D&D 4E D&D Fluff Wars: 4e vs 5e

[Tony Vargas]

Leaving aside spells, it's kind of the whole show mechanically speaking.

Exactly the point. It's all you'd have, not all you'd need. It also illustrates how the design space for magic is crowded, while that for non-magic-using classes & sub-classes is wide open.

 

[Tallifer]

I have played off and on since AD&D in the early 1980s, so I just take or leave each piece of fluff as it tickles my fancy. Eberron and then 4th Edition each had a multitude of exciting new ideas which I am still working through. I hope some day to play in someone else's full-fledged 5th Edition Forgotten Realms campaign, because honestly I have taken almost no notice of the new fluff, especially since my long-running campaign has been set in a sort of fairy tale version of Eberron.

 

[Chaosmancer]

DPR and Skills, yup: in a theoretical low-magic D&D, the rest is RP.

Leaving aside spells, it's kind of the whole show mechanically speaking. Mechanics are nice and light here, any and all support elements can be provided by the skill system.

Exactly the point. It's all you'd have, not all you'd need. It also illustrates how the design space for magic is crowded, while that for non-magic-using classes & sub-classes is wide open.

You know, I get the sentiment, but thinking about it... isn't that kind of how it is supposed to be?

If we took Catwoman, Rambo, Indiana Jones, and Jet Li and put them in a fantasy world, what kinds of things are we expecting them to do?

Use their skills (persuasion, stealth, investigation, survival, deception, ect) and hit people hard and fast (DPR)

Would we expect them to be able to cure petrification or summon the elements or reseal and ancient demon? If that was the plot, they would either need an NPC or a Macguffin (or and NPC named Macguffin) to cover that mystic stuff they don't have. And the story would make that a side-focus.

It isn't them casting the ritual, it's them holding off this crazy strong demon while the nerdy guy chants a 1 minute spell they pulled from the tomb of an ancient king, where Indy broke the traps and getting it translated by a guy Catwoman seduced.

In a mechanical sense, I agree, every party needs a variety of healing tools and capabilities as well as some magic craziness to fly or teleport to certain locations. But, you can tell a good story where that was all done by other people, and the heroes did the part that the others couldn't do. With only Skills and DPR

 

[cbwjm]

I definitely like some of the 4e fluff and have incorporated it into my homebrew.

The elemental planes have sections which are separate but merge in the middle into the elemental chaos (is this how it is in 5e?).
The Fey wild and shadowfell/plane of shadow both exist and war against each other.
The outer planes I haven't quite sorted yet since I don't need to. It might be like the great wheel or it may be that they are wholly separate.

In 4e, I really liked the shake up of the realms. My favourite bits were the genasi city of airspur (if that isn't the name, I mean the one with the floating rocks) and the reigniting of the wars between the air and fire genies and genasi in Calimsham. That change was really cool. I also liked the lore behind the transposition of lands between the twin worlds. The fact that the dawn war led to Ao creating a world for gods and a world for titans was pretty cool.

 

[Igwilly]

Talking about 4e's FR:
I'm not, by any means, a FR fan. But the whole idea of the Spellplague, twin worlds, the goddess of magic dying, etc amazes me; so I'll make a campaign around an event of the same kind in my homebrew world, eventually. I already know who killed the goddess of magic haha (he is a mortal).
But of course, if the fans disliked it, that should be a separate thing, but to each their own.

 

[Parmandur]

Talking about 4e's FR:
I'm not, by any means, a FR fan. But the whole idea of the Spellplague, twin worlds, the goddess of magic dying, etc amazes me; so I'll make a campaign around an event of the same kind in my homebrew world, eventually. I already know who killed the goddess of magic haha (he is a mortal).
But of course, if the fans disliked it, that should be a separate thing, but to each their own.

Taken alone, not bad story material; but in the context of an established setting...blowing it up to that extent is just bad business.

 

[Staffan]

Taken alone, not bad story material; but in the context of an established setting...blowing it up to that extent is just bad business.

There are very few setting reboots/large-scale changes that have turned out well.

Basically, the pre-4e Forgotten Realms was fairly divisive. While many people liked it, others couldn't get past its perceived flaws such as the patchwork feel, the abundance of high-level NPCs, highly active deities, and constantly advancing timeline changing things all over the place.

So, when doing the 4e version, the designers radically altered the setting, in order to both correct the previously mentioned flaws and to explain the differences in the game (dragonborn, warlocks, eladrin, etc.). The timeline moved up about a century with a magical cataclysm in the meantime to provide a rationale for the changes. The problem was:

1. People who previously disliked the Forgotten Realms were already inclined not to like the new version, particularly since the process of getting to the new version highlighted many of the things they didn't like in the first place (activist deities and radical changes).

2. People who did like the old FR saw their beloved setting pretty much destroyed and replaced with a new one with some shared geography and names, and invalidating two decades of published material.

I think, if you're going to reboot a setting you should start with one that's failing in the first place, and I'm pretty sure FR wasn't. Rebooting a setting that's partially successful will only lead to no-one liking the reboot. But if you start with a game/setting that's been out of production for a few years, and identify the things that do and don't work with the setting and make sure to keep the first and address the second... then you might succeed.

There's a Swedish game called Mutant (sort of but not exactly related to the current game Mutant: Year Zero) that I think actually provides an example of both approaches. Back in the mid-80s (I think 1984, but I'm not sure) the game Mutant was released as the first professionally published Swedish homegrown RPG (the game Drakar och Demoner preceded it, from the same company, but the first version of DoD was a translation of Basic Roleplaying + Magic World from Worlds of Wonder). The game was an unabashed Gamma World rip-off, but using a BRP-ish system, and having the sketches of a setting called Mutant Scandinavia centered around the Pyri Commonwealth in parts of what is now Sweden. This setting got more detailed though various supplements and support articles written throughout the 80s.

But apparently the company making Mutant wasn't happy with its commercial performance, and they saw the new cool Cyberpunk genre growing and wanted to get in on that. So they scrapped the old Mutant product line, and made a new one, also called Mutant. This was more of a dark future/cyberpunk game (though originally lacking in rules for cyberspace). You would still have mutants around, but they were more like morlocks or the neo-men from Camelot 3000. The focus moved from exploration of Forbidden Zones to dealing with gangs and megacorps in shady mega-cities. This product line was cancelled after only two years, in favor of the more 40K-inspired Mutant RYMD which later evolved into Mutant Chronicles.

Anyway, move up a few more years, to 2002. By now, the previous publishers of Mutant have gone bankrupt and been restructured as Paradox Entertainment (holding the rights to the old games) and Paradox Interactive (making some pretty nice computer games, though they weren't as big in 2002 as they are now). Some dudes in northern Sweden license the rights to Mutant from Paradox Entertainment, and create a a new version of the original Mutant. It still uses a Basic Roleplaying-based engine, but with many improvements on the old. You still have the four primary classes of characters (more like races in a D&D context): Human (non-mutant), Mutant (both mutant animals and humans), Psychic Mutant (also including animals), and Robots. The setting is back to Pyri Commonwealth, but a slightly earlier version, and the description of neighboring areas are more sketchy. The writing and illustrations are top notch at setting the mood, which I would characterize as satirical social-realist - there's a lot of emphasis on the struggles of the oppressed working classes of both mutants and humans, and the human-controlled upper class, and such. It's hard to describe, and very uniquely Swedish. Anyhow, this game became (by Swedish standards) a runaway success, showing that a setting/game reboot can work. The product line was cancelled after seven years, and the publishers said that they didn't cancel it because it wasn't doing well, but rather because the license was running out and they had already done a core book (and a revision), small splatbooks for the classes (collected into a big players' expansion book), a monster book, a highly acclaimed trilogy of adventures/sourcebooks forming a pretty epic campaign, and assorted other things. Basically, all the low-hanging fruit had already been picked, so it wasn't worth extending the license.

TL;DR: Taking an active, and already beloved setting and revamping everything about it will almost certainly not work. Taking an inactive setting and respectfully reinventing it, keeping the things that work and de-emphasizing the things that don't, might. The Swedish game Mutant provides a good example of both approaches.

 

[Tony Vargas]

You know, I get the sentiment, but thinking about it... isn't that kind of how it is supposed to be?

No. While D&D's hp and d20 resolution core systems make DPR the centerpiece for combat and skill checks the centerpiece for the other two pillars, they, clearly, do not exclude the possibility of other mechanisms. Sub-systems like spells, ki, rituals, and maneuvers make that clear enough, and there are also individual examples. The thing is, those sub-systems and individual mechanics are heavily skewed towards spell-casting concepts. Other forms of supernatural power, and the obvious alternative of extraordinary but still natural ('natural' within the context of heroes in a fantasy genre setting) abilities, have barely been developed.

There's a great deal of unexplored design space there.

The problem was:

1. People who previously disliked the Forgotten Realms were already inclined not to like the new version, particularly since the process of getting to the new version highlighted many of the things they didn't like in the first place (activist deities and radical changes).

2. People who did like the old FR saw their beloved setting pretty much destroyed and replaced with a new one with some shared geography and names, and invalidating two decades of published material.

Nod. Yet, sometimes an IP does get successfully rebooted, broadens its appeal and does better than ever. It's a crap shoot for the owners of the IP.

The other thing the spellplague did was make FR into a 'Points of Light' setting. A wrecked place in a Dark Age with islands of civilization or Good here and there. That's a radical change from Elminster's old stomping ground. And, ultimately, IMHO, it was a mistake. While the generic default suggested that sort of setting, there was no need to conform past settings to it. Some were already fine for it, and nothing about the game made it unsuitable for other sorts of settings...

 

[Aaron L]

I will admit right from the start that I genuinely despise everything about 4E, from the mechanics to the setting. But separating the flavor from the mechanics, one of the things that really made my stomach churn about the 4E setting flavor was the names, as petty as that may seem. Feywild? Shadowfell? Aarrgghh. So cutesy it makes my teeth itch. Call them Faerie and the Plane of Shadow, please (except the Shadowfell seemed to be a merging of Shadow and Ethereal, as far as I could tell.) As a great strip from Penny Arcade pointed out, Shadowfell just means "Dark Bad," albeit in the most precious, generic, Young Adult fantasy manner. All of the names seemed to be run through a cheesy "Earth to Faerun" translator and back again.

But the names really felt to me to be just a symptom of the whole way of thinking behind the flavor; the original 1E/2E/3E flavor was very much in the vein of dark pulpy Weird Fiction - Leiber/Howard/Lovecraft/Moorcock, while 4E felt to me like something from Eragon. (Speaking of cutesy, I even hate the 2E/Planescape names for the Outer Planes, so it's not specific to 4E. Carceri? Mechanus? By Yog-Sothoth, please no. Tartarus and Nirvana. Ysgard instead of Asgard? Why?)

 

[TheCosmicKid]

I will admit right from the start that I genuinely despise everything about 4E, from the mechanics to the setting. But separating the flavor from the mechanics, one of the things that really made my stomach churn about the 4E setting flavor was the names, as petty as that may seem. Feywild? Shadowfell? Aarrgghh. So cutesy it makes my teeth itch. Call them Faerie and the Plane of Shadow, please (except the Shadowfell seemed to be a merging of Shadow and Ethereal, as far as I could tell.) As a great strip from Penny Arcade pointed out, Shadowfell just means "Dark Bad," albeit in the most precious, generic, Young Adult fantasy manner. All of the names seemed to be run through a cheesy "Earth to Faerun" translator and back again.

To be fair, Tolkien did that a lot, he just didn't translate 'em back unless the result sounded cool. Mordor = "Blackland"; not cool. Isengard = "Ironfort"; not cool. Amon Amarth = "Mount Doom"; effin' metal.

...but yeah, "Shadowfell" and "Feywild" are awful names.

Names notwithstanding, I like them a lot better than their earlier counterparts. Faerie didn't even really exist in the Great Wheel, unless you count Arborea which was trying to be too many different things (a common problem with the Wheel planes). And merging Shadow and the Ethereal was a good move; it made both of them more interesting. Previously, "ethereal" was not so much a plane as it was a status effect. (And alongside "incorporeal", a redundant status effect.)

But the names really felt to me to be just a symptom of the whole way of thinking behind the flavor; the original 1E/2E/3E flavor was very much in the vein of dark pulpy Weird Fiction - Leiber/Howard/Lovecraft/Moorcock, while 4E felt to me like something from Eragon. (Speaking of cutesy, I even hate the 2E/Planescape names for the Outer Planes, so it's not specific to 4E. Carceri? Mechanus? By Yog-Sothoth, please no. Tartarus and Nirvana. Ysgard instead of Asgard? Why?)

If I were inclined to get offended about such things, I would not be happy that Nirvana is depicted as a stodgy clockwork universe populated by insane robots. As is, I'm mostly just confused by it. Better not to use names for things that the planes transparently aren't.