Speculation about "the feelz" of D&D 4th Edition

[Parmandur]

I know I am late to the party with this, but I wanted to respond to the notion that you must choose between a text that is clear and concise and an evocative text that draws you into the fiction. Monsterhearts provides us with a text that is easy to use, imminently readable, oozes style, and draws you into the fiction. It does so through a combination of directly addressing players, illustrating play in direct and relevant examples, the use of targeted vignettes, and thematic content. It does not need to resort to baroque "natural language" to accomplish any of that. Other games which pull off this trick include Demon - The Descent, Mouse Guard, Masks, Apocalypse World, Blades in the Dark, 13th Age, Godbound, and Stars Without Number.

5e strikes me as a game that could greatly benefit from more effective editing. It's not the worst offender. That honor goes to Exalted 3e. I love the actual systems behind the game, but I find the text almost unusable because of its like of brevity. Having to hunt through several paragraphs to determine exactly what a given charm actually does is immensely frustrating.

4e does not get off the hook here though. More effort could have been made to ensure the text was evocative while maintaining its ease of use.

There's a balance to be sure; 5E in my experience is crystal clear, though?

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[Parmandur]

I really find it's just the 4e player-side hardbacks that are non-evocative/dull - and that this makes the rules much harder to grok for me, because it's hard to read this text. I think pleasurable text is very important in an RPG to actually get people to take the time to read it, which if it's necessary rules text is very important. Conversely I have the 4e DMG open beside me right now and often read it for pleasure, and I find the Heroes of the... 4e Essentials books quite enjoyable to read too, certainly much more than the 4e PHB. Monster Vault and Threats to the Nentir Vale are fine, too.

WotC definitely seemed to have learned their lesson during 4E, as part of a straight line to the 5E balanced approach.

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[AbdulAlhazred]

I know I am late to the party with this, but I wanted to respond to the notion that you must choose between a text that is clear and concise and an evocative text that draws you into the fiction. Monsterhearts provides us with a text that is easy to use, imminently readable, oozes style, and draws you into the fiction. It does so through a combination of directly addressing players, illustrating play in direct and relevant examples, the use of targeted vignettes, and thematic content. It does not need to resort to baroque "natural language" to accomplish any of that. Other games which pull off this trick include Demon - The Descent, Mouse Guard, Masks, Apocalypse World, Blades in the Dark, 13th Age, Godbound, and Stars Without Number.

5e strikes me as a game that could greatly benefit from more effective editing. It's not the worst offender. That honor goes to Exalted 3e. I love the actual systems behind the game, but I find the text almost unusable because of its like of brevity. Having to hunt through several paragraphs to determine exactly what a given charm actually does is immensely frustrating.

4e does not get off the hook here though. More effort could have been made to ensure the text was evocative while maintaining its ease of use.

I think its hard to be sure what will be evocative to different people. I mean, I understand when you talk about colorful language and descriptions of action, characters, background elements, setting, etc as being evocative, they certainly can be. OTOH I find well-crafted, clear, usable rules that focus on providing a coherent experience to be evocative too. They inspire me to construct and draw out gaming experiences that are latent within them.

So, as with all else in RPGs, there's not really an objective definition of evocative. I think we can all agree that some things are NOT very evocative, and too much of any one thing can crush your vision, but for me at least 4e didn't do that. Certainly its ease of use for a DM has been a huge boon in terms of just focusing on the STORY and thinking about narrative aspects of things vs trying to figure out if encounter X will actually work at all.

 

[Ilbranteloth]

D&D was originally a game about exploration and resource management with combat elements (sort of a Tolkienian Oregon Trail game). It quickly developed elements of heroic narrative, due to the nature of the setting. Based on my understanding of the rules, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and now 5th Edition all attempt to maintain this tension between the "how many arrows the PC can recover post-battle" part of play versus the "hitting the Dragon in the heart with the PC's last arrow" part, but the 4th Edition rules seemed to have abandoned (or made irrelevant) the resource management part of the game. The rules have sections on equipment, the effect of weight,on movement, and such, but the allowances are so large that they have little effect, RAW, in how the characters interact with the game world. This accounts, I think, for the complaint that 4e "didn't feel like D&D".

In other words, I don't think it's a "grittiness" factor, in itself, that is the source of the complaint. One can,pump up the danger of a 4e game quite easily. It is, rather, the idea that the characters can effectively ignore mundane matters like "do we want fried rat or fungus sandwiches for dinner?" and "Drat it all! We didn't bring enough sacks, again. Get all the gold coins and as many of the silver ones as we can. Leave the copper coins. Do you have the map? Good, let's get out of here."

4e is still my favored edition.

I haven't read all of the other posts, but the reason why 4e doesn't feel like D&D to me is that it drastically changed. Having played since the '70s, it was relatively easy to transition our campaign to each new edition. Not so with 4e, it was redesigned from the ground up.

1) They changed the mechanics.

Open ended AC, attack rolls, ability scores, etc. all increasing at each level. This is a big part (for me) that makes it "feel" like a video game. When I check out a video game, and 4e, I have no reference point for what an AC of 45 is. I know it's more than 20, but I can't relate to it.

In all other editions of the game, armor itself sets the baseline. Even thought the d20 system reversed the way AC worked, it is still very easy to identify what a good AC is (anything that is equivalent to plate armor or better, for example). This problem exists across the math of 4e, as there is no "in world" reference to what the numbers mean.

2) They changed the world(s).

They decided that D&D (the core game) didn't have lore of its own. It was borrowed, or dependent upon campaign setting. So they made up a new base lore. Most elves are no longer elves, now they are eladrin, for example. Genasi are no longer mostly human with perhaps a few discernible features, they have glowing energy lines, and hair of crystal or some other element, along with a bunch of abilities. And to make sure that the new lore wasn't viewed as optional, they forced the new lore into the established campaign settings. The new cosmology, the new races and classes and all of the abilities, etc.

3) They changed the balance.

Or, balance became one of the central themes. All classes and races should be balanced across the same level. Encounters should be carefully balanced against those characters. And the biggest change - balance is relative. This relates back to #1 - 13th level characters are met with about 13th level challenges. The theory is that it doesn't matter if those challenges are impossible for 1st level characters, since they aren't 1st level.

4) They changed the focus.

Sure, you could (and many people did) maintain the exploration and role-playing center of the game in 4e. But it was primarily designed around providing more options, and carefully balancing, combat. While this probably wasn't the intent, they wrote a lot of the creativity out of the game. With so many rules to provide "interesting" options in combat, it becomes a game of managing your abilities and how best to use them, rather than a focus on the character and the story of that character. If a group of mid-level adventurers can get together to play for 2-4 hours once/week, and the adventure jumps from set-piece to set-piece, rather than providing a setting to explore, and the combats take anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes, there isn't much room for story, character development, etc. The focus is combat. Or making sure your character has interesting things to do in combat.

The focus is very much a munchkinizer's dream because you can spend so much time designing a character mechanically, rather than from a personality. But it also has the problem that if you aren't that into building the perfect (combat-oriented) character, you can feel left behind. It's much the same way as when my daughter and I recently played MtG for a short while. She liked the idea, it was fun when the two of us just picked up a set of two decks and played. We even enjoyed picking up a few new cards and building different decks. Until she tried to play a couple of people hanging out at the gaming store. She couldn't ever come close to winning. Because her decks were built on story, using cards that she liked for their appearance and lore. But that wasn't fun when all she did was lose. The real game in MtG is deck building, or you just copy somebody else's which isn't much fun either.

The real game in 4e was character design. For many home campaigns, not as much, but as soon as you had one or two players that really got into digging into the options and combinations, it can break many games.

The reality is, the 4e is a very well designed game, on its own.

But as an iterative edition of an established ruleset, not so much. The biggest flaw for me was that it was treated in a manner similar to MtG. A new edition can bring new lore, new creatures, new abilities, and...it's the same game. Except it's not. When playing MtG you don't need to invest in the story arc or the campaign setting to play the game. It really is just fluff. But in D&D, the fluff is a large part of what makes the game what it is. Not specific fluff. If you want to create a new world where elves as such don't exist, and a new race called eladrin do, that's fine. But to say that for the past 30,000 years in the Forgotten Realms, everybody was wrong, and now they all call elves eladrin, and they have different abilities and such? It doesn't work so well.

Whether you track arrows or not, ignore mundane activities, or whatever, that's all been part of the game. Really, all of the parts of 4e have been and continue to be part of the world of D&D in some way or another. But the 4e rules heavily encourage a particular focus and play style. While that trend was already happening, one of the biggest things that I think makes D&D D&D is that there is no one way to play it. If 4e fit your play style, or if you were a new player coming from video games or MtG, then you have a good chance of really liking the game. But if you were running an existing campaign and wanted to move into 4e, it was much harder, if not nearly impossible.

I will also say that looking back at it more, there are a lot of things that I thought 4e did, and it really didn't. But that was the perception we had, largely because of the presentation. And the presentation was a huge part of why we didn't like the new edition ("Play this race if you...want to look like a dragon"). But I pick up a book like the Forgotten Realms Player's Guide to flip through it again and maybe look for ideas, and there's almost nothing I can use in my 30ish-year Forgotten Realms campaign, and there are still a great many things that I'll start reading and I actively hate. That's on me, but it basically tells me that it's not the right edition for me. (I should also point out that there are quite a few things in the BECMI line that are the same way for me).

I still think that if 4e was not called Dungeons & Dragons, it would have received almost entirely positive reviews. On the other hand, it would not have sold nearly as many copies if that were the case, because D&D has a salability that a "new game" doesn't have. There's a long thread about Lore vs Rules that has shifted mostly to a discussion on canon. I think that 4e is a good example of when a company goes too far beyond what many of their customer base considers acceptable changes to a system and settings before a significant portion of them decide it's no longer the same entity. Or at least too quickly. I think 3.5e shows that significant change is possible without such a backlash if it's done in a more gradual way (because now I'm seeing more clearly how different 3.5e is from AD&D).

 

[cavalier973]

[video=youtube;QoELQ7px9ws]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoELQ7px9ws[/video]

This is a video of Matt Colville discussing how to "steal" elements of 4e to use in one's 5e game (mostly relating to combat, natch). In the latter half of the video, he discusses the history of 4e and his thoughts on the rules.

Some of what he says relates to my original point.

 

[S'mon]

The real game in 4e was character design. For many home campaigns, not as much, but as soon as you had one or two players that really got into digging into the options and combinations, it can break many games.

That really sounds more like 3.5e to me. And the difference between optimised & average PCs in 3e/PF is far far more than in 4e. I find in 4e it really does not matter much that one PCs is optimised, 2 are average and 1 is sub-par. Everyone is on the same side trying to beat the monsters, so the players of the weaker PCs are usually happy to have the stronger PC onside, while the powergamer enjoys showing off his build ability. You don't really get the 3e situation where some PCs cannot contribute at all.

 

[cavalier973]

I still think that if 4e was not called Dungeons & Dragons, it would have received almost entirely positive reviews. On the other hand, it would not have sold nearly as many copies if that were the case, because D&D has a salability that a "new game" doesn't have.

If they had declared continued support for previous,editions it might have gone a long way toward mitigating the backlash. They wouldn't have even had to call it "D&D Tactics", or whatever; just say: "Here are D&D rules that emphasize heroic-style play."

 

[Ilbranteloth]

That really sounds more like 3.5e to me. And the difference between optimised & average PCs in 3e/PF is far far more than in 4e. I find in 4e it really does not matter much that one PCs is optimised, 2 are average and 1 is sub-par. Everyone is on the same side trying to beat the monsters, so the players of the weaker PCs are usually happy to have the stronger PC onside, while the powergamer enjoys showing off his build ability. You don't really get the 3e situation where some PCs cannot contribute at all.

I could see that. I didn't play enough 4e to know how easy or hard it was to break the system, just that the focus seemed to shift very heavily to character design/combat.

I will reiterate that my perception is just that, my perception of 4e. Having not jumped in with both feet it may not be an accurate assessment of the rule set. But my perception seems to be shared by a lot of folks and I think that it was partly a failure in presentation, not just the changes.

 

[cavalier973]

I find in 4e it really does not matter much that one PCs is optimised, 2 are average and 1 is sub-par.

Well, 4e delineated the roles, so that different classes had different responsibilities during combat--and did not step on each other's toes. It wouldn't matter (too much) if a wizard were more powerful than the fighter in his party, because a wizard is not a defender. His job isn't to stand in front and keep the monsters from reaching the rest of the party. His job was to entice/force monsters to avoid going around the fighter.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Well, 4e delineated the roles, so that different classes had different responsibilities during combat--and did not step on each other's toes. It wouldn't matter (too much) if a wizard were more powerful than the fighter in his party, because a wizard is not a defender. His job isn't to stand in front and keep the monsters from reaching the rest of the party. His job was to entice/force monsters to avoid going around the fighter.

To a certain extent I think this is true. Obviously there's a line there someplace beyond which entire roles might become obviated (like if the wizard could just annihilate the enemy before they can pose a threat) but even 3.5 doesn't automatically reach that level of imbalance on day 1 (though it will get there without help).

As long as what the fighter, rogue, etc are contributing is significant and vital they don't have do more than fill their roles. Where it usually breaks down isn't in combat, its everywhere else. This can potentially be true even in 4e, where wizards still have access to some things that are pretty hard for others to get (short of learning rituals, which then kinda makes them part-time wizard, not a bad thing but maybe not what everyone wants). I think 4e did fix this to the extent it CAN be fixed.