4E is for casuals, D&D is d0med

[hong]

The fact that the designers of 4E actually believe this fallacy is why it is such a horribly designed roleplaying game. Rules don't matter to roleplaying, huh? Let's just label Chess, Poker, and Monopoly roleplaying games too. The rules don't matter, right?

There sure are a lot of people in the 4E Rules forum arguing over whether the rules for roleplaying are broken.

Have you read Tomb of Horrors? There are what? 2, 3 combats in it? And each of those vastly overpowering the PCs. If you fight something in that module, not only are you doing it wrong, you're going to die.

And G1-3 were all about strategy, not tactics. Play kick in the door in any of those and you'd get your butt handed to you.

The point is that all of those modules were ultimately about killing monsters and taking their stuff. Whether you do it the hard way or the easy way is irrelevant. There is precisely as much "roleplaying" in G1-2-3 and ToH as in KotS -- unless, of course, you happen to define "roleplaying" as killing monsters and taking their stuff the easy way.

 

[Testament]

The fact that the designers of 4E actually believe this fallacy is why it is such a horribly designed roleplaying game. Rules don't matter to roleplaying, huh? Let's just label Chess, Poker, and Monopoly roleplaying games too. The rules don't matter, right?

Now you're just being obnoxious with this reductionism; you know exactly what I meant. So I ask you, was first edition a Roleplaying game? What about 2nd or any of its countless permutations. 3rd edition? Why or why not?

If 4th edition plans on basing its status on the quality of its adventures, then people may start seeing D&D games as a devolution over time.

The fact that folks cannot see a few pages of interesting town design with some Q&A added to 2 dozen DDM encounters is a testament to 4E's hype. Take a step back and look at those pages. There is nothing on them that doesn't directly relate to DDM.

What I see are some well designed encounters, with a series of events linking them. I see the DDM integrated component as something inevitable, given that WotC is owned by the same company that turned a series of half-hour toy commercials into a cherished pop culture item. And that's even ignoring the fact that they've sold about 50 grillion units of the damn things and they've covered a lot of bases in the critters available, so it makes sense from both a design and a commercial standpoint.

So the adventure also contains a shill for another product. Big freaking whoop.

As for the implied superiority of earlier adventures there, given the way 4th plays and the wide reports of TPKs in KotSf, I'd say its about strategy too rather than kick in the door. And I still say that the best feature of ToH is as a how-not-to guide to adventure design, and a shining example of everything bad about the so called old-school style.

 

[sinecure]

Reductio ad Absurdum. RPGs have accumulation of narrative and participatory interaction between players. The rules are there to adjudicate the "Hit You Nah Huh Yah Huh".

Yep, reductio ad absurdum. That's the latin name for the argument type I used to point out the illogic of yours. And by the way, it's not a narrative until it's repeated after the interactions are completed. Narratives are by definition retellings.

Now, are you seriously assuming a referee isn't assisted by rules to roleplay the world? That's a huge job to remember for consistency if you choose not to use rules whatsoever.

The past 3 years of my experience with RPGs and the 3E system as a whole was nigh-diceless Spycraft campaigns. The rules didn't make those games, we did.

So you had no interactions with the world, only PCs? Or did you just make it all up as you went along to hell with any logical consistency?

Nothing stopping the DM or Adventure from creating over-whelming encounters. 4E hasn't broken into your house and installed a watching device.

I didn't say it did. I'm saying, based on their first adventure, they are making very, very poor adventure modules.

There sure are a lot of people in the 4E Rules forum arguing over whether the rules for roleplaying are broken.

As there's not, I'll just say it's because they don't care about roleplaying one way or the other. I think folks are into the minis games and kind of oblivious as to how it requires one to think out of character. (the opposite of roleplaying fyi)

The point is that all of those modules were ultimately about killing monsters and taking their stuff. <snip>

Actually, the weren't. And more importantly, neither is D&D. Let's just call this Major Fallacy #2. Another one en vogue at the moment. D&D is about being a hero.

Now you're just being obnoxious with this reductionism; you know exactly what I meant. So I ask you, was first edition a Roleplaying game? What about 2nd or any of its countless permutations. 3rd edition? Why or why not?

Not trying to be obnoxious, just trying to get my point across. I don't know what you meant if you actually believe RPG rules have no role in regards to roleplaying. That's Major Fallacy #1 again. (known in indie circles as system doesn't matter) And yes, all the editions of D&D are roleplaying games. It just so happens 4e places the least priority in its rules on roleplay.

What I see are some well designed encounters, with a series of events linking them. I see the DDM integrated component as something inevitable, given that WotC is owned by the same company that turned a series of half-hour toy commercials into a cherished pop culture item. And that's even ignoring the fact that they've sold about 50 grillion units of the damn things and they've covered a lot of bases in the critters available, so it makes sense from both a design and a commercial standpoint.

I am 100% on board as a commercial endeavor. Miniatures simply make more profit. As to what makes a good roleplaying game, DDM repeatedly removes one from behaving in character throughout play. (Not good for an RPG)

And honestly, what is this adventure doing making encounters for DMs? It's like it is telling them to railroad the PCs. Modules are fluid. You can't predict who will be where during design, before play even begins. Old designs didn't fall into this trap. As if the world doesn't change depending on the PCs actions. Sheesh.

So the adventure also contains a shill for another product. Big freaking whoop.

Again, this ain't a problem for me. It's the product that has problems when used in an incorrect manner.

As for the implied superiority of earlier adventures there, given the way 4th plays and the wide reports of TPKs in KotSf, I'd say its about strategy too rather than kick in the door. And I still say that the best feature of ToH is as a how-not-to guide to adventure design, and a shining example of everything bad about the so called old-school style.

If strategy can be minimized when to take an "extended rest" (and let's face it, this edition is all about minimization), then there is strategy in that adventure.

Tomb of Horrors is also widely regarded as one of the shining examples of adventure design for high level play. That high level adventures have turned into the worst designs as of late bodes poorly for the hobby. You really should take a look at it again. Only the best players will be able to beat it. I'm afraid your opinion may be clouding your judgement, but as it is so central to the core philosophy of D&D, I can't understand how you could hate it and yet enjoy this game.

 

[Fenes]

I'm saying, based on their first adventure, they are making very, very poor adventure modules.

editing

I don't expect any adventure modules I can use from any edition. I never found an D&D adventure that fit my playstyle in 2E, nor in 3E. Too much combat in all of them, and not enough social situations.
I usually consider them "collections of encounters I can use for the combat scenes in my own adventures after serious modifications are done".

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

The fact that the designers of 4E actually believe this fallacy is why it is such a horribly designed roleplaying game. Rules don't matter to roleplaying, huh? Let's just label Chess, Poker, and Monopoly roleplaying games too. The rules don't matter, right?

Rules matter. But not always in the way people think they do.

Monopoly is not a role-playing game because my characters ability do not depend on "who" I play. Be a car or a shoe, you're still doing all the same stuff. More-over, there is nothing in the game assumptions about talking about what a character might do or inter-acting with the world. There are no NPCs to interact with.

4E provides 4 general combat roles. This alone means there is a role-playing element. Furthermore, it gives these "color" by assigning power sources to different classes. And even than it goes beyond that (Ranger and Rogue are both Martial, and both Striker).
This is the purely combat-part of the roles. Some might not want to count them for "role-playing", despite them defining a role you have to play in the game.

Furthermore, the mechanics associate non-combat abilities to these classes. Rogues have Thievery and Stealth. Fighters have Athletics and Intimidate. Warlords have History and Insight. Clerics have Religion and Heal. Wizards have Arcana.

This is stuff not related directly to combat. They have totally out-of-combat purposes, and they describe a characters abilities in terms going beyond something like "the money I have" and "the magic items the streets I own" in Monopoly.

Even further, the whole game is supposedly motivated by a story. You are not just entering the game board and fighting some enemies. There is a story behind the reason. Depending on your personal preference, the story may be as shallow as "We were offered 200 gold pieces if we eliminate those Kobolds" or as elaborate as "In an effort to impress the Lord of Sharn, we attempt to take down a band of Kobolds. The Kobolds are only in this region because an orc-tribe has settled in their former homes and have driven them out. The tribe is worshipping Gruumsh, and the Kobolds fear a terrible ritual the Orcs are trying to complete. If the PCs manage to talk with the Kobolds, they might even learn about this and warn the Lord about it, and can stop it."

Sure, I could play 4E like a board-game, though I would ignore about as much rules material for that as I would have to play 3E as a board-game, or Shadowrun as a board-game.

---

So, in short, the idea that 4E is something else then a role-playing game is ridiculous. Anyone that seriously claims this must be misinformed, suffers from bad judgment, or has an agenda that makes him claim this despite any evidence to the contrary. Or, he has a very narrow definition of what a role-playing game is that I probably shouldn't bother addressing him.

 

[Fenes]

So, in short, the idea that 4E is something else then a role-playing game is ridiculous. Anyone that seriously claims this must be misinformed, suffers from bad judgment, or has an agenda that makes him claim this despite any evidence to the contrary. Or, he has a very narrow definition of what a role-playing game is that I probably shouldn't bother addressing him.

And don't forget that a number of fans of certain other RPG systems are convinced that no edition of D&D is or was a roleplaying game anyway.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

And don't forget that a number of fans of certain other RPG systems are convinced that no edition of D&D is or was a roleplaying game anyway.

Yes. Heck, even I might have been lead to believe that at the beginning of my role-playing game career, before I encountered D&D personally.

Roleplaying is a lot more then some Elitist like to make of it.
"Social interactions" with NPC is not even everything there is. Sometimes, role-playing is just inter-party banter.
Role-playing can be your Fighter screaming "Why won't you just die!" to an enemy monster before power-attacking(3E)/brutal striking(4E) your enemy.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

The fact that the designers of 4E actually believe this fallacy is why it is such a horribly designed roleplaying game. Rules don't matter to roleplaying, huh? Let's just label Chess, Poker, and Monopoly roleplaying games too. The rules don't matter, right?

They didn't matter to the people running 1st or 2nd Ed. Can your character repair a house? I don't know...make an Int check, the rules don't say. In fact, most of the best moments I had in these editions were precisely BECAUSE the rules didn't tell us everything our characters could do, we got to make up some of it that wasn't that important.

Have you read Tomb of Horrors? There are what? 2, 3 combats in it? And each of those vastly overpowering the PCs. If you fight something in that module, not only are you doing it wrong, you're going to die.

Tomb of Horrors is a bad example. It was pretty much written as "Do exactly what I think you should do or die immediately if you can't figure it out). Not exactly a fun time.

And G1-3 were all about strategy, not tactics. Play kick in the door in any of those and you'd get your butt handed to you.

Exactly. The tactics were entirely missing. So, for most people who played them it ended up being like this:

"We go down the hallway."
"There are 3 giants in the next room. They see you, roll for initiative"
*insert many rounds of rolling to hit and damage with no tactics at all*
"Alright, we search their bodies then head down another hallway"
And repeat.

Monsters in 1st and 2nd Ed were generally very weak. Most parties were able to beat them quite a few levels below when they were meant to be faced. Especially if you had a group who could abuse the rules well like mine did. Within a round, we'd have convinced our DM that one of our level 1 illusion spells or a cantrip could keep one of the giants completely out of the fight while we fought the other 2.

If 4th edition plans on basing its status on the quality of its adventures, then people may start seeing D&D games as a devolution over time.

Depends on how you look at it. I rather enjoy wandering through hallways killing giants. I have lots of fun with it.

The fact that folks cannot see a few pages of interesting town design with some Q&A added to 2 dozen DDM encounters is a testament to 4E's hype. Take a step back and look at those pages. There is nothing on them that doesn't directly relate to DDM.

Here's the meat of it. When we played 2nd Ed, there was all this flowery storyline. There were hundreds and hundreds of pages of books that would tell us what gravity worked like on a Spelljamming ship, what the ground felt like on the 432nd layer of the Abyss, and what Kobolds like to eat for breakfast.

When we'd actually play the game, however, the DM would come up with a problem for us to solve, we'd then have to kill some monsters in order to achieve that goal. I'd say less than 1% of the stuff in any of those books actually came up during a session ever(except as fun things to joke about outside of the game).

D&D adventures have, pretty much since the beginning been a series of combats tied together by a common plot(the giants are attacking people...put an end to it, there are evil people in a temple...go figure out what they are up to, slavers are kidnapping people...stop them, etc). However, they weren't explicitly spelled out like that. They'd give you a long background as to WHY the slavers were taking people, what their camp looked like, the unique symbol on the leader's sword and so on. The stat blocks for the monsters were always only a couple of lines, so they APPEARED to be a small portion of the adventure. Until the adventure saw play. Then, they pretty much all ended up the same way: "You approach the camp and someone spots you and sounds an alarm. Roll for initiative."

I've played in a lot of D&D campaigns in a lot of editions. I can tell you that when you strip the flowery text and pretense away, they all end up one of 2 ways: Aimlessly reacting to whatever the players do OR a series of battles connected by a plot. The battles would take 80% of the time spent playing the game and the plot would be 20% and largely involved trying to get to monsters to have another battle.

3e and 4e both pretty much realized that and are now writing down more information and more detail on the part of the game that people spend the most time in. If you are going to spend 80% of your time in battles, they might as well have interesting options instead of rolling attack and damage rolls over and over until the enemies were dead. Why should the DM need to make up the terrain, the effects of the terrain on combat, the starting locations of all the enemies, the tactics of all the enemies? All of that adds a barrier to entry as a DM.

I could tell you that we got so bored of battles in 2nd Ed that our DM used to just point at people in a clockwise direction and they were simply supposed to answer how much damage they did(he told us the ACs of enemies). We didn't move around, we didn't vary our tactics, it was simply who ran out of hitpoints first. Except for the Wizard, he got to take 10 minutes figuring out if his Web spell was sticking people and how many he got and how hard it was for them to get out.

 

[hong]

As there's not, I'll just say it's because they don't care about roleplaying one way or the other.

http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=229919
http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=230233

I think folks are into the minis games and kind of oblivious as to how it requires one to think out of character. (the opposite of roleplaying fyi)

Nonsense. Thinking out of character is central to certain definitions of roleplaying. And I like peanut butter.

Actually, the weren't.

In operational terms, yes, they most certainly were.

And more importantly, neither is D&D. Let's just call this Major Fallacy #2. Another one en vogue at the moment. D&D is about being a hero.

... which generally tends to mean killing monsters and taking their stuff, especially when you come to published modules.

Tomb of Horrors is also widely regarded as one of the shining examples of adventure design for high level play.

To be precise, it is widely regarded as one of the shining examples of _bad_ adventure design.

That high level adventures have turned into the worst designs as of late bodes poorly for the hobby. You really should take a look at it again. Only the best players will be able to beat it. I'm afraid your opinion may be clouding your judgement, but as it is so central to the core philosophy of D&D, I can't understand how you could hate it and yet enjoy this game.

See, if you didn't think of roleplaying solely in terms of "beating the dungeon", life would be much simpler.

 

[sinecure]

Rules matter. But not always in the way people think they do.
<snip>
So, in short, the idea that 4E is something else then a role-playing game is ridiculous. Anyone that seriously claims this must be misinformed, suffers from bad judgment, or has an agenda that makes him claim this despite any evidence to the contrary. Or, he has a very narrow definition of what a role-playing game is that I probably shouldn't bother addressing him.

Let me back off from my D&D is not a RPG cheese. It's a RPG, just one putting a very low priority on RP in comparison to others. I still believe the majority of play in KotS is DDM scenarios loosely interlinked by some town and character description. As you go back in time this has not been the case.