D&D 4E The Best Thing from 4E

[The Crimson Binome]

First you try to claim a OneTrueWay that D&D has 'always' been, then you dismiss what the guy who wrote it had to say.

Like I said: I started with 2E. From my understanding, that guy was mostly out of the picture by then.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Like I said: I started with 2E. From my understanding, that guy was mostly out of the picture by then.

So why are you always going on about 'tradition' and making pronouncements about 'the way the game was always played?'

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The point is, it is not the, or even an 'original goal' of D&D. It's one of the many crazy things folks did with D&D back in the day.

First you try to claim a OneTrueWay that D&D has 'always' been, then you dismiss what the guy who wrote it had to say.

Yeah, that was a little odd. EGG, AFAIK having never met the man personally, was interested in a fun game. I don't think he or his group really cared about 'process-sim' so much as they cared about player vs imagined dungeon world. Rules that emulated reality in some sense were only useful to the extent that the player's goal was to figure stuff out, to outwit the DM's traps. So the player was acting as a sort of 'sleuth' and it was important that he could reason about what he was encountering. The dice, as I understand it, serve 2 purposes in that agenda, to determine how well the character performed some task, and to stand in for all the unknown and unknowable variables that couldn't be filled in because no GM could list or track them all. When the thief fell off the wall maybe it was because it was wet, and maybe he just messed up and picked a bad hand hold. Or maybe the god of thieves didn't like him that day!

Overall though, as Tony has noted, Gygax prized PLAYABILITY, he was a gamist, as any perusal of what he wrote on the subject of combat will instantly reveal. Beyond that he was a very intelligent guy with a lot of interests and I think he liked putting a lot of that into his game. He had detailed rules for building a castle because castles were fun to him and he knew a lot about it, not because it was serving a game agenda beyond that.

 

[pemerton]

Amongst all this discussion regarding Skill Challenges what should not be lost in the conversation is that each technique is not binary (on/off) and exclusive (single technique).

<snip>

These conversations, like the examples in the DMG, are examples of some of the things that can be accomplished/done, not the entirety of what can be done.

I believe the examples in the DMG were simple examples (almost shorthand) to showcase some of the techniques but lacked in the explanation side (as shorthand usually does).

One problem though was the tendency to have SCs in adventures that ONLY provided basic mechanical costs. It is partly a consequence of the author not having access to the characters in the story, he can't know what their specific agendas are. Still, published SCs were often woefully framed.


The problem of course was that they simply failed to illustrate vital techniques.

I agree with both of these. I think D'karr is correct that the published examples have to be understood as roughly analogous to a set of monster stats plus some tactical notes: if the PCs do something unexpected then the GM is going to have to depart from the tactical script, and the same is true for a SC.

I think AbdulAlhazred is correct that the advice/commentary in the DMG didn't explain this, and didn't illustrate vital techniques, nor explain the techniques being used in the worked examples. This is true of the later RC also.

 

[pemerton]

I'd sum up the decision point as "how do you want this story to go?" (Is that fair?) If I decided to pray to Melora with my high Religion check, instead of using my okay-but-not-good Nature check, at that point I'm putting my PC's relationship with Melora into question, or at the very least bringing religion into the game. When I build my PC I'm going to invest in the resources that allow me to guide the fiction in the direction I want.

I guess one question is "why wouldn't you always use the skill with the highest modifier?" (Which makes me think of Burning Wheel's detailed list of skills.) That's probably a feature - the system reinforces your PC build choices by making whatever you're most interested in have the greatest weight so that you can reliably push the fiction in the way that you want, but on the same hand I can see how that would limit decisions because you'd always want to use that skill. The DM would need to be nimble, I think, to react and put pressure on the PCs and thereby the players.

The players can only apply their skills to the fiction at the points where they can demonstrate that the narrative will support it, so obviously that's one limitation that we are all aware of. Its great to be a level one 4e PC with a +14 Diplomacy bonus, but skeletons just don't really care...

Beyond that there may be reasons why a character may not want to exercise his best skill every time. There could be narrative consequences to pursuing some tactics for instance.

This is a good exchange.

My experience is pretty similar to AbdulAlhazred: the players have two main reasons to not use their highest skills.

The first is that the GM frames them into a situation where a given skill is not feasible (either at all, or relative to the DC that would apply - RC, in particular, has advice on stepping up the DC for repeated skill use by a given player).

The second is that the outcome the player wants - LostSoul's "how you want this story to go" - is not one that will flow from the best skill. In my own game, this probably comes up most often when the dwarf (who is best at physical stuff) or the drow (who is best at tricking/scaring) want to befriend or persuade, and so test Diplomacy even though neither is trained in it, and the dwarf (at 28th level) has 12 CHA. (At least for the drow it's his prime stat.)

 

[The Crimson Binome]

If Newton's Laws of Motion were really set in stone, Einstein would never have had a chance, and Global Positioning Satellites would not work as they do.

The thing is, Newton's Laws weren't wrong, exactly; they're just a simplification, which holds extremely well for large-ish objects travelling at small-ish speeds. Likewise, Navier-Stokes simplifies down to Bernoulli when you're talking about incompressible flows with no viscosity.

We don't need perfectly accurate equations in an RPG, because we're generally only dealing with a small subset of reality anyway. In a game like D&D, we don't bother with resolution any finer than five feet, or time increments smaller than six seconds. If you're talking about a sci-fi game, then the actual laws of physics might matter (for things like GPS), in addition to the simplifications we use to run normal interactions.

And that's really much of the appeal of process sim, at least to me. The fact that you can take reality (our real world, or any imagined world), and model it with any degree of accuracy, using only math that we can do in our head.

It's kind of like Mythbusters that way - the specifics of how you do it are less important than the principle that you can do it. And there are explosions.

You lost me. What has this to do with fate, destiny, free will, the nature of game world natural laws or anything like?

If you take two similar characters, and use different rules to model them, then any interaction between them is likely to resolve based on the differences in the models rather than the underlying reality of the (fictional) situation. As an extreme example, imagine if PCs had +20hp and +5 to all checks merely by virtue of being a PC. It's like the game is forcing its own agenda on you, to have you succeed because the game wants you to succeed, rather than being determined by your choices (and random chance).

Where I'm okay with using different models is when it's a matter of detail, and you're just making a simplification so that the model runs more smoothly. Ideally, you should still recognize that the same principles are in play, and the outcome of any interaction shouldn't matter too much on the fact that you changed the model.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

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.

That sounds like a very defeatist attitude. Even if it's true, though, that doesn't mean that trying is pointless. Even if there aren't better and more-efficient mechanics that can be discovered, to improve the resolution with smaller complexity costs, you can still find new and innovative combinations along the way. There are an infinite number of points along that sliding scale.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The thing is, Newton's Laws weren't wrong, exactly; they're just a simplification, which holds extremely well for large-ish objects travelling at small-ish speeds. Likewise, Navier-Stokes simplifies down to Bernoulli when you're talking about incompressible flows with no viscosity.

We don't need perfectly accurate equations in an RPG, because we're generally only dealing with a small subset of reality anyway. In a game like D&D, we don't bother with resolution any finer than five feet, or time increments smaller than six seconds. If you're talking about a sci-fi game, then the actual laws of physics might matter (for things like GPS), in addition to the simplifications we use to run normal interactions.

And that's really much of the appeal of process sim, at least to me. The fact that you can take reality (our real world, or any imagined world), and model it with any degree of accuracy, using only math that we can do in our head.

Climatologists want to talk to you I don't actually disagree within certain limits. You can guesstimate some sort of realistic-sounding answer for most situations governed by everyday physics. Even if you're wrong the people at the table won't care, its consistent and believable. The question is why you need to worry about any of that ahead of time. The other question is what about the fantastical elements. PERSONALLY, what makes those interesting to me is that they're unknowns.

If you take two similar characters, and use different rules to model them, then any interaction between them is likely to resolve based on the differences in the models rather than the underlying reality of the (fictional) situation. As an extreme example, imagine if PCs had +20hp and +5 to all checks merely by virtue of being a PC. It's like the game is forcing its own agenda on you, to have you succeed because the game wants you to succeed, rather than being determined by your choices (and random chance).

Where I'm okay with using different models is when it's a matter of detail, and you're just making a simplification so that the model runs more smoothly. Ideally, you should still recognize that the same principles are in play, and the outcome of any interaction shouldn't matter too much on the fact that you changed the model.

Of course I'll give you the '4e answer' which is its perfectly fine to model 2 characters differently if it serves the participants' agendas. There is just nothing sacrosanct about putting a PC and an NPC on an even footing. The game is ABOUT the PCs, as you yourself already acknowledged pages back when we talked about the "Anthropic Principle". Once you accept that the game chooses to focus on the "chosen ones" (and even Gygax framed it this way, proving that he'd considered this very point) there's no reason why it should treat them even-handedly. In fact they don't even have to be treated consistently. There really isn't a specific 'formula' for how games must treat characters, all that is really required is the result be entertaining (or whatever, I choose to assume people play to be entertained at some level, though there are times when I have been driven to question that...).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

That sounds like a very defeatist attitude. Even if it's true, though, that doesn't mean that trying is pointless. Even if there aren't better and more-efficient mechanics that can be discovered, to improve the resolution with smaller complexity costs, you can still find new and innovative combinations along the way. There are an infinite number of points along that sliding scale.

Well, its a matter of tastes in gaming at some point. What is fun for you is not necessarily fun for me, at least not so much anymore. As I said before, nothing about it is 'defeatist' because I'm not defeated. I simply grew in some sense and that growth involved a realization of new and more varied goals. Again, I don't want to cast it as if playing extreme process-sim type games is 'inferior', just that it tends to be a starting point in most gamer's trajectory, and in the trajectory of the hobby as a whole, and then we often move on.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I actually really liked a lot of the 4E cosmology.

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.

I also liked the encounter design ideal of having more moving pieces involved... a party of pcs versus a group of monsters; I liked that a lot more than how 3E encounter design tended to work.

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.