With 5e here, what will 4e be remembered for?

[cavalier973]

World of Warcraft is just Dungeons and Dragons in digital format. If you're not playing Rogue, you're not playing a CRPG.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

as well as MMOs such as World of Warcraft.

Generally a very good post, but can you explain why you believe this? It seems, superficially, to merely be one of those canards people trot out periodically, but which have no actual reasoning behind them.

Everything else you say makes sense (even if I don't agree 100%), so it stands out to me.

 

[TrippyHippy]

Generally a very good post, but can you explain why you believe this? It seems, superficially, to merely be one of those canards people trot out periodically, but which have no actual reasoning behind them.

Everything else you say makes sense (even if I don't agree 100%), so it stands out to me.

First of all, I think there was a genuine interest in Wizards at the time to be able to integrate all the tabletop experience into a seamless connection with online gaming. I think there was even a plan to set up their own WoW style online D&D game, which you could play with tabletop characters and vice versa. It was abandoned, however, when other issues (technical and economic) arose.

Secondly, and this is in no way intended as a dig about anything, the whole game was driven by a need to be more visually involving. It wanted the tabletop to look busier with battle mats, miniatures and other things like cards and such. 3E had been moving this way anyway, but 4E pushed it right to the forefront. The whole game wanted the players to be thinking in these terms. The recent 5E expression of a ‘theatre of the mind’ was pushed back in favour of providing something that was more explicitly a ‘game’ to the casual player.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

First of all, I think there was a genuine interest in Wizards at the time to be able to integrate all the tabletop experience into a seamless connection with online gaming. I think there was even a plan to set up their own WoW style online D&D game, which you could play with tabletop characters and vice versa. It was abandoned, however, when other issues (technical and economic) arose.

That doesn't seem accurate.

The proposed VTT (which I was very interested in for playing with friends in other countries) didn't share any features unique to or originating with MMOs, nor even ones which are associated with MMOs beyond other games, and most of it's features weren't found in MMOs at all. It was basically somewhat akin to NWN in DM-run mode (the Bioware version of NWN), only with a persistent character between modules (which I believe NWN1 allowed), and turn-based, rather than real-time with pausing. It didn't have a "persistent world", or any "massive" elements.

This is why I say canard - there was nothing in the proposed VTT which was "WoW-style". It was not a "WoW-style online game" on any level that I can see, and I am in no way being willfully blind or the like. On the contrary, I am straining to see similarities.

I presume you were misinformed on this, and think that, perhaps, they were shooting for something akin to the current Cryptic NWN, which is most assuredly a "WoW-style online game". That was not true though.

Also, if we're talking about the same thing, and I think we are, it was not cancelled for "technical and economic" reasons, unless we're talking in the most ridiculous euphemisms possible. It was cancelled because the lead developer and driving force behind it and the DDI in general killed his wife and then himself:

http://www.examiner.com/article/the-murder-suicide-that-derailed-4th-edition-dungeons-dragons-online



That's a big part of why the DDI stuff ended up with another company entirely in 4E (5E's digital stuff is with yet a third company).

Anyway, there's nothing "WoW-style" about what they were describing, unless you would, for example, describe all other VTTs as "WoW-style online games" (which would be fairly ludicrous). They hoped for a more polished, streamlined and branded experience than other VTTs, to be sure, but it was just a big fancy VTT they were aiming for.

Secondly, and this is in no way intended as a dig about anything, the whole game was driven by a need to be more visually involving. It wanted the tabletop to look busier with battle mats, miniatures and other things like cards and such. 3E had been moving this way anyway, but 4E pushed it right to the forefront. The whole game wanted the players to be thinking in these terms. The recent 5E expression of a ‘theatre of the mind’ was pushed back in favour of providing something that was more explicitly a ‘game’ to the casual player.

This is certainly broadly true, but has seemingly nothing to do with WoW or being "WoW-style", so I'm curious at seeing it connected to that.

They didn't want it just more visually appealing, either - they wanted a more tactile experience (which again, WoW is absolutely not), and put a strong initial focus on miniatures, on cards to hold, on maps, and so on - stronger, I agree, than even 3.XE had been. There's no way the 4E tactical combat system could really work well without maps of some kind, in fact (I've seen interesting variants that avoid them, but they are rather different).

"The whole game" is a very inaccurate overstatement, though. Certainly that wasn't the case, because there were no attempts to apply the same visual and tactile stuff to skills, to rituals, to skill challenges (which could have actually benefited from some success/failure counters or the like!) or anything of that sort, and frankly, that's a huge part of "the game" - often I've had 4E sessions where 90%+ of the session is those things.

"The whole of combat", though, I would agree with.

So 4E definitely attempted to move D&D to a default of a more visual and tactile focus in combat. It wasn't the first edition to do that - 3E was and good god did I kick my little lets in the air and scream when I realized a battlemap was basically required for 3E play if a lot of abilities were going to work right, but with 4E I'd got over that, and 4E actually did a good thing here by not half-arsing it. 3.XE was in an awful middle-ground place, where TotM wasn't really viable for complicated fights, or when certain classes got involved in the mix, but the game didn't use the map enough to make the map actually fun - it was just a hurdle. Whereas 4E's abilities, terrain hazards, and general design ethos did make the map fun, and not just a hurdle.

TLDR: 4E did want to make the table busier, to sell minis, maybe to sell cards (they gave up on that so fast I've never been sure if they were serious), and because they thought it appealed, I think, to a newly-recognised potential audience of people who didn't play RPGs, but did play fairly complicated boardgames. But none of that has anything to do with WoW. It has a lot more to do with Settlers of Catan.*

* = My experience is that they were dead right on this. I know a lot of people who will play any number of complicated Euro/German-style board games, deck-builders like Dominion and even the bloody complicated Game of Thrones boardgame (which once lead to me shouting "I WILL BREAK YOU!" at my wife - I banned myself from ever playing House Greyjoy again after that!), and most of those people had no interest in RPGs when seeing them played, and little in hearing them described (some were long-ex-RPG-players, too, and not keen to return), but when they saw D&D 4E, or even better, played it, they got it, and they engaged with it.

 

[Emerikol]

I guess I need to explain my point "everyone was playing D&D".

I did not mean that every living human on the planet was playing D&D. I meant that people who wanted a D&D esq game were largely playing D&D. Wotc owned the D&D rpg market. Even if you were clinging to 1e or 2e, you were still playing a D&D game.

Nowadays, lots of people are playing a D&Desq game and not playing D&D. (I'm using D&D in the legal sense here and not the conceptual sense). OSR and Pathfinder have lots of players.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I guess I need to explain my point "everyone was playing D&D".

I did not mean that every living human on the planet was playing D&D. I meant that people who wanted a D&D esq game were largely playing D&D. Wotc owned the D&D rpg market. Even if you were clinging to 1e or 2e, you were still playing a D&D game.

Nowadays, lots of people are playing a D&Desq game and not playing D&D. (I'm using D&D in the legal sense here and not the conceptual sense). OSR and Pathfinder have lots of players.

You know this is the point I've been making, too, right?

But it's not right to say "During 3E, everyone was playing D&D", unless by 3E, you mean strictly 3E and NOT 3.5E (so 2000-2003). Castles & Crusades was 2004. OSRIC appeared in 2006. Labyrinth Lord in 2007. Basic Fantasy, 2007. Swords and Wizardry, 2008 (so developed before 4E was released).

There were tons of more amateur stuff out there too. As soon as people realized that the OGL effectively allowed them to re-create older editions of D&D, but tidy them up and modernize them a bit, OSR stuff spread rapidly.

HackMaster, too, was 2001, and certainly ate some of 3.XE's audience, and is clearly a D&D-esque game in the way you're using the term.

So the divisions, the cracks, go way back. People started playing D&D-esque games as a direct alternative to playing WotC D&D long before 4E came out.

 

[Emerikol]

You know this is the point I've been making, too, right?

But it's not right to say "During 3E, everyone was playing D&D", unless by 3E, you mean strictly 3E and NOT 3.5E (so 2000-2003). Castles & Crusades was 2004. OSRIC appeared in 2006. Labyrinth Lord in 2007. Basic Fantasy, 2007. Swords and Wizardry, 2008 (so developed before 4E was released).

There were tons of more amateur stuff out there too. As soon as people realized that the OGL effectively allowed them to re-create older editions of D&D, but tidy them up and modernize them a bit, OSR stuff spread rapidly.

HackMaster, too, was 2001, and certainly ate some of 3.XE's audience, and is clearly a D&D-esque game in the way you're using the term.

So the divisions, the cracks, go way back. People started playing D&D-esque games as a direct alternative to playing WotC D&D long before 4E came out.

I think my only argument is magnitude. I think 4e forced a lot of players to look at these other options. Some people no doubt tried them prior to 4e. C&C is very obviously targeting the pre-3e crowd and it definitely got some adherents in those days. I'm just saying that 4e turned it into a stampede instead of a trickle.

 

[TwoSix]

Generally a very good post, but can you explain why you believe this? It seems, superficially, to merely be one of those canards people trot out periodically, but which have no actual reasoning behind them.

I tend to believe it simply because I think the people designing 4e weren't stupid. WoW was a phenomenon in the period where 4e was being designed (2005-2007), to the point where it was recognized even outside the nerdosphere, and into general pop culture.

Considering that WoW's fundamental identity is inherited from D&D (with Warhammer influences), why wouldn't they try to do some cross-pollination?

I'd say the bigger mistake was in not borrowing MORE from WoW, say, by having character stats be visible and persistent on DDi.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I think my only argument is magnitude. I think 4e forced a lot of players to look at these other options. Some people no doubt tried them prior to 4e. C&C is very obviously targeting the pre-3e crowd and it definitely got some adherents in those days. I'm just saying that 4e turned it into a stampede instead of a trickle.

I think "forced" is emotive and silly, but I will agree with "encouraged"!

I mean, what I was that, pre-4E, before anyone knew jack about 4E, OSR was already big (though rarely called that, back then). People went on and on and on and on about C&C and OSRIC and LL before 4E was really even a thing to the point where I was just mentally shutting down whenever I came across them in a thread (not because I disliked them, but I did find the constant discussion very dull!).

What surprised me, in fact, was the 4E was like "Shove OSR!" in it's design, and went in the precise opposite direction, considering OSR seemed to be popular.

So then add in the godawful early marketing of 4E, which was basically "Your old game was crap, play our game, you dumbass!", and which was of course ESPECIALLY insulting to anyone with OSR leanings, and the fact that 4E's design, however good or bad, is very transparently not OSR-ish, not "traditional" in appearance, and so on, and yep, certainly lots more people are looking at OSR. Trickle to flood or stream to river? Hardly matters, but it happened.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Considering that WoW's fundamental identity is inherited from D&D (with Warhammer influences), why wouldn't they try to do some cross-pollination?

Sure, but no-one can ever seem to find any real evidence that they did. Just vague sweeping stuff like "WoW is visual and 4E was more visual..." (pretty much everything got more visual in that period, though) or "WoW is online and the VTT was online" or "WoW has roles and 4E has roles" (well, sure, but they're different ones, and ones D&D has always had on some level) - etc...

Whereas 3.XE has an actual goddamn Warcraft sourcebooks! Why didn't 4E have anything like that?