Is it time for 5E?

[eyebeams]

I disagree. Gygax pushed Greyhawk in AD&D. Mentzer was built assuming Mystara. 3E and 4E came with built in gods. And 2E had some nice stuff like the Campaign & Catacomb Guide or Villains Handbook, but not much built into the core, plus a setting deluge spearheaded by the Forgotten Realms.

D&D's saving grace as a construction kit was a baseline implied setting that drew on enough mythology, pulp fantasy and Tolkien to have done enough foundation work to support most people's idea of what swords & sorcery was, even if a few anomalies did creep in (e.g. clerics, oriental monks). From that baseline, innumerable frustrated fantasy enthusiasts found a departure point for creating their own worlds and playing their own adventures.

No D&D takes players by the hand and goes something like, "this is an elf. You might want to build these subraces for your world", with the result being Johnny's purple, jungle-dwelling Feral Elves and Johnny thoroughly invested in the game, because it's not Gygax's Greyhawk or Mearl's Nerath, but Johnny's World of Magerizing. Or something like that, I don't know the details because it hasn't really been done. The most support given to homebrewing is stuff about town demographics and wandering monster tables by climate, that sort of thing. Not exactly riveting stuff compared to the apple the designers themselves bite into.

But it's a core appeal of D&D. If you want someone else's world, there are CRPGs, comics, novels, movies and MMORPGs aplenty to service you. D&D appeals to an audience of creators, at least in the DM's seat, and the players wouldn't be there save for the passion of that person for what they've made.

If I am a novice gamer, the appeal to me to do all kinds of crap to have an elf in a unique world makes my eyes glaze over. It's boring. I just want to play al elf in a cool world. I don't care how much you think it's virtuous to make my own world and elf mini-culture based on vague implications.

If I am an experienced gamer, that vagueness is equally useless, because it's less than what I can come up with myself. If I am experienced gamer, I want a more detailed world, because the more stuff there is, the more I have to choose from. Any detailed campaign setting is a smorgasboard unless I want to complain on the Internet about how Elminster's existence oppresses me.

Your approach fails new gamers and old. We've seen it tried. WotC had a chance to show us how awesome D&D would be with the world moved backstage and replacing it with rules mastery. This has proven to be unsustainable. In fact, even the period we could as success seems in hindsight to have been a period largely fuelled by self-delusion at all levels of the hobby. The D&D hobby did not need to reach faddish levels again -- it needed simple sustainability. 3e failed to provide even this, and having amputated itself of the ability to produce decent narrative content, WotC resorted to ever more convoluted extensions of the rules mastery principle, along with rebadging to disguise the inevitable supplement treadmill -- inevitable because little brown softbacks were obviously a failure, and by 2002 pretty much everyone who wanted a PHB had one. 3.5 was a manifestation of these issues. Eberron was an example of how basic flaws in creative leadership led to the squandering of obvious talent. (As I have said before, my view is that Paizo basically does the same thing -- makes creative people make uninteresting things.)

4e was a ground up revision pretty much because it needed to be, and in the process it absorbed a bit of fashionable nonsense promulgated by terrible gamers, but it still managed to be brilliant in its design. It just wasn't interesting as a thing that connected people to a world, and to fiction of their own devising. It lacked some critical ambiguity as to whether it was creating the basis of the fiction or the beats of the fiction. The OSR proved that this was still a cherished value, even at the expense of game systems that, honestly, really are kind of better.

What I'm talking about is something often expressed in edition wars. I love 4e, and it is totally true that you can rationalize 4e systems in the world in all kinds of cool ways -- but 4e's text seems utterly unconcerned and reads as almost dismissive of this kind of thing. This reproduces the decade-old failure to understand that even though rules matter, it isn't really all about the rules.

D&D basically suffers from a dearth of meaning now, and WotC doesn't seem to know how to fix that. D&D's image is cheezily self-referential in a way that reeks of coded self-contempt.

Before 5e takes place, WotC needs to get its community building on. It needs to rebuild the idea of a D&D hobby as something other than a bunch of balkanized gamer tribes, one of which it throws its weight behind. This might take years. It might even be a good idea to just shut D&D down completely for a while. 1 to 2 years might do it. After that, it might be able to come back without so much of its damaged legacy to be greeted by gamers who actually want to see it again. I'd go for easy to learn but extensible rules, some return to atmospheric quirkiness in the system (especially spells) over rigid principles, and at least one world with decent support and a strong place at the front of D&D's image.

 

[rounser]

If I am a novice gamer, the appeal to me to do all kinds of crap to have an elf in a unique world makes my eyes glaze over. It's boring. I just want to play al elf in a cool world. I don't care how much you think it's virtuous to make my own world and elf mini-culture based on vague implications.

This is just a restatement of the "12 year olds are uncreative, impatient and low brow" argument, an assumption we're well used to and continues to be nought but ageism IMO.

True, when learning the game you need a bog standard elf, and a dungeon to sack. But I guarantee you that once the game is learnt, games masters always immediately become adventure writers, world builders or rules tinkerers...or all three.

IMO, it's perhaps THE core appeal of D&D. Homebrew is the most popular setting and adventures don't sell very well for very good reason - despite the way the game is written as a reflection of the designer's personal ego, D&D players subvert the game for their own worlds, adventures and rules (although
house ruling culture is diminished thanks to 3E and 4E rules milking focus).

All I'm saying is that for once the rules might try SUPPORTING what happens anyway, instead of always fighting it, or downplaying it by superimposing some designer's idea of what is cool. I understand you have experience in IP of worlds, but in this case I suggest you're so used to wielding a hammer that you're seeing this issue as a nail, when in fact it's perhaps a lot more subtle than that.

 

[pemerton]

I really can't answer any questions in regards to 4th edition players in comparison/contrast to RoleMaster players since I have no idea what RoleMaster is.

I think comparison to other fairly well-known RPGs can help understand elements of a game's design.

People say "4e kills creativity because its attack spells don't mention non-combat uses". Well neither did Rolemaster's attack spells (RM was one of the biggest selling non-D&D RPGs in the 80s and early 90s). But no one ever thought RM killed anyone's creativity. So I find the claim about 4e suspect also.

People say "4e kills roleplaying because it separates ingame causation from metagame/rules causation". Well, HeroQuest does the same thing. And HeroQuest is generally regarded as a premier vehicle for roleplaying. So I find the claim about 4e pretty suspect.

People say "Skill challenges kill roleplaying because they put a structure on what should be done freeform". Well, Burning Wheel had Duels of Wits before 4e had skill challenges. And no one seriously suggets that Burning Wheel kills roleplaying. So I doubt that 4e skill challenges do either.

I think there are legitimate criticisms to be made of 4e's design. LostSoul, for example, makes some (namely, certain features of the rules make it very easy for players to disengage from the fiction). I also think that it is obviously a design that does not cater to all tastes. Nor does 3E. Or Rolemaster. Or HeroQuest. What frustrates me is people whose tastes in RPGing differ equating a difference of tastes to "killing roleplaying". I personally don't want to play Classic Traveller. Outside of the character generation system I find the game pretty tedious. I'm not really into sci-fi RPGing at all, I must confess, and Traveller's unrelentingly simulationist mechanics get me down. But it would never even occur to me to suggest that Classic Traveller kills roleplaying.

So the notion that 4e kills roleplaying and creativity because it's all about combat and dice rolling! Just not true. Not true of RM. Not true of HQ. Not true of BW. Not true of 4e.

(And that's not even taking into account that in this very thread I've posted lists of 4e spells, and comparisons of 4e spell lists to Basic D&D spell lists, that show that 4e incorporates at least comparable amounts of non-combat magical abilities into the game.)

 

[shadzar]

Um ok... Don't know if you are talking about the RPG I just found out existed or what when you mention HeroQuest, and still have little idea what the others are either, so it still tells me nothing with all that mixed in.

What exactly about 4th in regards to what I was discussing about presentation guiding playstyle are you saying. If you want to reference other game you will have to explain what you mean about them more, because I don't know any of those you mentioned except for HeroQuest the board game. You will ahve to take the he said/she said things in regards to comparing other games like that up with those who said them.

The game presents itself in a manner that had been proven that old and new players stop being creative with 4th. I think that says something, even if other do get creative. We will have to wait for that one person to ask about their group to find out what difference is going on for them to get an idea of one case why.

 

[rounser]

Your approach fails new gamers and old. We've seen it tried. WotC had a chance to show us how awesome D&D would be with the world moved backstage and replacing it with rules mastery. This has proven to be unsustainable. In fact, even the period we could as success seems in hindsight to have been a period largely fuelled by self-delusion at all levels of the hobby. The D&D hobby did not need to reach faddish levels again -- it needed simple sustainability. 3e failed to provide even this, and having amputated itself of the ability to produce decent narrative content, WotC resorted to ever more convoluted extensions of the rules mastery principle, along with rebadging to disguise the inevitable supplement treadmill -- inevitable because little brown softbacks were obviously a failure, and by 2002 pretty much everyone who <snip>

I couldn't agree more. I'm not promoting rules mastery. But nor am I promoting stone soup settings, encyclopedic detail settings, nor some middle path between. I think you should maybe go back and read my posts a bit more carefully. And no edition helps you customise the implied setting, or sets out to help you craft your world the way it assumes you build a character. No, it's elves and dwarves and Greyhawk, or dragonborn and tieflings and Points of Light. The nearest D&D ever came to it was 0E, where the rules were presented as serving suggestions, and the idea of buying a published world like the Wilderlands was spoiling the fun part of making it up yourself.

Yes you need published settings for numerous reasons, but your assumption that I'm promoting 4E's dusty bones approach to settings is waaaaay off base. It's anathema to the way I think D&D should be handled.

 

[pemerton]

The game presents itself in a manner that had been proven that old and new players stop being creative with 4th.

I don't concede this point. The only evidence I have is my experience plus the various anecdotes posted here. My experience and Mallus's and Hussar's points one way. LostSoul's and a few others have evidence that points another way. I don't have any reason to think that one set of experiences is more representative than the other.

I do think that LostSoul's is on to something in identifying, as a potential problem, the capacity of the game to be played without reference to certain elements of the fiction - though we have different opinions as to the extent of this. I think skill challenges anchor things in the fiction a bit more than he does, for example, and I also see the battlemap and movement/terrain rules as playing a more important role in this respect than he does. Not that this means I think LostSoul is wrong or confused. Rather, I suspect we have slightly different views as to what counts as "anchoring the gameplay in the fiction".

These sorts of differences of opinion, and related differences of experience with any game system - including 4e - are not very surprising. But they don't warrant a general claim that "4e kills creativity". Perhaps it's true that, for a certain sort of player who is simulationist by habit, 4e makes it harder to roleplay - I personally haven't experienced this, and neither it seems has Hussar, but I don't completely rule it out - but again this is a very different claim from "4e kills creativity".

That blanket claim, together with blanket and unwarranted claims about combat focus - which I've refuted, as far as spells are concerned, in this very thread - are in my view simply not warranted.

 

[Stormonu]

Since newer things such as feats and skills in their respective editions still use the ability scores, the wouldn't some "jump" skill actually be the same as was implied, and later spelled out for people, as was done in 1st?

Jump uses DEX stat correct? So an attempt to jump would just be rolling versus your DEX. For all such checks you rolled under or equal to pas, rolling over would be a fail in the attempt; such as people wanting higher stat scores.

I could get my books out, but just put them back up.

For most of these type of things and ANY action, you would just find the ability score that closest related and roll vs that ability.

For the most part, this is true. But one example I remember from C1 - Hidden Shrine in Tamoachan, there's a series of jumps you have to make across 4" wide beams spaced 7' apart (a sort of jump/balance combo). It uses a Dex check, but on 4d6 (I remember this because I converted it for use in 3E some time back, and replacing the little subsystem with 3E skill checks stuck out in my mind). Again, without having the books handy, I have to wonder back how S2 - White Plume Mountain handled vaulting from one swinging disk to another in the mud room; I know it had the rules in that section somewhere, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were quite different from the rules for C1.

While you can certainly infer from the newer rules how to handle these types of skill checks now, my point is when these old spells and items first came out there was not a standard method for determining skill sets or probabilties (perhaps beyond a thief's skills), without a heavy dose of fiat (which is part of the reason a DM is there to figure out these things).

As the game system evolved and these questions started getting answered by being presented in the core rules, the items and spells weren't scaled back or removed as standardized ways to perform the same thing became part of the standard skill set of every player.

This came somewhat to a head in 3E, where spells and some items gave a free pass on certain checks. 4E tried to tackle this by sidelining those spells (and near-nullifying certain items) into rituals with exceptionally long (and in my opinion toooooo long) casting times and cost to encourage skill use over the use of these "legacy" spells. They're not gone (well, maybe essentials has finally nullified them), but they've been marginalized in the extreme (much to my annoyance - I don't want them to dominate, but they've been regulated to the "nerfed so bad they aren't worth the effort").

 

[MrMyth]

Don't get so haughty so fast. Because you are wrong.

I said virtually all spells are constructed for combat. Meaning, they are created in that context. (I never said they couldn't be used outside of combat, just that combat is central to their structure.)

Combat occurs within an encounter. It does not exist outside an encounter. Shifts, standard actions, move actions, interrupts, etc. all occur within an encounter. (It would be utterly pointless to tell a wizard outside of combat that he is using his standard action for that turn when there is no turn because there is no encounter.)

Darn near every wizard utility in the PHB is either defined by being an "encounter" spell, or by its type of combat activity (free/minor/standard action), or actually contains in-combat effects. (There are exceptions, but they are the minority.)

I think defining 'encounter' as 'combat' is one mistake you are making here. Similarly, providing mechanical structure for skill/scene/movement benefits does not prevent their use in less mechanical forms.

From what you seem to be saying, an ability that says, "You are skilled at negotiating! You gain +2 on Diplomacy checks!" is somehow more geared towards non-combat activity than an ability that says, "You are skilled at negotiating! You gain Smooth Words, an At-Will Utility power that, as a minor action, gives you a +2 bonus on your next Diplomacy check!"

I'm not sold on that idea. Most players I know will still use that power when getting involved in negotiations outside of combat.

I'm not going to say you are completely wrong - the format can change someone's expectations for the power, and I think there is some minor attitude adjustments along those lines. At the same time, there are some benefits to the stricter mechanical format and context for these powers, rather than omnipresent bonuses or abilities that are vague or poorly defined.

My main objection is to the claim that this element of format somehow trumps other areas of the rules where the game encourages or advises creative use of abilities, or pursuit of non-combat goals or actions, etc.

Could 4E do more in this department to encourage creative power use, or selection of more non-combat elements? Probably. And, honestly, they are doing quite a bit of that these days, between the 'built-in' ritual abilities in Essentials (such as druids who can talk with plants 1/day), as well as articles in Dragon on creative power use or reflavoring abilities (and likely similar articles to come when they start adding their free gaming advice columns.)

But the fact they can give better advice doesn't inherently mean there is currently no advice at all, or that they are fundamentally worse about this than other games or editions out there.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Good post, and interesting thesis, Stormonu. Sorry I can't XP you at the moment.

 

[shadzar]

That blanket claim, together with blanket and unwarranted claims about combat focus - which I've refuted, as far as spells are concerned, in this very thread - are in my view simply not warranted.

And you are welcome to your view, but just refuting it doesn't change it, so we will just be of different views. I see the strong combat focu due to the evidence I have given somewhere on this site...

Stormonu I am finding that and digging the Hidden Shrine out to read to see what you are talking about then coming back to this thread so I can follow along correctly.