Could Wizards ACTUALLY make MOST people happy with a new edition?

[Cergorach]

I do demand an apology.

So your the kind of guy that demands an apology from his inlaws if he ever gets a divorce. "I'm not satisfied with her since I married her, you made her, I want an apology!" ;-)

Buying something is always a risk, it's the consumers responsibility to research the product. I do not feel that 4E was falsely advertised, if you do, could you please explain?

This is also drifting into edition war territory...

 

[Vyvyan Basterd]

I'm still a little bit baffled by this mentality. If I could boil my experience D&D (pre-4e) down to a "core unit", the encounter definitely wouldn't be it. Thus the difficulty of persuading someone like me to accept this new philosophy if they tried to carry it forward into a new edition.

Can you boil your pre-4E experience down to a core unit? What is that core unit to you?

I'm baffled by the mentality as well, but in a completely different way. When I play 4E the encounters don't stand out to me in a way that would cause me to react negatively. It just seems like another abstract measure of time like a round, a turn (either as one player's round or 10 overall rounds), etc.

As for design by encounter, the whole concept started for me with 1E/2E AD&D. The tables in the back gave guidance to the DM to create encounters based on the level of the dungeon the characters were exploring. The classic gaming modules of the era broke down into encounter areas. Those areas could be exploration encounters where path choice and/or dungeon dressing occurred. They could be populated with NPCs for the player characters to interact with. They could be events, like a chase through a crowded market. Or they could be combat encounters. 3E brought about the formalized concept of Encounter Level. What has really changed from those days that makes people see the E word as such a bad thing now? I too am baffled.

 

[amerigoV]

So your the kind of guy that demands an apology from his inlaws if he ever gets a divorce. "I'm not satisfied with her since I married her, you made her, I want an apology!" ;-)

You got it. Especially since her Dad has money, so I was "due" that part of the inheritance.

Buying something is always a risk, it's the consumers responsibility to research the product. I do not feel that 4E was falsely advertised, if you do, could you please explain?

They promised excitement. The book was watching paint dry...

This is also drifting into edition war territory...

Naw, you are reading too much into it. 4e is fine, the book is boring. See my post above (after the first) for more on it. It did not fit my groups, so I moved on. No major harm.



On the whole grand unification thing - it does not really matter to me. I have accepted that I am not in their target market group (I am an old, grumpy man with a couple of young kids - and most of my circle does not have the time for piles of gaming books that D&D has trended to). It does not mean that I will not buy from Wizards, but I am just very selective about it now. I want cool adventure/campaign ideas. Since getting hooked on Savage Worlds, I also want multiple genres. Lets be honest - that has not been Wizard's strong suite of late.

If 5e has some really cool adventures - I'll pick some up. If they come out with a new cool campaign setting (or campaign seeds) - great, I'll look at them. If 5e is a bunch of complexity dials on how you want to kill your orc....then no. Savage Worlds kills orcs to my satisfacation -actually, 3e and 4e do to, if I happen to play in someone else's game.

 

[pemerton]

PF in particular has focused on adventures, which takes the prep out of the equation to some extent.

When I talked about 3E/PF prioritising pre-play over play, I wasn't talking about prep time. As per my quote of Vincent Baker, I was talking about invention and meaning.

I agree that PF focuses on adventures. Which is to say, it focuses on play in which the invention and meaning have already been determined, pre-play, by whoever authored the adventure.

4e is designed, in my view, to focus on a different sort of play. (WotC's 4e adventures less so - this is one of the reasons why the adventures do such a poor job of showcasing the system).

I should also note - the above is written without attempting to integrate BryonD's comments above, or a response to them. I'm still thinking about that.

 

[Bleys Icefalcon]

Somehow I would see the parent company of WoTC vigorously approving 5th Edition - they've made it vividly clear, they are not concerned with a quality product - unless of course said product is profitable. Collectors and those who simply have to have the newest, shiniest of everything will flock to the stores for 5e, even if 5e is 200 pages of furry softporn. It would sell, regardless of what's inside the covers. Selling = profit, which is all that matters to them.

Granted TSR made a muddy mess at the end, and WoTC tried to fix things, and in many cases succeeded - but it simply got away from them with 3.5. Too much power, too little balance. 4e is a thoughtful detailed, balanced system, unfortunately, it's not really DnD - not to those of us that have bled their way through all of the versions since even before there was any official system. It's too far away from, and turns it's back on the Gygaxian way of play - where the game is a mystery to the players. That's DnD. The players get posed to them a mystery. They don't get to see behind the screens. They don't get to read up on the monsters. They don't get to see the DMs rolls. They don't get too, as then there'd be little wonder, and less challenge.

If I know there are trolls in the next room, and I know the trolls will do nothing until I open the door, no matter what, then I have time to ride my pony back to town and concoct a dozen or so Molitov Cocktails, ride my way back, head to that door, light them and toss them in, firmly shutting and blocking the door with the shoring timber I picked up in town while I was at it.

Conversely, if I don't know there are trolls on the other side of the door, then I react REALISTICALLY when I find out - everyone having a kumbuyah session and mutually running the game is all well and good, but it ain't DnD.

5e will be great if we get back to DnD the way it was designed and envisioned, but won't do anything to make the old school purists happy if it continues to drift away from the it's founding paradyme.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Can you boil your pre-4E experience down to a core unit? What is that core unit to you?

I don't know that I have an easily operational game term that I would say is similarly a core unit. I'd say a game session can probably be boiled down to "scenes" not "encounters". A subtle distinction, but an important one. A scene may or may not involve encountering anything, and it may or may not involve dice rolls; it's just a subjective unit of time before the narrative jumps.

I'm baffled by the mentality as well, but in a completely different way. When I play 4E the encounters don't stand out to me in a way that would cause me to react negatively. It just seems like another abstract measure of time like a round, a turn (either as one player's round or 10 overall rounds), etc.

There are two things about the encounter concept that stand out (to me). One, rounds have always been measurements of real time (6 seconds in D&D; different in other rpgs). That isn't abstract. Two, "encounter" implies that there is a concrete goal to each scene., either winning a battle or accomplishing something with skilll checks or the like. My experience is that the things I would describe as encounters-even loosely-take up only a minority of session time. Thus I see building a game around them as a rather large paradigm shift.

As for design by encounter, the whole concept started for me with 1E/2E AD&D. The tables in the back gave guidance to the DM to create encounters based on the level of the dungeon the characters were exploring. The classic gaming modules of the era broke down into encounter areas. Those areas could be exploration encounters where path choice and/or dungeon dressing occurred. They could be populated with NPCs for the player characters to interact with. They could be events, like a chase through a crowded market. Or they could be combat encounters. 3E brought about the formalized concept of Encounter Level. What has really changed from those days that makes people see the E word as such a bad thing now? I too am baffled.

I have no doubt the concept predates 4e. However, consider that pubished adventures are not the core of the game, and neither is the XP system. I'd postulate that a majority of gamers use neither of those things (and I have evidence for the latter). Despite being in the core rulebooks, I wouldn't describe CR/EL as a core part of the game, more like an optional rule for advancement if you don't already have and prefer have your own ideas on the subject. Similarly, published adventures are optional and don't necessarily represent the way people play the game.

What has changed is the proscriptive aspect of the rules. Before, you might have some encounters, 4e is built around them. Similarly, the concept of roles frequently rose out of play in other editions, but now each character is explicitly built to perform a rather gamist role. If you were going to make a 5e, you'd have to choose whether the rules used these concepts or not, and you'd likely be choosing between pleasing one group of players or another.

When I talked about 3E/PF prioritising pre-play over play, I wasn't talking about prep time. As per my quote of Vincent Baker, I was talking about invention and meaning.

I agree that PF focuses on adventures. Which is to say, it focuses on play in which the invention and meaning have already been determined, pre-play, by whoever authored the adventure.

4e is designed, in my view, to focus on a different sort of play. (WotC's 4e adventures less so - this is one of the reasons why the adventures do such a poor job of showcasing the system).

I'd agree that's true of adventures, and that 3e/PF focus more on adventures. Most people don't use them; but they're good for people who don't have time to prep.

Setting those aside, the rules of earlier additions have much more of a "toolkit" feel that let you do what you want, while the 4e mentality is much more (again) proscriptive. I'm still not seeing where preplay vs. play is a point of difference. I'd agree that 4e focuses on a "different sort of play", but I'd also say that improvisational storytelling (i.e. playing on the day) isn't it.

So, oddly, I'm saying that this preplay vs play distinction is not one of the many difficulties of "reunification" with a putative 5e.

 

[Imaro]

When I talked about 3E/PF prioritising pre-play over play, I wasn't talking about prep time. As per my quote of Vincent Baker, I was talking about invention and meaning.

I agree that PF focuses on adventures. Which is to say, it focuses on play in which the invention and meaning have already been determined, pre-play, by whoever authored the adventure.

4e is designed, in my view, to focus on a different sort of play. (WotC's 4e adventures less so - this is one of the reasons why the adventures do such a poor job of showcasing the system).

Your logic here seems to be a little off. In the first statement you seem to state that Pathfinder (the rules) focuses on adventures and further define adventure as... play where the invention and meaning have already been determined prior to actual in-game play by whoever authored the adventure...

Now for discussions sake lets ignore the fact that the statement above implies that any game having pre-made adventures (including 4e) should have this as it's default playstyle, which I think is erroneous in the extreme...

Next you seem to state that 4e is designed to focus on a different sort of play (without defining said type of play) then disregard the 4e adventures as doing a poor job of showcasing whatever this type of play is...

So for PF, the adventures define, or at the least are representative of the type of play the rules create. Yet in 4e you claim adventures are actually a poor example of what type of play 4e was designed to facilitate. This seems like a double standard to me... Maybe 4e's adventures are very much indicative of the type of play the designers expected for 4e and designed its rules to accomodate. (I mean very few if any people actually complain that the rules as used in most of the 4e modules are prone to errors or misused, so I don't think the modules do a bad job of actually showcasing the rules).

IMO, the above is a more realistic conclusion then believing that the same people who designed the game rules are incompetent in using said rules to create adventures in the game's expected playstyle.

Now whether you personally play in the games expected playstyle is a whole different argument of course.

 

[BryonD]

Maybe 4e's adventures are very much indicative of the type of play the designers expected for 4e and designed its rules to accomodate. (I mean very few if any people actually complain that the rules as used in most of the 4e modules are prone to errors or misused, so I don't think the modules do a bad job of actually showcasing the rules).

IMO, the above is a more realistic conclusion then believing that the same people who designed the game rules are incompetent in using said rules to create adventures in the game's expected playstyle.

Now whether you personally play in the games expected playstyle is a whole different argument of course.

I think is very much on the mark.

I respect that Pemerton runs a great game. But from reading numerous posts about how he runs the game it sounds a lot like he is taking a product intended to be a beach towel and celebrating its virtues as an umbrella. And kudos to him on the insight and innovation. But I've never heard anyone, in particular anyone from WotC, promote the game in ways that are consistent with Pemerton's descriptions.

And, again, credit where credit is due here. Maybe I don't care for 4E because my DM skills are not as elite as Pemerton's and I don't get the whole new tier of game. (I don't *think* that is the issue, but I'm seriously offering that it may well be.) But 4E is supposed to be good for brand new GMs, not game design theory post-docs.

 

[Vyvyan Basterd]

I don't know that I have an easily operational game term that I would say is similarly a core unit. I'd say a game session can probably be boiled down to "scenes" not "encounters". A subtle distinction, but an important one.

Semantics. I could just as easily say "locations." I still don't see how the use of any of these words fundamentally changes the game.

A scene may or may not involve encountering anything, and it may or may not involve dice rolls; it's just a subjective unit of time before the narrative jumps.

Exactly my definition of an "encounter" if you review my previous post.

There are two things about the encounter concept that stand out (to me). One, rounds have always been measurements of real time (6 seconds in D&D; different in other rpgs).

Minor quibble. "Rounds" in D&D have changed over the editions. A 1E round was 1 minute, e.g.

That isn't abstract.

But a "scene" is and you're OK with that.

Two, "encounter" implies that there is a concrete goal to each scene., either winning a battle or accomplishing something with skilll checks or the like.

Who says? Mike Mearls has had many recent articles about encounters without skill checks and encounters regarding exploration. I think you are putting too much value on a word in a game that has always used the English language very loosely to name game terms.

My experience is that the things I would describe as encounters-even loosely-take up only a minority of session time. Thus I see building a game around them as a rather large paradigm shift.

Maybe for your group. My own experience with various groups, gaming clubs, conventions, etc. is that most players enjoy the bits of the game when they are progressing towards a goal. Spending large amounts of time on frivolous matters, such as buying a pair of boots for your character, leads quickly to frustration. YMMV, obviously.

I have no doubt the concept predates 4e. However, consider that pubished adventures are not the core of the game, and neither is the XP system. I'd postulate that a majority of gamers use neither of those things (and I have evidence for the latter).

There is equal evidence here on EnWorld that modules *are* core to the game. Many discussions relive the old classics. Others discuss peoples' woes over the poor quality of the WotC modules. A whole company built its reputation from Adventure Paths.

Despite being in the core rulebooks, I wouldn't describe CR/EL as a core part of the game, more like an optional rule for advancement if you don't already have and prefer have your own ideas on the subject. Similarly, published adventures are optional and don't necessarily represent the way people play the game.

Again, discussion about the failings of the CR/EL system abound, trying to find better ways to implement them. Whole shared-world campaigns with very large followings use(d) the CR/EL/Level method of building challenging encounters and rewarding those who accomplished their goal. 4E in particular doesn't even stress the encounter=experience as the only means to award XP. The suggestions on Quest XP in the DMG help remind a new DM that characters should be rewarded for achieving their goals.

What has changed is the proscriptive aspect of the rules. Before, you might have some encounters, 4e is built around them. Similarly, the concept of roles frequently rose out of play in other editions, but now each character is explicitly built to perform a rather gamist role. If you were going to make a 5e, you'd have to choose whether the rules used these concepts or not, and you'd likely be choosing between pleasing one group of players or another.

I agree they call things out more that used to be more subtle. Some of those things I consider a strength, others easily ignorable.

I'd agree that's true of adventures, and that 3e/PF focus more on adventures. Most people don't use them; but they're good for people who don't have time to prep.

I think alot more people use adventures than you would surmise. Otherwise I don't think Paizo would have the success that puts them in the strong position they are today.

Setting those aside, the rules of earlier additions have much more of a "toolkit" feel that let you do what you want, while the 4e mentality is much more (again) proscriptive. I'm still not seeing where preplay vs. play is a point of difference. I'd agree that 4e focuses on a "different sort of play", but I'd also say that improvisational storytelling (i.e. playing on the day) isn't it.

I couldn't disagree more. The toolkit I have at my fingertips now with DDi makes my job as DM almost too easy, in both prep and ad-libbing.

 

[broghammerj]

Unfortunately for 4e, many gamers still prefer the pre-game to the game itself. I know several players personally who adore this aspect of D&D. Pouring over magic item lists, looking through book after book for one particular spell, endlessly tweaking that perfect build.

That's why they can never forgive 4e, for taking that particular aspect of the game away. For them, that's the magic of D&D.

I don't particularly understand it, but since I've seen the behavior personally, I also can't dismiss it.

That's were 4E failed. With 3E I could dream up a character idea and pour through the rule book to find find a class, feats, weapons, magic items, etc to create him. It was a collage that painted a picture of my idea....yes, it was premaid prior to play. As an aside, I worry about "perfect build" as a term because that can sound like powergaming. I could pick up 3E and make my dual weapon wielding dwarven minor from many facets of the game. This provided me the opportunity to adapt my mind's creation to paper. The great fun was then seeing how that image would unfold in the DM's world with the rules as a tool.

When I tried to do the same with 4E I found that I had a collection of combat powers. The rest of the stuff could be hand waved or "role played" without any supporting rules. The non-combat portion of the game seemed less important. I always heard the argument that wait for more splatbooks and I could make what I wanted but the point was I didn't define my character by combat abilities. 4E itself is a great tactical combat game, but lost alot of the extras. In and of itself, it's a great game. No what it might do is be an even better game for hard core role players who want rules to define combat structure but the rest of the game is left to their imagination. I lack that sheer creativity and don't care for that type of game as I require rules to help guide my actions.

Any new edition needs that additional extra beyond combat powers to draw me in.