AdmundfortGeographer
Getting lost in fantasy maps
James in red AND in white?
WotC's Annual Xmas Layoffs
I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
Windjammer said:
Innnnnnteresting. If I remember correctly (and I may not), he's working more with the board game side of WotC at the moment? At any rate, he wrote some of the most...polemical...words in 4e.
Words like...
andJames Wyatt said:
James Wyatt said:
IIRC, he moved to board games in last year's little shake-up, when Mearls got promoted.
Curious.
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I love this.
In the same breath you praise Rich Baker and yet denounce one of the products he worked on. Is he sinner or saint? Or are you just mad, bro?
True, although I suspect that's true of a significant population of publicly traded corporations.
My general point is simply this: If everybody who is currently involved with any sort of d20 game (yes, Pathfinder folks, this includes you -- you are playing something which is WotC-derived, after all) picked up some HAS stock AND then chose to make noise about the holiday layoff practice (either in person at the annual meeting, or via proxy), we might stand a chance of causing them to do something about it.
GrayLinnorm
Explorer
They had to let them go. They need the money to hire Lorraine Williams back.
Matt James
Game Developer
I haven't actually laughed out loud in a long time while reading something. Dude, you have earned a free sourcebook (or something). Come find me at Gen Con or DDXP.
Ydars
Explorer
Need you ask (madness is never far away in my case).
Seriously though, just because he worked on 4E does not mean Baker backed every single thing it represents; I blame Mearls, Wyatt and Slavisek for the problems in the 'design philosophy' of 4E that turned me off it.
Baker did so many good things in the 3.5E era that he is excused in my book.
Oh and sorry for starting the corporate greed firestorm Umbran.
Ah, the tyranny of fun. One of the silliest paragraphs ever written in a D&D book. Ironically I was just looking through the DMG2 the other day, and came across an example of a good roleplaying encounter, I think in the skill challenge section: negotiating with gate guards to get into a city.
I don't know if that was a deliberate riposte to Wyatt from another (better) designer, but I thought it was funny.I think it's possible to extract good advice from Wyatt's paragraph: You don't always need to have the PCs negotiate with every gate guard, you don't always need to track food and encumbrance. Sometimes it's fine to skip through the process of moving through the ruined dwarf fortress and focus on critical decision points & encounters. I found for instance with PBEM play, that's a much better approach than the traditional dungeon crawl. But taken
in isolation as a hard warning against any sort of exploratory play, as advice to new DMs it's terrible, and has resulted in major problems with 4e adventure design.
The original 4e design philosophy (PHB-DMG-MM) seems to have been Wyatt/Slavicsek/Heinsoo, but not Mearls. Mearls seems to prefer an older aesthetic and was responsible for the change of direction with Essentials, which garnered a lot of criticism from fans of the 4e approach. I was initially enthusiastic about what Mearls was trying to do, but as time has gone on the original 4e approach has really grown on me (I've grown adept at working around the problems while getting the most out of the new, good stuff), whereas I've found that IME Essentials didn't really achieve its design goals, other than to give me a great monster resource with Monster Vault. Although a big problem with Essentials is the terrible online character builder; if they had updated the much better offline charbuilder with Essentials stuff then the E-classes would come over a lot better I think.
Matt James
Game Developer
Chris Youngs is still around. Not sure why he got put in red (??)
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