What is the essence of D&D

[Zardnaar]

Um, no. 4e outsold Pathfinder in every quarter until after Next was announced and they stopped publishing new 4e stuff.

The revival started around the time Aquisitions Inc got big, which was well before the Next playtest was announced. Hell, before Essentials, IIRC.

The torch never needed PF or OSR to keep burning, also. More people kept playing with their old DnD books than played either of those.

At it's height, DDi subscriptions probably outdid PF book sales. Why do I say that? Because even at the low point during the Next playtest, DDi still had nearly 100k subs. Even if they all had 1 year subs, which were at a very generous discount, they were raking in gobs of cash from that service. At the height of 4e, when DDi was still the place to get new Dragon and Dungeon mag articles on top of the builder and compendium, it was much larger than that.

Everything other than DnD is like every campaign setting other than homebrew in popularity. You have to discount the top dog to even call them popular with a straight face. And now 4e is lumped in with everything else behind 5e in places like roll20, but before the playtest was announced, nothing was beating it.

Didn't DDI count inactive players and ex players? I had an account as well for example.

We know now they decided to kill 4E in 2010, 5E design started 2011. That's not successful they probably sold well at launch when people bought it blind like I did. Never bought any more books after release and forgot to cancel DDI until 2010.

 

[Nagol]

Diving suits don't exist in the D&D world. Diving wreck adventures usually provide a way to get underwater if required via NPCs or a water breathing plant you eat.

Yeah, the DM can throw the players a bone.

 

[Zardnaar]

Yeah, the DM can through the players a bone.

Without magic you don't get to explore the wreck. Or are you suggesting that people get to breath water?

Quite a few underwater adventures in older D&D. Even 4E required magic for this what's your point?

If people can breath water, and fly it's not D&D it's super heroes. Even then they normally have some explaination that makes sense in their universe.

Superpowers are still supernatural in practice. The force isn't magical as such but it's not normal either.

It's fiction, heroes can do stuff we can't IRL.

 

[Arnwolf666]

When you have to virtually take Dungeons out of Dungeon and Dragons because no cleric ie this super sized impact on the game... Yeh that means more important.

It wasn't even me saying that but one of those arguing that primacy of magic isn't the thing... because you could adjust the game to deal with lack of X. The adjustment is over the top.

Further from all I have heard a party of clerics and druids in 3e... make the party of fighters or even the Fighter that joins look worse than the Druids bear. So I think there may have been more importance.

Actually I think Zard was saying that 3e might be the only edition where magic was that much more important but the lack of cleric goes all the way back.

I was thinking u were saying

ff


Here's a quick anecdote from a 3.5 game I ran:

The group has cleared an ancient monastery of bandits and are doing a final pass to clean up/check for secrets before heading out. They notice via the Druid's Detect Magic that one of the mosaics in the living areas is a magic item. The Wizard casts Identify and discovers it is a teleport link to somewhere and learns the command word. The Wizard has other interests he wants to get to, but the group decides to scout it out.

A quick recon of the arrival point area doesn't find a matching magic portal to bring them back to the surface, but by talking to a friendly spirit they discover it is a forgotten city of the dwarves lost since the Great War. The Druid, the Fighter, and the Barbarian strongly want to explore further, the Wizard strongly wants to leave and the other two PCs have no opinion. The Wizard is the only character with long distance travel capability. He announces he is leaving and anyone who doesn't want to be trapped with unknown dangers with no known escape route are welcome to join him. They return home.

Quiz time!
How was the magic discovered? How would a fighter find it?
How was the magic unlocked? How would a fighter do it?
Who decided the group needed to leave regardless of what the other members wanted? What gave him that power?

The fighter can ruin an encounter also by saying I don’t want to participate.

 

[Nagol]

It was a low-level adventure.

OK, Wizard 1 and 2 suggest the first mooks should crank while wizard 3 drops a web to keep more undesirables out. Or 2 enlarges after laying down web and grease. Or... I can go on.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

TLDR version: I'm right and you are not entitled to your opinion.

Have a good one.

Oh dear lord stow the melodrama. "I'm right" doesn't equate to "you are not entitled to your opinion".

You can think anything you want. What you are never, ever, in any public facing discussion venue, entitled to, is stating that opinion without any chance of someone telling you that you're wrong. Or calling out mistaken factual information.

It's fine that you found the powers too similar for your taste. That doesn't mean they were the same, it just means you had a higher bar for dissimilarity (especially of presentation) than the designers or people who enjoyed 4e.

If your argument has never been that the powers literally did the same things and had no distinction or uniqueness and that classes of the same role all played exactly the same, then nothing in my argument has anything to do with you, and you easily could have just not replied to me with a defensive counter-post calling me a jerk or whatever.

If your argument has been the above, then I was talking about your arguments, and I will maintain and reiterate here that you were wrong about that. Because they powers simply do not do the same things, and make the classes that are thematically similar play more differently than they have in the past. If you can't see how different Come And Get It is in play from Blinding Barrage...then you are actively choosing not to see it, or you haven't actually read the powers with any intent to understand them on even a basic level. It's genuinely as simple as that. There is no negative feeling here, it's just a matter of what the actual game mechanics in question do in the game.

 

[Nagol]

Without magic you don't get to explore the wreck. Or are you suggesting that people get to breath water?

Quite a few underwater adventures in older D&D. Even 4E required magic for this what's your point?

If people can breath water, and fly it's not D&D it's super heroes. Even then they normally have some explaination that makes sense in their universe.

Superpowers are still supernatural in practice. The force isn't magical as such but it's not normal either.

It's fiction, heroes can do stuff we can't IRL.

As I wrote above. it'd be nice if D&D offered stronger support whether via items, NPCs, factional support, non-magical equivalents, or publicly available magical access to turn magical necessities into conveniences.

 

[Zardnaar]

4E powers aren't the same, I think they're repetitive but not the same.

It's a common complaint, it's clear what people are really complaining about us the powers themselves.

On release you couldn't really play an illusionist. A side effect of 4E design was they didn't have room to fit all the classes in lol. That's not good design when you exclude 5/11 classes.

 

[Nagol]

I was thinking u were saying


The fighter can ruin an encounter also by saying I don’t want to participate.

Not by mid-level he can't. The party can go "Ok" and do without by sacrificing more power to that encounter. The fighter is approximately 1/N of the standard combat capability where N is the number of PCs. That's much easier to handle.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Didn't DDI count inactive players and ex players? I had an account as well for example.

We know now they decided to kill 4E in 2010, 5E design started 2011. That's not successful they probably sold well at launch when people bought it blind like I did. Never bought any more books after release and forgot to cancel DDI until 2010.

Wait oh my god I'm literally cackling over here. Are you suggesting that a significant number of DDi subscribers, which is people paying a monthly fee for access to the DDI service were actually just people who forgot for multiple years that they were paying for it? Seriously!?

That is actually the most absurd thing I've ever encountered in a discussion about 4e. I really hope you meant something else.

I don't know you need to believe so hard that 4e flopped hard, but it just didn't, bud. They canned it because they knew that they weren't getting as much of the pie as they could with an edition that wasn't soured by an edition war, and they knew that to get it they were going to have to start from scratch with enormous amounts of player feedback and actively invite people back into the fold in the most inclusive way possible. They rebooted DnD, refusing to even call the new edition by an edition number, because they knew that a divided fanbase was limited how much they profit they could make, not because they were losing money.