Confirm or Deny: D&D4e would be going strong had it not been titled D&D

[Dannyalcatraz]

I don't know about Olympic-level sprinters. I've known state-level sprinters who can do their best once, then need a serious rest before they can do that best time again. (I don't know the physiology of it, just the phenomenon.)

With respect, that doesn't even pass a sniff test. Unless the field is exceedingly small- unlikely at a state level event- there will be multiple heats run for each kind of competition at a track meet, with the exception of the long distance stuff. Sprinters, IOW, will be asked to perform their best several times in a day, unless eliminated. Anyone making it to state competitions will be perfectly capable of multiple peak level performances.

That doesn't mean they're setting personal records every time they run, or even that they're getting close each time. It just means that they're able to perform at their best more than once a day, or even once per hour.

If they can't? Well, they're not qualifying for state track meets.

 

[pemerton]

Unless the field is exceedingly small- unlikely at a state level event- there will be multiple heats run for each kind of competition at a track meet

I don't know about the structure of the competitions - these are people I met as fellow university students, not as fellow athletes! (I'm not an athlete.)

Sprinters, IOW, will be asked to perform their best several times in a day, unless eliminated. Anyone making it to state competitions will be perfectly capable of multiple peak level performances.

That doesn't mean they're setting personal records every time they run, or even that they're getting close each time. It just means that they're able to perform at their best more than once a day, or even once per hour.

Purely as an observer of sporting events on TV, athletes in heats don't seem to run as fast as they run in finals. They're not pushing themselves as hard.

(There's also a tension, isn't there, between "performing at their best" but "not getting close to their personal best".)

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Purely as an observer of sporting events on TV, athletes in heats don't seem to run as fast as they run in finals. They're not pushing themselves as hard.

Depends on the heat. A loaded heat early in the meet may well be as competitive for the front runners as the semis. If 4 of the best runners in the meet are all in the same bracket because they're all from the same region, they may have to go all out if only the top 3 will advance...

(There's also a tension, isn't there, between "performing at their best" but "not getting close to their personal best".)

No, because setting records- even personal ones- requires more than just your personal effort. Environmental conditions have to be right- temperature, humidity, a headwind or even the elevation of the location of the meet can add to your time in such a way that your best efforts on the day may not be close to a personal record. Your physical and mental conditioning and condition (your general health and hydration at the moment the starter's gun fires) can mean you run as fast as you can at that moment...and still come up short of your personal best. You have to account for things like false starts, muscle pulls, equipment failures, etc.

Even the competition figures into things. Rivals push you harder than you realize. I'm no sprinter- I'm a human fireplug. But when I went out for HS Football, I did have to run sprints. My best buddy on the team was in a race with me. He ran a 10.1, I ran a 10 (no, we were not anywhere near the front of the pack.) when we faced each other again, he ran a 10...and I ran a 9.9. I would not let him beat me.

 

[pemerton]

Rivals push you harder than you realize.

Yes, this is true even for ordinary people trying hard.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I used to do boxing and martial arts. I just can't think of a 'move' you could only pull off once a day because you are too exhausted afterwards. Fighters definitely can exhaust tgemselves and diminish their power and fight but that is going to effect everything. Encounter powers make more sense but not by much. It isn't like I have one heavy upper cut, but if I use that up I am okay because I still have a heavy right cross I can use (and both come back after five minutes of rest?). But once per day I can body slam my opponent for some reason.


part of the issue with these is I've seen two different explanations. The second is energy based, like pemerton makes now. I don't think this really holds a lot of water. The other is that it's just a general average of what you can achieve in the course of a fight (basically each fight you roughly get one chance where everything is just so and you can pull off that super cool move). I but that makes more sense but still have issues with it. At the end of the day the problem is it is a very odd resource management arrangement for mundane powers. I get that they make sense to some but I genuinely have a hard time with the notion that I have a finite number of right hooks and tackles in a given day or encounter (and the fact that I experience these decisions in a totally different way from my character and I just mentally can't get around thst is s genuine problem for me).

 

[Wicht]

I don't know about Olympic-level sprinters. I've known state-level sprinters who can do their best once, then need a serious rest before they can do that best time again. (I don't know the physiology of it, just the phenomenon.)

Others have already addressed this suffeciently, so there is no need for me to say "poppycock." (And even so, resting after a race is not the same thing as not being able to race again that day).

The real world just does not work that way. Furthermore, sometimes, frequently, when you are "on" in a particular field, you remain that way for some period of time. The whole concept of a Daily Power, while being elegant mechanically (and there is an elegance to it), is pretty hampering when it comes to options within an RPG. Encounter Powers suffer a similar problem.

Again - I understand the concept mechanically. It works beautifully as a game mechanic. But I don't want it anywhere near my fighters and rogues if I can help it.

What I am saying is that mundane actions have always been rationed, within D&D combat: no more than one attack roll per round.

Sure - there has to be some rationing of actions per round. But that is different from strictly defining what those actions cannot be based on the idea that you already did a thing once, so you can't do it again. Mechanically, again, its a good system - but its not the best system for modeling actual mundane abilities within an RPG in my opinion. It would be like telling the baker: you decorated one cake beautifully already today. Now you can't do another cake - you can only bake cookies. It makes no sense.

This is not the same rationing as magical abilities (until you get to at will, 1x/round cantrips), though. It's never occurred to me before that the "dissociation" concern is a variant of, or related to, the "sameyness" concern (if that is part of what you are saying).

It's clear that the "sameyness" issue is a big deal for many (would-be) D&D players. Hence the move back to asymmetric class builds in Essentials and in 5e. I think there are interesting issues raised by this about the relationship between mechanics and fiction - for instance, what do persuading someone and climbing a wall have in common that one might use the same mechanic (skill/stat check) but casting a spell lacks that thing in common so we use a different mechanic (auto-success at casting, though not necessarily in affecting the target)?

I don't know that its the same issue; or rather if its the issue then it only flows one way. If one were to make the magical abilities operate more mundanely so that when you can do something then you can always do it, that would be a whole 'nother issue and probably not as big an issue. That is, if wizard spells worked like the 3e rogue's skills, or the 3e fighter's attacks, then there is no loss of verisimilitude, because how magic works is entirely fictional. But to make the fighter's abilities perform as if they were wizard abilities via an artifical construct of dailies and encounter exploits takes what is intuitive and makes it non-intuitive, thereby creating discord between the mechanics and the fiction (in some).

There are some readings of hit points where they model skill, talent and knowledge - for instance, the more-or-less Gygaxian treatment, where they reflect accrued combat skill and expertise.

They model being able to go until you can't go no more. What keeps you going is what is debatable and malleable.

I think if you see hit points this way, then daily martial powers - mechanically hard limits where the fiction has to accommodate itself to the mechanics - are perhaps less counterintuitive, though the limit is reached as a result of player choice rather than random rolling.

I don't know that you are right about that; about the idea that thinking about hit points differently makes daily powers more intuitive. They are still modeling two different things. Hit points are the ability to keep doing things. An expended daily power is telling you that you are no longer able to do what you know you should be able to do, even though you still have the ability to keep doing things.

To put it another way, hit points, until they are gone are always a positive. An expended daily power is always a negative. Hit Points are empowering. An expended Daily Power is a literally depowering. Hit points say "yes you can," to the player. An expended daily power says "no you can't"

Now you might say that when hp run out they too become a negative and that is true. But losing all your hit points is also indicative of losing the fight and at that point almost all your options are gone because, well, you lost. Counterwise, a non-expended daily power does you no good because you are not using it. But as soon as you use it, is is gone as an option and becomes depowering. There is really a very different feel between the two mechanics, though both are expendable.

From the point of view of "association"/"dissociation", for me the emphasis in 4e on player choice reinforces the connection between player and character because when the character really wants to pull out all the stops and try hard, the player can do the same thing (by choosing to spend these rationed resources), rather than simply have random dice rolls determine whether or not the character is really trying hard enough to win.

I prefer a hero point system for this sort of thing - allowing the player to do more than normal, instead of telling the player they can't do what they can normally do unless they want to pull out all the stops.

 

[Wicht]

If they can't? Well, they're not qualifying for state track meets.

Relatedly, its worth noting that when we talk about this in the context of RPGs, we are rarely talking about some casual athlete or scholar, but, and especially at higher levels, about some of the people who are among the best in the world at what they do. Even at 1st level, we are assuming a certain amount of training or raw ability which normally allows the PCs to perform above average.

 

[TerraDave]

You seem to imply every small non D&D game is doomed for failure (saying that 4e wouldn't have been as big as it was with having the name) when clearly that isn't true. Look at... well just about ANY D&D esque rpg, 13th age, Dungeon World, Mutants and Masterminds, Castles and Crusades... the list goes on. Most have been going strong (relatively speaking) for years now.

I guess another way of asking the poll is : Would 4e have survived if it was named anything else?

Just came to the thread and...deny the premise. Strongly deny the premise.

Your examples show why. 4E obviously outsold all those. Massively. But thats a fail for D&D and its owner.

So, if WotC had released and called it Encounter Master or something, sales would have been even smaller, and it would have been an even bigger failure.

If a 3rd party had released it...but how could they have? It was still expensive to make. But lets say they released the three core books of Encounter Master. Their immediate audience would have been much smaller, and all the more skeptical. If it was lucky it would have been another C&C or 13th age, etc. But so what? Another obscure fantasy heart breaker.

On top of that, the flaws of the initial release are worth repeating, as people seem to forget them over and over again.

TO START WITH

A VTT that was heavily, heavily hyped and did not work.
Gleemax (never forget).
Terrible, terrible positioning and initial marketing by WotC. This included...
Cancellation of Dungeon, Dragon and...
A very confused and alienating approach to licensing
An overwhelming release schedule that flooded the market with splat...even as
Adventure support was very week.

AND THEN

The game was filled with errors...
Monster Math,
A marginally useful DMG,
a PHB filled with dubious choices and weak builds for a game that was all about balance
HP inflation and over long fights

AND ALSO

The massive wave of errata that over reacted to those errors
The move to the online DDI
Essentials

THATS NOT EVEN CONSIDERING

Yes, all those things, like all sorts of world/cosmology changes, uniform power structure, magic items instead of gnomes in the PHB, ect, that pissed people off.

AND FINALLY

It can be pretty wonky, but overall 3E works fine at the level ranges most people play at.

WITH ALL THAT

I would consider 4E to be a great success.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

At the end of the day the problem is it is a very odd resource management arrangement for mundane powers. I get that they make sense to some but I genuinely have a hard time with the notion that I have a finite number of right hooks and tackles in a given day or encounter (and the fact that I experience these decisions in a totally different way from my character and I just mentally can't get around thst is s genuine problem for me).

What are the alternatives, though? You have old D&D, where you could never reliably do anything special. You could do a Fatigue Point system, which mostly rewards just spamming your one best move over and over. Or you have this AEDU structure, which imposes an artificial limit on how often you can do each move.

At the very least, the AEDU system provides the variety that you would get out of a system that more closely measured the exact circumstances required to set up each move - it emulates the result of a system that would tell you why you can't just spam your best move over and over.

 

[tomBitonti]

If I may throw out an alternate interpretation of the success of 4E:

I'm convinced that one of the goals of 4E was to wean the player base off of the 3E license structure.

Within that goal, 4E was successful, and continues to be a success: The license structure for 5E has a clear separation from the 3E license structure.

You can argue about whether that was a good goal to pursue, but that is a different question.

There were unintended consequences: The player base may have shrunk. Very definitely, Pathfinder became a huge success.

Whether the Pathfinder success is actually a problem for WotC is debatable. Without Pathfinder, a lot of folks who are adopting 5E might have dropped out of the market altogether. Then, was Pathfinder good for WotC, or bad? I can't say. Would 4E have had a greater adoption without Pathfinder? Again, I can't say.

Thx!

TomB