D&D 4E 4E: The Biggest Changes in any D&D Edition Switch

[Hussar]

/snip

I recently bought some dice in the local game store, which is really a boardgaming/Magic the Gathering club with with a retail operation. The guy operating the register asked me "You still play D&D?" I had to tell him that yes, there really were people that still played PnP RPGs. He thought it had completely died out. I can't personally name anyone I know under the age of 30 who plays D&D, and I know plenty of people in their 20s.

New players simply aren't coming. Few of us want to face up to that, but we are part of a dying hobby. When the last time you saw an ad for D&D anywhere but the geek press? Nobody but the existing player base knows or cares about a 4th Edition of D&D. In fact, most of the actual player base (who don't read the online forums and don't go to Cons) neither know nor care about the 4th Edition.

My experience is also completely opposite. In my last campaign, we went through 15 players (4 stuck it out for most of it and we had 1-2 spares that came and went over the couple of years). At 35, I was the oldest at the table, and the next oldest was 25. In the campaign before that, I had almost 45 players (don't ask), almost all of which were 18-25. Dragon Magazine pegged their average readership at about 23 a couple of years back.

The greying of the game is perhaps overblown. I think it has more to do with the fact that there are just more older gamers coupled with the fact that there are more gamers now than there has been in a couple of decades.

 

[The Little Raven]

The greying of the game is perhaps overblown. I think it has more to do with the fact that there are just more older gamers coupled with the fact that there are more gamers now than there has been in a couple of decades.

Also, people tend not to go too far outside their demographic when looking for groups, so it's understandable that older gamers wouldn't notice younger gamers, since they aren't actively looking for them.

 

[Fallen Seraph]

Well, as someone who is 18, I think I have a bit of a window into how D&D is doing amongst the younger audience.

I would describe it as, "small but strong." PnP will never have large numbers, that is just the way it is. But there will always be people playing it, at any age.

The small but strong comment comes in that, there is a small but quite devoted following of PnP gamers in the younger community. I think one difference comes in that, we are less... Hobby store going and posting messages on the board type. More, group of close friends chatting it up on msn and deciding to play on Friday.

We also as a younger group are less committed to a single franchise, since we haven't seen it since the beginning. For instance for myself and the rest of my friends, you will see: D&D, WoD, GURPS, Shadowrun, etc.

 

[Campbell]

I work in IT so my perspective is probably slightly skewed, but I come across gamers in my age group (21-27) quite frequently and a fair number of lapsed gamers. That being said the only people in that group I know of that tend to frequent hobby stores are also Magic players that play competitively. Most of us (myself included) do our shopping either online or in book stores.

 

[Mr. Wilson]

IMO, in Fluff only.

AD&D to 3E to me seemed to have much more crunch changes than 3.XE to 4E.

 

[Li Shenron]

I voted that the fluff changes are the largest, but I am not sure about the crunch.

I moved from BECMI to AD&D and back again. Then to 3rd. The Crunch differences between 3rd and 2nd are larger at this point. (Unification of Attributes, total reworking of saves, Feats, Unification of XP, removal of set XP values etc.)

I don't understand why these changes are "large". Streamlining IMHO is not as large as changing an assumption about how the game plays as a whole, so IMO the 3e reworking of saves into 3 only (which is the largest change IMO among those you mention) is a moderate change. 4e switch to encounter-based powers is a major change, because it affects how adventures work as a whole.

Feats a major change? Maybe, but the fact that they are a plug-and-play addition doesn't IMO change the game dramatically (except for the fighter class which is based on them, you could play 3e without feats and it would still be quite the same game).

The XP changes of 3e are the same magnitude than the ones by 4e.

As I said, I'm not sure which edition has the biggest crunch changes. But I disagree on all these examples.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

The XP changes of 3e are the same magnitude than the ones by 4e.

As I said, I'm not sure which edition has the biggest crunch changes. But I disagree on all these examples.

You had some great good points, but this I gotta call foul on.

The change from AD&D XP to 3E was gianormous. 3E brought unified progression tables, a unified mechanic for experience, and tied wealth and equipment to experience in a way that had never been done formally before.

Heck, even the idea that all XP would be given to the party as a whole rather than having seperate mechanics for spell research and picking pockets was a pretty big shift.

3E-4E is using the exact same system just changing up the pacing and the way monster XP is recorded and read strategically.

Maybe I'm not understanding what you mean by XP?

 

[Roman]

Personally, I do think that the changes announced for 4E are the biggest yet in both crunch and fluff.

 

[TheSleepyKing]

As much as anything, I suspect 4E represents the biggest shift in the way people play the game since D&D was introduced. I’ve often wondered how many people actually play the game using a battlemat and focus on the tactical aspects of encounters. I’ve been a member of six different gaming groups in my life, and exactly one of those used minis or tokens in combat – and then only for major set-piece battles.

In previous editions you could get away with playing without the battlemat – from what we’ve seen, you can’t really do that in 4E (not without a huge amount of DM handwaving, in any case). This might be a turn off for gaming groups that don’t use minis; it might compel them to use minis (which is clearly what WoTC hopes for). I don’t know. In any case, I think that it means for a lot of people the way they play the game is going to be drastically altered.

 

[Henry]

As much as anything, I suspect 4E represents the biggest shift in the way people play the game since D&D was introduced. I’ve often wondered how many people actually play the game using a battlemat and focus on the tactical aspects of encounters. I’ve been a member of six different gaming groups in my life, and exactly one of those used minis or tokens in combat – and then only for major set-piece battles.

In previous editions you could get away with playing without the battlemat – from what we’ve seen, you can’t really do that in 4E (not without a huge amount of DM handwaving, in any case). This might be a turn off for gaming groups that don’t use minis; it might compel them to use minis (which is clearly what WoTC hopes for). I don’t know. In any case, I think that it means for a lot of people the way they play the game is going to be drastically altered.

I've had the opposite experience:

1) Of all the groups I've played in, the only time I didn't use "mats & minis" was when I originally played with one player and me as DM, back when I first taught myself how to play. The group I met later, ALL of them First Edition adopters from about 1978, used minis of some sort and mats (in those days, it was risk pieces and a laminated piece of 1 inch graph paper). After them, every group I played with has used some form of spatial representation for play of D&D.

2) I ran a poll on the 1e AD&D Dragonsfoot forums a few years ago; http://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1344
and the consensus at the time was that the majority did use some form of spatial representation, whether tape and minis, or dice, or chits of some sort, etc. (unfortunately, Dragonsfoot seems to be down right now.) It's not surprising, considering AD&D's wargame roots, that this would be the case. In fact, it seems to me that the generation of players that started between 1985 and 1995 would have been more likely to NOT use minis, than the generation before it.