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Convincing 4th Edition players to consider 5th Edition
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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5978265" data-attributes="member: 82106"><p>Not to actually want to pick any kind of fight or anything at all, but out of pure curiousity... I hear this a lot, yet year after year I wait for someone to actually present one of these brilliant alternatives in a form that would be usable in 4e and I'm still waiting! I found the Forge discussions to be far too thick with theoretical mumbo-jumbo and short on practical translation to concrete practice to be really illuminating to me. While I've had some limited exposure to various BW incarnations I find it hard to think in terms of translating that to D&D in a way that doesn't undermine some of what I consider core principles that the game has consistently stuck with, namely avoiding any serious attempt to codify PC personality, goals, and behavior (unless you count alignment, which IMHO never worked well and in any case does little for you in practical story telling terms).</p><p></p><p>Again though, what are the actual alternatives? The problem I see is that you have combat, which is a pretty narrowly defined activity in general (though you can pull in things like loyalty, morale, etc). Then you have this whole 'other universe', which IMHO is so vast in scope that any suggestions I've seen for overarching mechanical abstractions that would fill the role of hit points etc seem hopelessly abstract or awkwardly shoehorned in. IMHO what the SC mechanics were intended to do was walk a sort of fine line where instead of trying to codify some sort of abstractions they tried to create a framework that would both not interfere with the simple logical cause/effect flow of action and reaction to a given situation, but still give you some definable quantitative measure to use as a framework. I am not suggesting it succeeded brilliantly, but again I'd love to see someone propose something that sits in that space and does it in a measurably better way. Obsidian was the closest thing I've seen and that isn't even clearly an advance over what is in RC now (though it did fix some problems with the original SC rules in DMG).</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Yeah, the Essentials presentation was mud. I hated both the way it was organized and the vastly bloated word count. I found that odd too because if they were really trying to get at the feel of older material the big thing they missed was just how SPARE the writing in say 1e was. I mean it had numerous sections of safely ignorable text, but when you go to your 1e PHB and read the section on 'Fighter' it is right down to nuts and bolts and very sparely written and formatted. There's no nonsense there. Even the PHB1 4e class writeups are fairly dense and to the point. The Essentials ones go on and on about stuff that most players simply don't care about but have to wade through to get to the good stuff (and the page flipping was horrible). A 'fog machine' indeed! <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite2" alt=";)" title="Wink ;)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=";)" /></p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 5978265, member: 82106"] Not to actually want to pick any kind of fight or anything at all, but out of pure curiousity... I hear this a lot, yet year after year I wait for someone to actually present one of these brilliant alternatives in a form that would be usable in 4e and I'm still waiting! I found the Forge discussions to be far too thick with theoretical mumbo-jumbo and short on practical translation to concrete practice to be really illuminating to me. While I've had some limited exposure to various BW incarnations I find it hard to think in terms of translating that to D&D in a way that doesn't undermine some of what I consider core principles that the game has consistently stuck with, namely avoiding any serious attempt to codify PC personality, goals, and behavior (unless you count alignment, which IMHO never worked well and in any case does little for you in practical story telling terms). Again though, what are the actual alternatives? The problem I see is that you have combat, which is a pretty narrowly defined activity in general (though you can pull in things like loyalty, morale, etc). Then you have this whole 'other universe', which IMHO is so vast in scope that any suggestions I've seen for overarching mechanical abstractions that would fill the role of hit points etc seem hopelessly abstract or awkwardly shoehorned in. IMHO what the SC mechanics were intended to do was walk a sort of fine line where instead of trying to codify some sort of abstractions they tried to create a framework that would both not interfere with the simple logical cause/effect flow of action and reaction to a given situation, but still give you some definable quantitative measure to use as a framework. I am not suggesting it succeeded brilliantly, but again I'd love to see someone propose something that sits in that space and does it in a measurably better way. Obsidian was the closest thing I've seen and that isn't even clearly an advance over what is in RC now (though it did fix some problems with the original SC rules in DMG). Yeah, the Essentials presentation was mud. I hated both the way it was organized and the vastly bloated word count. I found that odd too because if they were really trying to get at the feel of older material the big thing they missed was just how SPARE the writing in say 1e was. I mean it had numerous sections of safely ignorable text, but when you go to your 1e PHB and read the section on 'Fighter' it is right down to nuts and bolts and very sparely written and formatted. There's no nonsense there. Even the PHB1 4e class writeups are fairly dense and to the point. The Essentials ones go on and on about stuff that most players simply don't care about but have to wade through to get to the good stuff (and the page flipping was horrible). A 'fog machine' indeed! ;) [/QUOTE]
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