Right, so this is the first of my regular RP updates, focusing on... well, whatever springs into my memory, really.
This session was rather light on actual roleplaying, since the characters are currently trawling through a dungeon, and there were basically no opportunities for non-combat interaction with NPCs last night.
The weekly D&D game starts (officially) at 7.30 in the evening, and runs until at least 10.00, usually later. Last night ended just gone 10.00. For once we actually started on time, continuing from last session.
There was the obligatory chattering, description of various things the characters could see as they made their way deeper into Skalmad's lair, and by about 8.00 they had found a room with some nasties in it.
Since I don't particularly want to spoil the adventure for anyone reading this, I won't bore you with all of the details, but here's an interesting factoid:
Combat in 4E takes a lot longer than it ever has before.
I don't mean a bit longer. I mean a lot. In fact, last night's session consisted of the grand total of one single combat encounter. That's it. By 10.00 my wife was falling asleep in her comfy chair, so conversation with the rescued NPCs was put off until next week, but from 8.00 to 10.00 was one combat encounter.
2 hours.
11 combatants.
Now, time for the caveats: Adam had never played the character before, and indeed had never played 4E before, so we were teaching him as we went along, and leaping into playing an 11th level character is a lot harder than playing a 1st level character, so that slowed it down... a bit. But not by more than 20 minutes over the whole session.
It wasn't that the fight was hard, either - it's just that it took a lot of time, with all of the consideration, movement, reactions, interrupts, options and... well, the list just goes on and on.
Whereas in 3.5E a party could easily crack through 3 or 4 encounters in that length of time, the sheer (and almost overwhelming) array of choices has slowed the combat system to a crawl. I won't deny that the combat system is better, at least in terms of ensuring that everyone, regardless of their character, remains interested throughout, because they always have options on what to do next, but every single action taken involves an in-depth discussion of tactics that just eats away at the available time.
I'm certain that, with practice, it will get faster, but I doubt it will be by much.
Because of this extensive tactical consideration, my perspective of 4E as "a very good, detailed miniatures system" has been reinforced yet again. Where was the chance to try talking? Where was the interesting discussion about trapped doors, detailed searching, and witty banter with the NPCs? It didn't happen, but only because there wasn't time for it to happen.
Next week should include that side of the RP experience, and I'm really looking forward to it. It'll make a nice change from spending 2 solid hours running a single fight.
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Honestly: what is motivating you to continue running a game using 4E?
ReplyDeleteThe last time I can remember being in an RPG where combat took that long, I was probably playing Rolemaster or Harn or Champions. (God! Champions....)
While I've heard good things about D&D 4E's combat in terms of it being a miniatures game, as you say, I just can't imagine it being fun in a 'imagine this combat in your mind's eye' way; and for me, the best roleplaying combats were always that.
Seems to me a recounting of a D&D 4E session might end up sounding more like Arnold Rimmer's Risk campaign diaries than anything else. ("And then disaster! I rolled a 1 and a 3." etc)
Honest answer to honest question: I want to give it a fair crack of the whip.
ReplyDeleteTo date, I have never rejected an RP system I have purchased, whether it's insanely complex or incredibly simple, and I've played games that run the gamut of choice.
I like systems that elegantly portray real-world physical events as much as I like systems that let you break the laws of physics. The duration of a combat encounter is not, in itself, a game-breaker for me. But when combined with other aspects, particularly that 4E is clearly targetted at miniatures users, which I prefer NOT to use, if I can help it, is pushing me further and further into rejecting the game system as a whole.
I'm not quite there, yet, but I'm damned if it's not a close thing.
I'm going to soldier on, unless my players scream hatred at me. I intend to finish the current adventure. Once I've got that far, I'm going to house-rule D&D3.75E, stealing the best mechanics from 4E and folding them into the 3.5E game.
At that point, I believe, I will have a truly robust and useful game system that flows smoothly and doesn't suffer from the huge breakages in 3.5, nor the feeling of "I don't care about the characters" that I'm getting from 4E.
As far as recounting a game session... I don't think it would be quite Rimmer-esque, but it would come close - it would boil down to the tactical movement and the selection of power choices in combat, not to "we fought through the trolls until we met the king, and then the paladin..." which is what I'd *like* a recounting to be.
If you want D&D3.75, I suggest Star Wars Saga Edition. It'd need heavy houseruling for magic, but its very obviously the halfway step between 3.5's rules and 4e's powers.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I can run my entire turn in about 30 seconds. Granted I'm only third level, but I know my role, what my powers are, and all my modifiers etc. It also may help that I'm the party's defender, so the biggest threat is my target.
Have the Star Wars Saga Edition - hadn't considered backbuilding from there as a method. Good advice.
ReplyDeleteThe thing is that I don't want to come across as a 4E hater. I certainly don't HATE it. It just fails to push my buttons as a good system for RPing with, and it punches my buttons on a few other points (like excessive use of miniatures for combat).
My group has been running 4e for a few months now; we're all up to fifth level, pushing close to sixth. The GM wants to take a break, and one of the other players is going to be running his own 4e game, and I'm torn. His setting sounds very interesting, and I'd like to explore it, but I'm fast becoming disenchanted with 4e. I think it works well as a system, but I'm not sure I like the style of gaming to which it leads. We only play once every two weeks for about three or four hours, and as you've found, that's about one combat scene in 4e. Fighting is fun in 4e, but it takes ages, and pushes everything else out to the sides. Two-thirds of the time, combat is fun and exciting, but it's that last third, when you're out of powers to use, and it's just "I hit him" until the monster falls over, that kills the game.
ReplyDeleteTomorrow, I'm meeting with a couple of the players, and we're going to run some 4e encounters with halved hit points for both players and monsters, to see if that sorts out the length of fights without breaking the system. If we can't figure it out, I may move on.
I also have another problem with it in that I find character creation incredibly boring, as it's all about combat efficiency, but that's a whinge for another day.
Noooo, Kelvin, it's not a whinge for another day! Whinge now.
ReplyDeleteIt was expressly stated by the 4E design team that they were focussing everything on combat - I forget the exact quote (though I could find it when I get home if I want to), but to paraphrase it: "Class abilities that aren't combat oriented ain't there no more".
The ability to create a balanced character who shines out of combat but sucks sweaty scrotum in combat simply doesn't exist, and *that* is a travesty of 4E.
OK. I guess being one of Chemlak's wednesday night players I should chime in here....
ReplyDeleteI think a large part of the slow down in combat is that we're all pretty damn new to 4e, so we're kind of feeling our way through combat and trying to calculate whether to use X daily power now, or to save it... much like I imagine it was originally envisaged. I love 4e and I just think it's going to take a few more weeks or so to get the hang of when to use the dailies and when to just go with enc/at will powers. Once we've got that idea down, it's just a case of normal combat.
For me, 3.5e is still the mutts nuts, but I'm enjoying the "wowified" feel of 4e (shock!). I truly don't think it's the system thats slow. It's the players. Chem can play a 3.5 campaign without having to refer to any books except on very odd occasions there's someone trying to wangle their way round a rule or bend it to meet their needs. Oh and to double check the nasty things that his ebil creatures can do to us.
I hope we give this the time for the rules and style to embed itself so Chem's not feeling like it's a one-fight-a-night system and we can get on to learn the depths of the system's potential. I see great things.... but only when they finally release the Arcana supplement so I can toy around with my Fel 'lock and get used to teleporting round the scenes just because I can!
Thing is, Veritam, that I found 3.5E to be very intuitive and comprehensive. Sure, there are some hugely broken things in it (dare I mention Level Adjustments?), but at its most basic level, everything makes sense.
ReplyDeleteWhile I might get ragged on for saying so, there are some aspects of 4E that I just can't get my head around in terms of allowing smooth, logical running of a game.
My love affair with 3.5E is unlikely to end any time soon, unless something in 4E just "clicks" in my head. With 3.5E I can see the underlying reasons and mechanics, whereas 4E still looks inscrutable to me... and not a little too much like an MMO. Plus the fact that the mechanics of characters aren't as easily ported to other settings as 3.5E's - making a sci-fi or modern-day RP based on 4E would require completely new classes to fill the various niches in the game and... that's a lot of work. Sure, it also had to be done for 3.5E d20, but a huge amount of stuff could be simply ported across with little or no change - I can't see that with 4E.
I've not given up, yet. I'm not sure I will. But I'm actually less enamoured of 4E than I am of some of the other systems on my bookshelf.
The jury is still out on whether I think 4E is a sustainable game system - I know that a lot of my players really like it, Veritam and Pix being two of them - so I'm happy to keep going for the moment... but I also would love to run an M&M game on my Wednesday night slot, or Champions, perhaps, or maybe a Buffy game, just to be different.
The truest test of an RPG I've ever found is what I call the "break test" - if we take a break from a game and people want to get back to it after a few weeks of trying something else, then the game has traction.
*Shudder* Please please never mention level adjustment again.... I remember the Quasi-Deity we secretly brought into the game as my character and the seemingly interminable wait to finally level up!
ReplyDeleteI'm by no means disputing what you think of 4e, I completely agree with your thinking that it's become more like an MMO. Not surprisingly, being a World of Warcrack addict, that's part of what I like. The reason I play WoW so much is it "feels" the way I wanted the game to feel and that part of me has latched onto 4e. I'm not entirely sure it is sustainable as a paper and dice system, but that seems to be more the way the adventure is set up rather than the strictures of the system.
I know that even if we do a Buffy game (thats got my vote by the way! Mmmmmm Willow.....) I know I'll be itching to get my hands back on my 'lock to see what mayhem we can create and see if we can break the game system =)
To me, 4e is little different from Basic as far as the roleplaying/combat division goes; both games give you little but combat statistics and everything else is built on top of that. It's not ideal, but I can deal with it.
ReplyDeleteThe problem for me comes from the fact that combat takes up so much of our play time. We play once a week, 4e one week, something else the other, and we only have about four hours to play. As it stands, an awful lot of that time is taken up with fighting, particularly that last third of the fight when you're just swinging at each other because you're out of cool stuff to do. Veritam, we've been playing for about seven or eight months, and we're still hitting this problem, even though we know our characters and the rules well by this point. I know that our GM has been skipping and summarising whole chunks of plot so that we can get to the good stuff, which usually involves, alas, a fight.
We ran a playtest today, two level one encounters and one level five encounter, and ran through them with halved hit points (and the according surge and bloodied values) for both players and monsters. The result was much quicker fights, probably knocking about a third to half the time off, as well as more edgy fights, as a good couple of hits could take a combatant out of the running. I much preferred it to the usual swaggering superhero style of the game, even though I lost my bard (partly my fault, and partly clever play from the GM). Minions become tougher, as they deal a fair bit of damage for a low "cost", and healing becomes much more precious. Ongoing damage also becomes something to be feared, rather than something for which to roll a save if you can be bothered to remember. We're a bit concerned how all this will play out at level ten and above, but it seems to work well enough in our range, with one campaign on hiatus at level five and a new one starting from first level. The GM of the new campaign intends to try out the half-HP rule, to see how it goes.
Honestly though, I'm overjoyed to find a potential way to make fights go quicker while retaining the tactical fun of the 4e system, which leaves more time for the roleplaying/plot/character bits in-between.
As far as character creation goes, my problem with 4e is that the combat emphasis means that essentially all characters of a certain type will either look more or less the same, as they're geared to making best use of their powers, or they're going to be sub-optimal. Giving a wizard a high strength (for example) is a waste in this system, because those points should be going to intelligence or dexterity in order to play the game as it's intended. There's enough of a whiff factor in 4e when you've got maxed stats, let alone a measly +1 bonus. One of the joys of the hobby for me is to take a pregen, or roll a random character, and think of how to get something entertaining out of this bunch of numbers I've been given; that seems less possible in 4e.
These may all be problems in 3e too, but I've been lucky/unlucky enough never to play that iteration, having moved on to other games due to lack of interest in 2e, and moving away from rpgs completely during 3e's lifetime.