The roots of 4e exposed?

Charlaquin said:

I feel like you’re arguing against a point I’m not trying to make. I’m not saying PF2 is 4e 2.0. I’m not saying there will be a mass exodus of 4e fans from 5e to PF2 (are there even that many 4e fans playing 5e?). I’m saying there are a lot of 4e fans who don’t like 5e, and PF2 looks like it may appeal to 4e fans - it does to me, as a 4e fan. And I will find it amusing if a not insignificant number of 4e fans adopt it in leu of other systems, because Paizo very much made their brand on the promise of being a haven from 4e.

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Fair enough. I guess I misunderstood you. It sounded to me like you were saying that it was going to be to 4e, what Pathfinder was to 3e. I hope you enjoy it. For my group, we're starting to really dig 5e. It took us this long to begin playing it.

Kobold Boots said:

I think it's important to let you know though that at the time I didn't see it as a bad experience. I still don't. Guy was a better friend to me than I was to him and now that I'm the guy that has all of his campaign notes whatever I didn't understand fully I do now.

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I think that you can be a good friend and a bad DM at the same time.

Maxperson said:

Fair enough. I guess I misunderstood you. It sounded to me like you were saying that it was going to be to 4e, what Pathfinder was to 3e. I hope you enjoy it. For my group, we're starting to really dig 5e. It took us this long to begin playing it.

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For sure. Yeah, it’s definitely not to 4e as PF1 is to 3e. More like, both PF2 and 4e are evolutions of 3e design, and there are naturally going to be some ways in which they converge and others in which they diverge. But for me at least (and I suspect I’m far from alone in this), that’s a lot more appealing than 5e, which is in many ways a whole different branch, though still sharing a common ancestor in 2e.

The future of D&D was look'n pretty grim there for minute.

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The future of DnD was looking grim but not for the reason that you may be thinking.

When the pendulum of DnD swings right to the extreme edge of the DnD axis then either it shoots off the edge and fails or it comes back into the larger DnD tent. Say what you will about 5e but it at least succeeded in returning to a more normal DnD base line.

Tony Vargas said:

The future of D&D was look'n pretty grim there for minute.

But, had that been the case, and D&D been shelved for the last six years, we still might be seeing the come-back, just with the OSR & PF (mabye a more 5e-like TSR-era-evoking PF2 or Advanced PathFinder or something) reaping the rewards and Hasbro not noticing/caring.

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If we take Paizo at their word, that PF2 has been in development longer than 5E has been out in the wild, then I doubt PF2 would be all that "5e-like TSR-era-evoking".

Charlaquin said:

5e would never have been green-lit had Hasbro not changed its policies.

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I have seen this stated on the forum a couple of times by 4e fans but I'm wondering where did this information (D&D no longer needing to be a core brand and 4e being ended because it didn't make core brand money) come from? And if 4e was doing good to great why not just keep it rolling if D&D no longer needed to make core brand profits? Or at least iterate on the design with the next edition since the pressure was no longer there. In other words while the above may be true I don't see how that rules out something like 4e not having enough fans to be sustainable... and if it did...why such a radical departure in design?

Tony Vargas said:

If what 4e fans liked mattered, we'd still have 4e.

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I think you paint it too black and white - that either what 4e fans likes was everything, or completely ignored. There is a middle ground - what they liked mattered, but not enough to have 5e be a clear evolution of the 4e ruleset. In the long analysis, the 4e-style fans are probably not sufficient in number to support the main flagship of the brand, such that the design couldn't cater to them very strongly. And the market simply isn't large enough for WotC to have much more than the flagship of the brand.

If one sets aside the anger and partisanship that colors analysis though, one can see places where some things that 4e fans liked did get translated over. For example - the at-will/encounter/daily structure still exists, in cantrip/short rest/long rest. There are others. But they had to be recast in ways that fit the more classic framework that apparently appeals to the larger audience.

Dannyalcatraz said:

Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

(And yes, it WAS an Int-based casting class).

FWIW, I’ve also played low-STR martial PCs, too.

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OK, so someone did it once, someone ran a 12 STR fighter in 4e once too, no doubt. It isn't the way either game envisages characters being built and it isn't even remotely close to the norm. So is it really that relevant to a discussion of the game? I mean, yes, it is, if we're talking about how each game handles edge cases etc. In terms of how they normally play though? I'm not guessing the 3e or 4e designers were losing sleep over that.

Maxperson said:

You can say that, and you can disagree with me, but you can't change the facts. The fact is that I was never irrelevant, whether I played a caster or non-caster. Nobody in a game I ran was irrelevant, caster or non-caster. Sure the power imbalance doesn't itself render anyone relevant or irrelevant. Only way a person will be relevant or irrelevant is through his perceptions of that imbalance. You perceive yourself to be irrelevant as a non-caster, so you are. I don't, so I am not.

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You don't seem to want to hear it, but there's nothing you can say to deny it. Sure, you can say that you had fun in particular game X, Y, and/or Z. That is STILL NOT THE SAME THING as when I as an RPG designer sit down and try to do things with 3.x. I HAVE to confront and deal with the fact that casters are simply utterly dominant to a level where playing a non-caster past 5th level is actively contrary to the notion of being effective in play. Thus ONLY notions under which non-casters are not effective (except at the lowest levels) doesn't fly in 3.x! This isn't disputable Max. It is iron clad fact of the system.

And a REALLY large part of what made 4e so great for many of us was the opening up of this space in both story terms and mechanical terms. 30th level fighters that hang toe-to-toe with their wizard bretheren and can look them in the eye and honestly say they pull equal weight, that is a really big thing. Big enough that, in the end, it spelled the doom of all the 3.x based systems.

Shasarak said:

I agree that you can have long fights in any DnD system.

The main problem for me with 4e fights was that every* fight was a long fight.



*OK so we did have one fast fight where the Rogue went first and hit and killed every minion with an AoE. But I guess that would be an equivalent to the 2 guards example above.

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What I find is the issue with 4e is that once you stop making the scenes very dynamic, then its pretty easy to get into a scenario where someone has a long turn, probably because they're standing face-to-face with some elite soldier trying to beat it down and scraping out every extra thingy they can lard onto their turn (APs, every magic item they can think of, etc.) and then everyone else is bored and wanders off and can't remember what is going on when their turn finally comes around, at which point THAT gets slow too, and then it drags on and on.

That can happen in AD&D as well, but if you have the typical party with a cleric full of heals (he ain't taking long, heal or bash something once with a mace), a wizard (the possibly long turn), a rogue (no length there), a fighter (another quicky unless he's got goblins to beat on), and a ranger (well, his might take a while, but less than the wizard). So basically you have 1.5 characters that are ever likely to really eat time. So it will get slow when you have lots of ranged attacks (multiple attacks), or some unclear situation (all too common in AD&D), or you're blessed with 3 or 4 casters (which can happen, particularly with elf-happy groups). Once the wizard takes 10 minutes figuring out his awesome spell fest, then it starts to slog from there on out.

As I said, 4e does really well in dynamic situations, but it is admittedly a horrible game for running "steel cage death match" type room by room fights.