D&D 5E I think we can safely say that 5E is a success, but will it lead to a new Golden Era?

[Tony Vargas]

My copy of the PHB arrived at my door last week, but I'm still really struggling to like this edition. I have to be perfectly honest that I'm a bit underwhelmed. At the moment, I think 5e is a failure for my playstyle. The default system is NOT something I want to play at all.

Out of curiosity, what's this playstyle, and what editions did you find succeeded at it?

 

[BryonD]

That's a revisionist-history fiction I just don't understand. There is no 'harkenning back to theatre of the mind.' D&D was a wargame, in the ensuing 20 years, it never distanced itself much from that mindset. 1e gave everything in freak'n scale inches. Playing without minis or tokens of some sort and a surface was something you did if it was logistically impossible to use a playsurface.

I'm really sorry you missed out. I mean, I'll agree that in the modern context 1E is a very poor "theatre of the mind" game. But in its day it was a major game changer and was awesome entirely for being exactly a breakthrough into theatre of the mind.

It is easy to see how someone could play it as just a battle game and completely miss out. And, as I said, it was soon replaced by vastly better options. But if the potential was lost on you then that is a shame for you.

Just because you slipped through the wide net doesn't mean it wasn't a wide net.

So you are stuck abusing common terms of language now?
Just to be clear (a) the phrase "wide net" is, in fact, not literal and (b) amongst people seeking functional conversation is understood to mean it is appropriate for the target.

But, more importantly, I make no claim whatsoever, that it not including *ME* is meaningful. The vast number of people is missed for a wide variety of reasons is what is meaningful.

You will meet people who rave over how great something is, /just/ because it's new, no matter how bad it is. Just like you will meet those who rant about how terrible something is, just because it's new no matter how good it actually is. It's a phenomenon so common as to be cliche.

Agreed. And yet the pattern seen in 4E stands out as quite unique.

 

[Mercurius]

I'm starting to wear down, Tony, but will try to keep going and have enjoyed the back and forth!

We can't really say that some mechanics lead to this or that subjective experience 'more often' without some sort of exhaustive survey, and, really, it wouldn't help in the case of 'dissociative mechanics,' as it would just map precisely to what side of the edition war the respondent was on. It's meaningless.

I agree with your first sentence, not with your second because I don't think it has to be tied into edition warring in a similar sense that making differentiations about editions isn't inherently warring about them.

At that level, yes, you just have anecdotes nullifying eachother's minimal value. Looking at the game itself, though, how badly is being off a little on tactics vs spot-on going to skew things? I don't think it compares to the gulf you get from poorly-balanced systems, or systems, like 3e, that intentionally reward system mastery.

Hey, I agree with you. I actually overall preferred 4E to 3E, so a debate about their respective merits between the two of us wouldn't really generate much friction. I do think, though, that you are writing off the downside of 4E's tactical mastery, perhaps simply because it never was an issue for you.

Again, where with 3E it was almost entirely a rather pronounced systems mastery, 4E combined some systems mastery and some tactical mastery in a way that was frustrating for "systems-tactics neophytes."

For instance, one tactical blunder that's easy to make is applying a condition a creature already has. You could, say, waste an encounter dazing something that's already dazed save ends. You still did damage to it, though, so you still contributed, and it is still dazed so you didn't make the situation worse for your party or anything, just expended a resource inefficiently.

Well part of it is understanding the roles and how they all benefit the group. Strikers are just the sexiest, although controllers have their moments (as impressive as 50 HP of damage to a single target, 20 HP of damage to five targets is even more impressive). Defenders and leaders weren't quite as sexy, though, unless in the hands of a capable player who gets how it all works. And for really casual players who just like to show up and roll dice, there's a steep and long learning curve.

Again, slightly different experience. I found house rules were the norm in AD&D, rare and poorly-regarded in the RAW-is-king 3.x years, and rare but generally accepted in 4e. In 3e, RAW was a big deal because that's the system you mastered that gave you your rewards. In 4e, the system was workable, so the /need/ to mod it was a lot less, but there were no great objections from players when a DM did so.

OK, fair enough.

Nothing about AD&D was /simple/, but yes, it did invite voluminous rulings and variants, both because the rules were vague and baroque enough that their actually meaning was debateable and the DM obliged to provide frequent rulings, and because there just weren't as many alternatives if you wanted something different, you modded D&D /into/ what you wanted. 5e is, indeed, very similar. It's core /mechanics/ are more consistent, as they're inherited from d20. But, no, like AD&D, it's not simplicity that'll tempt one to make ruling and additions.

That's a fair characterization, although I'm a bit confused about the last sentence.

So 5e is simple because you expect people to ignore bits of it? Or it feels like AD&D with fiddly bits excised? The latter's prettymuch been the case since 3.0, when things were consolidated around the d20 core system.

The second - it feels like AD&D with fiddly bits taken out, but with a more streamlined core mechanic. Sort of like what 3E "should" have looked like (aka "Castles & Crusades") with the extra stuff as options, not core.

I find rule systems pretty interesting, actually. But I don't get the impression you're looking for answers to that question. If you want to put the quality of a system down to a set of imponderables and subjective opinions, you can. But, really, what do you have to talk about then. You can state how you feel, and, if asked 'why,' you'd be obliged to explain that you have no reasons or justifications, and that's the end of it.

I think you're missing my view here, Tony. I just don't think we can separate out subjectivity like you want to. I know it would be cleaner that way, but we're a messy (and rather irrational) species and there is no avoiding it. Think about how deeply offended some were that the gnome and druid were lacking from the 4E PHB. I mean, I got it - I'm not a fan of dragonborn, tieflings, and prefer gray elves to eladrin - but I can live with them being there. But some folks were really, deeply offended. We can't just ignore that.

It would be kinda awesome of people who didn't care for something on purely subjective grounds just did that. One post "I kinda don't care for it, can't say why," and gone. No warring.

I hear you and think this is where a lot of these debates comes down to misunderstandings and different cognitive styles, even personality types.

On the other hand, where we disagree, I think, is that you seem to think that we can completely separate out the subjective, or even need to to have a worthwhile conversation. I see he subjective component as being the marinade, the sauce - without which we have a dry and tasteless meal.

As with 'dissociative mechanics' that just maps to which edition war trench you're in. When you try to identify the qualities that make this or that mechanic immersion-shattering, it becomes contradictory. A mechanic that shatters immersion on one edition is no barrier to it in another.

I take issue with your insistence that one must be in one trench or the other. I refused to choose a trench!

I'm interesting in something that, I imagine, game designers are especially interested in: How do different mechanics facilitate different kinds of interior, imaginative experiences? There is such a wealth of avenues of inquiry there.

I'm sure they didn't think they were doing it for no reason. It turned out that reason had a lot to do with unrealistic revenue goals and the implosion of on-line tools, but that doesn't matter. I'm not sure we've heard an explanation for dropping 3e early, but, presumably, again, they probably thought that launching 4e in 2008 instead of a more decorous 2011 or 12 (maybe right after the Mayan callendar ended would've been a good time) was something they believed (just as strongly as they do now) would be best for the game.

Tony, do you think it possible that 4E was canned because of the splintering of the community that had occured during that time frame? Do you think it possible that WotC said, "OK, we tried making it work - and for whatever reason 4E just wasn't was well loved by as many folks as we had hoped."

Let me be clear: Popularity, or success in this sense, is not a value judgment. Miley Cyrus sells a lot more albums than Arvo Part, but one is considered a musical genius and the other is not. I mean it could be that 4E was just too sophisticated, too brilliant for the average D&D player to take ahold of. I'm not saying that is true, but it is a possibility. I just want to differentiate this, because I sometimes get the sense from fans of 4E that when somebody says it was a failure, or it wasn't as well loved as, say, 3.5, they get defensive -as if I was making a value judgment. I am not.

Point is, whatever the reasons, 8 years is a shorter run than 10 or 12, and 4-6 is a /lot/ shorter.

And, for the fan, the rapid cycle can be discouraging.

Yeah, I hear that. I've advocated for longer "macro-cycles" of whole editions--maybe 10-12 years--and smaller "micro-cycles" of sub-editions or revisions, maybe 2-3 years. I know Essentials was along these lines, but it didn't quite take.

They were summarily hidden away when the site changed, so I suspect they lost a lot of folks right there, so, no probably not for long. Not produced legally, no, and not cloned like Pathfinder did for 3.5, again, not legally. So, no, no ongoing support, much like the 2e>3e changeover. Really, like all of them but 3e>4e, when ongoing support in perpetuity was on the table and the game could be legally cloned.

Could you imagine a 4E Pathfinder? It is another conversation, but how would you change it? (In brief).

''Whining" hardly captures the full scope of the edition war.

I know, but...re-read what you wrote, my friend. A pretty provocative statement.

Pragmatic, perhaps. The early-stated spin on the goal - to create a "D&D for everyone who ever loved D&D" and to have erstwhile edition warriors able to play characters embodying the things they loved about their respective edition at the same table - that was pretty noble. Far-fetched, but noble.

And it remains to be seen if it can be actualized, or rather to what degree it will be actualized. I imagine that for some it will work, for many it will not.

It's very easy to look at 5e and see the things you hate from another edition, and conclude that it's just that other edition and not for you. That's unfortunate, but if you look past it (or if you don't hate specific things from specific editions too much), you get a clearer view: it's a d20 game.

Yup.

Clear, balanced and playable would be quite adequate. That D&D had to change so much to achieve those fairly simple things that it seemed innovative, revolutionary or exotic is just a testament to how stodgy it had been for so long.

You know I'm always amazed at how much people don't like specific editions. I've found them all to be fun, in their own time at least. I love 3E when it came out and thought it was a tremendous advance from AD&D, and really liked 4E, although felt it was more of a sideways move from 3E - improvement in some ways, not so much in others.

But my point is, all editions of D&D are great. Just like if you listen to the albums of your favorite band, or the novels of your favorite author, you might have fond favorites, but hopefully you see a progression. But just because their first album or novel was comparatively simple compared to more recent work, it still has its place and charm and is fun to listen to.

Funny. I've got some folks telling me that 4e is homogenous and blah, and you're painting it as a unique specialty item. It's just a version of D&D that was better-balanced than before. Better balanced games just give you more meaningful/viable choices, and remain workable over a wider range of applications.

I agree that it is more balanced than before, but I also think it veered furthest from "that classic D&D feel," both in terms of game mechanics and the style of presentation and content. I mean when you have dragonborn and eladrin in the PHB, you're saying "This ain't your daddy's D&D!" This was part of the problem, for many. They felt "If it ain't broke, why fix it?" Some still feel that way about OD&D, while others it is more of a tonal, stylistic quality.

That doesn't map to a flavor of ice cream. A better analogy might be that the balanced RPG is like the ice cream bar where you can select from a lot of flavors and toppings. While the imbalanced one may have more or fewer flavors and toppings - but some of them are contaminated with salmonella.

At least give my ice cream analogy a shot! You're just writing it off without considering it. Do you agree that a more "vanilla" flavor is a better base flavor than chocolate hazelnut crunch? That it is better to start with vanilla and then add toppings, then to offer a flavor that some people love but a lot don't?

I'm not saying it is going to work, but I think it has a shot.

But I don't think your analogy of the ice cream bar works because, well, it didn't work out that way. Many people felt that they were being force-fed a rather specific flavor.

I mean, you keep writing off the actual experience of many, many gamers - enough that Pathfinder thrived, enough that 4E only lasted for three and a half years. Again, the point is not that the flavor of 4E wasn't (isn't) a good one, just that it was too stylistically specific to carry the flag.

 

[Siberys]

Please, enough with the disingenuous and spreading of misinformation, first of all, there are clerics and healing in 2nd Ed Dark Sun, so that, right there, is you blatantly lying to try to convince people that 4th Ed is somehow the best D&D, once again, and all other editions are not as good a "game"; and no, it did not work for Dark Sun, like, at all, 3rd Ed's attempt was pathetic, but 4th Ed's was a travesty of a mockery of a sham.

Tony Vargas misspoke WRT clerics, but even so they were inelegantly shoehorned into Dark Sun in 2e. 4e's version of the setting is at least consistent when it comes to Divine stuff, and the Dawn War fit very well with the setting.

Tieflings were an unnecessary addition, I'll agree. The Eladrin's backstory was pretty cool, though.

 

[Siberys]

I mean, you keep writing off the actual experience of many, many gamers - enough that Pathfinder thrived, enough that 4E only lasted for three and a half years.

Sorry to be jumping in on just a part of this post, Mercurius, but I just wanted to tie this back to what I was saying earlier in the thread;

There is no information we have than can peg the cancellation of 4e on this. The information we do have - admittedly incomplete - points more toward pressure from Hasbro that is no longer a factor for D&D going forward. Even given the success of PF, even given the "actual experience of many, many gamers," it's entirely possible 4e was cancelled due to factors completely unrelated to all of those people. So bringing it up this way is misleading.

As an aside, you make some seriously long posts. You must spend a /lot/ of time typing these up.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I'm starting to wear down, Tony, but will try to keep going and have enjoyed the back and forth!

I'll try not to reply to everything...

I don't think it has to be tied into edition warring in a similar sense that making differentiations about editions isn't inherently warring about them.

It is when the differentiation has no basis in anything definable, but, instead, always comes down along edition war lines.

I do think, though, that you are writing off the downside of 4E's tactical mastery, perhaps simply because it never was an issue for you.

That's a real danger, so what am I missing?

Again, where with 3E it was almost entirely a rather pronounced systems mastery, 4E combined some systems mastery and some tactical mastery in a way that was frustrating for "systems-tactics neophytes."

The system mastery in 4e is both minimal in impact and has a sort of 'floor' at which it's just dead easy. The class descriptions come right out and tell you how to do a 'build,' rather than keeping it a secret or intentionally misleading you to 'reward system mastery' when you figure it out. I'm not sure how I'm missing a way the tactical side is that different - one of the occasionally voiced complaints about 4e is that the powers and such work too easily. You can power through DR, you can expect your power to work on most creatures in most circumstances. Things like that. Those are ways in which tactical (and strategic) mis-steps are less severely 'punished.'

Well part of it is understanding the roles and how they all benefit the group. Strikers are just the sexiest, although controllers have their moments (as impressive as 50 HP of damage to a single target, 20 HP of damage to five targets is even more impressive). Defenders and leaders weren't quite as sexy, though, unless in the hands of a capable player who gets how it all works. And for really casual players who just like to show up and roll dice, there's a steep and long learning curve.

That was rather easily explained in 4 sentences, so I'm not seeing the steep and long learning curve. There's certainly some depth to it, but the payoff of mastery isn't so great that you /need/ it the way you might have in 3.x (I say might have, because it could really vary by campaign), and learning the basics doesn't take much.

The second - it feels like AD&D with fiddly bits taken out, but with a more streamlined core mechanic. Sort of like what 3E "should" have looked like (aka "Castles & Crusades") with the extra stuff as options, not core.

Yeah, I can see that. Can't empathize with the 'should' because that would have been such a frustratingly slow and incremental approach for a game already flirting with with irrelevance, but I can certainly see it. To me, it just ends up feeling nostalgic. Which, at my age, is actually quite nice.

I just don't think we can separate out subjectivity like you want to. I know it would be cleaner that way, but we're a messy (and rather irrational) species and there is no avoiding it. Think about how deeply offended some were that the gnome and druid were lacking from the 4E PHB. I mean, I got it - I'm not a fan of dragonborn, tieflings, and prefer gray elves to eladrin - but I can live with them being there. But some folks were really, deeply offended. We can't just ignore that.

I'd be delighted if subjectivity could just be accepted as such. The real rabbit holes open up when someone starts trying to justify their wholly-subjective opinion....

I take issue with your insistence that one must be in one trench or the other. I refused to choose a trench!

There's a reason they call the area between the trenches 'no man's land.'

I'm interesting in something that, I imagine, game designers are especially interested in: How do different mechanics facilitate different kinds of interior, imaginative experiences? There is such a wealth of avenues of inquiry there.

It is a tempting thing to try to figure out, I acknowledge. If it could be kept wholly accademic, it'd be worthwhile. But, such theories get turned into excuses for the kinds of excesses we saw in the edition war. It's one of the many sad things about that conflict.

Tony, do you think it possible that 4E was canned because of the splintering of the community that had occured during that time frame? Do you think it possible that WotC said, "OK, we tried making it work - and for whatever reason 4E just wasn't was well loved by as many folks as we had hoped."

Not really credible, no. Thing is, I saw that happen with /every/ edition. There were always hold-outs. Then, we find out from that Dancey fellow what 4e was trying to accomplish, and the 'failure' makes sense. Then it comes out that DDI was torpedoed by human tragedy. The pieces fall into place.

It's not like it doesn't happen all the time. Something will be brought to wrong market, or at the wrong time, or have the wrong backer or the wrong expectations or myriad other factors, and, while there are some good points to it, it'll be a failure on some business level.

I just want to differentiate this, because I sometimes get the sense from fans of 4E that when somebody says it was a failure, or it wasn't as well loved as, say, 3.5, they get defensive -as if I was making a value judgment. I am not.

Obviously it''s hard to say 'failure' without some value judgement being applied. There's a converse problem, because, no matter how hard I try to make it clear I'm only speaking of mechanical minutiae and technical properties, using the word 'better' in a sentence with 4e is going to apply some value judgement.

And, all the weasel-words get in the way of making a point.

Yeah, I hear that. I've advocated for longer "macro-cycles" of whole editions--maybe 10-12 years--and smaller "micro-cycles" of sub-editions or revisions, maybe 2-3 years. I know Essentials was along these lines, but it didn't quite take.

Could you imagine a 4E Pathfinder? It is another conversation, but how would you change it? (In brief).

Can I imagine a situation where one could happen legally? No. Could I imagine what one might hypothetically be like, sure.

You know I'm always amazed at how much people don't like specific editions. I've found them all to be fun, in their own time at least. I love 3E when it came out and thought it was a tremendous advance from AD&D, and really liked 4E, although felt it was more of a sideways move from 3E - improvement in some ways, not so much in others.

Nod. You start with an ed of D&D and - if you're a fan like me - it's this revelation. Wow, this kind of game is possible. You're never going to dislike that edition, no matter how much better the game may get over time.

When later editions come out, you have a choice. You can choose to allow that they may be better than the treasured one and give them a chance. Or not. Both are actually valid choices.

But my point is, all editions of D&D are great. Just like if you listen to the albums of your favorite band, or the novels of your favorite author, you might have fond favorites, but hopefully you see a progression. But just because their first album or novel was comparatively simple compared to more recent work, it still has its place and charm and is fun to listen to.

I'll disagree a little, because eds are really more like re-makes than new material. There may be elements that are new, a new class or whatever, but it's still the same game, re-done, not a completely new one.

I agree that it is more balanced than before, but I also think it veered furthest from "that classic D&D feel," both in terms of game mechanics and the style of presentation and content. I mean when you have dragonborn and eladrin in the PHB, you're saying "This ain't your daddy's D&D!" This was part of the problem, for many. They felt "If it ain't broke, why fix it?" Some still feel that way about OD&D, while others it is more of a tonal, stylistic quality.

Well, if there's every a version of D&D that couldn't do with some fixing, I'll consider thinking that way. As for Dragonborn and Eladrin, the latter are high elves, the former toned down half-dragons - nothing 'not D&D' about them. But, yeah, there's no question that 4e was furthest from the classic D&D feel. Until it came out, 3e was the furthest from the classic D&D feel. Before 3e, I'm not so sure - the differences between 2e and 1e are so slight, and AD&D, BECMI, and 0D&D were virtually cross-compatible....



3e or 4e were never so far, though, that they weren't D&D. They were just more modern versions of D&D.

But I don't think your analogy of the ice cream bar works because, well, it didn't work out that way. Many people felt that they were being force-fed a rather specific flavor.

Yeah. Funny how someone can walk up to a build-your-own-sundae bar and complain about that. Almost like they hadn't actually tried it.

I mean, you keep writing off the actual experience of many, many gamers - enough that Pathfinder thrived, enough that 4E only lasted for three and a half years.

See, that's why I have to keep bringing up the business realities that actually shortened 4e's run - because people keep using that run as 'proof' that there was something bad about the content, that /so many people must have hated it/, even though they have no numbers.

Pathfinder thrived when D&D wound down to a slow pace of releases and finally stopped producing anything new. D&D was a failure for not bringing in $50 million a year, Pathfinder a wild success for peaking at $11 mil. That is not evidence that one was vastly more popular. It's not even clear evidence that people weren't buying both of 'em.

What I'm writing off is the anonymous claims of people on line who obviously have an axe to grind that they speak for some imaginary majority of the fanbase.

Again, the point is not that the flavor of 4E wasn't (isn't) a good one, just that it was too stylistically specific to carry the flag.

And, again, that's simply not true. 4e was more amenable to a /wider/ range of styles than prior eds, because it was relatively more robustly balanced. It was the greater breadth, the fact you could easily do things with it that you couldn't in classic D&D, that made it feel less like D&D. That's why your ice-cream analogy, above, fails, because it's backwards. And, because it leaves out salmonella, of course.

 

[RotGrub]

Out of curiosity, what's this playstyle, and what editions did you find succeeded at it?

Would you be surprised if I said I don't play 4e anymore?

I'm rather ticked off that healing surges remain in the game (hit dice). If I wanted that I would play 4e because I think it does a much better job at that sort of game. In addition, I think the long rest rules are beyond stupid. They couldn't even be bothered to include an alternate rule for them in the PHB, and who knows what kind of option ghetto I'll end up in with the DMG. Overall, the PHB sets a bad precedent and gamist styled expectations for new players, all of which I utterly hate.

There are some good things about the game that I do like. I'm just very disappointed with the lack of optional rules in the PHB. The optional rules that are in the book are few in number and mostly irrelevant to enable any particular playstyle. IMO, these optional rules (which were in the playtests) were removed on purpose.

Lastly, the PHB looks nice, but it's not functional as a game manual. The page footer doesn't even include the freaking chapter you are on and it's hard to read. The book says, "go to chapter 8" and you end up flipping through the manual looking for the first page of chapter 8.

I'm now wondering why I even purchased the PHB. There isn't really anything new in it that isn't already in the basic free rules.

 

[pemerton]

D&D should be trying to re-establish, refine, streamline and perfect the winning formula it's had for years... not go for something totally different. They tried that with 4e

My response to this is similar to my response upthread to [MENTION=5788]me[/MENTION]curius - it's post-hoc reasoning.

Of course 4e is different from earlier versions of D&D. So is 5e. Even 2nd ed AD&D was different - in some respects (eg wizards) very different. But the claim of "totally different" is quite contentious. And for a lot of D&D players 4e was not "totally different" at all - it streamlined and perfected what D&D, as they had experienced it, aimed at.

Look at the commentary in Worlds & Monsters, for instance, and you can see tha 4e awas all about re-establishing, refining, streamlining and perfecting the story elements that have been central to D&D for the past 30-plus years.

I personally think that a "better" approach would have been for 4E to be a kind of alternate path for D&D, a game within the game - sort of like D&D's answer to Exalted. Then they could have gone even further with it, made it more gonzo and true to its newer influences of anime, World of Warcraft, Hong Kong cinema, etc.

<snip>

experts (and academics, for that matter) can get so lost in abstraction, in their expertise, that they forget what the point of what they're talking about is - in this case, a game's primary purpose is to have fun. If game rules facilitate that, they work.

Most people who play D&D simply want to have fun in a game of imaginative, fantasy immersion. They don't care about cutting edge game design, excepts as it facilitates that primary objective.

There are two implications here. One is that 4e players wanted/want an alternative to D&D. This implication is, in my view, not correct. 4e players want to play D&D, and see 4e as a realisation of that desire.

For those who look at 4e and wonder why someone who wanted to play D&D would play that game, my answer is: look at the reasons why you prefer 3E or 5e's saving throw structure over the classic categories that Gygax invented. Whatever story you tell to yourself, so as to persuade yourself that the new saving throw structures are improvements rather than alternatives to D&D, you can be confident that most 4e players see 4e's changes to 3E in much the same way.

The second implication seems to be that people who play 4e, or who think 4e is well-designed, don't want to have fun. Maybe there are people out there playing 4e just to prove a point, but I haven't come across them. When I read posts from 4e players on these boards, I see them posting about the fun they are having playing an RPG. When I see them express concerns about the mechanical balance of 3E/PF or 5e, I see them either talking about issues that have affected their fun, or expressing fears for future burdens upon their fun.

In other words: it's fine to note that some people like 4e and others don't. But to label the first group as not really wanting to play D&D, or as favouring theory over fun, is frankly ridiculous.

********************

1st or 3rd person is a matter of style, but my point is that the 4E mechanics seemed to encourage, or at least imply, a greater separation between the player and the character, with the player being the controller and the character being a kind of avatar or game piece.

Let's put to one side that there is a fine tradition of "character as game piece" play in D&D (eg that is the basic way of playing Gygaxian D&D).

How do the 4e mechanics encourage, or imply, a greater separation between player and PC than (say) the 3E mechanics? In either game, playing your PC, you wonder about what you should do. You compare your knowledge of the ingame situation (as related to you by the GM) to your conception of what you (as your PC) are good and bad at, and you declare actions.

In my 4e group, I have players who think of their PCs primarily in 1st person, and players who think of their PCs primarily in 3rd person, just as I have had GMing any other system.

it does seem that some people are able to get a deep, immersive experience more easily out of one version of D&D than another.

True. I am able to get it more easily out of 4e than any other version of D&D that I have played.

As far as combat is concerned, the reason for that is raised in the next quote:

HP and AC are flat and don't offer much beyond 'roll over AC, roll for damage'. There's just not a lot of room for a fun and engaging combat here.

I personally agree with this. That's why I ran Rolemaster rather than D&D for nearly 20 years.

Part of the appeal of 4e, for me, is that it's combat system keeps the traditional D&D "roll to hit, roll for damage" but overlays it with a system of positioning, movement, debuffs etc that make the combat engaging rather than just a process of rolling for attrition.

what I think of as D&D is the fluff, things like settings and monsters and art. The rules are a vehicle for that, but aren't D&D all on their own.

Absolutely.

When I ran Rolemaster for all that time, I was still "playing D&D", in the sense that my campaign worlds were D&D (Greyhawk and Kara-Tur), many of the modules I used were D&D (Slavers, D1, OA3, OA7, Freeport trilogy, Bastion of Broken Souls, etc), and the basic tropes of PC building (warriors and magicians who gradually grow in power) and emerging plotline (start small, end up saving the universe from evil forces) remained the classic D&D tropes.

 

[pemerton]

Whether it's a 2e fan accusing 3e of being grid-dependent or a 3e fan making the same accusation at 4e, or a 5e enthusiast reveling over how TotM-friendly 5e is (without specifying whether that's in contrast to 2e C&T, 3e or 4e or something else), it's a lot of nonsense. There's virtually nothing to choose from among the various eds of D&D in that regard. They all have rules for range, area, movement and positioning that are too granular to be convenient in TotM - 4e's, ironically, with squares as the unit of granularity and chunky cubes for most AES, actually presenting the slightly lesser obstacle in that regard.

In my personal experience, I never used a gridded map and tokens before 4e. In earlier games, if a sketch was needed I would whip one up.

The reason I use tokens and a grid so often in 4e is because 4e is the first RPG I've played in which details of positioning (i) matter so strongly to combat resolution (eg OAs, combat challenge etc) and (ii) are such detailed objects of combat resolution (eg lots of low-single-digit forced movement, plus the shift rules). 3E seems to have some of this too (eg OAs) and so does 5e.

The reason that AD&D was so much easier to run without token and grid, I think, was because positioning played such a small role in its combat resolution. (Eg becaues movment within melee is free and does not trigger OAs, you can work out who is flanking whom, etc, just by assuming that the more numerous side automatically adopts the most advantage positions against the less numerous side.)

Character generation is far more streamlined in 5E than in 3.x. or 4E. No lists of powers of feats to parse. No skill points to spend. Pick a race, class, sub-class (skip if playing basic), and background.

If you're a caster, you have to pick spells. From longer lists than the 4e power lists for a 1st level character.

So, for a 4e character: race, class, sub-class/build option, powers, skills, gear.

For a 5e caster: race, class, sub-class/build option, spells, background/skils, gear.

I'm not seeing a wild difference.

In 4e can I play a balanced fighter whose equally adept at the sword and bow?

Heavily armoured? Play a slayer.

Lightly armoured? Play a DEX ranger who uses the DEX melee powers from MP2, or play a STR/DEX ranger (there are plenty of ranger powers that don't rely upon high WIS).

Moderately armoured? Play an archer warlord from MP2 (uses STR for melee and archery).

Well, no.

I don't think I agree - see possible builds just above.

if I don't like the AEDU structure can I pick a character that doesn't use it?

<snip>

If every class has to use powers and they have to be in an AEDU structure... how is that not rigid?

I don't fully get this - I mean, in 5e what if I want to play a PC where (as in many D&D-derived games) speed/reflexes and agility/co-ordination are different stats? I can't - I'm stuck with DEX. Does that mean 5e is rigid?

The game has to have some structure or other - 5e uses race, class, sub-class, background. 4e uses a different structure.

In any event, there are classes (eg knights, slayers, thieves) that don't have dailies other than healing surges.

 

[13garth13]

Well, since 4E was such a success....

Then why was the Rouse saying this a couple of years ago?

It seems to me that above and beyond the absolutely borked financial expectations that Hasbro had, there was a failure to provide a sufficiently "D&Desque" experience to engage the majority of the gaming audience (obviously it engaged quite a large proportion, to such an extent that for many gamers 4E is the pinnacle of D&D design/play, but quite clearly it failed to engage enough of said audience, and through any number of SNAFUs {GSL, Gleemax, etc} as well as design decisions even "succeeded" in alienating a sufficiently high number of previous D&D players that the well was effectively poisoned).

That's just my interpretation of course, and everyone is free to put their own spin on it

Cheers,
Colin