As I mentioned in my Retro-Stupid post, I feel that 4e is knowingly taking a step toward embracing the aspect of the early versions of the game that were fun while doing away with some of their unfun legacy (fun and unfun being completely subjective concepts; I think it is at the heart of many pro/con 4e debates so far).
This time I’ll share my take on the apparent shift D&D 4e takes in regards to the difficulty of combat and I’ll draw a parallel about how the 1st versions of the game actually fostered Role Playing without any non-combat incentives.
As I was reading through the various blog entries published in Wizards Presents “Worlds and Monsters” one of the recurring themes was that D&D 3.x combat were better and more fun when a DM ignored the CR rule and created encounters where each individual opponents was close to the characters’ level in power.
As experienced D&D 3.X DMs know, the Challenge Rating (CR) was designed to create combat encounters in which a party of a given level would spend about 25% of it’s resources to beat a CR equivalent threat.
A formula was even proposed for an adventure where you would get a few lower CR encounters, a few CR equivalent and one or 2 higher Boss-level CR encounters.
The formula was very good when we started playing D&D 3.0 way back in the early 2000s because we were learning the ropes of a new game, we experimented with class builds and, quite frankly, new players sucked at combat!
As players gained experience, grew used to the gaming group and achieved some forms of synergies, the system could be beat easily and the 25% of resources often dropped to much lower (baring no critical hits by monsters).
As the novelty of D&D 3.0/3.5 wore off, CR equivalent combat became less interesting especially when you needed to grind 13 of those to gain a level. Combat could become very repetitive and a DM needed to be creative to create challenges for PCs to spice things up (including ignoring the CR suggestions or adding interactive terrain elements)
Heck, even a CR+2 dragon isn’t much of a challenge for my players anymore (which points out to another 3.X problem for solo monsters).
Now if you compare to the 1st editions of D&D (I’m talking about OD&D, the first versions of the Basic D&D game and, to a lesser extent, Advanced D&D 1e) most if not all combat encounters were downright lethal (and still are, as people still play those games)!
I haven’t played any of these games except AD&D, but I’ve read numerous accounts on Retro gaming blogs and forums along theses lines.
Now the level of lethality in these earlier games didn’t seem to be much of an issue since Character Generation was relatively fast and I don’t think one was supposed to derive all that much fun from building up a character’s story. The stories probably grew from the fact that one could actually survive from one dungeon delve to the next.
(I’d like to see some feedback on how accurate that assesment is in current retro-gamer groups)
However, here’s where I suspect the actual Roleplaying elements of D&D were born. If combat was that lethal, it became a challenge for players to survive long enough to come out of the dungeon alive with some loot. Finding ways to avoid combat became a strong incentive, regardless of XP, and what better way to avoid combat than parlay with the creatures of a dungeon and try to survive with a player’s wit instead of testing his luck with polyhedral dice (or Paper Chits if you’re that much of a Grognard).
In fact, non-competitive Gygaxian Adventures, from Keep on the Borderlands to the recent Castle Maure commonly had multiple communities in a Dungeon that you could pit one against another and avoid some fighting.
Heck, in the 1st Against the Giant adventure, there are 300 slave orcs in the dungeon under the keep that just beg to be given the chance of ruining the Giant’s party on the level above (at least that,s what my players did).
I’m convinced that E.G.G. was well aware of that and derived more pleasure from seeing players find non-combat solutions to his fiendish encounters than having players bore him with line combat and endless spot and listen checks. I once read that he created the Ear Seeker (an insect that burrows from your PC’s ear to his brain, killing him) as an answer to overcautious, over-predictable players.
My final argument on this (though I doubt that any of this is controversial) resides in the fact that A D&D gave XPs for finding treasure and using magic items. Getting one’s hand on treasure and surviving was one great motivation not to charge headfirst in the room full of trolls with your 3rd level characters.
My point? Well, the 4e designers seemed to have fully realized this and have espoused the philosophy that harder fights with monsters whose power level rivals the PCs are more exciting and can motivate players to take another approach than killing everything.
For this to be doable though, one fundamental aspect of the game had to be killed and that was the caster’s dependence on spells per day. Making combat more difficult automatically means that you increase the amount of resources PCs need to spend to succeed in the encounter.
Keeping all of the caster’s resources based on Vancian magic would have meant that players would request, then argue, then whine about resting after each encounter (Am I right or am I right?).
f all encounters were designed to be harder than 3.x, then the whiners would be right if character survival is the a core value of the gaming group. Given the time it now takes to design a D&D character, it usually is.
That’s why I think that the new 4e casters will only have about 20% of their resources tied to 1/day abilities. That’s also why I think many characters (all?) will have access to healing surge powers to recover hit points without necessarily resorting to ‘healing’ magic.
Harder, more lethal fights but this time with a toolbox of resources to deal with several of those over the course of an adventure is, IM(not so)HO a good move on the part of the 4e design team.
What say you?
1st edition AD&D character generation was fast?
Assuming you’re talking about a 1st level character, in 3rd edition with a “standard array” you can be ready to buy equipment in about 10 minutes, maybe 15 if you need to pick spells. (Equipment buying is essentially unchanged in duration; at least 3rd edition has some – fairly useless – standard templates).
1st edition, however, requires as many as 72* throws of 3d6 before you can even pick a class, and then you have to carefully check the maximum and minimums to see if you can actually qualify for the race you want. Then there’s multiclassing to consider if you’re demihuman (which, unless you figure on the campaign going to more than about 12th level, you almost certainly should be). Now, that’s a worst case – if you use the 4d6-pick 3 method (which was still valid in 1st edition) I’d say that the comparing values to see if you qualify in 1st edition was about the same as picking skills in 3rd (and that’s being very generous in my comparison – most classes only get 2 or 3 picks, assuming you max out a few skills rather than spread the points).
1st edition was also much less intuitive. One of the reasons it’s relatively quick to generate a 1st level character in 3rd edition is because the attribute bonuses are a simple formula FLOOR((x-10)/2), where x is the value of the attribute**. There’s no such standard in 1st edition – I know few people who could tell you, off the top of their head, exactly what bonuses you get for a Charisma of 16, for example, or a Strength of 18/67.
And the idea that combat was easier in 1st edition is not really supported by evidence – I present for your consideration the necessity of various tables for “to hit” chances (THAC0 was not officially in use until 2nd edition), the “weapons vs armour” table in the original PH, and the percentage based unarmed combat rules that basically bore no resemblance to any of the other core systems.
It’s a side point, and I’m sure you don’t mean to imply that 4th edition is a return to this sort of thing, but it’s always bugged me when people are being inaccurately nostalgic; I don’t even LIKE D&D, but I’ll give it its due: it HAS tended to improve.
* One of the standard methods is to roll 3d6 6 times in order to generate 12 characters, and then pick one – which is 72 rolls. Slightly less arduous is rolling 3d6 6 times for each attribute in order, picking the best roll – that’s only 36 rolls. The other method – I mentioned 4d6-pick 3 above – is to roll 3d6 12 times, pick the best 6 rolls, and assign them however you like. I’m excluding the Method V added in Unearthed Arcana.
** In my opinion it’s purely anachronistic that they even HAVE 3-18 scores any more. The appropriate thing to do was to ditch the baggage completely and rate your Strength, Dexterity, and so forth from -5 to +5 (with no upper limit). The way it is currently designed in 3rd edition leads to questions – why, for example, are all enhancement bonuses to attributes in even multiples of 2? According to the designers, it’s because if you had (eg) “Gauntlets of Kobold Power [+1 enhancement bonus to Strength]” then it would have the weird effect of making Joe 13 Strength stronger, but not his buddy Jack 14 Strength. I submit that this is a ridiculous argument that just begs the question, and anyway even if it were true you’d then have to explain why the +1 per 4 levels doesn’t work like that, or more directly why Tomes, Manuals, and Books can give +1 to +5 inherent bonuses.
I had the privilege to play a 4e demo at a recent con. The aspect of spells being usable more frequently was only the tip of the iceberg for me. I found the non casting classes had similar abilities.
Currently in 3.5 non casters have either very little “special moves” or things they can only do once a month under a full moon as long as they are within 35 feet of a hot dog stand. What I saw at the 4e demo raised my hopes as it seemed that all the classes got fun moves. Some once per day, some once per combat, and the best yet were some that were once per day but only if they succeed.
At the table this translated into fun. Pure and simple. We all had cool little tricks we could bring to the table and felt free to do so with impunity. As a player I often find myself incapable to act with my special powers because of the chance I might need that power for a greater purpose before the sun sets. I tend to avoid playing spell casters for this reason.
I can only cast how many spells a day? Well, what time is it? Do I hear any more skeletons down the hall clanking about or does it sound like I’ll get a chance to rest after this fight?
I’m going to have to agree with you here. I am very excited about this new dynamic. I think it’s a great thing and not just for casters either.
@ Gazza: A D&D was a fence case when I wrote this and I’ll agree with you then that Char Gen could be a chore (especially with the variant ability score generation methods from UA).
Combat wise, at least in the 1st years, it was closer to it’s predecessors in term of harshness to the character’s survival and therein lies my main point.
Edit: Let me rephrase that dear Gazza: Early edition Combat was deadlier… 1ed AD&D was too…. I didn’t want to imply that it was easier to play out. But maybe you ranted at the Nostagic community in general… and that’s cool. 🙂
So I differ to your analysis, I really only meant A D&D for combat lethality and challenge…
@Jim : Welcome to the blog. I just hope that all these special abilities will remain fun and won’t degenerate down a power creep spiral as new sourcebooks come out… I feel that, like 3.x, vigilant DM reading will be ever needed.
@Gazza:
I’m a nitpicker…
Equippable ability score enhancement items in D&D as far as I’ve known it have always come in +2, +4, +6, etc…mind you, tomes/manuals and such are different, and there maybe an item or two I’ve overlooked…but most of that argument isn’t an actual problem…
I think your assessment is mostly right in a lot of ways. I’d like to speak to this specifically:
“Now the level of lethality in these earlier games didn’t seem to be much of an issue since Character Generation was relatively fast and I don’t think one was supposed to derive all that much fun from building up a character’s story. The stories probably grew from the fact that one could actually survive from one dungeon delve to the next.”
When I play Basic/Expert D&D, “character story” is something that evolves over the course of a campaign. I don’t suggest that players come with fully realized characters at all – in fact I encourage them to think of their characters almost as “pawns” when we start playing. This is a complete 180 from how I structure non-D&D games, and even how I run my 3e D&D games, but I find that the structure of B/X D&D makes it work quite well. Character personalities/histories tend to grow over time, and since there is very little in the way of “mechanical bits” for personal histories or personalities or much of anything other than combat mechanics in B/X D&D, characters can grow at the table through play into fully formed characters.
The upshot of that is that if your 1st level thief dies in that first room with the kobolds, you haven’t spent a lot of time on him and it’s relatively easy to roll up a new character and start playing right away. By the time a character has grown enough of a personality and history for a player to really get attached to him (roundabout 3rd-5th level usually), the character’s survival chances have increased to the point where he’s probably going to be sticking around (or you can afford those Raise Dead spells from a high level cleric).
That’s a play style that most modern game systems just can’t support — mostly because they’re explicitly designed NOT to support it. Even 3.x D&D doesn’t really do that play style very well for me – characters take too long to make for one thing. But also by the time you’ve statted up your character you “know” too much about him. Just selecting skills and feats suggests a certain background or personality for a character that you don’t get when you play BD&D. And most of my players already start to get ideas of a target Prestige Class that they’re aiming for, so the character already has more goals than “enter the dungeon and find money” when he starts out. You may not know as much about him as you would a starting Champions or GURPS or Ars Magica character, but he’s certainly less of a blank slate than a 1st level BD&D character. (And in fact most of my players tend to come up with fully realized 3e D&D characters the same way they would for any other RPG currently on the market – because that’s what they’ve been trained to do and because 3e character creation really is built to guide players towards that kind of play style.)
Another thing to point out that goes along with what you’re saying is that Tension is Fun (in games… or media in general, actually.)
The CR system as written, and the way monsters are built in general in 3.5, doesn’t encourage tension. They tend to be all or nothing. There’s speed bumps that drain the requisite 20ish% but never are threatening, and then there’s the monsters which always hit against all but the most min-maxed ACs. At higher levels, the PCs have so many abilities and options that Save or Die is used as a shortcut to insert auto-tension, but even then it tends to fall into the unbalance category again (Fort save or die vs some, Ref save or lots of damage vs others.)
I think most 3.5 DMs- myself included- tended to use the CR as a really, really rough guidelines, and then the monsters would almost always have higher CRs than what was standard. That way, most fights were challenging and had tension. (We just had to be careful not to go over the line.)
Tension is an important element in the older adventures you list, as well.
Dave T. Games last blog post..“Mouse Guard” RPG: A Points of Light setting
I’ve been following a lot of the 4e preview stuff being put out by WotC, reports from the various demo playtesters, etc, and from what I’ve been seeing, I like how things are looking.
I’m about 99% sure that the “healing surges” are going to be available to every PC. From what I’ve gathered, a character has a set number of these per day, I believe determined by class / role + CON modifier. Once per encounter, they can take a “second wind” action to use up one surge and gain a set percentage (I think 25%) of their max HP. This reduces the need for a dedicated “band-aid” character who’s only job is to keep everyone else alive, which (at least for me) is boring to play. There still *can* be the band-aid but in the example cleric sheet I’ve seen, the “Healing Word” spell (looks equivalent to cure light wounds) was a “minor” action, allowing the cleric to still do a move + standard in the same round.
And it also looks like every class is getting a mix of “at-will” (i.e. a fighter’s “I hit it with my sword”), “per day” (big flashy spells or extrordinary combat feats), and “per encounter” (somewhere in between) abilities. The Wizard’s “Vancian” call-back appears to be their spellbook: they get a larger list of “per day” abilities they can choose from, but can only prepare a certain number of them. But they still have sets of at-will and per encounter abilities that they can use without having to go “I’m spent guys, time for us to rest…”
Hmm, getting long, maybe I should wrap up. I’ve already put in a pre-order for the core 3 books (PHB, DMG, MM). I’m hoping that the mechanics are as well-put-together as the previews seem to suggest, while still keeping that old D&D flavor.
Chatty, I’d say your analysis of Gygaxian play is spot on. What I don’t get is how we’re supposed to get more outside-the-box thinking through 4e’s apparent system, whereby every PC is handed a pile of combat powers, most of which can be used in every encounter. If you give a million players each a hammer, some of them will use the tool imaginatively, but most of them will simply pound in nails or bust holes in stuff.
Jeff Rientss last blog post..I went to the bookstore over lunch
Hum…
OD&D’s combat was probably a bit deadlier than 3.x, but that didn’t always inspire more cautious/talky play styles. I’ve played with groups who tended to treat challenging opponents as an opportunity to try for first round kills. (This happens in 3.x too, but it is less essential. I vaguely recall playing a pyromaniac fighter character who once expended 100+gp of lamp oil at a go in an attempt to deal with a rather too powerful for us opponent. *chuckles* Oh for the old days when everyone announced their actions at the beginning of the round. I think I may have gotten some party members at the same time. (I told everyone to stay out of the room and announced my actions as “I toss in my crate of lamp oil, I toss in my torch, and I slam the door.” This was followed by at least one other player announcing that they were going into the room to go toe to toe with the creature.)
Hee, I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that at one point in the mid 1990s, I probably could have rattled off the pluses and minuses on the old stat charts.
Unfortunately, the CR system isn’t particularly functional, which I find to be a huge pain in the butt when I’m running low level games. It is really hard to find the sweet spot where the party is challenged but not wiped for not playing an incredibly canny game. (I will run scenarios where they have to go for the canny to win. I just hate it when I pull out a critter that doesn’t look too tough that is CR+2 or +3 that comes damned close to wiping the party before I realize what is going on. Dire Tigers and Destratchan both can fall into that category.
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@Reverend Mike: Nitpicker! 🙂 Remind me to hide any crunch related posts from your laser sight eyes (and those of Graham and…)
@Jer: Welcome to the blog. Thanks for the insight in Basic/Expert D&D. While I have read the Red Box (as well as Labyrinth Lord), Keep of Borderlands and Palace of the Silver Princes, I never actually played a full game of it.
Yes baring you don’t go the pre-packaged way, 3.X characters generation take a significant time investment. While no Gurps or Champions, when I had a 1st level character die in my games, I often suggested that the player reboots the character with a slightly different name to allow him back rapidly (So Biff the Barbarian came back as his Twin Brother Cliff)
@Dave: You hit my subtext straight on the head. Tension is essential for fun. Since D&D will remain a combat oriented action RPG, tension should need to be better built in the system.
I agree that 3.5 DM have a tendency to juice it up, but as you said in your last campaign log, players that have run out of resources will do anything, including ignoring the DM’s threat of random encounters in order to rest.
@SciGuy: Welcome to my Chatty Abode. I’ve actually started making Cure Spells as Swift Action in 3.5 and it worked fine. Yes… only a few more days now… I’ll buy the Keep on Shadowfell as soon as it’s out.
@Jeff: Thanks for the kudos. 4e optimists (myself incuded) would probably answer ‘Well it’s going to be a pretty big box’ but I totally see your point.
Nobody will argue that D&D is now a Mechanized monster of a rules engine that was probably partly designed to be compatible with programming algorithms to allow for official derived products. I’m personally okay with that as I tend to gravitate around such solid engines.
My one concern, that I’ve seen in Iron Heroes (one of the many design philosophy precursors of 4e) is that character powers will always be stronger and more sexy than outside thinking (ex: Kicking a chair at an opponent to have him fall prone)…
I really hope that the 4e engine will have the options of allowing risk-based stunts (hopefully vaguely worded enough to allow true creativity) whose mechanical effects outweigh ‘normal’ powers, provided the player accepts an adequate level of risk for failure.
Yep…CR system is broken…last session, our party punched through 5 CR 11 encounters at level 7…we level up very fast as a result of this…I very much hope to see 4e fix this so I can get back to DMing without accidentally killing the party all the time (oh, what fun reincarnations we’ve seen)…
@Chatty – Oh yea…I’m one of the biggest rules lawyers out there…it’s gotten to the point where I’ll often correct my fellow players/DM on a guess…and I’ll often be right (or at least all of us will be wrong)…can’t wait to read 4e…
-Reverend Mike-
Admittedly, both of my examples came out of a game I ran after a several year hiatus and I was still getting back into the swing of how to run a hard fight without killing the party outright. (There were some colossal flubs on my side, though I more often had to double an opponent’s HP than cut them back. I have no problem with changing numbers in the middle of a fight if it means that the party is having more fun, though while I bump the CRs of opponents I made tougher up a bit, I leave them alone on the ones I nerf mid-fight. ) I’ve got no problem at all with letting a last ditch effort succeed even if the numbers in front of me say “no way in hell.” (For example, the Destratchan fight ended with 5 of 6 party members unconscious from the cone attack and the sixth a wizard out of spells. The wizard had a heavy crossbow, rolled 4 under the number he needed to hit (by this point, my players had worked out the critter’s AC) spent his final action point, got a 5. Rolled his damage, got an 8. The thing had 16 hp left and there was now way it wasn’t taking him down the next round, but to hell with that. Marked it as a kill and the party told the story of his valiant last stand/final shot for the next several adventures.
Michael Phillipss last blog post..house cleaning
Speaking of CR (I knew I forgot something), another design goal I’ve liked in the 4e previews is that encounter design starts with an “XP pool”, scaled to the party’s level and size. From this pool, the DM can “buy” monsters (each has an XP stat) to make up the encounter.
Since the pool is calculated based on who’s actually in the party (instead of 3.5’s implicit assumption of a party of 4), and removes the “ok, two CR 4’s makes a 6, plus a CR 5 makes a…uh….7?” hassle for the DM, the hope is that this system will make encounter design easier to balance while still allowing for flexibility. And the design of individual monsters (where creatures have similar striker / defender / controller / leader roles as PCs) seems to actually encourage more mass combat encounters rather than PCs vs. one or two big creatures; although that’s certainly an option as well.
Now, whether or not all that comes together as easily as WotC promises is something that probably needs to wait until 4e releases. But I’ve gotten the impression that the 4e designers were heavily into getting the underlying math of the engine right to streamline the mechanics to the point where players and DMs can focus on the coolness of standing up to monsters and kicking ass.
I, for one, am going to miss the sliding experience scale though. It is one of those neat mechanics from many CRPGS that I was happy to see show up in my pencil and paper games.
Michael Phillipss last blog post..more little brother
You mean how you got Max XP if you killed a monster who’s exactly at your CR ?
How so Michael?
@SciGuy: So basically, D&D encounters will now be made according to a system taken from Miniature Combat Games forces building rules… intriguing.
-Chatty-
In the cases I’m thinking of, you get more experience for fighting things tougher than you, just like in 3.x FF Tactics springs to mind. It actually requires 100 xp per level, but creatures much lower level than you give almost no experience. The log scale experience charts always seemed a bit off to me. For example:
In 1st edition, a fighter needed 250,000 XP to go from 10th to 11th level. If I’m reading my books right, Bahamut was worth 25,000 xp by himself. I’d give him the “challenging opponent” multiplier and say he was worth 50,000 xp. You have to kill 5 demigod class opponents to go from level 10 to 11 (Of course, I do have the initial version of the AD&D monster manual, so maybe you were better off than that. ) Of course, I didn’t go through and work out the xp value of his treasure, bu
Michael Phillipss last blog post..more little brother
Oh, hells yes! You saw this a lot in Gygax’s modules. It’s not only in the chance to play Yojimbo in “Keep on the Borderlands” between the orcs and the goblins. If you’re lucky, and you play it smart, you can walk through the entirety of “D2- Shrine of Kuo-toa” without once drawing your blades. Right after it came “D3 – Vault of the Drow” in which you had to navigate your way through an entire drow city, teeming not only with the dangerous dark elves, but all their many allies and slaves: countless orcs and goblins, hundreds of troglodytes, and even demons. Fighting your way through that mess simply wasn’t an option.
(Something similar shows up in the infamous “Tomb of Horrors” as well, but it’s subtle and I won’t ruin it for anyone by blabbing here.)
So yeah, a room full of monsters was not necessarily an invitation to slaughter and mayhem in spite of the myth that D&D was simply all hack-and-slash back in those days. In fact, while my evidence is completely anecdotal, I’ve found that people playing Moldvay/Cook D&D were/are far more likely to chat with any goblins they encounter than those playing 3.x.
– Brian
Brians last blog post..Shields Shall be Splintered!
Character design could be quick, assuming that one didn’t resort to the “Complete” series (from Cleric to Elf to Fighter to Thief…yes, I said thief…mmmm, kits.) or dig into some of the alternate options in Dragon. But if you had a table of players looking to go into a campaign that was robust, then yes, you took the time to design background, history, etc… this was almost never a “15 minutes aaaand, we’re done!” process.
And there’s no indication that D&D was any less “non-lethal” between 1 and 3.5– you are *still* good to the last drop, errr, hit point… and only if you start to incorporate the critical hit system from Dragon #81 or the combat manuevers from #176 (precursors to feats, anyone?) do you start to see some lethality working into the system. This gets compounded with the critical charts from Combat and Tactics…yes, dear God, I remember that book… maybe the only one of the abortive Player Options books I picked up. Undead were certainly a bit more lethal, but then I knew few tables that didn’t modify those effects, too. (Truly, did anyone know a table that ran pure, stock, unfiltered from the book D&D anywhere but at the convention table?)
*If* you used the armor adjustment chart in the 1E DMG, and not everyone did, then you likely incorporated it right at the table and the impact on speed of play was negligible because you were accustomed to it. I ran tables of up to 9 players and we cruised through combat because I had the numbers charted behind the screen and all the players had to do was say what they wanted to do and roll, and then I would weave the story around it– indeed, it made combat much more cinematic, because other than a rough dry erase board map of positions, the action was all done through description and explanation. Those players *still* remember some of those massive battles, and this is 10 years later. The description is what imprinted them and the description is less evident at tables I’m at today– the idea that not all damage is physical injury is something that’s drifted out of the table’s paradigm… I ran an Living Greyhawk table where I described an arrow shot of 3 points of damage as “bouncing off a pauldron and into the weeds” and had the player look at me and go, “Oh, so I missed.” Lots of focus on combat mechanics has drawn focus away from storytelling.
These players of long ago didn’t focus on combat unless that was the only option, they weighed the options and did a lot of social interaction because combat was very abstract. I have to say that right now I’m in the camp that suspects that 4E will be combat intensive because that’s the largest toolset that’s been demonstrated so far– where are the tools that will improve character history generation? That will provide hooks and drive storylines so that characters start the campaign with built-in plotlines waiting to be tapped? Where are the shiny new tools that will make creating that robust, faceted character that much easier? But I’ll tell you what, let’s make it easier to heal up and charge into the next fight…
Don’t get me wrong, I love me some brawltastic. I love to mix it up against some rough and tumble foes in some wonderous locations with everything important on the line. But I want some pathos, some emotion, tension and concern, and I don’t want it all generated by the razor’s edge of combat. Where are 4E’s contributions to this portion of the game? (and how many people who are not the GM will say, “that’s a part of the game?”– in which case the baby DM cries quietly in the corner with Uni…) 😉
-Ben.
Bens last blog post..Design Log: The Black Art of High APL Encounters
@Brian: Well I’m happy to have assumed correctly 🙂
@Ben:I assume you are refering to AD&D 2nd edition of which I didn’t mention because I have limited knowledge of it and late AD&D Adventures were more story focused and less ‘lethal’ in my mind.
Let me ask you this, what Core books of any edition of D&D ever had that? Historically all these were provided (if at all) in Settings Books and Box Sets, none of which were available at any of the game’s editions launches.
As some have said in this blog, D&D, as designed, is and has always been about Combat and exploration. It’s what it does best… I don’t think it needs broad mechanics for character stories as people can come up with stories regardless of game engine or setting.
That being said, what’s really cool about the whole net (and especially since we won’t be able to publish anything crunch related for 4e until October) is that fans may provide these tools themselves.
If setting and storytelling elements are weak in 4e (we don’t know yet) these are exactly what we’ll all be allowed to publish without regards to the OGL.
CR and the encounter level thing will remain broken for one simple reason. D&D has too many magic bullets. By magic bullets here I mean save or die effects or effects that take you out of a combat such as petrification or paralysis. You’ll always have to look the monster over to figure out if it’s something reasonable for your PCs to face. If it has a magic bullet you need to make sure your players have magic ballistic vests or bat anti-bullet cream or something. As you might guess, this is not a mechanic that has ever impressed me. Even with the spells to counter it the whole thing has the feel of wasting one or more spell slots to just unwrap the encounter and make it playable.
As far as thinking outside the box, the reason it doesn’t happen so much in 3e and beyond is simple. There are only two ways to think outside the box. You either never get in it in the first place, don’t know jack about it and wander out of it by accident (think new player) or you know the box exceedingly well and can deliberately path outside of it with some effort (experienced and creative player).
Unless the DM is really, really looking out for him the newbie in 3e seems to get screwed a lot. You don’t know the combat maneuvers (charge, bull rush, etc), attacks of opportunity can seem to be hiding under every rock waiting to jump you, and generally your time will be taken up staring at a combat map wondering what to do with it. These things sap the energy that might otherwise go into creative actions.
By the time you’re experienced with the system you’re juggling all the baggage from race and class abilities you had with previous editions plus all the new stuff designed to make the combat map necessary. Maneuvers, movement, cover, concealment, attacks of opportunity, moving with your party, etc. All sorts of stuff to juggle. And then after you have all that down, you have to think of something that’s outside that box. That’s not so easy. I’m having a real hard time thinking of any other tabletop roleplaying game that hems you in quite that much.
I’m not sure how they’ll handle combat complexity in 4e. It sounds like they had some changes in mind for the save vs getting sidelined spells and effects so… I’ll just have to wait and see how it all works out.
@chatty:
The “Complete” series in 2E had some good material for getting more into the background portions of designing your character. They looked at archetypes, they looked at roles, they looked at different takes the characters…special rules for each class.
For 1E? Yes, a lot of the background/character material was built into the setting, Greyhawk or Mystara…but there were some (very limited) tools for more development in the 1E DMG, that book really had everything and the kitchen sink in it. (Insanity options? Check. Defensive Construction definitions? Check. Sample dungeon with walkthru? Check. MM lite? Check.) Not a lot there for character development, but then that’s circa 1970something. We’re 30+ years down the road here… White Wolf has changed the landscape, other systems have changed the landscape, roleplaying has grown. D&D began as an outgrowth of wargaming, and it’s got strong roots there… but if you’re going to rebuild the whole damn thing, then let’s do it right. Let’s put that solid character dev material that we waited until UA to generate this time through. Let’s build it right from the get-go, and not wait years to include it.
Just because there’s a lot of “break into people’s houses, kill them and take their stuff” in the game doesn’t mean that we can’t create more fully defined characters to try pushing the stories beyond that. I don’t think it’s all that the game is, I think that it makes participating in combat that much easier because it *is* so well done. I think that the more tools at our disposal to flesh out those characters, the better. If we can make those tools in the interim, I guess that’s good… disappointing, but good.
*sigh* I’m not sure… I guess we’ll see. I’m hoping for more.
-Ben.
Bens last blog post..Design Log: The Black Art of High APL Encounters
-Lanir-
Your criticism was valid back in the first year or three of 3.x. But by this phase in the product cycle, the reason it is hard to think outside the box is that the box is so damned big that there’s not much not covered by the rules somewhere. Also, and this is mostly an artifact of my preferred group structure, the newbie issue seldom comes up. I prefer to run a group of 6 players with no more than 4 who haven’t played before. I don’t have to coddle my newer players because I’ve always got a salting of veterans to help guide them till they’ve gotten up to speed.
Also? I’ve been playing since 1990 or so, and with 3 short exceptions, every game I’ve played in or run used a battle map of some sort for combat. The fact that the game has AoEs always screamed to us that it needed maps.
-Ben-
And there’s no indication that D&D was any less “non-lethal” between 1 and 3.5
I’ve got to differ with you there. Two major reasons. 3.x characters, especially at higher levels, have a lot more hit points than their 1.0 and 2.0 counterparts. And while it is true that a character has no penalties until they hit zero hp in both systems, in 1stand 2nd you dropped dead at zero, while in 3.x you are still marginally functional at zero, and you are still alive until you hit -10. Add to those the much broader availability of healing magic and the ability to come back during combat from what in the old systems would have required a raise dead spell means that the 3.x games are a lot less lethal than the earlier editions.
Also, from a monster standpoint, dr is a lot less powerful than it was, making it reasonable for parties to take on opponents that would have been improbable to impossible in the earlier editions. (Pet peeve of mine. I played with a GM who decided that magic would be ultra rare, but that creatures that needed magic weapons to damage would be quite common.)
Michael Phillipss last blog post..more little brother
-Ben-
I would say that the stuff you are asking for rightly belongs in the setting books. Character background development beyond the level presented in the 3.5 phb really doesn’t belong in the core books of a generic system. (And notice that even in Chapeter 6, it is highly genericized. The reason that White Wolf can have so much background stuff (or Traveler or Bubblegum Crisis or Amber Diceless, or what have you) is that your setting is heavily defined in the core book for the game you are playing, while D&D really gives you a very sparse set of basic assumptions and a lot of room to bend and break them. The moment you start folding them into the actual rule system, you make it a lot harder to play any setting except the one assumed by your new background stuff. That said, some of their settings aren’t particularly hard to adapt to different worlds. I’ve been sketching out games that use the special assumptions of the Eberron setting without the setting itself and others that use the Birthright mechanics without being more than vaguely like Cerillia.
Michael Phillipss last blog post..more little brother
/greywulf sits back and munches popcorn.
Good debate going on here, folks! 🙂
I’m still very much on the love-hate roundabout with 4th Edition. There’s a tonne of stuff I see that I love (not least, the new spell/powers mechanics), and I can’t wait to get my grubby mits on the books themselves. All this talk of 4e being the new old-school just makes me drool all the more; it might just be the kick in the butt my own gamer group needs. RPG’ing has died here at Greywulf Towers, with our last session having been cancelled for various reasons three times now. Gah!
Roll on 4e and New Enthusiasm.
@Ben: I hear you. I don’t feel the same need you do but then we belong to separate niches of the gaming spectrum and that’s cool. I really hope that some genius minds will create awesome setting books and that some of the brilliant Story-driven mechanics that have crept up in the best of late design small press games make it to 4e somehow.
I just doubt the core game will have them.
@Greywulf: All my players are actually munching on their first true 4e characters. Before we start the new campaign, we’ll play Keep on the Shadowfell as an intro adventure and one player even suggested that players switch characters between each other from one game session to the next to get a feel of the character mechanics…. which I found brilliant.
-Michael Philips-
I may not have delineated the change very well but I was intending the second to last paragraph in my previous post to refer to experienced gamers. I think this covers the areas you pointed out. Sorry if that didn’t come out very clearly.
– to everyone else –
Some of the discussion about older versions of D&D vs newer ones reminded me of something silly. There was a druid of Rhiannon class printed up in one of the Dragon magazines I had back during 2e. I remember wanting to play it because it sounded like fun. I didn’t see anything that was -really- obviously overpowered. Maybe a touch more oomph than a base class but it would equal out if I just didn’t take a kit (druid kits were… odd to say the least anyway). So I took it to a DM and asked if I could play it. 2-3 minutes later, his eyes bugged out and he said NO in no uncertain terms. I was confused and asked why. He points at the class write-up and says “They get hit dice up to 16th level! They’d have way more hit points than anyone else.” Now of course this is just amusing. I never did get around to ‘porting them to 3e though. I think by the time I understood it well enough to do so I was disillusioned with 3e in general and had forgotten.
As for the roleplay vs rollplay debate and where 4e will stand on it once it’s up and ready to run, in the end it may not matter too much. I disagree with the idea that the core books need a particular setting to give you anything useful to sketch out a background. Even just a simple list of feats based on the type of area you come from would be useful and fit in. A desert survival feat for example. Kind of a single feat that rolls in bonuses to survival, bonuses to rolls to endure environmental problems in that environment (heat stroke, etc) and you’re done. Sketch out these for a few different types of areas. A paragraph or two on how to adapt other feats to represent a character’s background (you grew up in a monster infested area so you get skill focus in a knowledge appropriate to that monster type and your first rank of that knowledge skill only takes one skill point whether it’s cross class or not – or, you grew up among a tribe of primitive plains hunters who didn’t use mounts, take run or endurance early on, etc). This sort of thing is easy. It’s like 5-10 minutes of thought.
The thing -I- think you’d need to do to make something like that really work the way it should though is make them a separate kind of feat. Call them Background Feats. Then make sure everyone gets bonus background feats at times when you think they should (1st level and if you have any made up that are appropriate for later levels, maybe some bonus ones later on too). Unless you’re running a social game where background is very important and provides it’s own kind of power then I think background stuff really needs to be a bonus. Otherwise you risk having problems where your munchkin types pull even farther ahead of your roleplayer types than they would already.
Overall it’s not that it can’t be done. It’s not that it can’t be done in a generic way. It’s not that it can’t be done easily. Mainly this just hasn’t been the game they’ve thought you were buying from them. Maybe they’ll change their minds on that for 4e and maybe not.
Chatty,
Thanks for the welcome. Alas I believe the power creep spiral is inevitable in any game that you build upon unless you ware willing to only build out and not up. It’s the same problem most CCGs suffer from.
When you don’t add power to a game everything becomes variations of flavor of the same cookie. The CCG market moves very fast so they build up in power with each new expansion because there is little value to a CCG player in getting more of the same just with different art work.
With RPG design they can only build horizontally for so long before flavor isn’t enough to sell new product. They will have to build up in power or they’ll lose the attention of their market. 4e will be no exception. At the end of the day WotC is here to make money.
The real question is scalability. Will the system build up as well as out? How long can they do that before it becomes unbalanced?
In my opinion, they aren’t doing anything new here. Many of the new techniques they are using have already been run through the gambit in other game systems. While D&D may be getting a face lift it really doesn’t sport any new features you can’t find somewhere else.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve been playing a different game system and someone at the table said, “Geez, I wish D&D had this rule.” Lately I’ve been able to counter those remarks with, “Actually, in 4e it will.”
The true test of it’s legs will be in the running and only time will tell. But the great elephant of the table top adventure is not likely to stumble much if it does at all. Death, taxes, Microsoft and D&D. Some things you can always count on.
Jim Daviess last blog post..Demoing Changeling: the Lost
-Lanir-
Yeah, I caught that. *sigh* I was replying out of order without thinking to put in structural markers that would indicate that they were two seperate thoughts. Sorry.
“Alas I believe the power creep spiral is inevitable in any game that you build upon unless you ware willing to only build out and not up. It’s the same problem most CCGs suffer from.
When you don’t add power to a game everything becomes variations of flavor of the same cookie. The CCG market moves very fast so they build up in power with each new expansion because there is little value to a CCG player in getting more of the same just with different art work.”
Hmmm, I wouldn’t agree with that.
There’s not necessarily a raw increase in power (though that happens too), but an increase in options. There are some games that choose to explore new portions of design space, creating side/sub-systems when the core system is maxed out.
However, “power creep” is going to happen in an exception based system because of emergent properties. The more options there are, the greater chance that it will interact with an existing exception to create greater power than expected.
There are examples on both sides, of course, but I wouldn’t accept that forced power creep is inevitable.
Dave T. Games last blog post..An Instruction for All Xbox Live Users
“However, “power creep” is going to happen in an exception based system because of emergent properties.”
Dave, fair enough. Power creep can occur due to unexpected synergies when you build laterally. But isn’t that still an increase in power even if it isn’t by intent? It seems to me that as powers increase in a game, maintaining balance becomes harder too.
I just don’t see any way to expand upon a game system without eventually disturbing the balance. In the end it will always be up to the game master to act as a sanity check. I’d be curious if anyone out there ever plays without at least one house rule. I try but there always seems to be something.
Jim Daviess last blog post..Demoing Changeling: the Lost
I really think that House ruling is good for the game… it encourages a gaming group to seek out ways to enjoy a game better.
I try the play the game as is only during the time I learn it. Then tinkering starts. I used to be one inflexible stickler for rules. But as I grow more confident of my inherent understanding of what is fun for the majority in a game I happily and aggressively house rule…
Of course, I get player buy-in, we document this in an easy to find place, and we challenge the proposed House rule with a ‘is it needed? Does it add value? Is it more fun?’
Hmmm great material for a future post.
“I just don’t see any way to expand upon a game system without eventually disturbing the balance.”
Yes, I agree with you, my game design lecturer just kicked in for a minute.
Dave T. Games last blog post..An Instruction for All Xbox Live Users
a little fuel on the fire:
http://pc.gamespy.com/articles/867/867920p1.html
a look at D&D Insider …
-Ben.
Bens last blog post..Design Log: The Black Art of High APL Encounters