D&D 4E The Best Thing from 4E

[pemerton]

Railroading, as I define it in the GM chapter of my RPG, is "ending with the GM's desired outcome, no matter the actions that take place."

<snip>

It's the same with "the players will arrive at the ritual at this specific point, no matter what choices they make." This is the GM's desired outcome, and it doesn't matter what actions the players take.

Two things.

One, it's not an outcome - it's a starting point.

Two, it reflects the players' desires, not the GM's.

So it doesn't fit either limb of your definition.

 

[pemerton]

That seems weird to me. If your campaign setting has a history of being plagued by undead and demons, and not so much by giants or dragons, then it would make internal sense if that setting had more demon-slayers and undead-hunters than dragon-slayers and giant-killers.

There is no such ingame history. Or at least, no such history known to me or the players.

The reason the players focus on undead and demon-killing ability is because, having played with me for over 15 years in a group that has had overlapping membership going back 25 years, I am known as a GM to favour those sorts of creatures as opponents for the PCs.

I don't know who wrote that module.

Which module? I didn't know we were talking about a module. I've been talking about a hypothetical that originated with you and [MENTION=6668292]JamesonCourage[/MENTION], where there is a choice of left and right paths, the right path is known to lead to the possibility of victory, and the left path is essentially unknown, and unknowable except by taking it.

I think you have a pretty thorough understanding of my style, by now. Players are players and the GM is the GM. The players each play the role of one character. The GM plays all of the NPCs, and designs the world which the PCs explore.

<snip>

It is similar to a sandbox-style video game, which is entirely created by (often professional) game developers in some dark office building.

Yep. At this level of description, the game may or may not be player-driven: see below.

Just as it is good role-playing for a player to imagine herself in the place of her character, and make decisions from that standpoint, so it is my place as DM to imagine what the Big Bad would do. If you have a lot of minions, then you're going to need an office to keep that stuff organized. It would be weird if that information didn't exist somewhere.

And for me, this is the crux. If you look at D&D adventures from the 70s (and even early 80s) - say, the modules published by TSR, or the adventures in White Dwarf - what you see is that the office will be there, but it will provide some reasonable avenue for PC (and therefore player) exploitation.

The particular issue we were talking about was time, and these adventures from the first decade of the game generally don't have time-driven scenarios of the "rescue the prisoners" variety. The main reason for caring about time, as a player, is because it determines the incidence of wandering monster rolls. It also determines the use of torches, the consumption of rations, the expiration of spell durations, etc.

So in these games, the GM puts in the office for a veneer of verisimilitude, but it is also a potential resource for players to exploit. In this era, it would be considered a bad example of dungeon design to put in a choice which (i) cannot be scoped out in advance of being made, and (ii) is an autolose.

I don't know how the video games you mention are designed, so I don't know if they follow this model or not. Generally, the Fighting Fantasy books that I used to play in the 80s adhered to it.

For those current players who aren't familiar with these old adventures, they may be hard to conceive. As I mentioned upthread, I'm rereading the Puffin book "What is Dungeons & Dragons" (published 1982). It has a sample adventure, a dungeon with 20-odd rooms. The dungeon is an evil crypt.

The high priest of the crypt is Odric. As the dungeon is written up, he is in the process of sacrificing a halfling NPC to a giant lizard in the main sacrifice hall (in the language of the time, this is a "freeze-frame" room - whenever the PCs arrive, the sacrifice is about to take place). This sacrifice hall is basically the centre of the dungeon, and the closest you get to a dramatic set-piece in this early style of D&D.

In a room at the edge of the dungeon is a magical statue that can answer questions.

And in a room between the dungeon entrance and the sacrifice hall is an office. And in the office is an NPC, a senior cleric of the cult from another town, who has come to investigate the theft from that town, by Odric, of the magical statue. There is no explanation of how this NPC entered the crypt without being seen by the orc guards at the entrance. There is no explanation of the fact that Odric seems completely oblivious to the presence of this angry NPC in his office, about 20 feet away from the main sacrifice hall where a sacrifice is about to take place.

By contemporary standards this would be terrible adventure design, with no verisimilitude at all. But by the standards of the time it is quite sophisticated: the adventure designers have come up with a way of giving the PCs access to a friendly insider within the evil cult, with whom they can do a deal to find the stolen statue, get leverage against Odric, etc. The NPC in the office, like the magical statue, is first-and-foremost a gamepiece along these lines, and the function of the backstory is to give it all just enough verisimilitude to be tolerable in play, and to set up the fictional connections that will facilitate gameplay that trades on them.

Once you get to modern world and adventure design, with contemporary standards of verisimilitude, coherent backstory, etc, it seems to me there are two ways of going. Roughly speaking, yours is one: the GM authors and has unilateral control over this word, which is not designed primarily as a gamepiece, and the consequence is that there is no player agency (at least as I am focusing on it).

Mine is the other: the rules and procedures of the game preserve and foster player agency of the sort that I am interested in, and as a consequence the world gets filled out over the course of, and partly as a product of, play. This preserves the early convention that there will be no autolose options, but it abandons the early convention of a Spartan, paper-thin world written up in the GM's dungeon key.

OK, we have danced with this scenario a little - meeting the "random" stranger, overhearing the interesting conversation, etc. This has been bothering me and I think it's because it sits at the heart of what I begin to see as a key problem with "naturalistic" play.

The thing is, how many people do we encounter or conversations do we overhear from day to day? Speaking for myself, the answer is "loads". Most are inconsequential, a mere blip that barely registers on my memory "radar". Others are much more important. For some reason - often quite whimsical and sometimes totally unpredictable - they assume greater meaning than the myriad of others. But, how might we "model" this in a roleplaying game?

<snip>

In short, it seems to me that either we present a massive long list of random topics and ask the players for an indication of (lack of) interest in each one, or we cut out the tedious listing and just ask them - which you say you don't (want to) do.

I think this explains why pretty much every RPG I have ever played ends up basically framing a situation (an "adventure") around whatever the players are either expecting to do or interested in doing. The first is basically the GM or the system telling the players "this is what you should expect to do" (which they can either accept or decline), the second is the players (maybe in negotiation and definitely with a GM veto) selecting what the game should be about. The difference between the two seems slight, to me.

This was a good post on the Spartan world!

My point of disagreement is in respect of the last sentence: I think the difference between the two approaches is not slight, at least in extended campaign play. Because in extended campaign play the effects of decisions compound and snowball - so in a GM/system-driven approach, the game ends up being the players exploring the GM's world/story; whereas in the player-driven approach, the game ends up being some sort of expression of the players' conceptions of their characters and those PCs' goals.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Railroading, as I define it in the GM chapter of my RPG, is "ending with the GM's desired outcome, no matter the actions that take place." So, when you say (and what I replied to) "So, if the DM is deciding the players are wanting a fight, then why present any choice at all? I wouldn't" then you've railroaded them to that point. That's why I see scene-framing as light railroading (because you're forcing an outcome, but then letting it play out without GM force).

It's the same with "the players will arrive at the ritual at this specific point, no matter what choices they make." This is the GM's desired outcome, and it doesn't matter what actions the players take.

And again, I use scene-framing (light railroading) often in my other games (like my superhero one-shots). I'm not saying it's an inherently bad technique.

Well, I disagree. But again, if players are cool with being on the rails at times, who cares? It's fun all around.

Yeah, I sort of think your definition of railroading might be a little too broad in scope. Its pretty peculiar to say that if a player ASKS for something and then the DM makes it happen that because it was then the DM making it happen that it is a railroad. It may be possible that could be true, in some situation, maybe, but 99.9% of the time nobody is going to call that a railroad and in a large number of situations it would be outright absurd to do so. Not only that but you've said it yourself, it has to be the GM's desired outcome. I hardly think it counts when the GM's desire is "the players get the plot they asked for."

As far as I can tell, pemerton makes extensive use of modules and scene-framing.

Eh, I get the impression he uses bits and pieces at times. I've been known to do that too, now and then, though in general I go for whole cloth. I think I've used on 4e Dungeon adventure, to some extent, though I made some pretty major changes to the plot and only loosely followed the encounters.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I do tend to run a fairly spartan game, much for this reason. Out of curiosity, how would you feel about abstracting that all out to a Gather Information check (I think the 4E equivalent is Streetwise)? The players say what kind of information they're looking for, and the DM can return a general consensus about what people in town are talking about, and more specific information about that topic.

Of course, that sort of thing would make it difficult to play out the encounter with the mysterious stranger, since the act of playing out the encounter would reveal the fact that the NPC is important.

Yeah, I'd use an SC probably. I might frame that SC various ways, perhaps it would be overarching and the stranger would be a detail, the goal being to defeat the whole organization somehow. It might be just a small-scale search for information. This would all depend on how much the players are hankering to spend their time getting into the details. If they want to play cloak-and-dagger for a while, we'd play it all out, and if they wanted to get on to some larger issue we might just have one overarching SC.

I think this, more than anything else, is my tool for 'framing', I will just jet past things, reduce some less interesting part of the adventure to an SC, narrate some trivial plot-irrelevant fight as blowing past a few minions, etc. The resource game matters, so it has to work within that context, but we all know there are plenty of times when resources aren't really a gating factor either.

 

[doctorhook]

Apologies for the intrusion, but today I randomly found myself thinking about one of my favorite bits from 4E: kruthiks. Loved those li'l reptile/buggers.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Agreed, but I think there is an interesting divergence of play preferences here.

For some players, the fact that 2nd ed AD&D relies upon massive amounts of GM force, suspending/fudging the rules, etc to deliver dramatic fantasy play is a virtue. So 4e's innovations in this respect are actually setbacks.

Whereas for others (and I put both of us in this box!), 2nd ed was deeply flawed, and 4e corrects those flaws.

Its those damned mint oreo cookies! I'm telling you, they're anathema!

I think that @Manbearcat is correct that this is a big split in the D&D base. I think ENworld is, by default, in the "2nd ed's features were virtues" camp, with a side-dose of "we prefer Gyaxian gamism", and the "4e-crowd" somewhat bringing up the rear.

I think its a place where people who are pretty set in their gaming habits tend to hang out. Its been around a long while, people are comfortable. There's plenty of interesting discussion, but yeah, a lot of the community hasn't any interest, or often any notion, of different ways to play.

I never used Nentir Vale - as far as I can see from skimming over it in the DMG and Essentials books it's a pretty generic starting setting. In my game I used the equally generic map and key from Night's Dark Terror - both have forests, a river or two, hills, mountains at the edge of the map, etc.

But the idea of PoL was important in my game. At Heroic and through the first half of Paragon, the fall of the Nerathi empire was a constant backdrop to the game, and gave context to events that I framed and to the way some of the PCs engaged with them. In the latter part of the campaign, those mortal events have been subsumed into (and in a sense become a local metaphor for) the bigger issue of the Dawn War, the failure of the Lattice of Heaven, and the seemingly impending arrival of the Dusk War.

For 15 levels the PCs in my game never left that map - which is around 200 miles wide and 100 miles high - although they did traverse most of it. Because of the downplaying of exploration in 4e, and the more metaphorical/symbolic/thematic role the setting plays, it wasn't necessary to expand further, although if the focus was on world creation then it would seem rather contrived that so much eventful stuff happened in this rather backwaters region of the world.

Eh, it had to happen somewhere!

I've got my own setting, which oddly enough evolved to cosmologically and setting-wise a point not too distant from where PoL is, by the mid-80's. We do various side games from time-to-time, but there's always somewhere in the 1000's of years of history and continents worth of maps to set most campaigns. Of course now and then the world gets wrecked and nobody has yet quite figured out how come history doesn't get wrecked. Honestly, its a mystery, like most other things. I have considered running a really much darker sort of PoL though, maybe starting with "as far as you know, Fallcrest is the last inhabited town on Erth..."

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Apologies for the intrusion, but today I randomly found myself thinking about one of my favorite bits from 4E: kruthiks. Loved those li'l reptile/buggers.

lol, I've thought about having a Kruthik lair, but never quite got around to it.

 

[Manbearcat]

There was SOME player agency ("Don't walk in the mountains!")

I hear you but this is a very slippery slope I find. When players find that their agency is limited to such an insignificant (or non-existing) strategic/tactical/thematic scope and they're so vulnerable to "gotcha" moments, defense protocols/contingencies get initiated and paranoia comes out writ large. Play almost inevitably ends up as a pixel-bitching, turtling-fest with players trying to tease out the GM's psychology/M.O. with games of "20 questions" whilst trying to wrest control of play in whatever (dysfunctional) way they can (which typically involves engaging in the combat resolution mechanics...often on merchants, bar-wenches, and whatever other hapless NPC happens to cross their path when they're feeling particularly prickly!).

but the primary goal is to demonstrate to the players that things happen in the world which the PCs have no control over. This is a very common RPG agenda! It's simply antithetical to most modern RPG design, which is focused on the creation of drama which is built around the PCs.

I've seen it, of course, but as to its frequency, I have no idea so I'll have to take your word on the commonality of it!

 

[doctorhook]

lol, I've thought about having a Kruthik lair, but never quite got around to it.

Do it! I won't pretend kruthiks offer much in the way of campaign- or even adventure-fodder, but they can certainly make a unique low-level encounter. I enjoyed the section of KotS where the party explores a kruthik warren; narrow little tunnels filled with skittering little horrors popping out of the walls. Awesome! Double awesome because none of my players were familiar enough with them to have any idea what they are.

 

[pemerton]

As far as I can tell, pemerton makes extensive use of modules and scene-framing.

Eh, I get the impression he uses bits and pieces at times. I've been known to do that too, now and then, though in general I go for whole cloth.

What is the standard for "using a module"?

A typical module has at least two things: a map, and a description of inhabitants of said map.

If it was written after the early 80s it probably also has some backstory that (more or less) rationalise the map and its inhabitants.

If it was written after the mid-80s there's a good chance it also has a deemed or default plot.

When I "use a module", I am typically using a map (or a described location), some inhabitants and some backstory. If the module also has some cool scene or idea in it, I might use that to help with scene-framing: here is an example, drawing on Robin Laws's scenario 'The Demon of the Red Grove' in his HeroWars Narrator's book.

The backstory I kept from Laws's scenario is that a demon is haunting a magical apple orchard. I changed the orchard to being one belonging to an Eladrin lord on the Feywild. And I changed the demon's backstory, to make its presence there a result of the ancient conflict between Lolth and the Raven Queen.

In that same post, I describe events in a location that were almost entirely conceived of by me (the Tower of Sunset is described in a WotC online suppement to H2, but that's it - I don't even remember if I kept the floorplan). And that post foreshadows the PCs going off to fight Frost Giants: I used the maps from G2, and kept many of the inhabitants the same, but I wrote in some backstory that G2 itself is missing!

If by "running a module" is meant "picking up an AP-style thing and running the PCs through the encounters from page 1 to page 32" then I don't think I've ever done that!