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

[Thomas Shey]

Neither I nor @hawkeyefan have suggested that one single person must be responsible. The responsibility might be collective, or distributed in some fashion. Hence why we have used imputed responsibility to the group.

Not the game!

I've been making the point I've been making. How it relates to any of the rest of you is your business. My statement was that a given game system can, indeed, be the proximate cause for a gaming group to break up under the right circumstances. Any reading into it beyond that is not my problem.

 

[Imaro]

Huh? No one is particularly surprised that group's might break up. What is surprising is the argument that this is 4e's fault! As opposed to the fault of the people who can't resolve these relatively small stakes social conflicts.

Think of 4e as the catalyst then... is that better?

 

[hawkeyefan]

Then we differ. I've seen it enough times over the years I'm pretty comfortable with doing so. Some of the responses remind me of people who seem shocked and put off that there are a lot of communications breakdowns among gaming groups; they seem to have lived in very different world than I have.

No one is doubting that gaming groups can have breakdowns or miscommunications over something. We’re just not accepting that the blame lies beyond the participants. As with any other social group.

I remember being in kindergarten and fighting with a friend of mine who would get to be the blue team for a game of Trouble. Neither of us would give in. The teacher came and took the game away from us.

It wasn’t Trouble’s fault.

Think of 4e as the catalyst then... is that better?

Sure. But the game has no will. It doesn’t impart on those who play it the inability to compromise with their friends or associates.

Seriously, think about what you guys are saying. Blaming a game for peoples’ behavior?

 

[Thomas Shey]

No one is doubting that gaming groups can have breakdowns or miscommunications over something. We’re just not accepting that the blame lies beyond the participants.

If you don't accept any blame can come from beyond the participants, then we don't have anything further to say to each other. And no, the fact a game has no volition is not in the least relevant as far as I'm concerned. "Fault" is not dependent on volition.

 

[Imaro]

Sure. But the game has no will. It doesn’t impart on those who play it the inability to compromise with their friends or associates.

Seriously, think about what you guys are saying. Blaming a game for peoples’ behavior?

No one's claiming the game has a will but it had legacy expectations because the game was named D&D and the marketing claimed ze game would remain ze same... Alot of people have a (perfectly understandable) negative response to being misled.

 

[Hussar]

No one's claiming the game has a will but it had legacy expectations because the game was named D&D and the marketing claimed ze game would remain ze same... Alot of people have a (perfectly understandable) negative response to being misled.

I would disagree. PEOPLE had legacy expectations. And WotC's absolutely abysmal communication in the lead up to 4e did a very poor job of communicating that these legacy expectations wouldn't be filled. Now, add to that the very real behavior of people who took single bits of advertising or single lines in the DMG or whatnot, pulled completely out of context, stripped down to suit their personal beef and beaten into a sharp pointy stick with which to poke and prod people FIFTEEN YEARS after the fact, and you might see why other people just might point to the people being the cause of the problem, moreso than the system itself.

 

[hawkeyefan]

No one's claiming the game has a will but it had legacy expectations because the game was named D&D and the marketing claimed ze game would remain ze same... Alot of people have a (perfectly understandable) negative response to being misled.

Sure. But then how they behave given how they feel about the game is up to them. The game can’t cause a group to break up. The very idea is just stupid.

 

[Imaro]

Sure. But then how they behave given how they feel about the game is up to them. The game can’t cause a group to break up. The very idea is just stupid.

It...was...the...catalyst. If it hadn't been introduced the group wouldn't have fallen apart.

 

[Imaro]

I would disagree. PEOPLE had legacy expectations. And WotC's absolutely abysmal communication in the lead up to 4e did a very poor job of communicating that these legacy expectations wouldn't be filled. Now, add to that the very real behavior of people who took single bits of advertising or single lines in the DMG or whatnot, pulled completely out of context, stripped down to suit their personal beef and beaten into a sharp pointy stick with which to poke and prod people FIFTEEN YEARS after the fact, and you might see why other people just might point to the people being the cause of the problem, moreso than the system itself.

WotC did marketing that claimed the game was the same... thats not abysmal communication... thats borderline dishonest sand set expectations.

 

[Hussar]

WotC did marketing that claimed the game was the same... thats not abysmal communication... thats borderline dishonest sand set expectations.

Yup. If you ignore the dozens of hours of actual plays, two hard back books, thousands of words of blog posts, and dozens of other sources.

But yup. That one YouTube video was the sole source of information about 4e.