Please take this post with the necessary grain of salt. See my comment below the post.
Ahhh it’s been a long time now has it?
What? You don’t know who I am?
I am the dark power behind Chatty’s feverish prose. I’m his id, his darkest desires made thoughts!
While he tries real hard to be balanced, fair and open to such ridiculous concepts as ‘Shared-narrative’ ‘stories’ and other RPGs than D&D, I’m the honest one here.
It’s always been about mechanics, die rolls, power accumulation and so on. All in the name of ” The Rule of Cool” (Pfaa!)
For I am the Crunch Overlord, and I’m here to say that I won!
Mwa HA HA HA!
With the inevitable advent of D&D 4e, I can finally come out of the obscurity and announce that my plan was a rousing success. Crunch wins and fluff lost.
Even my Nemesis is, as we speak, working at a 4e adventure!
I mean, Chatty’s little Characterizations tips contest isn’t garnering much participation now is it? He offers a 50$ prize (you know you can sell it on Ebay if you don’t need it, right?) and it got a mere 8 entries after 4 days!
You want proof that Crunch won?
Here’s an example from the most overlordy of Cleric spells: Command!
In the 1st edition of the game (taken from the Old School Reference & Index Compilation)
Command:
By speaking a single word of command with the force of divine power behind it, the cleric may force a creature to obey the order. The creature must be able to hear the cleric and understand the language in which he utters the command. The command may be only one word and must be completely unambiguous. “Halt,” “Flee,” and “Sleep” are typical commands, but many others arepossible.
The command “Die” has the same effect as the command to “Sleep”.
Creatures with intelligence of 13+ and/or hit dice of 6+ gain a saving throw against the spell’s influence.
Bla bla bla!
Now in 3.x (From the d20 SRD):
Command:
You give the subject a single command, which it obeys to the best of its ability at its earliest opportunity. You may select from the following options.
Approach: On its turn, the subject moves toward you as quickly and directly as possible for 1 round. The creature may do nothing but move during its turn, and it provokes attacks of opportunity for this movement as normal.
Drop: On its turn, the subject drops whatever it is holding. It can’t pick up any dropped item until its next turn.
Fall:On its turn, the subject falls to the ground and remains prone for 1 round. It may act normally while prone but takes any appropriate penalties.
Flee: On its turn, the subject moves away from you as quickly as possible for 1 round. It may do nothing but move during its turn, and it provokes attacks of opportunity for this movement as normal.
Halt: The subject stands in place for 1 round. It may not take any actions but is not considered helpless.
If the subject can’t carry out your command on its next turn, the spell automatically fails.
Can you feel the restraints of game mechanics choking the flexibility out of the description?
Now in 4e (*):
Command:
Attack: Wisdom vs. Will
Hit: The target is dazed until the end of your next turn. In addition, you can choose to knock the target prone or slide the target a number of squares equal to 3 + your Charisma modifier.
Isn’t this the most beautiful, concise, description possible for this spell? And let’s face it, it’s what people have been doing with this spell for 30 years with the possible exception of forcing a monster from dropping it’s hand held weapon.
Any DM worth his salt could have argued that drop is vague enough as a one command word to be interpreted at least 2 ways (i.e. Fall down or Drop what’s in your hand).
So there you have it. Almost all of the PCs powers are for combat use and are explained with minimalist but oh so crunchy prose.
My Fluff-inclined minions (that I keep nearby to better watch my ennemies) have pointed out that there is flavour text for all of 4e’s powers, but seriously, who reads those?
In fact, D&D finally embraces it’s role as a Combat Roleplaying Game and that makes me so happy!
I’ve won dear Mr. Baur! See you at 5th edition’s launch in 8-10 years.
* Yes I’ve seen the Core Books, don’t ask me how because I won’t tell. I’m perfectly aware of how thin the ice I’m skating on is, I will assume the consequences if any. Buy the books!
In fact, reading the powers has shown me just how combat focused they all.
So focused that I’m seriously thinking of starting a Web initiative to create a Net-Book of non-combat uses for all of D&D’s Core Class powers.
Yes I know that some Wizards and Rogues Utility powers like Mage Hand and Master of Deceit have non combat uses, but it would be great to allow a Cleric to Fry some Bacon (or burn a hole in a door) with his Sacred Flame ability!
To be discussed after launch.
In 1e our party’s favorite Command to use on our enemies was “masturbate”! Yes, we were 13.
Aww, the new command removes “Autodefenestrate”
Michael Phillipss last blog post..Geneology, what’s that
The books read as if they were quick-start rules writ large. They have definitely embraced the “multiple sets of core books required” concept
Michael Phillipss last blog post..Geneology, what’s that
Chatty, dude…
The at-will/encounter/daily powers are indeed combat-focused. That’s their entire point.
They’re the spells of 3.5e. When was the last time you saw a 3.5e Wizard prepare “Quench” or some such spell?
The difference in 4e is that they aren’t making you choose between combat spells and non-combat spells. You have your at-will/encounter/daily spells for combat. Out of combat, you have your skills, rituals, and utility spells.
(Though most utility spells are useful in combat as well.)
But don’t create a book of non-combat uses for spells. It’s not needed. Just like nobody needed to tell Vinylsaurus to use Command: Masturbate, nobody needs to tell a 4e player that a fire spell can be used to fry some bacon.
Go back to the 1e mentality for a second, and leave this up the creativity of the players.
I remember commanding a gargoyle to dive when the only semi liquid thing around was a gelatinous cube… Hehe!
@Vinylsaurus: Oh man, and here I was, tthinking that I came up with that when I was 13… ! 🙂
@Michael Philips: Good one! I can already see the Orc asking for a thesaurus to obey that one…
@ Graham: Not all DMs are going to feel ‘allowed’ to be creative with the rules. The powers I’ve read so far are almost all exclusively written for combat and a lot of literal minded players are going to believe that being creative is against the rules. Unless the DMG says ‘go wild, improvise’, I forsee a lot of Bad DMs quelching creative uses for powers because of this.
That being said, I’m starting a campaign to encourage DMs to think outside the box and allow such creative uses of combat powers.
🙂
This is a sad commentary on the amount of control corporations seek to inflict on us.
“Yes I’ve seen the Core Books, don’t ask me how because I won’t tell. I’m perfectly aware of how thin the ice I’m skating on is, I will assume the consequences if any.”
There should not be any consequences to reading a game book a week before the release date that some marketing wonk decided. Go for it Chatty! Stick it to the Man!
Trask, The Last Tyromancer
Trasks last blog post..Encounter Idea:The Tornado
well we can’t really ask them to write books to protect us from bad DM’S. we could ask douche bags not to play.
I got a question – in the the keep of the shadowfell – it is very hack and slash – and “ooooh” a +1 thingy. I have always played more story and very little hack and slash, give me (thermautology…what song guys…come on?) all 18 ability scores kinda shit.
how did/ do yall play?
i am new here and to these boards – sorry if i am breaking any rules/etiquette stuff
I concur with Graham – combat uses for the spells are what I would expect for encounter and at will based abilities – the vast majority of encounters are going to have combat as at least a POSSIBLE outcome.
I’m not even sure D&D really needs much in the way of mechanics for non-combat situations. The traditional way it’s been approached is with handwaving or optional supplements – I’m not really convinced that approach is bad. Virtually all D&D players are going to want to fight things. Not all D&D players are going to want to build castles and rule kingdoms, or politically embarrass rivals (“Command: Sneeze!” when your rival courtier is about to praise the hypochondriac ruler), or manipulate the economy (Wall of Iron + Fabricate = destruction of mining village income). It looks like a decent decision to address the concerns of the majority in the core books, and leave the rest for either individual GMs or supplements to cover.
YMMV.
No, this really does suck. Chatty, is that the entire text for the Command spell? Because if it is, there’s absolutely nothing there about out-of-combat abilities. Nothing about using it to distract guards or coax fliers to descend or swimmers to beach themselves. It’s nothing but a psychic sunkerpunch. Even if your DM is flexible enough to allow you to use flame spells to fry bacon, there’s apparently nothing here in the 4e rules to even imply that Command can be used for anything else. Which means, unless your DM has played earlier versions of the game, one of the most interesting, entertaining, and useful spells is now nothing more than a straight-out attack. :/
– Brian
Brians last blog post..Compare and Contrast: Monster Books
4e is definately add-your-own fluff. Which is fine for long-time players, I mean most people have all that tasty flavor fluff from their collection of 3e books, right? I mean the Lords of Madness book is still a good reference for aboleths and mind flayers. I still use some of my 2e books for that purpose. All in all I am liking the new edition, but it isn’t perfect. New players, which this version was designed for, are not going to have all the background on the iconic monsters and fluff sides of things and may end up seeing the game as just a hack-and-slash festival.
On the other hand, it is pretty obvious that they have decided to let the fluff and crunch of the game get completely seperated. Which may turn out to be good or bad. It really is a test of the idea that you can apply fluff to any rules system. On the gripping hand, I hope that there are fluff-heavy books published later.
All in all this reminds me of the old Shadowrun RPG, back during it’s 1st and 2nd editions. They released a main book that was so much crunch that it was pretty much just a mechanics and crunch encyclopedia. The result: Almost all of the world suppliments were pure fluff and flavor text that had only a tiny rules chapter in the back. So even though the rules system has changed so much since then that the mechanics are unreconizable, a good amount of those 10-15 year old books are still wonderful resources. So maybe we will see a bit of this in 4e d&d.
@Trask: I’m all for doing it, in small doses 🙂
@Dax: Welcome to the Blog. Agreed that bad DMs need to be given the chance to get better… if they don’t they need to be shown the door.
Keep on the Shadowfell is not devoid of story potential… But since it’s an introduction to a new system whose core is action combat, you get a lot of those. As all gaming groups do, Hand and Slash group will do just that and story groups will try to convince the mooks in there that there is a better life outside the Keep… 🙂
@Gazza and Brian: Each Power has a few lines of flavour text that can give guidelines for non combat uses.
Command has this (In for a penny, in for a pound):
As you can see even that was nerfed.
Graham gave me a good idea, I will start a log of my 4e games here and I will encourage my players to come up with non-combat uses of powers and we’ll test them and report how it went here.
@Glyph: You know something? New players to D&D almost always start with Hacking and Slashing. It’s as fun way to explore the system and its iconic monsters. So making the Core as crunchy as possible is a good move I agree (I’m just a bit jarred at how constrained some are now… makes it easier to adjudicate, but man it feels like a CCG/CMG).
Some (if not most) players from previous editions will have moved to a wider playing style and can start as soon as they grasped 4e mechanics.
I think that’s why I saw so many ‘it feels just like D&D’ in posts about playing Keep of the Shadowfell.
Hey man, even OLD players often start with the Hacking and Slashing. 🙂
They even created a game just to recapture that “1st edition feel”, which any KoDT fan will be well aware of.
Would that be that game where you get to be a Master at Hacking by any chance?
Anything crunchy is good! Mwa HA HA HA!
Don’t you love that I flaunt my 2 personalities in the comments like that…. I need to setup a different Gravatar for the Overlord… 🙂
Do note that the Crunch Overlord, in his haste to announce his triumph, has clearly not read the chapter on rituals yet…
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/4ex/20080528a
This seems to cover a lot of non-combat magical effects like scrying, illusions, long range teleport and various cures.
Maybe therein lies non-combat powers.
Silence! I Kill you!
I have peeked at the ritual section and it is a filled with the more non-combat fluff spell.
What i find good in it is that it’s not a class specific thing. You just need to have the feat to be able to cast ritual from a book but anyone can cast one from a scroll (for one use).
In order to limit the use of these abilities it is now component base. You’ll need some amount of material of a specific type worth X gp to cast the ritual. An you need to find these or purchase these ritual.
I find this a good thing since that removes the “we need a cleric to be able to restore ailment” now we just need someone that is able to cast rituals (take the feat) and we are set and even then we could use scrolls to cast them if nobody as the feat.
Nobody should feel forced to take a class he does not want to play…
@ Chatty
Why don’t you post a “Power of the Week” and open it up for us to give our ideas for non-combat uses? I won’t be getting the books, or even playing 4e in the forseeable future, but I love creativity exercises.
I wish they didn’t have that “fluff” sentence in the Command, as I feel it limits it.
“You can choose to drive the foe back, order it closer, or cause the foe to throw itself to the ground.”
Besides, the way the power reads it sounds like a “stun” with “telekeniesis.”
“Hit: The target is dazed until the end of your next turn. In addition, you can choose to knock the target prone or slide the target a number of squares equal to 3 + your Charisma modifier.”
@ Yan: That’s interesting and it’s in line with the Tome of battle Martial Scripts that allowed non Matrial Adepts to perform one maneuver!
So if I get this straight a ritual is a long-to-cast spell that needs a feat to be performed from a spellbook but anyone can use them from scrolls.
Oh boy this will irritate a lot of purists!
Yum, Sacred cow make good steaks!
@Child: That’s precisely what Graham suggested to me last night.
I will and I shall! As soon as the books are officially out… 🙂
I agree that the second line of flavour text technically kills Command’s more creative uses, but as a DM I’d be willing to waive this.
However do note one thing. Now that non-combat NPCs don’t have stats anymore, having an ‘open’ command power available every 10 minutes (because it’s an encounter power now) against non-heroic/non-monster target is an issue.
As this little analysis suggests, some of the new designs have changed how the game can be played and I guess we’ll have to accept that, hack it carefully and check what breaks or move on to something else.
Thank goodness they left in at least some of the fluff. I’m still horrified, but it’s not quite as bad as I’d feared. ;p
The rituals thing is interesting. I’ll be curious to see how people use it and feel about it two years from now.
– Brian
Okay, I’ve played like a quarter of one encounter in 3.5 with veteran players and attempted a little of the basic starter set 3.5e with other people as clueless as myself – my point being, I know little. I also tend to be literal minded when it comes to games with rule books (I don’t know if you can spot anything from there it didn’t say anything about it in the DM starter guide!) but I also understand that this game is much more open than say, Sorry, where the rules are the same, and the rules are the rules! PCs may do wacky things like attempt to fry bacon. Just as it is difficult for a DM to anticipate what direction the PCs will take when he is writing his adventure, I suspect it would be similarly difficult to anticipate the more off the wall non combat uses for spells. The combat uses are more cut and dry so those are the ones more clearly defined. I do not get the impression that other uses would be not be tolerated, just harder to anticipate. The kind of people who are drawn to this kind of game are not the kind of people likely to let pass an attempt to use their spells for something other than toasting monsters. I do not think 4e’s approach to the combat aspect of the rules spells an end to bacon – not even for the newly initiated and relatively literal. However, that said, I’m all for a list of non combat related uses for spells.
Personally, I like the fact there is not so much “fluff” because I feel like this aspect of the game is being left to the players. How fluffy is it really if you are being spoon fed those things? Wouldn’t those same literal minded people stick to the preconceived fluff? NO! You can’t set Xor’s pants on fire, only monsters and bacon! I look forward to putting in my own variety of fluff and leaving the crunchy number things to people who can add.
If I get a chance I’ll probably play 4th ed. I think I’m going to stick with 3.5 fro running D&D for the time being though. That said, I really like some of the things I’ve seen from 4th edition, means and methods and play concepts, things that I think will be reasonably translatable.
I’m also really tempted to start working on writing 3rd/4th edition compatible materials (not GSL material, but 4th compatible. I dislike what I’ve seen of the GSL so far, but there is no reason to actually be bound by it.)
Michael Phillipss last blog post..Geneology, what’s that
I just returned from KublaCon where I had the opportunity to run Keep on the Shadowfell on Saturday and Sunday. I discovered very quickly that less fluff = more roleplaying. This may sound like B.S. to some of you, and I’ll admit I was a little surprised.
Two things were noticable: at first as the players were getting used to their powers they focused solely on the hard crunch mechanics. This was fine and in fact the lack of fluff made it easy for all of us to have the exact same interpretation of the rule. Secondly, after a little time the players started adding their own fluff. They were describing what “Tide of Iron” looked like this time;
“I strike with my maul and shove him back with my schoulder!”
-or-
“I fake left and when the kobold stumbles, smash him in the back of the head!”
Instead of having their imaginations stifled with pre-existing fluff they were creating and roleplaying and bringing the combat scene to life. I discovered very quickly that I love the rules being concise and mechanical. And although my sampling group was small if the game has the effect for others I see even better things on the gaming horizon.
Crunch wins! Fluffy DMs now have to ask themselves if they are fluffy because it’s what they like better of if they are fluffy because the crunch wasn’t designed well.
Yaxs last blog post..New Skin!
John
Yeah, I think I’ve made that point at least obliquely in several previous threads. The role playing side of a game (at least in my case) happens best despite the rules, so the more transparent the rules are, the better (potentially) the role playing can be if the group of players is interested in such things.
Ferex, some of the best role playing sessions I’ve ever played or run were in strongly rules-light systems like BESM or Amber Diceless Role Playing.
(Well, actually by the year before the release of 3.0, our 2nd edition group knew the rules so well that they might as well have been transparent, but the learning period for a game like 2nd ed. AD&D is months or years vs an hour for BESM and “till you are done with character creation” for Amber. I found that systems with a single unified mechanic and no during gameplay use of charts tended to take little time to get back to strong role playing with my group. (Fuzion was like that. There were two mechanics and minimal charts, so we were able to get the mechanics down during character creation and get on with the actually playing our characters during the adventures. 3rd most intrigue based game I’ve ever played was a Bubble Gum Crisis game on the Fuzion engine.)
That is what I loved about 3.0 and especially 3.5. The actual game system was, itself, fairly simple and streamlined. There was very very little stuff that needed to refer to the books that couldn’t be handled between sessions after you learned the 1.5 different core systems. (the d20 system and the grapple system)
Michael Phillipss last blog post..Geneology, what’s that
On the one hand this “all crunch, no fluff” will really annoy the John Wick’s of the world. On the other hand I’ve never much cared for fluff. Fluff gives us Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk, neither of which interest me, and even when it gives us Llankmar, I’d rather read about than play in someone else’s world.
The problem I have is basically this. When I start a new campaign, I have to sell my players on the excitement of what the campaign will be “about”, some of which – much of which – will be what the world will contain. My enthusiasm for someone else’s creation is unlikely to ever be as great as my enthusiasm for my own creation. The one thing fluff does do is act as a crutch if you are unable or unwilling to make things up yourself – but if you are able and willing to create your own fluff (or let your players do it), then it’s nice not to have to worry about going against the “official” fluff when you do so. In that sense the less “official” fluff the better.
Keep the fluff to supplements, I reckon.
Heya Michael. Amber is one of my all time favourite games, but I’m not sure I’d really agree that it was rules light. Indeed, virtually all of both books is pretty much entirely about rules – Wujick pretty much just points you at Zelazny if you want to know anything about the setting.
It’s true that these rules look a bit different to what D&D rules look like – there’s a lot of advice about what to do to resolve situations without a randomiser, and so on – but they are rules nonetheless (and obviously just as able to be ignored as any other rules).
Certainly I think Amber is more rules heavy than Fudge. With Fudge you’ve got one simple core mechanic and essentially everything revolves around that mechanic; with Amber, none of the Powers work quite the same, there’s a completely different subsystem for building items, Shadows, and (with Shadow Knight) Constructs, and so on.
Gazza,
the book proper starts on page 7. The rules as rules end on page 104, and the majority of that range is lists of powers and illustrations of what a given rule means. The book itself ends on or around page 256, so even counting every page in the rules section as a rules page, well more than half of the book is how to run a game suggestions (of the “here’s an idea and here’s and idea and here’s an idea”, and the “if your players do x, you could do y, z, q, w, e, r, or t” types,) and NPC character sheets.
D&D 3.5 by comparison goes from page 7 to 180 with much denser type and a lot less non-rule material per page. (That is excluding the spell list on the 3.5 book even though my listing of the amber books includes several similar lists that I didn’t exclude. Mostly because I am not feeling up to an indepth analysis of the books side by side today.)
A more complex analysis would include going over the PHB, the DMG, and the Amber Main book and doing a word count. I skipped the DMG, and I used a very broad brush for both the Amber book and the PHB, both of which have fairly low rules per page densities. Honestly, I think I’d strip the skills and powers out of my list of rules in both cases if I wanted to spend the time to do a full analysis. Those aren’t rules as much as they are modules that interface with the rules. (There are definitely rules in the skills and powers sections, things about how to gain them, how to compare them, and how to adjugate them, but the skills and powers are a slightly different sort of entity. )
Michael Phillipss last blog post..Geneology, what’s that