Innnnnnteresting. If I remember correctly (and I may not), he's working more with the board game side of WotC at the moment? At any rate, he wrote some of the most...polemical...words in 4e.
Words like...
and
IIRC, he moved to board games in last year's little shake-up, when Mearls got promoted.
Curious.
I have to spread XP, but this post hit seveal "I agree" buttons, for me.
Yeah - I find it especially ironic that this topic is very much one that would be/would have been far better handled in the way Monte Cook is advocating in this week's Legends & Lore column. Change that quote to:
"If an encounter with two guards at the city gate isn’t fun, tell the players they get through the gate without much trouble and move on to the fun. If niggling details of food supplies and encumbrance usually aren’t fun, don’t sweat them, and let the players get to the adventure and on to the fun. If long treks through endless corridors in the ancient dwarven stronghold beneath the mountains aren’t fun, move the PCs quickly from encounter to encounter, and on to the fun!"
...and you might get many more folks to agree. Lay out several approaches to play, including this one, and indicate what sort of play each will favour and you get an even better response, I'll wager.
Indeed - especially as I read his "talk to fairies" as trying (somewhat unsuccessfully) to get accross a rather nuanced point: if all you are doing is "talking to fairies" with little aim or consequence, that is a fairly marginal activity; if, on the other hand, you are talking to fairies to try to find out what the fairy queen knows of the evil wizard who is plotting to steal Springtime, that is a whole 'nother kettle of fish!
Yep - 4E still desperately needs a more cohesive approach to non-combat challenges.
Those '
If's would have made a difference - But he did not use any 'if's. Instead he made blanket statements, and his statements did not get curbed before seeing print, and formed the basis for many people's belief that 4e was not going to be the game for them.
I think that Wyatt, more than any other, was the source of the 'bad-wrong-fun' description that a lot of folks felt that WotC was trying to place on 3.X.
And I will be honest - I think that he said exactly what he wanted to say. He said the same things too many times for it to be otherwise - that he really did view 4e as being all about the combat encounter.
He was trying to limit the game to those things that 4e does handle well, and trying to play down what it did not handle well. He was not misplacing nuances, he
was trying to tear down 3.X in the hopes that by doing so he would promote 4e. If so, then he was very wrong.
Mind, 4e itself would likely have turned off some of those same people that were angered by his statements, but adding what many saw, and still see, as needless insults really did not help matters. Insulting your customer base is not the best way to start things off.
And I think that there is little doubt that folks
are using 4e for things far beyond just combat encounters, those statements weren't
necessary. He would have been better served showing how those things can be done with 4e than by saying that they 'aren't fun' and that you were better off just not doing them.
Yet Mr. Baker is leaving and Mr. Wyatt is still there....
The Auld Grump, but at the rate WotC goes through people....