So the 4th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons is coming down the pike and people have recently been asking me what I think about it.
Well, I’ve written up some of my thoughts in the past. Those thoughts are largely unchanged: The design team at Wizards of the Coast has decided to design a really amazing tactical miniatures game. (Their motivation for doing so probably has more than a little to do with the reports that the D&D Miniatures game is the most profitable part of the D&D brand.) In order to design that game, however, they have apparently decided that:
(1) They are going to fundamentally alter the gameplay of D&D. (The short version: Yes, the game has changed considerably over the years. But playing a basic fighter in 3rd Edition was still basically the same thing as playing a fighter in 2nd Edition or a fighter in 1st Edition or a fighter in BECMI. Playing a wizard in 3rd Edition was still basically the same thing as playing a wizard in previous editions. And so forth.)
(2) It’s not particularly necessary for them to actually make a roleplaying game. (Don’t believe me? Go ahead and read my previous post on this. WotC’s designers are on public record saying the only thing that matters in the game is what happens during combat.)
One of the most pernicious results of this design philosophy, in my opinion, is the prevalence of dissociated mechanics in 4th Edition.
When I talk about “dissociated mechanics”, I’m talking about mechanics which have no association with the game world. These are mechanics for which the characters have no functional explanations.
Now, of course, all game mechanics are — to varying degrees — abstracted and metagamed. For example, the destructive power of a fireball spell is defined by the number of d6’s you roll for damage; and the number of d6’s you roll is determined by the caster level of the wizard casting the spell.
If you asked a character about d6’s of damage or caster levels, they’d have no idea what you’re talking about. But they could tell you what a fireball is and they could tell you that casters of greater skill can create more intense flames during the casting of the spell.
So a fireball spell has a direct association to the game world. What does a dissociated mechanic look like?
A SIMPLE EXAMPLE
Here’s a sample power taken from one of the pregen characters used in the Keep on the Shadowfell preview adventure:
Trick Strike (Rogue Attack 1)
Through a series of feints and lures, you maneuver your foe right where you want him.
Daily – Martial, Weapon
Standard Action Melee or Ranged weapon
Target: One creature
Attack: +8 vs. AC
Hit: 3d4 + 4 damage, and you can slide the target 1 square
Effect: Until the end of the encounter, each time you hit the target you can slide it 1 square
At first glance, this looks pretty innocuous: The rogue, through martial prowess, can force others to move where he wants them to move. Imagine Robin Hood shooting an arrow and causing someone to jump backwards; or a furious swashbuckling duel with a clever swordsman shifting the ground on which they fight. It’s right there in the fluff text description: Through a series of feints and lures, you maneuver your foe right where you want him.
The problem is that this is a Daily power — which means it can only be used once per day by the rogue.
Huh? Why is Robin Hood losing his skill with the bow after using his skill with the bow? Since when did a swashbuckler have a limited number of feints that they can perform in a day?
There’s a fundamental disconnect between what the mechanics are supposed to be modeling (the rogue’s skill with a blade or a bow) and what the mechanics are actually doing.
If you’re watching a football game, for example, and a player makes an amazing one-handed catch, you don’t think to yourself: “Wow, they won’t be able to do that again until tomorrow!”
And yet that’s exactly the type of thing these mechanics are modeling. Unlike a fireball, I can’t hold any kind of intelligible conversation with the rogue about his trick strike ability:
Me: So what is this thing you’re doing?
Rogue: I’m performing a series of feints and lures, allowing me to maneuver my foe right where I want him.
Me: Nifty. So why can you only do that once per day?
Rogue: … I have no idea.
I stumbled across this blog entry from searching after someone mentioned “‘dissociated/associated’ mechanics” on another forum.
Just wanted to say raging against daily powers is dumb. The reason you can only use Martial dailies once per day is because you’re only able to find *just the right moment* to work in that attack.
Again, using your Robin Hood example – maybe you use the ‘arrow chase’ ability earlier in the combat, and now they’re wise to your tricks. Or maybe this particular foe has fought you before (or the party’s bard has extolled the mastery of your arrow-chasing skill at a tavern, and this guy’s heard that tale, and doesn’t quite open himself up to the position.
Martial dailies make perfect sense, and if you say “well, that’s just mental contortions to justify it,” SO IS A MAN MAKING A BALL OF FIRE COME OUT OF HIS HANDS.
Sorry, Del, but martial dailies don’t make sense based on your arguments to promote them. So Robin has used the ‘arrow chase’ ability earlier in the combat? That’s a good justification for why someone might not be able to use an encounter power again, but how does that prevent Robin from using that power again in another fight with enemies who haven’t seen him use that power?
Comparing it to fireballs doesn’t work either. Whatever you may think of the Vancian-inspired structure for magical spells, it’s a structure that provides an answer for why you can’t cast that spell slot more than once per day independent of the situation the characters are in. And, even better, you can get around it by preparing that fireball more than once per day as long as you have sufficient resources and desire to do so, something you can’t do in 4e. So even the wizard’s dailies, arguably the most sensible use of dailies in 4e, are more dissociated from the character’s reality than spell slots in earlier editions of D&D.
For what it’s worth, I could get behind the use of martial daily powers in 4e (or now 5e under development) given a few changes. Give the player a pool of points that he can use to push a more mundane attack into a daily level of achievement and let him use it as often as he wants until he runs out of points. Then it becomes a narrative tool for the player to use to affect the performance of his PC and it doesn’t have to be a fire-and-forget power where you have to come up with some sort of wacky justification for why it can’t be used again.
@Del: Sure. But that doesn’t make the mechanic any less dissociated. Your character doesn’t have the power to choose when “just the right moment” will occur; the mechanic gives you, as the player, that power.
The dissociation between your decision-making process and the character’s decision-making process is self-evident. And this distinction is important.
Sorry for necro-ing this comment section. I stumbled upon these articles through the YouTube videos by Alexander Macris and his Arbiter of Worlds channel.
I am still looking for a reason, why D&D 4e has a bigger disconnect than, let’s say, any other edition of D&D. I will read your articles with great interest (and give my piece of mind, if that’s okay).
For starters, I still see why martial daily powers are hard to grasp for someone coming from 3e, but they are in my opinion not a dissociation between rules and game world, but an abstraction no worse than for example hit points. First of all: a daily power does not work “once per day” but “once per long rest”, which is a very importan distinction in my opinion. I know that it was different in 3e, as a lot of powers (also from martials) were tied to a time cycle. But this was updated in 4e to be now tied to a long rest, i.e. a time of at least 6 hours of meticulous preparation, that is no longer tied to a 24 hours day and night cycle. Which in fact makes the disconnect less in 4e than in 3e. It makes sense that there are some extraordinary feats that require special preparation, either they require a specific state of mind through meditation, they strain the body in a way that requires rest or they have to be prepared like a magic trick. I think the argument of Del is also fairer than you give it credit, not from a simulationist standpoint, but from a narrative standpoint. If you have an ability that requires a specific “right” situation or maybe an extraordinary amount of luck, it makes sense that it would not constantly occur. And even if we view it from the world and not the narration, for a rogue in a fantasy world it would make sense to have “luck” as a limited resource that needs recharging, especially in a world with actual interfering gods of luck.
Use of “powers” requires active decisions from the player, where hit points are just passively there, so they’re easier to ignore. Plus people anyway spent decades trying to replace hit points with something less abstract, and failing because the alternatives just aren’t as fun.
Luck is the ultimate dissociated mechanic, but it has the interesting feature that it’s one that people in the real world actually believe in. Except, if you can choose when to activate it, now it doesn’t feel like “luck” any more.
“4e’s mechanics are too dissociated” is ultimately an attempt at an explanation for why people like me who’d being playing D&D for many years had such a visceral “WTF is this?” reaction to it. Maybe you can argue it’s not really any more dissociated, but then you’re left looking for a different explanation for why it didn’t feel like D&D.
@colin r
As I said, powers have existed in previous iterations of D&D, too. You had abilities that worked “1/day”, “3/day” or even “1/week” and similar. And those were not only magic class abilities. The only difference was that it was not as formulaic. Those abilities either had their rules in plain text, like spells in 3e and 5e, or referenced spells themselves. If you see a problem with the way 4e powers work then the way they presented the rules only made it more apparent, but the “problem” always existed.
Instead of “Luck” I should have rather written “abilities to challenge fate” or something like that. Luck is when you roll the dice. What rogues in stories (and RPGs) are doing is bending their luck.
I still think the main reason why a lot of people hated 4e lies elsewhere. For once it completely eradicated the old magic system with spell slots, Vancian memorization and arguably a very large power gap between mages and non-mages. Another reason, that is related to that, might be that 4e is more tuned to group work. In 3e, when a certain kind of problem arose, then it was often the task of a single one of the adventurers to deal with it. Like dispelling a magic door seal for the mage or disarming a trap for the rogue. In 4e those challenges are always embedded in a larger context, that gives everyone their task and lets them help each other. A trap is always embedded in a combat situation, and dispelling the door seal might require the help of other characters climbing or a similar skill challenge. It robbed the magic user classes of their special place and spotlight, and this was imo the main reason it was hated. And since I am more of a Fighter/Rogue player, I loved it. 😉
People Who Dislike D&D 4E: This is why we don’t like D&D 4E.
4E Fans: They must be lying.
People Who Dislike D&D 4E: We’re not.
4E Fans: If only there was some way we could solve this enigma!
@Frank
Fair 😉
It’s just that in most cases if someone offers criticism of 4e, they seem to completely misunderstand the rules, misrepresent the rules, ignore half the rules and overall try to play the game as if it was 3e. It is in fact an enigma for me. As a game designer I don’t think that you can play a game wrong. If there is a misunderstanding in the intent of the rules, that’s on the designer, and it is clearly a weak point of 4e, that it did not communicate clearly enough how different it was from 3e. And also the lack of fluff, which is part of the problem imo. But I still think that one of the main problems with 4e is that it is seen as an update to 3e, which it clearly is not.