4e: A work in progress?

[Mercule]

I the world of Quality Control, there's a difference between completeness and correctness. A thing is complete when it has all the desired features. it is correct when all those features have no bugs.

As far as that analogy goes, 3e was complete, but not correct.

I can't really get behind that statement. I've used psionics as standard/core since the 1e PHB. Until the XPH came out, 3.5 didn't have all the desired features, IMO. Similar statements could be made by fans of lots of the 2e "Options" books until at least Unearthed Arcana.

4e is as complete as 3e, in most ways. It has the "original three" (magic-user, fighter, cleric) and the "basic four" (wizard, fighter, cleric, rogue/thief). It's also got a number of player races. If you're looking at the structure of the game, it's as complete as 3e was with the PHB, DMG, and MM. The lack of druid and barbarian are no more significant than the lack of psionics (personally, I'd prefer to see both psi and shadow show up before primal, but that's life).

Of course, you could always argue that 4e doesn't yet support summoners. But 3.5 didn't support true-name magic until near it's end. Both are pretty big staples of fantasy fiction. There's probably a similar analogy for most "missing" pieces of 4e.

That doesn't mean 4e is without flaw any more than 3(.5)e was. I'm not particularly sold by the homogeneous power mechanic and would rather see a subsystem by power source -- but it doesn't bother me any more than the traditional slots did.

As far as the original question, I'm not sure what I think of a game that evolves too readily. With 3e, you could walk away for a couple of years and return to find the baseline how you left it. Sure, you might not recognize the warlock or swordsage, but skills still worked the same. Even if skills did change, the variants were (generally speaking) confined to Unearthed Arcana, which made the re-learning fairly straightforward.

As I'm about to embark on a 12-18 month nWoD campaign, I'd be a bit put out to come back only to find out that I had to buy PHB/DMG 2-4 just to be up to date on the current state of the base game rules. On the other hand, I don't want to see problem systems retained just because they were published early on.

 

[Umbran]

One could make the argument that 4e is incomplete in the sense that certain things were missing (familiars/summoning/illusions, minion/trap creation rules, etc), but that is more a personal opinion as to what makes a Complete D&D game. Nothing was missing that was necessary to run the game from beginning to end.

Specifically - if the measure of completeness is that it meets the detailed desired feature set of each and every individual potential user, then it is likely that no product of any sort has ever really been complete. It simply isn't a practical standard to meet.

 

[Minicol]

That depends on your definition of 'well-developed'. I think of lot of great 3e material came in later supplements like the Bo9S and PHBII. Because of this, I consider 3e a work in progress, something that got better over time.

This is purely a matter of personal taste. For me, 3e worked and was complete because it was a self contained system and was directly playable off the PHB, and more importantly in the spirit of previous editions.

By the same standards, a lot of the later 3.5 stuff, including BO9S and PHB2 are mostly useless and unbalancing books not worth breaking open on the table. Except maybe for a BBEG, who does not need to be balanced anyways.

This does not mean either of us are wrong. It just means different people, different expectations. Some will agree with me, some will agree with you, both are fine.

So can we move on ? We are all rolepayers, is it not what matters most ?

 

[The Ghost]

Wait, what? Crack open your 3.5 PHB and look at the deities. There's not a whole lot more there, compared to the 4e PHB.

I am not talking about the number of deities but the composition of such. I think they would have been better served bringing an entirely new pantheon into the base setting rather than an amalgamation of Greyhawk, Realms, and other setting's deities. They had an opportunity to create something completely new for 4E and they chose not to. An opportunity missed in my opinion.

 

[Rechan]

So can we move on ? We are all rolepayers, is it not what matters most ?

Hi, you must be new to the internet. I hope you enjoy your stay here.

 

[Rechan]

I am not talking about the number of deities but the composition of such. I think they would have been better served bringing an entirely new pantheon into the base setting rather than an amalgamation of Greyhawk, Realms, and other setting's deities. They had an opportunity to create something completely new for 4E and they chose not to. An opportunity missed in my opinion.

And if they had, they would've offended people due to the lack of Corellan and Moradin.

And they couldn't have used interesting gods like Bahamut, Asmodeus, and Tharizun.

 

[Jack7]

It seems like 4th edition is still very much a work in progress.

I think that's certainly a fair enough critique. No plan ever survives first contact with the enemy. Or even first contact with the astute and clever officer who knows it will not work as envisioned. Theory and practice are always antagonistic siblings.

On the other hand nothing is ever really absolutely complete, or as good as it will become through real world exposure. So nobody starts out building a Lexus or a Raptor, they start by building a Model T and a bi-plane.

Now perhaps 4E (which I like better than 3E, but 4E does have obvious weaknesses in design, and 3E has a few strengths in comparison) could be more appropriately analogous to a modern vehicle, with 3rd, 2nd, AD&D, and previous editions being the proto-typical models of previous eras. In that case, in my opinion, 4E is kind of like a car built to run on an experimental fuel. In some ways it is a radical departure, not merely a progressive advance on previous models.

Radical redesigns have both their own particular assets, which favor certain types of progress, but also their own inherent set of entirely new and peculiar flaws. You don't have to experiment with how gasoline will react in a new model of combustion engine automobile, you already know what gasoline does by long process of observation and engineering. Therefore you can concentrate on other problems, like efficiency, or ergonomics.

Redesign a thing fundamentally enough though and you might still produce a car, but it may very well be so different from previous car models that it is analogous to shifting design paradigms from the prop driven airplane to the jet driven airplane. (I am not saying 4E is a fundamental shift in fantasy role play gaming equivalent to the advance to the jet engine, to me it is not. But it does suffer the same kind of problems you have to solve when you attempt a radical redesign. Just attempting a different operational paradigm implies wholly different sets of problems to be addressed, than merely upgrading current technologies. And in a sense that is what editions are, different technological-era versions of gaming. A Raptor is an airplane, so was the one flown at Kitty Hawk. They are nevertheless so different in nature, operation, and appearance that if you did not know the developmental history of the past you might not necessarily make the connection of the one to the other.)

Anyways you can't improve a thing except by experimentation, and far more often than not, by trial and error, and by exposing a thing to the very sure rigors of the real world. And there is one undeniable thing about the real world - it is filled with people. And that means what is brilliant in one camp, is a dark disaster in another.

And maybe that is as it should just naturally be. No friction, no fire, no impulse to progress.

 

[Holy Smokes]

I don't have much to add to the already excellent replies so far, except to say that exception-based design affords greater flexibility in making changes to gameplay. While this doesn't help skill challenges much, class and power issues like Wizard dailies or Ranger twin-strike monomania and such can be re-tuned in future releases. That's no help if you're limited to the initial core rulebooks, but it's way better than a fractional-edition maintenance release, IMO.

While the initial 4E release may be technically complete, in a minimal fashion, I personally don't think this edition will really be a mature D&D game system for another 2-3 years. Fortunately, the 4E architecture is a bit more organic, and has some extra space for growth.

 

[Dedekind]

While the initial 4E release may be technically complete, in a minimal fashion, I personally don't think this edition will really be a mature D&D game system for another 2-3 years. Fortunately, the 4E architecture is a bit more organic, and has some extra space for growth.

Certainly true. In fact, Martial Power is a testament to this. New powers just plug-and-play with no problem at all, while also addressing the relatively small number of power and feat options in the PHB. I am a real MP fanboi, but I also think it is the first fruits of the 4e architecture. I'm excited to see Arcane and Divine Power.

 

[delericho]

A few recent discussions have made me realize something. It seems like 4th edition is still very much a work in progress.

I really hope that's not the case, or at least not intentionally so. If that were the case, it would imply that WotC released the game knowing it was an inferior product that just wasn't ready. The implications of that are... depressing.

Besides, I think one of the ideas behind the 4E rollout was to update through the new volumes of the core books since they decided not to do a 4.5.

A very big mistake, IMO. It has become apparent (already!) that there are several problems with 4e, some of them in quite significant areas. Skill Challenges, in particular, could do with a complete overhaul. Between them, these areas would provide ample justification for a 4.5e - trying to fix the problems across future volumes of PHBx is likely to lead to the solutions being spread out across many volumes, and quite possibly a cascade of errata on top of errata. A single three-volume update of the core rules would have been vastly preferable, IMO.