Quote from: LordVreeg;388582They actually appear to be one of the better and more malleable parts of the particular ruleset.
They seem to bring out the best in many GMs, when I read the descriptions of games using them.,

The problem is, where don't you read one of these great skill challenges?  In the rulebooks, where they appear highly dissociative.  People can change them, sure, but the 4e crowd want their cake and eat it too.  They want to be able to defend the system by showing how they've altered the RAW, and yet claim that the RAW isn't dissociative because it can be changed into one of their great examples.  :huhsign:

Shifting definitions, claiming logical points are subjective, these are the kinds of defenses you are reduced to when you won't accept even a minor contention: that 4e reaches it's tactical complexity and high game balance, by dissociating the mechanics to the point that it impedes a high level of immersion.

When we were playing on Sunday, we were trying to sneak up on a gate to check out the guard situation. Each person tried a different tactic (stealth and athletics mostly, with one going the bluff route) and we each rolled for our own successes, without helping each other. That was a skill challenge we were all involved in (trying to surveil the gate) but we performed seperately - so how does that fit into the argument? Should we have just had one person surveil, supported by the others in the group?

We also had a handful of other challenges where the group DID support someone's action (trying to fast-talk someone in this case - one person doing most of the talking, the others chiming in with support, and yes, we all actually said stuff and then rolled, so we were kinda acting I guess).

So in one session, we did it both ways. Were we wrong?

Quote from: CRKrueger;388584The problem is, where don't you read one of these great skill challenges?  In the rulebooks, where they appear highly dissociative.  People can change them, sure, but the 4e crowd want their cake and eat it too.  They want to be able to defend the system by showing how they've altered the RAW, and yet claim that the RAW isn't dissociative because it can be changed into one of their great examples.  :huhsign:

Shifting definitions, claiming logical points are subjective, these are the kinds of defenses you are reduced to when you won't accept even a minor contention: that 4e reaches it's tactical complexity and high game balance, by dissociating the mechanics to the point that it impedes a high level of immersion.

Well, becasue I am such a stickler when there is cause, I try to look for the bright side in every comment and post when there is not.  Gaming is fun, 4e is bringing new gamers into the RPG fold, companies are making money selling gaming stuff, etc, this is all good.
I'm a big game theory/game design guy, and passionate about that.  I think that people can immerse in all RPGs, but that you can look at mechanics and learn a lot about what they do and don't do well.  That's more tha goal.

Quote from: Werekoala;388586When we were playing on Sunday, we were trying to sneak up on a gate to check out the guard situation. Each person tried a different tactic (stealth and athletics mostly, with one going the bluff route) and we each rolled for our own successes, without helping each other. That was a skill challenge we were all involved in (trying to surveil the gate) but we performed seperately - so how does that fit into the argument? Should we have just had one person surveil, supported by the others in the group?

Actually if you were having all successes and failures add in to the same overall success tally, you'd be playing Skill Challenges as written and as intended. Nothing wrong with that.

Now one thing that a lot of people (including me) object to is the fact that as written, you would be tactically better off by having every one of your party members just say "Fuck it. The Ranger is good at this shit, just let him do the surveillance, I'll be in my tent." There are various workarounds and house rules floating about to encourage players to do exactly what you did by making it either mandatory or tactically superior to just having the Ranger make perception checks over and over again.

QuoteWe also had a handful of other challenges where the group DID support someone's action (trying to fast-talk someone in this case - one person doing most of the talking, the others chiming in with support, and yes, we all actually said stuff and then rolled, so we were kinda acting I guess).

So in one session, we did it both ways. Were we wrong?

No. Both methods of doing things are legal within the Skill Challenge format. The second technique is tactically superior in the rules as written. By such a massive margin that players who analyze their chances of success in such things generally find it to be rather constricting. Technically everyone doing their own thing to "help" measurably and demonstrably harms the team's chance of success. A lot of people don't think it should.

But in any case, nothing actually requires you to optimize your tactics in any system. And if you're using the post errata difficulty guidelines it probably isn't going to matter much, since your chances of failing are actually very low as long as you get to pick your skill use.

-Frank

Quote from: Werekoala;388586When we were playing on Sunday, we were trying to sneak up on a gate to check out the guard situation. Each person tried a different tactic (stealth and athletics mostly, with one going the bluff route) and we each rolled for our own successes, without helping each other. That was a skill challenge we were all involved in (trying to surveil the gate) but we performed seperately - so how does that fit into the argument? Should we have just had one person surveil, supported by the others in the group?

We also had a handful of other challenges where the group DID support someone's action (trying to fast-talk someone in this case - one person doing most of the talking, the others chiming in with support, and yes, we all actually said stuff and then rolled, so we were kinda acting I guess).

So in one session, we did it both ways. Were we wrong?

wrong in what way?  
From the RAW?
In terms of dissociative or associative?  Purely associative.
From the GM standpoint? Sounds great, sounds like great fun, especially the last part with chiming in...I can see that one, hell, i'm immersing in it from here.

Quote from: CRKrueger;388584The problem is, where don't you read one of these great skill challenges?  In the rulebooks, where they appear highly dissociative.  People can change them, sure, but the 4e crowd want their cake and eat it too.  They want to be able to defend the system by showing how they've altered the RAW, and yet claim that the RAW isn't dissociative because it can be changed into one of their great examples.  :huhsign:

Shifting definitions, claiming logical points are subjective, these are the kinds of defenses you are reduced to when you won't accept even a minor contention: that 4e reaches it's tactical complexity and high game balance, by dissociating the mechanics to the point that it impedes a high level of immersion.

Maybe the real problem is that youv'e taken some advice for a DMing technique in the DMG ad interpreted it as "rules as written" rather than merely a framework for actually playing.

Frameworks aren't that easy to explain. But my example from five years ago reads like so:

"The third part of the key was hidden high up in the nest of a giant paper-wasp-- some 80' off of the ground. This task was more straightforward- Niv and Ro'oka managed to climb to the nest. Niv cast an obscuring mist around the outside and then taunted the winged beast out into the air. The wasp chased Niv directly into the rest of the group, who stood with readied weapons. While the rest of the group readied to meet the wasp on the ground, Ro'oka dashed into the nest and retrieved the last part of the key.
"

So here was a challenge that involved an athletics check, a bluff, some fancy casting (arcana), and a stealth check.. it's pretty much exactly what a skill challenge looks like. Skill challenges (as described in the DMG)  are obviously a DM technique--often enough completely improvised-- the designers are trying to help players (via teaching, examples, advice, and structure) in creating these kids of action oriented scenes in a presentable format with XP attached. It isn't exactly new, no, but it is a technque that has never appeared in the DMG before.

Quote from: J ArcaneThen you have the players who simply don't pay any fucking attention to what's going on and just roll the dice whenever they're told to, the ones who're more in it to see how badass a character they can roll up and still get it past the GM, the ones who ignore or seem to even react with hostility to anything that might present even the most basic backstory or fiction into the game.

I must be stupid lucky, because I've never seen this and even have kind of a hard time imagining it.

QuoteI've even encountered quite a few who seem to treat the very idea of actually roleplaying something with open hostility, like it's some magic threshold where suddenly the past-time has just become too much of a geek endeavor for their tiny cocks to withstand. The other day I actually had a prospective D&D player inform a friend and I that any use of "voices", as he put it, meant he'd refuse to participate further in the game.

In fairness, though, "voices" are pretty off-putting for me for a number of reasons. All women being baritones for example.

I do try to talk in character and keep a good tone of voice given the situation though. So I'll try and sound angry for angry people rather than trying to sound like a 90 year old woman.

QuoteI'm just fucking sick of it.  The truth is, 4e isn't the problem, or the cause of the problem, it's just a symptom of it.  It's a generation too in love with irony and a very video game mindset to actually engage the game as it was meant to played, as a fucking roleplaying game.  D&D itself has become this ironic hipster geek thing, to be strutted out to gain "cred" in this burgeoning web geek culture that's formed in the last few years, and treated with the same overt self-awareness one expects from fans of B-movies and MST3K.  Everything is fucking cliche and shite and no one takes anything remotely fucking seriously, because otherwise you've suddenly crossed an invisible line and become one of "those guys", you know, the guys who actually are geeks instead of pretending to be them because it's cool to say on the internet.

Ironic hipster geeks? What is this, 2005? I'm pretty sure we're all sick to death of pretending to like things by now (those 4 people who were on board with all that to begin with I can't speak for).

QuoteSo you get lots of "dissociative mechanics" or whatever the fuck, because associating with them in the first place is anathema.

Again, just not seeing it. Why can't incompetent people just design a bad game from time to time without it being a sign of the times?

4e is a very competently designed game for it's target audience and stated goals.

It's just that those goals are goddamn retarded.

It's the same retarded demographic that gets all hopped up on Steampunk and Zombies and "pirates vs. ninjas" and raptor Jesus and the rest of the inane, mostly in-joke based modern Internet geek culture.

If you can't see this shit around you, well, I envy you, but it's there, and it's getting goddamn obnoxious, especially when it starts undermining genuine expression.

Quote from: J Arcane;3886044e is a very competently designed game for it's target audience and stated goals.

It's just that those goals are goddamn retarded.

Disagree. A lot of the design goals, I'd even say most of them, were very reasonable design goals. However, 4e D&D consistently fails to meet those goals. The design is very shoddy and the game is absolutely dominated by a "patch it later" mentality. We are dozens of patches into the skill challenge system, and the only positive thing that 4vengers can say about it is that they can still just not use the printed rules, and grab functional mechanics out of other games from the nineties to use instead.

QuoteIt's the same retarded demographic that gets all hopped up on Steampunk and Zombies and "pirates vs. ninjas" and raptor Jesus and the rest of the inane, mostly in-joke based modern Internet geek culture.

If you can't see this shit around you, well, I envy you, but it's there, and it's getting goddamn obnoxious, especially when it starts undermining genuine expression.

Raptor Jesus and Steampunk are genuine expression. There's nothing pure about Gygax ripping off Tolkien, Pohl Anderson, Jack Vance, Leiber, and Greek Myth in order to hit "frappé" on the concept blender. Taking a bunch of fantastic and fictional elements and mixing them together to tell stories in a fantasy world is what Dungeons & Dragons has always been.

Yes, styles change over time, but that doesn't make them worse. It just makes them different. And sometimes, change is good. Complaining about how kids these days have pirates and ninjas - as opposed to the purity of the old days when you had Lankhmar and Oriental Adventures - that's just blatant hypocrisy. What's next, do you want to get the "kids these days" off your lawn?

-Frank

This thread has been a fun read the last few days.

How is that whole 'engaging with bullshit arguments like they are legitimate' thing going for everyone?  I predict at least another dozen or two posts where 'rules as written' needs to be carefully explained over and over, as well as the reason it is the only way to discuss matters related to the rules.

Quote*snipped*

-Frank

How ironic you should resort to an age reference when you're clearly too goddamn old to even understand what I'm on about.

There's a pretty clear difference in the modern distraction-based Internet culture, one a lot of very smart people have written volumes about, and a lot of people young enough to actually understand it who could tell you what they've written already.  

All your comment demonstrates is you have no idea what the fuck I'm talking about because you don't have any experience with the culture I'm referring to.  And your analogies fail utterly because they completely ignore the very words even presented in this thread that make it clear they're not the same phenomenon.  

So I'll start here, and see if I can make some ground by using an actually accurate analogy an old fucker like yourself might actually get:  Are you familiar with Mystery Science Theater 3000, or with B-movie fandom?  Or at least with the phrase "so bad it's good"?

Quote from: J Arcane;388607So I'll start here, and see if I can make some ground by using an actually accurate analogy an old fucker like yourself might actually get:  Are you familiar with Mystery Science Theater 3000, or with B-movie fandom?  Or at least with the phrase "so bad it's good"?

I love MST3K!

I'm not really helping, am I?

Quote from: StormBringer;388608I love MST3K!

I'm not really helping, am I?

I do too.  I think the guys who worked on it are all incredibly funny, talented people who made a great show, and are making another one with Rifftrax.  Though at times I grow weary of it in great doses, because to be frank, as great fun as it can be occasionally to see them make light of such terrible films, at the end of the day, you're still watching a really awful movie.  I've started to prefer Rifftrax, because at least there they're usually working with much better base material, something you might actually watch on it's own.

But more to the point, it's a great thing to point and laugh at that sort of awfulness now and again, but it's another thing to actually confuse it for something worth a damn, to start believing the bad really is good and overextending it's welcome past the point of any humor or entertainment into the just plain sad.  

This isn't about borrowing from other works, it's about a culture that has devolved to the point where it relies solely on ironic cliche because they've lost the ability to acknowledge anything genuinely decent.  That relies on constant, uninterrupted streams of pop-culture references and cliches that were hoary and silly 20 years ago, and at this point have just become inane.

No one can do anything genuine, anything with substance, just spout lame "memes" that weren't that funny the first time, and get progressively less so with age.  

It's pathetic.

Quote from: J Arcane;388607All your comment demonstrates is you have no idea what the fuck I'm talking about because you don't have any experience with the culture I'm referring to.  And your analogies fail utterly because they completely ignore the very words even presented in this thread that make it clear they're not the same phenomenon.  

So I'll start here, and see if I can make some ground by using an actually accurate analogy an old fucker like yourself might actually get:  Are you familiar with Mystery Science Theater 3000, or with B-movie fandom?  Or at least with the phrase "so bad it's good"?

I am familiar with all of those things. I preferred Joel to Mike.

But unlike you, I can see the continuity between 4chan and the past. And I find people grieving over how "over the top" things have gotten with warforged and zombie pirates to be hilarious in the context of the Serious Business that was Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. So when I say that I understand where Raptor Jesus, what I should really be saying is:


Yours really is a complaint which is best responded to with dismissive image macros and lolcats.

-Frank

Regarding the "patching" issue, we talked about that a bit on Sunday as well (I'm the 4e "newb" of the group so I have questions...) and I decided it was a product of the "permanent Beta Testing" culture. If you notice, video games are no longer complete at release, almost universally, and even MMOs are that way - and by "complete" I mean bug-free and playable when released. It never used to be this way, but now, you're just supposed to drop you $60, load the game, and immediately patch it (usually many times). The new Star Trek Online is a prime example of having to pay $14.95 a month to beta test a "release-quality" game. Oh, sure, they keep patching the hell out of it and have slim content releases and such, but they have to do that to make the game playable. In fact, the MMOs are probably the worst about this (another piece of the 4e/MMO puzzle?).

My comments re: 4e (that got some nods) is that there are books on the shelf right now (specifically the core books) that if you bought them for full price and sat down with a group that has been at it for months or years, I would not be able to participate at an optimal level. There have been tons of changes / additions / tweaks / removals that ensure my books are just very pretty paperweights (aside from Monster Manual probably). I need the DDI subscription and the Character Builder to be up-to-date. I don't have a problem with that in theory, but I do have a problem with so-called core books being obsolete and STILL being sold at full MSRP. Oh, sure, its easy to get updates, and it only costs $5.00 a month, blah blah, yadda yadda. Not the point.

It would be comparable to someone just now getting into Warcraft with only the core game, and everyone he wants to play with playing Wrath of the Lich King, in areas the "newb" doesn't have access to, much less all the character updates and such.

So, that's my take on the "patching" of 4e.