I played the heck out of AD&D back in the day, went to every convention I could find (and we didn't have a shortage of them in the bay area), and had the opposite experience. With D&D, we used minis if we possibly could, because you needed them - for marching order, for positioning. (snip)
Exactly.
We use to mark everyone's positions on graph paper in pencil and, as the character was moved, we erased the old mark and made a new mark. Low tech, to be sure, but it was the only way to be fair about positioning in a game that involved, inter alia, the
lightning bolt and
fireball spells.
And it really was about being fair. Sure being a DM in those days was about delivering the full Four Yorkshiremen experience, but you were supposed to be fair about it.
(snip) What does stand, regardless of region or personal anecdote, is the game, itself. And D&D has never had meaningful support within its rules for playing in the TotM style....
'Grid dependence' was a frequent criticism of 3.x - especially from 2e fans hat'n on it - and it was just as unfounded as it was later when applied to 4e. It's really a nonsense claim, D&D has never provided rules that actually facilitate TotM, even 5e which claims to 'default' to that style has nothing, it's mere lip-service. (Which, frankly, was an excellent move, you had such a fake uproar going that they had to move away from having functional rules for minis, yet the core of the fanbase driving that uproar was so traditionalist that any hint of an actual TotM system, like 13th Age uses, would have been equally provocative. So just turning back the clock and positioning 5e's combat system neatly between 2e & 3e, while giving a purely symbolic nod to the disingenuous talking points of the edition war was the best way of coping with a bad situation.) (snip)
When I read the great cries of support for the wonderful change in gaming technology that allowed TotM to be the default in 5E - and then I actually read the 5E books with their complete lack of any support for TotM (except for a couple of controversial paragraphs in the DMG) - I am reminded of the
Emperor's New Clothes. Much like in that fairy tale, it seems that only the wisest amongst us can perceive 5E's magnificent support for TotM... and then some of us are left wondering why the TotM emperor is naked.
(snip) I really disagree strongly with the notion that there is anything inherently 'un-D&D like' about 4e or that makes it any less suitable as a D&D product offering than other editions have been. I've run 4e very extensively and had great success with it. Ordinary people who like to play D&D are perfectly happy with 4e, and DMs LOVE running it for the most part.
As to the notion that it is some huge break with previous editions, give it up. This is just not really supportable. OD&D through 2e certainly represent a 'family' of games that have more in common with each other than they do with 3.x (d20 D&D), or 4e (which is really a flavor of d20 system). However , the differences aren't that big, and 4e isn't significantly more different from 2e than 3e is, nor is 5e significantly more similar to 2e mechanically. 3e-5e represents a 'WotC version' of the game, D&D, but with SOME differences, that's all. (snip more good stuff)
4e shifts the emphasis of the game and conceptual organization of play in terms of story and action, which IS significant, but it does it WITHOUT abandoning most of the infrastructure of the game. Its more a remodeling where various parts of the structure take on new significance and new functions but still retain most of their old form.
4E is a natural evolution (for the more prissily pedantic, a logical mutation) of what came before it. As I posted somewhere else in this thread, it was the first edition that really delivered on the implied promise of the cover art and whatnot of D&D that this game was about big damn heroes doing big damn deeds. Of course, we had to get through the Four Yorkshiremen years first - a mode of play still preferred by some. ("Luxury!")
You don't even need good initial adventures, HotDQ was just as awful as KotS, and there was more of it to suffer through. (snip)
WotC was fortunate, though, that while HotDQ was a bit of a dog,
Lost Mine of Phandelver was one of the best adventures it has ever published. How I wish its author, Rich Baker, had also written the first 4E adventure. He wrote the second and fourth and they were both very good - even excellent by comparison with the other dreck in that same pseudo-adventure path.
(snip) There's more to the timing than just letting folks burn out of 3.x, which had a good few more years left in it, easily. There were also major market timing factors. 2008 featured the worst recession since the Great Depression, the OSR movement, and a general malaise was already gripping the broader hobby. 2014, OTOH, the anemic recovery was in full swing, the OSR demand had been fully satisfied, and boardgaming was beginning a strong resurgence that drew potential new players to the FLGS where they could be ambushed by Encounters. (snip)
I was living in Singapore and Australia at the time of the Global Financial Crisis so I tend to forget that it had a huge influence on the US market (in large part because it was US-created) - it barely touched us. That sort of malaise gets into the bones, so to speak, so I can see what you mean about it being a bad time to release a new edition. When things go wrong like that, people look for the familiar.
Oh, I appreciate 13A and might even lift concepts from it now and then, but it remains easier to get together a D&D game just because it's D&D...
...and 13A class design did disappoint to a degree. It still balances, thanks to the draconian full-heal-up mechanism, but it's inelegant by comparison. In that sense, though, it does feel quite a bit like D&D. (snip)
I like 13th Age in theory, at least, but I just cannot make the jump. A big part is the icons - I don't see why they are front and centre when they're just a loosely modelled version of something a lot of us have been doing for years/decades - but the full heal-up is, as you point out, a bit draconian. Its combat system and monster design are both incredibly elegant bits of design. I think I would just like to replace most of the existing classes with my own but that's too much work especially when I am enjoying 4E.
Right, those are all good points. Honestly I played little 3.x and no PF and can't say what the quality of Paizo adventures is, though I did read through one of the APs and frankly I wasn't overwhelmed. Still, it was MUCH better written and seemed more dynamic and engaging than the 4e HPE and other pre-Essentials-era adventures, which were kinda uniformly dull or at least required a lot of up front work to make them good. (snip)
The Paizo adventure paths are three adventures' worth of cool ideas spammed with three adventures' worth of XP grind to make the core ideas fit into six volumes. Many would, however, make excellent 4E adventures as combining smaller 3.5E encounters into larger 4E encounters would reduce the grind and make them a lot more exciting.
(snip) hehe, yeah. 4e fixed a lot of stuff, and that is truly un-D&D like. (snip)
I laughed at this. It's not something you could imagine Gygax doing. His approach would be (and was):
1. "A smart DM would be able to fix that in play."
2. "I didn't design that. It was someone else's fault."
3. "You think you fixed that but now you're not playing AD&D."
(snip) Sometimes we had to make do as well, but in those cases we'd always at least have some coins and half-inch ruled paper to sketch out the scene on. I did like wargames a lot back in that day, but RPGs were a LOT more popular, so we actually did fairly little real full-up wargaming. Most of what we did was Sea Power, Micro Armor, Star Fleet Battle Manual, and stuff like that.
One of the guys in our group was reasonably artistic so he made cardboard stands with illustrations of the PCs on them (this is in the late 80s). That was a good start.
Which is how all those bovines become consecrated in the first place; they become associated with the feelz. Sending them to the slaughterhouse had best be done for clearly explained and obviously beneficial reasons because you are going to affect the feel for everyone in addition to ticking off anyone with grognard tendencies.
I sometimes wonder whether "grognard tendencies" is a polite way of saying "is on the spectrum". IME, D&D tends to attract those of us with some OCD tendencies as well as those on the spectrum. If that completed untested hypothesis is even partly true, it does help explain why the customer base is so resistant to change.
(snip) 5. Unprofessional customer communications habits for WotC staff: I mean, the things they said while arguing with people being wrong on the Internet were astounding: one thing for us to engage our sub-hobby here, but they need to be more pro about it. (snip)
I remember when the former head of D&D with his exalted title had his monthly column which seemed more focussed on telling us how important he was (exalted title) and how many people worked for him personally. Yes, not the company - for HIM. I pointed out several times that we customers were less interested in knowing how important he thought he was and more interested in knowing what was happening with certain DDi initiatives at the time. He could have used that column to engage with the base on the issues that were important; instead we got self-promoting marketing speak. It was a lost opportunity to display genuine leadership.
(snip) I think the murder-suicide had a much, much larger impact on 4e than one might initially think. WotC always has a relatively small team working on D&D. That one of their own went out and killed his wife and then himself *right at launch* is the kind of thing where the whole department had to be thinking about it. Not that it necessarily made any one individual mess up, but that's the kind of thing where inertia can create problems. (snip)
And because WotC is known in the market for sub-standard salaries, finding someone on short notice prepared to accept a sub-standard salary while working ridiculous hours with little support and reporting to people who had absolutely no idea what was happening was not going to happen.
If WotC had been smart, they would have engaged an offshore team for the same local cost and ended up with a lot of people working on DDi for the same cost as one or two local underpaid local staffers. And that wouldn't be stealing American jobs because nobody wants the job anyway!
There's another oft-repeated edition war talking point that doesn't stand up to the least scrutiny.
There's not one certain play style that's supported to the exclusion of others in 4e. Quite the contrary, it opened up playstyles the game couldn't handle well in the past (and, 5e hasn't gotten around to, yet, FWTW), and didn't exactly sacrifice play styles in the process. (snip)
If anything, I have seen more RP in my 4E games than in the earlier edition games (some of which date back to 1984) with the same players.
Because the game is so well-balanced, the players can focus on the story issues knowing that combat is not simply going to devolve into rocket tag. My experience is that the threat of rocket tag forces players to focus more on combat and less on story - obviously that seems to be the complete opposite of what a lot of people experienced/claimed to have experienced with 4E.
