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: 4282579" data-attributes="member: 2067">For those people who absolutely loved straightforward fighters, it was known the moment they said "No more straightforward fighters!" like it was a wonderful thing. Same thing for those who loved Bigby and those who adored half-orcs and those who were intimate with the Great Wheel. For a good chunk of D&D players, the tropes were the point of the play experience. Without the tropes, it's just not the same experience, and, thus, not very fun for them.I think WotC is obviously on-target when it assumes that the chunk was pretty small, and that most people don't give a rat's arse about who Bigby is, and that a D&D interested in recruiting new blood can't assume people will care about Bigby. But those who already do definitely know what effect it will have on their play experience, and knew before 4e was released. Sure, but the powers themselves are still bland and "samey" to me to get me excited about any of them. I'm left going "Meh, does it REALLY matter?" at every level I can choose something. Nothing stands out. What's wrong with it? 4e wants, from all I can tell, to be simpler, more accessible, and to give more people what they really want based on what they enjoyed about the game before, stripped down to "bare essentials" and given elements that will help push sub-industries like minis and DDI that can help enrich the basic game. Evidence includes almost every review saying "simpler! more streamlined! faster!", minis-focused combat, the ads for DDI plastered in many places, etc., etc., et al. This is like giving everyone McDonald's, because most people eat at McDonald's, and maybe letting them pay extra for "angus burgers" and "salads" if they want some options.3e wanted to give every D&D fan something to love, and to be able to customize the basic core for their own needs. It wanted to be a framework so that you could take and do what you wanted with it, based on what you enjoyed, whatever that was. Evidence includes the OGL movement, the SRD, genre supplements, the conversion manual, etc., etc., et al.3e was this, too, and moreso than 4e, since it doesn't assume you want to use Tieflings and Dragonborn, but rather assumes you want to use what D&D has always used, and then gives you rules for adding medusae and angels. Regardless of the quality of the rules, or whether you personally felt they met your needs, the intent seems fairly obvious to me. Maybe its just McD's is too harsh? Perhaps it would go over better if I said 4e was firing all the cooks so that they could make us all Applebee's? Or Outback Steakhouse? Or Nathan's Hot Dogs? Or Long John Silver's? They certainly aren't telling me to tinker with the system to produce the flavor I want. They're telling me "Hey, you think Points of Light and Dragonborn are cool, right?!"I mean, its D&D, so it won't ever be able to surrender that tinkering mentality entirely, and 4e doesn't tell you not to or you'll void your warranty (like the iPhone does!), but it is telling you "You never really liked gnomes that much anyway, did you?"It's going to be right more often than not. More people buy McD's in a day than cook dinner from scratch in a day. Its giving people what they have said they've wanted. 4e fires 3e, though, and so the cooks are basically told that they can't make any other food with their old ingredients. They now have to assemble them based on pre-approved designs that meet with certain criteria. McD's can always have a new limited edition sandwich, and can even bring back classics! It can make meatloaf that may or may not be just like momma used to make, but will probably be vaguely similar to what most people's mommas used to make, and might just be good enough that most people don't really care, and a few are really into it (hot smack I love those nuggets!). But man, those cooks who made stuff from scratch and liked it, weird and obsessive and unusual as they are, were happy with the earlier edition (which did try to prepare meals for you, especially toward the end), and you can't really expect them to love the new world order."I think if you care more about eating food than about making it, this New World Order of fast food is likely going to be a better way to eat for you than making food from scratch was."This ends up being false, too, because, as <a href="http://www.michaelpollan.com/omnivore.php" target="_blank">Michael Pollan</a> points out, narrative content is not independent from mechanical subsystems.But perhaps I've wrung this metaphor about as tight as it can go at this point. <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=":)" /></blockquote>

Verification