So, as I mentioned in Blog #1 I've been running two regular groups in 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons. One group (6 players strong) was mostly grognards and we played essentially a cross-breed of AD&D 1st and 2nd edition with some Castles & Crusades mixed in for good measure. The other group (4 players) had been playing Runequest, the new Mongoose edition, since January. I had talked them in to it, as I had committed to not running anymore 3rd edition D&D since around January of 2007, and had stuck to my guns so far. As it turned out, despite some reluctance initially to experiment (only one player was previously experienced with Runequest) they all got quite in to it. Enough so that it took a bit of convincing to get them to try 4E when it arrived!
Anyway, aside from the two groups I DM, I am in one more group that meets and plays 3.5 with a rotating mix of DMs, including my wife, who runs her own twisted campaign world, the house host who runs a very straight up "DM vs. the players" sort of game, and the third DM who runs a 3.0/3.5 mix using the Dragonlords of Melnibone setting, which Chaosium published back in the early days of 3rd edition's arrival. I refrain from offering up any DMing to that group, as it's a bit too crowded anyway, although I'm one of those people who loves to DM and grates at being a player half the time; it's fun to let someone else run things sometimes, though!
So, as of this moment, each group's players started around 1st level and are approaching or hitting 4th level at the present time, and each group's gotten in about 6-8 game sessions apiece, with plenty of combat, role playing, and "other fun stuff" mixed in. I've also run a one-shot where everyone rolled up 20th level characters (we weren't brave enough to figure out the epic destinies, heh!) and got to see how the game worked at that level of play, too.
Now, the main reason I stopped playing 3.5 was because I was burning out on the upper-level complexity that seemed to dominate the high end content of the game. My 2006 campaign, for example, was a great deal of fun, some of the best gaming I've ever had in years, but by December characters were hitting level 14-18 and a single session would turn in to an all-night slug fest for one battle. When I lived in Seattle, I remember a single combat that took 3 consecutive game sessions to resolve. It was interesting, but felt very little like the more rollicking and speedy adventues I used to run in AD&D, and I missed being able to craft a detailed adventure with lots of encounters and adventuring happening in a single play session. 3rd edition seemed to inevitably slow the process down; instead of 4 or 5 major encounters in a five our game session, there were 1 or 2 that lasted all night. And instead of some common sense rule adjudication from the DM, the games almost always now included half an hour or more of "the rules say it is like this" moments involving referencing the books, arguing about the terminology and interpretations, and so forth. It seemed like rules lawyering was kicked up a notch or three with 3rd edition!
Anyway, long story short is I met an old school grognard who joined my group at the beginning of 2007 who hadn't bought a rulebook since the 1E days and wanted to play the original again. All the other players in my group, being around my own age, were keen on a return to the good old days, so we gave it a shot, and enjoyed it, staying with the old school campaign right up until the first week of June 08. When 4E arrived, I showed up, ran it, and decided this would be a major litmus test: would everyone grokk the 4th edition experience, or would 4E be too much renovation and continution of the 3rd edition methodology? Based on reading the rules I could tell that 4E was stylistically simpler and more intuitive than 3rd edition....but would it bridge the gap in playstyles? Would it let me return to my 4-5 encounters per session play style from the good old days, and allow for more action than 3rd edition did?
Well, so far it's been a major success. I've run some pretty interesting games in 4th, and have been much more interested in creating new scenarios, monsters, NPCs and so forth if only because the new edition has made the DM's job immeasurably easier than it was in 3rd edition. However, there are aesthetic differences between 4th edition and 3rd that I think can be likened to the way AD&D 1st edition was to the old Basic/Expert D&D sets from the eighties, although the differences are a bit slighter here. 4th edition is definitely more streamlined, in terms of how, what and why it accomplishes its goals to facilitate a good game.
If 3rd edition was a simulationist game, one with provided a rules architecture that was supposed to fit all parts of a potential fantasy world, then 4E is a return to the notion of gameist architecture, in which the rules of the game are now more malleable, and designed to support a good story rather than model a fictional reality. It works great, but you have to aknowledge that certain "rules features" of the game are not meant in any way to reflect the reality of the universe in which the game takes place.
Of all my players, only one so far seems to be choking on the 4E rules and describes himself as still on the fence about it; he's in another group, too, which plays 3.5 and is looking forward to Pathfinder; they are all very opinionated about 4E, although none of them have actually tried playing it, so take that for what it's worth. Anyway, one of the reasons (well, the main reason) he has issues with 4E is for precisely the simulationist vs. gameist issue above: I think it bugs the hell out of him that the rules no longer reflect reality as closely as a D&D game will permit, and instead reflect reality from the protagonist's point of view, as seen in the course and pace of a good novel or film. It's a hard gap for him to jump; I'll give some examples below and inforthcoming blogs:
Healing: In third edition hit points were presumably a meter of direct physical health. When you took X number of hits of damage, you healed (assuming good rest) X number equal to your level back per day. This was an effective nod to realism, although no where near what actual damage would be like (to which one must refer to GURPS, perhaps).
4th editon of course has healing surges, and hit points are no longer an actual record of physical wounds, but overall moxie, staying power, fatigue, mental conditioning and physical temperament rolled in to one. In 3rd edition, a 20 HP character who took a sword blow could be described as "cut and bleeding." In 4th edition, a character with 40 HPs might take a sword blow, but unless he's bloodied (half his base HP or less) it's more likely he's "being harried by blows from his foe and his getting winded, nicked and cut." the sword through the gut probably won't happen to the 4th edition character until he hits 0 HPs. And if he takes his second wind, then it turns out it was a shallow flesh wound after all. This stuff is noticeably more abstract, and the fact that a character can be fully recovered after a day's rest (under most circumstances) means that while a character may suffer wounds and cuts from the previous days' events, they will not affect him in a mechanical way anymore.
Now, in actual play I like this system, because it dramatically reduces the problem in all earlier editions of the game that included clerics being healing batteries, characters having to have one good fight then go hide in town for a few days to recover before hiking back to the dungeon again, or even the problem of parties with no healer present. What happens in play is that each individual player gets a little bit of extra resource management to keep an eye on their hit points; it's a bit of a gamble, because you might want to hold out, in case you run out of surges before the next major rest, for example. If you lack a healer in the party, you're no longer doomed. But when you run out of surges....you're character is exhausted, essentially, then you are quickly facing a world of hurt.
In game mechanics the rules are easy to understand. The problem comes if you try to apply it to world mechanics. DM characters and monsters basically have 1 surge, which can be used to get one second wind (just like PCs). But with only one surge, most NPCs can get enough extra moxie to run the second mile, but if they get caught afterwards they are doomed, possibly. This is the default; players are supposed to be running the heroes of the story, so the rules favor the heroes and place more basic expectations on Everyone Else. If I as a DM wanted to run an ordinary joes game, for example, ordinary joes would definitely only have 1 healing surge a day. But the system as written is designed to support heroic roles only for players. No one starts as a zero level character here.
Now, the 4E/3E disconnect comes from the following problem: non-heroic PCs are essentially living a normal life in a normal world as decided by the DM. But in 3E the rules spelled out how that normal character functioned; thus you could have a 10th level commoner walking around. In 4th edition, you really shouldn't have any 10th level commoners....that's not a common thing, after all, and more over, the DM is the final arbiter or what life for these NPCs is like. So a PC rests and recovers the next day, fine. Everyone else only has 1 surge, so unless they have a PC cleric present, odds are they are not going to be rested and recovered enough the next day to go on. In fact, they can be catching leprosy, a cold, or the plague and nothing will stop that from eating away at that NPC except the plot devices and needs of the DM. The game system no longer says "so and so dies or lives according to rule X" anymore. Now it says, "so and so dies or lives according to the needs of your game." I like that.
Now, I can easily see a future rule supplement introducing new rules for tougher wounds and combat in the game for PCs. It would be very easy to state that any character who is bloodied gets a wound point. When he gets more wound points than he has healing surges, then he falls unconscious and will begin saving vs. death the normal way until he fails his three saves or some professional healing is applied. Then he can lose one wound point a day, with proper rest and care, until they are gone. Easy to house rule in something like that, I say. Which is an entire other issue, by the way: this edition of D&D is easy to house rule again, something I never thought 3rd edition was good at doing without unintended consequences.
Anyway, that's my take on the healing surges in 4th edition and how they create a fundamentally different approach to managing the underlying game world for the DM. Next time I'll talk about Powers, and then later on skills and some other things. Overall, I'm really, really pleased with the direction 4E has gone, but I definitely see how dedicated fans of 3rd edition will find the new ruleset disconcerting at the least and a completely different play style.
Tags: 4E D&D RPGs
