Interesting Decisions vs Wish Fulfillment (from Pulsipher)

[Iosue]

It probably had more/broader appeal than most other editions, including being more successful at retaining new players.

That's highly unlikely. Per Mearls, they found that while the Starter Sets sold well, people weren't moving on to the rest of the game. Thus the attempt of simpler classes with Essentials, and then basically starting from scratch to create a game with easier buy-in.

 

[BryonD]

BryonD is under the mistaken impression that because I find that 4e fixed many of 3e's issues, that I somehow hate 3e.

Hussar is under the mistaken impression that putting false words in someone's mouth makes them true.

so after, once again, putting false words in my mouth you go into a change-the-subject song and dance.

You said:

This is where I disagree. Unpredictable consequences might snowball into dramatic showdowns, but, because they're unpredictable, most often won't.

I replied: Do you mean "to you"?

So, do you mean "to you"?

 

[Tony Vargas]

Thats one huge "if" right there.

It is, indeed, another thing D&D has never done, even as the de-facto gate-keeper of the community: a few folks who don't really care for it slip through and get hooked on other games, never looking back.

Yeah, it did have that effect on a very large number of people, didn't it?

Actual edition warriors were really pretty few. And their antics reflected on them - not on the game they favored or dis-favored.

 

[BryonD]

It is, indeed, another thing D&D has never done, even as the de-facto gate-keeper of the community: a few folks who don't really care for it slip through and get hooked on other games, never looking back.

Well, that is a massive moving of goalposts. If 4E had come *anywhere near* the level of popularity of prior editions, we would not be talking about 5E right now.

Actual edition warriors were really pretty few. And their antics reflected on them - not on the game they favored or dis-favored.

You seemed to think there were pretty influential when you brought them up a few minutes ago....

 

[Tony Vargas]

This is where I disagree. Unpredictable consequences might snowball into dramatic showdowns, but, because they're unpredictable, most often won't. After all, "dramatic showdown" is just one of several scenarios and frequently not even the most likely since as soon as they become most likely, it's not longer CaW but CaS. That's what CaS is supposed to do after all.

The Soccer analogy holds, though: it may be a low-scoring game, so not exciting 'most of the time,' but each goal is greeted with great excitement, precisely because they're comparatively rare.

 

[pemerton]

But, odds of success are a measure of difficulty IN A GAME. It's somewhat disingenuous to keep pointing to real world examples where success is not determined by a random die roll. The example of child birth, your example of running a sprint, both are very controllable events in the real world because you have access to virtually 100% of the information that you need, every time.

In a game, that is virtually never true. The players rarely have access to that level of information.

<snip>

Since they don't, then random chance rules. In a combat as war scenario, random elements should be much stronger, since the PC's are not protected by the "combat as sport" idea of rules. If the dice say you die, then you die.

Well, I don't really subscribe to the CaW/CaS dichotomy, for reasons I stated a few posts upthread.

But as to whether or not player choices can significantly alter the prospects of success in RPG action resolution: my view, based on my experience, is that they can, at least in certain systems. Runequest is a system in which I think player choices within the context of resolution probably have the least impact, because it is straight % dice rolls - so once the conflict is framed, it all comes down to the dice.

But in 4e, to pick a system closer to the opposite end of a notional spectrum, there is scope for player choice at nearly every point of play, not only once the conflict is framed, but in the deployment of resources at every turn. And player choices absolutely can make a difference to this. If the dice say you die then you die, but the players have lots of opportunities to make choices to stop the dice from saying that.

A pretty trivial example from my last session: the players were healing up during a short rest, and the cleric cast Word of Vigour (which hadn't been used during the encounter). The cleric has the Shared Healing feat, so any PC can spend the surge for any other PC. The players spent a few minutes discussing this and decided to have the paladin (who has a bucketload of surges from a Ring of Tenacious Will) spend all the surges - which then left the defenders with 10 surges each, and the strikers and controller with one on 5, one on 6 and one on 7. This sort of surge-management is part of managing the odds.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Well, that is a massive moving of goalposts. If 4E had come *anywhere near* the level of popularity of prior editions, we would not be talking about 5E right now.

Even if 4e had won the entire TTRPG market, we likely would be. The goals set it were that unrealistically high, even pulling in double the revenue of the entire RPG industry would have fallen well short. When those goals weren't met, Hasbro withdrew resources, WotC retrenched with cheaper-to-produce Essentials, which tanked, and 5e was the only option left to them.

The good news is that Hasbro no longer has the 'core brand' rubric /and/ is no longer holding D&D separately accountable from the rest of WotC's brands (which include high-performing CCGs - an industry many, many times the size of the RPG market), so 5e is prettymuch a shoe-in to 'succeed,' even if it fails to unseat Pathfinder.

You seemed to think there were pretty influential when you brought them up a few minutes ago....

Not incompatible with being few in number and being responsible for their own behavior.

 

[pemerton]

There are some clear ways that RPGs constrain open-ended play. The big one is the rules. If there are things the rules won't let you do, that's less open-ended.

Well, no RPG is open-ended in the sense of anything conceivable being possible (eg in any edition of D&D it's not possible for a first level PC to call down a meteor storm, even though such a thing is conceivable).

I took open-ended to mean "no practical limit to the range of options", rather than "every conceivable option is available".

They're both examples of problematic or broken rules in some editions that were fixed in 4e.

<snip>

That's why it's important to remember that CaW/CaS was a product of the edition war.

I know that/why polymorph and summoning were problematic in 3E. But I don't see how that has anything to do with combat as war. Polymorph self in 1st ed AD&D is not especially broken, but I thought AD&D was meant to be a CaW edition.

When I played Rolemaster for nearly 20 years it was a very strategic/logistically-focused game, with lots of scry-buff-teleport and the like, and hence CaW (to use that terminology). But that doesn't mean that we embraced broken abilities. When we identified broken spells, we took steps to fix or ban them.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I know that/why polymorph and summoning were problematic in 3E. But I don't see how that has anything to do with combat as war. Polymorph self in 1st ed AD&D is not especially broken, but I thought AD&D was meant to be a CaW edition.

Certainly, AD&D was called out as CaW edition (any edition but 4e was, IIRC), and Poly-Other having a severe potential consequence balancing it's potential abuses probably only made it more appealing in that sense.

Potential for abuse seems to have been of prime importance in CaW - again, as conceived in the edition war, when folks were warring against an edition that had reined in a lot of potential for abuse.

 

[Iosue]

That's why it's important to remember that CaW/CaS was a product of the edition war.

CaW/CaS was a product of spitballing about how 5e could be designed to accommodate different playstyles. Are you just arguing from memory? I take it you didn't actually look at the original post linked to in this thread?