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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6095922" data-attributes="member: 82106">You certainly lose a LOT of generality when you stop using a common vocabulary across different elements of the game. By that I mean a common set of 'hooks', not necessarily 'words' as such, though it makes little sense to call things by different names when you want to treat them the same either. Note how 4e addressed that with layered terminology, you have 'powers' and then specific types of powers are 'exploits', 'spells', etc. This lets you discuss things naturally and allows for common references where required. Anyway, the point is simple enough, if you make your 'road' according to a standard then everyone can drive what they want on it and they can all take advantage of the same infrastructure, and they can more importantly ALL CONNECT. For instance it will be close to impossible to make something like 4e hybrids in DDN. Heck, it isn't really possible to make that work even with Essentials classes, it will never work with DDN martial classes and casters, certainly not without MANY new and complicated rules.I am a bit dubious about the whole "must learn terminology" argument. Lets be real, the terminology of 4e is no more arcane, extensive, or obtuse than that of previous editions. If I say to a bunch of players "your characters were just hit with 19 poison damage" they all know what that basically means and in fact that statement would make sense in any edition. In 4e it has SPECIFIC meaning, the dwarf character's player might pop up and say "well, this racial feat I have grants Resist 10 poison" and we can deal with that. It isn't exactly obscure at all. Every edition has had these things, even OD&D had a "dwarves get a bonus to poison saves of 1/3.5 points of CON" (yeah for obscure facts). The difference is there was nothing like a damage type concept. In say 1e if you were hit by flaming poisonous acid or something and you were a dwarf it was entirely unclear what would happen, whoever created that circumstance would have to come up with a rule. There is IMHO no advantage to this. In fact the repertoire of things that a player might be asked to remember in 1e is literally unbounded and often very fuzzy. IME while players are certainly not all desirous of mastering all the terms in 4e, those same players never grasped the terminology of AD&D either. They are certainly no worse off now than they were then.NOW, the ways in which the casual player DOES seem perpetually in trouble are things like action mechanics. I have players that have been playing 4e for years who still try to insist they can Second Wind and make an attack, or aren't clear about it (because of course when said player was playing a cleric she could Healing Word and attack, etc). All I can say about that is that this player is perfectly happy and I don't have a problem with that, and we don't dwell on mechanics that much. It would be nice if DDN eased this, but IMHO every edition has these issues in some fashion and it isn't going away. Obviously if you want to play Dungeon World or something then sure enough you can have highly abstract streamlined play that reduces it to a minimum. That's fine, yet oddly even my less engaged players are happy, so is it really an issue?Yeah, I don't know what the differences are between 4e and DDN playtest. Is it really vastly different? My understanding of the DDN playtest is that most of the really serious playtesting happens internally and with closed F&F test groups. Public P/T is more or less just a "are you OK with this" level of thing. The closed P/T of 4e was AFAIK pretty large and lasted a goodly time. Maybe it was run badly or somehow got fixated on the wrong things, etc. I'm not sure I can see a reason why we would be necessarily getting a better playtest this time around. I hope it is better, it is certainly higher profile, but that alone doesn't mean much.Well, I played 13a P/T and I certainly thought it was an interesting game in some respects. I found it had some of the same issues that DDN has. There were a plethora of divergent class mechanics, to the point where Bards at one point had 4 different 'power' systems, and clerics had 3!!! I haven't played or read the current pre-release, so maybe they have cut back on the craziness some, but my main reaction was "You know, I could rephrase all this into AEDU and it would be like 90 times easier to understand, and the rules would be shorter" which is pretty much how I see DDN. 13a's other features really aren't closely tied to the class mechanics. Its background/skill system is a whole other thing of its own that wouldn't be impacted by class design much, feats are really class-specific options and would only be BETTER with a common mechanics to leverage, etc. I think the story-driven aspect of it is GREAT overall, though maybe a bit narrow for a broader game like D&D. Still, you could do something similar, and even 4e's backgrounds and themes could have been turned into something like that. Still, I LIKE 4e's skill system and want to keep it. I think one answer there is to just fix the terminology. What 4e calls 'skills' can be called 'talents' for example. They're not so much narrow training as they are broad predilections. A guy with Athletics is a guy that naturally has an easy time mastering physical tasks. He's got a knack for them, has honed his general talent in that area, and just habitually approaches problems from that angle. A guy with Arcana has a natural tie to magic and a feel for magical phenomena. He's PROBABLY also learned about it, either by study and/or practice. He may even BE just very well book-learned, but in any case it is "his thing". NOW you can have 13a-like 'skills' that represent specific things that the character has done or studied, and the character's unique background can be emphasized as a source for these skills and an RP hook. I do this now with 4e, it is just not quite so thoroughly spelled out there.That gets to the final thing. I think 4e's presentation, while professional, just didn't gel. I think a game that is going to emphasize narrative flexibility and 'mechanics support narrative' needs to REALLY focus on conveying that to the players. 4e doesn't do that. It almost seems like especially when James Wyatt was writing the DMG that he was blissfully unaware of the true nature of the game he was writing about. Now and then inklings of what you would want to do with 4e and how to do it peek through, but much of it is shrouded in classic simulationist challenge-oriented play terminology and outlook. The result is a bit wonky. In one sense the 4e DMG is a great book. In another sense it is sort of a terrible DMG for 4e specifically.</blockquote>

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