Is 4E charmless?

[Jack99]

It will really becomes Bollywood when PHB II introduces the Bard in regular campaigns - then everyone can sing and dance and kick ass to the song of the Bard! (And now I know what the Bards Healing Power does when it lets him slide his allies! He brings them to dance!)

Lots of prancing around those guys...

 

[lutecius]

I wouldn’t say charmless as much as plain fugly, but that’s just me
More seriously, I don’t mind the streamlining or losing of some dnd quirks. 3e did that a lot too and I liked it. If anything, I thought it didn’t go far enough.
I don’t even mind the classes’ sameness in 4e, I simply hate the way it was done, "new paradigm" and all.
And 4e has a few idiosyncrasies of its own, like marks or multiclass feats. Some may find these moles "charming".

The fluff/implied setting is hit or miss afaic. At least in 3e, the corny bits could be justified by tradition. Things like dragonborn have no such excuse.

 

[Keefe the Thief]

D&D needs an excuse for adding new stuff? Since when? And what was the excuse for Council of Wyrms?

 

[Obryn]

Does 4e have as much charm as 1e? I'd say no.

Does 4e have as much charm as 3e? I'd say yes.

I think "charm" is really, really subjective, though. For me, it's tied into arcane subsystems, weird trivia, and a sense of enthusiasm. 1e has all of that in spades.

-O

 

[Halivar]

Rules aren't charming for me. Stories are charming. The only charmless game is the game I can't tell a story in. I find it harder to tell a story when the game's rules are trying enforce a "verisimilitude" I find ludicrous. 4E stays where it belongs: conflict resolution. Otherwise it gets out of my story's way.

 

[Nivenus]

I suppose it depends entirely on what you mean by "charm." Personally, I find the art and design style of 4e to be very charming, much moreso than 3e. However, I can certainly see your point fluff-wise, as very little thought seems to be given towards universe fluff. While this makes sense for the core books, given their focus on a "catch-all, fill-in-the-blank" nameless setting, it certainly seems like the settings should have more charm than they do.

Although I actually like 4e FR, it seems to me it does lack charm to some extent. But so far as the actual rules are concerned - nah, like others have said, I get my charm from fluff, not crunch.

 

[Wootz]

Any game, when you look at it, is in its most basic form, a set of numbers. That's it. In my opinion, the charm comes from the people playing it. If you need the game to give a "charming" explanation as to why the numbers are what they are, by all means, find yourself a system that works for you. But I think it's a little unfair that you call 4e charmless because it tries to be user-friendly :/

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Sorry, 2E has the most charming campaign settings and monster manual material of any edition. 4E can't even provide a decent implied setting, if it can be called D&D at all. It can't even offer suspension of disbelief IMO, let alone magic that feels magical, or suggest a world for it's PCs beyond the combat grid. And when you put it all together it's the model of a charmless game.

Interesting. I was just about to make all of these points, except from a completely opposite perspective.

2E's plethora of settings and overwhelming amount of monster manual material really diluted the charm of DnD lore. I mean - Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance taken on their own charming. Taken together and it's, well, market fracturing.

Al-Quadim is my favorite setting of all time, but it's my greatest disappointment in DnD that it's not integrated with anything. That's both the charm and the ugliness of 2e.

4E is the first edition that I feel actually does a great job putting the implied setting first. It takes all the most DnD elements and puts them together into a framework that is at once expansive and coherent.

It's the first out of the box setting where I can actually believe in the implied narrative. Where magic feels like something integrated into the setting rather than tacked on or arbitrarily divided and where PCs have a role in the world at every level from village champion to immortal demigod. It's the first DnD since 1e to make race feel important and charming without making it restrictive or exclusive.

Now I can hear the complaints and sympathize - much of the charm is derived from prior editions but it is by no means the same charm - but it seems to me that this is a game where the DnD charm has grown up.

Saying 4E is charmless is like saying that the punk girl you went to high school with isn't cute anymore without realizing that she came back from college a little less idiosyncratic but with both taste and humor.

 

[Mournblade94]

Anyway, i hope you are not too angry if i see this as a low-aggression-way of 4e-kickin. Clearly, just as RPGs evolve (whatever that means), ways of saying "me not likey" evolve, too.

From "damn 4e you l$%"§$ my D&D" to "like a video game" to "without charm, don´t you agree?" to...

Hmm... "not enough depth" has already been used. What about "stiffles creativity with clearly defined rules"? No, that was implied in a thread yesterday. Or "ejects tradition without reason" - no, you get that over at Candlekeep already.

Who will be the successor?

Probably another true statement will be the successor, as all the previous ones you listed I have found to be quite true.

Maybe... 4e is all the fiber with none of the sugar?

 

[mhacdebhandia]

So now that I'm over my hissy fit, and playing a 4E campaign, the only criticism I have left is that 4E is...charmless. For me, it's like the new Mini. It's technically brilliant, but it trades entirely on the coolness of its predecessor without adding any of its own.

I disagree entirely.

Fourth Edition excites me more than any previous edition of the game, including the red box Basic Set I started with and the AD&D books which really solidified the hobby's grip on my brain meats.

Also the new Mini looks and drives better than the old one, and therefore multiplies the coolness of the original.