A reason why 4E is not as popular as it could have been

[shadzar]

This seems to be contradictory, or close to it - you say it is railroading to have a story in advance, but that it is a flaw of 4e to not permit a story in advance.

Do you know what time it is? I got to read all that now?

Not to have a story to tell in advance, but telling the story in advance in railroading.

Rather the DM should have a story in mind, but only presents parts of it that are planned. The story is then told by the players through tier actions...

We are still on settings right?

based in the default 4e world

What is that though? The link provided to the PoL info request thread has that default world just set as I have been saying before that thread was created...there is no default world/setting, you have to create it fromt he ground up.

It's a secret, twilight place cut off from the mortal world by a thin and permeable border, where eladrin live in regions of great natural beauty. What more do you need to build a PC than that?

Now admittedly if you'd never read a fairy story or Tolkein or watched a fantasy movie or listened to Wagner's Ring Cycle than you might need more than the above to help you along. But how many players of D&D fit this description? (None that I've ever met.)

So it has vampires that sparkle in it! See that is more info than I had received elsewhere. The Feywild is excised form the game as vampire do NOT sparkle!

What I need is why int he heck creatures from the Feywild, being cut off from the mortal world, are here IN THE MORTAL WORLD?

So is it cut off or not with its permeable border? Make up your mind. Don't flake out decide what it is and then discus it.

To make an Eladrin character, I want to be inspired by something to play it other than it is a version of Nightcrawler that sparkles. (PS: Nightcrawler doesnt sparkle either!)

Eladrin are high-elves that mated with Nightcrawler and then moved into a pocket dimension....still not really inspired to play one.

What I do need, in advance, is what the OP called "atmosphere and vibe". And the 4e books give me this.

To enough it seems it does NOT provide that, ergo "not as popular as it could have been".

When I prep I have a world history and myth,

These are part of the default setting with previous versions set in medieval era. 4th is missing most of the world, and has no real history. Again see the thread linked about PoL being added to and still the default setting is being designed 2 or more years after the game has been released.

Myth? How do the other races view each other in 4th? What stories of the other races are there to offer?

Legolas and Gimli had a reaction through race to each other. 4th edition races are all sleeping together in one tent.

Heavy alteration of alignment could play a BIG part in this lack of myth and world history because nothing was developed to talk about these races interaction, and some of the newer ones are not present in Tolkien et all to derive from.

Well if you do derive from many, then dragonborn are abominations and bad and should be killed, not adventurer with, likewise the demon teiflings should be hunted down and killed.

Does it work for a game? Yes. Was that the intended response from those races? No.

I don't really know what this means, but if you're saying that there is no backstory in my game

Think I am on the Neverending Story analogy here, so it isnt about backstory, but rather the party is always surrounded by The Nothing, until they decide to go in a direction and things in that direction are then created.

If, after reading the 4e PHB, and learning about the fall of Nerath, the rise of Vecna and the Raven Queen, the migratin of the eladrin from the Feywild to the world, etc, etc, you can't think of any richer premise for a game than "kill some randomly generated monsters and take their stuff" then I'm not sure what you're doing playing FRPGs!

Quite possibly the fact that the Raven Queen, Eladrin, Nerath and return of Vecna are things I am not interested in. Such as some not finding the death of Mystra, Elminster, the rest of the Chosen of Mystra, etc dying off as being not interesting.

Just because it is a fantasy story, and I like fantasy, does not mean I will like the fantasy story presented.

Thank you for letting me know that my game doesn't work, and is just a series of random encounters strung together!

You are welcome. Please also note that you designed your world before play started, you said so yourself somewhere, and your JIT was only altering the story, not the entire setting or creating the setting as you had already done so save for the open bits you left for later to JIT with.

Had you not done any of that pre-game prep work, how would your game differ?

Luckily I don't get angry at my players, and I don't set out to screw them over. I set out my own views on the sorts of features of a game that can lead to GM-player conflict in the recent alignment thread that I started, so won't retread that ground now.

Again we are looking at FOR YOU, things such as the alignment thread. that is good that your method works FOR YOU, but as this thread deals with the popularity of 4E is not determined BY YOU for all others.

BTW, did you try changing alignment to being component parts rather than the 9 straight ones, if so how or does that work for you?

As you yourself say, altering something presupposes a prior state. Given that here there was no prior state, it follows that no alteration took place. Generalise this across large scale features of the gameworld, and you have "just in time" GMing. And I know it can be done, because I do it. And I'm not the only one.

But I don't give you that, nor to Mallus. I say that it must exist in a state when the world is created and JIT cannot create the world/setting. It can only alter it the existing states.

I am saying Schrodinger's Cat was in the box and alive. JIT is trying to decide if it is still in the box and if it is alive of dead. With JIT when you check the state you alter it, but you KNOW it had a state it was in to begin with. JIT doesn't give you that state, putting the cat in the box or not to be able to check later gave you the state JIT is checking and/or altering.

Jewelry was/is worn. Your wizard has feet so might be wearing footwear. These are how they are set. JIT is just checking the state and/or altering it, not creating something that never before had a state.

 

[shadzar]

This doesn't read to me quite the way it read to you.

It wasn't said in W&M, but I seem to recall a designer put it in one of his blogs. Mearls? Wyatt? I think are the possible names for that "traipsing" quote.

Who did say that and where?

 

[TheAuldGrump]

It wasn't said in W&M, but I seem to recall a designer put it in one of his blogs. Mearls? Wyatt? I think are the possible names for that "traipsing" quote.

Who did say that and where?

Wyatt - I misattributed it, the quote is from R&C, not W&M. (I own neither book, and had to look at a friend's copy to confirm.)

And charging as much for a freakin' advert as was originally charged for the 3e PH? Oy!


The Auld Grump

 

[pemerton]

Not quite as loosely as you pretend

No pretence on my part - I don't own R&C, and you did attribute the passage to W&M.

But what has come to light - inadvertantly on both our parts - is that R&C and W&M are in almost express contradiction: compare

D&D is emphatically not the game of fairy-tale fantasy. D&D is a game about slaying horrible monsters, not a game about traipsing off through fairy rings and interacting with the little people​

with

This is a dangerous, twilight realm of natural beauty . . . Such beauty can be welcoming and cheerful. Much more commonly, though, it is dark, frightening, mysterious or hostile. . . Adventurers of all levels can find appropriate challenges of combat or intrigue there. . . I wanted to convey the terror of the Wild Hunt in every encounter, the hopelessness of getting lost in a faerie mound, the terrible horror that lurks in the original versions of almost every Grimm's fairy tale.​

The passages from W&M expressly contemplate traipsing through fairy rings (well, faerie mounds) and interacting with the little people (well, getting involved in the mysterious, and perhaps frightening, intrigues of the fey).

charging as much for a freakin' advert as was originally charged for the 3e PH? Oy!

Well, this is the main reason why I don't own R&C.

On the other hand, W&M is in my view not an advert but rather a better guide to GMing a points of light game than any other WotC publication. There is a small amount of overlap with the MM lore entries, but not a lot. It's mostly about the intended game purpose of the various game elements found in the core books. If this sort of stuff had actually been in the 4e DMG - so that as well as a discussion of combat-encounter-building from the metagame point of view, it discussed how to build and run the gameworld from the metagame point of view - then I think that the DMG would have been a better book. One of the strengths of the 1st ed AD&D DMG is that Gygax isn't afraid to talk about the metagame purpose of various elements of the gameworld.

 

[Lanefan]

I'm guessing that another difference is this - from reading your posts over the years, I get the impression that a lot of the dynamics for your group are driven by player/PC interaction.

True that, when things are chugging along.

Which raises, I suppose, a corollary question that might even wander vaguely back toward the original topic: how is 4e at handling player/PC interaction vs. earlier editions? Does it matter if the players drive the bus, even if that means grinding the story to a halt? And what happens when-if said interactions get hostile?

In my group there is some of that, but I suspect a heavier burden of driving the action falls on me as GM. This is why I've taken to doing more of the heavy lifting as I go along - because even if I'd preplanned it all I'd need to tweak it to introduce dynamics into the game as we're all sitting around the table.

It all just comes down to this: there's x-amount of work that's going to be done at this sort of stuff by any given DM before/during a campaign; and every DM does some %-age of x before the campaign starts and the rest during it.

The ratio is the only variable.

So in my Night's Dark Terror game, the details of the homesteads, the goblins strongholds, the temple on the island, and so on are fairly well known. And the histories of a lot of those PCs are pretty rich as well - Golthar, especially, has a much richer backstory in my game than in the module because of other stuff I've brought in (he is also Paldemar from H2 Thunderspire Labyrinth, for example).

You're bringing extra stuff in where I'm trying to cut it out!

Lan-"with perfect character balance, any PC-vs-PC combat should always reach a stalemate, right?"-efan

 

[pemerton]

Not to have a story to tell in advance, but telling the story in advance in railroading.

Rather the DM should have a story in mind, but only presents parts of it that are planned. The story is then told by the players through tier actions...

Well, you've lost me here. What is the GM presenting - beginnings? or endings? Beginnings don't need much of a world, as per the example in my previous post: tell the players to look at the PHB and build something out of that. As for endings, they don't come from the GM deciding in advance. They come from playing the game. And the necessary setting for framing and resolving a situation can also be provided by the GM in the course of playing the game.

The link provided to the PoL info request thread has that default world just set as I have been saying before that thread was created...there is no default world/setting, you have to create it fromt he ground up.

Other than the empires, the pantheon, the races, the planes, and some of the personalities who appear in the names and flavour texts of powers. And if you care to use it, there's even a town and map in the DMG (I don't use the Nentir Vale myself, but others do).

I don't call that "having to create from the ground up".

So is it cut off or not with its permeable border? Make up your mind.

Huh? Permeable means permeable.

Here is a passage from p 110 of Robert Ferguson, The Hammer and the Cross: A new history of the Vikings (Penguin, 2010):

[Snorri] tells us of a Swedish king names Svegdir who crossed the Baltic on a sort of pilgrimage in search of ... the home of the gods and Odin. . . Tjodolf of Hvin described in verse the result of his search. Very drunk and on his way to bed one evening, he saw a dwarf sitting under a large stone. The dwarf lured him inside with a promise that he would meet Odin. Svegdir accepted and was never seen again.​

Here we have a real-world story about a person being tricked by a fey creature into entering a faerie mound and crossing the permeable boundary between the mortal world and the Feywild. Most D&D players probably don't know the story of Svegdir - I certainly didn't until I read the book I've quoted from - but I'd be surprised if they don't know some sort of story like this, even if it's only Rumpelstiltskin.

To make an Eladrin character, I want to be inspired by something to play it other than it is a version of Nightcrawler that sparkles.

<snip>

Quite possibly the fact that the Raven Queen, Eladrin, Nerath and return of Vecna are things I am not interested in. Such as some not finding the death of Mystra, Elminster, the rest of the Chosen of Mystra, etc dying off as being not interesting.

I wasn't in any doubt that you don't like the default 4e setting. But it doesn't follow from your dislike (i) that there is not enough there to seed a game, nor (ii) that the game is therefore just about killing things and taking their stuff. Which are the claims you made.

Just because it is a fantasy story, and I like fantasy, does not mean I will like the fantasy story presented.

Please also note that you designed your world before play started, you said so yourself somewhere, and your JIT was only altering the story, not the entire setting or creating the setting as you had already done so save for the open bits you left for later to JIT with.

Before play I had a myth and history provided by the 4e PHB, DMG, MM and W&M (which you yourself deny establish a setting).

Over the course of play I have built a world, some of it through prep but big chunks of it through play.

Had you not done any of that pre-game prep work, how would your game differ?

Well, I wouldn't have had as many maps. Some of my NPCs would have been less developed. The backstory would probably be even more byzantine.

I don't know what your approach to GMing is. But I know that I can run a session for my players with nothing but a map, some inhabitants and a few ideas linking that situation to the myth and history of the gameworld. (The most recent sessions didn't even have a complete map.) The details are worked out in play. This is, in my view, what 4e is designed to support.

To put it another way: after 2 years of running this particular campaign, my campaign notes (not scenario notes) consist of 3 documents: a one page document fleshing out some myth details, a 2 page document fleshing out the more recent backstory for the campaign, that I've been adding to as I go along (so that's about 2000 words total), plus a timeline of events which is mostly notes of what the PCs have done but also some notes about what NPCs are doing at the same time - this is a bit over 1000 words.

This is what I need to create situations and run my game. Obviously as the game progresses those notes will get longer. But I don't think that 3000 words over 2 years of play shows that I'm really a closet world builder!

But I don't give you that, nor to Mallus. I say that it must exist in a state when the world is created and JIT cannot create the world/setting. It can only alter it the existing states.

Earlier in this post I've quoted you talking about "gaps", but now you seem to be denying that there are gaps.

The problem with your quantum mechanical analogy is that a fiction doesn't have to have a state until the author chooses. What sort of timber was used for the panelling of Sherlock Holmes' apartment in Baker Street? We don't know, because (at least as far as I've read through the stories, which admittedly isn't all of them) Conan Doyle doesn't tell us! And we can't infer it from anything else.

From the fact that the wizard PC in my game rides a horse with stirrups, and walks through swamps, dungeons and the like, I think we can safely infer that he has footwear. But what sort? We don't know.

JIT is just checking the state and/or altering it, not creating something that never before had a state.

If I'm making something up, I don't check it. I don't alter it. I create it. [Of course, I]from the point of view of the fictional inhabitants in the gameworld[/I], there is an answer. But given that, ex hypothesi, the content of their point of view hasn't been decided yet by the author, this doesn't get us very far.

 

[pemerton]

True how is 4e at handling player/PC interaction vs. earlier editions? Does it matter if the players drive the bus, even if that means grinding the story to a halt? And what happens when-if said interactions get hostile?

Players driving the bus - no worries. Players trying to push in different directions - no worries, and DMG2 even gives advice on how to structure skill challenges where the PCs aren't all on the same team. PCs fighting? It can be done, but the system won't shine at this point, because the combat rules are designed to give good results for multi-member PC parties against monsters with more hit points but fewer active resources. PC vs PC will bypass all this, and probably be quick and deadly.[/QUOTE]

 

[Crazy Jerome]

I'm starting to think that one of the reasons that 4E is not as popular as it could have been is that WotC underestimated the number of people who think that exploration is a necessary prerequisite for roleplaying.

 

[Vyvyan Basterd]

If it stands for casual gamers, then why not call it, I don't know, casual gaming/games instead of "beer & pretzels" games?

I know. I knew better. I even noted that I don't like the term and used it anyway. Moment of weakness

This is a MASSIVE undercharacterization of Clark's emotional and time investment.

He worked closely with WotC (then Linnae Foster and Scott Rouse) on the GSL for months. He had several 4e items in pre production (including a 4e Tome of Horrors and an adventure path). He attempted to take a stab at a version of "old school" 4e.

I don't know if you think you're being fair Vyvyan or if you yourself are being intentionally obtuse.

Sorry. You're right, I'm not being fair. I too looked forward to his involvement with 4E and it is a shame he and WotC could not work things out.

Edit: My only excuse is the oddity of being attacked for a premise of "4E is less popular because there are other good D&D choices out there." A simple observation of "now" vs. "then" and I get dogpiled by h4ters who think I'm defending 4E. What part of "I understand why someone might not like 4E" could be any clearer that I wasn't here to defend my edition of choice?

 

[Vyvyan Basterd]

I'm starting to think that one of the reasons that 4E is not as popular as it could have been is that WotC underestimated the number of people who think that exploration is a necessary prerequisite for roleplaying.

I'm not sure what you mean. I'm currently running a World of Greyhawk exploration campaign using 4E.