Not that this thread needs another post, but...I think it might. I have a counterargument to the Seerow quote...
This may have been brought up before, but what's lost in all the hoopla is simple. D&D used to be a New Thing. Hear me out.
These days, the players are more exposed to programming - which is DnD in a nutshell. They've been exposed to dozens of computer games. And they know that different teams/sides/factions what-have-you are designed to be "balanced" against one another. Virtually equal. But that's not the sad part. The sad part of computer gaming is how incredibly transparent this is. They have played through these electronic scenarios over and over and over from every angle and it's always the same set of fairly predictable results. The player is sort of stuck in a mathematical box and can't break out.
The crime is not the "gameyness" of 4e, but it's potential to simply elicit similar experiences to these. The fear is that it simply won't be "different" enough. It won't feel NEW. It will yield predictable "curves" for just enough variables to feel synthetic, for lack of a better word. If the boilerplate for "class" is fixed, or if there are too few boilerplates in general, it will feel stale.
For all the idiocyncracies of 1e and 2e, these qualities gave the player the feeling that it was possible to do something novel. Everything wasn't locked down tight -- and it was loose enough that one could regularly stumble into new territory. This player-experience coincided with the character's experience of an unpredictable world. Player-character parity could be achieved more easily and immersion was easier to obtain as a result.
People don't want just another venue in which they are trapped in a mathematical box. This is part of the draw of splatbooks, after all. Imbalance is something humans are drawn towards like moths to flame. And yes, as Seerow explores, sometimes that flame burns. But the draw is there, nonetheless.
Now, one could certainly argue (successfully as Seerow has) that the idiosyncratic ripples in the fabric of 2e were exactly what broke the game down into a monotonous system of exploits, house rules, "leveraged" imbalances, and so forth. But the other side of the argument is this sense of hopeless, mechanistic systematization that threatens the feelings of exploration and discovery. Yeah, yeah, you've heard this about 3e....but 4e is 'better.' Better meaning smoother? More systematic? I imagine a very smooth, perfectly engineered steel cube....boring.
But maybe it'll be wonderful.
This may have been brought up before, but what's lost in all the hoopla is simple. D&D used to be a New Thing. Hear me out.
These days, the players are more exposed to programming - which is DnD in a nutshell. They've been exposed to dozens of computer games. And they know that different teams/sides/factions what-have-you are designed to be "balanced" against one another. Virtually equal. But that's not the sad part. The sad part of computer gaming is how incredibly transparent this is. They have played through these electronic scenarios over and over and over from every angle and it's always the same set of fairly predictable results. The player is sort of stuck in a mathematical box and can't break out.
The crime is not the "gameyness" of 4e, but it's potential to simply elicit similar experiences to these. The fear is that it simply won't be "different" enough. It won't feel NEW. It will yield predictable "curves" for just enough variables to feel synthetic, for lack of a better word. If the boilerplate for "class" is fixed, or if there are too few boilerplates in general, it will feel stale.
For all the idiocyncracies of 1e and 2e, these qualities gave the player the feeling that it was possible to do something novel. Everything wasn't locked down tight -- and it was loose enough that one could regularly stumble into new territory. This player-experience coincided with the character's experience of an unpredictable world. Player-character parity could be achieved more easily and immersion was easier to obtain as a result.
People don't want just another venue in which they are trapped in a mathematical box. This is part of the draw of splatbooks, after all. Imbalance is something humans are drawn towards like moths to flame. And yes, as Seerow explores, sometimes that flame burns. But the draw is there, nonetheless.
Now, one could certainly argue (successfully as Seerow has) that the idiosyncratic ripples in the fabric of 2e were exactly what broke the game down into a monotonous system of exploits, house rules, "leveraged" imbalances, and so forth. But the other side of the argument is this sense of hopeless, mechanistic systematization that threatens the feelings of exploration and discovery. Yeah, yeah, you've heard this about 3e....but 4e is 'better.' Better meaning smoother? More systematic? I imagine a very smooth, perfectly engineered steel cube....boring.
But maybe it'll be wonderful.
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