D&D 4E Ben Riggs' "What the Heck Happened with 4th Edition?" seminar at Gen Con 2023

[Thomas Shey]

Not the person you are replying to, but it's hard for me to see a gaming group breakup as anything other than a social thing, especially for long term groups.

For the game to even be a considering factor, people's experience must be so bad that it outweighs how much they enjoy each other, and someone has to have so much control that they can drive that game's usage in spite of that dislike, and be more committed to the game than to the idea of hanging out with the people who dislike it.

Like, I'm sure this is something that can happen, but it suggests deeper interpersonal issues with the group.

First off, not every gaming group are particularly close outside of gaming, so "enjoying each other's company" can easily be a secondary consideration to "enjoying the game". I know this is a disconcerting idea to some people, but I think calling it a group dysfunction is a bit much.

And as long as GMs have a disproportionate amount of influence in what's played, a pretty heavy degree of control on their part of what gets played is not uncommon.

The usual solution to that described is taking a walk, but sometimes people don't realize how much they'll dislike a game until they've played it for a while, and that can lead to a much more acrimonious disconnection than would otherwise occur. That doesn't seem to suggest anything particularly deep other than people can get grumpy when they've tried to forge on through something they fundamentally dislike.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Ok but, the group allowed the game to tear them apart is the problem here.

Like, let's say you and your friends have a weekly boardgame night. After awhile, everyone has their favorite games and games they don't like as much. Eventually one day, some of your friends say "let's play Cataan with all the expansions!" and a few others say "ugh, I'd rather walk on hot coals."

If there's a big fight and you stop having your boardgame nights over this, that's not Cataan's fault, is it? No, it's the fact that you and your friends were unable to broker a compromise or simply decide "hey, we can just play games we all like".

But again, this is a situation where people could have got into playing without realizing how much it would annoy them, and there's a strong tendency because of its ongoing nature for people to try and stick out things. As I said, if people always knew and pulled out at the start, this sort of scenario would be much less likely, but that's not always what happens.

 

[Imaro]

A gaming group could break up over any game. If game A is being insisted upon and players X and Y refuse to play it, then some compromise must be made, or else that group will split up.

Ultimately, that’s a failing of the group.



I’ve been in that very situation. I’ve been the player who didn’t want to play a specific game, and I’ve been a GM who wanted to run a specific game that a player didn’t want to play.

When I was the player, I sucked it up and played the game I didn’t want to. I wound up having fun… perhaps not as much as with another game, but still worthwhile. When I was the GM, I asked the player to reconsider. They refused. I talked to the rest of the group, and they weren’t open to playing something else, so we stuck with it, and that player opted out. My main goal here was to make sure there were no hard feelings.

These are people issues.

Sooo your group still split? Would you say there was a failing of the group or that the people in your group had issues before the new game was introduced? If not wouldn't that stand to reason the cause of the split was the introduction of the new game?

 

[James Gasik]

But again, this is a situation where people could have got into playing without realizing how much it would annoy them, and there's a strong tendency because of its ongoing nature for people to try and stick out things. As I said, if people always knew and pulled out at the start, this sort of scenario would be much less likely, but that's not always what happens.

Hey, I have some friends who rabidly collect board games. I rarely know what I'm getting into when they ask me to play. Usually I find the rules to be obtuse, can't figure out a good strategy, and lose without really grokking why.

So I tell them "hey, I didn't have fun with that, can we play something else?"

If they insisted "no, these are the games we have to play!", then I stop showing up, but that's not the fault of the games, that was their refusal to compromise. And if they're ok with ostracizing me because I'll scream if I have to play another game of House on Haunted Hill, maybe they weren't people I should be gaming with in the first place.

 

[billd91]

During the full throes of the edition war, I called the perpetual vitriol and unending crusade behavior akin to "a scorned lover." To that point, I had never seen its kind for all values of "perpetual" and "vitriol" and "unending crusade" and I'd been witness to or involved in lots of communities and disputes up to that point (including the "role vs roll" culture war back in the day).

"Scorned lover" didn't take.

But your valorizing it as "child Bruce Wayne extracting righteous vengeance for the murder of his parents?" That finally got us there! 15 years later we're finally at the point where we can just come out with what we already knew; so much of this was/is deeply, deeply personal and animated by (righteous) vendetta.

You say things like this, both of which are kind of blatantly insulting, and yet don't take any responsibility for how this tends to perpetuate edition wars. Astounding!

 

[payn]

...I'll scream if I have to play another game of House on Haunted Hill, maybe they weren't people I should be gaming with in the first place.

Thats not a maybe

 

[Lanefan]

On this, I stand by my view that the basic lines of development were clear from the first half of 2008. So that passage in the DMG didn't surprise me at all. It is a D&D-ish way of expressing the basic principle of cutting to the action and not fostering "setting tourism" as a focus of play.

With rare exceptions, I don't see 'cutting to the action' as being a worthy principle.

I haven't bought any of the supplements for 5e D&D. Nor have I bought any of its core books.

I get the core three for each full edition as they come out, to give myself an idea of what makes the new edition tick and also to see if there's any good ideas in there worth mining.

I don't usually bother with splats or "point-five" releases, though; I never got any of the 3.5e books and very likely won't get the updated 5e (a.k.a. 5.5e) books either.

 

[Lanefan]

This little sidebar is such a perfect microcosm of the problems 4e faced. Because "skip the gate guards" is NOT what the DMG says. If you read the section, in context, what it's actually saying is, "It's okay, Mr. New DM Who isn't Really Sure, to move on from things that your players aren't enjoying. Do not feel compelled to play out every single thing just because it's there. This is the express permission being given to you, Mr. New DM, to not force things just because they happen to be in a module or in your notes."

Which, in context, makes this some of the best New DM advice in any DMG.

But, people, just like now, never actually READ the DMG. So, they see the whole "skip the gate guards" thing as an attack on playstyle, which it wasn't in any way, shape or form.

Except I did read it; and what I took away from reading that piece was, when boiled down, "skip the small stuff".

There's a difference between telling a DM it's OK to skip the small stuff and actively encouraging same; and I took the 4e DMG to be very much doing the latter.

 

[Gammadoodler]

First off, not every gaming group are particularly close outside of gaming, so "enjoying each other's company" can easily be a secondary consideration to "enjoying the game". I know this is a disconcerting idea to some people, but I think calling it a group dysfunction is a bit much.

And as long as GMs have a disproportionate amount of influence in what's played, a pretty heavy degree of control on their part of what gets played is not uncommon.

The usual solution to that described is taking a walk, but sometimes people don't realize how much they'll dislike a game until they've played it for a while, and that can lead to a much more acrimonious disconnection than would otherwise occur. That doesn't seem to suggest anything particularly deep other than people can get grumpy when they've tried to forge on through something they fundamentally dislike.

And everything you've described still sounds to me Iike a social issue rather than a game failure. Because what has to happen is that people (both GM and players) have to be deciding that the game is more important than the participants.

I'm sure that's a thing that happens. And I wouldn't say that there is anything necessarily wrong with people making those choices.

It's just hard for me to buy "x edition broke up my gaming group" when there are so many social levers to pull to avoid that result.

 

[payn]

It's just hard for me to buy "x edition broke up my gaming group" when there are so many social levers to pull to avoid that result.

Probably right, but if you ask people which edition broke their gaming group five will get you ten its 4E.