Convincing 4th Edition players to consider 5th Edition

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Things I do not need in 5E to become a Happy Ex-4E gamer:

1) Miniature and Grid focused combat
2) At-Will, Encounter, Daily and Utility Powers
3) Feats
4) Defensive Auras and Marking
5) Healing Surges

What I do want is

1. Balance.
   I am okay with modules that screw balance over. I just don't need to use them. But fixing an unbalanced game with a rules module will hardly, if ever work. Balance has to be fairly independent of time factors - that doesn't mean we need encounter powers or at-will, but it would mean something like the Wizard's spellcasting lasts about as long as the Fighter's hit points, and then they'll both decide to go home. In the long term, the Fighter has to be able to stand up to a Wizard that casts meteor strikes, teleports and desintegrates.
   And I do not want the Wizard to not get these abilities towards the end. They just need to be reasaonably balanced with whatever the Fighter can do.
2. Interesting non-spellcasting Combat Options.
   This can come in a rules module as well, I just need to one that looks good. The outlines I've seen so far are not convincing. If the only good one they can come up with is 4E AEDU, I can live with that just fine, but I am also eager for something new.
3. Non-Magical Healing / Inspirational Healing
   This can come in a rules module as well, but it could also be in the core and a rules module would remove/limit it to fit more into the hit points = meat paradigm (and having the core be a bit "vague" on what's going on.)
4. Easy of duration/time tracking.
   I don't like to track the minitua of time unless it's something really plot-relevant, but my players need some consistency to make meaningful decisions. I prefer to determine simple ending conditions, like "lasts until you cast another spell" or "lasts until the next dusk or dawn" or "lasts until you spend a hit die".
5. NPCs that are simple in play.
   NPCs whose mechanical elements I can use without referencing any spell books or similar external rules modules.
   Of course, if you add in rules module that allow/add this feature, that's no issue for me, and it will certainly be cool for some people. But I personally really don't ever want to go back to reading a spell name in a monster description and having to open another book to figure out what the spell does, or have to organize the spell book and spell lists of NPCs. It's okay if the option is there, but not if it's a default assumption.
6. Combat with mechanical/tactical depth.
   What I would like is a "narrative" combat module that doesn't require grids and miniatures but gives some depth to combat interaction. The core rules can remain fairly simple.

If all else fails, I seriously hope that they'll keep the 4E character builder, monster builder and compendium around. Then they'll at least still get my DDI money.

 

[Lanefan]

I think your logic is full of holes too. Audiences change.

No, audiences stay roughly the same. Games change, and in the case of videogames technology changes; the audience is left scrambling to keep up whether it wants to or not - some do, some don't.

Pac-Man, a game controlled by a single joy-stick, used to be the most popular videogame in existence. These day, Call of Duty, whose sales utterly annihilate anything that came before, requires mastery over two joysticks, over a dozen buttons, an RPG-like character customization system, and vastly more complicated strategy and three-dimensional spatial navigation, not to mention it is required to co-ordinate with your fellow players over voice-chat.

Which explains why I gave up on videogames many years ago...

Well, in an /ideal/ world, cynical marketing folks wouldn't take advantage of our nostalgic impulses to fleece us in our 40s. But, yes, in an ideal world envisioned by folks with a fiduciary responsibility to Hasbro stock-holders, and the unenviable task of using TSR's old IP to fulfill that responsibility, all the kids who played D&D in middle school in the 80s would run right out and buy 5e.

Thing is, much of TSR's old IP still stands up pretty well. I'm not quite as cynical as you seem to be about the marketing aspect - and this is coming from someone who doesn't like any WotC edition so far; they're going to have to work to get me to adopt 5e, but so far I'm at least still interested (by this point in 4e's development I'd already given up).

So, the poor kids who don't know any better need to be eased into 'real' D&D?

I think you read what I wrote in about the most negative light possible on this one...your perogative, I suppose; yet I was merely trying to be fair (for once!) to those who have only ever played 4e, and stand up for them.

Re: the 5e changeover:

In yet a third 'ideal world' it wouldn't be happening for another 5 or 6 years.

Now here I agree; my own preference would be to have all prior editions fully supported in their own right*, with perhaps a slower unification as time goes on (the simple act of writing adventures statted for all 4 editions at once would tend to gently introduce players of each edition to the others; ideas would be swiped, people would houserule, and the game might - just might - have slowly started to unify itself).

* - and for some odd reason they seem to be going this route as well, at least to a point, by reprinting - and thus, one must assume, intending to support - 1e and 3.5e. Much as I like that they're reprinting 1e, I think they should have gone one route (a unifying edition) or the other (reprint 'em all), but not do both.

Lanefan

 

[TrippyHippy]

....

 

[TrippyHippy]

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.

That is not an objective measure. The sample could be biased. The questions could be biased. The test itself could be skewed to get whatever you want from it, while the poll results themselves are still based on subjective views on what is 'good' or 'bad'.

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.

And the 'fact' that many people 'clearly' hate 4E means what exactly?

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.

Not true. 4e was targeted at all D&D players in the potential market, and it failed to capture them. The very point that Pathfinder was provided with a market as big as it got is an abject failure from the WotC marketing professionals.

Also, I'll say that preserving a game's "baggage" is a potential design goal, but not one that appeals to everyone. I, for one, have no interest at all in D&D's baggage. If I were to create a custom D&D variant exclusive to my preferences, then orcs, elves, dwarves, gith, beholders, rust monsters, and pretty much every other D&D sacred cow would all be on the chopping block. I think their loss would make the game more fun for me. Chasing that baggage is simple chasing fan nostalgia, which is a design goal that can often run counter to the goal of making the game appealing to a much broader audience and making the game fun and accessible. It leads to things like 5E introducing a weak Fighter and overly strong Wizard, even though that that exact choice has been hated and despised by countless D&D fans for years.

By using the term 'D&D' you are capitalising on 'baggage', nostalgic or otherwise. It's called a brand. And if the majority of fans are choosing to recognize the brand by playing other versions of the game, then somebody (marketing or design) is at fault.

Moreover, I'm sick of the mantra that 4E was good design in the first place. It was shoddy design for an RPG. It failed to account for 35 years of RPG development, and ultimately reduced the game back to a skirmish game. That isn't good design - it's utter rubbish! The only reason 4E sold at all was the brand name it was associated to.

4e sold to a lot of people who hadn't played any other RPG before, so this statement is definitely wrong. Additionally, this crosses the border into edition warring, which is, as it is well known, not tolerated. - Lwaxy


And contrary to the idea peddled here, 3E was praised all over the place when it first came out in reviews and wotnot. It was regarded as being a good design that integrated a number of popular developments into the game that werent there before, and was hugely successful in the early 2000s. It accumulated 'bloat' over the span of 8 years of a squillion different supplements (OGL and official) which is hardly surprising, but it's ideas were clearly the driving force behind RPGs in the last decade. Without a doubt, the most influential game of the 2000s. And I say all that as someone who personally never really bought into D20 and the whole OGL shebang.

 

[Herschel]

It feels like most gamers want D&D to be a shoot'em'up. Now that sounds like "dumbing down the game" to me, not the attempt at making the rules lighter.

I would like to see a game where if you want to fight you really want to play a fighter, and you play a rogue if you want to explore, and you play a cleric if you want to heal & support, and you play a wizard if you want to solve those situations that cannot be solved with mundane means.

"Dumbing down the game" is telling someone if they chose a class this is all they're good at instead of letting them have ways to participate in basically everything. If I want to play a rogue, why should I have to sit on my thumbs when we get in to a fight because I'm good at picking locks and finding traps? Why if I'm a Cleric should I just be a healbot instead of doing cool things myself? That's not fun. One of the best things 4E did was the design of the leader classes. You now get to support AND do cool stuff. I have a Warlord with a Bow and and melee butt-kicking Cleric and I love the fact I can heal my allies while setting them up for awesome stuff while still getting in good licks myself.

 

[Bedrockgames]

My 3E-fu is a bit weak, but is this really true? I don't think 3E had active metagame player resources like Come and Get It (pre-errata version), or overtly metagamed scaling DCs, or out-of-combat scene resolution (skill challenges), or combat maths (including in-combat healing) deliberately designed to produce a partcular pacing outcome.

I think it is a judgement call. Some of the elements in 4e appeared in some sourcebooks during 3e for example. Not sure that those kinds of things count. Personally i think 4e is not at all close, in any way to 3e. They are two completely different games ImO. The classes are structured in a completely Different. Vancian casters (in the manner they existed in the previous three editions) are effectively removed from the game. All the martial classes suddenly have power resources. The transition from 2e to 3e made some logicial sense and while different, i could easily see 3e as a new iteration of 2e. 4e was a massive overhaul. It was intended to be.

 

[Bedrockgames]

"Dumbing down the game" is telling someone if they chose a class this is all they're good at instead of letting them have ways to participate in basically everything. If I want to play a rogue, why should I have to sit on my thumbs when we get in to a fight because I'm good at picking locks and finding traps? Why if I'm a Cleric should I just be a healbot instead of doing cool things myself? That's not fun. One of the best things 4E did was the design of the leader classes. You now get to support AND do cool stuff. I have a Warlord with a Bow and and melee butt-kicking Cleric and I love the fact I can heal my allies while setting them up for awesome stuff while still getting in good licks myself.

That isn't fun for you. For some people it actually makes playing those characters more fun. I don't want to do "cool stuff" all the time. I realize this is what lots of 4e players do want and its very reasonable for them to ask for this. But for me it waters down the overall excitement of the game when I am given buttons for all occassions.

This is important because its why we spend hours and hours flaming one another on this topic. Fun is subjective. Its why the phrase tyranny of fun cropped up in the wake of 4e: for some people the 4e approach, while intended to make the game fun at all times, was anything but fun.

 

[Bluenose]

Every single genre of gaming (and by this I mean both traditional board and tabletop gaming and videogaming) has demonstrated a tendency towards much greater complexity and intricacy over time. Over time, audiences become more sophisticated, and develop tastes for more complex (and at the same time easier to use) game systems. At the same time, they develop a more critical eye towards things like game balance, with fanbases full of people willing to use spreadsheets calculus to analyze every element of a game.

Actually, in the tabletop wargame market which I know well, this isn't true. There's much more of a cycle to it. Certainly the earliest rules were simple, and they became gradually more complex. Then they became simpler again, with far less focus on minutiae and more on getting the right 'feel' and being historically accurate without needing highly intricate and opaque rules. There's much more of a mix of styles than merely old=simpler, new=complex.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Actually, in the tabletop wargame market which I know well, this isn't true. There's much more of a cycle to it. Certainly the earliest rules were simple, and they became gradually more complex. Then they became simpler again, with far less focus on minutiae and more on getting the right 'feel' and being historically accurate without needing highly intricate and opaque rules. There's much more of a mix of styles than merely old=simpler, new=complex.

The rpg market seems to be on the simple to complex to simple cycle as well. I don't think we want a simple escalation of complexity with rpgs.

 

[Li Shenron]

"Dumbing down the game" is telling someone if they chose a class this is all they're good at instead of letting them have ways to participate in basically everything.

No, that's not what it means: Dumbing down - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The problem I am calling "dumbing down" is about every character focusing on attacking something and damage/destroy it.

I am not saying this is a problem of 4e... I've heard many times people saying that in 4e you can do a lot of other things in combat, such as pushing/pulling opponents around, tripping, slowing/constraining them etc.

But I still see a lot of people using "damage output" as the only measure of balance, to the point that even those combat alternative have to measured in how much damage are you giving up to use them.

Now, if another game tells you that you are inferior in combat in terms of how % of the monsters' HP you can drop, maybe to your gaming preferences this can lead you to think you have nothing good to do, but to my gaming preferences this means I should activate my thinking helmet and find something more creative to do, so to me it has the opposite effect of "dumbing down" the game.

Of course then such "something more creative to do" could be already provided by the rules in explicit form for your non-fighter PC, could be more hidden within the general mechanics, or could even be non covered by the rules and require an adjudication between the player and DM.

If I want to play a rogue, why should I have to sit on my thumbs when we get in to a fight because I'm good at picking locks and finding traps? Why if I'm a Cleric should I just be a healbot instead of doing cool things myself? That's not fun.

It's not fun for you, but it's always been fun for me and my group, because normally none of us had to sit on their thumbs. But even if we had to, in a game where a combat takes 10-15 minutes, it's not a big deal. There is always some time when a player doesn't know what to do in a RP/interaction scene, or an exploration scene, or even a shopping scene, and that is no problem unless it lasts too long. 4e combats last so long that yes, if a 4e player had nothing to do in combat, he might prefer to quit the table.

But you have to understand that not everybody wants to play D&D as an endless stream of combats or one huge combat. Once again, this is a matter of what you're looking for when playing D&D, I'm not saying that if you want combat only it's badwrongfun, I'm saying that to me that kind of game has bored me long ago, and I want my RPG to have a much wider scope, like in fact D&D always had.