4th edition, The fantastic game that everyone hated.

[Obryn]

Isn't that sort of like saying "You can't fire me. I quit!"? They stopped producing books for a reason.

The broader point, though, is that if WotC had stuck with the core elements of the game and with the OGL, there wouldn't be a large enough market for other games for any of this to have happened.

.... And if we're playing what-if, if WotC had not made the OGL, they would not be in the unenviable position of competing with their own games I mean, speculation is speculation.

Keep in mind - before moving on from 4e, they also moved on from 3.5, 3e, and 2e. All for a reason.

 

[pemerton]

double post

 

[Ratskinner]

Pathfinder has only outsold 4e since they gave up producing books for it. Stupid move on WotC's part - getting the players out of the habit of buying books.

...unless maybe we won't be buying books next time.

 

[Argyle King]

Unless the object in question cannot be destroyed by brute force(say, an inter-dimensional portal or some other non-corporeal object, or doing so would just set the trap off) I always allow my players to just "smash it until they win".

I did that too, but I quickly realized that the way 4E PCs are built in comparison to the world around them meant that "smash it" was so often such a good option that it rendered a lot of other tactics obsolete. I found ways to fix that, but it took a lot of trial and error.

A friend of mine who also DMs had similar issues; he found that players fell back upon "well, let's break it/kill it" as a strategy too often because of how good their characters were compared to the world around them. He once commented to me that he no longer saw the point in trying to run social encounters because too many of his players would attempt to just kill the other side if negotiations didn't go their way. While as DM he could then simply ramp up the power of the other side, he tired of trying to keep up with what he saw as an arms race he was too often on the losing side of. To be fair, part of the problem there is one of problem players, but it's worth noting that those players (I know the same group he DMs for because I play with most of them in other games) seemed to learn a lot of that mentality during their experience with 4E. I'm not in any way implying 4E caused them to be problem players, but I do think the way the game was built -for whatever reason- caused them to look at it differently than they had looked at their rpg experience with different games, and I do believe part of it was that they realized what their power level was in comparison to the world around them.

 

[Siberys]

I'd (personally, mind) peg that on the player - I've found that there's a particular sort that doesn't care about the context, they just set fighting as their go-to option. My old group of players were like this whatever we played, and my longest campaigns with them were in Pathfinder and 3.5. :/

Though I could get behind the /content/ of the campaign, not the system, being involved in the formation of those assumptions. I know in the first campaign that I ran for that group, combat was super central to the game early on, so maybe it colored how they acted. Could the same be true of the group you're talking about? An early and perasive focus on combat, but then when the focus started to shift some of the players didn't quite catch the cue?

I'm currently running some brand-new players through 4e Zeitgeist right now, and they haven't started jumping to violence as their best option; maybe the campaign's focus on interaction and my increased GMing skill relative to when I started that first group are playing into that a little?

 

[Herobizkit]

I did that too, but I quickly realized that the way 4E PCs are built in comparison to the world around them meant that "smash it" was so often such a good option that it rendered a lot of other tactics obsolete. I found ways to fix that, but it took a lot of trial and error.

D&D has always been this way. In 3.x, it was more efficient to hit and damage things than use manoeuvres as the penalty for doing so was too harsh; to lessen the penalty was expensive (feat tax).

Pre-3e, you didn't have much in the way of manoeuvres to even use. Disarming was messy and time-consuming. I'm not even sure if tripping was possible... and grappling just made you a target for the un-grappled. 2e introduced random tables for unarmed combat (for flavour) but again, doing 3-4 damage a punch was still not as efficient as hitting it with you axe (even thought there was a random percent chance to stun an enemy by punching/kicking).

And Pre-2e... well... manoeuvres weren't even a consideration. They had to invent rules for charging with a lance.

Point is, in virtually all cases, it's more efficient to beat up an enemy than do anything else to it... except talk to it, and clearly your players aren't into talky-feely kind of gaming.

 

[S'mon]

Pathfinder has only outsold 4e since they gave up producing books for it. Stupid move on WotC's part - getting the players out of the habit of buying books.

According to Lisa Stevens (in her 2010 lookback article, I think it was) they were outselling 4e by around mid-2010. Which AIR tallies with when Orc's Nest moved all the 4e stuff to a lower shelf and put Pathfinder on the prime shelf at eye level facing the door.
WoTC may have still been taking in more revenue due to DDI, but Pathfinder seems to have replaced 4e as the leading RPG by shop floor sales pretty quickly.

 

[S'mon]

Since 2009 I've been posting on this forum explaining how I play 4e, how it clearly lacks the sim trappings of 3E but supports a different playstyle pretty well, etc. While some posters seemed to disagree, arguing that rather than playing 4e as written I was doing some sort of weird Forge drifting of it, some others have obviously found what I posted helpful.

I think that was me, both times! I seem to remember being pretty nonplussed by the Forge-iness of your approach when I was first trying to run 4e ca 2009-10.

 

[Bluenose]

Knowing from other convos how much you've adapted 4e to suit your own style, LostSoul, I think your threshold for drifting might be higher than others'. You and @S'mon both seem to have taken 4e out behind the bleachers and had your way with it. Which is awesome! I feel that it's absolutely a continuum, and not a binary thing.

Which is one of the things that always puzzles me, whether it's 4e or 3e (or any other game for that matter) involved. Why do that? When a game plays in a particular fashion, it seems like a lot of work to change it to play in a different fashion when you could instead play a different game - one that wouldn't need anywhere near the amount of work to make it fit. I don't play 3e for Lankhmar or 4e for Game of Thrones; there are other games that do that well, and leave me time to get the campaign together rather than wrestle the game into submission.

You just presented a hypothesis about what they thought, and I replied to it... If they didn't know then they shouldn't have made the claim that it was the same as previous editions? Why not do what 3.0 did in Dragon magazine and break down the mechanics (also highlighting the differences between it and the previous edition) without telling us whether it was or wasn't the same game... would've led to less dissapointed expectations in the long run.

Well, they did that with 3e. And plenty of people discovered very quickly that all the claims about how things converted turned out to mean that you could play the same way you always used to and get different results. Or you could play a different way and get different results. But you couldn't get the same results, and the game wasn't the same. At least this time they tried to be honest.

 

[S'mon]

Isn't that sort of like saying "You can't fire me. I quit!"? They stopped producing books for a reason.

The broader point, though, is that if WotC had stuck with the core elements of the game and with the OGL, there wouldn't be a large enough market for other games for any of this to have happened.

I do wonder what would have happened though if WoTC had stuck close to 3e in the design of 4e but had still had the GSL SNAFU that drove the third-party publishers away from supporting WoTC's game. If Paizo still had to develop their own D&D variant to stay in business.
I guess the likeliest thing would have been people treating the two games as interchangeable, and buying Paizo APs to use with the WOTC system, which would still have been a win-win for both companies. But I can see a possibility that Paizo might still have eclipsed WoTC. Paizo's big strength is in mood & feel, tone, fluff, not crunch - even their original crunch books like the Advanced Players Guide I think are well received more because the (eg) Alchemist is well presented, imaginative and seems a lot of fun, not because of any technical skill in systems design. I just don't know whether Paizo's large and extremely enthusiastic market are really driven by Stare Decisis, the desire to stick close to 3e's precedents in terms of mechanics, or if it's more about the presentation/mood/feel, with crunch an afterthought.