>Not incredibly relevant to the discussion, but D&D 4E has gone to a system
>where the stats of foes are based on the levels of the characters.
Completely? So the "Here is the same monster/NPC at different levels - we've done the math for you" is no longer relevant? Interesting. (I've only skimmed through 4E, it looks like a great game for what it is trying to be.)
>The math
>in the system is built so that at any level, the abilities of the
characters
>to succeed at skills or attack roles is within one or two of a "base
>resistance". From that number, monsters are either easy, normal or
hard for
>a given level, but easily scalable to the characters' current level. NPCs,
>in this case, would have a broad range where they are relevant (e.g.
levels
>11-20), and only have to be spec'ed-out with a few keynote abilities, not
>full stats.
Interesting. That certainly takes care of that problem, but probably has
annoyed the hell out of some people who loved the 3 and 3.5 ability/need
to stat everything out.
I always pined for the days of 1st Edition when I could make a monster
just be "a 3rd level fighter" and that was enough to use, so I'd be fond
of the change.
>Thus, when making dungeon crawls, or skill-based story-telling sessions in
>your setting-of-choice, you are in many ways using the relative-based
>narrative that has been discussed here ad nausium. True, there are still
>numbers; but those numbers have now been built around a Pass/Fail cycle,
>with guidelines in the DMG on how to cycle your encounters (both
combat and
>non-combat) so that the story has a dramatic flow.
I heard that they tried to make 4E handle non-combat significantly again. It even looked like it wasn't a bad system for it. I always disliked how 3rd Edition went into "The game is about fighting monsters and that's it" but it seemed a solution to some of the problems with D&D. 4E seems to have tried to go back the other way, but with some massive redesign. As I said, it does seem an interesting approach. Still highly tactical based, and if I recall, even the non-combat skill resolution was very "tactics to win" based. (I could be misremembering, though.)
>So while D&D may be focused on tactical combat, even their designers
>have realized the benefit of tailoring the story to dramatic flow. In this
>case, it was just pre-built into the system so that the process of
DMing is
>easier for the general public. This is lightly touched on if you read
design
>notes or the guidelines in the DMG, but not widely know about the system,
>since it's not relevant to most players. (Whether they succeed at this
>narrative scheme, I could not say. I've not played more a few combats and
>skill-based encounters, just to see what the new system was like.)
Interesting. And yes, I think relevant to the "the numbers aren't fixed"
question.
I think the first question someone would ask would be, "So the same
Dragon is equally difficult at 2nd and 15th level?"
LC
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