7 Years of D&D Stories? And a "Big Reveal" Coming?

When asked what he was working on, WotC's Chris Perkins revealed a couple of juicy tidbits. They're not much, but they're certainly tantalizing. Initially, he said that "Our marketing team has a big reveal in the works", and followed that up separately with "Right now I'm working on the next seven years of D&D stories". What all that might mean is anybody's guess, but it sounds like there are plans for D&D stretching into the foreseeable future! Thanks to Barantor for the scoop!

 

[Tony Vargas]

Sooo... it's the implementation of the detail...

Implementation is a detail.

It's more how the detail comes together with other details.

Take HD vs Surges. Both are daily resources that provide non-magical healing. They're similar. But, how they fit into the system and what including them accomplishes are very different. HD are silo'd away from other forms of healing. Surges were the primary 'fuel' for most forms of healing. HD represent enough healing to heal up from 0 once a day, if you have an hour. Surges let you do so three or four times a day, in 5 minutes. Spells, depending on your party's mix of classes, can represent a great deal more healing than HD do, or none at all. Surges represented most of the party's healing resources, regardless of party composition, though leaders enhanced surge healing and bring some non-surge healing. Surges were useable 1/encounter, in combat. HD are not. Surges allowed parties to operate successfully without a traditional healer or even without a nominal leader-role class. A party depending on HD would be at a profound disadvantage compared to one with more casters able to heal.

Similar mechanics, accomplishing very different things in the broader context of the game. It's not the nature of the mechanic, but what they accomplish (or don't accomplish) that's at the root of preferring one over the other.

 

[BryonD]

Seriously, though, he's not wrong in pointing out the inconsistency in claiming to dislike one system solely for some intolerable mechanical detail,

Yes he is.

I have a friend in Boston. I have another friend in San Fransisco. Last week they both reported seeing the sun directly over the horizon on the water.

It would be wrong to point out inconsistency in one facing east and the other facing west.

This is no more accurate.

even though a similar detail present in another system that you do like, where it's a non-issue.
It's not the detail that's disliked, but the broader context, or what the detail accomplishes in that context that's the issue. Inconsistency explained. Not gone, not never real, just explained.

Shrug. Again, for MOST of his points, even exactly as described, the difference is fundamental and they do not hold water. period.
RAW healing in 5E sucks, IMO. The fine details may vary, but if you want to discuss RAW 5E healing, you will get a pretty consistent position from me for why I don't like it.
I have house ruled it. I have house-ruled it HEAVILY.
I doubt you will find anyone who was outraged by healing in 4E and plays healing RAW 5E healing.
You may find that there are people who were completely unhappy with 4E, but the healing part was minor or nothing whatsoever to them, so they choose to tolerate it in 5E, or never minded at all in the first place.
But none of these people fit Hussar's fiction of people hating on a mechanic in 4E and patting it on the back in 5E.

The inconsistency does not exist.

I'll add that Hussar has challenged me on why I didn't just house-rule 4E. The elements of 4E that were unsatisfactory were numerous and in many cases fundamental to the system. As we agreed in the other thread, 5E is highly open to house rules. Compared to other available games the effort of houseruling 4E and the appeal of end product, would still fail to live up.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Yes he is.

I have a friend in Boston. I have another friend in San Fransisco. Last week they both reported seeing the sun directly over the horizon on the water.

It would be wrong to point out inconsistency in one facing east and the other facing west.

This is no more accurate.

Wow. That is one of the worst analogies I have ever seen.

Seriously, you're trying for an analogy about one person, having different reactions to two things that are on some level similar. You come up with two different people, having the same reaction.

Let's work on it:

Someone is living on the east coast, he calls you up, and says "I love sunrises!" (He's just that kinda guy, for sake of the analogy).

Later he comes and visits you, and in the morning, he looks out blearily at the sun rising and says "I hate sunrises!"

That's inconsistent.

Maybe he likes the sun rising over water but not over hills?
Or maybe he's just jet-lagged and in a bad mood.

Either way, explaining the inconsistency doesn't mean it didn't happen.

 

[pemerton]

We can pick out any number of things or combination of things to find similarities and differences in the various editions. ByronD would call confirmation bias. But this is a good example of what I was saying about the difference in the way that you and I think and communicate; as I see it, you focus on and seemingly require far more specificity about things, while I tend to look for the overall feeling or vibe. Another way to put it is that you seem to emphasize parts while I emphasize wholes.

<snip>

But back to the numbers, they were being used to emphasize a point - that 4E felt like a larger jump (or divergence) from 3E, and from earlier editions, than many were comfortable with. The exact numbers don't matter because they aren't factual or even real - and they depend upon the individual.

<snip>

As I said, the numbers depend upon the individual, so you could say all are right (or wrong, depending on how you want to look at it). But it does seem that there are groups of people that gravitate around certain broad "views of tradition," such as the OSR folks, the d20/3E/Pathfinder folks, and the 4E folks.

<snip>

I am more asking if you can see how for a large number of folks--those that rejected 4E, to whatever degree--it (4e) broke with the tradition of D&D enough that they wanted something more "personally resonant" with the Platonic Idea of D&D.

<snip>

for whatever reason, a lot of folks didn't have the same experience as you.

<snip>

By talking about the "space-between" or the "vibe and feeling," I am merely saying that the experience of a game or edition isn't only about specific rules or combination of rules, it is also about other less tangible elements

<snip>

Maybe for you all of that is wrapped up in specific rules, but time and time again I have seen people emphasize the art or the flavor text or the vibe of the game and how that influences their affinity (or lack thereof) for it. For some people the art doesn't matter, while for others (that are, perhaps, more visually oriented) it is huge.

I don't understand what you are trying to achieve here.

You are telling me about how important feel is - but then, when I give rather detailed explanations of why, to me, 4e felt like a realisation of the best essence of D&D, you respond by saying that unlike you (and othesr? I'm still not sure who you are intending to speak for) I don't focus on "feel" and "vibe" but on minutiae of rules and parts rather than wholes. You accept that the numbers that rank degrees of difference are relative to the individual, but you then you seem to imply that my rankings are less valid because the differences I care about are not the same as the differences you care about. (Art, for instance, while something I enjoy in RPG books, has almost no influence on how I approach the game, except that it might suggest a certain element of encounter or scenario design - the three instances of that I can recall off the top of my head are a huge cavern with a statue of a god and multiple entrances at varying heights above the floor, inspired by a picture in an old White Dwarf; a stairway going down the side of a huge underdark cavern, inspired by a picture in the 4e book Into the Unknown; and an attack by beholders in an underground cavern with a chasm in the middle of it, inspired by a 3E picture that might have been the cover for Dungeonscape.)

My view of D&D is ultimately fiction-first. D&D is a type of story, structure+content. At it's heart is party play - a group of adventurers who, while perhaps having different ultimate goals or desires, are somehow bound together by some trajectory of fate. Those adventurers live in a world that throws challenges at them, and those challenges aren't merely petty or human challenges (of the sort that some Runequest or Traveller play involves, for instance) - they are world-historical or cosmological challenges, or at least proxies for them (that's why we have alignments, outer planes, books about gods, etc, or for less cosmological settings like Greyhawk we have epic histories that determine the current shape of the world).

As the adventurers take on these challenges, and (typically, or at least from time-to-time) best them, they grow. They grow in capability - the fighters become more puissant, the wizards more eldritch. They grow, simultaneously, in social, historical and/or cosmological stature - they become lords, archmages, high priests. They commune directly with higher powers, doing their bidding or opposing them directly. In a cosmological game, they become agents or enemies of the gods. In a world-historical game, they transform the world, bringing history to a new end or perhaps to its ultimate crisis point.

These adventures are ultimately about externalised expressions of personality. The adventurers may have inner lives, and these may come out in play from time-to-time, but D&D (at least before the Inspriation mechanic) does not emphasise this.

I wouldn't expect everyone, perhaps anyone else, to see D&D this way. For me, it is what D&D derives from Tolkien and REH, which - as I play the game - are the two biggest influences on my approach that also appear in Appendix N. (The other influences are the X-Men and martial arts cinema - these also emphasis world-historical or cosmological conflict, with externalised rather than internalised moments of confrontation.) It is also what Moldvay Basic promised me in its Foreword, in which the hero slays the dragon tyrant and frees the land, using a sword bestowed upon him by a mysterious cleric.

Consistent with this view, I have always used D&D as a source of story material more than mechanical material: in my past 25 years of GMing I have run mostly two systems (Rolemaster and 3E) but have used D&D material ranging from 1st and 2nd ed AD&D Greyhawk books, to Oriental Adventures material that straddles both editions, to 3E and d20 modules, some B/X stuff, and a handful of 4e modules. The mechanics in which a module presents itself is secondary to me: I am pretty good at systems and can handle whatever conversion needs to be done without much trouble. When I say that I am "using a module" or "using a setting book" I am talking about story elements: maps, histories, characters, cosmologies, conflicts etc.

In 4e, it happened that the company that publishes all this story material also happened to publish a rules system that was not only suitable for using that story material in an effective way, but was perhaps better suited than nearly any other system out there, given what I was wanting to do with it. It realised what, for me, had in the past been an unfulfilled promise. And it showed me, at least, how this could be done not by scrapping D&D's mechanics and starting over, but by distilling out the essence of what had always been there, plus some stuff that had been added over the years, and then generalising it and making it into a well-tuned, reliable system. Hence I bought what they were selling.

It's obvious that not everyone experienced 4e the same way that I did. I was posting on these boards in the months before 4e came out. It was obvious at that point - just to give one example - that 4e was going to realise and extend the potential inherent in Gygax's metagame systems (hit points, saving throws), and that some existing 3E players weren't going to like those sorts of systems. Hence, they didn't buy what WotC was, for a relatively brief period, selling.

When you ask "if I can see" that some people felt that 4e broke with the D&D tradition, what are you asking? I assume you don't think that I'm ignorant of their existence, given that some of them are posting in this very thread and I've had exchanges with several of them. And given that I've already reposted twice in this thread a post of mine from 4 years ago, from a thread that you started, stating that 4e seems to have turned out to be less popular than WotC had (presumably) hoped.

So I can only assume that you are asking whether or not I can see that they are (from their point of view) right?

As I said upthread, particularly following the moderator caution, that's not a path I'm very keen to go down. I've spent the past 6 years being repeatedly annoyed by people telling me that I hate D&D, that I don't know what a roleplaying game is, that my games must, a priori, be shallow skirmish games because they're being run in 4e, etc. A sensitive critic can do a brilliant job of interpreting a person's experience back to him or her, even if that interpretation ends up revealing something less than flattering about what the person was doing or feeling. But most of the people who have told me those things have not been sensitive critics, and the job they've done has mostly been less than brilliant.

On this sort of forum, I think it's up to those with different views of the tradition to articulate those views and their experiences, and how they fit into a bigger picture of what D&D is about. They don't need me to do it for them.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I doubt you will find anyone who was outraged by healing in 4E and plays healing RAW 5E healing.

I have enough trouble finding anyone who was outraged by healing in 4e, off-line. I won't go looking.

But none of these people fit Hussar's fiction of people hating on a mechanic in 4E and patting it on the back in 5E.

"Fighters cast spells." A favorite edition-war-era h4ter lie, much repeated as a reason to hate 4e. 5e comes along, and fighters - specifically with the Eldritch Knight archetype - /actually/ cast spells. Nobody cares.

Because it's not the detail, it's the context and what's accomplished. Fighters using exploits and wizards using spells in 4e, all under the common AEDU framework, allowed the classes to be better-balanced than ever before (and, obviously, better balanced than they appear to be in 5e). The power-block format also made how each exploit, prayer, & spell worked mechanically, much clearer, reducing the need for ad-hoc rulings to keep the game flowing.

In stark contrast, the EK actually casting spells has none of those effects. Spells have one sort of write-up, totems another, manuevers and ki powers yet others, and so forth. There's not even an appearance of balance among the classes.

In spite of the similarity (fighter casting spells), the differences are clear, and preferences can be formed accordingly.

I'll add that Hussar has challenged me on why I didn't just house-rule 4E. The elements of 4E that were unsatisfactory were numerous and in many cases fundamental to the system.

Does that really matter, though? It's not the many details, but the overall effect that matters. It's easy to break a balanced game.

As we agreed in the other thread, 5E is highly open to house rules.

It is very vocally so, yes, one of the things that mitigates it's mechanical failings. Of course, nothing stops a DM from house-ruling any system, even a more robust one like 4e. Well, nothing except a Cult of RAW like the one that grew up around 3.x, in spite of its explicit 'Rule 0' language, that is. Players are not so entirely powerless as all that.

 

[Imaro]

I don't see how this changes the fact that whether or not this increases verisimilitude, or goes beyond mere metagame/gameplay considerations.

Encounter powers in 4e are regained only through resting for five minutes or more. So they can also be rendered in the fiction as related to stamina and the like, by those who want to. (And the 4e PHB says stuff along these lines.)

Some people, though - as expressed in various posts over the years - think it is weird that my stamina to do Sweeping Blows is all used up, but my stamina to do (say) Passing Attacks is still all there. Hence they find the stamina idea, as an in-fiction explanation, implausible.

My point was that the same sort of concern applies to superiority dice. I can have all my superiority dice used up - so my stamina for combat manoeuvres is gone - but still have an action surge left, be at full hit points, be suffering no exhaustion effects, etc. Just like 4e, someone might see it as very "silo-ed" stamina, perhaps implausibly so.

This is why, in both systems, I'm inclined to see the mechanics as gameplay devices, and to not put very much weight on the stamina idea.

Ok, let's step back and actually look at what I was addressing...

This seems to be one of those "matter of degree" things. Because this well of stamina is not connected to any other aspects of the game that seem to model stamina (eg hp, fatigue rules, STR checks, Athletics skill, etc), it seems to me pretty obviously metagame.

Here you state that the superitority dice are "pretty obviously metagame" because they are not connected to any other aspect of the game that model stamina... I was showing you that your assertion (and stated reason for them being pretty obviously metagame) were flat out wrong... it connects to rests an aspect of the game used to model stamina.

... At which point the choice between a pool of uses, and a pool of one-use-each abilities, looks like a gameplay issue rather than a verisimilitude issue.

And here plain as day is the biggest difference between the two implementations of maneuvers in the systems... one is a set of one-use abilities while the other is a pool of "uses" to fuel maneuvers... One lines up pretty seamlessly with the fiction of drawing on a trained reserve to accomplish special fighting moves... while the other one seems to imply the same fiction but the modelling seems off. You want to call it a game issue fine, whatever but it certainly caused a certain level of dissonance in verisimilitude for my group when we tried to give 4e a chance.

 

[Imaro]

Implementation is a detail.

It's more how the detail comes together with other details.

Take HD vs Surges. Both are daily resources that provide non-magical healing. They're similar. But, how they fit into the system and what including them accomplishes are very different. HD are silo'd away from other forms of healing. Surges were the primary 'fuel' for most forms of healing. HD represent enough healing to heal up from 0 once a day, if you have an hour. Surges let you do so three or four times a day, in 5 minutes. Spells, depending on your party's mix of classes, can represent a great deal more healing than HD do, or none at all. Surges represented most of the party's healing resources, regardless of party composition, though leaders enhanced surge healing and bring some non-surge healing. Surges were useable 1/encounter, in combat. HD are not. Surges allowed parties to operate successfully without a traditional healer or even without a nominal leader-role class. A party depending on HD would be at a profound disadvantage compared to one with more casters able to heal.

Similar mechanics, accomplishing very different things in the broader context of the game. It's not the nature of the mechanic, but what they accomplish (or don't accomplish) that's at the root of preferring one over the other.

All you're doing is showing me how similar mechanics are implemented differently in different games... thus again it's the implementation... as well as the fact that the mechanics (regardless of how slight) are actually different.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Here you state that the superitority dice are "pretty obviously metagame" because they are not connected to any other aspect of the game that model stamina... I was showing you that your assertion (and stated reason for them being pretty obviously metagame) were flat out wrong... it connects to rests an aspect of the game used to model stamina.

The short rest is an aspect of the game that models stamina, yes. And, battlemaster dice are recharged by it. By the same token, of course, encounter and daily exploits also connected back to rests. So, here we have another one of those little inconsistencies that Hussar observed. However, the explanation is not hard to find. Rather than dig deeper into the details and tallying similarities and differences (CS dice are layered on top of normal melee attacks, encounter powers are each unique, there are 18 of maneuvers vs 100s of powers, only being able to use the same trick once in an encounter is DS, etc, etc, etc), look at the bigger picture:

AEDU put all classes on one time-table, with comparable mixes of resources, which helped balance them against eachother, even when pacing was varied, and helped balance party vs encounters, for a given pacing.

CS dice put the Battlemaster on his own, unique, resource-recovery timetable, with it's own, unique, resource mix. That makes each class distinct on both a mechanical level, and in how they play when the pacing of the campaign is varied. Doing that must have some benefit - beyond wrecking class and encounter balance, even if you do find that a benefit, as well, that is - at minimum, it can be seen as giving class differentiation some 'teeth.' And, it does change the 'big picture' of the game's mechanics, making it less orderly, less prone to analysis - and such obfuscation could be said to check the impulse to optimize or metagame, or even to enhance 'immersion' ( tangled mass of strings is less obviously pulling everything than a neat, orderly system of strings).

 

[Imaro]

The short rest is an aspect of the game that models stamina, yes. And, battlemaster dice are recharged by it. By the same token, of course, encounter and daily exploits also connected back to rests. So, here we have another one of those little inconsistencies that Hussar observed. However, the explanation is not hard to find. Rather than dig deeper into the details and tallying similarities and differences (CS dice are layered on top of normal melee attacks, encounter powers are each unique, there are 18 of maneuvers vs 100s of powers, only being able to use the same trick once in an encounter is DS, etc, etc, etc), look at the bigger picture:

They are different mechanics for modelling the special maneuvers of a martial character... there is no inconsistency in liking the Battlemaster mechanics but not liking the 4e fighter powers... or vice versa in your own case.

AEDU put all classes on one time-table, with comparable mixes of resources, which helped balance them against eachother, even when pacing was varied, and helped balance party vs encounters, for a given pacing.

CS dice put the Battlemaster on his own, unique, resource-recovery timetable, with it's own, unique, resource mix. That makes each class distinct on both a mechanical level, and in how they play when the pacing of the campaign is varied. Doing that must have some benefit - beyond wrecking class and encounter balance, even if you do find that a benefit, as well, that is - at minimum, it can be seen as giving class differentiation some 'teeth.' And, it does change the 'big picture' of the game's mechanics, making it less orderly, less prone to analysis - and such obfuscation could be said to check the impulse to optimize or metagame, or even to enhance 'immersion' ( tangled mass of strings is less obviously pulling everything than a neat, orderly system of strings).

What are you talking about here... seriously, I have no clue what the purpose or point of this part of your post is or why you quoted me to post it...

 

[Werebat]

Can we please just all agree that there's one thing we all love -- xxxploiting the system! And no matter what WotC does, there will ALWAYS be XXXploitZ!