players orienting themselves around that explanation, is considerably more complex.

Getting 2 people, let alone 3-5, to extract the same takeaway, and orient themselves similarly, from the multiple vectors that must be assimilated, is asking for trouble in the way of excessive handling time and jarring clarifications (and often retcons). As much as anything, this is why you see folks like me inclined away from ardent process sim and inclined toward each player possessing the authority to in-fill details about the immediate situation (that comport with their own unique mental model). We actually find it more immersive (along with improving table handling time for action declarations).

As to the second, I definitely agree. Hence the xp.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

And the procedures too, all the encounter checks and such. If you actually stop to think about it there's no way that every peasant that walks down the road is having these encounters, the whole human race would be eaten inside a week.

It's not like NPCs have free reign to wander between civilized areas without being attacked. There's a reason why heroic monster-killers are in demand. I would expect this to be even more true in a Point-of-Light style of setting.

In general, though, I would consider the ability to craft a world where monsters are common enough to challenge the PCs, without being so common as to destroy society, to be one sign of a good DM.

The players made a choice to play the characters. After that they will make many choices that will presumably shape the course of events to come, but they can't choose not to be in the story. They are there, and they are bound to play some significant role in it, assuming they survive.

They can always choose to end the story. That's the traditional resolution to a game where the DM is breaking the established social convention to such a degree that the players have given up on trying to salvage it.

That's not the same as removing the characters from the story, of course, but the story is only ever defined as "whatever ends up happening with these characters".

 

[The Crimson Binome]

There was no need in these games for the referee to be neutral about the WORLD vs 'the players', he just had to not favor one player over another. That was the job of the referee, to adjudicate that no, indeed, the cutting at Antietam was too steep and columns of soldiers couldn't march up or down the sides. Secondarily the role of world creator came into existence when these games transferred to a fantasy realm. The world plainly had to be 'balanced' just like everything else, so that the various players had a chance to succeed in the campaign, and defeat each other, or at least field a force in battles that were played out that was worthy of the bother.

That's an interesting theory, at least. It's not one which I particularly care to try and refute, and I'll be looking for evidence to support that theory whenever I end up reading relevant source material.

It's also entirely tangential to the point at hand, of course. The origin of any gameplay element has little impact on its current usage.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Getting 2 people, let alone 3-5, to extract the same takeaway, and orient themselves similarly, from the multiple vectors that must be assimilated, is asking for trouble in the way of excessive handling time and jarring clarifications (and often retcons). As much as anything, this is why you see folks like me inclined away from ardent process sim and inclined toward each player possessing the authority to in-fill details about the immediate situation (that comport with their own unique mental model). We actually find it more immersive (along with improving table handling time for action declarations).

That sounds an awful lot like you've given up, and are consoling yourself with some secondary benefit as a silver lining. Or to put that in more neutral terms, it seems like you've evaluated the costs and benefits of attempting to align perceptions versus letting different narratives exist simultaneously, and found that your priorities have shifted.

I certainly can't fault you for that. It's all about the trade-off, and what will get you the most fun with the least hassle. That's bound to vary from person to person.

 

[pemerton]

Hence my clarification. I think we're in agreement that 2E was a departure, in some ways, from earlier editions. The thing is, 2E was also fairly influential in the design of later games - there were a lot of players who took the no-meta-gaming thing to heart, and they later went on to create their own games.

If you pick up any game that came out after the early nineties, it's hit or miss on whether the rules will actually include a side-bar where they mention meta-gaming is bad. A lot of people think it's pretty important.

Sure, but that doesn't mean that metagaming is inimical to roleplaying.

What I'm saying is, if you want a story in your game, you don't need mechanics which promote pacing or scene-framing or anything because you'll always end up with a story anyway. It might not conform to the structure of traditional story-telling, but whatever happens, that's your story.

When I talk about "story" in a game, I'm not just talking about a sequence of events.

I'm talking about protagonists, conflict, rising action, resolution - the actual structure of a story. The sort of structure that Moldvay Basic alluded to in its foreword, with the heroic fighter killing the dragon tyrant, and thereby liberating the realm, using the magic sword gifted by the hermit cleric.

A lot of 2nd ed material (and its predecessor material, like Dragonlance) aimed at that sort of play, but lacked any techniques for delivering it other than GM force (often deployed illusionistically). 4e provides the resources to achieve it without illusionism. Just to give one instance, the rules mandate that by reaching 21st level the PCs acquire some sort of cosmologically significant status that has implications for their destiny, and also makes that destiny a part of the overall campaign trajectory.

No illusionism: in this case, transparent PC-build mechanics.

 

[Manbearcat]

That sounds an awful lot like you've given up, and are consoling yourself with some secondary benefit as a silver lining. Or to put that in more neutral terms, it seems like you've evaluated the costs and benefits of attempting to align perceptions versus letting different narratives exist simultaneously, and found that your priorities have shifted.

I certainly can't fault you for that. It's all about the trade-off, and what will get you the most fun with the least hassle. That's bound to vary from person to person.

Just to be clear, this is but one reason. The other reasons are many-fold and multi-faceted (of which most have been elaborated upon already). Like many, my early days of GMing strived for process simulation (GMed Classic Traveller amongst other games). The reason for this was because I figured that enhanced causal logic and internal consistency would correlate to enhanced player agency, table handling time, and immersion. That turned out to not only be incorrect but the futility of striving for it actually became an impediment.

Meanwhile, relieving the extraneous (beyond what was absolutely necessary and possible) focus from the futile attempt at meaty process-sim improved all of those things (especially handling time) and others. The focus could be recalibrated toward genre coherency/logic, emotional stakes, pacing, and consistent narrative dynamism. We lost nothing of the absolute essentials of internal consistency and causal logic with the removal of the extraneous obsession with intensive granularity. And we gained so much (we being myself and the people I GMed for).

We found that being devotees of intensive, granular process sim did nothing but suck the well of creativity dry because interesting, genre/coherent outcomes become 100 % subordinate to physical causal logic (which naturally contracts the range of potential outcomes and dramatically - hehe? - so).

That being said, I think there is an interesting aside here. Some of this is bound up in mental frameworks. The way people perceive, organize, and process new information is pretty central to the discussion (my table is composed of a physical scientist, a computer scientist, an engineer, and an accountant by training so trade/craft doesn't straitjacket/mandate/arise out of a tight coupling to mental framework). I think I'll bridge from those possessed of the mental framework which requires high fidelity to granular process sim in their gaming vs mental frameworks which require only the bare essential necessaries of process sim + genre logic, to the current discussion for a moment. I think the reaction to the way 4e reordered its presentation of information (people absolutely freaked out about this) rankled as many feathers as its reordering of the play agenda (from Gamist/Simulation to Narrative/Gamist). I've always held that this is primarily due to (folks who are mostly or exclusively D&D) veteran players lashing out over their personal investment in their (perceived) hard-earned mastery of the necessary mental framework to easily perceive > organize > process the information in the books (even if they prior layouts were utterly disjointed, inefficient, or outright incoherent). Making them recalibrate the way they groked the system's information caused a pretty volatile (to say the least) response.

Couple that with moving the creative agenda from gamist/sim to primarily Story Now with a lot of (truly) fun gamist trappings (and adjusting to/grooming the new mental framework required to meet those demand...unless of course you already possess it because you had played plenty of games that entailed that agenda before) and you have the perfect storm that was the 4e launch. It is probably akin to people who play console games and they've been playing 2-3 games in a row with the specific controller layout and then this new game comes along and (RAGE) it has a different controller layout and requires you to recalibrate your mental framework.

I would also say that "always push play toward conflict" rather than "skip the guards and get to the fun" and/or the DMG2 being the initially released DMG of the game (don't get me wrong...I think DMG1 was excellent) and/or the Dungeon World Gamesmastering section being in the initial 4e books and/or the designers being utterly transparent about these changes (as Heinsoo and Tweet were in 13th Age) would have helped things along. Maybe they were concerned about being over explicit/transparent about the shift? Maybe the editorial staff had a different view than the designers? I don't know. Regardless, they ended up taking it on the chin anyway and being raked over the coals for language that was perceived as actually more incendiary and dismissive than if they just would have used already established advice (always push play toward conflict vs "skip the guards and get to the fun").

Alright, I'm done with my meanderings.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I agree it can be - and [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION]'s version is pretty elaborate.

It's just not something I do in 4e. And it's also not something that I think becomes meaningful if it's grounded in nothing but GM fiat. LostSoul uses a whole lot of mechanical techniques to make it meaningful, for instance.

I'm not sure what 'nothing but GM fiat' is in this case. 4e has a perfectly well-articulated set of resource management rules. Admittedly it eschews some of the more traditional resource categories, or at least doesn't emphasize them, but I don't see it as being inferior in that sense to AD&D, which tried to have many resource games and yet they were still in some sense subject to the GM. 4e seems to measure time, when it bothers, in dramatic terms and plot terms, but it can do it. It certainly manages HS/HP/AP/DS/Power Use as well as any system.

So, maybe we represent a continuum. I believe in the use of tools which foster drama, like the use of an SC to bring a time restriction into an objectified mechanical domain, and some degree of 'framing', to the extent that the situation of the characters is pregnant with opportunities for them to formulate their character's dramatic needs. The narrative will then be built around those.

However, I feel that part of the tension also arises from matching the player's resource management and strategic thinking skills against the situation at hand. So that situation does need to be in some degree 'objectified'. That is it needs to be spelled out such that the players understand the task at hand and can make these strategic and logistical choices. Sometimes they may also choose to gamble, but it should be an interesting choice. I can easily accomplish all of this in 4e, and I don't agree with LS, JC, or Saelorn when they insist on what I consider unattainable objective adjudication of every detail of the game world. I'd much rather those details would often be open to arbitration. It may mean that at times the people at the table subvert the resource game, but so what? It will always go on. We don't really play with only one narrow specific agenda.

So in fact I may often emphasize different things in different parts of the game. A trek across the Great Desert might be a hard resource test, but the intrigue in the Sultan's Palace is probably pretty much going to be "I'm throwing monkey wrenches at you, have fun catching them!", etc.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

It's not like NPCs have free reign to wander between civilized areas without being attacked. There's a reason why heroic monster-killers are in demand. I would expect this to be even more true in a Point-of-Light style of setting.

In general, though, I would consider the ability to craft a world where monsters are common enough to challenge the PCs, without being so common as to destroy society, to be one sign of a good DM.

So, what you're saying is then that E. Gary Gygax was the world's leading genius on ecological relationships and worked out how many orcs, trolls, bugbears, stirges, dragons, etc could all exist within his world (and consequently all their physiologies, so he was also a biology genius)? Don't make me laugh! Gygax was a fairly intelligent person with a good mind for learning and studying a wide range of things, but World of Greyhawk (and every other campaign setting by analogy) is just pulled out of thin air. There's no such analysis. The very idea that anyone has the vaguest idea of how to model a realistic ecology, or even eyeball it, is absurd. I invite you to study the subject in even the most cursory way and you'll quickly learn that such a thing is beyond existing human knowledge.

If every peasant has to have the same encounters that PCs do, if they travel, then surely by any encounter tables I've ever seen, there would be no travel of any sort whatsoever, except maybe a very few extremely heavily armed groups. So how is trade carried out? Even the pseudo-medieval economy of the typical campaign world presupposes abundant trade. Otherwise there would be naught but stone tools and weapons in every town, and in fact no towns at all because the 97 peasants required to feed every townsperson were long since driven off the land and eaten!

The typical D&D world is in fact patently absurd right on the face of it. Its utterly a construct built for the purpose of playing a game where heroes can wander around the countryside finding dire threats to annihilate at every turn.

 

[Manbearcat]

Yeah, I don't really have a lot against the concept, I guess. I just don't really buy into [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION]'s automated world concept. I'm with Dungeon World and [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] though, I think the DM is an advocate FOR the players. That's subtle though. He's not 'on the side of' the characters, but he's trying to give them a chance to be heroes if they can. Making it hard is part of being on the side of the players though, the game isn't much of a game if there's no way to be thwarted. For the same reason that sportsmen try to win at sports, the DM should make the attainment of the PCs goals uncertain and difficult.

Do you think it would have changed things if the very small, extraordinarily cogent Gamesmaster section for Dungeon World would have been the preeminent advice in 4e? If just pages 163-167, very slightly 4e-ified) would have been in DMG1 (as the abridged version of GMing 4e), I really think it might have made a dent in some of the volatility 4e received. I'm not saying it would have changed the ultimate outcome, but I think it would have at least smoothed out/softened the transition of some GMs, of a certain persuasion, to the game (and certainly changed the nature of some of the edition warring!).