D&D 4E Ben Riggs' "What the Heck Happened with 4th Edition?" seminar at Gen Con 2023

[payn]

Indeed. And there are some board game groups that refuse to play it because of its social dynamic.

Understandable, some of those dynamics go well beyond Diplomacy. I know folks who prefer only co-ops and do not like competitive games at all.

 

[Red Castle]

And yet .... Diplomacy.

Start a Friday night as a group of friends, leave Sunday as the bitterest of enemies.

Awww man!!! Such a nice game!… opening the door after a discussion and seeing one of your friend eavesdropping… priceless…

 

[Thomas Shey]

Although this brings us into a bit of chicken or egg territory. Because then we're into the factors which made people less likely to adopt 4E (some of which were contextual, like edition release churn) as compared to, say, 3E, which was also a radical change from the prior edition but had a better environment for acceptance.

As someone mentioned, it didn't hurt that, hostile as some of the reaction to 3e was, it was entering at a time when, big as the D&D playing populace was, it wasn't exactly growing, and it got a lot of people back to give it a look that had walked away from D&D (sometimes for a long time). So any catastrophic failures in its acceptance were often lost in the enthusiasm.

(That said, I don't doubt there were some situations where groups went very south on it, too; people don't seem to remember the degree of active hostility with which it was received in some circles. 4e produced Pathfinder but 3e produced the OSR).

 

[Thomas Shey]

And yet .... Diplomacy.

Start a Friday night as a group of friends, leave Sunday as the bitterest of enemies.

Well, yes, but Diplomacy is a game that virtually asks to do that if people don't have a very good equilibrium on such things. Its the ur-backstabbing game.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The game does not have a will, Thomas. It cannot exert influence on anyone. Peoples' feelings toward the game are theirs. People allow their feelings about something to influence them.

This is such a misreading of the impact things, especially heavy engagement hobbies have with human nature its virtually phoning in from another universe.

Not at all. In such a case, then who will lament the breakup of the group? If there is nothing tying a person to their play group beyond what game is being played, then they absolutely should leave if the group decides to play a game they don't like.

Sure. If they only realize they should do that at the start instead of once they've committed to playing it for a while, taking up a bunch of time, and finding along the way that it seriously irritates them.

Again, not everyone gets into a game knowing enough to figure out its a problem, especially early in the game's life-cycle. Heck, I had a game I was at one time a proponent of that took me literally years to realize on a fundamental way was boring me to tears because I liked many elements of it in theory.

 

[billd91]

On page 319 of a "Hey Let's Revisit How Crappy 4e Was" thread, I don't think it's fair to accuse others of fueling the edition war. You guys clearly have an axe to grind.

Here's the thing, there may be some of us willing to grind the axe when the conversation comes up, but it's not like snarky psychoanalysis about our motives and being "scorned lovers" isn't contributing it. But you go ahead and dodge all responsibility as well, we know how this works.

 

[Aldarc]

Probably right, but if you ask people which edition broke their gaming group five will get you ten its 4E.

And if you are old enough, many would also tell you that it was 3e when it went from "true D&D" to "WotC D&D."

 

[Justice and Rule]

That's a chain of primacy that leads back to games neither of us want to play, but...yes? That isn't exactly a novel criticism, we see "4e resolved this problem in X way" all the time, and you don't ever get "you simply don't understand 5e" as the response. Instead the argument tends to be that 4e's underlying design philosophy isn't desirable making the solution untenable, and then there's a proxy discussion about the assorted games' book sales/popularity.

Uh, people do say that all the time, they just don't say it in that direct a way, just like most people here aren't being like that. People tell us what 5E was designed for all the time compared to the critiques it gets.

But also I find that to be a terrible comparison, because that doesn't match what is being shown: you can say that 4E solved something that might be a problem in 5E while still engaging with it, just like you could do the reverse. If I say that 4E solved their martial problem by given them at-wills and 5E should do that, that doesn't really conflict with the design constraints of 5E, especially given some of the playtest stuff we've seen.

But that's not what is happening: instead, people are trying to apply some sort of "logic" to the thing that doesn't work because it's built on different principles. Complaining about how something is "illogical" because in trying to narrow down how something works does miss the design of 4E removing barriers to be less restraining in its powers. This isn't about using one to critique the other, but rather the specific critique and how you approach it.

You can't have both. Either it's different enough it requires engagement on its own terms, or it is similar enough it can be judged for failing to meet the existing audience's expectation. If we're going to treat all the versions of D&D as distinct games, that's certainly one thing, but if we're holding them in conversation with each other, then it isn't incumbent on existing D&D players, either now or in 2008 to evaluate 4e without their preexisting norms.

This is a false dichotomy: just because something is a continuation doesn't suddenly mean you can disengage from new design and only look at it through the lens of the previous edition. We can do both to different degrees as required, thus we can look at it as D&D given that it has a bunch of aesthetic and even mechanical continuations while still engaging with what it's trying to do that's new. I don't see why this is so hard, yet I feel like people want to find some way to avoid actually talking about the mechanics on their own merits.

That's sort of exactly backwards. It's not on me to be sold on the new game that was replacing the thing I liked, it was on the thing to sell itself. Plus, there's nothing "reflexive" about the judgements in question, especially 15 years on. 4e certainly sharpened my tastes to a finer point, in that I had to spend a lot of time articulating and trying to grasp at what precisely about this new thing undermined the experience I was going for, and certainly broadened my horizons in realizing a great many things I'd taken as background norms for the D&D experience were no such thing.

I don't really see how it's backwards. Just because it's 15 years on doesn't mean the judgements weren't reflexive; we can see people trying to argue the logic of a game using the design principles of a different edition. Just because it's 15 years on doesn't mean it's not reflexive, either; it just mean it's a hardened reflex at this point, where people go to the same arguments.

If you have broadened your horizons, cool, but I guess I'm not really addressing you, I'm addressing someone who is making arguments that have been largely repeated for the last 15 years about how things are "illogical" because they don't follow the previous conventions.

 

[Mannahnin]

And if you are old enough, many would also tell you that it was 3e when it went from "true D&D" to "WotC D&D."

On Dragonsfoot 3rd ed was (may still be) commonly referred to as TETSNBN for The Edition That Shall Not be Named. 4e was then and thus just YAETSNBN.

 

[Thomas Shey]

On Dragonsfoot 3rd ed was (may still be) commonly referred to as TETSNBN for The Edition That Shall Not be Named. 4e was then and thus just YAETSNBN.

Just the place I was thinking of with my earlier post. There was some of that in Giant in the Playground at the time, too.