D&D General Maybe I was ALWAYs playing 4e... even in 2e

[James Gasik]

First of all, don't go knocking my Firecube! It was simple and effective. Second, if the DM wanted a Firecube to light stuff on fire, they could, and there were guidelines for how much damage that could do, but I mean, even the classic Fireball doesn't inflict ongoing fire damage to it's targets.

Third, the "video game" thing is kind of blown out of proportion. They did want to simplify powers so you could figure out what they did quickly- I don't know if you've encountered this before, but over the years, I've spent many a time poring over spell descriptions to figure out exactly how they work because a player will skim over it, declare "my spell does this amazing thing!" and I'm left to go "hold on...".

Now, did they have plans for handing off the 4e rules to develop video games? Sure! That's been a thing ever since AD&D. And did they think easier to digest rules elements would help with that? Probably. They also wanted to develop a VTT which is why all the rules are designed with a grid map in mind.

But at the end of the day, the usual "it's like a MMO" comes down to two things- codified roles for classes, and effects like "marking" which generate "aggro" (sort of) for the Defender classes.

After 3e, when suddenly enemies had no particular reason to target a Fighter over a Wizard, and the "rules of engagement" in AD&D were flipped on their head, it was nice to see that sort of thing.

As for the "samey powers", it's not as big of a deal as one might suppose, and WotC was very quick (sometimes too quick) to develop new powers for the classes, to the point that it was impossible to keep track of them all without the online character builder.

Because if there's one thing that D&D designers love to do, it's make more spells.

 

[Lyxen]

But at the end of the day, the usual "it's like a MMO" comes down to two things- codified roles for classes, and effects like "marking" which generate "aggro" (sort of) for the Defender classes.

But don't forget, that it was also a boardgame, because you were pushing counters on a grid and counting squares, so obviously it was not only a MMO !

And here we are, my mouth has put me in trouble again...

 

[James Gasik]

But don't forget, that it was also a boardgame, because you were pushing counters on a grid and counting squares, so obviously it was not only a MMO !

And here we are, my mouth has put me in trouble again...

Lol, well yeah. But I mean, that's just going back to the game's roots as a wargame, isn't it?

EDIT: I mean, I don't know if anyone who has played the game a long time has noticed, but over the years, there has been a constant attempt to push the "wargame" of D&D back at the players. Battlesystem, Chainmail revivals, The Miniatures Handbook- I've lost count, but I'm sure there's a couple more I'm forgetting.

It's like, deep in some hidden cubicle, there's a secret society of grognards who are like "we need to bring back the real game, and stop mucking around with these side objectives!" (ie, how Dungeons and Dragons got started).

 

[Lyxen]

Lol, well yeah. But I mean, that's just going back to the game's roots as a wargame, isn't it?

I honestly would not say that. I played a lot of wargames and 4e stayed really at a level way below most wargames. And it was Gygax/Arneson's stroke of genius to create TTRPGs out of the wargame anyway, so...

EDIT: I mean, I don't know if anyone who has played the game a long time has noticed, but over the years, there has been a constant attempt to push the "wargame" of D&D back at the players. Battlesystem, Chainmail revivals, The Miniatures Handbook- I've lost count, but I'm sure there's a couple more I'm forgetting.

It's like, deep in some hidden cubicle, there's a secret society of grognards who are like "we need to bring back the real game, and stop mucking around with these side objectives!" (ie, how Dungeons and Dragons got started).

Maybe, but I'm not sure. It's just for me, that war is such a common background of a lot of settings, campaigns, and games that is seems natural to want to model it so that you can "simulate" a lot of the genre. There can be no LotR without Helm's Deep, Minas Tirith and the Black Gate. No Stormlight Archives without the Shattered Plains, etc. and it's the same for most books from the old ones to the new.

As for me, I have always, in all editions, created games sometimes centered on war, so I have done battle and armies simulations. But I've done that using the BECMI war machine which is as far as a wargame as possible, it's theater of the mind based, totally scalable and totally integral to the PC stories. I used it a lot in Avernus, the PCs have been commanders of legions of devils and others, and still it's really not back to chainmail and fantasy wargames, nothing in common with that.

 

[DEFCON 1]

4E was enjoyable for the years I played it. Just like 5E has been enjoyable for the years I've been playing this. Just like 3E was great fun the years I was playing that. Because the one thing all of them have in common is the focus on the "monster combat" board game. So long as that is the focus of Dungeons & Dragons (and if one of the three books is always going to be a Monster Manual it always will be)... then to me I don't need to select one of them to be "My D&D". That seems to be missing the point.

I've always felt that needing to select one of the D&Ds as the most important to me would be like selecting which version of Ticket To Ride was "my" Ticket To Ride. That just seems an unnecessary demarcation. They are all relatively the same game with just various rules adjustments, so I've never seen a reason to pick one of them as being over the rest. I'll rank TtR against Catan and Carcassonne, sure... just like I'll rank D&D against WoD and Shadowrun... but ranking internal versions is hair-splitting to me.

 

[Krachek]

If I made an humorous view of my experience vs past edition I say

3.5Ed was the time I use excel grid to manage the various buff on my characters.
4Ed was the clock work, 2 combats, 2 skill challenge per session, always on tik.
5Ed is the first edition I got sessions without any combat. Don’t worry it was satisfying sessions.

 

[Jacob Lewis]

I know a lot of D&D fans who also like MMOs and board games, myself included. So I don't know why that's a negative comparison. But I understand why that became the standard dismissal for people who want to feel like part of the crowd when bashing this particular edition. They can't help themselves to low-hanging fruit. I suspect it's more because they haven't played it or read it enough to form a more substantial argument for their criticisms. Trust me, there's plenty of those to choose from.

 

[Charlaquin]

It's lateral progression. You get to roll twice, but you can never roll higher than the set max DC. You can never be exceptionally good and it's always a literal roll of the dice whether you succeed or not instead of being able to build a character who is fully competent. How many professionals at anything just fully derp out and fail one in every five to ten times they try?

Don’t call for a roll to resolve tasks where such uncertainty isn’t appropriate or desirable.

 

[Charlaquin]

hahaha.

Laugh if you like, but you said there was no description or fluff. Literally the italic text under the header is a fluff description.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I think "HP are not meat" is the biggest sticking point for a lot of people. Reason being: if HP are not meat, then why do you die when they run out? Since you die when you run out of HP, clearly they're meat...or at least meat adjacent.

I mean, there are plenty of precedents for that not being the case. Death saves and healing up from 0.

so as I have thought about this, I realized my style has ALWAYS been a mix of 4e and end stage 5e (social skills, encounters that have ways to win without fighting, warriors being as important as casters) and as such I don't think 4e tought me to play... I think that 4e was built 4me... or people like me.

Believe it or not, while the specific details of your individual preference don't match mine, the overall response does.

I spent years, very literally years, trying over and over to reshape 3e into the game I wanted it to be. I thought it was already the game for me, that it just needed some little tweak, some perfect difference that would make it just right and then I would be happy. But that never worked out. I wasted several years on this process.

When I finally gave 4e a try (after having been told it was awful by friends and thus ignoring it for several years)....I was shocked. I liked a bunch of its lore. The mechanics looked solid. And then I tried it...and it suddenly clicked for me. I had been flogging myself to death trying to make a game that wasn't for me into one that was. And 4e was absolutely for me. It was ACTUALLY a game about teamwork, not just a game that had four or five solo adventurers who always just happened to be adventuring in the same place. It was ACTUALLY balanced, not paying lip service to the idea of "cooperative games should give different players equal opportunities" while secretly making some classes stupidly OP and others extremely limited unless the DM showed pity on them. It was ACTUALLY tactically engaging, enjoyable as a game itself, not just as a thin veneer of mechanics to grease the wheels of roleplay. And it had ACTUALLY really awesome lore and concepts in it.

So...yeah. I was always trying to play 4e. But the system kept getting in my way. Once I actually had 4e...suddenly, I was having fun almost effortlessly. It was a genuine night-and-day difference.

That's why I will never, ever actually buy that "system doesn't matter." It does. It really, truly does. System isn't the ABSOLUTE end-all, be-all, it is NOT true that nothing will ever matter BUT system. But those extremes are just as foolish as asserting that system doesn't matter at all.