D&D 4E Presentation vs design... vs philosophy

[Maxperson]

I made his exact statement and swapped out 4e for 3e and you lost track that he even said it.

It's irrelevant what edition you stick in. He wasn't saying it seriously. He was throwing back what had come at him in an effort to show the poster he was responding to that the poster he was responding to was attacking him and not his argument. He was doing a turnabout in order to help the other guy understand what he was doing.

 

[Nagol]

Or to put it bluntly its like saying "5e is sabotaged it has Mike Mearles in charge and he worked on 4e"

You know, I've actually seen that argument but in reverse. Mearls working on 4e sabotaged it to get a preferential system. That one doesn't make any sense either.

 

[Garthanos]

He was throwing back what had come at him in an effort to show the poster he was responding to that the poster he was responding to was attacking him and not his argument.

He didnt get attacked by the explanation offered nor was that explanation saying his opinion meant nothing because of association X ... that is not turn about.

 

[Garthanos]

You know, I've actually seen that argument but in reverse. Mearls working on 4e sabotaged it to get a preferential system. That one doesn't make any sense either.

Occasionally I did see assertions that essentials was an intentional failure.

 

[Oofta]

Occasionally I did see assertions that essentials was an intentional failure.

The sky is purple.

I just made an assertion that the sky is purple. Does that make it true? Or that I believe it?

Has someone, somewhere made that assertion? Well you just did so yes. Can you point to an interview, recording or any official source that a company intentionally tanked the product when they had no way of knowing if 5E would ever be released, much less a success?

 

[Garthanos]

The sky is purple.

LOL if I say I saw someone assert the sky is purple does that mean I agree that the sky is purple.

I was just saying that i also may have seen the nonsense argument that Mearles tried tanking 4e

 

[Garthanos]

OK trying to take this as actual philosophy discussion

and magic items that really make a difference

The philosophy you are running up against with this might be magic items a DM controlled resource should not have more influence on the nature of a player character than player controlled elements.

Note I do think with the amount of influence a DM was encouraged to give players over the magic items their character received made this far less necessary than was put into practice.

I actually think character concepts can be both ones where items are a huge element say one version of King Arthur (where the item is an element of their paragon paths and epic destinies) and another like Lancelot where it is a barely mentioned part of gear. Do I get that feat because of my item or is it part of me? the distinction is most of the time pretty subtle powerwise.

 

[Fanaelialae]

4e and PF2 share the same genetics. They're both reactions (at least to an extent) to 3.x and the issues inherent to that edition. So it isn't terribly surprising that they ended up with somewhat similar solutions when they were solving the same 'problems'.

As for why the game isn't more like 5e, I think they wanted to make their own thing rather than chasing after WotC. Which is perhaps a bit ambitious but commendable in it's own way. I realize that some people really just wanted a more rules heavy variant of 5e, but my impression is that that's not the direction that the designers wanted to go.

Is it better to design the game you envision or the game that is successful? (I mean, in an ideal world you probably want both, but this is assuming you can only have one or the other.) The answer is obviously subjective. I think that they went with the game that they wanted to design and hoped it would be successful (rather than trying to design a game for success but not having it be a game they wanted to create).

Given that we don't know what their sales goals were for the game, and we have only limited data on how well the game is doing, all we can really do is speculate as to whether or not the game has been successful. Heck, the Gamemastery Guide is just coming out now, so I think it's a bit premature to make that determination. Is it a 5e killer? Definitely not. But I don't think they ever set out to do that, so unless I'm wrong, that was never a metric for the success of PF2. Ultimately, only Paizo really knows whether or not the game met their expectations.

Or just special in a different way, or good at a different thing.

Comes back to strong niche protection (strengths) and significant weaknesses being good things. I'm really good at this, you're really good at that, she's really good at something else, and together we cover off each others' weaknesses except we're all awful at the fourth thing; we'd better go recruit someone who can do that for us.

In fairness though, 4e did have fairly strong niche protection in its roles. A striker couldn't really do a defender's job, and neither of them could replace the leader. There were also more specialized applications by class. The cleric and bard were both leaders, but the cleric was far more capable of granting their support from the front line, whereas a bard would need to hang back more.

I get that it wasn't to everyone's taste, and that's fine.

However, when I see "if everyone is special then no one is" it really seems to smack a bit of "if everyone gets to do cool stuff then no one does". Which is something I just can't wrap my head around. Bob the fighter getting awesome moves that he can use doesn't diminish my wizard in the least, IMO. Niche protection is important in class based games, but no one's niche should ever be 'all the cool stuff'.

 

[Garthanos]

In fairness though, 4e did have fairly strong niche protection in its roles.

In 5e my spell caster shares spell lists all over the board and my fighters special moves can be trivially snatched with a feat and or a level dip. Multiclassing took way more investment in 4e to get a characters interesting stuff.

I see 5e having far less niche protection in some ways.

 

[Garthanos]

Sure, another way of saying this is the latter games make it much harder to build a crippled character, but I do not think this is what us gamers are asking for and I don't think this is what us gamers want.

For me that reads as gamers want it easier to build a crippled character so someone can show off their system mastery?