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: 4283043" data-attributes="member: 2067">Yes, and the Sky is Blue.But more specifically, 4e presents a fantasy world with characters and empires and towns and says "Have Fun with These." They gave me a menu of options that I can choose from and that they can add to.And 3e gave me a head of lettuce and said "Here's how you make a salad out of it. And here's how you make a sandwich out of it."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."I'm not really trying to say that either is better, just that they are entirely different goals. It's also a continuum, not a binary choice. 3e was more focused on a toolset ("Here's prestige classes! Now go make some yourself!"), 4e is more focused on an instruction manual ("Here's some really cool paragon paths! Wait for more!"). These aren't exactly exclusive of each other, but its a very different intent that has lead to certain things that some people liked about 3e getting axed to make it a better instruction manual. And because 3e runs the risk of being "canceled" because of that, people who like those things aren't happy about it.....okay, reiterating the point you're trying to respond to:Narrative content in an RPG is not independent of mechanical systems.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'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.Some people really liked the toolkit and are angry that it is being retired in favor of the ready-to-eat meal.I'm a little shocked that this is even a controversial position. Of COURSE 4e wants to be ready to play out of the box. That's one of their explicit design goals. And 3e wanted to give you a whole box of tools that you could make a large range of games under. That was one of its explicit design goals. And the two aren't mutually exclusive, its just a matter of focus. 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. 4e doesn't need the processing power of the more robust game systems because it knows what most people find fun, and it serves THAT (and rather well).The point that not everyone finds it fun, because some people like a more tinker-intensive system, would seem to be almost self-evident.Which brings me back to my original post: its more accurate in my mind, if 4e is the Wii, to say that 3e is a Linux machine (heck, its entirely Open Source!) than to say that 3e is like the PS3, and that some of the 3e anger comes from feeling like they're being kind of forced to browse the web with a Wii. That lack of choice, that feeling that what you like is being taken away just because you're not part of the majority, is where a lot of the frustration can come from. The Wii is vastly more popular than Linux, and is a lot of fun, but it doesn't have the exclusive domain on what people find fun, especially some of the "fringe" people that 4e is alienating that 3e speciflcally tried to mostly accommodate. 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).</blockquote>

Verification