3E & 4E Love and Hate Polls - What does it mean?

[The Little Raven]

I'd put my money on 3E.

Most people would claim that their preferred version had a greater impact. It's like asking who had a greater impact on music, the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. Beatles fans would say the Beatles, and Stones fans would say the Stones.

 

[haakon1]

This is a battle ground site.

Less like Switzerland, more like Alsace-Lorraine, OK. But it's still not a site dominated by one side or the other.

From an academic view the questions and answers are not well written. There is little security on the polls, so I imagine it wouldn't be hard to vote more then once.

Yeah, I think you're probably right on this, now that I see the people talking about 500 new posts in 2 hours or whatever. If that's true, I concede -- this is all meaningless if somebody stuffed the ballot box.

People can see the results before they vote.

Not by default, but they can do it that way if they want. I don't see why it would change the results, though.

There is no analysis or real interpretation of answers just people guessing by looking at raw data.

And that's really not a lot different from professional polls.

 

[Crothian]

And that's really not a lot different from professional polls.

I have no problem calling many professional polls worthless, as well.

 

[Celtavian]

Most people would claim that their preferred version had a greater impact. It's like asking who had a greater impact on music, the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. Beatles fans would say the Beatles, and Stones fans would say the Stones.

No. I'd bet money that 3E did a better job of growing D&D than 4E. I liked 3E. I liked 2E. I liked Advanced and even basic. So it's not a matter of favorite edition.

I'm personally shocked many of the old timers enjoy it. It lacks so much in terms of creativity and verisimilitude compared to previous editions. D&D was never a great simulationist game. I'll never proclaim that it was. But 4E has thrown out every advancement made since basic to provide simple rules for better simulating real fighting scenarios. It did this to give the average gamer simplicity and balance, which I guess is more important to some.

4E is a modular game which makes it lack the creativity you saw in 3E and previous editions in terms of what characters could do. It really to this day astounds me that anyone can begin to argue that 4E is as creative a game as previous editions.

As I stated earlier, I would bet money it will spawn nowhere near the creativity of 3E. Not just because of the modular rules, but also because of the licensing restrictions. The 3E era was the most open period of game design we have ever seen in the RPG industry, and will probably remain so through the entire 4E era.

 

[Celtavian]

No it is not. This is a battle ground site. It's been so bad the mods have had to ban discussions that would lead to endless arguments. We have trolls from both sides making hit and run posts.

From an academic view the questions and answers are not well written. There is little security on the polls, so I imagine it wouldn't be hard to vote more then once. People can see the results before they vote. There is no analysis or real interpretation of answers just people guessing by looking at raw data.

Agreed. It would take an independent, objective pollster to get accurate results. And I'd still put my money on 3E being more positive for the D&D community even before the results of the poll or study each game system had on the D&D community.

 

[Dice4Hire]

are most likely biased towards 4E because the majority of folks that still frequent this site are folks that have embraced 4E. Most people that prefer 3E have quietly accepted that the new version of D&D is not to their liking and left for other games with other web sites or are quietly continuing to play 3E and sticking to those forums. For all practical purposes, EN world is pretty much a 4E site now with some leftovers from the previous 3E era.

I think that is generally true, but also note that the polls are taking place in specific forums. I visit Genral rules and 4E rules exclusively (with a monthly look at gamers) so itf you put a poll about 3.5 and pathfinder in the pathfineder forum, I am not voting there. I'll never even see it.

So the people who do polls are so self selected that the results might be good for Enworld, but not beyond.

 

[Umbran]

4E is a modular game which makes it lack the creativity you saw in 3E and previous editions in terms of what characters could do. It really to this day astounds me that anyone can begin to argue that 4E is as creative a game as previous editions.

That depends on how you wish to be creative.

4e is modular - that means if you don't like some bit, you can take out that "module" and slap another in its place without as much fear of it not working well as a non-modular game. For many, this gives them more room for creativity, rather than less.

You talk about verisimilitude - I will grant you that 4e has less detailed rules. However, for many gamers that's a gain in verisimilitude, not a loss. It means that they have fewer cases in which the rules clash with what they think ought to happen. They get to insert what they think ought to happen more often, without breaking things. Again, a gain in creativity.

And, so on. No edition really strangles creativity in general - but one edition or another may be better suited to your particular style of creativity.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

No it is not. This is a battle ground site. It's been so bad the mods have had to ban discussions that would lead to endless arguments. We have trolls from both sides making hit and run posts.

From an academic view the questions and answers are not well written. There is little security on the polls, so I imagine it wouldn't be hard to vote more then once. People can see the results before they vote. There is no analysis or real interpretation of answers just people guessing by looking at raw data.

Contested grounds at the least, yes.

I would like to see the results of similar polls, but with better security on the ballot box.

Mind you, the results will be skewed further by the existence of the previous polls....

The Auld Grump, may those who corrupted the previous polls find their dice turning ever toward 1.

 

[Barastrondo]

I'm personally shocked many of the old timers enjoy it. It lacks so much in terms of creativity and verisimilitude compared to previous editions. D&D was never a great simulationist game. I'll never proclaim that it was. But 4E has thrown out every advancement made since basic to provide simple rules for better simulating real fighting scenarios. It did this to give the average gamer simplicity and balance, which I guess is more important to some.

It doesn't surprise me much. Consider the reverse wording "Would you prefer a game that favors more realistic combat simulation at the expense of greater simplicity and balance?" That's how some see it. It might be nice to have everything. But if there's a choice to be made, not everyone's going to value the same stuff.

Plus you never know just what players will be attracted to. My wife loves Champions, for instance. She does not like actually building a character much, though. What she does like is the versatility — and the fun of doing knockback. She just gets me to build her characters for her, so she can mess around with the "actual play" interface and do lots of Knockback. Forced movement in 4e is similar. It's a selling point on its own.

4E is a modular game which makes it lack the creativity you saw in 3E and previous editions in terms of what characters could do. It really to this day astounds me that anyone can begin to argue that 4E is as creative a game as previous editions.

I tend to see players getting awfully creative with 4e, and some of them do so in some ways moreso than they did in 3e. But it depends on whether or not you consider reskinning and other such things competitive in the "creativity" department. Using shifter + druid rules to have a workable werewolf character? That's pretty creative, I think, and it's all client-side: it doesn't rely on published rules for playing a werewolf. Also, it really, really depends on whether or not the group is comfortable with things like pg. 42 of the DMG, or ad-libbed skill challenges.

It's all totally reliant on chemistry, of course. A group that doesn't get along with 4e's core assumptions is going to spend more time chafing at the restrictions than a group that enjoys what it's trying to achieve. That's pretty much true of any RPG ever, though. Players who want to be larger-than-life heroes who beat the living hell out of evil aren't going to fit well with Call of Cthulhu no matter how elegantly refined that venerable game may be.

 

[haakon1]

Agreed. It would take an independent, objective pollster to get accurate results.

I don't think lack of objective pollsters is the problem.

The two polls, posted by someone else for 4e, and by me afterwards for 3e, have identical answers.

I am a 3e fan, but I didn't write the original answers and I don't see anything biased or unfair about them (in either poll). I asked the 3e question to see if the answers would come out differently.

What I was EXPECTING to see is that a lot of people like both editions, so love + like + mixed bag would likely add up to 65% or more in both, which would be a sort of "meh, edition wars don't matter" result. I'm not really sure what the real answers were before it got hacked . . . some other folks were discussing that early in the thread.

BTW though, since I didn't notice it myself until I'd already ranted here about how the polls aren't so bad and shouldn't be that far off (err, sorry!), the 3e poll was totally hacked, with a sudden 500 new "hate" responses after it had been running for days with a more believable set of answers. I haven't checked if the 4e poll was also vandalized.

So, the big problem NOW with these polls is hacking, which overwhelms the real responses from real people. I won't speculate on why the person who hacked it did it, since their opinion really doesn't matter in the scheme of things. Could be trying to "prove" polls are bad by making it so, could be Edition War childishness, or it could be just hacking because they can . . .