"Despite the fact that my weapons and armor are in desperate need of repair, I blow the entire reward on ale and whores." - Skull, PVP (Scott Kurtz)

Here's the bad news:

The release of Legends & Labyrinths will be delayed until July 31st. As I mentioned at the end of June, I suffered a rather serious computer crash at the end of last month. Fortunately, all of our data was recovered. Unfortunately, after five days of trying to resurrect the machine, it remained stubbornly dead.

At this point, as July dawned, I was now facing a deadline for Legends & Labyrinths that had moved from "comfortable" to "barely possible". So I stopped trying to get my main computer rebuilt and focused all my attention on getting another machine set up so that I could access the document files and continue working on the graphics and layout for the book.

... which is when I discovered that the versions of Adobe Acrobat and Quark that I own don't work on Windows Vista.

Which was, of course, the operating system installed on the new machine I was trying to convert into a platform for production work.

All of which brings me to my current situation: I could probably, if I worked tirelessly between now and next Tuesday, crank out a presentable version of Legends & Labyrinths and have it released on July 15th. (Assuming that I can ever get Acrobat working.) But the question I'm left with is whether it's better to do it quickly or to do it right.

In the final analysis, I'd rather do it right. Like all of the projects here at Dream Machine Productions, one of my primary motivations for developing and publishing Legends & Labyrinths is that it's a book that I want to own and to use. (Plus, I figure that, if I want a product like this, there are probably other people out there who want it, too.)  And for me, personally, I'd rather wait the extra two weeks and do it right rather than trying to rush the process and end up with a book which isn't as good as it could be.

GALLEY PROOF PREVIEW: SKILLS & ACTION CHECKS

Okay, so that's the bad news.

Here's the good news: We're releasing the first of our Galley Proof Previews.

A Galley Proof Preview is literally an excerpt from our first galley proof of the manuscript. This means that what you'll see in a Galley Proof Preview is something like a rough draft: Before seeing publication, our internal production process will take the text through three more complete proof-reading cycles. The Galley Proof Preview also notably lacks the SRS, which won't be added until later in the process. So what does a Galley Proof Preview contain? A sneak peek at the actual content of the book.

Our first Galley Proof Preview is Legends & Labyrinths: Skills & Action Checks. This preview contains the entirety of Chapter 6: Skills and Chapter 13: Action Checks. This preview gives you a look right into the heart of the streamlining process that renders 3rd Edition down into the lean, mean, fighting machine that is Legends & Labyrinths.

If you're already familiar with 3rd Edition, you may be struck by all the things that are "missing" from these streamlined rules. But that's missing the forest for the trees: If the 3rd Edition tries to give you a complete building, Legends & Labyrinths gives you a foundation. If 3rd Edition tries to give you as much support as possible, Legends & Labyrinths lets you run free.

It's a different way of rolling the dice. Whether it's what you're looking for or not is up to you.

3RD EDITION LIVES!^TM

PLAYTESTING 4th EDITION

It seems crazy to say this, but I've been talking about Keep on the Shadowfell since May. That's a lot of time to dedicate to a single adventure. But, of course, a lot of this time has also been spent reading, analyzing, playing, and talking about the 4th Edition ruleset.

This essay is going to be about my playtesting of 4th Edition. Understanding these comments may require a little bit of context, however. So let's start with that.

When 4th Edition was first announced in August 2007, I posted some Thoughts on 4th Edition. These primarily consisted of three points: (1) What WotC says about a new edition and what a new edition actually does are frequently two completely different things. (2) The design ethos being espoused at WotC did not fill me with confidence. (3) I wasn't going to draw any conclusions until I actually had the rules in my hands.

In May of this year I wrote a series of essays on Dissociated Mechanics. These essays were written before 4th Edition was released, but provided a detailed dissection and analysis of what I still believe to be a serious flaw in the design ethos at WotC.

After the rulebooks were released, I revisited the subject of Skill Challenges. I was over-hasty in my reading of certain rules, but also far too forgiving in others (check the comment thread attached to that post).

If you've looked through some of this material, it will be clear that I had some serious reservations about 4th Edition. But I was also determined to approach the new system with an open mind. Ultimately you can talk a game to death, but it lives or dies in the playtest.

My initial intention was to take Keep on the Shadowfell and use the Quick Start Rules to play 4th Edition right out of the box -- just as the designers intended it. I had high expectations that, with Mike Mearls and Bruce Cordell writing it, I would be able to just pick up the adventure and run it. Unfortunately, my first impressions of the module left me fairly disenchanted, and the 12-part series of remix essays should give some idea of the amount of work I had to put into the module before I felt comfortable running it.

Eventually, however, I was ready to go. And I have now run two separate playtests of the module: One for a group of experienced D&D players (my regular group) and another for a group of newbies (some of whom had never played an RPG before).

So let's talk about my first reactions to playing 4th Edition.

COMBAT

Combat is the highlight of the game. It is interesting and dynamic. I was surprised, however, at the lack of a paradigm shift. Although the mechanics have been thoroughly shuffled, combats still largely play out the same way they did in previous editions.

One of the things promised in the preview material and hype, for example, was greater mobility in combat. But mobility has not noticeably increased at my gaming table. Some people claim that full-attacks resulted in 3rd Edition combats where people stood around and beat on each other, but that was never my experience: It was the desire to avoid attacks of opportunity that tended to lock opponents together (although this never stopped people from doing a lot of maneuvering at a small scale). Opportunity attacks are still in the game and, predictably, people are still trying to avoid them. And once you add marks into the mix, combat had a tendency to become less mobile, not more mobile.

The other major change that was promised was the ability to run combats involving large numbers of NPCs. But, personally, I've been running combats involving large numbers of NPCs for 20 years now. We did see a greater ability to run such encounters as 1st level characters, but that has more to do with 1st level characters playing more like 3rd level characters from previous editions than anything about the combat system.

PADDED SUMO WRESTLERS: There were also suggestions being made that combat in 4th Edition was going to be considerably faster. Even accounting for the slow-downs associated with acclimating to a new system, this was not our experience. Even basic encounters were chewing up huge chunks of time.

One of the primary reasons for this is that combats now resemble what I saw one person describing online as an "all-out brawl between heavily padded sumo wrestlers". The number of hit points has been significantly increased and the expected damage output of the PCs has been significantly reduced.

The result was that we were very quickly seeing combats that had outlasted their welcome and degraded into "I hit him", "I hit him again", "I hit him again", "I hit him again", "... he's still not dead? I hit him again".

This problem appears to become exacerbated at higher levels.

MINIONS: My players were not impressed with the "prick 'em and they die" aspect of minions. They liked the target-rich environment, but the fact that they didn't have to roll for damage made it feel as if they were never actually getting to land their blows.

They were also annoyed by the dissociated nature of the minion mechanics, which I found surprising because: (1) I wasn't, and dissociated mechanics are probably my biggest problem with 4th Edition. And (2) It came from an unexpected direction. It wasn't the fact that they only had 1 hp that yanked them out of the game world, it was the "never take damage on a miss" clause. This meant that they were making meaningful tactical decisions about which abilities to use based on whether a given target was a minion or non-minion -- they were either bothered by the fact that they were making tactical decisions that didn't map to their characters' perceptions; or they were bothered by the fact that their characters had some sort of minion-detector.

Unknown to my players at the time of our 4th Edition playtest, I'd actually been developing a different set of minions rules for Legends & Labyrinths. Based on their reactions to the 4th Edition system, I'm glad that I decided to take a different direction.

FORCED MOVEMENT: The one element of the combat system that did feel as if it was adding a meaningful new dynamic to the game were the forced movement mechanics. The ability to shove people around the field of battle without suffering the rather heavy penalty of an attack of opportunity did give some unique flavor to 4th Edition combat.

We have not found forced movement to be particularly revolutionary, but this is also something that might change at higher levels when forced movement starts being more than 1 square at a time. Hard to say. If nothing else, it certainly encourages me to think that removing the attacks of opportunity from Bull Rush and similar maneuvers in 3rd Edition wouldn't be a bad idea.

LEARNING THE GAME WITH KOBOLDS: I feel that kobolds were a bad choice to use for the initial villains in 4th Edition's introductory product. In 4th Edition characters can take a standard action, a move action, and a minor action each round. And, as a move action, characters can shift (move 1 square without provoking opportunity attacks).

Kobolds, however, a racial ability (Shifty) that allows them to shift 1 square as a minor action.

Any villain will probably have some ability that "breaks" the general rules, but this one was particularly confusing because it made it quite difficult for players to distinguish the general rules for shifting. Both experienced and newbie players were frequently trying to perform shifts as minor actions, only to remember (or be reminded) that the kobolds could only do that because of a racial ability. (And this was despite the fact that I was playing with open stat-blocks to help the players figure out the mechanics.)
 

To be continued...

APOLOGIES

Apparently my auto-updater isn't working properly on the new computer, either. So I've had a couple of days worth of updates just sitting on my hard drive without actually updating the website. So if you've actually been watching the site, you're going to see several days worth of updates all pop up at the same time.

And if you haven't been watching the site, then this note is irrelevant... Move along.

Normal updates will (hopefully) continue tomorrow.

PLAYTESTING 4th EDITION

PART 2: RUNNING COMBAT

Running low-level combat encounters in 4th Edition is considerably more complicated than in previous edtiions. I would roughly estimate the level of complexity as being equivalent to a difficult 15th level encounter in 3rd Edition.

In my experience, there are three factors which determine how complicated an encounter is to run: The number of abilities the monsters have, keeping track of hit points, and making stat-block adjustments as a result of buff and buff-like effects.

MONSTER ABILITIES: In 3rd Edition, high-level creatures frequently featured many different abilities. Part of the complexity of running encounters was knowing what these abilities were and how they could be used to best effect. Part of mastering the system meant learning how to quickly discriminate between the abilities which were combat-relevant and which weren't, and revised stat blocks helped make that distinction clearer.

In 4th Edition, the designers intentionally stripped monsters of their non-combat abilities and worked to reduce the number of combat-relevant abilities, as well. Their theory, as expressed by David Noonan, was simple: "We wanted our presentation of monsters to reflect how they’re actually used in D&D gameplay. A typical monster has a lifespan of five rounds. That means it basically does five things, ever, period, the end."

Their logic was fundamentally flawed when it came to 3rd Edition, for reasons which I'll only briefly summarize here: First, it ignores the fact that you'll frequently meet the same type of monster more than once (in which case having some variety in what the monster can do is valuable). Second, it ignores the fact that monsters need to be able to react to the unexpected actions of the PCs (in which case having a wider array of tactical options is valuable). Finally, and most importantly, it neglects to consider that D&D is supposed to be a roleplaying game, not a tactical miniatures game. In a roleplaying game, even if you're fighting, the reasons why you're fighting are frequently important.

(As I've written before: "It's often the abilities that a creature has outside of combat which create the scenario. And not just the scenario which leads to combat with that particular creature, but scenarios which can lead to many different and interesting combats. Noonan, for example, dismisses the importance of detect thoughts allowing a demon to magically penetrate the minds of its minions. But it's that very ability which may explain why the demon has all of these minions for the PCs to fight; which explains why the demon is able to blackmail the city councillor that the PCs are trying to help; and which allows the demon to turn the PCs' closest friend into a traitor.")

All of these flaws in WotC's reasoning remain equally valid when it comes to 4th Edition, but we can also add another one to he batch: Due to the "padded sumo wrestling" nature of the system, monsters in 4th Edition tend to have lifespans much longer than 5 rounds. Since their tactical options have been limited, 4th Edition monsters tend to do the same couple of things over and over again -- they don't have any other choice, after all. This is not only the result of the "padded sumo wrestling" combat, but also contributes to it by making the longer combats boring.

These problems with WotC's design ethos, however, are relatively tangential to the issue at hand: Reducing the complexity of running combat. Reducing the number of abilties a monster has would, in fact, accomplish that... if the number of monsters in each encounter were the same.

But they aren't. Not only is 4th Edition designed to have more monsters in a single encounter, but the system is specifically designed with the expectation that you will have a greater variety of monsters in each encounter.  In 3rd Edition you might have a battle with 8 ogres, but they'd all have the same abilities. In 4th Edition you might have a battle with 8 ogres, but they'll have five different stat blocks.

For example, demons and devils are generally agreed to be the most complicated 3rd Edition monsters to use in an encounter. A horned devil in 3rd Edition is a CR 15 encounter. They have roughly 14 abilities that could be used during combat (if you count both their different attacks and non-combat abilities which are relatively easy to ignore; in practice the effective number of abilities you need to keep track of is considerably lower). 

Encounter A3 in Keep on the Shadowfell features 5 different types of kobolds who have, between them, 12 different abilities that could be used during combat. (And that's not counting their different attacks, which -- in an apples-to-apples comparison -- would increase the number of abilities to 18.)

Making things even more difficult is that many abilities in 4th Edition are immediate actions: They take place during other characters' turns. In 3rd Edition most creature abilities can only be used on the combatant's own turn -- which means that simply taking a few moments to look over a monster's stat block on their turn was generally effective. But in 4th Edition it's not enough to simply be able to quickly parse a stat block, you pretty much have to keep a large number of abilities in your head at all times so that your monster's can take advantage of the triggers for their actions as they occur.

TRACKING HIT POINTS: One effect of the minion rules is to eliminate the number of monsters the DM needs to track hit points for (since any hit kills a minion). This is fine as far as it goes, but -- once again -- 4th Edition encounters are generally designed around larger groups of monsters. Which means, in practice, it appears that you'll have just as many hit point totals to keep track of.

For example, looking at the first few encounters in Keep on the Shadowfell we find in the first encounter three creatures; in A1 five creatures; in A2 three creatures; in A3 seven creatures; and in A4 four creatures that need to have hit point totals tracked.

BUFFS: One of the things I hear people claiming is that there aren't as many buffs in 4th Edition. This is not actually true. It's true that there are fewer "permanent" buffs (in the form of equipment giving flat bonuses, for example) and it's also true that there are fewer buffs to ability scores and the like.

But short-term bonuses and penalties? They're all over the damn place. And, to make matters worse, they're largely situational bonuses -- by which I mean that you get things like a +1 for each ally adjacent to your target; -2 for being marked; +1 to a particular skill check if you're within 5 squares of one character; -2 to a different skill check if you're within 6 squares of another one. Marks just add to the laundry list of such abilities.

These situational buffs are the worst type of buff when it comes to adding complexity to battle. Permanent buffs from equipment, for example, are calculated into a stat block at character creation. And for oft-used buffs (like a barbarian's rage or always casting bull's strength on the fighter before a big battle), there are tricks and work-arounds (like prepping a second character sheet or stat block).

But for situational buffs you pretty much have to keep on your toes. You have to both (a) remember that the situational buff exists and (b) make frequent on-the-fly adjustments to multiple stat blocks as the buffs come and go (or move around).

THE BOTTOM LINE: I was always fairly comfortable with the level of complexity you'd find in high-level 3rd Edition encounters. It took a certain degree of system mastery, certainly, but it's a level of system mastery that flowed pretty naturally into my blood the first time I ran a group from 1st to 20th.

So, for the most part, 4th Edition combat looks just fine to me. But if you're someone who disliked the complexity of high level 3rd Edition encounters, you should be warned that this is par for the course in 4th Edition.

I'll also say that I have little confidence that I would ever get to a point where I would be able to run 4th Edition encounters flawlessly. The multitude of situational buffs and marks are something that I'm likely to get more right than wrong, but I suspect there'll always be something getting overlooked at some point during a session.

THE GOOD NEWS: I can't vouch for this through playtesting, but it looks like this level of complexity stays pretty constant from 1st level to 30th level in 4th Edition. Like many things in the system, if they've hit your sweet spot then you're going to be fairly happy for the duration. But if they've missed your sweet spot -- or if you had many different sweet spots (and liked the variety of having different styles of gameplay) -- then 4th Edition is going to be continuously problematic.

To be continued...

PIMPING MISCELLANEOUS MEDIA

I'm in a sharing mood today.

Let's start with Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. It's written by the unmitigatingly awesome Joss Whedon and stars Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion, and Felicia Day. It's available freely online for a limited time (through the end of the week), and will then be available for a nominal fee through iTunes.

Also: It is made of glee.

Every so often I'll depress myself by thinking about what might have happened if the 2000 election hadn't been stolen by George W. Bush. Al Gore is, once again, demonstrating his keen vision and willingness to confront the tough, long-term problems facing this nation and the world: He is challenging the United States to transform its energy infrastructure so that, within 10 years, 100% of our energy needs would come from solar, wind, and other eco-friendly sources. This isn't just something that we can do, it's something that we must do.

Here's the best version of the speech I've managed to find online. You'll want to skip to about 2 minutes into it to get to the actual beginning of the speech (skipping over the accolades and "thank you" stuff).

"When demand for oil and coal increases, their price goes up. When the demand for solar cells increases, the price often comes down. That's the difference. One source of fuel is expensive and going up, and the other source of fuel is free forever. When we send money to foreign countries to buy nearly 70% of the oil we use every day, they build new skyscrapers and we lose jobs. When we spend that money building solar arrays and windmills here we build competitive industries and gain jobs here at home." - Al Gore, July 17th, 2008

"We could and should speed up this transition by insisting that the price of carbon-based energy include the cost of the environmental damage that it causes. I have long supported a sharp reduction in payroll taxes with the difference made up in CO2 taxes. We should tax what we burn not what we earn." - Al Gore, July 17th, 2008

"Our democracy has become sclerotic at a time when these crises require boldness. It is only a truly dysfunctional system that would buy into the perverse logic that the short-term answer to high gasoline prices is drilling for oil 10 years from now in areas which would be protected." - Al Gore, July 17th, 2008

PLAYTESTING 4th EDITION

PART 3: CHARACTERS

Go to Part 1

RANGE AND FLEXIBILITY: The range and flexibility of the game has been significant reduced.

(1) Although you can now go from 1st to 30th level, the scale of actual power wielded by your characters is significantly smaller than it was in previous editions. Both the low-end and the high-end has been lopped off.

(2) You have far less ability to customize your character.

(3) There is a much narrower range (an almost nonexistent range) of play-styles supported. In "Death of the Wandering Monster", I talked about how there was a huge difference in previous editions between the ways in which clerics, fighters, rogues, and wizards played (for example). This could lead to "balance" problems if a particular group's style of play catered to one style of play over another, but it also meant, in my experience, that different players gravitated towards their preferred style of play and, if they got bored with that style of play, they could switch to another style and keep the game fresh.

4th Edition, on the other hand, only offers different gameplay within the context of combat. And, even there, the differences are not as significant as in previous editions.

ROLES AND CLASSES: On this topic, however, I also want to suggest that you consciously toss out whatever preconceptions you may have about how the different classes play based on previous editions. They are almost assurredly wrong.

I also want to encourage you to go one step further and toss out whatever preconceptions you may have formed about how the different roles will play.

For example, in our experienced gaming group we saw that fighters are defenders. Based on how fighters had played in previous editions we had, unconsciously, ended up with some preconceptions about what it meant to be a defender and how a defender should be played.

We were wrong. Not horribly wrong, but wrong enough that until we sat back and re-analyzed our preconceptions the group was meeting with some frustrations.

To be continued...

PLAYTESTING 4th EDITION

PART 4: THE NOVA CYCLE

Go to Part 1

Speaking of "Death of the Wandering Monster", the 15-minute adventuring day predictably reappeared in 4th Edition.

This was an interesting thing to observe because the design team for 4th Edition swore that they had done away with the 15-minute adventuring day. But the reality is that, rather than fixing the "problem", they ended up making it worse.

As I describe in "Death of the Wandering Monster", the 15-minute adventuring day is the result of a simple mechanical incentive: By design, the spellcasters are supposed to deal more damage less frequently and the fighters are supposed to deal less damage more frequently. Over the long-haul, this should balance out. But the 15-minute adventuring day -- in which the spellcasters go into a single encounter, nova their most powerful abilities, rest, and then do it again the next day -- destroys this balance. Not only does it result in the spellcasters consistently out-performing the fighters, it also leads to the entire party being far more effective against the opponents that they face.

Some people dislike the 15-minute adventuring day because it feels unnatural to them. But the reality is that it's actually quite natural. In real life, people rarely fight intense battles and then turn around and immediately go looking for another one. When historical armies have been forced to fight a second battle immediately after the first one, for example, it has generally ended poorly for them. And you'll basically never see a boxer fight a second match on the same day.

It makes perfect sense, all other things being equal, for characters in a life-and-death situation to use every single resource they have available to end up on the "living" side of that equation. And if that means they have to rest up and gather fresh resources before facing the next life-and-death situation, that makes sense, too.

And ultimately, as I say in "Death of the Wandering Monster", this leads to the conclusion that the best way to solve this problem is to create a world or story where there is a reason for the characters to persevere. And that solution will work almost as well in 4th Edition as it did in 3rd Edition.

I say "almost as well" because, as I mentioned before, 4th Edition actually ended up making the problem of the 15-minute adventuring day worse. And it did that by making the incentive for doing it larger.

To understand what I mean, let's talk about the other solution for the 15-minute adventuring day: Removing the mechanical impetus for resting. In order to do that, you have to do at least one of two things:

(1) Completely remove any mechanical benefit for taking a long rest.

4th Edition's designers apparently believed that they fixed the first problem by making sure that every class was given at-will and encounter abilities -- things they could continue doing for as long as they wanted to without ever taking a long rest.

But the nova-rest-nova cycle of gameplay isn't driven by a character's least powerful abilities, it's driven by their most powerful abilities -- the things that are designed to be used rarely, but which the nova-rest-nova cycle allows to be used frequently.

In 4th Edition, a character's most powerful abilities are their daily abiltiies. Which, as the name suggests, still benefit from the nova-rest-nova cycle and the 15-minute adventuring day. But just as all of the classes were given at-will and encounter powers, all of the classes in 4th Edition were given daily powers. Which means that you've gone from having one or two characters who could potentially benefit from the nova-rest-nova cycle to having ALL of the PCs potentially benefit from the cycle.

Okay, so what about the other potential mechanical solution -- offering some sort of mechanical bonus for not taking a rest?

Virtually nonexistent.

You can accumulate X action points by going through 2X encounters per day, but this is irrelevant because you can only use 1 action point per encounter and you get 1 action point whenever you take a long rest. 

You can also accumulate X daily uses of your magic items by going through 2X encounters per day. This is more useful because, unlike action points, you can use all of your accumulated daily uses for your magic items in a single encounter. But in order to gain that advantage you have to make sure you don't use the daily use for your magic items in your first Y number of encounters in the day.

And that's it. So, on the one hand, you have the ability to occasionally use more than one daily use of a magic item in a single encounter. On the other hand you have the ability to use all of your daily powers (including your daily use of a magic item) in every single encounter. It's not hard to figure out which one represents the larger incentive.

Aggravating this problem even further, there's the issue of healing surges. Characters have a certain number of healing surges per day, and virtually all healing in 4th Edition works by activating and using up these healing surges. Once you've used up your healing surges for the day, you basically can't be healed any more and you have to rest.

In 3rd Edition, a group who wanted or needed to continue adventuring could invest in resources -- like a wand of cure light wounds -- that would allow them to do that. In 4th Edition, however, that same group will find itself literally incapable of pressing on.

Take, for example, my experienced gaming group. Because of the way our 3rd Edition campaign is structured, this group rarely experiences a short adventuring day. In fact, they're usually scrambling to figure out some way to pack even more activity into every single day. This same group hit 4th Edition and, despite my efforts to jack up the sense of urgency in Keep on the Shadowfell, quickly fell into the 15-minute adventuring day. This was partly due to necessity (they were using up healing surges), but it was also largely because the pay-off for doing it was so much greater than it was in previous editions.

To be continued...

July 21st, 2008

PLAYTESTING 4th EDITION

PART 5: DISSOCIATED MECHANICS

Go to Part 1

Okay, I talked about dissociated mechanics before the 4th Edition rulebooks came out. I was concerned because these types of mechanics make it more difficult for me to do the things I generally enjoy doing in a roleplaying game -- immersive roleplaying and world-building. In a worst-case scenario, dissociated mechanics actively impede any kind of roleplaying -- when the game mechanics require you to make decisions as a player which have no analogy to the decisions of the character, the game has stopped being a roleplaying game and become something else. (Not necessarily something bad, just something else.)

In practice, I found 4th Edition to be as disappointing as I expected in this regard. The experienced players did, in fact, feel more distanced from their characters by the dissociated mechanics and ended up roleplaying less and focusing on the mechanics more.

The newbie players, on the other hand, roleplayed quite a bit. But this roleplaying was noticeably divided from the mechanical portion of the game -- it was like improvising a story around a game of Chess or Life rather than using the improv structure of the roleplaying game.

What I discovered, however, was that the dissociated mechanics strewn throughout 4th Edition made it very difficult for me to respond to their creativity.

New players tend to sidestep the game mechanics and interface directly with the game world. When the mechanics are directly associated with the game world, this is easy to handle: You simply take what the new players are telling you, interpret it mechanically, and resolve it. But dissociated mechanics, by definition, create an interpretive barrier.

This problem actually comes from two directions: First, there's the "you can't do that" problem. This is what happens when something should be possible in the context of the game world but is impossible in the context of the mechanics. These types of conflicts are black marks on the game design, but are relatively easy to deal with in practice: You simply invoke Rule 0 and let the logic of the game world override the illogic of the game mechanics. Managing the huge number of effective house rules this requires eventually becomes a headache, but in the short term it's not insurmountable.

The other aspect of this problem, however, is more insidious. 4th Edition is filled with dissociated tactical decision points. (For example, the fact that certain powers are more useful against minions than non-minions and vice versa.) These have no touchstone with the game world, which means that whenever somebody is trying to engage directly with the game world every single one of these decision points becomes a stumbling block. Dissociated mechanics, by their very nature, insist that you pay attention to them instead of your character's world if you want to play the game.

Long story short: Dissociated mechanics are bad and 4th Edition is riddled with them.

JULY 2008: 

PART 1 - PART 2 - PART 3 - PART 4

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