Heinsoo on Alignment & Rebranding

[I'm A Banana]

I think you're right, but I think it's also labeled "don't take this."

Ah, sure. IIRC, the Evil alignments in 3e were also pretty explicitly labeled that way, too: "This is the worst alignment because XYZ."

 

[Mournblade94]

Emphasis mine. At the risk of coming this side of edition-warring:

I've had a horrible sinking theory since 2008 that 4e was a reaction to trying to close the barn doors that the OGL left wide open. So much of the game seemed different-for-differents-sake that it felt like someone overlooking things kept telling people to "change it up" and re-invent the wheel. Look at just some of the things we saw change:

1.) Alignment. While early O/BD&D did use the three-alignment system, most of D&D 1977-2007 used the nine-alignment grid that was common parlance among gamers. We might debate the finer points of what Lawful Good behavior IS, but no one could ignore the fact LG was recognizable. Changing that robbed its special symmetry.
2.) The Planes. I admit, I like 4e's cosmology, esp the feywild. However, The Great Wheel was again 30 years old at that time and had survived rebranding (Baator, Mechanus, Arborea) before. 4e's cosmology tossed much of that into the dumpster, only to slowly bring it back anyway in the form of Astral Realms anyway.
3.) Monster naming: Many monsters got descriptive adjectives added to them. Mostly, this was to distinguish them from monsters of the same type but different level/stats, but it also did create non-OGL variants of rather mundane monsters, like giant scorpions, wights, or kobolds.
4.) Tightening of Equipment to Archetype: In 2008-9, rogue were pretty much limited short blades and crossbows with leather armor by their powers, creating a distinct "image" of a D&D rogue. That makes it easy to produce art, minis, etc when you know a rogue is going to have a crossbow and daggers, a ranger has a longbow and two swords, a paladin wears plate while a fighter is in scale, a wizard has an orb or a staff, etc.
5.) Initial Offerings: 4e was the first edition of D&D since Basic that didn't begin with a druid, bard, or gnome in the PHB. It instead added the IP-locked Warlord and Warlock, as well as the Dragonborn and Eladrin (both not in the 3e SRD) to the mix. Even tieflings (OGL thanks to the Monster Manual) got a revised origin, abilities, and unified look (easier to make minis, art, etc).
6.) Power Names: Yeah, a few iconics (Magic Missile, Fireball, Sleep, Cure Light Wounds) reappeared in the PHB as selectable powers, but a goodly chunk of powers were new names. Some of this was necessity (rogues and fighters didn't have powers, new names were required) but due to the nature of the power system and siloing of spells into rituals, it was very common to see wizards and clerics (not to mention druids, sorcerers, and bards) never learn-nor-cast a single "spell" from 3e in favor of all new powers, spells, and variants.

I used to say 4e didn't feel like D&D, but I sometimes think that was an intended effect. It wasn't supposed to feel like 1e/2e/3e, it was just borrowing some of its concepts and dressing. I think part of it was designed to create a "new" D&D that wasn't open like 3e's OGL. (Indeed, the 4e license shows how much they wanted to keep it in house). Doing that would require new races, classes, spells, monsters, places and terminology. So 4e went back and reinvented the wheel on things to create the "new stories" that Paizo, Goodman, or anyone else couldn't recreate with the SRD.

Incidentally, when Essentials came out I think the tide had shifted and they had opted to "embrace" the traditions of old rather than continue building new (or rebuilding). Tonally, it shares more in common with Next's "Old with a modern twist" than 4e's "Rebuilt from the Ground Up" approach.

Its funny that you write all this. I have been told several times that the reason I don't like 4e is because people observe me expecting it to play like older editions.

Well yes I do. If I cannot play the new D&D the way I played the OLD D&D then what is the point.? I might as well just go play another game entirely.

Indeed I think those people were right. I do not like 4e because I expect it to be too much like what D&D was before. That is NOT my fault. A game with D&D on the cover I expect to play like D&D. When I want to play a different game, I do that. What I did not want was for a game called D&D to force me to drop my expectations of how a D&D game should be played. I have run alot of 4e for encounters and such, but my fun only derived from the reactions of the players, never from whtat the game was doing. I only ran the 4e for the encounters program, but I would have had fun with any game I was running due to the players I was getting.

So when people tell me I do not like 4e because i was doing it wrong, well 4e gave me no reason or benefit to do it right.

 

[Alzrius]

No, it's not exclusionary but if we are being that broad then there ARE no new stories, ever.

Yeah, but that's a viable take on the whole thing, as per [MENTION=2067]Kamikaze Midget[/MENTION].

I think they mean "new stories" in terms of the very specific details of those stories.

If you want them to be specific enough, then I suppose that might be true, but the level of granularity there is so high that I suspect that that's highly impractical. If your story has to involve the Raven Queen, for example, and can't have any other kind of goddess, no matter how similar, then you have a point. But anything less than that level of specificity can be overcome with creativity, and comparatively not that much, at least to my mind.

It's likely this story is actually one that can't be run in 4e at all. Demons want to destroy the universe in 4e. It's unlikely that they'd spend their time cultivating relationships of any kind.

Part of the point of that story was that everything has exceptions and outliers, and I see no reason why that can't be true in 4E. Certainly, there are demons in pre-4E that want to destroy everything.

But the kind of things you'd see in the Abyss and Hell would be completely different in the 2 editions given they are very different places. Also, you might be willing to take the risk given that there is no particular dislike between demons and devils in 4e but you might not want to involve yourself in the Blood War. They'd be different stories in the 2 editions: The reasons to go on the quests would be different, the places you'd visit would be different and it's likely your interactions with the creatures would be different.

There's nothing particularly inherent regarding those differences, though. Gauging the level of danger, or noting what those specific dangers are, have virtually nothing to do with the setting backgrounds across the editions. Hell and the Abyss are going to be dangerous if you cross them using routes that specifically avoid the Blood War in 2E, for example (since that was largely fought on the planes between Hell and the Abyss), which makes it functionally no different than using a 4E route between the two planes.

Likewise, there's no particular reason for the locales to be all that different. The closest you can say in this regard is that the Abyss would have a more elemental theme, but there were layers of the Abyss in pre-4E that had that (e.g. my namesake's layer was a fiery place called Conflagratum).

That example is just too similar in the two editions. Let's say a story about attempting to find a Elemental Gem created by the Primordials during their war against the Gods. It is now in the elemental chaos in an ice fortress with lava running through it guarded by elementals of all 4 varieties. The fortress can be reached by walking. It isn't environmentally dangerous to the PCs.

That story would be difficult, if not impossible to run in previous editions. The old elemental planes don't really allow that as an option. The reason the planes are different is because the alignments are different so the planes no longer need to be tied to them.

I dunno, at a glance that sounds a lot like the Temple of Elemental Evil (hence the "elemental" in the title, plus the Tharizdun connection). I might be wrong, as I'm not that familiar with that adventure or its retreads, but that shows that it's hardly impossible to make that in older editions.

Yes, but you can't run the story where one member Galactic Senate on Coruscant can't seem to get off the planet without coming up with a LOT of convoluted reasons why there are no starships around. Yes, MANY stories can be told. But some cannot. That's fine. Restrictions often cause some of the best creativity. However, if you want to open it up to entirely new stories something changing the restrictions helps.

The reasons need be neither numerous nor convoluted. Your ship is shot down onto a hostile world with no sentient life by an enemy senator's hired gun, who's now tracking you and your senator down to kill you. Bam, that's an adventure, and an eminently plausible one to boot. True, it's not on a city-planet, but the problem of having no starships available in a galactic hub isn't a Star Wars-specific problem.

Yeah, I believe it's true for 1e, 2e, 3e, and 3.5e. Though I could be wrong about 1e and 2e. It's been a while. I do remember 2e having some way to detect powerful as opposed to weak evil creatures.

I'll check on that when I get home.

That said, it's just one of the reasons why this isn't an issue in older editions. Same for a magic item of undetectable alignment.

 

[innerdude]

I'm suspicious whenever marketing is giving R&D (which is what the designers are) their marching orders. It seems like there's something remarkably backwards about the business model when that happens. Rather than making a valuable product and preparing it well for the most receptive market, they're concerned with finding a receptive market and making a product that (might?) meet that market's needs. Re-branding influencing game design speaks to some severely mis-aligned priorities in management, I think.

This. THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS ad inifinitum.

 

[scott2978]

For example:
"So, the king's new wife is secretly a succubus. She's controlling him. Wait, I can't do that. The king's best friend is a Paladin so he'd be able to detect that the queen was evil. But wait, maybe the succubus has a magic item of some sort that masks her alignment."

Not sure if this is just a bad example but I don't see any problem with the alignment system. The problem in the example has more to do with poor story writing by the GM than with the alignment system. Why does the kings new wife have to be a succubus? Why does it have to be a secret? Who is it a secret from? The real question is "what is the GM trying to accomplish with this story?" Depending on that, pretty much any story can be done in pretty much any edition of pretty much any RPG. Plus, if you embrace alignment as a storytelling tool instead of seeing it as a storytelling obstacle, the possibilities explode.

For example maybe the king is fully aware that his new wife is a succubus, and so is his best friend the paladin, and it's only a secret to the PCs. So the paladin, being incapable (or unwilling) to take action against the succubus (who is now the rightful queen of the realm!) because the king is his best friend and also his sworn leige (and/or perhaps his previously sworn oath to fall upon his sword rather than bring the slightest harm to the royal family which now includes a succubus!) "silently" recruits the player characters to deal with the situation. So now the alignment system is not only NOT an impediment to the story, it suddenly becomes the impetous driving the story. What are the PCs alignments? Do they all agree? Or even better... what if the paladin IS a PC?!

All that and you didn't change a single stat block on anything, give anyone any magic items, or do any serious thinking about how/why you were going to fit a succubus into the story. Feel free to concoct some reason for your succubus being there in the first place, or not. You can also just let the truth evolve as the players investigate the situation. But to the point, alignment game mechanics don't really get in the way of telling any kind of story.

 

[Gadget]

Too bad, as I thought the 4e alignment system was superior to the lame 9 alignment grid. Especially the addition of 'unaligned' as an option; that was a long overdue innovation. I've always felt that the 9 alignment system was too much of trying to force everything into various buckets that either weren't fine grained enough for what they were trying to do, or too fine grained for little benefit they gave to the game. The fact that the whole planes structure and multi-universe seemed to blindly follow the alignment structure to a large degree didn't help matters much either.

 

[Jacob Marley]

Ah, sure. IIRC, the Evil alignments in 3e were also pretty explicitly labeled that way, too: "This is the worst alignment because XYZ."

Close. The wording was: [alignment] is the most dangerous alignment because..., slightly different connotations.

 

[I'm A Banana]

When I read that one of the considerations was to enable new stories, I don't read that as "D&D is so confining for all the stories that we've wanted to tell!"

I read that as "Lets give our DMs the tools to not re-tread the same tired old stories that we've been doing in D&D since forever. Lets not return to the temple of elemental evil (again), or have a tomb of horrors II electric boogaloo, lets do new and different and exciting things."

And the new alignment system fits that plan, since it lays out a pretty dramatic core conflict in 4e, rather than the assorted pick-n-mix conflicts of previous e's. It's a bold new story.

It's also the only story that 4e was really concerned with helping you tell. Which is where 4e might've stepped into the weeds a bit.

 

[the Jester]

This is true for more recent editions (e.g. 3E). I'm not sure how true that is for the older ones (my books are at home).

It goes back at least to 1e; not sure about anything before that.

 

[scott2978]

Too bad, as I thought the 4e alignment system was superior to the lame 9 alignment grid. Especially the addition of 'unaligned' as an option; that was a long overdue innovation. I've always felt that the 9 alignment system was too much of trying to force everything into various buckets that either weren't fine grained enough for what they were trying to do, or too fine grained for little benefit they gave to the game. The fact that the whole planes structure and multi-universe seemed to blindly follow the alignment structure to a large degree didn't help matters much either.

I don't know much about 4e, but what's the difference between unaligned and neutral? Choosing an alignment that's not an alignment just sounds munchkin to me.

I know a guy who runs his 3.5 game with no alignments. It works for him most of the time but it takes constant reworking of the rules, and game balance is often skewed because alignment is also a game balance tool. With complex systems like 3.5 it's often a slippery slope changing things and alignment isn't as insignificant as it may seem at first.

Without getting too far off topic into a discussion of what alignments mean, I'll say it would be nice to have more definition in the rules as to just how to apply it to common situations. The ubiquitous scenario "Do you kill the baby orcs?" comes to mind.

But I digress... changing stuff, especially iconic stuff like alignment, so drastically in 4e does seem to be driving all the "does it still feel like D&D?" questions coming from 5e development. My playgroup didn't think about changing editions until years after Pathfinder had come out, but it was that exact thing that made PF much more appealing than 4e. And I think brand identity in the internet age is worth a lot less than the bean counters think. Branding didn't stop eveyone I know from choosing Pathfinder instead of a less attractive "D&D" branded option. That said, not many of us were happy about that either, so maybe brand identity does count for something... just not what they think.