What's really at stake in the Edition Wars

[Raven Crowking]

Removed by Admin. See my note above. ~ PCat

 

[Ourph]

Annnnd... removed by Admin, as it referred to the posts I just removed.

Back on topic, por favor. ~ PCat

 

[SpiderMonkey]

I'm just gonna jump in here for a moment to thank the mods for not locking the thread outright. Muchos gracias.

 

[ST]

This sounds off-topic but I promise it's relevant. I was browsing the Mass Effect forums and noticed they have their own edition war, and it breaks down much like this one. The first game had random loot that you'd sell to save up credits for fancy weapons; the second one has a research subsystem and a simple screen to choose your equipment before a mission.

They both accomplish the same end goal, but there are plenty of people unhappy that they can no longer manually manage their inventory and stock up on gear to sell. "Dumbed-down" is the kind of complaint you might hear.

I think it ultimately comes down to how people view their own preferences; a little perspective can be helpful. I don't honestly think tons of people loved ME1 for its inventory screen (which had been done much better in almost any other CRPG), but it was familiar, and they liked the game, so it must have been one of the reasons they liked it. And they felt uncomfortable with what replaced it. But nobody got into ME1 for that inventory management -- it was the story and characters, and that part is still just as solid in the sequel.

But who's going to fight about shared preferences when it's much more "fun" to argue about differing ones?

Although the thing that throws me off here, is, yeah, you can't play ME2 with the first game's inventory system, but you CAN mix editions at the table. But then it comes to getting a group of gamers to talk openly and honestly about what they like and dislike about various systems, and that's not very easy to do for various reasons.

 

[Vyvyan Basterd]

Well, I certainly could care less about the former, and I would guess that most everyone else could care less about the latter.

As a compassionate human being I definitely care to see people able to continue being gainfully employed and "pay their mortgages." As a vested member of the economy I definitely care to see people able to continue being gainfully employed and "pay their mortgages." And from the multitude of well-wishers involved in the "WotC layoff" threads I surmise that your assertion in incorrect in regards to "most everyone else."

Edit: I also find it distasteful when people here wish for the failure of a game system. Not only will the fans of said game lose due to the failure, people will probably lose their jobs. Would you want someone to wish that upon you in hopes that you get fired?

 

[Mistwell]

Link? Or any support for this claim whatsoever?

Majority? I really do not think so.

Some, perhaps; a small minority, surely; but a majority?

I believe it was in this, or in later WOTC-employee comments and analysis on that survey. It may have been them crunching some numbers based on data outside that survey when compared to that survey, I don't recall exactly. I know WOTC was estimating total current players at 3 Million in 2004, and it probably had to do with a comparison of that number to estimated 3e players at the time. Hopefully someone else will remember.

 

[billd91]

Edit: I also find it distasteful when people here wish for the failure of a game system. Not only will the fans of said game lose due to the failure, people will probably lose their jobs. Would you want someone to wish that upon you in hopes that you get fired?

It depends. I would hope that if a corporation had come out with FATAL it would fail miserably. I routinely hope that certain ad agencies or marketing departments of major fast food chains would get cleaned out for stupid commercials (the singing mounted fish one for McDonalds comes to mind, particularly since I encounter it most as a radio ad thus negating the visual cues important to get the ad's attempt at humor).

All that aside, I would hope that a corporation would acknowledge and learn from its mistakes and make any necessary changes that would be involved. If a game really is sub-par in quality or market performance, I'd want to see actions taken to protect higher quality product lines or ensure the company thrives in the long term.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

That was actually a significant barrier to entry for me and my group. We'd long been a bit tired of saying, "I'll play a dwarf fighter! I'll play an elven mage!" etc. We really liked the more estoric and oddball options, and it was fun to do stuff that was off the beaten path. Going from a very filled out, robust, 3.5 edition with a lot of options to the bare-bones core only 4e would have been an extremely impoverished experience for us that didn't offer us at all what we were interested in anymore.

We were playing more and more oddball characters in our 3E campaign, too, after a few years of playing.

When we tried Patfhinder, I noticed that I could actually play one one of the "standard" characters again. Because it was different now. It was a breath of fresh air.

And it was the same with 4E. The classes had the same titles, the same story. But they were implemented in a new way, and it was all new and exciting to try out. And with the time our experience grew with the system, the system itself grew, too. So now there are again a lot of characters I might want to try, getting more "oddball" as I move up the Player Handbooks (or DDI articles, as I am particularly fond of the Assassin and really want to try that...)

 

[Vyvyan Basterd]

All that aside, I would hope that a corporation would acknowledge and learn from its mistakes and make any necessary changes that would be involved. If a game really is sub-par in quality or market performance, I'd want to see actions taken to protect higher quality product lines or ensure the company thrives in the long term.

Agreed. But your outlook is a sane one, whereas actively hoping for people to fail is just rude.

 

[I'm A Banana]

And I defy anyone to update my 3rd/3rd elven ranger (with beastmaster kit)/bard (with Meistersinger kit) from 2nd to 3rd. It's a whole barrel full of work and really, really not worth it.

I'm not really trying to say that it's an exact translation. Yes, certain things will be lost in the 2e-3e transition. But more stands to be lost in a 2e-4e transition, largely because of 4e's efforts at re-definition. Which, again, gives 4e a heck of a lot of freedom, but constrains people who liked what they were already doing more so than the 2e-3e transition did.

I can translate your elven beastmaster/meistersinger with more faithfulness from 2e to 3e using only the "core books" than I can from 2e to 4e using only the first generation of "core books." It's not gonna be exact, but it's a continuum. A comparison.

[sblock=how I'd do it]
Ranger/Druid/Bard. Possibly even drop one of those classes in favor of a homebrew feat replacing the relevant abilities, OR using the 3e's DMG guidelines for mixing and matching class traits to make you your very own class. Neither activity done with any more effort than just saying "spend a feat," or "pick this ability from this class, and this ability from this class."
[/sblock]