Speculation about "the feelz" of D&D 4th Edition

[MwaO]

Well, if you consider one versus three rounds significant....

I just defined a medium challenge as per DMG for a party of 4 level PCs. A party should find 6-8 medium/hard combats per day with two short rests challenging. Again, as per DMG. At 20th level, that's not true for one of the two groups. Either the party with no magic items is getting slaughtered or the group with magic items blows through everything without much challenge at all.

That matters to the game.

Point is, you can give Blackrazor to first level PCs, or never use magic items, and the game is playable with no mat required: things will swing differently, but it doesn't matter to the game.

That's true of any edition of D&D. Including 4e from levels 1-30. You're describing how marketing makes you feel that you can't do that with 4e and can do it with 5e. That's not part of the game, but rather the marketing. And that's a legitimate concern about the marketing of 4e that you feel that you can't do that. But 3e had all that same marketing.

 

[Parmandur]

The talking points the h4ters used in the edition war were repeated ad nauseum, and the only thing you're likely to accomplish by repeating them (at least, without some new insight, like the OP had) is to tar yourself with the h4ter brush.

Case in point. If you don't want to look the part of the h4ter, don't run so many plays from their book.

Sure, sure. And, you'll note there's virtually no edition warring going on in the 5e discussion group (at least, not against 5e).
The situation you cite was far more the case during the edition war. Fans of 3.x who felt all betrayed not only had a vast wealth of already-published material to draw upon, but the prospect of ongoing support from 3pps in perpetuity. Yet they actively warred against the current edition.

Now that 4e is dead, the only edition of the game that is both unsupported by WotC, and can't legally be cloned by anyone else, the h4ter edition warring continues.

How terrified do you have to be of something to keep shooting it in the back after it's bled out?

Really, it's designed to be closer to the classic game: it leaves a lot of 3e-isms on the floor, too. (One of the ironies of the edition war is that 3.5/PF fans were in the trenches, fighting harder than anyone, yet 5e snubbed them almost as badly as it did 4e fans, in seeking to woo back the fans of the classic game.)

And, not coincidentally, as someone who fell in love with the classic game, I'm quite fond of 5e. It punches the ol' nostalgia buttons neatly, and, after over a decade of player-focused systems, it's a blast to run D&D with the kind of absolute power DMs enjoyed back in the day - indeed, when I run the 4e campaign I'm finishing out, I find myself increasingly edging it towards the same DMing style.

At the same time, as with every prior edition, I'm not in denial about its technical deficiencies.

Not my position, but it's very like the circular argument common in the edition war. H4ters claim something terrible about 4e (it's mechanics dissociate them, they can't RP, it's an MMO, etc, but when they're pressed to site the actual attributes of 4e that cause those issues, the same qualities are readily found in prior editions that they like. How then can you hate one and defend the other?

There are lots of us - Mearls claimed that the early playtest polls showed the majority of respondents felt this way - who love D&D, and aren't militantly devoted to (nor irrationally hate) a specific edition or era.

Of course, you can decide how credible you find him when he makes statements like that.




The counting squares thing is funny, with the 5' square being a thing in D&D since 2e C&T (c1995), and AD&D using inches that could be 10' or 10 yards, depending.

The ways in which 4e, itself (as opposed to the market weakness and business side fiascos it was afflicted with) was different from prior (and, now, later) editions were clustered around one system quality: balance.

H4ters complained about all sorts of soft qualities that could hide behind the shield of subjectivity, but, when able to cite anything concrete at all, it was virtually always a game element that functioned to provide class or encounter balance, most often the former.

Now, balance is a desirable quality in a any game, but especially so in a complex game with a wide scope, and especially so in a cooperative game where there will be no explicit winner, so being - both of which are likely aspects of an RPG.

That is, desirable unless you're intent on 'winning' a cooperative game by cracking the system, dominating play, or outright ruining the experience for others. D&D had been a very poorly balanced game for a long time, so it's long-time fans had either learned to cope with and compensate for that downside - or to embrace and leverage it. Either way, suddenly playing a much better-balanced version of the same game presented challenges and challenged expectations.

Yeah... no. There's a lot of high-minded retro-nostalgic psuedo-analysis and revisionist history muddying the waters of the classic game, let alone the original game. And the one you cite sounds like it's in that sea of turbidity.

No, early D&D was not intentionally rules for building a shared world. It was rules for dungeon-crawling, wilderness-exploration, treasure-hunting, magic and combat, some of those a lot more detailed than others, the whole of them not in the least consistent in design paradigm.

But, it /is/ true that, if you took them seriously enough, they started to imply things about the world for whom they'd act as de-facto laws of physics. But that's true of any RPG ruleset, even those that go out of their way trying to be 'generic.'

The one example cited by your source, though, level limits, in addition to being an unsuccessful attempt to balance the multi-classing rules over many levels, was a case where Gygax came right out and said he was intentionally trying to evoke the fantasy genre, said genre being humanocentric in spite of featuring super-human races.

Ironically, level-limits were one of the most unpopular and ignored of rules, with 2e raising those limits substantially, and 3e dropping the whole thing entirely (and, you'll notice, it's one thing 5e hasn't brought back).

D&D went about as far as the early 90s. ;P

Seriously, 4e would have been a revolutionary game if it had been published before Over the Edge, for instance. d20, had it been published in the 80s, before open-source was a thing, would have been a solid core system, a worthy rival to Chaosium BRP and GURPS.

Bonds/Flaws & Inspiration is the kind of RP-carrot I recall from early predecessors of modern indie games. Aside from that?

Of course, I'm a grognard in my own way, and am probably much more tuned to the classic-D&Disms of 5e.

Well, let's leave the edition wars behind, and approach this in a phenomenological fashion: people threw irrational hissy fits over feeling dissociated...but that doesn't mean they didn't feel that way. What is that caused that emotional reaction? As someone who experienced that in a low key way, that's the interesting question to me: why?

"Balance" only goes so far; balancing knights in shining armor with Merlin is always going to be relative; taking it too far just isn't realistic. 5E achieves sufficient balance, while allowing for difference: it also throws major roadblocks in front of charop, and makes the rewards for that limited (see earlier about magic weapons).

Sent from my BLU LIFE XL using EN World mobile app

 

[MwaO]

Yeah, the idea that 5E is somehow "only for grognards" does seem fairly bizarre, given the general popularity among new players (most of the folks I know playing); or that is "unfit for the future" which flies in the face of it's continued growth and flourishing. False narratives of progress and reaction are not helpful.

It isn't that complex. Core books sell heavily in the first couple of years of an edition and then drop off dramatically and that's where all the profit is. And Hasbro wants to see WotC keep growing revenue across their product lines, not see a drop off.

 

[Parmandur]

I just defined a medium challenge as per DMG for a party of 4 level PCs. A party should find 6-8 medium/hard combats per day with two short rests challenging. Again, as per DMG. At 20th level, that's not true for one of the two groups. Either the party with no magic items is getting slaughtered or the group with magic items blows through everything without much challenge at all.

That matters to the game.



That's true of any edition of D&D. Including 4e from levels 1-30. You're describing how marketing makes you feel that you can't do that with 4e and can do it with 5e. That's not part of the game, but rather the marketing. And that's a legitimate concern about the marketing of 4e that you feel that you can't do that. But 3e had all that same marketing.

That is one way that 4E does evolve straight from 3.x: it takes what 3.x said was mandatory, and really pushed that to the next level: stuff we ignored like magic item reqs or wealth by level. Guidelines, was how we saw them: easily ignored. 4E did a lot more to get in the way of playing that way, or at least in presentation (which is hugely important).

Sent from my BLU LIFE XL using EN World mobile app

 

[Parmandur]

It isn't that complex. Core books sell heavily in the first couple of years of an edition and then drop off dramatically and that's where all the profit is. And Hasbro wants to see WotC keep growing revenue across their product lines, not see a drop off.

True, there is that; seems to be working so far. But the commercial aspect is not connected to whether the gameplay is "fit": natural selection indicates it is most fit, with PF the next most fit for the future.

Sent from my BLU LIFE XL using EN World mobile app

 

[Imaro]

It isn't that complex. Core books sell heavily in the first couple of years of an edition and then drop off dramatically and that's where all the profit is. And Hasbro wants to see WotC keep growing revenue across their product lines, not see a drop off.

But grognards don't grow a playerbase, they are a set group who only produce X sales... new players do so we are roughly 2+ years out from the release of the corebooks and they are still selling like hotcakes... which doesn't make sense if they only hold an attraction for grognards... irregardless of what Hasbro and WotC want.

 

[Parmandur]

But grognards don't grow a playerbase, they are a set group who only produce X sales... new players do so we are roughly 2+ years out from the release of the corebooks and they are still selling like hotcakes... which doesn't make sense if they only hold an attraction for grognards... irregardless of what Hasbro and WotC want.

WotC spent years, and money, on figuring out what people broadly wanted to see and play; that appears to have paid off passingly well.

Sent from my BLU LIFE XL using EN World mobile app

 

[cavalier973]

...Gygax came right out and said he was intentionally trying to evoke the fantasy genre, said genre being humanocentric in spite of featuring super-human races.

That's sort of what I was trying to say. To paraphrase Colville, Gygax was "planting his flag" on the hill of pulp fantasy. The game rules were supposed to evoke Conan and Farfa...Farver...Big Sword Dude and the Grey Mouser.

There's a lot of high-minded retro-nostalgic psuedo-analysis and revisionist history muddying the waters of the classic game, let alone the original game. And the one you cite sounds like it's in that sea of turbidity.

That's just, like, your opinion, man.

Well, you're probably correct; my understanding was that, at least in the early days of the game, one was expected to be able to play his same character at any table, hence the idea of a "shared world". I rely on Colville for this idea, and perhaps he is wearing his nostalgia goggles too tightly.

I wouldn't know, myself, since I didn't play in the early days.

 

[Tony Vargas]

It certainly didn't seem like between 2008 and 2014 when 4e was the officially supported version of D&D that there was a dearth of new players.

I'd hardly call the playtest period 'official support' for 4e. ;P

But, no, there wasn't. The Encounters program, which I was participating in from the 2nd season on, and which grew (or something) into AL, was attracting new players, and 4e was stunningly good at retaining them, because it was so much easier to pick up than other editions. Encounters also attracted returning players, but 4e was not so easy for them - the problem with a new version of an old game that's easier than it used to be, is that it's /harder/ to un-learn the old tricks and expectations you /needed/ to play it before than it is to just pick it up from square 1. I saw that play out again and again. New players, even players who had only be casually involved in RPGs in the past, would pick up 4e and not only keep playing it, but be running decent games, themselves quite quickly. But experienced and returning players - especially those with little experience of other systems than D&D - would run aground on their own expectations constantly. Little things, like expecting to have to assemble the numbers you need to resolve an attack starting with the stats of your weapon, they'd search the character sheet for a weapon and not find it, they'd go right past the 'basic attack' that had everything they needed already there. Or the thing that caught my entire group the first time we played: adding CON MOD instead of CON score to 1st level hps!

There's probably a psychological effect to that, too, you go into the game expecting to have an advantage from years of experience and, instead, you're overcoming a handicap. Do you set aside the preconceived notions and approach the game on a more or less equal footing with the new players - or do you blame the game?

The encoutners draw continues with AL, but there's also a lot of returning players at my FLGS - I am no longer on the extrem elderly tail of the age curve! OK, I'm still a good standard deviation from the mean. But where I'd be the lone over-40 guy (and my wife the lone over-40 gal) in store crammed with tables of 20-somethings, now there's someone around my age (50 now) at every table. The returning folks skew heavily towards last-gamed with 2e, if not started with 2e, though there's some with 3e/PF experience, too, they're usually returning after leaving the hobby having last played that edition, rather than converting directly from PF, which seems to hold onto it's fans pretty tenaciously.

Another convergent trend helping 5e, though, is the rise in boardgame popularity. Our current FLGS is a decicated game store spun off from the old comic book store, and it's shelves are full of board games. Card games have a substantial shelf right near the cash-register, and D&D has part of one island it shares with PF and whatever the other recent d20 RPG they have in stock, ten times that shelf space is devoted to boardgames.

And that's were the genuinely-new players come from, they're exposed to D&D because we're playing it in the store while they shop for boardgames.

I really tend to think, as has been discussed up thread, that 4e simply fell into a point in the market cycle and economic cycle where the release of a new D&D, and certainly one that didn't cater at all to the then-popular OSR trend, was simply disfavored. I suspect that if 5e had been released in 2008 we'd be looking at an edition roll over from that now as well.

5e seems like it might have been less unacceptable to the 3.5 crowd. The tipping point there might hypothetically have been the handling of 3pps. If they got a 5e SRD fairly promptly, they might have gotten on board, and, with no PF to rally around, as that very hypothetical 5e got more material out, it'd've gotten more converts. OTOH, if WotC in this alternate history, kept the same attitude towards 3e and the same GSL, we'd probably have seen a similar dynamic develop with Paizo & PF - though there'd've been less to differentiate them.

But, it could certainly have had more OSR appeal.

5e certainly arrived at a time and in a form that was fortuitous and its marketing (or largely lack thereof) was handled without huge missteps. It is a game that is a little backwards-looking

5e seems to have been designed almost as if it were still 2008 or 2010 and the OSR crowd was the prime audience. Almost. I think they had the presence of mind to roll their sites forward to early 2e.

Yeah, the idea that 5E is somehow "only for grognards" does seem fairly bizarre, given the general popularity among new players

The genius of 5e's grognard appeal is that an experienced DM can run a great game of D&D, in spite of the game's traditional faults (any he hasn't long since gotten used to fixing or working around he's actually leveraged in some way). So if you draw in the grognards and get them enthused, you have mentors to teach new players the old 'tribal knowledge' it took to play classic D&D, in the classic way.

Conversely, you tick of the grognards at your own risk.

 

[Parmandur]

I'd hardly call the playtest period 'official support' for 4e. ;P

But, no, there wasn't. The Encounters program, which I was participating in from the 2nd season on, and which grew (or something) into AL, was attracting new players, and 4e was stunningly good at retaining them, because it was so much easier to pick up than other editions. Encounters also attracted returning players, but 4e was not so easy for them - the problem with a new version of an old game that's easier than it used to be, is that it's /harder/ to un-learn the old tricks and expectations you /needed/ to play it before than it is to just pick it up from square 1. I saw that play out again and again. New players, even players who had only be casually involved in RPGs in the past, would pick up 4e and not only keep playing it, but be running decent games, themselves quite quickly. But experienced and returning players - especially those with little experience of other systems than D&D - would run aground on their own expectations constantly. Little things, like expecting to have to assemble the numbers you need to resolve an attack starting with the stats of your weapon, they'd search the character sheet for a weapon and not find it, they'd go right past the 'basic attack' that had everything they needed already there. Or the thing that caught my entire group the first time we played: adding CON MOD instead of CON score to 1st level hps!

There's probably a psychological effect to that, too, you go into the game expecting to have an advantage from years of experience and, instead, you're overcoming a handicap. Do you set aside the preconceived notions and approach the game on a more or less equal footing with the new players - or do you blame the game?

The encoutners draw continues with AL, but there's also a lot of returning players at my FLGS - I am no longer on the extrem elderly tail of the age curve! OK, I'm still a good standard deviation from the mean. But where I'd be the lone over-40 guy (and my wife the lone over-40 gal) in store crammed with tables of 20-somethings, now there's someone around my age (50 now) at every table. The returning folks skew heavily towards last-gamed with 2e, if not started with 2e, though there's some with 3e/PF experience, too, they're usually returning after leaving the hobby having last played that edition, rather than converting directly from PF, which seems to hold onto it's fans pretty tenaciously.

Another convergent trend helping 5e, though, is the rise in boardgame popularity. Our current FLGS is a decicated game store spun off from the old comic book store, and it's shelves are full of board games. Card games have a substantial shelf right near the cash-register, and D&D has part of one island it shares with PF and whatever the other recent d20 RPG they have in stock, ten times that shelf space is devoted to boardgames.

And that's were the genuinely-new players come from, they're exposed to D&D because we're playing it in the store while they shop for boardgames.

5e seems like it might have been less unacceptable to the 3.5 crowd. The tipping point there might hypothetically have been the handling of 3pps. If they got a 5e SRD fairly promptly, they might have gotten on board, and, with no PF to rally around, as that very hypothetical 5e got more material out, it'd've gotten more converts. OTOH, if WotC in this alternate history, kept the same attitude towards 3e and the same GSL, we'd probably have seen a similar dynamic develop with Paizo & PF - though there'd've been less to differentiate them.

But, it could certainly have had more OSR appeal.

5e seems to have been designed almost as if it were still 2008 or 2010 and the OSR crowd was the prime audience. Almost. I think they had the presence of mind to roll their sites forward to early 2e.

The genius of 5e's grognard appeal is that an experienced DM can run a great game of D&D, in spite of the game's traditional faults (any he hasn't long since gotten used to fixing or working around he's actually leveraged in some way). So if you draw in the grognards and get them enthused, you have mentors to teach new players the old 'tribal knowledge' it took to play classic D&D, in the classic way.

Conversely, you tick of the grognards at your own risk.

Fair points; I had never DM'd before 5E, but I did have some "tribal knowledge" secondhand (and while I started in 3.x, I do suppose some of my college friends had played 2E in middle school/high school, and maybe from parents/siblings, so who knows how far back that goes). But in my experience...it just isn't that hard for new people to get into the swing of things? Never played in a store/con environment, just home groups, so mine is more anecdotal, I reckon.

Sent from my BLU LIFE XL using EN World mobile app