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What is the essence of 4E?
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<blockquote data-quote="Pauper" data-source="post: 7451923" data-attributes="member: 17607"><p>I'm going to take a slightly different tack here. I don't disagree that all of the elements under discussion here were part of the 4E design/intended experience, and I agree that 4E set out to, and did, solve a lot of problems inherent to the design structure of 3E.</p><p></p><p>But, since the first release of the OGL, we've heard something akin to a truism: adventures are important, but they don't sell. Even in 5E, it seems that WotC wants to off-load adventure publication to third parties (see DMs Guild).</p><p></p><p>So why has a slight majority of 5E game books published by WotC actually been adventure books? (Hoard of the Dragon Queen, Rise of Tiamat, Princes of the Apocalypse, Out of the Abyss, Curse of Strahd, Storm King's Thunder, Tales from the Yawning Portal, Tomb of Annihilation vs, PH, DMG, MM, SCAG, Volo's Guide, Xanathar's Guide) Even if you count the Elemental Evil Player's Guide as a game book, despite being released in PDF only, there's still a slight majority of adventures over 'crunch' books.</p><p></p><p>Someone might argue that the adventure books are also serving as campaign books, examining locations in the Realms and expanding them, but that's a very recent phenomenon, if it's true at all -- Tomb of Annihilation contains some setting details regarding Chult, but SCAG has way more info on specific locations in the Sword Coast than all the adventure books combined.</p><p></p><p>I believe that WotC is focusing on adventures even more than sourcebooks or other 'crunch', because the actual essence of 4E, as derived from design experience, is that people had a very difficult time taking the 4E rules and turning them into compelling adventures.</p><p></p><p>The beginning of the 4E era featured adventures written by folks who seemed to presume that 4E adventures would work just like 3E adventures, and ended up with wildly unbalanced series of encounters that led to overwhelming final battles that, often as not, would leave the group unsatisfied. (I'm looking at you, Keep on the Shadowfell, but this was not the only early 4E adventure that suffered from this problem.) Phase 2 of 4E adventure design occurred once adventure writers fully got their brains wrapped around 4E's encounter design rules, but still hadn't figured out how to combine those encounters into coherent adventures, leading to adventures with a series of interesting set-piece encounters, but no real narrative cohesion. Living Forgotten Realms features a lot of these adventures, but the apotheosis of this style of adventure is probably Madness in Gardmore Abbey, which uses the gimmick of the Deck of Many Things to feature a series of wild battles. (You can even track the transition of 4E adventure design from Phase 1 to Phase 2 by going through the Scales of War Adventure Path, which began firmly in Phase 1 design mode, but slowly transitioned to Phase 2 just prior to the change from Heroic to Paragon tier with the adventure "The Temple Between".)</p><p></p><p>Somewhere during Phase 2, somebody got the idea to solve the narrative problem by adapting older adventures with already-understood narratives. In this way, the adventure wouldn't need to deal so much with the underlying narrative, since players familiar with the original adventure would provide their own narrative superstructure for the action. You could see the beginnings of this style with Demon Queen's Enclave, the WotC-published mid-Paragon Points of Light adventure; it wasn't D3 Vault of the Drow, not really, but you could see the connections if you squinted hard enough. This was followed by explicit reflavorings of old adventures, including Revenge of the Giants (the G-series), Tomb of Horrors, and finally, the Keep on the Borderlands, which launched alongside the nostalgia-fueled Red Box whose earlier analog had hosted the original Keep for the previous generation of D&D grognards.</p><p></p><p>Did anybody get 4E adventure design right? I'd argue one group finally did -- the Living Forgotten Realms folks mentioned above. Only a handful of Season One LFR adventures were really memorable, as their designers figured out the design of 4E encounter building ahead of the curve (my nominees for best Season One LFR adventures would be BALD 1-2, The Night I Called the Undead Out, and DALE 1-1, The Prospect, each of which I ran repeatedly for new players), but by the time Season 3 rolled around and regions were getting reshuffled, the narrative portion of the TTRPG experience had managed to make a solid return to the table. Some of the best 4E gaming experiences I've ever had occurred at GenCon 2012 at the LFR tables, especially WATE 4-3, which our group resolved not with a massive combat, but with a hastily-prepared theatrical production attempting to goad the adventure's villain into revealing himself, an event that would have warmed the heart of any streaming 5E DM. Unfortunately, by that time, WotC had already announced 'D&D Next', and the experience of adventure writers who finally could figure out how to marry narrative and combat in 4E's highly-structured system was no longer required as the much less structured 5E rules system seemed to allow narrative more room to breathe.</p><p></p><p>The lesson that WotC seemed to take from the 4E experience was not to leave adventure design in the hands of those who don't understand your system -- which became reinforced when the in-house Lost Mine of Phandelver proved a far superior 5E adventure to the outsourced Hoard of the Dragon Queen. Though WotC still has the DMs Guild to provide an outlet for third-parties to supply 5E adventures, the marquee adventures are all either released from in-house resources (the hardcover adventures) or from hand-picked third parties of known quality (the Adepts that publish on DMs Guild).</p><p></p><p>I honestly believe that, if adventures like WATE 4-3, EPIC 4-2, and Shards of Selune had been available in 2009 rather than in 2012, the story of 4E would look very different.</p><p></p><p>--</p><p>Pauper</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Pauper, post: 7451923, member: 17607"] I'm going to take a slightly different tack here. I don't disagree that all of the elements under discussion here were part of the 4E design/intended experience, and I agree that 4E set out to, and did, solve a lot of problems inherent to the design structure of 3E. But, since the first release of the OGL, we've heard something akin to a truism: adventures are important, but they don't sell. Even in 5E, it seems that WotC wants to off-load adventure publication to third parties (see DMs Guild). So why has a slight majority of 5E game books published by WotC actually been adventure books? (Hoard of the Dragon Queen, Rise of Tiamat, Princes of the Apocalypse, Out of the Abyss, Curse of Strahd, Storm King's Thunder, Tales from the Yawning Portal, Tomb of Annihilation vs, PH, DMG, MM, SCAG, Volo's Guide, Xanathar's Guide) Even if you count the Elemental Evil Player's Guide as a game book, despite being released in PDF only, there's still a slight majority of adventures over 'crunch' books. Someone might argue that the adventure books are also serving as campaign books, examining locations in the Realms and expanding them, but that's a very recent phenomenon, if it's true at all -- Tomb of Annihilation contains some setting details regarding Chult, but SCAG has way more info on specific locations in the Sword Coast than all the adventure books combined. I believe that WotC is focusing on adventures even more than sourcebooks or other 'crunch', because the actual essence of 4E, as derived from design experience, is that people had a very difficult time taking the 4E rules and turning them into compelling adventures. The beginning of the 4E era featured adventures written by folks who seemed to presume that 4E adventures would work just like 3E adventures, and ended up with wildly unbalanced series of encounters that led to overwhelming final battles that, often as not, would leave the group unsatisfied. (I'm looking at you, Keep on the Shadowfell, but this was not the only early 4E adventure that suffered from this problem.) Phase 2 of 4E adventure design occurred once adventure writers fully got their brains wrapped around 4E's encounter design rules, but still hadn't figured out how to combine those encounters into coherent adventures, leading to adventures with a series of interesting set-piece encounters, but no real narrative cohesion. Living Forgotten Realms features a lot of these adventures, but the apotheosis of this style of adventure is probably Madness in Gardmore Abbey, which uses the gimmick of the Deck of Many Things to feature a series of wild battles. (You can even track the transition of 4E adventure design from Phase 1 to Phase 2 by going through the Scales of War Adventure Path, which began firmly in Phase 1 design mode, but slowly transitioned to Phase 2 just prior to the change from Heroic to Paragon tier with the adventure "The Temple Between".) Somewhere during Phase 2, somebody got the idea to solve the narrative problem by adapting older adventures with already-understood narratives. In this way, the adventure wouldn't need to deal so much with the underlying narrative, since players familiar with the original adventure would provide their own narrative superstructure for the action. You could see the beginnings of this style with Demon Queen's Enclave, the WotC-published mid-Paragon Points of Light adventure; it wasn't D3 Vault of the Drow, not really, but you could see the connections if you squinted hard enough. This was followed by explicit reflavorings of old adventures, including Revenge of the Giants (the G-series), Tomb of Horrors, and finally, the Keep on the Borderlands, which launched alongside the nostalgia-fueled Red Box whose earlier analog had hosted the original Keep for the previous generation of D&D grognards. Did anybody get 4E adventure design right? I'd argue one group finally did -- the Living Forgotten Realms folks mentioned above. Only a handful of Season One LFR adventures were really memorable, as their designers figured out the design of 4E encounter building ahead of the curve (my nominees for best Season One LFR adventures would be BALD 1-2, The Night I Called the Undead Out, and DALE 1-1, The Prospect, each of which I ran repeatedly for new players), but by the time Season 3 rolled around and regions were getting reshuffled, the narrative portion of the TTRPG experience had managed to make a solid return to the table. Some of the best 4E gaming experiences I've ever had occurred at GenCon 2012 at the LFR tables, especially WATE 4-3, which our group resolved not with a massive combat, but with a hastily-prepared theatrical production attempting to goad the adventure's villain into revealing himself, an event that would have warmed the heart of any streaming 5E DM. Unfortunately, by that time, WotC had already announced 'D&D Next', and the experience of adventure writers who finally could figure out how to marry narrative and combat in 4E's highly-structured system was no longer required as the much less structured 5E rules system seemed to allow narrative more room to breathe. The lesson that WotC seemed to take from the 4E experience was not to leave adventure design in the hands of those who don't understand your system -- which became reinforced when the in-house Lost Mine of Phandelver proved a far superior 5E adventure to the outsourced Hoard of the Dragon Queen. Though WotC still has the DMs Guild to provide an outlet for third-parties to supply 5E adventures, the marquee adventures are all either released from in-house resources (the hardcover adventures) or from hand-picked third parties of known quality (the Adepts that publish on DMs Guild). I honestly believe that, if adventures like WATE 4-3, EPIC 4-2, and Shards of Selune had been available in 2009 rather than in 2012, the story of 4E would look very different. -- Pauper [/QUOTE]
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