D&D 5E (2014) D&DN going down the wrong path for everyone.

[Pour]

The only way 4e can fail with that is if there are more tribalist goofballs in this hobby and its potential target audience than there are people who just like to play make-believe with weird dice and funny voices.

--FTFY

*slow clap*

 

[I'm A Banana]

The only way 4e can fail with that is if there are more tribalist goofballs in this hobby and its potential target audience than there are people who just like to play make-believe with weird dice and funny voices.

--FTFY

I'm a fan of a lot of 4e, but "modularity" and "play how you want!" weren't part of its core promises. Not that these things were impossible, but like Mearls said, the game told you that there was one right way to play, and didn't brook much dissent from that one true path.

It's still D&D, so I think it was a lot more flexible than some people give it credit for, but if you didn't want to play on a grid, for instance, it did not really care about you or your game.

Are the Rip van Winkle of gaming or something? Did you fall asleep in 2007 and not wake up until yesterday?

Most of the intractable extremists I've seen have been online message board posters. And even a minority of them. With how anonymity and the internet tend to exaggerate emotions, I would not be too shocked if these people were by and large more opinionated online than they are in person. Certainly no one I've ever actually played with is half as tribalist as some of the posts I've seen would indicate.

People aren't naturally filled with bile for those not like them, but people are pretty skittish, so it's easy to ramp up the tribalism when you don't actually interact with them in person. In person, people tend to tell a different story.

Not everyone. Some folks really are narmed like that. But those folks are pretty few and far between.

 

[Aeolius]

I'm a fan of a lot of 4e, but "modularity" and "play how you want!" weren't part of its core promises. Not that these things were impossible, but like Mearls said, the game told you that there was one right way to play, and didn't brook much dissent from that one true path.

"D&D is a game about slaying horrible monsters, not a game about traipsing off through fairy rings and interacting with the little people." - James Wyatt, "Races and Classes" (pg. 34)

I play D&D wrong!

 

[Guest 85555]

Yeah, I liked the WRITING in 2e. The problem was the system didn't deliver on the promise. It was the exact same old dungeon crawling system of 1e. Sure, they had different suggestions for how to give out XP, which was nice and all, but the game itself didn't even attempt to encourage or facilitate the sort of play they were talking about. It was as if Jeff Grub took a page from one of the early story games and tried to convince everyone D&D was that kind of system. It just didn't work, I was left feeling disappointed. Note that 2e wasn't better in some modest respects than 1e, but it left so much more on the table, it seemed almost like cowardly design.

Our group gamed with 2E for years and loved it. They were not trying to make a new game. They wanted some backwards compatability with things like modules. But they did a good job in my opinion of making improvements to presentation, adding in more options, and bringing in stuff like NWPs to the core book (which were introduced during 1E). The big thing 2E added was through its supplements. I ound the complete books were a great addition to the game, with kits working very well in most cases.

When 3E came around i felt they improved the game where I was hoping to see improvements (multiclassing was way easier, the skill system was more robust and a bigger part of the game, they brought ack popular classes that were removed in 2E). There were some misteps, but i was hoping those would be corrected in 4E.

Still, i don't get the "cowardly" design criticism. Games dont exist in a vacuum. You need to consider how much people will like the game you make. Surely popularity has to be a factor in any metric of good design for THE RPG. Part of retining the game's popularity means it will need to be recognizeable to people who are the fans.

I dont think there is anything wrong with 4E. If you like it that is great. But I also dont think it has a monopoly on good deign among editions of D&D. It depends on what your goals are. There were some clunky its in AD&D, and 3E did get rid of many of those things. They were aware of those elements when they made 2E, but because one of their design goals was backwards compatability, removing them would actually have ben bad design in a way (because people wouldn't be able to use older products as easily). Most of the criticisms toward 2E at the time had nothing to do with mecanichs failing to improve and everything to do with them taking out stuff that was deemed too "dark" or "evil" because of the satanism craze (also the dmg was much too lean and mising key things from the original).

 

[Ratskinner]

Over the Edge is 1992. It's clearly trying for something more narrativist, and it has free descriptor PC building, and a focus on scene-framing in scenario design and adjudication.

Maelstrom Storytelling is 1996, from memory, and it has free descriptor building, and scene-based conflict resolution with metagame resources being managed to introduce the (modest) tactical elements (some general resemblances here to HW/Q extended contests or 4e skill challenges).

OtE arguably is a little bit still in the Storyteller mould. Maelstrom definitely is not - it's a full-fledged narrativist system.

I agree on OtE. I didn't see Maelstrom until later, didn't know it went back that far...Still 7 years is hardly "RAPIDLY eclipsed by what followed it".

 

[SkidAce]

With the release of the 2ed books, and the ability for more of the group to own them, my friends are planning on switching back to 2ed. And running some 1ed adventures such as "To Fnd a King" or something I think.

Played a short warmup scenario...wow...every move brough back memories. Some good some bad. But I have to admit it was fun*.

* except for the 3 per round dart with poison throwing rogue...I wish we had left that behind.

 

[Ratskinner]

I think there is a huge issue here. People want combat to be interesting but they also want it to be short.

Of course there is a difference between "short" in the sense of having only a few rounds, and "short" in the sense that each round is quick to resolve, and I believe the majority wants the second, not the first, or not?

If we're taking a poll, yes, the second must come first. (IMO, FWIW) In general, I'm ambivalent about how many rounds a fight has, but I think a D&D fight should usually clock in the single digits somewhere.

<snip>

Probably the strongest way to make combat more interesting from the PCs' actions point of view, is therefore to allow a variety of possible actions (also spells) with very different outcomes than just scratching HP away from the monsters. However this increases the complexity (also is harder to design) and that means resolving a round will inevitably take longer.

It's not the only way to make combat more interesting, for example you can use terrain features and environmental circumstances, however this is more a DM's responsibility. Game design can make a difference, but if the DM never thinks about staging an encounter on the crumbling edge of a cliff, on a storm-tossed ship, or knee-deep in mud, then game design can't force this kind of variety on someone's game.

Only problem I see with this thinking is maintaining flexibility. Some tables aren't bothered by fighters playing the anvil chorus with the bad guys. Putting a bunch of player-side mechanics in kinda locks the table down to that. Can you balance the fiddly-bit mechanics with straight HP damage?...I haven't played with Martial Damage enough to know. Anybody out there tried a "vanilla" fighter next to a "fancy" guy? How did they stack up?

Keeping it DM-side in the manner you suggest leaves it up to the table.

There is a third path, taken by more narrative games, of using free-form descriptors and having generalized rules for handling them. MHRP's version of Cortex+ and FATE are probably the standard bearers for this type of game. It is definitely not the same experience as a D&D fight, and many would balk at it being "not D&D." I don't know if that's a problem that could be fixed or not.

 

[Ratskinner]

At length, my preference of the two would be to have slightly more rounds and slightly shorter rounds (things like 3e's dispel magic are pretty awful). But that pales into irrelevance when compared with a need to get through a meaningful combat quickly. Against level-appropriate foes, and excluding end-boss type fights, no combat should run more than 20 mins (unless the group consciously choose otherwise).

I agree with most of your post, [MENTION=22424]delericho[/MENTION], and your experiences match fairly well with mine. For some reason, this last paragraph caught my eye. It made me think of MHRP's mechanics. The GM or Players can "buy" the end of a scene, and negotiate the terms that it ended on. Of course, its optional, specifically for the purpose of ending an exchange that is dragging on and re-framing to a more interesting scene.

Currently, this only happens in D&D when the DM basically handwaves the end of the fight. I wonder if D&D would benefit from a standardized method of doing so.

 

[Balesir]

Only problem I see with this thinking is maintaining flexibility. Some tables aren't bothered by fighters playing the anvil chorus with the bad guys. Putting a bunch of player-side mechanics in kinda locks the table down to that. Can you balance the fiddly-bit mechanics with straight HP damage?...I haven't played with Martial Damage enough to know. Anybody out there tried a "vanilla" fighter next to a "fancy" guy? How did they stack up?

There is actually a very effective methodology for finding that balance that is used in experimental economics. It would work as follows:

1) Give the additional damage as a high-sided die type - d12, say. Give 1 or more, depending on level, class, whatever.

2) Periodically - I would say at each short rest, but you could vary it to suit whatever you find - allow the player to set a "special power" bid. I they roll this bid or lower, they get the "special effect"; if they roll higher they get the damage. For example, take "Daze" as an effect; suppose the player selects "5" as their bid. They roll the "extras" die as usual if they hit; if the die result is 1-5, the target is dazed. If the result is 6+ the target takes the die result as extra damage.

3) Record the players' bids for the various effects - the more data here the better.

Once your playtesting is done in this way, the data will tell you how much damage the various effects are perceived to be "worth" in various play scenarios. You can use that data to balance the powers you design.

I would love to see game designers using this sort of structured data gathering to formulate rules that are informed by real feedback.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

enh? Rapidly ecclipsed? You'll need to refresh my memory. I don't recall anything published I'd call narrative until....jeez, maybe not 'til after 2000. There was a weird little super-hero game called Panels, which was apparently around in 1999. (It was so simple it was basically somebody's geocities page. Doesn't exist now, AFAICT.) Panels was the first system I ever saw that really made me take notice of its narrative possibilities.

Goodness, you were closeted Amber Diceless springs instantly to mind, published in 1991. Many other games are older than you seem to think. Toon?! --all meta-game. TSR itself incorporated narrative elements in Top Secret SI. Another game which had them was that game about being a mobster in Chicago in the 1930's, whatever it was called. En Garde! also has many story-telling elements and it was published in 1975 (and fairly represents a line of RPG development entirely unrelated to D&D) which was quite well known in the day and is still in print today. Sure, I agree that game design was less advanced, but I think you sell 90's game design a little short.

I do remember a whole lotta systems in the 90's that did the same thing 2e did...talked all about story, but did nothing to support it. Heck, WW/WoD talked about it lot (even named their system "Storyteller"), but still didn't have anything significant mechanically. So much so that some credit them with "turning off" a lot of would-be narrative gamers. AFAICT, the 90's was the age of "resolution experimentation". Everybody seemed to think that they could fix everything if they just got the game's resolution system right...'cause somehow the other 999 ways to roll dice were missing something.

I agree about 2e's intentions, though. You could see Grubb wanted to make something with the story at the heart, but the tools weren't there. IMO, 2e's abject failure in this regard is what spawned the Forge and its thinking, but it took about a decade before anybody actually made much progress figuring out how to do narrative mechanics.

Eh, the problem was 2e did nothing. It neither cleaned up and rationalized 1e's rules, broke any new ground, etc. In fact for a good long time we didn't even bother with it because why spend money on new books (and 1e core books last FOREVER). Surely I can't say what Jeff did and didn't know about plot-based mechanics. What was not super well understood at the time wasn't that such mechanics existed, but more exactly how to employ them in a game design. All I can say is 2e sorely disappointed us at the time, it seemed like more of the same. We wanted mechanics like 'hero points' or something to get rid of the depressingly conservative play that glass D&D characters engendered. I recall having these discussions with some of my DM friends.

That's certainly an interesting take on TSR's problems. Obviously they had some, but that's a unique interpretation of what they were. I can't say too much about 1e's peak popularity, but I would guess more people were playing 2e at its peak, just from the growth of the hobby as a whole. Certainly in the places I was gaming 1e was all but replaced, if only because of a lack of books. Plenty of people I knew played material from both editions side by side, though, so that's hard to judge. (Whaddya call a game where the DM is using a BECMI adventure with a 1e MM and most of the players are using 2e characters, but one guy has a 1e Barbarian?)

Well, I recall statements made about 2e's sales being something like 1/2 what 1e's core book sales were. I'm not so sure the hobby GREW from 1983 to say 1993 either. It became a good bit lower profile after the days of the crazy RP hating nuts and the D&D cartoon. OTOH 2e was in bookstores (albeit the product displays appeared to gather much dust). Yes, we all played 1e and 2e material together, they were the same game mechanically, with a couple of fairly trivial exceptions (slight changes in AC, monsters tended to be beefed up). We all have different experiences of course, but IME everyone was playing in the early 80's, heck in 1980 I literally moved to a new town and the FIRST PERSON I MET randomly on the street was another DM, and I had a game going at school in like the first 2 hours. I think the mid-90's were more a time when those of us who kept playing were in our 30's now and could afford to buy a lot of stuff. I'm not at all sure the absolute numbers ever hit the 1980's. Maybe that wasn't much to do with 2e realistically, but I don't think 2e helped any. It opened up the window for other companies to establish real inroads into the market.

WW almost outsold TSR there for a couple years. Maybe their game wasn't exactly mechanically a game with narrative support, but people clearly saw it as a game that was trying to promote RP as opposed to whatever 2e was doing, dungeon crawls.