[D&D4E] Some WOTC encounters
happysmellyfish:
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An individual DM can still standardise things a bit, though.
I've recently finished GMing a 12 week Savage Worlds campaign, in which we did just that. The whole thing was solely, explicitly a gamist exercise. I used a point system to match encounters to the players, and each session would have three encounters. I tallied each player's kill count as we went, and the winner became team leader for the next session, which had mechanical benefits. We averaged a TPK every four sessions, but survival wasn't the real goal. The coveted title of MVP was their real aim.
It eventually got a bit stale when we all realised that in-world fiction wasn't having any impact on the game play. My point is that Savage Worlds doesn't support or advocate that sort of play whatsoever, but groups still can and do beat it into shape for whatever they're after.
Callan S.:
For all the 'boardgamey' charges laid against it, D&D still, out of the box, lacks the vital components of a board game. And probably raises another generation to intimately link incoherance and the notion of 'roleplay' together, utterly intertwined. With all the interferance that garners against developing coherant games. To make a coherant game is actually against market.
I wonder if I could announce a design comp somewhere (here?) where you take snakes and ladders and make an RPG from that base, without breaking the flow chart/having dead ends in the flow chart towards the end/win condition. I have no prizes though, except to read entries avidly. On the other hand, I'm curious about how much the idea would be like a chicken bone in the throat?
mark2v:
D&D 4th Ed is a strategy game, with strategy game goals and measures of success.
If you get through the encounter and still have a few healing surges and no one is dead. Congrats that was good use of skills and management of resources. . Exp points for you.
Finding the best way to fiddle your party skills in unexpected ways while overcoming the encounter is another form of success that I think gets less attention than it deserves. Players love to talk about skill combos, figure positioning and fiddly bits. Many players get a great deal of satisfaction from that part of the game. It is the same personal reward a player gets for a good move in chess or checkers. That satisfaction is a meta effect of the game and not a written part of the system, but it is real none the less.
I have never been able to mentally jive that part of the system together with a “role playing.” That’s a discussion that been beat to death already, and not really part of this one.
Callan S.:
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If you get through the encounter and still have a few healing surges and no one is dead. Congrats that was good use of skills and management of resources.
So if we beat four minions or we beat four dragons, we get the same congrats? The same social salute for either?
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Players love to talk about skill combos, figure positioning and fiddly bits. Many players get a great deal of satisfaction from that part of the game. It is the same personal reward a player gets for a good move in chess or checkers.
I think if your playing to win, you don't play to have fun, you play to win. If your inclined to have fun while playing to win, then having fun is a side effect of that. Generally when I hear about player satisfaction, it's reversing the priority. Ala 'It's all about the fun'.
Anyway, these things do hinge on written system, because that's the method of determining win or lose. Or, if your making up win conditions, a hard question to ask for anybody is 'If you want to face win/lose conditions, why do you keep playing games where there is such an absence of them that you start making them up?"
contracycle:
Hmmm... I think there's room for some nuance in there. I'm sure people like professional athletes play to win to such an extent that whatever fun they might have had from the sport when they started out is totally lost. Which is understandable when it's a career. For hobbyists, though, I think both usually co-exist in varying degrees. Eevry online, mass-player game I've played has a range among the regulars between the seriously competitive and those who simply enjoy the way the game plays. Even for people who totally play to win, there must be some means to choose between this game and that, and I expect that is the play experience. Which I think is an adequate explanation for why competitive players are still found in games like RPG's with fuzzy conditions.
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