Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercurius" data-source="post: 6360942" data-attributes="member: 59082">Yeah, this crossed my mind as well. The simple idea of "dark-skinned race is bad, pale-skinned race is good" is quite problematic, even if it isn't derived from racist sentiment. I'm guessing there could be a way around this, though, by say making the drow more gray-skinned, and having sub-races of elves that are darker skinned, like wood elves, for instance, could be a kind of nut-brown.You mean Battle of the Svirfneblin and Ixitxachitl isn't a good movie title? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> But yeah, this is another good point. Even the LotR movies had a couple cringe-worthy moments (and I'm not talking about Galadriel's goofy trip-out scene) where actors over-emphasized the exotic pronunciation of a word. "Mordor" with a rolling "r" was a nice attempt on Viggo's part, but it still sounded a bit forced. Or the overly affected, "Isildur!"Again, you're talking from the perspective of someone for whom the 4E approach worked. There were lots of folks that just didn't take to it. So what you're saying is true, of course, but so is the experience of those that found it dissociative. I think the difference isn't as much one group being right and the other wrong, but more akin to cognitive or even learning styles. Some people think in a way for 4E works well, while others don't. I'm not prepared to make a value judgment about it, but instead stick to "different." Perhaps you are right, but the thing is that most people I know learned to play AD&D in a more theater of mind approach, hand waving or outright ignoring a lot of the 1E stuff. Perhaps that is part of the appeal of 5E: the rules are closer to how people played 1E than how Gary actually wrote it - a simple, core game, and you could add in the details that you wanted (e.g. how many people actually used encumbrance? I'm guessing it was a minority).Again, we're talking about perspectives not what is factual or not (if for no other reason that our facts are always colored by perspective). Anyhow, I agree that 1st or 3rd person is a matter of style, but my point is that the 4E mechanics seemed to encourage, or at least imply, a greater separation between the player and the character, with the player being the controller and the character being a kind of avatar or game piece. This is why, I think, many felt that 4E was more dissociative and that 4E combat seemed more tactical than prior versions.Welll again, there are reasons that WotC pulled the plug on 3E and 4E when they did, which are probably almost entirely financial (although with 4E I think it had a lot to do with the tenor of the community as well). You say that "4E was too early, 5E ridiculously so" but that is presumably only from the perspective of adherents of said edition. Clearly WotC felt otherwise.I personally think that a "better" approach would have been for 4E to be a kind of alternate path for D&D, a game within the game - sort of like D&D's answer to Exalted. Then they could have gone even further with it, made it more gonzo and true to its newer influences of anime, World of Warcraft, Hong Kong cinema, etc. This would have still necessitated a new edition of the core game, and perhaps it would have been something like 5E is, but it could have come out after 10-12 years (thus 2010-12), rather than 8.But of course that isn't how things happened, but it is fun to consider alternate histories! Good job!Hmm...perhaps. But there's still the vocal minority thing, as well as the "bird in hand" principle. I think with 4E WotC made the erroneous assumption that the Hardcore Few could be taken for granted, that they would come along no matter what. But it didn't work out that we (thus, Pathfinder and, to a lesser extent, the OSR).Yeah, I think this is basically true. But the other thing is that the Hardcore Few isn't static, that it can gain new "converts" - and they must come from (3).Maybe, although a bit overstated and perhaps one-sided, as someone noted ("Two to tango"). I mean, it is also probably true that the absence of edition warring means that there is less unhappiness with the new edition.So regardless, 4E wasn't "successful" by WotC's definition of what that means. Presumably neither was 3E, or at least not by 2007.But one difference is that where 3E seemed to dry up the well with its onslaught of product from 2003-07, 4E hadn't gotten to that point. There were other, deeper problems than simply the law of diminishing returns via the splat treadmill.I think this is exactly what WotC did with 5E - in a way it tried to create the "renaissance edition" of traditional D&D - a classic feeling but with modernized mechanics and presentation. As the oldest and flagship RPG, this seems like a good choice. D&D, as the oldest and flagship RPG, probably shouldn't be too innovative, too exotic. The corrolary is that for people wanting exotic or innovative takes on gaming, maybe D&D isn't the right choice.I agree, although think the truth is somewhere in the middle and includes element of that RPG forum meme. People buy brand names because that's what they recognize, that's what they grew up with. It doesn't mean its crappy, though, just that the familiarity breeds a kind of loyalty and love.Yes, true. I think you're touching upon the difference between experts and lay people, and how experts (and academics, for that matter) can get so lost in abstraction, in their expertise, that they forget what the point of what they're talking about is - in this case, a game's primary purpose is to have fun. If game rules facilitate that, they work.Most people who play D&D simply want to have fun in a game of imaginative, fantasy immersion. They don't care about cutting edge game design, excepts as it facilitates that primary objective.</blockquote>

Verification