Maybe different versions just have different goals, and that's okay.

[Branduil]

So if someone made a "4e with old-school flavor," you'd have no problem with it?

 

[Hussar]

Which is true...and yet, not true at the same time.

A party composed of a Gnome Illusionist, a Part-Orc Assassin, a Dwarf Fighter, a Half-Elf Cleric and a Human Ranger, along with a low-level Human Thief who is the Assassin's henchling (to illustrate a bunch of 1e archetypes)...that party is going to take a different approach to Slavers' Stockade than the group you list above. And the defenders are going to do things differently, too. Why? Because in both cases they can; the system is different, and allows/disallows different things than it did when A2 was written.

Sure, in hindsight both groups might accomplish exactly the same thing...kill everything they meet in the Stockade and carry on...but the actual on-the-scene gameplay while doing so will be very, very different.

I'll find out *how* different in the fall, when I'll be ret-conning Keep On the Shadowfell to 1e and running my group through it...assuming of course they survive so long; thus far, when the enemy's not killing them, they've been killing each other!

Lanefan

See, I'm not really so sure. At the end of the day, there's going to be a lot more similarities than differences. The rogue/thief (whatever you want to call him) is going to go sneaky sneaky and check things out. The party will still start at the secret door and meet the same monsters along the way. By and large, it's going to be very, very similar.

It's not that I can't. It's that I simply have no desire to fix this game. It's a catch 22 - stuff up the core flavour that much, and I have no motivation to do repairs on it. If it were in some sourcebook I'd be happier to customise, but the lame is in the core books now, annoying me every time I refer to them.

Well, stuff that.

One man's trash and all that. See, I don't see any "stuffing up" at all. I see most of this stuff as pretty much stock fantasy. At least, certainly as stock fantasy as gnomes or half orcs. So, it doesn't bother me in the least to have dragonborn or tieflings in core.

Heck, I look at my new campaign roster: 3.5 Savage Tide campaign. I have a Tiefling, a Grippli, a Lupin, a Kenku and two humans. Why on earth would 4e races possibly bother me?

 

[Lanefan]

See, I'm not really so sure. At the end of the day, there's going to be a lot more similarities than differences. The rogue/thief (whatever you want to call him) is going to go sneaky sneaky and check things out. The party will still start at the secret door and meet the same monsters along the way. By and large, it's going to be very, very similar.

To a point; though the mechanics and in-session play would be again quite different. In 1e the Thief has to tell the DM what she's searching, and where; as 1e likes lots of detail...in 3e the Rogue can take 20; as 3e wants to get on with things.

And those "same monsters" would also play quite differently.

Here's a fun exercise for ya, if you have a night with a few spare players and nothing to do: take an Ogre as written (base, no templates, magic, etc.) from each edition (1-2-3-4) and stick 'em in an arena, fight to the death. See how differently they run out. Now, multiply that difference by every monster in the adventure - never mind the differences within the PCs - and I think you'll agree that playing A2 using 1e rules is a vastly different animal than playing it converted to 3e or 4e rules; even though, in the end, the same in-game ends are achieved.

Which, thinking about it, is making me ever more curious to see how KotS functions when taken the other way...

Lanefan

 

[Hussar]

Sure. I'll buy that. Round by round play will likely be fairly different. True.

But, after the session is over, when people are sitting in Pizza Hut kibbutzing about the session, I'll bet the stories are probably pretty close.

Are they different games? Oh, of course, and I don't mean to imply that they aren't. But, I think the similarities are far greater than the differences.

 

[Reynard]

It took me a while but I finally discovered what it is bout 4e that I don't like. It's difficult to express directly, so I'll use an analogy:

4E is like Spiderman 3. It's like the people the created them (by and large the same people that had been involved in the previous iterations) decided to focus all of their creative talents on a singular aspect, the one they thought made the earlier versions successful. And in so doing, they managed to remove all the things that *I personally* found worthwhile and valuable in those previous versions.

And they still made a bajillion dollars, but that don't make it right.

4E is the crappy summer blockbuster, effects driven, popcorn movie of the D&D franchise with no heart or soul.

 

[Hussar]

Fair enough I suppose.

Me, I look at the fact that Spider Man 3 was the top grossing movie of all time for a while, and was incredibly popular with huge numbers of people and not worry too much about ideas of "soul" or "heart" which are incredibly nebulous.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Me, I look at the fact that Spider Man 3 was the top grossing movie of all time for a while, and was incredibly popular with huge numbers of people and not worry too much about ideas of "soul" or "heart" which are incredibly nebulous.

Yet, nonetheless, incredibly important.

"Fun" is an incredibly nebulous idea, too.

 

[Hussar]

Yet, nonetheless, incredibly important.

"Fun" is an incredibly nebulous idea, too.

I'd argue that fun is a whole lot less nebulous than "heart". I know precisely, to the second when I'm having fun, and, more importantly, when I stop having fun.

I tend to tune out when people start talking about the "heart and soul" of any form of entertainment, whether it's music or RPG's. This isn't high art. This is what I do on my Tuesday mornings for a few hours every week. Whenever people go on and on about how this or that is destroying the hobby, or selling out the music or whatever trufans tend to go on about, I just walk away.

 

[Mallus]

It's not that I can't. It's that I simply have no desire to fix this game. It's a catch 22 - stuff up the core flavour that much, and I have no motivation to do repairs on it. If it were in some sourcebook I'd be happier to customise, but the lame is in the core books now, annoying me every time I refer to them.

Well, stuff that.

I'm sure glad that I've always thought the "core flavor" of D&D --pick an edition and setting-- varied between faintly ludicrous and totally ludicrous. Because of this, I felt free/inspired/required to make D&D into anything I wanted it to be.

 

[Hussar]

Yeah, I'm pretty much with Mallus on this one.

Heck, tieflings have to be resonating with someone long before 4.0 came about. The iconics for Paizo's Age of Worms campaign included a tiefling. The iconics for Shackled City were all human IIRC, but, it does show that some time before the release of 4e, at least tieflings were popular enough to get top billing by D&D artists.