In my last post, I mentioned This Post of Shieldhaven's, and now Wombat's gone and responded here. So now, I must needs venture my opinions on the topic.
I have an odd position in the groups I game with, in that I'm generally the only Person of Color(tm; also, unless you count the Angry Cuban in our AE games). Incidentally, until having the conversation with Wombat (who is white, but a jew), I was also the only person who generally felt that the presence of humans was okay, sure, but not necessary in a game world.
So, how this conversation even started:
Shieldhaven was talking about the new races he'd created during his late night maundering, and mentioned that, in order to have people actually pick his classes, perhaps he should strip a game with them in down to just humans and the new races. To which my question was, "Er... why include humans?"
Now, as implied above, I realise that my question and feelings on the matter are solidly in the minority. Anyone who knows me even a little will not be shocked by this. Shieldhaven felt, at base, that giving the players something understandable and familiar-- i.e., humans-- was important, so as not to lose them. I marked that the new races-- the Veytikka in particular-- were written in such a way that they kind of did not make sense unless you had another, baseline race to compare them to. The Beruch as well, and the Rindari have not been written yet, but-- they were all designed to be minorities. And while this was not, from talking about it, a conscious decision on Shieldhaven's part, it was... curious to me.
And here is where I will dispense (for the moment), with the issue of player investment and whether or not players will buy into a game setting where there's no human baseline. I, personally, would like to play a race in the context of what they're like internally, _without_ comparing them to a human genero-culture. As is pointed out in both of the posts I mention, there's sort of a problem with humans-- they typically wind up with their racial trait being, "generic". Of course we know what humans are like-- we are humans, aren't we?
Thing is, as game designers are themselves human, apart from some physiological details, and a pointed attempt to make the things that they feel, do, or care about completely unrelatable, any new race is going to be some variety of "like humans, but..."
Take the Veytikka. They have certain physiological features (claws, snout-like faces) that make them inhuman and change the way they interact with their environment, but as far as their attitudes and actions go, they're actually pretty darn human, but...
...They eat carrion. They're well designed for it, and for them it is the right and proper thing to do. Thing is, a human culture could just as well do that, out of some philosophical inclination, and then we get into trickier issues of intra-species race. Apart from that, the racial culture is given as tribal, and they are suited to some specific classes, like most D&D races. They're statted to fit into 3e and 4e D&D, so they'll be further colored by the rather familiar expectations of the classes they choose. Tl;dr, the text already explains the ways that Veyttika differ from humans in the context of the player's own person and culture, so why would there need to be humans in play to underscore the difference?
As part of my objection to the philosophical part of the "people need a familiar race to be the point of reference" is actually the "point of reference" part. Because I am human, I will automatically be thinking of how this race is different from a human. It bothers me, to then have to, in play, be ever conscious of my character in the context of, "I am different from this other group, which is normal."
I realise that this does not address the issue of turning off players through an excess of difference, but I feel that that aspect of the question is dealt with at length and better elsewhere, and I'd like to deal with the aspects so avoided, which are, frankly, relevant to me. Let it also be said that I don't blame anyone for choosing not to deal with stickier issues and assumptions when it comes to race in gaming, but... well, I think that it's just possible that part of the reason for my preferences in story telling and roles therein might have something to do with my own background, and the same for other folks. This doesn't say anything about myself or anyone else as people, but is objectively interesting to me.
Let me use another example, which has about an equal chance of refuting or supporting my point: the 4e race, Wilden.
Wilden are supposed to be a new race just out of the feywild, terribly curious and eager to learn about new cultures and races. They're a tablua rasa, looking for things to ape so they can learn how to be actual people. They have a hatred of abominations, but apart from that... well, they're plant people.
And let me tell you, they're hard as hell to play, esp in the party I'm in.
I picked one up in Chessenta as a power gaming option-- I wanted to play a Protection Shaman, and they had the best stat options, and were also something I've never played before. Now, I am in a party with two humans and an Orc-- fighter, avenger, and rogue. Given that my racial MO seems to be, "try to be like the others you're around," how do you suppose I play my character?
Answer: Well, like a bear shaman. Because that's what I'm actually doing, leaves or no leaves. The role of the Shaman is much stronger than the role implied by my race, except in the (hasn't actually happened yet) incidence where I need to use a racial power. And the same is true for humans, actually-- except in AE, where humans are marginalised as compared to Giants, I generally see human players playing the trope for their class. Only Grish, the Orc, plays a racial trope to any extent, and even that is second to his outstanding thievery. Well, and Ullentarni the Dragonborn, but that's because his racial story was supported by the game, and the circumstances in which we encountered him. For the rest of us, race doesn't actually matter, or much inform how we play.
So... what does all of that mean for the presentation of a game, before and during play?
First of all, I have the strong temptation to strip stats from races, and give them basically the human stat choice. If including humans in the game, I'd be further inclined to write specific racial abilities for them which were something other than, "I'm so generic, I can do anything with my generic self," depending on the setting. That is to say-- If other races have specific, geographically or otherwise bound cultures, it makes more sense in a given setting to have the humans be so too, than otherwise. In my game, I get around it by having most races be pretty much ubiquitous-- only races of a fey or outsider sort of origin are in any way concentrated, or have cultural norms outside of the norms for their region. I did not go so far as to change up races that much, mostly because my game is at least partially about teaching 4e to its players. But I think next time, I might, so as to make the race choice more purely about preference, vs. optimization.
And I'm tempted, especially if offering a setting where it makes sense to do so or I am offering all-new races, to just not have humans in the game. Now, it's at this point that the Player Investment issues come to the fore. We'll go ahead and take it as read that players dislike having high barriers to entry, and/or having to do a lot of reading in order to play a game, or understand their characters, unless doing said research was their idea in the first place. So let's think about how to address this.
1) First of all, sticking to a well known system, OR a system where everyone is expecting to do reading because it is all new. Personally, I prefer the former, partly because I like D&D so well and well... I am used to it. This could, however, work okay in a system where the expectation of newness is working for you. Nonetheless, I think that changing as little as possible about a system that the players (assuming all the players are familiar with said system) know, and explaining early on the conciets of the setting, you'll probably have a better chance of not throwing them off. In particular, I would not introduce any new classes, but have everyone stick to existing stuff.
2) Keep written material to a minimum. At most, I'd keep the info about the size of any racial write-up in a character creation book. If the setting is such that it demands it, include info about how the race fits into the world, how they behave amongst themselves, and what, if any, prejudices and assumptions they have about the rest of the world. This is the part where you're pretty much highlighting what makes them different from humans, what sorts of stories they are likely to have as a race. In all other ways, it should be clear, or at least safely assumed, that they are just like any other people.
3) Support the races in-world. Once you're in the game, the structures and social constructs of the world should reflect the people who live in it, and the GM's job is to convey this to the players in as seamless a manner as possible. Players are likely to look to NPCs for clues on whether a thing is common or unusual, good or bad if they have no other guide, and a couple of lines of dialogue can speak volumes about how the players should feel about a given situation or people. It's all right for there to be minorities and marginalized groups, or majorities that are not generic, but it's important for the world itself to convey that that actually means.
The example I can think of at the moment is actually pretty problematic-- Karnath, in the Eberron setting, specifically as run by Wombat. This is a place where Undead Soldiers are the norm, and the whole country supports that construct pretty completely. If we, the players, had been playing all Karnathi, the world did a very good job of playing this particular social construct up as normal, and we'd have had to do some twisting to not be at least tolerant of it. As it was, we all played people from elsewhere, at least one of whom had character reasons for objecting strongly. My character, being from a country that had formerly allied with Karnath (and which no longer exists), didn't really have an opinion one way or the other until very late, though she had some very strong in-game pressure to find the Karnathi Military Structure pretty darn appalling. I am marginally curious as to what would happen if we _had_ all been playing people who were raised to accept this situation as normal.
Permit me, for a moment, to refer to a thing that I mentioned earlier, about my problems with a culture that can only be viewed through the lens of a somebody else. That can be done well, and the ways in which it is done, interestingly, change the "point of reference" race/culture. Let's look at the Veytikka, for example. In a world where this race is common and reasonably accepted, it'd make a certain amount of sense for some non-Veytikka races to say, be all right with having established places to dispose of their dead, for Veytikka to come and clear away, in a symbiotic sort of way. Or to have some shady characters try to scoop up all the dead things before the Veytikka can get to them, and try to sell them back at a profit, controlling their food supply. It all depends on where you want to go with them, and if you're having the Veytikka be hunters who kill and eat their food raw, or if they say, disdain hunting and prefer finding as a cultural Thing.
But anyway, there is a certain point to be made there about the usefulness of humans-- it is easier to change them, and the way they see things or act, to accommodate their relationships to other races, than it is to do the same for races where one's understanding of them is learned. When we're talking about human vs. non-human, that's pretty much all of them.
I'll save this topic as it relates to non-European-based cultures amongst humans in Sci-fi/Fantasy/Gaming for another post, as this one has gotten really quite rambly and long.
Showing posts with label chessenta. Show all posts
Showing posts with label chessenta. Show all posts
Monday, February 7, 2011
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Session Roundup #1
Partially for my own benefit, and partially to satisfy my own nonsensical desire to order the universe, I am going to try, each Thursday, writing up a brief rundown of the previous week's games. It is possible that All My Gaming will be changing up soon, which makes me very sad. Also there's been some breaks in the schedule of late, but the past two sessions of various games have been worth mentioning.
B's Game, last Tuesday-- We finished up a storyline in which, from the little we could tell, the Raven Queen sent her minions after Hane, my Revenant Assassin. We didn't find out much of what was going on, but she'd taken over the Imperial Palace, and we had the Crown Prince (a 6th level warlord) with us. We had him wait outside the door to the throne room while we tackled a couple of Ebony Guard and two Gawd Awful Hounds with a nasty fear aura, that dropped our attacks by 2 when we were in aura 5. Yeah, bad times.
On top of that, after we'd committed to wiping out the Guard as fast as possible (so we could deal with the hounds, which we'd fought before and which have unholy hit points), a Revenant Lurker showed up, with poison daggers and an eye towards making our lives bloody miserable. Fortunately, (though the player wasn't there, we had a Bard.
And the Bard had Insult to Passivity.
Insult To Passivity basically dazes an enemy until their are attacked. This is important-- they can take damage and stay dazed, so long as they're not attacked. Enter My Assassin's Shroud, and the feat that allows me to deal shroud damage without removing the shrouds when I use my Dark Reaping racial ability.
So this chick was super unhappy, trying to get close enough to hit us with daggers on her next turn, and eventually trying to run off... but we got there first and shut the doors on her. So sad for her, not having phasing. Finally, after we'd (well, mostly I'd) been wrecked by the hounds, and pretty much put them down, Our Mageblade went and started wailing on her, so she could finally use her powers. Which were pretty brutal-- she immediately went invis on us and hid behind some tapistries.
Shame I'd put Hunter's Eye on her, since she was my shroud target, and thus could find her no matter where she went. It also gave me +2 to attack her, but that's neither here nor there. Also, Norman-the-Runepriest-Barbarian-Hybrid-Dwarf (Also my Assassin's descendant) had Earthsense, and could tell where she went.
Oops.
So we wrecked her pretty hard, and that was awesome. I have to say, this was a really cool fight, and everyone got a chance to feel pretty awesome. Our Mageblade has specialized in AC improving stuff, and the things that targeted AC were balanced in such a way that while they could get most of us, they couldn't get him, most of the time. Norman also did some splendid damage, combined with healing like a madman, and our Wizard was... well, our wizard. But enough about Magic Missile in 4e. Because we wrecked her so hard, we didn't find out much more about what was going on, but the Crown Prince and the Emperor were very happy with us, the Raven Queen's shroud went away, and we all were extremely satisfied to leave the encounter with pretty much nothing left but at-wills.
Chessenta, monday-- Chessenta: Book of Serpents is run by He Who Stands in Fire, and is the most brutal game in which I play. This session was no different.
As of last session, we wound up in the town where we'd received our first quest-- we had the Axe that we were supposed to return to the town's church, and had, uh... gotten sidetracked helping out some Brass Dragons before taking it back. Of course, when we get there, the entire town's been swallowed by the Shadowfell.
Oops.
We made our way into the Shadow-Copy of the town last session, via a pretty darn neat gating system which stuck each of us in a black room with a horrible monster. For me, this meant sitting there trying not stay alive while my poor Shaman was wailed upon brutally. The others killed their monsters and teleported to another of the four rooms. Naturally, they got to me last.
But I was just fine.
Anyway, after I was rescued by my buddies, we found ourselves attempting to sneak through a city full of undead and shadow creatures towards a church. It was really just one of those sessions where we could not pass a skill challenge to save our hides. The sheer quantity of 1s rolled on 20 sided die were staggering. Thus, we wound up in two really quite brutal encounters with shadow creatures and horrible undead fleshy-monsters, one of which dropped some interesting papers. The second encounter involved these dudes who not only were able to turn invisible (and threw poisoned daggers), they created huge freaking zones of total darkness. Ultimately, we had to just frigging run away, and then try to lay in wait for them, hoping that they'd go back visible. That worked all right, and once we could, you know, hit them, we did so with much vigor. Also, our combat rolls suddenly got better. We then got to the church, rescued the mayor of the real town, and realised that we were going to have to go into the creepy sewers beneath the shadow town after all. The best part was hanging the axe back up in the church, which got us a happy quest reward: all of our weapons now do Radiant Damage as long as we're in the Shadowfell.
Hurrah super useful quest rewards!
B's Game, last Tuesday-- We finished up a storyline in which, from the little we could tell, the Raven Queen sent her minions after Hane, my Revenant Assassin. We didn't find out much of what was going on, but she'd taken over the Imperial Palace, and we had the Crown Prince (a 6th level warlord) with us. We had him wait outside the door to the throne room while we tackled a couple of Ebony Guard and two Gawd Awful Hounds with a nasty fear aura, that dropped our attacks by 2 when we were in aura 5. Yeah, bad times.
On top of that, after we'd committed to wiping out the Guard as fast as possible (so we could deal with the hounds, which we'd fought before and which have unholy hit points), a Revenant Lurker showed up, with poison daggers and an eye towards making our lives bloody miserable. Fortunately, (though the player wasn't there, we had a Bard.
And the Bard had Insult to Passivity.
Insult To Passivity basically dazes an enemy until their are attacked. This is important-- they can take damage and stay dazed, so long as they're not attacked. Enter My Assassin's Shroud, and the feat that allows me to deal shroud damage without removing the shrouds when I use my Dark Reaping racial ability.
So this chick was super unhappy, trying to get close enough to hit us with daggers on her next turn, and eventually trying to run off... but we got there first and shut the doors on her. So sad for her, not having phasing. Finally, after we'd (well, mostly I'd) been wrecked by the hounds, and pretty much put them down, Our Mageblade went and started wailing on her, so she could finally use her powers. Which were pretty brutal-- she immediately went invis on us and hid behind some tapistries.
Shame I'd put Hunter's Eye on her, since she was my shroud target, and thus could find her no matter where she went. It also gave me +2 to attack her, but that's neither here nor there. Also, Norman-the-Runepriest-Barbarian-Hybrid-Dwarf (Also my Assassin's descendant) had Earthsense, and could tell where she went.
Oops.
So we wrecked her pretty hard, and that was awesome. I have to say, this was a really cool fight, and everyone got a chance to feel pretty awesome. Our Mageblade has specialized in AC improving stuff, and the things that targeted AC were balanced in such a way that while they could get most of us, they couldn't get him, most of the time. Norman also did some splendid damage, combined with healing like a madman, and our Wizard was... well, our wizard. But enough about Magic Missile in 4e. Because we wrecked her so hard, we didn't find out much more about what was going on, but the Crown Prince and the Emperor were very happy with us, the Raven Queen's shroud went away, and we all were extremely satisfied to leave the encounter with pretty much nothing left but at-wills.
Chessenta, monday-- Chessenta: Book of Serpents is run by He Who Stands in Fire, and is the most brutal game in which I play. This session was no different.
As of last session, we wound up in the town where we'd received our first quest-- we had the Axe that we were supposed to return to the town's church, and had, uh... gotten sidetracked helping out some Brass Dragons before taking it back. Of course, when we get there, the entire town's been swallowed by the Shadowfell.
Oops.
We made our way into the Shadow-Copy of the town last session, via a pretty darn neat gating system which stuck each of us in a black room with a horrible monster. For me, this meant sitting there trying not stay alive while my poor Shaman was wailed upon brutally. The others killed their monsters and teleported to another of the four rooms. Naturally, they got to me last.
But I was just fine.
Anyway, after I was rescued by my buddies, we found ourselves attempting to sneak through a city full of undead and shadow creatures towards a church. It was really just one of those sessions where we could not pass a skill challenge to save our hides. The sheer quantity of 1s rolled on 20 sided die were staggering. Thus, we wound up in two really quite brutal encounters with shadow creatures and horrible undead fleshy-monsters, one of which dropped some interesting papers. The second encounter involved these dudes who not only were able to turn invisible (and threw poisoned daggers), they created huge freaking zones of total darkness. Ultimately, we had to just frigging run away, and then try to lay in wait for them, hoping that they'd go back visible. That worked all right, and once we could, you know, hit them, we did so with much vigor. Also, our combat rolls suddenly got better. We then got to the church, rescued the mayor of the real town, and realised that we were going to have to go into the creepy sewers beneath the shadow town after all. The best part was hanging the axe back up in the church, which got us a happy quest reward: all of our weapons now do Radiant Damage as long as we're in the Shadowfell.
Hurrah super useful quest rewards!
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Combat can be fun!
(Another re-post from LJ, originally viewable here. Incidentally, you will sometimes see references to a gentleman called B. B is a fellow gamer, one of my DMs, and also my boyfriend ~K.)
Instead of the post I was going to originally make, which was a run-down of my problems with 2e and 3.x D&D, I am going to sum those up, and get to a topic about which I actually care a good deal more. To wit, earlier editions do not have 4e's barriers to player entry, obtuse and overwhelming character creation system, or near-necessary online program that pisses you off when you realise you need it after having spent a ton of cash on books. 4e does not have the huge vagaries and limitations of role that previous editions do, and adds economy of action to many different things, healing in particular-- plus you realise from the outset when you've built a character badly, instead of only figuring it out 6 levels later, after you've been convincing yourself this whole time that one day, you'd be awesome, really. Proponents of both systems argue that it is the other one which is actually limiting and frustrating-- I know that I do. So, I have come to the conclusion that it is a matter of A) what one is used to, and what sorts of limitations you are willing to accept in presentation, and b) What tools help you, personally, become immersed in the game. I would like to think that there are ways for those who love the old editions to share their preferred format with those (i.e.-- me) who have become spoiled by 4e, and for those who are skeptical or downright hostile to 4e come into it in such a way that they'll enjoy the new things that are coming out for the system.
First of all, let's talk about what not to do if you're running or playing in your first 4e game. Primarily, and while I have said this before, it bears repeating-- Start At First Level. When I ran 1/2e/3.x, I generally would start a game at 3rd level, particularly if there were any spellcasters in the party. 2 words-- Haste, fireball. Also, you might possibly have a hit point or two by now. This will not be so much an issue in 4e, so it's better to get used to the way things work from 1st, than to try to jump up. Also, this is easier on the DM, so that they can get a feel for how to stat encounters for this party.
Converting your current game to 4e and keeping going is a really bad idea for every possible reason. For one, you're still in the old game mindset, people are used to what they can and can't do, you have established mechanics and ways of doing things that are natural to the characters and the game. Suddenly switching to Powersets, condensed skill lists, magic items that work a lot differently (and this is huge-- changing up people's stuff is a really good way to tear them out of your world and make them angry, /especially/ if it is something they use all the time-- also, You Don't Want To Convert Them All, Trust Me), non-combat characters suddenly becoming Useful and Important in combat-- no no, is too much. Play out your current campaign in the way you're accustomed, and run your 4e game new. This will also give you, the DM, the ability to get used to the Monster Manual, and the way statblocks work for monsters.
I hadn't noticed, but a friend pointed out this weekend that the Monster Manuals don't physically describe the monsters. Spacewise, you see, it seems to make so much more sense to include blurbs about how the monsters fight tactically-- so that if you're say, throwing goblins at your players (this being the 1st 4e encounter that I've run, and yesh), you can throw a bunch of different kinds of goblins who all fight differently, and have powers that help out their allies and do horrid things to the players. This is pretty durned neat to me. Goblin Tactics is awesome. As players encounter more of them, they learn who to kill first and how-- and it isn't always the caster, though sometimes, ja (If the caster is a Goblin Hexer and there are other goblins on the board, OMG KILL IT FIRST, KILL IT WITH FIRE). Anyway, hit dice don't really exist-- all monsters of a given name and level are going to have the same hp. This is something, by the by, that the players a) don't know unless you tell them and b) if you really want to, you can modify. It is very easy to raise/lower hp if you really want to, or if you want to tweak fight length, but it's not likely to be necessary. Also, there's the matter of minions-- don't skimp on them. Your AOE casters will really like being able to mop them up, and they have some interesting strategic uses for the standard monsters in a given encounter.
Which brings me to another potentially problematic bit-- if you are not used to using minis and a map (grid, not hex) in your campaigns, in 4e you pretty much have to. 4e has a lot of forced movement, terrain with various effects, and variable ranges. This can be a roadblock for players who are either not used to those, or are not used to the sheer, laid-open mechanics of movement and move actions being so much a part of the game. When learning it, I completely understand it breaking one from immersion. Here's a place where the DM and Player aspect can fix this-- it is, like so many things, a matter of describing what you're doing. A lot of powers have wonderful descriptions, as for instance:
Forceful Drag
You dig your fingers into a foe and drag the struggling opponent across the battlefield.
Encounter Martial
Move Action Personal
Requirement: You must have a creature grabbed.
Effect: You move your speed. For each square you move, you slide a creature grabbed by you 1 square to a square adjacent to you. The creature remains grabbed, and you do not provoke an opportunity attack from the grabbed creature for this movement. At the end of the move, you can end the grab to knock the creature prone.
Published in Martial Power 2.
Here's where the roleplay part comes in-- and it is some badass roleplay, as your fighter, having grabbed ahold of some critter or bad guy explains how they are hauling their sorry ass across the field, and then deciding whether they want to knock dude to the floor or not. Hells. Yeah.
I really want to talk about limitation, and who can do things like grab monsters and how, and the differing roles of skills and their base stats and the like, but I have realised suddenly that this is a heap big topic that I'll have to maunder about at another time.
So playing with map and minis in 4e has convinced me that one of my big mistakes in previous editions was not using them for combat. The inclination to use very small spaces and non-specific locations made combat kind of arbitrary, like turn-based video game combat. This is not a problem with previous systems themselves, but it is a problem with how I played and ran them. In going back to 3.x or earlier, I might be tempted not only to go to map & minis, but to limit ranges on spells and effects so that their use is more strategic. But that brings me to another issue, which I guess I'll go ahead and bring up now. Since we're talking about straight up mechanics. Which, of course, is marking.
But before I get to marking, I have to talk about roles, which are another new thing, and which for me were difficult to wrap my head around initially. You have the Leader, which means, basically 'Healer'. That is to say, the classes that fill the Leader role are generally going to have some power, usable as a minor action, which allows them to drop healing, usually 2x per combat. And here I restrain myself again for going into what I feel is the biggest strength of the system-- economy of action. /ahem. So we've got Strikers, which are there to do huge buckets of damage, and are kind of squishy otherwise. Then Controllers, who are also squishy, generally work best from range, and move things around and set them up so that other people can do huge buckets of damage to them. Also-- AoEs. And finally, Defenders, who have a Mark.
Marks are excellent. Marks are what permit Defenders to truly protect the other roles from games of SmashCaster. Basically, it's an ability that punishes x enemy for attacking people who are not the Defender, so that if said enemy is standing next to a Wizard and a Fighter, and can only attack one of them, he's not going after the wizard for being all cloth-wearing and tasty-- except at a -2 penalty. No, he's going after the paladin-chick with the effing axe who has been hacking at him for the last 5 rounds. As it makes sense from a story standpoint for him to do so, it also gives a material benefit that is good for everyone in the party, and allows the Defenders to do what they're good at-- tank!
This is, however, an extremely visible gears mechanic that some folks might find a turn off. I think that it's a case of explaining why, from a narrative/simulation standpoint, that focused attention effects are cool. I think the best example is actually a first level bard power:
Misdirected Mark
You conceal your arcane attack, tricking your foe into thinking the attack came from one of your allies.
At-Will Arcane, Implement
Standard Action Ranged 10
Target: One creature
Attack: Charisma vs. Reflex
Hit: 1d8 + Charisma modifier damage, and the target is marked by an ally within 5 squares of you until the end of your next turn.
Level 21: 2d8 + Charisma modifier damage.
Once again, the description is what's important here-- in which our tricksy bard makes the ogre think that the paladin chick over there? Yeah, she totally smacked you upside the head while running past you. I am just an inoffensive dude with a mandolin. Now go away.
So hopefully, the Narrativist types (I am one of those, btw) will like this enough to accept it. This is Gameism at it's finest, so I assume that the Gameists are way ahead of me. But I can still see the Simulationists being somewhat dubious, and making arguments that marks are arbitrary. This is a harder one to see a good solution for, to make it more palatable to older edition sorts. I do think that it is something that can be simulated in 3.x with a generic mark, used as a minor action or something, that a fighter could use to hold the attention of probably a single enemy, if you wanted to make the argument that a fighter could probably only hold the attention of one at a time. But seriously, it's a mechanic I'd like to see done backwards-- I don't know if there's something similar previously, but I've never seen it.
All of this said, here's the hard part, and something that I could stand to keep in mind as I continue with my game-- run things straight before you start changing stuff. And the corollary-- once you understand how the mechanics work, don't be afraid to change stuff.
Game balance in 4e can be a sort of scary thing to contemplate-- as you play through encounters, you'll notice that, as written, they look ridiculously brutal on paper. Thing is, the player? Ridiculously brutal. Heroic tier is effing heroic. Go with the basics initially to get a feel for what sort of damage the party can do, and what of their defenses are strong and weak-- you only roll saves when you have a condition on you in 4e, generally, attacks are rolled against the appropriate defense. Yes, this means wizards can miss or fizzle their spells. But since they're not frying a spell slot, that doesn't screw them in the same way it would have previously. The experience point chart is a pretty good guideline for what you ought to be throwing, and you can always pad out the numbers with minions, or extra standards if say, you've got a party with 2 controllers who basically mop them up like crazy. The players will figure out fast that a lot of their abilities do things that help out their allies, or otherwise effect their allies. This means that there is likely to be a lot of mechanical table talk, as they try to suss out what they can and can't do, and how it helps their pals. The biggest difference in feel that I ran into in changing to this edition was that I didn't feel as though I was acting in a bubble. What I chose to do mattered-- not just to me, but to everyone standing next to me, and I might save a power that gives attack bonuses or resistances to adjacent allies till I was, say, next to the greatest number of allies. Effects look at the battle and apply only when certain conditions are met, so-- and here's another zap for you-- you've got to pay attention not just to your turn, but to everyone else, to see what they've done to the enemies, and how they're moving, so that you can adjust your actions accordingly. Versus getting up and wandering out of the room till it's your turn again, while the hasted et al fighter takes a bazillion actions.
Which brings me to another point-- in 4e, no seriously, don't play evil. Or even crazy-chaotic neutral. I know that people telling you not to do that was arbitrary and sort of lame in earlier editions, but in 4e, you won't have a good time. What will happen is that you could lose the 'ally' status with the other people in the party, which means their enemy only stuff will hit you, you'll be cut off from buffs and bonuses, the enemies still don't necessarily count you as /their/ ally, and the chances of you getting asked back sink to pretty much no. I cannot stress enough how much you /really/ want to get along with your party. And if you do, the more cohesive you are, the more awesome you are. Which is why most games will not use tribal and guild feats. The more cohesive you as a party get, the more powerful you are by orders of magnitude, even if your numbers don't look it.
So, what I want to know here-- how would any of you, as DMs or Players, build a similar kind of party cohesion in a 3.x or earlier game? How would you suggest that I, as a player, build my character so that I can support the party in combat, and not also be ineffective elsewhere? I suspect that the skills system might have some solutions, since they are fairly vague, but I am very open to suggestions.
And a 4e question to go along with that-- if you wish to run a game with intra-party suspicion and paranoia, the way that the party mechanics work, you seriously risk making combat situations un-fun if they party winds up disliking each other enough. In our Planescape game, for example, which is a pretty awesome game and my first intro to how much fun skill challenges could be, all of the PCs belong to different factions in Sigil, some of which, like my Sensate and B's Doomguard, are very much opposed to each other. Nonetheless, due to the nature of the game, we all wind up getting along much better than we perhaps ought. Now, some of this is that the histories written for the various characters are all sort of middling when it comes to faction loyalty-- but playing someone who was a hardline factionist would be /really/ difficult both from a story perspective, and from a game mechanics perspective. ETA: Well, admittedly, this game isn't the best example because it is Planescape-- if we are too fractious on faction lines, the Lady of Pain will personally send us all to the Maze. Bad times. Personally, I prefer in this instance just accepting that it's going to be collaborative and move on, but I can definitely see situations and games where one would really want to make party schism-- or at least suspicion-- possible, without completely screwing everyone.
Instead of the post I was going to originally make, which was a run-down of my problems with 2e and 3.x D&D, I am going to sum those up, and get to a topic about which I actually care a good deal more. To wit, earlier editions do not have 4e's barriers to player entry, obtuse and overwhelming character creation system, or near-necessary online program that pisses you off when you realise you need it after having spent a ton of cash on books. 4e does not have the huge vagaries and limitations of role that previous editions do, and adds economy of action to many different things, healing in particular-- plus you realise from the outset when you've built a character badly, instead of only figuring it out 6 levels later, after you've been convincing yourself this whole time that one day, you'd be awesome, really. Proponents of both systems argue that it is the other one which is actually limiting and frustrating-- I know that I do. So, I have come to the conclusion that it is a matter of A) what one is used to, and what sorts of limitations you are willing to accept in presentation, and b) What tools help you, personally, become immersed in the game. I would like to think that there are ways for those who love the old editions to share their preferred format with those (i.e.-- me) who have become spoiled by 4e, and for those who are skeptical or downright hostile to 4e come into it in such a way that they'll enjoy the new things that are coming out for the system.
First of all, let's talk about what not to do if you're running or playing in your first 4e game. Primarily, and while I have said this before, it bears repeating-- Start At First Level. When I ran 1/2e/3.x, I generally would start a game at 3rd level, particularly if there were any spellcasters in the party. 2 words-- Haste, fireball. Also, you might possibly have a hit point or two by now. This will not be so much an issue in 4e, so it's better to get used to the way things work from 1st, than to try to jump up. Also, this is easier on the DM, so that they can get a feel for how to stat encounters for this party.
Converting your current game to 4e and keeping going is a really bad idea for every possible reason. For one, you're still in the old game mindset, people are used to what they can and can't do, you have established mechanics and ways of doing things that are natural to the characters and the game. Suddenly switching to Powersets, condensed skill lists, magic items that work a lot differently (and this is huge-- changing up people's stuff is a really good way to tear them out of your world and make them angry, /especially/ if it is something they use all the time-- also, You Don't Want To Convert Them All, Trust Me), non-combat characters suddenly becoming Useful and Important in combat-- no no, is too much. Play out your current campaign in the way you're accustomed, and run your 4e game new. This will also give you, the DM, the ability to get used to the Monster Manual, and the way statblocks work for monsters.
I hadn't noticed, but a friend pointed out this weekend that the Monster Manuals don't physically describe the monsters. Spacewise, you see, it seems to make so much more sense to include blurbs about how the monsters fight tactically-- so that if you're say, throwing goblins at your players (this being the 1st 4e encounter that I've run, and yesh), you can throw a bunch of different kinds of goblins who all fight differently, and have powers that help out their allies and do horrid things to the players. This is pretty durned neat to me. Goblin Tactics is awesome. As players encounter more of them, they learn who to kill first and how-- and it isn't always the caster, though sometimes, ja (If the caster is a Goblin Hexer and there are other goblins on the board, OMG KILL IT FIRST, KILL IT WITH FIRE). Anyway, hit dice don't really exist-- all monsters of a given name and level are going to have the same hp. This is something, by the by, that the players a) don't know unless you tell them and b) if you really want to, you can modify. It is very easy to raise/lower hp if you really want to, or if you want to tweak fight length, but it's not likely to be necessary. Also, there's the matter of minions-- don't skimp on them. Your AOE casters will really like being able to mop them up, and they have some interesting strategic uses for the standard monsters in a given encounter.
Which brings me to another potentially problematic bit-- if you are not used to using minis and a map (grid, not hex) in your campaigns, in 4e you pretty much have to. 4e has a lot of forced movement, terrain with various effects, and variable ranges. This can be a roadblock for players who are either not used to those, or are not used to the sheer, laid-open mechanics of movement and move actions being so much a part of the game. When learning it, I completely understand it breaking one from immersion. Here's a place where the DM and Player aspect can fix this-- it is, like so many things, a matter of describing what you're doing. A lot of powers have wonderful descriptions, as for instance:
Forceful Drag
You dig your fingers into a foe and drag the struggling opponent across the battlefield.
Encounter Martial
Move Action Personal
Requirement: You must have a creature grabbed.
Effect: You move your speed. For each square you move, you slide a creature grabbed by you 1 square to a square adjacent to you. The creature remains grabbed, and you do not provoke an opportunity attack from the grabbed creature for this movement. At the end of the move, you can end the grab to knock the creature prone.
Published in Martial Power 2.
Here's where the roleplay part comes in-- and it is some badass roleplay, as your fighter, having grabbed ahold of some critter or bad guy explains how they are hauling their sorry ass across the field, and then deciding whether they want to knock dude to the floor or not. Hells. Yeah.
I really want to talk about limitation, and who can do things like grab monsters and how, and the differing roles of skills and their base stats and the like, but I have realised suddenly that this is a heap big topic that I'll have to maunder about at another time.
So playing with map and minis in 4e has convinced me that one of my big mistakes in previous editions was not using them for combat. The inclination to use very small spaces and non-specific locations made combat kind of arbitrary, like turn-based video game combat. This is not a problem with previous systems themselves, but it is a problem with how I played and ran them. In going back to 3.x or earlier, I might be tempted not only to go to map & minis, but to limit ranges on spells and effects so that their use is more strategic. But that brings me to another issue, which I guess I'll go ahead and bring up now. Since we're talking about straight up mechanics. Which, of course, is marking.
But before I get to marking, I have to talk about roles, which are another new thing, and which for me were difficult to wrap my head around initially. You have the Leader, which means, basically 'Healer'. That is to say, the classes that fill the Leader role are generally going to have some power, usable as a minor action, which allows them to drop healing, usually 2x per combat. And here I restrain myself again for going into what I feel is the biggest strength of the system-- economy of action. /ahem. So we've got Strikers, which are there to do huge buckets of damage, and are kind of squishy otherwise. Then Controllers, who are also squishy, generally work best from range, and move things around and set them up so that other people can do huge buckets of damage to them. Also-- AoEs. And finally, Defenders, who have a Mark.
Marks are excellent. Marks are what permit Defenders to truly protect the other roles from games of SmashCaster. Basically, it's an ability that punishes x enemy for attacking people who are not the Defender, so that if said enemy is standing next to a Wizard and a Fighter, and can only attack one of them, he's not going after the wizard for being all cloth-wearing and tasty-- except at a -2 penalty. No, he's going after the paladin-chick with the effing axe who has been hacking at him for the last 5 rounds. As it makes sense from a story standpoint for him to do so, it also gives a material benefit that is good for everyone in the party, and allows the Defenders to do what they're good at-- tank!
This is, however, an extremely visible gears mechanic that some folks might find a turn off. I think that it's a case of explaining why, from a narrative/simulation standpoint, that focused attention effects are cool. I think the best example is actually a first level bard power:
Misdirected Mark
You conceal your arcane attack, tricking your foe into thinking the attack came from one of your allies.
At-Will Arcane, Implement
Standard Action Ranged 10
Target: One creature
Attack: Charisma vs. Reflex
Hit: 1d8 + Charisma modifier damage, and the target is marked by an ally within 5 squares of you until the end of your next turn.
Level 21: 2d8 + Charisma modifier damage.
Once again, the description is what's important here-- in which our tricksy bard makes the ogre think that the paladin chick over there? Yeah, she totally smacked you upside the head while running past you. I am just an inoffensive dude with a mandolin. Now go away.
So hopefully, the Narrativist types (I am one of those, btw) will like this enough to accept it. This is Gameism at it's finest, so I assume that the Gameists are way ahead of me. But I can still see the Simulationists being somewhat dubious, and making arguments that marks are arbitrary. This is a harder one to see a good solution for, to make it more palatable to older edition sorts. I do think that it is something that can be simulated in 3.x with a generic mark, used as a minor action or something, that a fighter could use to hold the attention of probably a single enemy, if you wanted to make the argument that a fighter could probably only hold the attention of one at a time. But seriously, it's a mechanic I'd like to see done backwards-- I don't know if there's something similar previously, but I've never seen it.
All of this said, here's the hard part, and something that I could stand to keep in mind as I continue with my game-- run things straight before you start changing stuff. And the corollary-- once you understand how the mechanics work, don't be afraid to change stuff.
Game balance in 4e can be a sort of scary thing to contemplate-- as you play through encounters, you'll notice that, as written, they look ridiculously brutal on paper. Thing is, the player? Ridiculously brutal. Heroic tier is effing heroic. Go with the basics initially to get a feel for what sort of damage the party can do, and what of their defenses are strong and weak-- you only roll saves when you have a condition on you in 4e, generally, attacks are rolled against the appropriate defense. Yes, this means wizards can miss or fizzle their spells. But since they're not frying a spell slot, that doesn't screw them in the same way it would have previously. The experience point chart is a pretty good guideline for what you ought to be throwing, and you can always pad out the numbers with minions, or extra standards if say, you've got a party with 2 controllers who basically mop them up like crazy. The players will figure out fast that a lot of their abilities do things that help out their allies, or otherwise effect their allies. This means that there is likely to be a lot of mechanical table talk, as they try to suss out what they can and can't do, and how it helps their pals. The biggest difference in feel that I ran into in changing to this edition was that I didn't feel as though I was acting in a bubble. What I chose to do mattered-- not just to me, but to everyone standing next to me, and I might save a power that gives attack bonuses or resistances to adjacent allies till I was, say, next to the greatest number of allies. Effects look at the battle and apply only when certain conditions are met, so-- and here's another zap for you-- you've got to pay attention not just to your turn, but to everyone else, to see what they've done to the enemies, and how they're moving, so that you can adjust your actions accordingly. Versus getting up and wandering out of the room till it's your turn again, while the hasted et al fighter takes a bazillion actions.
Which brings me to another point-- in 4e, no seriously, don't play evil. Or even crazy-chaotic neutral. I know that people telling you not to do that was arbitrary and sort of lame in earlier editions, but in 4e, you won't have a good time. What will happen is that you could lose the 'ally' status with the other people in the party, which means their enemy only stuff will hit you, you'll be cut off from buffs and bonuses, the enemies still don't necessarily count you as /their/ ally, and the chances of you getting asked back sink to pretty much no. I cannot stress enough how much you /really/ want to get along with your party. And if you do, the more cohesive you are, the more awesome you are. Which is why most games will not use tribal and guild feats. The more cohesive you as a party get, the more powerful you are by orders of magnitude, even if your numbers don't look it.
So, what I want to know here-- how would any of you, as DMs or Players, build a similar kind of party cohesion in a 3.x or earlier game? How would you suggest that I, as a player, build my character so that I can support the party in combat, and not also be ineffective elsewhere? I suspect that the skills system might have some solutions, since they are fairly vague, but I am very open to suggestions.
And a 4e question to go along with that-- if you wish to run a game with intra-party suspicion and paranoia, the way that the party mechanics work, you seriously risk making combat situations un-fun if they party winds up disliking each other enough. In our Planescape game, for example, which is a pretty awesome game and my first intro to how much fun skill challenges could be, all of the PCs belong to different factions in Sigil, some of which, like my Sensate and B's Doomguard, are very much opposed to each other. Nonetheless, due to the nature of the game, we all wind up getting along much better than we perhaps ought. Now, some of this is that the histories written for the various characters are all sort of middling when it comes to faction loyalty-- but playing someone who was a hardline factionist would be /really/ difficult both from a story perspective, and from a game mechanics perspective. ETA: Well, admittedly, this game isn't the best example because it is Planescape-- if we are too fractious on faction lines, the Lady of Pain will personally send us all to the Maze. Bad times. Personally, I prefer in this instance just accepting that it's going to be collaborative and move on, but I can definitely see situations and games where one would really want to make party schism-- or at least suspicion-- possible, without completely screwing everyone.
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