Are Essentials more old school or just a clever marketing ploy?

[Scribble]

So essentials hasn't been marketed as stand alone and playable without further books... it's a houserule to play it as the designers intended? That's like saying playing with just the PHB1, MM1 and DMG1 is a houserule... c'mon Scribble...really?

Essentials is marketed as the intro into 4e as a whole- so YES if you play essentials only you're basically house-ruling out aspects of the game. It's a common practice sure- but it's still a house-rule if you decide not to include certain elements of the game.

Whatever the case, essentials still has not "reversed the course" of anything having to do with rituals. It hasn't removed them from 4e it just doesn't include the specifics in this particular group of books- just like it hasn't "reversed the course" on familars or multi-classing. The rules just aren't presented in the beginner books.

I guess they figure those concepts are better suited to the more "advanced" material.

 

[Imaro]

First of all, thanks for getting this thread back on track.

Second of all, thanks for putting into words something I have been struggling to do. I do actually think you are right. Core 4e is this "surface" game. I however was very happy with it, because I always believed it wouldn't matter. Roleplaying and immersion doesn't come from the books, especially not the rules, but from us, the DM's and the players.

What I have been realizing, slowly, is that in fact 4e has made my group more grid-centric, more focused on what the character can do in combat. Its been slowly creeping up on us, and while I had a feeling of je ne sais quoi, I couldn't quite put my finger on what was wrong. It's not that it is a huge problem, my players all seem happy enough with the game, but there is this feeling that we lost some of the magic along the way.

Of course, it might not be 4e that has done this. Maybe its us getting older, maybe it's something else entirely. But I do get a totally different vibe when reading stuff from WotC lately - especially Essentials, but also some of the dragon/dungeon articles who seem much more.. alive(?)

Hey, first let me say I am sorry for my part in taking this thread off track... That back and forth definitely was unnecessary and shouldn't have persisted for so long. So I apoogize to everyone enjoying this thread...

The above, IMO, is a pretty good observation, my players noticed the difference between how 4e felt in play and how our other games felt in play almost from the beginning...and I do think it's not only that grid-centric nature but also it's increased focus on group tactics that had alot to do with this new feeling. The jarring thing was that we had never had this problem before with D&D. Now before I get into the problems I had with the grid/tactical nature of 4e I want to comment on somethig else I had issues with as far as core 4e when first released goes.


I think a really big aspect of the way 4e felt different was in how the original corebooks were constructed, in all honesty they just didn't fire my imagination or inspire me to want to play different characters and run games in the way older editions did... I think this also resulted in me being much less familiar and thus much less comfortable in running 4e as I was never able to power through reading it, and gain a complete understanding of the rules... the weird thing is I'm not having this problem with essentials, even the RC seems more readable and inspiring... though to be honest I think the true test of this for me will be the Monster Vault and whether it inspires me as far as adventure material goes like previous D&D monster books have always done.

That said I think the grid/tactical nature of 4e also caused my group and I to look at the gameplay experience differently. My players slowly transitioned from making characters inspired wholly on what they imagined would be cool (and who were not tactically sound in a group way)... to a point where trying to make characters whose powers and feats were tactically sound and meshed well with the group was more important than the "character" they had imagined in their head. And I guess as much as I didn't care for it I understood this shift as group tactics and survivability really are much more focused on teamwork in 4e (and honestly no one wants to be that guy who caused someone else's character to die.). However this definitely created a game that became more focused, along with my players, on combat, tactics, power selection, etc. to, IMO, the detriment of the other aspects of the game.

For me as a DM... I started creating my "encounters" in the way I saw that WotC's modules and books set them up... as static, tactical pieces, with monsters already situated and a prescribed "start" area for PC's... and where interesting terrain and cool monster powers became more important than the actual reasons and consequences (storywise) of the combat. after awhile this started to feel stiff, non-malleable and unsatisfying for me insofar as what had always enthused me about runing games. That added with my lack of rules mastery with 4e caused me to grow less and less enthused with 4e. Now I know this isnt the fault of the game but it definitely was a paradigm shift that I experienced when trying to play 4e.

 

[Imaro]

Essentials is marketed as the intro into 4e as a whole- so YES if you play essentials only you're basically house-ruling out aspects of the game. It's a common practice sure- but it's still a house-rule if you decide not to include certain elements of the game.

Whatever the case, essentials still has not "reversed the course" of anything having to do with rituals. It hasn't removed them from 4e it just doesn't include the specifics in this particular group of books- just like it hasn't "reversed the course" on familars or multi-classing. The rules just aren't presented in the beginner books.

I guess they figure those concepts are better suited to the more "advanced" material.

Sigh... I never said rituals were removed from 4e... I said they didn't exist in an "essentials" only game. Your comment about an essentials game being a houserule was pointless and irrelevant to my original point so please explain to me why it was even brought up in the context of our conversation?

EDIT: If I didn't know any better it almost feels like trying to switch goalposts instead of just saying... Imaro you're right they don't exist in an "Essentials" game... but no, that couldn't be it.

 

[Truename]

Back to your comments, what in particular within the Essentials corpus--even specific Dragon and Dungeon articles--exemplifies this feeling of "aliveness"?

I've noticed the same thing Jack99 is referring to. The Cavalier preview and Scarecrow article were particularly good.

A cavalier of sacrifice must be ready to give up anything—money, status, power, or life itself—to defend those too weak to shield themselves from evil. Cavaliers of sacrifice are renowned because of the hardships they endure for the good of others. You sleep in a stable while your allies rest in an inn, to save a few coins for the poor. You wear little more than simple, peasant’s garb when not in armor and are an ascetic devoted to your cause, willing to endure any ill or pain to prevent others from suffering it.

A terrible oni witch that lived in a cave of mirrors once caught seven thieves looting her belongings. To teach them a lesson, this oni disemboweled one of them and stuffed a sackcloth effigy with its entrails; she hooked the thief's face onto the effigy's shoulders and animated the thing with dark magic. When the oni turned her creation on its former companions, they fled in terror throughout her cave. But confounded by the mirrors she had set up, they became lost.

In the end, seven gruesome scarecrows writhed beside the cave entrance, pinned to the stone with iron spikes, their dead human faces possessing black buttons where their eyes once had been.

Contrast to articles of just a few months ago--generally walls of powers with the barest sketch of evocative description. They were about mechanics, and we were expected to flesh out the "hooks" with our own descriptions. This month's Beastmaster Ranger article is a typical example of the breed.

A ranger knows that in the wilderness, only the clever survive. To be clever, one must to come to terms with the rules of their stretch of wilderness and the rhythms of its inhabitants both savage and benign. Beastmaster rangers have not only come to terms with the wilderness, they’ve found companions within it—hunting companions both wondrous and steadfast. Stories abound of exotic beast companions. There is the villainous ranger, Dail the Hardfoot, who brought back a catoblepas from the Shadowfell, and the eladrin archer Galival who lassoed and tamed the ki-rin of Tza, even if these stories are often dismissed as myths. Most rangers share their near primal link with ordinary animals that are abundant in the world, both wild and domesticated.

 

[I'm A Banana]

What I have been realizing, slowly, is that in fact 4e has made my group more grid-centric, more focused on what the character can do in combat. Its been slowly creeping up on us, and while I had a feeling of je ne sais quoi, I couldn't quite put my finger on what was wrong. It's not that it is a huge problem, my players all seem happy enough with the game, but there is this feeling that we lost some of the magic along the way.

There's this old idea in a lot of design circles: the interface changes the experience.

Think of how walking through something like the Alhambra is different than walking through, say, a Denver Mega-Church, and you start to appreciate how, while the purpose is largely the same, the experiences, how they achieve their goals, is very distinct.

Or how, to bring some videogames into the phase, Super Mario Brothers is a different design experience than, say, Pong (though the goals of playing a game are similar), or even the difference between SMB and Super Mario Galaxy (the plots of the games are even pretty similar there).

Design is about the underlying experience of the thing. Game design should, IMO, be about the experience of the game. Good D&D game design should, IMO, be about that shared narrative, the thing that D&D does that is unique, the thing that D&D is the most famous for doing.

Part of that is, of course, a simple "new coat of paint," and some fresh guidelines about what you can do within the Powers structure and advice about how to treat sacred cows. It's marketing. But it's not JUST marketing. It's a different play experience.

To me, the narrative experience is at the core of the thing, and why those first 4e products received a very skeptical embrace from me. Essentials I feel much better about. There's still plenty of legacy issues that are in there, but there's far fewer now, and I can't wait for the CB to be updated so I can play some Essentials characters.

 

[Scribble]

Sigh... I never said rituals were removed from 4e... I said they didn't exist in an "essentials" only game. Your comment about an essentials game being a houserule was pointless and irrelevant to my original point so please explain to me why it was even brought up in the context of our conversation?

EDIT: If I didn't know any better it almost feels like trying to switch goalposts instead of just saying... Imaro you're right they don't exist in an "Essentials" game... but no, that couldn't be it.

"Rituals and "everyone can cast magic with just a feat", for me is... definitely nowhere near old school. 1e largely used this as fluff that was left in the DM's hands mechanically... 4e formalized it and threw it open to any class who wanted it with a feat and no real DM control. Essentials goes back in the opposite direction."

This is what I've been commenting on.

Essentials does NOT go in the opposite direction. It even talks about rituals because they are a part of the game.

Essentials Is NOT a separate edition- it's part of 4e as a whole. This is why I said going Essentials only is a house rule- because you're basically doing the same thing as if you said only characters from PHB2.

It's the intro rules to the game of 4e as a whole. Riituals are part of the game as a whole.

Essentials does nothing to change this or reverse direction.

 

[Imaro]

"Rituals and "everyone can cast magic with just a feat", for me is... definitely nowhere near old school. 1e largely used this as fluff that was left in the DM's hands mechanically... 4e formalized it and threw it open to any class who wanted it with a feat and no real DM control. Essentials goes back in the opposite direction."

This is what I've been commenting on.

Essentials does NOT go in the opposite direction. It even talks about rituals because they are a part of the game.

Essentials Is NOT a separate edition- it's part of 4e as a whole. It doesn't change directions.

I never said it was a separate edition... where are you getting this stuff from? The whole premise of this thread is that we discuss the differences between the Essentials books vs. the Core 4e books... Essentials books do not include rituals or a way for characters to learn them. What exactly are you not understanding?

 

[Kralin Thornberry]

Fair enough. Despite your reasonable arguments, I must admit that I still disagree with you. The warpriest, which I would compare to either the Str-cleric or the Runepriest, might be a tad more powerful, but both those classes/builds were somewhat below the powercurve, unless heavily optimized.

As for the mage, yeah, there is a slight boost to what is already considered the strongest controller, I will give you that. I will still argue that to compare his relative overpoweredness to that of previous editions, or saying its heading in that direction, is like comparing apples to oranges. The wizard of old was so broken that he could run around circles with just about anyone - even if naked

Oh, I completely agree 100%. Compared to older edition, it's not nearly as overpowered/broken.

And I would actually compare the runepriest to the earth domain priest, since they do the offensive/defensive with their at-wills and such.

And I'm not sure you can "optimize" a runepriest, since his "buffs" are related to their having rune feats, and most of them are not all that great, and you need them all to get any kind of decent bump.

And for the record, I would play in an Essentials game, but I don't think I'd mix the Essentials and the "non-Essentials" classes.

 

[Jack99]

As an aside, I think it has to do with the fact that 4E is, more than any other edition of D&D, basically a bifurcated game: There is combat, which is grid-centric and basically a tactical war game, and then there is non-combat, which is off the grid, story focused, with less rules for non-combat situations than before. The "problem," such as it is, might be the transition and contrast between the two. I don't think the "solution," however, is to make more non-combat rules, as some seem to think, but to lessen the reliance upon the grid and thus make the transition from non-combat to combat less jarring, and thus the contrast less stark.

Aye, you might have a point there as well. I noticed the contrast quickly, as one of my players commented on it, but blew it off, saying that combat and the rest of the game have always been separated (we have been using a grid of some sort since '89). But looking back, it definitely might have influenced things as well.

Back to your comments, what in particular within the Essentials corpus--even specific Dragon and Dungeon articles--exemplifies this feeling of "aliveness"?

I do not have any of the recent DRA/DUN at hand, as I am behind on remembering to download them, and I never keep the individual articles, but it is my impression that two things have happened.
1) The articles hold more fluff than before.
2) The crunch-fluff is becoming much more evocative. The two examples provided by Truename are good examples of what I think.

I think a really big aspect of the way 4e felt different was in how the original corebooks were constructed, in all honesty they just didn't fire my imagination or inspire me to want to play different characters and run games in the way older editions did... I think this also resulted in me being much less familiar and thus much less comfortable in running 4e as I was never able to power through reading it, and gain a complete understanding of the rules... the weird thing is I'm not having this problem with essentials, even the RC seems more readable and inspiring... though to be honest I think the true test of this for me will be the Monster Vault and whether it inspires me as far as adventure material goes like previous D&D monster books have always done.

I am beginning to feel that I am repeating myself, but this is yet another thing that came sneaking up on me. Maybe I am slow - or something - but at first, it didn't bother me at all. In fact, I thought it was cool that rules books were rules, and then all the inspiration could come from elsewhere. Well guess what. 2 years in 4e, and it has begun to annoy me. Not much, but slightly and definitely.

That said I think the grid/tactical nature of 4e also caused my group and I to look at the gameplay experience differently. My players slowly transitioned from making characters inspired wholly on what they imagined would be cool (and who were not tactically sound in a group way)... to a point where trying to make characters whose powers and feats were tactically sound and meshed well with the group was more important than the "character" they had imagined in their head. And I guess as much as I didn't care for it I understood this shift as group tactics and survivability really are much more focused on teamwork in 4e (and honestly no one wants to be that guy who caused someone else's character to die.). However this definitely created a game that became more focused, along with my players, on combat, tactics, power selection, etc. to, IMO, the detriment of the other aspects of the game.

Yet another thing I have noticed which I hope Essentials will fix. Even if my players aren't particularly great at optimizing, there is definitely a different focus when they make their characters, and gone are the odd characters. It's a pity, really - Says the guy who has ALWAYS been an incorrigible powergamer.

 

[Scribble]

I never said it was a separate edition... where are you getting this stuff from? The whole premise of this thread is that we discuss the differences between the Essentials books vs. the Core 4e books... Essentials books do not include rituals or a way for characters to learn them.

My entire point was based on your comment that essentials reverses the direction on rituals. It doesn't- It just doesn't include the rules for them because they aren't "essential" to learning the game of 4e D&D, just like multi-classing or familiars.

If you were to say that essentials changes the direction on say- any magic items being available for purchase- I would agree with you.

If you were to say Essentials changes the direction of all character in the game having to have At-will, Encounter, and Daily powers- I would agree with you.

Even if you want to say it changes the direction on the amount of flavor in the game- I would agree with you.

But the comment that it changes the direction on rituals is just flat out wrong.

The only way it would be correct would be if Essentials was designed to be the complete game, but it's not.