D&D 4E Is there a "Cliffs Notes" summary of the entire 4E experience?

[Nagol]

No skill checks (no skills, afterall), but the passage doesn't even mention reaction rolls or anything. But, each step does come down to money. Buy rounds of drinks, toss coppers to beggars, offer some 'inducement' to the Warlock (really? 8th level? Llewellyn /is/ lofty).
So maybe that was the intended metric: wealth depletion. Bleed the PC of coin until you feel he's earned a shot.

There are reaction rolls implied (how will the town guard react to being called by a wealthy foreigner because he is too lofty to help the beggars? How will the beggars react to being given coin?).
The intended effect as I read it is to provide a series of small challenges which if successfully navigated achieves the original goal stated by the PC. Failure at a single step is probably not fatal, but will require some form of recovery action.

 

[Iosue]

First, let me link to this, so people know that even if I may seem critical of 4e in this post, there's a great deal that I love about it. Also, let me state that while the below is written in straight declarative statements without qualifiers, all of it simply represents my personal take on the situation -- it's all "I think" and "IMO".

A lotta folks, particularly 3e fans, point to the marketing for 4e. But this was absolutely out of the 3e playbook. They did the same exact thing when they introduced 3e. Worse, even. To my knowledge, they never introduced t-shirts listing how 4e was better than 3e, which they did for the introduction of 3e. Far be it from me to tell anyone if they should be offended or annoyed with something. But it does then strike me that this is probably not really a 4e issue.

For the moment, let's ignore the big picture (we'll come back to it later), and focus on the relatively small sample of the internet community. In particular, there's something that has always bugged me in these discussions. Manbearcat said,

[sblock]

1) prolific indie design elements (there are tons, from system elements to GMing role and GMing principles)

2) transparency and focus of its architecture (outcome-based design rather than process-base)

3) unified class resource scheduling which focused on the "genre tropes and the tactical resolution of the conflict-charged scene (see 1)" rather than the "strategic murderhoboing of a sandbox setting/dungeon crawl"

4) presentation including actual formatting, the artwork, and the facepalm editorializing in the initial DMG and PHB - "skip the guards and get to the fun (!)"

5) lack of fealty to canon and aggressively establishing its own backstory

6) aggressively coherent design framework that pushes play toward consistently churning out high-octane action for mythical fantasy as default (rather than - say - FFV or GoT)

7) aggressively taking a stand on historically polarizing elements such as HP

8) 4e "basic" (the initial core books) didn't include the Barbarian, Druid, Sorcerer, and Monk. The prior 3 only had to wait 7 months for PHB2 but Monk had to wait 19 months (ouch) for PHB3

brought out the worst tribal instincts in the D&D fanbase.

[/sblock]
I don't mean to pick on Manbearcat, but the above quote nicely encapsulates a common thread of argument. One of the worst bombs to throw into a 4e discussion is "It's not D&D." But I'm sitting here looking at this list of how 4e made major, fundamental breaks from D&Ds of the past, and then when people vehemently reject these changes, it's chalked up to the "worst tribal instincts of the D&D fanbase." Excepting, of course, for the obvious existence of trolls and jerks in almost any internet discussion, I like to assume good faith on both sides of this issue. WotC made drastic changes to the game, fundamentally changing it. It is, for all intents and purposes, a different game that plays differently. They did the same with 3e, but it would seem to a lesser degree. I think it's entirely fair to say WotC changed the game too much to be accepted by a significant number of fans. That doesn't mean "WotC tried to make it into an MMO," is a particularly good argument, but nor does it mean that fans were being unreasonable in expecting a certain fundamental consistency in the gameplay and fluff. I greatly enjoy playing 4e, and it mechanically supports the tropes we liked back in my early BECMI days. But everything Manbearcat mentions in the above quote? Not what I expect or look for in D&D. (For that matter, neither is 3e's obsessive focus on world simulation through play mechanics.)

But back to the big picture! While the above matters for the most part to our the serious RPG gaming community, I do not think it was the problem with 4e on the whole. And that's because I firmly believe that WotC has never cared about "bringing along the base" with a new edition. I've talked about before, new editions are all about bringing in new players. And those players don't really give a crap about previous iterations of the game (at least, not at first). So, while I can sympathize with older players who felt 4e was a change too far, I don't really think that hurt 4e or WotC. They got a lot of new players. They retained some players who liked the changes, and some players who didn't mind the changes. Enough that they could prove the viability of the DDI subscription model, which gave them both gobs of money and gobs of market data.

But I think that early on they found that they were not meeting their projections for new players. Because new editions are in many ways reactions to old editions, you can perceive what the designers/managers saw as issues of old editions by looking at the new ones. 2nd Edition was in many ways a reaction to the baroqueness and family unfriendly presentation of 1st Edition. With 3e, they wanted the mechanical universality and consistency that 2nd Ed. didn't have. With 4th edition, they wanted to address the balance and GM issues of 3e, while bringing in design elements from popular indie, online, and board games.

Mearls has said (I wish I could find the interview to link to it) that one of the things their data showed was that a lot of people were buying the 4e starter sets, but they weren't moving on to the rest of the game. And you can see this hanging over much of 4e and the transition to 5e. 4e had two starter sets in three years. They tried to lower the barrier to entry with the Red Box starter set and the Essentials line, but ultimately it was no go. Over and over throughout the playtest Mearls has stressed making the core game easy and simple for new players to pick up and get right into gaming. To the point that they've made big changes to their sales model. Instead of 3 Core Books as the game and an introductory set to get you interested, they have a cheap quick-start starter set, that transitions to the free Basic game, that transitions to any one of the Big Three, depending on your particular needs.

Regarding the indie elements of 4e and how much Mearls understood it, I think I'll keep this message from getting any longer than it already is by linking to these previous posts.

 

[Manbearcat]

Just wanted to say great posts @Nagol , @Remathilis , and @Ratskinner . I've discussed my own thoughts on what I tend to label 4e's in-coherency at length with @pemerton , @Manbearcat and a few others. It's just good to see there are others who felt the same way after reading the 4e core books.

I get the idea that they were trying to do something D&D has always claimed to do: cater to a wide audience of fantasy and game enthusiasts.

Combat was built around tactical/co-op play, with movement and strategy that appealed to wargamers and skirmish-gamers.

Character design was built with an eye to MMO gamers with clear roles, powers that returned at various cool-downs, and an emphasis on "builds" and item-acquisition.

Role-playing and Non-combat advancement was clearly borrowing from Indie-gaming, but I don't think they were exactly going for "story first". I think that was a pleasant side-effect of the way powers, skills, and such interacted. It was order built from chaos, rather than the "grand design" which is why it seems absent in the early books but prominent in the middle ones.

Incidentally, I don't think it helped for D&D to chase all those player-bases: 4e suffered a bit of an identity crisis for it. At its height, Wizards was trying to sell me monthly books, an online subscription, minis packs, power-card packs, terrain tiles, and dice. It really created the look of a game that was a miniatures skirmish game with a card-game element and an online requirement. I'm sure the perception fueled MANY a hater's disdain.

Just one thing right quick before I reply to @Ratskinner and, indirectly @Nagol . Some of my first posts on this website were more or less a breakdown of how I felt 4e was an (intentionally) incoherent (in the Forgist sense) ruleset carved out as a fusion of the Step on Up and Story Now creative agendas. I talked about how I can successfully (and had done) play a gritty and lethal Oregon/Appalachian Trail attrition game with the ruleset merely by (i) using the DMG2 advice for Extended Rest restrictions, (ii) charge healing surges for micro and macro failures in exploration Skill Challenges, (iii) allow PCs to spend healing surges to buff checks (DMG2), (iv) make liberal use of the condition/disease track (DMG1 and DMG2), (v) make macro-failure fallout punitive (eg - hazards, difficult combat encounters, redos on the exploration skill challenge), (vi) budget combat/physical encounters at level + 3/4 as standard and level + 5/6 as hard. I talked about how I can just run a series of discrete noncombat conflicts and resolve them with the mechanical framework of the SC. I talked about how I can just fiddle around and run combat encounters.

There are lots of discrete tools and system components to 4e that work to make this ruleset driftable genre-wise and creative agenda-wise. I felt like folks were far too adamant that this game was rigidly exclusionary could only be run one way and couldn't be run as a classic exploratory ruleset. I didn't feel that was true. I just felt that the tools to do so and what GMs should be ablating (healing surges, gold/level, and dailies instead of HPs, potions, item charges, and spellcaster spells) was a bit different. Nonetheless, entirely achievable.

So, in summation, no, I don't think that 4e is a coherent Story Now engine. Absolutely not. I've never held that position and I've played far too many games that have a laser-like focus on that agenda to know the difference. So, if your sense is that 4e is a system of discrete components (I mostly agree with Rem's analysis above but I would also include that there are (i) elements for an objective sandbox/exploration engine and (ii) several other Story Now bits and bobs and advice/principles) which toggle between Gamist and Narritivist interests, and sometimes mash them together, I don't disagree at all. Never have.

My primary contentions have always been (A) its much more driftable than it is given credit for and (B) it is at its best and most coherent when run as a 75:25 Narrativist/Gamist piece of machinery by a GM who knows their way around the system, what each piece is trying to accomplish, and knows the GMing principles/techniques that perpetuate that agenda.

and then when people vehemently reject these changes, it's chalked up to the "worst tribal instincts of the D&D fanbase."

Because it definitely isn't clear, I wasn't referring to one tribe's instincts. I was referring to both tribe's instincts. There is some stuff mentioned above up there that was absolutely problematic. There was some needless antagonism and some extremely easy and odd lack of deference to legacy elements (such as several classes not being in the PHB). There is other stuff as well.

One tribe goes on the offensive. The other tribe circles the wagons, even defending things that there is no real cause to defend (eg why are we defending "Skip the guards and get to the fun (idiots)!" when it could be so easily captured in "every moment push play toward conflict" without the inflamatory rhetoric?). When they're done circling the wagon, they go on the offensive. The other tribe pushes back. Etc, etc.

Two tribes. Worser natures and all that.

 

[Nagol]

Just one thing right quick before I reply to @Ratskinner and, indirectly @Nagol . Some of my first posts on this website were more or less a breakdown of how I felt 4e was an (intentionally) incoherent (in the Forgist sense) ruleset carved out as a fusion of the Step on Up and Story Now creative agendas. I talked about how I can successfully (and had done) play a gritty and lethal Oregon/Appalachian Trail attrition game with the ruleset merely by (i) using the DMG2 advice for Extended Rest restrictions, (ii) charge healing surges for micro and macro failures in exploration Skill Challenges, (iii) allow PCs to spend healing surges to buff checks (DMG2), (iv) make liberal use of the condition/disease track (DMG1 and DMG2), (v) make macro-failure fallout punitive (eg - hazards, difficult combat encounters, redos on the exploration skill challenge), (vi) budget combat/physical encounters at level + 3/4 as standard and level + 5/6 as hard. I talked about how I can just run a series of discrete noncombat conflicts and resolve them with the mechanical framework of the SC. I talked about how I can just fiddle around and run combat encounters.

There are lots of discrete tools and system components to 4e that work to make this ruleset driftable genre-wise and creative agenda-wise. I felt like folks were far too adamant that this game was rigidly exclusionary could only be run one way and couldn't be run as a classic exploratory ruleset. I didn't feel that was true. I just felt that the tools to do so and what GMs should be ablating (healing surges, gold/level, and dailies instead of HPs, potions, item charges, and spellcaster spells) was a bit different. Nonetheless, entirely achievable.

So, in summation, no, I don't think that 4e is a coherent Story Now engine. Absolutely not. I've never held that position and I've played far too many games that have a laser-like focus on that agenda to know the difference. So, if your sense is that 4e is a system of discrete components (I mostly agree with Rem's analysis above but I would also include that there are (i) elements for an objective sandbox/exploration engine and (ii) several other Story Now bits and bobs and advice/principles) which toggle between Gamist and Narritivist interests, and sometimes mash them together, I don't disagree at all. Never have.

My primary contentions have always been (A) its much more driftable than it is given credit for and (B) it is at its best and most coherent when run as a 75:25 Narrativist/Gamist piece of machinery by a GM who knows their way around the system, what each piece is trying to accomplish, and knows the GMing principles/techniques that perpetuate that agenda.

Almost any game can be drifted if you customise the engine. I've drifted Ars Magica into a long-term dungeon crawl, Aftermath into a taut political intrigue game, and 1e D&D into a murder mystery worthy of Sherlock Holmes.

But I find that if I need to drift a system into a different form of play I chose the wrong system to begin with.

I agree the style you and pemerton espouse sounds like it fits the game engine better than a style I more generally associate with previous incarnations of D&D. I just wish 4e had been more transparent and up-front about that style if it was indeed the expected mode of play.

 

[Manbearcat]

Almost any game can be drifted if you customise the engine. I've drifted Ars Magica into a long-term dungeon crawl, Aftermath into a taut political intrigue game, and 1e D&D into a murder mystery worthy of Sherlock Holmes.

But I find that if I need to drift a system into a different form of play I chose the wrong system to begin with.

I don't disagree. Which is why when I get together with some of my old buddies to run a one-off megadungeon, we're playing 1e (that and because those guys don't know 4e).

I agree the style you and pemerton espouse sounds like it fits the game engine better than a style I more generally associate with previous incarnations of D&D. I just wish 4e had been more transparent and up-front about that style if it was indeed the expected mode of play.

Plenty of other smart, experienced, good faith gamers felt the same as you and the DMG2 can be differentiated from DMG1 for its laser-like focused on that agenda, so clearly your point has merit.

 

[Campbell]

[MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] and [MENTION=6680772]Iosue[/MENTION] => Excellent posts!

I'm absolutely not one to lay blame at the feat of people who approached 4e expecting a more traditional game. It did fulfill many of the expectations that I had if D&D for a long time, which 3e largely failed to deliver on. As a game of heroic adventurers in a world on fire 4e delivers in spades with high drama added on top. As a world simulation or dungeon crawling game it's pretty meh from my perspective.

I also never expected 5e to be a direct successor to 4e. I hoped for a seat at the table - that my concerns would be taken as seriously as anyone else's. What I'm largely seeing now is a game that takes many superficial features from 4e without taking any of the design principles that matter to me. It feels like they added things in to get 4e players to shut up rather than make an earnest attempt to find out why we love the game. I would have been much more satisfied with a 5e that included sufficient mechanical rigor, modular scene framing support, and focused thematic material than one that includes tieflings, dragonborn, second wind, and hit dice*. My great disappointment with 5e is that it fully embraces 90's era design aesthetics instead of pursuing the middle road.

* I hate hit dice. they are unreliable, don't interface with the rest of the game, and have widely disparate impacts based on PC Constitution. Not only do they muddle with the game's healing economy, but they offer none of the healing surge model's aesthetic benefits - namely that most healing is inspirational in nature and fail to provide diminishing returns on additional healing, which provided strong strategic depth to party composition in 4e.

 

[pemerton]

I don't mean to pick on Manbearcat, but the above quote nicely encapsulates a common thread of argument. One of the worst bombs to throw into a 4e discussion is "It's not D&D." But I'm sitting here looking at this list of how 4e made major, fundamental breaks from D&Ds of the past

<snip>

WotC made drastic changes to the game, fundamentally changing it.

<snip>

everything Manbearcat mentions in the above quote? Not what I expect or look for in D&D. (For that matter, neither is 3e's obsessive focus on world simulation through play mechanics.)

I think there is a wide range of conceptions of what D&D is (and was, in the past).

For some people D&D is a set of mechanics. In that case, I think 4e's departure is not radical - probably no more radical than 3E. The change in saving throws, for instance, from classic D&D to 3E has an absolutely huge effect on play, arguably equally as great as giving players of fighters rationed powers.

For some people D&D is a style of play - roughly, GM-led/managed exploration. The exploration can be of different things - compare ToH to 2nd ed Ravenloft modules. And it can be quite varied in the sorts of demands it places on players - the same comparison, of ToH to 2nd ed Ravenloft, will illustrate this point. I think 4e is not very good for this, for reasons that [MENTION=23935]Nagol[/MENTION] posted a little way upthread, and that are really quite well-known: the focus on the encounter as the locus of play, the emphasis on player-side tools and resources, the metagame mechanics, etc.

For some people D&D is a style of story - I often call it "gonzo fantasy" - in which improbably lucky heroes, powered by a lot of metaphysical juice, save the world from cosmological threats writ either small (a priest of Bane has whipped the goblin tribes up into a frenzy) or large (the sorcerer-king is trying to turn the whole atmosphere of the world into unbreathable poison). For me, this is the heart of D&D. It's there in the G and D series, in the Slaver series, in 3E modules like Speaker in Dreams and Bastion of Broken Souls, in Keep on the Borderlands (with its evil cleric and chaos cultists), in the Penumbra d20 modules, in the Freeport trilogy, in the OA modules that came out for AD&D, and plenty more besides.

For those who see D&D in this way, mechanics are to some extent secondary - I have played this sort of D&D using Rolemaster, for instance. And a lot of the traditions of D&D dungeon crawl module design are also secondary. The last time I ran B2, for instance, the Caves of Chaos barely even figured - the players learned about the Chaos Cult and followed clues that led them to a city where it was based (Critwall, in Greyhawk's Shield Lands) and continued to operate against it there. I've never run much of D3, but for me both D1 and D2 have played primarily as negotiation/social adventures (D1 over 20 years ago, using Rolemaster as the engine; D2 around 6 months ago using 4e).

For me, brining out the story of these D&D adventures - some classic, some obscure - has often required ignoring the filler, amping up the backstory (and making it more accessible to the players - D&D module writing has a tendency to use the backstory as something to motivate the GM rather than the players, which I always find bizarre), and generally reducing the dungeon-crawliness of it all. For a player like me, for whom D&D is what I've just described, 4e did not depart from what has been D&D. It fully realised it.

I think that early on they found that they were not meeting their projections for new players.

<snip>

Mearls has said (I wish I could find the interview to link to it) that one of the things their data showed was that a lot of people were buying the 4e starter sets, but they weren't moving on to the rest of the game. And you can see this hanging over much of 4e and the transition to 5e.

I don't have the link but I remember Mearls's remark. And I think you are absolutely correct on this point - they want an easy "on ramp".

I think there's room for legitimate doubt at this stage as to whether or not they've achieved it - it's the nature of a fan-based playtest that it is experienced rather than new players who are involved, and I think that in many ways 5e is a very demanding system for GMs, which may create road blocks on the on ramp. Hopefully I'm wrong about this.

Regarding the indie elements of 4e and how much Mearls understood it, I think I'll keep this message from getting any longer than it already is by linking to these previous posts.

It turned out I'd already XPed the first one! But you got some belated XP for the follow-up.

 

[Manbearcat]

Having just reread the relevant DMG sections....I think its just that its far to subtle, even timid about it.

I don't disagree.

I don't see anything about spending a Healing Surge for success intentionally. If Healing Surges are intended to be an "economy" for Story Now purposes rather than a sim-ish reflection of Character Condition, I see no evidence of it in the text of the DMG1.

DMG2 and other articles that just post-dated DMG1 (unfortunately).

but honestly I don't get how most of those other points line up as "Indie". I mean, Healing Surges are no more "open descriptor" than HP before them.

Absolutely agree. I would say they're pretty much the same. However, one classical element of most indie-design is open/broad descriptor resources and fortune in the middle resolution. Due to its system interactions (eg fueling the heroic comeback/rally by way of player invocation of abilities that trigger them during play), healing surges (not just the surge themselves but the entirety of the infrastructure) push play toward enabling the default genre of big damn heroes as capable protagonists in high fantasy play.

Quest XPs are certainly not intended to be the primary (sometimes only) source of advancement as are similar mechanics in other games.

Its certainly not primary (you get it via defeating challenges as well) but post-town fallout isn't the only "xp" in Dogs (the analogue to 4e quest xp). You also get post-conflict fallout "xp". Same thing for Dungeon World. You get xp for failures, xp for any of the 3 End of Sessions that you can answer yes to, and for resolving bonds and successfully fulfilling alignment statements in the course of play (the analogue to 4e quest xp). Both straight up Story Now engines.

Overall, in DMG1, I think the below pushes play toward a Story Now agenda (I think most of it pushes toward an indie agenda with much of the rest of it being Step On Up):

- About half of the Good Structure advice (Building An Adventure)
- About half of the Poor Structure advice(Building An Adventure)
- The Quest section, especially player designed quests (including hooking the power gamer on page 8 - which is the point of most of indie xp - matching player interests, including the subordinating of optimal decision-making sometimes, with story-making incentive device)
- Some of the Skill Challenge advice (generally what pemerton quotes upthread)
- Noncombat conflict resolution at all
- The GMing principle to "say yes or roll the dice" outlined several times including on p42
- The GMing principle to not overprep, to leave things open and malleable and allow the players the freedom to define the world during and before play and run with their ideas
- The invocation of the virtue of troupe character creation
- The first section on combat encounters which specifically calls out this game as a collection of "scenes" (where the game happens) in an ongoing drama (rather than serial exploration) which are meant to test the player characters against something that impedes their progress...may sound vanilla but that could literally be from several indie games (especially Dogs) if a little more specific language was used ("Dogs" for player characters, "conflict-charged scene" for encounter, "the sinful inclinations of the spiritually besieged" for something that impedes, and "maintenance and protection of The Faith" for their progress)
- The transparently outlined thematic focus and guidance per tier of play

In PHB1 there is some other stuff (but I'm not inclined to look it up right now cause I'm tired!) but "skip the guards and get to the fun (!)" could have been subbed out for the noninflammatory "every moment, push play towards conflict" if Vincent Baker hadn't claimed that first!

As has been said a hundred times over, Robin Laws involvement with DMG2 (hell, he probably wrote or influenced pretty much all of it) really, really brought it home and fleshed out the above in greater and more transparent detail (including Fail-Forward).

The scene based mechanics I'll give you, but that was pretty old hat by the 2008.

It was.

It seems to me that that's what these discussion always come down to, and I think its instructive and evidence for what I'm talking about. Other than you (and some other around here) "got it" when 4e first came out, and I failed my Secret Decoder Ring check, I actually don't think we disagree much about it.

I don't either. You and Nagol are smart, good faith, veteran players of indie games. The fact that neither of you saw it certainly says something.

 

[Raith5]

I don't mean to pick on Manbearcat, but the above quote nicely encapsulates a common thread of argument. One of the worst bombs to throw into a 4e discussion is "It's not D&D." But I'm sitting here looking at this list of how 4e made major, fundamental breaks from D&Ds of the past, and then when people vehemently reject these changes, it's chalked up to the "worst tribal instincts of the D&D fanbase." Excepting, of course, for the obvious existence of trolls and jerks in almost any internet discussion, I like to assume good faith on both sides of this issue. WotC made drastic changes to the game, fundamentally changing it. It is, for all intents and purposes, a different game that plays differently. They did the same with 3e, but it would seem to a lesser degree. I think it's entirely fair to say WotC changed the game too much to be accepted by a significant number of fans. That doesn't mean "WotC tried to make it into an MMO," is a particularly good argument, but nor does it mean that fans were being unreasonable in expecting a certain fundamental consistency in the gameplay and fluff. I greatly enjoy playing 4e, and it mechanically supports the tropes we liked back in my early BECMI days. But everything Manbearcat mentions in the above quote? Not what I expect or look for in D&D. (For that matter, neither is 3e's obsessive focus on world simulation through play mechanics.)

But back to the big picture! While the above matters for the most part to our the serious RPG gaming community, I do not think it was the problem with 4e on the whole. And that's because I firmly believe that WotC has never cared about "bringing along the base" with a new edition. I've talked about before, new editions are all about bringing in new players. And those players don't really give a crap about previous iterations of the game (at least, not at first). So, while I can sympathize with older players who felt 4e was a change too far, I don't really think that hurt 4e or WotC. They got a lot of new players. They retained some players who liked the changes, and some players who didn't mind the changes. Enough that they could prove the viability of the DDI subscription model, which gave them both gobs of money and gobs of market data.

But I think that early on they found that they were not meeting their projections for new players. Because new editions are in many ways reactions to old editions, you can perceive what the designers/managers saw as issues of old editions by looking at the new ones. 2nd Edition was in many ways a reaction to the baroqueness and family unfriendly presentation of 1st Edition. With 3e, they wanted the mechanical universality and consistency that 2nd Ed. didn't have. With 4th edition, they wanted to address the balance and GM issues of 3e, while bringing in design elements from popular indie, online, and board games.

Mearls has said (I wish I could find the interview to link to it) that one of the things their data showed was that a lot of people were buying the 4e starter sets, but they weren't moving on to the rest of the game. And you can see this hanging over much of 4e and the transition to 5e. 4e had two starter sets in three years. They tried to lower the barrier to entry with the Red Box starter set and the Essentials line, but ultimately it was no go. Over and over throughout the playtest Mearls has stressed making the core game easy and simple for new players to pick up and get right into gaming. To the point that they've made big changes to their sales model. Instead of 3 Core Books as the game and an introductory set to get you interested, they have a cheap quick-start starter set, that transitions to the free Basic game, that transitions to any one of the Big Three, depending on your particular needs.

Good post. But I always got the feeling in 4e that it was mechanically rewarding and spelling out things that were long part of the game. So I dont buy the point that the "indie" elements were alien. Basically it was long held that rouges do sneak attack, but someone asked the question in 4e: what mechanical expression can we give to other classes?

My sense was that a bigger issue was the 4e started PCs at a high level of power (and probably complexity) than what many fantasy tropes articulated. That said the rise to demi-god hood in 4e did remind me strongly of BECMI.

FWIW I agree that barrier to entry to 4e was too high: it was too complex. Mind you, i would have liked to see a free basic version of 4e/ 4e essentials!

 

[Neonchameleon]

As a player, I prefer to stay in actor stance. The dissociative mechanics are something I dislike in 4e (or FATE which I like to run, but won't play).

As a player I too prefer to stay in actor stance. And because of this, and for all the reasons you list, 4e is to me vastly superior to any other edition of D&D.

I dislike the reversal of cause->effect the power structure imposes without an equal in-game imposition ("Why didn't you try to trip him? Because I tripped someone else earlier today, he presented no opening."

More like "Why didn't you trip him?"
"I didn't see an opportunity."

The rest of your comment is to me metagaming and indicates that you are already out of actor stance. The OODA loop should be adhered to while gaming - and all options present all the time defeats the point of this.

and "Gee it was a good thing you tripped him! Yes that's why I avoided tripping anything earlier today. The Conservation of Martial Action theorem dictates I only get one possible success a day").

Try "That was impressive! I didn't think you had it in you!"
"Like just about all professional athletes and unlike some people I know about pacing myself. I am not, unlike most anti-immersive fighters an untiring robot who always performs at exactly the same level regardless of whether we are fighting goblins or a dragon. I have adrenaline, emotions, a sense of timing, and the ability to pull out all the stops."

I dislike the way the dying condition is presented -- either the wounds were grievous enough to kill or they were only flesh wounds a la the last scene in The Last Action Hero).

To me this is straining at gnats while swallowing camels. The elephant in the room is Hit Points. Hit points where you can be whittled down to one and have no mechanical effect at all and it takes no longer to recover than a professional athlete after a race.

It's a choice between The Last Action Hero and an utterly incoherent system that suddenly changes from a Hollywood Action Movie when you are above 0hp to ... something else once you cross that threshold.

I find a consistent world, as 4e presents, makes maintaining actor stance vastly easier.

I dislike having my will suborned by other players without an external effect that can be pointed at (warlord using his turn to move my character. I hear that was 'clarified' in later books so the original player can refuse, but that wasn't the original rule).

To me the ability to refuse is just common sense.

I dislike fiddly positional combat both as a DM and as a player. I much prefer FATE's zones to a grid. I use at most a whiteboard/chalkboard for current character positioning and generally rely on TofM.

Fiddly positional combat is a feature of D&D. 4e's is less fiddly than 3e's - and far less fiddly than either 2e's fireballs-by-volume or 1e's distances measured in inches. Theatre of the Mind works great in systems built for it like Fate and 13A. But the battlemap is the only way I can maintain actor stance without analysis paralysis and games of 20 questions in any form of D&D.

And when you add in the fact that 4E is the one version of D&D where you very rarely have to look up rules (something that shatters actor stance because it means you don't understand the world) then 4E absolutely crushes all previous editions for me for actor stance.

I don't mean to pick on Manbearcat, but the above quote nicely encapsulates a common thread of argument. One of the worst bombs to throw into a 4e discussion is "It's not D&D." But I'm sitting here looking at this list of how 4e made major, fundamental breaks from D&Ds of the past, and then when people vehemently reject these changes, it's chalked up to the "worst tribal instincts of the D&D fanbase."

What's missed by [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] is that a lot of those changes are reversion to the roots of D&D - particularly the GMing principles, the opinionation of the advice, the aggressively pushing a playstyle, and the lack of fealty to canon. It was 2E and 3E that got away from D&D being a delightfully focussed game that aggressively pushed a playstyle, and that got away from balance. 4E brought it back.

Regarding the indie elements of 4e and how much Mearls understood it, I think I'll keep this message from getting any longer than it already is by linking to these previous posts.

To the first of those posts, you're saying that KotS sounds like a classic dungeoncrawl. Possibly so - but if so it's a terrible one. It's a dungeon stomp that's fight after fight after fight with little exploration. OK, so my standard for a good dungeon crawl is Caverns of Thracia with multiple factions, a non-linear dungeon, levels of history, and more. But there is no edition in which the Keep would have been a good adventure.