Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4282476" data-attributes="member: 2067">I like 4e. I like my Wii. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> As I was using the term, I meant it to mean this:"This game is essentially the same game as before, meaning that if you are familiar with Fireball in 1e, you will recognize it in 3e, and if you know what a Bodak is in 2e, you will recognize it in 3e, and if you are aware of how a wizard works in BD&D,  you will see a similarity to how it works in 3e."3e was the "same game." It had barbarians and half-orcs and the Great Wheel and spell slots and straightforward fighters and all of those other sacred cows. The underlying rules may have changed (multiple subsystems resolved into d20 rolls), but you can basically do the same things you've always done with this game.4e is, at least in this respect, a dramatically "different game." It has what it thinks you want most, it has sacrificed sacred cows very efficiently, the rules have changed so much that you cannot do the same things you've always done with this game if they are markedly different than the things that most other people have done with this game. If you want a dungeon survival or simulationist or Great Wheel or  straightforward-fighter 4e, you're basically boned. 4e is meeting what they see as the greatest demand. They're probably right, but 3e chose a more inclusive approach (which lead to its complexity, in part). When I say 4e doesn't want to be "quitessential D&D," I'm saying that 4e has no real interest or investment in most of the sacred cows, memes, and habits that D&D had acquired in the previous editions. 3e obviously did.Options are not complexity. Complexity would be if each of those options had some Gygaxian sub-system and table you could roll on (for instance). That's not necessarily desirable. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />If 4e isn't remarkably simpler to play than 3e, then I don't know what half this buzz is about. In my experience, its about the same, but I've only  played low-level 4e so far, and low-level 3e wasn't very complex, either. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> I believe their promises about the game being simpler, and this makes the Wii analogy work well, because its a simpler, more basic system. The difference between "simple" and "simplistic" is largely subjective, lying on that "is it so simple that it's not fun any more" cusp. There are several elements of 4e that fall into this department for me. There are certain Wii games that fall into this department for me. I see 400+ variations on "I damage him and inflict a condition or move him some distance" to be pretty simplistic. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />But either way, this isn't the heart of my post. The heart of it lies in how 3e is much more like an Open Source computer if 4e is a Wii, and that, yes, if everyone had to buy a Wii because the Nintendo could cancel Linux, there would be a whole buttload of annoyed people who didn't want to have to buy peripherals to shop at Amazon or type messages to the internet using the Wii browser. Thus, this is part of the reason why there is a substantial vocal populace who has a lot of problems with 4e being "forced" on them. Simple is good and fine and fun for a lot of people, but if you CANCEL the complexity and force people to accept the simplicity, there's going to be some bad blood.To Generic Food Metaphor it, if you stop letting people cook their own meals and just serve them McDonald's every day because its "Simpler" and more people buy McD's than cook their own meals, you're going to get a lot of cooks who are very pissed, even if they don't make up much of the populace.</blockquote>

Verification