Yesterday I talked about marks in 4th Edition, focusing particularly on how one particular mark — the war devil’s besieged foe ability — was dissociated and the problems that dissociation causes in terms of game design.
Today I’m going to talk about the dissociation of the marking mechanics in general. To understand the problem, let’s start by looking at the marked condition in 4th Edition:
MARKED: A particular creature has marked you. You can only be marked by 1 creature at a time. If another creature marks you, you lose the old mark and gain the new one. If you attack a creature other than the one marking you, you suffer a -2 penalty on your attack rolls.
The problem with this rule is that it forces an association between two mechanics where it wouldn’t otherwise exist.
Let’s look at three of the marks I listed yesterday: The warpriest’s challenge; the paladin’s divine challenge; and the fighter’s challenge.
The warpriest’s challenge allows them to take a free attack on the marked target if the marked target moves away or tries to attack somebody else. The fighter’s challenge causes the target to suffer a -2 penalty if they attack anyone other than the fighter. The paladin’s divine challenge is a magical compulsion that similarly causes the target to suffer a -2 penalty if they attack anyone other than the paladin and also deals damage if they do so.
Individually, all of these abilities can be explained: The warpriest issues a challenge and pays particular attention to one target. If the target doesn’t pay attention to the warpriest, the warpriest can take advantage of that and make a free attack.
The fighter uses his martial prowess to engage with someone, using his own attacks to distract them and interfere with their ability to attack other characters.
The paladin uses their connection with the divine to create a magical compulsion, forcing the target to either attack them or face the consequences.
The dissociation happens when these abilities start affecting each other. Take a simple sequence like this one:
- The fighter puts their mark on an opponent.
- The paladin puts their mark on the same opponent, causing the fighter’s mark to come to an end.
Imagine trying to explain what happened there to the characters involved. It’s impossible. There’s no reason why the paladin’s magical compulsion should prevent the fighter from using their martial skills to interfere with an enemy’s ability to attack their allies. It makes even less sense for the fighter’s martial skills to somehow dispel the magical compulsion. Yet this is what the marking mechanics say.
Why are the mechanics like this? Primarily game balance. Imagine two paladins coming up and both laying down a divine challenge on a single opponent. Now, no matter who this opponent attacks, they’ll be suffering at least 8 points of radiant damage each round. And if they attack anyone other than the paladins, they’ll be suffering 16 points of radiant damage each round.
Similarly, take the war devil’s besieged foe ability (granting their allies a +2 bonus to attacks against that opponent). Now, imagine an encounter with 6 war devils all dumping this mark on the same character. Suddenly all of the war devils have a +12 attack bonus against their chosen opponent.
This type of synergistic stacking is an issue and needs to be dealt with. In 3rd Edition, for example, the same ability wouldn’t stack with itself and bonuses or penalties of the same type wouldn’t stack with each other, either.
Another solution to this problem, however, would be to make it so that the ill-effects of a mark could be avoided as long as you targeted any of the characters currently marking you. Of course, this still leads to dissociation — if the paladin places a magical compulsion on me that requires me to attack the paladin, why does the fighter’s fancy footwork negate that?
Plus, the other reason the mechanics work like this is an effort to minimize complexity: There are apparently going to be lots and lots of marks in the game, and by limiting them so that only one mark can be in effect on a creature at a time you limit the amount of bookkeeping that needs to be done.
But all of this demonstrates that, at a fundamental level, 4th Edition is completely dissociated. The only way the PCs could possibly understand why their abilities interact with each other in this fashion is if they understand that they’re actually just characters in a roleplaying game suffering the consequences of the marking mechanic.
Breaking the fourth wall in Order of the Stick is pretty funny, but do we really need to turn D&D into a punchline?
It is interesting that you mention “Order of the Stick” in this one, and it might the key where the main difference lies between D&D 4e and more oldschool games. In something like D&D 3.x you would have for example a spell or a class ability and all the rules would be in plain text intermixed with fluff text. There are some basic common stats for spells, like reach and components, but the major part of the rules are in sometimes very big text blocks. So in a sense, the storytelling informed the rules. This is more clearly separated in 4e. All the necessary rules are contained in a very formulaic statblock. The fluff is only that: fluff. It has no bearings on the rules.
A player used to the old systems might assume, that anything that is not mentioned in the fluff is basically “missing rules” and has to be added, but I don’t think that is the case.
In your example, you assume that due to the fluff that one ability is a spell and the other is not, they would work differently, basically a “fluff informs rules”. But it is the other way round. If the rules are that only one mark can be active on one character at the same time, then you would have to assume, that there is a common “story” reason for this. In this case it would make sense to assume that any character with the “Marked” condition has to keep concentrated on the marking character, and placing a new mark shifts the concentration to the new character. In a sense, rules inform diagetics, and not the other way around as you would expect coming from the older games.
In Order of the Stick is was played for laughs, but in a way it also highlighted how the rules are often disconnected from the inner workings of the world in older versions of D&D. So this isn’t really a new problem. It’s just that D&D has always been a game, and not been very “simulation focused”.