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

[Undrave]

Who among you lovely folks remembers Golden Wyvern Adept?

See, following from Bo9S (the same product where D&D players first learned that outright lies and comparison to D&D's unrequited crushes like anime and vidja games could sway people against good products), WotC previewed the new edition with a feat for wand casters that had flavor referencing an organization of wand-based casters; the Golden Wyvern School.

The wonderful folks who are now champions of D&D flavor obviously loved this and... no wait, they ripped it to shreds. They filled several 50+ pages threads on how this was the worst thing to ever happen to D&D and how WotC should NEVER put flavor text into rules. They demanded WotC learn this lesson and never do this again.

Then WotC published clean rules with flavor text in the italics or in the headers for Races and Classes.

At which point, those guys collectively shouted 'GOTCHA!' and pounced on them, tearing them to shreds for not having feats just chock full of flavor text.

Damn... I had no idea... well that sucks

 

[EzekielRaiden]

To be fair, their marketing campaign DID dump on older editions unnecessarily. It really helped spark those fires.

They did it when they were talking 5e too. People-in-general just don't complain about it when 4e is the target.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Who among you lovely folks remembers Golden Wyvern Adept?

See, following from Bo9S (the same product where D&D players first learned that outright lies and comparison to D&D's unrequited crushes like anime and vidja games could sway people against good products), WotC previewed the new edition with a feat for wand casters that had flavor referencing an organization of wand-based casters; the Golden Wyvern School.

The wonderful folks who are now champions of D&D flavor obviously loved this and... no wait, they ripped it to shreds. They filled several 50+ pages threads on how this was the worst thing to ever happen to D&D and how WotC should NEVER put flavor text into rules. They demanded WotC learn this lesson and never do this again.

Then WotC published clean rules with flavor text in the italics or in the headers for Races and Classes.

At which point, those guys collectively shouted 'GOTCHA!' and pounced on them, tearing them to shreds for not having feats just chock full of flavor text.

yup

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Damn... I had no idea... well that sucks

Yeah. Much like how, when 4e was being previewed, people cheered at the removal of Vancian casting.

Guess how long that lasted.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

They did it when they were talking 5e too. People-in-general just don't complain about it when 4e is the target.

if there was a third party company still publishing new 4e material the edition wars would be as bad or worse...

 

[Mannahnin]

At some point you run into the limit of your page space. 4e had plenty of lore but that lore just wasn't in the middle of the damn rules.

Sure. There's always a give and take here. D&D has mostly included (over its various versions and editions) a mix of descriptive "natural language" and mechanical text in rules, especially spell descriptions.

The 4E design brief/style guide, for the most part, worked EXTREMELY well at keywording everything and parsing the mechanics down to crystal clarity. But the result is that power descriptions and many other parts of the rules, in refining and increasing their utility as technical reference documents to express mechanical concepts well, became less naturalistic and for many folks less evocative.

 

[James Gasik]

Basically, as a collective, D&D fans have no idea what they want.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Sure. There's always a give and take here. D&D has mostly included (over its various versions and editions) a mix of descriptive "natural language" and mechanical text in rules, especially spell descriptions.

The 4E design brief/style guide, for the most part, worked EXTREMELY well at keywording everything and parsing the mechanics down to crystal clarity. But the result is that power descriptions and many other parts of the rules, in refining and increasing their utility as technical reference documents to express mechanical concepts well, became less naturalistic and for many folks less evocative.

see this is an example of showing that well 4e was good and had alot of good parts, it still needed some refineing. I just wish WotC agreed and would take the way 4e worked and improve on these things.

4e useing advantage/disadvantage having slightly more varianc (and in the last few books they were) and have slightly more rolled back numbers (less HP less bonus to things) and having some more fluff worked in (say outside of the power stat block) would be improvments... fixing skill challanges and some math would be great... but KEEP what works (powers over all, monster types monster roles, balance between classes, keywords)

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Basically, as a collective, D&D fans have no idea what they want.

well this too.... and not just D&D fans. most fans make AWFUL choices when given complete control.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Sure. There's always a give and take here. D&D has mostly included (over its various versions and editions) a mix of descriptive "natural language" and mechanical text in rules, especially spell descriptions.

The 4E design brief/style guide, for the most part, worked EXTREMELY well at keywording everything and parsing the mechanics down to crystal clarity. But the result is that power descriptions and many other parts of the rules, in refining and increasing their utility as technical reference documents to express mechanical concepts well, became less naturalistic and for many folks less evocative.

If it interests you, perhaps consider contrasting these requests against what people actually said at the time.

Which....yeah. Seems to be pretty much explicitly what you're saying 4e did, but shouldn't have done. "Don't force flavor down my throat! Make things generic and flavor-free so we can give the the flavor we want!"