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General Category => Your Stuff => Topic started by: Ron Edwards on October 10, 2013, 04:42:49 PM

Title: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: Ron Edwards on October 10, 2013, 04:42:49 PM
So last night I had an unplanned chance to play some D&D in a more-or-less pickup context, at the Chicago game store The Wanderer's Refuge (http://www.wanderersrefuge.com/). It's an ongoing game which seems to be organized across more than one table or group, with regular attendance preferred but variable in practice. I was invited to make up a character but I asked instead to play one that might be "just lying around," so I got to play "Hank," a Vryloka unaligned Blackguard paladin. For your information, the only words I recognized in that description are "Hank" and "paladin." After looking at a completely unfamiliar character sheet, I asked and learned that this was straight-up, rock-solid fourth edition. (Cool - I had never seen even a bit of this in action before.)

Here are some thing which I might have taken as foreboding. I was not permitted Hank's actual sheet but a photocopy; I get the idea that he's being played by someone else more permanently and perhaps any bad things I did or had happen to him, i.e., death, would be confined to my photocopy and not extended to the "real" Hank. Apparently the others at the table were also somewhat not quite the core group, and the DM told us we'd be playing something peripheral to the current campaign/story - a one-shot, more or less. He asked us if we'd prefer a fight or a story/interaction, and after wrapping my mind around the difference, I opted for the fight and the others agreed. My request for a relevant fight was met by the concept that more of the group needed to be there for that.

In the event, however, I enjoyed myself immensely. Part of it was the welcoming atmosphere at the store, including one fellow who knew Hank's sheet well and although he was playing at another table, helped me go through the various interconnecting abilities. He was totally not patronizing and seemed genuinely excited that I spotted cool combos on my own. The three people I played with, including the DM, were really nice young guys whose social contract for play was functional, considerate, and enthusiastic.

Lesson 1: 4th ed is all about the bad-ass. If you didn't know this, my character was about as goth as you can get: a Vryloka is some kind of vampire hybrid with undead affinities, a Blackguard is (in this case) an ex-paladin with all sorts of necromantic and cold/dark/scary abilities, and this guy had all kinds of spear expertise and black plate armor. These characters were second level, and my guy can tell an opponent "you suck" and do damage by it, as well as Slow them, then hit with a Dominator Strike for insane bonuses, then levy that into some kind of necrotic poison which does ongoing damage, and so on and on. If he fought someone without anyone else in an adjacent space, he got way-awful bonuses; if he was swarmed by mooks, he got bonuses as a multiplier to their number. The others were almost as insane, with the sorceress who could cast lightning, channel it through her spear, and in a pinch, breathe it at people. It was totally D&D meets Champions. I repeat: second level! I cannot even imagine what tenth level 4th ed characters must be like.

Lesson 2: there's a learning curve, but a rewarding one. Damage hits hard and hurts, but you have all sorts of ways to restore hit points whether permanent or temporary, as well as to help out your buddies. My character was kind of a master at this, to the extent of burning his hit points for damage bonuses, but then bestowing to-hit bonuses on his allies after doing heinous damage, then doing something which restores hit points. But as a player, you can't slack off and trust to your pile of hit points and your armor class to hide in, because the bad guys have all sorts of nasty of the same sort. You have to assess your status, your position, your choice of attacks, and choice of abilities with care every round; the fun thing is that there's so much to choose from. Every round in our fight produced a unique visual series of events, especially when we started holding actions to set up a tactical order based on what stuff we wanted to use.

The situation was pretty simple. Our characters were staying with some gnome mage's weird house in Baldur's Gate, and we got our dreams combined and invaded by a "shadowy figure" who reeked of malevolence and mischief, eventually attacking us with minions. It turned out that it had escaped from one of the mage's experiments. The fight dice went very much our way, with no-cheat 20's showing up at least six times among us, and one DM-facepalm round in which all three minions simultaneously rolled 1's - one of them actually disintegrated itself in doing so. Even so, that attention to hit-point management was still pretty important, all of us were "bloodied" at one or more points during the fight. The guy playing the bard also timed his spell-backed Diplomacy roll perfectly, right after my character had cowed, frozen, and damaged the big bad guy with that scary-speak ability, and nailed it with a rolled 20 for a total of 35 - and then I demanded we be returned safely to our correct place and time with another 20 on a Diplomacy roll, so we were able to exit victoriously. Now legitimately awake again, we then told the mage to put her nasty little experiment back into its jar.

Color, descriptions, and role-playing in the character sense were ... minimal. My auxiliary descriptions or bits of Color and dialogue clearly raised the bar at the table, and the DM effectively refused to describe the dream landscape or to elaborate upon the opponents as anything more than "shadowy figures." The other players did provide decent one-line descriptions of their characters' personalities, but only because I asked for them. Given the Color practically dripping off the character concepts, combat mechanics, and every individual ability, I found that a little odd. It definitely leads me to add 4E to my list of "stuff to GM one day," although Lamentations of the Flame Princess will come first.

Any system thoughts? Sure! But you know them already. Mike Mearls was one of the original three guys including me who floated the idea of the Forge in 1999, and Rob Heinsoo was an active participant there. It's no surprise that I'm finding the game so appealing.

Best, Ron
Title: Re: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: Eero Tuovinen on October 11, 2013, 01:34:59 AM
That's an interesting experience of the 4th edition. If you don't mind, I'll do a quick run-down of my own conclusions about the game for contrast. (I don't have any particular need to argue about what 4th edition is or isn't like, so feel free to ignore this if it doesn't seem useful.)

First, colorful fiction: this might be some sort of cultural thing, but 4th edition has consistently failed to grab me with any sort of literary value. To the contrary, I've tended to react with disdain for the materials and their calculated attempt at inoculating me with bog-standard, dusty D&D cliches. A big part of this is how 4th edition character builds are so inherently lacking in meaning, even much more so than earlier editions of D&D. There is no social positioning, psychological attitudes, ideology, or anything else to the building-blocks your character is made of: the only thing that matters is the skirmish combat, and how your character's particular power set interacts with that. The 4th edition definition of a "Rogue" is that he's a guy who "darts in and out of combat, looking for weak spots to strike". Not only doesn't this mean anything in realistic terms (this is not how a melee works outside of highly stylistically developed D&D-land), it is solely focused on a combat role and nothing else.

(It admittedly does not help that I have difficulty relating with video game fantasy fiction - a genre that 4th edition very much represents - aesthetically. However, even keeping in mind that I hate the artificial and calculated cliches, 4th edition is remarkable in how substance-free it manages to be. It's the single edition of D&D where being a "monk" matters even less in ecclesiastical terms - or even martial arts terms - than it does in the others.)

Well, fair enough, it's a skirmish combat miniatures wargame, then. However, my second stumbling block with the 4th edition has always been that the way the game is constructed makes it extremely difficult for there to be a strategic layer to the game at all; it is by nature a game that must be played as a chain of pre-planned skirmish encounters, with some basically meaningless GM narration tiding things over in between. Of course we can try all sorts of things to make player actions "matter", but the fact is that the beef of the game is in the fights, and the fights are borderline-impossible to manage without extensive prep. Consequently it is no wonder that the adventure model of 4th edition is completely railroaded: any and all adventure modules I've seen have consisted of numbered combat encounters with some sparse notes about the roleplaying encounters (which do not have any stakes, note, as the next fight gotta happen no matter what) in between.

One might think that I'm just complaining because I can't accept the game's nature, but I do think that I like and can enjoy a miniatures skirmish game. 4th edition is just so... ambivalent about how it deals with the strategic vs. tactical layers. The game's history and context as a supposed roleplaying game promises so much about the strategic layer that it is difficult in practice to set aside my expectations. It always annoys me immensely that the game makes it so infeasible to select our own vectors of approach to problems. Ultimately the combat has to occur in the prepared location (on the specific combat map) and against the prepared opponent, or the GM has nothing to work with.

The game does nothing to help with the strategic level, either, I think; there are no interesting strategic resources or choices available to the players, so choices made in between the fights don't get to influence things that way, either. It took me a bit to understand why this is the case, but ultimately it's pretty simple: 4th edition comes out of the 3rd edition culture that stresses game balance guaranteed by masterful game designers as a paramount value, so of course it is desired that nothing whatsoever can actually influence the tactical balance of a given encounter. This is why your typical 4th edition between-fights strategic challenge stakes healing surges instead of having concrete consequences; taking away a healing surge or two from a character is completely meaningless in tactical terms (the only thing the surges affect is whether you'll need to have a long rest after this fight or not).

The capstone problem for me has been the way the game deals with failure: there are no actually functional procedures for handling situations where characters lose their fights. Maybe this works for somebody else, but my experience, and the experience of the people I've played with, has been that we really, really hate it when we lose a fight in 4th edition. It just ruins the game, we might as well put it away again and try to forget that we got suckered by the colorful toys into trying it again.

Why is losing so problematic? It's because character death in 4th edition is psychologically awful: character-building in the game is complex and learning to play your character takes a bit of time, so the very last thing I want to be doing is to start from scratch when I've only just managed to figure out how this character of mine plays. You basically don't want characters to die ever, if you care about player enjoyment.

The other problem with losing is of course that it derails the proposed adventure something fierce. How is the GM supposed to continue from there? We've tried simply replaying the fight until we succeed (sort of like how a computer game in the tactical skirmish genre usually works) with or without fictional elaboration (that is, maybe the party can "come back" to try again, or maybe we'll just ignore the results and rewind the fiction), pretending that the fight was won when it was actually lost, taking the fictional stakes at face value and retreating from the adventure for good, and none of those is at all satisfactory and fun. The best approach is probably constructive narration with strong dramatic protections: the principle needs to be that a lost fight means waking up after the fight as a prisoner instead of dying, and the adventure needs to continue from there without significant deviation from the prepared material.

I've been known to characterize this difficulty 4th edition has with lost fights as the "tilt screen", because in actual play it feels exactly like playing a computer game that just crashes on you when you do the wrong thing. Unless you're carefully prepared and know exactly how you're going to proceed after a lost fight, the game leaves you quite helpless should the party lose their fight. And at least my experience is that a lot of fights will be lost; the game is random enough for it to be a regular occurrence. And no, I have no idea how people who play this game regularly avoid losing fights - maybe they cheat, or maybe they're just that much better than I in building characters.

The overarching problem that has made me slow to adapt the game so that it works for me is, of course, with creative agenda: is this supposed to be a gamist game, really? I'm not so sure. Reading the GMing advice and trying to figure out what works psychologically and what doesn't, it seems to me that for most people 4th edition is really merely an extended ritual for rolling around in D&D fantasy aesthetics. It is possible that the game is at its most functional when it is played as "simulationistic for real D&D"; the players constructively pretend as if they had a strategic goal and as if they were making decisions, but in fact everything's been preplanned to provide the classical D&D experience without the need for the players to actually perform their part. It's like watching a tennis match instead of playing one.

This ambivalence about the creative agenda strikes completely through the entire exercise for me: I react with disdain to the xp system, for instance, as it is so transparently meaningless, merely a call-back to old D&D where the xp mechanic was king. Ultimately the game just traps me into a massive catch-22 in that anything at all that might be done to give roleplaying context and fictional stakes for the individual skirmishes is necessarily either meaningless (in that it doesn't influence the core activity of skirmishing), or unbalancing, and the latter is actually not in any way useful for the skirmish activity: the fights that we actually waste our time on need to be reasonably balanced, or there's no point in setting up the map and the figures for it.

So as you can see, my reaction to the game is pretty different. The above impressions are based on about a half dozen scattershot sessions of the 4th edition proper and Gamma World (basically the same game, just a little bit streamlined) over the years; we tend to take the game out occasionally, as the tactical skirmish thing is a bit appealing, but each and every time has ended with frustration with the above issues. I know that I won't be trying it again before I develop an elaborate protocol for handling the macro-level strategic issues; the tactical skirmish works well enough, but we evidently don't have a clue as to how it's supposed to be used as part of a roleplaying game. I sort of know what I'm going to do to transform the game into a genuinely gamist exercise with concrete player buy-in and meaningful encounter balancing, but we'll see when I'll finally have the time to execute the Big Plan.
Title: Re: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: Callan S. on October 11, 2013, 05:36:32 AM
Hi Ron,

Did anyone get pounded into the ground/neg HP? I played in quite a few of the 4e D&D encounters (material provided by WOTC) at a local gameclub and all the combats seemed to render someone unconcious. Indeed I rather suspect its the replacement for character death. Character death was pretty rare, through the encounters season. Though one time we fought a Kracken type creature, who's tentacles were all high level minions - and it kicked our arses! I mean bam, bam, bam! The funny thing was the same encounter was also being run on another table at the club, for a second group and as they had a wizard, they mopped it up quite neatly. Meanwhile our GM, left to reading the after text (which just assumes you won/lived), basically announces a deus ex and then replaces all the adventure text where the folk hail us as heroes and want us to go do X now into hailing us as having had our arses kicked and because of that, they want us to do X. Just ended up reveling in the absurdity.

Anyway, it always seemed the only way to really die is by a full TPK - and if you have a cleric, that's pretty dang unlikely. So being knocked into the ground (and having to knock your figure over to prone) seems the next closest losing condition. So, anyone get knocked out (however briefly)? >:)

QuoteEvery round in our fight produced a unique visual series of events, especially when we started holding actions to set up a tactical order based on what stuff we wanted to use.
It's just really nice to hear that! I hear so many threads elsewhere with people QQ'ing about why can their rogue only do his special thing once a day and rejecting imagining stuff, just based on that sort of thing. It's just nice to hear someone taking all the cues and having fun with it, imaginatively. I know I did!
Title: Re: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: glandis on October 11, 2013, 03:30:12 PM
My very brief experience with 4th edition led me to summarize it as "d20 D&D meets Melee/Wizard" (note: NOT "d20 D&D meets The Fantasy Trip"). There's good and bad to that, and I can imagine enjoying play - I was disappointed that we didn't give it more of a try (though glad to avoid "investing in" [urg - I thought it, so I won't change it to the more accurate "spending on"] a bunch of books again). But for people who'd come through Talislanta to d20 and found ways to use and enjoy it for not-Gamist play - 4th edition didn't offer much.

I am somewhat excited by 13th Age, the Heinsoo/Tweet collaboration that many consider a 3rd edition/4th edition hybrid, and I think even my limited exposure to the (at least potential) virtues of 4e is part of why.
Title: Re: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: Ron Edwards on October 11, 2013, 10:05:57 PM
Eero and Callan, I could not have asked for a better pair of posts in reply, each one arriving from a completely different orientation toward the standalone complex and 4th edition's relationship to it.

Callan first. No one was quite knocked out or hammered into blithering ineffectiveness in any way, but it's clear to me that the dice were responsible for that – we really did roll way too many 20s and the DM did roll that really shitty round. At the halfway point, I noticed how ripped-up the other two characters were and anticipated being the last one standing against the big bad guy. When the rolls started going our way so decisively, we were able to strategize with a fuller deck than that particular set-piece, with the same characters, would be expected to use at that point in the fight, in statistical terms.

As I mentioned, we did have a pretty good set of strategies for hit point recovery, especially for my character who beefed up by doing damage ... and then could burn hit points to do more, if that seemed necessary. We did have to strategize thoughtfully about such things and if the rolls have been more average-y, we'd probably have had to eat at least one PC getting his or her ticket punched.

Unconscious, that is. I completely agree with you about unconsciousness being the functional replacement for insta-death in ordinary combat.

Your brief note about the story context in the game you mentioned ties right into what Eero was talking about, so I'll kind of merge that part of your post with his in what follows.
Title: Re: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: Ron Edwards on October 12, 2013, 11:33:57 PM
It might be hard to believe this, but stuff like World of Warcraft or even late-80s video games with dungeons & levels plays no role at all in my understanding of 4E. I never liked any of that stuff, still don't. What I think I'm seeing is a callback to the D&D which actually prompted that particular form of electronic entertainment. It wasn't my favorite D&D at the time (nothing was; I realized in 1980 that no extant D&D did what I wanted), but I did appreciate it even back then. I'm talking about really concentrated, no fucking around tourney play and its home-grown derivatives.

Of course your character could die. And of course, that meant you lose. And of course, by definition, that hurt. It was supposed to hurt!

Eero, you're right, in that any time someone tried to 'port this kind of play into an epic campaign with chapters and missions and stuff, it fell flat as a water balloon's contents when dropped from the fifth floor balcony onto the sidewalk. As thin a layer of water as physics allows, that's how flat. You can see it in the bogus attempts to "expand" the Slave Lords series into a campaign, as if you were supposed to be playing something day in and day out for the characters, where they go here and talk to some guy, and then decide to go over there, and omigod, look, it turns out we're right at the door to this fortress!

Where you're wrong is thinking that it's an added-on thing from electronic entertainment. Such bullshit. Back then, in 1978, you came to play in that dungeon. The term of the day was "running through," as in, "Yeah, I'm a DM, I can run you through my dungeon." This is one reason why sandboxy talk makes me snort beverage through my nostrils - you think most people were playing in sandboxes, as conceived now, back then? Maybe in Blackmoor. But not hardly in playing anything called "D&D." I played a ton of different tables of D&D, with everything from military guys on-base to the hobby store group to summer programs with adults teaching the kids to a confused bunch of junior high school guys like me to games I organized with women ten years older than me. Sure - fair enough, some of it was "wander about and make your own decisions." But you know what happened when you did that? People said, "That's not playing D&D!"

Yeah. This is 1978-80 I'm talking about, not 1985. The vaunted sandbox was widely considered aberrant play. The one touchpoint I can identify - and again, not all, but the majority - was what Moreno calls "pest control." You go into that fucking dungeon and let's see if you can make it out of an exit. Wham and bam.

Marshall, in the fundamentalism thread, you mentioned:

Quote... within a framework where players can always say "ok, forget this dungeon, we're going somewhere else" (a commonly-held tenet among various interpretations of  "sandbox" play)...

and I just snorted beverage out of my nose again, upon reading that. That's precisely what no one did. You came to play in that dungeon. Opting out = not playing = no guts.

So, you say, there's no story? Sure there can be a story. Sure there can be a framework. In the best games, there was something at stake that for purposes of play, mattered. A people's freedom, perhaps. A cosmic gate to be opened or closed. A dragon's egg to be found and then ... well then, decided what to do with. Any number of things like that which made the fights matter. You can see it all over the artifacts, the tourney-derived adventure modules. But the issue was decided in the fight and the loss was real.

Eero, I can see why you found losing this kind of play terrible. Because this kind of losing isn't what you bought into, and the grander play-on, play-on of it all appeals to you. Because you like Gamism with a lot of context and with a lot of emergent situation and it must be said, a minimum of personal pain. In some of the games I sat in in 1979, they'd have had you squirting tears ... and laughed. Raw meat Gamism, and not some wuss computer game where you get to do it all over. No do-overs here.

You played Tunnels & Trolls! Can you imagine doing so non-ironically? A lot of people did. I am pretty sure you're unaware of Bear Peters' dungeons for that game. Or that Grimtooth's Traps weren't parodies.

As for how people avoid losing the fights, all I have to say is, they care enough to get good at it. The learning curve for this kind of play is real, and it is flatly inaccessible to those who aren't inclined in the first place.

Eero, you wrote,

QuoteUltimately the game just traps me into a massive catch-22 in that anything at all that might be done to give roleplaying context and fictional stakes for the individual skirmishes is necessarily either meaningless (in that it doesn't influence the core activity of skirmishing), or unbalancing, and the latter is actually not in any way useful for the skirmish activity: the fights that we actually waste our time on need to be reasonably balanced, or there's no point in setting up the map and the figures for it.

I think you have it backwards: in this kind of play, you don't get through the fight in order to continue the adventure, you only do adventures so you can get into the fights.

Best, Ron
Title: Re: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: Eero Tuovinen on October 13, 2013, 03:29:28 AM
To be clear, Ron, you're saying that 4th edition is about gamist challenges on the level of individual skirmishes, with GM narration bridging the gaps in between the fights?

The above is my interpretation of how the game is most naturally executed, assuming you don't cheat to keep the party alive (if you do, or just low-ball the difficulty so defeat can never happen, then it's more natural to consider the simulationist angle I speculate upon above). I've used a comparison to the miniatures wargame Warhammer here to clarify my point when trying to figure out the game with other people similarly confused: if 4th edition is all about the challenge of the individual skirmish, with narrative bridges in between, then its creative agenda is essentially identical to Warhammer's - it's a miniatures wargame!

Note that the reason I compare to Warhammer specifically is that the game has a rich tradition of reaching towards rpg-like fictional intricacy. For example, the type of structure a 4th edition adventure seemingly utilizes, with combat encounters stringed together by narrative bridges and occasional simple branching and alternate mission goals, that's exactly the same as the default Warhammer "campaign" structure, excepting the lack of the GM in Warhammer. It's right in the rulebook (or was in the last edition that I read): players wanting more depth of immersion may wish to, instead of playing unconnected battles, string them together with a preplanned campaign arc.

It hasn't been any great difficulty for me to understand the game in the above terms (at least not after I got over my initial disappointment in -08; as was the case with many others, I really wasn't that excited about an edition of D&D that focuses on the fights instead of exploration as the content of play), but it has proven surprisingly difficult for us to execute the game as a wargame, and make it fun. This has to do with very practical issues that might be easier to understand if I compare to Warhammer:

In Warhammer it's no big deal if you lose a fight, as that doesn't mean that you have to abandon your current army plan and start developing a new one. In 4th edition this is sort of strongly implied (the game speaks really, really rarely about what to do when the party loses fights, but it does have rules for dying and introducing new characters to the party), and it sucks as a practice: you have no time to learn to play your current character when he dies on you, and then you have to make a new one.

In Warhammer the challenge is usually symmetrical: the players attempt to structure a fair scenario that they feel is equally possible for both parties to win. Good gamesmanship provides a context for how to deal with the challenge both during and after the game. In 4th edition, on the other hand, a points-buy scenario balancing system exists, but it's at least implied by the rules that it is attempting to balance the encounters so that the party always wins, rather than balancing for serious 50/50 encounters. What is one to think of here, in terms of gamesmanship? What if you lose despite the system guaranteeing your win, what does that make you as a human being?

In Warhammer the campaigns are planned to account for both winning and losing. This is obvious, as both sides of a fight are protagonists, so someone who's victory we care about is always winning. Not so in 4th edition, which really doesn't have any advice or tools for the GM to react to it when the party loses and thus derails the adventure. The game just ends.

Those three are pretty serious pits in executing the game, at least for me. Now that I'm well aware of them (after our last attempt with the game about six months back), I think that I'll be able to fix the game so that it doesn't crash on us. Basically the above three points just need to be recognized and solved in whatever manner; it might even be enough to just warn ourselves carefully in advance that this shit's going to happen. After all, those points are largely psychological in nature, it's not such a shock to have to go through the boring chargen process twice in one session if you know what to expect :D

Also, if you don't mind, I'll say a couple of words about the lethality of the game, because I'm always astounded by how Internet accounts differ from my own experiences; I have no idea how people are keeping their adventurers alive in this game. I believe the people when they say that they apparently manage to survive indefinitely, but with us the game's fragile illusion of being fun breaks reliably within a single session as a total party kill or desperate retreat leaves characters dead on the ground.

So, to be explicit, my experience with the game is limited to roughly the following (I might be forgetting some sessions) over the last five years:

3 x attempting to play the Keep on the Shadowfell
3 x attempting to play the introductory adventure in Gamma World
2 x playing GM-generated stuff

In all of these sessions we had either general retreat with bodies on the ground or total party kills within the first three combats of the game. In the case of the Keep there's this kobold hideout behind a waterfall combat that kills pretty reliably unless you know just what you're doing; in the Gamma World introductory adventure the third combat of the sequence has some area-attacking enemies that'll get you every time, it seems.

I've played this game only with most hardcore gamers, people who have extensive experience with both tabletop and computer-based strategy games. Maybe we are just sucky players and that's why we can't finish a single session of play without losing a fight and derailing the game?
Title: Re: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: Ron Edwards on October 13, 2013, 11:38:10 AM
I'm not the guy to judge your kill/loss experiences, as I'm almost completely inexperienced with the game.

I think your Warhammer analysis is completely accurate with the sole flaw of being unbelievably ass-backwards again. Warhammer, miniatures skirmish variant and all, is nothing but a re-furbished D&D of the kind I'm talking about. Which, again, was the closest thing to a "the" D&D in existence prior to the early 1980s.

Best, Ron
Title: Re: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: Callan S. on October 13, 2013, 10:29:52 PM
I agree with Eero on the lopsidedness of (atleast current) roleplay vs table top wargaming - in table top wargaming, someone gets to win. Someone comes away with a fistpump! But the structure of roleplay has evolved to where the GM so consistantly has his side all die that - well, you give up on the GM trying to win anything. Thus when the monsters TPK the party, nobody wins! Which is indeed a sucky structure! However - as I understand it in warhammer battles the heroes you use on the table are not subject to death - or regardless of that you play as a faction, which is also not subject to death. Thus you can lose time and again and it's cool. While in roleplay, perhaps simulationist aligned desires would not allow such a 'boardgamey' conceit of just having main dudes who never die (of course the gamist 'die at any time' dudes have it because you can lose at any time).

On escaping from combats, I actually started a thread on that in the D&D next playtest general discussion forum about adding text on how to get away after combat, specifically just how plausible/possible that is (but they adjusted the forum structure and I don't know if I could find it again). Alot of folk just wanted to handwave the whole thing to 'The GM decides that when it comes up' - perhaps even trying to avoid any text on the matter? This possibly ties into Ron's stand alone complex idea, in that when you leave it so up in the air (can you even escape or is it really do or die/TPK?) people, despite the lack of instructions (or indeed BECAUSE of the lack of instructions) assume people have had fun with this thing, thus they start inventing stuff but treat it as if that's how it always was. People don't recognise the significance of leaving the gates wide open on what happens when you lose a combat.

Given all that, it seems some holy cows need to be slaughtered - it doesn't seem to be working out.

Also there's the question of tactical leverage of the SIS. Sure the combinations of powers in 4E spur the imagination, but such imagination wont be giving you any extra mechanical power in turn! A simple example of leveraging the SIS is perhaps you roleplay chumming up to the mayor and say you manage to wrangle him into giving you some of the healing potions you know he has. That's all imagination stuff, right up to the healing potion which indeed grants a mechanic power (so here imagination does grant mechanical power). While if the between battle stuff of 4E stuff is purely set piece and has no chance of, by speaking your imagination, gaining you further mechanical power and the actual combat mechanics don't really support imagination begetting mechanical advantage (note: the +2/-2 rule in the books is a kind of imagination to mechanical effect rule - it's just pretty weedy), then...well, while I dislike how people throw around 'you're just playing a boardgame' idly, it's essentially just boardgame play. One might say the GM builds the encounter from his imagination - I would agree. But I think for gamist play the players need to try and wrangle mechanical effects from the SIS or atleast have a chance to. Otherwise at best you have gamble play, where you don't interact with the imagined scene, you just hope it favours you (gamble). This is possibly why gambling gamist inclined players will often put up with sim inclined GM's and vise versa without a clash appearing for some time.

Just a side note, I've actually heard that keep on the shadowfell and the gamma world adventure actually have a ball buster encounter built into them. Possibly by mistake. But equally, mistake or not, that's the gauntlet that is thrown down. I know the fiction surrounding each game is the cuddley, fun fiction we all know and find cute - so when, like some oompa loompa suddenly drawing a bloody knife, eyes glowing red and showing cannibal teeth, it goes brutal - well, I'd agree it could do with some forwarning of the brutality level. But still, that's the gauntlet, all the same.

So I agree with some elements - but the base, problematic precepts don't seem to be dealt with by people - instead of dealing with the problem, folk adapt to them and build compensatory structures around the problem. One compensation method often seems to be to water down the capacity to die (found an old RPG.net thread on it: [4e] the day I tried to die (http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?631349-4e-The-day-I-tried-to-die))
Title: Re: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: glandis on October 14, 2013, 05:09:54 AM
Some things I hope are useful: the guy from my extended Talislanta/d20 group who has most strongly taken to 4.0? One of the guys who shouldered a lot of the GM duties. Apparently, 4.0 is a simple joy to GM compared to the burden of getting our ver of d20 "right." Remembering my GM stints, and thinking about my attempts to run Pathfinder (with various levels of success), I can see that.

And while Ron is dead-on in his description of that late 70's/early 80's play style, oddly (or not - I mean, I know you acknowledge variation, Ron) my recollection is at slight odds, in that we specifically identified it as NOT "real D&D." Real D&D was an epic, long-term campaign thing - bigger than one dungeon. We actually played the style Ron describes more with T&T & Melee/Wizard than with D&D - though sometimes we did it with D&D. Creating the weird situation where we played D&D that wasn't REAL D&D. Although ... there was the option to bring your "real D&D" character into most any dungeon. That was the ultimate gutsy move - if your real D&D character died in that dungeon, his epic story ended then and there. But if you weren't willing to risk that, you couldn't carry the loot from that dungeon back to your campaign ...

(Text from a dungeon I started to write sometime before 1980 "... characters are provided, [as] losing your own character in a dungeon of this type is all too probable, and can be very upsetting." Aw, I wanted to keep players from being upset! How nice of me ... So did I just talk myself into more full agreement with Ron, or not? Not sure.)

Callan - Assuming that the play I remember actually is the play Ron's talking about, winning and losing are entirely about performance by the players, with the DM getting kudos for running the dungeon well no matter what. No such thing as nobody wins - pretty much the DM can always win. I mean, he might screw up, but the real question is, how will the players do? Which may be another aspect of why my friend became drawn to 4.0 GMing.
Title: Re: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: Eero Tuovinen on October 14, 2013, 07:16:55 AM
For what it's worth, I don't have any personal issue with high lethality and enclosed dungeon environments in D&D. It is specifically the 4th edition which I find to handle high lethality poorly, and this has to do with the specific way the game sets up situations and characters when compared to older technology. Thus it's not that I cry when my character dies, but rather that it's fucking frustrating to spend two hours creating a character, one hour learning to play it, and then have it die despite best efforts to the contrary. I'd have to be some sort of moron to enjoy repeating that process.

Compare with certain older editions and styles of play, such as what we're currently doing with LotFP: you can kill my characters all day without it becoming frustrating, as there the gamist procedures work just fine: characters are generated (not created) quickly, they die as the outcome of choices and not because a certain killer encounter is mandatory, and the procedures for continuing play are clear when a combat ends in organized retreat, outright running, leaving companions behind, part of the party dying, all of the party dying - there is no encounter outcome that leaves us scratching our heads as to how to continue, and no outcome that means that we can't play anymore because we'd have to go through another three hours of character planning because we lost the investment in the last set of characters.

Perhaps my point would be easier to understand with a comparison: playing 4th edition is like playing Champions where the content of play consists entirely of the GM railroading you through combat encounters with opponents built on equivalent character points to your party, all in the interest of "balancing" the combat encounters. And unlike your average superhero comic, all the opponents are bloodthirsty barbaric demihumans who'll slit your throat if you get "stunned" or otherwise taken out of a fight - that's what you're trying to do to them, after all. The GM has prep tools that make it quick for him to create his enemy mooks, but you, you get to spend hours in the character design mini-game only to have that character die on you after 2-3 combats on average.

Many people don't like 4th edition because it's just a combat miniatures game instead of an exploration adventure game like older editions of D&D, but I believe that I wouldn't mind this - there's room for plenty of different games out there - if it only was more clear-cut how serious the game is about the real challenge, and how the GM is supposed to cheat to keep the party alive (I genuinely don't know the answer to that last point - it's not that I obdurately want to kill PCs whenever possible). In other words, it suffers from its history as a D&D game, causing it to leave weird lacunae for the GM to fill in how the enterprise is kept together. It's the same bullshit that the commercial mainstream of rpg design is always prone to, people afraid of writing decisive and limiting advice that might by its clarity piss off somebody who would like to utilize the game in a different manner. 4th edition is massively more focused than earlier games called D&D, of course, but it's still apparently not so clear that I wouldn't need to use an endoscope to get to its internal workings.

(Incidentally, the Gamma World method of character generation is explicitly intended to be more random, quick and less about character build optimization than the 4th edition proper method. Unfortunately it's still not enough to make the game compatible with high lethality in practice, I think: a big part of the enjoyment in this sort of candy store skirmish game is in learning to use your character, and you'll never get a chance if your character dies on you every third combat.)
Title: Re: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: RangerEd on October 14, 2013, 12:14:15 PM
I find the changes made between 3.x and 4e strange. The color of both seems consistent, as the artwork and naming styles for options readily inspires my imagination. However, as a player of both, diversity is attenuated and complication is amplified as one transitions from 3.x to 4e.

As Ron pointed out, the game is fantastic at providing mountains of color and inspiring the imagination of players. Yet, my group found insufficient diversity among classes in the mechanics for players to explore. Moreover, there is little or no reward for actually anthropomorphizing a character with history, motivation, desires, social connections, and so on outside of the group and mission. To create such humanity risks the gameplay itself when one character lacks motivation consistent with the mission the DM has planned.

Of course, I remember a mushroom cave module a DM laid before our group in 2e in the early '90s. Me and another guy were playing elves with royal blood, so we passed on the adventure option. The DM said he had nothing else prepared, take it or leave it. Well, the blue blood, pointy ears got muddy and filthy for no good reason except to ride the rails provided. Gameplay is gameplay, and something was better than nothing. Railroading aside, the difference in my mind is that 2e had enough gaps in the rules to allow a DM to allow diversity of characters to affect the gameplay, whereas 4e has filled in too many gaps in the search for equality.

In the search for equality among combat participants, 4e leaves every character mechanically the same. Dividing in and out of combat roles, minions, minor combat powers, and major combat powers for every class and having something for every character to offer seems like a great selling point. However, roleplaying in such a system left me essentially playing the same character over and over, simply with a different skin and carrying different weapons to use a FPS metaphor. I saw through the fourth wall.

Strangely, the cornucopia of powers to bolt on is perfectly in line with 3.x and Pathfinder. The feat system seems to grow continually in complication without satisfying complexity. What I mean by complexity in this instance is the exploration of options that help actualize a character to fulfill a particular and useful niche in gameplay. Such a mechanic need not be difficult or require a lot of page flipping through a pile of source books. On a side note, I thought Hero Lab was worth the hundreds of dollars I spent to cope with complication of both 3.x, Pathfinder, and 4e. The dollar figure was cheaper than buying all the source material, was easier to search and build characters, and the software didn't require a suitcase worth of books for every flight. I think the complication is unnecessary in the search for novelty of character.

Complexity can create novelty by combining basic building blocks in new permutations without generating complication. All of life on Earth is composed of permutations of very few organic compounds. Why game designers don't use the idea is beyond me. Your Goth guy could really be something special then, even after many iterations of 4e gameplay.
Title: Re: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: glandis on October 14, 2013, 04:33:29 PM
Eero, just to underline your point about character generation - as mentioned, modules/dungeons/whatever in the play I'm remembering frequently came with pre-generated characters. As far as "learning" how to use them though, while I see what you're saying and sympathize, the hard-core response would be a shrug; maybe an invitation to play more and learn faster.

Ed - I think some of the blandness you talk about springs from what I see talked about nowadays as designed-in "system mastery" opportunities. While you have all these options, there are certain end-states that are clearly the most useful/powerful/advantageous, so lots of players end up building towards the same goal and ignore sub-optimal options. This is true in 3.x, and is pretty well understood in 3.pathfinder - but being less-than-optimal seems like less of a problem in those flavors than 4.0 for some reason.

-Gordon
Title: Re: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: Ron Edwards on October 14, 2013, 05:21:33 PM
So I wonder if you guys find the following interesting: my first notes on what I'd do if I were to DM D&D 4E. I have lots of one-page notes like this stuffed into game books at my house, and as the years go by, I get a chance to play more of them than you might think. All of the following would be fixed in utter stone; do it this way or don't play.

1. Race limitations: githzerai, shifter, minotaur, shardmind, wilden, tiefling.

2. Class limitations: ardent, battlemind, seeker, monk, psion. You can hybridize any of those with ranger, druid, barbarian, or warden. But you can't play any straight from that latter list, you can't hybridize between those on the first list, and there's no multiclassing.

3. Setting notes, from looking at the races & classes: wilderness, ruins, wastelands, old battlefields, vortices, strongholds, holdouts.

4. Role-playing influences subsequent set-piece creation substantially - more than one conflict is going on simultaneously, with concrete setting-affecting consequences, involving many different NPCs with varying priorities, so choices include which battle to fight in (or pick), what items to get or issues to investigate, which NPCs to support or try to defeat, what particular goal might be sought through a given fight (not the same as what the NPCs might want), and to what degree the player-characters ally or separate based on the conflicts of the moment. Which is to say that the enemy of your enemy may not only be a provisional friend, but could become a real friend.

5. Fairness is not adjusted to carpenter's-level evenness just prior to fights. It is very likely that the player-characters will be over-matched, either because they unfortunate bad decisions about that fight in the first place, or because the foes are simply that much better. Think as tactically and creatively as possible regarding player-characters' abilities and options. Perhaps another way to put it is that fights will be won most likely through second-order, cross-character thinking about abilities, not just taking turns having your guy point-and-shoot. Also, plan-B thinking is recommended.

6. No DM fudging either in player-characters' favor or against it. I play my NPCs honestly both in character and in combat. Which is to say, also, there is more than one way to defeat a foe.
Title: Re: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: RangerEd on October 14, 2013, 06:14:23 PM
Gordon,
I have a personal character flaw in that once I find a way to optimize in a system, I cannot bring myself to go suboptimal. Cases in point, 2e rangers and Pathfinder zen archers. It is my failing, but refer to it as breaking the system. Of course my form of optimization speaks to my personality interacting with the system as much as the game itself.

Ron,
I'd play it. I am less sure it would be well received by others. Not sure why, but the groups I've played 4e with pride themselves on their optimization stratagems and could buck against house rules that undermine their expectations. Your draft notes also seem to illustrate something I believe, in the face of system-matters-above-all commentary: a good DM with some well thought out house rules can make any flawed tabletop system fun. My thoughts stray to what you could do with games like The Helpless Doorknob or The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen.
Title: Re: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: glandis on October 14, 2013, 07:07:11 PM
Ed - Your approach is totally understandable. After much uncertainty, I finally decided not long back that the ONLY way I can continue playing Pathfinder is to just not ever play with the most ultimate optimizations (like, yeah, a Zen Archer w/ all the right feats/items/etc.). Chop off the top of the curve, and everyone else can be happier. Even typing that sorta makes me feel dirty, but it is what I need in that system.

Ron - Hybridization was key to the 4.0 play I tried. Of course, none of us were in any way expert, but it did seem to be a great "this is MY guy" flavor-booster. The general feel I get from #1, #2, & #3 is an improvement on what I sorta-remember trying to do back in the White Dwarf/Eldritch Wizardry/psionic days. Improvement because of many things, but a big piece is definitely pruning-out core-D&D stuff that doesn't fit well. #4 is especially grabby/interesting - as either player or GM, pulling that off would be total fun. #5 is the issue/obstacle - can the system really be made to work that way? I don't have enough experience to say, and for every 4.0 "I couldn't die!" comment there seems to be a "we died so easy!"
Title: Re: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: Callan S. on October 14, 2013, 09:36:59 PM
Hi Ron,

With #4, I'm not sure about treating encounters just as 'choices'. Aren't they a gauntlet the GM throws down, and the players either declare they are good enough to take it on, or admit to all they think it's too tough for them?

It occurs to me now a problematic issue in if one throws down several encounters to potentially take up, what happens if in doing one the others then become unavailable to do (as is often the case in trad roleplay)? Does that mean one is admitting they were too tough to do? Or even avoiding admitting the others were too tough, while potentially choosing the easiest encounter there?

I know there's 'setting affecting consequences' - but did someone in RL at the table admit a challenge was too tough, or did they declare to all they could take it on and went on to attempt to do so?

Actually this all also made me reflect on such matters in regards to a Rifts campaign I'm running at the moment, as well.

Title: Re: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: Ron Edwards on October 14, 2013, 11:06:10 PM
Ed, never mind "others." You began your post with the encouraging statement that you'd play what I described. Can you tell me why? It would be very helpful, as right now I'm firing on at least 50% unarticulated inspiration.

Gordon,

Quotefor every 4.0 "I couldn't die!" comment there seems to be a "we died so easy!"

Yeah, I'm seeing that for sure.

Callan, I'm not sure if I can articulate what I have in mind to your satisfaction, but I think I have it solid enough so that scenario/situation/fight generation can be at least a little more emergent than it is now. Trying to hammer it all out in legalese doesn't suit my process well at this point - from here out, the only next step is to try it. I'd be able to articulate it better once there's some real play with real humans to talk about.

Eero, I was looking at your posts again and one thing really jumped out at me: your presumption that all foes, all the time, were simply and only relentless murderers re: the characters. I think they can be a lot more interesting than that.

Best, Ron
Title: Re: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: Callan S. on October 15, 2013, 12:22:07 AM
Quote from: glandis on October 14, 2013, 05:09:54 AMCallan - Assuming that the play I remember actually is the play Ron's talking about, winning and losing are entirely about performance by the players, with the DM getting kudos for running the dungeon well no matter what. No such thing as nobody wins - pretty much the DM can always win. I mean, he might screw up, but the real question is, how will the players do? Which may be another aspect of why my friend became drawn to 4.0 GMing.
If the focus is on who the players beat or who beat the players, and no one is putting their hand up to having beaten the players, running the game well does not substitute for someone having won in that regard. If no one will claim to have been trying to beat you, and you lose, then no one won.
Title: Re: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: glandis on October 15, 2013, 02:51:56 AM
Quote from: Callan S. on October 15, 2013, 12:22:07 AMIf the focus is on who the players beat or who beat the players, and no one is putting their hand up to having beaten the players, running the game well does not substitute for someone having won in that regard. If no one will claim to have been trying to beat you, and you lose, then no one won.
Sure, some folks at least sometimes focus it that specifically. I'm saying "winning" and "losing" are some aspects of showing guts/not and rising to the challenge/not; they are not the only aspects. "You failed" has sting no matter if there's an "I win" or not. "I succeed" can only feel satisfying if that was really in doubt, but need not be synonymous with "you lose." I think I was involved in long conversations touching this re: Gamism at the Forge, but unfortunately they're almost unreadable now because one of the participants deleted his posts.

I read Ron's #4 as not the purest hard-core form of gauntlet, but that doesn't mean it's not a gauntlet at all. If it was the purest hard-core form of gauntlet, I'd probably have no interest in playing. Tastes vary within Agenda as well as across 'em! That's actually a useful and timely reminder for me.

Title: Re: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: Ron Edwards on October 15, 2013, 07:44:36 AM
To reinforce Gordon's point, I'll call back to the 2002 Gamism essay, in which I stressed the difference between winning, which may or may not be involved in Gamist play, and not losing, which must be involved. That point has only been reinforced by my experiences since writing that essay.

Best, Ron
Title: Re: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: Eero Tuovinen on October 15, 2013, 08:33:51 AM
Quote from: Ron Edwards on October 14, 2013, 11:06:10 PMEero, I was looking at your posts again and one thing really jumped out at me: your presumption that all foes, all the time, were simply and only relentless murderers re: the characters. I think they can be a lot more interesting than that.

That's the literary content of D&D talking - 4th edition is very, extremely faithful to the atavist wish fulfillment facet of D&D, and thus it takes conscious reinterpretation to get non-murderous relationships between combatants. I mean, what would you do with these murderhobos that attack you, trying to kill you and take all your stuff, if you were one of these goblins or kobolds that PCs assault all the time in these adventures? It's pretty obvious that the world of D&D is kill or be killed, and either the PCs are completely immoral assholes or the demihumans you're slaughtering actually deserve it because they are the sort who wouldn't hesitate to slit your throat given half a chance. Of course we constantly get deconstructive urges, players attempting peaceful solutions or DMs depicting other ways to relate; in an older type of D&D this is even fruitful content, as it becomes alternate problem solving solutions or handicaps for players interested in it.

(For the sake of academic curiousity, we have resolved this murderous subject matter of D&D satisfactorily in my circles by moving the game out of the racist Gygaxian fantasy world and into a more historical sort of setting. The hostile, ruthless relationships and colonial adventurism work much more logically when we don't try to sugar-coat it by pretending that our characters are heroes and those others are "monsters". When there are actual social, psychological and political reasons for hostility between the "men" and "goblins", it is possible for humane solutions, just war, and realistic reasoning about appropriate amount of force to flourish.)

Regarding 4th edition planning, I've got my own notes about it in the desk drawer. As I've described, we've played the game as occasional one-shots, trying to figure it out, and I think that I'm beginning to be at a stage of understanding where I'm basically ready to run something sensible with 4th edition at some point. My brother Markku has been a big fan of the game over these years, so he has a complete collection of material for it; it's quite possible that I'll end up trying a serious 4th edition campaign at some point when the player base and other ancillary factors make it a good choice.

Here are the basic precepts of one 4th edition campaign I've been occasionally contemplating:
- The campaign concerns the fate of a community of pure strain humans in Gamma World. All player characters to begin with are pure humans, generated by Gamma World rules. The player characters may or may not be in leadership positions in the community. The acknowledged subject matter of the campaign is the fate of this community: rebuild the old world, get overrun by anthropomorphic badgers, rebuild into a pluralistic mutant society, or what.
- The campaign develops a simple strategic overlay that revolves around strategic resources and challenges of the colony: water supply, agriculture, manufacturing industries (direct impact on availability of adventuring gear), population pool (affects the availability of different character build options), geographical knowledge (tracked by traditional hexcrawl techniques, probably). The adventuring/fighting that the PC party does is largely involved with these community stakes. Occasionally matters may be resolved without combat as well, of course - the game does have the "skill challenge" system after all.
- The players are in primary position to develop the combat encounters, or at least influence their nature heavily: random encounters come off simple tables that may be discovered by intelligence gathering in advance, so the players may take informed risks about where their adventurers wander in the setting; opportunistic operations (raiding trade caravans, for example) rely on the players choosing for themselves whether to attack a force of N enemies or not; pre-combat maneuvering enables the players to have input on the nature of the battlefield itself.
- The different types of enemies are, in complete contrast to ordinary 4th edition procedure, cohesive rather than varied: at the beginning of the campaign the combats are almost always against merely a single type of enemy creature, with the occasional special unit alongside. The variety of enemy types develops entirely on the terms of the fictional positioning: travel to a distant place, and there may be exotic new beasts. The purpose here is to make the combat encounters less of a guessing-carnival of strangeness, and more about knowing your enemy and exploiting their weaknesses.
- Combats are balanced on the basis of fictional positioning, which means that sometimes characters encounter too easy or too hard encounters. Enemies do not gain levels as characters do, which is again in direct contradiction to 4th edition procedure; an ordinary badgerman soldier is level N, and that's that. When the encounter level is more than 3 levels too high or too low, the combat encounter is replaced with a skill challenge; the outcome will either be avoiding the battle, or revising the battle so that it actually becomes a level-appropriate challenge. For example, characters encountering a party of low-level badgermen may run a skill challenge about pinning them down before they can retreat to their fortress; success indicates automatic victory, failure indicates a combat encounters in a fortified position, which would presumably make the combat difficult enough for us to bother with setting up the miniatures.
- Characters are generated rather than purposefully created, with random scores, default equipment parcels, etc., all so as to make losing characters more acceptable. The players run stables of characters and choose on a per-mission basis which character they'll use. XP is tracked individually for each character. New character options (races, classes) become accessible via setting exploration.

As you can see, it's basically an old school hex crawl sort of affair, except revolving around skirmish combat encounters. The key change in comparison to 4th edition to my mind is that here the players have negotiating options regarding the combats that are actually played: the individual encounters won't be the pretty set-pieces that 4th edition advocates (impossible to prepare unique stuff like that), but they'll retain interest better because the players have to buy into each individual combat using tools similar to what old school D&D uses to negotiate challenges: it's up to the players to decide how many badgermen they can beat, and while retreat might have its own cost depending on the strategic situation, it's ultimately up to the players to retain their own strategic maneuverability to a degree where they don't get pinned down to fight a combat they don't think they can win. Ultimately the goal is that everything does lead towards a skirmish combat encounter, but once the encounter comes up, it'll have important stakes, player buy-in for the challenge, and a level of challenge that everybody in the group finds appropriate.

I've got another notion about how to use 4th edition to run pure-strain Dragonlance, but perhaps I'll speak to that later.
Title: Re: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: Joshua Bearden on October 15, 2013, 02:17:32 PM
I've played once so far - in a drop in Google Hangouts game.  I had fun chiefly because of this: http://chaoticshiny.com/full4e.php

I didn't even expect to play at first I just clicked a link and found myself lurking ... and then players started talking to me.  Hey are you playing or what?  One of them handed me a link to the character generator and I suddenly had a thief or rogue or something.

I relate this merely by way of offering anecdotal support for Eero's position.  My character didn't die but I think my low initial investment in the character was crucial to my enjoyment. Not fearing character death allowed me to play more colourfully and creatively. As luck (or design) would have it this lead me to make more significant tactical contributions.





Title: Re: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: Ron Edwards on October 15, 2013, 02:52:37 PM
Joshua, you are almost certainly going to Gehenna for linking me to that webpage. Couple it with Gozzy's (http://www.gozzys.com/article.php?cm_id=8) = time sink city!

Hi Eero, I don't know if it's ever going to be possible to convince you that "Gygaxian" is a latter-day construction and not in any imaginable way a good descriptor of playing D&D in the late 1970s. The whole idea of "the world of D&D" simply did not exist. Remember, only a fraction of people playing had even heard of Greyhawk, much less owned a document with that word in the title. The fraction was probably pretty large in the D&D belt (Madison, Wisconsin, to Springfield, Illinois), but outside of that region I bet it was pretty low. In the diverse circles I played in, the word "Gygax" was never spoken, and the idea of "setting" was absent. I remember reading about world-building in the Tunnels & Trolls rulebook and being utterly baffled. And yes, Glorantha was a world with an extensive history, but its map at that time was a tiny piece of the setting and we all understood that Glorantha was very special, not the case to be expected in playing any other game.

That would all change in 1980 or so, when the Greyhawk folio was finally published and previously isolated adventures were now published as parts of it, or of other (brand-new) settings. A good minor marker in non-D&D was the pretension to a setting in The Fantasy Trip, called Cidri, which was defined pretty much as "so big you can make up anything you want in some corner of it," and which had no map. Another negative indicator was the utter absence of setting in Villains & Vigilantes or Champions, for which the players were expected to be creating their own comic book in the RPG medium, case closed, no exceptions.
Title: Re: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: Eero Tuovinen on October 15, 2013, 03:16:36 PM
I do not dispute what you say, Ron. When I call something "Gygaxian", I'm usually discussing either the direct corpus of Gygax's work (the original D&D text, AD&D, early adventure modules mainly), or literary history. In the latter sense I think that the adjective is pretty apt: the D&D setting has certain fantasy concepts that are pretty original to it, and apparently original to Gygax specifically as an author.

For example, above I used "Gygaxian" to describe a certain type of fantasy world, the one that is the default world of D&D: a world where multiple humanoid peoples live side by side, mostly in their own polities, and nuanced racial stereotypes are both ever-present and objectively true; a world that is in the early stages of a magical industrial revolution, with magical tools of convenience and war limited to societal elites and produced by a guild system. It's a very particular sort of fantasy setting, I've written in the past about how strange and artificial it tends to seem to me, due to not having grown up with D&D, unlike many other roleplayers.

What makes the adjective "Gygaxian" useful here is the fact that his work has had an immense influence in the fantasy literature of the last 30 years. The above ideas, which were fringe and rarely appeared together before, are now almost the definition of the genre in the mainstream, especially anywhere even distantly related to gaming culture. It is useful to have a descriptive term for what amounts to the second-most influential influence on current fantasy literature (after Tolkien).

As you can see, I don't intend to imply anything about actual play by the use of that word - it's strictly a scholastic term pertaining to the examination and use of certain texts. For all I know it's possible that not even Gygax himself was "Gygaxian" in actual play, despite writing the material he wrote.
Title: Re: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: glandis on October 15, 2013, 07:34:22 PM
Ron -

Just to push the idea of "setting" a little further back in time chronologically, and mark its influence as a little more widespread geographically: The City-State of the Invincible Overlord (Judges Guild) goes back to 1977 and certainly "spread" to me on the east coast before 1980. The influence of actually using the Outdoor Survival map (did you run into that ever?) also kinda-encouraged setting development.

This is more a "you build it from our tools" setting than a "we deliver it to you whole cloth" setting, sure. And that's real important. So if you're only talking about the latter - forget I said anything.

-Gordon
Title: Re: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: Callan S. on October 15, 2013, 07:56:31 PM
Quote from: glandis on October 15, 2013, 02:51:56 AMI read Ron's #4 as not the purest hard-core form of gauntlet, but that doesn't mean it's not a gauntlet at all. If it was the purest hard-core form of gauntlet, I'd probably have no interest in playing.
I think there's A: Somewhat acknowledging an activity is too tough, but not wanting to say that and perhaps raising taste as the supposed reason instead and B: Not acknowledging it as too tough at all, just genuinely  just not to taste, not aesthetically pleasing or something not entertaining.

To me, you could be saying either. I get and somewhat accept A, even if it makes me want to heckle! But I'll say B doesn't have anything really to do with gamism. It doesn't even warrant heckling.


Ron,
Quote from: Ron Edwards on October 15, 2013, 07:44:36 AMTo reinforce Gordon's point, I'll call back to the 2002 Gamism essay, in which I stressed the difference between winning, which may or may not be involved in Gamist play, and not losing, which must be involved. That point has only been reinforced by my experiences since writing that essay.
I'm reading this from the main gamism essay
QuoteI'm defining "winning" as positive assessment at the Step On Up level. It even applies when little or no competition is going on. It applies even when the win-condition is fleeting. Even if it's unstated. Even if it's no big deal. Without it, and if it's not the priority of play, then no Gamism.
I'll contrast against the video game nethack, where you want to win it (you're told right from the start you are to get the amulet of yendor and ascend), but you might play for a couple of hours, then hit save, not having won (since it'll take many more hours to even possibly win). What did you do during that time if you did not win? You tried to not lose. Do that long enough, multi hour session after session of attempting to not lose, and the parochialism of the short term play session (which is essentially ones peep hole experience of the game, since NO ONE sits down for a start to finish session of nethack/sees the whole thing at once. We only ever work through peep holes) creates the synecdoche of the activity being about 'not losing'. Indeed, I'll even estimate that leaves what the activity is about 'up for grabs' in some regards.

Anyway, that's my estimate. I don't know how you've gone on to saying winning not need be involved, only 'not losing', after having written the quote above? It seems a mistaken advancement of the idea.
Title: Re: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: Judd on October 16, 2013, 03:30:42 AM
I liked how 4E really nailed teamwork. I enjoyed pushing enemies towards my friend's character to beat up or blinding a dragon or damaging one of its wings with my Rogue special abilities. The way all of the special powers worked together was nifty.

Skill challenges felt like they were really close to filling in the gaps between combats with meaningful dice rolling based in the fiction that could set up the next set piece with consequences from the skill challenge's outcome but didn't quite measure up at the table, in my experience.

And I like the Raven Queen as an addition to the D&D mythology, alongside Vecna, githyanki, githzarai, etc.
Title: Re: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: Mike Holmes on October 17, 2013, 01:08:59 AM
OK, as a guy who has extensively played both 1E and 4E, I think I can make some valid comparisons.

First, on the subject of color/literariness or whatever... 4E FAR outdoes earlier editions. If 4E is a cliche of 1E, recall that 1E is a pastiche of fantasy tailings, pretty damn cruddy in itself. What I see in 4E is an attempt to at least clean that stuff up and make it sort of internally consistent. OK, maybe most of that work was done in 3E. But by 4E you have stuff like warlocks that have to take a particular pact that says TONS about the character's social positioning. Yeah, it's still pretty petty if you're going to compare it to something like My Life With Master, or even Exalted. And yeah, it's sorta video-gamey in it's tone. But I guess I just have low expectations coming from 1E, where you had to try to infer a character's social positioning from what sort of castle or whatnot they might build if they ever got to level 10. At it's worst, 4E certainly does no worse than 1E (and earlier editions of D&D are even worse than this, don't tell me otherwise).

Are the particular choices of aesthetics good? I think that's going to be a personal thing, and you can't make any blanket statements. Within that aesthetic, the art is very well done, and I find it at least as engaging as any other RPG art.


As for survivability, clearly 4E is supposed to make PC losses rare. If you look at the creatures that are "balanced" to fight against the PCs, they lack any of the versatility that PCs have, up to and including simple things like taking a Second Wind. They are basically the same in terms of HP and damage output, but just don't have the options that give the PCs the edge. To whit, I've run the game for kids as young as 9 years old, and they've had no problems surviving, even when I've hit them as hard as I could as GM. Is it possible that the dice could dictate a result? Yes, possible, but pretty unlikely. EVERY case I've seen of PC death was a case of the GM hitting the PCs with something that wasn't balanced for their level, in an attempt to make things more challenging.

On the other hand, this GM overbalance phenomenon happens because hitting players with the same balanced encounters over and over gets dull fast. Good thing you level up fairly quickly in 4E, or that problem would be even worse. I think you might even do better by doubling the EXP output and cutting out half of the duller encounters.

In any case, TPKs in 1E were de riguer (and again earlier editions were insanely dangerous). 4E is vastly better in this regard. Combat is about "Did we crush them mightily, or did we squeak by in a tense fight?"


Strategy vs Tactical... well yes 4E has daily powers and the limit on surges per day. Which isn't really powerful strategic stuff, no. But the fact is that this exact same problem has always existed, with "wandering monsters" being the theoretical, but actually unhelpful solution. D&D has NEVER been a successful strategic game. At least 4E is slightly interesting tactically, which was never true in earlier editions. I'm not saying it gets spectacular marks as a tactical game, but it's not terrible. Earlier editions were really terrible as a tactical game. Take this from a guy who has a whole 'nother life outside of RPGs as a wargame, and boardgame player (I just picked up my 12 year old son from the local Games Workshop earlier this evening; he kicks ass on adults, because I'm instructing him).


If much of this sounds like backhanded compliments and bars set very low, well... yeah, I'm wondering why we're talking about D&D at all on a forum whose moderator is the author of Sorcerer RPG. But then again, he brought it up. D&D is what it is. 4E is just a lot more pure and explicit about that than earlier editions. If you don't like 4E, you probably shouldn't be playing D&D at all.

If you can discern some huge gap between editions of D&D, you're waaaay too close to it.
Title: Re: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: Ron Edwards on October 17, 2013, 08:08:37 AM
Hi Callan,

My treatment of the win/lose matter was less explicit than I remembered.

From the Gamism essay, in the section titled "The definition at last:"

QuoteGamist play, socially speaking, demands performance with risk, conducted and perceived by the people at the table. What's actually at risk can vary - for this level, though, it must be a social, real-people thing, usually a minor amount of recognition or esteem. The commitment to, or willingness to accept this risk is the key - it's analogous to committing to the sincerity of The Dream for Simulationist play. This is the whole core of the essay, that such a commitment is fun and perfectly viable for role-playing, just as it's viable for nearly any other sphere of human activity.

In the sub-section titled "Reality check:"

QuoteTo get back to the dark and steaming roots of the first wave of role-playing innovation, check this out from The Basic Game chapter in Tunnels & Trolls, 5th edition (1979, Flying Buffalo Inc; author is Ken St. Andre, with possible edits or additions by Liz Danforth):

QuoteEvery time your character escapes from a tunnel alive, you may consider yourself a winner. The higher the level and the more wealth your character attains, the better you are doing in comparison to all the other players.

From the Adventure Points chapter in the same text:

QuoteAs long as a character remains alive - regardless of how many adventures he or she participates in - you are "winning." If ill fate befalls the character, or if you overextend yourself in playing your character's capabilities, the character dies and it is your loss. Of course, these games allow you to play any number of characters (sometimes referred to as a "stable of characters") and some will survive and advance, and everyone wins in the end.

This seems a bit softer, until one notices that although winning is qualified by quotes and extra text, loss significantly is not.

I'd hoped that these T&T quotes would act as a climactic moment to the sequence of thoughts under "The definition at last," and actually revise the entire discussion of winning into not-losing. I can see now that I was writing too point-last, and expecting the reader to see it without help.

Best, Ron

P.S. Mike, awesome.
Title: Re: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: Callan S. on October 17, 2013, 07:45:38 PM
I find escaping the dungeon as a finish line kind of awkward in a game with ongoing levels outside of that - but looking past that, that's defining a finish line.

The second quote is alot like the video game genre of infinite runners, or games like Tetris, where you just try to go as long as you can. The T&T text switching between the two is a bit indicative of the era's 'not sure what were doing'-ness. I don't think it helps make a topic clear.

And even with the latter, you don't just try to go as long as you can/try to not lose. If you got a T&T character up to fourth level, he dies, but then your next three characters you can't even get them off first level, would you think 'Hey, I'm winning!' or 'Dang, why can't I even get to third, let alone equal or surpass my old characters level?'? I'd be inclined to think 'don't lose' is really a shorthand that does not fully describe 'don't lose, so I can beat my old high score - which is the win I'm gunning for!'. Or am I wrong in how I imagine people would take it and folk would, even if they got to fourth initially before dying, would consider it winning after that for a first level character to get awhile in, die, then winning while getting awhile in, die, over and over, never leaving first level? If so I'd pay my understanding isn't on track.

I mean, I've played in games where were not losing...and we weren't winning, either. Limbo. There has to be a progression, I'm pretty sure. I get maybe 'not losing' refers to an organic creation of a finish line - you just wanna get to X or Y. It just comes to you instead of being printed in a book - and that's cool! But equally I throw down the gauntlet here of not just coming up with such in ones head, but saying it - for example, having gotten to fourth level and died, explicitly say in front of everyone else you want to get to fifth (or maybe atleast equal your old effort of fourth!). Sure it'll burn if you get to second level and die, having said that to everyone. Sure the text says during all the time your guy lived before dying at second, he was a winner. But...if you yourself as a player don't really see that as a win and was gunning for fifth level, did you win? C'mon, were tough - do we really need the protection of a text saying no matter what we do, were special?

To me, with a charitable reading, this 'don't lose' stuff is really refering to 'hey, organically generate your own win condition!'. When that's clear, that's cool to me! Maybe that doesn't seem contentious to say - if so, cool, just more random words on the web from me, then! I'd post cat pictures if I could! heh!


Mike,

Nice summery, particularly
QuoteCombat is about "Did we crush them mightily, or did we squeak by in a tense fight?"
The thing I'd very much like is if the texts of the book acknowledged this - as is, it's kinda like oh sure if you know the game really well you know it's this, but if you don't know the game really well, it all seems like a 'will you live or die' deal, so when you talk to anyone who's head of D&D 4th but you suspect they don't know the game like you do, then there's this misscommunication leading to a false challenge - if they don't die, they think they've won the challenge, even though they squeaked through. But really they suck at the true 'did we crush mightily or squeak through' challenge - which they don't know about, even though they THINK they know the books. Because the books hide the true nature of the challenge. Which, atleast for me, spoils the whole challenge thing. But it is nice to see the 'mightily or squeak though' thing recognised, for these reasons!
Title: Re: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: glandis on October 18, 2013, 01:31:35 AM
Callan,

This is just me, not Ron/GNS, using a not-RPG analogy that (while I think it can translate just fine) may not translate to RPG play like I think it does. Hopefully, you know/play poker, or that's another way this may not translate.

You know how, in poker, someone with a good hand (NOT the "nuts", the guaranteed best), may choose to fold their hand in the face of a big raise? And that the general reaction might (depending on a lot of complicated factors involving past history, pot size, stack size, etc.) NOT be "what a wimp!" but "smart laydown"? Or alternatively, if they don't fold and lose, the reaction at the table might be "gutsy call", not "hahha, you lost"?

Gamism is a lot more about "smart laydown" and "gutsy call" than it is about winning and losing.

At least, that's my current take on it.
Title: Re: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: Marshall Burns on October 18, 2013, 02:46:18 AM
Mike,
I think you're thinking of "strategy" differently than Eero does. At least, it seems to me that Eero is talking about, what I think he's talking about, which is the layer of the game that's about: Which challenges do you pursue and when? Where do you base your operations, and when do you get the hell outta Dodge? Which factions and power interests do you align yourself with, and which do you snub? When and how do you double-deal, betray, and/or Red Harvest them?

Many forms of D&D are ripe for this sort of thing, and all of them make me start drooling for it. I can't say whether Eero is right about 4e not supporting this stuff, because I'm almost completely ignorant of how 4e actually works.
Title: Re: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: Mike Holmes on October 18, 2013, 03:22:28 AM
Er... at first you seem to be talking about the same things I'm talking about with strategy, basically overall dungeon-level strategy, Marshall. Which has always boiled down essentially to "Do we stay or do we go?"

But then you start talking about factions and such... which edition of D&D is "ripe" for that stuff? None that I can think of. Other than in the "Well the rules don't prevent you from doing it" POV. In which case 4E is just as good. Or bad, I guess.

The arguments I hear about stuff like this go like this:
Well, early D&D had so few rules that the GM was just forced to adjudicate things on the fly in anything outside a dungeon. And since dungeons were very lethal, this meant that players went around finding ways to avoid the dungeons, or at least straight up fights in dungeons. And since players didn't have any special mechanical options for doing these "other" things than fighting, the players had to "role-play" it. Which means that they were much more creative than players today, who are given options that allow them to win fights, and avoid "role-playing" by making diplomacy rolls.

All of which is complete tripe. OK, yeah, I'm sure that somewhere there were groups that played D&D with interesting strategic level politics and factions, etc, etc. Or maybe we're talking about the "solution" to Keep on the Borderlands here. Whatever. All I know is that for every group that may have played this way, there were many more groups that played it "straight," by which I mean killing things and taking their stuff. And PCs dying a lot. Again, again, again, most D&D groups never actually have much of anything that resembles a SIS or consistent in-game continuity even. So to say that the rules, by an absence of mechanics, support some specific style of strategic play, is patent nonsense.

Can you play this way with D&D? Sure. I'd argue that it's precisely as easy to ignore the thrust of the rules in 4E as it was in "OD&D," however. OK, actually not as easy in 4E, because you might actually have fun playing by the rules in 4E, and just do the tactical hack and slash stuff. You have to ignore more and better rules. Woohoo, old D&D is so bad, it's good!

The logical conclusion of this argument is that the best RPG for "role-players" is freeform... since the players can't possibly fall prey to the lure of a combat system. Which is, in fact, how all the freeformers got started. And which conclusion is falsified by the existence of hundreds of RPGs that exists now that actually support things like the sort of "strategic" play you mention. The only RPGs that make the "role-playing" difficult are, well, any that are like D&D, that have no particular support for it.

As I see it, and I don't think that Ron's latest observations go against this, the branch of the OSR that makes these claims comes from D&D players (DMs mostly) who have striven hard against the thrust of D&D for a long time, and were put off when the designers of D&D came out and said in 3E that, "Well this is what D&D has always supported most strongly, so we may as well make the game play to those strengths well." Which felt to them like they'd been abandoned. When, in fact, they'd been playing the wrong game system from day one. Not that they had any really better choices until this century.

Mike
Title: Re: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: Ron Edwards on October 18, 2013, 10:23:15 AM
Hi guys,

As so often happens, D&D threads tend both to sprawl in topic and heat up in tone. In this case, and my posts included, the discussion is encompassing both 4E and so-called "OD&D" to our collective disadvantage. That's why it's gone into three pages now, and although every post has been incredibly interesting, the agreements and disagreements aren't making much sense to me when I read it as a whole.

So let's put the old-days discussion aside, which I think did get a thorough workout, in favor of 4E and what it's good for now.

Mike, I thought you might be interested to know that the kind of inter-fight role-playing I'm talking about - and which I think Marshall was confirming - isn't avoidance of fights, it'd be a way to generate them. Maybe that's the best way to look at it, that since the game is about fighting, we have an opportunity through very colorful role-playing to set up the fights instead of merely wait for them to be delivered (and one person to compose and deliver them from scratch).

Another thing which seems to me central to having fun with 4E, is as much raw freaky hallucinogenic landscape and immediate circumstances as possible. This simply cannot be a "D&D fantasy world," and at the moment, my continued play in the game at the game store is confirming this to me. The characters are fifty times more vivid and interesting than anything and anyone in the setting or immediate situation, and as the latter are mainly being read to us straight from the adventure module, I think I'm pretty clear in thinking that 4E really should never have retooled "classic" (i.e. 80s) TSR settings, ever. What this game needs is a new way to generate awesome fights in situations which rise to the level of the character color. Buckets of nigh-random but provocative setting color ... with nigh-random reflecting a dangerous and unstable world as well as the simply unknowable impact of magic ... with "provocative" often focusing on understandable NPC priorities ... well, I can do that very easily.

What I'm saying is that I think I see agreement between the last two posts, as long as we aren't talking about the older history and its meaning. Everything that's been said about that is great on its own, but the question now is whether playing 4E can be good, which would be neither (i) the kill-it-all or avoid-fights conundrum Mike's talking about or (ii) the bogus GM's-story-players-fight Exalted deal. I think it can be.

Also, I played another session, so I'll post about that soon.

Best, Ron
Title: Re: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: Marshall Burns on October 18, 2013, 11:06:44 AM
Just clarifying real quick:
I think Ron's got the right idea about what I mean: the part of the game that leads you to the fights and dungeons (which are kinda just a really long fight), wherein the quest-giving, appeals for the party's martial aid, sale of treasure to interested parties, etc. occurs. As far as I can tell, this meta-dungeon layer is present in nearly all D&D play; the part that might not be present is a certain form of player agency -- such as having quests and appeals from multiple sides and allowing the players to choose -- that creates the possibility of a strategic game at this level.

Since I'm not informed enough to know how well this concept can apply to 4e, I think now it's time for me to start a new thread about it. Gimme a few days, and I'll tell y'all all about The World Is Your Ashtray play.
Title: Re: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: Mike Holmes on October 19, 2013, 04:30:46 PM
OK, I get what you're talking about now in terms of "strategic" play. But what I'd emphasize is that in my experience, in all versions of D&D, for many groups, that "strategic" level stuff ends up being the GM just laying down what's going to happen. Possibly even just reading some text from the module at times. Which is hardly "play" of any sort to me, rather just situational set-up. I'm not seeing any "support" for this sort of play at all, and the fact that many D&D groups play sans any sort of intra-dungeon play seems to me to say that there really isn't any such thing.

Or, put another way, when I ran my 4E game (in Greyhawk), I took it as a personal challenge. The challenge was to run a "Story-game" using D&D as the system. And I managed to make it work, pretty much entirely by relying on skills I had developed using systems that DO support non-tactical play. But in the end, the game collapsed, because my players said to me that it was useless using 4E for the game I was running, because we were pretty much ignoring 90% of the character mechanics all the time, since there were few combats. In the end, they basically said that in order to continue playing in the style that we had, that I ought to switch systems. So what does that say about D&D's ability to support anything outside of combat?

I think you guys are saying something about positioning with characters or something that D&D supposedly does? Well I'm just not seeing it. Do we have any practical examples, say from your recent 4E play Ron?
Title: Re: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: Eero Tuovinen on October 19, 2013, 05:04:29 PM
How about my campaign from last year (http://indie-rpgs.com/adept/index.php?topic=63.0), Mike? It self-identifies as D&D, and it's fully strategic. Of course we could say that it's not D&D because D&D is X, but then we're no longer asking for an example of how D&D is played strategically, but rather merely defining: it's not D&D if it's strategic.

However, before we jump to that conclusion, a thought: the original Greyhawk campaign was strategic in its later stages (that is, the players negotiated with the GM for what they wanted to do and with which characters), apparently the Blackmoor campaign was as well (I don't know enough about it to say for certain), and the AD&D DMG (which arguably is the clearest early description of how the game should be arranged) is strategic; the Mentzer D&D (the last influential old school D&D core text) is strategic as well, with even the first red box outlining clear precepts for how the players can take control of the play outside the dungeon.

(I should clarify that the only reason ever that I'd argue from historical precedent on this topic is that we're now talking about "what D&D is", presumably as a historical phenomenon. In no way do I want to claim that it's important that Gygax played this way or that way. The only importance is that I'm trying to point out that if both Gygax and Mentzer did it, it's funny say that it's not D&D.)

Considering the above points, and also fully acknowledging that all sorts of railroading, illusionism and GM's story play is common a fuck in the rpg culture (fully embraced by TSR, too), I don't think that it's fair to attempt an essentialist reading of D&D where we just decide that D&D is strategic, or is not strategic. It's a too wide tradition of play and text to make an universal judgement, both of these types of play have a long and vivacious tradition as something called "D&D". If you were saying that D&D is a game that uses hit points, sure, that'd be on a historically supported characterization; claiming that real D&D is linear and illusionistic, not so much.
Title: Re: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: Mike Holmes on October 19, 2013, 05:59:46 PM
You'll note that in all of my posts I'm saying things like "for many groups." Not all play the way I'm saying. What I'm saying is that if D&D provided support for the way you play, most groups would play that way.

Put another way, what is it about D&D that you find supports your methodologies, Eero? Simply saying that you managed to pound a nail in with a screwdriver is not the same thing as saying that a screwdriver is a hammer. Maybe you're just a very talented carpenter? In fact, I know you are.

Note, too, that I don't claim that D&D is supportive of Illusionism at all. In fact, rather the opposite. I can't take credit for figuring this out, once again it was Ron who pointed out way back that simple dungeoneering, which the game obviously supports, gives players complete agency within it's confines.

That play of D&D often evolves into illusionism is, to me, due to the fact that you get players like myself who want more out of play than just the dungeon, and just combat, and who found that (not having at the time the tools I have today ported over from play of OTHER RPGs), I could not get drama out of play without railroading it. D&D supports Gamism. I've given a recent example of how I myself used D&D to run a strongly Narrativism-seeking game. I also admit that I was pretty crazy to have done so, when I could have used something like Dungeon World. And that the game suffered for it.

From what I read about your D&D game (which hasn't been a thorough reading, I'll admit), is that you used a lot of good role-playing technique to accomplish what you did. Which is great. It's just not included in the box with D&D, and most people don't have those additional tools. To whit, their games don't look like yours.
Title: Re: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: Eero Tuovinen on October 19, 2013, 08:49:50 PM
I agree that everything you need to play D&D as a complete game is not in the box; in fact, the developers of the box have failed again and again in expressing the game in a manner that would satisfy e.g. myself - and of course often they have chosen a different game, a different D&D to put in the box instead of the one I would prefer. I would like to argue that this does not mean that the game is incomplete or does not exist, it just means that it hasn't been put in the box very well so far.

(I'll note that the dungeoneering part is actually pretty well boxed. For example, the Mentzer red box is, I'd like to argue, up to modern standards as a game text, and I think it captures the spirit of the sort of D&D I play pretty well. It's limited and has some funky mechanical elements due to the tradition, but within its confines it describes the game correctly and clearly.)

How, then, can I refer to the game, if I do not refer to the box it comes in? D&D is, I think, in an unique position where the textual and oral transmission has been so complex and varied that considering any single text as "the" D&D would be a mistake. It's better to deal with it as a tradition of play and focus on observing actual play habits (largely as explained to us by the people playing). This enables us to ask not merely what TSR thinks you should do while playing this game, but rather how the game is in fact played.

In other words: judging D&D on the basis of selected game texts is like trying to analyze the Nordic larp tradition with a Whitewolf larp handbook as a reference. The text is only barely relevant, and any given individual you accost might reject it altogether. To get deeper we are forced to consider play qua play.

Assuming for the sake of argument that we can agree on the above, you can see how the question of "support" is something of a red herring here. I mean, I could name D&D texts that "support" the kind of play I propose here, but if you're invested in following a certain textual transmission as the only legitimate D&D, then you'll find it easy to brush anything like that aside. For example, volume III of the original -74 edition of D&D has clear procedural description of how to play wilderness exploration (so-called "hexcrawl") where the players are assumed to be in control of intent and direction of play (the book refers to the possible motivation of players exploring to find an appropriate location for their castle, but that's just one possibility); would you consider this book to be sufficiently D&D for it to count as support material for the style of play I suggest here? Or is it more significant that ten years later TSR had largely abandoned this particular tool-set in favour of GM-controlled railroads or (at best) pearls-on-a-string dungeons? Which is the real D&D that we must evaluate to find out whether support for this style of play exists?

That aside, I think I can answer this question:

Quote from: Mike Holmes on October 19, 2013, 05:59:46 PMPut another way, what is it about D&D that you find supports your methodologies, Eero? Simply saying that you managed to pound a nail in with a screwdriver is not the same thing as saying that a screwdriver is a hammer. Maybe you're just a very talented carpenter? In fact, I know you are.

Off the top of my head, the following elements of D&D make it particularly fulfilling for the creative agenda I use it for:
- The default situation with the adventuring party and a drive to get from rags to riches puts the players in the driver's seat from the very beginning: in this harsh world, how will you survive and prosper?
- The default challenge the game provides, exploration, is a fun activity that suits well to be performed in a SIS. The procedures the game provides for the purpose work well and are interesting. (The two big ones are dungeon exploration and wilderness exploration. Both are complex procedural entities with plenty of nuances.)
- The game's basic methodology of play (the way the GM/player roles are differentiated, and the way rulings are made) enables us to establish and abandon mechanical solutions in direct service to the creative agenda, without stopping play and doing game design. This in turn makes the game superbly flexible as regards discovering new challenges and expanding the scope of play when necessary; few games handle switching from dungeon exploration to epic sea voyage to wargame campaign as well.
- The conflict-resolution method is all about player ability to visualize the SIS and perform snap judgements about it. This is perfect for our purposes.
- The experience system is elegant and goal-based, which makes the xp an excellent score-keeping device for gauging success in the game. The score-keeping makes the game surprisingly addictive, even a small group of players may find that they can generate enough social esteem for the best players that they'll be motivated to try hard to succeed.
- The hit point system is an elegant abstraction of combat, and it suits well the exploration focus of the game.
- The character class system provides players with operative specialist identities, which helps with team-building. The dungeoneering procedure further helps the players in forming a functional, goal-oriented party. The party system in turn has proved massively robust socially: D&D is one of the few games that can genuinely handle tired and inexperienced players alongside sharp veterans.
- The quick randomized character generation, character development (not primarily mechanically, but rather in terms of positioning and identity) and character death as failure condition work together beautifully to produce arcs of challenge. Player characters are like shooting stars the players shoot over the horizon, hoping for the best and slowly learning the skills it takes to lead a character to success. Very satisfying as a framing device.

(To be entirely explicit, the creative agenda here is "to mess about with some fantasy stuff, discover interesting conundrums and challenges, and then tackle them for greater glory and satisfaction of success.")

I can already see how you might read the above with an eye towards dismissing most of those points because they don't actually exist in D&D. I might grant the point regarding the conflict resolution method (it's an annoying blind spot in the D&D tradition, these people are very unable to talk about how conflicts are actually resolved due to the viking hat DM mythology), that one is really deep and you have to basically set up all the other pieces to discern the missing conflict resolution theory by the shape of the hole the other elements leave. All of the other points, though, are very clearly and consistently available in almost any edition of D&D.

It is interesting to compare the above with Tunnels & Trolls, which I also find entirely piquant; the games have a very similar creative agenda (that is, I have a very similar agenda I project upon them) and methodology and procedural tradition, but their fundamental mechanical cornerstones are different, which causes them to parse the fiction differently, resulting in a fresh experience.
Title: Re: [D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours
Post by: Mike Holmes on October 20, 2013, 07:13:12 PM
Well, yes, D&D is incomplete. But I agree with you that what D&D can be defined as is in terms of how it is played. And mostly it's played in a way that has little of the "Strategic" play under discussion, that being what Marshall was saying that you were saying it was. If I understand correctly, stuff to do with role-playing stuff to do with factions and the like. Fun intra-dungeon stuff that has to do with character motives and the like (note that "dungeon" here can mean a set of outdoor encounters or whatever you like, but simply a set of linked encounters). I totally agree that the dungeoneering part is well supported and have said so; as such I won't address any of your points regarding how well it supports that portion of play (though I'm tempted to really call BS on he HP thing, which I abhor.)

Your comments about the GM/player power split sound a lot like Rule Zero to me. That the GM should feel free to ignore the rules or change them when it furthers play. As I've always claimed, this is not a feature of a game any more than saying you can add foglights to a car a feature of said car. Sure, you can do it, but you can do it with any game, so it's not a particular feature of D&D. Worse, D&D texts often establish that it's essentially OK for the GM to do this clandestinely (fudging, for example), which is really problematic. Maybe I misunderstand your point, however.

The goal-based XP system only exists in some editions, and does, yes, support pretty much whatever sort of play you want to angle for when it's both actively used, and not ignored. In most games I've seen, mostly EXP are rewarde for killing things, and sometimes for taking their stuff. In no edition is this omitted. The end result is that hack and slash is most strongly supported, so it gets the most attention in play (again, in MOST games of D&D). 4E, interestingly, gives the best description of how to use EXP for "Quests" than any other edition.

From what I've seen, classes (especially when combined with alignment) result often in the complete opposite of a "goal-oriented party." I often see it lead, in fact, to intra-party conflicts that the system doesn't help handle in any way that leads to dysfunctional play - up to and including the game being disbanded altogether. As far as being "robust socially," my experiences have been very different, in that newer players are often left feeling like clueless newbs, and they often drop out of play because of it. I'll admit that this has become even MORE of a problem in later editions than it was early on, but my first game to fall apart because of such issues was in 1978 using Holmes Basic (BBB), which is extremely pretty simple in these regards.

Your last point about "shooting stars" seems to militate directly AGAINST the point of it supporting strategic play. When you don't even survive the dungeon to get to the strategic part, how can you enjoy it? Even if you survive one to die in the next one, where's any sense of strategic continuity?

Again, I'm not saying that D&D is getting in the way a ton in these regards as (especially if you're playing an early edition, say Mentzer), the system is very much silent on these portions of play. But the result of that for most groups is that they end up playing sans much, if any, of the intra-dungeon play.

I can still recall when "Town" was a new concept to us. D&D so omits the "how to play" that for a cargo cult, they may well assume in early editions that there is NOTHING that exists between dungeons. That's not common now, no. But if you want to hearken to the traditions of play, well they're mostly lacking in this department.