What will happen to 4th edition?

[prosfilaes]

Also, even if one accepts the premise that games like chess are eternal phenomenons

Whose premise? All things must come to an end. The question is longevity, not immortality.

It didn't become the chess we know today until at least 925 years later, around 1475.

Which means that games can be stable for 500 years and survive. To the extent the claim is that D&D needs 4E-size changes to survive and not 5E-size changes, because games that don't change die, I have no problem taking as evidence against that claim. I'd also say that games that modern game historians call chess changed over a period of 925 years; I find it much more likely that in 1500 years, their histories will group tabletop RPGs in anachronistic categories and consider D&D a early brand name.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't believe abbreviations are an acceptable way to avoid the grandmother rule about language acceptable on these boards.

Best left to the mod gods...

That would be a stupid claim; that's why it's not reasonable to assume he was making it.

That is a novel form of argument. "This argument is so inane that I couldn't possibly have meant what I said!" Sadly it doesn't change what argument was being made...

I don't think anyone was contesting that. The question is, what properties of games make them stick around and what properties of games make them fade away.

Cultural relevance and compatibility with current culture would be big ones. Does D&D resonate with younger people well? These days when I talk to younger PLAYERS they have basically never read, often never heard of, the literature which directly inspired D&D. A lot of the cultural referents are strange to them, and the sensibilities of the game can seem odd. I found that 4e, with a refreshed sense of these things and modern presentation often spoke better to younger players. The other problem is the FORM of the game, an often noted thing. Relatively few people are interested or willing to put in the time and energy that is required to play. Again 4e at least tried to address that with drastically reduced DM time requirements for instance.

When a game is moribund, it is not being played. That's what moribund means. It doesn't mean that it as ceased to change. That when a game has ceased to change (in any meaningful way, whatever that means) it is becoming obscure and unplayed is what you're arguing for, so simply repeating it doesn't make your case. A claim that doesn't let you predict forward what will happen doesn't mean much; anyone can in retrospect fit their theory around what has already happened.

Arguments that try to split semantic hairs go nowhere. You understand what I'm saying. It is quite valid to prove a theory against past events, and this has no effect on its ability to predict future ones. A theory MUST NECESSARILY explain the past as well as the future.

Checkers is still sold in every major general store. There have been brief breakthroughs in D&D, like the 4E Basic Box that went into some stores, but D&D is still below that point. Checkers is 500 to 1000 years old, depending on what you're counting, so you have to explain why it's so old. If we accept that it is dying, I have to look at the 12 national varieties (including international and American) that Wikipedia mentions and wonder why a game with such continual change is dying.

I wonder what the actual sales of checker sets is. Checkers, in various forms, has been a traditional game for eons because it doesn't require elaborate props and the rules are simple enough for illiterate people to follow. Its also a betting game. I'd venture that what might apply to checkers is really pretty different from what might apply to D&D. In fact I don't really think board games are a very good analog at all personally.

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

Whose premise? All things must come to an end. The question is longevity, not immortality.

Which means that games can be stable for 500 years and survive. To the extent the claim is that D&D needs 4E-size changes to survive and not 5E-size changes, because games that don't change die, I have no problem taking as evidence against that claim. I'd also say that games that modern game historians call chess changed over a period of 925 years; I find it much more likely that in 1500 years, their histories will group tabletop RPGs in anachronistic categories and consider D&D a early brand name.

Oh semantics, where would the interwebs be without you? Pick whichever word you want; longevity highlights my point all the more clearly. Oh, and I'm gonna need a citation for your assumption that chess(?) was stable for 500 years.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Oh semantics, where would the interwebs be without you? Pick whichever word you want; longevity highlights my point all the more clearly. Oh, and I'm gonna need a citation for your assumption that chess(?) was stable for 500 years.

Oh, I've been friends with a few different chess aficionados. 1475 is generally considered the date that the 'modern' rules of the board were finalized, all the current pieces existed and had their modern accepted moves, including details like pawns initial move of 2 squares, castling, etc. However the rules of PLAYING chess continued to evolve. Things like what constitutes a stalemate, time keeping, etc have changed at least up into the 20th Century, and there are still innovations like different time keeping rules for special games, etc.

I think chess is a freak amongst games though frankly, along with go. They are both remarkably old and stable, and still attract a large following. It would be unwise to assume other games will experience the same type of success.

 

[prosfilaes]

Oh semantics, where would the interwebs be without you?

Without meaning, like in any text-based format.

Oh, and I'm gonna need a citation for your assumption that chess(?) was stable for 500 years.

Your date, not mine.

 

[prosfilaes]

That is a novel form of argument.

Not really. It's a pretty standard tool; human communication is challenging, and if you're in an argument you're likely to use the least favorable interpretation. That's a way of listening to what the person you're talking to is actually saying by interpreting what they're saying in a reasonable sense instead of one that's convenient to argue against. (And you aren't the one who used mockingly used the word "semantics", but it is a bit rich for someone to argue that someone else's words must be taken literally, even when ludicrous, but their words must be interpreted generously.)

Cultural relevance and compatibility with current culture would be big ones.

That which echoes current culture too closely tends to be taken as pastiche or worse. D&D has done quite well producing its own lines of fiction, and there's always licensed RPGs if you want to be really culturally relevant.

These days when I talk to younger PLAYERS they have basically never read, often never heard of, the literature which directly inspired D&D.

By simple fact of their age, younger players have not read a lot of literature. Maybe if you pack it with last year's young adult best sellers, but then D&D is chasing the fads, a dangerous game for anything that wants long-term players. Pulling the 1E DMG off the shelf, and thinking back to that hallowed time when a DM turned to 2E gave that to me as part of my first RPG books, I turn back to Appendix N. I read Tolkien, Norton and the Amber series somewhere around that time. The rest of it was unheard-of to me, and some of it, even after some willful self-versing in 20th century science fiction and fantasy, still is.

The other problem is the FORM of the game, an often noted thing. Relatively few people are interested or willing to put in the time and energy that is required to play. Again 4e at least tried to address that with drastically reduced DM time requirements for instance.

That's a different theory then just calling for generalized change.

It is quite valid to prove a theory against past events, and this has no effect on its ability to predict future ones. A theory MUST NECESSARILY explain the past as well as the future.

When computer programmers design neural net AIs, we train them on half the sample data, and check against the other half. If we train it on all the sample data, we get an AI that works very well on the sample data, and not so well on reality. http://xkcd.com/1122/ is a bunch of theories that explained the past--no one has been elected president that has lost New Mexico, for example--but didn't explain the future very well. For a third analogy, despite Nostradamus believers being able to show how every major event in recent history has been predicted by Nostradamus, most people still believe that it's merely the believers interpreting the text to fit history, and not the other way around.

Mathematically, I can come up with a function that predicts the past of any numeric feature perfectly, just fit it to a polynomial. I can give you Microsoft's share price to the cent for every day it's traded. It will, however, probably either predict that in ten years, the share price will be negative or millions of dollars. Is that useful?

In fact I don't really think board games are a very good analog at all personally.

Then you've tossed out anything that is remotely analogous to D&D. From within roleplaying games, there's nothing analogous--D&D is the only game with its lifespan and its results in the market in RPGs.

 

[billd91]

Oh, I've been friends with a few different chess aficionados. 1475 is generally considered the date that the 'modern' rules of the board were finalized, all the current pieces existed and had their modern accepted moves, including details like pawns initial move of 2 squares, castling, etc. However the rules of PLAYING chess continued to evolve. Things like what constitutes a stalemate, time keeping, etc have changed at least up into the 20th Century, and there are still innovations like different time keeping rules for special games, etc.

So... people add house rules and that's the innovation that keeps chess alive? That's basically what rules on time keeping are - house rules or campaign rules for chess.

I think chess is a freak amongst games though frankly, along with go. They are both remarkably old and stable, and still attract a large following. It would be unwise to assume other games will experience the same type of success.

Nobody is. What we're not assuming, however, is that it is a lack of innovation that killed all other games from the middle ages and older. There's a difference.

 

[Imaro]

What is your point, btw, if not to simply threadcrap? Not these little details you're quibbling over with Abdulalhazred; but your impetus for posting in this thread.

I'm sorry I must have missed where this was declared a thread where only positive things could be posted about 4e... he general question seems to be what will happen to 4e... I answered that question and replied to the assertions of another poster... In what way is that thread crapping? You want a 4e lovefest go create a thread for it and make sure you indicate that only positive opinions of 4e are welcome.

 

[Imaro]

This is silly. The MC Power Swap feats all reference powers in a fully generic manner. In fact it is so fully generic that you can't use them with most E-classes because those classes broke the power progression! Its irrelevant that there are more than one of these feats, and the other BASE MC feats don't reference the power system at all particularly. So what? Lots of feats don't reference powers, news at eleven! lol.

[h=1]Novice Power [Multiclass Encounter][/h]Prerequisite: Any class-specific multiclass feat, 4th level
Benefit: You can swap one encounter attack power you know for one encounter attack power of the same level or lower from the class you multiclassed into.
Note: If you have no encounter attack powers, this feat grants no benefit to you.

That's funny because I see the multiclass feats refer to ... "encounter power", "attack power" and "level"... which is making a differentiation based on type of power (not referencing power in a generic way.) and that is why they can't be used with some of the E-classes because they don't meet the specific power requirements the feats reference...

There are other feats that also reference powers in general. There is the Skill Power feat for instance, and the Reserve Maneuver feat, and the various Martial 'swap a power' feats (which are limited to martial powers but still work with ALL martial classes). 4e is in fact blessed with quite a few of these things and I'm only skimming the surface, I'm sure there are plenty of others.

Dude read what you wrote... SKILL power feat... it's already non-generic. And the reserve maneuver specifically references an encounter attack power... again not generic... It's different only in the way it's being categorized there is no generic reference to just powers...

Sure it is. The 4e Skill Power mechanism is quite elegant. It opens up additional build options to the player but adds no complexity to the character at all. They simply swap out an existing utility power slot to gain a skill-related power instead. This is very easy in 4e because every class has the same mix of utility powers. While I'm sure you can add on more things to 5e characters it isn't as elegant.

How do you know? How would the system I described add more complexity to characters? How is it not as or more elegant than the power system? It's universal base would be 5e's skill system which is the same for every character... And I disagree with your point about their being no added complexity to swapping powers out. It's a new power with new rules that must be learned and applied and that is more complexity.

Those are limitations that CAN be added to powers in order to allow for the existence of powers that might not play well with other elements due to balance mostly. I don't see how this is an issue or a criticism of the power system, since it is A) not a core aspect of it and B) every game has limitations. Nor are the rules for the different usages of powers in 4e a big deal. Heck, 5e has those AS WELL AS rules for each spell-casting class, and there are a hefty bunch of classes that have spells.

So now we're talking about some hypothetical power system as opposed to the actual one 4e uses? Because in 4e the classification of powers is core to the power system...

Powers are no more complicated than the sorts of maneuvers and such that say 5e fighters have now. Nor were fighters exactly dirt simple in 3.x either with all the feats they had, the multiple attack rules, etc. Don't even TRY to tell me that most 4e characters are more complicated than 3.x characters except MAYBE at very low level, maybe, and a basic level 1 4e PC isn't exactly vastly complicated.

Wait so 3e fighter gets feats... 4e fighter gets feats and powers... but the 3e fighter is just as fiddly as the 4e one... that doesn't compute.

But you DO understand what the reason for asking it was, clearly. Its because the 5e rules are very obtuse, and I would actually say poorly thought out in this entire area. I can recall Mike and the other columnists back during the early 5e design pronouncements fumbling around trying to make up a different better skill system and at every turn being shown how it was not going to work as well as what already existed. But they had to do it different, nothing could be declared good enough. So they shot themselves in the foot and now when we play 5e we have to scratch our heads in wonder at what the heck they were thinking.

And you should understand your views on the rules being obtuse and poorly thought out aren't shared universally (this is what I mean when I say you state opinion as if it were a fact)... I'd even be hesitant to call them a majority in those playing 5e... so I can accept you find them hard to parse and understand but that doesn't make them universally hard to read, understand and apply.

DCs are simply looked up on a table. The DM declares the level of the encounter and the DCs come from that. GENERALLY they are either medium or hard DCs, but all that the Rules Compendium says about that is that a certain number of them can be hard. Still, for a system that encompasses ANY sort of action its pretty tight. No NPCs don't ever make opposed rolls in an SC by RAW for any of the 'make a skill check to fail or succeed' rolls, but additional types of rolls (for advantages) could be of any type.

Ok, so in 5e I could do it that way or let NPC's roll... how is that not more flexibility?

You talk about RAW as if it is a straight jacket but it isn't. I can do all the things in 4e that you can do in 5e, there aren't WotC police stopping me. There are however some rules I can choose to follow that work and make sense. Is it really too much to ask that when I buy a rule book for a game it has rules that make sense and are reasonably complete such that in the first 5 minutes of my game I won't have to make up new ones? 4e LETS me make up whatever I want, and it is even very good at getting out of my way and not telling me what my game should be like, narratively. 5e keeps throwing narrative baggage at me and the same time lets me down when it comes to giving me an actual framework to hang my play on.

So basically doesn't matter because I can house rule it... well then if it doesn't matter which edition it is because "hey we can houserule" I'm going to go with 5e simmply because I don't like the alot of the base assumptions in 4e

I don't want to get carried away here and give the impression that I think 5e is a bad game, its not, but it isn't a better game for Mearls' misguided notions.

And I don't think 4e is a bad game... perhaps bad for what I and many others expect of D&D... but not a bad game in and of itself.

And they are. You weren't at all convincing in stating that they aren't. A vast common set of rules and concepts that are common to all powers verifies that. And again, every edition has many rules in common between characters of all classes. What makes it a problem only in one game? Frankly I think people don't know why they like or dislike something and then they just invent logical-sounding reasons later on.

Only powers are not in 4e... hello psionics, hello essentials. Different powers have different keywords, sources, levels, pre-requisites, usage times, etc. the only thing they all share in common is (just like class features in 5e) they've all been grouped under one heading. The fat that you're not convinced doesn';t make it any less true.

Eh, 4e doesn't really have 0-level rules except for some Dragon article that honestly wasn't incredibly well thought-out of you ask me. I heard a couple people tried it but it didn't sound like it was that special. Personally I like that I can play all levels of 4e and not have to play only one niche sort of low level play where everything is a death trap. As I said before, you can still do that even in 4e if you want.

My point was why create an article and adventure addressing that type of play if there is little demand for it. Personally I thought the rules were pretty clever but to each his own.

And then they were compelled to spend the next 6 years trashing it and talking down on all the people that were happy with it or didn't really care one way or another. Thanks!

Eh, people wanted change and voiced their dissatisfaction with it... same as you're expressing your dissatisfaction with 5e, the thing is I don't take it personal in the least and if there are enough people who don't like 5e then it should be replaced.

 

[sgtscott658]

Ok, my question is, with 3,5 being so successful, why did WoTC put out a completely different version of D&D in the form of 4E? Why did 4E tank? Was it because it had almost nothing in common with previous editions?