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

[Nikosandros]

Honestly, this whole thread is the 4e forum experience in a nutshell.

Ironic and true. The OP really had his wish granted... he got to relive all the things that he missed.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I assert my definitional disagreement - as I have previously throughout the thread - that player agency for their character (those last three words are important too) comes from having their characters be able to exercise what I believe is the central premise of a role-playing game: that anything can be attempted, and that when this isn't so there's an in-game rationale for why such a limitation exists.

And then when rationales are offered you reject them. Apparently no one in your world ever gets wise to tricks, no one tires, and no one needs to pace themselves ever.

Saying that a certain action becomes less effective and/or more difficult to pull off from one moment to the next for a purely metagame reason inhibits that character agency

Saying that you frequently can't pull the same stunt twice with the same effectiveness is just common sense on the other hand.

Intent, by itself, is not enough. Agency means the ability to try and do something; wanting to do it is insufficient.

You have the ability to try.

 

[billd91]

Cars, brocolli, rice with stew, the analogies keep piling up. At the end of the day, are we here to annoy each other with counterpoints based on the wrong extrapolation? I guess the answer is 'yes, yes we are."

Everyone has their own favorite system or terminology to use to put RPGs in context. The Alexandrian, the Forge, dissociative mechanics, quadratic wizard-linear fighter, video-gamey, unbalanced, kill things and take their stuff, blah, blah, blah. And if you're outside the tribe that embraces those terms, chances are they piss you off on these boards.

 

[Alzrius]

This is a figment of your imagination. The idea that everything you try always has the same chance of success, no matter what you have done before, how tired you are, and which muscles in specific are tired is just as silly as the idea that Usain Bolt can run the 400m with each 100m taking exactly the same length of time.

This is a product of your own mind, and nothing more. While external factors are by their very nature associated, the idea that somehow fatigue only applies when performing special moves is so lopsided as to be on-its-face discarded for its lack of believability.

In short the game isn't about wounds. So it always must have been wounds. Riiiight.

The game is about wounds, it's just not about the debilitating effects of wounds. Again with this silliness that "we must perfectly model all aspects of reality!"

Because clerics have good PR. Healing times in AD&D are about those of marathon runner recovery.

It's this sort of deliberate ignorance of contrary evidence that makes your argument hard to take seriously. 1E was, at best, inconsistent on the nature of hit point loss. Accept it and move on.

They aren't arbitrary which means they must be an incredibly limited subset of what's going on.

Not so. You have the ability to attempt to do anything - that's inherently less limited than a paradigm where you can't try to do anything.

No, I meant what I said. If you associate you limit.

On the contrary, if you dissociate you limit.

And it having no actual effect on characters until you reach 0hp has always been part of the system. Most games fixed that because if you want hit points to be physical damage that is necessary.

Not only is the debilitating nature of progressive injury not at all necessary, it's not even desirable. Once again, D&D is not trying to be, nor should it be, a perfect simulation of the real world.

Apparently you think that duelling with everyone around you in the time it takes for most people to engage in one person can accurately be summarised as "Swinging a sword in a circle around you". This is your issue.

Apparently you think that performing a single action once will necessarily fatigue you to the point where you'll suck at performing it again (but not fatigue you in any other regard). That's your issue.

 

[Alzrius]

Ah! The heart of the matter!

I've been trying to get down to that. But everything changes, and the ashes will scatter.

The restriction is NOT arbitrary. It's designed to enforce genre conventions. It's designed to maximize variance in power use and minimize use of the same power over and over again. It is not associated with any particular in-fiction constraint, true. But it is NOT arbitrary.

The restriction is arbitrary, because it has no corresponding in-game function that it's attempting to model or explain; a genre convention has nothing to do with what's happening in-character. I fully understand your reasoning in that 4E is trying to enforce a certain style of game - but from an in-character standpoint, that is an arbitrary imposition, since there's no reason within the context of the game world for the character's abilities to suddenly be limited in such a manner, either in scope or efficacy.

 

[evilbob]

I see that 4E was polarizing in a number of ways. But can someone give me the "jist" of the whole thing? Or maybe point me to a site that has already broken it down?

As this thread has unsurprisingly demonstrated in the last few days, you can see just how polarizing 4E was. This thread may be locked soon just because you asked a question that was nearly guaranteed to get edition-warsy. All that to say: yes, there was a lot of change and a lot of opinion about that change. 4.0 took D&D in a whole other direction; to summarize the changes is nearly impossible, and it's just going to offend some people regardless. In short, it was a very different game, and some liked it and others didn't.

The main thing to know, though, is that 5.0 is much closer to 3.5 than 4.0 was to 3.5. I think you'd have an easier time transitioning to 5.0. Also, the product is newer and therefore will get better support in the future. Pathfinder is often called 3.75 because it's basically just a continuation of 3.5 with some tweaks. That would be even less of a transition for you, and it is also being supported currently.

 

[Neonchameleon]

This is a product of your own mind, and nothing more. While external factors are by their very nature associated, the idea that somehow fatigue only applies when performing special moves is so lopsided as to be on-its-face discarded for its lack of believability.

In short your problem isn't that you aren't restricted - it's that you're not restricted enough

The game is about wounds, it's just not about the debilitating effects of wounds. Again with this silliness that "we must perfectly model all aspects of reality!"

There is no way in which hit points model reality. Unless we're in action movie physics and cosmetic damage land.

It's this sort of deliberate ignorance of contrary evidence that makes your argument hard to take seriously. 1E was, at best, inconsistent on the nature of hit point loss. Accept it and move on.

1E lent strongly one way. 4e lent the same way. 2E, 3.0, and 3.5 weren't specific and have hit points as a complete mess. Accept it and move on.

Not so. You have the ability to attempt to do anything - that's inherently less limited than a paradigm where you can't try to do anything.

I repeat, try and CAGI in 2E.

On the contrary, if you dissociate you limit.

I can do more in Fate than with non-magical characters in AD&D.

Not only is the debilitating nature of progressive injury not at all necessary, it's not even desirable. Once again, D&D is not trying to be, nor should it be, a perfect simulation of the real world.

That's because it's no simulation of injury at all. It's trying to simulate Eroll Flynn style swashbuckling.

Apparently you think that performing a single action once will necessarily fatigue you to the point where you'll suck at performing it again (but not fatigue you in any other regard). That's your issue.

So your problem is that AEDU isn't restrictive enough. That's the opposite issue to what you were claiming.

 

[Alzrius]

And then when rationales are offered you reject them. Apparently no one in your world ever gets wise to tricks, no one tires, and no one needs to pace themselves ever.

They're rejected because they fail to measure up. In the game world, no one does need to pace themselves, that's a gamist concession that it makes. Likewise, someone "getting wise to your tricks" doesn't explain why the character suddenly sucks at using them on anyone else in the fight, even if they weren't there when he used them previously.

Saying that you frequently can't pull the same stunt twice with the same effectiveness is just common sense on the other hand.

It's not sensical at all, especially when that reasoning is applied so lopsidedly.

You have the ability to try.

If your ability to try is suddenly massively burdened for no particular in-game reason, then that ability is being impinged upon.

 

[piffany]

You have it backwards here. Gary wrote that article explaining his rationale. But by its very nature, magic has an in-game reasoning for how it functions, under whatever rules it uses. Magic works the way it does because it's magic, and ergo that can be recognized in-game.

I think we remember that article very differently: Gary starts with the list of game play requirement and tries on a few different ideas before saying (despite quotes, I'm paraphrasing) "Hey, wait, if I use this Vancian Magic thing I can get the mechanics I want with a plausible explanation!" I can excerpt it here if that would help.

Untrue. Skills are (by themselves) physical abilities that can be used in various intuitive ways. Magic isn't intuitive, as it doesn't need to model anything except itself - ergo, neither are "because game."

You are saying "untrue" but as near as I can tell there is no actual justification for this. All the rules in all the systems, including 1e, 2e, 3e, and 4e are the way they are Because Game. I get that you find the explanation in 4e to be unsatisfying, but I don't see how you can argue that the game mechanics of the various systems are not the game mechanics of the various systems. What am I misunderstanding?

I mean, basically this conversation feels like retread #835,152 of "It's not realistic that that dragon's acid breath would not corrode my armor!"

 

[I'm A Banana]

The restriction is arbitrary, because it has no corresponding in-game function that it's attempting to model or explain; a genre convention has nothing to do with what's happening in-character. I fully understand your reasoning in that 4E is trying to enforce a certain style of game - but from an in-character standpoint, that is an arbitrary imposition, since there's no reason within the context of the game world for the character's abilities to suddenly be limited in such a manner, either in scope or efficacy.

I think it's possible to note that a mechanical or genre reason isn't arbitrary from a player standpoint, even if it is arbitrary from a character standpoint. And that we do a lot of things that are arbitrary from a character standpoint and only make sense in a player standpoint -- ESPECIALLY DM's, but players, too, in certain ways.

So I think we can agree that there is a reason for it -- perhaps a dang good reason -- but that this reason has to do with the metagame, not the character experience, and thus breaks the character experience for some portion of the players.