D&D 4E The Best Thing from 4E

[Balesir]

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.

All fair comment, but bear in mind that neither Newton's laws or the work of Claude Navier and George Stokes sprang into being as a result of a single experiment or observation. They were the culmination of many years of work and many, many experiments by many people (that they were able to read about due to the scientifiv libraries that were developed in the "scientific revolution").

The level of understanding that someone with a scientific education posesses today is in no way natural or commonplace in a historical (or even non-western modern) context. Basic science is hard; it requires years of effort by many people - in most fantasy worlds this sort of thing will be quite alien.

What remains is experimentation - trying stuff to see if it works. Now, if a character in a game using the randomised method I suggest were to carry out an extensive series of experiments intended to measure the exact process of the use of chaos energy, they might find a distinct pattern and be at the same time excited and suspicious that it seems to work in surprisingly precise 5% increments... But the idea that they would instantly know whether or not the thing was possible seems totally implausible to me.

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.

Right - you might more comparably think of psychological or economic investigations as being analogous, rather than physics experiments. The basic principle of "it needs multiple, repeated, well designed (controlled and blinded) experiments by a range of observers before it's proper science" still applies, though.

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.

If you were considering a modern or roughly contemporary game, I think you might have a point, but prediction of where science might go or what it might discover in 100 or even 10 years is as good as fantasy. If someone had told even an 18-yeaar-old me that one day I would have my own suite of computers and one of them would fit in my pocket, I would have thought they were barmy; that "just didn't make sense" to me at the time...

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.

Doing back-of-the-envelope stuff for RPGs can be fun, but I run accross fatal issues with traditional "process sim", personally.

Mostly, these stem from the fact that, as often implemented, the "process sim" model of reality that is taken as a base is that of just one person - the GM. This is not so bad with physics-type stuff; most of what comes up (except sci-fi with supposedly STL travel) will be Newton's laws stuff, and you either kknow those or you don't. But that, as mentioned above, is not the typical level of model we need; we need stuff more like economics, psychology and hand-to-hand combat. In my experience with the specific parts of those topics with which I am reasonably familiar, most GMs do an absolutely abominable job of modelling many of these things even vaguely correctly (or even plausibly). If they do that with the bits I know about, I assume that they are just as inaccurate with the bits I don't know about.

What this arrangement leads to is a situation where the model of reality that is in use is utterly unknown to me and I assume to be largely disconnected from the real world. So, I am left playing a game of "guess what the GM is thinking". Yawn. Immersion actually becomes almost impossible, at this point, since I am concentrating on the GM's body language to pick up the "tells" that mean a plan is going to work or it's not - in short, the Expectancy Effect writ large. Follow that up with an involuntary game of "spot the heuristic" and it just becomes an experience that I find frustrating and irritating. Especially when said GM gets defensive about what he or she perceives to be the nature of reality...

Compared to this, I find the paradigm of a fixed set of rules that apply to all a breath of fresh air. Dealing with "experiments" randomly means that I don't meet the situation of trying something that, for what are to me arbitrary reasons, won't work. I will at least know that an "uncertain" situation is genuinely uncertain!

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.

I agree with the explosions

If you watch Mythbusters a fair bit, though, you will see that most of the myths - whether they are "bust" or not - are not really cut-and-dried. Sure, the way the myth is commonly presented might not work, but some variant or modification might come close. To quote Ben Goldacre, "I think you might find it's more complicated than that"... In other words, there are very few totally clear "cannots" - just a lot of fairly nuanced limitations.

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).

Well, for a start, depending on what hit points actually represent there might be actual in-game reasons for certain characters to have more of them (I'm thinking, in part, of Birthright, here, where rulers of domains got +10hp because of the manifestation of their divine bloodline). In a wider sense, I would take the view that there must be an in-world reason for PCs to have more hit points (if that's what the game says). There really is no such thing as "rules without in-game reasons"; game rules, by definition in my view, have in-game reasons. They might not be dictated to you in the rulebook, it might instead be left to the players' imaginations, but there must be reasons; that's just fundamental to what reasons are. If you want to play in a game world where those reasons don't exist, then don't use those particular rules - but saying "I think this reason is stupid so no game rules ever should have rules that might be due to this" is just, well, pointlessly demanding.

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.

Fine. Most differences I see are like this. HârnMaster works well with BattleLust (a skirmish wargame designed for HârnWorld) in much this way; HârnMaster PCs are far more detailed than BattleLust warriors, but they fight pretty similarly. Of course, a Hârnic "adventuring party" (to the extent that such things exist) would likely come out of the situation better, but that would be due to the quality of healing they generally have access to, rather than to combat prowess, necessarily.

Much the same could be said of 4E D&D, actually, in the sense that equal-level elites are typically as powerful as the PCs. Of course, the guidelines for play recommend not using such powerful encounters. That doesn't mean you cannot do it if it floats your boat, but if you want a 30-level heroic arc with the same characters (and, at least for some campaigns, we do) then it's not going to be conducive.

 

[Balesir]

When they only gave you a monster stat block, including THAC0 and Hit Dice and AC and Intelligence range, it's because the vast majority of the creatures of that type would have stats that fall close enough to the listed that the differences didn't matter.

If you just needed the stats for a bandit, then it didn't matter whether that bandit had Wisdom 8 and Dexterity 13, because you needed extremely high or low stats before they had any impact on combat. It's not that NPCs didn't follow normal 3d6 distribution, so much that the chance that any of that would matter was low enough that actually generating stats would be a waste of time.

Oh, sorry, but now you're just rationalising defensively!

 

[The Crimson Binome]

But the idea that they would instantly know whether or not the thing was possible seems totally implausible to me.

They should have a pretty good idea whether it's something that should work, based on what they currently know about how things work. A pocket-sized computer might seem impossible to you, eighteen years ago, and it was! Eighteen years ago, there's no way you could have made a pocket-sized computer.

Likewise, a sorcerer or arcanist should know, with little time for consideration and a fair degree of certainty, whether chaos energy can be channelled from a dying firedrake into a magical item or into oneself. Not in terms of theoretical possibilities of the far future, but whether they have the capability of doing that right now.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Oh, sorry, but now you're just rationalising defensively!

You mean it wasn't immediately obvious to everyone that every creature in the game world actually did have stats that could be measured on a standard 1-25 scale, the details of which were usually omitted because they were irrelevant?

I suppose that's barely conceivable, though I find it hard to believe. If I ask someone what the Dexterity of a typical Ogre is, I'm pretty sure that they'd give me a number (likely in the range of 4-14) rather than claiming that the question doesn't make sense because Ogres don't have Dexterity.

 

[S'mon]

(e) which all added up to its look of AD&D3e.

Yeah, I'm finding it's an awesome game for running with the grognards on Dragonsfoot, it really sings. Conversely when I tried running Phandelver with my 4e group it felt rather flat & we soon went back
to 4e.

 

[S'mon]

While I don't think you're factually wrong in your premises, I can't agree with the conclusion. D&D has historically done well when /not/ innovating. It'll always be the first RPG. It remains the only RPG with mainstream name recognition. Keeping it familiar may be a solid strategy: people coming to D&D find what they've heard of, people returning to it find what they remember. Maybe not a good strategy for growth, but for maintaining the brand, keeping costs low, and minimizing risk. Not a tombstone, perhaps, at worst a place-holder until a new opportunity presents itself.

Yeah, it's the Captain America of RPGs!

Obviously I'm a 4e fan, but it's definitely an acquired taste, and its un-D&Dishness caused it major problems in the marketplace. I think D&D needs to be familiar and D&D-like. 3e managed that despite innovation,
I think 5e too. 4e is in many ways a cooler game, but it's not the easy-access dungeon-bashing game people expect from D&D.

 

[S'mon]

5e is classic short-term thinking. It probably boosted sales, for a while, but it hamstrung the product in the process by driving out the people that were likely to innovate with it.

I'm 3 sessions in to my online 5e game and innovating like crazy, thank you.
It seems a great system for houseruling - so far I've redone skills & saves, remade Turn Undead,
implemented Slow Healing per DMG, capped spell level, effectively changed combat movement... all the stuff I can't do in 3e without fear of breaking it. It's like my dream version of 3e. B)

 

[Balesir]

They should have a pretty good idea whether it's something that should work, based on what they currently know about how things work. A pocket-sized computer might seem impossible to you, eighteen years ago, and it was! Eighteen years ago, there's no way you could have made a pocket-sized computer.

Thanks for the flattering assumption, but by "18-year-old me" I meant when I was 18 years old, which was a good deal more than 18 years ago!

And, you know, the funny thing was that I kind-of-sort-of did have a pocket computer, then. For school I had an early programmable calculator. Sure, it didn't have what you might identify as an "operating system" and the range of apps available was limited to some key sequence listings in geek magazines. But it did computations, it fitted in my blazer pocket and it was mine.

Likewise, a sorcerer or arcanist should know, with little time for consideration and a fair degree of certainty, whether chaos energy can be channelled from a dying firedrake into a magical item or into oneself. Not in terms of theoretical possibilities of the far future, but whether they have the capability of doing that right now.

Sorry, I'm not buying it. Some of the time, maybe, but I have set out to do too many things where all we knew about its possibility at start was "well, you never know 'til you try!". Sometimes you're surprised by what's possible; other times you're surprised by what's not possible!

You mean it wasn't immediately obvious to everyone that every creature in the game world actually did have stats that could be measured on a standard 1-25 scale, the details of which were usually omitted because they were irrelevant?

Well, uh, no. Otherwise, RuneQuest would not have been such a big deal when it came along and DID give stats to "monsters".

I suppose that's barely conceivable, though I find it hard to believe. If I ask someone what the Dexterity of a typical Ogre is, I'm pretty sure that they'd give me a number (likely in the range of 4-14) rather than claiming that the question doesn't make sense because Ogres don't have Dexterity.

I think you have to realise where roleplayers were originating from, in the early days. I, and most roleplayers I knew prior to around 1980 or so, started out as wargamers. OD&D derived from a set of wargame rules. The troops - including the fantasy ones like orcs and elves - in Chainmail (the wargames rules that D&D came from) had just a combat die rating. The "great leap" taken by D&D was to tack on these "statistics" to give unique individuals that were designated to be played by the players in the game as their own "selves". The idea was that, instead of just jumping straight into the hero/general's shoes (commanders often got special characteristics, too, albeit different ones) you could start as a veteran grunt or a junior magic user and work your way up. This all meant that the idea that "monsters are people, too" really wasn't obvious or intuitive. Of course, once RQ had done it, everyone could see it was a neat idea. But just because an idea is neat doesn't mean it should be applied everywhere. Like peanut butter, there are some things that are really improved when you add it, but there are other things where your best move is to leave it out. Computers, for example.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Sorry, I'm not buying it. Some of the time, maybe, but I have set out to do too many things where all we knew about its possibility at start was "well, you never know 'til you try!". Sometimes you're surprised by what's possible; other times you're surprised by what's not possible!

"I don't know if I can do it, or even if it's theoretically possible but if it is possible then I know I can do it."

Yeah, no. Not buying it. Of the various possible ways to run this, that one seems less probable than most alternatives. More likely candidates include, "I don't know if it's possible, but even if it is possible, I don't know how to do it," and "I am fairly confident that it is possible, and if my understanding is correct, then I can probably perform that task."

Edit: Actually, now that I think about it, it does kind of make sense from a dramatic perspective. Protagonist scientists are routinely doing things that should be impossible, mostly because it's more dramatic that way. So I guess that furthers the 4E agenda, at least.

 

[pemerton]

Responding to [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] and [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] on 5e - I can see where both of you are coming from in your comments on 5e. I don't know if I fully agree. (With the word "fully" used literally, not just for rhetorical effect. I think I partly agree.)

On the PC-build side, 5e looks like a revision of Essentials. My best sense, from looking at the rules and following play reports, is that while asymmetric in its builds, it is probably relatively well mathematically balanced over a "standard" adventuring day. And it does have features (cantrips, encounter recharges of some spells, etc) to try to reduce the prospects of caster novas. (Which, if they become routine, obviously blow asymmetric balance out of the water.)

The monster stats also seem to be relative methodical in the way they're put together - though, in my view, somewhat boring compared to the best or even the middling of 4e. But it doesn't have the pseudo-simulation of 3E's "natural armour" bonuses, uncapped stats etc, which are just mechanical devices cloaked in the thinnest veil of ingame meaning.

I'm one of those who thinks the Stealth rules are terribly written, but I think you could just jack on the 4e rules without any problems.

It seems to me, then, that the illusionistic/AD&D-ish elements or tendencies come from other places.

First, the encounter-building guidelines are not as crisp as 4e. That said, they're still there, and by all accounts 5e PCs are mechanically very robust, so I don't see why anyone would have to fudge monster hp in 5e moreso than in 4e.

Second, the non-combat conflict-resolution mechanics seem to be very thin. It offers structure for exploration, which should reduce the need for illusionism in that department compared to (say) 2nd ed AD&D, but no so much for actual conflicts/encounters which don't involve either violence or charm spells. (13th Age lacks robust non-combat conflict resolution mechanics also, but I think is cleaner in its DC presentation and its fail-forward advice.) This can produce illusionistic non-combat resolution.

Third, and here is a contrast with 13th Age, there is no ready-made structure for enforcing the balance of encounters-per-day (especially combat encounters) that will support the asymmetric balance. 4e doesn't have this either (contrast 13th Age), but non-Essentials doesn't need it as much because if everyone novas it might make the encounter a cakewalk but doesn't create intra-party balance issues. This can produce illusionistice managing of pacing.

Fourth, two and three somewhat overlap, in that if casters are using their spells to resolve non-combat conflicts, they are powering down in relation to combat, but there is no real corresponding way for non-casters to shift their effort or resources from combat to non-combat because of the aforementioned lack of robust non-combat mechanics (so eg, there is no canonical way that I know of for a fighter to use Action Surge or Second Wind to buff his/her effort in relation to an episode of non-combat resolution that is comparable even to the loose guidance on action point and surge expenditure provided by 4e's DMG2 in its skill challenge section). This can produce illusionistic management of both pacing and resolution.

Fifth - and building on one and two - it may be that the core mechanics (PCs + monsters + the sorts of encounters/conflicts the game tends towards, given its resolution mechanics and its build guidelines) aren't as mechanically interesting as 3E (not know well be me, but I gather pretty intricate) and 4e. So the interest has to be "injected" by the GM from outside, which favours manipulation of the story via illusionist techniques.

I wonder what [MENTION=205]TwoSix[/MENTION] or [MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION] (or, of course, anyone else) thinks of these conjectures?

I've redone skills & saves, remade Turn Undead, implemented Slow Healing per DMG, capped spell level, effectively changed combat movement

I know your skill and save changes (and have read the thread that explains how your save changes will break this most modular of games!), and I know what slow healing is.

What are your Turn Undead, spell level cap and movement changes? I think the 5e rules for combat movement are probably its most dramatic innovation on the action economy side of things.