D&D General Chris Perkins and Stan! - previous D&D edition thoughts

[Minigiant]

"4E was partially meant to appeal to video gamers" is a fair statement by me. Just don't start calling it "tabletop World of Warcraft" and I'm mostly good.

If I said WOW is an "Online West Marches" campaign, I'm the crazy one

 

[BigZebra]

However, I went on over the next decade to completing almost all of the adventure paths put out in the PF1 era.

That. Is. Impressive.

 

[mamba]

And with 4e? It worked. That single argument was one of the greatest successes of "the" Edition War. It turned almost everyone I knew who played 3e against 4e. Even the people who played and enjoyed World of Warcraft.

I find the argument itself not holding much water to begin with, inspiration can come from all kinds of places, CRPGs, boardgames, novels, TV, you name it. None of it is inherently bad.

What I find interesting in your post is that even the WoW guys saw that as a negative, I would have expected them to not have an issue there.

 

[BigZebra]

Exactly.

It was treated as a truism--as a foundational, bedrock, "we hold this truth to be self-evident" thing--that anything whatsoever of video games ever, for any reason, being even remotely involved was proof positive that the thing in question was horrible, anti-D&D, the purified expression of "not only is this not D&D, it is actively hostile to anything D&D was or could be, and thus it deserves our hatred."

That was repeated. For years and years and years. Hell, in some places it still is repeated. The wounds have never had the chance to close, because they're constantly re-opened, intentionally so.

My theory for why this is the case is, basically, that video games were seen as soulless corporate-mandated trash, and thus could not possibly be D&D. MMOs were particularly reviled, because in being "Massively Multiplayer", such video games (already the enemy, that part was given!) must also be lowest common denominator, the worst, meanest, vilest form of pandering, AND that the gameplay experience thus produced must be nothing more than "spamming buttons" and "waiting for cooldowns", entirely and overtly devoid of any form of creativity, imagination, richness, or joy.

Hence, if you could "prove" any connection between 4e and video games, especially if you could prove that it was connected to the Great Sat--er, Great Adversary, namely World of Warcraft, then you had conclusively and objectively proved that 4e wasn't just flawed, wasn't even just bad, wasn't even just not deserving of the name "D&D", but was...well, as I said above, actively hostile to anything D&D was and could be, and thus deserved to be hated by anyone who loved anything at all about D&D.

Part of the reason I make this argument is that you saw exactly the same argument made against 3e before, but because MMOs were still in their relative infancy in 2000, as EQ had only launched the year before, it was another Blizzard property that got the comparisons: Diablo. The complaints are nearly identical in structure, differing only in which game is invoked. That, to me, indicates that the real meaning of the argument was never about any actual relationship between the complained-about edition and the video game used to vilify it; it was about finding a way to prove the prejudice against that edition as the only thing a true fan of D&D could conscience.

And with 4e? It worked. That single argument was one of the greatest successes of "the" Edition War. It turned almost everyone I knew who played 3e against 4e. Even the people who played and enjoyed World of Warcraft.

Great post. Thanks for that perspective.

 

[Scribe]

Do we need yet another thread to go down the '4e discussion' path?

 

[tetrasodium]

I can kind of see where Perkins is coming from here, to an extent. Like, yeah, I guess if I had to say which edition 5e feels most like, I would say 2e. But really, even then, it does not even come close to feeling like it. And yeah, like you, I think the main difference is player expectations. Which, 5e really leans into given the sheer competency of your average PC starting at 1st level.

I can see the desire to make the claim, but it's hard to take it seriously because it only actually holds up to any degree if you ignore how 2e actually played when people were playing 2e. Sure I could make 2e game feel like 5e if I never played 2e and treated all of the PCs as demigods right out of the gate, but the need to engage in apotheosis during chargen taints the analogy to the point of exist well beyond where fact check websites apply flames to a melting accuracy meter.

 

[payn]

I will say one take I had out of the E.war is that they really need to stop reinventing the wheel. There should be more focus on facilitating play, like digital options, and adventure based products. So, while 3E was how I wanted the game design philosophy to be, I was not satisfied with how it worked in practice. 4E was a complete (from my perspective) overreaction to 3E, but I also recognize that its the philosophy some folks want. I was fine putting up with the problems of 3E because Paizo was delivering me awesome adventure products. I realized that went a long way towards keeping my interest up and in the game long after it became a bit worn out. I dont need a complete overhaul every X amount of years.

So, with 5E I think they are taking that lesson and going evergreen. I think its going to work out for them, particularly moving into more digital facilitation. While the system is...fine, I dont get too excited about the idea of playing it. A lot of that has to do with a myriad of settings D&D has and inconsistent adventure products. YMMV.

 

[Reynard]

Do we need yet another thread to go down the '4e discussion' path?

This thread made me nostalgic so I went down a rabbit hole reading an old 4E play report style thread of mine from forever ago. What a strange experience. I have no memory of that game. I'm glad I had fun tho!

 

[Charlaquin]

I’ve got nothing against 4e - it wasn’t for me when I read the PHB, I’ve never played it, and life has moved on. If there were great ideas that came out of it that fueled new design in other games and the current edition, that should be a feather in its fans’ caps, wouldn’t it?

Unfortunately, most of 4e’s best ideas were only followed up on superficially. Take 5e’s hit dice, for example, which look a lot like 4e’s healing surges, if you have only a surface-level understanding of 4e’s healing surges, but utterly fail to even address the actual role of healing surges in 4e’s design.

There really is no proper successor to 4e, that iterates on 4e’s actual design ethos. Just some vaguely 4e-like aesthetic elements that get pointed at to and claimed as throwing a bone to the 4e fans.

 

[Charlaquin]

LPart of the reason I make this argument is that you saw exactly the same argument made against 3e before, but because MMOs were still in their relative infancy in 2000, as EQ had only launched the year before, it was another Blizzard property that got the comparisons: Diablo. The complaints are nearly identical in structure, differing only in which game is invoked. That, to me, indicates that the real meaning of the argument was never about any actual relationship between the complained-about edition and the video game used to vilify it; it was about finding a way to prove the prejudice against that edition as the only thing a true fan of D&D could conscience.

Fascinating. I also remember the comparisons of 3e to Diablo, but I remember them being made positively. Of course, I was hearing them from my friends’ “cool” older siblings (they were in middle school and probably seen as extremely uncool nerds by their peers, but they sure came across as cool to me at the time!)