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Message: <blockquote data-quote="catastrophic" data-source="post: 5642045" data-attributes="member: 81381">Actually, it turns out a wide cross-section of gamers- including people who were playing 3e but eager to trade up to a better game, and people who had long abandoned 3e because of how bad it was- found it a good system to buy. And yet, as we all know, a LOT of people did not make the move. On the other hand, and this keeps happening in these debates- you're basically claiming the same thing can happen, only in reverse with none of the bad bits, and it simply doesn't work that way.  A 5e successfully aimed at fans of 3e will not retain fans of 4e. They will stay with 4e. You are not going to please a bigger tent. Too many people who have played 4e now know how terrible 3e is, and will never, ever go back to that kind of game. So in other words, everything you just said is meaningless, and you're just feeding the myth that 4e is a terrible failure and 5e will make everything better by being terirbly designed like 3e.  I'm sorry that your point of view runs contrary to reality? There's no getting around the fact that most 4e-bashing is nonsence. It doesn't matter how many times people say "4e is a wow-like gamist antigygax which stops roleplaying and makes things feel less fun", it's stil not true in any real sense.  It's just people who made up their minds not to like 4e, no matter how often they protest to the contrary.  And contrary to popular myth, a designer cannot design a game that can overcome the mostly basless subjective viewpoints people project onto a game system, often without even playing it. Even people who do play it are colored a lot more by the endless online vendettas on the issue, than a genuine undeerstanding of the system.  No, actually, you can't. Firstly, you can't at higher levels, which is the only time they're comparable. Second, the rest of the time, you're not engaging in a comparable activity, any more than you can compare flipping a coin to playing Monopoly.  3e combat is a disfunctional imbalanced farce where concepts like Class and Challenge Rating fail far more often than they suceed. The extra utility added to 4e combat means that yes, 4e combats are long- but compare that to 3e combat and you have a mostly successful implementation, compared to a farce which people have grown used to, and treat with far too much tolerance.  Yes, it's a farce a lot of people have convinced themself works, if they put lots and lots of work into it. No, that's not a good excuse.  And how much time are you really putting into that encounter? How muchtime to DMs in 3e games put into trying to make that idiotic system work- only to have the party's FPspellcasters blow everything flat in a round and a half? And what about the time they spend prebattle, buffing? What about the time NOT spent, on the players at the table who don't actually do anything meaningful in combat? You can talk all you like, but there's no bigger waste of time in the history of D&D than third editon combat.  Absolute rubbish. We all know how long it takes to set up 3e combat.  FOR THE DM! For the DM, designing challenging and fun 3e combats takes hours- unless of course, you're running a combat which is meaningless, where you toss a few monsters out and they flail around for a few seconds before dying, in which case, why do it at all? Why not just handwave the combat? On the other hand, 4e's system is robust enough that you really can throw together and encounter in minutes- certainly, monsters have improved over the lifetime of the system, but on day one they were already leaps and bounds more useful, and more meaningful and characterful than the mostly-pointless bags of hit points in 3e, despite their lack of a 'rope use' skill or full list of spells known. Setting up the minis? Again, rubbish- 3e was just as reliant on minis as 4e is, it's just that 4e actually makes use of that feature. This is another example of a misrepresentation of the facts, used by people bashing 4e. If you can run 3e without minis, you can run 4e without minis. If you can't run 4e without minis, you can't run 3e without minis. Both have concrete movement, spell area templates, rules for flanking and adjacent foes, variable movement speeds, terrain, and more. Both use a battlemap by default.  Actually your wrong again, and bordering on dishonest once again. There's nothing stopping you from running a combat with a handful of minions, and that will take all of a few minutes. That is after all, comparable to the mostly-pointless kobold bash you're talking about running in 3e.  You're deliberatly misrepresenting the system, in order to further an argument that falls apart when faced with the facts. Many rational people have made legitimate arguments about the time 4e combat takes. You are not one of those people. People buy trash all the time. Trash sells well in all sorts of fields and markets.  Does it mean the people buying the trash have made an informed decision, that the trash them magically becomes a better product? If they were true, the american economy would still be riding high on the back of CDR's and subprime. The 3e design is trash. It was ok when it came out, but 4e is leaps and bounds ahead of it. People's nostaligia and attachment to it doesn't change that. Paizo dressing it up with nice art and, admittedly nice support products, don't change the facts about the core system and how broken it truly is. Talking fantasy like 'it's really fast to set up!' doesn't change that. And more americans believe in angels than believe in evolution. That is not the fault of the theory of evolution, nor a repudiation of it's merit. Appeal to popularity. Spare me. If popularity was the measure of a game's merit, we'd all be playing world of warcraft. Pathfinder is competition for 4e because a bunch of people were attached to 3e and didn't want to make the switch. On top of that, there was a huge, hysterical backlash that many 4e haters wallowed hip deep in it for years, permanently coloring their viewpoints and the broader comunity's viewpoints on the issue in a way that has nothing to do with legitimate analisis. You can't lure those people back unless you give them another carbon copy of the garbage system they're comitted to inflicting on their friends- and even if you could, WOTC can't, because those same people have damned them forevermore, for the foul crime of having creative integrity and making a better game. There may be a subset of more reasonable people who would buy Mearls's hypothetical fake big tent 5e without an aburd return to the bad old days, but the closer you get to pleasing that hater demographic, the further away you get from the people with DDI subscriptions and book-cases full of 4e.</blockquote>

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