4E is for casuals, D&D is d0med

[Spatula]

It would have been possible to fix 3e without the wholehearted shift in focus, or to better support toolboxing and simulationist gameplay in the core rules, but at least everything I mentioned above trumped that for the design team this time around.

How do you fix 3e while fundamentally changing the underlying structure? This is one of the reasons Mearls cites as needing to ditch the old system, and he has the point - the game just breaks down at high levels. Your attack bonuses and saves are either massive or ineffective. AC is nearly meaningless. Combat is over in 2 rounds and takes 2 hours to play out. Monsters have to have so many HD to survive a round of the players' attacks that they can't fail saving throws and can dump their entire BAB into PA. Tactics largely consist of maneuvering to get the jump on your opponents when you're fully buffed and they are not, and preventing them from running away to buff and hit you back. Which can be interesting, but the combat itself should be fun too.

This is why, while I really like 3e (up to maybe 12th level, anyway), I'm glad they made 4e. They saw what didn't work in 3e and addressed those issues, and as a result the combat foundation is built on much sounder ground than in previous edtions. Of course it remains to be seen how good the execution will be, in the long-term.

 

[I'm A Banana]

This is true of fast food. I don't get the sense that it's interestingly true of 4e in a way that it wasn't of 3E. Both give races, gods, an implicit social system etc.

4e's implied setting is much stronger than 3e's was. 3e's was kind of "Here are some races and some classes that D&D has had before, and they all work together, or not." 4e's is kind of "In a world....where empires have fallen and dragons are born...come heroes...who have destinies."

4e is more like Arcana Unearthed/Evolved in this respect, because it makes deliberate choices, omissions, and proper nouns that exist outside of name-dropping. It has a theme, a feel, a mood, a beginning and an end. 3e didn't have much of that straight out of the box, which both let you add your own, and MADE you add your own, if you wanted it.

Furthermore, with the choice to focus on new IP, the "generic mythos" creatures have been pushed a bit farther back in favor of "D&D specific" creatures.

All this helps create an atmosphere of "Play Our Game" more than "Play Your Game."

It's still a continuum, not a binary choice, but the difference is real nonetheless.

Ron Edwards' attitude towards RPGing, as expressed in his essays, has a similar optimistic tone: the masses would love RPGs if only good RPGs were made accessible to them.

I think tabletop RPGing has a few fundamental barriers that stop it from being loved by "the masses," and that the closest we'll ever get is the World of Warcraft/Videogame boom that's happening right now.

#1: It requires a lot of time. Even a "casual" campaign is going to require a 4-hour block of time spent just playing. Attention spans of most poeple are difficult to maintain for that long on one thing.

#2: It requires schedule coordination. That 4-hour block of time needs to be free for at least six people to play a game of D&D4. That's hard to get even amongst people who are generally good with the idea.

#3: It is an active thing, not a passive thing. It demands a higher level of interaction than WoW or any other videogame, a level that not everyone is going to be eager to do (especially over something like pretending to be an elf in a magical faery world). Related, it is a social thing: every one of those six people must contribute. This means that it cannot be one person's vision, and that it will, of necessity, lack a certain focus.

#4: It can never be topical. In addition to the "six people" thing, D&D won't really be able to address the way that normal people are feeling. D&D can't tackle the issues that at least Americans have to deal with: Contentious elections, economic hardship, emerging class struggles, questions of freedom and safety, the notion of just violence and unjust violence, of honesty and deception in places of power, of the responsibility of the media....let alone big human issues like trust, fidelity, fear, romance, war...

You might get a Pratchett novel that can take on these issues, and you could definitely get a Dickens novel or a Scorsese flick that looks at these issues, but six people pretending to be elves for four hours a week says more about those six people than it ever could about the world in general. A good DM might be able to inject a campaign with the feel of one or two of these things at a time, but it doesn't really help "the masses" since RPGing isn't a spectator event.

Games in general can deal with those, even. But I'm pretty sure D&D and tabletop gaming can not. Practically speaking, this is a niche, and it will always be a niche (though it might be a niche that is always around).

You can get popular and complex, but you need the third ingredient of INTERESTING, and you need to ditch the idea of simplicity (though embracing convenience is a good plan).

 

[I'm A Banana]

How do you fix 3e while fundamentally changing the underlying structure? This is one of the reasons Mearls cites as needing to ditch the old system, and he has the point - the game just breaks down at high levels. Your attack bonuses and saves are either massive or ineffective. AC is nearly meaningless. Combat is over in 2 rounds and takes 2 hours to play out. Monsters have to have so many HD to survive a round of the players' attacks that they can't fail saving throws and can dump their entire BAB into PA. Tactics largely consist of maneuvering to get the jump on your opponents when you're fully buffed and they are not, and preventing them from running away to buff and hit you back.

All of this is one problem:

The Math.

That solution doesn't mandate that you get rid of the Great Wheel or that you introduce an ancient human empire that has fallen or that you remove the option to disarm from combat.

One possible answer to how you could have done this: fix the numbers, leave the rest alone.

Heck, examples of this were occurring in 3e. E6 and FFZ all had variant reward schemes that tried to preserve the sweet spot without messing with much of the rest of the system.

But, again, 4e had many more agendas than just fixing 3e's problems.

 

[Spatula]

All of this is one problem:

The Math.

That solution doesn't mandate that you get rid of the Great Wheel or that you introduce an ancient human empire that has fallen or that you remove the option to disarm from combat.

Well, I agree with you there. The change-for-change's sake alterations to the implied setting are my personal sore spot concerning 4e. But the fluff doesn't have anything to do with the 3e-as-toolbox, 4e-as-finished-product design differences. If they had kept the Great Wheel and all of that but everything else was still the same - not a huge stretch given the general lack of story in the PHB - it's still a completely different system that does not aim to cater to the tinkerers.

But, again, 4e had many more agendas than just fixing 3e's problems.

That's true of anything designed by a team or commitee.

 

[pemerton]

It can never be topical. In addition to the "six people" thing, D&D won't really be able to address the way that normal people are feeling. D&D can't tackle the issues that at least Americans have to deal with: Contentious elections, economic hardship, emerging class struggles, questions of freedom and safety, the notion of just violence and unjust violence, of honesty and deception in places of power, of the responsibility of the media....let alone big human issues like trust, fidelity, fear, romance, war...

I'm not sure I agree with you about this. Of course there's a sense in which those issues won't be directly in play (except perhaps just vs unjust violence). But nor are they directly in play in a film like Bad Education (which I mention because I rewatched it the other evening on DVD). That doesn't stop Bad Education saying something meaningful about humanity which is relevant to all those topical issues. And I do feel that RPGs can do something similar.

Given the spontaneous nature of RPGs I don't think they'll ever be on a par with great works of narrative art. But the authenticity of the expression by the players themselves can generate a different sort of aesthetic experience which I think has a value of its own.

 

[I'm A Banana]

But the fluff doesn't have anything to do with the 3e-as-toolbox, 4e-as-finished-product design differences. If they had kept the Great Wheel and all of that but everything else was still the same - not a huge stretch given the general lack of story in the PHB - it's still a completely different system that does not aim to cater to the tinkerers.

Actually, it has something to do with it.

The stronger the setting is implied, the less "wiggle room" there is to try a new setting. By assuming there is an ancient human empire, they've ramped up the work for those campaigns that don't want to include an ancient human empire (for instance), which is part of the game's way of saying "Just play with an ancient human empire, man, it won't kill ya!"

That's a finished product: you've got a place for dungeons and legends to come from.

Vs. 3e, where it was entirely up to you why these things existed.

The Math could have actually helped the tinkers a lot if it was the only thing that was changed, because one unified list of 30 levels where, say, you're getting class powers at every even level and feats at every odd level, doesn't eat up much page space, giving you more room for options that tinkers can pick and choose and customize from.

 

[Intense_Interest]

4e says "You like dark heroes, right? Here's tieflings! They have an ancient empire and a conflict with the dragonborn!"

3e says "D&D has, in the past, given you half-orcs. Here's how they look now, in Stereotypical D&D Land. Do whatever you want with 'em, whatever you've been doing for 30 years, or some of this new hotness we've got going on, or whatever."

Thats a pretty broad-brush assessment that fits more into your personal bias than as part of an objective observation.

First, the Implied Setting you note is not a problem, considering that gods and planes are a bigger piece of the landscape for homebrews-

Tieflings have Angst because they are spawn of demons. Half-Orcs have Angst because they are spawn of savages. The former has even more of an icky connotation that leads into more Sturm and Drang.

Narrative content in an RPG is not independent of mechanical systems.

That is largely a factor of Genre. Swords and Sorcery has Tropes X, Y, and Z that is entirely different than Superhero Tropes T, U, V, and W. Even GURPS has this, just separated into its distinct books.

Narrative Content, from what I believe, is not things like "Kolbolds are Weak and Tricksy", which the two ways going about this (exception based or system based) both serve.

Narrative Content is actually things such as Absolute spell stats, Wealth-by-Level charts, Flat Diplomacy skill DCs, and 3-easy-then-1-hard-encounter-then-you-rest system assumptions. Having decoupled "Ritual" systems that involve behind-the-screen assessments like a Succubas charm, you actually give more room for a DM to create the Narrative Content than before.

Yet even then the actual story-telling is a sum of the input of all participants. A game-table decides that swashbuckling is the answer, we have swashbuckling.

Point the first, I'm not talking, nor do I care, about the quality you personally found in 3e's attempt to do what 3e attempted to do.

I don't believe you can talk about the achievements and goals of a system without taking quality into account.

I'm putting forth a really very mundane proposition, there. That 3e was more of a toolkit than 4e is, because 4e isn't concerned as much about you modding your home game to accommodate all sorts of weirdness, largely because the team found that those rules cluttered up the main books while adding very little to most games.

I agree in part.

*4E isn't built to accommodate reams of house-rules and alterations within a 300-page book.
*4E instead creates a modular game engine to which new or different alterations could then be added or subtracted.
*4E, by virtue of the subscription method for content, will sell you those alterations in books

The reason this is true is because the Eberron book-style- races classes, Items, feats, Powers, all contained within a binding connected by theme- was an ample success for WotC, and they desire to continue to drive a profit.

4E is more modular than 3E because many of the add ons previously were like adding a new leaky bucket under the hole of the other one.

In this way, 4E is a Linux system, because the alterations are skins and method (Ubuntu, Gentoo et al) that end-users commonly only change slightly to match their needs once taken. 3E, on the other hand, is UNIX with its base-level coding and hard script assumptions that have to be made by the end-user from start to match the desires. How many "chuck Grapple" house-rules are there? Part-Dragon Races/Classes/PrCs/Items?

I'm confused as to how the idea of 4e being "more ready to go right away" than 3e, and 3e being more "tinker-intensive" than 4e, is somehow inaccurate. That's kind of the bleedin' POINT of the link in hong's initial post: 4e is the Wii.

"The Wii" is a crypto-slam meme on 4E for being "Casual", which is a lame pejorative trying to play up into a "Supercool Hardcore" image of the user.

hong is not the prophet of people who enjoy 4E and can even be disagreed with at times.

In no possible way does this mean that 4e somehow cannot handle people's house rules and minor tweaks. The sky is blue, of course it can. That doesn't really change the intended focus of the edition: you're not supposed to HAVE to house rule it (while 3e basically MADE you house rule it, even if you didn't really want to -- oddly enough, just like every other D&D edition, as far as I can tell).

A bad system is still bad, no matter what its goals are. He may love you and buy you flowers, but a black eye is a black eye.

Which leads me to:

This leads me to the other portion of your theory, that people who like 3e and want to stick with it are frustrated because 4e will replace it. Others are suggesting that 4e is so different that it should have been called something other than D&D. If this had been done, and all of those people who were frustrated with 3e bought that game instead, would it have kept that edition in print? Would everyone have gotten what they wanted? Or, if 4e by a different name had been so popular, would any company be able to profit enough by sticking with 3e?

I'm not sure what the answer to those questions is. We've got Paizo looking at keeping 3e alive as Pathfinder, but that isn't a true equivalent to my hypothetical situation, as Pathfinder doesn't have the brand name recognition and Paizo doesn't have the resources of WoTC.

I guess what I'm ultimately saying is, should people be forced to use a set of rules that weren't working for them so it can be kept alive for those who were enjoying it? In that scenario, only one group is really getting what they want. In the current scenario, rules systems exist to satisfy both parties, but one will have to settle on not getting as much product support as they used to (and maybe additional trouble finding a group to play with).

I'm not sure what better alternative there is to this problem.

and also to

The thing is, if WotC basically did Pathfinder and called it 4e, they might've been able to solve the problems without a massive overhaul and abandoning the 3e gearheads. And if they released a more streamlined 4e as a new minis game (for instance), they might've had their cake and ate it, too.

Two games by one company that share genre? You'd be abandoning the Market Leader status in the RPG community for nothing.

Most of the 3E grognard crowd that ascribe to any printed game being the bringer of milk and honey for all their needs is a reactionary response supported by a self-selected group on the internet. You see the same thing in Pro-Ana Livejournal groups and other forms of risk appeasement communities.

Pathfinder should be some metaphorical Thinspiration, but it'll be about a year or so before you can be able to find a real assessment of what the difference in player groups has lead to.

That solution doesn't mandate that you get rid of the Great Wheel or that you introduce an ancient human empire that has fallen or that you remove the option to disarm from combat.

All of those had reasons that played into the core genre tropes and objective playability issues.

Great Wheel was hitting bellow the Mendoza line (.200) in actual playabiltiy and usability.
Everyone Speaks Human is a core genre trope.
Disarm is an all-or-nothing ability in action economy and therefore should be constrained to a power (encounter imo) that should be released later.

Yes KM, there are some strong liabilities in 4E design (Underfoot, the class named "Ranger", Half-Elf, no Dim aura from Bright source), but the core mechanics and game engine contribute to a very well designed system greased by the blood of Sacred Cows.

 

[hong]

Ask any newly potty trained toddler: doing it yourself has its own rewards.

Ah. By this definition, clearly RIFTS is the best system out there for rules tweaking DMs. I am glad to have that cleared up, as I had never been aware of this before.

 

[sinecure]

Ah. By this definition, clearly RIFTS is the best system out there for rules tweaking DMs. I am glad to have that cleared up, as I had never been aware of this before.

RIFTS is one of the better systems still on the market. It may be the only old school system still putting out books. At least we have plenty of 2nd edition books still on bookshelves in hobby shops or newcomers wouldn't know D&D was originally a roleplaying game at one time.

You're thread seems to make a point of how horrible 3E was when it comes to simplicity. What will be the mocked element of 4th when the designers come out against it in a few years? You should return to 2nd.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

For the reasons I've given, I think this may be harder to do well in 4e than in earlier editions, because the emphasis is no longer on mechanical balance (this is already given to you), but on the integration of mechanics and theme, which may be harder to successfully pull off.

Of course, it may not be.

When I created monsters in 3E, I usually tried to find a "theme" for them.

I remember running a 3E/Arcana Evolved game focusing on... spiders and crystals. I created a template to fit the crystal theme and slapped it on classed NPCs, and created a spider mixing multiple creatures MM spider creatures. I don't think there is any difference between 3E and 4E, except that I don't have to advance monster HD and distribute skill points, or add class levels to my creatures, or have to use a template. I can just slap on the abilities I want, and let the mechanical details be informed on the monster guidelines and comparing to existing powers.

---

And what are the worries around the implied setting? There isn't even a "Golden Wyvern Adept" feat anymore! The only thing that is remaining are some vague background infos to races and the gods, and the new cosmology. Which is approximately as intrusive as the Great Wheel (but I like the new one more). Ignoring that when I build my own world is very easy. Though I probably won't, since I came to like the PoL world...