[D&D 4E] My goth guy is much tougher than yours

[glandis]

Ed - Your approach is totally understandable. After much uncertainty, I finally decided not long back that the ONLY way I can continue playing Pathfinder is to just not ever play with the most ultimate optimizations (like, yeah, a Zen Archer w/ all the right feats/items/etc.). Chop off the top of the curve, and everyone else can be happier. Even typing that sorta makes me feel dirty, but it is what I need in that system.

Ron - Hybridization was key to the 4.0 play I tried. Of course, none of us were in any way expert, but it did seem to be a great "this is MY guy" flavor-booster. The general feel I get from #1, #2, & #3 is an improvement on what I sorta-remember trying to do back in the White Dwarf/Eldritch Wizardry/psionic days. Improvement because of many things, but a big piece is definitely pruning-out core-D&D stuff that doesn't fit well. #4 is especially grabby/interesting - as either player or GM, pulling that off would be total fun. #5 is the issue/obstacle - can the system really be made to work that way? I don't have enough experience to say, and for every 4.0 "I couldn't die!" comment there seems to be a "we died so easy!"

[Callan S.]

Hi Ron,

With #4, I'm not sure about treating encounters just as 'choices'. Aren't they a gauntlet the GM throws down, and the players either declare they are good enough to take it on, or admit to all they think it's too tough for them?

It occurs to me now a problematic issue in if one throws down several encounters to potentially take up, what happens if in doing one the others then become unavailable to do (as is often the case in trad roleplay)? Does that mean one is admitting they were too tough to do? Or even avoiding admitting the others were too tough, while potentially choosing the easiest encounter there?

I know there's 'setting affecting consequences' - but did someone in RL at the table admit a challenge was too tough, or did they declare to all they could take it on and went on to attempt to do so?

Actually this all also made me reflect on such matters in regards to a Rifts campaign I'm running at the moment, as well.

[Ron Edwards]

Ed, never mind "others." You began your post with the encouraging statement that you'd play what I described. Can you tell me why? It would be very helpful, as right now I'm firing on at least 50% unarticulated inspiration.

Gordon,

for every 4.0 "I couldn't die!" comment there seems to be a "we died so easy!"

Yeah, I'm seeing that for sure.

Callan, I'm not sure if I can articulate what I have in mind to your satisfaction, but I think I have it solid enough so that scenario/situation/fight generation can be at least a little more emergent than it is now. Trying to hammer it all out in legalese doesn't suit my process well at this point - from here out, the only next step is to try it. I'd be able to articulate it better once there's some real play with real humans to talk about.

Eero, I was looking at your posts again and one thing really jumped out at me: your presumption that all foes, all the time, were simply and only relentless murderers re: the characters. I think they can be a lot more interesting than that.

Best, Ron

[Callan S.]

Callan - Assuming that the play I remember actually is the play Ron's talking about, winning and losing are entirely about performance by the players, with the DM getting kudos for running the dungeon well no matter what. No such thing as nobody wins - pretty much the DM can always win. I mean, he might screw up, but the real question is, how will the players do? Which may be another aspect of why my friend became drawn to 4.0 GMing.

If the focus is on who the players beat or who beat the players, and no one is putting their hand up to having beaten the players, running the game well does not substitute for someone having won in that regard. If no one will claim to have been trying to beat you, and you lose, then no one won.

[glandis]

If the focus is on who the players beat or who beat the players, and no one is putting their hand up to having beaten the players, running the game well does not substitute for someone having won in that regard. If no one will claim to have been trying to beat you, and you lose, then no one won.

Sure, some folks at least sometimes focus it that specifically. I'm saying "winning" and "losing" are some aspects of showing guts/not and rising to the challenge/not; they are not the only aspects. "You failed" has sting no matter if there's an "I win" or not. "I succeed" can only feel satisfying if that was really in doubt, but need not be synonymous with "you lose." I think I was involved in long conversations touching this re: Gamism at the Forge, but unfortunately they're almost unreadable now because one of the participants deleted his posts.

I read Ron's #4 as not the purest hard-core form of gauntlet, but that doesn't mean it's not a gauntlet at all. If it was the purest hard-core form of gauntlet, I'd probably have no interest in playing. Tastes vary within Agenda as well as across 'em! That's actually a useful and timely reminder for me.

[Ron Edwards]

To reinforce Gordon's point, I'll call back to the 2002 Gamism essay, in which I stressed the difference between winning, which may or may not be involved in Gamist play, and not losing, which must be involved. That point has only been reinforced by my experiences since writing that essay.

Best, Ron

[Eero Tuovinen]

Eero, I was looking at your posts again and one thing really jumped out at me: your presumption that all foes, all the time, were simply and only relentless murderers re: the characters. I think they can be a lot more interesting than that.

That's the literary content of D&D talking - 4th edition is very, extremely faithful to the atavist wish fulfillment facet of D&D, and thus it takes conscious reinterpretation to get non-murderous relationships between combatants. I mean, what would you do with these murderhobos that attack you, trying to kill you and take all your stuff, if you were one of these goblins or kobolds that PCs assault all the time in these adventures? It's pretty obvious that the world of D&D is kill or be killed, and either the PCs are completely immoral assholes or the demihumans you're slaughtering actually deserve it because they are the sort who wouldn't hesitate to slit your throat given half a chance. Of course we constantly get deconstructive urges, players attempting peaceful solutions or DMs depicting other ways to relate; in an older type of D&D this is even fruitful content, as it becomes alternate problem solving solutions or handicaps for players interested in it.

(For the sake of academic curiousity, we have resolved this murderous subject matter of D&D satisfactorily in my circles by moving the game out of the racist Gygaxian fantasy world and into a more historical sort of setting. The hostile, ruthless relationships and colonial adventurism work much more logically when we don't try to sugar-coat it by pretending that our characters are heroes and those others are "monsters". When there are actual social, psychological and political reasons for hostility between the "men" and "goblins", it is possible for humane solutions, just war, and realistic reasoning about appropriate amount of force to flourish.)

Regarding 4th edition planning, I've got my own notes about it in the desk drawer. As I've described, we've played the game as occasional one-shots, trying to figure it out, and I think that I'm beginning to be at a stage of understanding where I'm basically ready to run something sensible with 4th edition at some point. My brother Markku has been a big fan of the game over these years, so he has a complete collection of material for it; it's quite possible that I'll end up trying a serious 4th edition campaign at some point when the player base and other ancillary factors make it a good choice.

Here are the basic precepts of one 4th edition campaign I've been occasionally contemplating:
- The campaign concerns the fate of a community of pure strain humans in Gamma World. All player characters to begin with are pure humans, generated by Gamma World rules. The player characters may or may not be in leadership positions in the community. The acknowledged subject matter of the campaign is the fate of this community: rebuild the old world, get overrun by anthropomorphic badgers, rebuild into a pluralistic mutant society, or what.
- The campaign develops a simple strategic overlay that revolves around strategic resources and challenges of the colony: water supply, agriculture, manufacturing industries (direct impact on availability of adventuring gear), population pool (affects the availability of different character build options), geographical knowledge (tracked by traditional hexcrawl techniques, probably). The adventuring/fighting that the PC party does is largely involved with these community stakes. Occasionally matters may be resolved without combat as well, of course - the game does have the "skill challenge" system after all.
- The players are in primary position to develop the combat encounters, or at least influence their nature heavily: random encounters come off simple tables that may be discovered by intelligence gathering in advance, so the players may take informed risks about where their adventurers wander in the setting; opportunistic operations (raiding trade caravans, for example) rely on the players choosing for themselves whether to attack a force of N enemies or not; pre-combat maneuvering enables the players to have input on the nature of the battlefield itself.
- The different types of enemies are, in complete contrast to ordinary 4th edition procedure, cohesive rather than varied: at the beginning of the campaign the combats are almost always against merely a single type of enemy creature, with the occasional special unit alongside. The variety of enemy types develops entirely on the terms of the fictional positioning: travel to a distant place, and there may be exotic new beasts. The purpose here is to make the combat encounters less of a guessing-carnival of strangeness, and more about knowing your enemy and exploiting their weaknesses.
- Combats are balanced on the basis of fictional positioning, which means that sometimes characters encounter too easy or too hard encounters. Enemies do not gain levels as characters do, which is again in direct contradiction to 4th edition procedure; an ordinary badgerman soldier is level N, and that's that. When the encounter level is more than 3 levels too high or too low, the combat encounter is replaced with a skill challenge; the outcome will either be avoiding the battle, or revising the battle so that it actually becomes a level-appropriate challenge. For example, characters encountering a party of low-level badgermen may run a skill challenge about pinning them down before they can retreat to their fortress; success indicates automatic victory, failure indicates a combat encounters in a fortified position, which would presumably make the combat difficult enough for us to bother with setting up the miniatures.
- Characters are generated rather than purposefully created, with random scores, default equipment parcels, etc., all so as to make losing characters more acceptable. The players run stables of characters and choose on a per-mission basis which character they'll use. XP is tracked individually for each character. New character options (races, classes) become accessible via setting exploration.

As you can see, it's basically an old school hex crawl sort of affair, except revolving around skirmish combat encounters. The key change in comparison to 4th edition to my mind is that here the players have negotiating options regarding the combats that are actually played: the individual encounters won't be the pretty set-pieces that 4th edition advocates (impossible to prepare unique stuff like that), but they'll retain interest better because the players have to buy into each individual combat using tools similar to what old school D&D uses to negotiate challenges: it's up to the players to decide how many badgermen they can beat, and while retreat might have its own cost depending on the strategic situation, it's ultimately up to the players to retain their own strategic maneuverability to a degree where they don't get pinned down to fight a combat they don't think they can win. Ultimately the goal is that everything does lead towards a skirmish combat encounter, but once the encounter comes up, it'll have important stakes, player buy-in for the challenge, and a level of challenge that everybody in the group finds appropriate.

I've got another notion about how to use 4th edition to run pure-strain Dragonlance, but perhaps I'll speak to that later.

[Joshua Bearden]

I've played once so far - in a drop in Google Hangouts game.  I had fun chiefly because of this: http://chaoticshiny.com/full4e.php

I didn't even expect to play at first I just clicked a link and found myself lurking ... and then players started talking to me.  Hey are you playing or what?  One of them handed me a link to the character generator and I suddenly had a thief or rogue or something.

I relate this merely by way of offering anecdotal support for Eero's position.  My character didn't die but I think my low initial investment in the character was crucial to my enjoyment. Not fearing character death allowed me to play more colourfully and creatively. As luck (or design) would have it this lead me to make more significant tactical contributions.

[Ron Edwards]

Joshua, you are almost certainly going to Gehenna for linking me to that webpage. Couple it with Gozzy's = time sink city!

Hi Eero, I don't know if it's ever going to be possible to convince you that "Gygaxian" is a latter-day construction and not in any imaginable way a good descriptor of playing D&D in the late 1970s. The whole idea of "the world of D&D" simply did not exist. Remember, only a fraction of people playing had even heard of Greyhawk, much less owned a document with that word in the title. The fraction was probably pretty large in the D&D belt (Madison, Wisconsin, to Springfield, Illinois), but outside of that region I bet it was pretty low. In the diverse circles I played in, the word "Gygax" was never spoken, and the idea of "setting" was absent. I remember reading about world-building in the Tunnels & Trolls rulebook and being utterly baffled. And yes, Glorantha was a world with an extensive history, but its map at that time was a tiny piece of the setting and we all understood that Glorantha was very special, not the case to be expected in playing any other game.

That would all change in 1980 or so, when the Greyhawk folio was finally published and previously isolated adventures were now published as parts of it, or of other (brand-new) settings. A good minor marker in non-D&D was the pretension to a setting in The Fantasy Trip, called Cidri, which was defined pretty much as "so big you can make up anything you want in some corner of it," and which had no map. Another negative indicator was the utter absence of setting in Villains & Vigilantes or Champions, for which the players were expected to be creating their own comic book in the RPG medium, case closed, no exceptions.

[Eero Tuovinen]

I do not dispute what you say, Ron. When I call something "Gygaxian", I'm usually discussing either the direct corpus of Gygax's work (the original D&D text, AD&D, early adventure modules mainly), or literary history. In the latter sense I think that the adjective is pretty apt: the D&D setting has certain fantasy concepts that are pretty original to it, and apparently original to Gygax specifically as an author.

For example, above I used "Gygaxian" to describe a certain type of fantasy world, the one that is the default world of D&D: a world where multiple humanoid peoples live side by side, mostly in their own polities, and nuanced racial stereotypes are both ever-present and objectively true; a world that is in the early stages of a magical industrial revolution, with magical tools of convenience and war limited to societal elites and produced by a guild system. It's a very particular sort of fantasy setting, I've written in the past about how strange and artificial it tends to seem to me, due to not having grown up with D&D, unlike many other roleplayers.

What makes the adjective "Gygaxian" useful here is the fact that his work has had an immense influence in the fantasy literature of the last 30 years. The above ideas, which were fringe and rarely appeared together before, are now almost the definition of the genre in the mainstream, especially anywhere even distantly related to gaming culture. It is useful to have a descriptive term for what amounts to the second-most influential influence on current fantasy literature (after Tolkien).

As you can see, I don't intend to imply anything about actual play by the use of that word - it's strictly a scholastic term pertaining to the examination and use of certain texts. For all I know it's possible that not even Gygax himself was "Gygaxian" in actual play, despite writing the material he wrote.

[glandis]

Ron -

Just to push the idea of "setting" a little further back in time chronologically, and mark its influence as a little more widespread geographically: The City-State of the Invincible Overlord (Judges Guild) goes back to 1977 and certainly "spread" to me on the east coast before 1980. The influence of actually using the Outdoor Survival map (did you run into that ever?) also kinda-encouraged setting development.

This is more a "you build it from our tools" setting than a "we deliver it to you whole cloth" setting, sure. And that's real important. So if you're only talking about the latter - forget I said anything.

-Gordon

[Callan S.]

I read Ron's #4 as not the purest hard-core form of gauntlet, but that doesn't mean it's not a gauntlet at all. If it was the purest hard-core form of gauntlet, I'd probably have no interest in playing.

I think there's A: Somewhat acknowledging an activity is too tough, but not wanting to say that and perhaps raising taste as the supposed reason instead and B: Not acknowledging it as too tough at all, just genuinely  just not to taste, not aesthetically pleasing or something not entertaining.

To me, you could be saying either. I get and somewhat accept A, even if it makes me want to heckle! But I'll say B doesn't have anything really to do with gamism. It doesn't even warrant heckling.


Ron,

To reinforce Gordon's point, I'll call back to the 2002 Gamism essay, in which I stressed the difference between winning, which may or may not be involved in Gamist play, and not losing, which must be involved. That point has only been reinforced by my experiences since writing that essay.

I'm reading this from the main gamism essay

I'm defining "winning" as positive assessment at the Step On Up level. It even applies when little or no competition is going on. It applies even when the win-condition is fleeting. Even if it's unstated. Even if it's no big deal. Without it, and if it's not the priority of play, then no Gamism.

I'll contrast against the video game nethack, where you want to win it (you're told right from the start you are to get the amulet of yendor and ascend), but you might play for a couple of hours, then hit save, not having won (since it'll take many more hours to even possibly win). What did you do during that time if you did not win? You tried to not lose. Do that long enough, multi hour session after session of attempting to not lose, and the parochialism of the short term play session (which is essentially ones peep hole experience of the game, since NO ONE sits down for a start to finish session of nethack/sees the whole thing at once. We only ever work through peep holes) creates the synecdoche of the activity being about 'not losing'. Indeed, I'll even estimate that leaves what the activity is about 'up for grabs' in some regards.

Anyway, that's my estimate. I don't know how you've gone on to saying winning not need be involved, only 'not losing', after having written the quote above? It seems a mistaken advancement of the idea.

[Judd]

I liked how 4E really nailed teamwork. I enjoyed pushing enemies towards my friend's character to beat up or blinding a dragon or damaging one of its wings with my Rogue special abilities. The way all of the special powers worked together was nifty.

Skill challenges felt like they were really close to filling in the gaps between combats with meaningful dice rolling based in the fiction that could set up the next set piece with consequences from the skill challenge's outcome but didn't quite measure up at the table, in my experience.

And I like the Raven Queen as an addition to the D&D mythology, alongside Vecna, githyanki, githzarai, etc.

[Mike Holmes]

OK, as a guy who has extensively played both 1E and 4E, I think I can make some valid comparisons.

First, on the subject of color/literariness or whatever... 4E FAR outdoes earlier editions. If 4E is a cliche of 1E, recall that 1E is a pastiche of fantasy tailings, pretty damn cruddy in itself. What I see in 4E is an attempt to at least clean that stuff up and make it sort of internally consistent. OK, maybe most of that work was done in 3E. But by 4E you have stuff like warlocks that have to take a particular pact that says TONS about the character's social positioning. Yeah, it's still pretty petty if you're going to compare it to something like My Life With Master, or even Exalted. And yeah, it's sorta video-gamey in it's tone. But I guess I just have low expectations coming from 1E, where you had to try to infer a character's social positioning from what sort of castle or whatnot they might build if they ever got to level 10. At it's worst, 4E certainly does no worse than 1E (and earlier editions of D&D are even worse than this, don't tell me otherwise).

Are the particular choices of aesthetics good? I think that's going to be a personal thing, and you can't make any blanket statements. Within that aesthetic, the art is very well done, and I find it at least as engaging as any other RPG art.


As for survivability, clearly 4E is supposed to make PC losses rare. If you look at the creatures that are "balanced" to fight against the PCs, they lack any of the versatility that PCs have, up to and including simple things like taking a Second Wind. They are basically the same in terms of HP and damage output, but just don't have the options that give the PCs the edge. To whit, I've run the game for kids as young as 9 years old, and they've had no problems surviving, even when I've hit them as hard as I could as GM. Is it possible that the dice could dictate a result? Yes, possible, but pretty unlikely. EVERY case I've seen of PC death was a case of the GM hitting the PCs with something that wasn't balanced for their level, in an attempt to make things more challenging.

On the other hand, this GM overbalance phenomenon happens because hitting players with the same balanced encounters over and over gets dull fast. Good thing you level up fairly quickly in 4E, or that problem would be even worse. I think you might even do better by doubling the EXP output and cutting out half of the duller encounters.

In any case, TPKs in 1E were de riguer (and again earlier editions were insanely dangerous). 4E is vastly better in this regard. Combat is about "Did we crush them mightily, or did we squeak by in a tense fight?"


Strategy vs Tactical... well yes 4E has daily powers and the limit on surges per day. Which isn't really powerful strategic stuff, no. But the fact is that this exact same problem has always existed, with "wandering monsters" being the theoretical, but actually unhelpful solution. D&D has NEVER been a successful strategic game. At least 4E is slightly interesting tactically, which was never true in earlier editions. I'm not saying it gets spectacular marks as a tactical game, but it's not terrible. Earlier editions were really terrible as a tactical game. Take this from a guy who has a whole 'nother life outside of RPGs as a wargame, and boardgame player (I just picked up my 12 year old son from the local Games Workshop earlier this evening; he kicks ass on adults, because I'm instructing him).


If much of this sounds like backhanded compliments and bars set very low, well... yeah, I'm wondering why we're talking about D&D at all on a forum whose moderator is the author of Sorcerer RPG. But then again, he brought it up. D&D is what it is. 4E is just a lot more pure and explicit about that than earlier editions. If you don't like 4E, you probably shouldn't be playing D&D at all.

If you can discern some huge gap between editions of D&D, you're waaaay too close to it.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Callan,

My treatment of the win/lose matter was less explicit than I remembered.

From the Gamism essay, in the section titled "The definition at last:"

Gamist play, socially speaking, demands performance with risk, conducted and perceived by the people at the table. What's actually at risk can vary - for this level, though, it must be a social, real-people thing, usually a minor amount of recognition or esteem. The commitment to, or willingness to accept this risk is the key - it's analogous to committing to the sincerity of The Dream for Simulationist play. This is the whole core of the essay, that such a commitment is fun and perfectly viable for role-playing, just as it's viable for nearly any other sphere of human activity.

In the sub-section titled "Reality check:"

To get back to the dark and steaming roots of the first wave of role-playing innovation, check this out from The Basic Game chapter in Tunnels & Trolls, 5th edition (1979, Flying Buffalo Inc; author is Ken St. Andre, with possible edits or additions by Liz Danforth):

Every time your character escapes from a tunnel alive, you may consider yourself a winner. The higher the level and the more wealth your character attains, the better you are doing in comparison to all the other players.

From the Adventure Points chapter in the same text:

As long as a character remains alive - regardless of how many adventures he or she participates in - you are "winning." If ill fate befalls the character, or if you overextend yourself in playing your character's capabilities, the character dies and it is your loss. Of course, these games allow you to play any number of characters (sometimes referred to as a "stable of characters") and some will survive and advance, and everyone wins in the end.

This seems a bit softer, until one notices that although winning is qualified by quotes and extra text, loss significantly is not.

I'd hoped that these T&T quotes would act as a climactic moment to the sequence of thoughts under "The definition at last," and actually revise the entire discussion of winning into not-losing. I can see now that I was writing too point-last, and expecting the reader to see it without help.

Best, Ron

P.S. Mike, awesome.