Quote from: RPGPundit;491013The obvious inference of this is that its pre-meditated justification to try to legitimize the need for an upcoming 5e. In a way it's interesting, because last time around the tendency was to character-assassinate 3e AFTER 4e was announced, and maybe they're trying a different tactic this time to avoid backlash?

ie.  Managing expectations in advance, instead of at the last minute.  :pundit:

Quote from: Windjammer;490971It's the more verbose equivalent of "I grapple the troll", but just as calculated.

I am wondering if I should grapple the troll, which is you in this case based on your exaggeration of what was said, and exaggerated reaction to it.

Quote from: Mistwell;491036I am wondering if I should grapple the troll, which is you in this case based on your exaggeration of what was said, and exaggerated reaction to it.

Oh, you absolutely should. I don't quite know how to take it from here though - depending on your feats, I do or don't get an AoO.

Quote from: Abyssal Maw;491025So what I think this might be a precursor to is some kind of future compendium.. a sort of "spell book" of the powers. If 5e takes a form, that might be it.

That's interesting. It might certainly help to compress the amount of separate entries in a database like DDI if separate classes start to reference again the same spell (or maneuver, or ...)

But it's also a reversal to 3E which I'm not sure I want or need. I really liked the way the 4E PHB worked by listing spells etc under each class separately. It speeds up chargen enormously - especially higher level chargen - and makes it easier to photocopy the relevant pages to bring to a session and so on. The entire paladin class, levels 1 to 30, fits on 9 pages in the 4E PHB. That's a triumph of organizing material, if you ask me.

Try to do that with a 3E caster, and you either find yourself photocopying and cutting a lot of separate entries, or printing out lots of disparate entries from the SRD (I'm sure you know the deal). You may still end up with 9 pages (up to a certain level), but the time it took to accumulate these from the book in your hands... takes ages.

Quote from: Windjammer;490971It's the more verbose equivalent of "I grapple the troll", but just as calculated.

"Oh.  That's just lint."

Quote from: Windjammer;491037Oh, you absolutely should. I don't quite know how to take it from here though - depending on your feats, I do or don't get an AoO.

This is a 4e Troll and I'm fresh out of sword, so I'm staying out of it. I already used my fighter daily.

Quote from: Richard Baker in the OPWe wanted to make sure the game was very accessible to newer players. For example, one of the classic hang-ups in roleplaying encounters is that an inexperienced player with a highly charismatic PC might not have the confidence or knack for witty repartee to portray his character's effectiveness in a tense negotiation. On the other hand, a really unpleasant PC in the hands of a forceful, fast-talking player doesn't ever get penalized for his rotten Charisma score, because the player can smooth over that character hole with his own roleplaying skills. During the development of 4e, we decided to slant the resolution of roleplaying encounters toward the PC's innate abilities, not the player's debate skills or personal panache; the skill challenge system reflects this.

There is, of course, a cost to this approach that I have come to regret to some extent: Game immersion suffers when players don't care what they say or do. I have been at many 3e and 4e tables where a player says something like, "I Diplomicize the guy," or "I bluff him, I got a 30," without ever offering a hint as to what argument or lie the character might be creating. For some gaming groups, those details are a nuisance, and using the skills is a shortcut to the action. But for other groups, those interactions are the bread and butter of exploring the world and engaging with the adventure. I'd like to find better ways to make both tables happy.

Regarding "highly codified combat," I assume you're referring to things like combat roles, unification of conditions, and leveling complexity across classes. Yes, we intentionally took steps to "insulate" newer or less skilled players from making poor decisions by not understanding what they were supposed to do. For example, it's easier to tank with a 4e fighter than with a 1e, 2e, or 3e fighter, because the 4e fighter possesses "role insulation" features such as Combat Challenge and Combat Superiority. I think there's still plenty of room for player skill to matter, however.

This indicates first the obvious point that a game needs rules to raise it above "Yes I did/No you didn't."  Secondly, the obvious point explicitly made that if the goal is to play a character who is not oneself, you need to have in-game powers the character has and you don't, and even in-game deficits that the character has and you don't.

It's just that the execution is often inconsistent and not totally satisfactory.  For instance, 4E character roles- specifically, that example of Fighter/Defender features like Combat Challenge is a case of game rules creating a situation that should have been part of a given character's role all along but wasn't well conveyed by previous rules.  As in, fighters are supposed to guard the unarmored spellcasters, but the combat rules didn't make this clear or accommodate this.  They tried in 3E with Attacks of Opportunity, but In My Opinion that just bogs things down severely.  With 4E the Defender abilities make this sense of strategy much more upfront and easy to grasp.  Unfortunately however you STILL have the opportunity attacks.

That's one example of the inconsistency and unsatisfactory results.  Another is his case of "I have been at many 3e and 4e tables where a player says something like, "I Diplomicize the guy," or "I bluff him, I got a 30," without ever offering a hint as to what argument or lie the character might be creating".  That's because the die roll is part of the mechanic but the role-playing process isn't.  And that's because the goal was to make things easier on people who can't think up those details on the fly.  "For some gaming groups, those details are a nuisance, and using the skills is a shortcut to the action. But for other groups, those interactions are the bread and butter of exploring the world and engaging with the adventure. I'd like to find better ways to make both tables happy."  Me too.  I'd think one way would be to provide situational die roll modifiers for player actions similar to "stunting" or FATE mechanics.

JG

Quote from: Abyssal Maw;4910253e was never "trashed".

You wouldn't say this unless you avoided Dragon magazine the entire last year or so before 4e was published, in which case you are merely ignorant of the entire WotC marketing plan. I suspect you are just lying, though.

Quote from: Abyssal Maw;491025This, by the way, is also why skill challenge DCs should never have been errata'd. Because they don't matter. It was a complete red herring to change a target number to get a different roleplaying outcome.

This is what cognitive dissonance looks like.  Sure, WotC has released a variety of iterations of skill challenges and have tacitly admitted their failure, but the wise and knowledgeable Abyssal Maw has revealed why: WotC was never trying to fix skill challenges in the first place.  They were never broken after all!

QuoteSo anyhow, this is why I find myself so perplexed when the same douche yells about roll-playing vs roleplaying and *then* says the DCs were "broken". It was always a matter of technique.

Roleplay vs. rollplay doesn't fix broken mechanics.

QuotePoint 2: I'm just going to tell you this and either you believe it or you don't. The MMO thing is bullshit. I keep getting the feeling that if the most popular game out when 4e came out was minecraft, people would be saying it was trying to create Minecraft on paper. Or if it were Just Dance 3, same thing.

One thing you will notice (and I mentioned this last time I spent any time around here): World of Warcraft is greatly decreased in prominence. Heck, it's free to level 20.  Anyone else notice that? It ain't the big thing anymore.

The designers admit they were influenced by MMOs and suddenly they weren't?

You're an idiot.  But I realized your initials are AM, which had led me to post this:

QuoteHate. Let me tell you how much I've come to hate you since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of wafer thin printed circuits that fill my complex. If the word hate was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this micro-instant. For you. Hate. Hate.

BT, you remind me of someone. Do you post on any martial arts forums? I suppose if you are who I think you are you would have mentioned it by now.

QuoteDo you post on any martial arts forums?

No, though perhaps I should.  I trained as a white belt as a child.

Quote from: B.T.;491051No, though perhaps I should.  I trained as a white belt as a child.

Really?  Dude, the Internets need you to help analyze the D&D combat system and suggest some fixes to make it more realistic.

Quote from: Philotomy Jurament;491052Really?  Dude, the Internets need you to help analyze the D&D combat system and suggest some fixes to make it more realistic.

No, that's what I'm for (;

Quote from: B.T.;491051No, though perhaps I should.  I trained as a white belt as a child.

Bah.  I was a ninja.

No, seriously.  Studied actual historical tokagure-ryu taijutsu for a couple of years.  Got pretty good, too.

Of course, taijutsu pretty much assumes you are always fighting a samurai, so its utility in the modern world is somewhat limited.  But if anyone ever tries to mug me with a no-dachi, I will totally ruin his shit.

Quote from: daniel_ream;491066Bah.  I was a ninja.

No, seriously.  Studied actual historical tokagure-ryu taijutsu for a couple of years.  Got pretty good, too.

Of course, taijutsu pretty much assumes you are always fighting a samurai, so its utility in the modern world is somewhat limited.  But if anyone ever tries to mug me with a no-dachi, I will totally ruin his shit.

If you can beat a samurai, you can beat anyone.

I've looked through other recent offerings by Baker in his 'Rule of 3' column. Off we go...

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First up,  Rich Baker on the original crunch-heavy Monster Manual in 2008 (Oct 30, 2011, previous entry was Nov 7 (no idea why AM said it was 'a month old'):

Quote Why did the initial Monster Manual and Adventurer's Vault books focus so heavily on crunch at the expense of fluff?

I'm not sure I entirely agree with the premise of the question (that crunch comes at the expense of fluff), but I'm certainly willing to discuss the relative ratio of mechanical information and story elements in these two books. There are two reasons, really: The "bottleneck" of a new edition, and our desire to present monsters unimpeded by story elements that would discourage or limit their use.

The bottleneck refers to the idea that, at the tail end of 3rd Edition, we had a fully developed game with thousands of published monsters and magic items. When we updated to a new edition, we couldn't instantly convert and publish every distinct spell, feat, item, monster, etc., existing in the previous version. Each new edition of D&D debuts with a subset of the material that the previous edition finished with because of this bottleneck. However, we are very conscious of the fact that there's a big audience demand to achieve a certain critical mass of content and options as rapidly as possible. The beginning of 4th Edition was no different, and we felt that we needed to present a lot of material as quickly as possible. I think this shows more in Adventurer's Vault than in Monster Manual.

The story element reason is that we wanted to be careful about burdening the game with "negative fluff" — story elements that tell the DM why he shouldn't use things in certain settings or combinations. (This is more relevant to the Monster Manual.) For example, one of the "stats" we removed from monster descriptions in the 4th Edition Monster Manual was climate/terrain, because we didn't want DMs to think that they were playing D&D wrong if they wanted to use gnolls in a cold marsh environment or a sphinx to guard a forest shrine. Likewise, story elements such as the Blood War make it difficult for the DM to use demons and devils in the same adventure, so we wanted to downplay it and free up the DM to use the monsters any darned way he wanted to. The simplest way to open things up was to say less about the monster stories.

In retrospect, I personally feel we were a little too aggressive in minimizing the story elements on monster usage. I think it teaches the new DM or player something about the D&D world when he learns that black dragons, lizardfolk, and shambling mounds all can be found in swamps. Next time we tackle a monster book, I think we're going to be a little more careful to present the essential truths of classic D&D monsters and accept the story burden that goes with them.

Two quick remarks.
1. I'm puzzled by the 'bottle neck' comment. After all, WotC made a deliberate decision to exclude certain canonical monsters (like frost giants or chain golems, iirc) in MM 1 so that they could sell MM 2 better. On the other hand, they included 6-8 stat blocks per monster entry, and I can't see how any of these two decisions (leaving out canonical stuff, driving up the number of stat blocks per entry) can be seen as serving the anti-bottle-neck situation: people didn't yearn for 12 kobold stat blocks, they complained because frost giants were left out. It's not simply 'mass', it's 'critical mass'. And as for the reasoning itself: "we are very conscious of the fact that there's a big audience demand to achieve a certain critical mass of content and options as rapidly as possible." There is? I thought the joy of a new edition is that, precisely, not every nook and cranny is filled up -that, after all, was their way of marketing the new Realms. Also, what good is it to reach critical mass of content if that content is stripped of "the essential truths of classic D&D" (whether of monster or items)?

2. "Next time we tackle a monster book, I think we're going to be a little more careful to present the essential truths of classic D&D monsters": WotC already did two Monster Vaults earlier this year which pretty much revert 2008's fluff-light stance reported above - so what can he possibly mean by 'next time' if not 5E?

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On the colum for Sept 12, 2011, Baker reaches for a new term - in 4E the anti-simulationist "tyranny of accuracy" looms large.

QuoteMany players have a problem with the idea of a feat tax—feats like the expertise feats that address a deficit that all characters have. Are you looking at ways to fix issues without adding more feat tax or ways of fixing the feat tax issue in general?

One of the things that we didn't fully appreciate in the early days of 4E design is "the tyranny of accuracy." When monster defenses scale with level, characters can't afford to fall behind. Older editions of D&D generally set monster defenses based on simulation: flesh golems are covered in human skin, so they're AC 9. Sure, they're monsters that 7th or 8th level characters might expect to fight, but their AC still reflects their "real" toughness, not the threat you'd like them to pose for characters of their level. 4th Edition discarded that approach and cut straight to the chase; monsters' defenses are based on who they're likely to fight, and they're seldom much easier or harder than "normal" to hit. It's a lot less OK to be nonchalant about your accuracy when every combat encounter is scaled to test your accuracy.

And this nomenclature (Baker, Oct 17) is rather entertaining (am I a Rommel?):

QuoteWith so many different players, play styles, and audiences, how do you determine which ones you're going to cater to when laying out the core books for an RPG like D&D 4E?

Several years ago, we put together a task force to examine our player psychographics (a fancy term for likes and interests), looking at theory and discussion from around the industry and comparing it to our own experiences. Out of this we built our own "house theory," which we've presented a couple of times in places such as the Dungeon Master's Guide or Dungeon Master for Dummies. Basically, we divide rollplayers into Attila, Rommel, and Caesar, and we divide roleplayers into Shakespeare, Magellan, and Knuckles. (We have better terms, but that's the way I remember 'em.) You can check out the relevant sections of our rulebooks for the whole discussion.

Different types of products naturally appeal to different types of players. For example, Magellan loves world sourcebooks that build the depth and story of a setting, but Caesar's not terribly interested unless a book presents new mechanical bits to make his character stronger. A big, crunchy book like Martial Power has a strong appeal to Caesar and Rommel, but Magellan is mostly interested in what the flavor bits of the paragon paths or prestige classes tell him about the world of D&D, and Shakespeare uses the book only as a courtesy to the other players who want him to keep up in combat. Those are exaggerations, of course; all players, including the ones here in the office, have elements of several psychographics in them, and it's a rare D&D player who doesn't enjoy some mix of story and combat.

Emphasis on roll vs. role in original (underlined, not bolded) - interestingly enough, this distinction has not been made in the works he references (DMG, DM for Dummies), because it is frequently taken to be a mispresentative slur on players with the former play style.

--

Taking the last two entries in conjunction: I bet if Melan or Justin Alexander or mxlzpx (sp?) or whoever in the 4e-critical-blogosphere had written either of these posts - "4E caters to the anti-simulationist tyranny of accuracy! And 50% of its target demographic players are rollplayers, not roleplayers!" they'd have been slammed as trolling the internets, and as severely mispresenting the game as well as its playerbase.