Mearls: Abilities as the core?

AbdulAlhazred said:

I don't think anyone is claiming that 4e "is the same as" 3e. Clearly they are different games. Just as you obviously may favor one some people favor the other.

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I'm glad you see it that way. But it is routine to have people insist that they played 3E and they now play 4E and there is no difference for them and, therefore, there is no real difference for anyone else. A lot of people ARE claiming exactly that.

For myself I don't really buy, or care about, this theoretical argument that somehow 4e is mechanics that are just fluffed to this or that. Are you seriously saying that you think someone sat down and designed a neat package of mechanics, decided it should be named 'fighter' and then invented some fluff to support that? Seriously? I didn't think so...

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OK. They said so.

In any case IMHO RPGing is about telling a story. I'm going to tell story X. Now, maybe one set of rules or another set of rules makes it easier to do that. I'm going to tell it and pull in the rules I want to use that will make that easy. I did that 35 years ago with Old D&D, and I do it today, and I did it with all the editions of the game in between. The process was different and the results were a bit different but really 4e still fits the same basic genre concepts that other editions did. I could really care less if saves work different now than they did before.

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So would roleplaying Superman in a 100 point GURPS game using only the core book be just as fulfilling as roleplaying Superman in a 1,000 point GURPS game using the SUPERs supplement?

We can all sit around and tell a shared story. A lot of the fun, at least to me, comes from using a solid system for modeling the story being told. Telling a story and playing an RPG are related but importantly different activities.

I don't think comparing 4e to a board game like Descent is really sensible at all. You can use almost any game as a 'role playing game' but so what? Again, if I want to tell a story with players playing characters in the story that isn't a board game. It makes no difference where we get our mechanics from and if for some reason stealing stuff from Descent worked really well so what? It has nothing to do with 4e, which quite obviously is intended to be used as an RPG from the start.

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You are making my point for me.
You just said that Role Playing is just sitting around telling a story and so it doesn't matter what system you are sitting around. But suddenly it is not "sensible at all" to swap out 4E for Descent. If you are "just telling stories", then you are just telling stories.

I AGREE with you that you can't just swap out systems. Because in addition to telling a story, the system you are sitting around when you do that is important.

I we were to assign numbers arbitrarily I'd give 3E a 20, 4E a 14 and Descent a 4. 4E is vastly better than Descent. But anything less than an 18 turns out to be "not good enough", so as far a I care, 4E and Descent are in the same group.

And you can say that, to you, 3E is a 20 (or a 2) and 4E is a 50. That's great. I'm not offering any comment on your opinions or preferences. I accept them. All I'm saying is that people who don't accept these differences as being real to a lot of players are wrong about that. Lack of awareness does not make it go away.

Nineball said:

I don't see it.

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Yeah. I know. That is a big part of my point.

You're confusing what you the player bring to the table with what the game brings. The game brings the mechanics and the fluff. The players parse the fluff through the filter they make for the game.

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No, I'm absolutely not. I've actually been on record many times stating that you can not find role play between the covers of a book and the players bring that to the table themselves.

BUT, the mechanics of a good RPG must support that. And in 4E they DO. Just not nearly as well as in some other systems.

Except, again, that's not what 4e did. The monk is an especially bad example for you, as the mechanics for the monk work brilliantly to cover a fast, unarmored, nimble character with high flying acrobatics and a flurry of attacks, along with support for both unarmed attacks and martial art weapon attacks - far better then the 3e monk ever did. The 4e monk is better for roleplaying then the 3e one is because the 4e monk has mechanics that actually support it.

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Actually, I picked the monk because it was the example Andy Collins used when he was explaining that they made this change. You need to correct him, not me.

The use of "4e" is interchangable with every edition. No edition of D&D described itself has "the physics work" or "realistic compelling reasons to play a class." Every edition of D&D has been "here's the classes, they're really cool, which do you want?" 4e is no different from this.

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See, I love this.

When 4E came out the end of "the rules are the physics" was praised over and over by 4E fans. And was one of the 3E issues that was finally being killed.

Yeah, 4e used "the math works." But 4e use a whole lot of other things too. 3e once stated "back to the dungeon." By your logic, does that mean 3e can only take place in a dungeon?

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Heh, not seeing the distinction between mechanics and story is part of the point.

See, I get this, and I don't get this.

I get that people would play 3e without any combat at all. I get that they'd play 3e for politics and intrigue heavy games, or for no magic gritty fantasy, or for Arthurian knights. What I doni't get is why.

There are already games that do politics and intrigue better then D&D. Games that do no magic gritty fantasy better then D&D. Pendragon is literally about Arthurian knights!

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Why does my intrigue have to be about Arthurian knights. You are the second person to throw up this example. It just goes to further drive home the wild difference in perception.

It's something I've seen with D&D - and only with D&D - and it's this bizarre brand loyalty. That somehow, if you aren't playing D&D, you're doing something wrong.

4e is a more focused game then 3e is, you are correct in that. But 4e does one thing brilliantly rather then 5 things poorly. Because 3e isn't good at politics and intrigue, the skill system is too widespread and, to use a word some people here love to throw around, "dissociative." 3e isn't good at low magic gritty fantasy, because the CR system is built around having lots of magic available, and the vast majority of classes are centered around having magic. 3e isn't good at Arthurian knights, because the mounted combat is a muddled mess and there's simply far too much inherent magic.

Play other games. Don't just stick to D&D. Nobody will reward you for brand loyalty.

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Politics works great in my 3E game. shrug.

But, to be clear, I have ZERO brand loyalty.
I left D&D for better games a long time ago. And I swayed more than one group into getting past their brand loyalty and looking for better games. Then 3E came along and I went back to it not remotely because of the name, but because it rocked. Certainly that brand loyalty effect had benefits for me because it provided a foundation for that rocking system and the OGL to explode upon. But my investment was in quality, not brand.

Crazy Jerome said:

The independence just means that if you want an in your face monster, you know how to reskin the mechanics to get one.

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No. It might just mean that to you. But it can mean a lot more than that.

But you have veered off into defending your point of view. I have no qualms with your point of view.
But there seems to be a real string resistance in the 4E fanbase to accept the idea that a lot of other people don't share that point of view and the overall popularity of 4E is impacted by that.

Part of RPGing is the reaction both the players and the DM take to the rolls?

I wonder how many people agree that there are three components that are being talked about here:

There is role-playing : This is the story the DM tells, the creatures he decides to pit against the heroes and the NPC's and the constant shared story building expierence. This includes character to character banter and character to DM banter. There is no rules crunch here. This is part novel/part movie/part improv.

There is the game : The crunch. The combat system, the skills and the skill challenge system. My character is this strong/smart/fast compartively to my companions and the world around me. My character has this many hit points and his defenses are this good and this gives a sense that there is a chance that my character is this good in defeating his opponents, is this good in being successful at certain skills and there is a chance that he may die.

I think eveyone has a different idea of how much they want the crunch to influence the role-playing. If you enjoy more of the character interaction and storytelling you don't want a heavy rules game. If you enjoy more of a "game" then you want to be able to fiddle with the crunch.

Then there are the parts that are a bit of both : How does my character react to the fact that they failed their skill check in negotiation to get the King's help? When I make a successful attack against a creature I can come up with a description of that attack. When my character is dies because of either bad luck or choices that put him in a bad position I can come up with a dramatic end to his story.

These three components have always been there to varying degrees. 4e may have taken the combat crunch/role-playing to a new level by including fluff descriptions with the powers for the martial characters. This was already being done in earlier editons with spell-casters so it doesn't seem like a big leap. The whole "you're ruining my role-playing with 4e powers" doesn't hold water with me.

In the end RPGing is all a bizarre balancing act that we all go through differently.

JeffB said:

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Then why bother posting?

ExploderWizard said:

Then why bother posting?

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Why take an interesting thread and divert it towards edition-war land?

Spatula said:

Why take an interesting thread and divert it towards edition-war land?

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Gotcha. I'll just skim a thread and if I don't like the cut of its jib then I can call it an edition war thread and take a big ol dump in it.

BryonD said:

I'm glad you see it that way. But it is routine to have people insist that they played 3E and they now play 4E and there is no difference for them and, therefore, there is no real difference for anyone else. A lot of people ARE claiming exactly that.

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Yeah, maybe we read different forums. I haven't seen anyone say there was 'no difference'. I think there are a wide variety of opinions on what the differences are and what significance they have.

OK. They said so.

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I guess I would need a citation on that. I think the idea that someone designed the mechanics in isolation from what narrative concepts they were intending to model is frankly preposterous. It might hold some amount of water if we were talking about a totally generalized system like GURPS that was designed from the ground up to support almost any genre. Even then at some point the designers had to look at what concepts they needed to support, make sure the core rules allowed them to be implemented, and implement a 'player facing' layer of the game that mechanically related the concepts to the mechanics, as well as providing fluff. In the case of 4e the relationship is MUCH tighter than that. Again the idea that someone, to take a random example, designed the mechanics of the Warlock class and then after the fact decided "Hey, this will make a great caster that operates by making a pact with a powerful being!" just doesn't wash.

So would roleplaying Superman in a 100 point GURPS game using only the core book be just as fulfilling as roleplaying Superman in a 1,000 point GURPS game using the SUPERs supplement?

We can all sit around and tell a shared story. A lot of the fun, at least to me, comes from using a solid system for modeling the story being told. Telling a story and playing an RPG are related but importantly different activities.

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Yes, and what I said was that the story came first, and then I picked the mechanics that would be useful for resolving the things that came up in that story. There are a variety of points at which these decisions happen. First I'm going to conceive a type of game I want to run, then I'm going to look around and find a system that easily supports that type of game, then I'm going to create material for the game I'm going to run, adventures and setting and whatever. During that process I will decide which game mechanics I can use. Generally the system will offer most of that off the shelf if it is even remotely appropriate to the genre and style of play desired. The players will then do something similar to come up with characters to play. Then as we play out our story we will use the mechanics to help us resolve what happens and track how the world and the characters effect each other. We may make up new mechanics, refluff existing mechanics, change some mechanics, delete or ignore others, etc. The mechanics are just a tool. We don't start out with a set of mechanics and just play a game and try to figure out how to explain them.

You are making my point for me.
You just said that Role Playing is just sitting around telling a story and so it doesn't matter what system you are sitting around. But suddenly it is not "sensible at all" to swap out 4E for Descent. If you are "just telling stories", then you are just telling stories.

I AGREE with you that you can't just swap out systems. Because in addition to telling a story, the system you are sitting around when you do that is important.

I we were to assign numbers arbitrarily I'd give 3E a 20, 4E a 14 and Descent a 4. 4E is vastly better than Descent. But anything less than an 18 turns out to be "not good enough", so as far a I care, 4E and Descent are in the same group.

And you can say that, to you, 3E is a 20 (or a 2) and 4E is a 50. That's great. I'm not offering any comment on your opinions or preferences. I accept them. All I'm saying is that people who don't accept these differences as being real to a lot of players are wrong about that. Lack of awareness does not make it go away.

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I don't think you're really understanding my point. That is as likely a failure on my part to explain it coherently as anything else. I agree, the system matters, but that is because some systems make some things easier to do. Role play HAPPENS, the system may or may not have some rules that indicate that certain RP decisions effect the mechanics (like say alignment in older D&D or the character development mechanics in Mouse Guard). 4e happens not to have such mechanics on the basis that they tend to restrict player options or whatever. D&D in general never was big on that. This is a respect in which mechanics could impact RP.

I just don't see that people are 'not accepting those differences'. Personally I don't think there's a way to 'rate' games in any hard and fast way. That doesn't mean I don't find some systems better or worse to use for certain games. I don't think ANY serious posters here have ever asserted that all systems are equal.

Honestly though, there is a pretty strong subtext to your posts. It reads like 3.x was a good tool for role play and 4e is mostly only good for hack-n-slash. Personally I think the opposite. 4e maps the tropes of the fantasy genre with a great deal more fidelity to the mechanics IMHO. Conan is a perfectly viable concept in 4e (the non-magical fighter type who kicks butt using superior physical prowess, weapons, and his wits). A Conan type character in 4e is truly functioning mechanically as advertised. He's a worthy adversary, a mighty warrior hero who can overcome any kind of adversary. You can't even get close to that in 3.x. Any half decent caster or monster with more than trivial magical capabilities will make short work of such a character. Intrigue and mystery? As straightforward in 4e as it could be in any system. Any character can be decently stealthy etc almost trivially. All characters have a core of valuable skills to apply. Casters don't dominate all problem solving, etc. Sure, you can do it in 3.x, but you have to work at it quite a bit more in my experience. This is all obviously my opinion, but I think you're off base in your assessment of the two systems. I'm happy to politely accept that everyone has their opinions and that's cool. OTOH I just don't agree with some of them.

BryonD said:

No. It might just mean that to you. But it can mean a lot more than that.

But you have veered off into defending your point of view. I have no qualms with your point of view.
But there seems to be a real string resistance in the 4E fanbase to accept the idea that a lot of other people don't share that point of view and the overall popularity of 4E is impacted by that.

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No. I included some of my point of view by way of explanation, same as you. But there seems to be a real resistance in some of the 3E fanbase to accept the idea that some of the things you think are qualitative differences assertions that we reject on grounds other than point of view. You don't have to like the degree to which 4E moves in a direction, but your assertion that 4E has crossed the line into "complete independence" of "game" versus "roleplay" is not shown in your argument. Trying to pin a reply back on mere point of view is a diversion from that issue.

Look, what we are really talking about are "tipping points". That is, the point at which a matter of degree becomes a matter of kind, simply by enough movement. I accept that there can be arguments made about where, when, and how a tipping point gets crossed. But if your argument is going to be, "some people feel it got crossed here," then one can't argue with a feeling. If you feel it got crossed there, then you feel it, and that's that. OTOH, if your argument is that, " some people think it got crossed here," then presumably you have reasons, and some of them are present in the discussion.

I have reasons why I think it did not, and expressed one of them. If I give you the courtesy of assuming that at least some of you expression is thought, not feeling, then I would prefer that responses be in kind.

Of course, it is complicated because what we are discussing is the facts that cause a tipping point in "feel". Of course feel is going to be part of the discussion, and thus point of view. But it isn't all of it.

If your claim is that 4E moved some amount on this scale (true), and that this has been a tipping point in feeling for some people (inarguable, charitably must assume reports of feeling are mainly accurate), then yeah. I'll grant you that fully. It isn't asking much. Nor does it really claim all that much.

OTOH, if your claim is that 4E has moved effectively off the scale (what we are debating), and that some people feel this (again, going with reports) and some don't (again, reports), -- and that the people who don't feel it only don't feel it because they are not operating on that scale at all. Then I call extreme nonsense--putting it politely.

If the argument of moving off the scale is to be made seriousy, it has to be made in good faith, and with the same charity towards reported play as is expected going the other way. I suggest as a first step, digging deep into an understanding of why the "disassociated" meme is a disingenuous piece of crap. Once that underbrush is cleared away, someone might make an argument that could get somewhere.