Windjammer
Adventurer
Earlier today I came across an amazingly insightful comment on Monte Cook's latest column. I'll reproduce it in full:
I agree with this, because this week as I'm starting up a new 4E campaign the usual stuff ensues. Endless bickering over which stuff to declare legit, what's off bounds, what doesn't fit this time, and so on.
As a GM of 20 years experience I continue to be amazed by players who think they can predict what a campaign is going to be about, or even worse, what it's ought to be about. That the things bickered about end up being trivial bonuses to attacks and skills goes without saying. There's never any inherent interest in the character beyond his abilities.
It's not just the grand level publishing strategy that's the problem, and which this poster alludes to. It's the very specific handling of content that WotC deliberately failed to deliver in 4 sub-editions now.
In 3rd edition we had the polymorph debacle. Over night, any and every stat block in any monster book ever published became a player asset. This wasn't simply a bane for GMs, it was a bane for D&D authors: they could no longer write up crazy monsters which GMs could use however they wanted to see fit, but now had to carefully balance GM material against player (ab)use.
Even the most die-hard fan of 3rd edition, and certainly the hardest critics of that edition, will agree that the rules and errata mess the polymorph subsystem generated was one of the worst failings of that game.
And it wasn't a wailing because it produced over powered characters, or because (which is also true) the rules text never attained a level of clarity that ended the bickering on the table. No, the reason why this was such an immense failure was because it failed to separate DM material from player material.
And then 4E came along, and blew this error to the worst of all proportions. It dreamt up a Character Builder into which every rules element ever published for the system would be pooled together, and all within a second's reach of the player.
'But hold on,' you might say (because you are a reasonable, patient person), 'why should players not exercise discretion?'.
Indeed, why not? Easy. Because the Character Builder references the source of each mechanical element but not its purpose.
Examples from this week:
Player: why is this alchemical component off limits? It appeared in Dungeon magazine, no less!
DM: Because, if you had read the actual article it appeared in, you'd know that it explicitly said that these alchemical experiments are solely known to an NPC, and for the sole use of the DM.
Or again,
Player: why is this power off limits?
DM: Because we're playing in Eberron, and that power appears in an article called 'Artificers of the Realms'?
And so on and so on and so on and so on for a thousand new items. The magic item rarity system, however staggeringly incompetent one may find its execution (I do), managed to address a real issue: WotC authors could no longer write up mysterious magic items, because whoops-de-doo they'd end up in the player's finger tips before GMs even had a chance to make room for them in their campaigns. Here, read this article on that very issue, by a WotC staffer no less, and ask yourself: how does this differ from 3.x polymorph in the slightest? Why would a company want to repeat this mistake?
I'm curious. Because, WotC, whatever you do next, please end this mess. End the endless bickering over what rules are used at which table. Don't dial this complexity meter and 'players can choose their own customization' meter to 11 again. Don't repeat that mistake again.
What we want is a stable, errata- and 'update'-free, rules platform on which rotating GMs can run stable campaigns. Make the campaign the central rules element in 5E, not the PC. Give us an edition where D&D is about campaigns which PCs can play in - and end this nonsense of special snowflake PCs which DMs have to design campaigns around.
E Decker at RPG Geek said:
I agree with this, because this week as I'm starting up a new 4E campaign the usual stuff ensues. Endless bickering over which stuff to declare legit, what's off bounds, what doesn't fit this time, and so on.
As a GM of 20 years experience I continue to be amazed by players who think they can predict what a campaign is going to be about, or even worse, what it's ought to be about. That the things bickered about end up being trivial bonuses to attacks and skills goes without saying. There's never any inherent interest in the character beyond his abilities.
It's not just the grand level publishing strategy that's the problem, and which this poster alludes to. It's the very specific handling of content that WotC deliberately failed to deliver in 4 sub-editions now.
In 3rd edition we had the polymorph debacle. Over night, any and every stat block in any monster book ever published became a player asset. This wasn't simply a bane for GMs, it was a bane for D&D authors: they could no longer write up crazy monsters which GMs could use however they wanted to see fit, but now had to carefully balance GM material against player (ab)use.
Even the most die-hard fan of 3rd edition, and certainly the hardest critics of that edition, will agree that the rules and errata mess the polymorph subsystem generated was one of the worst failings of that game.
And it wasn't a wailing because it produced over powered characters, or because (which is also true) the rules text never attained a level of clarity that ended the bickering on the table. No, the reason why this was such an immense failure was because it failed to separate DM material from player material.
And then 4E came along, and blew this error to the worst of all proportions. It dreamt up a Character Builder into which every rules element ever published for the system would be pooled together, and all within a second's reach of the player.
'But hold on,' you might say (because you are a reasonable, patient person), 'why should players not exercise discretion?'.
Indeed, why not? Easy. Because the Character Builder references the source of each mechanical element but not its purpose.
Examples from this week:
Player: why is this alchemical component off limits? It appeared in Dungeon magazine, no less!
DM: Because, if you had read the actual article it appeared in, you'd know that it explicitly said that these alchemical experiments are solely known to an NPC, and for the sole use of the DM.
Or again,
Player: why is this power off limits?
DM: Because we're playing in Eberron, and that power appears in an article called 'Artificers of the Realms'?
And so on and so on and so on and so on for a thousand new items. The magic item rarity system, however staggeringly incompetent one may find its execution (I do), managed to address a real issue: WotC authors could no longer write up mysterious magic items, because whoops-de-doo they'd end up in the player's finger tips before GMs even had a chance to make room for them in their campaigns. Here, read this article on that very issue, by a WotC staffer no less, and ask yourself: how does this differ from 3.x polymorph in the slightest? Why would a company want to repeat this mistake?
I'm curious. Because, WotC, whatever you do next, please end this mess. End the endless bickering over what rules are used at which table. Don't dial this complexity meter and 'players can choose their own customization' meter to 11 again. Don't repeat that mistake again.
What we want is a stable, errata- and 'update'-free, rules platform on which rotating GMs can run stable campaigns. Make the campaign the central rules element in 5E, not the PC. Give us an edition where D&D is about campaigns which PCs can play in - and end this nonsense of special snowflake PCs which DMs have to design campaigns around.
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