Basic D&D Announced! D&D going Free-To-Play [Archive]

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HylianKnight

2014-05-27, 12:32 AM

New Legend & Lore (http://www.wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4ll/20140527) is up, go read it.

So, after the announcement of the core books release dates and prices, there's been some confusion as to what exactly is in each book and what is required to play. Now we have our answer. It looks like the core rules of D&D will be available to everyone for free over the internet. While we've already long since seen the use of SRDs to index the core rules in the past, freely distributing the actual document teaching people how to play is definitely new. This is big.

captpike

2014-05-27, 01:00 AM

this is must admit is cool, at the very least it will be enough to judge the system without having to buy anything or even get off my ass ;)

Kurald Galain

2014-05-27, 03:13 AM

Lokiare

2014-05-27, 07:49 AM

Just when you think they are taking 10 steps back, they take a step forward. This is one of the few things that they could do to actually renew the trust they've squandered.

Edit: This would be a really good idea if they had actually made a game for everyone instead of a very narrow play style. As it is, all its going to do is give everyone not using that play style fair warning not to buy it.

1337 b4k4

2014-05-27, 08:27 AM

That was unexpected.

Still, good move on their part. After all, the two most popular games that they're competing against are also available for free, so they would need to have some free content to match that.

Yeah, I wasn't expecting to see the full 20 level progression be released free for any classes, even when they teased at it last week.

Person_Man

2014-05-27, 08:36 AM

obryn

2014-05-27, 08:48 AM

This announcement isn't at all incompatible with OGL, though I'm still skeptical about a license anywhere near that open.

Good move on WotC's part.

1337 b4k4

2014-05-27, 09:19 AM

Free to Download Basic D&D does not equal OGL or SRD.
3rd party publishers and homebrewers will be unable to support 5E without infringing on Hasbro's copyright.

And "Basic" could be extremely stripped down version of the game that's basically unplayable unless everyone at the table is playing Basic D&D. If 5E depends heavily on "optional" rules modules, and Basic 5E doesn't contain any of those modules, then it's very difficult to impossible for a new player to read the free Basic rules, and then sit down and play with a group of "Advanced" players that use multiple modules. Basic 5E and Advanced 5E will essentially be two different games.

This is just a bone that they're throwing the old fan base in the form of a free giveaway that will be useless to most players new 6 months after it's released. It is not a return to the glory days of the OGL/SRD, otherwise they would have announced an OGL/SRD.

I'm not sure anyone has suggested this is a return to OGL and an SRD. But it is significantly different (and in some ways an improvement) from the SRD of 3e and 4e. The SRD was great from a developer standpoint, but horrible for getting people to actually play the game (without significant cleanup and adaptation i.e. pathfinder). This is different, it's aimed at players, a way to let people get in and try the game without having to drop any money on it. Though it does leave the interesting question of why someone would want to buy the starter set then? Is one adventure and a set of dice worth $20? Maybe, especially as a gift (kind of hard to wrap a PDF), but this might also cannibalize any sales of the starter set. To be fair, I've already pre-ordered the starter set and don't plan on canceling it after this announcement, so maybe not.

As for supporting 5e without infringing on Hasbro's copyrights, that cat is already out of the bag. The OGL opened up so much of D&D's terminology to the public it would be fairly impossible for them to effectively close it now without rewriting huge swaths of their terminology. Obviously you'll still need a separate license if you want to put "Compatible with D&D" on your cover, but you've always needed that. Off the top of my head, the only thing in the playtest that wouldn't be covered by the existing OGL and SRD would be something like "Advantage" and "Disadvantage" and maybe some of the "Legendary Moves" but even then, you can replace the names with your own if you want and at least under US law, you'll be fine* since they can't copyright game mechanics, just the presentation thereof.

*IANAL, taking legal advice from a public forum dedicated to a web comic is not a good idea.

Kurald Galain

2014-05-27, 09:23 AM

I'm not sure anyone has suggested this is a return to OGL and an SRD.
Probably not, but one of the most frequently asked questions about 4E is "will it have an OGL". And it would not be good for WOTC's reputation to answer "no", so they must either ignore the question or make up something that sounds like an OGL but really isn't (actually 4E has one of those, but the customers weren't fooled).

The SRD was great from a developer standpoint, but horrible for getting people to actually play the game
Sorry, how is an SRD horrible for players? I'm not seeing the issue here.

As for supporting 5e without infringing on Hasbro's copyrights, that cat is already out of the bag.
Indeed, and if WOTC is clever they'll support and embrace this. More third-party publishers for your system means more market share.

1337 b4k4

2014-05-27, 09:40 AM

Sorry, how is an SRD horrible for players? I'm not seeing the issue here.

Well for one, the SRD was incomplete (no advancement / creation rules). But further, presentation matters. I would never hand the SRD to a player and say "here's the game we're playing". I would hand them a PHB, but the SRD is a lousy document for learning the game. It is after all a "reference document". It's like learning small engine repair by reading through an encyclopedia and the occasional routing diagram. It's doable, but it's a whole lot easier if you're given the shop manual and the right tools.

pribnow

2014-05-27, 09:58 AM

1337 b4k4

2014-05-27, 10:16 AM

I think the SRD was great to learn 3rd edition. I got introduced to d&d by a friend who had the books. After playing one session, I pretty much learnt the entire game by studying the SRD. And I found it pretty clear and very well organized.

Well, I could certainly be wrong. Maybe more people found the SRD to be easy to learn from. I found it's presentation lacking, and a lot of the people I played with at the time didn't care for it either when compared to the actual books.

obryn

2014-05-27, 10:19 AM

Well for one, the SRD was incomplete (no advancement / creation rules). But further, presentation matters. I would never hand the SRD to a player and say "here's the game we're playing". I would hand them a PHB, but the SRD is a lousy document for learning the game. It is after all a "reference document". It's like learning small engine repair by reading through an encyclopedia and the occasional routing diagram. It's doable, but it's a whole lot easier if you're given the shop manual and the right tools.
I'm in full agreement, here. It's all about presentation. Having all the rules in a searchable, hyperlinked format is great for reference. It's not a great introduction to the game. An SRD has a lot of the what, but not much how and why.

1337 b4k4

2014-05-27, 10:30 AM

I'm in full agreement, here. It's all about presentation. Having all the rules in a searchable, hyperlinked format is great for reference. It's not a great introduction to the game. An SRD has a lot of the what, but not much how and why.

Yeah, I probably should have been more clear on that front too. I'm not saying the SRD isn't a great tool at the table, especially the hyperlinked versions, but as an introduction to the game and getting people started, I found it to be lacking.

Kurald Galain

2014-05-27, 11:01 AM

I agree, having a PHB available with background, pictures, and a step-by-step introduction certainly has value that the SRD doesn't cover.

Felhammer

2014-05-27, 11:30 AM

Free to Download Basic D&D does not equal OGL or SRD.
3rd party publishers and homebrewers will be unable to support 5E without infringing on Hasbro's copyright.

3rd party companies were making content for 4E and were not using the GSL. When you add in the way people will be able to hack into 5E via the OGL, we will likely see far more supplements for "The Latest Edition of the World's Most Popular RPG".

Yorrin

2014-05-27, 12:54 PM

Back to the actual topic of this thread- this is a brilliant move. You have to remember that this is aimed at brand new players, not veterans. The types of players who don't know what a Paladin or a Druid is, and who would be just as happy to refluff a Fighter or a Cleric for those purposes anyway. I happen to be collecting just such a group of players right now to teach the game to, and this will be an invaluable tool to teach them the basics and get them really into the game without overwhelming them with options. Then, once we've run a short campaign, I'll probably pick up the new PHB and say "now that you've learned the basics, here are some more options for you guys to dive into." Keeps them hooked with new stuff. This is exactly how you breathe life into a brand that has been stagnating for a while, as it's going to expand the player base in what is probably the most accessible way they could have done it.

Garan

2014-05-27, 04:19 PM

I'm just hoping it doesn't go the way of the 4E basic rules (don't remember offhand its name, I saw it at a friend's house and flipped through it): It provides a fairly large range of classes, and hints at there being more than one kind that could be created with this base- and then only actually provides one class with more than one variation.
If they're going to give us the four classes, they'd better be the complete versions of the classes.

Upside to this, though, is that there might be a greater chance of runs of books similar to the Completes of 3.5, as they could say, "Hey, like magic characters but are bored of the mage? Buy Complete Mage and test out new spellcasters!:

captpike

2014-05-27, 04:44 PM

Lokiare

2014-05-27, 05:50 PM

SpawnOfMorbo

2014-05-27, 08:16 PM

In the article Mearls clearly says that its just one sub-class of each of the core four classes. So we already know it won't be complete classes.

Well not exactly.

We will have levels 1-20 with one subclass for each class. Those four classes will be complete since (by what have been said) you don't even need subclasses to actually play the game. It is like saying that the classes in the 3.5 SRD aren't complete because you don't have every option in 3.5 on the SRD to work with.

If the four classes didn't have all the stuff to actually use the class with the rules then yeah they wouldn't be complete, like say the Fighter doesn't tell you what its HD is... Then yeah the classes wouldn't be complete.

Actually using subclasses is one play style that some people may straight up ignore so they can have the old D&D style and others may use them to get a more modern D&D style.

*shrug*

Pink

2014-05-28, 11:42 AM

Free to Download Basic D&D does not equal OGL or SRD.
3rd party publishers and homebrewers will be unable to support 5E without infringing on Hasbro's copyright.

And "Basic" could be extremely stripped down version of the game that's basically unplayable unless everyone at the table is playing Basic D&D. If 5E depends heavily on "optional" rules modules, and Basic 5E doesn't contain any of those modules, then it's very difficult to impossible for a new player to read the free Basic rules, and then sit down and play with a group of "Advanced" players that use multiple modules. Basic 5E and Advanced 5E will essentially be two different games.

This is just a bone that they're throwing the old fan base in the form of a free giveaway that will be useless to most players new 6 months after it's released. It is not a return to the glory days of the OGL/SRD, otherwise they would have announced an OGL/SRD.

Pretty much my opinion on the matter.

Don't get me wrong. I think it is a good move. It is good for players to have something free. But it's hardly innovative or a masterstroke. It's barely keeping up with competition like Pathfinder and FATE who have the ENTIRE rules available for free and OGL fashion. This is something that WotC is basically forced to do to be taken seriously by the savvy, experienced RPG consumer market.

That being said, when Mike says things like Basic D&D will be capable of supporting a 'Lifetime' of play by itself, I'm very skeptical. It seems to be basic rules to try the game with and play around with to decide if people like it enough to buy or not. Again, good, because price-point is certainly a barrier to entry without some insight to how the game plays and such. However, considering the highly marketed 'modularity' of the system, I truly doubt that Basic D&D will be completely accurate to how the full game is played by most groups. And most certainly I do not see any group who looks at the Basic D&D rules and goes "Yeah, this is enough to play with for a very long time of our gaming campaigns, no need to buy anything else".

1337 b4k4

2014-05-28, 12:17 PM

That being said, when Mike says things like Basic D&D will be capable of supporting a 'Lifetime' of play by itself, I'm very skeptical. It seems to be basic rules to try the game with and play around with to decide if people like it enough to buy or not. Again, good, because price-point is certainly a barrier to entry without some insight to how the game plays and such. However, considering the highly marketed 'modularity' of the system, I truly doubt that Basic D&D will be completely accurate to how the full game is played by most groups. And most certainly I do not see any group who looks at the Basic D&D rules and goes "Yeah, this is enough to play with for a very long time of our gaming campaigns, no need to buy anything else".

Eh, there's a difference between "capable of supporting a lifetime of play" and "never 'need' or want to buy anything else". I fully expect that the basic set could support a "lifetime of play". There's no reason why it couldn't. There are people who are still playing 0e D&D (and people that have returned to it). That said, sure they're expecting that for most people it won't be "enough" because we always want more and, for some strange reason that Gygax could never figure out, we always want official copies of the "more". But just because you personally want more doesn't mean the basic system wasn't capable of supporting a lifetime of play. In fact, when you really boil it down "capable of supporting a lifetime of play" is a meaningless statement. Monopoly is capable of "supporting a lifetime of play" as long as for your entire lifetime you only ever want to play monopoly in some form or another.

SpawnOfMorbo

2014-05-28, 12:28 PM

Eh, there's a difference between "capable of supporting a lifetime of play" and "never 'need' or want to buy anything else". I fully expect that the basic set could support a "lifetime of play". There's no reason why it couldn't. There are people who are still playing 0e D&D (and people that have returned to it). That said, sure they're expecting that for most people it won't be "enough" because we always want more and, for some strange reason that Gygax could never figure out, we always want official copies of the "more". But just because you personally want more doesn't mean the basic system wasn't capable of supporting a lifetime of play. In fact, when you really boil it down "capable of supporting a lifetime of play" is a meaningless statement. Monopoly is capable of "supporting a lifetime of play" as long as for your entire lifetime you only ever want to play monopoly in some form or another.

The reason we want more official stuff is because people, for whatever reason, don't trust third party. In 3.P I see it all the time where people straight up ban third party just because it is third party.

Even dreamscarred press, whoes Psionics are awesome, are looked at with distrust when I get away from these internets.

Which is all weird, if it was just a broken worry then why are people playing 3.P classes that are broken (up or down)? Weird.

It might be related to the name brand versus off brand mentality of shoppers. Sure an offbrand version of food may taste just as good or better, but why risk it when you have come to know and trust your brands?

Lokiare

2014-05-28, 01:53 PM

Well not exactly.

We will have levels 1-20 with one subclass for each class. Those four classes will be complete since (by what have been said) you don't even need subclasses to actually play the game. It is like saying that the classes in the 3.5 SRD aren't complete because you don't have every option in 3.5 on the SRD to work with.

If the four classes didn't have all the stuff to actually use the class with the rules then yeah they wouldn't be complete, like say the Fighter doesn't tell you what its HD is... Then yeah the classes wouldn't be complete.

Actually using subclasses is one play style that some people may straight up ignore so they can have the old D&D style and others may use them to get a more modern D&D style.

*shrug*

Where did you get the idea that sub-classes were optional? They really aren't. They determine how the class works and without them the classes are even more unbalanced than 3e. They aren't optional and as far as I know WotC never said they were. The 'simple' game is a set of sub-class choices that don't have any choices and keep things simple by having static mods for non-casters instead of maneuvers and powers.

Edit: The reason a lot of people want official support is you don't know what you are going to get. If you are a player you don't know if your DM will allow it, when if its official more than likely the DM will allow it.

You don't know if its going to be clever and well balanced or dull and horribly unbalanced or any combination thereof. If there were some kind of third party rating system that could be used or certification process to make sure 3rd party products met a certain standard, then people would trust them more.

1337 b4k4

2014-05-28, 02:03 PM

Edit: The reason a lot of people want official support is you don't know what you are going to get. If you are a player you don't know if your DM will allow it, when if its official more than likely the DM will allow it.

I guess I wasn't quite clear. When I was talking about the weird obsession with "official" add ons, it wasn't referring to comparing 3pp vs OEM, but more of a "One of my players wants to play X, please make rules for this for me and take my money". Obviously outsourcing is a thing, and that's a contributor to all of this, but it always amazed me how often I see (and apparently it amazed Gygax how often he got) people insisting on getting an "official" interpretation or version of something for their own personal game, not even to resolve confusion for say a tournament. It's just an odd quirk that seems to come out in a lot of geek hobbies. We like "official" things (cannon, source books what have you) and seem to have serious issues with something that isn't "official" even if it wouldn't matter. Eh, what can you do, we're all weird.

You don't know if its going to be clever and well balanced or dull and horribly unbalanced or any combination thereof. If there were some kind of third party rating system that could be used or certification process to make sure 3rd party products met a certain standard, then people would trust them more.

To be fair, you have this same issue with a lot of first party products too. WotC (and TSR before them) have always put out some real stinkers when it came to add ons.

obryn

2014-05-28, 02:24 PM

It's just an odd quirk that seems to come out in a lot of geek hobbies. We like "official" things (cannon, source books what have you) and seem to have serious issues with something that isn't "official" even if it wouldn't matter. Eh, what can you do, we're all weird.
It kinda goes both ways, though - I've rarely been in a game where there were no house-rules at all.

HylianKnight

2014-05-28, 02:26 PM

Where did you get the idea that sub-classes were optional? They really aren't. They determine how the class works and without them the classes are even more unbalanced than 3e. They aren't optional and as far as I know WotC never said they were. The 'simple' game is a set of sub-class choices that don't have any choices and keep things simple by having static mods for non-casters instead of maneuvers and powers.

Sub-classes are definitely 'optional' in the sense that you can have a complete class while not allowing players to pick between subclasses.

In the case of Basic D&D, it means a new player can roll up a Fighter and have a complete 1-20 class experience by the game automatically making every fighter a (referencing the play-test here) "Path of the Warrior" Fighter.

So yes, in that sense the sub-class system is absolutely optional in that it's totally optional whether or not you want to give your players the choice of a subclass.

Lokiare

2014-05-28, 02:30 PM

Sub-classes are definitely 'optional' in the sense that you can have a complete class while not allowing players to pick between subclasses.

In the case of Basic D&D, it means a new player can roll up a Fighter and have a complete 1-20 class experience by the game automatically making every fighter a (referencing the play-test here) "Path of the Warrior" Fighter.

So yes, in that sense the sub-class system is absolutely optional in that it's totally optional whether or not you want to give your players the choice of a subclass.

The other poster is talking specifically about not playing with sub-classes as if that was an option.

SpawnOfMorbo

2014-05-28, 03:17 PM

The other poster is talking specifically about not playing with sub-classes as if that was an option.

WotC mantra since introducing subclasses has been that they are optional.

If you want a more old school D&D feel then you can just ignore subclasses and feats. They even talked that players at the same table could be diverse in this choice. If one wanted to play a fighter sans subclass and another wanted a fighter with a subclass then it would be completely viable.

I don:'t know if the Dev team actually has the ability to do that... But that has been their mantra for the longest time.

You don't need a subclass to play next, at least from what I've seen so far.

If the classes were missing proficiencies, HD, class features, or names... Then yeah they wouldn't be complete but if they have only one subclass then they can still be complete because you don't need multiple subclasses (or any) to play the game.

Do we want multiple (free) subclass options? Hell yeah! Do we need them to play the game? Nope.

Or are you saying that the game hinges on subclasses so much if you don't have multiple options or if they aren't there then the game just doesn't work?

HylianKnight

2014-05-28, 03:27 PM

The way they worded it in the Basic D&D announcement,

presenting what we view as the essential subclass for each

made it sound to me as if one of the subclasses for each would be presented as the "Default" option, with the notion of choosing subclasses or presenting them as such would only appear in the PHB.

I could be totally wrong, but that sounds better to me then just straight up removing abilities from classes, resulting in a decreased power level and several dead levels for each.

captpike

2014-05-28, 03:28 PM

the problem they could run into is if they gut the game too much, even people who would like the full game would get turned off by the PDF.

if they only offer simple classes for example then people who want complex ones don't see an option for such a character and never get past reading the PDF

SpawnOfMorbo

2014-05-28, 03:48 PM

The way they worded it in the Basic D&D announcement,

made it sound to me as if one of the subclasses for each would be presented as the "Default" option, with the notion of choosing subclasses or presenting them as such would only appear in the PHB.

I could be totally wrong, but that sounds better to me then just straight up removing abilities from classes, resulting in a decreased power level and several dead levels for each.

Which means that those subclasses are part of the main class and just called a subclass so you know what you are trading away when you do choose a subclass.

I can dig it.

If they gave us dead levels I wouldn't be surprised, yet another lesson WotC failed to learn (stop giving people dead levels!).

Felhammer

2014-05-28, 04:12 PM

If they gave us dead levels I wouldn't be surprised, yet another lesson WotC failed to learn (stop giving people dead levels!).

If every level has something in it, then that leads to many people claiming there is ability bloat.

If you have several levels where all you gain a small bonuses (better to hit, better damage, more spells), then some people claim those do not count against dead levels because those small bonuses were "expected".

So really, the prime culprit is the 20 level structure that may or may not actually be the ideal number of levels for the game.

SpawnOfMorbo

2014-05-28, 05:10 PM

If every level has something in it, then that leads to many people claiming there is ability bloat.

If you have several levels where all you gain a small bonuses (better to hit, better damage, more spells), then some people claim those do not count against dead levels because those small bonuses were "expected".

So really, the prime culprit is the 20 level structure that may or may not actually be the ideal number of levels for the game.

See, if you do it correctly you don't have those small bonuses and have no dead levels.

The 3.5 wizard has no dead levels but has no small bonuses or bull crap forgotten class features.

So each level give me something awesome, something worth the XP or what's the point?

Edit: 20 levels is really is to much for a system like D&D. They should just make D&D 10 to 12 levels. I tend to stop around level 8 but I do like getting a not higher from time to time.

Psyren

2014-05-28, 05:17 PM

This is a step in the right direction for WotC. I'll judge more fully once I see what they're actually giving away for free.

Edit: 20 levels is really is to much for a system like D&D. They should just make D&D 10 to 12 levels. I tend to stop around level 8 but I do like getting a not higher from time to time.

If you change the leveling system now, you make it that much harder for existing players to translate their current campaigns, monsters etc. For example, if D&D stopped at 10-12, then presumably the titular dragons would still be top-level challenges in this new system. How strong then would an Ancient, Wyrm or Great Wyrm dragon be under the new system? Would they all three be max-level challenges now, or is there some scaling involved such that an 8th-level 5e party can handle challenges that would have required a 14th-level 3e/PF party?

T.G. Oskar

2014-05-28, 05:46 PM

Fun thought: I look at the Basic D&D for D&D 5e/Next with the same degree of skepticism as I see Dragon Age: Inquisition - their earlier counterparts simply didn't do it for me and I prefer the rules behind that, so they have to do something spectacular to make it work.

From what I saw, they're really going for a bare-bones approach to the system. I seriously doubt there'll be an SRD for D&D 5e/Next for those same reasons: the SRD would have to present the system bare-bones, without all the options. For all it's worth, Basic D&D WILL be the SRD for 5e/Next: four races, four classes (and the default approach to them), and the core mechanics. Everything else is optional: the other races, the other classes, the subclasses for every class, the feats, etc. I can imagine some stuff "bleeding" in (I usually don't bet, but I can say with certainty Basic D&D will have backgrounds since they were promoted to be a big part of character creation).

Considering what Mearls mentioned (there would be content in the site which would add additional rules), I presume their approach will be opposite to Paizo and Pathfinder: whereas PF makes everything thats Core part of the SRD and also OGL, 5e/Next will only post the crucial aspects to play and then release most of the adventures (and the specific things of the adventures) for free (though all of the "adventure paths" would be for Faerun). In terms PF players will understand: instead of having the Core Rulebook and all splats in the SRD, think having only a stripped Core Rulebook, but all the content of Rise of the Runelords, Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous tacked in.

What I'm most skeptic is to the "modularity" of this Edition. Basic D&D will probably play as a mash-up of BECMI and 3rd: the tables and the math of 3rd, but the content of Basic (in fact, going by the races and the classes, this seems to be the intent). As mentioned by Mearls, the PHB/DMG/MM would be "Advanced" 5e/Next, which includes the other races (Gnome, Half-Elf, Half-Orc), the other classes (Barbarian, Bard, Druid, Monk, Paladin, Ranger and Sorcerer), the rules to create magic items (Basic would probably have an assortment but not the way how to create custom magic items; considering the idea of "imprinting" with the magic item, perhaps that will be Basic content), the Product Identity monsters and the templates (and maybe the special abilities you can add to monsters; I have the feeling monsters will work a lot like their 4e counterparts), the rules to create cities and dungeons, and so forth.

As for "sub-classes"...why do they sound like Archetypes? Or an unholy mixture of 3.5's alternate classes, PF's archetypes and 4e's subclasses (like Slayer, Blackguard and whatnot)? It's pretty much obvious the Basic D&D PDF will contain the Big Stupid Fighter, the Thief, the Healbot Cleric and the Blaster Wizard; everything else will be a subclass.

Being so close and apparently complete, I'm at the expectative for the release of the PDF to see how much they can cling towards "lifetime of playing"; no matter how flexible LEGO blocks are, you'll want the sets with all the items you want...wait a second...Basic D&D is a bucket of basic LEGO blocks, Advanced includes the playsets, and the Campaign Settings are LEGO Pirates, LEGO Fantasy and so forth!

Morty

2014-05-28, 05:53 PM

The basic, free set kind of sounds like it might only be good for supporting the most basic D&D party ever, with a heavily armoured fighter, lock-picking thief, healbot cleric and blasty wizard. Still, it is a good move, since even such a bare-bones approach can show how the system works. I suppose cleric and wizard will be better off, as usual, since their "essential" subclasses can do things, whereas the "essential" fighter is a big dumb door-opener and the "essential" rogue is a sneaky person who stabs things sometimes.

As far as levels go... 20 is just a number. It's a nice, round one, so it works for how many levels there are. There's no real reason to change how many levels there are, although there might be reason to change what each level means - since it's meant different things in every edition. I believe levels should mostly act as "caps", determining how powerful abilities you have access to. There's no need for every level to give you something unique if you have a large pool of "small" powers to pick from. Two of the three core "Tier 1" (how I hate that term, but it fits here) classes in 3e have no real class features to speak of, and yet they're the most varied. Same goes for martial initiators - they do have class features, but their bread-and-butter are the maneuvers, the accessible level of which is determined by their class level.

da_chicken

2014-05-28, 06:24 PM

I don't know, I assume it will be Fighter (Warrior), Rogue (Thievery), Cleric (Life), and Mage (Evoker).

That makes the Cleric the healbot, and the blaster Mage (Evoker) is almost certain to be the narrowest Mage (although it's always a popular choice). The Warrior path is pretty uninspiring in my packet, too. Thievery isn't exactly a bad path, though. Use Magic Device is nothing to shake a stick at. The Assassination Rogue is kind of lame, IMO.

SpawnOfMorbo

2014-05-28, 06:33 PM

This is a step in the right direction for WotC. I'll judge more fully once I see what they're actually giving away for free.

If you change the leveling system now, you make it that much harder for existing players to translate their current campaigns, monsters etc. For example, if D&D stopped at 10-12, then presumably the titular dragons would still be top-level challenges in this new system. How strong then would an Ancient, Wyrm or Great Wyrm dragon be under the new system? Would they all three be max-level challenges now, or is there some scaling involved such that an 8th-level 5e party can handle challenges that would have required a 14th-level 3e/PF party?

I don't think it would be that hard, all you need to do is translate the monster levels too.

But yeah I think that people would flip their lids if D&D was 10 levels.

captpike

2014-05-28, 07:47 PM

SpawnOfMorbo

2014-05-28, 09:05 PM

I personalty think that about 15 is the least they can have without chomping off a large part of the game.

part of the coolness of the game is going from village hero to god slayer. its hard to do that in only 10 levels, and still have enough to have a good arc in any one range.

See, you could do that in 3 levels if you made the game right.

But 15 might be a good number for it for the average D&D gamer.

Though I may just adopt some sort of e6 rules for 5e and call it a day. Perhaps additional subclass options in place of feats though... Work your way up to becomes the "perfect" fighter/cleric/wizard/rogue or whatever?

captpike

2014-05-28, 09:18 PM

See, you could do that in 3 levels if you made the game right.

But 15 might be a good number for it for the average D&D gamer.

Though I may just adopt some sort of e6 rules for 5e and call it a day. Perhaps additional subclass options in place of feats though... Work your way up to becomes the "perfect" fighter/cleric/wizard/rogue or whatever?

if you wanted a short game sure, three would work.

but if want to do an arc where the players, after great effort, save the town then another where they move up to the nation ect. you need enough levels to do that, while not becoming boring because you are spending 6 RL months in the same 2 levels.

DrBurr

2014-05-28, 10:17 PM

captpike

2014-05-28, 10:47 PM

Lokiare

2014-05-29, 06:59 AM

WotC mantra since introducing subclasses has been that they are optional.

If you want a more old school D&D feel then you can just ignore subclasses and feats. They even talked that players at the same table could be diverse in this choice. If one wanted to play a fighter sans subclass and another wanted a fighter with a subclass then it would be completely viable.

I don:'t know if the Dev team actually has the ability to do that... But that has been their mantra for the longest time.

You don't need a subclass to play next, at least from what I've seen so far.

If the classes were missing proficiencies, HD, class features, or names... Then yeah they wouldn't be complete but if they have only one subclass then they can still be complete because you don't need multiple subclasses (or any) to play the game.

Do we want multiple (free) subclass options? Hell yeah! Do we need them to play the game? Nope.

Or are you saying that the game hinges on subclasses so much if you don't have multiple options or if they aren't there then the game just doesn't work?

They dropped the idea of sub-classes being optional in the last 2-3 play test packets. They instead included one simple sub-class option for each class that has static bonuses and zero choices.

If fighters and rogues don't get sub-class options then spell casters will be even more powerful over them than in 3E. So I'm essentially saying both.

Yorrin

2014-05-29, 09:36 AM

I assume it will be Fighter (Warrior), Rogue (Thievery), Cleric (Life), and Mage (Evoker).

This, except I'm hoping they give us some sort of generalist Mage instead of Evoker. It wouldn't be that hard to write one and would be much more in line with "generic as possible." Something that grants Prestidigitation as a bonus cantrip the way illusionist does with Minor Illusion, and then gets a bonus like a scaling number of more spells prepared per day without actually having more spell slots per day, for the sake of increasing versatility the way a generalist should.

Lokiare

2014-05-29, 11:14 AM

This, except I'm hoping they give us some sort of generalist Mage instead of Evoker. It wouldn't be that hard to write one and would be much more in line with "generic as possible." Something that grants Prestidigitation as a bonus cantrip the way illusionist does with Minor Illusion, and then gets a bonus like a scaling number of more spells prepared per day without actually having more spell slots per day, for the sake of increasing versatility the way a generalist should.

If they really want to get the traditionalist crowd they'd make a whole new subclass that grants extra spell slots in exchange for having to tie specific prepared spells to specific slots like 3E did. Then maybe grant extra known spells like learning 2 spells per level instead of one, and have no other class features.

Fralex

2014-05-29, 11:51 AM

20 is definitely very high for end game. In my experience It takes way to long to get there and theres too much power bloat making it not worth it for the DM. Chances are we'll see a similar status in 5e based off the playtest documents and some crazy builds within the first month of the game's release. 15 seems like a solid end point heck even 10 was considered high level back in 3e if I'm remembering correctly

Well, it's like a toaster. There's always going to be a setting that burns whatever you put into it, even though very few people want something that black. But it's there so you get the biggest possible range of options between "light" and "dark." 20 levels doesn't mean you're expected to make use of all 20. It just means that whether you want a short campaign where everyone's not all that powerful and ends up a little more powerful, a short campaign where everyone starts out already pretty strong and gets superhuman abilities by the end, or even a super-long campaign where you start as a humble adventurer and eventually become a god, that playstyle will get supported by the rules. When there's a bigger range than strictly necessary, it guarantees most people will find something they want.

Felhammer

2014-05-29, 12:09 PM

Well, it's like a toaster.

I really like this analogy.

SpawnOfMorbo

2014-05-29, 12:23 PM

If they really want to get the traditionalist crowd they'd make a whole new subclass that grants extra spell slots in exchange for having to tie specific prepared spells to specific slots like 3E did. Then maybe grant extra known spells like learning 2 spells per level instead of one, and have no other class features.

But giving spell casters no class features outside of spells is what people call dead levels!

And we can't have that!

(My blue isn't working for whatever reason)

DrBurr

2014-05-29, 03:48 PM

I really like this analogy.

It is a really good analogy, my only concern is if they make it possible for me to retrieve my blackened toast without using an imaginary fork, because at some point one of my player's is going to say lets do a campaign from level 1 to 20 and I'd like not to have to make things up to maintain balance once they cross level 15.

Felhammer

2014-05-29, 04:30 PM

It is a really good analogy, my only concern is if they make it possible for me to retrieve my blackened toast without using an imaginary fork, because at some point one of my player's is going to say lets do a campaign from level 1 to 20 and I'd like not to have to make things up to maintain balance once they cross level 15.

You could just be subtle about it and resolve all the major plots by level 15. By the time they get to 15 (year or two's worth of adventure more than compensates for the PC's being so "efficient"). :smallwink:

captpike

2014-05-29, 06:07 PM

It is a really good analogy, my only concern is if they make it possible for me to retrieve my blackened toast without using an imaginary fork, because at some point one of my player's is going to say lets do a campaign from level 1 to 20 and I'd like not to have to make things up to maintain balance once they cross level 15.

were the game made well, that would not be an issue.

Felhammer

2014-05-30, 12:10 AM

were the game made well, that would not be an issue.

Not entirely true.

D&D has long assumed that by the time you reach mid/high teens (and beyond) you are a force that has few equals in the world. That is a fundamentally different playstyle than protecting a farmstead from wolves and goblins. Many will like one style but not the other.

The designers make a conscious decision to allow for both kinds of styles to exist in the same system. That is both good and bad but it is not a sign of a poorly designed game.

captpike

2014-05-30, 12:28 AM

Not entirely true.

D&D has long assumed that by the time you reach mid/high teens (and beyond) you are a force that has few equals in the world. That is a fundamentally different playstyle than protecting a farmstead from wolves and goblins. Many will like one style but not the other.

The designers make a conscious decision to allow for both kinds of styles to exist in the same system. That is both good and bad but it is not a sign of a poorly designed game.

I cant agree more with the bolded, that is half the reason to have levels after all. so you CAN have your cake and eat it too. you can save your villages at low levels, and kill gods at high levels.

however that should never mean the math stops working, or that the system should break down. it means the kinds of things PCs do change, but the game should still keep on working at max level as much as at level 1.

Felhammer

2014-05-30, 02:00 AM

I cant agree more with the bolded, that is half the reason to have levels after all. so you CAN have your cake and eat it too. you can save your villages at low levels, and kill gods at high levels.

however that should never mean the math stops working, or that the system should break down. it means the kinds of things PCs do change, but the game should still keep on working at max level as much as at level 1.

The reason to have levels is to showcase growth. That does not imply that the scale should go from dirt farm protector to god slayer.

Like I was saying, some people dig the god slaying, while others adore the dirt farming protector. The fact that you can go from one extreme to the other is the reason the game has so many problems at higher levels. You are fundimehtally playing a different kind of game, one that does not exist well in the rules structure built by a game designed for goblin killing. The immense power of god slaying characters is simply above and beyond the scope of the game.

What WotC really should do is ratchet the scale back so that we go from dirt farm protectors to the King's best men, then create an optional add on that fundimehtally alters the game so as to make god slayer mode sane and mechanically balanced.

T.G. Oskar

2014-05-30, 03:36 AM

New article (http://www.wizards.com/DnD/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4ll/20140529), and this one addresses the OGL...well, sorta.

All that Mearls has said about the OGL is "we'll tell in fall 2014/early 2015", pretty much. A whole lot of words to say nothing, which is the critique I've seen from some people regarding how he addresses some of 5e/Next's changes.

Well...he did mention something along the lines of "we could say something when the DMG comes out, but we want people to see the rules before doing something else"; that said, there's mention of "[ensuring] that the quality of anything D&D fans create is as high as possible", so...

Methinks the rules for making stuff will be released from the DMG to whatever the OGL happens to be (another SRD?) as a companion supplement to Basic D&D, and...that'll be it. I think they'll reserve the "optional" stuff to whatever they wish to release in terms of adventures, which probably includes the feats and "Advanced D&D" classes.

Some mention of what can be done with Basic D&D in terms of fan-made content would be nice, though, since no matter what, people WILL make fan content with as little as possible (I mean, there's already homebrewed content with the playtest rules!!) At least acknowledging "we're not gonna pursue legal action if you do; waste of time and money and all that, unless you publish it" would be enough.

As for 20 levels: I think one of the many "Legends & Lore" bits were how to define the "tiers" of play, just as how 4e went with "Heroic", "Paragon" and "Epic". One of the things mentioned was that, even implicitly, people separated 20 levels into tiers of play. Chances are there will be an E6 (or whatever the tier boundary ends up being) released soon enough, so I concur with Fralex; aside from being tradition by now (before 3e/3.5 there were no 20 levels per se, but there WAS a level limit; 3e/3.5/PF just settled that to 20, and 4e/Essentials settled it to 30, whereas BECMI settled it to 36), it helps to allow people to gauge the "tiers" of play to cater to all styles of play (from Mundane to Heroic to Wuxia/Paragon to Superheroic to Epic to Apotheosic, at least how I visualize it). I say "don't try to fix what's not broken" with it; if most adventures finish at 12th level because of tedium, then gauge the end of your adventures around that level (offer retirement, for example), but don't insist that the game HAS to end up at 12th level just because of that. After all, some people like their toast mildly browned and others prefer it to be totally carbonized.

Morty

2014-05-30, 07:42 AM

D&D has long assumed that by the time you reach mid/high teens (and beyond) you are a force that has few equals in the world.

Sometimes it has, sometimes it hasn't. It's never been consistent. One of the good decisions behind 4e was that it was a lot more specific about what it means to be this level or that.

1337 b4k4

2014-05-30, 07:53 AM

Sometimes it has, sometimes it hasn't. It's never been consistent. One of the good decisions behind 4e was that it was a lot more specific about what it means to be this level or that.

Yeah, the explicit level tiers in 4e was definitely a good idea. Unfortunately, like a lot of 4e's really good ideas, the execution was a bit lacking. I would have preferred to see much more of a "shift" between tiers. Part of it I think is that as Felhammer was saying, when you reach that level of power, you really are (or should be) playing a different game. What works for challenges and game play as a farmer's child protecting their family is not the same as what works for a plane traveling demigod. I mean it can work from a purely "is it possible" standpoint, obviously 4e did that much, but when you take a step back from the details it's really just the same stuff you were doing 10 levels ago, just with all the numbers inflated.

Morty

2014-05-30, 10:15 AM

It's true that 4e suffers from the problem of high-level material being roughly the same as the low-level material, only with bigger numbers, perhaps even more so than other D&D editions. I don't think the D&D Next designers are interested in addressing this problem, though, at least not from what I remember.

1337 b4k4

2014-05-30, 10:39 AM

I agree, I don't think 5e will address the issue either. Part of the problem for WotC is it's entirely unclear as to what the "next phase" should actually be. BECMI addressed the issue with domain management and a mass combat system. ACKS I believe does something similar. The problem is, not everyone wants that. There are quite a few people who don't mind at all the fact that high level play is the same as low level play, just with bigger numbers.

Perhaps the best way to address this would be to scale down D&D. To retreat from the level inflation it has seen over the years and split it into 2 or 3 different games. Basically, go back to the B/X days and make the core dungeon crawling game span 10 levels. Then, make a new relatively unattached game that imports your character from the first 10 levels as a leader/general/domain manager for another 10 level game. In this game, your old individual skills / class features don't matter as much and you get a whole new set related to the new aspects of the core game. There should be a sort of "if you had these things in the first 10 levels you get this bonus, if you had those things you get that bonus", but it should take a back seat to the new class/skill features of the new tier. From there they should bring back the concept of a separate "imortals" game and add the final 10 levels with again, completely new skills and class features. Each tier should play and feel completely different, as if they were almost different games, but tied together by importing features of your old progress into your new character. Finally, as part of their ongoing support of the game, each tier should get additional modules after the fact that stretch the numbers bigger (or smaller as the case may be) so that more play can be obtained for a given favorite tier, and to account for people that don't want to play in one tier but would happily play in another and to accommodate those that just want bigger numbers.

Of course, that's frankly an even larger change to D&D than even 4e was and a huge risk if it's done poorly. It's also a commitment to essentially designing and supporting 3 different games. Ideally, they'd have to do it the way BECMI did it. One tier at a time over time. I'm not sure in this modern culture where everyone expects the whole game right now (just look at the reaction to the stepped release of 5e) that the customer base would give the support required to do this slowly and correctly. In a large sense, D&D is a victim of it's own success here.

Cayzle

2014-05-30, 11:09 AM

New article (http://www.wizards.com/DnD/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4ll/20140529), and this one addresses the OGL...well, sorta.

... there's mention of "[ensuring] that the quality of anything D&D fans create is as high as possible", so ...

That's the key quote, and it is actually an ominous one.

1) First of all, the tone of the entire blog post makes it sound like it was filtered through a layer of lawyers to me.

2) The post about OGL talks ONLY about fan-made content, nothing about third-party content. That's because there will be NO third party content and NO OGL, if I may be allowed a prediction.

3) Mearls says that Hasbro wants to "ensure" that the content made by fans (not by publishers, but by fans!) will be high quality. How will the corporation ensure that our home-brew rules are high quality?

Maybe D&D will include design guidelines and rules-creation advice; that would be great! Maybe Hasbro will offer a registration/subscription service where you can post your creations, and even get feedback; that might be okay ... Maybe Hasbro will claim ownership over anything you post in their walled garden, and if it is any good, sell it, giving you a thanks on the last page; that would be bad. Maybe Hasbro will go after anyone publishing/posting homebrew rules on the Web outside their garden, like back in the bad old T$R days; that would be worst!

As someone who lived through those bad old days and feared those takedown notices from T$R, I can tell you that it is not an impossible scenario.

For more on this topic, plus many links and background on the issue, check out a blog post I put up today on the announcement (http://www.cayzle.com/screeds/click058.html).

Morty

2014-05-30, 01:21 PM

captpike

2014-05-30, 02:08 PM

The reason to have levels is to showcase growth. That does not imply that the scale should go from dirt farm protector to god slayer.

Like I was saying, some people dig the god slaying, while others adore the dirt farming protector. The fact that you can go from one extreme to the other is the reason the game has so many problems at higher levels. You are fundimehtally playing a different kind of game, one that does not exist well in the rules structure built by a game designed for goblin killing. The immense power of god slaying characters is simply above and beyond the scope of the game.

What WotC really should do is ratchet the scale back so that we go from dirt farm protectors to the King's best men, then create an optional add on that fundimehtally alters the game so as to make god slayer mode sane and mechanically balanced.

or just use the level system so if you want to go no further then kingdom's hero you don't go past a certain level.

it is hard to make yes, but there is no reason you cant use the same basic rules for all the levels, or that you need to chop off half the game to get the other half to work

Yeah, the explicit level tiers in 4e was definitely a good idea. Unfortunately, like a lot of 4e's really good ideas, the execution was a bit lacking. I would have preferred to see much more of a "shift" between tiers. Part of it I think is that as Felhammer was saying, when you reach that level of power, you really are (or should be) playing a different game. What works for challenges and game play as a farmer's child protecting their family is not the same as what works for a plane traveling demigod. I mean it can work from a purely "is it possible" standpoint, obviously 4e did that much, but when you take a step back from the details it's really just the same stuff you were doing 10 levels ago, just with all the numbers inflated.

that is why you don't fight the same creatures or do the same things at different levels, you don't fight a beholder at level 1, nor anything significantly less powerful then a god at max level.

you goals as well should change. a level 4 character who saves a town is doing good for himself. by max level he should be saving whole planes.

SpawnOfMorbo

2014-05-30, 02:29 PM

or just use the level system so if you want to go no further then kingdom's hero you don't go past a certain level.

it is hard to make yes, but there is no reason you cant use the same basic rules for all the levels, or that you need to chop off half the game to get the other half to work

that is why you don't fight the same creatures or do the same things at different levels, you don't fight a beholder at level 1, nor anything significantly less powerful then a god at max level.

you goals as well should change. a level 4 character who saves a town is doing good for himself. by max level he should be saving whole planes.

Who says you can't or shouldn't fight beholders at lvl 1? Heck I had level 3 one shot save the elemental plane of fire from its demise.

Low level doesn't mean squat about what is at stakes. That is up to the story/DM.

Hell gandolf was what? Level 5 bard in the movies if you think on terms of DND 3.5.

Edit: A bard that over compensated for not being a wizard and got a free template/prestige class for sacrificing himself for his friends... Ha, like Risen Martyr :p

captpike

2014-05-30, 03:01 PM

Who says you can't or shouldn't fight beholders at lvl 1? Heck I had level 3 one shot save the elemental plane of fire from its demise.

Low level doesn't mean squat about what is at stakes. That is up to the story/DM.

Hell gandolf was what? Level 5 bard in the movies if you think on terms of DND 3.5.

Edit: A bard that over compensated for not being a wizard and got a free template/prestige class for sacrificing himself for his friends... Ha, like Risen Martyr :p

the game works best with the default assumption that as you level you gain power, as you gain power the badassness of your enemies goes up, and the scope of what you do goes up. without that assumption in place the entire level system serves no function.

its not hard to change that if you want but it makes things easier if that assumption is in place. it makes it easy to pick a scope to play in and then to be able to play in a level range that was made for it.

SpawnOfMorbo

2014-05-30, 03:25 PM

the game works best with the default assumption that as you level you gain power, as you gain power the badassness of your enemies goes up, and the scope of what you do goes up. without that assumption in place the entire level system serves no function.

its not hard to change that if you want but it makes things easier if that assumption is in place. it makes it easy to pick a scope to play in and then to be able to play in a level range that was made for it.

All of that is relative and is a personal preference. There is absolutely nothing in the rules that keeps a party of first level adventurers from saving the material plane, abyssal plane, or even an elemental plane...

Sure the game designers made assumptions but that doesn't mean you have to play by them. Staying with sacred cows for the sake of sacred cows is pretty annoying.

Now games like 3.5/PF whose monsters work with similar rule creation as PCs it is difficult to change their levels and such. But that doesn't mean you aren't allowed to adjust things.

Games like 4e where monsters are their own system it is extremely easy to change up the levels to challenge PCs of any level.

I would love to see a rule that says "you can't save anything other than villages at low levels and beat up on goblins", tabletop RPGs just can't enforce that rule, that is more of a videogame concept since you can't really determine what you can do in a videogame except for what the programming allows (unless you hack the system).

I ran a one shot 4e game where level 1 players fought and killed a Lich (and minion lichs) and they took to the game just fine. They saved their world during their first battle.

captpike

2014-05-30, 03:38 PM

Bezhukov

2014-05-30, 04:02 PM

All of that is relative and is a personal preference. There is absolutely nothing in the rules that keeps a party of first level adventurers from saving the material plane, abyssal plane, or even an elemental plane...

Sure the game designers made assumptions but that doesn't mean you have to play by them. Staying with sacred cows for the sake of sacred cows is pretty annoying.

Now games like 3.5/PF whose monsters work with similar rule creation as PCs it is difficult to change their levels and such. But that doesn't mean you aren't allowed to adjust things.

Games like 4e where monsters are their own system it is extremely easy to change up the levels to challenge PCs of any level.

I would love to see a rule that says "you can't save anything other than villages at low levels and beat up on goblins", tabletop RPGs just can't enforce that rule, that is more of a videogame concept since you can't really determine what you can do in a videogame except for what the programming allows (unless you hack the system).

I ran a one shot 4e game where level 1 players fought and killed a Lich (and minion lichs) and they took to the game just fine. They saved their world during their first battle.

I agree that the assumptions can and should be changed depending on the table. Thad said, if you save the world in your first adventure, what is there to advance to? It's the Dragonball problem. If every threat is the most deadly ever, what's the point of any of it?

SpawnOfMorbo

2014-05-30, 04:03 PM

I did not say its a rule, I said it was an assumption, and the game works best when its in place.

I have no problem with changing it. but it would screw things up if you made the game without that assumption.

And I'm saying that no it doesn't screw up anything and have actually played the game both ways and the game didn't magically break.

You seem to think that if you go against that assumption then magically D&D/PF breaks down. Does the game break down if you are level 20 and you are fighting to save a village against a horde of level 20 goblins? Not one bit.

You may be more comfortable playing a certain fantasy trope but please don't start saying that if you go against your preferred method then the game gets screwed up when you haven't given any proof. I can post monsters I've modified recently for 4e if you want.

Please show me math or some sort of way that a game gets screwed up. Do wizards stop being able to cast spells? Do Fighters stop being able to fight?

I've ran multiple games where I went against this golden cow and I promise you that the DMG/PDF didn't catch fire (pick an edition: 2e, 3.P, 4e, or Next Playtest... I've done it with all of them)

Edit: There are always more problems... Be it on the material plane or not. Saving the world at level 1 level 11 or level 20 doesn't change anything. I was in a year long 3.5 level 20 game and we took on a crap ton of challenges.

captpike

2014-05-30, 04:19 PM

archaeo

2014-05-30, 04:26 PM

I agree that the assumptions can and should be changed depending on the table. Thad said, if you save the world in your first adventure, what is there to advance to? It's the Dragonball problem. If every threat is the most deadly ever, what's the point of any of it?

Truly, so much of the debate over the number of levels in the game and all the rest come down to how the DM crafts the story. Appropriately, OotS provides a great example of keeping a game's story alive despite the increased capabilities of the characters. Unfortunately, we are not all as capable as Mr. Burlew at crafting a good story (and I'd still argue that the Giant is an underrated master of the fantasy genre), and it's all too easy to create Buffy/X-files-style monster-of-the-week/arc story segments.

SpawnOfMorbo

2014-05-30, 05:58 PM

please read what I wrote
I said it is not and should not be a rule. nor did I say it would break the game if you went against it.

I said if you make the game without it things get messed up. you no longer have any reference for the level system. how do you know the kinds of things a level 20 PC should be able to do? or a level 1? this assumption underlies the whole concept of a level system.

its useful when making the game to know the power level the PCs should be at a given level.

I replied to a specific thing you said.

or just use the level system so if you want to go no further then kingdom's hero you don't go past a certain level.

it is hard to make yes, but there is no reason you cant use the same basic rules for all the levels, or that you need to chop off half the game to get the other half to work

that is why you don't fight the same creatures or do the same things at different levels, you don't fight a beholder at level 1, nor anything significantly less powerful then a god at max level.

you goals as well should change. a level 4 character who saves a town is doing good for himself. by max level he should be saving whole planes.

the game works best with the default assumption that as you level you gain power, as you gain power the badassness of your enemies goes up, and the scope of what you do goes up. without that assumption in place the entire level system serves no function.

its not hard to change that if you want but it makes things easier if that assumption is in place. it makes it easy to pick a scope to play in and then to be able to play in a level range that was made for it.

I did not say its a rule, I said it was an assumption, and the game works best when its in place.

I have no problem with changing it. but it would screw things up if you made the game without that assumption.

I'm sorry I apparently misread. Your point must have went over my head.

The assumption you are using doesn't need to be followed and your assertion that the game will be screwed up if you don't follow it is nothing more than ludicrous.

Give me proof that the game screws up if you don't use their assumption. Without proof the only thing I can take from your assertion is that the game magically breaks down if you don't follow their assumption.

I have played countless games against that assumption and the game didn't screw up. Apparently I don't know what I'm doing or perhaps I'm good enough to beat the assumption?

(I assure you, I'm not a great DM or player, more like average at best)

captpike

2014-05-30, 10:04 PM

SpawnOfMorbo

2014-06-03, 02:53 PM

how about this, how powerful should a level 1 spell be? should it be able to move mountains or just be a minor irritation?

what abilities should a level 5 character have? how about a level 20?

knowing that "a level 10 character is a national hero, he is roughly as powerful as a small army" gives you a framework to go from. it gives you an idea of what kind of things to give the class.

its more for the people making to game then anyone else. yes it can be easily changed. just change the level of what your facing, or the name of high level creatures. as you said its not hard to make level 20 goblins.

it also lets the feeling of the game change as you level. your not just fighting different things as you level, you fight them in a different way. my Lv30 swordmage|warlock's playstlyle is different from what it was at Lv10. even if the scope did not change the character would be different.

You are thinking weirdly. You don't have to be able to fight an army to save a nation or the world. Level is not an in game world idea, it is a game term to help us gauge what the PC can mechanically do in relation to other levels. It doesn't say you can't fight a Lich at level 1, just that you can't (or shouldn't) fight a level 16 monster. So if you have a level 1 monster then things are fine. (Yeah groups have a range of levels they can fight, I'm keeping this simple)

The feeling of the game has nothing to do with what you are fighting or what level you are but how the DM sculpts the situation in which the PCs are in.

With your thought if you based the lord of the rings as a 3.5 party/campaign they should have never been able to save their world. If you put them in 3.5 (or 4e or Next) with your thought process they never would have been able to get the feelings that they had cause they would need to wait and level up to 20... Unless you are saying each person there was a level 20 class in 3.5 and that a level 20 commoner can go save the world but a level 1 Fighter can not?

Maybe in YOUR campaign you think PCs can't save the world at level 1 but that doesn't mean squat in anyone else's game. There is also nothing within the game that says otherwise. You still haven't proven with math that the game breaks down.

You are also confusing power with level. Level does not equal power. I can build a level 10 wizard that can destroy a level 20 Fighter, Rogue, or whatever. You can have PCs on the same level and yet different power. A Fighter 5 and Wizard 5 is on the same level but the Wizard has more power within the world due to their utility. You can change your power all you want to be however you want... However within the confines of each edition level X will always equal level X even if they are different class or power levels.

captpike

2014-06-03, 03:18 PM

SpawnOfMorbo

2014-06-03, 03:28 PM

the point of level is show roughy how powerful something is, if your level 10 wizard is more powerful then my level 20 fighter then the system needs to be fixed.

yes you can do what lord of the rings did and give low level characters a way to win without fighting, they only had power because the DM game them a way to win without using any class abilities or powers.

Relative to level NOT to plot. You keep mixing level to plot/story. Level does not dictate what you can or can't do within a plot but what you can do within your class. You are mixing things up.

Also, where is that proof? I want mathmatical proof of your opinion that the game breaks down when you say it does. I'm still waiting. Please show me that saving the world at level 1 breaks the game.

captpike

2014-06-03, 03:36 PM

Relative to level NOT to plot. You keep mixing level to plot/story. Level does not dictate what you can or can't do within a plot but what you can do within your class. You are mixing things up.

Also, where is that proof? I want mathmatical proof of your opinion that the game breaks down when you say it does. I'm still waiting. Please show me that saving the world at level 1 breaks the game.

that is not what I said.

yes you can save the world at level 1 but it needs the DM to be very heavy handed with stuff to help you do it (ala the one ring)

the idea of level is for a default assumption that is more for making the game then anything else. DEFAULT that means you can change it. if you make a game without if you would have no reference for how powerful a level 20 character should be in relation to the world.

you MIGHT not need such a reference if every skill and ability you have is only good for small scale combat. no long range teleports, no stone-mud ect.

SpawnOfMorbo

2014-06-03, 03:52 PM

that is not what I said.

yes you can save the world at level 1 but it needs the DM to be very heavy handed with stuff to help you do it (ala the one ring)

the idea of level is for a default assumption that is more for making the game then anything else. DEFAULT that means you can change it. if you make a game without if you would have no reference for how powerful a level 20 character should be in relation to the world.

you MIGHT not need such a reference if every skill and ability you have is only good for small scale combat. no long range teleports, no stone-mud ect.

Monster =/= Level, Plot =/= Level, and Level = Level. Power is relative based on each class, monster, level, and any other options. Please stop mixing up plot and level.

Please read the reply from me the last time you told me to read what you said.

It may break or screw up YOUR plot but it does not break or screw up the game or MY plot. Keep your fingers out of my cookie dough.

I'm done with this until you can either read what you said (and what i already replied to) and you can give me proof that the game gets screwed up (like you said it does).

captpike

2014-06-03, 06:36 PM

my plot is that a dark lord is going to use an army to kill everyone. he personally killed some of the most powerful paladins and wizards in the world.

my PCs have to stop him, however they are level 1. they then die because they are out of their league.

you CAN make up for it by Mcguffins, or giving the PCs allies who do the real work. but by default the PCs would just die.

level has to have some relation to something else for it have any meaning (if all being level 5 means is that your more powerful then a level 4, but not as powerful as a level 6 then it provides no information at all). if I have a group of 5 Lv5 PCs I need to be able to take that information and be able to make encounters for them, have some idea of what kind of plots work best (including when I need to add Mcguffins and I can just let them bulldoze it)

SpawnOfMorbo

2014-06-04, 10:04 AM

captpike

2014-06-04, 01:10 PM

Still don't see that mathematical proof the game breaks down or gets screwed up.

Please post proof.

in order for a dark lord to kill the best fighters and wizards of the land he must be very light level, at least (using 4e parlance) 10.

if level 1s fight a level 10 they die.

where he low enough they could win, he would in fact NOT be a threat to the world, any more then a random peasant who picks up a sword is not a threat to the world.

SpawnOfMorbo

2014-06-04, 02:44 PM

in order for a dark lord to kill the best fighters and wizards of the land he must be very light level, at least (using 4e parlance) 10.

if level 1s fight a level 10 they die.

where he low enough they could win, he would in fact NOT be a threat to the world, any more then a random peasant who picks up a sword is not a threat to the world.

The best fighters and wizards of the land that he killed? Level 2.

You still are saying that it hurts your PLOT not breaking the math in the game or breaking the system.

Try again.

Edit: I now feel like i need to explain to tou how you are missing the point. I'm not arguing with you, you just aren't getting what I'm saying.

You are mixing up level with plot. Just because someone is level 2 doesn't mean you can't be the greatest fighter in the world. If you level a level 20 creature down to level 2, it doesn't effect the system numbers and doesn't break down the game.

Level =/= Plot

If you need to explain why a level 1 group defeated the best fighter in the world (so that it helps your plot) you can say he was holding back or perhaps he underestimated the group working as a team. Within d&d there is always that 5% chance of failure after all. While holding back or underestimating the group that Level 20 is fighting at a level 2 Fighter level? Though all of these are Plot reasoning, actually making that level 20 enemy a level 2 enemy won't screw up the game.

You seem to also think that fluff has a mechanical effect on the game. Fluff =/= mechanics, but fluff can help shape the mechanics as in if you make a paladin there is a fluff that helps you mold mechanics.

But just because you can't make it work with your plot (because of your limited view on the matter) doesn't mean it breaks the system down.

(Damnit I got sucked back in... *sigh*)

captpike

2014-06-04, 03:49 PM

The best fighters and wizards of the land that he killed? Level 2.

You still are saying that it hurts your PLOT not breaking the math in the game or breaking the system.

Try again.

Edit: I now feel like i need to explain to tou how you are missing the point. I'm not arguing with you, you just aren't getting what I'm saying.

You are mixing up level with plot. Just because someone is level 2 doesn't mean you can't be the greatest fighter in the world. If you level a level 20 creature down to level 2, it doesn't effect the system numbers and doesn't break down the game.

Level =/= Plot

If you need to explain why a level 1 group defeated the best fighter in the world (so that it helps your plot) you can say he was holding back or perhaps he underestimated the group working as a team. Within d&d there is always that 5% chance of failure after all. While holding back or underestimating the group that Level 20 is fighting at a level 2 Fighter level? Though all of these are Plot reasoning, actually making that level 20 enemy a level 2 enemy won't screw up the game.

You seem to also think that fluff has a mechanical effect on the game. Fluff =/= mechanics, but fluff can help shape the mechanics as in if you make a paladin there is a fluff that helps you mold mechanics.

But just because you can't make it work with your plot (because of your limited view on the matter) doesn't mean it breaks the system down.

(Damnit I got sucked back in... *sigh*)

what happens when the PCs turn level 5 and are several times more powerful then the most powerful person in the world? or level 10 and if everyone in the world ganged up on you, it would be so easy as to not even require dice?

my point, again, is that as a default assumption level=power needs to exist. you CAN and in some cases SHOULD change what it means. but if you don't have it you run into issues like the above.

it needs to be simple and easy for me to to feel my power increasing as I level, not just relative to what I was but to the world. things that were hard to do at 1 need to be become easy. creatures that were unbeatable at level 1 become easy to beat at level 5, and not worth getting the dice out at lv10

you can change it, but if that assumption is not there then level 20 will feel like lv1, you cant do more things, you cant fight more powerful creatures ect.

in you make it with that assumption then you can easily flatten it back. if you make the levels flat and without meaning then you cant give them meaning easily. so again there is NO reason not to make the game where everyone gets what they want.

Felhammer

2014-06-05, 01:24 AM

what happens when the PCs turn level 5 and are several times more powerful then the most powerful person in the world? or level 10 and if everyone in the world ganged up on you, it would be so easy as to not even require dice?

my point, again, is that as a default assumption level=power needs to exist. you CAN and in some cases SHOULD change what it means. but if you don't have it you run into issues like the above.

it needs to be simple and easy for me to to feel my power increasing as I level, not just relative to what I was but to the world. things that were hard to do at 1 need to be become easy. creatures that were unbeatable at level 1 become easy to beat at level 5, and not worth getting the dice out at lv10

you can change it, but if that assumption is not there then level 20 will feel like lv1, you cant do more things, you cant fight more powerful creatures ect.

in you make it with that assumption then you can easily flatten it back. if you make the levels flat and without meaning then you cant give them meaning easily. so again there is NO reason not to make the game where everyone gets what they want.

The issue is not level=power it is the gradated scale by which you mete out power increases. The difference between the starting point and the end point determines what that scale is. Should that wolf you fought at level one still be a challenge at level 10? In the real world it would be. In games that do not escalte the power scale dramatically, that wolf should still be a challenge. However, if the end point is near-godhood, there is no way that wolf would still be a challenge any where close to even the half way mark.

The issue of whether a level 1 character could or should save the world has far more to do with the genre of fantasy the campaign is using. If you are playing in Sword & Sorcery campaign, then even high level characters should not be dealing with world-threatening foes. Conversely, if you are playing in an Epic Fantasy campaign, then it is only right and proper that mundane people are chosen by gods/destiny to change the world, so even a relatively low level character would be dealing with world-threatening enemies.

The problem with D&D is that it has always tried to remain, more or less, neutral in terms of genre while at the same time making an awful lot of assumptions when designing the rules. Those assumptions change with editions but regardless, the game does (nay has to) make such assumptions to be marketable. It is thus dependent on the DM to alter those assumptions, and even the rules, to better suit his campaign. With that in mind, it is always better to err on the side of less/weaker than on the side of more/stronger simply due to the fact that it is always easier to add than it is to subtract (especially from an individual player's perspective (no one wants to be told the Gandalf's Super Heat-Seeking Fireball is not available for use, even though it is in the core rulebook)).

This dovetails back into the concept of tiers of play and how they could be used as a way to differentiate between playstyles while still maintaining a cohesive ruleset (i.e. as you go up in tiers more rules are added to enhance the experience for the assumed types of adventures that take place in such a tier). However, I am sure the designers (and the masses) are leery of such an idea because it is new and different. If nostalgia is the name of the game, then such a concept would not work in core (although as an optional add on... Perhaps).

SpawnOfMorbo

2014-06-05, 07:23 AM

What you are missing out is that level doesn't equal power, do you know what does? Power equals power. (Wait... Where did I hear this before?? Lol)

Level = Power only works within each class or monster or whatever item you are comparing to itself. When you start to compare 1 creature to another that level = Power idea breaks down.

Because it is relative and doesn't always equal true.

Level 20 Fighter doesn't really have power when you compare them to a level 13 Wizard.

The Fighter is more powerful than the level 20 commoner or a level 10 Warmage but that level 13 wizard will wreck the level 20 Fighter.

So you can't say that Level = Power is a grand universal rule that is at work. They tried to do that and yet failed. Now a level 20 X class will have more power than a level 10 x class but that is where it stops. Even in 4e, the most balanced of D&D, some classes and builds are more powerful than those of a higher level from another class build.

A wolf can be dangerous at level 10 or it could be a side thought. You can keep the wolf at low levels or you could level him up. If your plot says "wolves aren't a problem at level 10" then that works, but having "there are stronger wolves out there that can be a problem at level 10" then that works too because it is a PLOT issue not a math/game breakage issue. Having a party of level 10 PCs go up against a pack of wolves, and be challenged, doesn't break the game... Though it may break your plot or idea of the world it may not break someone else's.

You still seem confused about screwing up YOUR SPECIFIC IDEA of plot and screwing up the game.

Edit: Huh, my quote button sent me to the reply screen but didn't quote cptpike weird...

captpike

2014-06-05, 12:19 PM

1337 b4k4

2014-06-05, 01:50 PM

in a good system yes level=power. this is not true of PF or 3e because they borked up the system.

when a level 20 X=Level 10 Y then level has no meaning, it might as a well be a random number.

if you can't use level as a rough gauge of power, of items, creatures, and PCs then it serves no function at all.
the reason to have it is so you CAN compare disparate things and have it make sense. so you can look at two items and know what they should cost, what creatures are fit for a fight with the PCs (or how to adjust them if they are not fit by default)

if not power then what is level suppose to mean? what information do I have when I tell my DM "I am level 5 now" that he did not have before?

To be completely fair, level doesn't have to = power. For example, in pre-3.x days, XP was a better measure of power than level because of the non unified progression system. And of course, level does not need to = power between different things. For example, a level 10 monster is not equal in power to a level 10 PC. There's no reason (other than convenience) why you couldn't design a system where a level 10 fighter was not comparable in power to a level 10 thief. Level tells you exactly what it is meant to tell you. If the game is designed such that different levels of different classes are not comparable, that doesn't inherently make the game bad unless the game tells you that the level between classes should be comparable.

Psyren

2014-06-05, 02:30 PM

The point is not Level 20 PC Class X should = Level 20 PC Class Y. The point is that Level 20 PC Class X and Level 20 PC Class Y, in conjunction with Level 20 WBL, should be able to handle a CR 20 challenge.

A Fighter 20 with WBL 20 can kill a Balor, working as intended.

obryn

2014-06-05, 02:43 PM

To be completely fair, level doesn't have to = power. For example, in pre-3.x days, XP was a better measure of power than level because of the non unified progression system. And of course, level does not need to = power between different things. For example, a level 10 monster is not equal in power to a level 10 PC. There's no reason (other than convenience) why you couldn't design a system where a level 10 fighter was not comparable in power to a level 10 thief. Level tells you exactly what it is meant to tell you. If the game is designed such that different levels of different classes are not comparable, that doesn't inherently make the game bad unless the game tells you that the level between classes should be comparable.
I think AD&D actually does the opposite of what you're implying - because the key wasn't how many XP you had, the key was how many levels, say, 10,000 XP got you. Level's still the benchmark, not XP.

(This is not to say that I think AD&D did a great job of balancing stuff, mind you, and most of the balancing was done outside the class/level system.)

The point is not Level 20 PC Class X should = Level 20 PC Class Y. The point is that Level 20 PC Class X and Level 20 PC Class Y, in conjunction with Level 20 WBL, should be able to handle a CR 20 challenge.

A Fighter 20 with WBL 20 can kill a Balor, working as intended.
Shouldn't the one imply the other? I don't think these things are different.

Psyren

2014-06-05, 03:20 PM

Shouldn't the one imply the other? I don't think these things are different.

But they are. A Wizard can handle a Balor much earlier than 20, even if only just to send him back home for 24 hours. But he most definitely can handle it (permanently) by the time he reaches 20.

Level 20 is a minimum rating, not a maximum. "You should be able to handle at least this challenge." The fact that other classes at the same level can handle it more easily or in more ways does not diminish your ability to handle it.

obryn

2014-06-05, 03:53 PM

But they are. A Wizard can handle a Balor much earlier than 20, even if only just to send him back home for 24 hours. But he most definitely can handle it (permanently) by the time he reaches 20.

Level 20 is a minimum rating, not a maximum. "You should be able to handle at least this challenge." The fact that other classes at the same level can handle it more easily or in more ways does not diminish your ability to handle it.
Yeah, and that's a problem. It's illustrating captpike's point, and exactly what makes level rather meaningless as a measure of ability in 3.x. If you can't do the calculation both ways - "CR 20 is a suitable challenge for Level X characters" and "A level X character will find CR 20 challenging" - it's of marginal utility at best.

In your example, you might as well be honest and say a character with the capabilities of a 13th level Wizard is, in effect, 20th level, rather than insisting on calling them 13th level.

So... why not tweak the power levels and make it so a Wizard can handle a CR20 challenge at right around the same level a Fighter can?

-O

Psyren

2014-06-05, 05:00 PM

captpike

2014-06-05, 06:08 PM

Because I don't think it has to be "challenging." That is too difficult a term to define because it depends as much on player skill (not to mention DM skill) as the class design, monster design, item design or anything else.

I just think it should be doable, and that is exactly what level + WBL tell you - when something is doable. (Minus corner cases like That Damn Crab.)

you have to have some assumptions on skill, after all a wizard could have nothing but the worst spells memorized.

yes it can be hard to define "challenging", but its needed in order for the DM To be able to make encounters that function. it also again means that level has a meaning.

obryn

2014-06-05, 06:52 PM

Because I don't think it has to be "challenging." That is too difficult a term to define because it depends as much on player skill (not to mention DM skill) as the class design, monster design, item design or anything else.

I just think it should be doable, and that is exactly what level + WBL tell you - when something is doable. (Minus corner cases like That Damn Crab.)
Player skill and DM skill are normalized for this, and "doable" is a rather poor excuse for "let's just leave it the way it is without trying to make it better." :smallsmile:

Psyren

2014-06-05, 09:59 PM

you have to have some assumptions on skill, after all a wizard could have nothing but the worst spells memorized.

yes it can be hard to define "challenging", but its needed in order for the DM To be able to make encounters that function. it also again means that level has a meaning.

But it's easy to make an encounter more challenging by either adding numbers to the enemy side or countering favorite strategies of the players. The system does not have to be balanced down to the individual level. If you can spend the time designing your ass off to do that and still keep classes interesting, well, more power to you.

Player skill and DM skill are normalized for this, and "doable" is a rather poor excuse for "let's just leave it the way it is without trying to make it better." :smallsmile:

If the price of "making it better" is homogenization, is it truly better?

obryn

2014-06-05, 10:52 PM

captpike

2014-06-05, 10:58 PM

But it's easy to make an encounter more challenging by either adding numbers to the enemy side or countering favorite strategies of the players. The system does not have to be balanced down to the individual level. If you can spend the time designing your ass off to do that and still keep classes interesting, well, more power to you.

adding numbers can work sometimes yes. the first encounters I made for my current group were made that way so I can adjust on the fly (I had never made encounters before, nor had I played with them before).

but there are cases when you want/need to only have a certain number of creatures. for example what if the PCs are fighting the last boss in an arc, and there are good reason why he is by himself, say the PCs wet to alot of trouble to set things up that way.
Then I can't just add more creatures, I need to be able to make one creature that is exactly as challenging as I want him to be.

relying on changing strategies can work, but it also often will not. if I am running a team of crack assassins, who very much know what they are doing then I would run them as very intelligent. it would make no sense to have them suddenly turn stupid because they were doing too well. nor would it make sense for a team to dumbass's turn smart because they were doing badly.

there needs to be a way to make an encounter at a difficulty level the DM can predict or it will cause all kinds of problems. you will have rampant TPKs in fights that should not have been a threat, and fights that should have been hard will be so easy you hardly needed the full party for them.

If the price of "making it better" is homogenization, is it truly better?

that is not what he said, not even close.

when they are testing the system they have to make some assumptions on how optimized the average PC will be, how good at tactics, how good the DM will be ect.

then you add ways to adjust it from the default.
in 4e for example Level+2 or so is the default, but if the group is not very optimized you can always go to Level+0. if they are you go to Level+3 or level+4.

Psyren

2014-06-06, 12:40 AM

I'm advocating calling a spade a spade. What's the functional purpose of saying a Fighter and a wizard are both 13th level, when the wizard is capable of handling 20th level stuff, and the fighter struggles with 13th level stuff? It's lazy.

More to the point, why not change the wizard's power level so it matches that fighter more closely and they struggle to the same degree?

I think that if it were possible to do that and keep the classes interestingly varied from one another, it would have been done. 4e had it's shot, let's see if 5e manages it.

there needs to be a way to make an encounter at a difficulty level the DM can predict or it will cause all kinds of problems. you will have rampant TPKs in fights that should not have been a threat, and fights that should have been hard will be so easy you hardly needed the full party for them.

We agree on this. The problem is that sweet spot is definitely going to vary from group to group - refining the level system, to whatever extent one can, is not enough to pinpoint it.

captpike

2014-06-06, 12:53 AM

I think that if it were possible to do that and keep the classes interestingly varied from one another, it would have been done. 4e had it's shot, let's see if 5e manages it.

4e classes were much more varied then 3e ones. so many "classes" in 3e shared spell lists, had no real class features (just feats), and functioned the same way in practice that if 3e is your standard then they should try to make every class as identical as possible.

its not like more people bought 3e that they can afford to just ignore 4e and still make good money on 5e (yes I know that seams to be what they are doing, does not make it smart).

We agree on this. The problem is that sweet spot is definitely going to vary from group to group - refining the level system, to whatever extent one can, is not enough to pinpoint it.
no, but it has to be the first step. you need to have a good idea of what a party of Level X PC's is capable of, without knowing their classes or builds.
at least in general terms, if the people making the system can get it right then DMs have no hope.

obryn

2014-06-06, 08:41 AM

I think that if it were possible to do that and keep the classes interestingly varied from one another, it would have been done. 4e had it's shot, let's see if 5e manages it.
Not even talking about 4e here (which I think did a pretty good job, all things considered), are you saying that a group of solid Tier 3 classes in 3.x wouldn't fit the bill?

SpawnOfMorbo

2014-06-06, 12:04 PM

Not even talking about 4e here (which I think did a pretty good job, all things considered), are you saying that a group of solid Tier 3 classes in 3.x wouldn't fit the bill?

That is actually what 4e did that really bugs people. They brought all the high end stuff down to earth. It isn't that they made non-casters good, but they made casters work within the rules.

If 4e had the same set up but with tier 1 classes, yes even the fighter, then people wouldn't have cried so much. Spells that could wreck havoc and abilities that could keep up. I think 3.5 bred a power gaming mentality that 4e offended. If you power game in 4e you are still a mortal that can get spanked in 3.5 if you power game you are untouchable. Sure PC lethality went down in 4e but so did your overall power to effect the world.

It was like people were insulted that magic wasn't able to do everything anymore... Or at least not able to do everything easily.

Or whatever *shrugs*

I love 4e, but I can see where people have problems with it. ^ ^ and this tends to be one no one talks about.

captpike

2014-06-06, 12:20 PM

That is actually what 4e did that really bugs people. They brought all the high end stuff down to earth. It isn't that they made non-casters good, but they made casters work within the rules.

If 4e had the same set up but with tier 1 classes, yes even the fighter, then people wouldn't have cried so much. Spells that could wreck havoc and abilities that could keep up. I think 3.5 bred a power gaming mentality that 4e offended. If you power game in 4e you are still a mortal that can get spanked in 3.5 if you power game you are untouchable. Sure PC lethality went down in 4e but so did your overall power to effect the world.

It was like people were insulted that magic wasn't able to do everything anymore... Or at least not able to do everything easily.

Or whatever *shrugs*

I love 4e, but I can see where people have problems with it. ^ ^ and this tends to be one no one talks about.

the problem with doing it the other way is the kind of things you would have to give fighters and co to keep up.

seeing fighters easily lift two tons, or jump a mile might have pushed even some hard core 4e gamers idea of immersion.

look at the best wizard spells in 3e then think of what it would take for a fighter to do that.

Lokiare

2014-06-06, 01:34 PM

Yeah, the explicit level tiers in 4e was definitely a good idea. Unfortunately, like a lot of 4e's really good ideas, the execution was a bit lacking. I would have preferred to see much more of a "shift" between tiers. Part of it I think is that as Felhammer was saying, when you reach that level of power, you really are (or should be) playing a different game. What works for challenges and game play as a farmer's child protecting their family is not the same as what works for a plane traveling demigod. I mean it can work from a purely "is it possible" standpoint, obviously 4e did that much, but when you take a step back from the details it's really just the same stuff you were doing 10 levels ago, just with all the numbers inflated.

Not even close. In 4E they add the more debilitating conditions around the beginning of paragon (11-20). They also add ways to fast travel from one location to another via rituals and magic items. Minions start having effects when they die like getting a last hit in or turning into a zone of poison. In the epic tier (21-30) they start adding in the save or die effects where you fail 2 saves and your dead. They also add in plane travel rituals and magic items. Minions start having effects when they die that are devastating like paralysis until you make a save or blind until you make a save. Solo monsters also start spawning these kinds of minions. The game fundamentally changes.

Who says you can't or shouldn't fight beholders at lvl 1? Heck I had level 3 one shot save the elemental plane of fire from its demise.

Low level doesn't mean squat about what is at stakes. That is up to the story/DM.

Hell gandolf was what? Level 5 bard in the movies if you think on terms of DND 3.5.

Edit: A bard that over compensated for not being a wizard and got a free template/prestige class for sacrificing himself for his friends... Ha, like Risen Martyr :p

Actually Gandolf was akin to a planetar that was only allowed to meddle in mortal affairs if he only did what mortals could do, so he picked the most powerful mortal type to emulate: The Wizard. You could play Gandolf in 1E by getting a Cleric up to level 18 and then dual classing to wizard.

What you are missing out is that level doesn't equal power, do you know what does? Power equals power. (Wait... Where did I hear this before?? Lol)

Level = Power only works within each class or monster or whatever item you are comparing to itself. When you start to compare 1 creature to another that level = Power idea breaks down.

Because it is relative and doesn't always equal true.

Level 20 Fighter doesn't really have power when you compare them to a level 13 Wizard.

The Fighter is more powerful than the level 20 commoner or a level 10 Warmage but that level 13 wizard will wreck the level 20 Fighter.

So you can't say that Level = Power is a grand universal rule that is at work. They tried to do that and yet failed. Now a level 20 X class will have more power than a level 10 x class but that is where it stops. Even in 4e, the most balanced of D&D, some classes and builds are more powerful than those of a higher level from another class build.

A wolf can be dangerous at level 10 or it could be a side thought. You can keep the wolf at low levels or you could level him up. If your plot says "wolves aren't a problem at level 10" then that works, but having "there are stronger wolves out there that can be a problem at level 10" then that works too because it is a PLOT issue not a math/game breakage issue. Having a party of level 10 PCs go up against a pack of wolves, and be challenged, doesn't break the game... Though it may break your plot or idea of the world it may not break someone else's.

You still seem confused about screwing up YOUR SPECIFIC IDEA of plot and screwing up the game.

Edit: Huh, my quote button sent me to the reply screen but didn't quote cptpike weird...

That's because the level system wasn't accurate. It was always meant to be a rough gauge of power.

But it's easy to make an encounter more challenging by either adding numbers to the enemy side or countering favorite strategies of the players. The system does not have to be balanced down to the individual level. If you can spend the time designing your ass off to do that and still keep classes interesting, well, more power to you.

If the price of "making it better" is homogenization, is it truly better?

Who said anything about homogenization? I take it you didn't have a chance to look over the Essentials material where they didn't gain class features or powers at the same time or type as the pre-Essentials characters, but were relatively balanced?

You can get balance without homogenization. That's just an assumption people have because they think 4E = Balance, when in fact 4E was balanced, but there are other ways to balance a game than 4E took.

Kurald Galain

2014-06-06, 02:02 PM

Who said anything about homogenization? I take it you didn't have a chance to look over the Essentials material where they didn't gain class features or powers at the same time or type as the pre-Essentials characters, but were relatively balanced?

The later 4E classes aren't even remotely balanced, giving us such "gems" as the vampire on the one hand and the elementalist on the other. So that pretty much invalidates your point.

captpike

2014-06-06, 02:08 PM

The later 4E classes aren't even remotely balanced, giving us such "gems" as the vampire on the one hand and the elementalist on the other. So that pretty much invalidates your point.

the vampire I will give you once you get to 8 or so. its better then most classes in 3e but that is a low bar.

the elementalist is odd, but overall its balanced. it could use some help but at all levels I have no doubt it could stand on its own.

1337 b4k4

2014-06-06, 02:24 PM

Not even close. In 4E they add the more debilitating conditions around the beginning of paragon (11-20). They also add ways to fast travel from one location to another via rituals and magic items. Minions start having effects when they die like getting a last hit in or turning into a zone of poison. In the epic tier (21-30) they start adding in the save or die effects where you fail 2 saves and your dead. They also add in plane travel rituals and magic items. Minions start having effects when they die that are devastating like paralysis until you make a save or blind until you make a save. Solo monsters also start spawning these kinds of minions. The game fundamentally changes.

I disagree. To me, none of that is (and wasn't when I played) a fundamental change to the game. It's a, to borrow a video game term, "new game plus".

Kurald Galain

2014-06-06, 02:48 PM

I disagree. To me, none of that is (and wasn't when I played) a fundamental change to the game. It's a, to borrow a video game term, "new game plus".

Indeed. Remember that 4E was intentionally designed after level 6 through 10 of 3E (what WOTC calls the "sweet spot"). 4E is explicitly designed so that the game does not fundamentally change at higher levels, only incrementally.

obryn

2014-06-06, 02:54 PM

I disagree. To me, none of that is (and wasn't when I played) a fundamental change to the game. It's a, to borrow a video game term, "new game plus".
Ummm... It does kind of change natures, though not as dramatically as (say) RC D&D does, where you end up switching from adventuring to domain management.

It's a lot more about the "connective tissue" changing, where the stakes get higher, the PCs gain more power in the world, and they start directing the destinies of nations/planes more directly. Yeah, the mechanics change a bit, control effects and big whammies become more common on both sides, and both PCs and monsters get a huge breadth of options, but the biggest sign of advancement is how the fiction changes.

So while the mechanics might be similar, if you're running the same kind of game at Level 19 (or, 29 for heaven's sake) that you were at Level 3, I think you're doing something wrong.

Psyren

2014-06-06, 03:23 PM

The later 4E classes aren't even remotely balanced, giving us such "gems" as the vampire on the one hand and the elementalist on the other. So that pretty much invalidates your point.

Hilarious, the one thing 4e was supposed to do well (balance) and they even managed to mess that up. And now they're tossing out the edition like so much chaff to make room for the new toy.

Lokiare

2014-06-06, 03:26 PM

Essentials classes were as different as 3.5E classes were. You forget the AEDU was pulled part by part from 3.5E and put together in 4E. Essentials has classes that have at-wills (or rely entirely on basic attacks) and don't have encounter powers, but have dailies (like the 3.5E casters). They also have classes that have at-wills/BA's and encounter powers but not daily powers (like the 3.5E Barbarian). Basically if you claim homogeneity for Essentials you either don't know what you are talking about or you are being intentionally obtuse.

I know 4E looks 'samey' on paper, but when you actually sit down and play the classes don't play anything like each other.

The fighter hits things near it dealing a little damage to another adjacent target and gets free attacks on things that try to attack other players. They also have some dailies that they don't expend if they miss with them. An example of play might be one round hitting 3 adjacent targets and marking them. Next round they might use a utility to gain regeneration, the next round they might use a powerful daily to hit a particular creature extremely hard and knock it down only to miss and try again the next round.

The wizard on the other hand throws balls of energy around and knocks enemies back with peals of thunder. They can use their encounter to blind, prone, daze, or paralyze for a round and extend that to a second round if they want. They have dailies that create zones that apply damage or conditions or create summoned creatures that they control with their actions such as a ball of flame that rolls around the battle field damaging nearby enemies.

So when someone says 4E classes play the same, the only conclusion I can come to is that they haven't played the game and are just interpreting what they heard somewhere else because the facts defy the meme.

1337 b4k4

2014-06-06, 03:38 PM

Ummm... It does kind of change natures, though not as dramatically as (say) RC D&D does, where you end up switching from adventuring to domain management.

Well sure, but that's my point. Not that 4e didn't do it at all, but that the execution was lacking. There were changes, they just weren't what I would call "fundamental" changes. They were largely surface level.

So while the mechanics might be similar, if you're running the same kind of game at Level 19 (or, 29 for heaven's sake) that you were at Level 3, I think you're doing something wrong.

Sure, and I agree with that. But when I'm talking fundamental changes I'm aiming for actual shifts in how you interact with (and advance) in the game. Even if the fiction changes, as you advance in 4e, you're still doing the same thing at level 19 and 29 as you were at level 9, it's just the numbers got bigger. Comparatively, early D&D vs the Domain Management parts vs Immortals were very different experiences. And this isn't to say that they did this perfectly either. Obviously, even though out Domain Management and Immortals, you were gaining XP by boffing orcs. They were just inter-dimensional orcs. But the game still had some fundamental shifts. Domain Management changed (and opened up a new way of) gaining XP and advancing. Immortals was a completely different game practically (at least the original one, my understanding is that the RC immortals part is much less different). Again, it's not that I think 4e didn't change as you moved between tiers, it's that I think they didn't go far enough with their idea.

Edit
----------------

So when someone says 4E classes play the same, the only conclusion I can come to is that they haven't played the game and are just interpreting what they heard somewhere else because the facts defy the meme.

As I said previously (though not to you) this attitude is rudely dismissive of other people. I personally did play the game. For two years in two campaigns and then in ongoing one off experiences for another year or so. I played multiple classes, including the core 4. My experience, the experience of a number of my group was that the classes felt very similar and play very similar to each other, especially classes that fill the same roles.

obryn

2014-06-06, 03:38 PM

Hilarious, the one thing 4e was supposed to do well (balance) and they even managed to mess that up. And now they're tossing out the edition like so much chaff to make room for the new toy.
The difference between a Vampire and a Rogue or Wizard in 4e is vastly smaller than the difference between a Fighter and a Wizard in 3.x or Pathfinder.

In any crunchy system that's out for long enough, there will naturally be some things that are better than others at similar jobs. The goal is making sure the difference between the best and the worst isn't insurmountable. And in this case, the Vampire happens to be something of a stinker, along with the Binder.

Importantly, though, it's hardly a Tier 1 vs. Tier 5 situation, and a Vampire's perfectly capable of contributing at least through Paragon tier. Not that I'd recommend it, but there you go.

At any rate, while ideally both should be a lot better and there's really no excuse for how boring the Vampire is and how sub-par the Binder is, IMO it's more important for gameplay to eliminate overpowered options than to eliminate underpowered ones. Having a Vampire in your 4e game won't explode the game. Heck, it won't even put any added burden on the DM to balance things. (And it will still have more interesting options than a 3.x/PF martial class.)

obryn

2014-06-06, 03:43 PM

Again, it's not that I think 4e didn't change as you moved between tiers, it's that I think they didn't go far enough with their idea.
Yeah, no argument there. I wish Epic Tier had been handled better, altogether.

I think both exploring dangerous Dungeons and fighting deadly Dragons are essential to the D&D experience, and I wouldn't want them eliminated at any tier of play. However, I think the 4e designers were so focused on the reasonable criticism of 3e's epic tier (namely, that it's terrible and broken) that they were more focused on making something work. And it works ... mostly. It's just not particularly daring.

This kind of feeds back into the regrettable fact that both 3.x and 4e (and now, 5e) are descendants of the AD&D branch of the game rather than the often-more-interesting-and-better-designed D&D branch.

Psyren

2014-06-06, 04:18 PM

The difference between a Vampire and a Rogue or Wizard in 4e is vastly smaller than the difference between a Fighter and a Wizard in 3.x or Pathfinder.

But 3.x/PF has them play vastly differently too. So there's at least a reason for the power disparity. It's not the same mechanics AWED mechanics with a different skin.

IMO it's more important for gameplay to eliminate overpowered options than to eliminate underpowered ones.

Given how many years upon years T1 classes have been around without causing those games to implode on themselves I'm calling bunk on this notion. Just because a class has a high ceiling doesn't mean every group is going to hit that ceiling.

da_chicken

2014-06-06, 04:27 PM

I know 4E looks 'samey' on paper, but when you actually sit down and play the classes don't play anything like each other.

The fighter hits things near it dealing a little damage to another adjacent target and gets free attacks on things that try to attack other players. They also have some dailies that they don't expend if they miss with them. An example of play might be one round hitting 3 adjacent targets and marking them. Next round they might use a utility to gain regeneration, the next round they might use a powerful daily to hit a particular creature extremely hard and knock it down only to miss and try again the next round.

The wizard on the other hand throws balls of energy around and knocks enemies back with peals of thunder. They can use their encounter to blind, prone, daze, or paralyze for a round and extend that to a second round if they want. They have dailies that create zones that apply damage or conditions or create summoned creatures that they control with their actions such as a ball of flame that rolls around the battle field damaging nearby enemies.

So when someone says 4E classes play the same, the only conclusion I can come to is that they haven't played the game and are just interpreting what they heard somewhere else because the facts defy the meme.

Because people do the same thing regardless of what class their playing.

Roll Initiative. Roll d20 and add your ability modifer.
Unless it's an easy encounter, determine which daily power you're going to use for this combat. Your first round, blow your daily. Remember to always focus fire down the enemy with the highest DPS first. Roll d20 and add your ability modifer x5.
For the next 3-4 rounds, blow your encounter powers. Roll d20 and add your ability modifer x3 for each.
At-wills, baby. Roll d20 and add your ability modifer (x2 if you're lucky) for each. Repeat until you win (second wind as necessary).

Tell me that doesn't explain how 90% of encounters go. Now, your dailies, encounters, and at-wills do different things based on your class, but you're still essentially always doing the above, and the choice about which daily to use, which order to use encounters, and which at-will to use is always what you have to do every combat. You can't get away from it by changing class. Sure, you have a different role based on your class, and you might have a trick you specialize in like a stealth, slide or trip build. Sure, if you're a striker your minors go to attack powers, if you're a leader they go to buffs and healing, etc.

By and large, though, that's how it goes. For every class. Once you know how the build works and what powers it has and how it works in combat, it's just a matter of rolling the dice, usually. Roll d20 and add your ability modifer. Roll d20 and add your ability modifer. Roll d20 and add your ability modifer. Boy, they weren't kidding anymore when they said it was a core mechanic, were they? Remember when you were a 3.x Wizard or Cleric and might not roll a d20 all day except for initiative?

But that's ok, it's not all combat. Nope. There are skill challenges, too! Roll d20 and add your ability modifer. Roll d20 and add your ability modifer. Roll d20 and add your ability modifer. :smallsigh:

"Oh, but they fixed this with varied classes in Essentials and fixed monsters in MM3 and fixed guidelines for skill challenges!"

Sorry, that was like two years into the game. We'd played it for a year and a half, gotten burned out, and went back to 3.5 by then. And the fact that it took two years to get fixed monsters is outright ridiculous.

Now, I had a lot of fun playing 4e, and it is one of the best tabletop combat games I've ever played. It's much better than Descent. The tactics introduced by the Fighter class abilities alone are genius. It's just not the kind of tabetop game I want to inject RPG elements into. I'd rather it were run like a Blood Bowl league.

Edit:
And as for why Fighters in other editions don't generate this feeling, even though compared to 4e they have zero tactical options and zero choice: Rolling an attack in other editions takes 5 seconds. You don't have to refer to your character sheet to figure out anything. In 4e, resolving an average at-will takes about 30 seconds, IMX.

captpike

2014-06-06, 04:35 PM

But 3.x/PF has them play vastly differently too. So there's at least a reason for the power disparity. It's not the same mechanics AWED mechanics with a different skin.

Given how many years upon years T1 classes have been around without causing those games to implode on themselves I'm calling bunk on this notion. Just because a class has a high ceiling doesn't mean every group is going to hit that ceiling.

that is hardly the case, 4e classes are much more different then 3e ones by any rational measure.

3e only had 2 or 3 classes, non-caster, arcane spell list caster, divine caster. with both casters being questionable as different classes because they have overlaping spell lists and have few real class features.

the only reasons you would ever play with T1 classes in 3e and not have the issues would be A) the players were limiting themselves for meta reasons B) the DM was houseruleing like crazy to avoid issues. c) your low level

Because people do the same thing regardless of what class their playing.

Roll Initiative. Roll d20 and add your ability modifer.
Unless it's an easy encounter, determine which daily power you're going to use for this combat. Your first round, blow your daily. Remember to always focus fire down the enemy with the highest DPS first. Roll d20 and add your ability modifer x5.
For the next 3-4 rounds, blow your encounter powers. Roll d20 and add your ability modifer x3 for each.
At-wills, baby. Roll d20 and add your ability modifer (x2 if you're lucky) for each. Repeat until you win (second wind as necessary).

Tell me that doesn't explain how 90% of encounters go. Now, your dailies, encounters, and at-wills do different things based on your class, but you're still essentially always doing the above, and the choice about which daily to use, which order to use encounters, and which at-will to use is always what you have to do every combat. You can't get away from it by changing class. Sure, you have a different role based on your class, and you might have a trick you specialize in like a stealth, slide or trip build. Sure, if you're a striker your minors go to attack powers, if you're a leader they go to buffs and healing, etc.

By and large, though, that's how it goes. For every class. Once you know how the build works and what powers it has and how it works in combat, it's just a matter of rolling the dice, usually. Roll d20 and add your ability modifer. Roll d20 and add your ability modifer. Roll d20 and add your ability modifer. Boy, they weren't kidding anymore when they said it was a core mechanic, were they? Remember when you were a 3.x Wizard or Cleric and might not roll a d20 all day except for initiative?

But that's ok, it's not all combat. Nope. There are skill challenges, too! Roll d20 and add your ability modifer. Roll d20 and add your ability modifer. Roll d20 and add your ability modifer. :smallsigh:

"Oh, but they fixed this with varied classes in Essentials and fixed monsters in MM3 and fixed guidelines for skill challenges!"

Sorry, that was like two years into the game. We'd played it for a year and a half, gotten burned out, and went back to 3.5 by then. And the fact that it took two years to get fixed monsters is outright ridiculous.

Now, I had a lot of fun playing 4e, and it is one of the best tabletop combat games I've ever played. It's much better than Descent. The tactics introduced by the Fighter class abilities alone are genius. It's just not the kind of tabetop game I want to inject RPG elements into. I'd rather it were run like a Blood Bowl league.

Edit:
And as for why Fighters in other editions don't generate this feeling, even though compared to 4e they have zero tactical options and zero choice: Rolling an attack in other editions takes 5 seconds. You don't have to refer to your character sheet to figure out anything. In 4e, resolving an average at-will takes about 30 seconds, IMX.

yes and all 3e is:
1) Roll Initiative. Roll d20 and add your ability modifer.
2) Unless it's an easy encounter, determine which daily power(s) you're going to use for this combat. Remember to always focus fire down the castersfirst. make them roll saves
3) your done! you might have the let your baggage handlers (non-casters) finish off some of them but its not important

BTW ignoring the effects powers has in 4e is like saying that all spells do in 3e is damage, and anything else does not matter.

Lokiare

2014-06-06, 04:41 PM

Because people do the same thing regardless of what class their playing.

Roll Initiative. Roll d20 and add your ability modifer.
Unless it's an easy encounter, determine which daily power you're going to use for this combat. Your first round, blow your daily. Remember to always focus fire down the enemy with the highest DPS first. Roll d20 and add your ability modifer x5.
For the next 3-4 rounds, blow your encounter powers. Roll d20 and add your ability modifer x3 for each.
At-wills, baby. Roll d20 and add your ability modifer (x2 if you're lucky) for each. Repeat until you win (second wind as necessary).

Tell me that doesn't explain how 90% of encounters go. Now, your dailies, encounters, and at-wills do different things based on your class, but you're still essentially always doing the above, and the choice about which daily to use, which order to use encounters, and which at-will to use is always what you have to do every combat. You can't get away from it by changing class. Sure, you have a different role based on your class, and you might have a trick you specialize in like a stealth, slide or trip build. Sure, if you're a striker your minors go to attack powers, if you're a leader they go to buffs and healing, etc.

By and large, though, that's how it goes. For every class. Once you know how the build works and what powers it has and how it works in combat, it's just a matter of rolling the dice, usually. Roll d20 and add your ability modifer. Roll d20 and add your ability modifer. Roll d20 and add your ability modifer. Boy, they weren't kidding anymore when they said it was a core mechanic, were they? Remember when you were a 3.x Wizard or Cleric and might not roll a d20 all day except for initiative?

But that's ok, it's not all combat. Nope. There are skill challenges, too! Roll d20 and add your ability modifer. Roll d20 and add your ability modifer. Roll d20 and add your ability modifer. :smallsigh:

"Oh, but they fixed this with varied classes in Essentials and fixed monsters in MM3 and fixed guidelines for skill challenges!"

Sorry, that was like two years into the game. We'd played it for a year and a half, gotten burned out, and went back to 3.5 by then. And the fact that it took two years to get fixed monsters is outright ridiculous.

Now, I had a lot of fun playing 4e, and it is one of the best tabletop combat games I've ever played. It's much better than Descent. The tactics introduced by the Fighter class abilities alone are genius. It's just not the kind of tabetop game I want to inject RPG elements into. I'd rather it were run like a Blood Bowl league.

Edit:
And as for why Fighters in other editions don't generate this feeling, even though compared to 4e they have zero tactical options and zero choice: Rolling an attack in other editions takes 5 seconds. You don't have to refer to your character sheet to figure out anything. In 4e, resolving an average at-will takes about 30 seconds, IMX.

That's literally not what happens in my games. My players use dailies half way through the encounter sometimes, sometimes they go first. Other times they use them last. Encounters and utility powers are the same way. They get used when most appropriate. In my last game I had the sorcerer hold off on their encounter powers until the enemy was grouped up enough. They used at-will powers until the enemy was grouped and then the used one of their encounters and saved the other until another group of enemies were close enough together (it was a pincer ambush by orcs, goblins, and kobolds).

You could play 4E the way you describe and it might suck the fun out of it, but that's not the only way or even the most effective way to play. The real problem is you could apply the same logic to 3E and get the same results.

Like I said the people I've played with don't do that. They don't do skill challenges that way either. They sometimes gain automatic successes by using powers or choosing to do something ingenious other times they fail completely and have to go the hard route. In all of it there is a lot of role playing going on so we don't hardly see the rules intrude at all (we still play RAW though).

Edit: Also unless they have a really, really good reason, I don't let them use their most effective skills. I do allow them to assist each other. So when the no cha no diplomacy fighter/ranger talks to the king they can get a cumulative bonus of +8 from the other party members, but only if the other party members RP to get their roles. 4E RAW says you don't get to roll until you describe what your character is doing and then the DM picks the skill with the player being able to suggest a skill to use.

obryn

2014-06-06, 04:45 PM

But 3.x/PF has them play vastly differently too. So there's at least a reason for the power disparity. It's not the same mechanics AWED mechanics with a different skin
Say what? 4e fighters and wizards play the same now? You can't be repeating this chestnut in good faith.

Kurald Galain

2014-06-06, 04:46 PM

"Oh, but they fixed this with varied classes in Essentials and fixed monsters in MM3 and fixed guidelines for skill challenges!"

Surely if your issue is that classes can be played on autopilot, then that's not going to be fixed with those newer classes (that rely on using the same melee basic attack every single round). Later classes are less tactically versatile, not more.

I can attest from personal experience that some classes at least can be played on autopilot, most notably the Ranger. No, that's not just my opinion: the ranger is frequently labeled the most boring class ever.

You are not the first person either to claim that (almost) all classes can be played on autopilot. That does not match my personal experience, but I think I get where you're coming from.

Lokiare

2014-06-06, 04:46 PM

Say what? 4e fighters and wizards play the same now? You can't be repeating this chestnut in good faith.

Yeah, I just got done explaining how 4E classes don't play anything alike. That's one internet meme that needs to die in a fire.

obryn

2014-06-06, 05:48 PM

First off, nope, that isn't how "every encounter" goes unless every single fight takes place on a flat, featureless plain with no obstructions and identical enemies. But moving on...

"Oh, but they fixed this with varied classes in Essentials and fixed monsters in MM3 and fixed guidelines for skill challenges!"

Sorry, that was like two years into the game. We'd played it for a year and a half, gotten burned out, and went back to 3.5 by then. And the fact that it took two years to get fixed monsters is outright ridiculous.
Yep, pretty ridiculous. There was a lot of stuff that was wrong out the gate, monsters being the biggest shortcoming.

But that doesn't change the fact that now it's a damn fine RPG that works exceptionally well. I'm not going back to 2009's rules for a reason; I'm running the actual 4e game as it exists right now, after all that stuff that shouldn't have been broken from the outset got fixed.

I could go on and on about how the 4e release was crippled from the outset by terrible adventures, lack of playtesting, and awful advice in the DMG. I have, repeatedly. And I could go on and on about how I could improve the game as it is right now - for example, feat bloat is awful and I'd rather the game was feat-less. And I could talk about how the MM1 and DMG1 are nearly useless, because they were rushed to release. I don't really think I need to, though, since that was 2008 and now it's 2014 and I have no idea why this forum looks like it's suddenly fighting five year old edition wars with classics like "all classes play the saem!"

da_chicken

2014-06-06, 06:19 PM

That's literally not what happens in my games. My players use dailies half way through the encounter sometimes, sometimes they go first. Other times they use them last. Encounters and utility powers are the same way. They get used when most appropriate. In my last game I had the sorcerer hold off on their encounter powers until the enemy was grouped up enough. They used at-will powers until the enemy was grouped and then the used one of their encounters and saved the other until another group of enemies were close enough together (it was a pincer ambush by orcs, goblins, and kobolds).

You could play 4E the way you describe and it might suck the fun out of it, but that's not the only way or even the most effective way to play. The real problem is you could apply the same logic to 3E and get the same results.

Like I said the people I've played with don't do that. They don't do skill challenges that way either. They sometimes gain automatic successes by using powers or choosing to do something ingenious other times they fail completely and have to go the hard route. In all of it there is a lot of role playing going on so we don't hardly see the rules intrude at all (we still play RAW though).

I'm not trying to say that your experience is wrong. I believe you when you say your games run well and the system works for you.

I'm just trying to explain why some people come to the conclusion that 4E feels like you're playing the same class all the time. To give you an idea of what they feel as they're playing. I think part of it iss because even the most basic turn of "move and use at-will" appears to require more thought from players -- it's paradox of choice paralyzing people. This makes turns take longer, which makes rounds take longer, which makes combats take longer, which makes the game boring for some. 3.x has fewer decisions for many classes, so there's less stopping to think. We found we could move through combat very quickly and efficiently if you sat and planned what you were going to do as the round elapses, but it made the game feel like a business meeting. Since we have players who like to do shots as the night goes on, that just doesn't work out so well.

Only a third of my group favors system mastery as a goal in itself, anyways. We've got 8 players and a DM trying to run the very badly written modules in Dungeon at the start of the game and modifying encounters on the fly to suit the double sized party, and the DM finds he either makes combats too easy and we just blow through everything, or combats are way too hard and we barely make it out using all the resources we can. And the DM can't tell how good anything is because the system is so different.

da_chicken

2014-06-06, 06:42 PM

Yep, pretty ridiculous. There was a lot of stuff that was wrong out the gate, monsters being the biggest shortcoming.

But that doesn't change the fact that now it's a damn fine RPG that works exceptionally well. I'm not going back to 2009's rules for a reason; I'm running the actual 4e game as it exists right now, after all that stuff that shouldn't have been broken from the outset got fixed.

It's too late for us.

I could go on and on about how the 4e release was crippled from the outset by terrible adventures, lack of playtesting, and awful advice in the DMG. I have, repeatedly. And I could go on and on about how I could improve the game as it is right now - for example, feat bloat is awful and I'd rather the game was feat-less. And I could talk about how the MM1 and DMG1 are nearly useless, because they were rushed to release. I don't really think I need to, though, since that was 2008 and now it's 2014 and I have no idea why this forum looks like it's suddenly fighting five year old edition wars with classics like "all classes play the saem!"

I haven't looked at 4e since early 2010. I don't particularly care to, either. "It's fixed now!" doesn't change the validity of my complaints when I did play the game, it doesn't change my experiences when I did play the game, it's not going to convince me to try it again, and I'm not going to sugar coat my experiences with it. So, people keep asking, "I don't understand why people hate on 4e," and I can tell you why we don't play it. We didn't like it. We gave the game a chance. An 8 hour roughly weekly session for year and a half is a good chance. It failed. You can blame bad players or bad DMing or crippled rules at launch or WotC mismanagement, but it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if it's different now and all the bugs are patched and the system is flawless and it washes your car on Saturday and brings your daughter home on Friday before 11. It's all fruit of the poisoned tree. Not going to play it with my current group ever again because of the consistently bad play experiences we had. There's a guy in my group that bought every 4E book for that first year and a half. He has a whole shelf full of thirtysomething 4E books. He will never play 4E again. They done ****ed it up.

da_chicken

2014-06-06, 06:46 PM

Surely if your issue is that classes can be played on autopilot, then that's not going to be fixed with those newer classes (that rely on using the same melee basic attack every single round). Later classes are less tactically versatile, not more.

I can attest from personal experience that some classes at least can be played on autopilot, most notably the Ranger. No, that's not just my opinion: the ranger is frequently labeled the most boring class ever.

You are not the first person either to claim that (almost) all classes can be played on autopilot. That does not match my personal experience, but I think I get where you're coming from.

It's not the only experience I have with the game, but it is some of it, and I've heard it from my friends in my group to understand what they're saying.

And, yeah, Ranger is horrifically boring. I had a blast playing my Fighter and some fun with my Warlord, but both the (pre-Divine Power) Cleric and Ranger bored me to tears. Ranger certainly is effective, though.

obryn

2014-06-06, 06:52 PM

It's too late for us.

I haven't looked at 4e since early 2010. I don't particularly care to, either. "It's fixed now!" doesn't change the validity of my complaints when I did play the game, it doesn't change my experiences when I did play the game, it's not going to convince me to try it again, and I'm not going to sugar coat my experiences with it. So, people keep asking, "I don't understand why people hate on 4e," and I can tell you why we don't play it. We didn't like it. We gave the game a chance. An 8 hour roughly weekly session for year and a half is a good chance. It failed. You can blame bad players or bad DMing or crippled rules at launch or WotC mismanagement, but it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if it's different now and all the bugs are patched and the system is flawless and it washes your car on Saturday and brings your daughter home on Friday before 11. It's all fruit of the poisoned tree. Not going to play it with my current group ever again because of the consistently bad play experiences we had. There's a guy in my group that bought every 4E book for that first year and a half. He has a whole shelf full of thirtysomething 4E books. He will never play 4E again. They done ****ed it up.
Whoa there, cowboy. I don't think I challenged the validity of your complaints or your experiences, or said you should give it another shot, or anything.

As I said, you'll find no argument from me that the launch was bungled and that the game needed a lot more testing.

But when I'm talking about the game, and talking about taking design cues from it, I'm talking about how it is now. I have no interest whatsoever in trying to argue that MM1 math was great, or that skill challenges weren't broken out the gate. I had to repair every adventure from about P1 onwards, and they were almost unsalvageable. It's not a flawless game - far from it - but it's the best D&D we've got, as far as I'm concerned.

We stuck with it through the early rough patches because even with all that, it was a damn sight better than going back to 3.x. And now that it's been patched and tweaked, it's a much better game for it. But that's why I play it, not why you should.

captpike

2014-06-06, 07:39 PM

SpawnOfMorbo

2014-06-06, 07:58 PM

da_chicken

2014-06-06, 08:10 PM

Can I buy those books from him?

Since he won't ever use them I should get a good discount right?

PM me if wants to sell them.

:) You're not the first to ask, but no. He collects everything. He has the full set of Hackmaster, too, and we've never played that. He's one of those guys who sees something and says "This is awesome!" and buys the whole thing whether or not he intends to use it. I mean, to be fair, Hackmaster is awesome. But, hey, I'm pretty sure the guy has a full set of Magic: The Gathering. Yes, a full set of the entire game.

Kurald Galain

2014-06-07, 02:09 AM

It's too late for us.

Yes, I can see that.

Also, for every person here who claims that the later-year changes to 4E fixed and improved everything, there's someone else who will say that these same changes broke and ruined everything. The later books have been controversial, clearly. Me, I'm not seeing any big difference; the monsters got slightly better, but the class balance got much worse, and skill challenges remain a horrible system no matter which patch you apply to them. Anyway, there's no silver bullet here.

Psyren

2014-06-07, 03:47 AM

the only reasons you would ever play with T1 classes in 3e and not have the issues would be A) the players were limiting themselves for meta reasons B) the DM was houseruleing like crazy to avoid issues. c) your low level

1) You're assuming every T1 player is a Tippy desperately hobbling themselves to keep the game world intact. Outside of message boards that kind of player is much less common than you think.
2) Every table I've played at has had at least some houserules. ("Some," not "houseruling like crazy.") This is not just allowed in both 3e/PF, it is actively encouraged. There's nothing wrong with it.
3) Most games are played at low levels, but see #1 and #2 for the ones that aren't.

captpike

2014-06-07, 11:09 AM

1) You're assuming every T1 player is a Tippy desperately hobbling themselves to keep the game world intact. Outside of message boards that kind of player is much less common than you think.
2) Every table I've played at has had at least some houserules. ("Some," not "houseruling like crazy.") This is not just allowed in both 3e/PF, it is actively encouraged. There's nothing wrong with it.
3) Most games are played at low levels, but see #1 and #2 for the ones that aren't.

the only thing I am assuming is that full T1 casters are picking from the best spells, and when they are in a situation worth useing one they use the one best suited to the situation.

that is all it takes to break 3e.

SpawnOfMorbo

2014-06-07, 12:07 PM

the only thing I am assuming is that full T1 casters are picking from the best spells, and when they are in a situation worth useing one they use the one best suited to the situation.

that is all it takes to break 3e.

That is a hell of a lot of assuming.

Actually for me it isn't about having the best spells but about being useful or being able to actually effect the game world like a fantasy hero should.

I don't always take the easy way with this, sometimes I take leas optimal spells.

Playing tier 1 isn't always about OMG POWER but about omg I'm playing mid to high fantasy!

captpike

2014-06-07, 12:48 PM

That is a hell of a lot of assuming.

Actually for me it isn't about having the best spells but about being useful or being able to actually effect the game world like a fantasy hero should.

I don't always take the easy way with this, sometimes I take leas optimal spells.

Playing tier 1 isn't always about OMG POWER but about omg I'm playing mid to high fantasy!

not really.

were I a wizard who is doing a very dangerous job I would want to stack the odds as much in my favor as possible. the best way to do this is to make sure I have the best spells I can memorized, and when I decide its time to use magic I use it to the best effect I can.

da_chicken

2014-06-07, 01:33 PM

That is a hell of a lot of assuming.

Usually for me I'm like: "OK, so the old king's ghost is speaking a garbled language and clearly doesn't understand us, either. Well, now I need tongues so I can have a conversation and find out what happened to his son. I chose death ward, restoration, freedom of movement, and ghost touch weapon because we were probably going to fight undead, and it was a good thing, too, because spectres are nasty. I have comprehend languages but that doesn't let me ask questions, and speak with dead but his body is gone and even then it wouldn't understand me."

In other words, I'm picking spells that are almost exactly what I need, but the actual situation means my choices were just wrong enough not to be useful.

Sartharina

2014-06-07, 01:56 PM

not really.

were I a wizard who is doing a very dangerous job I would want to stack the odds as much in my favor as possible. the best way to do this is to make sure I have the best spells I can memorized, and when I decide its time to use magic I use it to the best effect I can.

Except there isn't always a "Best Spell", aside from maybe Dispel Magic (Which actually doesn't do anything but take away other's magic), and other polymorph spells (All dependent on having access to Monster Manuals), "Mind Blank" (Which is trying to do too much and grants immunity to the game - but is strictly defensive), and a few other level 9s that are essentially "Do Anything!" (Gate, Shapechange. Wish counts only if you can mitigate the costs)

Also - scribing spells is expensive, worse if you blow the spellcraft check, and every spell is situational. Most casters unintentionally limit themselves (Black tentacles and Stinking Cloud may be effective, but they're also gross)

SpawnOfMorbo

2014-06-07, 03:58 PM

not really.

were I a wizard who is doing a very dangerous job I would want to stack the odds as much in my favor as possible. the best way to do this is to make sure I have the best spells I can memorized, and when I decide its time to use magic I use it to the best effect I can.

No. You are assuming that everyone who has ever played a tier 1 caster is doing so for one reason.

Not only are you assuming a hell of a lot, it is a very arrogant way to think, that you know how everyone who has ever played a tier 1 caster is thinking and you must be right.

Not all people are optimizers, again you are assuming that everyone thinks like you.

From time to time I'll make an evocation wizard, but I guess I never did that before because I must play the way you play.

captpike

2014-06-07, 05:21 PM

No. You are assuming that everyone who has ever played a tier 1 caster is doing so for one reason.

Not only are you assuming a hell of a lot, it is a very arrogant way to think, that you know how everyone who has ever played a tier 1 caster is thinking and you must be right.

Not all people are optimizers, again you are assuming that everyone thinks like you.

From time to time I'll make an evocation wizard, but I guess I never did that before because I must play the way you play.

I am not talking about optimizing, I am talking about RPing a character who is going to risk his life. given a choice of spells a character like that WOULD pick the spells that would be be the best for the known situation.
yes you can RP characters who would knowingly not pick the best spells, but how many characters would look at their spellbook and say "I could take stinking cloud and probably end an encounter, or I could take Ablative Barrier and sort of help someone maybe for an encounter"
my character is fighting for his life, at what point does it make sense to say "I could easily and quickly win the fight that could kill me....but I rather not"

if I was going into combat in RL and was offered a p90 or revolver I would pick the p90 because it would be better, because it would give me the best chance of staying alive.

and that is the problem, the system should not break by playing the character correctly, playing a full caster and picking the best spells.

yes you can put meta limitations on yourself like playing an evocation wizard. I already said that.

rlc

2014-06-07, 05:57 PM

They should've done this for every version

Envyus

2014-06-07, 06:46 PM

captpike

2014-06-07, 06:54 PM

Listen I have seen a ton of people that make themselves not very well built for a Wizard and 100% they were not trying to limit themselves. Lots of people play evocation wizards because they find it more fun or don't see the value in a lot of other spells not because they are trying to limit themselves.

I am pretty sure that at least 70% or so of people that play Wizards have no idea how to play them to the best of their ability.

even if your numbers are correct the game breaking for 30% of all T1 characters simply by playing in the most logical their players know is not acceptable.

if your playing a way that you know is not even close to the optimal way to play your character (which is not the same as playing an optimal character) then your limiting yourself. often for meta reasons, like finding blaster wizards more fun, or something.
I have done this myself several times, I am not saying its bad I am saying that it should not be needed to play a class without breaking something.

Envyus

2014-06-07, 07:24 PM

even if your numbers are correct the game breaking for 30% of all T1 characters simply by playing in the most logical their players know is not acceptable.

if your playing a way that you know is not even close to the optimal way to play your character (which is not the same as playing an optimal character) then your limiting yourself. often for meta reasons, like finding blaster wizards more fun, or something.
I have done this myself several times, I am not saying its bad I am saying that it should not be needed to play a class without breaking something.

What I am saying is that most people don't even know it's not the optimal way.

captpike

2014-06-07, 07:58 PM

What I am saying is that most people don't even know it's not the optimal way.

even if that were the case it would not matter. having a system that breaks if used correctly is a bad idea, even if they make it hard to use correctly.

and again I am not talking about making the best possible character, with all the best spells. I am just talking about someone who has a good knowledge of the system picking what look like the best and most useful spells for the day ahead.

and of course the game has to work for people who like to optimize just as it has to work for those who don't.

Lokiare

2014-06-07, 08:57 PM

even if that were the case it would not matter. having a system that breaks if used correctly is a bad idea, even if they make it hard to use correctly.

and again I am not talking about making the best possible character, with all the best spells. I am just talking about someone who has a good knowledge of the system picking what look like the best and most useful spells for the day ahead.

and of course the game has to work for people who like to optimize just as it has to work for those who don't.

Car Salesman "Great model, but don't drive over 50 in hot weather, the engine will fly out of the hood in an angry mess".

Rube "Ok, I'll take it. Sounds great!"

SpawnOfMorbo

2014-06-07, 11:32 PM

I am not talking about optimizing, I am talking about RPing a character who is going to risk his life. given a choice of spells a character like that WOULD pick the spells that would be be the best for the known situation.
yes you can RP characters who would knowingly not pick the best spells, but how many characters would look at their spellbook and say "I could take stinking cloud and probably end an encounter, or I could take Ablative Barrier and sort of help someone maybe for an encounter"
my character is fighting for his life, at what point does it make sense to say "I could easily and quickly win the fight that could kill me....but I rather not"

if I was going into combat in RL and was offered a p90 or revolver I would pick the p90 because it would be better, because it would give me the best chance of staying alive.

and that is the problem, the system should not break by playing the character correctly, playing a full caster and picking the best spells.

yes you can put meta limitations on yourself like playing an evocation wizard. I already said that.

Siiigh, stop assuming everything.

Stop assuming that your optimization is the correct way to play. It is quite arrogant that you are saying that everyone that doesn't make the optimal choice is playing wrong. Just because I play differently doesn't make me wrong.

Also you are assuming that in game a person has to like to use or will use the most optimal choices. There is more than one way to get the job done.

You forget that charcters within the game don't sit down and make a character sheet then decide what they will do. The gun metaphor is a bad one, how about life choices.

What college to go to, what hobbies you have, what you are good at inately, what you prefer to do? Are these things you sat down one day and you decided on and made them so just for making that choice? No. Life doesn't work that way. It is the same within the game, a wizard may not have the ability to cast transmutation/conjuration spells and makes them his barred schools cause he just can't do it all that well. A wizard may not know about certain spells and that's why the player doesn't have their wizard learn them.

Sure if you as a player makes your wizard an optimizer and explains it then yeah... They will make all the right decisions. But you assume that is how everyone makes their character.

Is the game broken? Sure 3.5 is, but not because there are tier 1 classes. You can have a fine system with t1s running around. The system is broken because you have classes that can't even keep up with the game.

captpike

2014-06-07, 11:45 PM

Siiigh, stop assuming everything.

Stop assuming that your optimization is the correct way to play. It is quite arrogant that you are saying that everyone that doesn't make the optimal choice is playing wrong. Just because I play differently doesn't make me wrong.

Also you are assuming that in game a person has to like to use or will use the most optimal choices. There is more than one way to get the job done.

You forget that charcters within the game don't sit down and make a character sheet then decide what they will do. The gun metaphor is a bad one, how about life choices.

What college to go to, what hobbies you have, what you are good at inately, what you prefer to do? Are these things you sat down one day and you decided on and made them so just for making that choice? No. Life doesn't work that way. It is the same within the game, a wizard may not have the ability to cast transmutation/conjuration spells and makes them his barred schools cause he just can't do it all that well. A wizard may not know about certain spells and that's why the player doesn't have their wizard learn them.

Sure if you as a player makes your wizard an optimizer and explains it then yeah... They will make all the right decisions. But you assume that is how everyone makes their character.

Is the game broken? Sure 3.5 is, but not because there are tier 1 classes. You can have a fine system with t1s running around. The system is broken because you have classes that can't even keep up with the game.

its a valid and even encouraged way to play, and doing so breaks the game.
that is the problem. even if only 1 in 10 plays that way its still a problem (and I would peg it much much higher then that)

when I am playing a wizard in 3.x I assume at some point my character went through a list of spells and decided what ones would be best to learn, or what he should specialize in. just like when he levels up I assume that he has spent time thinking about what it would be best to learn ("hmm, we have been fighting alot of other wizards lately, I should try and learn/make something that would work on them better").

T1s would still be broken even if everyone was one, they can fix too many problems, win too much with too little effort. the game is just not made well enough to handle what they can do.

and as I have said, would you be ok with T1 fighters? who can jump miles at a time, punch the earth and do more damage then a fireball to everyone around them, or whirl around such that anyone that comes within 20ft of him take damage for the entire encounter (while being able to do his normal stuff after he starts it up).

because it gets weird if you start looking at spells and start trying to think of ways to give abilities on par with those to fighters.

SpawnOfMorbo

2014-06-08, 08:25 AM

its a valid and even encouraged way to play, and doing so breaks the game.
that is the problem. even if only 1 in 10 plays that way its still a problem (and I would peg it much much higher then that)

when I am playing a wizard in 3.x I assume at some point my character went through a list of spells and decided what ones would be best to learn, or what he should specialize in. just like when he levels up I assume that he has spent time thinking about what it would be best to learn ("hmm, we have been fighting alot of other wizards lately, I should try and learn/make something that would work on them better").

T1s would still be broken even if everyone was one, they can fix too many problems, win too much with too little effort. the game is just not made well enough to handle what they can do.

and as I have said, would you be ok with T1 fighters? who can jump miles at a time, punch the earth and do more damage then a fireball to everyone around them, or whirl around such that anyone that comes within 20ft of him take damage for the entire encounter (while being able to do his normal stuff after he starts it up).

because it gets weird if you start looking at spells and start trying to think of ways to give abilities on par with those to fighters.

What I'm trying to say is... YOUR PLAY STYLE IS NOT THE ONLY VALID PLAY STYLE!

You keep arguing from a position that only you can be right about this (and other things) and if someone is doing it differently then they are wrong and not playing the game right.

People who play differently from you are not wrong, between the last quote and this one you seem to have a very limited view on how people should play wizards. Just because you have an opinion on the matter doesn't mean someone else or myself are wrong.

Sure some people may like to optimize but not all of us like to optimize. Not all of us goes full-tippy every time we play D&D.

To the other point... The game doesn't break because of the powerful classes. They can keep up with the game and then go beyond it... Just like hero's in fantasy stories, eventually the heroes become too much for the bad guys to ever really win (though not always). Superman is a good example of this, dude just keeps on ticking and finds a way to always win. The game breaks when full base classes can't keep up with it. T4's can do one thing but can't do anything else and lower T's just can't do squat. When the name of the game is FUN, it helps to have the games mechanics work. Sure you can have fun with a fighter but the DM will have to be holding your hand a lot. Whoever heard of heroea that, even collectively, will never be a threat to the BBEGs? How can they be heroes if they can't do their job?

Higher tiers aren't the problem, lower tiers are.

da_chicken

2014-06-08, 10:28 AM

Higher tiers aren't the problem, lower tiers are.

I would disagree with that. I would say that all or nearly all classes should be Tier 3. A small number of classes could be near Tier 2 or low Tier 2, and a small number of classes could be near Tier 4 or high Tier 4, but all Tier 1, Tier 5, and Tier 6 classes are either outright design errors or simply not intended to be used by the player. In other words, Tier 3 should be the design goal. Tier 2 is going to happen sometimes, and Tier 4 is going to happen sometimes, but that should not be the norm.

SpawnOfMorbo

2014-06-08, 10:57 AM

I would disagree with that. I would say that all or nearly all classes should be Tier 3. A small number of classes could be near Tier 2 or low Tier 2, and a small number of classes could be near Tier 4 or high Tier 4, but all Tier 1, Tier 5, and Tier 6 classes are either outright design errors or simply not intended to be used by the player. In other words, Tier 3 should be the design goal. Tier 2 is going to happen sometimes, and Tier 4 is going to happen sometimes, but that should not be the norm.

For a balanced game? Yes all tier 3s would be great and I support this. The design goal should be tier 3.

What I meant was that within the system we have as 3.P, the problem isn't the higher tiers. The higher tiers aren't always optimized 100% and usually don't pose such a problem as they theoretically can. However the lower tiers (4-6) always pose a problem unless you optimize then out of their tier.

So if the goal is to have fun and, I would happen to guess, most people don't like to be super railroaded or have their hand held by the DM... Then the classes that break the game are always tier 4 and below and sometimes tier 1.

This isn't a law or anything just what I've seen over the years and will vary from group to group (and DM play styles).

You can choose to play a balanced (tier 3) wizard, you can't choose to play a balanced fighter. Even with optimization you end up tier 4 or using the fighter as a dip class. Thee is the intimidation route but I think you hit tier 4 with that too (low 3?) and you are less of a fighter and more of an intimidate skill check. Going gown a tier is easier than going up a tier.

Well I guess you can play the Warblade or Crusader but then people will call it BESM (Big Eyes Small Mouth... An anime 3.5 3rd party rule book).

Note: I'm probably explaining this wrong, I do apologize for that.

captpike

2014-06-08, 11:48 AM

What I'm trying to say is... YOUR PLAY STYLE IS NOT THE ONLY VALID PLAY STYLE!

You keep arguing from a position that only you can be right about this (and other things) and if someone is doing it differently then they are wrong and not playing the game right.

People who play differently from you are not wrong, between the last quote and this one you seem to have a very limited view on how people should play wizards. Just because you have an opinion on the matter doesn't mean someone else or myself are wrong.

Sure some people may like to optimize but not all of us like to optimize. Not all of us goes full-tippy every time we play D&D.

To the other point... The game doesn't break because of the powerful classes. They can keep up with the game and then go beyond it... Just like hero's in fantasy stories, eventually the heroes become too much for the bad guys to ever really win (though not always). Superman is a good example of this, dude just keeps on ticking and finds a way to always win. The game breaks when full base classes can't keep up with it. T4's can do one thing but can't do anything else and lower T's just can't do squat. When the name of the game is FUN, it helps to have the games mechanics work. Sure you can have fun with a fighter but the DM will have to be holding your hand a lot. Whoever heard of heroea that, even collectively, will never be a threat to the BBEGs? How can they be heroes if they can't do their job?

Higher tiers aren't the problem, lower tiers are.

why do you keep doing that? you ignored the first things I wrote. literally the first things I said was

its a valid and even encouraged way to play, and doing so breaks the game.
that is the problem. even if only 1 in 10 plays that way its still a problem (and I would peg it much much higher then that)

I never even hinted that the way I said I play is the only valid way to play.

---
the problem at high tiers, at high levels is that the game is no longer a game with combat rounds and tactics. its a game of rocket tag. its a game of who loses to the save-or-die spell first. its a game of scry-and-die tactics.

da_chicken

2014-06-08, 01:02 PM

Pink

2014-06-08, 01:43 PM

For a balanced game? Yes all tier 3s would be great and I support this. The design goal should be tier 3.

What I meant was that within the system we have as 3.P, the problem isn't the higher tiers. The higher tiers aren't always optimized 100% and usually don't pose such a problem as they theoretically can. However the lower tiers (4-6) always pose a problem unless you optimize then out of their tier.

So if the goal is to have fun and, I would happen to guess, most people don't like to be super railroaded or have their hand held by the DM... Then the classes that break the game are always tier 4 and below and sometimes tier 1.

This isn't a law or anything just what I've seen over the years and will vary from group to group (and DM play styles).

You can choose to play a balanced (tier 3) wizard, you can't choose to play a balanced fighter. Even with optimization you end up tier 4 or using the fighter as a dip class. Thee is the intimidation route but I think you hit tier 4 with that too (low 3?) and you are less of a fighter and more of an intimidate skill check. Going gown a tier is easier than going up a tier.

Well I guess you can play the Warblade or Crusader but then people will call it BESM (Big Eyes Small Mouth... An anime 3.5 3rd party rule book).

Note: I'm probably explaining this wrong, I do apologize for that.

Not that I disagree with you, but I think that you might be missing something. In the same way that, in reality, T1s are not usually played to their optimal levels, there exists a way that lower tiers are uplifted. The fighter for example. It's tier limited because it really can't to anything but fight, an there can be better options. However, a number of magical buffs exist in the forms of magical items to make them better at that role and. T1s who use their ability to buff the lower tiers can create a method of play where the unfairness of the tiers is virtually unseen.
While yes, the wizard coul probably dominate combat from the start, I believe the average player looks at the numbers on paper "Gee, my HP and AC are pretty low" and decide to buff that fighter with the superior HP an AC who wants to get up in the monster's face and distract them so the wizard is safe and can cast other things. Get fly on the fighter, displacement, let them go ahead and stick to the enemies, and everyone is having fun doing the thing their character is meant to do. Wizard casting game-changing spells, fighter smashing things.

However, at the same time, some are particularly immune to this effect. The rogue for example, fewer spells exist as buffs the wizard can cast, more spells are instead ways of doing the rogue's job outright, but better. Knock, invisibility, silence, divination. They just outright cut some of what the rogue should be doing, leaving it with only sub-par combat capabilities. So, your point still stands with some classes, but with others the 'actual game' stance is usually those T1s helping out their less fortunate classes. Though of course this might be an overly sheltered play experience of mine.

Lokiare

2014-06-08, 03:17 PM

What I'm trying to say is... YOUR PLAY STYLE IS NOT THE ONLY VALID PLAY STYLE!

You keep arguing from a position that only you can be right about this (and other things) and if someone is doing it differently then they are wrong and not playing the game right.

People who play differently from you are not wrong, between the last quote and this one you seem to have a very limited view on how people should play wizards. Just because you have an opinion on the matter doesn't mean someone else or myself are wrong.

Sure some people may like to optimize but not all of us like to optimize. Not all of us goes full-tippy every time we play D&D.

To the other point... The game doesn't break because of the powerful classes. They can keep up with the game and then go beyond it... Just like hero's in fantasy stories, eventually the heroes become too much for the bad guys to ever really win (though not always). Superman is a good example of this, dude just keeps on ticking and finds a way to always win. The game breaks when full base classes can't keep up with it. T4's can do one thing but can't do anything else and lower T's just can't do squat. When the name of the game is FUN, it helps to have the games mechanics work. Sure you can have fun with a fighter but the DM will have to be holding your hand a lot. Whoever heard of heroea that, even collectively, will never be a threat to the BBEGs? How can they be heroes if they can't do their job?

Higher tiers aren't the problem, lower tiers are.

The problem is if the play style isn't supported WotC is losing a huge chunk of customers. If any play style isn't supported WotC is going to pay for it in lost revenue and they can't afford that. So they should support all play styles. They should make a balanced game, then have a module or two in the DMG filled with all the broken spells and options to play a 3.5E style game. They chose not to do that, so they are going to lose customers. I recently played the latest play test with a few members of my regular group. We quit after the second battle because we just didn't like the swingy rocket tag play style.

SpawnOfMorbo

2014-06-08, 03:45 PM

The problem is if the play style isn't supported WotC is losing a huge chunk of customers. If any play style isn't supported WotC is going to pay for it in lost revenue and they can't afford that. So they should support all play styles. They should make a balanced game, then have a module or two in the DMG filled with all the broken spells and options to play a 3.5E style game. They chose not to do that, so they are going to lose customers. I recently played the latest play test with a few members of my regular group. We quit after the second battle because we just didn't like the swingy rocket tag play style.

Yes a game should be flexible, however captpike kept suggesting that his play style is the only play style. If you can n't play his style then you are wrong.

A larger group of D&D players don't super optimize though, I know it seems like they all do because of these forums... But the ones on forums are a minority.

I'm all for a balanced game, I tend to run 3.5 with Bard + ToB + MoI + Binder + Warmage/Beguiler/Dread Necromancer.

But I do love playing a high optimized tier 1 PC from time to time. Perhaps not rocket tag but high op black op type teams. Something you can't really do with lower tiers (4 - 6).

But just because others don't play my way doesn't mean they are scrwwing up the game or doing it wrong.

I wasn't saying his play style shouldn't be supported just that it wasn't the ONLY play style out there.

Lokiare

2014-06-08, 04:18 PM

Yes a game should be flexible, however captpike kept suggesting that his play style is the only play style. If you can n't play his style then you are wrong.

A larger group of D&D players don't super optimize though, I know it seems like they all do because of these forums... But the ones on forums are a minority.

I'm all for a balanced game, I tend to run 3.5 with Bard + ToB + MoI + Binder + Warmage/Beguiler/Dread Necromancer.

But I do love playing a high optimized tier 1 PC from time to time. Perhaps not rocket tag but high op black op type teams. Something you can't really do with lower tiers (4 - 6).

But just because others don't play my way doesn't mean they are scrwwing up the game or doing it wrong.

I wasn't saying his play style shouldn't be supported just that it wasn't the ONLY play style out there.

I didn't get that out of their posts. I got that they aren't including their group so why should they pay for 5E. Which is my stance on it. 5E might be an awesome rectroclone for a fantasy vietnam style game, but that matters to me why? I'm looking for a tactical game with roleplaying weaved in. It wouldn't be so bad if WotC would just admit they made a fantasy vietnam retroclone and quit trying to convince people its a game for every play style. They might get somewhere.

nyjastul69

2014-06-08, 04:51 PM

captpike

2014-06-08, 06:49 PM

Yes a game should be flexible, however captpike kept suggesting that his play style is the only play style. If you can n't play his style then you are wrong.

please either read correctly or stop blatantly lying about what I said.

my last two posts have said this:

its a valid and even encouraged way to play, and doing so breaks the game.
that is the problem. even if only 1 in 10 plays that way its still a problem (and I would peg it much much higher then that)

the post before that said

even if that were the case it would not matter. having a system that breaks if used correctly is a bad idea, even if they make it hard to use correctly.

the one before that said:

even if your numbers are correct the game breaking for 30% of all T1 characters simply by playing in the most logical their players know is not acceptable.

captpike

2014-06-08, 07:06 PM

What is a 'fantasy Vietnam retroclone' ? I've never heard that term before.

"fantasy Vietnam" is a playstyle wherein the first to go wins, or the first to hit wins. there is no puzzle, no tactics totally out of the PCs control.

SpawnOfMorbo

2014-06-08, 08:29 PM

I didn't get that out of their posts. I got that they aren't including their group so why should they pay for 5E. Which is my stance on it. 5E might be an awesome rectroclone for a fantasy vietnam style game, but that matters to me why? I'm looking for a tactical game with roleplaying weaved in. It wouldn't be so bad if WotC would just admit they made a fantasy vietnam retroclone and quit trying to convince people its a game for every play style. They might get somewhere.

Well I want to add first off that roleplaying or fluff has nothing to do with mechanics. Just like 4e didn't take the roleplaying out of the game, neither will this edition.

I don't think they made a fantasy Vietnam game. So far what it seems to me is they made a base system that you could throw a system wide template on top of. If that makes any sense... This is a hunch but please bare with me...

Essentially you have the guts of the system "D&D Basic". And if you want a more tactical game you can use the tactics/4e rules in the DMG. If you want a more rocket tag game then you can add the 3.5 rules in the DMG. If you want a more low scaled game then use the 2e rules from the DMG. Right now the rules that we have seen so far seem like they could easily have templates applied to them for broad general sweeping rule changes.

Rocket tag D&D would have rules to make the game even more like 3.5. More spells and abilities that ups your damage and let's you splatter things. This would have general rules like... Add X number of spell slots to each spell casting class per spell level.

Tactics D&D would have rules to make the game more like 4e. More conditions and abilities that will allow you to work in a team. Perhaps rules for AoO, different flanking rules, terrain rules. All of these interact with your characters.

Then perhaps rules to make you a Christmas tree if you like?

Kinda like a DM could say that they are using: Base Rules (everyone uses) + optional rule package 1 + optional rule package 3. Roll up a character using option character creation rules number 1.

Although these rules packets should be in the PHB and some in the DMG...

If you set the game up like this then you really could play whatever type of game you wanted. Sadly I don't actually think WotC thought of this. *

Edit: But seems like they did... Totally being way to optimistic right now.

da_chicken

2014-06-08, 08:37 PM

captpike

2014-06-08, 09:00 PM

Envyus

2014-06-09, 04:36 AM

there comes a point when it stops being incorrect marketing, and starts being outright lying.

they are saying its a "game for everyone" it is not, from the looks of it they have put Zero effort into making such a game.

if they call a spade a spade, then I may not buy it because I don't like spades but that's it. when they call a diamond a spade then I buy it because I love diamonds then its different. they outright lied to me about what I payed money for.

You have not payed for it and you have yet to open the box to see what it actually is.

Also of course not everyone will enjoy it there is always a few people that dislike or like something no matter what it's quality is. In our form they are called Lokiare and Captpike with their unchanging pessimistic and until the game comes out incorrect views.

captpike

2014-06-09, 01:21 PM

You have not payed for it and you have yet to open the box to see what it actually is.

Also of course not everyone will enjoy it there is always a few people that dislike or like something no matter what it's quality is. In our form they are called Lokiare and Captpike with their unchanging pessimistic and until the game comes out incorrect views.

your acting like we have no knowledge whatsoever about the game, we do. we have the playtests, we have intervies. we have enough to see the trends of the game, and what they are trying to do with it.

both I and Lokiare have laid out the logical reasons we have not to trust Wotc, how it makes no sense to trust someone who has lied repeatedly to your face.

Felhammer

2014-06-09, 03:49 PM

your acting like we have no knowledge whatsoever about the game, we do. we have the playtests, we have intervies. we have enough to see the trends of the game, and what they are trying to do with it.

both I and Lokiare have laid out the logical reasons we have not to trust Wotc, how it makes no sense to trust someone who has lied repeatedly to your face.

You do not like the game, we get that. The game is not for you, we understand. All we have been saying is that, collectively, we do not have all the facts. We do not know what the final product will look like. We do not know if the play tests were legitimate versions of the game, or whether WotC just cranked the dials up and down to test certain features. We do not know what the optional add on features will be. :smallsmile:

Why bother coming here to debate if you have an unchanging stance? You, me and everyone else here are 100% powerless to change WotC's course of action. The books have been sent to the printers (or soon will be). All we can do is wait and see what they give us.

captpike

2014-06-09, 03:54 PM

You do not like the game, we get that. The game is not for you, we understand. All we have been saying is that, collectively, we do not have all the facts. We do not know what the final product will look like. We do not know if the play tests were legitimate versions of the game, or whether WotC just cranked the dials up and down to test certain features. We do not know what the optional add on features will be. :smallsmile:

Why bother coming here to debate if you have an unchanging stance? You, me and everyone else here are 100% powerless to change WotC's course of action. The books have been sent to the printers (or soon will be). All we can do is wait and see what they give us.

its possible they could put the game out in a way I would like. its not likely but it is possible.

also keep in mind I post about problems more then anything else because posting "X feature is awesome" is rarely helpful or interesting to anyone

obryn

2014-06-09, 03:59 PM

also keep in mind I post about problems more then anything else because posting "X feature is awesome" is rarely helpful or interesting to anyone
Sure it is.

Even as someone who's completely uninterested in switching my game over to Next, I know I'd rather read posts from people who are excited about something than I would posts from people grousing.

Pink

2014-06-09, 04:13 PM

Sure it is.

Even as someone who's completely uninterested in switching my game over to Next, I know I'd rather read posts from people who are excited about something than I would posts from people grousing.

Ah, well then let me say, as somebody who hasn't paid much attention but with the release soon as hand I'm slightly undetermined in my buying, I find posts from all, especially those who have heavy criticisms with solid reason, to be of value in determining if this is a product I should be excited about, or to manage my expectations. If there are major issues in not delivering on what has been promised, I am certainly going to approach it much more carefully especially when it comes time to choose whether to lay down money or not, and I appreciate the posts of the critical crowd. Just because it is a new product, does not mean we should turn all threads into ''excitement and praise and optimism" threads, if there is real concerns that the product may not meet the expectations. At least these folks have taken the time and concern of following the playtest material to determine their general opinion instead of just advocating soemthing like "Not changing because X edition is the best ever" which would be truly counter productive.

Felhammer

2014-06-09, 04:48 PM

Ah, well then let me say, as somebody who hasn't paid much attention but with the release soon as hand I'm slightly undetermined in my buying, I find posts from all, especially those who have heavy criticisms with solid reason, to be of value in determining if this is a product I should be excited about, or to manage my expectations. If there are major issues in not delivering on what has been promised, I am certainly going to approach it much more carefully especially when it comes time to choose whether to lay down money or not, and I appreciate the posts of the critical crowd. Just because it is a new product, does not mean we should turn all threads into ''excitement and praise and optimism" threads, if there is real concerns that the product may not meet the expectations. At least these folks have taken the time and concern of following the playtest material to determine their general opinion instead of just advocating soemthing like "Not changing because X edition is the best ever" which would be truly counter productive.

If the game had been released, your viewpoint would have more validity since we would be discussing real rules and not some facsimile cobbled together from wildly different playtest packets and less than specific grand concepts stated by the folks at WotC.

da_chicken

2014-06-09, 05:18 PM

If the game had been released, your viewpoint would have more validity since we would be discussing real rules and not some facsimile cobbled together from wildly different playtest packets and less than specific grand concepts stated by the folks at WotC.

I completely disagree. It's absolutely reasonable to assert that the final game is going to look more like the playtest than any other edition of the game. Thus, if you want to get an idea of what the final game will look like, looking at the playtest and seeing where people have issues is absolutely valid. Certainly you would hope that the issues raised have all been addressed in the final game, but now you will know what to look for.

It's like when 3.5e got released: "Oh, did they fix Bards? Well, more skill points and armored casting, so that looks better. Did they fix CoD? No, not really. DCs are slightly lower, harm isn't completely stupid, and haste isn't an 8th level spell you cast at level 5. How about Fighter? Holy God, they didn't do anything with Fighter. Wait, all they really did was move Ranger and Paladin abilities down the table. That doesn't fix multiclassing at all!"

SpawnOfMorbo

2014-06-09, 09:41 PM

Felhammer

2014-06-10, 01:09 AM

I completely disagree. It's absolutely reasonable to assert that the final game is going to look more like the playtest than any other edition of the game. Thus, if you want to get an idea of what the final game will look like, looking at the playtest and seeing where people have issues is absolutely valid. Certainly you would hope that the issues raised have all been addressed in the final game, but now you will know what to look for.

It's like when 3.5e got released: "Oh, did they fix Bards? Well, more skill points and armored casting, so that looks better. Did they fix CoD? No, not really. DCs are slightly lower, harm isn't completely stupid, and haste isn't an 8th level spell you cast at level 5. How about Fighter? Holy God, they didn't do anything with Fighter. Wait, all they really did was move Ranger and Paladin abilities down the table. That doesn't fix multiclassing at all!"

Except the packets have all had very different styles. Dials were being turned and we do not know where those dials wound up, nor do we know how much or how little WotC was withholding from the packets in terms of content. We know they showed us little, if any, of the variant rules that will be released in the DMG. Who knows how those will affect the game. They could easily turn someone from not liking the game to a big fan. This is the edition that supports and encourages the idea of every DM making the game their own (to an extent that was definitely not present in 4E).

You can easily compare 3.5 and 3.0 because they are two finished products. The packets were ever evolving and rarely static (as a whole). It is vastly more difficult to compare a moving target to an unreleased static one.

Here's the real danger in dissecting the packets - they are full of lies. We were never once presented with the real game, or even a version of it. They deliberately twisted things to get us to test the ideas they wanted tested. The Playtest was never a Beta, it was just a collection of rules that emphasized different aspects of the potential game at different points in development. They willfully withheld key information and rules so as to not give everything to the masses free of charge.

Here is what you should glean from the packets - the game will feel old school. How old school? We do not know but if you do not like that style of game, then you will have to wait until the DMG drops to see how many tools WotC is going to give you in order to alter the core game and make it better suit your preferences.

That's really all we know for a fact. Everything else is up in the air.

We could get a game that is basically just the last packet OR we could get something that looks and feels nothing like the last packet. We have zero concrete information. We will not know for sure until the starter set is released next month.

Even then, we will still have to wait another month for the PHB to be released and another two months before we have the whole game. It will then be several months after that - once everything has been played with together for a long while - before we will know for a fact that this edition will be good, bad or in between.

Knaight

2014-06-10, 01:15 AM

Except the packets have all had very different styles. Dials were being turned and we do not know where those dials wound up, nor do we know how much or how little WotC was withholding from the packets in terms of content. We know they showed us little, if any, of the variant rules that will be released in the DMG. Who knows how those will affect the game. They could easily turn someone from not liking the game to a big fan. This is the edition that supports and encourages the idea of every DM making the game their own (to an extent that was definitely not present in 4E).
I wouldn't call them very different. They've been playing around with parts of the game individually, but there are some very obvious trends in all of the packets. All of them moved to increase the importance of attributes, all of them took a chunk out of skills, all of them emphasize relatively simple classes and some unification of rules (e.g. the whole easy to hard scale instead of skills having difficulties listed for specifics), all of them kept a huge amount of the sacred cows, etc.

We have a pretty solid idea of what the game is going to be. Some of us don't particularly like it - in some cases because D&D just isn't for us (I don't like classes, I don't like levels, I don't like dungeons, of course I won't like the finished product; I might still poach mechanics if they're worth something), in some cases because 4e is preferred (Lokaire and Captpike fit in this category) and it's obvious that 5e is turning away from it. I do think it's too early to call it bad in general, but enough facts are in to have a good feel for whether it's a good fit, at least for those of us for whom it clearly isn't.

there comes a point when it stops being incorrect marketing, and starts being outright lying.

It's marketing and sloganeering. Of course it's ridiculous - I wouldn't even call it a lie, as everyone knows this. It's no different from how just about every breakfast cereal has at least one grandiose health claim* to it, usually following some weaselly phrase like "studies have shown" without any reference to what studies conducted by whom. It's the same way beer commercials routinely portray beer as the single most important part of every party, where everyone remembers the drinking of the beer itself above everything, despite it not actually being magic. WotC says "a game for everyone", the cover art says "the world's best role-playing game". We all know what that actually means is "a game mostly for existing D&D players from all previous editions". After all, even if we assume that only RPG players are meant, "everyone" includes people who have no interest whatsoever in the entire fantasy genre. We also know that they have a very good reason to say "a game for everyone", as putting something more qualified out will outright undersell what gets through, as the blatant over exaggeration in essentially all marketing demonstrates.

Basically, we're operating in the realm of the hyperbolic. We all know that, and as such I wouldn't really call any of it lying. Deceptive, sure, but it's not like we're getting actual hard information (e.g. page count) which is just going to be wrong.

*Including the likes of Fruit Loops and Cocoa Puffs, which are glorified candy.

Lokiare

2014-06-10, 06:56 AM

What is a 'fantasy Vietnam retroclone' ? I've never heard that term before.

Its a game where the outcome is not based on player decisions, it is based almost entirely on the random roll of the dice and the fiat of the DM. Some people enjoy that kind of game. The same kind of people with gambling problems I suspect. For a lot of us though, we would rather player choice play more of a roll than the random dice.

Well I want to add first off that roleplaying or fluff has nothing to do with mechanics. Just like 4e didn't take the roleplaying out of the game, neither will this edition.

I don't think they made a fantasy Vietnam game. So far what it seems to me is they made a base system that you could throw a system wide template on top of. If that makes any sense... This is a hunch but please bare with me...

Essentially you have the guts of the system "D&D Basic". And if you want a more tactical game you can use the tactics/4e rules in the DMG. If you want a more rocket tag game then you can add the 3.5 rules in the DMG. If you want a more low scaled game then use the 2e rules from the DMG. Right now the rules that we have seen so far seem like they could easily have templates applied to them for broad general sweeping rule changes.

Rocket tag D&D would have rules to make the game even more like 3.5. More spells and abilities that ups your damage and let's you splatter things. This would have general rules like... Add X number of spell slots to each spell casting class per spell level.

Tactics D&D would have rules to make the game more like 4e. More conditions and abilities that will allow you to work in a team. Perhaps rules for AoO, different flanking rules, terrain rules. All of these interact with your characters.

Then perhaps rules to make you a Christmas tree if you like?

Kinda like a DM could say that they are using: Base Rules (everyone uses) + optional rule package 1 + optional rule package 3. Roll up a character using option character creation rules number 1.

Although these rules packets should be in the PHB and some in the DMG...

If you set the game up like this then you really could play whatever type of game you wanted. Sadly I don't actually think WotC thought of this. *

Edit: But seems like they did... Totally being way to optimistic right now.

The major problem with this idea is that you literally can't layer any kind of 4E style game on top of the 'basic rules' that they've shown us. You would literally have to change half the rules just to get any kind of 'player choices determine outcomes'

So you're just upset/frustrated/whatever that D&D 5e isn't marketed properly?

No, we are upset/frustrated/whatever that WotC keeps claiming one thing while showing us something entirely different. Its the same behavior that prevented me from buying a lot of their products that I would have otherwise bought (monthly books, DDi subscriptions, etc...etc...)

Except the packets have all had very different styles. Dials were being turned and we do not know where those dials wound up, nor do we know how much or how little WotC was withholding from the packets in terms of content. We know they showed us little, if any, of the variant rules that will be released in the DMG. Who knows how those will affect the game. They could easily turn someone from not liking the game to a big fan. This is the edition that supports and encourages the idea of every DM making the game their own (to an extent that was definitely not present in 4E).

You can easily compare 3.5 and 3.0 because they are two finished products. The packets were ever evolving and rarely static (as a whole). It is vastly more difficult to compare a moving target to an unreleased static one.

Here's the real danger in dissecting the packets - they are full of lies. We were never once presented with the real game, or even a version of it. They deliberately twisted things to get us to test the ideas they wanted tested. The Playtest was never a Beta, it was just a collection of rules that emphasized different aspects of the potential game at different points in development. They willfully withheld key information and rules so as to not give everything to the masses free of charge.

Here is what you should glean from the packets - the game will feel old school. How old school? We do not know but if you do not like that style of game, then you will have to wait until the DMG drops to see how many tools WotC is going to give you in order to alter the core game and make it better suit your preferences.

That's really all we know for a fact. Everything else is up in the air.

We could get a game that is basically just the last packet OR we could get something that looks and feels nothing like the last packet. We have zero concrete information. We will not know for sure until the starter set is released next month.

Even then, we will still have to wait another month for the PHB to be released and another two months before we have the whole game. It will then be several months after that - once everything has been played with together for a long while - before we will know for a fact that this edition will be good, bad or in between.

They flat out said in their articles after the play test was done that the game wouldn't change a lot, they would fiddle with the numbers a little, (they called it fine tuning) and add a few missing classes, but that there wouldn't be any grand vast changes. That indicates to me that the game will be very similar to the play test packets and therefore based less on player choices and more on DM fiat and random dice rolls, which is exactly the type of fun I do not like (Even though I'm lucky enough to roll one 20 out of 5 rolls on a D20 most of the time).

pwykersotz

2014-06-10, 07:10 AM

They flat out said in their articles after the play test was done that the game wouldn't change a lot, they would fiddle with the numbers a little, (they called it fine tuning) and add a few missing classes, but that there wouldn't be any grand vast changes. That indicates to me that the game will be very similar to the play test packets and therefore based less on player choices and more on DM fiat and random dice rolls, which is exactly the type of fun I do not like (Even though I'm lucky enough to roll one 20 out of 5 rolls on a D20 most of the time).

But as we know, WotC lies to us.

Lokiare

2014-06-10, 07:20 AM

But as we know, WotC lies to us.

Yes, but which statements are lies and which aren't?

SpawnOfMorbo

2014-06-10, 07:45 AM

Yes, but which statements are lies and which aren't?

Take the @&%#+! blue pill and find out! :smalltongue:

1337 b4k4

2014-06-10, 07:57 AM

Its a game where the outcome is not based on player decisions, it is based almost entirely on the random roll of the dice and the fiat of the DM. Some people enjoy that kind of game. The same kind of people with gambling problems I suspect.

In case you're still wondering why everyone things your a negative troll, you should take this to be exhibit A. You are rudely dismissive (to the point of being insulting) of every person who's opinions or preferences differ from yours. You have no cause or reason to assume that the people who prefer a more "swingy" game have a gambling problem any more than I would have reason to assume that people who prefer your style of game have "wish fulfillment issues". If you want people to stop thinking you're a troll, you should stop insulting them.

Millennium

2014-06-10, 12:11 PM

Its a game where the outcome is not based on player decisions, it is based almost entirely on the random roll of the dice and the fiat of the DM. Some people enjoy that kind of game. The same kind of people with gambling problems I suspect. For a lot of us though, we would rather player choice play more of a roll than the random dice.
And this, my friend, is where you are wrong. Outcomes are still based on player decisions: it just shifts the importance to decisions you make at the time the event happens, rather than decisions you made when you created your character. Which is, frankly, where the importance belongs: in the moment, not in the build.

SpawnOfMorbo

2014-06-10, 12:51 PM

And this, my friend, is where you are wrong. Outcomes are still based on player decisions: it just shifts the importance to decisions you make at the time the event happens, rather than decisions you made when you created your character. Which is, frankly, where the importance belongs: in the moment, not in the build.

I can't agree with that.

That is like saying in my life it doesn't matter what I study or do the outcome will always fall to luck or fate.

When I build a character to reflect a certain type of hero, they better be able to change results based on the build rather than if the moment is right or not.

Felhammer

2014-06-10, 01:03 PM

I can't agree with that.

That is like saying in my life it doesn't matter what I study or do the outcome will always fall to luck or fate.

When I build a character to reflect a certain type of hero, they better be able to change results based on the build rather than if the moment is right or not.

But how much should cherry picking 2 levels of Brokenmancer and taking obscure but broken feats 1, 2 and 3 really be?

captpike

2014-06-10, 01:15 PM

But how much should cherry picking 2 levels of Brokenmancer and taking obscure but broken feats 1, 2 and 3 really be?

your talking like its not possible to have a PC decision based game without it breaking.

SpawnOfMorbo

2014-06-10, 01:24 PM

But how much should cherry picking 2 levels of Brokenmancer and taking obscure but broken feats 1, 2 and 3 really be?

Make a balanced game and you don't have these problems. Atop treating magic like Scion and non-magical like Lord of the Rings and we can get somewhere.

Make Ex ability actually extraordinary and not crap?

Felhammer

2014-06-10, 02:21 PM

Make a balanced game and you don't have these problems. Atop treating magic like Scion and non-magical like Lord of the Rings and we can get somewhere.

Make Ex ability actually extraordinary and not crap?

Make a balanced game you say?

Balance is relative. What one person calls balanced, another calls homogenized. What one person called broken, another calls tactical.

There is no middle ground to be had if you are going to a) keep scared cows, b) play to nostalgia, c) not re-invent the wheel.

The best you can do is make a fun game that tries to be as accessible and modifiable as possible, that way it appeals to a large audience and can be changed to suit the needs of different mentalities/playstyles/outlooks.

your talking like its not possible to have a PC decision based game without it breaking.

If we are going to use the flawed premise that swingy=no player choice matters, then obviously pre-planning characters=broken.

captpike

2014-06-10, 02:26 PM

Make a balanced game you say?

Balance is relative. What one person calls balanced, another calls homogenized. What one person called broken, another calls tactical.

given that balanced and homogenized are in fact unrelated, I don't see your point.

and of course you cant have a tactical game that is broken and vice versa. it would be like saying that "that circle is too square"

There is no middle ground to be had if you are going to a) keep scared cows, b) play to nostalgia, c) not re-invent the wheel.

given that A and B are utterly worthless when making a game, I don't see your point.

SpawnOfMorbo

2014-06-10, 02:49 PM

Make a balanced game you say?

Balance is relative. What one person calls balanced, another calls homogenized. What one person called broken, another calls tactical.

There is no middle ground to be had if you are going to a) keep scared cows, b) play to nostalgia, c) not re-invent the wheel.

The best you can do is make a fun game that tries to be as accessible and modifiable as possible, that way it appeals to a large audience and can be changed to suit the needs of different mentalities/playstyles/outlooks.

If we are going to use the flawed premise that swingy=no player choice matters, then obviously pre-planning characters=broken.

So a tier 3 game in 3.5 D&D isn't baanced balanced? A game of all tier 1 classes isn't balanced?

You can have a swingy game or a tactical game or whatever kind of game you want. But it can still be balanced.

Put everyone on the same playing field and then make the game however you want. Sadly a lot of people don't want everything on the same playing field.

You can have bad options in a game, that doesn't make it unbalanced. However trap options are terrible for game creation. When you give X group all good options as a base (with the ability to pick up good or bad options) and group Y mostly bad options as a base (with the chance to pick up bad or decent options) then you will have an unbalanced game.

Felhammer

2014-06-10, 03:03 PM

given that balanced and homogenized are in fact unrelated, I don't see your point.

and of course you cant have a tactical game that is broken and vice versa. it would be like saying that "that circle is too square"

4E was balanced. It achieved that balance by homogenizing the player experience. That is the easy to to achieve balance. To achieve balance without homogenizing requires more thought, more planning, more testing and makes assumptions about play style.

Vancian casting is balanced relative to the assumption that wizards do not go nova and parties do not stop to rest when the wizard/cleric runs out of spells. However, most groups do not play that way, when the caster runs out of his spells (or even more commonly when the caster runs out of high level spells). That makes classes whose Schitck is to "keep going all day long" like the Fighter even more weak since the party never experiences the "weak caster" part of the day (i.e. when the Fighter should be the one who shines).

Broken is relative to the style of game being played. If you are fighting hordes of orcs, then a fireball sling wizard is amazing. That same wizard would be terrible in a court intrigue campaign. Some people see broken as anything that makes the current adventure/scenario too easy. A designer cannot anticipate such things.

given that A and B are utterly worthless when making a game, I don't see your point.

If we were designing a new game, sure. However this is D&D. Not just D&D but the edition that is supposed to appeal to all fans. You cannot accomplish that if you do not retain sacred cows and use nostalgia as a tool. Otherwise, you wind up with 4E, a game that many claimed did not feel like D&D.

Felhammer

2014-06-10, 03:14 PM

So a tier 3 game in 3.5 D&D isn't baanced balanced? A game of all tier 1 classes isn't balanced?

You can have a swingy game or a tactical game or whatever kind of game you want. But it can still be balanced.

Put everyone on the same playing field and then make the game however you want. Sadly a lot of people don't want everything on the same playing field.

You can have bad options in a game, that doesn't make it unbalanced. However trap options are terrible for game creation. When you give X group all good options as a base (with the ability to pick up good or bad options) and group Y mostly bad options as a base (with the chance to pick up bad or decent options) then you will have an unbalanced game.

People complained about how Fighters in 4E were too magical, while Wizards were not magical enough. You have to manage expectations.

People say they want balance but at the same time they want the game to conform to their expectations, which makes designing D&D very difficult (which is something other games do not have a problem with since there aren't any expectations, sacred cows, traditions or etc.).

Trap options are much easier to avoid in a homogenized system since the difference between good and bad are much more readily apparent. It is much harder to divine if something will be good or bad in a game that uses wildly different sub-systems (which various designers will, invariably, have more or less experience with relative to other designers).

Millennium

2014-06-10, 03:23 PM

I can't agree with that.

That is like saying in my life it doesn't matter what I study or do the outcome will always fall to luck or fate.
You've got it entirely backwards. It is build-centric play that makes outcomes fall to luck or fate. All the meaningful choices are made at character creation or even beforehand, though some might not be able to be written down until the character gains a few levels. After that, if you've built your character so that the rolls don't matter (dare I say, so that The Dice Never Lie), then everything falls into preprogrammed routine. You could do away with the dice entirely, and run your adventures on a simple flowchart: if stat X is higher than number Y then go to page Z. You'd barely even need a DM.

Moment-centric play, where the important choices are made as things happen, gives the players actual agency. Sometimes things go wrong, yes, but you adapt: this is what humans (sentients, in a game world) are good at. Things don't always go according to plan, but that makes things more fun, not less.

captpike

2014-06-10, 03:42 PM

4E was balanced. It achieved that balance by homogenizing the player experience. That is the easy to to achieve balance. To achieve balance without homogenizing requires more thought, more planning, more testing and makes assumptions about play style.

you really should stop spreading this misinformation and lies, if anything 4e did the opposite. 3e had multiple classes that had feats as their only class features of note. multiple classes had the same spell lists.

there is no possible definition of "homogenized" the would apply to 4e but not 3e.

Vancian casting is balanced relative to the assumption that wizards do not go nova and parties do not stop to rest when the wizard/cleric runs out of spells. However, most groups do not play that way, when the caster runs out of his spells (or even more commonly when the caster runs out of high level spells). That makes classes whose Schitck is to "keep going all day long" like the Fighter even more weak since the party never experiences the "weak caster" part of the day (i.e. when the Fighter should be the one who shines).

Broken is relative to the style of game being played. If you are fighting hordes of orcs, then a fireball sling wizard is amazing. That same wizard would be terrible in a court intrigue campaign. Some people see broken as anything that makes the current adventure/scenario too easy. A designer cannot anticipate such things.

perfect balance is not possible of course, does not mean they should go the 3e route and just not try.

If we were designing a new game, sure. However this is D&D. Not just D&D but the edition that is supposed to appeal to all fans. You cannot accomplish that if you do not retain sacred cows and use nostalgia as a tool. Otherwise, you wind up with 4E, a game that many claimed did not feel like D&D.
they are, its called D&D 5e, not be confusted with D&D 4e, or 3e.
its a new edition if they are unwilling to chance such things then they have no reason to make a new edition

the bolded sentence is worthless, if your going to go to the trouble of writing a sentence please try and include some information in it.

SpawnOfMorbo

2014-06-10, 03:59 PM

People complained about how Fighters in 4E were too magical, while Wizards were not magical enough. You have to manage expectations.

People say they want balance but at the same time they want the game to conform to their expectations, which makes designing D&D very difficult (which is something other games do not have a problem with since there aren't any expectations, sacred cows, traditions or etc.).

Trap options are much easier to avoid in a homogenized system since the difference between good and bad are much more readily apparent. It is much harder to divine if something will be good or bad in a game that uses wildly different sub-systems (which various designers will, invariably, have more or less experience with relative to other designers).

Let them argue, people will argue about anything.

But if, for the sake of keeping people from arguing, you make the same mistakes and keep the same sacred cows around, then you will never truly make a new game and what you have is more of thee same stuff. You get nowhere that way.

That sacred cow I'm talking about is having fantasy non-casters conform to our reality instead of the reality within the game.

If they stop pushing for non-casters to work under our rules, and started explaining how Ex means EXTRAordinary then you won't have as much of a problem. Instead you have classes that gain ordinary abilities that are called Ex abilities and thus have a ceiling on the entire system.

This isn't just a class fix but a system fix.

A class fix gave us ToB, one of my favorite books. But it was a bandaid to the problem.

4e gave us balance by changing all the classes but kept the same principals. Hell 4e is mostly variant 3.5 rules from unearthed Arcana. But it was not a core system fix. Roll 1d20 and add modifier.

So stop trying to change the class and just change the system already. In a system that has Natural abilities, Extraordinary Abilities, and then Magic Abilities well defined you can start to change the culture problem with D&D and not get the problem you have with 4e.

Actually define the floor and ceiling for each type of ability. Then balance them.

Have a system where magic can be special but so can Ex. Give each type their limitations but be flexible with with their limitations.

And how about we don't make the system be Magic versus Ex but create them in tandem? Magic and Ex shouldn't cancel each other out but build upon each other. But use different systems to keep their individuality.

Natural ability: Strength Check. All creatures with a strength score can make a strength check. Roll 1d20 + strength modifier + misc to determine your strength check.

Magic: Strength Surge. When you cast this spell upon a creature their strength score is considered 6 higher when performing a Strength check or strength skill check. This last for 1 minute per CL.

Extraordinary: Feat of Strength: Whenever you roll for a strength check or strength skill check you multiply your level by your strength modifier and add it to your d20 roll (+misc).

Normal rules are kept as they are, magic gets to change things within physics, and ex gets to push and break the bonds of physics. So unless you have a way to be magical or Extraordinary then you play by the rules that physics/nature/reality within the game world says to.

1337 b4k4

2014-06-10, 04:00 PM

they are, its called D&D 5e, not be confusted with D&D 4e, or 3e.
its a new edition if they are unwilling to chance such things then they have no reason to make a new edition

New Edition != New Game and in fact, in most games it never does. It's extremely rare for a new version of a game to be a radical departure from the previous version. Improvements? Yes. Polishing the rough edges? Yes. But a completely new game (such as 3e to 4e to 5e) is extremely rare. It's also one of the things that hurt 4e. By taking a completely new game and calling it D&D, WotC essentially performed a bait and switch on their players. If they had instead released 4e as it's own game with it's own brand, it would have fared much better.

Felhammer

2014-06-10, 04:10 PM

you really should stop spreading this misinformation and lies, if anything 4e did the opposite. 3e had multiple classes that had feats as their only class features of note. multiple classes had the same spell lists.

there is no possible definition of "homogenized" the would apply to 4e but not 3e.

perfect balance is not possible of course, does not mean they should go the 3e route and just not try.

they are, its called D&D 5e, not be confusted with D&D 4e, or 3e.
its a new edition if they are unwilling to chance such things then they have no reason to make a new edition

I love 4E but there is no way you can say it did not homogenize the player experience. Pre-essentials, everyone used the AEUD system. Compared to that structure, 3.x was the wild west. We had classes that relied solely on feats and abilities to be special. Casters were divided into preparatory and spontaneous, the former had to decide which and how many spells to prepare each day, while the latter had access to a tiny list of known spells but could cast them all without preparation. On the preparatory side we also had ones that had a spellbook (i.e. their own special book of spells they have learned) and casters who had access to every spell on their spell list from every supplement ever released. Then, outside of core, we were given classes that only shot rays, classes that bridged the gap between preparatory and spontaneous, classes who channeled half-dead gods, classes who imbued magic items and etc. It was literally the wild west. Very little thought was given to these various sub-systems and how they were balanced against one another and how they played in game. Some were super powerful, others did not work past a certain level.

I am not advocating the idea that you need to dump balance. In fact, games work better when you have balance. The problem is dealing with the unrelenting weight of D&D's history relative to everyone's desire to balance the game. The car we use for balance will inevitably cheese some people off. The goal should be to find the most benign form of balance that a majority of consumers can agree on and embrace (then expect the variant rules to alter that bar up and down to suit different people's expectations).

the bolded sentence is worthless, if your going to go to the trouble of writing a sentence please try and include some information in it.

I am not going to re-hash 6 years of arguments. We should all know how the detractors of 4E felt and why they felt the way they did. It is a gut call based on emotion and expectation. They can be either right or wrong, it doesn't matter. What does matter is that the new edition of D&D has to appeal to those people in a way that feels familiar. That is what this edition is going to do in core (once you get into variant rules, it is anyone's guess as to what WotC will do).

captpike

2014-06-10, 04:29 PM

New Edition != New Game and in fact, in most games it never does. It's extremely rare for a new version of a game to be a radical departure from the previous version. Improvements? Yes. Polishing the rough edges? Yes. But a completely new game (such as 3e to 4e to 5e) is extremely rare. It's also one of the things that hurt 4e. By taking a completely new game and calling it D&D, WotC essentially performed a bait and switch on their players. If they had instead released 4e as it's own game with it's own brand, it would have fared much better.

your acting like 4e was not a wild success that topped the charts.

and yes 5e needs to be its own game, otherwise no one will care about it (see above post)

I love 4E but there is no way you can say it did not homogenize the player experience. Pre-essentials, everyone used the AEUD system. Compared to that structure, 3.x was the wild west. We had classes that relied solely on feats and abilities to be special. Casters were divided into preparatory and spontaneous, the former had to decide which and how many spells to prepare each day, while the latter had access to a tiny list of known spells but could cast them all without preparation. On the preparatory side we also had ones that had a spellbook (i.e. their own special book of spells they have learned) and casters who had access to every spell on their spell list from every supplement ever released. Then, outside of core, we were given classes that only shot rays, classes that bridged the gap between preparatory and spontaneous, classes who channeled half-dead gods, classes who imbued magic items and etc. It was literally the wild west. Very little thought was given to these various sub-systems and how they were balanced against one another and how they played in game. Some were super powerful, others did not work past a certain level.

I am not advocating the idea that you need to dump balance. In fact, games work better when you have balance. The problem is dealing with the unrelenting weight of D&D's history relative to everyone's desire to balance the game. The car we use for balance will inevitably cheese some people off. The goal should be to find the most benign form of balance that a majority of consumers can agree on and embrace (then expect the variant rules to alter that bar up and down to suit different people's expectations).

the AEUD system has nothing to do with homogenization one way or another.

your talking about the 3e way of doing things like it matters how you got a spell. it makes little difference how you got the spell on your sheet, only that you have it. feats do not make a class, nor do saying "you have the same spells as this other guy, but you learn them slightly different"

at first glance 4e classes look like they would play the same, but they don't. just as at first glance 3e classes look like they would play differently but in the end don't.

I am not going to re-hash 6 years of arguments. We should all know how the detractors of 4E felt and why they felt the way they did. It is a gut call based on emotion and expectation. They can be either right or wrong, it doesn't matter. What does matter is that the new edition of D&D has to appeal to those people in a way that feels familiar. That is what this edition is going to do in core (once you get into variant rules, it is anyone's guess as to what WotC will do).

the problem with the sentence was
1)"many claimed" could mean 2, could me a million. gives me no information

2)"did not feel like D&D." telling me your feeling is worthless, saying WHY you feel that way is not. "the fighters powers are to powerful" or "the scope of the wizard's powers is too small" is helpful.

Lokiare

2014-06-10, 07:33 PM

Take the @&%#+! blue pill and find out! :smalltongue:

I don't take candy from strangers, sorry... That blue pill could be a roofy and then there's not telling what is going to happen.

In case you're still wondering why everyone things your a negative troll, you should take this to be exhibit A. You are rudely dismissive (to the point of being insulting) of every person who's opinions or preferences differ from yours. You have no cause or reason to assume that the people who prefer a more "swingy" game have a gambling problem any more than I would have reason to assume that people who prefer your style of game have "wish fulfillment issues". If you want people to stop thinking you're a troll, you should stop insulting them.

I'm not being dismissive. The same things that fuel wild swingy rolls are the same things that fuel gambling addicts: http://www.calproblemgambling.org/why-do-some-people-have-gambling-problems

Here is a quote from the article:

Here are some of the reasons that people at risk of, or with a gambling problem gamble:

Hoping for a “big win” (at least 1 month’s salary)
Trying to win back lost money
Seeking the excitement of risk-taking
Impulsivity (acting without thinking in advance)
Trying to feel better about themselves
Escaping from loneliness, depression, anxiety and/or other unpleasant feelings
Hiding from life’s problems
Distraction from physical or emotional pain

Nearly all of those apply to people that like swingy rolls. They like the idea of getting that 20 on the d20 "big win". They think that the 'big win' of rolling that 20 will make up for 19 rolls that fail (mathematically that doesn't work). They seek excitement from the swingyness of the dice. They like to act impulsively without thinking. For example running and jumping over a chasm even if they have only a small chance to make it across. They don't stop to think that an alternate safer route would be more effective and less likely to end up with death from falling 100 feet. The last four are signs of wanting to play a fantasy game or seek entertainment (not all of them apply to every individual, but usually at least one does. You don't go to a movie because you want to feel the same way, you want to be impressed and not think about your life for 2 hours).

You've got it entirely backwards. It is build-centric play that makes outcomes fall to luck or fate. All the meaningful choices are made at character creation or even beforehand, though some might not be able to be written down until the character gains a few levels. After that, if you've built your character so that the rolls don't matter (dare I say, so that The Dice Never Lie), then everything falls into preprogrammed routine. You could do away with the dice entirely, and run your adventures on a simple flowchart: if stat X is higher than number Y then go to page Z. You'd barely even need a DM.

Moment-centric play, where the important choices are made as things happen, gives the players actual agency. Sometimes things go wrong, yes, but you adapt: this is what humans (sentients, in a game world) are good at. Things don't always go according to plan, but that makes things more fun, not less.

That only works if the players build toward not rolling dice or where the dice don't matter. I've made a few of those in 4E (Lite, my female NPC cleric built like a character that heals the party when they miss and is built to miss 90% of the time. Every power basically had a 'miss' line or an 'effect' line and they had a feat to heal on a miss.) however there are also crit-fisher builds that rely on getting critical hits to have 3-5 effects trigger. So when they crit 5% of the time they make up for the other 95%.

I love 4E but there is no way you can say it did not homogenize the player experience. Pre-essentials, everyone used the AEUD system. Compared to that structure, 3.x was the wild west. We had classes that relied solely on feats and abilities to be special. Casters were divided into preparatory and spontaneous, the former had to decide which and how many spells to prepare each day, while the latter had access to a tiny list of known spells but could cast them all without preparation. On the preparatory side we also had ones that had a spellbook (i.e. their own special book of spells they have learned) and casters who had access to every spell on their spell list from every supplement ever released. Then, outside of core, we were given classes that only shot rays, classes that bridged the gap between preparatory and spontaneous, classes who channeled half-dead gods, classes who imbued magic items and etc. It was literally the wild west. Very little thought was given to these various sub-systems and how they were balanced against one another and how they played in game. Some were super powerful, others did not work past a certain level.

It homogenized character creation, it did not homogenize the player experience. We've gone over this a million times. Fighters play differently than Wizards who play differently than Rogues who play differently than Warlocks, etc...etc... This meme is propagate by people that either didn't play the game and read it on some website or another or didn't follow the game's RAW. Now there are plenty of legitimate gripes about 4E but homogenization is not one of them. For instance if you were to say that you didn't like how on level up everyone picked the same kind of power, that would be a legitimate gripe, but that is only in character creation and management, that is not in play. You could even say you don't think its believable that non-casters have powers they can use only once per encounter or once per day. That's a legitimate gripe. You may even mean one of those when you say the game was 'homogenized', but what you say and what you mean aren't matching up and its not helpful to miscommunicate about things like that.

Just a few examples:

Fighters had to use weapons with their powers and the powers range and damage was defined by the weapon. They also only did physical damage. They also had daily powers that could be used over and over until they successfully hit with them. They mainly dealt conditions like daze and stun. Most of their powers were single target powers.

Wizards on the other hand had powers that specified their ranges and damage and each one was different. They also dealt elemental damage of various types as well as psychic damage. They had daily powers that had lesser effects on a miss or that were sustainable across multiple rounds by giving up actions each round. They dealt all the conditions in the game including daze, stun, paralyze, blind, concealment, dominated, charmed, etc...etc...Their powers also were mainly blast or burst meaning a large area effect near or at range.

I am not advocating the idea that you need to dump balance. In fact, games work better when you have balance. The problem is dealing with the unrelenting weight of D&D's history relative to everyone's desire to balance the game. The car we use for balance will inevitably cheese some people off. The goal should be to find the most benign form of balance that a majority of consumers can agree on and embrace (then expect the variant rules to alter that bar up and down to suit different people's expectations).

I am not going to re-hash 6 years of arguments. We should all know how the detractors of 4E felt and why they felt the way they did. It is a gut call based on emotion and expectation. They can be either right or wrong, it doesn't matter. What does matter is that the new edition of D&D has to appeal to those people in a way that feels familiar. That is what this edition is going to do in core (once you get into variant rules, it is anyone's guess as to what WotC will do).

Then don't bring them up like they haven't already been refuted into the ground. The reason people felt the way they did is either they read it on the internet and picked it up, or they are outright lying. Its possible a few of them had DMs that didn't read the rule books and attempted to merge 3E and 4E in their minds and couldn't reconcile the differences, but those are rare.

The only real way to deal with tradition and sacred cows is to slowly change them over the course of 5-10 years of errata until the game resembles what you want. Basically the frog in the pot syndrome. Where if you put a frog into a pot of boiling water it'll try to jump out, but if you put it into warm water and then slowly heat it to boiling, it won't notice the change in temperature. You have to change things gradually, like slowly make laws that restrict rights a few inches at a time until 10 years later no one has any rights (except in special free speech zones). Its actually very effective.

1337 b4k4

2014-06-10, 08:10 PM

I'm not being dismissive.

You are. Case in point:

The reason people felt the way they did is either they read it on the internet and picked it up, or they are outright lying. Its possible a few of them had DMs that didn't read the rule books and attempted to merge 3E and 4E in their minds and couldn't reconcile the differences, but those are rare.

It is not possible that other people had experiences different from yours. It is not possible that people who are perfectly capable of running a TTRPG understood 4e and just didn't like it. No, the only way it's possible that people don't like 4e in your mind is either that they didn't read it and are repeating what other people said or they're lying. Even though multiple people have told you to the contrary, you dismiss them and their experiences.

captpike

2014-06-10, 08:17 PM

It is not possible that other people had experiences different from yours. It is not possible that people who are perfectly capable of running a TTRPG understood 4e and just didn't like it. No, the only way it's possible that people don't like 4e in your mind is either that they didn't read it and are repeating what other people said or they're lying. Even though multiple people have told you to the contrary, you dismiss them and their experiences.

he said that one objection (that the classes are homogenized) is not based in fact. not that everyone who does not like 4e thinks that, nor that it is the only objection people have to 4e.

it would be like me objecting to 3e by saying "the wizard is too weak, even at max level they hardly can do anything"

pwykersotz

2014-06-10, 08:50 PM

he said that one objection (that the classes are homogenized) is not based in fact. not that everyone who does not like 4e thinks that, nor that it is the only objection people have to 4e.

it would be like me objecting to 3e by saying "the wizard is too weak, even at max level they hardly can do anything"

They are weak. Have you seen their hitpoints? One shot is all it would take. :smalltongue:

obryn

2014-06-10, 09:00 PM

Hey, guys, 2009 called. They want their edition war back. Also, it really wants to show you this video of a kid named David after going to the dentist.

Felhammer

2014-06-11, 01:50 AM

the AEUD system has nothing to do with homogenization one way or another.

your talking about the 3e way of doing things like it matters how you got a spell. it makes little difference how you got the spell on your sheet, only that you have it. feats do not make a class, nor do saying "you have the same spells as this other guy, but you learn them slightly different"

at first glance 4e classes look like they would play the same, but they don't. just as at first glance 3e classes look like they would play differently but in the end don't.

Of course AEUD is homogenized. Everyone uses the same structure to play the game.

You may have a spell on your sheet but you cannot approach the game from the vantage point of a single encounter or even a single adventure. A Cleric or a Druid could completely alter their playstyle each day. That feels (and plays) very differently than a Sorcerer who has the same spells day in and day out or a Fighter who has no spells and must rely on feats to make himself a more competent combatant.

Compare that with 4E where the AEUD system forced everyone to use the same structure. Everyone has at wills, everyone had encounter powers, everyone had daily powers. Everyone had the same number of powers of each variety. You cannot look across the table and see a Wizard stealing spells from the Necromancer's spell book or the cleric praying to his god for a completely new spells. That does not happen in 4E. That is homogenization by comparison.

The game needed that level of homogeonized structure to create a balanced game. Like I said, it is the easy way to achieve balance. If everyone is the same, then it makes creating the rest of the game much easier since you will never have to deal with things that plagued previous editions (nova casters, sleeping after the wizard is out of spells, the Fighter feeling useless because his power level is not equal to that of casters, etc.).

At any rate, my point was not to get into a discussion about 4E. My point was simply that if you start out with a system where all of the players are using the same sub-system for combat, then it becomes very easy to create a balanced game since you do not have to worry about the way two or more sub-systems interact with one another (which inevitably causes massive headaches and requires a lot of time and experience to balance).

the problem with the sentence was
1)"many claimed" could mean 2, could me a million. gives me no information

2)"did not feel like D&D." telling me your feeling is worthless, saying WHY you feel that way is not. "the fighters powers are to powerful" or "the scope of the wizard's powers is too small" is helpful.

Considering the vitriol spewed forth from an unrelenting of negative nancies during the time when 4E was popular, I do not need to give you numbers. Just google search it. You will find and endless stream of hate. Heck, go down to your local gaming shop and ask some roleplayers why they dislike 4E. You will find a bunch who will chat your ear off.

I do not dislike 4E. I am DMing a 4E campaign right now. I like 4E. What I am talking about is the people who do not like 4E and why their preferences are being catered to with this edition. 4E was too controversial, too different. It eliminated sacred cows, changed the way classes work and put the emphasis squarely on combat. Notice how everything we have seen of Next is doing the opposite? There is a reason for that - WotC wants to court those who disliked 4E because they are a large percentage of the playing public (far larger than those WotC will cheese off by not making a refined version of 4E).

Then don't bring them up like they haven't already been refuted into the ground. The reason people felt the way they did is either they read it on the internet and picked it up, or they are outright lying. Its possible a few of them had DMs that didn't read the rule books and attempted to merge 3E and 4E in their minds and couldn't reconcile the differences, but those are rare.

There is so much wrong with this statement. I find it patently unbelievable that you think this way.

New Edition != New Game and in fact, in most games it never does. It's extremely rare for a new version of a game to be a radical departure from the previous version. Improvements? Yes. Polishing the rough edges? Yes. But a completely new game (such as 3e to 4e to 5e) is extremely rare. It's also one of the things that hurt 4e. By taking a completely new game and calling it D&D, WotC essentially performed a bait and switch on their players. If they had instead released 4e as it's own game with it's own brand, it would have fared much better.

I've long he;d this belief. If 4E was called anything else, it would have been a welcome addition to the pantheon of role playing games. One of the only other games I can think of that radically changes itself is Warhammer (Fantasy & 40k). Most of the time they will radically alter the game in one addition, then spend a decade refining it, then change everything once again. Those big changes are almost always met with extreme discontent, not unlike the the switch from 3.x to 4E. The refinement editions (that are released between the editions that change everything) are much more readily accepted.

Of course, we all know now why WotC made 4E the way they did - they wanted to make a system that was balanced and could be easily imported into a computer. Edition previous to 4 were too byzantine and arcane for such a task, hence why 4E has very straight forward, clear and concise rules (which are easily programmed into a computer).

captpike

2014-06-11, 11:40 AM

Of course AEUD is homogenized. Everyone uses the same structure to play the game.

You may have a spell on your sheet but you cannot approach the game from the vantage point of a single encounter or even a single adventure. A Cleric or a Druid could completely alter their playstyle each day. That feels (and plays) very differently than a Sorcerer who has the same spells day in and day out or a Fighter who has no spells and must rely on feats to make himself a more competent combatant.

Compare that with 4E where the AEUD system forced everyone to use the same structure. Everyone has at wills, everyone had encounter powers, everyone had daily powers. Everyone had the same number of powers of each variety. You cannot look across the table and see a Wizard stealing spells from the Necromancer's spell book or the cleric praying to his god for a completely new spells. That does not happen in 4E. That is homogenization by comparison.

The game needed that level of homogeonized structure to create a balanced game. Like I said, it is the easy way to achieve balance. If everyone is the same, then it makes creating the rest of the game much easier since you will never have to deal with things that plagued previous editions (nova casters, sleeping after the wizard is out of spells, the Fighter feeling useless because his power level is not equal to that of casters, etc.).

you seem to be confusing when you get your powers for how characters play. they are in fact NOT the same thing. they are only related in that they are both in the 4e system.

At any rate, my point was not to get into a discussion about 4E. My point was simply that if you start out with a system where all of the players are using the same sub-system for combat, then it becomes very easy to create a balanced game since you do not have to worry about the way two or more sub-systems interact with one another (which inevitably causes massive headaches and requires a lot of time and experience to balance).

[QUOTE=Felhammer;17610427]
Considering the vitriol spewed forth from an unrelenting of negative nancies during the time when 4E was popular, I do not need to give you numbers. Just google search it. You will find and endless stream of hate. Heck, go down to your local gaming shop and ask some roleplayers why they dislike 4E. You will find a bunch who will chat your ear off.

then don't say anything. if your not going to convey any information then why are you speaking (well typing)? that is the only reason to every say anything to anyone.

There is so much wrong with this statement. I find it patently unbelievable that you think this way.

then give a logical reason he is wrong if it is so easy, why 3e in fact had classes that were different from each other (even they they used the same spell lists, and non-casters had no real class features) and 4e classes are not.

just saying "your wrong" is useless, and only hurts your point.

I do not dislike 4E. I am DMing a 4E campaign right now. I like 4E. What I am talking about is the people who do not like 4E and why their preferences are being catered to with this edition. 4E was too controversial, too different. It eliminated sacred cows, changed the way classes work and put the emphasis squarely on combat. Notice how everything we have seen of Next is doing the opposite? There is a reason for that - WotC wants to court those who disliked 4E because they are a large percentage of the playing public (far larger than those WotC will cheese off by not making a refined version of 4E).

I've long he;d this belief. If 4E was called anything else, it would have been a welcome addition to the pantheon of role playing games. One of the only other games I can think of that radically changes itself is Warhammer (Fantasy & 40k). Most of the time they will radically alter the game in one addition, then spend a decade refining it, then change everything once again. Those big changes are almost always met with extreme discontent, not unlike the the switch from 3.x to 4E. The refinement editions (that are released between the editions that change everything) are much more readily accepted.

Of course, we all know now why WotC made 4E the way they did - they wanted to make a system that was balanced and could be easily imported into a computer. Edition previous to 4 were too byzantine and arcane for such a task, hence why 4E has very straight forward, clear and concise rules (which are easily programmed into a
computer).
next is going back to 2e/3e because they think that everyone who likes 4e will automatically buy 5e, or they are buying the hype that everyone hated 4e.
were they acting more logically and intelligently they would be taking what they learned in 4e into consideration, instead they are activity ignoring it.

D&D Is not a small product or a niche one (at least in the RP market). it cant just get buy on what it had before (those who just hang on from previous editions). it has to keep getting new players and to that it has to keep up and grow with the times.

yes alot of people were pissed about the change to 4e, so? it was a wild success, and more then a few people were tired of the problems with 3e. if they had not changed it they would had lost alot of people as well.

hardly, the reason they made 4e the way they did was to make a better game. for that you need clear and concise rules.

Sartharina

2014-06-11, 11:46 AM

please either read correctly or stop blatantly lying about what I said.

my last two posts have said this:

the post before that said

the one before that said:What you think you are saying and what you are actually saying do not align.

pwykersotz

2014-06-11, 11:49 AM

hardly, the reason they made 4e the way they did was to make a better game. for that you need clear and concise rules.

A small nitpick, this isn't true. Some people (myself included) operate better this way. I have at least two gamers however, who are the exact opposite. They have a better game when things are somewhat ambiguous. When they aren't shackled by the system and are free to use their imagination. They want a structure to play with, not a box to be thrust into.

captpike

2014-06-11, 11:51 AM

What you think you are saying and what you are actually saying do not align.

all I said was

1) this is only one of many playstyles, but even if only 10% of people play like this it breaks the game in unacceptable ways

2) this is why it breaks the game for that playstyle.

why is that wrong? did I not take your feelings into account?

if you think I am wrong say why in a logical mannor, saying "nope your wrong, wont say why" only hurts your point

captpike

2014-06-11, 11:54 AM

Sartharina

2014-06-11, 12:27 PM

given that A and B are utterly worthless when making a game, I don't see your point.

What you call "Nostalgia" and "Sacred Cows", I call "Product Identity". When I play Dungeons+Dragons, I want to play Dungeons+Dragons - the game written about in hundreds of articles. The game that created a moral panic back in the 80s. The game that featured in the movie E.T. The Extra Terrestrial. The game with hundreds of stories over on /tg/ and here on GiantitP. And I want it to play like that Dungeons+Dragons game. Newer editions should not be completely new games - they are iterations and cleaning up of that game that's been played and loved in the 70's, fixing issues that were baked into the system as problematic but can't be fixed by mere errata, and taking advantage of newer developments and research into game design to ensure the gameplay is more streamlined and intuitive than the last. But ultimately, the game should still be the same.

captpike

2014-06-11, 12:31 PM

What you call "Nostalgia" and "Sacred Cows", I call "Product Identity". When I play Dungeons+Dragons, I want to play Dungeons+Dragons - the game written about in hundreds of articles. The game that created a moral panic back in the 80s. The game that featured in the movie E.T. The Extra Terrestrial. The game with hundreds of stories over on /tg/ and here on GiantitP. And I want it to play like that Dungeons+Dragons game. Newer editions should not be completely new games - they are iterations and cleaning up of that game that's been played and loved in the 70's, fixing issues that were baked into the system as problematic but can't be fixed by mere errata, and taking advantage of newer developments and research into game design to ensure the gameplay is more streamlined and intuitive than the last. But ultimately, the game should still be the same.

that is a contradiction, you cant both fix the problems the older versions had and keep all the sacred cows.

Felhammer

2014-06-11, 12:41 PM

you seem to be confusing when you get your powers for how characters play. they are in fact NOT the same thing. they are only related in that they are both in the 4e system.

When you get your powers, how many you have, when you can use your powers, how often you can use your powers and how you can use your powers are the backbone of any system. It is in fact more important than what you are describing when you look at the game from outside of a single encounter.

The fact that a Fighter uses weapons to hit an enemy while a Wizard uses spells transcends editions. The difference is how the classes interact with the underlying structure of the game. In 4E, the classes utilized the same sub-system which made combat predictable and easy to balance. By comparison to 3.x where the massive number of sub-systems and character build choices made predicting and balancing combat incredibly difficult.

In 4E, everyone is geared up to be a warrior of some kind. They all have powers that make them useful in combat. If you have all of the roles covered, regardless of classes chosen, you knew you could fight an appropriately challenging encounter. In 3.x, there were builds (all talk-y, not hit-y) and styles of play (like every encounter after a Wizard goes nova) that effectively side-lined characters during combat because they had nothing to meaningfully contribute. That makes balancing the game very, very difficult because there is no fundamental similarity from group to group, no foundational cornerstones on which to build assumptions.

When I say 4E was homogenized, I mean that in a good way. It is a good thing because it makes the game reliable and predictable for designers, DMs and players.

next is going back to 2e/3e because they think that everyone who likes 4e will automatically buy 5e, or they are buying the hype that everyone hated 4e.
were they acting more logically and intelligently they would be taking what they learned in 4e into consideration, instead they are activity ignoring it.

There are sheep in the world who buy a product called "D&D" regardless of the rules. They are not being catered to in any edition.

The 2E and 3E communities are vibrant and alive. Just go to the Play-By-Post Forums on this site and see how many people are playing 3.x/PF games compared to 4E games. The numbers are far and away in favor of the former.

WotC IS actively taking ideas from 4E but they are couching them in different terminology, so as to hide its origin from those who would be immediately repelled by the faintest hint of its existence.

yes alot of people were pissed about the change to 4e, so? it was a wild success, and more then a few people were tired of the problems with 3e. if they had not changed it they would had lost alot of people as well.

A simple revision of 3.5 would have been even more successful than 4E. 4E was a huge hit BUT, at the same time, it was also not a success in that it did not generate the numbers it needed to to keep D&D alive and well. If it had, we would be getting a new version of 4E, rather than an homage to 2 and 3.

hardly, the reason they made 4e the way they did was to make a better game. for that you need clear and concise rules.

Untrue. We know for a fact that one of the end goals was to make a video game-like product that would allow people to play D&D online (which would have been what WotC needed to get to that 100 million dollar mark). Computers have a much easier time processing simple actions than interpreting dense, ambiguous, byzantine text. That doesn't mean it was not good game design (it was), it was just game design with a clear end goal.

Sartharina

2014-06-11, 12:46 PM

they may prefer to play that way, but the game itself is not better.

set rules hardly mean you lose anything, it means you know what you can and can't do.

rather then a rule that says "you can fireball a couple times a day" you would have "you can use a fireball once a day".

The "And Can't Do" is the problematic part, putting unreasonable and often arbitrary restrictions on player imagination and creativity.
this springs to mind (http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1235)

all I said was

1) this is only one of many playstyles, but even if only 10% of people play like this it breaks the game in unacceptable ways

2) this is why it breaks the game for that playstyle.

why is that wrong? did I not take your feelings into account?

if you think I am wrong say why in a logical mannor, saying "nope your wrong, wont say why" only hurts your pointAnd yet, going with your suggestion breaks the game for other playstyles as well.

that is a contradiction, you cant both fix the problems the older versions had and keep all the sacred cows.Then you have to keep the sacred cows. Otherwise, you might as well just take all your game development stuff and throw it in the trash because it's not going to deliver what it needs to, or at least scrub off the title and replace it with a new one (No, a new edition number isn't the same as a new title) instead of lie about what the game is.

But if, for the sake of keeping people from arguing, you make the same mistakes and keep the same sacred cows around, then you will never truly make a new game and what you have is more of thee same stuff. You get nowhere that way.
We don't want a new game. We want a better version of the game we've been playing since the 1970s. If you want a New Game, buy one without "Dungeons & Dragons" on the cover, and stop trying to take Dungeons & Dragons away from us who want to play Dungeons & Dragons, instead of some new game trying to wear its cover.

1337 b4k4

2014-06-11, 01:06 PM

Then you have to keep the sacred cows. Otherwise, you might as well just take all your game development stuff and throw it in the trash because it's not going to deliver what it needs to, or at least scrub off the title and replace it with a new one (No, a new edition number isn't the same as a new title) instead of lie about what the game is.

We don't want a new game. We want a better version of the game we've been playing since the 1970s. If you want a New Game, buy one without "Dungeons & Dragons" on the cover, and stop trying to take Dungeons & Dragons away from us who want to play Dungeons & Dragons, instead of some new game trying to wear its cover.

Yep. As I've said before, the problem with 4e isn't that it was a bad game. It was that they weren't selling D&D.

I'll be honest, for the life of me I can't figure out how Captpike can be so adamant that WotC is lying to him about 5e by not including his very specific play style in the core rules (or not putting the things he thinks should be in the PHB in the PHB) but then so easily dismisses the idea that 4e "did not feel like D&D" as so much lies and bullcrap.

obryn

2014-06-11, 01:21 PM

We don't want a new game. We want a better version of the game we've been playing since the 1970s. If you want a New Game, buy one without "Dungeons & Dragons" on the cover, and stop trying to take Dungeons & Dragons away from us who want to play Dungeons & Dragons, instead of some new game trying to wear its cover.

Yep. As I've said before, the problem with 4e isn't that it was a bad game. It was that they weren't selling D&D.
Whoa there, folks.

I've been arguing with captpike all over the place here, but I've been playing D&D since 1983ish, and this kind of argument always makes me incredibly disappointed. I saw it leveled against 3e when it came out, against 4e when it came out, and now against 5e. There were even arguments about 2e when it came out, though mostly those were played out (...slooowly...) in Dragon Magazine's Forum.

So can everyone just cool it with the "not D&D" rhetoric? You can pick an edition you like and play it forever, but D&D doesn't exclusively belong to you any more than it belongs to me, captpike, or that dude over there in the howling wolf t-shirt who's been running the same campaign since 1979. You don't get to kick captpike or 4e out of D&D's big tent.

1337 b4k4

2014-06-11, 01:43 PM

I've been arguing with captpike all over the place here, but I've been playing D&D since 1983ish, and this kind of argument always makes me incredibly disappointed. I saw it leveled against 3e when it came out, against 4e when it came out, and now against 5e. There were even arguments about 2e when it came out, though mostly those were played out (...slooowly...) in Dragon Magazine's Forum.

Sure every edition is going to have parts and changes that "aren't D&D" for someone, but very clearly 4e was the largest departure from previous editions. And then when you start talking (as Captpike has) of new editions being "new games" and "if you can't do <X> without throwing away <iconic game element Y>, then you are talking about going into "not D&D" territory. Beyond that, even WotC/Hasbro seems to think that they've let "D&D" become "not D&D", hence all the time and effort into trying to suss out what "D&D" is for people.

D&D is many things for many different people, but there are common elements and threads. Individual pieces of a game may be "not D&D" more than others, and it's certainly not a binary value, but more of a sliding scale. But when you talk about making wholesale changes to how the game is played, and tossing out those common elements, then you very much run the risk of falling on the "not D&D" side of that scale.

As an analogy for you video game players, take the Final Fantasy video game series. The series is well known for changing all sorts of things up from game to game (i.e. the entire battle system). Seriously, if there was one game where something big changes almost every new version FF would be it. But there are still bits and pieces that ultimately make it into every (or most) Final Fantasy games no matter how much things change. Off the top of my head and superficially, some of these are: Magic with discreet spells, HP, massively scaling damage, a main character that fights with a sword, multiple party members, a changeable party, moggles, chocobos, Cid, Biggs/Wedge, "final bosses", world exploration, character customization by gear selection, mini-games, side quests, references to mythological gods/beings, summons. Remove any one of these elements (as FF games have done from time to time) and while you will get people that say it's not a Final Fantasy game, it's still largely Final Fantasy and most people will see it that way. Remove all of these elements, replace the game with something that plays like Champions of Norath, and you can call it Final Fantasy all you want, but most people will tell you it isn't a Final Fantasy game, and frankly they would be right. Heck, you don't even have to get that drastic of a change. Replace FF with a Chronotrigger game and people will tell you (rightfully) it's not final fantasy, even though most FF fans like Chronotrigger. So how many elements can you remove? There's not an exact amount and it's not an exact science, but it's also very clear that there is some amount that is too far for example FF XI crossed that line for many many people and is largely considered one of the least Final Fantasy of the Final Fantasy games.

That is the situation D&D and WotC find themselves in. There are elements that make D&D "D&D", and balancing and picking which of those elements are important and necessary to have (and in what form) in order to get people to recognize your game as D&D and to feel like a D&D game for those players is a difficult balancing act. A charge of "Not D&D" has nothing to do with the quality of the game, or even it's relative value compared to D&D. It's just noting that if I reach into a bowl of brightly colored small round candies after being told they're M&Ms, I don't expect to come back with a handful of candies that taste like Skittles. No matter how much I might like Skittles, or even prefer them other M&Ms, sometimes you just have to give people what they ask for.

obryn

2014-06-11, 01:51 PM

And then when you start talking (as Captpike has) of new editions being "new games" and "if you can't do <X> without throwing away <iconic game element Y>, then you are talking about going into "not D&D" territory. Beyond that, even WotC/Hasbro seems to think that they've let "D&D" become "not D&D", hence all the time and effort into trying to suss out what "D&D" is for people.
I'm not excusing captpike from this same criticism.

That is the situation D&D and WotC find themselves in. There are elements that make D&D "D&D", and balancing and picking which of those elements are important and necessary to have (and in what form) in order to get people to recognize your game as D&D and to feel like a D&D game for those players is a difficult balancing act. A charge of "Not D&D" has nothing to do with the quality of the game, or even it's relative value compared to D&D. It's just noting that if I reach into a bowl of brightly colored small round candies after being told they're M&Ms, I don't expect to come back with a handful of candies that taste like Skittles. No matter how much I might like Skittles, or even prefer them other M&Ms, sometimes you just have to give people what they ask for.
WotC did surveys and whatnot for similar reasons - to try and make sure they hit a bunch of sweet spots for D&D players. Those were for marketing and design reasons, though, not for nerd tribalism or edition warring.

Simply put, none of that excuses statements from one D&D fan to another D&D fan that the game they're playing really isn't D&D.

Millennium

2014-06-11, 01:51 PM

your acting like 4e was not a wild success that topped the charts.

and yes 5e needs to be its own game, otherwise no one will care about it (see above post)
4e should have been its own game, but that didn't stop it from being, as you put it, "a wild success that topped the charts". Why would 5e be any different?

Honestly, though, I don't think it's possible to gauge the success of a system while it's still current. You don't measure the success of a system in dollars, but in grognards: the people who, even when a system has been abandoned by its creators, still insist on continuing with it. You can't do that while the system is still "active", because the numbers get skewed by people chasing The Latest And Greatest. You have to see what happens when they have moved on.

1e and the white box still have their fair share of grognards, especially when you consider the OSR-clones that basically exist to work around the fact that these editions were not open. 2e, by contrast, has not fared so well: it gets some play, to be sure, but it is overshadowed by its predecessors and successors alike. 3e is going like gangbusters even if you don't count Pathfinder (which I don't: I loves me some Pathfinder, but Paizo has become such a major player in this industry that it would be ridiculous to call Pathfinder unsupported, so I can't count it). Wholly outside the D&D family of games, we can look to what is now called the "Classic" World of Darkness as an example of a highly-successful system: the grognards held out long enough, and in large enough numbers, that the company eventually started revisiting the games. Could there be any greater indicator of success?

Where are the 4e-grognards? I don't know. Maybe there are some enclaves that I just haven't seen, but they're certainly not coming out in force (not in the numbers that 1e and 3e inspired, at any rate). And if we're to take this thread as any indication, then things really aren't looking good for 4e, because the grognards simply aren't there. Even the 4e-supporters in this thread are not grognards, by and large, as evidenced by the fact many have said (here or elsewhere) that they're moving on when Wizards does. Perhaps not to 5e, but that barely even matters: the real take-away is that the idea of continuing to use 4e to tell their stories either just doesn't occur to them, or gets written off as impractical even though other systems have succeeded in this niche. Given that a large part of the concept behind RPGs is storytelling, could this not be seen as an indication of the system's failure? Maybe not as a commercial project (where captpike's numbers are compelling), but as an RPG?

obryn

2014-06-11, 02:01 PM

Where are the 4e-grognards? I don't know. Maybe there are some enclaves that I just haven't seen, but they're certainly not coming out in force (not in the numbers that 1e and 3e inspired, at any rate). And if we're to take this thread as any indication, then things really aren't looking good for 4e, because the grognards simply aren't there. Even the 4e-supporters in this thread are not grognards, by and large, as evidenced by the fact many have said (here or elsewhere) that they're moving on when Wizards does. Perhaps not to 5e, but that barely even matters: the real take-away is that the idea of continuing to use 4e to tell their stories either just doesn't occur to them, or gets written off as impractical even though other systems have succeeded in this niche. Given that a large part of the concept behind RPGs is storytelling, could this not be seen as an indication of the system's failure? Maybe not as a commercial project (where captpike's numbers are compelling), but as an RPG?
Oh for pete's sake.

Hi, I'm here. Sticking with 4e for my D&D games since it's far and away the best version I've played in or run in 30 years, but I've never been a one-RPG kind of guy so I both have and will continue to run other RPGs when the mood strikes me.

Also, they're not here because this is an extremely 3.x-centric board. Check rpg.net if you want to see people who are sticking with 4e.

captpike

2014-06-11, 02:41 PM

There are sheep in the world who buy a product called "D&D" regardless of the rules. They are not being catered to in any edition.

The 2E and 3E communities are vibrant and alive. Just go to the Play-By-Post Forums on this site and see how many people are playing 3.x/PF games compared to 4E games. The numbers are far and away in favor of the former.

WotC IS actively taking ideas from 4E but they are couching them in different terminology, so as to hide its origin from those who would be immediately repelled by the faintest hint of its existence.

the problem is that the 4e group is far more important then the 2e/3e group because they are about the same size, and you are far more likely to move to a new edition if you were playing the last one.
how many 2e/3e people will make the switch?

the main groups of customers in order of importance:
1) people just trying the game for the first time
2) 4e fans
3) 3e fans
4) 2e (maybe, I have a feeling the number of people who play 2e, and are going to try out 5e is very small)

A simple revision of 3.5 would have been even more successful than 4E. 4E was a huge hit BUT, at the same time, it was also not a success in that it did not generate the numbers it needed to to keep D&D alive and well. If it had, we would be getting a new version of 4E, rather than an homage to 2 and 3.

the only way they could get the numbers hasbrio wanted was to have literally everyone who buys any RPG materials start playing 4e and buy all the books.

while I have no numbers on hand, I doubt it would have made more. after all that is basically what pathfinder did and it did not do as well as 4e until after they stopped putting out real 4e stuff and went to essentials.

also don't underestimate the number of people who were just ready to play a new game, where the inherit problems of 3e were gone.

Untrue. We know for a fact that one of the end goals was to make a video game-like product that would allow people to play D&D online (which would have been what WotC needed to get to that 100 million dollar mark). Computers have a much easier time processing simple actions than interpreting dense, ambiguous, byzantine text. That doesn't mean it was not good game design (it was), it was just game design with a clear end goal.
I am going to ask for a source for this claim, that the game was made around being a computer game, not a TTRPG.

its not like its ever a bad idea to have clear concise rules

The "And Can't Do" is the problematic part, putting unreasonable and often arbitrary restrictions on player imagination and creativity.
this springs to mind (http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1235)
And yet, going with your suggestion breaks the game for other playstyles as well.
Then you have to keep the sacred cows. Otherwise, you might as well just take all your game development stuff and throw it in the trash because it's not going to deliver what it needs to, or at least scrub off the title and replace it with a new one (No, a new edition number isn't the same as a new title) instead of lie about what the game is.

We don't want a new game. We want a better version of the game we've been playing since the 1970s. If you want a New Game, buy one without "Dungeons & Dragons" on the cover, and stop trying to take Dungeons & Dragons away from us who want to play Dungeons & Dragons, instead of some new game trying to wear its cover.

then play the old game, if that is all you want then why are you here?

you know what happens when you put sacred cows higher then making a good game? you lose big time. people start ignoring your game because you are just pushing the same thing you have for 20 years, people go to newer better games that don't have the baggage yours does.

the first and most important thing they need to do is make a good game, not cater to people who refuse to admit that D&D can be improved on.

I'm not excusing captpike from this same criticism.
WotC did surveys and whatnot for similar reasons - to try and make sure they hit a bunch of sweet spots for D&D players. Those were for marketing and design reasons, though, not for nerd tribalism or edition warring.

Simply put, none of that excuses statements from one D&D fan to another D&D fan that the game they're playing really isn't D&D.

and the surveys were horribly made, its hard to believe they provided any useful information.

4e should have been its own game, but that didn't stop it from being, as you put it, "a wild success that topped the charts". Why would 5e be any different?

Where are the 4e-grognards? I don't know. Maybe there are some enclaves that I just haven't seen, but they're certainly not coming out in force (not in the numbers that 1e and 3e inspired, at any rate). And if we're to take this thread as any indication, then things really aren't looking good for 4e, because the grognards simply aren't there. Even the 4e-supporters in this thread are not grognards, by and large, as evidenced by the fact many have said (here or elsewhere) that they're moving on when Wizards does. Perhaps not to 5e, but that barely even matters: the real take-away is that the idea of continuing to use 4e to tell their stories either just doesn't occur to them, or gets written off as impractical even though other systems have succeeded in this niche. Given that a large part of the concept behind RPGs is storytelling, could this not be seen as an indication of the system's failure? Maybe not as a commercial project (where captpike's numbers are compelling), but as an RPG?

the nature of this site means that it will heavy favor 3e.

also one thing to keep in mind is that 4e players have less need for the internet then 3e ones. you don't have to worry about as many broken combos, or that a splat will cause issues, or that the game's balance changes as you level.

and the lack of an OGL means you dont have many, if any third party stuff.

Sartharina

2014-06-11, 03:13 PM

then play the old game, if that is all you want then why are you here?

The old game has fundamental problems at the core that detract from the core experience, especially as people learn and master the system.

When 3e came out, it felt like a beautiful cleanup of the older editions with more streamlined play, balanced and codified progression options, and simple multiclassing. But then, as the game was played, underlying flaws and balance issues within were likewise unmasked, and we ended up with CoDzillas, Pouncebarians, Blinking Flask Rogues, WBLmancers, and God-mode Wizards.

Yet, when 4e came out, we got balanced classes, yet it didn't have the "D&D" feel. The torches, mapping, and piles of mundane and magical trapfinding, dungeon-crawling, and encounter-aiding gear (Partially killed in 3e), along with brutal but swift ambushes, bypassing monsters to get to treasure, and the ability to bypass certain encounters through clever tool, spell, or environment use. Among other changes. However, it was still D&D in a lot of other ways, especially later on in the run (Except the leveling system has always left a bad taste)

If I want to play D&D, I want to play D&D.

captpike

2014-06-11, 03:20 PM

The old game has fundamental problems at the core that detract from the core experience, especially as people learn and master the system.

When 3e came out, it felt like a beautiful cleanup of the older editions with more streamlined play, balanced and codified progression options, and simple multiclassing. But then, as the game was played, underlying flaws and balance issues within were likewise unmasked, and we ended up with CoDzillas, Pouncebarians, Blinking Flask Rogues, WBLmancers, and God-mode Wizards.

Yet, when 4e came out, we got balanced classes, yet it didn't have the "D&D" feel. The torches, mapping, and piles of mundane and magical trapfinding, dungeon-crawling, and encounter-aiding gear (Partially killed in 3e), along with brutal but swift ambushes, bypassing monsters to get to treasure, and the ability to bypass certain encounters through clever tool, spell, or environment use. Among other changes.

the cow's are the fundamental part of the games they are in, you can't make fundamental changes to the game without changing them

by "encounter-aiding gear" do you mean stuff like silver weapons and whatnot?

the only one you listed there that really went away was "brutal but swift ambushes". all others you can still do and have. you might have to disallow some items like sunrods or use rituals instead of explicit spells but you can still do them.

Sartharina

2014-06-11, 03:40 PM

The cows can be changed/mutated, but they still need to be cows/part of the game.

Gear includes 11 1/2 poles, marbles, barrels worth of flasks of oil (That was fun!) caltrops, smokesticks, thunderstones, tanglefoot bags, rope+grapples, some silver/cold iron backup weapons for use against monsters that can be fought with such but aren't so powerful that they need primary weapons to be such, and stuff like shovels, tarps, pitons, pickaxes... stuff you can do to rig a battlefield into your favor for significant results (3e didn't have enough support of this, either). 4e, 3e, and PF had too many hitpoints for 1d6 fire damage to be meaningful. And magical gear as well.

Also, the way wizards changed was a fundamental shift in the game, especially with the growth of the "If I'm not casting spells, I'm not being a wizard" mindset... at least Cantrips have been a nice compromise there, allowing them to be magical all the time while also filling their traditional role - and with fewer spell slots (Especially of higher level) making it clear that their spells are limited tools. If a spellcaster runs out of spells before an adventuring day is over, it's supposed to indicate that he was too liberal with his spellcasting, not that it's time to go to sleep again.

captpike

2014-06-11, 04:52 PM

The cows can be changed/mutated, but they still need to be cows/part of the game.

what is just a small change to you is breaking it to someone else. the only way to leave them untouched is to not fix any of the core problems in the game. to never improve it in a meaningful way (PF would be an example of this).

for example of the core problems with 3e was caster/non-caster balance. one of the big reason that existed is that that casters only had daily abilities and non-casters were relent on at-wills.
there is no way to balance the classes without changing that cow.

Also, the way wizards changed was a fundamental shift in the game, especially with the growth of the "If I'm not casting spells, I'm not being a wizard" mindset... at least Cantrips have been a nice compromise there, allowing them to be magical all the time while also filling their traditional role - and with fewer spell slots (Especially of higher level) making it clear that their spells are limited tools. If a spellcaster runs out of spells before an adventuring day is over, it's supposed to indicate that he was too liberal with his spellcasting, not that it's time to go to sleep again.
the big reason this wont work is that it requires every DM have a certain number of encounters every day. any less and the wizard just stomps it by using 2x the number of spells he should have. any more and he is left with nothing to do.

I rather make the number I think works best for my story, not what the game needs to function.

A Stray Cat

2014-06-11, 07:00 PM

the problem is that the 4e group is far more important then the 2e/3e group because they are about the same size, and you are far more likely to move to a new edition if you were playing the last one.
how many 2e/3e people will make the switch?

the main groups of customers in order of importance:
1) people just trying the game for the first time
2) 4e fans
3) 3e fans
4) 2e (maybe, I have a feeling the number of people who play 2e, and are going to try out 5e is very small)

You may be on to something here with the 2e folks. My group has been playing mostly 2e for decades. It's a heavily house-ruled blend of 1e and 2e with some Options bits mixed in. We liked some aspects of 3e, and one of our members keeps talking about running a PF game. But one of the issues that keeps coming up is the unwillingness of our players (and our best DM) to learn new systems.

The reason I've delurked recently is because I have been reading about 5e once I heard some bloggers saying that it was a return to older editions in a lot of ways. I figured it was worth investigating. We rejected 4e, pretty much without much more than a glance-over because the direction it went was different from our vision. I'm still collating data, as they say. I've pre-ordered the starter set, and I'm looking forward to get a look at the free basic stuff.

1337 b4k4

2014-06-11, 11:27 PM

the main groups of customers in order of importance:
1) people just trying the game for the first time
2) 4e fans
3) 3e fans
4) 2e (maybe, I have a feeling the number of people who play 2e, and are going to try out 5e is very small)

Facts not in evidence. There is no reason to believe that a 4e fan is any more likely to switch than a 3e fan. Arguably there is evidence they are less likely to switch if they like 4e over 3e because 5e is closer to 3e than it is to 4e.

the only way they could get the numbers hasbrio wanted was to have literally everyone who buys any RPG materials start playing 4e and buy all the books.

I would argue that even had hasbro made the money they wanted, if they continued to bleed players like they were, they would still consider 4e a failure. One of the consequences of being king of the hill is that your success is also measured in how well you stay on top of that hill. WotC was (is?) bleeding players. Think of it this way (because I assure you, WotC/Hasbro did) every single pathfinder player is a lost customer. If you were selling a product called Smokakola, and for the past 30 years, you had been the leader in the industry. Now you decide it's time for a change. There are some problems with your product, and things people don't like. So you make a new product, and you introduce New Smoke. If within the following years, a previously minor league competitor managed to take your old recipe, and produce Schmepsi and not only rival but in some cases completely outsell your New Smoke product and many or most of those sales are going to your previous cusomters, even if you made as many sales year over year in New Smoke as you were with Smokakola Classic, wouldn't you consider it a failure? At best, you might consider it the invention of un untapped market (since you now have two major players), but think of all those sales you're not getting.

also don't underestimate the number of people who were just ready to play a new game, where the inherit problems of 3e were gone.

And you should probably not overestimate the number of people for whom the "inherent problems" of 3e were actual problems, or were sufficiently large problems that it was actually impacting fun.

then play the old game, if that is all you want then why are you here?

Presumably for the same reason you are. After all, if 4e is your bag, it's not like when 5e gets released, Hasbro pushes a self destruct button on your books.

you know what happens when you put sacred cows higher then making a good game? you lose big time. people start ignoring your game because you are just pushing the same thing you have for 20 years, people go to newer better games that don't have the baggage yours does.

And yet GURPS survives. As does Traveller (though to be fair they've had some radical shakeups too). V:tM did pretty well without any major shakeups. Also, this flies in the face of the entire Madden (or any sport) video game series, the entire Dynasty Warriors series, just about every GTA installment and pretty much most of the fighting games (Street Fighter / Mortal Kombat). It turns out, sometimes your fans really do want the same thing over and over again, just with different paint and more polish.

the first and most important thing they need to do is make a good game, not cater to people who refuse to admit that D&D can be improved on.

D&D is a good game. 30+ years of history back that up. It may not be your favorite game, and it may not be a game you enjoy, but D&D doesn't become and stay the biggest TTRPG in the world without being a "good game"

for example of the core problems with 3e was caster/non-caster balance. one of the big reason that existed is that that casters only had daily abilities and non-casters were relent on at-wills.
there is no way to balance the classes without changing that cow.

And yet, caster / fighter balances was a smaller issue in earlier editions of D&D. So clearly it's possible to do something within the structure defined by vancian casting.

Lokiare

2014-06-12, 01:36 AM

A small nitpick, this isn't true. Some people (myself included) operate better this way. I have at least two gamers however, who are the exact opposite. They have a better game when things are somewhat ambiguous. When they aren't shackled by the system and are free to use their imagination. They want a structure to play with, not a box to be thrust into.

That's odd because I remember the 4E DMG having a page 42 in it that allowed exactly that kind of thing while still managing to make it balanced. It amazes me how the critics of 4E don't seem to know the 4E rules half the time.

all I said was

1) this is only one of many playstyles, but even if only 10% of people play like this it breaks the game in unacceptable ways

2) this is why it breaks the game for that playstyle.

why is that wrong? did I not take your feelings into account?

if you think I am wrong say why in a logical mannor, saying "nope your wrong, wont say why" only hurts your point

What this poster is saying is if your market is 100,000,000 people and you lose 10% of that, guess what? that's 10,000,000 lost customers. If you remove the play style of 10% of your players, then you are making a bad game, especially when I and others have explained in detail how you can make a game that caters to everyone's play styles.

What you call "Nostalgia" and "Sacred Cows", I call "Product Identity". When I play Dungeons+Dragons, I want to play Dungeons+Dragons - the game written about in hundreds of articles. The game that created a moral panic back in the 80s. The game that featured in the movie E.T. The Extra Terrestrial. The game with hundreds of stories over on /tg/ and here on GiantitP. And I want it to play like that Dungeons+Dragons game. Newer editions should not be completely new games - they are iterations and cleaning up of that game that's been played and loved in the 70's, fixing issues that were baked into the system as problematic but can't be fixed by mere errata, and taking advantage of newer developments and research into game design to ensure the gameplay is more streamlined and intuitive than the last. But ultimately, the game should still be the same.

Yeah, this has been beaten to death. What one person thinks is D&D is not D&D to another person. Your favorite edition is considered 'not D&D' by a large chunk of fans (if your favorite is 3E then a large chunk of 1E/2E fans don't think your edition is D&D). Now, not liking an edition is perfectly fine but making large blanket statements like 'edition X is not D&D' is just insulting to those of us that disagree. Its better to stick to "I didn't like X edition" and even better "I didn't like X edition because of reason Y, Z, A, B, D" and then explain each in detail.

When you get your powers, how many you have, when you can use your powers, how often you can use your powers and how you can use your powers are the backbone of any system. It is in fact more important than what you are describing when you look at the game from outside of a single encounter.

The fact that a Fighter uses weapons to hit an enemy while a Wizard uses spells transcends editions. The difference is how the classes interact with the underlying structure of the game. In 4E, the classes utilized the same sub-system which made combat predictable and easy to balance. By comparison to 3.x where the massive number of sub-systems and character build choices made predicting and balancing combat incredibly difficult.

Nothing predictable or easy about 4E combat unless the DM and players have no understanding of tactics.

Again, it amazes me how many people criticize 4E without knowing the rules. Fighters get powers differently than Wizards. Fighters get daily powers that they regain every round as long as they miss with them. This could be very advantageous if you have some feat, class feature, or racial trait that triggers off missing with daily powers. Even if you don't have that it means when you finally lose the power it is because you hit with it.

Wizards on the other hand get to pick 2 daily and utility spells at each level they get them and choose ahead of time which one is prepared. If they choose a certain class feature they get even more spell powers known and choose from. When they expend a daily its gone, but it usually has a half effect even on a miss. Totally different than fighters. Rogues have a few powers they can use until they hit and warlords have some powers that they regain if they hit with them. That's all just in the PHB1. If we go further out psionics doesn't give encounter powers instead you can boost your at-will powers several times between short rests. In other words if you say anything more than "early 4e classes gain the same number of powers in the same usage categories as every other class." then you are in fact wrong. There's no real nice way of saying it.

In 4E, everyone is geared up to be a warrior of some kind. They all have powers that make them useful in combat. If you have all of the roles covered, regardless of classes chosen, you knew you could fight an appropriately challenging encounter. In 3.x, there were builds (all talk-y, not hit-y) and styles of play (like every encounter after a Wizard goes nova) that effectively side-lined characters during combat because they had nothing to meaningfully contribute. That makes balancing the game very, very difficult because there is no fundamental similarity from group to group, no foundational cornerstones on which to build assumptions.

When I say 4E was homogenized, I mean that in a good way. It is a good thing because it makes the game reliable and predictable for designers, DMs and players.

I'd rather you be more precise and not use terms that are blanket terms that could literally mean anything.

There are sheep in the world who buy a product called "D&D" regardless of the rules. They are not being catered to in any edition.

The 2E and 3E communities are vibrant and alive. Just go to the Play-By-Post Forums on this site and see how many people are playing 3.x/PF games compared to 4E games. The numbers are far and away in favor of the former.

WotC IS actively taking ideas from 4E but they are couching them in different terminology, so as to hide its origin from those who would be immediately repelled by the faintest hint of its existence.

A simple revision of 3.5 would have been even more successful than 4E. 4E was a huge hit BUT, at the same time, it was also not a success in that it did not generate the numbers it needed to to keep D&D alive and well. If it had, we would be getting a new version of 4E, rather than an homage to 2 and 3.

3E was canceled because it didn't meet the sales goals. 4E was canceled because it didn't meet the sales goals. They were both about equally successful from the few accounts I've heard the developers talk about when they compare the two editions. What makes you think 5E will magically get better numbers than 3E did and 4E did? That's just blind wishful thinking. Like walking off the edge of a roof and hoping you will fly with no assistance from devices.

Untrue. We know for a fact that one of the end goals was to make a video game-like product that would allow people to play D&D online (which would have been what WotC needed to get to that 100 million dollar mark). Computers have a much easier time processing simple actions than interpreting dense, ambiguous, byzantine text. That doesn't mean it was not good game design (it was), it was just game design with a clear end goal.

Here you are factually wrong. What they said was they wanted to make DDi get WoW like monthly subscription dollars. They didn't say anything about 4e being designed like a video game and also they haven't made a faithful 4E game because while the rules of 4e are streamlined, each power is different and it would be extremely hard to program that into a game. There are however things like Fantasy Grounds (recently released on steam) where they parse the text and can make a workable power out of it that the computer can understand about 80% of the time (usually you have to tweak it one way or another).

Yep. As I've said before, the problem with 4e isn't that it was a bad game. It was that they weren't selling D&D.

I'll be honest, for the life of me I can't figure out how Captpike can be so adamant that WotC is lying to him about 5e by not including his very specific play style in the core rules (or not putting the things he thinks should be in the PHB in the PHB) but then so easily dismisses the idea that 4e "did not feel like D&D" as so much lies and bullcrap.

Again 'D&D' means different things to different people. Its insulting to those of us that like 4E for people to say that its not 'D&D' your personal favorite edition was probably called 'not D&D' at some point unless of course you still play the original game that requires the Chainmail war game to do combats. We know WotC is lying about 5E not including our play style because they openly admit it nearly every time they post on their blog site (The wotc news page). They describe a mechanic that negates our play style. For instance those of us that like tactical choices know right away that we aren't going to be able to play our play style when they say you will get 5 feats across 20 level and only 1 or 2 other choice points. meaning there are at least 13 levels where you don't have any choice on how your character improves. We also know it negates our play style when they tell us that we start with extremely low hp and advance just as slow while monsters damage goes up faster. That doesn't allow us to make tactical choices. We almost entirely have to rely on the random rolls of the dice.

Sure every edition is going to have parts and changes that "aren't D&D" for someone, but very clearly 4e was the largest departure from previous editions. And then when you start talking (as Captpike has) of new editions being "new games" and "if you can't do <X> without throwing away <iconic game element Y>, then you are talking about going into "not D&D" territory. Beyond that, even WotC/Hasbro seems to think that they've let "D&D" become "not D&D", hence all the time and effort into trying to suss out what "D&D" is for people.

I came in during early 2E and I've heard this kind of vitriol spewed at 3e as well as 4e and I even hear it about 5e sometimes (mostly by the 1E/2E holdouts that were promised an early retroclone, but upon closer inspection are getting a 3E clone with some 2E style features). This kind of stuff is purely subjective and based entirely on the opinion of individuals. Not only that when it is said, I can usually dispel it with a few well worded questions. Like for instance when I ask if 1E/2E/3E had encounter powers, daily powers, and attacks that could be made whenever (at-will). The answer is yes. Then I ask if any classes go the same types of those powers on the same schedule and the answer is well yeah most martials got at-will attack powers (BA) and casters got all dailies and at-wills. Once you begin to examine it you realize 4E is no more a departure from previous editions than any other edition before it. Its just that one or two features of 4E stick out to you personally. Most of this is psychology and nothing more.

D&D is many things for many different people, but there are common elements and threads. Individual pieces of a game may be "not D&D" more than others, and it's certainly not a binary value, but more of a sliding scale. But when you talk about making wholesale changes to how the game is played, and tossing out those common elements, then you very much run the risk of falling on the "not D&D" side of that scale.

As an analogy for you video game players, take the Final Fantasy video game series. The series is well known for changing all sorts of things up from game to game (i.e. the entire battle system). Seriously, if there was one game where something big changes almost every new version FF would be it. But there are still bits and pieces that ultimately make it into every (or most) Final Fantasy games no matter how much things change. Off the top of my head and superficially, some of these are: Magic with discreet spells, HP, massively scaling damage, a main character that fights with a sword, multiple party members, a changeable party, moggles, chocobos, Cid, Biggs/Wedge, "final bosses", world exploration, character customization by gear selection, mini-games, side quests, references to mythological gods/beings, summons. Remove any one of these elements (as FF games have done from time to time) and while you will get people that say it's not a Final Fantasy game, it's still largely Final Fantasy and most people will see it that way. Remove all of these elements, replace the game with something that plays like Champions of Norath, and you can call it Final Fantasy all you want, but most people will tell you it isn't a Final Fantasy game, and frankly they would be right. Heck, you don't even have to get that drastic of a change. Replace FF with a Chronotrigger game and people will tell you (rightfully) it's not final fantasy, even though most FF fans like Chronotrigger. So how many elements can you remove? There's not an exact amount and it's not an exact science, but it's also very clear that there is some amount that is too far for example FF XI crossed that line for many many people and is largely considered one of the least Final Fantasy of the Final Fantasy games.

That is the situation D&D and WotC find themselves in. There are elements that make D&D "D&D", and balancing and picking which of those elements are important and necessary to have (and in what form) in order to get people to recognize your game as D&D and to feel like a D&D game for those players is a difficult balancing act. A charge of "Not D&D" has nothing to do with the quality of the game, or even it's relative value compared to D&D. It's just noting that if I reach into a bowl of brightly colored small round candies after being told they're M&Ms, I don't expect to come back with a handful of candies that taste like Skittles. No matter how much I might like Skittles, or even prefer them other M&Ms, sometimes you just have to give people what they ask for.

Its hilarious that you use Final Fantasy XI as your example when Final Fantasy XII took its system and made it automatic (minus the annoying mana is your limit break bar bug "Oh look I have 99 items that restore mana to max, the game is a cake walk now because all I do is pop them and do special limit breaks")

Also see my other comments about how its individual opinion and how every edition of D&D has had these criticisms by hold-outs from the edition before them.

The old game has fundamental problems at the core that detract from the core experience, especially as people learn and master the system.

When 3e came out, it felt like a beautiful cleanup of the older editions with more streamlined play, balanced and codified progression options, and simple multiclassing. But then, as the game was played, underlying flaws and balance issues within were likewise unmasked, and we ended up with CoDzillas, Pouncebarians, Blinking Flask Rogues, WBLmancers, and God-mode Wizards.

Yet, when 4e came out, we got balanced classes, yet it didn't have the "D&D" feel. The torches, mapping, and piles of mundane and magical trapfinding, dungeon-crawling, and encounter-aiding gear (Partially killed in 3e), along with brutal but swift ambushes, bypassing monsters to get to treasure, and the ability to bypass certain encounters through clever tool, spell, or environment use. Among other changes. However, it was still D&D in a lot of other ways, especially later on in the run (Except the leveling system has always left a bad taste)

If I want to play D&D, I want to play D&D.

When 4E came out it did exactly what the 3E fans asked for. It removed or nerfed broken spells, gave non-casters the same agency as casters and balanced the game where you could make encounters that did what you expected them to do more than half the time. Basically beware what you wish for because you just might get it.

the cow's are the fundamental part of the games they are in, you can't make fundamental changes to the game without changing them

by "encounter-aiding gear" do you mean stuff like silver weapons and whatnot?

the only one you listed there that really went away was "brutal but swift ambushes". all others you can still do and have. you might have to disallow some items like sunrods or use rituals instead of explicit spells but you can still do them.

Actually if you've never seen a whole party -1 ready daily powers to use when their last compatriot opens a door, then I see how you could say no 'brutal but swift ambushes', but that's how my players operate so I can say I've seen quite a few of those ambushes. If you've never played 4E, imagine 4 wizards and a rogue outside a door and the four wizards readying to cast one of their quickened mid-range spells at whatever they see inside. It gets pretty nasty.

The cows can be changed/mutated, but they still need to be cows/part of the game.

Gear includes 11 1/2 poles, marbles, barrels worth of flasks of oil (That was fun!) caltrops, smokesticks, thunderstones, tanglefoot bags, rope+grapples, some silver/cold iron backup weapons for use against monsters that can be fought with such but aren't so powerful that they need primary weapons to be such, and stuff like shovels, tarps, pitons, pickaxes... stuff you can do to rig a battlefield into your favor for significant results (3e didn't have enough support of this, either). 4e, 3e, and PF had too many hitpoints for 1d6 fire damage to be meaningful. And magical gear as well.

Also, the way wizards changed was a fundamental shift in the game, especially with the growth of the "If I'm not casting spells, I'm not being a wizard" mindset... at least Cantrips have been a nice compromise there, allowing them to be magical all the time while also filling their traditional role - and with fewer spell slots (Especially of higher level) making it clear that their spells are limited tools. If a spellcaster runs out of spells before an adventuring day is over, it's supposed to indicate that he was too liberal with his spellcasting, not that it's time to go to sleep again.

You do realize that most of that is actually in 4E, they just didn't include it in the core books because it was assumed that it didn't cost enough to worry about. You just told your DM you bought it and had it and the rules took care of the rest (especially page 42). All of that kind of stuff was present in 4E.

You may be on to something here with the 2e folks. My group has been playing mostly 2e for decades. It's a heavily house-ruled blend of 1e and 2e with some Options bits mixed in. We liked some aspects of 3e, and one of our members keeps talking about running a PF game. But one of the issues that keeps coming up is the unwillingness of our players (and our best DM) to learn new systems.

The reason I've delurked recently is because I have been reading about 5e once I heard some bloggers saying that it was a return to older editions in a lot of ways. I figured it was worth investigating. We rejected 4e, pretty much without much more than a glance-over because the direction it went was different from our vision. I'm still collating data, as they say. I've pre-ordered the starter set, and I'm looking forward to get a look at the free basic stuff.

Let me save you some heart ache. If you didn't like most of 3E, then you likely won't like 5E. Its basically a 2.9E edition where it takes a few cues from 2E but is mostly based on a cleaned up 3E engine.

Kurald Galain

2014-06-12, 02:18 AM

Facts not in evidence. There is no reason to believe that a 4e fan is any more likely to switch than a 3e fan. Arguably there is evidence they are less likely to switch if they like 4e over 3e because 5e is closer to 3e than it is to 4e.
Indeed. Also, there is a lot of evidence that the group of 3E players (including PF) is substantially bigger than the group of 4E players. After all, WOTC did the market research and is catering to them.

It's important to realize that 5E's prime competition isn't 4E and has never been 4E; the main competitor is Pathfinder.

Presumably for the same reason you are. After all, if 4e is your bag, it's not like when 5e gets released, Hasbro pushes a self destruct button on your books.
They kind of do: Hasbro can decide to turn off the character builder at any time, at which point many players will instantly lose access to their books plus all the characters they've stored. WOTC has promised that they won't do that for now, but WOTC isn't actually the decision maker on that.

Lokiare

2014-06-12, 02:32 AM

Indeed. Also, there is a lot of evidence that the group of 3E players (including PF) is substantially bigger than the group of 4E players. After all, WOTC did the market research and is catering to them.

It's important to realize that 5E's prime competition isn't 4E and has never been 4E; the main competitor is Pathfinder.

They kind of do: Hasbro can decide to turn off the character builder at any time, at which point many players will instantly lose access to their books plus all the characters they've stored. WOTC has promised that they won't do that for now, but WOTC isn't actually the decision maker on that.

WotC didn't do any market research. They say Paizo pull ahead after they stopped putting out products every month and then some bean counter panicked and said they should have those customers too, except WotC doesn't cater to customers that like quality products and honest companies that they can trust and they still don't. So what's happening is WotC is panicking and responding to that panic. There was zero market research or WotC would have realized they could just as easily started printing the occasional high quality new 3.5E book and pulled ahead again. In fact most of WotC business decisions baffle me and I've taken a lot of business classes in college and have a pretty decent business sense.

Yeah, the thing about that is most people when they get screwed over by a company have no problem obtaining their materials using extra legal means and shutting off a money maker like DDi (until its down to about 20 customers or so) to try to force people to move to the next edition is exactly a 'screw you' kind of move that will trigger that behavior. Not to mention a lot of people have already moved into the grey area of scraping the compendium and putting it into their preferred ready (I use Fantasy Grounds myself) so shutting off DDi will only lose WotC money, not gain any converts. Really even if people don't do any of those things most of them simply won't buy WotC products out of spite.

Pink

2014-06-12, 04:33 AM

I kinda want to mention here, because it getting mentioned a lot, but I think a lot of people don't have the right idea of what exactly the RPG market and competition within it are. Tabletop RPGs are a niche market. They are also a product with relatively light capital investment, and generally little cost for switching, or using multiple different systems. What I mean is, aside from the initial purchase, you don't pay anything, significant, in order to play the game whenever you want, or to play a different RPG and switch it up, and keep purchasing new ones. You guys are talking about competition as though it is a saturated market, as though each purchase of 5e will be one customer taken back from Pathfinder. In this industry, it's a really toxic attitude to take and I really hope that isn't how WotC is looking at it.

People who play RPGs, even if you have a system you play with 90+% of the time, will often try out different RPGs, even purchase them. The right tool for the right job afterall. Games have different feels, different genres they do best. Maybe not all RPG players will do this (though, not all RPG players will buy product at all, and mooch of friends or pirate). But the fact remains that, purchasing a RPG does not prohibit you from purchasing and playing with a different RPG. In fact, customers that do both are a boon.

Why do I say a boon? Well, let's start with what competition element does exist in the RPG industry. The money of customers. Yes, it's a pretty inexpensive hobby when you compare it to other things, but it's also not necessary, and some of the customers don't have a great budget for luxuries like hobbies, to say nothing about being able to support multi-system purchases. As has been mentioned, we're stingy with our money, we want to see the good system before spending that money. So, while there is a number of the current playing market that will have the funds and desire to purchase new systems, eventually, with new systems and supplements, those people are going to be strapped for cash too and pick favourites and drop the system they don't like. The future of the hobby lies in the new consumers. Growing the hobby. Getting fresh money into it. It's the most important thing, and the more popular all RPG hobbies become, the more potential new consumers you have. Those multi-system people? They are able to teach those systems to new people. Some of them might choose the competition. Some are going to choose 5e though. And by supporting the concept of playing multiple games, you're able to spread it to people who might not've tried a one-shot or the starter box because they were previously satisfied with their current game.

Overall though, WotC should, and us too, look at this as growing the hoby and not just as product supremacy. If pathfinder gains 50,000 new players? That should be great news for WotC, maybe a portion of those new people will try out 5e as well.

A good comparison would be earlier Superhero movies. While now they're a pretty prime market, back when you had things like the first X-men and Spiderman movies, it was a bit unknown how well they were going to do. Each new movie that was successful helped to build the entire market, because customers were able to consume both products, and those interested in one superhero movie should be reasonably interested in another.

I dunno. Maybe I lost what I was intending to say in this post. The simple point is, the worry should be less on converting current RPG players to only play 5e. The goal should be a good game that can integrate and grow with the hobby. Talking about appealing to certain players and to win them away miss some very crucial nuances of the industry.

Kurald Galain

2014-06-12, 05:07 AM

1337 b4k4

2014-06-12, 07:03 AM

That's odd because I remember the 4E DMG having a page 42 in it that allowed exactly that kind of thing while still managing to make it balanced. It amazes me how the critics of 4E don't seem to know the 4E rules half the time.

One sentence and a table has a very hard time overriding 600+ pages of rigidly defined rules and structures. Especially when the example given for how to use the table is actually the wrong way to use the table.

Again 'D&D' means different things to different people. Its insulting to those of us that like 4E for people to say that its not 'D&D' your personal favorite edition was probably called 'not D&D' at some point unless of course you still play the original game that requires the Chainmail war game to do combats. We know WotC is lying about 5E not including our play style because they openly admit it nearly every time they post on their blog site (The wotc news page). They describe a mechanic that negates our play style. For instance those of us that like tactical choices know right away that we aren't going to be able to play our play style when they say you will get 5 feats across 20 level and only 1 or 2 other choice points. meaning there are at least 13 levels where you don't have any choice on how your character improves. We also know it negates our play style when they tell us that we start with extremely low hp and advance just as slow while monsters damage goes up faster. That doesn't allow us to make tactical choices. We almost entirely have to rely on the random rolls of the dice.

And my point was you can't say "WotC is lying to me about 5e being capable of supporting 4e play" while simultaneously dismissing those who feel that D&D 4e didn't feel like D&D. Regardless of the fact that every edition has had it's detractors, saying a particular edition doesn't "feel like D&D" or "isn't D&D" is short hand for saying "this edition doesn't support my style of play, even though by retaining the D&D brand, it claims to".

Once you begin to examine it you realize 4E is no more a departure from previous editions than any other edition before it. Its just that one or two features of 4E stick out to you personally. Most of this is psychology and nothing more.

Sure, if you rename all the features, and throw away all the other parts of the game that are dissimilar, then yes 4e is just like all the other editions. Except for those places where it isn't. And further, even for the parts that are "psychology" you shouldn't dismiss those things out of hand. Psychology and understanding how player perceive and relate to the game is an essential part of designing an RPG.

Its hilarious that you use Final Fantasy XI as your example when Final Fantasy XII took its system and made it automatic (minus the annoying mana is your limit break bar bug "Oh look I have 99 items that restore mana to max, the game is a cake walk now because all I do is pop them and do special limit breaks")

Oh christmas, you're seriously going to nitpick my choice of FF example used to highlight how the removal of enough core features from a game turns it into "not X" for a large segment of the fans. Yes, FF XII also took it's lumps for the amount of departure from what the fans want and expect. My point was never which game was the least FF of the FF games, but rather that you can have large changes in a game and still retain it's feeling of being the "same game" by retaining enough common elements.

They kind of do: Hasbro can decide to turn off the character builder at any time, at which point many players will instantly lose access to their books plus all the characters they've stored. WOTC has promised that they won't do that for now, but WOTC isn't actually the decision maker on that.

Sure, but then again, that's largely 4e's fault for being so complicated people need (or want) a computer system to manage and build their characters. The books will still function as they always have.

WotC didn't do any market research.

Facts not in evidence. I strongly suspect that WotC and Hasbro know more about the TTRPG business market as a whole and their specific sales figures than Lokiare.

Millennium

2014-06-12, 07:11 AM

Oh for pete's sake.

Hi, I'm here. Sticking with 4e for my D&D games since it's far and away the best version I've played in or run in 30 years, but I've never been a one-RPG kind of guy so I both have and will continue to run other RPGs when the mood strikes me.
OK, cool. Found a grognard.

Also, they're not here because this is an extremely 3.x-centric board. Check rpg.net if you want to see people who are sticking with 4e.
And everything you say is true, as far as it goes. You're right: a place like this is going to favor 3e over 4e, if for no other reason than that it centers on a comic that is itself 3e-centric.

But there are 4e players here, and it only stands to reason that if they can even stand being in a place like this, they'd be more secure in their 4e fandom than many of the people in 4e-centric communities would be. Hostility, or even non-default status, has a way of weeding out the fair-weather fans (I'd call this board the latter case, though I suspect many 4e-fans would disagree). These are the people who can afford to wade into the debates and discussions: the most vociferous defenders, and the ones I would most expect to continue on with 4e even after Wizards has abandoned it. Yet even among these, I find the number of actual grognards to be shockingly low. What am I supposed to believe of the system, with that information? It looks to me like it's being dropped by the players almost as fast as it's being dropped by its maker, and if that isn't a failed system, I don't know what is.

But you pointed me at a community where I should be able to find more grognards. Thank you. Now that I know where to find them, I can learn more about how some people plan to keep playing when Wizards is gone.

obryn

2014-06-12, 08:11 AM

OK, cool. Found a grognard.
I thiiiink you might have a non-standard definition of "grognard" here. :smallsmile:

But there are 4e players here, and it only stands to reason that if they can even stand being in a place like this, they'd be more secure in their 4e fandom than many of the people in 4e-centric communities would be. Hostility, or even non-default status, has a way of weeding out the fair-weather fans (I'd call this board the latter case, though I suspect many 4e-fans would disagree). These are the people who can afford to wade into the debates and discussions: the most vociferous defenders, and the ones I would most expect to continue on with 4e even after Wizards has abandoned it. Yet even among these, I find the number of actual grognards to be shockingly low. What am I supposed to believe of the system, with that information? It looks to me like it's being dropped by the players almost as fast as it's being dropped by its maker, and if that isn't a failed system, I don't know what is.
...no.

You've got holes in your logic you could drive a truck through. You can't conclude anything about fans who are not here, based on fans who are here. This is no kind of a representative sample of any sort, of 3e fans, 4e fans, OSR fans or what-have-you, and no torturous logic will make it so. :smallsmile:

But you pointed me at a community where I should be able to find more grognards. Thank you. Now that I know where to find them, I can learn more about how some people plan to keep playing when Wizards is gone.
Oh mah lawd, what ever shall we do! (the answer is "cbloader" with a healthy dose of "don't have DDI anyway" and "we're fine." :smallbiggrin:)

da_chicken

2014-06-12, 11:39 AM

Honestly, I'm not too certain WotC cares all that much about 4e players. When I say that I don't mean what immediately springs to your mind, however. Let me explain.

Players who play 4e, when presented with 5e, are likely to choose two things: play 4e, or play 5e (there are other possibilities, but they're not interesting in discussion). If they choose the latter, that's great. More sales for WotC, more players on the most recent edition. If they choose the former, they're going to either not buy any RPG books at all -- making them non-customers -- or they'll continue to buy 4e supplements they haven't yet purchased. While those books are now out-of-print, the people who buy them are still buying something ultimately from WotC. They are, fundamentally and regardless of which side of the fence they fall on, still WotC's customers.

Players who play 3.x, on the other hand, might be incorporating Pathfinder or Paizo modules with 3.x. If they're presented with 5e, they have the same choices: play 3.x or play 5e (again, there are other possibilities, but they're not that interesting and probably not that likely). If they choose 5e, they become 100% WotC customers. If they stick with 3.x, on the other hand, they're very likely to remain or become Paizo customers.

Thus, the only truly bad situation for WotC is when 3.x players continue to choose Pathfinder over D&D. So it makes the most business sense to target Pathfinder players to lure them back. 4e players are locked in. They're not a threat to your market share because you own that segment of the market.

Sartharina

2014-06-12, 11:51 AM

That's odd because I remember the 4E DMG having a page 42 in it that allowed exactly that kind of thing while still managing to make it balanced. It amazes me how the critics of 4E don't seem to know the 4E rules half the time.Ah yes, the infamous Page 42. It had a good idea, but implemented it horribly. That was actually something 4e almost did right - it took them a few iterations throughout the product to make it work, though.

What this poster is saying is if your market is 100,000,000 people and you lose 10% of that, guess what? that's 10,000,000 lost customers. If you remove the play style of 10% of your players, then you are making a bad game, especially when I and others have explained in detail how you can make a game that caters to everyone's play styles.Yes, you lose 10% - but if you're only getting 60,000 because your current product has alienated 30% of the playerbase, losing the 10% you like it to get those 30,000 back is worth the lost customers.

Yeah, this has been beaten to death. What one person thinks is D&D is not D&D to another person. Your favorite edition is considered 'not D&D' by a large chunk of fans (if your favorite is 3E then a large chunk of 1E/2E fans don't think your edition is D&D). Now, not liking an edition is perfectly fine but making large blanket statements like 'edition X is not D&D' is just insulting to those of us that disagree. Its better to stick to "I didn't like X edition" and even better "I didn't like X edition because of reason Y, Z, A, B, D" and then explain each in detail.

Again 'D&D' means different things to different people. Its insulting to those of us that like 4E for people to say that its not 'D&D' your personal favorite edition was probably called 'not D&D' at some point unless of course you still play the original game that requires the Chainmail war game to do combats. We know WotC is lying about 5E not including our play style because they openly admit it nearly every time they post on their blog site (The wotc news page). They describe a mechanic that negates our play style. For instance those of us that like tactical choices know right away that we aren't going to be able to play our play style when they say you will get 5 feats across 20 level and only 1 or 2 other choice points. meaning there are at least 13 levels where you don't have any choice on how your character improves. We also know it negates our play style when they tell us that we start with extremely low hp and advance just as slow while monsters damage goes up faster. That doesn't allow us to make tactical choices. We almost entirely have to rely on the random rolls of the dice.I honestly think 4e is still somewhat D&D, but not the D&D I love (Which is OD&D through 3e). And in the playtest packets I have, most classes have/had a choice every level with their class features, or the class features were flexible enough to provide more choices at-the-moment. And your "Doesn't allow us to make tactical choices" has been disproven in almost every adventure I've played, except Murder in Baldur's Gate, which was terribad.

I came in during early 2E and I've heard this kind of vitriol spewed at 3e as well as 4e and I even hear it about 5e sometimes (mostly by the 1E/2E holdouts that were promised an early retroclone, but upon closer inspection are getting a 3E clone with some 2E style features). This kind of stuff is purely subjective and based entirely on the opinion of individuals. Not only that when it is said, I can usually dispel it with a few well worded questions. Like for instance when I ask if 1E/2E/3E had encounter powers, daily powers, and attacks that could be made whenever (at-will). The answer is yes. Then I ask if any classes go the same types of those powers on the same schedule and the answer is well yeah most martials got at-will attack powers (BA) and casters got all dailies and at-wills. Once you begin to examine it you realize 4E is no more a departure from previous editions than any other edition before it. Its just that one or two features of 4E stick out to you personally. Most of this is psychology and nothing more.

When 4E came out it did exactly what the 3E fans asked for. It removed or nerfed broken spells, gave non-casters the same agency as casters and balanced the game where you could make encounters that did what you expected them to do more than half the time. Basically beware what you wish for because you just might get it.And one of my biggest complaints about 3e was that the imbalances caused the metagame to evolve in a direction that lost a lot of the classic D&D feel and playstyle, and further exacerbated the imbalances. 4e fixed the imbalances, but preserved the late-3e gameplay.

Actually if you've never seen a whole party -1 ready daily powers to use when their last compatriot opens a door, then I see how you could say no 'brutal but swift ambushes', but that's how my players operate so I can say I've seen quite a few of those ambushes. If you've never played 4E, imagine 4 wizards and a rogue outside a door and the four wizards readying to cast one of their quickened mid-range spells at whatever they see inside. It gets pretty nasty.This isn't the type of 'quick, brutal ambushes' I was thinking of (In part because it requires daily resources, and an unusual damage spike). It's largely a result of a focus on the "Level-Appropriate Encounters" and "Encounters per day" concepts that were created in 3e and codified in 4e. ALthough, honestly, that was more an issue of presentation (Along with the Treasure Rules - where are my random treasure tables?) than an actual issue with the game, since it probably could be played out in a more classic manner by a cunning and ruthless party.

You do realize that most of that is actually in 4E, they just didn't include it in the core books because it was assumed that it didn't cost enough to worry about. You just told your DM you bought it and had it and the rules took care of the rest (especially page 42). All of that kind of stuff was present in 4E. And the rules for handling these were extremely gimply. Equipment didn't do as much in 4e as it did in older editions - it was too much character-ability driven. Of course, that swing was something the game did need, and I hope 5e manages to get a better balance between tool use and character abilities providing options and advantages.

Let me save you some heart ache. If you didn't like most of 3E, then you likely won't like 5E. Its basically a 2.9E edition where it takes a few cues from 2E but is mostly based on a cleaned up 3E engine.It feels like it's trying to take another shot at 3e to me, which is something I've been wanting. Hopefully there is enough of 4e in it for me to crib the awesome ideas from that edition to fix the game to my liking. I may have to wait until 6th edition, though.

Fwiffo86

2014-06-12, 03:07 PM

This is fascinating to read.

I have some questions.
Can we get some proof?

Proof defined as Documentation representative of your claim. Facts that can be verified and sources cited for others to verify your claims?

Not to be a jerk, but claims like "WotC didn't do any market research" is a pretty strong claim to be alleging.
Not to mention alleging surveys are this or that when others cannot, at this time read for themselves.

If you are going to declare something as a fact - back it up with proof. Elsewise its just an opinion.

Lokiare

2014-06-12, 04:00 PM

One sentence and a table has a very hard time overriding 600+ pages of rigidly defined rules and structures. Especially when the example given for how to use the table is actually the wrong way to use the table.

Not at my table it doesn't. In fact during a recent session an elf rogue great bow archer climbed up onto the roof of the ancient and broken down house that the rest of the party was about to enter. He narrowly avoided falling when a part of the roof caved in due to age (it was a pit trap in mechanical terms that I had set up ahead of time). Afterward he used the hole to snipe enemies drawing back behind the edge out of sight to regain combat advantage. Now the rest of the party had entered and several of them had gone down. Fearing the worst, he put his bow away and jumped down with his weapon ready attacking one of the Gnolls as he did so. I ruled that it was an acrobatics check versus reflex and he did the appropriate damage that's on the improvised table for the hard to repeat column since it would require about two rounds to get into position again. That's a very well working improvisation system.

5E has nothing like it. WotC just expects every DM to be extremely experienced and to know not to give players multiple rolls because of the massively increased failure chance. Its also not one sentence. Its an entire page, thus Page 42. As far as I know that's the most that's ever been written about improvisation in any edition.

And my point was you can't say "WotC is lying to me about 5e being capable of supporting 4e play" while simultaneously dismissing those who feel that D&D 4e didn't feel like D&D. Regardless of the fact that every edition has had it's detractors, saying a particular edition doesn't "feel like D&D" or "isn't D&D" is short hand for saying "this edition doesn't support my style of play, even though by retaining the D&D brand, it claims to".

See if those other people were just saying "this edition doesn't support my style of play, even though by retaining the D&D brand, it claims to." I would have no problem, instead they are telling me that my preferred edition 'isn't D&D' and inferring that its that way for everyone and because I like it I'm some kind of outcast or something.

Sure, if you rename all the features, and throw away all the other parts of the game that are dissimilar, then yes 4e is just like all the other editions. Except for those places where it isn't. And further, even for the parts that are "psychology" you shouldn't dismiss those things out of hand. Psychology and understanding how player perceive and relate to the game is an essential part of designing an RPG.

Nope, sorry. The only thing you have to do is take away encounter and daily powers for non-casters and healing surges and you have a very cleaned up 3.5E. That's 2 things. Only 2 things are keeping it from being very much like other editions.

Oh christmas, you're seriously going to nitpick my choice of FF example used to highlight how the removal of enough core features from a game turns it into "not X" for a large segment of the fans. Yes, FF XII also took it's lumps for the amount of departure from what the fans want and expect. My point was never which game was the least FF of the FF games, but rather that you can have large changes in a game and still retain it's feeling of being the "same game" by retaining enough common elements.

If you're example doesn't hold up to inspection how are we supposed to understand or believe your argument (argument being your statement that you want us to evaluate and believe)? I'm simply pointing out the flaw in your argument. To some FFXI is completely a final fantasy game because the specific set of elements they believe are core to being a FF game are there. In this case its the various signature creatures and NPCs as well as the signature status effects and spell names as well as the epic story that gets told. Same with FFXII. Same with D&D. Each individual person gets to define what is D&D for themselves, other people shouldn't run around and say "X edition isn't D&D" because they don't have the right to tell others what is D&D or not D&D. Its for each individual to choose. Its also not very helpful. It would be more helpful if you explain exactly why in concise detail you don't like a specific edition. Like I've been doing with 5E.

Sure, but then again, that's largely 4e's fault for being so complicated people need (or want) a computer system to manage and build their characters. The books will still function as they always have.

Yeah, except that its not any more complicated (and in some cases less) than other editions for character creation. Its simply that we are in the digital age and people just don't sit down with 50+ books and look through them like they did with 3.X and earlier editions. I personally use Fantasy Grounds if I want to create characters and I certainly don't go pencil and paper for any edition when I play them. In fact the last time I played 3.X (several months ago) I used several online tools scattered around on different sites including a now defunct wiki sight that listed all the 3.X features, feats, and spells.

Facts not in evidence. I strongly suspect that WotC and Hasbro know more about the TTRPG business market as a whole and their specific sales figures than Lokiare.

Facts are strongly in evidence. Take a look at Pathfinders success. That alone proves Hasbro/WotC doesn't know the market. They lost out to a small 3rd party company they alienated, who then took their last product and made it a raging success. I'm sorry, but if you think WotC wanted that to happen, you have more faith in them than I can muster.

Not only that but I personally predicted many of the outcomes that happened in the market. I said that Essentials would be a failure before it was out. It was. WotC didn't know what the market wanted.

See you have this mistaken idea that Hasbro is throwing any resources behind WotC D&D division at all. As far as they are concerned D&D is nothing more than a property to make movies, video games, board games and books. Even then its so small as to not be on their radar. WotC D&D division does not have access to most of Hasbro's resources. I'd be skeptical of the idea that they have access to WotC MtG division resources. If they did, they would know that it was quality content and the way Paizo was straight forward with their customers and their willingness to communicate when something went wrong that made them a massive success in the market, but they still don't seem to understand because they are still putting out bland flat unimaginative adventures for 5E (they have 1-3 out by now). The facts of the matter are they simply don't understand the market at all.

OK, cool. Found a grognard.

And everything you say is true, as far as it goes. You're right: a place like this is going to favor 3e over 4e, if for no other reason than that it centers on a comic that is itself 3e-centric.

But there are 4e players here, and it only stands to reason that if they can even stand being in a place like this, they'd be more secure in their 4e fandom than many of the people in 4e-centric communities would be. Hostility, or even non-default status, has a way of weeding out the fair-weather fans (I'd call this board the latter case, though I suspect many 4e-fans would disagree). These are the people who can afford to wade into the debates and discussions: the most vociferous defenders, and the ones I would most expect to continue on with 4e even after Wizards has abandoned it. Yet even among these, I find the number of actual grognards to be shockingly low. What am I supposed to believe of the system, with that information? It looks to me like it's being dropped by the players almost as fast as it's being dropped by its maker, and if that isn't a failed system, I don't know what is.

But you pointed me at a community where I should be able to find more grognards. Thank you. Now that I know where to find them, I can learn more about how some people plan to keep playing when Wizards is gone.

Internet forums don't represent anything. They represent the people that get on them and are outspoken. The rest of my group pretty much thinks like I do when it comes to 5E, but they don't post on any internet forums that I'm aware of.

In other words the rest of 4E players could easily outnumber other fans 10 to 1 and are just too busy playing 4E to rant on the internet about 5E just as easily as all 4E players could be rapid forum posters. You can't know unless you do some kind of intensive research that I think no one really cares to do.

Honestly, I'm not too certain WotC cares all that much about 4e players. When I say that I don't mean what immediately springs to your mind, however. Let me explain.

Players who play 4e, when presented with 5e, are likely to choose two things: play 4e, or play 5e (there are other possibilities, but they're not interesting in discussion). If they choose the latter, that's great. More sales for WotC, more players on the most recent edition. If they choose the former, they're going to either not buy any RPG books at all -- making them non-customers -- or they'll continue to buy 4e supplements they haven't yet purchased. While those books are now out-of-print, the people who buy them are still buying something ultimately from WotC. They are, fundamentally and regardless of which side of the fence they fall on, still WotC's customers.

Players who play 3.x, on the other hand, might be incorporating Pathfinder or Paizo modules with 3.x. If they're presented with 5e, they have the same choices: play 3.x or play 5e (again, there are other possibilities, but they're not that interesting and probably not that likely). If they choose 5e, they become 100% WotC customers. If they stick with 3.x, on the other hand, they're very likely to remain or become Paizo customers.

Thus, the only truly bad situation for WotC is when 3.x players continue to choose Pathfinder over D&D. So it makes the most business sense to target Pathfinder players to lure them back. 4e players are locked in. They're not a threat to your market share because you own that segment of the market.

The problem is 13th age happened and while I used to think it was more like 3.x after having played it a few times, I really think it might replace 4E if WotC decides to drop support. All they have to do is put out a book describing how to convert theater of the mind to tactical battle map combat and I'm 100% sold on it.

This is fascinating to read.

I have some questions.
Can we get some proof?

Proof defined as Documentation representative of your claim. Facts that can be verified and sources cited for others to verify your claims?

Not to be a jerk, but claims like "WotC didn't do any market research" is a pretty strong claim to be alleging.
Not to mention alleging surveys are this or that when others cannot, at this time read for themselves.

If you are going to declare something as a fact - back it up with proof. Elsewise its just an opinion.

I won't say they absolutely didn't do market research. I will say what they got from any research they did do was wrong. The market is about quality content at reasonable prices. All you have to do is look at Paizo's success. They aren't in the slightest worried about WotC because WotC missed the point. People didn't abandon WotC because of 4E's rules changes (that happened a year later) they abandoned WotC because of how they treated their customers and their lack of quality products. Paizo treats its customers with respect and puts out quality products. They are successful. WotC is still putting out shoddy products that aren't well tested with low quality adventures. You really have to be blind not to see it and I guess WotC is actually blind at this point.

Fwiffo86

2014-06-12, 04:11 PM

I won't say they absolutely didn't do market research. I will say what they got from any research they did do was wrong. The market is about quality content at reasonable prices. All you have to do is look at Paizo's success. They aren't in the slightest worried about WotC because WotC missed the point. People didn't abandon WotC because of 4E's rules changes (that happened a year later) they abandoned WotC because of how they treated their customers and their lack of quality products. Paizo treats its customers with respect and puts out quality products. They are successful. WotC is still putting out shoddy products that aren't well tested with low quality adventures. You really have to be blind not to see it and I guess WotC is actually blind at this point.

This is not evidence. At best, this is Opinion Testimony.

The unquantified determination that company A is doing superior to company B cannot be proven until you have account sheets demonstrating the net gains of a similar product to compare. I am pretty sure, you don't have that. What you have is an observational view of local game stores that have more X product, than Y product. This is by no means a large enough sample to even begin to make this determination. Even if you add in internet traffic, ads, events, etc, without hard numbers, it remains unquantified, and unproven.

1337 b4k4

2014-06-12, 04:31 PM

See if those other people were just saying "this edition doesn't support my style of play, even though by retaining the D&D brand, it claims to." I would have no problem, instead they are telling me that my preferred edition 'isn't D&D' and inferring that its that way for everyone and because I like it I'm some kind of outcast or something.

The problem is you're conflating "is D&D" with "is good" or "is something you should like"

Nope, sorry. The only thing you have to do is take away encounter and daily powers for non-casters and healing surges and you have a very cleaned up 3.5E. That's 2 things. Only 2 things are keeping it from being very much like other editions.

And rituals. And encounter powers for casters. And at will powers in general (as opposed to basic attacks). And auto-leveling skills. And the whole "roles" system which was 4e's true class system. And the lack of utility casting (no, one utility power every few levels doesn't count). So yeah, like I said if you take out everything about 4e that's different from all the other editions of D&D then it's similar to the other editions of D&D.

If you're example doesn't hold up to inspection how are we supposed to understand or believe your argument (argument being your statement that you want us to evaluate and believe)?

It does hold up to inspection, you're just being purposefully obtuse about it. The point was not to determine which FF game was the most "not FF" but to point out that even games that have substantial difference between them have common threads that bind them and when you alter those common threads, you move the game along a continuum that stretches from "quintessential X" to "not X"

It would be more helpful if you explain exactly why in concise detail you don't like a specific edition. Like I've been doing with 5E.

You seem to be under the mistaken impression that I don't like 4e. "Not D&D" is not a statement of quality or appreciation. It's an observation of where the edition falls along the aforementioned continuum.

Yeah, except that its not any more complicated (and in some cases less) than other editions for character creation. Its simply that we are in the digital age and people just don't sit down with 50+ books and look through them like they did with 3.X and earlier editions. I personally use Fantasy Grounds if I want to create characters and I certainly don't go pencil and paper for any edition when I play them. In fact the last time I played 3.X (several months ago) I used several online tools scattered around on different sites including a now defunct wiki sight that listed all the 3.X features, feats, and spells.

Point missed. You should re-read the exchange.

Facts are strongly in evidence. Take a look at Pathfinders success. That alone proves Hasbro/WotC doesn't know the market. They lost out to a small 3rd party company they alienated, who then took their last product and made it a raging success. I'm sorry, but if you think WotC wanted that to happen, you have more faith in them than I can muster.

Just to be clear here, by your assertion, 4e is not what the market wants. Which then strongly gives support for 5e being less like 4e. Or alternatively, that the difference between 4e and 3e isn't as large of a driving factor in this market as company behavior, which then gives little support to your assertion that 5e's choice to be less like 4e is a failure to read the market.

I won't say they absolutely didn't do market research.

Except you did. You specifically said :

WotC didn't do any market research.

And then not a handful of quotes above, you just defended that assertion.

Lokiare

2014-06-12, 05:03 PM

This is not evidence. At best, this is Opinion Testimony.

The unquantified determination that company A is doing superior to company B cannot be proven until you have account sheets demonstrating the net gains of a similar product to compare. I am pretty sure, you don't have that. What you have is an observational view of local game stores that have more X product, than Y product. This is by no means a large enough sample to even begin to make this determination. Even if you add in internet traffic, ads, events, etc, without hard numbers, it remains unquantified, and unproven.

Actually no. It is well known. Go look up IcV2 and all their best selling TTRPG articles. Its well known who outsold who and when. 4E outsold Pathfinder and all other TTRPGs right up until they swapped out and went to Essentials. At that point Paizo tied with WotC and then the next report shows they pulled ahead. Its pretty much common knowledge at this point.

From there all you have to do is look at the difference in strategy between Paizo and WotC and realize what they did different was the way they treated their customers and the quality of their products.

The problem is you're conflating "is D&D" with "is good" or "is something you should like"

Not at all. I'm explaining that when someone says "is not D&D" they are speaking from the perspective that they think D&D is a single specific set of features and that the edition they are referring to doesn't have one or more of those features. However this is different from person to person and is a useless and insulting standard. It is akin to me telling you what your opinion should be rather than trying to sway you with logic, facts, and quotes and let you make up your own mind.

And rituals. And encounter powers for casters. And at will powers in general (as opposed to basic attacks). And auto-leveling skills. And the whole "roles" system which was 4e's true class system. And the lack of utility casting (no, one utility power every few levels doesn't count). So yeah, like I said if you take out everything about 4e that's different from all the other editions of D&D then it's similar to the other editions of D&D.

3E doesn't have non-weapon proficiencies, it has this thing called feats, they totally threw out the Thac0 chart. 3E isn't D&D its a completely different game.

Again, nit picking a few features that you personally think "aren't D&D" isn't helpful. You do get points for actually going into detail this time though. Add why you don't like each feature and we are well on our way to understanding each other.

It does hold up to inspection, you're just being purposefully obtuse about it. The point was not to determine which FF game was the most "not FF" but to point out that even games that have substantial difference between them have common threads that bind them and when you alter those common threads, you move the game along a continuum that stretches from "quintessential X" to "not X"

I'm trying to show you why statements like "is not D&D" are insulting not helpful to the conversation at hand. You could use any example you wanted and I would still prove that. You have features YOU personally feel are required for an edition to be D&D. Others have different features. Claiming that an edition isn't D&D is just insulting and doesn't move the discussion forward. Listing those specific features and detailing why you like them isn't insulting and does move the discussion forward.

You seem to be under the mistaken impression that I don't like 4e. "Not D&D" is not a statement of quality or appreciation. It's an observation of where the edition falls along the aforementioned continuum.

Point missed. You should re-read the exchange.

As should you, or you could just read what I posted above and let it sink in for a moment.

Just to be clear here, by your assertion, 4e is not what the market wants. Which then strongly gives support for 5e being less like 4e. Or alternatively, that the difference between 4e and 3e isn't as large of a driving factor in this market as company behavior, which then gives little support to your assertion that 5e's choice to be less like 4e is a failure to read the market.

Nope. My 'assertion' is that 4E failed and Pathfinder won out not based on the content of the rules of the game, but because of how the company that made it acted. WotC was arrogant and insulting to its fans and made bad quality supplements (adventures mostly) Paizo was understanding of its fans and made high quality supplements (adventures mostly). WotC still doesn't understand this.

Except you did. You specifically said :

And then not a handful of quotes above, you just defended that assertion.

Its called changing my opinion. I realized that they could very well have done their research and then simply came to the wrong conclusions or gathered the wrong evidence. So I altered my stance. It happens from time to time. You should try it on occasion.

Fwiffo86

2014-06-12, 05:22 PM

Actually no. It is well known. Go look up IcV2 and all their best selling TTRPG articles. Its well known who outsold who and when. 4E outsold Pathfinder and all other TTRPGs right up until they swapped out and went to Essentials. At that point Paizo tied with WotC and then the next report shows they pulled ahead. Its pretty much common knowledge at this point.

IcV2. Interesting choice for factual data that can be proven. Just to be clear.... Accounting sheets from Hasbro, and WotC, and any other company you feel needs to be in this to prove your point. A website that has ads on it does not inspire confidence in its authenticity, much like FOX news doesn't inspire confidence in their reporting. Just like in school, internet resources are not to be trusted. At best, this shows the pop culture (a thing known to be fluid and difficult to quantify or measure) trend, and is probably lending credence to those that line its pockets with money, instead of giving cold hard facts. I don't trust this source of information for the above reasons, and I would like to think, neither do you.

I will rephrase my request. Do you or anyone you know, have access to Accounting sheets/documents/reports/or any other official documentation that show the sales of Product A to Product B from the parent companies or any subsidiary of those companies, of the products that are in question? Does that information include sales on the global market?

If not, you are stating your opinion. Nothing more. Is it wrong? I have no idea, I do not have access to that information. You could very well be completely correct. Who knows? But unless you actually work for the companies you are bringing into question, and have first hand knowledge, I am asking you to acknowledge that you are expressing an opinion, and do not have adequate proof to change that opinion into fact.

Lokiare

2014-06-12, 05:57 PM

IcV2. Interesting choice for factual data that can be proven. Just to be clear.... Accounting sheets from Hasbro, and WotC, and any other company you feel needs to be in this to prove your point. A website that has ads on it does not inspire confidence in its authenticity, much like FOX news doesn't inspire confidence in their reporting. Just like in school, internet resources are not to be trusted. At best, this shows the pop culture (a thing known to be fluid and difficult to quantify or measure) trend, and is probably lending credence to those that line its pockets with money, instead of giving cold hard facts. I don't trust this source of information for the above reasons, and I would like to think, neither do you.

I will rephrase my request. Do you or anyone you know, have access to Accounting sheets/documents/reports/or any other official documentation that show the sales of Product A to Product B from the parent companies or any subsidiary of those companies, of the products that are in question? Does that information include sales on the global market?

If not, you are stating your opinion. Nothing more. Is it wrong? I have no idea, I do not have access to that information. You could very well be completely correct. Who knows? But unless you actually work for the companies you are bringing into question, and have first hand knowledge, I am asking you to acknowledge that you are expressing an opinion, and do not have adequate proof to change that opinion into fact.

Um.. seriously IcV2 is literally the standard that everyone goes by. See each company submits their financial records to IcV2 and then without naming specifics and keeping all that info confident IcV2 gives a comparative rating to their readers. Thus companies like WotC can compare their sales to Paizo and vice versa without having to resort to corporate espionage. IcV2's authenticity is proven because WotC and Paizo both rely on it.

Fwiffo86

2014-06-12, 06:20 PM

So the answer to my question is no.

And yet, I can think of no instance where icv2 has been used to prove anything, or has been used as an expert to prove up financial numbers. But that is fine. I guess I was being to literal in asking for numbers that I can ask the companies about and verify, or locate on a public information site. No worries. We are long past it being relevant.

Kurald Galain

2014-06-12, 06:39 PM

And yet, I can think of no instance where icv2 has been used to prove anything, or has been used as an expert to prove up financial numbers. But that is fine. I guess I was being to literal in asking for numbers that I can ask the companies about and verify, or locate on a public information site. No worries. We are long past it being relevant.

Aside from that, it still doesn't support Loki's conclusion. Just because the moment were Pathfinder overtook 4E's popularity happens to more-or-less coincide with the release of 4.4 doesn't mean it was caused by that. It is quite possible that 4E's decline was caused by either people who played 4E to "try out something new" getting tired of it, or by word-of-mouth and "living campaign" events causing the popularity of Pathfinder to skyrocket.

Fwiffo86

2014-06-12, 07:07 PM

Nor does this serve as an accurate representation. As far as I can tell from the suggested site, the entire thing is United States centric. Failing to account for world sales. That would be a better indicator of anyone's claims really. The only conclusion I can realistically come to at this point is it is an opinion. It is neither wrong, not right.

Lokiare

2014-06-12, 09:35 PM

Aside from that, it still doesn't support Loki's conclusion. Just because the moment were Pathfinder overtook 4E's popularity happens to more-or-less coincide with the release of 4.4 doesn't mean it was caused by that. It is quite possible that 4E's decline was caused by either people who played 4E to "try out something new" getting tired of it, or by word-of-mouth and "living campaign" events causing the popularity of Pathfinder to skyrocket.

It might be entirely true that other things caused the problem (things like pathfinders living campaign is simply another type of 'quality product' though) or it could be what I said. However...

Nor does this serve as an accurate representation. As far as I can tell from the suggested site, the entire thing is United States centric. Failing to account for world sales. That would be a better indicator of anyone's claims really. The only conclusion I can realistically come to at this point is it is an opinion. It is neither wrong, not right.

Yeah, you need to go read up on what IcV2 is. You clearly have no understanding of what trade publications are or their purpose. In this case its a highly trusted insider magazine for multiple entertainment industries that even big corporations like Hasbro use as a benchmark. Dismissing it out of hand just shows how little you understand it.

Fwiffo86

2014-06-13, 08:09 AM

Yeah, you need to go read up on what IcV2 is. You clearly have no understanding of what trade publications are or their purpose. In this case its a highly trusted insider magazine for multiple entertainment industries that even big corporations like Hasbro use as a benchmark. Dismissing it out of hand just shows how little you understand it.

I am not dismissing anything. The statement that Company A and Company B both use the same site for something does not prove anything. All it does prove is that they provide a site with information. Even if every company in the world used this site, that doesn't prove anything other than they use the site. There has been no proof provided/cited/referenced that the information is remotely accurate.

So far, I haven't heard concise yes, or no answers to my question on if you have this documentation to support your claim. Either you have it, or you do not. Instead, you have offered vague website references with absolutely no further direction to the information you seem to believe is valid. If your claim is that you have it via IcV2, then you need to provide links to the information requested. You have made it clear that you believe this site to be valid. So use it like I am asking you. I have asked repeatedly for proof of your claim. You have produced none. A website reference, devoid of article reference, or page reference is not proof. I could very well say "The UFO are kidnapping aborigines and using them as bombs." Attempting to claim I am right by saying "Its on the internet" citing nothing, and claiming truth. That is a far cry from being true, much less doing anything to prove my claim.

Additionally, I was taught that when I back up my arguments, to provide more than one source of proof. Something as simple as Did the 4e PHB outsell Pathfinder basic book on the world wide market seems easy enough. Show me links to that information on sites that publish it. Show me first hand knowledge of this information. Show me more than one article from more than one site that claims the same information.

You are fond of saying "It needs to say that" or its bad/faulty. I'm calling you out on "You need to show me so I know". Hold my hand, like you want your TTRPG materials to do. Saying "check this site" is no different than having to puzzle out how to use a feat based on its description. I am not being unreasonable by asking for sources cited. It's called proving your argument. It is not my responsibility to locate the sources of your information serving as the basis of your argument. It falls directly on you. It is my job to examine the facts you provide and change my mind or not based on the proof you have provided.

If a more direct approach is needed, I'll be as clear as I can.

Provide a link to an article that publishes the information you are basing your argument on. Please be sure this information contains information on the World Market, instead of just a single country. Also verify that these sites you provide have their own links to their source information if possible.

You have done neither of these. Until you do so, you simply have an opinion. And as I have said before, it is neither right, nor wrong.

EvanWaters

2014-06-14, 06:58 PM

The problem is that to some extent, bad data is worse than no data. The methodology of IcV2 is so questionable (a small self-reporting sample) that while it probably reflects general trends I'd be hard pressed to take it as gospel, let alone use it as so many do as evidence of the objective failure of 4e.

da_chicken

2014-06-14, 09:57 PM

The problem that I have with IcV2 is that much of Paizo's sales are conducted on paizo.com. The company offers several PDF-only products that are only sold on their website. That's potentially a lot of sales that I have to think IcV2 is missing completely.

Fwiffo86

2014-06-15, 12:24 AM

Agreed. The information will be difficult at best to verify

pwykersotz

2014-06-15, 08:08 AM

That's odd because I remember the 4E DMG having a page 42 in it that allowed exactly that kind of thing while still managing to make it balanced. It amazes me how the critics of 4E don't seem to know the 4E rules half the time.

Actually, I don't play 4E and I never have. Nor have I ever cracked a rulebook (it has a stigma in my group). My dissent was not about 4E though, it was about the concept and idea that captpike had about rules. It was never system specific.