D&D 4E The Best Thing from 4E

[Balesir]

It would not be very appealing to me, in any case, since it removes player agency. You might as well roll randomly to see if rocks fall and everyone dies. Granted, D&D does have a long history of rolling randomly to see if everyone dies, but I've never been a big fan of that style.

A game is a series of meaningful choices. You may not always know the full ramifications of each choice, but they should always matter.

If the left turn is in some way identifiable as a specific type of choice, I think we all are agreed. This might be as simple as the left hand door/passage having a sign on it saying "Business Office - Keep Out!"

But if the left turn and the right turn are apparently identical - if there is no indication of the significance of either - what then? How is this distinguishable from a random selection?

 

[JamesonCourage]

As a thought experiment, what would you both think of a setup whereby the "room with a clue" might be visited before the "evil lair" based on a random roll of a die? Say there was a straight 50:50 chance that the room full of incriminating documents might be visited or might not - would that be "railroading"/"illusion building" or what?

Context matters here. Is it something like a a Search or Perception check initiated by the players? An "evens they find it, odds they don't" initiated by the GM? What led to this 50% chance? Why might it not be visited again (is it more natural... if you go either direction, the other fades forever into the ether? Or is it because the GM says so?)?

I can't answer it based just on that. Who is controlling the roll and the percent, their motivations, a type of "naturalism" vs GM scene setting, etc. all play into answering that question.

Example One:
So, say it's something like the PCs have made decisions while exploring. They come to a fork. There's a Perception check to allow them to find a hidden clue marking what's left and what's right, and the best guy in the group has a 50% chance of spotting it (just by chance... that's where his skill happens to land). They're very interested in the documents, and in no hurry to the big bad in the other direction, so if they know about the documents, then there's no question they'll pursue them. In this scenario, I say there's no illusionism or railroading.

Example Two:
The PCs come to a fork. The players elect to go right. The GM rolls a d6; on evens, they see the documents, and on odds, the big bad. He has no notes on what is either direction, and doesn't decide before they pick left or right. I'd call this light railroading and light illusionism, since he's giving them the illusion that their choice of left or right matters, when he could have just said "you come to a fork, and after you decide, regardless, you encounter..." and been done with it. It's a little heavier railroading if he takes away the documents room for no in-game reason; people generally railroad for narrative reasons.

Example Three:
The PCs come to a fork. The players elect to go right. The GM has notes on what is both directions or had decided before they chose. He doesn't think their choice fits for a better story or fits the pacing he wants right now, so he ignores it and leaves it to fate. The GM rolls a d6; on evens, they see the documents, and on odds, the big bad. I'd call this railroading and light illusionism, since he's giving them the illusion that their choice of left or right matters, when he could have just said "you come to a fork, and after you decide, regardless, you encounter..." and been done with it. It's even heavier railroading if he takes away the documents room for no in-game reason.


Do these examples make sense?

 

[The Crimson Binome]

As for the players persuading the lieutenant to pursue some other agenda without knowing who she is - that doesn't sound like my sort of thing. What is the players' motivation, here? Why are they having their PCs engage with the lieutenant? Is she important to them in some other capacity (as in my case, where the players, and therefore their PCs, cared about the niece but didn't know she was a necromancer)? In that case, some sort of reveal or twist would seem in order, so the players actually know what has happened in the fiction.

In the example I'm imagining, they might overhear this NPC at the tavern, complaining about her boss or some other sort of vague grievance. Maybe they approach, and start asking questions, in the way that adventurers do. Maybe they give advice, and convince her to run off with her love interest, since she's clearly unhappy with her job. More likely, they ignore her as irrelevant, only to recognize her much later on when she does her thing. There's also a chance that the whole building will go up in a massive explosion, as sometimes happens in proximity to the PCs.

I have trouble with the example - why is there something in the evil lair that is both (i) meant to be important - the secret documents, yet (ii) the players don't know about it, or have no way of knowing about it except random chance (choosing left rather than right). To me, that seems like poor design.

Maybe I didn't present that clearly. I didn't mean to imply that it was a random, binary choice. I meant that they had a clear goal, and had the option of not immediately pursuing it.

In any case, though, the secret documents aren't necessarily important. Maybe the party never went into town, so they don't recognize anyone on the list. Maybe nobody can read the language it's written it. It is what it is. If they find it, and it helps them, then great. If not, then don't worry about it.

In other words, if nothing turns on whether the PCs go left first, then right, or right first, then left - if it really is just random - why preserve that choice at all?

It's not my place to say. Maybe they'll reach their goal, and then feel some compulsion to leave without going back to explore (someone gets petrified or poisoned, and you need to get back to town for the cure). There's any number of reasons why players might choose one path over another, or choose to not explore both. Or maybe the Fighter has a disagreement with the Wizard, and storms off in the opposite direction. Who knows?

What would be more interesting would be if getting the information gave a reason not to go right, but also created a cost - instead of stopping the sacrifice now, say, the PCs get the chance to expose the whole evil plot and all its backers! But then that sounds interesting enough that it would seem better just to frame the PCs into that choice, rather than make it depend upon going left or right.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'frame' in this instance. Is that like railroading?

There's also the issue of the mysterious stranger. Do the players know about this person? Is s/he of interest to them? If the answer to either is "no", then why is the GM trying to push something that has not got traction with the players? If the answer to both is "yes", then why is the GM making an interesting episode of play - the PCs confronting the mysterious stranger about his/her allegiance to the bad guy - contingent on the players choosing to go left rather than right?

The answer to both is "maybe". The DM has no way of knowing if or when the PCs will encounter this stranger, or what their reaction will be. Nor could the location of the secret info possibly depend upon that.

Which I think just serves to highlight the differences in our playstyles. You want the DM to set things up in a way such that events will be most interesting/exciting to the players. I want the DM to set things up in whatever way makes most sense to the DM, without particular consideration for how the players feel about it. When the DM takes my interests (as a player) into consideration while directing the story, my brain gets caught in a feedback loop and I can't proceed.

Edit: If the DM has something planned, and I don't like where it's going, I would prefer to see it through to completion rather than having the DM retcon it based on how the players receive it. Not every element of the story needs to be a home run.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

But if the left turn and the right turn are apparently identical - if there is no indication of the significance of either - what then? How is this distinguishable from a random selection?

If the PCs are making a blind choice to go left or right, and that's all there is to it, then there's no practical difference whether it was pre-determined or determined on-the-spot by a die roll. There is still the matter of integrity, and letting the players determine their own fate, but in this trivial example it's irrelevant.

The real difference is that the situation in the game is rarely that simple. Players are going to disagree about which way to go, or someone is going to run off, or there will be an explosion which blocks one of the passages. It's entirely probable that they will want to backtrack, whichever way they go first. Maybe they'll get halfway down a corridor and then change their mind. You never know.

It's kind of like how Minions work. They do work as intended, within a narrow role. If you're actually sitting there and maneuvering and attacking them, they do a great job. It's only when you try to drag them out of their comfort zone that things start to break down.

 

[Balesir]

My goal is to reassure players that their choices matter. If everyone just charges head-long toward the goal, then that might not always work out for them. They might miss out on something. They might get in over their heads. And if they do, then hopefully they realize that they brought it upon themselves. And if they survive that, they can either continue being recklessly straightforward, or decide to be more cautious in the future.

This happens to illustrate an issue I have with this "naturalistic" or "common sense" type of play. The characters might "get in over their heads", or "recklessly" push on. Or they might achieve surprise, overrun the big bad before s/he has a chance to prepare or interrupt something that provides them with advantage (maybe the big bad is in flagrante with their SO?).

The point is that your election that they "get in over their heads" and "realize that they brought it upon themselves" is pure value judgement, on your part. The game-players among the players will be working on learning and reading the way your values will work. In the end, the game could be less an exploration of an imaginary world and more an exploration of your personal assumptions and values as a GM. The only reason the game world works this way is because it's the way you (the GM) think it ought to work. The players have no way to know this except to know you; there is absolutely nothing in either the real world or the game world to establish this prediliction in advance.

Context matters here. Is it something like a a Search or Perception check initiated by the players? An "evens they find it, odds they don't" initiated by the GM? What led to this 50% chance? Why might it not be visited again (is it more natural... if you go either direction, the other fades forever into the ether? Or is it because the GM says so?)?

I think it's interesting if you find a 50% chance as a result of some skill check significantly different from a simple, independent 50% chance, but what I had in mind was a simple, independent 50% chance.

I can't answer it based just on that. Who is controlling the roll and the percent, their motivations, a type of "naturalism" vs GM scene setting, etc. all play into answering that question.

So, the suggestion is that the GM's intent is a critical element, here? Not merely the fact of what is done, but the intent behind it? How are the players to have any inkling of GM intent?

Just for the record, what I had in mind really didn't feature the "fork in the way". You could think of it as a sequence of rooms where the order of entry was random. In other words, the first door leads to one room or the other, and beyond that another door leads to the second room.

An interesting sequel to the comparison might be, as well as your view on rolling for which room is through the first door - the clue room or the fight room - would it make a difference if the order of rooms was diced for in advance, before the session, as opposed to when the players announced that the characters were going through the (first) door?

Do these examples make sense?

They do, but the scenario you have assumed is not neccessarily the one I had in mind.

There is a limit to how important this is, of course. The main point of this exercise is to explore where, for you, "the line" is drawn. Extensive work with stochastic occurrences has led me to view randomness as simply representing the impact of "stuff we don't know". An uninformed decision by someone is thus identical, to me, to a random selection. At some remove, it becomes obviously so, but closer in it is sometimes intuitive to perceive divisions in "types of randomness". It's interesting to explore those in this case because I think they are informing your view of (I would say, only apparently) different cases.

Example One:
So, say it's something like the PCs have made decisions while exploring. They come to a fork. There's a Perception check to allow them to find a hidden clue marking what's left and what's right, and the best guy in the group has a 50% chance of spotting it (just by chance... that's where his skill happens to land). They're very interested in the documents, and in no hurry to the big bad in the other direction, so if they know about the documents, then there's no question they'll pursue them. In this scenario, I say there's no illusionism or railroading.

If there is player information (i.e. the skill check is made) then I exclude it from the scenario. That immediately becomes an informed choice and thus subject to illusionism by any measure.

From this point of view, there is arguably an interesting Gamist slant to be had in including the left-right fork. Character skill selection becomes a de-facto way to skew the odds in what remains a fundamentally random selection. So, for the purposes of this exercise, please exclude the "skill check for a helpful skew" possibility.

Example Two:
The PCs come to a fork. The players elect to go right. The GM rolls a d6; on evens, they see the documents, and on odds, the big bad. He has no notes on what is either direction, and doesn't decide before they pick left or right. I'd call this light railroading and light illusionism, since he's giving them the illusion that their choice of left or right matters, when he could have just said "you come to a fork, and after you decide, regardless, you encounter..." and been done with it. It's a little heavier railroading if he takes away the documents room for no in-game reason; people generally railroad for narrative reasons.

How can the players have any notion of their choice genuinely mattering if they have no information on which to base the decision? The only thing they might possibly perceive is that they are making a genuine gamble - which remains true if a die is rolled for the result. There is, incidentally, no reason I can see why the players should not roll the die (except a purely aesthetic one if they wish to pretend that there is some sort of "reality" to the game world beyond the GM - i.e. a Simulationist agenda).

Example Three:
The PCs come to a fork. The players elect to go right. The GM has no notes on what is both directions or had decided before they chose. He doesn't think their choice fits for a better story or fits the pacing he wants right now, so he ignores it and leaves it to fate. The GM rolls a d6; on evens, they see the documents, and on odds, the big bad. I'd call this railroading and light illusionism, since he's giving them the illusion that their choice of left or right matters, when he could have just said "you come to a fork, and after you decide, regardless, you encounter..." and been done with it. It's even heavier railroading if he takes away the documents room for no in-game reason.

I don't see what is the difference between this and example 2? Can you explain further?

As a further explanation of my own position, I really don't see the point of the fork unless it has some value in player decision making. If there is, say, a sign on one or both options, or even a skill check to discern a difference (if we are playing very build-centric gamist) then it makes sense. If it's just going to be random then I would make it random - or set one order or another by the layout of the scenario up-front.

As Robin Laws says in Gumshoe - what is interesting about clues isn't finding them, it's what you do with them when you have them. In a sense, this might be the real dichotomy between ROLLplaying (rolling to find the clues) and ROLEplaying (the decisions made once the clues are revealed).

 

[The Crimson Binome]

The point is that your election that they "get in over their heads" and "realize that they brought it upon themselves" is pure value judgement, on your part. The game-players among the players will be working on learning and reading the way your values will work. In the end, the game could be less an exploration of an imaginary world and more an exploration of your personal assumptions and values as a GM. The only reason the game world works this way is because it's the way you (the GM) think it ought to work. The players have no way to know this except to know you; there is absolutely nothing in either the real world or the game world to establish this prediliction in advance.

Presumably the players agree to trust my judgment on these matters, and that's why they're playing a game where I'm the judge. If my rulings didn't make sense to them, then they would find some other game with a different judge. Thus, while my assumption may not be universal, or entirely based on actual reality, they should be understandable to everyone playing my game.

Kind of like how different authors have different styles, and you might not buy into the types of characters and stories favored by some authors, so readers end up sticking to authors that they like. The DM is the author of the game-world, so it should be no surprise when the story reflects this fact.

 

[Manbearcat]

This is a pretty great thread by the way. Thanks [MENTION=6668292]JamesonCourage[/MENTION] and [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION] for your involvement. You guys haven't gotten enough xp so there is some xp for a few random posts. Its amazing. People can actually oppose each other without being giant DBs. Who woulda thunk it?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Presumably the players agree to trust my judgment on these matters, and that's why they're playing a game where I'm the judge. If my rulings didn't make sense to them, then they would find some other game with a different judge. Thus, while my assumption may not be universal, or entirely based on actual reality, they should be understandable to everyone playing my game.

Kind of like how different authors have different styles, and you might not buy into the types of characters and stories favored by some authors, so readers end up sticking to authors that they like. The DM is the author of the game-world, so it should be no surprise when the story reflects this fact.

Eh, you may presume too much. They may not be informed of your DMing techniques, they may be playing for social reasons, they may simply play for other aesthetic reasons and not care too much about player agency. I've seen all of these.

In fact I played in several campaigns with a DM, from 1980 to the mid 90's, who was super railroady and an inveterate illusionist. Yet we were good friends, he is a very creative guy, so his stories were usually interesting, and we had a lot of friends we all played various games with, so it wasn't really feasible to avoid playing in this particular GM's game. Honestly, it was OK, but in some sense he could have been a VASTLY better GM if he'd just let the players have some agency. You just knew going in that the plot was out of your hands, if you did anything significant in the game world it was either in accord with 'the plan' or it would just not come off no matter what you did.

We did play some other games, though at the time stuff like OtE wasn't even on our radar. I think he'd have vastly benefited from a system like that, and indeed in the few RPGs he ran that were less 'dysfunctional' or 'incoherent', to risk invoking Edwards again, the results WERE better.

Anyway, the point is that its never a good assumption to just believe that all is as you believe it to be in the world. People may in fact have wants and needs that are unmet by the current game, and its always a good idea to test your assumptions and experiment some.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This is a pretty great thread by the way. Thanks [MENTION=6668292]JamesonCourage[/MENTION] and [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION] for your involvement. You guys haven't gotten enough xp so there is some xp for a few random posts. Its amazing. People can actually oppose each other without being giant DBs. Who woulda thunk it?

I think 'oppose' is too strong a word. Maybe we disagree, on some points. I think there are plenty of points of congruence. Of course I'm perhaps the exception, I could probably play happily in a game run by any of the main contributors here. I'm really not very picky at that level, though I'd probably prefer certain GMs over others, to some extent.

 

[pemerton]

Isn't this the same guy who self-identified as 'narrativist?'

Yes - but he's also the guy who was writing essays saying that people should run (and design) games in ways that suit what they want. He characterises narrativism and gamism as "opposed poles of a magnet".

I'm not sure they're as opposed as Edwards thinks they are, but his real point is that simulationism is the odd one out. In gamism the fiction is for something: an arena for confronting and overcoming challenges (White Plume Mountain, Tomb of Horrors, Hidden Shine remain some of the quintessential D&D examples). In narrativism the fiction is for something: it provides the elements with which, or against which, the players express their PCs' dramatic needs, and from which the resolutions to those dramatic needs are constructed.

In the community for which Edwards was predominantly writing (ie the "indie" community of the late 90/early 2000s), the puzzle of simulationism is that the fiction is not for anything. That's why Edwards called his essay on simulationism "the right to dream" - because dreaming is the spontaneous creation of fiction that is not for anything.

Part of the Forge objection to illusionism is that it is simulationism masquerading as something else: the GM pretends to the players that they overcame a challenge, but in fact it was all determined by the GM's fudging of the dice rolls; or the GM pretends to the players that they made choices that expressed the dramatic needs of their PCs and thereby determined fictional consequences, but in fact it was all determined by the GM's manipulation of the backstory.

This is also why Edwards calls consenusal "illusionism" participationism: there is no illusion, and the players willingly participate in the experience of the GM's dream. Of well-known systems I think that Call of Cthulhu is the clearest example of this: no one pretends, in standard CoC play, that the choices of the players make a meaningful difference to overcoming challenges or to resolving dramatic needs. The players are experiencing the GM's narration of a cosmic horror story in which their PCs are caught up, but are not protagonists (protagonism is largely antithetical to the aesthetic aspirations of cosmic horror).

I don't know if you've read Luke Crane talking about playing Moldvay Basic. This is a celebration, by an author most often associated with narrative RPG design (Burning Wheel) and credited (by Jonathan Tweet among others) as a pioneer in articulating "fail forward" as a technique, of hard-failing, PC-death gamist play. Most telling, in the context of illusionism discussions, is his comment about fudging:

I've learned that it's a hard game to run. Not because of prep or rules mastery, but because of the role of the GM as impartial conveyer of really bad news. Since the exploration side of the game is cross between Telephone and Pictionary, I must sit impassive as the players make bad decisions. I want them to win. I want them to solve the puzzles, but if I interfere, I render the whole exercise pointless.

I've a deeper understanding why fudging dice is the worst rule ever proposed. The rules indicate fudging with a wink and a nudge, "Don't let a bad die roll ruin a good game." Seems like good advice, but to them I say, "Don't put bad die rolls in your game."

To expand on the point: The players' sense of accomplishment is enormous. They went through hell and death to survive long enough to level. They have their own stories about how certain scenarios played out. They developed their own clever strategems to solve the puzzles and defeat the opposition. If I fudge a die, I take that all away. Every bit of it. Suddenly, the game becomes my story about what I want to happen. The players, rather than being smart and determined and lucky, are pandering to my sense of drama—to what I think the story should be.

So this wink and nudge that encourages GMs to fudge is the greatest flaw of the text.​

Luke Crane clearly gets narrativism (evidence: Burning Wheel). He clearly gets gamism (evidence: the passage I just quoted). Does he get simulationism? Dunno, but I'm not sure he's on board with the subordination of player agency that simulationism requires (because once there's player agency, we're not just dreaming - the players are using their agency to do something).

It's simulationism which is the odd one out, from the Forge perspective.

Frankly, the article you linked, for all that it is a nuanced dismissal of balance, is still a dismissal. I mean, did it result in a clear definition of 'balance?'

The point is that there is no single, clear definition of balance.

You can see this manifested concretely in game design. In 4e, having a weakness to a certain sort of attack (say, fire vulnerability) is a penalty, and so in PC build needs to be traded off against other benefits. (Much of the dispute over the vampire class is whether the tradeoffs around regen, radiant vulnerability, healing surge cap, etc are balanced.)

In Burning Wheel, that sort of weakness is something you have to pay for at PC build, because it opens up a point of leverage for your PC in relation to the fictional situation that you would not otherwise enjoy.

In Marvel Heroic RP, the characters with smaller dice (hence weaker) are more likely to roll 1s. A 1 gives the player a "plot point" (fate point) and the GM a bonus die in the "doom pool" (which is the GM's resource pool). And the GM is likely to use the dice in the doom pool to try and confront the heavier hitters in the party.

Different resolution systems, connected to different approaches to the goals of play, mean that considerations of balance or imbalance are very different in these games.

all I'm seeing in the glossary is the the Roll v Role thing again

Then I think you've misread. Read Luke Crane's take on Moldvay Basic. That is the quintessential Forge outlook. From the Forge point of view, Gygaxian "skilled play" D&D is as sensible and comprehensible as some avant-garde game designed by Paul Czege or Vincent Baker. It's the 90s-style "storytelling" play associated with 2nd ed AD&D (though, as per my post upthread, found as early as 1982 in a prominent commentary on the game) and with White Wolf that is the problem case.

The contemporary expression of that would be the Adventure Path - neither gamist (because the players have to win for the thing to progress) nor narrativist (because the story is pre-authored) but wanting to maintain some sort of illusion of player agency.

Any derived-from-within theory of a sub-culture that starts by dividing it up into us-and-thems is immediately suspect in my book.

That may be wise, but again I think you have mis-identified the "them": it is simulationism, not gamism.

"These are the definitions we'll use for the debate, as a result one side of the debate is already wrong, by definition."

I'm not sure who you think is being defined as wrong.

On balance in gamism, Edwards says:

1. Parity of starting point, with free rein given to differing degrees of improvement after that. Basically, this means that "we all start equal" but after that, anything goes, and if A gets better than B, then that's fine.

2. The relative Effectiveness of different categories of strategy: magic vs. physical combat, for instance, or pumping more investment into quickness rather than endurance. In this sense, "balance" means that any strategy is at least potentially effective, and "unbalanced" means numerically broken.

3. Related to #2, a team that is not equipped for the expected range of potential dangers is sometimes called unbalanced.

4. In direct contrast to #1, "balance" can also mean that everyone is subject to the same vagaries of fate (Fortune). That is, play is "balanced" if everyone has a chance to save against the Killer Death Trap. Or it's balanced because we all rolled 3d6 for Strength, regardless of what everyone individually ended up with. (Tunnels & Trolls is all about this kind of play.)

5. The resistance of a game to deliberate Breaking.​

Who is being said to be "wrong by definition"? If we look at 4e, for instance, it aims at (2) and (5), to the extent that it involves (1) this is seen as an unintended and perhaps unfortunate side effect (eg people emphasise that the power gaps that open up in 4e are generally less than in 3E), supports (3) (the "team synergy" for which 4e is widely lauded) and doesn't really care about (4).

Contrast classic D&D, in which (4) is generally true, likewise (3) (though thieves are perhaps optional), (1) is true (and is closely linked to (4), because how well you progress can depend heavily on the vagaries of fortune, including magic item acquisition) but (2) is definitely absent (at low levels physical trumps magic, and from around level 5 and up magic trumps physical) and (5) is not very robust (it's not that hard to deliberately break AD&D, especially post-UA).

And now compare 3E. (5) is right out (the game is very easy to deliberately break). (4) also tends to be missing above low levels, because some players get resources (via their PCs) that let them regulate their exposure to the vagaries of fortunes. Neither (2) nor (3) is present: the most mechanically effective team is not a "balanced" one but an all cleric/druid one, perhaps with a back-up wizard; and martial and magical strategies are not generally equally effective.

The only real way in which 3E is balanced, from the gamist point of view, is (1): everyone has all the options in front of him/her and so has equal opportunity of PC build. Hence the importance of system mastery to gamist 3E play.

The upshot: I'm not sure what your objection is to this discussion of balance, as it seems to me to give a fairly robust set of concepts for understanding the different ways in which 4e, classic D&D and 3E are balanced or unbalanced.