D&D General D&D Evolutions You Like and Dislike [+]

[Alzrius]

That D&D 4th edition was inspired by WoW and other MMORPGs seems patently obvious to me.

You're not wrong about that. None other than Ben Riggs has told us that WoW was the impetus for 4E's creation, and that designers were told to try and build a game that would appeal to its audience.

 

[Reynard]

You're not wrong about that. None other than Ben Riggs has told us that WoW was the impetus for 4E's creation, and that designers were told to try and build a game that would appeal to its audience.

That is not the same thing as saying they tried to recreate WoW's mechanics in 4E. At the time, WoW was decimating the TTRPG community. WoW was at its zenith and we all knew folks who abandoned TTRPGs for WoW guilds. Sometimes whole groups shifted over to WoW. So WotC was inspired to compete with WoW with a fresh take on D&D, both in lore and in mechanics.

How well one thinks it worked out is pretty much the defining Rorschach test of EN World.

 

[Willie the Duck]

You're not wrong about that. None other than Ben Riggs has told us that WoW was the impetus for 4E's creation, and that designers were told to try and build a game that would appeal to its audience.

But, it should be noted, that is all (that we know definitively). They wanted to capture that audience, full stop. Not emulate MMOs or mirror mechanics or anything else specific like that. Individual notions like AEDU being meant to emulate cool-downs are conjecture.

 

[Alzrius]

That is not the same thing as saying they tried to recreate WoW's mechanics in 4E. At the time, WoW was decimating the TTRPG community. WoW was at its zenith and we all knew folks who abandoned TTRPGs for WoW guilds. Sometimes whole groups shifted over to WoW. So WotC was inspired to compete with WoW with a fresh take on D&D, both in lore and in mechanics.

How well one thinks it worked out is pretty much the defining Rorschach test of EN World.

But, it should be noted, that is all (that we know definitively). They wanted to capture that audience, full stop. Not emulate MMOs or mirror mechanics or anything else specific like that. Individual notions like AEDU being meant to emulate cool-downs are conjecture.

To reiterate what Riggs said in his seminar, "one thing that stayed popular from the get-go was the idea of implementing "cooldown" periods for powers. This eventually became the AED part of the AEDU suites of abilities."

 

[CreamCloud0]

But a game isn't a story until it is over. RPGs generate stories by virtue of being played, but they aren't "A Story". Stories have beginnings, middles and ends. they have plots and characters, high and low points. None of that is true with RPGs except in retrospect. The story we tell about the game we just played IS the story, generated from the game. Treating an RPG like a "story" with important predestined plot points is a good way to ruin the "game" aspect and impinge on the most important element of RPG play: player agency. RPGs are games where we play to find out what happens.

(Just because the world is a weird place, I will go ahead and specifically say "all this in my opinion" as if it weren't obvious from the start.)

i disagree, stories don't have neat beginnings middles and ends, they start and stop within themselves and overlap and intertwine with each other, you can't just stand at the end and say 'well that's now a story because it's finished' it's like, take lord of the rings, where does it start? when sauron was born? when he learned to make the rings? on bilbo's 111th birthday when frodo receives the ring? and where does it end? when the ring is destroyed in mt doom? when aragorn is crowned king? when bilbo and frodo leave on the elf ship? and what about all the stories inbetween those points or don't start or end related? how far do you need to backtrack from the events of the hobbit to say where things relate to the story of the ring? the rise and fall of erebor? is the troll encounter not it's own story? smeagol finding the ring and turning into golum? these are all stories happening even as they play out, they don't 'become' stories retroactively and you can never tell that a story isn't going to be continued at a later point after it initially seemed to of already ended, if you didn't have the knowledge of future events, you'd say that gandalf's story ended when he died falling with the balrog in moria.

this might not of been said seriouly but i feel this quote from the recent kingdom hearts fandub is still true and meaningful on the subject "one time, when i was swimming, i saw that there was something grey on the floor, and so i picked it up, and then i realised that this in and of itself, was a story, everything can be a story"

 

[Willie the Duck]

To reiterate what Riggs said in his seminar, "one thing that stayed popular from the get-go was the idea of implementing "cooldown" periods for powers. This eventually became the AED part of the AEDU suites of abilities."

Interesting. I stand corrected (if we take Riggs as an accurate source).

I stand by the generalized statement: the notion that the 4e devs wanted to capture the gamer market exemplified by WoW at the time does not directly imply that any given 4e innovation was either 'WoW-like,' nor made the game wildly like a MMO. Individual support for a link (such as you have provided) is needed for such claims.

It should also be noted that the problem AEDU addresses was hardly new with WoW. The 5/15-minute workday was a major complaint of 3rd edition (or honestly since the beginning of D&D, for any DM where the party just left and rested whenever they were low on spells/hp, since many people never did the whole West Marches thing). When the end of Vancian casting was announced, it was met with significant applause, seemingly from more than just WoW gamers.

 

[Alzrius]

When the end of Vancian casting was announced, it was met with significant applause, seemingly from more than just WoW gamers.

It's funny that you mention that. I was at Gen Con in 2007 when 4E was announced, and in the seminar where they said that there wouldn't be Vancian casting, the entire room burst into applause. I remember being stunned by that.

 

[Willie the Duck]

It's funny that you mention that. I was at Gen Con in 2007 when 4E was announced, and in the seminar where they said that there wouldn't be Vancian casting, the entire room burst into applause. I remember being stunned by that.

I mean, that's my (secondary) point -- even if they were in fact (as Riggs indicates) borrowing cooldowns by way of AEDU, it was addressing an incredibly longstanding frustration many had had with the game.

 

[billd91]

It's funny that you mention that. I was at Gen Con in 2007 when 4E was announced, and in the seminar where they said that there wouldn't be Vancian casting, the entire room burst into applause. I remember being stunned by that.

And the funny thing is - it's not entirely true. Saying that a wizard's daily spells are "daily" doesn't really change their nature. They're as Vancian as anything else in the sense that you've got a designated slot, you prep one spell for it, and when you cast it it's done until you prep it again.
They just added to the array of spell/power options.

 

[TwoSix]

It's funny that you mention that. I was at Gen Con in 2007 when 4E was announced, and in the seminar where they said that there wouldn't be Vancian casting, the entire room burst into applause. I remember being stunned by that.

Yep. Dissatisfaction with Vancian casting was pretty rampant in 3e’s heyday in the mid-00s. It’s why you saw so much experimentation with casting mechanics in 3.5 supplements. The warlock, the spirit shaman, and the beguiler were all examples of the designers to see how far the boundaries of the classical “spell list” system could be pushed.