D&D 4E The Best Thing from 4E

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

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! GAAAHHHH! The Elemental Chaos is much more interesting than planes of pure endless fire, water, etc (and they had to basically mix them together to make them interesting, you can still have a 'region of pure fire' in the EC). Likewise the rest of it, and the whole idea of a fundamental existential conflict between order and chaos incarnated in the form of gods and primordials. It is all genius from a pure plot generating and adventure location point of view.

 

[JamesonCourage]

Of course all of this does exemplify @JamesonCourage's points about GM agency and its ascendancy over player agency.

Right.

The issue then is how it would be resolved, particularly in a way that preserved his insistence on the authorial control being entirely in his hands. Frankly I'm mystified by that. I don't see how players can be empowered in the sense he means, where they can always construct a definitive mechanical answer to every situation without reference to the GM's judgement AT ALL. I just can't even conceive of the mechanical structure of said game.

Well, it's not completely in the hands of the players. But I want as much there as possible.

So, as an example, my RPG uses Knowledge skills (like 3.X does). So if someone makes a Knowledge check to see if their character is aware of something (as compared to research, or the like), the checks follow very vague guidelines (different DCs representing different levels of proficiency -Competent Professional, Skill Professional, Master Professional, etc.). But that's because Knowledge is used to know about setting, and setting it determined by the GM, and varies greatly. I can't write out concrete DCs (DC 15 lets you know about bears!) because each and every GM has their own take on their own game world's setting. So I am forced to leave it vague, meaning that the GM's judgement is mandatory.

On the other hand, everything else I can take away from the GM, I do. I want objective DCs when I can get them. So, how hard is it to gather food? What about in different terrains? In different seasons? What's the temperature? Has the area been picked clean? Is food in the relevant season to be found? Is it particularly lush? Well-traveled? Are you moving quickly? All of these are modifiers to the DC to find food, and the players can look them up and take them into consideration before deciding if they want to gather food, if they would rather roll or take a 10, if they want to take a different route, if they want to move quickly or slow down, etc.

The GM still sets the setting, of course. The GM does get to determine what food can be found where, and what the terrain is, and what the season is, and the temperature, and if it's been picked clean, etc. Because the GM does run the world. But players can do things to mitigate GM interference (feats to eliminate penalties from bad terrain, seasons, etc.). They can explore the setting and use that knowledge to mitigate these conditions in the future.

The GM's judgement is still part of the game. It's a required part of it. Just like player judgement. But I want to hand over as much information as I can to my players (transparency) -usually in the form of objective DCs- and then give them access to character builds where they can leverage explicit rules to their advantage, without getting permission from the GM.

I want them to be able to say "the DC is normally 18, but my Adapted Skill feat reduces the DC to 15, and I get +6 and can always take a 10 from the Consistent Skill feat. I take a 10, get a 16, and succeed. And barring outside circumstances (fatigue, or attribute damage, or whatever), I always will succeed." And I want them to be able to do this on their own, without my input.

I can certainly imagine guidelines which spell out an approach and a general mechanical framework, but that's exactly what the 4e SC system is! Maybe he can enlighten us with an example of how this would play out in his system. I'm genuinely curious.

Well, even my skill challenge system is more structured than 4e. The number of successes necessary is set based on:
(1) Who is participating, and if they can succeed at all the skill checks by rolling a 0, 5, 10, or 15.
(2) If they're acting quickly, or under tight time constraints.
(3) If they're trying to keep their actions secret.

These modifiers determine the DC. The players have control over how quickly they're acting and if they're trying to keep their actions secret, and so explicitly have control over the difficulty of the skill challenge. They also have control over who is participating (and can leave out incompetent PCs, if they wish), and can look up DCs to see how hard the skills will be, and thus can make a very informed decision on (1), as well.

My system also explicitly calls out situations that are resolved via skill challenges (like chases or outlasting a storm), with lists of the most common skills to be used in those situations and what those skill uses will be (like Land checks to catch up to someone or Craft checks to jury rig a shelter). So, my system probably wouldn't resolve Manbearcat's scenario using a skill challenge (it'd just be skill checks).

Anyway, I hope some of that was enlightening.

 

[Tony Vargas]

It is all genius from a pure plot generating and adventure location point of view.

I'll admit I have used the Dawn War as an 'origin story' for a number of items, monsters, and locations.

 

[pemerton]

I'd sum up the decision point as "how do you want this story to go?" (Is that fair?)

Just another thought on this.

With my group, and I suspect with [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION]'s group, generally the "how do you want this to go" is approached and answered by the player from the perspective of the character. ("Advocating for the character".)

Relating this to your question about best skill bonuses, I think this shows a difference in this style (which at least arguably is what 4e is the best at by default(?)) between PC building and actual gameplay.

When building a PC, a player isn't (I think) primarily advocating for the character. S/he is thinking about what sort of character s/he would like to play, what sorts of events does s/he want to be involved with during play (want religious events, build a cleric or paladin; what to be at the centre of a vortex of steel, build a fighter; etc). It's a bit like choosing your Beliefs and Instincts in BW.

Sometimes, though, PC building does get driven by advocacy. In my BW game, the player of the wizard has worked out that casting spells in Fight! is hard, and so he wants to learn melee skills. And the wizard character himself worked this out too, when he tried to lightning bolt some zombies and ended up taxing himself to unconsciousness instead. So when the player then sets as a Belief 'I will get my hands on a melee weapon" (or something like that), there is a strong sense of playing and advocating for the character as well as choosing what sort of story to engage with at the meta-level.

In 4e I see this happen too. On levelling to 28th level and choosing feats, a couple of the players - knowing that they were going after Orcus and Lolth - chose poison and necrotic resistanc feats. This has a meta-element, of building a certain sort of vehicle for play, but it also has a character-advocacy element ("Moradin, I'm taking the fight to Lolth, but I need you to ward me against her deadly poisons!").

In gameplay, I think the priorities mostly reverse. Sometimes a gameplay choice is made because it would be fun at the meta-level (in the 4e DMG's player typology, that's the instigator), but mostly it's an exercise in advocacy. The player wants the story to go this way rather than that way because that's what serves the needs/interests/desires of his/her PC.

 

[pemerton]

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).

This is true but trivially so, I think.

And it's true for the mechanical approach you prefer, too.

Elaborating in two respects:

(1) The idea that a PC and an NPC are similar, and hence should be modelled the same way, is rejecting the dramatic/literary dimension of similarity or difference. Once you factor in that dimension, you see that they aren't similar - one is a protagonist, the other not - and hence a good model should model them differently, so as to capture that difference.

(2) Choosing to ignore the literary/dramatic dimension is just as much a choice as choosing to incorporate it, which just as much means that the game "forces its own agenda onto you". Determining the outcomes of events by random chance without reference to dramatic considerations is just as much an agenda as the opposite.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

(2) Choosing to ignore the literary/dramatic dimension is just as much a choice as choosing to incorporate it, which just as much means that the game "forces its own agenda onto you". Determining the outcomes of events by random chance without reference to dramatic considerations is just as much an agenda as the opposite.

I don't agree with you. The game mechanics can either favor the PC, or hinder the PC, or they can stay out of the matter altogether. Choosing to not incorporate bias, either for or against, is an entirely different level of neutrality.

A dramatically-neutral system is not forcing its agenda on you, because it doesn't have an agenda. It's not trying to promote any given outcome.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I don't agree with you. The game mechanics can either favor the PC, or hinder the PC, or they can stay out of the matter altogether. Choosing to not incorporate bias, either for or against, is an entirely different level of neutrality.

(Trying to recall my 2e: I played it, but heavily modified, and it was the ed that drove me from the game for 5 years, I'm really /much/ more up on 1e.) The normal range of stats for D&D humans is 3-18. Doesn't rolling 4d6 drop the lowest for PC stats favor them? Doesn't giving the classes, compared to the poor classless kobolds, for instance, also favor them? Doesn't having them all come together conveniently to form a party favor them?

Just getting a party of 1st level adventurers together to /be/ PCs requires a lot of system-favoring-the-PCs-just-for-being-PCs assumptions. Some of them mechanical, many of them merely implicit.

That's if you want to play a game about adventurers who might or might not be heroes - who will probably die quite soon, like as not. If you want to play a game about 'heroes,' then, yeah, you need more such mechanics just to get it off the ground.

 

[pemerton]

I don't agree with you. The game mechanics can either favor the PC, or hinder the PC, or they can stay out of the matter altogether. Choosing to not incorporate bias, either for or against, is an entirely different level of neutrality.

A dramatically-neutral system is not forcing its agenda on you, because it doesn't have an agenda. It's not trying to promote any given outcome.

It does have an agenda, namely, an agenda of dramatic neutrality!

That may not be an agenda that you care about it, but it's an agenda that is important to me, and one that I've become increasingly conscious of over the years.

The two systems that I am aware of that have the greatest degree of "dramatic neutrality" are classics: Runequest and Traveller. I have played them both, I love them both, I re-read the books fairly regularly. But I would never play them on an ongoing basis, because they would not produce the sort of play experience I am interested in having. Rather, they would "force an agenda" on me, namely, the agenda of dramatic neutrality.

And pulling back to a higher level of abstraction and observation: roleplaying games are about creating shared fictions. Referees create imaginary worlds; players create imaginary persons; the gist of play involves describing events - made-up events - happening to those persons in those worlds.

This need not be a literary pastime - Gygaxian D&D is not, for instance - but it obviously has potential connections to ideas of literature and story-telling. The notion that a game of this sort taking a stand on whether or not PCs are protagonists is not pushing an agenda is mind-boggling to me.

 

[Manbearcat]

Just another thought on this.

With my group, and I suspect with [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION]'s group, generally the "how do you want this to go" is approached and answered by the player from the perspective of the character. ("Advocating for the character".)

Relating this to your question about best skill bonuses, I think this shows a difference in this style (which at least arguably is what 4e is the best at by default(?)) between PC building and actual gameplay.

This is spot on.

For instance, consider your Paladin Thurgon thrust into the exact same scenario that Saerie is in. The differences between the two characters would clearly come out in playt:

- Thurgon is a man of religion and miracles, literally bulwarked by divine potency.

- Thurgon is a man of action, of physical, symmetrical, overt approach.

- Thurgon is a learned man and understands the art of relations, statesmanship, and the projection of presence.​

How do we know this? You built him such that:

- Athletics (+ Mighty Sprint), Diplomacy, Endurance, Intimidate, and Religion will succeed at the medium DC with regularity with the other social skills respectably challenging it.

- Exiled Noble + Knight Commander

- Suite of resources that places him at the tip of the spear, inspiring allies with presence and action, and wielding miracles where that fails.​

My guess is that you would play Thurgon such that he would eschew seeking natural shelter and holing up there. He would probably steel the childrens' will, aggressively work his way down the mountain with them in lockstep behind him, pray for divine intervention (perhaps a fishermen or local hunters or fishermen from a nearby village randomly being where they are), and if it be the will of Kord that he stumbles upon some folks in these wilds, he would attempt (likely successfully) to parlay with them.

And if I wanted to "put Thurgon in a spot" and "show a downside of his class/PC build" (as the result of a failure) to see how he responds, I would be doing some different things than I would be with Saerie. That isn't "gaming the system" from a PC perspective and it isn't GM fiat (meaning a decree indistinguishable from arbitrary) from a GM perspective. It is appropriate PCing and GMing!

 

[D'karr]

One other thing that really appeals to me is that the growth of the character can take the character in very different directions based on story elements that also contain mechanical heft.

Race, class, build, backgrounds, themes, feats (racial, by tier, by fighting style, etc.), paragon paths and epic destinies all play an important part in the story of the character and each have mechanical features that make them distinct. I also like that the rules take into account that the character the player started with might not be the character s/he envisions as s/he grows within the setting/story. So that retraining/rebuilding options are available for the DM to consider from the start.

I particularly like that different characters with the same class can distinguish themselves in different ways by use of all the available building blocks. Even more significant to me is that even classes with similar roles play differently. In one of my regular games I have a fighter, a warden, and a paladin. They are all defenders but they all play very differently.

The more I keep looking the more "best" things I keep finding.