If James Wyatt is a Dalek... Ron Edwards Must be DavrosOver on
theRPGsite, a thread had come up about how in 4e, people don't ever talk in roleplaying terms at the table, instead, the OP noticed that the game itself seems to really push players to have to describe everything in terms of game jargon.
Meanwhile, in that same thread, Jackalope noticed and took issue with these quotes from James Wyatt:
The shift in philosophy reflected in this table is most evident in the
section on terrain in Chapter 4 (pages 67-68). In past editions, we'd
describe things like cave slime as if the DC of the Acrobatics check to
avoid slipping in it were an objective, scientific measurement of its
physical properties. "How slippery is cave slime? It's DC 30 slippery."
But
setting a fixed number like that limits its usefulness -- cave slime
would be too challenging for low-level characters and irrelevant for
high-level characters. In 4th Edition, we tell you to set the DC to
avoid slipping based on the level of the characters, using the
Difficulty Class and Damage by Level table. So when 5th-level
characters encounter cave slime, they'll be making a check against DC
22, but 25th-level characters have to make a DC 33 check.
Does that mean that high-level characters encounter Epic Cave Slime
that's objectively slipperier than the Heroic Cave Slime they
encountered in their early careers? Maybe.
It doesn't matter. What matters is that the DM has permission to use
terrain that's relevant to the characters, regardless of their level --
and has a table supported by solid math to make sure it's relevant.
(to which the poster who had put up the quote, not Jackalope but someone else, added: "
"How slippery is the cave slime?" will always be answered in 4E by "as
much as it needs to be to ensure proper game balance and appropriate to
the treasure parcel it will provide." Remember - fiction is irrelevant,
only the game elements are relevant.")
Finally, Jackalope added:
This is the most absolutely idiotic thing I've ever read.
So basically, no matter how good a character gets, everything should
remain an identical challenge? Nobody gets better, the numbers just get
bigger.
I just don't get it.
And, my purpose for highlighting this particular line of conversation for all of you is in my response, because I think its damn important. Because you see, some other posters had then tried to argue with Jackalope and others that in fact, this sort of thing is really "typical", its not anything we haven't seen before, and its something that happens because 4e is a "rules-heavy" game.
Jackalope said: I just don't get it.Jackalope, its based on the absurd and utterly idiotic idea that the PCs have to
be ABSOLUTELY AWESOME at all times or else the world ends. So low level
characters have to be AWESOME. High level characters have to be AWESOME.
FUN MUST BE HAD AT ALL TIMES! WORLD DOMINATION! UNLIMITED RICE PUDDING! EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!
They're idiots. And 4e's domination of jargon has
nothing to do with it
being a rules-heavy game. There are plenty of rules-heavy games where
the
actions described are based on the
situation in play;
rather than being abstract super-maneuvers that have no connection to
any sense of "immersion" in the fantasy world of the rpg.
No, the domination of Jargon in 4e is part of a conscious attempt to
try to destroy (exterminate, if you will) the very possibility of
experiencing "immersion" in D&D. Because immersion is evil, because
Ron Edwards said so. You want a game that intentionally encourages
people to be as disconnected from their character as possible, to think
of him as a playing piece (a miniature?) on a board, and not as a
personality that you assume while acting out adventures in an imaginary
world. Imagination must be exterminated.
So that's it.
RPGPundit
Currently smoking: Castello Collection 4k Canadian + G.L. Pease's Samarra
Comments (14)
My only consolation: I predicted all this last year, way ahead of anybody else.
Which feels like having won the Last Great Time War: not good at all.
The line of thought behind the "fluid" DCs is the same sort of misguided desire to always provide a constant level of challenge and rewards that guided the makes of the computer game Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. In it, all the enemies in the game world leveled up with you, so that the practical effect you becoming more powerful was absolutely nothing, and the effect of you choosing to venture to the Safe Meadows or the Keep of Certain Doom was also nothing, as both places and all inhabitants therein were exactly as dangerous as you happened to be. Furthermore, all the loot was "level-approriate" too.
This, of course, made playing the game extremely unrewarding. You could never be out of your depth, and never stomp the enemy underfoot either. It took only a day or two after the release for the first unofficial mods to remove the scaling system to come out. The developers themeselves have never admitted their error, and aim to repeat it with Fallout 3.
The same sort of folly is at work here. 4e designers think that the only thing that's truly important is level-approriate challenge with level-appropriate rewards: what those challenges and rewards actually represent in the game world is just fluff and flavor, of no consequence.
In D&D 4e, the DCs and the related skills are utterly irrelevant. You have exactly three sorts of skill rolls - easy, normal and hard, and these will stay constant regardless of what your actual skill values are. No amount of leveling up will turn a normal challenge to an easy one.
They could have for the same effect replaced the entire pointless DC system with just trying to roll under your relevant stat.
Anybody actually read the damn book! Seriously some of these arguments are stupid as hell as they cherry pick selected passages.
Note the header on 67 SAMPLE FANTASTIC TERRAIN. They are trying to explain how to construct terrain that will challenge the party. They are not giving a definitive definition of a patch of cave slime.
Note the the second paragraph. It is about using the example as a toolkit to construct the challenge the way you want. Of course nobody can bother to look at page 64-65 where they do the type of absolute "physics" that post said they don't do. Give fixed DCs for climbing, breaking doors, etc.
It is no different then the tools that GURPS and Hero give you. Should HERO be condemned for explaining how to build a villain to challenge a player with a 1000 pts?
Of nobody is reading page 42 which tries to give the DMs a little math to help them when they make shit up. 4th edition WANTS the DM to improvise, to wing it, to go for broke.
D&D 4th edition is high fantasy 24/7 all the time. The way the rules work out the higher level you are the crazier shit you will be dealing with. Not just in tough monster but tough situations.It not about grinding the same old crap over and over again.
The problem of D&D 4th edition are not in the rules set. If anything it is a throw back all the way to OD&D where the focus was on combat and few other game activities. To me D&D 4th edition is GURPS Advanced Combat bolted on top of OD&D.
So are there going to be issues with D&D 4th? Sure. The biggest that players will flounder with their new non-combat freedom and start to ignore it in favor of combat 24/7. That Wizards will ignore the Skill Challenge system and additional non-combat subsystems (like how they added rituals) in favor of more powers, more class, more splat.
Because if non-combat side is ignored then the same problem will rise with D&D 4th that happened in the past and with MMORPGs. Eventually you try every class every power and ask "Is that all there is? and quit the game. If you lucky a few will try other RPGs.
>>So low level characters have to be AWESOME. High level characters have to be AWESOME.
>>FUN MUST BE HAD AT ALL TIMES!
Geez, how terrible. Game designers figuring out that a game should be fun at all time. Let me pick up my torch and pitchfork...
This is why I get infuriated at your blog sometimes, Pundit. You talk a lot about bringing new people into the hobby but you're not willing to take the steps needed to do it. Right now RPGs only cater to the hardcore. The fun in old editions of D&D started at level 6 or so, and to get there we're talking hours of preliminary bullshit and multiple sessions of 4+ hours. What about your average person who might be interested in RPGs but only got about an hour a week to dedicate to the hobby? Are they to be stuck forever in Level 1 hell? How about people who actually like their characters, instead of seeing them as a bunch of numbers? They're supposed to assume that 9 out of 10 of them will die before level 3? "Don't get too attached before level 5" was what we used to say.
I also think your definition of immersion is bullshit. 4E is plenty immersive, as long as you realize you're not simulating reality but simulating a cinematic experience. In your average fantasy book or movie, the author does not pit his character against wildly 'level inappropriate' threats. Because it makes for a really boring story if the character is more powerful than anything he fights with, or vice versa.
>The fun in old editions of D&D started at level 6 or so
I contest this assertion. Struggling to survive as a pathetic nobody is fun.
Hell, even being doomed to hopeless, useless failure can be fun (that's why Call of Cthulhu has been a fan favorite for decades: people like powerlessness fantasies as well as power fantasies).
@XDarkAngelX - I wonder if Frodo and Sam were level appropriate for Mordor?
4th edition certainly spends a lot of time telling a referee how to design challenges for particular levels. Like any other RPGs it is the DM's choice how to apply those guidelines. I would consider any player to be a fool for assuming that every encounter they chose to get into is going to be "level appropriate".
Now how is this fun? Because when your actions have consquences that makes the game fun. If you always going up against the equivalent challenge then literally what is the challenge.
However with that being said, I view the all the focus on creating challenge in the DMG a good thing because frankly it save prep time. A average campaign will have a mix a easy, moderate, and hard challenges and it is nice to have some firm guidelines so that what you setup will fill the role you want it to fill.There are plenty of times in GURPS where I setup something and went either "Oh shit that went down harder than I thought." or "Man that was too easy.". The better and easier the guideline the easier my job will be.
Of course there going to be DMs who are going to take the rules too damn literally and think that Cave Slime are always scaled to the characters level and that the party never should face a challenge outside of their range (too easy or too hard). But then that been the bane of RPGs since the first copies of D&D went out the door.
>>I wonder if Frodo and Sam were level appropriate for Mordor?
Maybe not. Let's just say that the way Sam saves Frodo sounds like a crappy DM invoking a Deus Ex Machina in order to keep his campaign on rails...
>>Struggling to survive as a pathetic nobody is fun.
Then your DM can use Level + 1 and Level + 2 encounters exclusively and KNOW that that's what he's shooting for.
Again, the hardcore-only cries of "DMs should learn how to do appropriate encounters by screwing up a million of them first, because we don't want people to tell us the underlying math of our gaming, cuz math is hard man!"
D&D 4th edition is high fantasy 24/7 all
the time. The way the rules work out the higher level you are the
crazier shit you will be dealing with. Not just in tough monster but
tough situations.It not about grinding the same old crap over and over
again.
Does the gameplay itself get tougher, or just the names and descriptions of the monsters and situations? I'm actually interested in hearing from someone who's played at low level and at high level -- was there any difference in difficulty as a player?
@abacaca - Of nobody is reading page 42 which tries to
give the DMs a little math to help them when they make shit up. 4th
edition WANTS the DM to improvise, to wing it, to go for broke.
^^^^^^
Ding! Ding! Ding! Pundit, you are missing the boat entirely. You are very very wrong. 4e wants the fun stuff improvised. The combat is more tactical, but its also (1) fast, (2) fluid, and (3) keeps everyone involved. If you want more immersion (creativity?) feel free to alter the flavor text on the fly. Don't think "my rogue uses precise strike", say "Nickler the Black, deftly parrying until he spots an opportunity, looks for the weak spot in the Bugbears defense. ." How is that any less immersive than any prior edition of 4e? The skill check system encourages the DM to basically say. "yeah... the floor is supernaturally slippery, as if some evil icor coats the ground, DC 30." Why DC 30? Did the DM consult some codex of DCs? No! They just picked a good sounidng number, one that's challenging, but not impossible. And the game goes on. The rules are fast. In fact, its a pretty rules-light system outside of the square-based tactics.
NERD FIGHT! EVERYONE GRAB YOUR SHARPENED POCKET PROTECTORS!
Really though, I agree with pundit. Just because you say that you want the DM to improvise rather undercuts the whole idea of creating silly static tables to begin with.
As to immersion...so you add all this wonderful flavor descriptions to your crappy list of powers...great. Which jackass is going to get strapped coming up with flavor descriptions for the same power as it gets used over...and over...and over...ad nauseum. THAT is where the immersion breaks down. You aren't "seeking weak points in the bugbears defenses." You are using your at will "ringing blades" or somesuch to deal 2d4+2 and move an opponent 2 squares in any direction...hmmmm, how sexy is that? Oh yeah, it's not.
I love how for the last 6 months all the fanbois have been going off the deep end every time that their beloved crap pile was compared to an MMORPG. Now that the rules are out and it has basically proven that this is EXACTLY the case, suddenly it's a GOOD thing? Sheesh people, if that's what you want play WoW, its more cinematic, less objective, and requires no exhausted DM to come up with silly flavor descriptions for the same powers used over...and over...and over...
Because the old system, where non-casters could choose to attack, full attack, bull rush, overrun, disarm, grapple, or sunder (most of which were either impractical without a feat or stupidly complex) was so much better than a system where every character (not just the casters) has a wide and interesting array of abilities to choose from was sooooo much better, right?
I have only played D&D and a little bit of Shadowrun and Aberrant (White Wolf), so I am far from the most experienced gamer out there, but so far I find D&D 4e to be the easiest, most dynamic system for myself and my players to become engaged in an enjoy.
Both with my home group and the once-a-month meetup games I run, it has proven much easier to improvise things on the fly, which seems to greatly encourage creative and descriptive use of skills and combat powers.
The flow and descriptiveness of both combat and social situations has been better in 4e than it ever was in my 3rd edition games. My 3e characters are level 12 now, and I am jonesing to wrap it up and move to 4e because I am so tired of three hours of real time / 4 rounds of game time combats where the players need a graphing calculator to figure out what AC they hit, and their abilities far exceed those of any monster in the MM under CR 16 or so, so I have to massively customize everything anyway.
4e is not a perfect system, of course, but it is very easy to both plan and improvise challenges that are a cakewalk, certain death, or anywhere in between. This puts the onus on the DM to design the kind of campaign and challenges that they and their characters want. If "epic cave slime" offends your sensibilities, then make all cave slime DC 20, but don't expect to be able to use it with mid-high level characters. All the DMG does is say "here are the approximate difficulties to use if you want to present challenges of this level to your party," which frees you up to mix and match them as you see fit to create varied and enjoyable encounters.
The table on page 42 and the excellent section on designing various types of encounters across all levels of play are some of the best things about D&D 4e in my mind, and most players I have gamed with would prefer a preponderence of level/party appropriate challenges with a few easy or hard ones mixed in than a crazy, static world to wander through where 90% of things are below their notice or beyond their capabilities. Unlike WoW, most D&D players don't like to hang out in Stranglethorn Vale ganking n00bs all day long and would prefer to do something that takes a little ingenuity and effort to get through.
I have only played D&D* and a little bit
of Shadowrun and Aberrant (White Wolf), so I am far from the most
experienced gamer out there, but so far I find D&D 4e to be the
easiest, most dynamic system for myself and my players to become
engaged in an enjoy.
* Meaning 3rd edition and 4th edition.
No offense, but that's not saying very much at all.