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Gort posted:I find the "gruelling slog through a dungeon where you have to carefully ration your resources so you have enough to make it through" kind of adventure to be the exception, rather than the rule. Far more often the adventures I run only have one or two real combat encounters in them, and the party being able to dump all their dailies on these encounters makes balancing them much more difficult. Same, I find most people run plot-driven RPGs on the basis that most encounters take place several days apart. My solution to this is to have "daily" powers, etc. recover after a Long Rest instead of overnight, where "long" is defined as "long enough that your enemies can advance their plans without your interference".
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Feb 6, 2023 13:31
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So, I wonder. If one of the issues with game balance at higher levels is the higher importance of multi-attacks versus everything else, then would introducing monsters with fixed damage resistance address this issue? For example, let’s say we have a ranger that does two attacks at 15 damage per attack, versus a barbarian that does 25 damage with a single attack. Sure, the ranger is more effective. But if we introduce a monster with DR 5, then the ranger does 10 damage twice, and the barbarian does 20 - same amount - with a single attack. And if we have an iron golem / stoneskinned alchemist with DR 10, then the ranger would be even less effective, doing ten (5*2) damage on average, with the barbarian still doing a respectable fifteen. As long as the GM mixes and matches enemies in an encounter, so only some of them have such DR, and gives sufficient information to the players as to which enemies have such DR, this could let them be more tactical, I suppose. Or is the math still going to be off?
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Feb 15, 2023 16:30
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perfectly balanced rules are boring.
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Feb 15, 2023 17:41
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YggdrasilTM posted:perfectly balanced rules are boring. which ones did you have in mind
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Feb 15, 2023 17:46
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balance is good but trying to create successive layers of different mechanics to cancel out the natural consequences of the previous layer is almost never a good idea. it just creates little pockets and edge cases which naturally become the focus of optimization, meaning you've made the game more complicated for little if any benefit in depth if you want to make a game where damage values are carefully bounded, the answer is not to penalize multiplication, it's to not have multiplication in the first place
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Feb 15, 2023 17:48
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Gort posted:which ones did you have in mind In a perfectly balanced game any of the classes is just one of the 4 archetypal roles reskinned, with no difference in any feature from the other classes with the same role. That's boring.
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Feb 15, 2023 17:56
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I find I hot patch every RPG at the final stage by just adjusting combat encounters. Not lying about dice so much as just getting a much clearer idea of what the party, and the monsters, can do over time. Actually, one of the big draws for a merciless old school simulationist sand box game for me is that I could finally stop worrying if the stats for this or that monster are bad. I can just throw up my hands and say "it is what it is!" I've never actually run one, I iust day dream about it.
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Feb 15, 2023 17:59
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YggdrasilTM posted:In a perfectly balanced game any of the classes is just one of the 4 archetypal roles reskinned, with no difference in any feature from the other classes with the same role. what if the archetypal roles are unbalanced
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Feb 15, 2023 18:00
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games like go and chess and poker are perfectly balanced and yet not boring balance does not imply a lack of complexity; rather, complexity makes balancing increasingly difficult. But attempting to balance complex rules does not inherently mean simplifying them, and nor does simple rules inherently imply simple play or simplistic strategy or lack of depth. e. for me, good game design boils down to having interesting choices to make; I think that balance enhances rather than detracts from the interesting-ness of choices.
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Feb 15, 2023 22:06
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For balancing monsters just cheat. If they're dying too soon just give them more hp. If the pcs aren't threatened just make something extra happen when the monster is bloodied. It's easy to fix that stuff on the fly or in prep. The hard thing to balance is player contribution. I ran a game for 6 players, 5 of which were well optimized and performed incredibly in their roles (ever see an entire party on the brink heal for surge + 25 each? Pacifist clerics, man). The last guy was just building out of the books without optimizing and felt like he was half a player. Dragon sorc would hit 2-3 targets for 20 damage, scout ranger would do 40 to one target, hexblade warlock would do 18 to one target and then hurt adjacent allies. It was bad. No one wants to feel outperformed and there isn't a great solution besides handing that PC better items and boons, which comes with a new set of problems.
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Feb 15, 2023 22:20
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The real solution there is to talk to the player, and help them optimize the character to a point where they're contributing the same amount as the others, or are much closer to hitting that benchmark. Figure out what they want out of the class fantasy they're going for, then help them optimize the poo poo out of it. The hexblade does have a lower ceiling than something like a dragon sorc if they want to keep with the hexblade theming, but you can get decently far out of a hexblade iirc.
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Feb 15, 2023 22:56
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12Apr1961 posted:So, I wonder. The math won't be off unless you miscalculate. But you want to think about the types of tactical and strategic questions the system asks. In a vacuum, that's boring because there's just this obvious right answer of how to attack. Use multiattacks if they have no resist and use big single attacks if they have resist. But in context, it seems like it could be pretty good: imagine a ranger who has multi-attacks but no big attacks and a barbarian who has the opposite. The ranger and the barbarian want to take out these two priority enemies before moving onto the others. If they split up and each focus on their strength, they finish faster. But if they focus fire, they take the first enemy down quicker at the expense of taking longer to deal with both together. Is that tradeoff worth it? That's a good tactical question! Now if the ranger can just choose a multiattack and a big single attack and have both on the same character, you've cut out what was interesting.
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Feb 15, 2023 23:23
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SynthesisAlpha posted:Dragon sorc would hit 2-3 targets for 20 damage, scout ranger would do 40 to one target, hexblade warlock would do 18 to one target and then hurt adjacent allies. It was bad. No one wants to feel outperformed and there isn't a great solution besides handing that PC better items and boons, which comes with a new set of problems. I agree with the previous orator here - if a hexblade does 18 damage, when a scout does 40, then the GM should sit with the hexblade and figure out what is going wrong. If a scout does 20 with each weapon, then the hexblade should be doing at least 27 - a fey hexblade can optimise for Light Blades same way as scout can, and they get 2+Dex static damage bonuses. On top of that, the scout's second attack is not always guaranteed (it's a separate to-hit roll), the fey hexblade would have higher defenses from their power riders, and they should be going invisible every now and then, either further increasing their defenses, or getting opportunity attacks if the monsters decide to attack someone else. Jimbozig posted:But in context, it seems like it could be pretty good: imagine a ranger who has multi-attacks but no big attacks and a barbarian who has the opposite. The ranger and the barbarian want to take out these two priority enemies before moving onto the others. If they split up and each focus on their strength, they finish faster. But if they focus fire, they take the first enemy down quicker at the expense of taking longer to deal with both together. Is that tradeoff worth it? That's a good tactical question! Well, then the strategic trade-off comes at leveling time - the ranger will consider taking something other than "two attack spam" powers, so it's still a win in my books. I don't have a ranger in my party right now, but the barbarian did take a close burst encounter power to deal with situations of being surrounded by enemies, rather than going single-target high damage all the time.
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Feb 16, 2023 15:20
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Oh the entire group tried to help the player optimize, but he specifically shot down all the suggestions for optimal choices. He made the decisions he wanted to and performed worse, rather than doing what everyone else did (numerically optimize, and then flavor the abilities how they wanted.) I'm a very easy going fun-first DM. I told the group that any sort of reskinning on powers was absolutely okay (the hexblade player 100% refused and only described his powers based on the book descriptions). I allowed players to retrain any time, including complete class changes and statistical race changes (you can look like a dragonborn but take the stats of basically any race). The hexblade player started as a swordmage and changed to a warden. I offered to work with him to re-skin the warden powers to work with his previous arcane abilities and instead the player decided no, he just learned nature magic instead (also refused to change racial stats). After our time skip into paragon (we jumped from level 8 to 11 with a 10 year time passage), he respecced again to the elemental hexblade. There's not a lot you can do when a player stubbornly refuses optimization assistance and then complains that he's not optimal. My original point was that as a GM you have such full control over the monsters and behind the screen activity that you can put a pretty heavy hand on bending the rules/math to make combats more exciting. The flip side is that you can lead a player to optimal choices but you can't actually make the player take those choices. It really sucks to have someone reject advice, complain they're ineffective, and then reject further advice to fix that problem. You can't really give a player more power without it being obvious to that player and the group and that can lead to a whole different set of problems.
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Feb 16, 2023 15:57
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SynthesisAlpha posted:There's not a lot you can do when a player stubbornly refuses optimization assistance and then complains that he's not optimal. My original point was that as a GM you have such full control over the monsters and behind the screen activity that you can put a pretty heavy hand on bending the rules/math to make combats more exciting. The flip side is that you can lead a player to optimal choices but you can't actually make the player take those choices. It really sucks to have someone reject advice, complain they're ineffective, and then reject further advice to fix that problem. You can't really give a player more power without it being obvious to that player and the group and that can lead to a whole different set of problems. Oof! My condolences. I'm not sure if this problem is system-specific, though. I suppose the equivalent would be building a 3E fighter with low Strength, or a Wizard with low Intelligence, so they are prevented from casting higher-level spells. Or not taking any combat skills in a skills-based system, maybe. I suppose you could give some help by giving them better magic items (what would be the rod equivalent of Staff of Ruin?), but's a band-aid at best. But I'm also not sure that cheating on dice is really the way to solve this. For me as a 4th edition GM, it's really enjoyable to treat combat as a tactical mini-game where I use the encounter budget to create fights, then don't try to cheat or hide dice rolls during the session. I have had bad experiences in 2nd and 3rd editions, when I can accidentally TPK'ed the whole party with a bunch of orcs, whereas the 4e game I've been running the last few years feels a lot more robust. Yes, we lost a bard early on, the PC's came close to a TPK on a couple occasions, and the orc barbarian rolled a few too many death saving throws over the years, but overall, it's been a much smoother experience than what I had with other systems.
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Feb 16, 2023 16:17
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SynthesisAlpha posted:Oh the entire group tried to help the player optimize, but he specifically shot down all the suggestions for optimal choices. He made the decisions he wanted to and performed worse, rather than doing what everyone else did (numerically optimize, and then flavor the abilities how they wanted.) The system really just does not support this, it simply doesn't actually step up to explicitly say this anywhere. To its credit, it does a fair amount to make it very hard to make a truly bad character, though.
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Feb 16, 2023 17:06
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Making flat DR more common is one way to tamp down on the incredible value that 4e bakes into multiattacks in specific, although it's probably hard to calibrate; each hit of a multiattack is going to vary by how much it's weaker than a single attack over different examples, and some "multiattacks" multiply themselves across multiple turns such as Flaming Sphere or similar wizard dailies. Multiattack-blunting DR is also going to have to grow with monster level, since of course player damage bonuses grow with player level and create an increasing delta between how hard a single attack hits as opposed to two. What I wish is that all multiattacks just worked the same way that assassin (the kind that places shrouds) do, where you roll several attacks to determine how many damage dice to add but ultimately only add your static damage bonuses once. You could go farther and basically create a 1/round limit on a character's ability to apply their static damage bonus to the same target my any means, period, or farther still and functionally cut static damage bonuses out of the game.
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Feb 16, 2023 17:22
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Lemon-Lime posted:The system really just does not support this, it simply doesn't actually step up to explicitly say this anywhere. Absolutely! The problem arose from one guy who just chose powers and items and made a middle of the road, functional character. The other 5 players were incredibly optimized and constantly making power plays (enlarged blood pulse on 5 targets, heal the entire party with healer's mercy, drop a brute in a round with an action point turn, etc) and when that happens the regular guy feels left out. He didn't make a BAD character, the hexblade would be totally fine in a group of normally built characters. It's why in later campaigns I was a lot tighter with magic items and instituted a "no dragon magazine" rule. 12Apr1961 posted:But I'm also not sure that cheating on dice is really the way to solve this. For me as a 4th edition GM, it's really enjoyable to treat combat as a tactical mini-game where I use the encounter budget to create fights, then don't try to cheat or hide dice rolls during the session. So I'm not one to cheat on dice rolls. My "cheating" is just, letting the monster survive an extra turn, or modifying the static damage mod depending on the situation, or coming up with a new ability after the monster is bloodied to keep up the pressure. On the fly adjustments to the flow of combat, but I'm never ever going to miss or hit when the dice didn't say that (I don't like using an actual screen so they figure out the accuracy math pretty quickly). This is mostly when a combat is just not exciting and not challenging the players. I don't think I've ever had to pull punches in 4e except MAYBE at very low levels when player options are more limited. I cheat to make it harder not easier. As a note about how OP this 6 person party was I put them up against 3 dragons (at level solos) and they won.
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Feb 16, 2023 17:25
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In terms of fight balance hotfixes, I don't think I'd object to monsters unlocking new powers upon getting bloodied and/or to reinforcements flooding in but I'd get mad if, say, I bloodied an enemy after dealing 30 damage and then noticed later that it took me 50 more damage to actually put it down.
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Feb 16, 2023 18:00
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I won't say that I've never cheated on dice rolls, but I think it always represents a failure of game design that the GM is compensating for in play, at least in tactics-RPGs like 4E. There's nothing wrong with a game that seeks to produce particular outcomes in order to satisfy the players' expectations, and nothing wrong with a game that tests the players on some skill and makes outcomes contingent on that, but they can't both be priority #1 at the same time and the mechanical scaffolding that enables each is, at best, wasted on the other, and at worst outright counterproductive.
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Feb 16, 2023 18:53
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I won't say that I've never cheated on dice rolls, but I think it always represents a failure of game design that the GM is compensating for in play, at least in tactics-RPGs like 4E. There's nothing wrong with a game that seeks to produce particular outcomes in order to satisfy the players' expectations, and nothing wrong with a game that tests the players on some skill and makes outcomes contingent on that, but they can't both be priority #1 at the same time and the mechanical scaffolding that enables each is, at best, wasted on the other, and at worst outright counterproductive. I feel like failure of game design is a bit harsh here. The issue lies more in the hands of the GM than the ruleset. There are so many variables to consider in a game like 4e that the designers can't always properly account for every scenario, and if the GM miscalculates an encounter or rolls hot, the system can't be blamed for those issues. Most of the time dice are terrible at telling stories, and it's up to the GM to make mechanical decisions on the fly when something doesn't work out as planned. This isn't to say the system is perfect, it clearly has problems, but expectations for any system need to be realistic in the sense that we can't reasonably expect any system to account for any possible scenario given the near infinite options afforded to players.
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Feb 16, 2023 19:06
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We can expect honesty and regard from our fellow players, though. If you're going to ignore a dice roll because you think executing on it would hurt the game, that's fine, but don't pretend otherwise.
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Feb 16, 2023 19:18
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Ferrinus posted:We can expect honesty and regard from our fellow players, though. If you're going to ignore a dice roll because you think executing on it would hurt the game, that's fine, but don't pretend otherwise. In the past as a pre-game session zero thing, I've told players something like "this game can have harsh consequences, including your character dying. However, I don't think characters should die randomly - you need to have made choices that led to it, such as by choosing to take big risks. So, I almost always go by the dice but I will occasionally put my thumb on the scale if I think a bad outcome is coming due to my own error (like I designed an encounter badly) or just an absurdly long sequence of bad luck (an enemy just rolls 20s the whole encounter). I also never fudge rolls against the PCs. If an encounter was supposed to be hard but they make it easy, I let them have an easy encounter and just make the next one more difficult. (As an aside, somehow adding another couple of skeletons to the graveyard isn't "cheating" the way a fudging a dice roll is for a lot of folks, even though in both cases it's just the GM exercising their authority over the game world. Odd, when you think about it!) I've never had a group of players object to this approach. Not that I've run that many games, but it's a fair few. I'm sure there are some folks who genuinely want the opportunity to just have their character they've invested months into die because they rolled below 8 while I rolled 15+ on a bunch of consecutive rolls in what should have been a normal, challenging but beatable encounter. But probably they're a minority. It's different when you're running like a joke/comedy game, where character death is more like a slapstick event, and I've played in a game or two like that: but I tend to look for games like Paranoia! for that tone and prefer my D&D to be a bit more serious. Still fun and jokes sometimes, but the time investment in the characters leads me to want them to feel more like people. I've never run a medium-high level game, I should mention that. My players generally don't have easy access to resurrection. I think that if your characters are more or less impervious to death you have much less reason to fudge dice rolls in their favor. This doesn't mean we never have permanent PC death. But it's more likely to happen because a player chooses heroic risk taking, which can be tragic but makes sense within the game; if you die tackling the BBEG off the edge of the cliff, that's way better than dying to a random encounter with some ghouls because the GM forgot how brutal level drain can be, or dying in a random encounter with some goblins because you whiffed a bunch of easy attacks, got stabbed into negatives, and then whiffed a bunch of saves in a row.
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Feb 16, 2023 19:42
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Ferrinus posted:We can expect honesty and regard from our fellow players, though. If you're going to ignore a dice roll because you think executing on it would hurt the game, that's fine, but don't pretend otherwise. That's true and fair, but that will always occur in the realm of TTRPGs where one person is the DM and the rest are players, but even that specific issue can be rectified by the GM rolling openly (which is what I do). There is no such thing as a perfectly balanced game (even in chess white wins more often than black).
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Feb 16, 2023 19:45
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Verisimilidude posted:That's true and fair, but that will always occur in the realm of TTRPGs where one person is the DM and the rest are players, but even that specific issue can be rectified by the GM rolling openly (which is what I do). There is no such thing as a perfectly balanced game (even in chess white wins more often than black). While I have to point out that gesturing at the impossibility of "perfect balance" is 100% of the time a tell that you're about to be hit with some bad game design, balance (between one player and another or between players and NPC antagonists) doesn't really figure into this at all. It's a question of whether the DM understands that they're playing a game with the other participants or if the DM just sees generating the illusion that a game is being played as one of their several responsibilities.
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Feb 16, 2023 19:50
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Leperflesh posted:In the past as a pre-game session zero thing, I've told players something like "this game can have harsh consequences, including your character dying. However, I don't think characters should die randomly - you need to have made choices that led to it, such as by choosing to take big risks. So, I almost always go by the dice but I will occasionally put my thumb on the scale if I think a bad outcome is coming due to my own error (like I designed an encounter badly) or just an absurdly long sequence of bad luck (an enemy just rolls 20s the whole encounter). I feel the same way. A player death should be possible but as a result of the player's actions. Experienced DMs can sniff out when an encounter is going poorly for players, and it's up to them to make the decision to run things as is, or make some kind of change. I've gone as far as to make a character's sword suddenly something much more powerful. I think there was an encounter between the players and some undead, and the players were having a real bad time of it. Rolling poorly, and on top of that the encounter was way overpowered for their level, two things they could not possible account for. They had found a magic sword previously and hadn't identified it yet, so I made it into a +1 sword of undead slaying or something, and the players went from being really frustrated and scared to excited when the player's weapon began to glow and undead started dying in one swing. It was cinematic and memorable, and my players bring it up to me often as a great moment in their games.
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Feb 16, 2023 19:51
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Ferrinus posted:While I have to point out that gesturing at the impossibility of "perfect balance" is 100% of the time a tell that you're about to be hit with some bad game design, balance (between one player and another or between players and NPC antagonists) doesn't really figure into this at all. It's a question of whether the DM understands that they're playing a game with the other participants or if the DM just sees generating the illusion that a game is being played as one of their several responsibilities. I think good GMing is a mix of both of these qualities. I like the Seth Skorkowsky example of an epic fight between the BBEG and the last standing PC. In one scenario, they roll initiative, the BBEG goes first, rolls a crit, insta-kills the PC and the game ends. In the other scenario, they roll initiative, the BBEG goes first, rolls a crit but the DM just says "he hits you for 11 points of damage", the player gets his licks in before ultimately dying and the game ends. In the first scenario the outcome is the PCs lose, the campaign ends and the players are disappointed and frustrated. In the second scenario you end up with ultimately the same outcome, but the players are excited and thrilled to have almost beaten the BBEG in single combat. The second scenario is essentially an illusion, but the players don't know that. All they see is the epic fight they almost won. In my 20+ years of playing and running D&D and other RPGs, most players would prefer the second scenario to the first, assuming of course the GM doesn't ruin the magic for them by saying it was fake from the start. GMing is a mixture of illusion and mechanics. Being a good GM is knowing when to say "this mechanic is getting in the way of my players having fun" and throwing it out or making some kind of change on the fly. The best GMs can do this without the players ever knowing the difference.
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Feb 16, 2023 19:57
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I'd rather have the first, personally but I also play every video game on "iron man" almost any time they let me. I like being forced to accept bad results and take my narrative, my personal story, in unexpected ways.
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Feb 16, 2023 20:02
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i agree with what Ferrinus and Leperflesh have said, but it's also slightly perpendicular to what i'm trying to get across I don't think "dice are bad at telling stories" is accurate analysis. I think randomness is frequently misused by designers who haven't really done their due diligence and are just copying someone else or defaulting to it when hidden information, resource management / bidding wars, etc. might do a better job, but that's not quite the same thing. What I'm saying is that one of the ways that D&D, and games like it, produce stories about heroics is by embodying it in the mechanics. To cheat on the dice -- after consulting your players or without ever telling them -- is to say "this shouldn't have been left to chance" (in which case the failure of game design is that the rules shouldn't have called for dice there) or, even more dramatically, "this outcome should not have been at risk, on any metric" (in which case it probably shouldn't have been run in D&D and all, because then what was the point of learning all that poo poo?) or put another way, it gets back to the question of whether players should identify with or direct their characters; to cheat on the dice is to come down firmly on the side of direction. which isn't a bad thing by itself, but the point of direction is to maximize player's control over the narrative, while the point of identification / embodiment is to heighten the emotional experience of play by taking away direct control and throwing players into situations more-or-less analogous to the ones their characters experience; to require that they be skillful and lucky, and be rewarded for and in proportion to it, not just tell a deterministic story about someone who in the fiction is skillful and lucky. e: people don't like losing games, but they also don't like a sandbagging opponent -- someone doing that has basically cheated you of the real satisfaction of victory. the beauty of tactics-RPGs, and in my opinion pretty much the only thing that can possibly justify D&D-esque levels of crunch, is that it allows the GM to be disfavored by the odds without the GM, as a player at the table, having to actually sandbag. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 20:10 on Feb 16, 2023 |
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Feb 16, 2023 20:08
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Jack B Nimble posted:I'd rather have the first, personally but I also play every video game on "iron man" almost any time they let me. I like being forced to accept bad results and take my narrative, my personal story, in unexpected ways. I think that's fair, but in a scenario where you can't witness the GM's rolls, you wouldn't know the difference anyway. An example of a bad GM would be one who rolls openly, the dice determine some kind of outcome, and the GM says "actually, this happens instead" and all of the players know it's GM interference. That takes players out of the magic of the system and breaks the illusion. If you're going to roll openly, you have to live with the outcome of the dice, and unfortunately dice don't always tell good stories.
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Feb 16, 2023 20:10
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a good GM might occasionally choose preserving the illusion over everyone being miserable that they lost, but a good game should never put them in that position in the first place and also if you're going to play something that's basically 75% wargame you probably shouldn't be that averse to ever losing, really (although, again, some of this reflects more on the game failing to create the right incentives and communicate them to the table, than on the players for not reacting "correctly" -- e.g. what are the consequences for losing a fight, and are they interesting or just tedious?)
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Feb 16, 2023 20:13
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:a good GM might occasionally choose preserving the illusion over everyone being miserable that they lost, but a good game should never put them in that position in the first place Most if not all scenarios/encounters, except of course pre-written modules which I think are much closer to the point of your argument, are granted to players via the GM, not the rules as written. Rules can only provide guidelines for a GM designing scenarios and encounters, and if those are causing a lot of the issues you're speaking about, then I concede to your point, but in my experience the encounter building in 4e is very good.
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Feb 16, 2023 20:18
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Verisimilidude posted:I think good GMing is a mix of both of these qualities. Most players would prefer a third scenario in which their PC actually, factually put up a good fight. If their DM is sneaky enough, they might confuse your second scenario with that third scenario, but would they prefer, consciously, to be fooled? If they would they've made a series of very strange choices to end up in their position, because the choice to play D&D at all is now being seriously called into question.
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Feb 16, 2023 20:21
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Ferrinus posted:Most players would prefer a third scenario in which their PC actually, factually put up a good fight. If their DM is sneaky enough, they might confuse your second scenario with that third scenario, but would they prefer, consciously, to be fooled? If they would they've made a series of very strange choices to end up in their position, because the choice to play D&D at all is now being seriously called into question. I thought it was weird too, but I asked my current group of players if they preferred me fudging rolls from time to time, or if they preferred following the outcome of dice results 100% of the time. All of them said the first option, because my players trust me to not abuse that power and to only use it for the benefit of their enjoyment. It's unfortunately something I've gotten away from with the move to VTTs, as it's often easier to run the system following the result of dice rolls rather than fudging them occasionally. I've had to shift to other methods, such as tweaking hit point levels, modifying to hit numbers, and reducing damage dice on the fly.
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Feb 16, 2023 20:27
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Verisimilidude posted:Most if not all scenarios/encounters, except of course pre-written modules which I think are much closer to the point of your argument, are granted to players via the GM, not the rules as written. Rules can only provide guidelines for a GM designing scenarios and encounters, and if those are causing a lot of the issues you're speaking about, then I concede to your point, but in my experience the encounter building in 4e is very good. I actually don't agree at all about engagement with the rules only happening through the GM as a medium. Players can read the rulebook on their own, and if they use what they read there to inform their decisions, that's still direct engagement with the rules even if the GM is the final adjudicator of rules disputes -- and also, separately from this (and probably departing from D&D RAW, admittedly), there isn't actually any particular reason that the GM should be the final adjudicator of rules disputes. I do agree that encounter building in 4E is very good; that's why I like it.  To the extent that I still think it's flawed, it's usually in subtler but more fundamental ways (like not breaking down the conventional Dungeon Master role down into its constituent parts). Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 20:32 on Feb 16, 2023 |
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Feb 16, 2023 20:30
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Verisimilidude posted:I thought it was weird too, but I asked my current group of players if they preferred me fudging rolls from time to time, or if they preferred following the outcome of dice results 100% of the time. All of them said the first option, because my players trust me to not abuse that power and to only use it for the benefit of their enjoyment. I would also prefer that the DM be willing to ignore the rules when they aren't serving the group. The question is, do your players expressly want not to know?
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Feb 16, 2023 20:30
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:the beauty of tactics-RPGs, and in my opinion pretty much the only thing that can possibly justify D&D-esque levels of crunch, is that it allows the GM to be disfavored by the odds without the GM, as a player at the table, having to actually sandbag. I think the GM has dual roles, as both a player of the game at the table in the sense you describe here, and as a referee and arbiter who is explicitly given the job of making choices about how the game will go that keeps it within their individual and/or shared vision. The RPG rules provide a structure for that engagement, but at least in D&D, the GM cannot simply "play by the rules" because they are actively creating and implementing rules of a sort as they go. A simple example is encounter design. Yes, there's guidelines like challenge ratings for what should be in an encounter, but the GM is told to optionally include choices about terrain, cover, special effects in the encounter, and the decision to add a particular piece of cover is a creative act. Even in games with as tactical an implementation as 4e give the GM freedom to add improvised or houseruled effects to an encounter: you could give a magic door a spell-like effect even though no such door with that effect exists in the monster manual, for example, and that is clearly within the spirit of the rules. From that perspective, the GM is making essentially arbitrary decisions that could kill the PCs or make an encounter trivial. They can't just "play the game" the way participants of a boardgame engage solely with what the rules of the boardgame anticipate. So the discussion here is, at least somewhat, about the power and freedom for the GM to make decisions on the spot to alter decisions they previously made. Yes, sometimes it's the "rules of the game" that left some outcome up to a die roll when perhaps it shouldn't have been; but it's also at least as often the GM who created that situation in the first place, such as by choosing a particular monster, terrain, spell, etc. to place in front of the players, and choosing not to modify the stat block in some way beforehand. I could replace an at-will attack power of a monster, taking away its dice roll and giving it a flat damage result that always hits. Or I could give its spell a low, easy save. Or I could just add "doesn't affect dragonborn" to the description. That's within the bounds of the rules. Does it matter if I do that before the PCs enter the encounter, or, after I roll a die during the encounter and decide the result shouldn't have been left to chance? Ultimately the challenge the players face is all coming from the GM, one way or another. The system is a tool for the GM to use. The GM can choose their tools.
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Feb 16, 2023 20:31
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It's true that encounter design isn't nailed down to quite the same extent that e.g. setting up the table for an actual wargame is, or as much of the initial state of a CCG or whatever. But I think it's still significant that it's siloed in time from the act of actually playing out the combat; designing an encounter in D&D isn't done with the same intent as competitive list-building in Warmahordes or Magic, most likely it's done to create something that the players have a (high, but not completely trivial)) chance of succeeding at, and in 4E's case making them expend a certain amount of resources, etc. But as long as it's not asking you to do both at the same time, the rigor of the first system doesn't have to be perfect to preserve the integrity of the second. It just needs to be accurate enough that your intent as a designer is realized without demanding undue levels of trial-and-error, and that, once you have a relatively-balanced encounter, the variance is bounded enough that neither the dice nor sincere best-effort play as "team monster" are going to break it. e: Also I'd totally play a game where encounter design was that nailed down, but you still had structures for long campaigns, narrative interludes, character development, etc. and the GM's role literally was just resource management and optimization instead of wearing two hats. 4E isn't that game, but it's closer than anything I'm aware of except maybe a few games that are really obviously influenced by it. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 20:46 on Feb 16, 2023 |
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Feb 16, 2023 20:42
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I actually don't agree at all about engagement with the rules only happening through the GM as a medium. Players can read the rulebook on their own, and if they use what they read there to inform their decisions, that's still direct engagement with the rules even if the GM is the final adjudicator of rules disputes -- and also, separately from this (and probably departing from D&D RAW, admittedly), there isn't actually any particular reason that the GM should be the final adjudicator of rules disputes. This is a question of GMing theory, but the way I run my games is "player tells me what they want to do, I tell them what they need to roll". This is of course done much easier in less mechanical, more fluid systems than 4e, but it works perfectly fine as a method. My more experienced players know the rules as well, and speed up their turns appropriately by jumping right into using powers and abilities on their character sheets, and I never tweak anything that has to do with the players and their characters (unless I discuss it with them first), but anything outside of the player's immediate control is fluid and subject to change at my discretion. Guided by the rules, but ultimately up to me to adjudicate the application or the outcome. This doesn't mean I'm simply choosing when to do anything. I follow the stats of monsters, their abilities, and I even roll my dice openly on our VTT so the players know those specific outcomes. But every now and then I nudge something in a direction that is more in-tune with expectations of the scenario itself. It's why I believe the best time to be a player in a game and the best players to have in your group are new players, exactly because they don't know the rules. The game is a mystery to them, and the magic of the illusion of the game and the story that unfolds is its most potent.
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Feb 16, 2023 20:42
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Ferrinus posted:I would also prefer that the DM be willing to ignore the rules when they aren't serving the group. The question is, do your players expressly want not to know? The cat's out of the bag unfortunately, but they don't know the extent of the illusion. And unless I tell them, they'll never know. Again, I'll reiterate that I'm not making up all results whole-cloth. I'm gently nudging things from time to time, maybe once every couple sessions. Verisimilidude fucked around with this message at 20:46 on Feb 16, 2023 |
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Feb 16, 2023 20:44
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