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

[I'm A Banana]

I've heard this argument before, and it doesn't hold water for me, because it blows a very small aspect of TTRPG rules out of all possible proportion.

The issue is that the gulf between player and character in a TTRPG is already so vast, that the ability to overcome that gap and achieve immersion cannot possibly be consistently, irretrievably foiled by something as obscure and trivial as a 'dissociated mechanic.'

I mean, if you're trying to get under the exoskeleton of your Thri-Kreen character in Dark Sun - to achieve 'immersion' in the imagined role of a giant insect slowly cooking to death under the brutal heat of an alien sun - while sitting around a table in an air-conditioned FLGS, sipping cold mountain dew, eating twizzlers and rolling dice with your fellow gamer geeks, and you actually /do/ it, you have one kick-ass imagination. And to claim that you /cant/ do so if your ability to unleash a flurry of claw attacks is 1/encounter instead of not existing at all, is more than a little implausible. It's like the suspension of an ATV being wrecked because, between off-roading over huge rocks, it hit a small pothole on a short stretch of paved road.

I understand this phenomenon ("So this little niggling detail collapses your entire construct?") as the vagaries of personal subjective experience. There's no objective threshold for what should or should not collapse an experience, and people view these things very differently. Just because you like numbers and patterns doesn't mean you're obligated to like sudoku, and an otherwise universal hatred of construction toys won't mean you don't enjoy LEGO. If encounter powers kill it for someone, okay, that's real and its legitimate and its acceptable and the useful conversation usually is about how and where and why and in what ways (to tease out the underlying, perhaps subconscious reasons). Conversation about how they're being arbitrary about it is possibly counter-productive (you don't want people getting defensive about their reactions), and at the very least just baldly unuseful (what, people's preferences when viewed in the abstract tend to be arbitrary? Well, sure, mine and yours and everyone else's, too).

Maybe. There are a lot of ways to express yourself in an RPG. If you're playing a pre-gen, it might be through interpreting the character like an actor given a role in a play. The amount of customization doesn't matter.

Though it's a distinctly different kind of fun. If you're big on character gen as a way you enjoy D&D in Expressive mode, pregens are a non-starter for you. There's PLENTY of folks 'round here who will tell you they've never used pregens because making a character is an essential part of playing D&D to them, probably for just this reason.

Given that, it's surprising TTRPGs aren't more popular. By their very nature, they can deliver on either or both of these ideas in a big way.

Most games deliver a LOT of kinds of aesthetics at various different moments of play. D&D specifically has a bit of a problem because there's lots of disagreement over aesthetic should be core (ie, the REASON you play D&D), because it has historically been all over the place and open to individual drift. Some people played it to tell a story, some people played it to be a character, some people played it to face the challenge of monsters or to get surprised by random generation tables. 5e can't even come out and say "D&D is a game about telling stories" without dozens of voices who have never played D&D for that reason going to the message boards in unison.

While I think there's certainly some value in applying a theory like this to RPGs - and in developing RPG-specific theories like DNS - I don't think that value lies primarily in giving people thoughtful-sounding excuses for dumping on games other folks are enjoying. It was sad seeing this sort of stuff abused in the edition war. It'd be nice to see it used more positively in 5e...

Yeah, the primary value I see in the kind of academia I like to apply is that it tends to help me understand what is happening on a design level when someone says something like "4e is too videogamey!" Why that perception occurred, what might be the reasons for not liking that, what might be the reasons for not minding that or embracing that...I feel like I understand the hidden nuances there a little better.

The Forge gets under my skin sometimes because a lot of it just reads like extra layers of obfuscating jargon (which, yeah, academics can, too -- "Abnegative Aesthetics" is hardly neutrally comprehensible) that is kind of incoherent (ask ten different people what Fortune in the Middle is, get ten different responses), and allso tends to come across a little judgy in practice (Oh, you're simulationist, of course you wouldn't enjoy the rarefied air of player empowerment mechanics with your process-sim limitations that just want to turn physics into game mechanics.). But I may be unfairly maligning the group due to an exposure to only some elements of it in certain contexts. I've never felt the need to rely on their explanations, anyway.

Or from yet another perspective: Realistic or not, ability descriptions provide a model for an imagined world, with a lot of fun to be had adding detail to the descriptions. Then, the descriptions are a key value, together with the mechanical processes behind them. In my view, a lot of what wrong with 4E was that value was diminished.

Sure. If I were to push a little bit into the psychology of it, I'd ask maybe something like "Okay, what happens at the table when the description is radially divergent from the effect? What if D&D had an ability whose description was Divine energy flows into your wounds, knitting tissue and bone and flesh, while a cooling breeze washes over you, and it did 3d10 damage and forced you to save or die?...what would that ruin, if you played a game where that happened?"

In digging into the thing it wrecks, I might get a sense of what you're actively looking for, and I could know if it fits into one of the typical aesthetics and then probably be able to figure out how that game could be better designed to nail the aesthetics you're actually looking for.

 

[Alzrius]

Super powers aren't really a fantasy genre element, no. But heroes doing things that range from the wildly improbable to the super-human certainly is. I'd say the genre 'redefines' heroes as other than mundane, in general - with strictly-mundane heroes an exception that would be spelled out in the narrative, or, perhaps, sprung on the audience as humor.

That's a genre-based explanation, which isn't what I meant. I was referring to the idea that these abilities are defined as being things that go beyond the boundaries of what's possible in the real world, and as such must be (mountain) due to non-natural abilities.

A trifle circular.

I wouldn't say circular per se. Rather, it's connecting a thing to its (new) definition.

So, for instance, Grendel, a huge, sketchily-described monster that rips seasoned warriors to bits, has been 'redefined' even though the epic never says what he is, where he came from (apart from having an equally monstrous and little-described mother), or why he possesses such superhuman power, or 'has no analogue' even though he is 'man-like.'

That's just looking at the narrative though, which doesn't touch on the issue of associated or dissociated mechanics, since it's not concerned with mechanics in any regard. We don't need to worry about the exact nature of Grendel's being or powers if we're not trying to have game rules define how they function.

OTOH, Beowulf, who displays the superhuman strength and prowess to swim across frigid arctic seas, wrestle sea-serpents, and rip Grendel's arm off, needs, in your estimation, some specific rationalization for those feats?

As a narrative, no. As a character in a role-playing game, possibly - that depends on what the mechanics are and how they function. Just describing him in terms of the genre isn't enough to make a determination by itself.

He's not the son of a god, not dipped in any magic rivers, not festooned with magic items, he's just a Geat - a mighty, heroic one worthy of an epic poem. And in that context, he can do things that would be impossible, realistically.

There are some problems with that presumption (which seems to be referring to the CGI film from a few years back), such as how one could make the case that none of these are impossible per se (people have swum across large bodies of water, wrestled with large dangerous animals, and ripped people apart - especially when they used a door to do the latter), or how there was an element of unreliable narration for some of them (the sea serpents, for example), or how the background of the story included supernatural elements that suggest a possible (albeit far-fetched) explanation involving things that would be non-natural powers.

But those are all minor points. The major point is that you're just presenting half of a scenario. In order to make a determination about associated or dissociated mechanics we need to see what the mechanics are.

So, no, I don't think we need to be told how heroism or super-human feats 'work' to accept that they're part of the genre. Not anymore than we need to be told how magic that conforms to genre expectations works in any great detail.

It's not about accepting if they're part of the genre. It's about determining if they're associated with what's happening from an in-game standpoint or not. Genre is not a part of that determination.

 

[BryonD]

I am willing to back away completely from the implication that more hold-outs might eventually come-around to a new system in the absence of ongoing support for the old, than in the presence of same. I think it's a perfectly reasonable assertion, but it's in no way central to the 'perfect storm,' and the detailed data that would be needed to prove it (or prove an alternative hypothesis) are simply not available.

The validity of the perfect storm holds whether you want to believe 4e's content was abysmal or wonderful. D&D has /always/, through name recognition if nothing else, attracted new players and has a sub-set of longtime fans who unquestioningly adopt each new edition. In the absence of all elements of the perfect storm, that phenomenon, alone, would have seen 4e through a 'normal' (for WotC, apparently 8 years, vs 10+ for TSR) run and kept it from being a nominal failure, no matter how determined and stubborn the hold-outs may have been. In the presence of the perfect storm, no amount of improvement in quality or other aspects of content could have 'saved' it. There was simply no potential for any conceivable TTRPG, no matter how nearly-perfect or innovative, to pull in double or quadruple the earnings of the entire industry without establishing the hoped-for subscription revenue stream by delivering on /all/ the promises of DDI. Those two elements of the 'storm,' alone, sealed 4e's fate. The third element is really only necessary to explain Pathfinder's relative success (which is the question originally addressed). Without the OGL, Pathfinder would have to have been like 13A - a game only somewhat evocative of the prior ed of D&D, rather fully compatible and subsuming it's core - and had no chance of beating out an ed of D&D having an otherwise unremarkable run.

I agree that the perfect storm existed and played a major factor in Pathfinder's existence. I would say the perfect storm was in Paizo's favor and in addition to the elements you listed the failure of 4E to appeal to a very large portion of the fanbase was also part of that storm.

It is true that D&D "always" has attracted through name recognition. But it has thrived or died off due to quality. (A point you have disputed a couple time now.) I'd strongly dispute that no-amount of quality could have saved 4E. But it is a wildly hypothetical consideration because it is largely agreed, even by most detractors, that 4E was quite good at the things that it DID do. The problem is, a whole lot of people were not interested in a game that did that.

You treat brand loyalty as a truism and many companies in many areas have collapsed under similar thoughts. 1E was well loved *as a game in its own right*. But other that OD&D, there was virtually no competition. 2E inherited the fanbase, but it was not a wild shift away from 1E. Over the course of 2E, the quality dropped off and, in exact contradiction to your claim, the popularity was waning as new *higher quality* games were coming into existence. There was more than quality that played into the final TSR collapse. But if undying loyalty was as you claim, no of that should have mattered. WotC brought out 3E and the name got the attention, no doubt, but the "second golden age" came about because a massive portion of the fan base really liked it a lot. This is not to say that there were not plenty of people who hated it. And nothing against them that they did. But the market decided. The market spoke loudly.

Your presumption that 4E must follow the pattern based on history must consider what other factors were different this time. And for the first time ever a game came out under the D&D name that was *disliked* by a large margin. This is a huge difference and you can't point to history to overcome this difference.

You have moved from hold-outs to now you are just proclaiming some massive new fanbase would appear out of the ether. In fairness, this was part of the pro-4E mantra from the beginning. I was told many many times that it did not matter how many existing fans left because 4E was going to bring many times over new people into the TTRPG hobby. The popularity of WoW was cited as a new fanbase of elf-pretenders waiting to be tapped. My reply at the time was that the fraction of the population who play TTRPG was more or less constant and would continue to be more or less constant. I was told that I didn't know what I was talking about. But, I was right, apparently through dumb luck.

So, still, you have offered that some barriers to 4E could have been removed. But when it comes to the actual controlling factors (aka: appeal to the market) you are still just making wild wishes.

 

[I'm A Banana]

PS: I know it's a faux pas to say this in a 77 page ENWorld thread, but I've really been enjoying much of the dialogue here, I feel like there's a lot of good ideas bouncing around in here, and no one seems to be brimming with hostility as would be par for the course with some of the subject matter, so basically, yay.

 

[BryonD]

in a 77 page ENWorld thread

Is it ironic that it is called "cliff notes"?

 

[Neonchameleon]

This is not exactly the same thing, but it's related. People who write in genre fiction (of any kind) outside of the real world have to deal with the "suspension of disbelief" problem. And one of the first things I learned about it was that, generally, you can only take people outside their comfort zone once. Saying "this is a world where spies fight world-dominating secret organizations without mussing their suits" can get past people's filter without too much difficulty. But add in a talking animal for no reason, and you get people leaving the theater, saying it's "unbelievable".

You can only push people's immersion past a certain point, and it's different for everyone. So, yes, you can have people capable of accepting the hideous clawed monster, and then the "oh, btw, your attack power has charges" is too much for them. It's an emotional reason, but it's valid. It's not hypocritical, it's the way they honestly feel.

And as usual I have different standards I require for immersion to people who disagree with me. I require tonal and emotional consistency. The D&D universe in literally any edition is incredibly magical. Gandalf uses what? Half a dozen meaningful spells in the entire Lord of the Rings? Depending on your edition, a third to fifth level wizard in D&D can do that in one single day. High level non-4E spellcasters are better with magic than Exalted spellcasters. Since the wizard started getting automatic spells on level up (i.e. Specialist Wizards which were certainly in 2E and I think UA) the PCs have been absurdly magical. In 2E and RC things were just about OK for the fighter; they were larger than life themselves, able to kick arse and take names and stare down dragons while shrugging off spells - although the Thief was a serious problem class. In 1E things were OK - spells were treasure rather than an inherent part of the character. And the treasure lists were loaded towards the fighter. In 3.0 this balance was shattered. Fighters were playing Cugel the Rogue. They couldn't be either Achiles or Odysseus. While the magic users were exalted way past Circe or Medea. All of which I could accept in worlds like The Dying Earth or Ars Magica where such is reality and it shows forth into the setting. But D&D doesn't do this. Due to the multiclassing rules almost anyone can learn magic and it is incredibly useful. All of which means that the way people behave makes no sense to me. There is a simple and lazy route to power. The social and emotional realities of wizards who always gain spells and mundane non-casters make no sense at all to me. And this means that I'm fought at every step of the way by the setting if I want to immerse.

If on the other hand we have a setting which magic actually permeates, meaning that fighters are larger than life at fighting, with magic flowing through their bodies, and fighters are Beowulf, Cuchulain, Gilgamesh, the Knights of the Round Table, Achiles, Heracles, Jason, Odysseus, the Outlaws of the Water Margin, Orlando Furioso, or just about all the myths that modern fantasy is based on then the emotional reality of the universe is maintained. Everyone is larger than life and whereas the magic flowing through the wizard gets externally expressed, the magic flowing through the fighter gets expressed by making them more awesome at what they do to the point of literally holding the world up or cutting the tops off mountains. Gandalf works in Lord of the Rings because there is only one of him and he's an NPC. With dozens upon of wizards vastly superior to Gandalf around and fighters who can't keep up with Strider, I start wondering why Aragorn is meant to be pivotal rather than a puppet.

And there's nothing wrong with aliens in Indiana Jones. The problem is, as ever, bad writing. The aliens and the escaping a nuclear blast in a lead lined fridge aren't problems in themselves. They are problems because they are a tonal mismatch for the rest of the film. Crystal Skull's problem is that it's nowhere near pulp enough. With all the parts involving Shia LeBoeuf and most of the rest of the film it gets the same mismatch in tone I see in post-1E AD&D. If the writing had been of the quality of Raiders of the Lost Ark I'd have bought the aliens because the whole film is high action ridiculous. For that matter if the film had been Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods, Frank Darabont's draft of the script, I'd have bought the aliens.

So that's another thing that breaks immersion for me - although it's a breaks immersion thing rather than something that means I can't immerse in the first place. The social and emotional realities making no sense.

 

[Nergal Pendragon]

Is it ironic that it is called "cliff notes"?

Sadly, I suspect this thread really is the cliff note version of the last six years.

 

[Lalato]

Sadly, I suspect this thread really is the cliff note version of the last six years.

Not only that... and just like the last six years... no one in this thread has listened to the other person and just accepted that their worldview is just as valid, and that they just don't share it.

There is so much that we can't know. All we know is that we play some form of D&D, and that at least some of us don't smell of elderberries.

Can we turn this back into a joke thread now? I mean, we have enough pages to sustain us...

/pagequit

 

[Tony Vargas]

I agree that the perfect storm existed and played a major factor in Pathfinder's existence.
It is true that D&D "always" has attracted through name recognition.

But it has thrived or died off due to quality.

Not really. It thrived in the fad years and hasn't varied greatly since then apart from new eds & half-eds goosing revenue with core-book sales. The companies holding the IP have certainly been through a few things, though - like TSR going out of business, WotC acquiring them, getting into trouble, being acquired by Hasbro, sailing into the perfect storm, seemingly learning little from the disaster, etc...

You treat brand loyalty as a truism and many companies in many areas have collapsed under similar thoughts

True. WotC (Hasbro, actually) has done a /lot/ to piss off it's fans in the last dozen years or so. Starting with springing 3.5 only a couple years after 3.0, really.

1E was well loved *as a game in its own right*. But other that OD&D, there was virtually no competition.

So not "as /a/ game in it's own right" but as the first, and only well-known game of it's type. Very different. As games of the era go, others had surpassed it in quality of content even at the height of the fad years.

2E inherited the fanbase, but it was not a wild shift away from 1E. Over the course of 2E, the quality dropped off and, in exact contradiction to your claim, the popularity was waning as new *higher quality* games were coming into existence.

In the 90s, two things - again, having little to do with the quality of D&D - that really hurt it in the 90s. (OK, three, there was also a business meltdown at TSR, but it didn't much impact the game's popularity, just threatened it's continued existence.) One, ironically, was the rise of CCGs which siphoned off part of it's potential new-player base in that generation. The other, of course, was Storyteller/LARPs and a shift in the RPG market from being about genres or systems to being about settings. TSR tried /hard/ to jump onto the setting bandwagon - and 2e is still noted for the quality and sheer number of settings it produced - but ultimately wasn't that compelling outside of existing fans, and WWGS 'led' the industry (maybe not in sales, but in terms vision). Funny thing, though: Storyteller, also not a great system.

But if undying loyalty was as you claim, no of that should have mattered.

It really didn't. TSR croaked because it over-extended itself in publishing novels and failed 'collectable' games. D&D was still stolidly selling to all the longtime fans.

WotC brought out 3E and the name got the attention, no doubt, but the "second golden age" came about because a massive portion of the fan base really liked it a lot.

Actually, there /were/ a lot of holdouts. They just had nothing much to rally around so didn't get the same kind of sheer crazy going with the edition war. They were, though, just as capable of coming up with imagined reasons for hating 3e - just as in the edition war, some of them were particularly laughable, like 'needing minis' when the game had roots in wargaming, or 'killing RP' when 2e had been the poster boy for ROLLplaying.

Where 3e really killed was the OGL. In the 90s, D&D had a lot of competition from good games or great settings. As soon as the OGL hit, many of those competitors became de-facto partners, gleefully jumping on the d20 bandwagon at the prospect of even remote association with the D&D name. It was wildly successful for all involved, but particularly for D&D, and it did grow the hobby a bit, as well as consolidate it a lot. I mean, why make a game from scratch that's virtually certain to languish in obscurity when it's /much/ easier to leverage something from d20 /and/ you'll benefit from D&D's name recognition, however peripherally. WWGS budded off S&SS, and then imploded. Few other strong contenders from the 90s did much better. d20 ruled. Really, it still does. WotC's many mistakes - and part of the perfect storm - was trying to get that genie back in the bottle.

Your presumption that 4E must follow the pattern based on history must consider what other factors were different this time. And for the first time ever a game came out under the D&D name that was *disliked* by a large margin. This is a huge difference and you can't point to history to overcome this difference.

You keep claiming that, but there's no evidence of it. 4e sold strongly at release, just like any other D&D re-boot. It tapered off just like any other re-boot.

You could make a case for Essentials being a remarkable failure for a half-ed, but then, they denied it /was/ a half-ed, and it wasn't in the critical sense that it didn't obviate the prior full-ed, just added to it - making it just another low-selling batch of particularly redundant supplements.

You have moved from hold-outs to now you are just proclaiming some massive new fanbase would appear out of the ether.

I am presuming no such thing. The D&D loyalist, alone would have been quite sufficient to bring 4e through a normal run, even if it had been as bad as h4ters pretend, or as unpopular as you continue to claim (entirely without supporting evidence). Again, 4e didn't lack for sales as D&D eds go (as far as we can tell from the available data, which is not complete or detailed at all) - it just had to meet unprecedented revenue goals (1/3rd of the perfect storm).

In fairness, this was part of the pro-4E mantra from the beginning. I was told many many times that it did not matter how many existing fans left because 4E was going to bring many times over new people into the TTRPG hobby.

That was the theory. DDI was supposed to bring in WoW-like subscription revenue. It'd probably have never worked, but it never had a chance, because the development effort was torpedoed by human tragedy, and the vaporware never coalesced.

FWIW, 4e probably /did/ bring in more new players (and retain more of them) than 3e. I say probably, because there's no solid data - I'm just inferring from the experience of seeing so many new players try it, and, contrary to my experience with other eds, stick with it. But, of course, that's something that could vary regionally. The rules, themselves, were a lot clearer, DMing was easier, and time and again I'd see a new player take to the game, and begin running games in a matter of months. Not typical of earlier eds - or even most other games. It was surprising.

So, still, you have offered that some barriers to 4E could have been removed. But when it comes to the actual controlling factors (aka: appeal to the market) you are still just making wild wishes.

I'm not sure they could have been removed, the fact is they happened, and they doomed an otherwise innovative and technically much-improved edition of a traditionally stodgy game. The alternative theory, that it was 'appeal of content to the market' has to 1) ignore the perfect storm and 2) come up with some solid, detailed sales figures of 4e /and/ prior eds for comparison to have any support at all. Since your alternative theory can't be proven (unless WotC opens it's books and old TSR records can be unearthed), and the perfect storm happened, and the effect it posits on 4e & Pathfinder is consistent with the available evidence, I'm pretty content to leave it at that.

 

[Nergal Pendragon]

I guess I shouldn't have hired that army of ninjas to spike everyone's perfume/cologne/deodorant/shampoo/soap with elderberry juice...