Uniting the Editions, Part 2 Up!

[Ratskinner]

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I just want them to not have areas that are lacking. I never once said they need to cover everything.

Can you explain how this is not contradictory? To have no areas of that are lacking must mean that all areas are included, yes? "I want nothing excluded" is logically equivalent to "I want everything included" right? Do you have some standard for an area of rules that would disqualify it as valid areas of concern?

I'm not trying to poke fun. I'm sure we both have some limit of picayuneness where we'd say "no need for a rule.". Your original concern in this thread:

What if I want a simplistic, no-feats wizard who can use at-will spellcasting? It sounds like I'm just out of luck.

Seems to me to be a fairly specific issue (within the context of D&D, anyway.) Especially so, since a fix within the rules sounds quite likely. Of course we really don't know what the rules are yet, so maybe there's a basic class for this in 5e, anyway. Personally, I'm not sure how any heavily spellcasting class would count as "basic" rather than "complicated", but who knows?

The more expansive the system, the less need for house rules to begin with.

Provided the game plays the way you want it to, yes. However, the more expansive the system is, the more it locks down playstyle by making significant deviation harder. To quote Mearls from the D&D 5e Info page:

"With fourth edition, there was a huge focus on mechanics. The story was still there, but a lot of our customers were having trouble getting to it. In some ways, it was like we told people, ‘The right way to play guitar is to play thrash metal,’ But there’s other ways to play guitar.” - Mike Mearls.
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Not that I'm trying to start an edition war skirmish. I personally feel this kind of thinking started back in 3.5, and the attitude goes back farther.

Less interacting mechanical bits increase the likelihood that a house rule will be needed, which since most GMs aren't game designers, leaves open the possibility that the house rule is lopsided or otherwise makes things worse.

I agree with your premise, but not your conclusion. You are correct, that's why such a system is more vulnerable to bad DMing. The trouble is that "lopsided"-ness can be a feature that a DM or group wants in their game. Just consider the innumerable threads on whether casters and fighters were balanced at various levels in various editions, and then consider the (also large) numbers of threads debating whether they should be balanced at all. The flexibility of the "lighter" systems of days gone by is (I'm confident) one of the things that a lot of people miss in the current editions.

 

[BryonD]

Agreed, but for some reason D&D seems stuck with this somewhat adversarial approach to allocating responsibilities across participants.

I would strongly object to the term "adversarial" here.

First, if the group WANTS to create a collective responsibility campaign no D&D system I am aware of would remotely hinder it. It may not actively promote it, but simply being silent on the issue is a far cry from "adversarial".

And, frankly, DM control runs in line with the grain for 90+% of all groups out there. It could be fairly argued that the realistic options are neutral silence or boat-rocking *anything else*.

My personal opinion remains that the very best of the best games happen when the DM is fully in control but (A) absolutely remains focused on making players more than eager to play whatever it is that the DM has dreamed up and (B) is willing to accommodate and even encourage reasonable and constructive ideas and curve balls from the players.

Obviously that last part is nothing more than as I described it: "my opinion." No argument if you completely disagree. But if you truly call it adversarial then I would question the thoughtfulness of your assessment of other styles.

 

[SkidAce]

I'm pretty sure that they won't.

The implication of Monte Cook's comment that it is up to the GM to decide whether or not to use a grid to resolve combat is that action resolution mechanics will be the same across all PCs.

I think that DCs will be the same across all PCs too - otherwise WotC would not be able to write sellable adventure modules.

The difference between PCs will be in the character build mechanics that are used to generate the numbers and other details (eg can take 10 when swinging across chasms) that engage the action resolution mechanics.

This is what I wanted to say.....different levels of building complexity...but end result runs same for everyone.

I can't xp [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] again so soon, sadly.

 

[JohnSnow]

People seem to be getting confused by what Monte means when he says that the "core of the game" looks "a lot like OD&D." He's not trying to say something that all of us seem blissfully unaware of.

What labels a game as Dungeons & Dragons, even to someone who's never played it?

- D&D is medieval fantasy roleplaying.
- Rolling a d20 for combat resolution.
- The four iconic classes: fighter, magic-user, cleric and thief.
- The Tolkien races: human, elf, dwarf, and halfling.
- The 6 attributes: strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, constitution, charisma. The 3-18 scale has also ALWAYS been in the game.
- Alignment (someone who's never played knows what "lawful good" means).
- XP and levels.
- Armor Class and hit points.
- Magic loot.
- Saving Throws.

That's Dungeons & Dragons. Other things can be added. You don't have to use ALL the iconic races, but without these things, the game just isn't D&D.

Personally, while I feel that the traditional (so-called "Vancian") magic system has legacy - it's certainly the most iconic way to handle magic in the game - I refuse to say that those who use a spell point (or some other) magic system aren't playing D&D. Oddly enough, the spells themselves may actually be more "core" than how they get cast.

The point is that all of these things were part and parcel of OD&D - also known around ENWorld as "that game diaglo plays."

Obviously, if you cut out all the stuff that was added later, you end up with a system that looks like OD&D. Even if fighters can do more in combat than their OD&D counterparts, or everyone has a skill package, the base game is still going to look surprisingly similar to OD&D.

Why won't it BE OD&D? A few reasons. It's highly unlikely that they'll go back to descending AC. Similarly, I don't expect us to need tables for combat or saving throws, or to see the return of different XP progressions for each class. I do expect unified bonuses for the six attributes (a feature of OD&D, BECMI, 3e and 4e) to stick around. I don't expect to see a return of exceptional strength, and so forth. 2e's THAC0 may have been an improvement over the "to-hit tables" of earlier editions, but using attack bonuses and escalating AC was a better idea still. Yes, many of these mechanics come from later editions, but the point I'm making is that the mechanics we're likely to see are modern ones. But without all the modern subsystems, the core, central game will still have an "old school vibe" to it.

The biggest discrepancy from edition to edition seems to be in how lethal the game should be. My preference is for characters who are legitimately at risk, but aren't going to die from a single unlucky roll. When I read old school reports like Dougall the thief dying because of a poison needle trap, my nostalgia button dies quick. Poison should suck, I guess. But save or die has NEVER been fun, or cool - in my opinion.

I'd love it if a D&D fight played out like a scene from a swashbuckling action movie. I want the game to move fast, and I want to believe the protagonists are in real peril, but I don't want their deaths to come out of left field. To me, that kind of randomness isn't fun.

On the other hand, if the party makes a lot of mistakes in judgement and gets in way over their heads? And the paladin chooses to fight a desperate holding action against superior foes so that the rest of the party may live? That's great gaming. But it should be the end result of a number of deliberate player choices - not just "oops, stepped on a trap - you're dead."

I think the biggest "playstyle" issue the design team is going to have to cope with are those surrounding the healing, injury, and death mechanics. Those are also, fortunately, among the easiest things to make "modular."

That said, I bet characters built strictly off the core won't be quite as fragile as their actual old-school counterparts. They're probably a bit more fragile than their 4e counterparts, but lethality probably should be set somewhere in the middle as a default - with BECMI (1st level characters with 1-11 hp, dead at 0 hp and lots of save or die mechanics) at one end of the spectrum and 4e (1st level characters with 20+ hp, death saves, and no "save or die" mechanics) at the other.

Hope that didn't get too ramble-y.

 

[Alzrius]

Can you explain how this is not contradictory? To have no areas of that are lacking must mean that all areas are included, yes? "I want nothing excluded" is logically equivalent to "I want everything included" right? Do you have some standard for an area of rules that would disqualify it as valid areas of concern?

It's not contradictory because my hope for this is realistic; I don't want the rules to have lacking areas, but I recognize that there's no way for any game system to cover everything - that's simply impossible.

I see a difference between my original statement of "I don't want them to have lacking areas" and "I want nothing excluded." It's certainly possible for rules to act as guidelines without having to necessarily expound upon everything (I didn't play 4E, but from what I hear the "page 42" rule was a lot like this).

I'm not sure what you mean by "disqualify it as a valid area of concern." If there's something I want the game to do, it should ideally provide a framework for how to do it, or they'll cover a given idea to the extent that any gaps are so small that they can be covered by flavor text alone (e.g. there's no "solder" class specifically, but the fighter is so close that you can just say your fighter is a soldier - if there's no class that lets you possess other people's bodies, that's harder to fill with a reskinned existing class).

Now, the latter example there is a fairly extreme one, but I've had players ask to play a sentient couch before, so these things come up. I'm not saying these aren't understandable gaps, but gaps do happen (which is another reason why I want 5E to be under the OGL - so someone can cover these odd corner-cases).

I'm not trying to poke fun. I'm sure we both have some limit of picayuneness where we'd say "no need for a rule.". Your original concern in this thread:


Seems to me to be a fairly specific issue (within the context of D&D, anyway.)

A lot of them are fairly specific issues. This was just the most relevant to the topic at hand because it'd been mentioned before.

Especially so, since a fix within the rules sounds quite likely. Of course we really don't know what the rules are yet, so maybe there's a basic class for this in 5e, anyway.

That's true, but given that we don't know how various things will interact, it's harder to judge how a house rule will go over in terms of its impact on the wider game. Simply assigning "at-will spellcasting" feats to a spellcasting character that doesn't want feats but wants at-will spellcasting could very well carry its own set of problems. Hence why I'd prefer the rules to cover that, so they'll be ahead of any potential problems.

Personally, I'm not sure how any heavily spellcasting class would count as "basic" rather than "complicated", but who knows?

Depends on who you ask. A 1E-style wizards is pretty basic to me, but I play Pathfinder, so take that with a grain of salt.

Provided the game plays the way you want it to, yes. However, the more expansive the system is, the more it locks down playstyle by making significant deviation harder.

I don't think this is necessarily true. While there is a connection between rules and playstyle, I think that an expansive playstyle doesn't necessarily "lock down" the system from smaller changes or additions. Now, if you want "significant deviation" then I'll grant you that it is harder to do so under an expansive system...but if I wanted significant deviation, I don't think I'd be playing that game to begin with.

Of course, that was another benefit to the OGL, in that it let other companies deal with those problems and resolve them when they offered a significant deviation of the game.

To quote Mearls from the D&D 5e Info page:

"With fourth edition, there was a huge focus on mechanics. The story was still there, but a lot of our customers were having trouble getting to it. In some ways, it was like we told people, ‘The right way to play guitar is to play thrash metal,’ But there’s other ways to play guitar.” - Mike Mearls.
​

Not that I'm trying to start an edition war skirmish. I personally feel this kind of thinking started back in 3.5, and the attitude goes back farther.

I didn't feel that it was there, at least not very much, in 3.5. That said, we seem to be talking about slightly different things...you're talking about adding house rules because you want to (e.g. you feel you can do X better), whereas I'm talking about adding house rules because I (perceive a) need to (e.g. because X is broken, or simply absent altogether).

I agree with your premise, but not your conclusion. You are correct, that's why such a system is more vulnerable to bad DMing. The trouble is that "lopsided"-ness can be a feature that a DM or group wants in their game. Just consider the innumerable threads on whether casters and fighters were balanced at various levels in various editions, and then consider the (also large) numbers of threads debating whether they should be balanced at all. The flexibility of the "lighter" systems of days gone by is (I'm confident) one of the things that a lot of people miss in the current editions.

See, I don't see this as falling under the purview of house rules at all, however, but rather as a question of playstyle - one that's completely divorced from the rules.

To run with the "are casters better than fighters (at higher levels)?" example, I found that regardless of the system, this was solved by adding more encounters during a play session. No new rules were needed, but rather one simply had to adjust how they were structuring game-play.

By contrast, a house rule would likely have either tried to de-power casters or crank up the power of fighters...both of which would likely have had unintended consequences.

 

[pemerton]

having each player at the same table using totally different rules (i.e. one guy just has his ability scores, attack bonus, and other bare essentials, another guy has skills, feats, 4e-like powers, etc), well now that is an entirely different matter. Trying to manage all of that is going to be a nightmare for the DM. And frankly, I don't even find this idea at all desirable. It's like I want to play chess and the other guy wants to play checkers. Choose which one you're going to play; trying to mix the two games into one is just ludicrous.

I think that you are mixing up the character build mechanics and the action resolution mechanics.

Varying approaches to character build won't be a nightmare for the GM, because (assuming that the game is properly designed) the GM won't have to interact with them.

And I'm pretty confident that is intended that the action resolution mechanics will be the same across all PCs. There may be "action resolution modules" (eg gridless vs gridded combat) but these will be table-level "GM choice" modules, not player-by-player modules.

 

[Ratskinner]

But having each player at the same table using totally different rules (i.e. one guy just has his ability scores, attack bonus, and other bare essentials, another guy has skills, feats, 4e-like powers, etc), well now that is an entirely different matter. Trying to manage all of that is going to be a nightmare for the DM. And frankly, I don't even find this idea at all desirable. It's like I want to play chess and the other guy wants to play checkers. Choose which one you're going to play; trying to mix the two games into one is just ludicrous.

I believe they've explicitly stated that you can run characters "in those styles" (by which they seem to mean degree of specificity) side by side. However, you won't be running simultaneous multi-edition games.

To me, it sounds like the Player-side options won't affect the general play of the game, just how their character is specified within it. That is, I'd expect simple and complex characters within the same game to have the same types of numbers and calculate them the same way, make the same kinds of ability/skill checks, have the same kind of spells and related issues, etc. Even if one character has 6 notes about its abilities and another has 2. It'd be like the way some fractals work: looks very similar to itself as you zoom in on it.

Monte Cook: "For example, the basic game fighter might have specific level-bases abilities. Things that every fighter has. If you decide to get more customized, you can swap standard abilities for more complex, optional abilities. These are the kinds of things that feats do now. But the complex stuff is balanced with what's in the core. One character is more complex, but not necessarily more powerful."

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So if you're character starts with the simple Theme A, you might decide at level 6 to get more complex. You might replace Theme A with a selection of sub-abilities from Theme A in the complex chapter. So instead of having "Theme A" on your character sheet, you'd write "Feature a1, feature a3, feature a4" or something like that. There might even be another level of complexity where you'd explode one of those. (Although that gets into headache territory quickly.) My guess is that Race, Class, Background/theme, and possibly some kind of level-abilities will be "explodable" in a similar way.

The GM will (presumably after consulting with the players) decide what GMOPtion modules he wants in play before the game starts. Those might change the nature of the mechanics the players have to choose from; the stats they have to calculate, the way spells work, the way movement works, the flow of combat, hit points, healing, etc. However, once those are decided, they would be decided for the table, not individual players. I suppose you could change which options are available at sometime during the game (maybe a god gets killed? the nature of magic changes?) and have everyone recalculate, but I wouldn't anticipate that as the norm.

Theoretically, GM options that would affect the character, but not resolution mechanics could be applied to different PCs. I suppose you could have a player choose a "high lethality" option run next to a character with a "High Heroics" option....I just don't know why/how that would work socially at the table.

"So, the game is actually a matrix of these choices, with some made by the DM and some by the players, which will end up determining the feel of the overall game and might allow the group to "emulate" a prior edition." - Monte Cook.

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Emphasis added.

 

[pemerton]

People seem to be getting confused by what Monte means when he says that the "core of the game" looks "a lot like OD&D." He's not trying to say something that all of us seem blissfully unaware of.

What labels a game as Dungeons & Dragons, even to someone who's never played it?

<snip>

- Alignment (someone who's never played knows what "lawful good" means).

<snip>

That's Dungeons & Dragons.

Lawful good originated as part of the nine point alignment system, which is AD&D, not O- or Basic D&D. (Did any of the supplements introduce it before AD&D?) Back in the late 70s, there were disputes as to whether it was good or bad for the game to adopt the 9-point system.

This may seem a mere quibble, but it does tend to reinforce the suggestion that pinning down the core of D&D isn't utterly trivial.

 

[pemerton]

To run with the "are casters better than fighters (at higher levels)?" example, I found that regardless of the system, this was solved by adding more encounters during a play session. No new rules were needed, but rather one simply had to adjust how they were structuring game-play.

By these lights, I can say "an at will wizard is just a pacing thing - ensure only one encounter per rest period, and your wizard can cast all his/her spells in each encounter."

One way to try and deal with nova-ing (assuming it's causing a problem) is to change pacing. Another is to change mechanics to make nova-ing less unbalancing. I mean, if I like the current pace of my game, but nova-ing is causing headaches, than nova-ing is a rules problem, because (ex hypothesi) I don't want to make it go away by changing my pacing.

 

[pemerton]

The GM will (presumably after consulting with the players) decide what GMOPtion modules he wants in play before the game starts. Those might change the nature of the mechanics the players have to choose from; the stats they have to calculate, the way spells work, the way movement works, the flow of combat, hit points, healing, etc. However, once those are decided, they would be decided for the table, not individual players. I suppose you could change which options are available at sometime during the game (maybe a god gets killed? the nature of magic changes?) and have everyone recalculate, but I wouldn't anticipate that as the norm.

This will be interesting to see.

Both HeroWars/Quest and Burning Wheel have simple and complex resolution options that are meant to work side-by-side. In HW/Q the default assumption is that the GM chooses, of any encounter/situation, which way it is handled. In BW the default assumption is that the player chooses. In either system, the thought is that you can zoom in and out depending on how much attention some particular event in the course of the game deserves.