Why is it so important?

[Beginning of the End]

The party had just finished their third encounter in the caves, a real tough one in which a couple characters almost dropped and a lot of spells were cast. One of the players looks around and states, "Well, I guess we better pull out and rest." The other player and I look at her and ask simultaneously "Why?"

She was so used to having to stop in the middle of adventures and rest to recover spells that it was a habit. A bad habit. One we've broken nicely.

For me, this is not necessarily a feature. Being forced to retreat and lick your wounds is a dynamic I like. It makes the characters human. It adds variety.

Now, if they can find a way to support longer adventure days WITHOUT completely eliminating the need to retreat and rest, then it'll be fine.

 

[pemerton]

OK, then. Here's the problem as I see/understand it:

(1) Each battle either does or does not use up per-day resources. I will consider PC death as a per-day resource.

(1a) If a battle does not use up per-day resources, nothing is lost in engaging in that battle. This means:

(1ai) The PCs can engage in an effectively endless number of these battles.

(1aii) The only significant impact of these battles can be the opportunity to give the PCs stuff.

(1b) If a battle doe use up per-day resources, the PCs will be at less than full capacity. This means:

(1bi) These battles are automatically much more important than the other battles.

(1bii) The PCs can only engage in a limited number of these battles per day.

(1biii) This impact of these battles is to make the PCs less able to deal with future events.

To my mind, these things together lead to several conclusions

<many conclusions snipped>

I believe that the designers are correct in terms of initial play (first 3-6 months), but the more players become aware of the meaninglessness (in a metagame sense) of the majority of encounters, the less excited they will be by those encounters, the less fun they will have, and the more they will want to get on to the "real" encounters that have a chance to significantly (in a metagame sense) impact the game.

Very clear derivation of your conclusions.

I think, however, that in principle (1aii) is false. A battle can have a thematic impact without having either a resource-attrition or resource-enhancement impact. If the aim of the game is to explore thematic content, then such impacts can be significant and rewarding at the metagame level.

I am not sure that 4e embraces this metagame goal, however.

If it does not, and if the only reward of these non-resource-impacting batles is the thrill of "playing my guy and using all those nifty abilities", then I think your prediction about the evolution of play has a reasonable degree of plausibility.

 

[pemerton]

I don't want to quibble about the metaphor, but open-endedness is talking about the ends, and therefore having a number of ways you can reach a pre-determined conclusion is not open ended by virtue of the existence of the pre-determined conclusion.

<snip>

I don't know what you mean by "thematic exploration" - perhaps that's something that's worth another thread to define.

Thanks again for the reply.

By "open-endedness" and "thematic exploration" I had in mind the following sorts of examples. The first is from "The Ebon Mirror" - so I better give a SPOILER ALERT - the second from my own game many years ago:

*The climax to the module requires the players to choose whether the half-orc antagonist is reborn as a pure orc, reborn as a pure human, or remains a half-orc. Each alternative has implicaitons (spelled out by the module author, Keith Baker) for the personality of the antagonist and her future relationship with the PCs. Each also has implications that are not spelled out, but are obvious in the context of the adventure and the nature of the choice posed, for an understanding of racial identity in D&D and therefore (I believe) in the real world. Which choice the players should make is not mandated; unlike many typical modules, therefore, the win is not rail-roaded (contrast this with, for example, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where there is a climactic choice at the end, but the adventure writer tells us what counts as a win, so we have an incentive to use Detect Magic etc to learn which is the true Grail - in "The Ebon Mirror" even knowing the consequences of each choice does not tell the players what counts as a win - the thematic determination is there's to make). In this sense the adventure is open-ended.

*The climax to one of my adventures involved the PCs travelling to another plane, where an enemy cult were preparing a sacrifice to a dark god. The PCs had been intending to fight them. One of the PCs, upon learning the motivations and reasoning of the cult, instead decided to join with them, and helped them sacrifice another of the PCs. This choice (unsurprisingly) fundamentally altered the direction of the campaign from then on.​

In both these examples, the circumstances and context of the climax are pre-determined by the adventure writer, but it's resolution - and especially the thematic implications of that resolution - are up to the players. This is (in my view) a type of rewarding open-endedness that does not rely upon resource management.

Who you choose to kill is possibly an emotional issue, but *how* you choose to do it is probably based on a more rational assessment of the situation (or at least it is if you want to live).

<snip>

In any case, a move to encounter-level resources AFAICT has no bearing on how easy emotional issues are to interject into DnD.

<snip>

In comparison, players of DnD are very well educated about the effectiveness of various weapons and tactics and it's hard for me to imagine that they can put aside that knowledge for the sake of roleplaying.

<snip>

I would argue that characters like Conan and Aragorn, while they have personality and emotional issues, those issues are not a significant factor in their tactical approach to combat. They still use optimal weapons and tactics available.

If the focus of the game is thematic, in the way I've tried to explain above, one can then introduce mechanics which empower players to pursue the themes that interest them, and remove the incentives you identify always to fall back upon the "tactically superior" options.

For example, suppose a player decides one motivation for his character is to "uphold my late father's honour" and this includes wielding his father's sword. That PC might receive a bonus of +1 dice of damage whenever pursuing this goal. The player then has an incentive to pursue the theme, and does not have to trade off that goal against the prospect that the +1 greatsword is a tactically superior choice to his father's cutlass.

Linking this to novels, Aragorn and Conan both fight better when there is something at stake that moves them deeply. Mechanics can support that - perhaps Aragorn gets +1 dice when wielding Narsil/Anduril, +1 dice when fighting to restore his kingdom. Then the player of Aragorn has an incentive to push the game in a certain direction, make certain choices, and gets rewarded not just by engaging in tactically superior play, but by pursuing certain themes even if they are (from the tactical point of view) irrational. For example, charging a troll might be irrational in general, but if Aragorn does it wielding Narsil, because it is the only way to keep his hopes of inheritance alive, he gets +2 dice of damage and suddenly it becomes mechanically feasible to make the choice which would in other circumstances be irrational.

Per-encounter rather than per-day resources can support this sort of play by stopping operational considerations from getting in the way of these thematically-driven choices.

Of course, for a fully dynamic and open-ended game of this sort the player has to be able to change his or her thematic commitments. TRoS's Spiritual Attributes allow for this. So do The Dying Earth's tagline rules (in a much more light-hearted way).

I will be interested to see whether 4e has any mechanics of this sort. I suspect that it will not, but you never know.

 

[Raven Crowking]

This assumes that the only reason to have a battle is to consume resources. But there's another, much simpler reason to have battles - because they're fun. And I don't think most gaming groups judge how much fun a battle was by how many per-day resources it consumed. I've been gaming for a long time now, and I've never played in a group that judged how much fun a battle was in that way.

Question: Then whysoever, may I ask, have we been told time and time again, to eschew that "4 goblins vs. 10th level figher" in 3.X?

Answer: Because we are told that it is not fun.

Question: Why are we told that it is not fun?

Answer: Because it is not significant, and more specifically because it has no chance to affect the outcome of the adventure.

Question: If this was true for 3e, why would it not be true for 4e?

Answer: ????

 

[Raven Crowking]

And also lets remember there are more degrees than life or death or "gimme". Theres a wide range in between.

That's actually the crux of the argument.

I would contend that there were more degrees in 1e, where even a goblin could potentially affect a 10th level fighter, than in 3e.

I would contend that the reduction of resource management in 4e will again lessen the scope between life and death or "gimme", and I have seen no answer to that argument other than, effectively, ignoring the argument or "I will that it shall not be so, therefore it shall not be so."

RC

 

[Raven Crowking]

Oh, and one other thing. Even looking at it solely from the standpoint of how many resources are expended, a hypothetical 4E fight that only uses per-encounter resources isn't comparable to a "4 goblins against a 10th level fighter" scenario, because that scenario uses no resources at all. Which isn't the same thing as a fight in which per-encounter resources are used.

Again, you are closing in on the point.

Please explain to me how the resources of the PCs have changed from the pre-fight resources to the post-fight resources, as they enter the next encounter? How exactly is it different from "4 goblins against a 10th level fighter" in actual effect?

Because, yeah, people are going to go "Cool! I got to use my per encounter powers!" for a few months, I agree, before coming to the conclusion that they are actually wasting their time with such encounters because the outcome is both preordained and inconsequential.

Six months to a year after the last 4e Core book is released, we'll be reading advice to handwave those encounters here, exactly as we do the 4 goblins vs. fighter 10 now.

 

[Raven Crowking]

But these arent really resources. Not to players and not from a design perspective. The ability to walk isnt a resource. The ability to speak isnt a resource. Not in terms of how people generally think about it.

Bingo.

If the ability to swing a sword isn't considered a resource, because you can always do it, then the same will be true of the per-encounter abilities, sooner or later, once players figure it out.

As your examples demonstrate, only things where the use of them now significantly impacts the future ability to use the same things later are considered resources by players of the game.

 

[Jackelope King]

Again, you are closing in on the point.

Please explain to me how the resources of the PCs have changed from the pre-fight resources to the post-fight resources, as they enter the next encounter? How exactly is it different from "4 goblins against a 10th level fighter" in actual effect?

Mechanically, probably hit points.

In-game?
- the story has progressed
- ground is gained or lost
- the situation gets better or worse for the characters
- they managed or failed to rescue the innkeeper's daughter
- the enemy forces have been depleted of a unit
- the heroes proved their mettle to the townsfolk
- an important clue as to the location of the cleric's long-lost brother was whispered through the dying lips of one of the bandits
- a treasure map was found during the looting of the bodies
- the scuffle did or didn't alert the dragon to the party's whereabouts
- the delaying action of the rearguard frustrated the PCs' attempt to capture their king
- the PCs now must make a daring running slide under the portcullis before it shuts or be forced to scale the castle walls
- the heroes use their prowess to earn the respect of a might lord of mercenary warbands
- it's a trap and now the heroes find the other forty goblins surrounding them with crossbows
- one of the cut-throats was carrying a piece of an artifact which sets into motion the scramble to reassemble the Last Mirror of the Witch-King
- the PCs accidentally killed their own countrymen in a late-night scuffle, leaving them in serious hot-water
- the wizard learns that his old master hired these goons to test his young apprentice's spellpower
- the wicked sorcerer was just setting the heroes up for a good ol' fashioned delayed blast fireball
- the changelings managed to hold the heroes long enough that they missed the lightning rail to Sharn
- the necromancer's ritual requires three hundred bodies to complete... and now he has four more
- it was a bluff, and the one important piece of treasure that the PCs were supposed to recover, the True Crest of the Royal Family, was handed off to a fence long ago
- great, now the inn smells like dead goblin, and the PCs have to clean it up at 3 in the morning

 

[Raven Crowking]

Why should I stick to chess? I used it as an analogy to illustrate that tactics are important even in a system where you can expand all your resources with abandon. Next time you play chess, you pick up the board and put up all your pieces. I didn't make any further analogies with chess though I responded to some other analogy. So, "surely" I won't concede my analogy exactly because that I was after! In the sense that if all powers are per encouter you can use them all in a given encounter but it still leaves room for tactics. That was my point and I won't concede it.

Fair enough, then. We agree that tactics are important in a win/lose situation, regardless of whether or not you need to reserve resources. However, that doesn't in any way, shape, or form imply that tactics without resources are interesting without that "win/lose" aspect.

Your refusal to examine your analogy in light of this makes it a very poor analogy, IMHO.

RC

 

[Imaro]

Mechanically, probably hit points.

Unless th cleric or "healer type" has a per encounter healing abilty. Even if it only heals a small amount but refreshes every minute it's going to make anything but the most damaging encounters negligible.

In-game?
- the story has progressed
- ground is gained or lost
- the situation gets better or worse for the characters
- they managed or failed to rescue the innkeeper's daughter
- the enemy forces have been depleted of a unit
- the heroes proved their mettle to the townsfolk
- an important clue as to the location of the cleric's long-lost brother was whispered through the dying lips of one of the bandits
- a treasure map was found during the looting of the bodies
- the scuffle did or didn't alert the dragon to the party's whereabouts
- the delaying action of the rearguard frustrated the PCs' attempt to capture their king
- the PCs now must make a daring running slide under the portcullis before it shuts or be forced to scale the castle walls
- the heroes use their prowess to earn the respect of a might lord of mercenary warbands
- it's a trap and now the heroes find the other forty goblins surrounding them with crossbows
- one of the cut-throats was carrying a piece of an artifact which sets into motion the scramble to reassemble the Last Mirror of the Witch-King
- the PCs accidentally killed their own countrymen in a late-night scuffle, leaving them in serious hot-water
- the wizard learns that his old master hired these goons to test his young apprentice's spellpower
- the wicked sorcerer was just setting the heroes up for a good ol' fashioned delayed blast fireball
- the changelings managed to hold the heroes long enough that they missed the lightning rail to Sharn
- the necromancer's ritual requires three hundred bodies to complete... and now he has four more
- it was a bluff, and the one important piece of treasure that the PCs were supposed to recover, the True Crest of the Royal Family, was handed off to a fence long ago
- great, now the inn smells like dead goblin, and the PCs have to clean it up at 3 in the morning

This are all story resources, but let's for a minute suppose you are running a dungeon crawl...now what resources have changed? I wouldn't even call these resouces but more advancing the plotline than anything else. Resources are things that are expended to give your PC the ability to do a p[articular something.