Hey, look kids. Two posts in one week. I can feel the waves of accomplishment roll over me.
I’m a simple and deluded creature.
So some of my purely 4e peeps have gnashed their teeth a bit at my reflection on what 4e did wrong. It stings as it does for children watching a divorce—the shock of watching love and devotion being transformed into reflection and regret. But there is still love there, I promise you folks. We still talk. We still play. She still whispers sweet nothings into my ear. Reflection and regret, though, those are powerful tools. Pain brings sharp lessons.
This makes me think for the future—the future that will not be. The two camps unite. It’s a myth, right? The two essentially non-existent and often purely self-referring camps will never be universally happy. Gamers tend to be professional contrarians. I know that. But it doesn’t hurt to try. I’m just searching for the—“oh, yeah, like that.”
I live for the “oh, yeah, like that” moments in life.
Personally I think one of the places where 4e pushed the game forward in a good way was the action economy, but even while I was at the WotC offices, I felt like we didn’t go far enough. Maybe a little after the fact, mind you, which doesn’t help.
Monkeys fighting. Heh. Heh.
Imagine a nice simple action mechanics, something divorced for the strange wargame axioms that have been latched on to D&D from the beginning—the segmented action economy that asymmetrically leaned away from attacks. Not without reason, but reasons we should now start to question.
As rules were expanded and explained, optimal opportunities rose up—ways to get multiple attacks in one round. I’m looking at you, dart.
The types of actions (standard, move, and full-round, especially) were stopgaps for optimization in the most aggressive forms. 3e, through the course of its history, added all sorts of buffer and interrupt actions—attacks of opportunity, immediate actions, swift actions—because those things are fun and interesting not only in the game space, but also in the narrative space. But that weakened the stopgaps, which created new problems.
Even the games space is narrative, though. Sure, we go into rounds, we conserve our actions, and attempt to pull from our bags of tricks, even at the prompting of buddies that say “hey don’t you have a…?” To some people 4e battle didn’t feel right. It wasn’t that they were not doing cool things, but they were doing things called powers, with strange names, very strict parameters, and often decent effects. The narrative of combat seemed off; seemed too abstract. More than anything, powers contributed to a feels like WoW or feels like and MMORPG mentality. They saw them as buttons and hot keys because they were structured like buttons and hot keys.
But frankly that argument is stupid. There is going to be somewhat of a give and take in game design. There has to be. Anyone who complains that MMOs created agro, really have to think what attacks of opportunity actually are. There has been a back and forth from the very beginning. Games cross-chatter.
Powers were a way to design actions in a standardized form, but we really should have been looking at the action mechanic itself to play that part. You can have a diversity of actions—attacks, moves, spells—and balance them purely on that level. In fact you have some interesting space to do wild things, that 4e tried to do, but was saddled with its own action structure and some strange regulations on actions that only compounded the issue. It created constraints from without, instead of constraints from within.
I believe that you can make it all pretty simple too. Imagine a world where there were only two types of actions—standard and immediate.
This reminds me of the time one of my 2AD&D games moved to `real segments’ for an adventure. Everything that you wanted to do required a certain number of segments, and we just counted up from zero every time we cared. About 1/3 of the idea (from memory) was built in to the rules already, and we built the rest ourselves. At one point, we added `d6 segments recovery’ between actions; I can’t recall now if we added that during the first fight to make things less crazy, or removed it during the first fight to make things *more* crazy.
Mechanically, it worked out ok. In play, though, we found that always infinitely counting up was exhausting in a certain mental sense – the act of `resetting’ each round was comforting in a way that we’d lost.
I’d have to agree that the action economy is one of the better things about 3e-4e D&D, IMO; certainly compared to my time in GURPS, Shadowrun 3e, or White Wolf. The end of 3.5 got crazy: adding Swift and Immediate actions everywhere was, to me, as big a mechanical change as anything done between 3.0 launch and PathFinder Alpha. In 4e, I think the action economy works well, although there are still balance problems with Immediates.
I think you can have your simple actions, have the simplicity of the reset, and fix the problems that come from balancing immediates. Maybe I’m a dreamer.
The problem with most simplistic action systems is that not all actions are valued equally. Is attempting to grab someone the same and attacking an enemy and doing enough damage to kill them? Not really. Is attempting to jump over a pit the same as casting a spell that kills 10 enemies at once? Not at all.
You need a system that recognizes the differences between types of actions and how much affect they have on a combat. That way you won’t have a situation where the fighter makes attacks every round for 10 damage, while the rogue spends all of his actions moving into position for a backstab, while the cleric spends all his actions following the fighter around and waiting for him to take damage, while the wizard spends all his actions doing 30 points of damage to 5 creatures at once…..or worse, casting a spell that essentially removes the enemies ability to fight back entirely.
If actions were rated in a different way, it might be possible to balance a spell that does 30 points of damage to 5 creatures at once simply by making the action take 3 “action points” in a turn instead of 1 for a normal attack.
In a combat game, no action is going to be more important than attacking and damaging your foe. I think you have to understand that. I don’t think you can necessarily balance all actions.
Situation puts stress and creatures interest in other actions. It is the engine of choice between one action or the other. A matrix can’t do that work, because the weight of an action is contingent on the situation. It has no intrinsic weight in and of itself.
My favorite action system is from the old Mayfair DC Heroes game (now known as MEGS). The simplified version is:
“On your turn, you do 3 things. They can be any things you want. Only one of them can be an action that requires you to roll dice.”
The restriction of only one Dice Action was pretty harsh, and rules out certain multi-action combos like the d20 classic Move-Action-Feint + Attack (although it could open up design options for special abilities that specifically allow you to take more than one Dice Action). BUT it kept things moving quickly, and it was very unambiguous and easy to explain to new players.
I’m with it until you get to the last part. I think that needs to go.
Movement is one of the truly wonderful contributions of 4E. Being able to escape plain 20′x20′ rooms being all you needed and 40′x60′ being tons of unused space… that was a great change.
Great article!
Dave/Sarah – I’ve been working on a d20 spin-off called d20 Threshold (or just Threshold) that has a point-based Actions system. I’d be curious to hear your thoughts. You can see the site at http://www.d20threshold.com and the action points system is at http://www.d20threshold.com/gamemastering/encounters/actions-in-combat#TOC-Action-Point-Costs Thanks!
Ha, I have been feeling a bit like, “Oh no, mommy and daddy are fighting.”
Having just standard and immediate doesn’t really appeal to me. I’m with Dave on wanting a way to buy actions per turn but that runs into the issues of system mastery and decision costs that some gamers seem to love. I also wish there was a simple way of orchestrating group attacks other than holding actions but I realize that a fair number of people like to have the spotlight on just them during their turn. I guess one issue then is that some people want a cinematic fight experience full of special effects, wire-fu and constantly moving camera and other people like something a little more closer to “real world” physics and limitations. Providing both in the game can be done in 4e (imo) but it requires having builds/classes for each type.
I, too, would like to see a simple way of orchestrating group attacks. I can’t help but think that the assistance system we have for skill checks could somehow be translated over to combat. I’m no game designer so I don’t have any ideas on how to do it, but seeing the success of assisting in skill checks I would think that the same mindset could be applied to combat in some sort of basic, simplified format.
I really would dig a more elegant action system (another classic is you get X action points per turn, given actions cost from 0-3 to perform). But the one thing the current 4e action system does is that encourages movement and making the battlefield more dynamic. Since the ways to convert movement into attacks are rare (and attacks win combats), you’re encourage to use that movement when you can. I wish all the classes made more use of all three of the action types, but the encouragement built right into the system is there to get your fights moving.