[Forked from the Escapist Magazine Interview Thread] What implications does E...

[Neonchameleon]

There seems to be a COLOSSAL amount of energy here spent trying to argue that someone who has a different experience is just having BadWrongFun,

You might want to read that word again. BadwrongFun. The point of this thread is that people were having BadWrongNOTFun because Eladrin teleportation made worldbuilding improbable. On a different thread, one that did not start out about the claim that Blink Elves ruined worldbuilding and forced mental gymnastics the response would be very different. But this thread is about how 4E trashes worldbuilding (or doesn't).

If you want to make your Eladrin into scatological jerks by "birding" no one is stopping you. Any more than they are stopping you having people climbing trees and doing this (although I don't want that form of watersports in my game, thank you and would rather it not be associated with the hobby). And when you personally are saying that 4E enables this specific DM in a thread that was set up about statements that unjustifiably run down 4E it is very hard to read that as a good faith "Isn't this thing cool" post rather than a "4e sucks" post.

And had this thread started "Hey, Cool! I've just build a wonderful Eladrin city full of gleaming spires and mystical architecture based on Eladrin Teleportation! What else have you done with it?" things would be very different.

as if it's some sort of grand attack on some core principle of the game to say that you don't like how eladrin teleportation affects the world you make.

Once again you are creating a straw man for the purpose of beating on it. The issue isn't people who don't like Eladrin teleportation. It's people who don't like their imagined version of Eladrin teleportation that does not match what happens under the actual rules of 4e.

I don't know when or how or why the bamf became such a totemic rallying point of sacred gameplay that Thou Must Be OK With.

Have you been reading this thread? Because no one, so far as I know has been saying "You must have Eladrin." What's being said is "If you are going to object to the worldbuilding issues Eladrin create, at least be honest about them. Don't make up stuff."

I don't know what makes it worth all this line-in-the-sand "you're with blink elves or against all of 4e!" sound and fury.

Your imagination. Nothing more, nothing less.

I don't know when keyholes became a point of system failure

When @DDNextFan claimed there was nothing preventing people teleporting through vault doors because they could look through the keyhole. There are plenty of other ways of dealing with this - but the simplest is to use actual vault doors rather than stick keyholes right the way through them.

If it's causing you some stress, you might want to try on the counterpoint for size: that it's OK for someone to not like eladrin teleportation.

No one is saying it isn't. This is you personally misreading the thread. It's OK to not like Eladrin teleportation. What's not OK is to blame the system for your misunderstanding of Eladrin Teleportation.

That you don't have to tell them that they have to like it.

Once again, I do not believe anyone is doing this. What they are being told is that saying you dislike bunnies because they are four legged carnivores with long snouts and canine teeth is silly. And that bunnies are a different animal - it's possible to object to them (and for good reason) - but if you can't tell a bunny from a wolf then the fault isn't that of the bunny.

That people can play this game in different ways and still have fun.

No one is disputing this. What is being complained about is once again when people have BadWrongNOTFun and blame it on the system.

I mean, what's at stake?

Basic civility. Something that ENWorld frequently has problems with - and why the anti-edition warring policy of ENWorld has been largely toothless.

Making up nonsense about a game, insisting in the face of the rules of that game that your interpretation of the rules is correct, and then trashing the game based not on the actual game but on the version that you have made up is probably the single most common form of edition warring. It is also, at least to me, one of the most obnoxious because people start to believe such myths.

To me the statement "You are free to your own opinions. You are not free to your own facts." is fundamental to discourse because without it there is no common ground. Making stuff up to castigate things you dislike is far worse than ad hominem attacks. Ad hominem you can ignore. But cleaning up misconceptions takes an order of magnitude longer than spreading them.

 

[Hussar]

Look, I couldn't care less that someone doesn't like Eladrin teleport. That's groovy. I saw the OP, which claimed that eladrin teleport was so disruptive to world building concerns that it destroyed a game. So, I wanted to see what those disruptions actually were. Apparently, those disruptions were the result of the PC eladrin rogue teleporting through keyholes into a vault.

I'm pretty sure that I would not find that too much to handle if I was DMing that game, so, yeah, I'm going to stand by the statement of, "Really? THAT'S what broke your game?"

Hey, fine, no problems. But, let's call a digging implement a digging implement. To me, this is a massive over reaction to a pretty minor element of the game. I find it frankly baffling that THIS breaks the game, but the other seven hundred impossible things we have to swallow before breakfast aren't a problem. So, yup, I accept that this is DDNFan's feelings. And I honestly believe that he honestly believes what he's saying. I also think that it's not something I would even consider so much as a ripple in the difficulties in world building in D&D.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Ah, just 'cuz it doesn't matter how hard you scream at auntie mildred, she's not going to come back to life.

And this is at the very least pouring oil on the troubled fires of the edition wars, and I'd call it pure edition warring myself.

Inspiration can not, as far as I know, raise the dead in 4E at all. PC or Auntie Mildred. It's not something that happens in any edition including 4E. But it is one of the misrepresentations that anti-4E edition warriors love to use to show how unrealistic and ridiculous 4E is. (See also "Shouting hands back on").

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

But that's not really your position, right? I mean, it sounds silly, to insist that someone's experience is illigitmate because they have keyholes? Wouldn't it be much more in line with how people actually play the game to understand that people have different experiences and that what works for one table doesn't work for others and that some games don't have blink elves and that's OK? Isn't that a lot more reasonable than insisting that D&D games with keyholes are somehow taboo and that everyone must accept eladrin teleport as not a big deal or be banished from the game?

I see no indication that anyone has a problem with people playing differently or having different tastes. NOBODY BUT YOU ever brought up words like 'badwrongfun' or 'illigitimate', etc. ALL we pointed out was that it is ludicrously easy to say "eladrin don't use 2-sided through-door Victorian style keyholes" and it fixed a major part of the problem, along with a whole raft of other EXCEEDINGLY minor things that are at the level of stuff DM's decide on the fly every day. So we have come to the conclusion that the failure here was not of the GAME, but of the people playing it. They didn't take responsibility for their own fun and even try FEEBLY to make it work for them. When they have tried, at least a tiny bit, then I will stop dismissing their protestations and take them seriously. Until then telling us that we're accusing people of 'badwrongfun' is ridiculous. Its a horse you need to stop trying to ride, because it isn't going anywhere.

End of argument? Silliness? Bunkum? Man, you gotta chill out, we are literally talking about magical elves in a game of make-believe, this isn't anything like an argument. Arguments are what you have with your family at the holidays. And "bunkum" is what you shout at them if you're a snake-oil salesman from 1884.

I'm just having fun with it. Honestly, this is as you said a discussion of blink elves, not something to take seriously, so I tend to wax a bit silly at times.

If you can't find a rule that says that all eladrin don't teleport, then someone's reading of that racial ability as true in all cases of the race is just as valid as someone reading that racial ability as only true in specific cases. It's not wrong to play a game where only certain eladrin teleport, butit's not wrong to do it some other way, either. The point is, experiences are different.

I think you just don't get the point here. It isn't about 'valid' or 'invalid' readings of the rules. Its about missing the whole POINT of the rules, which is to make a fun game. If the game wasn't fun then they needed to take charge and make some sort of change. The only reason I mentioned the interpretation of the rules was to illustrate how TRIVIAL the change need be, just interpreting an existing rule differently. If there is no wrong or right way to do that then why was it a barrier to the people having this complaint? In that sense YES THEY WERE WRONG because they interpreted it in an unfun (for them) way. What you will NEVER hear me saying is "calling it unfun is BS, they need to define fun just like I do". THAT would be me being an arse.

There seems to be a COLOSSAL amount of energy here spent trying to argue that someone who has a different experience is just having BadWrongFun, and that they must accept blink elves as not having a major world effect or be Doing D&D Wrong, So Say The Fun Police, So Say We All, as if it's some sort of grand attack on some core principle of the game to say that you don't like how eladrin teleportation affects the world you make. I don't know when or how or why the bamf became such a totemic rallying point of sacred gameplay that Thou Must Be OK With. I don't know what makes it worth all this line-in-the-sand "you're with blink elves or against all of 4e!" sound and fury. I don't know when keyholes became a point of system failure. This doesn't seem like the game I've been playing for the last 6 years, the game I think of as the most flexible and solid of any version of D&D. That's not a game that relies on eladrin teleportation being OK to function. That's not a game that MUST be played with them in it.

If it's causing you some stress, you might want to try on the counterpoint for size: that it's OK for someone to not like eladrin teleportation. That it's really not a big deal. That they get to not like eladrin teleportation if that's what makes them happier in their games. That you don't have to tell them that they have to like it. That people can play this game in different ways and still have fun.

I mean, what's at stake? What harm would taking that position do to you? If you put away the Fun Police badge and become OK with people playing the game in different ways, what do you lose?

Its so bizarre that you first say that if we tell people to reinterpret things in a fun way for them we're being insensitive clods who don't understand the different brands of fun, and then at the same time its all no big deal and we shouldn't make issue with something that WE DIDN'T COMPLAIN ABOUT TO START WITH. I have no stress on this subject, the guy that wrote the diatribe about how blink elves ruined his game is the one you need to be talking to.

So, let me just say it again for clarity. The only way to 'play wrong' is to not have fun. If you are not having fun then you need to take charge of your fun and change something so that it is fun. In this case that would have been INCREDIBLY easy, to the point where the group had to almost go out of its way to have a bad time. This is their business, they have the 'right' to do whatever they want, but they don't have any business complaining about the game in this case. The complaint is ridiculous and specious. If it were a complaint about some fundamental aspect of 4e then it would be just "OK, you are entitled to your tastes in games, we disagree but that's cool".

Can you grasp what I'm getting at here? It just seems to be rolling right off somehow. We aren't criticising anyone for their tastes. We ARE criticising them for their incredible unwillingness to own the consequences of their tastes and do something about it, and that's a perfectly legitimate thing to do.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I have to agree with [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] and [MENTION=4139]Neo[/MENTION]nchemeleon. I don't really want to get into some big debate of this being an 'edition war' issue, but its DOES smell of haterism. This was a VERY common pattern with people who really actively disliked 4e. You take a very trivial and often common aspect of the game, warp it by whatever interpretation, unfavorable (mis)reading of the rules, or just beat on it as "my sensibilities are unable to encompass this" and RIDE that baby for the next four years. Perhaps we are all VERY impatient with it and simply call it out and burn it the millisecond we see a sign of it, but given that the community did virtually nothing but poop (I'd use a less polite term) on my gaming preferences for the last 5 years straight I just have no interest in seeing even the faintest whiff of it and won't tolerate it at all. This might make me a bit reactionary, but so be it.

In the interests of peace and friendliness and burying the hatchet that got stuck in my head lest it get wielded against others I'm not climbing Mt Edition War again by any means. However, I think the guy could have been looking for a reason to not like his 4e experience, and eladrin teleporting through keyholes was the vehicle. I could be wrong.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Note, KM, you are defending the guy who decided that having keyholes made the game unplayable and quit because of it.

You might want to back off from the idea that we're being too inflexible in our point of view.

1) I'm not defending a guy. I'm defending anyone's ability to play D&D however they have fun with D&D. Which includes nixing elements they don't like for whatever arbitrary reason they don't like 'em.

2) Specifically, I'm defending anyone's ability to say that they don't like eladrin teleportation.

3) The counterpoint I'm criticizing is the idea that no one should actually have a problem with eladrin teleportation -- the asumption that if they do, they are Doing D&D Wrong. That is, to borrow a fun little phrase, bunkum.

4) I'm not really interested in backing off of the idea that someone who mandates that another player be cool with some arbitrary game element is being inflexible. Yeah, if you're saying that playing 4e D&D requires you to accept eladrin teleportation, you are being much more inflexible than someone who says it doesn't. The first solution to people quitting over minor game elements like this is to not imagine that they are sacrosanct and inviolate things that must be accepted as they were handed down from on high -- to be able to tell them, "Well, okay, just do something else, not a big deal."

If someone's reading of the rules is causing their game to collapse because of keyholes, and that's not the most natural reading of the rules, are we still sure that it's a valid reading?

Since there's no Fun Police or Natural-Reading-O-Meter that objectively quantifies and enforces these things, we have no choice but to rely on people applying their best understanding. D&D's never really been a game about One True Way To Play.

Look, I couldn't care less that someone doesn't like Eladrin teleport. That's groovy.

All right then, apparently we can drop the idea that someone is applying the rules wrong or that the complaint is illegitimate.

To me, this is a massive over reaction to a pretty minor element of the game. I find it frankly baffling that THIS breaks the game, but the other seven hundred impossible things we have to swallow before breakfast aren't a problem. So, yup, I accept that this is DDNFan's feelings. And I honestly believe that he honestly believes what he's saying. I also think that it's not something I would even consider so much as a ripple in the difficulties in world building in D&D.

Different folks got different problems. There might be ways to solve it or not have it, but whatever. Nobody needs to do any of that solving. They can just kick eladrin out of their games if that breaks it for them and keep on keepin' on.

Is it fragile if this breaks their game? Sure. But D&D is optional, it has to compete with other stuff for our attention, and our attention is very fragile. If DDNFan's handle is any indication, it sounds like 5e, with its stripped-down basic core, is going to be right up his ally, and he knows it. Plus, it sounds like those who really like eladrin teleportation will probably be able to still do it, if they want. And viola!, we have a robust game that can accommodate multiple playstyles and no one has to tell anyone else that they're an Edition Warrior if they don't like Rule X.

I don't really want to get into some big debate of this being an 'edition war' issue, but its DOES smell of haterism. This was a VERY common pattern with people who really actively disliked 4e. You take a very trivial and often common aspect of the game, warp it by whatever interpretation, unfavorable (mis)reading of the rules, or just beat on it as "my sensibilities are unable to encompass this" and RIDE that baby for the next four years.

People get to like or dislike anything for any arbitrary reason they want, ya know? Some people don't like 4e. Some of them don't like it for completely irrational reasons. You can't make someone like something they don't want to like with reasonable debate and discussion. It doesn't reach the level of Edition War until they start playing Fun Police and telling everyone else that 4e is objectively somehow awful in some way that everyone who is a reasonable person must surely agree with.

"I don't like teleporting eladrin" is a fine (if kind of shallow) reason to not like 4e, if that's what kills it for you. People get to be arbitrary about that noise. It's their own subjective experience.

It becomes an Edition War when someone says "You are WRONG to not like teleporting eladrin!" or "You CANNOT enjoy teleporting eladrin!" When you presume to speak for the game as a whole or start trying to define what others can do with it. Avoid that, and everything else is just wishy-washy subjective independent arbitrary whatevering.

I mean, someone could say "I hate 4e because I don't like THAC0," and they'd be very silly for saying that, and they're wrong, on so many levels, but that's their right. Whatever, man. When someone says "No one with any wit likes 4e because it has THAC0, which only idiots like, BAB is clearly superior in every relevant way" then, whatever wrong-ness they have, they're being an edition warrior, which deserves the mod-bombs.

 

[Hussar]

In the OP, I quoted DDNFan. This was his first reply in this thread.

All of these occurred to my party's eladrin blink-charging thief within two minutes of entry. No keyholes. No gates. No walls less than 40 feet high. No arrow slits at any height. And then our DM realized the whole town was designed for a non-teleporting race.

That's more or less when we quit playing entirely. This is what you get when you design your adventures in a vaccuum. So before people jump on my comment as edition warring (it is not), or out of the blue, think of it more like poor adventure design, by adventure designers who think of everything in terms of combat stat blocks and not on a holistic level.

All of these interviews with people from Kobold press and Mike Mearls and so on, bring home the fact that adventure design is more organic and free-flow, involving more than just the combat pillar of the game. When you take the blinkers off, you're forced to confront the story implausibilities of having races that value shiny objects with poorly thought out, poorly designed defenses. It was a matter of minutes that we deconstructed that entire setting as being basically a lazy hack.

Now, look at the issues he's talking about - keyholes, gates, walls 40 feet high, no arrow slits at any height. I mean, anything that's more than 25 feet stops teleport. How was the town actually designed for a non-teleporting race? Does he mean that there SHOULD be these things? Is that the issue here? I though the issue was that there was these sorts of things, and eladrin teleport made them pointless. That was the sense I certainly got later.

Perhaps a bit clearer post on the issues from [MENTION=6776483]DDNFan[/MENTION] might clear this up a bit. What exactly is the issue here?

 

[pemerton]

there's no Fun Police or Natural-Reading-O-Meter that objectively quantifies and enforces these things, we have no choice but to rely on people applying their best understanding.

In that case, how did you work out that 4e's rules are too fragile?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

In the OP, I quoted DDNFan. This was his first reply in this thread.



Now, look at the issues he's talking about - keyholes, gates, walls 40 feet high, no arrow slits at any height. I mean, anything that's more than 25 feet stops teleport. How was the town actually designed for a non-teleporting race? Does he mean that there SHOULD be these things? Is that the issue here? I though the issue was that there was these sorts of things, and eladrin teleport made them pointless. That was the sense I certainly got later.

Perhaps a bit clearer post on the issues from @DDNFan might clear this up a bit. What exactly is the issue here?

See, this is why my first comment was "why pick out eladrin?" ANY D&D adventure is equally silly and improbable and incoherent. ALL OF THEM. Believe me we used to sit around the table back in the day and when the mood struck us totally deconstruct every aspect of different adventures and setting material. Its NEVER going to be that consistent. No one person can possibly encompass in their mind all the possibilities and work out every different element of the world, culture, etc in a consistent and coherent manner. The whole thing is ALWAYS a facade. The DM and adventure/setting designer draw a picture and present action and plot against it in such a way that HOPEFULLY the players don't get all caught up in some logical inconsistency.

It may or may not be 'lazy design' when something is inconsistent. I guess there can be better and worse game materials and taste is of course paramount, but again it seems to me that the participants in the game are the front line. Its their job to find the particular elements of the game that do work for them and make a fun game out of that. If a setting isn't fun for them, pick a different one. If a game isn't fun, pick a different one. If its legitimate to defend the [MENTION=6776483]DDNFan[/MENTION] on the basis of "all taste is valid" then the GAME ITSELF has to be defended on the same basis, and the setting/adventure he complains about equally so. It just reduces all discussion to pointlessness.

 

[billd91]

In the interests of peace and friendliness and burying the hatchet that got stuck in my head lest it get wielded against others I'm not climbing Mt Edition War again by any means. However, I think the guy could have been looking for a reason to not like his 4e experience, and eladrin teleporting through keyholes was the vehicle. I could be wrong.

It's too late. You're already engaged in edition warring. Notice the tribalism in this thread. Notice how the lines are drawn. Notice how you've taken a complaint about a significant power not being taken into account in an adventure's setting has been blown into a tribal war. This thread is extremely edition warry... but not in the way that you think and not in the way that you're claiming. It's full of the exact behavior that blew the place up into edition wars in the first place. KM's right. There's tons of badwrongfun lurking just below the surface here.

And the mods should shut the thread down. It's long past its usefulness.