Convincing 4th Edition players to consider 5th Edition

Emerikol · Aug 31, 2012

Dornam said:
+1 to Emerikol

I don't play game systems, I play adventures, and while 4e might give me a very good game system, it just doesn't give me very good adventures.

However I sympathize with the OP because the ones that don't like 4e have Pathfinder and, so it seems, 5e. What do the ones that love 4e have?

From what I've seen 3.5e is being played nearly as much as Pathfinder. We all know that 6e is likely only 5 to 6 years away. Just keep playing 4e. We all agree that WOTC produced crappy 4e adventures (even the pro-4e people) so you been running without adventures for a long time now. Just keep on keeping on. I wish 3.5e satisfied me fully. I'd be there. I keep thinking there might be something better coming. But from what I've seen of 5e maybe even I'll stick with 3.5e or maybe Pathfinder.

GreyICE · Aug 31, 2012

Dornam said:
+1 to Emerikol

I don't play game systems, I play adventures, and while 4e might give me a very good game system, it just doesn't give me very good adventures.

However I sympathize with the OP because the ones that don't like 4e have Pathfinder and, so it seems, 5e. What do the ones that love 4e have?

About 4-5 different open gaming systems and several promising closed gaming systems currently in the works, including one I'm working on.

4E has given me some great adventures, and I'm sure 4E and its spiritual successors will long into the future. WotC never pushed 4E to its full potential and if it's dropping the mantle there are plenty willing to pick it up.

Emerikol · Aug 31, 2012

GreyICE said:
About 4-5 different open gaming systems and several promising closed gaming systems currently in the works, including one I'm working on.

4E has given me some great adventures, and I'm sure 4E and its spiritual successors will long into the future. WotC never pushed 4E to its full potential and if it's dropping the mantle there are plenty willing to pick it up.

This might be the ideal. I wish the 4e people well honestly. But I would love if D&D got back to it's roots and 4e spun off into another game. The war erupted because it was the takeover of D&D not because something different existed. 5e will make a serious attempt to unite us. I hope they can do it but if not then this idea is probably best. Just sell OD&D and ND&D.

GreyICE · Aug 31, 2012

Emerikol said:
This might be the ideal. I wish the 4e people well honestly. But I would love if D&D got back to it's roots and 4e spun off into another game. The war erupted because it was the takeover of D&D not because something different existed. 5e will make a serious attempt to unite us. I hope they can do it but if not then this idea is probably best. Just sell OD&D and ND&D.

DnD's roots? Would that be 2E or 3E or even 1E? Because besides the 1>2 transition, DnD never "stuck to its roots." The fallacy of that has been pointed out a thousand times. 3E tried to make a simulationist (by which I mean rules-centric simulation) game out of a gamist system and changed a thousand things in the process, 4E brought it back to its gamist roots and cut a lot of the core 'tropes' of DnD in the process.

Meh, I honestly don't care. 5E is going to be more balanced than 3E, but I'm not sure it's even going to meet the standards of being "better." And it's certainly not particularly paying attention to what the 4E players want. The shoddy tactics module was pretty much the last nail in the coffin for me (Facing? Really WotC? FACING?!?).

Frankly, we can do it better than WotC, and I'm fine with waving goodbye to them if they throw out everything they learned from 4E. And Facing is the OPPOSITE of everything that 4E ever did.

P.S. There were some good 4E adventures, but on the whole they're found in Dungeon Magazine. For some reason what made it to print was terrible.

Emerikol · Aug 31, 2012

GreyICE said:
DnD's roots? Would that be 2E or 3E or even 1E? Because besides the 1>2 transition, DnD never "stuck to its roots." The fallacy of that has been pointed out a thousand times. 3E tried to make a simulationist (by which I mean rules-centric simulation) game out of a gamist system and changed a thousand things in the process, 4E brought it back to its gamist roots and cut a lot of the core 'tropes' of DnD in the process.

Meh, I honestly don't care. 5E is going to be more balanced than 3E, but I'm not sure it's even going to meet the standards of being "better." And it's certainly not particularly paying attention to what the 4E players want. The shoddy tactics module was pretty much the last nail in the coffin for me (Facing? Really WotC? FACING?!?).

Frankly, we can do it better than WotC, and I'm fine with waving goodbye to them if they throw out everything they learned from 4E. And Facing is the OPPOSITE of everything that 4E ever did.

P.S. There were some good 4E adventures, but on the whole they're found in Dungeon Magazine. For some reason what made it to print was terrible.

I say that because that is how I see it. You see it differently. You keep disagreeing and I keep saying what I see. We just disagree. Your answer though does not prove to me that I'm wrong. If that is your question. I see 1e,2e,3e as a natural progression. I see 4e as a sharp turn in a different direction. While I do agree 3e added a lot of rules, I still see it in the spirit of D&D. If you don't then thats fine. We just disagree.

keterys · Sep 1, 2012

Anecdotally: before 4e was announced, I was playing a streamlined 3e game. I basically cut way down on the breadth of stuff we were using (ex: no 7-class MC craziness) and on the DM side I just had appropriate stats and abilities for monsters, without sweating how their feats and such lined up.

I was having a lot of fun with it, then 4e premiered and it was almost the same game. It was like "Whoa, what a natural progression, just removing the bookkeeping cruft I was tired of".

It's easy to draw the path from A to B, and it's easy to get bothered by any number of the detours or pit stops.

If I had a chance to redesign any edition of D&D, I'd change a lot of things. Less fiddly bits in 4e, less encyclopedic nonsense in 3e, more mechanical streamlining in 2e, more mechanical sensibility in BD&D, etc, etc. I'm sure it would have a lot of similarities to what other folks would design, and a lot of differences. And at its core still stem from the same stuff.

So, y'know, feel free to grok the whole thing, or not claim to.

slobo777 · Sep 1, 2012

keterys said:
Anecdotally: before 4e was announced, I was playing a streamlined 3e game. I basically cut way down on the breadth of stuff we were using (ex: no 7-class MC craziness) and on the DM side I just had appropriate stats and abilities for monsters, without sweating how their feats and such lined up.

...snip...

It's easy to draw the path from A to B, and it's easy to get bothered by any number of the detours or pit stops.

Just to add to the different angles inferred here, I played basic, 1e, 2e- then moved to other systems because I had grown dissatisfied with D&D as a whole. I came back with 3e because I felt it had radically changed the game in ways which made it acceptable again. And I moved to 4e out of curiousity, but had no initial aims or desire to "fix" anything in 3e and found it a very different game again (4e is now my favourite version)

So I don't see any natural progression really between "classic" TSR D&D or either of 3e or 4e.

I agree the progression between versions is more about individuals' journeys, and not so much about the game internals.

Steely_Dan · Sep 1, 2012

GreyICE said:
And it's certainly not particularly paying attention to what the 4E players want.

I play (DM) 4th Ed, what would that be?

Tony Vargas · Sep 1, 2012

I certainly see a clear progression within classic D&D. A very slow, almost stately progression, I guess you could say. 1e started in 1977, and 2e didn't start until 1989, and was /barely/ different, at first. A lot of years with not a lot of change. Half way through 2e I gave up on it. It just wasn't providing anything of value. I missed out on the 'option' series, and, so I've heard, there were hints at what 3e would go on to do in there. But, I missed them, so to me 3e seemed fairly radical, and a definite improvement.

This millennium, D&D has moved a lot faster. 3.0 to 3.5 to 4e to Essentials in 10 years. 3.5, at 5 years, had the longest run, and it was never stagnant, new spells, feats, PrCs, and so forth were constantly coming out, and changes were made to basic rules and structure here and there, like the introduction of re-training late in the run, for instance. 4e may seem like a radical change from 3e, but given the pace of change within 3e, itself, it really wasn't. Both are merely the modern face of D&D.