But what if I LIKE Anime/Video-game tropes in my D&D?

[The Ubbergeek]

I don't know - for you it' sovercooking or seasoning.

But cuisine is very much subjective, and tastes are personal.

For me... it's quite exotic, not sure if I will like, but I am open to taste it at least.

 

[WayneLigon]

But as far as comics in general, bookstores are not a good measure of that industry.

I dunno, with huge rise in trade paperback sales a lot of people seem to think that the trades are what's keeping the industry afloat right now. See below.

Again, anything to back that up?

OK, I see an apples and oranges situation here, I think. We have this article:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118851157811713921.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Now the U.S. market for anime is worth approximately $4.35 billion, according to the Japan External Trade Organization. Annual manga sales in North America have more than doubled since 2002, totaling $200 million in 2006 according to research firm ICv2.

Then this one:

http://www.cbgxtra.com/Default.aspx?tabid=1857

Comic Buyer's Guide Extra's end of 2007 estimate for top 300 comics and top trades from Diamond combined is $300.31 million (up 9%).

These are where I got the $200 million vs $300 million figure. Now, Diamond carries a good number of manga but not nearly as much as the general book trade does. So... what I'm missing are figures for non-manga trades from the book trade instead of through just Diamond. I'm sure that's a much larger figure than the $50-something million through Diamond.

 

[Scribble]

As another old-timer, let me put it this way.

A good, well-designed game is like cooking a meal. You combine ingredients to get the right "flavor" and wait until it's "done."

One of the adages of cooking is that undercooking can be corrected, overcooking cannot. There is a similar one to use of spices.

Some of the 4Ed changes that have been revealed are analagous to "overseasoning" or "overcooking"- seemingly arbitrary, possibly contrary to a large segment of the installed base, whatever- and could have been drafted as optional rules to be added on instead of being integral to the base game.

But is it really overcooked/seasoned or is it only because you personally prefer less spices?

For example, consider the Tiefling as a core race. I have absolutely no problem with PC Tieflings- I even try to play them on occasion. I DO have a problem with them as a core race replacing a legacy core race AND without the corresponding Aasimar as a core counterbalance.

Too much seasoning, too much cooking.

Again to continue your food thing...

To me the races are ingredients, not how well cooked it is.

Some people like chicken in their chili, some people like beef.

Perhaps tieflings are beef, and they're saving the chicken gnomes for people who like chicken in their chili? (Ebberon players...)

 

[Rallek]

Interestingly, I actually like this part of D&D. I like that I have a lot of time to make my complicated tactical decisions, including counting squares, choosing to trip or disarm or just make an attack. I think most video games make this part unsatisfactory. I never found the Never Winter Nights fight, for example, as exciting as "real" D&D battles.

I too, was disappointed in general with NWN, though to be fair I found that there were a few good multi-player servers that were a lot of fun. As far as taking a bunch of time to make tactical decisions, well, that sounds like SRPG territory to me, so NWN might not be the best choice of media for that.


Secondly I find that if I really want to break out the minis and go all tactical on my table top, well it's time to play some warhammer fantasy battles, or some 40k. Of course, then we're talking inches and templates instead of squares, but close enough, I suppose.


Thirdly, since the last half of our first 3e session, my group has demanded a 30 second limit on decisions during combat. This means that sometimes the mage gets an ally caught in an area of effect, sometimes you don't remember in time that creature x is immune to effect y, and sometimes you charge the enemy lines only to come up a few feet short. To be completely honest, we stopped using minis after 5 or 6 sessions, because we found that it took too long even with the "30 seconds per turn" rule. After years of 2nd ed, and many other RPGs we find it fairly easy to keep the running battle in our heads. On the rare occasion that someone is having trouble visualizing the field, a 30 second sketch of the enemy positions has never failed yet at getting us all on the same page.


We all (my group) play and enjoy video games, but we all like D&D too, and in my experience we like it for all of the things that it can do so much better than a video game. Perhaps we just like to put emphasis on other parts of the game. As always YMMV.

 

[The Little Raven]

To be completely honest, we stopped using minis after 5 or 6 sessions, because we found that it took too long even with the "30 seconds per turn" rule.

The only way this could be possible is that you weren't actually enforcing the "30 second" rule.

 

[Rechan]

This is possibly the worst case of spin I've seen, even on this forum. Not a single statement above is remotely objective.

Well no. I wasn't intending it to be objective; I was making a paraphrased list of complaints that I have seen people make on these and the WotC forums, to explain where the "4e = Videogamey" complaints are coming from.

No one, aside from a few 4e haters, has said that wizards will be just evokers. It has been stated that the most powerful echantment and illusion effects are being reserved for other classes. Utility spells (e.g. phantome steed) have already been mentioned as still being in the game, as have non-evocation spells such as sleep.

No one, eh?

If WOTC doesn't allow wizards to be more than stupid blasters, I foresee a lot of folk giving WOTC stuff a "heave ho" and looking for other companies ot produce more friendly OGL books with arcane stuf. Sigh

Since for my group the point of D&D is to have fun and not having Enchantment and or Necromancy could be a large deterrent to fun....sorry guys no Morgan Le Fey type character for you, sorry Bob you cant play your Inca themed shaman that looks on the undead as a sacred tool that only the holy can use.....but you can be Tim the Sorcerer and blow things up!

Blowing things up in 4E, by default, will have to be so good that other archetypes will not even be considered.

Come on over to No Necromancers, Illusionists and Enchanters?. Or here for that matter:

Wizards as alpha strikers - MMORPG concept, especially similar to Everquest wizards (utility plus blaster, with a handful of other effects)

Or...

Unfortunately, this is definitely not going to change. The Warlock and Warlord are in. The Wizard is basically becoming an Evoker, which means we will need new classes to serve as Transmuters, Conjurers, and Enchanters. They promised the Monk and Bard will return in subsequent books - no doubt these books will include all of the other classes.

Or should I pull up the original thread when the Wizard article came out and start quoting people?

Fighters have powers, most of which would be better described as maneuvers. Anyone who has even skimmed the Book of Nine Swords (touted as a significant preview of 4e) can see that the majority of the powers listed in that book are not supernatural in origin.

Allow me to take a quote from here

As for the lack of options, I think the core classes are like potato chips...they are so good, nobody can have just one. It seems like today's players all want a fighter who can blast and heal and sneak as good as anyone else, and the rules haven't accomodated this yet. 4E sounds like it is getting close, though.

I've seen others make similar statements.

Per encounter abilities in no way equal button smashing. It is an alternate method of resource management that doesn't require a party to rest after a 15 minute work day. It also happens to simulate cinematic action (yes, even non-anime cinematic action) and traditional fantasy (i.e. fantasy not written from a D&D perspective) better than the current system.

I'm aware of this. But it is still an objection raised by people who think the game is Video-gamey.

If it's not the per-encounter abilities, if it's not the Paladin's Smite giving that guy more AC or that guy some healing or preventing that monster from getting Line of Sight on its abilities, if it's not the Fighter's ability to still do str damage even if he misses an attack, what is being complained about that's video-gamey?

Anyone who thinks that monsters in D&D are one trick ponies hasn't been looking at the previews we've been given. Dragons in particular have been shown to have a wide range of abilities and attacks. If giving foes a tighter focus means no more giants with a strange mish-mash of abilities that don't work together, and are either too powerful or so weak as to be meaningless for a CR appropriate encounter, then I am all for it. It's what's called good game design.

Hm.

Boss/Elite/Minion monsters - general MMORPG concept, and a recent one at that

Regardless of them having looked at the previews, I've still seen the statements. Countless times. When the dragon fight came out. When we found out Dragons wouldn't be casting spells. After the Monster podcast.

Would you like me to mosey on over to the WotC forums and pluck some quotes?

 

[IanB]

A lot of the little checks and balances of game balance in 3/3.5 go out the window when you move away from the game mat, too. Dwarves get even better when they're not being strictly held to their 20' speed all the time, AOOs are really finicky, etc., etc. It is one way to play, but I would wager it isn't the way most groups play, and it probably would work much better with a different system.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I'm 23, and apart from the Middle Earth books, I've hardly read any fantasy. I have, however, played nearly every RPG and adventure game produced by Square and Enix, and those are really the fantasy styles I'm most interested in. I don't know that 4th Edition is moving any closer to that, but I'd be pleased if it did, and I'd congratulate Wizards on the quality of their market research. If the game is going to grow, it has to reach out to more people my age and younger, and they could do worse than to incorporate the parts of console and computer RPGs that make them great.

Heck yeah. I don't think that D&D has to loose the Howard/Leiber/Tolkein groove it had going in the '70s, but I do think that it has to grow beyond that, and there's only so many words you can cram in a PHB. If it's going to grow, we're going to have to pick and choose the strongest inputs from a variety of genres, put them all in a pot and stir 'em up.

I am in your boat entirely on this. Fantasy videogames have been far more compelling to me than fantasy novels for most of my life. Though there are some good fantasy books coming out recently: anything by Gaiman, the HP series, Scar Night, The Book of Lost Things, Meville, Pratchett, etc. Fantasy books when I was growing up were mostly full of LotR rip-off FAIL, though. So I found my fantasy in videogames, and through videogames, discovered anime. I think the Moogle is a strong fantasy trope.

But I am skeptical of how much 4e is embracing this. Baby steps, to be sure, but a lot of the things 4e is doing don't tie back into genre specifics as much as it just ties into Occam's Razor a lot of the time.

That said, check the sig. Regardless of how much 4e embraces or doesn't the various videogame/anime archetypes, rest assured, that niche will be filled with awesomeness in Final Fantasy Zero. And it's kind of uncanny that I see a lot of things in 4e that are going to be so readily and easily embraced in FFZ...and I guess that might lend a point or two to the idea that D&D is taking some cues from videogames.

 

[Mallus]

Let me get the dating-myself out of the way: I turned 11 in 1980, in New Jersey, no less. I like to think if the 80's were a place, they would be New Jersey.

I've been a fan of the literature and film of the fantastic since I was a kid. I started with Star Trek and Japanese monster movies, both readily available on the television stations of my youth. I moved on to... wait, no, I added Dune and LotR, old Hugo award-winning stories, Niven, Moorcock, then Delaney and Gibson and the rest, a mix of Scifi Book Club selections and the typical Waldenbooks bait. Then came 1st edition D&D, a kind of literature all its own. Sometime around college I got into comics through the usually latecomer sources; Miller, Moore, Gaiman, and Morrison. Then anime as it got easier to come by. Oh, then there's the more literary literature of the fantastic; Kafka, Borges, Lessing, the magical realists, etc. Sometime during school I picked those up too.

Years after that I discovered the joy of Japanese console RPG's. Which I can't really explain beyond saying some of them really work for me. They bring me a kind of overwrought, over-cute, turn-based joy that I secretly suspect is some form of really clever cultural criticism that I'm not quite getting. Or perhaps they're just nutty junk, either way, they make me happy.

My point, if I have one left, is I don't really understand categorically disliking any specific part of the literature of the fantastic. I'm not so much a fan of any particular part that I'm tempted into orthodoxy. All this stuff occupies one big, messy (incestuous, even), brain-space for me, therefore I welcome anime and video game influence in D&D.

Not that convinced we're actually going to see much of that in 4e...

 

[Xethreau]

For many years, I've always seen spell effects and such with a very anime-like tone. If I'd been able to illustrate the last couple years of my 1E games and the 2E games I ran, you wouldn't have been able to tell it apart from an anime series. Huge lightshow special effects, weird pets, warriors in outsized armor or virtually none, etc. Today, it's even more pronounced.

Cure Light Wounds!

Teleport!

That's how I see a lot of my spells too. BTW, what is the name of that anime? (must watch now!)