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

[Gilbetron]

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?

This is exactly right for my groups. We play for 1-3 hours, usually about 2 hours, and 3E, 4E, and even Fantasy Craft all have combats that just take too damn long. In my last campaign using d20 (started with 4E, switched to FC after 6 months for the remaining 6 months) I realized that the only combats I could have were epic, final "boss" battles. The biggest problem is that you can make combats in those system be short, but then they are dull. Savage Worlds is my compromise system currently, but I really want a d20 system, as I like the basics of it (all the polys, d20, criticals, saving throws, hit points, blah blah). I want Fantasy Craft Lite. Or maybe 4E gridless lite. I like AEDU, but don't need that specific thing. I want flexibility. I like the idea of 4E monsters being this fun little package of combat, I just want the combat to be over in 15-20 minutes, generally speaking.

 

[Ratskinner]

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.

I don't think that's obvious at all, given the vastly different material the games covered.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yes. My experience has been that 4e rounds are considerably shorter than the 3e equivalents (except at 3e's lowest levels), but that a 4e combat has many more rounds than the 3e equivalent.

Either way, the net effect was that combats take too long.



The issue we're having with high-level 3e is very definitely one of resolution, rather than of too many choices - we're pretty efficient about having people ready with their actions when their turn comes up. Of course, that's not universal.

I dunno, 2.5 hour combats and tons of rounds doesn't sound like what I get with 4e combat. Our fights are 5 rounds long, almost like clockwork. Now and then one will go 6 to 8 rounds if it got bogged down badly (usually means the PCs cornered a tough opponent). I've seen very few combats go less, though once in a while 'circumstances changed' and everyone decided not to really rumble. Climactic fights can take a couple hours, sometimes, but who wants the BBEG to be toast in 20 minutes after a couple months of buildup?

3.x combat is much like high level 2e combat, it just gets bogged down in numbers. Where 4e REALLY streamlined the numbers 3e just throws them at you left and right and makes you deal with them. Both games have a LOT of effects and etc but at least 4e tries to make them easy to handle.

In any case if you shorten the number of rounds then fights are silly, nobody gets to decide anything meaningful, there's no point to hang any tension on, etc. and the only thing that matters is banging out the damage or some SoD. Once you go beyond 5 rounds things equally become redundant IMHO. 5 is good, you can have an opening, an up, a down, and a finale.

The whole trick with interesting combat is to stop thinking about it like AD&D "creatures hacking on each other in a room" model action. Think about it like Indiana Jones kind of action, leaping, jumping, falling, moving terrain, fires, explosions, floods, collapsing mines, GOALS besides "hack them all to death" (IE save the princess, get the map, destroy the gem, whatever). Once you create an interesting dynamic environment then it is much nicer to have all the quick resolution mechanics, powers, and PCs that can take some licks that 4e offers.

Of course if your goal is to creep through a giant maze of rooms and fight monsters and traps in each one, then you're probably best off with a different game. AD&D is great for that, IMHO 3e (despite 'back to the dungeon' whatever that meant) not so much, but still more so than 4e.

 

[delericho]

I dunno, 2.5 hour combats and tons of rounds doesn't sound like what I get with 4e combat.

Sure. I'm not going to claim that my experience (which is hugely limited) is universal. In particular, this was before the fixes to 4e's monster math, and before all the work people put in to understanding and eliminating grind. It's also entirely possible that the PCs missed with almost every Encounter and Daily that they used - it's been a long time, so I don't remember.

At that point, 4e was already very much in "last chance saloon" with me, so this mostly just solidified my feeling that it was not for me.

In any case if you shorten the number of rounds then fights are silly, nobody gets to decide anything meaningful, there's no point to hang any tension on, etc. and the only thing that matters is banging out the damage or some SoD. Once you go beyond 5 rounds things equally become redundant IMHO. 5 is good, you can have an opening, an up, a down, and a finale.

This I can agree with wholeheartedly - especially if an exception is given for the occasional big-boss fight that goes longer.

The whole trick with interesting combat is to stop thinking about it like AD&D "creatures hacking on each other in a room" model action. Think about it like Indiana Jones kind of action, leaping, jumping, falling, moving terrain, fires, explosions, floods, collapsing mines, GOALS besides "hack them all to death" (IE save the princess, get the map, destroy the gem, whatever).

Problem is that the game* tends to make "hack them all to death" the optimum strategy. Any round the characters are working toward any other goal is a round they're letting the enemy whittle away at their hit points, and because the monsters tend to have higher movement rates, it's difficult for the PCs to disengage once those goals are achieved anyway.

* D&D, not any particular edition.

 

[Ratskinner]

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.

It's completely possible I was "closeted", but see my comments below on geography.

"meta-game", at least as its used around here, doesn't really imply narrativism. Toon is the only one of those that I've ever played...and it was soo long ago that I can't really say I remember much about it mechanically, the descriptions I can dredge up don't paint it very narratively. Amber is one of those things that people keep telling me about, and how awesome it is...and yet fairly well failing to convince me. ::shrug:: Can't say I've ever heard of En Garde or know which Gangster game you might be referring to.

Overall, I think the raging success that all these games utterly failed to enjoy says a lot about the state of things at the time. Its hard to sell them short when you couldn't even buy them in a store.

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 <snippage>
2e helped any. It opened up the window for other companies to establish real inroads into the market.

I was involved with a few conventions back in the day. I got a chance to talk candidly to some TSR folks. One conversation that really stuck out to me was that RPGs and associated games at that time were a very regional phenomenon. He said they'd go to one region and a game would be considered a bad joke, then go to another region and it would dominate the tables. Their own sales figures supported regionalism hypotheses, as well. It was a time before the internet was here so that we could tell each other what to think, I guess. I'm very skeptical of drawing many broad conclusions about that era, other than what you draw by what came after or survived. Given the lack of sweeping changes between 1e and 2e which we've both noted, I suspect that 2e's adoption rates and sales would be locally variable depending on the availability of 1e material to prospective new players. Which makes it very hard to say anything globally.

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

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.

Maybe if you take it as written, sure, but in practice this is demonstrably untrue. It plays just as well off-grid as every other edition I've played (which is all of them).

Some of the wording in the books was... regrettable, and so it leads one to the first impression that it's a bad game. This was originally my opinion, in fact; Hated 4e. The game earned its own slogan or ad byline in my group: Reads awful, plays amazing.

Right now, the playtest is reading pretty awful for me, and I haven't been all that impressed by how it's played so far, but who knows, maybe further play with all the dials will improve my opinion. However, since 4e I have a much better understanding of what I want out of a game and the default presentation in the packets largely consists of AD&D dungeon crawling. That doesn't exactly sell me on it.

"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)

Until you buy/read the Heroes of the Feywild.

I play D&D wrong!

So do I. I'll bet a great many of us do.

 

[Iosue]

Can I ask why you guys are referencing Jeff Grubb as bringing narrative elements to 2e?

 

[I'm A Banana]

Maybe if you take it as written, sure, but in practice this is demonstrably untrue. It plays just as well off-grid as every other edition I've played (which is all of them).

I'm not saying it's a universal experience for every single player, I'm saying that flexibility isn't one of 4e's high points. In much the same way that cleric balance isn't one of 3e high points, but not every group experienced an unbalanced cleric.

If you need to somehow divine intent from something other than what was actually written on the page, you do not have a game that is designed to be flexible, you have a game you might be able to flex despite its written and stated explicit intents. That's fairly true of 4e, because D&D can only ever be so inflexible, but it's a mistake to attribute the trait of "flexibility" to the game, and assume that everyone who criticizes it for its inflexibilty does so just because they are bad actors with an axe to grind.

 

[Celebrim]

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.

Isn't he though? These kids; always think their generation was the first to discover things. Toon is so far ahead of its time in every way you have to wonder how it would have impacted RPG development if it hadn't been built as a silly/comedy game. You could have also mentioned Traveller (1977), C&S (1977), Ars Magica (1988) and Pendragon (1990) in that list. And that's not even to get into how many tables had diverged in practice from exploring RPG in more of a theater game mode than a wargame mode regardless of mechanics or had turned mechanics on their head to support that, or what was going on in LARPs. The very fact that early games didn't tell groups how to use their mechanics often meant that two different tables with the same rules were playing different games entirely.

IMO, there is very little that Indy games like FATE or BW do that wasn't done before them. I'm not sure about DitV, which in my opinion is further a field in its mechanics and desires than either of them, but I'm fairly sure that the sort of play its intended to create isn't novel. (Is their an earlier generation example of an RPG built around bidding to obtain the conch and FitB in RPGs?) What makes all of them different is a conscious combination of mechancs toward a particular end, but its definately more evolutionary than revolutionary IMO (especially given the relatively low adoption rate of these new games, fairly or unfairly).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

Yeah, in our group we just banned everything past core 3, except the Complete Priest's Handbook and a couple other minor things. The rest was almost all clearly WAY out of balance with the core material and invited all sorts of rules issues with little practical gain. A lot of it was fun to read, but rules-wise it was mostly kinda crap. That wasn't a big deal though, we were used to 1e, and had similar feelings about UA, so we pretty much didn't feel a huge need for 100's of character options at that time (though in a way the lack of good ones was a fault).

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.

Well, I thought, from my initial reading of 3e PHB when it came out and subsequent experience, that the 3e rules were very poorly thought-out in some ways. I agree it was mostly intended and envisaged as a cleanup and rationalization of 2e, but they simply failed to appreciate the implications of the new subsystems in obvious ways. I assume this was a type of playtest blindness where they just didn't even consider how people would actually play. The missteps thus seemed deep in the sense that fixing them required a pretty deep rewrite. From my perspective 4e DID address them.

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.

Yeah, I think 2e was too conservative, and then they added loads of stuff on top of its basically 1e 1977-vintage engine and it created a lot of issues. I think 2e was very nicely written, it just wasn't mechanically up to the task that was given to it. I can understand their desire to keep backwards-compatibility, etc. There's no way of establishing if what they published was the better or worse choice vs some deeper restructuring.

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).

I think there are some real modernizations and improvements that exist in 4e. Mike has talked about things like human factors and presentation aspects where they did a lot of market and product research. 4e also front-loads a lot of work on character gen and sets a standard in clarity of rules presentation, etc. I think those are very definite advances that have little to do with specifics of what the rules are or how the game plays. I'd assume those features will be present in DDN.

Again, I don't know what level of 1e compatibility 2e really HAD to have. All I know is it was too much for many people's tastes. The whole "Baatezu thing" just made us laugh and roll our eyes at the silliness of TSR. We all knew what to call devils and demons etc and it was all just a joke. In fact the funniest part of it was the whole anti-D&D craze was mostly an early 80's thing anyway. It was like TSR was reacting to some lunacy that most people had already forgotten. Maybe it was a big deal to someone somewhere, but it meant squat to us.