D&D 4E D&D Fluff Wars: 4e vs 5e

[Imaro]

Sharn, itself, is a PoL setting. The majority of the city is right out of a gritty noir pulp story, with some areas of safety. It's an urban PoL, and always has been.

There are dangerous parts of Sharn but I wouldn't classify it as basically a dangerous wilderness with small pockets of safety. At least that's not the impression the 3e book gave. It's cosmopolitan, relatively safe and nowhere near what I'd consider PoL...

 

[Parmandur]

dmsguild has a lot of the dragon and dungeon mag issues for 5$ each, too. I will they'd put them into collections at a reduced per issue price, but still, 5 ain't bad.



Anyway, I agree with 95% of the OP.



Also, the idea that FR isn't the default setting is just silly. At best, it's nit picking a technicality.

I don't see how it's nitpicking: all publications so far support a multi-setting model. Forgotten Realms was the most supported setting in 2E as well, but was never the official setting. Indeed, even Volos Guide has more Greyhawk fluff than Realms stuff, cutesy post-it notes aside.

 

[cbwjm]

Maybe if WotC published an adventure path set in Greyhawk, Eberron, or Dragonlance with notes for converting to Forgotten Realms then people would feel less like FR wasn't the default.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I don't see how it's nitpicking: all publications so far support a multi-setting model. Forgotten Realms was the most supported setting in 2E as well, but was never the official setting. Indeed, even Volos Guide has more Greyhawk fluff than Realms stuff, cutesy post-it notes aside.

FR is definitely the default setting, and the books give examples of how things might work in other worlds. The whole presentation of it puts FR front and center, with anything else being an alternative.

 

[Aldarc]

Maybe if WotC published an adventure path set in Greyhawk, Eberron, or Dragonlance with notes for converting to Forgotten Realms then people would feel less like FR wasn't the default.

One can dream.

 

[Parmandur]

FR is definitely the default setting, and the books give examples of how things might work in other worlds. The whole presentation of it puts FR front and center, with anything else being an alternative.

Nah, rather there is a default set of assumptions derived from Greyhawk, which is to say that home brew is the default setting: FR is just a frequent fill-in example. Again, the main book from last year has approximately zero Realms material in it.

 

[pemerton]

Hot take: It's symmetry. People like symmetry

People in general? Or many of the people who are the core market for D&D (which overlaps to a greater than random extent, I think, with the core market for other fantasy genre entertainments, sci-fi; and which, I think, includes a greater-than-random representation of engineer-y/tech-y types).

And only semi-related: it surprises me that a system for framing moral and political conflict in a fantasy game - namely, alignment - gets treated by many D&Ders as a total system for moral classification of human conduct. Under even the least scrutiny that proposition is absurd: eg Gygax, in describing "good", casually interchanges rights-type, value-type and Benthamite-type descriptors of the good, and in the values includes all the classic ones like dignity, autonomy, truth and beauty; so that, say, a character who accuses someone of being expedient in their willingness to trade off (say) truth for comfort is apt to be contradicted by a Know Alignment spell, which tells you that this is all just happening within the domain of The Good.

Or, to pick examples along a different axis: Gygax links the goal of self-realisation as the path to happiness with CG, yet requires all monks to be lawful; identifies individual freedom with Chaos and regulation with Law, and hence can't even coherently frame questions about the rule of law, constitutionalism, etc - which tend to dominate many contemporary political discussions.

Once it's recognised that alignment is not, and is obviously not, a total system of description, the idea of alignment-based outer planes becomes pretty ludicrous as a default (it might be fun as a particular take on the issue). And the idea that one would ask "What alignment is Darth Vader" or "What alignment is Batman" or "What alignment is Elrond", as if all genre characters and their conflicts fall under Gygax's idiosyncratic schema, becomes equally absurd.

I feel that 4e was distinctive in having some of the most tightly engineered mechanics of any RPG ever, but at the same time moving away from some of the more simplistic ways in which the D&D story elements had been presented. In those parts of the game which seem to need less engineering and more storytelling (in a rich sense of that term), it didn't hold back.

 

[Parmandur]

People in general? Or many of the people who are the core market for D&D (which overlaps to a greater than random extent, I think, with the core market for other fantasy genre entertainments, sci-fi; and which, I think, includes a greater-than-random representation of engineer-y/tech-y types).



And only semi-related: it surprises me that a system for framing moral and political conflict in a fantasy game - namely, alignment - gets treated by many D&Ders as a total system for moral classification of human conduct. Under even the least scrutiny that proposition is absurd: eg Gygax, in describing "good", casually interchanges rights-type, value-type and Benthamite-type descriptors of the good, and in the values includes all the classic ones like dignity, autonomy, truth and beauty; so that, say, a character who accuses someone of being expedient in their willingness to trade off (say) truth for comfort is apt to be contradicted by a Know Alignment spell, which tells you that this is all just happening within the domain of The Good.



Or, to pick examples along a different axis: Gygax links the goal of self-realisation as the path to happiness with CG, yet requires all monks to be lawful; identifies individual freedom with Chaos and regulation with Law, and hence can't even coherently frame questions about the rule of law, constitutionalism, etc - which tend to dominate many contemporary political discussions.



Once it's recognised that alignment is not, and is obviously not, a total system of description, the idea of alignment-based outer planes becomes pretty ludicrous as a default (it might be fun as a particular take on the issue). And the idea that one would ask "What alignment is Darth Vader" or "What alignment is Batman" or "What alignment is Elrond", as if all genre characters and their conflicts fall under Gygax's idiosyncratic schema, becomes equally absurd.



I feel that 4e was distinctive in having some of the most tightly engineered mechanics of any RPG ever, but at the same time moving away from some of the more simplistic ways in which the D&D story elements had been presented. In those parts of the game which seem to need less engineering and more storytelling (in a rich sense of that term), it didn't hold back.

Traditional D&D metaphysics are, indeed, absurd, and 4E tried among other things to introduce sound metaphysical principles to some degree: however, the absurdity of Grsat Wheel-verse can be seen as part of the fun.

 

[Tony Vargas]

People in general? Or many of the people who are the core market for D&D

People in general, yes. Take our reaction, as a species to highly asymmetrical faces, for instance.

And only semi-related: it surprises me that a system for framing moral and political conflict in a fantasy game - namely, alignment - gets treated by many D&Ders as a total system for moral classification of human conduct.

Even though we tend to be analytical engineer types? IMHO, part of the appeal of an RPG is that it takes the horrifically complex, self-contradictory, and vile universe of life as a human being, and codifies it with simple (wildly complex by the standard of non-RP games, but still), consistent, rules that can be mastered and leveraged using logic and basic numeracy. It can be wonderfully comforting to spend time in a universe like that.

I feel that 4e was distinctive in having some of the most tightly engineered mechanics of any RPG ever, but at the same time moving away from some of the more simplistic ways in which the D&D story elements had been presented. In those parts of the game which seem to need less engineering and more storytelling (in a rich sense of that term), it didn't hold back.

Does that make it GNS-'incoherent' or just inconsistent? Because I get the feeling there's a quality starting with 'in-' implied there...

 

[TheCosmicKid]

Hot take: It's symmetry. People like symmetry, far more than was obvious when the 4e design maxim of "avoiding needless symmetry" was coined.

Yeah, but forced symmetry is awful. To continue [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION]' face analogy, the Great Wheel is smack in the middle of the Uncanny Valley: it looks unnatural. To me, anyway. Clearly, I'm in the minority, and most D&D players are also fans of the perfectly-proportioned dead-eyed characters coming out of mediocre computer graphics studios.