Comments on: A Montage hack for 4/e

By: Wayne Peacock

Wayne Peacock — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 18:00:58 +0000

Mr. Macklin,

Sir, you are playing 4e all wrong. Don’t you know that it is a miniatures combat game? The game clearly forbids any of this Role-Playing, story-based piffle!!!

IN THE NAME OF THE GRID, STOP!!!!

Actually, this was teh awesome. Fun is always reason enough. Theory should never stand in the way of that.

You were absolutely playing 4e, IMHO. 4e, clears the path for this kind of innovative story mechanics, and encourages by giving us the skill challenge framework. I REALLY hope that the DMGs to follow will adopt new “mechanics” such as your own. That would be a great boon to the gaming community for 4e embrace mechanics such as this.

By: Mick Bradley

Mick Bradley — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 19:53:43 +0000

Hey Ryan,

Rich and Judd mentioned your hack on Canon Puncture #74. Here’s the link:

http://www.canonpuncture.com/2009/07/canon-puncture-74-jerks-at-the-table-and-their-looong-backstories/

By: Michael P

Michael P — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 00:13:04 +0000

I did a similar effect when I was nearing the end of my Campaign. I was using one of the WotC Prepackaged Mods, because it sounded fun (Pyramid of Shadows), but after the first few sessions I could see it was getting stale.
So, the PC’s met with a previous NPC, who told them that the end was coming, and that they didn’t have time for all this BS, and cast a time altering ritual on them, essentially giving me free reign to advance the story to it’s key points, end the current adventure, and throw them into a tumult of time travel. It also showed what happened to there home when they were gone for a year in a magic prison, there home town and the surrounding valley had become war torn in the face of a ongoing year of war. Enter the last encounters of the final story, now at level 11, to stop an extra planar invasion.

I think I am definatly going to take this one and add it to my D&D toolbox.

By: Female Half-Elf Bard in question

Female Half-Elf Bard in question — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 05:51:58 +0000

The hours approaching, just give it your best
You’ve got to reach your prime.
That’s when you need to put yourself to the test,
And show us a passage of time,
We’re gonna need a montage (montage)
Oh it takes a montage (montage)

Show a lot of things happing at once,
Remind everyone of what’s going on (what’s going on?)
And with every shot you show a little improvement
To show it all would take to long
That’s called a montage (montage)
Oh we want montage (montage)

And anything that we want to go from just a beginner to a pro,
You need a montage (montage)
Even Rocky had a montage (montage)

(Montage…montage)

Anything that we want to go from just a beginner to a pro,
You need a montage (montage)
Oh it takes a montage (montage)

Always fade out in a montage,
If you fade out, it seem like more time
Has passed in a montage,
Montage

By: Female Half-Elf Bard in question

Female Half-Elf Bard in question — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 05:49:31 +0000

Even though we did this just 4 days ago, and I was one of the 3 doing it, the recant was awesome. I LOL’d through the entire thing thinking, “man that WAS awesome”.

I thought it was a great and creative way of getting us level 2 to 11. Just saying “we trained int he East for 9 levels” is weak and so not creative. This was way for us to use our imagination to narrate the story, within somewhat reasonable guidelines. What we did was heroic and beyond what a normal session could ever do. It would have taken 40 sessions to complete all we did in 1 hour.

The outcome was both fun and amazing. Paragon should not be a boring level 11, it should be mythical and fantastical. I think this montage fit that context perfectly.

~ DeeWo

By: Carl Rigney

Carl Rigney — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 23:04:37 +0000

Very nice! I think you were playing totemic D&D, in which you were rolling dice and saying what happened, with the books on the table informing your decisions but not controlling them.

So after you play at 11th level a while, are you going to advance to 21st in a similar manner, on the last night (or perhaps next-to-last) of the game?

By: Ryan Macklin

Ryan Macklin — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 20:46:11 +0000

Typo fixed.

By: Burrowowl

Burrowowl — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 20:28:46 +0000

Took me a minute to realize that “to clam him” was a typo. “To clam” is a verb representing the action of narrating another player’s character without his consent. Originating from a collaborative storytelling game called MetropoliS where somebody picked up the bad habit of turning other PCs’ heads into clams.

By: Ryan Macklin

Ryan Macklin — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 19:21:42 +0000

Adam,

I think you’ve hit on why I continue to use the word “context” because it involves that which the setting assumes that the rules make true. It’s partly the intersection between “pure rules” and “pure setting.”

Of course, the context goes further into the campaign-specific. The context was “halflings are total badasses,” with the campaign-specific rules being “all halflings are at least one level higher than you in Heroic tier” and the campaign-specific setting being “they’re ex-pats of a land where dragon empires constantly attempt to crush them from existance, like early Israel.”

To answer your question, we might have, but I think the same in that we would be reflecting the context we’d be playing in with GURPS. The rules of the montage are ruleset-independent, but nothing can be truly independent, so it becomes context-dependent — in the specific case.

I’d also say that I might not have been forced to come up with nine events if not for D&D’s leveling scheme, so GURPS may have let me off to easy, or not given me enough to work with.

- Ryan

By: Adam Dray

Adam Dray — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 19:12:18 +0000

The other way to look at the question is this: Would you have had the exact same experience with the same setting but a different set of rules? Answering this requires you to draw a line between “setting” and “rules” that frankly makes me a little uneasy, but let’s say that everything that has a number or uses dice (like racial abilities) is rules and everything that describes the elements of the D&D world (such as racial descriptions) is setting.

Would you have had the same experience using GURPS rules and your setting?

Now if you call everything in the PHB “rules,” including racial descriptions and stuff, and only use “setting” to mean stuff you added on top of the PHB, then the answer changes.