D&D 4E Throwing ideas, seeing what sticks (and what stinks)

[pemerton]

Why on Earth wouldn't 4e lend itself to this?

I see it as a matter of degree. The fewer the "unique" combat encounters, and the more the turnover of encounters, the less it makes sense to put weight on the resolution of one of them in particular.

I don't see this as the same thing as "theme"/"story" vs "mere colour" encounters. As you probably know, I'm not a big fan of colour/filler encounters. (Unless they're really pretty spectacular colour - at the risk of being self-congratulatory, I would put the one time I used a beholder into this category.)

For me it's more that 4e favours a lot of encounters, and even if they're building up to something big, or expressive of the theme/story of the game, no single one (except for the ultimate ones, maybe, with Orcus et al) quite has the "heft" to support the prep/prelim stuff.

But I agree if one was going to do it, the mechanical techniques (eg skill challenges etc) are there. But even then, what happens if the skill challenge or whatever fails? A game like BW supports the PCs coming into the big fight without the info/resources they need and getting creamed, because it has pretty robust failure rules and guidelines. I'm not sure that 4e supports this so well - I think it's closer to a situation where, if the PCs lose the end-game fight, it's game over - and that's probably another influence on my thinking about this.

its pretty easy to find accounts of campaigns that appear to have had this sort of issue where the GM wasn't terribly creative about building interesting scenarios and the game devolved down to a long list of 'fight to the death' scenarios 5x5 without much varying except the mix of monsters. Some of those will be interesting, but I think its quite possible for a game to become very cookie-cutter.

<snip>

I think though that some oddball monsters can help some DMs. I think that classic D&D had many such creatures, and 4e may have watered some of them down a bit too much, or just left them out entirely in a lot of cases. Certainly that can be colored as "focusing on the sweet spot of the design" but I never understood the mentality that having a Trapper, a Green Slime, etc would really be a BAD thing. Its not like you MUST use them.

I don't mind oddball monsters.

I got good mileage out of a gelatinous cube encounter - they were one of the first Large monsters to appear in the campaign, and got to glide their corners over pits that the PCs were in danger of falling into. And I've used green slime, and a rot grub zombie, and a roper.

My favourite oddball/specialist monster has probably been the chained cambion, because its psychic chain ability did such a good job of making the players whose PCs got "chained" together get frustrated with and angry at one another (one was ranged, the other melee, and so they couldn't agree on how they should be manoeuvring while staying adjacent to avoid the damage) - which gave real concrete expression to the cambion's description as spreading its rage and anguish through its psychic powers - the players didn't have to roleplay that their PCs were feeling upset! I like a puzzle - as that was (how do they work together under the constraint of the psychic chains?) - that also engages the players viscerally and thematically.

 

[MoutonRustique]

My favourite oddball/specialist monster has probably been the chained cambion, because its psychic chain ability did such a good job of making the players whose PCs got "chained" together get frustrated with and angry at one another (one was ranged, the other melee, and so they couldn't agree on how they should be manoeuvring while staying adjacent to avoid the damage) - which gave real concrete expression to the cambion's description as spreading its rage and anguish through its psychic powers - the players didn't have to roleplay that their PCs were feeling upset! I like a puzzle - as that was (how do they work together under the constraint of the psychic chains?) - that also engages the players viscerally and thematically.

Man I love that monster!

Creepy art: check!
Awesome flavour: check!
Cool mechanics: check!
Level range where it will certainly see play: check!

Nothing intelligent to add, just wanted to gush about this critter.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Well, I agree that 4e doesn't particularly have anything beyond "be a creative DM" in terms of supporting interesting failure modes. It is rather implicit in SCs that they have a sort of fail-forward aspect to them, but even that isn't really anything beyond some rather inconsistent advice to not have failure block progress. Contrariwise it seems that the whole theory of 4e balanced combat encounters goes the other way, it posits essentially that every combat is a life-or-death affair which better not end badly for the PCs because that will be the end of their story. There's a slight mitigation there in that 4e's system does make escaping from a lost cause at least feasible (whereas in classic D&D this was nigh impossible).

In some sense what I would call 'thematically interesting monsters' makes all this a bit more feasible. That is to say a reasonably weak monster can present a sort of challenge, particularly in a situation that isn't focused on a fight to the death, etc. Here 4e's stuff really is pretty good. Can you blast past the minions to block the guy from escaping with the McGuffin? What if they're not minions but some sort of monster that can be largely bypassed with some specific technique? You could still win by a variety of tactics, but there's one fun option that could become feasible if you did some sort of homework, think out of the box a little bit, etc. Heck, another way to play that is to let the players invent such things and inject them into the scenario! "Oh, Choker tribe goblins, they're deathly afraid of the sign of Imotnoi!" Of course using said sign has to lead somewhere interesting, either in terms of what it says about the character, or in terms of some consequence etc.

 

[pemerton]

4e's system does make escaping from a lost cause at least feasible (whereas in classic D&D this was nigh impossible).

As you've probably seen me post before, the one time we had a TPK in our 4e game (either at the end of 2nd or beginning of 3rd - memory has failed) only two PCs actually died - one because, given how things had unfolded, there was no way he had avoided going to negative bloodied, the other because the player wanted to bring in a different PC. The rest I deemed to have been knocked out at zero hp, so they woke up in the goblin cells.

This also could have been done by-the-book in 1st ed AD&D (I'll quote the passage from Gygax's DMG p 110 in a sec), but back then I was a crappier GM!

From AD&D DMG:

Now and then a player will die through no fault of his own. He or she will have done everything correctly, taken every reasonable precaution, but still the freakish roll of the dice will kill the character. In the long run you should let such things pass as the players will kill more than one opponent with their own freakish rolls at some later time. Yet you do have the right to arbitrate the situation. You can rule that the player, instead of dying, is knocked unconscious, loses a limb, is blinded in one eye or invoke any reasonably severe penalty that still takes into account what the monster has done.​

The way that I make sense of this is that the GM is entitled to adjudicate death as, instead, unconsciousness - including perhaps the same sorts of penalties, like maiming etc, that can follow from reaching -6 hp. Another way in which Gygax had more imagination in his conception of how the game can work than he is sometimes given credit for, and another point of resemblance between 4e and the classic game!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

As you've probably seen me post before, the one time we had a TPK in our 4e game (either at the end of 2nd or beginning of 3rd - memory has failed) only two PCs actually died - one because, given how things had unfolded, there was no way he had avoided going to negative bloodied, the other because the player wanted to bring in a different PC. The rest I deemed to have been knocked out at zero hp, so they woke up in the goblin cells.

This also could have been done by-the-book in 1st ed AD&D (I'll quote the passage from Gygax's DMG p 110 in a sec), but back then I was a crappier GM!

From AD&D DMG:

Now and then a player will die through no fault of his own. He or she will have done everything correctly, taken every reasonable precaution, but still the freakish roll of the dice will kill the character. In the long run you should let such things pass as the players will kill more than one opponent with their own freakish rolls at some later time. Yet you do have the right to arbitrate the situation. You can rule that the player, instead of dying, is knocked unconscious, loses a limb, is blinded in one eye or invoke any reasonably severe penalty that still takes into account what the monster has done.​

The way that I make sense of this is that the GM is entitled to adjudicate death as, instead, unconsciousness - including perhaps the same sorts of penalties, like maiming etc, that can follow from reaching -6 hp. Another way in which Gygax had more imagination in his conception of how the game can work than he is sometimes given credit for, and another point of resemblance between 4e and the classic game!

Sure, this is certainly a very real option. To the extent that I feel it worth actually writing this sort of thing down in my hack (which really doesn't need to be codified since I don't think anyone but myself is really going to run it) I invented 'afflictions', which are pretty much just a bit more generalized and deliberately 'narrativist' sort of version of the 4e disease track. So you can be met with an affliction as a consequence of failing death checks, taking massive amounts of damage, or (in the case of a really minor affliction) simply being bloodied in some memorable and dramatic way.

On a completely other note; afflictions are more generalized and follow a more mythological logic than is usual in FRPGs. There are no such things as 'disease' and 'poison', and such per-se. All such things are afflictions and they all have their origins in some sort of malignant magic. Thus the distinction between disease, curse, poison, and even to some extent 'disability' are mostly semantic and mutable. A poison wound may be inflicted by cursing a weapon for instance, and a disease is simply a sort of curse that is more environmental in nature (possibly, kind of depends on the disease, but think of malaria in its pre-modern sense for instance).

I also don't hold with D&D's general design of providing uninteresting and general panacea for such things. There's no 'remove curse' that just fixes anything, you gotta unravel the SPECIFIC affliction using something appropriate and generally unique to that specific affliction.

Another aspect of this is that there's no such thing as 'non-magical' 'alchemy' or poison-making. These things are fundamentally magical processes and the results are fundamentally magical. In fact, I don't really think that a division between magical and non-magical is generally appropriate in this genre (though I guess some niche fantasy like 'Swords & Atoms' MIGHT parse differently, OTOH Saberhagen was the major proprietor of that genre and its pretty hard to say they're distinct things there).

 

[pemerton]

afflictions are more generalized and follow a more mythological logic than is usual in FRPGs. There are no such things as 'disease' and 'poison', and such per-se. All such things are afflictions and they all have their origins in some sort of malignant magic. Thus the distinction between disease, curse, poison, and even to some extent 'disability' are mostly semantic and mutable.

This reminds me of Runequest, with its disease spirits and the like.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This reminds me of Runequest, with its disease spirits and the like.

I just try to look at the world from a pre-modern point of view and see what it looks like, which I always assumed is a lot of what the designers of Glorantha were about too. Though Glorantha always struck me as having a more ancient classical feel than medieval.

 

[MoutonRustique]

I NEVER MISS! ...BUT IF I DO, I DO IT WITH STYLE!
[sblock=super secret section that shouldn't be read by anyone that dislikes DoaM]
With all the discussions on DoaM, what [hp] mean, how the narrative relates to hits, misses, damage, poison application, escaping from a fireball centered on your head while naked in an empty room, etc, etc, and the lack (or the very weak) differentiation of intensity of effect from success with regards to skill rolls as opposed to attack rolls, I had an idea.

This idea is neither new, nor revolutionary, but I had it on my own - before I learned that a lot of people had had the same one... BUT I've not seen the following proposition applied to 4e before - as such, this is now MY idea. (I think I discovered it, I can find proof I did not after the fact, it's a-ok, I'll just discredit the proof and keep on saying it's my idea. After all, this is a proven method of land attribution - and so, of course, it works for ideas as well. It's the same thing really.)

I hid DoaM by flipping it! haha!

[/sblock]

Here's a ~recent thought that percolated to my fingers: A character's attack always succeeds.

What I mean: you don't roll to hit - you just hit.

Why I like this: in D&D, casters are awesome because even if they miss with their lightning bolt, they just threw a frigging' lightning bolt! Martials (fighters in particular) are supposed to be mighty warriors of incredible skill - when they swing, they should always have succeeded at something.

How this would work: pretty much the same way it works now actually... [Huh? ]
The d20 would be rolled as another aspect of the [intensity of effect]. Depending upon class or power, there could be rider effects. Base reason would be: roll to see if you crit.

Now, this opens up a good deal of opportunity to bring in a slew of new things (mostly by taking 13th Age's kidneys and jamming them in here), but there is a (I think) way to bring this about in 4e with fairly minimal work:

Every power deals half the damage rolled. If you hit, you get to double that (i.e. just take the regular damage you rolled) and do what you'd normally do on a "hit".

Every power that has DoaM is either removed (made obsolete) or simply suffers a small comparative nerf. I'm pretty confident that 4e has enough powers so that removing a couple in this way won't impact choice possibilities too much.

The above isn't what I'd like to do with the idea though. What I'd like to do would be to remove the attack and defense bonuses. I have a few "not quite ideas yet" floating around, but nothing hard enough to be able to "verbalize" them. I'd very much like to keep the "high level isn't really affected by lower level" thing of 4e - I like the idea of bounded accuracy, I don't like how 5e's going about it.

1st not quite and idea: damage reduction (leaves the rider imposition problem wide open...)
2nd: opponent-based roll penalties (good with math-heads, very bad with others)
3rd: ability/power based negations (this would work very well with 5e's iterative attack approach!)
4th: straight-up level comparative bonus/penalty (kinda like the 2nd, but, at the table, it feels awkward...)

I could just keep the att and defense value progression also... yep... let's do that.

Now what I really want to implement would be something like:
- you have a base effect
- you choose a basic addition (from class list)
- you roll die
- die configuration implies degree of success

Ex: if all attacks dealt 2d10 dmg
- As a fighter, you succeed on imposing a mark if you have one+ even die
- Succeeding on a trip attempt requires at least a 8+
- Succeeding on a push attempt requires at least a 6+
- On a pair, you can target another foe

There would still be a couple of "powers" known - they would have automatic effects, or vastly improved odds on a few special maneuvers. These powers would be a key structure in differentiating class purpose and playstyle.

In my mind, this would have had the effect of greatly improving speed of play - seeing it written down... not so sure anymore...

As always, let's see if this sticks or stinks - or both!

 

[Tony Vargas]

(I think I discovered it, I can find proof I did not after the fact, it's a-ok, I'll just discredit the proof and keep on saying it's my idea. After all, this is a proven method of land attribution - and so, of course, it works for ideas as well. It's the same thing really.)

- you have a base effect
- you choose a basic addition (from class list)
- you roll die
- die configuration implies degree of success

I can't remember what game it was, but back in the day there was some system advertised as revolutionary that had a single roll for degree of success: hit & damage & whatnot in one.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I can't remember what game it was, but back in the day there was some system advertised as revolutionary that had a single roll for degree of success: hit & damage & whatnot in one.

There have been MANY such designs.

You could certainly do it, BUT we're now FAR FAR afield from anything like a 4e 'hack'. I mean, now you've done away with attack rolls (which are a major form of checks). For consistency you'd want ALL checks to follow a similar format, so you've now replaced 'rule 1' of 4e with a new rule 1, and thus ALL OF 4E'S RULES fall by the wayside at that point!

This is of course why [MENTION=22362]MoutonRustique[/MENTION] endeavored to keep the d20 mechanics, and just creatively reinterpret it within a recognizable 4e structure as 'degree of success' instead of 'hit or miss'.

Interestingly, again, in my 4e hack I have a 'degree of success/failure' concept. Its the first rule! Instead of stating the d20 rule as 'you must equal or exceed a DC on a d20 to succeed' I defined 4 levels of result as follows:
[TABLE="width: 100%"]
[TR]
[TD="width: 100%, colspan: 2"]

Results​

[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="width: 50%"] Roll
[/TD]
[TD="width: 50%"] Result
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="width: 50%"] 5 more than DV or higher
[/TD]
[TD="width: 50%"] Complete Success
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="width: 50%"] Equal to DV
[/TD]
[TD="width: 50%"] Success
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="width: 50%"] Less than DV
[/TD]
[TD="width: 50%"] Limited Failure
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="width: 50%"] 5 less than DV
[/TD]
[TD="width: 50%"] Critical Failure
[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]

Now you can simply key power results to these result values. MANY powers simply do nothing on both types of failure, and have an effect on both types of success, but most do at least have some bigger effect on a Complete Success. I've removed the concept of 'critical hit' here as well, since it seems a bit redundant, though you could retain that. Instead I have put in place an 'Expect a Vitality Point to obtain a Critical Effect if you got Complete Success' rule (actually I just thought of that, scribble scribble).