Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5455379" data-attributes="member: 54877">The more I read threads like this, the more I appreciate how difficult it is to convey the sensibility of a game system. Or if "sensibility" is a little too vague, then perhaps the "the set of styles meant to be easily supported by the mechanics and accompanying setting materials." As to why, the funny thing to me is that 4E feels more like D&D than any version of D&D, ever. It evokes and supports, quite well, the feel that we tried to get out of Red Box and early AD&D. The things that were annoying to us in those mechanics, that seemed to go against the "feel" of D&D as we were playing it, are mostly gone. Meanwhile, new things are supporting that intended style of play. But when I try to convey specifics of this, I'm reduced to thinking that maybe Mearls was trying to recruit himself--and me. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> (You'll note that this does not mean that I find the 4E implementation perfect. Far from it. Pretty much everything Robin Laws got his fingers on makes me want to scream in frustration, particularly when it comes to finding a way to let players "succeed" even when they totally blow every opportunity. However, like grappling rules in AD&D, I find this easy to ignore in play.) I'll try one specific in the hope of clarity. Consider the D&D trope of a bunch of low-level heroes going into the starter dungeon, killing some monsters, and getting the treasure. Being a trifle unfair for the sake of distinctions: Red Box: As the combat example illustrates, and play supports, you'll likely lose at least one PC during the first fight. Survivers retreating makes a lot of sense, and for this reason you'll learn to avoid fights when possible. If you want to play a gnome, he has hairy feet. 1st ed: Ditto, except now your lost PC can be a wider variety of races and classes. Your poor gnome was a ghoul snack. 2nd ed: Your gnome would've gotten eaten by the ghouls, but since you roleplayed that conversation with the powerful NPC, he bailed you out. Or maybe the gnome fast talked the ghoul king. Eventually, the lich will kill the gnome, but he will get to make a dramatic speech before he dies. 3rd ed: Your gnome was quite successful in his initial forays. That sorcerer with a few early levels of rogue wasn't nearly quite as overpowered as everyone first said, but it worked well enough. And paragon levels rounded him out nicely. We lost a PC early, but it wasn't you, since you had enough sense to stay far away from that orc with the great axe. 3.5 ed: Now you get to play that gnome bard you've been trying to play forever, with more or less the same results as 3rd ed. Or if the previous campaign taught you different lessons, you went wizard for power, and the hell with concept.  4E: You know that goblin fight in the Hobbit, that sounded so chaotic in the text? You can have that fight now, gnome or halfing your choice, and you won't need a ring of invisibility or Gandalf to have a decent shot to survive. Depending on how the group reads the suggestions in the rules, it may or may not be up to you to make sure you are fighting the goblins and not Smaug, who will eat your whole party very rapidly if they stick around. Now see, every edition had an answer to, "How do you deal with those early fights?" And they were all effective answers, in that they work if you approach the game with the corresponding mindset. But if you, for example, wanted a particular feel counter to that answer, you weren't going to get the result you wanted.  We learned pretty rapidly that the Hobbit goblin fight was not going to happen as we wanted. So we adapted to what Basic expected and avoided fights. It didn't feel right, but that's what was necessary to make it work. This is accepting the mechanics for what they are, but nonetheless bucking the intended style at every turn. It can be very fun, but it isn't what you want.  4E lets us accept the mechanics for what they are while also embracing the intended style. Equally fun results with less chafe. <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/laugh.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":lol:" title="Laughing    :lol:" data-shortname=":lol:" /></blockquote>

Verification