D&D 4E Is there a "Cliffs Notes" summary of the entire 4E experience?

[Tony Vargas]

I think this gets to the heart of why 4e didn't feel like D&D to me.

When you get involved with something for a long time, you get used to its quirks. Hell, sometimes you don't even notice they are quirks.

You may even take to calling flaws 'quirks.' Seriously, though, I'm in complete agreement. 4e fixed a lot of stuff, and that made it feel unfamiliar.

Sometimes folks cross the line from "doesn't feel like D&D to me" to "not really D&D," or even "an MMO"/"tactical board game"/"not an RPG." But when expressed without the hyperbole, it's an understandable sentiment.

There's not really anything that could have been done about it: you can't make a game better while 'maintaining the feel,' when the feel is defined by the very flaws you're trying to fix. The best you can do is clean it up and re-print it, and they played that card in '89.

You can see 5e trying to avoid the 'mistake' of improving - and thus changing too much - anything from prior editions - it just adds a few things here or there.

I just finished reading all 83 pages of this GD thread (which in itself may be sign of sickness). It really makes my head spin to see how hard people will work to disprove each others experiences and opinions.
I think both sides in the war should meet in the middle hug it out and just play 13th Age!

I've played 13A three times, each time with a different class, and I'm just finding none of the core classes appeal to me. 13 True Ways sounds like it has some real possibilities, though.

What if the goal is not to convince the person I'm arguing with, but those outside the argument who might read it?

It's easy to think you might be saving some lurkers.

The other thing that keeps me replying to a lot of this stuff is false and misleading statements in support of opinions. I don't expect to change the opinion, but I'd like to correct the misapprehension.

If someone says they won't eat kale because they're allergic, fine. If someone says they won't it eat it because it's become too trendy, fine. If they say no one should eat kale because it contains lethal levels of cyanide, I might want to speak up in the vegetable's defense - and not just because I liked it sauteed with linguica & tomatoes long before it was trendy.

 

[Savage Wombat]

I just finished reading all 83 pages of this GD thread (which in itself may be sign of sickness). It really makes my head spin to see how hard people will work to disprove each others experiences and opinions.
I think both sides in the war should meet in the middle hug it out and just play 13th Age!

You want me to try 13th Age you're going to have to come to Topeka and run it for me.

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

Yeah I keep saying this - there is no such thing as common sense or intuitive rules* there is just stuff you are familiar with.**

Yup, and the intuitive rules tend to be the ones that we first gamed with in our naive teen or childhood years.

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

The other thing that keeps me replying to a lot of this stuff is false and misleading statements in support of opinions. I don't expect to change the opinion, but I'd like to correct the misapprehension.

I can't count the times that someone has posted "I don't like 4e because I can't do X," where X is something they would have found by merely perusing the table of contents. Just today, a Paizo fan claimed "I can't make my own 4e monsters without DDI."

 

[Dr. NRG]

Having read none of the above, posting directly to the question posed by the OP: Judging by the fact that the responses tally 84 pages, no.

NRG

 

[LostSoul]

See my previous posts for this. The construction of ordered "turns" in combat is an issue of presentation as the players see it. The segmenting of different "turns" in combat represents characters all dong things in the same short amount of time, where some actions manage to complete before others - even then, the issue of "complete before others" is an issue of presentation for the players, since the issue of "one round ends and another begins" isn't one that affects what happens in the game world.

I was playing d20 Modern last night, and it uses the same combat system that WotC D&D does. Anyway. My PC was riding his motorcycle underneath a flying alien caravel. They were shooting at me and I was shooting back. I told the DM that I'd stay under the caravel so I would have cover, then I'd swerve out to the side and take a shot at the guys on the deck, then swerve back under cover.

That's impossible with the standard stop-motion combat system. There's no "keep pace" special initiative or movement action.

I don't know if that counts as dissociated or not: the mechanic has a connection to the game world, but the player's decision-making process is not directly equated to the character's (unless characters actually do move in a stop-motion manner in the game world, which is possible, I guess). This is a feature that comes up every single time any player or the DM makes a decision in combat.

 

[Alzrius]

I was playing d20 Modern last night, and it uses the same combat system that WotC D&D does. Anyway. My PC was riding his motorcycle underneath a flying alien caravel. They were shooting at me and I was shooting back. I told the DM that I'd stay under the caravel so I would have cover, then I'd swerve out to the side and take a shot at the guys on the deck, then swerve back under cover.

That's impossible with the standard stop-motion combat system. There's no "keep pace" special initiative or movement action.

I'm presuming that your GM was able to do it, which would suggest that it wasn't impossible.

That said, chases have always been the sticky wicket of turn-based combat, since the turn-based presentation can model simultaneous actions adequately enough, but has a harder time representing actions whose results are modified by other simultaneous actions - hence the issue of it looking like you caught up to someone "before" their move, when in fact you're both moving at the same time.

That's not an issue of dissociation, however (since every metagame mechanic had a corresponding in-game action that it was representing, and vice versa). There's still no doubt that the combat rules are representing everyone acting at the same time, with those having a better initiative getting their action done just ahead of the other characters finishing their actions.

I don't know if that counts as dissociated or not: the mechanic has a connection to the game world, but the player's decision-making process is not directly equated to the character's (unless characters actually do move in a stop-motion manner in the game world, which is possible, I guess). This is a feature that comes up every single time any player or the DM makes a decision in combat.

I'm not sure what you mean by the player's decision-making process not being directly equated to the character's. The scenario you described has no mechanics that affect the in-character narrative without having an in-game reason for doing so - it's just that the rules could arguably do a better job of it, not that they're failing to do it at all.

As an aside, how were you able to move, shoot, and then move back all on your turn? Was that some sort of Spring Attack thing?

 

[Umbran]

Don't bait the mods; nothing good ever comes from it.

Listen to this person, please. Technically, you talk back to moderation, and a moderator may just give you a temp ban for your trouble.

But I can win the internet, I know I can!

I understand the desire to be a wiseacre. And, if you're trying to be a tad ironically snarky, then at least you hit the right mark. Of course, since snark is fundamentally failed communication, hitting the mark is irrelevant. Not a single person who is thinking of continuing is going to be convinced by that. So, not really helping.

What if the goal is not to convince the person I'm arguing with, but those outside the argument who might read it?

Too frelling bad. Get a blog, take it to G+, or go somewhere else that supports your proselytizing. EN World does not exist to support anyone's crusade for One True Way, ego trip, or Edition War. We have limited patience for people stinking up the place to make a point to some unnamed masses.

 

[pemerton]

In my experience in table top role-playing I don't clearly recall anyone losing themselves in character. (I may have - I seem to recall someone getting very angry about something his character would or would not do in a Living Greyhawk game many years ago).

In a recent session we came the closest to having an in-character fight turn into a real world fight that I can remember for several years at least.

The PCs had "acquired" a planar dromond from some demons. A couple of them - the elementalist sorcerer drow and the fighter/cleric of Moradin - had come up with a plan to use the dromond to revitalise the economy of their base town. The town is on a now-dead trading route next to a large lake, mostly human but with a modest dwarven population. The plan was for the dwarves to ship their beer, using the dromond, to the City of Brass, which has good docking facilities, a lack of local beer supplies, and an assumed high level of demand for beer.

The Erathis-serving, Rod of 7 Parts-wielding invoker didn't like this plan, however: he was worried about establishing more connections between the Elemental Chaos and the world, and also (I suspect) didn't fully trust the sorcerer. So he snuck out at night and used a Disenchant ritual to turn the rune keel of the dromond into residuum.

His first attempt was thwarted by the sorcerer, who was keeping watch, but then when I made them dice for it - the sorcerer wasn't spending all his time on the dromond, and the ritual doesn't take that long to cast - the player of the invoker won and the plan therefore brought to an abrupt halt.

Voice were definitely raised at the table, and incredulous and dark looks exchanged. I think there could be more of this to come as the camaign comes to its climax, too, as these conflicts between the PCs are growing, and crunch points will become more frequent.

The times I seen people lose themselves in the game are in tense combat situations when everything has gone to pot the situation is looking extremely dicey for our heroes & everyone is focused on making sure they take the very best actions they can & every dice roll becomes dramatic.

I find this is fairly common at my table. It's why I find it odd when many posters suggest that combat is an alternative to roleplaying, as opposed to one possible site of roleplaying.

it's clarified my thinking on story games as distinct from role playing games (or at least the aspects of those games that cover one or other of those activities).

I don't understand this distinction, in so far as "story game" tends to be used as a type of misdescription.

CaGI, for instance, isn't about "story gaming" - it's not the player's job to use the power to create a better story. For the player it is a resource to be used to advance the ingame situation of the PC, just like any other resource. It just makes sure the player is automatically successful. It's comparable to an auto-crit token, for instance - no one would suggest that 3E suddenly became a story game if a group used a house rule where once per session each player could declare one d20 roll to be a natural 20. CaGI, or other auto-success abilities in 4e, are no different from that.

 

[Nergal Pendragon]

Too frelling bad. Get a blog, take it to G+, or go somewhere else that supports your proselytizing. EN World does not exist to support anyone's crusade for One True Way, ego trip, or Edition War. We have limited patience for people stinking up the place to make a point to some unnamed masses.

I apologize. I should not have made that comment. I will not treat this place in that way.