Convincing 4th Edition players to consider 5th Edition

CasvalRemDeikun said:

HOW IN THE IS WOTC SUPPOSED TO LEARN ANYTHING FROM THE PLAYTEST?

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Watch your language.

This is supposed to be a family-friendly site. We have a language filter. It is there as a last resort. It does not exist for you to be able to use foul words with impunity. The rules include: Keep it civil, and keep it clean. This violates both.

For everyone: If you use foul language, we are usually going to assume that you're temper is up to the point where you are not bothering to control yourself. That's usually a quick route to getting an infraction, booted from the thread, or worse.

Which is to say, keep your cool, or we may keep it for you. Clear? If not, please e-mail of PM the mod of your choice to discuss it. Thank you. We now return you to your regularly scheduled thread.

Herschel said:

Balance is important if you want everyone at the table to have fun.

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Nope. Balance is not necessary for fun.

JamesonCourage said:

So, that's not Fun. Okay... what if it doesn't lead to bad feelings between the players, or a miserable evening? What if a group can play with Game B and, despite how your group feels about it, actually have Fun with it? What if they have more Fun with it than they did with Game A? Is Game A now objectively worse than Game B? Or, perhaps, is a measure of how Fun something is actually subjective, and not objective?

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Speaking as an amateur game designer, if I give a game to someone to playtest and they report back to me the following:

1. The game was awesome.
2. Their nephew Timmy was crippled early in the game and never had a chance to win.
3. In fact, as a result of his early game problems, he spent the whole evening making rote movements and uninteresting decisions, and only stayed in the game because having one player drop would have ruined the game for everyone else.
4. But in spite of this, nothing is wrong with the game.

I'm not going to believe 1 and 4. If my playtesters think these things, then I literally know better than them, and I'm going to improve my game whether they know to ask me to or not. The game would have been better if Timmy had a chance to make a comeback, or if the game had a meaningful ranking system so that fighting for second to last instead of last was fun for Timmy, or if the game were shorter so that the low time for Timmy was shorter, or probably any number of other changes I haven't even thought of.

If my playtesters tell me that it was totally ok for Timmy to sit there pointlessly for hours, they're wrong.

TrippyHippy said:

Anyone foolish enough to assert his preference as 'objectively' better than someone elses, needs to be called on it. Anybody who then compares dissent with 'genocide' speaks volumes for the validity of his views.

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Or maybe someone upset by it needs to read the qualifying sections he wrote. 4E is objectively a better designed game than any previous edition because the mechanics are more balanced, the math is much tighter, etc.

Subjectively, that doesn't mean everyone will actually LIKE it more. "Citizen Kane" is objectively a better movie than "Clash of the Titans" (the new one especially) but many who like the latter won't even watch the former or get through maybe 5 minutes. Subjectivity is very important in entertainment.

Holy Bovine said:

Nope. Balance is not necessary for fun.

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So it's fun for you to sit at a table for four-12 hours while everyone else does things? Or okay if it's you doing things and others are just sitting there?

Someone is always trying to balance the game in order for people to have fun. The difference being that DMs have had to spend a lot of needless time balancing things, things that could be taken care of by the system. Personally, I very much enjoy just coming up with the story and going and when the game is properly balanced, the game can go in any direction without marginalizing anyone. So if the social skill monkey starts diverting the adventure his way there's two paths:

1. The fighter player can start playing on his phone or go home because the system isn't balanced.

2. If the system is balanced the fighter's player has things to do and you don't have to try and railroad the story back to combat unless you want to hear him snore.

It's easier to have a flexible, breathing game when you don't have to have specific things happen in a certain order. One session, it may be all combat, another it may be none and nobody can feel skipping the session is a good idea.

Umbran said:

Watch your language.

This is supposed to be a family-friendly site. We have a language filter. It is there as a last resort. It does not exist for you to be able to use foul words with impunity. The rules include: Keep it civil, and keep it clean. This violates both.

For everyone: If you use foul language, we are usually going to assume that you're temper is up to the point where you are not bothering to control yourself. That's usually a quick route to getting an infraction, booted from the thread, or worse.

Which is to say, keep your cool, or we may keep it for you. Clear? If not, please e-mail of PM the mod of your choice to discuss it. Thank you. We now return you to your regularly scheduled thread.

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I edited the language out of my post. I won't post with that sort of language anymore. Thank you for calling me out on losing my cool.

Cadfan said:

I don't know what else to say except to refer you back to my original post, where I took Game B, a game explicitly designed to NOT have everyone be equally powerful all the time, a game explicitly designed to NOT have the design goal you thought I was evaluating it with respect to, and discussed other design decisions that would need to be worked into the game in order to make varying power levels at varying times a functional concept that doesn't leave players sitting at the table like vestigial extras, eating Cheetos and doing nothing important or meaningful, for hours and hours of gameplay each night.

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The problem here is you are still using A as the ultimate measure of fun. You assume a game where anybody isn't always on par with others can't be fun in your evaluation of B. What constitues functiona game play is going to vary from person to person for the reasons people listed. Essentially tey ave said, no B can be enjoyable and can function well as a design goa even if your two caveats are not met.

I also posted this over at RPGNet:

Great post Neonchameleon!

So far (and I know its early days yet) I have seen nothing from 5E to suggest its as good as 4E...let alone better.

4E has (or has had) a few problems but most were easily resolvable:

1. Rules Bloat: I think in particular the individual classes REALLY take up far too much space.

Solution: http://eternitypublishing.wordpress....ed-4e-fighter/

2. Lack of Identity for the higher Tiers: The higher tiers are just more of the same with more math, when they needed to add elements like mass combat, running a stronghold, gigantic monsters, politics, running a country, becoming a religion/immortal.

Solution: Use these ideas as the backbone for new books instead of "Fighter Book 4".

3. The Game System License: Slightly improved now, but the initial GSL for 4E really isolated the third party companies and caused the schism that is Pathfinder.

Solution: To be honest I'm not sure. Maybe the damage is already done. Maybe they just need to rebrand/repackage 4E (4.5E?) to remove the stigmatism. I suspect that no matter how good 5E is, that a large chunk of people will still be playing Pathfinder and 4E respectively.

4. Too Combat Centric: Don’t get me wrong, I love RPG combat/tactical play and 4E is the best system for that. But after reading Revenge of the Iron Lich it was clear that other 4E products (adventures in particular) really ignored the exploration and puzzle side of the game.

Solution: I think WotC have already made strides in this area with adventures/products like the Madness at Gardmore Abbey. Although I don't think every adventure needs to be a mega-adventure.

5. Underwhelming Products: While 4E had its share of gems (Dungeon Delves, Open Grave, Draconomicon, Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting among others) too many of the books were all too familiar and pretty lacklustre efforts. I can’t remember the last time I really got excited by a 4E release.

Solution: Come up with some new ideas for books rather than a schedule dominated by either a) retreads of books I already have for every past edition, or b) rules bloating class books.

Obviously WotC sees 5E as the solution. But maybe they should have had a bit more of a think about how they could improve upon 4E first...?

Cadfan said:

Speaking as an amateur game designer, if I give a game to someone to playtest and they report back to me the following:

1. The game was awesome.
2. Their nephew Timmy was crippled early in the game and never had a chance to win.
3. In fact, as a result of his early game problems, he spent the whole evening making rote movements and uninteresting decisions, and only stayed in the game because having one player drop would have ruined the game for everyone else.
4. But in spite of this, nothing is wrong with the game.

I'm not going to believe 1 and 4. If my playtesters think these things, then I literally know better than them, and I'm going to improve my game whether they know to ask me to or not. The game would have been better if Timmy had a chance to make a comeback, or if the game had a meaningful ranking system so that fighting for second to last instead of last was fun for Timmy, or if the game were shorter so that the low time for Timmy was shorter, or probably any number of other changes I haven't even thought of.

If my playtesters tell me that it was totally ok for Timmy to sit there pointlessly for hours, they're wrong.

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Then you are not listening to your playtesters. Now if keeping everyone in the game is a key design goal for you because you know most of yur audience wants that, of course you read this playtest with that in mind. But what this person is saying is the chance of being booted out of the game either didn't detract from his enjoyment or was a factor that added to the exvitement (you would have to followup to know more). If i wanted to make a game that catered to peope who find such a game exciting, i can do so, and it isn't objectively worse than a eurogame design approach (personally i cant stand games that keeo me in play all the time). This isn't to say your approach is bad or invalid, just that there are people who like B and dismissing their opinions doesn't make A objectively better.

It really comes down to how you want the game.

4E was very DM Neutral. The DM had to do little to make sure every player's character had something meaning ful to do and thus the DM could play anything kind of game with with any proportion of the 3 Plillars or Number of Encounters.

D&D Next current cureently plays like older editions where the DM had to mandate certain types of characters or retool his or her game to ensure everyone was doing something meaningful... eventually.

It's a preference but the current form of 5E and the plans attributed to it seem to leave 4E player behind.