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"Hot" take: Aesthetically-pleasing rules are highly overvalued
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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8113146" data-attributes="member: 82106"><p>Well, this all just reinforces my point. There was a lack of thinking things through. They had a game which was sold in the form of several books. What you describe (and this was born out in practice) is that the books were almost unsellable because they were obsolete from day 2. C 2008 WWW was simply not capable of supporting online tools of sufficient quality to make up for that (and WotC was frankly not competent to implement them). The .NET-based 'original' CB was one of the results, with all of the limitations and whatnot you describe. Beyond that, it was just unreasonable to expect most average players to fork out $7-10 a month for DDI. Given that they had no options! You could buy an obsolete book, or simply come to games and beg the geeks to do your character for you, maybe supplemented with some quick browsing of the DM's supplement collection (followed by the inevitable "yeah, it doesn't work that way anymore"). </p><p>MMO games with huge budgets like WoW can afford to operate this way, yes, because they had the $100 million needed to write custom client software for every platform, and then the mass scale of the MMO to bring people in and get them to pay. D&D is not really a mass scale game, it is a game of many independent groups, and you will not get them to all expend the resources to be online, not even most of them.</p><p>So, the core design of 4e was not just inelegant, but that inelegance in the Power system (the heart of 4e) DOOMED it to being unscalable. This is what I saw on day one. There was incoherence between the design and the clear business and entertainment goals of the game, which in the end was pretty disastrous really. An elegant solution, one single unified list of powers (or at least smaller lists) would have mitigated that and allowed the game to scale much better. Heck, they could have just released supplements with ENTIRE REWRITES of ALL THE POWERS in each one! lol. (yeah, accusations of 4.1, etc. but so what).</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 8113146, member: 82106"] Well, this all just reinforces my point. There was a lack of thinking things through. They had a game which was sold in the form of several books. What you describe (and this was born out in practice) is that the books were almost unsellable because they were obsolete from day 2. C 2008 WWW was simply not capable of supporting online tools of sufficient quality to make up for that (and WotC was frankly not competent to implement them). The .NET-based 'original' CB was one of the results, with all of the limitations and whatnot you describe. Beyond that, it was just unreasonable to expect most average players to fork out $7-10 a month for DDI. Given that they had no options! You could buy an obsolete book, or simply come to games and beg the geeks to do your character for you, maybe supplemented with some quick browsing of the DM's supplement collection (followed by the inevitable "yeah, it doesn't work that way anymore"). MMO games with huge budgets like WoW can afford to operate this way, yes, because they had the $100 million needed to write custom client software for every platform, and then the mass scale of the MMO to bring people in and get them to pay. D&D is not really a mass scale game, it is a game of many independent groups, and you will not get them to all expend the resources to be online, not even most of them. So, the core design of 4e was not just inelegant, but that inelegance in the Power system (the heart of 4e) DOOMED it to being unscalable. This is what I saw on day one. There was incoherence between the design and the clear business and entertainment goals of the game, which in the end was pretty disastrous really. An elegant solution, one single unified list of powers (or at least smaller lists) would have mitigated that and allowed the game to scale much better. Heck, they could have just released supplements with ENTIRE REWRITES of ALL THE POWERS in each one! lol. (yeah, accusations of 4.1, etc. but so what). [/QUOTE]
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