Are people still mad about . . .

[avin]

I'm not "maaaaaad" about anything, but there are some changes that I dont like:

- World of Darkness newest fluff
- 3E inserting wings on the Golden Dragon
- 4E killing yugoloths and fluff in general

 

[tmatk]

Not mad, but I can't help but wonder what 'could have been' had the gametable been a reality.

 

[Perram]

Things I'm still mad about:

1) 4e's GSL mess. Yes, I would have prefered that they would have kept the OGL going, but even so, the wreck with the release of the GSL and its delays hurt more than just NOT having an OGL would have.

2) The PDFs. Their logic regarding the PDFs of their products was completely flawed, and hasn't done anything to stop piracy of their books. (And yes, I HATE piracy.)

3) DDI and its game table. Dead horse? Maybe. I don't believe we will EVER see it released, and string us subscribers along for as long as they did before admitting it? Horrible. Yes, EVENTUALLY DDI took a form that is now worth their subscription, but I consider their approach to this whole product as false advertising.

4) My loss of trust for WotC. After the rediculous amount of double speak, broken promises, and out and out fabrications... I no longer trust anything that WotC says until I see it in action and in my hands. I think things are getting better now, but I've been burned too many times to let my guard down yet.

5) They would have had another loyal 4e customer if they could have just handled their own launch better. Instead they gave me enough reasons to look elsewhere. I'm still mad that I'm NOT a loyal customer of 'D&D' any longer. I miss being a 'Dungeon Master' and not a game master.

7) The Realms. I just can not understand why they felt the need to invalidate everything they published for the realms up until 4e.

6) OUTLAW PRESS. I'm not a T&T player, but I'm still mad that that much blatant theft could go on. Someone needs to get this guy in court.

 

[Raven Crowking]

I have a one dollar american bill that I found on the grungy floor of a strip club saturday night...

Hey! That could be mine. Does it have George Washington on it?

 

[Raven Crowking]

6) OUTLAW PRESS. I'm not a T&T player, but I'm still mad that that much blatant theft could go on. Someone needs to get this guy in court.

I had been unaware of that. That's.....pretty awful.


RC

 

[Mournblade94]

I remain disinterested in doing business with Hasbro, but since Paizo meets my needs these days, I'm not actively 'mad' about anything.

If anything, things turned out pretty well. Because 4E occupies the young gamers/casual gamers/MMRPG influenced gamer niche so fully, Paizo is incentivized to keep a more traditional, old school approach. So now we have two systems, and one of them works fine for me.

Ken

I agree with this. I really stopped caring about 4e or what WOTC did after Pathfinder was released. I think the edition wars settled down once Pathfinder was released. The edition wars never bothered me. At least in Game stores for me it was more of a civil debate. It is only online that I encountered the vitriol. Maybe because online people just talk to words written on a screen instead of actual people.

IN any case I agree. There is 4e for the New MMORPG style, and Pathfinder for the more traditional. All is pretty settled in the game stores now.

 

[ferratus]

Trying to do that using 4e is problematic at best. Pacing is different, the mindset is different. You could use an old map, perhaps, but the adventures need radical changes to be compatible.

Actually, I'm finding that 2e adventures that I like are easier to convert to 4e than they were to convert to 3e. The biggest problem with 4e vs. older adventures is the smaller rooms. If you break formation in 4e, it can be a bad scene.

But there were more group combats in 2e than 3e. Monstrous humanoids are generally found in groups for example, and monsters worked together more. In 3e you generally had a party fighting numbers of monsters smaller than your party size, while prior to 2e you had moments of having more or less monsters.

I actually prefer converted adventures converted from pre-D20 to the actual 4e adventures (for the most part). The reason being that I think 4e doesn't seem to appreciate the value of the short resolution encounter. Sometimes coming across a solitary monster, or a weaker encounter is good to move the plot along, or allow you to have the experience of exploring a larger dungeon (over 10 rooms) without having to run back to base all the time.

Now if I was going to convert a 3e adventure, there would be too many speedbumps. But older adventures which didn't worry so much about making sure an encounter was balanced to level or CR (merely logical for the monster personalities and interesting) do very well with the tougher 4e characters. You get some speedbumps to be sure, and some very dangerous encounters involving a high level monster thrown in for spice. However, I've only killed characters with 4e encounters. (They were an Irontooth TPK, hobgoblins and Harpy killed a wizard, tiefling darkblades killed another wizard and there was a TPK in the Well of Demons.

 

[ferratus]

IN any case I agree. There is 4e for the New MMORPG style, and Pathfinder for the more traditional. All is pretty settled in the game stores now.

I wouldn't call Pathfinder traditional myself. In many ways it is even more gonzo than 4e is. The mechanics of Pathfinder are more like 3e I suppose, but the flavour text of the classes and races is pretty much as over the top as 4e's flavour text.

I'd prefer a game with 4e's mechanics and the modesty of flavour text of earlier editions. We sort of drifted away from pulp fantasy dungeon crawling and low magic worlds over the decades to high arcana, exotic fantasy and superheroic panache. Planescape and Spelljammer were the harbingers, 3e tried to take us back to the dungeon but gave up a couple years into its run, and 4e and Pathfinder seem to have made the new flavour the new norm.

 

[Vyvyan Basterd]

Action!
Dominion Rules
Donjon
FUDGE
FATE 2e
Myriad
Shadows
Spirit of the Century (Fate 3e)
The Shadow of Yesterday (Solar System)
vs. Monsters
Wushu Open

I've excluded games with licenses that forbid commercial development. Interestingly, two of the above games predate the OGL.

Thanks for the list. According to The Encyclopedia of Roleplaying Games there are over 1,300 RPGs in existence. That's right around 1% that are open knowing that your list may not be 100% complete on a world-wide basis, multiple games on the list may fall under the same OGL, the encyclopedia may not be 100% complete (it's missing at least one game I know of), etc. So WotC and the other publishers above did do something great, but it's not the norm and shouldn't be expected.

There is really very little compatibility between 4e and any adventure from previous editions. That's the major backward-compatibiliy issue for me.

Actually, I'm finding that 2e adventures that I like are easier to convert to 4e than they were to convert to 3e.

This is my experience too. I've had great success converting 1E adventures to 4E. I think the pacing of 1E modules fits 4E better than it did 3E.

4E occupies the young gamers/casual gamers/MMRPG influenced gamer niche so fully,

Excuse me? I'm definitely not young, both in actual age and "gaming age." I'm not a casual gamer. And I've never played an MMORPG. Are you intentionally trying to start an edition war? Because you're coming off as very dismissive of a game just because you don't like it.

 

[Windjammer]

The biggest problem with 4e vs. older adventures is the smaller rooms.

Quite! It's also a problem with modules published for 4E specifically, e.g. Demonqueen's Enclave where we even know that the cartographer got the dimensions wrong and ended up drawing maps with too confined spaces.

My quick solution to that problem is to pretend that the squares in the original maps (whether 2E or 4E now) don't measure 5 foot but 10 foot.

You're fine with this rescaling as long as you don't break verisimilitude. Sometimes, adjustments are in order; e.g., if a bed occupies a square in the original map one isn't to assume that the bed now stretches 10 feet in length.