A reason why 4E is not as popular as it could have been

[Dannyalcatraz]

What would make it feel more like D&D?

As I recall, there was a thread on that last year. While I won't rehash, its contents probably wouldn't surprise anyone...nor would the fact that nearly every poster's list included things others didn't want.

And as I recall, it didn't end well (though I could be misremembering).

 

[Aldarc]

As I recall, there was a thread on that last year. While I won't rehash, its contents probably wouldn't surprise anyone...nor would the fact that nearly every poster's list included things others didn't want.

And as I recall, it didn't end well (though I could be misremembering).

Sadly, I figured as much. (I may recall the thread now that I'm thinking about it.) There a number of elements to 4E that I like (e.g., new cosmology, static defenses, removal of Vancian magic) that many others would find abhorrent to remove from D&D. There is no pleasing everyone, but D&D should aim at trying to please most by providing a system that can be used by its target market.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

To flip this whole "feels like" thing around: Take a (hypothetical) player who has come to the game through the latest edition. She has nearly three years under her belt. At her local club (common here in the UK) she joins in a 2e game one week.

If her take was: "This is great fun, but it doesn't feel like d&d to me. There's much that's familiar but many things are weirdly different. It doesn't match my expectations." Is she being narrow-minded or unreasonable?

Seems to me that this disconnect is just a question of expectations, and nothing whatsoever to do with 4e or any other edition. Nor is she challenging 2e's right have 'Dungeons & Dragons' on the cover.

Pretty much - the feeling of disconnect would work both ways. A young whippersnapper who has been spoon fed 4e will feel differently than an old man who had OD&D as his pablum.

And both would/will feel that disconnect, regardless of which edition they like.

The Auld Grump

 

[pemerton]

If I understand your post, Pemerton, and I think I might, I agree with you.

4e, by virtue of balance and strategic focus, is really, really good at off the cuff exploration in, not just a "hack and slash way" but also a high adventure swashbuckling way or a barbaric mercenary way, or even a evil infiltrate and destroy way.

This is the sort of thing I have in mind. What I'd want to add is that: if you really care about the minutiae of swashblucking or infiltrating, 4e probably won't do it for you. But if you care about the emotions of swashbuckling - you want a game where you will[ have to fight your pirate nemesis on the high seas - or if you care about the intrigue of infiltrting - you want a game where, whatever the secret truth turns out to be, it's not a banal one - then 4e is (in my view) a good system.

And it's a good system because it lets the GM and players increase or decrease focus by mechanically engaging at the right level of detail (like I tried to explain in the post upthread) and it makes it easy for the GM to introduce new and responsive elements while assuring everyone at the table that the challenges won't be overkill or underkill (this is the encounter design stuff).

There are other bits as well that I didn't mention upthread, like paragon paths and epic destinies. Every player has to choose what his/her PC's paragon path is - a GM who can't manufacture compelling situations out of this isn't worth his/her salt, in my view. For example: I had one player tossing up between Pit Fighter and War Priest. His PC found himself in an encounter with some witches, who said "So, you think you might be a pit fighter, do you?" and then dropped him in a pit full of giant spiders. At first he tried to take them solo, but then had to call in the rest of the PCs to save him. In the upshot the player decided to go Warpriest instead. (This isn't about railroading or steering the player. It's about setting up situations that make the player choose, and reflect upon those choices. Also, I'd already built the spider encounter, but introducing the "pit fighter" jibe was a spur-of-the-moment thing.)

In yesterday's session I introduced some stuff to do with another PC who is getting ready to become a Demonskin Adpet: dreams of the Queen of Chaos, waking up with strange sigils burned on his demonskins and on the inside of his eyelids (Demonskin Adept has a class feature that involves self-blinding), the other mage PC sensing the chaotic power before he'd even noticed the runes, etc. At the moment this is all just flavour stuff and a tiny bit of intraparty tension, but when the PCs meet servants of Demogorgon and Dagon, as they are soon likely to, I will be able to push it a bit further.

And then there is the planar stuff.

In all sorts of ways, 4e seems to me well-designed - both mechanically and in its "vibe"/"atmosphere" - to support this sort of play.

Here I think you've pointed out some excellent strengths, strengths that WotC hasn't really done a great job of pointing out.

<snip>

I mean, part of the argument of "4e isn't D&D" is really just "the goals, playfeel, and intent of 4e are different from prior editions". So, if WotC wants to change the goalposts, they should at least be clear to the customers where we should "kick the ball" (sorry, superbowl Sunday).

I think WotC played their cards too close to their chest when saying "the more things change, the more they stay the same".

4e IS different, in many wonderful ways. If they wanted to change the game that much, I think they really should have showcased what the changes could offer...not make sweeping, broad, and intense changes and then pretend they never happened?

Those changes are BIG...and they can offer a lot.

But not everyone will like them.

Right, wrong? Agree, disagree?

Agree with this 100%. This is why I'm complaining upthread that the rulebooks don't really tell you how the designers envisage the game being played.

Because I read the interview with Rob Heinsoo I linked to above, and because I'm familiar with the rulebooks for a few indie RPGs, and because I read The Forge from time to time, I think I've got a pretty good idea of how the designers envisaged 4e working. (It's resemblances at various points to those indie games are really pretty obvious, in my view.)

But with the exception of combat - which is covered in detail in the DMG - WotC don't tell you how to use all these tools they've provided. Worlds and Modules talks about the game function for a whole lot of creatures, but it's not core and was sold as a preview rather than a guidebook. And the DMG talks about making encounters meaningful, and about linking paragon paths and epic destinies to the fiction, but doesn't actually give any advice on how to do this.

Did WotC think that they could trick people into liking the game? There is an idea that Ron Edwards mentions in one of his essays about a game that starts out simulationist/exploration-focuse, but over the course of play leads its players to discover the joys of, and engage in, the sort of character and situation focused play I'm talking about here. Edwards is pretty sceptical that this sort of game is possible. Maybe WotC thought, in effect, that 4e could be that gameL write sim-sounding rulebooks so as not to scare anyone off, but write a game that will work best when played in a non-sim fashion, and then rely on the players stumbling into that alternative approach.

If that was their plan, though, it doesn't seem to have worked!

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

There is no pleasing everyone, but D&D should aim at trying to please most by providing a system that can be used by its target market.

Back when I joined this site, I used to see a lot of threads about how to HR this or that...and a lot of responses along the lines about "Why are you trying to do that in D&D- try System __________." Now some of those changes are in 4Ed.

I bring this up because it is actually illustrative of your point- WotC may have been aiming at those gamers as a way to grow the game. The market share held by competitors' FRPGs had to be appealing...

Unfortunately, that meant leaving some behind. Whether they have more, less, or roughly the same # of players or market share I can't say, though.

 

[pemerton]

Dannyalcatraz, adding to what you've just said: we don't know what there market share is (although there is some reason to suspect it might have dropped, certainly from the heyday of 3E).

We also don't know what there market share is relative to their projections. For example, if part of the reason for going to 4e was because they had already projected an OGL-driven loss of market share arising from good 3pp competing with 3E, then it may be that they are now better off than they feared - or worse off than they hoped. Until we know this, it's hard to tell whether the move to 4e was rational from WotC's point of view.

Another complexity is how the changes in the game are taken into account by the business side of 4e trying to project their impact. I'm sure they're sophisticated enough to rely on more than just designers' intuition as to whether a particular mechanical approach will be popular, but I'm also pretty sure that market research into RPGs is not as sophisticated as into many other entertainment products. For example, how sophisticated is their marketing analysis of gamer demographics, and of RPG rulesets, and of the popularity of different rules with different demographics? Again, I don't know, but without those sorts of analytical tools I imagine it is fairly hard to predict how changes to the game are likely to fare in the market place.

 

[Aldarc]

Back when I joined this site, I used to see a lot of threads about how to HR this or that...and a lot of responses along the lines about "Why are you trying to do that in D&D- try System __________." Now some of those changes are in 4Ed.

I bring this up because it is actually illustrative of your point- WotC may have been aiming at those gamers as a way to grow the game. The market share held by competitors' FRPGs had to be appealing...

Unfortunately, that meant leaving some behind. Whether they have more, less, or roughly the same # of players or market share I can't say, though.

Good points here. And this may have been one of the dividing points of the OGL. Many 3pp tried to address "problems" of 3E and the d20 system, and it created an increasingly diverse market that made it harder for WotC to retain its target market. No one could quite agree what the problems were or how to properly address them. I sometimes find myself agreeing with what 4E tried to fix, but simultaneously at odds with 4E for how they attempted to fix it. The same is also true for other 3pp game systems in regards to 3E.

Others in this thread have also observed how a number of WotC's later 3.X products seemed to be a reaction to other 3pp that proved popular. I think it can be argued that 4E tried to accomplish too many things and accommodate too many people in its design, which left many of those same people unsatisfied with 4E for either doing too much or not enough in its changes. For example, I think that WotC likely tried to bring their D&D tabletop game more inline with their miniatures line. The "square-dancing" combat system of 4E makes accessories such as tabletop squares and minis somewhat required for play. (Though I think one of the reasons behind the use of a "square" measurements instead of "feet" or "meters" is to simplify international releases without the need of imperial and metric conversions.)

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Just as a point of clarity: I was referring to more than just 3PP variants of 3.5, but other RPGs as well.

 

[Aldarc]

Just as a point of clarity: I was referring to more than just 3PP variants of 3.5, but other RPGs as well.

I got that, but many of the popular RPG variants seemed to skyrocket as a reaction to 3.5. Arcana Unearthed, for example, was released in 2003 around the same time as WotC was releasing 3.5. It was also clear from Monte Cook's design diaries that he was aware of the upcoming 3.5 changes. Blue Rose, True20, Iron Heroes all came out in 2005.

 

[Lanefan]

I do agree that 4E is far more challenging to customize and makes world-building more difficult in some respects. One of 4E's greatest strengths in regards to world-building is its modularity that allows for certain flavors of classes to be used or removed without a fear of losing an "essential" role and risk the integrity of an ideal party composition. For example, 4E demonstrated this through the removal of divine power source classes in Dark Sun, a feat that was practically impossible or impractical to do in either 2E or 3.XE mechanical assumptions. But 4E's modularity allows for an arguably "truer" Dark Sun in 4E than the original in 2E, at least when it comes to classes.

Except keep in mind that 2e was itself pretty modular; if for some reason you wanted to get rid of divine classes you could, provided you could inject a suitable replacement for healing and-or were prepared to have your parties spend lots of downtime recovering from injuries.

Much like in Dark Sun, I found this to a breath of fresh air when it comes to world-building, as I do not feel compelled to retain a divine, psionic, arcane, or primal power source. But the mechanics of 4E also sometimes come with their own set of "world assumptions," that could be frustrating to the DM. For example, the eladrin's fey step assumes the existence of a Fey Wild.

It also assumes the existence of eladrin. Not all of 4e's base assumptions are mechanical.

(As an aside, I greatly prefer 4E's more "mythological cosmology" than the Great Wheel of old. The new cosmology has actually been more conducive in my idea generation for world-building than the old cosmology.)

I'm not a real fan of any version of as-written D+D cosmology, truth be told, and quite some time ago designed my own. That said, I am a fan of the 9-alignment model and wasn't impressed to see it reduced to 5.

Well, in the case of a gameworld, you don't need fictional elements until the players engage with them at the gametable. So "just in time" GMing means coming up with those elements when they're needed, ie, during the course of play as the players engage with them. In a D&D game, that engagement mostly happens via the PCs.

The point of just in time GMing is that the gameworld that results is one that is highly responsive to and engaging of the players. This is achieved because the gameworld is built by the GM around the players' activities at the table (including especially the things they do with their PCs). The quote from Paul Czege that I posted upthread gives an example of this. So does the actual play report from my own game that I linked to. At the forefront of this approach is that the game is a game - it is not the players exploring a pre-existing world, but rather the players and the GM playing a game together in which the story of the PCs is created. (Of course in this sort of gaming there can be a type of experience of "discovering" rather than "creating" the story - but that is just a metaphor, as when an author says of a book that "it wrote itself". The literal truth, at which the metaphor gestures, is along the lines of the creation being a less-than-fully conscious process.)

Just in time GMing can also save on prep time, but not necessarily very much- I find that I spend a lot of time planning and tweaking and revisiting situations, thinking about the direction the next few sessions might take and making notes on possible permutations and developments. And because the parameters for all this change after each session, there is always room to come back to this stuff and revise it. (In some ways, this is not unlike the way in which a sandbox GM might have to make notes after each session to make sure that any on-the-fly decisions made get incorporated into his/her formal setting notes.)

From this it sounds to me like the only actual difference between us when it comes to world-building is that you're willing to do all the heavy lifting as you go along, where I want as much of it as possible (within reason) to be done and locked in before I drop the puck so I don't have to worry about it later.

We still end up with rich deep worlds by campaign's end; they're just created in different ways and at different times before or within the campaign.

I sometimes find myself agreeing with what 4E tried to fix, but simultaneously at odds with 4E for how they attempted to fix it. The same is also true for other 3pp game systems in regards to 3E.

People complain about 1e mechanics, but there were so many things (e.g. clerical turning, polymorph, combat fluidity) that worked in that system that didn't work in 3e and that 3.5e and 4e failed to fix. But going back was completely taboo to the designers (ego?) yet was so obviously the best answer - or at least an answer - when looked at from a broad perspective.

[MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] - I've bit the bullet and just launched a party into Night's Dark Terror...let's see how this goes...I'm already in major rejigging mode both to make the map fit my world (I'd forgotten the adventure covers such a huge swath of territory; and yes this does count as world-building on the fly!) and to get rid of some of the needless little side quests e.g. rescuing Stephan...

Lan-"if you get rid of divine classes, the gods ain't gonna save you"-efan