Comments on: The Overlord Welcomes 4e! Crunch Wins!

By: Michael Phillips

Michael Phillips — Fri, 30 May 2008 11:55:58 +0000

Gazza,
the book proper starts on page 7. The rules as rules end on page 104, and the majority of that range is lists of powers and illustrations of what a given rule means. The book itself ends on or around page 256, so even counting every page in the rules section as a rules page, well more than half of the book is how to run a game suggestions (of the “here’s an idea and here’s and idea and here’s an idea”, and the “if your players do x, you could do y, z, q, w, e, r, or t” types,) and NPC character sheets.
D&D 3.5 by comparison goes from page 7 to 180 with much denser type and a lot less non-rule material per page. (That is excluding the spell list on the 3.5 book even though my listing of the amber books includes several similar lists that I didn’t exclude. Mostly because I am not feeling up to an indepth analysis of the books side by side today.)

A more complex analysis would include going over the PHB, the DMG, and the Amber Main book and doing a word count. I skipped the DMG, and I used a very broad brush for both the Amber book and the PHB, both of which have fairly low rules per page densities. Honestly, I think I’d strip the skills and powers out of my list of rules in both cases if I wanted to spend the time to do a full analysis. Those aren’t rules as much as they are modules that interface with the rules. (There are definitely rules in the skills and powers sections, things about how to gain them, how to compare them, and how to adjugate them, but the skills and powers are a slightly different sort of entity. )

Michael Phillipss last blog post..Geneology, what’s that

By: GAZZA

GAZZA — Fri, 30 May 2008 03:55:08 +0000

Heya Michael. Amber is one of my all time favourite games, but I’m not sure I’d really agree that it was rules light. Indeed, virtually all of both books is pretty much entirely about rules - Wujick pretty much just points you at Zelazny if you want to know anything about the setting.

It’s true that these rules look a bit different to what D&D rules look like - there’s a lot of advice about what to do to resolve situations without a randomiser, and so on - but they are rules nonetheless (and obviously just as able to be ignored as any other rules).

Certainly I think Amber is more rules heavy than Fudge. With Fudge you’ve got one simple core mechanic and essentially everything revolves around that mechanic; with Amber, none of the Powers work quite the same, there’s a completely different subsystem for building items, Shadows, and (with Shadow Knight) Constructs, and so on.

By: GAZZA

GAZZA — Fri, 30 May 2008 03:50:28 +0000

On the one hand this “all crunch, no fluff” will really annoy the John Wick’s of the world. On the other hand I’ve never much cared for fluff. Fluff gives us Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk, neither of which interest me, and even when it gives us Llankmar, I’d rather read about than play in someone else’s world.

The problem I have is basically this. When I start a new campaign, I have to sell my players on the excitement of what the campaign will be “about”, some of which - much of which - will be what the world will contain. My enthusiasm for someone else’s creation is unlikely to ever be as great as my enthusiasm for my own creation. The one thing fluff does do is act as a crutch if you are unable or unwilling to make things up yourself - but if you are able and willing to create your own fluff (or let your players do it), then it’s nice not to have to worry about going against the “official” fluff when you do so. In that sense the less “official” fluff the better.

Keep the fluff to supplements, I reckon.

By: Michael Phillips

Michael Phillips — Fri, 30 May 2008 03:44:43 +0000

John
Yeah, I think I’ve made that point at least obliquely in several previous threads. The role playing side of a game (at least in my case) happens best despite the rules, so the more transparent the rules are, the better (potentially) the role playing can be if the group of players is interested in such things.

Ferex, some of the best role playing sessions I’ve ever played or run were in strongly rules-light systems like BESM or Amber Diceless Role Playing.
(Well, actually by the year before the release of 3.0, our 2nd edition group knew the rules so well that they might as well have been transparent, but the learning period for a game like 2nd ed. AD&D is months or years vs an hour for BESM and “till you are done with character creation” for Amber. I found that systems with a single unified mechanic and no during gameplay use of charts tended to take little time to get back to strong role playing with my group. (Fuzion was like that. There were two mechanics and minimal charts, so we were able to get the mechanics down during character creation and get on with the actually playing our characters during the adventures. 3rd most intrigue based game I’ve ever played was a Bubble Gum Crisis game on the Fuzion engine.)

That is what I loved about 3.0 and especially 3.5. The actual game system was, itself, fairly simple and streamlined. There was very very little stuff that needed to refer to the books that couldn’t be handled between sessions after you learned the 1.5 different core systems. (the d20 system and the grapple system)

Michael Phillipss last blog post..Geneology, what’s that

By: Yax

Yax — Thu, 29 May 2008 23:44:25 +0000

Crunch wins! Fluffy DMs now have to ask themselves if they are fluffy because it’s what they like better of if they are fluffy because the crunch wasn’t designed well.

Yaxs last blog post..New Skin!

By: John Lewis

John Lewis — Thu, 29 May 2008 21:12:44 +0000

I just returned from KublaCon where I had the opportunity to run Keep on the Shadowfell on Saturday and Sunday. I discovered very quickly that less fluff = more roleplaying. This may sound like B.S. to some of you, and I’ll admit I was a little surprised.
Two things were noticable: at first as the players were getting used to their powers they focused solely on the hard crunch mechanics. This was fine and in fact the lack of fluff made it easy for all of us to have the exact same interpretation of the rule. Secondly, after a little time the players started adding their own fluff. They were describing what “Tide of Iron” looked like this time;
“I strike with my maul and shove him back with my schoulder!”
-or-
“I fake left and when the kobold stumbles, smash him in the back of the head!”
Instead of having their imaginations stifled with pre-existing fluff they were creating and roleplaying and bringing the combat scene to life. I discovered very quickly that I love the rules being concise and mechanical. And although my sampling group was small if the game has the effect for others I see even better things on the gaming horizon.

By: Michael Phillips

Michael Phillips — Thu, 29 May 2008 18:32:26 +0000

If I get a chance I’ll probably play 4th ed. I think I’m going to stick with 3.5 fro running D&D for the time being though. That said, I really like some of the things I’ve seen from 4th edition, means and methods and play concepts, things that I think will be reasonably translatable.

I’m also really tempted to start working on writing 3rd/4th edition compatible materials (not GSL material, but 4th compatible. I dislike what I’ve seen of the GSL so far, but there is no reason to actually be bound by it.)

Michael Phillipss last blog post..Geneology, what’s that

By: Heather

Heather — Thu, 29 May 2008 16:21:56 +0000

Okay, I’ve played like a quarter of one encounter in 3.5 with veteran players and attempted a little of the basic starter set 3.5e with other people as clueless as myself - my point being, I know little. I also tend to be literal minded when it comes to games with rule books (I don’t know if you can spot anything from there it didn’t say anything about it in the DM starter guide!) but I also understand that this game is much more open than say, Sorry, where the rules are the same, and the rules are the rules! PCs may do wacky things like attempt to fry bacon. Just as it is difficult for a DM to anticipate what direction the PCs will take when he is writing his adventure, I suspect it would be similarly difficult to anticipate the more off the wall non combat uses for spells. The combat uses are more cut and dry so those are the ones more clearly defined. I do not get the impression that other uses would be not be tolerated, just harder to anticipate. The kind of people who are drawn to this kind of game are not the kind of people likely to let pass an attempt to use their spells for something other than toasting monsters. I do not think 4e’s approach to the combat aspect of the rules spells an end to bacon - not even for the newly initiated and relatively literal. However, that said, I’m all for a list of non combat related uses for spells.

Personally, I like the fact there is not so much “fluff” because I feel like this aspect of the game is being left to the players. How fluffy is it really if you are being spoon fed those things? Wouldn’t those same literal minded people stick to the preconceived fluff? NO! You can’t set Xor’s pants on fire, only monsters and bacon! I look forward to putting in my own variety of fluff and leaving the crunchy number things to people who can add.

By: Brian

Brian — Thu, 29 May 2008 14:06:56 +0000

Thank goodness they left in at least some of the fluff. I’m still horrified, but it’s not quite as bad as I’d feared. ;p

The rituals thing is interesting. I’ll be curious to see how people use it and feel about it two years from now.

- Brian

By: ChattyDM

ChattyDM — Thu, 29 May 2008 12:47:03 +0000

@Child: That’s precisely what Graham suggested to me last night.

I will and I shall! As soon as the books are officially out…

I agree that the second line of flavour text technically kills Command’s more creative uses, but as a DM I’d be willing to waive this.

However do note one thing. Now that non-combat NPCs don’t have stats anymore, having an ‘open’ command power available every 10 minutes (because it’s an encounter power now) against non-heroic/non-monster target is an issue.

As this little analysis suggests, some of the new designs have changed how the game can be played and I guess we’ll have to accept that, hack it carefully and check what breaks or move on to something else.