darjr
I crit!
I hope so. I’ll be happy being wrong.
D&D 4E Ben Riggs' "What the Heck Happened with 4th Edition?" seminar at Gen Con 2023
Parmandur
Book-Friend
I do not trust WotC to learn any lessons, because it is a legal construct. However, I do trust Perkins and Crawford to learn lessons, and I really think they planned ahead for this.
TerraDave
5ever, or until 2024
Digital compatibility and laying the foundations for online play was also a 3.0 design goal.
The ability to do this was largely lost when Hasbro bought WotC for too much--over valuing Pokemon--and licensed out a lot of the digital rights to make up for it.
In the end all we got were the e-tools.
The ability to do this was largely lost when Hasbro bought WotC for too much--over valuing Pokemon--and licensed out a lot of the digital rights to make up for it.
In the end all we got were the e-tools.
fluffybunbunkittens
Hero
How, exactly, do they resemble the cooldowns? The MMO cooldowns that are ticking down mere seconds until they are ready to go again? Please be detailed.
And of course, the 4e encounter/daily cycle is still the same in 5e, they just renamed them to depend on short/long rest. Is 5e just an MMO? My god, DnD3 had at-wills, how far back does this go?
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Yeah, from a purely aesthetic view, AEDU sort of resembles MMO cooldowns (which, games other than MMOs have cooldowns and did in 2009), but in practice it's just.... the exact same stuff as the rest of the game structure in other editions. 3.5's "You can rage for exactly 7 rounds a day" isn't somehow more "immersive" than something letting you do it again after a minute's rest. If anything, 3.5's power structures were generally more """gamey""".
Also, I've heard that when 3e came out people were calling it a Diablo clone. Turns out people are just really bad at describing why they may like a game.
What always confused me was, while I always felt the "4e is WoW" comparisons were ludicrous (having played both extensively), I did admit that it was likely the easiest edition to code into a computer game. And yet (I believe due to licensing issues), we never actually got such a game.
A friend of mine once postulated the theory that it was the lack of ability to market 4e in such a way as well as the fact that the plans for a VTT were hopelessly premature that made Hasbro so quick to scrap 4e.
Sure, Paizo had taken advantage of the fan base being cracked in half to get a slice of the market share, but it wasn't like 4e couldn't have been salvaged. The foundation was good, even if some of the math needed adjustment. Little things like simple character classes and magic missiles that couldn't miss (ironically, the Essentials magic missile was actually nerfed, as it couldn't benefit from "on hit" bonuses, so it was practically worthless) could easily be added if that was what the player base wanted.
The biggest tragedy with 4e is that nobody cared about the people actually playing the game who liked it. Everyone wanted to woo people who either didn't play TTRPG's or who already had a version of the game they preferred, be it 3.5 clones like Pathfinder, or clones of even older games (OSR)!
Rather than say "hey, people who like this game, what do you want?", they tossed out Essentials as a watered-down version of 4e to try and get people invested in the game who had no real interest in it, and then scrapped it entirely- all in the quest to make TTRPG's profitable.
(What follows is an old gamer's lament, not really relevant to the topic, feel free to skip to the next post).
The sad thing is, maximizing the profits for D&D means losing a lot of the things that made me fall in love with the game. Scores of supplemental books fleshing out campaign worlds and providing deep lore and many options for different kinds of games. Experimenting with ways to improve and adjust the game instead of being beholden to design decisions made when I was an infant.
Sure, maybe the mountain of books didn't make much money. But having access to a historical campaign setting book like A Mighty Fortress or Charlemagne's Paladins, or being able to buy a book full of ways to make a tired old game new and fresh again like Magic of Incarnum or Complete Adventurer, or a deep dive into a little known part of a campaign world like Old Empires or even it's distant past like Netheril: Empire of Magic, was what really excited me as a gamer.
To know that now, supplemental products won't be made unless they are chock full of player options because "nobody buys DM books", only the most bare bones of settings will ever be given, and that nothing innovative will ever arise unless a certain percentage of every possible customer is on board with it, is just sad. The great campaigns and games of the past weren't ever based on "x% market approval" or comparing potential book sales to pork futures.
Obviously, a business is just that, a business, and it exists to make money. That's undeniable. But once upon a time, I'd like to think some of the people in charge actually cared about the hobby. Now it's just "what's the bare minimum we can do to make a profit"?
And sure, maybe I only used a fraction of what was printed in those supplements of yore. But they inspired me, in a way that "new spell X" or "new subclass Y" really doesn't.
A friend of mine once postulated the theory that it was the lack of ability to market 4e in such a way as well as the fact that the plans for a VTT were hopelessly premature that made Hasbro so quick to scrap 4e.
Sure, Paizo had taken advantage of the fan base being cracked in half to get a slice of the market share, but it wasn't like 4e couldn't have been salvaged. The foundation was good, even if some of the math needed adjustment. Little things like simple character classes and magic missiles that couldn't miss (ironically, the Essentials magic missile was actually nerfed, as it couldn't benefit from "on hit" bonuses, so it was practically worthless) could easily be added if that was what the player base wanted.
The biggest tragedy with 4e is that nobody cared about the people actually playing the game who liked it. Everyone wanted to woo people who either didn't play TTRPG's or who already had a version of the game they preferred, be it 3.5 clones like Pathfinder, or clones of even older games (OSR)!
Rather than say "hey, people who like this game, what do you want?", they tossed out Essentials as a watered-down version of 4e to try and get people invested in the game who had no real interest in it, and then scrapped it entirely- all in the quest to make TTRPG's profitable.
(What follows is an old gamer's lament, not really relevant to the topic, feel free to skip to the next post).
The sad thing is, maximizing the profits for D&D means losing a lot of the things that made me fall in love with the game. Scores of supplemental books fleshing out campaign worlds and providing deep lore and many options for different kinds of games. Experimenting with ways to improve and adjust the game instead of being beholden to design decisions made when I was an infant.
Sure, maybe the mountain of books didn't make much money. But having access to a historical campaign setting book like A Mighty Fortress or Charlemagne's Paladins, or being able to buy a book full of ways to make a tired old game new and fresh again like Magic of Incarnum or Complete Adventurer, or a deep dive into a little known part of a campaign world like Old Empires or even it's distant past like Netheril: Empire of Magic, was what really excited me as a gamer.
To know that now, supplemental products won't be made unless they are chock full of player options because "nobody buys DM books", only the most bare bones of settings will ever be given, and that nothing innovative will ever arise unless a certain percentage of every possible customer is on board with it, is just sad. The great campaigns and games of the past weren't ever based on "x% market approval" or comparing potential book sales to pork futures.
Obviously, a business is just that, a business, and it exists to make money. That's undeniable. But once upon a time, I'd like to think some of the people in charge actually cared about the hobby. Now it's just "what's the bare minimum we can do to make a profit"?
And sure, maybe I only used a fraction of what was printed in those supplements of yore. But they inspired me, in a way that "new spell X" or "new subclass Y" really doesn't.
Aldarc
Legend
In most cases, if one wants to make a full-time career as an historian a post-graduate degree is a necessary qualification.
It was not always thus and there are many examples of successful historians without such qualifications but as the American Historical Association comments: “Although some historians are self-employed, most work for academic institutions, corporations, government agencies, law firms, archives, historical societies, museums, parks, historic preservation programs, or other institutions.”
