Crunch or Fluff Changes
- Thread starter Remathilis
- Start date
Samnell
Explorer
Fluff-wise, I loathe the assumed setting. Powerfully. I find isolated frontier regions strangling. I dislike the changes to elves, but less powerfully. These are things that I can hopefully avoid with minimal effort. D&D's default setting fluff is usually a trivial effort to ignore in itself, but its impact on crunch design can be subtle. 1e and 2e both had extremely strong setting assumptions which cut across every world TSR produced and were very strangling to me, since they manifested in many condescending lectures about how magic can never, ever be a commodity, it's rare, and so forth. They further hindered design by creating spaces that the rules were not supposed to go to. Rules for creating magic items amounted to level prerequisites and a lecture for the DM about how PCs should not really be allowed to do it. That's fine if your idea of fantasy fits those tastes. Mine is just the opposite.
Crunch-wise, they're getting rid of many things that I either like and think slot very nicely into the milieu or do not rise to the level of needing the level of change involved. I potently loathe the direction they're taking with monster stats. Judging from the commentary in those threads, I think I like monsters using the same rules as players at least as much as the people who hate it dislike it. I am further extremely unfond of the haphazard way we're getting information and consider the tiny open playtest an incredibly worrisome blunder on WotC's part.
I think ultimately I don't want a 4e. I do not want a major revision to the game. I want 3.75. At the very least, I do not want what we are lead to believe 4e is. I like the Tome of Battle so much I'm using it on my NPCs and wrote a 22 page review of it for my players. I like the idea that casters have some kind of specials that they can use battle after battle, and fighters have cool tricks to keep up. However, I think I'd prefer if a wizard were closer to 40% or 50% depleted when he blew all his spell slots instead of 20%. I don't care at all for the de-emphasis of magic items. I would rather a new DMG offered two or three sets of wealth by level scales and the new MM offered CRs to match each one. That would only require two more numbers on the CR line, separated by a slash, and a couple more charts in the DMG.
If what we get ends up to be an extremely over-hyped 3.75, I'll be one happy gamer. But what I hear about the mechanics and flavor suggest to me that it's really another whole new game. Having built up a powerful loathing of 1e and 2e pretty much as soon as I saw another RPG (and I live in a small town with a pathetic RPG section in a small local bookstore, so this took years) I had given up on D&D entirely. I still tried to play or run it sometimes, but by the time I was done filling out a character sheet I was irritated with the thing and ready to toss it away. I played a lot of Alternity and some of the other games TSR put out, which were uniformly better put together than D&D. I bought 2e setting books because I enjoyed reading about the settings, but they didn't see much actual play.
So I guess my answer is that both things make me fairly irate and sometimes enthused, but in different ways.
Crunch-wise, they're getting rid of many things that I either like and think slot very nicely into the milieu or do not rise to the level of needing the level of change involved. I potently loathe the direction they're taking with monster stats. Judging from the commentary in those threads, I think I like monsters using the same rules as players at least as much as the people who hate it dislike it. I am further extremely unfond of the haphazard way we're getting information and consider the tiny open playtest an incredibly worrisome blunder on WotC's part.
I think ultimately I don't want a 4e. I do not want a major revision to the game. I want 3.75. At the very least, I do not want what we are lead to believe 4e is. I like the Tome of Battle so much I'm using it on my NPCs and wrote a 22 page review of it for my players. I like the idea that casters have some kind of specials that they can use battle after battle, and fighters have cool tricks to keep up. However, I think I'd prefer if a wizard were closer to 40% or 50% depleted when he blew all his spell slots instead of 20%. I don't care at all for the de-emphasis of magic items. I would rather a new DMG offered two or three sets of wealth by level scales and the new MM offered CRs to match each one. That would only require two more numbers on the CR line, separated by a slash, and a couple more charts in the DMG.
If what we get ends up to be an extremely over-hyped 3.75, I'll be one happy gamer. But what I hear about the mechanics and flavor suggest to me that it's really another whole new game. Having built up a powerful loathing of 1e and 2e pretty much as soon as I saw another RPG (and I live in a small town with a pathetic RPG section in a small local bookstore, so this took years) I had given up on D&D entirely. I still tried to play or run it sometimes, but by the time I was done filling out a character sheet I was irritated with the thing and ready to toss it away. I played a lot of Alternity and some of the other games TSR put out, which were uniformly better put together than D&D. I bought 2e setting books because I enjoyed reading about the settings, but they didn't see much actual play.
So I guess my answer is that both things make me fairly irate and sometimes enthused, but in different ways.
Atlatl Jones
Explorer
Love the crunch, but the fluff sounds pretty good too. Ultimately the fluff isn't as important to me though, since I play in other settings and homebrews.
Brother MacLaren
Explorer
The claim "Your mage will never have to resort to a dagger or staff" bothers me WAY more for fluff reasons than for crunch reasons.
Lancelot
Adventurer
Very excited about the crunch, and mixed reactions to the fluff. I'm loving most of the changes (elves, eladrin, "points of light", Asmodeus-as-a-deity, even the new look of some of the creatures), but the infamous erinyes/succubus thing has me nervous.
For those who say "Why are people even worried?"... it becomes a slightly bigger deal if you're a Planescape fan, or if you're running the Savage Tide adventure path, or if you've splashed out recent money on the Fiendish Codexes. I fall into all three categories.
Consider if WotC suddenly announced: "There are too many humanoids, and they're all very similar. Hence, Goblins are CG in alignment and are prank-playing fey... and, uhh... Hobgoblins no longer exist. After all, they're pretty much just Orcs anyway." Might be a cool change, especially for new players, but it results in a lot of rework for long-term DMs.
I'm still very excited about 4e and looking forward to it, but I hope there's some attention to "backward compatability" with the fluff changes.
For those who say "Why are people even worried?"... it becomes a slightly bigger deal if you're a Planescape fan, or if you're running the Savage Tide adventure path, or if you've splashed out recent money on the Fiendish Codexes. I fall into all three categories.
Consider if WotC suddenly announced: "There are too many humanoids, and they're all very similar. Hence, Goblins are CG in alignment and are prank-playing fey... and, uhh... Hobgoblins no longer exist. After all, they're pretty much just Orcs anyway." Might be a cool change, especially for new players, but it results in a lot of rework for long-term DMs.
I'm still very excited about 4e and looking forward to it, but I hope there's some attention to "backward compatability" with the fluff changes.
Sundragon2012
First Post
I never play the implied core setting, whatever the hell that is. All my campaigns have taken place within real settings whether homebrew or published (shout out to Midnight, Dawnforge, Krynn and FR). By real settings, I mean settings that are actual settings with their own backstory, history, races, classes, atmosphere and internal consistancy.
I can care less about changes in core fluff, though I can be inspired by new and interesting ideas that I can use in the settings I use. D&D has been and will continue to be NOTHING more than a set of rules and mechanics that allow me as DM to simulate certain fantasy RPing genres. I play D&D because I like the way it does what it does ( recently, I have abandoned it for True20 and Conan D20) and am thrilled with about 90% of the mechanical changes I am reading about and about 98% of the fluff changes I have read about. I think the 2% of disagreement is with turning Asmodeus into a god, though it is more ambivalence than disgust.
4e might be what brings me back into the D&D fold again.
Sundragon
I can care less about changes in core fluff, though I can be inspired by new and interesting ideas that I can use in the settings I use. D&D has been and will continue to be NOTHING more than a set of rules and mechanics that allow me as DM to simulate certain fantasy RPing genres. I play D&D because I like the way it does what it does ( recently, I have abandoned it for True20 and Conan D20) and am thrilled with about 90% of the mechanical changes I am reading about and about 98% of the fluff changes I have read about. I think the 2% of disagreement is with turning Asmodeus into a god, though it is more ambivalence than disgust.
4e might be what brings me back into the D&D fold again.
Sundragon
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Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
The fluff is interesting, but at the end of the day, I'm still using Ptolus and other than figuring out where to insert eladrins (if at all), the fluff's not going to make any impact on my game.
I don't think you understand what the implied setting is: it's the contents of the PHB that are assumed to exist in a D&D world; the races, the classes, the equipment lists, spells etc. and magic items from the DMG, and those monsters from the MM.
The implied setting is any setting in which these D&Disms are assumed to exist. If you use that stuff, your setting is a reflection to a degree of the implied D&D setting, which isn't a setting as such, more just a collection of materials that are assumed to exist in most D&D worlds. Given that almost every D&D player uses these books, I assure you that it's extremely likely that you've played with elements of D&D's implied setting, if not all of it. You probably even like it, else you'd go play some other game.
