4E - WotC's equivalent to the New World of Darkness?

[delericho]

In some sense it seems that the Sacred Cows that have been killed with 4E are more fluff than crunch.

Disagree. The mechanical changes are at least as profound as the flavour changes. It's essentially a whole new game with the same name. (Which is not to say it "isn't D&D", just that it is a very different D&D.)

So it came to mind that Wizard's 4E is somewhat similar to White Wolf's New World of Darkness (or the new Bond films, for that matter): a re-boot that is receiving mixed reviews. Sure, every edition is a re-boot of sorts, but not as drastically in terms of fluff and tone.

The NWoD is a good analogy.

A few questions to ponder: Was the New World of Darkness better received than 4E thus far? Will 4E pay off in the long run? Will enough Old Timers switch over AND enough Newbies come in?

Well, those are the real questions, aren't they?

Initially, I thought the NWoD was a really bold move from White Wolf, and would be a massive success. Then I read through it, and found that the mechanical changes were good, but the setting material (the core of that setting) just left me cold. It just doesn't seem to have been a particularly great success, although all my evidence for that is anecdotal (and therefore completely useless). It certainly hasn't set the RPG world alight the way the first edition of "Vampire: the Masquerade" did.

For 4e, I suspect the majority of the old guard will switch over eventually, and that the game will draw in more newcomers than 3e did (especially in the last five years). However, I expect it won't draw significant numbers away from MMORPGs, and that the D&D Insider will either fail absymally or be a marginal success at best. (No evidence for any of this; that's purely my gut feeling, which is wrong about 50% of the time.) Under those circumstances, I think if the game had come from any other company it would be considered a resounding success. However, when viewed with the Hasbro lens, it may well be a different story. Time will tell.

 

[DragonLancer]

I think the difference is that the new World of Darkness games are not new editions they are new games. Dungeons & Dragons is still the same game that has been changed.

 

[Byronic]

nWoD Wasn't badly received at all. I think that a lot of people liked it. In the crowd that I was in if you didn't like it they just shrugged and played with the old one. They didn't try to tackle on bits from the former onto the new.

I think the largest changes were probably the setting for some people. People who didn't like the metafic as much liked nWoD better. I think the changes in the mechanics mattered a lot less because WoD has always had a lot more emphasis on the actual story and things like character development then DnD and that doesn't really change much.

DnD 4.0 did good on some things (like never having to use a slingshot again as a Wizard) however they screwed up some other things (my 3eD characters felt more "real" and more different).

All and all though I think that it's biggest mistake was not how it differed from 3.x but rather how it failed to live up to its potential. If Race mattered more, if weapons felt more different and other things like that.

*shakes his fist* Damn you WotC! I was promised Fey! Wicked Capricious Fey! Not Elves With Pointy Magical Sticks!

Bah, I'm going to have to make a proper man out of 4.0. Grrr!

 

[jdrakeh]

It certainly hasn't set the RPG world alight the way the first edition of "Vampire: the Masquerade" did.

In fairness, this is true of all other oWoD games, as well (including later editions of V:TM). The closest that White Wolf has ever come to recapturing that level of success is Exalted 1e (which, I'm told, actually surpassed the high water mark for V:TM 1e, if only for a very short period of time).

 

[Psion]

In some sense it seems that the Sacred Cows that have been killed with 4E are more fluff than crunch.

I think the fluff revisions are pretty extreme.

The crunch revision didn't seem that extreme at first, but I am beginning to think that it's more extreme than I thought at first.

But overall, I think you are right.

 

[Vanuslux]

While I didn't like a lot of changes they made to the fluff, the only thing that kept me from jumping onto the new WoD bandwagon was the fact that I can't read the stupid font the new Vampire books use without eye strain.

While i don't like a lot of the changes that 4th Edition D&D is making to both fluff and crunch, I'm still overall enthusiastic about the new edition because I feel the pros strongly outweigh the cons.

 

[Imaro]

As far as the nWoD goes... I think it was a necessary reboot if they ever wanted new people to find any of their lines accessible. It had just become to bloated in backstory and the only one's who understood everything were those who stayed abreast of the snumerous splats for multiple lines. I know I enjoy the nWoD ten time more than the old, especially with their toolbox approach and I'm seeing alot of fluff coming out now that doesn't invalidate but instead offers numerous ways to approach the different games. Changeling the Lost is probably my number one rpg right now and I can't wait until October to start my campaign.

With 4e I really didn't see the changing of the fluff as necessary. It wasn't bloated (except maybe the FR) and was in fact barely touched upon in any depth throughout the history of 3e (now 2e that was the edition of creativity and great fluff). I really think WotC did the mythos of D&D a vast disservice by not exploring it before deciding to destroy it and rebuild. Alot of players started with 3e and missed the likes of Dark Sun and Planescape, two settings I feel could have easily outshined FR and even Eberron. So the canging of the fluff feels like change for changes sake and nothing more to me.

 

[Mercule]

Personally, I always hated the amount of pseudo-setting that was implied by D&D. I picked up D&D to play my own spin of Medieval fantasy. I don't have any issue with people who want a pre-built setting and the Great Wheel, Sigil, Tinker Gnomes, the Underdark, or the Far Realms are fine for their specific settings, but I want none of them anywhere near my game.

By 3e, I think D&D had similar, but not identical, fluff issues. D&D had a mountain of implied setting that was almost impossible for even professional authors to keep straight, but that tended to irk fans if it was contradicted. Not as bad as oWoD that had a smoothering meta-plot explicitly tied through nearly every product in its line. The oWoD meta-plot was filled with wildly conflicting metaphysical "realities" that were often filled with enough cheese to make Uwe Boll blush.

4e removed the odious level of implied fluff, but (IMO) did so without completely invalidating campaigns based on the old way. Really, if you want the Great Wheel, it's pretty easy to say that those planes are the only astral islands with frequent contact to your world and sages have typically representing them as a wheel based on the heavily stratified ideologies of their residents. You might have to putz with demons a bit, but it's otherwise pretty much just that easy.

On the other hand, I can remove the Far Realms and aberrants (both of which I dislike) without worrying that something else is going to break or some heinous hole will be left in source books I pick up.

I really don't think WotC killed as many sacred fluff cows as they just put them on a diet. Which isn't to say none were killed. There were certainly some killed and some born. It all just feels less opressive to me -- which is pretty much what I feel about the nWoD. Both just feel more open to letting me run the game I want to run.

 

[Set]

I was pretty invested into the established World of Darkness setting (much as I am into the 3E D&D game, to the tunes of thousands of dollars worth of stuff and hundreds of books), so I was hoping that the 'new' World of Darkness would just be an improvement on what had come before, a bit of nip and tuck and some tightening of the vision.

Instead it was a new thing entirely. I coulda bought GURPS instead, 'cause it wasn't what I was looking for.

We bought it anyway. We played it. It was not what we had spent so many years enjoying, and so we shelved it, because it was not as fun as what it had replaced. (Perhaps it is now, after a few years worth of supplements, but none of us felt the need to spend a few hundred dollars and a couple of years to be able to do *what we were already doing.*)

The same has now happened to D&D, unfortunately. Perhaps in a few years, with PHB2, PHB3 and PHB4 re-introducing the Druid, etc. we'd be able to recreate the fun we're having with 3.5 *right now,* but I'm not going to stop having fun and wait for the game to 'catch back up to us.'

I used to be the anti-grognard. I dragged my gaming group kicking and screaming out of Greyhawk into the newfangled Forgotten Realms (at the time, just a few articles in Dragon, not even a published setting!). We did Al-Qadim. We did Oriental Adventures. We did Spelljammer. We did Ravenloft. We did Dark Sun. Quite some years later, when the Realms imploded in the Time of Troubles, they graciously invited me back with nary an 'I told you so' and we had some post-Greyhawk Wars fun again. We've pretty much covered the range, and had some fun in just about every setting. (Well, not Ravenloft, so much. We're kind of goal-oriented people, and games where you can't 'win' don't really do much for us. Call of Cthulhu has obviously never been our cuppa.)

Now I just feel old and cranky. The WoD has moved on to a small shadow of it's former coolness (with a few really nice rules fixes, that we'd already been house-ruling for years anyway). D&D finally got rid of my kryptonite, Vancian magic, and pretty much gutted everything I liked about the system in the process, again, making a large inclusive game into a much smaller and more limiting set of specific roles and options. GURPS 4E is way mathier than I care to follow, and the friendly people who try to explain it to me generally make me feel like a caveman trying to figure out quantum super-string theory.

On the other hand, Mutants & Masterminds 2E is a major step up from the already awesome 1E, so perhaps I'm not a total grognard yet. [shakes cane threateningly, "Get offa my lawn, you kids!]. I'm not so far gone as to be knee-jerk reacting against *all* change, just the ones that make it harder for my gaming group to enjoy ourselves.

 

[pawsplay]

I'd say the NWoD changoever was more like the transition from AD&D to D&D 3e. While some people where unhappy with the changes, most people really were looking for a substantial reboot that systematically fixed problems. Some of the fluff changes might be annoying in some campaigns, but for the most part, people's campaigns had died anyway.

If D&D 4e succeeds, it will be like really nothing else we've seen. If it fails, I can point to Champions: The New Millenium as another game that attempted to bring the awesome, simplify the game engine, and re-fluff the campaign that was ultimately rejected by the fans. It had mechanical brokenness, lack of content, and being too different from what brought them to Champions/Hero in the first place all working against it.

But I haven't seen too many game systems simply get overhauled into a very different version and succeed, without splitting the fan base.