D&D 5E With Respect to the Door and Expectations....The REAL Reason 5e Can't Unite the Base

[Underman]

But given that more good and influential games have come out of the Forge than from Justin Alexander, I'm happy to defer to their expertise, at least in a preliminary way!

And yet "fortune-in-the-middle" is not a commonly used term (I believe you use it the most on this forum?) and a lot of people still don't understand it, which, if true, just goes to show that academia is its own little bubble and not influential enough, such that the rest of us mainstream folk still don't have good terminology to use, and we're still muddling along using a hodgepodge of semantics.

I also generally think it's preferable to describe someone's playstyle in a fashion they accept, rather than one they don't. "Dissociated" is obviously intended to be pejorative - it is the stalking horse in an argument that 4e is a tactical skirmish game, after all.

How about "unassociated"?

I don't care myself. I just use whatever's the going terminology in any one thread.

I find this a little hard to follow. But as I understand it, you prefer the system to tell you what is happening in the fiction, rather than to have to consciously establish that yourself.

Um, well, it's more complicated than that, isn't it?

 

[pemerton]

Um, well, it's more complicated than that, isn't it?

You should know! But I'm not joking when I said I had trouble following that paragraph. Are you able to elaborate a bit?

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

It always amazes me that people want to take D&D which has a proud tradition and totally change it. This is basically what 4e did. Why do you care? If D&D was a rotten game all the way till 2008 then you obviously have few ties to it. Wouldn't it be better to just seek out a game that caters to your interests more directly?

But D&D wasn't a rotten game till 2008. It was a game with perks and flaws, stuff I liked and stuff I disliked. I enjoyed playing it, but I saw mistakes that needed fixing. 4E fixed many of those mistakes. So it was for me quite a logical conclusion of the game. When I lock back even further, I tend to think "Well, they didn't know how to do it better back then, but they had the heart in the right place".*

You see D&D pre-4e did cater to a LOT of peoples tastes. Pathfinder is proof of that if nothing else. And the ridiculous thing people are missing is that 3.5e maybe getting played as much as Pathfinder is getting played. An informal survey of players in my game club of 100 would definitely indicate that.

Pre D&D also had to face with "rivaling" game systems, be it something like Call of Cthulhu, Storyteller, Rolemaster or Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Games. And lots of the people playing those games used to be D&D players as well.

I tend to believe that each edition of D&D will make its own mark and have its own unique situations. 3E came out after a long-lasting edition, and it introduced the concept of the Open Gaming License. This had never happened before. What you may be missing is not just that Pathfinder was succesful, but that there was also a large, new movement of OSR games. That to me suggests that 3E did not really appeal to everyone either, since the OSR games depart from 3E in many ways. Paizo had the key advantage of being already very popular thanks to their handling of the Dragon magazines, the OSR community is probably a bit more split between alternate options since there was no single, popular leader.

4E came after this, and as such, it was one choice of several - maybe a more "likely" choice, since it carried the brand, but there was still much more D&D options then there were to the times of 3E.

*) If that seems condenscending - I believe I may have sometimes underestimated Gygax & co, but I still believe that they still created flawed games. The idea of balance over levels, e.g. a low level caster is weaker than a low level non-caster, but the relationship reverses at higher levels, was a notion of balance they had. It probably just needed to be done to see that it was not really a good way for many players. Only once we've seen it in action we could really see the advantages and drawbacks.

 

[Underman]

You should know! But I'm not joking when I said I had trouble following that paragraph. Are you able to elaborate a bit?

If I had the time and patience to do so, and I succesfully articulate myself (a rehash of what's probably already been restated by various posters from various angles), would you just tell me how that relates to 3E or 4E? Because I don't really care And 5E is too preliminary to know how it would fit with 5E either.

 

[Emerikol]

That's true of a lot of dismissive terminology. Of course, the stakes in RPG play and design aren't very high, so I'm hardly on a crusade. But I do like to be able to talk about my hobby in a way that acknowledges different approaches without automatically judging some of them to be merely tactical skirmish games linked by freeform improv.

I don't think the term is dismissive. Dissociative just means breaking you out of your immersion or sense of verisimilitude. Not the only way that can happen but thats what it means. Also he has rewritten that article in a far more neutral language using sports analogies and admitted that his first post was fired by anger at 4e.

D&D has traditionally been the opposite playstyle wise of what is was in 4e. The 4e designers didn't realize (I hope) what they were doing when they changed so much in the ways they did. So an emotional reaction is not surprising. I didn't have such a reaction at the beginning only because I didn't realize what was going on or understand how it would affect my game. I only later grew into this knowledge via experience.

When you own the number one (and at the time bar none) game, it seems risky to switch all of it's design tropes. Say what you want but D&D was crushing all the competition in the rpg market prior to 4e's release. It is a testament to the staying power of D&D's brand that it did as well as it did. I'm obviously someone who jumped in and bought a lot of stuff before realizing I disliked the game. There are a good number of people like me. It's why I don't even consider the sales numbers fair at this point. I consider it even worse for 4e.

 

[pemerton]

D&D has traditionally been the opposite playstyle wise of what is was in 4e.

This itself is contentious, because there is no single D&D tradition. Like [MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION] said.

 

[pemerton]

If I had the time and patience to do so, and I succesfully articulate myself (a rehash of what's probably already been restated by various posters from various angles), would you just tell me how that relates to 3E or 4E? Because I don't really care And 5E is too preliminary to know how it would fit with 5E either.

FYI, this is the sort of thing I'm referring to: describing martial dailies as supernatural, as if it is not feasible to play an RPG in any but a process-sim fashion.

 

[Emerikol]

This itself is contentious, because there is no single D&D tradition. Like [MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION] said.

Well at least in the context of this discussion (process-sim). I realize that 3e and 4e both had skill systems and 1e and 2e didn't.

 

[LostSoul]

I do believe that prior to 4e, it was possible to play without dissociative issues and with 4e it was not.

I'm not sure that's true.

Let's say I want to shoot a guy in the leg in order to slow him down. I think the only way to do that in 3E is to have the Hamstring feat and sacrifice some Sneak Attack damage to reduce his movement rate. The PC should be able to make that decision, but as a player I cannot.

So the player - character decision equivalence is disrupted.

Maybe I want to trip a guy with my longsword by hooking his leg with my quillons. A longsword is not a trip weapon so that's not possible.

So there is no connection between the trip rules and the game world, at least in this instance. (How about a ranged trip with a chair into his feet?)

Even if it were, are there not some situations where a failed trip attempt may not result in getting tripped on your own, without having the Improved Trip feat?

Once again, player - character decision equivalence is disrupted.

Even a simple melee attack doesn't have any more connection to the game world than a 4E power. You can't choose, as a player, what your character does until the die is cast; only after you read the die can you determine what your character did. Your choice is "make a melee attack", not "stab him in the foot".

Then there's the "stop-motion" initiative system of 3E that means you can't make decisions until everyone else has taken their full allotment of 6-second actions, at which point you can decide what you're doing for 6 seconds without much interference from others.

I'm not sure how the player and the character are making equivalent decisions.

I've seen this disconnect many times in play, especially from new players who are approaching the game as if they were making their decisions as their character.

I could have a horrible misunderstanding of what dissociated mechanics mean, though, so I'm open to discussion on these points.

 

[Hussar]

Everything you're giving an example of isn't the player taking authorial stance though, they are still making the decision and controllling only the actions of their PC.

Whether it's a good choice or bad is fundamentally irrelelvant since that's saying Protagonists in fantasy fiction never make dangerous decisions, when the fact of the matter is that they do this type of stuff all the time... maybe I'm not understamding your argument here.

Possibly. But, they're also not in actor stance either. They're in Director stance. They are making decisions, not based on what the character would do, but, what the player thinks is the most interesting "best" choice in the given situation.

Which was my point. Everyone talks like there are only two stances. There are three. Granted, only casters got to play in Author stance in traditional D&D most of the time (outside of Action Points and a few other odds and sods). But, lots and lots of the time, players are in Director stance. Which stands at odds to the idea that traditional D&D was always in Actor stance.