Convincing 4th Edition players to consider 5th Edition

[TwinBahamut]

Indeed, and that's largely the point. But although people who are not entirely happy with 3E (which it is possible to be without being a hater) would have been a part of the target market, so would people who are happy with 3E. It would have been silly to purposefully exclude those people, because when you stop supporting 3E their money will stop coming in.

I wouldn't call it "purposely exclude" so much as "didn't realize existed". 4E didn't lose a large chunk of the audience out of deliberate intent, it simply made the mistake in believing that the entire audience had the same priorities. 4E works very, very well for anyone who has the priorities and preferences that it caters to, much better than 3E ever did. 3E was a bad game for those people, and 4E is better for them. On the other hand, there are people who played 3E in a way that 4E's designers probably didn't expect or understand, and they fell outside of 4E's design goals.

The truth is that D&D has a very, very highly segregated fanbase. It's rare to find two groups who play the same way, and many of these styles of playing D&D are more or less totally different games that happen to share a few elements of a common ruleset. You can either make a game that will partially please all of them, or you can make a game that fully pleases a group of them and is useless to everyone else. 3E was the former (and was a clunky, poorly designed mess because of it), and 4e was the latter (made many people very happy and is well designed, but has more narrow appeal to the existing fanbase). I wish I could make a comment about which one worked better to appeal to people outside of the pre-existing fanbase, but there is no way I could get that data (I'd bet on 4E, but really can't prove it).

I suppose this is the whole root of 5E's potential failures and this discussion, though. The style of play 4E caters to is just a different game than many other styles of D&D (like old-school DM antagonism or improv no-rule no-combat play), and because 4E is more specialized, it will work much better than any other ruleset for that style of play. A 5E that tries to be something for everyone may never be able to create a 4E-styled experience anywhere near as well as 4E was, even if the designers put their heart and soul into making the attempt.

I guess this is turning more into an argument for multiple product lines or people just abandoning D&D for other, more specialized games than anything else. Maybe 5E's playtest has just crushed my hopes that a "D&D for everyone" can ever exist...

 

[TwinBahamut]

I am not a fan of pathfinder nor did I feel their management of dungeon matched my tastes, but i do not see what is shameless about making a game for a system that has an open license and making it a huge success. I didn't like their adventures but clearly lots of people did and they turned that goodwill into gold. Good for them. I think its refreshing. There is nothing wrong or shameless with what they are doing.


Much rather be gaming in this environment than one where T$R was filing shameless lawsuits against anyone trying to make an rpg.

I guess I'll just say that I'd prefer to live in a world where Paizo went on to create a much more unique spin on the D&D experience that significantly improved and innovated upon the game in a way that moved it away from either 3E or 4E and was still a success. I'll leave it at that.

 

[Nagol]

Right, but are there any actual examples of systems that create monsters without any kind of flavor?

It's entirely possible to do in GURPS or Hero. The acronym TEM (Tire Eating Monsters) is a generalised description of an opponent or character thrown together without any flavour or rationale other than "I want it to do this".

 

[Fifth Element]

I wouldn't call it "purposely exclude" so much as "didn't realize existed".

They didn't realize that people who like 3E existed? Didn't they have, like, sales figures for 3E books and stuff?

 

[Nagol]

They didn't realize that people who like 3E existed? Didn't they have, like, sales figures for 3E books and stuff?

I think T.B.'s belief is the designers fell into an echo chamber/projection trap. They liked some thngs and didn't like other things. They are gamers. So obviously all the other gamers that like the current D&D will have the same likes and dislikes with the system.

The new system wil totally rock everyone's world because it is addresses all those dislikes in neat and interesting ways -- like moving D&D away from being a game about going through fairy rings, getting rid of that silly wheel cosmology, balancing all classes by building them on the same basic framework, and so on.

What do you mean some people liked it the other way?

 

[Campbell]

I'm not a fan of the hater language for what amounts to an economic preference. The players of 3e that expressed their discontent and helped to shape did not hate D&D. They just preferred different things than those that still play 3e and Pathfinder. Bringing emotion into what should be a discussion of slightly different economic preferences only serves to cut off meaningful discussion because it leads to people bunkering down. Liking different things does not make someone worse of a fan. Edition preference doesn't have intrinsic value. There is no moral dimension here.

 

[LostSoul]

I debated the fact that 4E's monster creation system has strong ties to monster colour or fiction with BryonD a while back.

It's easy enough to make a tough dragon who can breathe fire: make it high-level and give it a breath weapon. Making it a solo monster is another way to make it even tougher. But when you want to say, "It should be as easy to tag the dragon with a beam of light as it is to hit the side of a barn," 4E will let you down. Reflex is going to be high; I'm not sure what happens to player agency if you reduce a 27 Reflex Defence to 10 or 8, but I think it could cause problems.

3E does the same thing in places, with high saves and skills tied to HD, but there's not as much of it.

I think this has to do with the relationship between colour and the reward system in 4E. How the imagined content in the game changes in 4E as the characters gain levels isn't quite the same as it is in 3E. I am not going to pretend to have a good grasp of how this works in either system, but my gut says: in 4E the group defines the colour of their campaign as they play it; in 3E it's established when the campaign begins.

That's kind of confusing... let me see if I can clarify as I work this idea out for myself.

In 3E, climbing a hewn rock wall is DC 25. That doesn't change as the game is played (that is, as fiction is created, the game world is explored, and characters grow). Just because it's DC 120 to balance on a cloud doesn't mean that characters can't attempt it at 1st level; they'll just always fail. The relationship between colour and the reward system doesn't change over time: you know that, if you can score a DC 120 balance check, you can balance on clouds; a +1 to your Balance check brings you that much closer to success.

In 4E, I think the relationship between colour and the reward system changes: you don't know what it will mean, when you first start playing, to make a Hard Level 30 Acrobatics check. Which means that gaining levels doesn't have a defined relationship with what your PC can do in the fiction - just because your Acrobatics check has increased by 1, it doesn't mean you're that much closer to balancing on a cloud. I think the group needs to define that for themselves; as far as I can tell, this is supposed to arise organically through play, and go through major shifts as Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies enter the game.

*

There's another aspect to the difference between 3E and 4E: how you played the game. For groups who had the standard Fighter/Rogue/Cleric/Wizard party, and used Wands of Cure Light Wounds, and didn't let the Cleric and Wizard's abilities completely change the game (e.g. don't let them cast Geas/Quest on the adult red dragon), I think there wasn't much of a shift in game play. For others the difference is more pronounced.

 

[Herschel]

I think the issue with that as a point is that a lot of people were ignoring it anyway, so It did not actually come as a change.

Which makes me chuckle that a number of players want DDN to resemble most closely a game they didn't actually play.

 

[Incenjucar]

In 3E, climbing a hewn rock wall is DC 25. That doesn't change as the game is played (that is, as fiction is created, the game world is explored, and characters grow). Just because it's DC 120 to balance on a cloud doesn't mean that characters can't attempt it at 1st level; they'll just always fail. The relationship between colour and the reward system doesn't change over time: you know that, if you can score a DC 120 balance check, you can balance on clouds; a +1 to your Balance check brings you that much closer to success.

In 4E, I think the relationship between colour and the reward system changes: you don't know what it will mean, when you first start playing, to make a Hard Level 30 Acrobatics check. Which means that gaining levels doesn't have a defined relationship with what your PC can do in the fiction - just because your Acrobatics check has increased by 1, it doesn't mean you're that much closer to balancing on a cloud. I think the group needs to define that for themselves; as far as I can tell, this is supposed to arise organically through play, and go through major shifts as Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies enter the game.

This is a common myth about 4E. 4E's DC chart is based on what would be a challenge for you at that level. It does not determine that everything you encounter will be a challenge for you at that level. An oak door is an oak door, but a DM who wants to make a door that is hard to break isn't going to use an oak door at level 24. Similarly, specific tasks often have a set DC. The DC to jump a certain distance does not change with level, nor does the DC to heal someone. The DC to cure a disease is determined by the level of the disease. The DC to hear a loud noise at a certain distance through a stone wall does not change with level.

 

[Fifth Element]

I think T.B.'s belief is the designers fell into an echo chamber/projection trap. They liked some thngs and didn't like other things. They are gamers. So obviously all the other gamers that like the current D&D will have the same likes and dislikes with the system.

I don't think we have any basis for a conclusion like that. Regardless, we're only talking about who the game was targeted at. If what you say were true, then they were targeting 4E at everyone, rather than only those people who disliked 3E altogether.