Quote from: obryn;318196Auto-damage, by and large, is relatively low; it's usually unmodified, and usually minimal for the PCs' level. While giving them DR doesn't completely negate the issue, auto-damage is IMO the biggest problem with minions.

I was playing a fighter, once, who could dish out 2d6+9 or so to anything that started its turn in a square next to him. Daily, but still.

QuoteI have no problem with simulation-style gaming at all.  It doesn't float my boat, but it's not ridiculous.  I was saying it'd be ridiculous to use minions if you want to run a simulationist game - something which I assume you'd agree with.

Which is how I reread it, and is something I totally concur with.

QuoteYeah, we've had slapfights before, but I'm honestly not trying to be a douche here. I'm completely happy to have reasonable conversations about games. I get torqued off when people spend all their time bitching about shit they don't like, or when they go about pissing on the fun other people are having. One-true-wayism pisses me the fuck off. None of that is happening here.

Fair enough, on all counts.

QuoteEDIT: Frankly, I don't even remember what the fuck we were arguing about before, so I'm happy to start fresh if you are.

To be completely honest, neither do I.

Sounds fair enough to me.

Quote from: B.T.There is no smiley that can adequately express my rage at this statement.

Oh? Why's that?

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;318219Sounds lamezorz.

If your characters couldn't know, you can't know. If your characters can figure it out in-game, so can you. Aren't we roleplaying?

That works great as long as everybody agrees on what "roleplaying" means, and whether they want the particular style of play you're describing or not. So as long as everybody at the table is on the same page, that's all that matters.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;318219If your characters couldn't know, you can't know. If your characters can figure it out in-game, so can you. Aren't we roleplaying?

We're all roleplaying.  It's just that some people are roleplaying brave and talented adventurers risking perilous journeys into the unknown, while others are roleplaying indestructable superheroes who resolve everything through combat and know the metagame details of their foes before battle even begins.
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Quote from: B.T.;318214The majority of people that I have seen supporting the concept of minions have used the "it lets the PCs feel awesome" argument.  I can only imagine that those who need to feel "awesome" with their fictional characters are trying to compensate for their less-than-awesome existence (particularly given that the stereotypical D&D player is overweight, unattractive, and unhygienic).

I'm scratching my head, and I can't think of any games where characters are less-capable than the players themselves, unless you're going into comedic beer & pretzels games like Kobolds Ate My Baby.  We're talking about Dungeons and Dragons, where the nerdy kid who reads books can kill things with his brain, and you can pretend to be an elf who's a crack shot with a longbow.  Hell, even BRP Call of Cthulhu assumes your investigator is more educated and skilled than you yourself are.

QuoteRe: Cinematic

I have no issue with the word itself, but its overuse causes a deep clenching within my bowels.  The majority of complaints that I have about 4e are the powers not making sense, and there are plenty of folks who brush that off with inane comments like, "Welcome to cinematic role-playing."  "Cinematic" is a meme and buzzword that 4e shoved to the forefront of D&D when people began criticizing it for lacking verisimilitude.  It is hollow, a husk of word that people bandy about instead of making actual arguments.

...I hate the word "cinematic."  I guess I do have an issue with it.

I don't think it's so hollow.  It means, "I want my game fights to work kind of like fights in action movies."  You can argue whether or not 4e, BtVS, M&M, or anything else succeed at this - but that doesn't make the term meaningless.  It's been used in a gaming context since the nineties, if not earlier; it's not new to 4e.

-O

Quote from: obryn;318152Besides, if I lay out a map and there's a few big guys and then a bunch of unnumbered identical minis, they figure it out anyway.  I don't even need to get to minis.  "There's a huge troll, a hobgoblin with a staff, two mean-looking goblins sneering at you with wickedly-sharp knives, and eight poorly-equipped kobold rabble wearing rags and wielding daggers."  The math is not hard to figure out, and frankly pretending otherwise bores me.

When you say "the math", do you mean because each group of monsters encountered adds up to a certain level of danger, and minions 'cost' less than normal monsters of their type?

Because if so, I think people who dislike identifying minions would probably dislike "the math" as well.

I don't mind the idea of minions. Creatures that die from being hit once are more realistic than ones that won't. But telling players who a minion is, is just too much boardgameyness for me, just like players being able to pick magic items.

Quote from: GnomeWorks;318222I was playing a fighter, once, who could dish out 2d6+9 or so to anything that started its turn in a square next to him. Daily, but still.

I know the one you're talking about - the Rain of Steel stance, IIRC - and yeah, that's just about peak for auto-damage.  That one doesn't bother me much, though, being a Daily power.  You're giving up something else pretty awesome to take it.

I have a much bigger problem with dippy little Clouds of Daggers and minor magic item abilities zapping a roomful of minions.  Hence, why I like giving them DR.

I really think the designers dropped the ball when they didn't take into account how many ways there are to deal miniscule - but sufficient - auto-damage to minions.

-O

Quote from: Age of Fable;318228When you say "the math", do you mean because each group of monsters encountered adds up to a certain level of danger, and minions 'cost' less than normal monsters of their type?

I was speaking metaphorically about the math, not about the encounter construction.  I'd get pissy if my players were adding up encounter XP in their heads and then had the poor taste to say something about it.  I'd probably throw in extra monsters out of spite.

I'm just saying they can, in character, look at a group of enemies and figure out with high degrees of accuracy* which ones are badass and which ones lack badassitude.  That's the only "math" I'm talking about.  This has stayed true for as long as I've been gaming.  I'm not saying there have always been minions, just that picking out big threats (wizards) from non-threats (poorly-equipped kobolds) is second-nature to most parties, and not metagaming at all.

-O


* unless the DM is being intentionally tricky, which for the record, I'm fine with and have been plenty of times.

Quote from: ColonelHardisson;318205Distasteful has a different connotation than "not to my taste" - "I find their vulgar language distasteful," "Her wearing of a stripper dress in church was distasteful," "that joke he made about how that guy died was distasteful" - those carry the connotation of something that is socially or morally wrong (though in a relatively mild way). I'm am genuinely asking how you see 4e as distasteful using that connotation.

I am well aware of the word's meaning. Well, the ones that I have encountered - most likely the more common ones, I expect. I was not using it inappropriately, ignorantly, or in any other way along either of those lines that might, it seems, have been suspected.

This is hardly the perfect resource to be calling upon, I know, but for lack of anything better online - that I'm currently aware of - it will suffice:

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/distasteful

Now, here we have a selection of possible interpretations, some of which at least don't entirely comply with your PoV. And they're close enough to exactly what I was saying and meaning, however, that I'm not going to be editing those posts anytime soon.

QuoteSeriously, I'm not just being argumentative. If you mean the 4e rules are distasteful, in the sense they offended your morals, I'm genuinely curious as to why? I'm not trying to be a dick, I promise you! The usual connotation of distasteful is usually synonymous with offensive. Do you see what I mean? If you find 4e offensive, then why? There are plenty of games I don't like, but they don't offend me, and I would never refer to them as distasteful (except the one I mentioned). We're simply having a disconnect in communication here.

As for me finding it offensive... not so much. That comes across as a peculiar stance, to my mind anyway.

See, me mentioning my distaste for a certain game? Okay, so it really doesn't appeal on whatever level(s). Big deal. But if I was expressing my being offended at that game's, what, very existence? Huh, now we're talking cage fight and the whole nine yards.

I just don't care that the game exists. Seriously. Those people who like it? Bully for them. I happen to not like it one bit. I wouldn't play it if a game was being offered. Too much about it would annoy the absolute crap out of me, break my suspension of disbelief, the 4th wall mentioned above, and so on. But this is not because I am offended, or on a fucking CRUSADE about it. Really not. That's not my fight.

If you are STILL stuck on that one word... well, there's doubtless NOTHING else I can say to help with that. _shrug_

Quote from: B.T.;318124Tell me: is this an example of the tyranny of fun, or am I misunderstanding the concept?

I haven't read the thread, but probably. A few rhetorical symptoms to look out for:
- "I don't want my game to be work; I have real work, and I just want to relax, right?"
- "Thanks God they fixed this, it was clunky and just. not. fun. I can't imagine going back to the days when the DM could just wave his dick and destroy your characters."
- "Well, of course they know their business, they are game designers."
- "I don't want to be deprotagonised, that's all. I want to meaningfully contribute, and if the DM takes away that, I may just as well go home and play WoW."
- "If someone did that to my characters, I'd get up from the table and find a new group. Life is too short to spend it on a game where you are getting nowhere."

I'd say your examples, and most of the recent 4e discussion threads on RPGNet, tend to hit these notes a whole lot, more than ENWorld does (WotC is of course the worst). Also, the Tyranny of Fun, while 4e really caters to that sentiment, is not universal: there are a whole lot of people to whom it is barely, if at all applicable. Now the hardcore RPGNet squad... yeah, pretty much.

I know the Tyranny of Fun is catchy and all, but it's a made up problem. It assumes a group where people want different experiences out of the game but somehow aren't able to just talk about it like adults, so oh my god someone's oppressed. If that's true then something is bound to fuck the group dynamic anyway.

You guys are just describing people having different opinions about how a game's run, and the side of the argument you don't agree with is a bunch of powergamers who don't respect your knowledge of how the game ought to be played. Shit, you could hear that old tune probably since the first time two people had a rules disagreement.



For what it's worth, I don't prefer identifying which NPCs are minions because it make the game easier or give the players a power fantasy trip, I prefer it because I think they're useful more for providing group/formation tactics that would lead to a fight being overlong if they had full HP. And having to guess if they're minions might "add" HP to them, basically, because overkill damage is wasted.

I think of a group of minions as fulfilling the same sort of role as a terrain feature or hazard -- they complicate movement and positioning. Knowing they're minions doesn't preclude you still having to deal with them, it just eliminates overkill. And again, if you prefer minions not being labeled, I see why you might feel that way. I just personally think it's a little obfuscated by the guessing-game element. That's cool, tastes differ.)

Quote from: Sweeney;318267I know the Tyranny of Fun is catchy and all, but it's a made up problem.

No, it refers accurately to a cheat-mode culture of player expectations that's crept into RPGs.
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As in, "I want to play a game that is like an action movie".  The action movie that is nearly always in mind is something like Die Hard, or some obscure wuxia flick.  I don't think I have ever heard anyone say, "I want to play a game where I can be like Jet Li in Hero!"  

In other words, it's always a western-culture action movie where the good guy wins.

Quote from: Hairfoot;318272No, it refers accurately to a cheat-mode culture of player expectations that's crept into RPGs.
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You're wrong about what you're perceiving.

Quote from: Sweeney;318267I know the Tyranny of Fun is catchy and all, but it's a made up problem.

No, it is the identification of a rhetorical trend in gaming and game design.

Quote from: DeadUematsu;318277You're wrong about what you're perceiving.

We've gone over this in other threads.  I've got nothing against god modes, per se.  It's just that I enjoy them in FPSs rather than RPGs, where I like to be challenged and invest some intelligence in the game, rather than take glee in being an all-powerful conqueror that the game world revolves around.
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