Confirm or Deny: D&D4e would be going strong had it not been titled D&D

[innerdude]

Nod. There have been many games published that were much better than D&D - better than 4e, for that matter. Few of them have succeeded well enough to keep even a very small publisher afloat, most have vanished into obscurity. Only an equally-bad clone - Pathfinder - has successfully challenged D&D.

D&D just has that mainstream name recognition, so it's where most potential new RPGers start, and, if D&D isn't good enough, it's understandable that they'd just pass on the hobby, completely. Those who are left either prefer D&D for it's egregious flaws, develop a fondness for it in spite of them (I can't be the only one), or can tolerate it long enough to clue into other options.

For many years, I'm sure, there were those hoping that, if only D&D could get to be even halfway decent, that third category could become dominant and the hobby could expand and a good game could finally be successful. The edition war proved the futility of that hope.

The TTRPG hobby is dominated by D&D, and D&D is dominated by fans in that first category, who demand it remain a bad game.

Hmmm, see, I kind of have a problem with this comment. D&D is a "bad" game? (Except for your beloved 4e, I'm assuming).

This is exactly the kind of thing the 4vengers were forever rolling out during the height of the edition wars----"Just because YOU don't like 4e doesn't mean it's bad!"

I'd say the same thing---just because you don't like any version of D&D other than 4e doesn't mean it's "bad." Wait, as a matter of fact, I seem to recall many, many 4e proponents trying to tell me "just how much like classic D&D 4e really is" as a selling point.....so which is it?

Millions upon millions of people have derived countless hours of enjoyment from this "bad" game, your favorite version included.

Look, frankly, D&D does a lot of things RIGHT. Class-based advancement makes it easy for players to choose a niche / character type. Level-based advancement makes it easier for GMs to set encounter difficulty. While I don't like it much, "Vancian" magic is a robust, flavorful spell system that makes it easy to incorporate checks and balances (whether they've been implemented well or not in the past is another story).

And as much as I've come to not like the concept of hit points generally---at least not as D&D implements them---it makes a very easy shorthand for "combat readiness" and "health factor" that is ubiquitous across gaming media.

D&D players don't prefer it for its "egregious flaws," they prefer it because it provides a play experience they understand and enjoy.

(Believe me, I personally have discovered I can get a much better play experience using a different system, but not everyone has had that experience yet, and frankly maybe they don't need to.)

Second, few would consider Pathfinder an "equally bad" clone of D&D. To me the concept of Archetypes alone makes Pathfinder a reasonably objective improvement over 3e multiclassing. Whether it improves anything else, by how much, whether it improved enough of the right stuff (or didn't go nearly far enough) is subjective, obviously.

For the record, I think Fantasy Craft is the best implementation of "Fantasy D&D" on the market.......but at this point I just don't go for d20-based stuff at all. 4e, Pathfinder, 5e, Fantasy Craft, True20, Arcana Evolved, 13th Age, doesn't matter, I just don't care for the base assumptions and tropes of D&D-based systems anymore. You'd be hard pressed to get me to play or run anything d20. A buddy of mine tried to run a "core only" 3.5 campaign maybe 7 months ago, and after Savage Worlds and the One Ring it was like nails on the chalkboard every session. Every instinct of mine was fighting against the system. Heck, I don't like GURPS at all, and frankly I'd be more inclined to run GURPS over D&D / d20 of any variety. (But really this whole paragraph is tangential to the topic at hand.)

The point is, bagging on an entire group of the RPG population for liking and enjoying D&D comes across as arrogant and elitist. You're more than entitled to your views, but if the goal is have a productive dialogue about RPG play experiences---with the intent of making a positive impact on people's approach to the game and their system of choice---this probably isn't the way to go about it.

 

[Zak S]

The TTRPG hobby is dominated by D&D, and D&D is dominated by fans in that first category, who demand it remain a bad game.

It's weird when you meet someone in 2015 who still writes their opinion-as-fact, especially this hard.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

The TTRPG hobby is dominated by D&D, and D&D is dominated by fans in that first category, who demand it remain a bad game.

I can understand that point of view even if I don't entirely agree with it. There are a lot of components of D&D that I find unintuitive, stilted, artificial, clunky, and so on and so on.

Frex, IMO:

• Hit points suck as a mechanic. What the heck are they anyway?
• Classes are a straightjacket
• Vancian casting has no close analog in fiction, not even in Vance, or at least the ones I remember reading
• Levels are simplistic and arbitrary
• Alignments are just weird
• Don't even get me started on initiative rules in 3E+
• (Imagine an insult to your favorite mechanic here in case I've missed it. Don't want to leave anyone out)

Yet somehow, it comes together as a really fun game, with all of the elements working together. And when I want a fun D&D experience, I want all of those things even though I dislike them individually. And when I want a different RPG experience I find a game with none of those mechanics and have a great time too.

For me at least, it's not that I demand D&D remain a bad game. I demand that D&D remain D&D, warts and all. Because even with its faults I have a ton of fun with it.

 

[Aribar]

For the record, I think Fantasy Craft is the best implementation of "Fantasy D&D" on the market.......but at this point I just don't go for d20-based stuff at all. 4e, Pathfinder, 5e, Fantasy Craft, True20, Arcana Evolved, 13th Age, doesn't matter, I just don't care for the base assumptions and tropes of D&D-based systems anymore. You'd be hard pressed to get me to play or run anything d20. A buddy of mine tried to run a "core only" 3.5 campaign maybe 7 months ago, and after Savage Worlds and the One Ring it was like nails on the chalkboard every session. Every instinct of mine was fighting against the system. Heck, I don't like GURPS at all, and frankly I'd be more inclined to run GURPS over D&D / d20 of any variety. (But really this whole paragraph is tangential to the topic at hand.)

I think this is why Tony said D&D is a bad game. Even though 4E can provide the exact same feeling as previous D&D games, the modern mechanics were such a departure that many of the old guard disliked it. People can still have fun with bad games; every week I play in a 3.5 game and I've ran games in the system as well. My opinions are contrary to yours in that the encounter balancing system in 3E (and what we got in 5E) are wonky and hard to plan for, Vancian magic's balancing act is an all-or-nothing affair that makes adventuring days revolve around it, and at least in 3E over time the class-based system lost its unbalanced simplicity and became a glorified pick-and-choose skill tree system so to speak. Each edition, including 4E (yay awkward higher level play, dozens of fiddly bonus numbers, minor action attacks, stuns/dazes, etc.) are flawed and archaic in their own ways to the point where I wouldn't bat an eye at calling some of them poorly designed in part or whole.

 

[Stacie GmrGrl]

4e as a game design for how it was designed was an amazing game for what it was designed to do. It is also the best example of an RPG based on Balance... And it show cased both the positives and negatives of extreme game balance. It was the negatives of this reliance on balance that got me to appreciate games like Heroes Unlimited, where there is no balance at all.

On the idea of D&D being a good or bad game... Its a good game if you can buy into the D&D paradigm of its own fantasy genre, but if you want any other kind of game session than its a bad game design. I'm not saying its not fun.

I do want to chime in on the FantasyCraft comparison... Yes its a d20 fantasy game, but its classes and magic system are very much built on a very different paradigm. You can do D&D style of games with it AND you can do other styles of fantasy with it as well. Its a vastly superior game to any version of D&D that has none of the problems of your typical D&D style game.

 

[Manbearcat]

What I think might be a pretty interesting discussion/poll is something mildly askew of this one.

If 4e would have been the original incarnation of D&D (instead of OD&D evolved from a naval wargame), would it have captured that era's zeitgeist or created one of its own (that was as potent)?

Then, if it would have, what would the evolution of the D&D brand look like (from then and on to today); what genre tropes, resolution mechanics, and hobby culture would have emerged?

 

[Bedrockgames]

What I think might be a pretty interesting discussion/poll is something mildly askew of this one.

If 4e would have been the original incarnation of D&D (instead of OD&D evolved from a naval wargame), would it have captured that era's zeitgeist or created one of its own (that was as potent)?

Then, if it would have, what would the evolution of the D&D brand look like (from then and on to today); what genre tropes, resolution mechanics, and hobby culture would have emerged?

I don't know. I think one of the things that captured peoples imaginations wasn't so much the mechanics (which I do think were sound) as the way Gary and company warmly talked about play, how new it felt and how much enthusiasm they conveyed. I think a lot of the later editions haven't been able to match that by their nature because in a lot ways they are just restating things.

That said, I think mechanics could have served as a deterrent to its popularity. Would 4E have been able to achieve what earlier versions achieved? I don't know. That is a pretty hard hypothetical to weigh. One thing to consider though is 4E effectively makes everyone function mechanically like a spell caster. This isn't a criticism, but it does add a layer of complexity to the game for every single player (not just the spell casters). I think most seasoned gamers don't have any problem figuring that out and adopting it, but I do wonder if that would have effected its ability to appeal to the audience it did, without the "i just play a fighter" as a simple option because every player now has to keep track of their abilities in a way they didn't in earlier versions of the game. I know when I started playing D&D we always had people in the group who seemed to gravitate toward the simpler character options. 4E is unusual because it has a certain simplicity but also a lot of moving parts through its powers system.

 

[Bedrockgames]

The TTRPG hobby is dominated by D&D, and D&D is dominated by fans in that first category, who demand it remain a bad game.

I think at a certain point, if people keep coming back to the system, it is probably safe to assume it isn't as bad as you think. You might not like it, but clearly it works for a lot of folks for some reason. While it is true D&D dominates and always has, there have been plenty of times where its supremacy has been challenged, where other alternatives became real possibilities. D&D is the first game most folks hear about, but lets face it, once you get into this hobby, you are quickly introduced to a bunch of other games and people who are enthusiastic about them. From the very beginning I was playing not just D&D but GURPS, Cthulu, TORG, and Palladium. Eventually games like Vampire came along and it was pretty common for groups to try out new systems. I am not saying D&D is the best system out there, or that it will always be on top, but after this long against so much other competition, I just don't think its success is purely an accident. There is something about this system (with all its idiosyncrasies) that works well for the kind of game it is.

 

[TwoSix]

I think the release of 4e was like the Time of Troubles for sacred cows. Some were taken down and proven all too mortal, while others were elevated and their divinity proven. What I think the reception of 4e (and later 5e) proved is that out of all the sacred cows, Vancian style spellcasting, with its spell slots and long list of delineated effects, is the sine qua non of D&D for a majority of its player base. I think all of the other bugaboos of 4e (inspirational healing, diagonal geometry, lack of a Great Wheel, even the focus on encounter play over exploratory play) would have been rendered less injurious by the soothing palliative of the familiar spell list and spell slots.

I do think, though, that a 4e presented as an extension of D&D (and released by the company that makes D&D, to boot, which I think would be an enormous leg-up even now), which didn't invalidate the previous edition, and supported by an existing IP, could have worked and worked well. I think releasing a 4e style game as "Magic: The RPG" could have worked well, for example. Or maybe package the game together with Eberron. Then you see how these changes are received, and you can work the ideas that are popular into the next new D&D core.

 

[innerdude]

What I think might be a pretty interesting discussion/poll is something mildly askew of this one.

If 4e would have been the original incarnation of D&D (instead of OD&D evolved from a naval wargame), would it have captured that era's zeitgeist or created one of its own (that was as potent)?

Then, if it would have, what would the evolution of the D&D brand look like (from then and on to today); what genre tropes, resolution mechanics, and hobby culture would have emerged?

The immediate thought I had was, "How would 4e evolve?" From OD&D to 5e, there's a fairly easy-to-follow trend of how the rules evolved based on what the player base was trying to get from it at the time.

Looking at it from that lense, I had to ask myself, what would change in 4e? Would a 4.25 system have evolved to include no martial dailies, with encounter powers and some kind of recharge mechanic? Would 4.5x have done away with healing surges and added a wound track?

One thing that I think would be even more noticeable would be that players looking for "simulationist" gameplay would jump off the D&D bandwagon even faster than they did 1e. As I noted earlier, the design space of the 4e system as a whole doesn't appear to leave a lot of room for "drift" into simulationism. Assuming Runequest still shows up in 1977 like it did, I think the divide between those wanting more "realism" in their RPG and those enjoying the "game" of RPGs would have been more pronounced. D&D has never been great at true "simulationist" play, but if you close one eye and sort of half squint at it, you can sort-of, kind-of convince yourself there's some "simultionist" qualities there. Would there have been more pressure on D&D to evolve in that direction?