[D&D]Balance killed my game
Guy Srinivasan:
Quote
1) View a combat encounter as part of a longer resource loop
2) Do not expect that 4e's combat is Magic the Gathering type awesome
3) Find simple, general best practices that make a single combat encounter crafty-combo-supportive
Quote from: Patrice on July 28, 2009, 05:28:09 AM
Sorry to answer you that bluntly, Guy, your ideas sure look good but... They seem to me a bit like the Money Pit Callan was writing about. Why would you spend such an amount of time and energy to transform a game that, deep down, doesn't meet your expectations? Why wouldn't you design one yourself or just pick another, more suitable to your tastes and needs?
See option 2. :D I am in a social situation which gives me decent-sized incentives to play D&D 4e, and I imagine it's not an uncommon situation. As such the path of least resistance, for me, is to figure out what 4e actually offers me and bring correct expectations to the table. The ideal outcome is that option 1 or 3 worked without money-pit effort, so I put some effort into it. Stalker0 has put more.
And of course option 3 is virtually indistinguishable from "design one yourself"...
But take a good look at option 2 again. I assumed 4e was at least in part as you described:
Quote from: Patrice on July 28, 2009, 05:28:09 AM
Looking at it this way, I find the GSL consistent with this creativity denial. What's left is a board game or a wargame. Since I'm not a natural enemy of wargames, having played quite a lot of those during the years, I'm open to the idea but I expect a wargame to provide me, at least, with opportunities to put my wits in action. That's not the case with the 4th for all the reasons I've mentioned earlier.
and came away with the conclusion that 4e is a terrible wargame (board game). But when I instead assume that those parts of 4e are not a board game, a very different picture emerges. First of all, outside of combat things seem fine. The GM (+players, depending) puts the PCs in interesting situations, you all describe what your characters are doing, the GM adjudicates the world's response, and if she feels like the fiction calls for it, can call for skill checks of various sorts. The rules don't give the GM a lot of assistance in prep or run, but those are different considerations, and as discussed partly useful from a fiction-leading stance. Now look at combat encounters through the lens of option 2. If all (okay, not all, but lots and lots) of my options in combat are acceptable from a standpoint of beating up the monsters, then why constrain myself to build a super-effective-at-beating-up-the-monsters character (or party)? I can trade away the minimal gains in Effectiveness for Positioning instead (or huge gains in out-of-combat Effectiveness). Same thing during play. My most fun 4e combat encounter experiences have all shared the quality that everyone at the table (as far as I could tell) didn't include beat-up-the-monsters-as-hard-as-possible as part of the Gamism going on, in direct contrast to my most fun wargame experiences.
Frank Tarcikowski:
P.S.:
Quote from: Patrice on July 28, 2009, 05:28:09 AM
One funny effect of this long rambling is that it took me back into the retro-gaming systems blossoming these days: OSRIC, C&C, S&W, LL and LJ. I've always thought of retro-gaming as of a kind of nostalgia but what if actually, less was more? Ideas still linger in my mind that suit this media since they involve gaming fantasy more than sword & sorcery fantasy and for these ideas (and these ideas only), I'll take a long peek into these systems instead of trying to carve them in a system that obviously isn't designed for the kind of play I like.
Personally, I have found that Savage Worlds is a modern game with a very well developed design which supports the "old school" style of play (with the fiction leading) very well. I highly recommend it. It's not retro, though.
Patrice:
I totally agree about clearly grasping the differences the two terms of Effectiveness I've brought in and you've explained (much better than I would). On one side we have making use of Situation via Positioning, working with the fiction and on the other making use of System via Resources, working with the rules. As a matter of fact, I like both styles, with different aims and ways about each. Thing is, opportunities to work with the fiction are pretty low in D&D4, for all the reasons I've put forward earlier, System coverage being the foremost ; and attempts to make use of System via Resources lead to such tiny outcomes in Effectiveness that, given my expectations (which I fully acknowledge), this doesn't lead to relevant Effectiveness at all. Of course, everything lays in the "relevant" part, which is widely a matter of taste and game expectations.
Build isn't the only point here, combat routine is also an issue. In most D&D4 Situations, the combat, the pushing the minis and grid play subsumes to an applied routine. Of course, encounter design makes a whole world of difference but eventually, you get caught again in a fixed series of patterns. I want my tactical mind to matter, or my Positioning and fiction-building, whatever, but I eventually want wits to matter at some point. In chess, there comes a point where you HAVE to think, in pre 2nd Ed AD&D, there came a point where you had to be cunning, or to have guts, or maybe sheer luck. Even in WoW, you still get that from some Achievements and from the Ulduar patch, etc. I keep looking and looking and can't find it in D&D4.
Except from Guy's perspective. Granted, Guy, the second options pays good enough to keep your game sparkling a bit. But this is mainly a game writer option. Looking at Stalker0 awesome examples, or at whatever the D&D Insider brought, I can see, of course, that extreme Situation tweaking can produce interesting encounters. My point is that:
1. This is obviously rules-tweaking, almost a Drift since at some point, these Situations often involve side rules and new crunch.
2. This all lays in the designer's skill. You can GM this with huge prep, you can write like this (that's what I did actually) but you have no choice as a player whether to get this or not.
In summary, this is another way of saying "okay, let's play this game in such a way that it wouldn't suck". To me, this sounds very much like "this game sucks but I've got no other choice than playing it". And that's what you say when you talk about your social situation, I think Callan's thread about Warhammer! Chaos! Order! Molasses! might be handy here. Moreover, if you trade Step on Up for Positioning to that extend, you end up playing some simulation of D&D. This might be cool a few sessions, but this is also how I got bored to death at the end.
Yes, Franck, Savage Worlds is a great other option here, thanks for mentioning it.
Callan S.:
Quote from: Patrice on July 28, 2009, 05:28:09 AM
The threshold thing sure comes into what repels me but I want to rephrase it according to my experience: it's not so much about the choices being easy than about the choices being actually offering fake options. If you take the WLK example, you can play, say, a single class in two, maybe three different ways. Can you tweak it further? No. The game offers a vast gem and enchantment management system that eventually comes to the same conclusion: there's just one way to do it right and be efficient. In D&D4, it's a bit the same except that in addition, even bad choices are rewarded almost equally. I don't want my pain, nor the hardcore thing, I want to use my creativity when playing.
I'll just note that a sedoku only has one way of doing it as well and that works.
What's happenening here is that with the enchantment system the answer has already been found. It's game over, except no big sign comes up to say congratulations, bravo, and this is the end ... because it's a mmorpg and they don't want your money going anywhere soon.
D&D (and many other trad RPG's) try and be without end as well. Can you complete D&D4E? No, and yet you give account of basically having figured it out. Perhaps it's the lack of being able to complete the game which is a major issue?
JoyWriter:
Patrice, imagine you design a brand new game for you and your friends. What parts might you want to rip out of D&D4e? I ask this because I hope it should solve all the money trap stuff. Just say your not playing D&D, but that it has simularities where it is good, then you can get right back into design.
Now on the design front, sounds like you solved the game as you played it. Just like Draughts becomes mechanical when it has been solved, so does this game. Now think about this strange idea; telling you how to challenge your players will tell them how to win, because it will make you predictable, so to an extent the game cannot support you much there! You need to inject the unpredictable, to dial up the complexity.
Now I'd keep all those parts of the game that could interact with that complexity, and allow you to make good moment to moment decisions, like the movement/grid stuff and presumably the stunting and ritual rules too. I'd add in more complex spatial arrangement stuff, so you're suddenly playing bejewelled or something with the monsters while fighting them. And I'd use the ebberon setting and play it like it's ocean's eleven meets shadowrun! With lots of planning and double dealing. And meanwhile there would be a mystery to solve. That should get the complexity up!
But on the analysis front, isn't it a tragedy that you can now make combat choices with almost no mechanical difference? Well not to me; I've been trying to make my own D&D-ish game for a bit and I wanted to even out "the stats" from various perspectives, so no-one would go "I am a ___ so I must always have high ____" I did this so that people had space in the rules to pick a multitude of different takes on the same subject. But I still made a basic paper scissors thing between the different types, although who knows if that will work out well yet. The point is that by "balancing" you make space for the choice to be about something other than the optimal for winning. So if those choices are not being used in your game, don't implement them, they are there for someone else, collapse them into one choice, or make the differences matter.
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