D&D 4E The Best Thing from 4E

[Tony Vargas]

The real laws of physics - even in a fantasy world - must be true regardless of your belief in them (barring extreme circumstances where they actually are shaped by your belief, but that's a degenerate case).

I don't care if it's a degenerate case, reality shaped by belief is a pretty reasonable idea to hang magic on. Mage: the Ascension went way, way down that rabbit hole with entertaining results.

In a fantasy world, there needn't be physical laws in the sense we're used to thinking of them - and that sense is relatively /new/, going back a matter of centuries. The observable 'mundane' phenomena of the world could all have supernatural forces behind them - gods moving the heavens about, fairies painting morning dew onto everything, genii loci being responsible for the forms of mountains, rivers, fields, even individual stones. And, all those supernatural forces could be conscious and quite arbitrary in what they do. The sun could rise every morning, but that doesn't mean the sun god will always keep such a rigorous schedule...

If you try to detail a world in this manner, you get a world where the laws of physics are literally determined by playing dice.
The laws of physics cannot possibly work that way.

You mean like Quantum Mechanics?

Obviously, the laws of physics in a D&D world are, in essence, the rules (or the DM, playing Mad God, overriding the rules at whim, of course), and those rules often in involve dice. Not that stochastic variables should bother any would-be in-game-world physicist.

 

[TwoSix]

Emphasis mine. If you try to detail a world in this manner, you get a world where the laws of physics are literally determined by playing dice.

That seems to be the idea, yes.

The laws of physics cannot possibly work that way. The real laws of physics - even in a fantasy world - must be true regardless of your belief in them (barring extreme circumstances where they actually are shaped by your belief, but that's a degenerate case). Sometimes, the correct answer of someone who does everything right must be that an idea is wrong. Most science goes toward disproving theories.

The laws of the universe are immutable for the characters. They are obviously mutable for the DM. Basically, I believe [MENTION=27160]Balesir[/MENTION] is saying to have the characters test, make some rolls based on the test they're framed, and have the results feed into the character's and player's knowledge of the way magic works.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

In a fantasy world, there needn't be physical laws in the sense we're used to thinking of them - and that sense is relatively /new/, going back a matter of centuries. The observable 'mundane' phenomena of the world could all have supernatural forces behind them - gods moving the heavens about, fairies painting morning dew onto everything, genii loci being responsible for the forms of mountains, rivers, fields, even individual stones. And, all those supernatural forces could be conscious and quite arbitrary in what they do. The sun could rise every morning, but that doesn't mean the sun god will always keep such a rigorous schedule...

That's more like a fairy tale than a fantasy world. I guess there might be some people who are into that, but it's not something that D&D has ever tried to do. None of the established settings work that way. That's not to say you couldn't do that in D&D, but there's no reason to expect that anyone would, or that it would reflect the experiences of anyone who has played D&D in the past.

 

[Tony Vargas]

That's more like a fairy tale than a fantasy world.

Fairy tale, myth, fantasy world - they're all fantasy. Why can't a fantasy world be lit by a deity in a burning chariot, for instance?

I guess there might be some people who are into that, but it's not something that D&D has ever tried to do.

That's always the bottom line, isn't? If it's what you recall D&D 'always' having done, it's the only way.

Anyway, what D&D did or didn't do has no bearing on what the broader idea of a fantasy world might encompass. Myth, legend, folklore, traditional beliefs, and fantasy in the broader sense have been and can be /very/ different from the modern concept of 'laws of physics.'

That D&D may have failed to model that (or, more accurately, not addressed it), is hardly surprising, considering D&D's consistent record of failure in modeling most aspects of genre.

None of the established settings work that way. That's not to say you couldn't do that in D&D, but there's no reason to expect that anyone would, or that it would reflect the experiences of anyone who has played D&D in the past.

The campaign world I used from the early 80s through '95 was a flat earth composed of the 4 classical elements inside an iron sphere. I was into the history of science, so had all sorts of interesting long-disproven ideas as facts of life: spontaneous generation, phlogiston (Spelljammer lifted that one, as well, though, IMHO, they got it wrong), Aristolean physics. And, of course, magical thinking being right more often than not.

Among other things, such a world neatly torpedoed some of the lamer abuses of magic in the early years of the hobby. One good reason to go down that road, but not the only reason.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Anyway, what D&D did or didn't do has no bearing on what the broader idea of a fantasy world might encompass. Myth, legend, folklore, traditional beliefs, and fantasy in the broader sense have been and can be /very/ different from the modern concept of 'laws of physics.'

D&D isn't a particularly broad realm of fantasy. It's a fairly narrow type of fantasy, originating in the works of Tolkien and a few other authors, which has since expanded to codify a number of different-but-similar genres.

You could do a mythic game, where the Sun doesn't rise because that particular deity has the flu, but it's not something that D&D has tried before. That idea has no particular applicability toward anyone else who might be playing the game at some other table. There's no reason that any discussion about D&D in general, and settings in particular, should be made to accommodate for your particular wild deviations from precedent.

 

[Balesir]

The laws of the universe are immutable for the characters. They are obviously mutable for the DM. Basically, I believe [MENTION=27160]Balesir[/MENTION] is saying to have the characters test, make some rolls based on the test they're framed, and have the results feed into the character's and player's knowledge of the way magic works.

Spot on, and well put - thanks!

That's more like a fairy tale than a fantasy world. I guess there might be some people who are into that, but it's not something that D&D has ever tried to do. None of the established settings work that way. That's not to say you couldn't do that in D&D, but there's no reason to expect that anyone would, or that it would reflect the experiences of anyone who has played D&D in the past.

Um, Glorantha. One of the oldest 3(?) published roleplaying worlds, after Empire of the Petal Throne and City State of the Invincible Overlord and before Greyhawk, was and still is based firmly on myth rather than anything recognisable as science.

Such is the role of the DM, and a good example of that is in the description of HP loss. As pointed out in 5E, different DMs like to describe HP loss differently, mostly based on what makes sense to them on what's going on in the narrative; it creates a very different tone for the game, when the DM describes an arrow which digs into your back (-5 HP, no penalties) vs one that you narrowly dodge (-5 HP, no penalties). When you agree to let one person run the game, you agree that his or her aesthetic will shape much of the world.

That might be a problem for some, but it's not for me. Because I quite deliberately don't describe what hit points mean in the D&D I run; it's none of my business how players imagine the world. I tell them what the rules are, they have to imagine the world such that those rules are true. How they choose to do that is up to them. As long as we all agree that, at 0 hit points, you hit the deck, and before that you have no penalties, the imagined state of a creature that has lost some but not all of its hit points is arbitrary. Everyone may imagine it as they see fit - provided they don't try to claim that the rules should change based on how they imagine it. That particular road is one way.

Emphasis mine. If you try to detail a world in this manner, you get a world where the laws of physics are literally determined by playing dice.

No, you get a world where the laws of nature are what they are - the dice just reveal what they might be as explored by a series of tests the characters decide to run.

(I could add a dig about quantum mechanics, here, but actually that arises more from the lack of individuality of subatomic particles rather than stochastic divergence, as such, so it doesn't entirely count).

The laws of physics cannot possibly work that way. The real laws of physics - even in a fantasy world - must be true regardless of your belief in them (barring extreme circumstances where they actually are shaped by your belief, but that's a degenerate case). Sometimes, the correct answer of someone who does everything right must be that an idea is wrong. Most science goes toward disproving theories.

Others have already pointed out that the first part of this is not a sound argument because its premises are not necessarily true, but more generally it doesn't make any difference to what I'm suggesting. The dice reveal whether or not the hypothesis is true, is what I'm suggesting. I maintain that this is a perfectly functional and rational way to play. The game world has fixed natural laws, sure - but nothing says that one person should get to be the arbiter of them all, or even that they should be all fixed prior to play.

For any roleplaying game world, the rules are what define the world. If those rules include randomisers, them chance plays a part in the natural laws, but that doesn't mean the world itself is random. Consider a roll to hit in melee - a commonplace in most RPGs. Does the fact that we roll dice for this mean that combat is genuinely random? That, if we were to look in detail at every move and counter-move, we could not explain everything in terms of circumstances, actions of the combatants and natural laws of motion? I would suggest that we still think of the combat as being decided by the individual small events, circumstances and actions that happen in it - and yet we roll dice to decide the outcome. Just because we roll dice does not mean that the game world is literally composed of chaotic randomness (although it might be...). Why should not the same apply to questions of the underlying, arcane nature of magic?

 

[Manbearcat]

[MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION], would you care to comment on what I wrote in the above post (I'll just sblock the relevant bit below for easy reference rather than linking).

[sblock]Now let us take a look at how AD&D handles this and compare it with 1-4 above.

In AD&D, the handling procedure is to consult the Natural Shelter table for the given terrain/locale, roll percentile dice, determine success/failure. So here I would be rolling vs 40 % (Natural Shelter - Mountain). If they fail and they want to try again, it is 3 turns worth of searching so I’m rolling 1 or more times for random encounters. Those random encounters could be stock from the DMG or of my own devising (both type/kind and frequency).

Now an interesting intersection of the rules is how do nonproficiencies play into this? There are lots of them that would seem applicable; eg Alertness, Athletics, Direction Sense, Geography, Mountaineering. However, none of these NWPs are actually synthesized with the conflict resolution mechanics of % to find Natural Shelter. So if the player is going to have any agency, any decision-points at all (and the resultant fiction being anything resembling interesting or dynamic), I'm going to have to wing the synthesis of PC build resources > resolution mechanics entirely. Unless, of course, they deploy a spell...

Outside of the latitude of rule 0 and hiding percentage chance to succeed (and hiding rolls behind screens), this is probably the major issue with AD&D and illusionism. Either the rules outright do not canvass very central aspects of mundane noncombat resolution that are key to functional play…or, where they do, the intersection of PC build mechanics and conflict resolution mechanics are a tangled mess of incoherency. This is a goldmine for illusionism GMing.[/sblock]

A fair bit (ok almost all of it) of your commentary leaves me wondering just how much you have actually GMed AD&D. Your version of content generation and how play procedures manifest during noncombat resolution (and the feel those procedures engender at the table) doesn't remotely comport with my own. Take the above scenario, for instance. I ran a large amount of wilderness exploration in AD&D (well, in all versions of the game to be honest), so this situation was one that I was very familiar with.

What exactly does the Natural Shelter Table mean? We have a percentage chance for the PCs to locate a Natural Shelter (or the means to construct one) for every 3 turns (30 minutes) of exploration. This percentage is dependent upon geographic locale. The play procedure is literally for the players to declare this is what they are doing and then the GM rolls the % dice (rather than the players...) to find out if they find shelter. As I note in the above example, the resolution mechanics run aground of synthesizing the PC build mechanics of NWPs. If they did, it would allow players to (begin to) approach the OODA Loop of the character actually exploring the fantasy world...enabling something remotely resembling the kind of serial decision-making/action-declaration one would be undertaking in such a scenario. But they don't. So If you want to include them (as a % augment for example), it is basically left up to the GM to fiat or for the table to negotiate in-situ (or house rule out of game.

What the rules and play procedures here do not connote:

* Wilderness exploration via process-sim > micro action declaration > micro-task resolution.

* High resolution wilderness settings in which the tight-zoom, on-screen details are prepped before play, and thus independent of player action declaration and subsequent resolution.

* Highly detailed maps of mountainsides and a key that indicates where on this slope or that slope are the materials for natural shelter or the caves (etc)

What the rules and play procedures here do connote:

* Wilderness exploration via abstract conflict resolution of which the zoomed-in task resolution/PC build mechanics of the system is completely unsynched, thus irrelevant RAW.

* Zoomed out, low resolution wilderness setting with spontaneous content generation based on on-screen action declarations and subsequent mechanical resolution (or subsequent illusionism!).

* Low resolution wilderness maps featuring named mountain ranges, or perhaps a mount, that might say ELVES or TROLLS or RUINS OF BURGLEY MCDURGLERSON or METEOR PEAK or any other number of adventure-relevant mush.

In my 31 years of running games (half of those running AD&D), I certainly never prepared anything beyond megadungeons at a high level of zoom (where the resolution mechanics and expectant play procedures actually become more fine...in some places). Cities were typically prepped at an average zoom while the wildnerness was always quite abstracted.

 

[pemerton]

The players play characters, who explore the world. That shouldn't have been ambiguous in any way.

In many fantasy worlds, of the type which D&D can readily model, there are plenty of interesting things out there to explore - monsters, treasure, magic, etc. As the characters travel, they discover what/where/why the monsters and other NPCs are

If I describe that using real-world language, that seems to be the players discovering what is on the GM's maps and in the GM's notes.

they change the course of events which otherwise might play out differently.

When you say "otherwise might play out differently", that looks like a reference to the fiction - ie the fiction might otherwise be different. I'm not 100% sure what that actually means, because it's not as if someone is going to write the fiction of gameworlds that are never played in; nor do such worlds, undisturbed by episodes of play, exist in some Platonic heaven.

Looking at it from the point of play, what it seems to mean is that the GM would describe the gameworld one way, but then the players declare certain actions for their PCs and so the GM describes the gameworld a different way. So the players' action declarations act as "triggers" for GM authorship.

If they want, the player characters may choose to explore the nature of magic,

<snip>

Most characters will probably be content with exploring the mundane matters of the world, just like most people in real life don't care how the laws of physics work.

I'm not sure what you mean by "exploring the nature of magic". When a player declares as an action for his PC of internalising the chaos energy so as to make a magic item, is that "exploring the nature of magic"? If so, then I would expect exploring the nature of magic to be quite common in a game that includes magic-users.

 

[pemerton]

The laws of physics cannot possibly work that way. The real laws of physics - even in a fantasy world - must be true regardless of your belief in them

There is a category error here.

Let's assume that a fantasy world has laws of physics. And let's assume that a realist metaphysics of natural laws is the correct one. (Both are contentious assumptions, but can be made for the sake of argument.) Then it follows that the physical laws of a fantasy world are independent of the beliefs of the inhabitants of that world.

But it doesn't follow that they are independent of the beliefs of the authors of the fiction in question. In fact, I think they are obviously dependent, in some fashion, on such beliefs. For instance, it wouldn't be true of Middle Earth that elves can sail west on the "straight path" except that Tolkien imagined this to be so, and wrote it down.
[MENTION=27160]Balesir[/MENTION] is not supposing that the inhabitants of a fantasy world throw dice to determine the laws of that world. He is supposing that the inhabitants of the real world (ie him and his fellow players) throw dice to determine what sort of fantasy world they are authoring.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

The dice reveal whether or not the hypothesis is true, is what I'm suggesting. I maintain that this is a perfectly functional and rational way to play. The game world has fixed natural laws, sure - but nothing says that one person should get to be the arbiter of them all, or even that they should be all fixed prior to play.

I'm trying to follow along. Are you saying that none of the natural laws are known, until a PC checks them? Or just the magical laws, which nobody (including the DM!) would have any pre-conceptions about?

In either case, not only are you handing narrative power over to the players (!), but you're tying that power directly into the skill check of the characters! If the player wants it to be possible to channel firedrake essence into a ring, then that theory works because the character knows a lot about magic. My character knows a lot about magic, therefore he knows that my theory is true.

As opposed to my (much more traditional) method, where that action either is or is not possible, and a successful skill check would allow a character to know which it is (and, if it is possible, how to actually do it), but the narrative control - whether or not it is true - is wielded exclusively by the DM.

I mean, even if you did want players to have some narrative control over the setting, it just seems like a bad idea to tie that into skill checks. Since narrative control is a player resource, you probably want to share that equally, rather than saying that stronger character in-game also has more power across the meta-game.