That's weird, 'cause I've done it.
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D&D 5E With Respect to the Door and Expectations....The REAL Reason 5e Can't Unite the Base
That's weird, 'cause I've done it.
Folks, a few pages back, there were some folks who slipped, and started getting personal.
Don't do that. Really.
Generally speaking, you should address the content of the post, not the person of the poster. In addition, we expect our users to treat each other with respect - as if being a fellow gamers was more important than differences in personal preferences of playstyle and such.
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Pickles JG
First Post
Prior to the 3e release I described my 2e game on these boards as a tactical miniatures game with in character chat. It is the way I have always played D&D so I find its application to 4e rather reassuring. Not that that will help us win the edition wars.
So did I (XPH classes in an otherwise 3.0 game). And I played 2e when the DM was using 1e and Basic adventures. But it doesn't change that there were a lot of fiddly differences between core 3.0 and 3.5; I never played 1e, but it seems to me that 3.0->3.5 was a similar level of change to 1e->2e.
No argument there. I merely argue against the flat, "You can't play one with the other."
Neonchameleon
Legend
Simple answer. It's a new edition when they pull the old edition and its supplements off the shelves and make sure you can only buy the new incompatable one as far as they possibly can.
The 4e PHB 1 is on sale alongside the Essentials books. And the only problem with buying a copy of e.g. AV1 is finding the thing. Therefore not a new edition.
They pulled 3.0 and they pulled the books like Song and Silence, replacing them with Complete Arcane and the like. Therefore new edition.
Mustrum, I thought the same thing. Didn't you or me even post it already upthread?
I think this is a standard definition of stances:
*In Actor stance, a person determines a character's decisions and actions using only knowledge and perceptions that the character would have.
*In Author stance, a person determines a character's decisions and actions based on the real person's priorities, then retroactively "motivates" the character to perform them. (Without that second, retroactive step, this is fairly called Pawn stance.)
*In Director stance, a person determines aspects of the environment relative to the character in some fashion, entirely separately from the character's knowledge or ability to influence events. Therefore the player has not only determined the character's actions, but the context, timing, and spatial circumstances of those actions, or even features of the world separate from the characters.
*In Author stance, a person determines a character's decisions and actions based on the real person's priorities, then retroactively "motivates" the character to perform them. (Without that second, retroactive step, this is fairly called Pawn stance.)
*In Director stance, a person determines aspects of the environment relative to the character in some fashion, entirely separately from the character's knowledge or ability to influence events. Therefore the player has not only determined the character's actions, but the context, timing, and spatial circumstances of those actions, or even features of the world separate from the characters.
[MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s example of the chandelier is Author stance: the player decides that it would be cool to have his/her PC do a stunt, and then (retroactively) decides that his/her PC wants to do something stuntish. My own view is that most RPG players switch between actor and author stance all the time, and neither has anything to do with 1st vs 3rd person narration (you can do either with either).
This is quintessential author stance. I don't think it's very controversial that this is part of RPGing.
A well-known example of director stance from 4e is (pre-errata) Come and Get It: when the player decides to use the power, the NPCs close on the PC even though the PC has no power (ingame) to influence their behaviour. Most of the complaints about CaGI as "mind control" seem to miss this feature of the power, and to assume that its use must be an instance of author or actor stance.
In AD&D, every time the player of a cleric writes down his/her 3rd or higher level spells for the day without checking with the GM, we have director stance too: because (per Gygax's DMG) the player has decided that the servitors of his/her god, whom the PC has no power over within the gameworld, have granted his/her requests for spells.
To explain why the CaGI director stance is controversial, but the AD&D director stance is not controversial, is not trivial, though I think there are important differences (one is part of action resolution, the other part of day-to-day PC build; the GM has a veto power over the AD&D player's decision, but not the 4e player's; etc).
I think this issue of fictional positioning is important. And I think 4e takes a particular approach to fictional positioning: keywords are very important to it, and in combat some parts of the fiction (eg details of facing, weapon technique used, etc) aren't relevant to action resolution. In skill challenges, it relies heavily on the GM to adjudicate the details of the fiction.
But I'm not sure that this goes to the "dissociation" issue, because that doesn't seem to be about fictional positioning. As best I can tell, the anti-dissociation view is that no decision should be made by the player which does not correlate to a decision by the PC (the reverse is permissible - the PC decides to strike high or low, even though the player doesn't have to). Which is why what puzzle me is that D&D hp pass this test, or initiative - because, as I posted upthread, when the player decides to act based on knowledge of his/her PC's hp total, or rolls initiative, what is the PC doing in the fiction?
It's also worth noting that actor vs author stance is irrelevant to "dissociation", because a player can make a choice in author stance and still have it correlate to a choice by the PC. But director stance is ruled out. And so are any mechanics that have no stance at all, because don't bear upon the content of the fiction at all (initiative would be one example, I think).
I agree with this.
I don't dispute that 4e has distinctive mechanics compared to some earlier versions of D&D - especially, more metagame and more director stance in the "active" aspects of action resolution. My objection to the "dissociation" idea is that (i) it is pejorative in tone, and (ii) it misses innerdude's point that it about personal and group responses to game systems, rather than objective truths about their suitability for RPGing.
Part of the point of my example of the paladin and the polymorph is to try and show, via a concrete actual play example, that metagame, director-stance, "dissociated" mechanics are completely consisted with "inhabiting" and playing one's PC, provided that the players take them in their stride. (As my player did.)
I'm glad I ended up making sense to you!
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My own view is that Essentials is an unstable mix of marketing ("new onramp", "evergreen product", etc) and gameplay (essentially errata plus splatbooks for 4e).
From either point of view they're poorly put together - absurdly padded with contentless, woolly flavour text, duplication of content across books, etc.
Some worthwhile content in my view (though I know some others disagree eg [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION]), but the editors and marketers did a really poor job in my view.
Tony Vargas
Legend
I find /some/ worthwhile content in Essentials, specifically in the RC (skill challenges) and MV (MM1 monsters updated to MM3 standards, occasional gems in the "woolly flavor text").
HotFL, HotFK, and the post-Essentials HoS, OTOH, are mostly toxic.
You miss my point, what I'm saying is we can go back and forth all day, you say toma
to, I say toma(h)to. I was responding to an earlier post. 3E and 3.5 were separate editions because much of the information in 3.5 superceded 3.0, where Essentials didn't supercede anything in 4E, and not just in available products but also in characters already in-play. If I'm playing in a game with Essentials, I don't need to change my regular character to fit (or to not awkwardly fit). From 3.0 to 3.5 many did. They weren't that far apart, but again the new superceded the old. Who said it was? The fact remains the company doesn't give a whit about a solid ruleset, they care about rate of return and sales. For another example I give you reality TV. Network execs see the cost/return numbers and don't care it's not quality or creative, only that it makes them money.
By your definition designers certainly aren't waiting for sales data or direction, they've got ideas still in the bucket not introduced with the last product and stuff they're coming up with all the time. (We'll come back to this)
If you believe this I've got some ocean front property in Iowa you may be interested in. They had outside input as well as market research. They weren't a bunch of dummies cooped up ignoring the outside world.
It's realistic and not really cynical.
1. WotC heard all the gamers decrying about how 'other companies gave us a public playtest because they care about us' stuff and they thought "hey, we can use that". It's good PR.
2. This introduces new concepts and rules more gradually in to the market. From that standpoint, those that may be more reluctant to change aren't given such a "jarring" transition.
3. If you think Combat Superiority is something they came up with only after feedback lets talk about that Iowa property. Mearls and Co. have a bucketload of stuff they want to introduce just waiting. They're bright guys.
4. Marketing is often the most expensive part of a product when all is said and done.
Yes and no. I'm not claiming it's a majority, but there's definitely a group there. It's more like a Venn Diagram than overlapping groups.
Doubtful. People want Vancian Wizards for different reasons, I'm not claiming otherwise. I do think they should not have Vancian Wizards as core (or any system past at-wills) but have that module in the first product offering.
And I agree with that. I think they should. I also think that it should be set up as alternate spell systems should not supercede anything in the core system but handled as add-ons.
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