Cynicism of an AD&D refugee

[pawsplay]

I think a game system is more akin to an Operating System. You don't expect an OS to have everything out of the box and to have no new applications to come out. You want to get new games or new programs for it and use them. If someone told you there wouldn't be coming out much, you would actually say that this is probably not a good OS to use.

If the OS comes with limited functionality and requires a lot of specialized software design to create new functions for, that is also not a good OS to use. There are of course various forms of incompleteness.

Backwards compatibility: This is inevitible at some point, but it's very weird in a D&D game when you can't rework concepts which in theory should be independent of the system. If you were playing a gnome bard, guess what? But setting aside specific races and classes and ability sets... what about all those miniatures? What is shocking to me is that for the time, ever, only a smallish portion of the D&D miniatures can be used in previous games, because so many monsters have changed so much. And the ones that are still there frequently have a new aesthetic. It's not much of an exaggeration to say that you would do as well with Mage Knight figures for a 3e game, and something like Reaper is clearly superior. What is a 3e player supposed do do with a flame archon? Were you hoping for a complete run of 3e demon and devil minuatures? ... Too bad for you. This represents not only a stack of obsolesced books, but of discounted time, since whatever you knew about Forgotten Realms or Eberron or Greyhawk simply cannot apply in the new D&D, with its dragonborn and tieflings and eladrin. High elves can teleport? Who knew?

Incompleteness of design: Every system has things it covers and things it doesn't. With 4e, we've seen a new surge in things in covers, or things in covers in such a way other things become more problematic. I'm speaking mainly about numerous combat options. And things like polymorph or large PCs? Well, the design team decided they were too hard to balance, so they're gone. Virtually any effect that could have unexpected consequences is gone. Look at the succubus charm... they might as well have called it Bigby's Interposing Dwarf.

Incompleteness of modularity: To create a new class for 4e literally requires you to map out 30 levels of stuff, including ideally at least two "builds." A race now needs more than a quick profile... to be balanced, they need PC treatment, especially racially specific paths. In 3e, I could tweak a class if I wanted, but it's hard to imagine stripping down a 4e class and giving it something a little different. Many, many powers presuppose certain weapons or skills or whatever. I've written many variant classes... many, such as turning a barbarian into a corsair, are nonsensical in 4e. To use the OS analogy, the new OS here doesn't come loaded with a lot of program modules and each program has to be written and compiled with a lot of code. New applications are bloated, and tedious to design. Try imagining the class variants section of Unearthed Arcane rewritten for 4e... it would be a 64 page pamphlet by itself. Or, to put it another way, a sizable chunk of Martial Power. Or Martial Power 2.

 

[Mallus]

The worst thing any RPG publisher can do is give the impression that they want to make a profit by deliberately limiting your game.

Some gamers have unreasonable value expectations for products. A publisher has to accept that.

It's perfectly fine for someone to feel that the 4e core doesn't offer them what they want. It's perfectly unreasonable for them to feel that 4e doesn't offer a complete game or a wealth of playable character options.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I can get pink fuzzy dice for my car too if I want them, but I don't need to get them from Ford. Accessories are not necessities. I can get the optional veggie basket for my fridge instead of the drawer, but those are just options.

You don't need to buy a new fridge every year, or car. Likewise you don't need to buy a new game every year.

A game is defined on who you are. The company wants the products to sell in whatever way they can get them to so they don't drop the product line (see D&D podcast #28). While the consumer wants the product they have to buy less often and maintain less.

New "core" books each year is upkeep and maintenance that the customer doesn't have to need.

Just claiming PHBII as core just means that the first 3 books are not a complete game.

How many board games do you buy that require more to be bought later?

If you want continued money from the consumer you have to either get more consumers for your product, or give existing ones things they will want to buy. Not trick them into thinking they will need an optional part for any reason because you neglected to put it in the box.

DIY bookshelf complete with instructions. (Screws sold separately.)

That is what it boils down to.

Add on to it PO, and that is what people get when they have to spend more all the time is PO'd.

Your assumption is that you somehow need the PHB II and so on. But you just don't. The game works at is. Naming them PHB II is a marketing ploay, implying:
"We treat this as Core, so you can expect further support for it, even in other settings." (this is actually the only thing that really matters - it means it's not like the 3E new base classes that you often had only one book and would never see again - and this was criticized, so there is obviously a portion of the market that finds this better then the idea of purely contained supplements!)
"We worked on this with the same effort as for the first one."
"This is stuff you really want to have - it's core!"

But the truth is it's still just a supplement you can buy or ignore.

 

[Starbuck_II]

Sure they are. It's called playing a Rogue. The "Fighter" (the class) is the heavy weapons guy. If you want to be a skirmisher play a Ranger or Rogue. They're Martial classes for a reason.

This is for the win!
Really, Fencers aren't tanks: they don't wear heavy armor: why choose the heavy armor guy to make him?

So Rogue makes more sense.

In 3.5: you could argue BAB, but in 4th: BAB is the same for every class.

 

[pawsplay]

It's perfectly unreasonable for them to feel that 4e doesn't offer a complete game or a wealth of playable character options.

Then I shall be unreasonable.

 

[I'm A Banana]

The OS comparison is interesting. Recently I had the thought that 4e (and most editions of D&D) doesn't know whether it's a system or a game.

If it's a game, it needs to be tightly focused on one thing. Mario doesn't need to be able to engage in zombie survival horror. If you're playing Metriod, you don't need to worry about recruiting the right quarterback. A game that tries to branch out and give you more diversity usually suffers for it, but a game that is tight and specific often benefits from it.

4e is fairly focused around minis combat, but it's not quite a pure minis combat game.

If it's a system, it needs to be able to cover a broad amount of things. No one expects the hardware to cover everything, but the Wii should be able to do an FPS, an RPG, it should be able to cover Mario and Metroid and Zelda and a variety of other games.

4e is certainly not broad enough to be a system.

4e isn't a system you plug games into, and it's not a game that you have a devoted single-issue support for. It can't figure itself out, in so many ways, so people who want one thing or the other aren't happy.

I'd say it's more of a game than a system, but it's still not a very focused game (half of the core books will go unused by most gamers, for instance).

 

[pawsplay]

Now, there's no question that fencers, fighter-mages, lightly armored fighters and the like benefitted a lot from the 3.5 splatbooks. But even with just core, they're viable. Perhaps not ideal, but in their own niche, as good as anything else. Not so with 4e.

Just to clarify, since this seems to be causing some confusion, the "they" in that second sentence refers to "concepts not explicitly supported by the core books," not to fencers specifically. In 4e, fencers are rogues. The 4e equivalent would be something like a guy in plate armor who wields two axes, or a non-blasting wizard.

 

[tomBitonti]

Will you grant that it is possible that WotC/Hasbro has repriced (higher) the D&D product line? That is consistent with a profit maximizing strategy for a monopolist. That is also consistent with D&D being sold by a large corporation, which presumably has done a study of the D&D market and has selected a price point based on this analysis -- more so than any of the companies that sold D&D in the past. My impression is that this is the first edition of the product to have gone through a proper market analysis. (I could be wrong: Does anyone see that 3.0 or 3.5 having gone through a lot of market analysis?)

My own impression is that the first three books are _much_ less complete than the first three books for 3.0 or 3.5E, in the sense that they provide many fewer _player options_ in terms of class concepts and builds.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Some gamers have unreasonable value expectations for products. A publisher has to accept that.

It's perfectly fine for someone to feel that the 4e core doesn't offer them what they want. It's perfectly unreasonable for them to feel that 4e doesn't offer a complete game or a wealth of playable character options.

But these demands, to a much larger extent, were met in a previous edition.

Obviously, it's completely possible to satisfy most or at least MORE of these demands than 4e chose to.

Really, the core of this is the pagecount consumed by the powers system, because that's probably reason #1 that there weren't more races or classes, and is yet another glaring flaw in the powers system for me.

4e doesn't consider diversity in that respect to be very valuable. Some players disagree. It's not unreasonable to expect a continuation of what you've had before.

 

[pawsplay]

4e is fairly focused around minis combat, but it's not quite a pure minis combat game.

I remember reading the Miniatures Handbook skirmish campaign rules and wondering, "I wonder what would happen if you used this as a role-playing game and improvised everything non-combat?"

Apparently, WotC wondered the same thing.