Lurks-no-More said:
With the red/blue/green/black boxed D&D sets (the ones w. Elmore dragon art), shifting later to AD&D 2e (and from there, to 3e and 3.5).
OK, then.
There are several avenues where I have problems with the 4e releases thus far, but only two are relevant here. I will describe them under the headers "Basic Experience" and "Diversity of Experience". Although they are linked, I feel that doing so will make my position clearer. Please note also that this is a first real attempt to do this, so there will be a lot of rough edges.
Basic Experience
At its core, the basic experience of D&D has always been "an assemblage of characters go to mysterious places, encounter mysterious creatures, and seek treasure". This statement certainly isn't changing with 4e. Indeed, in some ways the 4e designers seem to be hearkening back to earlier editions, by making exploration a viable playstyle using the core rules.
And, if your understanding of the touchstones of the game is nothing more than this statement, then certainly 4e hasn't changed it. But the same statement could hold true for dozens of other games that are
not included in the basic experience of D&D. The basic experience of D&D -- the core experience, if you will, or the game's core identity -- has always been related to what those elements are and how those elements interact.
In this sense, D&D's "mythology" (as used earlier, as the trappings of the world, society, races, magic, gods and monsters shameless ripped off from other fantasy sources and filtered through the Gygaxian lens) is part of its core identity. The inclusion of new elements to that core identity can expand and strengthen it. The loss of the strongest elements of that core identity can only weaken it.
Here's an easy example: Alignment. One of the primary tenets of fantasy, going back before the term "fantasy" was used, is that moral choices have consequence in the real world. This is as true for
The Golden Compass as it is for
The Lord of the Rings as it is for King Arthur, as it is for Beowulf, as it is for Gilgamesh. Alignment in D&D has always been used as a tool to bring this into the game.
There has also been a nice side benefit to this method of growing the core identity: As players/DMs read more, they encountered echoes of the game they were playing. One could pick up almost any fantasy novel (and still can to this day, including modern fantasy) and discover things that D&D reflects, or that reflect D&D. In this way, the simple act of reading or seeing a movie recharges creative batteries and increases both the range and the depth of what might occur in the game.
This is not just a "good" basis for the game, it is a bloody brilliant one, and one whose like has never been matched.
If, on the other hand, "an assemblage of characters go to mysterious places, encounter mysterious creatures, and seek treasure", is all there is to D&D's core identity, then "an assemblage of scarab beetles go to mysterious dungheaps, encounter mysterious bugs, and seek dung" would be as appealing as any other set-up.
It is not.
Diversity of Experience
Of course, not every DM/player likes alignment, or elves, or race restrictions on class. Each group playing the game alters things to make it more of what they want, and to make the game more rewarding for them. I am no exception to this rule. When playing 2e, my house rule document was 60+ pages (many relating to deities and specialty priests), and my 3e house rule document tops 600 pages.
However, I don't think that a DM should have to write that much simply to create diversity from the core. Which means that the names, concepts, and fluff text in the core should be as generic as possible, with expansions that broaden the horizon as much as possible. This is the 2e, and later the 3e, model.
And it is a good model.
It allows for an immersion in that brilliant core experience of the game without modification, and equally allows for modification to take the game away from that core experience into newer, less charted (or even uncharted) territories.
Some folks have claimed that making changes to 3e is difficult; i.e., that it is hard to run a low-magic game using the 3e core books. I don't believe this to be true. 3e is a wonderfully open system, as is best demonstrated by examining many of the 3rd-party offerings. It can support an astonishing array of worlds, from the "basic" Gygaxian D&D world to Victorian fantasy, to a Modern setting based of a Gygaxian world. If I wanted to run, say, a game based off of any novel's world, I would find it easier to do so using the basic 3e ruleset than any previous ruleset. Far from "not doing Conan well" (for example), D&D can do Conan by simply placing restrictions on what material is used.
But what is best is that it can do Conan in one scenario, and
Pirates of the Carribean in another, and
King Kong in yet a third, all within the same campaign world, and using the same characters at various levels/points in their adventuring career.
Why I Quit D&D
I have a ton of 2nd Edition materials, and I think TSR did some good work with that ruleset overall. But it's also the first (and thus far, only) edition of D&D that made me quit the game.
2e was produced at a time when (you guessed it) TSR was concerned about branding their product. Even though 2e is still fairly generic, TSR made a point that, while your work may include brownies, the TSR brownies were
a unique and special case of intellectual property owned by TSR.
Now, this was all ultra-light-touch branding, but it was much more pervasive than one might think at first brush. Where 1e had said, "here's a griffon," 2e said "here's a griffon, and here's what it eats, and here's how it acts." Similarly, 2e was not concerned with merely giving you elves, it was concerned with the particulars of elven society in a way that, in the end, made D&D less diverse the more materials you used.
More materials = more diversity is good.
More materials = less diversity is bad.
And it was the constant effort of battling the game's conception of what these things were that drove me away from D&D for a bit. Specifically, I found that when I was working on non-D&D fiction, the D&Disms kept trying to creep in. And, a lot of what TSR offered was really cool stuff, but it weighed me down. It quietly, and gently, restricted the way I viewed the game world.
So I quit. 3.0 brought me back.
4th Edition
I've run
Keep on the Borderlands using BD&D, 1e, 2e, and 3e. Doing so, in each case, required only minimal modification. I suspect that I will not be able to run
Keep on the Borderlands without heavy modification in 4e. In fact, I suspect that
Keep on the Shadowfell is supposed to be 4e's
Keep on the Borderlands. I begin to suspect that the delay in getting an SRD to third-party developers is to ensure that KotS becomes a shared experience. After all, you'll have nothing else to try.
I once participated in a thread about the rust monster, and the Mearls redesign of the same. In my view, coming from earlier versions of the game, the rust monster is a wonderfully adaptable creature that can be used in the game in several ways: used to detect seams of metal by the miner's guild, used to indicate old dwarf works (where it still seeks out mined and unmined ore), and explanation for why dwarfholds use stone doors with recessed hinges, even an intelligent genius of its kind that can be bargained with. Contrasting to this was the view that the rust monster could only be used as a "gotcha" monster that should really be statted as a hazard.
A lot of what I am reading about 4e strikes me as "rust monster is only a gotcha monster". Very little strikes me as "rust monster is a concept that can be used in many ways."
"Branding" is all about restricting options to a common denominator. As I said earlier, this is generally a bad thing for D&D. Fluff names like "Golden Wyvern Style" require more work to remove from the game than it seems on the surface, as Dr. Awkward pointed out so well. Indeed, it might be easier to stat up gnome PCs for yourself than to extract the common denominator fluff being built into the game's terminology.
Say what you like, but the concept of "lizard guys"
as a protagonist species is far, far less common as elves or dwarves in the same role. Offspring of devils/demons? Sure, that's fairly common (Merlin was one, according to some sources), but that could have been covered by a feat or a background "racial talent tree" available to any race. And "tiefling" is a (IMHO) stupid name that doesn't have the same instinctive meaning as even "tainted" would have (i.e., Merlin, tainted human wizard 16).
Ditching the Great Wheel? Meh. The Great Wheel only existed as an example of how to create your own cosmology, anyway. Trying to force your cosmology down my throat by tying the "new core" PC races into it? No bloody thank you.
D&D at its best is a toolbox of archetypes and options. The core ruleset should contain the means to deal with the most common archetypes/tropes. These are, IMHO, not being spread out because it is better for the game, but because it will induce you to buy later books in order to get, say, druids, or a widely beloved race/monster/whatever that just didn't make it into the "big three" books.
(The big three are the PHB, MM, and DMG, in case you are wondering....the only things you should have to buy to experience D&D's core identity, and the only things you
did have to buy before now.)
More materials = more diversity from core experience is good.
More materials = required for core experience is bad.
So to answer your question, the thing that is being removed by 4e that was supported by all the other editions, to varying degrees, and with varying degrees of emphasis, is the core identity of D&D itself: the trappings of the world, society, races, magic, gods and monsters shameless ripped off from other fantasy sources and filtered through the Gygaxian lens.
Add to it by all means. Take it away, though, and you deliver a weak sauce indeed. (Thanks, KM, for that phrase.)
RC
