The "real" reason the game has changed.

[shadzar]

(At this point, Bob jumps. The outcome of Bob jumping is not yet known. Note that the player can narrate what is known, and is within his control, i.e., "Bob jumps", prior to knowing the outcome.)

Exactly, this is where the players narrative control comes in. When you want to do something an only have a power that includes push, and you don't want to push someone, that push dictates the player and DMs narrative control.

With the Jump, the DM had narrative control as to what was landed on, and the player had narrative control of his flailing as he fell.

Weapons use to be the things that did stuff like "push" by having abilities added to them is you wanted to via magic.

4th, that requires the powers, really cannot be played without giving up narrative control.

All editions you can roll the dice and then describe how the blows were traded between the fighter and the orc. $th edition, you can't really decide to push someone away, if not using a power that has the "push".

Now how would you so that in older editions? Well someone spelled out subdual damage or whatever it is, the non-lethal damage. This is so those who didn't get it before could have something that would tell them your blows don't always have to do damage. Otherwise to push an opponent, when you rolled your attack you and the DM would decide how much damage had to be done of the max for the attack, say has to be worth half damage, then if you get that much you have the foe be pushed away from you rather than received the damage. That, or you could use a "called shot". Called shots were your cinematic, over the top, key action scenes from past editions, where you didnt need something special to make the characters special.

When the "special moves" went from being something the player decided to being incorporated all throughout the game, it means the player loses narrative control when to use those.

You can say the player and DM can agree to not let the power push the opponent, but I would bet you would have other players whining and crying that the player isn't pulling his weight, because the system would become unbalanced leaning towards the DM. I also bet that most 4th edition players wouldn't let another, or even the DM "push" someone away from them with an attack, unless the power included it.

4th isn't I want to swing with my sword and push someone. 4th is I swing with my sword, and the power MADE me push them.

It really is funny that combat focuses heavily on the design concepts of a miniature game, when the miniature game for D&D failed.

So the action happens when a player "attempts" to do something, and the resolution just tells you how well they did. That is the players narrative control, and that is what was taken away with 4th in that it doesn't allow for as much control because the player is dictated to what things they can try.

Perhaps it is easier to understand when one agrees there is no such thing as a difference between reality and fantasy except by personal choice (or social agreement for a less fundamentalist approach).

If you disagree and instead you accept that you can understand a Sender's communicated message by deciphering it, then you accept that there are such things as patterns. And you would be in contradiction to the majority of contemporary communications theory.

Also, delusion is held as a personal identifier one creates for themselves (or is one gained through a social popularity contest). Either way, it has nothing to do with similarity to any underlying reality.

My definition of roleplaying is coming from the roleplay simulation realm. Learn and perform one's roles as best one can, in D&D's case the class played. Fictional character performance is largely irrelevant.

Did you mean to post this in the alignment thread? Cause it pretty much sums up the problems people have with alignment, where one does not understand they are not playing the character in the world today, but in a fictional world that has vast differences, and those differences you learn about through playing.

Which is a funny change to D&D, removing alignment rather than just explaining to people, in the OFFICIAL BOOKS FROM THE DESIGNERS, that alignment is based on the way the D&D world views things, not how people view things in today's world, ergo fictional like the characters being played.

You know what, I am going to copy this and my reply thus over to that thread actually.

 

[Ariosto]

IIEE (Intent, Initiation, Execution, Effect)

Whereas in a 4e "skill challenge" it's:
1) DM decides goal and context
2) DM decides level and complexity
3) DM decides what skill numbers are applicable, with what +/- factors
4) DM decides on other conditions
5) DM decides on consequences
6) Players roll dice and make up excuses for why

Now, I know that the formalism is a lot of fun for you and yours, and I wish you only more fun from it. However, for me it is dreadful. It pretty much sticks a knife in the guts of why I play RPGs in the first place, and then takes way too much time twisting the blade.

It's not at all a matter of having "skill rolls" in a game. We've had those since the 1970s, and Traveller and RuneQuest used the same basic method of play as D&D and T&T.

What makes it a "4e skill challenge encounter" in the first place is the pre-determined structure. There must be at least X number of dice rolls, up to so many successes or failures, to the prescribed DCs. No shortcuts around that are kosher, because rolling the dice -- pretty darned precisely just that -- is how you 'earn' the experience points.

(Even if you're so sick of it that you will gladly give up the XP in order to have a chance to try to get the in-game-world objective by implementing your own plan, the DM may be too attached to the gadgetry he's worked to build, or too inflexible to depart from a published scenario.)

It's the ne plus ultra of the way 3e turned wandering monsters from strategic problem into "XP on the hoof". The drunkard's walk may be less than optimal, but now it's not too bad either. If you actually play smart enough to avoid trouble, you get stiffed XP for "not addressing the challenge". The challenge is no longer to secure an objective but rather to get maximally fouled up along the way.

It's one thing to consider things that are likely to come up, and to have notes on methods to deal with them. Every RPG "rule" book ever published, and many a magazine, has been largely devoted to providing examples of such things.

It's quite another thing to reduce player choice to such an insignificant afterthought as 4e "skill challenges" -- and the "assumption that everyone is searching everything all the time" -- do in my experience.

 

[Ariosto]

edition, you can't really decide to push someone away, if not using a power that has the "push".

There's Bull Rush, 4e PHB page 287 -- not a Power but a move available to anyone -- but that entails shifting into the vacated space, so the subject is not actually any farther away from you unless you have pushed the subject over a cliff edge or the like.

The fighter's Tide of Iron makes shifting into that space optional.

What's the appropriate trade-off for getting to do something that other fighter took a Power to be able to do? DMG page 42 offers a chandelier-swinging example. The DM is to choose one of three DCs determined by the PC's level. These are basically calculated to ensure that you never actually get better at doing anything.

In the example, the swinger gets an Easy roll on Acrobatics. The probability now gets reduced by a second roll, this time a Strength attack versus the ogre's Fortitude. While it's not explicit, my impression is that this is still the same binary pass/fail -- with failure of either roll indicating failure of the attack.

If both rolls pass, the PC gets not merely to 'push' an ogre, but to cause it a Normal Damage Expression (High) -- again, a factor based on the PC's level (as opposed to an assessment of the danger posed by a brazier of burning coals).

"You can safely use the high value, though," because the character (a rogue) could have dealt about that much damage with an encounter power and Sneak Attack.

With some foresight (e.g., considering what you want to encourage or discourage, and where getting kicked into hot coals figures on the three-level scale of nasty), you can set up interesting tactical options.

 

[billd91]

Whereas in a 4e "skill challenge" it's:
1) DM decides goal and context
2) DM decides level and complexity
3) DM decides what skill numbers are applicable, with what +/- factors
4) DM decides on other conditions
5) DM decides on consequences
6) Players roll dice and make up excuses for why

<snip>
What makes it a "4e skill challenge encounter" in the first place is the pre-determined structure. There must be at least X number of dice rolls, up to so many successes or failures, to the prescribed DCs. No shortcuts around that are kosher, because rolling the dice -- pretty darned precisely just that -- is how you 'earn' the experience points.

That's about as uncharitable a spin on the skill challenge system as I've seen. And it's about as uncreative as I've seen as well. I would recommend getting a look at Galaxy of Intrigue for SWSE and its treatment of skill challenges. Probably the best treatment of them I've seen out of WotC.

You could view the skill challenges in such a rigid light as you've posted, but that bears about as much relation to well-run skill challenges as a DM using the encounters detailed in a published adventure exactly as written regardless of player interaction has to a well-run game.

 

[Dice4Hire]

NEW EDIT: Another way to look at this is that anything in the present tense or past tense can be narrated. The future, however, is opaque.

Yes. Reminds me of how I post on my Yahoogroups games.

The fighter runs up to the pit and he ...

<Go to online roller and roll the dice>

<Post link to roll in post>

... trips just as he gets to the pit and nose-dives into the green slime lining the bottom of the pit.

I try to play that way.

 

[BryonD]

I'm not entirely sure I agree with that.

I can't force you to agree with me on anything. But I've been in numerous discussions with 4E fans praising this specific aspect of the game. So it really doesn't matter if you agree or not.

4e doesn't really care. It just says you use this skill to open locks. The how is left entirely to the player. That's what it means when mechanics are divorced from narrative. Come and Get It says that X happens. How it happens is entirely up to the player.

But it isn't divorced. The narrative needs to agree with the action. In 4E the mechanics "says what happens". Yes, the player is free to come up with any of a billion explanations for how that particular thing happened, but they are still following the lead of the mechanics. Pop-quiz role playing

And obviously some people love it.
I don't.

 

[BryonD]

I am not sure this is as much of a selling point for 4E as you think. I'm a 4E player and DM, but "meta-narrative" (where mechanics are taken as absolute and in-game events made up on the fly to fit them, rather than mechanics being a way to resolve the outcomes of in-game events) annoys the hell out of me.

Fair enough. I loathe the Pathfinder Regeneration system. But I still love Pathfinder overall.

I think you can find people who dislike most any individual element of an RPG but still really like the game. My impression is that most 4E fans see it as a selling point, but perhaps when I've debated that it just naturally follows that people who do like it are the ones that discuss it. Who knows?

 

[Mallus]

That's about as uncharitable a spin on the skill challenge system as I've seen.

He tries real hard!

But don't you see, Bill, 4e is defined by the people who use the rules badly, whereas earlier editions of D&D are defined by the people who use the rules well, or not at all. I don't see how this can be any clearer...

 

[shadzar]

There's Bull Rush, 4e PHB page 287 -- not a Power but a move available to anyone -- but that entails shifting into the vacated space, so the subject is not actually any farther away from you unless you have pushed the subject over a cliff edge or the like.

The fighter's Tide of Iron makes shifting into that space optional.

What's the appropriate trade-off for getting to do something that other fighter took a Power to be able to do? DMG page 42 offers a chandelier-swinging example. The DM is to choose one of three DCs determined by the PC's level. These are basically calculated to ensure that you never actually get better at doing anything.

In the example, the swinger gets an Easy roll on Acrobatics. The probability now gets reduced by a second roll, this time a Strength attack versus the ogre's Fortitude. While it's not explicit, my impression is that this is still the same binary pass/fail -- with failure of either roll indicating failure of the attack.

If both rolls pass, the PC gets not merely to 'push' an ogre, but to cause it a Normal Damage Expression (High) -- again, a factor based on the PC's level (as opposed to an assessment of the danger posed by a brazier of burning coals).

Then why have "push" assigned to any power if you can do it without a specific power that has it? What if I don't want to do the damage?

If you can "push" without a power having "push" in it, then why have any powers with "push"?

This is where the mechanics dictate the flavor, as some would say, or more along my point, the mechanics are taking away narrative control. If you can add push to anything, then you should be able to likewise take it away, so why even waste time, space, and confusion adding it to anything to begin with?

Was it done just to ramp up the number of "powers"? So 4th really has nothing new to offer over older editions, except it just writes more things down for you to begin with, and the powers are really just examples of tactics you can use, and the game can be played without them?

But then playing without them would royally mess with the rest of the game that depends on those specific powers being used.

The designers, I guess, just wanted some narrative control over each groups game then.

 

[Ariosto]

That's about as uncharitable a spin on the skill challenge system as I've seen.

Well, (1) through (6) are straight from the 4e Dungeon Master's Guide. As for the rest, I hardly think the enthusiasts trying to "sell" people on the formalism have been presenting it uncharitably.

I was recently looking at just such a thread over at rpg,net, in which there's one example after another of the "DM decides what's to be done, and how" essence.

Strip that away, and I'm happy -- and it's no longer a 4e "skill challenge". It's just playing an RPG, using the long proven method that simply has no need for the complicated construction.

It's not at all a matter of a "well run" or "poorly run" one. It's a matter of the fundamental method itself. Many people like it and dislike old-fashioned role-playing games, but my tastes are just the opposite.

I don't want to be "creative" about coming up with an excuse to roll stat X some number of times. I don't want to be "creative" about rationalizing why nothing I do changes the need for so many dice rolls, or by much the consequent previously established probability of success or failure.

I want to be "creative" about about making my own plans and seeing them succeed or fail on their own merits.

I do not want to be told a story. I do not want to tell a story.

I want to play a role-playing game.