Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;264170They simply aren't the sum total of everything 4e is. 4e is as much the actual game sessions as the rulebooks and their contents. It's also the public concepts and common ideas that undergird the structure of the rules.

This is your opinion, but it's simply not true for everyone.

I'll even use my group as an example.  I'm the only person in my group who participates in the hobby by taken part in online discussion on forums and boards like this one.  I'm the only person in my group who reads about the hobby and trends within the hobby.  All the other people in my group just buy the RAW, and play within our gaming group.  They don't belong to the 4e community.  Hell, they didn't even know that a 4th edition was being written until I told them.  The only thing that they have to go on is the RAW.  If the RAW doesn't have information or rules on wandering monsters or random encounters.  Guess what?  There are no random encounters or wandering monsters in the games run by everyone else in my group.  Why?  Because it's not in the RAW, and they don't participate in the culture of play.  I would say that gamers like you and me, and everyone else on these boards are the exception and not the rule.  Most gaming groups exist in isolation from the hobby conversation, or the culture of play.

I fully understand your points and contentions, and there is merit to them.  I'm just saying that your point is not absolute, and, more than likely, applies to the minority rather than the majority.  In fact, I think that the term 'culture of play' has a nice ring to it.

Quote from: Aos;264180The DMG does indeed have a section on Random encounters and how to generate them- it's on page 194.

Well, there you go.  That's all that needed to be said.  

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;264163If that doesn't count, most games don't have random encounters. Wandering monster tables have been out of fashion for a long time in RPGs.

I tend to consider a random encounter / wandering monster to be any encounter that is not planned ahead of time and that does not arise during the session from the demands of the story.

I'm a bit rushed, but opinions of fashion are the very point of the ongoing discussion, and the divergence between your personal definition and the actual one is also pretty relevant.

QuoteI think there are many ways of deciding how these encounters will arise, but I don't see anything _fundamentally_ or _essentially_ different between deciding that the PCs have drawn the attention of monsters while they search the catacombs and flipping through the MM to find some appropriate foes; and deciding that for every ten minutes they spend searching the catacombs, you're going to roll on the wandering monster table. They are different styles or methods of the same thing.

There's a big difference; one involves impersonal risk (to a large extent), the other is much more a matter of the DM specifically taking responsibility for modulating continuity and pacing. In the case with impersonal risk it's a lot easier for a DM to honestly say something after a game like, "Boy, you guys were lucky, I thought for sure you'd get caught sneaking through those tunnels," or "Tough break, it just wasn't your night."

Quote from: Aos;264180The DMG does indeed have a section on Random encounters and how to generate them- it's on page 194.

Why, then, did it take 20 posts to get to this answer?  I thought Pseudo had a weekly game or something.  Shouldn't he have mentioned those?

Of what does that section consist, if you don't mind providing the executive summary?
EDIT:  Assuming you are going to go through the trouble, if the entire section is on that single page - or worse, only part of that page - I will save you the time.  I have grave doubts that a single page in the 4e DMG is going to be anywhere near as comprehensive as Appendix C from the 1st Edition DMG, which starts on page 174 and runs on for about 20 pages.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;264088This thread was originally Stormbringer fulminating about two blog posts Mike Mearls wrote about using some throw-away ideas he (Mearls) had about wandering monsters and using skill challenges to represent non-combat interactions with monsters. Stormbringer at no point asked if anyone was using wandering monsters or how, he simply launched into a harangue about how 4e doesn't have wandering monsters and why this makes it a piece of shit etc.

No, sadly, if only this were true, your participation in this thread would at least have a point.  As it stands, you are just responding to your knee-jerk instinct of defending your game/preference against all challengers.

My primary complaint was much the same as Caesar Slaad's in starting this thread.  Without even understanding the role of wandering monsters, how can the argument be made that removing them was justified?

QuoteMy group had a random encounter triggered by an unexpected level of involvement with a throw-away NPC last session.

So, at some point during a set interval, or because of some other event that would sensibly alert a monster, your DM rolled for a monster check, then rolled on the resultant table for the monster(s) you encountered?

QuoteHe's simply factually wrong that 4e doesn't have random encounters. It just doesn't have anything in the rulebooks mentioning them specifically. To repeat: He did not actually bother to ask anyone playing 4e if they were using random encounters or how they were using them. His commentary on 4e is simply uninformed ranting.

I just wanted to re-iterate the direct contradiction here.

(Pending Aos' response...)
Also, I haven't asked anyone playing 4e if they were wearing pants.  I would presume that 'wearing pants' falls within the delimits of the '4e culture'.  Yet, I am pretty sure there isn't anything in the DMG about the proper attire.  The group that steadfastly refuses to clothe themselves in a requisite manner would have to fall outside the mainstream, I would think.  Therefore, any additions to the rules, be they houserules or group dynamics or what-have-you, really couldn't be considered 'official', right?  I mean, did you mean to make the point that your particular group's play preferences are in some way universal, or that they carry the same weight as the books published by WotC?  Or that simply by stating how your group does things makes it so that WotC actually did publish something they didn't?  Perhaps because my group likes to smack each other with padded weapons, that would mean that, despite the books not actually saying anything about it, the statement 'the books don't have information about boffers' is factually incorrect?

QuoteWhile not all critical commentary on 4e is such, there is a lot of commentary that is in a similar vein. I think that's because people are overly focused on how the game was designed, to the detriment of learning about how the game is being played.

How the game was designed has a great impact on how the game is played.  Unless you ignore most of the rules, substitute your own where ever you want, then pretend you are playing the same game as everyone else.

Primarily because the only thing you can really discuss is how the game is designed to be played.  I don't give a tinker's damn if your group dresses up in mime outfits and relays information around the table with semaphore flags using a dart board to determine d20 rolls.  That isn't how it was designed to be played.  That you can't seem to raise a valid point regarding the design shows how poor your grasp on the implementation of the ruleset remains.  All you have to fall back on is some addle brained rhetoric about 'culture of play', which really amounts to 'everyone is entitled to their opinion', because you are unable to comprehend even the most fundamental concepts of the design.

In any event, you are not even attempting to demonstrate that wandering monsters are not needed in 4e, you are feverishly scrambling around to prove that they are still extant, even if you have to make up almost all of the rules yourself.  In other words, as I have mentioned elsewhere, you are pulling out all the stops to show that this latest, greatest evolution of the rules, built upon and improved from the folly and brokenness of the previous versions still uses a mechanic from the very first edition.  It's as though you can't help making every effort to bind 4e to the legacy that the current designers and yourself sneer at on every other occasion.  Random character generation?  How quaint.  Treasure parcels not tailored to the party?  Good Lord, you must be from the stone age.  Wandering monsters?  Mearls' said he didn't know why they were there, but that just means he was exaggerating and really does know why there were there, and despite cutting them out of the books, they are still in there, if you make up the rules for them yourself.

It's bizarre.

QuoteOriginally Posted by Pseudoephedrine  

They simply aren't the sum total of everything 4e is. 4e is as much the actual game sessions as the rulebooks and their contents. It's also the public concepts and common ideas that undergird the structure of the rules.

This is absolute bullshit.

If an isolated group of gamers think that 4e is full of more shit than a Christmas Turkey, then that has exactly what effect on any other unrelated 4e game?

Quote from: StormBringer;264268EDIT:  Assuming you are going to go through the trouble, .

Don't be silly.

Quote from: Aos;264277Don't be silly.

I know.  What was I thinking?

Hopefully Pseudo or someone else looks them up, however.

Quote from: StormBringer;264279I know.  What was I thinking?

Hopefully Pseudo or someone else looks them up, however.

He has to.

This is how he demonstrates that his intellectual penis is just as big as anyone else's.

Quote from: jeff37923;264280He has to.

This is how he demonstrates that his intellectual penis is just as big as anyone else's.

Ha!

At any rate, it should help cut down on the contradictory nonsense he and his colleagues have been spewing recently.

Although, as I mentioned in response to Aos above, that single page is going to have to be spectacular in order to compete with 20 pages in 1st edition.

I looked them up because I hadn't seen them (as I have only been able to dedicate a small amount of time to plodding through the 4e rules books). I was actually surprised because I had skimmed the book and didn't recall them - and here's My Pal Aos giving page citations (graduate school, indeed!).

I have to be honest that while I agree to a small extent with Pseudo's belief that the game is more than what's written in the books, I think it doesn't apply here because the discussion was, as Stormy points out, focused on the design process of the game. The fact that Pseudo's groups is working around that is great - but not relevant to the issue of Mearls understanding, during the design process, the purpose of wandering monsters before eschewing them.

And I say eschewing them because the rules given on page are not exactly wandering monster/random encounter rules. It does go into detail (it's about 2 pages of text, three with pictures) about how to create a deck of cards to provide a random encounter generator (to the point of expressing the ability to eschew the DM if desired!). However, to me, it's another example of one of those little details that might not mean much to a large swath of gamers, but is an indicator to me.

I don't have my 1e DMG with me (it's downstairs and I'm upstairs and lazy), but IIRC, the reason it goes on for so many pages is because it has all of these encounter tables for various terrain. IOW, the type of encounter is tied to the setting and the world and what makes sense for it. In the 4e DMG, the way to pick is essentially driven by character level - with some advice that it is sometimes nice to do a theme:

QuoteYou can assemble monsters at random, but you can create more interesting and flavorful encounters by working with a theme, such as aberrant monsters or evil cultists.

And there's this:

QuoteA random encounter is usually less complex than one you craft yourself, but it doesn't have to be any less fun. You can create interesting tactical challenges with a few die rolls.

which, though I'm probably reading too much into it, seems to be saying that fun is derived from complex/interesting tactical challenges.

Anyway, it's mostly consumed (the two or so pages that is) with the creation of an Encounter Deck for generation of random encounters (could be traps or hazards as well). FWIW, YMMV, TEHO, etc. etc.

Quote from: StormBringer;264268Why, then, did it take 20 posts to get to this answer?  

That's actually a good question. I had read that section and it didn't occur to me to mention it in my long reply above. I thought about it, and it struck me that the "random encounters" section in the 4e DMG seems more like the "random dungeon" section of the 1e DMG than the wandering monster tables. They aren't quite the same thing, and James J Skach very cogently distills why this is so.

The 4e section suggests a much more random system, ironically enough, than the wandering monster tables of 1e (or 3e, at least if you count third party stuff like Necromancer Games' "Mother of All Encounter Tables), due to what James pointed out - the 1e tables grow out of where the characters are physically rather than where they are career-wise. The 4e system seems more free-floating, detached from any locations.

I know that may seem to be an odd statement given that much of the 1e set of tables deals with "dungeon levels." In that era, though, such "levels" were actual locations the PCs could end up in, regardless of what level they were in their classes. At least, that's how it was in my experience, so YMMV.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;264170The rulebooks are RAW. They simply aren't the sum total of everything 4e is. 4e is as much the actual game sessions as the rulebooks and their contents. It's also the public concepts and common ideas that undergird the structure of the rules.

No, it's not. That's like saying combat in Palladium is fast because my group triples supernatural strength damage and lets gunshot deal direct damage to hitpoints... Palladium isn't fast, I'm fast.

Quote from: Cranewings;264586No, it's not. That's like saying combat in Palladium is fast because my group triples supernatural strength damage and lets gunshot deal direct damage to hitpoints... Palladium isn't fast, I'm fast.

An excellent point.

Quote from: Cranewings;264586No, it's not. That's like saying combat in Palladium is fast because my group triples supernatural strength damage and lets gunshot deal direct damage to hitpoints... Palladium isn't fast, I'm fast.

No, that would be fine with me.