Convincing 4th Edition players to consider 5th Edition

[Pickles JG]

[MENTION=40398]Tequila Sunrise[/MENTION] Yeah just because they no longer bake in that you get +1 per level doesn't suddenly mean that +2 to hit is not a huge bonus.

There is no reason to make weapons have any simple + to hit or damage but to put forward the idea that characters with widely differing levels of gear will remainn perfectly balanced is disingenuous at best

 

[billd91]

What about the complete and utter removal of all racial class and level limits? It's difficult to see an argument that that's only a minor change to the game. Until 2E there were very strict limits on which races could be which class, and then how many levels they could progress in said class as well.

If "all classes are wizards" is a big change, then surely "all races are human" (with the addition that humans can now multiclass freely) is as well?

I would argue those changes were fairly minor from a mechanical standpoint. People were house ruling changes to those long before 3e came around and formally got rid of those. The addition of alternative positive reasons to play humans (bonus feat and skill ranks) enabled those rules to really wither away.

I would agree that it was a major flavor change for a lot of people, but since those flavor issues could easily be dealt with by adding a house rule, I'd still call those changes minor in the grand scheme of things.

 

[billd91]

This is an example of another big change between 2E and 3E: the assumption of PC magic items, building them into the math, and the resultant wealth-by-level guidelines. Nothing like this was considered before 3E.

Nothing so formal, no. But one element behind the WBL guidelines was estimating when the PCs would have magic weapons and of what level of power and what level the PCs would reasonably start encountering monsters that required weapons of that power to defeat. And that was an element of 1e and 2e thinking.

There are elements of 3e that took 1e and 2e to much more formal levels, levels that merited a bit of pruning. Hopefully, 5e will do that. 4e took some steps to simplify them, but I wouldn't exactly say that was pruning them back entirely.

 

[billd91]

Overall, if WotC has to choose an audience, I think they should choose the audience that cares about good game design, rather than the audience that cares about nostalgia or tradition. Appealing to tradition and nostalgia (making a game that "feels like D&D") works in the short term, but it will slowly kill the brand because it leads to a rejection of broad appeal in favor of appeasing an aging and limited group. A game focused on good game design (who cares if it "feels like D&D" if it's fun) would have a much easier time of appealing to young new audiences, which would help it in the long run. The new fans will eventually outnumber the old fans before long, though it will probably take more time than WotC gave 4E.

If you're not throwing at least a bone to tradition and nostalgia, why push a distinct brand at all? Doing so becomes pretty much meaningless.

D&D is just a game to me, albeit one it is strangely fun to argue about on forums, so even if the brand is shelved by Hasbro and only exists in the here do.e future as a movie license it wouldn't matter too much to me. I'd just find a good fun game to play instead. If WotC wants my money, they need to focus on making that fun game, rather than hoping I stick around for a game designed to appeal to a bunch of old guys' sense of nostalgia.

I would argue that you're the worst sort of market to target with any sort of trademark or distinctive intellectual property. So why should they try to point D&D in your direction rather than just come up with a different game entirely? Doing so and then slapping the D&D brand on it just weakens the identity of the brand.

 

[pemerton]

Bottom line we want imaginary world to make sense and be logical so we can believe in it.

Who do you think doesn't want this?

No my concern was directly related to what another poster said about flavor being incidental. He seemed to be arguing two poibts (and I could have misunderstood but this is why i made the statement originally): flavor is essentially meaningless and all that matters is the mechanical challenge the monster brings to the table (i.e. He is a mental debuff rather than a vampire that feeds on brain fluid).

Which poster said this? I've read the whole thread and I don't recall any claim to this effect.

There were posters who said that 3E's "realism" in monster build is essentially illusionistic - but that's not a claim about believability, nor about the importance of flavour.

I want a dragon to be powerful, breath fire, be tough to hurt, etc.

I'll ask again (as no one's replied from upthread) - what do you think the +39 natural armour bonus of a Great Red Wyrm means in the fiction? Clearly that number has been assigned not based on any conception of the fictional toughness of the dragon's hide, but rather to make its AC reach a level that is deemed appropriate for a CR 26 creature.

Go to 4e and suddenly every class is built around the same exact resource management scheme.

This isn't correct. The wizard has a different scheme from other classes, because s/he has a spellbook to manage.

 

[pemerton]

I'm hoping that what it really means is that they're planning on dumping +X items altogether (or severely limiting them to +1 or +2). That seems a bit of a dream, though.

In the article they say that +3 will be the maximum. In a bounded accuracy scheme, this seems fairly significant - for example, for a PC who hits on 9+ on d20 (60% hit rate) it reduces the number needed to hit to 6+ (75% hit rate). That's 25% more hits, so a +25% DPR, more frequently imposed effects (if hits have effects), etc.

 

[billd91]

First, SkyOdin already did a good job of replying to the idea that simplicity and good game are somehow at odds. In fact, they are not. A game can be simplicity itself, with rules that could fit on half of an index card and still be well-designed. In fact, it is generally better to have fewer rules in a better-designed game.

A game can be quite simple, but whether or not fewer rules are better than more depends on the design goals of the game. One Page Bulge has a lot fewer rules than Advanced Squad Leader, but they have very different design goals even though both may incorporate being able to play out the Battle of the Bulge.

Whether any given person enjoys a game or not is subjective, but the quality of the game design can be determined objectively. For example, if you poll a reasonable sample group of people who have played the game, you can get an objective measure of how the game made them happy. Taking such information from playtests and applying it to improve the ratio of happy to unhappy players is pretty much the central process of good game design. The quality of a game designer can be determined rather easily based on how well they carry out the basic processes of game design (though a large part of it is built upon experience and intuition). In truth, game design isn't about making the most popular or most commercially successful game, but about making the largest group of people in your target audience happy.

The fact that so many people hated 3E, for example, indicates that it is a rather poorly designed game. It tried to appeal to many people, but D&D fans have been complaining about its horrible balance and bloated rules since it was first released, and you can pretty much blame the entirety of the current fanbase divide on the split between happy and unhappy 3E fans. 4e was mostly targeted at the unhappy 3E fans (the marketing made this as plain as day), and was very successful among that group, so I'd say it was well designed in that regard. Meanwhile, Pathfinder was aimed exclusively at the happy 3E fans, and was rather successful at that, as well, though Paizo used more marketing than game design to secure that business.

I think I'm meandering here, but I guess the basic point of all of this is that game design is a real, valuable thing, even if it is not everything.

You may be meandering here, but I believe you're also showing a very strange standard of game design quality. 4e is better game design because its target audience (3e haters) like it better than 3e? Isn't that kind of begging the question? 4e is better than 3e because people who came to not like 3e like 4e better? Then wouldn't PF (and by extension 3e if, as you say, PF is really not much about differences in design but in marketing) most likely be better than 4e because people who like 3e like PF better than they like 4e?

Frankly, I think your assumption of being able to objectively assess game design based on an aggregation of subjective opinions is faulty.

 

[Stormonu]

In the article they say that +3 will be the maximum. In a bounded accuracy scheme, this seems fairly significant - for example, for a PC who hits on 9+ on d20 (60% hit rate) it reduces the number needed to hit to 6+ (75% hit rate). That's 25% more hits, so a +25% DPR, more frequently imposed effects (if hits have effects), etc.

Uh, double-check your math. That's a +15% increase (each +1 in +5%).

 

[pemerton]

I guess this would depend on one's definition of "heroic fantasy". IMO, the rules do a fairly good job of creating a game of the type of heroic fantasy found in sword and sorcery tales.

Perhaps you should define exactly what you mean by "heroic fantasy".

Again, please define "heroic" because I'm sorry but I don't get what a "default storyline of heroic conflict" is... the stories I've read are so varied and different I find this kind of artificial when you try to apply some type of default to all heroic fantasy... and in fact I am beginning to suspect that you are moreso speaking to a very narrow band of heroic fantasy when talking about this supposed default.

In some/many/most heroic fantasy dungeon or wilderness journeying, and loot are a big part of the stories.

By "heroic fanatsy" I mean fantasy fiction in which the protagonists are motivated not by mercenary reasons - the desire to kill and loot - but by values - the righting of (perceived) wrongs, honour, justice etc. In the context of D&D, this would be PCs who fight goblins not to rob them, but to proect the world from them.

Here's one example of the conflict between heroic fantasy play and classic D&D play: players who are playing heroic PCs will not ignore wandering monsters, because (presumably) wandering monsters are as dangerous and wicked as placed monsters. This means that, in a heroic fantasy game, wandering monsters will not play the mechanical role they were intended by the game designers to play (as indicated by Gygax in his PHB - he instructs would-be skilled players to avoid wandering monsters because they carry little loot).

But even looking at something more "high fantasy" such as The Hobbit... Bilbo and the Dwarves are pretty much amoral treasure hunters, who explore wilderness and dungeons while slaying and or fleeing from dangerous creatures that are for the most part unrelated to Smaug

<snip>

I mean even Arthur's quest for the Holy Grail can arguably be described as being about loot.

The Hobbit is not about amoral treasure hunters, and I'm a little surprised anyone would read it that way. The dwarves' claim to the treasure is based on ancestral heritage, not "finders keepers", and the book ends up as a morality tale, in which the lust for treasure leads to wrongdoing and suffering.

Read the Grail quest as a story about loot is a little odd also. It's a story about redemption.

REH's "The Tower of the Elephant" is a tale about a protagonist motivated by loot, but even it ends up being a type of morality tale. Classic D&D can't easily produce even this story, because in the end Conan misses out on the treasure - as a D&D character, he would earn no XP for it.

But there are rules for where and how one can gain a magic sword and the stats for dragons... this seems a little specific and more centered on campaign setting creation as opposed to the actual rules. I know for a fact there were published adventures with hermits who had treasure... not sure about an official "dragon tyrant" though.

I've recently re-read Moldvay Basic. There is quite a bit of detail on how to design and stock a dungeon, handle wandering monsters, etc. There is nothing about how you might set up and run a game based on the struggle against a dragon tyrant (or any other sort of tyrant), in which treasure is acquired not by looting it but by being gifted it by mysterious forces (hermits, Elrond, whatever), and the like.

I find that 4e core in turn doesn't support PC's coming into rulership (which many heroic stories support), or the leading of armies, or even the hireing of henchmen.

Henchmen are covered in the DMG2 (companion rules) and Mordenkainen's Magnificant Emporium. There are no rules for it in the PHB.

Rulership and leadership is covered via the Paragon Path and Epic Destiny Rules. You become a leader of armies by taking the Knight Commander paragon path (PHB). You becme a ruler by taking the Eternal Sovereign Epic Destiny (MP2?).

How doesn't the selection of one's race, class, alignment, etc. not embed PC's in circumstances of heroic conflict. Yet again this seems more based in campaign/setting than in the rules.

Page 37 of the 4e PHB tells me this about dwarves:

More so than most other races, dwarves seek guidance and protection from the gods. They look to the divine for strength, hope, and inspiration, or they seek to propitiate cruel or destructive gods. Individual dwarves might be impious or openly heretical, but temples and shrines of some sort are found in almost every dwarven community. Dwarves revere Moradin as their creator, but individual dwarves honor those deities who hold sway over their vocations; warriors pray to Bahamut or Kord, architects to Erathis, and merchants to Avandra—or even to Tiamat, if a dwarf is consumed by the dwarven taste for wealth.

Dwarves never forget their enemies, either individuals who have wronged them or entire races of monsters who have done ill to their kind. Dwarves harbor a fierce hatred for orcs, which often inhabit the same mountainous areas that dwarves favor and which wreak periodic devastation on dwarf communities. Dwarves also despise giants and titans, because the dwarf race once labored as the giants’ slaves. They feel a mixture of pity and disgust toward those corrupted dwarves who still have not freed themselves from the giants’ yoke—azers and galeb duhrs among them.​

Moldvay Basic doesn't give me this sort of information about what it means, in the fiction, to be a dwarf. It tells me that dwarves are stubborn, practical and love hearty meals and strong drink. This is a bit of colour, but it does not locate dwarves in any sort of mythic or heroic conflict.

I just wonder if this is the type of heroic fiction the majority of D&D players were or are interested in recreating.

I don't know how many are, but clearly some are. It's the whole premise of Dragonlance, for example.

 

[pemerton]

Uh, double-check your math. That's a +15% increase (each +1 in +5%).

Actually, you're the one who's in error.

If you hit 60% of the time (on a d20 roll), and get a +3, you will now hit 75% of the time. That is a 25% increase in your hit rate (1/4 of 60% is 15%, and 60+15 = 75%). In other words, when previously you hit 4 times, now you will hit 5 times. Hence a 25% increase in DPR.