D&D 5E Why the claim of combat and class balance between the classes is mainly a forum issue. (In my opinion)

[Ahnehnois]

Honestly though, my role-playing game should include Role-playing, Imagination, and be Mentally challenging? That's like saying chickens have core values which include beaks, feathers, and eggs.

And yet, you'll read people vehemently arguing against all of these things, perhaps just for the sake of argument.

 

[Mercurius]

I feel obliged to say something in this mega-thread because [MENTION=85870]innerdude[/MENTION] so kindly paired me with the brilliant, if allegedly self-important, Marshall McLuhan.

I think [MENTION=85870]innerdude[/MENTION] expressed something about [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]'s perspective that I was trying to get across, but in a much clearer manner. I also agree with the idea that pemerton's approach is rather unusual - and probably quite skilled - within the context of 4E, and shouldn't be taken as the "typical example" of how 4E is played. So even though pemerton proves that 4E can be played in a certain way, it doesn't mean it is designed in such a manner to easily facilitate such play.

Pemerton, I honestly think this is a case of you being too clever, and skilled, to see that what you are doing is not easy, or even encouraged, by the 4E rules. Even if it is stated within the 4E rules, the end result for a large number of players is that 4E did not in fact encourage the type of immersion you have spoken of, and that the AEDU paradigm had the net result of distancing players from their characters, turning the latter into tokens to manipulate by the former.

As someone said in another thread, the "feel" of D&D outside of combat is largely the same, regardless of edition (although I would add that character creation and advancement is also quite different). Sure, there are differences in how social interactions and skills are employed, but by and large the DM sets a scene and the players interact within it, making choices that guide the narrative. It is when combat starts that the differences between editions really start to show up, and 4E inspired a kind of cognitive dissonance between combat and non-combat, like they were two different games - and this largely due to both the requirement of the battlemat and the AEDU structure.

Now if you're able to reduce or eliminate this cognitive dissonance it likely means that you take an unusual approach to the game and/or you're a very skilled DM and/or you have very accomplished players. I suspect all three.

One final note. I think a big underlying "problem" with 4E, so to speak, is a carry-over from 3E, but magnified further - and it is that system mastery is required to really bring out the fullness of the game experience. This was true of 3E with regards to character optimization, but in 4E it is more relevant to not only "tactical optimization" but immersion. Its just too hard to get to the point where the rules are transparent.

Actually, this inspires me to start a related thread - a hypothesis that I'd like to further explore. I'll post a link momentarily.

 

[pemerton]

4E inspired a kind of cognitive dissonance between combat and non-combat, like they were two different games

I've frequently posted over the past few years that one of the bigger flaws in 4e is the lack of integration between combat and non-combat resolution. (It's not hopeless - there are some gestures in the DMG2 discussion of skill challenges, for instance; and some modules - an early one like Heathen, and a later one like The Cairn of the Winter King - try to bridge the gap via allowing hit point damage via social skills.)

But I don't see that that has any particular connection to balance. Nor to (say) gamism vs narrativism: for instance, two well-known narrativist games - HeroQuest revised and Burning Wheel - both have rules that forbid the use of social skills to resist physical attacks (ie once the punch is thrown you can't try and talk them down). Whereas, as best I understand, FATE has no such rule.

pemerton's approach is rather unusual - and probably quite skilled - within the context of 4E, and shouldn't be taken as the "typical example" of how 4E is played.

I don't know if it's typical or not. There are plenty of regular posters on this board now, and over the past few years, who seem to play 4e in much the same way.

There's a good chance I take the game more seriously than many other players - given my ENworld postcount I'm obviously fairly far into the hardcore of RPGers! - but that's equally true of those posters playing 3E or OSR games.

what you are doing is not easy, or even encouraged, by the 4E rules. Even if it is stated within the 4E rules, the end result for a large number of players is that 4E did not in fact encourage the type of immersion you have spoken of, and that the AEDU paradigm had the net result of distancing players from their characters, turning the latter into tokens to manipulate by the former.

This may be true. I'm not sure it tells us how 4e is meant to be played, though - it's not impossible that those who dislike the game have a better handle on it than those who like it, but it's certainly not obvious to me that they do.

I also don't accept that playing characters as token is particularly foreign to D&D play. How else is a module like Tomb of Horrors meant to be played, for instance?

As someone said in another thread, the "feel" of D&D outside of combat is largely the same, regardless of edition

<snip>

Sure, there are differences in how social interactions and skills are employed, but by and large the DM sets a scene and the players interact within it, making choices that guide the narrative.

See, for me this is highly contentious. AD&D 2nd ed didn't have social skills at all, at least in the books that were in use when I was playing the game. And the use of CHA as a catch-all social ability was very different from either the 3E approach (with Diplomacy skill) or the 4e approach (with skill challenges).

More generally, it doesn't seem to me that there is anything innate in the idea that combat should be resolved mathematically via dice rolls, but social interaction via free negotiation and GM fiat. But to the extent that D&D is designed to make combat a privileged site of player control over the fiction - because the one place where the mechanics put definite control into player hands - there will be pressure for mechanical balance in the combat capabilities of various character builds.

 

[dd.stevenson]

As I also said, being generally hostile to AD&D 2nd ed doesn't mean you having anything against D&D as such.

I read plenty of people who are very specifically hostile to 4e, but I don't infer from that that they hate D&D as such. I am rather hostile to AD&D 2nd ed, but strongly deny that I am hostile to D&D as such, given that I've been playing it in one form or other more-or-less continuously since 1982.

Perhaps you mis-typed earlier? You didn't say that the forge wasn't anti-D&D "as such", you said that they weren't anti-D&D "at all".

I agree that not everyone involved with the forge is hostile to every type of D&D.

 

[Bedrockgames]

See, for me this is highly contentious. AD&D 2nd ed didn't have social skills at all, at least in the books that were in use when I was playing the game. And the use of CHA as a catch-all social ability was very different from either the 3E approach (with Diplomacy skill) or the 4e approach (with skill challenges).

builds.

Minor quibble. Technically it did, just not the kind of social skills you find in D&D today. Under the non-weapon proficiency optional rules (which were pretty detailed and in the phb) they had ettiquette for example. This was deliberately treated as a knowledge skill, where the player made the roll to see if they knew the appropriate way to behave in a given situation, the gm would inform the player and the pkayer owuld then act on that knowledge. The idea was they didn't want to the social skill roll to replace or interfere with the roleplaying (and they pretty much say this in the text description of the nwp). So it isda kind of dilomacy skill. They certainly didn't have the broad range of social skills 3E had (thouyg one coud expand this concept to other social categories (where it isnt rolled as an action but to give the playerd information to inform action).

I don't think there is a right or wrong way to go about this, but i find is suits my style much betterl

 

[Bedrockgames]

Perhaps you mis-typed earlier? You didn't say that the forge wasn't anti-D&D "as such", you said that they weren't anti-D&D "at all".

I agree that not everyone involved with the forge is hostile to every type of D&D.

I notice a lot of these threads veer into talking about the forge itself, maybe it would be better if someone opened a new thread on that topic?

 

[Iosue]

If "pemertonian scene framing" for 4e was easy to "grok," and was providing the same kinds of experiences as it is for your group for the D&D fan base at large, then why did the bulk of the fan base--to say nothing of the company that produced it--largely abandon it?

To me this was and is a clear signal from the fan base to the makers of the game---we want less gamism, not more; we want a more "naturalist" approach to encounter design. If the collective "We," meaning the "average" D&D game group, has to indulge Gamist Player Bob in his need to "step on up," there'd better be a very, very good counter-payoff that makes an RPG experience wholly unique as a social and entertainment art form, one that is DIFFERENT from the thousands upon thousands of other gamist, "step on up" avenues Bob has at his disposal.

RPGs only matter as an entertainment form BECAUSE they inherently offer more than "step on up."

I very much agree that PSF, while an interesting and effective way to use the 4e rule set, was not the style of play initially imagined, nor explicitly presented in the rule books (though I think there were implicit hints).

However, I don't think I can quite get on board with the above quoted portion.

It seems common wisdom that WotC's goals with D&D have been to bring "the fan base" with them from edition to edition. I don't believe that historically that has been the case. Jeff Grubb has explicitly said that the company did not care if any TSR-era players got on board with 3e, and that they even made t-shirts denigrating 2nd Ed. The company has always been looking for new players, and their design strategies have reflected that. 3.x made a deliberate move from the abstractness and baroqueness that had always been a hallmark of D&D to create a unified system with elaborate character generation. This was a move to grab players who heretofore had not been interested in D&D, and along with other factors (new edition buzz, OGL, etc) was very successful.

Likewise, 4e made a distinct move away from the rules-as-physics aspects of 3e and pursued a kind of design that tapped into Eurogames, MMORPGs, and indie design, combined with an ambitious digital initiative and introduction of a subscription model of service. Again, the main impetus here was not to bring along "the fan base", but to grab new players who heretofore had not been interested in D&D. It was again successful, if not to the degree hoped for when the pitch was initially made.

5e, likewise, looks very much like an attempt to get back to basics, with a very easy buy-in and adjustable complexity. But I do not believe they are really looking to bring along the 4e fan base, or even to bring back the Pathfinder players, or to court OSR/TSR players. I do think that, unlike in previous editions, they are interested in picking up money from those fans in the form of adventures that can be usable, with some conversion, to various historical editions. But I don't believe they expect people to drop their current editions and jump wholeheartedly on the Next train.

To be sure, WotC is always happy when people cross over to the next edition. But the essential conceit of RPGs makes this a poor strategy to rely on in the main. In the end, it's a limitless game. Once you buy a set of rules, you never need to buy anything more, and certainly you don't need to buy a new edition. And most casual gamers don't. TSR left behind millions of players with 2e. WotC left behind millions of players with 3e. They left behind millions of players with 4e. They will undoubtedly leave behind millions of players with 5e, as far as the core books go.

The 3e/4e split may be based on rules-as-simulator versus rules-as-balanced-action-resolution. But by the same token, the 2e/3e split was based rules-as-DM-guidelines versus rules-as-simulator. What is at play here is not playstyle agendas (i.e., gamist v. narrativist v. simulationist), but rather the role of rules as a mediator. Mearls has not talked much about "telling stories", "simulating a genre" or "creating challenges", but he's talked a lot about "simplicity", and "letting the rules get out of the way". Like it's predecessors, 5e is making a move away from the previous paradigm -- the interaction with the rules themselves providing the fun (be that 3e style character building/system mastery or 4e style finely-tuned tactical combat), towards a paradigm of simple rules with optional complexity and greater reliance on the DM/group to decide the degree of rules desired, and their role thereof. And like it's predecessors, this is less about moving the fan base to the next edition than it is about bringing in people who heretofore have not been playing D&D.

 

[Mercurius]

I've frequently posted over the past few years that one of the bigger flaws in 4e is the lack of integration between combat and non-combat resolution. (It's not hopeless - there are some gestures in the DMG2 discussion of skill challenges, for instance; and some modules - an early one like Heathen, and a later one like The Cairn of the Winter King - try to bridge the gap via allowing hit point damage via social skills.)

But I don't see that that has any particular connection to balance. Nor to (say) gamism vs narrativism: for instance, two well-known narrativist games - HeroQuest revised and Burning Wheel - both have rules that forbid the use of social skills to resist physical attacks (ie once the punch is thrown you can't try and talk them down). Whereas, as best I understand, FATE has no such rule.

True. I guess I was thread-jacking as I wasn't as much talking about balance as re-convening the "immersion conversation," which probably better belongs in this thread.

I don't know if it's typical or not. There are plenty of regular posters on this board now, and over the past few years, who seem to play 4e in much the same way.

There's a good chance I take the game more seriously than many other players - given my ENworld postcount I'm obviously fairly far into the hardcore of RPGers! - but that's equally true of those posters playing 3E or OSR games.

Any regular poster on EN World is already a "serious" gamer; the 5K+ post counts imply "hardcore" to some degree. But I do think you bring up an interesting point - that your seriousness about the game facilitates your style of play. Try to imagine being pretty casual and "just showing up" for a 4E game, or being serious but not hardcore and wanting to run a game, but not necessarily having the time or energy or interest to know every knook and cranny of the rules. This pretty much describes my group: a group of casual players and a "serious plus" DM (me).

It could simply be a matter of time and laziness on my part. I've always learned D&D through playing it. Yeah, I read a few pages of the basic game, but I've never ready a rule book from start to finish and have always felt that the first half a dozen sessions of a new edition or game are kind of like "spring training" - they're learning the rules.

But this returns me to the main "problem" with 4E - it isn't that it is a bad game or not fun or cannot truly fly, but that it is harder to get to that point--of really "flying"--than in previous editions. See my other thread.

This may be true. I'm not sure it tells us how 4e is meant to be played, though - it's not impossible that those who dislike the game have a better handle on it than those who like it, but it's certainly not obvious to me that they do.

Again, see the other thread for further discussion of this. Consider it a "working hypothesis."

I also don't accept that playing characters as token is particularly foreign to D&D play. How else is a module like Tomb of Horrors meant to be played, for instance?

Definitely agree. But again, later editions - 3E, but especially 4E - emphasized this further, mainly through the need for a battlemat but also the AEDU paradigm.

See, for me this is highly contentious. AD&D 2nd ed didn't have social skills at all, at least in the books that were in use when I was playing the game. And the use of CHA as a catch-all social ability was very different from either the 3E approach (with Diplomacy skill) or the 4e approach (with skill challenges).

Weren't non-weapon proficiencies part of 2E from the beginning? I thought they were introduced in 1E in Unearthed Arcana (or was it Greyhawk Adventures?) and then incorporated into the core of 2E.

More generally, it doesn't seem to me that there is anything innate in the idea that combat should be resolved mathematically via dice rolls, but social interaction via free negotiation and GM fiat. But to the extent that D&D is designed to make combat a privileged site of player control over the fiction - because the one place where the mechanics put definite control into player hands - there will be pressure for mechanical balance in the combat capabilities of various character builds.

I agree that its not innate, but again, I think it is easier to attain deeper immersion--what we could call "player-character fusion" in which the player inhabits, so to speak, their character in theater of mind--outside than within combat in 4E, which is why I say that it is basically the same as in other editions, or at least closer to them, outside of combat.

 

[Mercurius]

The 3e/4e split may be based on rules-as-simulator versus rules-as-balanced-action-resolution. But by the same token, the 2e/3e split was based rules-as-DM-guidelines versus rules-as-simulator. What is at play here is not playstyle agendas (i.e., gamist v. narrativist v. simulationist), but rather the role of rules as a mediator. Mearls has not talked much about "telling stories", "simulating a genre" or "creating challenges", but he's talked a lot about "simplicity", and "letting the rules get out of the way". Like it's predecessors, 5e is making a move away from the previous paradigm -- the interaction with the rules themselves providing the fun (be that 3e style character building/system mastery or 4e style finely-tuned tactical combat), towards a paradigm of simple rules with optional complexity and greater reliance on the DM/group to decide the degree of rules desired, and their role thereof. And like it's predecessors, this is less about moving the fan base to the next edition than it is about bringing in people who heretofore have not been playing D&D.

Interesting post. I work at a small private school in which we're always tinkering with not only the curriculum but our governance structure (one of the perks of being a private school). I've found that over the five+ years that I've been here, and from what I've heard about the past, the general paradigm oscillates back and forth between a more defined and conservative approach and a more loose and progressive approach, each with their own strengths and weaknesses and seemingly inherent hurdles to overcome. Very few people that I've worked with are truly "balanced," and if they are, as in Taoist philosophy, one can always imagine a polar opposite. "Dark" can only defined in relation to "light."

But my point in bringing this up is that I've found the "new" paradigm is always in reaction to the "old" paradigm. When I first arrived at the school it was very loose, very "hand wavey" (to use an RPG term) and a kind of coup occurred in which a much more structured (and, in the end, rigid) paradigm arose.

As you said, 5E is (at least partially) a reaction to 4E, which was a reaction to 3E, which was a reaction to 2E, which was a reaction to 1E, which was a reaction to OD&D. And so it goes.

The problem is that if the new iteration is based too much on reaction, it tends to go too far the other way. So the key, I think, is trying to find a middle ground, that doesn't throw the baby out with the bathwater (of the old paradigm or edition), yet does seek to address the excesses (that is, the bathwater's gotta go!).

Now if we want to be wise in a Taoist sense, we will realize that that there is no final, perfectly balanced solution. There is no Edition to End All Editions...if we want to be even wiser, we can say, "But...there is an edition to end all editions, and it is the one you're playing!"

 

[Mistwell]

I don't think this is true. Forge games are played. Forge designers are widely cited as influences. (I mentioned Vincent Baker upthread. I could equally mention Luke Crane, who is cited by Jonathan Tweet for "fail forward" principles in both the 20th anniversary edition of Over the Edge, and in 13th Age.) FATE seems to be reaching a crescendo of popularity, which means a crescendo of popularity for indie-style play. None of that strikes me as failure. These are all typical marks of success for a cultural movement.

Edwards essentially shut down the Forge, and he gave up and slinked away with his tail between his legs after every game he developed, one of which he went on a costly European tour to promote, all failed. Fewer people know of the Forge now than did 5 years ago. They tried to create a cultural movement, and utterly failed to do so. You are citing "influence" from about 8 years ago on a couple D&D guys, and those authors no longer talk about the Forge anymore. Indeed, after Edwards argued D&D players were literally brain damaged by playing D&D, pretty much every legit D&D author slowly backed away from the crazy that was Edwards.

Anyway, again this is not a topic I want to debate. If you insist on debating it, I will just direct you over to TheRPGSite.com, where they will be happy to discuss in intricate detail why The Forge was very harmful to the RPG industry in general, and how they've failed.