D&D 4E Is 4E the designers homebrew coming to my gaming table?

[broghammerj]

If that's your criteria, then I say aside from alignment (and its restrictions), certain class fluff (Bards=Musical and/or Vocal, paladins and monks can't multi-class), and the fact that aside from subraces, each demi-human race has no variation of culture, there is no fluff that has prevented me from having fun.

Hell, I say the only fluff that I passionately dislike out of taste is that white dragons are brutish and savage. And the only change in fluff that would make me mad would be any changes to kobolds.

Otherwise, burn it to the ground and rebuild if you want. I don't care.

No you are taking my point to the opposite end of the spectrum. If the fluff adversely affected your gameplay then perhaps it is a problem that needs to be changed. If it didn't impact you then it shouldn't be messed with or burned to the ground as you say. I got a great laugh from your conclusion btw as I must of clearly misrepresented my point of view.

 

[Rechan]

I'm all for change if it's more enjoyable or leads to better ideas. I think after ideas gather enough weight of time they need to be grabbed and shaken and get the dust off of them (I.e. the shakeup with regards to wizards and their implements). That is a nice, sexy reinterpretation. And it is Very Nicely related to one of my favorite story series, The Dresden Files.

I'm the complete opposite of you. If the only reason to not change it is "Because that's just how it's always been", then there's little reason to not change it.

 

[blargney the second]

Original D&D was Gary's homebrew.
-blarg

 

[broghammerj]

Ah. And right there is a reason that we'll never see eye-to-eye on this. I though the Greyhawkisms of 3E were just barely enough. I can't think of anything that would be more boring, or worse for the game as a whole, than completely flavorless/generic rulebooks. As I said in another thread:

I can see where you're coming from with this idea. I don't want stripped down rules with no flavorful text.

You can describe in great detail a barbarian with his enraged fighting style and strange cultural nuances with enough flavor to capture the imagination of the reader but don't have to say he is a Klingon barbarian from the northern reaches of QunoS known to fight with his Batleth. I certainly don't play DnD using Star Trek races so that is not how I want my barbarian described. Yet the Klingons make a good example of a barbarian.

Much like I could care less about their talents for wizards described as iron sigil, emerald frost, etc.

Generic does not have to equal boring and fluff does not equal flavor.

 

[broghammerj]

Also I just want to go down in history that the 4E Tiefling in core will = 3.X drow. How that race ever made it into the core book is beyond me. Why there isn't a generic plane touched entry in core with all of the relevant planar races as sub groups I don't know.

 

[Sundragon2012]

Let's be honest here.

Because all this stuff is imaginary (though the concepts they are derived from may not be) hasn't D&D always been an issue of folks playing in Gary Gygax's, Mike Mearls', Monte Cook's, etc. homebrew games? Of course this is unless one creates a entire setting whole cloth which is possible of course.

However, the whole Great Wheel, the nature of the planes, the fact that alignments were actual "things" as opposed to merely points of view, the named spells ie. Modenkainen's this and that, the names of the demon princes and arch-devils as well as their relative natures and strengths....in fact anything outside of pure game mechanics (and even some of those) is someone else's homebrew.

This is why I never take CORE canon lore(I vastly prefer the term lore to fluff ) seriously in my games, not because it isn't good (sometimes its great, sometimes it stinks) but because I have no particular desire to give another individual's imagination more relevance than my own. If I choose to get into a given setting such as Dragonlance, FR, Midnight, ect. than all bets are off. In these cases I willfully suspend my own imagination to an extent so as to buy into the shared fantasy and atmosphere of the setting.

IMO core is merely the mechanics of a generic, nameless, faceless setting. All fluff included with said core rules is completely optional and has no bearing on anything outside of this core "setting" unless an individual DM wants it to.



Sundragon

 

[WhatGravitas]

IMO core is merely the mechanics of a generic, nameless, faceless setting. All fluff included with said core rules is completely optional and has no bearing on anything outside of this core "setting" unless an individual DM wants it to.



Sundragon

However, core is also the first thing new players come into contact with. This said, I think the fluff should be generic, yet evocative - to get a new group to playing as soon as possible, which this stuff hopefully does. More experienced players with other settings or homebrew are going to ignore the core fluff anyway.

And since my first D&D stuff was 3.0, I think the implied Greyhawk was not very inspiring (though it made me curious for more), and I've DMed a homebrew, FR, Diamond Throne, then Eberron afterwards, not GH - this new lore, however, strikes me as far more inspiring.

Cheers, LT.

 

[jasin]

"Bonecrusher zombies and a zombie hulk go into the reliquary. That’s a bit different than the Blood of Vol clerics I’d slotted in there, but I wanted to put the new monsters through their paces. (And a robust NPC creation system is something we don’t have… yet."

This is the first piece of fluff that bothered be, but for different reasons. At the risk of using a worn-out overloaded phrase, the names of monsters sounded videogamey. In a video game, you need different labels for different monsters so (I guess) names like bonecrusher zombie, zombie hulk, hellsword cambion are OK.

But I'm not sure I want names like these in the MM. I want people to think of zombies as zombies, because the zombie concept is cool enough in itself, rather than making them "bonecrusher zombies", "clawslasher zombies" and "zombie hulks". And if you write those names down in a rulebook, people will use those names as a default.

But then, the 3E MM has stuff like celestial charger and frost giant jarl, which I thought were pretty cool. If the monsters mentioned are something along those lines, samples of what's possible with advancement rather than baseline creatures, it's all good.

 

[Sundragon2012]

However, core is also the first thing new players come into contact with. This said, I think the fluff should be generic, yet evocative - to get a new group to playing as soon as possible, which this stuff hopefully does. More experienced players with other settings or homebrew are going to ignore the core fluff anyway.

And since my first D&D stuff was 3.0, I think the implied Greyhawk was not very inspiring (though it made me curious for more), and I've DMed a homebrew, FR, Diamond Throne, then Eberron afterwards, not GH - this new lore, however, strikes me as far more inspiring.

Cheers, LT.

I agree. Fluff in the PHB is good for getting things up and running quickly for a new DM and/or players. That's how I used it when I started out DMing in high school. And I have to say as well that this new lore looks far, far more interesting than the old Great Wheel lore. It seems more mythic or like something you could see in fantasy fiction and not just in D&D fantasy fiction which is not always the best...though I enjoy FR novels from time to time. IMO the less D&Disms the better ie. no alignment based planes, no planescape references, just a millieu with a good background that a DM can choose to use or not.



Sundragon

 

[JamesM]

The more of these Design & Development articles I read, the more it seems clear to me that, whatever other purpose this new fluff serves, it also creates a new batch of D&D IP. This serves two purposes.

First, it establishes a strong brand identity of something that is distinctly D&D (in the sense of "associated with the currently available D&D edition" -- I personally don't think most of the new fluff feels very much like "historical" D&D, but that's neither here nor there).

Second, I'd be willing to bet that someone within WotC (or Hasbro, or both) thinks that the D20 SRD for 3E basically gave away the store when it came to D&D-specific IP. Remember sometime in the v.3.5 era when WotC removed several monsters from the SRD, like the beholder and the mind flayer? Why did they do that? My feeling is that the same motivation behind that is what's going into overdrive with 4E: to have fluff material that obviously separates D&D from Generic D20 Fantasy Game #532.

Given all of this, I would not be surprised in the least if nearly every bit of fluff from earlier eras of D&D gets changed or at least significantly modified in 4E. WotC wants to reclaim D&D as their own intellectual property and, to do that in the post-OGL era, they need to create new IP to replace stuff that's now open. I'll bet that the 4E SRD will be more open rules-wise than the 3E one, but far, far more restrictive about fluff, even to the point of lots of new monsters not appearing in it and you can be sure there will be lots of new monsters.