D&D 4E Find the Anime/Video games in 4e

[Professor Phobos]

Off the top of my head, Feng Shui had a built in "You can rebuild your character if you don't like it early on" rule.

EDIT: And I'm sure people have been allowing it for decades now. It's a good rule to have formalized, regardless of its provenance.

 

[Rechan]

Most video games have far fewer item slots than D&D does. And Longsword +1, +2, etc was already old when I started playing D&D, somewhere in the late 80's. You can't honestly claim that is an influence from video games.



2E had rules for 'Knocking at Death's Door'; I don't know if any previous editions did, but either way, this is not something that D&D took from video games.

You seem to be missing what is being said regarding "Raise dead/magical items/etc'.

It's not that "D&D ripped this stuff from video games", but that "This makes D&D feel like a cheapened videogame, as opposed to a fantasy story". Where your character is just some numbers and you're killing things to get better stuff to kill bigger things. That's as monotonous and faceless as any video game.

Death isn't final or even epic, it instead is "Oh, well I'll be back as soon as you get back to town". +1 Longswords then +2 then +3 makes magical items into just a nameless thing for a mechanical bonus to be better only to be discarded when you find a better one. As opposed to a Named magical creation with a long history that you want to learn, and keep with you.

So, the stuff that makes D&D more like a video game (of a faceless hero just killing stuff, death is just an annoyance, items are just stat boosters to make him better at killing) are the things that have always been there, rather than the New Ideas stolen from MMOs.

 

[Mercule]

Not to mention non-Eastern fighting styles:

Nope. The problem wasn't "named fighting styles." It's "flamboyantly named fighting styles."

There is a world of difference, to my ears, between Lightning Panther Strike vs. Bonetti's Defense or Capa Ferro. I would absolutely love names like the latter two for martial manuevers. The first one sounds heinous.

 

[Rechan]

Nope. The problem wasn't "named fighting styles." It's "flamboyantly named fighting styles."

There is a world of difference, to my ears, between Lightning Panther Strike vs. Bonetti's Defense or Capa Ferro. I would absolutely love names like the latter two for martial manuevers. The first one sounds heinous.

Except that Capa Ferro is a foreign language. What does it mean when it's translated into English? It could mean "Eye-Gouging Sissy Punch". But because it's foreign, it sounds nice. The various oriental maneuvers like Swallow Snatches the Cricket or something sounds really nice in its native tongue, because it's usually two words that have various inflections with the syllables, but sounds clunky when translated into English.

To your "Bonetti's Defense", there was even complaints about things like Ridley's Gambit in PHBII in how it had a Guy's name, and thus that means that That Guy must exist in your campaign because the feat name is there.

The point is that fighting styles have names just like Lightning Panther Strike. And considering the context they were talking about (Barbarians, who are feral, and get bite attacks and liekly other animal-like attacks), an attack named after an animal makes sense.

A barbarian who can pounce foes and claw their eyes out isn't going to name his eye-gouging finger poking gesture "Grull's Offense", he's going to call it "Eye Gouging Raven" or something after the animal he's emulating because he's a barbarian that emulates animals. Fancy names are sorta beyond barbarians in this context.

 

[AllisterH]

You seem to be missing what is being said regarding "Raise dead/magical items/etc'.

It's not that "D&D ripped this stuff from video games", but that "This makes D&D feel like a cheapened videogame, as opposed to a fantasy story". Where your character is just some numbers and you're killing things to get better stuff to kill bigger things. That's as monotonous and faceless as any video game.

Death isn't final or even epic, it instead is "Oh, well I'll be back as soon as you get back to town". +1 Longswords then +2 then +3 makes magical items into just a nameless thing for a mechanical bonus to be better only to be discarded when you find a better one. As opposed to a Named magical creation with a long history that you want to learn, and keep with you.

So, the stuff that makes D&D more like a video game (of a faceless hero just killing stuff, death is just an annoyance, items are just stat boosters to make him better at killing) are the things that have always been there, rather than the New Ideas stolen from MMOs.

But the point is that these two features ORIGINALLY came from D&D and influenced videogames, both console and pc rpgs.

It's a weird argument that D&D is becoming too much like a videogame based on elements that the videgame designers themselves admit came from D&D.

 

[Professor Phobos]

It is the circle of life.

 

[bonethug0108]

I think every referrence to video games mentioned in this thread(save for MAYBE the halo referrence) was actually originated in d&d first. Resurection? D&D first. Go fight monsters in a dungeon and get loot and experience? D&D first.

Alot of people forget that d&d came before hardly any video games were out, and most certainly no video game rpgs were out before then.

If someone can name an rpg video that existed before d&d and that d&d borrows from, I'll concede the point. Until then video games are rip-offs of d&d.

Now if you want to talk about things d&d ripped off, let's look at the fantasy genre as a whole before d&d existed. And how could it not rip these things of? It's a fantasy game.

 

[bonethug0108]

But the point is that these two features ORIGINALLY came from D&D and influenced videogames, both console and pc rpgs.

It's a weird argument that D&D is becoming too much like a videogame based on elements that the videgame designers themselves admit came from D&D.

^This.

Saying d&d feels like a cheap rip-off of video games is really saying d&d is a cheap rip-off of video games that were a cheap rip-off of d&d.

D&D definitely came first. Only new mechanical aspects such as per encounter can be said to come from video game mechanics.

 

[IanB]

AFAIK the first appearance of the "respec" in D&D is the XPH in the form of the 'psychic reformation' power, well after it had existed in MMOs.

However before 3E, D&D didn't really have anything *to* respec, of course. Spells in your spellbook if you were at the cap for your int is the only thing that I can think of that anyone might want to respec. Maybe powers in the 2E implementation of psionics.

 

[Rechan]

But the point is that these two features ORIGINALLY came from D&D

Yes, that is the point. D&D has always been that way.

It's a weird argument that D&D is becoming too much like a videogame based on elements that the videgame designers themselves admit came from D&D.

No. As you can see by this thread, there's very little argument about D&D becoming too much like videogames.

The argument that Doug McCrae made is that elements that were originally in D&D to begin wtih from 1e back in the 70s is more video-game like than anything that could be absorbed into it from games now of days.

Doug McCrae's argument is not "D&D is becoming a videogame because it's taking Raise Dead from a video game" but "Raise Dead has always been there, and that's more cheap and un-fantasy and un-story driven than anything that could be taken from Video games now. Raise Dead has always given D&D a video-game like tone of death being cheap and easy to fix."