D&D 4E Ron Edwards on D&D 4e

[cavalier973]

Go back to the 1st page of this thread if you want to hear a bunch about that.

How did I miss that very interesting and informative discussion?
shakes head in confusion

 

[cavalier973]

Interesting, though when I think of the early settings I think more of huge sprawling things with 1000's and 1000's of locations and super elaborate encounter tables and whatnot (Wilderlands of High Fantasy, City State of the Invincible Overlord). I mean, those two products together are like a dungeon map and key on a huge scale, and the hexcrawl rules are just subbing in for the dungeon exploration rules. lol.

He specifically compares PoLand to Greyhawk, but I don’t know a whole lot about the latter.

I took his argument as being that PoLand fit the idea of Law versus Chaos; civilization versus wilderness; order versus entropy.

 

[cavalier973]

SO, you are saying I'm not brain-damaged??!! lol. Or did playing 4e reverse the damage that was done by 2e? What about 1e, did that just create impotency? WWWHHHAAAAAA

Player Brain Assault DM Attack 20
Daily * Primal, Psychic
Standard Action Close Burst 5
Prerequisite: You must have a copy of any edition of D&D rules
Target: Each creature in the burst
Attack: INT vs Will
Hit: 66d6 psychic damage, and the target is dazed and dominated (save ends)
Miss: half damage, and target is dazed

 

[pemerton]

Gonna be brutally honest: anecdotes about how epic awesome your particular games were don't disprove the anecdotes the people whose games fell flat.

Sure. But the reverse is true too - that someone's game sucked doesn't show that mine did. And it also doesn't meant that I was doing the same thing as them but just don't get bored when they do.

When a group of posters - me, @Manbearcat, @AbdulAlhazred, @Campbell are some of them active in this thead, and back in the day there were others, and it seems Ron Edwards is from the same school - converge without colluding on the same understanding of 4e and how and why it works, that suggests that it's more than just wild idiosyncracy or arbitrary differences in taste that meant some of us got great games out of it.

I think Edwards's comparison to early Champions - not a game I ever played, but I have a bit of a sense of it - is a pretty interesting one.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

He specifically compares PoLand to Greyhawk, but I don’t know a whole lot about the latter.

I took his argument as being that PoLand fit the idea of Law versus Chaos; civilization versus wilderness; order versus entropy.

I don't know why that would make it look like Greyhawk. Greyhawk is more of a sort of poor man's version of the Forgotten Realms arrived at by first running a wargame, and then evolving it into a primitive RPG, tossing in the kitchen sink of fantasy, and finally rewriting the whole thing with a mild dose of Tolkien pastiche layered on top. I agree that Greyhawk is the first modern RPG setting, it is really fairly similar in a lot of its FORM at least to things like FR, Eberron, PoLand (at least some late iterations of it, post the board game).

I'm not sure how PoLand and its law/chaos theme (just borrowed whole cloth from the WA cosmology generally) is much like Greyhawk though. Greyhawk is pretty much thematic chaos. In some ways its very messy lack of order is almost its best part, and it mimics the real world in some ways, where things are a consequence of infinitely dense skeins of causally connected happenings and nobody can really say "this is so because" for anything not utterly trivial. Of course in the case of GH it is that way simply because nothing there DOES make sense and there are no causal connections at all....

So, form is similar, but PoLand is a lot more thematically coherent and focused than Greyhawk.

 

[cavalier973]

I don't know why that would make it look like Greyhawk. Greyhawk is more of a sort of poor man's version of the Forgotten Realms arrived at by first running a wargame, and then evolving it into a primitive RPG, tossing in the kitchen sink of fantasy, and finally rewriting the whole thing with a mild dose of Tolkien pastiche layered on top. I agree that Greyhawk is the first modern RPG setting, it is really fairly similar in a lot of its FORM at least to things like FR, Eberron, PoLand (at least some late iterations of it, post the board game).

I'm not sure how PoLand and its law/chaos theme (just borrowed whole cloth from the WA cosmology generally) is much like Greyhawk though. Greyhawk is pretty much thematic chaos. In some ways its very messy lack of order is almost its best part, and it mimics the real world in some ways, where things are a consequence of infinitely dense skeins of causally connected happenings and nobody can really say "this is so because" for anything not utterly trivial. Of course in the case of GH it is that way simply because nothing there DOES make sense and there are no causal connections at all....

So, form is similar, but PoLand is a lot more thematically coherent and focused than Greyhawk.

You know, as I am remembering it, the comparison he makes to Greyhawk is more along the lines of the piecemeal way both settings were published. Bits here and bits there in various books and magazines. Contradictory themes and elements. That sort of thing, rather than the underlying story worlds of each setting.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Sure. But the reverse is true too - that someone's game sucked doesn't show that mine did. And it also doesn't meant that I was doing the same thing as them but just don't get bored when they do.

When a group of posters - me, @Manbearcat, @AbdulAlhazred, @Campbell are some of them active in this thead, and back in the day there were others, and it seems Ron Edwards is from the same school - converge without colluding on the same understanding of 4e and how and why it works, that suggests that it's more than just wild idiosyncracy or arbitrary differences in taste that meant some of us got great games out of it.

I think Edwards's comparison to early Champions - not a game I ever played, but I have a bit of a sense of it - is a pretty interesting one.

I played a little bit of it. It was definitely a fun game. I just remember that in play things were very wacky, and we spent a LOT of our time in chargen, a LOT. I also recall that I got pretty good at hacking the CP system, and built such monstrosities as 'Mushroom Man', which spewed poisonous 'spores' that were ridiculously toxic, and 'wizard', all of who's powers and attributes were invested in his staff (greatly reducing their cost, hence he was able to kick the arses of all the other characters of his power level). Of course the GM arranged to steal the staff, someone invented fungicide, etc. It was amusing, but at least the early versions of the game definitely required the players to go along with all the genre conventions. They kept tweaking things, but I assume they never got the CP system to be really bulletproof, I doubt it was possible.

Of course, exploiting the system was kind of missing the point of the game, but that was sort of how things went, back in 1981. The world was not really ready.

 

[Campbell]

Other than the initial state of skill challenges (which the DMG2 really made sing) the biggest issue with 4e is how the DMG phrased every bit of instruction as polite suggestions instead of actually teaching you how to run the game. This is a general issue that's been with us since 2nd Edition though.

The DMG2 is so much better at instructing how to run the game then the initial DMG.

 

[Manbearcat]

You may (or may not) be surprised to know that there are folks On This Very Forum who would argue that 4e is a Story Now RPG.

(I believe these are the appropriate incantations for summoning @AbdulAlhazred in all their dread glory.)

Yes. One of them started this thread.

And bringing the domino back in time to the beginning, yet another one sent Ron’s 4e videos to you in hopes you would start a thread because I neither have the stamina nor interest in making gigantic post after gigantic post about this anymore (I’ve spent well more than my share of virtual ink on the subject)!

4e is clearly a robustly capable Story Now engine…and not by accident nor by dint of GM’s drifting it.

That premise + the revolting edition war = why I started posting on ENWorld.

 

[pemerton]

Other than the initial state of skill challenges (which the DMG2 really made sing) the biggest issue with 4e is how the DMG phrased every bit of instruction as polite suggestions instead of actually teaching you how to run the game. This is a general issue that's been with us since 2nd Edition though.

Also, whereas the combat encounter section is excellent from a mechanical point of view, and - contrary to widespread opinion - I think the skill challenge section is not bad, the section on adventure design is awful.

In the combat encounter section there is no discussion of theme or story from the metagame perspective. All that is found in the W&M prequel. The only bit of the DMG that really compares to this in tone is the section on languages. I think a lot of that W&M stuff could have been dropped into the DMG whole-cloth and made it quite a bit better.