[D&D4E] Some WOTC encounters
Anders Gabrielsson:
This is all sort of rambling but at least tangentially related to your last post.
The whiff factor is one of the least enjoyable aspects of 4E, and one of the reasons other than pure effectiveness to hunt for as many to-hit bonuses as possible. (There are more of those than there used to be, I think, but I'm not sure - it used to be pretty hard to get anything beyond a +1 in a specific situation until they tried to fix the math problems with the Expertise feats which was a bad, bad way to go. But I digress.)
But the way that most combat encounters create that "Oh shit we're gonna die!" feeling even though you're almost certain to pull through okay... they've done that extremely well. My players say they almost never feel a combat is a sure thing until the last couple of turns, and that can be with a +1 encounter that I know will at most knock out one of them, and probably not even that. (They're running double leaders in a five-person team, with one of them being a healing-focused Cleric.) That makes it fun both for them, in that they get a real sense of danger and get to feel that their choices matter, and for me, since I don't have to hold back but can go all-out with the monsters. And very occasionally, in a tough fight one of the PCs will die which keeps the players on their toes. (I think it's happened twice in something like 40-50 encounters.)
I think one reason why missing is so frustrating compare to not being able to act is that when you do get to act you have the potential to do something really cool and meaningful, but when you're knocked out that's that - there's nothing you can do so there's nothing to be disappointed about when your turn rolls around and nothing cool happens.
Callan S.:
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But the way that most combat encounters create that "Oh shit we're gonna die!" feeling even though you're almost certain to pull through okay... they've done that extremely well.
Wow, that actually just made me really wary? I'm all too aware of how the feeling of danger and actual danger are not just linked together. Given that, to me it calls for seeing if you can actually fail or whether it just feels like you can fail...hmmm, well, if a TPK is classed as a fail, that happened once in about ten games at the store. That's not a good sign, by itself. Bummer.
If I could measure what the actual challenge is, then you can just check if it's being delivered each game and then even if it's beneath your skill level, atleast you know it's being delivered. Like if a game was about remembering sequences of numbers of five in length, then if it delivers five length sequences, you know it's presenting that challenge (even if your so good at it you beat it all the time). What challenge is the current iteration of D&D providing? It's hard to test if it's delivering anything and instead simply obsfucating through myriad flow chart choices a predetermined result. And no 'the need to be tactical' isn't what it's presenting - 'tactical' is an empty, unmeasurable word.
Gah, and I was enjoying that...or more to the point, what I had gone and assumed was there.
Anders Gabrielsson:
I'm not entirely sure I understand your last post, but I'll try to answer the question "What challenge does 4E actually present compared to what the players experience?", assuming that's what you asked. If not, please correct me.
In my experience, the actual danger is still there, it's just not as big as the players experience it. Part of this is probably that much of the actual danger is front-loaded: many, probably the vast majority, of the monsters' most dangerous attacks are single-use or recharge abilities, meaning they will be used early in the fight and then maybe once more (unless the GM rolls really well for recharge). When a monster's first attack takes away a third of your hitpoints that makes you feel it's very dangerous, but when that attack is "Recharge when bloodied" and the monster's at-wills do much less damage it's actually not that bad.
Another factor is the "he does what?" experience you get when a monster triggers an unexpected ability or a (seemingly) very powerful effect you haven't seen before. That often makes the players feel they've been thrown into the deep end without warning, even if the ability is actually quite limited (through limited uses as above, or because it can only be triggered when fairly specific conditions are met).
I can take a specific example of the latter from a recent encounter I ran for my group, which involved an Umber Hulk (probably one from the Monster Vault but I'm not sure). It can attack with both claws as a standard action, and if both hit the same target it becomes grabber. If the Hulk has a target grabbed it can do an attack against it that does a lot of damage. Since the UH is an elite it has an action point, so in the encounter I ran I used that AP to trigger the conditional attack when the UH managed to grab someone. The attack did a bunch of damage and my players were freaked out - "That thing's really dangerous!" And that's true - kind of. If you get grabbed and if you don't get out of the grab you're going to take a whole bunch of damage, but it's fairly hard to get grabbed and fairly easy to get out of a grab so if you're playing reasonably well - putting someone with high defenses up against the Hulk and having someone in a position to do forced movement on one of them if they still do get grabbed and don't manage to get lose - the danger is minimal.
So yes, the danger is less than it may seem, but it's still there. A group that mismanage their resources and don't cooperate will get wiped out by encounters that a group with identical characters but who use them better will have no problems with. In other words, whatchoices the players make matter.
Chris_Chinn:
Hi,
4E's default philosophy is that each encounter should eat up about 1/4th of the party's resources. This is actually a pretty safe margin for encounters overall, and basically fits what a lot of players are looking for- "risk" that isn't terribly risky.
Given that D&D Encounters and similar organized play thrives on having continuous participation - there's more incentive to do low risk play than high risk challenging encounters (such as classic tournament D&D, or "deathtrap dungeons").
That said, it's not inherent to the system itself by any means- you can look up tons of stuff online where people are talking about upping the challenge - players using better tactics and teamwork, DMs using challenging setups.
Tactics and teamwork do make a major difference in effectiveness- though it requires full group buy-in as part of the Creative Agenda of play- the DM has to build encounters with that in mind to challenge the players, the players need to work together for gamist strategies.
I tend to see it as a spectrum - on one end you have the high challenge gamists, who want to think hard, and play hard to win, down to the low challenge gamists who are happy if they figure out a slightly more effective tactic, here and there, and aren't much in danger of losing, and the very end being players who want Illusionism with zero threat of risk at all. All of these folks want very different games, and usually find themselves frustrated when they encounter something other than what they were looking for.
Anders is quite correct in the psychology of perceived danger, though. The nice thing about perceived danger is that it makes the players feel like the stakes are much higher than they are, which is usually great for low-challenge gamists or illusionists, and non-existent for high challenge gamists.
Chris
Callan S.:
As I said, in terms of two people communicating with a relatively high understanding of what each other mean, the words 'tactics' and 'tactical' are quite empty words. Or atleast with me, I wont know what your talking about.
Anyway, it's ironic, because the situations possible easyness is really hard to overall grasp.
Basically, looking past TPK's for now, there is no yardstick to judge performance by. Of course in a direct PVP board game, the yardstick is did I bet Kevin or Bob. In a PVE (player Vs environment) game, there needs to be a mechanical yardstick.
Or when you look at a TPK as a yardstick, it's entirely binary - you all die, or atleast one of you lives. Unlike many board games where you have points (often with a point total you must reach) and thus you have a gradiated yardstick. Here with D&D, you could not TPK against a group of minion goblins or not TPK against a group of dragons and therefore...not TPK'ing is nothing in terms of a yardstick. The supposed importance of 'Do you liiiiiive!!!!???1!?' is, at the very least, illusionous. It wouldn't be illusionous if D&D had no levels and all monster encounters were of the same challenge rating. Then you would have a definate yardstick of how good you are at the game.
Perhaps I should ask the GM what the WOTC's modules challenge rating was? Perhaps, in terms of a gamist CA, it's vital I ask?
Anders,
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Another factor is the "he does what?" experience you get when a monster triggers an unexpected ability or a (seemingly) very powerful effect you haven't seen before. That often makes the players feel they've been thrown into the deep end without warning, even if the ability is actually quite limited (through limited uses as above, or because it can only be triggered when fairly specific conditions are met).
Yeah, I think I know exactly the feeling your talking about.
Hmmm, it strikes me as an obsfucation - you assume the monster can keep doing so and so. Why is it an obsfucation? Because once you realise the pattern, your immediately able to see it from the outside (instead of being stuck inside "He does what!!??").
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