D&D 4E Where was 4e headed before it was canned?

[Garthanos]

Oh and hunting around for a way to make a character jump in 5e gives people recommending ways to get the jump spell ... predictable.

 

[Parmandur]

Here are two claims:

(1) System makes no difference to the play experience.

(2) Many people prefer the 5e play experience to the 4e play experience, just as some prefer the 4e to the 5e play experience.

I don't think both claims can be true.

If one difference between 4e and 5e is the degree of ad hocery, and the role that the GM playes in that respect, then it makes sense that some people should focus on that as a cause of the difference in experience. And there's no reason to think that this is about "toxic GMing". Did everyone who didn't like 4e have toxic GMs?

System is ultimately unimportant in comparison to the people played with, but rules can get in the more or less, or be more or less elegant. The 5E rules allow for quick and elegant action resolution, without getting in the way.

The point about "toxic DMing" is that a DM a player needs to be protected from is not somebody that I would play with, or seek to work around with game rules.

Not all people. Some people. I'm also not sure what you mean by "a broader amount of play".

If the argument is that the popularity of5e is a sign of virtue either in the system or its players, I don't see how there can be grounds for complaint that those who prefer 4e want to point to the virtues in 4e as a system or in its players. Surely no one expects 4e players to infer that, because they are in a minority, they and their preference suck!

The popularity of 5E is a sign of fitness for most people's playstyle. What WotC found, in the aftermath of the reception of 4E when they did rigorous research on how most people play, they discovered that while the WotC insiders and a vocal contingent of Con goers, forumites, etc. had been playing 3.5 in a manner increasingly like 4E that made the changes seem organic, the vast majority of people playing 3.x had actually been playing 3.x like Moldvay/Mentzer Basic D&D with a bunch of suggestions in the books to use or not on an ad hoc basis, as had been apparently the case with most AD&D play. So, 5E was built to fit the playstyle of the vast majority of folks, which is also why 5E burst Pathfinder's bubble, as the Crypto-Basic D&D crowd (the by-far majority playstyle, apparently) finally had rules that matched their play.

This isn't neccesarily any sort of virtue, other than commercial. But for those of us who had been playing this way the whole time, it is a breath of fresh air, and very freeing. I'm not saying it is by any means wrong to prefer the 4E style, but I do find the ad hoc approach easier to improvise in play (which was the original point of the digression).

 

[Garthanos]

the vast majority of people playing 3.x had actually been playing 3.x like Moldvay/Mentzer Basic D&D

Want to bet the vast majority of people playing 5e never played those earlier games...

 

[Garthanos]

The very very slanted questions in the play-test were a turn off for many 4e fans they seemed intentionally so for many of us. It was upfront already planned to be a throwback

 

[Parmandur]

Want to bet the vast majority of people playing 5e never played those earlier games...

Nope, because most of the target audience was in diapers when 3.x was released: I'm an old D&D player now, and I wasn't born when BECMI was released. Yet, that is the playstyle that persisted through TSR and WotC shenanigans, and now dominates among whipper-snappers who at on web cameras.

 

[Parmandur]

The very very slanted questions in the play-test were a turn off for many 4e fans they seemed intentionally so for many of us. It was upfront already planned to be a throwback

After they figured out what the vast majority of their customers wanted, they did move pretty firmly in that direction. I can appreciate that this is frustrating, but they had to act on what they found out.

 

[Garthanos]

After they figured out what the vast majority of their customers wanted

Start off with slanted polls get slanted results. Sorry you are putting the cart in front of the horse the playtest was a marketing ploy that coincided with many things beyond the nature of the game.

 

[Parmandur]

Start off with slanted polls get slanted results. Sorry you are putting the cart in front of the horse the playtest was a marketing ploy that coincided with many things beyond the nature of the game.

If it was just a ploy, it wouldn't have worked. They brought in the big data research resources from Hasbro and found out about how people mainly play before the playtest, yes. That's how they figured out what people wanted, and started designing for that. That's capitalism and big data at work to make the world a better place. And it worked.

 

[Garthanos]

If it was just a ploy, it wouldn't have worked.

no... a success can happen and a marketing technique can get word out, and things sell due to many factors that have nothing to do with the products nature. Good marketing made VHS win in spite inferior tech.

 

[Garthanos]

The idea that something sells makes it better or even "really really" what the audience wants is just plain ludicrous.