The Sacred Cow Slaughterhouse: Ideas you think D&D's better without

[TwoSix]

The inner plane/outer plane distinction I can handle, and have used in my own (Rolemaster) games. But I have no real use for a seperate Astral and Ethereal plane.

As for the outer planes, I've treated them 4e style well before 4e started too, because the "wheel" makes no sense once you get rid of alignment - and then you can go for various sorts of thematic and pantheonic outer planes rather than the weird scattering of pantheons over planes that we've seen ever since the original DDG and the MotP.

I like the Great Wheel, but I've mixed it around a fair amount. I've made the gods explicitly the side of "Law", and the primordials the side of "Chaos". Thus, divine magic is also "Lawful", and I defined arcane magic as explicitly "Chaotic". The Feywild is the areas where the Material Plane and the Chaotic planes blend together, and the Shadowfell is the transition area between the Material and the Lawful planes, where souls travel to meet the Gods, and the River Styx can be found. (I'm a big fan of Moorcock's Middlemarchthe from the Von Bek books, and I like the idea of shaded transitions between the real world and the immortal one.)

Additionally, Limbo is the Elemental Chaos, and Nirvana is the Astral Sea, an ocean of stars where all Platonic ideals are crystallized islands.

 

[Derren]

90%+ of the game revolves around combat

That should be the first thing to die.

 

[Herschel]

At this point, I'm sorry I used the halfling barbarian as an example, because everyone seems to be focused on that specific idea instead of the bigger picture.

Substitute OCD for OPP and sing along.
[video=youtube;7f7FuDagYLU]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7f7FuDagYLU[/video]

 

[Remathilis]

Wow, I hadn't realized 2nd edition had changed them that much. That indeed makes a big difference.

Dwarf: Fighter 15, Cleric 10, Thief 12
Elf: Fighter 12, Cleric 12, Mage 15, Ranger 15, Thief 12
Gnome: Fighter 11, Cleric 9, Thief 13, Illusionist 15
Halfling: Fighter 9, Cleric 8, Thief 15
Half-elf: Fighter 14, Cleric 14, Mage 12, Thief 12, Ranger 16, Druid 9, Bard Unlimited
Human: All Unlimited
Half-orc: Fighter 10, Cleric 4, Thief 8 (single classed could go higher)

That doesn't even factor in slow advancement above name level or bonus levels for high abibility scores. At a certain point, they stopped being a concern to most players.

 

[pemerton]

I like the Great Wheel, but I've mixed it around a fair amount. I've made the gods explicitly the side of "Law", and the primordials the side of "Chaos". Thus, divine magic is also "Lawful", and I defined arcane magic as explicitly "Chaotic". The Feywild is the areas where the Material Plane and the Chaotic planes blend together, and the Shadowfell is the transition area between the Material and the Lawful planes, where souls travel to meet the Gods, and the River Styx can be found. (I'm a big fan of Moorcock's Middlemarchthe from the Von Bek books, and I like the idea of shaded transitions between the real world and the immortal one.)

Additionally, Limbo is the Elemental Chaos, and Nirvana is the Astral Sea, an ocean of stars where all Platonic ideals are crystallized islands.

Mixing the Great Wheel with 4e? Heresy.

 

[jbear]

Yes. D&D could easily benefit from better GMing advice. For instance, the 4e DMG in dicussing combat encounters has pages and pages of terrific advice on how to set up and adjudicate their tactical dimensions, but has virtually nothing to say about setting up and adjudicating the story function(s) of a combat encounter.

Did you actually read the 4e DMG. From your comment I would think not. Either that or you are grossly exaggerating on purpose by saying "virtually nothing".

There are pages dedicated to how to narrate what is going on ("Show not tell"), are these not the story functions of a combat encounter? Narration, brevity, atmosphere, cinematic style, enticement, realism, roleplaying, suspense, pacing, props, dispensing information, improvising, saying 'yes' ... are these not in there to assist in the adjudication of the story functions of a combat encounter?

Also, have you read the 4e DMG2? That is a fantastic tome that a DM running any system could learn STACKS from. E.g the chapter on group story telling which looks at: story structure, branching, cooperative arcs, cooperative world building, roleplaying hooks, vignettes, drama rewards, flashbacks, transitions, third person teasers, core motivations and interrelations of characters ... or directly what you are talking about in the very next chapter: Advanced encounters. First Bullet point: encounter as story: "this section discusses encounters as turning points in a story of your adventure and focuses on encounter objectives that add purpose to a combat encounter". Anyway, I believe I have made my point.

Sorry, I had bypassed the comment you made until I came to another posters comment a few pages later about all the DMG's stating overtly that rules are guidelines, naming every edition except 4e. I assume that omission is also out of ignorance, as that philosophy is also made very clear in the 4e DMG, where having FUN is stressed as the core and most important element of playing the game.

I get a little tired of the many many throw away comments made by posters that infer that 'IT IS KNOWN' that 4e is the "BAD/WRONG" mistake edition of D&D.

But I am more than happy with the many sacred cows that were slaughtered by 4e.

 

[pemerton]

Did you actually read the 4e DMG.

<snip>

I get a little tired of the many many throw away comments made by posters that infer that 'IT IS KNOWN' that 4e is the "BAD/WRONG" mistake edition of D&D.

This is a first for me - being accused of being an edition warrior against 4e!

I am a very strong proponent of the merits of 4e, and have posted many actual play threads showing what I'm doing in my 4e game. But I do not think the game is flawless either in mechanics or in rules text.

There are pages dedicated to how to narrate what is going on ("Show not tell"), are these not the story functions of a combat encounter? Narration, brevity, atmosphere, cinematic style, enticement, realism, roleplaying, suspense, pacing, props, dispensing information, improvising, saying 'yes' ... are these not in there to assist in the adjudication of the story functions of a combat encounter?

<snip>

I had bypassed the comment you made until I came to another posters comment a few pages later about all the DMG's stating overtly that rules are guidelines, naming every edition except 4e. I assume that omission is also out of ignorance, as that philosophy is also made very clear in the 4e DMG, where having FUN is stressed as the core and most important element of playing the game.

I regard it as a very great strength of 4e that it presents its rules as rules and not as guidelines (Essentials pulls back a bit from this, in my view to its detriment). I think 4e's action resolution rules do a good job of delivering well-paced gonzo high fantasy adventure. (Combat is tighter than skill challenges, but they are far from hopeless.)

But I do not think the 4e DMG gives a very good discussion of how to frame combats from the story point of view (eg theamtic heft of different opponents; thematic heft of powers; using opponents + powers + terrain to set thematically weighty stakes; etc). Worlds & Monsters is a lot better than the DMG in this respect. The only time the DMG really goes in for the sort of discussion you get in W&M is in the page on languages; and the Monster Manual is all written from the in-game point of view rather than in the out-of-game terms in which frank GM advice needs to be given.

The DMG 2 is a different kettle of fish. It has strengths, but also disappointments. In particular, Robin Laws has just cut and pasted a lot of his text from HeroQuest revised without adapting to reflect the quite different mechanical framework of 4e.

I personally have found that the single best DMG's advice book for running 4e is Luke Crane's Adventure Burner for Burning Wheel. HeroWars/Quest, Maelstrom Storytelling and WotC's own Worlds and Monsters have also been helpful. The best parts of the DMG are its advice on tactical considerations in combat encounters, its advice on using powers to affect objects (because this is the ony text which really makes clear how important keywords are for linking mechanics to fiction), its skill challenge advice, and obviously all the mechanical machinery stuff around p 42, building monsters & traps, allocating treasure and XP, etc. The best bits of the DMG 2, for me, were more on traps, more on combat encounter design (especially circular paths), and its stuff on skill challenges.

Hopefully this gives you a better idea of what motivated my comment, and what I had in mind.

 

[TwoSix]

Mixing the Great Wheel with 4e? Heresy.

It's the heresy that makes it fun!

 

[jbear]

This is a first for me - being accused of being an edition warrior against 4e!

Snip

Hopefully this gives you a better idea of what motivated my comment, and what I had in mind.

Sorry @permerton I don't mean to derail the thread. Yes, that makes what you said much clearer. I don't quite get what you mean by the giving of 'heft' to things but it sounds like an interesting topic for another thread.

Personally, the half page of the DMG I got the most out of was the passage about saying 'yes' to my players. It changed my Dming style irrevocably for the better. I saw the change visibly in a matter of 2 gaming sessions as I brought a group of new players to the game.

They went from 1 session with low level 3.5 characters completely frustrated an unenthused, struggling to stomp on the heads of a few diseased rats to the next, trying out 4e for the first time, feeling like important heroes battling against swarms of rats and other worthy foes ... and they were hooked. And a lot of that had to do with my approach to DMing which went from 'No, you can't ... you need to be higher level ... No, the rules say ... Okay, you can try but the DC is so hard that ...' to running with players ideas, actually letting them influence and take some of the narrative control of the story telling and play out their ideas without needing to reference the rules.

So right there was perhaps the most important sacred cow slaughter for me personally. I am not saying that this is a sacred cow for D&D in general. I have played D&D since I was 12 and I am going on 35. So for whatever reason that message of how to DM had never gotten through to me until then. But I am very thankful to the 4e DMG that eventually it did. (Other people may have received this message in earlier editions, I am aware of that e.g. Dragon magazine. I did not have access to those sources.)