Civility

[billd91]

It's things like this that cause the problem. Of course WOTC wasn't going to market a roleplaying game as a board game. It isn't a board game, there are rules on diplomacy, non-combat conflict resolution, exploring dungeons, traps, treasure, running a long running campaign, setting up villains as long term enemies, coming up with plots, what kind of terrain and politics to find in the Feywild, and so on and so forth. All things that aren't needed and don't work in a board game, but do in a role playing game. Like D&D.

Both of you have expressed opposing opinions. Neither flaming the other. So what is the problem the other poster caused? I'm not seeing one.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Both of you have expressed opposing opinions. Neither flaming the other. So what is the problem the other poster caused? I'm not seeing one.

To me, it in the equivalent of saying "I like pizza from Pizza Hut" and someone saying "I like pizza from Dominoes Pizza...what insults me the most about Pizza Hut is that they continue to market Pizza Hut as a PIZZA place! I like to think of it as oatmeal. It tastes like oatmeal and looks like oatmeal. It has the physical properties of oatmeal. Don't get me wrong, I love oatmeal. And Pizza Hut makes great oatmeal. I might even have it for breakfast myself sometimes. But if I ask you what your favorite pizza place is and you say Pizza Hut, then you don't have any idea what pizza is, since they don't serve pizza."

It's kind of insulting. It says I don't know what I'm talking about. It's the equivalent of putting a pile of garbage in from of me and telling me it's fillet mignon. It's an attempt to grossly stretch the facts of a situation so badly that we can no longer have valid discussions about it anymore.

I'm fine with "We didn't like it, we found the rules got in the way more often than they helped" or "The combat rules were too complicated and it caused us to be concentrating on them so often that it put the focus too much on combat for my liking" or "a power block makes the ability seem artificial even if the end result is the same as attacking with a weapon in a previous edition, the presentation makes it feel like a different thing" or "I don't like combat to take that long" or any number of other complaints that can be fixed.

All of those are completely valid complaints that I would like to see answered in 5e. But starting with "The problem with 4e is that it's a board game(or video game, or MMO, or not D&D, or not a role playing game)" is not a point that can be discussed.

 

[billd91]

It's kind of insulting. It says I don't know what I'm talking about. It's the equivalent of putting a pile of garbage in from of me and telling me it's fillet mignon. It's an attempt to grossly stretch the facts of a situation so badly that we can no longer have valid discussions about it anymore.

Don't you think that the people expressing the other opinion might feel the same way? When presented with 4e as D&D, should they have said "I know what D&D is, and this isn't it" and been insulted because, for some reason, you tried to make them feel they didn't know what they were talking about?

All of these things are based on different opinions, different tastes, different priorities. You start to make it sound like the real problem is that people are holding substantially different opinions from you and you don't like them expressing that. I'm no fan of 4e. I don't think it feels like D&D. It would make an OK skirmish game like D&D miniatures. It's a better fit as a board game than as D&D. Is it actually a problem that I'm saying that? Or is it a problem for you that I'm saying that?

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

All of these things are based on different opinions, different tastes, different priorities. You start to make it sound like the real problem is that people are holding substantially different opinions from you and you don't like them expressing that. I'm no fan of 4e. I don't think it feels like D&D. It would make an OK skirmish game like D&D miniatures. It's a better fit as a board game than as D&D. Is it actually a problem that I'm saying that? Or is it a problem for you that I'm saying that?

I don't have a problem with different tastes. Different tastes are saying "I don't like pepperoni on my pizza" or "I don't like pizza so greasy". I can handle discussions like that. Each person has their own tastes. But to look at a pizza that had anchovies on it and say "That's not a pizza, pizza's don't have fish on them. It's fish and chips." seems like an effort to spoil the discussion by purposefully renaming things to make them sound worse than they are.

After all, you can't discuss which things people like from various editions of D&D when you write one of them off as not being an edition of D&D. Or worse yet, not even the same category of game when it really has more in common with any edition of D&D than it does with any board game.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Yep, there is a secondary disagreement on vocabulary and semantics. And sometimes when you see someone pushing hard on that, it ain't them coming out of nowhere, but pushback against something more subtle and pervasive. And sometimes not.

I think that was a fairly neutral desciption of what happens.

 

[DonTadow]

To me, it in the equivalent of saying "I like pizza from Pizza Hut" and someone saying "I like pizza from Dominoes Pizza...what insults me the most about Pizza Hut is that they continue to market Pizza Hut as a PIZZA place! I like to think of it as oatmeal. It tastes like oatmeal and looks like oatmeal. It has the physical properties of oatmeal. Don't get me wrong, I love oatmeal. And Pizza Hut makes great oatmeal. I might even have it for breakfast myself sometimes. But if I ask you what your favorite pizza place is and you say Pizza Hut, then you don't have any idea what pizza is, since they don't serve pizza."

It's kind of insulting. It says I don't know what I'm talking about. It's the equivalent of putting a pile of garbage in from of me and telling me it's fillet mignon. It's an attempt to grossly stretch the facts of a situation so badly that we can no longer have valid discussions about it anymore.

I'm fine with "We didn't like it, we found the rules got in the way more often than they helped" or "The combat rules were too complicated and it caused us to be concentrating on them so often that it put the focus too much on combat for my liking" or "a power block makes the ability seem artificial even if the end result is the same as attacking with a weapon in a previous edition, the presentation makes it feel like a different thing" or "I don't like combat to take that long" or any number of other complaints that can be fixed.

All of those are completely valid complaints that I would like to see answered in 5e. But starting with "The problem with 4e is that it's a board game(or video game, or MMO, or not D&D, or not a role playing game)" is not a point that can be discussed.

The war happened, and there are always going to be people who think something, u can't make them not think it. Their idea of a board game is different than yours. I do think that 4e is closer to board game than rpg. Doesnt mean i respect 4e folk any more.

See in my scenerio its like your pizza anallogy, but instead of saying its like being compared to something outside the foodgroup, we say ,it is a lot closer to pie than pizza. Now, in some countries your style of pizza is just called pizza. But to a lot of folks its a little too close to pie.

4e was very decisive. There's no getting around that. And people have strong opinions bout it. So much so that in a mere 4 years they company who created it has decided to dump it and build something else.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

The war happened, and there are always going to be people who think something, u can't make them not think it. Their idea of a board game is different than yours. I do think that 4e is closer to board game than rpg. Doesnt mean i respect 4e folk any more.

To me it's fair to say that the battle system seems more like a board game...but the entire game?

Board games have a set win condition, end after a certain period of time(generally 20 minutes to 6 hours) and declare a winner based on victory conditions. They almost always abstract enough that you don't have a character to represent yourself...but even when you do, I haven't run into a single board game that has a section for roleplaying your character or acting the way your character would act. There are only a couple of board games where there's a dungeon master or someone else playing all of the challenges of the game. Board games come with 1 or 2 boards that you play the game on and the game is always played that way. Almost none of them encourage changing the rules or suggest it's even possible.

I can only think of 1 or 2 board games that even resemble anything close to D&D, and the entire point of the game was to have a board game that played like an RPG(Descent and the D&D board games for example).

Does 4e combat resemble a board game? In the context that it has more strictly defined and clear rules that are written in a board game like fashion? Sure. I'm the first to admit to this. And like it, in that board games are fun to play and often D&D combat wasn't.

But saying "D&D IS a boardgame and it angers me that WOTC marketed it as anything but a board game" is a little bit like saying "That's not a basketball, that's something else...it's black and white, not orange like all basketballs have to me." It's a matter of semantics, but it is also a subtle way of putting down the people who us a black and white basketball by claiming they aren't REAL fans of basketball...or perhaps they just don't know what they are doing. When, if you are being honest with yourself, the color of the ball doesn't determine what it is.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

I don't mean to be uncivil, but . . . if those who don't play 4e can't see how it works as a roleplaying game rather than a tactical board or skirmish game, how is this discussion about a unity edition meant to progess?

In honesty, I do not think that it can, but I will hope otherwise.

I will expand what I said saying to include that the game has roleplaying elements, but that roleplaying, as semi-pseudo-sorta stated by one of the designers, was not the main point in some regards at least. ('D&D is a game about combat, not about traipsing through the faerie rings to interact with the little people...' gods above and below I hate that line... )

Much of what follows is not addressing your quote, but other posters above:

Heroquest was a boardgame with RPG elements, Warhammer Quest was a boardgame with RPG elements. 4e is, in my opinion, almost evenly a mix of boardgame, tactical combat wargame, and RPG, with the focus on how combat works making it more of a boardgame/tactical combat game.

That is an opinion, an honest one, but only an opinion. While 4e is not to my taste these elements do not make it a bad game - simply one that I do not like.

It is entirely possible that Essentials, while using the same rules, brought the focus back towards RPG.

It is also possible that the focus was primarily caused by the PoV of one of the writers that pushed his direction more vocally than others. That the focus on the boardgame/tactical elements was more narrative than rules.

Either way, it was enough to make me give up on 4e as an RPG.

And there seem to be enough 4e players and enthusiasts that acknowledge that it plays, in some ways at least, like a boardgame that I am unlikely to be swayed in that opinion.

The Auld Grump

 

[DonTadow]

To me it's fair to say that the battle system seems more like a board game...but the entire game?

Board games have a set win condition, end after a certain period of time(generally 20 minutes to 6 hours) and declare a winner based on victory conditions. They almost always abstract enough that you don't have a character to represent yourself...but even when you do, I haven't run into a single board game that has a section for roleplaying your character or acting the way your character would act. There are only a couple of board games where there's a dungeon master or someone else playing all of the challenges of the game. Board games come with 1 or 2 boards that you play the game on and the game is always played that way. Almost none of them encourage changing the rules or suggest it's even possible.

I can only think of 1 or 2 board games that even resemble anything close to D&D, and the entire point of the game was to have a board game that played like an RPG(Descent and the D&D board games for example).

Does 4e combat resemble a board game? In the context that it has more strictly defined and clear rules that are written in a board game like fashion? Sure. I'm the first to admit to this. And like it, in that board games are fun to play and often D&D combat wasn't.

But saying "D&D IS a boardgame and it angers me that WOTC marketed it as anything but a board game" is a little bit like saying "That's not a basketball, that's something else...it's black and white, not orange like all basketballs have to me." It's a matter of semantics, but it is also a subtle way of putting down the people who us a black and white basketball by claiming they aren't REAL fans of basketball...or perhaps they just don't know what they are doing. When, if you are being honest with yourself, the color of the ball doesn't determine what it is.

And I could sit here and tell you everyway it is, and even your examples I have board games in my 300 game collection that mimic similar situations. There are tons of boardgame/rpg hybrids, and 4e , for us, feel like that. And that's okay. It's an opinion. One that not just one yahoo with crazy hasbro conspiracies is spitting. But one that a lot of us has.

Now, if you want my further analysis, I'd go ahead and say that 4e was a little closer to 1e for me in terms of design and combat being the most pertinent thing in the game. 1e was very close to a board game (after all it was started as an addon for strategy games) as there weren't a ton of rpg rules or outside of dungeon rules in the early rules. Of addons revised that. 2e has more of Arneson's influence and had more of the rules that we familiar with 2e dnd and 3e dnd.

I'm really not sure if Gygax and Arenson had a unified idea on DnD. I recommend reading the new book by Shannon Applecline.

 

[hemera]

To be honest, all the edition warring drove me away from the board which I had been a part of since Eric was doling out the 3rd edition tidbits. I'd really like to see a return to the calm civil discussions of old. Think of Eric's Grandma! ^.^ But really, what does it matter if your favorite edition is pre 1st, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, PF, any other d20, or 4th? It isn't like wotc is going to pull a fahrenheit 451 on you to get you to upgrade. So let's all take a breath, step back a sec and before we post anything in anger just try to understand where the other person is coming from first. And now I retreat back to my lurking.