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

[Dannyalcatraz]

The analysis has long since been done. Valid criticisms of D&D have been hashed out decades since (not that there aren't plenty of invalid ones, as well). Any reader could easily supply some well-known ones as D&D's 'shortcomings' - unless they were somehow convinced D&D were perfect (are you convinced D&D is perfect? Would you care to prove that it is?).

I am under no illusions that D&D in any of its iterations is flawless. Heck, only 3.5Ed cracks my top 5 favorite systems, and it isn't even #1.

However, I will state that many of the so-called flaws people criticize in message boards I have found to be features or artifacts of playstyle. IOW, rare is the critique of D&D systems that is truly and purely objective...including my own.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Now, if you want to assume that D&D is a fantastic, accessible game and that everyone who tries it loves it, you could, and then you could come up with some alternative explanation for the consistently miniscule size of the TTRPG hobby. Something that accounts for D&D having mainstream name recognition, and it yet remaining unpopular even as closely-related hobbies, like CRPGs, MMOs, CCGs and board gaming are successful.

I'd be delighted to hear something more optimistic than what I could come up with.

The mantra here always seems to be that RPGs will be just as popular or more than these mediums if D&D simply makes a "better" system. I am not convinced this is the problem. I think the issue may be that table top roleplaying, just by its nature, is going to have limited appeal. I has had a few big moments where it reached a slightly broader audience or entered into the popular mind more, but if the system were the problem, and if 4E was such an improvement, why didn't it take off during that edition? (And why haven't any of the countless other RPGs out there taken off, since people could just as easily introduce non-D&D players to them as they have any of these successful boardgames.

People keep advancing this idea that people who play D&D want a broken and bad system. No one here is saying it is perfect, but I think the detractors of the game and its "sacred cows" might simply not appreciate why these have worked and been popular over the years. Some of it you can certainly attribute to things being grandfathered into the hobby, but a lot of it really seems to have stuck for a reason.

In terms of bringing people into the hobby who are not already part of it, the biggest hurdle I encounter is not the quality of the systems. For what RPGs do, that honestly isn't the biggest hurdle I meet (unless the game is so broken it makes play impossible or difficult). The biggest hurdle, across the board when I bring new people in, is the lack of simplicity. RPGs tend to be a bit hard for people to learn (even easy ones like Savage Worlds have tons of little things that non-RPG players find a bit hard to grok). Because RPGs are about playing a character and immersing in an imaginary world, I don't think it is like board games or card games where you need mechanics that are themselves entertaining away from the imaginary events they generate. What matters in RPGs is the imaginary events themselves. So I just don't think this notion of a perfectly designed system is what will bring new blood to the hobby, what we need are easier entry points. But even then, I think table top RPGs are still only going to appeal to a limited audience. Increasing the popularity of the table top hobby requires more of a shift in the broader culture I think (where people are open to the idea of it and it has a certain coolness factor) rather than a shift in the culture of game design.

 

[Zhaleskra]

Neither. There were some things in the pre-4e discussion I liked. A lot more I didn't. I know myself, and knew I would not enjoy it. When I actually saw the inside of a 4E Player's Handbook, I had issues with certain character abilities being called "Exploits". I remember when I first saw the core books not being fond of what I saw as overly-cartoony art.

 

[Manbearcat]

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 don't either. I recall what captured my imagination back in 1984. It wasn't reading the books. I knew nothing about it before I witnessed it. I knew about The Hobbit and LotR and I loved that source material. But D&D? No clue. I was a 7 year old. I liked dinosaurs, Indiana Jones, Star Wars, cool/fast cars, the A-Team, The Dukes of Hazard, He-Man/Transformers/GiJoe, playing make-believe adventure/war, reading books/comics, drawing, and watching/playing sports. That seems pretty joe-average.

One day I found myself at my older cousins. He was playing D&D with some other kids his age (around 12 or so) and a few adults. I was mystified. They scaled a supposedly unclimbable cliff to retrieve a silver dragon's eggs. The cloud giants had kicked her out of her home, stolen her eggs, and broken her wings so she couldn't fly anymore. Bastards. The characters climbed those cliffs. They heroically beat down those cloud giants and gained magical treasure in the process. They rescued the dragon's eggs and brought them back to her. She rewarded them with gratitude and the few baubles she had left.

I was mystified. I was hooked. All. In.

Any game system that can produce that play experience has a chance to thrive for jenamored by make-believe and tales of heroic daring-do, joe-average kid, I'd think.

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.

They could have served as deterrent. Like you, I don't know. It is a tough hypothetical.

But I think there is just as much of a chance (if not more) that, back in the day, people played fighters because they like the archetype versus the class mechanics or the play procedures involved in action resolution. That was my experience with the players who picked Fighter or Thief in the games I GMed. They wanted to be Legolas or He-Man or Optimus Prime or Face or Sherlock Holmes or Han Solo or Indiana Jones or a ninja-ey guy. And they wanted that to come out through play. Advanced class/action resolution mechanics may have not been a deterrent in that case. They may have been welcome. We'll never know but it is an interesting thought experiment.

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.

<snip>

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?

This is a good point. Dungeon World is definitely a hybrid outgrowth of 4e coupled with the PBtA engine. It plays just like it reads and it does it without fail. And it reads as a rules lite, Story Now (!) rpg with PCs as hearty protagonists, high action-adventure tropes, points of light genre, with robust resolution mechanics, GMing advice, and transparent/coherent play procedures. And it still has dynamic, exciting, tactical combat (just different than 4e). That might have been the evolution of 4e back in the day. If it would have been, who knows where we would be now? Maybe fractured perhaps but perhaps with a healthy, bustling, competitive marketplace informed by the acknowledged understanding that focusing intently on achieving our varying sought ends (and excluding those anathema to it) at the design phase will create tighter, better games (that consistently produce the play experience we're looking for rather than fighting against us)! I do not consider the late 80s to mid 90s the high point of RPG design!

 

[Bedrockgames]

But I think there is just as much of a chance (if not more) that, back in the day, people played fighters because they like the archetype versus the class mechanics or the play procedures involved in action resolution. That was my experience with the players who picked Fighter or Thief in the games I GMed. They wanted to be Legolas or He-Man or Optimus Prime or Face or Sherlock Holmes or Han Solo or Indiana Jones or a ninja-ey guy. And they wanted that to come out through play. Advanced class/action resolution mechanics may have not been a deterrent in that case. They may have been welcome. We'll never know but it is an interesting thought experiment.

!

I think both types of people have existed in the hobby. My only point was I definitely played with folks in the late 80s and through the 90s, who chose fighter because it was one of the easy classes to play and they didn't want to bother with things like spells.

 

[Stacie GmrGrl]

What 4e had going against it was legacy of perception of what D&D is 'supposed' to be with over 30 years of previous history of how the game was played and then 4e pretty much said that 'this is a different kind of D&D, made for the modern audience, and we are looking at different sources of inspiration than what the previous 30 years had been based on' and its entire design paradigm was fundamentally very different than all previous editions... and it all came down to the public's perception of what they thought D&D was meant to be vs. how the designers thought about D&D at the time and what they perceived as overall changing perceptions of modern game design and Nostalgia by the previous generations won out.

To me D&D 4e was the pinnacle of it's game design, and while 5e is pretty dang amazing in its own right... it's truly a step back towards Nostalgia and the rest of the OSR type of gaming. You can thank 4e for the OSR, as the OSR was probably an indirect result at least of how 4e was being handled. People were simply so used to a D&D with Vancian magic and alignments and specific classes being a certain way and that old schooled feel that anything labeled D&D simply, for the most part with the majority of fans, must have those sacred cows.

I never had that nostalgia factor with D&D. I am a very much a minority when I can say that D&D was not my first rpg. My first rpg was Marvel Superheroes and then Battletech, Star Wars d6, Earthdawn and Shadowrun. Those are my background, so when D&D came out with 4e and did away with all those sacred cows that IMPO were horrible game design, I was overjoyed.

and I am still overjoyed about that with 4e. They took a chance, did something different that required people to really think outside the box, and many couldn't do it. They broke with something new, got rid of a lot of what was bad design from the previous generations of D&D, and in the process made something quite revolutionary that unfortunately also had its own inner faults that showed off its warts and possible bad game design. Maybe calling it bad design is wrong, I don't know, but D&D has always seemed like a horribly designed game that for some reason people just loved.

It's nostalgia for most gamers. For me it's not. I didn't grow up playing the game. I didn't even hear about the game till after I had played a bunch of other games and when I finally got around to playing it, D&D was a vastly inferior product in every way possible. Now for the majority who grew up on D&D, because its their first love, their first influences within the gaming hobby, and it was their guiding light into roleplaying, that nostalgia factor is so strong in a lot of gamers and they had so much fun and it influenced so many people at such an early age that no matter where gaming goes in the modern day, many of those players will still play D&D as their first priority game, their chosen game, and they want D&D to be the game they remember playing and the game they have played for twenty/thirty years and there is nothing wrong with that. And for these people, 4e was so jarring a difference, it was changed in so many ways that a lot of the people who grew up playing D&D just wouldn't/couldn't look past those differences.

4e did bring in a lot of people who grew up with the internet and the video game/MMO generation because in many ways D&D 4e was made for them. It was made for a new generation of gamer, and I don't think Wizards even thought of how the many would react. With 5e it's quite obvious that they decided to go back to the many... and those who started playing D&D with 4e see it as a step backward, and rightly so.

In the end it's all perception, its subjective, it's a factor of how important that nostalgia feeling is in some people, and with many they just couldn't get past it. Their own personal paradigms of what D&D is was so strong that anything different isn't D&D... even if it was D&D.

 

[Manbearcat]

I think both types of people have existed in the hobby. My only point was I definitely played with folks in the late 80s and through the 90s, who chose fighter because it was one of the easy classes to play and they didn't want to bother with things like spells.

Yup. I played with those guys too. They were definitely there. I wonder how many folks wanted to play wizards and clerics for their archetype but didn't due to the inherent complexity? Obviously can't be sure, but I'm certain it isn't 0.

If you could just be Gandalf with a (very) scant number of cool light/radiant/force/spirit expulsion/summoning spells, some lore capability, a heartening catch-phrase or two, and martial prowess. I know a lot of players who wanted to be that guy but couldn't do it until much, much later (specialty priests of 2e were a start but fell short). The frail, vancian MU and the tanky cleric never worked (but the tanky cleric was certainly closer!).

 

[Bedrockgames]

The frail, vancian MU and the tanky cleric never worked (but the tanky cleric was certainly closer!).

I don't know. Personally for me the complexity of the wizard gave it the right feel (since they were supposed to be on the more cerebral side anyways). I always loved how wizards started out weak and frail and progressively became very powerful (at least in the first two editions of Advanced).

 

[Bedrockgames]

To me D&D 4e was the pinnacle of it's game design, and while 5e is pretty dang amazing in its own right... it's truly a step back towards Nostalgia and the rest of the OSR type of gaming. You can thank 4e for the OSR, as the OSR was probably an indirect result at least of how 4e was being handled. People were simply so used to a D&D with Vancian magic and alignments and specific classes being a certain way and that old schooled feel that anything labeled D&D simply, for the most part with the majority of fans, must have those sacred cows.

I never had that nostalgia factor with D&D. I am a very much a minority when I can say that D&D was not my first rpg. My first rpg was Marvel Superheroes and then Battletech, Star Wars d6, Earthdawn and Shadowrun. Those are my background, so when D&D came out with 4e and did away with all those sacred cows that IMPO were horrible game design, I was overjoyed.

and I am still overjoyed about that with 4e. They took a chance, did something different that required people to really think outside the box, and many couldn't do it. They broke with something new, got rid of a lot of what was bad design from the previous generations of D&D, and in the process made something quite revolutionary that unfortunately also had its own inner faults that showed off its warts and possible bad game design. Maybe calling it bad design is wrong, I don't know, but D&D has always seemed like a horribly designed game that for some reason people just loved.

It's nostalgia for most gamers. For me it's not. I didn't grow up playing the game. I didn't even hear about the game till after I had played a bunch of other games and when I finally got around to playing it, D&D was a vastly inferior product in every way possible. Now for the majority who grew up on D&D, because its their first love, their first influences within the gaming hobby, and it was their guiding light into roleplaying, that nostalgia factor is so strong in a lot of gamers and they had so much fun and it influenced so many people at such an early age that no matter where gaming goes in the modern day, many of those players will still play D&D as their first priority game, their chosen game, and they want D&D to be the game they remember playing and the game they have played for twenty/thirty years and there is nothing wrong with that. And for these people, 4e was so jarring a difference, it was changed in so many ways that a lot of the people who grew up playing D&D just wouldn't/couldn't look past those differences.

4e did bring in a lot of people who grew up with the internet and the video game/MMO generation because in many ways D&D 4e was made for them. It was made for a new generation of gamer, and I don't think Wizards even thought of how the many would react. With 5e it's quite obvious that they decided to go back to the many... and those who started playing D&D with 4e see it as a step backward, and rightly so.

In the end it's all perception, its subjective, it's a factor of how important that nostalgia feeling is in some people, and with many they just couldn't get past it. Their own personal paradigms of what D&D is was so strong that anything different isn't D&D... even if it was D&D.

Meh. I am frankly a bit tired of hearing this argument from people. I think you can't just reduce this to nostalgia, and I think it is a mistake to think of 4e as going forward while 5e is a step back. Brand identity is a real thing. You can't just make a game or a car in a vacuum, you do need to consider why people go to your brand in the first place. Personally D&D wasn't my first RPG, and I had a long history of playing other RPGS, not limiting my gaming to Dungeons and Dragons. So for me when I do play D&D, I want it to feel like D&D feels (because when I am in the mood for it, that is what I am after). If I want another kind of game, there are tons of options out there and I play plenty of them. From my point of view it wash' that 4E advanced the mechanics and I was afraid or unwilling to try (good lord did I try to play that game), it just kept mucking with how I liked to play. The new mechanics kept getting in the way for me. There are other games out there that do all kinds of new and interesting things that don't create that problem for me. In the end it was a confluence of different factors (didn't feel like D&D to me, the mechanics interfered with my approach to the game, the mechanics produced a kind of play I didn't enjoy---at least in terms of combat, etc). If others liked the system that is cool. I think it had some nice qualities and I do think it would have worked for a supers or wuxia style game....it just didn't feel right for the kind of fantasy I expect in D&D for me. If others were able to fit it to their desired fantasy campaign, again that is totally fine, I am not going to tell them they are wrong. I think when folks reduce those of us who didn't like 4E to "they couldn't think outside the box" or "they were just being nostalgic", it is a bit insulting and basically saying our tastes in games are incorrect.

 

[Stacie GmrGrl]

Meh. I am frankly a bit tired of hearing this argument from people. I think you can't just reduce this to nostalgia, and I think it is a mistake to think of 4e as going forward while 5e is a step back. Brand identity is a real thing. You can't just make a game or a car in a vacuum, you do need to consider why people go to your brand in the first place. Personally D&D wasn't my first RPG, and I had a long history of playing other RPGS, not limiting my gaming to Dungeons and Dragons. So for me when I do play D&D, I want it to feel like D&D feels (because when I am in the mood for it, that is what I am after). If I want another kind of game, there are tons of options out there and I play plenty of them. From my point of view it wash' that 4E advanced the mechanics and I was afraid or unwilling to try (good lord did I try to play that game), it just kept mucking with how I liked to play. The new mechanics kept getting in the way for me. There are other games out there that do all kinds of new and interesting things that don't create that problem for me. In the end it was a confluence of different factors (didn't feel like D&D to me, the mechanics interfered with my approach to the game, the mechanics produced a kind of play I didn't enjoy---at least in terms of combat, etc). If others liked the system that is cool. I think it had some nice qualities and I do think it would have worked for a supers or wuxia style game....it just didn't feel right for the kind of fantasy I expect in D&D for me. If others were able to fit it to their desired fantasy campaign, again that is totally fine, I am not going to tell them they are wrong. I think when folks reduce those of us who didn't like 4E to "they couldn't think outside the box" or "they were just being nostalgic", it is a bit insulting and basically saying our tastes in games are incorrect.

I can understand and respect where you are coming from and I am not saying you are wrong at all even if we have different opinions.

I see 5e as a step back to its previous form while being a big step forward within that design sphere of the OSR style of games. 5e is an amazing game for what it is designed to do. I can see that, and its a fun game. Its the first edition of any OSR style of game that I like.

All of that doesn't detract from the fact that while 4e was out it lead to Pathfinder and an entire rise if the OSR games, all of which I am sure designed by a lot of people who wanted D&D the way they remember it, and it lead to a lot of good games being designed.

So in many ways 4e's design lead to a lot of great things for the hobby as a whole.

I can recognize that even though I myself have no real desire to play any of those OSR games. To me, 5e is WotCs own OSR game. And its a really good one.