4th edition, The fantastic game that everyone hated.

[Raith5]

Personally I think that the "traditional core" of D&D is simply outdated. Lets be hones, D&D began as hack and slash dungeon crawler and a lot of its traditional core values tie into that. But I think PnP players don't look for hack & slash games any more. Video games can do them a lot better. What PnP rpgs still can do is character and world interaction and an adapting story. Sadly 4E made it quite clear that those things take the backdrop by not even trying to present a believable world. Instead the world was just there to give the combat context (The magic item costs for example or the scaling environmental challenges by character level)

I think I agree with the first part - I am sure there are many who have good hack and slash adventures but I think computer games do this far quicker than an RPG. But I dont think that 4th ed was inherently roleplaying light. I am not sure that 4th ed magic item costs are any less believable that 3rd ed. Also I found the cosmopolgy of 4th to be really engaging. Issues like the primordials, dragonborn vs tieflings, demons vs devils, the raven queen have been key drivers of the story of my high fantasy campaign. So I think the claim that the world just gives the combat context in 4th is a pretty big claim to make.

The underlying point here is whether you want to play hack a slash or high fantasy - D&D must be able to cover these.

 

[Aenghus]

4e has spoiled previous editions of D&D for me.

Apart from the advantages already provided by other 4e fans, and some of the more honest critics, the biggest feature of 4e that attracts me is the transparency. To a much greater extent in 4e, what you see is what you get. In previous editions of the game, far too often weak spells, abilities and entire classes were described as great, and weren't, or weak, and weren't. Some game elements were so badly described as to be very unreliable, varying in power and prominence wildly from game to game - illusions would be the poster boy for this sort of thing.

The more subjective and arbitrary the game is the more important it is to play the DM rather than the game. I've always hated arbitrariness in games, and old school D&D had bucket loads of arbitrariness - random death traps and spell effects, random pcs etc.


I like 4e. It looks like next is moving away from 4e, which means it's moving away from me. sigh.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I like 4e. It looks like next is moving away from 4e, which means it's moving away from me. sigh.

Sounds like you're getting ready to feel like many of us 3.5Ed fans did a few years ago.

And I say that with sympathy, not out of mockery.

(Because for me, that was a really weird feeling.)

 

[Quickleaf]

As a 4e DM, I obviously enjoy this edition, however I recognize it has several major flaws:

• Presentation/Marketing were atrocious
  
• Adventure Support mostly sucked
  
• PC Customization diminished, particularly non-combat PCs (compared to 3e)
  
• Narrative-Mechanics Dissociation leading to gray rules & errata
  
• Lack of Non-Grid Alternative
  
• The Designers not fully grasping the strengths of the system till late in its life
  

When you look at all of these points, it is pretty clear why 4e was not a great fiscal success: It probably appealed most to certain homebrew DMs who skipped or grew tired of 3e, but didn't give them sufficient tools/examples until late in its life ( or, arguably, ever ).

I think a lot of 4e's best features take some time, experimentation with the rules, and imagination to figure out. Now that I've "gotten it", I can do pretty much anything with the system from epic staged/scripted dragon fights to claustrophobic dungeon-crawls against kobold guerillas, from courtly intrigue to solving mysteries, from mass combat to managing a keep. WotC could have made it easier getting to this point, but now that I'm here, my group is having a blast

 

[Dragonblade]

4e is AMAZING! It doesn't get nearly the love it deserves. I run it in a free wheeling OSR style and find the rules really make it easy to role-play and promote a lot of narrative creativity by the players and the DM. Having a robust tactical combat system too is just icing on the cake.

 

[Obryn]

Sounds like you're getting ready to feel like many of us 3.5Ed fans did a few years ago.

And I say that with sympathy, not out of mockery.

(Because for me, that was a really weird feeling.)

I for one am perfectly happy running a "closed" edition. It means my RPG budget can go to other cool stuff, and it means very little for the actual game I am playing at my table. I'll check into Next and buy ... whatever the core turns out to be ... but this extended playtest seems to be making the core design of the game more conservative and less experimental than it would take for me to be a true fan.

-O

 

[Sunseeker]

I for one am perfectly happy running a "closed" edition. It means my RPG budget can go to other cool stuff, and it means very little for the actual game I am playing at my table. I'll check into Next and buy ... whatever the core turns out to be ... but this extended playtest seems to be making the core design of the game more conservative and less experimental than it would take for me to be a true fan.

-O

I have much the same sentiment, though I hope DDI will continue to support 4e for a while. I'm not sure why they wouldn't since they've already invested in it.

 

[pemerton]

I picked up a copy of "Worlds and Monsters" and found all the evocative prose and art that was missing from the 4e DMG.

I completely agree that W&M is a lot better than the DMG on story elements - both describing them (and what they're for) and depicting them. It should have been folded into the DMG, perhaps replacing the very ordinary chapter on adventure/scenario design (compare it to the much briefer discussion in Moldvay Basic to see how weak it is!).

What PnP rpgs still can do is character and world interaction and an adapting story. Sadly 4E made it quite clear that those things take the backdrop by not even trying to present a believable world. Instead the world was just there to give the combat context (The magic item costs for example or the scaling environmental challenges by character level)

Your repeated comments along these lines would benefit from a bit of context as to what RPGs you are familiar with.

Many RPGs that are innovative story games (HeroQuest revised, Maelstrom Storytelling) use scaling DCs - it is a device for deemphasising operational play and emphasising the thematic and story significance of choices.

That came out in this exchange on an old thread of mine:

The scenario I ran yesterday (from the Eden Odyssesy d20 book called "Wonders Out of Time") called for a Large bear.

I wasn't sure exactly how many 10th level PCs would be facing it at once, and so in prepping I placed a single elite level 13 dire bear

<snip>

As it turns out, the whole party encountered the bear. I didn't want to do any re-statting on the fly, so stuck with the level 13 elite. They players decided that their PCs would try to tame and befriend the bear instead of fighting it. To keep the XP and pacing about the same as I'd planned, I decided to run this as a level 13 complexity 2 skill challenge (6 successes before 3 failures).

in a "fiction-first" system, the players could attempt to avoid a combat because that offered their best chance of success. If you design the challenge of avoiding said combat "To keep the XP and pacing about the same as I'd planned", then you undo the value of that choice.

I strongly disagree. Wide variance in difficulty or rewards based on player strategy doesn't preserve the value and meaning of player choice, it destroys that value - essentially, you create a single correct choice.

<snip>

if a diplomatic approach is just as hard as a fight, whether or not the PCs have good CHA, skill trainings, etc means something. The fact that the characters chose a non violent means of resolving the problem even if it wasn't any easier tells us something about their values. If talking is easy, then PCs can get through without strong social skills, and all that their choice tells us about the characters is that they're expedient.

I think Victim is completely correct here. The purpose of level scaling in 4e is to ensure that other dimensions of play - the tactical decision making [MENTION=56051]Raith5[/MENTION] referred to upthread, and also the desire to spare a bear's life, that mattered in the example I've just given - become the focus of play.

One result is that 4e is not the best RPG for a world exploration game. But world exploration is not the only thing that can be done with an RPG.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I for one am perfectly happy running a "closed" edition. It means my RPG budget can go to other cool stuff, and it means very little for the actual game I am playing at my table.

Yea, me too. Ask me how many guitars I've bought since 2008...

I'll check into Next and buy ... whatever the core turns out to be ...

Ditto that as well. Once I get my hands on the Core, I'll be able to decide how I feel about the game.

That's what I always do. With 4Ed, I quickly figured out I didn't like the way it ran as a DM, even though I liked playing the game well enough. So I bought none of the DM stuff- no MMs beyond the first, for instance- but I bought nearly everything that had classes and feats.

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

It just sucks that 4th edition D&D's biggest flaw is having Dungeons and Dragons attached on to it. There are hundreds of RPGs out there that are much MUCH worse and yet still awesome, if 4th edition D&D was named like... Final Fantasy Tactics the Roleplaying game or whatever other than D&D. The audience would know exactly what they were getting. The game is solid, it shouldn't have been judged on the basis that it wasnt D&D, but eh, that's the world we live in i guess.

Sad, isn't it? Still, I think the D&D logo is more a boon than a bane. Without that recognizable name attached, 4e wouldn't have had the funding to become anything more than Fantasy RPG #947, and it wouldn't have half the fans it has today.

4e has spoiled previous editions of D&D for me.

This is exactly how I feel. I'll play other editions (not as DM), and I'll probably have fun, but now each one feels like just another fantasy heartbreaker.

2e has some great settings, and 3e multiclassing is a great idea, for example...but each one is weighed down by inconsistencies and kludginess.