One more time to pay for all.

[alexandraerin]

It's 3:30 and I'm awake and not writing... but I have noticed something. The person who'd been messaging me about D&D did it again and this time I recognized them as being an old troll who knows how to push my buttons, who probably isn't even a member of the forum he keeps sending me links to... he must have just gotten the address from when it came up months ago and decided to set me off again.

I'm not proud of having buttons that are so big and obvious and easy to push, but I think I've got more reasons to be proud than the person who pushes them for fun. :P

So, I'm going to make one last venty, ranty post about 4E bashing and then I'm done. Not done talking about D&D, but I'm going to keep it positive after this post. The rest of this post might just seem like more of the same grousing, but it's helpful to me in getting the fuck over it to take a look at and identify the sheer ridiculousness of it all. If you don't want to read it, you don't have to. I'm making it for my own benefit.



Okay, so just to get this all out of my head where it's bouncing around, I'm going to detail and refute some of the most nonsensical non sequitur arguments that I've seen popping up on these forum threads:

1. The fact that 4E's limited economy rules effectively disallow players from stripping every corpse and picking up everything that's not nailed down so they can sell it for book value is a symptom of the game designers not wanting to allow anything that breaks the cycle of kill/loot.

Budawhuhuh? Removing the incentive to loot perpetuates looting? Getting the players in my group to realize that there was no reason for them to obsessively pick up all the stuff that would be "Vendor Trash" in an MMO... their characters had no in-universe motivation for wanting fifteen kobold spears, nobody would pay them for them, etc., was a bit of an uphill battle in places, but I consider it to be one of the better parts of this system. One of the points of the treasure parcel system is to encourage DMs to move away from looting and put treasure into a scenario organically.

This is the first edition of D&D since its inception where player characters don't routinely end a battle by pulling out their Items of Infinite Inventory (portable hole, bag of holding, handy haversack) and stuff everything their dead enemies were wearing or carrying so they can sell it at the Magical Shop Where Everything You Drag In Is Somehow A Fungible Commodity Now... and this change makes it less realistic and immersive and more video gamey?

Of course, someone piped up on the forum to point out that the rules don't stop players from strip-mining encounters, they just make it more of a headache to sell the stuff and thus waste more time. Not at my table. If someone really wants to take the armor off seventeen dead kobolds, I'll ask them if their character is insane. And if they say yes, I'll let them do it. And then when they get back to town and say they're looking for a buyer, I'll tell them, "Good luck with that." and ask what everyone else is doing.

Bottom line: immersion doesn't require rules that support any merchant in the first town you come to buying the makeshift leather tunics that seventeen kobolds died in. That isn't realism. That isn't verisimilitude. It's a bunch of straight up video game bullshit that's got no place in a consistent, living world. No one wants your dead kobold leather. Seriously.

2. The fact that there is no value listed for a small golden idol means that you can't say the PCs found a small golden idol, and so the options for treasures are limited.

This one's easy. How much do you want the small golden idol to be worth? I don't need a book to tell me that a small golden idol worth 200 GP is worth 200 GP, or that one worth 50 GP is worth 50 GP. There are absolutely guidelines for how much "art objects" are worth... or rather there are guidelines telling you how much the art objects found at each level should be worth, to be level appropriate. Though there's nothing that stops you from having a whole chess set's worth of smaller, cheaper statuettes at a higher level, or combining the monetary value of five of the first level treasure parcels to represent the fabulous treasure of Sumded Ghai.

The crux of this complaint, though, is that gold itself as a precious metal is not given a value and this is a crippling oversight in the system... if we say that the statue's worth 200 GP, they want to know how much gold that is, by weight. Well, if it's important: how much do 200 gold coins weigh? That's how much gold is worth 200 GP. It's precious metal, not fiat money. This isn't even hard.

Though if this complaint were really about realism and immersion and not about "WE'RE USED TO PLAYING D&D LIKE IT'S A GAME AND NOT AN ACTUAL FANTASY WORLD SO WHY CAN'T WE KEEP DOING THAT?", they wouldn't be looking for the precise value of the idol's metal. They'd be complaining about the lack of rules for finding an art collector.

I mean, why would you want to melt an sculpture down and sell it for its value in metal is beyond me, unless there's a gold shortage and the art market is saturated? It's logically more valuable as a finished product than as a base material.

If players want to roleplay finding a buyer for the golden idol, yippee! And if I judge they do another encounter's worth of stuff trying to find the collector who'll pay for it, I'll up the value they get for it by one encounter's worth of gold. If they're not that interested in playing it out, though, I'll give them the value I've predetermined for it... that's not the price tag stamped on the bottom, it's not the idol's value as a bizarre form of religious icon-based currency, it's the price an interested buyer would give for it. The rulebook doesn't say that's what the value of an art object actually represents, but as a great philosopher said: ARE YOU DENSE? Do we really need to use up a line in the rulebook explaining that "one art object" is not actually an oddly-shaped denomination of coin?

3. You aren't allowed to make monsters in 4E. [when confronted with the guidelines for monster generation] The rules for making monsters in 4E are so bad that clearly they don't want you to do it. [when it's illustrated how easy it is] The monster you end up with is no different from any other except by its stats, name, description, and flavor text so therefore no new monster has been generated

Do I really need to address this one? There's a Monster Generator tool on the 4E website.

4. But monsters are so poorly balanced in 4E that the monster you generate will probably kill the entire party.

These complaints are coming from people who think paladins are literally worthless except in an entire party of paladins, from people who can't figure out a better tactic than picking the power that gives the most obvious and straightforward advantage and attacking over and over again with it. I'm honestly not surprised to read again and again that they get Total Party Kills from level-appropriate monsters.

5. The fact that monsters/NPCs aren't fully statted out like PCs robs me of options except using them in combat... I can't have them surrender or be captured after combat or have the players interact with them in any way except killing them!

Huzzzzzzuh? I really can't follow this argument at all. I used to play Tunnels & Trolls. PCs had full OD&D style stats. Monsters had one stat: Monster Rating. I also play quite a bit of GURPS, in which there is no difference between NPC stats and PC stats. I don't really recall either paradigm affecting my options when it came to non-combat interactions.

My 4E combats tend to involve some dialogue at the beginning and near the end, and possibly in the middle, if there's a common language. Some of the losers get away, if they can. The "boss" of one fight was taken alive and kept prisoner for a time. And then there's gamingdragon's creative repurposing of an NPC succubus, which I've detailed elsewhere.

Actual legitimate consequences of 4E monsters not being statted like PCs: Wizards can't get bonus spells by stealing their spellbooks. That's yet one more supremely video gamey D&D trope I'm happy to see fall by the wayside. What work of non-D&D fantasy has experienced wizards rifling through the backpacks of their defeated foes to see if they can find written instructions to do something neat?

Man, I wasn't planning on any particular theme for these, just picking out the most nonsensical, but it seems they keep coming back to the same complaint: that "looting" itself, in the terms of the familiar game mechanic, has been diminished in importance. And this somehow makes D&D more like a console video game or MMOs.

They can keep harping on how much "verisimilitude" is missing when the book doesn't detail the value of the nails they pulled out of the door when obviously those nails are made of something and that something is worth money, but... gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah. One of my favorite characters to roleplay as is absolutely greedy to her very heart. She's not appraising the value of random dungeon fixtures and dead orc wear, though, because there would be nothing realistic about that. That's "RPG Reality", not actual reality.

6. "The rules force you to have either all melee or all ranged, and paladins are useless unless you have a whole party of paladins. And fifty eight orbizards can kill fifty eight Orcuses. And giving a flying character a bow wrecks combat."

Man, I'd have to see how the hell these people are playing the game to understand how they come up with these bizarre ideas. I mean, I do kind of get it from the way they reduce the classes to raw straighforward calculations of damage dealt/avoided and how they assume that DMs are going to play monsters the same way... I don't get why they do that and then complain about "boring tactic-poor grinds" when it seems like that's the way they prefer to play.

I have yet to play in or DM for a party that wasn't a mix of missile and melee. I've played in a group that had one single paladin.

7. "Some of the monsters are terribly unbalanced. Like, succubus is listed as a level 9 monster, but if you have a party of five level nine characters facing five succubi you're pretty much screwed."

Really? Even if they're five orbizards? :P

This is funny, though.

If you suggest a house rule or handwave to answer any of these people's objections, they'll say that if you can't play the game as it's written then it's a problem. But they've got no problem postulating a combination of monsters not supported by the encounter-building guidelines in the DMG.

Yeah, you could very easily wipe out most heroic-tier parties if you fill an encounter with succubi, flying creatures that can make themselves immune to one person's attacks and Dominate with an at-will attack. You could also very easily wipe out most heroic-tier parties by saying "Rocks fall, everybody dies." or "Floor drops out, you fall 100 feet into an acid pit." Each of those scenarios involves the DM arbitrarily creating a condition that's not going to exist if you're playing the game as written. The descriptions of monster controllers (which succubi are) in the DMG recommends limiting them to 1 or 2 per encounter. None of the encounter templates later in the book consists of wall-to-wall controllers.

No, there's no rule that explicitly says "You can't make an encounter that's all controllers", but the 4E bashers jump on anyone who points out there's no rule that says you can't do something. All available guidelines on setting up encounters limit controllers to two at most, the sample encounter for succubi has one succubus plus other, non-controller helpers... the response these arguments get is inevitably "But they said it's no hassle to balance encounters in 4E! Obviously that was bullshit!"

It is no hassle. The tools are right there. You're ignoring them and putting five succubi in an encounter. If your DM fiat results in a total party kill, that's an instance of Rocks Fall; Everybody Dies, not evidence of a mechanical problem.

8. "All you have to do to break the combat system is give a flying creature a bow."

And a flying creature with ranged attacks is unbalanced? Yeah, no duh. That's your verisimilitude. You're complaining about reality. Can you imagine how individual human flight with hover capabilities would have changed pre-mechanized warfare? What would a Spartan phalanx have done against flying archers? If boxing matches had one person on the ground, throwing punches, and one person flying above them dropping sandbags, who would win?

The fact that flight offers a clear advantage isn't a mechanical problem.

This "balance problem with reality" was a much bigger problem in 3E. 4E's designers recognized it and made sure nobody can fly freely and reliably (without shifting into a non-attacking form) before about level 16, and only certain builds can do that.

And like any other gamebreaker, the strategic advantage of flight is situational. There's no way to "nerf" the power of flight itself beyond what they did: heavily restricting it until you reach a level where your opposition is likely to have options, but there's an easy to negate the advantage: ceilings. Don't quite a lot of Dungeons & Dragons adventures take place in "dungeons"? Evil fortresses, evil caves, evil catacombs? The big climactic fight against the big climactic bad guy... who maybe can fly, too, or has really good ranged attacks... can happen in a big climactic room, but who cares what your hover flight speed is when you're fighting in hallways and rooms with an eight foot ceiling?

Again, you can say "If the system wasn't broken then the DM wouldn't need to come up with situations that block it.", but... flight. Flying. What's the systemic fix?

7. But since PCs can't really fly much before level paragon tier, you can kill the entire party by throwing a bunch of flying heroic tier monsters with ranged attacks at them.

Yeah. Here we come to a reason why parties consisting entirely of melee or entirely of ranged attackers is not a great idea. Though honestly, "Finding combinations of monsters that can wipe out the PCs" is an odd pasttime for a DM, especially when this edition makes it so easy to make up balanced encounters that provide genuine challenge but are still winnable.

8. But fighting on horseback gives you such tremendous advantages that it breaks everything, forever.

Situational advantage. Like the orbizard as gamebreaker theory, like the flying deathmonkey as gamebreaker theory, like all the other "game breakers", this assumes that the entire game experience is going to conform to a narrow set of circumstances. If fighting on horseback beats everything, what about flying? :P What about places that are inhospitable to horses? I'm sure the answer to this would be "There's no rule that says I can't take my horse into the mines/swamp/desert/Elemental Chaos!" Yeah? What about your verisimilitude? A consistent and logical world says you can't.

9. "Those dumbfucks at Wizards of the Coast didn't realize that if a conjuration effects everything in adjacent squares then you can conjure it in midair above a square and now all nine squares beneath it are adjacent. Too bad they're stuck thinking two dimensionally or they'd realize that they overpowered some level one attacks!"

Definition of adjacent square, from player's handbook: squares are adjacent if their sides or corners are touching. If we project a three-dimensional grid of the squares that flying creatures move through, you will note that the sides and corners of the squares at altitude one do not touch the sides or corners of squares at altitude zero. If we extend those squares up into cubes, then we can see that the cubes are adjacent.

To put it simply, it does not require a house rule to say that "adjacent squares" only applies in the horizontal plane. It works just fine exactly as written.

Is this WotC being "stuck thinking two dimensionally"? Well, the unbalancing exploit you thought you saw doesn't work because the system they designed works two-dimensionally instead of three. The hilarous thing is that the call the designers "The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight".

10. This one was jogged loose from my memory by that last aside comment: "I came up with this great infinite gold loop exploit that involves making gold armor for a tiny creature, using the enchantment rituals to resize it for a gargantuan creature, and then selling the gold. But it doesn't work because the system provides no way for me to make money off! This is terrible game design and horrible mechanics and poor verisimilitude!"

I always thought "verisimilitude" meant something like "the quality of seeming true to life". Apparently I was mistaken and it means "letting me have more pretend money because I WANT IT, I WANT IT, I WANT IT!"

You want verisimilitude, here it is: there is no combination of rituals that mortals can perform that allows them to create vast amounts of wealth for far less investment of time and capital than any other pursuit allows. That's versimilitude. That's how you pretend like the game that you're playing is representing a real world that's consistent and persistent and has a purpose beyond providing you with entertainment.

Pretending like there are magic words people could learn to say that give you infinite money but yet the world plods on more or less unchanged?

Not realistic.

Not consistent.

Which brings me to number 11, which is going to be where I wrap this up and move on with my brainspace.

11. "Infinite gold loops and other wealth exploits that we found in 3E that 4E made impossible aren't actually unrealistic because all that would happen if someone did it is that there would be hyperinflation and so they'd pick some other currency and the world would move on and there wouldn't be any real effect on the game."

Somebody actually made this assertion. That is all.

Seriously.

Comments

Re: People are dumb

[ego-sideways.livejournal.com]

Oh, if only 'twere possible. If only. But it's like a scab, or to more appropriately insult the perpetrators, a really painful infected pimple: It bugs you and bugs you and bugs you until you finally painfully squeeze it until you bruise yourself, and sometimes you pop it and sometimes you don't, and no matter what you just make it last longer, so you'll inevitably come back to it again.