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

[Tony Vargas]

Certainly we shouldn't be blinded by our dislike of something. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't look for explanations either. I mean I think I am pretty even handed in my treatment of different systems (including 4E).

Looking for explanations is fine. But, when you're looking for an explanation for why you /dislike/ something, you have to be particularly on guard, because human nature is to find any explanation that confirms your existing opinion, no matter how logically invalid, quite compelling.

Running an explanation by someone who doesn't share your bias, for instance, could be helpful. If they, say, find that the standards you're using to judge the thing you dislike are so nebulous as to be easily applied with just as much validity to things you do like, that would be a red flag.

Some just don't appeal to me, and when they don't I find it helpful to try to understand why. Dissociative Mechanics as a concept resonates with me in a lot of cases as an explanation.

Even though they're nonsense. A perfect example of confirmation bias.

This isn't like hating a cook and trying to prove all his meals are too salty, it is about realizing you don't care that much for spicy food and knowing you might want to avoid the chef's meals because he uses plenty of crushed red pepper.

Except capsaicin and salt exist outside the perception of the taster. You can't label a dish salty if it has no salt in it. You can label mechanics dissociative at whim.

But this is a complaint I heard and hear again and again with 4E.

Well, it is the internet. Things get repeated, even things that aren't true - especially things that aren't true, that some people wish were true.

Even when people don't specifically use the term dissociative they describe the experience of that disconnection.

Not so much, no. At first, they were going on about 'fighters casting spells,' then 'realism,' then, as it spread around, they lined up behind 'dissociative.' The target was always the same: class balance, non-casters getting some cool stuff for a change. The rationalization differed over time.

So I think whatever we call it, there is probably something to this as a source of frustration for many people. Perhaps dissociative mechanic is an oversimplification as a description, but I do think it is pointing to a very real thing people experienced frequently with 4E that they felt they didn't with previous editions (or didn't experience to he same degree at least).

There are many very real candidates. Rules that used neatly-defined jargon and common formats to achieve greater clarity and consistency. A common leveling structure that delivered much greater class balance and encounter balance. Classes that weren't in the PH1. Classes with formal source & role supported by the rules. The differences were profound. They were almost uniformly improvements - sometimes vast improvements. Too much all at once? Maybe.

Now all that said, we of course could be totally wrong. We are all just individuals making the best judgment we can. But I don't know, maybe rather than accuse people of all kinds of bad intentions and bad reasoning, just say you disagree with their conlcusions and move on.

Bad reasoning is hard to let slide. Bad intentions are unfortunate, but we can't really judge them with much confidence in a medium like this.

The problem I have with how you've been proceeding in this discussion is you are adding in a moral judgment of people who say they don't like 4E because of dissociativeness that feels wholly unnecessary and provocative.

I know it can seem that way, but, even though we're mostly just avatars on-line, and most of us aren't putting any sort of reputation on the line, it's not my intent to accuse any specific person of any specific character flaws or wrong-doing.

However, when patterns emerge, I'm not going to deny them, either.

The problem I have with how you've been proceeding in this discussion is you are adding in a moral judgment of people who say they don't like 4E because of dissociativeness that feels wholly unnecessary and provocative.

All I've done is demonstrate that the dissociative label can be applied to almost any mechanic, using the same standards and rationalizations as when it's applied to 4e and is therefore invalid. A rationalization rather than a reason.

People make errors in reasoning like that all the time, particularly where strong personal feeling are involved.

By itself, that's not a personal attack, and not meant as one. But, this has been a fast-moving thread, and you and Wicht, in particular, have come at it from a variety of angles, including analogies couched as involving yourselves, personally. I'm sorry if any of my answers to any of that could be construed as personal attacks. That wasn't my intent. I'd prefer to keep it on the level of discussing games and ideas, not individuals or groups of fans. But, sometimes the discussion goes there.

 

[Tony Vargas]

No, I could not easily find myself believing such complaints because that's not the way I think. Likewise, when I hear complaints, I never take the word of a single individual as being absolutely true. I don't think that way nor behave that way.

What does confirmation bias have to do with whether or not you, or a majority of the people around you, like a meal? I have difficulty even thinking that way.

I never said I was not subject to confirmation bias. I am aware enough to guard against it pretty well, in point of fact, which is why that is not how I think, nor am I particularly vulnerable to it.

You go from not even being aware of the concept of confirmation bias, to being so vigilant against it that you've trained yourself to not even think like a human being anymore?

This isn't even about you personally. No need to get so defensive.


Anyway, your own claim of super-human self-possession aside, confirmation bias clearly played a huge role in the edition war. The rallying around criticisms as meaningless as 'dissociated mechanics' is ample evidence of that, by itself, though there are many more examples from both sides of the debate.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

Certainly we shouldn't be blinded by our dislike of something. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't look for explanations either. I mean I think I am pretty even handed in my treatment of different systems (including 4E).

Looking for explanations is fine. But, when you're looking for an explanation for why you /dislike/ something, you have to be particularly on guard, because human nature is to find any explanation that confirms your existing opinion, no matter how logically invalid, quite compelling.

Running an explanation by someone who doesn't share your bias, for instance, could be helpful. If they, say, find that the standards you're using to judge the thing you dislike are so nebulous as to be easily applied with just as much validity to things you do like, that would be a red flag.

Some just don't appeal to me, and when they don't I find it helpful to try to understand why. Dissociative Mechanics as a concept resonates with me in a lot of cases as an explanation.

Even though they're nonsense. A perfect example of confirmation bias.

It's also human nature to reject criticism of things one likes, and this is frequently done by attacking the basis of the criticism, even when it is perfectly legitimate. Especially when it is perfectly legitimate, I should say, when the thing being criticized is indefensible. I thought that the essay on dissociative mechanics captured very well the main reasons why I didn't care for 4E. I'm willing to discuss "the dissociative mechanics in 4E are okay because ..." or even "4E mechanics are not dissociative because ..." though the second is a hard sell. "There is no such thing as dissociative mechanics" is nonsense and not worth my time to debate.

 

[Tony Vargas]

It's also human nature to reject criticism of things one likes, and this is frequently done by attacking the basis of the criticism, even when it is perfectly legitimate.

Of course. That's why discussions like this so often touch on more formal logic, because that's a way of avoiding such things.

Instead of going with how the explanation of 'dissociative mechanics' makes you feel on a read-through when you want to believe it, look at the actual rationales used, the standards by which things were judged 'dissociative.' See if they're valid, if they can be applied elsewhere.

Instead of just rejecting the explanation of 'dissociative mechanics,' because you disagree with the conclusion, or because the writer had been verbally attacking WotC like maniac for the previous year, actually look at how they're presented and defined. Is it really just a rant, or is there an objective definition that can be isolated from it? Is it really driven by bias, or can it be applied disinterestedly with consistently similar results?

 

[Bedrockgames]

All I've done is demonstrate that the dissociative label can be applied to almost any mechanic, using the same standards and rationalizations as when it's applied to 4e and is therefore invalid. A rationalization rather than a reason.
.

No you haven't. You haven't demonstrated anything. You've asserted it, you've listed reasons why you think your assertion is true. A few posters who have agreed with you on all these points about 4E and dissociative mechanics for the past five years we've been having this discussion agreed with you as well while many disagreed with you. You can keep asserting this as much as you want. That doesn't make it so.

 

[innerdude]

Not so much, no. At first, they were going on about 'fighters casting spells,' then 'realism,' then, as it spread around, they lined up behind 'dissociative.' The target was always the same: class balance, non-casters getting some cool stuff for a change. The rationalization differed over time.

I'm sorry, I generally consider myself a fairly rational, cognizant individual. But my response to this statement is an emphatic......well, let's just say it's a much less socially appropriate way of saying "cow dung."

So yeah, an EMPHATIC COW DUNG is my response to this.

I spent more time "outside the head of my character" / engaging with the metagame of 4e than any other RPG before or since. And for the longest time, I could never figure out why. Why was my play experience with 4e, and my mental state during that play experience, so different than when I was playing BECMI or 3e?

"4e is just as much D&D as anything else!", right? That's the claim every 4e proponent from here to Andromeda continues to shout at the top of his or her lungs, right?

So why was my experience so different?

One answer obviously might be, "You were doing it wrong." That may be part of the problem, I am willing to admit.

But you've just stated in the quote above that you place no credence in the idea that the nature of the AEDU design concept, along with its built in decoupling of mechanics and fiction, might, JUST MIGHT generate a kind of play experience and psychological response from players based on the inherent design/character/function of those rules.

I get it, the whole dissociation / "getting pulled out of your character" didn't happen to you with 4e. Well guess what---it happened to me. EVERY....SINGLE.....TIME I played it. It was a very real, tangible, recognizable response to my experience with the game. "Why I am so much less engaged with this than I was with 3e?"

Yet somehow, you think I spent my limited time in 4e worried that my buddy playing a fighter might get to do cool stuff? (I played a rogue, by the way). You think THAT'S the reason I could never embrace 4e? Jealousy? I played a rogue SPECIFICALLY because everyone told me, "Hey guess what, rogues don't suck now!" I've played more half-elf rogues in D&D than any other three character concepts combined. I LIKE playing rogues. So somehow, the fact that I've enjoyed playing what is widely regarded as the most mechanically inferior class from 1e to 3e, and chose to play one again in 4e---because THE BALANCE STUFF IS SUPPOSED TO BE FIXED NOW!!!!!!---and yet STILL didn't have fun playing 4e, means that I just couldn't handle the new class balance?

EMPHATIC COW DUNG. Tony, you're generally a pretty well-reasoned guy, but this comment goes beyond the boundaries of ridicule. It's so ridiculous I can't even fathom the depth of intellectual laziness and dismissiveness required to formulate it and put it into writing.

We get it, you don't grok mechanical dissociation. But you don't get to tell me what's going on in my own head while playing an RPG.

 

[Wicht]

You go from not even being aware of the concept of confirmation bias, to being so vigilant against it that you've trained yourself to not even think like a human being anymore?

Firstly, I never said I was not aware of what confirmation bias is. The concept is hardly novel.
Secondly, if one refuses to believe a thing merely on the evidence of say-so from one source, and, knowing the tendency to want to believe what one already believes, makes a conscience effort to consider the other side, one can guard against it. Being mentally self-disciplined is all that it is; there is nothing inhuman about it.
Thirdly, if one considers the evidence and finds that one's original opinion remains the same, that does not mean that it is merely confirmation bias at work; there is always the possibility, no matter how remote, that one was right to begin with.
Fourthly, we are discussing matters of tastes and opinion - confirmation bias has little to do with it. There is no such thing as a mechanic that is good or bad in and of itself.

This isn't even about you personally. No need to get so defensive.

I'll try not to, thank you.

Anyway, your own claim of super-human self-possession aside, confirmation bias clearly played a huge role in the edition war. The rallying around criticisms as meaningless as 'dissociated mechanics' is ample evidence of that, by itself, though there are many more examples from both sides of the debate.

Someone disagreeing with you is not evidence of confirmation bias. They might just have a different opinion, or different tastes.

And, why are you so eager to make this about some battle over which edition is "better." People can like different games and their opinions don't make one edition better or worse than another. Some might be more popular, but different people like different things. And that's alright.

 

[Remathilis]

Nod, the classes are very different, mechanically. You can also go into specific builds using classes and class combinations. You have a tremendous number of choices in 3e. However, unless you make your choice from a much small sub-set, you could very easily find yourself overshadowed or even non-contributing much of the time.

That's the difference between many choices, and many viable/meaningful choices. That balance, in 3.5's case, the lack thereof.

Nod. More classes, fewer build options, but still a lot of choices that are mechanically differentiated.

The jury's still out on 5e as far as balance is concerned (and it doesn't look good), but it also suffers from another issue that D&D always has struggled with. While you have a lot of mechanical choices, they're tightly coupled to conceptual choices. You have not one but 3 spell-casting schemes for archanists, for instance, and something like 13 sub-classes among those. All together, there's about 30 options for casting. Non-casters, OTOH, there's only 5, and all of them have little to contribute but DPR in combat. You can choose simple resources management or complex, but you can't choose complex resource management unless you play a caster.

And thus you make the logical fallacy of different mechanics equals imbalance, which fails utterly. Yes, there are classes stronger and weaker than others (druid is clearly strong in 3e, monk is very weak) but overall game balance is much better than those who adhere to the Tier system give credit for.

As to 5e, clearly you skipped over Battle Master, which has a very strong resource management system and yet is completely martial. In fact, the Fighter is the best example of the three types: Simple (Champion; few moving parts), Medium (Battlemaster, more moving parts), Complex (Eldritch Knight, many moving parts). This is a far cry better than 4e; where playing a simple/medium fighter required me to buy Heroes of the Fallen Lands 3 years after 4e came out (and already in the twilight of 4e, when WotC was trying to shove smoke back in the bottle around ADEU).

Nope, only the resource management. Spells/exploits/prayers - all presented in a clear 'power' format, as are monster attacks and abilities - class features, role support, and permeating all of that, class & source concept, are all radically different. The PH classes all pay very, very differently. You can't help but notice that if you ever play the game.

From a resource management position (which was what I my post addresses) they are. It seems that all they could do to "balance" the classes was give them all the same amount of encounter, daily, and at-wills. They basically threw up their hands and said "we can balance casters and noncasters, so lets give them both powers and be done."

Profound class imbalance was a hallmark of D&D. That made it a bad game. Balance it, and it's a better game - but it might not be accepted as D&D.

So if classes with different mechanics are inherently imbalanced, and 4e classes are balanced, does that mean all 4e classes are therefore the same?

Thanks for proving my point.

And, we are back again to the original topic: The D&D name-plate worked against 4e, because it wasn't bad in the old familiar ways that D&D had been for over 30 years. It could have been bad in different ways instead of just better, and the result would have been the same.

Well, we reached the same conclusion: D&D's name hurt 4e more than, say, calling it 13th Age would have. We can (and are) debating the "better" but I think we ultimately agree that 4e was D&DINO and would have done much better (in terms of longevity, not necessarily short-term sales) as its own unique brand.

 

[Jester David]

Just a poll I wanted to make. I have a sneaking suspicion that the worst part about Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition was that it was attached to the name. With that name came expectations which led to an early demise. We didn't even get a proper DM3 for epic level play which I'm still salty about.

So hopefully this won't turn into an edition war thread, if it does just close it, but I'd like to see results from the poll.

I'm almost certain this thread is going to descend into an edition war or playstyle skirmish, if it already hasn't.
But I can't stay away from speculation like this. It's my kryptonite. Or chocolate. Chocolate kryptonite?

Would 4e have done better without the D&D name? That's a big question.Well, the D&D name didn't help 4e by generating the edition wars and detractors. There was all the fuss that "it wasn't D&D" or "didn't feel like D&D". Which makes sense as D&D is such a big tent game with lots of ideas and styles.

I didn't like 4e. I don't like 4e. But it wasn't a bad game per se; It had its warts and flaws but nothing egregious. And I played and ran it enough to know it was more robust and flexible than some people gave it credit for. I just didn't like it. It wasn't for me.
I was initially crazy negative about the game at launch, but this owes as much to my disappointment with the product as the product itself, and I wish I could have slapped past-JesterCanuck upside the head for being such a douche. But even after some hands-on with the game showed me some of my initial thoughts were less valid, my dislike never truly went away

But, in some theoretical-hypothetical world where 4e was released under a different name or by another company or in a world where there was no D&D, I don't think it would have done better. The D&D name brought new people to the game that wouldn't have looked otherwise. I for one would not have bought the game under a different name. And I'm not alone: initial sales of 4e were huge. Massive. Better than sales of the Pathfinder Core Rulebook to date. But they didn't last.
And that's the catch... WotC didn't (and doesn't) care if current D&D feels like D&D or if the grognards are happy. The D&D team might (and likely does) but the management only cares about numbers on a spreadsheet, about the bottom line: sales. Had 4e had enough sales, it would have continued.
I'm sure the drop in sales didn't help, but if sales were still strong enough they'd have kept producing material.

In an extra-hypothetical world where 4e was released by a different company without the needlessly high expectations of WotC and under a different name? Well, it's hard to tell for sure given the amount of hypo in that thetical. It's easier to theorize about a world where the Nazis won and we've all been wearing red armbands for 70 years.Other RPG companies do have lower goals in terms of sales and revenue, with many operating as a hobby more than a full-time job.
In this world 4e likely would have lasted longer, had it found an audience. However, a smaller company would not have had the resources for DDI. And they would have released books at a much slower pace, so while the game would have lasted longer the final content released would have been less.

 

[Remathilis]

I will end my side of this debate with the following assertion.

D&D Essentials is what 4th edition SHOULD have been.

The Knight, Slayer, and Thief shows you can balance a class without forcing them into the same ADEU structure as Mages and Warpriests. They allowed the eladrin to exist without redefining the elf as "non-arcane casters", they created casters that felt different from others of the same classes (evokers, transmuters, and necromancers for mage; sun, storm, and death domains for warpriests) and game paid homage to its roots even while introducing new concepts like dragonborn and warlocks.

Essentials, reworked into a PHB/DMG/MM format and sold in 2008 WOULD have been a much larger success with a much longer lifespan than what was sold in the first core books.