The Tyranny of Fun pt. 2
So, from yesterday's blog, I've received a share of criticism. Chief among these are two main arguments:
1. So what if the point is to have fun all the time? Isn't that a good thing?
and
2. Real adventure isn't about facing opponents that are way outside your level. Fiction authors don't determine the monsters their heroes face randomly, and don't have them face a creature they can't possibly beat at the start of the story.
In response to the first point let me say this: D&D (and just about every other RPG) was "fun" up till now primarily due to two forces: challenge/risk, and immersion. And the latter was far more important than the former.
Look at this way: if you're playing checkers, you don't really give a fuck if any single piece gets eaten. You aren't immersed in imagining that said piece is a little soldier with a life and a personality that you've been building up.
Obviously not; the only reason you could possibly care in any meaningful sense would be if losing said piece means that you've also lost the "game".
In D&D, therefore, Immersion was essential. The more you could connect to your character as a person, and not a set of bonuses on a character sheet, the more valid the second source of fun, risk, would become.
4e does away with both of those sources of fun. It kills immersion by making the game about the "game", about the mechanics, about the powers you have on a piece of paper, and most of all by divorcing the experience the players are having in the game from the experience of pretending to be the PC living in his world. You're no longer encouraged to think the way Ragnar the Barbarian would think, in the world of Toril, and choose based on what made sense to him. In fact, doing that will be generally detrimental to your odds of "fixing the game". You are encouraged at every turn to think of your character as a set of numbers on a piece of paper, and the world as a backdrop where no matter where you go, cave slime will have a DC fixed according to your level, because someone decided that immersion was the wrong way to go.
So the "fun" that is created, in an enforced and artificial fashion, by 4e is the fun of instant gratification, at imagining yourself to be cool without having done anything to particularly merit it. The game becomes just one artificial shallow sense of coolness after the next, and nothing you do really matters; even if you die it doesn't matter because you know your next PC will be precisely as "cool" and just as balanced in his "coolness" with the rest of the party as the last dozen PCs were.
Let's do a little experiment to simulate the "coolness" of 4e. Get a deck of cards first. Now, carefully go through the deck, removing any deuces, threes, fours, fives, sixes, sevens, eights, nines and tens; except for, let's say, the ten of spades.
Ok, after you've done that pointless busy work, the game begins. Here are the rules in play:
1.You draw a card: is it a Jack, Queen, King or Ace? If so, YOU ARE EXTREMELY AWESOME. YOU TOTALLY ROCK!! FUCK YEAH!!!
2. If you do in fact rock, then repeat step 1.
3. If you drew the 10 of Spades, then Its game over for you; however, you may immediately proceed to start a new game, and be totally awesome, and rock once more.
Now, I suppose for some people (very very small children and mental defectives for the most part) such a game might be "fun". But to me, a type of fun that is pointless artificial "pre-fab awesomeness" where there is no risk aside from a strictly mechanical risk that is equal under all circumstances, and because everything has been mechanically equalized and divorced from immersion, there's nothing to make any individual character special to you.
"If you believe there's nothing up their sleeve, then nothing is cool", in other words.
As for the argument for the defense #2 up there; well, its just stupid. In the first place, D&D isn't fiction. You're not writing a story. We're not storygamers, we're roleplaying gamers. That will NEVER change no matter how much someone tries to ram that down our throats.
In the very real sense of immersion, we are different from fiction writers; we aren't creating a story, we're creating a living world (in the case of the GM), and creating people that live in that world (in the case of the PCs). And the story is NOT something we create, its something that happens organically. We're not writing a great novel, we're playing a make-believe, running a simulation, doing improv, whatever you want to call it.
But besides that, the argument is stupid because, in fact, in any story worth reading, the Hero will ALWAYS run into opponents that are not balanced to their worth. They will ALWAYS run into opponents that are much tougher than they are, and seem "impossible" to beat. Opponents that they must run away from, or hide from, or trick, or find some way to defeat other than to just walk up to them and kick the crap out of them with their At-will and Once-per-encounter Powers.
And in a good RPG, one that will be really satisfying to players as well as GM, that's what needs to happen to. RPGs where the players know that their opponents will always be perfectly balanced to their power level and will only present a certain limited threat of death, are FUCKING DULL RPGs. No matter how much you try to force the rules to scream "This is sooo Awesome!!!!" at every step of the way. A game where the PCs don't need to shout "We can take him!", because they know, for a fact, that they can always "take him", is going to be a game that gets boring, fast.
So in this one case, I really wish the 4e people had taken a bit more inspiration from the truly great novels, and not been so fucking stupid about the idea of balance. Oh, and immersion.
RPGPundit
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Comments (48)
Aside from agreeing with your points on general principle. You still don't connect them to D&D 4th in a meaningful way. Again you are using that stupid Cave Slime example which is taken out of context.
How is D&D 4th any different than GURPS, HERO, Rolemaster, or any other RPG with a tactically rich combat system?
A criticism can be made by past fans that it no longer D&D/ In past editions you could kind of pretend that the combat was realistic by describing the results imaginatively. Doing this certainly helped the immersion factor without losing the simplicity of the system.
But 4th edition combat is specific in its powers. It isn't hard to describe or imagine what you are doing. But trying to describe things realistically, even at 1st level, is out the window. So if you are a fan of immersion by realism it is gone in D&D. Even for folks that liked just a little.
That the thing I noticed about 4th edition right away. Because of that GURPS will remain my main system. However the criticism of enforced balance is a sign that a person hasn't read the book or lets his preexisting bias color everything. 4th edition is very good at giving you the math but at the same time encouraging DMs to wing it.
Again Cave Slime, EXAMPLE terrain.Doesn't support your argument.
Come on Robert! Encount4rdization is well established, well explained and firmly entrenched into WotC design culture. Don´t pretend it´s all new to you.
@Settembrini - However the fact remains that the DMG doesn't read that way. That Pundit is trying cite stuff from the DMG in way that is bullshit.
D&D 4th has bigger problems than Tyranny of Fun and the quality of it rules. Problems that legitmately will a large minority of older fans frothing at the mouth. Problems that will cause their current fan base to lose interest quicker and look for alternative.
1) The focus on one particular feel to the exclusive. (High Fantasy)
2) A reworked combat system that is 90% of the focus of the game.
3) The relative lack of subsystem outside of said combat system.
4) The loss of customization relative to 3rd edition.
As for Encount4rdization, it is a common problem for RPGs that go the rich tactical route for their game. It altogether too easy to make your "adventure" product a series of wargame scenarios. Look at Orcslayer for GURPS to see exactly the issue.It is only further aggravated by having to sell to the mass market (as such)
However I predict that the Fun Tyrant will go on the same shelf as the Killer DM, and Monty Haul DM as an object of ridcule. That people will play 4th edition much in the same way as OD&D and other RPGs that have a lack of rules for anything else other than combat.
Are you going to starting complain that you can't get immersion in OD&D now? How much of OD&D is devoted to anything outside of combat, monsters and treasures? Building Baronies a is about it.
What I can't stand are the bogus arguements thrown around. If you going to critize 4th edition, criticize for the real problem it has. If you don't like High Fantasy shoved down the your throat then say that. It why I am not going to be leaving GURPS anytime soon.
But Cave Slime in a section of EXAMPLE terrain who Pundit trying to kid here.
>>without having done anything to particularly merit it
It's a game. You put in barriers to fun, you don't have a bunch of people clamoring 'Wow, I'm so glad I stuck with this crap and found a reward', you've got 90% of the general public going 'This game is stupid, let's play WoW/Magic/read a book instead'.
You're every wargamer who sneers down on games where you don't need to paint your figs for 20+ hours before you can sit down and play.
You're every punk rocker or black metal elitist POS who called someone a poseur because they didn't spend their life digging through obscure compilations and demo tapes to find the bands that inspired some of the more well-known (though still non-mainstream) punk and black metal bands that everyone who start out listening to that music heard of.
You're every fratboy fucker out there who feels that since he had to get a broomstick up his ass to join in to the fraternity, then the broomstick up the ass is a valuable and necessary tradition of his organisation, and that anyone who would ever want to join without going through it is unworthy.
Your fate is that of forever being an atavistic cry in the wilderness, wondering why his hobby is changing, while people who understand how to make something interesting for more than a handful of (to be gentle) compulsive obsessive fans bring in new blood in the hobby and eventually overrun you by sheer force of numbers.
For instance, this whole 'immersion' thing you're going on about is exactly the *weakness* of pen&paper based RPGs. Creating a living world necessitates so much computing power that it gets into the way. Ironically, that sort of gameplay would be much better served by computer-based videogaming. It seems your ideal RPG would be a Star Trek holodeck.
At least the storyteller crowd realize that the strenght of PnP is that you get to create a story, which is not the case in video games where you are by design straight-jacketed into the vision of the game's designers.
Don't be ridiculous, DarkAngel. Immersion is as much the "weakness" of RPGs as kicking spherical objects around is the weakness of football.
It is true that certain types of video games are excellent sources of immersion. Immersion can be found in many things - some movies, many books. Things like World of Warcraft are very poor sources of it. The
more a medium forces the audience to use their imagination, and the
more interactive it is, the more immersive it is. The best of these are text adventures. You get an evocative textual description, you input a command, and get another description. If this sounds familiar, it's no coincidence - my definition of RPGs has always been "(points at a text adventure) like that, but with people". It's functionally the same thing.
Yet, a PnP RPG has certain strengths computer games will never have: the infinite adaptiveness of a human GM. An adventure game does not understand all commands you can think of, and finding something sensible not working jars you from the experience. A GM does not have this problem. A PnP RPG is a text adventure with an infinitely good parser, or (to use another point of reference) a choose-your-own-adventure booklet that always has the options you want.
Rules systems outside arbitrary GM fiat are themselves not necessary for this experience. In a text adventure, there are typically no random elements, no separate combat system, and everything the player may attempt has a pre-defined answer. This works perfectly well in them, and in my experience, in RPGs too. Thus, the only rules an RPG truly needs are "player decides what he wants to do" followed by "GM decides what happens". Rules on top of this structure may help, but they may also hinder the immersion by bringing metagame elements into it, and their benefits must be carefully weighted against their intrusiveness.
The Pundit is entirely correct in that the purpose and goal of RPGs is immersion. What he is wrong in, is that D&D (any edition of it) would be a good RPG for that. It's one of the least immersive RPGs that ever existed, and has always been, with entirely too many unnatural restrictions and too much focus on battlemats and placements.
I have no idea where the bizarre demand to bring "story" into all this came from. Stories are things you can tell after the game, about the things you did in it.
I agree 110%! 4e has turned its back on immersion. You can say "But I want a RPG without immersion," which is fair enough - but to deny that's what is going on is the height of folly.
@mxyzplk - Then how OD&D handles immersion better than 4th edition.
>>Immersion is as much the "weakness" of RPGs as kicking spherical objects around is the weakness of football.
Immersion is shit.
The reality is that you're not creating a living world. You are creating a Potemkin village. When the PCs and the GM go home, the NPCs don't continue living their happy little lives independantly of you. If a tree falls into a forest and there's no PC around, who gives a flying crap?
To create an actual living world you would need more processing power than WoW. This is why RPGs are shit at trying this, and why every attempt at bringing immersion into RPGs result in unwieldy rulesets that interfere with the important aspects of the game, mainly: a) the gameplay, and b) the story. (In that order of importance.)
@XDarkAngelX - That baloney too. Of course we can't be little Mentats and run a perfect simulation. But with skill and practice we know how to fake it well enough that the players don't notice or care.
There are several techniques I use to make this happen.
1) Let the players choose where they go.
2) Follow up on the consequences of the player's actions both good and bad.
3) Have background chatter to give a sense of a wider world. (The Traveller News Service is a good example of this).
4) Insert random events that don't relate to the main focus of the player.
and others. Some of the tricks are th same ones used by the Soap Opera writer to draw their viewers into their little world. Others are used by storytellers and a lot are unique to RPGs.
And it not easy and not fun for some DMs. So it ok not to have a immersive world. However understand without the "Soap Opera" effect interest wanes much more quickly (on average). Because as Pundit the ability to be immersive is one of the characteristics of tabletop that makes it unique.
The beef I have with the post is the baloney arguement used to try to say that the core rules D&D 4th work against immersion. I believe it is neutral in that regards worse than some other RPGs and better than others. The biggest pitfall against immerision, if you want that in your game, is paying too much attention to the combat system. It is easy to do with D&D (as well as GURPS, HERO and other combat heavy games) because so much of the game focuses on Combat.
GURPS and HERO tries to midigate this by making character creation as detailed as Combat. But D&D 4th doesn't have any such recourse and thus relies solely on the DM to make it happen.
DarkAngel, check your terms. Immersion does not equal "creating an actual living world". That's just one of the many things that can help you reach immersion, not a requirement for it by any means. Immersion is the feeling, the sensation of being drawn into the game world, and typically takes the form of the player going "what would I do in this situation" in his mind as if the situation was real. When the players forget they are playing a tabletop game and consider the situation they are in with the same vim and vigor as if it was real, speaking and thinking of it not in game terms but real world terms, they are immersed.
I have heard many tales of GMs who felt exasperated when their players lost themselves into planning their next assault for hours. Those GMs felt that the game had ground to a halt and the players were just wasting time, when in reality that is precisely an example of when everything goes well: the players become so engrossed that they start to run the scenarios in their head themselves, and practically entertain themselves without the GM even having to do anything. And when they finally make their move, intense thrills and catharsis are almost guaranteed.
An example of a movie that did this for me was the first Saw: I couldn't follow the plight of the main characters very well, because I kept imagining what I would do in their stead. This was less a factor of the movie's world being vivid and alive and more of the puzzle being so fascinating in design that I lost myself into its world anyway. The only problem was that in a non-interactive medium, this detached me from the experience rather than taking me further into it.
"Story" is inconsequential: if the players are immersed, even the weakest "story" will feel fantastic to them. And I know I'm in a minority with this, but I don't consider even characters being very important to an RPG. I would rather have that every player played shallow self-inserts, because that would bring them so much closer to the character's viewpoint. Characters' personalities are but a facade anyway, ultimately it's the player who experiences the thrills and the player who calls the shots.
"Story" is inconsequential: if the players
are immersed, even the weakest "story" will feel fantastic to them. And
I know I'm in a minority with this, but I don't consider even
characters being very important to an RPG.
I agree. :)
How important is "character" is there in a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, Fighting Fantasy, Zork or Colossal Cave? Not much.
Your point makes sense, if 4th edition actually played like that, but it doesn't. I've played about 10 sessions now across two games, and I'm really invested in my character. He's a paladin, and is optimized for diplomacy, not fighting, although he's not shabby at the latter. Every encounter I've been in has been hard, and we've had the whole party knocked out and captured. Most encounters, we worry about that, and often, one of us will fall. We've run and played it smart to trick enemies.
The game scales with the characters, yes, true. Every game I've played - 3rd edition D&D, definitely - had that same feature. Some challenges were way harder than others, but the low end tended to rise with you.
I just don't see it. I think you're criticizing your perception of 4th edition, not the reality of it.
"I just don't see it. I think you're criticizing your perception of 4th edition, not the reality of it."
This.
I also have been playing (and running) 4e since it was released, and I've found that it's not inherently different than any other roleplaying game on the market.
>>You are creating a Potemkin village
No, it would be a Potemkin village if the GM claimed to be running
every intrigue at the Duke's court and every transaction in the agora,
but in fact, nobody claims that. We all know we're dealing with a human being and not the Matrix; we're not idiots.
In the end, yes, the GM makes it all up, so what? Frank Herbert didn't simulate Dune's climate on a bank of supercomputers, and Tolkein didn't
write econometric models to determine the price of iron in Rohan; that
doesn't mean those works aren't immersive.
You're making Pundit's point for him here, xDarkAngelx. "Immersion is evil, because Ron Edwards said so."
Indeed, my thanks to darkangel. The prosecution rests on the defense's case.
RPGPundit
Also, Heikki is right. You can do as much "immersion" entirely in the confines of a dungeon as you can in a vast kingdom, or a sci-fi galaxy. Any of these places can be emulated environments, or they can just be pointless backdrops for a purely mechanical game, or cheap excuses for creating pseudo-"story".
Stuff that scale with the power level of the players is the copout for the weak minded. It´s the ultimate fallacy of people who never grasped what RPGs are capable of.
It´s a widespread sickness, so widespread, it is now a god to many.
There goes D&D, from mentally challenging game with consequences to a consequential game for the mentally challenged.
First, the "living, breathing world" argument is a red herring. RPGs are not attempts to create fully functional and complete alternate realities; rather, they are built on creating impressions piecemeal through back and forth communication between the participants. There is no need to see the totality of a collectively imagined world to be immersed: a select handful of images, consistent consequences to player-proposed actions and a few independent factors are enough.
Second, doing all this is not rocket science: even very stupid people could do it without much effort. The claim that traditional RPG play is beyond the reach of "the average gamer" or is "only for hardcores" contradicts all practical experience and history in this hobby, and cannot be considered as anything but the product of deliberate misrepresentation and historical revisionism. Making things up, even doing it in a systematic fashion, is natural to all human beings. Turning it into a hobby of collective communication is original, but in its principal form, completely intuitive. It is no accident that millions of bright teenagers in the 1980s took up this hobby: they liked and enjoyed challenging, imagination-stimulating games. Their current equivalents are no different, nor will any future generation. Being immersed is natural.
Third, putting an effort into playing a game would only be singled out as strange by someone who first has to write off almost all gamers from chess enthusiasts to those who spend a lot of energy developing a winning move in an RPG, a card game or what have you. Furthermore, feelgood, consequence- and risk-free entertainment based on continuous positive reinforcement is not the natural state of playing games; it is, if anything, an odd aberration produced by entertainment companies. Chess is brutal and competitive, go is brutal and competitive, PvP MMORPGs, FPS games, all of these have very clear and very often occurring loss conditions. They don't make you feel AWESOME by default. They make you feel awesome after you have defeated brutal, relentless opposition.
All in all, XDarkAngelX is talking nonsense; his points are contradicted by the overwhelming bulk of available evidence, human nature and the laws of nature.
To forestall a potential point of criticism, it has to be kept in mind that RPGs are both "games" and "playing", mixing the challenging nature of the first with the fanciful freeform nature of the second. Trying to turn an RPG into a purer representative of either type is patent idiocy, since it is the mixture of seemingly contradictory elements which makes them so appealing.
All in all, XDarkAngelX is talking nonsense;
his points are contradicted by the overwhelming bulk of available
evidence, human nature and the laws of nature.
I concur.
Dammit! and here I was all ready to get four lettered at darkboi, and you all show him the bars of the cage he created for himself. How...cathartic.
Immersion is what makes this PnP games different and better than movies, video games, and chess. It takes the best elements of all and creates a gestalt that is (or can be) as more compelling than all combined.
Why sit around watching Conan the barbarian, and laughing at the silly choices he makes, when you can BE him, and make your own silly choices? PnP RPG's (IMO) fulfill the need by people to feel that they actually matter in the grand scheme of things. You don't often get that in real life, so we use a shared narrative fantasy to act these impulse out.
Where 4E gets it wrong IS the immersion. To attempt to re-inforce pundit's point, lets abandon the cave slime analogy (useful as it is) and try a different approach. BALANCE ABOVE ALL. This is the coda used to create this...this...polite words escape me at the moment. To me, and apparently all of the 40 or so wonderful people I share my collective narrated fantasy worlds with, half of the fun of the game (3.X in particular) was the absolutely endless variety and options the base ruleset gave you in creating players, scenarios, and monsters. Party roles? HA! ANYONE could fill ANY role if they simply thought it out, and if they didn't, and made some godawful "broken" build, they could simply die or retire and try again.
There was none of this "Striker, Defender, Controller" crap. A sorceror with the half dragon template could tank quite well at low and mid levels. A fighter could dual class and become a decent negotiator, you get the point. Party role, was whatever you wanted it to be. Ranger on the front lines dual wielding up a storm whle fighter uses bow to pick off wounded enemies? Easily done. Letsd not even get into the abortion that is 4E multiclassing, it is embarrasing to anyone that has ever actually wanted to multi class.
Now dont get me wrong, 4E does have some good points, I really like how they made battles a teamwork affair. Skill challenges are a great idea, and have made their way into my various 3.5 and Pathfinder games as well. What kills it, is once again, BALANCE OVER ALL. This is not fun to me or mine. IMO, people who complain about playing warriors that get outshined by spellcasters at higher levels are whiners. They obviously forgot about owning the game until 10th level. Spellcasters who whine about being useless at low levels, need to remember that apprentices not only
A.)Are supposed to be whiners anyway
B.)Are going to totally own all when they come into their true potential.
Pathfinder RPG goes a long way in cherrypicking some of the better design choices from 4E to fix something that wasn't terribly broken in the first place. Based on my first hand experience DMing and playing 4E, I can say that IMO, it is an upgraded D&D minis game. It focuses heavily on tactical combat, requiring minis and a mat (as much as some would have you believe, these are NOT optional, especially in mass melee) that introduces some cool ideas that would have been better used in the 3.5 ruleset.
For what it's worth Pundit, I had a really hard time "connecting" to my character. I really felt like I was simply pushing buttons to do either A, B, or C each round. It felt as thought the roleplaying was simply a tacked on subset of rules attached to a tactical minis game. Predicteably, the people who seem to have the biggest beef with 4E are the hardcore roleplayers, and immersionists. The folks whom enjoy flexibilty over arbitrary balance enforcement.
Sometimes the fun is in the swingyness, but 4E players wont have to worry about that part anymore. LET THE FLAMES BEGIN!
For what it's worth Pundit, I had a really
hard time "connecting" to my character. I really felt like I was
simply pushing buttons to do either A, B, or C each round. It felt as
thought the roleplaying was simply a tacked on subset of rules attached
to a tactical minis game.
Note this isn't a complaint unique to D&D. It arise often when playing tactically rich RPGs. The DM needs to pay attention and work at it or the player will feel like they are pushing figures around in a wargame. In GURPS there is the option of basic combat which a lot of GURPS GMs use. But D&D 4th doesn't have it.
This is the primary cause of the loss of immersion people are feeling. Not the fact that D&D is exposing the math of balencing encounters.
Rob Conley
You are right that
D&D 4th edition is D&D minis expanded. I found that out when I bought a box for D&D Minis to have some new figures and found that while the quantity of powers was reduced the gameplay was similar.
Settembrini Said:
Stuff
that scale with the power level of the players is the copout for the
weak minded. It´s the ultimate fallacy of people who never grasped what
RPGs are capable of.
It´s a widespread sickness, so widespread, it is now a god to many.
There goes D&D, from mentally challenging game with consequences to a consequential game for the mentally challenged.
------------------------------
This is so wrong that there are no words to explain it.
Face it, your just pissed that 4th edition has been successful and it proved that you were just talking out of your ass and that you don't speak for the majority of the gamers. You may think you speak for the majority of gamers but you do not.
4th edition is successful because it's what gamers want. It may not be what you want, but it does not mean that the people who like 4e are playing wrong, they are simply playing differently.
The only one who has a sickness is you. You need mental help in a very big way.
@RPGpundit - Case? What case are you talking about?
See, if you don´t like 4e, you´re brain-damaged. Those ar ethe fans of 4e, totally sure of themselves so that they don´t have to piss on 30 years of player base and history.
Honestly, the worst things about 4e:
1) designer blogs
2) 4e fans
3) dmg