Hey Man, well this is Babylon

I’m slowly falling out of love (again) with Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition. My love affair with this game has been a tumultuous one, I admit. When I first perused the leaked PDF copies pre-release, I practically loathed it. It did not seem the game for me. When I finally got a chance to actually play it, I was wowed by the tightness of its combat mechanics, the interoperability of the team roles, and the constant awareness of all your available options. In recent times I fought a brief addiction to the process of character-building, very similar to a previous addiction I had when first introduced to 3rd Edition’s drastic rules changes.

But now I feel that fling coming to an end (again?). The big kicker for me this time are the jolting unnatural transitions between the game’s core modes of play. In no other tabletop game do the words “Okay, everyone, roll for initiative” make me cringe so deeply. The switchover from Talk-Time to Fight-Time is so drastic, sudden, and severe that it breaks me out of my imaginative reverie and reminds me that yes, I really am only here to grind mobs for XP.

Consider these transitions as if they were part of a Japanese video RPG. These games have three basic modes. In Exploration Mode you move Your Guy around a typically disproportionately-represented dungeon, town, or world map. Sometimes you interact with the scenery when exclamation points appear above Your Guy’s head. Sometimes you talk to other NPCs in the game setting, most of which just repeat the same lines of dialog every time you select the talk command.

Sometimes while in Exploration Mode, the screen will suddenly and violently shift into a miasma of geometrically-swirling trippy colors and patterns, and after a few seconds you will find yourself in Battle Mode. In Battle Mode, your characters all line up perfectly along one side of the screen, usually looping through idle-battle animations (the usual leg-bendy motions of which would probably just destroy the quads of any real human) while waiting for you to give them commands. Once the commands are given, they take turns first leaping into the fray to strike at an enemy and then leaping back perfectly to their initial starting position in the battle line-up. You continue to give commands, they continue to leap back and forth, and the positioning continues to remain unchanged.

The third mode is Cutscene Mode, in which all of the rules of the game are thrown right out and sometimes shat upon, all for the same of “compelling” story. Over the course of the game, Your Guy might be pelted with hundreds of thousands of bullets in Battle Mode sequences, but if they are hit by a single errant gunshot in Cutscene Mode, it usually means lights out for Your Guy. And on the opposite end of the spectrum, in Cutscene Mode Your Guy will frequently perform feats of skill and power that you can only dream of actually using in the other modes – feats that the actual game rules have no way to handle with fair application of mathematics.

Considering these three typical game modes, JRPGs and D&D 4E have a lot in common. In fact, I’d go so far as to state that 4th Edition has more in common with JRPGs than it ever did with MMORPGs, contrary to what many of its detractors continue to complain (whether this is good or bad is a matter of personal tastes). Exploration Mode is what is frequently called “Story Mode” or “Role-Play Mode” in the current gamut of tabletop games. In here you role-play a bit, seek out some narrative goals (which can frequently be missed by bad spot checks), talk to important people to gain clues, and maybe roll a Climb or Diplomacy check. But the moment there’s any kind of two-or-more-person conflict, the screens of imagination swirl and heavy metal music starts playing, breaking the immersion and throwing you into Battle Mode.

Battle Mode in JRPGS and Combat Encounters in D&D 4E are virtually identical: immutable rules, everyone waiting their turn to act, numerically-set battle order sequences (initiative), repetitive animations (a limited array of prescribed actions), static positioning (characters just standing face-to-face whacking at each other). Sure D&D gives you some nifty, colorful, and mechanically diverse options, but when you break them down they are just combinations of hit point damage and status effects – and most “big bads” have status resistances so goddamned high that they might as well be immune (like every boss in ever JRPG ever).

Cutscene Mode, then, equals the well-known Rule Zero. Personally, I despise Rule Zero, and I view its inclusion in a product as a sure sign of shoddy game design, but that’s a subject for another discussion. You should all know what Rule Zero I’m talking about: that one rule that’s in just about every game master’s section of just about every tabletop role-playing game in publication. It’s that rule telling the GM to break these rules whenever he really wants to. It’s that rule that invalidates all the other rules of the game. It can destroy character builds, obliterate well-crafted plans, and transform the dice we employ and cherish into a complete sham. It turns pages of rules like “you can’t do this action in this circumstance, ever” and “this rule is always true” and “2+2=4″ into mere suggestions, guesses, and poorly-tested options.

The Cut Scene/Rule Zero allows the GM to break the game, basically. It allows things like this to happen:

GM: “Sure, I know each bullet only does 2d6 damage, Bob, and you’ve got 371 hit points. But we’re out of combat right now, and this bad guy’s pointing a gun at you, so I need you to roleplay that you’re scared, okay?”

Cut Scene Mode tries to draw you out of the physics-ignoring rules of Battle Mode and reinforce the rules and dangers of Real Actual Life. But when the rules of the game’s primarily-advertised Battle Mode so drastically clash with the rules of Real Actual Life, Cut Scene Mode is often difficult to swallow. This is especially true for the kinds of players who like to manipulate and manage the rules of the game.

Like in JRPGs, the transitions between these modes in D&D 4E are so severe and obvious that they grate on me. Every time a GM tells me to Roll for Initiative, I shudder and snap out of the moment I was just in. Whenever combat pauses to allow the Big Bad his five-minute-long speech, the sickness grows inside me. When the GM narrates that the boss gets away despite us pumping his body with more bullets than exist in the state of Texas, just because he wants the should-be-dead villain to return later, I die a little inside.

It’s like there are multiple games being played here which don’t interact all that smoothly with each other. Wizards of the Coast did a good thing when they unified the core dice mechanic with 3rd Edition. There were a lot of disjointed math systems that clashed violently in the older editions. Smoothing those into a single mechanic and a single numerical goal horizon was a smart move. Good job with that.

Now would you guys please fix those hideous play-mode seams that you left behind?

Afterword

For more amusing readings on the clash between game play and role-play, check out this link.