D&D 4E So all these wacky arguments are still about 4e, right?

[Jeff Carlsen]

It's not really the edition war proxy. 5E has given us the opportunity to analyze every mechanic to within an inch of its life, and there are many reasons to like or dislike particular mechanics. Now, there are sets of mechanics that go together due to an overall design philosophy, and those can be readily aligned to an edition that was designed that way.

But it's entirely possible to like unlimited cantrips and not like martial daily powers, or to dislike damage on a miss but be okay with hit dice. Heck, I'm okay with races having the same speed, but I foam at the mouth about the lack of racial penalties and the human standard.

Sure, to some degree we want the rules to reflect the editions we hold most dear. But few people are completely one sided or intractable.

 

[I'm A Banana]

In theory? No.

In practice, on ENWorld in 2014? Well...

I dunno, I started a thread about replacing damage-on-a-miss, and it attracted some really useful dialogue.

There are Edition Warriors who will grind their axe, but there's always jerks on the internet. A public medium isn't limited to decent people (as anyone who worked in retail could tell you). I don't feel like they're global and monolithic, though. Often vocal, but only really as annoying if one lets them dominate the conversation.

 

[Uchawi]

It is not exclusive to 4E, it is about what traditions you want represented in the game. The question is whether the developers of 5E will create a path to implement different feels to the game. And the majority of arguments hover around hit points, which is the most abstract concept in the game.

The other arguments revolve around implementing a simple rule set or reduction of sub-systems, and when tradition trump the decision making process. For example I want a complex wizard and a simple fighter. What if someone wants a simple wizard and a complex fighter? Shrug. The edition wars will never go away.

 

[dmgorgon]

That's a very good observation. In general, it's always a battle between the 4e (13th age) camp and the pre 4e /Pathfinder players. The positions are uncompromising and in some cases they are polar opposites.


D&D Next must identify these play-style differences and speak to each player base directly.

As a 2e player I find myself falling in the pre-4e camp a lot more, but I often have different reasons for why I like/dislike something.

 

[TwoSix]

It seems sort of inevitable that when a new edition is created to be a summary of all the best material that came before it, it will inevitably turn into a referendum on what the best material actually is.

I think many of the discussions aren't over lingering bitterness over 4e (although some are, yes!), but rather the continued attempt to determine how many and which kinds of new-school rules concepts are appropriate for the D&D brand. I think 4e helped to crystallize for a lot of people what sort of mechanics they didn't like, mechanics that previously had only been slowly filtering into previous editions. That's why the "Edition War" was really just a hot flare-up of the broader "Playstyle War".

 

[darjr]

Mathematically, if you control for level (that being crucial, here), success and failure in 4e rarely go outside the 5-15 range - and more commonly the 7-13 range.

If you change level scaling in 4e to every 4 or 5 levels, the math looks kind of similar to Next.

I don't think most discussion on Bounded Accuracy is really "about" 4e, though, which is why I left it off the list.

I actually think the bounded accuracy is a direct answer to the inflated target numbers needed when you add level to rolls. So it's all about 4e and how Next is different.

 

[amerigoV]

I do not know if its a 4e thing or not, but as someone that does not have a dog in this fight but still follows D&D I certainly sense a lot of angst on this board lately with the 5e. I have not paid close enough attention if its wide spread or a small, vocal angsty crowd. There also seemed to be an uptick when Wizards kicked some people off of their board awhile back that came here, but I am not sure all those correlate as that seemed to have die down..

 

[Gadget]

I'm afraid I must mostly agree with the original premise. The D&D landscape is so Balkanized now these issues are almost inevitable. I will put in my own two cents that I see Bounded Accuracy as a descendant of E6 and its goal, among others, to tone the numbers down. Not a direct descendant, as we still have plenty of wahoo to add as levels go up, but it seems rooted in the concept.

 

[Dausuul]

I actually think the bounded accuracy is a direct answer to the inflated target numbers needed when you add level to rolls. So it's all about 4e and how Next is different.

Bounded accuracy is "a pox on both your houses" to 3E and 4E, both of which had bonuses and target numbers that scaled into the stratosphere at high levels. It harks back to the days of AD&D when both target numbers and attack values were kept within a more limited range--though 5E narrows the range even further than AD&D did.

 

[Jester David]

First off - I seriously hope this doesn't descend into yet another DoaM thread. it has the words "Damage on a Miss" in it, though, so I know I'm playing with fire here.

Let's take a look at all the major ... kerfluffles? ... yeah, let's call them kerfluffles we've had about Next since day one. Let's go down the list. It's possible I've missed something; this isn't necessarily exhaustive.

• Martial healing
• Warlords - the class's existence separate from Fighters/Bards/etc.
• Self-healing, especially with the Fighter's Second Wind
• Overnight healing
• At-Will spells
• Nothing to see here->Damage on a Miss
• NPCs and PCs - do they need to be built the same?
• Spell lists in monster stat blocks
• Fighters and other sword-swinging guys having maneuvers which are use-limited in some way
• ...how fast Halflings move? Yeah, I guess we'll count that.
• Just Added: Availability of PDFs
• OGL or other open licenses

So Next just a proxy battle for the same damn Edition War that's been crapping up forums for about the past 6 years, right? It's not about the game mechanics; it's about the heart and soul of D&D and making sure the edition fits whatever personal vision of the game you hold. Or, that the arguer was "right all along" and that 4e was either (a) awesome with great and innovative stuff that needs to be kept, regardless of their compatibility with the game's overall design goals or (b) a terrible betrayal and all elements from it must be purged, even if those elements work well mechanically.

I mean, the particulars are somewhat different now - there's no way many of these would have ever been arguments during 4e's run, because 4e itself was the forest and its game elements were just individual trees - but I can only think of one giant debate that isn't about a 4e element, even novel ones like the exploration rules.

(The sole exception I can think of is "bounded accuracy," which still has a 4e-ish flavor because 4e used level-scaling bounded accuracy for its mathematical underpinnings. So who knows, there. And it's more argued elsewhere, not so much here.)

Am I missing something here, or just spelling out the bleedingly obvious? What, if anything, can be done about it? Or should it?

Many of these issues started with 3e and were included in 4e as a result. So it's more a case of things some people hated 10 years ago and things people didn't mind or like 10 years ago. Such as fighters with powers, NPCs using PC rules, slow healing, lack of at-will spells, spell lists in monsters, the fragility of low level PCs, alignment (number, related spells, and restrictions), and QW vs LF.

Some are new to 4e, like the warlord & martial healing. Although, most of the ire seems aimed at martial healing. While the warlord gets many "should it exist?" threads, the objections raised there are similar to any hybrid class, such as assassin or thief-acrobat or duskblade or runepriest and are largely edition neutral.

The arguments continue to run hot because, frankly, 4e played favourites. The designers of that game picked the options they liked and just assumed everyone else would just accept it because "it was D&D". If you have similar tastes as those designers then 4e is amaztastic. If you have taste contrary to the designers then 4e is balls.