D&D 4E Should I play 4e?

Imaro · Jun 18, 2019

Joshua Randall said:
Needs citation.

You don't know the difference between subjective and objective? If not, I'm not the one to give you a lesson and if you do... well I'm sure you can figure out which fall into what category.

Tony Vargas · Jun 18, 2019

Joshua Randall said:
4e may not be to your tastes, it may have been a financial failure (debatable), it may have died a premature death due to various factors

When your parent company gives you a 50 mil goal, with a 100 mil stretch, and development resources commensurate with those goals, and you pull down less than 50 mil, it's a financial failure - even though you were competing in a 20 mil market.

-- but it was an excellently designed game.

It was an astounding feat of design from the PoV of a long-time D&Der (this would be me) long since resigned to the many problems facing D&D being fundamentally insoluble.

But excellent? No. Even at it's best, D&D has been, as just a game, in the technical sense, relatively poorly designed. Maybe it's just that 45 years really isn't that long for a brand-new /type/ of game to evolve? Maybe the design goals have never really been adequately laid out? Maybe RPGs are intrinsically resistant to good design because they're innately open-ended or "infinite" games? IDK.

lowkey13 said:
The first is that I have noticed that you often state your playstyle preferences as if they were fact

Nope. I understand how it can look that way, if you consider *your* playstyle preferences, habits, or expectations from many years of playing a certain ed a certain way with a certain group to be fact. But, since I was called out for casually tossing out known quantities without back them up, I went ahead and gave (another - Imaro had given some, too) example /how/ those classes were different.

"Samey" is a subjective complaint tossed out without foundation in fact. The facts contradict it.

There is a difference between normative (what ought to be) and descriptive (what is).

LFQW is a complaint about what is, certainly, and that 4e did away with it is also descriptive.

LFQW - among other things - contributed to most editions of D&D having a 'sweet spot' in the middle levels, depending on your preferences, the boundaries of it varied a little, but it was certainly there, with levels above and below being problematic in various ways to various degrees. 4e's 'sweet spot' was prettymuch the whole level range.

Now, like I said above, and have said many times, that doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't or should feel bad about preferring a particular edition. So, no, I'm not asserting an opinion as fact or denying other's their opinions.

I do put it as loving the game in spite of it's flaws vs for it's flaws, though. I feel OK doing that, because I've been on both sides of it. I know what it feels like to really enjoy something in the game that I know is a bad, superfluous or problematic bit of design. I know what it feels like to appreciate the potential of the game or the broader hobby, in spite of the details of just how bad the 'state of the art' was at the time.

Now, you might have very strong preferences regarding what is, and isn't, good design; I know that we have previously discussed, inter alia, our differences regarding what constitutes "balance" in a game.

I'm happy to define terms, the best definition of balance I've ever seen is simply: a game is better-balanced the more meaningful, viable choices it can present the player with.

Thus a game with many choices, most of which are actively worthless, and a few of which are extremely potent, is poorly balanced - and so is a game that presents only a few choices, at all. 4e can be held up as the 'best-balanced' version of D&D, but even it has pretty seriously imbalanced areas: feats, most notably, the fighter's sad position outside of combat is another one I tend to notice, and that Imaro & I apparently agree about.

it is fine to discuss preferences, but it is much harder to discuss a preference when that preference is asserted as a fact.

It's also fine to discuss facts. But, as soon as the facts start to turn out to support one conclusion over another, it becomes very convenient to start claiming everything is subjective.

Yes, you can have very different preferences. No, they don't change the facts.

So it's very difficult to square the comments of the designer (smaller variations due to the timeframe that were only, later, modified) with your insistence that other people could not view the classes as "same-y."

There's nothing incompatible there. Whatever reason the design team had for sticking closely to the AEDU framework in the PH & PHII, then tweaking it in the PHII, and abandoning it in Essentials, AEDU still presented balanced, LFQW-erasing, clearly differentiated classes.

one thing you tend to discount is people's strong desire for a simple class. Surveys of player preferences consistently show that the simplest classes rate as the highest; moreover, surveys of classes in use consistently show that the simplest classes are the most played

Surveys of player preference consistently rate the Fighter highest & most-played: when it was the simplest class in 1e, when it was significantly more complex (especially to build) than the Barbarian in 3e, when it was, as a defender, pretty close to the middle of the pack in terms of complexity, in 4e, when it was again relegated to relative simplicity in Essentials, and when it was given a bone-simple and a couple of somewhat less simplistic options in 5e. The archetype of the fighter is familiar from heroic fantasy, it's relatable, iconic, it's always been the most popular class, no matter what D&D did to it, mechanically.

The runner-up most-popular classes, OTOH, include some the /most/ complicated.

So, yeah, I put no stock whatsoever in the "people want a simple class" rubric. The fighter was a simplest class for 25 years. It's just expectation and familiarity driving the insistence that it be relegated forever to the LF of LFQW.

That said, 4e did fail, and it failed in ways that were predictable. I described 4e as snakebitten, and, in some ways, it was, but in other ways ... look, Paizo got a lead out because Jason Buhlman went and playtested 4e, and reported back that 4e was ... well, what it was. So Paizo was able to concentrate on developing PF instead of waiting to see if a 4e license would come out.

That's a new one. The story I always heard was that lack of a license left Paizo with nothing to develop for 4e, so they had to do something. When the GSL came out, it was awful, and they went ahead with PF.

It was the business side, again, pushing the businesses in those directions, but some like to interpret it as "proof" that 4e was "bad." 4e was a terrible business decision. It was a technically superior game by many metrics that solved multiple long-standing, intractable problems with D&D - much to the horror of a certain segment of the fanbase that /loved/ what they were able to get away with thanks to those long-standing, intractable flaws.

But there seems to be this lingering issue that you seem to find the fault in people who enjoy things you don't for the failure of the system

No, I do not. I am fine with people playing what they like. I am not fine with people maligning things they don't like for reasons unrelated to that dislike, that get the facts wrong. I am not OK with people begrudging others the game they like, and setting out to destroy it.

I'm OK with people enjoying what they like, as long as they're not actively warring against what I like.

Is that in any way unreasonable?

lowkey13 · Jun 18, 2019

*Deleted by user*

Tony Vargas · Jun 18, 2019

Tony Vargas said:
Now, we've been on this marry-go-round before, so having demanded facts and having received them, you'll retreat into the claim that it's all subjective, that the facts - that you demanded - don't matter.

Yep, called it:

Imaro said:
(though many of the things you listed fall into the realm of personal preference as opposed to making an objectively better game).
... your subjective preferences do not make your game an objectively better edition than any other one.

It's fair to say that the objective qualities of a game don't in any way negate subjective preferences. Indeed, you can prefer something in spite of it having objectively bad qualities, or even /for those very qualities/. And it's nobody's place to stop or convert you (I mean, unless you exercising your preferences constitutes a clear & present danger to others). Humans having free will and all...

...but it's not fair to say that subjective preferences negate objective qualities.

lowkey13 · Jun 18, 2019

*Deleted by user*

Imaro · Jun 18, 2019

Tony Vargas said:
Yep, called it:

Lol... did you??? The only way this is true is if you are saying every one of Joshua Randall's assertions are purely objective facts... simple yes or no question...are you?

Tony Vargas said:
It's fair to say that the objective qualities of a game don't in any way negate subjective preferences. Indeed, you can prefer something in spite of it having objectively bad qualities, or even /for those very qualities/. And it's nobody's place to stop or convert you (I mean, unless you exercising your preferences constitutes a clear & present danger to others). Humans having free will and all...

...but it's not fair to say that subjective preferences negate objective qualities.

Good thing I didn't then...

Tony Vargas · Jun 18, 2019

Imaro said:
Lol... did you??? The only way this is true is if you are saying every one of Joshua Randall's assertions are purely objective facts...

Oh, you went dark on that tangent, and now were back to the subjectivity portion of the ride.

It's not exactly an unfamiliar pattern.

Hey, when you asserted I had a pattern of not backing up my claims with facts, I went ahead and /did/.

Why don't you "prove me wrong" the same way, and instead of waving the subjective flag at someone's post, get 'descriptive' with the thing they're talking about to illustrate how the facts maybe don't align exactly with their assertion?

lowkey13 said:
I'm just going to quote this part for the "whoosh" component.

Y'know what, I'm going to skip the personal stuff - it's silly, we're both old-timers who love(d) the game in it's 1e form... we have too much common ground to go there.

Subjective 1:
The design goal makes for a better RPG or D&D.

So, the design goal in question was to create a game that was functional at all phase of play, not just the middle bit. I'm not sure how we're supposed to objectively judge a game that doesn't work for ~half it's presented arc of play as no better/different from one that does.
I can certainly see holding very different opinions about it, of course.

I know you don't. And that's fine. But all we have are surveys (preferences) and revealed preferences (what people play), and simple classes always, always, always do well.

No, the /fighter/ always does well, whether it's simple or not in the edition in question. The Cleric, Wizard and Rogue also tend to always do well, even though two of them are among the most complex classes in the game, in every ed. And the Barbarian, even when the simplest class (3e & 5e, for instance, though in 5e, the Champion is the simplest sub-class), does not do as well as the "Big 4."

That's not "simplicity makes a class popular," that theory doesn't fit the results you're basing it upon, the polls of popularity don't give us results anything like popularity descending in correlation with increasing complexity.

Jacob Lewis · Jun 18, 2019

Well this is spiraling down in a hurry. I think everyone needs to remember the most important thing about this discussion:

The OP had been asked to leave the site a while ago for some shenanigans on another thread. With any luck, he is playing 4e right now and not being exposed to any of this, which is the BEST way to enjoy any edition. IMHO.

HJFudge · Jun 18, 2019

Imaro said:
Emphasis mine that wasn't the original claim but ok. I'm not sure how one can look at the 5e Fighter especially the Battlemaster and think the Wizard is better in combat than him but I'm willing to be convinced... Can you explain this or is this purely about having the same number of things to call out as "moves" in combat?

Sure! I'll give you one example that comes to mind right off the top of my head.

Simulacurum - This spell allows the wizard to literally make another fighter and use that fighter in combat. There is nothing a fighter can do that is even remotely as powerful.

That said, 5e is less egregious than editions prior to 4e in terms of LFQW. But it WAS brought back, and is much more prevelant than it was in 4e.