[D&D4E] Some WOTC encounters
Anders Gabrielsson:
Quote from: Callan S. on July 06, 2011, 02:26:38 AM
Chris, with the right set of eyes they would find your own preferences ridiculous. C'mon, the human default is to think oneself has won the magical belief lottery and has the right belief/preference and so is qualified to determine what is, overall, rediculous. If were working from the default, well then my dad could beat your dad anyday...
C'mon, take two! No default! Or you can instead just say my preference is so rare and held by so few (or just me) you'll skip talking on it, fair enough.
I don't know about Chris, but I don't understand this post at all.
I'm fairly sure (but I don't have my books here so I can't quote chapter and verse) that you only get XP for an encounter if you defeat it - basically, kill all the monsters, which you can't do (bar some weird edge case that's not going to matter anyway) if you're dead yourself. I highly doubt the text goes into it more than that.
Chris_Chinn:
Hi Callan,
You asked about yardsticks to measure what kind of challenge is being faced beyond TPKs. Then you added the qualifier that the book must explicitly explain to you that doing something faster, better, with less resource costs is better than doing it slower, worse, with more costs.
No one seems to require soccer teams to explain winning by 5 goals is way better than barely winning by 1 goal in overtime.
If you are interested in what kinds of challenge D&D 4E provides, as a system, or comparing the kinds of challenge you get from following the encounter rules vs. prepackaged adventures (such as D&D Encounters), then there's plenty of yardsticks.
Those yard sticks also become the tools by which you can define "tactical" - choices made to improve the outcomes of tackling challenges, much more than Win/Lose as a binary.
Otherwise, it sounds like you've already decided what you feel about the game without actually engaging with it. I'm not sure anyone can have much of a conversation with you if that's the case.
Chris
Ron Edwards:
Well, hold on a moment. I think we might well examine the distinction between textually explicit success and what becomes experienced as success in any given game. I read a lot of card game rules about six years ago, while trying to understand card games better, and although for every game the rules were absolutely explicit about who wins and who does not, not one explanation addressed the issue from a personal enjoyment level. Not one addressed, for example, the possibility of someone who plays the best but happens to lose this particular round, even for a game which necessarily relies on multiple repetitions, like poker.
There may be some kind of shared understanding among practitioners of a given game regarding the unstated avenues of success. I'm thinking especially of pre-4th edition Champions, which I have previously described as a car that can run in any GNS direction, as long as the group in question kicks the tires in a particular way and throws out specific portions of the material. More important to this thread, the game was also highly customizable, or rather interpretable, in terms of the various flavors of Gamism. Sitting in with multiple groups and reading about even more groups' accounts, I realized that no one ever explained these extremely necessary avenues of reading and modifying the rules - it was always about sharing a group ... call it "value system," in which explicit success, like winning fights, acted as a practical framework.
Best, Ron
contracycle:
I'm reminded of the old Streetfighter game (maybe?) which would reward you with a "PERFECT!" if you took your opponent down without sustaining any damage yourself. Would something like that qualify for a Callan's textually explicit yardstick? Say you shifted, or modified, rewarded XP by what proportion of hit points you had at the end, for the D&D type case. Of course I'm not really sure that would actually work because current D&D seems to be attritional and quite finely calculated, but is that useful as a thought experiment?
Also seems to me the issue gets a bit fuzzier with team games as opposed to 1 on 1 games. In a team game you might actually lose but still individually be recognised as man of the match, or as having the highest kill count, or something else related to individual contribution. Hence I think in team games one of the yardsticks that will always be present, and isn't made up, will be the recognition of your peers. Also, given the nature of these encounters, as I understand them, a local club could put up a leaderboard of different groups playing through each, and as with my HP suggestion, rank each group by how many HP they came out with. That isn;t exactly how its designed to be played now, but it certainly could be textual.
Anders Gabrielsson:
I'm not sure if this is what you're after, but poker is actually a fairly illustrative example of different measures of winning: hands or money; long-term or short-term. Many poker books heavily stress playing "correctly"; i.e., for long-term monetary gain (for ring games - tournament play is a different beast). Handling repeated defeats at the hands of less skillful players is one of the most important skills for a professional poker player because it happens a lot and maintaining discipline is key to being successful in the long-term monetary sense.
However, for an amateur player, "getting one up on the pro" - correctly calling a bluff, avoiding a trap, making them fold - can be a victory, even if they're down money by the end of the year.
To make D&D more like poker there would have to be many more encounters in a day but the party should have the ability to easily avoid or escape from them. That way they would be better able to choose when to commit their resources for as much gain as possible.
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