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

[Nergal Pendragon]

And, as happens so frequently, someone else claims to be a better authority on what I said than I am.

This is exactly the point I've made throughout. I'm glad you have come around to understanding it and no longer disagree.

And in this, you admit defeat and that you dance around in clown makeup and a tutu!

(Joking! Had to make the joke! )

 

[TwoSix]

Ok, why would they stop H4ting a game they H4te?

I was very negative towards 4e in late 2007 based on a lot of the previews. Discussion and explanations of how to look at the game a little differently than I was used to clicked a light bulb for me, and made me appreciate how the game could give a different experience than other games I had tried.

I was also somewhat sour because I thought the initial PHB was underwhelming. Actually playing a campaign changed my mind again.

Not saying it has to happen, or anything is wrong if your feelings don't change. But it certainly can happen.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Ok, why would they stop H4ting a game they H4te?

Because their hate was based on:

A) Impressions which are more due to bad DM'ing, a bad adventure or a bad group.

or

B) Inaccurate ideas about the game.

or

C) Prejudice.

or

D) They personally changed.

So, y'know, it can happen. I saw people say they hated 4E and then come back later saying it was actually okay or even good. Same pattern in 3.XE too.

Like TwoSix I was extremely negative towards 4E before release. I only bought it because I had a lot of cash right then and it was D&D, basically. So...

 

[Kraztur]

And in this, you admit defeat and that you dance around in clown makeup and a tutu!

Haba haba! After mating with dirty witless primitive early humans, I could sure go for a clown in a tutu!

 

[Tony Vargas]

Spectacular in it's absence is the once-everpresent "EVERYTHING IS CORE!", which used to be the source of literally endless "I HATE 4E BECAUSE THEY MAKE ME USE WARFORGED IN MY PRECIOUS CAMPAIGN!"-type rants, back in 2008/9. Man people got so wildly mad about it. Also the lack of an obvious/explicit Rule 0. Hoo boy did people hate that.

Was anyone really taken in by "everything is core?"

I can just picture WotC marketing guys talking to Hasbro marketing guys:

WotC: "Well, in the RPG 'industry' core rule-books sell better than supplements..."

Hasbro: "Great! From now on, you only put out core rule-books, no supplements."

WotC: "...."

 

[Nergal Pendragon]

Was anyone really taken in by "everything is core?"

I can just picture WotC marketing guys talking to Hasbro marketing guys:

WotC: "Well, in the RPG 'industry' core rule-books sell better than supplements..."

Hasbro: "Great! From now on, you only put out core rule-books, no supplements."

WotC: "...."

I believe that's actually what happened, too.

 

[BryonD]

I was very negative towards 4e in late 2007 based on a lot of the previews. Discussion and explanations of how to look at the game a little differently than I was used to clicked a light bulb for me, and made me appreciate how the game could give a different experience than other games I had tried.

I was also somewhat sour because I thought the initial PHB was underwhelming. Actually playing a campaign changed my mind again.

Not saying it has to happen, or anything is wrong if your feelings don't change. But it certainly can happen.

Agreed, but obviously it didn't change the balance of the popularity.
As Tony has agreed, the tendency is for the game to decrease in fan base over time.
And for every one of you there are more out there saying that the issues with 4E didn't seem real until they played for a year or two.

The "perfect storm" had nothing to do with the rate at which 4E is losing its fan base. The idea that the removal of "the perfect storm" would have made any difference is flawed. Even without it, there would still have to be some attraction. There is no hard and absolute proof either way, but there is more reason to reasonable conclude that the people who found 4E "videogamey", "homogenous", "too tactical", etc... etc... would still feel that way.

 

[BryonD]

So, y'know, it can happen. I saw people say they hated 4E and then come back later saying it was actually okay or even good. Same pattern in 3.XE too.

Right. But the net balance for 3E was decline over time. And 4e declined faster.
Anecdotes not withstanding, the market results are there.

 

[BryonD]

And in this, you admit defeat and that you dance around in clown makeup and a tutu!

(Joking! Had to make the joke! )

took me a moment. Nice.

 

[Alzrius]

Firstly, martial abilities needn't be wholly physical. They can have mental dimension as well: courage, boldness, trickery, intimidation, and focus are among the mental abilities that a martial character might need to develop, use - and sometimes hold in 'reserve.'

You're attempting to move the goalposts here. Not only are you suggesting that the self-titled "martial" abilities aren't, well, martial at all, but that now one's emotions and state of mind are somehow held in discrete reserves, and are necessary to performing a physical action. That doesn't solve the underlying problem, it just moves it to another area.

Secondly, how do 'we' know how physical abilities of a hero work in the context of a fantasy world? Anyone here ever cut a giant's achillies tendon, killed a band of kobolds in six seconds flat, cut their way out of a purple worm? No. We can't rely on our workaday nerdly experience of 'physical abilities.'

Yes, you can. Unless you're saying that there's something inherently different on a fundamental level regarding how things like "swing a sword" work, then this excuse doesn't have any appreciable level of being reasonable. You're saying that the nature of killing a kobold will be so different from any particular physical action in the real world that it operates by fundamentally different rules regarding the physical nature of the task. That's not only unintuitive, it's unbelievable.

However, even if we /were/ to do something that preposterous, it still doesn't support your assertion that 'deep reserves' must be 100% generic, and that exhausting your capacity to do one preternatural heroic stunt necessarily exhausts all such options. If you do a set of high-weight curls with one arm, the muscles of that arm are going to anaerobic and become unable to continue beyond many reps. That won't stop you from running.

This is simply flat-out wrong. Not only do you start from the premise that "saying there are any physical parallels between the physical actions of swinging a sword at a kobold and swinging a sword at a human is preposterous," but you then suggest that physically tiring yourself out won't actually physically tire you out. You're essentially denying all terms and definitions to say that your scenario is somehow workable.

That's leaving aside the bizarre conflation you're making of declaring that martial abilities are preternatural, and then still arguing from a position of "but it can so work like physical abilities." If they're preternatural, just say they're preternatural, and that's that.

So, even if your invocation of RL physical abilities were valid (and it isn't), it would provide counter-examples to your assertion, not support for it.

On the contrary; not only is my invocation (which is the book's invocation) of real-life physical abilities valid (and it really is), it flat-out supports my assertion, while denying yours.

That line of reasoning having failed you, why can't you accept the official explanation of 'exhausting deep reserves' given in the PH1? And, even if you can't accept it, why do you do feel the need to substitute a dissociative one, given that you find dissociative mechanics unappealing?

Because that particular assertion of yours has already been inarguably shown to be inherently self-contradictory due to its dissociative nature. Trying to twist definitions to say "no, really it's not associated at all" doesn't make that so.

If martial abilities are not non-natural in nature, then it's dissociative to claim that they can only be used in discrete "deep reserves" that apparently cause physical fatigue in using them again, but in absolutely no other aspect. Your attempts to dance around this basic understanding have so far proven completely invalid.

You don't actually have to answer these questions, there. You might want to just stop and think about them. Chances are you have a reason that you, yourself, have not examined, and you may want to take a break and do that.

Quite the contrary, it's self-evident that you haven't thought through your own lines of assertion, and because of that have created such tortured logic to try and explain away reasoning that you don't fully understand. Given that you're tragically misguided, no one will hold it against you if you need to take some time away from the thread to reflect, re-examine your stances, and try to figure out what you actually think about these issues.

You're adding 'physical.'

Because I didn't want to do you the disservice of presuming that you meant that you might exhaust your muscles' mental abilities.

The gamist reason is to enforce the kind of variety of action you see in the fantasy genre (and the broader heroic or 'action' genres). You don't see characters in genre acting like Gauntlet sprites and just whapping away repetitively. You /do/ see some 'signature' things that the character does, say, in most fight scenes, but they're not generally what they do at the big dramatic moment. Limited-use is a way of modeling that aspect of the genre.

In pursuit of that, it limits character options to a degree that impacts the game-world to a degree that the characters are aware of, without providing an in-game rationale for why that's so. Hence the dissociation - trying to force people to play to a "genre convention" impedes on their ability to attempt anything.

In-game, the explanation of 'deep reserves' that may be compartmentalized is not any more difficult, intuitively, then they idea of fantasy-genre heroics, in the first place, nor any more or less valid or consistent than generic reserves.

It is in fact much more difficult, intuitively, than the idea of how a character would actually act. It's also far less valid and consistence than "generic" reserves (whatever those are, as you haven't defined them yet).

We've been through this. If you assert that limits make something dissociative, then Vancian is dissociative, and you're unwilling to accept that. Thus your definition of dissociative can't rest on limits.

We have been through this - I've already explained that Vancian casting is not dissociative because magic is not dissociative, whereas physical abilities with limitations that have nothing to do with how physical actions intuitively work are dissociative. Ergo, my definition of dissociative can refer to limits.

I see your problem (well, one of 'em). Martial powers are presented as abilities found in heroic fantasy settings, not in the real world.

You're actually seeing the reflection of one of your own problems. Martial powers presented as abilities in heroic fantasy settings need to have an in-game explanation greater than "because genre."

And, what I mean by generic is what /you/ mean by it. You assert - with no supporting evidence from the game itself nor from the genre the game emulates, nor even from reality - that the associative explanation for limited-use martial exploits given in the PH1 /can only be interpreted/ as generic resources that can be used interchangeably to enable any power, whether a Ranger's 'Crucial Advice,' that lets an ally re-roll a skill check with a bonus, or his 'Weave Through the Fray,' that lets him shift away when an enemy closes with him, for a particularly clear instance.

Given that you admit that you're putting words in my mouth here, I find it hard to take the rest of this seriously. You presume that somehow physical fatigue is discrete to each physical action that you perform - which is a huge break from the most basic of agreements as to how reality itself works - and then suggest that because this isn't true for the real world, it doesn't need to be true for the game world's presumption of real physical abilities.

It's also incredibly disingenuous of you to suggest that a power that's clearly labeled "advice" somehow relates to that ability at all, since it's clearly associating itself with something else (though if that's a limited-use power, I look forward to your explanation as to why a ranger can't give advice to someone more than once a day).

Again, you are adding restrictive language to the concept not found in the PH1, itself. You are changing explanation to make it dissociative. Why is it so important to you that it be dissociative?

Again, why are you insisting that the self-evident restrictions are not there? I'm acknowledging something that the rules present openly, whereas you seem intent on denying that the issue even exists. Why is it so important to you to deny something that's clearly the case?

It seems like you're suffering (or quite enjoying) a profound double-standard here. Martial characters and Magical one are both characters from an heroic fantasy world. They are equally-weighted choices in the game. If there's a compelling genre reason to make them wildly disparate in effectiveness and importance, then, from the gamist perspective, those choices either have to very differently-weighted, or one character type or the other needs to be removed as a playable option. Otherwise the game becomes imbalanced.

This is a deliberate misstatement that shows that you're aware that your explanations suffer from a double-standard, but are simply ignoring it. The fact that the game is being played to genre stereotypes in no way makes any kind of in-game sense for how the characters in the game world would act. The characters aren't aware of a "compelling genre reason," and trying to emulate that within the context of the game only works so long as nobody does anything out-of-genre, regardless of any other reason, no matter how compelling it may be.

Suggesting that "balance" has anything to do with enforcing genre conventions, of course, is largely laughable, considering that the definition of "balance" itself is so mutable.

Look up 'preternatural.' It is not equivalent to supernatural or non-natural. And, yes, martial powers are supposed to be superhuman, but not supernatural. It may seem like a fine line, and it's probably a blurry one, too - so if it helps you avoid the dissociation you claim to abhor, imagine that there is a possibly-supernatural explanation at any point where you perceive a possible dissociation.

That simple solution, alone, should have kept you from ever complaining about dissociation, in the first place.

Again, you're attempting to have your cake and eat it too here. Regardless of the definition used, you can't claim that martial powers are presented as being wholly natural abilities, and then discard that definition whenever it's convenient and with no further examination simply by invoking the term "preternatural." If something is a power beyond what mundane, real-world forces can achieve, then it's non-natural by definition, and can play by its own rules. But you're trying to say it's both. That doesn't work, no matter how you try to slice it.